information Inspiring video about a startup that purchased a premium name

[AEProgram]

Credit to the Domain King Rick Schwartz for sharing this on LinkedIn

The relevant part starts in 23:25

 

[MadAboutDomains]

Thanks for sharing, I watched the whole thing. I have a few takeaways that I'd like to share from watching it...

The thing about "Hell Night":

I can't believe how much I related to that story. I have been in a very similar situation, though my site is on AWS. I'm sat there tired as hell, it's late at night, my site is extremely busy, I've just got into bed and I'm settling down and the clock strikes midnight. Something about the new day caused and event in the code and related infrastructure that brought my site hard down and I received an alert about it. Needless to say I had to drag my tired self out of bed and back onto the computer that I had just shut down.

I was barely able to think because I was so tired it was absolutely awful. I had work (my day job) the next day, I knew that my site was being used by so many people and I was there screeching, nearly to the point of tears and I was feeling very alone and to be honest great shame that I was letting everyone down. It took 4 hours to find the issue, far longer than it should have done because I was very tired. I had many times where I thought "This is it, it's OVER, my site will NEVER recover" I might as well just go to sleep and let it be broken until the morning because I'm not going to be able to stabilise it tonight. Thank God I didn't have to do that, because that really could have been detrimental, I dread to think what it's like when you're in the same situation but you have paying customers snapping at your heels.

I know what it's like to be alone late at night when your pride and joy project breaks in the middle of the night and there's nobody except for yourself to blame or to fix the issue. Success can be really lonely sometimes and I've only had moderate success due to a heavy helping of luck and determination.

Cybersquatting!?:

I take issue with the guy saying "[the owner of teamwork.com] was just cybersquatting the name...". No he wasn't. For a start it's not cybersquatting, that has a specific definition in law relating to existing businesses' trademarks/names. The domain owner's is not at fault, it's the business owner's liability for building a product on a name he didn't own and might never have owned.

The domain owner was holding a valuable asset, just like any other asset, that he wanted to buy and so he did at the fair market rate and kept paying the upkeep on it for the duration that he owned it for. You can't get butthurt about people owning things that are worth money because they had the foresight to do it long before you did.

If it wasn't for a healthy ecosystem of domain owners and domain sellers then he wouldn't have been able to take his company to the next level. If it wasn't him it would have been someone else and they might have had a different view on how much they were willing to let the name go for. Why do people take it for granted that there are people willing to risk their hard earned cash day in day out to hold assets that might never sell? Not only that, but I think that a developer should keep a healthy bank of domains set aside for future projects, if you don't then you're not thinking.

I wonder if he thinks that there are no legitimate reasons to hold domains... for me it's part and parcel of the process of creating websites and it's required to succeed and there is no other viable model other than fair trade in an open market that can lead to a healthy outcome. He got the name at a fair price that he was willing to spend, what more can he have asked for?

Conclusion

No beef with the guy, obviously, but just my thoughts cause I think it's important. I really enjoyed the talk.

 

[AEProgram]

Cybersquatting!?:

I take issue with the guy saying "[the owner of teamwork.com] was just cybersquatting the name..."

I agree with you but some of the general public when they want a domain and they see its for sale at a premium price they just get angry.

GoDaddy has a video they made to explain premium names, I saw a lot of downvotes on the video and didn't know why until I checked the comments

The main comments are about squatting and people are angry about values.

Personally that video should have included 10 examples of domain sales and their prices and the business empires built on them.

GoDaddy has a ton of traffic a day of people interested in domains, they could educate the public very quickly and they do but what is missing is real examples of companies that paid premium prices (publicly disclosed sales obviously) and their success story (also publicly known). You'll see a lot more people open to paying for a premium.

In this GoDaddy presentation to domainers, they cover this too starting at 21:50