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

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. The growth rate stays steady, and a steady rate is exactly what was wanted in a business.

A conscious choice at the start of DNSimple was not to take other people's money. DNSimple was not a rocket ship meant to return tens of thousands of dollars for each dollar put in. The business was meant to facilitate a chosen life. Four kids, the last almost ready to graduate high school, were kids throughout DNSimple. Time was there for the vast majority of their childhood. The family traveled and enjoyed life together. There was no need to spend 80 or 90 hours trying to help somebody else become rich. Being already rich in time was an essential part of the construction of the business.

DNSimple has grown and continues to grow. Engineers are still the champions, and DNSimple has found ways into enterprise-level contracts. Many enterprises remain on legacy software or legacy registrars and are really suffering. DNSimple helps them on board and move domains off other providers, then gives a stable, consolidated system. A year and a half to two years ago, DNSimple launched a domain control plane. Domains managed at Route 53 or in Azure can connect from DNSimple so the domains can be seen and edited, with bi-directional synchronization between DNSimple, Route 53, Azure, and CoreDNS on-prem.

Transcript

Making DNSimple (Changelog Interviews #637) ·

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  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 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.

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