Home

Featured in Newsweek · USA Today · New York Times · MSNBC · Boston Herald · Arizona Republic  

August 27, 2012

Domain Sales

Latest News

Articles

Dear Domey

Resources

Archive

YTD Sales Charts

The Lowdown

Legal Matters

Letters to Editor

Classified Ads

About Us

 

 

 

(Editor's Note: I started planning this article about DNZoom.com in the summer of 2007. While following the ongoing development of this ground-breaking free domain management service, I have gotten to know the principals in the company and gained a better understanding of what they have built (and are capable of building in the future). That insight (along with another recent business development) led to recent talks that may result in my entering into a formal business relationship with DNZoom. There is no relationship as of this writing, but, in the interest of full disclosure, the possibility that one could be forged in the near future needs to accompany this article. My honest opinion of this service, as expressed in the article below, was formed well before these unexpected recent developments. Now, with the stage properly set, let's get on with the show!)

Update: The talks I referred to in the post above did result in DNZoom.com being acquired by Bido.com (I am one of four partners that founded Bido.com). A deal was finally reached just a few hours before the Bido.com launch party in Las Vegas Feb. 18. 

Update 3/10/08: I have left Bido.com so no longer have a business relationship with Bido or DNZoom. Of course, none of this changes the opinions I have about DNZoom as expressed in the article below, but as a matter of full disclosure I wanted readers to know about these developments since they relate to a company we wrote about. 

Say Hello to DNZoom and Goodbye to Domain Management Hassles
By Ron Jackson 

If you are like most people in this business, you have found that the domain names in your portfolio have a way of multiplying like rabbits on maximum strength Viagra. Before long, managing all of those domains can become a real headache - especially when you reach hundreds or thousands of domains in your collection as I have.

Like many of you I tracked my domains in an Excel spreadsheet, but that leaves a lot to be desired, especially if you forget to enter names you buy in your Excel file. I've done that several times and a few years ago it cost me four 3-letter domains. Since I had forgotten to enter them when they were purchased, the spreadsheet did not alert me when they were expiring. To make matters worse, I wasn't reading the hundreds of renewal notices I was getting because I thought I already knew what was expiring from the information in my spreadsheet! End result, bye bye domain names I would liked to have kept. 

ModernGigabyte co-founders Michael Fountain
(left) and Jeremy Christ after being named 
finalists for Ernst & Young's Entrepeneur of the 
Year Award
for their region in 2006. Last year 
their company spawned DNZoom.

I thought there had to be a better way to keep track of domains. Some smart guys based in Louisville, Kentucky thought the same thing and when they looked around and didn't find what they were searching for, they created it themselves, called it DNZoom - and it was good! DNZoom was spawned by an industry leading billing automation firm called ModernGigabyte that was founded by CEO Jeremy Christ and CTO Michael Fountain

I met some of the their key team members while making the trade show rounds last summer. Their service was in its first stage of beta so I logged in and started poking around. I thought it was a major leap forward so I told them I would like to do a story about it. 

Over the past six months that article has been sitting on the back burner but the water has been continually boiling as DNZoom developers have added one new feature after another 

since I first peaked at the product. Now described as being in Beta 2.0, DNZoom allows you to not only manage all of your domains in one place (regardless of wherethey are registered) but also manage all of your parking  services (so you can get one cumulative set of stats across multiple PPC companies instead of having to go to all of them individually). 

On top of that, you can track domains for sale at Sedo and Afternic and domains that will be dropping through the built-in lists included with the free service. There are also tools that let you search keywords, spin keywords, check Alexa information and do WhoIs lookups. Basically it offers everything but the kitchen sink (and I'm sure that is coming soon too) all in one easy to use interface. The screenshot below is your starting point where you can begin adding your registrar and parking account portfolios. Fully automated importing and synchronization of your DNZoom and registrar accounts is currently available with eight different registrars (with more on the way). Full or semi automatic operations are also in place for several key PPC companies and those parking companies and registrars that are not yet set up for automatic importing and syncing can be accessed manually.

Portfolio page in DNZoom. See screenshots of other DNZoom 
features in the appendix at the end of this article.

Knowing that DNZoom developers plan to keep adding things as long as users keep asking for new features, I decided there was no point in continuing to put off this piece while waiting for a "final" release. So I rounded up the key guys on the DNZoom team to tell us more about what prompted them to tackle the challenge of building the domain industry version of the Swiss Army knife and how this service works to solves domain management problems. 

It all started when Sean Stafford (who is now DNZoom's Director of Product Development) realized that he had a problem. "After getting to a near breaking point with my own domains, I knew there was a better way to handle the management of them," Stafford said.  Dan Kimball (DNZoom's Chief Strategy Officer) and I searched on the internet for a way to make the process more efficient. After finding virtually no program out there to manage domains, we knew this was an area of the market that needed to be addressed. Since we already had vast knowledge of API’s, automation, and software, we felt our team could fulfill that need.  After Jeremy and Dan attended a few tradeshows, the decision was made to move forward with the design of our tool.  What we came up with was the world’s first truly agnostic tool, built for domainers by domainers.  A few months later, DNZoom was born.

Dan Kimball (left) & Sean Stafford

Jeremy Christ
DNZoom/ModernGigabyte CEO

The expertise Stafford mentioned was developed at ModernGigabyte, where he, Kimball and other members of the DNZoom team earned their stripes. Kimball said, "Jeremy and Michael started ModernGigabyte six years ago out of necessity while owning a hosting company. We have over 13,000 customers in over 50 countries and are on our 5th version of that software. DNZoom uses a lot of the same technologies and has just as many or more touch points or API integrations. We are building on our six years of development expertise with applications and APIs in developing DNZoom."

Christ told us "Consolidation and interactive services are the key words. Working with domain centric companies, DNZoom will become a "launch pad" for domain name investors. We are building the foundation that will make the industry more efficient for all players involved; no matter how big or how small. DNZoom makes it easy to be a domainer again!"

Considering how fully featured DNZoom is, I was a little curious about why the Beta label is still on the product. Christ explained "I see software and life both as BETA.  I’m not sure what version of BETA my life is in, but I’m constantly learning, which is what life is all about.  DNZoom Beta 2.0 is similar in ways, because we are constantly learning from our customers, endorsers, and this exciting industry we live, eat, breath, and play in. We do NOT consider the word BETA as broken or feature incomplete.  Rather, we see BETA as growing and maturing and I only hope that DNZoom will continue to grow.

Kimball followed up on that saying, "Prime example; Our first thoughts on the functionality for DNZoom was totally focused on domainers who focused on parking revenue, but since then more and more speculator domainers have contacted us to build in more and more functionality for them. Like can we push domains from DNZoom to sale at Fabulous, Sedo, DNForum in one click...or can we input offers we get from these services into DNZoom so they can track the offers for each domain in one place… I can keep going...but we get a suggestion a day basically.  Great ideas...and we want to get them all into DNZoom.

Lead developer Brian Smith and DNZoom's User Interface expert, seasoned designer/developer Eric Radtke deserve a lot of credit for incorporating a steady stream of new features into DNZoom.  A solid buzz has grown up around the service since it was introduced so it is obviously striking a chord with portfolio owners who felt that their domain management chores had gotten out of hand. Fountain feels their pain.

"If you have 1,000 domains, on average, 2-3 of them will expire every day. This will include EVERY weekend, EVERY holiday, and of course when you least expect it, on EVERY vacation!" Fountain said. "Now, every day of the year, you need to be on top of your domain renewals. If all of your domains came from one registrar, this might be fairly easy to maintain; however for most Domainers, it’s not that simple. In our research, we find that most Domainers have their domains spread across half a dozen or more registrars! But wait, there’s more! What about your parked domains? Where are they parked? How are they performing this week?  What if you had 10,000 domains or even more! Using DNZoom, you can take control of your domains and get your life back."

Michael Fountain
DNZoom/ModernGigabyte CTO

Considering how much time and money went into building DNZoom I had to wonder how the developers were going to make any money from the project when they aren't charging anyone to use it. Kimball said, 'I think our history of building quality software products in the past gives us a unique perspective on this. On our other products like ModernBill, we charge a minimal fee or nothing to use those services but rather focus on the add-on services to generate revenue.  Services like auctions, domain consulting, DNS, and referral fees can offer DNZoom enough revenue to run and profit from this venture."

Director of Business Development Jude Augusta added, "Google was free and had no revenue whatsoever for years. They provided value. Before you knew it, everyone was using Google – and now, its actually frightening – we can’t live without Google. We’re capitalizing on that same example.  We provide intense value and utility.  We quickly gather an audience who evangelizes our services.  We can introduce the masses to value added services, affiliate products and services, and new utilities to capitalize on the most value out of their domain portfolios."

DNZoom's Jude Augusta, Dan Kimball and Sean Stafford manning the company 
booth at the DOMAINfest Global conference in Hollywood, California (January 2008).
Stafford just published an excellent ebook for new domain investors called Tapping 
the Online Mines
that can be ordered at DomainGraduate.com.

When someone is inputting sensitive account data in a new service, security is an obvious concern and Fountain said it is the top priority at DNZoom. "One of our major goals was to create a "secure" and "trusted" web-based application. All account related data is securely encrypted and never presented to ANY human user; In addition, you do not have to store your 3rd-party account credentials at all. The application is smart enough to ask you for them before performing any task when credentials are not present."

"I’d also like to point out that this is not some "little script" installed on a shared web server amongst other unknown sites," Fountain said. "DNZoom is securely hosted in our private rack custom built by The Planet in Dallas, TX. The solution is firewalled, load balanced, and setup to scale to millions of domains. No client data is stored on any of the front-end production servers and the back-end database is clustered for optimum stability, scalability, and security."

Building trust is also why there is a good chance you will run into one or more DNZoom team members if you go to any major domain conference. "Dan, Michael, Jeremy, Jude and I have made going to these different shows a top priority for our company," Stafford said. Although each and every one of these events has been fun, the main reason we go is that we want to show domainers that we can be trusted. If the people who use your software trust you, then it is much easier to do business with them, and they are far likelier to tell other people about that software. We want to show people that we are trustworthy, and so is our platform."

"Since we have made going to these tradeshows a high priority, we are getting fewer and fewer people who don’t know what DNZoom is," Stafford added. "In the short time we have been in existence, we have gained a lot of recognition. We fully believe this is because the software we are building is going to vastly improve domainers organization, which ultimately means improving their bottom line."

Sean Stafford
speaking at DOMAINfest Global 2008

*****

APPENDIX - DNZoom Screenshots

Accounts page - Add Registrar accounts. Importing from many major registrars, including 
eNom, Register.com and EuroDNS is fully automated. GoDaddy and Fabulous have basic functionality and others can be added manually. 

 

Accounts page - This screen appeared after I told the program to automatically import 
all of the domains in my eNom account. Alert message tells you all domains will be 
imported within 5-10 minutes.

 

Accounts Page - After my eNom domains were imported I could click on a domain name and get the toolbox screen above that tells me everything I could ever want to know about that domain and even includes a screen shot of the current landing page.

 

Accounts - Add Parking Services. Importing domains and stats from Sedo is fully automated while DomainSponsor and NameDrive are semi-automated. Others can be added manually.

 

Marketplace Page - lets you keep track of domain sales and auctions around the net. This page shows auctions ending in 24 hours at Sedo (other services can be selected from a drop down box)

 

Tools Page - here you can Spin keywords, Search keywords and do Alexa and WhoIs Lookups

 

Drops page - You can select a variety of current drop lists from the drop down box at top of yellow column (for example domains dropping in the next 48 hours). You can filter the lists in many ways including Google Page Rank, Alexa Site Rank & Link Popularity

A full range of reports is also available on the Reports page. DNZoom - try it, you'll like it!

*****


Return to Domain Name Journal Home Page 


 Home  Domain Sales  YTD Sales Charts   Latest News  The Lowdown  Articles  
Legal Matters
  Dear Domey  Letters to Editor  Resources  Classified Ads  Archive  About Us

See the Bido.com video on YouTube!

 



Copyright 2007 DNJournal.com - an Internet Edge, Inc. company. 
No material may be copied from this site without expressed written consent.