7 ms·
How we got the Hall.com domain
- bretthellman 15y agoThis is a follow-up to: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3094562 http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3094562
- rsiqueira 15y agoI'm trying to see an old version of this website (hall.com) using archive.org, but I got an error message because http://hall.com/robots.txt http://hall.com/robots.txt is blocking it: User-agent: * Disallow: /
- bretthellman 15y agorsiqueira you're not missing much. Check out the live version :)
- pyre 15y agoProbably just wondering whether it was being squatted or if there was a legit business on there.
- bretthellman 15y agoIt was a corporation previosly
- gojomo 15y agoAre you specifically concerned about the site's past history being available, and/or do you want to block the current version from being archived for the future? To give a chance to the crawls which feed the Wayback Machine (and drop your de facto veto of showing any prior crawls), you could whitelist 'ia_archiver' and 'archive.org_bot'. To give a chance to up-and-coming search engines where competition is sorely needed, you could also whitelist 'ScoutJet' (for Blekko.com) and 'DuckDuckBot' (for DuckDuckGo.com).
- user24 15y agoyeah that's a pretty restrictive robots.txt
- kloncks 15y agoThat's an unbelievable price for a four-character domain.
- bretthellman 15y agoThanks kloncks, we feel fortunate.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- bretthellman 15y agoThanks David but it was more about persistence... not settling
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- vaksel 15y agoa domain is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. i'm in the process of selling a 4 letter domain name, that stands for a major financial product, that gets 20-30K searches a month, and that's currently ranking #1 for that keyword in Google...and the most I was able to get from the 40 companies I contacted is $7,500(estibot value is at $15K). And that's for a product, that has a transaction fee based model...to a point where a single customer could be worth 5-10K per month, and a big customer could be worth $100K/mo BTW the estibot value for the hall.com domain is $294,000
- larrys 15y ago"and the most I was able to get from the 40 companies I contacted is $7,500" Can't sell names outbound. Someone has to come to you. So this doesn't surprise me at all. "estibot value for the hall.com domain is $294,000" Estibot means almost literally nothing. As you said "a domain is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it" There is no correlation whatsoever between any domain I have sold and what estibot or any "appraisal" service says about the value of the domain. Although I have used that value if it gives me an advantage with someone who doesn't know about the business.
- larrys 15y ago"We started the conversation by offering a fair price to show we were serious. We didn’t want to get ignored by starting with a low, insulting offer. After a few emails negotiating a price, we struck a deal for $20k. No equity, just cash exchanged with escrow.com." This is my business (since '96). You did a great job and bought the name for a very fair price. If you would post the contents of the emails you sent I would be glad to give some further opinions that might be helpful to others in the same situation. As far as what someone in this business thinks when they receive emails from buyers (I have received thousands so there is no pattern I haven't seen yet.)
- saurik 15y ago(Do you generally do, or would you be willing to do, consulting on matters like this, paid or otherwise? If so, I would love to talk to you for a bit and get some opinions. -- saurik@saurik.com)
- larrys 15y agoSure I'll contact you no problem.
- nhashem 15y agolarrys -- I'm in a similar situation and the domain brokers I've talked to have all been really sleazy. I would love to an HNer experienced in this field. I'd reach out to you privately but unfortunately your HN profile and even some light Google stalking didn't yield much as far as your contact info. So if you could contact me that would be great as well. nate.hashem@gmail.com
- kloncks 15y agoLet me jump on that as well. We'd love to talk to you over some consulting on a domain. Email in profile :)
- timc 15y agolarrys what is best way to reach you?
- namityadav 15y agoWow, a one word, four character domain for 20K! Kudos!
- bretthellman 15y agoThanks namityadav! A big win but a heck of a lot left to do
- citricsquid 15y agotl:dr; we offered money for the purchase.
- rjj 15y ago"The idea of using the term “group” or “room” didn’t excite us; group was overused and room felt stale, reminiscent of AOL." I agree with this, but then I went to hall.com and the very first thing it says in the software window is "Team Room - Hall.com"! Huh?
- bretthellman 15y agoThanks for pointing that out. It was more about not being another GroupMeLyO.IO clone
- GiraffeNecktie 15y agoOver the years, I've had plenty of offers for my three letter cool sounding word .com domain, unfortunately most have been in that "insult" category. I wouldn't call $20k an insult but at ten percent of my asking price I'm not sure I'd bother responding.
- citricsquid 15y agoSo you have a dictionary word that is 3 letters long .com domain and nobody has offered $200k? or is it a colloquialism like "wut"?
- GiraffeNecktie 15y agoNo, it's a common English word that I believe would be excellent for many different concepts. I had one serious offer at 40k which I turned down. They were wanting to use it for some kind of music sharing site for musicians.
- JoeCortopassi 15y agoYou have a domain you are trying to sell, people are asking about it on an entrepreneurial news board, and you won't say what it is? Free press man. Unless you got a real good reason to keep it a secret (how can you if you want to sell it), you should be name dropping that domain as much as possible when you have a captive audience
- GiraffeNecktie 15y agohum.com
- mattm 15y agogig?
- smackfu 15y agoDid you just buy it in 1998 or something and keep renewing it?
- badclient 15y agoGeneric domains are overrated.
- bretthellman 15y agoDepends on the product.
- benvanderbeek 15y agoEveryone besides me probably already knew, but "Wall has been trademarked by Facebook" ? Wow.
- bretthellman 15y agoIndeed and they take it very seriously.
- bethling 15y agoI was surprised that they list 32665 with their trademarks (I had to search to figure out that was the FBOOK SMS short code). Can you trademark a number? I thought that's why Intel ended up with the "Pentium" instead of "586".
- delinka 15y agoYou can claim trademark on anything you like. You can threaten legal action over the claimed mark. You can start litigation over the claimed mark. These facts do not mean you have grounds to win. Registering a mark gives you better protection and drastically increases your odds of winning against an alleged infringer. Registering numbers, AFAIK, still is not allowed.
- bethling 15y agoAhh.. okay. For some reason the claimed vs. registered didn't click here for me. Thanks - that makes sense to me.
- jonah 15y agoWell done and a great price. (I sold a letter + word .com for more than that.)
- bretthellman 15y agoThanks jonah, stop by the startup hall and say hello some time: http://hall.com/startups http://hall.com/startups
- rudiger 15y agoGreat story, and I appreciate the lessons learned at the end. However... can you put the dates in? When you started working on your original product idea, when you bought the domain name, etc.
- vaksel 15y agoby the way the "if the domain owner held the domain since _____" is wrong. When you buy a domain on the secondary market, the original creation date gets transferred. So you can have a 1998 registered domain, that was just purchased a week ago
- AznHisoka 15y ago"Hall" has been trademarked. What make you so confident the owners of those trademarks couldn't take action against you, and leave it up to half-chance that it could be taken away from you (even though you may not have infringed against it)?
- bretthellman 15y agoBecause we filed the trademark
- djbender 15y agoBoom goes the dynamite.
- larrys 15y agoEdit: You didn't say you had the trademark not implying that you did. You have a 1b intent to use application not a registered trademark http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/jumpto?f=doc&state=4010:55oouc.2.103 http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/jumpto?f=doc&state=4010:55oou... That being said obviously the trademark app is needed. But the fact that you are using the domain name and that there are actually multiple trademarks for "hall" and that it's a common term is the thing that offers the real protection here from predators. Your attorney should have not filed this as a 1b though. It will take longer to get the trademark issued. They should have advised you to simply use even a site mockup or beta site to create a screen grab for the application. (I have 21 registered trademarks).
- larrys 15y ago"owners of those trademarks couldn't take action against you" There are actually ways that a knowledgeable person can dodge that (and yes getting your own trademark is one of them). But there is an interesting paradox here. As noted by another post on this page vaksel had noted that "the most I was able to get from the 40 companies I contacted is $7,500" with relation to a domain name he was trying to sell that he felt was worth way more. The paradox is this. If more companies realized the value of domains they would be easier to sell. But there would also be many more UDRP's and cybersquatting lawsuits than there are now. Many companies simply don't see enough value in the domains to even pursue a UDRP that can be done for probably $5000 (if the right firm handles the complaint).
- larsberg 15y agoI'm pretty shocked you got it for so little. I've been offered more than five times that for my "first name only" domain, and it's just been from other people with the same first name. Though they're right about the lowballs and not even replying. I routinely get mail either demanding that I give it to somebody because, "I is can start no profit save cancer" or around $150 because somebody thinks a domain name is a neat birthday present for their kid.
- pg_bot 15y agoWhile I see the benefits of having a short one word domain, I think it is more important to allocate your resources on talent or marketing. While a name won't make or break a company, having a poor product and running out of money will. If you are willing to search for a while you can still find good domains out there. (This is from the perspective of someone who is bootstrapping with less than half the capital of what you guys spent on your domain)
- timc 15y agoGreat job on the domain! and the hall.com service.
- bretthellman 15y agoThanks Tim!
- jhuckestein 15y agoHere's a startup idea for them: Sell hall.com and walk away with a million dollars. From my experience this seems like an incredible steal. Congrats :)
- opendomain 15y agoI do not know why companies insist on buying domains. We have given domains to open source groups for years for Free including Drupal.com, OsCon.com, and many others. and yet we have companies insist they want to own the domain. We are "open source for domains" - don't they understand it is free to use?
- opendomain 15y agoWe also acquired a single word domain bitch.net - we thought it would be a good brand for edgy fashion or perhaps a counter culture feminist site, but the only people interested have been in the adult industry. What would you think the value could be?
- astrong 15y agoFrom someone who also works with and helps entrepreneurs to acquire domains, I think you got a great score here Brett and your persistence has to be noted. I'm sure it didn't take 1 email Only one question I'm curious what your "non-low-ball" initial offer was if you got it for such a reasonable price.
- bretthellman 15y agoBefore we even had the idea for "HALL" we tried medium.com, foundation.com etc... to explore the possibility. We were never really excited about these names. We started the conversation off by offering $5k. That didn't work out well. The owner essentially blocked us after emailing back w no thanks. We even considered the idea of leasing a domain which is doable.
- ohashi 15y agoClearly you didn't research the owners well. They are owned by some of the savviest guys in the domain business. They are also sitting on some of the best portfolios of names and have very little incentive to sell for anything but a really high price.
- Blocks8 15y agoWhy hasn't anyone made a LaunchRock.com landing page for collecting bids on parked domains. I have my fair share of names- a lot just bought on a whim - that I'd happily offload- just waiting for some to expire. Am I missing something out there that exists to do this?
- there 15y agothere are a bunch of domain parking services like sedo.com that will host a parked domain, give you advertising revenue from the ads shown on it, and handle buy offers that come in from it. http://hntrades.com http://hntrades.com has quite a few domains from other hacker newsers for sale or trade. i could probably extend it to also serve as a domain park page if anyone wanted it.
- ohashi 15y agoAlmost all give you the option to post it for sale. You must have bought names nobody wants to buy.
- gopi 15y ago$20k for hall.com is really really cheap!