I was chatting with someone I’ve known for many years, and he started to tell me something in confidence about his business. He asked the standard, “can I tell you something that you can’t share with others?” I think my answer caught him off guard.
Instead of agreeing and listening to something that he doesn’t want to have shared, I told him not to tell me. As interested as I was (and still am) in what is happening with his business, I declined to hear the secret he wanted to share with me.
One of the more annoying aspects of domain investing is negotiating a deal, coming to an agreement, and the buyer flaking when it is time to pay. It can be disappointing and frustrating, but I do my best to forget those broken deals and put them in the past.
I’ve always set minimum offer amounts on my platform-listed domain names. I don’t want to deal with $100 offers for 4 and 5 figure domain names. I have heard great tales of brokers closing six figure deals that started with 3 figure offers, but I’ve never seen that.
Squarespace acquired Google Domains in 2023. All domain names that were registered at Google Domains at that time were migrated to Squarespace.
Squarespace is primarily a website building platform with a focus on small to medium sized businesses. The domain name business was acquired in support of its primary services. To that end, the company has never put out a marketing campaign focused exclusively on its domain name registrar line of business.
I appreciate that GoDaddy now shows how many searches are made by its customers for specific domain names that have relatively high search volume. This isn’t simply the case for domain names that are for sale. GoDaddy is also showing the number of searches within its Domain Broker Service call to action box within the search stream.
With this information, we are able to compare the number of searches between extensions. I thought about this while searching for the price of Luminous.ai, which is listed for sale via GoDaddy. My company owns Luminous.com and was curious about the asking price for the .ai domain name.
This morning, I shared that Namecheap Founder Richard Kirkendall stepped down as CEO of Namecheap following the company’s acquisition. I noticed this when he transitioned off of the @NamecheapCEO account on X and he is now using the @NamecheapCEO123 account.
Longtime Namecheap COO Hillan Klein was promoted to the role of CEO. In taking over the executive suite, Hillan also took charge of the @NamecheapCEO account on X. His first post was made this afternoon:
Last night, I noticed that Richard Kirkendall no longer had the NamecheapCEO account on X. Instead, his account handle changed to NamecheapCEO123, which I was following. I mentioned this precautionary in the event he had lost control of the account for some reason. Fortunately, the change was intentional.
In a post on X early this morning, Richard shared that he has stepped aside as Namecheap CEO. This change comes in the wake of CVC Capital Partner’s $1.5 billion acquisition of Namecheap. According to Richard, the new CEO of Namecheap is Hillan Klein, who has been the company’s Chief Operating Officer for 12 years.
