Video Transcription
Mike Mann:
Okay guys, here we are. And I’m actually on time. Beautiful. I have my friend Ron Jackson: here, who is the leader of the domain name industry. He’s been around since the beginning. He knows everybody and everything.
Mike Mann:
He’s the editor of Domain Name Journal at dngjournal .com, which I encourage you all to subscribe to, read and participate. You can blog on the bottom of it. And anyway, Ron was here a few weeks ago, which was an awesome, I interviewed him.
Mike Mann:
And this time he’s gonna interview me. So here is my buddy Ron.
Ron Jackson:
Morning sir, how are you? Good morning Mike, good to see you again. My pleasure.
Mike Mann:
How’s Diana?
Ron Jackson:
Diane is doing great. I probably should give some folks some background on this. As you mentioned, we talked a few weeks ago and at the time I thought, you know, since you started doing your streams, there are a lot of new people who are discovering you.
Ron Jackson:
Anyone who’s been in this industry for any period of time already knows you, they know your background, but I’m thinking you just finished doing your 20th show. So I suggested to you when you reach a landmark like that along the way, let me come in, flip the tables on you.
Ron Jackson:
And for those folks who don’t know your background, which is pretty fascinating, I thought we could let them know about that, how you rose to prominence in the domain industry. Everyone came here from a different path.
Ron Jackson:
So, and my point on that is that it’s probably my favorite thing about the business is looking back at all these directions people came in from because domaining in the 1990s was an entirely new thing.
Ron Jackson:
People, there are very few like kids who discovered it and started it, mostly it was people who were already in business and they came here from some of the location. So I wanna ask you about that, particularly since your start involved, when you were on 15 years old, and incidentally, a lot of this information comes from a cover story I did on Mike back in 2003, when he was one of my first cover story subjects at DN Journal.
Ron Jackson:
In fact, I wanna thank you for that because I was just starting out, I used to, I was there at the beginning, but you were well established several years before I came along. So when I came in as a nobody, it was so helpful to DN Journal when people like yourself and some of the other pioneers of the industry agreed to be profiled and share your story with others.
Ron Jackson:
So I think you had a lot to do with helping me get off the ground and I never forgot on that. So anyhow, I remember back then you told me that you, I’m not sure a runaway is the right word, so I’m gonna say it this way, you left home when you were 15 years old, you didn’t tell your parents.
Ron Jackson:
So generally that probably would fit the description. You grew up in Washington, DC, and you took off and went all the way back. I did tell them. You did tell them, but. Okay, I thought you didn’t even bother to tell them.
Ron Jackson:
So I feel like that’s it.
Mike Mann:
I don’t know where I was going, but I did tell them I was leaving. Okay, well, you know, it’s different.
Ron Jackson:
You wound up as far away as you could get. All the way on California in Santa Barbara. So tell me what was the motivation from leaving at that young age? And basically you were on your own from that point on.
Mike Mann:
Well, I got in a ton of trouble basically. So, but and the interesting thing was is back then though, they had these promotional flights on People’s Express for $99 across country. And this was before nine, way before 9 -11, like extremely before, but you didn’t need any ID.
Mike Mann:
You needed a name. And I think they actually did card me, but I just said I didn’t have my ID. I had a fake name. I had $99. And so I arrived at the airport in Los Angeles with my backpack and my normal dead -head attire.
Mike Mann:
And so yeah, that was the beginning of the rest of the journey right there.
Ron Jackson:
I used to spend a lot of time in LA 70s and 80s when I had record stores. I would go out there to buy collectibles from people in the record companies. How is it that you arrived in LA, but why did you go on up to Santa Barbara a couple hours north?
Mike Mann:
I actually ended up in Santa Cruz. I ended up in Santa Barbara, where I went to Santa Barbara City College. So I actually came back and forth across country a few times. And I did end up in Santa Barbara at when I was older, slightly older.
Mike Mann:
And I went to Santa Barbara City College and I got an AA in business management. And then a couple of times after that, I moved back to California on and off to Santa Monica.
Ron Jackson:
Now you wound up going back to Washington DC and started an entrepreneurial career. One of the things you told me back then is you ran a pretzel company. It was one of the first things you did. You had a bicycle messenger service.
Ron Jackson:
The first thing that really connected though, 1994, you started in internet service provider, internet interstate. And I wonder how you made that leap from some of your earlier ventures on to the internet, which was then just getting started.
Ron Jackson:
Thank you.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, well, again, I’m kind of agnostic about the whole thing. I actually mostly was trying to make money to service my charity work and pay myself also. But I had these ideas regarding operating charities and charity work.
Mike Mann:
And it’s just not a profitable thing. You can’t, if you’re working for somebody else in the charity world, you’re getting paid very little. So the only way to really do what I wanted to do was to make money.
Mike Mann:
Nobody was gonna give me any. I wasn’t gonna inherit any. I wasn’t gonna get some great job. And I always tell people that I could never hold a job because I’d be fired the first day for being tardy and insubordinate.
Mike Mann:
So it would be all over with.
Ron Jackson:
Well, internet interstate actually to your point, and that’s actually exactly what led you into a huge involvement in charity. You had a big success there and Barrio came along in 1998 and bought your company in a seven figure deal.
Ron Jackson:
Now you for the first time really had a lot of capital and you really started pouring a lot of efforts into charity work then. I know you’ve written books on the subject as well. I think the first one may not have been the first one, but a big one you were part of was an organization called Bite Back that you were chairman of for three years.
Ron Jackson:
And I thought that was very interesting what the work that you did with that organization, tell us about that.
Mike Mann:
That organization still exists and they’re doing an incredible job in Washington, DC. So it’s amazing they’ve actually persisted so long and had several changes of leadership since I was there in the beginning stages.
Mike Mann:
But it’s a really great organization that has computer training centers and the inner city and churches and homeless service centers and places like that where people, you know, need a break. It’s all free.
Mike Mann:
So people go in and get free training. They get help with their resumes and their clothing and all sorts of different stuff. It’s all operated by volunteers and by donations and things like that. It’s actually a great model that, you know, we might work on something similar.
Mike Mann:
We’re doing a lot of stuff with Sean Randolph and myself here in South Florida. I do want to just back you up one step for how I ended up doing internet work. And the answer is I was just hanging out in the library trying to figure out how to make money just reading business magazines.
Mike Mann:
This was before I was on the internet. So reading business magazines, reading newspapers, reading business books, just studying how can I make money? How can I make money? And there was this repetitive theme that people, I mean, I remember the first couple of times I read it, I think it was in Newsweek the first time.
Mike Mann:
There’s this thing called the internet. And one day, you know, all the newspapers are going to be on there and you’re going to buy, you know, your, you know, your food on there and get your food delivered.
Mike Mann:
And you’d you started seeing articles like this, like 20 something years ago, I’m like, I guess it was like 30 years ago at this point. And just like, are you kidding me? This is crazy. And you kept reading about it.
Mike Mann:
Like, Oh, yeah, there are all these billionaires are going to be created from this thing called the internet. I’m like, what the hell? So in any case, I just decided, okay, I’m on the internet, I’m the internet guy, I’m going to be the best internet guy.
Mike Mann:
Keeping in mind, I had no interest in technology. And I still don’t really, I just hired people. So somebody showed me, you know, the basics of getting on a bulletin board BBS, I put an advertisement on DC dot jobs BBS.
Mike Mann:
And in Washington DC, there are all these young kids from all over the world going to like George Washington University, American University, most of them don’t have any papers and they have all kinds of skills, though, all kinds of different people with all sorts of skills.
Mike Mann:
So basically, it’s a rudimentary version of what I do today is I hire a bunch of smart young people and I gather them together and try to produce these little businesses basically.
Ron Jackson:
That’s very interesting. And it’s very interesting. One thing that makes you very unique among people that I know when you’re in that age range, is that you’re in your 20s. And a lot of us at that age, yeah, we’re thinking about making money, but I knew very few at that point in their lives who were already thinking and so dedicated to the idea of doing charity work.
Ron Jackson:
That’s a very rare quality. And generally you take some times, particularly for guys to mature. You wanna run around, spend money on cars and apartments and clothes and house. What was it innately about you that drew you into wanting to make that really the focus of your life and where you’re gonna take the fruits of your labor and put them?
Mike Mann:
Well, a lot of stuff happened early on, basically. I mean, you talked about when I was a runaway. So when I was a runaway, I was among the common people, like homeless people and substance abusers and crazy people and whoever else happened to be around, people of all ethnicities, for example.
Mike Mann:
So I wasn’t, I didn’t, you know, I was, so in any event, I never really actually had any other ideas other than to do, I like doing business stuff, but the idea has always been about, you know, producing some service or playing music, but it’s, you know, doing good stuff in the world, for the world, having a good time, meeting nice people, whatever.
Mike Mann:
So all the business stuff that I ended up spending 90% of my time on was meant to not take so much time and is meant to finance the other work. But I think the point is, especially, you can bring it to the present is, my charity work is going extremely well and my business work is going extremely well.
Mike Mann:
So I’m on the exact same path and you’ll see myself and my team do a ton of really great stuff, like we’re already doing, it’s more and more, more scale.
Ron Jackson:
Well, now let’s talk about domains more specifically after very old but internet interstate. It wasn’t too long after that that you founded Bydomains. And Bydomains, when I came along in the start of 2002 was already like a huge, it’s almost like a vacuum cleaner that was vacuuming up every good domain as they expired.
Ron Jackson:
So how did you make this step from internet, from being an ISP provider to recognizing domains as an investment and creating a platform for buying and selling domains. That would be one, how you got that interest there and then how you became so dominant in that space.
Ron Jackson:
And it really, not very long after you started it.
Mike Mann:
Yes, sir. Well, thank you. Well, first of all, the beginning is that I owned menus .com from my days before that. I owned an internet service provider you mentioned, internet interstate. And we had a web development department.
Mike Mann:
And so we had bought a couple dozen domains that we were trying to use as bait to bring in clients. So I was trying to, like, I owned menus .com domain name because I wanted to bring in the National Restaurant Association.
Mike Mann:
I was trying to get them to pay me, which they didn’t do. But regardless, at the same point, I owned realtors .org. Then I was trying to get the National Real Estate Association to become my client. So I just owned all these great domains, government .net.
Mike Mann:
I probably owned a couple still from that first batch. Like, did you buy a new one?
Ron Jackson:
I started to interrupt you, but did you buy those domains are of such high quality? Did you have to pay a premium and buy them from an owner or were those available as hand registrations back then? And we’re talking about the mid 90s.
Ron Jackson:
I think you’re
Mike Mann:
Yeah, well, you had to do some very tricky stuff, of course. Well, you had to be first in line is the most important thing. You had to send in a mailed certificate to San Diego to internet and send in maybe 50 bucks or something.
Mike Mann:
But aside from that, there was all these sort of like abandoned domain names out there that, you know, you had to send in whatever kind of BS paperwork. Plus you were only allowed to register one domain per physical snail mail address.
Mike Mann:
So you had to have all your friends and family and everybody used all these different addresses so you could register. In order to have 20 domains, I needed 20 snail mail addresses. That’s why you couldn’t collect millions or however many.
Mike Mann:
So the whole system constantly kept changing, as you know, obviously. So in any event, I own menus .com. Somebody offered me 25 ,000 for it and I’d paid like 70 bucks through internet. And I was like, man, this is incredible.
Mike Mann:
And I said, okay. And then the next day, somebody offered me 50 ,000 for the same name. I don’t know if they knew each other. I don’t know the backstory, but unfortunately, I was already committed to the first guy, but you know, I’d say, you know, that’s the light bulb is, man, these things are worth a fortune.
Mike Mann:
And so then probably the next day, most likely I called my friend, Ron Fitzherbert, who’s a real hacker, like the real deal, who knows one of these guys I told you about from DC, who seriously knows the stuff.
Mike Mann:
They built the original internet framework, basically, in DC for whichever companies, MCI and whoever, all these companies were from DC, you know, that Pentagon, et cetera. So in any event, I told him to write software that would help me find these domain names and register them quickly because I couldn’t sit there and like do them one at a time.
Mike Mann:
I was going crazy. I was doing it one at a time for a couple of weeks, thinking up, like I remember one of my first ones, I actually did in my head was ventureinvesting .com, probably took me 10 years, but I eventually sold it for probably 10 ,000 bucks or something.
Mike Mann:
So that was again, a hand registration from my head, but moving forward is all software driven. So, you know, we’re still redoing and improving the software and we’re have to fight the system that has their own software and people and hackers and you know, it’s a convoluted system of BS.
Ron Jackson:
Yeah, well, my domains really became just a colossus and it ended up attracting a buyer. I remember reporting when you sold by domains to name media. Subject to an NDA back then, people were floating pricing around like it might’ve been an $80 million deal.
Ron Jackson:
I don’t suppose I could get you to confirm or deny or say that’s in the ballpark on what, because that’s never come out to my knowledge.
Mike Mann:
There’s a lot of articles about it. I mean, a ton of people posted about it. I don’t really care. I’m pretty sure it’s passed the statute of limitations by now.
Ron Jackson:
Is 80 million sound right? Is that ballpark?
Mike Mann:
That’s pretty close. I got some stock also. It’s not just me. It’s my whole team, the IRS, my exes. It was shared. Really, I mean, my charity fund, which is doing great right now with the rise of the stock market, was a major beneficiary.
Ron Jackson:
Yeah, one thing I noticed in those days, other than not being able to compete with you to get a domain, was that you’ve always been a dot com guy and emphasized the value of those. But one thing that you really, by domains, had a lot of, there’s one of your great names right there, foam .com, but you had a ton of really great dot net and dot org domains that you got up.
Ron Jackson:
I could see you’re interested in dot org from charity work and dot net, of course, as tied into the network and you ran an ISP. But was that, what was behind your conscious decision when then a lot of people were only chasing dot coms to get the great nets and orgs while you were at it?
Mike Mann:
Well, the nets were strictly for investment purposes. I just, I was getting them for very cheap and they looked like very good quality ones. I was only trying to buy the best ones for a very low price.
Mike Mann:
So it’s just, my typical strategy. And I was trying to do the same thing with the .orgs, but the difference is, is I could use and keep those because I used to run my own charity, grassroots .org, where we had hundreds of members and a bunch of affiliated websites.
Mike Mann:
So we were using the domains for a lot of different purposes, the .org domains. Just the best ones in the world really. Right, relief .org.
Ron Jackson:
Right. Now after you sold by domains, now you’re still involved of course in buying and selling and now you have a new after, not really new now, but a couple of years ago you rolled out domainmarket .com.
Mike Mann:
12 years ago, but who’s counting?
Ron Jackson:
Domain market been 12 years.
Mike Mann:
hasn’t been, it was only supposed to be a couple years, but…
Ron Jackson:
To me, I did you only start put I mean is it mostly it’s a home for your own portfolio. You’re not having third party
Mike Mann:
I’ve lost a lot of years. I’m sorry to tell you wrong. Yeah. Yeah, I know they’re.
Ron Jackson:
They go by quickly, but that’s really scary when you start thinking something was 12 years ago
Mike Mann:
I mean, I like to say five and 10, but if I actually do real math.
Ron Jackson:
Right. Let me ask you another thing I’ve always been curious about. And it came up again here where Rick Schwartz was telling this story just this week about selling GoBet .com. And his first offer was $70 ,000.
Ron Jackson:
And he just said, no, no, no, the guy, it goes up to $100 ,000, $200 ,000, $300 ,000, $500 ,000. I don’t know how he says no to $500 ,000, but he does. Yeah, seriously. Yeah, ends up selling it for $850 ,000.
Ron Jackson:
How about you? Now you have, you know, I’ve seen you-
Mike Mann:
Totally screwed, I can’t do that. Nobody else can do that.
Ron Jackson:
Right. Yeah, I was wondering how much you had your list prices and you might be say 29888 I always wondered do you negotiate much off of I know you don’t want to let potential buyers know how much you’re going to come down
Mike Mann:
I mean how many potential buyers are watching they can get it they should be watching if they’re smart they get the inside tips But right the answer is is that we usually discount like 15% if the people are harassing us And then sometimes I have them priced too high by accident So I might have give more leverage or if I like need to pay my bills at the end of the month or something
Ron Jackson:
I know you had hit a thousand millions at one point.
Mike Mann:
close to that. I mean we probably have about 320 at the moment.
Ron Jackson:
Are you still running software to acquire them and still building them or is it kind of like a relatively stable number of domains that you’re at now?
Mike Mann:
It’s like a lot of stopping and starting. I’m trying to buy a lot more, but I need a lot of capital, obviously buying 350 ,000 domains on auction and then renewing them every month starts adding up. Plus I have, obviously my staff and it’s just very expensive enterprise.
Ron Jackson:
You did comnet .org and I know you haven’t been a huge fan of the TLDs, but what are your thoughts on as investments new TLDs and also CC TLDs?
Mike Mann:
Well, it’s so hard to make a profit on dot com and there’s so many millions of dot coms that are tradable. It actually, there’s no reason why you would go down a level and look at that other stuff. But having said that, you know, there’s a ton of good quality ones, but it’s still a tiny percentage of them.
Mike Mann:
There’s a lot of numbers, you know, there’s hundreds and thousands of good names in those other spaces, like again, I own oil dot co oil co gas dot co, you know, credit cards dot co just for example, those are Columbia dot co.
Mike Mann:
And so at that level, if you’re going to get the very best ones in those other spaces, but there aren’t that many of the best ones. And ultimately, you know, I already own all these as far as new investments I’m doing, I’m strictly dot com.
Mike Mann:
I haven’t bought any of those other things for years. I still own some of the best stuff. There’s no reason to delete it because they’re great. And I’m not saying people should not invest in the best of those, but there aren’t that many of the best.
Mike Mann:
And there’s not really, you really, there’s so many domains out there and it’s so hard to make a profit. You need to build a huge filter just to look at the best stuff. And then once you’re looking at the best stuff, you gotta get the best prices out of it.
Mike Mann:
Otherwise you’re going down a money pit, like a Bitcoin money pit.
Ron Jackson:
Yeah, we’re coming off of a really crazy year here with COVID -19. And it’s kind of been, I’ve seen kind of a roller coaster of impressions among people about how this was going to affect things. When it first started in the US around March, I kind of had a sinking feeling that we’re, you know, going to go back to like the great recession, money’s going to be tight and it could be really a bad situation.
Ron Jackson:
But within a quarter, the conversation shifted to where people, I think Andrew Rosener, it was first one I started talking about, it was in menace demand for demands is starting to go crazy. And then it kind of dawned on everyone.
Ron Jackson:
Well, yeah, because people can’t do business face to face very easily anymore. And all of a sudden it’s been like a stampede online has dawned on a lot of people, only about 50% of businesses had websites as of last year, the last stats I read.
Ron Jackson:
So all of a sudden they’re realizing they’ve gotten by without one. But now if I don’t have one, maybe my business doesn’t survive as the only chance I’ve got. What have some, a lot of this is anecdotal.
Ron Jackson:
I haven’t seen a lot of the hard evidence, but most people tell me their sales are up considerably. What has your experience been as a guy who’s got this man, one of the greatest most and broadest portfolios on the world with respect to your sales?
Mike Mann:
Well, it’s interesting. I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, when nobody’s transacting anything and everybody’s confused, the sales went all the way down practically to zero. So my expenses remain the same.
Mike Mann:
I had the same staff, same domain renewals, same domain purchases, basically, although the auction’s got a tiny bit cheaper, but not much. So that’s at the beginning, but then people realize, hey, the economy’s all going online.
Mike Mann:
So you see a little surge, the economy going online. Due to everybody staying home in quarantine, people are starting businesses at home. On the other hand, then people realize the economy’s kind of screwed here.
Mike Mann:
Everybody’s stuck at home. Nobody has money. So again, it’s fluctuating a lot. And then the government, free money, free money, free money. So again, that puts a little more, so basically you’d see the stopping and starting.
Mike Mann:
Ultimately, when you calculate the end of the year, we were a tiny bit behind the year before, nothing substantial. And then presumably, it’s still a digital economy and the whole globe is a digital economy.
Mike Mann:
Presumably, again, people, if they have alternative domains, whatever it might be, they would want to protect themselves with the dot -com of the same prefix. And again, new companies should be starting around the world, especially in America.
Mike Mann:
People want to work at home. There’s not as much of a traditional office for life corporate structure to protect you. So you’re better off starting your own company. Even if your company’s not an online business, it has to have some sort of online marketing component and social component.
Mike Mann:
So everybody has some sort of online business. At the very least, they have some sort of directory listing or something. So every company has an online component. They’re better served by getting a domain.
Mike Mann:
Their best bet is to get the best domain. And so therefore, domain names, again, all I ever promote is the type I buy, which is the verybest .com. Everything else is, the verybest .com are too speculative.
Mike Mann:
Like it’s hard to pay the bills. Everything else is so speculative that you shouldn’t do it at all. So again, that’s where we’re at.
Ron Jackson:
Yeah, so it is really critical for you to be selling domains. So let’s talk about selling. I got every week, and I just had one yesterday, I get an email from someone who says, I poured a ton of money in this, I bought all these domains, and I have had like no sales, usually it’s because they’re this really horrible domain names.
Ron Jackson:
Sometimes they’re, they look serviceable or whatever, but there’s always been a debate with respect to selling, do you put them out there and try to get an offer and negotiate, do you buy it now? And I’ve been reading for the last couple of years, all of the selling platforms encourage you to put a buy it now price.
Ron Jackson:
And I was kind of just thought, well, of course they want transactions they’re gonna make money from. But there was always that fear in the back of my head, maybe you’re leaving, you know, a lot of money on the table.
Ron Jackson:
If you just put it out there to buy it now, maybe you miss prices. But they said the sell through rate could be three times higher. So for me this year, I took everything under about $5 ,000 retail, I priced all of it.
Ron Jackson:
And I don’t even accept any offers. I just put it out at that price and I would have been stunned in the last year, my sales have indeed gone up about three times and they’re selling at what I asked for.
Ron Jackson:
And it’s stuff that if I made a mistake, it’s not, can’t be a big mistake if you’re selling saying the 1 ,000 to 5 ,000 range. So,
Mike Mann:
It could be a big mistake actually. Hopefully it’s not.
Ron Jackson:
Yeah, well, I mean, you could sell a $5 ,000 name for a thousand, but generally,
Mike Mann:
not bad it might actually be worth 500 ,000. Well, yeah, yeah, that’s true.
Ron Jackson:
I really doubt that I’ve had any made that I’ve been that far off the mark, but it’s it’s possible I mean that has happened those kind of a rarity what the point that I’m getting to is for you And I another I’m never done outbound at all.
Ron Jackson:
I figure people come and look for a name I think the landing page is really important so they know that it’s for sale So regarding selling obviously you’ve got domain market, but I know you also list your domains Like at afterneck and cdoh so you get it out in front of as many people as you as you can So what advice do you have or what’s the approach that you take with regard to selling in general?
Mike Mann:
Well, luckily, the GoDaddy and CEDO network, mostly GoDaddy, does most of it for me because that’s the whole thing about pricing. If you price it, first you have to have a contract with them, obviously, but if you price the name, it goes into the syndication network because it’ll get sent out to 1 ,000 of their business partners or however many.
Mike Mann:
I’m just making it up through syndication. If you don’t price it, whether it goes through that network or not, nobody can buy it. I mean, you could send it through with no price. I don’t even think they send it through if there’s no price, but let’s pretend they did send it through the syndication network with no price.
Mike Mann:
People all over the world are looking at it, but they can’t buy it because they don’t have a price. If you put a price on it, it becomes like Amazon. Buy now, bam, and then it gets fed through the system and I get paid.
Mike Mann:
So that’s what you did, whether you know you did it or not, you know? Right.
Ron Jackson:
It’s true and and also the the thing I think in the pandemic had a lot to do with this I wasn’t traveling anywhere doing anything and I started re just sitting there rethinking things I go Like most people I was only selling one to two percent of the domains a year and I go it seems like there’d be some way You could accelerate that in some way.
Ron Jackson:
So I had that time on my hands and so that’s why I decided to do it and I was just really shocked and I’d also gotten to the point after what it’s like almost 20 years when you do it make Offer and and variably the offer is like it’s like everyone earth agreed to make $200 That’s what $100 ,000 name or
Mike Mann:
It’s actually inflation they used to do $50 now they do $200 that’s pretty good. That’s the number of $500 ,000 domain They give you a $200 off exactly that was a
Ron Jackson:
$50 was the first number I was going to throw out. And then I said, and then I said, well, 200 more, what I was seeing. So I just got tired of the whole game. I don’t see if the server, if the platforms are right, but quick price on them.
Ron Jackson:
And I’ve been delighted so far to this point.
Mike Mann:
The $50 thing is a funny thing because they’re putting $50 out there because in their mind they’re gonna go up to a hundred. They think you bought it for ten bucks. You’re gonna make ten times your money.
Mike Mann:
Right. You’re gonna take a hundred bucks. Exactly. But of course it’s not happening.
Ron Jackson:
Let me ask you another question aside from the charity work, the reason that you’re here. What is it about, I mean you’ve been in this industry a long time, now what is it about this industry that you really love still today that attracts you to it that you would point to?
Ron Jackson:
To the industry? Yeah, just what do you love about being in this industry where there are all the people or the lifestyle, what is it that you love about it?
Mike Mann:
Well, you know, it’s obviously gambling. So, you know, I’m playing every day. I actually am one of the people who would go to Las Vegas and Atlantic City and never spend a cent gambling. It’s spend money.
Mike Mann:
I’d give it to my wife to gamble, whatever. But I would never gamble myself. But it’s because I gamble for a living and it’s a very high stakes and it’s very stressful and takes a lot of time. So, you know, it’s good for somebody like me who doesn’t sleep much, drinks a lot of coffee and likes to keep my brain occupied.
Mike Mann:
It’s a gamble. And really, I haven’t really been paid enough yet. So, I mean, I think I’m gambling for the jackpot for later, you know, when Ali Baba calls. And you never know, that could happen. Or they should because I own the assets.
Mike Mann:
There’s no way to get to them without paying me. Right.
Ron Jackson:
pay the man that’s where that slogan came from is there anything else we should cover before we we go today that’s To me it’s been really fascinating and filled in some gaps that that I had to but I mean we could take the rest of the afternoon I know people would stay with us or not No, I would
Mike Mann:
I really appreciate it. You did fabulous. I really appreciate your help and sort of highlighting the most salient details of our history and this industry together. I just didn’t really ask you about the holidays or whatever.
Mike Mann:
And after that, I’ll do my domain name training. All right, that sounds good.
Ron Jackson:
good I’ll stick around and watch that then.
Mike Mann:
good time for Christmas in the New Year’s.
Ron Jackson:
It was great. Yeah, the holidays were really good. I mean, with pandemic we didn’t go anywhere. We did have a Diana sister came over. She had been quarantining as well. So we were all pretty safe there.
Ron Jackson:
It was different, but it’s one of, I just feel blessed and thankful that we’ve gotten through this thing healthy and that we’ve had a safe place to hunker down. Looking forward to now that we’ve gotten some vaccines going around out there sooner or later, we’re gonna get this thing behind us just like the Spanish flu ended.
Ron Jackson:
It’s been disastrous obviously. And then my heart’s got everyone who’s sick or even the deaths from it, which is crazy. But God willing, we’ll get through it and we’ll all be seeing each other in person again.
Ron Jackson:
And I wish everyone out there the best new year ahead, good health, happiness and now 21 will be their best jet. And you too,
Mike Mann:
Yeah, thank you so much. I agree with all those sentiments and I really appreciate everything from you today and in the industry in general and I’ll talk to you very soon. Great, thank you Mike. Thanks Ron, take care.
Ron Jackson:
Bye bye.
Mike Mann:
Okay, thanks guys. That was awesome. Ron is great. My bed’s not supposed to be in the picture. There we go. So we’re going to do live domain name training. And if you guys put good domains on there, I will teach you how to appraise them.
Mike Mann:
If you didn’t put them on there, then I’m going to go from my own list. So since I don’t see anything yet, I’m going to find my list and start some domain training. So keeping in mind that we’re looking for three main characteristics, we’re trying to disambiguate the name, figure out what it means, kind of think about it a little bit, what it means to the economy and society and the current business trends, for example.
Mike Mann:
And then we’re trying to find out the breadth, how many potential buyers are there, and then the depth, what’s the deepest buyer, who’s got the most money, who might pay me the most. That’s really indicating what that thing is worth.
Mike Mann:
So let me get a better list of domains up here in one second here, and we’re going to be in good shape. OK. So the first domain I’m going to do here is socialmediacenter .com. And I’m going to share my screen with you guys and hit Google as our tool to appraise this domain, socialmediacenter.
Mike Mann:
Thank you. Oh, that’s not gonna work. Hold on a second. So sorry, gotta figure out the best way to do this. It’s gonna only take me one second. Chrome tab, new tab. Okay, so we’re gonna appraise social media center.
Mike Mann:
We always use Boolean, even though Google doesn’t know how to use Boolean properly and they have no competitors, there’s no customer service, there’s no way to get it done properly. Called a monopoly, illegal.
Mike Mann:
Supposedly they do no evil as their slogan, but they kind of lost that. It’s like animal farm. All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others. So social media center, we’re in good luck here.
Mike Mann:
It’s worth a ton because you can see there’s 10 million results in Google. So thank goodness for that, because I own it. So again, what does it mean? We know what it means basically. We need to understand who it means it for.
Mike Mann:
That would be the breadth. So that’s our next effort here. We’re gonna scroll a little bit and see what’s going on here. And then we go to the images, pictures worth a thousand words, try to focus on the images and look for logos, slogans, brand names, trademarks, sides of trucks, whatever, something that’s solid that’s a business brand as opposed to just a word.
Mike Mann:
Again, we can see this is an uppercase here, meaning it’s a real entity, real enterprise as opposed to just a bunch of words. So right off the bat, there’s a fabulous name because there’s so many search results.
Mike Mann:
And again, their uppercase here, or not uppercase, but they start with uppercase letters, whatever that expression is. So it’s a great name, we’re gonna do the images. So we know there’s a ton of breadth.
Mike Mann:
Question is what’s the depth? Like who’s really using this thing? Well, business growth and so tech, again, we’re looking for Fortune 500 companies using it. It’s the best thing we can hope for. This is Social Media Command Center from Salesforce, pretty darn close.
Mike Mann:
Again, that’s what we’re looking for, Fortune 500 using that expression. But it’s mostly vague hits. So I would say it has a ton of breadth, but only a little bit of depth so far. We’re not finding a ton of huge, although this is Boeing, so I guess I just changed my mind.
Mike Mann:
It has breadth and depth. So it’s worth a ton. It’s a long name, so we have to discount it for being so long. And again, ultimately we make up a price. I’ve done the most appraisals and the most sales of anybody, so I get to decide the prices.
Mike Mann:
Although I respect other people’s opinions, but at the end of the day, the market maker makes the prices. So this is incredibly valuable, but long. So we’re gonna discount it to take that into account.
Mike Mann:
50 ,000 would be too much because it’s so long. 25 ,000 would be too cheap because it’s such a great name. And therefore, socialmediacenter .com is worth 30 ,000. Okay, thank you very much. See what else you guys have here.
Mike Mann:
Allsther has stock mentorship, that sounds pretty good. Let’s check that out. But what does it mean? It means you teach somebody about how to use stock trading on Wall Street. Unfortunately, it has extremely few results in Google.
Mike Mann:
So he’s hosed, although it sounds like a cool domain, but you have to have the support from the industry, from Google and from the marketing community. Here it sort of does, but it’s not an exact expression.
Mike Mann:
You see stock trading mentorship program could be shortened to stock mentorship, but it’s not. Could be, but it’s not. Google shortened it, but the actual company using it isn’t using that precise phrase.
Mike Mann:
So you’re looking for precise matches and we’re just not finding them. Again, there’s not a lot of hits. We know what it means. The breadth is very light and the depth is very shallow. So it’s really not worth very much.
Mike Mann:
Sounds really cool though, so it gets some value for sounding cool and it’s easy to spell, it means something. So, you know, definitely some value to that. So it wasn’t such a cool name, you know, it should only be valued at $500 based on what we see in Google, but it is a really cool name.
Mike Mann:
And just based on that fact, it’s a really cool name. It’s a calm, we know what it means. It’s easy to spell the minimum for anything like that. It’s $2 ,000. So it’s really a good job technically because you could buy a domain like this for really cheap, but it’s actually worth $2 ,000.
Mike Mann:
You could probably buy it for 10 bucks on a different market, not from here or from there. So let’s see what else you guys have going on here. Americanfight .com, Toronto State Law, Electrolictic. I don’t know what that means.
Mike Mann:
I guess I should try that. Josie has fish and freaks. I’ll try it, fish and freak, that sounds pretty good. Thomas has carry hook. Well, that’s good, you guys did a good job except for Steven put in a dot pro, which of course I’m not gonna praise that.
Mike Mann:
It’s not worth anything. Fish and freak we’re doing first, thank you. We basically know what it means already and they’re trying to correct the spelling, but you could do that just to analyze a related word to understand the depth, but really the word is the word.
Mike Mann:
It has to be an exact match, but you can see people use that expression in commerce. Here’s a Facebook page. If we had more time, we could look at how many followers they had and if they have posted in the last week, and if it’s a real site that does commerce, that has money, we could drill down and look at all these, but you just don’t have time at the moment.
Mike Mann:
The good news is there’s a lot of exact matches here. We know what it means. It’s actually a literation, which is cool, F and F. And it’s also slang, which could be bad because you need two names. You’d need to buy both, fishing, freak, and fish and freak, plus there’s the plural of both, fish and freaks, fishing freaks.
Mike Mann:
So it’s way diluted there because there’s four expressions that mean the identical thing basically. And then there’s a bunch of other related ones. Like the word, you don’t necessarily have to use the word freak, but irrespective of that, it’s a cool name.
Mike Mann:
We know what it means. We can see a good number of hits and activity here in Google that’s spelled the same way, but it’s only 2 ,600 hits right there. That’s not a lot. So this is some site, 133 followers, that’s nothing.
Mike Mann:
So it’s kind of like the last name where like there’s no support for it on Google barely, but we can see it’s a really cool name. And again, using a literation gives it a premium sounding cool, it’s easy to spell to the extent you can hear what the person says, fishing freak.
Mike Mann:
But if you heard fishing, it’s not so easy to spell. You’ll spell it with a G. So diluted, diluted, diluted, basically the same as the last one. It’s worth 2 ,000 bucks for the same reason. 2000 it’s like in peaks roadshow, bam Thank you very much see what else you guys have going on here American fight calm do I really want to appraise that hopefully there won’t be gross pictures But it has a lot of results American fight directors No idea what that’s about Again a nonprofit organization.
Mike Mann:
I talk about doing charity work There’s a lot of nonprofits that aren’t really charities, you know, they do art Which is great and there’s nothing bad about it, but it’s not the type of charity. I do we’re talking about serving the sick and the poor Organizations 501c3 these guys could be 501c3, but it doesn’t make them a charity.
Mike Mann:
It makes them a nonprofit in any case Back to the subject at hand American fight system. So the question is what does it mean? Means all kinds of stuff. These people are fighting over the American language the English language American fight clubs American fight sports fight for freedom.
Mike Mann:
So that’s cool. I mean as far as disambiguating it It’s easy to spell and say We don’t actually know what it means which is bad But on the other hand it means multiple things which is good because any one of them could have some sort of value attributed to it And whichever one is the most value is ultimately what gets the price for the domain So the breadth is since it means three different things four different things It has a lot of breadth each area could have its own potential interested parties So it’s way cool And then the depth is not so great because Well, let’s see.
Mike Mann:
Let’s look at images and see if there’s a lot of logos. Okay. It is so great I’m wrong again. Again. This is how you make money on domains is you see something like this on a list somewhere You can buy it for 20 bucks 50 bucks 100 bucks Then you do an appraisal which again a minute ago I wasn’t very excited about and now all of a sudden I can see there’s this American fight league American fight directors spelled the exact same way I don’t know what it has to do with BLM.
Mike Mann:
Oh, I guess I don’t know what the hell that is but in any case Fight directors fight directors So the answer is that it has a bit of depth not a ton It’s a little bit long, but it’s not too long pretty easy to say pretty easy to spell You could have plural American fights Also, you could just use us USA.
Mike Mann:
You don’t have to use the word American So again, those are dilutive factors to take into account so ultimately we have to pick a price and I go through this little thing where I say is I go high and low high and low and until I find myself a Medium point that makes sense.
Mike Mann:
So we can do that with this name American fight. Is it worth 50 ,000? Definitely not It’s worth 5 ,000 maybe worth 10 ,000 Maybe we’re 15 definitely not it’s too. So it’s not that great So let’s say between five and 10 ,000 to look at for a minute.
Mike Mann:
We have these guys right here I’d say 10 ,000 fair American fight 10 ,000 I Speak to you from an peaks road show Probably an antique domain Hey, cool, so we’ll do a couple more and then everybody’s going to the beach I Actually have calls the rest of the afternoon.
Mike Mann:
So I’m just dreaming but I Don’t know you guys put a bunch of bad ones on there. I’m gonna pull some from my list so we can get some high numbers Okay, I’ll do the riverside calm I Could have looked at that pull down The Riverside church Riverside incident so keep in mind there’s a city that’s Medium large in California called Riverside But the Riverside could mean, you know the side of the river.
Mike Mann:
It doesn’t have to be You know capital like that to the riverside. Well, I bet there’s a lot, looks like there’s a lot of restaurants called riverside, but I bet some of them are the riverside, restaurants by the side of the river, riverside in, you know, tiny thing, but so what does it mean?
Mike Mann:
It’s kind of a hotel. I mean, that’s where we’re coming down here. It’s a hotel by the side of a river. It might mean other stuff also, and it might mean things related to riverside California, but ultimately hotels have a lot of money, and it looks like there’s a lot of these hotels called the riverside, so that’s our buyer.
Mike Mann:
So we kind of know what it means. It could mean a couple of different things. It’s the name of a movie apparently, or that’s actually a band, the riverside folk. That actually seems to be the highest number of hits in here.
Mike Mann:
So it means, oh, here’s this better. The riverside company is a global investment firm, leading private capital options. Okay, bingo. So this is where the action is, but again, they’re not called the riverside, they’re called riverside, or riverside company.
Mike Mann:
It says the riverside company, but they’re not known as the riverside. So this actually doesn’t have any value there, but the breadth is that it’s got a decent breadth, bunch of hotels and a few other things, bands, the riverside convention center.
Mike Mann:
Well, again, that’s actually riverside, they just put the word the in front of it, that wouldn’t be their domain name. And so the depth is pretty deep because there’s a bunch of big companies that are trading, and here we go, this is the best one.
Mike Mann:
This is actually using the exact expression, the riverside, experiences too long. I don’t wanna see that thing. I don’t even know how to get rid of it. Perspective investment opportunities, and technicality, which I even demoed there.
Mike Mann:
Okay, so it’s got a lot of depth. We know what it means. It’s got a good amount of breadth. So it’s a very valuable domain. Oh, coincidentally, I own it. It’s always good news. For 30 ,000 any day of the week.
Mike Mann:
Thank you very much. Okay, one more, and then beach. What’d you guys give me, Mark? He likes when I do the expensive ones. Okay, I have two here. Josie has Florida connection, Mark has passionate .com, which of course I should charge him a fortune for, but we’ll just do it for fun.
Mike Mann:
Okay, we’re gonna do passionate .com. So again, we know what it means, of course, and it could be an adult site, which hopefully we’re not gonna find by accident, because I have an adult filter on. So hopefully nothing gets through it.
Mike Mann:
Passionate. So again, the breadth is any kind of adult company, clothing company, a movie, all kinds of stuff. Great name in the dictionary, 452 million results in Google. I mean, again, it’s very serious.
Mike Mann:
You wanna look in the images, a lot of activity here. And to do this correctly would take a lot of time, but just right off the bat, you can just start through your tiered system. So again, it’s passionate .com worth a million bucks.
Mike Mann:
Wouldn’t be surprised, but I don’t think anybody will pay it. So worth 500 ,000, yeah, but still people won’t pay it, because they’re cheap and you could buy better names for 500 ,000 actually that are worth millions.
Mike Mann:
But the answer is it’s just incredibly valuable. It’s hard to come up with a good answer. I don’t really have the date on the traffic or I didn’t do enough research, but having said that, it’s definitely worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Mike Mann:
We know that much. It’s not worth a million and it’s worth more than 100 ,000. So that gets us started. I mean, if I owned it, I’d list it for 400 ,000 and sell it for 200 ,000. And there we have it.
Mike Mann:
Oh, I promised we would do Josie one more here and then we’re done. Um. When Josie comes home so good, she’s the pride of the neighborhood Florida connection. It’s a good name, live in Florida. Again, what does it mean?
Mike Mann:
I mean, everybody’s traveling to Florida constantly through every sorts of means of travel. Or if you’re already in Florida, you could connect in Florida, intra connection, Florida connection or intra, inter through other states and countries through any means of transportation or within Florida, each of which could be Florida connection.
Mike Mann:
Plus you have organizations that are already called Florida connection. I’d be willing to bet. So again, we’re gonna go find out Florida connection and then we’re done. Okay, so what is Florida connection here?
Mike Mann:
Florida connection Academy, Florida connection rentals. So we see Academy as a big thing in property. So there’s already two organizations, one’s an Academy and one’s a real estate organization. But again, you could start any new thing, specifically related to travel, anything in the travel industry would be well served, particularly good name because it’ll just never lose value.
Mike Mann:
Could always start a new company called Florida connection. So all this Facebook stuff already. And this is a perfect example of a great investment. Somebody could buy a domain like this for relatively cheap and it’s actually worth a lot.
Mike Mann:
So what does it mean? It means variety of things, mostly related to travel and transportation. Easy to say, easy to spell. It has a kick to it. It sounds like a real name and a real company and sounds like something people would wanna pay money for.
Mike Mann:
So those are all excellent signs. Florida is a great place of rising economy. A lot of new companies moving down here. I think Goldman Sachs is moving down here, potentially to Boca, I’m not sure. So it’s cool.
Mike Mann:
The breadth is a lot of breadth. The depth is a lot of depth. Again, there’s a lot of companies that could use it and the one that needs it is the one with the most money should pay up. So it’s another case of a good domain investment where you could probably buy it for cheap but it’s actually worth a lot of money.
Mike Mann:
15 ,000. Awesome, this was like the greatest session with Ron and our domain appraisals. You guys are the best. Appreciate everything so much from my audience here. This thing is gonna be saved on YouTube so you can share it and watch it later if you’re interested.
Mike Mann:
And next week I have Divyank Turkaya. Hopefully I say his name correctly. And he is the man. He’s like the smartest guy we know, the best businessman, the most successful businessman. He has the most fun of anybody I’ve ever seen.
Mike Mann:
So Divyank’s next Wednesday. Ron knows him really well. And he’s the most successful person who came out of the whole domain name industry and there’s a ton of very successful people but Divyank’s literally a billionaire from doing these deals and selling his company.
Mike Mann:
And I really don’t know all this stuff he does so we’re gonna ask him next week. So again, thanks for everything. Join us next week and we’ll talk to you guys soon.
