I was going through the expired list that I received from Namejet and noticed that MOHO.com was expiring. I said to myself “This will sell on an auction between $15k-$30k”, that’s the going rate for a pronounceable 4-letter domain.

So I decided to do a little research and see if I could contact the owner and try to buy it directly from them before it hits the auction. I’ve tried everything, using DomainTools whois history tool I did see an owner of the domain, not sure if it’s the current owner. What wound up happening is that I found a person that’s listed in the whois on Facebook, it was a person from Indonesia. There was no other contact info except the name of the person. I went as far as befriending the person and sure enough, they accepted my friendship.

I sent a message via messenger telling the person who I was and why I was reaching out. After 2 weeks I did not hear back, so I decided to leave a last message saying, “Hi, I see you own moho.com, and it’s expiring, I’m willing to pay you $2000 for the domain name.” 10 days later, I get a message that says, “I’ve renewed the domain name, how can I get the $2k?”

I was very excited to hear from this person, who is a 70-year-old who loves photography. I went ahead asset up the escrow.com transaction and that’s how I got Moho.com for $2k.

It wasn’t easy getting the domain transferred to me as the owner wasn’t tech-savvy and had asked his student to help him with transferring the domain, which meant unlocking it and providing me with transfer codes.

It pays to reach out to people and see if they will renew and sell their domain. It happened to me.