advice You’re not Rick Schwartz. So don’t try to emulate him

[News]

Assuming you did not get in early and don’t have millions in the bank, you shouldn’t try to emulate everything he does.

When you have money you can pass on deals that other people would accept. It puts you in a great negotiating position. Your BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) is to just skip the deal and move on.

If $50,000 is a lot of money to you, you’re not in a position to turn down a $50,000 bird-in-hand to pursue a $75,000 offer that might not materialize. (You can substitute the numbers in this example, of course.)..

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[JoeE]

But to be fair about the whole thing of being there early, some people did come to the party later than some of us, (maybe couple of years after the value of domains start to show signs, like the famous Altavista.com sale which started part of what started the frenzy) and they managed to grab some good domains (2 words, exact match, and some decent domains by today's standards) because they saw the value and had some actual proof of the concept. I personally was out of the ISP business and was busy doing other things (still holding about 15 domains or so) but I was not looking at domaining as a business and they did and made some decent money at it. So there is always room to get into it but it's much more difficult today to find the large gold nuggets that were once available, but with some luck and new trends and new TLDS you can never know what will transpire in a few years. Those who cry about not being there early may start telling similar stories like I'm doing now about how they missed things because the direction was not obviously clear where things were heading.

 

[dordomai]

2) It was expensive registering domains, domains cost about $10 to register today and used to cost about $70 back then and if you take time value of money a lot more expensive than today. Back then you'd have invested $100 in something else rather than domains.
3) It was never a pre-calculated investment. .com might not have seen the boom at all? Internet might not have took off as it did? Perhaps .net could have been more used than .com? There are a lot of doubts, questions and speculation involved when you consider that.

i started looking into domain investing as early as 2001 i think and spent some time looking up available .com

Found that all good .coms were taken and I did not research it further. I think there was no or little information on domain investing available back then. If I had seen the opportunity and put in a lot of work I could have succeeded possibly beyond my wildest dreams. Probably would not even if I had tried.

I thought I was too late. I did not know about dropcatching.

I did the same in 2004, bought a couple of domains on the drops but didn't know the difference between a good and a bad one. I even realized that I needed to hold them for a long time and set them to Autorenew for many years. Let them expire because I forgot about them. would not have had much value due to lack of knowledge when buying them.

It always seems easy looking back but it wasn't easy or obvious.

It is easy to see someone else making money and just copy what they are doing.. seeing the potential when no one else does and taking a huge risk and executing your strategy while no one does it very hard to do.

 

[UmerK]

Basically we are more or less in same situation in terms of NGTLDS. There are always two point of views, if NGTLDS do achieve what .com did you will see Frank and people here on winning side and if they don't you'll see the opposite side as winners in 10 years of time. NGTLDS as still being in birth are seen differently by people, you could've said same for .com 15 years ago. On a personal note, I am of opinion that there's decent money to be made from NGTLD for us as domainers but biggest hurdle is renewal prices and some expensive registrations, If i can register a 2 word .com domain which I think i could sell why would I go for an untested and untried NGTLD?

 

[tranquillity]

There not real estate there more like rental property themselves and we are the renters.

*they're *they're

 

[Smiles76]

*they're *they're

Please don't be that person. You understand the point he's trying to make.

 

[ValleyRock]

It is easy to see someone else making money and just copy what they are doing.. seeing the potential when no one else does and taking a huge risk and executing your strategy while no one does it very hard to do.

Speculation vs Investment !