The 18 year process to buy LiftFilms.com

I started Lift Films in 2002 (the year I graduated high school). I still have a few of the early videos I was making with the Lift Films branding on them. I also have a hard copy of the first invoice I drew up for a customer and my first business card that I printed on card stock and cut out by hand.

In 2004 I purchased the domain www.LiftFilms.net because the .com was owned by a production studio in New Orleans at the time.

I wanted the .com but I knew it would be nearly impossible to get with my budget. I needed a website for my business so I purchased LiftFilms.net to get me by. Every once in a while I would check to see if the .com was available but It wasn’t until 2011 that it happened. I reached out to the sellers but I never got a response. At this point I accepted my .net fate and talked myself into believing that it wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

In 2021, I was researching domains for another project I was working on and decided to check the status of LiftFilms.com. I was surprised to see it was listed for sale on GoDaddy’s domain marketplace for $5,000. I still believed that the .com wasn’t that important to my business but my ego couldn’t let someone else get that domain.

I submitted a bid for $1,000 but it was quickly declined. For the next year and half I exchanged messages with the sellers and never budged from my $1,000 offer. Sometimes I would ignore them for weeks at a time. It became a game for me (and them I’m sure).

Below are a few of the highlights from the bidding exchange with the seller. Unfortunately they don’t show my responses since it was through the GoDaddy marketplace portal. The first message was on April 22, 2021. On September 22nd, 2022 they accepted my offer and I was finally the rightful owner of www.LiftFilms.com.