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Billion dollar hand regs

Shane

Top Contributor
I'm reading 'Killing Fairfax' at the moment. It's a great read, which focuses on how Fairfax was smashed by a couple of little startup websites...

I thought these two excerpts would be of particular interest to domainers:

realestate.jpg


carsales.jpg

Imagine picking up realestate.com.au or carsales.com.au as hand registrations? They couldn't have imagined at the time they would form the basis of a pair of companies with a combined market cap of $13 billion.

And here's a thought... If punters were free to speculate on com.au domains back then, and both of those had already been picked up by domainers, do you think the founders would have stumped up the extra cash, or would they have just gone with different options? It could've changed the face of two of our most successful online businesses.
 

snoopy

Top Contributor
Realestate.com.au maybe a big player would have bought if it were taken. Property.com.au was one of the big 3 also before being bought out.

Carsales.com.au I don't think is worth anything without development.
 

findtim

Top Contributor
Imagine picking up realestate.com.au
STORY: ( old story so i may get it wrong) when i first came to melbourne in @ 2010 i use to play wednesday golf at homesglen, i live near by .
i didn't know anybody so i'd just show up and most times i'd just join in with a group.
this day there was a "3" ( you can only play 4 in a group) so i asked to join and i played 15 of the 18 holes with them, 2 retired blocks and a guy my age who was the son of one of them.
so for 15 holes we talked about nothing as you do in golf and then we got onto the internet conversations and i said i build websites, the son was interested and we chatted as he said he was a programmer, on the last hole i asked him what sort of programming do you do and he said "everything" but mostly realestate.com.au !!!!!!!!!!!!
turns out this bloke was one of the originals and i asked him, was it realestate agents or programmers first? and he said "no realestate agents, we were looking for concepts and found realestate.com.au available so we went and created it "
i don't know his name but he was a very down to earth guy, he said " but i have sold out of it now for 20 million " that was back in 2010, maybe he now wishes he held on?

tim
 

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