Interviews

Gumroad is a pretty cool e-commerce platform that also helps build an audience. As the website itself states, “Gumroad is for independent writers, designers, software developers, musicians, artists, teachers, filmmakers, and anyone in-between. Whether you sell digital goods or physical goods, you can use Gumroad. Simply put, if you make stuff for people to buy — Gumroad is for you.”

Gumroad founder, Sahil Lavingia, took time out of his schedule to answer my questions.

Mike: Where did the idea for Gumroad come from?

Sahil: Quite simply: I wanted to sell an icon I had designed in PhotoShop. For just a buck, to just my audience. I looked around and couldn’t find an easy way to do that. There were huge marketplaces and things, but I just wanted a link. So I built Gumroad.

Mike: Prior to launching Gumroad, you worked at Pintrest. What was it like to be an early employee there and did you learn lessons that you could apply at Gumroad?

Sahil: It was great! I learned a lot, shipped a lot of product, and got a ton of feedback. I also learned about being an early employee–what I wanted from the company I worked for–so that when I started growing Gumroad, I had that perspective.

Mike: Your Linkedin Profile states that Gumroad has “…put more than $77,000,000 in the pockets of musicians, artists, writers, and more.” Amazing! How does that feel to be responsible for this?

Sahil: We should update that! It’s over $175,000,000 now! It feels great. But there’s a lot of work to do! I’m hopeful we can get to that first B in the next 3-4 years.

Mike: I’m a domainer at heart. I was pleased to see you own your own name as a domain at sahillavingia.com. What is your philosophy on owning your own name? Should everyone attempt to do that? What can we expect from your musings when subscribing?

Sahil: Yes! It was a little easier with my relatively unique name. It just keeps things simple. Instead of having to invent a brand, it’s just my name. Easy! With my newsletter, I want to share thoughts about the creative process. As I write, paint, and of course ship software–the differences and similarities and how they all interconnect for me.

Mike: At the time, when you launched Gumroad, how did you promote it and enable the business to gain some traction? That seems like a difficult task.

Sahi: Honestly, a lot of cold emails. Just finding people already selling stuff in a janky way, or people with audiences that weren’t selling stuff yet–and letting them know Gumroad existed now. That is really it. A lot of that.

Over time, people started to know what Gumroad was and it became easier. But I still do that today!

Mike: I imagine the are some top sellers using Gumroad. People that really rake in the sales. I won’t ask you to reveal numbers, but can you tell us about any of these top sellers?

Sahil: Yes, we have creators that are multi-millionaires off their Gumroad sales. Just last month someone made almost $900,000–in a single month!

It’s all about building an audience that trusts you. It has to have a significant size, sure, but it’s more important to prime them for your upcoming launch.

There are no hacks or secrets. It’s a lot of time, hard work, and giving away your learnings as you grow–so that you have a dedicated audience when you’re ready to sell your product.

Mike: It’s one thing to start a company as a founder, but quite another to run a successful company as CEO. Was it a natural transition for you? What challenges or lessons can you share?

Sahil: It’s not too different. The focus is still the same: ship a great product. Build a great team.

It’s easier if anything, because now we have thousands of creators telling us what we need to build, and a lot of data to learn from.

Mike: Are there any changes or evolutions in the internet or technology that you are anticipating and will need to adapt to for long term success?

Sahil: Honestly, no. I am just constantly iterating on Gumroad. Not trying to scope out some grand future, but betting on the obvious stuff: more mobile usage, for example. But really we’re a nimble startup, so we can react to change pretty quick.

Mike: Where did the name “Gumroad” come from and does it have any meaning?

Sahil: My mom 🙂 – I like names that take two words and combine them. It makes it easier to remember and spell, in my opinion. So…yeah. Nothing too deep!

Mike: What is one book that you have read that has impacted you and you would recommend to others? Why?

Sahil: The Golden Compass is my favorite book of all time. That whole series made a pretty profound impact on me, I think.

I won’t recommend non-fiction, because everyone already does that 🙂 – read more fiction!

Dana Khomyak is living in Sweden and creating the biggest event streams aggregator in the world. She is co-founder of Events Terminal and is passionate about making information and education accessible globally.

Mike: What is the goal of EventsTerminal.com and how are you toward achieving that goal?

Dana: Before developing Events Terminal, we (Co-Founders of ET) organized business events. Indeed, thanks to this experience we’ve seen what problems events organizers and events visitors have. One of the most boiling was that it’s hard to visit an event that is in another city or even country.  Therefore, we created a marketplace for knowledge-sharing events streams and records, so people wherever they are based will be able to watch and learn. A couple of months ago we successfully launched our website eventsterminal.com and within a few days had 250+ users from 40+ countries.

Mike: How did you come up with the name for the company?

Dana: Honestly, it wasn’t that quick and easy to find a good company name. We spent a few weeks discussing different options before choosing Events Terminal. Thinking about a name, I knew that it should be somehow connected with events. Later I saw in the internet word “Terminal” and thought it should be a good match for us as terminal is a machine where you can buy a ticket. You also can buy tickets to events on Events Terminal. After discussing this option with another co-founder, we agreed on Events Terminal, that’s it.

Mike: The company has been up and running for about a year, what challenges and success have you faced?

Dana: When you’re a startup, challenges are with you all the time. And if you can’t make challenges your friend, you will lose. Since we founded the startup, we have faced  challenges literally everyday: finding a team, working remotely, building a prototype, building a website, finding your first customers and hundreds more. We like challenges (we don’t call it problems) because overcoming it we become wiser, smarter and stronger. If you don’t like it, I suppose building a company will be a really tough thing for you.

Mike: You were a project manager intern at a startup accelerator. What lessons did you learn there?

Dana: Startup Depot is rather a business incubator and I had an opportunity to have an internship there. It was one of my first working experiences and I learnt a lot of good staff there – starting from work with the MS Excel ending learning how to be a team member, now I see it was a really good push for my further career.

Mike: Events Terminal appears to be backed by Think Accelerate. Explain what it means to work with an accelerator and your experience thus far.

Dana: Last autumn (’18) we’ve got an opportunity that I won’t lie if say we’ll be grateful for the rest of our lives. We were accepted into one of the best Swedish Accelerators – Think Accelerate. Think team provided our team with an office, great mentors, advice and an environment where we could develop our startup quickly. During this program we’ve finally launched our website, established cooperation with Swedish organizations and gained traction. Such an amazing time, people and priceless experience.

Mike: Are there any books that have inspired you or shaped your style that you would recommend to us?

Dana: I like how books can make us think from a different perspective, change our mind, feelings or even actions. I’d recommend you to read “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain, it will make you appreciate and love yourself the way you are more. Also, all we know that a lot of women nowadays have different working conditions, salaries for the same job and attitude comparing to men, read Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” to know why it’s not just a stereotype, how to overcome it and become a real professional having a work-life balance.

Cybele Negris is CEO & Co-Founder of Webnames.ca, Canada’s original .CA Registrar and accredited registrar for hundreds of domain extensions as well as provider of webhosting, email and web development and many other services. The multi-million-dollar company has an impressive client list including many Fortune 500 companies. Webnames.ca’s Corporate Services division specializes in premium concierge service for medium to large businesses and organizations with large domain portfolios requiring specialized tools and security.

Cybele is a hall of fame inductee and four-time winner of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful women in Canada amongst many other awards. She is a serial entrepreneur having successfully started and exited multiple companies. She’s a seasoned board member serving on the board of the Royal Canadian Mint and numerous other boards. She’s a mentor, columnist and speaker at over two dozen events each year including TEDx.

Mike: Tell me a little more about Webnames.ca. What makes it special?

Cybele: Webnames is Canada’s original domain registrar. We started as a spin-off of the .CA Registry founded in 1987 by my business partner John Demco. He ran the .CA Registry as a public service for thirteen years, free of charge, and has been recognized as one of the pioneers of the Canadian Internet. Webnames.ca was incorporated in 2000 and the .CA registry was sold and transitioned to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). What continues to distinguish us today is our deep expertise in corporate domain management, which comprises a large part of our business, and our exceptional customer support. Now, I realize that a lot of registrars have good support and can quantify it as we do with great response times and customer satisfaction ratings, but it runs deeper than that. Our approach has always been to do more – we support customers above and beyond the use of our products. This might be a website update for a retail customer who is struggling with their CMS, a late-night DNS change for a Corporate client, or the development of a new domain management feature for a reseller. In turn, we’re fortunate to have loyal customers, many who have been with us for ten, fifteen, or more years. We also have an incredible team that our customers know and trust. A majority of our staff have been with us for more than five years, and a third of our staff for more than ten. We have no weak links, everyone is truly an expert at what they do, and there is an incredible amount of knowledge transfer that goes on.

Mike: How and when did you become interested in domain names?

Cybele: I met John Demco the founder of .CA in 1999 as I was doing some consulting work at the University of British Columbia after I exited another company. He had been running the .CA Registry with about 100,000 domains under management. It was time to move from a volunteer effort. I was fascinated by what I had heard from John. I visited his office and saw the piles of documentation used to verify an individual or corporate entity’s entitlement to a .CA domain. Back then an individual would register yourname.vancouver.bc.ca or yourname.toronto.on.ca. A provincially incorporated entity in Alberta for example would register companyname.ab.ca. To register companyname.ca a corporate entity had to be federally incorporated or provincially incorporate in more than one province. We worked with the technology transfer manager at UBC, brought on developers to build the first generation website to take orders, hired a small team of students to help with support and subsequently sold and transitioned the Registry operations to CIRA. As we transitioned the Registry, we were having so much fun working together that we decided to become one of the accredited registrars under CIRA. We grew from 4 to 30 people in 4 months and by capturing pent up demand under CIRA’s newly liberalized rules to allow anyone to register yourname.ca, we were able to generate multiple millions in revenue in year one to fund future operations and growth. The domain industry has continued to explode over the last 19 years I’ve been involved. Today, Webnames offers over 600 different domain extensions and I still love what I do!

Mike: Do you personally own any domain names?

Cybele: I don’t have a massive portfolio but I do have some. Most are .CA or .COM but also some .TEL and new gTLDs.

Mike: What is it like running a registrar? What are some things the average domainer may not know about the position you hold?

Cybele: It is way more complicated than one would imagine. We spend a lot of resources and effort on security, systems improvements and new product innovation. We are constantly trying to excel at what we do rather than become complacent. We have to deal with issues around compliance with ICANN, individual registries and their rules, privacy rules across various countries, compliance around data storage, taxation of individual provinces and different countries, anti-spam legislation across various countries and much more. We often get dragged into disputes where a complainant wants us to take down a website due to its content, sometimes where it is objectionable but not against the law or fraudulent in nature. We also have to deal with fraud, DDoS attacks, and other nefarious activity. We must navigate the complexities of systems that serve customers with one domain name or hosting account as well as domainers, resellers or Fortune 500 companies with thousands to tens of thousands of domains.

As a woman leading a technology company, I have many opportunities to speak to media and to entrepreneurial groups. Having a phenomenal team internally allows me to spend a significant amount of time giving back to the community serving on government boards, in economic development activities or non-for-profit initiatives such as raising money for early cancer detection. I have also been involved in numerous mentorship activities such as advising on the creation of MentorshipBC or acting as a mentor through the Women’s Executive Network for 7 years.

Mike: What is your prediction of the future of domain names… let’s say, 10 years from now.

Cybele: I think domains will continue to be relevant for some time to come, despite the growth of apps and self-contained online ecosystems. With the growing distrust of walled gardens like Facebook and Instagram, the need for independent websites, and therefore domains, is not going to go anywhere. Over the next few years, the remaining gTLDs from round one will launch some with more fanfare than others as has been the case over the last few years. Adoption of these less recognizable extensions will continue to grow, albeit slowly. Some will fail to survive, and we will see further consolidation in the industry with successful registries buying up the less successful ones. I do think there will be a round two launch of gTLDs but that will be a few years out given the policy work that needs to be done by ICANN working groups/subcommittees, approvals by the board, publication of a new applicant guidebook, public comment periods, and revisions.

I also think domain aftermarket will only become more important every year. We’re seeing that now. Business people have learned the value of a great domain and its importance to branding and digital marketing. More people are recognizing that it makes sense to purchase the best domain you can get for your business, if you’re in a position to do so. The trend in aftermarket will continue to value short or one-word .COMs highly but premiums in other extensions will continue to gain popularity. The continued growth of IoT and smart cities may drive the further domain name growth as all things in a home become connected to the internet.

Mike: When is a .ca name better than a dot com or any other TLD?

Cybele: If you’re a Canadian that’s targeting Canadians or doing business primarily with Canadians, .CA may be a better bet for you than .COM for a few reasons. A .CA domain offers some geo-targeting benefits on search engines when searches originate in Canada – it signals that your site is Canadian and probably more relevant to Canadian users. Studies have also repeatedly shown that Canadians, when given a choice, prefer making online purchases from Canadian businesses and retailers. It’s also going to be easier to rank locally in Canada with a .CA. As an added bonus, there is much better domain availability in .CA than .COM.

All that said, if you can get your .COM – do it. If you can get both your .COM and .CA, all the better. As the most recognized domain extension globally, .COM transcends borders and audiences. The bottom line however is to make sure that the domain you choose – be it .CA or .COM – is both clear and memorable for your users. All domains have equal opportunity to rank, so focus on branding.

Many of our clients register multiple domains under multiple extensions and forward them to specific landing pages on their main website or to a blog. With the low cost of domain names many businesses have come to recognize the value of protecting their brand and generating traffic through a strong domain strategy.

Mike: As a leader, what book would you recommend to entrepreneurs trying to get off the ground?

Cybele: Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It..and Why the Rest Don’t by Verne Harnish is one of my favourite and that of many entrepreneurs. It is a sequel to his Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.

Drawing from her experience working in design and lighting, Lights.com co-founder, Sheva Knopfler had a thought: buying well-designed, well-crafted lighting should not be nearly as complicated or expensive as it is. In the age of the internet, why are we buying four-figure chandeliers from pushy salespeople in a showroom? Instead, why not provide outstanding value by offering thoughtfully-designed goods directly to our customers?

Sheva’s husband, David, joined her in this vision, bringing to the table his expertise in marketing and business development. They cultivated a team of people, not only knowledgeable about lighting, but also well-versed in art, fashion, technology, and interior design, lending outside perspectives on what a lighting company can and should be. Together, they are striving to surpass industry norms and to discover new ways to offer their customers exceptional product and exceptional service.

Mike: Tell me a little bit about how David and Sheva decided to launch Lights.com?

Josh: Sheva, one of our co-founders, had been working in the lighting industry for several years and realized there was a huge gap in the market for well-designed, responsibly sourced and fairly priced lighting. The only options at that time were either mass-produced, poor quality or ridiculously expensive. She realized this better option could be accomplished by avoiding the traditional showroom model and selling directly to the customer online, and so Lights.com was born.

Mike: What has the growth been like over the past five years since they began?

Growth has been continuous. We certainly share challenging moments that come with the kind of expansion one sees in a small business, especially in a dynamic consumer goods industry. The challenge is staying ahead of consumer demands and updating product lines, while maintaining a tight supply chain that is uncompromising in both quality and design. At the same time, we ensure that our customers have access to our full line of lighting products at fair prices. We invest in quality and are proud of the outcome.

Mike: How did they acquire the name? Can you tell us the cost?

Josh: When we were a pretty small company, we received an email late one night from a domain broker who offered to sell us the name, Lights.com. It was a chance for Ambient Lighting to have the kind of reach and growth that would let us expand in a way that competes in a global sense.

David’s real estate background taught him to always say yes to a good deal and figure out finances later. This is what he did. Although it proved much harder to finance a domain name than real estate. The deal included an NDA so we’re unable disclose the price but we paid a good sum. It turned out to be a great investment.

Mike: You play an important role in the company as Marketing Director. Can you tell us more about your role?

Josh: I oversee the team here that manages all of the marketing for Lights.com. We currently focus heavily on digital channels, primarily social media advertising, SEM, SEO and email. As an online-only business, the performance of our website is deeply intertwined with our marketing results, so I lead all update and optimization projects, working with our designers and developers to make sure our site experience is the best it can be.

Mike: What challenges or benefits have you found in running an online business? Is it harder than most people think?

Josh: The most challenging aspect is that the challenges are constantly evolving. You will see another retailer (or ten) pop up that uses your exact value prop, with similar products, for the same price or less. Amazon continues to dominate e-commerce more and more and pull customers away from independent retailers. The barriers to entry to start an online business continue to get lower and, while a positive in many ways, this has cluttered the marketplace and driven up costs across advertising channels. It requires being more creative to get in front of the correct audience than it did even 2 years ago.

Mike: How many employees does it take to keep the “lights” on in a business like lights.com?

Josh: We have 17 people in our NYC office and 8 in our Los Angeles warehouse.

Mike: What role has the key word domain name played in the companies success?

Josh: Aside from receiving some traffic from people optimistically navigating directly to our website, I believe having a domain like Lights.com offers an air of legitimacy to the brand that would be harder to develop otherwise. The only downside is that because of how broad the name is, it takes extra effort to identify and communicate a strong brand personality.

Mike: What type of traffic do you see from people strictly typing in the domain name?

Josh: Metrics for this are tough to measure but anecdotally I’ve heard from customers who have found us this way. They’re typically a little less tech-savvy and may not be aware of the other methods for surfacing the products they’re interested in finding. They may also just be curious, and then we enjoy pleasantly surprising them!

Backyard produces creative content for some of the best ad agencies and top brands in the world. Headquartered in Culver City, CA, their team of talented directors and seasoned producers deliver a collaborative creative process that builds happy client relationships.

The Backyard brand is nearly 30 years old. Fellow Chicagoan, Founder, and current CMO/Managing Director of Backyard, Roy Skillicorn talks about the company and the domain that represents it.

Mike: I read that you founded Backyard with Chicago photographer Tony D’Orio in 1988 while you were working as a rep for PIXAR. What inspired the idea for Backyard and what was your vision at the time?

Roy: I was a rep for Pixar, Colossal Pictures, and HKM at the time I started Backyard. All were start ups that I helped establish by not only finding them their first projects but also repped them all throughout the eighties. Since I had had such luck finding initial work for companies that soon became powerhouse live action and animation entities, I asked them all if they wouldn’t mind me starting something in Chicago for local work. They all agreed to allow me to rep them while starting Backyard. After the first 6 months I took on a partner who had been a student of mine when I was a young high school art teacher. He helped in numerous ways including back office tasks, bidding and production leaving me to what I enjoyed: sales. My vision for Backyard at the time was to create destination to do smaller, local work while keeping my representation business going for the big national work I was enjoying. When bigger national work started coming in for us at Backyard, I folded Skillicorn & Associates, my representation company, to focus 100% on Backyard. This proved to be the right move and we soon were getting work from the best agencies in NYC and from the west coast. I moved the entire company including the secretaries and assistants to Los Angeles where we eventually became a $50 million company.

Mike: You founded Backyard in 1988 and domain names were hardly even in existence. When did you aquire Backyard.com and did you purchase it on the aftermarket from someone or were you the first to register it?

Roy: We were early and we were the first to register it.

Mike: You’ve recently returned to Backyard after founding it and building it into a successful company, then founding the award winning Seed Media Arts. What brought you back to Backyard?

Roy: Upon selling Backyard in 2011, I started Seed Media Arts and modeled it after the changes I had suggested to my partner and producers at Backyard. I saw the business changing, where the advertising and marketing business was headed from being on the street and by talking to hundreds of clients and agency folk. Those changes were rejected though. I was and I still continue to be on the street and in the trenches. That gives me insight into the future and at that time, I saw what was coming in 2008-2010. I created Seed with very little overhead.

Intermittently I judged the the goings on at Backyard, being the company I started. I continually heard that directors and producers that I had hired over the 22 years, were leaving. Later, I saw that the new management and owners even discarded the iconic logo that my wife had designed, a logo that was so well liked, well known and respected. Then I heard that the company had finally downsized as I had suggested years before. Recently I came to find out that all the directors I had brought to the company and all but one producer had left and that it had been sold to a new owner. As fate would have it, I found the owner lives in Chicago and I clicked “connect” on Linkedin. He contacted me soon after and asked me to rejoin the Backyard team as Managing Director.

Mike: How important has the name Backyard.com been to the company’s success? Do you feel you would have achieved the same results had you registered a name like “BackyardProductions.com?”

Roy: Backyard Productions is the real name of the company BUT everyone calls it Backyard and as the name connotes, it is a friendly and casual place. Backyard.com just made sense. Simple is always the best.

When I first keyed in “Roadster.com,” I was half expecting to see some fancy hotrods on such a cool name.  To my surprise, I found an commerce platform.  But I wasn’t disappointed.  I actually found this branding to be quite fitting for the product.  Roadster provides consumer driven commerce solutions for today’s modern dealership. With Roadster’s proprietary technology platform, dealerships can provide hassle-free car buying in-store, online or on the go. From inventory merchandising, to financing/leasing, incentives, trade-ins and F&I– Express Storefront delivers near penny perfect deals in a beautifully designed interface that your customers and employees will love.

Michelle Denogean, CMO of Roadster took time out of her day to answer a few questions for me.

Mike: How did you decide to name the company “Roadster?”

Michelle:  When we named the company, it was very important to us that we not only select a memorable name, but that the name itself represented a premium experience.

Mike: How have commerce platforms changed for dealerships over, say, the past 20 years?

Michelle:  Most of the commerce solutions in dealership to date have been very dealer facing and disconnected from one another, making it hard to for sales people to easily access the information they need to complete the transaction. The big shift has been to providing tools that are customer facing– providing customers with more transparency and control over the deal making components. This goes beyond just eCommerce that is plugged into a dealership website for online car buying, these are tools that customers can use side by side with sales agents in the showroom to streamline the experience and save both parties time. Companies in the past have tried to deploy eCommerce, but they were ahead of their time. The industry wasn’t ready and frankly, consumers weren’t quite ready either. While the number grows daily, the percent of consumers who are buying cars 100% online is still very small. Commerce platforms like Roadster are working to streamline the experience in-store so that as the number of online transactions grows, dealerships are ready with their internal sales process to accommodate those online transactions.

Mike: How does your platform differ from the others in the industry?

Michelle: The biggest differentiation is that we are truly omnichannel– customers can start online and finish in-store or the other way around. Our solution is white labeled for dealerships to use on their website, or in the showroom with customers. We have spent the past several years building out tools to be used in-store so that customers can have a streamlined experience and sales agents can feel more empowered. This includes our latest roll out of Express Desking, that allows sales agents to review all of the possible deal terms with a customer, make adjustments and get approvals without leaving the customers side. We are one of the most comprehensive platforms on the market, both integrating with all of the backend systems that the dealership uses to process the transaction, but also in the amount of data and customization of the data that is available to ensure the numbers we show are as close to pencil perfect as possible.

Mike: Can you talk about how you acquired the domain name and what the process was to complete the purchase? Can you share what you paid for the name?

Michelle:  The process was pretty straight forward. We went through a domain broker to purchase the name. We are not at liberty to share the amount paid at this time.

Mike: What volume of traffic do you see just from having a great domain name like Roadster?

Michelle:  It varies greatly. When we first started the company, we were a direct to consumer car buying service. In June of 2018 we pivoted the company to be 100% focused on the B2B side of our business.

Mike: Do you invest in other types of marketing or is the domain and organic search results enough?

Michelle: We absolutely invest in other kinds of marketing. We do a little bit in Paid Search, but our primary vehicles for driving demand are organic media (PR) and content marketing via social channels and our Roadster blog. With a name like Roadster, we focus heavily on brand opportunities that can lead to organic search overtime.

I’ve always enjoyed my interviews and conversations with Rob Monster of Epik.com.I first interviewed Rob back in July of 2010 where he shared his vision of the internet and what he was doing to take things in that direction. You may recall the success of the product portal sites he offered to keyword domain holders until the Google algorithm change took a toll on the model. I connected with Rob a few years later in a Skype interview, in 2014, where he brought us up to speed on what Epik was up to at that time. In 2017, Rob talked to me about the acquisition of Underdeveloped.com. Most recently, Rob and I caught up just a couple of weeks ago where he gave me the details behind his involvement in DigitalTown.

Speaking with Rob is always insightful. He has vision, futuristic ideas and a passion for what he does. I always walk away with a new perspective on domaining, business, and other areas. He inspires me to think out of the box like no one else. This conversation was reminiscent of my first conversation with him back in 2010, but exponentially more advanced. With that said, let me share our conversation with you.

Mike: Rob, it’s been a while, how have you been?

Rob Monster: I’ve been good. It’s been a busy few years. In addition to running Epik, in May of 2015 the board of directors of DigitalTown approached me about coming on board to run their company and I’ve been very much active in running both companies although DigitalTown has taken on a life of its own. But personally good and in a good place. Making wise choices and generally speaking at peace with the Lord and very much governed by the Lord’s will.  And part of the Lord’s will for me has been to work on this project called DigitalTown while at the same time looking out for the interests of people who hold the names and protecting their intellectual property rights, oftentimes serving as an ombudsman on their behalf in an environment where I think we’re seeing growing amounts of censorship and a desire to take away personal sovereignty. That’s something that I feel strongly about. Domain names, in my view, is part of personal sovereignty. People should have the right to own domain names and to maintain their own digital identity and digital presence and that too should not be infringed. So whenever, to the extent I can support that, this is certainly a priority for me

Mike: Sure. It sounds pretty consistent with when I spoke to you way back in 2010. Seems like a lifetime ago but back then you had a pretty grandiose vision of the internet and where it should be for people and how it should work. I don’t know if you recall back then we were talking about things like linking the domains together, things like comments.com and questions.com and bridging from site to site.

Rob Monster: I would say that to a large extent that vision of global interoperability is what’s being manifested in DigitalTown. The idea that we can have single sign-on for the world and be able to, with one login, work with both the public sector and the private sector and be able to transact peer to peer, peer to merchants and peer to government, and that you should have the ability to maintain portable identity and portable reputation as you go from site to site and use case to use case. Questions and Comments and those types of projects which by the way were a co-development with the guy who owned the domains. We didn’t own the domains. And so those projects basically didn’t get commercialized due to kind of a lack of vision of that particular partner. But the idea of an interoperable web that is user centric, I never lost sight of that idea. In fact, I would say the move to the new TLDs to a large extent and now the arrival of blockchain as the catalyzing technology, is opening up vast possibilities to deliver on the vision that we first talked about back in 2010 when I was actually relatively new to the domain industry.

I started Epik in 2009 with a primary emphasis on mass development as you may recall and only because of Google taking away the Punch Bowl did that particular strategy not pan out. But had Google continued to index the vast number of sites that we were producing at the rate of about 250 new sites per week we would’ve had a vast, vast content and media network all connected through single sign-on and all empowering these various components like questions and comments and so forth. But when Google took the Punch Bowl away, that economic engine which was basically mass production of sites went from being a complete cash machine for both us and our clients to being basically a money loser because we were dealing with people who had bought a site that was not producing enough cash within the first year to recoup their investment. This is what we guaranteed.

I think that were it not for Google taking away the Punch Bowl, I think we would’ve been able to deliver the vision of a global media network connected to single sign-on where people could own their own sites but the user experience would’ve been interoperable between sites would’ve been achieved five years earlier.

Mike: You were definitely headed in that direction and I can just remember kind of randomly visiting sites and I could see they were powered by Epik and it was easy to link between the different keyword domain sites that were backed by your platform.

Rob Monster: It was quite an economic engine. It was making a lot of money for a lot of people.

Mike:  I remember that sweeping change that came with…

Rob Monster:  Google Panda.

Mike: Yes, Google Panda and it pretty much undid everything there. But let’s switch the focus to DigitalTown. It’s very much tied to your vision, your original vision. I see you bought hundreds of thousands of domain names and it looks like a major focus is on the dot City names. Is that the direction that you’re continuing to follow?

Rob Monster: DigitalTown is built around the premise that every city can be its own Google, Amazon, Expedia, OpenTable, Airbnb, PayPal and Coinbase all in one, branded in the identity of the city and owned by the citizens through the mechanism of blockchain. Every city platform which is typically branded in the identity of, say, austin.city, dallas.city, toledo.city, you name it. It gets tokenized as a jointly owned platform at the rate of 10 city shares per capita.

A city share is a blockchain Ethereum smart contract that defines the relative ownership of the perpetual rights to the city platform branded in the identity of that particular city. The reason why we did it this way was recognizing that, in many cases, the municipalities where people live will not be as quick to adopt DigitalTown as a movement as might be the citizens who live there. When we approach promoting DigitalTown as a direction for the world, in terms of an economic model to restore local economic sovereignty, we’re really engaging the dialogue on three levels. We’re talking to NGOs, non-governmental organizations, and people that are involved in global models for how we can cooperate economically, UN, World Trade Organization, American World Chamber Federation, groups like that.

Then the second is we’re talking to the municipalities themselves as well as to some extent, state-level leadership and in some cases even federal level leadership, in essence, government. The third level is the consumers themselves. Saturday I’m scheduled to give my first TED Talk in Budva, Montenegro. I hope my voice will hopefully recover by then. I spent the last two days with a couple of very long days in San Francisco at an Impact Investor Conference. But the point is that this is a movement and we’re advocating it on a global level, working already on four continents and concurrently educating both the global organizations, the local governmental organizations and at the same time starting a consumer level movement with a particular emphasis on youth.

We will announce next Saturday at the occasion of the TED Talk the launch of a global youth ambassador program based in Las Palmas, which is a city in the Gran Canaries off of the African Coast. It’s part of Spain where the EU and the Spanish government have agreed to subsidize the hiring of new university graduates to work as youth ambassadors and to allow people from all around the world who are selected to come to Las Palmas to be trained in how to build a DigitalTown and they’ll bring that movement back to their home cities where they live or where they are studying.

This is really about how do you activate a new economic paradigm where we, as a community, instead of just be habituated to using services like Google and Amazon and Expedia and OpenTable and Airbnb and so forth, we actually have a reason to adopt this new behavior that is local first. Number one because it will lead to our own economic benefit because we are a stakeholder in the ownership of that platform, but number two because we’re also making intervention to reverse a trend that is not looking very promising for the youth generation. You think about your own encounters with youth. I don’t know how many children you have or what their ages are but, you know, these kids are graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans, taking jobs where they are clearing almost nothing after they pay for their rent and their living expenses, being told that you look forward to living in a tiny house or a micro apartment and not owning a vehicle because they’ll have mobility as a service, and at some point you’re going to wake up and say, “You know what? This is bullshit. That’s not what I looked forward to for me or my children or my children’s children. I want a better way,” right?

We are engaging these youth at a time when they are waking up to the reality as they clear the haze of the smoke-filled rooms whatever it is they’re smoking or vaping, recognizing that they should maybe reconsider their future and how to basically empower them to be able to work for a better outcome. That’s fundamentally is when this thing will really become a phenomenon is when you have youth from around the world working together to co-create a different outcome that they own or they part own. That’s what I think is particularly exciting

Mike: Talk about that ownership piece a little bit. It seems a little complex to understand.

Rob Monster: Well, it’s very simple. It’s really very simple. The basic idea is for every citizen in a city, we have created a fixed allocation of blockchain-based city shares. So if you’re familiar with how Ethereum works or how Bitcoin works there’s a finite number of units that can ever be produced. In the case of DigitalTown we actually fix it so the number of the population determines the number of city shares that are ever to exist and now we give them to the citizens. You can claim them at the rate of 10 city shares per capita and if you want to buy more than the 10 free city shares that you are given for free you can buy them for a fixed price if you are an accredited investor and are willing to go through KYC and AML, right. Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering. So that kind of works.

Basically, every citizen can be a stakeholder and even if they later choose as you can see and austin.city is an example. I know a number of other city sites that are live. If they choose to sell their city shares they still maintain a democratic vote in the future outcome of the fate of their digital platform for which they’re still a registered user. So you don’t necessarily have to maintain your ownership interest. If you wish to sell it, you can sell it peer-to-peer through our peer-to-peer marketplace. We’re not a market maker, we’re not a broker-dealer but we are allowing people to buy and sell city shares peer-to-peer and that’s how we get around the SCC regulatory frameworks that exist for that particular class of security token as it’s called.

Mike: Okay, got it.Those 10 free shares per capita… would the 10 shares be tied to my hometown or how does that work?

Rob Monster: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So basically the way it works is single sign-on, you know, one login for the world…each city has its own ownership framework based on city shares and…but your wallet that is tied to your single sign-on, if you go to like austin.city and log in for example or you download the mobile app, right, which is on iOS and Android you can download the DigitalTown mobile app. Some cities like Austin already have their own app. We have an austin.city app. It’s basically a private label version of the DigitalTown app. But, most people will just download the DigitalTown app and even if you use the Austin app it roams globally. When you go to another town or simply wanna change your city, it will now let you navigate what that city has to offer. Think about your own experience going from city to city and town to town how you need a different app for a different login to use a ride share, a bike share, public transportation or if you buy from a local merchant online, right? It’s very, very cumbersome.

Now you go to another city and it’s the same thing all over again. You need a new login for every one of those use cases in every city where you go. And what does it mean? It means that people throw up their hands and say, “Forget it. I’m gonna take an Uber. Forget it. I’m gonna buy from Amazon. Forget it. I’m gonna go to BestBuy.” They have their go-tos, they have their winner take all platforms that they habituated themselves to as being the place where they go to solve this, that or the other problem or use case. The problem with that is the cumulative effect is a massive hollowing out of the local economic base. And so the root of the tiny house movement and the root of the micro-apartment movement and the root of mass indebtedness and homelessness and opioid crises and all of the problems that humanity is dealing with now, the root cause of all of that is rigged capitalism.

The only way we’re going to be able to get out of this is to address the root problem. We have to overcome rigged capitalism because if we don’t then the powers that be are going to herd humanity towards choosing universal basic income but there’s a problem with that and the problem is that universal basic income is when the government that can give you everything that you want can take away everything that you have. If you believe, as I and many others do, that sovereignty is a good thing then we need to figure out ways to restore sovereignty. You’ve got people who are trying to find sovereignty by living the lives of a digital nomad. Or they’re embracing the gig economy thinking that it’s giving them sovereignty. What they don’t realize is even the gig economy is rigged because Uber takes more than 50% of the gross revenue. Anyone of these different platforms that you might identify as being some last gasp of sovereignty is actually another leg of the rigged system.

We want to systematically restore sovereignty down to the local level and down to the individual. Every individual has sovereign authority over who knows what about them. This is called self-sovereign identity. That is your single sign-on which allows you to project directly and locally with merchants all around the world, bypassing the extraction economy and purchasing directly from that local merchant so that that local merchant has more margin left over as opposed to paying 40% commission to Expedia and getting paid next day after stay for getting most of that revenue and they’re getting it on the day of booking or latest on the day of stay. Now that means that they have more resources available to pay their suppliers on time, to be able to give their workers wage increases and to reinvest in their community through philanthropy.

This is the positive cycle that we have lost over the last 40 years. And if you look at the charts, and this will be in my TED Talk, it shows you very, very clearly that basically the game has been rigged since the mid-1970s when productivity continued to rise at the rate that it’s been rising for the last 40 something years but wages stopped growing. People are working longer. Now you’ve got two-income households. You’ve got people working multiple jobs to be able to put together an income. You’ve got people who’ve blown up their 401K. They have no safety net and so now they are not only working until well into their retirement years but they’re also working without any safety net.

Our capacity as a humanity to look out for each other is predicated on us having sufficient reserves to be able to help each other out. If you think about it, walking down the street, “Brother, can you spare a dime?” Well, in this one guy,  you might have the ability to stop, have a chat with the guy and to give the guy a little bit of money. When there are two guys it’s a little harder. When it’s five guys it’s pretty hard. When it’s 10 guys it’s a crowd. You cross to the other side of the street. You can’t help them because there are too many

When it’s man-to-man you got a fighting chance, you know. You wanna have a subsequent conversation about this guy and where he’s been and what troubles he has and, you know, give him some words of encouragement and give him some money. But when you’ve got a crowd you can’t even have that conversation.

So the problem is that we’re basically heading down this spiral where we get to a point where people don’t help, not because they can’t help but because they’re outnumbered. And then people can’t help because they don’t even have the ability to help. And at that point what are you left with? You’re left with basically a hollowed-out economy whose last hope is to basically surrender sovereignty to the state. Tthis has been a designed implosion of the middle class going back to at least the 70s and probably going back to the time of Karl Marx.

Mike: Wow, that’s a lot to take in. Let me dig a little bit into how the business works. I’m just trying to think through how you spread the word about this and it sounds like one of the great ways you’re doing that is the global youth ambassador program. In what other ways are you spreading the word about this?

Rob Monster: The main method we use right now during the early launch phase is we are recruiting community leaders at the local level. We have in various cities, head of community, one or more community leaders and then a much larger number of community influencers and citizen journalists who are part of a movement to activate the DigitalTown in their particular community. These people are typically compensated through the mechanism of city shares and in some cases through also revenue share of the merchants that they onboard. We are hand selecting them now. It’s not necessarily kind of a grassroots open source movement.

Anybody in any city anywhere can sign up at digitaltown.com and find their city of which there are about 3.7 million cities, towns and villages around the world of which only 4,400 have 100,000 or more and they can activate their city, town or village. When there’s a 100 or more people that sign up in any city, town, or village we will activate their DigitalTown for free. Every citizen gets a smart wallet, every merchant gets a free storefront and they can typically see it in their own currency and their own language and we’re adding more languages and more currencies all the time including our four cryptocurrencies and 16 fiat currencies.

Mike: And how does it work for a merchant, a local merchant?  You said they get their own storefront.

Rob Monster: Yes, there’s no setup fee, there’s no service fee. We cover solutions for retail services, dining and lodging and they only pay for what they actually use and that is for actual sales. If you do payment processing of an actual merchant sale where we’re selling the item, like you’re browsing and searching and then we sell that item, the National Commission for Retail Services and Dining gets 8%. The National Commission for Lodging gets 12%. But peer-to-peer payments are free. Point of sale…the payments in other words that are made direct by cash are commission free. People can, in fact, use this platform to do peer-to-peer payments without cost including across borders.

Think about all the people who are doing overseas remittances. They have the ability to bypass the Western Union extraction economy, the PayPal extraction economy and use DigitalTown to transmit funds across borders and be able to spend them in their local community where the currency is transferred in real time.  I can pay somebody in dollars and they’d get paid in pounds. Somebody can pay me in Bitcoin and I get dollars. The translation of the currency is in real time. If you download the DigitalTown smartphone app on iOS or Android and create an account, you can see how it works. You can fund your wallet and use it to do seamless payments in any currency currently in 16 fiat and 4 cryptocurrencies.

Mike: Could a merchant run an e-commerce platform?

Rob Monster: They can. We provide them an e-commerce platform, a service provider booking platform, lodging booking platform and a restaurant dining management application including digital venue creation, the ability to book tables and the ability to process online orders and to take payment in store.

We’ve done seven acquisitions in the last two years. So we didn’t have to build everything from the scratch. We’ve had the ability to also combine both organic development, partnership technology but in particular seven acquisitions that have been done in 2016 and ’17 and more than one acquisition pending here in 2018.

Mike: How many employees are there at the company?

Rob Monster: About 34 worldwide.

Mike: How have you been able to juggle managing  leading this huge effort and running Epik at the same time?

Rob Monster: Number one, Epik is an established product with an established brand and an established platform but number two we have a fantastic team. Many people who will use Epik as a registrar have firsthand experience with the caliber of the team that we’ve assembled to provide ongoing 24/7 support and customer service with software that was designed, you know, from the ground up by us. All of the engineers that built the original software are still with us and have continued to improve the product in response to customer feedback and it runs more and more like a well-oiled machine. The addition last year of Joseph Peterson who,  former navy Shipman.runs Epik like a well-oiled military machine. He dots every I, he crosses every T. You know from his punditry that he is a guy who loves retail.

We’re very fortunate to have assembled a fantastic team of very diligent and dedicated people that have allowed me to spend more time on working on this other project. But there’s a very important overlap between DigitalTown and Epik that the casual observer sometimes overlooks and that is this notion of the smart web. The smart web is about making a web that is intuitive, personalized and secure using descriptive domain extensions to provide consistent and familiar user experiences as you go from website to website. So .city is an example. You go from city site to city site and you have a consistent user experience. But we’re doing the same thing with .work, .fit, .law, .wedding, .profession and many, many more that are part of the smart web initiative. And ultimately that backs into a certain level of confidence that as we move to the new domain economy of the descriptive TLDs that there is a place for them but it’s not the same model as what the traditional, you know, com, net, org, everybody do whatever you want, you know, no interoperability paradigm, Wild West space of the internet.

The internet just like telecommunications is becoming more interoperable and we need interoperability because if we don’t have interoperability we are basically surrendering to the winner take all economy. Let me explain that. In an era where Google and YouTube and Facebook are the ones who decide what you see, then your ability to stand out from the crowd with your .com is much reduced versus where things were 15 years ago where you could actually go and produce pre-Google a website and brand it and people would hear about it and they would share it and you would have a fighting chance. But the moment that the world becomes curated by an engine like Google that, you know, takes away as much as it gives you’ve lost your sovereign ability to stand out from the crowd.

By virtue of introducing a more intuitive web based on descriptive direct navigation standards like go.vertical, right, dallas.law, seattle.wedding, we actually have a fighting chance to reeducate the consumer about the possibility of direct navigation. Now technology will help because not only are we giving them a direct navigation URL in the form of a couple of keywords that are easy to remember like miami.work but we’re also giving them QR codes which are going to be hacks that are basically URLs rendered as a 2D image which you can then scan with your smartphone if you are able to do it with a free hand, and if you’re driving you can rely on the keyword hack of simply remembering vertical.geography for example.

If you look at the list of the main names that we’ve been acquiring they are predominantly vertical .geography. That’s the pattern that we have adopted. To a large extent, we’ve done it with partnerships with the individual registries who believe in our vision for a smart web and who would like to see somebody curating and advancing a new and better way for direct navigation. So that’s what that’s about and the reason why we have been able to buy so many domains is because of, A) a view over the future is going to look like but, B) because we have that cooperation from registries that have vision that they too would like to see a way to overcome the stranglehold of Google and the other winner take all platforms that are basically eroding the value of domain names.

Mike: Talk to me about that vision. If everything goes as planned,  as you see it today, where will DigitalTown be 10 years from now?

Rob Monster: I think that what we are building is a future state where every city, town and village in the world has the opportunity to be its own sovereign local economy powered by technology that they can sovereignly own. I think that’s probably the big shift that I see unfolding is this move towards restoring local economic sovereignty on a global scale through a network of locally-owned cooperatives that are digitally interoperable. I think that blockchain is going to revolutionize large segments of our economy. The limitations that you see of current blockchain architectures are going to go away. Distributed ledgers are going to be capable of processing tens of thousands of transactions per second and be able to do it for little or almost no cost which means that it becomes practical to be able to allow every city and every community to be able to have trust economies that bypass the winner take all profit-maximizing extraction economies like Amazon and Expedia and Open Table and Airbnb and PayPal.

Not only that but also restore the flow of funds so instead of, for example, you and I as a consumer depositing money in the bank and getting 1% and then somebody that goes and borrows from that bank being able to borrow for say 2% or 3% and then lend it out as a payday loan for up to 600% per year, we’re going to have people be able to borrow money locally peer to peer, be able to do direct banking, peer-to-peer banking and public banking where you’re going to have the ability to allow people to easily reinvest funds back into their community without being constrained by the regulatory limitations that basically deem certain people as being not credit worthy. I don’t know what your experience is with the banking system, but if you have any experience you will recognize that there is a vast number of people who have very good ideas and are very honorable people but they spend all their life savings overcoming a crisis.

Somebody whose wife died of cancer who was a 20-year, you know, organic baker and now would like to open a bakery where he needs $60,000 to buy equipment and do a modest amount of tenant improvements but can’t get $60,000 from the banking system for anything less than, say, 20% interest which he would never be able to service. So as a result, he’s basically not able to practice his craft and instead has to go take a job at McDonald’s. Well, what a shame, right, that we can’t have people like that engaging the community with a product or service that would improve people’s quality of life and give people a reason to go sit down and meet a stranger at a café that is operated inside of the bakery run by this third-generation baker who makes fantastic baked goods. These are building blocks for restoring local economic sovereignty but it’s more than that. It’s building blocks for restoring the quality of life at a local level.

Mike: Just tying back to the shares and economy of it all, how do those shares increase in value, if I were to invest or to get those initial free shares?

Rob Monster: That’s a good question. Number one, the theoretical value of the city shares should correlate to the economic activity that is happening on those city platforms. At the starting point, the valuation of these city platforms is about $1.60 per capita or about 16 cents to share, 10 city shares per capita. But as the economic activity ramps and it becomes, you know, the de facto search engine and transaction engine for purchasing local and purchasing directly from people in the community and engaging in peer-to-peer commerce the value of it should grow quite significantly. And the endgame in most cases is for the municipality itself to be the owner of the platform. If the city…there’s license to the platform from DigitalTown at the outset, and the community of citizens owns it initially as a cooperative, that’s what we call platform cooperative is the academic term. Then when the city is ready to buy it they’re buying it from the citizens and the citizens get cashed out for right out to their ownership based on city shares.

Mike: Okay. I see. I’m just thinking through some pieces. As far as the local base and the commerce, are you also targeting big business as far as business travel and that type of thing to be able to focus in on location?

Rob Monster: Yes. If you download the app then you can see that that app also is suitable for like booking business travel. I use our own app for booking all our hotels. All hotels at Expedia and Booking.com are on our platform and the prices are as good or better which you will find on Expedia or Priceline. There’s no reason why somebody couldn’t use that app as a way to, for example, book local, book direct for both lodging and dining and, you know, service provider booking. It will get easier and easier but the funny thing is a large amount of that inventory now exists already as structured data. And so it was possible for us to add all of that lodging inventory, all that dining inventory from the abundance of sources that are already…that have already aggregated and curated this data with a high degree of precision but were not transactional.

We’re adding the transactional layer so that you can not only find the restaurant that is serving jambalaya tonight but you can actually book an appointment or book a table or push an online order from that provider and do it natively within the app or within the city website. The merchant activation is the next big phase. But already right now you can, for example, book lodging with any of the hotels that you would find otherwise on Expedia or Priceline.

We use the public stock as a vehicle for rolling up acquisitions. And right now, with the market cap of under 10 million, I submit to you that DigitalTown is woefully undervalued, and consult your investment advisor. But if you figure out an appropriate way to, you know, draw people’s attention to the fact that the company might be undervalued then they should take a look and gauge from their own opinion if I’m right about a local first digital future for the global economy and if you think the thesis is correct then you have to ask yourself, “If not know, then when?” And then secondly, “If not us, then who?” And I believe that we are the company that is going to do this globally.

Daniel Redman has been a marketing professional for more than 13 years. In 2006 Daniel co-founded the eVisibility media department, quickly building it up to a million dollar revenue channel. As one of the early and continuing pioneers of Emerging Media Marketing, Daniel has managed campaigns for several flagship clients and been a source of innovation.  In his spare time, he noticed some online buzz around ugly sweaters which led to the purchase of BuyUglySweaters.com which now forwards to UglySweaters.com.

Mike: Dan, what’s the attraction, especially around the holidays, to people and ugly sweaters?

Dan: Deep down, we all just want to be loved, Mike. We want to feel apart of a community and like we belong. With a strong sense of irony in fashion, trendsetters arrived at Ugly Sweaters about ten years ago and now this thing has gone totally mainstream. It’s a recipe of nostalgia, anarchy, and humor that make it a necessity for people to have at least one ‘show stopping’ sweater in their arsenal.

Mike: I see today that BuyUglySweaters.com forwards to UglySweaters.com. Did you find that the shorter name draws more traffic? Can you share your traffic numbers?

Dan: Not necessarily more traffic overall with the shorter domain, but 1000% more direct traffic. I believe I have the most recognizable domain in the niche. Because I was one of the only folks around doing this crazy thing in 09, I was able to rank organically very easily (with BuyUglySweaters as the primary) and tipped 3mil pageviews in my first year. As a number of competitors have moved in since, with deep pockets, it’s much leaner these days.

Mike: Tell me about your initial purchase of these names. Were you the first to register or did you purchase the names on the aftermarket? If so, can you tell us about the process? The price?

Dan: I started with BuyUglySweaters in 09 from GoDaddy after noticing that a very fashion forward Facebook friend was talking about an Ugly Sweater party with her cool friend, then later researched and found that search volume was steadily upticking. I then purchased UglySweaters from a broker a few years later that reached out to me. I was surprised that it just sort of fell in my lap that way. I started with ‘BuyUgly…’ because I assumed that it would hold more purchase intent for visitors. This is the type of niche where buying intent is sometimes hard to find. Crafty folks might just be hunting around for ideas or examples of sweaters. The UglySweaters domain typically gets a few offers for purchase every year as it’s somewhat of a rarity to have the exact match for such a large search set.

Mike: Do you have other domain names?

Dan: Of course, I’m a recovering domain hoarder. At one time I had over 70 domains in my portfolio when I was attempting to build an advertising network. I’ve paired it down to about 15 now. Some are pretty interesting, others will likely never see the light of day, like ZikaVirusDating.com <—what was I thinking?

Mike: It looks like you are using Shopify as you platform. How did you decided on that and are you happy with your decision? What are a few of the pros and cons?

Dan: I have enjoyed my experience with Shopify thus far, however it is pretty darn expensive. Since I’m a one man show for most things, It’s a must though. I have grown my business using their apps and saved a plethora of time not having to dig into code or hire out work. I’ve always used ecomm through WordPress and a free shopping cart back in the day. WP took too much time for me and the Free cart had some security issues that ended up costing me.

Mike: Have you found the desire for ugly sweaters has increased or decreased since you began selling?

Dan: Increased dramatically! It now has bonafied staying power. Target and Urban Outfitters carry their own lines of Ugly Sweaters and there are some ecommerce brands doing millions in revenue. It’s crazy to see how far it’s come. When I first started doing this I was interviewed by Entrepreneur online and I sort of cast this category off entirely as a fad. I’ve been proven wrong.

Mike: How important is social media to your site?

Dan: It’s important, but I can’t claim to have totally maximized it. We have a small but loyal following on both Twitter and Facebook, of which I primarily use as backstops for paid ads. All in all we know that direct traffic is going to be our bread and butter and taking up real estate in the SERPs.

Mike: What has been the hardest or most unexpected hurdle to running an online business?

Dan: Dealing with a mass influx of competition. Affiliates, money backed businesses that are just chasing the SEMrush reports have all taken sizable chunks out of our business. I never expected UglySweaters to be a thing beyond a year or two, so I didn’t build a fortress like I could have.

Michael Gargiulo is a simple visionary. He loves to dream and get seriously bored with people who do not know how. He enjoys building websites and driving quality traffic to them. He studied finance and risk management but his competitive advantage over others is in search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization.

Sully:  You are the founder and CEO of VPN.com.  Tell me about the company and what you do.  Is it a VPN comparison site?

Michael: Thanks for the opportunity Sully to share some ideas with your readers. And yes, I am the founder of VPN.com where we provide information on more than 900 different VPN providers to help you find the right VPN for your needs and budget. We have spent thousands of hours researching the industry and nearly every provider inside of it to make it easy for potential customers to quickly find the information they are looking for before buying and downloading.

Sully:  In 2017 you acquired VPN.com.  I’m going to take a wild guess that purchasing a 3 letter category killer name wasn’t a cheap affair.  Can you tell me about how you came across the opportunity? Are you willing to share the purchase price?

Michael: This was probably the toughest part of our journey thus far. I had been pursuing the previous owner for more than four years before a deal was struck. Most of the time, I didn’t get replies to my emails or phone calls so it wasn’t like a negotiation was made during that time either. Three years into my chase, I brought in a broker to help with the acquisition and after working with him for nine months we were finally able to put a deal together. I highly recommend a broker for large transactions like this as we nearly lost the opportunity to someone else several times there at the end.

And unfortunately, I am under an NDA through July of 2018 on the exact price but I can say we will be in the top 10 domain purchases of 2017 according to DN Journal’s 2017 Year-to-Date Top 100 Sales Chart.

Sully:  Why a VPN comparison site.  Why not offer your own VPN service with a name like VPN.com?

Michael: We looked at several models for our site. Of course, building and selling our own VPN was one of them. In this space, you need $2-3 million to develop a competitive suite of products. We were not interested in making that investment to become just another VPN provider. Instead we wanted to maximize the potential of our domain name and we let this guide us to the version of the site you see now. Just like Cars.com, Hotels.com, and Apartments.com, none of these multi-billion dollar corporations own the products they provide information offer.

I believe if we execute on our current strategy over the next 18 months, we can bring 20 million people to the site per month and that type of volume will continue to attract many opportunities.

Sully:  This isn’t your first crack at business and not your first time leveraging a premium keyword domain name.  Tell me about ProxyServer.com and the business there.

Michael: I have been in the proxy and VPN space for nearly a decade now and it started in high school when I was trying to unblock different websites behind the school firewall. Its interesting to reflect back on those days. Most grand visions, like ours, take years to prune and even longer to gather the proper resources for. I am lucky to have ProxyServer.com and lessons it taught us. Without it, VPN would have never happened.

ProxyServer.com was the precursor to VPN.com. While we were trying to acquire the VPN.com domain I actually had most of the technology we would attempt to initially sell on VPN.com already set up and being sold on ProxyServer.com. I knew if we acquired VPN, we could easily migrate it over or pivot to another model.

Sully:  How important have you found the quality of your domain name to be in relation to the success of your business?

Michael: The domain name was the best investment the company will ever make. VPN providers, teammates, new hires, and even competitors take us seriously and for no other reason than our name is VPN.com. I have had many great conversations with CEOs and executives of some of the largest VPN companies on earth because our name is VPN.com.

I still don’t think we fully understand the value of owning the name. Moving forward, I think the domain will continue creating inbound opportunities for us especially as we move on to page one in Google for “VPN.” No matter if you are a provider, competitor, end user or investor, people will always respect a name like ours.

In addition, we receive dozens of offers on a monthly basis to buy or invest in the project along with some incredible partnership opportunities from various VPN providers. This tells me we are on the right track and that people are watching.

Sully:  You seem like you’re still a young guy, but while in college you bought and sold more than $2 million dollars of unwanted gift cards. How did you do this?

Michael: The gift card hustle was a critical period of my life. Primarily through Craigslist and eBay, I was able to purchase cards at a discount and resell them to larger buyers and make my cut on the spread. Selling the cards was much easier than finding people you could trust and buy from. Thankfully, I developed several relationships with contractors and builders who were constantly turning over cards and needed a quick way to cash them out.

Most of the profits I generated from gift cards I invested into my first websites. I knew gift cards would not last forever and wanted to move to a form of income that was a bit more hands off. Looking back on it, it was small decisions like this that moved me in the direction of what became VPN.

Sully:  You also built and grew 3 websites to 3,000,000+ monthly visitors (making $2-3k per day).  Can you give up some of your secrets? What’s the story behind these sites?

Michael: My biggest secret is buying a great name. The location you offer your products matters even more online. I was fortunate to make some solid domain acquisitions early on in my career that offered me great insight into search engine optimization. I grew all of my sites organically through search engine traffic and I have always believed if I couple a great name with a great experience there was absolutely no way I could lose with my visitors and no way I could lose with search engines like Google. Basically, this is the same formula I used for VPN.com and I expect to see similar results with it over the next 18 months.

Thank you for this opportunity Sully and everyone reading. Check out our latest VPN article on Yahoo targeted at Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, and Netflix VPNs. We plan to deliver more accountability to brands who don’t take the privacy of their users seriously. Stay tuned!

And feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

Is a family run business and was started to help spread the word on vaporization and show the world that there is a better way to get the benefits from plants and essential oils.  Damon Inlow is the owner of Vaporizers.ca and took some time to discuss with me.

Mike:  Damon, you have a category-defining keyword domain for your website.  Did you register this domain through the normal process or did you purchase the name on the aftermarket?  Tell us about the process.

Damon:  Back in 2005, there was only a handful of American Vaporizer dealers, and we were the only Canadian vaporizer dealer. Not many people even knew about the concept of using herbs with vaporizers and very few people sold them. One big advantage of being the first vaporizer dealer in Canada is that we did have our pick of .ca domains. We decided to go with vaporizers.ca through the normal registration process.

Mike:  The tld of your domain is dot ca, which represents Canada.  How well have you found this tld to work for you as compared to a dot com name?

Damon:  With our product, we wanted to focus on the Canadian market. The .ca has been good for that, but it certainly limits your United States rankings and search exposure. If your goal is North America, you definitely want a .com as well as a .ca. For a focus on the Canadian market only, the .ca domains are a great choice.

Mike:  I don’t smoke or vape.  The site mentions “a much safer and healthier alternative to smoking.”  Is that a scientific fact or merely a guess based on limited information available?

Damon:  Smoking is combustion; combustion produces tars and other toxins. If you remove the smoke part and vaporize, you then only get the essence of the herb. Some herbs, like tobacco, are still bad news, but most herbs are safe when vaporized. There are many studies on vaporization, mostly medical, that are easy enough to find. Israel has done a lot of those studies.

Mike:  I’m not familiar with the laws regarding the devices.  Are there laws in Canada and the US regulating the sale?  Does that complicate things for you?

Damon:  Vaporizers can be used with hundreds of legal herbs so there are no laws against them. The American Government tried to cause problems over a decade ago, but they lost in court. The court clearly saw how many legal herbs you can vaporize and its medical uses. We have dealt with many non-legal complications like PayPal issues and advertising restrictions.

Mike:  Do you do any advertising outside of organic search engine results?  Do you use Google AdWords or any other paid advertising results?  If so, what has been your experience?

Damon:  We use organic searches as well as some limited advertising. AdWords blocked Vaporizers many years ago as well as Facebook. It was a very unpleasant experience at first as they were very ignorant of the benefits of vaporizing and the policies were not clear at all.

Mike:  What has been the biggest challenge running an online business?  How have you navigated this?

Damon:  Getting the page setup and getting those initial sales is tough for sure but we find the biggest challenges are the logistics. Not only getting the inventory to us but shipping across the country. Takes a lot of work and shipping is always a loss money wise. Every year rates go up and we lose more money on shipping. You can go dropship, but it’s hard to find a reliable one you can trust. Customer satisfaction is key and if your dropshipper fails, you fail.

Kelly Bedrich is the Co-founder of ElectricityPlans.com and President of Cypress Capital Ventures. He is an IT entrepreneur focused on acquiring, marketing, and improving e-commerce sites. His current emphasis is on taking ideas from startup to maturity with sustainable business benefits.

Kelly is skilled at building and executing strategic initiatives by leading global product teams and guiding technical teams to bring results-oriented businesses to life. He is driven to build and develop efficient operational sites that maximize sales and marketing pipelines through low cost of customer acquisition and high retention.

Mike:  Kelly, what got you interested in comparing utility plans?

Kelly:  Good question. My co-founder and I both live in Texas, which has had an active retail energy deregulation market since around 2002. Like most Texans, we would have to choose our electricity provider and sign a new contract every year or so. To do that, we would usually visit the comparison site operated by the Texas Public Utility Commission called Power To Choose. The last few times we did this, we became increasingly confused and frustrated by their site and knew there had to be a better way. We wanted to answer some basic questions like:

• What would be the $ amount of my utility bill if I chose a specific plan?
• Why does Texas have 3 electricity rates on each plan?
• What’s the catch with the teaser rates that appeared to be too good to be true?

The PUC site and other comparison sites in the market weren’t doing these things, so we decided to start our own. We focus on rate transparency and quality content that explains some of the inner workings of the retail electricity industry so that customers can make informed choices and save money in the process.

Mike:  Were you the first to register  ElectricityPlans.com and NaturalGasPlans.com  or were these domains you purchased on the aftermarket?

Kelly:  We acquired ElectricityPlans.com in late 2015 from a broker. However, we were able to purchase the .net version as well as both NaturalGasPlans.com and .net in 2016 as new domains. We launched ElectricityPlans.com in early 2017.

Mike:  Explain your business model.  How do the sites generate revenue?  Do you get a cut if someone switches providers?

Kelly: That’s correct. Like most comparison sites we are basically a matchmaker between buyers and sellers. Our focus is for the buyers (electricity shoppers) to find the best possible rate for their needs. To make this happen, we get paid a small commission from our retail electricity partners if a customer signs up for one of their plans. We do this both through affiliate links and through direct APIs with the electricity providers. We also have a free electricity shopping service for Texas customers where we compare a customer’s usage to our database and select the right plan for them.

Mike:  How well do your sites rank in Google?  ElectricityPlans.com comes up on the first page when I search for “Electricity Plans” (without quotes).  Did you have to put any extra effort into that ranking?

Kelly:  Since our industry is highly competitive on specific keywords, we don’t focus much on how our overall site ranks in Google or Bing. However, we religiously watch how certain keywords rank for us. Our customers typically don’t search for ‘electricity plans’ but instead search for keywords that vary by different states. We currently have 382 keywords (including variants) that appear in the top 10 slots on Google. We also have similar numbers on Bing. We’ve accumulated these results through classic SEO techniques like content focus and site authority.

There’s definitely extra effort over and above simply acquiring and launching an EMD (Exact Match Domain) site. There’s really no such thing as an EMD bonus anymore from Google. In late 2012, Google cracked down on ranking sites simply based on their domains. In fact, they began to penalize EMDs with poor quality sites according to Search Engine Land (source: https://searchengineland.com/ library/google/emd-update ).

In our experience, building out an EMD site really boils down to basic SEO – have a good quality user experience (including mobile), write good content, and focus on building backlinks. The benefit that you have from including an informative keyword in your domain is that you immediately set the user’s expectation for what they will get. If you site is done well, this will help your site’s overall authority and help in areas like bounce rates and backlinks. In our case it also helps potential partners find us.

Mike:   Have you received any unsolicited offers on the names?  Anything worth considering?

Kelly:  Yes, occasionally, but since we are an active revenue site I think buyers tend to shy away from making offers on just the names. There is an active market for domains in the energy vertical and we do watch the market for domains with our keywords. We have purchased several related keyword domains more as a defensive move than anything else.

Mike:  Do you feel it’s possible for anyone to make a living online with a good domain name?

Kelly:   Unfortunately, no. It takes a combination of several factors to make a living doing this in my opinion.

First, it isn’t really about the domain. It’s more about the product/service, content, and experience that you give to site visitors. Simply launching a site with a few keywords in the domain won’t get you very far. Think through your own digital shopping experiences and consider your recent positive experiences. This includes everything from things like product quality and customer service to the site interface itself. Do these things well.

Second, your product/service has to be marketed. If simply launching your site with a keyword or two in the domain is your marketing plan, you’ll likely be waiting a while (if any sales come through at all). By the way, marketing doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. There’s a lot of room for creativity here.

Next, focus on your competitive advantage if your site is entering a competitive market. Do your due diligence on competitors and see what you like or don’t like about their products.

Finally, there’s the personal and financial aspect of owning a site. Do you have the financial backing to not only launch a site but scale it up to profitability? Do you have the patience to write content and duke it out in the battle for keywords? Have you determined what makes you uniquely qualified to fill a specific need? All of these factors come into play when deciding if you can head down the entrepreneurial path and make a living online.
Mike:  I noticed you have only a couple of states associated with the gas and electric sites.  Why is that?   Any plans on expanding?

Kelly:  Yes, definitely. We are currently in Texas, Ohio, and Connecticut with our electricity site and Ohio and Michigan with our natural gas site. We are definitely planning on expanding to other deregulated markets (there are 14 total for electricity and 20 for gas). We will soon go through the licensing and certification process in the other deregulated markets and enter them in an orderly manner through the end of 2018.

In addition, many countries have varying degrees of energy choice for consumers. Our long term plan is to enter these markets as well.

Tina Willis graduated 2nd in her class from Florida State University College of Law.  She has worked as a big firm defense attorney and as a law professor, not to mention the many awards under her belt.  She now focuses her time as a personal injury attorney.  She is using InjuryAttorneyFlorida.com as her domain to her business site and likes to refer to herself as an Orlando car & truck accident attorney.

Mike:  What attracted you to practice law from the start?

Tina:  My grandparents raised me and we had very little money or connections.  As I became a young adult, who thankfully was able to attend college, I became more aware of the societal and economic pressures that had made life difficult for my grandparents.  So I suppose you could say that I wanted to help those who were less fortunate when they needed an advocate. That was because I knew how it felt to need help, and not be able to find anyone who really cared.  That is one big reason that I love my current practice area, which allows me to help those who could not otherwise afford to hire a lawyer, instead of helping large corporations.  Plus, I have always loved a good debate!

Mike:  You’re leveraging InjuryAttorneyFlorida.com along with tinawillislaw.com.  Are there any other domains you own?

Tina:  On the advice of a not great SEO agency, when I first started my practice, we purchased over 100 domains, and still own quite a few of those.  These days, we only maintain and regularly update my primary domain (InjuryAttorneyFlorida.com).  We made the decision to focus our efforts online because maintaining more than one website, much less many other websites, was far too challenging.  We also get virtually no traffic or leads from the other domains we own.  So basically we learned the hard way that the advice to purchase many domains was not good.

Also, as a side note, managing multiple domains is so problematic that tinawillislaw.com is not even forwarding properly (to my primary domain).  We purchased that domain name only for email and offline marketing.  But the forwarding has never worked.  Your interview actually reminded me that I need to check with my tech/website support people, to hopefully get that resolved.   But that’s a perfect example of how multiple domains can lead to many unexpected complications.

Mike: I have to ask some questions related to law.  If I were to be injured at work or at a business, what are the first steps I should take?  Is that any different if I were to get injured on someones residential property?

Tina:  Most of the cases that we handle are either auto accidents, such as car, truck, or motorcycle accidents, or premises liability, such as slip and fall, or negligent security cases.

Your question relates more to premises liability.  But many of the steps for an injured victim to take after any accident are the same.

First, they should make sure they get immediate medical treatment.  If their injuries are serious, the best scenario in terms of adding value to their injury case is to be transported by ambulance to the hospital right after their accident.

Second, or simultaneously, they should report the accident, either to the police (in an auto accident), or the business owner (in a premises liability case).   They also should take detailed photos of the accident scene, vehicles involved, property defects in a premises liability case, and any visible signs of their own injuries.

Finally, they absolutely need to call a personal injury & accident lawyer ASAP.  Injured victims have the burden of proving their cases in court.  And that burden is a heavy one.  So we need to quickly gather evidence, which could, and often does, disappears very soon after any accident.  This includes documentary evidence, physical evidence, and witnesses.

Although they have a duty to report the accident to their own insurance company (in auto accident cases), usually within a short period of time, they should call a lawyer first.  The reason is that their own insurance company wants to pay the least amount of money possible, on every claim.  If their insurance company might owe any money under an uninsured motorist (UM) policy, they WILL ask questions, sometimes very innocent-sounding questions, to get information that can significantly reduce case value.  Injured victims have no obligation to communicate with the other party’s insurance company, regardless of what they say.  Either way, injured victims need a lawyer speaking and working for them, very quickly, particularly if they sustained serious injuries.

If someone were injured on residential property, there might be different issues involved, primarily with getting the home owner’s insurance policy.  Lawyers do not have access to homeowner policies.  So we might need the client to get the homeowner’s policy, or we would have to reject case.  This happens in dog bite cases, for example.  One exception would be if the residential property were an apartment complex, and some defect with the apartment caused their injury.  Then we might be able to accept the case, and hold the landlord, management company, or owner responsible.

The bottom line with all injury and accident cases is that the facts can change the outcome.  So there really is no substitute for a consultation, during which we tell our clients what they need to do to get the most money possible in their cases.  We provide free consultations so we encourage potential clients to take advantage of those.

Mike:  How has this descriptive, geographic domain name helped your traffic and what made you decide to try this approach?

Tina:  We believe the domain name has helped our online presence because we tend to rank well for many of our targeted phrases.  But, as you know, the Google algorithm doesn’t send you a message telling you what helped your phone ring.  So we cannot be sure.  That’s just a hunch / gut-feeling.  We purchased this domain name on the advice of an SEO professional and friend.

Mike:  Have you considered other domains with TLDs such as dot law or dot legal as some other attorneys have?

Tina:  I have considered the other TLDs, primarily because I have friends who have successfully used them.  But, after just going through a conversion of my website from http to httpS, there is no way in the world that I would change domain names at this point.  Besides, my personal opinion is that dot com will always be the best.  Plus, the algorithm awards domain age.  So I wouldn’t want to convert an older URL to a brand new domain name, for the sake of possibly better keywords.  Also, many of the exact match domain names have already been purchased, so we would still have to settle for a partial match domain.

Mike:  Would you recommend a geo name for other businesses, such as “orlandodentist.com?”  Why or why not?

Tina:  As I said, I think having geography in the name has been helpful.  But I have no statistics or analytics to support that theory.  I just assume they help, based on what I have been told, and we seem to rank reasonably well.  On the other hand, since the algorithm involves hundreds of factors, there definitely could be other factors that are helping our website rank.  I am not aware of any way to test any one specific factor.  That all being said, if I were starting a new business, with a new website, then I definitely would try to include geo factors.  That creates a problem of finding an available, exact match domain name.  Partial matches aren’t as helpful.  As it turns out, actually, mine is a partial match, because an exact match was not available.  On the other hand, if I had an established domain, then I wouldn’t switch domain names just for the geo component.

Philip Shawe is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of TransPerfect, a global family of companies and the world’s largest privately held provider of language and business services. Phil oversees the day-to-day operations of the company.

Under Phil’s leadership, TransPerfect has received numerous awards and distinctions. The company is a seven-time honoree of the Inc. 5000 Award, a six-time honoree of the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and has earned multiple Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service. Crain’s New York Business has ranked TransPerfect as one of the largest privately held companies nine years in a row. TransPerfect was also named to fastest-growing lists six times by Entrepreneur.

Mike:  Tell me how you came to acquire Translations.com.  Can you talk about the process you went through to acquire the name? 

Phil: When we decided to establish the technology division in the late 90s, Translations.com seemed an obvious choice. The head of our corporate development efforts, Mike Sank, looked into acquiring the domain and we determined that the cost was about the same as we’d spend on a professional branding exercise so we opted to pay the expense and get on with developing the business.

Mike:  What exactly do you do at Translations.com?  Clearly some form of translations but I know it is really much more than that. 

Phil: Translations.com was initially focused on providing language services for companies that were dealing with digital content, while the predecessor company, TransPerfect, represented more of the brick-and-mortar side of the business, with offerings such as document translation, interpretation, and multilingual desktop publishing. The increase in demand for software localization and web localization, and the need to cater toward the unique requirements of those projects drove the need to create a specialized team. Through some very strategic mergers and the development of our own technology, the Translations.com division now offers flagship technology products that help customer manage their translation workflow in digital environments. Translations.com also produces those same software products for our internal use company-wide, which help the whole of TransPerfect operate more efficiently, and we are able to pass those best-practices and saving on our clients, with the net result of providing higher value solutions than our competition.

Mike:  Focusing specifically on you, you seem to have done quite well in business.  Do you feel that is due to skills that you have learned, personality traits that you naturally have, a combination, or something else?

Phil: Ultimately, I attribute much of my success to the team of people I’ve managed to gather around me. While I do think I’ve got some talent in a few important areas of business, what’s made me the most successful is an ability to identify, motivate and retain others, who possess the true talent that drives our business. TransPerfect and Translations.com have grown to have over 4,000 employees working in over 30 countries, out of over 100 offices worldwide — revenues of more than $615MM in 2017 — and we just completed our 100th straight quarter of profitable growth. None of that would be possible without the hard work and dedication of the team we’ve assembled. I have learned a ton about management in those 25 years, but I continue to learn with each passing day, and I’m looking forward to next 25 years which has just begun.

Mike:  Are you willing to share what you paid for the name? 

Phil: I believe we paid in the neighborhood of $75,000 at the time. As I mentioned before, that was comparable to what we’d have paid for a separate branding exercise run by a marketing firm — so we thought, let’s get a recognizable and memorable domain name — along with the name of our new tech-focused company.  It was very hip at the time to be a “dot com.” — and it may be so retro now that we’ve survived all this time, that it may become hip again.

Mike:  How much traffic does the name pull in on a monthly basis? 

Phil:  While those numbers are informative, they don’t matter as much to us as they might to some other brands as our website is not an e-commerce platform. We’ve got highly professional sales and client service teams that really drive our revenues. Still, even after all these years, we do get new leads directly from the site and some of those have grown into major client relationships.

Mike:  How important would you say a good domain name is to an online business’ success? 

Phil:  I definitely think that a good domain name is helpful in terms of building a brand and having easy name recognition. For example, if your domain name is really long or hard to remember, every time a salesperson tells someone how to get in touch with them via email, there’s an opportunity for confusion and missed messages. But at the end of the day, what’s most important is the quality of the product or service your offering and the commitment your team makes to its customers. So while I’d advocate for being thoughtful about a domain and making sure it’s memorable, easy to spell, and culturally appropriate, I wouldn’t obsess over it at the expense of properly delivering services or technology solutions to your clients.

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