YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Rosener

lines on the record: 182
first: 2023-12-20
most recent: 2023-12-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In most cases, yes, So, generally speaking, we apply that option fee. Let's say that you approach me, you want to buy a domain, that domain is $100,000. We agree to one of these lease deals. Maybe you're going to put $5,000 or $10,000 down up front, and then you're going to have a $90 or $95,000 fixed price option to buy. And then you're going to have a lease component. And the lease component's a true lease. The payments don't go towards the purchase price, but it's half a point. So like if it's a $100,000 domain, you might be paying $500 or maybe $1,000 a month. So it's a half a point or a point a month, which is going to get the owner of the domain a very reasonable conservative rate of return. Call it, you know, five to 12% rate of return, which is going to account for inflation and account for, you know, the risk. And you're going to have the opportunity for less than a cost to keep your floor clean, to operate on your exact brandmatch.com.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. It's going to be the initial option. Get some skin in the game. Buy yourself an option. And then you've got a lease component. And the lease component is going to usually be like a half a point, right? So if it doesn't”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to. But within that five year period, they have a fixed price option to buy the domain exclusive to them. And then they have a monthly lease. And so generally rough back the napkin math, the way these things usually fall is like somewhere around 5% could be 10%, the bigger the value usually the numbers come down.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it were, it goes to a third party forum, arbitration forum, and they will basically organize that because they're the ones holding the domain. So they've got an interest in sorting this out as quickly and amicably as possible. And so they hold the domain. There's usually a payment up front, which basically buys you an option, which in the world of finance, like any other option, you have an option to purchase this domain at a fixed price for a fixed period of time. I generally default to five years. I think that's a great runway. Most businesses at a period of five years are either going to make it or break it. It's going to be binary. At the five-year point, they know they've got a business and they're raising either more funds or they're profitable or they've achieved some level of scale, but they either have a business or they don't. And so at that five-year point, they have, and they can execute at any time during the lease. They can execute after the first monthly payment.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Third party arbitration I mean, I am their number one client I've done hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and knock on wood. I've never one time ever had a transaction go to arbitration.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A domain transaction that's, in my opinion, the only, maybe you can use a lawyer, but other than that, it's the only safe way to conduct a domain transaction. And it used to be owned by Fidelity. And then it was sold to a private guy, and then that guy sold it to a freelancer, which is a public company from Australia, freelancer.com. They're the sole owner of the company now. Anyways, we're going to put the domain in escrow.com. That way, no matter what somebody else offers me, no matter if I change my mind, there's nothing I can do unless you as the person leasing the domain breaches the contract that we enter into. There's nothing I can do. You keep making your monthly payments. You write off into the sunset. You might not even ever have to talk to me again if you don't want to.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On these domain names that we all know are really amazing assets. They keep going up in value, but they're so underutilized sitting in our portfolios. And really the whole parking thing, which used to be big business, like we used to make real money from Google with parking. But around 2008, 2009, that started, you know, it's been a downhill slope ever since. We used to get the lion's share of the revenue and now we get peanuts. So as the values went up, sales got harder. And I came up with this idea of like, well, why don't I just lease you the domain? I'll give you a fixed price option. So you have an exclusive option to buy this domain. Nobody else can buy it. Even if somebody shows up and says, you know, I'll give you 10 million dollars to that domain that you lease to this guy for $1,000 a month. Nothing I can do about it. We use escrow.com is one of our biggest partners. It's a third party escrow service, which I would encourage anybody doing.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I think regardless of the cash position that you're in, not regardless completely, but like within a realm, it's a better strategy, the leasing rather than an upfront, just all out purchase. And so around that time, 2014, 2015, domain names really started to rise. And I was sort of telling you why I attribute what I attribute that to. But as the values started going up, it became harder and harder to sell these things. There was less people that could afford to buy them. And there was some companies offering financing, but at very high rates and not super attractive to most businesses. And so I was trying to come up with ways to increase the pool of potential buyers and increase my ability to close sales. And so I thought, well, we're all, I say we're all because I also own a lot of domain names. We're sitting.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like anybody who's successful, they learn from previous experience, and a lot of them understood that, okay, I launched on this silly name and I might have gotten lucky and been successful because the market wasn't crowded. But now the market's crowded and now there's a million people that want to compete with me and there's a lot more resources to fund those people that want to compete with me. And so I need a strategic advantage that my competitors can't that gives me a moat. And a domain name is one of those advantages. And so a lot of repeat founders, this is a trend that I see. First time founder pushes back a lot on buying their exact brandmatch.com. They see it as a risk, as you said. Most people perceive it as a risk. What I would tell you is that it's actually a de-risking”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fast enough from dot com boom happened. But a lot of those early dot-com successes were coming back for their second shot in that sort of time period.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is not actually the worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is that they no longer have a path to ownership for their exact brandmatch.com. That's actually the worst case scenario. That's a much worse scenario than we have to pay some exorbitant fee to get our domain name. And I'll explain why. So about 2015, 2014-2015, we started seeing really like a parabolic rise in the value of domain names. I don't even know really what to attribute it to, but there was a sudden sort of inflection point where more and more investors, when I say investors, I mean really primarily VCs, as well as startup founders. And I think the startup founders part, I understand, that area around 2012, 2015 was sort of a lot of the guys that had a win or let's say might have had a win, but then didn't say.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was super important that I was hyper focused on earning $250 a day. You know, you're going to have a hard time really like building a big business if your focus is on making $250 a day. But it was critical for that first year to have that small goal and be achieving it regularly. But then when I got my first bigger win, it gave me the ability to take a deep breath and then say like, okay, I think this business is going to work. And I can start thinking bigger. And, you know, I lost the discipline of like the 250 dollars a day, but I started hunting bigger fish with the inherent confidence that came with achieving this discipline of, you know, hitting these small targets.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, so the banking sector was growing rapidly. The Panama Canal was expanding. And we were basically really, let's say, for the first decade of the 2000s, that was kind of peak globalism, right? It was like, wow, everybody's doing trade with everybody. That got sort of shortstopped with, you know, the financial crisis, but things were booming. So anyway, Panama ticked all the boxes. That was really why we landed on Panama.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. That was big. That was a big reason. It was very safe. At that time, Panama was the fastest growing economy in the world from a GDP perspective. I think it was 13.5% GDP growth in 2008 or 2009, whereas China was number two with like 11%. So huge GDP growth.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so, anyways, it was like, look, we're doing this business that we can do from anywhere. And so let's go somewhere warm. And I was like, yeah, let's go somewhere warm. And so we kind of explored all these different places. You know, we had visited a lot of places in the Caribbean and we'd gone to Central America and we'd, you know, I had been to Panama actually a couple of years earlier because of a friend of mine from college was Panamanian and invited me down. And so Panama just checked a lot of boxes. It was on the US dollar. Most of my business was going to be in US dollars. So that eliminated sort of the currency friction of volatility.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We originally planned to move back to Europe and the sky was falling. And so we thought we really hated being in the US where it was really just being inundated with bad news all the time. And we kind of just thought, okay, well, it's going to just kind of be more of the same in Europe. Germany would have been the obvious next step. We kind of said like, okay, we really want to escape that environment, particularly because we're going to launch a new business. I need some positivity. Like I don't, what I don't need is like constant negative vibes around me all the time. The other thing was that this was we left in November. And so it was like a bitter New England cold winter, horrible cold. And I remember my wife got stuck to the manual car. She was driving up a hill in Providence and she got stuck in the snow.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I calculated what my annual expenses were going to be in totality and divided by the number of business days. And this is another thing. It came from Peter. It was like, look, keep your expenses low. All my competitors, they were doing sort of different things, you know, but they were all trying to be very technical about it and build scalable businesses and lots of people and lots of technology and huge overhead. And I had, you know, at that time I had basically no overhead. And so I was chugging along and doing whatever it took. Like I would give away a domain name just to make $250. It didn't matter. Even if I knew I was doing something that was going to be harmful to me, literally, I was not going to end my day until I made $250. And if I didn't make it, which was very rare, the next day I had to make not double, but triple. So it was like just punishment. It was like, okay. So I really stuck to that.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$250, then I am already falling behind the eight ball. But if I can make $250 every day minimum, then my business will survive.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, long story short, I sold pizza.net. I think it was for like $120,000 at the time, which, you know, used to be a lot of money. And I earned probably a $20,000 commission on that. Probably the owner made $100,000 net more or less. And it was a lot of money for me. I had this mantra. At that time, I had just left a job where I was making about $400, $300,000 $400 grand a year consistently. And I was 26 years old or 25 years old, whatever it was. And I was making a lot of money. Like, way more than any of my peers. And I literally jump ship, moved to Panama, started this brokerage business. And I had a limited amount of savings because I'd spent most of it on domain names. And I had a limited amount of savings. And it was basically just enough for us to last one year. I had this mantra of every single day, five days a week, every day, I need to make $250 profit. If I don't make...”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe there was an element of security. You know, they're kind of a socialist organization. And so they probably thought it was unfair for any one company to dominate a letter of the alphabet. But for a variety of reasons, they clawed them all down three. Yeah.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll tell you the story. So Adam actually registered all other 23. So numbers aren't allowed. Single numbers are just not allowed for security conflicts prevented by ICANN from being registered. So he went and registered all the other one-letter dot com dom domain names. But because he wasn't using them, ICANN then decided, oh, this is a bad idea. Nobody should be able to have these one letters. And so they pulled back all but the three, which they grandfathered in because Nissan was using Z.com for their 300Z car, which is quite popular at the time. I think it was Quest Communications was using Q and Elon, as it were, was using X at the time. It was actually originally owned by a lawyer. Elon bought it from him prior to merging with Peter Thiel for PayPal. So those three got grandfathered in and the rest got pulled back. Basically, I guess I have read quite a bit about it. I think the way ICANN was thinking about it was like.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time in the early 90s, when he bought this domain, I want to say it was registered in 92, mind you, most people didn't even know the internet existed till about 94, 95 regular home adoption didn't really happen till 96, 97. But at that time in 92, 94,.NET was actually the preferred, most people thought.NET because most of the people using the internet were network providers. These were ISPs. They were, you know, it was a read-only or write only. It was mostly He originally registered, you know, you brought up X.com. There's three oneletter.com domains in existence. Okay, that's it. Three. It's ZQ and X. But Adam are the only one.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Yes. The company was gone, okay? But the owner of the domain. Which he's also a fascinating, that's another fascinating story. But I don't recall how he found me. He was the guy that literally strung the internet cable up the entire east coast of the United States. So he literally put in the actual hardware that created the first internet network on the east coast of the United States. Adam, I can't remember his last name. Adam something.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First time anybody has ever seen anybody order a pizza online on the internet. Sander Bullock goes to pizza.net and orders a pizza online. And so pizza.net is, man, it's another rabbit hole, but pizza.net actually has prior art on a whole bunch of patents. So Google. Has the patent on here's your IP? We're going to provide you, you search for pizza, we're going to provide you the pizza restaurants that are within a certain distance around your IP address. They have a patent on that. Pizza.net was doing that prior to Google filing that patent. And so pizza.net technically.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“PJ.net was a unique case. Pizza.net was a very famous domain because it was highlighted quite prominently in the movie The Net with Sandra Bullock in 1994.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The sale where I thought, wow, okay, I'm really, I think I'm going to be able to make this into a business was pizza.net. This is a great.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm finding the people that I was trying to sell them to very rarely are they coming and finding me. It does happen, right? Lightning strikes and...”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And get published in DN Journal that were sort of a source of pride was like, oh, look, my sale got published in DN Journal this week. And people would see that you sold a domain for a good price and then double down on. So that was how the people that owned the domains were finding me.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of the people that own the domains I'm selling at that point, that's no longer the case, but at that point, most of the domains that I'm selling are owned by domain investors, right? And so I'm meeting these people on the forums. There's the end journal, which does this weekly sales report. And so today, I'm like, Most discreet person you're ever going to meet. But at that time, trying to build a business, I was, you know, every time I make a sale, I would announce that sale. That would be published on the”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Line out the door, right? So there's a handful of domain investors that understand what they've got and they have no real eagerness or intention to sell except when somebody makes them. But everybody else is literally, they buy domain and they expect it's going to sell them next day, right? And so anybody that can help them achieve that unrealistic objective, they are banging on the door. So I get so many emails every day of people that want me to sell their domains. So endless supply of inventory to sell. So I start banging on doors and basically playing fake it till I make it because nobody had really done this before.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm kind of taking a wild guess here, but just for emphasis, it's literally probably 95, 98% of our business is domain names that were registered prior to 2000. So in 2008, when I said, hung up my shingle and started the business, I am super late to the party. Now, I have started accumulating some domains, but most of them weren't really great at that point. But what I understood that it was going to be a very capital intensive business. And I had already spent a lot of capital. And if I want to continue this hobby, I needed to generate cash flow to support it. So that was one of the premises of starting media options. So then that premise worked. We started successfully selling other people's domain names using our commissions to then fund the acquisition of better domain names for people would come.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nope for that. Nope, you don't. And so there's very strong mechanisms, both preventing and, let's say, clearing the market. There's very little upside to doing this anymore. And so, like I said, there's still bad actors, but it's a very small problem compared to what it used to be.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Protocol? Basically, there's three elements, and if you could prove those three elements, the domain is going to immediately get transferred to you, okay? And it's only going to cost you about, let's say, $2,500, maybe three grand if you go for a three-person panel for this arbitration, and they're going to make a decision. The owner gets to respond if they choose to. And in most of these cases where it's a clear trademark infringement, they don't even respond. And then that's it. You're going to get to domain name.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's always going to be bad actors, but it is a very, very, very small fraction of what it used to be. We've got cyber squatting laws now. It's quite punitive. $100,000. If you get sued in federal court, it's $100,000 per name penalty for infringing on somebody's trademark, cyber squatting. There are also much cheaper, faster, and easier mechanisms for recovering domain names that infringe on your trader.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I'm going to pause for a second because this is a really important point that I want to make. I would say like if your audience got one point from me today, I really want it to be this. There is a very clear distinction between a domain investor and a domain squatter. The guy that owns Google with three O's is a squatter. He is the person, he, she, whatever, is the person that gives the domain industry a bad rap in the late 90s, in the early 2000s. That is worn off, you know, it still resonates, but it's mostly worn off at this point. But in the early days of my business, that was the biggest hurdle was like you're just that dirty domain squatter, right? It was like the fact that somebody was an investor in domain names was a negative connotation. And funny enough, some of the biggest domain investors are, you know, famous VCs that are funding the companies that are accusing domain investors of being squatters.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, prime.com. You know, people want to go to prime at Amazon. They just type in prime.com. And we helped Amazon to get prime.com for that very reason because tens of thousands of people were going to prime.com every day and not finding Amazon. And so if you own these domains though, you can park them with Google or Yahoo on their parking feeds. And they display keyword advertising. And then when people click them, you earn a couple cents sometimes more. And at scale, that can be considerable revenue. And that used to be the primary business model in the early 2000s.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Policy changes, you know, domain names are governed by ICANN, which is the multi-stakeholder non-governmental organization that basically governs domain names. And remarkably important organization, by the way, that very few people know even exist. And more people should know that they exist. But there's all these different layers, right? And okay, and then you've got as the industry evolved through the late 90s and then the early 2000s these good domain names get what we call type-in traffic. It's just inherent traffic. People just inherently go to these domain names.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But either way, we utilize primarily the same tools as like the SEO industry to sort of gauge what the total addressable market of these domains is. And so there's a whole bunch of different tool providers in the domain industry to sort of uncover who owns a domain, trying to evaluate a domain based on a bunch of data points. There's a bunch of different tool providers. Then you've got forums where these people meet less today, it's less relevant today. I would say Twitter is kind of the X. Another segue we can go down, but X is really where the material domain world is meeting these days. And there's just a lot of these investors coming at this from a lot of different angles. And then you've got some of the names that you mentioned, domain name wire, DNJ journal. I would say those are the two most prominent. They are covering the news. These are our true journalists for the domain name industry. And they're talking about”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like any market, it has a structure. There's a clear texture and structure to the market. You have, let's say at the lowest level, you've got guys that are just really appreciate domain names and they're investing in domain names. Maybe they're hoping to strike it rich like a lottery ticket. Maybe they're like me and they just have eccentric ideas and registered domains around them. Maybe they drank too much and thought they had a clever idea that they regret in the morning. But, you know, there's just people that are sort of collecting domain names. And then you've got people that are really taking it seriously, investing into domain names. And they've got varying methodologies. Like I've got one of my very good friends, Yanni is super methodical. He's a robot. He's got algorithms. There's very little emotion or anything that goes into his formula. Whereas I'm kind of the opposite. I'm basically 100% on instinct. And then I back it up with data. But I primarily am operating from instinct.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the end users that ultimately could benefit most from them. And more importantly, playing educator between this nascent asset class and the broader business environment that I think recognized like, oh, this is an extension of our brand, but didn't understand why these things might cost so much and why they're so valuable and the various benefits of owning them. And therein was born media options. And my wife and I founded it together. And I think it was maybe a year or two later that Tess became my account rep at GoDaddy, just going full circle here. And then ultimately left GoDaddy to come work for me. And I went from a lone ranger to plus one. And shortly thereafter, you know, we moved to Panama. We left Rhode Island and moved to Panama.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the shot clock is up. And then we're moving somewhere else. And the shot clock ran up. And it sort of ran up at the same time that I would go doing this deep dive into this domain world. And what I realized was there was nobody playing matchmaker between the people that had these domains, fascinating characters, right? Like literally you would be hard pressed to find an industry that has such a motley crew of extremely successful and variety of standards people, but from just wildly different backgrounds, wildly different interests that have stumbled into this industry in completely different ways. And I decided to basically build a domain brokerage business to play matchmaker. And there was people trading amongst themselves, kind of playing hot potato in the domain industry, but there was nobody taking these domain names and selling them.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People trading these things, and you can monetize them. And I was like, well, I had no idea. Tell me more. And so literally I spent like three or four hours on the phone with her getting a download on that there's a domain industry. And, you know, an aftermarket and there's people on forums talking about these things and there's different ways to park them and monetize them and Google will pay you for the clicks. And anyways, this was all new to me. But it was fascinating. And so I then spent weeks as I do deep diving into this new world of domain names. And I got super fascinated. At this point, I'm married. And my wife thinks I'm crazy. In fact, everybody thinks I'm crazy because I've now spent a considerable amount of money buying domain names by that point. And basically, when I got married, my wife said, look, I'll live in the United States for four years.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“worked for GoDaddy and GoDaddy at this time, then early 2000s, they launched what they called the executive department or something at that time. They looked at their accounts and they were like, wow, some of these people have like thousands of domain names. Let's reach out to them and figure out what they're doing with these domains. And so they set up this little department with a few people. And, you know, their job is to reach out to these people that had more than 1,000 domains and figure out what they were doing with them. Most of these people knew what they were doing with them. They had a purpose. I did not. So anyways, Tess called me and I was actually in my car. I was driving up to my good friend JB's house in upstate New York, quiet please farm. And I had a lot of time. And so she called me. She said, you know, what are you doing with all these domains? And I was like, I have no idea. Every time I have an idea, I buy them. And she said, well, you know, there's like a domain industry and there's.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a few of these domains and I transferred the domains to him on the spot. And at that time, I had no idea how to do a domain transaction. And so I just took the leap of faith, transferred them to domains. A couple weeks later, I got a coffin in the mail. And, you know, the rest is history. That moment then gave birth to my whole domain business. I realized it just, you know, little esoteric corner of the world, you know, if this guy wanted his domains that bad, every business in the world is going to want or need their respective domain names. And so, you know, at this point, I'm still in the seafood business and I was making quite a lot of money for somebody in their mid-20s. And I just started backing up the truck and buying as many domains as I possibly could.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you know, so he was like, You have no chance, forget it, get in line. And, you know, we're talking shop. And it came up that I had these domains. And it was like his proverbial jaw dropped. And he immediately was like, how much you want for those domains? And it was the first time, like I said, I bought a lot of domains at that point already, but never thinking, oh, these are valuable assets that I'm going to sell in the future. It was always like, oh, this is another lame brained idea that I'm going to try and build a business around that I never got around to. And I didn't even know what to answer. And so I said, well, I want one of your hands. And he goes, no problem. Done. And I was like, oh, wait, that's too easy. And so I was like, and $5,000. And he's like, done. And I was like, well, you know, that ham's got to come from that first container. You know, George Bush's container. And he's like, done. Oh, wow. Okay. And, you know, I kind of was like, all right, it's yours. And so.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And these were like, I don't know, seven, eight, ten thousand dollar legs of ham at that time. And it's literally, you know, it's a whole leg”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This stuff. So I got back to the US and that was my intention. I discovered that it was actually illegal. The FDA did not allow you to import this harmony bitico because it's cured for 18 months. You know, it's a raw meat that's cured for 18 months in salt. And like French cheese, the FDA didn't designate it as fit for human consumption. So, you know, that was sort of that. And I put it in the closet and forgot about it. And then a couple years later, I'm driving to my office. and I hear on NPR radio that George Bush is about to get the first Homoni Barrico ever legally imported into the United States and couldn't believe it. And I got to my office and I found out who the importer was and I called him up and, you know, started talking shop and I told him, you know, I wanted to buy a ham from him. And he was like, look, kid, I'm sold out for a year. I basically have a monopoly or he had a monopoly.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditionally speaking, it's a Spanish ham from the black-footed pig. And at that time, in the very early 2000s, it was illegal to import it into the United States. And when I tasted this with my wife, my now wife, I was blown away. It was the best meat I'd ever had in my life. I couldn't believe it. And I was like, why don't we have this in the United States? And I was in the seafood import business. So I thought, I'm going to import this to the United States. backtrack to my college days that was literally the immersion of the mid-90s. It's the emergence of the consumer internet. I took a class learning about the internet. I thought, wow, domain names, amazing. I started registering them because I'm hyperactive and every time I had an idea, I'd get a domain for it. Not thinking that these would be valuable. But anyways, coming back, I thought I'm going to get some domains for this homonoberico thing and I'm going to set up a website and I'm going to start importing.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did a semester abroad in Australia where And while we were dating playing international love affair, she took me to Mallorca, where I had Jamon Iberico, Patanegra. There's many different names for it. The Portuguese would tell you that the pigs are raised in Portugal and then cured in Spain. But traditionally speaking, it's a people.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The price. And so I can do what you were saying before, which is like what we call back to back. But by having the stuff that's in short supply, I'm going to get the business because I'm going to have the thing they need, even if maybe I'm going to be a nickel or a dime higher on the stuff that, you know, the other stuff that's abundant, I'm going to be the guy that's got the right price on the stuff they need that they can't get from everywhere. And so that was really our superpower was knowing where to fill the holes, which gaps we're going to give us that advantage that would allow us to compete on the stuff we otherwise wouldn't have been able to compete with.”
2023-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #711: Andrew Rosener — Becoming The Hokkaido Scallop King, Leasing Blue Chip URLs, Life Tenets from Charlie Tuna, Selling 8-Figure Domains, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT