Speaker 1: 0:11

Welcome to the Uncomfortable Podcast with Jeffrey Gabriel. In our last episode, I shared my journey culminating in the toughest decision I've ever made in my career, which was leaving my position as Vice President of Sales at Uniregistry and, despite the security of a well-paying job, the responsibility of leading a team of 50, and the prestige of working at a top company respected by my peers, I chose to step away to chase my dreams. So now it is part two of this episode, when I'm leaving the island and you get to hear my story of Sawcom. All right, so the music. All right, so the music All right. So I try to do this all in one episode and I'll tell you something it's interesting when you're doing something like this and maybe you should try it yourself, even if you don't make it a public thing. But as you're going through this, there's a lot of ideas and thoughts that are all happening at the same time as you're replaying this through your mind, and there was a lot of things that I wanted to say and go over, and it was also extremely tiring to do. So I took a break and I never came back, and so now I'm back to do the sawcom part and I'm going to try to make it a relatively quick episode to the point. I hope you can learn some things and be a little bit entertained as well. Um, and I said I moved home. And so right before I just want to point something out that kind of came to me before I I made this decision to leave.

Speaker 1: 1:43

Uh, uniregistry was. I actually went out to dinner with my accountant. He was on the island and we were sitting there eating pizza and talking and I brought up that I was considering potentially leaving Uniregistry, and it's a small island. He knows, frank, he did the taxes for a lot of other people in the office, especially the Americans, and I said hey, tim, I'm considering leaving Uniregistry. I want to go pursue my own ideas, my own dreams, go sell domains for myself. And he said you know what the killer is of all dreams in the business world? And I said what's that? And he said it's $100,000 a year salary. And he said you obviously make more than that, so I doubt that you're going to leave this job. And I'm like what the hell is that supposed to mean? And he said it's very hard for people. Most people do not chase their dreams once they're getting a job with your income and your size and the prestige to go chase after their own dreams, because to get another job like this one is usually not possible or they can't reach it again.

Speaker 1: 2:52

And that kind of stuck with me and I was like you know what Fuck? That it is a chance and that is something that people are always, always worried about and they always say to me what if I fail? What if it fails? And I thought that to myself over and over again what if it fails? What if it fails? And the thing is is that I fail all the time and if you listen to the first episode, a lot of it is about failure and this episode, when I'm telling you these stories, is failing over and over and over. So when someone says to me now about starting a business, what if it fails? Like what? What time are you going to fail? How many times are you going to fail? Just talking about the broad failure, you know there are millions of failures that lead to successes, that lead to. You know it's like a cartoon you step on the board, it hits you in the face and you step on another board, it hits you in the face and you step on another board, it hits you in the face. Well, eventually you're going to get to your goal, as long as you stick with it and you keep working hard at it. And I hope that, after you hear some of the trials and tribulations and the experience that I had starting sawcom, maybe, if you're thinking of doing your own thing, it will help, inspire you or at least help you be better at what you're doing. So anyways, like I said, my wife packed everything up, she went home, I stayed there, I sold the house, moved back to the United States. We lived outside of Boston in kind of like the boonies, in this town called Sutton, with our friends. It was actually the family that my wife nannied for while she was in college and she's kept in touch with them and they're very good friends of ours. They were welcoming into their home and we stayed there and we had our little one, henry, who is two, our oldest child, who's six, living there as well, just trying to get our feet on the ground and figuring our lives out.

Speaker 1: 4:52

During that time I started to look for other opportunities. I was talking about brokerage. I didn't necessarily want to go full blast into brokerage and advertise my services, yet I was also really intrigued by GTLDs and potentially looking into consulting into that side of the business. I always sat on board meetings and different meetings with Von Liley, who ran the registry, and other folks who were part of it, like Heather, pierre, who's a great friend of mine, and obviously Frank, who's invested in 20, like 21 or 24 of these things, and I actually was interested in investing in one when they came out the first time and I missed the boat. And I actually was interested in investing in one when they came out the first time and I missed the boat and I also pretty much didn't have the money to do it anyway, but anyway.

Speaker 1: 5:31

So when I came back I actually was called by the people that owned AIcom and I said to them that I would be interested in taking that on as a broker and attempting to sell it and taking that on as a broker and attempting to sell it and one of my first things with Sawcom so this was in probably October-ish I went out and went to there's a large AI conference in Boston and when I went in there I kind of felt you know, this is a similar kind of sale that I did with like sexcom, like I went to the adult video conference, calling into these companies, trying to create awareness, using those people who say no. Well, do you know anybody else who might want to purchase the domain name? Going through all of those things, and I felt that going to an AI conference of all places should be an easier sell than trying to sell sexcom to a bunch of people that run porn sites. You would think right, but I was actually totally wrong. When I went in there, most people did not understand that a domain name could even be sold. They didn't know that they had value. I spoke to people who were marketing AI products. I looked and followed to figure out what vendors were there, the funding they had, if it was a B2C product rather than just like a B2B service, knowing which ones needed different products that were pushing AI. I even talked to one of the top guys MasterCard had, you know, like a product that helped with like fraud and other things like that, and it was a total dead end and I couldn't believe it. I left there.

Speaker 1: 7:14

I had a handful of leads and possibilities, but the majority of people had no understanding of domains in general and that they were valuable and that they could be sold, and I got very similar feelings that I did when I took on sexcom. When I took on sexcom and started going out there and trying to sell it, people laughed at me. They laughed at the price and they laughed at me because it had to do with adult right. So, like even some of my friends back at home called me sex Gabriel as a joke, because when I was trying to sell sexcom, it was just like, okay, you're trying to sell ice to the Eskimos, you know, um, and it was just really, uh, you know interesting, and pounding the phone and trying to make that happen. And then I started to put together, um, a CRM to start tracking these leads that I was creating and getting. And that's what any salesperson has to do You've got to have a CRM.

Speaker 1: 8:06

Anyways, I end up talking to Amanda Waltz, who's one of the best brokers in the industry. I used to work with her at Igloo and domain advisors and I said, hey, you know, I'm home, I'm done with Uniregistry and I'm going to start my own domain brokerage, but I'm also going to do some consulting work and I'm also, you know, going to do some other things that might not have a lot to do with domains or some other different things. You know, would you like to join? And she said, yeah, you know, I I felt that us working together two would be better than one. And with her, you know she has some great connections. Um, I think she's great on the phone, very professional, um, so we talked about it for a while and we agreed again that, you know, sawcom would be a very different place than Uniregistry, and the first thing was is as a company and a business, you know, we didn't have our own portfolio of domains Amanda and I don't own a lot of domain names.

Speaker 1: 9:01

Like, that is not our goal. We were a hundred percent brokers for our clients, whether it's selling domains or buying domains on their behalf or praising them for whatever reason, you know. And so the priority is 100% maximizing returns for our sellers or trying to save as much money as possible for our buyers. And, um, you know that was something that was important to us. And then you know it was not solely based on inbound leads generated from sales landers. We did a lot of buyer brokerage. We did some outbound selling.

Speaker 1: 9:34

Obviously that I was doing with AIcom, but other names as well Also did some appraising and, again, I've already said, you know, consulting, which I was doing for INC at the time. And what I started doing for INC at the time was helping them organize their sales team, get their CRM together in a working order, help them with their email campaigns, you know, target them in the right places and really just, and also work on their commission schedules right. Those are all really important things in a sales organization to have working at its peak. And it's one of those things that, as a sales organization, if you are serious about being a sales organization, you've got to have a very organized and efficient CRM. You've got to have, you know, very clear rules of engagement. You have to very clear sales processes. You've got to have a commission schedule that aligns with the goals of the company so your salespeople are achieving goals that help the management achieve their goals. And you have to have management's goals aligned with upper management goals or ownership goals or where the direction of the company is going top to bottom, and that is a very important thing. And the CRM has to be organized and the salespeople have to know that. They have to keep everything in there so everything is organized, easy to find, there's a plan of action, there's past sales, there's new opportunities. I mean it's obvious that that all needs to happen. All needs to happen.

Speaker 1: 11:15

We had an official launch date in really like 2019. And I remember talking to Doran, who's one of the owners of Efti, and I said, hey, I need a solution for sales landers, can you help me? And at the time I think his product was limited to like 2,000 or 3,000 names per account and he created an enterprise account for me because I had a handful of clients that had like 50,000 or 60,000 names in total that we then pointed at FD and we hooked that up and hooked that into our CRM. Getting that started, getting the inbound lead from sales going. You know, we were doing some advertising, doing videos, doing all kinds of different things to try to create some buzz in the business. And then Amanda and I did a video with Ron Jackson announcing our launch in December of 2019. Now let me back this up.

Speaker 1: 12:01

I worked with Brooke Hernandez at Igloo Domain Advisors. She left there, came to Uniregistry after I was there for a bit and then, the day that I told the company that I resigned and gave my notice, I walked out of the conference room with tears in my eyes and went over to my desk and my phone was ringing, I answered it was her. And my phone was ringing and I answered it was her. And she's like I don't know if what you're planning on, but wherever you go, I wanna go. And so I was like I don't even know what the fuck I'm gonna do right now, I just you know, but I'll let you know when it happens. And once she found out what was happening, she called and she said I want in, right, and so I talked to her and she was going to begin. And then I spoke to Rob Wilson, who was somebody that managed sales teams but also is a good salesperson, also kind of had a technical background, and I need someone that could help me with the CRM and some other technical things, and he was a great help for us as well.

Speaker 1: 13:00

But you also have to realize that setting up a CRM if you don't like what was great about domain name sales was is that like it was built from the ground up and then behind the scenes, it's actually really a. It's actually a really hard type of CRM that you need to build when it comes to domain names, and the reason why is right. So you have a product and that product is a domain and every domain is different. Right, it's unique and that domain name has people that want to buy it, or you have people that might want to buy it, okay, but like most CRMs, let's pretend Salesforce, for example Salesforce is made for a company that is usually consistently selling the same product or a similar product or a service to companies. So what happens is is that if I have this widget and I'm trying to sell it to IBM, then IBM would be the account, the people underneath that would be the contacts, right, and then the opportunity would be the domain name, because that's the product you're pitching, right? The problem is is that you have the domain name, okay, which is your opportunity in almost every CRM, because that's what you're pitching to this company. So then you have the name of the company, which is your account.

Speaker 1: 14:29

Then you have the potential buyers of the domain name. So there could be buyers that inquire directly for that domain, or you could have ones, like I just said before, that you found online, but the same buyer could also be a seller, right? That same buyer could also inquire on other domains you have for sale. They also could inquire and want you to do different services, like provide them an appraisal. Or they want you to help them find domain names. Or they want you to sell domains but buy domains like this. Or they want you to help them find domain names. Or they want you to sell domains but buy domains like this. Or they want you to help auction names, right.

Speaker 1: 15:08

And so you're trying to track all of that, trying to track different lead sources. What happens if they come in from this lead source but then they come in again from a different lead source? How do you track that? Right? And then just keeping track of all that? And what happens when a buyer comes and then goes to a landing page and that buyer comes back again a month later, what do you do with that? What if he goes to five different domain names? How is that handled? Who gets that lead? How does that work? Right? So you need to work all. It's not super complicated, but a lot of these CRMs are just aren't built for domains, it's just built for more of a basic situation where you're not doing so many different things.

Speaker 1: 15:49

So, anyways, we set up the CRM. That took me a little while, from October on, and it's gotten more and more robust as time has gone on, bolting in the FT Landers with that bolting in our website that we built from there and as a business when we first got it started. I have a colleague, bill, who works at a very large financial institution as a developer. He managed a development team large development team there. So what he did was I kind of brought him in as a CTO, but he was part-timer, he didn't want to give up his full-time job and he helped build the website. He did a lot of behind the scenes technical work with like assigning of leads and other things with the CRM and other technical connecting the website into the CRM and, you know, doing all of that kind of work. So we launched the business 2019.

Speaker 1: 16:37

Rob and Brooke start working for us. So now it's myself Amanda, rob, brooke. I got my friend Bill doing some work with us. I have an editor guy His name's Mike. He's helping us. I'm doing a little bit of development, hiring some people in the Philippines helping with some lead generation helping. I hired a couple of full-time developers in the Philippines because obviously I'm on a short budget to do some of this work and my friend Bill is overseeing their work. We went through a lot of different Filipino developers. The quality just wasn't there. But things started to get rocking and rolling. We started building a pipeline, started making some sales. We have the inbound opportunities coming, we're doing some buyer broker acquisitions. Those are going well. We had a couple of names pop, who are doing outbound on and things were on the up and up and the processes were coming into play. Stuff was working.

Speaker 1: 17:30

And then March rolls around in 2020. And it was about the 15th of March when I saw I came back, by the way, came back from NamesCon, which was in February of 2020. And everyone was talking about COVID. But it's mid March and it was like the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament was supposed to start. And I remember watching on TV and remember remember I'm in my parents basement of their house. That's where I started Sawcom, in my parents' basement, and it was furnished and it's nice. But again, I was working there. We were at the time we just bought a house. We bought a house in November and I was going to my parents' house to work there, just to kind of get away and just have a separation of home and business. And when that middle March hit and I was watching the NCAA get canceled and then all of a sudden, you know, flights were getting canceled and hearing people dying from being at Disney World and COVID really started to get going.

Speaker 1: 18:41

I remember watching the news and, like all these people in Italy were dying and they're showing like pop-up morgues popping up and all this stuff was happening. We saw our pipeline evaporate. My consulting gig was ended, you know, the guys from Diancy were worried they had every right to be, you know so they ended my contract. We had buyers that made offers and we came back with a counter offer and they would say thank God you didn't accept that, we don't want to pay for it. Our sellers were freaking out but our pipeline just evaporated.

Speaker 1: 19:24

And so going into April, we were all scared as a team. I was scared for my family. What was going to happen? There was a lot of just uncertainty in general. If you recall I mean I'm sure you do I remember at that time as well that the Black Lives Matter movement was quite heated. There were a lot of protesters. Even when I went to the grocery store like it seemed dangerous, you know the shelves were empty and you know I have two. You know I'm running this business and our pipeline is dying.

Speaker 1: 19:57

And then throughout April, like nobody can get a sale. It's just like we're fucked, like zero, you know, and I'm losing confidence in the business. I'm losing confidence in myself. I'm asking, thinking to myself, like we're fucked, like zero, you know, and I'm losing confidence in the business. I'm losing confidence in myself. I'm asking, thinking to myself like maybe I made the wrong choice, maybe I made a bad decision, but luckily um, well, I'm not luckily yet, but I ended up having. The world can't stop forever. The world will start buying again, the economy will come back and what we need to do as a team and as a company, and even to keep your own sanity, we have to keep working. We have to keep working extremely hard because when they start buying, we need to be first in fucking line.

Speaker 1: 20:50

And when I said that, I wasn't really sure, I even believed it myself. But I remember going to work and making those calls and trying to set the right example and trying to push the team to keep going. And I remember one woman answered the phone when I was making a call and she's like are you really trying to make a sale right now with everything that's happening in the world? And I'm like yeah. And she's like I can't believe that you're doing this right now, and I remember saying to her that you know part of doing this is helping me keep it together myself. And I got to say that my wife and I drank a lot of wine during that time, during April, may and part of June. We watched a lot of Tiger King, we watched the Last Dance and a lot of Schitt's Creek at night while drinking wine.

Speaker 1: 21:44

And I remember in about mid to late April, I remember coming home from work and I just felt like giving up. I felt really beaten down. It might have been even in May, I don't know, but I remember holding my wife in the kitchen and just crying, both of us just crying for a little while and then I got it together. And I also remember coming home for my 40th birthday, which I have this banner this banner you might've seen in the background that my kids made for me and had out when I drove up to our house that we just bought in Massachusetts, celebrating my 40th birthday, um, and that was a really tough, tough birthday. And um, and I remember shortly after that, um, telling my wife that you know, going through the winter that I didn't want to live there anymore. It was too cold, it was too dark, the regulations were insane. They closed the, they closed the lakes, they closed the beaches, they closed the hiking trails. I absolutely hated it.

Speaker 1: 22:55

But we kept working, we kept our heads down and all of a sudden it was like mid-June and those people, they started buying and the sales started happening. And it was scary for me and I felt bad because I had people that believed in me that left their jobs and it was failing and I felt awful about it. You know, and I wanted, and I still feel an obligation to the people who work with me, that I need to provide opportunities for everybody to make a good living. I don't want anybody to want or not be able to pay their bills who work for me, like I want everyone who works for me to make a good living or a great living.

Speaker 1: 23:36

But yeah, I mean it took off and during that time, I think, like you know, we started selling a bunch of names in June and July was good, august was good, you know, things were going really well and during that time a colleague of mine his name is Paul Thompson gave me a call and he said hey, you know, his specialty was selling brand protection products and one of them is the Adult Block. Adult Block is sold by MMX and it allows companies to register their trademark in pornsexadult. I think it's those three. I could forget. Maybe there's another oh and xxx and so you would sell those into big, usually corporates, or we actually did really well with selling to celebrities. There is a few that purchased them from us I can't mention their names, but they have it as well and he came on and did that and we did quite a bit of marketing for that and it went okay.

Speaker 1: 24:38

I think I learned from that doing this adult block, while things were getting going and things are going well and our business came roaring back was, you know, sometimes it's better it's good to add new product lines and new services, but sometimes it's just better if you just focus your energy into what you're great at, rather than focusing your energy into trying to do too many things because you end up finding out that you probably would have made more money faster if you just focused on what you're good at rather than trying to to add this other thing that you really would need to be able to sell at velocity or have like a customer base of, you know, thousands of companies to really make it worthwhile. But anyways, um, during that time I also um, but paul, even even though the adult block did not make as much money as we wanted, paul converted into a. He was a part-time broker and he worked for me, but he converted into a full-time broker and he's one of our best now. So you know, it worked out for us. But I think, looking back at it, it could have done better.

Speaker 1: 25:47

And during that time I added some folks in the Philippines to help Philippines to do some lead generation for us, business development, some design work. So we have five people down there, you know, and I actually was brought on as a consultant, or our team was brought as a consultant to MMX, which was great Right, so that brought in some consistent income, which was great right, so that brought in some consistent income. And that was something that I wanted to explore as a professional that side of the business I mentioned earlier. And at MMX I helped them redo their tiers. They had so many different tiers. It was confusing to me. I'm like why can't we make these easier for people to understand and registrars to understand? They did a lot of the high-low model. So your first year registration is $1,000, and then the rest of the years are $9. That's a really hard one when people are just glancing at a list. I was never a really huge fan of the high-low but they had that. We talked about, that. I helped with. That strategy did a lot of their sales. It was interesting when they were publicly traded. I was looking at their financial reports and at one of the financial reports I think it was the final one before they sold to GoDaddy that the premium domain sales made up about 20 or 25% of their revenue. So I thought it was really cool that our company had a very direct effect on the value of the company. When that company sold to GoDaddy, my contract ended, and rightly so. They had people who did that, but I also hired a person named Chris after that. Chris who, or how? He's from mainland China. He lives in England but he handles a lot of our work in the Chinese market During that time and all of these things happening.

Speaker 1: 27:36

I don't know exactly the sequential events. Maybe Chris came a little sooner or a little later with the ending of MMX. But my colleague Bill built our website in Angular. Angular is wildly fast at loading, but we found out later on down the road. It isn't so good with SEO, and we were spending a lot of money with some SEO folks helping us with that, writing articles, buying backlinks, doing all kinds of things to try to rank and it just wasn't working. And we ended up having to rebuild the whole website into WordPress, right, which was extremely frustrating. And we also made a massive mistake where what the world isn't designed for is a domain marketplace or a place that sells a lot of domain names, right?

Speaker 1: 28:26

So imagine you have a client with 25,000 domain names and you think to yourself okay, I'm going to link all 25 of those domain names. And you think to yourself okay, I'm going to link all 25 of those domain names to my company, because when someone goes to that name, it comes back to you know, it goes to a landing page or a contact us form and then people go to that, fill in their information and the lead comes into my CRM or it's emailed to me. However, you want to do it, life is good. I didn't understand SEO enough and what ended up happening was is all of those links were do follow. What does that mean? It means that Google picks them up off your website and thinks that those are all companies that have linked to you or websites that have technically linked to you. Now you might think that's good for SEO, but what Google does is they crawl your site and they're looking for patterns of similar material to understand what your business does.

Speaker 1: 29:15

Now, when you have 50 or 60,000 domain names of all different types and sizes and shapes and industries and everything, google didn't know what the fuck we were doing, especially because our website didn't have a ton of content. It didn't have a lot going on. So then we started ranking for all of these wrong things and the SEO guys were like what the hell is going on? Why are you ranking for I don't know skiing videos or stuff like that? It just didn't make sense. And then we figured it out, but by that point, all of those links were indexed and we had to fix them. So that screwed us up for SEO. Our and we had to fix them, so that screwed us up for SEO. Our website wasn't working right with SEO and Google, even though Google made Angular. You would think that Google would like Angular, but it doesn't, so that hurt us as well. So that was a mess and a real pain in the ass and we had to rebuild the site. We had to deal with those problems and those fixes would cost a lot of money to fix.

Speaker 1: 30:11

And you know hiring, you know, filipinos to do some of this work for me because I was on a short budget. You know it was tough and we had to make some changes. So I switched over to a like an outsourced um uh agency that helped with uh development and we made the changes. In my friend, bill, who had a full-time job um at a financial organization, uh, he stepped aside because he just said his business was too busy in my expectations and what I wanted to try to um achieve was just too great.

Speaker 1: 30:48

Now, meanwhile, when all these kinds of things are happening on top of you know, development issues, or you know SEO issues, and just doing all the things as a business owner, I'm still trying to make sales, I'm still trying to build a book of business myself and we have, you know, the other brokers and at the same time I was still dialing for dollars, you know, trying to sell um AIcom and obviously have a wife, two young kids, in the middle ofa pandemic, you know. So, in the middle of all of this mess going on and it wasn't a mess but like it was, you know, still challenging as a business, a new business owner going through all of these things. We as a couple, my wife and I said you know what we're tired of these regulations. We don't like the winter, we don't like the darkness, and we decided to move to Florida. So we packed up the family and we moved. I drove a rider truck down there with all our shit in it and my wife followed behind with the kids in the SUV and we drove down here and we rented a house for a period of time.

Speaker 1: 31:53

Now, on the development side of things, we've built an appraisal product, right, and the appraisal product you go to you can put in your domains. If you create an account, it saves the names that you've appraised. You can use our services to hire us as a broker, to acquire the domain on your behalf. You can hire us to sell the domains for you in your account or things that you want to do to try to lead into, you know, creating more opportunities. It's kind of like a mousetrap for us. We also built a buyer brokerage product that registrars or third parties can offer our services as a brokerage to people who are looking to, you know, acquire domain names, and that's where we, or I'm. That's the product that we created, that I ended up meeting NameSilo from, and it turned into a future partnership of ours, which I'll get to, you know, down the road.

Speaker 1: 32:45

But building those two products, releasing those two products, I realized that I have a very good sales background. I can go out there and I can sell a product, I can sell a service, I can go and give a speech, I can give a presentation on that. But when it comes to development, when it comes to working with developers and understanding code and all those things, I don't know it and I know that that was a shortcoming at the time and I have looking back at it. I tried my best but it just wasn't at the pace we were going and the quality and the things like that and having to do things over again. It wasn't going at the speed that I wanted to to achieve the dreams and the goals that I wanted to achieve for sawcom.

Speaker 1: 33:32

Right, and but not all of the things that we've done with the development team is visual. A lot of it is behind the scenes. With the CRM, with enriching data. You know we enriching data, emailing different triggers, different things happening at different times and building those things. You know and you know we've tried as a company, so many different ways to market ourselves as an organization, to market our brokerages, brokers as people, to market the names we have for sale. You know we've even hired outside companies to make appointments for us, making calls on a daily basis. We did some automated LinkedIn messaging. That failed and bombed. You know we do over 100,000 emails a month right now. You know the company calling out for us. It just didn't work. That bombed.

Speaker 1: 34:25

You know we've had a lot of you know, technical issues. We even had a time when one of our developers accidentally emailed our entire list in our CRM at the same time by accident, I mean, that was a mess that had to be cleaned up. You know, I mean, but it is what it is. It's the growing of a business. You're going to make a lot of mistakes, you're going to fail in a lot of ways. You're going to have a lot of successes and while all of this was happening, we were still selling names.

Speaker 1: 34:54

We were selling more names at a higher velocity on a monthly basis. We were getting more clients. We were getting more opportunities to acquire names. We were building a name for ourselves. Usually, like when I first started the business, it was really hard because you go and you say someone would be like so what sales have you made, what have you done and everything that I did up to that point. After I left Uniregistry, I would have to mention other company names for sales that I did there, but I had to bring up that I did them somewhere else and that I don't know. Maybe it just bothered me, but so we were finally getting sales under our belt. We were getting new customers, the momentum was growing.

Speaker 1: 35:35

Working together was great, everyone was having fun together as a company. We were having our issues internally with you know, technical stuff and things like that, and going, you know, through a few sloppy developers or people that just weren't as invested. But the company continued to grow and good things were happening. We even had a situation one time where I was paying for traffic or leads off of Google AdWords and we're spending, like you know, three or three to $5,000 a month on it. And I realized after, like talking to the salespeople, I'm like how those leads? They're like what leads? I'm like what the fuck are you talking about what leads? And I went and I tested it for myself and I realized that when people were going to our contact page and submitting their information, there was a disconnect between the website and the CRM and the website wasn't saving the data and it wasn't sending it to the CRM. So all that money just evaporated and we lost all those leads and whichever ones we got, from SEO as well, anyway.

Speaker 1: 36:37

So moral of the story is, when it comes to development, even though we had a QA, you need to check everybody's work. You know we've had our fair share of legal issues. I had someone chasing after me who thought I was the owner of some domain name because we had our sales lander on it. I'm sure if you're a broker after me who thought I was the owner of some domain name because we had our sales lander on it, I'm sure if you're a broker, you've dealt with that before, you know. But yeah, but that's all again growing pains and you know the business was going well, but I still had the admiration, or ambition, I guess, to grow the company to be one of the top domain brokerages in the business and, as I told the people that I've hired, this is the last time that I start a brokerage and really get it going. And this is the third time. This time I'm doing it for me and I'm going to give it everything I got and I have given it everything I got.

Speaker 1: 37:31

And so it got to a point with Amanda and I where we didn't really agree on the direction of the business and we decided to split up. And I said in the beginning, um, that one of the hardest decisions I ever made was to leave the Island, and the other one, I think my second hardest, or the hardest, equally as hard, was splitting up with Amanda and making that decision, cause, again, it's very hard to let people go that are as good as she is, but it was time to move on with her and it's really hard. And, talking about this, this is the first time that I've actually like really just gone over this piece by piece in my mind and really, you know. So this is. You know, this is a lot for me to go over, but you know, and also on top of this, with HR or working with people in general, I had to let a broker go that that wasn't performing up to the standards we want. But since then we've added two more, so we have five brokers and everyone is performing great. The team gets along well and so I'm really happy with the way things are going. But again, a startup can be tumultuous and you can have a lot of challenges. We also have a lot of successes challenges, we also have a lot of successes. So we have the five brokers and then, including myself, six right Plus the folks in the Philippines, and we have some developers and other people. So it's been great Through all of this the ups and the downs, the mistakes on the emails, the development issues, some issues internally you know, internally with the folks, that we've worked together.

Speaker 1: 39:14

We still were successful and in 20, I can't remember, my God, 2021 or 2022, I sold AIcom and the thing with that was is the experience to that was very similar, as I did with sexcom. Like I said, I was getting laughed at by people when I was trying to sell it. I remember going to a domain conference. People were making fun of me for it and then, when it sold, those same people wrote in the comments that it didn't sell for enough. With AI, that was a great sale. We had a lot of people interested. We had companies offering $3 million, $5 million, $6 million, $7 million a lot of money, and that one was an amazing sale. I was really proud of that one. But we also had a lot of other wins as a company during that time. We sold Candycom, we sold Virtualcom, we sold Dataai which I think was possibly the highestai ever sold Mediacom, cometcom, m1.com. We've sold a bunch of single lettervips for a lot of money. We've seen a ton of goodlaws. We sold perfectone, perfectcom, k1.com, coolcom. I think we have the highest tv domain extension sale ever.

Speaker 1: 40:36

I've been part of a handful of lawsuits as a star witness helping with domains in general. We've won quite a few different awards within our industry and also outside of it. Quite a few different awards within our industry and also outside of it. No-transcript, not selling anything right. You know since that day that I sold the domain name for Grant to my friend. As of today and looking back, I think there's sales missing in there because in the very beginning we had to make some changes and I think some data was lost and I think there's probably about $5 million off. But I'm not going to include it in this number because if it's wrong it's wrong. I'd rather give accurate. So what I have on the list as of this afternoon, we sold 1,033 domain names since our inception for $58,652,805. Again, I'm quite sure I'm missing some numbers there, so maybe we've done $63 or $64 million in sales, and I'll tell you.

Speaker 1: 41:59

It's been a lot of work. It's been a lot of sleepless nights, it hasn't always been pretty, but there's been a lot of work. It's been a lot of sleepless nights, it hasn't always been pretty, but there's been a lot of success and there's a lot of fun to it, and we have a great team. And the reality is, though, is that I realized, as a business owner and learning from my mistakes and learning about some of the decisions I made that weren't the best, that I can't be everything at a company at the same time, because I'm not great at everything, but I know what I'm good at, I know what I can do, and so I did a lot of soul searching after Amanda and I split up, and evaluating the business in general and what I want to achieve and where I want to go and how I want to get there.

Speaker 1: 42:50

And, again, like I said in the beginning, I wanted to build an industry leading domain brokerage, and I felt that technology I mean, I have awesome salespeople right All five of the salespeople have about except for Paul. All five of my salespeople have 10 years of experience selling domain names. Paul has 10 years experience in the industry, but a portion of that was selling the brand protection product, so that's pretty darn close as well. They all pretty much have almost. I think the least is 15 years of sales experience. I have 20. I can't believe I'm saying that in sales experience.

Speaker 1: 43:32

So I felt that applying our learnings as a team what I learned from Uniregistry, what I've learned from doing this at Sodcom and building another CRM that we would like to apply our learnings and really build a platform that people can use, make more money on and apply our learnings to it and also use it for ourselves to help our current clients that want to use our brokerage. And so doing that, I knew that me as the technical, like CTO, wasn't going to happen Right, and I talked to the agency that was helping me. That was doing a good job, but they didn't really um work, ever work with, like Matt, like lots of traffic and lots of domains pointing at a business and DNS and potential DDoS attacks and things like that. And I was talking at the same time when I was evaluating these things, I started talking to uh Christops, who's the CEO of name silo, and they built name lot and name lot is a sales platform for domain names. That never quite got to the height that they wanted it to get to and um, we ended up making a deal that I sold uh um uh, the assets of sawcom and we put them in a new business and they put the assets of of name lot into a business, plus, you know, some money, and we created a new, a new company, and we're making it into the sawcom marketplace and um, and it's in a beta right now and we're really excited to provide, to provide a product to the industry that will give sellers as much data as possible. But we're not gonna can't give it all at once. We're working on it so they can make the right decisions and hopefully make the most money on their sales, make it as user-friendly as possible.

Speaker 1: 45:22

I think domain name sales and university was the best tool that the industry has seen so far. I think the problem with it was is, a lot of the times, it wasn't the most user-friendly and I think if you weren't a salesperson and you weren't used to using a CRM, you might've gotten confused or missed out on some of the great technology and things that we built. So we wanted to make it a lot more user-friendly and doing some of the things that people don't want to do, and just make it a little more. I would consider Uniregistry as being more like an Android phone, and then this is more like the Apple phone, where a lot more is kind of done for you, you know. Make it again user-friendly an offer, you know. Consider amount of payment options if people want to pay with different forms of payment around the world crypto or using payment plans. You know we're going to offer all of those as well and, again, use it with some of the best technology that we have available, along with a lot of other bells and whistles that will come along the way bells and whistles that will come along the way. And having Chris Dobbs, whose background is a developer, balances out who I am as a salesperson, and that is where we are today, using their development team, that is, and I'm working with their project managers to deliver an amazing product.

Speaker 1: 46:43

We're not a registrar. We're not looking to get in the regist amazing product. We're not a registrar. We're not looking to get in the registrar business. We're not sharing customers. This is an entirely separate venture. I'm a domain broker. I'm in the domain brokerage business. That's what I wanna do.

Speaker 1: 47:00

But along this way, there are some things that I've learned that have gotten us to this point, to the beta, and I can't wait to release this. But I'm also nervous about it. I don't know if you ever built your own product and you're presenting it or showing it to people. You get nervous, get anxiety about it. You really hope people like it and you're really sensitive about what they say because you've put so much time and energy into it. You know people don't realize how hard sometimes you work on these products. But me also I have to realize that it can't. It doesn't have to be perfect. When it comes out for the first version, you know it just needs to work and then we're going to work on it and get it better. But I think the things that I've learned in this journey and thinking about it a little bit is you know you cannot do great things alone, right? You need the help of others. And when I say help of others, what does that mean?

Speaker 1: 47:58

Well, when I was at Uniregistry, it wasn't the Jeff Gabriel show, there was a lot of other people involved, despite me being the vice president of sales and managing the team and having a lot of say into what was being done. There was a lot of conversation. Obviously, frank the owner was involved, but we had some really good developers that were part of the conversation. We brought in the salespeople, asked them a lot of questions of what they needed, what they heard from customers, what did they want. Ask customers what they want, try to employ that. Try to make projections as to what kind of revenue those things are going to make. That'll get you there.

Speaker 1: 48:31

When it comes to my current business, one of the things you get to realize is the people that work for you aren't required to work for you. They can leave anytime they want. They're there voluntarily and they can tell you sayonara and go somewhere else in a minute. And you need to treat them with respect and include them in the business as much as you can, because if you want them to be dedicated to the goals that you have, you need to include them as much and keep them in the know so they are just as excited as you are and if your expectations are really high, you have to give them a reason to have high expectations themselves. But also, when I'm saying that you cannot do great things alone, you also need to recognize the people that you work with and a lot of the times, recognition is worth a lot more than money to some people and recognizing their hard work and what they're putting in is definitely important.

Speaker 1: 49:26

And I also think if you're going to be successful in life in general or successful with a product or services, you need to have a solid private or personal life, almost like a board of directors. So a strong personal relationship with someone at home interviewing a board of directors. So a strong personal relationship with someone at home interviewing a lot of people. With this podcast, it seemed to me that a lot of people had a great significant other that supported them, even though the risks were high, just like mine. But I also think that it's important that you have a good relationship with different professionals, that you can talk about some of the situations that you're in and bounce these ideas off and it's not judgment and that they're happy for you when you do well and that they're there for you when you're doing bad.

Speaker 1: 50:10

And I think if you're telling some people your problems in your business and they're not listening to you. You need to find somebody else. And if you're talking to people that are bringing problems into your life, I call it crazy. We don't let, melissa and I don't let crazy in our life, you know then get them out of your life. It's just not worth it. You know. But you should kind of create a board of directors that not necessarily even signing them to the board, but these are just people in your life that you can talk to, whether I mean I have great parents that I can talk to and confide in about things.

Speaker 1: 50:44

I have good friends that I can confide to and talk to about different things and ask them their opinions and they're honest with me. And when I'm down they're there to try to help me. When I'm doing great, they're there to celebrate my successes. And you need to take care of yourself. I try to go to the gym three or four times a week. I need to take care of yourself. I try to go to the gym three or four times a week. I'm getting old, I'm in pain half the time, but motion is lotion and I think that going to the gym for me in the morning helps me start my day. It lowers my stress or at least just doing something different or an activity.

Speaker 1: 51:17

And then you know again don't be afraid to fail. You know, I was so worried when I, when I quit, that I would fail. But looking back at it, I knew that I was going to give it everything I had and it wasn't going to let it happen. Um and so I'd be foolish if I wasn't worried about it and I'd be lying to you to tell you that I wasn't, but I shouldn't have been as worried about it. And here's a quote is I've heard before do not be afraid to fail big and to dream big. And the quote I'm going to leave you with here is from Denzel Washington. And this one has and I'm not a quote person at all, but this one, if you watch the YouTube video of Denzel Sayet, he does one at a college, he's a valedictorian, he does a speech there, or not the valedictorian, whatever, he's a guest, he does a speech there and he says it. But there's also a video when he's telling it to a person interviewing him, which I find is a really good quote. So I'm going to read it to you.

Speaker 1: 52:20

Dreams without goals are just dreams. Ultimately, they fuel disappointment and on the road to achieving your dreams. You must apply discipline but, most importantly, consistency, because without commitment you'll never start, but without consistency you will never finish. And I love that quote and if you think about it with anything in your life, it applies If you're going to go all in, you're going to get results, it's going to work. If you half-ass it, you're going to get half-ass results. Right, and the quote that I always said and I think of anybody who worked for me at Uniregistry, here's this one It'll probably give them shivers is hard work always pays off. And that's the story so far, but I'm sure we'll have a part three soon enough.