Our guest on this episode of the Domainer Show is Gabby Leibovich, Co-founder of Catch of the Day and the Catch Group and we get some exclusive domain name reveals in our chat.
Gabby and Hezi Leibovich are two of Australia’s leading business e-commerce entrepreneurs with an amazing track record of e-commerce business success over the past 14+ years.
When Gabby & Hezi came across the internet, they were seasoned sales people, Gabby had worked for many years at his father’s electronics shop in the suburb of Brighton, Melbourne, interacting with customers on the shop floor selling them electronic products.
In 2006, Gabby & Hezi launched Catch of the Day, a website that provided an exclusive deal everyday on the website which was a first in best dressed scenario, once they were sold out, that was it. By 2010 Catch of the Day had become Australia’s most visited e-commerce website.
Catch of the Day was rebranded to Catch in 2017 and with that rebrand came the purchase of their new brand matching domain name Catch.com.au for AU$33,000.
They built that business up from nothing & ended up selling Catch Group to giant Wesfarmers in August 2019 for a cool AU$230million.
Along with Catch, they launched Scoopon in 2010 which was purchased by the Lux Group in 2017 and after starting EatNow in 2012 and joining forces with Menulog in 2015, they were acquired by UK based Just Eat for a massive AU$855M only a few months later.
The domain name Coupons.com.au was purchased for AU$200,000 and redirected to Scoopon.com.au. Gabby & Hezi also own some other fantastic domain names such as Recycling.com.au and Special.com.au(.)
Many of the stories and lessons behind these businesses are documented in Gabby and Hezi’s new book Catch of the Decade.
I think this book is one of the best business books to come out in the past 10 years.
After our podcast, Gabby has announced that he and Hezi will be launching a new e-commerce business called Little Birdie at LittleBirdie.com.au, stay tuned for the full launch in early 2021.
Here are some links to topics mentioned in the podcast –
You can buy the Catch of the Decade Book <———-
Robert runs DBR.com.au
Ed runs OnlineImpact.com.au
Your most entertaining interview yet. It’s great to see people actually using their domain names.
Great show guys.
Looking forward to the book.
Need to work on my Chutzpa!
Cracking show. For me, it’s the best yet 🙂
Good interview thanks guys and Gabby for taking the time.
Gabby’s insight that it is better to do something very well in a high demand and established vertical rather than doing something mediocre in a new niche is interesting.
Not all have that luxury due to entry barriers.
Hence looking for a new angle or new way of operating in an established vertical is often the best way to go about things.
A good example is Sleeping Duck who is referred to in an earlier Domainer article (and who bought Sleep.com.au).
What Sleeping Duck did was find a competitive advantage through a superior product (doing things “very well”) delivered in a more innovative way (a very slick e-commerce operation that did not depend on physical showrooms).
Even beyond that comes key decisions that give you an enormous one-up on competitors. This is why many readers of this site invest in generic domain names.
When a great domain name is put to best use there is no stopping it. It’s a “lock it in Eddy” for the next 20-30 years. Some examples that easily come to mind are Loans.com.au, HomeLoans.com.au now with prime time TV ads and Conveyancing.com.au with ads all over RealEstate.com.au.
Won’t be long and all the boomers in marketing jobs atm will be in homes, and the business community will welcome more and more savvy and agile marketers and entrepreneurs like Gabby and Hezi.
Awesome interview, thanks guys and Gabby for taking the time.
Gabby’s comment that it’s better to do something standard very well than to do something novel to a mediocre standard is an interesting one. Two caveats with this are that not everyone can do something standard well and secondly that to do something standard well often has barriers to entry not least of which usually includes significant working capital.
I prefer option C, which is to do something standard in a novel way. Don’t innovate the product, innovate delivery, distribution and other aspects of operations to gain competitive advantage.
To gain competitive advantage within an established industry requires analysis of each component of the value cycle, and seeking to “one-up” competitors in as many components as possible with the least amount of risk possible.
One very simple thing that every business should be doing, the moment they find their inner chutzpa, is to buy the best domain name for the business. It does not matter what the business has been using previously, and it does not matter if sales are coming in the door now. It does not matter even if the owners of the business intend to sell the business in the future.
If the perfect domain name is not being used, the business is haemorrhaging leads, conversions, sales and above all else credibility and position within the marketplace.
It does not matter if ecommerce is not a big part of the business now. Ecommerce may become a big part of the business in the future, perhaps with whoever buys the business.
Without the perfect domain name in hand, your business is missing a vital organ. Any Gen-X or Gen-Y acquirer of the business will count it as a big strike against you as it is one more thing they need to do because you did not have the vision or chutzpa to do it previously.
This interview should be a wake-up call to heads of digital and marketing directors for major corporations who are yet to acquire the perfect .com.au for their brands under management.
To such people I would say this: Neglect your brands much longer and the Leibovich’s of the world will continue to steal away market share and your brands will soon enough find themselves in the corporate dustbin. Make the right call now, or lose your job in 2-3 years, the choice is yours.