What country are you based in?
Canada/Pakistan. Spent first 10 years of domaining in Pakistan, moved to Canada in 2010 and now spending time in both.
Do you feel your location has an effect on your domain investing?
No. Even during the first 10 years of domain investing, working from Pakistan was very smooth. Fun part was competing with big guys on drops and had good success of hand-registering three letter lll’s in .com and .net while connected on a 33.6Kbps modem.
How long have you been involved in domains?
20+ years,
Are you a full time domainer?
Yes, since 2010.
How did you find out about domain investing?
Read an article about the sale of Business.com for $7.5m. I think it was late 1999.
How many domains do you currently hold?
Approximately 4000.
What's your favourite non .com tld/nTLD/gTLD?
.PK (cctld of Pakistan). Small market, but good profits.
What's the best advice you've been given by another domain investor, either directly or through something they've said on twitter or in an interview?
Always respond professionally even to lowballers.
What kind of goals do you set yourself?
Never set any goals but always strive to do better than previous years and keep the gross profit around 65 to 75%. As I have a smaller portfolio , it is easily achievable.
Who are your top 3 domain investors?
Number 1 can go to Rick, Mike Mann, Andrew Rosener, James Booth and other top domain investors..
However, I would like to mention a couple of domain investors who have achieved excellent results and always amazes me with their picks and sales .
Sohail Roshni and Leigh Jo Anzures. Amazing personalities and domain investors, never met them but we have been together on this journey for the last 20 years.
What's the toughest part of domain investing?
Dropping the domain name after renewing it for 15+ years. Ok, it didn’t sell in so many years but it will not be easy to replace it with another $10 name keeping in view crazy bidding.
How do you structure the domaining part of your day?
Normally I spend 3-4 hours researching and scanning lists. Bidding may take another 1-2 hours. Last couple of years due to the pandemic and kids taking online classes it was very difficult to follow a set timetable.
How do you manage your portfolio?
I try to consolidate all my domains at a single registrar and keep all of them on auto-renew. At the start of each month review the expiring names and remove auto-renew for those which I want to drop. Also, I have developed spreadsheets for analyzing my portfolio.
Do you also have any NFTs or Crypto in your portfolio?
Yes, but they are eating up my domain sales profits.
What's the most you've ever spent on one domain?
$6,671 – Caught up in the bidding war, The domain is still with me and the TLD is now almost irrelevant.
Have you ever done outbound? If so, were/are you successful?
Yes, I did on names which I feel have a higher chance of selling and was quite successful. These days I am just listing on all platforms.
You're given $10k to spend on domains, how do you spend it?
Will try to get as many inventory names as I can in the range of $10-$300 each.
Outside of domains, what other business/wealth/personal growth figures do you look up to?
I have great respect for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
What do you do when you're not domaining?
Spending time with my family. Helping kids with their assignments (tech-related) and coding (PHP, Javascript, Python). These days I am spending around 60% of my time on development.
What advice would you give to people just starting out in domains?
Research, research and research. Lots of free resources available , use them and only invest what you can easily afford to lose.