In Oregon USA, (a different) Brand By Name sold personalised branding irons.
Go to a BBQ, bring your ‘brand’ along, press it on your steak, burger or even a slice of pineapple and ‘ta-da’ you knew which one was yours.
They had a website at brandbyname.com, a thriving business, and even a ‘patent pending’.
I owned brandbyname.com.au, but back then we all wanted the .com address. I wrote to them, but they didn’t reply. I guessed their branding iron business was going great guns.
Fast forward 4 years and I was getting a load of spam—asking ‘Did I want to purchase brandbyname.com’?
The Oregon business had closed and the domain name was up for purchasing.
The domain was owned by website hosting company GoDaddy, and the only way to buy it was an early morning online auction.
I got up at 6am, made a coffee, logged on to the auction site… sat in my comfiest pyjamas, and watched the screen…
My plan was to put a bid in towards the end, hoping that any time-wasters and lurkers would have given up by then.
Someone placed a $20 bid around the 15-minutes-to-go mark, which at this auction meant…
…the auction was extended by another half hour…
…it happened again…
…and again…
…and again…
…at which point I got properly p&ssed off (it was obvious the ‘bidder’ was probably a bot)…
I placed a much higher bid ($250) and walked away, sad that I had missed out, but not prepared to spend the rest of the day in a bidding war with a bot.
Well, friends, I won the auction. In the end, the domain only cost me $100. I don’t know how long it took, but at some point the bot/cat/person bidding against me gave up.
After paying for the domain, plus 6 months of website hosting with GoDaddy that I didn’t want, I was able to transfer the domain to a less-dodgy hosting company. Which I did, pronto.
This is the interweb, so there should be a what-I-learned-from-this anecdote.
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Email hello@brandbyname.com.au
or call +61 3 8658 7744
105 Wellington St,
St Kilda VIC 3182
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