IDN demystified

15 years in 15 mins

I left college in 1987 knowing that I had an interest and to a certain degree an aptitude for anything I.T related.

The UK in the 80’s was experiencing the “boom” part of a “boom-bust” cycle – it was a time when jobs were plentiful and corporate training budgets almost extravagant.




Entering the corporate I.T world in the 80’s was easy, and there seemed to be no shortage of companies willing to throw £’s at you to train you in whatever area interested you.

As I look back on those times, it’s almost as if that part of my life had already been mapped out for me; I come from a family that followed the traditional corporate management path – moving through the ranks to heady heights – but at the same time rarely challenging if there were other paths available taking you of in different directions.

So with my destiny laid out for me, I too walked that path.
The next 15 years would see me navigate through the corporate ranks at various multi-national companies. I would find myself running multi-million Pound projects managing my own teams. Although starting out in the software development area, it wasn’t long before I crossed the divide to “the business”.
My work now was more strategic, often working alongside Sales, Marketing and Distribution – gone were the days of projects being simply an internal necessity; everything had to a have a Business Plan to even have a chance of being approved, and everything was chasing the holy grail of a 20% ROI over 3 years.

It is a common story to hear domainers talk about how they missed the gold rush in the 90’s; but I am almost embarrassed to say that I worked in I.T since ‘87, and didn’t register my first domain until January of 2005.

You might ask WTF were you doing, how can you have missed that?
That’s a very good question…

… as I look at my PayPal account, the top left of the screen it says “Account Holder since 2002”. I think that is the first time I got online, but only to shop for DVD’s etc.

You see, my I.T background had always been IBM mainframe, later midrange and later still client-server such as SAP. At the time this was all mainly dumb-terminal type stuff, and even though the home PC had arrived; after having the pips squeezed of me each day in the office, I had no real motivation to be an early adopter of yet another I.T thing at home – so I guess I sleep walked right through it.

But I was hungry though, my father, at the time a successful Estate Agent (US: real-estate) had brainwashed me over the years that my pension(s) will be worthless, and that I needed something else to supplement it.

I was in the midst of a messy long drawn out divorce; divorces in the UK can be like that, even if one party wants to move fast – so I figured there was little point in investing in anything until that was all closed off.

After pretty much rebuilding my life financially in 2003 I considered a few options – I almost invested in personalized number plates (unlike the U.S where a Vanity Plate of your choice can be obtained for a hundred dollars – in the UK, the equivalent change hands for many thousands or tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of Pounds, due to the fact that you cannot create your own sequence of numbers/letters, and the most desirable sequences date from the very early simple registration patterns of 1930-1960)
.. but I again decided to walk the path others close to me had walked, I slowly started buying investment property.

Penny > Drop

Fast forward to 2005..

I had received a phone call from a buddy that simply said, hey you know I.T, any idea why my company website has stopped working?
I hadn’t a clue. I hadn’t ever thought of what is behind a website, what makes it work – I guess that just like the keyboard I’m typing on now, I don’t care what is beneath the plastic shell- I’ve never had the need to.

But if there is one thing I do like, that is a challenge.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that behind a website is a domain name and this domain name had a status, and that status meant it was dead (or at least close to dying)
A while later that evening, I remember thinking why was it that he was using this domain name, and not actually the name of the company. I asked him and he said simply it wasn’t available.
I didn’t think the name of this company was particularly common so I did some digging and found what I know now to be a registrar, and started to investigate.

We all have a story I suppose of how we found domaining, of how the penny dropped – I’m just glad I didn’t read about it first in some newspaper somewhere, or have someone tip me off – my moment was akin to a caveman discovering cave-women.

I remember sitting in my office after hours, looking down at the street below at the Double-Decker buses go by and typing in “bus.com” – nope, “car.com” – nope.
Oh c’mon. How about “courier.com” – nope.

Twenty minutes later… this bus drove by and I remember it had some sort of Giraffe ad plastered all over it, so I thought I would be smart, I thought I would type in some “ridiculous” domain that would obviously be available and then work backwards towards “sensible” and see where I ended up. But Giraffe.com, Peacock.com and the whole bloody zoo was gone.

I left the office soon after that, and traveling home was annoyed and frustrated, but even more bewildered.

Later that evening after a little research I downloaded a bulk check app and an English language dictionary, did some reformatting and threw the entire dictionary into a bulk check and went to bed.

The next couple of days and the results of the bulk check said it all – dictionary words I’d never heard of were gone.

So domain names are like Personalized Number plates (UK ones anyway). The best ones are all gone. Anyone can have an unremarkable one.
Rarity + desire of others to have them = value.

dot UK

.co.uk is by far the most common used extension in the UK; and something I was familiar with – when shopping for stuff, I would always limit my search to dot uk to weed out all the U.S websites – so I immediately ran the same bulk check on .co.uk.
The results were pretty damning, but not as disappointing, I managed to grab a handful of dictionary words, and took this as a sign that there was a bigger opportunity per Pound here.

I spent the next 12 months regging, buying the odd one from members at AcornDomains, (a forum that I stumbled upon dedicated to .UK domains) I tried my luck at drop catching, but soon was realizing that while there is certainly money to be made by flipping domains, that’s not really what I wanted – I wanted something bigger, and I was willing to up the risk.

It was around this time, and I cannot for the life of me remember in what context, but I followed a link from Edwin (whom I knew was almost legendary in the .co.uk scene) – to a little forum with a handful of members called IDNforums.

Next up: The meat in the sandwich. What and who I found at IDNforums, and how I utilized my background in assessing what I had just walked into.

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