There is an elegance to single word domains. Few valuable single word domains are available to be registered in most extensions, and it can be challenging to find those that are unregistered. Steven Tey encountered that, and said to himself ‘there must be a tool that makes it easy to find available single word domain names.’ But there wasn’t, at least not exactly what he was seeking. So he created One Word Domains and made it available to startup owners and domain investors.
Innovative domain investors have created and shared many useful products over the years. What sets Steven apart is his age, he is currently in his last year as an undergraduate student, and the speed that the project went from concept to working product. He had a beta operational within a week, and OneWord.Domains was being accessed by a large community of users within months. It is also noteworthy that, although he stood on the shoulders of existing codes and databases, the product was essentially developed by a single person.
I thought it would be interesting for NamePros readers to learn a bit more about Steven Tey, the person behind One Word Domains. I hope the interview provides interesting perspectives for those considering their own development projects.
Is it really possible that development of One Word Domains commenced only in May of 2020? Can you tell us a bit more about the birth of the project?
It started back in May of this year, during my summer break. I was planning a project, but I couldn't seem to find a brandable short one word domain name. I'm a fan of one word domain names, and that sort of frustrated me. So it got me thinking, why hasn't anyone taken the top 10,000 most commonly used English words and paired them up with a bunch of TLDs like
You are a data science and brand management student at Minerva. The program at Minerva sounds very innovative. Can you tell us a bit about the experiences that you have had, and how they influenced this project?
So Minerva is a fairly new school that started in 2014. The main idea is students get to participate in active learning. The second cool thing is we get to travel to a different country every semester to immerse ourselves in the local culture, work with local companies, basically just be a global citizen – that's the whole unique selling proposition of Minerva. It's been a fun experience. I've got to know a lot of different people around the world. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking to start their undergraduate studies now.
We start our first semester in San Francisco, because it's where one of the schools is based. The second year we go to Seoul in South Korea, and then Hyderabad in India. And then third year to Germany, followed by Buenos Aires in Argentina. Although the fourth year is supposed to be in London, because of COVID I decided to come back to San Francisco. The final semester was supposed to be in Taipei in Taiwan.
Clearly you entered the project with a lot of background and expertise so you could hit the ground running. Also, you made use of some existing open source resources. Can you briefly take us through the process of how One Word Domains was developed.
When and how did you first become interested in domain names? Other than using them for projects, do you invest in domain names for resale?
I've been a perfectionist when it comes to branding and naming a project, sometimes it takes me up to three months to get the final name. I'm mainly buying names for development. I did sell a domain name before, but it was a name that I chose for a project that ended up not working out.
As well as filling an obvious need, and being technically responsive, One Word Domains has taken off partly because you have been successful in getting attention. Can you tell us a bit about how you got the project noticed.
I posted on Reddit to get some attention, spoke with several people in the domain world, had a session on it at The Domain Show with Page Howe, and have been posting a bit on NamePros whenever I have a new feature coming out. Those have been my main sources of organic traffic. I'm mainly focusing on the product itself and trying to create the best user experience and make sure that everything works well.
The Slick carousel you use is a nice first page experience. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
It's called Slick JS. It's a really good framework for carousels. I wanted to build one by myself, but I decided to just use a carousel JavaScript framework that was already out there. And I've been using it on all my pages ever since.
How do you monetize Single Word Domains?
Currently there are two revenue streams – the first is the affiliate commission from registrars and marketplaces whenever someone purchases a name through One Word Domains. The second is the premium feature where people pay to get access to more TLDs as well as additional features. For example, I recently launched a Watchlist feature where people can monitor up to 50 domains that they're interested in, and get notified every time the nameserver changes.
I see from your LinkedIn profile that you have been involved in a number of other projects, including a co-founder at dBay a P2P commission-free marketplace for crypto, and Nadan, a way to bring students and admissions consultants together. Want to tell us more about either of those, or other projects you have played important roles in?
When I started at Minerva I was quickly introduced to the scene of startups and blockchain and cryptocurrencies – this was in San Francisco in 2017 and Bitcoin was the hype. In my freshman year summer I did an internship at this incubator in Tokyo where we worked on building a startup that uses AI and blockchain and that was a really good experience. While that didn't really work out – we ended up selling the company back to the incubator – I went on to build another startup that was in the EdTech space with a friend of mine, and that introduced me to the world of product management. That's when I did my first product management internship at this company in New York, Noodle Partners. Noodle Partners creates online programs for universities. I learned a lot about how to work with people and create the best user experience based on needs.
Now that you have interacted with the domain community, what have your perceptions been?
Before coming in, I had heard people describe domainers as being people who hoard domain names and never sell them. But after stepping into the industry this summer, I've had a really good impression with the many people that I've spoken to. So many people are really helpful and very willing to give feedback and help me improve the product. I would like to give a shout-out to a few like Braden Pollock, a really amazing guy, Josh Reason, he runs the Josh.co podcast and DNWE, was really fun to chat with, Andrew Allemann from DomainNameWire, Page Howe and many more. So it really did change my perception of the industry as a whole. There's a lot of creativity involved, a lot of innovation – although I would say that some of the biggest companies in this space really are pretty slow in innovating and there's a huge opportunity for startups to come out and disrupt the industry.
I understand that before you became a developer you were a successful writer, writing under a pseudonym a science fiction book that won the award for best use of visuals in a global WattPad competition. At 1500 copies, and 850,000 WattPad reads, it was a major success. With everything going on now, do you still have time to write?
I personally don't have much time to read or write fiction at the moment, although I would love to get back to it. What I do nowadays is mainly write technical articles. Recently I wrote about how you can build a mobile widget using just 30 lines of JavaScript. I think that's something that could be useful for a lot of other people as well. I wrote a Hackernoon article about my experience with One Word Domains.
The book Someone’s In My Head that I wrote while in high school was a science fiction novel – it was a story of a teenage boy who went through a car accident and when he woke up, there was someone else's consciousness inside his head. And he had to figure out who that person is. So he set out on this crazy adventure to figure out, and it was full of plot twists and revelations. There were over 800,000 people who read it on Wattpad. I've sold over 1500 copies of the physical book. I was in high school at that time, and I went to different schools to promote my book. It was, I would say, my first introduction to entrepreneurship. Not exactly startups, but it taught me about running my own business, promoting, marketing, and getting sales. It was a really good experience, that I'm really lucky to have had.
I saved the hard question for nearly last! Why isn’t One Word Domains on a single word domain name?
I noticed this irony in hindsight, when someone pointed it out. I have thought about rebranding eventually to a shorter
I agree that your existing name perfectly describes the product.
What plans for the future would you like to share with NamePros readers?
Currently, I'm working on a site-wide search feature for One Word Domains . With over 350,000 domain names currently on the site, it is critical to be able to access that information in an efficient way. I've had this this feature requests from a ton of users. I'm working right now on a new way to search, using the Spacy NLP library. It's a machine learning library. If you give it a word, it will find the words that have the closest similarity score with that search word. So it's not just using the root word, but also other similar words. Note added: I see this search is now active in One Word Domains.
Another feature that I'm working on is a domain name generator. I know, it's very overdone, but I really want to do something that is highly personalized to the users preferences, and hopefully something that can disrupt the competition. What I envision is you will put in different aspects of your preferences somewhat similar to a personality test, and it comes up with a holistic brand profile that it uses for recommended names. It also checks for trademark evaluation, social handles and more, all in one tool. I think it's a much grander project, and I am developing it for my senior thesis, which is really exciting.
What are your plans after graduation from university?
I'm going to be doing my own thing, my own startup, or work at a fast-growth startup for the first couple of years, and then eventually maybe go to a bigger company.
I like this quote from Steven’s online backgrounder:
He also comments in the same post on the domain field.
You can learn more about Steven Tey and his work at StevenTey.com. You can connect with Steven on NamePros StevenTey. From time to time he posts in the NamePros promotional section, such as when he announced the subscription model.
Thank you very much for the interview, Steven. It was very inspiring and illuminating to learn more about you!
I suspect numerous NamePros members have ideas for great tools. I hope that this interview will inspire more to take the step of developing them.
Innovative domain investors have created and shared many useful products over the years. What sets Steven apart is his age, he is currently in his last year as an undergraduate student, and the speed that the project went from concept to working product. He had a beta operational within a week, and OneWord.Domains was being accessed by a large community of users within months. It is also noteworthy that, although he stood on the shoulders of existing codes and databases, the product was essentially developed by a single person.
I thought it would be interesting for NamePros readers to learn a bit more about Steven Tey, the person behind One Word Domains. I hope the interview provides interesting perspectives for those considering their own development projects.
Is it really possible that development of One Word Domains commenced only in May of 2020? Can you tell us a bit more about the birth of the project?
It started back in May of this year, during my summer break. I was planning a project, but I couldn't seem to find a brandable short one word domain name. I'm a fan of one word domain names, and that sort of frustrated me. So it got me thinking, why hasn't anyone taken the top 10,000 most commonly used English words and paired them up with a bunch of TLDs like
.ai, .io, .co – the ones that are more popular among startups. I gave myself a deadline of one week to complete the project. It was also good practice for me to learn more about web development. Within a week I launched One Word Domains. A week later it was on the front page of Hacker News - you can read the archived discussion here. It also achieved a high rating on Product Hunt - read the discussion about One Word Domains launch here.You are a data science and brand management student at Minerva. The program at Minerva sounds very innovative. Can you tell us a bit about the experiences that you have had, and how they influenced this project?
So Minerva is a fairly new school that started in 2014. The main idea is students get to participate in active learning. The second cool thing is we get to travel to a different country every semester to immerse ourselves in the local culture, work with local companies, basically just be a global citizen – that's the whole unique selling proposition of Minerva. It's been a fun experience. I've got to know a lot of different people around the world. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is looking to start their undergraduate studies now.
We start our first semester in San Francisco, because it's where one of the schools is based. The second year we go to Seoul in South Korea, and then Hyderabad in India. And then third year to Germany, followed by Buenos Aires in Argentina. Although the fourth year is supposed to be in London, because of COVID I decided to come back to San Francisco. The final semester was supposed to be in Taipei in Taiwan.
Clearly you entered the project with a lot of background and expertise so you could hit the ground running. Also, you made use of some existing open source resources. Can you briefly take us through the process of how One Word Domains was developed.
- I went on Github to find the most commonly used words from different categories like adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc.
- I wrote a Python script that would call a WHOIS API to check for the availability for each of these domains.
- I used the Flask framework, which is a micro framework that works really well with Python. It's a very popular framework, especially amongst people who are building simple web apps or API's and stuff like that.
- For the front end, I kept it simple, I use HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- I also use Mailgun and MailChimp for my email marketing.
- For the database, I'm using PostgreSQL.
When and how did you first become interested in domain names? Other than using them for projects, do you invest in domain names for resale?
I've been a perfectionist when it comes to branding and naming a project, sometimes it takes me up to three months to get the final name. I'm mainly buying names for development. I did sell a domain name before, but it was a name that I chose for a project that ended up not working out.
As well as filling an obvious need, and being technically responsive, One Word Domains has taken off partly because you have been successful in getting attention. Can you tell us a bit about how you got the project noticed.
I posted on Reddit to get some attention, spoke with several people in the domain world, had a session on it at The Domain Show with Page Howe, and have been posting a bit on NamePros whenever I have a new feature coming out. Those have been my main sources of organic traffic. I'm mainly focusing on the product itself and trying to create the best user experience and make sure that everything works well.
The Slick carousel you use is a nice first page experience. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
It's called Slick JS. It's a really good framework for carousels. I wanted to build one by myself, but I decided to just use a carousel JavaScript framework that was already out there. And I've been using it on all my pages ever since.
How do you monetize Single Word Domains?
Currently there are two revenue streams – the first is the affiliate commission from registrars and marketplaces whenever someone purchases a name through One Word Domains. The second is the premium feature where people pay to get access to more TLDs as well as additional features. For example, I recently launched a Watchlist feature where people can monitor up to 50 domains that they're interested in, and get notified every time the nameserver changes.
I see from your LinkedIn profile that you have been involved in a number of other projects, including a co-founder at dBay a P2P commission-free marketplace for crypto, and Nadan, a way to bring students and admissions consultants together. Want to tell us more about either of those, or other projects you have played important roles in?
When I started at Minerva I was quickly introduced to the scene of startups and blockchain and cryptocurrencies – this was in San Francisco in 2017 and Bitcoin was the hype. In my freshman year summer I did an internship at this incubator in Tokyo where we worked on building a startup that uses AI and blockchain and that was a really good experience. While that didn't really work out – we ended up selling the company back to the incubator – I went on to build another startup that was in the EdTech space with a friend of mine, and that introduced me to the world of product management. That's when I did my first product management internship at this company in New York, Noodle Partners. Noodle Partners creates online programs for universities. I learned a lot about how to work with people and create the best user experience based on needs.
Now that you have interacted with the domain community, what have your perceptions been?
Before coming in, I had heard people describe domainers as being people who hoard domain names and never sell them. But after stepping into the industry this summer, I've had a really good impression with the many people that I've spoken to. So many people are really helpful and very willing to give feedback and help me improve the product. I would like to give a shout-out to a few like Braden Pollock, a really amazing guy, Josh Reason, he runs the Josh.co podcast and DNWE, was really fun to chat with, Andrew Allemann from DomainNameWire, Page Howe and many more. So it really did change my perception of the industry as a whole. There's a lot of creativity involved, a lot of innovation – although I would say that some of the biggest companies in this space really are pretty slow in innovating and there's a huge opportunity for startups to come out and disrupt the industry.
I understand that before you became a developer you were a successful writer, writing under a pseudonym a science fiction book that won the award for best use of visuals in a global WattPad competition. At 1500 copies, and 850,000 WattPad reads, it was a major success. With everything going on now, do you still have time to write?
I personally don't have much time to read or write fiction at the moment, although I would love to get back to it. What I do nowadays is mainly write technical articles. Recently I wrote about how you can build a mobile widget using just 30 lines of JavaScript. I think that's something that could be useful for a lot of other people as well. I wrote a Hackernoon article about my experience with One Word Domains.
The book Someone’s In My Head that I wrote while in high school was a science fiction novel – it was a story of a teenage boy who went through a car accident and when he woke up, there was someone else's consciousness inside his head. And he had to figure out who that person is. So he set out on this crazy adventure to figure out, and it was full of plot twists and revelations. There were over 800,000 people who read it on Wattpad. I've sold over 1500 copies of the physical book. I was in high school at that time, and I went to different schools to promote my book. It was, I would say, my first introduction to entrepreneurship. Not exactly startups, but it taught me about running my own business, promoting, marketing, and getting sales. It was a really good experience, that I'm really lucky to have had.
I saved the hard question for nearly last! Why isn’t One Word Domains on a single word domain name?
I noticed this irony in hindsight, when someone pointed it out. I have thought about rebranding eventually to a shorter
.com domain name, but for now I'm staying on OneWord.Domains. They call it a moat in the startup world, a differentiating factor that separates yourself from the competition. I'm still trying to find that factor, and once I do, I will invest in a name that is short and one-word and will become my long term name. But I think "One Word Domains" is a good name for now.I agree that your existing name perfectly describes the product.
What plans for the future would you like to share with NamePros readers?
Currently, I'm working on a site-wide search feature for One Word Domains . With over 350,000 domain names currently on the site, it is critical to be able to access that information in an efficient way. I've had this this feature requests from a ton of users. I'm working right now on a new way to search, using the Spacy NLP library. It's a machine learning library. If you give it a word, it will find the words that have the closest similarity score with that search word. So it's not just using the root word, but also other similar words. Note added: I see this search is now active in One Word Domains.
Another feature that I'm working on is a domain name generator. I know, it's very overdone, but I really want to do something that is highly personalized to the users preferences, and hopefully something that can disrupt the competition. What I envision is you will put in different aspects of your preferences somewhat similar to a personality test, and it comes up with a holistic brand profile that it uses for recommended names. It also checks for trademark evaluation, social handles and more, all in one tool. I think it's a much grander project, and I am developing it for my senior thesis, which is really exciting.
What are your plans after graduation from university?
I'm going to be doing my own thing, my own startup, or work at a fast-growth startup for the first couple of years, and then eventually maybe go to a bigger company.
I like this quote from Steven’s online backgrounder:
He also comments in the same post on the domain field.
You can learn more about Steven Tey and his work at StevenTey.com. You can connect with Steven on NamePros StevenTey. From time to time he posts in the NamePros promotional section, such as when he announced the subscription model.
Thank you very much for the interview, Steven. It was very inspiring and illuminating to learn more about you!
I suspect numerous NamePros members have ideas for great tools. I hope that this interview will inspire more to take the step of developing them.
Last edited:
