I think Rob believes in engaging people. He views NP as an important platform to engage target audience for many of his projects, including epik, and gauge their thinking. Exciting the core, being visible etc. are important here and he is a rare breed that understands all these.
He mentioned that he started at P&G and that is the best university for that kind of thinking. I worked for P&G myself and it is one of the best schools I have ever had in my life.
That's it -- co-creation.
I think what also come out of this is people learn from other experts about what to look for in a name. I am also giving a lot of private feedback in response to PMs though it makes for rather long days.
The process we ran for FullVenue.com, which led to us selecting
@Ategy.com's domain was a good example.
We also bought Armored.net, SignDeck.com, Toki.com, TrustRatings.com, Us.Tv and Watchmask.com, all here through various invitations for submissions, sometimes with polls.
Of course anyone could do this assuming they are prepared to follow through with a purchase.
The NamePros community could play a more active role in helping end-users find suitable domains. The talent is certainly here. The format is just more "open source" versus Squadhelp.
The steep rise of Squadhelp is telling -- end-users are going there and the domain name is a modestly priced
accessory rather than an integral and strategic starting point:
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/squadhelp.com
We are planning a next phase for the Epik domain marketplace:
https://marketplace.epik.com/
This is an increasingly fine marketplace -- integrating a lot of inventory types. However, to appeal to retail buyers, I definitely think we can take some pages from the SquadHelp playbook.
As noted elsewhere, I am a big fan "Make Offer" pricing. I would like to see more domains listed as "Make Offer" and to provide more help to domainers to get retail prices.
And yes, when someone does buy a domain for $50,000, we'll help them insure it, and the domain owner can earn affiliate revenue on the upsell to a Forever domains ($399) with an insurance policy (1% of the face value as annual premium).
I don't have the answer, but I am starting to ask questions about how to bring more end-user budgets into buying high quality .COM domains. We'll look to move swiftly.
@Ala Dadan @Domain Graduate