An unassuming lady walks into an ice cream shop. She orders two ice cream cones. She pays the $12 tab with cash, and she walks out of the shop. In the parking lot, the lady walks up to a Tesla and hands the man behind the wheel the two ice cream cones. The driver is none other than Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

As the ice cream hand-off is taking place, a domain investor is walking in to the ice cream shop to order his regular – a four scoop banana split with extra whipped cream on top. When he gets to the counter to place an order with the friendly shop owner, the domain investor can’t contain himself. “You idiot,” he bellows. “Those two ice cream cones were bought by Elon Musk! The guy is worth billions. You should have charged him $10,000 for those cones. Maybe if you were smarter, you would be a great domain investor like me,” he continued.

In 2018, I received an outbound sales email purportedly from the owner of a great one word .com domain name beginning with the letter I. The email was signed by this person, and throughout the email, the first letter was written as I and i. Even the return address appeared to be from this domain name. The price looked too good to be true.

I went back through my email records and saw that I had tried to buy the domain name using an alternative email address. I made a low but decent opening offer and never received a reply to my email. I followed up a couple of times and never heard back. After receiving the outbound email, I followed up to confirm that it was the owner who sent the email.

I own the matching .com domain names for my wife and kids. Ironically, I don’t own my own first+last .com domain name because it is owned and used by someone else who shares my name. I’ve always thought it was important for parents to try and buy their kids’ first+last .com domain name just in case they want to use it in the future.

I came across these two tweets from Minda Harts about securing domain names for family members. Minda shared that her brother was disappointed when he tried to buy his name matching .com domain name. That feeling changed when he learned his sister had already bought it for him to use: