Going Going Gone!

Well, it is done. I officially sold backofthenapkin.com. I am not sure what the company that bought it is going to do with it (they are in stealth mode), but they gave me a very generous offer that I could not refuse. It is enough to put my kids through college and buy that boat I have been looking at, well maybe not that much. Anyway, I bought it back in 2000 when the internet was hot and I always liked the domain. I like the idea of the back of the napkin for sharing ideas and concepts.

I went through many ideas, including a portal for people to share ideas with big companies. You would go on the back of the napkin and share a quick idea you had with a big Fortune 100 company, such as McDonalds. For example you could tell them to make a coffee flavored shake. We would send the info to McDonalds for you and track your ideas. The problem was the money. There were many ways to make money, just not enough. The best idea I had for the domain was a dating site. It would be like a personals site for people that lived in certain areas to connect. It would be like match.com meets Craigslist. That seemed like the best concept when online dating was exploding.

Anyway, the company that bought it has a good foundation of money to start the business with and what I have heard already it is a cool concept. So I have this money now. I bought the domain for 9.90 and sold it for 1000x’s times that amount in five years. 1000% return on your money is pretty good, like betting the Bears in the Super Bowl. Maybe that is what I will do with the money. Maybe I will buy 10,000 domain names and sell them as a broker. Well, my sister did not like that idea. Her quote was ‘you win the lotto, why use the money to buy lotto tickets.’

I am actually interested to see what they do with it. I never got around to doing anything with the domain. I had a few people offer a few thousand for it, but never enough to part with it. Mostly because I had my email on it and it would be such a pain to change. Well, cash is king. Plus this company has been nice enough to allow me and my family to keep our email for awhile. I am going to start moving our email and personal ‘web stuff’ sooner than later.

As for the money, I am going to donate a big part of it to Trilogy House in Chicago. See more at this link.

We are going to move our email to http://www.larrison.org/ – I set-up a site last night late that will host our email and our photos and other stuff for the kids. Check it out when you have a second. I think the idea of being an Organization in our family is a cool one. It is like we are the Swedish Mob from Alexandria. Anyway, our new emails are the same name, just different domain. So my email will be jim@larrison.org and Jen will be jen@larrison.org, and so on.
The only other thing I have to change is this blog. I told the company that I would rename my blog. I thought about it and decided to call it ‘The Cold Kiwi’ – since I have the domain and also it is a cool concept. So I introduce to you… Cold Kiwi!