It’s been one week since I boarded a plane from Orlando heading back to good ole’ Austin, Texas.

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few thoughts and interactions from my MERGE! 2018 experience.

As the 2nd Annual MERGE! comes to a conclusion in it’s final day, there were many sessions, keynotes and connections to be had and made from Day One, Day Two and Day Three.

Conferences like MERGE! tend to move at a lightening speed in person while it can be perceived as a long time when seeing the outlay of time on paper.

Nevertheless, the final day of MERGE! kicked off with a pasties breakfast bar and keynote from Stefan Pretty, CEO Subbly.co, entitled “Bootstrappers do it better”.

Although many points were about about bootstrapping, one of the key takeaways from Stefan’s presentation was how bootstrappers should constantly ask the following 4 questions at every twist and turn in their journey:

With Day One and Day Two of MERGE! long gone, I had the pleasure of kicking off Day Three moderating the Domain Name Solutions for Blockchain Challenges panel which consisted of Jothan Frakes, Jebidiah Burnett, Toby Hall, Dave Evanson, and Jodee Rich.

It’s hard to believe a year has passed since MERGE! burst onto the scene in its inaugural debut.

Many attendees have converged to meet in Orlando, Florida this year at the Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Vista – Disney Springs Area to pick up where we left off last year discussing an array of digital principles — Domains, Hosting, Digital Search, CMS, Cryptocurrency, IP, Blockchain, eCommerce and Security.

If you’re new to the domain investing (even if you’re not), then you likely encounter a how cumbersome of a task it is to identify undervalued domains.

From NameJet to GoDaddy to Dynadot to SnapNames along with many more domain auction aftermarket platforms, identifying and narrowing in on undervalued domains — whether expired, public, private, or closeout — is a full time job in itself.

Thousands of domains expire in auction daily (as a subset of data is shown via DomainState.com chart below), and an unidentified number of those domains go on to be caught, or deleted and made available for hand registration (small percentage, but still happens).

Figuring out what to name your company is just the tip of the iceberg, especially when hoping to secure a matching .com domain for a web presence.

Whether you’re in the pre-launch stage of your business, or you’ve been in business a number of years and in search of an upgrade domain, there are many things and actions to consider when selecting a domain to best represent your brand — especially when the domain is registered and owned by someone else.

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.