Show IH: I created a simple domain and username search tool
Hello hackers,
Chances are you may already heard about this tool back in 2015. It's called TheNameApp. It's a great tool and a great founder but the service is no longer available.
I'm not exactly sure why he decided to take it offline but the tool helped me in many times. Search through domain and username availability is troublesome and time taking one but this service solves that.
So I thought why not create the same service so that If I wanted to search through domain and username then I can use it. I built this in 24 hours. I documented the journey here in this twitter thread.
I used Django, Channels, Celery, Nginx for this project. There is no way that one can do username availability check in Instagram and Facebook but I managed to solve it using the third party tool.
I hope this tool also useful to you. And ideas are welcome to improve the service.
Wow! Really simple, but very good. There’s a lot of room to grow w/o damaging the UX.
Also, you can add a suggestions section as well, with a good vocabulary.
Good luck mate.
Hey Jay! Thanks for your comment. I'm collecting all the feedback to improve the service. Like I said I wanted this to be a very simple domain search tool that do what is intended to do which is username availability checker.
In my mind I just need to work on the UI improvement like mobile view and responsive improvement of text when scaling the media but what you said about UX I'm not experience with it. Can you tell me what are the UX improvement you feel like in social domain will be great ?
Right now, you don’t need to worry about UX. It’s clean and minimalistic. I only mentioned it to remind you to keep it that way, when you’re adding more and more features. A cluttered tool doesn’t make a good first impression.
Awesome! Thanks. I will keep as it is and my next goal is to focus on the SEO. I'm thinking of something like very minimal blog that integrated with the rest of the services will be great.
One more thing I'm planning to focus on is the twitter. Do you have any better idea I can do to get into hands of user when they need it?
I don’t understand the question. How do you want to focus on Twitter? You want to add Twitter services? Or do you want to get customers via Twitter?
I want to get customer from twitter. Right now I'm engaging with tweet that contains "domains", etc...
You’ll have a better luck with DMs on Twitter. Don’t be spammy. Just ask people to test the platform. If you can come up with a paid product, send them a discount code as well.
Also, try to get your product on listicle articles. (i.e., 10 tools to use if you’re starting your business, etc.) Cold email is the way to do this. Hit up tier 2 blogs and ask them to test the platform.