This is Epik LLC.
We'd like to provide an update from today:
1. JJE, TVT, and Adkisson were all paid today and released lawsuits. The sale of Epik Holdings Inc to Epik LLC was able to close.
2. ICANN was paid in full today.
3. Identity Digital was paid in full today.
4. Verisign was paid in full today, but it is not showing as cleared on their end yet. Should be by mid day Monday. Should have no problems with .com's getting registered and renewed Monday by mid day. All other endings are not in default and are able to be registered and renewed, but will be paid in full by end of day Monday regardless. These include Godaddy, Central Nic, Pir Org, and too many other vendors to list.
5. All aftermarket options were removed from epik.com today. As all of you have documented and somehow had the time to write up 299 pages about this rehashing the same thing 80 different ways, we need to focus on domains getting registered, renewed, and maintained. Support requests answered. And building the trust back of the core functions of a registrar: maintaining your trusted assets.
As all of you know, there's a big hole here to dig out of. We have shifted 10 customer support reps to support Epik.com customers starting Monday. We provide backend domain registrar services currently and can flex to as many people as needed to provide better customer service than any other option out there. It will take us some time though to learn Epik.coms software and quirks and obvious business operational problems that aren't normal. Our goal by the end of the week is to have 95% of phone calls answered live. 5% going to voicemail with a call returned in 2 hours or less. All support emails answered within 2 hours.
Our goals for Monday are to re-interview any old Epik Holdings Inc employees that would like to be rehired and that want to help us take care of the clients. Work our way through a long list of vendors and clients and start picking away at making things right. And we will not be accepting crypto as there was obviously massive operational and accounting problems in the current tech stack to properly account for it.
Once we can have domains safe and working well for our clients, we will start working through the in store credits. There's a lot there to work through. We'd appreciate your patience as we try to work through this.
There's a long history here and some weird stuff. Ok, maybe crazy stuff. Businesses make bad decisions all day every day: Montgomery Wards, Sears, JC Penneys, Toys R Us. You can watch hilco auctions to see businesses failing every day. Rob Monster might have made a bunch of bad mistakes, but he worked tirelessly for the last 9 months behind the scenes to make this deal happen and Brian Royce worked nonstop around the clock trying to save Epik and both tried as hard as possible to help as many clients as possible. There were so many problems we can't even begin to organize them into a cohesive postmortem to even attempt at speculating what caused it all. If you truly understood the mess behind the scenes what these two men pulled off is miraculous. And any of your speculation is worthless at this point also. What's important is moving forward and taking care of as many people as possible and trying to make things right for as many people as possible. We're no where close yet, but we're at least in a structure and position to try. There's a long ways to go and we recognize people have been financially hurt. We've very sorry for this, but if you'll give us time as the new Epik.com owners, we're going to try our best to help as many people as possible and right the ship. But it won't be overnight and words don't mean anything, actions will though, but it won't be fixed overnight.
Nothing we can say will fix what happened in the past prior to us, but we hope all of you will give us a shot to earn your trust. A lot of you are rightfully worried about customers not getting screwed. We care about that as well. It will be easier for us to make more people whole if there isn't an exodus of customer moving domains. Amazingly, if you look at the dumpster fire of the last 12 months and all the domains that have left. Epik still has an amazing following that believe in it and what it stands for. Epik still loses half as many domains as a percentage that Namesilo and Namecheap lose and is on par with Godaddy. There's still a very loyal following. And if the money had been there to keep domains renewing, Epik would have had a lot less get transferred out. And as a percentage done way better than Godaddy. We feel pretty confident we'll be back over 800,000 domains under management by the end of the year. We're here because the industry doesn't provide a great solution and we've tried them all and aren't satisfied with what is out there.
It might take awhile to earn your trust back, but we will keep trying, and will update this post next week as we progress.
Thank you for your time and consideration. We're here to help.
Epik LLC
