Telepathy...really?

[Keith]

I'm sorry but not a chance I'll ever pay $19 in order to negotiate on a domain. This is a clear money grab. You get bombarded with emails? Set up an automated system to field offers and go from there. This is the kind of shit that gives the domain industry a black eye!

 

[HUKU]

Seems reasonable to me. They just want to weed out enquiries that are wasteful of their time and if that is their strategy for doing that, well if the portfolio belongs to them then they should also control the rules. There is nothing forcing you to buy a domain from them.

 

[cocaseco]

I'd be happy to post my opinion, but to weed out all the requests, please send me $10 first.

 

[Keith]

Seems reasonable to me. They just want to weed out enquiries that are wasteful of their time and if that's their strategy for doing that, well there is nothing forcing you to buy a domain from them.

So you want to buy a house, a car...you should have to pay to find out the details or price? No way! Bad business...

 

[BoothDomains]

Keith, I think you are completely missing the point here. It is not about the $19 fee. If you own tens of thousands of domains, maybe more do you want 1000+ emails coming in a day with most offering nothing? Of course not. Telepathy will only sell their names to end users and in this industry if an end user wants the name they will pay a measly $19 to get through to the relevant person. If you are serious about making a $10m offer and moaning about $19 I am shocked. If I owned a portfolio that size I wouldn't want all these Chinese spam emails and other people offering stupid prices for premium names. Its not about the $19 its about the principal of if you are serious or not. Simple.

 

[James Iles]

Nat from Telepathy has a portfolio of around 10,000 names. Within that, he has many two and three letter .COMs, and hundreds of valuable one word .COMs.

He'll get hundreds, if not thousands of enquiry emails per week, and I believe he's only interested in dealing with those who will pay the six or seven figure fees necessary to buy a domain from him.

When you're talking about that kind of money, $19 pales into insignificance

 

[mwzd]

So your problem essentially is with a domain investor charging you for their time in replying?

Sedo, Afternic, GoDaddy etc have been charging for years to make unsolicited offers and I think it's in the $50 range, without ANY guarantee that the domain owner would even see the offer, unlike here, I don't see anyone complaining about that.

I think this is a really smart option:
1. it provides positive id on the person making the offer, no more 'poor college student' emails
2. by making the payment the person can't say "oh we didn't make the offer seriously"
3. it offers legal protection from people who will make an offer and then file a UDRP if the price is "too high" for their liking.
There are a ton of other reasons too, but I think these will suffice for now.

 

[Keith]

Then it goes on to say that their domains are valuable and if you can't afford the $19 you must not be serious. They can eat me.

 

[Domainace]

I agree with Huku. It's their domain - their rules. I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but I see the logic behind it. If you are not willing to spend the $19, then you probably don't want the name badly enough to pay the price the owners desires. He/she is probably waiting for a big fish, and not interested in offers from domainers or small businesses.

And I would think that a buyer who gives in and pays $19 has shown a willingness to play along, which bodes well for getting a bigger price.

On the other hand, it might just piss some people off on principal. Those people would rather go to a "domain broker" and ask him to negotiate for the name - at a significantly greater cost than $19. Go figure.

 

[iowadawg]

So you would be okay with Namepros charging you to come here?
After all, Namepros only wants serious members?
Or google charging you per search, as they only want serious searchers?
Or what if....
Namepros said you had to pay to find out about a domain for sale here?
Just threads saying "Domain for sale", but pay $19 to find out what domain and what price?
You would be okay with that?

 

[Michael]

Setting a minimum offer does almost nothing to stop low-ball inquiries. People just fill in $987654321 for the offer and in the comments say that their real offer is $100. Anyone who gets a decent amount of inquiries knows this. Charging $19 doesn't even completely stop it, but it comes pretty darn close. I've seen people pay $19 to make a $10 offer on an LLL.com though. Go figure.

Anyone who owns an LLL.com knows they get several inquiries a week, maybe more. Now imagine owning roughly 10% of all LLL.com domains in existence. Then add in several LL.com, hundreds of dictionary domains, hundreds of surnames, hundreds of city names, and more. The amount of spam and low-ball inquiries is astronomical. Wading through that flood trying to pick out the ten people a year who will actually meet your price expectations is not only daunting, it may cause you to miss legitimate inquiries. One thing is certain, if you are serious and willing to pay high retail for a domain there's no chance that paying $19 to ensure that your offer is heard is going to scare you away.

I find it odd that some people think the owner of one of the most valuable domain portfolios in the world is doing this to get rich $19 at a time. As the OP put it... REALLY? It's not about making money or about greed, it's about saving time and not having to hire an army of people to sort through spam and low offers. The only way to make someone think twice about pressing submit is to make them take out their wallet first.

This isn't like a car salesman whose job it is to show you around, tell you the price, and make the sale. This is like walking on the sidewalk in front of someone's house and spotting a Monet through their window, knocking on their door and speaking to them at length about it, and then offering $100 for it. How many times would you let that happen before you charge admission or hire security? Hundreds of times per day? I think not.

I personally find it more distasteful when someone thinks they are entitled to take away your time just because they like something you own, than when someone tries to qualify leads in the only way that actually works at scale. Rick Schwartz qualified leads by ignoring people and being rude to them to see who didn't give up. To each his own... I'd prefer to pay $19 than to have my patience tested.

Nat responds to all inquiries personally, except of course for domains that are under a brokerage agreement. Anyone who knows Nat knows he is very humble and gives freely of his time to causes such as the ICA. To suggest that he's doing this out of ego or any other bad intentions just shows how little you know about him and the reality of owning a large, premium portfolio.

There's only two ways to deal with it: reduce the number of inquiries by adding a hurdle or staff up and run a big operation. He chose the former... and that's his prerogative. The system stopped you, a wholesaler, from making an inquiry that almost certainly wouldn't have been accepted anyway. It saved your time, it saved his time, and what do you know... it didn't cost you $19. Just as it doesn't cost most people.

I realize it may make you feel snubbed that your offer wasn't heard but that isn't the intention, it's just to save time. If you want to PM me the domain and your offer I'll pass it along to Nat and I'm sure he'll respond. Just know that he doesn't sell wholesale, so unless you're asking as an end user or on behalf of one, the answer will almost definitely be no.

I've worked for Nat for eight years so I'm speaking from experience. Although let me be clear that I'm not speaking for Nat nor as a representative of the company, these are my words, opinions, and observations.

P.S. - Check out DomainAgents.com, they've been doing this for many years with great success

 

[Michael R.]

If they have tons of valuable domains, just build an offer page that rejects anything under $100k. These exact pages are used by other companies in the business. Problem solved.

Charging any amount is ridiculous.

Yes, but anyone can always make an offer greater that $100k. Very easy. And Telepathy will lose one week in negotiations before understanding the buyer is not serious...

And what if it was $0.019 just to avoid spam, non serious offers, etc...? Would you pay?
Then, I imagine that $19 for serious buyers of Telepathy's names is like $0.019 for me... Nothing.

 

[wwwweb]

Totally understandable mate, if it was me though and my GF wanted to still got here I would tell her to rather go with her friends because on principle I would not support a business like that. Knowing my GF she would tell them to take a hike as well. Its not at all about being cheap...just that I wont accept getting ripped off. I would gladly give that $19 to someone standing outside the restaurant who might have looked like they could do with a bite to eat but I would not give that $19 to the restaurant that is making $xxxx's per day

You don't get it, it is not like a restaurant that you can get a hamburger anywhere, each domain they own is very rare, and unique, and no one domain is the same.

If a client wants that unique keyword set, they have no choice, they can't go down the street to bob's domains, and get the same domain.

It is a one off item, not a mass produced hamburger, they are not concerned about what you think, or what I think, they are concerned about using their resources best for their serious customers, and not spending time gauging tire kickers.

 

[wormfood]

It probably wouldn't work for most websites and portfolio owners, and that's why they don't do it.
But it must work for Telepathy or they wouldn't continue to do it. So if it works for them, why does it matter?
If namepros charged fees like that, almost nobody would use the site.. and the owners would probably adjust their "greed" accordingly.

 

[vivaldi]

Makes perfect sense. Good way to filter out low ballers.

 

[Argentum]

Telepathy has best portfolio in domain industry. Only LLL.com's they own more than 1k! And they have funds to keep their portfolio for end users only and quotes starts from $100k, and that works! But with end users. So they are not interested in reseller/low ball offers and $19 is perfect filter for such kind of offers.

 

[hookbox]

I think most here are missing the point of the $19 fee. Outstanding domains receive hundreds of offers monthly if not daily. These offers are ignored by most major portfolio owners because most are lowballers. If you choose to opt into SecuredOffers.com network then the $19 fee assures you that your offer/email will not be ignored and you are guaranteed to receive a response from the owner of that domain. Everyone assumes that Telepathy only sells their own domains but that's not true. They have a large network of portfolio owners under the SecuredOffers.com network. The $19 fee guarantees that you will be in contact with the owner of the domain in 5 business days or less.

 

[Kingslayer]

Its greed pure and simple and any business who does this deserve to have their domain names rot in cyber space with no money or offers.

Being a business owner myself, when you’re a business, customers and potential customers are your everything, even the window shoppers just coming around for a nosey, be respectful and that goes a long way and they may come back some other time and buy.

Saying to a potential customer ‘to even talk to me/us costs x amount’ is having a superiority complex and the need to feel above someone and I personally wouldn’t do business with any person or company like that.

 

[wwwweb]

Many times I get uneducated owners of similar domains, just asking a price, so they can get an idea of what to price their domain at. I simply do not have the time to waste with all these questions. Just not enough hours in the day.

I have blocks up on some of my domains in regards to minimum pricing, and as others will attest you will simply get a response like this in the price field 2222222222222222, then you have to manually review it, then close it out. Unless they whip out their credit card, and are held accountable for that bid, it will not stop.

This takes time, time is money, some people have a lot of time on their hands to waste.

 

[LucidDomains]

Anyway quite an interesting debate, I guess there are two camps. No opinion is considered wrong. It's up to you how you view it.

 

[james haw]

The point is being missed here and some examples are nothing like the scenario we are discussing.

"Charge $5 to just see a menu in a restaurant" - this is bad, however this is not the scenario we are discussing. People are simplifying the situation as "charge for a service" and that is not what we're talking about.

A more accurate example using the restaurant menu charge would be:

"A restaurant gets 40 people a day coming in and asking to view the menu. The waiter goes off and gets it, discusses the menu with them, and those 40 people leave without buying anything, some try to haggle the lobster meal down from $59.99 to $1.99"

Even then, that restaurant is wrong for saying "this is an exclusive menu, and you need to pay $19 to view it" because their prices are likely only $100 or even $300 per person. But if the meals were $75,000, then would it be a problem paying $19 to see the menu?

 

[wot]

Done a lot of business,both buying and selling, with Nat over the years. One of the best I have ever dealt with.

The $19 tends to clear the wheat from the chaff, and as mentioned by a couple of posters, if you don't like the charge simply don't use it.

A bit of a no brainer that seems to have gotten lots of knickers twisted.

 

[OnlineBusiness.com]

No doubt the idea behind this seems unfair from a buyer's point of view. And I completely get why the OP feels this way.

However, at the same time all you have to do is simply put yourself in Nat's shoes. He's getting dozens if not, hundreds of low ball offers a day so you can see this system is probably the best thing he's ever done to weed out the low ball, time wasting offers.

If I had his portfolio, I'd definitely do the same.

 

[Keith]

The question is...were you hoping for a reseller price on that name? If so...

I was going to offer $10 million. Who cares though? It's the greed involved...

 

[Recons.Com]

What if you offer fair price, pay $19 and they counter with $1M for a name that should be more like $10K. Do they refund you for not serious price?

 

[tha-she]

Nat from Telepathy has a portfolio of around 10,000 names. Within that, he has many two and three letter .COMs, and hundreds of valuable one word .COMs.

He'll get hundreds, if not thousands of enquiry emails per week, and I believe he's only interested in dealing with those who will pay the six or seven figure fees necessary to buy a domain from him.

When you're talking about that kind of money, $19 pales into insignificance

I see people complaining all day about lowball offers, if the above is the case, charging to take a look at the offer is a fair way out, and in all seriousness if you NEED/WANT a domain and you are serious about it, whats $19, you say its not the $19 its the principal, i dont see anything wrong with the principal.

This person would stack in probably 24 hours a day and couldnt make it to reply/look at all the offers he would get daily, this is a fair way out, that allows you to get in contact with him and start a negotiation and does not waste hes time incase you are just interested in making a low-ball offer.