Cyger: And what was Internet Interstate back at that time?

Mann: It was a small ISP. So the idea was, AOL already existed and already had a few million subscribers, and it was only 15 miles away from us in the DC area. These guys had a huge hit that was a graphical interface. Right off the bat, I realized this is a closed system. It was closed; it wasn’t an Internet system. They didn’t even have an Internet gateway. They had private email. You couldn’t get to the web; you could only get to their private web. The whole thing made no sense. There was a company in New York that built a graphical user interface called Pipeline, way back. There was a science fiction writer who started the company Pipeline, the first graphical user interface open source web experience, where you were going on the open World Wide Web without having to go through a text browser, without having to go through AOL. I wanted to be a licensee, essentially, of Pipeline, but then the Pipeline actually became obsolete relatively fast because the industry moved so quickly.

So, then we just became a generic open source, whatever you call it, ISP Internet Service Provider. We connected businesses with these wires that were just insanity, just strings of wires everywhere in everybody’s closets because there were all these little tiny modems and they all had a bunch of wires—really, really old school stuff. It was crazy. So, in any case, we just built our way through that, and they invented the graphical web for everybody, so we started building web pages aside from connecting businesses with ISDN lines, T1 lines, 28.8K modems, giving them training, then we were in the web business building websites and web pages.

Cyger: Definitely. Okay, I’ve got a ton more questions for you about Aux.com and about how you start up companies and juice them right from the beginning, but first I want to back up and share with the DomainSherpa audience a little bit about how you got to this point. You were one of the first people on the web, Mike. You founded a company in 1994 called Internet Interstate. Can you describe what that business was?

Mann: I wasn’t one of the first people. Well, the web barely existed. The web was a text web—it was text based. So, we were all in it together when Mark Andreessen and Sert and whomever else invented Mosaic, which was kind of the first graphical browser which I would call the web. Before then, there was this thing called “Links” which was a bunch of text hyperlinks that you used your arrows and your enter button to get around. I wasn’t one of the first ones, but I was an early adopter for sure. I wasn’t an early adopter to technology at all, I was an early adopter to trying to make money on it. And I’m a late adopter to trying to make money on it. I think technology is cool, but I’m somewhat indifferent to the whole thing. I’m just trying to get paid, essentially. So I hire the smart techy guys that are really into the gadgets and the code. I don’t do any of that myself.

Mann: Yeah. Well, I didn’t say I made a ton of money selling BuyDomains. I just said I sold it. We’re kind of agnostic, and we want to look at entrepreneurs and see what they bring to the table. We own a ton of really cool companies that juice up the entrepreneurs on day one, so we’re extraordinarily efficient at starting and building new corporations. Just in the last six months, we’ve probably started literally six new companies, and they have a lot of head start because they start with a fantastic domain name, they usually start with some staff members that we’ve already worked with before, potentially from our other companies or people we know from the industry. Then we have clients on day one for these companies. So, for example, we started PRMarketing.com. We started PurePPC.com. We immediately had tons of work for both of these businesses because all of our other business have a lot of PPC work that needs to be done, and the customers of our other businesses have a lot of PPC work that needs to be done, so we can get them started before we even go to the outside world. It’s the same case with PRMarketing.com—we have lots of internal needs for PR/Marketing services and we own the domain, so we can juice up this company on day one. There are great people working there who we already know and have already worked with. They go out into the broader community and bring in new clients.

We’ve set up this very efficient method of starting new businesses, so when new entrepreneurs come to the table, they need to be good at a specific industry, at leadership, hiring people, training people, and doing deals. As for accounting, we have an accounting company, we own an HR company, a SEO company, a PPC company, a phone company, a PR/Marketing company, and we’re trying to start a bunch of other companies. Our HR company is called proHR.com, and it lists the current job openings with approximately 20 executive positions that are currently open. All 20 of those are names that came from Aux.com. They came from DomainMarket.com, then they went to Aux.com, then they went from Aux.com to having a business model and then moved over to BrightFuture.com. And that says, “We need a CEO for Advertising.co,” for example—one of our domains. So again, that’s how it filters through the whole system. And with those companies at proHR.com, we find great entrepreneurs to be the presidents of those companies. Like I just mentioned, we have all this additional juice to go out of the gate—much more so than almost any competitor would have.

Cyger: Wow.

Mann: Gives us a huge strategic advantage to start new companies, so we’re going to keep doing it.

Cyger: Great. And at DomainMarket, I can see that, for example, HappyBirthday.com is listed for a million dollars. So an entrepreneur can actually send you a business plan of what they’d like to do with HappyBirthday.com, and if they have the chops, the expertise, and a proven background, you’re willing to put in a domain name asset so they can put in their hard work, and you both can make a viable business out of it.

Mann: Right. I prefer to build the domain names, and we’re currently looking for automated systems to deliver landing pages that look like little websites, blogs, little commerce engines, and the likes—social portals, and whatever else. And we’re going to test everything. We have tons of traffic to our sites and our domain names, so we have an opportunity to test innumerable iterations of websites and landing pages. We prefer to build them and create something of value, but again, it’s just a physical impossibility. There are 160,000 domains; there’s only a small minority we’ll ever get to build.

Cyger: Sure. And so DomainMarket—the location that you reference, DomainMarket—is actually your location for selling the domain names. The 160,000 domain names that you own are available.

Mann: I started BuyDomains.com a long time ago, and then we sold it. Eventually my non-compete agreement ran out, and then we started DomainMarket.com.

Cyger: Great. And for somebody that doesn’t have an idea, but they’re a great entrepreneur or technical guy, they can go to Aux.com, they can look and see you have domains like HappyBirthday.com available, Wi.Fi available, Lure.com (as in fish lure), Homeless.org for somebody who wants to start a not-for-profit for homeless people, PhilanthropyAwards.com—a lot of great, ultra-premium domain names available.

Mann: That’s really the point. We do a diligent job of trying to acquire the very best domains, and again, 99.99 percent are for sale at DomainMarket.com. We try to peel the best of the best off and create corporations, websites, charities, and whatever we can do. We’ve had a lot of success with this, but there are 160,000 domains at DomainMarket, and we have maybe 160 of them on tap, essentially. Of those, we’ll be able to build maybe 16 in the next few years, so it’s a very tiny minority, but that’s the most interesting stuff happening. Just buying and selling the names themselves without anything on top of it isn’t so interesting.

Cyger: So any entrepreneur, if they’re [an] affiliate marketer, if they’re a search engine optimization professional, if they’re a tech entrepreneur—if they have an idea, they go to your website Aux.com. They can look through, they can see a bunch of domain names, and they can say, “Ah, that’s a great domain name that matches what I want to do; that’s a killer domain name! I want to contact Mike Mann and ask him how we can partner together.”

Mann: Yes, sir. I’m very accessible. My team in general is very accessible. You can find me through links on my website, through Facebook, by email, etc. So anybody can get to me, but the issue is that they don’t really have a credible plan, or good juice, or good history to get the thing done. The vast majority of people aren’t going to get through the system, or else we’ll have hundreds of cluttered up sites. We’re really just looking for the very best people. We think we have a good process for finding the best people. If you look around at my companies and the leaders of my companies and charities, you’ll find the best people already. We’re trying to do more of the same, essentially.

Cyger: And so if somebody goes to Aux.com, what will they find there?

Mann: What they’ll find is several hundred of our favorite domains. They are grouped into different categories for different purposes—some are nonprofit domains, some are eCommerce domains, some are .co from the country of Colombia, some are ones that we want to build now—and they fit into various categories that are labeled in Aux.com. Some of them have little blurbs next to them give a very brief introduction into what we might want to do with that domain, but they’re all highly contextual, and for the most part it’s almost self-explanatory what you could do on them. On the other hand, there are many domains with multiple options that would still be within context. In this case, we look for entrepreneurs—look for the businesses they’re in, the names they’re passionate about, what they want to do—and we go through this weeding-out process to find the best web developers, SEO experts, and graphics designers to help us in this pursuit

Cyger: Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Cyger, and I’m the publisher of DomainSherpa.com, the domain name authority and the place where you can learn about the domain name industry directly from experts, or Sherpas, themselves.

I live in Seattle, where there is a vibrant startup community. In addition to the startups, we have established high-tech and dot-com companies like Microsoft, Amazon, F5 Networks, and Big Fish Games. And every conference I go to, I meet a handful of engineers from companies like these who have a brilliant idea for their own startup. The problem I most often see is that these entrepreneurs are great with technology, stats, and proofs of concepts but could use help with branding and marketing. The most critical aspect, in my opinion, is getting a killer domain name. A company’s domain name is the core of a business’s identity, along with their name and telephone number. But how do startup entrepreneurs (who typically have very little cash) get great domain names?

Joining me today to answer this question is Mike Mann, a serial entrepreneur who has owned some of the finest premium domain names available and has built a number of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations on top of them, including Phone.com, SEO.com, Grassroots.org, and many others that we’ll learn about more today. Mike’s here to tell entrepreneurs how they can access premium domain names for their own startups. Mike, welcome to the show!

Mann: Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

Cyger: You have a ton of domain names, Mike—from my research, currently over 160,000 domain names—one of which is Aux.com, as in auxiliary. Can you describe the purpose of Aux.com?

Mann: Sure. Of the 160,000 domain names we have, about one-tenth of one percent of them we use for our own purposes, including starting companies, blogs, or whatever. We use maybe a couple dozen currently for different companies, blogs, etc., and we have several hundred on tap that we could potentially use in the near future. They’re on the waiting list. So, Aux.com is one of them we peeled off because it’s a great name, easy to remember, and there’s a lot of good, simplistic information on there for domainers and internet people.