Mailbag, incl: Aren’t Baristas in the manufacturing industry? April 19, 2026

**Scott Phillips** (0:10)
Welcome to Motley Fool Money, our very special Sunday Morning Mailbag edition. It is special as always, because it's the Mailbag, because it's Sunday. Why else? Oh, that's right, because he is here. He of course is Andrew Rampage, the man who invented the concept of Australia's premier online investment club that we call strawman.com, because of all the choices he could have made, he went with strawman.com.
It's a thing, it's a thing. It is Australia's premier online investment club though, Ramp. Good morning. And why is it so special?

**Andrew Rampage** (0:48)
Well, here's the thing, right? I think I've done a lot of bad capital allocation decisions over my career.

**Scott Phillips** (0:55)
I've done a lot of bad, bad things. Okay, confession time. Forgive me father, because I have sinned. Yeah, go on.

**Andrew Rampage** (1:00)
But one thing I did well, and it was entirely luck, was I bought the domain strawman.com 10 years ago.

**Scott Phillips** (1:08)
Right.

**Andrew Rampage** (1:08)
I would say I paid a thousand bucks for it or something.

**Scott Phillips** (1:11)
Well done. That's good.

**Andrew Rampage** (1:12)
I regularly get offers for it through GoDaddy or CrazyDom. I forget who it is even now.

**Scott Phillips** (1:19)
Okay.

**Andrew Rampage** (1:19)
Yeah, but it was like the dumbest thing in the world. Like I just, I'm half, not even because I'm too lazy to sort of change everything, but it's sort of like to 10X return or something like that. But what I don't get is like, why? Why would you want to buy like way back in the day, like.com or.a, .com.a be the only sort of suffixes that you would sort of have. But now you've got.ai,.io,.xyz.
Like there's a gazillion of them. And it's sort of like, it turns out that domain names aren't that important anyway, in a world of Google Search and AI. But there you go. There you go.
Of all the money that I threw away and set on fire in trying to stand this crazy thing up, that was one thing that worked out pretty well. So you're right, it makes zero sense, but it turned out that I should have just gone and bought a bunch of domain names.

**Scott Phillips** (2:14)
That was a big one, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Andrew Rampage** (2:18)
Not in the year 2000, mind you, in the year 2016

**Scott Phillips** (2:21)
That was the whole thing, the cyber squad thing was a whole little cottage industry, right? A lot of money was made by a lot of people who just bolt up in massive bulk, didn't know how to buy them, they just kind of registered them because they could and kind of went from there. You know what, you talk a lot about your own email domain and how hard it was in the old days. I am still kind of impressed, I've got a personal website just because actually no one cares, but the short story is I had some people who were, one guy who was basically a family man, Roger Montgomery of all things, just regularly in his own website. And so the advice from the business at the time was, read your own website, fill it with stuff, at least if people search for your name, they'll see you and the Motley Fool before this other guy who was just talking nonsense. He ended up deleting his site because Roger Montgomery threatened to take him to court. Fair enough, because you're the one.
So anyway, that was the back story. So I've got a personal website. And it's still kind of like, I've got to have a domain registry. I've got to point that to a website host, and I've got to have my own email kind of set up through Gmail. I've got to point that to the domain. And it's not hard. It just kind of strikes me that this day and age, kind of like, you would have thought it would be all the one thing.
I know it's not a naive thing to say at one level, because I know it's difficult, and you do have different options, and the choices are good and all that kind of stuff. But it's just still interesting to me, because I spend so little, obviously, I'm much closer than I am, but I spent so little time thinking about it. I'm like, if I want to change who my domain name is registered with, I could do that, then I have to point that to something else. I've got the whole website hosting over there, and that's a different thing. And then the Gmail accounts, I assume, pointed to, I use Google as my mail server, that's pointed to some domain somewhere with something, and I have to change that, I suppose. And it still strikes me as a little bit 1990s, that although that's not a simple process of like, scottphillips.com.au has this, you got a central thing like this and this and that, it's just darn it, it's just bizarre to me.