Domain Masters Radio Show

Starting a Successful Domain Business

Monte: Those were the good old days.

Richard: So another friend and I, we were registering a bunch of domain names, we figured we’d put up a website for local car dealers and try and put their inventory on-line or some brochure sites. And really, we were really learning HTML at that point, so we were--

Monte: Now, what year was this?

Richard: This is 1996.

Monte: Oh, okay. That’s the year I got started--

Richard: Yeah.

Monte: --basically. Okay.

Richard: And so Microsoft e-mailed us out of the blue and said, “Hey, you’ve got a domain name that we really like and can we work out a deal?” And it ended up that there was a trademark on that domain name, and so we actually ended up selling it to the trademark owner in Toronto, rather than Microsoft, but--

Monte: Oh, wow.

Richard: --it made for a very interesting story. And--

Monte: Can you mention the name?

Richard: Yeah, it was Carsource.com.

Monte: Carstores?

Richard: Carsource.

Monte: Oh, okay.

Richard: Yeah. And so from that, I decided to--you know, a lot of people would ask me, oh, you know, you have that interesting story, my company’s interested in registering a domain name, how do I go about doing it. So I built a website called Yournamefree.com, which had a simple script to look for a domain name and then to fire an e-mail, basically just filled in an e-mail form and sent it into the internet. And ISPs at that time were charging $50 to $100 just to fill in the paperwork, so Yournamefree, the concept was that you could fill in the paperwork for free at Yournamefree.

Monte: Right.

Richard: And--

Monte: Sign up for the service?

Richard: --there was no charge, and we provide a free parking page. And then I introduced an e-mail forwarding and URL forwarding, which I had seen Register.com doing for about, you know, $120 or $150 a year, something like that, and we were offering it for $49.

Monte: Wow.

Richard: And things just really started to take off. I got listed in yahoo, Rightsideregister.com, and it just started to go gangbuster. So I started hiring people and looked at starting my own registrar. So in 2000, jumping ahead about a year and a half now, I started up Namesdirect, which quickly became a top three ICANN registrar.

Monte: Now, how many names did you manage in that porfolio back then?

Richard: Well, Yournamefree actually processed about 300,000 domain registration requests.

Monte: Wow, that’s awesome.

Richard: So that--

Monte: Back then, I mean, that’s pretty big.

Richard: Right. So you multiply that by, at the time, I think it was $50 a year, so that’s, you know, a substantial sum that the Internex [ph] was able to invoice out, and I believe that about 40-50% of those people actually paid. So it generated quite a bit of revenue for Internex, but didn’t really generate a lot of money for me at the time.

Monte: Yeah, you were doing all of the work.

Richard: Yeah. So rather than make someone else rich, I thought I’d start Namesdirect.

Monte: Yeah, yeah.

Richard: And that went really well, and then Godaddy came out at 8.95. [Laughter]

Monte: [Laughter] Yeah, that changed all of our markets, didn’t it?

Richard: Yeah, it really took the wind out of the sale.

Monte: Yeah, definitely.