TechCrunch reported on the $95 million Series A funding round of a company called Finally. Originally, the company was known as Back Office, and it used the BackOffice.CO domain name for its business. Along with the rebrand to Finally, the company is using Finally.com for its website.
It is unclear to me when Finally.com was acquired by the company that is using it. At the moment, Finally.com is registered under Whois privacy at GoDaddy.
Paul Nicks, who has been a Vice President and GM of the Aftermarket at GoDaddy has been promoted. His new position is President of the Domain division at the publicly traded company. He will still oversee the groups that matter most to domain investors. It is unclear to me who has taken his role at the company.
Paul has been one of the main point people for all things impacting domain investors at GoDaddy. He has also been an advocate within the company for domain investors.
One noticeable change is Paul’s appearance on the GoDaddy corporate leadership page on the GoDaddy website.
Congratulations to Paul on the well-deserved promotion.
I’ve known Merlin Kauffman for many years and have seen him transition from successful domain investor to startup founder to angel investor. I believe Merlin still owns many domain names, and he continues to actively buy domain names.
Although I am not involved in the NFT or crypto spaces at all, I follow it because of the close ties with domain investors and the domain investing community. One upcoming NFT launch that caught my eye is called Metasaurs. It seems to be getting quite a bit of buzz, and it looks like Merlin is behind this new NFT. It looks like the “pre-sale minting” period began today (October 13th).
The Booth brothers, Andy Booth and James Booth, have done incredibly well selling domain names. They are among the most successful domain investors I have met and know. They are high risk and high reward investors, and this extends beyond the domain name investing business.
Andy and James somewhat famously acquired a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT for $1.3 million worth of ETH cryptocurrency. There was a great deal of discussion when I wrote about their purchase.
Earlier today, Andy and James sold their ape NFT for 740 ETH. The sale was reported by a Twitter account that tracks the sale of BAYC ape NFTs:
A little over a month ago, I shared some initial thoughts on the Dan.com update. Since that time, I made a few changes to my portfolio on Dan.com, with the biggest change being the removal of the Make Offer option for nearly all of my domain names priced below $10,000. I mentioned this on Twitter in early August.
2 weeks ago, I removed the Make Offer option for nearly all of my names at https://t.co/N3nk4c8w9b priced <$10k. So far, no sales there. I have ~1,300 names on Dan. I received a couple of emails asking to negotiate price, and I have also sold 2 names on Afternic since then. 1/2
— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) August 6, 2021
For nearly three weeks following this change, I did not have a single buy it now (BIN) sale on Dan.com. Since August 11, I have had four domain names sell at Dan.com using the BIN option. These sales were relatively small, with each being less than $5,000, but the revenue from the sales is motivating and reassuring.
Front is a customer communication platform that was founded in 2013 and has been using the FrontApp.com domain name for its website. This company has raised nearly $150 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Front.com has long been owned by a financial services company, although it had not been used since 2010, according to Archive.org.
Last month, Jamie Zoch noticed that Front.com was pending transfer and speculated that the domain name may have been sold. Jamie was right, and it turns out the Front.com domain name was acquired by Front.
Yesterday afternoon, Front announced its updated website, and more importantly, its new domain name. The company made this announcement in a fun way:
