This is a great start. I built Instant Domain Search (IDS) almost 7 years ago, and have learnt a lot from the experience. Some quick thoughts:
1. There are no margins in the domain industry. Start thinking about building a hosting company. Your site is cool, but weebly.com and heroku.com are real businesses. I work full-time for Facebook, not IDS. (BTW, Facebook is hiring people like you, message me at http://www.facebook.com/beau if you're interested.)
3. You should search names listed in the aftermarket and include them in your results. I've worked with http://www.buydomains.com/ for several years, and am happy with them. I can make an intro if you'd like.
Hey Beau, thanks for the feedback. I've always admired your work with Instant Domain Search and appreciate you taking the time to give me feedback on this.
When you say "there are no margins in the domain industry", I assume you're talking about registrars and how domain names don't make them money, hosting and other services do, yes? LDS is not a registrar; revenue is purely through the affiliate links. Assuming people use them, the margin on this should be decent. It's no Heroku or Weebly, but that's not necessarily the goal either.
There's definitely room for speed improvements; I'll be work on that over the next few weeks.
I'm not sure I want to partner with any of the aftermarkets just yet, but that's not a bad idea long term. And I definitely want to add thesaurus results.
When I see stuff like this, I always think "feature" not a company. There are two directions you can take this to avoid the "but its just a feature" issue -
a) build it so that you can license the technology to people that have made a company out of selling domains (domainsbot.com is a great model to take a look at)
b) become a reseller or registrar so that you can fully deliver the service and collect the recurring revenue.
There's still lots of room for innovation in this space and I think you are leaving a lot on the table if you don't flesh out the business model a bit more.
I was recently at a talk where someone rallied against this whole "just a feature" argument. They made a compelling argument that there's a fairly natural evolution you see many start-ups go through from feature -> product -> business.
The rationale being that you initially build some specific functionality you can't find in the market (feature), over time rounding this out into a product and finally evolving into a business as you understand how to monetize it and where opportunity for growth lies.
You don't need to have your business totally conceived on day one. And in fact, finding where the business lies (or whether you even want to grow your idea into a business) is something you'll have a much better understanding of after a few months of being out there.
Personally (disclaimer: I run the domain search site Domize - http://domize.com) I think it's wonderful we can launch these "just a feature" websites and evolve them into products or businesses over time (or not). These 'better mouse-trap' sites are a fantastic, low-risk way of generating passive income and if you can string a few together you can potentially get to a stage where you can live off them. At the very least, you've demonstrated the kind of initiative and creativity that will provide you with a great talking point on your resume.
Let's not forget, both YouTube (embeddable video for eBay auctions) and Twitter (group SMS updates) started as "just a feature" and evolved into billion dollar businesses.
"a) build it so that you can license the technology to people that have made a company "
Better yet a white label website that refers business back to the reseller or registrar and can be operated as a subdomain to the resellers or registrars main website ie suggest.registrarname.com. Do this on a monthly fee basis that is reasonable not per name registered.
"b) become a reseller or registrar so that you can fully deliver the service and collect the recurring revenue."
Reseller makes sense. Becoming a registrar doesn't. Using this as the cornerstone of an idea will never result in enough to cover the ongoing costs.
About three years ago I built and launched Domain Pigeon, a web app that listed available web 2.0-style domain names each day [1]. The site did fairly well, but it was my first foray into web apps and I lacked the experience to grow it into something bigger. Eventually I moved on to other projects and closed Domain Pigeon down, which has been one of my biggest regrets.
My original vision for Domain Pigeon is what Lean Domain Search now is: you type in a search phrase and the app would pair it with hundreds (in this case 1,000) keywords to generate domain names and show you which were available. I lacked the technical skills back then to do bulk domain search quickly, which is why I settled on simply generating web 2.0-style domain names. Fast forward a few years and I've picked up those skills so I decided to take some time off my other apps and finally build this tool.
Hope you guys like it. Let me know how I can make it better.
How are you bulk checking now? I've been in the industry a long time and it's always been a pain in the ass to do anything in bulk. I've had lists so big registrars didn't want to run them for me :( Using APIs really isn't an option when you have a million names and 1 per second limit. Automating a bulk checker, most of them disable/play with it after a certain number of times (so even at let's say 500, i might be able to get 20 tries in there before they mess with it).
The best solution I've found is checking against the zone file, but I am curious what you're doing.
I really like it. This proves there's still an immense number of viable domain names out there for startups.
Since you asked for some feedback, here's my two cents: I'd like to be able to sort the results by having my search term at the front or at the back of the domain name.
Highlighting the difference between verbs, nouns and adjectives is also something I'd like to see, taking a page from the book of http://impossibility.org/
Domain Pigeon was a brilliant site, I mourned its loss. It's wonderful to see that you've built a new site.
The execution is simple and easy to use. I'd be conservative when it comes to adding features or futzing too much with the UX. I find the color scheme very readable, although of course that might be different for some people. Thumbs up from me.
A post-search filtering mechanism might be useful, although of course you'll want to balance the benefit of a feature like that with the impact it would have on the elegance and simplicity of the design.
Suggestions (I may be wrong):
1) I don't like very dark sites, yours look nice, but anyways...
2) I have no idea how you check the domains, but: In case you get your results one by one, you should display them while they were loaded (instead of that "loading" screen)
Anyone else seeing very faded sidebars like that? I don't know what would cause that; if you have the technical skills do inspect it on your end to find out, please let me know.
Can you elaborate on what specifically you like better about bustaname?
One comment I have on your site is that you give to many choices (it's not lean) on one page and there is no organization to the choices. Also similar to what others do there should be a way to enter a secondary characteristic.
Oh, here's a bonus benefit to your site that I just noticed and a new place to market using the site.
The ratio of red-registered to green-available is helpful in determining how valuable or in vogue a domain name is that contains a particular word. I would compute a ratio of green to red.
(see as a test "search" or "social" vs. some other less popular word like "opthamology")
Also you don't appear to be checking the actual word that is entered to see if that is available. And you aren't indicating which TLD's so I'm assuming all your suggestions are in .com
Example: "Found 1000 available domains containing "ycombinator""
I'm working on something VERY similar to this actually, so I'll refrain from any critiques in lieu of just saying "I'd do some things differently."
Regardless, it's quite nice, and I'm already very jealous of how quickly you're doing the bulk lookups. It is much faster than my implementation.
There's a surprising amount of overlap, which tells me we're either both very right in a lot of aspects, or both very wrong. I'll take the optimistic route and figure we're both doing things right.
Best of luck. It's certainly a needed tool (IMHO).
It's great to have tons of inputs and tons of results, but we need a tool to get all these great results into a funnel that at the end you can easily spot a great name.
Suggestions:
1) Modifiers to minimize results like max chars in the domain name.
2) Take the word or phrase the person typed in and throw it into reverse dictionary [1] and then take those results and re-run them through your site (ditto for thesaurus.com).
3) Option to remove a result when one word ends and another starts with the same letter and try reversing to see if available (ie ramppart.com).
4) Option to include tons of different mythology dictionaries [2] and include names where definitions include the user's inputed word/phrase.
So, this is like my unfinished domsrch.com, my experience is that people don't really need this service this much and there are some others that already fill the space.
I definitely wish you to succeed where I failed :). I just wouldn't leave my day job which is why I am saying it isn't a startup.
I am relying on affiliate revenue for income and like it or not, GoDaddy is the largest registrar in the world. That doesn't mean its inclusion is automatic, but IMO GoDaddy is not evil enough to warrant removing it. Thoughts?
Some searches only result in a few available domain names. There's not much I can do about that other than generate and check more domain names (which I will in the future). It's the nature of whatever you're searching for; commerce (and most other money-related searches) will be saturated.
It's certainly useful, though it looks like it's just attaching choice-words to the beginning and end of the word I entered.
It's not clear from looking at the results what TLDs\ each result is, though it appears to only return .com. What about all the other cool TLDs like net/om/us/etc.
Looks like a useful tool. I get an "Oops, something went wrong ..." when I enter "shop". Besides that I really like the concept of http://stylate.com/ to find domains for startups.
Nice tool, I was looking for something like this a few weeks ago and most didn't "just work".
A few things I noticed while using other services -- none had all of these in one place:
- It would be handy to be able to sort by number of characters, etc.
- some places allow adding of common prefixes/suffixes
- Can you do a search of more than 1000 keywords via button to do the next 1000?
- In the case of searching a common word, I only got ~30 available domains out of 1000, it would be great if you automatically threw another 1000 behind it.
- Another registrar a lot of people use is moniker. Whatever I register through your site I'll use the referral link because you're saving me time
I just did a search for $string and it returned 1000 available domain names that were all $something+$string or $string+$something. However, ($string).com was not returned as an option even though it is available!
There was a bug that caused the "Double-check availability" results to show that every domain name was registered. I just pushed an update that corrected this so it now returns the correct results.
At first glance, looks pretty cool. However, I find the green of the available results to be quite painful to look at. Something like #B8FC9F looks a lot better, to me.
I think I may have found a bug - either that, or I don't understand what this site is meant to do. I searched 'media' and one of the available domains it found was 'medialounge.com'. Thinking, 'holy crap, that sounds like the kind of domain that I would like', I took a trip over to my registrar. Turns out that that domain is not actually available. Let me know if you need some system info and I can email it to you....
I'm seeing something odd with the way you're building the results HTML - on Safari 5.1.2 text search doesn't pick up the majority of instances of a string.
For example, the term you're searching against is only showing up 4 times, when it appears over 1000. It works fine in Chrome 16.
It's useful for times when you see a name you like but want to find the reverse combination.
[+] [-] beau|14 years ago|reply
1. There are no margins in the domain industry. Start thinking about building a hosting company. Your site is cool, but weebly.com and heroku.com are real businesses. I work full-time for Facebook, not IDS. (BTW, Facebook is hiring people like you, message me at http://www.facebook.com/beau if you're interested.)
2. It needs to be faster. For example, to squeeze another few hundred milliseconds out of our search, we built a distributed search infrastructure described here: http://instantdomainsearch.com/articles/faster_domain_name_s...
3. You should search names listed in the aftermarket and include them in your results. I've worked with http://www.buydomains.com/ for several years, and am happy with them. I can make an intro if you'd like.
4. Consider extracting words and doing a basic thesaurus search. We're doing something like that at http://instantdomainsearch.com/suggestions/
Hope this helps!
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
When you say "there are no margins in the domain industry", I assume you're talking about registrars and how domain names don't make them money, hosting and other services do, yes? LDS is not a registrar; revenue is purely through the affiliate links. Assuming people use them, the margin on this should be decent. It's no Heroku or Weebly, but that's not necessarily the goal either.
There's definitely room for speed improvements; I'll be work on that over the next few weeks.
I'm not sure I want to partner with any of the aftermarkets just yet, but that's not a bad idea long term. And I definitely want to add thesaurus results.
Again, appreciate the feedback.
[+] [-] freejack|14 years ago|reply
a) build it so that you can license the technology to people that have made a company out of selling domains (domainsbot.com is a great model to take a look at)
b) become a reseller or registrar so that you can fully deliver the service and collect the recurring revenue.
There's still lots of room for innovation in this space and I think you are leaving a lot on the table if you don't flesh out the business model a bit more.
(obDisclaimer: I work for a registrar.)
[+] [-] ansonparker|14 years ago|reply
The rationale being that you initially build some specific functionality you can't find in the market (feature), over time rounding this out into a product and finally evolving into a business as you understand how to monetize it and where opportunity for growth lies.
You don't need to have your business totally conceived on day one. And in fact, finding where the business lies (or whether you even want to grow your idea into a business) is something you'll have a much better understanding of after a few months of being out there.
Personally (disclaimer: I run the domain search site Domize - http://domize.com) I think it's wonderful we can launch these "just a feature" websites and evolve them into products or businesses over time (or not). These 'better mouse-trap' sites are a fantastic, low-risk way of generating passive income and if you can string a few together you can potentially get to a stage where you can live off them. At the very least, you've demonstrated the kind of initiative and creativity that will provide you with a great talking point on your resume.
Let's not forget, both YouTube (embeddable video for eBay auctions) and Twitter (group SMS updates) started as "just a feature" and evolved into billion dollar businesses.
[+] [-] larrys|14 years ago|reply
Better yet a white label website that refers business back to the reseller or registrar and can be operated as a subdomain to the resellers or registrars main website ie suggest.registrarname.com. Do this on a monthly fee basis that is reasonable not per name registered.
"b) become a reseller or registrar so that you can fully deliver the service and collect the recurring revenue."
Reseller makes sense. Becoming a registrar doesn't. Using this as the cornerstone of an idea will never result in enough to cover the ongoing costs.
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
There should be a lot of value in being the first site people visit when searching for a domain name though. We'll see.
[+] [-] leak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkolodny|14 years ago|reply
People thought that about search too until Google came along.
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
About three years ago I built and launched Domain Pigeon, a web app that listed available web 2.0-style domain names each day [1]. The site did fairly well, but it was my first foray into web apps and I lacked the experience to grow it into something bigger. Eventually I moved on to other projects and closed Domain Pigeon down, which has been one of my biggest regrets.
My original vision for Domain Pigeon is what Lean Domain Search now is: you type in a search phrase and the app would pair it with hundreds (in this case 1,000) keywords to generate domain names and show you which were available. I lacked the technical skills back then to do bulk domain search quickly, which is why I settled on simply generating web 2.0-style domain names. Fast forward a few years and I've picked up those skills so I decided to take some time off my other apps and finally build this tool.
Hope you guys like it. Let me know how I can make it better.
[1] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=domain+pige...
[+] [-] ohashi|14 years ago|reply
The best solution I've found is checking against the zone file, but I am curious what you're doing.
[+] [-] kenny_r|14 years ago|reply
Since you asked for some feedback, here's my two cents: I'd like to be able to sort the results by having my search term at the front or at the back of the domain name.
Highlighting the difference between verbs, nouns and adjectives is also something I'd like to see, taking a page from the book of http://impossibility.org/
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|14 years ago|reply
The execution is simple and easy to use. I'd be conservative when it comes to adding features or futzing too much with the UX. I find the color scheme very readable, although of course that might be different for some people. Thumbs up from me.
A post-search filtering mechanism might be useful, although of course you'll want to balance the benefit of a feature like that with the impact it would have on the elegance and simplicity of the design.
[+] [-] eduardordm|14 years ago|reply
Success!
Suggestions (I may be wrong): 1) I don't like very dark sites, yours look nice, but anyways... 2) I have no idea how you check the domains, but: In case you get your results one by one, you should display them while they were loaded (instead of that "loading" screen)
[+] [-] fudge|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarecat|14 years ago|reply
Superior in practice: http://www.bustaname.com/word_maker
Though I prefer where you've started.
Also, your favicon is... suggestive of something entirely different. Perhaps a less literal image would be better?
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
Anyone else seeing very faded sidebars like that? I don't know what would cause that; if you have the technical skills do inspect it on your end to find out, please let me know.
Can you elaborate on what specifically you like better about bustaname?
[+] [-] larrys|14 years ago|reply
There are also a few patents on this concept if I can find the link to the patent I will post.
http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html
http://blungr.com/
http://www.domainnamesoup.com/
One comment I have on your site is that you give to many choices (it's not lean) on one page and there is no organization to the choices. Also similar to what others do there should be a way to enter a secondary characteristic.
Oh, here's a bonus benefit to your site that I just noticed and a new place to market using the site.
The ratio of red-registered to green-available is helpful in determining how valuable or in vogue a domain name is that contains a particular word. I would compute a ratio of green to red.
(see as a test "search" or "social" vs. some other less popular word like "opthamology")
Also you don't appear to be checking the actual word that is entered to see if that is available. And you aren't indicating which TLD's so I'm assuming all your suggestions are in .com
Example: "Found 1000 available domains containing "ycombinator""
[+] [-] bmelton|14 years ago|reply
Regardless, it's quite nice, and I'm already very jealous of how quickly you're doing the bulk lookups. It is much faster than my implementation.
There's a surprising amount of overlap, which tells me we're either both very right in a lot of aspects, or both very wrong. I'll take the optimistic route and figure we're both doing things right.
Best of luck. It's certainly a needed tool (IMHO).
[+] [-] dETAIL|14 years ago|reply
It's great to have tons of inputs and tons of results, but we need a tool to get all these great results into a funnel that at the end you can easily spot a great name.
Suggestions:
1) Modifiers to minimize results like max chars in the domain name.
2) Take the word or phrase the person typed in and throw it into reverse dictionary [1] and then take those results and re-run them through your site (ditto for thesaurus.com).
3) Option to remove a result when one word ends and another starts with the same letter and try reversing to see if available (ie ramppart.com).
4) Option to include tons of different mythology dictionaries [2] and include names where definitions include the user's inputed word/phrase.
[1] http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml
[2] http://www.ventrue.net/GSA/myth.htm
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
I just added an option to sort by length, which should take care of #1. #3 is also a great idea -- I'll see what I can do.
Can you walk me through how #2 would work in practice?
[+] [-] desireco42|14 years ago|reply
So, this is like my unfinished domsrch.com, my experience is that people don't really need this service this much and there are some others that already fill the space.
I definitely wish you to succeed where I failed :). I just wouldn't leave my day job which is why I am saying it isn't a startup.
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
I am relying on affiliate revenue for income and like it or not, GoDaddy is the largest registrar in the world. That doesn't mean its inclusion is automatic, but IMO GoDaddy is not evil enough to warrant removing it. Thoughts?
[+] [-] chaz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pilom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bronson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyis|14 years ago|reply
It's not clear from looking at the results what TLDs\ each result is, though it appears to only return .com. What about all the other cool TLDs like net/om/us/etc.
Also have you seen this: http://domai.nr/
Was fast, which is appreciated!
[+] [-] yangez|14 years ago|reply
For example, "fotoflow" is listed as an available domain name but it is actually taken.
In any case, this is a very useful tool - thanks for posting.
[+] [-] kpi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|14 years ago|reply
A few things I noticed while using other services -- none had all of these in one place:
- It would be handy to be able to sort by number of characters, etc.
- some places allow adding of common prefixes/suffixes
- Can you do a search of more than 1000 keywords via button to do the next 1000?
- In the case of searching a common word, I only got ~30 available domains out of 1000, it would be great if you automatically threw another 1000 behind it.
- Another registrar a lot of people use is moniker. Whatever I register through your site I'll use the referral link because you're saving me time
Nice app, I've bookmarked it!
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
- Added sorting options (alphabetical, length) - Added filtering options (starts with, ends with) - Added a Moniker registration link
Will eventually add more search results; want to make sure this holds up first.
[+] [-] asynchronous13|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
There was a bug that caused the "Double-check availability" results to show that every domain name was registered. I just pushed an update that corrected this so it now returns the correct results.
[+] [-] tnorthcutt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hluska|14 years ago|reply
I think I may have found a bug - either that, or I don't understand what this site is meant to do. I searched 'media' and one of the available domains it found was 'medialounge.com'. Thinking, 'holy crap, that sounds like the kind of domain that I would like', I took a trip over to my registrar. Turns out that that domain is not actually available. Let me know if you need some system info and I can email it to you....
[+] [-] edlea|14 years ago|reply
For example, the term you're searching against is only showing up 4 times, when it appears over 1000. It works fine in Chrome 16.
It's useful for times when you see a name you like but want to find the reverse combination.