This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
I would like to wish everyone a happy leap year. Is it a happy leap year day? Is it leap year day or is it just leap year? It is only one day, but we are celebrating a leap year. Only comes along every four years.
Whatever it is, this 24-hour period is unusual in our Western calendar, so I encourage you to use it well. And if the leap year has already passed or the leap day, well, I guess just prepare for four years from now. Okay, now as for today's question, it's about domain name reselling. The right domain name is an asset and can be resold for profit. I've done this a couple of times myself, not any time recently, but long ago when I was first getting started with online stuff, I was like, oh, this is really interesting.
I wonder if I could register domains and then resell them. I never got super into it, but it still has an interesting little field, and it continues to this day. So today's listener is holding onto an asset. He has a five-letter domain name, and he's got an offer to sell it for $2,500. Should he take the money and run?
Or I guess there's probably alternatives. Should he take the money and not run? Should he run but not take the money? The bottom line is, what should he do? So stay tuned.
We're gonna dive into that. [Music]
Hi, Chris, this is Jeff from St. Paul, Minnesota, and I've been powering through, oh, I'm 650 episodes in since November of 2019. I have a question for you. I've owned a five-letter.com domain for about 18 years now.
I bought it because of a personal connection/end joke with my brother, but I've never really done anything with it. Over the years, I've had a few meager offers for it, but I've been happy with just keeping it for nostalgia's sake. Recently though, I was offered $1,000 from an anonymous buyer through GoDaddy services for the domain. Of course, I thought that was a low-ball offer, so I counted offered with $25,000 just to see what would happen. Today, I got a reply to my counter offering $2,500 with a note, "Our buyer's best and final offer.
"Thanks for your time." Doing a cursory search for the site without the .com gives me a handful of options as to what they would possibly be using it for. It's actually the name or part of a name of a few foreign cities in Central and South America. If I were to use it to generate side income, I would focus on one of those towns. My question is, am I being too optimistic? Should I take the money and run and apply it somewhere else?
Thanks, Chris. I hope to hear your opinion soon. [Music]
Jeff, what's up? Thank you so much for listening. 650 episodes in in just a few short months.
That's amazing. You deserve an award for most episodes in a brief period of time, at least the most I've heard recently. From time to time, I hear from people that are like, "I listened to 1,000 episodes in seven days." And I'm like, "Wow, what else do you do?" But anyway, congratulations on that 18-year investment in your domain name. That's pretty cool. And first from a negotiation perspective, good thinking regarding your interpretation of the lowball offer and making that counteroffer.
Doing that almost always gives you more information about the anonymous buyer because you can see how serious they are. If they disappear immediately, they're not serious, but if they come back with a different number, then you know like, "Okay, they actually do value this." And it was in fact a lowball offer that you first received. The confirmation of that is in what they came back with. But as to whether you should sell it, if you don't have a plan for this domain after 18 years, then yes, I think you should move on. However, rather than take that offer necessarily, I would suggest you first talk to a domain name broker who can give you some better advice than me as to its valuation.
You already saw that one party was willing to pay 250% more than their original bid. So maybe that is their final offer, maybe not, but also maybe somebody else would pay more. So the buyer is using a broker there, that's how they're able to be anonymous, but sellers can do the same. And that party can be helpful in making a sale, connecting you with a buyer, and also in giving you a more accurate understanding, as I said, of what it might be worth. So I would recommend you reach out to a few of them.
You can just Google, you know, domain name broker, you'll see lots of options there. I don't have a personal recommendation, so just do some diligence. And just kind of see what their take is or their input. And if they don't seem overly enthusiastic or have a ton of interest, then maybe that's confirmation that that price range, you know, $1,000 to $2,500, maybe a little bit more, is the right range. But however it shakes out, I would likely then try to sell it, since you don't have a strategy for doing anything else with it.
Either way, nice job on buying that domain almost two decades ago. And as I was thinking about this, reminded me of one of my favorite stories about buying domains comes from the team behind simple.com. I have no association with them. I just happened to once be in this group conversation. I don't remember if it was one of the founders or one of the team members, but somebody asked him, you know, hey, how did you guys get simple.com?
You know, and they assume the answer is like, well, we paid a lot of money for it. So the guy pauses and he says, you know what? It's a really funny thing. We were just talking about like, what could be the best name? And we went online and simple.com was available.
And so all of us are sitting around. We're like, oh my God, that's incredible. Like we're all thinking about going back home and like, there must be all these domains that we haven't looked for. You know, this is just a couple of years ago. And finally he says, oh, actually that wasn't it.
You know, we had some funding. We had investors and we paid $400,000 for it. And then everyone's like, ah, okay, right? Because, you know, unfortunately these days you're not going to find something like simple.com. All right, Jeff, good luck.
Let us know what happens. And listeners, if you have a question, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Crazy how that works. We're going to be featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. This has been episode 1155.
Leap day is over, but be sure you're subscribed because we've got a whole new month coming up. All right, thank you so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
