5-Month Recap and My Thoughts on Current State Of The Market

Well, it has been a really long time since my last blog post. However, I have my reasons. A lot of things have changed for me in the last 5 months including life-changing updates.

First things first, I’m a father now. Our baby girl is almost 3 months old. Last 3 months has been very exciting and I imagine the future will have a lot more for me, for my lovely wife and for our daughter. Her name is Oya and no, I didn’t (couldn’t) secure Oya .com for her. And, again no, I’m not interested in buying other extensions, at least for now. Here is her picture:

Second, there’s a very sweet coffee shop in our office building and we wanted to operate it since we first moved to our office. The place is located exactly a floor down from our office so, location is perfect for us. When we first moved here, we couldn’t make an agreement with the owner of the coffee shop because their asking price was a bit higher than we anticipated. However, guess what, after 2 years, we made an agreement with owner and bought the business in the end of August. Yes, 2 weeks before the arrival of our daughter. We almost paid the same price they were asking 2 years ago. Considering the inflation in Turkey, we made a way better deal. Patience paid off! The name of the coffee shop is Lavinnia Coffee and yes, we have the matching .com domain name. We’re also renovating our office so my new office is Lavinnia Coffee for a while. Here is a picture to give you an idea:

September, October, November, December and January is oil harvesting season. September, October and November harvests are mostly for olive oil and the rest is for table olives. Me and my wife have a small olive garden nearly with 50 trees. I had to leave my wife and my daughter for a while and went to the west side of the country for olive harvest. Well, it took 5 days (with 3 people) for us to finish. It was tiring but we did what we came for! Here are some pictures:

Yes, time to talk about the domains now! June, July, August, September and the first half of October, we did a really good job at SecretBrokerage.com and closed some very good acquisitions for our clients. You’ve already heard some of these acquisitions at DNJournal.com. Those are the ones we can report at the moment. There’re lots of great acquisitions we’ve made for our clients, but unfortunately, we’re not able to publicly share those.

The second half of October and November is really really slow. Mostly because of the economical issues happening all around the world. The FED is still rising the interest rates and unfortunately, that’s not good for domain market, actually, not good for any of businesses that are investment-based. Companies and people are trying to secure what they have rather than making investments and taking risks. I believe this situation will be similar until the second quarter of 2023 (I’d say 3rd quarter but I’m trying to be an optimistic here). On the positive side, these are good times for buying if you have cash in your hands. Also, these are good times to review your portfolio for optimization and leave some domains behind. SecretBrokerage.com is here to help for both cases.

Moving on, I’d like to write a bit about the recent happening about .xyz extension and sales. I haven’t met with Swetha before (Actually, we didn’t even e-meet) so I have no idea about who she is. Some notable people from the industry accused her for fooling and speculating the market. Well, if someone has any kind of a proof, please spread it to the market so people can review. Otherwise, these accusations do not make sense at all other than making people angry. I have respect for the all parties (people) involved but until now, there is NO proof on the table. So, if you do not like to be fooled and speculated, maybe you shouldn’t do the same.

I agree that some of those .xyz sales are super high prices and Swetha mostly making the sales. However, it seems that she took a risk and invested heavily on one-word .xyz domains when most of the people didn’t even care. There are tons of successful people in the business advising to other people to take risks in order to be a successful in business. This shouldn’t be an answer of taking risks. That’s not acceptable. Those sales can be criticized but not like this, we can definitely do way better than what we’re been seeing so far.

Again, I respect all the people who are involved to this in person but what I’m trying to say is, we can do better. We can discuss without accusing people, we can discuss with better words. Discussion is healthy and healthy discussions will take us to the success.

Lastly, I’ve been carefully following what’s going on at Epik.com and Masterbucks.com regarding their payment problems and debts to the sellers. The situation is not good at all but very disturbing for the people who make money from buying and selling domains. I hope things get better very soon so people can move on.

Until next time, take care of yourself, your family, your friends and your environment.

Cheers,