I’m going to try to hit every question asked so far, so I apologize if there’s any repeated stuff. Then I’m going to let this huge thread do its thing but will use other threads more narrow to specific things if asked.
Oh, and happy Friday and I hope everyone has a great weekend!
On the issue of retaining old Epik employees, while we only made an offer to one employee of the old Epik, I should note that you all know the company was owned by Rob Monster and run by Brian Royce. It was a very tightly-held company and to our knowledge, all final decisions were made by Rob and Brian. To pin Epik's failures on a front line employee that hits buttons and answers emails and routes problems to their superiors is not an accurate portrayal on any level. For example, the compliance director for a registrar monitors complaints from ICANN. An employee that's a compliance director can't somehow magically get the owners to be good people or the CEO to not run a Ponzi scheme.
We got fooled by Rob Monster more than anyone. He's a very compelling person. He's a great salesperson, but most importantly, he's very smart and knows not only how to seek out weaknesses, but prey and pounce on them in an extremely sneaky and manipulative way. Flat out, he fooled us. We should have let him and Brian get crucified on the false cross they preach under. Things happen for a reason. Hard to tell why on earth we got roped into this epik mess at this point. Time will tell.
I would like to expand on what we bought, though, as it seems to be asked a lot. Our original intent was to build our own registrar from scratch to serve our business customers. Those of you who know me know that this is a thing I've done a few times already. It was clear that this was no small task, however, so when the opportunity came to acquire the assets of Epik, we had our eyes set clearly on their registrar platform. More-so than even their customer base. We bought a small amount of assets. We didn't buy Epik Inc or Epik Holdings Inc, or Masterbucks LLC. or any of the weird creations of Brian Royce or Rob Monster to take over the free speech world. The business itself was something we intended to completely replace with our own. But from our perspective, after doing the due diligence, we realized very quickly something was very very wrong with "escrow" and anything to do with those types of transactions. Masterbucks was in a class of dumpster fire all by itself. Legally speaking, there was a very hard line there we couldn't touch with a football field length pole. It looked like full-blown fraud to us. So we agreed to buy assets like the customer base, the domain registrations, software, and the web sites. Basically, the functional components that make a pure-play registrar. But if we would hop into Masterbucks and start trying to make things right for every one of Rob Monster's victims over the last 10 years, that's just not something we could legally get into. We saved a lot of people and relationships with what we were able to do. We established a victims fund and helped hundreds of people get paid, and hundreds of vendors, and saved hundreds of thousands of domains from being in a real mess for registries, ICANN, and the registrants. Remember, there were domains that had been paid-for to Epik, Inc but never to the registries. Rather than let them be lost, we paid for those that could be recovered, even those in grace periods.
To a lot of people, the questions continue why not pay off anyone and everyone claiming something against Rob Monster, Brian Royce, Epik Inc, Epik Holdings Inc, or Masterbucks LLC. I don't know how to be more clear about it. We bought assets, not stock in those companies. We bought the Epik brand, and that like many of you have said, was probably a mistake, but we can't legally get into the mix with any of those people or entities. We established and funded a victims fund to pay off the debts based off what they disclosed to us.
Did we underestimate the toxic mess that Epik was? That would be the understatement of the year. We had no idea there could be such evil in a company as what Epik was. We were naive. We manage over 4 million US businesses for customers. And we've never seen anything as toxic and evil as what Rob had created with Epik. We all here hope Rob Monster and Brian Royce get what they deserve and many people come forward and hold them accountable.
Before now, Registered Agents had never even done social media. Look at the Registered Agents social profiles - the company didn't even have a Twitter account let alone know how to run one. Before I got here, they tried hiring a few sub contractors that specialized in social and that turned out really really bad. They rightfully don't want to care about social media, preferring to focus on improvements like returning money to people when domains expire (you've seen that we're pretty-much the only company that shares the purchase of an expired domain as credit by default. Who else does that?!). Improving the privacy and security of the software was our first goal. We actually shut down some features because of security issues and brought them back only after we brought them up to our standards. Our overarching goals are helping people maintain their portfolio. Helping people stand up their entire identity in minutes. Being the technology end of business services as well as leveraging our platform to make a solid offering for those who just need domains, hosting, email, and other things that all registrars should do well. Wait until we give domain investors a way to sell domains to over 4 million businesses that we have active relationships with, that no other domain registrar has access to. We are building things out as a platform. For the aftermarket, we think domains should sell through lawyers that have ethical requirements, not "escrow" companies. Where the old Epik makes a mockery of "escrow," we intend to do it right. We have relationships with 50,000 plus lawyers and are trying to make the software to where those in the aftermarket can choose from thousands of lawyers willing to transact sales for parties so it's easy for a domain seller and buyer to get a third party attorney to help them. This is where we leverage what Registered Agents is already doing as a leader in the field.
As for the Epik brand, well, frankly, we don't need the Epik brand. If the product is good, our customers will adopt it. Epik was loosing $400,000 a month when we bought it and it's already profitable and we haven't even offered the products to our customers yet. But hindsight is 20-20, and at this point, we're just focused on making the decision to eliminate over a year of software development pay off. We're here to help. We're here for the long haul and will be an independent option for people if they want it. At some point, I would like to direct my attention on moving forward. We can keep rehashing the Masterbucks and Rob Monster story, or we can focus on better things. I've personally never met Rob Monster or Brian Royce in person, we'll keep it that way.
I hope I hit everything. If you'd like to continue discussions about registrar operations and how Epik can help you or questions on our services, I’m going to open an Ask Me Anything Thread after this weekend and will direct my attention over there, as well as any new (more focused) posts. For now, the weather looks to be cooperating, so I’m going to do some serious gardening this weekend. I recently moved back to the Seattle area from California, and it’s really nice to have space to grow my own stuff again!
Christopher
