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@cultra & Andrei discuss my first sale, roast my portfolio & AI tools
Recorded: Feb. 20, 2026 Duration: 2:07:52Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, key players in the crypto and domain space explored the launch of new projects, the impact of AI on domain values, and strategic partnerships that are shaping the future of digital assets. With rising interest in AI and innovative funding opportunities, the conversation highlighted significant trends and growth potential in the industry.
Full Transcription
What's up, Shane?
What's up Shane? What's going on?
There we go.
We're back again.
Yeah.
Happy Friday.
Happy Friday.
Is your massage later or did you already get it in?
I actually go every other week.
But I do, like I told you, I do take my mom out to lunch every Friday.
I have for two years and I don't really miss it.
It's, you know, you gotta, you gotta be actionable to what you preach.
And I preach, if you have a chance to spend time with your parents while they're still
with you, you do it.
So my mom actually moved from California to the middle of the country so we could spend
her last decade.
I know that sounds terrible, but you know, to spend the last year.
So I make most of it and I schedule everything around Friday lunch.
Yeah, well, that's a great thing to do.
You know, I'm feeling that more and more,
but I'm also optimistic that AI will make that not a thing.
I was reading... That they don't die?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you or I will die
if you survive the next five years.
I firmly believe that.
I'm reading like Machines of Love and Grace,
which is Dario Amadei's essay. He's the CEO of Anthropic. And I don't know, he also has a background in biology and he lays out a pretty compelling picture for a lot of low hanging fruit in like biological systems, like just expanding the scope of CRISPR,
and developing new drugs for anti-aging and like basically AI just opening up the bottleneck
of, we just simply don't have enough like man hours to stumble upon eureka inventions in the world of biology and medicine.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm I'm optimistic.
I mean, it it seems like we have all these things laying on the ground.
I just started doing some peptides as well.
And those are like obviously outside of the fda approved schedule but they
have enormous potential for you know healing you know tissue damage and rotator cuff injuries and
my friends and uh doing just general like immune system modulation and those are like not distributed
at all through the population.
And it's really just like, you know, if you are online enough, you can discover these things.
Oh, yeah. I mean, everybody knows about BP 157 and retitutride and all that. So, yeah, I think I agree with you.
I think, you know, the way I look at everything pretty much in life, but especially in health, is that we have a baseline that we try and establish and we make it as high as we can.
So right now we kind of judge that through VO2 max is kind of the number that we have at this point that measures our health.
measures our health. And then we know at this point in time that we have a measurable decline
with time so that I think technology will lessen that decline and also give us the ability to have
a higher number. So I think we'll see, just like you said, I think we'll see healthier people and
I think we'll see less decline. Now, my generation, I'm a little too old to probably take full advantage of it, but the reality is if I want to run a marathon at 80,
I need to be at a certain number now and I need to reduce the decline every year to where I can
get there. But if I don't start with the high number in the beginning, that decline will get
me too low of a number. So that's how I approach everything but i'm right there with you i mean i'm all oh you know me i'm all over technology i also happen to be uh running
partners and best friends with a team of doctors and the sports doctors at all the universities
here and i travel with them around the world so i have pretty good information and testing and
forefront of what's happening and i also know like retitutrives
in phase three trials so I get to watch that so yeah it's just keeping your ears
and eyes I'm not a one of those guys that tries everything but at the same
time you got to stay on top of what's the newest researched things I guess
yeah and I saw an interview with the new fda chair and he seems very like you know
pragmatic and also like hyper aware of like a lot of the corrupt and bureaucratic bloat that's
happened in that uh agency and so he looks very he looks like he's very aggressively trying to
he looks like he's very aggressively trying to cut red tape and you know let people try drugs
um like if they if the circumstances really call for it even if it's not perfectly uh you know
proven to be safe yet um which makes a lot of sense you know right right if you're in a chronic
illness you should be able to take it's a balancing act and i think that's where you're in a chronic illness, you should be able to take risks.
It's a balancing act.
And I think that's where you're seeing right now, you're seeing foreign countries kind of advance that and push that a little forward.
And the FDA is using Saudi Arabia and they're using European agencies to allow it in first and using them as guinea pigs.
So, yeah, it's a worldwide thing now.
So the United States is feeling the pressure of others advancing quicker.
Yeah. I am trying to get you up here, Andre. My X app is not working. Oh, are you in now?
Are you here?
He's not up. I don don't see him he's up yet
andre phone in if you can hear us we've got some good people i see morgan my
my snow he's my official human snow shovel in the in brook and renee u, who's my financial guide.
So I got the team here all in the listening.
I worry for you if Renee is your financial guy.
I mean, Renee...
If I can get him to stop talking,
I just have to run everything he says through ChatDVT
and break it down to bullet points.
And he's one of the smarter guys I know.
Morgan and him are both brilliant people.
So every time I talk to Renee, I'm like, okay, hold on.
Pause, pause, rewind, rewind three seconds.
And tell me that gem of knowledge that you just spat out.
He is prolific, man.
I mean, that's okay.
That's what you want.
You want people that are,
you want people that are rustling the trees and knocking all the birds for you to see. okay that's what you want you must people that are that you want people that
are rustling the the trees and knocking all the birds for you to see so that's what you exactly
renee's clock and 160 iq easy yeah especially on the verbal side but anyways guys same way yeah
morgan's uh high iq high kindness exactly exactly um well it's good to have you here it is five
dollar Friday as always I under I'm trying to get you up here I don't know
what's going on here he's our leader yeah right we need him in here. My app is not working.
I wonder if I can make you a host and then...
Yeah.
And then you could do it.
Yeah.
He can also log, you know, he can turn it off and turn it on.
That's one of the few, this is actually one of the few places you can unplug it, let it reset and come back.
Yeah. Well, I worry it'll shut it down for everybody
if I do that. No, not you, him.
No, it's my app that's fucking up right now.
I see what you're saying. Suck it. Before we
lose people. We don't want too much silence here.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I've invited him.
So hopefully that works, Andre.
You can make me a guest host.
Oh, I think he's in now.
Anyway, yeah, I did. I did invite you to a guest host. Oh, I think he's in now. Anyway, yeah, I did.
I did invite you to be a host.
Okay.
Anyway, to kick things off, Shane, I know you.
So on the tin, we've got my first sale, which was a very big moment for me in my domaining journey.
Obviously, you know, I am the head of product at Unstoppable.
And so my capacity as a domainer is limited to really just like becoming one of you guys
so I can build a better product for you all and really wrapping my head around all the
you all and really wrapping my head around all the ins and outs of being a domainer.
ins and outs of being a domainer.
And I haven't dedicated enough time to being a domainer, you know, full time and, and really,
you know, being profit oriented around my domain. But in doing so, I think I've, you know,
definitely had some come to Jesus moments over the past year or so as I've been picking up some domains here and there.
So, yeah, I wanted to walk through my first sale and then we can go through my portfolio
at the nuts and bolts level and get you guys' take. Obviously, it's not going to be
the most impressive portfolio, but I think it could be instructive for people to get a take on the evolution, some of the early mistakes that I made.
So, without further ado, we can talk about my first sale, which was SwarmOperators.com.
And that sold for an enormous price tag of $400 on Afternic last week.
So wholesale pricing, I think Andre influenced me quite a bit on wholesale pricing for my domains as a way to like iterate quickly early on in my journey and get a sense for if I was on the right track with some
of my hand regs.
Swarm Operators was a hand reg basically a year ago.
I remember like ChatGPT Operator came out a year ago in January of 2025 and this was
the computer use agent for ChatGBT. You know, it was
a big deal. It was like the first time you could like, as a consumer, use a computer use agent and
have it do things and click around in a browser and accomplish a task for you. And I was, you know,
I thought we had minted a new agent keyword. You know, if Chachabichi is saying operator is what they're calling this browser use agent,
then, you know, I want to go and register a bunch of operator names.
So that's what I did.
I got some other ones.
I got swarm operations.com as well, which is considerably worse.
Swarm, I think, is an interesting keyword that I've seen much more popular lately with this open claw or clawed bot boom that we've been seeing on X.
People are talking about like spinning up swarms of agents.
Swarm having this like funny and nefarious
and also like just gleefully irreverent vibe to it.
And also terrifying at the same time.
So I bought a couple of Swarm names. I got swarmhardware.com,
swarmresearchers.com, which I think is probably also in the realm of the same quality as Swarm
operators. Swarmsynthesis.com, which I think is a flop. But anyway, these are low tier
hand regs. But for five bucks at Unstoppable, selling this for 400 bucks less commission
has paid for probably most of my hand regs over the past year. And so all it takes is one.
Hey Brady.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it works now.
Can you please tell us how many domains you have total and how you sold it?
I think that would help.
would help? Yeah, so it sold via Afternic. I've only really been listing on Afternic in earnest
Yeah, so it sold via Afrinik.
for the past three months, ever since Unstoppable joined the Afternic network.
So I'm probably missing out on a good bit of traffic and potential sales by not having listed there earlier
Consistent price point at 400 there and then I have about
Let me check exactly
I have
100 100 I have a hundred, a hundred domains here. So all of these are hand ragged. Oh, that's not true. I have probably 60 here. So most of them hand ragged. Some of them are like, you know, freebies with our upsells with that info and whatnot. So probably like 40, 40 in earnest, mostly.com a couple dot bots. And that's basically it.
Yeah, I think it would be interesting to have Josh's perspective on this because he said two things that are kind of useful in this context.
One, he mentioned that his sales for 2025 would have been kind of bad if not for his recent additions to the portfolio.
So in what you're doing now, which is kind of doing your best to responsibly mine trends
that are emerging is something that is working for people like Josh right now.
So it does make sense, of course, as long as you don't go overboard, because there's
always this risk of spreading yourself too thin.
And number two, I have a bunch of discussions with him back and forth about pricing,
because actually, as many domains as I do sell at wholesale levels,
I actually price my end user domains quite high.
Like now, for example, I have been playing around with 4888 with LTO included whenever possible.
And whenever I'm not under the 60 day lock with these.
And the thing is with these lower price points that you cannot just conjure demand from thin air.
So what I mean by this is that like if you
mentioned you had 60 names right this a good question to start would be if all of these domains
by magic would become available at the registration fee how many would be registered within a week
within a month and so on and you're going to realize that for a sample of, let's say, a thousand domains, unless you
have domains that are heavily botted, like fourletter.coms and where it wouldn't take
a long time at all for them to be registered, for the majority of domains that we consider
bread and butter inventory, you would not have a 100% sell-through rate or anywhere
near that,
even if the domain were available at the registration fee.
And so with these low price points,
there comes a time when it's just not worth it
in that you increase your sell-through rate,
but you don't increase it to enough of a degree
to offset the fact that you're charging so little for a domain.
Now, based on name bio data and my recollection of it, it's not really worth it usually to list under $1,000.
And it kind of ties in with my experience as well.
Because, yeah, I sell at very low prices wholesale,
but I sell domain by the hundreds.
I oftentimes sell multiple hundreds of domains
in like 30 minutes to the same person.
And so with these kind of economics,
it makes sense to do so.
Whereas on the end user front,
I see things differently.
I constantly add inventory and remove inventory much more
aggressively than other domain investors. But I always ask myself, since I'm at any given point
carrying thousands of domains, how do I make the most money possible from end users on those
thousands of domains that I'm carrying? And Josh had an hypothesis that it would be worth it to maybe
experiment with lower price points. But the truth is, he doesn't have experience with it. I don't
have experience with it either. And I think it's dangerous because after my conversations with him,
I did a bit of homework. I reached out personally to the few people who I know did this at scale.
And based on their feedback feedback both what they said directly
and what I deduced from the realities of the portfolio I analyzed in their case
it's iffy you know so with a price tag like 400 bucks where after commission I you know I don't
know if you don't have boost enabled if you're at 15 you're gonna you're gonna net uh you're at 15%, you're going to net 340.
And at 340 net, it's difficult.
Now, you don't have many domains, right?
Like at 60 domains, so much can be just noise.
So even at a price point as low as yours, you would want to have more domains than that
than that to draw any kind of conclusions you can rely on.
to draw any kind of conclusions you can rely on.
Um, I will, however, say just since you mentioned that, uh, my selling wholesale
kind of had an impact on your way of doing things, this two things are true at
the same time.
In my case, one, nobody sells wholesale probably at lower margins than me, but I
do it because I sell in immense volume and it's
worth it for that reason strictly but the second thing which is true at the same time is that for
me it I don't have enough data to say but my gut feeling and the data I've gathered from other
people makes me skeptical that pricing as low as 400
is conducive to maximizing results for the portfolio.
So in your case, I would probably consider pricing higher.
I'll chime in on this too.
Just listening to the conversation,
I can tell that I'm speaking to two highly intelligent and methodical people, but I think you're both
missing completely is consumer behavior. You're thinking of it as math. And there are a million
ways to make money in domain names. But the reality is in consumer behavior, there's going
to be stats, which we just explained most people don't have. But there's also what when people are searching and buying a name like that, what's a number that makes an instant buy and a number that they're going to try it out price?
Like, yeah, at this price, I'm willing to do it because if it's a real business, the difference between 400 and 1200 is nothing.
It doesn't matter. And so you only have to sell a third of the names to do that.
So yes, we do need a portfolio to the adjustment in pricing. But in talking to the people that buy the names, there's not much difference between $400 and $800 for them to pull the trigger.
So you're definitely leaving money, in my opinion, at $400. At the same time, you need cash flow. But the reality is to make people pull the trigger, I think we're talking more in the $1,000 to $1,500 range. And you can sell a lot more domains. You just have to wait longer.
Josh, there's a lot of reasons why people like Josh and some of the older investors are
selling more new names. The fact of the matter is they're better. They know better what to buy now.
So yes, their new names are selling better. AI has been super hot, but they're much better
investors. Josh is a much better investor. I'm a much better investor. Yes, I sell more
names that I bought recently because I have more cash. I have a better idea of what to hand reg. I have a better idea of
what to spend at auctions. I'm a better investor. Josh turned the corner two years ago. He really
knows what he's doing and he has a lot more data sets. Plus, we have a group of people that share.
I'll go back to you on Brady on your swarm. Swarm is a hot name.
Braden Pollack has had great luck with swarm names. I get to see what he sells and swarm.
Your keyword there was not operator. Your keyword swarm. They love swarm names. They're doing very
well. That would be a more of a concentration in my case. So, you know, just to kind of summarize
it, I think you almost as much as the math and the analytics behind it, need to pay attention to why people are buying it at certain price points and to analyze what the lowest you can sell for that still triggers that thought process.
And on higher names, if someone's willing to pay 50, they're probably willing to pay 70. And, I get stuck being a little high priced, but when
they do sell, they more than make up for the lack of sales during that timeframe.
Yeah, that's, that's helpful context. Obviously I was, I have to weigh like,
obviously the long-term economics that you're pointing to Andre with like wanting to get
instant feedback. Of course, you know, I'm looking at my Afrinit dashboard now and I
can see like some of my, my more popular names based on view count, ghostcluster.com. This
is another hand reg from probably six months ago.
Cluster being obviously like having to do with spinning up a server farm or something like this.
Autoaggregate.com, which I thought was a pretty low tier name, but that's got another 20 views in three months.
And then a couple of .bots, reviewer dot bot, prospector dot bot, the dot
researcher dot bot as well. I have budgeting, budgeter dot, budgeting dot bot. The dot bots
are very tricky because those are fairly expensive renewals at 50 bucks. And so it does not make sense with more than like a Hail Mary.
But I still think, you know, the one word, you know, reviewer, researcher, inspires action.
It really says what it is on the 10.
I think those are reasonable brands for like a small indie hacker project.
You know, I've been hanging out on a lot of the indie hacker and like Claude Code parts of Twitter.
And I see Dot So is really cleaning up with these guys or uh you know a very clean to the point not too convoluted brandable
in dot so um and you can hand rag those for 60 bucks or whatever um so i was really surprised
to see how how popular dot so was in those communities um Anyways, one other exercise that will be useful here is sort of going through the timeline
of my portfolio and looking at how my handrags changed over time.
So early on, the first handrag was SolanaMaximalist.com.
And of course, crypto has been in the dumps, but Bitcoin maximalist is a popular term.
And so Solana maximalist, Solana being sort of the up and coming chain that was set to rule them all.
Solana maximalist looked like a decent hand rag there.
Dronewarfare.org.
You know, I was seeing sort of the Houthis in Yemen and some of the drone warfare that was happening there,
and I figured drone warfare made sense for .org.
It has to match with the TLD, obviously, and org is quite particular in what the end users
might be.
I think maybe end dronewarfare.org, stopdronewarfare.org
also makes sense for like an NGO or nonprofit trying to be activists. Those are probably
available for anyone listening who's willing to take my advice, which should be concerning.
is should be concerning.
Then I went on a spree of auto names,
auto budgeter, auto forecaster.
I think this is a mistake.
This is like a, oh, it's like an alternative to AI
prefix with auto, but I don't,
they really don't roll off the tongue
and they don't sound good.
So those were all throwaways, auto procure, auto underwriter.
Then we got to operator names.
I bought Hive operator, Hive operators, Omni operators.
Again, I think these were largely mistakes.
Operator cluster, I think makes more sense.
Cluster has this cool edgy tech sound to it.
A couple of the swarm names I mentioned earlier, and then Ghost Cluster, which I mentioned
is the one, the better performing one on Afternic.
And then coming along, this is July of last year, I got into some bot, dot bot names,
like I mentioned.
I also went on a spree buying
some, I went down like the FDA drug approvals rabbit hole. And I was like, well, okay, raising
fi shows you which companies are raising, but what about like, which drugs are about to come on market?
And I went into this rabbit hole around FDA drug pipeline. And so I registered a couple
of, uh, they were the, the actual.coms were taken, but I picked up some of the.infos, uh,
and.xyz as like a $1 punt on, on some of these names. I think xZ is like really not a name you're gonna,
not a TLD you're gonna be wanting to put
any serious amount of money into.
And then I think I really sort of hit a stride late last year
where I was actually using Unstoppable Bot, my custom GPT,
which allows you to use inside of chat gpt uh and our availability api
to check real-time pricing and availability for names um and this was a real unlock for like
ideating more long tail uh brandables um so some of the names that came out of that were Neurovo, which is N-E-U-R-Y-V-O.com,
which is okay. It kind of doesn't really roll up the tongue, doesn't pass the
radio test, that's for sure. TheraVos.com. Thera being around therapeutics and biomedical applications.
And then I actually remember, this is one of my favorites, Crucible.com. Obviously it sounds like crucible.
I think it's pretty clean.
It looks nice.
That one,
that one,
I actually,
I looked back and I could find the conversation with chat GBT to iterate to
that name.
And it started with me just saying, oh, I have a thesis around, I think it was neuro names or something.
And it started with me just saying,
I have a thesis around.
And I was ideating a bunch of like AI brandables with that.
But, you know, Chatubiji is obviously great at just smashing together combinations for brandables.
brandables. So anyway, pulling back here, and then some final ones here, tensorcluster.com,
So anyway, pulling back here.
foundationautonomy.com, cellularhardware.com, synthetichardware.com.
And then I went on a binge with some biomedical names. So chromatin,
some biomedical names. So chromatin spelled with a T-Y-N at the end instead of T-I-N.
Chromatin is a substance in a cell having to do with CRISPR technology.
And then plasmid is a similar sort of technical term related to CRISPR. And so I registered plasmid labs, plasmid systems.
Yeah.
So point being, as I got deeper and deeper on my journey through handrags, I became a
little more selective, a little more like aesthetics oriented and importantly use this unstoppable watch to close the loop
between using chat GPT to ideate names and actually checking their availability
so I will I will actually pin the link to that spot if anyone wants to try it
out you know I've had pretty good reviews from people that it's useful for
being able to ideate names.
Reflections on that whirlwind guys.
Okay. Your audio broke up a bit. Is it working for you now?
I can hear you. Okay.
Was I breaking up?
I managed to hear everything you said, just the final words were a bit distorted.
I think what I would do in your case is I would probably add a bit more structure to what you're doing. And I would definitely combine ideation using AI with something more old school domain data driven.
an article posted yesterday by Andrew from Domain Name Wire with the top keywords in domains sold
on After Nick in December, right? And so I think this is something that people don't mention
enough, that mining and kind of ideating and then registering domains is quite dangerous if you don't have a strong foundation
of data to guide you.
And data means basically what keywords are selling.
It means maybe the relationships you have
with other domainers, you know what sold for them,
what worked for them, what didn't work for them.
And so I would say that in the absence of this kind of experience
it's going to be difficult right because let me give you an example um what you're saying can
definitely work and we all know mike man he's kind of crazy right but also he sold by domains
for a lot of money and then built another six uh another portfolio that consists
of a six-figure number of domains and in so doing especially with buy domains he gathered a metric
ton of data which enabled him to his to register i think 15 000 domains in a day i think that's
still the record of hand regs in a day. And I like registering 15,000 domains in a day would be really stupid for practically everyone.
But for Mike Mann, it's at least a bit less stupid because he they have the data to back up their decisions.
And it's just on a whole different level.
In the absence of that, it is a bit like shooting in the dark.
But even so, it can be a foundation from a strategy.
but you would probably have to work on your domain investing philosophical thesis let's say
like what you've mentioned in terms of model you know it's clear that you're excited about domains
you tried all these different things with dot bot with dot com with dronewarfare.org etc etc but i would say it does seem a tiny bit all over the place so
what i'd be interested in is kind of like why you invest the way that you do like if you ask me
to me it's simple i collect as much money as possible from end users while turning around
as much inventory as i can wholesale. And as long as
I'm able to do that as a reasonable cost, and as long as the market gives me enough names
to actually be able to replace my inventory, that's my model. Now, some people might say it
involves too much work. Some people might say something different. Doesn't matter. It's my
thesis based on what works well for me. So I would start there.
What would you say right now is your thesis? What's your MO as a domain investor? How would
you describe it in your own words? Sure. Well, obviously, I am a lazy domainer,
and I'm not a model for actually doing things the regimented and numbers oriented way.
I should spend much more time on name bio and like actually tracking these trends and really be in the trenches.
So really, it's just like time efficiency for me is my MO.
I would say I think there is still massive inefficiency between like the sort of the trends that that most domainers look at and sort of the futurist futurism that that I'm seeing on Twitter between like Claude Code
and OpenClaw in the present day
and sort of more of the long-term things around biotech,
nanotech, space exploration technologies
and things like this,
which are obviously much longer term bets.
So I think like being able to anticipate
those technological changes is some edge that I have,
obviously not like massive and it's a broad market.
So that's how I would encapsulate it.
And obviously, the laziness here really impacts my ability to dedicate time to finding gems in expired domains,
which is where, you know, the majority of wholesale pickups that are worthwhile happen.
So again, that efficiency gets in my way.
So again, that efficiency gets in my way.
Okay.
Okay.
So you're basically saying that given your tech background and your interest in stuff like AI aided coding and whatnot, and your time spent on social media following these trends, you might be in a better position than other domain investors to do future trend investing.
Like, would this short description kind of encapsulate it, do you think?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
Okay, perfect.
How do you want to develop your portfolio?
What are you aiming for?
Do you want to become, you know, kind of like a large portfolio holder and continuously grow your portfolio?
Do you want to start with these handwrecks, but then also diversify into higher quality domains that you treat separately?
Like if you were to envision yourself two and a half years from now, not that long, but not somewhat mid to long term.
What would you do with this edge that, in your opinion, you have and you might have?
But I'm curious, how would you turn it into a model that kind of leads to having staying power and somewhat consistent profitability as a domainer in two or three years as a time horizon?
You know, I do want to keep it efficient, domaining not my main priority in my career.
not my main priority in my career. And, you know, I also want to stay liquid with my assets,
given the, you know, the volatility and the craziness that I expect AI to unfold over the
world in the next couple of years. And so keeping it very lean and opportunistic,
And so keeping it very lean and opportunistic
and keeping carrying costs quite low
are my main goals there.
I'm really not shooting for like crazy upside.
Because that's kind of the thing.
Probably if I wanted to keep my carrying costs low
and I wanted to kind of not invest
too much time in domaining I would probably just use my money and let it work for me and rather
than kind of try to mine for trends and whatnot maybe those trends would inspire me but I would
contact owners of really good domains,
or I would try to acquire them using services like DNX, which helps you monitor names and is good for that.
And I would probably aim for higher,
for higher average value domains, if you don't want to put in the work,
because that way, you know, you can, you,
A know you have something of somewhat liquid value.
Maybe you bought it from an auction.
You know that the other two, three, four people who bid against you at least somewhat validated the value of your asset.
Whereas when you're shooting in the dark, so to speak, as a beginner, it's a bit more difficult to ascertain whether or not you have value in the first place.
to ascertain whether or not you have value in the first place.
So I would say probably that I would keep that idea
that you being better connected to tech
enables you to spot trends earlier on than other people,
but maybe rather than mining,
and unless you can find the best types of domains
for your given trend as you're doing it,
so unless you're super super early i would
probably try to you know contact people use something like dnx participate in the auctions
and build a small portfolio but of a higher average value domains and that way a you know
you have domains of value b by knowing you have domains of value if B, by knowing you have domains of value, if you need liquidity for
other projects or whatever, it's going to be easy for you to tap into that liquidity. C,
it's not going to be a burden on you moving forward because you're going to have a relatively
low number of domains. And so your carrying costs are not going to be high, right? Because otherwise, if you kind of want to play it another way,
what I'm doing or what some other people are doing,
the two goals that you have are difficult to reconcile,
like with hand-reg type domains.
Keeping your portfolio lean, yet at the same time,
drawing conclusions from your portfolio that you can rely on
and use to grow the portfolio portfolio question, it's kind of
difficult to do in the absence of some volume. Again, I'm talking about hand-reg domains. So if
you do this type of thing, mining, hand-registering future trends and whatnot, you probably will need
some volumes to draw any kind of conclusions that you can trust. But obviously, what does that mean
in a world where domain domains have to be renewed each year? It's going to mean higher carrying
costs. And so it's going to be difficult to reconcile these two goals, keeping carrying
costs low, A, and B, using hand registration as a strategy while keeping those carrying costs low. It's going to be a bit
difficult to reconcile with you. All right. Well, you have me here on for a reason too. So I'll
throw in. So there's multiple levels of acquiring domain assets and the bottom of the barrel is
hand registration. Those are the absolute lottery tickets, leftover names. And the only to think
that you're having, and this is no offense, Brady, but there's multiple people that are scraping
social media, scraping X and running a third party, using a third party to run through an API
and just scrape all the data to find keywords, to find stock words,
to find most talked about things, to find new accounts set up that use certain keywords.
There's so many people that are doing much more than you'll ever do of just reading
things along those lines. It's a lottery ticket and it's a scratch off. Where you could use your
advantage. So the four levels are finding a name that's not that's a website that's not being used and correcting and contacting the owner, directing, buying it from them.
Then the next one is going to auctions and seeing names that come up for auction that are either private listing or expired names.
listing or expired names. Then there's the mispriced listed names, which you're going to go
through keywords or things that you think are of value and find people that are underestimating
the value and buy it. You can use DNX, you can run your API, you have access to AfterNick,
you can set up and scrape AfterNick and find those bad registrations. And then there's
Dropcatch. So then you use the services that don't get quite
to hand registration, but get dropped and you can pick them off before. And then the last thing left
is what you're doing. If it makes it through all those scenarios are the hand registration.
And the only way to truly make hand registrations work are picking a keyword and buying a bulk
amount of them, because that's the
only way you can measure if you're in the correct area. So like I bought all the dot energy, or I
bought energy names, or Josh went and bought intelligence names. And so you're finding 100
or 200 names that are in a certain area. But if you don't want holding cost, hand registration is
the most expensive, inefficient way of keeping your
holding cost down.
It's much better to spend that $1,000 on one good name that you saw at auction that you
know the trajectory of that keyword is much better than people are giving it credit for
to use that.
So that's how you keep it because your holding cost is now $10 if it's a .com or $140 if it's a .ai.
And that's been my way of doing it.
The way I got my money early was not through hand registration, but through reselling and sending things to auction.
15 years ago, the auction market was much better.
You were much more able to buy a name and then put it up for auction and make a little bit extra money flipping it or selling it to other domain investors. We all
have done that. That's how most of us started is selling to other domain investors, not really
hand registering as much. So I think that right now you're pretty much throwing darts and you're throwing darts at a pretty unprofitable scenario,
in my opinion. It can be done, but it won't be your most enjoyable, profitable experience.
If it's for learning, that's great. I know you have $5 registrations and you want to see if you
can make that work, but that should be an ancillary add-on to your portfolio if you truly want to make money. And you can't,
pardon my language, you can't half-ass it into it or things don't work, whether it's domains or
life. You can't just kind of back into it. You kind of have to come up with a strategy,
like Andre said, a strategy of what you want to see, what kind of results you want to see, how much you want to put into it and not just scattershot everything.
Yeah, that's valuable advice, guys.
for example, for how not to go about your domaining journey,
which is to say being extremely lazy,
doing the absolute easiest thing that VeriSign wants you to do,
which is hand rag a bunch of domains.
You also have to, like, if you see it from the registrar's perspective,
VeriSign, the registry behind .com,
offers rebates to registrars for pushing cheap new registrations because VeriSign obviously
just wants to grow the pie. They want more domains out there, dot coms, to increase their
revenue base. And so all of the registrars and registries are promoting hand regs. Meanwhile, as a domain investor,
this is like you guys are pointing to the bottom of the barrel names. And the market is fairly
efficient with people who are automating a lot of this. So yeah, it's good advice. I don't want to dwell too long on some of these beginner mistakes, but this is valuable.
I'm going to, and I appreciate you guys pointing out sort of the dissonance between my stated
goals and what I'm actually doing.
So yeah, perhaps I'll have to dabble in some more aggressive outbounding to people with,
you know, domains they aren't using and try to acquire them that way,
which seems like a very solid strategy that
doesn't get talked about too much. So moving on,
let's talk about crates.com selling
yesterday in a fire sale from David Sustiel.
Did you guys see this?
He put up a GoDaddy checkout link.
I think he acquired this domain six months ago or something and was looking for a quick flip.
Crates.com, C-R-A-T-E-S.com.
And I think he sold it within an hour of posting about it.
And he sold it via the GoDaddy checkout link for around 20 grand on Afternic or via the GoDaddy checkout link.
Actually, I forget if it was.
I think he got an Afternic email.
email so maybe it was on Apnick and not the checkout link. My question to him was you know
So maybe it was on Afternic and not the checkout link.
if this thing sold in an hour after lowering the price don't you think you left a lot of money on
the table? You know the flash sale obviously indicates that that it was an offer too good
to pass up for someone. So i'm curious you guys's thoughts
like should he have priced it a bit higher should he have just gradually come down it seems like
someone was monitoring the name on after nick um if it went that quickly after after lowering the
price uh so i'm curious you guys thoughts on how that went down it's a bit more nuanced than that yeah i followed it
uh so it's not um it's not like he listed it on x and an hour later it's it's sold actually it is
what happened but there's a backstory behind it because prior to doing that he had contacted a
few people to buy the domain from him and as far as I understood the highest offer made by
them was something like 17.5 K 18 K or something like that and he was like you
know what let me just mention this publicly he put out a go daddy
checkout link it was go daddy checkout and 20 K or whatever it was and then an
hour later it sold and I assume it sold to one of the people that he had
contacted beforehand rather than someone who found out about it sold and I assume it sold to one of the people that he had contacted beforehand
rather than someone who found out about it later on. I could be wrong of course. Also it was a flip
but it was pretty close to breakeven. If I'm not mistaken he made about 3,000 on the name,
bought it for like 16,000 after commission sold it for 19, whatever it was. Let's call it
for the sake of this discussion,
$3,000. So it's one of those situations where from the sidelines without the context,
it's difficult to figure out why he did it. It could be something I would be curious if David
were here to kind of mention it. Did he try outbounding it to domainers? Because he was on
our show at one point, and he mentioned that he ran a moving business a while
back so the industry is something he knows about did he use that knowledge did he try to contact
people and then said you know that didn't lead to an end user sale let me just wholesale it and
move on to the greener pastures right like I think it's possible if I were to just speculate
that maybe when buying it, he was optimistic that he can maybe use his contacts to really
obtain a good price. But when it didn't happen, he was like, you know, let me do something better
with the money. He knows what context he has. So you don't go broke taking a profit. He took a profit and that's what it was.
That being said, it's a great name, but it's not the easiest name to sell because, you
know, it's not like having a name like orthodontist.com where you have all these orthodontists in the
US alone that you can sell to, whereas crates is something more specialized. So it's one of those things
where in theory, the name sounds good and you think you're going to sell it. Definitely
to many people sounds like the name that deserves to fetch six figures, let's say,
but actually realizing that sale is, I think, easier said than done. So he probably did
the right thing if he did indeed outbound it. He gave it a fair shot. It didn't garner as much
interest as he probably assumed it did. And so he was like, let me move on to something else.
That being said, while I don't think the new owner got the bargain of a century,
I think they got a great domain at a fair price.
And with a word as easy to spell and popular as crates, you know, doesn't mean the end
user has to be a company that sells crates.
You know, for all I know, somebody could launch a game called crates and it becomes the next
Roblox and you sell it for half a million or a million or whatever
but that's moving on to the more speculative side in my view it's one of those domains that
if you were to give it a score from zero to a hundred based on how good it sounds it's very
close to a hundred if you were to give it a score from zero to a hundred based on how likely it is
to sell for a meaningful amount to an end user you you probably would give it a lower score. So it's a great domain, but it's probably a bit
harder to sell at a really great price than most people think.
Yeah, and I think the domain value was 15 to 20,000, and he happened to buy it on the lower end and thought that he could sell it
pretty quickly.
That when he first got the name, he let everybody know he had it and how great it was and told
us all about the business and what a big business it is.
And he's not wrong on any of that.
But that's a name that requires patience.
And if you want to get the most money, you have to wait for the right buyer.
And it's not a huge amount of buyers, but the right buyer, it is a six-figure name.
So my guess is he bought it on the lower end of the value.
And the person that bought it is a lot more patient than he is knowing that they're going to be able to 5X, 10X that name, but they're just going to have to wait a while.
Whereas David, he wanted the cash. He was not willing to hold and tie up $15,000.
And these are, again, my opinions, but my guess is he didn't want to tie up that much money and he needs the money for other development or other things he's doing. He's not truly a domain
investor that's, when he buys a name, is going to wait five, seven years for that to be a 10X and probably sold it to someone that is willing to do that.
So all names are liquid. Saying domain names aren't liquid is incorrect. Domain names are
as liquid as you price them. I can probably sell any name in my portfolio if I price it
low enough. So liquidity is not a problem. Liquidity
at a profit is a problem. Liquidity at a great profit is very difficult. So not about liquidity.
That's not the problem. The problem is making money and being liquid. So he proved that. He
proved that he bought it at a good wholesale price and was able to sell it at a higher wholesale
price. That's a business model. There's
lots of people that do that. You've heard me talk many times. The Booth Brothers were the
finest re-howsalers in the history of domain investing. They would hunt, their mom and them
would go out and find premium domain names and flip them to other domain investors. Andrew
Rosner knows this as well as anyone and flip them for a $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 profit,
whereas the name was a half-million-dollar name, and they'd still only make $5,000 or $10,000.
Drew went on to sell that for half a million dollars. But eventually, once they had enough
cash and enough cash to be idle and patient, they no longer had to do that. So that's what you saw as two different types of investors on that name.
Yeah, well, I mean
It's interesting to me call it saying that's a wholesale price to acquire the domain at
which it seems, you know, everything you hear about
Domain strategy is that it's a power law game you have to you have to really get multiples
uh on the sales that you do get because uh you know you have so few hits in a given year
uh that you really need to make the ones count but um you know with with the certainty
you know i guess the more premium the name the lower the margin because you can be certain that it's going to be able to sell.
Is that how you think about it?
Yeah.
Everybody does it different, but I'm a profit dollar person.
I ran a brick and mortar business and that tends to be
really emphasis on margins. Everything is measured in margins. All the analytics and the sheets that
they give you at the end of the day are margins. But my mortgage is paid with profit dollars.
If I make a great margin, but make $2, I can't pay my bill. So I measure everything and how much money I make.
That being said, if you have a higher domain name and you buy it for a hundred and you sell it for 200, that margin in our industry is not that big, but a hundred thousand dollars profit is a lot of
money. So you'll see people like, um, doing higher end, uh, like Andy Booth is one of the best. He will spend $800,000 wholesale for a
name, knowing that he can sell it for 1.5. Now, if you look at the margins, that's terrible. And
you think, oh, I can't, but he knows it's such a high quality name and he has such good contacts
that he is able to do things like that. So it's a different game when you get to these higher values.
People really, everybody in this room knows it, but most people don't understand how expensive
a wholesale domain is right now, especially a quality one.
And I'm not talking just, you know, one word dot coms.
I mean, I paid $6,000 for peach dot X, Y, Z.
And that's a lot of money for an X, Y, Z. But I think it's one of the better X, Y, Z.
And so, you know, you just have to measure things of what you need to obviously pay your renewals,
but at the same time, what you need to pay your bills.
but at the same time, what you need to pay your bills.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaking of other sales, we saw Lotus.ai go for $600,000 a couple of weeks ago.
And we also saw confirmation of AI.com selling for 70 million ahead of the Super Bowl.
Obviously, this is enormous news.
That's the highest sale ever reported for a domain name bought by the same folks that bought crypto.com and turned that into a billion dollar business, really on
the back of the quality of that exact match domain.
Unfortunately the Super Bowl commercial and the subsequent failure of AI.com's app, which was clearly vibe coded and was broken during the Super Bowl due to such high traffic,
probably tainted the name in a fairly drastic way. But I mean, what are you guys thoughts around
this name, the sale price? Is this founder going to be able to recreate the success that he had buying crypto.com
for eight million dollars or whatever it was and turning that into a billion dollar business
you know it i i have i have an aesthetic aversion to it these exact match domains they feel so private equity efficiency soulless to me but you can't deny the value of
the you know authority that comes with that Andrew Rosner put out a good article basically
just saying you know he bought a seat at the table for you know the top domain company or top ai company companies in the space for 70 million bucks
um and that's not a not a horrendous price tag when you consider the many trillions hundreds
of trillions of dollars on the line uh if you are indeed able to you know build a good product here
um so yeah i'm curious you guys thoughts yeah so I mean, he did a good job with crypto.com and he's proven that he's someone who knows what
to do with a premium domain, but kind of like the Super Bowl mishap you mentioned, I think is
one of the largest scale metaphors that can help domain investors learn a lesson.
Because if there is one thing I noticed as someone who developed himself a fair bit,
like I had hosting businesses, I had a small escrow service,
I had like a gazillion smaller projects that I did my best with
and I tried so many business models over the years.
What I noticed time and time again with domain investors is that they severely
underestimate just how much you have to invest to truly create a business. And time and time again,
I've seen domain investors talk about development and about turning a domain into a business without
realizing that building a business is pretty damn hard and it can be pretty damn capital intensive.
And so what I've seen over the years are a lot of amazing domains owned by domain investors
that were built out with a development budget that was a fraction, literally a fraction of what they paid for the domain.
And this was kind of based on the assumption that the domain would kind of compensate for
everything else. And as long as you have a good domain, everything else will follow. And that's
not the case. And that's the reason why time and time again, development projects by domain investors flopped
because they didn't understand the budget requirements to really ship a quality product
and turn it into a business and have an actual cash register and basically do the work.
That's not to say that a domain isn't insanely important.
that's not to say that a domain isn't insanely important. That's not to say that this AI.com
purchase didn't give him a seat at the table with all of these multi-billion dollars, soon-to-be
trillion, multi-trillion dollars, CapEx spending entities, just by virtue of owning that domain
name. It's going to amplify everything you do. It's going to give you instant credibility.
It's just not going to make your business. You have to make your business and your domain is
there to augment everything you do throughout that process. I have a little different take on
it. If I were doing what he was doing, I would have had it crashed on purpose.
That was the best marketing move you could ever make.
I think it's the opposite of a failure.
I think we have been beating this horse for two weeks.
We've been talking about it for two weeks. you know, of social mentions of, you know, we're just, just the fact that it went down brought
hundreds of thousands of posts about the domain name. I'm, I'm not positive, but I guarantee I
would have had it crash on purpose during the Superbowl to generate more. I would have had it
crashed to a certain point and then opened it up again, because that's how marketing works. You do,
you do things like that to generate more revenue.
He is not a stupid man.
I'm not saying he really made it crash on purpose, but he knows how to run a business.
He has plenty of money.
To turn on Cloudflare is so easy so it doesn't crash.
It really wasn't hard not to, but to debate the value of AI.com is silly.
It's one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable name in the world right now.
He could do anything he wants with it.
It cost another $25 to $30 million.
I think the founder of Rowe.com laid out the cost of a commercial.
Not only do you buy the commercial, but you have to buy the exact same amount on other days. So if
you spent 10 million on the commercial, depending on what quarter you bought it, you're required to
spend another 10 million somewhere else on that channel. So you're talking probably 20 to 25
million dollar investment for the commercial, just the commercial alone. So if 25 million
was the cost of the commercial, he probably received $40 million in free mentioned by all of us discussing this.
So I think it's a brilliant buy.
I think it's super intelligent.
Yeah, you just can't get a better name.
And he's got two of the best names in the world.
I think he'll be fine regardless of what we say, talking about discussing this purchase.
But it was a great... What was the
other name you mentioned, Brady, that we were going to talk about? Lotus.ai.
Yeah. What I was going to say about that is, as domain investors, the beauty of X and the public
sales data that we have, it also causes us... I'll ask a person and say, if you had Lotus.ai,
would you price it at $600,000? Most people can't get the money or are afraid to get the money that
we see on these sales. And on the flip side, we see people way overpricing their domains. Domain
owners have an ownership bias and they see these other sales and
say, well, if that goes for that, then this should go for that. And they don't truly know the value
of their domain name. So most domain investors way overpriced their domains. And then there's
other ones that they way underpriced it because they didn't extract maximum value. So that's the
game we play is where do we is what's the perfect pricing?
And nobody really has that.
New domainers rely way too much on appraisal value to justify their pricing.
But the reality is you have to go with the trends.
In AI, you tend to price higher than you think.
And twoword.com and other ones, we price higher than they should.
Yeah, that's an important point.
Lotus.ai sold as part of BrandForce's portfolio.
You know, I suppose with a portfolio like BrandForce's,
which is enormous and very, very premium,
you know, they can be patient and price a bit higher and really swing for the
fences with those. I'm curious what their landers look like if they do allow offers
or if they just have a price request for every single one of their domains.
They just have price requests for every single one of their domains.
I would imagine, you know, these higher end names that they have are all price requests,
and it looks like they are for most of them here.
Yeah, I think excellent point about potentially doing it on purpose.
I think it's such guerrilla warfare out there in the information sphere.
It would not surprise me if they did do it on purpose.
And, yeah, I mean, it's kind of a flex to say that, oh, you know, we were getting so much attention during the Super Bowl that our servers went down.
It's a very actually notable thing that can cement yourself and users' minds.
But to Andre's point, you are competing with deep tech entities in ChatGPT and Anthropic and the rest.
And a domain does not get you a shortcut to that.
And what I'm seeing, and I had a post about this the other night,
and this has been a buzz on Twitter, obviously,
is just so much of SaaS selling off because we've seen,
especially with the MCP craze really maturing, is that
so many app interfaces are being pulled into these chatbots.
So Claude and ChatGPT have these MCP APIs that allow them to basically recreate the critical pieces of any application and pull in the data into the chat window so that you can draft Slack messages, you can mock up Figma designs, you can, you know, run a generated spreadsheet with their PowerPoint or Excel integrations.
And more and more of this work is being pulled into a context where AI can manipulate the data and automate a lot of the grunt work for you, as opposed to using a GUI to actually interact with these apps.
as opposed to using a GUI to actually interact with these apps.
And so I think that also, you know, to tie it home with AI.com,
you know, if you are not a deep tech play and you're just building,
God knows what AI.com is.
It seems like some sort of social network and personal agent.
But if you're not building the deep tech
that actually gives people the leverage
and that is soaking up all of SaaS,
then your moat as a business is very fragile.
We're also seeing that in GoDaddy stock.
GoDaddy stock has been basically straight down
for the past year and a half now.
We saw the other day that they updated their terms, now treating every user as a business user.
John Barry Hill had a thread on this on Twitter.
Basically, he confirms that domain name wires thesis
that this is probably to get around consumer protections
around data.
So potentially GoDaddy scrambling here
looking for new revenue lines as their stock tanks
with AI,
kind of showing that their business models around upsells for website builders
and marketing services and hosting
and all these other things
are a bit fragile in a world
where AI is able to build a website for you
and set up your hosting all from inside the chat window.
So I'm curious how you guys are seeing all this play out.
I got to say, is my mic on?
Yeah.
Yeah, it appeared off for me.
It's kind of interesting that I got some interest in consulting from
people who were interested in GoDaddy right around the official final nail in the coffin
of AdSense for domains. And yeah, I mean, it's kind of, I don't think it's a debt by
a thousand cuts, but there's certainly several cuts that kind of brought the stock, I mean, it's kind of, I don't think it's a debt by a thousand cuts, but there are certainly several cuts that kind of brought the stock, I think, to double digits.
You made a good point about the fact that their upsells are kind of losing their luster a bit.
So that's one thing.
Something else is number two, let's say that, you know, this is a world where the market loves it when you do stuff with AI, try stuff with AI, and they've kind of fallen behind on that. at true innovation and on the contrary you know it's where amazing uh projects like domain uh
like domain namesales.com uniregistry dan went to be sunsetted to be polite and so
that doesn't paint an amazing picture of godaddy as an innovator. Number four, the fact that actually if you crunch the numbers,
you're going to realize that so many GoDaddy domains
were affected by the AdSense for domains situation.
I'm referring to the domains they park when you register a domain name
and haven't yet changed your
nameserver, nameservers, the pages you see after domains expire, and so on.
And so, yeah, the depth of AdSense for domains certainly didn't help either.
Number five is it, I think, I'm also hearing kind of murmurs in private communities that
there's a mismatch between what their employees at the grassroots level tell them about today's
realities and what the GoDaddy upper echelon is able to do about it like I've seen people voice
frustration with the fact that you know people who have portfolios that are about eight, nine
times larger than mine, so 35, 40,000 domains, stuff
like that, and they were being damn near bullied
by their account reps to move domains to GoDaddy.
And they were like, oh my god, we're
going to give you a discount of
something like half a dollar or 70 cents or whatever it was. And the total discount for
the mini portfolio, if you wanted to move over, would have amounted to something like $1,500.
And the guy had like close to 40,000 portfolio domains and he spent on GoDaddy more than $1,000
a day. And they thought that, oh my God, they're going to impress him with that discount which is a bit tone deaf in today's world and their account reps are
good their uh sales people they understand this and are frustrated by the fact that you know this
is the only thing they can do and so there's probably some less than amazing cohesion over there as well.
So again, not that by a thousand cuts, but like kind of like a multitude of factors that kind of put Godad in a situation that's not amazing.
But yeah, they're not going to zero.
They're a behemoth.
distribution is next level, which as we talked about in previous shows, puts them in a unique
position to buy out portfolios like Frank Schilling's portfolio, or businesses like Frank's
and so on. So yeah, they're definitely not going to zero. But for the reasons I outlined,
and I'm sure I missed many, they're not doing too stellar.
And I'll take it from a trader standpoint. One, the software, and they are a software company, all the software stocks took a 20% dip. So across the board, any software company that's traded publicly is down quite a bit.
of Namecheap and Spaceship, the investors were able to see a comparable value versus what GoDaddy
was getting. And there was too big of a spread. So they brought that spread tighter to bring that
down to that comp price because they could see what Spaceship does. And they knew that was too
big of a spread. So GoDaddy had to drop with that purchase. I knew that immediately. Three,
GoDaddy had to drop with that purchase. I knew that immediately. Three, their AI doesn't give
them a leg up. AI, any company that can take AI to be more efficient, the only thing the AI is
going to do is let them have less employees. And so that may give them some operating margin
decrease with using AI. But as far as a tool to generate more revenue, it's not showing any value there.
So all the other things we mentioned are peanuts.
Like, yes, it moves slowly.
The tech's bad.
Domain investors, that really is such a small impact on the true value of the stock.
What we're seeing is the moat is disappearing and the valuation of GoDaddy overall in comparison to other things that you can invest in stocks.
People are switching to other valuable assets from GoDaddy. And that has a little more room
to run, most likely. I'm not doing any trading based on that, but the reality is there's still
a little bit of catch up. The software companies have come around, but it's only the ones that truly have a good moat, not the legal zooms.
Those are done. Those kind of things that I'll take over.
So I think that's what you saw in the stock. There was no doubt it was going to 100.
That was to me was pretty easy once they once the Namecheap sale went through.
So that's to me how it was truly that's the namecheap sale went through. So that's to me how it was truly,
that's the main reason the stock went down.
Yeah, interesting. I mean, I'm reconciling that with some of the timelines on ads for domains.
September 2024, Google makes ads for domains opt-in, and that went into effect in October 2024.
Meanwhile, GoDaddy's stock was still ripping up until January, I believe, of 2025, so just a month or two after that.
month or two after that. And then finally, in March of 2025, Google actually opt out
ops out all ad accounts from ads for domains by default. And, you know, at that point,
GoDaddy stock is already down 20% from the highs. has continued that march down to now 55% down
from the highs. So yeah, lots of changes in the mix here, but the ads for domains changes seem
quite prescient. I mean, there was, there was a, there was a month or two between
the September announcement, you know, the stock ripped 33% up, up until, you know, the
new year in 2025. And then, you know, straight down from there. And then of course, you know,
not sure why tariffs would impact domain names, really.
But, of course, everything tanks around the tariff tantrum in March and April there of 2025.
So, yeah, lots happening there.
Important to keep an eye on.
The comp is interesting with Namecheap.
We also saw Anand from D3 head over to Namecheap
as the VP of domains there.
Interesting move.
Shane, I know you probably know Anand reasonably well.
I think, what is that? We won't speak to D3 in particular,
but obviously Bitcoin in the dumps right now, you know, it's probably going to take a while
to find a bottom. Perhaps some jumping of ship there by Anand, or just moving on to a new position, who knows.
But some fresh blood into Namecheap as they've continued their private equity restructuring.
Yeah, any news or thoughts on that?
I think, uh, and I won't put Anand's words, he can speak for himself, but, um, what I
can say is it was a great job.
Like that was, I wouldn't say a dream job, but it could be a dream job.
It was a job that really fits him well.
He's an immense talent in this industry.
He knows so many different sides of domain names that he is a real asset to anybody.
And I think that D3 is still searching their path to what they're going to do.
And when you're in business as a person that was in business development and left for that exact reason. As a business development person,
you're there to sell and promote your entity, but when you're not quite sure
where the path of that entity is,
it becomes a difficult job.
So I assume he and I faced the same issues
and he found something that he knew what the role was
and he knows what the future is.
And so my guess is he went to a more sure, secure pathway of what his career would look like.
So that's that's what we do in life. That's what we do is we're we're we're we take roles for opportunity.
But we also like we like a clear path of what that opportunity is. And that's just a different space. So to me,
that's why he moved. And he's a real asset. So Namecheap got a great guy there. We did not work
there at the same time. We knew of each other more and probably just discussed things as 2BD
people and how we approach things rather than discussing the problems of where we worked. We
talked more about how to handle situations and our job.
And I love talking to business development people because we're kind of a special breed on how we talk about things and how we approach and how we network and those kind of things.
And so that's where I really appreciate the conversations with them.
Yeah. Well, two fresh names up in leadership at both GoDaddy with Alan Shiflett and now Anand over at Namecheap. a 5 commission increase to their aftermarket and they had added 5 to the buyers so not onto the
onto the sellers but actually coming directly out of the buyers side of those transactions
and they did so quietly without announcing it and then quickly rolled that back
quietly without announcing it, and then quickly rolled that back. And now have bundled it, I
believe, into just 10% on the seller side. So at least it's now transparent and the sellers
understand they can reprice their domains accordingly. I mean, what are you guys'
thoughts on that rollout? It seemed a little hasty uh and now they've uh you know rolled that
back uh do you guys have any takes there yeah i i don't think people had a problem with 10 per se
it's definitely a fair commission but rather i think what bugged them was the lack of transparency
in doing so um and we can contrast that a bit with unstoppable. Like I
remember when you guys had some issues where your for sale landers were unavailable for a few hours,
and then you went quickly on X and told people, hey, we're experiencing difficulties,
and literally nothing happened. People understood things happen. As we've seen recently,
issues with landing pages have occurred quite frequently at Afternick as well.
People are understanding. And the same way people understand that things go wrong tech-wise,
they also understand that companies have to turn a profit. And once again, I think you guys are
doing a pretty good job here. You're explaining right off the bat you're telling people
hey we went from five dollars to 5.99 you announced that ahead of time now you're going from 5.99 to
7.49 and you once again announced that and you gave people time to adapt and you just communicated
it properly and that's no problem at all as long as the companies in question communicate it
that's no problem at all. As long as the companies in question communicate it the way they should,
people understand it's business. Companies have to figure out a path to profitability. And there
is absolutely nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, I think what rubbed people the wrong
way was kind of this manner in which all of a sudden, they found out that their buyers were
charged 5%, which can put you in a pretty unpleasant position if you're
engaged in a negotiation and settled on a price. And then all of a sudden the buyer sees that,
oh, wait a second, why do I have to pay an extra 5%? Why didn't you tell me? Are you misleading?
I'm not sure in how many cases it actually backfired that way, but rather domainers
kind of realized that this type of situation can backfire
and this type of transparency can in worst case scenario also lead to them losing deals so i think
it's not it's definitely not a story of people having a problem with 10 as a commission level
i think that's fine but rather it was them just not appreciating the manner in which it
them just not appreciating the manner in which it actually the manner in which it wasn't
communicated. Yeah. And I think, I think Rick has done an amazing job with both spaceship and
Namecheap, but I also think that he has a really strong personality and he's the kind of person
that asks for forgiveness rather than permission. And that works at a smaller scale, but not at a larger scale.
And so every time he does something along these lines,
he tends to fight it in the beginning.
And so we all know that they should have just said,
hey, we want to test the buy side.
We want to add 5%.
You can opt in to either putting it on your 10% or put it on the
buy side because they wanted to test, would that make a difference? Is that an option for people
is to put it on the buy side and let the buyer pay? But what they did is they went ahead and
tested it without telling anybody. And so it was one of those asking for forgiveness rather than
permission. And that's what people had problems with. They probably would have appreciated the opportunity to try the buy side, but they also wanted,
if they had to take a 10%, if spaceship needed 10%, then a lot of people would have been fine
just putting the 10% because we know the cost of credit cards alone is two and a half to 3%.
The cost of negotiation can be another couple percent or more.
But so we know it had to be 10%. Even that's probably not enough margin for them to offer.
It probably needs to go up from there even, you know, 10, 15% is probably the numbers.
But again, it was the way it was presented. And the first one is, hey, we're just trying things
out. And people are like, we don't care if you're trying it out. We wanted to know that you are trying it out or have the
option to not try it out. It's our domains. You get to make the rules, but we get to be a part
of that decision. So I think that's how it played out. But the thing that I really commend him on
is he came out and said, hey, we made a mistake and he learned from that.
And as a leader, that's what you want to see.
You don't want to see a leader pushing back on saying, I know what we're doing.
Let us do this.
You want someone to say, hey, we did something.
It didn't work.
We're going to learn from that.
And that's what he did.
So I think he did a great job when it was all said and done.
Yeah, very reasonable.
I'm splitting payment between buyer and seller.
I'm curious what you guys' standard is, if you have a checkout link or escrow.com or
whatever service you're using, cough, cough, use unstoppables since we have 3% checkout
links. What is your best practice for splitting between the buyer and seller?
I know often people want the functionality to be able to put the entire fee on the buyer as opposed to you guys selling it.
What is your best practice? Have you seen pitfalls of that?
Are there bad reactions that can come out? Can you blow up a sale?
What should people watch out for then? I think it's the expectations of the buyer,
right? So if you buy anything at Sotheby's, if you buy anything at Barrett Jackson,
everybody knows coming into that that the buyers are going to pay a premium in addition to the seller.
So I think if a buyer expected to pay a commission, then it's okay.
Domain names to this point, buyers don't expect to pay commission, but they do expect to pay escrow.
So I think we have a standard. I don't see a reason why a buyer
wouldn't be if they go through GoDaddy and look to acquire a name, the buyer pays all the
commissions. You don't have to pay any. You get it completely commission free. So there are ways
and there are instances of buyers paying all the fees. So I don't think it's a bad idea to allow the buyer to pay some fees to take it off the seller.
But that option needs to be up to the seller because they're the ones that pay the loss of sale if it doesn't go through.
So I do think it's an option that should be available, but I do think it should be an option.
Yeah, to me as the wholesale guy, a lot depends on the price at which I'm selling, because as
of a certain point, I do feel like I'm stretching margins too thin. And even when it comes,
forget about escrow fees, even when it comes to PayPal, for example, if I'm in a negotiation with someone and he's buying a lot of domains, but he's really pushing me on my margins, I'm going to be like, okay, we can agree to this price.
If you want to use PayPal, you've got to pay me through PayPal mass pay so that we can keep fees low.
And that way you can get a good price.
I don't have to cover fees and then that's fine.
So for me, it also depends on the transaction, right?
On the other hand, you also have a feel of the other party.
So if I'm involved in a deal that I think makes sense for me,
and I kind of feel that the other party is a bit on the edge or uncomfortable or whatever,
I might decide against adding any unnecessary friction. And I'm going to
weigh the cost of that particular fee against the probability I perceive of losing the sale in
question. So I wouldn't mind at all in those instances, just eating the fee in question.
And that's that. So for things like an end user you know some end users can be quite edgy and
flaky sometimes and it's also a gut feeling thing that comes from perspective so if i think if i
think it's gonna be something like asking the buyer to pay the fee can be enough friction to
move the sale from uh let's do it to let me contact you some other time and then crickets
then i'm probably going to eat it.
So I would guess a lot depends on the context.
If I'm stretched super thin margin wise in wholesale deals
and I'm giving people such a good deal on the price,
then I expect them to help me in terms of escrow fee
or paying through mass pay or stuff like that.
With an end user, it just depends on the specific of that transaction
and how I perceive the end user.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Well, good to know.
Always good to have optionality.
Can't lose with that.
Shane, I know you wanted to talk about auctions, I believe,
and SEO value of some domains when you're
looking at expires.
Do you want to take us away on that?
Yeah, I mean, basically, it's an area that most domain investors don't understand or
really don't have the ability to utilize the names.
But if you look at the auctions on GoDaddy, I'd say half the top 10 or at least
30% of the top 10 are all SEO names, names that were purchased for their backlinks.
And I don't think people realize how huge that industry is. And it's something that you'll see
me announcing in the future of a business model behind that and how to utilize those names,
how to resell those names, how to find the people that to be able to buy those at auctions and sell
those to people that can utilize them. So we talked about, you know, searching a domain name,
a raw domain name from an old person that and then reselling that name. There's also a huge
opportunity in buying old names that have great SEO value and knowing thelling that name. There's also a huge opportunity in buying old names
that have great SEO value
and knowing the people that are willing to buy
those type of names in the categories.
Right now, gambling obviously is the big one,
but there's a whole,
I wouldn't call it an underworld
because it's not under,
but there's a whole world of people buying backlinks.
I make more money on my websites.
People talk about building
directories and building out. They don't realize if you build a site that has a pretty good
DR rating that you can sell links still. It's still very valuable. I probably make $500 a month
on a couple sites just selling backlinks to people that want to put them in my site to theirs just for
SEL juice. So I think it's a world that is not truly understood by domain investors. So I think
there's going to be some opportunity moving forward on how to flip those names as well.
Yeah, how do you how do you administrate that that business? Is it all manual? What does the actual backlink
insertion look like? Is it really just pasting it into your HTML?
It's literally working it into the article. Somebody just recently purchased the link
on my site is terrible, but bigisland.org.
And they approached me about, hey, we have a travel site and your DR rating is decent and we'll give you $100 to paste it.
I make sure that it fits into the article itself that I can work it in that it's a legit that my readers would want to use. But there is lots of forums of people looking, say, hey, I have a travel site to Australia.
I need some SEO links that would help promote Australian travel in that area.
And there's forums that buy and sell those millions of dollars a month that do those links.
And it's still you think, well, SEO is dead because agentics and
AI search is taking over. No, that still exists. That will continue to exist. It's still a way
that people prove value of a website in search. So yeah, it's a big market. And you look at the
auctions lately, it's definitely not going down. If everybody thinks that AI search is going to
take over Google search, just look at the auctions. It's proving that they don't think it's coming
anytime soon. And how do you get visibility with the people who want to buy backlinks? Do you list
your site or do they just find you using some of these SEO tools? People generally just email me, but again,
there is a couple of forums. Sean Markey is really good at it. He runs a forum that discusses SEO and
backlink purchasing. And I should know the name of his forum, but Sean Markey, I think he's at
ranks, but if you look him up in X, you'll find him. It's mostly done through
forums for people that are bulk buying or bulk searching. There's people whose jobs are hired by
larger companies that say, hey, we need to build some link juice. And they'll go out and just
go find links to them, mention them to the people and say, I think these would be good. And then
they purchase them and insert them into the website. So there's people whose entire job is to build a backlink profile
and they have a budget of what it costs to do that.
Yeah. Are you able to share one of these sites where you have this backlinks?
Yeah. So the one that I've just opened up a couple of weeks ago because Sean got me is bigisland.org.
It's just I what I did is I bought and this is, again, a business model I bought.
I had bigisland.com and I was going to build it as a Hawaiian travel site.
And again, it's a terrible site. I have put very little effort into it.
But at GoDaddy Auctions, bigIsland.org was the travel site for the
Big Island of Hawaii. And then Hawaii, the state, said, we don't want five different travel sites
for the state. We want one. So I think they started Go Hawaii and dumped all their, just let
all the other ones expire and rebuilt it into one that represented all the islands.
So that meant all the individual island state travel sites went into expiry. I bought it for $10,000 and then I rebuilt all the backlinks. You can use like SEMrush or any of the tools and it
shows all the backlinks that were to that site. I went to all the backlinks and I built an article based on that
on that backlink. So if Expedia linked to the best travel, it said Big Island, you know,
from Expedia, Big Island rental cars. I went and rebuilt that exact URL with an article about cars.
So now if you go to Expedia, it flows through. It's not a dead link anymore. It goes
right to the travel site. So all those backlinks that were there now still resonate and still go
through because I rebuilt a page to make it live. And so that's how you get instant juice. You find
something that has a good DR rating, you see all the backlinks, and you recreate the site. Doesn't
have to be word for word. It just has to use the same URL with good content on there. And so that's what I did. I essentially,
every article you see pretty much was a backlink from someone that now flows through. I did pay a
writer, a real person that lived on Hawaii to travel around and take photos and write an article
about all the different places he saw.
So a lot of those are actually real.
I mean, there's no AI on it at all.
It's all handwritten by a person myself
or that person that went there.
But most of it was based on links that I saw
and I said, hey, this one is a picnic spot in Hilo.
I need you to go visit there, write an article on it and put up
some pictures. Yeah, that's interesting. And then do you also do like affiliate commissions
for, you know, for the car services, car rental services? I haven't, like, I don't have a viator,
I should have viator, viator articles. Like you kind of said,
when you're domain investing, there's only so much time. I have not put forth the effort.
I did for a while, but you know how many irons I have in the fire. I haven't really put forth
the effort. So really it's just been just tinkering with it. It used to rank in the top
five for Big Island Hawaii or Big Island,
and it's slowly lost ranking because I'm not keeping the pages refreshed and rewritten and
new. Google or even AI likes to see new content, fresh content, sites that are constantly being
updated, and I'm not doing that. And again, I just haven't put
forth the time and I haven't really paid anybody to do that as well. It's a lot of work. We're all
up here talking about development. Andre said it well. Everybody buys and thinks they're going to
develop and now they think they're going to do it even easier with AI. It is still very tough. It's
a lot of work and it's like getting married. Once you do something, you have to stay on it. You have to be consistent. And Brady, you've heard me say this word over and over, consistency. If you're going to start something, you're going to build something, it's yours. Like, you're going to have to keep on it. You're going to have to keep it updated. And you're going to, that's going to be part of your week for eternity. So, um, you know, there's many things that I've
started that I, I thought that I would put forth a time. And unfortunately I found something that
was better and more lucrative to put forth my time. And so big Island is kind of sunk to the
bottom. Yeah, reasonable. But you would say like the revenue that you're getting from this is mainly from people coming and wanting backlinks in your articles not through any advertising or affiliate
uh you know revenue share agreements that you might have on anything no it's um from just the
the sales of the the tourism books there's a book that when I went there, it's called the Blue Book.
It's a guide and now it's on an app as well, but there's no better guide in the world.
It really showed you every restaurant, everything on the island.
Pretty much if you saw anybody on the island, they have that app or that book.
I put an Amazon affiliate between that and the ridiculous Google ads that I have on
there and the links,
it's good for five or $600 a month.
And that's with no effort and five or $600 a month is,
you know,
that's a reasonable amount for no effort.
I think if I did more,
I could get that to a thousand or 2000,
but that's also the reason I can't sell it.
Nobody really wants to buy a site that only makes $500 a month, to be honest. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, you're going to recoup your
costs in a year, so that's not bad. Well, not quite a year, but two years, assuming everything
goes to plan. And then you, of then you, of course, you know,
have the value of the domain.
So, so yeah, that's, that's fascinating.
And I do think like, were you using,
you were just raw doing it and chat GPT,
writing the articles and everything,
because like the magic of the MCPs would allow you.
And if you were actually like building the, not using a site builder, but instead like building the raw code itself, uh, and, and deploying that to a hosting service.
Um, then you could use quad code with MCP connections and all in the same environment, you could connect it to the SEMrush API via the MCP.
That could pull all the backlinks,
that could identify dead links
because it would show you which pages you have
and which you don't.
And then CloudCo can also just like write the articles
for you as well and potentially do some web search and pull in good sources and make them fairly detailed articles too.
So a ton of that effort could have been done strictly inside of Cloud Code with the right MCP setup, which is really remarkable.
I agree, but I don't think the articles would be
nearly as good with Claude Code. I do think that you could do that, right? And that's what
everybody's going to be doing. And that's why I say that AI is driving everybody to mediocrity.
The people that are really good are getting lazy and using code, and the people that are really
dumb are using AI to get smarter. So it's driving everybody to mediocrity. I thought the better idea, and I still think today,
was I put an ad on plain old Craigslist, and this is recent, looking for an author that lives on
the island that's a local, that can write an article from a local's perspective. Now on car
rentals, I don't have to do that. But when it comes to visiting places, they were able to tell stories and describe things in a way that
I don't think AI could do it. They were able to take photos that were only my photos, that were
real photos. And so I felt it was better to have a personal touch because the ethos of the island
is local. That's what Hawaii is.
They don't even like outsiders.
So I wanted a local to write it
because that's the island itself.
So that's how I approached it.
And when you have a personal island
like the islands of Hawaii,
a personal touch is so much better than AI.
There is definitely room for AI to write articles,
car rentals, basic flights, those
kind of things, yes. But when it comes to the local traders markets, and he put stuff on there
that I would have never thought about that are very popular tourist things that don't get
mentioned quite as often. So I know that was just my approach to it. I think the AI is all great, but I think there are times
where a human intervention or human input is just as valuable. Yeah, absolutely. You know,
if you want to half-ass it, it's going to give you half-assed results, that's for sure.
But just as an entry point for people, you know,
looking into trying it out and experimenting,
obviously that's just the quickest way to get started.
Spinning out a basic and then working it with the human touch is definitely the future.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
And, you know, as, you know, it's one thing if you are,
you know, if you're building out 100 and you're just, you know, doing a very basic rough pass with Claude Code, then you're going to have poor quality articles that aren't very well researched.
know, with the right prompting, I think you could, you know, really, and telling it to,
you know, be more esoteric, look for these lesser known spots, grounded in research from
other articles, you could develop a fairly comprehensive base of articles that would
give you a good content base. But yeah, that's fascinating. Fascinating model there.
Yeah, we'll have to think about that.
You know, as we...
We're actually looking into something similar.
I think we had Aaron Seminoff on a while back
talking about how he was doing similar research
through his auctions looking,
basically pulling in SEMrush data and then auctions data
and being able to do some interesting advanced search
using data enrichment from things like SEMrush
to find the right auctions that he was interested in.
So that certainly looks like the future.
And of course, we do have our unstoppable bot, the custom GPT, in the GPT store.
If you go into the chat GPT app, you can find that.
We are beefing that up.
So do take a look at that tool
and let me know how it goes for you guys.
Some other housekeeping as we wrap today.
It is 599.com Friday.
So you can get your allocation of 100 599.coms today.
And we've announced this a couple of times on X, but it's worth reiterating.
We are increasing our prices pretty substantially in likely the first week of March.
And so the 599.com Fridays will go away.
It's the end of an era.
It's been over a year of these $5 Fridays,
but we will be moving to 750 dot coms every day.
And that will be,
I think many hundreds per week for Domainer Club members,
which is still the lowest price that you'll find on .coms more or less at that volume.
And then for non-domainer club members, I think it's more like 10 a day or something if you're not verified.
And then on the transfer side of things, we are doing away with our $10,000 in transfer discounts.
in transfer discounts. So no longer the $5.99 for Domainer Club members, but instead it will
increase to $7.99 to start. You'll get your first 1,000 domains at $7.99 and then $8.99 for another thousand and then finally unlimited at 1099 beyond that so pretty
drastic changes you will be you know depending on how much of your current
discount allocation you've used you will be you know boosted up so you know if you've already maxed out your transfer
discounts you'll be at the 999.com transfer price so just be aware of that
we'll have a little dashboard that it will show you exactly where you are in
your discounts tiers so that should be much more clear.
And sorry, I misspoke, but you can get many tens of thousands
of dot com transfers at 999.
So yeah, that should be a nice broad cap.
Currently, if you max out your $10,000 in discounts,
which is 2000 transfers or so, then the price immediately
jumps to $1,108 for transfers. And so we wanted a nice clean ramp up so that you wouldn't have such
a drastic jump. And so now you can hover around $9.99 for transfers for up to $50,000 in discounts.
So anyway, just some structural changes there,
but you should take advantage of those transfer discounts.
You're not going to find anything cheaper than 599 anywhere else.
I think Arif was saying he's never been more ahead on his renewals based on our discounts.
So take a note from him and take advantage of free money while it's still flowing.
You know, we're in a different chapter now as a company.
We're much larger.
We have greater mind share amongst domainers.
And so prices are increasing as we no longer need to bribe you guys to use us
and the product is actually good enough to keep you around so um just be aware of that uh we do
still commit to being at cost we don't plan on making um you know large margins on our on our
renewals and and registrations um so so that, you know, as the prices are increasing,
we still intend on being really like emulating
the Dynadot model of being low cost,
bulk domain or focused registrar.
On some products that have...
I just wanted to kind of double down
on what Arif mentioned.
And, you know, even at your post-increase prices,
I read that Unstoppable is actually going to decrease prices on renewals to $10.99,
which, yeah, is basically just a tiny smidge above very sign-less ICAN fee.
But after you add in processing and all that, you're not making
money there.
At $749 for registration, $799 for transfers, you're not making money there.
We just talked about how Spaceship moved to 10% and might be moving beyond that.
You have 3% on your landers.
And so I don't think domain investors understand how unprecedented
this is i have been doing what i do now for about 20 years in this industry i used various companies
from net firms in canada when they had their deals to godaddy when they had their coupons to
z.com in japan to whatever dream host when they periodically
had theirs and so on. But like never before, have you had a company that had actually good,
solid working features like NetFirm, zet.com, DreamHost, they don't even have a half decent
automated push system, you have to contact support to get domains pushed. So for you
to have a company with the widest possible spectrum of functionality in domains that's willing to
lose money on all of its products for an extended period of time and that's willing to work with
domain investors and ship features like for LTOs uh down payments that after nick doesn't yet have
it's it's not just you know special it's it's never been done before never before has anyone
come close to doing the kind of things you guys have done and are doing at scale and you know i
just hope that people watching us and domainers in general kind of appreciate
the possibility of being here right now
and taking advantage of all this stuff.
Yeah, I appreciate you saying that.
It is definitely unprecedented,
the levels of discounts here.
And yeah, the product's getting more stable all the time.
You'll see, you know, I'm posting updates
to the dashboard very regularly to make it, you know,
I really do think we have one of the more powerful dashboards
in the industry between our search functionality
and bulk actions for everything and the number of columns
and the richness of data that you can see.
And still some bells and whistles to add for sure, but it's getting there.
And Shane, I know you had to run.
So thanks for joining us today.
I appreciate all the insights.
And we will catch you next time you're on.
Yeah, no, I appreciate you having me on.
And again, I look forward to joining you regularly here.
I like good conversation.
I like mixing it up.
We've done a great job.
And I'll just end by what I do appreciate about Unstoppable is building in public.
We get to see exactly what you're doing.
You're sharing what you're doing.
You're listening to what people want.
You're definitely growing as a domain investor.
I think there's several approaches to
it and you've approached the domain investor side. So if you continue to listen to what people want
and then using your tech background to build that, I think that's what the future of
domain registrars look like. Your nimbleness gives you a big advantage.
look like. Your nimbleness gives you a big advantage. Todd at Dynadot has always been
engineering first. And you mentioned his name, and I only repeat it because he listens and he
builds. He hasn't been the best marketing. He hasn't been the flashiest, but he understands
what nimbleness and engineering and the power that it comes if you have big ears and
and you're doing exactly that so I appreciate those efforts and
it will be rewarded if you keep moving forward and keep your ears open
yeah absolutely um yeah I mean Dynadot is uh has been number one registrar on Namepros for five, six years running for a reason.
You know, they have every long tail feature you could ever ask for over there.
And yeah, a good company for us to learn from as we establish ourselves in the industry.
Anyways, thanks Shane.
I do want to talk about back orders,
which we just launched at Unstoppable.
We have below cost back orders.
So we have only a few licenses,
really one at the moment, but more coming online very soon.
And so our back orders are not competitive.
This is not a drop patch or a G-name scale operation,
but we can offer you basically free back orders.
So whatever your regular pricing is
for domain registrations, you can backorder at the same exact price.
And for non-competitive drops, this is a nice way for you to put in some Hail Marys and to pick up names that otherwise you would need to come in and hand reg.
So yeah, check that out.
It works inside of our search.
You can just search for any pending delete domain
and hit the back order button.
There is a hold placed on your account balance
that is waived for Domainer Club members.
Otherwise, you will need some account balance that is waived for Domainer Club members. Otherwise you will need some account balance in order to place back orders. So just be aware of
that. It should be pretty easy to add that in one step. And then of course if
we if we don't catch the domain then that hold is released. You can also add in bulk if you go to our bulk search, so try
that out. If you need to paste a CSV or you know do a hundred a day you know you should be able to
manage that with our bulk search. And finally there is a fee between 2 and 4 p.m. just after the drop occurs.
That's Eastern time, 2 and 4 p.m.
This fee is to discourage clogging up our queues
with VeriSign and actually doing the registrations.
And so just be aware that that is non-refundable
if you try to backorder between 2 and 4 p.m.
right after the drop happens.
It's a bit of a weird design, but it is intended to make sure that our systems aren't being
overloaded between 2 and 4 p.m. by people, you know, basically automating their own drop catch
system. So just be aware of that. As long as you get your back order submitted before 2pm
Eastern, right before the drop happens, then it's free. That fee only applies if you are
trying to register after the name has dropped, only two hours after the name has dropped. So
just be aware of that. And yeah, we're still working out the kinks in this system. So always
open to feedback.
Try out back orders.
Let us know what you think.
I think we caught 45 yesterday.
The drop is going to happen in an hour here.
And so we'll see what happens today.
But seeing more and more usage of that.
I would liken this to SAV's offering. SAV had free back orders,
you know, not super competitive
except for some
of the more esoteric TLDs,
especially
in the
ccTLD
realm.
So yeah, you can expect similar
from us.
Currently, it's only we only support .com, though, so just be aware of that.
Otherwise, we are working on auctions for those back orders
so that we can resolve any competition between people.
And soon we'll have expired auctions coming as well to
unstoppable so you'll be able to look through all the juicy inventory from
those $5 Friday hand rags over the past year that are up and being expired so
that'll be a new venue for people to scour around and look for gems, which should be interesting for you guys.
Some other updates to the dashboard. You can now see your listing configuration straight in the dashboard to make it easier to filter and sort and figure out what your listings look like.
and sort and figure out what your listings look like.
That was a big one.
We also let you do saved views
so that you can rearrange the columns
and have very quick layouts that you can select
to get a different lens on your portfolio,
depending on what you are trying to look at,
whether it's you want to zero in on name server configuration
or listing configuration
or some of the traction that you're seeing on your domains.
You can click around into quick layouts
to isolate those columns
and really drill into your portfolio.
Yeah, that's more or less it on the
product side of things. We've got some other fun stuff cooking. Obviously, the AI custom GPT in the
GPT store is worth checking out if you haven't tried that already. Just search for unstoppable
domains in the GPT store inside the ChatGPT app and
you can find it. Then you can authenticate, search for domains. You can see AFRNIC and
CEDO domains as well on there inside of ChatGPT. And you can also purchase directly inside
of ChatGPT if you've authorized your account.
So tread with caution there, obviously, but this is the future of user experience
for basically all apps is being able to control them
end to end inside of these chatbots
and exposing the controls for these apps to agents
that can do it on your behalf potentially.
So check that out.
Let me know what you think.
It should be pretty damn cool to be able to compile a list,
refine down the domains that you're looking at,
and then purchase them all inside of the ChatDBT window.
So I hope you guys like that.
Let us know what you think. And, and we can put
out a new version soon. I think that's all for today, guys. We had a good two hours here,
covered a lot of ground. I got some good feedback on my portfolio. And so I'm going to take that.
And so I'm going to take that.
Truthfully, I don't have the time to really run with all of those comments, and I'm not
terribly focused on my margins as a demeanor.
But important to get the feedback nonetheless and to get some correction.
So I appreciate you guys being thoughtful with that and for sharing that with other folks
who probably need to hear the same advice.
Anyways, guys, appreciate your time today.
It was good to have you guys on
and we will catch you next week.
Hope you have a good Friday and enjoy the weekend.
Any fun weekend plans, guys?
Well, not weekend plans per se,
but in about 10 days, I have my first land deal closing
and it's a large one.
I have funding secured on that front, which is good.
Then in March, I have another one closing.
And so, yeah, I have this stuff to look forward to basically getting out on real estate and
digital real estate as always. Nice.
We will have to come out to Romania
to do the next Unstoppable Domains Gun Range outing.
Since you have all that land that needs development.
And all that fence that needs to be put up.
I can't wait for you guys to come.
Oh, great. Yeah, we can get our hands dirty. We're not all princesses that are
keyboard warriors here. What about you, Shane? I think he left. I think he left.
Okay, I can't even see it. Well, that's fun. Hope the deal goes well.
When AI is everything, it all rolls up to compute,
chips, power and land.
Those are really gonna be the only scarce things that matter
if when all of software becomes completely commoditized
and producible at the snap of a finger.
And so land's not a bad thing to invest in in this world so maybe I should take notes although to
God just being being a property owner scares me I love being able to live out
of a couple suitcases and not have any of the logistics weigh on me.
But who knows? We'll see what happens.
Anyways, Andre, thanks for joining.
Good to talk to you and appreciate everybody coming on.
And we will see you next week or probably in two weeks.
Thanks, guys. Have a good weekend.
