Mike Mann interview at Namescon Global 2023 – Mike Mann Gives it Away Original

All right, I know we’re right about on time and I know we’ve got a unique situation Yeah, very good one Dennis. You were telling me about this earlier. Yeah. Yeah, so we actually have It’s called man gives it away.

We have Michael man here You know, he’s actually the founder of domain name. I’m sorry domain market. Excuse me SEO comm phone comm He’s I mean when you say ogee, he’s one of the og so really excited to see him learn more about him We have Amanda waltz that’s gonna be hosting him today, and I know we’re gonna learn a lot So I’m really excited about this is gonna be a fun one really excited to welcome Amanda, yeah, let’s welcome them Am I on thank you everyone thanks for allowing both Mike and I to be here today If you’re in this room, and you know anything about the domain industry at all as they were saying before Mike is one of the originals The reality is he probably doesn’t need much of an introduction at all But for those of you that might Not know his history as well as some of us others He has made millions of dollars over the past 20 years as a domain sales Expert and as they mentioned before he is the founder of three very successful companies that have been built on What I like to call as brand -building Amazing domain names both phone comm SEO comm and then with his own domain portfolio at domain market The other really interesting and rare thing is I think I’ve only seen Mike at maybe one other conference In the domain space at all, and I’ve been coming for about 12 years now So I’m gonna turn it over to Mike and let him tell you why he decided to come back and join us this morning time.

Thank you. I spoke to Amanda a little bit before this event and she was giving me a little pointers and she said don’t try to be witty intellectual or charming just be yourself. No but on a serious note a guy walks into a bar named Ralph with his dog and he says hey my dog can talk and the people in the bar are like there’s no way your dog can’t talk we’ll give you a hundred bucks if your dog can talk.

So he says all right says to the dog what’s my name? The dog says Ralph. The people are like come on get out of here your dog can’t talk and the guy’s like wait wait wait give me one more chance. So he says okay what’s that on top of the house?

The dog goes roof roof and the people are like get the heck out of here this is ridiculous your dog can’t talk. He’s like come on just give me one more chance. Okay dog so this is his last chance he says Okay, dog, who’s the best baseball player of all time?

And the dog goes, Ruth, for Babe Ruth. And then the people kick him out of the bar. They’re like, we’ve had enough of this. So he starts walking down the street and the dog says, maybe I should have said DiMaggio.

Anyway, so the history of my domain conferences is that, this is actually the first time I’ve taken an airplane to a domain conference, even though I’ve been doing domaining for like 25 years. I’ve been to a handful of domain conferences, but it seemed like they were following me around at first because when I lived in Washington DC, they had this conference in Washington DC, so it was a simple drive to get there.

We actually had an awesome party at my house in Washington. Amar was there, Divyank was there, Ron Jackson was there. Actually, Ron Jackson has documented a lot of my journey, so if you can check out the old articles, like Google, DN, Journal, Man, and it’ll pull up a bunch of cool articles.

I’ve actually had lots of articles written in a lot of places, Washington Post, I’ve been on CNN before, CNET, and all these places, but actually Ron Jackson did the best job of documenting the real story, and he’s wrote a bunch of articles, or several articles.

So you can check out a little bit of my history that I skipped today if you’re interested in that respect. But in any event, so I lived in DC, they had a conference there, then they had a conference in New York, which was pretty crazy.

I drove there from Delaware when I lived in Delaware, so that was easy. Then I moved to Santa Monica, and next thing you know, they’re having a domain conference in Santa Monica, like literally right across the street from my apartment, so that was super cool, and we actually had a cool party there that I’m sure some of you were at.

That was a ton of fun living in Santa Monica and having a domain party there. And then I moved to Florida, and sure enough, enough they had several domain conferences in Florida which were really fun and they were an easy drive.

So this is the first one I’ve actually flown to and I don’t know if I think I should have driven because we ended up choosing this thing, Spirit Airline for any of you who know that and that was the freaking nightmare.

Aside from it being a crappy airline, we were getting ready to take off and we were waiting like 20 minutes and then they said, oh we need to fill out some paperwork so we’re taxing you back to the terminal.

Like you gotta be kidding me. So we sit there for another 20 minutes or so and the next thing you know is like, okay everybody has to depart the plane. I’m like, why would we have to depart the plane for a paperwork?

And it turns out it wasn’t paperwork that had a mechanical problem so then we’re stuck in the airport for over another hour. Mark Goriaffi was in the airport with me and his lovely bride, Justina, he was on our plane.

So in any case, so then they’re saying there’s mechanical trouble. I’m like, I hate flying in the first place. I’m on this terrible airline. Now they’re telling me there’s mechanical troubles. I’m like, get me the hell out of here.

So we’re trying to figure out any other way to escape that airport and still get our luggage. But no such luck. So we eventually got back on Spirit Airlines. Some of the people missed the plane because I guess they were unwilling to get back on or they were stuck in the bar or something.

I don’t know what happened, but they were a bunch of the first time the seats were all full. And then when we actually took off, there were several empty seats, a bunch of empty seats. So in any case, we got here, you know, it was a bumpy ride and next time I’m driving.

It’s a story of that. But those early domain conferences for those of you who are there were crazy. This is like much more mature and much more professional. Like back then, I don’t know if you guys know like Slavic Viner, Miguel, Dave Lismie.

You probably know Frank Schilling and his crew were there, Divyank and his crew were there. So like we used to party all night, go to rock clubs, go to strip clubs and go nuts. And it’s not so professional as it is anymore.

It was a lot of fun, but a little too fun. So contrasting last night, I stayed up all night drinking tea and watching TV. So it’s changed a lot to say the least. So in any event, it’s been a fun ride and I’ll answer whatever Amanda says.

Okay. Well, maybe I’ll sneak in a few other questions, but just kidding. I can go forever. So I think on the top of most people’s minds when we read the articles and listen to some of the information out there about you, is who or what really inspired you to become a Slavic Viner?

involved in the domain industry? Sure. I’m really a charity worker and those of you who remember some of the earlier conferences my charity grassroots .org used to be in one of the booths and I had my employees and co -workers work in the floor and getting people engaged in our charity and from the very beginning even before I was into business and domaining I was doing charity work and really you know a lot of people become successful and then they do charity work I was the charity worker that couldn’t finance my lifestyle so I had to learn business and start businesses in order to finance my charity work and you know pay for my apartment and things like that so I started out you know really modestly and you know at first just for example you know I lived in Washington DC I worked with the Homo Saton I worked with inner -city youth I branded myself as mic man counter lobbyist So the first thing I ever did when I learned to use a computer, I got a mail merge program and I would constantly write letters to every single senator and every single congressman.

And back then, you could walk into any office with no security. So I literally took my motorcycle down to Capitol Hill regularly and I hand delivered notes to every single senator office and every single congressman’s office a bunch of times.

And it was stuff about hunger and the environment and things I still support many years later. So in any event, at some point, I started a company called Internet Interstate, which was at the very beginning of the whole ISP phenomenon.

And our clients literally like, what’s the internet? How do we use it? But we install software, show them what email was, get them engaged, and eventually we got bought out by a company called Vario.

And I still had a couple dozen great domains left over that Vario didn’t get, that weren’t part of the transaction. But at that point, I thought I was retired, actually. I had a million bucks. The interest rates were 5%.

And I was planning on living on $50 ,000 a year the rest of my life and just doing charity work. But the president of Vario, Justin Joshkes, was like, you got to be kidding me. You’re a good businessman and there’s no way you can ever live on $50 ,000 a year.

You’re going to start wanting material possessions. Back then, I didn’t have any aspirations for houses and cars and vacations and things like that. So in any case, he was right. And it turned out that I’m a better serving charity by starting businesses, making money and building charities, giving money to charities, supporting charities, working on charity business plans.

That’s more beneficial than me just being one guy, helping the homeless at a homeless place for example. So that’s really been my mission. That’s what really drives me. Since that time, I’ve changed a lot.

Again, now I’m more materialistic. I have like a house, a beach house renovation I have to do. So, you know, I have to work hard to pay for that. I’ve taken out huge amount of debt and loans that I have to support.

I have two children and one on the way. One just graduated law school that was two weeks ago, who’s very successful and it’s very expensive. My son Victor is an extremely successful first grader, as smart as a whip, who’s somewhere back here.

I saw him come in. Back there. That’s great. And Elijah is going to be born in July. So in any case, I still, I do a lot of charity work. My main charity is called Make Change Trust Now. Grasroutes .org.

I closed a few years ago, but that was very successful. Grasroutes .org gave away free services to thousands of other 501C3 charities was our mission. So they got free phone services, free consulting, free web work, free web hosting, all variety of things.

But it turned out there’s some bigger companies that do a better job at that. When I started there weren’t. We were pioneers in that area. And nowadays there’s much bigger organizations that can do a better job.

So we eventually closed that. And now I operate a thing called Make Change Trust. For reference, there’s links to all this stuff at micman .com. There’s links to the book I wrote. There’s links to all my charity work.

There’s links to all the companies we’ve started and sold, ones we still have. And the other charity thing I’m starting recently is called Fearless Leaders .com. If anybody’s interested, you can check that out.

Great, thank you. So with everything that you have going on, how do you stay motivated within your own portfolio of domains and motivated to continue to drive sales? Well, I’m mostly super competitive.

I was just born like that. I can’t stand the idea of somebody doing better than me. So I have these guys out here that do better than me. So I have to wake up every day while they’re screwing around and get up earlier and work harder and study more and hire better.

So again, I wrote a book. I try to follow my own lessons from my own book about the work ethic and studying and doing a good job at hiring, learning, leveraging automation, technology, not being complacent about any of the things.

So I’m just super competitive. And I do need to serve charity. I do need to service my debt. I need to take care of my family. So I have lots of motivation. I’ve always been like that anyway. So I didn’t really have to change.

I was born like that, basically. Good. And so it continues to drive you forward on a daily basis. Yeah. Not a thing. as good as I used to be. I’m a little, I’m aging, but. Wondering if you could share a particular domain sale or story in business that you’re particularly proud of.

Well, we’ve built and sold a lot of cool companies. As far as one that’s purely a domain, we set a record a long time ago. Jeff Gabriel is actually, I don’t know if he’s here today, but he was the broker for secs .com.

So that was in the Guinness Book of World Records. And so that was 13 million bucks at the time. So that was a big thing. We also sold software .com. We sold skateboards .com, snowboards .com, surfboards .com.

So we’ve sold a lot of big names over the years. I still own a lot of really big ones that I have not sold yet. And I own a company called seo .com that leverages a premium domain, will you mention that?

I own a company that’s super cool called Phone .com, which is an awesome company you guys should check out. It’s doing really great. And again, it leverages a premium domain. The value of the company goes up because we keep adding clients.

But just as importantly, if you look at the comparables, you can see that Voice .com sold for $30 million. So Phone .com has an asset on top of all our clients and our cash flow. Just the domain ostensibly is worth $30 million, which obviously we bought it for considerably less than that a long time back.

And again, SEO .com used to have 120 employees, but now it’s a different organization. But the domain itself keeps going up in value. So again, just retaining the world’s best domain names. All those other ones I mentioned that we had sold, I wish I owned now because they’re worth dramatically more than they were worth back when we sold them.

True. I would agree with that for sure. With all the strategic moves that you’ve made within your domain portfolio, it always has seemed to me that you do this with such ease and confidence. Has that always been the case for you?

I wouldn’t say ease and confidence. I mean, it’s so hard. I mean, I’m very disciplined at buying domains. And I bought, at one point I had 300, well first of all, we sold another company called buydomains .com that a lot of you know about that had 500 ,000 domains.

So I had to look through and study millions and millions of domains in order to buy 500 ,000 names. Plus, anybody who buys domains here knows you can’t sleep, you can’t take vacation, you can’t do anything else if you’re gonna buy 500 ,000 domains, unless you’re planning on losing all your money very quickly.

So it required a lot of time and automation, but my current company had 300 ,000 names and I’ve been spending the last, so it’s not easy to buy, I was extremely hard to buy them, but… At some point I had 300 ,000 domains and the problem is I knew that I had bought them for less than they were worth because I Did the analysis when I bought them, but I didn’t know if they were worth You know if I bought them for 10 bucks or 100 bucks I knew they were worth at least a thousand they could be worth 10 ,000, but that’s the point I didn’t know what they were worth.

They were worth more than I paid, but I didn’t know what they were worth So I had to appraise Working endless hours and we built like an unbelievable tool set I have super smart guys that work for me or software engineers and we came up with all these tricks and data points and An incredible user interface to allow me to appraise those domains efficiently It still takes an incredible amount of time to appraise 300 ,000 domains no matter how efficient you are no matter how good you are No matter how much tools and data you have so but I just finished Doing the whole thing so It’s been exhausted That is quite a feat So as a result of that for one thing we’re gonna delete like 20 ,000 domains at the low end We have them priced super low right now those ones that will probably delete or we might put them on auction So we’re selling a lot for like three hundred fifty five hundred dollars the lowest end But a lot of them went up in price a lot of them went down in price We had them priced most of them were priced prior to this project But they weren’t priced as accurately now we have much better tools and much better data and spent dramatically more time So now the prices are really solid And we can negotiate we know we get forced to negotiate with people We want to get the fair market value, which is what they’re priced at but you know, we want to get paid So if we force to negotiate we take discounts, but The we never take less than 50 percent.

We usually we usually get a hundred percent sometimes we get 90 75 and You know sometimes if I really need the money and it’s a lot of money on the table I’ve taken 50 percent, but we never take less than 50 percent of the praise value.

I Can attest to that I’ve bought domains for Mike for clients and he’s a tough negotiator Well again, it’s like most people don’t really understand the fair market value Even if you have an eye you do better than most people but even if they have an idea They don’t have the data we have they don’t know the traffic and we have these Special data sets that other people have never known about or seen before even the biggest companies that do this stuff Don’t have the tools that we have so they can guess the price But you know, we’re motivated to get the price right because if I’m price it too high I get zero dollars It’s like pricing it at zero So I’m not trying to price them too high on purpose because that wouldn’t help me at all because I wouldn’t get I wouldn’t be able To sell the name and I’m not pricing it too low because I don’t want to lose any money So I’m trying my best to use all the tools possible and price them what I consider exactly right.

And since I’ve appraised more and sold more than just about anybody on earth, you know, there’s no, it’s a matter of opinion, but my opinion holds water because I’ve done the most of this stuff. So, and again, so we sell stuff every day for whatever prices and people online are like, how could you get that price?

You know, I would have sold that for a thousand bucks, something we just sold for fifty thousand. Again, because they don’t have the tools and the experience we have. And having said that, you know, we built a company called accurate appraisals .com, which is the world’s very best domain appraisal company.

Obviously I’m biased, but it’s actually true. Well, again, it’s true because the world’s best experts appraise the domains there, and I’m one of the appraisers. And the thing, the reason it’s the best is not because I’m the appraiser, it’s because there’s three appraisers.

Braden, I don’t know if he’s here, he’s one of, he helps me out all the time as one of the appraisers. Amanda’s going to help me. We have Mark Daniel, Maureen, some other people that a lot of people know are some of the world’s best domain appraisers.

So we have three people appraise each domain, which again, if it was at another company, they couldn’t get three people as good. They would probably charge a couple thousand bucks for it, and it wouldn’t be as good of an appraisal.

So we charge $88 to get the world’s best appraisal, and we appraise million -dollar domains all the time for $88. So it’s a great deal. It reminds me of my book in the sense that when I wrote my book, my book is called Make Millions and Make Change.

There’s a website, MakeMillions .com. All this stuff, by the way, is linked at mic -man .com. But my book is very cheap at Amazon, and it’s free online for download. There’s no ads or anything. So when I wrote it, I thought, well, everybody in the world is going to read this book.

How could they not? It’s free download, and you’re going to learn how to make millions of bucks. And it’s a small book. It’s relatively simple to read. So I was sure that I couldn’t imagine why everybody in the world, everybody talks about wanting to make money, but I was wrong.

I still don’t know why, but I was wrong. So that’s the same case with my appraisal company. When we launched this, and I got the best people to work with me on it, and we have a beautiful software system backing it up, I thought for sure everybody in the world was going to use it, because I’m like, well, these domains don’t have a liquid market.

How are we going to get liquidity in this space? How are all these big companies, because it’s even cheaper in bulk. So how are all these big companies with millions of domains, hundreds of thousands of domains, and all the people have a couple thousand or a couple hundred domains, they don’t have the method to get a fair market value, and they also don’t have a certificate certifying that it’s the fair market value.

So again, this is an extremely liquid market. It makes no sense. Again, if you look on Wall Street, it’s stocks and bonds. They’re all praised by professionals. used cars are all appraised by professionals, jewelries all appraised by professionals, and in a variety of industries, this is the only one where there’s billions and billions of dollars at stake and there’s almost no appraisals or hardly any qualified appraisers and hardly any tools, so it makes no sense.

So I still have a lot of hope for my book and for my appraisal company. Well, when you and I were talking previously, a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t even aware that you had this tool. So I think it’s even a secret within our industry and more people do need to know about it.

I’ve done a terrible job promoting both of them. Well, that’s really, that’s what it boils down to. I mean, I need to get out there more and I need to have a booth here that… Well, everybody here can get their own domain appraisals now.

Yep. Yeah, absolutely. That’s the object. Yeah. So… You touched upon this a little bit, but what are the key drivers for what your current portfolio looks like today? You just talked a little bit about those domains that you’re either going to delete or drop or auction.

Is there a method to all of this and why your domain portfolio looks as it does now? Yeah, well it’s based on the data first of all. So, you know, whether I’m buying something on auction or I’m appraising my own collection, I look at this data fingerprint basically.

And we have all the common data that a lot of people have, but we have a lot of data that other people aren’t familiar with that is extremely valuable. And we have this really awesome user interface that allows us to look at it in a certain way that other people can’t see the data.

So it’s all based on the data, the stuff, and then there’s comparables. So, again, you know, I have this idea related to AI where, you know, again, since we did such a detailed job of appraising our whole domain collection, those are the best comps in the world is my collection.

These 200 ,000 plus domain names, if anybody else has a collection, they could have some sort of AI bot, compare their names to my collection in an AI sort of manner. But that would only give you a rough idea.

So that’s what we do is we get a rough idea using our system, and then I manually study it and look at certain aspects of it. And based on my, you know, history doing this, I lock up price in. And we have price schedule.

So it’s like, you know, a lot of people have seen like 19888, 29888, 39888, and then, you know, it goes up to 9488, etc. Once it gets to a million dollars, we use round numbers, we get rid of the eights.

And a lot of people copy it. They like our structure. because they see us selling a lot of domains at 888. So in that respect, you get into the consumer’s head a little bit and know that these are the price points that are buying signals and they’re much more apt to buy if it ends in 888.

Basically. OK. And I don’t know if Walmart stole that from me or if they had it first, but Walmart does the same thing. I saw it at Walmart after I had done it. I don’t think they stole it from me, but we did it simultaneously.

But basically, we’ve all seen since the beginning of time everybody prices everything at 999, but then psychologically you move that up to the next level. So that doesn’t… But when you move down to 888, the people don’t psychologically jump it up to the next level.

They see it somewhere in the middle, which is the psychology behind it. It’s as high as we can get without people thinking it’s at the next level. So 29888, if they’re looking at the 9, they might think that.

Maybe we should make it in 2888. But in any event, 888s, we’ve found to be beneficial and we’ve seen a lot of people copying us as a result. Yep, makes sense. I’ve seen it too. Who are some of the folks in our industry who you admire the most?

That’s a setup. I actually wrote a little list, but I was like, this list is so long and I’m gonna forget some people. So if you want, I can read it or… Well, I mean, the people from way back who are my direct competitors, I mean Frank Schilling was always the second best.

I can’t say he was the best. You’re lucky he’s not here today. Kevin Ham did an awesome job. The Castello brothers did a great job. There’s so many people that I can barely do it. Amar did a great job, he’s done a great job.

Sahar Sirid still does a great job. He has like 30 ,000 domain names. The Domain King, I don’t know if he’s around. He does a great job. There’s so many people, that’s why this was like a setup. There’s also like a hundred great domain brokers, some of my very close friends.

There’s a lot of people that started awesome domain companies, David Wormos, on and on and on. I apologize, I just… There’s so many people that are really good, I just named a handful of them. But there’s no lack of great domain people.

Yeah, we’re lucky to have people that are so collaborative in our space and friendly and welcoming. I couldn’t agree with you more. Schilling was always the biggest storm in my side though. Because he was like me, he never gave up.

He worked all night and he was in every single auction, he was impossible. So thank God he retired. So if anybody has read… Mike’s book or any of the articles that he has written, you would know that he’s pretty honest about his philosophy on business.

What lessons have you learned over the years by adhering to your philosophies? Yeah, well again, there’s no shortcuts. Like it’s just crazy, like the books people write and the people are touting like a four day school day.

Like that’s ridiculous, a four day business day. Like I’ve worked seven days a week, almost my entire life. So the idea that in people, it’s great if you can afford to do it, it’s fine, but if you’re actually trying to make money, there’s all these books about like working less, how it’s going to be beneficial to you.

And that’s just not true. I mean, it’s not true. And the other thing is, you know, there’s a lot of soul proprietors, which is awesome, but you really can’t get a ton of leverage unless you have a team.

I used to have. literally hundreds of employees. Now I have a very small team. Well, phone .com has over 100 employees, but it’s a company I started, but I don’t actually work there on a day -to -day basis.

But my own current close team is very tiny, but they’re super hardworking and super smart, so that expands my reach dramatically and allows us to do a lot of things. You know, I could barely scrape the surface without the people on my team by a long shot.

So it’s a lot of work ethic. A lot of it is just self -confidence. Like, you know, I’ve taken on these very big things, and at first I was super successful, like regularly, so my confidence was unbelievably high.

Now I’ve had a handful of problems and failures, so I’m still very confident, but I’m like, I got knocked down considerably. But that’s bad. That’s the bad part. Having self -confidence, you know, you have to believe.

You have to believe in your plan. And speaking of a plan, again, most people, like, wing it. Like, they’re just like, oh, I’m just going to work. I’m like, I believe you have to have a very buttoned -up business plan and financial plan.

Like, winging it’s not going to cut it. It’s not going to work. You have to have a business plan. It has to follow the standard rules of business plans, and you need a lot of people to help you debug it.

And then that’s your execution plan, and you need to have a great team, a lot of confidence, and a lot of capital, or at least enough capital, to meet your plan. You share that philosophy with another entrepreneur, Matt Higgins.

Are you familiar with Burn the Boats? Sounds familiar. He talks a lot about how you also can’t wing it, and there are no plan Bs. You stick with your plan A until you either succeed or fail. And I never really drew the correlation between the two of you until you were just talking right now.

You sound a lot like him. That’s funny. The other point is that within your business plan, if you don’t have one of the world’s best domain names, you’re making a mistake because the world’s best domain names brings you recognition right off the bat.

It’s memorable. People repeat it. People think you’re a serious business. It draws more leads. It draws a higher conversion value. It also helps you sell your company if you’re trying to sell it or get investors.

I use the example of ring .com, got a billion dollars. It was called doorbot before that or something. I think doorbot. It would not have gotten a billion dollars. And it probably would have never gotten a meeting with Amazon at all.

He said, hey, I have this thing called ring .com. It’s the coolest thing in the world. Jeff Bezos said, really, let’s talk to you. If it was called something else, I would bet anything he would have never got a meeting and he would have never gotten a billion dollars for it.

So again, that’s just a lesson for every company that Most people in this room already know that, but again, it’s a shocking thing is and I’m sorry for everybody in here in the GTLD space But if you can get a dot -com it makes absolutely no sense not to get it because Somebody else is gonna have the dot -com and then they’re gonna look better than you or prevent you from using that in commerce And if you do have the dot -com you don’t need any of the other extensions.

So dot -com is king It’s always gonna be king. There’s never gonna be a way to displace it It reminds me of when I was young In school the teachers told us, you know, we’re getting rid of standard measurements Everybody’s gonna use the metric system.

So you’re gonna have to learn this metric system thing It’s like no, we’re never gonna have to learn the metric system Standard measures are staying in the United States and dot -com is staying forever.

So Again by the best calm the people here know it but the thing that makes no sense is the number of companies that keep naming themselves Really crappy dot -com names. They won’t invest five First of all, you can buy a great dot -com usually for two or three thousand bucks I sell them all day long at two or three thousand bucks like excellent names But for fifty thousand dollars you can buy an incredible one and for a million dollars you can buy something like ring dot -com So it just makes no sense to like put this effort into a great business plan Put all this self esteem into it work endless hours and then use some crappy long Dot -com domain or some crappy GTLD domain So it’s the same as Bitcoin there’s no end users it’s like That’s fun trading them around and talking about them and having conferences and bidding them up But they’re not gonna hold water.

So it’s a mistake Talk a little bit about What lessons you are teaching your own children about your work in domain investing if you could sure Well first of all my daughter used to sit next to me at my desk endlessly doing deals, and now she’s a mergers and acquisitions attorney.

And she got outstanding grades, which is interesting because I did very poorly in school, actually. She must have been listening and watching your work ethic. That’s kind of the point. It’s the work ethic and self -confidence.

Those are the main things I try to drive home. But again, just being cautious, studying really hard, documenting everything, working with great people. And again, my son sits next to me working, too.

And he got 100% on most of his tests in the first grade. We’re very blessed. So I just teach them hard work. Teach them there’s no free ride. Again, there’s no consolation prize or participation prize.

And those ideals are a mistake. Competition is what makes individuals great, and then all the great individuals. combined, makes everybody compete and makes the economy better and makes the world safer, smarter, more secure.

Sure. So there’s no replacement for competition. Okay. We are about six minutes left on time. I know we want to get some questions from the audience, but my final question is what and where can we, what can we expect next from you?

Well, my domain company is extraordinarily well situated, so if I stay in this business, you know, eventually, you know, we’re going to have more capital through sales and through investors and we’re going to start buying other collections and put more tool, put a bigger tool set into the auctions where we’re not going to let people take good new mains out of the auction to the best of our ability.

It’s getting very competitive and there isn’t as much stuff there, but basically we’re deleting the low end and we’re building out the high end of our collection. So we’re going to try to make this company very big.

My company, phone .com is awesome and growing. This appraisal company I mentioned is just starting out, but you know, we think, you know, there’s no competition for it. If there were, they wouldn’t have as good of people working on it.

Again, there’s three appraisers. We give the average and put it on a certificate. So it’s a very high quality appraisal. It’d be very hard to match it and if anybody could match it, they couldn’t do it at such a low price.

So I have a lot of hope for those companies, for my charity work. Again, I do this thing, make change trust, makechange .com. We give hundreds of thousands of dollars a year away, mostly to small charities in South Florida and people that I can see and work with and talk to.

So we’d like to build up that charity more. and help more people, expand it more. So basically, a lot more of the same, basically. And I’m doing a terrible job retiring. Well, unfortunately. I think that goes without saying that you have built everything on this hard work.

And it doesn’t seem like you’re ready to retire just yet. I’d like to be able to afford to retire, at least. But no, I’m obviously not going to retire. But I could do some more cycles at the beach and more sleep and more time with my kids.

Yeah. We’re getting down to three minutes. I’m sure that there’s some questions out there from the audience. Is there somebody with a OK, great Elizabeth, thank you. I see a gentleman right over here in the front.

And Mike. I was curious, now that you’re looking back at all these years and then going forward, what you think the answer to this horrible illiquidity problem in the domain industry is, right? So obviously, the answer for you as a business and many other businesses was quantity, and that is one answer.

But what do you think the answer is for the industry going forward? Because it is a grossly undervalued asset class. Yeah, well, there’s two answers. One is all the names have to be appraised professionally.

Otherwise, there’s no marketplace, there’s no liquidity like every other normal marketplace. So nobody knows what it’s worth. The buyers are nor the sellers, so it’s impossible to make a match without the buyers and the sellers.

And then the general marketplace has been confused by all the GTLDs. There’s nothing wrong with them. They work perfectly fine. But it’s just, you know, they should appraise very low. So again, and it’s for the same reason as they’re not as memorable.

You can trade them forever. You can raise the prices. Again, it’s like Bitcoin is like Bitcoin prices outrageous, but nobody uses Bitcoin. They just use it for trading. And that’s the same thing with the GTLDs.

People buy them, sell them, trade them around. Some people, very few, start companies with them. And most of those people regret it and then call us and say, okay, we’re ready to buy the .com. So it’s education for the end users.

It’s education for everybody here in appraising your own domain collections and appraising the world’s biggest marketplaces that have millions and millions of domains that are unappraised. So nobody has any idea what they’re worth.

So they’re actually not marketplaces. They’re places, but they’re not marketplaces. The marketplaces imply some level of liquidity, which they don’t have. We have the skills, the people who work for me have the skills to create a bot, but it’ll be much better than the ones that are out there.

And we probably we will eventually get to it. We have a really long tech list, and I need to hire some more people and get through my tech list. But we will eventually hopefully have a bot that is much better than the other ones, but there’s no replacement for a manual appraisal.

And again, I think I’m pretty good at appraisals. I’ve done more than anybody and I have lots of tools, but I still don’t even trust myself without getting Braden, Amanda, Mark, some other people to balance it out, to get three appraisals and take the average.

And that’s whether you use my service or not, everybody should get three professional appraisals in order to come up with one appraisal. So again, there’s no liquidity in the marketplace without proper appraisals and hardly any names that all have any appraisal or any certificate.

And again, just the general public has been confused by the GTLDs, by the country codes, by this and that. But again, if you see Fortune 500 company, every single one of them, 500 of the world’s best appraisals.

CEOs and the world’s best marketing people use .com. You can say Alphabet uses X, Y, Z, but they use Google .com. Nobody goes to X, Y, Z. They all go to Google .com. And the only reason they don’t have ABC .com is because somebody else has it.

They would prefer to be ABC .com. They don’t want to be X, Y, Z. They had a choice, but they chose an alternate path. So again, there’s this general education of the public, consumers, business people, the Fortune 500 already know, but millions and millions of small businesses need to be educated.

All the domains need to be appraised. Then we’ll have a real marketplace and a lot of liquidity. Anybody else before I get kicked out of here? I wish we had more time for more questions. Are you willing to stay if somebody has some questions?

I think we have a couple of gentlemen who are going to come up and give us some more domain sales. The last thing I wanted to say is I have some handouts that Peter has, I think, back there. Oh, he already handed them out.

Okay, so I have some handouts in business cards if you didn’t get them. I also, I put the text of the handouts. If you didn’t get them, I put it on LinkedIn and Facebook. I copied and pasted my handouts.

Yeah, there’s some handouts. And in the back by the camera there and over on the AV booth, there are your cards for people to get in touch with you. Cool. And I have a social media presence. I also did like 50 hours of live streams that you can find on YouTube and at mic -man .com.

So you can hear me talk for 50 hours like this. Again, you can read my book, which will teach you how to make millions of dollars and you can download it for free or buy it from Amazon for eight books.

Thank you. And call me, email me. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. You did a great job. That’s great, thank you.