I quit my job to make free web tools
nslookup.io
nslookup.io
Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time.
Ads have a bad connotation, mainly because they often track users across the web. Mine don't. For WhoIsMyISP.org, I've partnered with NordVPN, and have their ads with plain `<a href=...><img /></a>`. And for NsLookup.io, I've joined the Carbon network, which also doesn't have tracking.
Not criticism. I applaud your approach. I just point out that running non-tracking ads is harder than you would believe.
That said, due to third party cookie changes, tracking pixels have very limited usefulness these days and it's unlikely it actually tracks people over a full 1 day period
If I used a service like that I would expect some degree of privacy that goes beyond this. It's crazy to me that you're doing this to be honest
They're just domain names which are effectively public records. And even if you thought you registered a super secret domain name (no such thing), maybe the registrar looked it up, or some bot found it through brute force (if nslookup.io is open to bots).
Chrome don’t actively publish nslookups on public sites.
I think you’ve missed the point.
Leaking internal hostnames could allow an attacker to build a view of an internal network ahead of time, before actual penetration. Once inside a network it's often a race against time, so this can make a difference.
You know the Qualsys SSL Tester tool? That has a checkbox about making the result public or not and that is because by default people wouldn't expect the domain to be leaked (even though it's already public information that doesn't really matter)
I've been trying to find tools that would show other domains that are owned or associated with the domain that was searched. I work with a lot of sales leads and I think having information on other domains a company owns is super powerful for mapping companies and also understand company acquisitions, most companies transfer ownership of domains when they are purchased.
I have a question and ask:
1. There are quite a few tools online that do the same thing, long term what is your goal to differentiate? or where do you want to focus?
2. Other TLDs or Other Associated Domains, is this something that you would be able to find?
3. Can you determine from a DNS search if a domain is owned by a company or by a non-corporate entity (Blog, personal)?
Also from your blog post, I don't know if you were looking for any responses but:
Plan B - Stage 2: Sell an API to visitors.
>I would purchase and use this for a email verification process. I would rather go with a smaller company than large
Plan C - Stage 1: Make a one-off DNS dataset, give it away to founders, and find out how they'd use it and what they need.
>I would use this with Email Domain verification and Email format Verification. I worked with data teams that had to find emails formats & domains, if they had the domains it would save a ton of time and cost. As an end user how I think about this cost is I if I find a domain and run a MX or DNS check on it I will save the results and try now to run it on that domain again. That is why I like this plan, but the API would be super helpful as well.
> long term what is your goal to differentiate? or where do you want to focus?
Most other tools have clunky UX, dated design, or are painfully slow. I'm differentiating in ease of use, clarity and speed. Still a lot to be done, but I think I'm already doing okay compared to other sites.
> Other TLDs or Other Associated Domains, is this something that you would be able to find?
Since GDPR, nearly all WHOIS queries get their owner details purged. You also can't link it based on resolving IP addresses, as many sites use a shared CDN. There might be some signals left, but definitely not enough to give any kind of meaningful coverage to make it useful.
> Can you determine from a DNS search if a domain is owned by a company or by a non-corporate entity (Blog, personal)?
No, for the same reason as above. Here you could scrape the site and look for 'about' sections and do some ML, but that'd be quite involved.
> I would purchase and use this for a email verification process.
What would you like to use DNS for in email verification?
> Email format Verification As in, detect 'firstname.lastname' for 'john.doe@company.com'? There's already a SaaS that does just that: https://hunter.io/
FWIW I've worked for a small company for the last ~15 years and this is basically our differentiator. Most of our products weren't the first in their market, and we don't have all the bells and whistles, but we really focus on making an easy to use, non-frustrating user experience.
Ruurtjan here, from NsLookup.io. I've read plenty of these kinds of blog posts, and they've been a big motivator for me to take the jump. So I thought I'd share my story here as well. Thanks everyone, for giving me the confidence to give entrepreneurship a try.
I'll hang around today to answer any questions, so ask me anything :)
Interesting that I hear about this twice in the space of a week or so. Neal Stephenson was talking about it on the Lex Fridman podcast too. Apparently it's not possible. You'll always need a certain number of pentagons to complete the tiling.
Depends on what's riding on it.
It'd be "funny" if whatever gaps in humanity's best tesselation effort are marked as no-go zones, essentially non-existent to the digital / electronic world; Un-mappable therefore illegal to inhabit; there be dragons.
In our spare time, our team had been discussing on an ideal way to lay some form of "grid" over Earth so we can co-ordinate Climate actions & results between providers and buyers. We wanted a system that has been done before and we can build on top of it.
(I live in a country where other sports are more popular than soccer, hence I call it soccer not football, so my familiarity with the soccer ball itself is not as intimate as in many European countries).
Thanks for putting some numbers out there.
I do :) Here they are: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io Last month was exactly 400 USD from Carbon Ads. It does depend a lot on ad placement and target demographic, so your mileage may vary.
the ones that succeeded, are those that can be used for marketing by other companies (whoismyisp) or which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution.
i was always into this idea of building mvp to test markets. but the main issue is getting an audience. often success is 98% luck and timing and 2% hard work.
100% this. I've completely moved away from trying to be novel. Pick a solution that is profitable, but you think you can improve. Execute it better and gain market share.
I'm curious what is the use case for something like nslookup.io since I can more conveniently get the same info from the CLI?
In any case congratulations for finding a use case!
For many people it's more convenient to do DNS lookups on nslookup.io than googling the syntax and order of dig arguments, opening a terminal and entering it themselves. Plus, it can be convenient to get an overview of the popular record types, instead of doing 7 dig queries yourself.
> the same info
Nslookup.io provides more info than dig/nslookup CLIs: info about the A/AAAA IPs, logos for hosting providers, parsing DNS records, and more to come ;)
> In any case congratulations for finding a use case!
Thank you!
I have posted my site (https://text2db.com/) on hackernews, product hunt and reddit for getting reviews but got very few views (guess the idea is bad?), please do recommend me tips on how to increase traffic for site.
Thanks.
Not yet by a large margin, but it's going up slowly :)
> how did you attract users to website?
Currently, mainly through SEO. My stats are open [1], so you can see the percentage that comes in through search engines. In my case, there's a large search volume for 'nslookup', which is currently the largest chunk of traffic. An 'exact match domain' helped for sure. But in the end, Google will be able to gauge how well you're able to solve the problem that made people search for something. So an excellent product * the search volume * backlink profile * how well Google can understand what you're solving will approximate the number of users that visit your site.
You can use tools like ahrefs [2] (which also has a free tools) to get a sense of the search volume and competition on those keywords.
Hope that helps!
[1]: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io
[2]: https://ahrefs.com/
The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format. It does not seem that you do this on these properties, so briefly what kind of SEO optimization can be continually done outside of that? Are you still writing content as a guest poster and generating reputable backlinks? Engaging communities that are focused around your topic and promoting through those channels in hopes of generating backlinks? Or am I just in left field with all of this and what I thought I knew about SEO?
1. This very blog post is part of the SEO effort. A temporary influx in traffic, a couple of backlinks, and a larger following on Twitter (+80 followers from this post alone).
> The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format.
2. I've got an ex-Microsoft employee that writes content on a freelance basis. We do around one knowledge base article or blog post per month.
3. Original content that's genuinely useful and bring something new to the table (like [1]) take a lot of time, but pay off in terms of backlinks. The image by the way is release under creative commons with attribution, so I occasionally look if websites use it and ask for a backlink.
An other issue you have is that if someone understands the concept of foreign keys already then they've probably already figured out basic create table statements. Lastly, learning a new tool for something that is just a blip (table creation only) doesn't seem worth it.
So your audience for something like this is people that sort of get what a database is but don't know create table statements or people that struggle with tooling enough that an easier mechanism might be useful. I'd suggest pivoting to something like a spreadsheet2db tool. Where filename == database name, sheet name == table name, column name == column name. And the spreadsheet approach lets people actually provide data also. You can also roundtrip and have db2spreadsheet. Once you start supporting rows of data instead of just table creation you open up a lot more use-cases. Plus a lot of people have basic spreadsheet skills.
Everything above is completely off the cuff and I've done zero research to valid the idea. I know there are some integrations in Excel and some tools like SQL Developer partially support this. Another options (to support data in addition to table creation) might be to look into supporting markdown or restructured tables. Might be cool to be able to prototype a database from a basic doc page, markup2db.
My bigger problem is that the website feels unprofessional in a way that if I found it off a random google search I'd probably not come back:
1. Part of the website is a screenshot of text rather than actual text for seemingly no reason?
2. The examples aren't raw text and include HTML list elements which makes copy and pasting them awkward.
3. The rest of the website really needs to be run through a grammar checker and proofread.
4. The output of the tool is hard to read and poorly formatted.
> Part of the website is a screenshot of text rather than actual text for seemingly no reason?
I shall fix it.
> The examples aren't raw text and include HTML list elements which makes copy and pasting them awkward.
I made it in list form ,so users can understand that which symbols are table/column names. I can provide copy button on samples.
>The rest of the website really needs to be run through a grammar checker and proofread.
Sorry, English is not my native, but I shall try to proofread
>The output of the tool is hard to read and poorly formatted.
I shall add space between lines, you can also stretch the text area, based on your requirement.
Your opening paragraph is full of bad grammar and punctuation errors, which will instantly turn many people off.
> Reduce your time to create database , write down your database name,tables and foreign key in simple text with pre defined symbols and convert it into database script. paste that script in your development environment
I have re-written and corrected the text. Please check now? .
Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy.
> Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy.
Good to hear, thanks!
Its the world we live in. Once you break free of the box, your parents dreams, you can realise your own version of what "life is".
Would have expected this could rake in some SEO traffic though, but surprised that didnt work for you. Or maybe surprised isnt the right word, maybe i have the initial high hope for it when you registered it and tried it :)
In my opinion, these kinds of tools, which you only need once in a while, need to take as little cognitive load as possible. People have something to get done, don't get in their way.