Goals, accreditations (.me rocks!) and backorder on demand

Long time no see! We are so busy growing our company that no one really had the time to write in this blog. I’ll try to let you know of the countless advancements we have made.

As you probably know we are striving to achieve many different goals:

• Having the largest database of domain names in the world (almost there!)
• Dropcatching all good expiring domain names in the world (with Premium name, traffic or SEO value)
• Delivering awesome search services like Reverse IP and Reverse Whois. Not to forget keyword or trademark search in the database.
• Downloading all websites (since we know the domains already) and giving Google a run for their money

OK, the last one is a bit ahead in time, but we’re slowly getting there.

Because of our many goals and our wish to stay cash positive and not be investor-dependent, we have to carefully allocate resources. Our team has grown to 20+ people but the mountain of work is ever growing and so are expenses.

We have therefore identified some ground rules to make all this work:

1) Use what we already have. A great team, a monster domain database and between them awesome tools – SEO domains evaluation tools, bulk checkers of multiple types, dozens of API connections to third party data.

2) Build what can easily be built and will work even half ready. In our case we were long time close to having a good ccTLD domain catching system and now we finally have it. It’s not perfect but it catches most domains we are after and this is what matters.

3) Traffic domains! Premium domains are competitive and have a very very slow sell through rate, making them a questionable investment for a dynamic tech startup like ours, SEO domains we were already catching but what about traffic domains? For some reason we never did those until recently. They have the huge advantage of not having the sales burden of the other groups – you catch, park and forget. No need to sell.

4) Accreditations and partnerships. While we already have partnerships with many great registrars, we always thought that direct accreditation with registries (both ICANN and ccTLDs) is not worth the fees, deposits, contracts, accounting and other time and money wasters. Therefore we didn’t get accredited anywhere except the UK (where it’s mandatory for catching).

While we are right that some registries are hard to work with, we realized in time not all have the drawbacks we are afraid of. Here is a bright example with .me

• No fee to join;
• No big mandatory deposit;
• Stable backend provided by Affilias;
• Nice and friendly people;

You can learn more at https://domain.me/ – highly recommended.

The great .me experience made us reconsider the accreditations as a strategy and we proceeded with other TLDs too.

This will boost our catching capabilities for more competitive domains. And it’s just the right time, because we just launched SecureBackorder.com – a backorder on demand service.

Expect in the following weeks a huge database update we have been preparing for months. We’ll keep you posted.

Have a wonderful summer!