"The broker would help them find the owners of domain names, negotiate the price, and handle the transaction in exchange for a 10-15% commission of the price of the domain."<p>The incentives there seem misaligned to me. The person negotiating the price for them gets paid a higher commission if the price ends up being higher?
> Sure, they got a little lucky because they connected with a domain owner that shared their vision for science.<p>The fact that the domain wasn't sold since 1996, even when there were better offers from domain flippers during the time, suggests that luck played a much larger role than the statement implies
> [...] but their budget was $12-15K [...]<p>> ....<p>> After weeks of gentle negotiating, they came to an agreement: $54K in cash for the domain.<p>Yikes. That's 3.6x the max budget they were hoping to spend. I really do hope that in the long run it pays off.
All domains should really cost $1000/year from the registrar at a minimum to stop this idiotic "I'll buy thousands of them and sit on them forever until someone offers me enough for one of them to make the whole enterprise worth it".
I actually like Cofactor best. It basically screams science crowdfunding and is noticeably less generic than Experiment and highly spellable unlike Microryza.
"The founders conferred. They were prepared to settle for Ryza.com, but suddenly Experiment.com was available. That’s like being engaged to a high school boyfriend only to learn that Brad Pitt is interested in dating you. Never in their wildest dreams did they consider that they could get a domain like that. What to do?"<p>Stick with the person you love, right. Yeah, tell Brad Pitt to take a hike. Yep, that's definitely the right thing to do. Aww, high school sweethearts. That's lovely. What a nice story.<p>Oh. Wait. Huh? you dumped high school sweetheart for that wally off of the Chanel ads?<p><i>Sigh</i>, I suppose it was... "inevitable" (<a href="http://youtu.be/mGs4CjeJiJQ" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/mGs4CjeJiJQ</a>)
I probably wouldn't have chosen the name "Experiment." They won't be able to trademark that, because it's descriptive.<p>I think Ryza was the better choice.
I'm actually just about to go through the process of acquiring a somewhat recently dropped domain from BuyDomains.com for my new project. The current asking price for the domain is around $4,000 on their site.<p>Anyone worked with them before? I'm prepared to negotiate with them but also want to make sure I don't shoot myself in the foot and cause them to raise the price on me. I would ideally like to not spend more than $2k but the domain is really perfect for my project so if we have to bite the bullet then we will...<p>EDIT: To add more context here, I have purchased the getPROJECTNAME.com and PROJECTNAMEapp.com domains for normal registrar prices. PROJECTNAME.io is also available for the normal price of about $60/yr. So it's not a make or break situation, but since we're in stealth mode for at least another 5 months, I don't want to launch and then all of a sudden face a $40,000 domain acquisition situation rather than a $4,000 one.
Neat story. Were there any provisions should Microryza go out of business? Not a lawyer, but seems that org would be legally compelled to flip the domain for a price much higher than 54k, which could lead to the domain being used for something not 'nobel' as the seller intended.
Given that the company relies on word of mouth marketing, the move makes a lot of sense. 'Experiment' is a fantastic name.<p>My only concern is that such a generic term negatively affects findability. E.g., it makes brand monitoring or web-searching very hard. You won't rise above the noise.<p>You could address the findability problem by adding a unique token to the name (e.g., 'Experiment42').
In my view Premium keyword.com domains are best for services with not much frequent usage (like freecreditreport.com). For servces with repeat usage brand names are better, thus facebook and amazon are better names than socialnetwork.com or buy.com.<p>So by that logic i think Cofactor.com is a much better choice than the more generic Experiement.com