Video Transcription
Mike Mann:
You guys hear me? You guys see myself and my buddy Ben Katz:? Hmm, Ben, can you hear me okay? I can. Cool, I don’t know if anybody’s here yet because we just got on two seconds ago, but let’s see. Join, join, join.
Mike Mann:
Can you guys hear us okay? Michael and Hasrat? Uh -huh, uh -huh, uh -huh. Okay, perfect. So you guys can hear us and see us. This is my good friend Ben Katz: who happens to be a business and internet expert as well.
Mike Mann:
And I’m so glad he joined me today and joined us today. Hopefully we’ll get a handful more people to join us anytime now. I’m gonna just switch over to my notes real quick. So we know there’s all sorts of crazy stuff going on in the world this week.
Mike Mann:
Maybe we’ll talk about that as we move along later in the broadcast. But right now I just wanna introduce Ben Katz:. Ben, you can, if you want to, just give us a little bit of background on your bio and anything you wanna say about how you met me, any stories, anything you wanna share.
Mike Mann:
That sounds dangerous, Mike. Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s why it says safe stories on the format document.
Ben Katz:
Well, thanks for having me, Mike. Basically, grew up here in Montgomery County, like Mike, known Mike for a long time. I have three kids, 18, 15, and 13. And I know Mike because I joined him at Internet Interstate.
Ben Katz:
Gosh, Mike, I don’t even know. It could be 25 years ago, 30 years ago, a long time ago.
Mike Mann:
I’m not even 30 years old.
Ben Katz:
Not in your own mind. Went to University of Maryland. Most people will know me that I worked at the VU in the late 80s, early 90s. I’ll start with a funny story, which is Mike hired me to run a new product line.
Ben Katz:
We were going to do in building ethernet and bring internet at a $25 per seat. To small and medium -sized businesses in the Washington D .C. area to start. And we got the product up and running and we were on the Metro going down to a meeting.
Ben Katz:
And I knew like maybe five or six people walking out of Bethesda into the Metro. And Mike says, you’re in the wrong job. You’re my new sales guy. And that’s how I became a salesman. Actually, I haven’t even.
Mike Mann:
Because we were talking about your family and the next thing you knew your mom was in the exact same subway cars us Right. I remember that now That was the weirdest thing ever. It was like the biggest coincidence Yeah, and then there was that Mexican fast place like in the underground at Farragut North Right whatever that place was called that the little food court, which I guess there’s no such thing as a food court anymore presumably Hopefully not Anyway, I’m gonna go on mute so you can tell some more stories
Ben Katz:
Well, I’ll tell another story that I think you may not know. You either were still there or you had sold to Vario and I had taken over that office and a number of other offices. And Leo Sal had organized some Japanese executives to come and visit.
Ben Katz:
And I got a call from Justin Jasky who was the CEO of Vario at the time, saying, appreciate you taking the meeting. I’m gonna send you a fax of about 30 pages of what you can and can’t say. And so I spent all the evening trying to figure out all of that.
Ben Katz:
I came into the office, it was in Tyson’s corner across from May East, okay? And in comes about 15 Japanese executives. Don’t speak a lick of English. There’s one guy and he explains to me, we’re gonna do this in the traditional Japanese style.
Ben Katz:
You got three minutes to talk. They get three minutes to retort and then we’ll go back and forth. And so he was sort of the MC of the whole thing. And I’m telling you, dead crickets, dead quiet, no interaction, no nothing.
Ben Katz:
And so I went through it, they talked and I talked and they talked and I said, you know what, give me one of your bank, one of your cards. One of the bank presidents had given me one of his cards. I turned my laptop around, pulled up his URL on the laptop, hit enter in and it popped up and they all jumped up and started clapping.
Ben Katz:
Meeting was over. And afterwards they asked me what kind of pipe we had going out of that building and we were across from May East. We had at that time, the equivalent of 45 T1s connected directly to the May.
Ben Katz:
Right. They had never seen anything like that.
Mike Mann:
Well, I think that’s part of the same story as several times the executives from NTT, which is the largest phone company in the world at the time, I think bigger than AT &T, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph from Japan.
Mike Mann:
A lot bigger at the time. Yes. So again, all of a sudden we’re taking these meetings from NT &T and you and I are meeting these people who are actually like the top people at the largest phone company in the world.
Mike Mann:
All Japanese, I think they have an interpreter or maybe some of them spoke English. They brought us some Japanese fans as little presents. But the point is, is that about a year after that, NTT bought, very our company, our parent company, for like $2 billion.
Ben Katz:
You got six billion in cash, I believe.
Mike Mann:
some sick number, but the point is, is like, we probably helped host that deal by accident. Nobody told us that we were, I mean, I’m not positive that it was the same people, but it could have been because they were all the top executives from NT &T.
Ben Katz:
As it turns out they were that was the exploratory committee of those executives Looking to see and I think the reason they were so interested in our pipe was that purchase Was a purchase to complete there a single ASN around the world.
Ben Katz:
Yeah, exactly Well, they completed at that moment, right?
Mike Mann:
Well, I literally remember writing the graph on the blackboards and okay, here’s box a here’s a router Here’s a BGP routing. You know, here’s how it talks to the different boxes Here’s how the web page and the email is delivered from server to server And like literally like showing them how the internet connects to the Telecommunications network like how we’re connecting to their competitors in the United States to Sprint and AT &T and MCI for example
Ben Katz:
Did you get any response from them? I got crickets, nothing. Now I don’t remember.
Mike Mann:
I mean, I just remember having a meeting probably just a couple little questions, but you know, the whole thing was bizarre You know, they’re all bowing and again, they gave us these little fans. You you were probably at you know I remember two or three meetings with the same people’s Yeah, I think I was only They did buy the parent company for an insane amount of money and I didn’t get my share apparently Another IOU to add to my books In the will tell us more about the background because we jumped right into more detail So I’ll go back on mute so I don’t overtake your time here
Ben Katz:
Oh, no, I was pretty much finished my background. After that, if you flash forward from that, I took over internet and interstates business operations as end the Virginia office and the Baltimore office.
Ben Katz:
And then over the next couple of years, I took over the East Coast and helped them integrate whatever it was, 37 companies that they had bought in a very short period of time. And it gave me quite an education and whatnot to do in building businesses and helped do what I was gonna do for the next 20 years after that.
Ben Katz:
I think I left in 2002, 2002, and I took over what was the business of, helped take over the old business of Sight Smith that was purchased by AboveNet. They didn’t know what to do with it. And then I’ve been sort of reorienting businesses ever since I’m currently the president and CEO of a software company called Rousium that was founded about 10, 11 years ago.
Ben Katz:
It’s not a startup. We make the extension to traditional monitoring and management pools that allow you to see directly into the browser, which conveniently for us is where if you listen to Gardner, 12 to one applications are being spawned from within a browser.
Ben Katz:
And so it’s been a black hole for companies. And we also make the tools that allow you to fix the incompatibilities, lockdown Java, if something opens particularly well in Chrome or in an old version of IE, you can emulate those seamlessly and flawlessly across the entire enterprise.
Ben Katz:
And we have some big customers that utilize it, Pfizer, BP, Eli Lilly, large companies. And that’s pretty much what I wanted to say about myself. I’m more interested in talking about music, Mike.
Mike Mann:
Ben, you can share your screen if you want to show a URL or anything. You don’t have to. But we’re just saying is there is some kind of function on there, or I can do it. But I just wanted you to know.
Ben Katz:
Yeah, okay, so what are you listening to these days Mike?
Mike Mann:
The same stuff that I copied from you 10 years ago. Is that right? I have the same collection. Actually, my iPod got wiped out. I actually have all the songs. I just need to figure out how to get them back onto the iPod, which I can’t actually figure out.
Mike Mann:
Why do you need them on the iPod? Well, that’s how I’ve been listening to it. I have a little iPod. I’m very old fashioned. I have my iPod player. People don’t know about my iPod.
Ben Katz:
live, but what people don’t know about Mike is long after everybody moves to outlook and other males. He was still using Yodora.
Mike Mann:
Yeah.
Ben Katz:
into the 2000s.
Mike Mann:
Actually, up until three years ago was when I got rid of the door. It was way after they had still maintained it. Literally about three, maybe four of it the most years ago, I had the guy at the local computer store help me convert over.
Mike Mann:
I was always worried. Outlook isn’t as secure, but now it’s more secure and it has more features. But as of five years ago, it wasn’t as good of an app. And Udora was actually a better app, but then Udora stopped being supported and Outlook actually works much better than I thought it would.
Ben Katz:
So you’ve always been good at bucking the trends and going solid apps.
Mike Mann:
And so the background on the music thing is that Ben, first of all, is a great musician and guitarist. Next time we’ll play some music.
Ben Katz:
Yeah, sorry about that. I’m not with my guitars at the moment. That’s all good.
Mike Mann:
But with respect to the collection itself, Ben has an enormous digital music collection like very, very huge. How do you want to explain the detail?
Ben Katz:
Um, well, yeah, I’ve been a music collector since I was 10 years old I was that dorky kid that would wake up early on sunday and listen to kasey kason and map out the charts I’ve been collecting blues and jazz since I was about 12 um, I probably have about 15 ,000 final albums I’ve got uh I’ve now ripped everything that I have I have about 22 ,000 CDs crazy I connected with a guy um who used to own the the um CD shop in stereo right around the corner from our office is where I used to buy all the mobile fidelity second and Um, he and I become friends and he has like 30 ,000 crazy Problems and I spent about a decade ripping them in high quality.
Ben Katz:
So I have probably 800 ,000 to 900 ,000 unbelievable Something like that and it’s all digitized uh through it if you’re interested, I I’d love to help you do it is rune is a uh best of class media server that Will connect links from your the artists that you’re listening to Let’s say the guitarist on that album you click that and you can find all the albums that that guitarist played on And click right into the end play them cool The producers it shows you like you can if rick rubin produced this one album You click on rick rubin who shows you every album rick rubin Yeah, that’s that and you listen to it like live like right up my tv is my monitor Yeah
Mike Mann:
I still have like best domain names for this stuff like rock the world .com we should have put a library on rock the world .com for example rockconcerts .com on and on but
Ben Katz:
Yeah, you I think at one point that was a going concern right right and that one
Mike Mann:
rockconcerts .com, yeah, barely, but had a cool logo, that’s for sure.
Ben Katz:
So you’re still listening to the same old music?
Mike Mann:
Well, you know, it’s an enormous collection, but I always kind of revert back to the same type of stuff as if I’m alone and I can crank it really loud in my car, you know, I’m gonna listen to Nirvana and Chinese Rich.
Mike Mann:
Well, mostly, but I’m still listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin and Bob Marley, you know, Jimi Hendrix and classic stuff like that. But, you know, I still love all the Seattle stuff, like Soundvarden and Nirvana, Screaming Trees, and, you know, the band Live, I love.
Mike Mann:
Lots and lots of stuff, Green Day. And I still have, again, you gave me a huge chunk of a collection, I already had a huge collection. I don’t know if you borrowed any of my collection or… Right, I did.
Mike Mann:
Between us we have like the craziest collection, plus I actually collected tons of very rare stuff. So like the most rare recordings of Kurt Cobain and just super cool rare stuff I have.
Ben Katz:
And for everybody who collects digital music, Mike collected these really rare tracks, some of which have been released, some of which haven’t, but he put them at the end of the album with XX next to it as the track title.
Ben Katz:
And so you can always find them pretty easily.
Mike Mann:
that are mics, right? I actually have on my Facebook that Kurt Cobain actually has two daughters who are both on my Facebook and I think they’re watching right now. Chris Novicellich either is or was on my Facebook and then I’ve met Dave Grohl before in front of my house in Dewey Beach and in line at Starbucks before in Dewey Beach.
Ben Katz:
I’ve actually met Dave Grohl outside of your house in Dewey Beach. He walks the beach sometimes.
Mike Mann:
Yeah, I don’t know if you, yeah. I just saw him one time in front of my house and one time like a mile away, but Chris Novicellich, the bass player from Nirvana, I’ve corresponded with a lot and spoken to on the phone a lot.
Mike Mann:
And the interesting guy does political stuff is mostly what I spoke to him about. Right.
Ben Katz:
Well, Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl, at the time of Nirvana, had no idea he played guitar. Right. But really the Foo Fighters are the keepers of the rock. I don’t think he did it like this.
Mike Mann:
I think he started picking it up just like I’m not sure if he was really much of a guitarist at all He just you know, I think you’re right vain every day and like Kurt was like the best scratch guitarist in the world basically, so I mean Dave had a great inspiration to work with and Albums in the world by the time he started, you know
Ben Katz:
Well, I didn’t even know the Foo Fighters existed, but I was at the time living across or down the street from the bayou Used to go to the bayou on Saturday night now comes his band and I turned to my girlfriend.
Ben Katz:
I said wait a minute That’s where you saw that’s Dave goal. Oh, that guy’s the drummer for Nirvana Yeah, what band are we seeing and it was the first tour of the Foo Fighters sweet and he wasn’t that great on guitar He’s certainly not as good as he is
Mike Mann:
It’s not just that he puts the whole song together. He can do it in his head. He’s written the drums and the guitar and the song all in his own head, sort of like Kurt did. He does. It’s a perfect fit.
Ben Katz:
You know he’s been an inspiration to left some musicians, you know, I believe and I could be wrong I believe he bought the muscle Scholes Board and moved it into his house and invited a bunch of people to record there including Paul McCartney.
Ben Katz:
Yeah, go
Mike Mann:
Yeah, the other cool thing about the two fighters is it doesn’t sound anything like Nirvana really, but both of them are like the top of the rock world basically so. I’m a big fan of all that as you know.
Ben Katz:
you can see. I know you and I can go down a rabbit hole. I’m kind of a savant in music. So that might not be interesting to everybody.
Mike Mann:
Well, I’m not sure. I mean we’re gonna have people ask questions in a couple minutes But again
Ben Katz:
I ask you, what’s your take beside the fact that the scientists aren’t right on hydroxychloroquine?
Mike Mann:
Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely a scam. I mean, the only people that take it are Trump supporters. Trump kept talking about it. He has dirty deals with Fox News. So all day, every day, these Fox News correspondents are talking about this.
Mike Mann:
He has a deal with the pharmaceutical people. Once he starts talking about it, he just keeps doubling down and doubling down because he keeps losing and losing. So his philosophy is the greater lie he’ll never give in.
Mike Mann:
So he over, other people will ostensibly capitulate and then he’ll keep lying his way through. And you have his diehard supporters still supporting it, even though it’s factually doesn’t work. So it’s a sad thing.
Mike Mann:
I mean, my good friend messaged me that she was taking it yet last night, even before she’s even been diagnosed. And it’s just like, it’s insane. That’s a perfect example. Yeah, but it’s like, she thinks she has it, but whether she has it or not, it’s like that drug that she got illegally is scientifically proven not to help.
Mike Mann:
So the way science works is you have to have a double blind trial where half of the population is taking a placebo. And then that entire process has to be analyzed by peer reviewed by other top scientists who approve the process and the results.
Mike Mann:
And in this case, a hundred trials have been done and maybe 10 of them have been peer reviewed, double blind placebo trials. Every which one has failed where the medicine itself will not solve coronavirus.
Mike Mann:
It works on malaria, other stuff potentially, but will not help at all with coronavirus. Maybe it hurts. It’s probably like does almost nothing to you. But the point is that the top doctors, including Dr.
Mike Mann:
Fauci, who was hired for the thing and Trump’s own guy, he has this guy who works for him and Fauci works for him, the guy who’s the czar of coronavirus says, let’s move past this. It does not work. And you still have Trump talking about it and all the Trump minions talking about it.
Mike Mann:
So there’s this- It’s fine, I’ll drive.
Ben Katz:
chloroquine hilarious because the second you say hydroxychloroquine, people go on a tirade about Donald Trump.
Mike Mann:
Of course. Well, here’s the other point about the tirade is there’s this thing called Trump derangement syndrome with where, you know, the press and everybody freaking out about everything Trump does.
Mike Mann:
So you don’t actually know what’s true and what’s false because they’re freaking out about every single thing. But point is it goes the same the other way. All the people who are promoting this hydroxychloroquine have Trump derangement syndrome.
Mike Mann:
They agree with everything Trump says, even though it’s scientifically and factually proven to be incorrect in this case. So it’s just bizarre. And again, you and I are from DC, you know that I don’t like either the party.
Mike Mann:
They’re both corrupt. They’re both liars. And the only way through this is a third party. Socialism is not going to work. Fascism is not going to work. Riding is not going to work. Lying is not going to work.
Mike Mann:
Fighting is not going to work. Taxing is not going to work. This entire stimulus package is being passed on to our children who are going to work longer, pay higher taxes, have lower retirement, have lower inheritance, have greater debt and less security.
Mike Mann:
That’s what we’re spending right now to live a good life, to not have coronavirus destroy the economy, even though it’s still it’s a socioeconomic restructuring because it’s still destroying a huge chunk of the economy and the other people who own the banks, people that own the internet companies, the delivery companies, etc., the medical companies, they just grab more power.
Mike Mann:
And then the other half of society loses power. They think they’re fine because they got free government money, but that’s going to run out and then there’ll be no jobs and you’ll be beholden to Amazon and the power company and the people you pay rent to.
Ben Katz:
The funniest thing about where we are today is if you can’t even start that conversation without it becoming political. People put you into the box, one way or the other, the second you open your mouth.
Ben Katz:
But I think it’s non -controversial to say that there are serious repercussions to spending as much government money as we’ve spent, and there are certainly repercussions to locking a society down, or business down, for an extended period of time.
Ben Katz:
There’s indirect consequences to all of it.
Mike Mann:
And that’s the crazy part though, is the people are on one extreme side of the Democrats, one extreme side of the Republicans, but you’ll find out that they’re both voting for the same thing, which is to take the money and resources of the future, of the children’s future, of our descendants and spend it now so we can live and survive.
Mike Mann:
And it actually makes a little bit of sense except for it was done 10 times too much. Like the amount of money is ridiculous. It’s not fair to borrow that much from the future from our children. We did need to borrow some because it was such an extreme situation, but the amount we’ve borrowed is too much and in the Democrats and the Republicans are the same.
Mike Mann:
They’re all gonna vote for it. They’re all agreeing to 99% of what they’re gonna spend it on, half of which will be wasted. And nobody is talking about what a problem it is for the future and Trump’s gonna be gone in four years.
Mike Mann:
So he doesn’t care. He’s just a deal maker and he’s just trying to make himself look good to get through the election.
Ben Katz:
Well, I know that the Republicans were adamant that President Obama was mortgaging our future when he ran up another five or six trillion in debt during his presidency largely because of the Affordable Care Act are now spending just as much money or if not more.
Ben Katz:
I think you’re right, that both parties are complicit in that.
Mike Mann:
And so currently, you know, both parties are just as bad in my mind. And both are just as corrupt and have just as bad of a history. But currently the Republican platform is better because again, for one thing, you know, Biden would not have stopped airplanes coming from China.
Mike Mann:
So that would have been bad policy. He would not have helped on the border. He would have not have killed ISIS as well. Biden and the Democrats.
Ben Katz:
But we don’t know what he might do is as good or better.
Mike Mann:
Even if Biden was lucid at all, he’s supporting this extreme left -wing group. He just hired Kamala Harris to be his vice president. And again, he’s got Bernie Sanders and the Bernie Sanders employees are working in his back office and all the extreme left -wingers, you know, he’s in bed with whether he knows it or not.
Mike Mann:
So that would be an extraordinarily bad and risky platform. So both parties are equally corrupt. In my mind.
Ben Katz:
You don’t think Kamala Harris was a good choice?
Mike Mann:
She’s a good, she’s his only choice for him, but I mean, the whole thing is so absurd. I mean, first of all, Trump doesn’t says the most absurd things. It’s unimaginable every day. I can’t even believe it.
Mike Mann:
Yet he still has no competition. And the clear thing to me is that Bloomberg made a huge mistake. He could have competed. He may have lost to Trump, but he could have given in a fight. Biden can’t give any fight at all.
Ben Katz:
We haven’t even seen the fight.
Mike Mann:
I know, but it’s just Biden’s like he would have got again, if you look at what happened in Hillary was a good looking candidate and Trump was a bad looking candidate and he still beat her. Now, Biden is a much worse candidate on the face than Hillary.
Mike Mann:
Plus he has Alzheimer’s and he’s doing just this couple weeks. He’s, you know, being exposed for corruption, racism and all this stuff. Whereas even though we know all Trump’s negatives, he’s still gaining more power and a greater foothold over the situation.
Mike Mann:
And the whole thing with his
Ben Katz:
Yeah, I’d have to say I think the Democrats agree with you. I think the Democrats agree with you if you look on social media how many Stride voices within that party Are telling you don’t worry about the candidate any candidate is better than what we have currently
Mike Mann:
It’s a plausible argument, but you know, Biden’s so bad that it’s barely a plausible argument. But let me make one final political point and I’m going to ask you a couple business things. You know, Trump is already saying it.
Mike Mann:
The mail -in balloting is rigged. Now, first of all, historically, there’s been no evidence of this and he’s done it himself as far as I know. So it’s not true, basically. On a mass scale, there could conceptually be problems, although they probably wouldn’t be very big and they would probably be equivalent to the Democrats and the Republicans.
Mike Mann:
And plus people, including Trump, can be working on solutions before anything goes wrong. So Trump’s saying it’s going to be rigged. So that means if he loses the election, I told you it was rigged and now we have to redo the election.
Mike Mann:
So he’s ready to call it. I think we know why Donald Trump is saying all that. Well, the reason is because he thinks more Democrats are going to do mail -in than Republicans.
Ben Katz:
I think he’s girding himself in case he loses. Well, that’s the secondary thing, but. But we don’t know. We don’t know. That’s totally insane. We’ve never done it.
Mike Mann:
He’s predicting that he’s going to try to steal the election, essentially, because there’s no evidence at all that there’s anything being rigged or having been rigged in the past, yet he’s setting himself up to say the election is no good.
Mike Mann:
So that in and of itself is insane. But just saying, just using the word rigged on something that hasn’t even happened yet is also insane instead of trying to work on it. So it’s just it’s really bad news for people to talk like that.
Mike Mann:
But there’s one thing after the next. I mean, the worst things that are happening now is the loss of Hong Kong. Again, like Hong Kong’s gone. They’re a lot. They’re arresting newspaper reporters.
Ben Katz:
Hong Kong should be a bigger story in the news based upon its history and what’s happening currently. It’s not being reported. I agree with that.
Mike Mann:
So anyway, in a couple minutes, we’ll take questions. Right now, I just want to ask Ben a couple things about business, then we’ll take questions, then we’ll talk about domain names and whatever else you guys want to talk about.
Ben Katz:
I think we lost you, Mike.
Mike Mann:
I still
Ben Katz:
there with me? You just came back. We lost you a minute.
Mike Mann:
Sorry about that. I got to not press buttons while I’m working here. So back to business. So again, you’re selling accounts for your software, for your software as a service. And again, half the people who I work with who are on my social media sell high tech products, high tech software, browser -based products.
Mike Mann:
So what I want to ask you is about what apps you’re using, what’s your process? How do you do lead gen and conversion, analytics, contact management? What’s your flow just out of curiosity? Because I know it changes every generation.
Mike Mann:
I know you’re a good study on this stuff. So what’s your current format for that?
Ben Katz:
Right, you just you just asked the right question that that’s super interesting in that we’ve spent the last year redesigning that process internally We’ve got various our core strength is the marquee Accounts that we have and so we’ve spent a good amount of time figuring out how LinkedIn and other social media platforms Funnel information and we use something called lead feeder Which sits on the back of our website and tells us?
Ben Katz:
Exactly who visited our site and what pages they visited which is pretty important if you have multiple products We also use a separate called seamless That once you get the the company and the product will get you all of the contacts at that particular at that particular company and I Don’t have the current I didn’t come prepared I apologize with the current metrics, but we’re The last report I looked at we’re doing north of 10 percent in responses We’re doing Sometimes in in months as high as 35 percent in connections and in and starting conversations It’s literally 10 times if not more the industry average, so I think we’re on the right track doing it and I have to say I Talked to a number of business leaders this year and businesses are very slow To make that change and I’m not sure why what’s your take on that?
Ben Katz:
Thank you. I think you’re muted, Mike.
Mike Mann:
There’s so many ideas and tools with the modern lead gen and conversion apps. We’ve been trying some of the LinkedIn stuff. We use a private company to help us get leads and they use software that talks to LinkedIn.
Mike Mann:
There’s humans plus software plus LinkedIn, but it actually does a really great job because it does a tight demographic targeting. It knows who you’re already friends with. So it like sorts by the keywords and people’s profiles.
Mike Mann:
It looks who you’re already connections with. And then it does a drip communications like, hey, you know, how are you? Thanks for connecting to me. Here’s my contact info. And it’s like, hey, a couple of weeks later, hey, would you like to talk about such and such product and service?
Mike Mann:
And then I’ll probably give a third final one, for example.
Ben Katz:
I think it’s different by product, or maybe it’s different by product, but we tried to do that automated cadence of reach apps, and we weren’t getting north of 3, 4%. It was still good, but when we used the tools to learn exactly who was visiting the site, and exactly the title within that organization that would be the most interesting to speak to, when we reached out directly, immediately, with a very pointed message, that’s when we really hit the jackpot in terms of getting interest.
Ben Katz:
And another thing that we’ve started to do is to stop talking about features and functions, and stop talking about how good we are, and in that response, that immediate response, we ask the question, what problems are you having in this particular space?
Ben Katz:
And listen to what they have to say. It’s increased the amount of people that come into the fold and allows to do demos by 10 -fold. Oh, yeah, I’m very interested in that topic.
Mike Mann:
Do you use salesforce .com for anything?
Ben Katz:
We don’t, I switched everybody from ConnectWise to Pipedrive. And if you’ve never seen Pipedrive, Pipedrive looks like a combine board and you can move things just by clicking the mouse. They had been lagging in terms of what kind of reporting you can do.
Ben Katz:
However, they’ve gotten quite a bit better at it now. They just released their Insights module. At the moment, it’s free. I have no idea what.
Mike Mann:
Okay. What other cool business ideas or things are you looking at?
Ben Katz:
business ideas? Well within Browsium, one of the things that we’re doing, aside from consolidating our manager, and so you can look at all three of the products within one application, we’re extending to Mac support and looking at being able to gain insights into ActiveX controls and especially as flash starts to be depreciated or sunsetted, that creates a number of problems for us.
Ben Katz:
So we’ve just in our marketing campaign addressed. I’m not sure that’s a new business idea, it’s only trying to find the silver bullet in marketing this product. Very nice. What are you using?
Mike Mann:
I mean, my team keeps using new stuff. They keep changing on me. So right now we’re using this thing called Zoho for contact management and then it connects into LinkedIn for our LinkedIn campaign. I’m not sure, we were using Par.
Mike Mann:
also, but I’m not sure if we still use Par. Par. goes with that other competitor. What’s that other thing that instead of Salesforce, a lot of people are using that I forgot the name of?
Ben Katz:
Sure the other
Mike Mann:
I’ve never heard of par dot. Par dots the same is the one that like in explain gives you the contact info to add to your like you were saying You’re using seamless to get contacts, right? Yes, we’re using par dot to do the same thing
Ben Katz:
Oh, I see. Yeah, there’s lots of…
Mike Mann:
I’m going to just look up real quick what the sales sports competitors are.
Ben Katz:
Yeah, that’s not a competitive seamless is not a competitor to Salesforce exactly seamless is More a competitor I’m not sure they exist anymore, but Reigning King Right there was jigsaw back in the day.
Ben Katz:
Yeah
Mike Mann:
It shows some of the bigger ones, but I can’t remember the one that we were using before. I personally have been not doing it the right way. I also use this app called Asana where instead of a contact manager, a lot of my people are using Slack also.
Ben Katz:
Yeah, we went from Slack to Teams actually. Slack was, it was very good for internal, but we couldn’t get it to work externally.
Mike Mann:
Well, like Asana, I don’t use properly, but I just use it as a notepad. So I keep tons and tons of notes, but the cool thing is it’s all searchable and movable. And I can use, I can do, it does all sorts of tricks I don’t use, but my point is, it’s like, I’m not doing, I’m not a sales person anymore, but like keeping track of your contact info, I can just copy and paste your email address, your info, your phone number into one of my Asana records.
Mike Mann:
And I can search any of those items very quickly forever. So it’s equivalent to a contact manager. Yeah, no kidding, but always be closing. But, you know, I don’t have to keep like a contact management system.
Mike Mann:
I probably should, but I don’t really do that kind of work. It’s much just selling domains. It’s like their one time sales and they go away. So, well, does anybody have questions for Ben or me related to what we already spoke about?
Mike Mann:
And then we’ll speak about domain names in a minute if we’re done, whenever we’re done with this other stuff or if Ben has anything else he wants to mention. Okay, well, I think we’re gonna talk about domains then.
Mike Mann:
Let’s see who’s here. Well, Krista knows a domain expert. And I don’t, it’s hard to tell exactly who’s here. It looks like there’s some other domain name experts here. So who has excellent .com domains?
Mike Mann:
They need me to show you, I’m not a prey, I am appraising for you, but the object is not the fish for you, it’s to show you how to fish. Blinkets, I see that Mike. So this software that we mentioned all requires a little bit of research for people if they’re interested in sales and marketing, best practices management, et cetera.
Mike Mann:
These are all cool software apps that serve various parts of the pipeline process. So in any event, does anybody have any domains they want me to appraise or else I’ll just go back. I just posted a group on my wall that I needed to appraise.
Mike Mann:
So if nobody has any, I’m gonna pick from my screen here. I’ll put it back in here, I think, if I can. Let’s see here. Then I’ll go through the appraisal process. So what I’m trying to do is not so much appraise domains for people, but it’s to show them the process I use.
Mike Mann:
I’m gonna show them the manual process I use because I have back end tools, but since people don’t have those tools, there’s no point in teaching them how to use those tools. I’ll teach them just how to use Google to appraise domain names.
Mike Mann:
Krista, you gave me a nice abstract word that I can look up. Gened, gened, we’re gonna find out what that means. Okay, so first thing I need to do is share my screen. So I’m gonna figure out how right now.
Mike Mann:
Let’s see here. Share screen. Chrome tab, new tab, share. So I think you guys can see me. So I’m in this new tab here, and I’m gonna look up Krista’s word. Except for I did it wrong. Let’s see what is the word again, gened.
Mike Mann:
So I think you guys can see me. So I do everything in quotations because Google is purposely sending me a bunch of garbage results, but if you put it in quotations, it doesn’t. So this word could be G -E -N -E -D, or it could be two words.
Mike Mann:
Like here you see it’s two words, gened, general education. Well, there you go. Now we know what it means, at least. I didn’t even know what it meant. Now I do know what it means. I mean, general education, which is a very powerful name.
Mike Mann:
As a matter of fact, I think I might own generaleducation .org, German network for new economic dynamics. That sounds like they have a lot of money. This is really cool. So yeah, again, it looked like a lame name, and that’s why we do domain appraisals to find out what they really were.
Mike Mann:
So so far this one looks great. It means general education, which is a big term right now, especially online. It’s only five letters, which makes it fabulous. We can see 453 ,000 references in Google.
Mike Mann:
Looks like it’s almost all general education, general education systems. Very nice. Then when you go to the next page, it messes up your results and gives you 123, which is wrong. This is wrong also.
Mike Mann:
So the answer is what does this thing work? And I would say it’s worth 20 ,000 bucks. because it’s just a great name and has great context. It’s very short. It’s not really spelled as something, a popular spelling that other people would be familiar with.
Mike Mann:
But the answer is I think it’s worth around 20 ,000 bucks. For future genetic engineering, yeah, it’s a really cool name. And it’s just hard to say, okay, let’s see. BFX Arena. Let me try that one. Okay.
Mike Mann:
We can see there’s ostensibly a site there. An online BFX News and Media Reporter website maybe. Thank you. It looks very unexciting. The image is worth a thousand words. We just don’t find any exact matches for it.
Mike Mann:
We see all these random things that touch on it. But you see VFX Arena, but there’s a hyphen, which means it’s not an exact match. So there really, I can’t find any exact matches, but although there are ancillary things that are close, there are secondary matches that have both words in them, but they’re not exact.
Mike Mann:
I don’t even know what it means. It has something to do with video games, obviously. I could figure it out if I wanted to, but we could look at this Facebook page. So the answer is worth 2 ,000 bucks because it has some interesting little random things here, but not very much.
Mike Mann:
There aren’t very many potential buyers. If there were a buyer, it would be somebody who’s not going to pay a lot of money. So that is the answer. It’s worth 2 ,000 bucks. You have a winner. See, I’m the guy from Antiques Roadshow, where they look at your antiques and they tell you what they’re worth.
Mike Mann:
Okay, British Inn, that’s a good name. Equity Golf, that’s a good name. Okay, we’re onto something here. Those did I miss, DNA technology. Okay, I’ll go in order here. We’re going to do DNA technology.
Mike Mann:
Very good name. Could apply to coronavirus. We always use quotes. And you can see there are 2 .5 million results in Google. It’s a huge idea. And Google even has a box up here, which means it’s even more valuable.
Mike Mann:
Recombinant, recombinant DNA technology. Again, DNA technology is cool. There’s a lot of hits, a lot of answers, millions. It’s a very excellent expression. Again, I didn’t even think much about it until we started doing the search.
Mike Mann:
An image is worth 1 ,000 words. And what you don’t see here is a lot of logos, names of stores, names of businesses, which is bad. You want to see logos, businesses, signs, stores, but it’s a big idea.
Mike Mann:
It’s a large section of signs. So it’s still very valuable, but it would be more valuable if there were corporations that use that identical expression for the name of their corporation, which is not apparent from the Google image search.
Mike Mann:
We can go to the all here. And again, think more about this a little bit so we don’t make any mistakes. And you see, again, there’s not a lot of businesses that use that exact name, but it is a large branch of science and medicine, which makes it very valuable.
Mike Mann:
We could do more research and figure out the type in traffic and whether there’s been similar names sold, comps, comparables, but the answer is this is awesome and it’s worth 30 ,000 bucks. Which, and when I give you an appraisal, I usually sell things for up to 50% less than the appraisal because I need the money and I want the money, but the actual fair price, about 30 ,000 bucks, somebody offered me 15, I might take it, 20, I would definitely take.
Mike Mann:
Which gives you an idea of the appraisal. There you have it. ArtCounsel .net is worth zero because it’s a .net, vegetarian .com, and I don’t really have to research that one. That one’s, you know, nice round million bucks.
Mike Mann:
British Inn, we’re gonna do that one. British Inn, again, conceptually is the name of a hotel, I guess, but we’ll find out. Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, British Inn. or a British in. So here’s the pictures, gonna you write to the pictures.
Mike Mann:
It says one white place, which is tiny and has no money, most likely. And it might not even be the right name of the place. The pub has no value. British in signs, that’s cool. British in signs. So that’s what’s really happening is these British in signs.
Mike Mann:
If you own Britishinsigns .com, it’s probably worth more than British in, which is sound strange because it’s an extra word, the third long word, but British in is still cool. It also could be in plural, plus it could be hotel, hotels, on and on and on.
Mike Mann:
And it could say English instead of British, UK. Could say UK in UK hotels. So anyway, it’s not that great, but it is contextual. Also, it’s not, it’s a .com, but you’re in America. In England, it’s .co .uk.
Mike Mann:
So the answer is it’s worth 10 ,000 bucks. Congratulations. What did I miss here, British? And we did equity golf. I’m guessing that’s a zero, but let’s find out here. So I have no idea what that even means.
Mike Mann:
Equity golf? Well, I guess not. I’m wrong about that, like usual. I guess, equity golf, again, it’s a case, equity golf membership where you’re buying part of the club. So yeah, it actually means something.
Mike Mann:
Equity golf community, equity golf. So I was wrong about that for sure. I’d never heard that expression before, which is why we do research. You know, it’s an idea, it’s an abstract idea. Golfers might like it, but you see no logos, no magazines, no websites, no store names called equity golf anywhere.
Mike Mann:
So it’s just an idea. It’s a cool idea, but not that cool. So 5 ,000 bucks for equity golf. The golf. Okay, last one. See here, artcouncil .net, that’s a zero .com, would be worth something. British Inn was 20, or no, DNA was 20, I think.
Mike Mann:
Maybe more. Can’t remember, getting confused. Oh, you guys can type the answers for me while I do the appraisals. If you remember what the last appraisals were, okay, let’s see where we’re at. We have Ride Solo, Barley Gray, and Human Genome.
Mike Mann:
That’s worth a fortune. Let’s do Human Genome, that one’s fabulous. The Human Genome project itself was a mega million dollar thing from Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Ben Katz:
I’m surprised you didn’t already own that, like humanginoam .com.
Mike Mann:
Well, we don’t know who owns it. I mean, I don’t know if the person typing it in there. Yeah, he doesn’t. The Winder Paul. Hey man, that’s a good one. It’s ready for some retirement money. So Human Genome, 11 million responses.
Mike Mann:
Absolutely fabulous name. It’s worth a ton. Human Genome Project, again, that’s Dennis. If you remember, Ben, I don’t know. He’s like kind of like a rock star from Gaithersburg. See where is, what’s his dude’s name?
Mike Mann:
James Watts. Well, I don’t know. I think a guy named Dennis actually started it, but regardless, that’s a huge idea, the Human Genome Project, where the first people to map all the DNA of the body, the Human Genome, the first people to complete the entire thing.
Mike Mann:
And at that point, it took forever to do a study of one person’s cells, but now they’ve improved it and sped it up, a thousandfold or whatever. So Human Genome is 6 .9 billion letters. So that’s what they did is they had to study 6 .9 billion pair.
Mike Mann:
So here they’re saying it wasn’t properly sequenced. So there’s somebody saying they did it wrong. In any case, this name is absolutely fabulous. I wish I did own it. It’s unfortunate that I don’t. So I don’t even know.
Mike Mann:
I mean, it’s hard to give a price on it. It’s so valuable. But we should think it through. It’ll never lose value because that expression will never go away. .com will never go away. So whatever it’s worth now, it’ll go up in value.
Mike Mann:
It won’t ever go down. So the answer is humangenome .com is worth 200K. Great deal for the buyer. But again, I would take half price for almost anything. So I’d take 100K, but I don’t think I’d take any less because it would be a crappy deal for me.
Mike Mann:
I’d be better off holding onto it and waiting for it to become worth a million. OK, we’re on to something. He also has humangenome project. Well, that one’s too long and it only applies to one people that potentially have a trademark claim against you.
Mike Mann:
So that’s really not worth anything. I mean, it’s worth, let’s just say, $5 ,000. Could be worth $10 ,000. But again, that’s somebody’s trademark. So you might be worth zero, which is why it’s a pretty low.
Mike Mann:
If you can trade on it, it’d be worth more. Again, celebs and personality names, those people can sue you. I regret, so herself. OK, hold on. Let me go in order here. Excuse me. Barley. Did I do it? Barley Green, that’s not worth anything.
Mike Mann:
That’s boring. Ride solo, that one’s pretty good. Let’s try that one. So again, it’s the hard ones that are good to appraise. We’re trying to teach the hard skills. So how are we going to figure out what ride solo is worth?
Mike Mann:
First, we see there’s 364 ,000 results. That’s an excellent thing. We got to think about what it means. It’s related to the ride sharing. I guess if you ride solo, I don’t know if that’s still ride sharing.
Mike Mann:
But ride sharing is obviously a big idea. Riding solo looks like people on bicycles. We’re just going to look real quickly and see if it’s the name of any companies or any URLs. We don’t see anything stand out.
Mike Mann:
So it’s back to the case where it’s an idea, but not a company name. It’s not a very popular idea. It’s not a huge thing. But it is a nice flowing expression in context. In English, it’s short. It’s easy to say.
Mike Mann:
And here’s the important thing. This right here. You see that the people are using it for their brands. Time to ride solo. Ride solo 2020. The game rides solo. So this is important for branding. You’re selling a brand.
Mike Mann:
The domain’s a brand. Image is worth 1 ,000 words. And if we go back to merely the text and not the image, it’s like the word ride solo doesn’t look like much of anything. Because here we are with the text.
Mike Mann:
We can see all this text. It’s some directories on some websites. It’s no proper nouns. There’s no business names. It looks rather boring. But when you look at the images that are worth 1 ,000 words each, then you’re onto something here, which is what the appraisal is about.
Mike Mann:
It’s finding these little intricacies that are overlooked. If you’re better at appraising, then you can control the market and make margin by low and sell high. You can appraise better than everybody else.
Mike Mann:
In this case, you can appraise better because you know what to do here. You take the name, you break it up, put it in quotes. You look at the results here that are okay -ish. You can see it’s a short, easy to spell .com domain.
Mike Mann:
It means something. And the beautiful part here is that people are using it for their brand. It’s RideSolo Artprint. That’s $85 just for one logo. So, I mean just for one poster. So again, the domain itself implicitly has a lot of value.
Mike Mann:
It should say ridesolo .com on there in the bottom right hand corner and they’d sell a lot more. Time to ride solo, ride Illinois, be smart, wash your hands. So that’s the government of Illinois, McLean County, maybe.
Mike Mann:
The game RideSolo, I don’t know if this is a movie or something, documentary. Why wait when you can ride solo? T -shirt, RideSolo, stay safe. So the word ride solo is way cool. There’s a lot of applications to it.
Mike Mann:
A lot of people are into it. And it’s hard to say what it’s worth though. Gotta just think for a second. RideSolo .com, 10K. Congratulations, oop, knockoutco .com. Okay, I’ll do a couple more and then I’m gonna let you guys off the hook.
Mike Mann:
First of all, if anybody has any questions other than asking about domain names. Because you guys have pigeonholed me as the domain name guy. I actually know a lot of stuff about business, best practices, charity, government, I know about the beach, a little bit about vegetarian restaurants.
Mike Mann:
What name am I on? QIZ .com, that’s a good one, I’ll try that one. It’s DNA sequencing you have also. That one’s worth like 30 ,000, I can tell you off the bat. Let’s try QIZ .com. So, let’s find my screen.
Mike Mann:
QIZ always in quotes. Google purposely doesn’t distinguish between capital letters and lowercase. They could if they wanted to, but they want you to click around more and look at a bunch of stuff that you don’t care about.
Mike Mann:
It’s really annoying. I think we did this one before. Did we do this one last time? We did this one last time on any event, the qualifying industrial zones. I think we did because you can see I have a blue, a purple link on this.
Mike Mann:
9 million hits, three letters, sounds really cool. Plus sounds like the word quiz. It has something to do with an Egyptian trade zone. But that’s only one idea. So if they’re not a buyer, first of all, you’re trying to disambiguate it and figure out what does it mean?
Mike Mann:
Then you’re trying to find the depth of the expression to any one given potential buyer and the breadth of the expression. How many potential buyers? How many potential buyers are there? What’s the depth of any particular one?
Mike Mann:
How badly they would need this? The first thing is disambiguating the expression. What does it mean? So in this case, it means qualifying industrial zone. It might mean something cute related to the word quiz, like a quiz, even though it’s spelled differently.
Mike Mann:
It’s still cute and shorter. Three letters is very powerful, easy to remember. So we’ve disambiguated it. It means two potential things. And we need to see the depth. The depth is very deep for this potential buyer and for somebody selling a quiz service.
Mike Mann:
So it has a lot of depth, not a lot of breadth though. There aren’t very many quiz buyers with the wrong spelling. And there’s only one qualifying industrial zone owned by an extremely rich group called the government of Egypt.
Mike Mann:
But again, they might not like .com domain names at all. They might like. whatever, .eg. So the answer is what is it worth? There’s no correct answer. It’s just a matter of guessing. But since I’ve done more appraising and more sales than anybody, my guess stays.
Mike Mann:
And the answer is that this is incredibly valuable, a little bit abstract. It’s worth 100 ,000 bucks. Okay, congrats. You guys have some great domains if you could only sell them. And if I could only have a commission.
Mike Mann:
I got some error typing to Krista. I was saying it’s a dot com, not a dot co. The dot co was a mistake. I’ll just delete it so you don’t get confused. Well, did I miss any domains here? Is there any value?
Mike Mann:
Because we’re running a source help I need to do still for error. Why regret for Honorog? Okay, that’ll probably be it since I already ran over my time unless people want to talk about other stuff. So I’m going to do why regret and source help.
Mike Mann:
Probably regret. It’s a poem. And that’s the name of an article. And it’s a cute short expression. Easy to spell, easy to say, make a good brand name. There’s no reason for it to go down, but it’s not like the super most popular expression either.
Mike Mann:
And plus again, you see down here, there was a why regret hit. So that would be a similar expression, which potentially dilutes it if you only own one of them. Yes, not that great. Why regret, but it does mean something.
Mike Mann:
Let’s see if there’s any branding. Well, there really is a lot of why regret on these memes. That’s for sure. So that’s very good. Here’s some why regret thing here. Probably worth about $3 ,000 for why regret .com.
Mike Mann:
And then here’s the last one. I’m going to do one more. If you guys have any other questions about business or anything you want that’s not about domains, you can ask that in one minute after I do this last appraisal.
Mike Mann:
Oh, there we go, sourcehelp .com. I mean, the answer is it should be help source. It should be more valuable, but source helpful. There you go. There’s a dot org and a dot net. So that makes it valuable.
Mike Mann:
And check that out. It redirects to their Facebook, which means their Internet site’s down. They haven’t posted since 2015. So they’re out of business, but they invested something in the brand. So that implies there’s a little bit of value to it.
Mike Mann:
Open source help desk. PA source help, source help. The answer is that’s worth like $1 ,000. It’s not very valuable. It doesn’t really mean anything. There’s no particular brands or company names called source help.
Mike Mann:
Those help source would probably be pretty valuable, unless I missed something here. You can always do more research, but it’s definitely not worth a lot. So that’s it for the domain appraisals at the moment.
Mike Mann:
While I be voting in the election, I will indeed. Keep in mind that I’m a charity worker. I could never vote for either Trump or Biden. Trump’s done lots of things that are racially insensitive, if not racist.
Mike Mann:
He’s stolen money from his own charity. Done all kinds of crazy stuff. Hydroxychloroquine, on and on. He’s actually done a lot of great stuff too, but I would never vote for him. And again, Biden, I would never vote for any extreme leftist.
Mike Mann:
I wouldn’t vote for somebody with Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t vote for a racist like Biden. I wouldn’t vote for somebody that took bribes like Biden. I would never ever vote for Biden or Trump. So the answer is that I’m going to vote for Mickey Mouse.
Ben Katz:
And that’s gonna be too old to vote for, Mike.
Mike Mann:
This was my own political platform that I tried to start a few years back.
Ben Katz:
Maybe if he commits to only go into one term. What bro? Maybe if he commits to only serving one term. Who? Biden? Mickey Mouse. Oh Mickey Mouse.
Mike Mann:
Thank you. Well, you know, I just, again, it’s like, I mean, Trump technically would be good for me because he kills terrorists that hate Jews. He’s good for the economy. He helps people. He wants to clean up the violence in the inner cities, but I would still never vote for him again for lots and lots of reasons, but so it’s irrelevant.
Mike Mann:
But I appreciate it. Let’s see here. VFX VR animation like gaming’s in around the world or in place of OIC makes sense. I don’t know a lot about that, but I used to have a company called x3o .com, x3o emerging technologies.
Mike Mann:
I actually owned a gaming center in Rockville, Maryland where a bunch of kids played games, then knows the place for sure.
Ben Katz:
Sure do.
Mike Mann:
So, well, we really appreciate everybody joining us. Does anybody have any other questions before we sign off here? Thank you so much, Ben, for joining me.
Ben Katz:
Thanks for having me. I’m gonna do it again. Make no we’ll play music next time. Yeah
Mike Mann:
music next time. I don’t know if I added Ben’s Facebook on here. I’m going to do that. If you guys want to add Ben to Facebook, super smart character and great musician and knows a lot about music and he has tens of thousands of items in this music collection, hundreds of thousands.
Mike Mann:
So let’s see here. Here’s Ben’s Facebook. Cool. Well, thank you guys so much and thank you Ben. We’re going to see you guys next Wednesday at 11am. Same bat channel, same bat time. Thank you so much.
Mike Mann:
Have a nice day.
