Domz

Segment has tracked 920 users this month. It was 765 in July and 310 in June. A steady increase, so that's good!

I need to start optimizing for conversions soon, now that the traffic is on the rise. And soon I plan to add more marketing content on the landing page, which should help convince users that signing up would be useful.

Every since posting the update here on IH yesterday, 6 users signed up. As all previous users who signed up during the beta, these users will lock in a lifetime discount to the product once the paid subscriptions become available. There will also be a free tier as well.

We have our first batch of users for Domz!

Through a combination of some SEO tweaks and content improvement, traffic is up and 35 users have signed up.

I am not yet convinced these are the users who will ultimately pay for a subscription because they came when only the free pricing data became available. Now that we are focusing on the domain management functionality, we expect that the SEO will tune towards that and bring in a more savvy domain focused customer.

This is just the start, and we are wildly excited about the potential.

Alright! It's starting to get some traffic that is measurable and interesting.

This was the result of optimizing some page load times, improving SEO, and adding new content that would appear organically in search engines.

Next goal is 1000 unique visitors per month! Bring it on.

Domain registration pricing across service providers is cool. But making money solely off affiliate commissions is difficult work. Not all service providers offer an affiliation program, and it's also difficult to herd users into using your affiliate links to make their domain purchases.

Sure, I could reinforce the need for them to use our links by mentioning it all over the site, but then it feels like begging. Bringing awareness to users that they are helping continue the development by suggesting they use our links is reasonable, but at the end of the day it still feels like a hustle that doesn't reward.

As the pricing data is still useful and necessary, the pivot came in where I further analyzed my problems and needs. I manage over a thousand domains across 12 different service providers. This is a tedious and time consuming process any time I need to renew domains (I often transfer domains to cheaper service providers whenever the pricing benefits me) or needed to change WHOIS privacy information. When you have this many domains, it all just becomes unwieldy.

I've determined that once you have about 50 domains across multiple service providers, you are potentially losing money on renewal rates and losing time every year needing to manage these domains.

The pivot -- adding cross service provider domain management. One central panel to manage all of your domains.

Now to get started!

In the past I built products that I thought other people would want. I dreamed up solutions for problems that I heard other people talk about. In the end, some of these products were successful, and some of them total failures. What was common was that the passion wasn't always there.

I wasn't dogfooding my own products. I was solving other people's problems. While some of my products were helpful to me, most of them weren't. The result of not dogfooding is that you tend to misunderstand the problems you are solving because you can only reach out to others to understand the needs.

My new idea is a product that solves my own problems too. I buy and sit on a lot of domain names, some for building products and others for selling to others for a profit. There are a lot of places to register domains and the prices are constantly changing. The new product, called Domz, allows you to see the latest and best pricing for registering domains across a large number of service providers.

I'm excited to get started, initially just building this as a side project on the weekends.