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@cultra & I live demo AI domain search & our new backorders + API
Recorded: March 6, 2026 Duration: 0:38:58Space Recording
Full Transcription
What's up everybody?
We are live.
Happy Friday.
Shane, what's going on? Let you in right now. And Twitter is not screwing me today, which is great. Things are working smoothly.
I'm surprised that you called it Twitter instead of X.
Yeah. Oh, that's what's going on here.
It's just stabbing
me in the back for dead naming it.
Now I
understand.
Wow. Last $5
Friday ever. It's been
quite the journey, but
it's one for the books.
That's for sure.
It's, I mean, we've been doing this for about a year.
It's hard to believe that it's come this far,
but you know, it was time for us to grow up.
We have Unstoppable as a registrar
is much more competitive than we've ever been.
And $5 Fridays was a way for us to attract attention that we're getting on our own merits now. So it's the end of an era, but a rightful glow up, I think.
Well, I would say it's not who you are.
It's just part of a tool to get people to notice you. It's just a marketing, a way of marketing your company. So again, I think it's great you leaned into it, but I don't think it should be your identity. You know, you don't want to be the guy of the team or the red star that gives everything away. You just, just letting them know that you're always be good priced and,
and you know, it's a good user experience and it's cheaper. That's a, that's to me how I always
like things to look like, you know, you want to go to Costco, but it's funny how you go to Costco
and you know, everything's cheaper. You do have to buy a little more but everything's just so easy to use
and so well laid out and yet sam's club is kind of the same exact uh type of business but yet it
feels a little bit lower class right yeah interesting i haven't spent a lot of time in sam's club but why is that something about yeah just the way the user experience now the technology's gotten a lot
better in the fact that you can just scan as you go and just walk out you don't even have to see a
registrar but uh a register but they um they just have everything in racks um it's a walmart
owned company so it has that feel and that association as well.
And it's just never quite as clean. And they gear more towards resale, which means that a lot of
things are individually packed to reselling gas stations. That's a huge part of their market
is they bulk buy and resell because it's actually cheaper to go to Sam's Club and buy 50 bag of
chips or candy bars in bulk and then resell them
at the convenience stores and things like that or businesses. So it's kind of a different experience.
It is much more geared towards business than consumers, much more than Costco even.
Yeah. Did you see that guy who was buying gold at Costco? And then he was like, guys, I figured it out. I just return the gold bars at Costco if the price of gold goes down, which is obviously against their terms. They don't allow that. You shouldn't be, you know, metals trading with with Costco gold bullion.
But so funny that people people look for things like that.
But, yeah, I mean, like this strategy is is, you know, what we're oriented around. like a wholesaler for domains and to cater to professionals like domainers who need the nice
tools, who need, you know, the ability to manage 10,000 plus domains at a time and who are looking
for competitive pricing. You know, that's the market that we found ourselves in and created a wedge for ourselves.
And, you know, the Dynadots of the world operate in this market as well.
And I think we're moving really fast to bring together all the tools that people need for this market. So our user API is now live.
We've got a bunch of new product updates that we're
releasing this week. So we saw free back orders. I launched that or announced that
two days ago. So that's a big step. We've got a user API. We've got our ChatGPT app, meaning you can search, register, and manage your portfolio all inside of ChatGPT or Claude or any other AI tool that you choose.
We've got our user API for people who want to build custom scripts and applications to manage their portfolios and issue back orders
and things like that.
And finally, we've also launched our reseller API lately,
which allows anyone to sell domains inside their app
using our backend and not having to worry about
necessarily building,
you know, payment systems, which is optional or checkout, or obviously management of those domains.
So yeah, we're really, you know,
rushing towards being the Swiss army knife for domainers
and for other businesses that want to integrate domains into their
into their products so um rapidly expanding the the uh the toolkit there but you know table stakes
uh i do want to mention it is you know the final five dollar friday and sort of the the issue on
everyone's minds as unstoppablestoppable comes to mind lately
is the price increases that are coming on March 9th.
So we, yeah, those prices are coming fairly soon.
I'm seeing a ton of traffic from people, more transfers in as the prices are slated to increase.
Everyone's trying to get them in, you know, right up to the crack of midnight here on March 9th
so that they can take advantage.
I mean, $6 transfers are like really unheard of.
And, you know, this potentially the last time a registrar is willing to subsidize at this level to
enter the market like we have. And so I think people are realizing that and sort of scrambling
to take advantage while they still can. Yeah, so just note that that's coming on March 9th. And after that, we'll have $7.99 will be our cheapest tier of transfers for dot coms.
And that's available to Domainer Club members.
And then it ladders up through $8.99 and then finally $9.99 for transfers for a very large amount of transfers.
And then on the registration side of things,
I believe Domain Your Club members get $799.com registrations
for several hundred a week.
And then everybody else pays, I think it is $1099
if you're not in Domain Club.
So still the best pricing around, but still considerably higher, $2 higher than what we have priced right now.
So just be aware of that. That's coming.
Yeah, and be sure to take advantage while you can.
I think we've seen some confusion by people.
We didn't pin down an exact date until recently,
so thanks for bearing with us on that.
But now that we have an exact date,
I think people are comfortably scrambling
and making sure they get everything in on time.
So that's pricing. on the back orders front.
We can go ahead and walk through that.
So you may have seen my tweets,
but we just launched free back orders at Unstoppable.
So the pricing is whatever the registration pricing is for your tier, whether you're in Domainer Club or not.
So for Domainer Club people, that's $5.99.
We support .com and .net for back orders.
And you do need to, for Domainer Club members, you will need to pay back the registration fee within seven days of us successfully catching it.
And yeah, so keep an eye on that.
If you're not in Domainy Club, you do need to have the account balance upfront to cover
all of the registration fees.
And then if we don't catch it, we release it, release that account hold.
So that's basically it.
Auctions for those back orders are coming soon if they become contested.
We don't have a ton of backstop strategy to supplement
and really throw some Hail Marys in terms of catching various names
or looking at uncompetitive names that you have your eye on,
then you can't beat us.
So check that out.
We have a pending deletes tab in our marketplace
where you can search through a lot of these and issue the back orders. Yeah. So try that out.
Shane, I'm curious, you know, what do back orders look like in your strategy? How do they
make up, you know, in the collage of acquisition strategies that you have?
Zero percent. I'm not a backorder person. I'm not a hand register. I'm not a backorder. I'm
actually more like private acquisition auction type person. And I'm a smaller portfolio. I'm
the opposite of what a lot of people are doing. Since I'm mid-50s, I'm a smaller portfolio. I'm the opposite of what a lot of people are doing. I'm since I'm mid 50s, I'm not here to build up a portfolio that gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I'm here to generate profit dollars per do understand all of it, but it's not the market
I play. I have so many businesses going on. I actually don't have time to do that. It's just
not the type of business model that I use, but I completely understand who does it, why they should
do it. And I watch people like Renee or UFO do an amazing job. I love listening to his strategy and how he goes about it and who he uses for back orders.
His pricing model is attack model.
So, yeah, I think it's a great model.
It's just it's not my model at this age, honestly.
Yeah, totally reasonable.
Does that mean you are, yeah, I mean, so basically you are allocating less and less capital to domains over time just because of the illiquidity aspect?
Does that mean you are?
I wouldn't say less capital.
I would say that of my sales, a percentage of it has dropped.
So basically I used to put 100 hundred percent of my sales after taxes
back into domain investing. And now, um, I put after taxes, half of it back into acquire names.
So I'm still building my portfolio, but I am not actively reinvesting everything. And,
and the reason I I've learned this is, uh, my nursery, I reinvested every single penny.
And when I retired, all my money was in the business. I have millions and millions of dollars
invested in a business that I can't really do much with. So I've learned now to actually take
some profit. Before I didn't have any bills to pay. And that really is a great way to grow up
before that. If you don't need to take out money to pay your bills, you should reinvest
in yourself. It's the best business you can reinvest in is yourself and your domain portfolio.
But there also comes a time, you don't make money until you exit. And so there always has to be
some profitability taken off the table and that should increase the older you get. So it's just
a business plan. And I've been through every cycle of it.
I used to do drop catches.
I participated in every level of domain investing
and I just have a certain style
or business model now that I've gotten older.
Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
You'll never go broke taking profit.
So it makes sense to diversify there.
That's why I made a million dollars on NFT,
million dollars plus.
And people will say,
because of my,
the worst one I ever did was actually launching NFT.
That was probably not my best.
The best was just going bored apes and holding on.
Yeah.
Yeah, I missed that craze.
I was late to the punch, did not have, have much insider knowledge there and was not, not hustling otherwise. So, which, which is funny to say, given Unstoppable was, you know, part of that craze. But that was, that was before my time at Unstoppable.
but that was before my time
in Unstoppable
so one thing
that stood out to me was talking to
Thumbdomainer who had
he told me he had like 500,000
back orders at any
given time
all outstanding
and I think he was mostly using
SAV which is now like not a great
option because they're
doing some sketchy things
and not being responsive.
And he said they were sort of scaring him
out of being a customer there.
But really you can only afford
to have that many back orders out
if you're getting them at a very low price.
You know, you can't be doing that on competitive drops
at drop catch where you're spending 70 bucks a pop.
So that was interesting to hear his strategy there.
Yeah, I found it very interesting,
but you know, you do see wins in like the, the backorder, like, uncompetitive backorder game.
I think, so PrivateLLM.com sold a week or two ago.
And we probably all saw that tweet making its round.
I think that went for $250,000.
I need to check. I think that went for $250,000.
I need to check, but that was one at an uncontested,
uncontested closeout auction at GoDaddy.
And so that was 2023, I believe that was. like even even then you know there were
complete gems in the AI space um that were making it all the way to uh to closeouts and I think he
picked it up for 25 bucks and then sold it for 100,000 x uh or no 10 10,000 X. But I mean, so moral of the story is like,
I think these higher level domainers are onto something
and that the spray and pray backorder strategy
is a catch all worth looking into,
especially if you can do it programmatically
and just blanket you know,
just blanket cover your ass there.
But obviously, you know, the people that are really hustling are reaching out to the buyers
or the owners before they drop and trying to secure these kinds of names well before
they actually get to the drop.
But I found that very interesting that privatellm.com was picked up
at an uncontested closeup.
I mean, they're always going to be,
those are the stories that people love too.
I mean, it's the headline story,
the guy that wins the $50 million bet.
Yeah, and I think it is a business model. I think there are people that
are better at it than others. And, you know, as long as it's profitable in due time and you have
to give a certain amount of time to be profitable, but once you get a business model that works,
that you do your back orders. Again, I know people that do back orders well, do them everywhere.
They don't just pick a back order
place they utilize everyone so they should utilize you because you'll get some things
drop catch gnamecatched.com is another one that out of nowhere you know they do a lot of alternative
tlds and they do a good job with certain ones park.io made their name on bing.io before anyone
was .io then they started doing . .io before anyone was .io.
Then they started doing .gg.
So they knew they couldn't compete with the Dropcatch of the World.
So they said, hey, we're going to concentrate on this TLD because we think it's a good alternative TLD and really set their clocks to ping and hit that particular TLD better than anybody else
because it was an ancillary 50 you know, 50 down the line for their
registrars, but they made it number one and they built a whole, you know, backorder system just on
that. So find the people that specialize in the names that you like and go there and then utilize
everybody. If one person doesn't get it, then another one will. So there's no reason not to use unstoppable and try a couple things out. If you get it, you don't, you do, and you get a good
price. And if you get it somewhere else, you get it there. And if multiple people want it and you
want it more than them, you can outbid them. So it's a, it's, if you want a name, there's plenty
of choices. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And we're still very early innings. So we'll be specializing our system in the future.
Obviously.com is very competitive between all the drop catching services.
Whereas like you mentioned park.io or even Sav was specializing in some of the longer tail CCTLDs.
IO or even SAV was specializing in some of the longer tail, uh, CCTLDs, uh, I think.co,
they were pretty good at, uh, and some other ones like that, uh, GGCC, I forget which ones
exactly. Um, but you know, we will, it will, we'll need to find our little niche in that market,
um, and see where the, the competition is then where we can step in and offer something competitive.
But even with, I don't think SAV had a ton of licenses yet they were still fairly competitive
in these longer tail CCTLDs, which is still a very valuable market to be in.
So stay tuned on developments there. We're going to, you know, harden our systems and
and expand to new TLDs over time. So that should all get better with age.
And yeah, I mean, just another tool in the toolkit for domainers. We'll also add the ability soon to be able to issue back orders via API and via our MCP
server or through ChatChavici.
So that will also make it a whole lot easier to do it in whatever context or do it in volume.
You can issue them via CSV in bulk right now. If you just go to our bulk search page
and bulk search for pending delete domains,
you can add a bunch to your cart and buy them all at once.
So check that out guys.
Let me know if you have questions.
Like I said, auctions are coming soon
for contested back orders.
And we'll be doing a good bit more with auctions as well. So
obviously, we'll be monetizing our expired space. So you'll have a new venue and a new corpus of
expiring domains to come through quite soon as Unstoppable turns the corner around over a year being in this business.
We've got a decent inventory of expiring domains that are coming out.
So I'm sure it'll be fun to see all the folks come out of the woodwork
looking for good deals that they can find on our expired auctions.
It does seem like this cat and mouse
kind of whack-a-mole game that people play,
like jumping from, you know,
domainers want to go to these kind of lesser known
platforms so that they can find expires
that no one else is looking at before they go to the drop.
So I think there is sufficient incentive for domainers to go out and try new registrars, auction houses,
so that they can try to get their hands on domains before anyone else sees them.
Yeah, any thoughts on that?
I guess you also don't do the
Did you cut out or did I?
Yeah. Thank you. just a listener oh that's a shame it looks like i kicked everybody out
welcome back people sorry about that my twitter app just died. I should stop dead naming it Twitter maybe and it will treat me nicer.
Just restarted the space so just come back in. No Xeon in. Sorry for the trouble.
We'll get Shane back in here too.
We'll get Shane back in here too.
Where was I?
So I was talking about, you know, people trying out new registrars so they can get access to the latest inventory and how domainers wanted to go out on the long end of the curve
and try new registrars so that they can get differentiated inventory.
Shane, I just invited you up.
Yeah, I'm here.
What happened?
Did it get rugged?
I thought it was me.
Very strange.
I don't know.
I was just talking, and then I realized you weren't responding,
and I looked down, and then I realized you and then you weren't responding.
And I looked down and the app died. So I had to restart my app.
Where did I cut out at?
When you asked me the question as soon as my opinion, it was over. The app didn't want to hear it.
I see. Interesting. I mean, this thing is so buggy man you know i thought they they brought on nikita beer into twitter and you know he was all about oh we're
making product improvements we're doing like the little things that make the experience better
and then here we are six months later and i feel like it's it's bugger than ever. It never used to cut out on me like this.
Yeah.
One thing you can't do is you cannot be on your phone and on your X account at the same time.
So having two X accounts on with X spaces is almost a guaranteed rug at some point.
Yeah, I'm on the online.
I'm on the unstoppable account.
So that shouldn't be an issue for me.
I don't know why. Oh, yeah, that shouldn't be an issue for me i don't know why
oh yeah that shouldn't be a problem yeah if you're on that's the key is a second one yeah
yeah well anyways any thoughts on um you know different
dominators running around to different to different auction houses looking for that edge on expired inventory?
Yeah, I mean, that's the key is you have to know why you're at each one.
So there's a reason why people, yeah, you should absolutely, but everyone is known generally for something.
thing. So it's either a backup to another person. So if they don't get it, maybe this person has it,
So it's either a backup to another person.
or they're known for something specific, a specific TLD or getting certain types of names.
So everybody, if you ask a backorder person why they use this person, they'll give you an answer
in one second, why they use this one and why they use this one. So there's, you know, everybody's got a role in
the back order process. So that's what, to me, that's what you have to establish if you're going
to do that. Why are they going to use you? And, you know, most people don't have a ton of
registers. It's an expensive endeavor to have a bunch of registrars. And it's, I don't know that it's an extremely smart move because I feel, and again,
this is my pure opinion, but I feel that the TLD owners are going to start taking back the
expired names to their own TLD and then auction them out themselves. And you're going to see
more and more of that, right? I don't think they're going to release them to the wild and let people compete for them.
I think they're going to take them all back and then let people auction them off.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, we saw that with .ai, right?
Namecheap is the exclusive registrar partner for .ai.
And that comes with a considerable rev share for .ai.
It's not like .com where it's this free-for-all. .com is legally not allowed to reclaim and auction
off those drop .coms. They are forced in this drop catch process to let it go to the drop and to and therefore, like the registrars tend to capture and the auction, the drop catching companies tend to capture all of that margin as opposed to
of that margin as opposed to VeriSign recapturing all the margin for domains that are ostensibly
theirs, right?
All of this whole apparatus of domain name buying and selling is all renting from VeriSign.
And it's purely through the grace of the ICANN mandated drop process that domainers get to
participate in drops at all.
Otherwise, we would have much more efficient pricing where VeriSign just reclaims any expiring
domains and then reprices them fully to the fair market value, auctions them off themselves.
uh auctions them off themselves um and so instead of drop catch picking up a name and
uh being able to sell you know whatever it is at a million dollars every every other month it seems
like we have a million dollar drop catch auction um and instead of drop catch taking all that home
uh and gaming the system with their thousand licenses, VeriSign would just capture all that instead.
So it was very eye-opening,
building the system ourselves
and kind of peeling back the curtain
and seeing all of the very funny rules in the space
that result in this kind of weird process
and the competitive landscape
that we find ourselves in, in the domain space.
So, yeah, I think domainers don't really understand how precarious
their position in the market is and just how badly registries want to take
all of the margin that domainers currently eat up.
But it's something like people need to understand,
especially as they look at the competitive landscape of CCTLDs,
which sit outside of the ICANN regulatory apparatus.
They are eating more and more into domainer margins
by allowing themselves to sort of run these auctions themselves
for expired domains.
And they're therefore introducing competition
into that drop catch market,
which compresses the margins for domainers
themselves. So important, important dynamics to see. We've had obviously dot AI and Namecheap,
you know, dot AI was previously exclusively with Dynadot. And then that contract got reshuffled over to Namecheap.
And I'm sure, you know, that AI registry or whoever was not Identity Digital, but whoever was at the time running that AI fetched a much prettier penny when they switched over to Namecheap.
prettier penny when they uh switched over to name cheap yeah that whole you know park.io
ran the auctions forever and then um dynadot bought park to to bring that over and then
identity digital went in and bought or arranged the new deal and took it over and then renegotiated the contract
with Namecheap. And I don't know the numbers, but I don't think Namecheap gets any dollars at all.
I think they only get the renewals. I think all the money goes back to Identity Digital and to
the country. And I think the money for auctioning them is merely the renewal, the two-year renewal
that they get and the domains under management. I'm not positive of that, but I've heard rumors
that's the case. And that may be the case in the future. I think you're going to see
these auctions get pulled back by the registries and then anybody who wants to participate in the auctions can auction. So if any registrar wants to hold an auction for that, they can.
And I don't think they'll get paid much at all.
They'll just get a new domain under management if the auction is won at their auction place.
To me, I think that's where the business model is moving.
Nobody likes it, but there'll always be some registrar that say, yeah, I'll just take it
for domains under management. I'll run it and run the auction here. If nobody else wants to run it,
then I have the exclusive for it. So I think you're going to see most likely that in the future.
Yeah. Yeah. It sounds right. .ai prices are increasing $10, I believe it is,
in a couple of weeks too. So that's something people should look out for.
I think, yeah, .io we saw increase earlier, I think that was January. So yeah, I mean,
these guys know that they can squeeze more. .ai I think surpassed a million registrations
in the past couple of months.
And I mean, obviously, there's the sales have been skyrocketing. I'm looking at, I think there's a DN Journal article here on .ai.
But it really is puzzling.
You know, we see, I mean, all total registrations is up 6.2% year over year.
And I saw an article in the Financial Times showing that website creation is up.
I don't know exactly how they're counting that, whether that's developed domains or what.
But that also is up massively with, mean, almost certainly the advent of these
vibe coding tools, making it much easier for websites to be created. Meanwhile, even Verisign
stock is down considerably. GoDaddy's, we talked about this last time, has been taking a hit
recently. So there's a growing dispersion between the size of the total domains
market and the valuation that the, you know, the flag bearers for the industry are seeing in the
market, which is certainly concerning. And I think that's, that's part of like a broader,
you know, hit to SaaS that we're seeing across the market.
But potentially, if GoDaddy were more AI native and the market were perceiving it as such,
there wouldn't be nearly as deep a drawdown as we're seeing right now.
But it is concerning for every registrar out there, you know, seeing seeing the market grow.
Meanwhile, the the stock prices not keep up.
Yeah, there's there's a lot going on there.
I mean, yeah, across the board, SAS and every company that that could be impacted by all the tools and taking, you know, there's some efficiency that's good. To me, I think you're going to see the next couple of quarters and a
lot of these software companies start actually looking pretty good because they'll be able to
lay off some employees, get some work done and actually make more profit because they're not
going to be paying as many people. But at the same time, I think that, yeah, we are losing some brandability.
The more agentic comes on, the more search that never touches the company,
the more people don't care about who they're working with, only the results,
then, yeah, companies aren't as valuable across the board.
You're also going to see people being laid off. So long term, that's not a great thing. They won't
have money to spend. They won't be buying anything or spending for SaaS tools. Just a big unknown and
a big change. And I think people are scared and scared money don't make no money. So they pull
out and move to the side. That's why I'm in energy. It doesn't matter what happens. You're
always going to need more energy. The world's going to be based on power. So I'm the one just
sitting in the one category that I think no matter what happens, we will always need more power.
category that I think no matter what happens, we will always need more power.
So, but yeah, I also, the other thing I'd like to point out is I think that the VC
cap, or I should say value that was put on a spaceship or Namecheap actually redefined
the value of registrars.
of registrars. So GoDaddy's value, in the immediate point that the VCs announced the value
of Namecheap, I knew that GoDaddy had to draw down a lot because GoDaddy doesn't have the huge
moat that they need. There is no moat other than better known. That's changing every single day.
People know a lot of these other registrars, Dynadot, you're seeing it in the registrations.
People, the Super Bowl commercials, they were spending $20 million to be known in Squarespace
and all that. So that moat was gone. So if their advantage isn't there for AI, and it won't be
because everybody's going to have AI, there's no AI advantage, in my opinion.
So it was going to get a 50% haircut no matter what.
That was an easy call.
And while I have you, are people able to join?
My screen shows pretty much nobody on just coming and going.
Are they having trouble listening, you think?
I'm getting, I'm told people are kicked out uh and not able to rejoin
so here's what i'm gonna restart with a fresh one so check my check my x feed with a fresh uh spaces
uh oh well i mean todd and wolfgang are in now but apparently yeah apparently they're getting
booted like as soon as they join so i'm going to restart and uh issue a fresh one so check
my feed for the fresh space we'll be right back
