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Noah Kagan Presents

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

Noah Kagan Presents

Noah Kagan

Entrepreneurship, Business

4.71K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2017

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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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