Custom domains as a service
Hello!
Custom domains are a very valuable feature for SaaS products to offer. Quite often this feature can be the difference between your prospect choosing the Pro plan over the Basic plan, or even becoming a paying customer at all.
However, they're difficult to implement correctly and maintain. Most developers avoid adding this feature early on as it doesn't meet their time investment/value threshold.
Question: As a founder/developer are custom domains a feature you've wanted to add for a while but haven't yet? Would you be interested in a service that provided this feature for your product?
Interested to learn how much of a pain point this is for indie hackers!
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I hope it's a pain point for at least some businesses, because I run a service that does exactly this!
approximated.app
I can give you my experience at least:
You're right in that they are difficult to get right and maintain. Lots of obscure issues that pop up at random times, and are often difficult to learn about because few people know or understand them. You'll be dealing with CAs a lot with very little real power, because there are few of them. Learning to deal with their issues, unexpected behaviors, and changes to their process are all part of the game.
Scaling to 100 domains is different from scaling to 1000, 10k, 100k, etc. Each has plenty of very different technical challenges to solve. And it can be hard to plan in advance, scaling challenges will pop up as they happen. Usually in the middle of the night due to Murphy's law.
Because it's highly critical infrastructure for customers (issues usually mean customer facing downtime), it's a big deal when things go wrong. Many want SLAs with pretty strict terms to consider it. 24/7 immediate responses are expected by basically everyone.
There's also some pretty tough privacy and security hoops to jump through for larger customers, because their traffic flows through your product typically. SOC2, privacy and security audits, etc.
Larger customers, if you can solve all of that well enough, are good sources of revenue, because they understand how difficult it is and how much it can cost to do it in house. Smaller customers, who I enjoy helping, have a lot tighter margins but often necessarily need to have the same expectations as large customers (24/7 support, no downtime, technical help onboarding, etc). So it can be harder to make a business work with only smaller customers here.
Hey Carter thanks for the comment. The problem has been on my mind for a while but I've never seen a solution, and Approximated is exactly what I'd envisioned. Although I hadn't considered the demand for immediate responses, privacy, compliance and certification, at least you have somewhat of a moat with that and the technical challenges.
I run a custom domain service with a reverse proxy for my small startup, and you're spot on about Murphy's law. I can't imagine the stress of managing this service for multiple other companies, especially in the early days.
It looks like the business is doing very well and completely bootstrapped so hats off to you! I honestly have a lot of questions but to avoid interrogating you, can I ask what your main channels for growth have been to get to this point, and what you predict them to be, going forward?
So far the main successes in growth have come from direct outbound sales. Because it's usage based pricing (and imo it should be for this), you end up with 60-80% of revenue coming from the top 10% of customers. So doing sales to get the top 10% is pretty important.
An average bootstrapped customer might have 100 custom domains. One that's got a some traction might have 500-1000. And a small portion will have 10-100k domains. Those ones are the ones that will make the business actually successful instead of treading water, for a reasonably niche b2b product like this. They need, and can afford, a great service.
Finally, a lot of customers are at the idea phase with 1-10 domains. Any one of those could take off and grow to any amount in the next year, becoming a whale of a customer. But most (almost all) of those will either fade out or become zombie customers (not really using, but haven't cancelled yet). It's just the nature of selling to businesses and particularly startups. My goal with these is to help them succeed if I can, and to give them such a good experience that they come back for their next project if I can't. Which is sort of a growth channel all it's own.
It's a tough niche to market for inbound. It's just not a common enough need for even the big players to have a well known brand position here (as in, you've heard of it before you look for a solution). That you haven't seen any, and you've built a solution for your company, speaks to this. The most well known is CloudFlare's solution for custom domains, and all you have to do is google their product to see the confusion people have around it.
Even the terminology is still all over the place. People call this all kinds of different things, may not understand the problem well even when they have it, and often have very different contexts and mental mappings, which can confuse the topic (see the first reply to this post as evidence).
So yeah, direct sales at the right time with the right person (generic advice, I know, sorry) is pretty make or break for this business and is the most important growth channel, alongside just natural expansion revenue.
Thank you for the detailed response, I appreciate the insight. I had a feeling it'd be majority outbound sales, as you mention, it's an esoteric topic with people's understand and terminology all over the place. But, hopefully this indicates a lot of room for you to add value. Thanks again Carter, all the best!
What do you mean when you say "custom domains" ? selling domains ? are you a domain registrar ?
Pedro
I mean the ability for a SaaS product to allow their customers to white-label the product with a custom/branded domain.
Giving an example ...
So the SaaS service/product called chocolates.com offers a personalized subdomain like mychocolates.chocolates.com to clients that choose the Pro Plan ?
Pedro
On the right lines, the feature would allow users to turn mychocolates.chocolates.com into mychocolates.mybrand.com. For example Bitly allows users to connect a custom domain for branded links.