𝑹𝒊𝒄𝒉 𝑳𝒆𝒕𝒐

@cultra PS…love the custom plate!

@cultra Gorgeous, Shane! Best of luck!

Goals reached and thank you $BE

@domainnamecom @TLDInvestors Congrats! “Patience is the moat around great domains.”

I have held ColdRoom.com and ColdRooms.com for over a decade. I checked my record, there hadn't been any interested buyers inquiring about these two domain names for nearly 8 years. I had almost forgotten they were still in my portfolio. Then a few days ago, a buyer purchased the plural version directly at the BIN price on @afternic and 3 days later, the same buyer bought the singular version at the BIN price as well. An interesting transaction.

@cultra Congrats to you and Sean! Best of luck!

Today marks a major milestone personally and something I have wanted to achieve for over a decade. I am incredibly excited to officially announce the launch of Winterline (Winterline.com), a new asset management company I've founded with my long-time friend and business partner, Sean Markey. Don't let Sean’s quiet nature fool you, he is one of the best in the industry when it comes to expanding a brand's online footprint and reach. Between the two of us, we have spent decades in the trenches of the digital economy. Many of you have followed me here for a decade plus, so you know I have been in the domain space for nearly 20 years. I've owned and run businesses ranging from 50 employees to 2. Sean has spent the last decade plus working with major SEO firms and his private SEO group to master the art of high-level asset acquisition. What is Winterline? While Winterline is officially a brokerage, I like to think we are much more expansive than that. We specialize in the high-impact assets, both on and off-market, that actually drive modern business growth. We help individuals and companies navigate the buying and selling of: Premium Domains: The foundation of your business and marketing. Content & Traffic: Websites, SEO-focused properties, and high-value backlinks. Audience Platforms: Newsletters and established social media accounts. Modern Tech: Custom GPTs and emerging digital tools. A significant portion of our work is handled with strict confidentiality. Whether it is a private acquisition or a strategic divestment, we understand the need for discretion at the highest levels. Sean will be leveraging his deep industry relationships to lead our SEO and digital asset division. I will be focused on scaling our domain brokerage and building our capital investment arm. Our investment strategy is broad, ranging from individual premium domains to large-scale corporate investments. Ready to buy or looking to sell? You know where to find us. We’re also open to collaborating with other brokers, if you have inventory that fits our buyers' needs, let’s get it in front of them.

@tv_scientific you need to own this domain name; CTVadvertising.com. It’s available—sale or lease to own.

@BradenPollock So sorry, Braden. 🌈🐾🐾🙏

It’s always difficult to lose a pet. But this time was particularly heartbreaking. Bear was 15. That’s a good run for a pyrenees mix. He shared his life with me for the past 14 years and was truly the sweetest dog. I’ll miss him. #RIP

@tldn Are you on Shopify? If you are, hit us up with an invite on Shopify Collective.

@RichLeto You need to add ROAR RUB Original Lazy Blend… ManeSpice.com

Oh yeah! Get that flavor! Sun's goin' down, the grill is hot Got the secret spice, give it all you got! MAKE YOUR NEXT COOKOUT A LEGENDARY NIGHT WITH AWARD-WINNIN' FLAVOR THAT JUST TASTES SO RIGHT GO TO BBQRUBS.COM! Yeah, BBQRUBS.COM!

@mddanishyusuf @MavenDomains @fayazara Amazing flip, congrats!

🎉 Sold Iconbuddy for $30,000. 2.5 years ago, I bought it from @fayazara for $4,000. No revenue. No traffic. Nothing. That $4,000 was literally all I had in my bank. Here's the journey: → Launched on PH, Twitter, HN, Reddit → It blew up. People loved it → Tried sponsor slots for monetization. Didn't work well → Users kept asking for plugins → Built Figma, VS Code, Framer plugins → Added a $49 lifetime deal → Finally, real money started coming in → Bought the .com domain for $4k to build trust → Increased price to $89. People still paid → Built a second site targeting "free svg icons" keyword for $10 → Grew it to 350k+ pageviews → Redirected all traffic into IconBuddy → Everyone said I was crazy → 45 days later, Iconbuddy ranked for all those keywords → Grew to 100k+ users → All organic. $0 on ads → Made $50k+ in revenue running it solo → Now sold to @julianengel for $30k A $4k bet turned into $80k+ in 2.5 years. My 10th exit. Buy small, build smart, sell at the right time. Repeat.

@morganlinton @AGreatDomain Congrats and wow, what an amazing partner to launch with!

Today I’m excited to finally share something we’ve been working very hard on behind-the-scenes, that we’re now sharing with the public, along with our launch partner. And this could quite possibly be the most challenging, and exciting thing I’ve done in my career - it’s a big day. As someone that has been building AI agents for years, I saw a gap in the market, and some real challenges that generalized protocols like MCP had with things like token-efficiency and security. When Google announced UCP, I knew it was going to be big, and the surface for online shopping would begin to shift. But with this shift, things like performance and security are everything. Generalized protocols made too many tradeoffs that I saw in benchmarking caused things like tool misfires, token boat, and some pretty scary stuff on the security side. I see this as a turning point in history, and for us, as a company that has been providing a leading AI fit platform for 14+ years, the opportunity to really make an impact as this shift happens. So I am incredibly proud and excited to say that today we are announcing Agentic Sizing Protocol, a new AI-native protocol, designed for AI-agents in the conversion-critical hot path where every second matters and Enterprise-grade security isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a must. I am also incredibly humbled and honored to announce our launch-partner, GAP, one of the most iconic brands in history, and a true pioneer and leader when it comes to adopting AI early. GAP is getting a massive head-start on AI shopping, and will be giving their customers a truly differentiated sizing experience powered by Agentic Sizing Protocol. Today feels surreal, so much work has gone into this, I couldn’t be more excited to pioneer this new protocol, alongside such an incredible partner - here’s to our agentic journey ahead! You can read more in GAP’s newsroom, link in the first comment below.

Every time I see a brand like Bumper.com, it reinforces why I invest in premium .coms. Single-word, intuitive, auto-native name wrapped around a legit product experience. Love this domain name! This is how you turn a URL into an unfair advantage. #domains #dotcom #Bumper”

AlwaysGetThe.com #Dotcom #Domains

@BradenPollock That’s a doozy.

@domainname Hi Jack, Email sent to Vivi. Thanks, Rich

A client of DN.com has a budget of $1 million USD and is looking to purchase a single-word domain name, or a suitable .com domain name (4 words or less) for a finance-related purpose. Only .com domains are accepted, and quotes can only be provided via email. Thank you for your understanding. Please contact vivi@dn.com.

@searchbound Amazing, Peter💥💥💥

ranchjobs․com, a domain that has never been developed, that I bought for $5k, and renew every year for $10, drives 2,213 visits to RanchWork․com every year. Folks want ranch jobs, so they go to the browser bar, type ranchjobs and add .com to it. Then they find me via re-direct. Pound for pound, this might be the best marketing investment I've ever made.

@kris 💥💥💥☄️☄️☄️

Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS 🔥🔥🔥

@BettyAiProject I grabbed a coffee after the first paragraph—couldn’t stop reading! Amazing story of adversity, grit, smarts, never giving up and success! Thanks for sharing @BettyAiProject and congratulations!

I had 32 different jobs before I was twenty. Then 3 successful careers in the next 50 years. My shortest career lasted 4 hours and 15 minutes at a discount department store. After two hours I gave them my notice because on my 15 minute break, I got a job next door paying twenty five cents more an hour. Back then that was a 20% raise. That was how I made decisions. I didn’t wait. I moved up and moved on. I kept repeating that until I made a decent living. It wasn’t an easy road. In my last 3 semesters of high school I went to 3 different high schools. Looking back, that was a pretty damn hard thing for a 17-year-old kid to go through. Nashua, New Hampshire my last semester as a junior in high school. Encino, California for my first semester of my senior year. Covina, California for my last semester of my senior year. I survived that last year living in a 21 foot travel trailer with my mother and father and sometimes my brother. Tough times! I spent 18 months in college before I dropped out. The greatest single day of my life. The day of emancipation. I will never forget it. It was day one of my life. And the jobs continued. But this time I was scared to death! No skills, just a burning desire to be successful and make money. First Fuller Brush. Went through their sales training program for a week made two calls and moved on. Next stop was Kirby vacuum cleaners. Went through a week of their sales training program, made two calls and moved on. Next stop selling Pontiac and American Motors cars in Monrovia California. Every morning for the 6 weeks I was there, we had an intense sales training program. I hadn’t made any sales and they had this 1973 Gremlin on the floor, and everyone knew it was nailed to the floor and nobody should sell it. Well, I was hungry and I needed that $25 commission so I sold that fucker. To make a long story short, basically me and that car went out at the same time! Everyone knew I was going to be fired for it. But before I got fired, I found a job at a retail furniture store. That is where I first found my stride. By 19 I was making more money than my father. And what an interesting turn of events. So it’s my very first night at the furniture store. There was a bedroom set stacked on top of other bedroom sets to the ceiling. It was called the Singer 100. Unlike that Gremlin that was nailed to the floor, this was a bedroom set sitting on the floor for over two years that they couldn’t get rid of. And on my first night, I had the first success of my life. I sold that fucker. They loved it. I made like an $800 commission on it and I was off to the races. And while I loved Southern California, I can’t say I was that happy with the people. I never saw so many fakers, losers and backstabbers in one place in my life. So on Valentine’s Day 1973 I moved to Miami. And like the John Denver song goes. A place that I’ve never been to before. I got in my car and drove nearly nonstop to Miami in just 2 1/2 days stopping just one night for about four hours to get some sleep. I had the pedal to the metal. In the years ahead, I made that trip dozens of times, but I never made it 2 1/2 days! I got a job as a “packaging engineer“. Selling corrugated boxes and packaging solutions. I fucking hated it! We were middleman and while I was 20, I look like I was 15. The way it worked. You would schmooze these guys. Take them out to lunch. Give them gifts. Basically bribing them to do business. It could’ve worked for someone older than me, but for me didn’t work at all. I finally got my first really big order. Would’ve been making me tens of thousands a year for as long as the I can see and their credit department turned it down that was the beginning of the end for me. But one of the guys that I was calling on, a crazy Cuban and his brother, kept offering me a job back in the furniture business as a wholesale rep. calling on furniture stores. They manufactured lamps and occasional tables. After about a year of their offers, I finally had enough and I said OK. So I had a one week vacation coming and it was right during my 21st birthday and I went out and I worked with the owner of the company for a week on the road to see if I’m was willing to make the leap. I had the time of my life. I never made so much money and I never got laid so much all in one week. I found my calling. So I had been through all these fantastic training programs. I was a good salesman, but I wasn’t great yet. The guys that owned the company never took no for an answer. They would grind and grind, and eventually they would sell and sell. I learned how to grind. But the beauty of being a rep is you didn’t have one chance to make the sale and you had an opportunity to go back and make the sale again and again. The first call was tough and probably wouldn’t make a sale. But when you came back the second time and you actually showed up, you had at least a 50% chance of making the sale. And when I showed up the third time, it was almost a 100% guarantee that I would make the sale. I worked there for a little over 5 years, but the problem was I was hungry and wanted to make money and they had a hard time paying me because they just had a hard time paying me that much money. What fuckers they were. I would literally have to beg for my money. Do you know what it’s like to be in 21 years old, 1500 miles from home in Gary Indiana on a Friday at 5 PM with $.25 in your pocket, no gas in your car, and the bank just confiscating my Mastercard? So getting paid was like pulling teeth. So after 5 years, I jumped ship and went to the Direct competition. They gave me carte blanche because they knew who I was and what I had achieved. And they wanted me to do the same for them as what I did for the first company. And I did! So when I left the first company and went to the competition, they wanted to kill me. Really! They were angry. But that didn’t deter me. I got in my car and started calling on all of my accounts Coast to Coast border to border. 33 states and that trip normally took me 90 days to complete but I was on a mission. I was done in 30 days and taking about 75% of the accounts with me. 18 months later factory number one was out of business. And even though they wanted to kill me back then, we have become lifelong friends and still stay in touch. The second company gave me Carte Blanche and I built them up with blood sweat and tears. I became national sales manager. Hired a sales team. Trained each one individually. I opened warehouses all over the United States and built real relationships with real retailers. I was hungry and I worked like hell. It’s also the period and when I had a huge transformation. I met a buyer at Fimger furniture. It was the largest furniture store in the world. Located in Houston Texas. To make a long story short, we became fast friends. He was slick and as polished and as personable as anyone could be. He taught me how to make a presentation and stop being a salesman. That was the moment. It elevated me. I was no longer this hard hitting grinding salesman. Now I was just a guy making presentations and what does that mean? Well, I was a damn good closer to begin with. I didn’t take no for an answer easily. But I was raw. But then I got polished and what happened during that transformation is I went from closing maybe half of the deals to closing ALL of the deals. After I learned to make a presentation, I was no longer making sales even though I closed everyone that I made a presentation with. Because I no longer had to sell. I put them in a position to buy, and that took me out of my role as a salesman. But in 1984 I got fired for being too successful. I wasn’t supposed to win as big as I was winning. I wasn’t supposed to be outproducing managers twice my age. I wasn’t supposed to be making more money than the owners running it. They decided to replace me with this 55-year-old pipe smoking guy with a great resume, but never had a job for more than two years. Should’ve been a red flag for them. They wanted me to work under him. I told them I could follow a leader, but I couldn’t follow an asshole. They thought that contract would put a ceiling of about $75,000 on me. But they miscalculated. I was on track to make $750,000 that year because of the warehouses that I opened. And believe me back then that was a lot of money! So they blew me out the door after 5 years and less than 1 year into my new 5-year contract. They were flying high. Showrooms in High Point, Dallas, San Francisco. They grew from 1.5 million to over $12 million. I sued them. They settled after the deposition, and that became the seed money for my first real business. Just like the first company, they decided they could do it without me. And just like the first company 18 months later, they were out of business. The curse of Schwartz. So I printed 50,000 brochures. I wrote my first newsletter in an airport in Seoul. I paid for every trade show a year in advance. And for about 11 years I flew to Asia twice a year. Korea. Taiwan. Hong Kong. Mainland China. I imported rope lights, neon menu boards, giant advertising balloons. All of these items were very profitable. At the ends, the lighting was costing me $.35 a foot and I was selling it for $5 a foot. The advertising balloons were costing me about $58 landed. I was selling them for $300. They would order banners with lettering for the sides of the balloon. I charged $47.50 for a pair of banners that had a zero cost because it was included with the blimp. That was a really good markup. and charge $3 per letter to stick the letters to make the sign on the banner. so the banners would generally cost about $250-$300 with the printing and it would cost me a total of possibly $30 max. And when we got to the CUSTOM balloons, then the numbers were even crazier. I could sell a custom-made huge blimp for $12,000 and would cost me about $700 or $800 landed. Bottom line I only look for profitable items in industries. Not a one time or a two time markup. But a minimum of a 10X markup. It was always about value and never about price or cost. I assigned a value not based on cost ever! I went to 55 different industry trade shows. I lived in airports, hotels, and warehouses. I built something out of nothing long before the internet existed. By 1998 I sold that business for just under seven figures. Fourteen years of blood, sweat, and risk, all run out of a ten by ten bedroom and a garage. however, I was United van lines biggest customer. I had multiple containers of inventory. The reason I had so much inventory was simple. If a factory burned down, I needed enough stock to survive while they rebuilt. That’s how you stay in business. You outlast the fire. You prepare for the worst case scenario. Then December 26, 1995 happened. The internet. I was putting together my first website. And the guy at the other end of the phone said I needed a domain name. And I had a think quick and I came up with one. it was like Alex Trebek‘s on the other side of the phone and I had to come up with an answer in five seconds so I blurted out LipService.com and that became the moment that this 30 year journey began. I had been feeling my way around the Internet since the mid 1980s. First with Compuserve, which was more than difficult. And then AOL came to be that was the internet on training wheels and that’s exactly what I needed. I knew this was the next frontier. I left everything else behind and never looked back. Everything I did before that day prepared me for what came after it. The failures. The firings. The lawsuits. The trade shows. The travel. The instincts. The independence. All of it was training. All of it was the bridge to the next era. That’s how I got here. That’s why I think the way I do. And that’s why I’ve survived every cycle for thirty years. I didn’t come from tech. I came from the real world. And the real world taught me how to win. How to make presentations that lead to big sales. Everything before December 26,1995 was training. Everything after it was destiny. I didn’t stumble into the internet. I earned the instincts to recognize it.

@BettyAiProject Amazing, Rick. What a story!!!

The history of live domain auctions has a beginning. I know, because I wrote the first chapter in 2004. A story I’ve never told publicly until now! In 2004, at the very first TRAFFIC conference, we held the first live public domain auction the industry had ever seen. Not a drop auction. Not an online system. A live, in-person, open-room auction with real bidders. And yes, it was literally a whiteboard. Howard Neu put together a dry-erase board with about 24 domains written on it. Bidders would stand there and write their bids next to the names. No software. No bots. No artificial increments. Just real people, real bidding, and real money. @DNJournal even published the photos below and the original whiteboard is right there for anyone who wants to see where this all began. There was no playbook for live domain auctions. We created the playbook. And for years after that, TRAFFIC live auctions became the blueprint every platform later copied. The pacing, the increments, the psychology, the flow of natural bidding. Anyone who was there remembers exactly how authentic it felt because everything happened in the open. No shadows. No mystery bidders. No manipulation. Just transparency. Now here’s something most people never knew. One of the names on that whiteboard in 2004 was Banker.com Nobody wanted to be the first one to bid. Everyone was waiting for someone else to get things moving. So I did what you do to kickstart an auction, I put out a real bid. I wrote $42,000, fully expecting someone to outbid me. Nobody did. And the truth is, I was cash-strapped at that moment. I had just come out of a multimillion-dollar divorce settlement. I had the enormous financial cost and risks of putting on the first TRAFFIC show on my back and I had never produced a trade show in my life. More importantly, my entire reputation was at stake, because if it went south, it would be ugly. I was under real financial and industry pressure and I had no idea how it would all work out. And when I honored my bid for $42,000, it took most of the money out of my bank account. Because that’s what integrity looks like in an auction. I didn’t walk away. I didn’t stall. I didn’t say “never mind.” If you bid, you pay. That’s how auctions work and always have. Fast forward twenty years. Since 2004, I’ve participated in many hundreds of auctions, maybe more, and I’ve won roughly 95 percent of the ones I seriously pursued. That’s not luck. That’s experience. After you’ve been in enough real auctions, you learn to read them instinctively. You know the feel of real bidding. You know the sound of real competition. You know the timing of authentic increments. And you know when something doesn’t look natural. This isn’t theory. This isn’t emotion. This is pattern recognition built over two decades not including auctions I’ve been to for the 20 years before I got into domains. And here’s the part that matters today. It’s amazing how many people in this industry manage, oversee, or even run auction platforms, including on the tech and support side, without ever having participated in an actual domain auction themselves. Not as a bidder. Not as a seller. Not in a live room. Nothing. When you’ve been doing this for twenty years, you can always tell who has and who hasn’t. I’m not posting this to brag. I’m posting it because people deserve context and history. Real auction experience matters. History matters. Patterns matter. Integrity matters. When you’ve been doing this since the very first live public domain auction on a whiteboard in 2004, you don’t need anyone to explain how an auction works. You’ve seen everything. You’ve lived it. And you know the difference between real and not real. On the record, for the record!