The Washington Post just published a post on legendary domain name investor Mike Mann, entitled “Domain-name mogul Mike Mann will sell you happybirthday.com — for $2 million”
While this is far from the first press Mike has received, its a very good article in which he reveals some information I personally didn’t know, such as that his DomainMarket.com “grosses around $4 million a year in domain name sales, but it spends $3 million alone in buying new names. After legal fees, payroll, network expenses, technology upkeep and purchases, Mann gets a $5,000-a-month draw, which he pretty much lives on.”
The story recounts Mike’s first big sale in 1998.
“That’s when entrepreneur Mike Mann sold the domain name menus.com for $25,000.
He had paid $70 for it.
“I could not imagine anything having a higher profit margin than that,” Mann recalls.
“District native Mann, 47, has been in the domain-name resale business ever since, making millions.
People call him the Mann. The Domain King The Human Robot. Others call him the Used Car Salesman of the Internet. Speculator.“I am a speculator,” he admits.
He is founder of DomainMarket.com, which owns 350,000 domain names. For $2 million, you can buy happybirthday.com. Same for obey.com or angola.com. Mali.com runs $1.5 million.
Tasty.com is $1 million. Skincraft.com, $1.3 million.
He bought sex.com for $11 million and resold it for $13 million in November 2010, making the Guinness Book of World Records for most ever paid for a domain name at the time.
He is a born self-promoter.
“My nature is to hustle and survive,” said Mann. “I can absorb an enormous amount of information and am capable of going without sleep for days at a time.”
“He splits his time between an $8 million oceanfront home in Delaware (it’s in a trust for his daughter) and a luxury rental on Florida’s Gold Coast” Its nice to see Mike referred to as a Domain name Mogul and an entrepreneur as he should instead of some of the negative terminology that other stories on domain investors have used