Most domains never sell because the owner does the one thing that rarely works: post it on a marketplace and wait. Here's what actually moves a name — and how to do it without handing a broker a third of your sale.
A listing is a lottery ticket. You put the name on Afternic or Sedo, set a price, and hope the right person types it into a search box on the right day. For a handful of premium one-word .coms, that works. For everything else — the brandables, the .ai names, the two-word hand-registrations that make up most portfolios — inbound alone can mean years of renewal fees before a single offer shows up. Selling a domain is an outbound problem, not a listing problem.
Park the name on the big marketplaces and hope a buyer finds it. Costs almost nothing and works for genuinely premium names. For a portfolio, it's mostly renewal fees and patience.
A broker does the outreach for you — but takes 15–30% commission and usually only bothers with high-ticket names. Great for a five-figure .com, uneconomical for the long tail.
Find the companies a name actually fits, reach the decision-maker, pitch why it fits, and follow up. This is what closes the long tail — and it's a full-time job the moment your portfolio passes a few dozen names.
Inbound is cheap but rare. Brokers are effective but expensive. Outbound is effective but slow — unless you automate it. That last line is the whole game.
Put your names on the marketplaces with the most buyers: Afternic and Sedo reach the widest network, and Dan or Atom suit brandables. A listing gets you in front of inbound search traffic and gives a buyer a clean, trusted way to pay. Just treat it as the floor, not the plan. A name sitting on three marketplaces is still waiting to be found — and waiting is the slow path.
For each domain, work out the companies, products, or people the name would genuinely upgrade. A good name is worth the most to a specific buyer, not to everyone.
Get to the founder or the head of marketing — and a real email address, not a generic contact form.
Not “your domain is for sale.” Lead with why this specific name fits them. The pitch is the difference between a reply and the trash folder.
Most replies come on the second or third touch. One email is a coin flip; a short sequence is a campaign.
When someone bites, agree a price and move the name through escrow so both sides are protected.
By hand, that's 20–30 minutes per domain per touch. Across a 200-name portfolio it's a job you'll never finish. Which is exactly why most investors skip it — and exactly why their domains don't sell.
This is what Speeder does. Upload your domains and AI agents research each name, find the companies it fits, write the pitch, and send a personalized three-touch sequence every weekday. Each domain gets its own landing page and a listing on Speeder, Afternic, and Sedo. Replies land in your inbox; you negotiate and keep 100% of the sale. It's the outbound playbook above, run at portfolio scale — $1 per domain per month, no commission, no broker's cut.
Upload your portfolio and let AI run the outreach — $1 per domain per month, no setup fees, no commission, cancel any time.