Weekend Updates & Tips

I don’t know about you, but I get quite a bit of work done on the weekends, except in the Spring and Summer. This means I spend more time working during the week and less time focusing on my business on the weekends. The one downside of running a business as the sole owner is that I am always thinking about business.

Hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend. If you’re going to the Red Sox game at Fenway Park tonight (or basically any weekend game), let me know and we can meet up. Here are some updates and a couple of tips/suggestions.

• On Friday night, entrepreneur Mark Cuban mentioned Fashion Metric on Shark Tank. Fashion Metric was founded by Morgan and Daina Linton, and the company has Cuban as an investor. Congratulations to Morgan and Daina on this primetime mention.

• If you have an idea about a product or service that would benefit you if a company offered it, you might as well share your idea with the company (unless you are going to compete). I’ve often thought about things I think would benefit my business, and I’ve made suggestions to companies that might be able to implement. It’s a win / win.

• Perhaps this is a surprise, but I like the .Ninja TLD. I am not planning on buying any because I am on the sidelines in the first round of new TLDs, but I think the registry is going to sell a lot of these domain names. IMO, a brand that uses “Ninja” is probably one that is willing to take chances, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many adopt the .Ninja TLD. I saw a couple people tweet about Analytics.Ninja, and it’s owned by Avinash Kaushik, a published author who is an analytics expert.

• I am getting close to the $1,000 mark in my Pan-Mass Challenging fundraising effort. I am hoping to raise $5k by August. The money raised goes to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which is an exceptional organization. Here’s more information about my participation. Perhaps you can help me reach my short term goal of $1,000 this weekend?

• If you own a domain name and are trying to buy a similar domain name (the singular or plural for example) but the owner wants an exorbitant sum of money, why not offer your domain name to the other party? If he or she values the other version so highly, perhaps yours will have value to them, and you can offer it for a “deal.”

• Wishing my friends and colleagues in the San Diego area all the best through these tough times. The wild fires have been pretty bad. I am not sure if the 101Domain team is back in the office, but hopefully their employees and family are all safe.

• The .XYZ Registry just launched the fourth ever .xyz website – Dating.xyz. It’s for a TV ad campaign they are running in the UK in conjunction with the domain registrar, 123-Reg. They are still adding features, but you can check out the name generator tool. From a marketing perspective, this seems to be a good way to get leads that they control.