May 22, 2024 • 53 mins
When my accountant told me a well paying salary was where all dreams goto die, I knew it was time to chase the dream that had been simmering on the back burner. That dream? To pivot from my cushy role at Uniregistry and venture into the unknown with Saw.com. This episode takes you through the highs and lows of my career transition, from the early days of my startup, the pandemic and selling AI.com. Reflecting on my journey, I impart the wisdom that persistence and learning from failure are the fabric of my success.
About Jeffrey:
Jeffrey M. Gabriel is the founder of Saw.com, a boutique brokerage that specializes in acquiring, selling, and appraising domains. With over 14 years of experience in the domain industry, Jeffrey has a proven track record of closing multimillion-dollar deals and delivering exceptional value to his clients.
Jeffrey's core competencies include remote team management, online marketing, and strategy. He is passionate about helping businesses and individuals achieve their online goals and dreams. He has been involved in some of the most notable domain sales in history, such as Ai.com, Sex.com, and Poker.org. He is also a Guinness World Record holder and a frequent speaker and writer on domain-related topics.
Follow us on social media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sawcom/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/saw-com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sawsells
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome to the Uncomfortable Podcast with
Jeffrey Gabriel.
In our last episode, I sharedmy journey culminating in the
toughest decision I've ever madein my career, which was leaving
my position as Vice Presidentof Sales at Uniregistry and,
despite the security of awell-paying job, the
responsibility of leading a teamof 50, and the prestige of
working at a top companyrespected by my peers, I chose
(00:33):
to step away to chase my dreams.
So now it is part two of thisepisode, when I'm leaving the
island and you get to hear mystory of Sawcom.
All right, so the music.
All right, so the music Allright.
So I try to do this all in oneepisode and I'll tell you
(00:54):
something it's interesting whenyou're doing something like this
and maybe you should try ityourself, even if you don't make
it a public thing.
But as you're going throughthis, there's a lot of ideas and
thoughts that are all happeningat the same time as you're
replaying this through your mind, and there was a lot of things
that I wanted to say and go over, and it was also extremely
(01:16):
tiring to do.
So I took a break and I nevercame back, and so now I'm back
to do the sawcom part and I'mgoing to try to make it a
relatively quick episode to thepoint.
I hope you can learn somethings and be a little bit
entertained as well.
Um, and I said I moved home.
And so right before I just wantto point something out that
(01:39):
kind of came to me before I Imade this decision to leave.
Uh, uniregistry was.
I actually went out to dinnerwith my accountant.
He was on the island and wewere sitting there eating pizza
and talking and I brought upthat I was considering
potentially leaving Uniregistry,and it's a small island.
(02:00):
He knows, frank, he did thetaxes for a lot of other people
in the office, especially theAmericans, and I said hey, tim,
I'm considering leavingUniregistry.
I want to go pursue my ownideas, my own dreams, go sell
domains for myself.
And he said you know what thekiller is of all dreams in the
(02:22):
business world?
And I said what's that?
And he said it's $100,000 ayear salary.
And he said you obviously makemore than that, so I doubt that
you're going to leave this job.
And I'm like what the hell isthat supposed to mean?
And he said it's very hard forpeople.
Most people do not chase theirdreams once they're getting a
job with your income and yoursize and the prestige to go
(02:44):
chase after their own dreams,because to get another job like
this one is usually not possibleor they can't reach it again.
And that kind of stuck with meand I was like you know what
Fuck?
That it is a chance and that issomething that people are
always, always worried about andthey always say to me what if I
(03:05):
fail?
What if it fails?
And I thought that to myselfover and over again what if it
fails?
What if it fails?
And the thing is is that I failall the time and if you listen
to the first episode, a lot ofit is about failure and this
episode, when I'm telling youthese stories, is failing over
and over and over.
So when someone says to me nowabout starting a business, what
(03:28):
if it fails?
Like what?
What time are you going to fail?
How many times are you going tofail?
Just talking about the broadfailure, you know there are
millions of failures that leadto successes, that lead to.
You know it's like a cartoonyou step on the board, it hits
you in the face and you step onanother board, it hits you in
the face and you step on anotherboard, it hits you in the face.
(03:48):
Well, eventually you're goingto get to your goal, as long as
you stick with it and you keepworking hard at it.
And I hope that, after you hearsome of the trials and
tribulations and the experiencethat I had starting sawcom,
maybe, if you're thinking ofdoing your own thing, it will
help, inspire you or at leasthelp you be better at what
you're doing.
So anyways, like I said, mywife packed everything up, she
went home, I stayed there, Isold the house, moved back to
(04:15):
the United States.
We lived outside of Boston inkind of like the boonies, in
this town called Sutton, withour friends.
It was actually the family thatmy wife nannied for while she
was in college and she's kept intouch with them and they're
very good friends of ours.
They were welcoming into theirhome and we stayed there and we
had our little one, henry, whois two, our oldest child, who's
(04:37):
six, living there as well, justtrying to get our feet on the
ground and figuring our livesout.
During that time I started tolook for other opportunities.
I was talking about brokerage.
I didn't necessarily want to gofull blast into brokerage and
advertise my services, yet I wasalso really intrigued by GTLDs
(05:03):
and potentially looking intoconsulting into that side of the
business.
I always sat on board meetingsand different meetings with Von
Liley, who ran the registry, andother folks who were part of it
, like Heather, pierre, who's agreat friend of mine, and
obviously Frank, who's investedin 20, like 21 or 24 of these
things, and I actually wasinterested in investing in one
(05:23):
when they came out the firsttime and I missed the boat.
And I actually was interestedin investing in one when they
came out the first time and Imissed the boat and I also
pretty much didn't have themoney to do it anyway, but
anyway.
So when I came back I actuallywas called by the people that
owned AIcom and I said to themthat I would be interested in
taking that on as a broker andattempting to sell it and taking
(05:44):
that on as a broker andattempting to sell it and one of
my first things with Sawcom sothis was in probably October-ish
I went out and went to there'sa large AI conference in Boston
and when I went in there I kindof felt you know, this is a
(06:05):
similar kind of sale that I didwith like sexcom, like I went to
the adult video conference,calling into these companies,
trying to create awareness,using those people who say no.
Well, do you know anybody elsewho might want to purchase the
domain name?
Going through all of thosethings, and I felt that going to
an AI conference of all placesshould be an easier sell than
(06:26):
trying to sell sexcom to a bunchof people that run porn sites.
You would think right, but Iwas actually totally wrong.
When I went in there, mostpeople did not understand that a
domain name could even be sold.
They didn't know that they hadvalue.
I spoke to people who weremarketing AI products.
I looked and followed to figureout what vendors were there,
(06:50):
the funding they had, if it wasa B2C product rather than just
like a B2B service, knowingwhich ones needed different
products that were pushing AI.
I even talked to one of the topguys MasterCard had, you know,
like a product that helped withlike fraud and other things like
that, and it was a total deadend and I couldn't believe it.
(07:13):
I left there.
I had a handful of leads andpossibilities, but the majority
of people had no understandingof domains in general and that
they were valuable and that theycould be sold, and I got very
similar feelings that I did whenI took on sexcom.
When I took on sexcom andstarted going out there and
trying to sell it, peoplelaughed at me.
(07:33):
They laughed at the price andthey laughed at me because it
had to do with adult right.
So, like even some of myfriends back at home called me
sex Gabriel as a joke, becausewhen I was trying to sell sexcom
, it was just like, okay, you'retrying to sell ice to the
Eskimos, you know, um, and itwas just really, uh, you know
interesting, and pounding thephone and trying to make that
(07:54):
happen.
And then I started to puttogether, um, a CRM to start
tracking these leads that I wascreating and getting.
And that's what any salespersonhas to do You've got to have a
CRM.
Anyways, I end up talking toAmanda Waltz, who's one of the
best brokers in the industry.
I used to work with her atIgloo and domain advisors and I
(08:16):
said, hey, you know, I'm home,I'm done with Uniregistry and
I'm going to start my own domainbrokerage, but I'm also going
to do some consulting work andI'm also, you know, going to do
some other things that might nothave a lot to do with domains
or some other different things.
You know, would you like tojoin?
And she said, yeah, you know, II felt that us working together
two would be better than one.
(08:37):
And with her, you know she hassome great connections.
Um, I think she's great on thephone, very professional, um, so
we talked about it for a whileand we agreed again that, you
know, sawcom would be a verydifferent place than Uniregistry
, and the first thing was is asa company and a business, you
know, we didn't have our ownportfolio of domains Amanda and
(08:59):
I don't own a lot of domainnames.
Like, that is not our goal.
We were a hundred percentbrokers for our clients, whether
it's selling domains or buyingdomains on their behalf or
praising them for whateverreason, you know.
And so the priority is 100%maximizing returns for our
sellers or trying to save asmuch money as possible for our
(09:19):
buyers.
And, um, you know that wassomething that was important to
us.
And then you know it was notsolely based on inbound leads
generated from sales landers.
We did a lot of buyer brokerage.
We did some outbound selling.
Obviously that I was doing withAIcom, but other names as well
Also did some appraising and,again, I've already said, you
(09:41):
know, consulting, which I wasdoing for INC at the time.
And what I started doing forINC at the time was helping them
organize their sales team, gettheir CRM together in a working
order, help them with theiremail campaigns, you know,
target them in the right placesand really just, and also work
on their commission schedulesright.
(10:01):
Those are all really importantthings in a sales organization
to have working at its peak.
And it's one of those thingsthat, as a sales organization,
if you are serious about being asales organization, you've got
to have a very organized andefficient CRM.
You've got to have, you know,very clear rules of engagement.
(10:21):
You have to very clear salesprocesses.
You've got to have a commissionschedule that aligns with the
goals of the company so yoursalespeople are achieving goals
that help the management achievetheir goals.
And you have to havemanagement's goals aligned with
upper management goals orownership goals or where the
direction of the company isgoing top to bottom, and that is
(10:43):
a very important thing.
And the CRM has to be organizedand the salespeople have to
know that.
They have to keep everything inthere so everything is
organized, easy to find, there'sa plan of action, there's past
sales, there's new opportunities.
I mean it's obvious that thatall needs to happen.
All needs to happen.
(11:15):
We had an official launch datein really like 2019.
And I remember talking to Doran, who's one of the owners of
Efti, and I said, hey, I need asolution for sales landers, can
you help me?
And at the time I think hisproduct was limited to like
2,000 or 3,000 names per accountand he created an enterprise
account for me because I had ahandful of clients that had like
50,000 or 60,000 names in totalthat we then pointed at FD and
(11:40):
we hooked that up and hookedthat into our CRM.
Getting that started, gettingthe inbound lead from sales
going.
You know, we were doing someadvertising, doing videos, doing
all kinds of different thingsto try to create some buzz in
the business.
And then Amanda and I did avideo with Ron Jackson
announcing our launch inDecember of 2019.
Now let me back this up.
(12:01):
I worked with Brooke Hernandezat Igloo Domain Advisors.
She left there, came toUniregistry after I was there
for a bit and then, the day thatI told the company that I
resigned and gave my notice, Iwalked out of the conference
room with tears in my eyes andwent over to my desk and my
phone was ringing, I answered itwas her.
(12:21):
And my phone was ringing and Ianswered it was her.
And she's like I don't know ifwhat you're planning on, but
wherever you go, I wanna go.
And so I was like I don't evenknow what the fuck I'm gonna do
right now, I just you know, butI'll let you know when it
happens.
And once she found out what washappening, she called and she
said I want in, right, and so Italked to her and she was going
(12:43):
to begin.
And then I spoke to Rob Wilson,who was somebody that managed
sales teams but also is a goodsalesperson, also kind of had a
technical background, and I needsomeone that could help me with
the CRM and some othertechnical things, and he was a
great help for us as well.
But you also have to realizethat setting up a CRM if you
(13:04):
don't like what was great aboutdomain name sales was is that
like it was built from theground up and then behind the
scenes, it's actually really a.
It's actually a really hardtype of CRM that you need to
build when it comes to domainnames, and the reason why is
right.
So you have a product and thatproduct is a domain and every
(13:29):
domain is different.
Right, it's unique and thatdomain name has people that want
to buy it, or you have peoplethat might want to buy it, okay,
but like most CRMs, let'spretend Salesforce, for example
Salesforce is made for a companythat is usually consistently
(13:50):
selling the same product or asimilar product or a service to
companies.
So what happens is is that if Ihave this widget and I'm trying
to sell it to IBM, then IBMwould be the account, the people
underneath that would be thecontacts, right, and then the
opportunity would be the domainname, because that's the product
(14:12):
you're pitching, right?
The problem is is that you havethe domain name, okay, which is
your opportunity in almostevery CRM, because that's what
you're pitching to this company.
So then you have the name ofthe company, which is your
account.
Then you have the potentialbuyers of the domain name.
So there could be buyers thatinquire directly for that domain
(14:36):
, or you could have ones, like Ijust said before, that you
found online, but the same buyercould also be a seller, right?
That same buyer could alsoinquire on other domains you
have for sale.
They also could inquire andwant you to do different
(14:56):
services, like provide them anappraisal.
Or they want you to help themfind domain names.
Or they want you to selldomains but buy domains like
this.
Or they want you to help themfind domain names.
Or they want you to selldomains but buy domains like
this.
Or they want you to helpauction names, right.
And so you're trying to trackall of that, trying to track
different lead sources.
What happens if they come infrom this lead source but then
they come in again from adifferent lead source?
How do you track that?
(15:17):
Right?
And then just keeping track ofall that?
And what happens when a buyercomes and then goes to a landing
page and that buyer comes backagain a month later, what do you
do with that?
What if he goes to fivedifferent domain names?
How is that handled?
Who gets that lead?
How does that work?
Right?
So you need to work all.
It's not super complicated, buta lot of these CRMs are just
(15:40):
aren't built for domains, it'sjust built for more of a basic
situation where you're not doingso many different things.
So, anyways, we set up the CRM.
That took me a little while,from October on, and it's gotten
more and more robust as timehas gone on, bolting in the FT
Landers with that bolting in ourwebsite that we built from
(16:03):
there and as a business when wefirst got it started.
I have a colleague, bill, whoworks at a very large financial
institution as a developer.
He managed a development teamlarge development team there.
So what he did was I kind ofbrought him in as a CTO, but he
was part-timer, he didn't wantto give up his full-time job and
he helped build the website.
He did a lot of behind thescenes technical work with like
(16:24):
assigning of leads and otherthings with the CRM and other
technical connecting the websiteinto the CRM and, you know,
doing all of that kind of work.
So we launched the business2019.
Rob and Brooke start working forus.
So now it's myself Amanda, rob,brooke.
I got my friend Bill doing somework with us.
(16:45):
I have an editor guy His name'sMike.
He's helping us.
I'm doing a little bit ofdevelopment, hiring some people
in the Philippines helping withsome lead generation helping.
I hired a couple of full-timedevelopers in the Philippines
because obviously I'm on a shortbudget to do some of this work
and my friend Bill is overseeingtheir work.
We went through a lot ofdifferent Filipino developers.
(17:07):
The quality just wasn't there.
But things started to getrocking and rolling.
We started building a pipeline,started making some sales.
We have the inboundopportunities coming, we're
doing some buyer brokeracquisitions.
Those are going well.
We had a couple of names pop,who are doing outbound on and
things were on the up and up andthe processes were coming into
(17:27):
play.
Stuff was working.
And then March rolls around in2020.
And it was about the 15th ofMarch when I saw I came back, by
the way, came back fromNamesCon, which was in February
of 2020.
And everyone was talking aboutCOVID.
(17:49):
But it's mid March and it waslike the NCAA March Madness
basketball tournament wassupposed to start.
And I remember watching on TVand remember remember I'm in my
parents basement of their house.
That's where I started Sawcom,in my parents' basement, and it
was furnished and it's nice.
But again, I was working there.
(18:10):
We were at the time we justbought a house.
We bought a house in Novemberand I was going to my parents'
house to work there, just tokind of get away and just have a
separation of home and business.
And when that middle March hitand I was watching the NCAA get
(18:33):
canceled and then all of asudden, you know, flights were
getting canceled and hearingpeople dying from being at
Disney World and COVID reallystarted to get going.
I remember watching the news and, like all these people in Italy
were dying and they're showinglike pop-up morgues popping up
and all this stuff was happening.
We saw our pipeline evaporate.
(18:55):
My consulting gig was ended,you know, the guys from Diancy
were worried they had everyright to be, you know so they
ended my contract.
We had buyers that made offersand we came back with a counter
(19:16):
offer and they would say thankGod you didn't accept that, we
don't want to pay for it.
Our sellers were freaking outbut our pipeline just evaporated
.
And so going into April, we wereall scared as a team.
I was scared for my family.
What was going to happen?
There was a lot of justuncertainty in general.
If you recall I mean I'm sureyou do I remember at that time
(19:39):
as well that the Black LivesMatter movement was quite heated
.
There were a lot of protesters.
Even when I went to the grocerystore like it seemed dangerous,
you know the shelves were emptyand you know I have two.
You know I'm running thisbusiness and our pipeline is
dying.
And then throughout April, likenobody can get a sale.
It's just like we're fucked,like zero, you know, and I'm
(20:03):
losing confidence in thebusiness.
I'm losing confidence in myself.
I'm asking, thinking to myself,like we're fucked, like zero,
you know, and I'm losingconfidence in the business.
I'm losing confidence in myself.
I'm asking, thinking to myselflike maybe I made the wrong
choice, maybe I made a baddecision, but luckily um, well,
I'm not luckily yet, but I endedup having.
The world can't stop forever.
(20:29):
The world will start buyingagain, the economy will come
back and what we need to do as ateam and as a company, and even
to keep your own sanity, wehave to keep working.
We have to keep workingextremely hard because when they
start buying, we need to befirst in fucking line.
(20:50):
And when I said that, I wasn'treally sure, I even believed it
myself.
But I remember going to workand making those calls and
trying to set the right exampleand trying to push the team to
keep going.
And I remember one womananswered the phone when I was
making a call and she's like areyou really trying to make a
sale right now with everythingthat's happening in the world?
(21:10):
And I'm like yeah.
And she's like I can't believethat you're doing this right now
, and I remember saying to herthat you know part of doing this
is helping me keep it togethermyself.
And I got to say that my wifeand I drank a lot of wine during
(21:32):
that time, during April, mayand part of June.
We watched a lot of Tiger King,we watched the Last Dance and a
lot of Schitt's Creek at nightwhile drinking wine.
And I remember in about mid tolate April, I remember coming
home from work and I just feltlike giving up.
(21:55):
I felt really beaten down.
It might have been even in May,I don't know, but I remember
holding my wife in the kitchenand just crying, both of us just
crying for a little while andthen I got it together.
And I also remember coming homefor my 40th birthday, which I
have this banner this banner youmight've seen in the background
(22:20):
that my kids made for me andhad out when I drove up to our
house that we just bought inMassachusetts, celebrating my
40th birthday, um, and that wasa really tough, tough birthday.
And um, and I remember shortlyafter that, um, telling my wife
(22:41):
that you know, going through thewinter that I didn't want to
live there anymore.
It was too cold, it was toodark, the regulations were
insane.
They closed the, they closedthe lakes, they closed the
beaches, they closed the hikingtrails.
I absolutely hated it.
But we kept working, we kept ourheads down and all of a sudden
it was like mid-June and thosepeople, they started buying and
(23:05):
the sales started happening.
And it was scary for me and Ifelt bad because I had people
that believed in me that lefttheir jobs and it was failing
and I felt awful about it.
You know, and I wanted, and Istill feel an obligation to the
people who work with me, that Ineed to provide opportunities
(23:26):
for everybody to make a goodliving.
I don't want anybody to want ornot be able to pay their bills
who work for me, like I wanteveryone who works for me to
make a good living or a greatliving.
But yeah, I mean it took off andduring that time, I think, like
you know, we started selling abunch of names in June and July
was good, august was good, youknow, things were going really
(23:47):
well and during that time acolleague of mine his name is
Paul Thompson gave me a call andhe said hey, you know, his
specialty was selling brandprotection products and one of
them is the Adult Block.
Adult Block is sold by MMX andit allows companies to register
their trademark in pornsexadult.
(24:07):
I think it's those three.
I could forget.
Maybe there's another oh andxxx and so you would sell those
into big, usually corporates, orwe actually did really well
with selling to celebrities.
There is a few that purchasedthem from us I can't mention
(24:30):
their names, but they have it aswell and he came on and did
that and we did quite a bit ofmarketing for that and it went
okay.
I think I learned from thatdoing this adult block, while
things were getting going andthings are going well and our
business came roaring back was,you know, sometimes it's better
it's good to add new productlines and new services, but
(24:52):
sometimes it's just better ifyou just focus your energy into
what you're great at, ratherthan focusing your energy into
trying to do too many thingsbecause you end up finding out
that you probably would havemade more money faster if you
just focused on what you're goodat rather than trying to to add
(25:14):
this other thing that youreally would need to be able to
sell at velocity or have like acustomer base of, you know,
thousands of companies to reallymake it worthwhile.
But anyways, um, during thattime I also um, but paul, even
even though the adult block didnot make as much money as we
(25:35):
wanted, paul converted into a.
He was a part-time broker andhe worked for me, but he
converted into a full-timebroker and he's one of our best
now.
So you know, it worked out forus.
But I think, looking back at it, it could have done better.
And during that time I addedsome folks in the Philippines to
help Philippines to do somelead generation for us, business
development, some design work.
(25:55):
So we have five people downthere, you know, and I actually
was brought on as a consultant,or our team was brought as a
consultant to MMX, which wasgreat Right, so that brought in
some consistent income, whichwas great right, so that brought
in some consistent income.
And that was something that Iwanted to explore as a
(26:15):
professional that side of thebusiness I mentioned earlier.
And at MMX I helped them redotheir tiers.
They had so many differenttiers.
It was confusing to me.
I'm like why can't we makethese easier for people to
understand and registrars tounderstand?
They did a lot of the high-lowmodel.
So your first year registrationis $1,000, and then the rest of
(26:36):
the years are $9.
That's a really hard one whenpeople are just glancing at a
list.
I was never a really huge fanof the high-low but they had
that.
We talked about, that.
I helped with.
That strategy did a lot oftheir sales.
It was interesting when theywere publicly traded.
(26:57):
I was looking at theirfinancial reports and at one of
the financial reports I think itwas the final one before they
sold to GoDaddy that the premiumdomain sales made up about 20
or 25% of their revenue.
So I thought it was really coolthat our company had a very
direct effect on the value ofthe company.
When that company sold toGoDaddy, my contract ended, and
(27:18):
rightly so.
They had people who did that,but I also hired a person named
Chris after that.
Chris who, or how?
He's from mainland China.
He lives in England but hehandles a lot of our work in the
Chinese market During that timeand all of these things
happening.
I don't know exactly thesequential events.
(27:38):
Maybe Chris came a littlesooner or a little later with
the ending of MMX.
But my colleague Bill built ourwebsite in Angular.
Angular is wildly fast atloading, but we found out later
on down the road.
It isn't so good with SEO, andwe were spending a lot of money
(27:59):
with some SEO folks helping uswith that, writing articles,
buying backlinks, doing allkinds of things to try to rank
and it just wasn't working.
And we ended up having torebuild the whole website into
WordPress, right, which wasextremely frustrating.
And we also made a massivemistake where what the world
(28:20):
isn't designed for is a domainmarketplace or a place that
sells a lot of domain names,right?
So imagine you have a clientwith 25,000 domain names and you
think to yourself okay, I'mgoing to link all 25 of those
domain names.
And you think to yourself okay,I'm going to link all 25 of
those domain names to my company, because when someone goes to
that name, it comes back to youknow, it goes to a landing page
or a contact us form and thenpeople go to that, fill in their
(28:42):
information and the lead comesinto my CRM or it's emailed to
me.
However, you want to do it,life is good.
I didn't understand SEO enoughand what ended up happening was
is all of those links were dofollow.
What does that mean?
It means that Google picks themup off your website and thinks
that those are all companiesthat have linked to you or
websites that have technicallylinked to you.
(29:02):
Now you might think that's goodfor SEO, but what Google does
is they crawl your site andthey're looking for patterns of
similar material to understandwhat your business does.
Now, when you have 50 or 60,000domain names of all different
types and sizes and shapes andindustries and everything,
(29:23):
google didn't know what the fuckwe were doing, especially
because our website didn't havea ton of content.
It didn't have a lot going on.
So then we started ranking forall of these wrong things and
the SEO guys were like what thehell is going on?
Why are you ranking for I don'tknow skiing videos or stuff
like that?
It just didn't make sense.
And then we figured it out, butby that point, all of those
(29:46):
links were indexed and we had tofix them.
So that screwed us up for SEO.
Our and we had to fix them, sothat screwed us up for SEO.
Our website wasn't workingright with SEO and Google, even
though Google made Angular.
You would think that Googlewould like Angular, but it
doesn't, so that hurt us as well.
So that was a mess and a realpain in the ass and we had to
rebuild the site.
We had to deal with thoseproblems and those fixes would
(30:07):
cost a lot of money to fix.
And you know hiring, you know,filipinos to do some of this
work for me because I was on ashort budget.
You know it was tough and wehad to make some changes.
So I switched over to a like anoutsourced um uh agency that
(30:32):
helped with uh development andwe made the changes.
In my friend, bill, who had afull-time job um at a financial
organization, uh, he steppedaside because he just said his
business was too busy in myexpectations and what I wanted
to try to um achieve was justtoo great.
Now, meanwhile, when all thesekinds of things are happening on
top of you know, developmentissues, or you know SEO issues,
(30:55):
and just doing all the things asa business owner, I'm still
trying to make sales, I'm stilltrying to build a book of
business myself and we have, youknow, the other brokers and at
the same time I was stilldialing for dollars, you know,
trying to sell um AIcom andobviously have a wife, two young
kids, in the middle ofapandemic, you know.
So, in the middle of all ofthis mess going on and it wasn't
(31:21):
a mess but like it was, youknow, still challenging as a
business, a new business ownergoing through all of these
things.
We as a couple, my wife and Isaid you know what we're tired
of these regulations.
We don't like the winter, wedon't like the darkness, and we
decided to move to Florida.
So we packed up the family andwe moved.
(31:41):
I drove a rider truck downthere with all our shit in it
and my wife followed behind withthe kids in the SUV and we
drove down here and we rented ahouse for a period of time.
Now, on the development side ofthings, we've built an appraisal
product, right, and theappraisal product you go to you
can put in your domains.
If you create an account, itsaves the names that you've
(32:03):
appraised.
You can use our services tohire us as a broker, to acquire
the domain on your behalf.
You can hire us to sell thedomains for you in your account
or things that you want to do totry to lead into, you know,
creating more opportunities.
It's kind of like a mousetrapfor us.
We also built a buyer brokerageproduct that registrars or
third parties can offer ourservices as a brokerage to
(32:27):
people who are looking to, youknow, acquire domain names, and
that's where we, or I'm.
That's the product that wecreated, that I ended up meeting
NameSilo from, and it turnedinto a future partnership of
ours, which I'll get to, youknow, down the road.
But building those two products,releasing those two products, I
(32:50):
realized that I have a verygood sales background.
I can go out there and I cansell a product, I can sell a
service, I can go and give aspeech, I can give a
presentation on that.
But when it comes todevelopment, when it comes to
working with developers andunderstanding code and all those
(33:11):
things, I don't know it and Iknow that that was a shortcoming
at the time and I have lookingback at it.
I tried my best but it justwasn't at the pace we were going
and the quality and the thingslike that and having to do
things over again.
It wasn't going at the speedthat I wanted to to achieve the
dreams and the goals that Iwanted to achieve for sawcom.
(33:32):
Right, and but not all of thethings that we've done with the
development team is visual.
A lot of it is behind thescenes.
With the CRM, with enrichingdata.
You know we enriching data,emailing different triggers,
different things happening atdifferent times and building
(33:52):
those things.
You know and you know we'vetried as a company, so many
different ways to marketourselves as an organization, to
market our brokerages, brokersas people, to market the names
we have for sale.
You know we've even hiredoutside companies to make
appointments for us, makingcalls on a daily basis.
We did some automated LinkedInmessaging.
(34:14):
That failed and bombed.
You know we do over 100,000emails a month right now.
You know the company callingout for us.
It just didn't work.
That bombed.
You know we've had a lot of youknow, technical issues.
We even had a time when one ofour developers accidentally
emailed our entire list in ourCRM at the same time by accident
(34:37):
, I mean, that was a mess thathad to be cleaned up.
You know, I mean, but it iswhat it is.
It's the growing of a business.
You're going to make a lot ofmistakes, you're going to fail
in a lot of ways.
You're going to have a lot ofsuccesses and while all of this
was happening, we were stillselling names.
We were selling more names at ahigher velocity on a monthly
basis.
We were getting more clients.
(34:59):
We were getting moreopportunities to acquire names.
We were building a name forourselves.
Usually, like when I firststarted the business, it was
really hard because you go andyou say someone would be like so
what sales have you made, whathave you done and everything
that I did up to that point.
(35:19):
After I left Uniregistry, Iwould have to mention other
company names for sales that Idid there, but I had to bring up
that I did them somewhere elseand that I don't know.
Maybe it just bothered me, butso we were finally getting sales
under our belt.
We were getting new customers,the momentum was growing.
Working together was great,everyone was having fun together
as a company.
We were having our issuesinternally with you know,
(35:42):
technical stuff and things likethat, and going, you know,
through a few sloppy developersor people that just weren't as
invested.
But the company continued togrow and good things were
happening.
We even had a situation onetime where I was paying for
traffic or leads off of GoogleAdWords and we're spending, like
(36:02):
you know, three or three to$5,000 a month on it.
And I realized after, liketalking to the salespeople, I'm
like how those leads?
They're like what leads?
I'm like what the fuck are youtalking about what leads?
And I went and I tested it formyself and I realized that when
people were going to our contactpage and submitting their
information, there was adisconnect between the website
(36:25):
and the CRM and the websitewasn't saving the data and it
wasn't sending it to the CRM.
So all that money justevaporated and we lost all those
leads and whichever ones we got, from SEO as well, anyway.
So moral of the story is, whenit comes to development, even
though we had a QA, you need tocheck everybody's work.
You know we've had our fairshare of legal issues.
(36:45):
I had someone chasing after mewho thought I was the owner of
some domain name because we hadour sales lander on it.
I'm sure if you're a brokerafter me who thought I was the
owner of some domain namebecause we had our sales lander
on it, I'm sure if you're abroker, you've dealt with that
before, you know.
But yeah, but that's all againgrowing pains and you know the
business was going well, but Istill had the admiration, or
(37:07):
ambition, I guess, to grow thecompany to be one of the top
domain brokerages in thebusiness and, as I told the
people that I've hired, this isthe last time that I start a
brokerage and really get itgoing.
And this is the third time.
This time I'm doing it for meand I'm going to give it
(37:29):
everything I got and I havegiven it everything I got.
And so it got to a point withAmanda and I where we didn't
really agree on the direction ofthe business and we decided to
split up.
And I said in the beginning, um, that one of the hardest
decisions I ever made was toleave the Island, and the other
one, I think my second hardest,or the hardest, equally as hard,
was splitting up with Amandaand making that decision, cause,
again, it's very hard to letpeople go that are as good as
(37:51):
she is, but it was time to moveon with her and it's really hard
.
And, talking about this, thisis the first time that I've
(38:12):
actually like really just goneover this piece by piece in my
mind and really, you know.
So this is.
You know, this is a lot for meto go over, but you know, and
also on top of this, with HR orworking with people in general,
I had to let a broker go thatthat wasn't performing up to the
standards we want.
But since then we've added twomore, so we have five brokers
(38:35):
and everyone is performing great.
The team gets along well and soI'm really happy with the way
things are going.
But again, a startup can betumultuous and you can have a
lot of challenges.
We also have a lot of successeschallenges, we also have a lot
of successes.
So we have the five brokers andthen, including myself, six
(38:56):
right Plus the folks in thePhilippines, and we have some
developers and other people.
So it's been great Through allof this the ups and the downs,
the mistakes on the emails, thedevelopment issues, some issues
internally you know, internallywith the folks, that we've
worked together.
We still were successful and in20, I can't remember, my God,
(39:17):
2021 or 2022, I sold AIcom andthe thing with that was is the
experience to that was verysimilar, as I did with sexcom.
Like I said, I was gettinglaughed at by people when I was
trying to sell it.
I remember going to a domainconference.
People were making fun of mefor it and then, when it sold,
(39:38):
those same people wrote in thecomments that it didn't sell for
enough.
With AI, that was a great sale.
We had a lot of peopleinterested.
We had companies offering $3million, $5 million, $6 million,
$7 million a lot of money, andthat one was an amazing sale.
I was really proud of that one.
(39:59):
But we also had a lot of otherwins as a company during that
time.
We sold Candycom, we soldVirtualcom, we sold Dataai which
I think was possibly thehighestai ever sold Mediacom,
cometcom, m1.com.
We've sold a bunch of singlelettervips for a lot of money.
(40:23):
We've seen a ton of goodlaws.
We sold perfectone, perfectcom,k1.com, coolcom.
I think we have the highest tvdomain extension sale ever.
I've been part of a handful oflawsuits as a star witness
helping with domains in general.
(40:44):
We've won quite a few differentawards within our industry and
also outside of it.
Quite a few different awardswithin our industry and also
outside of it.
No-transcript, not sellinganything right.
You know since that day that Isold the domain name for Grant
(41:13):
to my friend.
As of today and looking back, Ithink there's sales missing in
there because in the verybeginning we had to make some
changes and I think some datawas lost and I think there's
probably about $5 million off.
But I'm not going to include itin this number because if it's
wrong it's wrong.
I'd rather give accurate.
So what I have on the list asof this afternoon, we sold 1,033
(41:40):
domain names since ourinception for $58,652,805.
Again, I'm quite sure I'mmissing some numbers there, so
maybe we've done $63 or $64million in sales, and I'll tell
you.
It's been a lot of work.
It's been a lot of sleeplessnights, it hasn't always been
(42:02):
pretty, but there's been a lotof work.
It's been a lot of sleeplessnights, it hasn't always been
pretty, but there's been a lotof success and there's a lot of
fun to it, and we have a greatteam.
And the reality is, though, isthat I realized, as a business
owner and learning from mymistakes and learning about some
(42:22):
of the decisions I made thatweren't the best, that I can't
be everything at a company atthe same time, because I'm not
great at everything, but I knowwhat I'm good at, I know what I
can do, and so I did a lot ofsoul searching after Amanda and
I split up, and evaluating thebusiness in general and what I
(42:46):
want to achieve and where I wantto go and how I want to get
there.
And, again, like I said in thebeginning, I wanted to build an
industry leading domainbrokerage, and I felt that
technology I mean, I haveawesome salespeople right All
five of the salespeople haveabout except for Paul.
(43:07):
All five of my salespeople have10 years of experience selling
domain names.
Paul has 10 years experience inthe industry, but a portion of
that was selling the brandprotection product, so that's
pretty darn close as well.
They all pretty much havealmost.
I think the least is 15 yearsof sales experience.
I have 20.
I can't believe I'm saying thatin sales experience.
(43:32):
So I felt that applying ourlearnings as a team what I
learned from Uniregistry, whatI've learned from doing this at
Sodcom and building another CRMthat we would like to apply our
learnings and really build aplatform that people can use,
make more money on and apply ourlearnings to it and also use it
for ourselves to help ourcurrent clients that want to use
our brokerage.
And so doing that, I knew thatme as the technical, like CTO,
(43:57):
wasn't going to happen Right,and I talked to the agency that
was helping me.
That was doing a good job, butthey didn't really um work, ever
work with, like Matt, like lotsof traffic and lots of domains
pointing at a business and DNSand potential DDoS attacks and
things like that.
And I was talking at the sametime when I was evaluating these
(44:21):
things, I started talking to uhChristops, who's the CEO of
name silo, and they built namelot and name lot is a sales
platform for domain names.
That never quite got to theheight that they wanted it to
get to and um, we ended upmaking a deal that I sold uh um
uh, the assets of sawcom and weput them in a new business and
(44:44):
they put the assets of of namelot into a business, plus, you
know, some money, and we createda new, a new company, and we're
making it into the sawcommarketplace and um, and it's in
a beta right now and we'rereally excited to provide, to
provide a product to theindustry that will give sellers
(45:09):
as much data as possible.
But we're not gonna can't giveit all at once.
We're working on it so they canmake the right decisions and
hopefully make the most money ontheir sales, make it as
user-friendly as possible.
I think domain name sales anduniversity was the best tool
that the industry has seen sofar.
I think the problem with it wasis, a lot of the times, it
(45:31):
wasn't the most user-friendlyand I think if you weren't a
salesperson and you weren't usedto using a CRM, you might've
gotten confused or missed out onsome of the great technology
and things that we built.
So we wanted to make it a lotmore user-friendly and doing
some of the things that peopledon't want to do, and just make
it a little more.
I would consider Uniregistry asbeing more like an Android
(45:53):
phone, and then this is morelike the Apple phone, where a
lot more is kind of done for you, you know.
Make it again user-friendly anoffer, you know.
Consider amount of paymentoptions if people want to pay
with different forms of paymentaround the world crypto or using
payment plans.
You know we're going to offerall of those as well and, again,
use it with some of the besttechnology that we have
(46:16):
available, along with a lot ofother bells and whistles that
will come along the way bellsand whistles that will come
along the way.
And having Chris Dobbs, whosebackground is a developer,
balances out who I am as asalesperson, and that is where
we are today, using theirdevelopment team, that is, and
(46:37):
I'm working with their projectmanagers to deliver an amazing
product.
We're not a registrar.
We're not looking to get in theregist amazing product.
We're not a registrar.
We're not looking to get in theregistrar business.
We're not sharing customers.
This is an entirely separateventure.
I'm a domain broker.
I'm in the domain brokeragebusiness.
That's what I wanna do.
(47:00):
But along this way, there aresome things that I've learned
that have gotten us to thispoint, to the beta, and I can't
wait to release this.
But I'm also nervous about it.
I don't know if you ever builtyour own product and you're
presenting it or showing it topeople.
You get nervous, get anxietyabout it.
You really hope people like itand you're really sensitive
about what they say becauseyou've put so much time and
(47:23):
energy into it.
You know people don't realizehow hard sometimes you work on
these products.
But me also I have to realizethat it can't.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
When it comes out for the firstversion, you know it just needs
to work and then we're going towork on it and get it better.
But I think the things thatI've learned in this journey and
thinking about it a little bitis you know you cannot do great
(47:48):
things alone, right?
You need the help of others.
And when I say help of others,what does that mean?
Well, when I was at Uniregistry,it wasn't the Jeff Gabriel show
, there was a lot of otherpeople involved, despite me
being the vice president ofsales and managing the team and
having a lot of say into whatwas being done.
(48:09):
There was a lot of conversation.
Obviously, frank the owner wasinvolved, but we had some really
good developers that were partof the conversation.
We brought in the salespeople,asked them a lot of questions of
what they needed, what theyheard from customers, what did
they want.
Ask customers what they want,try to employ that.
Try to make projections as towhat kind of revenue those
things are going to make.
That'll get you there.
(48:31):
When it comes to my currentbusiness, one of the things you
get to realize is the peoplethat work for you aren't
required to work for you.
They can leave anytime theywant.
They're there voluntarily andthey can tell you sayonara and
go somewhere else in a minute.
And you need to treat them withrespect and include them in the
business as much as you can,because if you want them to be
(48:51):
dedicated to the goals that youhave, you need to include them
as much and keep them in theknow so they are just as excited
as you are and if yourexpectations are really high,
you have to give them a reasonto have high expectations
themselves.
But also, when I'm saying thatyou cannot do great things alone
, you also need to recognize thepeople that you work with and a
(49:18):
lot of the times, recognitionis worth a lot more than money
to some people and recognizingtheir hard work and what they're
putting in is definitelyimportant.
And I also think if you're goingto be successful in life in
general or successful with aproduct or services, you need to
have a solid private orpersonal life, almost like a
(49:39):
board of directors.
So a strong personalrelationship with someone at
home interviewing a board ofdirectors.
So a strong personalrelationship with someone at
home interviewing a lot ofpeople.
With this podcast, it seemed tome that a lot of people had a
great significant other thatsupported them, even though the
risks were high, just like mine.
But I also think that it'simportant that you have a good
relationship with differentprofessionals, that you can talk
(50:00):
about some of the situationsthat you're in and bounce these
ideas off and it's not judgmentand that they're happy for you
when you do well and thatthey're there for you when
you're doing bad.
And I think if you're tellingsome people your problems in
your business and they're notlistening to you.
You need to find somebody else.
And if you're talking to peoplethat are bringing problems into
(50:21):
your life, I call it crazy.
We don't let, melissa and Idon't let crazy in our life, you
know then get them out of yourlife.
It's just not worth it.
You know.
But you should kind of create aboard of directors that not
necessarily even signing them tothe board, but these are just
people in your life that you cantalk to, whether I mean I have
(50:41):
great parents that I can talk toand confide in about things.
I have good friends that I canconfide to and talk to about
different things and ask themtheir opinions and they're
honest with me.
And when I'm down they're thereto try to help me.
When I'm doing great, they'rethere to celebrate my successes.
And you need to take care ofyourself.
I try to go to the gym three orfour times a week.
(51:02):
I need to take care of yourself.
I try to go to the gym three orfour times a week.
I'm getting old, I'm in painhalf the time, but motion is
lotion and I think that going tothe gym for me in the morning
helps me start my day.
It lowers my stress or at leastjust doing something different
or an activity.
And then you know again don't beafraid to fail.
You know, I was so worried whenI, when I quit, that I would
(51:25):
fail.
But looking back at it, I knewthat I was going to give it
everything I had and it wasn'tgoing to let it happen.
Um and so I'd be foolish if Iwasn't worried about it and I'd
be lying to you to tell you thatI wasn't, but I shouldn't have
been as worried about it.
And here's a quote is I'veheard before do not be afraid to
(51:47):
fail big and to dream big.
And the quote I'm going toleave you with here is from
Denzel Washington.
And this one has and I'm not aquote person at all, but this
one, if you watch the YouTubevideo of Denzel Sayet, he does
one at a college, he's avaledictorian, he does a speech
there, or not the valedictorian,whatever, he's a guest, he does
(52:09):
a speech there and he says it.
But there's also a video whenhe's telling it to a person
interviewing him, which I findis a really good quote.
So I'm going to read it to you.
Dreams without goals are justdreams.
Ultimately, they fueldisappointment and on the road
to achieving your dreams.
You must apply discipline but,most importantly, consistency,
(52:33):
because without commitmentyou'll never start, but without
consistency you will neverfinish.
And I love that quote and ifyou think about it with anything
in your life, it applies Ifyou're going to go all in,
you're going to get results,it's going to work.
If you half-ass it, you'regoing to get half-ass results.
Right, and the quote that Ialways said and I think of
(52:54):
anybody who worked for me atUniregistry, here's this one
It'll probably give them shiversis hard work always pays off.
And that's the story so far,but I'm sure we'll have a part
three soon enough.
Welcome to the Uncomfortable Podcast with
Jeffrey Gabriel.
In our last episode, I sharedmy journey culminating in the
toughest decision I've ever madein my career, which was leaving
my position as Vice Presidentof Sales at Uniregistry and,
despite the security of awell-paying job, the
responsibility of leading a teamof 50, and the prestige of
working at a top companyrespected by my peers, I chose
(00:33):
to step away to chase my dreams.
So now it is part two of thisepisode, when I'm leaving the
island and you get to hear mystory of Sawcom.
All right, so the music.
All right, so the music Allright.
So I try to do this all in oneepisode and I'll tell you
(00:54):
something it's interesting whenyou're doing something like this
and maybe you should try ityourself, even if you don't make
it a public thing.
But as you're going throughthis, there's a lot of ideas and
thoughts that are all happeningat the same time as you're
replaying this through your mind, and there was a lot of things
that I wanted to say and go over, and it was also extremely
(01:16):
tiring to do.
So I took a break and I nevercame back, and so now I'm back
to do the sawcom part and I'mgoing to try to make it a
relatively quick episode to thepoint.
I hope you can learn somethings and be a little bit
entertained as well.
Um, and I said I moved home.
And so right before I just wantto point something out that
(01:39):
kind of came to me before I Imade this decision to leave.
Uh, uniregistry was.
I actually went out to dinnerwith my accountant.
He was on the island and wewere sitting there eating pizza
and talking and I brought upthat I was considering
potentially leaving Uniregistry,and it's a small island.
(02:00):
He knows, frank, he did thetaxes for a lot of other people
in the office, especially theAmericans, and I said hey, tim,
I'm considering leavingUniregistry.
I want to go pursue my ownideas, my own dreams, go sell
domains for myself.
And he said you know what thekiller is of all dreams in the
(02:22):
business world?
And I said what's that?
And he said it's $100,000 ayear salary.
And he said you obviously makemore than that, so I doubt that
you're going to leave this job.
And I'm like what the hell isthat supposed to mean?
And he said it's very hard forpeople.
Most people do not chase theirdreams once they're getting a
job with your income and yoursize and the prestige to go
(02:44):
chase after their own dreams,because to get another job like
this one is usually not possibleor they can't reach it again.
And that kind of stuck with meand I was like you know what
Fuck?
That it is a chance and that issomething that people are
always, always worried about andthey always say to me what if I
(03:05):
fail?
What if it fails?
And I thought that to myselfover and over again what if it
fails?
What if it fails?
And the thing is is that I failall the time and if you listen
to the first episode, a lot ofit is about failure and this
episode, when I'm telling youthese stories, is failing over
and over and over.
So when someone says to me nowabout starting a business, what
(03:28):
if it fails?
Like what?
What time are you going to fail?
How many times are you going tofail?
Just talking about the broadfailure, you know there are
millions of failures that leadto successes, that lead to.
You know it's like a cartoonyou step on the board, it hits
you in the face and you step onanother board, it hits you in
the face and you step on anotherboard, it hits you in the face.
(03:48):
Well, eventually you're goingto get to your goal, as long as
you stick with it and you keepworking hard at it.
And I hope that, after you hearsome of the trials and
tribulations and the experiencethat I had starting sawcom,
maybe, if you're thinking ofdoing your own thing, it will
help, inspire you or at leasthelp you be better at what
you're doing.
So anyways, like I said, mywife packed everything up, she
went home, I stayed there, Isold the house, moved back to
(04:15):
the United States.
We lived outside of Boston inkind of like the boonies, in
this town called Sutton, withour friends.
It was actually the family thatmy wife nannied for while she
was in college and she's kept intouch with them and they're
very good friends of ours.
They were welcoming into theirhome and we stayed there and we
had our little one, henry, whois two, our oldest child, who's
(04:37):
six, living there as well, justtrying to get our feet on the
ground and figuring our livesout.
During that time I started tolook for other opportunities.
I was talking about brokerage.
I didn't necessarily want to gofull blast into brokerage and
advertise my services, yet I wasalso really intrigued by GTLDs
(05:03):
and potentially looking intoconsulting into that side of the
business.
I always sat on board meetingsand different meetings with Von
Liley, who ran the registry, andother folks who were part of it
, like Heather, pierre, who's agreat friend of mine, and
obviously Frank, who's investedin 20, like 21 or 24 of these
things, and I actually wasinterested in investing in one
(05:23):
when they came out the firsttime and I missed the boat.
And I actually was interestedin investing in one when they
came out the first time and Imissed the boat and I also
pretty much didn't have themoney to do it anyway, but
anyway.
So when I came back I actuallywas called by the people that
owned AIcom and I said to themthat I would be interested in
taking that on as a broker andattempting to sell it and taking
(05:44):
that on as a broker andattempting to sell it and one of
my first things with Sawcom sothis was in probably October-ish
I went out and went to there'sa large AI conference in Boston
and when I went in there I kindof felt you know, this is a
(06:05):
similar kind of sale that I didwith like sexcom, like I went to
the adult video conference,calling into these companies,
trying to create awareness,using those people who say no.
Well, do you know anybody elsewho might want to purchase the
domain name?
Going through all of thosethings, and I felt that going to
an AI conference of all placesshould be an easier sell than
(06:26):
trying to sell sexcom to a bunchof people that run porn sites.
You would think right, but Iwas actually totally wrong.
When I went in there, mostpeople did not understand that a
domain name could even be sold.
They didn't know that they hadvalue.
I spoke to people who weremarketing AI products.
I looked and followed to figureout what vendors were there,
(06:50):
the funding they had, if it wasa B2C product rather than just
like a B2B service, knowingwhich ones needed different
products that were pushing AI.
I even talked to one of the topguys MasterCard had, you know,
like a product that helped withlike fraud and other things like
that, and it was a total deadend and I couldn't believe it.
(07:13):
I left there.
I had a handful of leads andpossibilities, but the majority
of people had no understandingof domains in general and that
they were valuable and that theycould be sold, and I got very
similar feelings that I did whenI took on sexcom.
When I took on sexcom andstarted going out there and
trying to sell it, peoplelaughed at me.
(07:33):
They laughed at the price andthey laughed at me because it
had to do with adult right.
So, like even some of myfriends back at home called me
sex Gabriel as a joke, becausewhen I was trying to sell sexcom
, it was just like, okay, you'retrying to sell ice to the
Eskimos, you know, um, and itwas just really, uh, you know
interesting, and pounding thephone and trying to make that
(07:54):
happen.
And then I started to puttogether, um, a CRM to start
tracking these leads that I wascreating and getting.
And that's what any salespersonhas to do You've got to have a
CRM.
Anyways, I end up talking toAmanda Waltz, who's one of the
best brokers in the industry.
I used to work with her atIgloo and domain advisors and I
(08:16):
said, hey, you know, I'm home,I'm done with Uniregistry and
I'm going to start my own domainbrokerage, but I'm also going
to do some consulting work andI'm also, you know, going to do
some other things that might nothave a lot to do with domains
or some other different things.
You know, would you like tojoin?
And she said, yeah, you know, II felt that us working together
two would be better than one.
(08:37):
And with her, you know she hassome great connections.
Um, I think she's great on thephone, very professional, um, so
we talked about it for a whileand we agreed again that, you
know, sawcom would be a verydifferent place than Uniregistry
, and the first thing was is asa company and a business, you
know, we didn't have our ownportfolio of domains Amanda and
(08:59):
I don't own a lot of domainnames.
Like, that is not our goal.
We were a hundred percentbrokers for our clients, whether
it's selling domains or buyingdomains on their behalf or
praising them for whateverreason, you know.
And so the priority is 100%maximizing returns for our
sellers or trying to save asmuch money as possible for our
(09:19):
buyers.
And, um, you know that wassomething that was important to
us.
And then you know it was notsolely based on inbound leads
generated from sales landers.
We did a lot of buyer brokerage.
We did some outbound selling.
Obviously that I was doing withAIcom, but other names as well
Also did some appraising and,again, I've already said, you
(09:41):
know, consulting, which I wasdoing for INC at the time.
And what I started doing forINC at the time was helping them
organize their sales team, gettheir CRM together in a working
order, help them with theiremail campaigns, you know,
target them in the right placesand really just, and also work
on their commission schedulesright.
(10:01):
Those are all really importantthings in a sales organization
to have working at its peak.
And it's one of those thingsthat, as a sales organization,
if you are serious about being asales organization, you've got
to have a very organized andefficient CRM.
You've got to have, you know,very clear rules of engagement.
(10:21):
You have to very clear salesprocesses.
You've got to have a commissionschedule that aligns with the
goals of the company so yoursalespeople are achieving goals
that help the management achievetheir goals.
And you have to havemanagement's goals aligned with
upper management goals orownership goals or where the
direction of the company isgoing top to bottom, and that is
(10:43):
a very important thing.
And the CRM has to be organizedand the salespeople have to
know that.
They have to keep everything inthere so everything is
organized, easy to find, there'sa plan of action, there's past
sales, there's new opportunities.
I mean it's obvious that thatall needs to happen.
All needs to happen.
(11:15):
We had an official launch datein really like 2019.
And I remember talking to Doran, who's one of the owners of
Efti, and I said, hey, I need asolution for sales landers, can
you help me?
And at the time I think hisproduct was limited to like
2,000 or 3,000 names per accountand he created an enterprise
account for me because I had ahandful of clients that had like
50,000 or 60,000 names in totalthat we then pointed at FD and
(11:40):
we hooked that up and hookedthat into our CRM.
Getting that started, gettingthe inbound lead from sales
going.
You know, we were doing someadvertising, doing videos, doing
all kinds of different thingsto try to create some buzz in
the business.
And then Amanda and I did avideo with Ron Jackson
announcing our launch inDecember of 2019.
Now let me back this up.
(12:01):
I worked with Brooke Hernandezat Igloo Domain Advisors.
She left there, came toUniregistry after I was there
for a bit and then, the day thatI told the company that I
resigned and gave my notice, Iwalked out of the conference
room with tears in my eyes andwent over to my desk and my
phone was ringing, I answered itwas her.
(12:21):
And my phone was ringing and Ianswered it was her.
And she's like I don't know ifwhat you're planning on, but
wherever you go, I wanna go.
And so I was like I don't evenknow what the fuck I'm gonna do
right now, I just you know, butI'll let you know when it
happens.
And once she found out what washappening, she called and she
said I want in, right, and so Italked to her and she was going
(12:43):
to begin.
And then I spoke to Rob Wilson,who was somebody that managed
sales teams but also is a goodsalesperson, also kind of had a
technical background, and I needsomeone that could help me with
the CRM and some othertechnical things, and he was a
great help for us as well.
But you also have to realizethat setting up a CRM if you
(13:04):
don't like what was great aboutdomain name sales was is that
like it was built from theground up and then behind the
scenes, it's actually really a.
It's actually a really hardtype of CRM that you need to
build when it comes to domainnames, and the reason why is
right.
So you have a product and thatproduct is a domain and every
(13:29):
domain is different.
Right, it's unique and thatdomain name has people that want
to buy it, or you have peoplethat might want to buy it, okay,
but like most CRMs, let'spretend Salesforce, for example
Salesforce is made for a companythat is usually consistently
(13:50):
selling the same product or asimilar product or a service to
companies.
So what happens is is that if Ihave this widget and I'm trying
to sell it to IBM, then IBMwould be the account, the people
underneath that would be thecontacts, right, and then the
opportunity would be the domainname, because that's the product
(14:12):
you're pitching, right?
The problem is is that you havethe domain name, okay, which is
your opportunity in almostevery CRM, because that's what
you're pitching to this company.
So then you have the name ofthe company, which is your
account.
Then you have the potentialbuyers of the domain name.
So there could be buyers thatinquire directly for that domain
(14:36):
, or you could have ones, like Ijust said before, that you
found online, but the same buyercould also be a seller, right?
That same buyer could alsoinquire on other domains you
have for sale.
They also could inquire andwant you to do different
(14:56):
services, like provide them anappraisal.
Or they want you to help themfind domain names.
Or they want you to selldomains but buy domains like
this.
Or they want you to help themfind domain names.
Or they want you to selldomains but buy domains like
this.
Or they want you to helpauction names, right.
And so you're trying to trackall of that, trying to track
different lead sources.
What happens if they come infrom this lead source but then
they come in again from adifferent lead source?
How do you track that?
(15:17):
Right?
And then just keeping track ofall that?
And what happens when a buyercomes and then goes to a landing
page and that buyer comes backagain a month later, what do you
do with that?
What if he goes to fivedifferent domain names?
How is that handled?
Who gets that lead?
How does that work?
Right?
So you need to work all.
It's not super complicated, buta lot of these CRMs are just
(15:40):
aren't built for domains, it'sjust built for more of a basic
situation where you're not doingso many different things.
So, anyways, we set up the CRM.
That took me a little while,from October on, and it's gotten
more and more robust as timehas gone on, bolting in the FT
Landers with that bolting in ourwebsite that we built from
(16:03):
there and as a business when wefirst got it started.
I have a colleague, bill, whoworks at a very large financial
institution as a developer.
He managed a development teamlarge development team there.
So what he did was I kind ofbrought him in as a CTO, but he
was part-timer, he didn't wantto give up his full-time job and
he helped build the website.
He did a lot of behind thescenes technical work with like
(16:24):
assigning of leads and otherthings with the CRM and other
technical connecting the websiteinto the CRM and, you know,
doing all of that kind of work.
So we launched the business2019.
Rob and Brooke start working forus.
So now it's myself Amanda, rob,brooke.
I got my friend Bill doing somework with us.
(16:45):
I have an editor guy His name'sMike.
He's helping us.
I'm doing a little bit ofdevelopment, hiring some people
in the Philippines helping withsome lead generation helping.
I hired a couple of full-timedevelopers in the Philippines
because obviously I'm on a shortbudget to do some of this work
and my friend Bill is overseeingtheir work.
We went through a lot ofdifferent Filipino developers.
(17:07):
The quality just wasn't there.
But things started to getrocking and rolling.
We started building a pipeline,started making some sales.
We have the inboundopportunities coming, we're
doing some buyer brokeracquisitions.
Those are going well.
We had a couple of names pop,who are doing outbound on and
things were on the up and up andthe processes were coming into
(17:27):
play.
Stuff was working.
And then March rolls around in2020.
And it was about the 15th ofMarch when I saw I came back, by
the way, came back fromNamesCon, which was in February
of 2020.
And everyone was talking aboutCOVID.
(17:49):
But it's mid March and it waslike the NCAA March Madness
basketball tournament wassupposed to start.
And I remember watching on TVand remember remember I'm in my
parents basement of their house.
That's where I started Sawcom,in my parents' basement, and it
was furnished and it's nice.
But again, I was working there.
(18:10):
We were at the time we justbought a house.
We bought a house in Novemberand I was going to my parents'
house to work there, just tokind of get away and just have a
separation of home and business.
And when that middle March hitand I was watching the NCAA get
(18:33):
canceled and then all of asudden, you know, flights were
getting canceled and hearingpeople dying from being at
Disney World and COVID reallystarted to get going.
I remember watching the news and, like all these people in Italy
were dying and they're showinglike pop-up morgues popping up
and all this stuff was happening.
We saw our pipeline evaporate.
(18:55):
My consulting gig was ended,you know, the guys from Diancy
were worried they had everyright to be, you know so they
ended my contract.
We had buyers that made offersand we came back with a counter
(19:16):
offer and they would say thankGod you didn't accept that, we
don't want to pay for it.
Our sellers were freaking outbut our pipeline just evaporated
.
And so going into April, we wereall scared as a team.
I was scared for my family.
What was going to happen?
There was a lot of justuncertainty in general.
If you recall I mean I'm sureyou do I remember at that time
(19:39):
as well that the Black LivesMatter movement was quite heated
.
There were a lot of protesters.
Even when I went to the grocerystore like it seemed dangerous,
you know the shelves were emptyand you know I have two.
You know I'm running thisbusiness and our pipeline is
dying.
And then throughout April, likenobody can get a sale.
It's just like we're fucked,like zero, you know, and I'm
(20:03):
losing confidence in thebusiness.
I'm losing confidence in myself.
I'm asking, thinking to myself,like we're fucked, like zero,
you know, and I'm losingconfidence in the business.
I'm losing confidence in myself.
I'm asking, thinking to myselflike maybe I made the wrong
choice, maybe I made a baddecision, but luckily um, well,
I'm not luckily yet, but I endedup having.
The world can't stop forever.
(20:29):
The world will start buyingagain, the economy will come
back and what we need to do as ateam and as a company, and even
to keep your own sanity, wehave to keep working.
We have to keep workingextremely hard because when they
start buying, we need to befirst in fucking line.
(20:50):
And when I said that, I wasn'treally sure, I even believed it
myself.
But I remember going to workand making those calls and
trying to set the right exampleand trying to push the team to
keep going.
And I remember one womananswered the phone when I was
making a call and she's like areyou really trying to make a
sale right now with everythingthat's happening in the world?
(21:10):
And I'm like yeah.
And she's like I can't believethat you're doing this right now
, and I remember saying to herthat you know part of doing this
is helping me keep it togethermyself.
And I got to say that my wifeand I drank a lot of wine during
(21:32):
that time, during April, mayand part of June.
We watched a lot of Tiger King,we watched the Last Dance and a
lot of Schitt's Creek at nightwhile drinking wine.
And I remember in about mid tolate April, I remember coming
home from work and I just feltlike giving up.
(21:55):
I felt really beaten down.
It might have been even in May,I don't know, but I remember
holding my wife in the kitchenand just crying, both of us just
crying for a little while andthen I got it together.
And I also remember coming homefor my 40th birthday, which I
have this banner this banner youmight've seen in the background
(22:20):
that my kids made for me andhad out when I drove up to our
house that we just bought inMassachusetts, celebrating my
40th birthday, um, and that wasa really tough, tough birthday.
And um, and I remember shortlyafter that, um, telling my wife
(22:41):
that you know, going through thewinter that I didn't want to
live there anymore.
It was too cold, it was toodark, the regulations were
insane.
They closed the, they closedthe lakes, they closed the
beaches, they closed the hikingtrails.
I absolutely hated it.
But we kept working, we kept ourheads down and all of a sudden
it was like mid-June and thosepeople, they started buying and
(23:05):
the sales started happening.
And it was scary for me and Ifelt bad because I had people
that believed in me that lefttheir jobs and it was failing
and I felt awful about it.
You know, and I wanted, and Istill feel an obligation to the
people who work with me, that Ineed to provide opportunities
(23:26):
for everybody to make a goodliving.
I don't want anybody to want ornot be able to pay their bills
who work for me, like I wanteveryone who works for me to
make a good living or a greatliving.
But yeah, I mean it took off andduring that time, I think, like
you know, we started selling abunch of names in June and July
was good, august was good, youknow, things were going really
(23:47):
well and during that time acolleague of mine his name is
Paul Thompson gave me a call andhe said hey, you know, his
specialty was selling brandprotection products and one of
them is the Adult Block.
Adult Block is sold by MMX andit allows companies to register
their trademark in pornsexadult.
(24:07):
I think it's those three.
I could forget.
Maybe there's another oh andxxx and so you would sell those
into big, usually corporates, orwe actually did really well
with selling to celebrities.
There is a few that purchasedthem from us I can't mention
(24:30):
their names, but they have it aswell and he came on and did
that and we did quite a bit ofmarketing for that and it went
okay.
I think I learned from thatdoing this adult block, while
things were getting going andthings are going well and our
business came roaring back was,you know, sometimes it's better
it's good to add new productlines and new services, but
(24:52):
sometimes it's just better ifyou just focus your energy into
what you're great at, ratherthan focusing your energy into
trying to do too many thingsbecause you end up finding out
that you probably would havemade more money faster if you
just focused on what you're goodat rather than trying to to add
(25:14):
this other thing that youreally would need to be able to
sell at velocity or have like acustomer base of, you know,
thousands of companies to reallymake it worthwhile.
But anyways, um, during thattime I also um, but paul, even
even though the adult block didnot make as much money as we
(25:35):
wanted, paul converted into a.
He was a part-time broker andhe worked for me, but he
converted into a full-timebroker and he's one of our best
now.
So you know, it worked out forus.
But I think, looking back at it, it could have done better.
And during that time I addedsome folks in the Philippines to
help Philippines to do somelead generation for us, business
development, some design work.
(25:55):
So we have five people downthere, you know, and I actually
was brought on as a consultant,or our team was brought as a
consultant to MMX, which wasgreat Right, so that brought in
some consistent income, whichwas great right, so that brought
in some consistent income.
And that was something that Iwanted to explore as a
(26:15):
professional that side of thebusiness I mentioned earlier.
And at MMX I helped them redotheir tiers.
They had so many differenttiers.
It was confusing to me.
I'm like why can't we makethese easier for people to
understand and registrars tounderstand?
They did a lot of the high-lowmodel.
So your first year registrationis $1,000, and then the rest of
(26:36):
the years are $9.
That's a really hard one whenpeople are just glancing at a
list.
I was never a really huge fanof the high-low but they had
that.
We talked about, that.
I helped with.
That strategy did a lot oftheir sales.
It was interesting when theywere publicly traded.
(26:57):
I was looking at theirfinancial reports and at one of
the financial reports I think itwas the final one before they
sold to GoDaddy that the premiumdomain sales made up about 20
or 25% of their revenue.
So I thought it was really coolthat our company had a very
direct effect on the value ofthe company.
When that company sold toGoDaddy, my contract ended, and
(27:18):
rightly so.
They had people who did that,but I also hired a person named
Chris after that.
Chris who, or how?
He's from mainland China.
He lives in England but hehandles a lot of our work in the
Chinese market During that timeand all of these things
happening.
I don't know exactly thesequential events.
(27:38):
Maybe Chris came a littlesooner or a little later with
the ending of MMX.
But my colleague Bill built ourwebsite in Angular.
Angular is wildly fast atloading, but we found out later
on down the road.
It isn't so good with SEO, andwe were spending a lot of money
(27:59):
with some SEO folks helping uswith that, writing articles,
buying backlinks, doing allkinds of things to try to rank
and it just wasn't working.
And we ended up having torebuild the whole website into
WordPress, right, which wasextremely frustrating.
And we also made a massivemistake where what the world
(28:20):
isn't designed for is a domainmarketplace or a place that
sells a lot of domain names,right?
So imagine you have a clientwith 25,000 domain names and you
think to yourself okay, I'mgoing to link all 25 of those
domain names.
And you think to yourself okay,I'm going to link all 25 of
those domain names to my company, because when someone goes to
that name, it comes back to youknow, it goes to a landing page
or a contact us form and thenpeople go to that, fill in their
(28:42):
information and the lead comesinto my CRM or it's emailed to
me.
However, you want to do it,life is good.
I didn't understand SEO enoughand what ended up happening was
is all of those links were dofollow.
What does that mean?
It means that Google picks themup off your website and thinks
that those are all companiesthat have linked to you or
websites that have technicallylinked to you.
(29:02):
Now you might think that's goodfor SEO, but what Google does
is they crawl your site andthey're looking for patterns of
similar material to understandwhat your business does.
Now, when you have 50 or 60,000domain names of all different
types and sizes and shapes andindustries and everything,
(29:23):
google didn't know what the fuckwe were doing, especially
because our website didn't havea ton of content.
It didn't have a lot going on.
So then we started ranking forall of these wrong things and
the SEO guys were like what thehell is going on?
Why are you ranking for I don'tknow skiing videos or stuff
like that?
It just didn't make sense.
And then we figured it out, butby that point, all of those
(29:46):
links were indexed and we had tofix them.
So that screwed us up for SEO.
Our and we had to fix them, sothat screwed us up for SEO.
Our website wasn't workingright with SEO and Google, even
though Google made Angular.
You would think that Googlewould like Angular, but it
doesn't, so that hurt us as well.
So that was a mess and a realpain in the ass and we had to
rebuild the site.
We had to deal with thoseproblems and those fixes would
(30:07):
cost a lot of money to fix.
And you know hiring, you know,filipinos to do some of this
work for me because I was on ashort budget.
You know it was tough and wehad to make some changes.
So I switched over to a like anoutsourced um uh agency that
(30:32):
helped with uh development andwe made the changes.
In my friend, bill, who had afull-time job um at a financial
organization, uh, he steppedaside because he just said his
business was too busy in myexpectations and what I wanted
to try to um achieve was justtoo great.
Now, meanwhile, when all thesekinds of things are happening on
top of you know, developmentissues, or you know SEO issues,
(30:55):
and just doing all the things asa business owner, I'm still
trying to make sales, I'm stilltrying to build a book of
business myself and we have, youknow, the other brokers and at
the same time I was stilldialing for dollars, you know,
trying to sell um AIcom andobviously have a wife, two young
kids, in the middle ofapandemic, you know.
So, in the middle of all ofthis mess going on and it wasn't
(31:21):
a mess but like it was, youknow, still challenging as a
business, a new business ownergoing through all of these
things.
We as a couple, my wife and Isaid you know what we're tired
of these regulations.
We don't like the winter, wedon't like the darkness, and we
decided to move to Florida.
So we packed up the family andwe moved.
(31:41):
I drove a rider truck downthere with all our shit in it
and my wife followed behind withthe kids in the SUV and we
drove down here and we rented ahouse for a period of time.
Now, on the development side ofthings, we've built an appraisal
product, right, and theappraisal product you go to you
can put in your domains.
If you create an account, itsaves the names that you've
(32:03):
appraised.
You can use our services tohire us as a broker, to acquire
the domain on your behalf.
You can hire us to sell thedomains for you in your account
or things that you want to do totry to lead into, you know,
creating more opportunities.
It's kind of like a mousetrapfor us.
We also built a buyer brokerageproduct that registrars or
third parties can offer ourservices as a brokerage to
(32:27):
people who are looking to, youknow, acquire domain names, and
that's where we, or I'm.
That's the product that wecreated, that I ended up meeting
NameSilo from, and it turnedinto a future partnership of
ours, which I'll get to, youknow, down the road.
But building those two products,releasing those two products, I
(32:50):
realized that I have a verygood sales background.
I can go out there and I cansell a product, I can sell a
service, I can go and give aspeech, I can give a
presentation on that.
But when it comes todevelopment, when it comes to
working with developers andunderstanding code and all those
(33:11):
things, I don't know it and Iknow that that was a shortcoming
at the time and I have lookingback at it.
I tried my best but it justwasn't at the pace we were going
and the quality and the thingslike that and having to do
things over again.
It wasn't going at the speedthat I wanted to to achieve the
dreams and the goals that Iwanted to achieve for sawcom.
(33:32):
Right, and but not all of thethings that we've done with the
development team is visual.
A lot of it is behind thescenes.
With the CRM, with enrichingdata.
You know we enriching data,emailing different triggers,
different things happening atdifferent times and building
(33:52):
those things.
You know and you know we'vetried as a company, so many
different ways to marketourselves as an organization, to
market our brokerages, brokersas people, to market the names
we have for sale.
You know we've even hiredoutside companies to make
appointments for us, makingcalls on a daily basis.
We did some automated LinkedInmessaging.
(34:14):
That failed and bombed.
You know we do over 100,000emails a month right now.
You know the company callingout for us.
It just didn't work.
That bombed.
You know we've had a lot of youknow, technical issues.
We even had a time when one ofour developers accidentally
emailed our entire list in ourCRM at the same time by accident
(34:37):
, I mean, that was a mess thathad to be cleaned up.
You know, I mean, but it iswhat it is.
It's the growing of a business.
You're going to make a lot ofmistakes, you're going to fail
in a lot of ways.
You're going to have a lot ofsuccesses and while all of this
was happening, we were stillselling names.
We were selling more names at ahigher velocity on a monthly
basis.
We were getting more clients.
(34:59):
We were getting moreopportunities to acquire names.
We were building a name forourselves.
Usually, like when I firststarted the business, it was
really hard because you go andyou say someone would be like so
what sales have you made, whathave you done and everything
that I did up to that point.
(35:19):
After I left Uniregistry, Iwould have to mention other
company names for sales that Idid there, but I had to bring up
that I did them somewhere elseand that I don't know.
Maybe it just bothered me, butso we were finally getting sales
under our belt.
We were getting new customers,the momentum was growing.
Working together was great,everyone was having fun together
as a company.
We were having our issuesinternally with you know,
(35:42):
technical stuff and things likethat, and going, you know,
through a few sloppy developersor people that just weren't as
invested.
But the company continued togrow and good things were
happening.
We even had a situation onetime where I was paying for
traffic or leads off of GoogleAdWords and we're spending, like
(36:02):
you know, three or three to$5,000 a month on it.
And I realized after, liketalking to the salespeople, I'm
like how those leads?
They're like what leads?
I'm like what the fuck are youtalking about what leads?
And I went and I tested it formyself and I realized that when
people were going to our contactpage and submitting their
information, there was adisconnect between the website
(36:25):
and the CRM and the websitewasn't saving the data and it
wasn't sending it to the CRM.
So all that money justevaporated and we lost all those
leads and whichever ones we got, from SEO as well, anyway.
So moral of the story is, whenit comes to development, even
though we had a QA, you need tocheck everybody's work.
You know we've had our fairshare of legal issues.
(36:45):
I had someone chasing after mewho thought I was the owner of
some domain name because we hadour sales lander on it.
I'm sure if you're a brokerafter me who thought I was the
owner of some domain namebecause we had our sales lander
on it, I'm sure if you're abroker, you've dealt with that
before, you know.
But yeah, but that's all againgrowing pains and you know the
business was going well, but Istill had the admiration, or
(37:07):
ambition, I guess, to grow thecompany to be one of the top
domain brokerages in thebusiness and, as I told the
people that I've hired, this isthe last time that I start a
brokerage and really get itgoing.
And this is the third time.
This time I'm doing it for meand I'm going to give it
(37:29):
everything I got and I havegiven it everything I got.
And so it got to a point withAmanda and I where we didn't
really agree on the direction ofthe business and we decided to
split up.
And I said in the beginning, um, that one of the hardest
decisions I ever made was toleave the Island, and the other
one, I think my second hardest,or the hardest, equally as hard,
was splitting up with Amandaand making that decision, cause,
again, it's very hard to letpeople go that are as good as
(37:51):
she is, but it was time to moveon with her and it's really hard
.
And, talking about this, thisis the first time that I've
(38:12):
actually like really just goneover this piece by piece in my
mind and really, you know.
So this is.
You know, this is a lot for meto go over, but you know, and
also on top of this, with HR orworking with people in general,
I had to let a broker go thatthat wasn't performing up to the
standards we want.
But since then we've added twomore, so we have five brokers
(38:35):
and everyone is performing great.
The team gets along well and soI'm really happy with the way
things are going.
But again, a startup can betumultuous and you can have a
lot of challenges.
We also have a lot of successeschallenges, we also have a lot
of successes.
So we have the five brokers andthen, including myself, six
(38:56):
right Plus the folks in thePhilippines, and we have some
developers and other people.
So it's been great Through allof this the ups and the downs,
the mistakes on the emails, thedevelopment issues, some issues
internally you know, internallywith the folks, that we've
worked together.
We still were successful and in20, I can't remember, my God,
(39:17):
2021 or 2022, I sold AIcom andthe thing with that was is the
experience to that was verysimilar, as I did with sexcom.
Like I said, I was gettinglaughed at by people when I was
trying to sell it.
I remember going to a domainconference.
People were making fun of mefor it and then, when it sold,
(39:38):
those same people wrote in thecomments that it didn't sell for
enough.
With AI, that was a great sale.
We had a lot of peopleinterested.
We had companies offering $3million, $5 million, $6 million,
$7 million a lot of money, andthat one was an amazing sale.
I was really proud of that one.
(39:59):
But we also had a lot of otherwins as a company during that
time.
We sold Candycom, we soldVirtualcom, we sold Dataai which
I think was possibly thehighestai ever sold Mediacom,
cometcom, m1.com.
We've sold a bunch of singlelettervips for a lot of money.
(40:23):
We've seen a ton of goodlaws.
We sold perfectone, perfectcom,k1.com, coolcom.
I think we have the highest tvdomain extension sale ever.
I've been part of a handful oflawsuits as a star witness
helping with domains in general.
(40:44):
We've won quite a few differentawards within our industry and
also outside of it.
Quite a few different awardswithin our industry and also
outside of it.
No-transcript, not sellinganything right.
You know since that day that Isold the domain name for Grant
(41:13):
to my friend.
As of today and looking back, Ithink there's sales missing in
there because in the verybeginning we had to make some
changes and I think some datawas lost and I think there's
probably about $5 million off.
But I'm not going to include itin this number because if it's
wrong it's wrong.
I'd rather give accurate.
So what I have on the list asof this afternoon, we sold 1,033
(41:40):
domain names since ourinception for $58,652,805.
Again, I'm quite sure I'mmissing some numbers there, so
maybe we've done $63 or $64million in sales, and I'll tell
you.
It's been a lot of work.
It's been a lot of sleeplessnights, it hasn't always been
(42:02):
pretty, but there's been a lotof work.
It's been a lot of sleeplessnights, it hasn't always been
pretty, but there's been a lotof success and there's a lot of
fun to it, and we have a greatteam.
And the reality is, though, isthat I realized, as a business
owner and learning from mymistakes and learning about some
(42:22):
of the decisions I made thatweren't the best, that I can't
be everything at a company atthe same time, because I'm not
great at everything, but I knowwhat I'm good at, I know what I
can do, and so I did a lot ofsoul searching after Amanda and
I split up, and evaluating thebusiness in general and what I
(42:46):
want to achieve and where I wantto go and how I want to get
there.
And, again, like I said in thebeginning, I wanted to build an
industry leading domainbrokerage, and I felt that
technology I mean, I haveawesome salespeople right All
five of the salespeople haveabout except for Paul.
(43:07):
All five of my salespeople have10 years of experience selling
domain names.
Paul has 10 years experience inthe industry, but a portion of
that was selling the brandprotection product, so that's
pretty darn close as well.
They all pretty much havealmost.
I think the least is 15 yearsof sales experience.
I have 20.
I can't believe I'm saying thatin sales experience.
(43:32):
So I felt that applying ourlearnings as a team what I
learned from Uniregistry, whatI've learned from doing this at
Sodcom and building another CRMthat we would like to apply our
learnings and really build aplatform that people can use,
make more money on and apply ourlearnings to it and also use it
for ourselves to help ourcurrent clients that want to use
our brokerage.
And so doing that, I knew thatme as the technical, like CTO,
(43:57):
wasn't going to happen Right,and I talked to the agency that
was helping me.
That was doing a good job, butthey didn't really um work, ever
work with, like Matt, like lotsof traffic and lots of domains
pointing at a business and DNSand potential DDoS attacks and
things like that.
And I was talking at the sametime when I was evaluating these
(44:21):
things, I started talking to uhChristops, who's the CEO of
name silo, and they built namelot and name lot is a sales
platform for domain names.
That never quite got to theheight that they wanted it to
get to and um, we ended upmaking a deal that I sold uh um
uh, the assets of sawcom and weput them in a new business and
(44:44):
they put the assets of of namelot into a business, plus, you
know, some money, and we createda new, a new company, and we're
making it into the sawcommarketplace and um, and it's in
a beta right now and we'rereally excited to provide, to
provide a product to theindustry that will give sellers
(45:09):
as much data as possible.
But we're not gonna can't giveit all at once.
We're working on it so they canmake the right decisions and
hopefully make the most money ontheir sales, make it as
user-friendly as possible.
I think domain name sales anduniversity was the best tool
that the industry has seen sofar.
I think the problem with it wasis, a lot of the times, it
(45:31):
wasn't the most user-friendlyand I think if you weren't a
salesperson and you weren't usedto using a CRM, you might've
gotten confused or missed out onsome of the great technology
and things that we built.
So we wanted to make it a lotmore user-friendly and doing
some of the things that peopledon't want to do, and just make
it a little more.
I would consider Uniregistry asbeing more like an Android
(45:53):
phone, and then this is morelike the Apple phone, where a
lot more is kind of done for you, you know.
Make it again user-friendly anoffer, you know.
Consider amount of paymentoptions if people want to pay
with different forms of paymentaround the world crypto or using
payment plans.
You know we're going to offerall of those as well and, again,
use it with some of the besttechnology that we have
(46:16):
available, along with a lot ofother bells and whistles that
will come along the way bellsand whistles that will come
along the way.
And having Chris Dobbs, whosebackground is a developer,
balances out who I am as asalesperson, and that is where
we are today, using theirdevelopment team, that is, and
(46:37):
I'm working with their projectmanagers to deliver an amazing
product.
We're not a registrar.
We're not looking to get in theregist amazing product.
We're not a registrar.
We're not looking to get in theregistrar business.
We're not sharing customers.
This is an entirely separateventure.
I'm a domain broker.
I'm in the domain brokeragebusiness.
That's what I wanna do.
(47:00):
But along this way, there aresome things that I've learned
that have gotten us to thispoint, to the beta, and I can't
wait to release this.
But I'm also nervous about it.
I don't know if you ever builtyour own product and you're
presenting it or showing it topeople.
You get nervous, get anxietyabout it.
You really hope people like itand you're really sensitive
about what they say becauseyou've put so much time and
(47:23):
energy into it.
You know people don't realizehow hard sometimes you work on
these products.
But me also I have to realizethat it can't.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
When it comes out for the firstversion, you know it just needs
to work and then we're going towork on it and get it better.
But I think the things thatI've learned in this journey and
thinking about it a little bitis you know you cannot do great
(47:48):
things alone, right?
You need the help of others.
And when I say help of others,what does that mean?
Well, when I was at Uniregistry,it wasn't the Jeff Gabriel show
, there was a lot of otherpeople involved, despite me
being the vice president ofsales and managing the team and
having a lot of say into whatwas being done.
(48:09):
There was a lot of conversation.
Obviously, frank the owner wasinvolved, but we had some really
good developers that were partof the conversation.
We brought in the salespeople,asked them a lot of questions of
what they needed, what theyheard from customers, what did
they want.
Ask customers what they want,try to employ that.
Try to make projections as towhat kind of revenue those
things are going to make.
That'll get you there.
(48:31):
When it comes to my currentbusiness, one of the things you
get to realize is the peoplethat work for you aren't
required to work for you.
They can leave anytime theywant.
They're there voluntarily andthey can tell you sayonara and
go somewhere else in a minute.
And you need to treat them withrespect and include them in the
business as much as you can,because if you want them to be
(48:51):
dedicated to the goals that youhave, you need to include them
as much and keep them in theknow so they are just as excited
as you are and if yourexpectations are really high,
you have to give them a reasonto have high expectations
themselves.
But also, when I'm saying thatyou cannot do great things alone
, you also need to recognize thepeople that you work with and a
(49:18):
lot of the times, recognitionis worth a lot more than money
to some people and recognizingtheir hard work and what they're
putting in is definitelyimportant.
And I also think if you're goingto be successful in life in
general or successful with aproduct or services, you need to
have a solid private orpersonal life, almost like a
(49:39):
board of directors.
So a strong personalrelationship with someone at
home interviewing a board ofdirectors.
So a strong personalrelationship with someone at
home interviewing a lot ofpeople.
With this podcast, it seemed tome that a lot of people had a
great significant other thatsupported them, even though the
risks were high, just like mine.
But I also think that it'simportant that you have a good
relationship with differentprofessionals, that you can talk
(50:00):
about some of the situationsthat you're in and bounce these
ideas off and it's not judgmentand that they're happy for you
when you do well and thatthey're there for you when
you're doing bad.
And I think if you're tellingsome people your problems in
your business and they're notlistening to you.
You need to find somebody else.
And if you're talking to peoplethat are bringing problems into
(50:21):
your life, I call it crazy.
We don't let, melissa and Idon't let crazy in our life, you
know then get them out of yourlife.
It's just not worth it.
You know.
But you should kind of create aboard of directors that not
necessarily even signing them tothe board, but these are just
people in your life that you cantalk to, whether I mean I have
(50:41):
great parents that I can talk toand confide in about things.
I have good friends that I canconfide to and talk to about
different things and ask themtheir opinions and they're
honest with me.
And when I'm down they're thereto try to help me.
When I'm doing great, they'rethere to celebrate my successes.
And you need to take care ofyourself.
I try to go to the gym three orfour times a week.
(51:02):
I need to take care of yourself.
I try to go to the gym three orfour times a week.
I'm getting old, I'm in painhalf the time, but motion is
lotion and I think that going tothe gym for me in the morning
helps me start my day.
It lowers my stress or at leastjust doing something different
or an activity.
And then you know again don't beafraid to fail.
You know, I was so worried whenI, when I quit, that I would
(51:25):
fail.
But looking back at it, I knewthat I was going to give it
everything I had and it wasn'tgoing to let it happen.
Um and so I'd be foolish if Iwasn't worried about it and I'd
be lying to you to tell you thatI wasn't, but I shouldn't have
been as worried about it.
And here's a quote is I'veheard before do not be afraid to
(51:47):
fail big and to dream big.
And the quote I'm going toleave you with here is from
Denzel Washington.
And this one has and I'm not aquote person at all, but this
one, if you watch the YouTubevideo of Denzel Sayet, he does
one at a college, he's avaledictorian, he does a speech
there, or not the valedictorian,whatever, he's a guest, he does
(52:09):
a speech there and he says it.
But there's also a video whenhe's telling it to a person
interviewing him, which I findis a really good quote.
So I'm going to read it to you.
Dreams without goals are justdreams.
Ultimately, they fueldisappointment and on the road
to achieving your dreams.
You must apply discipline but,most importantly, consistency,
(52:33):
because without commitmentyou'll never start, but without
consistency you will neverfinish.
And I love that quote and ifyou think about it with anything
in your life, it applies Ifyou're going to go all in,
you're going to get results,it's going to work.
If you half-ass it, you'regoing to get half-ass results.
Right, and the quote that Ialways said and I think of
(52:54):
anybody who worked for me atUniregistry, here's this one
It'll probably give them shiversis hard work always pays off.
And that's the story so far,but I'm sure we'll have a part
three soon enough.
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