Behind the Sale: TrueAmateurs.com – from $59 purchase to $2,300 sale

Welcome to the fifth 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 David Gruttadaurio a part-time domain name investor from Indiana, the United States who also runs a service company with 16 employees.

David, tell me a little bit about yourself.

I have been buying domains a long time – unfortunately I was doing it very badly. I would buy a domain I thought would be good for development – I never considered trying to sell them. I was totally ignorant about the domain name aftermarket. Looking back, not one of them would have sold anyway. And of course, I never got around to developing any of the domains.

In late 2012, I ran across DomainShane.com. I’m not even sure why that happened. But reading it opened my eyes for the first time about the domain industry. From there I found other blogs and websites devoted to domaining. I analyzed the domains for sale and more importantly, how much they were selling for. My first sale after a couple of months was a direct sale of $2,800 for Zangfu.com that I purchased at NameJet for $79. The purchase was pure luck. I knew it was Chinese (which was a good thing), but I was totally clueless that it was also a key feature of traditional Chinese medicine. The sale to the acupuncture clinic was fast and easy and I was hooked – and we never looked back.

Today our company – HyperResponsiveMedia.com – has a portfolio of over 1500 domains, with almost 1100 parked at Efty.

What is the domain name that you’ve sold?

I sold TrueAmateurs.com in January of 2017 on the Efty platform. At the time we were using the Kiffer landing page theme. I only sell via BIN pricing. The selling price was $2980 but through the contact form, we began an email negotiation.

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

I purchased the domain in October of 2016 at DropCatch.com for $59. I thought it was a quality domain and was surprised no one else was bidding on it. We listed it immediately for sale and it sold three months later.

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

We rarely have to negotiate on sales (8% of our sales are negotiated pricing), but in this instance we did. The first offer was $200. I ignored it. Four days later he offered $400. I simply emailed him the link to the Efty parked page for the domain and told him he could buy it there. Later that day he emailed me and said $2,980 was too expensive for a domain registered in 2016 and he offered $1,000. I replied that we cannot sell TrueAmateurs.com at that level. He came back almost immediately with an offer of $2,300, which we accepted.

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

Some people in the industry think that simply offering a domain for sale is good enough… that a good domain will sell itself. And I agree with that to a point. However, the majority of us do not own true premium domain names. We have good domains and can sell them to the right buyers. But we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a good landing page and an ‘on point’ logo. Visuals are a powerful selling mechanism (“a picture is worth a thousand words”) and can’t be ignored. Efty has many options to present our domains in the best possible light – even having the ability to use custom landing page images and make our own logos.

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.