I bought the domain name table.com for my then-fledgling company Round Table Group way back in 1995.  roundtable.com was already in use, and roundtablegroup.com seemed too long, but table.com was still available.  Over the years, we used both table.com and a subdomain round.table.com.  Eventually we decided to switch to just roundtablegroup.com (because that's what our clients were typing in), so we haven't used table.com in several years.  Sort of a shame, since table.com is so short and sweet!

We didn't have a particular plan to sell the domain, but we didn't have a real plan for the domain either, and unsolicited inquiries kept coming in.  At first, because most of the notes weren't tangible (for example, "I'd like to buy your domain name.  Are you interested?"), I thought they were a new kind of spam!  As it turns out, there is a nifty feature on networksolutions.com (as well as on the sites of other domain brokers) that allows you to send a note to the owner of a domain making an offer.

Eventually, someone offered me $50,000 for table.com, and I paid attention.  It seemed like a lot of money, and would have been a good return on investment for us (the puchase and maintenance on the domain over a decade probably came to only a couple hundred dollars), but was $50,000 was a good price or not?  It was hard to say.  How could I find out?

This blog (which can be read historically through the monthly archive) is the story of an accidental domainer, the true story of selling a domain name.

In Domaining for Amateurs, I'm going to write about my experiences, from evaluating our options (should we sell to an unsolicited offer, hire a domain broker, or enter table.com in one of many various auction systems?) to (hopefully) selling table.com. I'll try to share some of the good information I've found and advice I've received.  I'll also describe my thinking, and my interpretation of the data and alternatives, and the consequences.

I will limit myself to information of use to people coming newly to the world of selling domains.  So, while I may occasionally allude to the world of pay-per-click, I will not write about the potentially profitable world of domain farming.

I talked with my business partners about whether to sell table.com to the individual who emailed me with the offer.  We didn't have any real way to evaluate whether $50,000 was an appropriate price for the domain, so we decided to spend some time looking into the other alternatives.

Some of the possibilities we thought about were auctions, listing services, soliciting potential buyers ourselves or using a broker, but we didn't know enough about any of these (yet) to make an informed decision.  Maybe we shouldn't sell the domain at all...  The number of people online grows every day, so perhaps it would be worth more at a later date?

There is much research ahead, so I will keep notes here.

One of the goals of sharing this information is to help other non-domainers who need to sell their own domain names, so everyone doesn't have to start from scratch like I did.  I am, after all, a beginner, so the information may not be complete.  So, if you have any other advice for someone in a similar situation, please share your insight by commenting on these pages. 

I will keep posting (at least) until we sell the domain name, so in the end I hope this will be an end-to-end domain sale case study.  By the way, here is the current status of the table.com.

And, of course, if you want to buy table.com, let me know!

First, I'm not a professional domain reseller.  That's the point of this blog, really.  Finding useful resources and understanding the business of domaining took some time, so I wanted to share my "notebook" -- where I jotted down and organized what I'd learned, and what I was thinking about -- with others.

In real life, I'm one of the founders of Round Table Group, a company that helps people (attorneys, consultants, and money managers, mostly) quickly find the right experts.  

I live near Chicago.  I also started another company, Centerstage, which grew out of my passion for the Windy City's arts & entertainment scene.  My Centerstage partners and I independently built and ran one of the very earliest online arts & entertainment city guides for 12+ years.  The site continues to thrive as part of the Chicago Sun-Times, which bought it a few years ago.

This blog is the story of my successful quest to sell the domain table.com.  As such, the posts appear in chronological order rather than (as is more typical for a blog) reverse chronologically.  If you want to whole story, I suggest you start at the beginning, in July 2007.  If you read straight down from the words you're reading now, you'll be peeking at the details of the resulting sale, and you'll miss out on all of the good and bad ideas that led there!

Hope you enjoy,

Chris Crone
Round Table Group

Note: this post has teleported in from the future to get you on the right track.