My domain investing journey have been more downs than ups. I regularly make mistakes that cost me lots of bucks but this doesn't hinder me from my goal to be among the top 1% domain investors someday. And last week was no exception.
I woke to collect a few expiring pronounceable domains. Wanted to acquire them, then flip it for a few hundred or a few thousand bucks. It was just another lazy wintery morning, but this day I was going to lose something more valuable, A DOMAIN WORTH HALF MILLION.
I was skimming through various expiring resources and I had my eyes suddenly fixed on a short pronounceable domain name. It wasn't a dictionary word but somewhat it looked worthy of a back order. I entered the URL in my notepad with a few other names I liked and headed straight to Estibot to get a quick idea of the worth of domains.
Note: Although all my viewers would be willing to know the name of the domain, I am sure the new owner would not like their domain name to be the talk of the town, so let me keep this URL under wraps. And for the sake of reference let's just call the domain name PRODUCT.COM.
Although I have seen a few domains that are worthless according to Estibot but have flipped for thousands of bucks, while on other hands there are lots of domains that are of high value to Estibot and other domain worth calculators but have flipped for merely a few peanut amount.
I casually entered the domain name in the Estibot calculator and waited for it to show results with half sleepy eyes. And when the result came, I was dead shocked, my eyes were bulging out of surprise, not literally though! I couldn't actually believe what I was seeing.
A domain that was worth $444000. A domain that was about to expire in the next 6 hours, was a domain worth half million dollars! A domain that was around 19 years old.
My mind was filled with a cloud of questions. Why was such a valuable domain expiring? Why didn't the current owner or company renew it? Why was the domain of so much value? The whys continued for a little while until it struck me that I should Google it for good. The Google uncle seems to have answers to almost all questions asked worldwide, no wonder millions of people rely on it for getting the day to day problems sorted out.
Then bammmm! It was a household product that was launched around 2 decades back. But recently another company acquired it and they carried out manufacturing of that product with a new name. And since they no longer needed the old product name, the connecting domain name was, I guess deleted from their part and was now expiring in about a few hours.
The angel and the devil in me were both seemingly happy. The innocent me was happy to have a valuable aged domain. The materialistic me was happy to cash it by flipping. But the practical me was happy to develop the site further and make my biggest dream to own a successful passive online business come true.
There were indeed reasons for my over excitement. The domain had backlinks from big sites like Wikipedia, Forbes, BBB, Bloomberg, Times and various other top notch portals. I was dancing, well my grey cells were dancing, to be specific. I felt like the lady luck was shining bright on me. There was no limit to my happiness.
And then under the influence of super excitement, I committed the biggest mistake that every domain dreads of. I didn't use all possible back ordering services. I just went with the myth that proved all wrong in my case.
The biggest myth of the domaining industry is that the chances of acquiring an expiring domain are high if you backorder it from the registrar where it was initially registered.
Since the domain was registered with Godaddy, I went straight ahead and backorder the domain there and just relaxed. There were reasons I didn't use other popular domain catching services was that I just don't trust their fidelity. I mean, in the past I have used a few back ordering services and they were successful in catching my favorite domains but then those domains went to either private or public auctions (although I mostly make sure I am the only one back ordering it even few minutes before any name expires) and I have lost to big sharks out there most of the time.
So again I went to all those big domain catching services, rechecked that no one else back ordered it and didn't use their service because I highly suspect that they send inventory to public and private auctions even if you are the sole bidder (unless the domain name is really bad, they award it to the original back ordering individual) and I was sure I would lose the domain name to some other domainer.
Eventually, I was relaxed that I will acquire it successfully since I trusted the myth that the original registrar has high chances to grab the expiring domain name. I was just 100% confident about it and went to sleep peacefully that night, just to wake up the next morning to see someone else had acquired it. All my big dreams and plans were shattered by now and I just cried inconsolably the whole day. Anyway, I learned a few lessons the hard way that day:
The original domain registrar does not hold high chances to acquire an expiring domain.
Use all possible domain catching services if you really want to acquire an expiring domain.
What was the biggest mistake you made in your domaining or marketing career?
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