This story begins 1 year ago when we were launching our new Color Palette Software for COLOURlovers: COPASO. The trained eye will notice that the name COPASO is just made up from the first two letters of the 3 words. K.I.S.S is a tactic I often use when doing naming and branding development.

Anyway, after coming up with COPASO as the name of our new tool I went searching to see if the domain was available… as with so many other domains it was owned by a squatter. I didn’t care so much about the domain being taken by a squatter, I would have been more upset if the name was already in use by another company. My plan for the COPASO domain was to be either a simple marketing site for our tool, or simply just to forward to it’s location on our site: (www.COLOURlovers.com/COPASO) So, I fired off a quick email to the contact information on the WHOIS and this is how the negotiations went…

Sent Jun 22, 2007:
Hello I would like to buy www.COPASO.com from you.
Please let me know your asking price.
Cheers, -Darius

A few days later I got a response from the squatter…

Received June 26, 2007:
I am considering offers above 7900 united states dollars
Greetings from the islands

Sent Jun 26, 2007:
I actually tried to buy the domain on the same day, but it looks like you beat me to it. Having only owned the domain for about a week or so and considering it isn’t a word in any language… I could offer you $500 USD for it right now.

That is a good return on a week’s investment.
Please let me know.

About two weeks later I got a response that was about 6k off.

Received July 6, 2007:
6500 united states dollars
Greetings from the islands

Since it was obvious I wasn’t getting anywhere with this squatter I gave up on the domain. We didn’t need it, so we carried on living our lives… but just last week I got an email from a service provider that wanted to help me secure this domain…

Received September 9, 2008:
Hi Darius,

I noticed that you own copaso.org and wondered if you are aware that copaso.com will soon be released. The previous owner failed to renew it.

If you would like this premium extension to complete your branding and web presence, or even to just stop domain squatters getting there hands on it then let me know.

As an expert in the area of acquiring dropping domains and with an 80% success rate I can help.
Please don’t hesitate to get back to me as there are just a few days before the domain is released.

Kind Regards

Appreciating the reminder and wanting to steal the domain back from the squatter, I followed up on the details…

Sent September 9, 2008:
What’s the cost?
-D

Received September 9, 2008:
Hi Darius,

copaso.com will expire within a few days, the previous owner has failed to renew it in time. If you are the previous owner then I am pleased to have brought this to your attention.

We offer a no win no fee service whereby we will attempt to acquire this domain for you within less than 1 second of it being released to the general public. There is nothing to pay upfront and if we are not successful then you will not have to pay a penny.

There are 3 levels at which we can try to acquire the domain for you.

Level 1

We try to register the domain up to 1000 times a second throughout the domains expiry window. We have a 90% (spprox) success rate in acquiring domains with this service. The cost (only if successul is £500 + vat (US$995)…

The email continued on with a couple more lower priced options that had lower success rates… but it just wasn’t worth $1k to me…

Sent September 9, 2008:
…It honestly isn’t worth that much to me for the domain. I don’t use the .org and probably wouldn’t use the .com.

Thanks anyway. -Darius

I then went and ordered a Domain Backorder service from GoDaddy.com for $18.99 (I used a 10% coupon to get a couple extra dollars off)… skip forward to today and I’m the proud new owner of COPASO.com.

Squatters 0. Darius 1.

Being Clever Will Save You Thousands of Dollars

Now to be fair I own about 100 domain names… I had some sort of intention to use most of the domains when I bought them, but there are a couple that I bought just because I thought they were a good investment. But, it just doesn’t make sense for people to spend tens of thousands on a domain or to even expect somebody to pay that much for one you own. If you’re clever you can still get a great domain and save tons of money.

www.haveamint.com is one of my favorite examples of how a little creativity goes a long way. Shaun Inman created a simple but powerful web analytics tool and named it Mint. Now this was before the big financial startup launched with the same name and probably paid a fortune for Mint.com, but I’m sure even at the time Shaun was launching his tool he would have had to pay a ridiculous amount of money for Mint.com. So he put on his creative thinking cap and came up with haveamint.com. A fresh and clever domain that contains the name of his tool, but also plays on the concept of fresh stats.

Shaun didn’t need mint.com to build a successful product. He was clever and launched the tool with a different, but easy to remember domain… and now he’s a top search result for “mint” and saved who knows how much money.

Launch Well,
-D