Investor makes a gutsy move with Yachts.com acquisition.
Borgos has had an up and down history investing in domain names and building websites. His biggest success was selling a network of sites including Bored.com for $4.5 million in 2008. You can listen to a podcast with Borgos here.
His story about acquiring Yachts.com is interesting and gutsy. He knows it’s a good domain name but didn’t know how he’d develop the domain until after he bought it. Instead, he figured spending so much money on the domain would be a kick in the pants to get him to find a way to make money with the domain.
“…my simple plan was that if I spent so much on a big domain, I would be forced to focus all my time and effort on it and eventually figure out what to do,” he wrote on his blog.
Even more surprising, Borgos says he doesn’t know anything about boats.
For now, Borgos has settled on creating a boat charter site. It will be fun to see how this progresses.
The avg. price for a Yacht is $8.4 million, lowest tier starting at $300K.
Mr. Borgos got a good deal on the URL.
You’d think a ship builder like Benetti, Hessen or OceanCo. would own the domain .
“…my simple plan was that if I spent so much on a big domain, I would be forced to focus all my time and effort on it and eventually figure out what to do,”
Sounds like a pretty big mistake, either buy it as an investment or but it because you have a clear plan, this won’t go anywhere.
My backup plan is that I will try to sell the domain after a year if I can’t make money from developing it. I think I should be able to at least sell it to a retail customer for what I paid.
Good luck, Eric. Looking forward to watching your progress.
Great Domain and buy Eric! If you have any interest in Dinghy.com let me know as it will fit perfectly on your yachts.com 🙂
I appreciate the offer, but right now I need to focus on Yachts.com. I will keep it in mind for the future though. What is your asking price?
Yacht.com would be much better domain, more flexible in usage options. The plural, yachts.com, IMHO can pretty much only be used as a listing service to sell yachts. Rich people who own yachts usually sell them through yacht brokers (not online). Now if an existing yacht broker, with all the industry relationships developed, bought yachts.com and used it as a trophy domain to list yachts for sale that he or she is brokering — that WOULD make sense. I do not think this venture will be successful, UNLESS the new owner of this domain is partnering with a yacht broker (or brokers).
Yes, that is the whole point, to create a yacht broker/charter site. Yacht sales and charters is a 16 billion dollar industry.
1. Unless you are already in the yacht brokering/charter business, you’d better also have $10 Million to deploy for marketing to even make a dent in that $16 Billion industry.
2. You overpaid for the domain. Worth $50K-$75K to an end-user.
3. Good luck — you’re going to need it with this venture.
While the wholesale value of yachts.com may be less than I paid, somebody already commented on my blog saying they were also trying to buy it and would have paid more than I did if they had known the seller would let it go for that price (the official asking price was a lot higher). So while I agree I did not buy at a cheap price or domainer level price, and may have overpaid for somebody who is not in the boat business, I am pretty sure the domain is worth in the general ballpark of what I paid.
Whether I can make a real business out of it is a whole other issue, and the odds are against me, but it is something I want to try.
It’s definitely worth more than 50-70k. I think he made a good deal here. Good luck Eric!
Thanks. Unlike almost every other domain name I have ever purchased, I didn’t buy Yachts.com because I thought it was a great deal. I do think it has potential to sell for $1 million to an end user, so that was part of it, but on the other hand $350k does not seem cheap just for the purpose of flipping it. It is mainly that the $350k price is around the minimum price I think I could sell it for in 1-2 years if I can’t make money from developing it, so I feel I have nothing to lose but my time and effort.
Good luck !!!
Eric, Want another one in the marine industry, let’s talk about marine.com….
What is the asking price for Marine.com?
Eric, reach out to me directly.. jim@marine.com
Would you be interested in yachtsjournal.com?
No thanks.
How about yachts.cam?