MikeMann.com Livestream #10 w/Chris Waters and Angie Graves +Live Domain Training

Mike Mann:

Okay, here we are again on my live stream. I’m gonna add my friend Chris Waters and introduce him slowly and allow some people to join our meeting here. And then we’re gonna have my other friend Angie Graves.

Mike Mann:

These are two of the best internet people around. So you guys should listen up for sure, ask some questions. And at the end of that, we’re gonna do live domain name appraisal training. And so I’m gonna add Chris and give you a little bit of our history together.

Mike Mann:

And then allow him to speak and ask him some questions and whatnot, just like the other ones. So here we go. And there’s my buddy Chris. Chris, how are you?

Chris Waters:

Great, how are you, Mike?

Mike Mann:

I don’t think I have my speakers on, so I can’t hear you, but you hopefully can hear me. I can hear you fine. Okay, perfect. Now I have my speakers on, thank you so much. I’m gonna just talk for a couple minutes and then it’s your turn.

Mike Mann:

So the background is Chris is my good buddy. In fact, our kids were swimming in the swimming pool together a few days ago, and we’ve been having lunches and dinners, and also we work together at SEO .com.

Mike Mann:

He’s the vice president of sales at SEO .com. Which is a fabulous corporation. He works with myself and Alexander Marshall, and they’re building a great company together with a little bit of my assistance.

Mike Mann:

So I’m very excited about that. But the background is, is that he and his brother have built cool companies and worked at cool companies. Rick Waters is another good friend of mine. Rick and I actually operated some really cool websites a long time ago called skateboards .com, surfboards .com, and snowboards .com.

Mike Mann:

And now we all just accidentally live here together in Boca by coincidence ultimately, because back then I either lived in California, DC or Delaware, not really sure, but in any event we all live in Boca.

Mike Mann:

And Chris is one of the most knowledgeable internet advertising guys, and he’s a good guy in general. And he’s also traveled to all sorts of super cool places that I’ve never been, that most people have never been.

Mike Mann:

So he could tell us some now, but you might wanna add him on social media and follow him and Google him and whatnot. And I’m gonna let him speak for himself. So Chris, how are you today? What’s been going on?

Chris Waters:

Great. I’m really happy today. I had an amazing call this morning with a really great technology out of Israel, a client that’s looking to have some guidance with their SEO program. And they’ve developed a virtual reality for seniors and senior living facilities that are dealing with COVID and the isolation, but they also have a technology for children so you can create Playrooms in your home without taking up any space.

Chris Waters:

It’s all virtual. So I thought that was a really cool call. It looks like they’re going to become a client of ours. I won’t disclose the name, but very exciting. We have clients pretty much on every continent except Antarctica and I have a feeling that at some point we’ll have a travel business that’s focused around that place.

Chris Waters:

So, really happy to be part of your team, Mike. I don’t think things happen by accident. I always had a feeling you and I would work together. And I’m glad, you know, when that opportunity arose in February, I jumped at the chance to work with you and I see this being an incredible opportunity because there has really been a paradigm shift, a revolution in the way people are consuming and create media and the way they interact with brands.

Chris Waters:

So it really demands a new approach and I believe we have that. We have the full domain lifecycle as you know and we can help people from, you know, that could walk in the door with as little as business cards and we can help them find the right names, protect their product, protect their brand, have a complete domain acquisition strategy, along then with a competent website design that’s based for high performance in Google and other search engines and then beyond that we can help them with their paper click campaigns or social media, their display, their native, their video, audio campaigns as well as OTT and CTV, which are our two new channels that are very important when it comes to delivering your message to your target audience.

Chris Waters:

Yes, sir.

Mike Mann:

You can tell you can see why Chris is such a good closer, but except for he skipped the whole Family background and yeah, and what he’s been doing up until this point and I’m a shark Before you do that I actually forgot some things that I wanted to mention in the Opening is that Chris and I actually know a lot of the same people who are actually some of the best internet Advertising and marketing people and he’s worked with them.

Mike Mann:

They’re my friends. I’ve mostly not worked Worked with them a little bit, but again, he’s worked with John Ferber from advertising calm and then they started a domain company and other companies John started and Chris has worked with him Our other friend Sean Sullivan our other friend mark daniel Jeremy Kane some of the best guys in the internet are actually all right here in bokeh And you know, we all know each other from business and from personal relations and our kids play and things like that but um So in any event we have an awesome crew in south florida and we’re opening an office in south florida And the other thing I failed to point out is that Chris is also helping me with domain market .com selling domain So ultimately seo .com helps domain market.

Mike Mann:

It helps them build The landing pages build the site answer the phone calls Do sales build the brand? and we have our own team of customer service people and programmers but ultimately chris and alexander and seo .com um are building a great team and And domain market is one of their customers essentially so In any event now you have to go back to the family background You can blast into current marketing and advertising stuff and then angie’s on at 11 20 ish

Chris Waters:

Got it. Not a problem. Thank you. So, you know, growing up in Boca Tone, Florida was really unique. I grew up right across the street from the Blue Lake complex, which is essentially where the personal computer was developed by IBM.

Chris Waters:

So, you know, Boca has really always been sort of a hidden mecca for technology. So I’ve always been surrounded by interesting people. And like you said, like we have a lot of friends in common that we’re really instrumental in developing the digital landscape as it stands today.

Chris Waters:

Innovations like behavioral retargeting were some of the first things John implemented. Growing up in South Florida also provided me with the never ending summer. So when I initially started out in life, I really wanted to be a professional tennis player.

Chris Waters:

And I was drawn to that sport because of travel and bringing you travel into it. It enabled me to go to places like Australia, New Zealand and compete against some of the top players over there on that continent.

Chris Waters:

I learned a lot about myself. It’s quite a humbling sport, especially in South Florida with the talent we have here. I played two world number one players. I played Gustavo Quarigin from Brazil. I think that was the worst beating I ever took in my life on the tennis court by the nicest guy ever.

Chris Waters:

And of course, Boca Tones Andy Roddick. I played a few sets with him when I was teaching at Chris Everett’s. So, you know, I sort of fell into the internet by accident. My brother Rick was really always on the cutting edge.

Chris Waters:

And he sold a desktop publishing company in Boston called The Gigger and came down to Boca and invested all his money in domain names and starting one of the first website development firms in Boca Tone.

Chris Waters:

And our flagship property was Logodesign .com. So through that, that’s really how I got my baptism into the digital media world. And that’s really how we met Mike and other innovators in the space. I was, Rick went to a domain or meetup run by Rick Schwartz.

Chris Waters:

And that’s kind of where a lot of these connections were made in Delray Beach. So South Florida is a really strong market. It’s international. You know, we have Miami so close, which is one of the largest economies in the country and it’s multicultural.

Chris Waters:

So, you know, it’s really was an interesting way to grow up. I love to travel as Mike said, I’m very self -sufficient. So I drove myself around Africa, I’ve been to 11 countries there, setting up my own tent in the jungle, shopping in their markets, interacting with the Baca Pygmies, I could go on and on.

Chris Waters:

But I just love travel and I believe we’re here on this planet to experience love and to experience all the great wonders that Earth has to offer. And it’s augmented of course by a great career in digital media, which I’ve been blessed to have.

Chris Waters:

So that’s the short order of it, Mike. As far as background, I’ve got a beautiful wife and a lovely son, Sammy, that I care for greatly and love to explore new places with him. We were just down at the Keys this weekend and Dana’s been by my side for 13 years.

Chris Waters:

And in a way, you know, we’re sort of high school sweethearts. We’ve known each other a long time before we got married. So it’s a great fit and I’m very blessed to have that kind of wealth.

Mike Mann:

That’s for sure. Well, just for the edification of the audience, first of all, like I said, they should follow you online because you post pictures and videos of the coolest places in the world, even before you even worked together.

Mike Mann:

I watched your stuff. But so in any event, what I want to ask you is, what the last, let’s say, four or five places you went, what the next four or five places you’re going to go to, and then we’ll talk about more digital media stuff.

Chris Waters:

So that’s a great question. I was, last year I worked at Brandstar. When I was working on a television show called Video Globe Trotter, and I was charged with coming up with the content and the different stories.

Chris Waters:

I was actually the writer and producer of that show. And I interviewed over 1700 executives in the travel and entertainment space. So the first place I’d like to go once COVID lists would be Surna. I find that country to be fascinating.

Chris Waters:

I haven’t been to South America yet. Believe it or not, they speak Dutch there. So it’s a real anomaly when it comes to culture. It’s real crossroads. They’ve got great food. It’s very eco -friendly.

Chris Waters:

It’s Amazon light, per se. It’s just like being dropped into the most remote parts of Brazil or Bolivia without having the logistical issues. Plus, I was also fascinated by the book about, it’s called Papillon.

Chris Waters:

I’m sure you guys have seen the movie with Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen, but I read the book and it takes place in Guiana, French Guiana and Surna and that part of the world. So it’s a really interesting country.

Chris Waters:

It’s like going to Indonesia, Holland, India, and Africa all at once. So the food is incredible. The people are friendly. And that’s the first place I’d like to go to. And we got really cheap flights out of Miami going down there.

Chris Waters:

And I think that would be a great place to start. Beyond that, I’d like to get back to Europe. I really love Spain. My wife and I love wine and cheese and good food and culture and history. So we’d like to go probably to Portugal.

Chris Waters:

I know since we have Miami, it’s such a great gateway to the world. Portugal has some really cheap flights that originate out of Miami. So that’s on the list. I’d like to go back to Morocco. That was one of the most fascinating destinations I’ve ever been to because it’s such an interesting mix of cultures there as well.

Chris Waters:

You have the French influence, the Spanish influence, the Arabic influence. And then of course, the people of the Seja also form that. The traders like the Tahrad that ran the original routes. It was fascinating to see a culture that was that old.

Chris Waters:

And you could literally sit there in certain cities and see Roman ruins because that was once Maritania, which was a Roman province before it became Morocco. So you have a lot of history there that could be explored.

Chris Waters:

And I only really scratched the surface. I did some hiking in the villages there in the high Atlas Mountains. And that was a great experience. And spent time in Marrakesh, which is an amazing city. Other than that, I’d like to go to Japan.

Chris Waters:

I just think that that culture is one of the first post -nuclear civilizations. They were victims of the atomic bomb. And I believe that they are living in the future. And we have a lot to learn from the Japanese.

Chris Waters:

That’s a country I’d like to spend a good amount of time in. And then I’d like to go to Israel based on my roots. My grandfather was Jewish. He escaped from Russia a long time ago in Haywagon, believe it or not.

Chris Waters:

My great grandfather did by way of Turkey. So I’d love to see Israel. And I’d probably like to get to Russia at some point and see my roots there.

Mike Mann:

I was going to just mention we actually own Maritania .com. I’m pretty sure. And we actually own a handful of countries in Africa, domain names, Angola .com. And I think we actually own, what was it, Le Pup?

Mike Mann:

What was it? What were you mentioning, Pampian? Pampian?

Mike Mann:

I think we own Lepampillon as well.

Chris Waters:

for a hotel for sure or a luxury brand. They can use a butterfly.

Mike Mann:

I want to take you through like a case study and have you tell me just for example, so we’re gonna set up this really cool office here in South Florida and we’re gonna proclaim to be the very best digital marketing agency in South Florida because we’re gonna put the best people together.

Mike Mann:

We actually probably already have the best people. We just have a small team and we need to add more people and get more organized and do more sales. But irrespective, the point is, is that you’re the best pitch man and it’s not about giving a pitch actually.

Mike Mann:

Let’s pretend you’re talking to your cousin and they own a widget factory in South Florida and they have widget services in South Florida. So they sell widgets locally in South Florida and service widgets locally in South Florida and they sell them internationally and service them internationally.

Mike Mann:

So, you know, your cousin has like $3 ,000 a month and that’s it and you need to make sure he is using that $3 ,000 a month efficiently to sell as many widgets as possible. So what’s going down here at the widget factory?

Mike Mann:

What are you gonna tell this guy to do?

Chris Waters:

Well, I think the first thing we have to understand at the factory would be what conversations is he having at a B2B level and a B2C level? And finding out what pieces of media are essentially supporting those conversations and nurturing either the B2B audience or the B2C audience, you know, essentially.

Chris Waters:

And really getting a feel for what’s worked for them in the past, what channels they’ve used, and getting an idea of what that would look like in the digital landscape. So obviously we’d want to find if it’s the KPI is sales, we need to discover what terms really are important that would bring in consumers with intent to buy.

Chris Waters:

I think that has to be recognized first and foremost as far as the consumer -facing conversation, because Google is such a direct response engine. And then beyond that, if they’re not ready to buy, then there’s different places where they’re at in the funnel.

Chris Waters:

So it’s figuring out how they nurture people from the top of the funnel down to becoming a client and really addressing what pieces of creative actually stimulate that next move into a deeper discovery of our brand or their brand.

Chris Waters:

And essentially, you know, find what will bring in the sales. I mean, that’s the first thing you have to find is that low -hanging fruit. Then beyond that, it’s really maintaining the middle funnel, which is often neglected by most companies, which is surprising.

Chris Waters:

But a lot of them don’t have the in -house resources to make new ad units, to go ahead and make changes to articles, ad video, create all that. That’s where we step in. So we enable someone like our cousin to in -house a programmatic trader, a copywriter, programmers, without having to pay them a salary.

Chris Waters:

So they can onboard this incredible marketing team and have a CMO essentially become an expert in their business without impacting their resources other than the spend they have in play. And it’s our job to, of course, make sure that that ad spend has the highest ROI.

Chris Waters:

So we would, of course, first have to discover, you know, what’s making people buy? What words are they, how do they approach that brand or that service or that need in buy mode? And what does that psyche look like?

Chris Waters:

And then from there, work backwards and figure out how that funnel looks where we could get someone who doesn’t know anything down to someone who becomes a client. Makes sense?

Mike Mann:

makes perfect sense. So let’s pretend they’re not your cousin. What is your process going to be to build the funnel and close down the funnel? What should other people do that are selling services like internet services and domain names?

Mike Mann:

What’s the most efficient way for somebody like me who owns a domain company or an SEO company or a web development company to bring in leads at the lowest cost to convert them for the longest duration at the highest cost to get them to get loyalty out of them, to get them to refer their friends.

Mike Mann:

How can we make money as a service corporation, as a domain corporation?

Chris Waters:

I think it’s important for a brand to, if they can, provide value at every touch point. Beyond that, our system is essentially matching full funnel media channel engagement to really measurable attribution in real time.

Chris Waters:

So our in -campaign optimizations are based on metrics and tagging options that can pull hundreds of lines of data often within minutes of engagement. So essentially we can work in all types of digital media from organic SEO, the paper click management, social media management.

Chris Waters:

Beyond that, you have display, you have native ads or ads that fit the form and function of different content wells. It can be a video, it can be an article. It actually has to have some purpose. It’s not just like an ad that just appears that no one clicks on anymore.

Chris Waters:

Although those ads do show post -view engagement when they go back to Google, and that’s why SEO is so important. They see your ad, let’s say on the Sun Sentinel or on CNN, but they don’t really click on it, so they don’t go to your site.

Chris Waters:

What they do is they go back later in Google, they kind of remember your company name or maybe one of your keywords. And guess what, if you don’t come up when they do that search, you just lost the ball.

Chris Waters:

So we ensure that our clients don’t have that happen because SEO is the foundation for all these other digital channels. Beyond that, when we run campaigns, we like all media channels to work in concert with each other, and of course, the data that we leverage is optimized consistently to really ensure that each media channel is delivering against KPIs.

Chris Waters:

It also often helps us roadmap optimization opportunities by channel within flight. So we discover, we become experts in your company and your brand. We don’t just pass you around to different people in our organization, we actually assign an account manager to you.

Chris Waters:

That really becomes an expert in your business. And it’s our duty to really perform, as I said, as your marketing company, as your marketing division, without you having to onboard the resources. And we can confidently run campaigns across all forms of digital media.

Chris Waters:

And I think that’s really what separates us from many of the others here that are established agencies like the Zimmerman’s great agency, they’re owned by inter -republic group. We look at them internally and the kind of resources they really have, they have nowhere near the talent and resources that we do in terms of the expertise and our know -how in market.

Chris Waters:

Like I said, we have the full domain life cycle here with you, Mike, so people can really start with the best potential of achieving success in the digital landscape with the right name, the right content, the right type of programming and site, along with the creatives that really can manage those consumer conversations throughout the entire funnel.

Chris Waters:

And of course, if we can provide our clients as well as we provide value at every touch point, that’s really the recipe for success. So that’s-

Mike Mann:

Well, you know, I’m really excited to work on this stuff. And again, just for the audience’s information that Chris and I have been interviewing a bunch of people were opening a physical office in Boca and Alexandra.

Mike Mann:

And we’re going to try to get, you know, really nice place in a that basically a retail location with a big sign. So we have a public presence here. And we want to build out that the entire corporation from here previously.

Mike Mann:

It’s been in Salt Lake City for 10 years and we still have staff in Salt Lake City. But we want to grow the new corporation, the new generation, mostly in Boca, not entirely because we still have a lot of remote workers and we’ll still hire additional remote workers.

Mike Mann:

But ultimately, we want to have the sales and marketing offices and the executive offices for SEO .com and domainmarket .com and my other companies in Boca. So we’re just getting started here. Chris is helping me with everything.

Mike Mann:

We’re looking for different real estate and and whatnot. And we’re interviewing some like super smart people, mostly sales and marketing, but also some digital marketing specialists and graphic artists and things like that.

Mike Mann:

So we’re fortunate that there’s a lot of great talent around here and between ourselves and his brother and our other friends that I mentioned. We basically know everybody or at least have access to everybody to meet.

Mike Mann:

So we’re going to be meeting everybody and try to hire and engage the best people to the extent they fit in with our plan and are going to be profitable with us.

Chris Waters:

Exactly, exactly. We want to experience operators that understand how to scale out our model. And I think, Mike, I think it’s smart that we have physical locations, especially for our SEO business in some of the major cities like Austin, which is such a hotbed for startup, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York.

Chris Waters:

And I’m excited to help grow that side of the business as well. And we will find the best people. There’s so much opportunity we offer here, Mike, with our full funnel approach. The future is ours. I’m excited about our OTT and CTV capabilities.

Chris Waters:

And what I mean by that, over the top is the distribution of video on demand delivered via the internet without necessitating the need for a subscription or a traditional cable or satellite ATV service.

Chris Waters:

So, and then of course, CTV is a television set essentially that’s connected to the internet and that facilitates the delivery of streaming video and content with built -in capabilities. So it includes devices and gaming consoles as well.

Chris Waters:

So we have access to Samsung, Amazon Fire, Panasonic, Roku, Android, PlayStation, you name it. I can run campaigns on Apple TV. We have access to a publisher landscape that’s second to none via the trade desk in New York.

Chris Waters:

So that’s something exciting. We’ve been to the table. OTT means over the top and that provides the targeting capabilities of a digital campaign, but it delivers impressions during long -form content in a non -skippable setting.

Chris Waters:

So that medium really allows brands to break through the clutter of a traditional broadcast, buy and gain efficiencies with highly targeted content. So we can really differentiate ourselves. We are essentially the full funnel here.

Chris Waters:

We can handle any aspect for any type of company from a Fortune 500 to a small startup and all those in between. We can facilitate your content needs, your creative needs, as well as give you a transparent place to buy into biddable media with a clear audit trail.

Chris Waters:

So we’re MRC compliant and tag compliant. It is important. I’m also a member of the IAB and I’m IAB certified in digital media and IAB is the Interactive Advertising Bureau and that’s an organization that John introduced me to and Lana Otremba who were some people I worked with at Bidtelect where I’m a shareholder, which was the first open native platform.

Chris Waters:

So that was fascinating to be a part of that. And before that, I was in charge of the typo redirect inventory, let’s say, at domain holdings where we found those domains had the most intent driven consumers because we’re just helping lost people find the way.

Chris Waters:

So, you know, once again, I’m excited to work with you Mike and grow this out. SEO is the tip of the sphere. And now with Domain Market, really, it’s really a unique spot. We are encountering brands at the beginning stages.

Chris Waters:

So we have them when they haven’t been burned and their budgets are ready to go and they walk into the right place with us and we can help them navigate the digital channel safely with third party oversight and really help them build a successful lead attribution modeling that most companies need as well as service and middle funnel.

Chris Waters:

So with that, thank you.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t realize you were still a shareholder and a bento like that’s cool. Yeah, I sure am. I’m showing some of the products and services we offer here. Well, Chris, I mean, this is awesome.

Mike Mann:

I appreciate you helping me in general and I appreciate you in helping with this particular broadcast. And again, I mean, Chris is like one of the best guys I know in digital marketing. I wish I could say the best guy, but we know like the best marketing already.

Mike Mann:

So they trade me. Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s what’s cool is like, you know, Chris is in the club of the best digital marketing people. Alexandra is now in that club as well. And the people that work for them on a day to day basis, building out the websites and doing the SEO for the customers are great.

Mike Mann:

So I mean, their team at SEO .com is fabulous. They also sell domains for me, which is a double bonus and we’re building a lot of cool stuff. So if you happen to live in Boca and be a and you’re a digital marketing expert, come on and meet Chris and myself and Alex and.

Chris Waters:

Or if you’re an agency and you want a new source of revenue without impacting your resources, talk to us. We love agency partnerships. We can certainly set up an excellent array of service offerings and white label them for your agency.

Chris Waters:

And I think that’s a tremendous opportunity for those that might only specialize in website design, for instance. Now they can do SEO. Now they can do a digital campaign and not say no to just lose that client.

Chris Waters:

If they’re a pay -per -click firm and they don’t know anything about organic, well, now you don’t have to send those clients away. We can come in and white label that for those types of agencies. So we can help many agencies and in -house brand teams solve problems with their marketing initiatives.

Chris Waters:

And that’s what we do.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, I actually, I guess I should mention some specific departments that we think will add a lot of leverage because we have a great product and service offering already at SEO .com. We have specific packages that are very beneficial and profitable for the majority of customers.

Mike Mann:

So the object is to scale the company and expand it as much as possible. One side of that that we’re all working on is financing that we’re doing right now. But aside from that, it’s really about building out teams and org charts.

Mike Mann:

So we have a specific focus at the moment. We’re trying to hire a handful of people, for example. So one person would be in charge of vertical market spaces. So they would approach any vertical market space that has a big opportunity.

Mike Mann:

For example, if we found law firms or advertising people or whatever or bars or restaurants, whatever it happened to be that we thought had a high conversion rate, a high profit margin, we’d have somebody use the manager of the vertical marketing program.

Mike Mann:

And then aside from that, we’ll have a manager of the online services program. So like buying advertising space on Google, buying advertising space on Facebook, the programmatic advertising, the SEO and PPC of our own website, for example.

Mike Mann:

Then we have the geographic expansion manager that we need to hire. So again, our first market is Boca in Salt Lake City, where we have a physical presence. The object is to open a physical presence in as many cities as we can, based on the proof of concept that we’re building here in Boca.

Chris Waters:

Right, when we sell a domain, we should sell them a website, we should sell them hosting, we’ll sell them SEO services, and then beyond that, once they see how competent we are, it’ll translate into them evolving as a client and engaging all of our offerings.

Chris Waters:

And that’s really our goal, is to create an incredible marketing powerhouse here in South Florida, and wherever we have a space, but we’re a global company, and we have the ability to service any size company and do it fairly seamlessly.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, so again, the other two positions that would get me managers of marketing departments would be URR, what I call it, is upselling retention and referral. So that entirely deals with our existing clients, making our existing clients happy, explaining our new services to them, getting introduced to other people that they know.

Mike Mann:

And then again, Chris touched on partnerships, what I call it, partnerships. Some people call it, you know, I forgot. There’s other names for the partnerships department. In any event, the point is, is that those are all distinct departments that we’re gonna build out.

Mike Mann:

Each of the people will be following best practices and have their own budgets and their own advertising. And they’re all selling the exact same product and service suite. So they’re all selling the same things and the same packages.

Mike Mann:

It’s just a matter of selling it in a different manner and building entire teams with their own analytics and best practices that all come back together with the central company and brand being SEO .com.

Mike Mann:

But the point being is that this allows us to develop unique experience in each of the sales and marketing areas and develop it all out and then bring it all back together in a powerful corporation. And then again, all of the services and products can be sold throughout each of those channels.

Mike Mann:

So again, SEO is our primary product, web development, pay per click being secondary, social media, conversion optimization, programmatic advertising. And again, now they sell domain names on my behalf, potentially on behalf of additional customers we’re gonna find.

Mike Mann:

So Chris, you’re the man, thank you so much. Thank you. See you in the next day or two and more about this stuff. And just thanks again. I hope you have an awesome rest of your week.

Chris Waters:

you too, Mike. It looks like we’re off to a good start. We’ve got some great proposals. We’re already kicking out the door and I think we’re gonna have some more business coming in and we’re gonna, we’re gonna re make your dream materialize here.

Chris Waters:

So, we got it.

Mike Mann:

Thank you. You’re right there. So stay on. Go back to Facebooker and watch the next one with Angie.

Chris Waters:

I know Angie quite well, really cool girl. She brought the internet to Australia, really, really cool story.

Mike Mann:

Oh cool, well she’s gonna have to tell me about the Svrande vu.

Chris Waters:

Yeah. So thanks, buddy. I’ll talk to you later.

Mike Mann:

Thank you.

Mike Mann:

There she is. Dun -da -da -dun -dun -dun. Miss America, you’re gonna do a little twirl. No twirling? Oh, I can’t hear you, honey. Are you on mute?

Mike Mann:

There we go. Yay. What’s going on?

Angie Graves:

Good morning. It was lovely to get to see Chris. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him. He looks great. Sounds like y ‘all are really busy or he’s busy. I’m glad to hear it.

Mike Mann:

Well, I’m busy too, but we’re working on different stuff.

Angie Graves:

All right.

Mike Mann:

What do you actually know you I didn’t realize you knew him or I would have done more like interaction there

Angie Graves:

It’s all good. It’s all good. Yeah. Tell me about your projects, what you’ve got going on right now.

Mike Mann:

second you got to interview me you can interview me on the next live stream if you want this one’s me interviewing you

Angie Graves:

Okay.

Mike Mann:

I can’t hear that quickly since you asked me, but in any event, yeah, I mean, I’m working on my three main projects, domainmarket .com takes up the vast majority of my time, and I help Chris and Alexandra and their staff at SEO .com.

Mike Mann:

I’m trying to spend more time on that and build out our office and our team and our investments and things like that. So that’s taking up a little more time now and I’m interviewing a lot of people. And then I work a tiny bit on our third company, phone .com, not too much.

Mike Mann:

So from a business perspective, then myself and Sean Randolph are doing a great job on our charity work. So I encourage everybody to talk to Sean and he’s doing all the work, but it’s, you know, he’s doing the work on my project.

Mike Mann:

He’s managing my project, which is now our project, makechange .com, makechangetrust, which is our charitable fund that does a lot of really cool stuff. So basically we have three businesses and a bunch of charity work and, you know, there’s always craziness, no sleep for the weary.

Angie Graves:

that keeps you busy and I think you’re in Florida now, are you not?

Mike Mann:

Yeah, and Chris is too. It sounds like you’re ready for a visit.

Angie Graves:

Come on, yeah, come to Atlanta or I’ll head down to Florida.

Mike Mann:

Absolutely, you’re so close now. You used to be in Texas before, right?

Angie Graves:

I was in Texas for a time, I was, it’s been a while. And you were in Delaware, I think.

Mike Mann:

All my exes are in Texas.

Angie Graves:

hanging out with Dave Grohl on the beat.

Mike Mann:

That’s in Delaware, yeah. No, that’s just a stupid song. All my exes are from Texas. I guess you didn’t hear that one.

Angie Graves:

Well, no, no, I heard it. I heard it. I’m slow to laugh sometimes. Sorry. You don’t have to laugh if it’s not.

Mike Mann:

funny I was just wondering if you knew the reference.

Angie Graves:

I do. I think they played that a ghillies a lot. But you mentioned make change. And I just wanted you to know if we were in my kitchen right now, you would see that your book, Make Millions and Make Change is on the pass through.

Angie Graves:

So every time I wash my hands or go to my sink for anything, I see you and your name and your book every day.

Mike Mann:

Well, I really appreciate that. Did you actually read it also?

Angie Graves:

I’ve read it and you kindly signed it for me.

Mike Mann:

just easy.

Angie Graves:

We were at your house in Maryland at the time. See you get around man.

Mike Mann:

Well actually that was me at my house, you get around.

Angie Graves:

I want to know where you keep all those drums now.

Mike Mann:

Well, first of all, I’ll tell you the funny part about that is I just posted a video I found yesterday and the real estate agent still used the video of that house that I just posted yesterday for their virtual tours.

Mike Mann:

I guess they keep selling the same house over and over. But the funny part is, is you can see my drum collection if you do the virtual tour from like 10 years ago. So the answer is, is that half my drums were in storage for 10 years and I pulled them out about a year and a half ago.

Mike Mann:

So that half is here with me in Florida and the other half is in Delaware at my beach house, hopefully not getting wiped out by a hurricane or anything.

Angie Graves:

You know, I, I, with somebody who’s, he’s actually Elton John’s keyboard tech, piano tech, and he had, he lived in Vegas. He had a bunch of, just like you, a collection, when he’s telling me this story, I was thinking of you, a collection of antique keyboards, vintage, rare, just different, you know, ivory things and all of that.

Angie Graves:

And when he moved from Vegas, he put some of his keyboards in storage, but the ones that meant the most to him, he took with him to Paradise, California.

Mike Mann:

Oh my God, you’re kidding.

Mike Mann:

Bye for now. See you next time.

Angie Graves:

and six weeks later.

Mike Mann:

It was a paradise burned down to the ground.

Angie Graves:

18 and he lost all I saw pictures of the melted keys and Sadness

Mike Mann:

because it’s the irreplaceable.

Mike Mann:

I couldn’t imagine. I don’t really have very many material possessions and the only ones I actually care about are my drums. Well, they’re collected from all over the world, mostly online, but a lot of them I got in person.

Mike Mann:

They’re really beautiful pieces of art and they sound cool and my son likes them. I’m not willing to give up my drum collection. I don’t really have very much other material stuff other than the house.

Mike Mann:

Bye -bye. Bye -bye.

Angie Graves:

It would take a lot for you to part with those. Well, I have, and let me see if I have it right here. I might have grabbed the wrong book. There is a photo that was promised to you 11 years, here it is, that was promised to you 11 years ago.

Angie Graves:

I won’t name the person who did the work to get it printed. I know, but it’s not my possession unfortunately. If it were, you would have it right now.

Mike Mann:

I know, it’s your partner in crime, Kena.

Angie Graves:

Well, see, I wasn’t going to mention her name, but this is the picture. It’s Phil Collins drum kit at Dodger Stadium.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, cool. He’s one of the first ones to actually go on stage with an electronic drum kit, or the first pop kit, at least.

Angie Graves:

I like him, I like Chester Thompson too.

Mike Mann:

Okay, so I love everybody dives right in, but what we’re supposed to do, I don’t even know why I ever give anybody instructions about what we’re supposed to do because nobody’s ever actually done it.

Mike Mann:

Reminds me of my normal life, but I actually don’t care because we had a beautiful conversation. I’m just teasing you, but we’re gonna go backwards in the order we’re supposed to go in, which is that you’re gonna tell me your family background, where you’ve lived, what your parents are like, or were like, and where you’ve lived, you can do that as briefly as you want to, and then tell me about the previous business life, and then where everybody’s gonna make the big bucks in the future, including yourself.

Angie Graves:

Okay, wow. I should write all that down.

Mike Mann:

Well, I’ll definitely remind you, you take your time and just say whatever you want.

Angie Graves:

Well, until I put people to sleep, that is, right? Yeah, I’m one of two children. I’m the oldest and my father, we moved 17 times by the time I graduated high school. And I finished after my junior year of high school.

Angie Graves:

And we’re not talking across town. We’re talking Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Florida, Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, and I’m probably leaving a couple out. So I lived two or three places in each of those states.

Angie Graves:

Like Mississippi, I lived in Columbus, Mississippi, Greenville, Mississippi, and I graduated from Tupelo High School in Tupelo, Mississippi. So anyway, and I’ve at this point moved 32 times. So another dozen or so since graduating from high school.

Angie Graves:

Some people are…

Mike Mann:

Some people have moved more than me, but not very many people.

Angie Graves:

But you get stuck if you stay in a place too long.

Mike Mann:

All right. I guess I have one.

Mike Mann:

I’ve lived in like, I guess like six different states probably.

Angie Graves:

That’s a lot I’m telling you, do get around. So my father was in the self -drink business. And his job was when he was part of the corporate group when bottling plants, most people don’t know this, bottling plants were mom and pop operations, just like local car dealerships.

Angie Graves:

They were Coke and Pepsi dealerships. So consolidation of those began in the 80s. And my dad was part of the, I’m from corporate and I’m here to help, he’d come in, change it from the mom and pop operation to the corporate operation.

Angie Graves:

And that usually took six months to a year and then we’d move on to the next place. Yeah, so my horrible joke, it really is bad joke. I’m regretting it before I even say it, but people say, why did you move so much?

Angie Graves:

Was your dad in the military? And I say, no, he was a Coke dealer.

Mike Mann:

OMG literally.

Angie Graves:

Coca -Cola.

Mike Mann:

Oh, right. Jesus. He ran so fast. You’re saying that’s why he moved for his job all those times.

Angie Graves:

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Mann:

I got you.

Angie Graves:

He ran bottling plants for

Mike Mann:

I understand.

Angie Graves:

I just don’t want anybody to take that one clip out.

Mike Mann:

Well, you know, I live in South Florida where most of the kids’ parents really were Coke dealers, so…

Angie Graves:

Well, my dad ran actually my dad ran Coca Cola in Hollywood, Florida, the whole Miami area, and actually all of Florida during the Miami Vice days.

Mike Mann:

My grandparents lived here back then in Miami, so I’m very familiar with it.

Angie Graves:

Yeah, to say that my dad was a co -dealer in Miami. Yeah.

Mike Mann:

People still live here, they’re just 70 years old.

Angie Graves:

Yeah, a lot of people from the North are in Boca Raton, where we lived, yeah.

Mike Mann:

That also, you know, people are moving down, but a lot of people that are just still here from the 80s or whenever it was the Wild West, the people are here like semi -retired, but they’re still sitting next to me in the bar, you know, or at the concert, whatever.

Angie Graves:

Yep, yep. Are you going to concerts?

Mike Mann:

I mean, well right now, not much, not in general. Just to the local ones. Like I watched all the local musicians. I don’t like to go to the big concerts with all the kids waving in line and stuff. It’s too stressful.

Mike Mann:

But the little concerts that I can go to and be home at a reasonable hour.

Angie Graves:

I understand no hour long departure from the parking lot and yeah, I get it. I get it.

Mike Mann:

Thank you.

Mike Mann:

And also the bands aren’t as good, like the big bands. Most of these guys, like the last, I don’t know, just a lot of the bands I want to see aren’t around anymore. But to the extent there’s a great young band that’s gonna play in Miami, I’d like to go see them.

Mike Mann:

And they don’t really have as many individual bands there. They have a whole series, a whole festival. So it’s always like some big event. And again, if you’re in Florida, the kids are going nuts. So it’s a little much.

Angie Graves:

What’s your musical style? I don’t know who you like the most. Oh, we’ve never talked about that.

Mike Mann:

I mean, I’m a rock and roll person. I like all kinds of stuff, but smashing pumpkins, Green Day, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, like the whole Northwest genre, and the traditional stuff, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Ramones, I like everything.

Mike Mann:

I like the day.

Mike Mann:

I’m gonna stand for jazz. What’s that?

Angie Graves:

Are you a Bachman Turner overdrive fan?

Mike Mann:

Absolutely. They’re awesome. I like Southern Rock, you know, Molly Hatchett and Leonard Skinner and like, you know, there’s a lot of great bands and some of the guys passed and some are still old time rockers.

Mike Mann:

And actually here’s a tribute as, you know, I guess Eddie Van Halen passed away yesterday. Yep. Yeah, so that’s sad news, but…

Angie Graves:

It is sad. He’ll be remembered for a long time though. I stepped on his hand one time. And I felt really bad about it. I thought some insurance person or agent was gonna come after me.

Mike Mann:

Seriously, I’m surprised. Yeah.

Mike Mann:

career. I could have ruined his career. You’re gonna explain why you’re

Mike Mann:

He stepped on his hand though.

Angie Graves:

Well, I mean, he would probably have told you it was his fault. I was working in a coliseum, it was after the show, taking down the lights. And there’s a point at which, during loadout, the lights are about 10 feet up in the air.

Angie Graves:

So to work on them, I stood on a rolling road case, if that makes any sense. Yeah. And I’m looking up at the lights, and I’m doing what I’m doing and moving along the line. And I wasn’t looking down.

Angie Graves:

Well, I didn’t know it. But Eddie was under me with his hand resting on the road case. So when I went to move, I just heard Al, and he pulled his hand out.

Mike Mann:

So you stepped on like the multi -million dollar hand. That’s like the last hand you want to step on pretty much other than like You know the Pope or something

Angie Graves:

Right, right. Well, and it’s a hard hat area. I mean, I don’t think insurance wise he’d be allowed to be even in that area.

Mike Mann:

And he’s not letting it put his hands in.

Mike Mann:

on the equipment. Exactly. Just go ahead.

Angie Graves:

Well, I was going to say, Huey Lewis and the News back in the day, those are guys I worked with for a while, used to do their own case pushing. And just for fun, because they liked the whole vibe of everything.

Angie Graves:

And there was a point at which their insurance people said, you can’t do that anymore. They won’t let them.

Mike Mann:

Well, I have an event that was like the best concert I ever saw, which I think was a slight insurance hazard, to say the least. Because first of all, it’s at American University. It’s like a small place filled with kids.

Mike Mann:

I’m already too old by this point. And I went myself because my friends are all deadheads, and they wouldn’t go with me to see Nirvana. I saw Nirvana at American University, which was the craziest, awesomest show ever.

Mike Mann:

And I didn’t know Kurt was going to die a few months after that. But in any event, so he left for the encore after the most incredible show. And this is Kurt Cobain, so he doesn’t care about any rules or protocols whatsoever.

Mike Mann:

So he’s gone for literally a half an hour at least for the encore. So most of us are die hard. 75% are still, where’s Kurt? Come on, bro. I didn’t turn on the lights yet. He had a contract with the Coliseum, so he had to come back eventually, theoretically.

Mike Mann:

But so maybe up to half the crowd had left. It took forever. We weren’t sure if he was coming back. So in any case, eventually he came back really, really out of his mind. But it was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen in my life, because he was on top of the amplifier stacks, like trying to kill himself on really high up there, shaking him.

Mike Mann:

And the guys under it were freaking out all the guards trying to save his life. He’s on top of the stacks high as hell. And then he played the craziest show, a second craziest show I’ve ever seen in my life, on the ground, doing Hendrick stuff.

Mike Mann:

It was unbelievable. I can probably find the recording and post it. And anybody else who saw that show at American University, it was probably like four months before Kurt died. So anyway, after that point, I accidentally met Dave Grohl a couple of times.

Mike Mann:

And I met Chris Novoselic on the phone and on email also. So that was kind of cool. So I met my two heroes. And I’d seen them in concert. I never actually met Kurt. So that’s my aside, my brush with crazy rock and rollers.

Angie Graves:

I love it. I love it. I’m thinking about climbing like Kurt did. I think Eddie Vedder used to climb a little bit too.

Mike Mann:

Like, yeah, they’re probably copying each other from Seattle. You know, Eddie and Kurt are from the same neighborhood.

Mike Mann:

yes

Mike Mann:

age for that matter.

Angie Graves:

Yeah.

Mike Mann:

Yeah

Mike Mann:

Well, so we got a little bit about your family history. Why don’t you explain briefly your business history and then get to current events? Where’s the action currently?

Angie Graves:

Oh my goodness. Yeah, I might be going into a, well, we’ll see. We’ll see if he can handle the curveballs. But I got my degree in English from a university of South Carolina and promptly went out on tour with bands.

Angie Graves:

And I was in Europe with Genesis when I was introduced to the internet. And I decided that the internet was a lot more exciting than little boys with big hair. Also, during the course of that tour, we had a situation that because of lack of communications, it could have cost a million dollars, a single phone call that just was happen chance.

Angie Graves:

And I thought, wow, if the internet exists, people need to be a lot more connected than they are. Also at the time, every country we went to, which was a different country every day, practically, there was a different pager system.

Angie Graves:

So, and this is pagers, beepers. We had walkie -talkies and pagers. So every single day we’re changing out. There were 208 people on the tour. If you can imagine issuing 200 pagers every day. It was insane.

Angie Graves:

So the internet was a perfect solution. So when, excuse me, when I got back from that tour, I went about building a private network. And I’m a girl, I’m always a rock and roll girl with English degree, but I taught myself networking and ended up not building that network.

Angie Graves:

I built it on paper, but I traveled to San Francisco in 93. And met so many people from that whole scene. That was where everything was happening at the time in San Francisco. But I was looking for co -located servers for my network in different geographic spots.

Angie Graves:

And ended up meeting so many people there that I thought, I don’t know if I changed direction or not, but I went die hard into learning internet architecture and network architecture. So I actually got, it’s really weird, but my first job in designing networks was, I was one of three designers of the Australian ISP network for the telephone company.

Angie Graves:

And the way I taught myself networking was I called salespeople from BBN Planet, SprintNet, UUNet, all the different providers. And I would call in and ask them questions. And over the course of about a year and a half, I learned enough about connectivity to get this crazy assignment and lived in Australia for a year, designing that network.

Angie Graves:

And then when I came back, IBM hired me as a global network architect. And that’s when I started getting actual certifications. Yeah. And then after that with AT &T for 10 years,

Mike Mann:

Yeah.

Mike Mann:

I know you still have your AT &T email address, right?

Angie Graves:

I don’t live.

Mike Mann:

Oh, you did not too long ago at least.

Angie Graves:

I had a few with AT &T, but yeah. Don’t send me email there. It’s liable to not get checked. Sorry.

Mike Mann:

I think I have like four or five email addresses for you at this point.

Angie Graves:

with you.

Mike Mann:

as you did. So let me, that’s for sure. So let me break down some stuff that’s like tangible to the people watching today and try to simplify it so it’s not high tech. So I understand it. I actually know a lot about you anyway, but I just wanna have you tell our audience.

Mike Mann:

But just explain what I can is and like you’ve been traveling around to some of these conferences, who’s there and what’s the deal, what’s going on there? Why does this matter to domainers or internet people in general?

Mike Mann:

And then about your own domain collection, like what are your best domains? How are you gonna sell them? And what other just new things you’re gonna do that other people could engage in as customer investor, partner, employee, whatever you have going down.

Angie Graves:

Sure, sure. Well, this is the internet and the internet’s a toddler. So there are always opportunities. And I grew up believing that, are experiencing actually that everywhere I went, career -wise, interest -wise, sports -wise, there were already people there.

Angie Graves:

It’s really tough on this planet to go somewhere or go into new territory where nobody is. But the internet offers that opportunity. There are still hidden nooks and crannies where no one has gone. And I tell people, we’re just now building the foundation, grating the ground, so to speak, to use a construction analogy.

Angie Graves:

In the history of the internet, this is the beginning. The internet’s a toddler. So we’re not even at the beginning of all the things that we’re gonna see and be able to do. And the youngs are going to exploit that.

Angie Graves:

I certainly hope that they do. We are going to be always connected, always on world. Look at Elon Musk’s Starlink with, is it 300 satellites? He’s already put several dozen up there. So the always -on future is what we’re coming to.

Angie Graves:

And just imagine all the, well, there are frightening things too, but imagine all the opportunities that exist in that. And then once those opportunities begin to be exploited, then there will be a counter to those.

Angie Graves:

In other words, if there’s a privacy issue, then there will be a counter privacy protection matching it. And it all will just build and build and build and will be in all kinds of new territory. It’s exciting.

Angie Graves:

The old timers, we think, oh, it’s already been all done and all said, and that’s just not the case with the internet.

Mike Mann:

So tell me which domains do you own and what the deal is with ICANN?

Angie Graves:

Sure, sure. Domains, I still have maybe 800 names. I got most of them in 94, 95, 96. So they’re primarily dotcoms. And they didn’t cost any money back then to have. That didn’t last very long, did it?

Angie Graves:

But, uh,

Mike Mann:

I mean, it costed like 35 bucks a year, right?

Angie Graves:

Well, I registered mine before that. Before that? 94.

Mike Mann:

that it was

Mike Mann:

Well, I don’t remember 94, though you’re like two years, three years before me, but by 97, I think they were charging $50 a year. And then after that, they charged $35 a year. And then it got opened up.

Mike Mann:

And as soon as it opened up, I was actually one of the competitors with BiDomains competing with the monopoly, who then became a monopoly by stealing all the domains that were deleted and auctioning them off.

Mike Mann:

There you go. They just went from one monopoly to a worse one.

Angie Graves:

You found a new opportunity to exploit, and I’m telling you, you went where nobody else had been, right? You broke me down.

Mike Mann:

have a monopoly. I’m an investor in all this, but a victim of the monopoly, investor in the domains. But these domains on auction should be $10 and sometimes you’re paying $10 ,000 for them for no reason.

Mike Mann:

And the company that’s getting the $10 ,000 has no reason to get a cent because it was somebody else’s intellectual property being bought by somebody else where they have no rights whatsoever. It’s entirely a scam, which I tried to stop, but it’s pointless because I’m just one person and nobody else cares.

Angie Graves:

Let’s say fair capitalism, right?

Mike Mann:

Well, it’s just not even capitalism. I mean, again, it’s a monopoly. If it was capitalism, we’d be in good shape.

Angie Graves:

I hear what you’re saying you’re I got you

Mike Mann:

contract from the government by like bribing government officials and doing scams with the senators, the Department of Commerce, you know the NTIAA, the National Telecommunications Infrastructure Administration, all graft and scam, of course, the people who get the contracts are 100% insiders associated with the right congressman in DC, with the CIA, with Virginia, with Senator Warner.

Mike Mann:

It’s entirely a scam. There’s no reason why anybody has that contract. Sorry I had to get into all that, but…

Angie Graves:

And yet you’ve managed to do okay for yourself, Mike.

Mike Mann:

Well, sort of, I mean, actually all my money goes to those people, so I hardly have any money left at the end of the month, literally. So if I didn’t have to pay them, I would actually be much more profitable and retired.

Mike Mann:

So it’s a monopoly that’s actually, it’s so deeply embedded that nobody ever even mentions it. It’s so ridiculous. But I’m not planning on stopping it. It’s just the way it is. It is what it is.

Angie Graves:

That should be the quote for 2020, shouldn’t it? Yeah.

Mike Mann:

That is the quote for 2020 or WTF might be a better quote.

Angie Graves:

I don’t know. I think we’re going to have to come up with a new meaning for hindsight is 2020. Don’t you think?

Mike Mann:

Yeah, exactly. Hopefully it’ll be on site forever and we’ll look back as an ancient relic that we never have to revisit ever again.

Angie Graves:

Oh my goodness, absolutely. Well, I did in 96, I think, tried to get X .com. And this is before,

Mike Mann:

Before I got sex .com, you got ex .com.

Angie Graves:

Well, I did try to get X .com and after six months of wrangling with the powers that be, the powers that were at the time, they said each of the single digit letters belongs to the Department of Defense and nobody can have them.

Angie Graves:

Of course, they didn’t put my name on a waiting list when they changed their policy. Yeah, seriously.

Mike Mann:

Well, actually, they had a snail mail in like 1996, I think you had to do a snail mail. There was no like electronic form. So you had to mail it in and InterNIC was actually in Orange County, California, because I guess that’s where the one dude lived, you know, but in any event.

Mike Mann:

So you had to mail a snail mail application and but you could look up online what’s available, but you couldn’t apply for it online. So int er .net, I applied for it was available. And I was in line and it turned out this huge company, PSI .net supposedly got their snail mail right in line right before me for the exact same name.

Mike Mann:

Unless I got scammed and they lied to me, probably. But irrespective of that, I got int r .net. So that was the my company, Internet Interstate had this tag int r .net, which was super cool. But not as cool as int er .net.

Angie Graves:

Right, right, right. Wow. And to even be able to have gotten that one, because with the turnaround with snail mail, you did very well.

Mike Mann:

That’s before I was into domains. I just owned the company at the time. I wasn’t a domain buyer. I was just buying it for my own company, like one domain, the first domain I ever bought. And then after that, we bought a handful of really cool ones in the same manner, menus .com, government .net, resume .net, congressional .com.

Mike Mann:

I think I might still own that one actually, the ones I bought. So congressional .com is probably the oldest one I’ve ever owned because I own it from before I was even in the domain business.

Angie Graves:

Wow. Wow. Well, I think that story though is a testament to your never give up attitude. You know, that door’s closed. I’ll take the next door or I’ll crash it open if I have to.

Mike Mann:

The other idea is if I don’t pay my bills, I’m totally screwed. I better go to work. It goes to hand in hand. The dream and the reality end up in the day to day operation.

Angie Graves:

I hear you, I hear you, that’s funny. Wow, you are a excellent example of resilience.

Mike Mann:

Oh, thank you and yourself. Well, the inner pioneers still here at it fighting the way.

Angie Graves:

That is one of my latest topics is resilience. I’ve been working in policy. I will mention ICANN since you’ve asked at least twice now. I got involved actually with the Internet Society in 1995, 1996 and went to a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for ISOC in 97, I believe.

Angie Graves:

That was kind of like my foray into what became ICANN. In 1996, ICANN was actually forming. It didn’t exist. There was a man named Ira Magaziner who had been appointed by Bill Clinton to put this organization together.

Angie Graves:

Paul Kane and Paul Toomey and a few other people worked with Ira to put this bureaucracy together. But ICANN didn’t until October of 2016 didn’t have the kind of authority, I suppose you could say, that it does today.

Angie Graves:

Some will argue that it was just on paper that the United States Department of Commerce until that time had basically a rubber stamp that was part of the process. We can argue back and forth about the importance of Department of Commerce involvement.

Angie Graves:

But the bottom line is there were a lot of countries at that time, nation states, that had their feathers ruffled even before 2013 about this being a global entity. And yet the United States had administrative ownership and final word and all that.

Angie Graves:

So after the Edward Snowden revelations, those voices got louder. And to the point where we were potentially going to have a fractured internet because other countries didn’t want to be part of any internet where they could potentially be spied on, etc.

Angie Graves:

Just things behind the scenes that they weren’t maybe sure of. And I just want to make a point, people can focus on governments having backdoors and secrets and all of that. But the truth is we’ve got corporations, not just governments, but we’ve got corporations watching us and we’ve got scammers looking for opportunities too.

Mike Mann:

They’re all that.

Mike Mann:

The government buys the information oftentimes from third parties that it works with as well. There’s not a lot of difference between a CIA, CIA contractor, NSA. And, you know, I’m from Washington and I know all the programmers in Washington with Secret Service clearance, but irrespective of that, I mean, the government, you know, I think there was one program called Raptor, or is that what it was called?

Mike Mann:

very rapidly.

Mike Mann:

But the idea, and that was a long time ago, the idea is that, you know, the CIA can search every email conversation in the world, every chat conversation in the world, every stream yard streaming broadcast in the world, every phone call that can, it can put a satellite beam into your front yard and look at you and listen to you and they can do whatever they want to do, which is how they wiped out ISIS.

Mike Mann:

And you know, I’m not suggesting that’s a good idea. I’m just pointing out that the idea, I mean, you have privacy in a lot of respects because 99 .99999999999% of the time nobody’s actually going to look at any of that data unless you happen to be a terrorist or a scammer.

Mike Mann:

So, and they have to get a warrant unless they’re Democrats where it’s all a lie and a scam with the FISA warrants, but everybody else has to get a legitimate warrant to actually search the data. So, I mean, if you live in the United States and you have like China and Russia and Iran and ISIS and people that want to destroy your country, it’s a good idea to have the CIA watching these people.

Mike Mann:

I’m not interested, I’m not into it, but it’s just the reality of wanting to survive and have your kids survive.

Angie Graves:

Well, it sounds like you are well informed about all of this. I’d have to go to you for that information.

Mike Mann:

Or I’m a conspiracy theorist, one or the other.

Mike Mann:

Ah

Mike Mann:

Ah, I got your opinion. The conspiracy theorists all think they’re normal and sane and everybody else thinks they’re conspiracy theorists. It’s just a matter of what brush you paint me with.

Angie Graves:

I see. Okay. Well, there’s a quote from a security researcher named Phil Zimmerman from the early 90s, who paraphrased… Yeah, thank you very much. Paraphrased Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol was a famous artist in the 70s and Andy Warhol’s big statement was that everybody in their lifetime will get 15 minutes of fame.

Angie Graves:

And that quote I think went around for decades, didn’t it?

Mike Mann:

Yeah.

Angie Graves:

But Phil Zimmerman repurposed it and Phil Zimmerman’s quote was, in the future, everybody at some point in their lifetime will get 15 minutes of privacy.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, exactly. The rest of it will be covered. Well, this is your 15 minutes of fame, or part of among your many 15 minutes of fame right here. Actually, you got 20 minutes of fame, so you’ve beaten all the odds.

Mike Mann:

And no privacy whatsoever. We got right into the heart of the matter.

Angie Graves:

Well, I’m glad for the time and I don’t want to overextend you. With respect to ICANN, they’re always looking for more people to join. And I think the more good guys you have, the better outcomes you’re going to get.

Angie Graves:

And there are, I think, 13 different constituencies. So there’s something for everybody, whether they’re lawyers or privacy advocates or nonprofits, corporations. Protesters. Protesters. Yeah, we haven’t had any pickets yet that I know of.

Angie Graves:

But anybody can. You are. But anybody can go to ican .org and see what the opportunities are. And ISOC, the Internet Society, is for everybody, Internet for Everybody. And they’re at isoc .org. And that’s an excellent, non -controversial organization.

Mike Mann:

Yeah.

Angie Graves:

True enough.

Mike Mann:

Yeah. Would you mind posting some links on my wall about stuff you do and then those organizations you recommend people research. You can if you have domains or so you can post anything you want but particularly the things we spoke about.

Angie Graves:

Well, I like that you liked my bio so much, you printed it twice.

Mike Mann:

Well, I was just promoting, yeah, I just kept promoting because if you post something at midnight, half the people don’t see. So you got to post it the next morning to get the other half of the people to see it is the idea.

Mike Mann:

I don’t think it works because Facebook discounts you down for duplicative content. Oh. I’m trying to push stuff out, but you know, Facebook’s always, if you spam them, they’re counteracting you by not letting anybody see your post.

Angie Graves:

Well, for your future guests, you must insist they provide you two differently worded bios.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, indeed. Well, actually, yeah, that’ll save me from the content problem.

Angie Graves:

So where are you going with this? Are you doing more of these? Are you going to do them every week? What’s this? Your number.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, this is the 10th one. So you’re like number 20 because I’ve done your number two today. So this is the 10th episode. So yeah, I mean, I was just playing it. I was doing it for a little experiment, but it’s kind of fun.

Mike Mann:

And I’m get to see all my friends on video. And it’s cool because we get to say this. Like when I see you 10 years from now, wherever at the bar, OK, we’re pulling up the video. What’s going on here?

Mike Mann:

Oh, man, you were so young back then.

Angie Graves:

He looks so young. Somebody came to me the other day and said, I want to show you a picture of when I was younger. And I said, every picture of you is

Mike Mann:

from when you were younger. Exactly, even if it was five minutes ago.

Mike Mann:

Yeah. Um, that’s awesome. Well, I super appreciate you joining me. And again, if you have any final thought, you’re welcome. And if you want to post anything on the wall, you’re welcome. And I’m going to post links to the video later that you can share and we can share if people want to watch it again.

Mike Mann:

And I’m going to do my live domain appraisal training you can watch, I think on Facebook and YouTube if you want.

Angie Graves:

Excellent, Mike. I appreciate the service you’re doing to the community, doing for the community. That’s very nice. And having these, I think you’re gonna make into a service too. So good for you.

Mike Mann:

Thanks so much. I appreciate your help and I hope I get to see you soon.

Angie Graves:

My cheritably minded friend, I hope to get to see you too. Thanks, Annie.

Mike Mann:

Take care. Take care, Mike.

Mike Mann:

Okay, so we have two choices here. We, I guess three choices. We get lunch, take a nap, or do domain appraisal training. And we’re gonna have to do domain appraisal training because that’s what I promised you dudes and ladies.

Mike Mann:

So this is way cool. And hopefully this will post on both walls. This integration between StreamYard, if anybody uses StreamYard and the other apps, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, the integration doesn’t work that well.

Mike Mann:

Each app works differently, the integration, and plus the features are broken. So each of the features that each of those services works part way. And on LinkedIn, I can’t get it to do anything at all.

Mike Mann:

So I’m gonna do the live domain appraisal training. So again, keeping in mind that I usually have a ton of tools and a ton of people to help me do this. So we can do a much more accurate job in my real job.

Mike Mann:

And if you need your domains appraised professionally and need a professional certificate, a testing to the value of your domain name, that’s from my company called at accurateappraisals .com. There’s no other company in the world like that that can give you an accurate appraisal on your .com domain name, at least not as consistently and reliably.

Mike Mann:

That’s the place. So, and these aren’t exact numbers. I mean, the market isn’t that explicit. It’s a illiquid market. So this is just one person’s opinion, but keep in mind that one person has sold more domains than anybody in the world and bought more domains and appraised more domains.

Mike Mann:

So my opinion hopefully holds a little bit of weight here. I’m gonna share my screen. We’re gonna do a rough domain appraisal training just using Google. So therefore it’s something you can do by yourself at home.

Mike Mann:

Now I know you guys like me appraising your domains for free, which I don’t really like doing. I want you to pay for it. But what I do wanna do is train you how to appraise domains. So I’m training you, I’m teaching you how to fish.

Mike Mann:

And if I’m fishing for you, it’s merely by accident during the training. So don’t get used to it. Okay, so here we are. I’m gonna put this Chrome tab up and hope it works properly. We have Google here.

Mike Mann:

We’re gonna do our first domain. I’m gonna look at the list here. I’m only gonna do the best ones. I don’t need to appraise domains that are worth $0. I wanna do the best one. So I’m gonna look from the beginning and see who put the first thing on here.

Mike Mann:

Okay, we’re online back here in the first person to type a domain. premiumcrystals .com, that’s a solid name. Thank you, Gaurav. And blooddeficiency .com. So we’ll do those two first. Blooddeficiency .com.

Mike Mann:

So again, we’re trying to disambiguate it, figure out what it means. And then we’re trying to figure out the breadth of it, how many companies might like it and the depth. Now, if it’s a name that he had just invented, we wouldn’t know what it meant.

Mike Mann:

So it would fail the first test of disambiguating it. It would fail the second test of the breadth. There would be no breadth, nobody would care about it. And of the people that cared about it of zero, there would be a depth of zero.

Mike Mann:

So if Gaurav had just made up a name, like people always try to do, they try to make up names and make them worth a lot of money. That has like a one in a million chance of working. However, there are millions and millions of names already on that market space, the dot com market space.

Mike Mann:

And there’s different market places you can buy them, including domainmarket .com. And the majority of them are for sale for much less than they’re worth, if they’re a great brand. Because those great brands go open value consistently year after year, just the domain.

Mike Mann:

And while it goes up in value, you’re using it to bring in clients and make yourself look good and build your brand. So there’s really no downside to buying a fabulous dot com domain name like blooddeficiency .com.

Mike Mann:

However, that name’s kind of long. It has two D’s in a row, which is a bad news. It might be a little bit hard to spell. And there’s probably a bunch of other ways of saying it. If I had enough time, I could step through them and I could use my apps to figure it out.

Mike Mann:

But we’re going quickly. But blooddeficiency .com could be blooddeficient .com or whatever. There’s probably a variety of synonyms in your thesaurus to describe blood deficiency. So that decreases the value of the name.

Mike Mann:

It delutes it by having too many other choices. It’s long, there’s too many other choices. It has two D’s. It might be hard to spell. So on one hand, it’s not a great name for that reason. On the other hand, blooddeficiency is a serious medical problem in the world that people are spending millions and billions of dollars on iron supplements.

Mike Mann:

And again, I don’t know anything about blooddeficiency and I don’t have all my apps and helpers here. So I’m just going to do a rough version of it, hopefully. Make sure you put it in quotes, even though Google still ignores a lot of the requests and gives bizarre responses by putting punctuation in the middle of my quoted string.

Mike Mann:

So we see, we know what blooddeficiency means. Essentially, inadequacy of blood, obviously anything with deficient is inadequate, hurts your liver. And again, people spend a huge fortune treating it in yogurt for Christ’s sake.

Mike Mann:

That stuff’s expensive. But what I really mean is medical treatments and any event, I’m not a doctor and we’re not going to spend too much time on any one given domain. But we are going to appraise this particular one.

Mike Mann:

So as far as disambiguating it, we know exactly what it means. What’s the breadth of it? Well, we like to look at the images. And again, you’re looking for brands. I don’t like to look at trippy, weird medical stuff or other bizarre stuff.

Mike Mann:

So you don’t look at a lot of pictures of weird stuff. I go back to the verbiage. But as far as how many people might like it, I mean, there’s a lot of doctors that could use this and researchers and it’s a really great name in many, many respects.

Mike Mann:

And there’s a lot of products and services surrounding blood deficiency. But as I said, there’s a lot of negatives that dilute the value of it. So what we do is we try to add it up as if there were no negatives and then we start subtracting out the negatives.

Mike Mann:

So we see here, it’s a very popular medical subject, but we don’t see a company called blood deficiency. And we don’t see a sign on the highway or a sign on a truck that says blood deficiency. We don’t see logos and slogans that say it.

Mike Mann:

It’s an area of medicine, a big area of medicine, but if it was a brand name, it would be worth more money, not a brand name. And it wouldn’t make a good brand name because it’s an awkward word, you know, few words.

Mike Mann:

You know, it’s a name, but not a product. It’s not terrible, but a little awkward. So we see here, Google has 213 ,000 hits. In this case, they didn’t put a lot of punctuation in the middle, so those are valid scores.

Mike Mann:

It’s a fabulous name. And so again, at the end of the day, you know, we’re making up prices here. And since I’ve done so much of it, I can probably do a pretty good job. And I’m gonna make up a price for blooddeficiency .com.

Mike Mann:

I’m thinking about it as we see.

Mike Mann:

week.

Mike Mann:

buddeficiency .com. It’s too weird, but it’s really cool. It’s worth 10 ,000 bucks.

Mike Mann:

Good job there.

Mike Mann:

Okay, Gaurav, premiumcrystals .com. Another cool name. What does it mean? Well, it probably means a lot of things to a lot of people, really. Crystals, it could be, you know, like 60s healing crystals.

Mike Mann:

It does not mean crystal, like silverware, like that goes on your fancy table. Crystals, you know, is cool crystals in the cave. I guess it’s just really related to crystals, although it could be some medical thing.

Mike Mann:

So we don’t know what it means. It’s a little vague, which makes it not so great. Plus, you know, the word premium is kind of vague also. There’s probably a thousand more descriptive ways of talking about crystals.

Mike Mann:

So premiumcrystals .com. Doesn’t sound awesome. Disambiguating it, we’re not 100% sure what it means. That’s a problem. If you don’t know what it means, it’s probably not that valuable.

Mike Mann:

Immune crystals that I spell it right? No. There’s a question.

Mike Mann:

another problem. People spell it wrong. So this number 95 is actually wrong. If it’s under 100 and it’s a popular expression, that means Google is messing with your head, I guess, because they don’t want you gaming their system like I’m doing right now.

Mike Mann:

So this is the wrong number 95. And they’re not trying to make life easy like they’re supposed to do for people using it for research. They want me to scroll to the bottom, which 99 .9 percent of people have no idea they’re supposed to do.

Mike Mann:

And find a teeny tiny link right here says, repeat the search results with omitted results included. That way we’re going to get the right number and the right results, but they’re not making it easy on us.

Mike Mann:

That right number is 51 ,000. As I told you, the 95 was a red herring of BS, just like a lot of Google is, which is why I recommend somebody take the best of Google and improve the deficiencies and make a competitive product.

Mike Mann:

So premium crystals, first we have to disambiguate it. What does it mean? Are the optimum size for maximum absorbency? Well, that’s good to know. And you can buy them on Amazon, shocking. Premium crystals from Reddit.

Mike Mann:

I never spend my units on premium crystals. So this must be some gaming thing. And we’re going to research it a little more without spending a terrible amount of time on it. Looks like it’s from the Transformers game, like video, I don’t know, TV series.

Mike Mann:

I’m not sure exactly what it is. My five year old talks about Transformers, but I’m not sure exactly what they do. Premium god knows means it’s not worth very much disambiguating it. And no logos, fresh step crystals that that it might be described as premium.

Mike Mann:

Here it’s premium. Actually, it’s using the word premium crystals, but it’s really a subtext of the branding. Fresh step premium crystals.

Mike Mann:

Hmm.

Mike Mann:

pretty good, but you know, this is just one kind of vague reference. If there were 10 of these vague references, it would add up to a good reference. 10 premium crystals, say what I say, 10 references.

Mike Mann:

10 premium crystals, Marvel contest. So, well, this is pretty cool because this again is back to this comic book series thing.

Mike Mann:

Hey guys, Sean here and today I’m doing another contest of champions video so I’m gonna be holding

Mike Mann:

Thanks, bro. Okay. Looks like crap so far, nothing personal. Premium crystals, these are the ones I was thinking of, the hippy vegetarian crystals, the yoga crystals. These are actually super cool. I actually have a collection of this and one of my first jobs was actually selling these things.

Mike Mann:

I collected them in my travels around California and Arizona and different places and swap meats and from people and then sold them to a nicer stores, usually in Delaware and Maryland. Well, in any case, I’m going in circles here, premium crystals has a little value in that respect.

Mike Mann:

So disambiguating it, it kind of means these kind of crystals and it kind of has something to do with cat litter, really no strong references. And again, there’s a lot of other ways of describing crystals other than saying premium.

Mike Mann:

So not so great in the disambiguation. The next thing is the breadth. The breadth is two crystal sellers, which there aren’t very many of and cat litter people. The question is how badly do they need it?

Mike Mann:

That would be the depth, neither of them needed at all. So we’re hosed here on this deal.

Mike Mann:

and premium first place. Premiumchristals .com.

Mike Mann:

is worth.

Mike Mann:

It can be very generous here and take 2 ,000 bucks.

Mike Mann:

Somebody offers you a thousand, take it and run for the hills. Buy something nice. Cool, next one.

Mike Mann:

if there are more. I think there are more on here.

Mike Mann:

We did blood deficiency, we did premium crystals, opportunity banks with a Z, that’s not worth anything. Cars, funds, no, that’s not worth anything. Tech health fit, that’s not worth anything. Medical legal cannabis, that’s not worth anything.

Mike Mann:

You guys are posting a bunch of crap on here, nothing personal. And now we’re getting into some good stuff. We have by private jet, that’s good. Then we have, what did I miss here? By private jet, bottomfactory .com, I’m not sure what that means, click up.

Mike Mann:

Okay, cool, so we have a bunch more here that I missed, because the scrolling thing is weird, this app is weird. Hopefully they’ll make it better. So let’s just see, Hal has a different question that I’ll try to address later.

Mike Mann:

Let’s see, praiseful training, how do you value brands? Sassy global, okay. It’s sassyglobal .com and sassy .global. Sassy .global is worth zero. Sassyglobal .com, how do you value brands? Well, if you were the owner of the brand, you’d value it as a brand and not a domain name.

Mike Mann:

If you were the domain owner of somebody else’s brand, if it was generic, you’d be in good shape. This one looks a little bit proprietary and a little bit generic, so it’s a debatable, fightable one.

Mike Mann:

So, sassyglobal, I can look up. But again, I’m not appraising websites, I’m just appraising domains that don’t have anything going on.

Mike Mann:

with them.

Mike Mann:

So Sassy Global, ostensibly it’s a brand, but I don’t know anything about the brand. And again, if we’re just selling the domain name, it doesn’t come with the brand. If you’re selling a company, that would be a totally different praisal process that would be too complex for this medium.

Mike Mann:

So this is the name of this corporation in Singapore. So the issue is, do they need it really badly or is it actually their proprietary material? Is it generic where we have the right to own it? Is it proprietary where they could have a UDRP to contest one’s ownership of it or literally fight it in trademark court?

Mike Mann:

So Singapore, it’s one company. Again, so we just have to go back to the fundamentals every time to figure out what it’s worth. And then we can talk about the risk factors which dilute the value of it.

Mike Mann:

So again, disambiguating it means absolutely nothing. Sassy global, it could mean something, but it doesn’t really mean anything except we’ll get into why it might have some value. But if you say, what does sassy global mean?

Mike Mann:

People say, oh, that just means people or whatever. Being silly around the world, you could make up something, but it’s not explicit. So again, the disambiguating it, it really just doesn’t mean anything.

Mike Mann:

And then the next, although it is using English expressions that are very easy to use and they sound very cool. So there’s a lot of value to that. But as far as actual meaning, disambiguating the meaning, we don’t know what it means.

Mike Mann:

We know how to spell it. We know it sounds cool, but we don’t know what it means. Next thing we have to do is figure out the breadth, how many companies would wanna buy that? That would be one, your company, Sassy Global Party, or the one you’re talking about in Singapore.

Mike Mann:

Now, therefore that’s a fundamental problem. Again, ultimately, we don’t know if this is a trademark, if they’ve registered it, if they would contest it. But the way I figure it, you know, you’re always bet, these people are always better off buying the domain from you than they are paying a lawyer to sue you.

Mike Mann:

So unless you’re selling the domain for 100 ,000 bucks, most likely they don’t wanna pay a lawyer and they’d either skip it or buy it from you at a fair market value, which we’re trying to determine.

Mike Mann:

But now again, I don’t know if you’re the owner, if you’re seller, buyer, whatever. But I’m just trying to make a point about domain appraisal in general. So in this case, the breadth is extremely not broad, one person, the depth is they might actually need it pretty badly if they don’t own it currently.

Mike Mann:

If they do own it, it’s totally a relevant point. But if they don’t own it, they need it pretty badly. So this is a case where the disambiguation, we don’t know what it means. The breadth is one party and those two things happen every time somebody has a proprietary trade name or trademark.

Mike Mann:

The issue is, is it generic enough? Could you win? If it’s not generic, you might have to give it to them for free or wanna give it to them for free or just sell it for really cheap if it’s their proprietary thing.

Mike Mann:

But again, on the other hand, if they’re a multi -billion dollar company and your lawyers tell you that this is a generic term, they don’t have any right to it and you can prove your legitimate history owning it.

Mike Mann:

And because of the great depth, if this was a multi -million dollar company, which it’s not, if it were, again, you would have a significant depth and you’d be able to sell that name for a lot of money.

Mike Mann:

In this case, it’s a disaster because we don’t have enough information and you could get sued for it and it has no meaning and so it has no value.

Mike Mann:

I’m gonna say 500 bucks because it sounds cool.

Mike Mann:

So I’ll do a few more. I’m like blasted way past my timeline, but if you guys are still here and still have some more domain names, I have some T -Lub.

Mike Mann:

We’re in good shape.

Mike Mann:

had midnight .com. That’s a big dollar name, ostensibly. So we’ll play with that and see if we can attempt to abstract a value out of it. So again, I go to my handy Google. Since it’s one word, I probably don’t really have to put it in quotations.

Mike Mann:

And Google actually gave me the right results here. It didn’t give me weird results. The word midnight shows up in 643 million of their references, which was overkill. I mean, that just makes it extraordinarily generic.

Mike Mann:

Makes it a dictionary word. So again, let’s just talk about it for a minute. We’re disambiguating it. Everybody knows what midnight means. So that’s easy. Then we’ll talk about the breadth of it. How many companies, what companies, how broad of a potential marketing base could this thing have?

Mike Mann:

Who could use this in the future for their branding? So the answer is everybody. This is the best name ever. Anybody could have a show at midnight. 1 ,000 people already have a show at midnight. It’s a cool name.

Mike Mann:

It’s hard to spell differently. There is no plural. There’s no midnight. If you spelled it N -I -T -E, it would be spelled wrong. It would still be a cool name, but it would be worth about a 10th of the correct spelling.

Mike Mann:

So really, there’s no other way to say midnight other than 12 PM, which doesn’t sound like anything, or 12 AM, I guess. So the breadth here is extraordinarily broad. It’s a very meaningful name. I would love to have a show called Midnight Whatever, Rock and Roll.

Mike Mann:

And so if you named it midnight .com, what’s the chance of you losing money? Zero. The domain name you’re gonna buy for cheap and negotiate the best deal you can possibly get. So you’re gonna be in the money on day one because you’ve got a great deal.

Mike Mann:

And then you’re gonna build something cool on it, so that makes it worth more and more money. And then the domains, the best domains in the world, like this one, go up in value consistently year after year.

Mike Mann:

So you’re in the money, in the money, and in the money. So buymidnight .com is the correct answer. Buy all the best domains in the world with .com because those are fabulous investments. They’re great investments.

Mike Mann:

They go up in value precipitously, and there’s no rational case for them going down in value. Maybe little bits here and there, but over a 10 or 20 year period. The people in a fantasy world about .com going away, we’ve proven them wrong.

Mike Mann:

500 out of 500 Fortune 500 companies still use .com, the best business people in the world. After all these people tried to promote all these other domains, they got exactly zero converts. So again, .com will not be going away, so therefore it keeps going up in value, but only the best names, not every domain, just the best ones.

Mike Mann:

Midnight .com is the best one. You can buy this for the appraisal value or less than the appraisal value, you’re smart and in the money, and you should do it as many times over as possible. They go up in value as long as you can afford to do this type of investing.

Mike Mann:

So, extremely broad as far as how many different companies could use it, and then the depth is, any one or any hundreds of companies really, really need it because it’s such a great investment. So, the answer is it has everything we could ever want in the domain name.

Mike Mann:

It is fabulous, and we have to come up with a current price, and I recommend somebody buy it, negotiate it as low as possible. This is the fair market value, but domains don’t generally trade on their fair market value because the buyer’s market thinly traded, the sellers always need cash flows so they sell the assets for less than there were, which is what I do.

Mike Mann:

I don’t wanna do it, but again, I need the cash flow, just like the owners of these things generally will. So, as a buyer, you’re in great shape. So, midnight .com, unbelievably great name, covers every possible criteria that we’re looking at, and I just need to come up with a good price.

Mike Mann:

So, one way of coming up with a good price is, I can do it in stages, I can say, is this fair, is this fair, is it too high, too low, too high, too low. So, for example, is $100 ,000 too high or too low?

Mike Mann:

It’s too low. Is $200 ,000 too high or too low? Gonna think about that one. Is $300 ,000 too high or too low? That’s too high. So, we’re in the $200 ,000 range, is $200 ,000 too high? Not really. There you have it, midnight .com is worth $200 ,000.

Mike Mann:

Again, I have a ton of tools to get a better appraisal. Might come out exactly the same and might not. Nobody else in the world has the capacity to come up with a better appraisal as quickly because Nobody else has done as much of this experience.

Mike Mann:

They can come up with all kinds of prices But based on the information we know in this very tiny bit of time We can make a reasonable appraisal of $200 ,000 for midnight comm If you buy it for the full price, it’s a great investment But people you shouldn’t buy it for the full price because if you had $200 ,000 You could buy two or three names just as good as this So the point being is you should try to buy it for half that price or a third of that price If you were to buy it for Less than a third of that price if you were to buy midnight comm for less than 66 thousand dollars The seller is getting a crappy deal

Mike Mann:

now.

Mike Mann:

You’re getting an unbelievable deal at anything $200 ,000 or below, but you know, I would not buy it for 200 ,000 That’s the fair market value. Don’t pay it pay less So again buy as many names as good as midnight comm for $60 ,000 as possible because you’re putting money in the bank You can build cool stuff with it and no matter what happens.

Mike Mann:

It’s gonna keep going up in value So there you have it We’ll do a couple more of these because I’m like blasted way way over my time Medi pay dot CN No, CN bro. Just calm those things. I wouldn’t be able to praise them and therefore the appraisal zero By private jet comm It’s a too abstract really it’s not gonna come up with a lot of value I can do it without going to Google just for example disambiguating it.

Mike Mann:

We know what it means What’s the breadth of it? You know, it could be by private jets by jets private jet comm private jets comm There’s a thousand other ways of promoting private jets, but this is a good way Thousand other ways So that relates to the breadth of it and the depth how bad does anybody need it?

Mike Mann:

It’s a long three -word name that has other ways of using it unless it was the actual name of their company Which I doubt it is It wouldn’t have much value. So in by private jet comm is not worth a lot I’m appraising it anyway since we’re in the middle of it With 500 again, I could give it a better appraisal if I sent more time and did it and used my tools and my helpers but You know just in the one -minute thing it’s probably worth 500 bucks.

Mike Mann:

It’s a long name. There’s other ways of saying it And but you know, it is pretty cool. It could be worth a couple thousand Ostensibly if I did more research, I don’t see any way it could be worth more than that So rich Sykes has filey .com Which is fine because the job is to disambiguate these things So if I le y comm we’re doing an appraisal of

Mike Mann:

questions what does it mean no idea. F -I -L -E -Y might be somebody’s last name. Nope, it’s the name of a beach on the Yorkshire coast.

Mike Mann:

wherever the hell the Yorkshire coast is, I guess it’s England or Ireland or Scotland or something. They have cottages there that’s very quaint. Again, wherever it is, it’s in England, they have .co .uk, so they don’t necessarily use .com, although they leverage .com for international marketing, which will be more prevalent in the future, people that used to rely on their own country code domains and are now relying on alternative domains, they will have a flight to quality and wanna promote international brands using .com.

Mike Mann:

So people will need the .coms if they don’t have them currently and they use the same expression with a different extension. They’re making a mistake not owning the .com, and so you’ll see the .coms become worth more and more to people with foreign word names.

Mike Mann:

So in this case, it’s a tiny little town, you know, it has a beach, so that might mean it has a tourist industry, but not really, I mean, it has a tourist industry. People live in tents for $3 a night, pretty sure they’re not buying $50 ,000 domain names.

Mike Mann:

So that’s what it is, I mean, finally is this cool place in Yorkshire, looks great, I mean, it looks like a fabulous place. And they probably have Philly .co .uk, which would add more value ostensibly.

Mike Mann:

It’s a very pretty place, bed and breakfast there. Looks awesome, put a jet ski right there and be very happy. So as far as a domain name though, we know what it means, and the breadth of it is that it’s only relevant to this one neighborhood, unless there’s some other things I might have missed, other places in the world, they have a liquor, that’s good, Philly Bay, but it’s not spelled exactly the same.

Mike Mann:

That actually dilutes the name Philly, if people call the area Philly Bay and not Philly, that makes Philly worth it.

Mike Mann:

less.

Mike Mann:

Um, yeah, so in any event, there’s very little breadth, although the depth is pretty heavy because if you own that town or own that liquor or want to establish a new hotel there called Filey coolest hotel in the world, the word Filey has a lot of depth.

Mike Mann:

So we know what it means. It’s this little neighborhood. The breadth is very low, but the depth is relatively high. And so we need to know what it’s worth.

Mike Mann:

It is a cool place for 3000 bucks.

Mike Mann:

Very nice, gonna do one or two more and let you guys go about your day. I have to have some good ones to do, though I don’t see too many good ones left on here. I have my own list. Oh, I hear some more good ones.

Mike Mann:

Just, it’s hard to read this interface. So I have Cointrade .com from Ryder. And then I have Michael with Click Hub. So those will be the last two.

Mike Mann:

two ones. Coin trade and click hub.

Mike Mann:

Both of these are cases where you want to search as one string and you also want to search as two words because if you’re building a brand, it could be coin space trade or it could be coin trade, domain market or domain space market.

Mike Mann:

So right off the bat here. So what does coin trade mean? I don’t really know what it means, but as far as the breadth of it, well, let’s look at what it means. It means something about crypto, which is super hot idea.

Mike Mann:

And then there’s the breadth of it. How many companies might want it? Every single crypto company, according to this imaging. Coin trade. Oh, that makes sense. They’re talking about Bitcoin. So again, one way to dilute it would be Bitcoin trade or crypto trade.

Mike Mann:

But this is actually a real exchange and a real name.

Mike Mann:

so.

Mike Mann:

I don’t know if they own it or whoever owns it. Well, here we go. I mean, they used the wrong name. So somebody who owns Cointrade, it’s gonna be in the money. If it’s not me, that sucks. Cointrade Crypto Exchange, here you go.

Mike Mann:

Okay, so let’s debug this a second. I don’t know if they have a trademark or if it’s an enforceable mark. They don’t have it listed here. So I would, and it’s a generic expression. So I would say this is an unprotectable expression.

Mike Mann:

So these people screwed up bad. Cointrade CX, some genius in their marketing department said the domain wasn’t that important when they started up and now their company’s worth millions of dollars probably.

Mike Mann:

And therefore they took the domain that was worth very little and now it’s worth 100 times what it was when they could have bought it a few years ago. Again, I’ve sold some crypto domains for hundreds of thousands of dollars already in the same manner, so.

Mike Mann:

So we know what it means. It’s like this cool thing. It’s related to trading Bitcoin, trading cryptocurrency, which is mostly a total scam, but either way, there’s billions of dollars of stuff being traded, hopefully less and less every day.

Mike Mann:

People get back to normal banking. So we know what it means, sort of. The breadth is, again, everybody in the crypto world could benefit from this unless they were scared that these people had a defensible trademark, which they don’t, but people might think they do.

Mike Mann:

And then the depth is very, very deep. A, this company needs it. And if they’re as good as these other crypto companies, they could be worth billions of dollars. I sold a domain to Binance .com that was worth billions of dollars that they had to pay up.

Mike Mann:

Again, I don’t know who these people are, but if they’re as rich as Binance, they’re gonna have to pay up. And then there’s, again, 100 other companies that would benefit from this name. They could speculate on it in the industry and build stuff on it.

Mike Mann:

They could wait for these coin trade people to conceptually buy it in an arbitrage. They could use it in a variety of industries or just any smart domain trader would buy this domain if the price was right.

Mike Mann:

So we’re gonna have to come up with the price. So again, it’s got all the best characteristics. There’s a tiny risk of somebody suing you here if the price were too high, but they would lose most likely.

Mike Mann:

So it has all the best characteristics is the correct answer. Cointrade .com, excellent, excellent domain. But how excellent is it? So we’ll just go through the stages here. And again, people won’t sell it for what it’s worth.

Mike Mann:

We’re gonna figure out what it’s worth. And then people sell it at a discount what it’s really worth. Is it worth 50 ,000? Way more than that. Worth 100 ,000. Make a case for that. Worth 150. Getting in the weeds there.

Mike Mann:

It’s too abstract. But again, coin trade, bitcoin. There are other ways of saying it though. Bitcoin trade, bitcoin trader, bitcoin traders, coin traders, coin trader. So that dilute, dilute, dilute.

Mike Mann:

So you can’t blast past 150 ,000, that’s for sure. And you could make a case at 150, I think is a reasonable case, but you’re safer at 100. You could definitely, it’s definitely worth 100. I wouldn’t even discount it.

Mike Mann:

Take 100. Tell them to go on and trade without the best brand and lose a lot of money. And then again, this is gonna be worth more next year of bitcoin still in business. So it’s a good investment. You could build stuff on it.

Mike Mann:

You could arbitrage upon it. You don’t even have to be in the coin trading business to even care. So I was gonna do one other one and then that you guys have a beautiful day. Click Hub, notice how I saved it.

Mike Mann:

I pasted it all together and I saved it. So in case I forgot, it would be in my paste. I have to look at it as one word in two words. Oh, beautiful. Okay, so again, what does it mean? Well, it means it’s some cool internet hub where you click stuff.

Mike Mann:

It could be any kind of cool internet hub, right? But we know it’s a cool internet hub. We know how to spell it. Not a lot of other ways of saying it. If you spelled click with a K, it would be wrong.

Mike Mann:

Hubs, you could do plural. Like hub spot is this cool app. I don’t know if that makes this worth more or worth less if they could sue you conceptually. Then there’s this thing here called the click hub that we could review, which is so what does it mean?

Mike Mann:

Means cool. The internety thing The breadth of it is that anybody who wants to own a cool internet brand name would be well served with this name That’s good news the depth is it’s very deep. There’s already These three or four companies trading in this expression.

Mike Mann:

So not owning the domain. Well, I assume they don’t maybe they do in the domain This one owns the click hub. So that deludes it by the fact that there is another version But it makes it more valuable in the sense these people need to buy it the other version.

Mike Mann:

So again, it’s a counterbalance We’re gonna step through a little more Deeply to come up with a good appraisal and this is the last one So I really appreciate you guys sticking with us today. My guests were fabulous like they always are and Just so fortunate and blessed that I know these people and they’re getting on my live stream Hope we all be able to keep curating additional guests and keep it rolling So it has all the right characteristics, it’s easy to spell easy to say short means cool stuff It’s a very modern sounding word It has a lot of a medium amount of breadth as far as the number of Customers that really need it although there could be a lot more that want it because it’s so cool But the ones that need it are relatively few five or six we can see right here The depth however is any one of them needs it very badly And a new company could need it because again, it’s so easy to spell and we can see this is the exact name of these people Might have the click hub, but Making a mistake.

Mike Mann:

They’d be better served with click hub To keep either way you need both of them. You wouldn’t want somebody else having the other one Like I own mic man calm and Michael man calm. I want to cover my bases and Homeless calm and homeless org again if you’re gonna build a brand on something you want to cover that that varying opportunities in digital branding and domaining So I’m blabbering blabbering blabbering and getting to the appraisal

Mike Mann:

and worldsclickhub .com work.

Mike Mann:

Well, step through it. 10 ,000 is not fair. It’s too cheap. We know people need it badly and more people might and it’s cool and it’s short. 20 ,000 sounds pretty good. Let’s look a little further. 30 ,000 sounds pretty good.

Mike Mann:

Look a little further. 40 ,000, that doesn’t sound fair. That blasted out of the reasonable range. 30 ,000 going once, going twice, too expensive. Cool name, but 20 is too cheap. 30 is too expensive.

Mike Mann:

It’s worth 25 ,000. And there we have it. We did another incredible live stream. I’m so happy and blessed that it worked well and the technology works. Excellent guests, excellent names to appraise. So I hope you tell all your friends and join us next time.

Mike Mann:

And I’m gonna share the YouTube video. You can share that on your wall. And bring your friends and help us change the world. Thank you so much.