How You Can Turn Your Junk into Treasure
"What seems worthless to some may be priceless to others."
— Kevin Ham (1970-)
Come and See and Understand
"Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
— Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986) Nobel Prize Laureate
It was the end of the year. Dec 2000. I was so excited for the coming new year. As I gathered with friends and family, I couldn't help but tell them about this new discovery about domain names, hoping to inspire them to invest in domain names.
People thought I was speaking nonsense because the Internet was going through its death throes. All the bad news made my claims sound irrational. "Is Kevin going crazy? What happened to medicine?"
I could tell by the look in their eyes that they were all skeptical. I became more reserved around family and friends. This pattern would repeat with future counterintuitive discoveries.
Ah, human nature.
But one of my best friends, Colin Yu, was interested. He invited me to a preseason Vancouver Grizzlies basketball game, my first NBA game, and asked me many questions about my thoughts on these domain names.
He was very interested in investing in domain names. He was one of my best men at my wedding. As he was super practical, so I was surprised.
I'll Take Your Junk and Turn it to Gold
"The art of turning lead into gold is not just alchemy, but also mindset."
— Kevin Ham (1970-)
But he had a twist on my vision of domain names. He wasn't interested in keeping domain names. He was interested in buying and selling, like Mike Mann of Buydomains.
Buy for $10 and sell for $1,000 (10x) or $10,000 (100x).
He asked if I could give him the list of all the domain names I didn't want to register, and he would register the "trash domain names."
I wasn't going to register them anyway, so why not? He was based in Hong Kong, working at HSBC. It would be his side hustle but eventually became his full-time hustle. We would later partner to create an even bigger business than our respective hustles, and Colin would retire in 2009, just eight years after that fateful basketball game.
Accelerating Time to Scale
"Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend."
— Theophrastus (371-287 BC), Disciple of Aristotle
At the end of 2000, I sold a few domains to register more domain names. I sold TicToc.com for $7,500, equal to 750 more domains. Then, when I found the Goto Pay-Per-Click (PPC) monetization engine, I realized I didn't need to sell domain names to register more domains.
So, I knew Colin's model would work well and encouraged him to go for it. I helped him build a website and watched him work his magic.
Then I had an idea. We could amalgamate our traffic to get a better revenue share with Goto (our PPC advertising engine).
We only got domain revenue stats monthly by spreadsheet, which was archaic. We needed real-time stats daily, and it would be even better if we knew what each domain name made in PPC revenue and how much each click made. It seemed like an impossible request. We asked anyway, but they refused, saying we needed more traffic volume.
So I asked our Goto if I got the biggest domainer, Yun Ye, onto Goto, could we get a better agreement? They were interested.
It was a long shot, but I emailed Yun, and to my surprise, he answered. Little did I know that he visited Vancouver often. I told him that he could 5x his revenue if he just swapped to Goto. He told me that Goto kicked him off earlier in 2000. That's why he was on Findwhat.
My assumption was wrong; I thought that because he was the biggest domainer, he was also the best. It turned out that Goto had terminated his agreement because they were dealing with internal issues, but Yun didn't trust them anymore. So I asked him, what if I could get him a contract that couldn't be terminated and got daily stats on each domain name and all the keyword data he could ever imagine? He was interested. So I brokered the deal with everything we wanted and that Goto wanted.
Our rev share went from 30% to 48%, along with daily domain stats, with keyword bids that would allow us to optimize the relevancy and monetization of each domain name.
Yun would go on to 5x his revenue to $20 million a year and profit $19 million. He and his wife were unstoppable. One year later, he sold his portfolio to Marchex for $164 million, an 8.6x multiple of his profit. He would retire in 2006. Mr. No name. He was a master of domains. Not many knew him, but a handful of us attempted to be as good as he was.
Yun, in his gratitude to me, said he saved one domain from his portfolio of 100,000 domain names to give to me:
It was MyBible.com
Yun knew I was Christian. I was very grateful and promised him that I would develop it one day.
In 2000, I was given a vision to own four domain names, which seemed impossible at the time: God.com, Religion.com, Heaven.com, and Jesus.com. I had the vision that once I obtained all four domains, I would be graced with a vision for all of them.
God has blessed me with three of them over the past 24 years. It took 4.5 years to obtain God.com, five years for Religion.com, and seven years for Heaven.com. Jesus.com remains elusive. Perhaps my heart is not ready. I have much to work on my inner spirit. However, God has blessed me with a suite of other domains, such as Christians.com, Hell.com, Baptism.com, Goodnews.com, Rapture.com, Armageddon.com, Messiah.com and 2000 other 'religion' domains.
If you could help me connect with the owners of Jesus.com, I would be so grateful.
I realized right away that acquiring these four domain names would require millions of dollars, and so my goal was set. I was figuring out the plan to do this, and I would get glimpses of it.
My Compounding Flywheel
"The compounding effect is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it."
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Everyone should conceive a Flywheel for each part of their life--
your health, wealth, relationships, faith, and happiness.
Here was my simple but powerful Compounding Flywheel for Domains
Get more domain names
Get more traffic per domain
Make more $ per domain
Make more $ per click
Repeat in a flywheel
Help others make more $ on their domains
This was my simple blueprint for the business, tt's based on the principle of leveraging strategic partnerships.
Leverage other people's unused:
Capacity
Capabilities
Resources
Know how
Assets
Life Questions
What Opportunities pass you by because you aren't open to them?
How can you leverage what you have at scale?
How can you accelerate time by leveraging other people's unused capacity, capabilities and resources?
Life Advice Then
From my 29-year-old self:
"Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game."
— Babe Ruth (1895-1948) Home run king
How much innovation comes from seeing abundance even in what is perceived as wasteful or useless
Opportunity is everywhere. Be useful. Provide value.
Everything is “figureoutable” if you persist in asking great questions.
How do we scale 10x?
How do you do it in 10x less time?
These force you to think differently.
What seems nice on the outside may be toil on the inside.
What would have been of us if we had never been helped to see the light of a better solution, a better way? Most of the time, we live in this unrealized state because it is hard to imagine 10x or 100x. Just imagine, dream, test, and do.
Life Advice Now
From my 53-year-old self:
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Wisely incubate your newborn ideas. Don't let others suffocate your dreams.
"A prophet is not welcome in his hometown" is an apt proverb when it comes to newborn ideas that light up your heart.
Focus more on compounding the flywheel in all aspects of your life.
Like the human body and its organs that work complementary with feedback and synergy, compound all parts of your life, especially the time and quality of time you have in this life.
Never forget your first vision.
Disney reminds us that it all started with a mouse. Never forget why you started in the first place. Finish well. Be strong. Have faith. What was impossible was done. Why can't the impossible be done again and again? Oh, you of little faith?
Next week: The crisis is Danger and Opportunity, Together.
Turning Danger into Opportunity.
See you next Thursday!
Subscribe to my Compounding Wisdom newsletter and start transforming your life.
