Two Weeks, Two Flips – How I Turned $1,000 into $10,000

Today I wanted to share two of my most recent flips with all of you. These flips particularly illustrate how much opportunity there still is in the Domaining space, if you make the right investments. This year I have focused almost exclusively on one and two word .COMs and one word .ME and .TVs. I have found these have the most liquidity and resonate the most with end users who can use them to build a brand or grow their existing brand.

I get a lot of emails from people who have spent thousands of dollars on terrible domains thinking that if they just sell one of them they’ll make a fortune. Unfortunately they usually lose their money and leave the industry with the feeling that all the good domains are taken and they are too late to make money.

My two most recent flips show how much opportunity their still is, but also shows how important it is to buy high-quality names. With that, let’s dive in and I’ll tell you exactly how I turned an $1,000 investment into $10,000.

dotMe

A few months ago Sedo held an auction of premium .ME domains. I have been a big fan of .ME for a long time now, they are great for branding and have become quite popular in the app world. I purchased a total of eight domains in the auction for $500/each. My bidding strategy was simple, I bid on about twenty names total simply setting my bid price at $500. Then I didn’t look at the auction at all after this.

When the auction closed I ended-up with a total of 8 names for a total of $4,000. Most of these were one word domains with a few really nice two-words that I just couldn’t resist. About a week later I was approached to put a few of these domains in an upcoming auction being held by another company. Before listing them in the auction I had Simonas send-out emails to the owners of similar domains letting them know that these were available to buy if they wanted otherwise they would go to auction.

If you don’t know Simonas he is in charge of domain sales for Linton Investments. He’s a very sharp kid from Lithuania who just graduated college and has a solid knowledge of the domain space. Two weeks ago we had six offers on camping(dot)me which sold for $5,000 and last week we sold rap(dot)me also for $5,000. A total investment of $1,000 yielding a profit of $9,000.

So as you can see these flips did not happen because I was in the Domaining industry early on (I wasn’t, I started in 2007), nor because I had some unfair advantage. The auction was open to anyone and all the names I bought were $500 so there wasn’t any incredibly high investment that had to be made. Now I have six more great .ME names to sell and $5,000 in profit once you subtract the $4,000 I spent on the names. The opportunities are there but if you’re hand registering a bunch of random domains you could end up spending thousands of dollars on a collection of domains, rather than real investments.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton