Kevin Lawrence is a successful entrepreneur, developer, and .TV investor who resides in Southern California.
Kevin just sold the domain name FYI.TV for $30,000 marking it the highest reported .TV sale of 2014.
I did a short interview with Kevin to get the background of how he decided on the .TV extension to investment a large portion of this domain investments.
So your a pretty big .TV domain investor can you tell me what drew you to the space?
”Almost weekly I come in contact with .TV because of an advertisement (car, billboard) or news related to a .TV startup featured on a non-domain blog (TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Forbes, or Business Insider). It is a frequent reminder of just how disconnected I have become with the .TV domaining community.
When a startup I founded in 2004 started to show traction, I left my professional career in May of 2005 to rejoin it . Because it was getting traction, the decision was motivated by the possible regret I’d feel if I didn’t pursue the opportunity full-time.
The startup developed a custom CMS to feature automotive content and to leverage our proprietary HD streaming video platform.
We streamed HD automotive video content several months before Google acquired YouTube–long before the masses knew about YouTube! Based on what I know now, the demand for video and the rate at which we acquired users with no marketing was a recipe to raise money, but that was almost a decade ago when I was a young entrepreneur (my partner even younger) coming in from outside the startup ecosystem for the very first time.
The positive, unsolicited feedback we received from our audience motivated us to work harder (work more) not smarter (raise money and scale). The video consumption habits of our audience seemed insatiable and demand continued to spike so we decided to feature the HD videos exclusively on their own domain.
That presented us with the modern day domain dilemma–what domain should we register that offers an excellent opportunity to brand this new video channel?
What would still be available in a .COM world on a shoestring budget where all good name were already in use or for sale in the aftermarket at prices beyond what we were willing to pay?
I poured through hundreds of aftermarket listings to identify ANY relevant .COM URL that might appeal to us, but the options did not look good so I expanded the search thinking we might get lucky and find a .NET or .ORG that could work and searched ‘All other extensions’.
That is when it happened!…
