How we got the Hall.com domain
blog.hall.com
blog.hall.com
This is my business (since '96). You did a great job and bought the name for a very fair price.
If you would post the contents of the emails you sent I would be glad to give some further opinions that might be helpful to others in the same situation. As far as what someone in this business thinks when they receive emails from buyers (I have received thousands so there is no pattern I haven't seen yet.)
In the mean time I've setup this email: startupdomainadvice@gmail.com
nate.hashem@gmail.com
Cheers
Registering a mark gives you better protection and drastically increases your odds of winning against an alleged infringer. Registering numbers, AFAIK, still is not allowed.
i'm in the process of selling a 4 letter domain name, that stands for a major financial product, that gets 20-30K searches a month, and that's currently ranking #1 for that keyword in Google...and the most I was able to get from the 40 companies I contacted is $7,500(estibot value is at $15K).
And that's for a product, that has a transaction fee based model...to a point where a single customer could be worth 5-10K per month, and a big customer could be worth $100K/mo
BTW the estibot value for the hall.com domain is $294,000
Can't sell names outbound. Someone has to come to you. So this doesn't surprise me at all.
"estibot value for the hall.com domain is $294,000"
Estibot means almost literally nothing. As you said "a domain is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it"
There is no correlation whatsoever between any domain I have sold and what estibot or any "appraisal" service says about the value of the domain. Although I have used that value if it gives me an advantage with someone who doesn't know about the business.
Question, when you contacted the 40 companies, how did you contact them? (Email, phone, postal)?
"?S? SYSTEMS, [llc|inc|llp|corp]"
(located in a state with skiing).
I've redacted but you should be able to verify..
Of the companies that didn't respond did you take any further steps?
Anyways, the final price ended up at $10K, which is pretty close to what I wanted
When selling a name, doing a trademark search is obviously important. You don't want to pitch someone with a federal trademark registration (this company hasn't received yet they just applied) or if you do pitch you have to be very careful or you will simply alert them and give them what they need to take the name from you in many cases.
With your name though it would have simply been an extra lead but a good lead (since the UDRP risk (in my opinion based on what I see on a quick check) is low and they value the term enough to trademark.)
Also, the first thing you also need to do when someone approaches you (before replying) is to check the uspto http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp to see if they have a trademark or if the person inquiring can be linked to the trademark. Can't stress this enough.
Anyways, the final price on ebpp ended up at $10K, which is pretty much what I was hoping for
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To give a chance to the crawls which feed the Wayback Machine (and drop your de facto veto of showing any prior crawls), you could whitelist 'ia_archiver' and 'archive.org_bot'.
To give a chance to up-and-coming search engines where competition is sorely needed, you could also whitelist 'ScoutJet' (for Blekko.com) and 'DuckDuckBot' (for DuckDuckGo.com).
From my experience this seems like an incredible steal. Congrats :)
When you buy a domain on the secondary market, the original creation date gets transferred. So you can have a 1998 registered domain, that was just purchased a week ago
Though they're right about the lowballs and not even replying. I routinely get mail either demanding that I give it to somebody because, "I is can start no profit save cancer" or around $150 because somebody thinks a domain name is a neat birthday present for their kid.
incidentally, I don't see how the pizza.com owner is going to recoup his investment
Hindsight is 20/20, it is impossible to know now where scarcity will inflate prices through the roof.
I agree with this, but then I went to hall.com and the very first thing it says in the software window is "Team Room - Hall.com"!
Huh?
Only one question I'm curious what your "non-low-ball" initial offer was if you got it for such a reasonable price.
We even considered the idea of leasing a domain which is doable.
http://hntrades.com has quite a few domains from other hacker newsers for sale or trade. i could probably extend it to also serve as a domain park page if anyone wanted it.
There are actually ways that a knowledgeable person can dodge that (and yes getting your own trademark is one of them).
But there is an interesting paradox here. As noted by another post on this page vaksel had noted that "the most I was able to get from the 40 companies I contacted is $7,500" with relation to a domain name he was trying to sell that he felt was worth way more.
The paradox is this. If more companies realized the value of domains they would be easier to sell. But there would also be many more UDRP's and cybersquatting lawsuits than there are now. Many companies simply don't see enough value in the domains to even pursue a UDRP that can be done for probably $5000 (if the right firm handles the complaint).
You have a 1b intent to use application not a registered trademark
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/jumpto?f=doc&state=4010:55oou...
That being said obviously the trademark app is needed. But the fact that you are using the domain name and that there are actually multiple trademarks for "hall" and that it's a common term is the thing that offers the real protection here from predators.
Your attorney should have not filed this as a 1b though. It will take longer to get the trademark issued.
They should have advised you to simply use even a site mockup or beta site to create a screen grab for the application. (I have 21 registered trademarks).