Building the engine that sold a premium domain at scale.

The product strategy was clear. The operating company and sales model were still being built.

I joined while Intercap Registry was completing its legal formation. The sales team had to be hired, the core infrastructure put in place, and the company still needed a repeatable way to create demand for a premium-priced domain.

Two broad channels were developing in parallel. Marketing created awareness, while a domain-industry specialist established the wholesale and reseller relationships needed to distribute .inc and trained those partners to sell it.

My focus was the direct channel: identify the end users with a reason to own a specific .inc name, find the person closest to that decision, and reach them directly.

Sunrise exposed the real sales insight.

Sunrise is the period before a new domain becomes publicly available, when trademark holders get the first opportunity to secure names matching their marks.

Trademark holders were already a known audience. The missing link was the person who had both the information and the obligation to act.

Using USPTO records, I could identify the attorney of record behind a trademark. Those attorneys had a professional duty to alert clients when their brands could be exposed if a matching domain fell into someone else's hands.

That changed the sales model. Instead of relying only on broad awareness or third-party distribution, we could reach the person already responsible for protecting the brand.

Prove the direct-sales model in Sunrise, then apply the same logic to broader segments after launch.

The approach was simple: find a segment where .inc solved a real business problem, reach the right person with a specific domain recommendation, measure what happened, and scale the strategies that produced results.

For many businesses, the value proposition was strong. Their exact-match .com was already owned, actively used or available only at a six- or seven-figure acquisition price. A premium .inc offered another route to a clean, exact-match corporate identity.

The goal was to keep finding the segments where that value proposition was strongest and turn each successful segment into a repeatable sales motion.

• A direct sales team. I hired and led a 6 to 8 person operating team, including the sales capability needed to turn broad market opportunity into direct end-user conversations.
• A layered contact-data stack. Manual and offshore research made the first target lists actionable. As volume grew, Crunchbase helped identify the right companies, Apollo provided broad email coverage economically, and ZoomInfo supplied verified business emails and direct-dial phone numbers. When an email generated an open or click, the rep had the phone number for the person already engaging.
• Micro-segment targeting. Campaigns became increasingly specific: public and private companies, executives, trademark holders, industries and recently funded businesses. One especially useful segment was recently funded companies operating on workaround domains such as getbrand.com or brandapp.com, because their exact-match .com was unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
• A domain recommendation engine. Outreach suggested the .inc name that best fit the company, usually the exact brand match, and expanded over time to the full company name, acronym and relevant industry-keyword alternatives.
• Name-match attribution. Sales closed through registrars, outside our systems. So from the beginning, we compared the domains suggested through direct sales with the names that were later registered. As the system matured, attribution incorporated CRM ownership, email engagement, website behavior and registrar information.

Sunrise became the first working sales model.

We contacted attorneys of record behind targeted trademarks and compared registrations against the outreach. Sales could be tied directly to those contacts, and that result validated the strategy. We expanded the approach using rankings of leading trademark attorneys, reaching firms that represented large portfolios of brands. Marketing and registrar distribution continued at scale, while direct sales created a targeted path to the end user.

General Availability opened .inc to the broader market. The same model was reused across increasingly specific segments: identify where .inc had a compelling business use case, reach the right person directly, recommend a relevant name, and measure the result.

As the target universe grew, automation expanded our reach. Broad, targeted email campaigns identified engagement through opens, clicks and activity on get.inc, and those signals created warmer, better-qualified leads for the sales team. The operating flow became:

targeted outreach→engagement→qualification→rep follow-up

Attribution became more precise at the same time. Suggested domains were matched to registrations, email engagement was tied to specific sequences, and get.inc showed which names prospects searched and where the traffic came from. Those signals determined which campaigns to repeat, which messages to refine and where sales effort should go next.

Intercap grew by raising the operating ceiling one stage at a time.