Divine Domains

For the entire time that the project was live, I was experimenting with adsense but never managed to place ads onto the site. Over the weekend I had some time and finally decided to dive into other ad networks. Adcash had a relatively quick onboarding process and I went to town plastering everything as tastefully as I could with ads.

When I first came up with the idea to polish off this project, my goal was to offer the product for free and use ads as the main revenue stream. This approach is unlikely to cover the server costs given what I know about ecosystem of the modern internet, but it's a business model I've always admired and it's neat to make my first foray into it.

It's also nailing the aesthetic theme I've been going for on the site, kinda like a sketchy cluttered 90s thing.

find.domains was a stellar name but quite pricey against the domains gTLD. The name expired recently and rather than renew it I opted to use the tool to find more economical domain instead.

Now the product really has named itself and the branding still works as well as it did before, which is a benefit of the brand being completely inconsistent with the logo.

Product Hunt Link

Last night I submitted a link to PH and prepped for the launch, albeit without trying to post the link elsewhere to gain traction.

Without landing on the featured section of the day's launches, it's actually pretty difficult to find all the products launching for today. You have to change the filter on the UI to be able to see all products.

I'm okay with this, but I'm not sure why the product also is so hard to find through the search function. I even can't find the page when typing in "find.domains" into the search section, let alone typing in something like "Find Domains". Maybe that should be a lesson for future launches, either make sure some upvotes are hard so it's impossible to ignore, or use a name without periods so it can actually cater to whatever SQL queries are being used.

The site lives on "find.domains", I did not think through how much of an uphill battle the SEO would be as a result.

Still, pretty great. A big part of the site was made to promote these kinds of domains rather than the standard, boring ".com" domains of the world.

To take it a step further, one of the other strategies that I had in mind was to really push the length boundaries of domains. I found that the J.D. Salinger (and laughing man) quote hadn't been registered yet as a domain, "ithoughtwhatiddowasidpretendiwasoneofthosedeafmut.es". Perfect for something like a guerilla marketing company.

Hey there. This is my first time launching a side project to the public, it's been quite useful to me but I hope that others can feel the same about it.

This journey began years ago when I first ran a script to find interesting domain names using the Namecheap API and some word lists. I revisited it a few years later to find that a lot of new TLDs had been introduced and I realized that I would have to update the script every time something was released.

Instead, I built a system to keep better track of the domain names I was searching for which would also be able to be mildly future proof against TLDs coming and going out of existence. Along the way I learned a lot about the ecosystem behind domain names, about motivation and persistence, and of course about building and hosting websites. This is the part where I have to learn about marketing but I'm really trying to put it off.