Thoughts

Andrew Miller

August 20, 2023

Exciting Transactions at Hilco Digital Assets

This week was another exciting one for us at Hilco Digital Assets, as we oversaw two valuable domain name transactions. The first was Lava.com, a phenomenal brandable domain, and the second a category-killer domain name that I will be able to discuss more freely next week. A few high-level thoughts: this is now our 8th major deal in the last few months, and of those, seven are category domains including Football.com, Legal.com, Sweepstakes.com, Networth.com, Chocolate.com, and Chat.com.

In 2021, during the high valuation, bubbly venture capital climate, exact match domains were hot and category domains quieter. I posted several times that I expected that cycle to turn towards category-killer domains, and it certainly has. I was very encouraged to have a world-class brandable domain get acquired this week (Lava). I am expecting a very good rest of the year for the most premium one-word brandable, exact match, and category domain name assets. For all of our domains, visit here.

Client Appreciation and the Art of Domain Negotiation

It was nice to get a text message on Friday from a domain name owner that I just sold a domain for, that said, “Thanks for all your hard work. I have never seen an advisor so on top of communication like you. It is no coincidence that you are as successful as you are at this. You’re not a talker, you are a doer, plain and simple.” Why am I sharing this? To stroke my ego? No! I am sharing it because as I repeatedly say, premium domain names are amongst the best-performing assets from an ROI standpoint.

But selling domain names is tricky; the market is illiquid, negotiations are art over science and can be fragile. We work so hard on every domain we represent. My network and Hilco’s is as strong as you can possibly get. It helps a lot in negotiations that I was a 2x founder of operating companies built on category premium domains (CreditCards.com and InsuranceQuotes.com), both successful exits, and have been an investor in many more. Most importantly, I know our strategy works, but sometimes these deals take a lot of time to materialize after we have planted so many seeds. As I say, if I am your jockey, let me ride the horse until we win. For that to happen, communication and transparency are so key.

All articles