Finding real end users is the part of domain investing that separates hobbyists from professionals. Anyone can register names or win auctions. The hard work starts when you actually have to sell the damn things.
I spent my first few years carpet-bombing every company that vaguely related to my domains. Generic info@ emails. Hundred-name lists. Templates I thought were clever. You know what I learned? Most outbound doesn't fail because of pricing or timing. It fails because I was emailing the wrong people at companies that would never care.
Who actually wants this thing?
The question I should have asked earlier: Who would realistically use this domain?
Not who could afford it. Not who might find it interesting. Who would actually build on it, brand on it, or buy it defensively because losing it keeps them up at night?
For most domains, that list is tiny. Maybe ten companies. Twenty if you're lucky. When I catch myself building a spreadsheet with hundreds of targets, that's usually me avoiding the real work of figuring out who the actual buyers are.
I look at whether the domain fits an existing business model. Does it replace a clunky name they're already using? Does it make their paid ads cheaper? Does it match something they already sell?
If I can't answer those questions, I'm probably wasting my time.
The decision maker problem
Even when I nail the company, most of my outbound dies in info@ inboxes.
I've sent probably a thousand emails to generic contact addresses over the years. Know how many real conversations came from that? Maybe five. Maybe.
You need someone who understands branding and has budget authority. Founder, CEO, CMO, Head of Marketing. For small companies, it's almost always the founder. For bigger ones, marketing leadership is the entry point.
LinkedIn helps me find names and confirm roles. I don't pitch there. That feels gross, but it gets me to real people instead of support queues.
Even then, most people ignore me. That's just the game.
The brutal math of cold email
Here's the part that almost made me quit outbound entirely: I'd send fifty emails and hear back from three people. One might be interested. One would tell me they already owned something similar. One would ask my price and then ghost.
Five to ten percent response rates are normal. Sometimes it's lower. That doesn't mean my domains suck. It means everyone is drowning in email and mine looks like spam.
What finally clicked for me: relevance beats volume.
I stopped sending polished templates to hundreds of contacts. Now I write one or two sentences explaining why the domain matters to them specifically. That's it. No hype. No artificial urgency. No six-paragraph stories about brandability.
Professionals spot BS immediately. Plain truth works better.
Spam filters hate me
The silent killer of every outbound campaign I've ever run: spam filters.
New domains trigger them. Bulk sending triggers them. Links, tracking pixels, and "limited time offer" language. All of it increases the odds I never reach the inbox.
I learned this the hard way after sending what I thought was a perfect campaign and getting zero responses. Not because people weren't interested. Because Gmail decided I was spam.
Now I go slow. Manual outreach. Plain text. No links. No images. I send from domains that have real websites and normal email activity, not fresh registrations.
It's boring as hell. But boring emails actually arrive.
What this actually looks like
My response rates are still depressing. I still email the wrong people sometimes. I still get ghosted by companies I was certain would bite.
But the sales I do close through outbound come from finding that tiny group of people who already understand the value. They don't need to be convinced. They just need to see the opportunity at the right moment.
That's the difference between signal and noise in domain investing. Most of what we do is noise.
The trick is finding the signal before giving up entirely.