Karn Saroya, CEO at Cover.com – an insurance finder company – shared his experience with the acquisition of their premium corporate domain.
Saroya’s blog post comes across as a “don’t do it” lesson, despite some gallant efforts to share his ultimate satisfaction for the end-result.
In a nutshell, the cost of Cover.com at $825,000 dollars was exuberant, yet necessary in Karn Saroya’s opinion; in the end, Saroya seems happy it didn’t cost the company the initial asking price of $1.5 million.
And yet, the article seeps out bitter surprise, dire warnings about the domain aftermarket, and loose claims of byzantine scenarios surrounding the gamut of domain brokers involved.
We cannot blame the Cover.com CEO for thinking he overspent on a generic domain name that displayed bedding PPC ads for the better part of twenty years.
This type of mentality is widespread among start-up neophytes that follow Y Combinator’s rules on bootstrapping costs like the Holy Bible.
This is exactly the mistake that such company founders make; they roll out a product without the matching .com domain, and then act gob-smacked when the price is quoted. Putting the cart before the horse trumps any Y Combinator principles, in this case.
Elliot Silver located an interesting exchange on the Y Combinator forums, and the commentary is mostly far from friendly towards the Cover.com CEO’s acquisition of the domain name.
Cover.com as a parked domain
