Video Transcription
Mike Mann:
Okay, guys, we did it again. Hopefully everybody can hear me. We’re going to add my friend Drew Rosenr in a minute, who’s an awesome domainer. I’m going to give it 1 second to allow a few people to join. First, I’d like to distinguish what Drew does from what I does just do so people understand that he, he does own a fabulous collection of domains, but he’s primarily a broker, which means you can work with him. And he knows everybody. He buys and sells domains.
Mike Mann:
All I do is sell my own.
Mike Mann:
Domains so I’m not as visible and I don’t know as many people. He knows all the top ceos and executives to buy and sell domains from. So even though we pretend we’re competitors, we’re not really. He’s a super smart guy and he.
Mike Mann:
Can speak for himself this very moment. So I’m going to add Drew and we’re going to roll. What’s up, my man?
Andrew Rosener:
Sup, Mike? How you doing, man?
Mike Mann:
It’s all good, man.
Mike Mann:
Boca.
Mike Mann:
You can’t beat it.
Andrew Rosener:
Well, I’m in Portugal, and I have to say that I’ve been to Boca a lot and I like Portugal better, but nonetheless not a bad spot. I think both of us are in good spots.
Mike Mann:
I’ve never been to Portugal, so I’ll take your word for it since I know we like a lot of the same places. You can audience. The last time I saw you, if you recall, was like, at one of my favorite spots in the world. Do you remember where?
Andrew Rosener:
I do. It was a little indian restaurant in. I don’t know if it was Santa Monica or Venice, but one or the other. And down the street from where I was actually, I just made the dire mistake of buying a house, and we thought we were going to move to Venice beach. And then very quickly came to the realization that was just not the right spot for us. Although I absolutely love that area. I love Santa Monica. I love that I just can’t live, um, for a variety of reasons. But anyways, it was the last time I saw you. That was great. It was a great me. You bought me lunch.
Mike Mann:
I left Santa Monica, too, actually, the place across the street is the vegan indian place. We ate at a place called thai vegan, which is.
Andrew Rosener:
Oh, you’re right. It was right.
Mike Mann:
That’s my favorite neighborhood, period. I love it there. But I moved away. We moved away also, just for a variety of reasons. But in any case, the question is.
Andrew Rosener:
Did you fly or drive?
Mike Mann:
I’m trying to think back. I had a car, so I drove. I hardly ever fly. I guess you realize fly, right?
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah.
Mike Mann:
I fly once in a blue moon when I have to, but I avoid it as much as possible.
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah, I don’t blame you. It’s not fun anymore, especially now.
Mike Mann:
I don’t think I would ever do it. I couldn’t even imagine doing it now. But I’ve been 911. I hardly ever did it.
Andrew Rosener:
I flew to Germany and it was actually just a couple of months ago and it was actually a trip. I have to say I had tremendous anxiety. I was not excited about getting on a plane and flying during a global pandemic. But it actually turned out to be like a real trip in the obscure meaning of that word. There was nobody on the plane. I had the entire business class to myself. Like, it was me and my family. We were literally the only people in the business class in the back of the plane. Had maybe ten people in it on probably a 100 and 8250 passenger plane. And it was easy peasy. We arrived in Munich and it was literally a ghost town. There was nobody. Completely empty.
Mike Mann:
Nice.
Andrew Rosener:
What your audience wants to talk about.
Mike Mann:
I want to talk about Portugal for 1 second.
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah, tell them.
Mike Mann:
And I also want to go to your background after that. With respect to Portugal. I have this really cool house on the beach in Delaware. And I have a photograph at the identical latitude pointing eastward, which is a picture of this really cool town in Portugal, which is straight across the Atlantic Ocean from my.
Andrew Rosener:
I’m in. I’m in Lisbon and I believe I’m like. I line up with New York or DC.
Mike Mann:
You’re due east of Dewey Beach, Delaware. Well, before we talk about domains for a minute, first I like to do people’s family background and their business background and then sort of their travels when your case is extensive, so you can make it brief and then we’ll.
Andrew Rosener:
So. All right, well, I’m from Rhode island, so I’m an east coast guy, New England. I’m not sure what you want to know about family, but if you want me to go way back, I’m actually 13th generation from Roger Williams, who was the founder of Rhode island, so I’m founding father material. And funny enough, which I think is quite relevant to these times, I think, like you, I didn’t necessarily support either side of this election. But the reason for that is that I’ve studied history pretty extensively, particularly american history and my family history. And, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t want to go down the politics rabbit hole, but I’ve recently been doing a lot more reading around that subject, and Rhode island was the first place on planet earth ever in human history that allowed a religious freedom. And I thought that was pretty interesting. So anyways, little tidbit of information. Rhode island born, Rhode island bred, 13th generations of Rhode Islanders. I’m the first one to escape Rhode island from my family, I believe.
Mike Mann:
So you’re not Jewish?
Andrew Rosener:
Well, my mother is Jewish. Sorry. My father’s Jewish and my father’s Jewish. Born, raised Jewish. Both his parents were Jewish.
Mike Mann:
They’re all from Rhode island, though. They’re all from that little dot of Rhode island.
Andrew Rosener:
Well, on my father’s side. So on my mother’s side, it’s the know, real, as deep rooted as it possibly know. We were burning the Gatsby and partaking in the. In the Boston Tea party. But on my father’s side, it was hungarian and german jewish immigrants who left Europe prior to the war. 1912, I believe, and wound up in New York. Pretty interesting story there, actually, too. My great great grandfather was a guy named Benjamin Block, who. Let’s see if horse. You see that horse up there? That’s Benjamin Block.
Mike Mann:
He invented blockchain, right?
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah, exactly. He did. He was on the board of the New York Stock Exchange at the time, during the great crash of 29, and he was one of the very few on the board that didn’t kill themselves. Lucky for me, or I wouldn’t be sitting here. So, yeah, when that whole crash went down, they all killed themselves. But he also had that horse, Morvich, which turned out to be a Kentucky Derby winner. So I guess that’s probably the most interesting parts of my family history. Everything else after that, after the crash, they lost everything. They went from driving my great grandmother to school in a Rolls Royce every day. And they had their residence at the rich Carlton in New York to moving to know backwoods town in New Jersey and subsequently later to Rhode Island a couple of generations later. Yeah, that’s it. And then I studied abroad in Australia, where I met my wife, who’s German. And then that sort of started my global escapade of becoming an immigrant, and I left the US in 2008. I moved to Panama for ten years. From Panama, I moved to, well, very briefly to Los Angeles, and then quickly pulled the parachute and two years ago moved to Portugal.
Mike Mann:
One of the interesting things is, just by accident, almost all my guests are internationalized. They’ve all lived all over, and a lot of them speak different languages and multicultural marriages and kids and stuff. I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s just when we talk to everybody, and they start talking about their background. It’s like they’ve had military families or just for whatever reason, they all seem to be very internationalized. Myself, I’m very american. I think I don’t travel international very often.
Andrew Rosener:
I think there’s two insights there. So one is, I think you have more personal reasons why you don’t do a lot of traveling. And then I think that our industry, which most of your, at least half of the guests you’re bringing on are from within the industry. And our industry lends itself to that lifestyle. Right. It’s something that can be done from anywhere. It can be sold in any currency. It can be sold to any country. And so it’s one of these few industries that now, today there’s more. But particularly at the early days of this business, it was one of the few businesses you could do anywhere. It was one of the original portable trades. And so I think it lends itself to people that are interested. Let’s see if I have the book here. Back 2002 ish, I read this book. I actually stole this from my old boss, and I was reading through, and this is like, historically speaking, portable trades, things that you could build a skill set in, build a mastering or an expertise in, and then do it from anywhere, not be beholden to any geographical location. It was the original sort of geographical arbitrage. And that for whatever reason, it spoke to me. And I was searching for my portable trade since then. And I had already been sort of dabbling in domains. I just didn’t know it was an industry. And at that time, I was in the seafood business. I was trading seafood commodities internationally, which also allowed me to do quite a bit of trade and travel. I’ve read that one, too. I think I’ve got, let’s see. Must have that here somewhere.
Mike Mann:
It teaches a method where you can work online, basically, which isn’t far apart.
Andrew Rosener:
Somewhere. Somewhere. I’ve got it. I don’t know. It’s not here on my shelf, but I’ve got it somewhere.
Mike Mann:
I’ll take your word for it.
Mike Mann:
As long as you know the methods.
Andrew Rosener:
I was in the auction with you. I was a second high bidder for makemillions.com. I loved that domain. And the moment I lost it, I regretted it. I was like, man, what were you doing? You were sleeping. You pay what you got to pay to get that name well, and you made very good use of it. And you hopefully have helped educate thousands of people to improve their lives.
Mike Mann:
I don’t remember the price, but I rarely expensive. It was a couple of event I rarely overbid but in that case I needed it to name my book. So like buying domainmarket.com, the domain of my company buying buy domains my previous I pay what I have to pay to get the perfect brand which is what everybody else should be doing.
Andrew Rosener:
Hold on, let’s see. I think it was 2009, 2009 it was me and you bidding at the end. Great domain. Makemillions.com great domain.
Mike Mann:
So tell the audience again, I have jeff on in a little while. Tell the audience about what you do for a living, how they reach you, and then how they can make money buying and selling domain names.
Andrew Rosener:
So we should do this again. In about a month we’re going to have some really exciting stuff coming out that I’ll be able to talk about. Unfortunately I just can’t yet. But we’re going to democratize the domain investment opportunity. I think a lot of what we’re going to say is going to be a lot more relevant to folks. But look, I think domain names are a proxy for physical real estate, for commercial real estate. I think that in today’s world you’ve got 30% of business commerce happening in the digital world and 70% still in brick and mortar. And over the next five years that flips to 70% digital, 30% brick and mortar. And as that happens, a lot of the value creation accrues to the underlying assets in the same way that it accrued to the commercial real estate that is now being dislocated. And that value will accrue to the digital real estate that underpins the digital economy. I’m very excited and optimistic about the future, and my business is to help the top businesses in the world acquire their best version, brandmatch.com domain name. And at the end of the day, I’d say we’re agnostic. We’re not going to tell our customers they can’t buy something that they want to buy, but we are definitely 99%. Com. And we also, in addition to helping businesses acquire their domain and helping them with the naming process and the domain selection process, we also help people that own domains or companies that own domains that are sort of sitting on their balance sheet, unused to sell them and put them in the hands of those parties that can make the highest and best use case of them. And we help both sides understand the value and do the education component and make a market. I mean, ultimately I like to say that our job is to bring liquidity to an illiquid market. And so, as you alluded to early on, you and I like to poke each other and make some fun on social media, but we don’t really directly compete. Sometimes we’re competing on an auction or two. But your business is buying very large volumes of undervalued domain names and more, let’s say mechanically or systematically selling them at scale. And my job is more I’m out there with a sniper rifle. We do buy domains for our own account. We have a portfolio of, I don’t know, maybe 5000 domains. But it’s all very high value and it’s all one off. It’s more, it’s a different animal. And so yeah, like you said, our primary business is the brokerage side. It’s helping people to buy or sell the world’s best domain names. And we really only deal in the top, I like to say the top 2% of domain names. So we’re not dealing with a lot of sort of longer tail, smaller names. You know, it’s mostly bang on big one word.com, meaningful commercial two word.com, three letter, two letter acronyms, stuff of that nature.
Mike Mann:
What are the best ones that you own yourself that you’re trying to sell?
Andrew Rosener:
Well, funny enough, opposite to you, we’re actually not trying to sell our domains. I have a little bit of a different perspective on the domain market. I don’t actually want to sell. Well, that’s not true. From the 5000 names, let’s say the top thousand names that we own, I don’t want to sell them. I would like to monetize them. I would like to do something other than sell them. Because once you sell these things, you cannot get them back. There is no replacement. Each one is unique like a snowflake. And so I don’t really want to sell them. And this is also very much related to some of the news that we’re going to have about a month from now. But we want to find ways to get these into the hands of the best parties that can make use of them and come along for the upside in some way or another.
Mike Mann:
What are the best ones, bro?
Andrew Rosener:
All right, so our best names that we own, clear eem.com twoletter.com. These things are always very subjective.
Mike Mann:
You have like a weed collection too. That’s pretty good.
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah, we have a pretty sick collection of weed domains.
Mike Mann:
I think my all the best ones.
Andrew Rosener:
Pretty much all the best ones.
Mike Mann:
You should post the list if you feel like promoting it because it’s so good. I mean it’s all the very best names in that space.
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah. And we sold some of them. And we had nugs.com. You sold that to Mike and MJ.com. We still have strains.com, cultivation.com. We still have sourediesel.com, blue dream. We’ve still got. I don’t even know, we’ve got about 1000 names in that space that are the best names there are.
Mike Mann:
I need to ask you about one other one too.
Andrew Rosener:
We got schwag. Schwag.com.
Mike Mann:
Nice.
Mike Mann:
Very good. Listen, I want to ask you about one other subject and then anything you want to conclude with. And then I’m going to put Jeff on. So the final subject is tell me about Mikesailor and voice, but also tell me about if phone did not have a corporation on top of it, what would it be worth?
Andrew Rosener:
Okay. All right. So, you know, I’m not only interested just in domains, I’m also very interested in bitcoin. You and I should have another one of these and debate bitcoin. But I’m a big fan. I’m a diehard believer. I do believe that the Internet deserves its own native digital currency. I do believe that cryptography is the greatest path to human freedom. And I do believe that bitcoin is the bridge of those two things. I was aware of Mike Saylor, actually, I was aware of the, in the early net days, I remember when he was a high flying.com CEO and microstrategy was a hot name on the street. But in more recent years, he came back on the radar after selling voice. $30 million set the benchmark for public sales. There are domain sales well in excess of that, but not publicly recognized. And so that was a big deal. I think, as he said, he sort of put a peg in the wall for where the market is on big names like that. If you can find the right end user at the right time and the stars align. And on the back of that sale, a year later, the guy went out and bought $450,000,000 in bitcoin. He’s up almost 40% or something in the last four months since he made that announcement, stocks up 100%. So he’s flying high. We had a really interesting two hour conversation with him on Jermaine Sherpa, on the program that I own and just. Fascinating guy. Fascinating guy. He understands the digital realm. He understands domain names. He understands the value proposition. He understands that we’re only scratching the surface in terms of the utility of the DNS mechanism and the utility of the domain name network and what these things are going to represent in the future from your identity to your wallet, to connectivity with the Internet of things and all of the things that are in it. From a control standpoint, from a location standpoint, there’s all kinds of exciting stuff that’s coming down the line utilizing domain names and DNS. As you expand utility, you expand value. And so one of the reasons I wanted to get on the show is it’s a very hard to explain to people what the value proposition of a domain name is. And he is very elegant and eloquent in his explanation. And so I encourage people to go watch that. Go domainsherpa.com, you’ll see it right away. There’s a video from. Hold on, sorry. Yeah, we’ll add a link.
Mike Mann:
Add a link on the thread. Tell me about phone, and then I’m going to add Jeff.
Andrew Rosener:
Ok, so phone. I mean, here’s the thing. My valuation methodology is very data driven, so I’m going to just plug it into a couple of tools here that aren’t going to tell me what the domain is worth, but they’re going to give me the data points I need in order to decide what the name is worth.
Mike Mann:
What I really want to know is if you owned it and there was no corporation. Again, there’s an incredibly great corporation on top of that domain, but I’m trying to separate the value of the corporation from the domain. But again, just pretend you own it and somebody’s negotiating with you. What’s your breaking price?
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah, again, I am very data driven on my valuation. So just quickly looking here, there’s about 700,000 exact match searches per month. You’ve got a dollar and a quarter CPC, roughly speaking. Extrapolate that out, give it a super premium name. Give it like a five year business multiple. I think the name is worth, and again, I hate to even say, what is the name worth? Because if I tell you what I think the name is worth, I want.
Mike Mann:
You to keep in mind. No, it’s okay. But voice.com deal could be a conceptual comp, and you’re a very tough negotiator. So you and I both go high.
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah. So I think at the low end you’re talking about $5 million, and I think at the high end, again, like you said, you’re talking about something like a voice, but I think 5 million is 530,000,000.
Mike Mann:
That’s a pretty big range, big gap, right? I think it’s worth 30 million, but if I was selling it, I would take 20, just based on discounting it off of the Michael sale or voice decom deal. But tell me whatever else you want to conclude with so I can add.
Mike Mann:
Jeff.
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah. Just add a little bit of color onto my valuation. Just why there’s such a big gap, because I don’t want that. I’m not trying to weasel out by giving this huge gap, but 5 million, I think, is like the price where it would be tradable if you came to me and said, look, there’s no corporation on top of this thing. I want it to be sold. I think that we could go to market and sell it in the 5 million range. So I think the value in the market today, 510 million dollars. I think that what is the actual value of that name? I think it’s at least $20 to $30 million. The value and the price, people conflate these two things. They’re very different. Domain names are at a very early stage of the maturity cycle, and so the value and the price have an enormous delta. But going forward, if we look forward a decade from now, the value will probably be about halfway up the maturation scale and will be, whereas that name is tradable in the market maybe at 5 million today, it’ll be tradable in the market at 15 or $20 million, and the value will be 50 million. Call it.
Mike Mann:
Okay, listen, we’re going to do domain appraisals after I’m done with Jeff. So if you come back on, I’ll add you back on, and you can think about the value of SEO.com, which is another fabulous corporation. But I’m just curious what the value of the domain is without the corporation. So thank you so much. This is an awesome time, and I’m going to add you back when you have your big announcement in a month or so, and I appreciate it. Hope you have safe travels with your family, wherever you’re going and whatever you’re doing.
Andrew Rosener:
I’m not going anywhere. But I appreciate it, and thank you, Mike. Pleasure to chat with you.
Mike Mann:
Okay, thanks, Drew. Take care. Jeff, how are you today?
Jeff Jacob:
Good, Mike, how you doing?
Mike Mann:
Sorry I was so late. Just Drew had so much good information at the end there, I didn’t want to cut him off. I actually tried to cut him off, but that never works.
Jeff Jacob:
Okay. You know, I’m not late for the office because I’m at the office, so it’s all good.
Mike Mann:
Yeah.
Mike Mann:
Good news about quarantine is it’s easy to get to the office.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah, I tell you. I mean, I already worked at home sometimes, but commuting is almost non existent now. For me, anyway.
Mike Mann:
You have a guitar on your wall. I like that. So we’re going to get into a few things, but the first question I have for you that I’m dying to know is what’s the connection between Anderson Cooper and Gene Simmons?
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah. The only connection is that Anderson is not a closet musician. Well, maybe he is a closet musician, but when I used to work in marketing for borders before they went bankrupt, I was on their national marketing team and I was fortunate enough to do all kinds of events and promotions with this wide swath of people, talent wise, not just musicians, but. So I did a handful of events with Anderson Cooper shortly after Katrina down in New Orleans. But the only connection is that I happen to do stuff with both of them.
Mike Mann:
You’re the connection.
Jeff Jacob:
I’m the connection, yes.
Mike Mann:
So what I want to do, if you don’t mind, is we’ll go to your family background and your business background and then we’ll go to today. To what’s going on today.
Jeff Jacob:
Sure. Absolutely. You just want me to jump in. Okay, well, great. So my family background, I grew up in the Washington DC area like you, right? Yeah. And it was a great area to grow up in. I think we realized certain things way in hindsight, the fortunate things that were in our life. But I loved growing up in that area. I mean, by my teens I was taking the subway from the suburbs into downtown to go to 4 July celebrations and museums. And what a great place to grow up from a cultural perspective and a sports perspective. And whether or not you like politics, you could never escape that. The beltway kind of sucked. But I grew up in that area. I went to school in south central PA after high school at actually a couple of different colleges because I was playing in bands all the time. So I was always dropping out to go on some wildly unsuccessful tour. But I graduated with a degree in the early ninety s in mass communications, film and tv production specifically. And I had always been the main songwriter in my bands. But I have a sister who lives in Miami and two parents who are in Delray Beach, Florida. So we’ve all kind of abandoned the.
Mike Mann:
Area and come visit next time you’re in Delray. That’s my stomping ground.
Jeff Jacob:
That’d be great. I would love that. I would love that. It’s a great town. What a fun place. It’s amazing what that place has become culturally and entertainment wise. My folks live in pineapple Grove. I don’t see them very much right now except on Zoom and across the parking lot with madness.
Mike Mann:
That’s where I park. That’s free parking in that neighborhood.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah, absolutely. One of the few places right.
Mike Mann:
There’s actually a drum circle right there. If you come on Wednesday, you can do the drum circle with me.
Jeff Jacob:
I love drum circles. I used to go, there’s a couple in the Delray area and I’m down in Hollywood and there’s one that meets in the downtown circle, young’s art park.
Mike Mann:
Oh, in to come down there sometime. But the one in Del Rey is very convenient because I’m already parked like a block away and I have my drum in my car.
Jeff Jacob:
Of course. Absolutely. Convenience is important and Del Rey has everything you could possibly want. Why ever leave?
Mike Mann:
Yeah. What’s cool is my grandparents used to live there a long time ago. So with respect to the changes that you mentioned, I’ve been watching all the changes from decade to decade, basically.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah. I imagine especially the last ten to twelve years, the explosion has happened. And the average age, I read a graphic a year or two ago. The demographic in Del Rey ten or twelve years ago, the average age was 60 and now it’s 37. So pretty amazing. Opposite of a lot of Florida, I would imagine.
Mike Mann:
Yeah. And they opened a ton of really good restaurants recently. The music scene is kind of marginal, but it’s manageable. But it’s fun. But the restaurant scene is very nice. And of course there’s a beach there, so it’s an awesome.
Jeff Jacob:
It’s great. Overall, I feel like the live music scene in a place like that lags behind how cool most of the rest of it is. It could definitely be better and be like a mini Nashville or a mini New Orleans or something like that, which would be nice. But Johnny Brown’s is a lot of, uh. After college in Pennsylvania, all my folks family had already moved away from D. C. And a friend of mine said, you’ve always thought you’re a pretty good songwriter. Why don’t you move to Nashville? And I was like, well, I don’t like country music that much, but let me check it out. I went to visit on a weekend a few weeks later, I fell in love with it. I didn’t know a soul and I vowed that I was going to move there. I went back home to DC, saved up for three months and moved down. And as a birthday gift to myself in my mid twenty s, I moved down there for 18 years and worked in many different facets of the music and broader entertainment industry. And as a songwriter, I was always doing that on the side. And I loved Nashville. I loved it. I started dabbling in nonprofit management towards the end of my time there and that’s what brought me down to South Florida. I had done a lot of volunteer work and I loved animals. And I got an opportunity to be the director in south Florida of the largest no kill private dog rescue east of the Mississippi. And my folks were already down here and the beach was here. So it was time for a change. That was five and a half or so years ago and been down here working in nonprofit management as my day gig ever since.
Mike Mann:
Well, back to Nashville for 1 second here. Tell us about, just for a few minutes, some of the famous people you met and if you have a story, and just for the know, my first major concert was Kiss at the Capitol center in DC. Of course, you were probably at the same show. I don’t know.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah. It’s so funny you mentioned kiss. Gosh, the best marketers in rock and roll, bar none, no doubt, the best merchandisers and marketers in rock and roll. I was working in marketing for borders at the time. We had a regional marketing team, a national marketing team, and I was based in downtown Nashville. And Kiss was on tour with Aerosmith. This was around 2007 or eight towards the end of my time there. I was there about ten years. And during my time with borders I was fortunate enough to meet just crazy cross section of interesting people, authors and musicians and politicians and everything in between. Some people checked all those boxes. Actually, at the time I was a bigger fan of Aerosmith and I was in the coffee shop one day when they were in town together on this joint bill. And in Nashville is one of those towns where you get used to seeing all kinds of famous people, especially in jobs like that. So you kind of ease off your wow factor a little bit. But we all have folks that we’re really interested in and really fans of, and Stephen Tyrell and Aerosmith were one of them. And one day he walked by the coffee shop and I did a double take and then a triple take and there was this guy who was about a half inch shorter than me, which made me feel really good with the long hair and the big lips, and it was Tyler. And so of course I went out to stare and a couple of folks beat me to it and we talked for a minute or two. But that night, not coincidentally, actually, we had a book signing scheduled with Gene Simmons from Kiss because he had put out a new book at the time. I think it was called sex money and Kiss or something like that. And it was sort of his version of a professional development and life development book, Gene Simmons style and so he was on the tour with Kiss and Aerosmith. He was stopping in certain cities to do book signings and meet and greets. And we were fortunate enough to be doing an event with him that night, which was doing a bookstore event with someone of that stature is kind of like trying to fill a fishbowl with a barracuda. I mean, you know that even if the attendance is not what you hope, you’re going to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and sometimes thousands of people trying to come into your bookstore and fit into this space. And Gene Simmons was one of those guys, and this is a guy who had lunch boxes and condoms and toilet paper, all this stuff branded after him. We were excited for that night. And he showed up that night a little early. And we had these event teams that kind of had a process for how we were going to handle big out of the box events. And we would usually get together with the big author or the big musician and say, hey, we’re excited you’re here. And this is how it’s going to work and this is how we’re going to manage 1000 people trying to come through in the next few hours. But it was the opposite with Gene. He came in and we met with him backstage, so to speak. And instantly he started telling us how it was going to go instead of us telling him. And it was, okay, we’re used to that a little bit here and there as well. And again, this is Gene Simmons. And I was so excited to take a picture with him backstage, so to speak, before we went out. We took a picture and I thought we were both going to stick out our tongues because he’s famous for his tongue, but he faked me out. I was the only one that stuck my tongue out somewhere there’s a picture of that. But for five and a half hours, 6 hours, we had probably 1401, 600 people come through that night. And a lot of them had bought his book, which is kind of. Most of them had, because that was kind of the price of admission. But they were bringing all kinds of other things for him to sign. And some of them brought body parts for him to sign. And I don’t mean brought them in a suitcase, I mean they were just part of their bodies for them to sign, that was always interesting. They were the females and he signed anything and everything. And at one point about 2 hours in the local NBC affiliate stopped in because part of my job was to reach out and talk with the media about certain things and especially exciting events. And NBC came down and much to both our horror and pleasure. He got on live tv with NBC and told anybody who was watching or listening to come down he’d stay all night if he needed to. And so again, you can’t buy advertising like that. So we were thrilled. But also at some point we wanted to go home, so we were terrified at the same time, but people came. We had probably 6 hours worth of people in line that night. The only thing that I think made him leave was I think he had to go to a concert to play in. It was a crazy time.
Mike Mann:
It was a lot of where he was performing, like, not go to one, but perform one.
Jeff Jacob:
He was playing.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, I just said that. He was born as Hayam wits in Haifa, in Israel.
Jeff Jacob:
Right. I think they emigrated here when he was nine or ten years old or something like that.
Mike Mann:
If you ever run into him again, call him Chaim.
Jeff Jacob:
Chaim. Yeah, no, and I watched that show. Yeah, he was a character. He was a know all kinds of. We. I’ve met Brian Adams and Anderson Cooper and Dr. Ruth and Mitch. Album was a thrill. I love his books. Just all kinds of interesting people over the years. Rascal Flats, a lot of country folks, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw.
Mike Mann:
Sorry to hear that. It’s okay, I’m teasing. You know, I’m a rock and roller. I don’t have anything against country music people. I just don’t want to hear their music.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah, I hear you. Although it’s interesting, having lived in Nashville for so many years, there was a real fine line between a lot of rock and a lot of country there. Really mean. And long before I moved to Nashville, the Eagles were putting the two together. Know Reese’s peanut Butter cup?
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah.
Mike Mann:
I mean, Jerry Garcia and Bob Dylan and Neil Young. It’s got a little bit of that going on.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah, I mean, even Ray Charles was always dabbling together and throwing all that.
Mike Mann:
Stuff, know, like folk music and bluegrass ties back into country. It’s all tied together, obviously.
Andrew Rosener:
Yeah, they’re all.
Mike Mann:
Go ahead.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah, I was just saying they’re all cousins. Blues and rock and folk and country, they’re all kissing cousins. And I like where they blur. I like where those lines blur.
Mike Mann:
It’s kind of James Brown and Elvis Presley getting people started way back when.
Mike Mann:
Absolutely.
Mike Mann:
Airplane. So tell me about how cool Face the music foundation is, what you guys are doing, how the viewers can get involved with you and reach you and what value add here.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah. Face the Music foundation is a nonprofit, 501 C three. We were founded about five years ago by some guys who really believed, as do I, that music is not just this fun, entertaining thing, but it can be a mechanism and a catalyst to change the world. It’s a universal communication tool. It’s been proven through science time and time again that music helps retention when it comes to learning new information or trying to change behaviors. And so when it was put together as a nonprofit, it really was born out of the need to try to raise awareness and reduce stigma surrounding specifically addiction and more broadly, mental health, and to raise funds to provide treatment scholarships for people who couldn’t afford or didn’t have good quality insurance for treatment. My predecessor actually decided pretty early on in the organization’s history that if we’re really going to be a respected organization in this conversation in the community, that we really should also have some community outreach programs that attacked the problem from other angles besides just trying to fund treatment. And what I mean by that is addiction and mental health are very multifaceted, nuanced epidemics, just like a lot of social ills, and you can’t cure them or fix them from just one angle. So prevention and education with almost any societal ill is a huge piece to eventually fixing it. When I used to work in animal welfare and animal rescue, we used to say as rescuers, we’re never going to rescue ourselves out of this problem just by opening more shelters and more rescue organizations. We have to change the conversation so that spay and neuter become the norm in our world, rather than just the exception. And it worked. So in about 20 years ago, in the animal rescue community in this country, we were euthanizing 20 million dogs and cats a year. And by a year or two ago, we were only, I say, euthanizing maybe two to two and a half million. Still a bad problem, but it’s easy to see where the arc is there. The arc is that that problem is well on its way to being solved as a societal ill. Well, addiction and mental illness are much earlier in their trajectory towards society, changing the conversation. And so prevention and education is a really big part of that now. And to dig, dive a little deeper, we have to be able to, as a country, as society, have conversations about the fact that my brother or my sister or my aunt needs to get help without feeling any worse about discussing that around the dinner table than we would about saying my brother or my sister or my friend has cancer. And until that is the norm and that stigma is gone, we face a challenge. Now we also have. So we have a community outreach program called get in tune, which works with at risk youth from a prevention standpoint. And it utilizes what I would call music assisted therapy to tackle difficult emotional topics for marginalized youth. Bullying, self esteem, personal boundaries, self advocacy, empathy for the other, whomever that is. And these are curriculum based programs facilitated by licensed therapists. But we use music as the gateway to have these tough discussions. We have modalities. We have something called lyric analysis, where we analyze songs that are based on certain topic matter along with the kids to help talk about those difficult topics. And it opens people up. It reduces the barriers, the resistance to conversation. We do collaborative songwriting with these kids also around the difficult topic matter. Now we have a program also we consider outreach called Grace Notes Project, and that utilizes musicians who are in recovery. And for those people out there who are not familiar with the phrase, recovery really means it’s folks who have gone through treatment for some sort of addiction or alcoholism and are now clean and working some sort of a program to stay clean. That means meetings at Na or AA, going to therapy, doing community service, maybe working a job, hopefully. So we take musicians who are in recovery and utilize their God given talent and passion for performance and put them back out in the community as what I would call musical warriors or musical ambassadors performing for other marginalized populations, senior citizens with dementia, kids with autism, soldiers with PTSD. Eventually we’d like to expand into the prisons and have a program called guitars behind bars. And now you have a musician using this performance as part of their regimen for staying clean, healthy and sober, but also providing not just entertainment value, but the real and proven science based benefits of live music performance for these other populations. So those are kind of the bookends that we provide in the community. In addition to yes, we still put on benefit concerts and advocacy events to raise awareness and raise funds, of course, for treatment scholarships and silver living scholarships as able now Covid-19 of course, stopped a lot of these programs and events virtually in their tracks, although three or four months in, we were able to start pivoting into the virtual world a little bit. And so we’re available to be seen online@facethemusic.org. We do some front porch sessions streamed as part of our Grace Notes project occasionally on Wednesday nights on our Facebook page, Facethemusic.com. Sorry, yeah, Facebook. Facebook.com facethemusicfoundation that’s a little bit about Facethemusic. I’m their executive director. I’ve been there about a year and a half, and we have a great board. We’re always looking for new board members who are ready to roll up their sleeves because we’re still a pretty young organization in the scheme of things, but everything that we do and everything that we feel we can do is seen and done through the lens of music as a method.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, it’s awesome. And I’m really into music and into charity in South Florida, which is how we met. Sean Randolph works with me on my charity work, introduced me to you for this purpose, and I believe you’re talking to him about working with make change trust.
Jeff Jacob:
We are actually, and we’re actually really excited about that because one of the things we’ve been talking about as a team and conceptualizing for the last year or so was could we take our get in tune program for at risk youth, which is curriculum based, but it’s pretty tight. It’s a month module that we do with different partners, like the boys and girls clubs or the YMCAs, and we work with a set group of ten or twelve or 15 teens for a month, once a week, and then we’re done with it. So it’s not as deep a dive as it could be in the world of what I would call these days, emotional intelligence. Which, by the way, is a topic matter that more and more school systems around the country are trying to implement in some shape or form, which is basically trying to teach living skills, coping skills to kids as something that’s at least as valuable as learning algebra. If not. So, we’ve been wondering what it would look like to take our get in tune program and blow it up and expand it into a more broad, sweeping, music based emotional intelligence program that we could partner on with.
Mike Mann:
Believe and I are going to work on that with you.
Jeff Jacob:
Yeah, we’re going to work on it with you guys. And we’re really excited. And we’ve got someone who’s worked with the schools a lot, who’s already jumped on board to try to help us flesh this out programmatically. So we’re going to see where it goes. But the potential to help such a wide swath of kids in a county that has a huge percentage of kids living below the poverty line, which generally means they don’t have great family infrastructure as well, is really inspiring. We’re excited for the opportunity to even attempt it.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, super cool.
Mike Mann:
So if you don’t mind, you should post any contact information you want, links to your sites, programs, social media, anything you want, you can paste on my wall and encourage people to add you to social media and follow you and help you like we want to do, because it’s such an awesome program. So I’m so grateful that you came and joined me today, and we have this video forever that everybody can share and view. And, you know, it’s been an awesome session with you and with Drew, and now we’re going to do some live domain training. Is there anything else in particular you want to say before we sign?
Jeff Jacob:
I just. I’m appreciative of the opportunity to speak with you and talk to the people who follow you. Mike, thanks for having me. Uh, so I should just post on your wall information?
Mike Mann:
Yep. Yep.
Mike Mann:
Go right ahead.
Jeff Jacob:
Very good.
Mike Mann:
You can post it either on my wall or append it to this live stream or both.
Jeff Jacob:
Ok. And once this is available as kind of the recording, I’ll reshare it in a couple of places. Facebook, LinkedIn, website, et cetera, et cetera, of course. Thanks so much for having me and keep up the good work. You’re doing some really great stuff for the community, and I know you’re a drummer, so one of these days we’ll have to do the drum circle together.
Mike Mann:
We’re going to do that soon. Yeah. We really appreciate what you do in the community, and we’re going to add you on the live stream again in a few months, and I’m going to talk to you again soon offline.
Jeff Jacob:
Sounds great. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. Take care of yourself.
Mike Mann:
Thank you, sir. You too.
Mike Mann:
Okay, so we’re going to do some live domain appraisal training. I am so blessed that I had two great guests again.
Mike Mann:
It’s been awesome.
Mike Mann:
It’s going to be saved on YouTube.
Mike Mann:
I don’t know if Drew’s going to come back to help me with the domain appraisal training, but he should.
Mike Mann:
So you guys didn’t add very many.
Mike Mann:
But I have my own list, so it doesn’t really matter. But you added a couple of domains that aren’t very good, so I’m not appraising them. Here’s a good one. Otar, thank you for saving me. So I’m going to share my screen and I’m going to do a Google research to do the domain appraisal, keeping.
Mike Mann:
In mind that a real domain appraisal.
Mike Mann:
Takes more time and I have a whole bunch of tools. Since you don’t have those tools, I’m going to teach you how to do it with just one tool, Google. So just give me 1 second here and we’re going to roll.
Andrew Rosener:
It.
Mike Mann:
Okay, there we have it. So we’re going to research gemsellers.com, which is a great expression. First thing we do is disambiguate it. We always use Boolean for Google. Since they’re not giving us good results, we’re trying to narrow it down to the best of our ability. So I put it in quotes, and.
Mike Mann:
Again, Google is giving me the wrong answer.
Mike Mann:
It’s not 71 results because we know that’s too good of a word. So I think they’re doing it to throw me off in case I’m a bot or something.
Mike Mann:
But the correct answer is you go.
Mike Mann:
Down to the bottom to find the right thing. And there’s this tiny little thing here, which proves that Google is a crappy app because they’re hiding us.
Mike Mann:
The actual correct results are in this tiny link at the bottom that nobody.
Mike Mann:
Knows how to find. So it’s kind of stupid. And so the correct answer is 710 results, which is actually pretty low. You can see this one has been used not just as an expression, but as a domain name, and it’s actually just a domain name for sale. So you can see there was never really a real corporation on top of it.
Mike Mann:
So the process we’re going through here.
Mike Mann:
Is we’re going to disambiguate it.
Mike Mann:
What does it mean?
Mike Mann:
Then we’re going to look at the breadth, how many companies might need it, and then the depth, who needs it the most and how much might they pay for it to establish a fair market value. And then if somebody’s actually making you an offer, you might discount it because you want the money, which is what most people do.
Mike Mann:
But we set a fair market value.
Mike Mann:
The true price, the true value, and then we take what we take. Everybody has their own tolerance for that. I usually go down like 15% if I have to. So we know what it means that somebody who sells gems, potentially a jeweler. There’s 1000 other ways of saying jewelers. Jewelry sellers, jewelry dealers, gem dealers, whatever. I mean, there’s a lot of thesaurus expressions that I hadn’t considered yet, but if I had enough time, I would figure out all the alternatives.
Mike Mann:
The more alternatives there are, the lower.
Mike Mann:
The value of this guy is. So the breadth, though, is almost any gem dealer and seller in the world. So I’m surprised there’s not additional results here. But it’s just not a popular expression. It sounds like one government e marketplace is what this is, but that makes no sense. Gem sellers. This is the one right here. Gem sellers association. So we’d like. There’s a Facebook site. I don’t know if you can see this on my screen or not, but only six people like it, so it looks lame. So we’re going to appraise this guy. The breadth is it should be broad, but it’s not as broad as one would think the depth is. There’s only one or two people that look like they would want it. So even though it sounds like a really cool name, which I’m going to give a premium for, sounding cool and being short and almost a dictionary word, practically, it’s a market space. Selling gems is a space in the economy, so it has some meaning, but it doesn’t have a lot of action in Google. Again, I have a lot of other tools that I could deconstruct it with, but we don’t have time to do that and you don’t have those tools. So it doesn’t matter with respect to appraising this guy. It’s a really good name, but it doesn’t have a lot of activity. So I think it’s worth like $10,000, but I would take less just because there’s not a lot of competence, there’s not a lot of demand for it. I’ll see what else you guys have. If it’s no good, I’m going to go to my other list. Okay. Otar looks like he always has the best ones. Alastair stock mentorship, not too bad. Tampa lenders. Come on, you guys can do better than that. Okay, so I’ll pick one or two off of here and then I’ll go to my own list. Don’t give me these crappy ones because it’s just cluttering up my wall. Crime advocate. That’s a decent name. We know what it means. Actually, we don’t know what it means. Really. They advocate for crime or against it? Who advocates crime? I can tell you who advocates for crime. This has an advocate for crime victims. So it makes no sense. Disambiguating it makes no sense. Nobody’s a crime advocate. Well, let’s see. Is anybody a crime advocate? Nobody’s a crime advocate. Well, wait a, uh, let’s see here. Is anybody a crime advocate? Is anybody that stupid? Sure enough, there’s really stupid people in the world. They advocate for crime. So in any case, disambiguating this guy crime advocate, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Actually, it makes no sense. And so therefore, the breadth is very few people and very few depth. However, people couldn’t conceptually use it and confuse it for a crime victim advocate. But it doesn’t make any sense to me. I like the names to be perfect and within context. So while it sounds cool, it makes no sense. So sounding cool isn’t good enough. Easy to spell, easy to say, sounds cool. It sounds like it should mean something, but it really doesn’t. Crimeadvocate.com $500.
Mike Mann:
See if there’s any others or I’ll.
Mike Mann:
Grab a few from my list. Cultivating.com. There’s a good one. Thank you, Ryder. Cultivating.com we’re going to do, guys, give me great ones. Great ones are the only ones worth appraising. It’s not good use of time to do crappy ones. Okay, so cultivating. So we know what it means. Actually an active expression of verb, I guess. But the problem is there’s cultivate cultivation, growing growth in a thousand other thesaurus metaphors. But it’s still a great name. It’s easy to spell, easy to say. It means something. It’s in the dictionary, but it’s imperfect for the reasons I described. So what? We know what it means. Maybe it means something extra. With respect to the weed industry. Farmer charged for allegedly cultivating marijuana doesn’t sound very enticing. This guy’s. I don’t know what he’s doing. He’s been smoking the marijuana, apparently this dude. So let’s see here. That looks pretty popular. Maybe that’s what it means. Maybe it’s about marijuana. And Drew’s actually the expert on these type of domain names. He has the best collection in the world that he just mentioned to us. As far as what it’s worth, though, I guess that we’re doing what it means. We know the breadth. Is anybody cultivating anything? The depth, however, though, it looks like the marijuana industry would be the highest payers. So we’re going to focus on what the value would be to them if they’re the potential buyers. And that’s a growing industry, particularly with the liberals in office. It’s going to be marijuana everywhere. As if there wasn’t already. I don’t know that that makes the word cultivating that exciting. So regardless, the breadth, is anybody growing stuff? The depth is it’s not the best domain in the world. Somebody might want it or need it pretty bad. It’s a dictionary word. There’s a lot of value there. It’s hard to appraise it. $15,000. Okay, let’s see if you guys have anything else here. I’ll do a couple more and let you guys get about your day. Ryder has bindle.com. We have kosher approved. That doesn’t sound very exciting. Revenuefromhome.com. That actually is a very long name, but it sounds good considering quarantine and Covid. You guys put a bunch of crappy domains on there, so you should appraise them yourselves, appraise them at zero and delete them. Follow the process I just showed you so you know how to appraise them. So as far as cluttering my wall, we’re going to go to revenuefromhome.com from Alastair. But again, that’s a particularly growing area. Revenue from home. The problem is it’s long. It’s three words. Money from home, cash from home, job from home, home job, home cash, home revenue. At home revenue, Covid revenue. There’s like a billion ways of rephrasing this one, which significantly diminishes its market value. So we know what it means and it’s good timing. It’s trending in some respects. The breadth is everybody in the world could be in, I don’t know, sell. Let’s just look at it like multilevel marketing or third party marketing. Different sorts of services that need resellers, revenue from home. You can make revenue from home, sign up for my reseller program, affiliate program, things of this nature. So we’re just looking at the images, but we don’t see it as the name of any companies. A specific brand name. It’s not on the side of a truck, it’s not a logo, slogan. Corporate name, proper brand name. It means something. There’s a lot of other ways to say it. It is easy to say and spell. It’s particularly meaningful right now. And it actually sounds, you just have to use your own personal opinion and just say, does this thing sound cool? Yes, it sounds cool. It should add some value in that respect. It’s your subjective review of it. And so here we get the real number. So again, the problem here is that Google showed us the wrong number and you had to know where to look. Google showed us 89 results, which again, you’ll never figure this out unless, first of all, you have to put it in Boolean or else Google is going to give you horrible results. And secondly, you have to know, you have to click down at this little thing. So that’s why you need this training, because otherwise you’re not going to know how to even use Google. So anyway, revenue from home has a ton of hits here. Seven and a half million. So it turns out it’s great name, but again, it’s not the name of a corporation at the moment. It should be one. So revenue at home is a cool name. Congrats, Jen. And that is Alistair’s name. Jen just sold another name she posted about. So again the breadth is pretty broad and the depth is it’s pretty deep because it’s such a cool name but it’s a very long name so we’re going to have to discount it down a lot and take into account that too many other ways of saying it. So I’m going to have to discount the hell out of it even though it sounds really cool. But $4,000 it’s too long of a name to sell it for anymore. But it would be a great investment for $4,000 for the buyer. All these are great investments. That’s the object here is great investments to build cool stuff. So I’ll do two more and you guys are off the hook because this thing is running very long, which I appreciate. We have so many cool things going on. Well I’m going to have to do my list I think because you guys posted a bunch of garbage on there. Okay, I’m going to do my list. Give me 1 second here. I’m going to pull two domains off of here and we’re going to do an appraisal. Okay, so let me get back to my trusty little Google here or untrusty in this case. First thing I’m going to try is one on this list and do rent automatically. So this would be related to renting an electric vehicle. So it’s a new idea, another trending idea. We know what it means but there’s too many other ways to say it. So we’re sort of finding the same thing across all these domains. People are doing a smart thing and.
Mike Mann:
Buying domains for cheap.
Mike Mann:
That sound really cool. And that’s a smart thing because all the appraisals I posted are actually worth more than the people invested in the domain. Some domains might be worth 500, some might be worth 5000. But I’d say in almost every case it’s greater than the person paid for it. I didn’t ask the people what they paid for it. But there’s another example of a cool name that probably didn’t cost very much that might be worth a few thousand. And we’re sort of seeing all the names today follow that same pattern where they’re worth a few thousand dollars. So we know what it means. It’s not perfect because there’s too many ways of saying it. Automatic rental car on and on and on. The breadth is anybody who’s in the car industry, in the car rental industry for example, or a domain name or marketing speculator the depth isn’t very deep just because there’s too many other ways of saying it. So again, we’re just back to that same situation. So rentautomatic.com is worth about $5,000. I’m going to do one more and let you guys go. Thank you so much for joining me. And thanks to my guests. Jeff and Drew did a fabulous job. We’re going to save this recording that you can watch and share later. I’ll post it in a couple of hours. So what else am I going to do here? I’m going to do one more that hopefully sounds pretty cool. Houseofame.com so again, what does it mean? I don’t know what it means. House of Fame. It’s like a museum for artists or something of famous people. House of Fame chaucer casting agency dance. You can see this pull down is actually relatively helpful. Tells us a little context for the expression. But it’s three words. It might mean something, but it doesn’t mean something in 1 second, necessarily. You don’t necessarily know what it’s referring to, although it is cool. And as we do the research, we see it means something. So what it means is, I don’t know, a house of fame. Maybe the house itself is famous. Maybe the people are famous. Dance academy so the good news is people are using it in branding, multiple places. House of Fame EDM record studio this is the net. So this is actually the most likely buyer, probably the owner of the net. It’s a crappy little site for some kid who’s a dj. He got houseofame.net for $10. I would have got something. Houseofamedj.com, he could have got for $10. Also just adding two extra letters so we sort of know what it means. The breadth is pretty good. There’s a lot of stuff we see here, a whole bunch of stuff. That’s the good news. And the depth is this brand. You can see 100 different ways people are using it over and over and over. The perfect, exact word, the same expression. Casting agency since 1993. Again, on and on and on. Books, agencies. I’d like to do more research, but we’re rushing here. So again, House of Fame doesn’t sound.
Mike Mann:
That great until you do the research.
Mike Mann:
Once you do the research, it sounds fabulous. The depth is huge because there’s so many competitors. And here we go. There’s like, this is 14 million hits in Google. It’s a poem that I guess is the first reference to it. And then people repurposed it and rebranded it on other spaces. And I have the domain, thank goodness. So House of fame is the winner, which makes sense since it’s mine. There’s two f’s there in a row, which is bad. People might mistype it, and it looks kind of weird when you read it. So I would take money away from that. From the appraisal. It’s a little long, but we just saw, like, 100 different companies use that exact same expression. So the answer is, it’s worth $50,000 any day of the week, and if you give me 40, you can have it today. And if you offer me 30, I don’t think I’ll take it because it’s too cheap. So you guys are awesome. Thank you so much for another fabulous afternoon. Meeting cool people and appraising domain names. You guys are the best. I really appreciate everything. And I’m going to see you next.
Mike Mann:
Week because I already have my awesome guests lined up.
Mike Mann:
I’m going to post about it in a couple of minutes. I’m going to post the video to this YouTube, and I’ll see you guys next week and see you on social media. Thank you so much.
Andrew Rosener:
Bye.
