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Ryan Colby and is a premium domain broker that has transacted more than $75 million in domains for clients over the past decade. Ryan specializes in helping C-suite, startup founders, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs manage their domain portfolios. Ryan has brokered domains for an extensive list of well-known brands, including Instagram, Tune, Ookla, and Rags. Ryan sits down with Chris Snyder to discuss how the domain industry is evolving and how a great domain can be a game-changer.
Ryan Colby and is a premium domain broker that has transacted more than $75 million in domains for clients over the past decade. Ryan specializes in helping C-suite, startup founders, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs manage their domain portfolios.
Today’s show is sponsored by banks.com – the world's most comprehensive and trusted branding and discovery platform for banks and banking related products & services. Banks.com is aligning consumer core values with trusted financial institutions bringing attention and awareness to leading financial brands.
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"I still to this day believe that everything you need to know, you learn in kindergarten. Like being respectful, sharing, how to communicate, how to just, in general, get along in society." - Ryan Colby
"It's amazing who you're influencing even when you're not thinking about it." - Ryan Colby
"It's still a fairly finite market for premium domains." - Ryan Colby
"Everybody should know the top three or four domains in their industry and what those names cost." - Ryan Colby
Ryan Colby and is a premium domain broker that has transacted more than $75 million in domains for clients over the past decade. Ryan specializes in helping C-suite, startup founders, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs manage their domain portfolios.
[00:00:44] Hello, everyone. Chris Snyder here, host of the Snyder Showdown, president at Juhll, and founder of FinTech Startup Banks.com. On this show, we take a no B.S. approach to business success and failure told through the stories of the top executives who have lived them. Join us today as we get the unfiltered backstories behind successful brands. Our sponsor today is banks dot com. Banks is a self-funded fintech startup, and the founding team is building the world's most comprehensive and trusted financial services marketplace. That marketplace is built on transparency, trust, connection and innovation. To learn more, you can go to banks dot com. OK, without further ado, today's guest is Ryan Colby. He is a premium domain broker that has transacted more than $75M in domains for his clients over the past decade. Ryan specializes in helping C Suite startup founders, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs manage their domain portfolios. Ryan has broker domains for an extensive list of well-known brands, including Instagram, TUNE, Ookla, and Rags.
[00:02:02] Ryan is here today to share with us how the domain industry is evolving and how a great domain can be a game changer. Welcome to the show, Ryan.
[00:02:13] Thanks, Chris. Happy to be here.
[00:02:15] All right. Happy to have you domains. Top of my list since I owned banks dot com, which I kind of sidestep my way into. I'm glad I'm gone. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:02:29] But before we get going on the domain side of the business, if you could give us a bit of your backstory, your upbringing, where you grew up, and maybe lead us into how you got into this domain business.
[00:02:40] Yeah, absolutely I am. I grew up in a small town called White and Zio, Massachusetts. As a matter of fact, I'm a New Englander. And my upbringing and my mother was a kindergarten teacher for twenty seven years. Wow. A small private school. A very, very small town. And I'd have to say, probably the issue is probably one of the most influential people in my life growing up. And I still to this day believe that everything you need to know, you learn in kindergarten. Like being respectful. Sharing how to communicate. How to just in general get along in society. Yeah. That's exactly right. I hear that every day. But I'm a big, big believer in that, that, you know, kids from a very, very young age, they have the right influences in their lives and they learned the right lessons early enough can make a big difference in their future outcomes of their lives. So give a little plug for my mom. She's not with us anymore. And unfortunately, she she had over sixteen hundred people at her funeral and unfortunately died of cancer at an early age of 54. But for me, she you know, she actually, you know, the success of her life. I mean, for me to think about 60 hundred people at my funeral, I can't even imagine that anything. I know that many people. But it looked amazing.
[00:04:16] That is nuts. That's really amazing. I was watching a news show the other day and it was one of the. I won't I'll leave him nameless. But his wife, one of the big time college football coaches, has been coaching for whatever 50 years. His wife had passed away and she had gotten I don't know, it was, you know, fifty thousand letters or millions of letters and notes and things that they had sent to her still alive, obviously, football codes, mega husband. And the one thing that struck me on the shows, he just said that. You know, don't weigh. You know, to tell people that they're doing a good job or tell people that you care about them, don't wait till they can't appreciate you appreciating them. You know what I mean? It was destructive. And then the second comment I have about about what you said is someone did tell me maybe 20 years ago, they said they're scoreboard is actually how many people they think will come to their funeral.
[00:05:30] So, yeah, you know, it's a I never would even think of that until it happened in the little town almost shut down. Yeah. And I'm like, OK. You know, she had an impact on people's lives and not only the kids, but the families and the parents that that went far beyond what she even probably could imagine. And then I chose a different route and business versus education and social services and things. But it's amazing who you're influencing, even maybe when you're not thinking about it or recognizing that. So, yeah, you know, having that awareness, no matter what you're doing. So I led with that, just as you know, a little bit of my backstory, especially this crazy day and age that we live in.
[00:06:15] You know, doing business with people, you know, it requires trust. You know, the big tea is the currency of this new millennium that we're in, in my opinion, you know, understanding who people are and what they believe in. You know, and, you know, building rapport and trust, it's it's key. And that's sort of the bedrock of everything I've done in my industry. And we'll get into it a little bit. But everything is based on trust in domain brokerage. You really only have one shot to earn your worth. And a lot of times your clients are placing a lot of the success of their company. They're building on your ability to negotiate and make it happen or not. And it's a lot of sensitive things that go on during that process. So if people don't like you and feel comfortable with you, it's a big problem. So I tried to really, you know, make trust and collaboration the core currency of what I do on a daily basis. So just to some of my core principles coming out early that no values are important.
[00:07:26] And I think, you know, it feels like you and I might be similarly aged. I graduated college in the late 90s, but, you know, started my business career in the mid 90s at a computer company called Gateway. And, you know, I do remember having those those training sessions on communication and in how sales works and how business development works. And we talked about core values and how to treat people. And it kind of feels like maybe you can comment on this while I kind of feel like as the we've we've set to optimize everything, including the the human relationship or the human experience. And I think what that means is, you know, traditionally it I'm not saying this is the absolute most efficient way to do it, but when you're cold calling one hundred one hundred miles a day and you might get 20 people on the on the line and you start having a human connection, a human conversation with them, that's obviously not the most optimal way to come in everyday and make a hundred phone calls a day. I did that for a very long time. Now it's about lead forms in surveys, in questions and videos in and we've we've we've optimized out of a lot of this connection, I feel like.
[00:08:54] Yeah, that's a really interesting conversation. Probably an entire podcast. Remember, I read a book once by the marketing guru. I think it seems Seth Godin. Oh yeah, I think it was. Small is the new big meeting that's scaling. And scalability sometimes isn't the Holy Grail. Sometimes it's a matter of developing such a core, strong niche in what you do, it being so excellent that that excellence is what distinguishes you. And it's not so much about getting bigger and better and optimizing and just making trillions of dollars. Although there's nothing wrong with that either. But, you know, the fact of. Yeah. Focusing on a market and serving it better than anyone else. That to me makes a lot of sense socially if you're doing high margin services and products. But very interesting topic for sure.
[00:09:46] Yeah, yeah. I'm a little old school that way. I mean, obviously we use all the tools and the technology to get more reach, more awareness for less money. And there's there's a whole bunch behind that. But honestly, that's why I like this show too, because it does provide for a human connection environment where it's safe. People can share what they have and what they're up to without the fear of reprisal or the the intent for someone to sell someone else something. We're just we're all here just trying to learn and figure out what would I do and figure out what you do, Ryan. So let's let's get into a little bit about the market. If you can describe for me. So I believe I can. Which is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names. This is a corporation that was established in the earlier mid 90s to start registering names on the Internet. Right. That's where this whole thing started. So maybe if you could tell a few of the folks in our audience who may not be aware of this, of anything regarding domains, domain brokering, it is it is a smallish group, right? It's a it's a very niche thing. So could you take us through this market and explain how this works?
[00:11:04] Yeah, I'll kind of go through the ecosystem in general to give the audience a sense of the market. So you have ICANN, which is pretty much the governing body for domain names. They they their objective is to really say enforce but oversee laws in what's going on, you know, weigh in on key policies that affect, you know, Internet traffic and domain names as they are. And there's a whole lot packed into that. So they also are involved with people who want to establish their own domain strings. So, for instance, if I wanted to go out in a, you know, set a dot com, I wanted to do Dot Coleby, my last name, I would have to go through a very stringent process of paying an application fee, applying for that domain string as an extension, and then go through a bidding process to actually gain the franchise rights, if you will, to own that or even sell it to others for what, DOT? Whatever. So it's a very it's a fascinating business. You have domain registrars such as Go Daddy or Written, which is Global Go Daddy is one of the largest. But there are also hundreds of others. And I know what the actual number is, probably close to couple of thousand registered round the world, you know, some from very small to medium to very large. Go Daddy owns a bunch of those as well, but those are the hosting companies, you know, essentially other companies that can provide you with an email, the host domains there, and Yoona Registry, which was one that was just acquired by Go Daddy, if you saw that news. Frank Schilling was this was the owner of a very well-known donator who got started and had a lot of success in the domain world. He sold his company to go Daddy. So you have the registrars. Then you have the the domain owners, which you and me, people who anybody can go and buy a domain name, just like real estate, just like physical property, except it's digital property. You can buy that domain in that domain if it's available or you purchase it from another individual is yours until you choose to sell it. As long as you are paying the annual renewal fees, which can range anywhere from five dollars to a dollar to fifty dollars to now it's hundreds and some even in the thousands, depending upon, you know, that that string and what they're charging to renew a dot com right now.
[00:13:49] It will vary from registrar to registrar, but I think it's. Roughly anywhere from six to twelve bucks. But it's amazing how many domain owners, even the good ones. Some of them fail to remember that, to register the domains and sometimes it could slip through. Yeah, there's a whole business behind that, too, where people are, you know, picking up dropped domains, expired domain. This is waiting. Right. Yeah. Basically, like, you know, the guy in the river with the gold pan looks sifting through the gold. And every day when they see things that, you know, made my drop or not become valuable to someone else, a domain investor would say, you know, I see value in that name. You know, to pay.
[00:14:36] Could be a two word dot com. It could be. Which is the most frequently dropped, you know, maybe seven and nine characters. Brandell domains that are catchy could make for a great new company name. You know, those types of names. See if you can pick them up for five or eight bucks and resell for two to four thousand bucks on the lower end. Right. So that's that's a whole business there.
[00:15:01] That seems to genius. First of all, first of all, I have a horror story about what you're talking about right now. I will. I bought a domain called simply fintech dot com. And I use simply fintech as a holding company for other fintech and financial services endeavors that I have, one of which is banks. Dot com. Yeah. Because if you if you have a portfolio of companies, you want to have it under one brand moniker. But one of my clients one time was sending me emails. They were getting kicked back and they called me on the phone. They were like, dude, your e-mails are getting kickback. I'm like, what the heck is going on? We had failed to renew the simply fintech dot com domain. Yes, that could have been a disaster if someone was panning for gold, as you put it. And they caught me slipping, as I would put it. I could have been out like this entire my Web site, my business model, the name, the branding, everything gone. And I didn't know it. I had no idea.
[00:16:14] Yeah, it happens and I've gotten plenty of those calls. It doesn't happen that frequently, but I've it's definitely happened, too. We lost the domain. What do I need to pay to get it back? Sometimes a 40, 60 grand and some matter half. And I hate to be that I.T. guy on the other end. Who? Who? Whoever was in charge of the domain renewal button or whatever it is. That's not a good that's not a good conversation to have with whoever was met. And that's a lot of what we do, too. Sometimes we help out with that management process to make sure it doesn't happen. OK. Lock locking up. Manage it. That's a whole nother segment of the have companies who only do that for a lot of Fortune 500 companies. I do a little bit of that. Not too much. But there are companies who. That's all they do. Or a big component is manage the IP intellectual property, which includes domain names and making sure that, you know, the premium dot coms are maxed out. You know, as far as they can go, they pay the registration dues. And it's you know, there's an annual maintenance. Some of these companies have thousands of domain names tied to brands and trademarks, all different. You know, it's it's a whole you know, it's not a fun thing to manage that. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people with inbound email. So, you know, is this domain for sale? What do you want for this? There is a whole sales element behind that as well. So it's it's a very interesting business. You know, it's not a it's not a huge business compared to other industries. I mean, I'd say I deal primarily in the domain. So we'll call it the secondary market.
[00:18:03] So the secondary market for domain names is the after market, if you will, for those who already own domains in the buying and selling, the transacting of those names that are already owned vs. call hand registration's names that can be picked up there are available for sale.
[00:18:22] And there's not too many of them these days. But you can still hand registered domains if you get like a brilliant idea or a catchy name, you want to see if it's available. You can go to a registrar, type it in and choose to purchase that name or not. But, you know, the market escrowed dot com is another you know, they're an espero company in the space. You probably familiar with them? I do most the majority in my S.R.O. business through escrow dot com, fsd epic domains, epigastric escrow. But, you know, they they publish their data on domain transactions, typically on a quarterly basis. So it's always interesting to look at that data to see how many millions they did per quarter to give you sort of an overall size of the secondary market. I want to say it's probably somewhere between 450 and 650 million roughly annually. So it's not huge, but it's big. You know, it's definitely there's a you know, there's a chunk of business that domain brokers are countering out of that annually. And I'll go up and down. But it's it's it's trended somewhere between that. There's also something called published sales or public sales and private sales. So a lot of people in the domain community really push to know what a domain is sold for. Sometimes they can find out. And in annual reports where companies are public, companies are required to report what they paid. Other times, they're completely under the table and under NDA A's, which is ninety five percent of what I do. I typically do not publish my sales, which is a little different. A lot of other brokers do, but most of my clients like to not let anybody know anything about private domain transactions. Little bit different than physical real estate, where you go to Zillow and find out what your neighbor's house sold for. But that being said, there still is a good body of a publicly traded or publicly listings of domains that have sold. And that's a really interesting list to to go through in terms of developing comparative sales, which is another thing that domain brokers do. We're always trying to see what this name sold for this than this name is somewhat like. It should sell for this, but it's it's not that easy either.
[00:20:57] Well, about that's that's all that's interesting. So you can get this data from espero dot com. Right. But I'm assuming you have a membership or subscription or you can't get it from escarole icon.
[00:21:10] There are more of the there the platform for the escrow deal. So they. However, there are some public sources, I think if you go to demeaning dot com slash public sales, you'll see a list of, I want to say maybe the top 250 public domain sales of all time. I've got a bunch in there. I think I maybe had 12 to 15 of them and that list that were published over the years. But that's you know, it's very interesting to see, you know, what names sold for half a million versus what's the most expensive domain of all time. You know, it's just it's it's super interesting. And we had, you know, voice dot com last year. Psalter, I think, was 30 to thirty two million. I mean, that's set almost a new record in the domain space. Previously to that. I mean, you had sex dot com selling for 14 million, but voice dot com blew everybody away because well number one, it was in the crypto space. So they they raised an awful lot of bitcoin in a theorem in their in their token offering. And they decided to invest that all that money into the voice dot com brand, which is going to be very interesting. It's supposed to be the next Facebook in terms of, you know, unfiltered opinion, you know, free speech. That's it.
[00:22:40] So let me ask you a question about the value, because you had mentioned at the beginning of this show that there's some some character limits or some character considerations, meaning, you know, three, four or five character domains worth probably more than 12 character domains, although there there are a few. Twelve character plus domains like, you know, I think car insurance, dot com or auto insurance. I don't know. There's some like that you would know better than I would. So there's a character consideration. And then there's also this notion of TMD, which is top level domain, which is dot com right now. And then what you were talking about before was, oh, if I decided you like Dot Coleby instead of dot com. So there's a difference in value there, I think. So I've already heard two considerations. And then you started going through a list of what I would consider to be industries. You had mentioned, you know, voice dot com and sex, dot com. So these are different, completely different industries. If we had to hone in on one or two or three of the top industries in the top character length in the Tildy versus TLT. Yes. Like, what would you say about that? Like if you had this, you're sitting on a gold mine and if you don't, you probably just go do two or three or four or five thousand dollars. On the low. On the low end. Sixty thousand dollars on the high end. In all of you other guys are playing for big money on the premium domain space. And that's what you talk about.
[00:24:31] That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, with what I do in MySpace, we refer to these types of domains that we make a liquid market in as investment grade domains. Their premium generic dot com dictionary terms typically in English.
[00:24:52] Those are the most valuable domains that you can buy. A lot of people think they have them. Most people don't. It's things like green dot com golf, dot com banks. Dot com.
[00:25:06] Yes. Yeah.
[00:25:07] Name way that it's the singular or the plural dot com is stoking. And a lot of people have tried. You know, there are now thousands of new extensions that you can buy as an alternative to dot com. And sometimes they make sense, you know, for cool branding initiatives like dot venters or DOT, whatever you want.
[00:25:33] I mean, there's I can't even keep track of how many autobio everybody's using dot io. I have seen that a hundred times. It kind of makes me nervous. I'm like, what's going on with. If someone does banks dot io, I'm kind of like, does that, does that matter? Ryan said I'd be worried about that.
[00:25:51] Yeah, well dot io actually has of all the extensions as far as my aftermarket brokerage sales gain, the most amount of traction relative to dot com. So if I had to say what comes after that dot com, I'm gonna say dot io, especially in the tech space. Because for some reason over the years. That the entire tech industry has gravitated around the dot io stuff like A.I. Robotics, one of the crypto stuff. It's cool dot IO has become a trend that doesn't always happen. Most of the time it doesn't. But. Dot.com is still king, and it's not a dot com and dot com is not going to get replaced. It is the ocean front real estate that everybody wants. So that isn't going away. And. Recently, if you saw in the news. Not sure if your audience is aware of this, but recently the Supreme Court ruled that generic dot coms are now eligible to apply for trademark protection. All when this happened a couple of weeks ago, that posted it all over LinkedIn and Facebook. But the case was with booking dot com. Oh, yeah. This was a landmark win, especially for premium generic dot com holders. Because what's happened now is that if you were holding a premium dot com, the value is probably gone up three or four times because of this ruling from the Supreme Court. So this is a huge, huge landmark when it just happened a couple of weeks ago.
[00:27:34] Let me put this into the. Let's put this into actionable reality for a premium domain holder who will remain nameless, but maybe someone that owns banks dot com.
[00:27:45] I mean, it's huge. Basically, you go out and you apply that banks, dot com or whatever it is. Dot com is a brand. It's a it's a piece of, you know, IP intellectual property that can be enforced legally, not as a term that everybody knows, but as a brand that game. Now, that's something that our clients have been saying anyway for decades. But the fact that it's going to become legally recognized, it's major so that, you know, the value of dot coms has just gone up because of that. Any you see it in the market pricing. It's definitely, you know, even this year that kicked out. You know, you see the offers are stronger. You know, I'm not saying we sell a million dollar domain every week, but, you know, maybe if your name was worth one hundred fifty fifty grand, now it's three hundred because of that. Because now, you know, you're you're a company. You get 14 million in D.C. funds. You raise your series a, you know. Hey, you know what, guys? We can go out or we can build a dot com brand and go through that trademark process. That's that's significant. Yeah.
[00:29:02] And we did when we did the intellectual property search and patent certs, when we were in discovery to buy bank stock calm and to build it. The the key. Consideration from our lawyer was, hey, man, we have to make sure that there's nothing out there or there's no patents filed. There's no trademarks filed. And we literally two hundred pages of it. Yeah. And from just about every single bank on the planet that you could possibly imagine filing documents for trade, none of them got approved, obviously. And, you know, back then my lawyer was like, scuse me. My lawyer was like, well, you can't. It's just a common name. You write a Maqdis, there's nothing you can do with this. You just have to build a bit to increase the value of this domain. You have to find like someone that really, really wants it more than you and they'll pay your price or you have to build a business around it in the comps for that business will determine the value, right?
[00:30:15] Exactly. So this this has the potential to change the game. And I think you'll see it over the next year. You know, I think companies will start going all in more because they can do this. They go through that process. You have a shot at it. And that that makes total sense to me. So booking dot com, right. To booking dot com. OK. That was the whole case was looking dot com as a brand versus booking dot com. It's just a generic term. But I think that this really says a lot about dot com, the extension and dot com the brand itself, because the dot com as a brand itself is so strong now.
[00:30:55] This is why this is happening. So two huge, huge win. I mean, it's it's probably the most significant piece of news I've seen in the domain space in a long time. And it's only good.
[00:31:09] So, yeah, you're going to see stronger offers. You can see domain values, dot com values going up. Bigger deals and. I think people get it. My clients, they get it. They get the value of a of a one word generic comment. They understand. This million three. Whatever. We get it. Not everybody does. But I think the ones that are. Raising money and they are building for a significant exit. They understand creating a blue ocean strategy of what we do and who we are. And this is where the value is. We're gonna we're gonna name ourselves. You know, they they get that value from everything from email to press and communication to, you know, there's so much that goes in. It's like the first thing you do is like when you build a house, you pour the foundation, it pour the right foundation in the Internet space. That's a dot com domain. So as one of my clients like to say, you can either you can either pay up now or pay up down the road. It's only going to be more. Now. Now it is. So it's worth it. Now you've got to be careful. Not all names are worth the same. You have. And I didn't talk about this much. But how I get into the spaces.
[00:32:33] I actually initially took a sales job. I was the director of North American Sales for a company called CEDO in Boston, which is one of the largest domain after markets. They specialize primarily in the smaller sales domains under two thousand bucks. But they have a large platform and they facilitate the buying and selling of domains. And I was in charge of their premium. One of the people in charge of the premium domain brokerage. That's really where I learned the business. And I did a lot with domain appraisals in the beginning. We actually had a sixteen point checklist that we would go through to almost. And I was I was a guy actually, you know, putting those together and saying, you need your domain is worth this and it's an estimate.
[00:33:20] But the thing in this space is that.
[00:33:23] People should realize that domains are both an art and the science. So there are certain quantitative factors that can go into measuring the value of your domain. But there are also qualitative factors that could be an X factor that you you can't control.
[00:33:42] So there's not a Kelley Blue book for domain names like like they are for used cars, even though everybody wants one of those. I mean, I probably get 50 emails a day. How much is this worth? How much is this worth? Right. All I mean. Fifty today. What's my name worth? What do you think of this? Give me a range and I and I will give my opinion. But I always give a little disclaimer. I say, number one, a domain is only worth what the buyers wanting to pay for it. It's not it's not correlated with the other buyer who bought. OK. Purple dot com, an orange dot com. OK. I'd say it's probably worth the same amount, but the buyer, a purple dot com, is not the buyer for orange dot com. So you could you could make the case that the values could be the same. But if a buyer doesn't have a strategic business objective for the name, maybe it's not. Maybe it's more. Maybe it was.
[00:34:38] Do I want to talk to you about that? Because what you just started to hit upon is. It feels like there's folks out there that are just looking to flip the domain, if they have it, they're just going to flip it. They're going to do it 100 times. And that's how they make their dough. What is the difference in this? Might be a bit of a nebulous question to I don't know if you can really answer it, but the difference between an operating company like, I don't know, voice dot com was an operated operating company when the crypto zillionaires bought it for way too much money. Clearly, they wanted it. Good for them. But what was the difference between them? Voice dot com getting that amount of money and maybe just using voice dot com because you mentioned it, I had no idea what happened there. But what is the difference between an entrepreneur really putting their head down maybe for a couple years and expanding the value by putting an operating company behind it? Or does the new owner come in and say, oh, your idea for, you know, voice dot com as it sits today is not at all what we're gonna do. We're going to do a crypto thing. But I'm still going to pay 30 million dollars for it. Can you talk about that a little bit? Creating extra value on top of that name?
[00:35:55] Yeah, look, it's all across the board. I think in the crypto space, you had something that was going on over the past couple of years that was in terms of fund raising. People would issue these tokens, tokens, sales, and they would raise millions and millions and millions of dollars in minutes. So the fund raising changed where they had so much. We'll call it funny money in crypto that could be converted into Bitcoin or a theory. A major cryptos that lose a lot of money sloshing around still is to some degree, but not like it was when it first launched. So some of these companies raise just amazing amounts of money that they could, in turn, invest. And I think to even telling the public about the size of the investment in a domain gets a lot of attention. So in some in some ways, it's a PR strategy that, hey, we paid this for the day because we think it's worth this. And, you know, it's kind of it adds to the shock value. It most domains, you know, depending upon their length and depending if they're a dictionary dot com, I mean, there's definitely an average price that we can usually fit these domains into. Like example, I think I have three re letter dot coms under contract right now for sale and they'll range anywhere from one hundred and sixty thousand to four hundred fifty thousand. So there's a differential there. And then with three letter dot three character dot coms, the actual letter makes a big difference. So is it a vowel or not? What's the combination of the letters? What's the value of the Chinese meaning behind letters? Oddly enough, that's part of the valuation. Now, who names? It's a big deal. The Chinese investors in three character in three digit dot coms over the past decade and they still hold a majority of those assets. So there's all these these crazy things that you would think about that, you know, fall into different types of names. So that's just one area. That's it. We'll call them three character domains.
[00:38:17] And we have three digit, four digit, two digit two letter four letter to word Branda Bulls.
[00:38:28] So I make markets and all of those. So based on what you're looking a buyer, so we can sort of narrow down. OK, know, here's what I personally sold for these types of names. We give you a benchmark, but then some people, you know, a lot of the value I offer is I make a liquid market for domain's. So sometimes liquidity is more important than domain's, sometimes cash. Maybe you want another name in. You know, maybe your initial investment in domain is fairly low and you can still get a very high R a y if you picked up domains back in nineteen ninety one through nineteen ninety four. You are typically paying, you know, dollars to four dollars a domain. Oh, my, with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[00:39:18] Now, I was in high school. I didn't even have a shot. I didn't even have a shot yet. I went to college.
[00:39:23] I was here. Ninety one. Ninety four. If you were if you had the intuition and the smarts to say this is going to be a big and I know guy. I mean, people would pick up hundreds of thousands. Oh, my God. They just cleaned it, cleaned up and they just thought they had it.
[00:39:41] And I went to college with a brother word processor. That was my departing head.
[00:39:47] Those two zounds in good shape. Yeah, I remember that.
[00:39:50] Yeah, dude, I said crank it out. And then they had one computer lab in my college and I doubt it had Internet. I seriously doubt it had Internet. Actually, I think I got my first Yahoo e-mail address in nineteen ninety five. Wow. Something like that. Right. So this stuff did not exist. So if you were you know, you're probably if you were buying domains for a buck back then, which is probably a lot like crypto nowadays. I don't know if you would agree with that. It's a bit of it feels like a bit of the same thing. And I've actually got a follow up question for you on that. But if you bought domains for a buck, you're probably like eighty five right now. Sixty five. Pardon me, but. Right. That's ridiculous. Who has who has the foresight to think of that companies here, people?
[00:40:44] Most of what I see was individuals. And a lot of them will sitting on them, though this is their retirement and they're just holding them. They're waiting for the right commercial as a right way to commercialize it with the right buyer at the right time. And sometimes it just doesn't make sense to sell.
[00:41:03] Phil Ryan, you're saying for further premium domains, they start around one hundred and fifty grand. They go up into that four, five, six hundred grand. And then there's probably what what all just call from you know, what I've been hearing you say is super premium. These are domains. Over a million bucks.
[00:41:21] So does that does that make sense that that is their market?
[00:41:27] And a little insight into into my business personally. I mean, most of what I'm doing transactionally is going to fall somewhere between 150 and 450. Dotto like an average. Is this a two to one quarter? Yeah. Two one one two. Two fifty. Yeah. The names we see that are, you know, don't take that long to materialize is going to be in that niche. Right. And we have names where it's seven figures or above. I mean, I had an offer three weeks ago. I had an offer at 750. And the, you know, is in the travel industry and the seller refused. So knowing I need a million firm to even talk. So this is pretty strong offer, you know, seven or 50 grand. So you have those ultra premiums. And but then sometimes you'll have an ultra premium domain with a motivated seller, something in their life changed. And I always tell people that what I do, my job is very interesting because a lot of times I am I'm part psychologist and I'm part CIA operative. I'm like the guy behind the scenes that knows what's going on. Francis, give me an example. If, let's say a company acquires another company and they part of that acquisition includes the sale of the domain name or the transfer of that domain, but they're not using the brand anymore. It could be a liquidation sale. They just you know, they don't want any more. They might want fair value, but they're they're more motivated to just get rid of it. Right. Situations change all the time. People, you know, they start a company that leave a company. God forbid somebody dies, but it happens. You know, things, assets transfer to other people, you have lawsuits. I've seen so many of those where it's all a sudden, you know, domain, you know, they're changing hands in the courts. I've dealt with what they call it, the people who mitigate the core by the appointed trustees. Right. I know all kinds of stuff that goes on behind the scenes. So.
[00:43:40] So you're like your. Is it a is it it. Are you officially like an agent or are you an agent? Like as the agency relationship or you're a broker which may have different legal connotations. How do you justify it?
[00:43:57] Very good question. And what you just said is something that all buyers and sellers should actually understand before they hire a domain broker, because there are many domain brokers out there who are actually domain investors, meaning they are looking to. Find out what you want to sell for so they can buy it and go resell and make a lot of money.
[00:44:20] Exactly, yeah. Now.
[00:44:22] I don't do that. And I've been very public about it, either represent a buyer or a seller. So I have an agency contractual relationship with either or and not both. And that is a huge, huge, huge thing to be aware of, is does the broker represent my best interests or not? Now, some brokers have no agency relationship. They're just trying to get a deal done. But the people that have been doing this a while now, this at least seven to 10 years, they know they usually have very contractual, firm, identifiable agency relationship because that's it. That's all. You know, who who's who's paying you? And where is that? Are they really working in your best interest to get the lowest price or the highest price? It's just like real estate, right? When you have a real estate broker, your agent is working. You know, if you're a buyer to help you get the lowest price. And if you're a seller trying to get the highest price and it's it can't be both of them do it.
[00:45:29] Do you feel like. I feel like this is a space. Along with Krypto, candidly, that might attract some nefarious characters. Yeah, leered you do you really have to. Do you really have to figure out what your positioning is in your personal brand?
[00:45:54] I know we started this conversation on trust and personal relationships and things like that. Now that I'm thinking about our conversation. I think crypto traditionally had been littered with quite a few bad actors. I'm not in the domain space. I don't know what kind of actors are in this space, but it sounds like this could run it a little bit in parallel. Yeah.
[00:46:16] There in there has been numerous incidents over the years from domain theft to just all the you name it. It's a it can be. It definitely can have a dark side. One of the reasons that I believe I've been successful is because I am very public about everything.
[00:46:34] I'm very, very public. So I like Twitter. I have 4000 followers on Twitter. I've got over thirty two thousand followers on LinkedIn. I post what I'm doing, what I do, who I do it with.
[00:46:46] I have a lot of domain brokers. If you're getting emails all day with whoever or whoever it is, you know, slick domain broker, dot com, you know, do your research. Who? Who. Who is this person? Are they in the business? Had they been doing this a long time? What domains have they sold or bought? And you really got to be careful. So. I know our industry is so niche. I would probably say there's really between 12 and 15 people around the world. That I was going to ask is, do you. Oh, I love. Yeah, there are there are probably thousands of domain brokers, but it's really like 12 to 20 unless we all know each other. We all. There's really. It's kind of a I wouldn't say a club, but it's you know, we've been doing this long enough to. It's a harder business to enter because no one's gonna trust you. You know, it's hard to just jump into the business, you know. If you haven't done it. You know, you haven't done the deals. I mean, that's one of the advantage of just longevity in this industry, is you have referrals here. Call this person up, see how it went. These are the names that we actually sold. We know what we got forums. So there's it's a business that you especially when it comes to high value domains, you have a name. You know, you start getting the two hundred thousand and up. You know, it's just it's like your house that you live in. You know, you want to make sure that you have the right agent. You don't want to leave money on the table. And, you know, if you were a seller and if you're a buyer, you want to make sure that you're you know, you're getting a good deal depending on the name that you want. The other.
[00:48:31] So how did your service work?
[00:48:33] You basically, based on all of your experience, you probably have a book of buyers in a book of sellers, whether they be in crypto financial services, travel, health. I'm assuming. And so if someone were to come to you, what I guess what they would expect, I guess very similar, the conversation we're having, you're unpacking this whole thing. So how does this work? You charge by the hour. You're like, hey, I'm not going to talk to you unless you pay me for 50 an hour. That's what my lawyer says. How do you. Great.
[00:49:10] Great question, too, about the monetization place. So the good news is, is I don't charge anything. It's all free unless a deal gets done. So and I will say that the best brokers out there will have a similar model. It shouldn't cost you anything to get an appraisal, to get an opinion. You know, I don't charge by the hour. However, I also don't take that many names on for sale. They have to qualify based on how good they are. So the only time money is is changes hands as if it domain take a domain sale takes place. If we can reach a deal for you, you know, on the buy side of the sell sell side, it's a nominal fee and it all comes right out of escrow. So whatever escrow platform we use, you know, they don't even see the money. It's basically part of the transaction. It's very clean. It's a hundred percent transparent. Usually takes a day or two mo at most, and it's done. So it's a very clean, simple business. It's what I like about it.
[00:50:11] Have you. I have I have a question. Have you have sellers come to you?
[00:50:20] And I don't know whether they're if they've been forthright or not, but let's say a seller is going to come to you and say, hey, I think I really want to unload this domain. And you spend all this time, you do all this work and then they go now and then they go and raise a bunch of B.S. money. And then they put you know, Ryan Coleby got me all the way down to a term sheet on this domain. It's worth two million dollars. And I'm using that as a valuation on my next race. I know that sounds crazy, but I kind of just thought of that just now.
[00:50:53] Yes. Haven't had some that detailed happened, but I have had situations. I mean, I had one situation at Domain four years ago. We had a four point nine million dollar offer on name that I thought was maybe worth 350. I and they refused the offer. And I said to the seller, I said. I just want you to know this is never going to happen again round ever seen your best interest to take the offer? We have 24 hours to decide. Oh, my God. Didn't take the offer, went bankrupt. I said for them, with the money you could have made on this domain where I could go get you another million dollar domain and you can start a business, you want to maybe the domain isn't as good, but it's still great. And you'd have all this extra money. So what you know, and that's what I said. Part of my job being a psychologist is that the ego and the way human beings are wired in terms of how they perceive value is amazing to me. How many people actually think they have a million dollar name when they don't? And, you know, it's cross the board, like just the perception of, you know, this is what it's worth. Ryan and I said, well, let's go to the market. Let's say the markets speak. Let let give me. So most of my contracts are 90 days. Sometimes I'll do more or less. But most on average, it's a 90 day contract. We take the name under this contract. We go to the market. And yes, you asked about the network. You know, we probably got 20 thousand people. And those people or startup founders, V. C's, family offices, general counsel, V.P., senior VP of marketing.
[00:52:47] You know, people on in that vein dealing with dealing with performance, marketing, brick, high level branding of most are CEOs. So most of the time the CEO is involved because it's that important. You know what the domain. But I do do a.
[00:53:06] What's the fastest you've ever sold a domain?
[00:53:10] Probably two hours a day.
[00:53:13] You're going to say something like a week. So no.
[00:53:16] Oh, yeah. Great move. They move because the other thing, too, is that that the savvy buyers. That's how they understand that they it's as competitive. And they also understand as soon as I go. To market the public very fast. Got it. They're going to miss it. And that this actually happened a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, it's like sometimes you have buyers and it's an extra 30 or 40 thousand. I don't know, I'm going to wait a little and it's gone. So, yeah, it happens all the time. It's very time sensitive. And that's the other thing that sellers need to understand. And a lot of times that they don't in. Domains are valuable, but they're also illiquid, meaning you can have a super premium domain. But at the end of the day, you might only have a dozen prequalified buyers for that particular asset in your space. So somebody in the pharmaceutical world has no interest in something in the tech world. All right. So what we do is we have a process in place to identify who are the buyers. Why would that name makes sense to them? And can they afford it based on their funding and what they have? And once you do all those filters, you realize that, you know, it's still is still a fairly finite market for premium domains, which is another interesting factor. Right. So not everybody has millions of dollars to spend on a domain. And not everybody has the business plan or idea to do it. That being said, the majority of our sales is to end users who would like to either start a new company or add to their existing portfolio because they get it. They understand the value.
[00:55:01] But I see it all the time.
[00:55:04] I mean, every other week you see another super premium domain go on the market with one of my competitors or, you know, it's and it's just a lot of it's timing. It's relationships. You never know when somebody's selling a company or sold their company to say, hey, we're going to do it again. You know, I need this. And then I'll have a new we call them buyer requests and buyer quest or basically I have four hundred thousand to spend. I want to five character domain, you know, in retail. Got it. So then I will go to the market and source. We'll come back with like a couple hundred ideas. Hey, what do you think. Here's the pricing, here's a levels and I'll basically sort that and position it up, say, OK, here's here's what I've done. This is all for free. These are just ideas. But that and that is probably the most value I add to the market because that's not something anybody can do. If you haven't been doing that a long time, you don't know what's available for sale, what's not. You know, I have I had spreadsheets that I use, you know, data with thousands of names with pricing on each name. So to say I got a travel buyer and tomorrow say, OK, you know, I already have a list of travel domains from one hundred grand to three million. What's your budget? What are you looking for? And then I can make those recommendations. So it's a very interesting let's market like that.
[00:56:37] It sounds like a lot of work behind the scenes. Is there a lot of you know, I'll use machine learning generically or some kind of modeling or some kind of database or model or system that you've set up over the years? Maybe it's a CRM, like a super top CRM. The Webster's Thesaurus. That is a super dope idea book.
[00:57:07] So you take this entire thesaurus. He'll love it. So I know probably 60 percent, 60 to 70 percent of who owns these. How much they want to sell for what's available and what's not. That's amazing. So we had, you know, index cards. OK. So you know how a lot of traders, stock market traders will memorize ticker symbols.
[00:57:31] Yeah.
[00:57:33] You remember names and BDA, Apple, you know, whatever it is, so I actually go through X-rays. I mean, sounds crazy, right? But I will memorize names and their prices. Well, you have to. Because you're an immediate. She gives me that edge because if I need I've got a million dollar buyer and I can move is speed is the currency of what I work in. So for me, quarterly, I work on a quarterly basis. You know, it's all about what did I produce on every quarter? Just like a company. And the faster I can do it and the faster I can deliver it is like the speed of information. Yeah. Move here and somebody might be available. You know, that domain might be available now. And this one might not. Or the seller might be, you know, have expectations that aren't really in alignment with the market. We can act on that. So acting on information. Again, it goes back to my job description as part CIA agent, part psychologist. It's keeping track of the ebbs and flows of also what what's going on in people's business. You know, I still have names. I know a bunch of startup founders. They're still there looking to exit maybe in six months. So I know that they're going to want to do it again. Hey, we just time for the next company, Orion. What do you got? So those are, you know, relationship foster clients that had success. They sold their company. That domain was part of that sale. They made millions of dollars. And then when they started next company, it's we do this, the whole thing over again. We have to follow the mark because it works. And that's that's the thing. If you've never done it before, you might and you might not get it. But the people who have been building, scaling and selling companies, they totally understand. But there's also different life cycles of the business. Maybe you can't afford a three hundred thousand dollar domain names starting a company. That's fine. By a brandell, by a solitude. And then but upgrade into that domain when you can. And if you have, you know, or at least stay abreast of the. Prices in the domain. So I might have it. You should. Everybody should know the top three or four domains in their industry. And what those names cost. So that's part of what I do is like, oh, I had a two hundred thousand dollar price reduction on whatever it is dot com. Hey, you know, the prices come down. That, you know, you want to be aware of opportunities. Right. When they present themselves, especially now with the whole Supreme Court and everything. I mean, now it is just it's really significant time for those who have a little cash to make that move. Go all in. Build build a brand on a dot.com. I mean, I'm kind of excited. I mean, there's a lot going on the world right now regardless. All right. I mean, a lot of people are. You know, they don't know what they're doing. They're panicked. They're maybe saving more money there. But the good thing. And, you know, I'm very grateful to be in this industry is that digital and online is just going straight up because most folks are realizing that the Internet really is the economy. A lot of ways even talk about that.
[01:00:57] Where where do you see the future headed then? Because you talked about crypto. So I think, you know, that's probably something that is Mason less nascent than it was 10 years ago. It's sleeping, but it's going to start to get mass adoption. Robin Hoods. You can trade crypto on Robin Hood and all this stuff. So that's crypto. What else are you seeing? Because you just mentioned e-commerce. Are you seeing a pickup in in that vertical? What other verticals are you seeing? Maybe health care due to the virus.
[01:01:28] Yeah, so. Digitization.
[01:01:31] Let's just call that the buzz word. Everything is going digital. It's efficient, especially in the fintech space. So I think money is the one application where this is obviously disrupting everything and it's throwing. Governments and banks into a tailspin because they all know that, you know, paper and metal, you know, and carrying things is just not an efficient way to do business. Right. So you're going to see. We'll call it digitization or tokenization. Basically, everything under the sun is moving towards this. Know whatever it is, having got the device, I do it from here. But the domain name goes along with that because the domain name is part of the brand. Right. So it's it's an asset. It's even more important in terms of communication value in distinguishing yourself, putting up the walls for your competition where they they can't come over. You know, that that's where the dot com domain makes the biggest difference. But I think the biggest trends is digitization by far. You're seeing in every industry when it comes to storage, you know, data transfer, money transmission records management. Now you've got remote working. That's not really I mean, that's digitizing work and a lot of ways. And what we're doing right now, podcast, everything is becoming hyper optimized and more efficient every day or probably by hour. Well, what is that was a Moore's Law. I forget what it is with know measures like the growth of technology. You know, it's it's exploding. I think the next 10 years, you see you see exponential improvements in all types of things. Technology, certainly health care. But the Internet. And for me, this is an odd thought. You know, we think of the I mean, it's around us constantly. I've got three screens, you know, but it's really not that old. It's I mean, it's not that old, you know, in the in the grand scheme of things, where are we going to be 50 to 100 years from now? There are higher continents like in Africa that are coming on board. So there are there are, you know, the population and the amount of people onboarding on the Internet is still growing at an incredible rate. If you look at various signs, data there, a sign is the company who owns dot com, if you will, the rights to it. They publish data on a quarterly basis for how many dot coms were registered and that just keep it keeps going up every quarter. So I think the number of people coming online, the digitization of everything, you know, just the sheer amount, they you just look at China. I mean, with the growth they have over there, I mean, most of what I do is in the States. But. China domains are massive. You know, it's all around the world. You know, you have. I mean, who knows what's going to happen? But what I love most about it is a lot of ways it's it it levels the playing field for those who can think right. And be, you know, be true entrepreneurs about taking all this information about the world. Everything like France, as I see things now, I have feed set up like specialty news feeds that alert me on certain things and different industries that I see picking up. And then I'll take that information in. And I'm not a domain or, you know, I disclose that I'm not. You know what, I, I will invest in Brandel Domain's hand registered sometimes that you know, for me, it's just fun. You know, I like naming. I like brands. I just. It's an addiction in a lot of ways. I know people who register domains like they need help. They need.
[01:05:30] They need to have like a thousand domains. And it's one of them's X, Y, Z. The guy said too many whisky's at night rush.
[01:05:38] I have it again and it's fun. But so, you know, I like random balls is like. As a way, you know, if you're a newbie, if somebody wants to get involved in domain names, I always say study Branda balls. Look at the names of companies that are raising money right now, study their names, study the extensions, and then see if you can emulate that for the lowest cost. Good idea. Great success with those names. And I don't actively market them. I just buy them and hold and I wait for the buyers to come to me to make me an offer. I consider it just a passive portfolio of creative inspiration and I sit on it now. I wish I could be trading at a much higher level when it comes to domain flipping, but that would be a conflict of interest if I did it. And that's the service I provide for clients. So. Super interesting. You mentioned domain slipping earlier. It's become a lot harder to do that now. Four to five years ago, it was much easier to get a real low price and in a big resale price on a domain. Now, the value has matured a little bit more. So it's harder to do the big flip switch domains because the value is it's just that the gap has sort of minimized itself over the years because people have indication that there's more information in the buyers are more educated.
[01:07:13] There's there's not a lot of you, but there's not like one or two. There's like fifteen of you guys that are premium or super premium. And there's there's two dogs, but there's only one bone around here. Right. If you're going to sell orange dot com or purple dot com or voice dot com, there are no more voice dot coms. That's it.
[01:07:34] There's only one. So that's like a masterpiece, right? I mean, that really is. How do you put a real price on that? I mean, that was my example. Going back to that four point nine million dollar offer on the domain that very at that very instant, that that domain, the idea, the perception, the platen, you know, what they saw was the perfect fit at the time. And you know what? What the biggest shame and all of that was the domain. The domain that they actually used was hand registered. Oh, wow. They got so fed up with the process that they took like a twelve dollar hand registered domain and they built a brand and they used all that money to go into. And that works too, you know, XYZ, you can build a brand. So that's some sometimes not. You know, it's a different approach. And that's that's what I like to you know, I'm like it almost like a business consultant to four companies. You know, what are the options? You know, do spend a million bucks or do we spend fifty fifty thousand?
[01:08:43] Or are you helping? Are you helping the buyers kind of see the vision? And are you also helping the sellers kind of see the vision craft a story almost like a pitch deck. It feels like you're creating this vision of what the possibilities are as you can maximize the yield or the value. Are you helping your absolute founder of companies with this?
[01:09:07] Yeah, I will typically lead with the ideas and put them right in front of the CEO or BP in marketing and say, you know, I've done this. I've seen the companies that have done it. Well, you know, I'm good at it. And this would be my, you know, talk to your list. Let me know what you think is something. Most of the time they agree. Sometimes they don't. But. You know, a fantastic name always typically has the same elements, it's short. It's generic category and defining is typically age. So it's been, you know, maybe still with the original owner. It's a platform to to own the market. So I think by owning your your category called the category controlling dot.com, you have a huge advantage over your competition over time. So the price might might seem pretty significant early. But over the lifespan of the business, well, we think, you know or say over 20 to 25 years, you know, you can't put a value on it. You know, it's a billion dollar billion and a half on that domain. Well, OK. What about the next twenty five years? Was it worth it if you take it over? Is that. And then it's like, oh OK. I see. Yeah. So it's a hefty upfront but. But that being said, we do domain's on payment plans sometimes we might do. Twenty four months. Thirty six months. You make a monthly or quarterly payment. Pay it off like a house. So your mortgage rate interest is holding services. I still have stuff in there that's being paid off, you know, over the years. So sometimes you might not need me and might need to put 20 percent down. You know, if the seller you know, we negotiate that most of the time, it's all cash upfront. But we do definitely have done financing deals.
[01:11:06] So you do it. I mean, you're I mean, this is this is really interesting.
[01:11:10] I would say that anyone out there that's listening, that does premium under you other stuff, too, but your skills and your ability to see this whole market, your experience in this market, I would think if I was a v.C firm or a big holding company that had a lot of companies and a specific vertical, I would just put you on retainer and then I would give you a piece of the upside. I would just give you a piece of the action. I'd say, forget all this. You you have to stay here, connect with us all the time. You have to talk to us every month about what's going on. I was going to pay you to do that. That's right. If I had an ability, I would pay you to do that. Right. I don't have any money.
[01:11:55] I agree. I mean, it's, you know, certainly. It's something that could be done. I just don't do it that way. But it's it's it could you know, I don't want to limit myself to any opportunities. But the way I view this business, too, is a lot of it's relationship rope rich. So when you if you have a network of a thousand CEOs, I mean, that that is powerful just in and of itself. When you're having, hey, you know, checking in what's going on, you raise some money. Did you sell that company? Do you have it? And it's all, you know, let me know when it's time to sell. So it's having these like I'm building value in the marketplace based on. Connections. You know, basically it's information brokerage and a lot of ways it's not public, but it's, you know, what's going on at domains face. What is what's a three letter dot com worth? Now, what's a two digit selling for? You know, what's a two letter selling for? You know, what is. There's so many different angles to it.
[01:12:57] So I enjoy that. You know, that's sort of like. And it also it it gives me an open communication to anybody any time. So a lot of times you will get back to me fast. I don't send an e-mail that, hey, you know, I know I'm not selling anything. They they just they know I'm here to help. Right. To buy or sell. I'm always acting in their best interest and I'm keeping them informed.
[01:13:21] In a in a in a market that isn't public, it's like behind the scenes and it's understanding, you know, significant developments that maybe nobody knows about. So this is really like I would just stay in touch with me, just like build a relationship with your domain broker. And it might not even be about domains. It could be something about, you know, this company picked up this name for, you know, they're doing pretty good. Like like that's working. That model's working or they're doing this and they did that. You know, there's so many things. But seeing it, I remember I look, I'll be the first to admit Instagram dot com. I thought the guy was crazy. What is instant, what is Instagram? You sure you want this name? That. I did. You know, they had a whole master plan behind that one.
[01:14:11] A billion dollars later. Right.
[01:14:14] Hours later. Right. Yes. Somebody had the right idea. So, you know, at the time, I'm like, OK. But that's a good example, too, of building a brand, you know, invaluable. What they did. But but still getting the dot com at the time was the single most important thing needed to to launch the company to that point. Right. Guy has got to have it.
[01:14:41] And now that's going to be that's going to be a household name for many, many, many years to come. OK. A category defining revolutionary thing that they did. And they will always have that. No different than Xerox with printers or Microsoft with software or Google with search, Instagram with images, pictures, social media. Look at my thing that I did selfies that category, defining the thing to a domain's.
[01:15:13] And I always encourage buyers to think about this is when you make that initial investment in the domain. You're not losing that equity. You're putting it into your home. You're going to probably get what you paid, if not a lot more. So when you put in that money and then you build the infrastructure and the assets, the digital assets on that brand. Now you've taken a company. You know, full, full circle. And then when it comes time to sell, that name has a huge premium on it. You built on the on the proper foundation. So I always tell him, you know, when it's ready to sell. Let me know. We'll turn around, sell it. You know, it's not. You didn't. You're not going to. The risk is lower with a premium domain because you already have intrinsic value built into it. When you're buying it at the point of sale. So that's. So what do you think?
[01:16:07] Gee, it's just gonna get better as long as you wait. It's gonna get better.
[01:16:13] So it's like longer. Just like wine age. It. Put it away in the cellar. You know, I have cellar they are they they for me inquiries all day. You know, the people who are looking to buy domains and it's just really it's really about when is the right time for you to it. My. Now I had a client recently just retiring. She's just done, you know, is retiring. And so I guess time to sell Ryan. Let's sell it. We sold it in three days. So, you know, it's just so. Awesome. But then again, the most important thing. What I love about this place is opportunity. I see new opportunities all the time and it's almost like I'm limited in my capacity to communicate all the different opportunities all the time to the right people. But I see them and that's sort of the frustrating part, is I've seen this like, oh, this is perfect. I thought I thought about at one point I become like a hedge fund manager for a domain for four hours thinking about Hassidim. I just want to sell stuff. So but there's something behind it. And if you look at GoDaddy, too, they've been firing. I mean, they've been putting up millions and millions of dollars into acquiring these dot coms for their own portfolio. So if go Daddy's doing it, you know, they see the value themselves there. They're like buying it back. It's almost like a company with their own stock, you know, buying that road because they believe in it. And they also know over time they can sell that even if it's a decade, they can get a super premium on those dot coms based on the size in the market, their platform, because it's so big.
[01:17:59] Well, Ryan, this is this is fascinating. I would say absolutely. One of my top 10. Most enjoyable shows, probably because you're awesome. Also because I own banks dot com. That's realty. I'll be shameless about that. I got an education today. I hope everybody else did, too. Right. To close the show off. If you could offer one piece of advice or a couple piece of advice to any of our listeners, your well-heeled, you've been around the block. You know, what's up? What would you say? A lot of our audience are entrepreneurs, founders, CSO, XO, C Suite would like. What do you what is your advice to these folks?
[01:18:44] I'd say get informed and pay attention about digital real estate. All we hear now is the world is ending. What are we doing? What are we buying? What are we investing in now? Specifically, now is the time to take a good, hard look at your domain portfolio strategy, whether you're a buyer or a seller, whether you want to go all in or you want to liquidate. Treat your domain names as one of your most valuable assets. And that's not always the case. You know, have it audited. Have a domain broker. Take a look, see what you have. Put a price on the assets and just pay attention to it. Almost like a balance sheet. What are my domain names? What did I make it? Bring it front and center. Because so many times they're taken for granted when they're really the most one of the most foundational, most valuable assets that you can have in business.
[01:19:39] Yeah, that's great advice. That's great advice. Ryan, where can we find you? I know we can find you at Ryan Coleby dot com, but do you have some other places to point us in case we want to learn some more?
[01:19:51] Oh, yeah. Ryan and Ryan call me dot coms. My direct email. Anybody can email me Ryan Coleby dot com. I do have a pretty active one. Twitter. Once Twitter handle. Oh, my. It's R.J. Coleby. Actually, my name, so R.J. Coleby, my Twitter. I also have a podcast, a domain name, insights dot com. But LinkedIn is probably the best way to get in touch with me or communicate with me. I'm very, very active on LinkedIn. And it's it's a big platform for me for communication and marketing and promotion. So, yeah. Happy to service.
[01:20:35] Excellent. Well, this show is going to go live on LinkedIn in probably two or three weeks. I can't wait to see the response from that. So, everyone, today's guest is Ryan Coleby. He's a premium domain broker that has transacted over seventy five million dollars in domains for clients over the past decade. This was a fascinating session. Ryan, thanks so much. Let's stay in touch. I have to take you up on that audio package. Jesus, I spent probably spent thousands of dollars a year in hosting fees. Don't even know what I'm spending it on. So I got to get that. I got to get that sorted out myself. You learn something new every day. So I appreciate that. OK. Thank you, Ride.
[01:21:16] Chris enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
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