Fuuny story behind covfefe:
I tried purchasing minutes after the tweet to find out someone had already purchased it. I reached out to the guy (midnight) to buy it but he didn't want to sell it. I offered my ideas on what he could to capitalize on the opportunity and so I ended up building up a store front with shirts/, coffee mugs, sweaters and other merch. I basically didn't sleep that night. I built the site, responded to purchase emails, etc.
It took some time to get the storefront ready because of issues with the forwarding (GoDaddy) but when we got it set up, we started seeing traffic. Not before long, sales. This thing started blowing up and as memes would start trending, I would immediately create new merchandise based on the memes and within minutes that same merchandise I had just created would sell. It was surreal.
We were up to ~$2k in profits with who knows how much revenue. Many emails started arriving and the owner would just forward them to me as (I think) he was not as savvy with business/negotiation/etc or just plain intimidated. It got so crazy that at one point Bloomberg and Inc.com reached out via phone to him and he told them about what we had done.
I kept pushing for him to put up the domain for sale on flippa.com and even got the director of the domains department to contact him directly. I also reached out to local newspaper outlets who were more than ready to write the story but since we weren't "partners", it wasn't "as" interesting. He promised to give me a stake in everything but I guess things and people got to his head.
As time went on, he starting drifting from the idea of selling because he thought he had hit something enormous. Which he did, just not the way he thought. He pitched me the idea to build an ecommerce store where he would basically sell anything (Amazon). I told him the only exit here is selling but if he wanted to go that route, he could (try) to build a brand (???). I insisted that the risk of continuing with anything other than selling the domain at peak hype was too great. That is, anything past hype days (1-4 days after the tweet) would drive the "value" to zero.
The days past and the opportunity quickly came to a close. He was offered (past hype time) $15k which he said he wouldn't take as anything below $X00k was dumb. Regardless, I kept pushing for him to sell the damn thing just so I could tell the story at the very least. He then told me he had partnered up with his brother (a lawyer), another marketing guy and he wanted me to take part in the team. He had me speak to his lawyer about equity for a whole 30 minutes which, again, I thought was ridiculous as I told him that this would soon die, if it hadn't already. We spoke over Facetime but soon enough, he kicked me off the storefront admin, stopped answering and now he still has the same domain forwarding to his merch store.
I think if he had acted quicker, he could have sold for at least $20k-$50k at the peak of the hype. Even if he sold at the solid $15k offer, he could have earned himself a great story.
covfefe.com