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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.
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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.
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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
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| 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!"
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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!
*****
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