Over the years, I have been asked by quite a few people to be their domain industry mentor. It’s an honor when someone thinks highly enough of me to ask me, although most probably did a quick Google search for “domain investing” and found my website… LOL. Unfortunately, I do not do any mentoring formally or informally.
There are several reasons for why I don’t offer mentoring:
If you own valuable domain names and you have spent a serious amount of money buying domain names, it is important for your significant other or family to know what to do in case something happens to you. Because domain investing is my job, my wife hears about my business every day, and she has a pretty good idea about who I trust, where I do business, and how the business works.
One thing I have done to help my wife and family in the event something unexpected happens to me is I created an emergency contacts list that I update once or twice a year with important contact information. These are the people who can help my wife and family secure control of my business assets and strategize on go-forward operations should something happen to me.
I want to share what types of contacts I have on my list because other investors should consider doing the same thing.
The majority of my domain names are now listed on DAN.com with buy it now prices. The platform has proven to me that it is helpful to sell names at all price levels, and as a result, I continue to add names to the platform. I have found the most utility from DAN is by setting the nameservers so my domain names resolve to buy it now or make offer pages on the platform.
One area where DAN lacks is its search functionality. If I want to find a list of the one word .com domain names listed for sale via DAN, I would be out of luck. As a buyer, the lack of search functionality is a bit of a bummer. As a seller, this means there is less of a need to delete listings that are no longer valid – domain names that sold elsewhere or domain names that simply expired.
Two years ago, I was presented with a mid six figure cash offer to buy one of my domain names. The catch was that just 10% of this would be paid immediately, and the remainder would be paid in installments over a couple of years. This was a solid offer, especially since the initial payment would not be refundable.
After considering the offer, opted to decline it because the planned usage of the domain name made me uncomfortable. Pierluigi Buccioli, an investor in gambling domain names, shared his thoughts on why he doesn’t like to offer payment plans for his gambling domain names, and his rationale is along the lines of mine:
There are a lot of great tools that can benefit domain investors. Some of these tools are made for domain investors and other tools weren’t specifically created for domain investors to use but can be extraordinarily helpful to us. One issue investors should keep in mind is that any data they input into these tools may be seen by the data providers and potentially associated parties.
I use third party tools for many things. I perform Whois lookups on domain names I am looking to buy and those I am researching. I check various metrics for domain names I own. I do research on prospective buyers for my domain names and domain names I want to buy. I have not built my own tools, so I use third party companies.
I was chatting with a business friend yesterday, and I mentioned one of the domain names I recently acquired in the context of the number of registrations with the keyword. He mentioned DotDB.com, and I generally use DomainTools for that type of search, but that is taking things off topic a bit. When I mentioned the domain name to him, he remarked that it was not resolving anywhere. I had a look and confirmed what he was saying. Yikes.
