This morning, I read a TechCrunch article announcing a new e-bike subscription service called Dance that was founded by the founders of Soundcloud. The company is based in Europe, and the service will first launch in Berlin. When I read the article, the thing that caught my attention immediately is the company is using the Dance.CO domain name.
What I did not recall when I read the article is that Mike Mann recently announced that he sold Dance.CO for $58,000 in a July 14th tweet:
Dancin’ in the streets. Sold https://t.co/hlR7t8JrsY $58,000. Purchased 7/19/10 $1.
— Mike Mann (@mikemanndotcom) July 14, 2020
The $58,000 sale is not yet indexed in NameBio, but when it gets verified and indexed, it will rank as the third largest publicly reported .CO domain name sale in the last five years (source). In addition, it will tie the $58,000 sale of Renovate.com for the 52nd largest domain name sale of the year to date, according to DNJournal.
In addition to this point of reference, I also found it interesting that the company acquired this domain name just one week ago and it is now publicly launching. Companies typically acquire a brand domain name like this further in advance in the event of any unexpected delays, although securing the domain name may have played an important role in the timing of the news.
Another interesting aspect of this news is that some of the largest e-bike and scooter companies do not have brand match .com domain names. Bird uses Bird.CO, Lime uses Li.ME, Scoot uses Scoot.CO, Spin uses and Spin.pm. The only ones I can see that use .com are Jump with Jump.com, Grin with OnGrin.com, and Skip with SkipScooters.com.
Thanks to Caleb for reminding me about Mike Mann’s sale of Dance.CO.
There should be a website that csn show how much traffic is lost from dot whatever to dot com. It is like how many wrong turns you made to reach your destination without using Google map.
Damn..I bought Tesla stock at 150$ years ago and now thru the roof.
Bought Amazon Microsoft homedepot….belly happy
Bought Starbucks at 21$
Dance.com redirects to Capezio.com. Will be interesting to see how much traffic they pick up as Dance.co builds out and is promoted. Undoubtedly, they will.
I wonder how much of that $58K he owes to the .CO registry . That name was not randomly purchased for $1 ,
Don’t see how starting an ebike company during a global pandemic is going to work well. Oh well!
Bikes sales are off the chart. Probably double or more since the pandemic started.
One thing I have learned after helping several start ups… when it isn’t your money you are spending, dot com be damned lol