Hot off the press – my interview with the guy who just sold Jackpot.io for $48,500

Today I was poking around Twitter when I saw this tweet:

Yes, you read that right, Jackpot.io sold for $48,500 and what’s even more interesting is the person who sold it, bought it just three months ago. Looking at NameBio I was able to find only three higher .IO sales making this the fourth highest .IO sale to date.

I met the guy who sold the name last year in North Carolina at Rick Schwartz’s MeetUp last year, super nice guy, incredibly humble, and I think it’s safe to say – he has a good eye for domains.

I was intrigued by the sale, asked Bar if I could send over some questions to publish on my blog, he said yes, and here we are. So enough from me, let’s get to the good stuff, enjoy a deeper dive into the sale that everyone’s talking about:

1) When did you acquire Jackpot.io?
3 months. I thought I had it a lot longer but when I looked back, 3 months.

2) Have you sold many .IO domains before?
Looks like I’ve sold 5 before this one. I’ve reported the sale of ritual.io a while back.

3) How did you determine the retail price for this name?
I knew this name was valuable right off the bat. Mike Carson’s sale of lucky.io is a great comp for this name.  Jackpot is on par with Lucky.  Both are two syllables, easy-to-spell, gambling names.  I also declined a couple of low five-figure offers for this name, so I asked some industry experts about it (to make sure I was doing the right thing.) The general consensus was that it was a $50K+ name, and given a few years the right buyer would come along and pay up to $100K for this name.  

4) Did this sell through an inbound or outbound?
Inbound email that I actually dug up from my spam folder!

5) Is the buyer paying upfront or using a payment plan?
The buyer paid in full, with BTC.

6) Was there a lot of back-and-forth negotiation to get the deal done?
Not a lot actually. Probably a dozen emails over the course of a few days.

7) Was the entire deal negotiated through DAN.com or did you end up hopping on the phone or Zoom with the buyer at any point in time?
The entire deal was negotiated through email. I imported the lead through Dan.com so they could handle the transaction part of it. Only 5% commission. Worth it!

8) If there was one lesson you think you learned from this sale what would that be?
I have like three or four lessons I could share. But I think the most critical is to never put yourself in a position where you have to sell anything.  I picked that up from Rick Schwartz and it has been reinforced by a few other friends since then. This assumes your names are good names that people and businesses actually want to buy (something I picked up from the dsad.com folks.) If you’re willing to wait and be patient, then the right buyer will come along.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton