Turning a No Into a Yes and a $5,000 Profit

I took a no and turned it into a yes which put five thousand dollars in my pocket with under two hours of work.  Here’s how I did it.

I came across an expired domain name at auction and I purchased it for a little under $300.  I had a clear idea of a company that could use the domain and after a bit of searching I was able to get the name of the person in charge of business development of the company.  After a little bit more searching I was able to find out the formatting of that company’s emails and by combining my first bit of information with my second bit of information I now had the email address of the VP of Business Development.  That’s a great starting point because honestly getting in touch with the right person is more than half the battle.

Now that I was armed with the email address and a domain name that I was sure would benefit the company I made a brilliant convincing email and sent it off and sat back and waited for him to offer to take the domain name off my hands and put some fast cash in my pocket.  I didn’t hear back after three days so I sent a follow up email.  TIP: If you don’t send a follow up email you are being lazy and you are missing out on potential business so take the extra 30 seconds and send a follow up email when necessary.

The follow up email did get a reply and the reply told me that the company was actually not focusing on that segment of their business any longer so I was about a year too late.

Rejected!

Besides being rejected I took his reply to mean that if I did contact him a year ago there would have been interest.  Game on.  I spent fifteen minutes reading up on the company and the latest direction they were going and I headed off to some domain marketplaces to see what was on sale.  I spent an hour and wound up with five domains that would be ideal for the direction the company was headed (three domains had fixed prices on them and two were open to offers).

I reached back out to the guy and told him I understood.  I also asked him that if they were focused on this other direction now would he be interested in any of these five domains that I thought could benefit him.  After a few emails back and forth I found out he was interested in two of the domains but what he had for a budget eliminated one as I knew his budget was much less then the current owner would want for the domain.  The second domain though was a winner.  It was listed for a fixed price of $1,500 and he was willing to pay $6,500 so in the end I walked away with a $5k profit for all in 2 hours of time.

A few things here to takeaway:

1.  This scenario above does not happen often.  This is an exception.  But putting in a little extra effort sometimes translates into unanticipated cash in your pocket.

2.  Some people may think me offering domains to him that I was not the owner of was wrong.  I disagree.  If you are ever able to find out demand before you purchase the supply you will be better off almost every time.  And because I was gauging his interest and finding out his budget I was never committed to selling him anything at any time until I actually purchased the domain first.

3.  I did run a risk here because if he visited any of the domains I offered he would have seen a for sale lander on them and he could have snagged the one he wanted for $1,500 instead of paying me $6,500.  I’ll accept that risk as opposed to the alternative having to buy them first whenever possible, its called good cash flow management.

4.  The right people to talk to at a company are key.  In my personal experience you want to try to reach out to someone in business development or someone in marketing.  The whois email address usually goes to someone on the Tech team and that team has nothing to do with making business decisions about buying domain names.

And because I know someone will ask, I am not sharing any specifics here because I want to keep this company and buyer to myself for the future.  I think there’s another sale or two left there and I prefer that cash to go into my pocket instead of someone elses, sorry.  Now get out there and make some of your own cash!

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