You don’t always see startup founders discussing how much they spent to acquire their domain name and why they felt it was necessary to do so.
Will Nitze, Founder of IQBAR, shared that his company acquired its brand match IQBAR.com domain name for $26,250. This was an upgrade from the call to action EatIQBAR.com domain name it had used since inception. IQBar.com was created in 2007, and it appears to have been owned by a business that owns many domain names.
Earlier this month when OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot was trending, I discussed some of the ways artificial intelligence (AI) could be used for domain investing. I cited a number of domain investors who shared the output of their ChatGPT queries on Twitter.
One area that wasn’t touched upon was how AI could be used to help people find brand names for their businesses. This morning, Squadhelp announced that it introduced an AI-based business name generation tool powered by GPT-3. The news was shared on Squadhelp’s Twitter page:
This morning in my DomainTools Domain Monitor alert email, I saw that Text.com transferred from Namecheap to GoDaddy under Whois privacy. Text.com had been owned by Brent Oxley, and while he confirmed the sale, he could not comment further. There’s a brand new website on Text.com, but the Whois record and landing page didn’t shed much light onto who acquired the domain name.
Shortly after mentioning the sale on Twitter, I saw that the Investor Relations Twitter account of LiveChat tweeted about Text.com:
Bear Grylls, a popular outdoor adventurer, writer, and television personality announced that he and partners have acquired Outdoors.com and relaunched the website with Grylls-related branding:
BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!
We’ve purchased and relaunched the inspirational @outdoors_dotcom
I believe we have never needed the wild more, and our goal at OUTDOORS is to bring it to you in a way that is fun, accessible and ripped full of adventure! pic.twitter.com/gFPQhSvamx
— Bear Grylls (@BearGrylls) November 30, 2022
This wasn’t simply a great domain name purchase. In looking at Archive.org, it looks like Outdoors.com was already an established outdoors-focused brand. With Grylls’ background, it is a perfect opportunity for him to grow the brand and expand his own personal reach. It looks like articles from the original Outdoors.com website have been ported over to the new website, and the design has been modernized and updated with Grylls’ personal branding.
Using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, it appears that the domain name changed hands in September when it transferred from Namecheap to GoDaddy under Whois privacy. Outdoors.com utilized Whois privacy for quite a long time – since 2015, so the exact date the domain name sold is unclear.
Terms of the deal do not appear to have been announced. Because it looks like the entire business was acquired, this wouldn’t be considered a domain name-only transaction.
This afternoon, I received the NameJet list of its Most Active Pending Delete Backorders. These are expired domain names that are about to be fully deleted and will be fought over by domain name registrars for partner auction platforms. One domain name in particular stood out to me – PureLife.com.
Whois records show that PureLife.com has been registered to Societe des Produits Nestle S.A. The domain name has been registered at Com Laude, a domain registrar specializing in corporate domain name management. The domain name has Nestle.com nameservers, but it doesn’t appear that Nestle used the domain name for much. Archive.org shows that PureLife.com forwarded to Nestle.com.
A few days ago, news broke that Elon Musk wanted to proceed with his acquisition of Twitter. Shortly after the news broke, Musk alluded to how Twitter would fit into his plan for “X:”
Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2022
X is in reference to a company Musk appears intent to build, and it would reside on the X.com domain name he acquired from PayPal in the Summer of 2017. For the last few years, the only thing appearing on X.com is the letter x, but Musk seemingly has much bigger plans for the domain name.
