
How we got the Hall.com domain - bretthellman
http://blog.hall.com/post/13936429456/how-we-got-the-hall-com-domain
======
larrys
"We started the conversation by offering a fair price to show we were serious.
We didn’t want to get ignored by starting with a low, insulting offer. After a
few emails negotiating a price, we struck a deal for $20k. No equity, just
cash exchanged with escrow.com."

This is my business (since '96). You did a great job and bought the name for a
very fair price.

If you would post the contents of the emails you sent I would be glad to give
some further opinions that might be helpful to others in the same situation.
As far as what someone in this business thinks when they receive emails from
buyers (I have received thousands so there is no pattern I haven't seen yet.)

~~~
astrong
you're gonna be a busy dude Larry. I'd like to chat you up too. Thanks

~~~
larrys
Just set this up, you can email me here: startupdomainadvice@gmail.com

------
benvanderbeek
Everyone besides me probably already knew, but "Wall has been trademarked by
Facebook" ? Wow.

~~~
bethling
I was surprised that they list 32665 with their trademarks (I had to search to
figure out that was the FBOOK SMS short code). Can you trademark a number? I
thought that's why Intel ended up with the "Pentium" instead of "586".

~~~
delinka
You can claim trademark on anything you like. You can threaten legal action
over the claimed mark. You can start litigation over the claimed mark. These
facts do not mean you have grounds to win.

Registering a mark gives you better protection and drastically increases your
odds of winning against an alleged infringer. Registering numbers, AFAIK,
still is not allowed.

~~~
bethling
Ahh.. okay. For some reason the claimed vs. registered didn't click here for
me. Thanks - that makes sense to me.

------
kloncks
That's an unbelievable price for a four-character domain.

~~~
vaksel
a domain is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.

i'm in the process of selling a 4 letter domain name, that stands for a major
financial product, that gets 20-30K searches a month, and that's currently
ranking #1 for that keyword in Google...and the most I was able to get from
the 40 companies I contacted is $7,500(estibot value is at $15K).

And that's for a product, that has a transaction fee based model...to a point
where a single customer could be worth 5-10K per month, and a big customer
could be worth $100K/mo

BTW the estibot value for the hall.com domain is $294,000

~~~
larrys
"and the most I was able to get from the 40 companies I contacted is $7,500"

Can't sell names outbound. Someone has to come to you. So this doesn't
surprise me at all.

"estibot value for the hall.com domain is $294,000"

Estibot means almost literally nothing. As you said "a domain is worth as much
as someone is willing to pay for it"

There is no correlation whatsoever between any domain I have sold and what
estibot or any "appraisal" service says about the value of the domain.
Although I have used that value if it gives me an advantage with someone who
doesn't know about the business.

~~~
ohashi
Can't sell names outbound? Not sure if I believe that one bit. It's just a lot
more work, like selling anything really. Sure it's infinitely easier when they
want to buy something from you, but you can definitely convince people they
need to buy something, be it domains or otherwise.

------
rsiqueira
I'm trying to see an old version of this website (hall.com) using archive.org,
but I got an error message because <http://hall.com/robots.txt> is blocking
it: User-agent: * Disallow: /

~~~
bretthellman
rsiqueira you're not missing much. Check out the live version :)

~~~
gojomo
Are you specifically concerned about the site's past history being available,
and/or do you want to block the current version from being archived for the
future?

To give a chance to the crawls which feed the Wayback Machine (and drop your
de facto veto of showing any prior crawls), you could whitelist 'ia_archiver'
and 'archive.org_bot'.

To give a chance to up-and-coming search engines where competition is sorely
needed, you could also whitelist 'ScoutJet' (for Blekko.com) and 'DuckDuckBot'
(for DuckDuckGo.com).

~~~
user24
yeah that's a pretty restrictive robots.txt

------
jhuckestein
Here's a startup idea for them: Sell hall.com and walk away with a million
dollars.

From my experience this seems like an incredible steal. Congrats :)

------
vaksel
by the way the "if the domain owner held the domain since _____" is wrong.

When you buy a domain on the secondary market, the original creation date gets
transferred. So you can have a 1998 registered domain, that was just purchased
a week ago

------
rudiger
Great story, and I appreciate the lessons learned at the end. However... can
you put the dates in? When you started working on your original product idea,
when you bought the domain name, etc.

------
larsberg
I'm pretty shocked you got it for so little. I've been offered more than five
times that for my "first name only" domain, and it's just been from other
people with the same first name.

Though they're right about the lowballs and not even replying. I routinely get
mail either demanding that I give it to somebody because, "I is can start no
profit save cancer" or around $150 because somebody thinks a domain name is a
neat birthday present for their kid.

~~~
notatoad
that's not a TLD.

~~~
larsberg
Indeed, and thanks for the correction!

------
GiraffeNecktie
Over the years, I've had plenty of offers for my three letter cool sounding
word .com domain, unfortunately most have been in that "insult" category. I
wouldn't call $20k an insult but at ten percent of my asking price I'm not
sure I'd bother responding.

~~~
citricsquid
So you have a dictionary word that is 3 letters long .com domain and nobody
has offered $200k? or is it a colloquialism like "wut"?

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
No, it's a common English word that I believe would be excellent for many
different concepts. I had one serious offer at 40k which I turned down. They
were wanting to use it for some kind of music sharing site for musicians.

~~~
JoeCortopassi
You have a domain you are trying to sell, people are asking about it on an
entrepreneurial news board, and you won't say what it is? Free press man.
Unless you got a _real_ good reason to keep it a secret (how can you if you
want to sell it), you should be name dropping that domain as much as possible
when you have a captive audience

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
hum.com

------
rjj
"The idea of using the term “group” or “room” didn’t excite us; group was
overused and room felt stale, reminiscent of AOL."

I agree with this, but then I went to hall.com and the very first thing it
says in the software window is "Team Room - Hall.com"!

Huh?

~~~
bretthellman
Thanks for pointing that out. It was more about not being another
GroupMeLyO.IO clone

------
citricsquid
tl:dr; we offered money for the purchase.

------
pg_bot
While I see the benefits of having a short one word domain, I think it is more
important to allocate your resources on talent or marketing. While a name
won't make or break a company, having a poor product and running out of money
will. If you are willing to search for a while you can still find good domains
out there. (This is from the perspective of someone who is bootstrapping with
less than half the capital of what you guys spent on your domain)

------
opendomain
I do not know why companies insist on buying domains. We have given domains to
open source groups for years for Free including Drupal.com, OsCon.com, and
many others. and yet we have companies insist they want to own the domain. We
are "open source for domains" - don't they understand it is free to use?

------
astrong
From someone who also works with and helps entrepreneurs to acquire domains, I
think you got a great score here Brett and your persistence has to be noted.
I'm sure it didn't take 1 email

Only one question I'm curious what your "non-low-ball" initial offer was if
you got it for such a reasonable price.

~~~
bretthellman
Before we even had the idea for "HALL" we tried medium.com, foundation.com
etc... to explore the possibility. We were never really excited about these
names. We started the conversation off by offering $5k. That didn't work out
well. The owner essentially blocked us after emailing back w no thanks.

We even considered the idea of leasing a domain which is doable.

~~~
ohashi
Clearly you didn't research the owners well. They are owned by some of the
savviest guys in the domain business. They are also sitting on some of the
best portfolios of names and have very little incentive to sell for anything
but a really high price.

------
Blocks8
Why hasn't anyone made a LaunchRock.com landing page for collecting bids on
parked domains. I have my fair share of names- a lot just bought on a whim -
that I'd happily offload- just waiting for some to expire. Am I missing
something out there that exists to do this?

~~~
there
there are a bunch of domain parking services like sedo.com that will host a
parked domain, give you advertising revenue from the ads shown on it, and
handle buy offers that come in from it.

<http://hntrades.com> has quite a few domains from other hacker newsers for
sale or trade. i could probably extend it to also serve as a domain park page
if anyone wanted it.

------
opendomain
We also acquired a single word domain bitch.net - we thought it would be a
good brand for edgy fashion or perhaps a counter culture feminist site, but
the only people interested have been in the adult industry. What would you
think the value could be?

------
AznHisoka
"Hall" has been trademarked. What make you so confident the owners of those
trademarks couldn't take action against you, and leave it up to half-chance
that it could be taken away from you (even though you may not have infringed
against it)?

~~~
bretthellman
Because we filed the trademark

~~~
larrys
Edit: You didn't say you had the trademark not implying that you did.

You have a 1b intent to use application not a registered trademark

[http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/jumpto?f=doc&state=4010:55oou...](http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/jumpto?f=doc&state=4010:55oouc.2.103)

That being said obviously the trademark app is needed. But the fact that you
are using the domain name and that there are actually multiple trademarks for
"hall" and that it's a common term is the thing that offers the real
protection here from predators.

Your attorney should have not filed this as a 1b though. It will take longer
to get the trademark issued.

They should have advised you to simply use even a site mockup or beta site to
create a screen grab for the application. (I have 21 registered trademarks).

------
bretthellman
This is a follow-up to: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3094562>

------
jonah
Well done and a great price. (I sold a letter + word .com for more than that.)

~~~
bretthellman
Thanks jonah, stop by the startup hall and say hello some time:
<http://hall.com/startups>

------
namityadav
Wow, a one word, four character domain for 20K! Kudos!

~~~
bretthellman
Thanks namityadav! A big win but a heck of a lot left to do

------
timc
Great job on the domain! and the hall.com service.

~~~
bretthellman
Thanks Tim!

------
gopi
$20k for hall.com is really really cheap!

------
badclient
Generic domains are overrated.

~~~
bretthellman
Depends on the product.

