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28-year-old
John Quail has had a lot of success
buying and selling high end generic
domain names including Inside.com, Diseases.com,
Vaccination.com, Laptop.net
and several highly coveted 2-letter .coms.
Now he is taking the next step, developing
some of his better properties into
full-blown businesses with personal injury
referral site Claims.co.uk
currently getting the most attention.
As
you can see just from the sampling above
(and we will give you more examples in this
article), Quail has already owned more
high quality domains than a lot of
industry veterans who have spent twice as
much time in the business. We figured a lot
of people would like to know how he got from
point A to B so quickly and why he has
now skipped past C to D (as in full blown
online business Development.)
Quail's
story starts in Belfast, Northern Ireland
where he was born and continues to live
today. "I was raised in a time
after most of the really bad troubles in
Northern Ireland were over," Quail
noted. "My mother is a great cook, and
runs her own café, whilst my father
is a plumber and my sister is the financial
director for our newest company,
claims.co.uk. I suppose I had the typical
family upbringing. I wasn’t a spoilt child
growing up, but never wanted for anything,
and my sister and I were always taught
the value of money."
"Throughout
school I excelled pretty well academically,
not finding trouble with any
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John
Quail in his Claims.co.uk
office
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John
Quail with his sister Claire
(who serves as
the financial director at Claims.co.uk. |
Quail's
name-picking skills soon improved
though. "The first name I
purchased from someone else was Description.com,"
Quail said. "I had been searching
through some of the domain forums (DNForum
at the time I think) and came across
some domains that had been picked up
by Snapnames.
Description.com seemed a cool name for
a dictionary type site, so I emailed
the owner out of the blue using the
information in WhoIs and I agreed to
buy the name for $500. I
didn’t have much money back then, so
I used my parent's credit card
(unbeknownst to them). Thankfully
before the credit card bill came in
I’d flipped it for $1,900 on
another of the domain forums. I was RICH!
The other bonus of course was
that my parents wouldn’t kill
me," Quail laughed. |
"After
breaking the news to them and paying them
back, they quizzed me for what felt like an
eternity until they were satisfied that I
hadn’t taken up drug dealing, skimmed
credit cards or identity fraud," Quail
smiled. "Surprisingly calm after that,
they even wished me well and let me go back
to my little project."
"That’s
when things started to go really well,"
Quail recalled. "Day and night I
was up checking domains that just popped
into my head, emailing those that had
terrible sites, no sites, or for sale pages.
With each domain sale I reinvested my
profits (easy when you have no rent,
rates, food or electricity to pay) and this
allowed me to shoot up to domains of
higher and higher quality, picking up
the low hanging fruit as I went. Buying and
selling domains such as region.com, toddlers.com,
prisons.com and Lapland.com.
Picking the low hanging fruit meant that
during the early days of domaining there was
only one domain I didn’t make money
on and that was due to a suspect trademark
infringement. I might have been doing well,
but not well enough to defend myself against
a lawsuit from a multi-billion dollar
company."
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Letter
from Santa image from Bigstock |
"Through
my early domaining days I was mostly a
‘flipper’, although I did
dabble with development with one
particular domain – Lapland.com,"
Quail continued. "I had spent
about £2500 getting a custom
animated Santa Village created,
and it did receive a decent amount of
traffic for my first real development.
During that Christmas I got about 350
letters to Santa. Unfortunately
the site proved really difficult to
monetize, and obviously, quite
seasonal, so I made the difficult
decision to sell it and move onto
other domains. I’ve always regretted
selling it due to the feel-good
factor it gave, but its just a little
too expensive for a vanity
project." |
Even
though Quail was making money in domains, he
still wanted to complete his education.
"Moving up through domains whilst doing
a Computer Science degree at Queen’s
University gave me a unique insight into
things," Quail said. "Before long
I had programmed a tool to scrape
every single word out of the DMOZ
directory and run it through Overture
Keyword tool to check their popularity
with the .com added. This gave me a great
list of prospects to work through and
email, and it was through this I had some of
my greatest successes."
"One
particular domain, Inside.com, I had
managed to purchase from the owner for only $9,000.
Fast forward a week or two later and I had
it sold for $90,000. Unbeknownst to
me, the domain was previously a well-funded
news site which had gone out of business and
a former employee was looking to take up the
reins and restart the site," Quail
said.
Actually
developing domains is an entirely
different animal than simply buying
and selling them. Many domain investors
have no desire to make that leap. So, what
sent Quail off in a new direction, building
and running a site at claims.co.uk
that helps people who need help filing personal
injure claims?
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"I
moved into the claims business about
the same time as the recession
started to hit," Quail recalled.
"It seemed to be getting harder
and harder to find good deals in
domaining, with a lot of the lower
hanging fruit having been picked off.
I was cash rich, but cash-flow poor
and was looking for an income
stream that would be more stable
than the volatility of having to find
and sell domains when they came
around. With my previous experience in
website design and domaining, moving
into running websites seemed like a natural
progression." |
Personal injury claim
image from Bigstock |
"The
opportunity to purchase my first claims
related site came about and I pounced on it.
Claims were the perfect industry
given the start of the recession. With the
setup of the UK injury claims system, it was
essentially recession proof. Soon
after purchasing that first site, I got
offices and hired a friend that had a lot of
experience in SEO and website
management. We managed to grow it into one
of the most highly trafficked injury claims
websites in the UK. As we were growing, I
was always on the lookout for websites
and/or brands that could push us to the next
level, picking up complimentary
established sites such as medicalclaims.co.uk
and whiplashclaims.co.uk. What I
really wanted though was claims.co.uk,"
Quail said.
"With
my experience in the domain name industry, I
knew the advantages a market leading domain
such as this would give. While
competitors in the injury claims industry
were spending over £6 million a year
in TV advertising to help build brand, a
domain such as claims.co.uk is a brand in a
box," Quail noted.
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"In
addition, being in such a competitive
industry, there is a need to eke
out any possible advantage over
your competition, especially if it is
one that they cannot easily reproduce.
Aside from the trust factor that such
a name reinforces, I was well aware of
a study
another |
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domainer
had conducted in the past. An
advantage such as this over
competitors can be the difference
between losing a lot of money and
making a lot of money in the PPC
arena. Armed with information like
this, and wanting to push the business
to its maximum potential, pursuing
claims.co.uk was a no-brainer."
"By
February 2012 we had finalized the
purchase of claims.co.uk for £100,000
(about $168,000 at the time) and
one of the top 10 .co.uk sales of all
time. After popping the champagne
and celebrating the end of months of
hard negotiating it was back to
work," Quail said.
Even
with the exact match domain he wanted
now at his disposal, Quail still had
to overcome some unexpected obstacles.
"Unfortunately in March 2012 one
of our other important claims sites was hit by
a Google
Panda update," he said.
"This hit our revenue quite a
bit, but thankfully by this time we
had diversified our business across a
couple of newly purchased/developed
websites. This was due to some
terrible link-building by the previous
owner and an SEO firm that we had
hired. This taught me lessons in the
perils of thinking short term with
your websites, and to make sure to
keep a close eye on not just who
you hire, but any work they are doing,"
Quail advised. |
Quail
popped the champagne when he acquired claims.co.uk
but it was soon back to work and
everyday beverages as he developed his
business on the prized domain. |
Quail
has many other domains with tremendous
potential. One of his favorites is c.co.uk.
"The opportunity to buy c.co.uk came
around in August 2011" Quail said.
"The previous owner had purchased
some domains from the trademark holders, who
had in turn won the domains in the sunrise
period, and he was looking for some quick
flips. By this time I knew that claims.co.uk
was the name that I wanted to build my brand
around, so c.co.uk was a risky purchase at
the time, as negotiations for claims.co.uk
were still ongoing."
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Letter
C image from Bigstock |
"In
addition, the auctions for the
non-trademarked short letter .co.uk
domains had not yet come around, so no
real market pricing was available.
However, the opportunity was just
too good to pass. I figured that
if worst case scenario if I could not
secure claims.co.uk, I figured I
should be able to still sell off
c.co.uk for break even, maybe even a
nice profit. So, I purchased the
domain at what turned out to be
below market value after the auction
had finished. Since then, I have rejected
offers of close to $100,000,"
Quail said.
"We
have no immediate plans for the name,
but are holding onto it to help with
future marketing efforts when we get
claims.co.uk established in the
marketplace. I think as well as being
a helpful redirect to the mobile
site (having a shorter address to
type), it also has the same appeal as
claims.co.uk by putting you forward as
a leading internet company. After all,
only 1 company can own the
letter C (.co.uk)." |
Many
.co.uk domain owners are worried about
plans that Nominet (the body that
administers the .uk ccTLD) has to allow
registrations in the base TLD for the first
time (for example someone could have claims.uk
instead of (or as well as) claims.co.uk).
As to whether this development would
undermine his investments in the space Quail
said, "I think the first proposal from
Nominet was terribly thought out, but
they are moving closer to something that may
work by allowing the oldest .uk domain
owners to pick up their .uk equivalent.
Whilst we would of course be happy at
picking up claims.uk to reinforce our brand,
it does pose problems for those with high
value .co.uk domains where the .org.uk
or other may pre-date the .co.uk. It
is obvious in the domain market that .co.uk
is the highest valued domain, so I could see
people trying to purchase predated .org.uk's
to secure the corresponding .uk ahead of
the .co.uk domain owner."
"All
the uncertainty has undoubtedly hit
the .co.uk aftermark values," Quail
added. "However, in my view this is
only a temporary glitch of Nominet's
doing until the confusion has been cleared
up and there is a definitive system in place
for release (or cancellation) of the .uk’s."
"For
us, we have a further complication
with c.co.uk though. As this was
released in the sunrise period (and was
purchased from the trademark holder soon
after) its registration date happens to be exactly
the same as c.org.uk. Nominet
hasn’t provided any guidance as to how
this type of situation would play out, and
it could be argued that it was unethical
auctioning off these domains knowing their
value could be considerably impacted by the
introduction of .uk’s. If it ends up
progressing to an auction environment for
these types of situations, we would be
aggressively pursuing the domain, as it is
central to our future brand and marketing
efforts."
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As
if the Nominet issue wasn't enough to
think about, there is also the
prospect of hundreds of new gTLDs arriving
soon. Quail has a different take on
those. "To be honest, the new
gTLDs aren't something I have
given much thought to in planning
forward with my business. My personal
view is that while some may be a
financial success, and there may be
some adoption to a few select gTLDs,
it will be extremely difficult to
make any sort of significant dent
in any of the established TLDs
(.com and the ccTLDs such as .co.uk
or .de)," Quail opined.
"I
may try to pick up a few related
domains in appropriate gTLDs for
defensive purposes, but I really
don’t see the value to myself in
pursuing claims.xyz or the likes. In
my opinion the aftermarket will be very
soft as the whole idea |
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up a wider possibility of domain
combinations. Where people have more
options, prices for these types of
domains will inevitably be
lower," Quail said. |
Looking
further into the future Quail said,
"I’m always on the lookout for
business opportunities that may come
along, maybe a quick flip, or even an angle
I can see in another industry to take
advantage of. One thing I am wary of though
is walking the fine line between diversifying
my investments and spreading myself too
thin. Right now, my priority is
claims.co.uk, and turning it into the best
business it can be."
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John
Quail (right) and his uncle at the
top of Mount Kilimanjaro after
they climbed to the peak to raise
funds
for the Northern Ireland Children's
Hospice (a charity
they promoted on their red
t-shirts). |
"The
claims industry in the UK has had some
bad press in the last several
years, mainly due to the conception of
a ‘compensation culture’. Although
this has been shown to be a myth, the
government has passed various laws to
make access to justice harder and
harder. In my view, the claims
business is simply a business that
wants to give people help at
what is quite possibly one of the most
vulnerable times of their lives. As an
extension to that, we have a major
charity ethos at claims.co.uk.
Although we are by no means a big
company, we do believe that even the
smallest help can make a big
difference in a person’s life."
"In
addition to the donations and help
which our company gives to charities
close to us, our staff have taken part
in some personal past and future
fundraising efforts. These include
myself climbing Mount Kilimanjaro back
in 2007 to raise funds for the Northern
Ireland Children’s Hospice,
and personally matching each donation
pound for pound. Later this year our
financial director, Claire, will be
doing the Lizard
to Lands End
Challenge in aid of the
Alzheimer’s Society. |
While
Quail has been to the top of Kilimanjaro,
his climb up the domain mountain
still has a long way to go, but judging from
the success he has had to date it seems
certain he will scale that peak too.
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