Shahed Khan is the Co-Founder of Loom, a video-based work communication tool. The company operates on its brand matching Loom.com domain name, but that wasn’t always the case.

This afternoon on X, Shahed shared the creative way his company was able to acquire Loom.com for $150,000 in 2018. Having Loom.com certainly helped the company. In fact, it was acquired by Atlassian for $975 million in 2023.

Here’s the first post in Shahed’s thread. You’ll want to click through through to X to read the entire story.

In a sales negotiation for my higher value domain names, I am frequently asked something along the lines of this: “If the domain name is so valuable, why is it still for sale?” The implication is that my domain name hasn’t sold because it is overpriced.

This is a simplistic way to look at it, but it makes sense that this would cross a buyer’s mind. Despite the fact that domain names have had commercial value for 30 years, people are still woefully uneducated about them. It is also a common response tactic to try and get the seller to come off the asking price.

Several years ago, Mode made an important domain name acquisition. The company had been using ModeAnalytics.com, and it acquired the brand matching Mode.com domain name. I had been a bidder in the asset auction that was the precursor to the sale. When I saw it was later being represented by Joe Uddeme, I kept in touch with him about the name as it was being marketed.

Not surprisingly, Joe successfully brokered the sale of Mode.com. I believe I already knew that. What I did not know is how much the company paid to acquire Mode.com.

It feels pretty good when a startup founder wants to buy your domain name. I know the domain name can probably incrementally help the business, and it will likely open some doors or impress some people as they raise capital. Oftentimes, it can be challenging to get that startup to make an acquisition commitment. ‘We’ll be in touch after we close our next round,’ a founder will tell me.

Every once in a while, I will touch base and see if anything has changed. Perhaps the business has gained traction, grown revenue, or the company has realized it is hampered by its current domain name. Sometimes founders will stay in touch, and other times they disappear.

A publicly traded company in the insurance space formerly called Baldwin Risk Partners has rebranded itself as The Baldwin Group. The company trades under the BWIN stock ticker on NASDAQ. In advance of the rebrand, the company acquired the brand matching Baldwin.com domain name. The company currently has a market capitalization of nearly $4 Billion USD, and it employees 4,000 people. The rebrand was covered in an insurance industry trade publication last month.

From what I can tell using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, it appears that Baldwin.com changed hands in or around December of 2023. Baldwin.com had been registered under Whois privacy at Network Solutions, and it transferred to Amazon’s domain registrar, also under Whois privacy.