Looking for feedback: Get notified when a domain is expired or for sale.

I've been buying and selling domains for the last 20+ years, so I'm pretty familiar with what "domainers" are looking for, as far as tools.

Most domainers already have tools they use, like domain monitoring through their preferred registrar or one of the many other domain monitoring sites out there.

I would not make them your target market.

Consider marketing towards small to medium sized businesses that may own 2+ domain names. Promote it like you would see an identity theft service would be marketed. Where you offer a service to protect people form domain hijacking, but also offer a reminder if the domain is expired.

For monetization, you could offer 1 free domain monitoring per year, or 2-10 domains for a yearly fee of $9.99, or whatever pricing would work.

As a former IT system manager/director of a company, I would say that there is a lot of paid service existing on the market,
some of them are just spoiling and cheat, but bigger companies has there own DNS supplier rather than using something like godday, and the supplier with charge the client for the supervision fee.
Not only for the domain name but also trademarks and lots of thing who can expire.

On the other side, smaller business does not care much about the domain name, if one favorite is occupied, they will simple add some prefix/suffix to it or change a root name(using .co, .cc, .net, .xyz other than .com )

And developers are able to supervise by their-selves with some cheap service of cloud service provider.

And there is less and less DNS investors now, because of the above reason and others (mobile app is more popular than webs )

So if you want to gain benefits on this market, you need to find a good position for your product and well locate your client : not too big, not too small, not too expensive and not free.

Generally it will be very difficult to do that.

It's could be an added value for another product or service, but can't be a product itself.

Dope, just put a domain in, cheers!

I don't want to discourage, also I don't want you to waste your time.

Recently, one of my clients forgot to renew their domain and sadly they lost it (i.e. someone else bought it a few hours after expiration).

When a domain expires it goes through several phases and it takes 45-60 days to register it back.

If you are monitoring domains through expiration date from whois data, they don't always reflect the right date.

Logically, if I'm waiting for a domain to expire, I'd prefer to register it as soon as it's available. Thus there is drop catch services.

I've tried to build a few things for "Domain investors", they are not the easiest customers. They are old and used to their old tools. They are blind to new stuff. On top of that, it's hard to create content around it, so content marketing is out of topic. It's either paid advertising or cold reach. Plus there is trust issues. Everyone thinks their domain name is worth million dollars. Before convincing them to pay, you'll need to convince them to trust you that you won't try to steal their domain and sell them for a higher price ;)

So good luck with your project.

What is privacy side of this? I have noticed many registrar snoop on user search and on next hour or day they register that premium sounding domain before the user who searched for it.

oh yeah there is a lot of potential for this. Even though I know other products exist I don't see why you can't join in on the fun.

I think this is a nice idea for domain investors and for people that own a domain or more. Maybe you can sell packs of notifications. :)

Pedro