Launch of Domain Brokerage, Saw.com

Ron:

Amanda, what can you tell us about it?

Amanda:

I would take that a step further too to say that we have been working with worldwide brands and agencies and are going to continue to do that in this new business. We feel that several brands truly don’t understand the value of what a generic or descriptive domain can do for their business.

Ron:

We’ve just started to scratch a surface and hope to continue to do so. I had mentioned that Jeff met during their time at Igloo. I’m kind of curious; here you are today entering a new partnership. What was it, Jeff, that you saw in Amanda when you first met her and through the years since then? Attributes that made you feel like she was the right partner?

Jeff:

I think Amanda is one of the best salespeople I’ve ever met and what makes a great salesperson is somebody that has an intimate knowledge of the products that they’re selling; that they have a professional demeanor at all times and that they have a consistent work ethic. Amanda possesses all of those things.

When we were at Igloo, we shared similar qualities and values about life and business. When I left and went to Uniregistry, working at a competing company, we stayed in touch.

We continued to make sales together and we also remained friends.

Ron:

I have a feeling it’s a mutual admiration society or you wouldn’t be starting the company together, but I’m curious also Amanda, what was it about Jeff that do you think that he’s the right partner in this next venture?

Amanda:

Yeah, absolutely! I think Jeff is a great negotiator.

I think to be a good salesperson and to do the best and the right thing by your customer, you have to be a good listener. Jeff has a unique quality that I think most sales leaders have, but he has a unique way of negotiating. I think that he has the tenacity to get what customers want and need very effectively and I think that our customers have followed him from one place to the next and I think that that’s a real compliment to him, but also sales in general. People buy from people and people work with people and I think that bringing a buyer and seller together and creating a strong concept of why they should buy from each other needs to have a good negotiation process. I’ve always been incredibly impressed when I’m negotiating with him on the same team as well as when I’m bringing a buyer to buy an asset that he’s representing.

He’s a very tough negotiator.

Ron:

You know we all love domains and it caught my eye right away when I saw your brand name Saw.com, and a great tagline, “be seen,” which is the entire objective of having a domain name, a website, a brand of any kind. So those who love domains are gonna wonder because we all value one-word dictionary domains, the shorter the better. And .coms are the ultimate thing to achieve as a brand and that’s why they change hands obviously for a lot of money.

So what’s this story behind Saw.com. Who brought that to the table? What was the concept behind the brand that you’re launching?

Jeff:

Well, the advice we give to our customers regularly is that a short, sweet, easy to spell domain name is the most important thing you can do for your business. It makes you memorable. You can advertise it and people will remember it and tell their friends about it and create repeat business. So if we’re going to give that advice to our customers, then we should probably take our own medicine.

Ron:

There’s a perfect example of doing that.

Jeff:

Absolutely.

Ron:

And speaking of that as a brand, Amanda, I understand that part of your business services, I’m not sure if we went into detail on that, but you’re going to offer a consultation on acquiring the right kind of brand building a brand that will all be part of the offering of Saw.com?

Amanda:

Yes, absolutely.

Sometimes, when companies are coming to us, or in the past when coming to us, they have a very specific domain name that they want us to help them acquire. And then other times they aren’t sure what they’re looking for. They understand their business, they understand their product and their service. So we’ll talk about that with them and then we cast a net out to some of our customers, some of our sellers and make that match. So again, you know, building upon the question that you had for Jeff about Saw.com, we want to make sure that we understand what they’re trying to achieve and then go out and find them the best options that meet their needs.

Ron:

We have a lot of different kinds of participants in the domain industry.  They’re part-timers, I know t people 18 to 80 years old. Some full-time professionals make millions of dollars, so there’s a lot of different kinds of people watching.

What kinds of clients do you think would benefit most from the services that Saw.com offers?

Jeff:

I think there are many different types, so we’re focusing a lot of our energy and our time in our resource section. What you’ll be able to see on our website is an immense amount of education about the industry. It is information that Amanda and I came up with that people can reference and that’s targeted towards entry-level domain investors, but mainly towards a lot of the corporates. We speak to some heads of marketing regularly that might come up with a brand name. They write the copy, they have everything ready to go, but then they go to acquire the domain and didn’t budget for it and they weren’t ready for it and then they speak to us and there’s almost a feeling of shock on the phone when they hear what our estimated price might be or what we’re walking into when we go to acquire this. I think that happens for a lot of reasons. For one, there isn’t a lot of information that is readily available to people. On the other hand, we have long-standing relationships. I have some that are close to 10 years old in the industry with domain investors or portfolio holders, and those that own some great domains and those are people that we’re going to focus on and work with to help sell their names at a fair market price and then everybody in-between.

Ron:

There one thing I wanted to bring up for people who are watching and would like to meet the two of you is that the industry’s biggest annual conference is coming up at the end of January, which is Namescon in Austin. I assume you’ll both be there. Can people who want to know more speak to you in person about it?

Jeff:

Absolutely, yes we plan to be there. We’re excited about the new location this year and we hope to see lots of familiar faces and hopefully meet some new people as well

Ron:

Something that is not directly Saw related, but I think I would be remiss having two of you who know the markets so well here without asking you about… Every now and then you’ll see something online where someone says “Oh, well domains are kind of going away, social media is replacing it.” But I know just from the weekly sales reports we do at DNjournal in just a recent week here we had the chart topped by a one and a quarter million dollar sale for one domain name TM dot-com. We had a numeric domain name 6500.com 120,000 dollars. We had three orgs in the top 20 dawn.org $50,000, a great domain name. And even country code domains. We had a half dozen in the top 20, so it doesn’t look like domains are going out of favor anytime soon from what I can see.

Jeff:

From my point of view, there is no lack of million-dollar offers that are happening right now on quality domain names and there’s no lack of demand on the lower valued domains and I haven’t seen it let up at all for several years, and I don’t see it letting up anytime soon. People talk about social media and apps replacing domain names, but I still do not see a technology that is going to make it that people just do not need domain names. Whether it’s for email and their website’s branding or whatever it might be, it is still a huge part of every business.