Of course it's for sale just not for $5,000
Again, I am thankful for the great advice this community has offered.
While I am not versed in the specifics of Internet domains, I do understand principles of valuation, supply and demand, PV traffic, vanity, etc. A survey of valuations on this blog and outside this blog indicates that cold.com is worth somewhere between 500K and 1.5m. The range (1m) is two times the low end (500k). That indicates two things, first that the sample size of domains that sell for over 1m is too small to regress a valuation formula and second that vanity plays a significant role. (Think vanity license plates.) That suggests that 500K and 1.5m are the first standard deviations of a bell curve. The value could be greater if a company really wanted it ... who would be truly surprised if it sold for 3m, or 5m?
If you look at cold.com as an investment, I have invested about $600 in fees over the last 14 years and if it is worth $1m today, that's about 180% interest compounded annually. I'll take that return any day. If I had any confidence that it would keep growing at that rate, I would wait another 14 years. But I don't - I believe it will continue to appreciate, but at a lower rate. In any event, I'm in no hurry to sell.
To maximize value, I think the private auction (mentioned here at least once) is the only way other than to simply sit and wait. Off the top of my head, the process might look like this:
Step 1, construct a list of candidate companies by Googling "cold", walk the cold and flu isle at CVS, query the USPTO for related tradenames, etc.
Step 2, retain a lawyer to hold deposits of qualifying bidders and to close the transaction.
Step 3, establish an auction date (or dates if there is a perfection period and second round).
Step 4, create a pitch.
Step 5, drop a press release into the various major markets in which there could be interest.
Step 6, dial, dial, dial.
Step 6, auction.
I'm guessing that to do this right would take a month of 100% dedication followed by a 3-6 month delay before the auction, followed by another month of hard work. The work is probably worth about $25K which is 5% of the low end of the range and about 2.5% of the mid-point. PR and lawyer might add another 10K. I'm thinking that the 10% offers I have been getting are way too high and none has offered me an auction process or resume of prior sales. I think I would have to sell it myself if I chose to auction it - it's the only way to be sure it gets done right.
I can also let it marinate a bit longer ... wait for someone to make an offer that I can't refuse, the trouble is that there are so many offers flowing in all the time. I'm growing very tired of lame offers. I want to be accessible, but the cost of being accessible is spam-like offers (mentioned in this blog). Most of them begin, "What do you want for cold.com?" Others begin with an off-the-chart offer like $5,000. Recently, there have been some much better offers, but they still fall short of anything that I would truly consider. Maybe I should just pick a number and put it into a text field in the DNS record.
Thanks again for all your wisdom!
Dave
