This episode of The Grow Fast Podcast, featuring Grant Polachek, focuses primarily on innovative domain acquisition strategies, particularly through atom.com. Grant discussed how the platform has revolutionized the domain acquisition process by offering a premium, brandable domain marketplace backed by AI and expert branding audits. This ensures that users have access to a large pool of well-vetted, memorable, and brand-aligned domain names. The discussion also touched on challenges faced by businesses in finding the right domain, highlighting how atom.com helps streamline the process, saving companies time and effort when selecting a brandable domain.

Another major topic was the importance of strategic marketing and protecting domain assets. Grant emphasized the need for trademark checks before purchasing a domain to avoid potential legal issues. He also shared insights into audience testing for brand alignment, advising businesses to ensure their domain resonates with their core values. Additionally, the podcast covered marketing strategies, including the use of digital channels like Google search, Quora, and YouTube for advertising, as well as the increasing significance of video content in attracting potential customers to their services.

You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Grant Polachek here:

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This is the transcript for this episode:

Mark Shriner [00:00]

Welcome to The Grow Fast Podcast, where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses fast. Let's go, Hey Grant, how are you?

Grant Polachek [00:15]

Mark? I'm good! How are you?

Mark Shriner [00:19]

Good, good. Hey, so whereabouts are you located?

Grant Polachek [00:22]

We're in the Chicago suburbs.

Mark Shriner [00:24]

Okay, so still summertime for you.  

Grant Polachek [00:28]

Summertime, the weather is beautiful, getting a little bit chilly last couple of days, but I'm sure it'll warm up a little bit. Where in the ride in Chicago. It's cold, and then it'll get warm and get hot a couple more times.  

Mark Shriner [00:43]

I mean, Chicago's a big football town, so about this time of the year, do people start getting is it getting kind of exciting? You know, it's preseason. We're almost there. You know.

Grant Polachek [00:54]

It is unfortunately for me or fortunately, I don't know. I'm not a, I don't really follow, but I know that, yeah, absolutely people are getting into it.

Mark Shriner [01:04]

All right? I took a look at your LinkedIn profile; says you've studied martial arts for many years.  

Grant Polachek [01:12]

That's correct.

Mark Shriner [01:13]

Which martial arts?  

Grant Polachek [01:15]

So, I started in a we called it Americanized taekwondo. So, it is rooted in a guy named June re who came over and was the first person, really, to teach at scale Taekwondo in America. And then, you know, the system was called National karate, and they got into kickboxing at some point. And really, you know, never gotten to the mixed martial arts as it is today, but really did try and integrate things like the kickboxing and many other forms, you know, a little bit of judo, things like that. So, they called it Americanized taekwondo.  

Mark Shriner [01:56]

Well, that's the interesting thing with martial arts. I've done a few myself, and sometimes they're labeled as traditional karate, for example, or traditional taekwondo. But if you dig deep enough, you find that all these arts have always been evolving. And there's, there's a really interesting history, you know, if we look at karate, for example, lot of it comes from Okinawa, and then it was brought up to mainland Japan. But how did it get to Okinawa? It came from China, and, you know? And so, there's, there's, and there's all these similarities between traditional Chinese Kung Fu, Okinawan karate, traditional karate, and even if you look at Taekwondo and some of the other Korean martial arts. So, it's interesting. You think any of that helps you with sales or marketing?

Grant Polachek [02:43]

Absolutely. I mean, it was, it was all about discipline. It was all about following the process it takes. You know what I learned? One of the biggest things I learned was, you're going to be this belt for this amount of time, and you're going to screw up a lot this belt for this. You're going to, you know, and a lot of people are going to beat you up for a long time, you know. And then eventually you're going to get okay at it, and then you're going to get pretty good at it, you know, really? And then it gets fun. Yeah, exactly, you know. I think lots of people talk about that, but it's like, it's the process, it's the showing up every day.

Mark Shriner [03:24]

So many times, I was trying to learn a new technique, a new move, and found it so difficult, and I'll never be able to do that. And it's weird, like you say, you just keep showing up and one day you might get a little bit of a breakthrough, and all sudden, the aha moment, and you're like, Whoa. And then a couple months later, usually  

Grant Polachek [03:42]

it's when you're, like, practicing, you know, just screwing around in the basement. You go, oh, that's how that's supposed to feel, right?  

Mark Shriner [03:49]

Yeah, I think if you've studied any music at all, for me anyway, learning a new song on guitar every time I try to learn something a little more complicated, it'd be like, I'm never going to get this. But you just break it down into small little segments, components and build on it. And I to bring it back to business. I think it's really important that, you know, you go in with that beginner's mindset and be a little bit patient and resilient.

Grant Polachek [04:16]

Absolutely, but working hard.

Mark Shriner [04:18]

Oh, yeah!

Grant Polachek [04:19]

Really, really, giving it your all every day.  

Mark Shriner [04:21]

Yeah, Japanese. They might have this in Korea as well, but they have this saying, seven times down, eight times up. I don't know if you've heard that, but you know.

Grant Polachek [04:32]

No, I have it, but yeah, it makes sense.  

Mark Shriner [04:34]

Same, same thing there. So let me ask you, because I want to talk to you about some of the different marketing strategies that you see working, especially with small, medium businesses and startups. But before we do that, let's kind of get a level set and talk a little bit about what you do at atom.com and what atom.com is.

Grant Polachek [04:53]

Absolutely! So, atom.com is changing how domains are found, you know, in the past, somebody would go to a seller of domains, which is usually the big registrars, and they'd say, okay, I need a great domain. And you know, they don't, you'd be on the website, and the big box says, okay, tell us what domain you want.  

Mark Shriner [05:17]

And I would type in, great domain.

Grant Polachek [05:19]

And they will tell us which one you want. So, there's a big gap between, how do I find a and we started in naming, so either a name or domain, which are really synonymous today for most companies, and finding one, and that's what we've really been trying to solve for a long time. So today, what we fundamentally are working on, and believe is a great solution. Is it what we call a premium or brandable domain marketplace? So, we have this community, about 250,000 people, and they think of domains and try and find great domains. All day long, they come to us, and we have this really great trained AI. We've been working on something called the domain genome project for about seven years. Now we have a ton of data about what makes a great domain, what words, how to combine them, so and so forth. So, we filter them with AI. And then we have real branding experts who have worked on projects with Pepsi and Hill and Hilton and Dell and some really big companies who perform a final audit of those names. So, it goes from real people thinking of great domains through AI through another set of real branding experts to get this collection, it's about 200,000 quarter million of domains that are just really well vetted. And you can go on and you can find something quickly. They're all easy to filter through. So, you can type in fashion and find a couple 1000 fashion domains, and usually you can pick one out there, and you can be confident that it's a really strong brand

Mark Shriner [06:48]

So, I want to drill down on that, but I want to also just kind of take a step back, because for people who haven't done this or haven't done it recently, the challenge because we've done it the company that I'm co-founding in running breeze docs. We had to do it. We wanted to come up with a name, and great domain, by the way, great domain. Well, thank you. And we wanted to come up with a you got to come up with a company name, but then you got to make sure that that domain, or some derivative of that that name, is available, right? So you'd go to the traditional, you know, the marketplaces, you know, you could say that GoDaddy’s, or the HostGator’s or whatever, and you, you type in breeze, and they would say, oh, breeze.com, not available. Breeze, dot that available? Breeze, 123 dot, it's available. And I'm like, well, that's not going to help me and I so I don't know what to do there. And then they would say, Oh, this one might be available. And if you pay a fee, we'll go act as an intermediary between whoever you and whoever owns the domain. We went down that rabbit hole once, and they wanted something like $25,000 and it was just a colossal waste of time and energy. And so what you're describing, which we could have used you, by the way, for, you know, about a year ago, but what you're describing is we've got a company name, and we want to see what kind of domains relevant to either our company name or the market that we are the product or platform that we're delivering are available, and these have already been vetted, right? Okay, and so let me ask you now, let's drill down on that. How, how, where are you pulling this data from? And you know, and how are you vetting these as potentially good brands or deliberately so?

Grant Polachek [08:31]

One minor nuance there is people who come to us typically don't have the name. They have a vision. Gotcha, we want to, we want to exist pre because that's the hardest part, right? What am I going to what do I name this thing?

Mark Shriner [08:46]

Well, yeah, because then you but as I kind of tried to allude to, was that your name oftentimes hinges on is their own domain available, which is kind of the carpet leading the horse or the tail wagging the dog, right? Because your name should be your name, and then you should just go out and get but it doesn't work.

Grant Polachek [09:04]

It would be wonderful if it did, but I just as a side joke, I always tell people, everything in the world is getting easier. You know, you can get anything shipped to your house and half a day at this point from Amazon. Naming is getting significantly harder because of all the domains and all the trademarks that are, that are out there, and how easy it is for people to start businesses. But back to your question, how do we decide and what data are we using? There's a core fundamental belief, and it I'm not going to be able to go through all of it, of what makes a good domain, and if you want to summarize it, it's easy to say, it's easy to spell, it's easy to remember, and that's kind of the and then there's some more complex ideas, such as brand alignment. So, I have this positioning statement, and does that to some extent align with what. Doing. And here's where it gets complicated, and we can go into it, or we can, you know, keep going on. But a lot of people will think like, oh, it has to describe my business. So, you know, quick pay. Obviously, that's a beautiful name, but you're not going to get that most likely, you know, it doesn't have to be that on the nose. It can be a few steps, few steps removed. So, there's a lot of nuance to what makes a great domain, but a lot of it falls into the words that you're using. How they're combining are, do they combine to make something more powerful, or they just smash together? Like, you know, breeze docs combine to tell a whole story. Breeze is fast as easy it's, you know, those kind of thing, docs. You know what a doc is? So that's a great you know, synergy of two words to make a good name. Red Bull is another one of my favorites. Red is power and energy. Bull is strength. Tells a beautiful story, but it's symbolic. So, a lot of people would see that and go, No, that's not it. You know, you want to be energy, energy plus kind of, very little, yeah, very literal. So, so there, you know, there's a lot of those nuances to the symbolism, to the words, to how the words are combined. There's great, you know, words come combination of words that create a dissonance. You know, Urban Decay was one of them that that I probably a little dated at this point. But, you know, there's, it's kind of weird, but it works because of that dissonance, because of that that that tension, that it creates. So, use all those things. We use AI. So, we start by training the AI in those principles and many, many more. And then we feed it. Feed it through. I'm sorry, let me step back. So, the first thing is real people come up with all the domains. These are people who understand this, this world, and you know, have been in it, and want to, want to help people find great domains. Then it goes into AI, well trained AI, and then it comes into real people who have worked with these businesses, like Hilton, like Nestle, like Alibaba, who are saying, I've actually been in the trenches, worked through many, of these projects, and based on all of the you know, both the data points and what works and these deep conversations with real brand leaders, you know, here's, this is, this is the list, and it's typically about 8% that will let in. So even after real people have come up with great domains, but 8% get through the second two filters.

Mark Shriner [12:43]

And then at some point, are you interacting with the was it the who is or the domain registry to to see what's available? I mean, how do you, how do you check that?

Grant Polachek [12:52]

Yeah, so these are, these are pre purchased domains. So that's actually the first step. The real people who are coming up with the domains are buying them, typically. So, they have to be owned by a real human being, and then that person has to, you know, we won't get in the technicality of it, but, you know, words like DNS and stuff, so we can see that they own it.

Mark Shriner [13:13]

Interesting. So, you know, in some cases, I guess you are, you also are a, I guess, a domain kind of marketplace, exactly what we are, yeah, okay, with the super intelligent search on top of it.

Grant Polachek [13:28]

Super intelligent search on top of it, yep. And we also, you know, we don't want to limit ourselves. We have this creative aspect where people can do crowdsourcing. We have some other tools that are involved, but the heart of what we do is we have this amazing collection of domains that are very easy to search and find and discover.

Mark Shriner [13:51]

Okay, so let's, let's kind of continue with that journey. You've got a business owner. He goes to atom.com he finds the domain that he's been looking for his whole life. He or she finds it. They register it, they own it. What are some best practices now in terms of promoting and protecting that domain?  

Grant Polachek [14:18]

Absolutely, we almost always recommend that you, even before you buy the domain, you do some level of trademark check. We have some of that or work with a trademark attorney, because you don't want to put the investment in and then realize that somebody else is using it. So trademark is really, really important. There's many levels and processes and ways to do that, but you really want to make sure nobody else is using it as you know that leads can lead to a cease and desist letter, which is not very fun, not that I've experienced it personally in any of the businesses I've worked on. But I can imagine that you know somebody telling you six months in they got to change your name, is not something you want to do. Um. And we also really recommend what's what we call audience testing. So take some names, a list of names. Oftentimes we say six names’ domains, and vet them against each other, what you don't want to do. And I have some pretty, I don't know if they're funny stories, but experiences where people will go out and they'll take a list of names and they'll ask their friends, do you like them? And that's just very, very dangerous, because what does it mean to like a domain you know? Then you're asking people to become domain experts, and since they're not, they're going to start making up all these rules that you know. Who knows?  

Mark Shriner [15:41]

So, would you need to do it even in the way you phrase the question, can lead to exactly say, hey, do you like this domain? Oh, yeah, you know, what do you think about our new domain? Oh, that's awesome. But if you said, here's 10 domains, pick the three worst and the three best, you might get different answers, right?  

Grant Polachek [15:59]

Yes, and that's what we always recommend, which one of these names are you most interested in learning more about? Is a great question, because you're taking it into a vacuum and you're saying. Does this name drive intrigue? The other one I really like is which one of these names best aligns with core brand principle, like integrity. So, then you're understanding, can this name draw people? And does this actually and that's what we're talking about, before brand alignment, does this align with what I'm trying to do? Because a big mistake you make can make in launching a business is creating a name, using a name, and creating a brand that doesn't align with what you're doing. And I can't think of any good examples right now, but you'll get the point. Maybe you'll think of one that'll you know, a brand that, on the surface, tries to be super innovative, but its product is super classic and honest and trustworthy, and you're just going like, just be what you want. Are why you Why are you trying to do this? Why are you trying to be two things at once? So, when you can say which one of these brand names conveys trust, and then another company will say which one of these feels the most innovative, right? And you might have the same company mission and vision and many other things, but you want to position it very differently.

Mark Shriner [17:20]

That makes a lot of sense. Let me just back up and say, how did you get atom.com I can't imagine that it was available at the time. And then what was the rationale behind it? I mean, I could think of some, you know, Atom building blocks, I don't know.

Grant Polachek [17:36]

That’s absolutely what we are leaning into. I mean, this is what we do. We are a domain platform, so we work with the biggest holders of domain portfolios in the world. We had a relationship with the person who owned this. We're venture backed. So, we're venture backed by a company called Hilco digital, which is a domain broker. So, they have all these relationships as well. So, I mean, this is again, it's just, it's just what we do. We can do it for if somebody wants a high quality, premium single English word, we are the place to get them, whether we have it on our marketplace or not.  

Mark Shriner [18:20]

So, explain a little bit about this other world that you know, of domain brokers and venture backed you know, are there like three big players? Are there 1000 players? Or what's it like out there?

Grant Polachek [18:36]

Yeah, that's a great feel like.

Mark Shriner [18:37]

I feel like we're going into the dark web stuff almost.

Grant Polachek [18:40]

No, no, no. We want to make sure that it's not.

Mark Shriner [18:45]

There's, there's a guy somewhere in Eastern Europe who controls 98% of all the domain traffic.

Grant Polachek [18:51]

You know and I think that's, that's where it gets. It's digital real estate. This is, this is real estate, but online, yeah, um, it's not as crazy as NFTs, which gets confusing to me. But you know, if you owned beachfront property in Florida, it would be worth something, right? It'd be worth more than the property sitting behind, you know, rundown motel in Iowa, right? And that's what a domain is, a single English word.com is worth more than what we're talking before that hyphenated dot app, right? And so there certainly are, and I don't know that counts, there are a handful of people who own some of the you know best online. You know when you think of digital real estate of domains, short, single English words are the cream of the crop.

Mark Shriner [19:56]

Are there any rules or aren't there some rules in terms of if you own a domain, and I think some people call it, was it domain squatting? Or, yeah, there are some rules in terms of you have to like, after within a certain amount of time, you have to actually have some sort of viable business attached to that or is there no rule about that?

Grant Polachek [20:19]

No what you and I there's a whole world of law which is fundamentally based on what's called UDRP. And just to full disclosure, I am not a UDRP attorney in any way, shape or form, but I'll tell you how I understand it in a very high level. What you what the major thing you cannot do is you cannot use a domain in a in a way it you can't use somebody else's brand. So, if I owned nike.com which I don't, of course, but let's say I did, I couldn't go and put up a website that said that had shoe coupons on it. You know, on purpose.  

Mark Shriner [21:10]

That would be what kind of confusing to the visitors, and it would delete the Nike brand and all that.

Grant Polachek [21:14]

Right! So, so you can't use somebody else's brand. The thing that's really important to understand about this whole world of naming and domains is I can use a domain in a different industry. I was driving, we'll stick with Nike. You know that's good. I was driving down the street and I saw Nike real estate investors. Nike shoe company can't do anything about that. That's a legitimate use of that business.

Mark Shriner [21:46]

They can't use the swoosh though.

Grant Polachek [21:47]

No, they cannot use the Swoosh, but they could use Nike in their domain, yeah. So that's where it becomes hard. That's, that's, that's where it becomes hard to, you know, define, but you can hold a domain indefinitely, is there's nothing, and there's nothing stopping you going back to real estate, like it's, it's, you couldn't say, like, if you didn't develop this property, I'm going to, you know, somebody's going to take it. You could have zoning laws that says you can't put up an XYZ in this space.

Mark Shriner [22:22]

I would love to see some kind of, a lot of markets, there are market trends and analysis and so on. It'd be great. I've never seen anything in terms of the domain, online real estate market. I don't know what you would actually call it, but it'd be kind of cool to see domain, domain, domain names are up 10% in the last two months. That signifies that there are a lot of newcomers to the that are trying to start-up businesses. Or, I don't know, I'm just making stuff up, but it'd be kind of cool to see some analysis.  

Grant Polachek [22:54]

Yeah, there's not a lot, there's not like a centralized body where all that data would come from. You know, we try and publish a good amount of data. So if you go to our Twitter, you can, or X, excuse me, you can see, you know, some of our data, but, you know, I mean, we are the largest brandable domain market, but, you know, we still don't have all the data, obviously, and a lot of people don't publish that. I would love to have that too, unfortunately.

Mark Shriner [23:25]

It would be interesting. So, if we go back to the services that that atom.com provides in terms of, you know, you've got the initial search, and then you help them with the acquisition, you can introduce trademarking services, audience testing. Is there anything else?

Grant Polachek [23:47]

That's the foundation of it. We do have logo design so we can Okay people with logo design. We do do some tagline work through our contest platform. And there's definitely plans for more, but those are, are the core services at this moment, okay?

Mark Shriner [24:06]

And then I'm assuming that your fees are based upon a percentage of the transaction amount in terms of the domain that's being acquired on the maybe our fee attached to introducing the trademark services and things like that.

Grant Polachek [24:19]

Yeah, we're a standard marketplace. We have a commission, and then we make money off of any other services.

Mark Shriner [24:29]

Okay, so let's go to your position. You know you're responsible as the chief growth officer for atom.com but I would assume growing your business right the goal for sure, and aside from podcasts, what else do you do? What's working for you guys?

Grant Polachek [24:48]

Yeah, we do a lot of digital so your classical digital channels like search, is very important for us. We. The search and the paid in the organic side. You know that remains a, certainly a bread and butter channel. We do a lot of work on some of the standard display channels, or display and social. So we're on Twitter, we're on Facebook or on which is also Instagram, a neat one that we like. We actually had a case study with Quora. Yeah, we like them pretty, pretty well. You know t's not a huge market or a huge platform, but it's got some neat features and tools. And you know we can target some good audiences there

Mark Shriner [25:38]

Because somebody would go to a potential customer of yours, would go to court Quora, and maybe say, how do I find a unique domain? And then you would have an article from item.com or one of your subject matter experts, and they'd say, hey, this looks pretty cool. Something like that. That's exactly right. Yep, I'm so I'm going to, I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to steal that idea from you and or borrow it? I'm giving you credit right now, though, but I that's something that I hadn't thought about, but it totally makes sense. Yeah.

Grant Polachek [26:09]

We like Quora, LinkedIn of course, LinkedIn is the major B2B channel. We’re starting a lot more into video, so we're really pushing into YouTube. That's a new one for us.  

Mark Shriner [26:28]

What would you do on YouTube, like instructional videos in terms of what we're talking about here, or what kind of content would you create?

Grant Polachek [26:33]

Short promotional before? So, we're doing paid ads on YouTube. Okay, yeah, somebody's watching a video on getting a great domain and where the pre roll, yeah. So, I mean, a lot of what we're doing is prospecting. We want to be where people are thinking about naming, and that's really, that's really where you know, that's where we find, that's where we start the conversation. If somebody is thinking about getting a domain or getting a name, we want to be there, we want to be talking to them. Um, let's see what are some other unique channels that we are having. Just trying to think here, you know, um, a lot of what we do is actually on the site itself. So, you know, our CEO is just, he's a super interesting guy. He came from technology. He came from a lot of e-commerce. He ran the, he was the CTO of a fortune 100 company, had a big role in in Sears early on, as they were doing a lot of you know of their e commerce build out and things like that. So, one of the things that we've really focused on is discoverability and making these making the easy to find a great domain. So, we really think from an e-commerce perspective, and talk a lot about that customer journey into the process, if somebody types in a keyword, are they getting the right results. We talk a lot about merchandising, and I think merchandising is absolutely fascinating, and it's not done in this space at all, you know. So, what we have on our landing pages? If you go to a domain, you see a logo. We use AI now to create a description that says this domain means this, and it tells a whole story around the domain. We have a brand alignment tool. It's really fun. So, somebody can come in, they find a domain they like, and they put in a summary of their own business, and then AI analyzes the domain versus their value proposition and tells them if it's a good fit or creates a unique story to get you know, to get that that vision started.

Mark Shriner [29:08]

Yeah, and I don't endorse any platforms or companies, typically, but I did go to atom.com before, and I ran some tests. I was impressed with the speed and variety of the responses. I mean, I was like, whoa. I mean, I just, how do they know all this? And then again, the logos, even if it's not the final product, it's kind of this. It allows me to see the domain in a kind of context of what it might look like. And then from there, I can scan on it, probably bring it to one.

Grant Polachek [29:43]

A presentation, and you'll, you'll appreciate this. I was on, I was just lucky, I was doing a presentation on merchandising and I was on Old Navy, and I found a product. For some reason, their first picture was just. A shirt kind of sitting there. And, you know, it had no person. It was just on a there must have been like a really early product, because they didn't have anything. And then I scrolled over, and it was a shirt on a person, and the person was, you know, handsome and standing, you know, in their cool pose. And, you know, there's, there's nothing. There's no comparison. Yeah, you want the shirt sitting there on the table looks terrible. The shirt on the person you're going, Yeah, I want to look like that guy. That would be cool, you know. And that's what we do with the logos and the descriptions. So, I didn't just get to this much, but in the crowdsourcing side of our business. So, we've worked with 1000s of companies that have come to us and said, We don't know what domain and we have a community of people who actually give them domain ideas. And one of the things that we found pretty quickly, and I think this is it's very, very interesting. And you know, if you're in the naming process, it's very important. I call it brand imagination. I've taken domains and names that are so good, and I've given them to people, and they go, you know, and I understand that, and maybe it's not perfect, but there's this ability to put the words together and start thinking of a story. And what you'll see is, the more somebody works in marketing and branding, the more likely and many other places. But if the more people have cultivated the ability to bring something to life and imagine it to come to fruition, the more likely they're going to go, yeah, all of these domains are great if, if you don't have that ability to to bring something to life in your mind, it's really important to have these tools like brand alignment, where you can plug it in and AI will tell you, here's A brand vision for you because, because, you know, I told I use this example, if somebody wrote, you had never heard this, if they wrote Nike on a napkin, I mean, the best brand arguably ever built top 10, at least, if somebody wrote that word on a napkin, would you be like, Oh my gosh, That is just so brilliant.  

Mark Shriner [32:21]

No, just yet, another Greek God, right? Why not Achilles? Why not, you know, Hercules, or what? You know? Why Nike? And right away, are people going to call it Nike? Or they could call it Nike because, yeah, we had to, we had to be trained, you know, because you'd see it, you'd be like.

Grant Polachek [32:41]

Well that one. People in Australia and some other places actually do call it Nike. Do they? That's funny. So I've been talking to people, and they'll say, Yeah, Nike. But you know.

Mark Shriner [32:55]

By the way, it's one of the best books I've read in the last few years is shoe dogs.  

Grant Polachek [33:01]

Had gone to it.  

Mark Shriner [33:03]

Oh, my God, he is. It's amazing, because they didn't start off making shoes. They were selling the onus good Onitsuka Tigers. They were representing them and selling them out of the trunks of their cars at, you know, to track athletes up and down the west coast and the business started. People said, hey, you know, those shoes are good. They started to grow. He flies to Japan. This is way pre internet, right? Goes over there, and because he's written them, and they say, yeah, come for a meeting, because he wants to expand the business with that with them and get kind of an exclusive arrangement. And they said, So, Mr. Knight, what's, what's the name of your company? And he got even thought about the and so he immediately, on the spot, he came up with, we're blue metal. Blue metal. Oh, blue metal. That sounds good. This is like 1964 by right? So, blue metal, okay? And then so he gets exclusive to for a while, but then Onitsuka, they want to, they want to go direct, and there's a classic battle, and that's when Nike actually starts to look at manufacturers and making their own brand and it's an amazing story, because I thought growing up that Nike was just overnight success brand that was the biggest brand in sports apparel. I remember with the shoes, when running became a thing and Nike shoes, running shoes were a thing. And then it was brand all the clothing wear. And then, of course, Air Jordan and stuff. But that came 10 or so years later. But back to the how we started off this conversation about, you know, the importance of discipline and sticking to it, and after a while, gets better. The journey that the Nike founders took to to get to the point where they were actually, quote unquote, successful, took maybe 15 years of. Lot of craziness, you know, just like I said, selling, selling shoes out of the back of the trunk of a car, that kind of stuff. And then, even then, when they first, it was probably a 20-year journey before they hit that, you know, that that the recognition that we have today. So, amazing story.

Grant Polachek [35:13]

So, can I tell you our founders’ story? It's pretty interesting, like that. So, we started as a crowdsourcing platform. Our founder was starting something totally different, and he couldn't name it. He was struggling. So, he went to this forum, and he said, I'll pay you guys $50 if you help me name the business. And he got like, 15 names, and said, okay, one of these is good enough. And, and then he's said, okay, I'll build the, you know, this was fun. I'm going to build this, and maybe 500 entrepreneurs will, you know, use it. And I don't know, he just was bored and thought it would be something fun to build. And for the most part, I mean, he was doing a little bit on the train here and there, but it was like, 8000 customers later, he was like, oh, wait, there's something here. And then what makes it even I think this is, this is one of my favorite parts of the story. So, we're crowdsourcing names. And then he goes to the biggest naming conference, there's a naming domain conference, and he comes back, he says, we're going to start a brandable domain marketplace. I said, we're going to what a who? I said, we're going to start a brandable domain marketplace like this. Might be a small part of our business, you know, 10% of our business one day, and it just worked, and now it's well over 10% of our business has really become our core focus, because we've realized how powerful it is to have a great name, no intention of going to help 500 people, and we're 50,000 clients in with a totally different business model, that that we ever dreamed, as you know, He ever dreamed of having.

Mark Shriner [37:01]

That's a great entrepreneurial story, and but again, it's hugely important. I think if anybody hasn't done a search recently, you know, you can come up with all these and then searching for them. It just takes so much time because you have to put them in individually. And it's just actually very, I found it, what's the word demoralizing? Because everything, every time we'd come up, everything's taken, man. I'm like, oh man. And wait a minute, what about this one? Did we search for that one? And wait, I think it's on the list. And how about, you know? And you know, there's three or four of us working on this, right? And it's but, yeah. So, I wish we would have found you guys a year ago.  

Grant Polachek [37:41]

I mean, you guys did okay, though, so it's, that's a good I like, I like your name and the thing is, you know, I think a lot of people that I've talked to, they don't even know the strategies for naming you're starting with, with no knowledge of how you're supposed to do this, you know, whoa, there's a whole. There's a whole. It's a whole discipline of how to, how to create these brands. So, one, you're starting without any most people are starting without much knowledge of the discipline of naming. Two, then you're sitting there searching all day and demoralizing, right? You're sitting there getting no, no, no, no, no, so 100%.

Mark Shriner [38:27]

We go back to, you know what you do to help grow atom.com you know, you start talking about search, paid in organic, and I'm curious how much planning you do, or strategy you do that relates to which browsers people are using, because I'm going to get different results depending on if I'm using Chrome. And then also with that, what trends are you seeing? Are people going more DuckDuckGo to brave, to Safari, to other alternatives.

Grant Polachek [39:06]

I mean, we always look at every angle, try and unturn every rock our core, the things that we see the most are, you know, what people are, the things that impact us the most are what people are doing right now, the closer we can get to somebody actually needs a name, the better, right? The closer we get to, you know, somebody needs a domain, the better. Which makes Google search really powerful. Um, you know, countries are, of course, very, very important. Let's see. So you're asking browsers, look at mobile and desktop a lot. That's a big one. Mobile is, of course, important because, I mean, I'm sure you're seeing this. I think the world is seeing as more and more people are using mobile. Yeah, but desktop converts much, much better, yeah, which makes sense for a complex, you know, high value purchase.

Mark Shriner [40:08]

Yes. The reason I was asking this is you might have heard that there was a recent court ruling that looked at the payments from Google to Apple to make Chrome the default and the ruling is those are illegal, so.

Grant Polachek [40:31]

I didn't know it’s illegal.

Mark Shriner [40:35]

Because it does something in terms of unfair competition. Again, I'm not a lawyer, either, but, and I think the payments were something like, it's something crazy, like 20 billion a year, and the margins on that, because basically, you're just saying for Apple, I'm just like, flip the switch. Chrome is the default. So, the margins are like, 99.5%. So, it's interesting, because there's some fall on effects there. Some of the effects are Apple's bottom, you know, bottom line is going to take a hit, unless they can recoup those payments from somebody else. But that remains to the lawyers have to sort that out. If they're illegal, for Google to do it. Can somebody else do it? Apple stock took a bit of a beating. Warren Buffett just sold off his, a big chunk of his, yeah, so it's so but, but that, I guess I'm just thinking like, okay, so if Chrome is not the default on Apple devices, right, what is and then do we have to optimize our marketing for whatever that browser is.

Grant Polachek [41:41]

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Let me see that's a big question. I don't know if I have the answer, but some of the things that I'm thinking about are, one of the nice things is you can, I think the device for us at least plays more than the browser itself. So we definitely see that an Apple user is a better potential customer for our services than a standard Android user. I have always assumed that you'll see Safari works better than Chrome. I had always assumed because Safari was, you know, the apple, and there was a correlation between Apple and Safari. But now that you told me that, you know, Apple's paying so much to be their default, I don't know if that's the right assumption, you know, so, so.

Mark Shriner [42:46]

Yeah, so..

Grant Polachek [42:47]

I don't know. I don't know if as long as you have, I would assume that the device is more important than the browser.  

Mark Shriner [42:57]

Okay, yeah, it's interesting. And then, you know, also, just the results for organic search are, can be different as well, like if you go to DuckDuckGo or brave browser, you know, you don't get the quote, unquote content bubble. And then these days, there's all kinds of, also political kind of discussions related to, you know, if you search for a candidate from this party, you'll get these results, and if you get from the other party, you will get greatly different results. And I'll just say some are more positive than others, right? That's, that's a discussion that's being had, and, and, but that can, you know, I don't know how much that affects marketing, but it's just something, I guess, to be aware of what the search engines kind of do.

Grant Polachek [43:43]

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to be candid, I think that Google needs to step up his game and really focus back on product. I mean, I don't know how much you engage with Google, and, you know, I feel like they're moving away from, we're just going to be the best search engine, and the money is going to come to the money needs to come. They feel like, they feel like a company that's not on top of their game. And you can see, you know, I feel like you saw the rush of the AI, you know, integration at the top of Google, which I think is one of the big changes that Google's made.

Mark Shriner [44:20]

You're talking about the AI.  

Grant Polachek [44:25]

There's an AI snippet across a lot of point.

Mark Shriner [44:27]

Yeah, yeah,

Grant Polachek [44:30]

Which I mean, I haven't been very impressed with. You know, one of the other things that I have been seeing recently, which I am absolutely baffled by is when I, now oftentimes have to search an incognito on Google because my customized results are so bad. Yeah, they're terrible. Like I was searching for something. I was searching for a brand name the other day, and it was a small brand in our industry. It was a news source, and they literally gave me GoDaddy, like it had the word domain. I mean, it was wrong. I think, that's what we're going to well, if Google doesn't step it up and own that space like it always has, because Google, for years, I think, has been the best search engine. And if they can't maintain that we're going to see a lot of shifts and Bing’s doing well, DucDuckGo is an interesting opportunity. I don't know, I mean, that's going to make our lives a lot harder if there's not as many uniform you know, if that world fragments, if the search marketing fragments, that's what's going to make a marketer's life a lot harder.

Mark Shriner [45:48]

And then somebody can have the one search engine to rule them all that can go and search your top five search engines in parallel, bring curated results, and then you can, I don't know, man. Anyway, hey, let me ask you, just kind of wind this up a little bit. You know, you have to stay on top of what's going on with, you know, domain registration and trademarking and, you know, audience testing. You also have to take to kind of keep abreast of what's going on in terms of the specific marketing activities that you know, you're leading with atom.com so where do you go and what do you do to kind of stay ahead of the curve?

Grant Polachek [46:32]

We hire smart people.

Mark Shriner [46:34]

Ah, that's great.

Grant Polachek [46:39]

You know, it's definitely a team effort. We just as one example, one of the people on our team who's helping with a lot of the Google platforms, I mean, he is a technical platform expert like I've never met before, you know, and I think that's, that's a lot of it is you have to, you have to realize you're not going to be able to do it all. And I'm sure you've seen that.

Mark Shriner [47:06]

If you think about the pace of change these days compared to, say, 60 years ago, where, you know, oftentimes people would stay in the same type of job, in the same company for their whole career, right? And that's just, is like, what, you know. And so every time you change job, change company, you're always learning. But the industries, every industry, is evolving very, very quickly, you know. So, so where do you know? You kind of want to be able to look a little bit ahead, you know, and see what's coming down the down the pike, absolutely. How do you do that?

Grant Polachek [47:39]

Yeah, you know, I think a lot of is the major publications you try and stay up on what time, but I think it is, I mean, in all seriousness, it is surround yourself with smart people, and you know, they share it with you. Our CEO is, as I was saying, his name's Darpan Munjal, great, very intelligent guy. He's always sharing with us. You know, this happened in he loves AI, this happened in AI, this happened in AI, this happened in AI, you know, I said our technical, Google specialist is always sharing articles, you know, you got to see this. You got to see this. We've got a great analyst who's always bringing us the best. Hey, have you seen this platform? He comes into a meeting, and he had done this, this, he brought, he had done this, this code in Python, or something like that. And, you know, all these things that I have no idea how to do, but they're, they're great. So, I think, you know, following, then just following a handful of people, yeah, and a handful of sites is, is really, I think all you can do at this point.  

Mark Shriner [48:45]

I totally agree with you. And I'm, I have a variety of interest, and they continually change, and I'm super intense about whatever I'm doing. And so, I'm always like, starting off new things. And a long time ago, I just got used to being the beginner, you know? And, I mean, yeah, I started out, even if we go back to, back to where we started, martial arts, you know, every time you change a style or of martial art, you have to start off as a beginner. You put that white belt on and go in there, humble yourself and don't, don't talk about what you studied before. And why do we do it that way? How about this? I just go in there with that beginner mind, but it's tough, you know, maybe a little bit easier to do that when you're a pre-teen or teenager, but when you get in your 30’s and 40’s, and I say, Okay, I'm going to go learn judo, and these guys are going to throw me around for a few months, you know, and I'm going to learn and but once you get used to that, I think those that, those pride, sensitivity, things get kind of calloused, and it's just easier. So, in the professional realm, it's, it's nice to surround yourself with smart people ask questions, and who cares if they're dumb questions.  

Grant Polachek [49:51]

Yeah, right. One of the things I'm really big into is, like, the application of timeless principles. You know, there. This book, a marketing book, and it talks about, I'm going to get it wrong, but basically there's, I think, he goes and says, there's three ways to get money. As a business, you get more leads at the time of sale, you get a bigger sale. After you sell somebody something, you sell more stuff, you know? And I had my first marketing company that I created myself was there was there was mine. Was called funnel marketing group, because I love that principle so much. How am I going to get more people at the time of sale? How am I going to get more people to buy stuff from me after I sell somebody? How am I going to get them to come back to work with me more? And you'd be, I mean, I was doing this back to martial arts. I was doing this at a just the math at a martial arts school. And, you know, you'll, you'll, probably, I mean, it wasn't very pretty. We had, basically, I did the math. And the average person after Black vault stayed for six months. I think maybe it was a year, really, yeah. And I went to the owner, I said, do you know how much money you're leaving on the table? He had, I mean, this was a, he himself owned four schools at that time. I could if you kept them for one more year, because it takes, you know, four or five years to get there. So, if you kept them one more year, you have a whole another school. Yeah, you know. And I think that that's. So, some of it is just, a lot of what my work is is, are we applying this simple principle properly? Like, you know, and other people, as I was saying, a lot of the technical experts can come in, they can say, here's a good idea. And obviously I do more than this. Hopefully people think that. But, you know, a lot of it is like, let's just stay focused on some of these simple things that you can learn in the best books on the subject, you know, kind of the 101 stuff.

Mark Shriner [51:51]

No, but I can see that, you know, keep the people around longer, because that cost of acquisition is your biggest cost, right? That the initial cost of acquisition and if you can keep them on the atom.com platform, for example, for one more service, an additional service, or get them to come back and, you know, yes, so.

Grant Polachek [52:09]

I take a referral, get a, you know, there's so much work that can be done.  

Mark Shriner [52:15]

Yeah, awesome! Well, Grant, I love it when I learned something, and I got a couple good ideas to help our breeze docs business, from, you know, market it more effectively based upon what we what you shared with me. One of them was the Quora. And then there's another one that I'm not going to say because it makes it's going to make me look like, what the hell Why didn't you

Grant Polachek [52:41]

We're back at the pride thing you just got to.

Mark Shriner [52:44]

I am representing a company, right? So, I got to, so anyway, hey, really enjoyed the conversation. And you know, like to wish you and the rest of the atom.com team a tremendous rest of the year.

Grant Polachek [52:59]

Thank you so much, you as well.  

Mark Shriner [53:01]

All right, take care. Cheers!