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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

a domain is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.

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

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"and the most I was able to get from the 40 companies I contacted is $7,500"

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.

Can't sell names outbound? Not sure if I believe that one bit. It's just a lot more work, like selling anything really. Sure it's infinitely easier when they want to buy something from you, but you can definitely convince people they need to buy something, be it domains or otherwise.

If you've got such an awesome domain, that others are valuing, why not build your own company on that domain? Busy? Hire someone to build something that gets you even 2-3x your adwords revenue - and you'll no longer care that you can't sell the domain.

it's a very high end B2B financial service. i.e. your customers would need to be huge(i.e. energy companies)...so selling would be a bit complicated...+ it's a mature service, so it's pretty saturated with competition.

You could build a website just for lead gen, and then call up the financial companies to buy the data from you. B2B financials like you describe could easily fetch $xxx per lead.

Did you sell it already? if not I'm interested in the details

it's ebpp.com

Interesting I sold a three letter name with the same letters in the same order (many many years ago).

Question, when you contacted the 40 companies, how did you contact them? (Email, phone, postal)?

email, which seemed to work ok since I had a pretty decent response rate.

Have you contacted this company:

"?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?

can't really look it up quickly since it doesn't seem like there was systems in the email address...but probably did email them since I went through the NACHA list of ebpp providers, which should be fairly complete.

Anyways, the final price ended up at $10K, which is pretty close to what I wanted

The company that I am referring to isn't on the Nacha list, I just checked. I found them while doing a trademark search on your domain.

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.

well most of my domains aren't really important enough to be stolen via a trademark.

Anyways, the final price on ebpp ended up at $10K, which is pretty much what I was hoping for

On financial product side I have clients that may be interested - drop me an email via my profile

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