One of my early domain registrations was a four letter .com, COVX.com.
I registered it on a “whim” in late 2000, while owning just a handful of other domains, because it was short and sounded edgy.
At the time, I only pursued domain registrations as brand ideas only. There were very little resources about domains, and no organized forums that I could locate.
A little over a year later, COVX.com became one of my first end-user sales. The offer was $250, I wanted $750. We settled at $500 and the money was sent via PayPal.
This was the first time I heard of Escrow.com, as my buyer wanted to use it.
He said I sounded honest, but he had been burned before. Not being familiar with Escrow.com, I insisted on using PayPal, to which he eventually agreed.
The exchange was smooth, and we parted ways.
COVX.com became the domain used by the pharmaceutical corporation CovX, that was acquired in 2007 by Pfizer, for $164 million.
Over the years, I’ve numerous domains sales where a domain I sold was used for an established corporation, or eventually became the epicenter of a successful business, but this one is by far the largest.
It’s also the reason I started using Escrow.com. 🙂
Acro what an interesting exercise it is to go over old escrow.com transactions and see where domains have ended up.
My first escrow.com transaction was in March 2002 when I paid $6.5k to a dropcatcher in China for the most common typo of a fantastic generic travel domain that he had grabbed in a NetSol drop.
I sold the domain in December 2004 for $10k and used escrow.com again for what I thought would be a $3.5k profit..
It actually turned out to be a sizeable loss as I had forgotten to compare the exchange rates; when I bought the domain the US dollar was very strong against my currency and when I sold it the US was very weak lol.
fizz – That’s an interesting story, with an extended lesson: the conversion rate affects a sale’s true ROI. Thank you for sharing it.