So I’ve decided it’s time, after almost five years of steering pretty clear of the news, to get in and give my two cents on what’s going on in the Domaining space. I still want to focus on case studies and real life experiences, but I want to go beyond the basics and dig deeper into some stories that I think are relevant and important to us as Domainers. Here’s the problem I run into. When I write about a sponsor of mine, everyone assumes it’s a sponsored post and that’s the only reason that I’m writing it.
I don’t work that way and for those who know me you know that I speak my mind and only publish things that I stand behind. I may be wrong sometimes and judge a company or a product incorrectly, but I never publish things just because a sponsor did something. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s get to the news, but dig a bit deeper…
Let’s talk about Protrada. I started working with this company before they launched, trying out an early beta of their product. The user interface was a masterpiece, but the product itself wasn’t quite there yet. For anyone who has emailed me before you know that I speak my mind when you ask me to try something out. I gave them some suggestions and, boom, a short time later a new version had rolled out, and it was much better, but still not there yet.
What impressed me about Protrada from day one is their commitment to building something that people want. See most people don’t realize that building something that people want is hard, damn hard. The reason why most companies fail is because they fail to find product-market-fit, they are afraid to learn from their customers and change their idea so they stay the same and slowly decline. Then there are the innovators, companies that constantly look for feedback and use this to build a better product.
This year Protrada has made a solid play into the domain monetization space with DevName and sites that looks like, well sites rather than parked pages. They have created a robust and highly configurable solution for buying expired domains and managing the entire transaction flow and most recently they acquired DomainFace. This is a big deal because it brings Protrada a big userbase with over 50,000 users. Of course when you transition from one company to another not all users come over, but it’s still a sizable pool to be drawing from.
On top of that, the owner of DomainFace has told his customers that he thinks Protrada offers even more than what they had with DomainFace, which is a very good thing:
“not only does Protrada offer everything Domainface does (in fully working order), it also has many more advanced features, some of which were planned for the Domainface future roadmap, but have already been developed by Protrada. So when Protrada made an offer to buy Domainface it made complete sense to add all of our experience into the Protrada mix to create the most complete Domain Trading Platform in the world” (Kenny Goodman, DomainFace Founder)
However this deal doesn’t just bring users, it also brings technology and experience. What it does deliver is the edge that I think Protrada has needed to truly call themselves the king of the pack. It’s a smart business move and big win for all of us in the community. Although this win extends far past Domaining, you see most of DomainFace’s customers are Internet Marketers.
I love the Domaining Industry, it’s my life and I honestly wake up every morning salivating to see what’s on Domaining.com. That being said, we’re a very small market. The Internet Marketing space is huge and only a segment of these folks understand Domain Investing. So in the end, what I see this move doing is actually broadening our community and adding new people with new ideas into the mix. I’d love to go to a domain conference where thousands of people show up, it might not be far off and I can tell you that this move from Protrada gets us one step closer.
