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Domain Naming Helper Software with Garrett Dimon
Nuggets:
- Learn why now is a great time to find a great domain for a new project.
- Find out how to start from a very simple mockup, validate an idea and grow it through iteration.
Action Steps:
- Do some market research on power users for domain names, i.e. people who spend a lot of time searching for and creating them. Can you attract enough that would pay a decent amount for a service like this? Find out if you can sustain a business based on power users paying for this.
- Research business models to find out what would work best. For example, affiliate programs, advertising or charging users at different tiers.
- Research registrars that you might connect with through an API to validate availability. Find out which registar(s) could be the right one(s) to connect your users to register with.
- Research the technical challenges of matching against all existing registered domains and storing and accessing the data on which domain name inquiries would be based.
- Keep in mind there may be "non-technical" ways to get this started. Don't assume you need to have advanced computer science skills.
- Validate with a landing page builder. But include a really rough version of it that people can play with. For example, generate four input boxes that accept nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Spins them all together and gives users a huge list that gives them an idea of what could inspire them.
- Use this foundation, plus take advantage of tremendous capacity for constant evolution based on user suggestions and your observations to slowly iterate and improve.
Follow through on these action steps and email us your results at update@runwithit.fm. You'll get exclusive access to a private Facebook group of action takers and one listener will earn a free mentorship call with our guest, and potentially, a business partnership.
Links:
Garrett Dimon is a software developer, entrepreneur and development consultant. In 2008, he created Sifter, a hosted bug and issue tracking application built with Ruby on Rails. In July 2010, he began working on Sifter full-time. In March of 2016, he sold Sifter to focus on recovering from medical issues that ultimately led to a left below-knee amputation. In 2013, he wrote the first edition of Starting & Sustaining, a book that addresses the logistics and lessons learned of starting and successfully running a hosted web application as a solo founder bootstrapping.