7 ms·
Becoming Remotive.com
- IYasha 4y agoDomain names are just bytes. Call me a romantic or a maniac, but DNs must be free. Period. That's why abandoned all of my domains and stopped paying for air. Moved to OpenNIC. But I don't run an enterprise though )
- charcircuit 5y agoWhy is it not legal to discuss the sales price of certain sales of expensive assets like domains or companies?
- recuter 5y ago- Usually domain squatters have a whole portfolio and prefer people not knowing the real prices - It makes for more dramatic blog posts - They signed an "NDA" For others reading and thinking of trying something similar: You could offer to lease the domain instead. Rent-to-buy. And/or a mix of cash and options/rev-share. Talk to your accountant (get an accountant you doofus) about writing it off, there may be tax benefits. Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything. They just write it off. Best to come up with a proper name to begin with and avoid all of this hassle. The one example I know personally where this actually mattered is a company called face.com (facial recognition) sold to Facebook. To be sold to a big company got to get on their radar first. And all things being equal, out of several face recognition startups, the one with the face.com domain is the more obvious choice :P
- rvnx 5y agoPretty sad story about human nature: shows how much some people are selfish enough to sell with a 10000%+ markup something they never needed and that anyway would have stayed in the dust, rather than give it to someone who needs it. Same with shoes, salt, sugar, PS5, etc.
- IYasha 4y ago+1 My thoughts exactly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Phenix88be 5y agoYou should never buy a domain like that. This just show that it work and make the domain parking business profitable. Stop buying those domain and it will kill that awful business...
- AlchemistCamp 5y agoMost care more about optimizing their own outcomes than spiting domain squatters.
- lbriner 5y agoI thought ICANN can forcibly transfer a domain that is not being used to another entity who can prove a legitimate need for it? That was supposed to end a lot of domain squatting, especially since web addresses are kind of crucial to modern companies and in the wild west of the internet, anyone can setup e.g. cocacola.org or something and start trying to steal your customers.
- usrbinbash 5y ago> that is not being used How will that be defined? It's not difficult to put up a small website. And just like that, the page is now used.
- number6 5y agoOr just have a mx record. It's legit usage of a domain. You don't even need a website.
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoYour example is quite bad since that would be an example of trademark infringement. That isn't what general domain squatting is about
- dncornholio 5y agoAm I missing something? Someone bought a parked domain for way too much money and they brag about it online?
- amarant 5y agoThey did end up on the HN front-page, so maybe it was money well invested as a marketing ploy, at least this once. I don't think this is a move you can copy though, the next company who pays way too much for their domain are unlikely to end up here. It seems being the first to do something stupid gets you a lot of attention. Marketing is weird.
- Intermernet 5y agoNot wanting to point fingers or start conspiracy theories, but what guarantee is there that GoDaddy didn't squat this domain? They had an employee act as "broker", and it seems there was little information about the original owner revealed. I ask because, years ago, I had a few friends tell me that they searched a domain name on a few registrars, found them available, then upon trying to buy them found that they were already registered. They suspected foul play on the part of the registrar. I own a few domains, and haven't come across this, but I'd like to know the current state of affairs. Is this a thing? Are there protections in place to prevent this? How do you avoid this? Is domain squatting still the wild-west?
- sen 5y agoGoDaddy absolutely squats recent searches. So so many other registrars. It’s been like that for many years now and has been proven time and time again. The only registrar I trust currently is Namecheap. They’re not perfect but they don’t do any major dark patterns.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- asah 5y agoI'm assuming Google doesn't squat.
- asah 5y agoa bit more color: it's not that Google "wouldn't" necessarily squat (I don't know), it's just that they reserve "aggressive monetization practices" like this for 100x larger businesses, like search and commerce ads, maps, gsuite, GCP, etc.
- dotancohen 5y agoThis used to be widespread. The registrar can reserve the name for up to 48 hours IIRC without itself having to pay. Godaddy in particular would justify the behaviour by "ensuring that nobody would snatch the names that it already said you could register". Of course, it was always obvious that this was to prevent you from registering them with someone else.
- sen 5y agoIt’s just not that hard to come up with a unique name that still has an available .com, I do it regularly for clients and have done for 20 odd years. Yes it’s gotten harder, but it’s still absolutely possible. Even short (sub-10 char) pronounceable names are still available if you just spend some time looking. There’s NO reason to pay 5 figures for a .com unless you can drop that amount of money without even thinking about it, and doing so when you’re a bootstrapped startup is basically irresponsible.
- Traster 5y agoI wonder if the author's previous blog post about spending an enormous amount of money for a previous .com domain tipped the domain name squatter off that the author would be willing to pay big bucks.
- rodolphedutel 5y agoOP here. I wondered about this too, it's a possibility...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- onion2k 5y agoI like this a lot. Spending a lot on a domain seems to say a few things about your business - you're big enough to have money to spend, which reassures people that you're not about to disappear; you value the brand enough to 'invest' which gives people confidence that you're in it for the long haul; and you're being intelligent about SEO and domain trust to know that a .com is preferred by people over a .io (outside of tech). Spending between $10k and $99k on a domain is just silly, but spending that money on marketing by buying a domain and then telling everyone you bought a domain is quite clever. You could get more value than that the cost of the domain back in PR and press out of a move like this if you were really savvy about it and had connections to the right journalists.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gyulai 5y agoYour first paragraph is vaguely reminiscent of a piece of folklore that I encounter a lot with small town wannabe entrepreneurs. It seems to roughly go like this: "One thing you need to do to make people trust you as a newly started business is to flash money. The more useless the stuff you spend your money on, the richer and therefore more trustworthy it will make you seem." The reality is that you can expect your business parters, especially the ones that matter the most like equity investors and lenders, to be able to see right through that and expect you to exercise poor stewartship over their money. The reason it's so widespread is because it's great for cognitive dissonance reduction. Say you leave a well-paid job as a middle manager in a factory to set up as a self-employed management consultant working for other factory managers. Your well-paid management job is a significant element of your identity, and leaving the job will create cognitive dissonance. On one hand you continue to think of yourself as deserving of the same financial status you had yesterday when you were employed and you think of the people who you hope will become your clients as your peers in terms of financial status. This implies you should be driving a brand new BMW. On the other hand you realize that you're taking a huge risk, and are asking the people who you hope will become your clients to take a huge risk on you, and it would be prudent financial risk management to make do with a used Volkswagen. So there are two voices inside your head, one that says "Get a brand new BMW", another one that says "Get a used Volkswagen". Cognitive dissonance reduction sets in. The latter is the voice you're going to try to silence. You tell yourself: I am not shallow. But those people are shallow, and they will never hire me as a consultant if I drive a used Volkswagen. So, whether I like it or not, it has to be the BMW. Mission accomplished in terms of cognitive dissonance reduction. Whether or not it's the truth is a whole other matter.
- rootlocus 5y agoIs there a legitimate reason why a .com TLd would increase the business value over .io?
- jeroenhd 5y agoI don't know if .com specifically matters, but buying a domain under control of a foreign government is definitely a risky choice. I have no direct reason to mistrust the administration of the British Indian Ocean Territory, but if there's ever a problem between whoever controls the military bases in there and your local government, you're in for quite a mess. A lot of vanity TLDs have this problem, some worse than others. I don't think general consumers care all that much, though the older consumers may have learned that .com means commercial and may distrust foreign/fancy/modern TLDs (or get confused about them, like typing in rootlocus.tech.com instead of rootlocus.tech, for example).
- WorldMaker 5y agoThere are known colonialist geopolitical problems with .io domains [1]. The islands are controlled by the British and were depopulated for a US military base. The British control the domain TLD and none of the funds go to the islands (or their former population). The most recent news is that the country of Mauritius has joined the fight over control of the TLD: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/21/mauritius-challenges-uk-rights-over-indian-ocean-domain-name-chagos-islands https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/21/mauritius-chal... Staying out of that geopolitical landmine seems a good reason to avoid .io domains. [1] http://www.thedarksideof.io/ http://www.thedarksideof.io/
- ChrisRR 5y agoBecause outside of the tech industry, not many people know about the .io TLD. If you have a company, I think it's natural that many people's first thought would be to go to <company name>.com (if they don't google it) If someone saw that <company name>.com doesn't exist, they might think your company doesn't exist or is a scam
- deleted 5y ago
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agolately I've indulged myself into finding a 3/4 letter domain and there is a surprising amount left unregistered even on .org, not to mention all the new domain TLDs. this guy asked me "why would you want a 3 letter domain" and i could only answer that with "dunno. bragging rights maybe".
- Lurkynerd 5y agoThis is a "cool factor" splurge. Spending ~100k cash for a bootstrapped startup on something rather superficial is enough to question their future decision making. To me this shows a bit of immaturity and irresponsibility. What future shinny objects will they splurge on instead of focusing on investments that have more substance?
- jrockway 5y agoI wouldn't spend this kind of money on a domain name, but I guess you have to ask what else you'd use the cash for. 6 months of software development? When put like that, it's not clear to me that this is a bad idea. You can write a lot of code without attracting any customers.
- 0des 5y ago> You can write a lot of code without attracting any customers. Why did you have to bring me into this
- Doctor_Fegg 5y agoHonest question - why do you care? They're bootstrapped. It's their cash, not yours. If you were a shareholder then fine, but by definition you're not.
- asah 5y agoFive is still reasonable. I know several that paid seven, after entering into rent-to-buy schemes.
- scandox 5y agoRecently bought a domain for a client. Negotiation started at 50k and ended at 8k. GoDaddy are absolute Messers. Take nothing they say at face value.
- adrianwaj 5y agoI would have gone for re-moat.com or remoat.com (reg'd) and put a castle in the logo.
- domainthrowa675 5y agoI am in the unusual situation that my family name is still available as a 4 letter .com. It's been that way as far as I can tell for many years and I imagine this is a rare situation in 2022. I always liked the idea of owning it and passing it down for generations (assuming email will last that long) The domain is parked by some small company / SEO agency but in theory seems to be available for sale. In the past they had a form similar to the one mentioned in this post, which only accepted offers above 10k$. I've been holding out on checking this domain for a while now since I expect every increase in traffic will affect the price but sometime in the last years they reduced it to a simple 'contact us' form without minimum price. I hope being honest is my best approach here, since I do not expect to build a business with that name (not good for the english speaking world) any time soon. It is meant purely for family email addresses and possibly one personal/family blog. I also see this as a one-off chance where I either buy it now for an acceptable amount or I won't come back to the table for pretty much ever since we will have to make a decision soon and settle on some other domain/gmail instead. Noone moves email addresses for fun, for us the value of acquiring the domain decreases over time. Can anyone here recommend to me how I should proceed with this? Would a broker be a good fit here or should I open the communications on my own since I am not a business and don't want to appear as such? At the same time I have no idea how to broker such a sale myself and wouldn't want to risk appearing an easy target for a scam.
- csw-001 5y agoHave you thought about *.Family? That's what's we went with.
- CSSer 5y agoThe problem with gTLDs is that there is no ceiling on the registration/renewal price for those domains. If a given gTLD takes off because, for example, someone writes a blog post about how great it is to just use it for your family's email addresses (great idea, by the way), the owners of the gTLD could quadruple the renewal price next year. Of course, some people spend tens, hundreds, or even thousands a year on domains anyway, so I suppose this only applies if you're particularly price conscious.