
How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com - irollboozers
http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-experimentcom/
======
simonw
"The broker would help them find the owners of domain names, negotiate the
price, and handle the transaction in exchange for a 10-15% commission of the
price of the domain."

The incentives there seem misaligned to me. The person negotiating the price
for them gets paid a higher commission if the price ends up being higher?

~~~
kkwok
Good system I've seen for domain buying is this: You set price you'll pay.
Broker decides to take job. They negotiate a price that equal to or lower than
your cap. They get fixed fee plus X% of difference between price paid and max
price you'd be willing to pay.

~~~
yid
I've always wondered why this isn't the way real estate agents work.

~~~
pyoung
There are some complications to the implementation of this system. If you
choose to incentivize the Realtor to stay below a specific budget, the Realtor
might start steering you to cheaper units (re: smaller, shabbier, poor
neighborhoods) in order to get a bigger commission. If you base the commission
on the discount negotiated off the list price of a home, you may push the
Realtor into low balling offers and not closing deals (not to mention, in many
markets, homes sell for over list price).

Probably the best method would be too use a flat fee, or a percentage of list,
and then add bonus commissions for performance in negotiations, using the
average 'over/under asking price' in the local market as an index. But this is
probably too complicated for most people, and at the end of the day, the
Realtor is more concerned about the volume of deals they can close rather than
the individual deals, so performance based commissions will still probably
have minimal impact on behavior.

~~~
eru
> If you base the commission on the discount negotiated off the list price of
> a home, you may push the Realtor into low balling offers and not closing
> deals [...].

That's not too bad an incentive, because all other incentives lead to them
closing more often than you'd like.

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sheetjs
> Sure, they got a little lucky because they connected with a domain owner
> that shared their vision for science.

The fact that the domain wasn't sold since 1996, even when there were better
offers from domain flippers during the time, suggests that luck played a much
larger role than the statement implies

~~~
larrys
"even when there were better offers from domain flippers during the time"

It's quite common in the domain business to claim that you have offers that
you have turned down. I would take that with a grain of salt. By the way while
it is possible that the seller was telling the truth I have been in this
business for a long long time. Most likely it was merely posturing. And for
the record nobody flips domains quickly. It can take years and years.

(Also I strongly agree with the luck assessment..)

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Ricapar
> [...] but their budget was $12-15K [...]

> ....

> After weeks of gentle negotiating, they came to an agreement: $54K in cash
> for the domain.

Yikes. That's 3.6x the max budget they were hoping to spend. I really do hope
that in the long run it pays off.

~~~
uptown
It's a strong-enough name to be considered an asset. Worst-case ... just
resell it.

~~~
keerthiko
I doubt anyone with a semblance of a conscience in their shoes could do that,
except back to the benefactor, for cheaper (which would also be pretty
lame)...the man turned down 6 figure offers and gave it to them because he
believed in their mission. That they would go "whoops, it cost too much, gonna
sell it to whoever offers me the most while we bail from our failed startup"
would make the benefactor feel like total shit. I would never do that to a
guy. I'd probably go work a 9-5 for a year and keep the domain for my next
stab at a dream in the space.

~~~
goatforce5
The original owner could have added the right to buy the domain back from the
new owners at a fixed cost should they wish to sell it in the future (or right
of first refusal, etc) if he was worried about that.

I worked for a start-up that acquired a smaller company (complete with an
awesome name) for cash/shares. Smaller company supposedly had a clause in
their contract saying they could buy the company back for £1 should the new
owner run out of money. Fast forward 2 years: parent company failed and
smaller company carried on...

~~~
lauradhamilton
Wow, that seems like a dangerous perverse incentive to me, if the founders
kept working for the parent company after the acquisition.

~~~
goatforce5
Yes, the smaller guys never really integrated themselves with the rest of the
team and were pretty smug about the whole situation all when the parent
company started to go down.

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MysticFear
They have started accepting Dogecoins:

[https://experiment.com/dogecoin](https://experiment.com/dogecoin)

~~~
gsu
It's actually pretty interesting to see these donations come in. No one would
ever give $0.0001 to a crowdfunding campaign but we're seeing a lot of micro
donations on the scale of 10-20 doges.

~~~
hayksaakian
The reason is that small donations either don't exist in USD (sub penny) or
get eaten up in fees with the payment processor.

Last i checked, doge transfers are 1-2 dogecoin for most transactions.

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sneak
All domains should really cost $1000/year from the registrar at a minimum to
stop this idiotic "I'll buy thousands of them and sit on them forever until
someone offers me enough for one of them to make the whole enterprise worth
it".

~~~
primitivesuave
Expensive domain registration would make it cost prohibitive for average
people to start a website. The better thing to limit is _how many_ domains you
can own, or at least how many domains you can park.

~~~
jameswburke
Treat domains like a trademark registration. You have x amount of time to show
that you're actually using it for something. And that something has some kind
of value.

There's issues with what's considered value, but our existing system is
nonsense.

~~~
tacticus
So what happens when you have internal domains?

~~~
freehunter
If it's 100% internal, you don't need to register them. If it's internet-
facing but designed for use by registered users only, it'll still have some
sort of authentication page, which should be enough proof that you're using it
for something.

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gbelote
I like the Experiment.com brand name so much better, as cool and quirky as
Microryza was. Congrats on a good find and sane price!

~~~
jjoonathan
Mycorrhizae are pretty darn cool. Two kingdoms of life abandoning a history of
distrust to form an intimate partnership and solve a Hard Problem. It's
symbolic.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbuscular_mycorrhiza](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbuscular_mycorrhiza)

"experiment.com" sacrifices the neat science _and_ the symbolism. The only
appeal I see is utilitarian. Given their difficulties with "Microryza," I
understand that this is enough to motivate the change, but it seems like the
opposite of cool and quirky.

~~~
mjn
Huh, I hadn't made the connection to mycorrhizae. I just read microryza as
straightforward micro-ryza, "small root", with a meaning of building up
science from small contributions. A pun on myco (fungus) vs. micro (small)
totally went over my head, if that was the intent...

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avalaunch
Am I the only one that likes the name Ryza more than Experiment? Experiment
just sounds so bland to me and will be harder to rank high with.

~~~
dchuk
Rank high for what? The term Ryza? It's easy to rank high for a made up word,
but if you're ever in debate over whether to use a domain with ambiguous
spelling or a standard word...go with the standard word.

~~~
avalaunch
Yes - rank high for Ryza vs Experiment. It's pretty bad if you aren't the
first result when someone googles your company's name especially for a company
relying on word of mouth.

~~~
dchuk
Looking at the SERP for "experiment", I actually don't see them having much
trouble ranking for it after a bit of time has gone by. Most of the results
are informative and they're spread across different sectors (There isn't a
heavy commercial influence in the SERPs).

Just look at Box.com...they rank for "box" now, for the same reasons
experiment.com will eventually come to rank for "experiment" so long as they
nail the basics for SEO.

~~~
nally
I agree. (original domain owner).

If ranking for that term is important to the experiment.com business model,
I'm sure they'll be able to do it.

------
untilHellbanned
I actually like Cofactor best. It basically screams science crowdfunding and
is noticeably less generic than Experiment and highly spellable unlike
Microryza.

------
jeremyjarvis
"The founders conferred. They were prepared to settle for Ryza.com, but
suddenly Experiment.com was available. That’s like being engaged to a high
school boyfriend only to learn that Brad Pitt is interested in dating you.
Never in their wildest dreams did they consider that they could get a domain
like that. What to do?"

Stick with the person you love, right. Yeah, tell Brad Pitt to take a hike.
Yep, that's definitely the right thing to do. Aww, high school sweethearts.
That's lovely. What a nice story.

Oh. Wait. Huh? you dumped high school sweetheart for that wally off of the
Chanel ads?

 _Sigh_ , I suppose it was... "inevitable"
([http://youtu.be/mGs4CjeJiJQ](http://youtu.be/mGs4CjeJiJQ))

------
lauradhamilton
I probably wouldn't have chosen the name "Experiment." They won't be able to
trademark that, because it's descriptive.

I think Ryza was the better choice.

~~~
wpietri
Ryza has real issues with transcription. Riser? Riza? Raiza? Ricea? Rysa?
Raitser? Because it's totally arbitrary, there's also trouble getting people
to associate the word with what you do. And I think both of those lead to
issues with retention.

In their shoes, I would have gone with something that was suggestive but not
purely descriptive. For example, Kickstarter is a great name, and Indiegogo is
pretty good too.

That said, naming a company a fucking nightmare, and as far as I'm concerned,
anybody who has gone through it without gnawing a limb off or calling their
company Drgnblv did well.

------
dchuk
I'm actually just about to go through the process of acquiring a somewhat
recently dropped domain from BuyDomains.com for my new project. The current
asking price for the domain is around $4,000 on their site.

Anyone worked with them before? I'm prepared to negotiate with them but also
want to make sure I don't shoot myself in the foot and cause them to raise the
price on me. I would ideally like to not spend more than $2k but the domain is
really perfect for my project so if we have to bite the bullet then we will...

EDIT: To add more context here, I have purchased the getPROJECTNAME.com and
PROJECTNAMEapp.com domains for normal registrar prices. PROJECTNAME.io is also
available for the normal price of about $60/yr. So it's not a make or break
situation, but since we're in stealth mode for at least another 5 months, I
don't want to launch and then all of a sudden face a $40,000 domain
acquisition situation rather than a $4,000 one.

~~~
sheff
I have bought domains from them in the past.

I would start off by offering half (as a maximum, less if you can) and
sticking to the offer. The thing to remember is that they may have acquired
the domain for registration price so even $2000 will be a large profit, and
they may not have another buyer for years.

If that goes nowhere, you can always go back later and pay the full price or
whatever they have come down to.

IIRC, they also sell domains which they don't own, and have less leeway for
negotiation on those.

~~~
dchuk
Awesome, thanks for the reply. Do you know of any way to find out if they're
brokering the domain for someone or selling it themselves?

~~~
sheff
If you make a low enough offer that they can't accept, they will tell you and
they have told me in the past that its because its below the sellers reserve.
Whois may also give you a clue as to who owns the domain.

They have fairly decent margins for discounts - I used to get marketing emails
offering 20%+ off prices in the past.

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727374
Neat story. Were there any provisions should Microryza go out of business? Not
a lawyer, but seems that org would be legally compelled to flip the domain for
a price much higher than 54k, which could lead to the domain being used for
something not 'nobel' as the seller intended.

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Grue3
Experiment.com is not even on the first page of Google results when I search
for "experiment". This can't be good for their traffic.

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jhund
Given that the company relies on word of mouth marketing, the move makes a lot
of sense. 'Experiment' is a fantastic name.

My only concern is that such a generic term negatively affects findability.
E.g., it makes brand monitoring or web-searching very hard. You won't rise
above the noise.

You could address the findability problem by adding a unique token to the name
(e.g., 'Experiment42').

~~~
stared
Actually, I am curious if such generic name is a good choice.

You need to tell people that you use Experiment the Crowdsourcing Website, not
experiment with crowdsourcing or use your experiment to crowdsource funds. And
the same for googling.

(And BTW I really liked Microryza; I do know that it may be hard to spell
(still easier than mycorrhizae), but Ryza sounds nice too!)

And an anecdote: when I was mailing with Cindy Woo almost a year ago, I joked
about the tagline:

"

Mic[r]oryza

Mycorrhizae spelled in the sane way

"

~~~
cindywu123
don't worry the name microryza will live on
[http://www.yelp.com/biz/microryza-coffee-roasters-san-
franci...](http://www.yelp.com/biz/microryza-coffee-roasters-san-francisco)

~~~
stared
:)

I am definitely visiting this place, when the next time in SF!

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gopi
In my view Premium keyword.com domains are best for services with not much
frequent usage (like freecreditreport.com). For servces with repeat usage
brand names are better, thus facebook and amazon are better names than
socialnetwork.com or buy.com.

So by that logic i think Cofactor.com is a much better choice than the more
generic Experiement.com

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jenntoda
All in the name of science. :)

~~~
nally
I agree.

(I'm the original owner that sold the domain.)

I'm sorry for not having won the web for the google search on 'experiment',
but I actually believe that this team is going to succeed where I have not.

I believe they are on the right track, and that they can grow into a variety
of spaces/tools/utilities/education/information systems etc., especially if,
as they have done so far, they "stay true" and focus on the bits that make for
high quality investigations.

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theklub
So this is just another Kickstarter clone which happens to have a great domain
name?

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beachstartup
article doesn't seem to mention it, but i wonder if the previous owner took
some equity or options in the venture.

~~~
rohin
Author of the article here. No, it was a straight-up cash purchase with no
equity involved.

~~~
nally
Yeah. (original domain owner here).

I really struggled on this point, but was coached by someone I trust that
legal gymnastics were not in anyone's best interest.

What I really want is for experiment.com to become wildly successful, so that
I can take part in some science projects.

------
steele
muryza.com

And use the savings to fill out a true, full rebrand

~~~
vvvVVVvvv
Muryza, fuck yeah ?

