But, and it is a big but, SH claims that they are branding experts and their ad I saw on youtube mentioned that there are 300 million plus domains, but only under 200k on SH because they are so good at picking the best ones. So either SH is BSing and they are clueless what good brands are or I don't know what is another explanation for this.
Even if every name on SH had a 2% STR that would still mean 90% of them won't sell in 5 years. So we can't fault them too much. Its a hard problem they are working on. They are obviously smart folks who know more about selling brandable names than you or I ever will.
But I do think they rely too heavily on automation and are too seller friendly, and that hurts the quality of their marketplace by diluting the curation. That might have made sense when they were starting and needed to increase inventory, but at this point they have too much inventory with 250k names.
Some examples where I think their automation hurts them:
1)
Expert Domain Reviewers
I think we all know how this works, but just to recap: SH shows submitted domains in blocks of 4 to a group of "Expert Domain Reviewers", and they select the one out of the 4 they like the best (if they like any). If the domain gets enough votes it is automatically approved without anyone at SH weighing in. This is the case for most of my domains on SH - I would say 80%+ of my names that are accepted were Auto-Approved in this manner.
On the surface this seems fine and is definitely faster, but it doesn't take much imagination to see that a mediocre domain could get lucky and be pitted against a whole bunch of crappy domains and thus still be auto-approved. Its also not going to take into account the overall health of the marketplace (i.e., approving too many similar names). And finally, folks that are willing to accept literal pennies per poll to do this work are just not going to have the same expertise as professional curators that actually work for the marketplace.
Its true that you can opt out of this process and insist that a member of SH's staff reviews the name, but that only effects your names - the marketplace is still full of Auto Approved domains.
2)
Pricing / Appraisal
SH lets you suggest your own prices, or you can let them pick the prices and they'll usually pick something between $2200-4000. Bigger accounts (500+ names) can increase the appraised price by 4x.
So under this system 2 domains both appraised at $2300 could be listed for any price between $2300-9200. And this applies all the way up, there's no limit. For example, they approved a domain for me last week at ~$20k which I was able to mark up to $75k. So what's the correct price? Who the hell knows! But one of us is totally wrong.
And it means that the sellers are setting the prices, not the curators, and that's a big problem. Their curation and appraisal is their core value proposition to buyers, and now the inmates are running the asylum.
This system destroys the utility of the primary filter the customer's have (price). And it means that those doing the pricing (sellers) have a different goal than the curators (selling their own names vs creating a brand customers can rely on to have quality, well-priced names). This is a recipe for trouble.
It also has a rather unfortunate second order effect: since SH knows the sellers can set the prices to whatever the hell they want, they don't seem to put much time into the appraisals and they usually skew low because they know most sellers are going to 4x them.
3)
Domain Insights
I have found their Domain Insights tool to be extremely hit or miss, although I believe Darpan when he says that domains with a high DI score (7+) sell 2x better than domains with a lower DI score (5-6). Keep in mind it never returns a score lower than 5.
But my suspicion is they are a little too in love with their own tool here and rely on it too much. As many of us have found, its just about impossible to automatically score domains in bulk regardless of how many signals you add to the mix or how many times you say "AI" in front of a mirror.
I have the same feelings about their Domain Grader AI. Its useful for a very rough filter of a giant list, but it cannot replace human curation and still selects a lot of crap. I ran tens of thousands of domains through it while it was open, and I would say *maybe* 1% of the names it returned were ones I ended up registering.
Let's be clear - that is a huge technical achievement. But we're a long way out from those AIs being able to choose great domains out of a pile of crap. (I have developed my own based on ChatGPT and it sucks too, but it works as well as theirs and its still the best way to filter the drop list.)
Conclusion
The common theme here is that by trying to scale curation they've ended up with a mess of 250k domains of wildly varying quality and price. It probably made sense when they were starting and needed to grow the inventory quickly, but its gone too far. Sellers may like some of the automation features but what sellers really like is sales - and that's not going well right now.
Adding the "ultra premium" marketplace is a symptom of the failed curation in the bigger martketplace. Its an admission that the rest of their inventory is the bargain bin, and you're going to have to spend lots of time digging in there to find anything good. Having to create an actually-curated section of a marketplace that's supposed to already be curated says to me that the curation isn't working. Otherwise I could sort by high price and automatically be shown the best names, but we all know that doesn't work on SH.
Like I said though, these are smart people with access to data we can only dream of. So I'd still rather bet on rolling with them than on going it alone (and I am making that bet). They've got work to do, but I think there's a good chance they can pull it off. They've gotten much further than a lot of other people who have tried, and they are continually innovating.
I'm absolutely thrilled to hear they're going to upgrade the name. I cringe every time I think of a potential buyer hitting that landing page and thinking "what in the hell is SquadHelp?"
A big part of SH's job is buyer education, and its hard to be credible when convincing someone to shell out for a premium name when you're running the damn business on a hand reg name. If SH was called Build.com, Eden.com, or something else thats really premium it would instantly make them more credible.
I'm also thrilled they've killed the Super Boosts. Their search rankings need to be more "pure", so anything that improves that is a good thing in my book. Rank the domains by their quality and relevance, not by whether the seller has a lot of SH points to spend.
My Ideas To Improve SH
If this was my baby, this is what I'd do:
1) Kill the expert review process and get a real team making real salaries to do the curation.
2) Drastically increase submission fees to knock the volume way down and to pay the curation team ($10 per name?). Maybe limit the number of names a seller can submit monthly, and increase that limit on a per seller basis when they have names accepted.
3) Tighten up the review process. They say only ~8% of names get approved, but everyone here says they get at least 40% through (I'm around 45%).
4) Purge the worst names from the marketplace. I'd do a liquidation program and pay people to convert their listings to SH owned listings, and then drop most of them at renewal. Maybe they could buy up to 50k names for $500k ($10/each) and thus remove the worst 20% of the names in the marketplace.
5) Stop letting sellers write their own descriptions and choose their own categories. Buyers want to see the best domain for them, not the domain whose owner is the best at gaming the search engine.
6) Re-price all the remaining domains and stop letting sellers set the prices
Common theme there is that SH delivers value through curation and appraisal, and so they should not outsource those tasks to automated systems or sellers.
Anyone else have thoughts on this?
