question High-stake domain that might be wanted by a large company

[matt78]

Hi Namepros members!

I'm a total newbie, just registered today after reading up as a visitor for the past few days. I have never done domaining and am more a dev (and business person) by trade.

I have a domain (I won't put the exact name as you never know, if I follow correctly here the discussions, showing positive intent to sell could be seen as negative if they claim my domain and try to sue, and I'd rather they think I'm not in a selling mode, good for negos

so here are the elements summing up the situation:

• I bought this domain in 2015 for an actual business project.I developed it a bunch, so there's content images and many pages but then i gave up moving to other dev projects, and the website well ...it survived lived like that and is still here with no update for the past couple of years.
• it's a .io domain
• it's a 5 letter name
• it's not a nonsense word like btagex but an actual english word , it has a meaning.
• this word actually is part of many western countries culture and people usually know the word , pronounced in different western languages about the same, so all in all a very good domain name IMO
• the website has real content
• the domain name is totally in line with the content i had put , that's why i had chosen this domain name, it had a meaning for my project
• recently an agency playing the intermediary contacted me and asked me if I'd sell the website, they made several offers who started very low ($xxx) and are not a bit bigger ($xxxx)
• I checked and I highly suspect that they're working for a 10 Billion+ revenue company who created an open-source tech with the same name around 2018 (so 3 years after my own domain name registering) and would like to secure the product name website.
• this company is a B2B company
• i don't know if they just want to redirect from my domain (product_name.io) to their bigcorps.com/product_name to be cautious and avoid any future domain squatting or if they actually want to host a lot of content on this product_name.io which would become the place they actually sell the tech. impossible to know and this might clearly affect how much they're willing to spend on it
• I also checked on USPTO for my website name in trademarks (that's how i found the company) and this company has a pending trademark they filed 2 months ago on the exact same name of my domain, making me think that yes I hypothesize they clearly wants to develop a full-fledged commercial offering that is larger than they used to have between 2018 and now. The timeline of their trademark and the outreach of this agency is for me a sign !
  About my trademarks search: there aren't many trademarks on my domain name, actually very very few, so it's not like there are many companies who put this name. the other companies who claimed this name for the past year are only a handful and all in totally unrelated fields (agriculture, toys...) which enable me to rule them out as it's unlikely they'd try to get a .io domain. So the only one in the past year is this huge company.
• While this is a huge company, they have 100+ of products and tech so it's not like my name which is one of their products is gonna be their top grossing product haha, it's one of 100+ tech they sell. Knowing a bit the dev world and tech, I think this assessment is accurate.
• .com is taken by something totally unrelated which is likely not going to give them their domain (I think at least), and even if they could I think they'd prefer to have the .io as it's highly technical product geared at developers and techies
• I unfortunately could not find on the web any further details on how big their (re)launch of this tech could be

Here comes the question: The domain agency said after I rejected time after time their $xxx then $xxxx offers "ok what price do you have in mind?": What strategy do you think I should have? If I'm correct about the clues about this multinational plans, what pricing range should I ask?


I'm adding here a few details as I saw this listed as important questions

Many thanks for any insights!

 

[karmaco]

Its very hard to say without knowing the name. PM me if you want. Sounds like you are using good logic so far . One thing to check is all the other extensions of your name pricing development etc.

 

[twiki]

If they own the .com already, this is either a redirect or a subproject / different purpose site etc.

I'd sell at the xxxx range, but that's just me.

 

[lock]

By sounds of it probably onto something but at same time it sounds to be branded. Pm name if you want an opinion. Eg if name is apple then no chance getting around extension if technology.