I heard a pretty funny story today. Back in the days of tasting one company was tasting about 200k domains a day. But once they forgot to delete them in the grace period, so they ended up with 200k rubbish domains. This error cost them a petty $1.4 mil 
.
Obviously tasting has been long gone today since the grace period has been cancelled by ICANN. It is now only possible to delete 10% of new registrations in the 5 day period.
May 8
Around 15 people have left Sedo in the past couple of months and I have information that more are to leave soon. That’s never a good sign for a company.
As I get to speak to people from Sedo on and off the mood and morale don’t seem to be very good. It seems that the organization got too hierarchical, bureacratic and unflexible. I think the company just became too German for a high growth and international business such as domains. People working there really have a problem in self realization. This bad mood may be more affecting the European office than the US one though.
Bottom line is that all this and the unflexible mode of doing business may be affecting relationships with key customers and Sedo’s bottom line. More aggressive and flexible companies such as Oversee and Namedrive are chipping away off Sedo’s parking business.
I can really illustrate this on myself. As great as Sedo’s account managers are (Hi Kamila!), they simply don’t call the shots and it is very difficult to push through non-standard business deals because of how Sedo is hierarchical. That’s why Sedo probably only gets around 5% of my business. Compare that to Oversee.net for example. I remember the first time I arrived to DomainFest (at that time I was doing maybe $700 revenue/day, which is basically nothing), my account manager (back then Jim Grace, who does a fantastic job, although we don’t work together any more) already understood my growth story and the potential I can bring them in the future so I got an introduction with Lawrence Ng and Jeff Kupietzky and all the top brass. Because they were able to make quick decisions and do non-standard looking deals, they got to win tonnes of my future business and we have a great relationship. Compare that to Sedo, which completely missed out.
Let’s hope Sedo will be able to reflect on what’s going on and be able to change the workings of the organization so it can get back onto a growth trajectory, wish them luck!
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