Why I Set Minimum Offer to $100,000

Elliot Silver
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For quite some time, I set what I believe is a fairly generous minimum offer requirement of $1,500 on my DomainNameSales.com account. The thinking was that someone willing to spend 4 figures on a domain name is a better qualified prospect than someone who would only offer registration fee.

After trying this for quite some time, I decided to set the minimum offer on my domain names to $100,000. Even though the majority of my domain names won’t sell for close to $100,000 a piece, there are several important reasons I chose to increase the minimum offer.

1) I have found people “walk up” their offers when they get the error message that they didn’t meet the minimum offer. Once they magically hit the $1,500 number (or thereabouts) they tend to stop. Despite the fact that it’s clearly a “minimum” offer, I don’t want someone to have any expectations that I would consider selling a domain name like Lilac.com for close to $1,500. IMO, some people may get confused with the minimum offer situation, and with much distrust for domain investors, I don’t want to complicate things.

2) I think people will continue to “walk up” their offer and tip their hand more if that minimum is higher. Yes, there will still be offers that aren’t legitimate because they want to test the minimum offer, but I think it will help reveal what someone is willing to pay at the beginning rather than having to negotiate longer.

When someone submits an offer that doesn’t meet the minimum, I am still able to see it. Let’s say someone offers me $25,000 for Graceful.com. Even though they would see a notice that they didn’t meet the minimum offer, I can always reach out and tell them I’d be willing to do the deal.

The other option I could utilize is to not include a minimum offer. I don’t really like that idea because I want to set expectations. If someone submits an offer, I want them to see that the price expectation is high.

The $100,000 figure is arbitrary. I could probably be okay to set it to $15,000 – $25,000 for the majority of my portfolio. However, for the handful of names that I ask 6 figures on, I wouldn’t want someone to think I am willing to sell for $25,000 if they submit an offer at the minimum.

I don’t know if this will impact leads and sales, so this is pretty much just a test for now. I don’t have a huge domain portfolio and never have had one, so I don’t foresee it being a problem.

I am interested in hearing how you deal with your portfolio minimum offer if you’d like to share your experience.

CX.com Sold: Company Rebrands as ampX2

Elliot Silver
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There have been quite a few two letter .com domain names that have sold in the last two years. Most of these deals transact in private, but when the Whois changes, it can be easy to detect that a domain name changed hands. I recently learned that the CX.com domain name was sold for an undisclosed price. CX.com had been owned for four years by a company that specializes in white label cloud storage and collaboration solutions.

According to the current Whois information, the new registrant of CX.com appears to be a Chinese company. In fact, it appears that the registrant information is the same as WW.com and MM.com. Both of those domain names sold in 2014, with WW.com selling via Sedo for $1.2 million and MM.com selling for an undisclosed figure. The deal was closed via Escrow.com.

After selling CX.com, the company

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DNS Brokers May Have More Insight Than Us

Elliot Silver
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Many of my domain names are parked on the DomainNameSales.com platform, so a fair percentage of the offers I receive on my domain names are submitted via DNS. When I can’t get a buyer to reply to me, or if I don’t think I will have luck negotiating with the buyer (or I am busy), I forward the lead to a broker from DNS. In addition to their skills negotiating, the DNS brokers may have another tool not at my disposal: data.

For people who have very large portfolios and receive many offers for their domain names, a useful tool is the “Inquiries by Buyer” tab. If a person has made offers for other domain names in a person’s portfolio, this tool will allow the owner to track those inquiries. Knowing what the person offered (or paid) for a different domain name can give valuable insight, and that information can be used as a comparable. For instance, “You offered $x for x.com, and we feel y.com is worth 1.5x that offer.”

For most people, though, this tool isn’t

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Lda Asked and DNS Shared

Elliot Silver
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In the lead up to NamesCon, I wrote an article about a question and answer panel led by Jeff Gabriel, Vice President of Sales at DomainNameSales.com. A reader with the “Lda” moniker commented, asking Jeff to share some examples of his sales to prove his expertise:

“However, to front a panel titled ‘… selling YOUR domains’ with no obvious public track record of named sales (inform me if this is incorrect), my trust in Jeff’s ‘expertise’ is clearly less than yours.

I’m simply inviting him to convince me that he’s worthy of the title ‘expert’ by releasing the names of domains he has brokered, that don’t have NDAs.”

If you visit DN Journal this afternoon, it looks like

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Startup Uses Buyer Broker to Acquire EasyPost.com

Elliot Silver
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A reader  shared an article with me that I think you might find interesting. The article is written by Jarrett Streebin, and it is aptly titled How We Bought EasyPost.com. The startup called Easy Post used a domain name buyer’s broker to acquire the EasyPost.com domain name. Prior to this acquisition, the company had been using EasyPost.CO for its website.

Some of my  key takeaways that I think should interest domain investors are:

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Measles.com Domain Name is for Sale

Elliot Silver
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Measles is a disease that was reported as eliminated in the United States in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Most babies born in the US receive an immunization shot for the measles in a vaccine that generally covers measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR). With that said, it’s a bit of a surprise that there has been a measles outbreak in the United States reported by many news outlets. The outbreak hasn’t been as large or as deadly as the Ebola outbreak, but it is concerning.

I was curious who owns the Measles.com domain name, and it appears to be owned by a healthcare company. The domain name  is currently parked with pay per click advertising links, and you’ll see a banner across the top of the landing page announcing that Measles.com  is for sale. After a bit of searching, I learned that Measles.com is being  brokered exclusively by Right of the Dot.

I reached out to Right of the Dot co-founder Monte Cahn, and he

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