"The broker would help them find the owners of domain names, negotiate the price, and handle the transaction in exchange for a 10-15% commission of the price of the domain."
The incentives there seem misaligned to me. The person negotiating the price for them gets paid a higher commission if the price ends up being higher?
Good system I've seen for domain buying is this: You set price you'll pay. Broker decides to take job. They negotiate a price that equal to or lower than your cap. They get fixed fee plus X% of difference between price paid and max price you'd be willing to pay.
I do this for a living. You are correct. The way I work is a fixed fee in advanced based on rough estimates of the final value of the domain. Consequently I get paid the same but I'm incentivized to purchase as cheaply as possible in order to get referral business (but not at the expense of making money).
They also talk about setting a budget. It's easy to imagine schemes where there is a fixed fee plus a percentage of the part of the budget that is saved.
> Sure, they got a little lucky because they connected with a domain owner that shared their vision for science.
The fact that the domain wasn't sold since 1996, even when there were better offers from domain flippers during the time, suggests that luck played a much larger role than the statement implies
"even when there were better offers from domain flippers during the time"
It's quite common in the domain business to claim that you have offers that you have turned down. I would take that with a grain of salt. By the way while it is possible that the seller was telling the truth I have been in this business for a long long time. Most likely it was merely posturing. And for the record nobody flips domains quickly. It can take years and years.
(Also I strongly agree with the luck assessment..)
It's actually pretty interesting to see these donations come in. No one would ever give $0.0001 to a crowdfunding campaign but we're seeing a lot of micro donations on the scale of 10-20 doges.
All domains should really cost $1000/year from the registrar at a minimum to stop this idiotic "I'll buy thousands of them and sit on them forever until someone offers me enough for one of them to make the whole enterprise worth it".
Expensive domain registration would make it cost prohibitive for average people to start a website. The better thing to limit is how many domains you can own, or at least how many domains you can park.
Would it be possible to ban the re-sale of domain registrations? This way squatting would only be done for trademark protection. I could see issues where bigger companies buy up all the related domain names to their specific industry, in the hopes of hindering future competition. Without re-sellers, that tactic would be easier, but it still might be better then the current system.
Mycorrhizae are pretty darn cool. Two kingdoms of life abandoning a history of distrust to form an intimate partnership and solve a Hard Problem. It's symbolic.
"experiment.com" sacrifices the neat science and the symbolism. The only appeal I see is utilitarian. Given their difficulties with "Microryza," I understand that this is enough to motivate the change, but it seems like the opposite of cool and quirky.
I’m with you. It’s a better name and can really be called a brand name in that it only denotes the company and otherwise has no other meaning. That uniqueness means no competition in search results, as you point out.
Unique-er, shorter, has a cultural history with the company, evokes “Rise”.
Keep in mind that brands really become signifiers of the company, and have little meaning of their own over time. Beatles, Google, Radiohead, Amazon. All either bad or meaningless on their own.
Rank high for what? The term Ryza? It's easy to rank high for a made up word, but if you're ever in debate over whether to use a domain with ambiguous spelling or a standard word...go with the standard word.
I actually like Cofactor best. It basically screams science crowdfunding and is noticeably less generic than Experiment and highly spellable unlike Microryza.
"The founders conferred. They were prepared to settle for Ryza.com, but suddenly Experiment.com was available. That’s like being engaged to a high school boyfriend only to learn that Brad Pitt is interested in dating you. Never in their wildest dreams did they consider that they could get a domain like that. What to do?"
Stick with the person you love, right. Yeah, tell Brad Pitt to take a hike. Yep, that's definitely the right thing to do. Aww, high school sweethearts. That's lovely. What a nice story.
Oh. Wait. Huh? you dumped high school sweetheart for that wally off of the Chanel ads?
Ryza has real issues with transcription. Riser? Riza? Raiza? Ricea? Rysa? Raitser? Because it's totally arbitrary, there's also trouble getting people to associate the word with what you do. And I think both of those lead to issues with retention.
In their shoes, I would have gone with something that was suggestive but not purely descriptive. For example, Kickstarter is a great name, and Indiegogo is pretty good too.
That said, naming a company a fucking nightmare, and as far as I'm concerned, anybody who has gone through it without gnawing a limb off or calling their company Drgnblv did well.
They can trademark "Experiment.com", but if they really had a shot at a pronounceable four-letter domain name, that seems like a no-brainer.
From the article:
It was just settling for a domain choice. In 40 years,
when I told my grandkids what I did, I shuddered at the
idea of telling them I worked at a company called ‘Ryza’.
Um, Denny, it's your job to make the name mean something. Why do you think your company was initially confused with Zynga?
I'm actually just about to go through the process of acquiring a somewhat recently dropped domain from BuyDomains.com for my new project. The current asking price for the domain is around $4,000 on their site.
Anyone worked with them before? I'm prepared to negotiate with them but also want to make sure I don't shoot myself in the foot and cause them to raise the price on me. I would ideally like to not spend more than $2k but the domain is really perfect for my project so if we have to bite the bullet then we will...
EDIT: To add more context here, I have purchased the getPROJECTNAME.com and PROJECTNAMEapp.com domains for normal registrar prices. PROJECTNAME.io is also available for the normal price of about $60/yr. So it's not a make or break situation, but since we're in stealth mode for at least another 5 months, I don't want to launch and then all of a sudden face a $40,000 domain acquisition situation rather than a $4,000 one.
I would start off by offering half (as a maximum, less if you can) and sticking to the offer. The thing to remember is that they may have acquired the domain for registration price so even $2000 will be a large profit, and they may not have another buyer for years.
If that goes nowhere, you can always go back later and pay the full price or whatever they have come down to.
IIRC, they also sell domains which they don't own, and have less leeway for negotiation on those.
Timing with them also can matter. Their sales people have quotas and goals for the month. You may get a better price towards the end of the month vs the beginning.
Neat story. Were there any provisions should Microryza go out of business? Not a lawyer, but seems that org would be legally compelled to flip the domain for a price much higher than 54k, which could lead to the domain being used for something not 'nobel' as the seller intended.
Given that the company relies on word of mouth marketing, the move makes a lot of sense. 'Experiment' is a fantastic name.
My only concern is that such a generic term negatively affects findability. E.g., it makes brand monitoring or web-searching very hard. You won't rise above the noise.
You could address the findability problem by adding a unique token to the name (e.g., 'Experiment42').
Actually, I am curious if such generic name is a good choice.
You need to tell people that you use Experiment the Crowdsourcing Website, not experiment with crowdsourcing or use your experiment to crowdsource funds.
And the same for googling.
(And BTW I really liked Microryza; I do know that it may be hard to spell (still easier than mycorrhizae), but Ryza sounds nice too!)
And an anecdote: when I was mailing with Cindy Woo almost a year ago, I joked about the tagline:
In my view Premium keyword.com domains are best for services with not much frequent usage (like freecreditreport.com). For servces with repeat usage brand names are better, thus facebook and amazon are better names than socialnetwork.com or buy.com.
So by that logic i think Cofactor.com is a much better choice than the more generic Experiement.com
I'm sorry for not having won the web for the google search on 'experiment', but I actually believe that this team is going to succeed where I have not.
I believe they are on the right track, and that they can grow into a variety of spaces/tools/utilities/education/information systems etc., especially if, as they have done so far, they "stay true" and focus on the bits that make for high quality investigations.
[+] [-] simonw|12 years ago|reply
The incentives there seem misaligned to me. The person negotiating the price for them gets paid a higher commission if the price ends up being higher?
[+] [-] kkwok|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrys|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattwritescode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheetjs|12 years ago|reply
The fact that the domain wasn't sold since 1996, even when there were better offers from domain flippers during the time, suggests that luck played a much larger role than the statement implies
[+] [-] larrys|12 years ago|reply
It's quite common in the domain business to claim that you have offers that you have turned down. I would take that with a grain of salt. By the way while it is possible that the seller was telling the truth I have been in this business for a long long time. Most likely it was merely posturing. And for the record nobody flips domains quickly. It can take years and years.
(Also I strongly agree with the luck assessment..)
[+] [-] Ricapar|12 years ago|reply
> ....
> After weeks of gentle negotiating, they came to an agreement: $54K in cash for the domain.
Yikes. That's 3.6x the max budget they were hoping to spend. I really do hope that in the long run it pays off.
[+] [-] uptown|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MysticFear|12 years ago|reply
https://experiment.com/dogecoin
[+] [-] gsu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgsandstrom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] primitivesuave|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avalaunch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyoung|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ESBoston|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbelote|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjoonathan|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbuscular_mycorrhiza
"experiment.com" sacrifices the neat science and the symbolism. The only appeal I see is utilitarian. Given their difficulties with "Microryza," I understand that this is enough to motivate the change, but it seems like the opposite of cool and quirky.
[+] [-] avalaunch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwsherman|12 years ago|reply
Unique-er, shorter, has a cultural history with the company, evokes “Rise”.
Keep in mind that brands really become signifiers of the company, and have little meaning of their own over time. Beatles, Google, Radiohead, Amazon. All either bad or meaningless on their own.
[+] [-] dchuk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untilHellbanned|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyjarvis|12 years ago|reply
Stick with the person you love, right. Yeah, tell Brad Pitt to take a hike. Yep, that's definitely the right thing to do. Aww, high school sweethearts. That's lovely. What a nice story.
Oh. Wait. Huh? you dumped high school sweetheart for that wally off of the Chanel ads?
Sigh, I suppose it was... "inevitable" (http://youtu.be/mGs4CjeJiJQ)
[+] [-] lauradhamilton|12 years ago|reply
I think Ryza was the better choice.
[+] [-] wpietri|12 years ago|reply
In their shoes, I would have gone with something that was suggestive but not purely descriptive. For example, Kickstarter is a great name, and Indiegogo is pretty good too.
That said, naming a company a fucking nightmare, and as far as I'm concerned, anybody who has gone through it without gnawing a limb off or calling their company Drgnblv did well.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|12 years ago|reply
From the article:
Um, Denny, it's your job to make the name mean something. Why do you think your company was initially confused with Zynga?[+] [-] dublinben|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchuk|12 years ago|reply
Anyone worked with them before? I'm prepared to negotiate with them but also want to make sure I don't shoot myself in the foot and cause them to raise the price on me. I would ideally like to not spend more than $2k but the domain is really perfect for my project so if we have to bite the bullet then we will...
EDIT: To add more context here, I have purchased the getPROJECTNAME.com and PROJECTNAMEapp.com domains for normal registrar prices. PROJECTNAME.io is also available for the normal price of about $60/yr. So it's not a make or break situation, but since we're in stealth mode for at least another 5 months, I don't want to launch and then all of a sudden face a $40,000 domain acquisition situation rather than a $4,000 one.
[+] [-] sheff|12 years ago|reply
I would start off by offering half (as a maximum, less if you can) and sticking to the offer. The thing to remember is that they may have acquired the domain for registration price so even $2000 will be a large profit, and they may not have another buyer for years.
If that goes nowhere, you can always go back later and pay the full price or whatever they have come down to.
IIRC, they also sell domains which they don't own, and have less leeway for negotiation on those.
[+] [-] ohashi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 727374|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grue3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhund|12 years ago|reply
My only concern is that such a generic term negatively affects findability. E.g., it makes brand monitoring or web-searching very hard. You won't rise above the noise.
You could address the findability problem by adding a unique token to the name (e.g., 'Experiment42').
[+] [-] stared|12 years ago|reply
You need to tell people that you use Experiment the Crowdsourcing Website, not experiment with crowdsourcing or use your experiment to crowdsource funds. And the same for googling.
(And BTW I really liked Microryza; I do know that it may be hard to spell (still easier than mycorrhizae), but Ryza sounds nice too!)
And an anecdote: when I was mailing with Cindy Woo almost a year ago, I joked about the tagline:
"
Mic[r]oryza
Mycorrhizae spelled in the sane way
"
[+] [-] gopi|12 years ago|reply
So by that logic i think Cofactor.com is a much better choice than the more generic Experiement.com
[+] [-] jenntoda|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nally|12 years ago|reply
(I'm the original owner that sold the domain.)
I'm sorry for not having won the web for the google search on 'experiment', but I actually believe that this team is going to succeed where I have not.
I believe they are on the right track, and that they can grow into a variety of spaces/tools/utilities/education/information systems etc., especially if, as they have done so far, they "stay true" and focus on the bits that make for high quality investigations.
[+] [-] theklub|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beachstartup|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steele|12 years ago|reply
And use the savings to fill out a true, full rebrand
[+] [-] vvvVVVvvv|12 years ago|reply