🚀 How High-Value Domainers Got Started
The people who own the big portfolios did not start with money. They started early, bought what nobody wanted yet, held through years of silence, and treated renewals like rent on a building — patterns you can copy even if the 1990s are gone.
The pattern behind the famous stories
The best-known domainers — Rick Schwartz, Frank Schilling, Mike Mann, Kevin Ham — built their positions in the late 1990s and 2000s, when generic .coms could still be registered or bought cheaply and almost nobody believed they would matter. The stories differ; the shape is the same: buy the words that businesses will need, before businesses know they need them, and hold.
- Rick Schwartz started buying generic .coms in the mid-1990s and famously held for years; his reported sales include Candy.com (about $3 million, 2009). His rule, repeated for decades: buy names you would be happy to own forever.
- Frank Schilling bought thousands of expiring generics in the early 2000s, built Name Administration and later Uniregistry, and sold the business to GoDaddy in 2020. He treated the portfolio as an operating company with revenue, not a collection.
- Mike Mann registered names at enormous scale — reportedly nearly 15,000 in a single day in 2012 — and sells through DomainMarket.com. Volume, plus a consistent pricing model.
- Kevin Ham, profiled by BusinessWeek in 2007, built a portfolio reported in the hundreds of thousands by mastering the drop and typo traffic before search engines closed that door.
Reported figures above come from public interviews and press; treat them as reported, not audited.
What they did that you still can
- Bought before consensus. Every one of them was early to a category the market later agreed on. Today's equivalent is watching which words are rising (our valuation shows the trend) and buying while the .ai/.io are still open.
- Held through silence. Years without an offer did not make them sell cheap. Cheap holding costs made that possible — which is the whole point of a dollar a name.
- Ran it as a business. Spreadsheets, renewal decisions, pricing rules, listings everywhere. Schilling's portfolio had staff; yours needs at least a calendar.
- Sold the tail. All of them sold or dropped names constantly. A big portfolio is a curated one, not a hoard.
What you cannot copy
The 1990s. Generic dictionary .coms are gone at registration and cost five to seven figures on the aftermarket. The open ground now is at the edges: new categories (AI, agents, robotics, energy), new extensions that businesses actually adopt (.ai has; most have not), and expiring names that owners let go. The Dumpster Dive exists because the edge is where a search of thousands of combinations still finds available names worth owning.
Questions
Who are the most successful domain investors?
Publicly known names include Rick Schwartz, Frank Schilling, Mike Mann and Kevin Ham, all of whom built large generic .com portfolios in the 1990s–2000s and held them for years. See our Top 10 domainers article for more.
Can you still get rich from domains?
The 1990s window for generic .coms is closed. Money is still made at the edges — new categories, expiring names, wholesale-to-retail arbitrage — on multi-year timelines and with disciplined holding costs.
What did top domainers do differently?
They bought before consensus, held through years without offers, ran the portfolio as a business with pricing rules and renewal decisions, and constantly sold or dropped the tail.
Put it to work
Value any name free, find what is still available, list at 5% commission, and park where the wait earns credits.