Mike Mann: from founding BuyDomains to S_x.com to DomainMarket and leveraging AI to grow business.

Our guest stay on the uncomfortable podcast with Jeffrey Gabriel is Mike Mann. Mike has been part of the domain industry since the mid to late 90s and created, founded, sold, or is part of many of the major brands that are leaders in our space today.

Mike has founded BiDomains, purchased and sold Sex .com, was an investor slash advisor to .co domain extension. He’s founded the domain domain market .com, SEO .com, which he grew into over 100 employee company and he’s recently sold, phone .com, and is even the creator of the technology behind domain search, something that we all benefit from on every domain registrar and domain marketplace today.

Oh yeah, and he’s a published author as well. But, you know, in the tumultuous world of entrepreneurship, there was always one constant with Mike. Mike always took the time to help others with his non -profits, grassroots .org, and make change.

And like I said, when I launched this podcast, people see the success in entrepreneurs or business people. But they do not always see the struggle in one success that they had to get there. And Mike comes from humble beginnings and is entirely self -made.

And as we know, life is not always roses. So today you get to hear his story, his journey, and hopefully some nuggets of information that will help you on yours. And I know I did. So today I give you Mike the man and you can contact him by visiting mikeman with two ends .com.

You can always listen to us on all the major outlets like Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and countless others. If you’d like to be a guest or have some feedback, send me a message at buzzatsaw .com. Buzeezy at SAW .com.

Thank you. So, Mike, going through your bio in your history as a business person, you’ve had your fingers in a lot of different deals and opportunities. But one that I really want to focus on is in the beginning of your bio that I read was in 1994, you sold internet real estate to a company called Vario.

And my question is, and obviously that was a really big deal in your life and a big opportunity and started everything off. But the first question of them all like to ask people like you is how the heck did you get into domain use?

Sure. Internet interstate. Yeah. Internet real estate is a different operation. No, it’s fine. Well, what happened is I was a small time entrepreneur and I studied business a lot. I read a lot of business books.

And I just, you know, I wanted to become, I wanted to make a lot of money. mostly to support my charity work, but I wanted to keep some of it. So back then, I literally just spent tons of time in the library reading business periodicals, and checking out business books, and studying around the library.

I had a job already and a small business already, but I was trying to figure out how to do something bigger. Again, this is 1992, 93. There was these hints and certain publications, business week, ink magazine, whatever the business periodical fortune magazine especially.

You would see these articles by these really smart people, and they would talk about this abstract thing called the Internet that was being used at universities and with the military and medical center.

They said, one day this is going to be commercialized, people are going to conduct billions of dollars worth of business on it, and all the platforms are going to collapse on top of this thing called the Internet, all the private networks were going to be connected to the Internet, AOL wasn’t going to be relevant or necessary anymore.

This pattern kept repeating by the smartest scholars in these business publications and scientific publications. I just decided, I’m not technically skilled hardly at all, like zero. I just decided, hey, I’m going into the Internet business before it was a big deal.

I was like, hey, I’ll catch the wave, I’m going to get in on this thing early and ride this wave, it’s being predicted out. I started a tiny company called Internet Interstate, whose job was to connect small businesses onto the Internet.

And to train them. So the vast majority of my customers either never heard of the Internet, they had no idea how to connect to it, they didn’t know what email. because they didn’t know what was going on.

So I hired some super smart young technical guys. Some of them were working part -time government employees, working on the government’s networks and internet, because I’m from Washington, DC. And so in any case, I hired these really smart young guys, and we started connecting small companies to the internet, basically.

And then Mark Andreessen invented the World Wide Web, or the graphical World Wide Web. The actual World Wide Web was invented, but it was a text -based enterprise. And then it was basically only geeks were using it, and there was very little content on it.

There was Yahoo! actually existed as a text -based thing. There was this thing called Yanoff’s List, which was like a directory of the few thousand things that were available on the web. It was one iteration of the internet.

So in any event, we started this company, Internet Interstate. We grew it up over a few years. And then this group called Vario was consolidating all the tiny internet companies like my own And so we sold out to them ultimately.

That’s the simplified version Got it and throughout that it sounds like you’re working more on helping people build websites set up email things like that When did you kind of kind of click that domains were going to be worth sure the money they are today?

I wonder that sure well again my clients were in the Washington, DC Area, so I started collecting domains that were relevant to the type of clientele I had I was trying to encourage them not really to sell it to them, but just hey you should use this website I was actually trying it in reverse.

I was buying the domain names and then approaching the businesses to become my customer So like okay, I owned realtors org and I was trying to get the National Association of realtors to become my client Which they never did I bought menus calm and I tried to get the National Restaurant Association to be my client.

I bought government net I bought a congressional net some of these I still own like But in any event so I was just collecting you know a few dozen of these contextual domain names for my clients intended to be my clients a few of them ended up being my clients But most of them I ended up keeping I gave one for free to my friends young and associates I gave them YA comm and then yada no way and then yahoo bought that from them for like a hundred thousand bucks or something Which now it’d be worth a couple million probably but back then oh yeah I was like they just got a hundred thousand bucks for something I gave them for free and and they just changed their own domain for their own company so in any event You know the theoretical value was presenting itself of the domains themselves So after I sold internet interstate, I still owned a couple dozen of these great domain names One of which was menus calm And so somebody approached me about buying menus .com for 25 ,000 bucks.

I was like, this is great. You know, cost me $35 a year to renew this. I’m going to make $25 ,000. Literally the next day, somebody offered me $50 ,000 for the exact same name. And I ended up selling it to the $25 ,000 guy because I had a verbal agreement with him.

Wow. And in early, well late 90s money, that’s probably three times that it is now, or at least two times what it is now. So that’s, and you didn’t have as much money as you have now as well, right? Definitely not.

So I’m sure that was a hard picker. And then again, the other point is, you know, 25 or 50 ,000, now that domain’s worth more than a million bucks. So another case of where I wish I’d kept it. So the main story is that I wish I kept all the great domains I’ve sold because then I’d be worth, you know, 10 times more than I am.

because I own all these great things that, and I wouldn’t have sold, you know a lot of the big ones I’ve sold, had I kept them, each, you know, the best ones keep going way up in value. So those, yeah.

Well, I mean, one of the best ones is a sale that I got to be a part of because of you, and we didn’t even know each other at the time. I mean, I spoke to an attorney, Brian Taft, who brought the opportunity to CEDO, as a broker, I got to sellsex .com.

How did you get yourself involved with buying that? I know there was multiple parties involved in that domain. Yeah, well, first of all, Brian Taft is still one of my best friends and one of the best deal makers, and we still do a lot of business together.

And so we’ve been working together for like 20 years. So he’s a super attorney and deal maker. I think, I don’t know if he’s still an attorney, but he has attorney training, and he’s done lots of mergers and acquisitions.

He’s a super smart guy, still work. As far as that deal itself, if you remember the story, Gary Kremmann used to own that, and it was part of this huge drama, like people should read. We had a drug problem, right?

And there were some other issues with him going on, and someone stole it, right? He stole the domain, and there was literally like a global manhunt to find the person, and there was like guns involved.

It’s actually like a true life drama. It was really crazy, which I have absolutely nothing to do with any of it whatsoever. The only thing I know that is I bought the domain from Gary Kremmann after all this happened.

So we just negotiated a little bit and eventually figured out a deal. So at the time, it was the most expensive domain ever purchased, and then at the time you sold it for us, it was, again, it set the record twice.

When I bought it, it set the record, and when it was sold, it set another record. And now there’s other ones, some of them are, we didn’t hear the price. but there’s at least a dozen that have sold for higher prices at this point.

Yeah, but I think the thing is looking back at it with sex .com and the way adult has gone on the internet. I don’t see an adult name selling for that kind of money for a very long time, unless you would see a business attached to it.

But just an adult name, I don’t see that there’s as much money as it was when I got in the industry, but maybe I’m wrong. Well, from what I understand, the guy who bought it from us, I guess some Canadian guy, has already sold it for 25 million is what I heard.

And then if I understand correctly, the guy he sold it to sold it again. So it’s possible it’s sold for, I mean, I can just guess I have no idea, but it sounds like it’s already sold multiple times. And now it’s probably sold for more than 25 million.

So, you know, back then I said, you know, this thing should be worth 50 million. I didn’t want to sell it. I got under pressure to sell it, but I… Trying to wait until it was worth 50 million to sell it Mm -hmm.

You didn’t have any plans to build it out. You just bought it as an investment Well, we we discussed some things but we never accomplished any of it So so it was too controversial to build it out as the bottom line Mm -hmm.

So I came into the picture with sex .com and we sold in 2013 But from when you sold you created Another business which ended up you founding by domains, which is still a major brand in the industry which sold to Which is now owned by new fold digital which used to be called web .com for those if you want to know who owns it But how did you get started with creating by domains?

What happened there? It’s also endurance before that Yeah, that’s true as well endurance. Yeah, I got them there .com. I acquired endurance calm for them when they changed their company name Sure You’re asking how that thing evolved Like how did it?

How did you end up founding? You know by domains and then they owned after Nick for a period of time Were you part of that too and then it kind of got split off or how did that happen? Well, I had a tail on my deal.

So I I owned a small percentage of it, but I didn’t really have anything to do with the business With with by domains, yeah After I still I still owned a tiny bit of it, but myself and my partner alone some Got it so Well, the the basic thing is that after I sold that domain Menus comm like this is crazy.

You know, I just got 25 thousand dollars for this thing that costs 35 bucks a year And I yeah, my friends are still these great programmers to this day, you know, I still have great programmers I work with so You know, we we wrote software and We patented it called who is plus.

It was a way of searching for great domain names So we did it to build our own portfolio of great domain names. And then we put it out into the public and we had a patent on this thing who is plus. And then we changed the name to name find.

So if you follow the trajectory, when by domains was sold, half of it was sold to endurance. The other half, the intellectual property, after Nick was sold to GoDaddy. So GoDaddy is actually the owner of the patent name find for the domain search that everybody in the world uses that concatenates parts of the words together.

Like if you put in money, it’ll do money online, money central, e -money, it’ll search for it and it’ll allow you to register it. So every domain register on the world uses that technology. It’s actually a patent of GoDaddy since they bought the rights to it.

But I don’t know if they know they own the patent. And I know they certainly don’t care because they’re definitely not enforcing it. So everybody just uses it as, you know, open technology. But technically speaking, I don’t mean I’m not a lawyer, but presumably they could try to enforce the patent and make everybody pay them for that.

But the second point is that they use name find the word, the trademark for a totally different service that has absolutely nothing to do with that service. But they still use the name find for their own private domain portfolio, which is millions of domains.

So, you know, that was my brand, my patent from way, way back. So they use that new fold web .com uses by domains .com. That’s wild. So I never knew that. And that’s that’s really interesting stuff. It is interesting that they’re, were you surprised when they came out with their own portfolio and they named it name find?

We like, oh, really? Did you know that they don’t have a name with that? Well, that’s when it just occurred to me that they might not even know they own the patent and know what name find is. Like they don’t know.

They don’t care. I’m just, I don’t know. Maybe they do know. They definitely don’t care because they haven’t made anybody pay them for the licensing rights to the idea. I mean, it’s a very simple idea, but it’s still a legal patent.

I invented it. They bought, they bought the patent. Not again, the venture capitalists bought my company, Highland Venture Capital Summit Venture Partners bought my company and then Endurance, which again was, well, Endurance, which is now Newfold bought all the domain names by domains .com.

GoDaddy bought all these intellectual property rights. So again, like I don’t, I don’t know how much of it that they, I don’t know, like they bought a whole package of intellectual property. I’m not sure if they know everything that they bought necessarily.

Or perhaps, you know, a lot of other people invented the same or similar thing that you did and they could compare it to what? Google does for search or some other search engines just say it’s really a keyword search at that point, right?

Well, they didn’t invent it. They copied it. So you in essence created the first name spinner in so many words and patent it got it Wow, which is very difficult and expensive to patent it But you know, we had the proof that we invented it and all the technical drawings and stuff so And what year was that that you patented name find in this in this technology, I Don’t even know so long ago Remember could have been like and then 2000 or something Yeah, and then I got you know, I got in the business 14 years ago and right in 2009 2010 in that vicinity And I remember a couple years.

I mean sex comm came and went and then I remember like a few months after I sold it, I heard the story that you registered the last like 2000 or 5000 four letter .coms that were available for registration.

And then you’re also you registered a lot of names of generic named companies in the phone book. Like that was something that you used to do, right? Is that how you’ve built a lot of your current portfolio?

Or is it other ways? The current portfolio I have now, the by -demand portfolio that I sold was a lot built like that by, you know, taking these databases, turning them into domain names, you know, whether again, databases of people names, databases from the phone book, databases of four letter, you know, expressions.

So we just, we took all sorts of databases, plus we used again our own name find technology to create words. So we would just create databases of words and then we’d check to see which ones are available.

And then we’d buy the best ones of those that were available. That was my old, my new technology is actually even better and more sophisticated and we have more experience and you know, it’s works much better.

It’s, you know, very evolved quality of technology that we use currently. So you’re constantly buying names to this day? I’m not doing very many right now, but I’m getting ready to start up again. Got it.

I had to just wipe out this debt load that I had before I went back into buying again. Plus we’re just working on a bunch of other stuff. So we were just too distracted basically. I hear you. I mean, buying names can become tedious and very time consuming and it’s a big investment, you know?

It’s very difficult. You know, it’s hard work to run domain auctions and then the domain auctions themselves have a lot of issues and flaws that, you know, can be frustrating. Well, if you’re not using bots, you’re gonna spend a lot of time just sitting there staring at auctions, hoping that you win it, and we’re just setting a lot of bids and seeing if they come through or not.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it can get very, very tedious. You know, it’s interesting to hear about how you built your portfolio around, you know, for by domain in the by domains time, which I’m guessing was around 2000, 2002, 2003.

And that is, was it in that time zone? Yeah, that was the main thrust of it, the middle of it. Yeah. And so when I worked for Frank, he built the majority of his portfolio from like 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, and going up a few more years.

And the way he built his portfolio was they were running scripts and guessing on what the traffic would be on names. And they were allowed to taste back then. And people who might not know what tasting is, you could win a name in an auction.

You could hold the name, I believe it was what, for seven days? Or am I wrong about that? I don’t think that’s about it. If you win the expiry auction, you can own the name for seven days. If you didn’t like the name for whatever reason, you could give it back.

What Frank was doing with his team of, well, Ryan was the developer and some other folks as time went on, and then Vern Jervik helping him, they would win the auction, they would taste the name if the name made itself in registration or made more money than what, in tracking for parking in a calendar year, they would keep the name.

If they didn’t, they would just throw it back. And they said that they won a lot of one word .coms that they just threw back because it didn’t have any traffic or didn’t make any money. But they bought a lot of like two word .coms and a lot of these random names that don’t mean anything because for some reason they got traffic and they made money in parking.

And this is why and how Frank ended up amassing a portfolio when I started working for him was about 360 ,000 names. We started to drop some of the real crap that didn’t perform anymore, that really had no value.

But by doing this as a secondary thing, which he was buying really mainly for parking, I mean, he bought a lot of generic great names anyway because he appreciates the value of names, but most of it was based on parking.

And then as parking started to decline significantly, he wanted to ramp up sales to keep his, the money the same. So were you, did you take a similar strategy to that and do a lot of tasting at the time?

Or were you really more focused at looking at, your own data and just kind of like that? I didn’t do any domain tasting. It was just, we didn’t find that to be a reasonable process. But the main point though is that at that time when he was doing that, the cost per click advertising values were much inflated.

So now you’d get like maybe one, fifth of the amount of money for the landing pages, for domain advertising in general, or just internet advertising in general, the value of the click -through is dramatically lower now.

So it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to buy domains for their traffic value, whereas when he was doing it, that tasting thing, you could see the traffic, you could look at the cost per click coming from Google, or from the parking companies or whomever, and you could tell if it was worth the registration investment.

But we actually never did any of the parking at all, and any advertising or any tasting, we’re all about the brand itself, whether it’s a meaningful brand, long -term brand for a corporation. So we run a lot of software, a lot of statistics, a lot of different things, but at the end of the day, somebody’s looking at it and studying and reviewing to what extent it makes sense as a global, long -term brand name for a corporation.

Got it. And so me clicking around on a domain market over the years and even before we talked today, I noticed that even some of the nicer names just go straight to the landing page when you go to those.

So you’re not doing much parking or any parking now, right? Yeah, it’s just 100% our landing page. There’s no advertising, no parking. It’s just us. It’s really interesting because Frank was able to build an extremely valuable, extremely profitable portfolio around the same exact time that you were.

And you built it in a totally different way than he did. And you sold bi -domains for millions of dollars and built… How many names did bi -domains end up with or have when you sold it? 500 ,000. So you’ve amassed 500 ,000 in a few years, Frank amassed 360 ,000.

I mean, that’s almost a million names right off the out of the market. I’m sure 99% of those were dot -coms at the time. Pretty much. Well, we did more .net and dot org sales then than we did now. So probably 95% or something.

Okay, so I’d probably say Frank’s is a mirror of that as well. But we sold it with 500 ,000. But again, we have a process at both companies, that company and my current company for deleting domains also.

So we’d actually bought more than 500 ,000. We probably bought 700 ,000 and then deleted 200 ,000 over a few year period. So we ended up with 500 ,000 after we finished deleting. So that’s the same strategy I use currently, basically.

And also keeping in mind, in order to buy 500 ,000, I had to look at 5 or 10 million. And then I lost 50% of the auctions or more, Frank bought more than me. So I probably had to do over a million auctions to get 500 ,000 or a million names.

You’re probably not winning 50% of the auctions. You’re participating either because you’re going against Kevin Ham and some of these other massive players as well and little guys. You know, you just there’s no way we’re in in half.

So there’s probably more than that. Yeah. Well, we didn’t buy them all from auction either though. Yeah. Well, you hand registered a lot like we were talking about with the four letters and you did that late in the game when I got in, you know, 2013 or 14 somewhere in there.

Yeah. So a lot of different stuff. So now I’m like much more focused and targeted. I understand better about the value of the names and in the software we have now is just out of this world. It’s like a thousand times more sophisticated than what anybody else has.

So I can leverage. Yeah. So you have about 215 ,000 names right now, right? Yep. And we had 300, but we’ve deleted and sold a lot. So you’ve called. the portfolio a bit and I mean if you’re doing the math you’re looking at you know with 200 ,000 Domains you’re looking at about two two million and change in renewals.

So yeah, that’s almost 200 ,000 dollars a month in renewals That’s a pretty big nut to crack every You know every month especially if the sales aren’t coming in as quickly so those domains better perform or you’re gonna be in trouble Yeah, you know, it’s super to keep it together.

So Yeah So looking at like, you know, when you you look at the 250 ,000 15 ,000 names You have 300 ,000 names prior to that give or take and you’re saying that you looked at all, you know Different data points and looking at those things When you have your saying yourself, we need to you know, save some money here cut back on some of our Investments and some of these names let them go to pasture What is it that that tells you when you’re looking at two different Two word comms that the search volume on both of them probably wasn’t great But they were both pretty brandable or they were a very specific product that you Kind of say I’m gonna keep this one and let that one go Especially when a lot of the data doesn’t really change from year to year That drastically.

Yeah, you know, how do you kind of make those choices? Well part of it’s objective in the sense that we’re looking at these data categories And then then at the end of the day we get the shortlist Whether we’re buying deleting selling whatever We get the shortlist and then It’s subjective of where myself or somebody’s personally studying it and looking at it And seeing if because the data isn’t the data may be perfect, but it doesn’t always tell you It doesn’t tell you everything So I just have to make a final subjective opinion as to the value if the value Is zero or close to zero we delete it Mm -hmm, so, you know, there can be two names if they have the exact same data Fingerprint profile We can look at them, they both might be great, we keep them, they both might suck, we delete them, one might be great, one might suck.

You just gotta look at them subjectively at the end of the day. Yeah, I mean, I think, and one of the things I’ve done with portfolios is made recommendations on what people should keep and what they should drop.

And it’s very easy to look at the best and say, okay, you’re obviously gonna keep those and these obviously suck. But then you kind of get in this gray area where you have 20 ,000 names that all almost are similar in statistics and you’re selling names out of that pile every week or every day or every month.

But that’s when it gets into like, you could own some of these names that you think are the best and keep renewing them and they’ll never sell in 100 years and others that you could buy today and you’ll have a buyer a week from now paying top dollar.

And that’s, what do you do to kind of… when you’re on the fence about those? Is it really just comes down to your gut? Pretty much. I mean, again, we have the data system, but then we can do some manual research to confirm our gut feeling about it.

And the majority of the time you can figure it out, but sometimes you’re just taking a risk, either keeping deleting or whatever the case may be. Yeah. One of the main metrics a really successful demeanor looks at in his portfolio is the number of inquiries the name gets on a regular basis or over the period of the year before he decides whether to renew it if it’s those ones in the gray area.

And when I look at when I look at domain market, one of the things, and you take a different strategy than we did when I worked at Uniregistry and we ran the marketplace with Frank’s names, was we would either do a make offer on all his names or buy it now make offer.

And our goal was always to capture the buyer’s details and see who this person is and understand them. And if we needed to sell a bunch of names in a month, we had the people to do it. Or we would use it as a metric to tell us if the name has demand.

I mean, a really shitty name sometimes gets uninglucid every couple of months. But it seems like on your site, you don’t really collect the data as much. Mostly everything’s buy it now. I know. Being in the business so long, why did you decide to go that way?

What’s a big problem? Actually, literally just yesterday, we took the prices off everything over 500 ,000 so we could collect the input data. But there’s a couple points here. We’re trying to give them an anchor frame in their minds what the price is going to be, approximately, if not exactly.

So they can understand the value because something is worth $300 ,000 and it just says request price. The guy is going to be in the business. starting in his mind at $500, working his way up to $5 ,000, $10 ,000, $20 ,000, but he never gets to $300 ,000 because of the way the psychological effect of framing goes.

So the flip side of it is, the best way to sell a name is to capture the information and do long -term retargeting of ads that they see online, drip campaigns, phone calls, locking them into your Salesforce database, keeping notes and personal information, birthdays, whatever.

So it goes against my sales training. It goes against my sales training in a lot of ways that you’re supposed to drive through the messaging over a long period of time and a lot of exposure in order to get them to buy.

But again, the idea of framing, it’s a psychological thing that it’s a very anchoring framing. It’s a really big deal. to get in their mind the conceptual value of the domain. And we don’t really mess around.

There’s a legitimate reason why we think the actual price, first of all, I’ve done more appraisals and more purchases than anybody in the world. And second of all, there’s a reason why we’re motivated to get the exact right price on there.

And the reason is they’re already very expensive on average, because that’s the type of names we deal in. If I put them too high, I can never sell them. So that’s like selling them for $0. I get no money at all if I price them too high.

I price them too low. I get less than I’m supposed to get, less than they’re worth. So we put the actual real appraised price on every single domain to the best of our ability. Sometimes we give people discounts, because we just feel this pressure to make money all the time.

But to illustrate why my method works, we just sold RevaClub .com, R -I -V -A, Club .com, which doesn’t sound very exciting, but we got $300 ,000 for it last week. You’re kidding me. And the reason is it’s our data system.

Nobody else has a data system like this. And our data system identified that domain and gave us this huge amount of information so we could see how incredibly valuable it was. And again, then we do the subjective confirmation where we review that data and we review that name and the branding and look in Google, et cetera, that confirms what our data system told us.

So again, you know, GoDaddy, Newfold, huge domains that have these enormous collections don’t actually know the value of their domains. I wanna help them and let them figure out the value of their domains, but you know, they’re too stubborn, essentially, and they think they know the value, but again, they would have sold that name for $10 ,000 and they probably would have negotiated it down to $5 ,000 because they don’t know what it’s worth because they don’t have a data system like ours.

They have some data points, lots of people have some data points, but first of all, we have every data point that the public has. We have a whole bunch of data points that nobody even knows about. We created our own unique algorithms to uncover all this extra data that nobody can see.

And we have this user interface that is unbelievably efficient and effective at pricing and repricing domains and constantly changing them based on the market conditions. And now we’re adding all these AI components into it, which is going to bring it again to the next level beyond that.

So, again, my data system is worth more than all my domains put together because if somebody has five million domains, they have to pay $50 million a year to maintain it. So they can’t really delete stuff because they’ll throw out the baby with the bathwater.

They don’t know what to delete. They don’t have a system that’s good enough. So they accidentally delete good stuff or they’re accidentally renewing garbage. Those people that have 5 million domains, they should be deleting probably 50 or 60% of them.

Then the rest of them, they need to figure out the price. Whether they’re going to put the price on the website or not is irrelevant. They need to know it for their own broker. So when somebody says, hey, what’s the price?

They need an appraisal or they could do the same thing I do and just put a buy now anchoring price. And the other point is just, you know, it’s this huge amount of overhead. If I wanted to put request price on everything, I’d have to hire five sales people to follow up on all these people that are offering $500 for a, you know, $500 ,000 domain name.

So, yeah. So again, I could, you know, those people with millions of domains could dramatically improve their companies, save many millions of dollars a year, make many more millions of dollars a year by employing my data system, our strategies, our user interface, but they haven’t got there yet.

So I can understand, you know, and it’s, it’s funny because I’ve heard with the pricing and sales of this size, right? I listened to at NamesCon a little bit, Rick Schwartz did a thing about negotiating in domains and he’s known to get some pretty high prices as well.

And one of the things that I was thinking of though is GoDaddy. And then later on with Frank, where we had a lot of overhead with the registrar and the registry and growing the business and things we needed to do, we were using Frank’s sales to pay for it.

We kind of found ourselves in a position like GoDaddy with stockholders or shareholders. They have to meet certain numbers every quarter come hell or high water. But with you and somebody like Rick, of course you have your overhead.

but for you to just say no is a lot easier than if they have to do something. And I think you’re in an easier position to do that. And you’re absolutely right. They are gonna miss opportunities like this one.

I would have probably missed it because when you search Riva Club USA, right? Or Riva Club, the very top one is RivaClubUSA .com. And when you click on it, this website looks like it’s from 1992. It was like one of the originals you made.

And you go down and you say, okay, yeah, well you have Riva Yachts. It looks like something like a Chris, is it like a Chris Craft or Mastercraft? Is that what a Viva Boat is? Well, again, that’s one of the points here.

Is that Riva Yachts, how much do you think one Riva Yacht sells for? At least 100K for a shitty one. I mean, it’s more than that. Yeah, that’s the type of stuff that my system is going to uncover. Is look and there’s, you know, again, whether you’re doing the analytical approach with data or you’re doing your subjective personal approach, there’s sort of two aspects overriding the whole thing.

It’s the breadth and the depth. So the breadth is how many individual potential buyers are there for Reva Club, which again, we know the answer to that. Well, there might be one. Well, again, there might be more than you can see in a cursory evaluation, but the question is how many potential buyers are there?

And then what’s the depth of most? Usually you’re just looking at the top buyer. How wealthy are they? How badly do they need it? And then you go down the chain. Let’s pretend there’s 10 potential buyers.

If two or three of those are billionaires, that’s something that my system’s going to recognize and the competitor systems aren’t going to recognize, which is why I got $300 ,000 for that domain. We knew the breadth and the depth of that name and all the data points.

And we had done a subjective appraisal of it. So we knew exactly what we were doing before we went to the table. So what would it cost for somebody? Cause I mean, I know like Name Fine has, you know, millions of names at this point and by domains has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of names at this point as well, but what if you’re a smaller domain or with 3000, 5000, 10 ,000 names?

What would you charge them to run their names through your tool and you give them their pricing? Well, we have a separate service, which is actually somewhat different called accurate appraisals .com.

That’s actually a manual appraisal service and where three experts, including myself, appraise the name independently. And then we create a certificate of authenticity that says, here’s the current appraisal for this domain, but it’s the average of the three.

So myself and two other experts are going to appraise the domain manually. Give you the average, but I’m talking about you’re saying you did. for your portfolio, how can somebody, because I think this is one of the bigger problems with domainers is in general, the smaller ones of course have trouble pricing their names.

You know, and a lot of them will come to me and say, you know, will you help me price my portfolio? And I say, sure, but you know, you got to pay me hourly to do this. Like I’m not just going to sit here for a week straight going through all your names and pricing each individual name for you.

And then you just take them and just put them up for buy it now as all on afternoon and say, thanks, Jeff, have a good day. See you later. You know, like, that doesn’t happen with me and other brokers.

Again, I have a very complex system and a bunch of employees. So the whole thing’s very expensive to operate. So, but just to back, you know, this, this goes together with accurate appraisals .com. So again, three experts will appraise the domain for only 88 bucks.

So that’s for excellent domains. And then there’s a bulk discount. So there’s a bulk. I’m written on the website and if somebody really has a huge number we could even reduce it even greater But just for example somebody we both know very well, you know one of the top domain brokers in the world emailed me yesterday or actually called me on the phone yesterday It’s like hey, we have this domain.

We need a praise It’s a one word domain, you know worth well over a million dollars and You know, I was like hey just put it in my system. It’s only 88 bucks You talking about you know, you should be charging five thousand dollars for this which is actually true Yeah, but we’re trying to create a consumer Brand that everybody can get their domains appraised for cheap So get accurate appraisals is the best appraisal company in the world because three world experts are gonna appraise your domain So aside from the fact that it’s the best appraisal company in the world.

It’s also the cheapest one. It’s eighty eight dollars per appraisal. So We charge a lot more right but again, you’re not gonna have nothing personal But you can’t give a better appraisal for a lot more.

This is gonna be a great appraisal with a certificate for only 88 bucks So again, as far as using my system for bulk things, you know, it’s it’s negotiable essentially I haven’t done it yet. I mean we’ve done small bulk things like 50 or 100 names But we haven’t done like a million or a hundred thousand domains or whatever But really, you know, there’s only three people in the world that have a big enough collection Which again is huge domains new fold and go daddy those people need me and my system extremely badly Whether they realize it or not is their own issue, but I Feel like huge domains the guys over at the Ray Berry brothers over there It seems to me they kind of put their the names into buckets right and then those buckets will like the specific price I don’t think there’s a lot much variation.

I haven’t looked at their names lately, but I’m saying like in the last few months ago I’ve always noticed there’s a like three nine nine five $5995, $2995. Yeah, absolutely. That’s what all three of those, that’s what they all do.

But the point is, is they’re missing all these exceptional domain prices. Like, again, they would have sold Reba Club for five, 10, 20 ,000 bucks. If they had given it to me in my system, I would have told them it’s actually worth 300 ,000.

So did you wake up one morning and it was sold for that much money? Or did they inquire to you and you negotiated for it? Yeah, it was late. Well, right after Christmas, the girl who works for me is like, that one’s sold.

We got the money. I was like, hallelujah. Because we needed to get it to the end of the season. But, you know, it’s just, you know, I’m just using that one and just as an example of, you know, the domain versus just guessing, you know.

Yeah. And compared to last year and the year before, how do you see your sales going? They’re ticking upwards. Yeah. They’re ticking upwards. You did better last year than you did the year before. Yeah.

Well, yeah, definitely. Just a little bit. I mean, I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but probably 10 or 20% better. And are you talking about number of sales or are you talking about revenue?

Revenue. And revenue. Did you have a couple of big sales that kind of tilted the scales or did you have, or was it just more of just better pricing and higher price sales? Well, my big sale wasn’t part of domain market.

My big sale was SEO .com. Okay, you didn’t count that. That was part of a separate enterprise with separate shareholders, whatever, even though I owned most of it, but both of those companies I own in the 90 -something percent, but they each have some minority shareholders in there.

So they’re separate business operations, basically. So that was the biggest sale. If that one had shown up on the domain market books, it would have doubled domain market’s revenue. Got it. All right.

And so right now, you and I have a name that I inquired to you on, and Brooke Hernandez is a broker for me who works at saw .com with me. She’s working with me for a decade, has a buyer for continentalsupply .com.

And we offered you $10 ,000 for it. I believe the list price for it is… Thirty. … $29 ,888. Yeah. If we bought it today with a credit card, we would get a 20% discount for $23 ,910. Right. I offered you $10 ,000, and you said not enough.

It’s not enough. Right. Well, so again, I mean, that thing was properly appraised. The full price is a fair price, and the discount, 20% discount makes it a 20% discount from a fair price. So that’s a great price.

And again, it goes back to the main points here. We have a complex data system that analyzed that name and a person subjectively confirmed the analysis and the valuation. So that’s a spot on value. And the reason, again, is because of the breadth and the depth.

So in this case, I did a tiny bit of research. I don’t have all the research. But there’s at least five, if not 10, companies that use that name, multimillion dollar companies. So again, the breadth is at least five potential buyers.

And the depth is some of them are millionaires. So there’s really no reason to sell it for any less because somebody will buy it. They can buy it next year, but it’ll be $40 ,000 instead of $30 ,000.

So I mean, that. And you think your algorithm is going to tell you that it’s worth almost double? than what it is now? Or you just raise it once you get somebody who’s interested in it? Well, the algorithm, first of all, goes with the economy.

So the best domains keep going up in value every year, and the appraisals go up every year as a result of that. But also, we do it based on demand. So if you don’t buy it, I’m just going to raise it for the next guy who comes.

And then when, if you were to start to collect more buyers from your inquiry pages, would you then account that into your appraisal tool to say, OK, well, we got this many people eyeballed the names.

Are you tracking the traffic of people looking at the name? Yeah, well, it’s all in there. The traffic is certainly a key component. But the number of quotes is this one component. We actually have the number of quotes in there, but it’s all ancient because we don’t collect quotes anymore because we have a price on there.

So but we use to have a request price. So then we have one of our data columns says how many people requested a price. And again, that’s a heavy objective weight into the valuation. Got it. I got it.

And what do you think it would be a fair price for this name if we were to get someone to pay for it today? I mean, that’s my point is it is a fair price. The full price is a fair price. The 20% off is a very fair price.

And anything less than that is an incredible price. And since we’re friends and you’re a top broker, I’ll give you a little bit less. But I don’t really have any motivation. I’m going to sell this thing anyway.

And again, I’ll probably sell it for $40 ,000 next year. So if I don’t get $25 ,000 this year, I’ll get $40 ,000 next year. Names at this level keep going up in value. So like my retirement fund is not selling them.

Again, my main regret in life or not in life, but in business is selling domains for too cheap that I could still own today that are worth many times more than they were worth like menus .com. com was my earlier example.

Yeah, that’s a good name. I really like it. Easy to spell, easy to remember. That’s what you’re looking for when you’re looking at order out. Wear the menus, honey. Right off the bat. I like this one.

Continental was an airline. It’s a tire company name. There’s many different brands in business to consumer name this. Business to business. There’s others, other suppliers, other companies. And if you take any kind of like a brandable name in the word supply, that’s pretty strong.

I think that it’s a solid name and it’s a good to word .com. And these are the kinds of names that really made up Frank’s portfolio. Yeah. You didn’t have a lot of people think that he just had countless one word .coms that we would just sell tons of them every month.

And he didn’t, he didn’t actually have like a lot of like SEO .com. Style domains or sex stock on style domains. He had a lot of this is this was Frank’s bread and butter Continental supply comm would be one that we would sell And we would sell them we would sell a name like this And I’m not saying this because we made you the $10 ,000 offer But we would sell names like this for 10 we would sell them for 15 and we would sell them for 20 and sometimes we’d sell You know, there were some metrics here and there but there was also all market conditions that we were going through that affected the five years ago was probably worth ten but the point is is the the value of these things keep going up, you know, I Agree and I think It’s more important for these companies like the when I do the search.

I see continental supply company comm I mean continental supply comm is a long domain to begin with It’s not totally easy to spell How could you spell it wrong? I mean No, I mean it just has the two P’s in the L.

Y. Like you know, so we could hear over over here plural You know, you’re looking at singular supply, you know, there’s like right below continental supply You see continental drilling tools and supplies It’s not a hundred thousand if it was shorter and there wasn’t a plural for it It would be a hundred thousand but the fact that it’s a little bit long and There’s a potential plural that reduced the value of it and again, you know, it says 30 29 ,000 whatever But again, if you put in a credit card, it’s actually like you said 23 whatever So it’s really a twenty three thousand dollar name, which is a bargain considering There’s a bunch of multi -million dollar corporations that use that name So the one that buys it is the only smart one the rest of them are stupid for not buying it Well, there’s a two -prong thing is it holds its investment value forever So it’ll be worth that much or more till the end of time and secondly they can use it to bring new customers in so and Yeah, probably, without a doubt.

Catch emails and do all kinds of things with it without a doubt. So I’d say that consumers aren’t well educated on the situation, on the value of domains. They just know they want it cheap. They don’t know what it’s worth.

They don’t care what it’s worth. They know they just want to get it for as cheap as they can do a hustle for. So that’s one of the main reasons why we do the anchor pricing. So they understand what they’re getting into before they start bothering us.

Well, I mean, I was explaining this to somebody where I golf, because when I told him what I do, he said, well, do you compete with Godad? And I said, yeah. And he said, well, how do you make any money when everything you sell is like 10 bucks?

And I was like, yeah, it’s not really that way. But the thing is, it’s interesting that you have a lot of companies like my own that aren’t paying rent. All the people that work with me work from their homes.

But you need a storefront and you need a good address. And now it’s become instead of. When I first got in the business world, people would pay a lot of money just to have a mailbox on Park Avenue to impress people.

Yeah. Right? And that was back into the 80s and before. Now you need a nice domain name to create that presence and earn that trust and that credibility. And paying 20 grand or 10 grand or 5 grand for it isn’t really a lot of money.

Yeah. And it looks like you also are offering companies to pay it off for 24 months. Yeah. That’s the other point for your customer. If they literally can’t afford it for the actual correct, fair appraised price, they can pay it over 24 months without any interest at all.

Just broken down at the normal price in 24 payments. And so again, it’s this branding excellence. They suddenly have an excellent brand. The domain retains its value. It makes their company look better and it improves their sales.

So again, there’s five or 10 companies that use that name in commerce. And the only smart one, or at least the smartest one, is the one that buys the name. Yeah. And they put it on their credit card and forget about it.

And that’s it. So I have a couple of questions for you that I got asked this yesterday, actually, by somebody outside of our industry. As an entrepreneur, so now it’s the beginning of the year, as an entrepreneur, what is something about yourself you feel like you need to work on?

As an entrepreneur or as a person? I could be both. I mean, I’ll tell you my answer as well. I mean, I don’t mind sharing it. Well, you can tell me. Go ahead. I think my problem as an entrepreneur and a business person is I’m not.

My brain is going pretty fast with ideas, especially when it comes to developing products and services. And sometimes when I would explain it to a project manager or a developer, I kind of go a little too fast or someone else on my team.

And then when the outcome doesn’t come out the way that it’s supposed to, I get angry that it’s not what I was envisioning or what I wanted. And but when I go back and I look at why it didn’t turn out that way, a lot of the times the problem is me.

And that I didn’t really fill in all of the the answers and all the questions and really do the best job that I probably could have to explain it. Yeah. I think I can do better. Sure. Um, well, I guess for me, you know, there’s plenty of things, but I’d say the main thing is I don’t like airplanes.

I don’t like hotels. I don’t like being away from my kids. So I’ve missed all these opportunities to spend time in New York, Silicon Valley. You know, I went to that one conference that I saw you out a few months back, but.

Yeah, but I. practically never go to any conferences. And I just, I’m doing what I do here. I do Zoom, I do email, I do phone calls, and I’m not getting the face time I need. So, like I own a company called Phone .com.

It’s an awesome company, it’s extremely successful. But if I was spending every week in Silicon Valley, I’d be able to do all these great deals and partnerships. I speak to a lot of these people and the president of the company speaks to all these people.

But I don’t have any physical presence there. I never go to conferences in Silicon Valley. I try to avoid New York like the plague. But that’s my biggest weakness, because that’s where all the money is, that’s where all the deals are, that’s where all the partners are.

So again, if I had that exposure, I’d probably make a lot more money. But I envisioned myself turning stuff over to other people, selling off most of my companies and most of my assets, and spending my time at the beach with my kids.

So I’m just not as engaged in the day -to -day and the travel as I should be, basically. So it makes me less profitable than I could be otherwise. Well, I think that kind of goes into your personal, as you’re saying you’re making a conscious decision to spend the time, more time with your family and be a great father.

And there’s nothing wrong with that either, right? Absolutely. And again, it’s just I have an aversion to airplanes, hotels and like that whole lifestyle. Yes, I know a lot of other people live like that.

Most of them like it, but I just it’s just not my thing. Well, when you came to Namescon, you had your wife with you and she was pregnant at the time. That’s when I realized that you had one on the way and then you had the baby like a month later.

Or yeah. And I was surprised you could even fly at that point. I know it was the end of the time the doctor said, we asked the doctor, he said, yeah, this is the last one. You can fly. Yeah. It was your last date that you could.

can do it. Yeah. But so you know. So a guy like you, what are your goals for 2024? Other than maybe flying more and going a few more meetings, what are your business goals for domain market? Well, I own several other companies that I need to build up aside from domain market.

And I do a ton of charity work. And I have a charitable fund. So I’m constantly talking to, meeting with, and researching different charities that I help and support. I used to run charities myself, one you might remember called grassroots .org.

And so I’m always doing a lot of work in that space and trying to improve, trying to focus on the groups that deserve the money. If anybody is interested in this stuff, my organization is called Make Change Trust.

So you can go to makechange .com. Or there’s also a link at micman .com that explains all my businesses, my charity, my book can be downloaded for free. There’s a link to charity stuff again at mic man .com.

There’s also a link to all these other podcasts that I did live streams that I did. So I’ve I’ve interviewed like tons of the top domain people and tons of other really smart business people. So there’s there’s all sorts of videos out there.

There’s a video of my speech from Namescon that I gave, which I thought was pretty good with Amanda. What year was that? What year did you give the speech at Namescon? Last year, you were sleeping through it at the one we just went to.

Amanda interviewed me there. Oh, God. Yeah. I didn’t realize you were the the the keynote for it. I remember watching you do an interview at Namescon when you were on video. But I must have had a meeting during your your speech at Namescon.

It’s all good. But that video is online. So I think that’s a pretty solid video that explains a lot of stuff, a lot of tricks about domain names and some of the history that I glossed over today. Yeah, I mean, I think I think a lot of people that, you know, they see you on Twitter, you write the sales that you write, you have pretty strong opinions about, you know, crypto, politics, other things.

I think some people would like to get to understand your background a little bit more. So before we wrap this up, one more question and then I think we’ll end it. With AI, OK, I know you’re embracing it.

I know you’re using it. And if you’re and you’re going to probably put it into your algorithm and help yourself and your businesses with it, I’ve been doing it myself. I’m finding myself using I’m paying for chat.

You be T for I’m I find myself using it a lot for work, whether it’s, you know, writing a sentence and asking you to rewrite it or or analyzing information. I’m finding myself using that more to a point than using Google search, because I’m finding with Google search the results aren’t very good anymore.

And that’s because a lot of the questions that you were questions you’re looking for answers for on Google search, the answers you’re getting are from like affiliates, just trying to like, if I have plantar fasciitis in my foot, well, then it’s just a guy writing, what are the top five sneakers?

And then there’s a link to the Amazon ad. And most of the time those sneakers don’t even help your feet, you know, it’s just getting paid the most. It’s basically, you know. Yeah, and it’s like, if you search for the like, domain broker now, you know, Neil Patel, who’s an SEO guy, he comes up as like the top 10 brokers and you have to pay him to get on that list.

You know, he wanted thousands of dollars for me to get on that list. And there’s companies on there that aren’t even in business anymore, right? And so it’s ruining, it’s ruining search. And I’m finding myself using, you know, chat GBT, I call my guy Ronnie, Ronnie the robot.

And he gives me better answers to the things I want to find. But what I’m realizing is, is that he’s making suggestions sometimes of services. or goods. And I think that as time goes on, if this becomes part of our cell phones, which it’s going to big time, and it becomes a much bigger part of search, do you think that we’re even going to get results in the future?

Or is it really just going to be suggestions from a bot that really starts to get to know you? And if you say to him, I’m hungry and we want to go to restaurant we haven’t been to before, it might know by knowing like navigation where you’ve been.

And it would say, well, you haven’t been to these restaurants in the area. What do you think of these? And your other friend, your friend Tony rated it five stars two weeks ago. Here’s his review of it.

And then he points you in that direction, or you want to buy a higher quality domain, instead of paying for Google AdWords, we might pay for headspace in AI. And the question is that direct question, where do you think domains are going to fall into this?

If AI is in essence, if my future I’m telling you becomes true, where AI is really just suggesting everything, and you’re not really giving the user legitimate results, you know, what’s going to happen?

Well, first of all, chat GPT has some some API’s such that thousands and thousands of private people can build their own systems on top of it so they can improve it, filter it, change it, customize it, focus it.

So people will create all sorts of services and apps that will refine the experience to get it the way you want it. If that makes sense. Plus chat GPT itself can improve their basic functionality. And chat GPT is just one experience.

There’s already, you know, it does another popular big services and 100 other smaller services. And there’s an insane amount of investment in this space right now. That’s majority of those companies are going to fail, but Yeah, I’d say the point is it’s just the super beginning of this thing There’s going to be just a massive amount of innovation on top of chat GPT and then Thousands and thousands of other companies that use chat GPT It’s almost like Play Store like Play Store is really cool Then there’s thousands and thousands of people that connect it or they connect, you know, they create a Windows application For example, they they’re not a Microsoft owned company, but they created Windows applications So it’s the same sort of thing, you know, you’re not owned by chat GPT, but you can have a chat GPT Compatible experience through your APIs.

So again, it’s already insanely cool It’s already evolving at an incredible rate. So you’re just going to see so much new stuff So I wouldn’t put yourself in a box or your mind in a box where you think it’s just going in such and such direction because it’s There’s just too much innovation to really predict what’s going to happen with all the ancillary companies or even with chat GPT itself.

But in the domain space, you know, we have a lot of plans here. We keep uncovering all these new ideas for everything we’re doing, for landing pages, for appraisals, all sorts of different types of research.

Again, we have this enormous number of data columns that we use that we analyze. And a bunch of them you know about, a bunch of them are proprietary. And you can use AI on like 75% of that stuff to improve what we’re already doing.

And then the landing pages, there’s all sorts of things. Plus, with search optimization, there’s all these crazy tricks that I think my people are going to be uniquely qualified to leverage. Remember I used to own SEO .com for 15 years.

Well, it’s just a domain. It was a corporation at one time had over 100 employees. So, you know, I think domain market plus phone .com and some of my other assets are going to get this enormous leverage from AI.

Some of where we already know the direction we’re going and what we need to do. And a bunch of stuff that hasn’t even been invented yet or we haven’t even don’t even know the basic idea of what’s going to come next.

So it’s going to be a huge amount of our time and money and thrust the next few years for all my companies. It’s going to be surrounding AI. I don’t own any AI company. It’s companies that leverage AI.

So all these people trying to sell that AI domain names, they seem to be missing the fact that all the people using AI don’t make them an AI company. There are thousands and thousands of AI companies.

Most of them are going to use .com and most of them are going to fail. So while .ai is probably cool for a few thousand companies and some of the very best domains, it’s not a competitive experience to .com and it’s never going to be.

I think if you’re a B2C company, you definitely need the .com. If you’re a B2B in the AI space, you can get away with it. But we can go down that road. That’s my point. That’s a whole number of companies.

So you’re going to use AI in the short term to further support your businesses, leverage your businesses. But you’re not thinking about really getting into the AI space these days. No. I don’t have very many employees anymore.

Again, phone .com has over 100 employees. But I don’t actually work there on a day -to -day basis. And it doesn’t work on any of my domain products. It’s a totally separate experience. They’re going to use AI in a lot of respects, but not be an AI company.

Again, so I just don’t have that many employees at the moment. And I’m just enjoying having like, I’m out. I have a group that does a great job that I’m outsourcing a lot of stuff to. But my own personal employees are like the least I’ve ever had in my life, which makes things a lot easier to deal with on a day -to -day basis.

Do you miss it? Having a lot of employees Yeah, like the social aspect did you ever have like when you had SEO comm I saw pictures of your you know Your company of everybody together in an office. Do you miss going to an office and no social aspect of thing?

First of all, I hardly ever went into the office, but the other Well, I think people should be in an office and I think companies are much more successful when everybody’s in the office together I was like the first remote user and you know from way back I’d go in to visit people my companies, but they always had a president and operations that I was separated from I was always the CEO Chairman of the board so I I rarely went into any office SEO comms from Salt Lake City where all my employees were I went to visit sometimes but But I think people should be in an office in general me personally No, I don’t miss it.

I like being with my kids and going to the beach and having a long lunch and You know again I’m usually working my ass off on the auction selling domain names and I usually have a lot more employees some on conference calls all the time But you know, I have I have a bunch of employees now a lot of its outsource and it’s more than enough to keep me busy So I don’t miss it.

I was totally overwhelmed with having too many employees too many businesses Too much one. I never get any sleep And Last question and well two more questions. The first is what advice would you give to a budding entrepreneur today from what you know?

Entrepreneur, but not necessarily with domains And anything Well, I wrote a book that has all the advice in it make millions comm make millions and make change There’s a hard copy available also from Amazon, but The basic thing is a hard work ethic Just working all the time having a well before that you have a succinct plan It’s a written plan.

It addresses something meaningful in the growing of economy, it’s well explained what you’re doing. It’s not so much for the outside world, it’s for yourself, but if you need investors and employees, they need it too.

But you need a plan in an emerging market space that you’re committed to. And that plan has an Excel file of your assumptions, of your pro forma that has realistic numbers as to what you can expect to achieve.

And again, you just work hard on a plan and the people you associate yourself with are equally as important, getting the very best people, the hardest working people, most honest people, the best connected people to be part of your team either as your employees, your business partners, people you outsource to.

So it’s really having a plan, having a work ethic, and having a team, and you can build everything off of that experience. And get a great domain name and a brand name that you can leverage forever on top of that plan.

and pay it off over two years with zero interest. Exactly. Get it from domain market. We’re from saw .com. There you go. Then last question, how can people contact you? Well, I’m all over social media as you mentioned, or they can just email me micman at micman .com.

Awesome. Well, thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate it. I think this is a great call. I said in the beginning, we want to try to keep it short. People say, make your show as a little shorter, but this was really interesting.

I hope people are listening and feel the same way. I think they’re going to get another one hour one, whether they like it or not. I appreciate it. Next time, I won’t have coffee before my call, so I’ll shorten my sentences.

Well, have two. I think this is great. Are you going to go to Namescom this year? We’re going to pull you out and get into the company. Unlikely. No. No ICA for you in about 12 days. I like those things, but in part of my speech when I was on there was about spirit airlines that I went on.

If I go next time, I won’t go spirit airlines, but I just don’t like traveling, basically. I like all the people, but I’m just not a traveler. If you fly spirit, I can see why you don’t like traveling.

Yeah, well, that I didn’t know. You know, I found out after the fact because I travel so infrequently, but it was a disaster. Yeah, I had a good time at the conference, but I don’t see myself going very frequently.

I hear you. I was going to say, you live in Miami now, right? I live in Boca, near Miami. You’re in Boca. How far are you from… Where in Miami I’m thinking that we would both know? How far are you from the Heat Stadium?

Like 20 minutes or so. Oh, that’s it? Maybe 30, something like that. Okay, one of the investors in my business lives down there, and I come down to Miami from time to time. So the next time I come, I’ll let you know.

We’ll go out and have a look. have a drink or some lunch or something. Yeah, man. If you’re around, let’s meet up. All right. Cool. Well, thanks again. I like this a lot. I got to know you better over the last year, but I think this really helps things.

And we’ll see about hopefully getting you a better offer and kicking this year off right together. Absolutely. Thanks a lot, Jeff. Appreciate your time and interview. And no problem. Have a great weekend.

Hope you do something fun. Thanks, buddy.