Matt Mazur

The new Domain Pigeon:

By far the most radical change to Domain Pigeon is that it is now completely free.

Until recently, only 25% of the domains on the site were viewable to everyone. The remaining 75% were viewable to members only, which cost a one time fee of $14.95. During the first two weeks there were a fair amount of sign ups, but surprisingly, the site was bringing in a nontrivial amount of money via the affiliate links too.

Here’s a brain teaser:

Say Domain Pigeon makes $10 when it displays 1,000 domain names. Will it make $40 if it displays 4,000?

I can see arguments being made that the revenues would become less than, about equal to, or more than $40. My hope is that more domain names = more selection and more word of mouth advertising = more registrations = more affiliate revenue. Brilliant, huh? Seems simple, and on one hand it is, but then you also have to factor in how much revenue I’m losing by not charging people for full access. Say 1/1000 visitors would have signed up for an account. Will I now make more than $14.95/1000 people? What if I had 1/2000 sign ups, but I make $X/1000 from affiliate revenue? And does that even matter? I’d rather make $3/1000 people with 10K visitors than $14.95/1000 with 2K visitors. Head asplode.

We’ll see what happens. Regardless of how the profits play out, I think its a good move because it makes Domain Pigeon a better service for its core audience: people looking for domain names.

The second major change is that domains are now added automatically throughout the day. Currently the homepage refreshes itself every 20 minutes with 20 new domain names. This works out to be 60 domains/hour, 1,440/day, 10,080/week. This likely will change a lot in the next few days. I’m going to make the amount of domains released proportional to the number of people that are currently on the site. This adds a whole new dimension to Domain Pigeon it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

-You understand the numbers are against you and realize even if you fail it’s worth trying again; you believe it’s better to go for 0 for 50 than 0 for 0.

-You provide a utility that is good enough for someone to pay for.

-Your startup saves someone time or make someone’s life easier.

-Your costs are so low you’re virtually impossible to kill.

-You don’t care about material possessions.

-Your startup makes others money.

-You treasure not (or rarely) having meetings.

-You love working for yourself.

-There’s very little wasted time and red tape. Your team is lean, mean and aggressive.

-You’re patient. Twitter, Kayak, Plenty of Fish and Facebook have been around longer than you think. And two of them aren’t even profitable.

-You know IPOs or acquisitions aren’t required to make a good living..

-You do instead of talking about doing.

-You realize, in the very early stages, that the worst thing that could happen is you lose a few hundred or thousand dollars and learn something. What do you have to lose?

-When you get lucky or catch a break you’re ready for it.

-You believe that success is the amount of your life you control.

-You love what you do. Or at the very least, love your situation.

-You avoid blanket statements like this: All the millionaires were in porn in 2000 and realize that not every “startup rule” or any rule applies. Businesses can be very different from each other.

-You understand that your odds of having an enjoyable job paying 200k are roughly the same as owning a profitable small business.

Posted here by Dan Haubert, cofounder of TicketStumbler.

Not much time to write; been diligently working on new features, which I hope to roll out on President’s Day.

Why is 168 important? It’s the number of hours in a week.

And its not enough :)

I don’t know what this says…

Domain Pigeon – gdy brak pomysłu na domenę

Domain Pigeon jest pomocny dla osób, które nie mają czasu bądź brak im pomysłu na nazwę dla swojej strony internetowej. Serwis pokazuje wolne domeny oraz umożliwia ich zakup.

Autor: Tomasz Ogrodowicz

Baza domen oprócz wyrażeń tworzących logiczną całość skupia się na nazwach, które kojarzą się z przypadkowym wstukiwaniem liter na klawiaturze, ale jednocześnie idealnych do nazwy nowej aplikacji czy dowolnego serwisu. Zawiera domeny typu: ainlo, ibasilisks, eenpl czy ghtmo. Przykładów takich nazw może istnieć nieskończenie wiele.

Serwis informuje ponadto ile osób zainteresowanych jest kupnem wybranej nazwy oraz umożliwia filtrowanie wg popularności, kolejności alfabetycznej oraz ilości liter. Osobną kategorię ze względu na swoją popularność mają domeny 5 literowe.

Baza opiera się na 14580 domenach dla użytkowników zarejestrowanych oraz 3731 dla gości serwisu. Rolą Domain Pigeon jest tylko wystawianie domen, jeśli któraś z nazw przypadnie nam do gustu i wyrazimy chęć jej zakupu, serwis odeśle nas do sprzedawców.

www.domainpigeon.com

But I like it…

And for the non-geeks out there, this is a screenshot from Google Analytics, which is a small piece of code that I add to the pages on Domain Pigeon that tracks visitors to the site. It let’s me do some pretty advanced analysis, including narrowing down Domain Pigeon’s traffic to a specific state, or in this case, a country.

I hovered over Katowice only because that’s where my father is from, and hey, that’s kind of cool. Right now I’m wishing he had taught me Polish though…

They deftly maneuver and muscle for rank

-Cake, Going the Distance

I stayed up till the early hours of the morning crunching Domain Pigeon’s performance numbers.

The results were not what I expected.

The Domain Pigeon you see in a week will be much much different than the Domain Pigeon you see today.

Last week was amazing.

The post-launch press from CNet and ReadWriteWeb was both unexpected and exhilarating.  Prior to launch there was a big question mark hovering over the project: Would people like it? Would people pay for it? Would it be secure? I’m happy to say that the answers seem to be yes, yes, and yes.

I’m cautiously optimistic looking forward.  Its a great start, no doubt, but its just that: a start. It’s no time to be complacent; the site needs a lot of work in order to prosper in the coming weeks and months. I’ve got no shortage of ideas to make that happen, only a shortage of time to implement them.

Before I start adding more features I’m going to add credit card processing to the site. The percentage of people that follow through to Paypal to complete their registration is abysmal. That might be because its not clear that it costs money–though I think it is–or it could be because people don’t like using Paypal for whatever reason. I need to give people the option to do it on Domain Pigeon or I’m going to constantly wonder just how much of an impact its having on the revenue.

Adding credit card processing is tedious and I honestly can’t wait till its implemented so I can get back to adding features. When I program, I tend just to hack away and then fix things as they break. Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury while handling credit card information. I won’t be comfortable with it unless its meticulously planned and tested prior to deployment. And that, I’m sorry to say, is going to keep me busy for the next few nights.

Yesterday:

Today:

Notable changes:

• Header – The new header is a bit smaller than the old one. This was done to get more information onto the homepage’s initial viewing area.
• Logo – The new logo is smaller and brighter than the old one, hopefully conveying a cleaner, more professional look
• Rounded corners – The header, the domain count, and the main content area now all have rounded corners. Apple’s homepage was the inspiration for this change. It’s such a small thing, but it looks so much better.
• Domain columns – The site now omits “.com” after all the domain names because it added clutter and not much value. I’m slightly worried that some newcomers won’t understand what the domains are without the “.com” to clarify it so I added a small line below the popularity legend saying “all domains are .com” which will hopefully eliminate any confusion. With the extra space I was able to include a valuable fourth column. Also, before when a customer hovered over one of the domains its border would turn black. Now it is a dark gray, which is nicer on the eyes.
• Twitter – I registered @domainpigeon in November while I was working on the site but wasn’t sure what role it was going to play. Now, instead of links to blog posts, the homepage will have Twitter updates. The blog will be reserved for lengthy posts, which, at this point, I don’t see happening too frequently.
• Sign In Area – This was a tough one. I liked it on the homepage, but there’s wasn’t a good way to integrate it. Now, I just added a link to a seperate page that lets you sign in. I figure cookies will keep most customers signed in anyway, so its not that important to have it on the homepage. I do think that having it ont he homepage encourages more people to sign up though, so, its definitely a tradeoff.
• In the News – You can’t see it here, but I added a great quote from the ReadWriteWeb article on there. I also moved most of the quotes to a separate page in an effort to preserve white space. Currently, the ReadWriteWeb and the CNet quotes are the only ones included on the homepage.
• Registered Domain Names – Before, the top domain in this list was #1, but its actually the last domain that was registered, so I changed the numbering.
• The domain count was moved up to the top. Also got rid of “Members can view an additional” as it’s unnecessary information. The total is fine. I think this looks a lot more professional than the way it was done before. This also frees up space on the right column. Notice the juxtaposition of the word “explore” and “Sign Up”.
• The title went from “Domain Pigeon – You’re #1 Source for Available Domain Names” to “Domain Pigeon – Available Domain Names”. I think this could still use some improvement, but I like it better than the former one, which came off as tacky.
• Link Usability – I noticed there was inconsistent use of underlines for the links on the homepage. They should all be standardized now.
• Registered domain names no longer appear along side the registered ones. This is because the 75% of the popular page was littered with pink domains, defeating its purpose.
• The primary font for the side columns is Lucida Grande. No more Verdana, ever.
• Added “Register.com” as one of the affiliates, per the request of a customer.
• Redid a lot of the CSS – I was kind of learning the intracicies of CSS as I went and now am able to go back and clean up a lot of it. There’s a lot less “float: lefts” in there now…

I’m very happy with these changes and think the site looks much better now.

Tomorrow I’m going to focus on cleaning up some of the code, writing more tests, and learning how to integrate credit card processing into the site.

From ReadWriteWeb: 

You’ve done the market research. You’ve built the killer app. Now, all you need is a decent domain name. Preferably a .com. Why? Because the iPhone doesn’t have a .net button, for one thing. But finding something short and memorable can be difficult at best. Enter Domain Pigeon, a domain search service that eschews one-at-a-time searches by allowing you to thumb through a laundry list of available domains – including the five-letter .com domains that are still available.

We’ve used a number of domain name searches, and Domain Pigeon’s approach is among the best we’ve seen. It’s simple and straightforward. Best of all, you get to see extensive lists of available domains all at once. But there’s one catch: you can’t buy a domain there.

Ironically, it’s the fact that you can’t buy domain names that makes Domain Pigeon so nice to use. Traditional domain services actually restrict your ability to research names by showing you a few domains at a time based on your searches. Why? For a very simple reason: once you search and find a domain, you’re more likely to buy one for fear of losing it.

But because Domain Pigeon is passing you through to another service – and picking up an affiliate kickback – there’s no harm in showing you everything at once. You get the freedom to look at a wide variety of domains and, should you decide to buy, Domain Pigeon still sees revenue. Win, win.

But don’t think all of the pressure is off. Domain Pigeon still does a nice job of motivating you to purchase by showing you how many other people are currently interested in that domain name. For example, 16 people are currently interested in purchasing illpe.com, so if you were building illpe, you might want to hurry.

The next time you’re still looking for that perfect domain name, try Domain Pigeon. At the very least, it will spark some ideas. At best, you may walk away with the perfect – albeit unintelligible – .com name for your new venture.

We’re looking forward to reviewing reakd, tchdo, ofgar, ainxx, and rpayi in the not too distant future.

Domain Pigeon, as it currently stands, is ugly.

My standard is this: Imagine standing by while someone whose opinion you hold in extremely high regards meticulously reviews your work.  If you can imagine yourself standing there confidently without worrying about what what he or she will find, you’ve probably got a great product. If, on the other hand, you imagine yourself thinking up excuses for why your product is not up to par, then you’ve probably got work left to do.

In Domain Pigeon’s case, I imagine myself saying “Well, I only launched it a week ago. Here’s what I’ve got planned for the future…” Instead, I want to say, “Look here, this is what I’ve accomplished.”

ECD: Sunday

Bunch of changes on the homepage:

Few things to notice:

• Domains are no longer unregistered; they are available
• No more Legend (combined it with How it Works)
• Moved How it Works up to the top, moved In the News down
• Moved the sign in area to a horizontal bar below the logo
• Added a quote from Killer Domains (not shown)
• Removed the gray gradient background and replaced it with a solid gray background
• Added a simple blog so that I can update visitors as to what’s going on (no comments yet–I’m worried about spam and don’t want to take the time right now to integrate Akismet into it

Overall, I’m happy about the progress, but these are not changes I want to show off. They’re missing something… quality?

I moved the sign in to the top to try to free up some real estate on the side columns, but I fear it looks somewhat tacky now. I may wind up just adding a link to “Sign In” that directs people to a seperate form.  I just don’t see a beautiful way to add it all.

I am happy to say that Domain Pigeon is at 39 registered domain names. Again, I’m holding off on the heavy promotion until I’ve improved a few more things. Notably, the site needs built in credit card processing. The number of people that are following through when prompted with the Paypal link is abysmal. More on payment processing numbers in another post…

It’s hard to believe the site launched less than a week ago.  Things are going very well so far, but the race is long.

The next few days are going to be spent on improving the site as it currently stands:

1) Adjustments with a focus on usability, simplicity, and good design

2) Payment processing with Active Merchant

3) Figure out what I’m going to do with the blog on the site

So, I added a blog to the site. Great. Now what? I write about Domain Pigeon’s development on here, what am I supposed to put on there? Small updates? If so, I shouldn’t really call it a blog. It should be called and updates log, or something. Blog implies lots of content. But, I also want lots of content for SEO benefits. I don’t know. Need to mull over it…

Late night edit: The more I look at it, the move I’m convinced it needs to be redesigned.