DomainFest Trend: Business Development

With parking revenue down across the board in the last couple of years, many people have taken steps to create different revenue streams with their domain names. While at DomainFest, I learned about a number of new ventures started by domain industry veterans, and I was impressed to see this.

These new businesses cover everything from product sales, services, and data management, and I want to share a few of the new ventures I learned about with you.

Tom Breen is someone I’ve met at a number of conferences but had limited business conversations with him. Like me, Tom is a big Red Sox (and Boston sports) fan, so we’ve had many sports conversations but I never really knew what he did.

During one of the parties, we were talking business, and I learned that he recently started a very successful local deals site called The Local Deal.  Focusing on the area around where he lives, Tom has built quite a big advertiser base and has made a dent in the local market. The company is looking to expand, which is good news and an important step with competition heating up from national companies like Groupon.

Jodi Chamberlain is probably best known by many for her work at Offshoring.com and for Latonas.com during the TRAFFIC conference planning process. She has a gregarious personality, and it’s likely she’s smiled at, waved at, or hugged you at once conference or another.

Via Facebook and at DomainFest, I learned Jodi and a friend have started a boutique soap company called The Cute Side. The company produces its own line of soaps that are sold online and in some brick and mortar stores. The company just recently launched, and with Jodi’s passion, I would bet it’s going to be very successful.

A friend of mine insisted that I have a meeting with Luc Lezon from Estibot, and I was very glad I did. Although I have been critical about Estibot’s domain appraisal tool, I think it has many helpful attributes (like CPC rates, monthly searches, page rank…etc.), and I listed the site among my 10 favorite domain tools.

Luc and a business partner have started a new domain management tool, and it has a great tool I intend to test (and test often). The tool will allow people to find domain sales leads for the domain names they want to sell.  The tool even says why it selected the particular contacts (paying for ads, name is part of the domain name for sale, name is similar…etc).  There are many more aspects to this tool, but this is what I look forward to testing most.

There are a number of other people who have moved away from domain parking in the past year to start their own online business. It is going to be fun to watch these people grow their companies over the next few years.