For the past 15 years, Bob Mountain has held senior roles at NameMedia (then parent company of Afternic) and GoDaddy. During his tenure, Bob’s area of expertise has been business development and partner management, serving in different C-suite and Vice President roles.
Bob shared some personal news with me that he is allowing me to share here. Bob will be retiring from GoDaddy at the end of this year.
GoDaddy has been running a private auction featuring domain names from its NameFind portfolio. I have been following the auctions and bidding on a handful of domain names I like.
Yesterday, I won the auction for Molasses.com. As I shared on X, it was won, paid for, delivered, and a landing page was launched within a few hours. I want to share how I made that happen.
I keep most of my domain names registered at GoDaddy because I find it is easier to manage a portfolio at one registrar. Throughout the year as I acquire domain names at auction, my other registrar accounts grow. I have domain names at Network Solutions, Namecheap, Dynadot, NameBright, and probably a few other domain registrars.
Late last night, Jesse Tinsley, Founder of Recruiter.com, announced a large domain name acquisition. His company purchased the Employer.com domain name for $450,000 USD.
Jesse shared details about the acquisition in a post on X:
Big news: We purchased https://t.co/GRPNMB5NiB for ~$450k.
Because it’s easy to remember and perfectly captures our vision: which is empowering businesses to onboard effortlessly and pay employees anywhere in the world with ease.
It’s the start of…
— Jesse Tinsley (@JesseTinsley) November 26, 2024
Notably, Jesse shared the reason his company spent nearly half a million to buy this meaningful one word .com domain name:
Yesterday morning, I noticed a handful of expiry auctions on GoDaddy Auctions that had a $1 opening bid. The typical starting bid for these types of auctions is $25, so that caught my attention. Most of the other auctions I visited yesterday had the standard $25 opening bid.
$1 expiry auctions at @godaddyauctions? pic.twitter.com/a90XMe1gbQ
— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) November 17, 2024
I reached out to GoDaddy to ask about this anomaly, and a company representative confirmed this is a test. He was unable to provide additional details about the test, so I don’t know how long we are going to see $1 opening bids. I was told GoDaddy does quite a bit of testing across many variables. For instance, the commas in prices and estimated values across different GoDaddy services were recently removed as a short-lived test.
In July of 2022, I was told about a GoDaddy change that was made with the hope of successfully delivering more GoDaddy Auction wins to customers. I believe the policy change is that if a GoDaddy registered domain name isn’t renewed 3 days before an expiry auction, it is no longer allowed to be renewed. I don’t bid on enough domain names to comment accurately, but by and large, it seems like I receive fewer refunds for GoDaddy Auctions wins.
When I buy a domain name, I list it on an Excel spreadsheet. If the domain name is not delivered instantly, I put a yellow highlight on the cell so I can keep track of it. Today, I scrolled up and saw a domain name I won at auction on October 27th was not delivered to my GoDaddy account. I paid for the domain name on October 30th. Two weeks is a long time for provisioning.
