Video Transcription
Andrew Miller:
Larry:, we made it to episode two. I can’t believe it.
Larry:
Believe it, that’s great. Congrats, man.
Andrew Miller:
We made it to one more. Welcome everyone to episode two of Random Thoughts. We’re excited to be here. Larry: is back with me again and we’ll come back to that. I thought before- You couldn’t get anyone else I heard.
Andrew Miller:
Yeah, exactly. We always have to settle, but because it’s only the second episode, I just wanted to reiterate again for a second why we are doing this and why I started this and why Hilco started this.
Andrew Miller:
I’ve been posting these Random Thoughts on LinkedIn since now, almost we’re on number 87. So a little over a year and three months of the Sunday Thoughts posts that cover everything from domain names, tech businesses, venture, public markets, investing, daily fantasy sports, my other passion.
Andrew Miller:
And I thought it was a really interesting time to create a podcast around it. And right now we’re planning on doing this every other Thursday at noon. The other side of it was I’m an investor in a company that has some pretty amazing live streaming technology that we are not using yet, but it’s in my plans that this goes well after we test it.
Andrew Miller:
But that technology allows viewers who are watching to come on from their phones and ask us questions or ask anyone who’s broadcasting questions face to face by video. And we had tested a lot of shows on my technology with professional athletes and had hundreds of people come on to ask questions.
Andrew Miller:
And I thought there was a really unique opportunity to do that in the domain name industry and attract all kinds of everyone from domain investors to potential clients and companies and startups and founders.
Andrew Miller:
So that was the second reason to do that. And as I said last week, there’s so many great domain name podcasts. I mentioned some, Domain Sherpa, Domain Name Wire, Jeff Gabriel at SAW just started a new one interviewing some really fascinating people in the industry.
Andrew Miller:
But I think more content is great. The more content there is, the more valuable it is for the asset class in the space. So I’m excited that we’re back for number two. I actually ordered, Braden Pollock, our friend and partner at Hoco, has urged me to order.
Andrew Miller:
We had a little bit of audio hiccups last time. So I ordered these Bose amazing AirPods that were supposed to be here yesterday and they’re now slated to arrive between 12 and three today. So I’m back on my AirPods.
Andrew Miller:
Hopefully we’ll be okay. So I’m excited to bring Larry: back for episode two and hopefully going forward. Larry:, we joked about this. He’s Ed McMahon, man. That’s how it’s gonna be.
Larry:
you realize how few people probably know who Ed McMahon is these days. I mean, that is true. But God, I’m here to laugh and cheer you on. So.
Andrew Miller:
And I think it’s funny because I don’t want to borrow that, you know, our friend Jonathan Tenebom and JT who hosts Domain Sherpa is the king of the nickname. So I certainly don’t want to bring on the, you know, Larry: Fisher, aka Ed McMahon, because that would be taking JT’s intellectual property and thunder.
Andrew Miller:
So a quick background, you know, while we’re still doing this early, Larry: and I have been investing in founding, advising and starting companies and doing everything around premium and one word .com domain names for way too long, 1997, 1998.
Andrew Miller:
Most recently we oversaw two of the largest domain transactions of all time, chat .com this year and home .com the year prior, both massive, massive domain transactions and both headed to doing really big things.
Andrew Miller:
So last week we had David Laz on who acquired home .com for his company, Fairway Mortgage. And that is on our YouTube page here at Hoco Digital. If you want to go back and watch it. But today I wanted to kind of turn our attention to massively successful companies that have actually become successes and have been built on one word domains.
Andrew Miller:
And there are way too many to cover. There are some obviously huge, multi -billion dollar public companies. But I wanted to cover this today because I thought it was timely with a lot of things going on in the news.
Andrew Miller:
To that accord, I personally had founded two companies where I bought the domains for my business, both successful exits, both still market leaders, creditcards .com, which I sold in 2004 and insurance quotes .com in 2010.
Andrew Miller:
Larry: has done some amazing stuff in this space along with starting one of the earliest domain companies, Smart Names, which was a two word generic domain. And then what we’re going to do is Larry: and I are going to talk a little bit about some of these companies out there and some of the news that we’re going to talk about.
Andrew Miller:
And then we’re going to bring on an amazing guest because the other goal of this podcast is to have end users. CEOs are founders who have leveraged domain into something successful like we did with David last week.
Andrew Miller:
And we’re going to bring on Warren Strule. Warren and his sons founded a business that is quite an amazing story. They actually, I met Warren because he acquired chocolate .com from us at Hilco this year.
Andrew Miller:
But Warren operates chocolate .com, licorice .com, carmels .com and pretzels .com. And he’ll be joining us in about 10 or 15 minutes and talk about his story. And he’s really crushing it out there doing this.
Andrew Miller:
And you know, two things, he’s living the dream. He’s in business with his kids and he’s crushing it. So it’s kind of an amazing, amazing business story. So I always like to say a great domain name will never take a shitty business and make it successful.
Andrew Miller:
However, a great business can get exponential enterprise value, you know, from an amazing category or exact match domain name. And I’m not allowed to name this company or person, but I have a very good friend and client who founded a company.
Andrew Miller:
It was a multi -hundred million dollar company. In 2017, he rebranded it to a single word domain name. And then a year later, sold the company for $1 .7 billion cash. And he would go on to say that that domain name was worth four or five hundred million dollars to his eventual exit.
Andrew Miller:
So Larry:, we’ve seen so many of these.
Larry:
Oh, God, we had one last year, year before, a good friend of mine now, Aaron, who bought marketing .com. And he goes, that was, and he’s a, somebody who’s bought a lot of businesses. He’s a venture capital guy and private equity.
Larry:
And he ended up saying to me, out of all the deals I’ve ever done, the best deal I’ve ever done was buying the marketing .com name for my company. And it just puts it in front of the places and he goes, you know, you can’t beat something like that.
Larry:
So I agree.
Andrew Miller:
really interesting lead in. You know, I have a few companies I wanted to reference and talk about before we brought Warren on today. And one of them is a company I’ve been following called Teamwork. Teamwork .com founded by an entrepreneur named Peter Coppinger.
Andrew Miller:
They have recently raised more money. They’re up to 95 million in venture capital, pretty late stage. We actually have, if Lawrence, our awesome producer can run this video in a second, we have a video of Peter talking about what he called his hockey stick moment regarding the domain name.
Andrew Miller:
Lawrence, can we cue that up for 30 seconds or whatever it is?
Andrew Miller:
So great, great story. We didn’t do that video is worth watching on its own. You can probably find it on YouTube or Google it. Peter Coppinger teamwork. He’s really done an amazing job growing his company.
Andrew Miller:
And as he said, it was the turning point. He goes on to tell the story of how he bought the domain name, which was really fun. But I didn’t want to spend four minutes on the video. You know, this week in the news or in the last couple of weeks, there’s been a couple of these kind of what I would call marquee companies that have been in the news Vegas .com, you know, arguably one of the greatest, you know, geo location domain names in the world was acquired by Vivid Seats, one of the largest ticket sellers for, I believe, was it Larry:, $240 million?
Andrew Miller:
Close to that. Yes. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago and Vegas .com is a great story because that was a company that built on the domain name Vegas .com from the ground floor up to really become a leading event and ticket and hotel, you know, Booker in Las Vegas.
Andrew Miller:
And with the sphere being built, right? And, you know, kind of so much happening in Vegas. I made a lot of sense for Vivid Seats to plant that anchor there.
Larry:
I mean, forward thinking they were. Years ago, they went out and not many people know this. They paid close to 95 million over time for this name. I forgot what they put down, but they’re doing these multi -payments that were yearly payments that were kept paying off and they were able to roll it, grow the business.
Larry:
And without that name, they would not have had the value that they ended up getting.
Andrew Miller:
Yeah, I mean, it’s the Vegas stock. We’ll see how it goes now, but you imagine you’re a, you know, you’re maybe the second place seats company to StubHub, which is what, you know, they’re second in line and now they’ve gone out and they, you know, now control Vegas, the hotel business, the ticket business, the eventual events that are gonna come into the sphere.
Andrew Miller:
I mean, we all know YouTube opened this place and, you know, what’s about to happen there and the kind of acts are just gonna be staggering. The tickets are gonna be thousands of dollars, right?
Larry:
I can only imagine what they’re saying the stones may take a small residency. Yeah, I can
Andrew Miller:
There’s going to be so much that happens at the sphere and ticket prices are going to be crazy. And you know, I think they just gave themselves by buying Vegas .com the single best opportunity to surpass StubHub in the space and especially as a brand, right?
Andrew Miller:
There’s certainly the second brand. You know, it reminds me of a couple others. So this week I read that Automatic, which is a company, almost a generic domain name, it’s a little bit of a spelling. I think it has like two C’s in it, but Automatic owns WordPress.
Andrew Miller:
It’s a parent company, a WordPress big company. They went out and acquired texts, TXTS like text messages. Text .com this week, which is a mobile app that is pretty awesome subscription based and aggregates your text messages from all platforms.
Andrew Miller:
So I know personally I’m texting on WhatsApp, Skype, my iPhone, iMessage, SMS, and Facebook Messenger, right? Twitter direct message and it aggregates everything. So they went out and paid $50 million cash Automatic to buy that app.
Andrew Miller:
And that’s another example of an app that very early on realized, wow, we can really leverage if we came out and changed our, I forget they had an original name. I don’t remember what it was, but they early on bottex .com.
Andrew Miller:
And, you know, very quickly achieved this result. This was not a long ramp.
Larry:
Funny story about Matt, who is the founder of WordPress, Automatic, we were at a domain show and he was the keynote speaker and he ends up talking about different plugins for WordPress. So at the end, a few of us get up, we stop talking to him and somebody says, how’s this, how’s this?
Larry:
I said, what about thesis? Which is a big work, one of the largest of the plugins. And he goes, don’t use them, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, oh, I’m sorry, I just have the name thesis .com. That’s why I was curious.
Larry:
He goes, you wanna sell it? He beats me, like, seriously, a few minutes later, I’m leaving, he follows me into the hallway, we make a deal on the name. And he bought it for some reason. I didn’t know that story, I love that.
Larry:
He bought it for spite. And if there’s a YouTube video on it and he actually talks about it and it was hysterical that. Wow, so that was the story.
Andrew Miller:
a defensive strategic move. Yep. Yep. Very, very good. We see that all the time. There’s a couple others that jump out of mind. Both of these guys are people I’m aiming to have on as guests like Warren is today in the near future.
Andrew Miller:
My friend Woody Levin founded a company called Hello Extend. They’re in the consumer warranty business. It’s really B2B2C warranty business selling warranties for almost everything. They are absolutely crushing it.
Andrew Miller:
They’ve raised, I think, over $400 million. They’re pre -IPO. Initially, they were HelloExtend .com. It was driving Woody crazy. He eventually bought the Extend .com domain and changed the brand just simply to Extend, which was the name of his product.
Andrew Miller:
It’s a great story. I’ve talked to Woody about this. I haven’t asked him yet. I’m going to hopefully he’ll see this and come on and join us as a guest. Another one really recently, which here out of Boston, is a company called Really Interesting Company that is absolutely disrupting an industry.
Andrew Miller:
They started as Notarize .com, a guy named Pat Kinsell here in Boston, also who I’m hoping to get on this podcast in the next few weeks as a guest to tell his story. They basically took Notaries online and they called it Notarize .com right out of the gate.
Andrew Miller:
Went right after it with the category name. They actually just acquired Proof .com as well. They have Notarize .com and Proof .com. They’ve now expanded to other things, proof of identity, beyond just Notaries.
Andrew Miller:
They bought the name for that. It’s an amazing company that’s going to be a household name and is absolutely here to stay. I can’t wait to eventually tell that story. With that said, I think it’s probably a great opportunity to bring up Warren.
Andrew Miller:
Lauren’s on the screen. Then before I introduce him, there he is. Warren Strule, welcome. Before we introduce him, I want to give a quick background and then have another quick video. I met Warren actually through Hilco’s awesome Chief Marketing Officer Gary Epstein.
Andrew Miller:
Somehow, we had not met on our prior, but we hit it off pretty quickly for a couple reasons. Warren went to Tulane and both of my kids are at Tulane. We actually were at the time -owned Tulane .com and he’s like, what can we do with it?
Andrew Miller:
I probably should just give it to Tulane, which is a whole other story, which eventually happened. Warren told me about his business and he’s like, I’m interested in chocolate .com. We worked together creatively and came up with the transaction and a deal that closed in August.
Andrew Miller:
I’ll let Warren tell about his business, but Warren’s business with his son is called Goat Foods, like Tom Brady, Goat, the greatest of all time. That company owns chocolate .com, obviously. Licorice .com.
Andrew Miller:
It operates Licorice .com, Pretzels .com, and Carmel’s .com along with that chocolate, which are acquired from us. I will say this, these guys are knocking it out of the park. I will tell a quick story.
Andrew Miller:
NamesCon, the big domain conference, is always in Austin these days in June. I landed in the Austin airport this June after having entered into the agreement to sell willchocot .com to Warren. I get off my plane and I start walking towards the Uber area.
Andrew Miller:
What do I see on my left? Back to back. This amazing vending machine. One says Licorice .com. He hadn’t bought chocolate yet. We agreed it, but it hadn’t closed. One said Pretzels .com. I’m like, wow, they’re empty.
Andrew Miller:
This packaging is amazing. There’s like two left in the both machines combined. I texted to Warren, I’m like, you better fill your machines in Austin. I’m like, wow, these guys are on to something. This is really cool.
Andrew Miller:
Before we move to that, Lawrence, let’s queue up the chocolate .com video. This is a 30 -second commercial, Warren’s been airing on national TV.
Larry:
That was a great commercial. Very memorable. Thank you.
Andrew Miller:
amazing. So Warren, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Excited to have you. I think what I’d like to do is, you know, have you start a little bit? Well, I think you should give a quick background from your words, not mine on on Goat Foods.
Andrew Miller:
And I actually would like you to tell you the story of why you started it, because I think it’s really, it’s a human interest story, if not a domain story. And then, you know, from there, maybe talk a little bit about what you’re doing in the business and obviously talk about, you know, why you went with these kind of generic category domain names.
Andrew Miller:
But sure, it’s the original story, because I think it’s awesome.
Warren Struhl:
Well, I’ll take you back. You don’t have a few hours to hear my full story. But back in 1989, I began my entrepreneurial career and had an idea to sell paper by mail. Laser printers were born right around then, and no one was manufacturing really interesting paper to load in your laser printer tray.
Warren Struhl:
People were stealing copier paper and putting in the laser tray. So I started a company, I guess, the common thread of everything that I’ve done. People laugh when I tell them what I’m about to do, which I love.
Warren Struhl:
It’s always a good sign of potential success. And I started a company called Paper Direct, which sold sheets of paper in 100 sheet boxes in 1989 through catalogs. And I cut my teeth on learning how to what was not called D2C back then, learning my way around the catalog industry, direct marketing industry.
Warren Struhl:
And within four years, we were doing about 100 million in sales, shipping out about 70 million catalogs a year and sold the business. I guess I was about 31 then and sold it to a Fortune 500 company that year of, as I said, 1993.
Warren Struhl:
Since then, I’ve invested, started 30 plus businesses. There isn’t an industry that I probably haven’t touched. I love getting up at bat, win, lose, or draw. I have the guts to do it. I come up with an idea and I get up there.
Warren Struhl:
I have a reasonable batting average. But one of the common themes, I guess, Andrew, is that I like finding concepts that are niches within big industries that really people don’t care about. So no one cared about selling specialty paper by mail in 1993.
Warren Struhl:
Then some other businesses, I started a popcorn business called Popcorn Indiana, which some of you may know, a red bag of kettle corn, which really started about 23 years ago the trend of upscale popcorn in America.
Warren Struhl:
They still adorn 50 ,000 stores today. I sold that business a bunch of years ago. And again, people sort of laughed that I wanted to pedal popcorn. And one thing led to another fast forward three years ago when I was getting ready to slow down a little bit in Florida.
Warren Struhl:
I was walking across the golf course in April 2020. Actually wasn’t playing because we weren’t allowed to. COVID just started. And I said, what is tomorrow? What’s going to be for tomorrow? What’s the next generation going to look at?
Warren Struhl:
How people are going to make money out of this really bad situation that we’re going through, obviously, at the time people were just walking around, just confused. Blessed to have a wonderful family, have a son and a daughter, Adam Strule and Sarah Strule.
Warren Struhl:
Sarah’s married to Jonathan Packer. And I walked across the golf course. I said, you know, I’m going to call the next generation who were gainfully employed, one with KPMG. Adam was working in the music business, Jonathan at KPMG.
Warren Struhl:
And I said, hey, guys, maybe we should start a business together. Your crazy father, father -in -law, has been doing this for a heck of a long time. Maybe it’s time in the time of uncertainty that maybe I’ll show you how to start a business.
Warren Struhl:
So I won’t tell you which son said this, but he said, well, if you’re funding, let’s go. What are we doing? So I said, look, I know a little bit about the popcorn business. So I know the food business for a bunch of years.
Warren Struhl:
We own these domain names because I was an early investor in register .com, as I was telling Larry: before, 1995, invested in register .com. So we were one of the original registrars. I actually wasn’t smart enough at the time to buy up domains like Larry:, but I came later.
Warren Struhl:
That being said, we have these, had a few names in the food space, knew that I can get some more names in the food space and decided that we try to put together a portfolio of synergistic brands that were great gifting brands as well as self -consumption, but really escalate the level of what these categories are.
Warren Struhl:
And we started out with licorice .com. That’s the one we chose first. And six months later, November 1st of 2020, we shipped our first order for licorice .com. 30 days later, we sold out. So my guys and I got together and I said, what do we want to do next guys?
Warren Struhl:
And he said, well, let’s keep going. And what are we doing? What’s the next brand? So we restocked on liquorice. That next year we started pretzels .com and exact same thing happened. Started the following year, we then went to caramels .com.
Warren Struhl:
Literally we’ve now reloaded on our third batch after testing it. And then I’m blessed to have chocolate .com which just launched literally a month ago. We have several other domains to go next year.
Warren Struhl:
We have cashews .com, taffy .com, cupcakes .com, soft pretzels .com and I’m missing one truffles .com. We was looking for a couple other additional ones if anybody out there has got some good ideas all year.
Andrew Miller:
Go Warren, you’re gonna get a lot of emails.
Warren Struhl:
I’m blessed. I’m really short of it as guys. I’m blessed to, as you said, Andrew, to work with my kids. My kids have just done amazing stuff. They would be on the podcast today, but they are packing many thousands of orders with their team of close to 100 people.
Warren Struhl:
And we’re shipping thousands of orders a day. And it’s been gratifying as a father, and it’s been gratifying as an entrepreneur to see them succeed and the business succeed.
Larry:
I have to say, I admire what you’re doing. As Andrew knows, my dream has always been to be working with one of my sons. So if you’d be able to do that and do that successfully, I hand that to you, commend that to you.
Larry:
I think that’s great. And thank you.
Andrew Miller:
Yeah, and I think it’s interesting because what is a kind of a backstory to this was, in 2005, I was part of a company, WeBoughtChocolate .com. And we had three really smart young guys out of college who came to us with the concept of a chocolate gift marketplace that would drop shipped chocolate from hundreds of vendors and they built it.
Andrew Miller:
And it was a beautiful storefront. I mean, if you came to it, you would think we were Amazon of chocolate. We had 5 ,000 products from 300 vendors and we did okay. Like we did a million dollars of revenue every year and we broke even give or take a little bit and we shipped 20 to 25 ,000 orders with no marketing budget and three young guys out of college, literally, working out of my office.
Andrew Miller:
And we tried to scale it and we just came to the point where we realized we’d be better off. So I actually was part of the group. I sold a domain name originally in 2019, I believe. And then the person who bought it for me, the investor, came to me in 2022 or 23, late 22 and said, hey, I’m not really able to do a very, very successful entrepreneur who had some other domain names, but had built a multi -hundred million dollar business on his own unrelated.
Andrew Miller:
And he came to me and he said, hey, I’d be okay to resell it if we can make some money on it. So we took it on to resell it the second time. This time as an advisor versus an owner. And of course, ended up doing the deal with Warren, which was, I’m excited because I already can see that the potential that was there, that we as operators just couldn’t get to, Warren’s going to.
Andrew Miller:
And Warren, I think it’d be interesting to talk a little bit about two things. One, the benefits you’re seeing from, all that you’re doing, a lot of marketing, right? You have the machines in the airports, you have the television spots and all kinds of other things.
Andrew Miller:
I’d be interested for you to allow, obviously you’re doing these all on category single word domains. So what kind of lift or what are you seeing? But when you spend this marketing and this clever advertising that we just saw at commercial, how are you seeing that play out, you know, regards to having to be the memorable kind of one word, never forget it once you hear it domain.
Warren Struhl:
So I know a little bit to be dangerous about one word domains before I started this actually a friend of mine who may be listening, Joshua Orback, called me this morning, sold a company called swag .com and I recently asked them.
Andrew Miller:
Josh is listening because he texted me about something this morning. Josh is also a friend of mine unrelated. And I’m like, Oh, Warren’s my guest today. So he said he was going to be here. Hi, Josh.
Warren Struhl:
I asked him as part of Jeremy, I said, so if you didn’t have the word swag .com, would you have exited as nicely? And the answer was zero chance. And I’ve seen this play before, which got me even more excited over the last few years to own these categories.
Warren Struhl:
I think that particularly the kinds of things that we’re doing, we’re spending a lot of money on digital and we’re spending even more money on television. So some of you out there may have seen our commercials, we’re pounding the airwaves right now, 15 seconds, 30 second commercials on 25 different stations.
Warren Struhl:
And I think that those marketing efforts would bear lots of fewer fruits, if you will, if the name was, you know, Jonathan’s liquorice or adams liquorice .com. So I think that the power of these four in the portfolio right now, the amount of people that say, oh, I’ve seen your commercial.
Warren Struhl:
And I think a lot of it has to do with one word domains, which is exactly what you wanna hear, Andrew. But at the end of the day, it really, I believe it more today than ever before. And I really saw it when we first launched liquorice, because when you say you own liquorice .com three years ago, that just means you know something about liquorice.
Warren Struhl:
That means, you know, you’re really passionate about that. You probably have the best product, probably have a great customer service, infrastructure, et cetera. So I think the level of credibility that you get for whether you’re doing TV, digital, or any kind of advertising, we’re gonna potentially start doing outdoor advertising on billboards with one words.
Warren Struhl:
I think that it just means a heck of a lot when you say the word and you have the word that says exactly the category.
Andrew Miller:
Interesting. It’s funny because it reminds me, wondering if you’re seeing the same effect. So many years ago, we owned luggage .com. And we were trying to get, so I’m gonna date people, but everybody knows Wayfair, obviously one of the leading e -commerce companies in the world.
Andrew Miller:
Before they were Wayfair, they were called CSN stores here in Boston and they were my good friends. And they had about 120 individually branded stores, kind of like Warren does, selling different niche products.
Andrew Miller:
And they were doing nine figures in revenue, very successful, very profitable. And I was trying to convince them to acquire luggage .com. I’m like, you guys really should have one more domains for your business.
Andrew Miller:
And they were kind of hemming hard. We don’t need it. We’re so good at the search. And one day we got an offer from Net Shops, which is now Hey Needle, which is owned by Walnut, who wanted to buy luggage .com.
Andrew Miller:
Also really good people and really successful. And I shot a quick note over to my friends at CSN stores and said, hey, your competitor wants to buy this thing. And they’re like, whoa, whoa, come down to the office.
Andrew Miller:
We were like three blocks away. Don’t do that. And we sat around the table and before we left, we had made a deal. Said they acquired luggage .com. That was their first kind of major single word domain name.
Andrew Miller:
And about a week later, I got a phone call from CEO and founder of CSN stores, now Wayfair, still the CEO, Nourage, great, amazing guy. And he said, it’s amazing. We went to the luggage show in Chicago at luggage .com.
Andrew Miller:
And we are the absolute hit buzz talk of the show. And it’s amazing. So we’re gonna go buy a bunch more domain names. And we agree, this is the way to go. So they hired someone to do it and I helped them on some and they went out and obviously bought many, many more strollers .com, cookware .com, off the top of my head.
Andrew Miller:
And eventually when they, you know, they decided to finally go public and change their name to a single destination, Wayfair, and just redirect those domains. But I’m wondering, you know, on the B2B front, Lord Warren, you know, with chocolate .com, as you’ve now had it for a short window of time, and you’re reaching out to partners and vendors and not just consumers, what kind of effect that’s had.
Warren Struhl:
It’s three levels up in getting to whoever I want to get to. We want to get to. I think the halo effect, I mean, the effect of being able to say you have chocolate .com has opened doors really quickly.
Warren Struhl:
We pulled this business together, the chocolate category. Obviously, we have the other ones operating in record time. Right. And as you can see from the website, it looks like it’s been around forever.
Warren Struhl:
And I think a lot of it had to do with partners, potential partners that heard the name chocolate .com knew that we were going to be serious about this and whether it be innovation, pricing, supply chain, needs that we had happen way quicker because of it.
Warren Struhl:
Amazing.
Andrew Miller:
And that’s, you know, I think that Larry:, right? That’s what we’ve been, that’s what we preach.
Larry:
that all you have to do is take a 30 second commercial of this with Warren speaking and the main sources like that.
Andrew Miller:
I do want to add a couple of things just for anyone viewing out there. We are, this is available on demand on Hillco Digital’s YouTube page, obviously after we just submitted our episode one with David Laz as an audio podcast into the Apple and Spotify store.
Andrew Miller:
Lawrence, I think, told me in a matter of, we’re just waiting for approval. So these will be on audio as well, going forward, as well as on demand video. But we have this unique feature where you can call in and ask us questions, Warren, Larry:, me.
Andrew Miller:
And if you do not have that link, it is on my, our Hillco Digital Twitter as of an hour ago and on my personal LinkedIn. So if you want to call in now and ask any of us questions, just you click on the link that I put in my posts and you can join us.
Andrew Miller:
With that said, my producer Lawrence just told me, and this was kind of pre -ordained, we knew this was going to happen. We have our first call in, which is kind of a call in slash special guest. So if we can bring Mike Mann up on screen, Lawrence, there he is.
Mike Mann:
What’s up guys? All the starting branding guys in one room.
Andrew Miller:
So a quick background for everybody. Mike’s an old, long time, mid -year friend and partner in multiple businesses down the path, phone .com being one. Mike is one of the all -time OGs and goats of lead, of domain investing.
Andrew Miller:
I first met Mike in 2000 and maybe four when he had sold his company by domains to private equity firms Summit and Highland Capital. Here in Boston, massive success and win for Mike and he’s just been doing it ever since.
Andrew Miller:
He has phone .com, which we’ll talk about because it’s obviously built on a category domain name like we’ve been talking here today. But what was ironic is Mike is in Florida and Warren’s in Florida.
Andrew Miller:
And when I told Mike about the chocolate deal, he had a lunch with Warren last week in the small world and they got to meet. So I’m like, wow, come on and join us. This would be a great, perfect person to call in slash special guest.
Andrew Miller:
So I think people know you, but welcome.
Mike Mann:
Thank you, sir. I think Larry: might be in Florida now, too, right?
Larry:
We’re going to head down in
Warren Struhl:
All right, come up the block. We’ll give you some free food right in Delray.
Mike Mann:
We got our favorite fagle place in common.
Andrew Miller:
I’ll even come down. So like I think most people who are the main world know you, but why don’t you give like a two minute, I mean, thanks for calling in. And if anybody else wants to call in, we will get your questions in at the end of the show.
Andrew Miller:
If we, otherwise we’ll just take it up to the end with Mike, but I’m Lawrence will alert me. So anybody else wants to dial in, go to my Andrew Miller:, my LinkedIn or he’ll go digital assets Twitter, and you can find the link to call in and ask either me, Larry:, Mike, all of us more in our questions.
Andrew Miller:
So Mike, give us a little background and tell us a little bit, you’ve been listening to the show, I think tell us a little bit about foam .com and cause obviously, you know, you believe deeply in building businesses on generic brands.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, well, phone .com gets extreme leverage from owning the name phone .com. It gets higher notoriety, more leads, higher conversion rate, more stickiness, less turnover, better access to employees, to partners.
Mike Mann:
As Warren was saying, once people knew he owned chocolate .com, it gave him a lot of leverage in the space on day one. So with respect to phone .com, we’ve been leveraging that for years. And we have approximately 50 ,000 small business clients as a result and a lot of cool technologies, over 100 really smart people working there.
Mike Mann:
A lot of revenues and partnerships and cool stuff going on. A lot of deep linkage in a Google and search recognition for a whole suite of keyword terms that include the word phone in it. So it’s an excellent asset.
Mike Mann:
As you mentioned, I’ve built a lot of assets on top of great domain names. Obviously you’ve been part of a bunch of those from way back where we did surfboards, snowboards, skateboards .com, whole bunch of other stuff.
Mike Mann:
I recently sold SEO .com domain name, which I had built a very successful company on top of. You wanna tell us for how much, Mike? I want to, but I’m not allowed to. But I mean, it would definitely register on the list to one of the top domain sales of the year.
Andrew Miller:
Excellent and an amazing name, right?
Larry:
Just perlata what you got. So this way we could add it on our own. So we got a lot of those.
Mike Mann:
No, I mean, you know, I would have actually liked to get more like usual, but I got as much as I could. And, you know, it’s a good enough deal.
Andrew Miller:
So Mike’s unique, I keep losing my air pod here. That’s why I need these new Bose sets. But Mike is a unique, you know, a unique call in guest because, you know, he’s kind of been on, like me, I mean, Larry: to some degree, multiple sides of this, right?
Andrew Miller:
I mean, he is, you know, he founded a, it owns, I mean, how many domains, by domains that you own probably several hundred thousand, if not more.
Mike Mann:
By domains, when I sold it, I owned 500 ,000 domains primarily .com. My current company owns 220 ,000. We did own about 300 ,000, but between the ones we sold and the ones we deleted, we’re at 220 ,000, which is a much higher quality on average since we deleted all the low end.
Mike Mann:
We sell more low end than high end because they’re obviously much cheaper. Therefore, we still retain over 100 ,000 very high end names.
Andrew Miller:
Amazing. And you know, I mean, Mike, so Mike’s kind of done both sides to this, right? He’s founded a business in the domain industry, a marketplace, and, you know, successfully sold it. And then has also taken individual domains and turned them into, um, into successful businesses like Warren is doing.
Andrew Miller:
And like I’ve done with credit cards and insurance quotes and Larry:, we’ve all smart names. We’ve all done this in the past. So it’s a pretty, uh, pretty, you know, powerful story. And as we were saying earlier on, you know, with, we played the Patrick, uh, the Peter Coppinger teamwork .com spot.
Andrew Miller:
I don’t know, Mike, if you were here for that. And, uh, you know, I could keep, you know, I could rifle off case studies and examples all day, but I thought it was important to highlight some of them.
Andrew Miller:
So, you know, it’s really great. And this is again, one of the goals of this podcast is to tell these stories of not domain owners who have domains that they’ve sold or want to sell, um, or advise others to buy or sell, but actual, it’s, you know, there’s been, um, um, what’s the word I’m looking for?
Andrew Miller:
A gap. There’s been a missing component, in my opinion, in domain content from years where there haven’t been the companies, the founders, the CEOs who have acquired them and built massively successful enterprise value in businesses who have come on and talked about that and told the story for one reason or another.
Andrew Miller:
So one of my goals or random thoughts is to have a worn Peter Coppinger, hopefully, uh, Woody Levin from Extent have someone each week, each, each, uh, we do this bi -weekly right now. So every other week who can come on and talk about their experience and their success.
Andrew Miller:
And I think that will go a long way in helping others understand really the difference this can make out there. So, um, anything else Larry:? Anything to add?
Larry:
You know what, I just sit back and let you talk. There’s an old saying, better to sit and have people think you don’t know what you’re talking about than opening your mouth.
Andrew Miller:
ARD et sho
Larry:
I find this interesting, since you do have so many names, you’d mention that you sell more low -end names, but you also have to delete. What process do you take when you decide what to delete versus what you feel could sell as a low -end?
Mike Mann:
Sure. I have an extraordinarily detailed database and internal proprietary application that keeps an enormous amount of data on all that each and every domain name over time. So we have all the data that everybody else has in the world, plus we’ve developed a whole suite of proprietary data categories and methods, proprietary ways we look at the data, we analyze the data, we review the data.
Mike Mann:
So basically we have our system providing me the candidates of ones that are potentially ripe for deletion. And essentially what it is, is what I’m really doing is re -appraising the entire database one domain at a time.
Mike Mann:
So the ones that get the lowest appraisal value, which is $188, is the lowest appraisal value, are candidates for being deleted. So basically as their expiration date comes up, we don’t literally delete them, we just fail to renew them, which is effectively deleting them.
Mike Mann:
So yeah, it’s mostly statistically based, but then there’s my subjective view of each one to make sure because a lot of times you get a list of candidates for deletion and you find these great names in there that statistically don’t appear to be great domains, but if you look behind the obvious, you can understand, again, particularly me, because I’ve traded more domains than probably anybody on the planet.
Mike Mann:
So basically I’m mostly using analytics and then I’m just doing a cursory view to make sure I want to delete them and takes an insane amount of time to do all this. But I’ve done it.
Larry:
So that’s great. I mean people see, I mean I don’t realize how hard you’re working behind the scene in such an elaborate, you know, when you’re selling your names. I’m always impressed by the various sales at different levels that you do.
Larry:
So Mike, I hand it to you.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, I appreciate that. And I have super smart people working for me, including programmers who, you know, I can come up with these ideas and they can put them into code in an interface that’s easy to manipulate and to help me develop the prices and plus the front end that makes it really easy to do the transactions.
Andrew Miller:
So I wanted to, before we wrap up a couple things, Warren, I wanted to give you, A, because you joined us and thank you and B, because I think, I will say, Hilko Digital Assets just recently, I probably shouldn’t say this because it’s supposed to be a surprise, but we usually, we just recently used chocolate .com for our holiday gift bags and some amazing items that are coming everybody’s way.
Andrew Miller:
And, you know, what, Warren, if you just look at the site, you know, the commercial we had earlier, chocolate .com, licorice .com, pretzels, any of Warren’s sites, these are amazing gifts, corporate gifts, personal gifts.
Andrew Miller:
So, Warren, I don’t know if you want to offer any call that, you know, action or any, you have any discount code or anything else for people who watch this or whatever you want to do. But I wanted to, before we wrap, I wanted to give you the chance because you really appreciate you coming on.
Warren Struhl:
So thank you for those words and I wanted to surprise you as well So if anybody out there wants to buy anything or anything Holiday or any other time just use a very special code called Andrew 20 Andrew 20 which we set up an hour ago And I don’t know how many days will be out there, but Andrew 20 is the code and we’ll know that it’s because of Andrew nice product
Andrew Miller:
are awesome. Is there anything like you know anything like jumps out of you like really cool for the holidays? I mean I know there’s so many options but there’s
Warren Struhl:
There’s just so many options. I think that a quick story, Andrew, and I’ll wrap up, I guess, let you wrap up, but chocolate .com when I agreed to buy the name. My grandmother, Macy Reston -Piece, always came to a family gathering with a box of crazy chunks of chocolate that was the most outstanding chocolate on the planet.
Warren Struhl:
So when this happened, I spent endless nights trying to find out the exact chocolate that she bought for every Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Thanksgiving. So to answer your question, my favorite on chocolate .com is Grandma Anne’s Chocolate Chunks.
Warren Struhl:
It is just spectacular. And it’s the exact same chocolate that 50 years ago, 60 years ago, she used to bring to every holiday dinner. So that’s my worst story on my favorite food, my favorite product on the side.
Warren Struhl:
That’s gonna stop.
Larry:
sell out. I’m telling you right now. Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew Miller:
Andrew 20. So I do before we I was starting to wrap up but I missed that we last week we had a bunch of people call us in to ask questions to us and last face -to -face we’re gonna you know with Mike on today we had less time for that so we’ll work on that for next week but I do have a question from Matt in the chat who didn’t want to call in which is you can see it on the screen how do you convince companies they need a buy domain and why do you think so many fail to recognize the value added to a company to the best case domain so thanks Matt I’m gonna answer a quick you know in a short amount of time I’m gonna give my quick answer to that which is what’s interesting is I don’t necessarily think you convince a company to buy a domain name whether it’s a large corporation you know Fortune 100 or someone like Warren who’s entrepreneurial what I think I have found over the years is at some level they get it maybe it’s Peter Kompinger a teamwork realizes man if we were just teamwork .com it would be a hockey stick moment or Woody Levin and hello extends says man we should drop the hello and just be extend .com or Warren Struels like man I can start this amazing business that I had already kind of been in with popcorn around foods if I had chocolate .com and liquorish .com and I think a lot of times you know I’ll give a quick example of this in a real life conversation I had this week and I want to protect the people because this is a multi -billion dollar Fortune 25 company CEO who I have a relationship with and we are representing a domain name that I’ve been talking to him about acquiring for over a year and I don’t want to say who it is but it’s in the domain name is beer .com and it’s in the beer industry so you know he gets the domain name like loves it but we’re talking about an eight -figure purchase and he’s like look it I don’t we’re successful and we’re who we are because we don’t just throw money around even though we have a lot of it and I don’t want to spend that kind of money on a domain name just to have it defensively or just to put it up on a trophy mantle on the shelf for us to buy that domain name which I get and I want to at some point it has to resonate and cut across all aspects of our company the packaging the bottles the bottle caps the Super Bowl ads the marketing and it has to all tie in for it to be really worthwhile and the strategic co -cohesion or the strategic synergy needed for that to happen that’s a long hard road to toe so I can sit here and tell him it’s the greatest thing ever and why but he gets that but he needs to have know how he’s going to use it and that I think is a common theme companies that know why they need the domain and why they’re going to use it ultimately are the ones who make these deals that we do you know we’ve done between Larry: me Mike you know we’ve probably done well over a billion dollars of transactions right on single word domain names and and in order for that to happen you know a lot of times it’s you’re finding that at the right time in the right moment and you’re finding that management person and you they trust you and you have a relationship with them and then you’re then it comes down to a negotiation right and is a big difference right to get you know maybe I can get 15 million where someone else might have got two right so that would be my kind of answer lair I love you know I’m Lauren I’ll probably I don’t you know Warren you probably could sit this one out but if you we only have like a couple minutes with Larry: and Mike you want to take a shot at that you’re welcome to each Larry: why don’t we start with you
Larry:
Yeah, I mean, I think, especially the Fortune 500 companies, you got too many people there at too many different levels that are afraid to put their, you know, go out on the limb to that type of purchase.
Larry:
I think what happens is you do have your insides, you have to people who have a vision, see it, and are able to convince other people of their vision. And I know when you were doing, I think it was home, you know, Andrew and I sold home in the eight figures, one of the largest deals ever.
Larry:
And I remember,
Andrew Miller:
was it one of the largest deals ever Larry:?
Larry:
I remember you I mean this that one comes to heart because you know to mine right away because I remember the story how One person that really saw it had to show that higher certain hard people How it will play out and they really realized now from an enterprise value That name could be you know, they see it as a billion -dollar business.
Larry:
So I can
Andrew Miller:
And to that accord, two things. I mean, we had a champion absolutely at fairway mortgage. And just, you know, I know if you, we have the entire story of home .com, both the deal and how to deal transpired, which is kind of what Larry: was just saying, at Hilco Digital’s YouTube page, that video is up at the keynote’s talk that Larry: and I did at NamesCon.
Andrew Miller:
And then we have last week’s random thoughts episode one where we talked about it even more because home .com was our guest. So worth checking that out. Mike, you got a quick answer or quick thoughts?
Mike Mann:
Well, first of all, how much did home sell for a per letter?
Larry:
Well, do you want to answer that, Andrew?
Andrew Miller:
Well, it had one extra letter to SEO.
Larry:
We got a quarter more, right?
Mike Mann:
There you go. Well, I think the branding overall and the domain name industry is poorly understood by the business, by pedestrians don’t understand it at all. The business community understands it’s a little bit.
Mike Mann:
The marketing community understands it a little bit more, but they don’t understand it very well. To the extent they do understand it, they mostly understand domain registrations and they’ve gotten in their head that those are supposed to be really cheap.
Mike Mann:
And then when it comes to the premium domain space, to us it’s the whole world, but again to businesses overall and marketing professionals overall, it’s a small abstract industry that’s opaque. So they just don’t understand what’s going on.
Mike Mann:
They’re nervous. They don’t know how to come up with a valuation because there aren’t good valuation tools and people generally don’t hire appraising companies like my own appraising company. And so they don’t know what they’re doing.
Mike Mann:
So they’re paranoid and then they hear about all these new domain extensions and they’re told, well, that’s just as good. So then they’re further confused. They may buy one of those for cheap or just feel like the whole thing is extra confusing and lacks transparency.
Mike Mann:
And again, this is only a small bit of people who even care the slightest bit. And even to the extent they do care, they have to be able to afford it, even if they think it’s a great deal, if they don’t literally have the cash in the bank, it doesn’t really matter if they think it’s a good deal.
Mike Mann:
But my fundamental business case here is that 500 out of 500 of the Fortune 500 companies use super premium .com domains or certainly .com domains. There’s one that sort of doesn’t, which is Google is what, ABC .XYZ.
Mike Mann:
But keep in mind, hardly anybody ever types that in. They all go to Google .com. Also keep in mind that the reason they don’t use ABC .com is they couldn’t get it because of ABC TV. And then the second thing is this theory that I espoused many, many years ago, said eventually this is before any of the TV commercials had .com names on it.
Mike Mann:
I said, eventually all the TV commercials will have super premium .com domains on it. So again, Warren is a great example of that. I saw his commercials, I thought, this is the coolest thing ever. Then I found out about chocogut .com.
Mike Mann:
And then it wasn’t until even after that that I realized he was in Delray Beach after speaking to his son, Adam. So I was like, this is crazy. They’re in Delray, they’re friends with Andy. So again, we met up recently and had a meeting of the minds.
Mike Mann:
But the main point is for anybody who cares is that all the best companies and marketing people in the world use premium .coms, all the best TV commercials where the most advertising money is spent per unit, use superpremium .coms.
Mike Mann:
And again, Warren’s an excellent example of it. So this is overwhelming, isn’t the main point.
Andrew Miller:
You know, to wrap up here, you know, I always tell people, just take one week in your life, one day, seven days, Monday at noon, the Monday at noon. And everywhere you go, whatever you’re watching on TV, wherever you’re driving on the highway past billboards, or if you’re on the train or the subway, or you’re opening and flipping through People Magazine, or whatever you do day to day, just know all the media that includes dot com.
Andrew Miller:
It’s NFL .com, it’s Walgreens .com, it’s Amazon .com. It’s, you know, and on and on and on and on, right? And what I think you’ll find is in a given seven day window, you’re looking at probably hundreds of millions of dollars of paid advertisement where the dot com for 25 years is embedded into the consumer’s mind, okay?
Andrew Miller:
And when during that week, I bet you will see, let’s eliminate charity .org. I bet you will see almost no other advertised extension. And you know, we got one more minute because I see them, they don’t have credibility.
Mike Mann:
You think there is scam and 50% of the time or 75% of time there are a fly by night or scam.
Andrew Miller:
Many years ago, GoDaddy launched .co and they were trying to promote it in the Super Bowl. So they did two Super Bowl commercials. Mike, you’re muted. I’m muted. Yeah, there we go. Anyway, they did two Super Bowl commercials.
Andrew Miller:
The first one was GoDaddy .com with their spokesperson, Danica Patrick. And the second one was GoDaddy .co with spokesperson, Joan Rivers. And after they aired both of these 30 second commercials, they later on realized and came out and said that almost 96% of their audience went to the .com anyway, even though they had a .co commercial.
Andrew Miller:
And that’s GoDaddy, right? Yeah, for the record.
Mike Mann:
Andy, you know that I helped launch the .co platform. We won the contract with the government of Columbia and a 1 .9 and 40% of the registrar. The registrar.
Andrew Miller:
remember that. Yep. So I think this was good. I’m going to remind everyone two things. Andrew 20 to buy chocolate from chocolate .com. Two. You can use that on any of our sites, by the way. Any of the sites, liquorish .com, Andrew 20 on everything, liquorish pretzels, chocolate, carmels, all .com.
Andrew Miller:
Go buy some awesome holiday gifts and support Warren. Second, there are, secondly, I’m hoping next week, we’ll post the link for people to call in and ask questions. We had a lot of people last week, so we can kind of rejuvenate that portion of this, because it’s a huge reason I want to do this.
Andrew Miller:
So we’ll have to work on getting more exposure for that. And lastly, since I’m Hilco Digital, and we’re putting this on, HilcoDigital .com slash Domains, we are overseeing absolutely the most valuable portfolio of domain name brands in the world right now.
Andrew Miller:
So if you have an interest, check it out. We will be back in two weeks. And domainmarket .com, of course. And domainmarket .com, which is Mike said, correct. And if you want any of Larry:’s names, you come to me.
Andrew Miller:
So, we’ll be back in two weeks, I think. Hopefully, Larry: and I, for, I haven’t had, with an awesome guest, I’ll announce that as soon as I have it official and confirmed. It is, my goal was to never make this more than 60 minutes.
Andrew Miller:
So it is 12 .59. Lawrence, we can wrap it, call it the day, and we’ll see you guys, everyone have a good couple of weeks, and we’ll see you back soon. Thanks a lot guys. Appreciate it.
Mike Mann:
Sorry.
