Sedo released its weekly domain name sales report yesterday, and the $100,000 sale of WordPlay.com was the largest public sale of the week on the platform. HubSpot CTO and Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah was the buyer of WordPlay.com.
I follow Dharmesh on Twitter, and like me, he is a big fan of the Wordle word guessing game that was recently acquired by the New York Times. Yesterday evening, I clicked one of his personalized Dharme.sh shortened url links related to Wordle, and I ended up on WordPlay.com. I recalled seeing the domain name on Sedo’s weekly sales list this morning and realized he was the buyer.
WordPlay.com is billed as “The Totally Unofficial Wordle Practice Game.” In addition to being a good way to practice Wordle skills away from the official Wordle website, you can also challenge friends on WordPlay.com.
I sent Dharmesh a message on Twitter to ask him if he could comment about why he spent $100,000 to buy this domain name. Here’s what he told me.
“This started as a fun weekend project with my 11 yo son — who’s learning to program in Python. But, it was an instant hit with friends and family and a ton of fun to work on. I was looking for a good domain name and came across WordPlay.com. I fell in love with it. More than I had planned to spend, but I’m a big believer in domains and power of branding.”
I remember the first iteration of the website Dharmesh launched in January was found on FirstWord.app. I spent a bit of time testing various words to see where they ranked. A short while later after gaining traction, Dharmesh acquired FirstWord.com and moved the website to that domain name. Now that his website has become even more popular, it can be found on the exceptional WordPlay.com domain name.
It has been neat to watch the evolution of this website which is becoming a brand in its own right.
On an unrelated note, I really appreciate Dharmesh for his support of my Pan-Mass Challenge last year. Even though we didn’t really know each other, he was the person who put me over my $15,000 fundraising goal.
