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Comment by canadiantim | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the key is to be patient. Put it a low-ball offer on a .com you want then wait. They'll reject initially, then they'll contact you again every couple months to see if you're still interested. Keep the low-ball offers going, maybe increasing by very small increments. Eventually you will catch them in a moment where the seller is desperate and then you strike a deal. I got a 6 letters .com domain for $3k down from $40k this way.

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I got one of my personal domains back for $100 after years of various different squatters asking between $2k and $10k for it. "Literally no one else will ever buy this particular domain from you, take the win" finally worked.

I'd like [my last name].com but a domain squatter has it and wanted over $10,000. I put in a low ball offer and they wouldn't budge. I told them they were crazy. I have an uncommon name that very few people would want so I may try your tactic.

You could try having a relative offer $40 and steadfastly refuse to negotiate any higher than $50. Might make your offer sound a lot better. Or it might backfire because now they think two people want it.

The price was $100 + “years”, not $100.

You say "years", I say "a minute or two annually".

If I'd urgently needed it back, I'd have had to spend more, yes.

You must mean that it got even cheaper, as today's $100 is worth a lot less than a couple of years ago.

Depends on how much those years without that domain cost you.

Curious, how’d you lose it? Expired cc?

IIRC (it was long ago): Expired card, broke college student, procrastination, and at a time where domain squatting was somewhat new.

Yea expired card is what scares me the most, I think these days theoretically that shouldn’t be a problem because cc companies will proactively send out the new info to companies charging recurring payments (which can be good and bad).

All my current registrars support backup cards, and they've gotten a lot better about warning in advance.

If they really matter, extend registration for 10 years and keep adding one annually.

Backup cards only work so long as the backup card doesn’t expire.

The bigger issue is that if your registrar sends a lot of spammy emails (ahem godaddy) you might miss the message reminding you to replace your expired cards.

A registrar I use for my local domains (I'm in Australia, and use a local registrar for .au domains) has my CC details on file including the expiry date. They send me an email out a couple of months before the expiry date reminding me to update my CC details, which is nice.

In my case it was email rules. They did the proper thing , ye I missed all emails because they were filtered in a subfolders.

> Keep the low-ball offers going, maybe increasing by very small increments.

Or maybe decreasing by very small amounts to show them the direction the negotiations are going to go if they keep it up.

In this specific case the broker had a good counterargument: If the seller googled "SuperTokens" they'd find SuperTokens.io and realize the buyer had VC funding and an investment in the brand. The broker convincingly argued it wasn't worth quibbling over a few thousand dollars if it risked the seller realizing they could ask for tens of thousands more and have a decent chance of getting it.

I tried looking for myfirstname.com and it is completely inactive and private registration for the last 20 years.

I am not even sure how would I go about placing a bid.

It is an uncommon name not in English dictionary. Possibly my namesake bought it 20 years ago and has done absolutely nothing (not even placed parking on it).

How could I even contact them?

Use a broker for $100.

Doesn't a broker just email the whois record?

The vast majority of whois records are privacy protected nowadays. So a broker usually does a bit extra.

Sorry to push, but what extra do they do?

I am curious too, how could they contact someone who has basically bought a domain to do absolutely nothing with it.

Also, I'd hate to pay a broker $100 just to be told that they can't do anything.

Now commission based I could see myself doing that.

Then again I am not willing to go 5 figures for a vanity domain - more like mid 4 figures just like the guys in the article.

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