Why Buy Domain Name sumo.com for $1.5 Million USD?

sumo.com screenshot

There is an inherent value in domain names. The sumo.com domain name sold for 1.5 million USD.

It took Noah Kagan of SumoMe.com 7 years of negotiations to buy the domain name sumo.com. SumoMe.com is now redirected to sumo.com.

SumoMe.com transitioned to sumo.com for $1.5 million

SumoMe paid $500,000 up front and it will pay the remaining $1 million over 5 years, in installments of about $16,000 a month.  SumoMe spends $50,000 a month on servers alone, so$16,000 a month is a small price to pay for your entire brand!

SumoMe didn’t want to settle the second rate domains: sumo.ly and sumos.com

Learn how Kagan persisted through seven years of negotiations to finally own Sumo.com, and how his financing creativity finally got the deal done.

 

DomainSherpa Interview about the sumo.com domain buy

(61:05): Watch | Listen/Download Audio | Read Transcript

Domain Name Wire Interview about sumo.com domain buy

DNW: SumoMe has been around for a while, so how long have you been interested in the Sumo.com domain name?

Sumo: We started to pursue the name in April 2010 to improve brand value, recruiting, and to be the de facto Sumo brand. Our co-founder and CEO, Noah Kagan, was one of the first employees at Facebook (went through TheFacebook> Facebook.com transition) and Mint (went through MyMint.com> Mint.com transition), so he is no stranger to the value of a strong .Com.

It has taken nearly 7 years to acquire it. Initially, the owners were unresponsive so we found an intro through a mutual contact on LinkedIn. Conversations were ongoing, but the owners would stop responding for months on end. We even hired 3 brokers to help push this through, but none were able to get the owners to budge.

We purchased sumo.ly and sumos.com, but didn’t want to settle for second best and Noah kept persisting. Ultimately, he offered them $1.5MM and a strict deadline to motivate them to close.

DNW: Are you changing the domain from SumoMe.com to Sumo.com or just using it as a forward?

Sumo: We are changing the domain to Sumo.com and rebranding from SumoMe to Sumo, which includes an updated logo and updating most mentions of SumoMe on our site and external mediums. We will be redirecting SumoMe.com to Sumo.com.

DNW: Has there been customer confusion because you didn’t own Sumo.com?

Sumo: This was a strong motivator for us. Several sites popped up after us in the SaaS space that utilized “sumo” in their name. We were the original and now we are positioned as the original.

DNW: How did you justified the cost?

Sumo: In the long term it improves our brand value and positions us as the original Sumo brand.

By David Michaels

David Michaels, J.D., B.Eng., CHRM is a trained attorney who holds certificates in Canadian Trademark Law (2012) and Canadian Patent Law (1996) from McGill University. He has worked in the area of trademark law in Canada since 1995 and in the USA since 1993. David is a legal blogger, brand consultant, an eCommerce entrepreneur, and an aeronautical engineer. http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davidtmichaels/ Warning & Disclaimer: The pages, articles and comments on trademarkpro.ca do not constitute legal advice, nor do they create any attorney-client relationship. The articles published express the author's notes of the current state of trademark law and should not be attributed as opinions of the author, his employer, clients or the sponsors of trademarkpro.ca. The author does not warrant that these notes are up-to-date. Trademark law is constantly changing and it varies between jurisdictions and even within jurisdictions. This website should not be relied upon.