The Domain Name Authority After 15 Years
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DomainSherpa.com: The Domain Name Authority After 15 Years, FastMail Finally Acquires Their .Com - With Rob Mueller Watch the full video at: http://www.domainsherpa.com/rob-mueller-fastmail-interview/ Today's founder discusses his Internet business that launched in 1999 and has lasted the test of time using a country code top-level domain from the Federated States of Micronesia. Recently they purchased the .com of their domain name. We'll find out why. Stay tuned. I have three sponsor messages before we get into today's show. First, if you have a great domain name and nothing to show when people visit, you're missing out on potential advertising revenue, leads and partnership opportunities. NicheWebsites.com can build you a site quickly with a price option to suit any need — but as their tagline says, they don't just build websites, they build businesses. NicheWebsites.com. Second, if you're buying or selling a domain name or portfolio and you want an estimate of it's value, Estibot.com is the place to go. Just like you'd visit Zillow.com to get an estimate of a house value, Estibot.com provides key information about the most important statistics so you can make an informed decision based on data. Finally, whether you are buying, selling, brokering or financing a domain name you need an escrow company that is properly licensed, bonded, insured and audited. That company is Escrow.com and they have been doing it since 1999. Escrow.com - it's about trust. Michael Cyger: Hey everyone. My name is Michael Cyger, and I'm the Publisher of DomainSherpa.com - the website where you can learn how to become a successful domain name investor or entrepreneur directly from the experts. Anyone that watches the DomainSherpa show knows that I publish on topics that are of interest to both domain name investors and startup entrepreneurs. Rob Mueller (FastMail.com) Page 1 of 22 DomainSherpa.com: http://www.domainsherpa.com http://twitter.com/domainsherpa http://facebook.com/domainsherpa DomainSherpa.com: The Domain Name Authority Both groups of people want to learn how the domain industry works. So, when I hear about a company that launched pre-2000, I think: "Great. You can build a real business on a domain name other than .COM," but recently that company purchased the .COM of their business name and I want to find out why, so I invited them on the show. I would like to welcome Rob Mueller, one the founders and director of the online email service, FastMail, which used FastMail.fm as their primary domain name from 1999 until just recently in 2014. Welcome, Rob. Rob Mueller: Hi. Michael: It is great to have you. You are calling in today from which country? Rob: Melbourne, Australia. Michael: Excellent. Well, we have got a nice, strong connection, so it is great to have you here. It is hard to imagine, because your company has been around for such a long time, but for those in the audience that have not heard of the Fast Mail service, how do you explain it to them? Rob: Well, the easiest thing to describe it is like a Hotmail or a Gmail, or something like that. We provide email services. You get an online mailbox. You can access it through the web or through an email software like Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and things like that. We target a kind of audience who is sick of free providers being inundated with adverts and things like that and want a professional service. So, it is a paid service only now. It is not that expensive, like the cheapest is ten dollars per year. The most expensive is a hundred and something per year. And you can either be an individual or a family or a business, and you can mix and match your accounts a bit, and you have got sharing and access controls in the bigger levels. And in the individual levels, it is all about having control of your email and a great service that is focused on the customer rather than on the advertiser. Rob Mueller (FastMail.com) Page 2 of 22 DomainSherpa.com: http://www.domainsherpa.com http://twitter.com/domainsherpa http://facebook.com/domainsherpa DomainSherpa.com: The Domain Name Authority Michael: Awesome. And so, how did you originally choose the name, FastMail, back in 1999? Rob: Well, along with the other Co-Founder, Jeremy, at the time, we were just looking for something. Jeremy really worked a lot on customer sites as a management consultant and was really tired of the slowness of Hotmail that he was using on customer sites a lot, and really wanted to focus on a professional service and kind of felt the name should really say what the product was on the box. So, he really just wanted it to be fast mail, but FastMail.com was taken even at that stage and he came up with what he thought was a kind of cute idea of taking those two main later of fast mail, so it was FastMail.fm. And it was like it sounds okay and like so many of these things, when you start really early on, you do not really think through the full consequences of a little decision like that. So, you make that decision there on the day. It is available, you buy it, and you start going down that road, and that is where you end up going down. And so, for the next 15 years, it was FastMail.fm. Michael: So, let me ask you about that. .FM is the country code for the Federated States of Micronesia. Rob: Yeah. Michael: So, you only selected it because the letters of fast mail matched .FM and you thought FastMail.fm is memorable. Rob: That is right. That is basically the reason. It was easier to explain that you could say FastMail.fm as in FastMail when you are trying to explain to people on the phone. The number of times I had to say that since made me realize probably that is the problem. Michael: How many times have you had to say FastMail.fm, not .COM? Rob: A lot. The number of times it has been FastMail.fm.com. FastMail.com. Just trying to explain to people. It has gotten better. It used to be really bad I would say. Recently I think the proliferation of more TLDs is actually Rob Mueller (FastMail.com) Page 3 of 22 DomainSherpa.com: http://www.domainsherpa.com http://twitter.com/domainsherpa http://facebook.com/domainsherpa DomainSherpa.com: The Domain Name Authority making it easier. People are more willing to listen and go: "Oh, it is just .FM, is it?" Yeah, just .FM. Okay. I think they have become much more in the public conscious. .COM is still clearly the thing that people think about and know of the most, but some of these other TLDs people are at least questioning now, "Oh, it is not .COM. That is okay. I can handle that something else than .COM exists even these days." Michael: Right. And most people have never heard of a country code top- level domain, like .FM, but if you ask them, "Have you ever used bit.ly or the Bitly shortening service," they are like: "Oh, yeah." They do not realize that .LY is the Libyan country code top-level domain. Rob: No, most people do not even realize, I think, that those two-letter things actually represent a country, shore, in some cases a geographic region that should not exist even as a country code. Some of them are a bit odd that exist. But especially now with the new flood of TLDs, I think there is going to be, over the next couple of years, a really understanding that the thing on the end can be anything these days. Michael: Yeah. And so, I went over to GoDaddy to figure out what the cost is of different domain names, like the .FM domain, and they price it about 90 dollars per year, whereas a .COM is about 12 dollars per year without a coupon or anything at GoDaddy. Is that roughly what you pay per year to renew the domain name? Rob: I think that was right. It was not excessive or anything like that. Realistically, the actual price of renewals is negligible compared to so many other costs in a business, so choosing your domain on the renewal price is not something you should be doing. Michael: And so, as a business owner, you really do not care what the price is as long as you are building a successful business. Rob: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. In the end, the main cost is buying the domain upfront if it has already been registered and someone else has it and you want to buy it off them. By far, renewal cost is insignificant in the long run compared to everything else. And it is all about building your brand as Rob Mueller (FastMail.com) Page 4 of 22 DomainSherpa.com: http://www.domainsherpa.com http://twitter.com/domainsherpa http://facebook.com/domainsherpa DomainSherpa.com: The Domain Name Authority well. What name do you want out there in the marketplace? And I think Google has made it a bit easier in some respects because, by far, most people came to us just by searching for fast mail. And whether they just typed fast mail in their address bar, which in almost every browser these days just does a Google search for fast mail and pick the first result.