If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last 26 years of doing business online, it’s this: A premium domain has the potential to make you and your company a lot of money.
My name is Michael Santiago and this is the story of how domain names allowed me to bank 7-figures personally and eventually net my business partner mid 8-figures after selling the business to a publicly listed NASDAQ company. This journey has inspired the creation of OnlineBusiness.com, where you are now.
My first experience of selling a domain name for life changing money was in 2004, when I sold Myblog.com for $400,000. It was an exhilarating time and that was the moment I knew domain names were incredibly powerful.
Acquired Then Built I-Newswire.com
This success gave me some time and freedom to explore different online businesses. And in 2006, I spent $35,000 to buy two online businesses. One was I-Newswire.com (the other was GetBlogs.com) and even though it didn’t have the greatest domain, I knew that one day I could eventually rebrand the business.
When I acquired it, it was earning approximately $1,000 per month. For the next couple of years I let it run on auto-pilot, mainly using the site to link to my other sites. But towards the end of 2009 I was working on a few side hustles and ultimately realized they were dead-ends.
That’s when in 2010 I decided to go all in with I-Newswire.com and do a complete revamp of the business.
I wanted recurring revenue and the easiest way to do that was to add a subscription package to allow users to submit PR’s monthly. So I hired a developer and we implemented it successfully and after nearly 3 years by 2013, it was doing over $20,000 in monthly revenue.
I was 35 at the time, about to get married and wanted to take a break and travel. So I decided to sell the business.
Partnership and Growth: Mike and Mike
Since this was my first attempt at selling an online business I decided to work with an expert and found a broker, Jason Yelowitz from Quiet Light Brokerage. It was well worth it because the process was overwhelming. And with Jason’s help made it much easier and less stressful.
Through QLB I met another entrepreneur also named Mike and from New Jersey. The synchronicity was clear. I’m Mike and I’m also from New Jersey.
We got on really well and closed the deal with the help of Jason in less than a month. Mike bought 70% of the company. And from that point, I brought my two brothers on board and we started to grow the business. The team was great and the product was solid.
But what fired myself and Mike up was the potential for us to compete with the big press release providers. We both knew there was only one way that could happen: If we acquired our best domain name Newswire.com. We just knew the impact it would have on the business.
The Game Changer: Upgrading to Newswire.com
In February 2015, we acquired Newswire.com. We finally got rid of the “i” in I-Newswire.com. We’d done it. The best domain name for our business was ours. We were really excited. So excited that I had to let Elliot Silver from DomainInvesting.com know about our upgrade and see if he would publish a short post about it.
The reason was simple. Aside from my excitement, I had a strong feeling that a few years from that point I come back to the post and give an update on the profound impact the domain upgrade had on our business.
At Our Team Summit in Sarasota, Florida – 2015
The business grew rapidly from the time we upgraded to Newswire.com and revenue started to increase…and fast.
We achieved $891,866 in revenue in 2015.
But something crazy happened the year after. We more than doubled our revenue to $2,407,107.
And our team continued to grow.
The Power of a Premium Domain
The one thing we changed that can’t be quantified? The upgrade to Newswire.com.
And even though it was an improvement we couldn’t track, we just knew it conveyed massive and instant credibility and trust within our target audience.
A small change with a huge impact.
The leader in press release distribution at the time was PRNewswire.com. Because our domain was similar, it’s likely many people mistook us for them, which may have worked in our favor. They looked at us as the leader, when actually we were just up and comers.
Continued Success and The Ultimate Exit
In 2017, our revenue jumped to $3,611,587 and then continued to increase to $8,219,222 up until 2020. It was at that point we started thinking about selling the company, mainly due to the enterprise value being in the millions of dollars.
And I’d never seen myself being in the PR business forever. It had already been seven years of us working together, when I’d originally only seen myself doing it for 5 years max. We were both eager to exit the business.
In 2021, and after the pandemic I was ready for something new. So I ended up happily selling my equity to Mike for millions of dollars.
Mike stayed on building the business for another year and a half and then sold it to a publicly listed company on NASDAQ, Issuer Direct, for an astounding $44M.
Why a Premium Domain Matters
Our Newswire team was amazing. The product was highly competitive in the space and now a complete Media Platform for PR Campaigns.
But the domain? It was the absolute best domain name we could have possibly secured. Our meteoric growth started the second we bought it and did the rebrand.
If you have a big vision for your company and don’t have a premium domain, you’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars, trust, and credibility within your market. It’s as simple as that.
And it’s not just my story with Newswire.com. There are hundreds of other companies that have benefited from an upgrade to their best domain name.
Why OnlineBusiness.com is Different
It’s the exact reason why I set up OnlineBusiness.com. To give startups and entrepreneurs the opportunity to accelerate and create the company they’ve always dreamed of.
If that’s you and you have an online business that needs your best domain or at least a better one, why wait? The best investment you can make for your online business is your domain name.
But here’s where we’re different. We don’t just sell domains like most domain marketplaces. Sure, we sell our domains outright but many times we are waiting for that visionary entrepreneur to acquire one of our domain names and make it into something truly valuable.
We seek to work with end-users who have a track record of success or are positioned to become successful.
So if you’re interested in one of our domain names but it’s out of reach, let’s talk. We might come up with something creative where we all win in the process building your dream business.
I’ll just leave you with this – Take 5 seconds to imagine:
You’ve just acquired your dream domain name for your online business.
How does it feel?
Exactly. Turn that into a reality. Let’s get in touch.
