Good .si vs .com discussion and shout-out for @rob on @tbpn

We secured Delete.com (@joindeleteme)…and the process to buy it took a much bigger turn than we had expected. Prior to acquiring the domain, Delete.com had been owned by Dr. Luann Linquist, a psychologist in her late 80s who was living in a care facility. Years earlier, she had used the domain for a project called DeleteStress, but the registration had eventually lapsed and the domain ended up in the expired auction. We thought we might be able to buy the domain for around $200,000, when we knew it was heading to auction. But, once the auction started, one bidder increased their bids (right when time was about to expire) for four-hours straight. Eventually, the auction ended with 356 bids from 32 different bidders, and a final price of $494,352. The mystery bidder kept us on our toes and reminded us to keep our calendars open when we’re bidding on domains at auction – because you never know when your day is going to be monopolized by someone else trying to secure the same domain. Read Full Story 👇 snagged.com/post/how-delete-…

There are definitely easy ways to buy a domain name. Purchasing one from a large corporation is not one of them. We learned this the hard way while trying to buy Plateful.com from a massive food company that, (for a surprisingly loooonng time), didn’t seem to know it owned the thing. We were working with a startup called Plateful, and had helped them originally to secure Plateful.co. Getting the .com was always the end goal. The problem was that Plateful.com had been sitting inside a huge domain portfolio inherited through an acquisition, somewhere inside a corporation large enough that figuring out who actually controlled it became a project of its own. After months of emails, redirects, and corporate-domain archaeology, we finally reached a guy named “Mike” in Legal & Corporate Affairs. Mike was a champ. He agreed to track down the right people, and eventually we got connected with the marketing team. So we made an offer: $25,000 for Plateful.com. Then, we got a totally unexpected response. The marketing team said “they” weren’t interested in ACQUIRING Plateful.com. We were like, “Wait, whaaaaa??” We just told YOU that we want to BUY the domain from you, and you think we’re trying sell it to you?? Yeeeesh….we knew this was going to be a long ride. Once everyone was on the same page, the company confirmed that, yes, they did own Plateful.com. And then they told us what they thought it was worth. $850,000. At this point, you might assume the story is about an absurdly expensive domain and a company that finally realized what it had sitting in its portfolio. It gets better. They sent us research explaining their valuation, and some of the material looked awfully familiar. They had found our own content about domain valuations and were now using it to make the case for why we should pay them more. Using our own blog posts against us is honestly pretty good. Fortunately, we didn’t pay $850,000. After some more back-and-forth, we eventually acquired Plateful.com and the defensive typo domain Platefull.com for $87,500. Nine months of trying to find the person who knew they owned the domain, followed by an $850,000 valuation supported in part by our own advice about what domains are worth. Buying domains is weird. That’s why we love it. Read Full Story 👇 snagged.com/post/they-owned-…