Behind the Sale: SuperMind.com – from $3,000 purchase to $12,500 sale

Welcome to the second post in our Behind the Sale series on the Efty blog. In this series, I talk with domain name investors who share all the details behind a recent sale. You will learn how they bought low and sold high, how the negotiations went down and much more.

Today, I am chatting with Daniel Ben-Ezra a part-time domain name investor from the Netherlands, currently living in New Delhi, India.

Daniel, tell me a little bit about yourself.

I’m a Dutchman currently living in New Delhi. My journey into the world of domain names started in the summer of 2015, largely inspired by the stories (and successes) of a good friend of mine that is active in the industry. Like most new domainers, I jumped into it without doing the required homework and thus ended up with a lot of crap. But resources such as DomainSherpa, DNgeek, Namepros and a few other sites helped me gain a better understanding of the market and eventually I think I ended up making a few good calls with regards to buying, selling (and dropping). You could probably say my niche is brandables and I buy only dot-coms. Investing in domain names for me is certainly just a part-time occupation and I currently own about 130 names which you can find at my marketplace DomainUnicorn.com

What is the domain name that you’ve sold?

I sold SuperMind.com in July 2016 after an offer through its Efty For-Sale landing page. I use the Mokum landing page design for most of my domains, simply cause I’m Dutch and Mokum is an old nickname for the city of Amsterdam.

How much did you pay for the domain and how much did it sell for? 

Especially in the first few months of starting out, I’d hand register a lot of domains. I’d play around with words on Godaddy’s search bar to check whether domains were taken or not. Of course all good ones are, and naturally, I should have known that a domain such as SuperMind.com would be as well. But when I typed in this name, it came up with a BIN of $3,000. And it struck me immediately as being a low price for such a great name. I figured the name could be used by companies active in the fields of AI, education, consultancy, etc. It’s also a yoga term. After doing my research on Estibot and Namebio, I figured it was worth the gamble and decided to buy it on January 30^th, 2016.  The domain name sold six months later, in July 2016 for $12,500

Can you share how the negotiations for this domain name went down? 

Ever since owning the domain, I would receive on average 2-3 inquiries on it every month. So I figured I was sitting on something of interest to a few people. The inquiry that led to the sale came in via an Efty landing page. The opening offer was $4,000, so I knew I was dealing with someone serious about the domain and who understood the value of premium names. My asking price originally was $25k. After a lot of back and forth with the buyer, we settled in the middle, for $12,500. In hindsight I might have been able to get more for the domain from someone else had I held on to it, but I admit I was getting a bit excited about having my first 5-figure sale and I reasoned that the ROI over 6 months was not that bad in this case (in an absolute sense I mean, if we had been talking about lower value domains then I don’t think I would have settled for a 400% return). The transaction was handled by Escrow.com, with fees carried by the buyer.

Thanks for sharing Daniel, is there anyone else you like to add? 

Doing my homework on domains and the market led to my ‘gutfeeling’ that a $3k BIN for this domain was on the low side. That involved reading blogs, sites about domaining and listening to DomainSherpa reviews and interviews. I also submitted this domain to BrandBucket, and they accepted it with a listing price of only $4,795 to end users. That worried me a bit. But in the end, the value of brandables cannot really be quantified and it’s what the end user wants to pay for it. So I decided not to list it on BrandBucket, and instead wait it out. In this case I was lucky enough to find a buyer for 5-figures within a relatively short period of time.

Do you have a noticeable domain name sale that you would like to share? Drop me an email at [email protected] as I would love to hear from you!

Disclaimer: Efty does not have access to user’s sales data. We, therefore only share information on sales that have been publicly reported. Read our full governance here.