In September of 2019, I posted an article highlighting a domain name acquisition request from Basecamp CEO Jason Fried. At the time, Jason’s requirements were that the domain name “Must be 3-5 letters, must be pronounceable, must be a .com.” In a tweet today, it looks like Jason revealed the domain name that his company acquired – and it’s pretty awesome – Hey.com:
6 years ago we went all-in on Basecamp. One company, entirely focused on one product. Today we’re announcing we’ve changed our mind. The best Basecamp ever – Basecamp 4 – is coming in 2021, but first we’ll be releasing something brand new this April: https://t.co/0HA74LY0rR
— Jason Fried (@jasonfried) February 6, 2020
In looking at the landing page on Hey.com, it appears the domain name will be used for some sort of email-related project:
“With HEY, we’ve done just that. It’s a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be. For web, iOS, and Android.”
They company said it expects to launch HEY in April of this year, so be on the lookout for it.
Using DomainTools Historical Whois tool, it looks like Hey.com has been registered under Whois privacy for many years, so I am not sure who sold Hey.com. I searched through my email records, and do not see any mentions of this domain name in brokerage newsletters. I also do not see any sales records for Hey.com in NameBio.
In the meantime, I sent Jason a message on Twitter to ask if he is able to share the purchase price or price range. Unfortunately, he was unable to share the acquisition price with me.
Thanks to Peter Askew for bringing this to my attention!
The owner:
Dane Golden, he renamed Hey.com to Vidiup.tv
https://vidiup.tv/what-is-hey-com/
hey.com Archived page: https://web.archive.org/web/20190306225752/https://hey.com/
Face palm . . . hope it was a large enough payout on Hey.com to slum it on that new name.
Nope, he got a STEAL on the purchase of Hey.com!
Appreciate the writeup Andrew, but unless Dane told you the sale price (which I doubt), you don’t know the price. When you asked me via Twitter DM, I told you I couldn’t tell you (we’re under a non-disclosure, as is Dane), so whatever number you have in your head is purely a guess.