At a high level, domain investing appears to be a simple money making activity. Buy great domain names at good prices and sell them profitably to buyers who want to build businesses on them. In practice, profitable domain investing is a capital-intensive business with considerable nuance.
This morning on Twitter, I came across two very good pieces of advice new domain investors should consider.
The first is from AbdulBasit Makrani:
One unfortunate speed bump and occasional roadblock I encounter when closing deals is the KYC requirements at Escrow.com. Oftentimes, it can be a minor inconvenience to get the other party verified. Sometimes, particularly when dealing with large corporate entities, it becomes impossible and it can complicate a deal at a critical time.
Let’s say I am selling a domain name to Example Company, a multi billion dollar organization that is traded publicly. At closing, I often deal with a senior legal counsel or CTO to paper a deal and close it. With the Escrow.com KYC requirements, not only does Example Company need to be KYC’d, but the individual closing the deal also needs to submit documents. Getting someone who has no vested interest or benefit from a deal to submit personal ID and documents has been problematic.
I have a “policy” of not sharing my sales for numerous reasons that I shared before. Others like sharing their sales for their own reasons. As an industry participant and publisher, I am always willing to highlight and/or report on a domain name sale I discovered or learned about.
Earlier this week, someone shared some details about a fantastic domain name sale that could have gone under the radar. According to the tweet below, ABiologics.com was sold via Squadhelp for $26,499. Impressively, this was reportedly a hand registered domain name as the seller needed to wait until the 60 day ICANN lock:
Hand reg, so waited a month to transfer this #domain.
Thank the buyer’s patience. pic.twitter.com/j61u43xBjs— Steley (@Steley) December 7, 2023
The seller could have kept this sale private and used this internal data to secure additional, similar domain names. If it were me, I would probably think that if ABiologics.com sold for more than $25k, perhaps other letter Biologics.com domain names could have substantial value to someone else. I would have gone through the alphabet and registered whatever was available and put those up on Squadhelp. That may have been a lightning bolt sale, but it would have been worth up to $250 to register other available domain names.
In case you missed it over the Thanksgiving holiday, Squadhelp CEO Darpan Munjal posted a long thread on X to share some domain investing tips. These tips are not specific to the Squadhelp platform, and they can be implemented by domain investors on other platforms or across their owns dales listings.
One suggestion I wouldn’t say I disagree with but don’t ascribe to is the one regarding Make Offer option with a BIN price. I agree on lower priced names but have it on many higher priced names. I tend to price my better inventory quite high, and I would rather give the option to make an offer in case my BIN price was set far too high. Sellers can always say “no,” stick to their BIN price and warn of a price increase if they wish. That’s just my opinion though.
When I first started developing my domain names, I learned the importance of downtime monitoring. On some of my growing websites, there would be random times when the WordPress-based websites went down for short periods of time. Occasionally, I would catch the downtime and occasionally an advertiser would inquire about why one of my websites wasn’t working.
To be more informed about downtime on my websites, I began using a downtime detector called Montastic. I added all of my developed websites to my account, and whenever there was any downtime detected, I would receive an email notifying me. This was helpful because I could ping the hosting company when I saw it and let them know when the websites were down so they could investigate the cause.
