Love this!!!
~ Be open to seeing trends.
~ Recognize that something 'free' (the domain!) does not necessarily mean 'worthless.'
~ Jump in.
~ Figure it out.
~ Develop your assets.
~ Be a friend to others without trying to gain anything.
This deal evolved from a social meetup.
The seller's quote reminds me of the incredible, The Boss @million$$$smile - "I still didn’t exactly know how to get a website online but I knew I needed to. I had so much to learn about this Information Super-Highway."
In the words of Michael Castello, the domain owner who sold:
...It was 1994. I still didn’t exactly know how to get a website online but I knew I needed to. I had so much to learn about this Information Super-Highway. The name of my production company at the time was Powwow Productions. I wanted my musical website to be called Powwow.com so I went about trying to figure out how to get that name. I eventually registered Powwow.com after many months of trial and error. Most domain names were available like Hollywood.com or 777.com. Why would I need those, I thought? After a few months I again checked the whois for Hollywood.com and realized it and many others had been registered in the previous weeks. It hit me like a freight train that there were others grabbing these domain names.
I decided to register more, one being Whisky.com. I had the original registration in March of 1995, and I registered it for free...
Over the next several years I created a website for Whisky.com...
I was doing business in Toronto in 2013 and while on the jet I remembered a domain blog named Toronto Domainer. I wrote a post on this blog telling the author, Toofun, that I would be in his neck of the woods and asked if he would like to join me for a few drinks to talk domain names...
Toofun immediately started contacting companies, and within a day he had two offers for the “domain name only”: one offer for $200,000, and another for £1,000,000. I was very impressed, but I told him that he needed to get more for the name. At the time, I had another inside contact at a major whisky distillery that was pushing his company to make me a $3 million offer and I told Toofun about it...
Toofun told the buyer that we needed more than $3 million, and that there was another potential buyer at the same price. The buyer than came back with an offer at $3.1 million! That was a perfectly fair deal for me, and it was $100,000 more than the Vodka.com deal of 2006...
The buyer eventually agreed to a two month NDA [instead of indefinite]. Our lawyers drew up contracts, and the money was wired on January 2nd, 2014.
Full article at DN Journal:
The Amazing Ascent of Whisky.com: How Michael Castello Turned a Free Domain Into a $3.1 Million Sale
~ Be open to seeing trends.
~ Recognize that something 'free' (the domain!) does not necessarily mean 'worthless.'
~ Jump in.
~ Figure it out.
~ Develop your assets.
~ Be a friend to others without trying to gain anything.
This deal evolved from a social meetup.
The seller's quote reminds me of the incredible, The Boss @million$$$smile - "I still didn’t exactly know how to get a website online but I knew I needed to. I had so much to learn about this Information Super-Highway."
In the words of Michael Castello, the domain owner who sold:
...It was 1994. I still didn’t exactly know how to get a website online but I knew I needed to. I had so much to learn about this Information Super-Highway. The name of my production company at the time was Powwow Productions. I wanted my musical website to be called Powwow.com so I went about trying to figure out how to get that name. I eventually registered Powwow.com after many months of trial and error. Most domain names were available like Hollywood.com or 777.com. Why would I need those, I thought? After a few months I again checked the whois for Hollywood.com and realized it and many others had been registered in the previous weeks. It hit me like a freight train that there were others grabbing these domain names.
I decided to register more, one being Whisky.com. I had the original registration in March of 1995, and I registered it for free...
Over the next several years I created a website for Whisky.com...
I was doing business in Toronto in 2013 and while on the jet I remembered a domain blog named Toronto Domainer. I wrote a post on this blog telling the author, Toofun, that I would be in his neck of the woods and asked if he would like to join me for a few drinks to talk domain names...
Toofun immediately started contacting companies, and within a day he had two offers for the “domain name only”: one offer for $200,000, and another for £1,000,000. I was very impressed, but I told him that he needed to get more for the name. At the time, I had another inside contact at a major whisky distillery that was pushing his company to make me a $3 million offer and I told Toofun about it...
Toofun told the buyer that we needed more than $3 million, and that there was another potential buyer at the same price. The buyer than came back with an offer at $3.1 million! That was a perfectly fair deal for me, and it was $100,000 more than the Vodka.com deal of 2006...
The buyer eventually agreed to a two month NDA [instead of indefinite]. Our lawyers drew up contracts, and the money was wired on January 2nd, 2014.
Full article at DN Journal:
The Amazing Ascent of Whisky.com: How Michael Castello Turned a Free Domain Into a $3.1 Million Sale
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