- Compounding Wealth & Health
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- How You Can Turn Your Junk into Treasure
What seems worthless to some may be priceless to others.
Come and See and Understand
Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
It was the end of the year. Dec 2000. I was so excited for the coming new year. As I gathered with friends and family, I couldn't help but tell them about this new discovery about domain names, hoping to inspire them to invest in domain names.
People thought I was speaking nonsense because the Internet was going through its death throes. All the bad news made my claims sound irrational. "Is Kevin going crazy? What happened to medicine?"
I could tell by the look in their eyes that they were all skeptical. I became more reserved around family and friends. This pattern would repeat with future counterintuitive discoveries.
Ah, human nature.
But one of my best friends, Colin Yu, was interested. He invited me to a preseason Vancouver Grizzlies basketball game, my first NBA game, and asked me many questions about my thoughts on these domain names.
He was very interested in investing in domain names. He was one of my best men at my wedding. As he was super practical, so I was surprised.
I'll Take Your Junk and Turn it to Gold
The art of turning lead into gold is not just alchemy, but also mindset.
But he had a twist on my vision of domain names. He wasn't interested in keeping domain names. He was interested in buying and selling, like Mike Mann of Buydomains.
Buy for $10 and sell for $1,000 (10x) or $10,000 (100x).
He asked if I could give him the list of all the domain names I didn't want to register, and he would register the "trash domain names."
I wasn't going to register them anyway, so why not? He was based in Hong Kong, working at HSBC. It would be his side hustle but eventually became his full-time hustle. We would later partner to create an even bigger business than our respective hustles, and Colin would retire in 2009, just eight years after that fateful basketball game.
Accelerating Time to Scale
Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.
At the end of 2000, I sold a few domains to register more domain names. I sold TicToc.com for $7,500, equal to 750 more domains. Then, when I found the Goto Pay-Per-Click (PPC) monetization engine, I realized I didn't need to sell domain names to register more domains.
So, I knew Colin's model would work well and encouraged him to go for it. I helped him build a website and watched him work his magic.
Then I had an idea. We could amalgamate our traffic to get a better revenue share with Goto (our PPC advertising engine).
We only got domain revenue stats monthly by spreadsheet, which was archaic. We needed real-time stats daily, and it would be even better if we knew what each domain name made in PPC revenue and how much each click made. It seemed like an impossible request. We asked anyway, but they refused, saying we needed more traffic volume.
So I asked our Goto if I got the biggest domainer, Yun Ye, onto Goto, could we get a better agreement? They were interested.
It was a long shot, but I emailed Yun, and to my surprise, he answered. Little did I know that he visited Vancouver often. I told him that he could 5x his revenue if he just swapped to Goto. He told me that Goto kicked him off earlier in 2000. That's why he was on Findwhat.
My assumption was wrong; I thought that because he was the biggest domainer, he was also the best. It turned out that Goto had terminated his agreement because they were dealing with internal issues, but Yun didn't trust them anymore. So I asked him, what if I could get him a contract that couldn't be terminated and got daily stats on each domain name and all the keyword data he could ever imagine? He was interested. So I brokered the deal with everything we wanted and that Goto wanted.
Our rev share went from 30% to 48%, along with daily domain stats, with keyword bids that would allow us to optimize the relevancy and monetization of each domain name.
Yun would go on to 5x his revenue to $20 million a year and profit $19 million. He and his wife were unstoppable. One year later, he sold his portfolio to Marchex for $164 million, an 8.6x multiple of his profit. He would retire in 2006. Mr. No name. He was a master of domains. Not many knew him, but a handful of us attempted to be as good as he was.