How to Turn Danger into Opportunity

Crisis in Chinese is composed of two words together: Danger and Opportunity. 

Powerful.

Danger is Coming

Our domain business was starting to compound and gain momentum. 

We were on pace to do over a million dollars a year, and each month, new insights arrived that made the flywheel spin faster and get bigger.

We had made it!

Yahoo, who would later buy Goto (the pay-per-click search engine), was using a company called ASI (Applied Semantics) to target domain names with relevant keywords. For example, Laptop.com had laptop keywords and relevant advertisers for laptops. This allowed better monetization of the domain names.

Guess who decided to buy ASI for $102 million in 2003? A little upcoming company called Google. They were the new search engine on the block, and Yahoo had used them as their search engine, branding them into significance. This was a great strategic move by Google and the beginning of Yahoo's decline. ASI would become "Adsense" and its powerful monetization engine, where it still makes over 90% of its revenues.

This left Yahoo with no contextually relevant ads on the domain names and our revenues plummeted by more than 50%!

Imagine waking up one day to disaster. C'est la vie.

The crisis is Turning Danger into Opportunity

Yahoo was scrambling for a solution and asked the larger domainers if we wanted to build our own keyword engine. They wanted to avoid dealing with smaller domain portfolios and wondered whether a handful of us, the larger domainers, could consolidate them.

I would have thought a giant technology company would invest in this 'keyword' engine. Their CEO, Terry Semel, was a traditional Hollywood guy and also passed up the opportunity to buy Google for $5 billion before it went public. Later, they did invest in Alibaba, their $1 billion stake selling for $40 billion. The Yahoo Directors had to oust their Yahoo founder, Jerry Yang, in order to sell it.

So, we were presented with an opportunity to help smaller domainers monetize their domains. This allowed us to learn from the entrepreneurial insights of many agile domainers.

Domainers came from all walks of life and were scrappy, agile, bootstrappers with solid work ethics and ingenuity. I learned a lot from both the small and the legendary domainers. This entrepreneurial real-life boot camp may have been better than attending business school and getting an MBA.

Homage to all my fellow domainers and entrepreneurs. Strength and Honour.

The traffic in our domain network became a Top 100 Global Network, as measured by the industry standard Comscore. I was astounded. Now we were really big.

My Life Dream

When I was 13, one of my good friends told me that my cousin Don was actually my brother. What? Why are you saying that? I asked my mom, and she sat me down and told me that Dad had a previous family before she had me, and I had two sisters and an older brother. They were stuck in Korea and my mom helped my brother come to Canada. But my mom couldn't love him like a true son, so Don was sent to grow up in group homes, apart from me. I had no idea.

I prayed that I would be able to have a business in the future that would allow me to work with Don. I asked him to join me in this Internet entrepreneurial journey. He had just sold his dry cleaners and was interested.

So, Don managed support on our domain parking business, Hitfarm. I also had a prayer to bring my sisters over to Canada. One sister found her way to the US on her own and my other sister now lives in Vancouver. So blessed.

I couldn't imagine the life they had gone through without parents. I thank God for all the people in my life who have helped me find my way and build a business from scratch. I am so grateful to God, my family, and to each person I have met along this amazing life journey.

Thank you. Much love to each of you. May God bless you with everything in your heart and let you shine like the sun… Read about my current crisis in motion at Ham.com.