I just came from #SumoCon, a conference held by a bunch of internet marketing and sales guys coming together. I really wasn’t going to do a video about it, but something strange happened and I ended up buying X27 Marketing.com’s domain name.
In this article (and in the video below), I’m going to run through how that happened, what the mindset was, how the negotiation went and give you some insight on what is like to buy a domain.
Let’s go!
Storytime: How I found x27 domain name in #SumoCon
It was the Monday after the conference, most of the attendants had already gone away and about 30% of the people was still at the conference.
While everyone was downstair at the hotel, I was working upstairs because I had back-to-back calls for X27.
One of my friends was downstairs and we were emailing each other. Then this guy walked by (I guess he was snooping on my friend’s email) and happened to notice that the company we were talking about was called X27 Marketing.
Well, it clicked on this guy’s head, because he owned the X27 Marketing domain!. A total serendipity, right?
For a long time, X27 Marketing.com was just one piece of text as a placeholder, and our main site was x27marketing.co or x27marketing.co. Obviously, I was hungry to know the person who owned the domain name and I locked in a meeting.
My friend introduced us, we shook hands and he asked a couple of questions about the company, like where we were and how we were doing.
By being aware of the possibility of a high price due to his need for more information, I decided to downplay our success as a strategical measure telling him we were a growing startup in the process of validating our services.
Then I asked him how much the domain, what he wanted for it.
Closing the deal
Next, I encouraged him to throw a price for the domain. He asked me back using my words; he didn’t even throw a price out so I threw two prices right off the bat.
First I was like: “I don’t really know how much a domain should cost, maybe a thousand dollars?” and he liked that offer.
He told me that he sold his last domain for 17.000$ and whether it was a deal or not I felt good about paying it. Apparently, he also felt good too so we shook hands on the thousand dollar deal.
I was a little worried about buying a domain or actually sending this guy a thousand dollars on PayPal because I really only met him one time and I didn’t want to be ripped off.
So later on a phone call, I told him about scam odds and if there was something we could do to make this transaction safer. His response to this was perfect, he was like “Dude, I’m not going to rip you off for a thousand dollars, I live in San Francisco. We own two houses”.
With that one sentence, I immediately gained a bunch of trust with this guy and sent him a thousand bucks. A few hours later he asked my GoDaddy info and he sent me the domain. We set up email, DNS and we’re all set now.
It was surprisingly easy!
I wanted to write this and the video for 2 things:
1. First to show you that domain buying is possible, not just people trying to scam you most of the time.
I think having this domain name is going to be better for business since people were already typing x27marketing.com in their browser. Now it’s going redirect them to the page, and that might boost our lead generation.
2. The second reason for me wanting to make a point on this is that sometimes, it pays to be trustworthy. If we made this deal super complicated, the process would have been much slower, and it wouldn’t probably be worth that guy’s time anymore, to the point where it just would’ve fallen through.
By trusting him a little bit and paying upfront, I got the domain, and now our company has X27 Marketing.com.
Do you have a similar story about your domain name? Just share the story with us down below! I want to know…
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