Quick Chat with Zane Gocha – Founder Namerific

By: Raymond Hackney

Quick Chat with Zane Gocha Founder Namerific.com 

1) When did you start registering domains personally, and how many domains would you say you own ?

I believe the first name I ever registered was sometime in 2004. One of the first names I can remember registering was Modern4Less.com (a short-lived e-commerce store I built for selling modern furniture). At present, our company only holds about 250 names — nearly all which are brandable — they are either listed for sale with Namerific, or planned as names for upcoming projects not related to Namerific.

2) What attracted you to the brandable domain space ?

I essentially fell into the niche without even knowing it. I have always been entrepreneur-minded, and since discovering domains, I've always registered the potential .com names for businesses or brands that I wanted to someday develop — which then left me with too many names to possibly develop, so I ventured out looking for ways to somehow monetize those extra names, which is where I came across a site called BrandStack.

While listing with BrandStack, I discovered that my domains didn't have as much 'spark' without attractive logos, so I turned my focus to learning how to design logos for the domains that I made. During the same time, I began building a personal site to display my own brands for sale, and named it ZTG Brands (ZTG being my initials). The main drive for creating ZTG Brands, was that I wanted to be sure that I would have the opportunity of promoting my domains for sale independently, and begin creating a name for myself in the brandable domain world.

About a year or so later of becoming involved with BrandStack, and getting some traction for ZTG Brands, I was invited to join BrandBucket to sell some of my names. I quickly became one of the leading sellers at BrandBucket, in terms of volume. It wasn't long before BrandBucket's Founder, Margot Bushnaq, invited me to help manage the company.

3) There seems to be a lot of Boutique brandable domain sites starting up, what separates Namerific from the crowd ?

We're focused on providing an amazing service for both our sellers and our buyers in the places they need amazing service the most.

For our buyers, we understand the most important thing is communication, so we have tools in place which allow us to communicate with clients extremely efficiently and timely – our typical response time to all client inquiries is less than 10 minutes, regardless what time that inquiry came in, and whether by phone or email. On top of that, we're focused on providing a simple and powerful filtering tool for browsing our domain portfolio, a wide variety of high-quality domain names and logos (while remaining competitive with pricing amongst similar marketplaces), and a blazing-fast escrow process (quite possibly the fastest escrow processing amongst any other domain marketplace).

For our sellers, we understand the importance of amazing support, no pesky fees, and flexibility.

(1) We don't have any listing fees – upon approval, your listing is free.

(2) We're non-exclusive, so you can sell your domain anywhere else while we help you sell your name.

(3) The logo design costs come out of 'our' pocket, and not yours — and we are the only marketplace that offers redesigns at anytime, current just $25.

(4) We don't 'require' forwarding a domain to us, so you are free to keep control of your domain while it's listed for sale with us.

(5) We give you options for expediting your logo design process, $10 puts you on top of the list (useful when the queue of pending logos is large and you want your name up fast — we show you exactly how many are pending, what order your domain is, and an estimated time it will be done.

6) Even when your domain is pending logo design, it can be sold – visitors who find your listing page directly can instantly buy your name.

(7) We offer you an easy way to get a bunch of added exposure for your domains, by allowing them to be featured across the site at a low cost.

(8) Your domain sales history is listed in your account, so you don't have to track that on your own.

(9) We provide amazing support for our sellers and a super fast domain approvaldesignpublication process.

(10) We offer you a variable commission structure, so that our commission amount is based upon your selling performance, portfolio value, and other factors.

(11) We're constantly working to build up site traffic with targeted users and build relationships with the most important people in the industries who can benefit from our service the most.

(12) After 11 points, we still haven't covered everything.

4) From reading your bio, I saw you spent a year working at Brand Bucket, what did that experience teach you ?

With any business, there are both negative and positive experiences that people will have in dealing with you. I learned about those experiences, and am focused on eliminating the potential negative experiences that come up, so we can excel in giving away positive experiences.

5) Do you see the small brandable boutiques having an advantage over the big aftermarket sites like Sedo and Afternic ?

If you're trying to sell a brandable domain, yes. While the big marketplaces will list essentially 'anything' (regardless of extension, list price, domain quality, etc) our niche of marketplaces is more focused on listing mostly (if not exclusively) .com domains, with prices based upon experience with brandable domain valuations, and standards put into place to ensure a certain level of name quality is met. This in-hand cuts down drastically the 'quantity' of choices a user has to sort through, allowing a better chance at them picking up your name. The type of user who browses these marketplaces is also very targetted, and typically looking to buy these exact types of names.

7) Anything else you want to tell our readers about Namerific ?

We're just getting started. We've only been around since the beginning of the year, and are building a hugely positive following. We're working to constantly evolve and deliver the best possible experience you can get when looking to either buy or sell brandable domain names. Our buyers and sellers both love us, and we plan to keep it that way 🙂