Good morning all!
We’ve written previously about how DNZoom By Bido was built, but one important factor we’ve not really mentioned was the why or what for. Now that Bido.com is about ready to launch, we couldn’t think of a better time to elaborate.
Back in our ModernBill.com days, we had around 250K domain names under management. I use the “management” term loosely. The fact of the matter is that “management” meant that Sean Stafford had to go in to our eNom account everyday and filter through which names were expiring, which names where needing to be moved to Sedo, which names should be let dropped, along with all the general sales inquiries. This was all done manually.
At this time we only used eNom.com and Sedo.com. Because our main line of business was business automation, we decided to build a small script to automatically point all expiring and unused domains to Sedo.com. This script only took a few hours to build, however it probably saved tens of hours of work. Once we saw the magic of automation take hold and save us those precious man hours, we knew we could expand upon this and add more features that would reduce the workload even more. This is when the first DNZoom prototype was built.
DNZoom at first only included a Sedo.com and eNom.com module. These were our only two providers at the time, but just by luck they were also the two providers with the best APIs in the industry. We quickly developed an eNom.com module to go along with our Sedo.com script. After that, we began working on a basic framework to keep track of names from a single location instead of using the platforms that were available on Sedo.com or eNom.com. With one central location we were able to see the full picture of the names we had. After all, if we relied on just Sedo.com data or just eNom.com data, we would only be seeing half of the picture.
The first interface was crude at best. It had very few features and didn’t do anything near what DNZoom does today, but it was pure magic. It changed nameservers and added domains to the Sedo.com panel. It was able to do things in minutes that would take an individual hours. Once we demo’d this to a few of our friends, we were inundated with requests to make a copy of this new toolset for them.
Then it hit us! Obviously this tool was a great boon for us, but what about others? Our core focus was automation in the web hosting industry, but could we export our knowledge to the domain industry?
The answer was a resounding “yes!” However, if we were to go to market with such a product we knew a few things were going to have to happen with our tool:
1) We would need a LOT more registrar/parking modules in order for it to be useful
2) We would have to get VERY staunch on security
So that’s what we did. We gathered as many APIs as we could, and then we locked down the security of the system. We also drew up all the features that we believed we would need in such a system and went to work.
Our next integrations were Tucows.com, NameDrive.com, and GoDaddy.com. We eventually received more and more APIs and got feedback from our clients. DNZoom was starting to take shape.
Then, after DNZoom gained a small following, we started to think about pricing. How much should we charge? How do we set up the pricing model? Knowing full well that any price on the software would be a barrier to entry, we decided to keep DNZoom free. We had something great on our hands and we wanted to revolutionize the industry.
So, with that in mind we focused on educating people about our product instead of selling it. If a product is free, there are very few reasons not to try it.
Today, DNZoom is the most well known management platform in the domain space. We’ve received a bit of competition, but nothing on the scale that does what we do. We grow by the day and every day we help more and more people take control of their portfolios.
Isn’t it about time you took control of yours?
Regards,
Dan Kimball