08: What I Learned Spending $1.5 Million on a Domain

Noah Kagan Presents

Noah Kagan

Entrepreneurship, Business

4.7 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2017

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today I'm sharing the story of why we spent $1,500,000 on Sumo.com. I discuss how I got past my reservations and in the process out my business partner Chad as Batman.

Why did I spend 7+ years, hire 3 brokers, and send over 200 emails to buy the 82nd most expensive domain in history?

Show notes at http://okdork.com/podcast/8

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Noah Kagan presents.
0:04.4	What up everyone, it's your boy, I Swatissipa,
0:11.6	aka Rabbi Can't Lose, aka Noah Kagan.
0:15.0	I want to share a story about why we spent a million and a half dollars buying
0:19.2	sumo.com. I'm going to start off with the Oh fuck moment right before we close the deal.
0:24.0	So I was texting my business partner and I was like a million and a half. I'm having a minor
0:29.7	hesitation Chad on the domain. I just need you to push me over the edge. So Chad said,
0:35.1	we're going to build an empire around it. It will be big, sumo big. Chad might also be Batman by the way.
0:44.1	But you know this is crazy for me, right?
0:46.4	I used to be so against buying expensive domain names.
0:49.8	When I was at the Facebook, they spent $200,000 to buy Facebook.com and then when I was at my
0:55.8	mint.com Aaron gave away 3% of the company to some rich bankers for the mint.com domain, which ended up being worth about
1:04.2	eight million bucks when into a bottom. So think about this. I was always like,
1:09.0	well just make a great product. Just make something that people really want.
1:12.2	Don't worry about the domain or
1:13.8	whatever the help. Call it whatever you want to help, poop.com. But that actually turns out not to be the case.
1:18.3	So for example, I hate Bank of America. But if you're going to go to their website and trust
1:22.3	them with your money, would you trust someone that was bank dash of dash America dash US.
1:28.0	I. Probably not.
1:30.0	Right? So what change for me? Like why did I start feeling more comfortable investing in
1:34.1	brand investing in this domain? So number one there was a lot of company clones.
1:38.2	A bunch of people were adding sumo to their name.
	...

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