If you have been following our activity on Twitter and Linkedin over the past 4 weeks you will be aware we have been discussing a rebrand! Some users gave some really great feedback (hat tip @Joffa_d) on the whole idea of a rebrand.. What is wrong with the emailexpert brand? Nothing, absolutely nothing at all, it is perfect, we truly love it and have grown very attached to it over the years. However purely as we have always operated from a .org domain we have limited our commercial activities. It has always been a point of concern when it came to considering ways to commercialise the emailexpert platform when we operated from emailexpert.org.
Whilst legally there is nothing that would restrict us from operating commercially from .org, we are a bit traditional and from the old school of internet thinking and would like to see the .org respected as per its original purpose. First choice was of course was “e m a i l e x p e r t.com” however at the height of our popularity we attempted to secure it and were quoted high 5 figure numbers.
There are also an amazing array of new TLD’s like .io that can be used, and as you can see we explored with the idea of new TLDs, hence we have this blog at https://emailexpert.info but in all honesty it just is not as good as a .com
We even secured expert.cm as part of our backup rebranding strategy, as an option for a new brand name. However the team at emailexpert have .mx .cm and other address they have used in day to day business. If for no other reason than transcribing your email becomes a real rigmarole we really wanted a .com
So over the past 4 to 6 weeks we attempted to go after a couple of variants of our domain as a .com and were quoted high 4 figure numbers. In fact our preferred domain emailexpert .com still had an asking price of 5 figures, it had actually been purchased in 2017 at auction for a little shy of $1000 and was being actively used. We considered and investigated legal action and also opened up a line of communication with the new owner through SEDO (who we recommend very highly, they have been professional with us throughout).
There was no way we could justify 5 figure investments in domain names so we decided we should investigate a complete rebrand. As part of our brainstorming process and to enable safely crowdsourcing feedback we secured a number of other domains, some premium, some had expired or never been registered. Included in the domains we purchased were some great domains like:
emailgeeks.com emailbrains.com emailbi.com emailrockstars.com emailsignal.com
We also had the opportunity to acquire a plural variant of our domain, it was a nice option, although we did a poor job in negotiations and the end price was not particularly attractive, plus even though it was similar it was not exactly “emailexpert”. So it would still have meant a re-brand.
So when 3 weeks ago the owner of emailexpert.com reached out to us after negotiations had gone cold with “this is my final offer” … we were pretty excited. The price was still a little high for us (several thousand dollars) but it was achievable, if we could win some backing and support we could do it. The issue was we had a week to turn this around. The Sedo platform gives us a few days to agree to the price, and then a few days after that to make payment. Even throwing all our accessible funds, and some that we should not have (like rent!) we still did not have quite enough.We had just a couple of days to reach out to our network, let them know what we planned for the relaunched emailexpert and see if anyone could help us make up the difference between what we had access to personally and what we needed to complete.
Two people helped us in our hour of need and we will be forever grateful, for more than their contribution, for the speed at which they acted to ensure we had funds available to complete the acquisition of emailexpert.com Gentlemen and Scholars; Keith Kouzmanoff and Scott Hardigree. Jolly Good Fellows (hat tip LoriBeth), both of them!
Well you have done well to have got this far, reading through this rambling post… The big news with the rebrand is that of course there will be no re-brand! We have secured emailexpert.com and as a special reward for being one of the first people to read this post, you get to see a very limited BETA preview of the new platform.. just head on over to https://emailexpert.com ! Please do not share the link directly on social media. Share the link to this post instead. Otherwise we will be forced to pull access to the BETA preview early. Thanks for understanding.