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Image: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images, Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images/Adam Taylor
In his new book Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff pulls back the curtain on the chaotic, often absurd reality of building one of the most recognizable consumer tech brands of the last decade. The following excerpt captures one of the book’s most pivotal moments: the high-stakes, borderline-reckless gamble to secure the name “Ring.com,” a decision that nearly emptied the company’s bank account, tested the patience of his investors, and set the stage for a brand that would soon reshape home security.
eBay.com. Half.com. Cars.com. Shop.com. Toys.com. And yes, Nest.com. So many great four-letter domain names. And I wanted one: Ring.com.The owner of the URL was willing to part with it … for 2 million bucks. That represented a massive chunk of the money my VCs were about to give me. Neither they, nor a couple of my seasoned tech friends who had experience with overpriced domain names, thought it was a great use of my new capital. Nor did the fellow who ran the mezcal company on the other side of the wall of our Santa Monica office. “You’re going out of business! Your doorbell doesn’t work! It’s just a name!” he yelled at me in the parking lot as I walked to my car one evening. On one hand, I wanted to yell back that he didn’t know what he was talking about; on the other, I wondered if he was right and I was making a huge mistake. I also wondered where his anger at me was coming from, but realized he’d probably heard some of my own raging through the walls. “You’re going to spend all that money on a stupid name?!” he barked.Another doubter wondered, “Jamie, does it really have to be four letters? What’s so special about four letters?”
Yes, it had to be Ring. When I’d come up with my voice message-to-email transcription service, I first called it Simulscribe, and it stagnated. When I changed the name to PhoneTag.com, we got a burst of interest. Names matter. I had once thought they shouldn’t—all that mattered was having a quality product with an easy-to-understand benefit, a great customer experience, and a fair price. Turns out, the name matters.
I would not make that mistake again with the doorbell. Soon enough, there would be lots of video-doorbell competitors whose products might be almost as good as ours when we launched F5. So the way to separate ourselves from the competition was brand.
A mission as big as reducing crime in neighborhoods deserved a brand. That brand deserved a great name.
For some totally unfathomable and fortunate reason, this URL owner showed zero curiosity about the individual or company that was trying to buy his name. In our exchanges, it seemed almost as if he was unfamiliar with the internet, which was particularly weird for someone who harvested domain names.
I got the sense that for some time he had overplayed his hand, consistently valuing the URL higher than the market did. Which happens. Maybe he had tried to sell it during the dot-com boom for $10 million and it was worth only five then. Or maybe I was the one being played, and he knew exactly how much a perfect four-letter domain name could fetch, certainly way more than I’d paid to own SlowDownAsshole.com ($15).
My friend Diego Berdakin—a brilliant entrepreneur, USC professor, and the single smartest person I know—urged me, explicitly, to not pay a cent more than $100k for Ring.com. I explicitly did not tell him the owner’s starting price.
First, I got the owner to knock the price down from $2 million to $1 million, but that was still an insane amount of up-front cash for a struggling startup to just light on fire, a full third of what I was getting from True Ventures. I had to figure a way to own the name without bankrupting our company…would the owner be interested in equity instead of cash?
No. Wow. Clearly, he hadn’t read about Google’s recent multibillion-dollar acquisition of Nest. I made one last offer for slightly under $1 million.
Nope. One mill. We set a closing date.
I forgot one thing, though. I didn’t have the money.
The morning of the closing, I called the owner. “Listen, I’m in the parking lot of my company and I’m so embarrassed. The bad news is my board won’t let me buy the name, full price today, for what I previously offered you.” It was not a lie. I had a board. The only detail I left out was that the board was just me.
“Wow,” said the owner. “That’s a dirty thing your board did.”
“Tell me about it. Worse than dirty. Disgusting.”
“I’m very upset.”
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“I hear you, brother. Me, too.” I went on a bit. I doubled down on what a bunch of assholes my board were being. “But the good news is I’m authorised to deposit one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars in your account, today”—I had $187,000 in the bank; the VC investments had not yet closed—“and the additional eight hundred twenty-five thousand paid in installments over two years, for a total of one million dollars.”
He lost his shit. He unleashed a string of four-letter words very different from Ring and eBay and Half. Effing this, mother-effing that. The connection dropped. He’d hung up.
Damn, I thought. Had I overplayed my hand?
Fifteen minutes later, I got an email from him.
Wire the money.
He included his bank information.
He never asked who was on the board. Never asked what we did. I hope I would have, in his shoes. Maybe when you’re offered a million bucks overall, with $175k coming that day, you just want to get it over with as quickly as possible.
I called my friend Adam d’Augelli—the young VC at True who had been my biggest champion—to boast what a great deal I had cut, that I’d essentially just saved us so much money. He wasn’t quite ready for high-fives; their investment was about to close, and already a significant chunk of it was gone because I had a jones for a great four-letter domain name. Adam was fully Team Siminoff but, as I’d done with others, I was not making it easy for him.
Ring.com. What a great sound. As sweet as the three-toned jingle the doorbell made.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jamie Siminoff is the founder of Ring.com.