It is said that in Major League Baseball, a player can fail 70% of the time at the plate and still make the Hall of Fame. Someone with a long career whose batting average is .300 or better has a decent shot of being inducted in the baseball Hall of Fame while being known as a solid hitter.
Domain investing is similar in a sense, but the bar to be considered successful is even lower than a hitter in baseball. A decent domain portfolio may have a 2-3% sell through rate (STR). A strong domain investor portfolio optimized for sales might sell only 5% of the portfolio in a year. 95% of a domain name portfolio may sit unsold each year, and a large percentage of these domain names may not get an offer or inquiry during the course of a year.
At first glance, this would seem like a failure, but it isn’t. If a domain investor is selling 5% of his or her portfolio at solid prices, the investor can still earn an excellent living while continuing to reinvest profits into similar and better domain names.
STR is a bit of a vanity metric that doesn’t matter much to some people, but it is an important metric for someone whose portfolio was built to maximize sales. People who recently started out with their domain investments and want to build a portfolio need a good STR to show they are buying the right assets and continue to have good cash-flow to continue reinvesting.
Achieving a 5% STR seems like a low bar. I think it is difficult to do that these days while earning enough money to continue doing it over a longer period of time. There has never been as much competition in auctions or hand registrations as there is today. Maintaining a 5% STR with comfortable margins is a big challenge for most people.
If you can build your domain portfolio to succeed 5% of the time, you’ve done well if selling domain names is your goal. It’s not easy to do these days.
I actually failed with a lot of my business ideas over the past 18 years, but I still made a good living. So I agree with the idea of the article.
I fail 99.999999% of the time but I am still making money and still having fun…
the best Revenge is Living Well- the best Motivation is Rejection-There is no such thing as Failures, they are only Delays
She has real talent. If she has any views I don’t care for I don’t let that interfere with appreciating her great talent, and sometimes I’ve enjoyed her stuff on YT. Not all who are as famous or popular have her level of genuine talent.
Elliot’s blog may also even be the only one in the industry that allows videos to appear like that vs. just text links. At least last time I thought about it when I was far more active commenting in the blogs.
It’s all about timing.
Failing is not an option.
Delay is the game.
If you keep a good portfolio with easy going names then one day they will knock your door, if you have new names you have to grab the buyers. But everything always is the timing, the pricing and a lot a lot of luck.
I totally failed as a “domainer” since over two decades now, but I laugh about it. My much bigger regret is not buying Bitcoin when I could have easily and made billions. Not for the usual reasons of greed and the love of money, but simply for legitimate good purposes and even doing a lot of good. But either I made a mistake or it simply wasn’t God’s will. Over the years I only had a few sales of any significance, two for about $25k each, and two for almost 10 Bitcoins when they were worth about $2k. The guy who bought them tried very emphatically to get me to hold onto the Bitcoins, but I had already seen Bitcoin go up and down like a stock gamble and he seemed a bit too fanatical, so I just cashed them out asap. He also sent them to me without any escrow or anything like that, just on trust. Would’ve been worth over $1m recently. Despite being a failed domainer, God has granted me some success as an end user, which has become my primary activity for a long time now. I’ve also said a few other things about myself in the blogs before.
So now I have the best of both worlds in terms of perspective, the perspective of a domain investor/”domainer” and the perspective of a commercial end user. Plus a number of great end user domains since I’ve been the buyer instead of seller for years now. I also sometimes give the luminaries like Elliot here a hard time, which has no doubt not escaped his notice, but he doesn’t censor me. 😉