Snagged.com

Thanks for having me on the pod, Erica. Was a fun one and you're a delight to chat with!

At the height of her fame, Madonna was one of the most recognizable people on the planet, yet she didn’t own Madonna*com. It pointed to a porn site. That disconnect captures something important about the internet in the late 90s. For a brief window, the rules around domains and digital property were brutally simple. Whoever got there first, won. In 1998, a domain investor named Dan Parisi registered Madonna*com as part of a broader strategy built around capturing high-intent traffic tied to familiar names. He had already proven the model with Whitehouse*com. Own a premium domain, capture the traffic, and monetize it however possible. In this case, that meant adult content. And, it worked….at least for a while. But as the internet matured, that playbook started to break down. Cases like Madonna’s forced a deeper question into the open: when a name clearly points to a person or brand, does “first come, first served” still apply? Her case became one of the earliest major tests of UDRP. To win, she had to prove not just that her name functioned as a brand, but also that the domain associated with it had been registered and used in bad faith. The decision in her case resulted in more than a domain transfer. It helped to shift the rules of the internet from “first come, first served” to something more nuanced, where identity, intent, and reputation started to matter. We broke down how Madonna*com helped redefine domain ownership online. snagged.com/post/madonna-c…

@public Sick!

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@julianengel pieceof.shit.com has a nice ring to it

@snagged The possibilities for subdomains though…. This Is, Get, Sell, Buy, I am, you are, this is 😂

Great name for a manure company.

Die.com was sold. The nameservers changed from @eftycom to Cloudflare. I noticed it previously had a @snagged landing page, and @rob confirmed the domain name was sold in a deal brokered by @jarcho. The price isn't being shared. Spotted via @domainIQ_com.

@Nameably @raisingfi @rob Wow used to own rob.co sold it a few years ago!

@raisingfi @rob didn’t know you’ve been building this side hustle next to @snagged

🏛️ Company: RobCo 🔗 Website: rob.co 📊 Amount: $100 Million 🔄 Round: Series C ⚙️ Industry: Robotics & Automation 🌍 Location: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

@andrewrosener Ha. You know better than anyone that, regardless of who a buyer is, their budget is their budget. I think we ran down 11 different names for them, and they were contemplating lots of different options. IMO a solid deal all-around!

@snagged Acquired is another way of saying "grand theft robbery"! Just playin, but you could of told me it was selling to a generational entrepreneur talent and world changing technology company. Just sayin...

When Jeff Lawson (@jeffiel) stepped down as CEO of Twilio in 2024, he walked away from one of the most important infrastructure companies in tech. @twilio helped turn telecom infra into software, allowing developers to add messaging, voice, and authentication to products with just a few lines of code. Over time the platform became deeply embedded in the architecture of the web. Many founders who step away from companies at that stage move toward investing, board roles, or advisory work. Lawson decided to start a fusion energy company instead. His new startup is called Inertia, and it has already raised roughly $450 million to pursue one of the most difficult engineering challenges humanity has attempted: building machines capable of generating electricity using controlled nuclear fusion. Fusion is the reaction that powers the sun. Scientists have understood the physics for decades, but turning that reaction into a practical source of energy on Earth has remained one of the hardest problems in modern science. Inertia is now working on the engineering systems required to make those reactions repeatable and economically viable. Before the company launched publicly, the team also secured Inertia.com to anchor the brand, and we were lucky enough to work with them on the deal. The technical hurdles for Inertia remain substantial, and fusion has historically proven difficult to commercialize. If Lawson and his team succeed, they could unlock an entirely new way to produce energy for the world. Read Full Story 👇 snagged.com/post/inside-in…

@Name__Groove @agentcommunity_ It’s a good strategy at least. Super competitive and every little edge counts.

@snagged @agentcommunity_ We can all "pre register" the same domains. It's mostly a push to have them get "endorsements" from users to win the TLD from ICANN

I just signed up to pre-order an .agent domain. Curious how this goes. :) 😀 #UKC7B7AK" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">agentcommunity.org/join#UKC7B7AK @agentcommunity_

@abcproductions @agentcommunity_

@snagged @agentcommunity_ Their chance of getting .agent in the next round -

@cultra @agentcommunity_ I love free things

@snagged @agentcommunity_ I bet you get really full at Costco with all those free samples 😂

@cultra @agentcommunity_ That would be sad. But also was free so 🤷‍♂️

@snagged @agentcommunity_ You're about to learn a little about the TLD process. Anyone can sell but only one person will get the TLD and you probably didn't find them

@DomainNameWire @agentcommunity_ Did not -- but figured worth a shot! .agent domains will be hot

@snagged @agentcommunity_ Do you see anything in their website that says who is behind it?

Love it!! And congrats on the upgrade. 🚀

March Domain Spotlight ⛹️‍♂️ Every March, underdogs take down giants. March Madness reminds us that upsets grab headlines, but fundamentals win tournaments. The same holds true for brands, domains, and businesses. The real question is not who gets hot for a weekend, but who is built to win when it matters. .COM 🔥 Flare.com ➕ ADD.com 🧪 Try.com ⚡ Actionable.com 🏴‍☠️ Bounty.com 🎯 Center.com 📄 Application.com 🏀 Layup.com .AI 🏗️ Optimal.ai ⚙️ Hardware.ai Some teams peak in March, but great brands are built to win every season. DM if you’re ready to sink some buckets. 🏀 mailchi.mp/7e80a6d36a65/d…

First sale on the @atomHQ platform -- 45 minutes from purchase to payment in my account. Color me impressed. Nice work @darpanmunjal @grantpolachek and team.

In 1995, a small startup operating out of a rented house near the Williams College campus in Williamstown, Massachusetts launched a feature that went on to change the trajectory of the web. The company was called @Tripod, and it was founded a few years earlier by a young college student named Bo Peabody (@bopeabody). Tripod’s idea was to allow anyone to create a personal homepage without needing to know how to code. At the time, publishing anything on the internet still required at least a basic understanding of HTML, which meant most people simply couldn’t participate. All it took was a title, a bit of text, maybe a photo, and a small hit counter that ticked upward every time someone visited. Within a few minutes, someone could have their own site live on the internet. The team didn’t expect the feature to become the centerpiece of the company. Tripod had already experimented with plenty of ideas that felt clever but never gained traction, so the team shipped the homepage builder quickly and moved on to other projects. Then the numbers started climbing almost immediately. Users began creating new homepages every few seconds and claiming Tripod subdomains as if they were digital gold. Fan sites appeared alongside personal diaries, band pages, poetry collections, and every kind of strange HTML experiment imaginable. The platform started filling with pages faster than the team could fully process what was happening. By 1998, Tripod had millions of users and roughly fifteen million daily page views, making it the eighth largest site on the internet at the time. But success created a new problem....they needed to figure out how to monetize millions of free personal websites without ruining them. One of Tripod’s early engineers, Ethan Zuckerman (@EthanZ), was tasked with figuring that out. His solution would go on to become one of the web’s most infamous (and annoying) inventions. The pop-up ad. The format worked, and perhaps a little too well. Pop-ups spread quickly across the web and became one of the most widely copied monetization tactics on the internet. Years later, Zuckerman publicly apologized for helping invent what he described as “attention-hacking” technology. At the time, he had simply been trying to solve a monetization problem. He never expected the format to spread so aggressively across the web. For a deep dive on the story of Tripod, the homepage boom, and the growth curve that helped shape the early internet, read the full story below. snagged.com/post/tripod-co…