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Unstoppable $5 .com Fridays & Domainer Q&A
Recorded: Aug. 1, 2025 Duration: 1:40:22Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion highlights the evolving landscape of the domain market, emphasizing trends in promotional events like $5.com Friday, the potential for growth through innovative financial solutions, and the importance of strategic partnerships. Participants shared insights on how to leverage market inefficiencies and the significance of active engagement in achieving success.
Full Transcription
What's up y'all happy Friday
Wherever you are in the world
I hope you are
Getting some sunshine
Soaking up the good life
And rolling in your Dom gains. Andre is here. Come
on up my friend. It's good to have you back. And of course it's $5.com Friday. So log on in to your unstoppable portal and max out that hundred domain limit. Andre
might have some some good newly expired gems for us here since he put out puts out his
list quite regularly. So if you listen in closely, you might get some hot tips.
Ishmael is also here.
So we got the whole gang.
You both should be invited now.
And we can get this thing going
what up ish
AGM CGI for everyone happy $5.com Friday all that good stuff
greetings happy $5.com Friday that's gonna be like the new the new greeting
you know crypto has GM and domainers are gonna have happy $5.com Friday.
H F D C F.
It's,
it really rolls off the tongue.
Someone is going to register that in the next five minutes,
dude.
I swear to fucking God.
every time I talk to anyone about anything business related domains related,
they go register the domain right
after I was like I was talking to a customer who's also like we have sort of a an advisory
relationship not really not formally I was asking him about a btappa a btappa is a way to bulk
transfer domains between registrars without paying a
transfer fee and then i look and this is random but we like stream all purchases at unstoppable
through our slack channel and then i look i search btappa in our slack channel and i can see that he
registered the main domain btappa.com right after I talked to him about it. I'm like Jesus Christ. These guys are ruthless
And so many people reach out to me with unstoppable related domains that they're trying to show me
You guys are just relentless
Unbelievable. Well, I guess we we asked for it by offering five dollar comm so
You know, why not why not roll the dice with five bucks you make the
price of the drugs cheaper that's right yeah it is it is an addiction i think everyone agrees that
we all have um an addiction and it's also kind of like it has an element of gambling to it
but you know you can carve out many excuses why it's not but ultimately it's um it's it's
a treasure hunt so maybe we'll use that one right yeah and it's it's very easy to get caught up in
the the little dopamine drip of hand ragging things because it's like five bucks here 20 bucks there it's like oh
what's what really what's the cost you know like and then you look back and they they all add up
and if you're hand-wrecking the sell-through rate is probably awful unless you really know what
you're doing and so you just it's a slippery slope i think someone should devise a way to, you know, like how you have an IQ test.
If you show me your portfolio, we should be able to give you some sort of score.
Like, oh, okay, you're definitely retarded.
We saw your names, man.
That is the base assumption for sure.
What's up andre
hey guys well you know just my my usual lists that i publish each day so hope you guys find
them useful i practically always have about a hundred plus domains there and i mean with respect
to the gambling thing i'm i think I'm a bit mixed on that
because I'm an economist and I run a nonprofit project of mine, which is called nevertrade.org.
So I kind of managed to make the entire trading part of the econ finance space hit my guts because
I tell people that as a retail trader, you're going to lose money. And I say
this as someone who has offered consulting for like, especially things like quant, smaller hedge
funds, where like all of the people involved are really good at math and numbers and so much better
at it than I am. But usually they don't have such a firm grasp
on the big picture macro stuff.
And so we kind of complemented one another.
And I got to say, as someone who has done this,
it's just ridiculous, even the smaller funds.
So think funds with 20, 25 people on board
who manage, I don't know,
a couple of tens of millions assets under management.
Even at that scale, it's ridiculous how much data they're leveraging, how sophisticated their
models are, and how even in those circumstances, profitability is not always that easy. And so
since I run the YouTube channel, so many people come to me and
they're like, oh, I'm sick and tired of my job. I want to become a day trader because it's so cool
to make money from your living room. And I keep telling them, don't do it because you don't have
an edge and there's data to back it up. Like kind of, you see those banners where the small print
always reads 80% of retail accounts lose money and whatever
and whatever. Because as a small player, it's ridiculously hard to have an edge in a sophisticated,
mature place like the stock market or whatever. What I love about domains is that there are so
many market inefficiencies at play that you can exploit. So everything that's wrong with, you know, the stock market for the little guy who wants
to trade stocks is right when it comes to the domain market, because you can actually
develop an edge in this market, because how many of us are there really?
I've been in this industry for a long time
and the answer is not that many,
especially if we're talking about people
who earn what can be considered a living in domains.
So yeah, there's competition,
but compared to the high frequency guys on Wall Street,
compared to all that,
the competition is ridiculously,
let's say, accessible in the domain space. And so you have
more than enough room to carve kind of an edge for yourself. Now, personally, I only focus on
.com. I only focus on the type of domains people already know I deal with because I've been doing
it for such a long time, because I have all this data, because I'm good at it, and because the day only has 24 hours. There are people who
do well with certain country code domains, like Luke, for example, many of you know him. He does,
I think, very well with European country code domains. He owns a lot of domains in that area,
and he has amazing data there. There's plenty of room for everyone.
Some people do well with, you know, how many people have done well with AI, with new,
with certain new GTLDs and whatever. And that's kind of what I love about it. Because on the one
hand, you have the dopamine rush, you have all of those things, but it's on more of a solid
foundation as a small player, because not only are the odds not
stacked against you, I think as long as you're willing to kind of put in the work and not treat
it like gambling, you know, but instead gather data, make data-driven choices and do your homework,
broadly speaking, that if you do that, if you just do this, I guess, simple thing, simple
fundamentally, but hard in terms of actually putting in the work.
But if you do that, I don't think the odds are stacked against you.
I think the odds are going to be kind of stacked in your favor, actually.
Yeah, I think it's more of a skilled sport.
I don't know if you agree or disagree, but there's a component of luck.
but there's a component of luck.
You might be thinking about a good name
and it might be available
or it might be taken
and be able to acquire it
at the right price point
to still make an ROI.
But I think ultimately,
you definitely can have an edge.
Adam, for example,
sold a name yesterday.
He's in the audience for 20 grand
that he picked up you know for 2500
and when he was talking yesterday on the spaces you you realize that it wasn't luck it's a skill
thing you know he's tapping into his knowledge on this um what was the name again it was
big wild it was a weird word but you know he explained it, it had context from his gaming background. It was like a character in a popular game. I'll find the word shortly. If you look up Adam's feed, you see the word. It was just posted yesterday.
see the word it was just posted yesterday but um you know so to me I feel like you know what are
the odds you never know when a name that you spend $2,500 um will sell for 20,000 but with having the
right edge like you alluded to you can definitely you know increase the odds of of things like that occurring you know um so i think the the reality is
you know i was kind of kidding when i said it's a gambling thing but i i also i'm not fully kidding
because people also do get lucky you know what i mean like maybe they jump ahead of trends and
but i think that the the edge is good research and, you know, proper pricing.
What do you guys think would be the single biggest thing?
I mean, Andre, you talk about, like, there's not a lot of us in it.
And, you know, the first thing that comes to mind when you say it is, well, surely that indicates that there's not a lot of, not the same amount of money to be made as there is in say public stock investing otherwise people would be
rushing in to buy domains so I mean there's that and then my other question
is what do you guys think would be the single biggest thing that would invite
invite new investors into the space.
new investors into the space
Now, I keep in touch with a few of the OGs in the space.
Let's say, like, I've written, some of you know,
Omni Avinci with Frank Schilling, for example.
And I think he owned, like, 300,000-ish domain names.
You know, it fluctuated.
But, like, there's a lot of money to be made, for sure. Like, Frank Schilling, you know, it fluctuated, but like, there's a lot of money to be made for sure.
Like Frank Schilling, for example, built an entire empire on the back of, he was kind of,
you know, he wasn't in the same sense as Rick, let's say he wasn't as early as Rick Schwartz,
but he was kind of the guy who, after the.com bubble burst, he was courageous enough to pick
so many good names on the drops when most
people had no idea what that even meant and so he amassed this portfolio and now if you keep in touch
with him you're gonna see that he's building uh you know huge buildings in the caymans and he has
real estate interests in canada he has so much land and i'm not sure if he's still selling it
He has so much land.
I'm not sure if he's still selling it so much Beverly Hills real estate that he's selling.
And he built all of that on the back of domains.
Now, so it's for sure, I think, to answer the first question Brady asked, I think for sure that there's a lot of money to be made.
But at the same time, it's very difficult to be in the trenches.
It's very difficult to amass the portfolio in question.
It's very difficult to kind of find the right balance
between monetization and, okay, less so parking nowadays,
but monetization, especially when it comes to landing pages.
And this is, to segue into the second question,
this is something unstoppable, I think,
should try to shine at.
And I'm going to play with your landing pages a bit
and see how it stacks up against Afternic.
So that's a thing.
But it's hard.
And a lot of times, you know,
it's kind of like building this humongous puzzle
and being at the frustrating stages where you know you have so's kind of like busy building this humongous puzzle and being at the frustrating
stages where you know you have so much work ahead of you like i've written several books and i know
how it is because it's the same way when writing a book and starting you know you know how much
work you have in front of yourself and how frustrating it is at the beginning so is there
money to be made yeah is there a lot of money to be made? I think so. Yes. But most people are not going to put in the work. Like I know people who have built a very good portfolio, or not their entire portfolio, but a good chunk of it, just through my list, because they went through it, they diligently registered domains. And you got some today, some tomorrow.
And then you gathered some data.
And you have your own little portfolio.
And there you have it.
But you have to pull in the work.
And it's not so much a matter of, oh, my God, Frank had these amazing secrets. You could tell at that point in time, Frank Schilling, I think, could have made a blog post where he highlighted literally
everything he did in a day his workflow everything pertaining to his methodology and people still
wouldn't be doing it because it's so damn hard and frustrating to keep at it for years and years and
years until you get good enough so i think the barrier is not that there isn't enough money to
be made because it is but rather that there's so much work involved.
And I have a theory to kind of address more the second question Brady asked as to what could push the industry forward and what I think will push the industry forward.
And I think a lot of it, it's going to sound weird, but I think a lot of it will have to do with job insecurity and layoffs.
And I mean that because, I mean, yeah, of course, this entire discussion with it's not AI that's going to take your job.
We mentioned this in the previous show as well.
It's someone using AI.
someone using AI, but you know, departments are getting smaller.
But, you know, departments are getting smaller.
They're going to get smaller.
They're going to get smaller.
There are going to be people who will feel, especially white collar workers, who are going
to feel more and more job insecurity.
And what are they going to do?
Well, most of them, of course, are just going to submit their resumes to a hundred thousand
places and their AI that's writing the revenue, the resumes will communicate with the HR
AIs who will pretend to be reading them. And it's just going to be this kind of dystopian
scenario. But, you know, most people will just want to find another job.
But I do think that there will be critical mass when it comes to people who are just going to be like, you know what?
I want to do my own thing because I don't want to go through this excruciating process
once every year or every two years where I'm kind of like in the desert looking for water,
except that I'm in the job market looking for jobs.
And they're going to have, it's going to sound weird, but hear me out on this,
the exact same scenario to deal as I did in Eastern Europe when I started making money at 15.
Because at that point in time, at 15, I was making more than the average wage in my country
while I was in high school, just writing articles in English part time.
And so for me, it was a no brainer because the system in Eastern Europe had so
little to offer me that I had no choice essentially, but to try to do my own
thing in my mind, at least.
Now, if I would have lived in Switzerland, where the job market would have been far more generous
with me, then obviously there would have been less of an incentive to do my own thing.
What I think is over the past few years, especially in white collar tech jobs, people were in
Switzerland.
They had job security.
It was also great for them and comfortable and whatever.
And now many of them will find themselves kind of in Eastern Europe.
And that's what I think is going to push the industry forward, doing their own thing, getting
the right domain to do their own thing.
And this small scale entrepreneurial hustle thing that's going to be set in motion, I
think is going to lead to kind of a tidal wave of
interest, especially in the affordable sectors of the market. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I mean,
as AI makes it easier and easier for people without, you know, coding experience to launch
websites and even complicated applications, you can expect more and more both retail buyers of domains
as well as people who are starting out doing their own thing.
And some of those things might be domain investing.
So yeah, it makes perfect sense to me.
I wonder, I'm sure the chart of domains in use
on the internet over time is just absolutely vertical,
but I'm sure it's even more vertical
over the past couple of years now that we have
Lovable and Cursor and all these various coding tools
that make it extremely easy to launch websites.
So that means it's good for both the buy side and the sell side of the domain market.
But yeah, it makes perfect sense.
I think you see a lot.
Anecdotally, I see a lot of people on Twitter saying, you know, oh, the job market's terrible.
Never going to find a job as a new grad,
especially like as a coder. So yeah, people will have no choice but to, you know, try to venture
out and do their own thing. Makes perfect sense. And yeah, like, to your point, it's very easy to
get into stock trading. All you do is like, you know a company,
everyone knows companies, like we use their services every day. And you're like, oh, I know
that. That's probably valuable. Smash the buy button on Robinhood. And then you're suddenly
a trader. And then now you have all this leeway to do some trading without zero information, zero prior experience. You don't
have to do any research. All you have to do is smash the buy button. Domaining is much more
open-ended. You have to figure out which domain you want to buy. All the good ones are taken,
so you have to really go down the long tail if you're going to be, you know, hand dragging something cheap.
And so the barrier to entry is quite high for a newbie to just show up and be able to buy a domain and get started.
And, you know, they, of course, don't even understand how difficult it is to to actually build a portfolio and to scour the expired lists and whatnot.
and to scour the expired lists and whatnot.
But yeah, like, and this is why fractionalization
and securitization are important
because you can allow people with zero experience
and zero time that they wanna dedicate to this stuff
to be able to get exposure to, you know, an index of assets.
And so they can treat it like investing in the S&P 500
where they can have some assurances that they're getting diversified exposure to this asset class,
and they don't need to do meticulous research and really compete PVP against all the other domainers in order to get exposure.
So that would be a huge unlock, you know, if we were to develop that.
So that would be a huge unlock if we were to develop that.
Yeah, we had a sort of a debate yesterday about tokenization and its impact.
And I think overall, most people felt like fractionalization was the weakest application of tokenization.
I also agree with that.
Really?
That's like the opposite of my experience
talking to domainers,
but I'm curious to hear.
Yeah, go on.
Yeah, I feel like, you know,
at least the way the industry is right now,
because, you know, on Wednesday,
I attended D3's gathering,
where they're pushing forward this whole concept of domain FI.
And I think there were a couple of Web3 guys out there from Azuki,
and the conversation was sort of like very revealing to them.
You could tell that they were very intrigued by the opportunity with
domains and they were able to sort of like visualize the similarities of Web3, right?
You're buying and selling digital assets. But, you know, when we were having that conversation
yesterday, I think everyone just felt like fractionalization was, you know, at the very best, very risky.
You know, there's really no measured, there's no real life scenario where it's really worked
out in the context of domains.
But everyone, most people, not everyone, most people feel like, you know, if I can use my name as collateral, whether it's for a micro loan or a major loan, then that will unlock a lot of liquidity.
Because we all have portfolios and, you know, we're paying renewal fees or whatever, but we know that some of these things have value.
So I can imagine in a peer-to-peer setting
you know i'll be able to put up a name and i'm like okay this name is listed for 10 grand
but someone out there might be willing to say ish i'll loan you a hundred dollars if you're
willing to use this name as collateral in the event that you default and you know a hundred
happened thousands of times creates a realistic marketplace where people could, you know, play the role of a lender or they could be in the position of a borrower.
And I think that that will unlock a tremendous amount of liquidity.
And that's what to me, that is a more attractive feature or application of the blockchain.
attractive feature or application of the blockchain.
You know, the idea that people will come together and, you know,
all believe, you know, buy a share or a part of a lucrative domain
and get some reward when it sells, you know, is a realistic sure.
But to me, I wouldn't, personally, I wouldn't participate in that.
And I'm sure there are people that will participate in it.
So, I mean, altogether, these are things that give us more options.
I'm curious why you wouldn't participate.
I wouldn't.
I just don't view domains as shares.
Like, I'd rather spend $5 and rely on my skill set to hand register a name.
I've done it before.
I've hand registered names and sold them for five figures.
I hand registered a pair of words that I sold last month for five grand,
testosterone, test kit, and testkits.com.
I feel like domain in your success is related to your, your, your success is correlated to your skills, you know?
And so it's like, I'm not someone who's not in the trenches.
I'm in the trenches.
I'm, I'm, I'm horning my skills and, you know, Bruce hand registered the name yesterday that he sold for 750 this morning.
So I'm, I'm, I'm more of a involved Domain versus someone who's just trying to get exposure to the asset class.
There's no name out there that would personally be attractive for me to say,
oh, I want to put in $100 in this name so that when it sells for 3x more, I'll make $300.
Domainers want a huge ROI.
We're used to getting 100x, 10x, 1000x in our names. Fractionalization would not
provide that opportunity, most likely.
As a buyer, I hear what you're saying.
It's all TBD, where these shares
would trade, basically. We had a thread, I think Josh
had a thread about what's what's the point
of tokenization uh and we got into uh you know the the prospects of fractionalization and basically
what it means is that you've got like this new i mean currently in domaining we have a bimodal
distribution of prices right you have wholesale pricing, where domainers are buying
from other domainers. It's very secretive, you know, the domainers that are, you know, picking
up names, don't want those names to be very public. They don't want a lot of competition.
They also don't want, as Andre pointed out, retail investors to know what the wholesale prices were
to anchor, you know, future conversations about, future conversations about the price negotiation.
So you have the wholesale market and then you have retail prices.
And they're just like 10x different more or less, where that's all of a domainer's edge
is in the delta between those two, you know, pricing clusters.
And if you were to sell, you know, some stake in a domain as a domainer, what you would
happen, what we, what you would have is like a new, more liquid price distribution between
the retail pricing and the wholesale pricing.
Now where exactly it would lie on that curve, who knows?
It could be closer to the retail price,
it could be closer to the domain price,
and it's all dependent on how the supply
and demand works out.
But you can imagine a whole new class of investors
that finds it much, much easier and much more attractive
to invest in blue chip domains, even at a premium to the wholesale price, because they
can get some return when it actually hits on the retail price.
And for the owners, they get some amount of liquidity.
It's really solving the same problem that loans do in that you're able to monetize your assets as a domain seller.
It's just in one form, you're selling equity.
In the other, you're selling interest that you're paying back on the debt later.
So both are good options to have.
have. And, you know, the best thing for us to do is just build it and see, you know, where exactly
those prices will fall between the retail and wholesale distributions. But yeah, that's,
that's very interesting ish. It's usually 5050. For me, I think, I think, when domainers hear about
like, fractional, I can sell fractions of a domain, like they see, they get dollar signs in their eyes because they see all the new types of buyers that could be buying their domains.
And they do see that opportunity for a much more liquid market as opposed to waiting for that 1% sell through percent sell-through rate to finally hit every
now and then well i think if you were in the spaces yesterday you realize that that's not
necessarily true i think it's one of those things where they're they're kind of like okay show me
then if it really if you really believe this is how it's going to be then why don't we just see
it working in in in real life you know what i mean? And like I told him, I said, if somebody comes right now
and said, hey,
Frank Shillen is well known for
selling his portfolio to
GoDaddy, right? GoDaddy
came out and said it was $88 million
in their books.
But there are people that said,
he sold it for over $200 million.
Of course, they're NDA, so no one will ever know the real amount.
But on their books, they wrote it off as 88 million dollars his entire portfolio
i interviewed frank and he said he spends over 65 million dollars buying domain names of course he
sold many of those along the way right so clearly he made a huge profit you know exiting the game
selling his portfolio then he sold his registry all kind of good stuff right um reg he made a huge profit you know exiting the game selling his portfolio then he sold his
registry all kind of good stuff right um he sold a bunch of his extensions that's how we acquired
dot hip-hop probably in my opinion the greatest domain ever lived but the truth is every domainer
has a price for their portfolio but there's no marketplace where they can even leverage your portfolio more
so a name right so if there was a a guy that came out to me and said hey ish I I see you've spent
six figures or seven figures acquiring developing this portfolio there's clearly value in there
right this is how much I'm willing to loan you if you're willing to use your portfolio as collateral
i mean i'm sure there are many domainers out that will be curious and say how much are you
willing to loan me right so if you look at it from that macro level then it's applicable on a
micro level does that make sense so you can either do it on a macro level or a micro level does that make sense? So you can either do it on a macro level or micro level
It could be a name. It could be a portfolio
and that's where
tokenization makes sense because tokenization enables you to do that in a trustless way, you know looking at the guy like oh
This guy has a tattoo on his forehead. I don't know if I can trust him. You know what I mean?
It's it's it's done in a trustless manner on the blockchain and the names are the the real the only thing that you have to
make that decision on you know in terms of like the value between the borrower and the lender
yeah and it allows you to you know plug into existing capital markets. And basically you just want to be on the,
on the standard that everyone's building on and open,
open source finance.
And that lets you.
I'm going to step aside for about 15 minutes, Brady,
just so I'll be listening,
but I got to take this call real quick.
Go for it.
Yeah.
So I saw Bruce,
Bruce,
you had your hand up.
If you want to chat, accept the speaker invite, and we can hear you out. I also see Adams up here. Adam, if you want to talk about the recent sale that you've had. I'm sure that'd be interesting for folks here. hey everyone how's it going brady gang just uh yeah i mean i talked about it a lot yesterday but
uh it was just a name i bought for 2500 uh the word the name was beguile.com um
and uh you know there's not a whole lot of tLDs registered for it. You know, I think maybe like 12, 13, but I thought it would make a really good brand.
And so I decided to go for it.
And, you know, and I buy names because I like them as well.
I don't, I guess that's a flaw and that's an advantage.
A lot of times I'll buy names that I like that maybe a lot of other people don't like.
But I figured this would be a good brand name
for maybe a perfume company or something
because it's kind of like,
it's a semi-negative connotation name.
It has to do with conceit.
Yeah.
But it's kind of like a romantic version of saying it
if there is such a thing.
And so I figured maybe a perfume company would like like it and i think that's who bought it um because there was one company
um that was using shopbeguile.com and uh their perfume and uh go daddy broker let's slip that it was a Canadian company and that company I was looking at does business in Canada.
So I figured that was it. So I originally had a price for $25,000 and I recently added Make Offer to my names, to a lot of the higher expensive names,
just to open up the door for the broker to talk to them
and maybe I could get close to what I want.
And plus I did this with a lot of names
where I raised the price so that I can bargain down
and let them, you know,
feel like they're, you know, doing something. So this is a case where... You really beguiled them,
Adam. Very well done. You really beguiled them with your little make-offer scheme.
Well, I had it listed for 25 and I ended up going down to 20. They opened up at like 17.5. So
we hit pretty much in the middle,
you know, which is fine because I don't think there's a lot of end users for that name, unless I want to wait, you know, a long time. And I already do that with a lot of my names. I mean,
I'm holding names, some names for 20 years. So I don't want to, I don't want new names that I want
to hold for another 20 years because, you know, I'll be pretty old by then. So, I mean, that's it,
you know, this, it's, it was
been slow last couple of months. This month has been pretty good on sales, just, you know, getting
a good number of them. And, uh, you know, I, I just like to buy names like that, that are, you
know, just that I like. So I try to tell myself not to buy a name just because I like it, you know,
but it's hard to rein that in a lot of the time yeah yeah
yeah you were pretty deep in the dictionary with that one um but still you know uh one word english
dot com is is obviously uh got a a reasonable floor price and so you you scoped out the
shopbeguile.com folks beforehand i'm sure and so you had an idea that it was going to be them.
Did you, did you outbound to them? No, no, I didn't do any outbound. I just,
you know, put it up on a for sale page and you know, I checked LinkedIn and Crunchbase and,
you know, there weren't a lot of companies that use it. There were, there were some,
I was more thinking it was either going to be that one company,
the Shopping Isle company, or a new company. But at that point, I was willing to hold onto it for a bit. That name was okay. I didn't want to hold on to it for too long. But luckily, someone came in.
And that's another thing. It's like, you have to pick and choose your battles it's a name like this
how many opportunities am I going to have to sell it for you know five figures if if I passed on if
I if I held firm to 25 maybe I would have gotten 25 but the broker said he was working hard to get
them up and and they were since they were Canadian they were having issues with the currency conversion rate.
So, you know, that was being tough for them.
And, you know, I didn't want to risk it.
I was, I mean, I was fine with 20,000.
That was, you know, a good multiple on my investment.
And, you know, I use that money now to buy more names.
So, you know, I feel like, you know, they, they say if you sell a name
or you have to be happy with the price and you have to figure that you can get some equally
good names to replace it. So, you know, that name wasn't a crazy quality, high quality name.
So I felt like it would be easy enough to replace that name with good or better names for 20,000. So that was a good sale. If it was a really good name and I was bargaining down on it
and I wouldn't be able to replace it, and there were a lot more opportunities to sell it, a lot
more potential businesses, then I would hold onto it. So I do that when I consider any offers for my names, just basically the opportunity costs you have to look at.
Yeah.
Are you, is a lot of your portfolio consisted of these names where you're buying, you know, more or less a premium.com for like a four-figure price tag and then looking to flip it for a couple of X?
That's some of my portfolio. I mean, I'd rather not be buying four-figure names all the time,
but I do buy several a month. Like I just picked up, I think the last name I bought was on the 29th and it wasn't even on my radar
that much until I usually research names as it gets closer to expiring so this
was there's a name I got called ESG consulting calm and you know there's a
lot of consulting company names that are out there and consulting companies but
this one that's actually a type of consulting um yeah environmental safety
governance or whatever yeah so i i'd never heard of that before until i did research on it and i'm
like that's interesting because you know i have a couple other consulting names and usually just
names of companies you know like there might be a few companies several companies that call
themselves that company but this was actually a type of consulting. In addition to a
lot of companies, call them that. I think there were like 50 or 60 TLDs taken for it. So I was
really intrigued by it. And I was just learning about it basically on the day that the auction
was expiring. So I got excited and I'm like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to try to
win this name. And, you know, I ended up getting it now, now I have it. I'm just waiting for Go
Daddy to clear it before it appears in my account that I can put a for sale page up for it. But,
but it seems like a name that there's a, there's a lot of end users out there, unlike beguile.com, you know, which the advantage is it's one word, but
a disadvantage is that, and, uh, disadvantages that it's not in use as much as this one,
I'm going to value a lot higher and I'm not going to settle for, you know, a lower price,
um, you know, 25 to 20,000 for beguile you know that's a 20% discount if you price
the name higher you know that discount would get bigger if you consider giving
someone 20% off so this name you know I'm not really sure what I'm gonna price
that I'm gonna do a little more research on it you know and then you know set it
just for make offer I usually do that with my names I don't put a price on it
immediately I just let it sit there with a make offer page, see if any offers come in, gives me an idea of the traffic of the interest.
And, you know, it gives me a little more time for research. And, you know, I'm a little lazy at
times. I don't, I don't like the price names every time I get one right away. I like to sit on them
maybe every month. Uh, I'll price all the names I bought for that month all at once, you know, and then I'll sit on the next group for another month.
So, but to your question, you know, I buy a lot of other names that aren't necessarily one word brandables or even .com.
I've been buying a lot of .ai names lately,
getting into that.
And, you know, I probably own about 20, 25 .ai names.
I haven't sold any yet,
but I haven't had them for very long
because it's pretty new for me acquiring them.
So I'm not picking up, obviously, the one word . dot AI because those just go for so much money now
I just think that's a little too risky because we don't really know what AI is going to do
I think it's going to do well for a while but I don't want to put that much money up for them
but I'm trying to pick up I think I think dot AI is here to stay you know it's going to be like a
dot IO or maybe a dot CO but I'm already seeing multi-word .ai selling and brandables.
So that's already an advantage that it has over other TLDs that, you know, were newer and it took them five, 10 years to get to that point.
And .ai is already there where you can sell those kind of names.
So I think you can still get good prices on those.
And I,
those are the kinds I've been focusing on and you know,
hopefully I'll be able to sell one.
Cause you know,
you basically have like a two year time limit on them before you have to
renew them.
So they can get pretty expensive pretty fast.
Yeah.
And those are mostly auctions.
I assume that you're picking those up on.
Yeah. The majority of them are auctions. I did hand reg a few of them that I, uh, that I found
that looked interesting. And I went through my domain names and my good ones, the ones I felt
were good. And I wanted to see if the AI versions were taken of them. And strangely enough, the AIs
were taken for a lot of my decent names.
They didn't have to be great names, just decent names.
You know, and I'm talking about maybe the one word or good, strong two word names.
They were a lot of them taken.
I found a couple that weren't.
So I registered a couple of those in the .ai extension just to have, you know, another option for selling or even throw it in the deal,
you know, to sweeten it if we're haggling on price a bit. But yeah, the majority of them
are from auctions and obviously from Namecheap auctions because they're the only ones that
handle the expired domain drops now for them. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's an interesting point you made and we actually have a
tool that helps you find you know available domains and other extensions
based on what you have in your portfolio at UD so if you go to
unstoppable well Adam I'm not sure if I added you to the domain or club but you
should be in the domain club if you're not let meer Club. But you should be in the Domainer Club. If you're not, let me know.
But yeah, if you go to like,
we have this portfolio suggestions tool.
And so it'll look at all the SLDs in your portfolio
and then it will scan and find unregistered domains
and other extensions that match those.
So yeah, you should try out our tool.
I'm sure you've already gone through most of, yeah, you should, you should try out our tool. I'm sure
you've already gone through, you know, most of them already, but, uh, should make it very easy
for you to do that kind of analysis that you were doing manually. Yeah. I'll have to check it out.
That is that the portfolio suggestions tab? Exactly. On the left side. Yep. Okay. And if I
see that, does that mean I'm part of the club? Yes. Yeah. So you're in, in um and that means yeah you can go to customize in the top right and you
can say hey give me ai give me i don't know if you're into xyz or something like that you can
check that as well and then it'll look through your portfolio and filter down and find the ones
and if they're you know even if they're listed on the secondary,
we'll show you the price for that as well.
And yeah, it just makes it easy
to find those alternate extensions.
So can you set that for multiple extensions for one search?
Like if I wanted to pull up .ai.net.org.io,
can you do them all at once?
Yeah, yeah.
You should be able to go to Endings and then filter down.
Okay.
Yeah, that's a useful research tool too
because I know there are already tools like .db and Domain Leads
that let you look at the number of extensions.
A lot of times you just want to see if domain names are registered in the key extensions, you know, the kind of, because,
you know, a domain could be registered in 50 extensions, but if most of them are the crap ones
and somehow they weren't registered in the good ones, you know, that'd be useful information to
know. And it would help determine the value. So you you can plug in i guess the extensions that uh you value the most and which do the best in the marketplace and you know see how many of
those are taken um i you say you could do this with your portfolio but can you do this with a
list of names that you don't own um not currently but that's certainly something we want to support in the future.
Okay. Yeah. But that sounds pretty useful.
Yeah. I mean, there's a whole slew of advanced search tools, basically, that we want to be able to build. onto this so that you can you know ideate names with an LLM draft up lists
manipulate the list and then pipe those into a bulk search and get you know
enriched data attached to it all that is like on the horizon we know that would
be really useful most domainers are already patching these tools together as
is you know outsider and in their own tools so yeah it's just a matter of time
before we we actually build that up but yeah fascinating to hear that you're
doing something quite similar in your own time Andre I'm curious if you have a
similar experience of that that kind of search or if there's any kind of search tools that you use.
Well, in my case, it's a bit tricky because I do a lot of volume. So like I mentioned in the previous show, I had a six-month period when I sold 1,500 domains.
Obviously, most practically, the overwhelming majority of them are wholesale
so for my uh use cases it's not uh it's not so much something uh
um i use but i think i think that uh whether we're talking about these tools or whether we're
talking about tokenization like which was something I had mixed feelings about initially.
But at the end of the day, I'm like, okay, this is what I do.
This is what I'm good at.
The day only has 24 hours.
And so let's say tokenization, for example.
You guys have mentioned a few obvious use cases,
like, for example, using it to gain exposure to blue chip domains.
So, for example, buying a part of a two-letter domain or a part of a super premium one word.
Perfect.
But it can also, if you think outside the box, it can be a way, I think, for people to sell their time.
Like at the end of the...
So just to give you an example, you know, I had a discussion a while ago. It's not any secret or whatever with Frank actually. And he's not really interested in getting back into domains now, but he might be interested in doing so, let's say to once again build a portfolio from scratch is not super
attractive to him and so he can buy time by using fractional uh these fractional ownership models
and what i mean by this is he can come to me for example or to someone else who wants to put in
the work and say look i want you to build me a portfolio. You decide when we sell.
You decide when we buy.
I don't have anything hands-on to do.
I will fund you for this venture, not a loan or anything.
No, no, no.
But I will buy into this model.
You keep 50%.
I keep 50%.
And all of a sudden, you have a way to...
Someone like Frank has a way to leverage his capital and get involved in the industry despite not having enough time at his disposal.
Whereas someone who's willing to put in the work or who has a hobby, like in my case, when it comes to building these specific types of portfolios, he can find ways to leverage that. Now, my suggestion for you guys at Unstoppable or, you know, in general in this industry is always to focus on sales.
And at the end of the day, this is what it all boils down to because I keep in touch with so many people who own huge, you know, domains in huge volumes and stuff happens like for example in my case
uh we live on a farm i built two huge wells and bought two pieces of land next to mine
and despite living in eastern europe which you would think is cheap i burned through something
like 150 000 in less than a two-month period which is just insane to me, you know. And so obviously, it does make sense. And life happens, no matter
where you are on the domain, in the domain ecosystem, so to speak. And therefore, it does
make sense to have these solutions at your disposal that provide liquidity. And I think also
to address our initial conversation, it's something that would help the industry as well, because you move away from just wholesale and end user.
You move away from that and you kind of have these hybrid solutions of getting a partner on board and him offering funding, you offering your time. So I think whether we're talking about something on the blockchain or whether we're talking about the tool you just discussed with Adam, as long as in one way or another, there's money on the other side, I'm all for it.
Of course. Yeah, it's got to be the North Star there. have you entered any of these kind of like, uh, arrangements with other domainers where you're going in on a portfolio and you
share ownership and you,
you have some sort of consensus mechanism to figure out how to make decisions
based on your differing opinions. Do you have any arrangements like that?
Not really. No, but primarily because, uh,
because the plumbing is just not there like every now and then the
most i do when it comes to other people is i sometimes i i don't really do it frequently
but i sometimes broker domains for friends like eric i don't know if he's interested
if he's listening eric borgo i brokered dumb.com for him which fetched a very very good six-figure
amount i forgot 300-something thousand.
It was a decent amount nonetheless.
So what I've done in terms of selling my time
and collaborating with other domainers that way
was probably on the brokerage side.
But again, I only did it for friends
and there wasn't really an infrastructure in place.
Yeah, a lot place. Yeah.
A lot of, a lot of.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
And also, I, as time passed, you know,
I had periods when I was launching my books and whatever.
So it also depends when I have the time it takes to commit to doing that.
So that's why it's important kind of an industry to have these tools ready so
that when the right context presents itself, like for you as a domain or whether
you need a lot of money in real life to buy real estate or whether you miss
working on domains and all of a sudden you want to build multi thousand domain
portfolios or whatever your case may be.
It's obviously something that's going to grow the industry.
If you know, you can plug into an existing system of tools that help you
with your specific situation in a way that leads to liquidity,
that leads to money.
Totally. Yeah. I mean, right now, if you wanted to enter an arrangement like that,
you need a, you need to talk to a lawyer, you need to get an LLC together, you need to hash out ownership between all the different parties, you need to set ground rules on how you're going to, you know, make decisions and what happens if someone needs to liquidate, what happens if you disagree on the price that you want to sell at. I mean, there's just a lot of edge cases.
And yeah, I do see, you know, unstoppable and tokenization being particularly good for
things like this because you can basically outsource a lot of the enforcement mechanisms
to the blockchain in a trustless way where you can have guarantees that whatever the preordained
parameters of your agreement are, are going to be abided by. And so whether it is blockchain
that's intermediating the agreement or unstoppable as a company. Either way, we'll give you, you know, some peace of mind
as a domain or if you're entering one of these contracts.
And, you know, as a platform, we'll be servicing, you know,
a large number of these.
So, you don't, we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time.
You know, for the most part, it's going to be like a one-size-fits-all agreement
fits all agreement with standard protocols for all of these different edge cases. Now, that said,
with standard protocols for all of these different edge cases.
I do think that fractionalization is a much more, much less complicated way to accomplish a lot of
this. You know, in my head, when we talk about fractionalization, we're only selling like
minority shares, these shares would not have like rights to set the price
or to be hold out on any, you know,
transaction that would be executed.
And so you would basically just be like,
the domain owner would retain control
and he would just sell less than 50% of his shares
so that he does maintain control.
And that makes everything else much much
simpler because then you don't need to do consensus between all these different people
and you know in that case you just have like a direct democracy which doesn't work where everyone
has different opinions and is out for themselves and you can't get consensus on anything and then
you'll end up having different political parties and factions inside of your fractionalized domain and in coups and all sorts of other nonsense, which is just a total distraction from the problem that we're trying to solve here.
So that's why I imagine just selling the shares is the most straightforward way to do this.
But you don't have the capability of pooling capital and pooling your brainpower
and specializing like you're talking about. So there will certainly be room for getting
more complicated, basically, holding companies and shared ownership of a portfolio like you're
talking about. Adam, I'm curious if you've had any of those kinds of arrangements with other domains it seems like I know ish has gone in on some domains uh
together with other people I've definitely heard of it happening here and there um but people say
it's just a pain in the ass and a lot of handshakes and trusting and you're only going to do it with
your friends because those are the only people you trust not to,
you know, run off with the auth codes. So it seems like there's some adoption of these kinds
of agreements already. It's just the tooling, as you're saying, Andre, isn't quite there yet.
Yeah, I haven't done it with anybody. I don't even know if I was approached to do this.
I remember a long time ago, probably in the 2000s,
I don't know if people know the Cowboys.com story?
I remember they were looking for people to go into it i don't think i was offered it but
i remember a bunch of them went in on that deal um with rick and uh a bunch of other people and
then some people ended up selling their shares you know they wanted to sell it to obviously the
dallas cowboys after they made a insulting bid at the auction
that it was at,
they went to a domain conference and they bid 200 and people were assuming it
was 200,000.
They only bid $200 for it.
The Dallas Cowboys bid $200 on cowboys.com.
Yeah.
It was the nerve.
Yeah.
No wonder they got together a cabal to try to stab him in the back.
Yeah,
exactly.
That kind of pissed off a lot of domainers.
So they got together and they put a gay dating site up on it.
Cowboy Corral.
Yes, exactly.
Like gay cowboys.
But I don't think they ever went for it.
But some people sold their stake.
And from what I read, it was kind of a pain in the butt, having so many people.
Because it wasn't just two people.
It might be easier with two, but there were several people in on this.
And I'm not even sure what's going on with that name today.
But for me to get into a deal, yeah, it would have to be...
Well, first of all, a lot of times you get into a deal like that with someone else because of how much it costs, you know, the way you can pad the cost by having someone else do it.
So that really works best with big ticket item names where you don't want to put everything into it for, you know, risk reasons.
put everything into it for, you know, risk reasons. Um, and the other is if you partner
with someone who has some skillsets that you don't have, like, let's say they're really good
at brokering, you know, like names, like they've had, they've had a high success of selling their
own names previously. Um, but you know, they're looking for, you know, someone to help fund name.
So that's, that's, that's like a best case scenario. I feel
like if you can get in with somebody who's, who's got a really good skillset, um, I guess
own having a lot of money would be considered another skillset, you know, so it's somebody
who comes in with a lot of money and someone who comes with a lot of skill, you know, that could
make a good team. Um, I know, um, and I've heard this on Domain Name Wire, Mark Levine and Logan Flat often partner up
on names, you know, and they're both very skilled and they're both very good at selling names
and they're good at picking out names. And they also compete for a lot of the same names. So it
makes sense that they would partner up for certain names. And they've had a lot of success doing that
and, you know, they trust each other.
And that's obviously the most important part of this is being able to do with someone you trust.
In my personal life, local friends, I have one good local friend who also invests in a lot of
domain names. And I wouldn't mind doing a deal with him if it ever came up.
I don't think it's necessary because we focus on different kinds of names. He's more of a
hand reg guy. So he doesn't have to put a lot of money up. He invests in technologies before
they're widely known and he does really well doing that. So why would he partner up with anybody
when you could just register names for 10 bucks? So that wouldn't work with him. But you know, if, and I know plenty of
other people down here in South Florida, there's a lot of domainers. So that I've talked to many
times. So I would certainly consider doing it with one of them if it made sense. But yeah,
overall, I think, you know, not having the money on hand or not wanting to invest as much money in a name
to parlay the risk is the main reason why somebody would do this.
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I mean, I see a lot of similarities with the brokerage market. And
you know, a lot of domainers feel like, oh, hiring a broker to outbound my names,
like, or negotiate for me, that's such a high touch white glove service, like I could never
afford that. But you see entrants like Adam, like cloud brokerage, basically, you know, making that
much more accessible for people, really opening up like a full blown marketplace of
brokers, as opposed to having a lot of like handshake agreements and no real way to like
discover brokers or just having to go through, you know, uh, uh, like a, go get a GoDaddy broker
or something like that. You know, worse incentives because they're just trying to sell any GoDaddy name, not necessarily your name. Um, yeah. So the problem there is like, there's not a unified way to discover these
brokers, to, uh, to negotiate with them, to contract with them. Um, and then, you know,
ways for you to follow up and keep in sync as that agreement progresses. And in the same way,
like there's all sorts of other, you know, partnerships and outsourcing, like, you know,
like you're saying, you know, you want a, you know, an orchestra of skill sets behind your
domains. You want someone who's really skilled at outbounding. You want someone who's good at
negotiating. You want someone who has the capital to put up to invest in the names. You want someone who's obviously great at name
selection. You want this conglomeration of different skill sets that is very rare to have
all under one roof. And if we can build some mechanisms to allow people to enlist help where they need help, whether it be a broker or capital
from external lenders or
you know time as Andre is saying, you know advisory from someone else on names
Then all of this if you provide those services then like domain becomes much more accessible to people because you don't need all of the skills in one brain. And you can, you know, use money to solve
that problem and enlist help from other people. So I see that being like, you know, sort of
this March, this long March that we're embarking on to try to make it much, much easier to,
you know, pull in these various services and make it seamless for domainers to
access them as opposed to this highly manual and much more expensive and inaccessible mode that we
see it taking right now. That actually, there were some interesting ideas there that I came up with
from you talking about that.
Because you mentioned, you know, having kind of like almost like a marketplace in a way where you can, you know, hire a broker, you know,
because normally you would have to have a good quality name and go to a broker.
And if you think about it, it's almost like, you know, partnering on a name because you're giving them equity in a name, you know, 20% commission or whatever.
you're giving them equity in a name, you know, 20% commission or whatever. So, so you're, so
you're, you're kind of going, you know, in with someone else, you know, but it's a professional
broker and they have the skillset, like I was talking about earlier that you don't have,
you know, maybe it's brokering. So you're saying, okay, you know, I'll give you, you know, 20%
value of this name. If you can sell it, you know, within this amount of time, you know,
in our contract. And then at the end of the contract, we can determine if we want to renew it or not.
But there's no marketplace where brokers can bid on your name, which would be kind of interesting.
I don't know how feasible it is, but imagine if you listed some names.
You listed some names because if you look at like Domain Easy, Domain Easy is setting up a whole kind of like a marketplace of brokers where you can choose a broker that signs up on someone shows interest in your name, then you can pass it off to a broker. So that's kind of an after a fact thing,
which in a way you want a broker to find you a really good end user
as opposed to the end user's already found you,
but you don't trust in your skills to close the deal
or get the maximum price, so you hire a broker.
But imagine if Domain Easy or another platform
also had the ability for brokers who signed up with their service to go through their names and find ones that are interesting to them and say, hey, I'm willing to broker your name for this amount of time and for this percentage.
And other brokers can also make
broker offers on your name. So you can, you can look at the brokers, you know, the platform might
show their stats, how successful they are, how well they've done, you know, and, you know, some
brokers, probably the newer ones, won't have great stats, but they'll offer, you know, less of a cut
for the commission, you know, maybe so that they
can eventually put some stats under them, you know, and get their feet wet. But that would be
kind of interesting, you know, kind of brokers fighting for names. And, you know, and then you
can even do it for like, you know, I mean, you would have to do it for at least a month, you
know, because brokers going to work hard and the sale might not come in in that first month, even though it due to their work, even though, you know,
you're not using them anymore.
So, um, I, that would be interesting.
I, you know, I, I haven't given it much thought, like what, what's the upside for the company
running this?
You know, they, maybe they take a little cut, like one, 2% off the top.
Um, you know, and it's good for the brokers because they get to cherry pick the names they want.
And it's good for the seller because they, you know, capitalism, it allows you to get the best offer because the brokers are competing against each other.
So that's just what I came up with while you were talking.
You know, you gave me some good.
Damn it, Adam.
You're exposing my entire product roadmap right here.
No, that's exactly. I mean and and props to Adam for no Adam calm I mean also props to you Adam for laying that up but Adam calm has been
you know they have this cloud brokerage service and so they're doing something
similar I don't think it's like I think you need to be a whitelisted broker to be there uh in their service but it's it's all going in that direction
where you have a one-click experience for sellers to enlist help uh vet the brokers that they're
contracting with uh and then you know get get to work you know it shouldn't be this, you know, get get to work, you know, it shouldn't be this, you know, very gate kept sort of sort of industry.
And I'm sure like the legacy brokers will be, you know, watching all of this with with caution because they see that, OK, now, especially, you know, AI tools, it makes outbounding easier and doing follow-ups and things like this. There's a lot of
edge to be eaten into in this very relationships-driven economy of domain brokering.
And, you know, new entrants will be able to come in and eat down those margins.
And new entrants will be able to come in and eat down those margins.
So, you know, bad for the top brokers, potentially really good for all domainers who are, you know, looking to, you know, get brokerage services and, you know, borrow capital.
And again, do all the other services that we were talking about before.
But yeah, we see like Unstoppable can be like a hub
for a lot of these different services
and just make it extremely easy for domainers
to get the help that they need,
whatever capacity that is in.
Yeah.
Andre, did you say you do a lot of brokering or just here and there for friends? I'm curious what that looks like and what your experience has been like.
had kind of a gateway to a certain industry like if it's obviously if you come to me uh with an
econ finance name by the way i i'm still pissed off that i didn't buy econ.com during the early
pandemic days i could have had it for a pretty low price but so if it's something related to my area
of expertise where i know a lot of people then i'm gonna. But realistically speaking, it's not something I want to do very
much of moving forward, especially because I think to draw another parallel to what we've
discussed previously with what exactly could push our industry forward, I think such a game changer
will be represented by agentic brokerage. And someone like unstoppable this means that you partner up
uh with one of those companies that will be able to finally produce a solution that's effective
right now the solutions that exist are they kind of suck but a year from now i don't think that's
going to be the case anymore but also initially at least i don't think they're going to be super affordable
and so for someone like unstoppable you can maybe seal the deal with one of the big players and
offer kind of like a white label type solution where you have this uh club of professional
domainers and if you're in it you can take advantage of uh these agentic uh chat based uh
take advantage of these agentic chat based outbound solutions and do it more cheaply
than just buying through the companies themselves.
I think it's going to be huge.
I don't really think that domain industry companies are very well positioned for it. I think whoever has the first mover advantage in this is
going to do so amazingly, so amazingly well. So yeah, in the future, I definitely want to do less
broker, especially if it's not something again related to my area of expertise, but rather just
boring end user research and sending out emails and whatever.
I want to do less of that.
And I think agentic solutions are going to offer that.
And I hope that unstoppable is going to be kind of leading the way in that direction.
Because yeah, that's the future.
In my ideal world, that's what's going to push my portfolio over the edge.
Because right now I make some of my money with end user sales, some of my money by selling
super in super large packages to wholesalers.
Right.
But the problem is that our industry is so small and reseller market liquidity is so low
that there's no way for me to have a 25,000 domain portfolio.
Why?
Because while for better or worse uh it would scale
when it comes to end users but even then it's kind of a diminished marginal quality uh thing
where with every set of additional 5 000 domains for your portfolio your sell-through rate is
probably going to go down a bit and a bit more and a bit more but you can still make it work
end user wise i think i think it would scale there for something like 25 000 domains with my
methodology for sure but when it comes to the wholesale market it's just super small and there's
no way for me instead of selling a thousand or fifteen hundred domains in six months it's practically
impossible for me to sell ten thousand domains in six months there just's practically impossible for me to sell 10,000 domains in six months. There just
isn't enough liquidity for me to tap into. And so my ability to move my portfolio to
firm five figure territory in terms of number of domains under management
is kind of dependent on these solutions existing, you know, where, okay, I have some money with
end users, that part is going to scale relatively well, I okay, I have some money with end users, that part is going to
scale relatively well. I'm going to have some money with wholesale liquidity, but that doesn't
scale very well. And then the third category can be represented by outbound revenue from
Magentic solutions. Like personally, I did, I've done a fair bit of research on brainstorming
in the direction of what exactly can I do to get the 25,000 domains, for example, and really the best
that I could come up with was this.
Yeah.
And I'm sure like these, the economics change and the sell through rate obviously would change drastically if you did have this agentic outbounding as well.
We discussed this last week, but you could expect higher sell through rate because you're able to outbound so many more names.
so many more names and so you know the carrying capacity of your portfolio would conceivably
increase because your your revenue stream would be would be much higher and your turnover rate as
well I personally prefer not to think of myself through rate in general because that would lead to a lot of distortion like you can imagine that if i include my that if i include my wholesale uh my my domain or to domain or sales in the
equation i have a sell-through rate of almost 100 sometimes which is crazy right so i what i what i
prefer to do is have two buckets of sales through rate analysis where in one bucket i say okay what is my sell through
rate like for end users what is my how does this sell through rate evolve as my as the number of
domains i have under management grows okay good what's my sell through rate when it comes to uh
the wholesale dimension and hopefully in the future i'm gonna have this other bucket where
i'm gonna be okay, what is the
sell-through rate I have when outbounding? What are my costs associated with outbounding? Because
at the end of the day, doing so for thousands upon thousands of domains is probably going to cost
a non-negligible amount, especially if it's done properly and not spam or anything, just super wide net. But if it's done well, and so I'm going to have kind of like these,
these three different buckets rather than just, uh,
mix it all together and, uh,
kind of assess the overall sell-through rate of my portfolio.
Personally, right now I have two buckets, but again,
I would love to have this third bucket once the technology is mature enough
let's say yeah of course um and i'm curious i mean you've talked a lot about your you know
wholesale selling um but i'm curious to hear more details you know as much as you're willing to share
uh you know is this a lot of like outbound driven selling of like large packages of
domains to people? Is it, are you selling these via auctions?
Like how are you, how are you delivering those to domainers and,
and you know, what's, what's the, what's a, you know,
give us a vague representation of the mechanics there and you know,
where the edge is.
Well, it's really kind of the same principle as with end users in that the more volume there is,
the lower my per unit price gets. So obviously for end user sales, my per domain return is amazing
because I sell for four figures each. The problem is that there's not a lot of volume there because the
sell to rate to end users is low.
When it comes to wholesale, the same principle is valid in that, um, for
example, when I test out a market, let's say if I haven't been advertising on a
certain platform for a long time and I do it, I'm probably going to go after a higher per domain price.
And so I'm going to start with something like $98. If you buy one domain,
$94, if you buy three domains, $88, if you buy five domains and,
and it goes from there. And I very frequently sell for these prices.
The problem is I've never sold sold let's say 200 domains to someone
at $98 each when I have the and therefore I have to make compromises and the more volume I push the
more domains I sell to a person the lower the per domain price I will settle for will be.
And so I've had people buy hundreds upon hundreds of domains from me in just one single transaction.
But it wasn't at $98 per domain.
It was a lot lower.
It was a lot lower in the two-figure zone.
But on the other hand, I needed the liquidity at that point in time.
I was able to move
a ton of inventory. At most, I moved close to 1000 domains in just one deal.
In my back, that's my number one, let's say, bulk sale that I ever had close to 1000 domains in,
in just one in just one deal, obviously not at an amazing price, but it got the job done. And so
not at an amazing price, but it got the job done. And so I list everywhere, I list literally
everywhere. I also love I mean, I'm a data guy. So I love I love testing new marketplaces. I like
I sometimes have this plan of also trying to sell to developers at prices between end user prices
and reseller prices. But that is kind of hit or miss because the volume is quite poor so yeah the bottom line is
that i have large portfolios i have to have serious turnover i want to see profits and i'm
perfectly okay with those profits not being amazing on a per unit basis as long as the
economics ultimately make sense and i sell domains by the thousands.
The problem is, and I'm saying this as someone who knows the wholesale market very well,
that I'm an ambitious guy, you know, and I think outside the box.
But if you asked me to sell 20,000 domains in a year, I don't think I would be able to do it.
I can sell probably can I sell
five six thousand yes but anything over ten thousand is gonna be super super difficult
which is why I kind of need the agentic layer as well yeah it makes sense um buying buying a package i mean obviously i'm not um an experienced domainer but buying a package
of domains seems like such a an odd proposition um where you know my instincts would be to
to really cherry pick the ones that you want and And of course the seller, you as the seller, just trying to get rid of, you know, as many of them as possible. Um,
and so yeah, this odd dance between, you know,
really gunning after the couple of gems and the portfolio, even, you know,
if the buyer can even review the, I mean,
our buyers like reviewing the entire package i'm sure you said it's only a
couple hundred names at a time so in that case certainly they have the time to to go through
each name um i'm just surprised they don't want to you know cherry pick the the names um i suppose
you make it economical for them to take a gamble on the rest of them. Exactly.
They do.
And I can let them cherry pick names.
Like I don't have any problem with anyone.
If you take a look at my portfolio now and you want to buy one domain, I will sell you one domain.
But if you want the best price, you're going to have to bring your checkbook.
And that's going to mean that you buy in bulk.
Also, there's this thing that, you know, we all know that domains are one of a kind and
whatnot. But at a portfolio level, and at scale, especially when you always price your inventory,
you can draw conclusions. And I'm not saying it's commoditization in the strict sense of the word.
saying it's it's come on commoditization in the strict sense of the word but once bulk buyers
know who you are once they kind of know what your sell through rates are for your portfolios
they know what they're buying even when if they're not cherry picking you know and at the end of the
day it's also uh it also depends on the goal the person in question has because if it's someone
who wants to build a portfolio
of thousands upon thousands of domains,
and they're better positioned than me
to just do it with end users, right?
If they want to do that,
then it's going to be not really worth their time,
really, to cherry pick.
They're going to pay more for a domain,
and if they cherry pick,
and if they're super, super selective like that, that it's gonna take them ages to build a portfolio of thousands upon thousands of
domains people's risk management is all over the place you know like i'm a pretty prudent guy so
the reason why like my portfolios are always profitable through strictly end user sales the
problem is that uh for me to bring them to like i said before
25 000 domains is that give me two or three years of great recession type activity where interest
from end user drops and your sell-through rate can be cut in half just like that and all of a sudden
the economics don't make sense and all of of a sudden, this 25,000 strong domain portfolio is going to act as a super hard to handle weight for your financial situation.
To make matters worse, this is going to happen in a crisis.
Obviously, it's not going to happen during an economic boom, most likely.
And so your other projects will be suffering as well.
And it's kind of going to be Murphy's Laws on steroids for someone like me, for someone like Frank Schilling, or someone who is
sitting on a super nice nest egg of liquidity, when they see that the market is crashing, they just,
you know, can't wait to buy more because their liquidity situation and risk management is
completely different to mine. And that's why it's important to have this healthy wholesale market because it's not a zero sum game. You
know, it's not if you buy domains in bulk from me, it's not that you're winning and I'm a sucker
for selling them to you, or I'm willing winning and you're a sucker for buying them from me.
It's rather the fact that we have this privilege of having the market where we can exchange inventory like this, and you can act based on your self-interest. I can act based on
my self-interest. Maybe I'm going to be right short to midterm and get my liquidity and I'm
going to be happy. You're going to be right long-term speaking, and you're going to build
a portfolio that you're going to sell to GoDaddy and you're going to retire in the Caymans, right?
It's not zero sumstum. Yeah.
One last question on that.
And then, Bruce, I see your hands up,
so I want to give you a chance to speak.
But yeah, Andre, so how are you deciding which names you take to the wholesale
versus the retail market?
Are you registering these names
with the end market in mind?
Like if you're buying them to wholesale versus retail?
I'm curious if it's just like, you know, with the passage of time,
you realize some names are, you know,
going to take a while or just aren't as desirable for an end user.
And so you want to offload them to wholesale.
So like, how are you, what are the heuristics that inform whether or not offload them to to wholesale so like how are you what what are the
heuristics that inform whether or not you take them to the wholesale market
one thing and one thing only end user sales i optimize for end end user sales and end user
sales alone because just like when you're advertising an advertising campaign you're like
oh this company is advertising on youtube and then on their website they're advertising another company
and that company is advertising another company on their website sure but ultimately somehow a
sale needs to be made and at the top of this pyramid are end-user sales And I know, which is why I focus on domains that at a portfolio level,
scalable level, do well with end users. As long as you build a portfolio that does well with end
users and that is profitable strictly through end user sales, you're going to have interest from
resellers as well because they want the same thing. The only thing that's different between, as I've mentioned in my example, is the time
horizon.
Maybe right now I have other goals in real estate and whatnot.
And so my time horizon for my portfolio is shorter term, whereas someone who wants to
build a 25,000 or 50,000 domain portfolio now has a longer term outlook and has the
capital it takes to see it
through. But what do we both have in common? We both want end user sales. And so my advice to
anyone really is that no matter what you do, we're not in the business of registering domains that
sound good, that look cool or whatever. We are basically just in the business of acquiring
domains that sell to end users.
And if you do that, you're going to be able to tap into reseller market liquidity as well when you need it.
You're going to be able to also make agentic solutions work in your favor because if you're trying to sell WXYZQK.info or .horse,
it's probably no matter how smart the AI is is it's not going to be able to do
much for you so always optimize for end user sales and you're going to be golden i think
yeah whether it's wholesale or retail all roads lead to uh to end users so that makes sense i'm just curious like i clearly you think you can
get a better uh you know annualized rate of return flipping wholesale uh rather than waiting for the the big ticket retail sale um so i'm sure there's like you know if if some kind of names are trendy
like your ais are finally hitting you probably wouldn't wholesale those but if there's some you know older school names or names that you know quantum blah blah
blah that are gonna take many many years to to hit it would make more sense to do sell those
wholesale um and uh and you know optimize your cash flow in the short term. Yeah.
Anyway, Bruce, I wanted to give you a chance to talk since I saw your hands up.
But yeah, great, great information, Andre.
It's fascinating.
How you doing?
Hey, Bruce.
How are you swimming in dot infos over there?
I delete every one that's in my account.
When I go to my cart to register a name, I delete the dot infos.
Yeah, fair enough.
We're going to have a bulk checkbox to let you delete them all soon enough, so it'll be easier for you.
Perfect, perfect.
So I was listening to earlier, and then I had to go take a phone call about the barrier to entry for new investors into this business.
And I've stated time and time over again,
if I lost every one of my domains today,
I can start over with a couple hundred bucks tomorrow and still make a good living.
Because it all depends how hard you want to work,
how hungry you are, and what you're going to price your names at.
I'm not pricing people who are pricing names at $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000.
They're going to sit there for a while.
Whereas you price them a little under four figures, you have a better chance, and you're outbounding them and letting people know that it's available.
You have a better chance of selling the name.
So that's where I've made my living for the last,
you know, 18 years.
And, you know, with the outbounding.
But again, to get involved in this business,
to, if you think that it's just going to come,
you know, natural. I going to come, you know,
natural. I'll never forget when people were,
whether it was DN Academy or, or this, they're saying, they're saying,
well, I bought these names and I haven't had a sale in a week. Well,
what do you know? I mean,
you just have to sit there and laugh because well,
what are you doing to sell your name? What are you doing to,
to help yourself to market yourself? Well, but no one's come by to buy it. Well, they're not going to, you, you doing to sell your name? What are you doing to help yourself, to market yourself?
Well, but no one's come by to buy it.
Well, they're not going to.
You've got to get out there and let people know that you have that name available.
So the barrier to entry in this business right now, like I said,
remember how Mark Cuban went on, you know, he started with X amount of dollars
and, you know, became a millionaire again on that one show, whatever it was called,
undercover, whatever it was called, undercover,
whatever it was called.
If I lost every one of my names today and had to, you know,
if you gave me like, you know,
$200 to $500 to go either buy drops or buy hand registered names,
I can make a good living with that and, you know, build up from there.
And I think that anybody who puts in the time,
puts in the effort, uh, will be able to do the same thing. And if you, if you're, if you buy them just to let them sit there and, you know, pray that, you know, keep on looking for that email
from spaceship after Nick Adam, whoever, it's just not going to happen. It's just not going to happen.
So every day, and I've, again, I've said this for many, many years,
there's 90,000 to 100,000 gems, not all gems,
but there's a lot of gems that are in there
that you have a great opportunity to make money on.
So it all depends on how the effort,
you're going to get out of it what you put into it.
If you put no effort into it, you're going to get nothing out of it.
Yeah, well put.
And, you know, these AI tools that we're talking about lower that barrier to entry even further because it's, you know, people can do it at higher scale and can really make it easier to outbounding and make it less of a slog.
100%.
But until then, Bruce, you have the advantage because you are just a masochist and willing to put yourself through that hell.
So props to you.
That's not an advantage.
That's just doing the work.
I mean, anybody, if you want to do the work, you can do it.
And that's, you know, people say, well, do you work from 9 to 5?
And I laugh.
You know, I laugh.
What does 9 to 5 mean?
You know, I work when it's dark outside the next day.
That's right.
Yeah, I mean, text rolls in, phone call rolls in, email rolls in, fire right back.
That's how you keep things moving.
But also give yourself that reason, give yourself that purpose.
You know, when it's so hot outside, right, and you turn that air conditioning on, you
just feel so cool, and you'll sit back and, you know, I'm not going to do anything today,
or I got that once the other day, so I'm cool.
You know, I got the first of the month today, and, you know, I got to tell you something,
and you know i gotta tell you something and i i shared it with a few other people
and I shared it with a few other people.
you know the first as sales people we have to depend on everything on ourselves so we you know
we have to make that sale to pay the bills to pay the the mortgage to pay you know the car payment
to pay the insurance payment to pay this payment to pay for dog food to pay for this well you're
not going to get it
by just sitting back doing nothing you have to be out there uh and making it happen in this business
there's not that many full-time domainers they're just not
because people just don't want to put the time into it and i think that if you put the time into
it you're gonna get a lot out of it. You are.
And, you know, it's not just, it's not luck.
You know, like Adam had that, that's learning that skill, that's understanding the business.
And it's just, it's learning the business.
You know, listening to different shows, reading the blogs, you know, studying the names.
And you just,
if you don't put that effort into it and you're just going to think that it's going to come naturally because you hear these people have a $70,000 sale and
you're going to go out and buy that same name and a different extension.
That's not, it's not going to happen that way. It's just not going to happen.
Yeah. A lot of,
a lot of heartbreak would be avoided if they would just listen to you Bruce.
But yeah, again, any job would just listen to you, Bruce.
Again, any job you have, if you put a bullshit effort into your job right now, they're going to get rid of you.
Of course.
If I put a bullshit effort into my job here, I'm not going to succeed. So I know that, you know, what I, you know, I have a picture of my, my wife
and my dog and my kids, and I look at them and they, they give me a purpose to want to really
succeed. And I have a sign above my desk that says, you know, $500 a day in sales, no excuses,
none. And that's what I got to hit just to, you know, just to take care of my, my monthly,
you know, my monthly bills, my, if I want to go on a vacation.
That's all included in there and what I've budgeted out that I need to do a day.
And that's not Monday through Friday.
That's Monday through the next Monday.
Yeah.
No excuses.
Maybe I should start a family, Bruce.
That'll make me a better demeanor.
Then I have the fire under my ass. Then I'll have bills to pay. going to lower you know people getting into domaining seeing that this is a you
know 5 10 year 20 year payout for some of their investments you know that's
that's a massive turnoff for a lot of people it's especially younger guys who
are you know used to immediate gratification and have you know no sense
of you know of time preference.
These guys, they want the immediate gratification.
They also see the acceleration of AI and technology and the economy.
Especially for me, it's very hard to imagine what the world is going to look like
in 10 years, let alone 20 years.
I think Adam was talking about this as well.
I have my names that, you know, I just put all, you know,
whether it's Spaceship or Affleck, I'm not outbounding them.
You know, I know that they're great names and that sale will come,
whether it's in a year, five years, 10 years, it's going to happen.
And I'm just going to, you you know i've seen so many people
say i bought this 15 years ago and just sold this for eighty thousand dollars because they they
really realize it's a great name and and they're just not gonna you know take take anything for it
so i do have those names that i just i'm not outbounding but the names that i'm outbounding
again i can find those names every day, every single day.
Yeah.
500 bucks a day.
That's it.
It's a slog, man.
No excuses.
Yeah.
It's inspirational for sure.
All right, guys.
Well, it is 140 on a Friday, on $5 Friday. So hop over, get your dot coms for five bucks each up to a hundred.
We've also got our, uh, five 53 transfers as well. And that's up to, uh, 370 ish.com so you
can transfer in at that price. Uh, you're not going to find cheaper transfers in that volume
anywhere else. Uh, so be sure to do that. Try us transfers in that volume anywhere else.
So be sure to do that.
Try us out. In terms of the products, like we mentioned recently,
we've just added self-brokerage chat to our landers.
We've got new bulk search to make it really easy to do batch orders.
We're coming out very soon with being able to list for sale via CSV upload.
So for all you whales out there, that'll make it a whole lot easier for you to price your domains in bulk.
Just using a little uploader tool.
Some more things coming down the pipe.
Pretty soon, we're already working on LTO.
And so that's coming hopefully in a month or so.
Being able to list from an external registrar
without transferring in.
I know that's an often requested feature
from a lot of you guys
who maybe don't want to take the full plunge
in transferring in,
but want to get extra exposure for their names.
So yeah, lots of good things coming. And many of you may have
experienced some flakiness with bulk actions earlier this week. Apologies for that. We shipped
an update over the weekend that broke some things. But it's all fixed and stable now. And you should
see just generally better performance from bulk updates going forward. I know that was an issue
for a lot of people. So rest assured, we're working hard. We're shipping features every day.
And yeah, I hope you'll come try us out. And of course, get out there and touch some grass this
weekend. Touch some sand, touch some ocean, whatever it is you're touching, go touch it.
Don't be like Bruce, where you lock yourself in your house all weekend and
outbound to hit your goals. Or maybe do. I take my cell phone
with me to the beach. And I'll sit there and
just walk Frankie. I'll walk Frankie to the water. I'll send out some text
messages. Easy. I do the same thing.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not sitting in my mom's basement my mom's been gone for 22 years i'm sitting in my basement right now
but it ain't my mom's and i'm selling names uh but i do get out they let me out of the house
every now and then okay every morning i'm two hours in the dog park with my boy so you know
you make me sound like uh you know they they're afraid to let me out with a
straitjacket on or something.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm the same way.
You know, some of us just can't turn it off, Bruce.
And that's a good problem to have.
Anyway, guys, great to talk with you, Bruce, Andre, Adam, the rest of the gang.
Ish has departed.
But great to circle back with you all.
And we will catch you next week.
Take care.
