PREFACE
Not only do I really, really know how domains work but I really, really believe I'm the perfect fit to be Two Barrels' Director of Domain Name Registrar role. Here's why I believe I'm the perfect fit...
1997
I discovered domain names around 1997 when TV commercials from companies like Sony and Motorola made their .COMs front and center. I thought it was the coolest thing since dialing up at a blazing 28.8 bps on AOL. I thought it was so cool, that I kept a journal of the domains I came across. I quit that damn journal when I filled a full page because I knew it was only a matter of time before everyone was going to have their domain and I'd likely end up physically writing my own, pointless, version of the Yellow Pages. Thankfully, there were sites like Excite, Lycos, and eventually Yahoo and Google.
Man, it would have so been cool to register my own domain, back then. But as a 14-year-old child, I didn't have the means to pony up $200 a year for some weird possible fad that I'd have no idea about what to do with it. Yet, I still understood the value. 2001 came around and domains got cheaper. Cheap enough that as a high school graduate with a job, I was able to register a handful of them and start my venture as a lifelong entrepreneur. I was, and still am, really into cars. So, I started an online automotive performance parts company right out of my mother's house. It grew pretty quickly, but my lack of business experience and guidance kept me from sustaining it for more than a couple of years. Credit card fraud was hot, I was a victim and it was time for me to go back to a regular ol' J-O-B.
Mortgages
Fast forward a few years and I enter the mortgage industry. That was fun. I learned how to pick up the phone and dial for dollars. Three guys ran this huge company that had an office that spanned a city block in downtown Chicago and had over 100 other loan officers. Not only did I learn how to make cold calls, but also what it takes to motivate your troops, work as a team, and that sometimes it takes extra hours to accomplish goals. I learned that you needed to reward yourself when you accomplish those goals, too. For the guys running their teams, it was a Lamborghini Murcielago or a Ferrari 355. They'd been in the industry longer than I had. So, for me, it was spending those dollars my fingertips bled for at GoDaddy Auctions.
In 2007, I bought and sold about 25 three to five-figure domains, using the sales skills I learned in the mortgage industry. One of those skills wasn't something out of Wolf of Wall Street where you don't take "no" for an answer or not hang up the phone until the client "BUYS OR DIES". No. Forcing something down someone's throat they don't want isn't the answer. The answer is in two parts. Part 1: show them the value and how it could help them accomplish something they're not already accomplishing. Part 2: hold their hand. Make them feel like they're getting their money's worth and show them you actually care. Sometimes (in both mortgages & domains), that meant meeting with the customer in person. Maybe it's their home, their office, or a coffee shop. Walk them through what they're getting and how to use what you're selling so that it's to their benefit. I believe I've been successful in sales by using these basic principles. Yeah, it might eat up a little bit more of your time, but sometimes it makes the difference between cashing in or striking out.
Alright. We've established I can see value in domains and that I know how to sell them. The 2008 recession destroyed any interest I had in continuing to sell mortgages. Let me into what makes me the right guy to be your new Director of Domain Name Registrar.
Tech startup 1
I never stopped buying domains. Much of the purchasing was for ideas I either tried to turn into a business or just mentally shelved for a later time. Some of what I bought was good enough to hold as an investment and I continued to sell them if I could make money. Some of those business ideas I had panned out. This is when I learned that having a SaaS was the fricken jackpot. Put sweat equity into something that you could put on auto-pilot and watch your bank account fill up?! HELL YES! OK, full disclosure, I'm not some rockstar programmer. I know how to do some basic PHP, JS, and a few lines in Python. But I understand how to build a flow chart and, most importantly, how to build and work with a team that can take a vision and makes it a reality. I honed these skills by building a service that, programmatically, generated unlock codes for BlackBerry smartphones based on the user-provided IMEI. I built myself a virtual money tree and, unofficially, had support from BlackBerry itself as an official partner. I'd say thanks to them, my love for business travel was born. I was flown around the US and put up in hotels at their expense to attend dev conferences and hackathons. Mystery boxes would show up at my house from Waterloo with beta devices. It was a glorious time. But, they failed to listen to customers and developers and didn't innovate. Instead of being led by the suits, they should have been led by the people in hoodies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We all know how that ended.
Tech startup 2
So, I retired from the mobile phone sector and moved on to other projects. Cold calling was sort of dying down, but email marketing was very alive. One could purchase lead lists that had email addresses. The problem with that was, that a lot of the emails were junk. There were typos, some were fake, and some were just dead. If you wanted to start a spam campaign and fire off 10,000 emails, but you didn't go through those lists, you were 100% getting blocked after sending the first 100 emails. There's no way anyone who's buying lists, or even using their own organic lists, was going through every single email manually to make sure it was good. There's no time for that. What I did, was create a service that scrubbed your list of emails. It checked to make sure the address was correctly formatted, made sure the domain was live, filtered against known fake entries, checked MX records, and a handful of other checks to give an opinion on which addresses were junk and which were valid. I, and the 3-person development team I hired, launched this project in 60 days. I barely got my Crunchbase profile set up before the project was acquired by a new gTLD registry operator another 60 days later. Arguably, they have one of the worst possible new gTLDs, so I see why they wanted to spam the crap out of people. I'm shocked the TLD is still live.
OK, let's recap. At this point, I know a bit about domain names, I know how to sell, I know how to build a team, build a SaaS product and how to exit from a startup. What's next? Holy crap, Uniregistry is hiring for a sales position selling DOMAIN NAMES IN THE CAYMANS!
Uniregistry & Registry sales
Jeff Gabriel...cool dude. Flew me down there and I instantly fell in love with everything about it. If you've never been to the Uniregistry office, I feel like you may have missed out. It was VERY cool. From all of the photos on the walls to the in-house chef, the standing desks, music, ambiance - the whole company culture fricken ROCKED! I'd have almost worked there for free. Just feed me and let me be a part of that team!! Unfortunately, after meeting me and learning more about my background, Jeff realized I wasn't Cayman material. However, he had a different idea. Considering I was a car guy with outbound sales experience, I was sent back home and put on the .CAR, .CARS, .AUTO team that Frank partners with Daniel Ngari on. I wasn't too heartbroken. I got to dial for dollars from home and do a bunch of traveling. I learned about what it took to set up and run booths at trade shows, such as the NADA convention in Vegas. My first sale was to an independent dealership in Chicago that specialized in former law enforcement vehicles. I sold Police.Cars to them, which was a perfect fit. $2888 annual renewal fees for small businesses is a tough sell, though. Our team was eventually broken up and I was back to figuring out what my next project was.
Tech startup 3
As an employee for a gTLD operator, I learned about their drop lists. Interesting. Not that it's any sort of "insider information", but it made me think. Of course, there were companies like Snap Names, Dropcatch, etc. already providing dropcatch services. But they all seemed focused on original TLDs, like .COM, .NET and .ORG. We have 1000 new TLDs, why weren't they focusing on those, I thought? So, I got to work hiring my previous dev team, learning about EPP, and building a global network to strategically capture dropping domains and names.plus was born. The focus was new gTLDs and ccTLDs. I had a unique idea, though. Instead of bidding in an auction, like the others were doing, just submit an offer. If your offer was the highest, and we got the domain, pay for it and it was yours. Nice and simple. Time to get that cash machine running again, I thought. That was, until my old buddy, Jeff Gabriel pinged me, letting me know Vern Jurovich was going to be giving me a call.
Uniregistry & Registrar sales
Turns out, Uniregistry needed to fill a spot in Newport Beach on the registrar sales team. OK, so you want me to move to Newport Beach and SELL DOMAIN NAMES FOR UNIREGISTRY?? F yeah! And so, I put my registrar idea on hold and relocated. It was a slightly different vibe from the Caymans, but it was the same at its core.
Admittedly, it had been a while since being with a live sales team, dialing a number, standing up, and asking people for their business. It took me a bit to get acclimated, especially since this was all going down with graphic designers, developers, and support staff all sitting within listening distance. A bit awkward. But I got past it. Most of the people we were calling were already Uni customers, so it's not like back in the day when we opened a phone book and randomly picked a name and number to call. One of the most valuable takeaways from this experience was learning what professional domain investors were looking for and the tools they found the most valuable. Our goal was to bring in transfers. Frank was trying to jockey for as many DUMs as possible. Unbeknownst to us at the time, his hidden agenda was that we were helping prep Uni for what would eventually become one of the most controversial acquisitions in the industry. The big bad, GoDaddy, would gobble up a much more domain investor-focused Uniregistry. After our registrar sales team was dismantled, I went back home and picked up on building the rest of my startup, names.plus.
Tech startup 3 & Exit
Within about six more months, the site was up and running. I was personally focusing on dropcatching .XYZ domains for my own portfolio, in addition to helping broker names for some ccTLD registries. We added a marketplace function to the site, as well as some unique domain research tools. Pretty soon, the site was dropcatching .IO domains...and we disrupted someone else's business. That someone else was Park.io. It wasn't long before a gang of new users signed up to get in on the .IO action, including one user with a female name. One female...out of hundreds of male names. I found this extremely interesting and did some research. Simply by cross-referencing their IP, email, and name, I figured out it likely wasn't a real profile. When I tracked the names they acquired from our service, I was positive it wasn't. It turned out to be Mike Cason, the owner of Park.IO. He was using our service because we were beating him and taking money out of his pocket. I did my research on Mike for quite a few months. It didn't actually take me long to learn Mike was a semi-early Bitcoin investor. It was December 2017 and I was tired of seeing us catch domains for Mike just so he could go auction them off on his site for thousands of dollars. We, unfortunately, didn't have the traction Park.IO had. It was time to let him know, that the jig was up. Bitcoin was at an all-time high, reaching around $20K. I knew this was the time to strike. I finally reached out and told him that I knew who he was and that he should just buy the company and that I'd take BTC. I knew that WHATEVER price I gave him, he was getting like an 80% discount, due to how long he's been holding. After about a month of negotiations, legal contracts, etc., I finally flew out to Philadelphia to meet him in person and ink the deal. I sold it and he shelved it. He bought it simply for the tech and for me to go away with my 2-year non-compete clause. I can tell you what we agreed on, only that it was more than 1 BTC and less than 15 BTC.
I'm bored
So, I temporarily "retired", once again. I took a nice month-long trip to Vietnam, with a couple of side trips through Asia, and returned home only to quickly get bored being "retired". I dabbled in a few ideas I had shelved, one of which was a way to generate sales leads based on domain name data, but nothing got traction. Eventually, LinkedIn recommended a job listing to me for a position with Dominion Enterprises as the Director of Registrar Operations. How cool! A position in a company, doing basically the same thing I recently spent 6 months building from scratch! I applied, the holidays passed and after hitting it off with Jim Schrand, I got the role.
Dominion Domains
Working for Dominion was unique, as I was the Director of Operations for the registrar, which solely catered to customers who owned domains in TLDs from the Dominion registry. (.homes, .autos, .yachts, .boats & .motorcycles). They had a terrible website that was made in WordPress and used Logic Boxes API as the back end - instead of building a platform from scratch and using EPP. 👀 I couldn't believe how terrible it was. It needed to go, but there was no budget to build anything from scratch. Dominion also had an interesting product. If you buy a premium domain on Dominion's TLDs, take Electric.Motorcycles as an example (I sold that), Dominion will finance it for you - for free. Using this scheme, the registrar has a steady revenue stream rolling in and the registry shows a profit. I think other registry operators should have taken note. Along the way, I handled or was a part of multiple tasks I think were typical of a registrar, like UDRPs, product development, overseeing sales, ICANN compliance, GDPR, and data escrow.
Shortly into this role, I learned Dominion Enterprises wanted to focus on their other companies which had SaaS services and therefore, offload their TLDs. While I didn't have any part in the sale of the TLDs, I did have a part in figuring out what the registrar was going to do once those TLDs were sold off. Certainly, opening up the registrar to allow customers to register and maintain domains from TLDs other than Dominion TLDs needed to be done, in addition to getting out of a ridiculous contract with Logic Boxes that was in place long before I got there that was a complete financial drain. Luckily, I have previous experience bootstrapping something like this and referred back to my experience with WHMCS. It was a quick and easy way to get a halfway decent platform up for customers to manage their portfolios. Not too long after the sale of the TLDs did Dominion decide they wanted to offload the registrar, too. It was a perfect time during the beginning of the pandemic when everyone was staying home, that Jim Schrand seized an opportunity to acquire the registrar and its assets from Dominion. Now that the registrar is basically on auto-pilot, Jim runs his registrar from home on his one-and-only employee.
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Since my separation from Dominion, I've stayed active in domaining, managing my own portfolio. However, I'm ready for an exciting new challenge of taking something from nothing, or maybe something which may be relatively new, and growing it into something powerful. I think there's some missed opportunity for registrars to offer products to customers, other than just domain names. I'd love to be a part of a team that's ready to take our experiences and build something, like the next "Uniregistry for startups".
FIN.