CNN Interview with Mike Mann

Jeff Bezos: It is absolutely critical. There’s no rest for the weary as we move forward. We’re constantly trying to innovate around customer experience. So what an example of this. One of the things we did is one click shopping. So again, this is an ease of use feature. It made it incredibly easy for people to buy online.

Bob Guccione: Penthouse is online very successfully. We sell membership, so we actually make money out of the internet, and it is now becoming the biggest, uh, contributor to to profit for the magazine.

Bill Tucker: Making an impression, if the name of your business doesn’t exude success, your bottom line may not either. Internet domain names are the first step in attracting customers to your site.

Joining us with tips on how to pick a name that gets noticed is Michael Mann, president and [00:01:00] founder of Rare domains.com. Michael, thanks for being with us. Thanks a lot for inviting me. What does rare domains.com do? If I come to you as a young entrepreneur and say, look, I’ve got this great business and I wanna move on to the internet.

What’s the service that rare domain

Mike Mann: provides? Well, rare domains.com owns the world’s largest. And we think the world’s best collection of internet domain names. Mm-hmm. So if you go into our website, you’ll see an interface that’s somewhat similar to what you would see at like Yahoo, where you go in and there’s a search box.

You can type in a key word. So if you’re a banker, you can type in the word finance bank money, and it’ll pull up potentially hundreds of internet domain names that are first sale that. Match the words that you’re typing in. And there’s also a browse category, so you could just click on the category finance, for example, to find those same

Bill Tucker: names.

Now, these are names you own, right? If I sat out there and thought up my own name, and if it happened to [00:02:00] be a name you owned, then I’d have to come and talk to you anyway. Correct? Basically. But in general.

Mike Mann: People buy right off our website, we

Bill Tucker: you’re welcome to talk to me. What’s, what’s the, what’s the cost if like, of a typical domain?

Do they vary by rarity or, I mean,

Mike Mann: is there, uh, I mean, it’s based on what we find to be the quality of the name. Most of our names that our market are approximately $500 each. On the other hand, we do have some names like government.net. And resume.net that are tens of thousands of dollars because of their uniqueness.

And they represent Yeah, they’re, they’re extremely rare.

Bill Tucker: What, what do you, what sort of service do you provide? Uh, uh, the customers who come in and say, okay, gee, I like that name. I want that name. What do, what do you provide? Do you register it to, to me in the case if, if we I’m

Mike Mann: the entrepreneur. Yes, sir.

We’ll transfer it right over to you. Basically, uh, next to each name there’s a little button that says Buy now. If you want to buy it, you fill in the form, sign it, put in your credit card [00:03:00] number, fax it in, and then we will arrange the transfer. So your company will then own that name. Do

Bill Tucker: you offer companies advice though, that are looking to get started on the web?

Do you have any kind of service or if you don’t or you do?

Mike Mann: Well, um, certainly there’s links on our site that provide some information, but in general, uh, we like to tell people that they want to have a key word in their domain name that’s relevant to the type of business they do, and therefore. Search engines on the internet are more likely to pick up their website.

So a unique identifier.

Bill Tucker: Exactly. What about, uh, you know, there are other ways to go about this business also. I can I get there? I could go to Yahoo and get a my company page. Uh, do you advise people to avoid using ISPs as an, as a, as a, in the form of their address and Well, we certain why, if

Mike Mann: you do. Yeah, we think it’s much more.

Appropriate for a company to be using their own unique domain name in their internet dealing. So for example, I would prefer to [00:04:00] have my company be www.raredomains.com, as opposed to www.yahoo.com/rare domains. And the same with an email address. I’d rather be. mike@raredomains.com instead of rare domains@aol.com,

Bill Tucker: how do you add value to a name?

I noticed that that’s one of the, one of the things you advise as well, but how do you do that?

Mike Mann: Well, I basically, we think that the names are adding value automatically. Okay. If, for example, somebody could own a domain name for an investment, even if they weren’t gonna use the name, and we believe that the value of these names will continue to rise because.

Huge numbers of new companies are continuously getting on the internet and they’re clamoring for good internet brands, right? And those brands are contained in the name that people use to look up the company.

Bill Tucker: Excellent. Michael, thank you very much for being with us. We’re out of time, but Michael Brown, president and founder of rare domains.com.

Thank you. That is it for Entrepreneurs [00:05:00] only. I’m Bill Tucker. Goodnight from New York

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