Paul Nicks is now VP of Domain Investor. Here’s what that means for you.
Paul Nicks has a new role at GoDaddy as VP, Domain Investor. The move is due to somewhat of a shift in how domains are registered and how the company views domains, so it’s important for domain name investors to understand what’s going on. On today’s show, Paul talks about the changes, who is leading the various domain teams at GoDaddy, and what Paul’s biggest initiatives are for domain name investors.
Also: Top 10 sale, RDNH
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Paul always does lot’s of talking but never doing. Just because he is a nice guy does not give him a pass for being 100% useless.
I agree .He is friends with some of the investors and I wonder if he only gets info and does what his bosses at Godaddy wants. I am sure he was seeing the afternic complaints and did nothing. Investors complained of commission and he was right there and forced investors to either use their nameservers or else get slammed with 25%.
Tell me how his new position makes investors trust Godaddy?
He is a nice guy on the surface but he alongside Joe Styler should have kicked against the nameserver rules . They are in competition with investors .
If friction breeds listing accuracy then Afternic would have the cleanest inventory imaginable, as you have an insane amount of friction already. You’re looking at it all wrong, you need to remove all friction not find the optimal balance of it. Friction necessitates idiotic things like reps doing manual adds/deletes in bulk without verifying literally anything.
You have the fast transfer network. Provide Afternic users with a unique token that they can input at their participating registrars. Afternic sends the domain/token combo to the registrar, and they respond back if ownership is confirmed or denied. No emails, no links to click, easy for your registrar partners to implement. Allow non-FT registrars to participate in this program as well.
Only for registrars that don’t participate, you still have your existing DNS verification method, which is decent enough. Most investors will be at a FT registrar though.
Between those two you should have everything you need to 100% confirm ownership, and also do periodic re-checks in a lightweight and highly scalable manner to catch listings that were sold elsewhere or dropped. Only allow these two methods, nothing else. Verify at the time of listing, not just if there’s a conflict with another account listing it.
Give people a few months warning, and then delete all listings that don’t use one of these two methods. Then without friction you have a clean slate, and you know it will stay clean moving forward as long as you stop allowing reps to perform manual actions.
Open up the Afternic API to everyone. Allow third-party developers to act on the API on behalf of a user, so portfolio management tools can actually do their jobs keeping inventory/pricing in sync across marketplaces, rather than just warning people about problems so they can fix them manually.
Turn off most of your triggers that cause “in review”. They are draconian and cause more accuracy problems than they solve, which again, necessitates manual intervention which is prone to errors.
Do these things and life will be much better for domain investors, for buyers on Afternic, and for employees of Afternic. And it’s really not that complicated.
To be more clear, the token suggestion would be an account-level thing, not a token for each domain. So basically Afternic would say “M’s token is 123456”. I would go input that token at GoDaddy, Dynadot, Namecheap, etc.
Then when I try to list a domain that is at Namecheap, you could immediately send them a request saying “Does the user with token 123456 have example.com in the account?” and they reply back yes or no. So I only ever have to input something one time per registrar, and I can list everything at those registrars hassle-free forever. No fiddling with DNS, no requesting verification at Afternic, and so on.
And you can periodically go back and say “hey, does 123456 still own example.com?” and if not you remove the listing. Keeps everything clean moving forward too.