Rate My Startup: DomainPigeon.com

The long of it: In March of last year I was in the process of writing some poker software and trying to decide on a name for it. I wanted a good name and also wanted to own the corresponding domain name so that people could easily find it. I used Ajaxwhois, a great site that lets shows you the availability of domain names as you type, and quickly got pulled in trying to find a good domain. I would spend hours trying things like “pokerguru.com”, “pokermaster.com”, “pokercalculator.com”, “pokerexpert.com”, and so on. After a lot of time and energy later, I found “allinexpert.com”, which became the name of the software.

Fast forward to about July. ALL IN Expert had just flopped and I was trying to decide on a new project to work on. I had several ideas in mind and again, I wanted a good domain name for whatever it wound up being. It was kind of sick: I wound up going back to Ajaxwhois and using it as the tie breaker. If I could find a good domain name for one project and not the other, that would be what I worked on.

It was crazy. There's got to be a better way. I wrote a small piece of software that played with various word combinations and displayed their availability. Surprisingly, there are a lot of decent domains out there... you just have to be patient enough or resourceful enough to find them.

Then it hit me: This is something other people could use too. I put the other ideas on the back burner and started on this one.

Domain Pigeon, an eccentric but hopefully memorable name I discovered with the same software, is intended to make finding unregistered domain names easier. It has been my learn Rails/JavaScript/web development nights and weekends project over the last few months. I hope you like it.

This is round two of its launch. Last week I posted a link to Philly on Rails, a local group of Rails aficionados, and received a lot of great feedback. The result is what you see today (hopefully, depending on how DreamHost does with the traffic).

I've got a list of about two dozens features I intend to add over the coming weeks, which will be modified and prioritized based on your feedback.

For me, Domain Pigeon has been as much about learning the process as it has been about the releasing the product. On that note, all feedback, positive and negative, is welcomed. I also keep a blog, mattmazur.com, where I write about Domain Pigeon and its progress for anyone that is interested. I try to be as transparent as possible, as that's the best way to get valuable feedback.

On a final note, a lot of the design decisions for Domain Pigeon were adapted from feedback given to other people launching their sites on HackerNews and for that, I owe you all a thank you.

Please let me know what you think.

So instead of:

"We help you find an unregistered domain name for your website"

Maybe:

"Find the best unregistered domains"

Or something else short and sweet?

Just a thought. Best of luck!

Of the 10 most popular domains, only 1 (campdeal.com) is moderately attractive. I browsed through a bunch of the categories and most of them were terrible. There is also no ability to search a keyword and have relevant names appear.

I would be very interested in a service like this, but you will need much more functionality to compete. I think you may have opened up for review before the product was ready.

If this site gets at all popular, domain squatters are going to scrape your site for domains that have any value whatsoever and register them. That's how they operate. They are set up to register domain names quickly and cheaply, and squeeze any profit from them at all.

For example, it used to be the case (might still be) that if you did a search on GoDaddy.com for some domain, and did not register that domain within X hours, GoDaddy would sell their searches to squatters which would then often register the domain you just searched for. My guess is their whole process is automated based on how long the domain is, which dictionary words it contains, etc. Shitty, right?

You are a dream come true to them: more than just data on if the domain was searched, but actually tracking non-registered domains' popularities... and posting it for all the public to see! All it takes is one of these self proclaimed "web real estate guru" assholes to come along and see your site has decent domain names listed, and tell his programmer crony to scrape and register them.

I see your only option being using images to display domain names, and mangling up the URLs, to hopefully stifle anyone trying to scrape your site. Then, if you have a lack of morals and want money really bad, you can sell a feed of popular domains to squatters from some good money.

Good luck.

Just nitpicking here, but you have the words "Click a domain name to begin" that shows up no matter what page I am on (including the registration page). Feels a little out of context there...

Maybe its just me. Great job.. Wish you the best

* Search should be above the fold. On my MacBook I have to scroll down to see the input field. Also on the results page I’d put a search box at the top, auto-focused (a la the Google homepage) so I can quickly perform another search.

* "You may have better luck with an account :)." - Why not tell me how many domains I could see if I did sign up instead? I’d be much more likely to fork over $14.95 if I knew what I was getting in advance.

- Does the search do substrings? Auto-acronyming? regexs? Startup folks may enjoy that.

- You probably killed off the cream of your inventory crop by showing it here first :-)

Also, perhaps do AB testing with $14.99 and $9.99. See if there's a psychological barrier there. You may find the drop in price is compensated by the increased conversion.

one peeve: I can't copy and paste the domain name text.

campdeal.com is available? wow.

He who comes up with a solution to that problem will become filthy rich.

Time to drop the addressbar and use a wordbar with disambiguation?

Who is in charge of pushing the world forward?