Merlin Kauffman is a domain name investor and president of True Magic, LLC which owns many great domain names like Exclusive.com, Lookup.com, Conferences.com, FileSharing.com, Volunteers.com, and Tabloids.com to mention a few.
Merlin is also the Founder and CEO of Soothe which is an on-demand massage service which launched in April 2013. The company just picked up a cool $10.6 million in new funding according to a story on TechCrunch.com!
As I began talking with massage therapists, they kept telling me the same thing over and over again, “the spa I’m working at is paying me very little.” It turns out that spas that charge $120+ for massages are usually only paying $35 to their therapists. I decided to remove the spa from the situation and reverse the equation by empowering skilled massage therapists to earn extra income and make a better life for themselves.
From this idea, I created Soothe, an online and mobile app that connects people who want to book same-day in-home massages with the best hand-picked massage therapists. States the about page on Soothe.com.
Congrats to Merlin on his startup success with Soothe as it’s always nice to hear domain investors succeed!
A bit of bad news for Merlin and True Magic, Projects.com was allowed to expire and sold on SnapNames for $87,550 July 2, 2015. I have not heard any word as to how/why the domain was allowed to expire. I did try to see who the current owner is for Projects.com, but whois is not resolving… so that makes me wonder if the domain auction was paid for? or why whois servers are not responding for the domain and the last whois update shows the day the domain name was grabbed during the drop on June 29, 2015.
payment still pending apparently. will most likely not be paid at this point i’d imagine.
projects.com whois $87,550.00 $69.00 Payment Pending qursan 02-Jul-2015
Good for Merlin, how is the bitcoin thing going?
I think the Uber Driver returns to the house after shuttling you to the airport and performs this service pro bono.
Jason,
Thanks for the coverage. We’re very excited about Soothe’s continued growth. 🙂
Congrats Merlin !!!!
Sure thing Merlin! Keep it up!
Projects.com has an issue and its not related to the payment of the auction.
I did send an email to SnapNames for confirmation about Projects.com but have yet to hear anything back.
Jason, Jamie, all the same… i see now how projects.com got expired :/
Wait, didn’t lookup.com sell at Sedo in 2010 for 17,500.00 USD?
Congrats Merlin! Exciting news – and wishing you great success!
-Lori Anne
Accident waiting to happen. Experienced and seasoned healers don’t work for apps like this. Toxic people with no experience do. Not everyone goes to massage school to help people nowadays. This I know as I’ve been a therapist 22 years. And the current crop of therapists I’ve seen at events are overweight, Dorito eating thugs. It’s just a matter of time before a therapist or a client is raped using one of these apps. Who invites a unknown person into their house, lays down naked and potentially falls asleep? Vice versa as a therapist I vet every client I take. I’m not showing up to a person’s home I don’t have a chance to speak to first. Period. Plus the money they pay sucks.