Celebrating Brandpa’s first birthday

A little over a year today, Brandpa sold its first domain name. Since then we’ve been growing pretty damn fast.

Let’s take a look at what happened between April 2017 – April 2018.

Sales

This is a graph of how much Brandpa paid our sellers each month:

Amount paid out each month to sellers (April 2017 – April 2018)

April 2018 is only half over as we write this, so short of a miracle, it will be our highest month ever (update: we broke the record 5 minutes before we made this post live).

We’re not yet ready to put an exact amount of that vertical scale, but our first year’s payouts to sellers were measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Average sale prices

Our average (mean) sale price in the past year was $2,966.

6% of our sales were under $1,000
18% of our sales were between $1,000 – $2,000
28% of our sales were between $2,000 – $3,000
23% of our sales were between $3,000 – $4,000
6% of our sales were between $4,000 – $5,000
15% of our sales were between $5,000 – $10,000
3% of our sales were over $10,000

(Due to rounding, figures do not total exactly 100%).

Domains

During our first year, we grew the number of domains we sell from 779 to 2,674.

Number of domains listed for sale (April 2017 – April 2018)

As you can see, growth in sales has drastically outpaced the rate at which we’ve added domains, which means we’re getting much better at selling.

This is super-important to us. We remained focussed on building the best quality website for selling domain names, and so we prefer to grow slower if it means a better experience for our customers and sellers.

Conversion rates

Our current annual sell-through-rate is 6.6%, which we believe is better than any other website that sells domains.

This means during a given year, 6.6% of the domains listed on Brandpa should sell. This figure is calculated based on the amount of time each individual domain has been on sale for, as most of our domains have not been listed for sale for a year.

Generally, short names converted better – 4 and 5 letter domains converted at least twice as well as other domains. The worst performing domains were all non dot-coms, and domains over 12 characters in length, both of which we stopped accepting in early 2018.

Appraisal and listing times

When we first launched, Brandpa received around 100 new domains a week from prospective sellers. By March 2018, that had grown to around 2,000 a week.

We had to expand from two staff to five (plus a tonne of part-time help). This year we redesigned all our technology to cope.

Right now, it takes us 6.7 days to appraise a domain on average, and 6.9 days to list a domain once you’ve pointed it to us. We update those figures in real time and publish them in our seller’s dashboard.

We’re pretty happy with the listing time, but we still think we can cut down the appraisal time with more manpower and better systems.

Features

We deployed 628 versions of the Brandpa website in a year, over one a day. That’s a LOT of new features, including:

We also rolled out a new logo, and adverts, like this:

A big thank you

All of the above wouldn’t be possible without our incredible team of sellers and designers. We’re extremely proud to work alongside all of you to make Brandpa the best website for selling brandable domain names.

We can’t wait to share with you what we have planned for the next year!

Updates