Rob Schutz

Good .si vs .com discussion and shout-out for @rob on @tbpn

We secured Delete.com (@joindeleteme)…and the process to buy it took a much bigger turn than we had expected.

Prior to acquiring the domain, Delete.com had been owned by Dr. Luann Linquist, a psychologist in her late 80s who was living in a care facility.

Years earlier, she had used the domain for a project called DeleteStress, but the registration had eventually lapsed and the domain ended up in the expired auction.

We thought we might be able to buy the domain for around $200,000, when we knew it was heading to auction.

But, once the auction started, one bidder increased their bids (right when time was about to expire) for four-hours straight.

Eventually, the auction ended with 356 bids from 32 different bidders, and a final price of $494,352.

The mystery bidder kept us on our toes and reminded us to keep our calendars open when we’re bidding on domains at auction – because you never know when your day is going to be monopolized by someone else trying to secure the same domain.

Read Full Story 👇
snagged.com/post/how-delet…

There are definitely easy ways to buy a domain name. Purchasing one from a large corporation is not one of them.

We learned this the hard way while trying to buy Plateful.com from a massive food company that, (for a surprisingly loooonng time), didn’t seem to know it owned the thing.

We were working with a startup called Plateful, and had helped them originally to secure Plateful.co. Getting the .com was always the end goal.

The problem was that Plateful.com had been sitting inside a huge domain portfolio inherited through an acquisition, somewhere inside a corporation large enough that figuring out who actually controlled it became a project of its own.

After months of emails, redirects, and corporate-domain archaeology, we finally reached a guy named “Mike” in Legal & Corporate Affairs.

Mike was a champ. He agreed to track down the right people, and eventually we got connected with the marketing team.

So we made an offer: $25,000 for Plateful.com.

Then, we got a totally unexpected response. The marketing team said “they” weren’t interested in ACQUIRING Plateful.com.

We were like, “Wait, whaaaaa??”

We just told YOU that we want to BUY the domain from you, and you think we’re trying sell it to you?? Yeeeesh….we knew this was going to be a long ride.

Once everyone was on the same page, the company confirmed that, yes, they did own Plateful.com.

And then they told us what they thought it was worth.

$850,000.

At this point, you might assume the story is about an absurdly expensive domain and a company that finally realized what it had sitting in its portfolio.

It gets better.

They sent us research explaining their valuation, and some of the material looked awfully familiar. They had found our own content about domain valuations and were now using it to make the case for why we should pay them more.

Using our own blog posts against us is honestly pretty good.

Fortunately, we didn’t pay $850,000. After some more back-and-forth, we eventually acquired Plateful.com and the defensive typo domain Platefull.com for $87,500.

Nine months of trying to find the person who knew they owned the domain, followed by an $850,000 valuation supported in part by our own advice about what domains are worth.

Buying domains is weird.

That’s why we love it.

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snagged.com/post/they-owne…

A recent YC startup spent 250k on a domain. I was slightly shocked. But when I asked how much they raised after YC, the answer was 6.5m. So 1/26 of their round. This is the time we live in; one shocking number counterbalances the other.

At some point, spending too much time around startups and domains changes your brain permanently.

You stop hearing words normally. Someone says two random nouns in conversation and your brain immediately checks whether the .com is taken.

A while ago, this turned into a dumb game I kept playing with friends. Someone would throw out a domain and everyone else had to guess whether it was taken or available.

The weird part is how bad human intuition actually is.

A domain like LaserBadger.com feels taken immediately. You just assume some guy wearing wraparound Oakleys bought it in 2007 for a BBQ sauce brand or tactical fitness app. Then somehow it’s available.

Meanwhile, something like QuantumLeaf.com has apparently existed for over a decade.

The internet gets very strange once you spend enough time paying attention to names.

So, naturally, we built the game.

Now I play it constantly, mostly because it’s impossible to stop once your brain starts trying to predict internet history.

If you want to test your instincts, or accidentally buy a domain you didn’t know you needed, you can play the game here👇

isit.snagged.com/game

📢 On this week’s Trailblazers pod, I spoke with the hilarious & brilliant growth mind, @rob (co-founder of @ro & founder of @snagged) We talked about the early founding days for each co, how growth marketing has changed in the past decade, & how he’s spending time now! So fun!

In 1994, a man named Uzi Nissan registered Nissan.com for his small computer business.

Four years later, Nissan Motor Company decided they wanted it.

What followed wasn’t a quiet buyout. It was a five-year legal war between a global automaker and a guy whose last name just happened to be Nissan.

The car company argued that Uzi was creating brand confusion by owning the domain name.

But, Uzi ONLY used the domain to host products and services related to his actual “mom & pop” computer business. There was nothing automotive-related on his site at all.

So, brand confusion….not really a thing (despite what Nissan, the car company, actually thought).

When litigation started, Uzi presented simple facts which ended up setting precedent for future domain cases.

Uzi owned the domain, registered it first, used it legitimately and, most importantly, (not that any rationalization was needed)…NISSAN WAS HIS NAME.

Despite being a corporate giant, Nissan (the car company) didn’t really have a case or real ground to stand on. Nissan may have been their brand, but it was a common last name. And, as it holds today, domains are standalone assets that people and companies can’t claim “rights” to, unless there is clear confusion, customer deception, or trademark infringement.

In 2004, after years of litigation, the courts let Uzi keep the domain, since the exact-match .com was never Nissan Motor Company’s property to claim.

After the case was over, Nissan had to settle for nissan-global.com to drive its traffic to…(a real “banger” of a domain, if you ask us).

Uzi never sold and took on one of the biggest automakers in the world, refusing to budge on his principle for owning the domain.

When he passed away in 2020, the domain stayed with his family.

Today, Nissan.com is still online as a tribute site to Uzi.

If it ever hit the open market, the domain would likely take high seven-figures (or more) just to start the conversation.

The early internet rewarded timing and legitimacy, and Nissan.com is still owned privately by an individual because one person refused to be pushed around by a corporate powerhouse.

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snagged.com/post/nissan-co…

February Domain Spotlight

Champions are built long before the spotlight 🥇🥈🥉

The Winter Olympics remind us that performance is never accidental. It is preparation, precision, and fundamentals done right when nobody is watching.

The same is true for brands.

The ones that win big invest early in the foundation, starting with the domain.

.COM
🔧 Piston.com
🌍 Everybody.com
🎯 Center.com
🎮 Playmaker.com
🌀 Labyrinth.com
📉 Bearish.com
⚖️ LegalConsulting.com
🧬 Antibiotics.com
⚖️ WeightControl.com

.AI
🧠 LLM.ai
🔁 Workflow.ai
🎱 Cue.ai

Train like a champion and build like one too.

DM to get in the game before the podium fills up 🏆

mailchi.mp/c0184918b3ad/d…

Ro is proud to offer transparent pricing and insurance access, and supports TrumpRx’s most-favored-nation innovative pricing model for FDA-approved GLP-1s. We’re excited to share our first Super Bowl ad today and get that message out to over 100M Americans. Patients deserve the highest quality care and treatment options. Couldn’t be more proud of our team!

@Ro’s first Super Bowl ad. Featuring the GOAT, @serenawilliams, and her journey on Ro—from weight loss to steady blood sugar levels to, as Serena says, having “knees like Megan.” Check out our spot. Couldn’t be more proud of the team. Still just the beginning!

@rob here (founder of Snagged). This is a WILD story about one of the strangest domain deals I’ve ever done…

In early 2025, an AI company we’d worked with before came back with one request: “We need the .com now.”

Their brand name was a person’s first name which, in the domain world, makes securing the matching one-word .com…pretty challenging.

For the sake of this story (and for buyer and seller privacy), I’ll call the domain Geoff.com.

The person who owned it wasn’t an investor. His actual name was Geoff, and he’d owned it for a loooonng time, so yeah, he was emotionally attached.

When I first contacted him, he wasn’t interested in selling.

Eventually he came around, but only if the deal was seven figures…paid in cash.

After months of irrational messages back and forth, he finally agreed to sell it on one condition.

He wanted to be paid in person, all in gold coins.

Yep. Gold frigging coins.

Some days he was “relatively” easy to deal with.

Other days, he’d go completely off the rails.

I learned quickly how to navigate negotiations with him because he warned me not to message him after 4pm…since he’d be drunk.

At one point he said that “if” we met in person, I should bring a gun.

He’d bring his too.

Somehow, after months of this, we got to a real agreement.

Six figures, all gold coins, paid in-person, at EXACTLY the spot price when we’d meet.

Not gonna lie, it was already a sweaty situation, so adding this level of complexity made it even more challenging.

So, I ordered the gold, packed it into my wife’s Lululemon fanny pack, and my partner @Jarcho and I drove 13 hours from New Jersey to rural West Virginia.

We rented a hotel conference room, hired an off-duty cop to sit in the room, and prayed this wasn’t the world’s weirdest catfish.

The next morning, I called an Uber to bring the seller to the hotel.

And the guy who walked in was calm, polite, sober, and weirdly…normal.

We talked about hummingbirds, Costa Rica, and surfing.

Then he handed me an iPad already logged into GoDaddy.

I tried to push the domain and the transfer button didn’t show up, so I manually edited the URL on the iPad.

The transfer page loaded and, after about 500 refreshes, Geoff.com finally hit my account.

I handed him the gold, he stood up, thanked us, and walked out.

It was pretty weird (but oddly satisfying) to think that a deal which took almost a year to get done was finally over…in a matter of minutes.

A day later, the buyer had the domain and the deal was “officially” closed.

Sometimes the only way to buy a domain is patience, persistence…and driving across state lines with six figures in gold coins.

See the CRAZY DMs in the full story 👇
snagged.com/post/six-figur…

In December 2024, we got a call from the team at Graphite.dev…right at a moment when the edges of their growth and identity were starting to stretch.

They wanted to acquire Graphite.com, but the domain was taken and being use by a company that had been operating on it for years, with email, infrastructure, and customers all tied to the name.

The @graphite team was curious if it would even be possible to acquire the .com TLD and, if so, what it would take to make that happen.

With most domain names that are in use, we couldn’t guarantee that we’d even get a response or a seller that would engage in a deal, but it was worth a shot.

This was the type of deal that required patience and an understanding of how a domain could be acquired from an active and successful company, even when it was deeply embedded in tech infrastructure.

After eight separate attempts of reaching out to the Graphite.com CEO, we finally got a response.

The early conversations weren’t about money. They were about what the domain actually touched inside the business and what a transition “might” look like, if they were to entertain a deal and domain migration.

Once that reality was clear on both sides, a fair number emerged.

The real work came after. Email migrations, subdomains no one remembered, redirects, SEO paths, and years of quiet dependencies that only show up when you try to move them.

Nearly a year later, Graphite.com finally changed hands and, only a few weeks after that, Graphite announced its acquisition by @cursor_ai.

The domain didn’t make the deal, but it removed friction at exactly the right moment.

Read Full Story 👇
snagged.com/post/inside-th…

Today marks a new era—@novonordisk launched the Wegovy pill on @ro. On Day 1, patients nationwide can immediately access the first FDA-approved GLP-1 pill for weight loss at the best cash price on Ro (starting at $149!). From diagnosis to delivery, in one app, without ever leaving their home.