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Business

30th Oct 2018

Teamwork, the Irish duo who paid half a million for a domain name and never looked back

Tony Cuddihy

Teamwork

Daniel Mackey and Peter Coppinger of Teamwork reveal their earliest mistakes in business, and how ‘wising up’ ultimately led them to being named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ 2018.

Daniel Mackey and Peter Coppinger of Teamwork reveal the massive cost of buying their website’s domain name.

Cork duo Mackey and Coppinger took home the biggest prize in Irish business last Thursday as the country’s leading business leaders gathered for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ awards in Dublin’s Citywest hotel.

Peter and Daniel spoke at length to Tadhg Enright on The Architects of Business after their win, and a business that employs more than 200 people and has 23,000 paying customers worldwide.

Peter admits everything really took off when he paid a staggering amount of money to move from TeamworkPM.net to Teamwork.com.

“So you can find out who owns the domain name, you can look it up – and we emailed this guy,” said Peter.

“And he just sends us back one link, and we click the link and it opens on one page that lists all these one word websites that have just sold for insane money.

“So sex.com for 16 million, pets.com for 20 million, insure.com for 18 million dollars and we’re just going “OK! This guy obviously wants (a lot of money).”

Listen to the full show here…

Ultimately, they would spend almost the entirety of their savings on buying Teamwork.com.

“I said, ‘look, for the love of God, give me a realistic price and he shot back instantly, ‘I’d consider $675,000. So I looked that up, that was exactly €500,000, so I checked our bank account from the pub – we had €530,000 in the bank – every penny we’d saved up.

“And at that stage now we had about 13 staff, maybe, so there were…”

“That was the wage bill, was it?” asks Enright.

“It was. So I replied to this guy and I said, ‘Sold! Let me just consult the board!’”

All Peter had to do at that point was tell Daniel how much money he had just spent.

Watch the full video here…