Richard Rodriguez
Ryan Vinson first had the vision for an online marketplace for the buying, selling and leasing of minerals in 2007 when he graduated from Texas Tech University. The idea went on the back burner as Vinson worked full time for a trust company and then launched MineralWare, an asset management platform for owners and managers of mineral interests. In 2019, with MineralWare growing quickly and establishing itself in a market with little competition, Vinson returned to his original vision and launched the web platform Energy Domain. Both companies — Vinson and Larry Brogdon, also an investor in MineralWare, are the founding partners — are based in the Fort Worth Club Tower, where MineralWare is the largest tenant.
Big potential Vinson views Energy Domain as having significantly greater potential than MineralWare, which cracked its first month of $250,000 in recurring revenue in 2019, triggering a substantial bonus to employees. First, “there’s a finite number of organizations that need a mineral management platform,” he says.
Cousin to Zillow? Energy Domain can be compared to Zillow, Vinson says. Where Zillow has transformed real estate in the amount of information available immediately to property owners, Energy Domain has the opportunity to demystify mineral ownership, he says. “The way it’s done today is literally [mineral] owners are getting letters every day,” he says. They know little if anything of the entity that’s making the offer and have little or no context in what their holdings are worth. “There’s very little transparency in minerals and royalties.”
How it works Energy Domain’s platform has three choices: auction (offer your holdings for sale), test the market (invite offers), or a “buy now” option. The site handles real-time transactions 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. MineralWare has aggregated numerous data sets that are incorporated into platform, and it’s worked out a business arrangement by which it and Energy Domain own the data sets. The data in Energy Domain’s platform allows mineral owners, for one, to get a view on what their holdings are worth. “We can do this more efficiently, more effectively, and all the while with more transparency, which the industry so desperately needs,” Vinson says.
How Energy Domain gets paid Energy Domain charges a “success fee” to the buyer and seller only if the transaction is completed. “We’re in the final stages of figuring out what that is, but what I can tell you is it’s less than half of the competition,” Vinson says.
Competition There’s one other online competitor, which has an auction platform, he says. He feared when he put the idea on the shelf years ago that more competition would step in. But barriers to entry are immense and include requirements for knowledge, expertise, and software development. Energy Domain has a group of seven people on its team, including Vinson and some employees shared with MineralWare. “I just believe we have the tip of the iceberg in this space,” Vinson says. “Folks are just beginning to realize just how sexy the mineral space is.”