Domain Watchman

After I launched Domain Watchman in September and sent an email to people on the waitlist, I received a few sign-ups. It was nice that they came, but I wanted more, so I submitted my project to four startup directories. BetaList, SaaSHub, and AlternativeTo accepted my entry, bringing me 1364 unique visitors that converted to 260 registered users.

In October, I worked on a new feature that allows you to label domains. Labels are a simple way to categorize your domains, which can come in handy when you have a large list of domain names in your portfolio. You can also group the domain list by attached label or registrar name.

I host the project on AWS and Cloudflare. AWS is for serving API requests and storing data, while Cloudflare is for hosting static files. AWS cost me $0.32 in October, and Cloudflare was free. I could optimize the project to make it even cheaper, but I don't think it's worth the time.

At the end of the month, I signed up for an account at Ubersuggest and discovered many SEO issues to fix. My plan for November is to fix those issues and work more on marketing.

Finally, I launched an MVP after working on the project for the last three months. The MVP is pretty simple - after creating an account, you can create a list of domain names you want to monitor, configure notification channels and receive daily alerts when certain events occur. Alerts are sent when domain properties like status, expiration date, or name server are updated, or the expiration date is close to expiring.

It took me so long to make such a relatively simple product because I worked on it in my spare time. Also, I decided to learn a tech along the way to make it more interesting.

Before I started working on the MVP in May, I made a landing page with a form to collect emails. Since then, 62 unique visitors have visited the page, and nine signed up for the waitlist. All visitors came from WIP.co and indiehackers.com, as these were the only communities where I posted about the project.

In April, I created an open-source Go library for scraping price data from the largest domain name registrars. I plan to use that data later in the final product to inform users about the possibility of transferring and renewing the domain for a better price. But for now, I made a daily updated page where I listed all the registrars and most popular extensions for quick price comparison before buying a new domain.

Link to the price comparison page.

I was drinking my morning coffee and scrolling through one of the tech-oriented communities when I stumbled upon a big poster announcing the MongoDB hackathon. I always like to work on something in my free time, and since I didn't have any side projects at the time, I decided to give it a shot.

I have a few scripts running on my home server made from Raspberry PI and doing various automated tasks. One of the scripts monitors a list of domain names and sends me a weekly email about the statuses of those domains. I thought such a script might be helpful for someone else, so it would be a great idea to participate in the hackathon and rebuild this script, which was very basic, into something more sophisticated and easier to use.

I finished the hackathon without winning any of the big prizes except a $25 coupon which I spent on a new baseball cap. The outcome of my participation in the hackathon was a React single-page application that can be hosted on the MongoDB Cloud. You can find the source code here.

My goal with Domain Watchman is to create a hosted version of the tool and learn some marketing along the way.