Smash Notes

Back to Making DNSimple (Changelog Interviews #637), with Anthony Eden.

How Did DNSimple Grow Slowly With Costly Domain Keywords?

On the show, DNSimple stays in business and continues slow growth by focusing on positioning and how the team uses words. Domain registration keywords are some of the most expensive keywords in the world, and companies buying Super Bowl ads compete at a level DNSimple cannot match. DNSimple competes at a level more appropriate for the company.

DNSimple still gets a lot of benefit from SEO and has followed changing trends so the company is good at optimizing for GenAI tooling. A lot of people are starting to get search results from ChatGPT or from Perplexity, and ChatGPT and Perplexity require a different set of inputs to earn placement. Materials are instructional, accessible, and machine accessible. The website, messaging at events, the way team members talk with other folks, and the way the community talks about DNSimple come together to guide people who have a specific problem DNSimple solves, even with really big alternatives out there. Competition is fierce on the operational side and on the domain side, and especially on the domain registration side.

Anthony Eden knows how DNSimple does the marketing and says the company does it well enough to stay in business and continue slow growth, while declining to call the work exceptional.

Transcript

Making DNSimple (Changelog Interviews #637) ·

Changelog Master Feed

More from this episode

  1. How Did DNSimple End Up Half a Registrar?On the show, domain registration at DNSimple is now mostly equal to operational DNS.
  2. How Did No Outside Money Let DNSimple Win Big Companies?On the show, DNSimple has never grown a ton aside from the very early days.
  3. How Did a Language Model Never Run the Rails Test?On the show, a weekend try to get a language model to run the test on a fresh Rails project failed.
  4. How Did a Forgotten Domain Make DNSimple Demand Proof?DNSimple requires a person to prove they actually have the rights before a domain that used to be with DNSimple comes back into DNSimple.
  5. How Did Let's Encrypt Turn Certificates Into a Click?On the show, Let's Encrypt solved one of the biggest gaps in the internet security space and changed the world of the internet.
  6. How Did Tailscale and Raycast Make Cineplex Login Easy?On the show, Tailscale installed on everything replaced a memorized home address with a network-friendly name that search can reach.
  7. Why Won't DNSimple Start Generative Domain-list Search?DNSimple is small enough that the company has not applied machine learning to all the data coming through. The generative part is not so interesting.
  8. Why Are Name Availability Checks So Hard for DNSimple?The hard part of suggesting domain names is not coming up with words to string together and suggest.
  9. Why Do Attacked Registries Get Paid While Registrars Innovate?On the show, the domain business is lopsided. Innovation happens at the edges, at the registrars, and the money gets sent to the core, at the registries.

People

More answers like this

More with Anthony Eden

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.