Buying the exact name a company had already built on

The team had been operating on a compromised variant for two years. We valued the target from comparable transfers, approached the holder without the company's name attached, and closed inside the founders' budget ceiling.

The brief

This was not a naming problem. The company already had its name, had built its product, customers and search history on it, and liked it. What it did not have was the exact dot. The variant it ran on was the kind of workaround every customer has to be told about and a few always forget, and every month on it added to the equity sitting on an address the company did not want to keep.

The obvious move was to write to the holder and ask. The trouble with that is the email signature. A holder who can look up the company, its funding and its traction prices against all three, and there is no way back from that first email.

The work

Holder research came first: who owned the name, how long they had held it, what else they held and how they had behaved in past sales. From there we built a valuation range from comparable transfers in the same extension and length class, and agreed a ceiling with the founders before any contact was made. Nothing would be offered or committed without their instruction.

The approach went out in our name. To the holder this was a credible buyer with no logo, no sector and no traction to price against, and the negotiation ran inside the ceiling from the first number to the last.

How it closed

The deal closed below the founders' internal ceiling. The transfer ran through accredited escrow, with the registrar handover and DNS continuity handled and the asset registered to the company's own entity. After two years on a variant, the company now lives at the name it had been building on all along.