10 Random Thoughts On Cloudy Saturday Afternoon

Today is opening day at the nursery so it’s 6 and 7 days a week from here on in. But a break in the action let me ponder a little about my other business venture and here are a few things that came across my mind

1. You know you’re consistent at something when if you don’t do it people think something’s wrong. I didn’t write a daily list today because the quality of the names on Godaddy were so bad I didn’t think it was worth wasting anyone’s time. I received about 6 emails today and a text from my Mom asking if something was wrong or if I forgot to hit publish today.

2. Juan Calle deserves a stand up ovation. He has proved that the key to a successful tld is good marketing and effort. He did it the old fashioned way and built a brand. There are probably better tlds out there but he outworked them, outspent them, and out marketed them. And now he has been rewarded. Heck of a job Juan. We’ll see if his company can do the same for a few other of the tlds in the Neustar portfolio. More than one person has told me that Daniel Negari is setting up to do the same with .XYZ. We’ll soon see. Not a great start but Daniel is a brilliant man and is a true business person so I wouldn’t be against him

3. Most people aren’t catching that the investor in Morgan Linton’s FashionMetric he keeps calling Mark is Mark Cuban. Yes Mark Cuban is THE investor in FashionMetric. Morgan must really love the domain industry to divert part of his focus away from the business to write domain articles. Not sure I would but then again I’m writing here while I’m selling plants

4. I really really wish I was going to DomainFest. Just too busy of a time for me and my wife is out of town that week for a conference in Vegas. When it comes to activities and a class act there is no better domain conference than DomainFest. They spare no expenses when it comes to a great experience.

5. I still haven’t bought one single new gTLD. Believe me I’ve tried. I don’t even mind paying up but I have yet to see one I want available and even when I do I look at a name I can buy for the same price in a dot com and I always end up buying a dot com instead.

6. I shouldn’t have gone back and looked at my buying records this past week. I saw the NNNN.coms that I bought and how little I paid. The worst was 1248.com that I paid $600 for. I made good money but I probably could get double or triple what I paid. But it was 3 and a half years ago and it’s easy to play the coulda woulda shoulda game. You can only sell once. But I will say it has made me more patient in the sales of my “top tier” domains. The short dot coms still have a way to climb IMO

7. I’ve started working with BrandBucket and listing names with them. It has been great so far but I’ll provide more details later. I used to think I could just build my own version but have come to reality that they have created a market that startups and buyers already come to for a name. They’ve done the work, I have perfect names for these types of buyers, I might as well join them. So I have.

8.  This year marks the 10th year I have been buying and selling names and my 15th year of owning domains (DomainShane will be 5 years old) .  I just wish I wouldn’t have purchased such shitty names the first 11 years.

9.  On that same note, between all my blogs I’ve written since 2006 I have now had over 15 million unique readers and 25 million pageviews.  When I think of it, it just seems crazy that I’ve had anyone, let alone millions, of people care about what I’ve written.  It doesn’t give me an ego, but it does give me the confidence that there are a few people out there that like my writing style.  And because of that I keep doing it. It may be on different topics but the style really hasn’t changed from blog to blog. A little less girl talk in the domaining blog.  But I can include it if you’d like

10.   When I think of the new great domain blog ads over the last year or two, I keep coming back to Mark at DomainPicks and Special K over at Online Domains.   I don’t read very many domain blogs but those two I check out every day.  It’s amazing how good of a job Mark does with his picks and the effort he puts in to every post.  I know better than anyone how long it takes to sort through the lists and he seems to have great names every day.  And Special K, Konstantinos, gets better every week with the new gTLD stuff.  Kevin at DomainIncite used to be the man covering it but he may have moved into the second tier with the constant quality articles that are coming out of OD.  Of course I’m kidding about the second tier for Kevin, he is a true professional writer and it comes across.  Kudos to those two men for the solid efforts.  The industry is lucky to have them.