[gkoberger]

It wasn't called ReadMe originally... I happened to be browsing HN, and came across a post with someone offering readme.io for free, and I was like "oh that's a great name!" (I ultimately paid $3k as a thank you)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6397526

For the first few years, we used readme.io as our domain. When we did our Series A, I finally bought the .com for $170k. By that point I knew we were successful, and I figured the longer I waited the more it'd cost.

[12907835202]

Wow I can't fathom the .com being worth that much. Did you manage to do any sort of math on whether the .com has helped bring in $170k of sales? Or how many years it would take to break even.

[vnchr]

It’s an asset they can resell, and he validated the $170k price himself by paying that much.

[Thorrez]

It's only worth that much to a company named Readme. If no such company exists, and no company is willing to rename itself to that, then it's not worth that much. It's worth $170k times the probability that there is or will be a company that wants to buy it for that much.

[onion2k]

It's only worth that much to a company named Readme

It's worth that much to any business that wants readme.com and believes it to be worth 170k. You don't need to be called Readme to want that domain. There are plenty of tech companies that want vanity domains to point to parts of their offering. I can easily imagine Microsoft, Jetbrains, Atlassian, or Replit making an offer for it.

That said, by far the most likely way any company would acquire it would be as part of acquiring Readme as a whole. If you want to exit by selling (rather than IPOing) the value of your assets still plays a small part.

[gkoberger]

It’s certainly been worth it. For better or for worse, the .com projects a level of professionalism the .io does not. We work with many large companies, and I’m absolutely confident we’ve made our money back on it.