TMBA 552: The Art of Buying and Selling Web Domains

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On today's podcast, we're excited to finally reveal that our remote jobs platform Dynamite Jobs is officially a ".com business".

After three years of running the company with a .co domain, that .com marks a huge symbolic change for our company, but it didn't come easily.

Enter Rob Barbour of DomainSOS.com and DomainVIP.com.

Rob has worked in the domain space for over twenty years and he owns a substantial portfolio of his own. He also specializes in helping people acquire domains that are difficult to obtain.

In this week's podcast, Rob joins us to talk about his history as a domain broker, how the industry has changed over 20 years, and how he helped us secure DynamiteJobs.com for our business.

Listen to this week's show and learn:

• How Rob got started buying and selling domains. (7:31)

• Why Rob decided to start brokering domains for other people. (22:35)

• What happened when Rob purchased DynamiteJobs.com for us. (31:11)

• Some of Rob's favorite domains that he owns right now. (44:43)

• How we feel about the deal now that we own DynamiteJobs.com. (56:00)

Mentioned in the episode:

Before the Exit - Our New Book
TMBA Masterminds
Partner With Us
The Dynamite Circle
Dynamite Jobs
Dynamite Deals
Tropical MBA on YouTube
DomainSOS.com
DomainVIP.com
Noah Kagan
Sumo.com
Enom
Name.com
Moniker.com
GoDaddy
ICANN
Johnathan Solorzano
How I Nabbed the .com for My Bootstrapped Startup Without Spending a Million Bucks - LauraRoeder.com

Enjoyed this podcast? Check out these:

TMBA425: Meet The Deal Master
TMBA548: The First 1,000 Days of Running an Agency
TMBA550: Revisiting Our 2020 Business Goals

This week's sponsor:

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Thanks for listening to our show! We'll be back next Thursday morning 8AM EST.

Cheers,

Dan & Ian 

Full Transcript

Rob: We agreed on a price came back to you, and you're like, ‘Ah’, still higher than I want to go and, and he wanted far more, but I was like, ‘Oh, well, maybe’, and then I let you know what the price was. And I know your response was ...

Ian: My response exactly was ‘You're ruining my weekend. Rob’.

Rob: That's what it was (laughs).

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TMBA Ident

Dan: Welcome back to the TMBA pod. Of course, the pod where we believe building a small business, that hopefully one day will get large, Bossman, is one of the most reliable ways to build wealth from scratch. In fact, it's the number one strategy in my book Bossman, what about yours.

Ian: I'm trying to think of a better one. Selling stuff on Craigslist is a slow road, but it might get you there.

Dan: You know what frustrates me actually? Just a little ranty rant at the top here. It frustrates me how, like real estate investing and stock market investing is often presented to folks with not a lot of capital as a way to get to wealth. I just don't think the math is in your favour there. You have to have a lot, a lot of capital in order to use these investing strategies, especially retail investing strategies, as a path to generate wealth and large amounts of passive income. And I think the promise of entrepreneurship is without that great deal of capital, ‘Hey, here's a way that you can build up your personal war chest and then, one day when you have a lot of capital, you can use those investing strategies’.

But personally, I get a little miffed at how those strategies are presented, because I guess they're so easy to present. Everybody could understand them, everyone can see the numbers, but the numbers don't look pretty if you're starting from scratch or from very little and what you're looking to do is to get wealthy.

Ian: Well, let me paint you a picture Dan, walk down to your favourite bank, give them a barrel full of cash and have them invest it, have returns of, you know, 8% year over year, or lock yourself in a dark closet, get rid of all your friends, don't call your mom on Christmas. Which one sounds cooler?

Dan: Welcome to the dark closet, everybody. Yes, this is the TMBApodcast. You are in the right crazy corner of the internet. Today we are going to do a little bit of an old school one, where we bring you into the real time what's happening in our business. And so the time has come to formally reveal that we are finally running our remote jobs platform, our career platform, if you will, on a dot com.

Ian: Whew. I didn't know what you're gonna reveal there. But, I'm glad it's that. Yes, we have switched over to the dot com. Officially, we were on the dot co for, I guess three years.

Dan: And let me tell you, Bossman, that M wasn't cheap. So things we're going to cover today, just a little history of why we wanted to purchase a dot com, maybe obvious to some listeners, but certainly maybe not to us a few years ago when we went with that dot co. There's a lot of downsides to running your business off a dot co domain. And one of them is that you know, people can miss links to you. So over the years, like people just assume you have the dot com. And so you're not going to get all the juicy backlinks you could have. This sort of same confusion happens when people try to find your site in Google, or even from time to time when they email you.

I think we can zoom back at the end of the episode to maybe talk about our reasoning, just a little bit more Bossman. But suffice it to say we wanted to get that dot com. And that's what today's episode is about. And part of, you know, us being geniuses is that because we grew Dynamite Jobs on the dot co, for three years, we made this transaction a lot more expensive than it might have needed to be.

Ian: Yeah, absolutely. By the way, this dot co, dot com thing has been confusing t shirt printers here for the last couple years too. I just couldn't bear the idea of seeing a dot co on a T shirt.

Dan: We would have had to obscure it, like no extension. And really, at the end of the day, what kind of business are you running if you can't have amazing t-shirts. But the problem Bossman, it's not like we didn't attempt to buy the dot com, we just couldn't make progress on it. The person who owned this domain was not getting back to us. So we had to enlist a middleman to help us and that person is today's guest and was recommended to us by our good friend, Noah Kagan.

So today, we're gonna hear from the person who helped us out. And frankly, I didn't really know these people even existed. And his name is Rob. A little bit about him: he's worked in startups. He's worked in online marketing. But a side hustle has always been domains. And, as you’ll hear in this conversation, that is his main focus these days. So how he gets paid is you pay him a little deposit up front. And he takes a commission from the deal, like a real estate broker. And, I gotta say, in this case, his commission was well worth the investment. It's been a pretty crazy journey. And I know there's no such thing as an internet business without a domain. And so I think everyone out there will find the lessons learned in today's episode useful.

Ian: So we actually haven't done a debrief with Rob. We acquired the domain and then we just kind of started running to the T shirt printer. We had to get these things embossed on everything that we own. So I'm excited to go back with Rob and bring you guys the actual story of what unfolded with the dot com over at Dynamite Jobs.

Music

Rob: My name is Rob Barbour. And I've been in the domain space for a little over 20 years and basically I help people acquire domains that ordinarily they may not be able to attain. And I also sell some of my own domains as well.

Ian: So Rob, we met over, I guess text message, an odd text message. I got your number through referral through a mutual friend. And I started texting you because there was a domain that we were trying to purchase, actually was Dynamite. Jobs.com. We had owned the.co for about two and a half years, we had a trademark and for whatever reason we decided to start this business without owning the dot com, probably something I wouldn't do in the future.

I contacted the guy that owned the domain. I actually at one point called him and had a conversation with them. And then at some point, he stopped responding to my calls into my emails. And so that's kind of how we met. And, and ultimately, I don't want to give away the story yet, because I think it will unfold through this podcast, but ultimately, we got to know each other. I want to hear more from you, Rob, about your 20 years of domain expertise. So start us off from the beginning, Rob. How did you get into buying and selling domains?

Rob: So the answer to that is, basically, I've been around the computer space since I was a kid and we're talking like, you know, back in the late 70s, early 80s. I did a lot of crazy stuff in my parents basement small house, Monroeville, Pennsylvania little suburb outside of Pittsburgh, these are 300 baud modem days, you know, you plug the phone into this suction cup thing. I was dialling up anything I could to try and get connection. I mean, I was building circuit boards for I had an apple three, like an early early early Apple. But anyhow, a lot of crazy stuff as a kid. I lived at Radio Shack, man.

But there was a point where I had learned about domains I used to design networks, I do all kinds of crazy stuff, worked for the government, travelled the world. And so I registered the name, whatever it was for myself. I had it … somebody wrote to me and said, ‘Hey, would you be willing to sell this?’ And at the time, I had no idea how to price things. I sold it for maybe like 1500 dollars, which back then, that was like I was like, ‘Holy crap. That's great’. And that kind of set me on the path forward learning ‘Hey, there's actually value in these digital names’, you know, you know, virtual real estate.

I bought and registered and started figuring out auctions and all these other things across. I don't know how many years. And then at some point, I realised that I could buy, I could buy domains on pretty much anywhere. You can find them listed, I bought my first big block of domains on eBay. Somebody had listed 900 plus domains, and no reserve. I ended up winning these 900 names for like $975, which is a steal. The guy was not happy. In fact, he never turned over maybe like 10 or 15 domains to me and I did my best to get them but I never could. And that was really what launched this. That's really how I got started.

Ian: You had a bit of a background in computers sounds like you know, growing up messing around and stuff like that. And then you figure it out, like, ‘Hey, these domains, they might be valuable’. I don't even know if you can sell a domain on eBay anymore. Can you?

Rob: Oh, yeah. Yes, it's rampant.

Ian: Interesting.

Rob: And there's a lot of crap on there. You know, I'm sort of giving away a secret source of mine. Because a lot of people just don't know you can get them on there. And eventually people figure that out. The sellers started increasing their prices because you used to be able to go on there and get names for next to nothing and one of them here. I actually pulled this up for you. I purchased CheesePizza dot com off Ebay for $510.

Ian: Wow.

Rob: And then I sold it for close to $5,000.

Ian: What year was this?

Rob: So I sold it in 2007. I purchased it 2005

Ian: What do you think that domain would be worth today?

Rob: I'd probably say in the 20 to 40 range, easy. It's just like real real estate, what somebody's willing to pay for it.

Ian: So Rob, I want to back up and talk because it sounds like you bought these 900 domains and that was kind of your foray into the, into the industry. What made you want to buy 900? Like most people that probably buy three or four or five or six to say, ‘Oh, this is a great name’. How did you figure out that early on that buying in bulk might be a good idea?

Rob: It was a judgement call, right? I was like, ‘Here, I've got a chance to get 900 domains, maybe 10% of them are really good. And 1% of them are amazing’. And so I literally took a chance, and it panned out..

Ian: So you bought these 900 domains and then you kind of had to figure out like, ‘Okay, how am I going to actually pay to maintain these because you have to pay a registration fee every year’. And so how did that work?

Rob: So it was interesting. It's like a lot of people when you start a new business and so I basically started figuring out, ‘Okay, great, I have these domains’, I and back then you could park them, parking means you just you can put up a landing page that just has predefined ads through parking companies, domain parking companies. And I mean, the amount of money that I started making off some of these domains off of the parked pages was crazy. So I might have had like 50 names that basically paid for the renewals of all the names and just from parking revenue, and then there was profit on top of that. It's all about numbers. domains are basically numbers.

Ian: So in the early days, basically, you would fall upon one of your domains somehow. And then it would be parked, and then essentially, there'd be ad revenue there and then you would get revenue through that. So essentially, this is how you were paying to maintain all these domains.

Rob: Yeah. And then I had the random sales. The selling wasn't as much back then because I had never really figured out, “Hey, I can build my own landing pages and put ‘for sale’ on them”. It was a brand new world for me trying to figure all this out. YI went to the first ever domain conference in Florida. Back in 2003 or four, I forget when. And that's where I met the world. We're talking about the people that own registrars, like I met the owner of Enom I met the owner of Name dot com, I met the owner of Moniker dot com, Monty and I became good friends after that. It was one of those leaps, right? So it's like a lot of things like, if you're going to be invested in an industry, it's always great to attend conferences and gatherings and I knew nothing. And it was incredibly eye opening. Then then I went to the first get together. And it and I mean this literally, I would say half if not 75% of the people at this thing are people who probably lived in their grandmother's basement, that never saw the light of day twice a week. Look, I'm really not kidding.

Ian: Oh, I believe you. I know the type.

Rob: I mean, and they couldn't carry a conversation. So this is sort of what helped me get to know me everybody. I was one of the few that actually will, hey, I like to talk, I can talk with anybody. And then in the basement of whatever hotel we were in, they did like a little miniature live auction. One of the things I remember was soap opera dot com sold for, I think it was like 35,000, something like that. Which at the time, even then that was a pretty good deal. But think about that now. I mean, what would that actually sell for me soap opera dot com and that's probably a million plus.

Ian: And so when you met these people, what was your idea about the industry and who they were and where you thought you might be going?

Rob: The answer is, I definitely wanted to be, like some of those people. I was still trying to figure that out. I definitely wanted to be the person going, ‘Oh, yeah. Hey, I'll buy soap opera.com for 35 grand’. And so looking back on it, I regretted not being able to buy some of those killer names, great prices. Conversely, I actually learned a lot listening to what are people paying for stuff? All of that helped me dramatically.

I realised that it was really a numbers game. Out of every hundred domains, you might sell one, or you might sell 100, it just depends. But the more you have, the more likely you are to sell them. And so I began ramping up very, I'm gonna say relatively quickly, and there was a point where I owned over 12,000 domains, give or take. And it was, now these are days, you have to remember that it was early for me and I really was leveraging everything into these domains. But conversely, I was making a lot of money with advertising.

Ian: Let's talk about that because I think a lot of people, including me don't actually understand how a domain lives, survives all that. So can you walk us through? Because it seems a bit ambiguous, right? So there's these domains for sale, but who's actually selling them if nobody actually owns them? So can you walk us through that and help us understand how a domain gets to be?

Rob: Sure, on the most basic level, you have what's called a what's called ‘the registry’, which is the governing body for an extension. So you'll have dot com and you'll have a registry associated with that. And then you have authorised registrars, like GoDaddy, who is authorised by the registry to sell domains based on a lot of criteria that they hand out and rules and regulations you have to follow, which in turn allows an end user to register them through a registrar. And the moment that you register it, say through GoDaddy, there's a little electronic wizardry that goes on behind the scenes. It's sent back to the registrar or registry and it says, ‘Okay, this name is off the market’. So it literally takes place in like milliseconds.

Ian: And so is this organisation, the organisation before GoDaddy, where GoDaddy purchases from, are they like a nonprofit, who gave them the authority to broker these domains?

Rob:Oh my god. Well, that's … I don’t know what kind of a call you want to turn this into. ICAN is the governing body of all this. So ICAN has some good and bad things with it. It's essentially a government that controls all this. So there's an auction block process just to even control the extension. Now you get that, then you become the registry for that extension. You can set your own pricing, you can reserve any domains you want so that nobody else can register them. There's a lot of things that have been done with those extensions over the years, some have done well and some have not. So overall dot com is the king. But years ago dot mobi, this is like 2004/2005, dot mobi was launched. That was going to be the default extension on all Nokia cell phones. So back then Nokia was the big player in that. So I was like, ‘Oh my god’, I started buying dot mobi land rush. This is like the day before it's even available to the general public.

I bought like Central America, dot mobi, South America dot mobi, I bought all these names. I ended up selling a bunch of them shortly after the extension was launched. And then, you know, mobi disappeared once Nokia disappeared. But overall anybody can, almost anybody, with a with a legal entity and the resources, and it requires quite a bit of money to a take hold of a registry because you have to bid, then there's all these government regulations you have to follow but yes, I've known a couple people that have actually done this and acquired other extensions, so it is it's an interesting process but not one that I ever desire to go after.

Ian: When you're describing all this, one word comes to mind and you can say yea or nay, sounds a little bit like a mafia. I mean, it's .. this process seems opaque. I mean, it sounds very, very complex and convoluted.

Rob: Boy, I'm really thinking about how to answer this. The answer is yes, it is complex, it's convoluted. And in my opinion, it's designed that way on purpose. There's a lot of back channel stuff I know that goes on that even those in the domain space don't even know about. But yes, it is. It's about as close to printing money as you can get. You give somebody the authority to control a domain extension, which is now basically it's what kind of runs the internet, aside from IP addresses, which is another massive industry clouded in mystery, controlled by the government.

If you own the actual extension, I mean, you can set whatever prices you want because you'll you'll know that like some extensions, you can't get them for less than $100 a year or 200 a year or if you want the premium names, like the one word killer names, they want like 50 grand up front, plus yearly renewals of like 510 grand or whatever that is. So to your comment, is it like the mafia? Well don't know since I'm not part of it, and I don't know of any organisation that exists like that. But if in fact it did exist, I would imagine this would be something pretty close to a nice closely guarded secret.

Ian: So Rob, let's progress a little bit with your history. After you started buying and kind of selling these domains, it became a number game at some point, you had 1200 of these things. At what point did you start buying and selling domains for other people?

Rob: I would say probably around 2010/2011, somewhere in there. I used to do startups every like three to four years, I'd go in and work basically for stock or options and I think it was at one of those was the first time anybody really asked me to help buy a domain. In fact, even now, honestly, I just, I've kind of run under the radar with that. I never really focused on that one aspect. Although it has gotten quite busy since 2010/2011. And most of that has been referrals.

Ian: Buying and selling these domains? You started to talk about all these people that you met at this conference, and I'm sure through the years you've met a lot of other people. So what kind of relationships do you have that most people don't in this space?

Rob: The relationships that I have, it's very nice to be able to, at the time, I had a lot of names at Moniker. So if I ever had an issue, or if I need to do something special, I literally could just reach out to Monty, who owned the registrar, and he would help me.

Fast forward to today, I have most of my names at GoDaddy and some other places. I have a semi dedicated rep at GoDaddy, and all these different places that allow me to help acquire names for people. So a lot of times, the average person, they go online, they type in a name, and it comes up and says, ‘This is for sale or might be for sale’. Well, maybe it is maybe it isn't, is their buy now price, who's really the owner. And so if I run into a roadblock, I can reach out to a lot of these people that the average user does not have access to.

Ian: So let's talk about acquiring domains that are hard to get or that are sought after maybe for yourself or for a client, like I did with you. Tell me a little bit about your process. The hardest ones and the easiest ones.

Rob: That’s a great question. You know, some people genuinely do not know that you can even buy a domain, don't know how to do it or the process. I would call those types of brokering deals, where I help them acquire them easy, right? Because for me, I look at it I go “Well, I could just click ‘Buy Now’” but I still try to help them and negotiate the price down and whatever. So those are what I'll call easy.

And then you get to the more challenging domains. I have another client and it's a one word, killer name, it's a.com, he couldn't reach them. He brought me into it. And I couldn't even find who the owner was through all of my sources. And eventually, I figured out who I think the owner is and I started reaching out to them all these different emails, no response phone numbers. And then one of them led me to like Comcast, Verizon, like, like an actual number there, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I wonder if this is either, you know, that entity that owns it or somebody that works there’, it turned out as far as I can tell with somebody who worked at one of those places who owned this name. And eventually, I sent a certified registered letter. I mean, the hoops I jumped through on this were insane. And eventually, they replied to one of my emails and said, ‘Thanks for all your contact attempts. It's never for sale. Don't contact me again’.

So my client, so maybe like a year later, he's like, ‘You want to ping them and see’, and I'm like, ‘Sure, why not?’ And so basically, reply was once again, still not for sale. And it would have been a, you know, probably a couple million dollar domain. Sometimes this happens. It’s like two dogs with a bone. So one person is willing to pay just about anything but the person who has it doesn't want to sell it.

Ian: Are there instances, you can shield the identity of the domain. It's very common these days. So people don't know that you own it. Is it possible somebody in your position can still figure out who owns it, though?

Rob: The answer is yes. But not all of them. About one year ago they started making who is private and taking the records away and they really just made it a challenge for anybody trying to do this. The only way to one hundred percent guarantee that nobody knows who owns a domain is to hand register a domain. And you put privacy on it at that exact moment.

Ian: So I found a domain name that's never been registered before. It's 200 characters long or whatever. I register it and at that moment, when I register in the checkout with GoDaddy or Namecheap, or whatever, then I put privacy on it.

Rob: Yep. at that exact moment.

Ian: Okay. Because otherwise, if you registered a domain, then think like, ‘Oh, you know, ‘I'm not gonna put this privacy on it, sell to somebody else, and then I put privacy on it’. Maybe it's possible to find who the previous owner was, and then track down the new owner.

Rob: Yep.

Ian: Is it just a matter of you knowing how to get that information? And me not knowing? Or is it something that you have in terms of your personal relationships?

Rob: Yes to both. There are many tools online that people know but they don't really know how to really utilise them to track who an owner of a domain is. There are also some really geeky things you can do from a Linux shell or command line or whatever. So a lot of these things come into play. I do the easy stuff first. And then some of it goes into the more complex and interesting ways of figuring out who owns domains. Sometimes you literally can't find out. It happens, but not often.

Ian: And why is this so opaque? Like, why hasn't somebody like you made this process more transparent? Because I'm sure that you could sell this process.

Rob: I think everybody has different processes, and different relationships. Some of these names that I can't figure out on my own, I can ask somebody at that registrar, ‘Hey, you don't have to tell me who the owner is. But can you just send them an email and say, ‘Hey, I'm interested’. Now, that's a relationship thing that average end users won't have, because you just call the generic line at GoDaddy. And they're like, ‘Yeah, I don't know, use our brokering service’, or whatever. There's a little bit of protection with the people that do this. Basically, I if I tell you everything that I do, I package it up. Now, I basically take away that edge that I have.

Ian: Rob you equate owning these domains to owning real estate? And do you think that most people that are holding these domains, like the guy that we bought Dynamite Jobs from? Do you think they equated to that too? Or do you think for them? It's just like, ‘Oh, one day, I'm gonna be a multimillionaire. I bought this domain in 1999. And I've been paying $10 ever since. And someday, somebody's gonna come … ‘and it's almost like a lottery ticket. How many of these people that own these domains view it as like a lottery ticket versus real estate?

Rob: Yeah. That's a great question. If you go back 10 years, I would say people that own names probably had some idea or they didn't know the value of them. And they would not have said, ‘Oh, this is my lottery ticket’. You fast forward 10 years to today. So much of it has been in the news. And domain sales, the whole industry has really exploded in the last 10 years for sure. Way more people now are aware of the value of the domains. And so those people that are aware of that may say, ‘Hey, this is my lottery ticket. I own you know, you know, you know, blah, blah, blah, com for words with hyphens in it, and it's worth, I’m going to be a millionaire’. Well, you know, they really don't know the reality of it. And some people actually know the reality of it. It's just going to vary, it's too much of a variance there between names and people.

Ian: Rob, when you're buying domains for other people like us, I want you to just kind of walk me through the steps of what transpired with Dynamite Jobs dom. What I did was I increased the price of Dynamite Jobs dot com by contacting this guy, by owning the trademark, all this stuff, by developing it on dot co. So walk me through what happened because we actually haven't debriefed really on what happened when you bought Dynamite Jobs dot com for us.

Rob: You know, that's a great point we don't think we ever did. So, essentially, so the guy who owned Dynamite Jobs, from what I can tell, he was just some guy and bought the name because he liked it, maybe owned a couple more domains, but it wasn't his full time business and he just really just wanted to make money off it.

So your initial dialogue with him was, ‘Hey, I've got the trademark’. And that instantly puts people on the defensive. Right? ‘Oh my god, what do I need to get an attorney?’ And that changes the dynamic of the interaction right there. It's really an interesting thing, maybe the case, but it's not any way to try and obtain it. no fault of your own. This is not me pointing my finger at you. It's just the reality of it.

So I approached him. I obviously gathered all the information from you. And I approached the owner using a fake email that I have multiple accounts that I use for these things that are not known. And it just helps the process because if somebody can't look you up online, and they can't tie you to somebody that they can relate to the domain or anything else, it makes the process much easier. And so basically, the owner and I, it took a while. In fact that if you recall, I sent you an email at one point. I'm like, ‘I don't think this guy's he just he's opening the email, but he's not responding’.

Ian: So you're using tracking pixels to know that he's seen the emails.

Rob: Exactly.

Ian: He’s not responding. Okay.

Rob: And it was a while before he even opened emails, right? So eventually, he opened an email. I'm like, ‘Oh, we have a winner’.

Ian: Give me an idea of a subject line and what you're putting in these emails.

Rob: It depends, when I say it depends, some of the subject lines are really as simple as ‘Domain name. Open to selling?’. Or if you can't get somebody to open the email, you say ‘Re, colon, blah, blah, blah’, that gets people to think, ‘Oh, wait a second, did I open this? Or did I respond ..’, even though that's been going on for a long time, when it comes to email marketing, the ‘Re, colon’ still works in people's minds. They're just like, ‘Oh, I'm part of this conversation’, and they open it.

Sometimes it is something related to the person that I look up. If I find out who the owner is, and I know they like baseball or whatever, I may use that in the subject line and/or the body of it. And this is all part of building rapport. This is just like in person, body language, right, you're mirroring, your tonality, you slow down. So, if you do a lot of mirroring, as much as possible through email, that also helps deals go a little bit smoother.

And so he and I basically got to a point where we were emailing back and forth, he was opening, was responding. And he did have an initial stance when it sounded like, one example, he was like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna make a boatload of money off this domain’, and we kind of circled the waggons and eventually, we agreed on a price came back to you, and you're like, ‘Ah, still higher than I want to go’ and, and he wanted far more. And then I let you know what the price was and I know your response was, ‘I don't know’.

Ian: My response exactly was, ‘You're ruining my weekend Rob’.

Rob:That's exactly what it was.

Ian: ‘We can't do this’. But when this guy thought that he was gonna make you know, tonnes of tonnes of money. At that point, how did you get them off that?

Rob: The more you can build up rapport with somebody, email or verbally, the easier it is to work on getting a price that is, let's call it ‘fair for everybody’. Now, as an owner, as a domain owner, I can ask anything I want for domain, it doesn't mean somebody will pay it, but I can put any price I want on it. So part of the process is essentially learning or knowing what does that person, the owner, really need to get out of this to make them happy?

If a domain is worth 100 grand, like literally worth 100 grand, I just won't offer five grand or 10 grand for it because it's just not realistic. That's part of the challenge. And also part of the expertise of knowing what is that limit that I can push. Now, if you know the person is desperate, they need money, for whatever reason, you learn something about them. Well, then you can push those envelopes, you can say, you know, look, ‘Hey, I know it's a great name. I can give you 20,000 ..’ it’s just like real estate, like ‘I can give you 20 grand cash today in your bank account for this name might be worth 100 grand but nobody else is offering’, and they may accept it.

Ian: So getting back to Dynamite Jobs. You guys had a dialogue back and forth. And finally, you know, we settled on a number. How happy do you think he was with that? How eager do you think he was to get rid of that domain? And do you think I got a good deal?

Rob: Oh, I think so. Here's the thing, so you got a good deal. And I'm going to tell you why you got a good deal. One, you had built a business on the dot co, which is not even close to a dot com, it's the next most valuable extension, in my opinion and others opinions, which is actually fine, right? A lot of people have this dilemma. They're like, ‘Oh my god, I can't afford to buy that.com I'll register an extension, build it’. But by then somebody realises, you know, ‘Hey, they built this business on the dot net, the dot co, whatever. And they track it down and they realise, ‘Hey, I can charge way more’.

So as a business owner, you don't have the money up front, it's better to build the business and then make the money to buy the.com at some point, always better than never starting in business. The flip side of that is, like your name, like Dynamite Jobs, I don't think the owner really put two and two together. I don't, because he could have easily said, ‘Oh, I want 100 grand or 50, grand or whatever. So for a business owner who's running something on a dot co to acquire the dot com for their brand, for their livelihood online, I think it's a steal. I mean, you could have easily paid. Well, a lot more, 10x-ed it.

Ian: Do you think he felt like he got a good deal? In the end? Do you think that he celebrated that weekend?

Rob: Boy, that's a great question.

Ian: Just based on your interactions with them, do you think he was super excited?

Rob: I think he had some regrets. He and I had an email thing after that took place, nothing bad. I think that on one hand, he was glad to get the money. On the other hand, I think he was sad to let this thing go that he had owned for a while, right? It's like a lot of people who collect, like they are collectors.

Ian: Did he own it since like, 1999 or something? Was he the original owner of it?

Rob: I think he was the original owner. Yeah.

Ian: So he's a collector, one of his one of his babies was leaving,

Rob: There you go. And that's also one of the things that I encounter when trying to broker names, is this person is literally in it for the business. They own thousands of domains, and it's a numbers game. That's a totally different approach than a person who owns five domains that they've owned for 20 years.

Ian: So it's almost like you know, there's an emotional reaction, there’s an emotional connection to these things like, ‘Hey, I bought all these things’. Whereas, you know, if you're buying from somebody that's in the business of buying and selling domains, they might actually know the value, be willing to let them go, thinks like that.

Rob: And this is sort of like the antiques world, same thing. You have people that collect and will never sell the thing. And then you have people, they get the business side of it and they're like, you know what, I bought it for $5. I'll sell it for 100 bucks. And then I'll take that hundred and buy something else, or whatever.

Ian: What percentage of domains are owned by a small group of people, you and your buddies in the basement of the hotel like. I'm starting to I'm starting to kind of get the idea. that maybe this isn't as distributed as we all might think, it's the 80/20. Right? Like 20% of the people own 80% of the domains. Is that the case?

Rob: I would say in the early days, that was definitely the case. Early days, I would say pre 2000. Two thousand to 2010 definitely becoming more public. So that crowd of owners is growing. Fast forward to today. There are a tonne of new people getting into buying domains. I mean, and the thing that most people don't know is that some of the largest corporations in the world are some of the largest owners of domain names. For example, Johnson and Johnson, they own a tonne.

Ian: Not necessarily things that are even relevant to the business, like somehow they just got into owning these domains?

Rob: Yeah. Maybe they acquired a company and then all of a sudden they own these domains. Or like Hallmark, even they own some domains that are crazy names that you wouldn't imagine they would own but they do. So yes, I would say there's a smaller percentage of people in companies that own the vast majority of names. One person that I know very well, he owns about 300,000 domains. I know two other people that one of them owns millions of domains and the other one owns another half a million or so and one of those people actually just sold their company to GoDaddy.

Ian: So you know, Rob, we're talking, back in the day, you can park these domains and have advertising revenue online, click through. And it was a way to pay for these domains. That was the golden days. Now, you can't really do that.

Rob: You can, absolutely can.

Ian: Is the traffic the same, though, as it used to be?

Rob: Well, the traffic is the traffic, depends on the person. I think the question is, are the consumers smarter? And the answer is yes, consumers are much smarter. So they go to a landing page, a parked page. And they've seen these before. They're like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm not clicking on that’.

Ian: Right.

Rob: So as domain owners, now I do this as well. So I still have some names that I leave parked, because honestly, I have not been able to figure out how to make more money doing it then a parking page and they still do really well. And I leave those alone.

Other names, I basically wrote a script that kind rotates different landers. So somebody shows up and one time it's this way, sometimes it’s another way and I figure out what works and doesn't work and it doesn't look like traditional parking pages. Some of my best ones are names that I picked up, that have real traffic, real users, and it's nothing, you're going to laugh, it is nothing but an image, just a big ass image. And with like, ‘Click here, do this buy now’, and I send them off to Amazon for the affiliate programme. I have one site that I've done nothing other than have a big ass image on there. It averages about 75 to 100 bucks a month just sitting there, does nothing.

Ian: So yeah, that was gonna be my next question are a lot of people doing Amazon affiliate sites and things like this, you know, monetizing these sites I'm sure it's changed over the years from ads to maybe Amazon. So with all that said, Rob, it sounds like you're still able to kind of monetize these pages. But if you own let's say, a million domains, is it still even feasible to own that many domains and have them pay for themselves?

Rob: Oh, yeah, of course. and I say ‘of course’, look, I don't I don't personally over a million domains. Okay. I keep mine around 5000 or so. Very manageable, definitely profitable. I use that more as having a great inventory. Yes, I have a lot that are worth a lot. But it's great that if I want to create a new brand, I just kind of like, ‘Well, what do I have and how do the trademarks look and blah, blah blah’ and An off I go and I don't even have to worry about buying a domain.

But yes, it is definitely viable to have, if you have the right domains, and you have the resources, it's all at risk, right? So these are digital items. Tomorrow, the government can say ‘all domains are dead’, you’re not allowed to use them anymore. And every domain is worthless. Which is what people freak out about, right? And it's just like Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. But the reality is it's been around for so long. It's not going anywhere.

Ian: You have 5000 domains. Are you emotionally connected to any of them? Are there any that you wouldn't sell?

Rob: Oh, yeah, for sure. When I say ‘emotionally connected’, I would say in the sense of it's a personal brand of mine, it is perhaps a name that has some emotional tie. Not many of them have emotional ties though. for the right price I'm willing to sell pretty much any of them.

Ian: What's your top three or top one or two favourite domains that you own right now?

Rob: I'm going to do this off the top of my head and I'm also going to look this up, I'm just going to see but off the top of my head. One of my favourite domains is I've got survival packs dot com. I've got LED Billboards and Billboards dot com. Now those are those two names, LED billboards. Those things came out of that 900 domain deal back in whenever, right, They are great domains, and I've had offers on them and I think I have them listed for only 75 grand. Right. So they're not unreasonable. Let's see what else partnered I own partner.com my fairytale wedding, what else? Annapolis Maryland I own, that's great. Love that name.

Ian: Tell me the most expensive domain that you've sold that was yours.

Rob: It's not even close to what you would imagine, I would say probably around 20 grand. People go, ‘Really 20 grand?’ Some people would assume you sold names for 100 grand or whatever. Here's the best way to put it. In the early days. I owned some great domains and I sold them far less than I should have because I didn't know any better. As I progressed through this, I've learned, and yes, some people may say they're priced too high. Some of them are priced high, but they're priced reasonably, in my mind, which also allows for negotiation. Since, as you mentioned before, I'm not emotionally tied to these things.

So if there is a name somebody comes in, they want to buy Annapolis, Maryland, I think I have it listed for sale for like 60 grand, pretty reasonable. Some people would say it's too low. Some people would say it's probably smaller listed for like 200 grand, right? It's priced at 60 grand for a reason. I haven't built it out. I haven't done anything with it. 60 grand compared with what I paid for it, that's a great return. So three months ago, I bought a name for $11. I just sold it recently for $3,500, three months. So when you get into those kind of ROIs, you can price them a little more aggressively,

Ian: It's almost like you're doing a volume game too and you know what the real business you have a cost of goods. I mean, the cost of goods here is the registration, and it's maintaining their domain. Maybe a little work putting ads on or whatnot. But, you know, there's nothing physical about it. So I can see where the margins kind of get pretty ridiculous, you know, three months time and you make $3,000.

Rob: And this is the thing that a lot of people just don't realise, you know how in life you know, people go, ‘Well, you know, that didn't take you long’. Well, yeah, that's because I spent 20 years figuring all this. It's like anything, right? ‘Oh, you did that in a minute’. Yeah, but she didn't see all the work that went into like, figuring all this stuff out.

And so you when you get ROI is like that. Yeah, you don't always get them. It's rare that I don't make something on the domain. But one of the ones that I made a lot of money on it but I lost money on the deal was a Search Pad. I forget what I paid for it, but it was low, maybe 10,11 bucks at auction. And I got an offer of 6800 bucks for it. I was like, ‘Ah’, now usually what happens is - somebody makes an offer and I dig into Google, dig around before I accept it. This time I was travelling or something. And just on the fly, I'm like, ‘Yeah, sure. Okay, go ahead sell it’, because I knew that I had paid so little.

What I didn't know was that Yahoo had launched a product called ‘Search Pad’. So somebody, and this person who bought it was in India, they bought the name from me and then they turned around and sold it to Yahoo for God knows what. So had I done my due diligence, that would have been a six figure domain. You know what? It happens. So that kind of answers your question. So why haven't you sold one for that? Well, it's because idiot me has made mistakes like this, like, it just happens

Ian: It does happen. I think that, you know, we all always reminisce about the missed opportunities and things like that, but the truth is that these domains have kept you basically in business for 20 years and so can't really complain about that too much.Rob, a couple other questions that I want to let you go. I want to dispel some of the kind of myths around some of these domains. And one of the questions I have is, is it true that the more you search for a domain in GoDaddy, at some point, it becomes unavailable.

Rob: There's a lot of talk about this. The short answer is, anything is possible because I don't work at GoDaddy. I have no idea what actually takes place. But where people get this notion from is something that is well documented. Ten years ago or so, Network Solutions, who used to be the only player in town, somebody would go on their site and look for something and then a way to ‘register it’, you know, quote, unquote, register it, to hold it for you, just in case you wanted it. You used to be able to register a domain for and hold it for three days, and then you could just delete it and pay 25 cents.

So Network Solutions did this. Somebody sued them, Network Solutions. I think that stopped that. I'm not aware of GoDaddy doing this. It doesn't mean they don't, but I'm not aware of them doing it, because that hurts them. But you have to remember there are more things and just go daddy and play here. There's all these processes that are in there that certain things are made available to people like me who buy domains. For example, your internet provider, they sell records of - you type in something in your browser that doesn't go anywhere. They have records of all that they will sell those to people who are looking to register domains now. They're not cheap. I mean, that stuff's expensive. I don't even know if they do it anymore but they used to and it is expensive.

But probably the biggest percentage of this stuff is literally, if you are thinking of an idea, there's probably 10 more people thinking of the same thing. And it may seem coincidental. Like ‘I just went on, it was available now today, it's not available, it's for sale or whatever’. Because there are people like me that run automated scripts that will literally crush a whole niche like, ‘Okay, I'm gonna register 1000 domains, covers all this stuff, and then I'll figure out what works and what doesn't’. So the answer is, I don't know if GoDaddy is doing that. To my knowledge, they are not it would be dumb in my opinion, if they did that,

Ian: But other people are doing it, essentially people like you running these scripts, trying to figure out what people are searching for and registering domains and then turning around and selling them.

Rob: Yeah, I mean, because as far as I know, the ISP is, you know, internet providers still sell those records of people type owing domains in the browser, or just what gets browsed the most.

Ian: Rob, the second thing that I'm curious about, is when you go to a page and it's parked and it's offered for sale. How likely am I to get that if I contact them directly? Like, are they actually in the business or something else going on here?

Rob: That's a little bit too generic and essentially, to answer your question, if you go there and you try and acquire it, it is a coin flip. But if you go to certain domains and you see a certain landing page, if you've been doing this long enough, you kind of know what network that landing page is from. That usually gives you an idea, ‘Okay, they're probably more likely to sell it because they have some idea what they're doing’. It's one of those things where, yeah, there's too many variables with that.

Ian: Third question is, should people be using these domain brokering services through GoDaddy and sites like this? Are they actually successful because it pops up all the time. ‘That domain is taken but you know, for some small amount of money, we can try to acquire it for you and then it's gonna be 20% on top of that’, do these services actually work?

Rob: I can't speak to those services because I've never used them. All right, but what I can tell you is that I do know several very well known brokers. Now, these are guys who only deal in hundred thousand dollar plus domains. And a couple of them work for some of the bigger names out there. Not GoDaddy, but some of the other ones. And so basically, they do work, if you don't know any better if it's your only option, you're going to select that. Right? You were very fortunate, right? You knew Noah and he was like, ‘Call Rob’. So if you don't know anybody do that. I would say it's a coin flip because I can't speak to it directly.

Ian: But do you have people that come to after using these services and say, ‘Hey, they didn't work’.

Rob: Yeah, yeah. The one thing I will tell you is that just because it doesn't work for one person, one broker can't do it doesn't mean another broker can't do it because we all have different methods. We have a lot of overlapping methods, but we all approach things very differently. We have different backgrounds and different skills.

When you're working with me for domain, it is me with you working to get you the best price and flat out that's it. That's not always the case with, say, somebody like GoDaddy because they're based on because of their fee structures and they don't have a personal relationship with you and what have you.

All of my business has been word of mouth, one person loves what I do they refer somebody else and I set up a site just to make it easier for people to find me but so I set up domain SOS dot com, where I can literally, you can go on there, you fill out a form, I help you and off you go. I have my site where I sell names on domain VIP dot come. So between those two sites, you can reach me somehow, some way for it. So obviously, I prefer the personal attention that I give people versus the large companies and their services.

Ian: Well, Rob, I certainly had fun talking to you today and I had fun, you buying the domain, You know, I came to Rob with the price that I wanted to pay, and I ended up paying about, like two or three times that but I was like, so happy to work with you, Rob, because you are professional. It was a fun experience, the stakes weren't that high, we could have continued to operate on the dot co I really wanted the dot com the money wasn't that crazy, you know, so a lot of ways this was just kind of a fun exercise and I really learned a lot. And I think it's one of these things. I buy and sell a lot of cars. Right? That's my thing, I kind of equate it to that.

If somebody came in they wanted a certain car I’d say like, ‘Look, it's not worth the trouble like, let me just let me just help you do this because I have so much expertise here. It would take you a lifetime to acquire all this’ and I think it's the same thing with you in buying and selling these domains. You know, if I had to do it again, I absolutely would not do it myself. Because although I learned a lot from us talking today and through the process, there's so much nuance here. For me, Rob is a really fun experience working with you and definitely one I would do again.

Rob: Oh thanks, same here.

Ian: Cool. Thanks so much, Rob.

Music

Dan: Bossman I gotta say, it's almost like having James Bond on the podcast. There's sort of international man of mystery quality to someone with such a focused niche, and the ability to cut these special deals and stuff. What a cool person to come in contact with, really had a good time working with Rob.

Ian: Yeah, I loved working with Rob. It was a lot of fun. I can't share all the banter that went back and forth on text message. Some of it's just not appropriate. Some of it, not everybody would find funny, but like, Rob, just made the process so fun. I mean, I think that this is what I was trying to communicate with some people a few weeks ago, they were looking to purchase a domain. Actually, in the DC. Somebody had written a thread, saying, ‘Hey, I'm looking to acquire this domain’, and I popped Rob's name in there. And as I'm doing that, I'm just thinking like, man, I would pay this guy again. I would pay this guy so many times because I just had such a fun time working with him.

It's just so rare that happens. It's like, ‘Take my money’. I think some of it is just that he actually acquired the domain. So I might have a different feeling if that didn't happen. But it’s one of these things I guess part of is because I tried and failed. And then Rob came in with his process in his charm, and we got to know each other. It was just a fun way to spend money, I guess. And coming from me, Dan, ‘A fun way to spend money’. That never leaves my mouth.

Dan: I'm just having to recover back to the microphone here because Rob has found a key to your heart that I haven't found in 15 years.

Ian: It's true.

Dan: But I gotta say it's one of these interesting things. What a cool way to make a business but also that that kind of skill set is critical in these situations, because these aren't people that are actively listing something for sale. These are people that just have an asset, and Rob's job is to convince them to sell. And so if it's not fun for a lot of parties, because sometimes it's not fun to part with something that you own, and that's become a part of your asset portfolio. And so, all of a sudden, a guy comes along that's personable, that's not going to be a pain in your butt, that makes sure everybody plays nice together. That's a real skill set in deal making.

Ian: Well, if you go back to ‘The Dealmaker’ podcast, with my buddy, Corey Rueth, he's the guy that has taught me a lot about buying and selling cars. He's moved planes and houses and all this stuff. And one of the things that Rob brings up that is just fundamental to Corey’s process is building a relationship. And the reason is clear is because the relationship is the basis for the deal, without that it doesn't get done because as Rob explained in the episode, and as Corey explained, a lot of times these purchases are not purely financial and transactional, they have to do with emotions and feelings and sentimental value.

And so you have to tap into that. You have to figure out what their core emotions are. And then you have to figure out if there's a way to meet in the middle. And I think, looking back in my interaction with this guy selling this domain, it was purely financial. That's where I messed up. And then Rob came in and cleaned up all my mistakes, he built a relationship with this guy. And ultimately, that's how the deal got done.

Dan: One of the things I learned early in my sales career is that everybody knew, in a larger organisation, the sales people that brought in bad deals. And the reason they would bring in bad deals is that they were kind of coercing the client along on a not fully fleshed out relationship. So when any little thing changed, the client would feel coerced, or they weren't willing to work with us. And so we all knew those sales people that were like accelerating relationships too fast, and that that client was likely to fall through the cracks.

And so the thing about internet marketing and selling stuff online is if your price point is at a certain level, the emotional involvement is a lot less, and you can kind of like push people through a funnel and put them to the sales page, get them on the phone, get them to pay the money. But with deals at this level, there's a lot more emotions and flexibility required on all parties. And that means you got to have a relationship.

That means too, you cannot be bullshitting people and a lot of bad salespeople, essentially, they use tactics to move people along. And it's not a more authentic, deep connection where you can ultimately be flexible and know that that prospect is likely to work out because they're more invested emotionally in getting something done.

Ian: The people I think that I've met that are the best salespeople would never call themselves salespeople.

Dan: Exactly.

Ian: And that's just the irony of the whole situation, these people are relationship builders. They're talkers, they're thinkers or learners. But most of them wouldn't classify themselves as salespeople, but they're really good at it.

Dan: Yeah, it's a good example, it makes me think of john Solozarno, who was on the podcast a few weeks ago. It turns out that he generates business on the phone by generating trust with his prospects. And after I got off the phone with him, I felt the same way about them because I said, ‘Man, here's a guy who's just not bullshitting me. And so I trust him’. And I know a lot that resonated with a lot of podcast listeners too because they reached out to him and asked him for advice about how to do things, or how they could work together.

It's just this thing that you know, if you go to like a ‘sales training programme’, they might not teach you that because it's sort of like this meta game you're playing and building trust. Whereas if your business is around, you know, selling stuff or whatever, then you have to, like create this body of knowledge about like, what selling is, whereas it can be something as simple as just being somebody that's no bullshit and is trustworthy and maybe just a little bit fun too.

Ian: Well just imagine too if you're Rob in this situation. And this is something that didn't come up on the podcast. But imagine if you're Rob in this situation, right? And you're working with this seller that we bought the domain from, Robin and him are in the same boat. There's not a lot of selling going on. I mean, Robin and him both own domains, like they both have the same aim.

So, if I'm Rob, I'm cozying up to this guy. And I'm like, ‘Hey, yeah, I'm in the same boat as you. Let me tell you what I would do. I know I'm working for my client over here. But let me tell you what I would do. I've never had anybody offer me as much money for a type of domain like you're offering right now’. That's sales 101, but it's actually coming from experience too.

Dan: Well, there's another element to the deals like this, which is why I mentioned at the top of the show, it's similar to real estate, which is - Rob isn't an advocate for you. He's an advocate for the deal. And your sales process needs to account for that he needs to help you to understand that you're going to be paying maybe a little bit more for this domain than if you just came in and we're trying to get the lowest price.

Ian: That happened. I mean, so this part of the story that didn't unfold here, we didn't actually talk where we started. But basically, I told Rob a number, okay. And then he came back and it was a much higher number than I had anticipated. And I basically told him, he's ruining my weekend. That's essentially what I told him. I said, ‘Rob, you're ruining my weekend with this number’.

Dan: But you were having so much fun.

Ian: I was. But the truth is, we paid triple what I thought we're gonna pay for it. And I was still happy to pay it.

Dan: Do we want to say the number that we paid for it?

Ian: Sure. It was $7,000.

Dan: I mean, let's talk about why. And I want to ask you specifically about: should you build a business if you don't own the.com? Okay, so I’m going to pack you up with that, I don't want you to answer it right now. I want to give some of my reasonings.

We've been running Dynamite Jobs, which is a trademark we own for three years now. We believe in it, we'd love it, we want the t-shirts. We love seeing people get jobs and the impact that we have every week, the team is amazing. It's a great complement to our community, the Dynamite Circle, it allows people to build their teams and in a very meaningful way grow their business. And at a certain point, we invested so much money and time and soul into doing this work that we just felt, ‘Hey, we really want to have it on the dot com’. It's almost like, there's a little bit of a legacy impulse. We really want to run this business for the next five years. And do we want to run an internet business where we don't own the dot com, the premier address for it? At the end of the day, for me, 7000 bucks relative to everything we've done, all the impact we've created in the world and what we intend to do. It kind of felt like a drop in the bucket.

Ian: Well, compared to our investment, it kind of is so yeah.

Dan: That's true. It just felt like although that is way way more than we should have paid had we been more strategic at the beginning and not built up the value. So market of one and we're like dummies building up the value of it. It's almost one of the most expensive things we've ever bought. But it still felt like something worth doing when you put it in context of all the other work and investments we've made relative to Dynamite Jobs.

Ian: It's definitely the most expensive domain that we've purchased. Laura Roeder had a good article on this. Her argument was like, don't start a business that the domain isn't available for. And I think that that's absolutely true. And that's something that we've tried to do in the past. I just think we had like a brain fart. I mean, if I can go back to what we were thinking it was we need to keep with the brand Dynamite and Dynamite Jobs dot co is available. Dynamite Jobs dot co is taken, but it's been parked since like 1999, nothing's happened on there. So I thought that, at the time, I had this illusion, ‘Oh, we'll just email this person and offer a couple hundred dollars for it. They're not doing anything with it’. You know, that was kind of the conversation. And then we registered the dot co and we just kind of started rolling, we got the trademark, and then it was like, ‘Yeah, I think we should contact that person and try and give them a couple hundred dollars’. And it was like, ‘Oh, this person isn't going to take a couple hundred dollars’, ‘Oh, this person is not responding to me anymore’. We've invested a bunch of money. Now we have a team around this. Now we're rolling with some success. How are we going to get this domain?

Dan: I'll say this, I think as a rule of thumb, going with the dot com makes a tonne, a tonne of sense. And I love that advice. But for us, and for a lot of people, there's a lot of nuance out there, which is what's more important, your website address or your brand? And I think we made the decision to go with a brand. I mean, we could have gone out and bought ‘The Dynamic Job site dot com or, you know, ‘Dynamite Jobs, number one job board dot com. But, at the end of the day, for us, it was really important to do our work under the brand of Dynamite Jobs, something that you know, is part of our legacy and part of our story and soI think that's ultimately why we went with the dot co and just sort of saw how things were going to play out. And I think any conversation, and this will come up relevant in the next few weeks Bossman is we were sure to secure that trademark. So regardless of what happened whether we were Dynamite Jobs dot io or or eg, or whatever, we have a registered trademark with Dynamite Jos. That's it.

Ian: There it is. We ain't so smart. Why are you listening to us? We don't know. Keep listening, I’ll cost you money.

Dan: Who knows what terrible, terrible mistake we're gonna make next Bossman, but certainly not a mistake talking to Rob today. Lovely chat and great to catch up with you as always. See you tonight on a bike ride. We'll see y'all next Thursday morning. 8am. Eastern Standard Time.

Ian: See you then.

TMBA Ident

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