The first time I met George Verdugo — a long-time domain investor and developer, and entrepreneur of dotMediaBrands.com, he was sharing an interesting story at MERGE! about how his course of action regarding the development of multilingual domains, specifically Spanish Domains.

There’s not too many people would quit or forgo business school or college to immediately start a business.

But today’s guest, Marianna Felsman, did just that decades ago on her way to becoming partner and entrepreneur of BlueAir, a thriving Austin-based Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) services company.

When entering into the domain industry with great hopes, wishes, and dreams of striking it rich as a domain investor, most domain investors would ever imagine having to mortgage their house in order for their dream to be realized.

Well, that very thought as well as few others was considered by Drew Wash — a long-time domain investor, and entrepreneur of MovingSites.com, a host of website communities designed to bring experts together.

A little over five years ago, I accidentally stumbled upon something that forever altered my domain development experience: geo service domains.

Sometimes categorized as exact-match or partial-match domains, I encountered a geo service domain via GoDaddy’s expired domain buy-it-now/closeout auctions for a suburb of the greater Austin, Texas metro.

Although Google had issued an exact match domain update that devalued and slightly lessen exact match domains’ ranking, I decided to take a chance on developing my newly discovered geo service domain.

Little did I realize my development and SEO prowess would produce a page one ranking geo service domain website.

Years later, and many new and existing domain investors still question whether or not geo service domains are worth investing in.  That’s the question will attempt to answer in today’s podcast.

It’s been a while since I shared a domain sale experience. The reason I’m highlighting today’s story is based on my latest experience selling a domain to a buyer that’s likely a Chinese domain investor.

How do I know that the domain buyer is a Chinese domain investor? I don’t know with great certainty, but it’s highly likely based on what I’m about to share with you.

I’m glad to report a few months into 2018 that I’ve been blessed with an influx of favorable domain inquiries. In fact, most of my sales started last November.

However, this specific domain request arrived a few weeks ago and intrigued me because of the following reasons:

NamesCon has concluded with yet another successful year as I type this recap of Day Three (more to come).

If you’ve missed Day’s One and Two Recaps, then please click below to explore my NamesCon experience:

Day One of NamesCon 2018 in the Books

Day Two at NamesCon: Domaining to the Future.

It’s the start of Day Three of NamesCon, the halfway point. In a city that never sleeps, I find myself a few steps slow.

A few days ago, I shared with you about GoDaddy Domain Auctions disappearing before time expired as experienced by now retired, longtime domain investor Rick Schwartz.

Schwartz was figuratively robbed in broad daylight by GoDaddy’s Aftermarket platform as he actively bid on a expired domain that vanished from his viewing with less than 5 minutes this morning.

With no good explanation of what took place, Schwartz took to Twitter, and lit a fire under GoDaddy with endless questions, jabs and everything in between.

And where did this get him and us, the domaining community?