People don’t seem to understand that domain investing is a business, and domain investors run their businesses to make money. In the last handful of days, I was asked if I would be willing to ‘let [a domain name] go’ for offers that were not even close to what I paid to buy them.

In both instances, the prospective buyers were hopeful startup founders. Both of these offers, if you can call them that, involved two different one word .com domain names that have substantial liquid value.

Although the ask was similar, the approach was a bit different. One person told me he was bootstrapping his startup and was short on funds as a result. The other person told me he didn’t have much money and hoped I could sell the name cheaply and make money on another domain name.

Aside from the fact that nobody is letting a valuable asset go for much less than what the open market would yield, I found it ironic that these two different prospects thought I would be willing to give them a major deal because they were low funded startups. I’ve ignored many people who claim to be poor students working on a project and people looking to buy a domain name for a non-profit, but that was different. These people seemed to hope I would cut them a major break so they could make money starting their own business.

I responded to one person curtly by telling him I wouldn’t sell for close to that amount. I ignored the second person entirely.

It doesn’t really make sense for a domain investor to give someone a much better deal than what the wholesale market would bring. I think people might have more success with the poor student approach than the poor startup founder approach.