Yesterday I launched Lean Domain Search, a new domain search engine, on HackerNews.

You can read the discussion here: Review my Startup – Lean Domain Search – The fastest way to find a domain name.

It started with Domain Pigeon

Lean Domain Search is a follow up to Domain Pigeon, my first Rails project which I launched (also on HackerNews) a little less than three years ago.

Lean Domain Search is what Domain Pigeon was supposed to be: you type in a search phrase and the app pairs it with other words to generate domain names and instantly shows you which are available. I even kept a notebook in my car and when I saw a company name that started or ending with something that would also work for a domain name, I’d jot it down. One problem though: I didn’t know how to do it.

It’s not hard to programatically check whether a domain name is available, but doing it in bulk and doing it fast is. When I started trying to implement bulk search for Domain Pigeon, I couldn’t figure out a way to do it well. I decided to pivot slightly and simply listed available web 2.0-style domain names instead.

Domain Pigeon did well, but I made a bunch of mistakes which eventually led to its downfall. I remember thinking foolishly “Man, making money with web apps is easy.” Domain Pigeon was never supposed to take off. It was a something I undertook to learn web development; it wasn’t supposed to be what I became known for. Yet I’d go to Philly on Rails meetups and I’d be the “Domain Pigeon guy”. And so I started working on other projects, one of which eventually became Preceden. I kept working on Domain Pigeon on the side, but as I became more and more involved in Preceden’s development, I let Domain Pigeon slide and eventually just said screw it and shut it down.

Looking back, my two big takeaways from Domain Pigeon where:

1) It’s hard to make money with web apps. If you are lucky enough or talented enough to find something that people like and will pay for, double down.

2) If you do decide to work on new projects, don’t abandon your existing ones. If you don’t have the discipline to maintain existing projects while building new ones, then don’t build new ones until you do.

Lean Domain Search aka Domain Pigeon 2.0

I launched Preceden and eventually Lean Designs, but I still had the domain name itch. I really wanted to build that original search tool and continued brainstorming ways to do it. About five months ago I decided to take a break from Preceden and Lean Designs development and go for it (without abandoning either — see #2 above).

Lean Domain Search is the result. It’s better that what I originally envisioned: it generates and checks the availability of 1,000 domain names in about 2 to 3 seconds (go check it out!).

The HackerNews launch

The launch on HackerNews went well, but it was not without issues (launch day never is).

The biggest problem was the accuracy of the results. I estimated beforehand that about 1 in 1000 available results would be actually be registered due to some quirks with the way they were being checked. That turned out to be a tad bit optimistic: it was more like 1 in 20. As an extreme example, the results for “cloud” returned 10 results, none of which were actually available. This was understandably frustrating to anyone who searched for “cloud”, found domain names that he or she got excited enough to register, and then found out it was actually registered.

As a temporary solution, I added a “Double-check availability” button that let folks confirm an available domain name was indeed available before going off to register it. This worked great on my local computer, but there was a bug in production that caused it to say that every result was registered. I didn’t notice this until a few hours later by which time 800 people had double-checked the availability of a domain name and Lean Domain Search said the equivalent of “Oh, actually it’s registered. My bad.”

There was a hectic hour of hacking after that where I troubleshot and fixed the double-check feature, but it still felt sloppy. Everyone searching for “cloud” still got those same 10 incorrect results. Eventually it clicked: why not track the double-check results and stop showing ones that come back registered?

After another few hours of hacking, I had a decent solution in place: if you double-checked the result of an available domain name and it came back as registered, Lean Domain Search would remember that and it would no longer be shown in the available search results for you or anyone else. This way the results become more and more accurate as more people use it. 1 in 1000 might never be possible, but the false positive rate should eventually be closer to 1 in 100 than 1 in 20 (and thanks to Mixpanel, I can actually track that over time).

This morning I spent a few hours cleaning up the code and making other improvements. For example, when you click a domain name it will now automatically double check the result so you don’t have to.

I also found a typo today in the Namecheap affiliate link that caused my affiliate code to be dropped so I didn’t get credit for who knows how many domain name registrations yesterday. Fun!

But it was still a good day. All in all folks used Lean Domain Search to make about 14,000 searches yesterday thanks to it sitting on the HackerNews front page for almost 20 hours. Launch day traffic is always inflated though (don’t be fooled!); the trick is getting it back up to that point over the next few months.

The mentions on Twitter about Lean Domain Search were very positive too — thank you to everyone who Tweeted about it.

Here’s a screenshot from today:

On a final note, I should be blogging a lot more in the future. If you’re not subscribed to the RSS feed, you should.

Hey ya’ll,

This blog is going on hiatus for a few months while I take care of some other commitments.

I’ll still be available by email if you need to reach me.

All the best,

Matt / matthew.h.mazur@gmail.com

(The following is a cross-post from the Lean Designs blog)

It gives me great pleasure to announce that you can now create hybrid width layouts using Lean Designs, letting you create professional looking websites in a fraction of the time compared to doing it by hand.

To understand the significance of this new feature and how to use it, we need to go over a bit of terminology:

Three types of layouts

Fixed Width

In a fixed width layout, the site is given a fixed, constant width which is then displayed (usually centered) in the browser. With this type of layout, you cannot use any of the excess space in the browser except for specifying the page’s background style (white in the example below).

Example:

Until today, fixed width layouts were the only type of design you could create with Lean Designs.

100% Width / Fluid Width / Liquid Width

In a 100% width/fluid width/liquid width layout, the width of the site is based on the width of the browser. Because the position of the the elements are based on the width of the page, they’ll appear differently to visitors depending on the width of their browser.

Example:

Fluid widths are not currently supported by Lean Designs.

Hybrid Width

Hybrid width layouts, as the name implies, takes pieces of both the fixed width and the 100% width layouts. With this type of layout the outer elements can have 100% widths, but their contents are held in a fixed width, centered container.

Example:

With today’s release, you can now create this type of design using Lean Designs. Note that the term hybrid width is not a standard web design term, but we needed a way to differentiate this type of layout from the fixed width and 100% width layouts.

Creating Hybrid Width Designs in Lean Designs

Creating hybrid width designs in Lean Designs is a piece of cake:

1. Add a DIV element to your designs

2. Position it against the left side of the canvas

3. Stretch it so that it spans the entire width of the canvas

When you export it, Lean Designs will recognize that you want this element to have a 100% width and generate the appropriate HTML/CSS.

For example, let’s add an H1 element, assign it an id of logo, assign the red element an id of header, and export it. This is what it will look like in the browser:

And here’s the HTML/CSS that Lean Designs generates:

Pretty cool huh?

OneHub Example

Lest you think this is only for creating simple, ugly sites, check out the following example of OneHub’s homepage re-created using Lean Designs in about 10 minutes:

In the editor:

Exported to HTML/CSS: (click here to view site)

Hope you like it. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up for free and create your own design in minutes.

As always, drop us a note if you run into any bugs or have ideas for improvement.

matt / matt@leandesigns.com

Here’s what’s going on:

About a month ago I changed jMockups’s name to Lean Designs. The primary reason for the change was a shift in focus away from creating website mockups towards actually creating websites, as that’s what most users wanted. It has taken a while, but today I launched a version of Lean Designs that lets you do just that. You can read more about it here. And check out the demo here.

Next to the initial launch in October, today’s release represents the largest milestone in the project’s nearly one year history. I’m incredibly excited about its potential to disrupt the web design industry. Don’t get me wrong: it’s got a long way to go. There’s a thousand ways it can be approve improved, but the fundamentals are in place. Now its all about pressure and time.

Onward.

In keeping up with my monthly progress reports, here’s an overview of what went down in March. (See also: January, February)

Preceden

One of my goals in March was to spend more time working on Preceden. I normally devote most of my free time to jMockups, but am trying to improve how I balance the two, given that Preceden actually turns a profit. I spent about 15% of my 120 hours online working on Preceden during March (up from about 5%), which is a big step in the right direction.

Preceden had 16,845 visitors during March (including embedded timelines) that generated 78,925 pageviews. There were 35 upgrades to the pro account, which generated $895 in revenue (up from $522 in January and $580 in February). However, I spent $540 in order acquiring 11 of those customers while experimenting with Google AdWords. After subtracting the hosting fees and AdWords expenses, I wound up with a profit of about $285.

While I’m disappointed that AdWords did not yield a positive ROI, I’m glad I took the time to do it. I’ve had it in my head that AdWords would be an easy road to four figure profits and as long as I believed that, I wasn’t terribly motivated to work on it (sounds stupid, I know). With the knowledge that it won’t be as easy as I once believed, I’m forced to get back into the game.

jMockups

While I continue to make a lot of good progress with jMockups, traction remains elusive. The trough of sorrow is aptly named. :)

jMockups had 9,914 visitors during March that generated 19,922 pageviews. 6,812 of those visitors were a result of posting about the launch of the new specifications tool on HackerNews.

Paid signups skyrocketed from 1 to 2 during March, yielding $38 in revenue. Subtract about $200 in monthly expenses, and I’m still out a bit each month.

On a much more positive note, I received an acquisition offer for jMockups towards the end of the month. The company a good fit, but I think I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with jMockups and it would therefore be a huge mistake to sell right now, regardless of the price. Plus, if I were to sell it, I’d start building something new almost immediately, so what would be the point of moving on as long as I’m still passionate about it?

Blog Posts

On the jMockups Blog:

The New jMockups Mockup Editor (Mar 4)

Improving the Website to Mockup Converter (Mar 8)

Share Your Website Design to Help Others Get Started with Theirs (Mar 11)

jMockups Introduces Mockup Templates to Make Web Design Easier (Mar 12)

jMockups Can Now Automatically Create Detailed Specs of Your website Mockups (Mar 20)

The Customers Have Spoken: We Want to Export Our Mockups to HTML/CSS (Mar 21)

Baby Steps Towards Mockup to HTML (Mar 28)

New Default Design for jMockups Image Elements (Mar 29)

Ajaxified Mockup Deletion (Mar 30)

On this blog:

February in Review: Life Tracking, Major jMockups Updates, and Preceden’s Best Month Yet (Mar 4)

How to Calculate Your AdWords ROI for a Freemium, One Time Purchase Web App (Mar 5)

AdWords: Week 1 Results (Mar 13)

A/B Testing Preceden’s Homepage – Round 1: 37% Improvement (Mar 13)

Preceden’s 15 Days @ $30/day AdWords Results (Mar 29)

The signal-to-noise ratio on some of these is a lower than I’d like, but these hey-here’s-what-I’m-doing posts are usually pretty quick to write and at least they get something out there (a strategy I’d recommend to anyone who wants to blog but doesn’t know what to write about).

Also, in an effort to get more involved in the local startup scene, I’ve started attending the monthly Lean Startup Circle Boston and Boston BizSpark meetups. If you attend either, drop me a note so we can hook up at the meeting.

Onward.

About two weeks ago I posted the results of one week of $10/day AdWords advertising for my web app, Preceden.

In a nutshell, I spent $72.16 and made $87, for a profit of $14.84, which works out to be a 21% ROI.

With the positive results, I upped my daily advertising limit up to $30 and let it ride.

Results

Over the 15 days the campaign ran, I spent $453.07 which resulted in 3,186 visitors to the site.

Out of those 3,186 visitors, 415 signed up for an account (about 13%). Out of those 415 who signed up for an account, 8 upgraded to Preceden Pro (1.9%) for $29 resulting in $232 in revenue. Overall conversion rate was 0.25%.

$232/$453.07 – 1 = -49% ROI

Ouch.

What happened?

Google Analytics tells me that the AdWords visitors were 80% more likely to sign up for an account and 60% more likely to upgrade. This makes intuitive sense because visitors who found the site via AdWords were looking specifically for a timeline tool. The overall site average is a lot lower because it also includes folks viewing embedded timelines, for example, who aren’t specifically searching for a timeline tool.

The difference is… visitors from AdWords cost money. About 13 cents on average. Despite their higher conversion rates at each step, not enough are upgrading for it to be profitable.  In order to break even, I would have had to have a 3.6% upgrade rate, which is almost twice what it was.

I saw a presentation earlier this week by David Skok, a VC at Matrix Partners, at the monthly Lean Startup Circle Boston Meetup in Cambridge. In it, he emphasized the importance of measuring your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) with respect to the the average customer’s Lifetime Value (LTV).

In Preceden’s AdWords case, the CAC is $453.07/8 = $56.63 and the LTV is $29. A poor ratio indeed.

Moving Forward

The good news is that for the last seven months, Preceden has grown organically without any outbound marketing efforts and has something like a 90% profit margin after taking into consideration the server costs.

Rather than throw more money at AdWords, I’m going to take that money and invest it in article writers via oDesk. Consider this: for $3-$4/hour, you can hire someone to write articles or blog posts. For the sake of simplicity, say it costs on average $10 for a single article. For the same $453, I could have had 45 fairly decent articles on the site about how to make specific types of timelines with Preceden (Civil War, World History, the War in Iraq, etc etc).

How many additional visitors would find those 45 articles via organic search? And how many of them will upgrade? I don’t know. But it will be interesting to find out.

Preceden’s homepage can currently be divided into four sections (see below):

1) The splash screen (Make an amazing timeline with Preceden, Quote, Sign Up)

2) Example

3) Features

4) Featured On

I’ve been running an A/B test to determine the impact of the splash screen design and the features.

Here are the results along with their corresponding conversions rates. The conversion rates reflect the % of people that make it to the sign up page. (In future tests I’m going to measure the % that actually sign up, which is probably a better indication of a successful conversion.)

Note that I’m stopping this A/B test before Google Website Optimizer has reported a statistically significant result, but I’m eager to try additional variations and don’t want to wait any longer. So take these results with a grain of salt.

Original

Conversion rate: 17.2%

Combination 1: New splash screen

Conversion rate: 19.2% (11.4% improvement)

Combination 2: Original splash screen, no features

Conversion rate: 23.7% (37.3% improvement)

Combination 3: New splash screen, no features

Conversion rate: 18.3% (5.95% improvement)

Summary

Page Sections

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The results were 180 degrees from what I expected. I’d have bet money that:

a) The sexier splash screen and call to action had a higher conversion rate. In fact, it decreased the conversion rate by 8.3%.

b) The shiny list of features would have had a higher conversion rate. In fact, not including the features increased the conversion rate by 15.1%.

The best result was with the original splash screen and without the list of features, which yielded a 37% higher conversion rate. Why? My theory is that in both cases, the landing page was simpler and people generally prefer simpler over more complex. Makes you appreciate why everything Google designs is dead-simple.

More to follow…

Last Sunday I started advertising Preceden via Google AdWords. I’ve played around with it before, but never seriously.

I wrote a few ads, picked a bunch of timeline-maker keywords to target, set my daily budget to $3 (and a day or two later $10) and flipped the switch.

Week 1 Results

Impressions: 18,439

Clicks: 564 (3.06%)

Visitors: 548

CPC: $0.13

Cost = $72.16

Sign Ups: 3

Revenue: $87

Profit: $14.84 (21% ROI)

Thoughts

The variance of this whole process is extremely high. 3/548 is a 0.54% conversion rate. Good, bad… I don’t know. It seems bad, but I don’t really have a lot to compare it to.

The good news is that the campaign made money. Not much, but something. Had 2 people upgraded instead of 3, it would have lost money (-20% ROI). Had one additional person signed up, the return would be exceptional (61% ROI). This whole thing makes you appreciate how small improvements to your site, which in turn might convince a few more people to upgrade, can make a huge difference to your bottom line.

Next steps: Refine A/B tests, bump daily budget to $30, and see what happens.

Here are the keyword details:

I run a web-based timeline tool called Preceden and am about to start experimenting with AdWords to bring in traffic. What kind of ROI can I expect given my current conversion rates and price?

Let:

s = Conversion rate representing how many new visitors sign up for a free account

u = Conversion rate representing how many free account holders upgrade to a paid account

p = The price of the web app

c = The average Cost Per Click (CPC) for our AdWords campaign

For example, let’s say our CPC is $0.25, 25% of the new visitors sign up for an account, 4% upgrade to a paid account, and upgrading costs $29 (which is roughly my situation with Preceden, give or take).

First, we’ll calculate the Expected Value for a single user. If 25% of the visitors sign up for a free account, and 4% upgrade to a paid account, the overall conversion rate is 1%. So 1% of the time a visitor signs up and upgrades to a paid account and we make $29 minus the cost of AdWords ($0.25). The other 99% of the time the user doesn’t sign up or doesn’t upgrade their account and we lose the $0.25.  The Expected Value then is 1% * $28.75 + 99% * -$0.25 = $0.04. In other words, we can expect to make about 4 cents per AdWords visitor.

Our ROI is the Expected Value ($0.04) divided by the cost ($0.25) or 16%.

If these numbers are correct, then if we spend $100 on AdWords, we can expect to make $116. If we spend $1,000 we can expect to make $1160. And so on.

The last line simplifies it all a bit. The implications make intuitive sense: if we increase the conversion rates or the price, we can expect to make more money. If we decrease the CPC, we also make more money. Likewise, if we want to double our ROI we can either double the price ($29 to $58), half the CPC ($0.25 to $0.125), or double the conversion rate (1% to 2%). Which of the three do you think is the easiest to do?

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Over the next few months I’m going to work on measuring and optimizing Preceden’s ROI with eye towards maximizing its profits. I’ll provide regular updates — stay tuned.

In December I announced a $4K/month challenge, where I try to reach $4K/month in profit from my web apps by the end of 2011.

In this post I’ll give an overview of what happened in February. Click here to see January’s report.

By the numbers:

1) According to RescueTime, I spent 121 hours working over the course of the month, which equals about 30 hours/week or 4.3 hours/day. (Not including day job.)

2) 10,578 people visited Preceden. 529 people signed up for an account. 20 people upgraded to a paid account. Revenue: $580. Total time spent working on Preceden: 0 hours.

3) 5,303 people visited jMockups. 302 people signed up for an account. None upgraded. Revenue: $19.

4) 9 blog posts:

Three on this blog:

jMockups and Preceden January Review – 5 Feb

Seeking Alpha Testers for jMockups Import Tool (cross post from the jMockups Blog) – 6 Feb

Launch! jMockups Website to Mockup Converter – 19 Feb

Five on the jMockups Blog:

New Keyboard Shortcuts to Make Designing Mockups Easier – 3 Feb

Seeking Alpha Testers for new jMockups Import Tool – 6 Feb

New Homepage Design, Some A/B Testing, and Why Data Can Be Misleading – 11 Feb

Website to Mockup Converter Launched – 19 Feb

Reengineering jMockups for Optimal Performance – 26 Feb

And one as a guest post on Sebastian Marshall’s blog:

Nine Tips for Getting Started with Life Tracking

Overview:

In terms of progress, February was a huge month for jMockups. For a good chunk of December, January, and early February, I was busily building and preparing for the launch of the Website to Mockup converter. The official launch was on Saturday, 19 Feb while I was in NYC with Chris Conley and Mike Nicholaides. All in all, it went fairly smoothly, though there were some issues rooted in the slowness of the jMockups editor. The week following the launch I reengineered the editor to eliminate the performance issues. Today was another huge update: the launch of the redesigned mockup editor. In a nutshell, compared to a month ago jMockups has a sexier design, an improved user interface, vastly improved performance, and one major new feature: the Website to Mockup converter.

Meanwhile, Preceden had its best month yet. 20 paid signups resulting in almost $600 in revenue. Long term I believe that jMockups has much more potential than Preceden, yet it’s a little unnerving that the thing I’m spending so much time on is hardly making any money and the thing I’ve ignored for the last seven months is growing and bringing in decent revenue. Rather than spend 100% of my time on jMockups and none on Preceden, I’m going to aim for a 85/15 ratio in the future. I keep saying it, but a few A/B tests, SEO, and target AdWords campaigns could have a huge affect on Preceden’s revenue so it’s time to start doing something about it.

Finally, I’ve been doing life tracking for 2+ months now and have had some great results from it. Tracking + slow, incremental improvements go a long, long way. Check out my post on Sebastian’s blog for more details.

One last thing: I really enjoy talking with folks about their startups and poker bot work, so if there’s anything I can help you with or you just want to say hey, please shoot me an email.

Thanks for reading — Matt