Buying Domain Names

Gagan Biyani, a Co-Founder of Udemy, Advisor at Lyft, and former CEO of Sprig, announced the name of his newest startup: Maven. The thing that caught my attention is the domain name that the company is using – Maven.com. The domain name has been owned by General Motors, and in fact, Whois records show the domain name is still registered to GM.

With that in mind, I asked Gagan and his two Co-Founders (Wes Kao and Shreyans Bhansali) if they bought the Maven.com domain name from GM. Gagan replied with a link to a tweet thread he previously posted sharing the startup naming process his team undertook. He also shared insight into the process of securing the domain name. I think this is a great thread for investors to read for additional insight into the mind of a startup founder seeking a great brand and corresponding domain name.

Here’s the thread:

I spend much more time focused on acquiring good domain names than selling them. I might make one or two efforts to sell domain names each week, but I am sending perhaps dozens of purchase offers each week for significant amounts of money.

At this point in time, nearly all of the best (one and some two word .com) domain names that are unused are in very strong hands. In many cases, the owners have turned down serious offers over the years. Some of these owners include Fortune 100 companies, well-funded startups, and other entities that don’t have a desire or need to sell any domain name assets unless they are blown away by an offer.

Every morning, I spend around an hour going through lists of domain names that are coming up for auction. When I say every morning, I mean every morning. I do this on weekends, when we are traveling, when we have friends or family over (in non-Covid times), and all those times in between. I review lists from auction platforms, Dropping.pro, and I recently added ExpiredDomains.net to the list of tools I use daily. This is the hunt, and it is probably the most enjoyable part of domain investing.

As I and others have discussed many times, the prices achieved in expiry auctions have grown in recent years. It has become much more challenging to find what I would consider to be a deal, so the hunt has expanded. I never focused much on pending delete auctions, save for the occasional gem, but I have been focusing on that area a bit more.