MikeMann.com Livestream #7 with best entrepreneurs, Braden Pollock then Mike Bahlitzanakis

Mike Mann:

Good morning. Hopefully I’m live streaming, but so confusing. Get my speakers going. Video is live now. Hello. Mike Mann: here.

Mike Mann:

And I’m going to have Braden Pollock.

Mike Mann:

And Mike Belazanakis just going to set up first and talk to you guys in a second.

Mike Mann:

Hopefully I am live streaming.

Mike Mann:

There we go. Turn that off and turn my volume up so I can hear you. Here we go.

Mike Mann:

Mike Mann: here. And I’m going to have Braden Pollock.

Mike Mann:

You guys see me? Okay.

Mike Mann:

Just going to set up first and talk to you guys in a second.

Mike Mann:

There we go.

Mike Mann:

And.

Braden Pollock:

Hey, Mike.

Mike Mann:

Hey, buddy.

Mike Mann:

He’s logging on.

Braden Pollock:

The calendar you sent me was 820.

Mike Mann:

Oh, I fucked up. I’m sorry. It should have been. I made a mistake. It was supposed to be 811. I’m sorry about that. It’s my fault.

Mike Mann:

Mike’s supposed to be on after you.

Mike Mann:

You’re supposed to be on first.

Braden Pollock:

Okay. You send an 820.

Mike Mann:

I believe it. I fucked up.

Mike Mann:

Sorry about that.

Mike Mann:

I’m, like, so exhausted. But whenever you’re ready, I’ll bullshit fur until you’re ready.

Mike Mann:

Okay?

Mike Mann:

Thank you. Thanks.

Mike Mann:

Okay, so we’re still here live streaming.

Mike Mann:

But unfortunately I messed up and sent.

Mike Mann:

Brayden the wrong time.

Mike Mann:

But Brayden’s going to be here in a few minutes. I don’t know if you guys could hear me when I was on pause or not.

Mike Mann:

We’re still here live streaming, but unfortunately, I messed up and sent Braden the wrong time.

Mike Mann:

But in the meantime, I’m going to.

Mike Mann:

Do some domain name appraisal training. So, that’s part of our broadcast, is domain name appraisal training and then interviewing entrepreneurs and interesting people and friends. We’ve had a lot of great broadcasts. You should go back to the last six broadcasts that were really cool. That’s part of our broadcast, is domain name appraisal training, and then interviewing entrepreneurs and interesting people and friends. We’ve had a lot of great broadcasts. We should go back to the last six broadcasts that were really cool.

Mike Mann:

Still messing with my settings here. Sorry about that. Anyway, Braden’s going to come on in a few minutes, and the meantime, we’re going to do some domain appraisals, and then Mike Belazanakis is going to be on. These guys are super smart domain name Internet entrepreneurs. You should look up their profiles, check them out on LinkedIn and Facebook. And in the meantime, Fred is doing me a favor here and sending me a domain to appraise the smart home. So I’m going to try that out. First, I’m going to share my screen, and then we’re going to do domain appraisal training for being patient with me today. It’s taken me a little longer to set up than usual. Going to appraise the domain thesmarthome.com right now. And then we’re going to add Braden and then Mike. So hopefully you guys can see my screen. The smart home. Now it would be better if it was just smart home, but the smart home is still valuable. Presumably we’re going to see what happens. We got to put it in quotes because Google purposely gives us a bunch of garbage results unless we hone in. Even if we do hone in, it won’t allow us to do case sensitivity. It won’t remove commas and periods in the middle of my search string. So really, Google’s not that great of a search engine. It’s just an advertising site. It’s a good search engine, but they purposely don’t make it targeted and force you to look at a bunch of junk you don’t want to look at. So the point being is there’s a huge opening in the market space for a better quality search engine. So the smart home has a huge number of hits in Google, the best smart home devices. And again, Google’s not giving me exact matches, even though I requested exact matches by putting it in quotes. So we can see that the idea of a smart home is very popular. They’re very expensive if people use them. But having an extra word in there, the makes it a three word expression and just the word smart home would be much better.

Mike Mann:

What we’re trying to do for every.

Mike Mann:

Domain name is disambiguate it. What does it mean? We know what this means. Then we’re going to look at the breadth and the depth of the potential buyers of the buyer landscape. So again, the breadth of potential buyers. I guess any real estate organization, construction organization could be a conceptual buyer. What’s the depth of it? There’s no depth because nobody uses that expression. There’s no logos, slogans, sites, names, brands. And there’s so many other alternatives that people probably wouldn’t spend a lot of money. So there’s a lot of potential buyers, but they wouldn’t pay a lot of money for it because there’s too many alternatives unless they absolutely needed it. But we would have no way to predetermine that and that would be too risky to be presumptuous. So again, we’re going to try to just come up with a fair, rational domain appraisal. If it’s too high, we’ll never sell it if it’s too low. We harmed our own families by not getting enough money. So in any case, the smart home, we see smart home, smart home.

Mike Mann:

Smart home.

Mike Mann:

But without the word the. Again, none of these are actual brands. They’re just ideas. They’re not actual logos and slogans and brand names. So the smart home appraisal we will do right now, the smart home.

Mike Mann:

Say $2,000.

Mike Mann:

It’s really not much action there, even though it’s a big vertical market real estate. Let me just see if Brayden’s waiting for me. There he is. Brayden. Thank you for being so patient with me.

Braden Pollock:

Great.

Mike Mann:

Here’s my buddy Braden, who I made get on early because I told him.

Mike Mann:

It was actually 1120 when I should have told him it was eleven.

Braden Pollock:

Well, it was only the calendar invite you sent me, but when I was signing on, I think I heard you say that the largest, most popular search engine in the world sucked.

Mike Mann:

I didn’t necessarily say it sucked. I just said they’re purposely not making it, perfecting it. They’re lying.

Mike Mann:

They could give you much more targeted results.

Mike Mann:

They could use case sensitivity. They could remove extraneous characters in the middle of your search strings when you’re.

Mike Mann:

Using boolean quotes, they’re purposely just making you search as much as possible and look at as much stuff as possible.

Mike Mann:

To make more money, which is fine.

Mike Mann:

If you’re an investor in their company.

Mike Mann:

But if you’re a researcher, somebody could.

Mike Mann:

Make a better Search engine. Like if you remember when you were a baby, there was this thing called.

Mike Mann:

Northern Light and they actually did do.

Mike Mann:

Case sensitivity and all that stuff, but they got blown out of the water.

Braden Pollock:

I remember northern one. Yeah, but what mean there’s so many other duckduckgo and there’s other engines out there?

Mike Mann:

I’m not sure.

Mike Mann:

I mean, I haven’t studied.

Mike Mann:

Well, duckduck go is like one of the only other ones, but I haven’t studied whether it does. The more details. I think it probably doesn’t really get.

Mike Mann:

Into the extra details.

Braden Pollock:

There’s still Yahoo and ask, well, I.

Mike Mann:

Should use some other ones.

Mike Mann:

But I think again, they don’t have all the extra features. I mean, Google does 90% of the things great.

Mike Mann:

The other 10% of things it doesn’t do.

Mike Mann:

I don’t believe those other engines do either. So there’s room in the marketplace for one category killer that’s just consumer friendly and doesn’t have a bunch of extraneous ads and results. Doesn’t force you to use Boolean all the time.

Braden Pollock:

I think the average person doesn’t do boolean searches. Right. So I would argue that this is probably the most consumer friendly and what you want to do is really not consumer behavior.

Mike Mann:

Yeah.

Braden Pollock:

You know what I mean? And it does allow you to do boolean searches and other kinds of searches that aren’t really consumer related searches. The average person doesn’t.

Mike Mann:

For me, that’s the thing most people it’s perfectly fine for. It’s just that I’m trying to do these really detailed searches all day and.

Mike Mann:

I’m having to comb through a bunch.

Mike Mann:

Of irrelevant results that they could conceptually filter out for me if they accepted my data input.

Mike Mann:

Like again, just case sensitivity, for example.

Braden Pollock:

Right. What’s the need? Right. So how many people are actually trying to do that other than you?

Mike Mann:

Yeah, no, just we human robots. You probably use it a lot.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah, well, yes, but the searches that we do are just not what most people are doing. And so they’re not going to make money catering to us, right?

Mike Mann:

You’re absolutely right.

Braden Pollock:

They’re going to make money catering to people that type in paddleboard or chinese restaurant.

Mike Mann:

But that’s kind of the point is it’s meant to make money.

Mike Mann:

It’s not a charity. It’s not entirely an altruistic event. Even though, again, their slogan is do no evil, one could make an argument that they do some evil.

Braden Pollock:

Yes, you can make the same argument for any large, massive company that does lots and lots of things. But the power of Google is so massive. And I mean the company, I mean, just the search engine, right? What we can do, really, you can go online and find just about anything for free. That’s pretty good, right? People forget the fact that when you turn on your television or the radio or get on Facebook or do a search in Google, all of these are totally free and they need to make money, right? Particularly something like Google, which takes a bazillion dollars a year to maintain and to build. The only thing that they ask in return is look at our ads, right? On tv or radio or Facebook or Google. Just look at our. And to make an argument for them, the publishers, they’re collecting data which everyone is always up in arms about. But the objective in collecting that data is simply to better target ads. And frankly, I want my ads. I know that that’s the deal, right? That I’m going to use Facebook and I’m going to use Google and I’m going to see ads. Fine, okay, I accept that I get all these things for free, but some things there’s other platforms where you can pay the $9 a month and not get subjected to ads. Right. So we do that if we want or we get subjected to ads. But if we’re going to be subjected to ads, I want them targeted. I don’t want to see ads for diapers because I have zero interest in diapers. I want to see ads that are specifically targeted to things that I would be interested in and might buy. It’s a better ad experience. And so the way I see it is Google wants to give me the best possible ad experience because more likely I’ll click on those ads and I want the best possible ad experience. I want to see things that I might be interested in purchasing. Yeah. I mean, if you kind of look at advertising in that perspective and data collection in that perspective, it reframes it a little bit.

Mike Mann:

I know we just went off topic, but. No, I mean, I love Google and I use Google more than probably almost anybody on earth. But I was just making a technical point that they could improve the algorithm if they wanted to, but they don’t want to because they make more money not doing so.

Braden Pollock:

Sure. You can’t blame them for that.

Mike Mann:

Yeah.

Mike Mann:

And so again, like, Amazon.com is another example that it’s unbelievably great, but it.

Mike Mann:

Could still be improved.

Mike Mann:

I mean, there’s a lot of fake goods going on there. There’s a lot of confusion on the pricing and the pricing algorithms. There’s intrusive advertising type stuff. So again, it’s like a great, most profitable system, but that doesn’t mean there’s.

Mike Mann:

Nothing competitor or they could do to improve it.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah, that’s true. I mean, the pricing algorithm works in ways that most people don’t even understand. Right? The price that you get for an item and the price that I am displayed for an item might be different for the same item based on our search and purchase habits. Right. So if you search for something on Amazon and just click one of the top three without doing any research, you might pay more than I would pay if I look through three pages and do some research. Right.

Mike Mann:

I lose on Amazon every time because if you think about my normal days, I buy domain super quickly on ecommerce. Bam, bam, bam, sell, buy domain. I’m jamming. So when I get on Amazon, I’m like. And then you go to my front door and there’s like 600 pounds of peanuts. I’m like, what the hell happened here?

Braden Pollock:

Yeah, and you paid more for those peanuts because you’re not researching, because you make quicker decisions, so therefore they jack up the price. Right.

Mike Mann:

But if you walk into Publix, you’re like, there’s peanuts. That looks like a good sized bag, you’re in good shape. You don’t have to do a lot of a comparison. And I figure the price is fair enough. If everybody else in my neighborhood paid that price for peanuts, I can pay that price well.

Braden Pollock:

And now they don’t have to pay for peanuts because you have 600 pounds you can share with everybody.

Mike Mann:

How’s that?

Braden Pollock:

You just said you get 600 pounds.

Mike Mann:

Well, we’re going out of order here. I needed to introduce you first, so I’ll do that now and then we’ll talk again. So anyway, Brayden Pollock is my friend for a long time. I don’t remember the first time we met. So I’m going to let him think about that. I like to do during this broadcast the first time we met. But I can tell you he’s an awesome entrepreneur. He’s an awesome domainer. He’s also sort of like the mayor of the domainer community. He shows up at all the events. You can count on him being reasonably sober, unlike some of the people, goes on all the panels. He knows everybody. He invests in a lot of the companies. Aside from that, he’s also an investor in other startups, other entrepreneurial startup, VC enterprises as well. The other cool thing is he’s a vegetarian vegan like myself. And he and his wife Lisa Bloom travel all over the world constantly. I live vicariously through them. They post tons of the coolest pictures at all the coolest places in the world. And they always have very interesting vegan dishes to go with all the cool.

Mike Mann:

Places in the world.

Mike Mann:

So it’s really awesome watching them online and in person. I’ve lived on and off in Los Angeles where they live. I’ve actually Braden’s previous house I don’t know about. I’ll ask him in a few minutes about his current house. But his previous house was the coolest place on earth. It was like you drive somewhere up in the Hollywood hills and it’s really this cool old school Hollywood house. And then it overlooks all of LA.

Mike Mann:

It’s the most beautiful place.

Mike Mann:

Got like swimming pool and hot tubs. And Lisa Bloom, his wife there, who’s a really famous attorney, her mother, Gloria Allred is his mother in law, who’s another very famous attorney, if he has anything he wants to mention about. Anyway, you know, following Brayden on social media and in general is a lot of fun. And he knows all the best restaurants. So if I’m ever in LA, it’s.

Mike Mann:

Always something good to eat.

Mike Mann:

And he has unbelievable stories from all over the world and from his family and his domaining, which he’ll have to tell you another time or the next broadcast because could take hours and hours. So, Braden, thanks again for joining me. I really appreciate it. Sorry, I’m bad at scheduling. I used to have an assistant who didn’t really quit. She actually graduated and got a better job in my organization, but she wouldn’t do my assistant work anymore. So I’m very bad with calendars and phone calls. I need another assistant ASAP. If anybody watching this is a very detailed individual and wants to be my assistant. Anyway, Brayden, thanks again. Tell me what’s going on in your life and whatever else and I’ll go on mute.

Braden Pollock:

Well, thanks for that intro. Not sure who you were talking about, but sounds like a cool guy and I’d like to meet him. What do you want me to say about myself that you haven’t already said? I think you did a better job than I did.

Mike Mann:

If you can just step us through the business stages, like where you went to where you’re at currently, and if you could actually touch on how coronavirus affected you, if at all, in your business, in your personal.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah, yeah. Welcome to the COVID age. So I had four offices. I had a lot of staff that was distributed, but we also had four offices, two in LA, one in the Bay area and one in New York. And we closed all those offices. I sent everybody home really early on, in early March, I believe, and everybody was pretty surprised that they got to work from home. But I saw what was coming and I wanted to get out in front of it, so sent everybody home and then shortly after that, closed all the offices and put everything in storage because I think this is going to be a long haul. And here we are in September, mid September, and really there’s no sign of opening back up anytime soon. So I’m glad I closed those offices. I don’t have to deal with landlords and rents, just the offices that people would go into and maintenance everything in storage.

Speaker 4

Everybody’s working.

Mike Mann:

Were they leases that you had set up?

Braden Pollock:

What’s that?

Mike Mann:

Did you have month to month leases?

Braden Pollock:

No, I had leases, but one was once a month. I mean, they’re all a little bit different. One I bought out, one was just a couple of months left, one was already expired. And I was on what’s called a holdover and I was looking for new space. So just a variety of things, and I just had the opportunity to get out of each one of them, and so I took it.

Mike Mann:

That’s good.

Mike Mann:

So you got out of several of the leases and then did these people get some work from home or they.

Mike Mann:

Just lost their jobs?

Braden Pollock:

No, everybody works from home.

Mike Mann:

That’s cool.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah. And I already had a lot of staff that was distributed anyway, so it wasn’t that difficult. I mean, I think the biggest adjustment were just for a few of the staff that they live in small apartments in New York, or they have a bunch of small kids at home or whatever it is. There are a few people don’t really like working from home, but most people love it and they’re thrilled to be working from home, and it’s easier. I’m saving probably $50,000 a month in overhead between all those rents, between rent and parking. Right. You have to pay monthly for parking spots, all the little things that add up. Each office had a copy machine maintenance contract for $135 a month or whatever it is. All of those little charges add up. So there was about 40,000 in a rent and about 10,000 in just miscellaneous. So it’s a significant savings.

Mike Mann:

You did a good job working it out, and I’m not surprised that you pulled it together and predicted it out. I was actually lucky in this case. I was about to sign a lease in Boca, and I have hired a bunch of people here, and I want to hire more people here, and I do want an office still. But I saved myself wasting a year of lease money because nobody would have probably even gone to the office if I had put down the lease. So I lucked out.

Braden Pollock:

Right. And there’s going to be much, much better deals going forward because there’s going to be so much empty space. This is not the time to be in commercial real estate. And I have some commercial real estate, but fortunately, those are factories and offices that are fine. And they’re not in LA. They’re in.

Mike Mann:

LA, too.

Braden Pollock:

I’m sorry.

Mike Mann:

I know you used to own some commercial property in LA that you showed me.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah, I had two office buildings in LA. Well, one in LA, one in Riverside, which is just outside of LA. But I sold those years ago.

Mike Mann:

I see.

Braden Pollock:

Five years ago or something. I’ve got a handful of houses now and then in Idaho, commercial sold. I had a bank of storage units, half a dozen storage units I just sold. And then it was a used car lot. So it’s got a warehouse and a lot. It’s three acres. And then I’ve got a business park with some partners that’s a giant 280,000 office and warehouse space. And all of those tenants are fine. Nobody’s left. Some of them have expanded and taken more space, so that’s good. But I would not want to be in traditional office space, particularly in a big city in Idaho. It’s not in a city, it’s kind of in the outskirts. But I know people that own property. I have a friend that owns 43 strip malls and she’s getting hammered because people aren’t paying rent. So not the time to be in office space and commercial for sure.

Mike Mann:

That industrial warehouse space is in Idaho.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah. Cool.

Mike Mann:

So let’s break down then. The next 18 months, are you going to be spending more time traveling, relaxing, chilling in LA, or more time investing in domains, going to domain conferences or more time on those other businesses that you just talked to me about?

Braden Pollock:

Primarily, I have a couple of projects in the works, some new businesses, and I’m always angel investing. I’ve done a lot of that. As a matter of fact, in my inbox right now, I’m signing another angel investment deal. I’ve done about 30 ish. I’ve been saying 30 for about a year and I’ve done more deals. So I don’t know, it’s give or take a few, but I’ve been spending a lot more time domain investing. I still have a few operating companies that have a staff and of course no more offices, but I don’t run the day to day in any of those companies. So they’re fine. They’re on autopilot. I do meet with them. Each company has a president or general manager. I meet with them once a month or quarterly and kind of go over the books and the general direction of the company. But for the most part, I’m out of the day to day and I spend my time reading decks and looking at new potential deals. I do still buy small companies and roll them up into existing companies that I have. I’ve been doing that for years and I’ve been spending more time in the domain industry with the community, which since COVID I feel like is a little more tight knit now than it used to be. There’s a lot more players, but now we communicate a lot more. There’s a lot more slack channels and Skype groups and discord groups. So there’s a lot more of that because we don’t see each other in person, which has been mean. Look, even you’re doing this right. There’s a lot more of these kinds of things a lot more. Josh. Josh Co has his podcast, which is new this year. Shane just announced today that he’s coming out with a podcast. So we see a lot more of that, including blogs. There’s new blogs because people have more time, and I have more time because I’m not commuting to the office. And it’s less about the commute and more about just people coming in and talking to me.

Mike Mann:

Well, you used to be a non stop traveler, so that cut into your time to sit around.

Braden Pollock:

Yes, we did a lot of international traveling. We would travel two to three months out of the year. Now we’re doing a lot of three day weekends, four day weekends. So, as a matter of fact, we’re leaving this Friday morning and coming back Monday afternoon. It’s my wife’s birthday. So we’re going on a road trip. We rented a camper going to for the first time. So see that we’re going to go to some lakes.

Mike Mann:

Or the other way around. You’re not the Beverly hillbillies, but I don’t know what the reverse of that would be.

Speaker 4

Where you come from.

Mike Mann:

The mansion and you go back to the farm.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah. So we’re actually looking at buying a camper van. So we’ve rented a few to test them out. A campervan is different than a car. Like a car, you look at it, you go drive it around, and then you decide whether or not you like it. But camper van, you got to sleep in it and cook in it. You got to live in it to see if you like it. The configurations are different in each one. So that’s our latest project. Since we think Covid is going to be around for a while, we’re not going to be doing much flying. We figure we can do road trips. So we’ve done a lot of those. So we’ve done some b b’s, and we’ve been doing a lot of camping. So we’re taking the camping to the next level.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, that’s cool. I really want to do that myself. I want to get a really luxurious camper van and cruise around. I just haven’t had the time. And my son’s in school. But it’s exciting. But it turns out that these places are so crowded now because everybody wants to do it. I don’t know much about it, but obviously you want to do your research before you show up at a big, long line somewhere.

Braden Pollock:

Well, yeah. So here’s the trick. All of the public campgrounds are full. There are private campgrounds. They cost a little bit more. So instead of $36 a day, it’ll be $100 a day. But these private campgrounds usually have more amenities. They all have hookups, they all have bathrooms, they all have showers. And since they’re private, they’re kept up a little bit better. And those you can reserve.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, that’s the way to go for sure.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah. So you can get into those. And they’re typically just nicer in general as far as amenities. We’ve done a couple of public campgrounds and there’ll be a group of 20 and they’re partying all night, which is fine, right? I mean, they certainly entitled to do that. They’re nice people, but I want to sleep. And at the private campgrounds you see less of that. So I don’t know why, but that’s what’s happening.

Mike Mann:

That’s interesting.

Mike Mann:

So with respect to the domain shows, they’re all going to be online indefinitely.

Braden Pollock:

Well, not indefinitely, but for the time being, namescon is trying to figure out whether or not they’re going to have a live in person event in Austin in January, I suspect. Mean, even if they feel like they can do it, I don’t think a lot of people will come. I think it’s too soon. Particularly. We may not have a vaccine by then. You know, we might have one at the end of the year, people talking about it. But not many people will be vaccinated. Right. They’ll take a year to vaccinate everybody. And that’s only for the people that will be vaccinated that are willing to be vaccinated. There’s a lot of anti vaxxers out. I don’t, I don’t see getting on a plane and going to an event in January. I don’t see that happening.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, I hear that. In general, I don’t like planes at all. You probably know, that’s why I see people so rarely unless they show up in to. I’ve lived in LA and DC and other places, but unless they happen to be near me, I usually don’t get in a plane. And especially now, I wouldn’t even consider it at hear. But you’re much more adventurous than I am. So I was curious what more adventurous people are doing at the moment.

Braden Pollock:

Camping and road trips. We’re going to a lot of lakes.

Mike Mann:

Very good.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah.

Mike Mann:

And you still have sciencefiction.com set up?

Braden Pollock:

I do.

Mike Mann:

Why don’t you tell us about that and then I’m going to go to Mike in a couple of minutes.

Braden Pollock:

Not a lot to say. I mean, we’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. We publish articles every day about movies and books and Sci-Fi related, including, like, the marvel kind of movies.

Mike Mann:

So a lot of reviews, advertisers.

Braden Pollock:

It’s ad driven. Yeah. So you got to be subjected to ads if you want something for free, I got to pay those writers, so I got to make money somehow.

Mike Mann:

And then another thing you were doing a couple of years back was related to shaving.

Braden Pollock:

So with Luke Webster, we’ve got a company called the grooming network, which is mostly consumables, but we also make straight razors and safety razors. So we manufacture most things. Beard classicshaving.com, which are some of our primary sites. We have straightrazers.com and straightrazer.com. I bought a company a few years ago called Sultra, S-U-L-T-R-A which is hair tools, professional quality, salon quality hair tools. So $150, blow dryers and flat irons.

Mike Mann:

You really have broad inventory. I mean, as far as you’re extraordinarily well diversified. Also, keeping in mind your wife’s a lawyer, most of your income probably relates to that, or a lot of it. So you’re extremely well diversified. Real estate, lawyering, warehouses, domain names, all these small companies.

Braden Pollock:

Got it. Startups. I derive income from a bunch of different sources, and then there’s a lot of them that really fund. So that the income funds the other things that aren’t making money yet. Right. I have companies and have had companies that really don’t make a profit because I put everything back in, and then I make the profit on the exit. So it might flatline for a long time, and then I’ll sell it. And that’s where the money comes from. Right. And that’s where the profit comes from. Yeah.

Mike Mann:

Well, it’s extremely impressive. I mean, I’ve spoken to you about this stuff, but I only knew a little bit. I think I have a better appreciation for your global investment footprint now.

Braden Pollock:

I’m just winging it. Hopefully one day it’ll all work out. And you look like lately, more than anything else, I’ve been buying premium names. Last few years, I’ve been buying the premiumoneword.com, and that’s been pretty good. The costs have gone through the roof over the last few years for sure what it cost me to get them. I mean, I’m paying three times what I was paying just a couple of years ago.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, the sales prices are higher, also.

Braden Pollock:

The sales prices are higher, but the sales prices have not tripled over the last few years, triple.

Mike Mann:

But since they’re already starting out at ten times compared to or plus of the purchase price.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah, but I would say that a name that I would sell a few years ago for 200 250 I can now get 400 for but I’ve paid three times even though I’m only selling it for twice as much. But the dollars are there, right? So it still makes sense. And the premium market, I’ve never seen it go down. Right?

Mike Mann:

Yeah, I mean for me it’s like it’s really hard to sell them but from my perspective I just want to buy all the very best stuff, best.com, even if I can’t sell it. Because the worst case scenario, if I don’t sell my company and don’t sell the domains, I’m going to pass on to my son and my daughter, the world’s best.com collection. So it’s not a bad situation.

Braden Pollock:

Well, they’re definitely appreciating assets for the most part, right? By and large domains are appreciating assets. There’s new gtlds which may or may not appreciate ctsds. There’s so many different niches within the domain investment community and there’s highs and lows and there’s the chinese investment phenomenon with the chips, with the three letter.com, four letter the numbers.

Mike Mann:

I think the issue is improving. The portfolio is just adding more high quality, deleting more low quality. So the average quality of the portfolio goes up and the average value of the best domains in the market space goes up. So you’re just improving your own portfolio. It’d be nice if I could create this huge profit margin, but since I reinvested so quickly, it’s very difficult.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah, well I think your model is different, right. Because you focus on quantity and I don’t want to say quantity over quality, but you’re selling names for maybe a few thousand dollars apiece and I’m focusing on the print. So you have a massive portfolio, right? Your portfolio is literally 100 times the size of my portfolio and you sell names every day. I don’t sell names every day. Yeah, I sell different year, but every time I sell a name it’s three, four, $500,000 each. Right.

Mike Mann:

I’m living vicariously still. I mean I want your life with a few hundred domains. I’m going to switch over to Mike in 1 minute. Do you have anything else exciting going on that you want to mention?

Braden Pollock:

I’m building a new company called Esquirex which will be a freelance marketplace, if you will. It’s a recruiting platform for legal help, legal freelancers.

Mike Mann:

Good.

Braden Pollock:

Which is an interesting thing that does not really exist.

Mike Mann:

It’s growing. With all the lawyers working from home, they might as well be independent contractors at this point.

Braden Pollock:

You would be shocked at how many lawyers are unemployed or underemployed. And particularly, you can get a lawyer that maybe is sitting at home in Kansas and doesn’t makes only $65,000 a year at their regular job. But as a side hustle, they’re happy to make $25 now.

Mike Mann:

Yeah.

Braden Pollock:

Seriously, in the evening. Right.

Mike Mann:

I’m going to talk to you about that. I need to hire some lawyers. Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining me. This was an awesome session and appreciate hearing from you and seeing you. You look great. You haven’t aged since I’ve known you for probably about ten years or more. You look the same.

Braden Pollock:

I’m just trying to keep up with my wife.

Mike Mann:

I know. She’s amazingly youthful and pretty and the best businesswoman, too. Incredible. So you should post anything you want on this wall. Let people research your companies, and anything you want, pictures, whatever you say.

Braden Pollock:

All right, great. Thanks for having me on.

Mike Mann:

Appreciate it, buddy. Talk to you soon.

Braden Pollock:

Bye bye.

Mike Mann:

Okay, I’m going to add my friend Mike Balzanakis. Extraordinarily smart guy. Funny thing about these two guys is they’re similar in their business and domain messages and methodologies. However, their politics are exactly opposite. Braden’s a super left wing Los Angeles liberal, and Mike’s a significant Trump supporter Republican. But otherwise, they’re both great guys and super smart. So I’m adding Mike Belazanakis right now. Mike, how you doing?

Speaker 4

Hi, Mike. How are you?

Mike Mann:

I’m doing great. You look great. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 4

I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Thanks for having me.

Mike Mann:

How’s everything been going there?

Speaker 4

Pretty good. I am going to say, with respect to my political views, I am a fiscal independent conservative, whatever that means. But I will tell you I chose to support Trump not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t really have any other alternatives. I’m more of a libertarian, to be honest with you. I want to be left alone. Don’t tell me what to put into my body. I appreciate my privacy, that sort of thing. And I think ultimately, if you want prosperity to grow around the world through peace, it happens with commerce. And I think this is what’s happening. But ultimately, what ends up happening is that when you take things away and when you create sort of cronyism and crony capitalism in systems. This is what sort of, like, brands capitalism as being the bad thing, the boogeyman sort of thing, and therefore people run to the state to sort of solve their problems. But I’ll leave it at that.

Mike Mann:

No, I hear you. And for me, actually, I agree with the vast majority of your politics, except for I wouldn’t actually vote for Trump because of all the terrible things he’s done. And, you know, I still promote him. I mean, this Middle east piece is fabulous. Amazing to clean up the rioting in the streets. He’s been making a lot of good economic decisions. I’m not really a supporter of this huge relief package, but given that they’re doing it anyway, I think he’s done a good job managing it for the most part. And hopefully the economy will be so good and so stable that it’ll pay for itself in the long run.

Speaker 4

Maybe, right?

Mike Mann:

I’m not really a supporter of it, but regardless, I think the point know, Trump has done a lot of good stuff. I wouldn’t vote for him because of the racial insensitivity and other stuff. I mean, even when I read his book, like probably 30 years ago, he was saying nasty stuff about Merv Griffin. I was like, how could anybody. Griffin, like the old man tv, for Christ’s sake.

Speaker 4

Yeah, he has this tenacity of really hitting personal, having a lot of personal attacks against his competitors and some of his, again, I am not a blanket supporter. I don’t agree with some of his reckless tweets. I almost feel like if you actually google his appearances, say of 30 years ago, 25 years ago, you see a much more calmer, very well spoken individual. And then all of a sudden, it’s almost like as if he’s doing whatever he’s doing to sensationalize and to create this media magnetism to sort of like. So it’s a lot of self promotional.

Mike Mann:

Again, he was a reality tv star. Plus, just over the top.

Speaker 4

The thing I will say is that ignore what he says, but more pay attention to what he actually.

Mike Mann:

Point, because Stephen Minutian is the smartest guy ever and Trump hired him. And Trump may say all sorts of stuff about the economy, and then he goes over to minutiae and says, okay, what are we going to do?

Braden Pollock:

Right? That’s what we’re doing.

Speaker 4

He’s good at finding really smart people. If you ask Trump to, hey, can you perform surgery on a heart patient? He’ll probably say, yeah, but he’ll stop right there and then he’ll find somebody to do the job to perform it. You know what I’m saying? He’s a solution.

Mike Mann:

You and I are used to that in business, people doing that. But again, I’m from DC. And when you’re in DC, you’re supposed to pretend to follow some sort of political correctness. I’m not politically correct.

Speaker 4

I am completely agnostic to anybody who’s in the White House that actually has our best interests in. So, you know, for Obama, I rooted for him. I voted for him once. I didn’t vote for him twice, but I voted for him once. And I basically said, great, let’s move on and let’s create a great country and build from there. Right. So I’m indifferent, really, as far as the politics. I’m not really per se a Republican. People think that I am. I do support the right, but I would be more of a classical liberal, a JFK liberal. I believe in our own personal rights. I believe in the right to our privacy. I don’t like to be involved in any senseless wars, stuff like that. And really, I want to promote commerce. I want to promote prosperity and a free society to do business.

Mike Mann:

I’m not used to all this common sense. I mean, when we turn on tv where you don’t get any of this, maybe you should be running for office.

Mike Mann:

No.

Speaker 4

Well, yeah, far away from it. For me, yeah, I’m too busy with other stuff.

Mike Mann:

But, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I agree again. But just for me, I just won’t actually give him the vote just because I could name a list of things. If he apologize, I might even look at it. But funny part is I post positive stuff about Trump and negative stuff. All I do is just post my version of the truth. If I post something negative, the people think I’m like pro liberal Biden and they go crazy. If I post something positive, they call me a nazi white supremacist. I’m like, I’m a jew. I’ve done charity work my entire life.

Speaker 4

Right.

Mike Mann:

A white supremacist, right?

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Mike Mann:

It’s just so crazy watching. I mean, most people, I let them say what they want, but a couple of people I had to cut off, like the whole white supremacist thing.

Speaker 4

Yeah. You don’t want to be associated with personal attacks. I’m all about having, I love when people just express their views and let’s just debate the facts, let’s talk about the information, and let’s move away from personal attacks. It goes nowhere and you just automatically lose your argument.

Mike Mann:

Well, the interesting part is we see Trump is so aggressive in our minds, but once the election’s over, he’s going to route everybody. It’s going to be crazy.

Speaker 4

Yeah. I don’t know where and how things are going to be right now. Things are really, to me at least, there’s a lot of distortion in the markets in terms of who could potentially win out of this. But studying some of the information we could see, obviously, as you might have read, a victory. Right, for Trump potentially. But then you’re going to be looking at contested results through ballots and all sorts of things. And while that’s happening, you’re going to see a lot of turmoil, potentially, and maybe possibly civil unrest moving towards some of the cities. So people are extremely polarized and divided about their positions and their politics. And I think it’s going to ultimately transcend to the streets. But the thing is, the reason all this is happening is because it’s really the economy, right? So the economy has been faltering for the last couple of years and the government has been trying to support it up to a point. And it just comes to about people having jobs and potentially people not having jobs. So ultimately this instability that’s happening will ultimately just come down to people not participating in the workforce. Hopefully, whoever becomes president, let’s hopefully move forward in a way that the transition ends up becoming peaceful. But I don’t really see that happening.

Mike Mann:

Right.

Mike Mann:

I think you’re probably right. But I think right now, Trump has not restored law and order on purpose because he’s deferring to the cities and trying not to appear to be a dictator, doesn’t want people calling him a dictator, want to take additional risk of things out of control before the.

Speaker 4

Correct, correct.

Mike Mann:

After the election’s over, I’m pretty sure he’s Mr. Law and order. He’s going to shut it down. But I don’t really think it’ll cause more rioting because there’ll be too many police in the streets.

Speaker 4

Right. And again, let’s hope for the best. Right?

Mike Mann:

I mean, presumably there’ll be some more rioting and some more, it’s hard to imagine there won’t be any. But I just think that he didn’t shut it down entirely right now because it’s too harsh and he was concerned about getting reelected.

Speaker 4

Right.

Mike Mann:

And again, just with his harsh rhetoric towards his enemies, he has no reason to really be nice to them after he gets elected because he’s not running again.

Speaker 4

Correct.

Mike Mann:

And we know his personality is he likes to take out his enemies and his competitors. So you have to presume he’s going to knock them off one at a time with that reckless disregard. Know being. So let me back up a little bit. This is my friend Mike Ballizanakis. I’ve known for a while. I don’t get to see him very much, but when I go into LA, we usually chill out a little bit, have a drink and get caught up. I don’t remember the first time we met, but he’ll have to tell me if he remembers. But one thing for sure is that he sold me SEO.com domain name a long time ago, which has been extraordinarily beneficial to me in my business life. So I’m very appreciative of that. Thank you.

Speaker 4

Yep, no problem. So I remember the acquisition story for us when we purchased SEO. It was from a defense contractor, a company by the name of Schwartz Electro Optics. They were based, I believe, in Florida. Yeah. And they were acquired by a much larger entity. Right. At the time, my strategy was to find domain properties that were associated with disenfranchised owners or owners that transitioned to a new business where there wasn’t that much of an emphasis or importance to the actual asset. And the advantage of that for us was that if we can get to the person that makes that powerful decision, we can swoop in and make a good deal. Right. And this was something that we did successfully with Weblog as well. I flew actually to a place in California that was close to LA, called Ontario, I believe. And I purchased was very, it was.

Mike Mann:

Kind of right next to Compton where they’re riding.

Speaker 4

Yeah. And I met up with this korean gentleman that owned it at the time and I swooped in and I purchased that one for a nice good deal. I ultimately ended up developing it and then I’ve exited a small exit from that and ultimately sold it with respect to SEO. It was funny, during the acquisition process, I got in touch with the CFO and I convinced him to sell it to me, but he needed to get the final approval from his board and I was kind of worried about that. And I said, okay, all right, I wonder how much due diligence they’re going to do on this. And I remember he agreed in principle. I put in an escrow.com transaction in place. He agreed in principle. And then as I was pinging him to close the transaction, I didn’t hear back from him. And then ultimately he called me back and he goes to me, and I won’t forget what he said to me. He said to me, so you want to tell me what search engine optimization is all about. That was kind of funny. I said, well, yeah, search engine optimization is basically a practice that enables individuals and small search hackers to figure out ways to high rank websites on sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Okay, well, I spoke to a few people and I think maybe we should revise the price. So at that point I’m like, okay, this is going to be a tough one. So ultimately the price did go up higher. And I said, well, I’ll reluctantly agree to it, but we’re going to have to execute this rather quick. And he ultimately agreed and we moved forward and the rest is history, as they say.

Mike Mann:

Yes.

Mike Mann:

Now it’s actually, you’ve probably watched the company itself, SEO.com, go through these transitions with the economy and with changes in the Google algorithms, because after we bought it from you very quickly, we were able to get a top positioning and get a ton of clients from that. And then they did that upgrade about four years ago, I think, and that reduced our positioning significantly and really changed around the economics of our company. We ended up building a much smaller staff or restructuring our staff. But having said that, now we have a great company and a great staff. It’s relatively small, but it’s bringing in a lot of good contracts and doing a very high quality work. So your domain sees life eternal.

Speaker 4

Yeah, I was happy with the outcome. I think my company at the time, we were happy with it and we moved on into other stuff, but that’s pretty much it with the SEO stuff. And I remember, I think we first met in Delray beach. It might have been Florida or I don’t know if it was, LA was another time, but I believe it might have been Florida.

Mike Mann:

There was a domain conference in Fort Lauderdale some years ago.

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Mike Mann:

We held a little party there at pier 66. You were probably at that party. I met a lot of people there. Well, that’s cool. And I know I’ve seen you a few places. Were you at my place in Santa Monica before?

Speaker 4

I think I might have just dropped in for a little bit. Yeah. And we talked, but I kind of subsided a lot of my domain dealings after, I think, 2010, 2011. I haven’t been involved as much in the space. I do monitor it from time to time. And if there’s a specific type of project that I would love to get into, I would immediately focus on a strategic acquisition to buy a name and then immediately develop it.

Mike Mann:

Sure.

Mike Mann:

Well, why don’t you tell me what not confidential that you’re going to. I mean, again, you have existing assets and things you’ve worked on what are you going to do with those? And then what new stuff might you be doing in the next couple of years?

Speaker 4

Right. So just to give you a little recap, the last two years my primary focus has really been data analytics. I’ve been involved a lot, mostly in doing a lot of search arbitrage between Facebook and Google. I’m sorry, Facebook and Yahoo and other tier one markets going into Yahoo. For know, it seems now that ever since the acquisition, with Verizon taking over Yahoo, Yahoo has become extremely gun ho in arbitrage based revenue generation. In fact, the majority of that money comes from it. Microsoft is just merely now a liquidity provider. As the marketplace has really shifted from the ownership of Yahoo to Microsoft, Microsoft is steadily taking on and increasing its search footprint. Believe it or not, Bing is actually growing. And to touch upon what you said before about search engines, you mentioned something about the Baleen search and the case sensitivity. Believe it or not, all that functionality is available from Google, but it’s just not easily accessible. You kind of have to search for that type of functionality.

Mike Mann:

I mean, the case sensitivity you can’t get at all. And even if, again, if I put a string in quotes, that means I want an exact string in quotes, but Google will deliver me that string and it has a punctuation in the middle, which means it’s not a legitimate string there to fix either of those things.

Speaker 4

Yeah, I’ll send you a document that shows you how to do some really interesting types of searches and meta types of searches. But it is possible. But it’s not really available from a mainstream perspective because obviously, I mean, they.

Mike Mann:

Have a back end API for some stuff. But I’m very interested. I mean, you always come up with the most interesting stuff, so I’d like to see whatever you have for sure.

Speaker 4

Right now I’m working on a hosting product that I’m looking to release. I would say I’m going to try to get this thing out by late Q four to early Q one of next year, I think with the pandemic and the lockdowns, I managed to speak to a lot of really interesting people and it kind of allowed me to really rethink some of the business ideas that I’ve done in the past. I think for me the search space is great. It made a good amount of money, but from a scaling perspective and from a project where you can commoditize and ultimately sell, I think that’s going to prove itself to be very difficult. So I think if you put in the hard work in developing your business ideas and put them on paper, and you ultimately really just hone in, in what you want to offer. I think you’d be surprised what you can accomplish. So this is something that I can’t really talk too much about, but I am working on a really exciting product in the coming months and I will be releasing it very soon.

Mike Mann:

That sounds really cool.

Braden Pollock:

Yeah.

Mike Mann:

What about city.com and some of your other top domain names and sites?

Speaker 4

Yeah, so city was a project that had a small, moderate success at the time. Obviously it has a very disruptive name. We ultimately became a key partner with IAC Interactive Corp. If you go to city grid, I believe, and you see top developers, we’re actually still right there in the know. Our company had one tremendous flaw, and that was we really just depended on one vendor to really just pay us, and that was IAC. IAC was in constant flux and we reached a point where revenues weren’t becoming sustainable. We grew up to a point and then we ultimately sold the company and its assets.

Braden Pollock:

Makes sense.

Mike Mann:

You still hold some great domain names though, right?

Speaker 4

Actually, I’ve been quietly selling, I’ve sold most of my holdings, believe it or not. I believe domain names are great. I believe they’re incredible disruptors to the space. If you have a really good idea, you can make it ten x in terms of exposure and to really introduce yourself. In the past, if you had a great name, you’re looking at 100 x in terms of opportunity. Today, everything is commoditized to the point where you have access to amazing developers, amazing graphic artists, amazing people with great ideas. Right? So if you have something that you can coalesce all these resources together, you could really put something incredibly powerful and people will ultimately find you if you have something of value. Right. If you don’t have something that’s too much of value, but something that are ultimately competing with other people, the domain will help you become a little bit more disruptive. I was in the game where I acquired some great assets throughout the years after the.com bust, and I ultimately held out and I sold a lot of them. Right. But to be honest with you, I think for me, my strength, my core competency is really taking ideas, building them into businesses. And that’s my main thing and that’s my main primary focus at this current state.

Mike Mann:

Very good.

Mike Mann:

With respect to traveling and stuff, are you locked down indefinitely with COVID Have you been getting out and doing anything?

Speaker 4

So my family and I, we did a little road trip to Martha’s Vineyard. We did a few road trips here and there, but nothing insane. Like last year we traveled a little bit to Europe, but this year, unfortunately, we kind of hunkered down. I think we only went away as far as exotic traveling to St. Thomas because that was the only island that was kind of open. And we were there for about a week and we had an amazing time there.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time in St. Thomas.

Mike Mann:

I like it.

Speaker 4

Yeah. And it’s great because when you visit that island, you’re getting actually two islands for the price of. Yeah. Because then you could know. Take a ride over to St. John’s.

Mike Mann:

Yeah, I love St. John. I’ve hiked St. John’s several times. Yeah, big ass hills.

Braden Pollock:

Holy cow.

Mike Mann:

Then these, like, donkeys running out of the woods about to run you.

Speaker 4

We, we went to this one restaurant, which I promised the chef I would write a trip advisor for. The food was amazing. Sorry, it was a steakhouse. But literally the taxi driver said to us, hey, have you been to this place before? I said, no. Well, you’re in for a treat. And the incline was like, no kidding. I felt like the car was going to detach from the road. It was really scary and it was at night.

Mike Mann:

But, yeah, it’s really pretty.

Mike Mann:

I mean, St. John is exceptionally pretty.

Speaker 4

Right?

Mike Mann:

Thomas is really nice. There’s just too many people there sometimes, right?

Speaker 4

Yeah. The beaches are amazing in St. John’s. I mean, I’ve never seen water, like, know I’ve been to other islands, but St. John’s has a special place for me.

Mike Mann:

Yeah.

Mike Mann:

So where I live now in Boca.

Mike Mann:

Is the closest we can do to.

Mike Mann:

That sort know grand Cayman St. John lifestyle, but still be in the mainland with offices and schools. Enough normal american existence. Right? Cool, man.

Mike Mann:

Well, what else do you want to.

Mike Mann:

Tell me before we do domain appraisal training?

Speaker 4

Well, I mean, that’s pretty much it. As I mentioned, I am working on a very stealth project at the moment. I can’t wait to share it with you, hopefully next time. But it’s going to be quite involved and I think it’s going to be an exciting thing for us to hopefully unveil with you.

Mike Mann:

That’s awesome. Well, looking forward to seeing that. And anything you want to tell us on the Facebook wall, you can just put links to any of your articles, assets, your fancy travel, anything you feel comfortable with, just share it. Because in my first live streams, I was doing it. I was posting stuff while we were talking, but it takes too much away from the broadcast and that was too distracting. So now I can do it. You can do it. People can just post stuff after the broadcast and others can go back and look. And keep in mind that these things will be saved on Facebook and YouTube, but there’ll probably be many more viewers in the future than there are live right now. Although having said that, we have a pretty good audience. We have 26 live people at least on one. It’s a little confusing. We have 26 on one. It looks like 24 on another one actions and 26 live viewers. Oh, I see how it works. But in any case, the viewers come and go, so there’s probably been like 100 coming and going total.

Speaker 4

Right.

Mike Mann:

Then it’ll be saved to get on YouTube and get a lot of viewers.

Speaker 4

I’ve been meaning to say this. I had a few people approach me and they said to me, because again, I’m very selective and picky now as far as doing anything with domains now, I don’t really go as much to the shows. If I do go to shows, which is kind of rare now, it’s to see people, right? To see people that haven’t seen in a long time because you develop certain types of friendships. But in any event, so people ask me on occasion, hey, is the main investing right for them? Is it something that they can do and start tomorrow and back in the day when you and I kind of got into the space, I was in high school, actually. No, I apologize. When I got my first job when I was working on Wall street, that’s when I started. But it was still a long time ago. And you’re generation zero. I was generation zero. B but I will say that. But I will say that what I realize is you’re seeing now more and more registrars creating a wedge between the buyer and the seller through convenience of privacy. Right. So you’re going to start seeing a trend of data protection happening with the who is database. Now you can’t even look up. Right. Yeah. So now it’s like you got to send sort of like a Hail Mary communication out to the registrar, hoping that your information will be relayed exactly in accordance to what you said. Oh, I guess he’s not interested. So it just becomes a lot more frustrating and that I feel that it creates a lot of discouragement for people to kind of get into the space. So it forces them to go to marketplaces. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with marketplaces, but it forces people to not be able to get to the lowest common denominator and getting information.

Mike Mann:

I mean, the system is totally rigged. I talk about it all the time. I blog about it. I’ve been writing articles forever. I’ve been to the Department of Justice before.

Speaker 4

You know, it’s funny.

Braden Pollock:

I don’t know.

Speaker 4

If anybody ever said this, but I remember when Bob Parsons started godaddy. He said, we’re building a new kind of registrar, one that fights the big machine. And now the very epitome of that big machine has become even bigger. Right? Obviously, the guy has left into the sunset.

Mike Mann:

The democratic liberals are all, like, riding in the street. Fascists like Animal farm. They get a little bit of power, and look what happens. The cycle repeats itself.

Speaker 4

Yeah, it’s pretty crazy.

Mike Mann:

I’m up for a fight still. The whole thing still needs to be restructured. I mean, it’s too small of a thing for Trump to recognize it, but it’s possible in the second term that somebody working for Trump will see the domain.

Speaker 4

I think Obama was going to hand over the reins of ICANn to an international, and I think he ultimately put a kibosh on it, to be honest.

Mike Mann:

With mean, the CIA has that stuff locked up like crazy.

Mike Mann:

But.

Mike Mann:

Again, these companies are all developed out of DC with their CIA relationships. You have to pay off the senator to get your contract. And that’s how these monopoly contracts for verisign network solutions, ICANN, NTIA, all that stuff exists through Washington, DC Graft and CIA.

Speaker 4

I’ve studied also the telephone system, the phone number system. There’s people making money on carrier termination. I mean, whatever it is that we do on the domain space, right. There’s still that vanity marketplace that exists in telephones, telephone connections and various types of networks. There’s wars between the celex and the IP telephony companies with Newstar. I mean, it’s just incredible.

Mike Mann:

Yeah. I mean, I own a phone company. I’m not an expert on the stuff, even though I. But I see a lot of interesting stuff where people are doing these hacks to get termination profits and spams. I actually know a guy here in Florida who was doing something he probably shouldn’t have been doing, but he was making money on these political spam like.

Mike Mann:

Dialers, which were probably illegal.

Speaker 4

A lot of people have actually, there was a massive indictment about six months ago, I believe, for phone dialers. Yeah, it’s pretty prevalent.

Mike Mann:

Well, thank you so much for enlightening us here. I really appreciate it. You’ve always been a great guy and a smart guy and doing really cool stuff, and your politics is pretty good. You’re not really an extremist. You seem to know what you’re talking about, so I respect that because everybody else is an extremist.

Speaker 4

Like, you know, I advocate for common sense. That’s it. If it makes sense, I don’t care who it is.

Mike Mann:

There isn’t a lot of common sense around. So that makes you in the minority, I guess.

Braden Pollock:

Thank you.

Speaker 4

Thank you. I appreciate that, Mike.

Mike Mann:

I’m a common sense person, too, until I start losing it.

Speaker 4

Absolutely.

Braden Pollock:

Okay.

Mike Mann:

Thank you so much. I’m going to do some appraisal training and I’m going to talk to you real soon.

Speaker 4

All right, take care, Michael. Thank you for having me. Bye bye.

Mike Mann:

Okay. Thanks a lot, guys. Those guests were great. I’m so excited. I had another great set of guests. So I have all these recordings that you guys should watch. Tons of great guests. I’ve had eight shows and I think two guests, most of the shows. So I must have had about 15 guests by now. It’s kind of interesting because I just did this randomly as an experiment and started working pretty well. So I guess I’m just keeping on doing it. My guests are awesome. And this is a cool new thing. Everybody’s stuck at home. We’re not going into the offices and, I don’t know, live streaming is it. So here we are. So I’m going to do some domain name appraisal training. I have a list of names, but if you guys have some, you can do some. We’ll do it for like ten or 15 minutes and I’ll let you guys.

Mike Mann:

Go about your lunch hour. Let’s see my list here. If somebody put something on here. Okay. Nextdayjob.com. I don’t think that has any value. What else do you guys have here for domain names? Exfoliants.com and global deposition.

Mike Mann:

Okay, so we’re going to share my screen. Hopefully you guys can see my screen now.

Mike Mann:

Left over from the last one, I think it was like exfoliants.com, right? Exfoliants.com. Well, exfoliants.com.

Mike Mann:

I forgot exactly what it means, but I know it’s a dictionary word and it’s some kind of product. So first we’re going to figure out what it means.

Mike Mann:

It’s exfoliants. Well, this is great. Great. This is all stuff that’s for sale. Expensive, fancy stuff that’s for sale. It’s the exact word on every single one without any additional words before it or after it. Exfoliants. Exfoliants. Exfoliants. So exfoliants is some kind of scrub or whatever. Some kind of perfume, whatever. It is, but it’s very popular, and that is great. I wouldn’t say it’s easy to spell, but it’s relatively easy to spell. Dictionary, word, one word. And all these huge corporations are building all these cool products surrounding exfoliants. So this is a great domain. So disambiguating it, we know what it means. It’s some cool beauty product that people buy a lot of and use that word. And the breadth is every beauty company in the world. That’s a really good thing. The depth is very deep because it’s spelled perfectly. It means something. If you buy it, you get rid of your competitors in that space to some degree. So the answer is, somebody is deep in the money on exfoliants.com. So what’s the answer here? The answer is it’s worth every cent of $100,000. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take a discount, but it’s worth $100,000. So there you have it. Let me just see this thing. Exfoliants.com.

Mike Mann:

Keep in mind, when I do real.

Mike Mann:

Appraisals, I have an entire system. I have tons of data history and comps and all the software and tools, all sorts of software that my own programmers developed for me. And so I’m doing a much more detailed appraisal than I just did here. This is just using Google. And the reason I’m using this and not my other tools is because this is something that you can do yourself. So I’m trying to train you how to do it. You can’t use my tools because you don’t have my tools. And Google actually does a great job if you go through that process we just went through, if you’re just careful about it, there’s no right answer. You just have to come up with a number, but you do it carefully, thinking it through and looking at how valuable it is to people. So the other thing is, when we do professional appraisals for third parties at our company, accurateappraisals.com, there’s three appraisers. So it’s myself and my tool set. I come up with an appraisal. So in this case, exfoliant is 100k. If Brayden, who was on here before, who’s one of my appraisers, could appraise the same name at, then I can have our third appraiser appraise it at 75k using all of them, making perfect sense, since there’s no right answer. So the right answer, the very best appraisal in the world, is taking three experts and taking the average. And that’s what we do on our site, accurateappraisals.com. So for any domain appraisal, for a really valuable domain, that’s the best way to get it. You have three experts independently appraising it very carefully. You take the average. That’s a fair market price for that domain. Xline iloveprince.com, which is very funny because just because he does love prince and his wife loves prince and they own a salon. And there’s a huge poster of prince that I was in a couple of weeks ago, and they’ve met Prince a bunch of times before he passed away and been to Minnesota before it was riding and burning. So, Jason, you’re a funny guy. So anyway, exfoliants.com is one hundred k. I love prince. Probably not worth anything, but we’re going to look it up just for fun. Jason is going to be one of my guests in a few weeks. Also, he’s been procrastinating.

Mike Mann:

Okay, so here we are back at Google.

Mike Mann:

We have to put this in quotes.

Mike Mann:

I love Prince.

Mike Mann:

I really don’t need to make anything capitalized because Google doesn’t use case sensitivity.

Mike Mann:

Well, here we go. So this actually turned out to have.

Mike Mann:

A lot more action than I thought. Keeping in mind maybe they love another prince. Not just prince, the musician. We know Jason’s talking about the, you know, we know what it means. It means they love the musician, prince. The breadth and the depth. Well, there’s like one or two people in the world that would be crazy enough to really have to have this name. There could be a bunch of people that might kind of want it, but nobody really has to have it because it’s just a cute little thing. It’s not a brand name, it’s not a corporation. It’s not a logo, slogan, or anything of that manner. So it’s a cute thing that somebody might want. But there’s not a lot of breadth.

Mike Mann:

And there’s not a lot of depth.

Mike Mann:

Because, again, it’s just not that valuable. There’s too many alternatives. So although it’s cute and Jason’s a funny dude, the name itself is not worth anything because it’s just a cute little thing. I think I just made a mistake. So iloveprints.com is worth $1,000. Sorry, buddy. Maybe you didn’t think it was worth more. Okay, this is a really good one, Barry. Thank you. On this billion dollar business sector, cloudaccounting.com. Well, Barry, cloud accounting is a good name. And we’re going to appraise it right now. So what does it mean? I mean, the cloud is a huge new commercial idea. All of the Internet is being done over the cloud. It used to be called hosted, now it’s called the cloud. There’s interchangeable different words. It’s called colocation, where you locate your machines with Internet providers, and it’s effectively the cloud. It’s somewhere out there where all your data is hosted. So in any event, the idea of the cloud is very strong at the moment. And I guess you can do accounting in the cloud. So we’re about to find that out if you can do accounting in the cloud. So right off the bat, you can.

Mike Mann:

Look down here again.

Mike Mann:

We’re looking for logos, slogans, proper names, capital letters, to see if these are actually company names, something that somebody really needs. So first we’re going to disambiguate it. It means sort of modern accounting over the Internet, less traditional accounting. So it’s an equivalent to saying modern accounting in some respects. And then we’ve disambiguated it. We know what it means. The depth and the breadth. The breadth first. Well, the breadth is actually pretty good. I mean, I would say any accounting company that’s wanting to diversify could leverage this name and they’d be smart doing so. So then there’s the depth. These are accounting companies, they’re rich. And if one of them decides they really need to use it in their business, there’s a good amount of depth. They need it. And it’s just a very explicit word. There’s probably other ways of saying it, but this is a great way of saying it. I mean, you could say cloud bookkeeping, cloud finances, but cloud accounting, I mean, accounting is a huge explicit industry called accounting. Cloud is a huge new area. They go together nicely. Easy to spell, a little bit too long, which is a negative, dilutes it. But again, if we look here, cloud.

Mike Mann:

Accounting, cloud clouding, and it really looks.

Mike Mann:

Like it’s software and not accounting firm. So cloud accounting software, you can even see right here, cloud accounting software. There’s cloud accounting versus desktop accounting. So there you go. It’s a whole new line of business. So it’s an absolutely great domain name. It’s hard to appraise any domain name, including this one, but we have to do it anyway to keep moving. So the issue is, what am I going to do it for? It’s a big area, say $40,000. Again, I sell all these at a discount. That’s what it’s worth. But I would probably sell it for 25. I don’t think I’d sell it for 20. That wouldn’t be fair. It’d be too cheap. Okay. Guys are awesome. See what other good names are sitting here. We’ll do two or three more and move on down the line. Amon blue tapes. Thinking that’s not worth anything because I don’t know what it means. Global deposition, Highland resort. I might check out those in a second. Let’s see if I’m missing any from the other interface. Yourbud.com. I’m going to try that one from Elias. Okay. Yourbud.com. That’s a double entendre. Your bud, like your buddy. He’s your bud. Or your bud, like your weed. We’ll see. Which picture is it going to pull up? My buddy or my weed? It’s my weed. What the hell do you know about that? Holy shit. Is that what weed looks like? Whoa. I didn’t know they did that. What do you know? You get old and weeds changed. Well, maybe when I’m 100 years old, I can try it. It’ll be too late for it to matter. Damn, this is some trippy stuff. Look at that thing. That is crazy. How to make your bud purple. Well, what do you know about that? So it’s not your buddy. There’s exactly zero references to your buddy, which is what I thought it was. Oh, your bud. Your bud wiser. What the hell? These people are very serious. Well, it’s basically related to marijuana, so I would discount. Well, okay. So first of all, we’re going to disambiguate it. What does it mean? It means two different things. Three different things. Your buddy, your marijuana bud, and your budweiser. The only one that has any relevance here is your marijuana bud because that’s 100% of the results, almost. So disambiguating it, we know what it means here. And then the breadth is, I guess, any marijuana dealer, which apparently there’s a lot of in the current environment. And then the depth, I would say the depth is not very good because there’s too many other interesting words you could say. This isn’t, like the most explicit expression ever. It means something. It’s short. It’s easy. It’s easy to spell. But these people are talking about this idea of your bud, but it’s not a brand name. It’s not a logo. It’s not a slogan. It’s not the name of any company, and it’s probably not ever going to be the name of any company. So it would just be maybe a cute website or blog or something. I doubt it’ll be the name of a corporation and so there’s not going to be any demand for it at all. The other thing is anything related to drugs or pornography I would massively discount right off the bat just to get it out of my collection. Usually I wouldn’t buy it at all, but if I were to buy it or if it was in my collection, I would try to get rid of it quickly by discounting it. So there you have the logic here. And now we have to appraise it. Actually, where did I go? I think here we are. Okay, so your bud is a pretty good domain. It’s not good enough. It dollars 4000. Okay guys, you’re awesome. Hopefully nobody gets upset about my free appraisals. Keep in mind, I’m not trying to appraise your domains. I don’t want to give you free appraisals. I want you to pay for your appraisals. But I am trying to train you for free so you can appraise your own domains and appraise your friends domains. So if you watch all of my videos, this is video number eight where I’ve done domain appraisal training. You could learn to be an amateur domain appraiser just by watching these things. Maybe not be great, but there aren’t very many good people in the entire. So. Okay, so we have Kevin Lee Croft is asking about visit frankfurt.com. Check that guy out. We’ll do a couple more after that and sign off since I’m a half hour late. Okay, visit Frankfurt. So again, I think we know what that means. But keep in mind, Frankfurt is in Germany, so it should be visit Frankfurt de. That’s the first thing I would look at is visit Frankfurt de. I just opened that in another tab. You guys can’t see it, so there’s nothing there but a landing page. So it has that negativity. So again, here we are.

Mike Mann:

I think you can see this share page.

Mike Mann:

Visit Frankfurt. Frankfurt’s a town in Germany. Probably a beautiful place to visit, but it’s in English and this is a city in Germany. Secondly, there’s a ton of ways you could say this. Go to Frankfurt, play in Frankfurt, vacation in Frankfurt. Frankfurtvacations.com. You could say it in German. However that would be said, there’s too many other options. You could also say german company doesn’t want a. That’s not really true, but they would want it. But at a certain price they wouldn’t want it. At as high of a price as an american. So disambiguate. We know what it means. You’re visiting the city in Germany. It’s a cool city. Probably has Oktoberfests, a lot of beer. Although I might be exaggerating. There’s some cute buildings, but it looks kind of boring. I don’t see any beer or parties. Just looks like boring. And boring. Pretty yet boring. Well, regardless of that part, the question is, what’s the thing worth? So the breadth is tiny. Tiny because it would only be a tourist related agency in this tiny town in Germany. And the depth is pretty tiny because there’s too many different ways of saying it. So it’s not very valuable. So visit Frankfurt regardless of that part. Sorry. Visit frankfurt.com is worth very little. 1000. Great. I’ll do two more and then let you guys off the hook. If you have any other questions about non related domain stuff, let me know. Sooner or the better. Theboring.com. That doesn’t sound very exciting. It sounds kind of boring. Let me look what else you guys put in here. Okay. Cavos. I have store price cherished. Okay, I’m going to do cavos and then cherished and I’ll be done. Save that one for my next search so I don’t forget it. Okay, so here we are. Cavos is a geography. It’s a vacation spot. So again, we’re disambiguating it. What in the world is Cavos? It’s a hotel. It’s a vacation spot. It’s in Greece. It’s on a greek island. People party there. They spend money there. It’s a small place. They might spend a lot of money, but there aren’t a lot of people. It’s very far away. It’s not in America. This is, Cavos.com is the global standard. So it makes a lot of sense. But again, they’re in Greece. So be Cavos Gr, which I’ll check and see if there’s a site there. Hello world. I wouldn’t call that a. So cavos also looks like it might be people’s last name. A hotel looks like kind of a crappy hotel, pretty pool, crappy neighborhood, crappy island. And it’s a really great name because it’s so short and it does actually mean something. There is commerce here. People are spending millions of dollars a day here. Cavos hotel. It’s kind of cool. I wouldn’t mind a vacation there. Hopefully I’ll get the vip suite. So here’s cavos. Back into the traditional Google result, there’s 10 million hits, which is a good sign. There’s stuff in YouTube, there’s families, reviews, vacations. So disambiguating it, it’s a travel related domain name explicitly for this island neighborhood in Greece. Then there’s the breadth of it. How many people might want that? Only travel related people related to that little island. What’s the depth? Depth is actually very deep because it’s the exact name of the place and it’s very short. So somebody who wants it might want it a lot. There aren’t a lot of people that would want it, but of those who would want it, they would want it a lot. So we have to appraise it.

Mike Mann:

It’s a really good name.

Mike Mann:

And again, this could be, it’s a small travel island, but maybe in five or ten years they’ll build some huge resorts and some cruise ships and be really valuable. It’s not going to go down in value, whatever the case may be. So cavos.com is good at 30k, but take 20, call it a day. Okay, last one, cherished.com. So I think we know what that means. That’s disambiguating. And then here’s a little list from Google to help tell us the top searches related to it. Teddy’s, that’s a product, maybe a proper noun, a logo brand. Cherished. Teddy’s again, cherished memories. So it looks like this teddy bear thing is a big part of cherished. We’ll find out in a second. But again, it’s a really great dictionary word. It’s very nice. The word cherished, it has a positive meaning. So positive words are worth more than negative words. So I need to use boolean and remove the word cherished because it’s cluttering my results still see cherished with a tremendous number. Here’s back to cherished here. So we know what it means. The breadth is anybody could kind of use it for any product if they wanted to. It would be good for a new product line because you could apply it to almost anything. So that’s a good news. It’s in the dictionary. It’s easy to spell and say, but cherish would be worth ten times as much. For example, again, then I guess you could say cherishing. Other things related to cherish, maybe. So the breadth could be anybody could use it. The depth is nobody actually needs it except for some people might need it because it looks like some people are already using it for their brand name, their Logan logo slogan, whatever. These dudes right here are using it. We’ll check them out. Cherish people, cherish life and wellness. Here we go. So cherished bride. So this is great. Cherished birth, cherished. Okay. So there’s tons and tons of people using the word cherish so we know what it means. It’s easy to say, easy to spell. It’s being used by a ton of companies, this one being the most popular one. Cherish teddies. Those guys are the most likely buyer for this, but counting on them to buy it would be foolish. I mean they’re the best buyer, but there’s still only a minority percent chance that they actually would convert. Anyway, you’d have to meet them, they’d have to like the price. They’d have to understand domains, not feel that they’re being ripped off, not want to sue you and agree to the details. So even if you have the perfect name for them, it doesn’t mean you’re going to sell it to them. You probably will not sell it to them, but you still have a chance of selling it to them and a chance of selling it to all these other people. Cherished candies. Cherish this, cherish that. Again, the more we scroll, the more excellent it looks. Cherished wives. It covers 20 or 30 different service areas that have no relation to each other. So again, we know what it means. The breadth is any company and we can see at least 100 already using it in commerce. And the depth is, it’s really killer and it’s a dictionary word so I would make the buyer pay up. 40,000.

Braden Pollock:

Cool.

Mike Mann:

You guys are awesome. Does anybody have any non domain or other items or questions before we sign off here? Okay, good.

Mike Mann:

Thank you so much. And thanks again to my guests, Braden Pollock: and Mike Belazanakis.

Mike Mann:

Those are some awesome guys. My buddies, super smart businessmen and they’re very welcoming to talk to. Probably add them all on social media and ping them if there’s something relevant. So thanks again to them. Thank you all for joining me and helping me with the domain appraisals. I look forward to seeing you all online. We have two more great guests next week and the week after. So I look forward to seeing you here. Invite your friends and we’ll see you all soon. Thank you so much.