To start our series of interviews, with domain investor experts, we were extremely lucky. Our first interview is with none other than Mike Mann!
How Mike Mann started? Mann, who’s 45 and lives in Delaware, joined the dot-com land grab relatively early, in the late 1990s. He had founded an ISP called Internet Interstate, but one day in 1998, much to his surprise, he got a $25,000 offer for a domain he owned, Menus.com. The following day he got a $50,000 offer.
He built up a business called BuyDomains that in 2005 he sold to Boston-based Highland Capital for about $80 million. That business is now called NameMedia, and it’s going strong. How about Phone.com, SEO.com, Software.com, DomainMarket.com, PRMarketing.com, PurePPC.com, and over 300 000 other domain names!?
Besides being a successful entrepreneur, Mann is an author of Make Millions and Make Change! a book focused on making money in small businesses so we can better serve society.
Mann was also granted a patent for system and method for generating domain names and facilitating registration and transfer of the same which was also later sold to Name Media. Although he registers 300 domains daily, he is not strange to registering 14,962 in a single day!
Having earned such an amount of money during the years, Mike’s big heart lead the way towards charity and philanthropy – Mike Mann – Charities
Mike, can you tell our readers what was the first domain name you registered?
First domain that I remember registering was intr.net.
What was the first domain you sold?
That would be menus.com.
What was the biggest sale you made?
sex.com.
How big is your domain portfolio?
300000 domain names like seo.com, software.com, phone.com, DomainMarket.com, PRMarketing.com, PurePPC.com.
Which .com is your favorite?
MikeMann.com, Obey.com, Tasty.com.
What is the oldest domain you currently own?
Congressional.com (Domain created on 07-Jan-1998).
How and why you got into domaining industry?
Sold menus.com for 25K and decided it was a good idea to invest more.
What excites you most in domaining?
Getting paid for charity.
How does your typical day look like, and what are you currently working on?
Domains and deals and charity, see www.mikemann.com.
Where do you see the industry going? What does your crystal ball tell you? 🙂
.com is king, people will be disappointed with all other TLDs.
Which new gTLD has the most potential?
.co
Anything you wish to add, promote, explain?
My team is successfully changing the world for the benefit of the sick, poor and repressed. Join us www.prohr.com/executives
Do you have a particular person in mind we should interview? Let us know via some of the social networks.
Which domains is Mike Mann selling in 2021?
In case you were wondering if Mike Mann is still buying and selling domain names in 2021 and domaining really hard? You need not look further than his Facebook account! He is still buying .com domains left and right!
Mike Mann’s list of domains can show you what kind of domains have the potential to sell. But it doesn’t explain the strategy. Most of these domains were registered more than 10 years ago. So we don’t really know if they were hand-regged back then, or if they were purchased recently in an attempt to flip.
A whois request will show us when the domain name was registered, but it will also show us the domain registrar. Since these domains are registered with different registrars, it’s difficult to assume what exactly happened.
Caption on that last picture should say “Welcome to the world of Mike Mann”.
Thanks Domagoj for a great suggestion!