Chad Folkening is “a co-founder of Domain Holdiings a developer of online domains, and owner of tens of thousands of URLs, many of which his various companies have turned into profitable websites. And that’s big business–when it comes to selling the dot-coms.
“Recently, Domain Holdings sold LocalRegister.com to Amazon.
“Some other successes in its past are Tagged.com and WebEx.com.”
The company did $10 million in sales last quarter alone.
What’s the state of the industry right now? Aren’t all the good domain names drying up? What’s left?
The supply of good names coming into the marketplace hasn’t necessarily slowed down. It’s picked up. There are still a lot of really good deals coming in. The opportunity for people to get in is still there. I thought that window would close years ago.
Interesting. What kinds of domains are coming in?
Yesterday I bought SkillsAssessment.com for $200. I bought StartupOffice.com for $300. I bought StoryDesigner.com for $22. If you hunt enough you can find the good deals.
What about coming from the other perspective–if someone has a startup, and needs a URL, what advice would you have for them?
If you have a good business, you can build it on whatever your TLD [top-level domain, such as .io or .uk] is. What we are seeing from our client base, and we’ve done almost $35 million in transactions this year, is that if and when you get venture capital money, and are ramping up as a legitimate company, you need to be as close as possible to your customers. Spend the money now, because the price on the domain you want is only going to go up.
So say a startup founder approaches you wanting to buy a domain name you own. What happens?
I go for fewer sales, bigger volumes, and the only way for me to squeeze that price up is to say “no.”
We’ve got deals that start at $3,000 that go up to six digits. It can take a day or a year.
What advice would you give to a startup founder trying to acquire a domain name that a professional domain-owner has in his or her portfolio?
That’s why people hire us to do negotiations! But really, the No. 1 rule in domaining is open communications, because if you can’t even communicate with the domain owner, you can’t negotiate. Second: Have a list of names, branding and how you name your company. Having some options and doing a little variation can get you a far better value. Get prices on several options–and then you really have options. Another thing: If you’re going to buy a .co, make sure you know who owns the .com. Know your competition before you step in.
Are there trends to be aware of, price-wise?
Premium names are going up. Middle-markets are going up, and lower-value names are going down.”
Nice interview. Thanks for sharing 🙂
“Premium names are going up. Middle-markets are going up, and lower-value names are going down.” Middle-markets referring to mostly two-word .com?
Great pearls of domain wisdom.
for the most part applies to people that have premium to semi-premium domains.