Morning Folks!!
When is it time to sell? Well for years I have had inquiries and offers for 235.com and my other NNN.com domains. I have one price for most of them $100,000. They all come back and say it is too high and not worth $100k. My canned respose...'Come back when it is'.
Well is 'Is'. And so a $70 gamble in 1998 pays off about $10,000 in ppc over the years and now $100,000 in cash. What stock coud I have bought in 1998 that would have done better?? Passively?? Over a 1500X return over the years.
Why sell now? Because like a farmer, the item was RIPE! I knew what 'Ripe' looked like for a long time. $100k. When the market reached $100k, the domain was 'Ripe'.
Now does that mean I believe it has reached full value? Absolutely not. I have NNN.com's that will not 'Ripen' until the market hits $250k. Go ahead and laugh. You can't even hold a candle to the laughs of 1998 when I 'Wasted' $70.
Do you have the patience to wait that long? My strategy started out knowing it could be 20 years. Not 20 minutes, not 20 days, not 20 months. Each domain will ripen at a different point because each industry is at a different point on how they are harnessing the power of the Internet.
Breaking through the clutter is getting harder not easier. THAT is why domains will keep going up in value regardless of what know nothings know and say.
Have a GREAT Day!
Rick Schwartz
RobbiesBlog.com
Congrats Rick! Well Done again another solid .com sold for a solid price!
Rick Schwartz
Actually, make that 17.
I sold eCruise.com to iCruise.com for an undisclosed amount and shares of stock back about 10 years ago.
Altaf
Congratulations Rick! on your 16th domain selling.
Your patience has ripen with your vision as well that we just learned a little. Keep it up!!
Gratefully,
Altaf
Congrats for 17th as well.
With best wishes & regards,
James
Congrats Rick i watched your video on Domain Sherpa the other day it was great you got great tactics. However i do believe you would of been bigger than Frank Schilling and the only thing that stopped you was a yahoo ad feed, because what i lernt is at the start you could only convert adult traffic through adult phone numbers. However mate you have still done great and you have the best patience in the industry lol congrats Rick you show most people how its done.
Garry
Rick,
Congratulations! Your vision blows my mind. You have a unique perspective that while I may not always agree with, you have proven yourself to be right on your 20 year plan. I cannot imagine the satisfaction that brings to you when you think about all the people that laughed at you all those years.
Rick Schwartz
And here is the kicker…..
I have 7000 domains. Even if I use the 80/20 rule, that would make me have 1400 good domains and 5600 Pigeon Shit…..at $100k a pop it creates a FLOOR value of $140MM.
Coder
“80/20 rule,”
With domains it’s more like 99.9/0.1 rule. Don’t go celebrating just yet.
:)
Arbel Arif
Thank You for The Inspiration…
kandyjet
congrats Mr.rick.
i think your bit afraid of the right after the dot feature and thought to liquidize few top ones?
EmergingDomains
Congrats.
Woudn’t it be great to own 247.com? I wonder what that is worth.
Acer
Er…why would rick fear the upcoming gTLDs? If anything, they will greatly inflate the value of his mostly .com portfolio after the new extensions fizzle and pop as the duds that they so obviously are.
Disagree? Tell it to the owners of .travel, .museum, .cat, .coop, .biz, .aero, .jobs, .pro, .mobi.
Acer
Whoops.
Me again. Forgot .info! All uber failures. Every one of them. I’ll even let you throw in the country code of .CO and the soon to fail .XXX too.
Yeah, .ECO or .NYC is gonna do significantly better. Snicker, snicker.
Don’t you worry about Rick’s .com portfolio.
Poor Uncle
Oh man….$100K is too little money. Don’t mention it unless it’s a $1mm or higher. Is this really only your 16th or 17th sale? You are missing out on all the fun.
Do you ever give away any of your domain names? When I walk by a restaurant and see some homeless elderly, I often ask if he/she wanted some food and get them something to eat and drink. I do it because it’s the cheapest feel good medicine I can buy. It takes so little to turn a hopeless stone face into a happy face with yellow & missing teeth showing and all. Do you ever have the same impulse to give away with your domain name?
You seem like you like to write and interact with people. Why don’t you setup some contest and give away some of your domain name once in a while. It’ll be something interesting to do. Buffett does it and look how many millions of tax dollar he avoided…and people think he is a saint. hahaha
UFO.ORG
If you have 7000 domains and you’ve sold 1 Pa for 100k. Then it looks like thats your sales revenue stream from that portfolio. Unless you’re going to live another 1400 years then its unlikely you’ll see the benefit of that 1 sale PA till then (80/20 rule).
At 100k with a disc rate of say 20% then your portfolio of 7000 domains is worth 500k. If you think that is wrong then you should be selling more of your domains (for less) and replacing them with fresh names (at a lower cost that you sold others). The acid test is cash flow, show that and then your portfolio has more readily ascertainable value.
Rick Schwartz
UFO, the first 20 years has nothing to do with the next 20 years. The price of domains is accelerating faster than anything I can do. So doing NOTHING is what makes it a winning hand. Remember we are talking about unique assets that are still appreciating and still earning me income. So why exactly do I have to rush??
His advice is free
He is giving you free advice. That should be enough. Out of all the friends and family I told about domain names through the years, zero of them have taken the initiative and dot involved. I was willing to teach them, too.
The bottom line is that most people are losers and cannot take advice even if the advice is worth a million dollars.
Does anyone know what Warren Buffet’s first two rules are?
1) Don’t lose money
2) Don’t forget rule #1
You know what else he says.”The greatest moves are greeted with yawns”. You have to get your money in when people aren’t valuing the asset correctly.
Lots of clowns run their mouths on the forums and blogs (not you), and I have seen so many people say that they wished they were around back in the mid to late 90’s because they would have picked up million dollar names and been rich. I think NOT. They miss the whole point. They are losers and don’t have the insight to be winners. That is why they chase dotmobi, .co, worthless hypen names, worthless incomprehensible 4 letter names like QYVT.com, etc.
There are more losers in domains than in most industries. Just like they are a high percentage of investors who are stone cold losers, and most Wall Streeters are morons.
Listen to Warren Buffett when it comes to stocks and Rick Schwartz when it comes to names.
Dotcom is king. And 99 percent of the names floating around are worth absolutely zero.
UFO.ORG
Yes, you’re right on that score. If the’re appreciating better than other classes of investments then you just hold and the real value is determinable on sale. One thing though I think domain investors don’t seem to always see is that its good to hold but its even better to sell and replace with the same stock and still have cash over.
And yes, that could be counteracted with the notion”why spend time messing about with smaller sales and turning over your stock when you’d prefer to spend your time relaxing or looking for new buys” etc.
Still though, I believe that as any investor increases their knowledge they should be looking to prune out the lesser performing assets and if someone makes an offer on a lower ranked domain then it would make sense to sell and pile that cash up for a higher grade and higher potential .com.
UFO.ORG
Warren Buffett made his money by investing for cash flow (and risk limitation of) and not for accounting profits. The two are not always the same and he’s always looked for that differential. He’s also sacrificed growth for that model, yet over the business cycle it delivers more. At the end of the day its all about cash in versus cash out, keeps his eye always on the money.
Tia Wood
Congratulations on the sale, Rick!
Jxff
I think if you realize that all the TLDs you mentioned have not been indexed in relation to how thousands of new TLDs will be indexed, you might think differently. For example… you are Google, you make a great deal of profit from search related advertizing. So, you now weight the TLD as a top criteria for a search because the more accurate the search, the higher the conversion rate for clicking on a paid link. Right now domainers are living in a library that only has a few bookshelves for all the possible categories of content. Starting in 2012 the library will have all the bookshelves it needs to separate content to give the user the best possible result for a search. Will the user care if it is a .com… nope! The TLD will define the best end result for a search. Will this mean the devaluation of .com domains? Not for a while. If you understand that adult content will be in the .xxx namespace not by popularity, but by law and that the search for adult content will be limited to the .xxx namespace than you will understand the reason for sunrise registration and the value of brand protection, etc. If you don’t think adult content will be limited .xxx namespace, you are kind of right. Just try to think of the all countries in the world that would allow the unregulated sale of pornography… not many. It isn’t censorship, if you want to provide porn on the Internet, it will be in the regulated namespace of .xxx. Once you understand how namespace will ultimately define search, you will realize that the existing scope of TLDs are nothing but dirt roads compared to the highways and interstates of tomorrow. The future relationship of TLDs to search queries will define the value of domains.
lefthook
Your reply to Acer is interesting to me, but i am new to domain investing and don’t fully understand your POV. Can you please re-word what you wrote so i, as a novice, might better understand? Thanks!
tommy wei
Congratulations, Rick.Looking forward to the next transaction.
Rachelle
You certainly deserve a round of applause for your post and more specifically, your blog in general. Very high quality material