I am Todd Han, Founder of Dynadot, Ask Me Any Question

Mahogany said:

Dynadot has become my favorite registrar over the last few years. Your story only solidifies that decision.

When facing adversity and uncertainty what do you tell yourself to keep things in perspective and keep moving forward?

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Thank you for this interesting question. I feel that I have a lot of grit and determination. So I am able to endure difficult situations, and fight when the odds are against me. As to why I have grit? I didn’t have a lot of advantages growing up. My family was poor. We were recent immigrants to America. I am introverted by nature, so I have always been a bit of an outsider. So simply encountering and overcoming a lot of small obstacles from a young age probably hardened me in some way.

- Todd

dande said:

Thanks Mr Todd for being with us here. I've been a Dynadot customer since 2009 and helped introduced so many people to the platform in those days.

My Questions:

1. How did Dynadot become a Chinese company. Because your name doesn't sound Chinese?

2. What are you doing to improve the marketplace to be able to complete with the likes of Epik and Dan?

3. Since you started from such humble beginnings, How were you able to afford the ICANN accreditation fees?

Your 5% commission on sales will be a game changer if you manage to improve the marketplace by reducing the 10days hold time to funds after sales. Again, $500 minimum payout is outrageous.

Thanks once again for being with us.

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Thank you for your questions. We are an American company. We are an LLC incorporated in California. We have offices in other countries, but our official headquarters is in San Mateo, California.

We have some exciting marketplace changes being coded up by our engineers as we speak. We will have a redesigned For-Sale page, a new Make-Offer system, and other tools for domain investors.

The ICANN accreditation fees are $4000 a year. I had worked for 4 years at a software company before I started Dynadot. So I had some money saved up from that job. Here is more information on ICANN fees for registrars:

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registrar-fees-2018-08-10-en

Regarding the payout minimums, yes we are working on lowering that.

- Todd

mAd MaX said:

1. Any possibility of Payouts via wire transfer?

2. Processing fee of 5% on payouts is high, don't you think?

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Thank you for your feedback. Yes, I will look into adding wire transfer payouts in the future.

Regarding the 5% fee, credit card processors charge us 2-3%. So we need to recoup that somehow. However I acknowledge your point that perhaps the payout is not the place to do that.

- Todd

xynames said:

DynaDot marketplace - suggestion to include subject and message in reply to Domain Offers

DynaDot marketplace suggestion - minimum offer

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Thank you for these suggestions. Our new offer system will include subject and message in all replies. Also a minimum offer will be added soon.

- Todd

Charizard said:

Do you plan to increase drop catch capabilities by making more shell companies and optimizing script?

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Thank you for this question. We don’t currently plan on adding new ICANN accreditations to our drop catch system. However the drop game is constantly changing so anything is possible. And yes we are constantly working on our drop catch algorithms.

- Todd

Surya Giri Kurniawan said:

Hi Tood. I had using Dynadot as my registrar for years. Until now most of my domains are registered in Dynadot.

I had one suggestion about Forum Name for transfering domains to other Dynadot account. It must be also seen in seller dashboard, not only in Community Auction Field. I had sold domains many times in Ebay, and always got problem for asking buyers the Forum Name. Many buyers sent me their Login names. I had to explain where Forum Name is located with screen shoot. Many ended with making account pull or with a new yahoo mail I made and I hand in the new account.

Honestly for me Dynadot and Godaddy are the best registrars. But buyers in Ebay usually think twice if the domain in Dynadot, it seems because it is not easy to find the Forum Name to transfer I guest. And because Dynadot doesn't sell good Website, Hosting and Email to easily integrated with domains. In Ebay writing Registered in Godaddy makes the domains easily sold.

By the way these are only my feedback. Thank you Todd. Wish a success for you.

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Thank you for this great suggestion. I understand what you are saying, that the forum_name is confusing. I will look into changing how our domain push works.

- Todd

Samer said:

You dont have to answer this;

What is your best domain?

Samer

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I only own 16 domains. I don’t own anything good, mostly just names of family members. For example I own toddhan.com.

- Todd

NameDeck said:

Come to think of it, I do have one question for you.

What other registrar do you look up to and why?

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Thank you for your kind comments. If Dynadot didn’t exist, I would probably register my domains at Porkbun.com. They focus on good design. GoDaddy is also a contender as the industry standard. They have always treated us fairly. However I am more of an end-user of domains, rather than a domain investor. So not sure how valuable my opinion is.

- Todd

HappyW said:

Hi @Dynadot ,
I want to know which city Dynadot's team in China is in and what business is responsible for?

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Thank you for your question. Our office in China is located in Tianjin.

- Todd

Jv1999 said:

Hi Todd! I like dynadot too!
Nice to finally put a name to the registrar!

I think your costumer support is excellent

Next year, I hope to get into your auctions... still learning them.

I'm curious though - I thought all registrars started out as domainers. Was this the case for you? It sounds a lot more like you were more of a dev.

Were you ever buying and selling pure domains for profit before you applied for a registrar?

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Thank you for this question. I have never been a domain investor. I own a total of 16 domains, mostly the names of family members. Meeting and talking with domain investors is important to me, because I don’t have investor experience myself.

Dynadot as a registrar does not own a portfolio of domains either. All the expired domains in our system are either auctioned off or deleted. We don’t keep any of them for ourselves.

- Todd

DomainBanana said:

"I AM TODD HAN, FOUNDER OF DYNADOT. ASK ME ANYTHING."

This would make a nice bumper sticker, line for a Mortal Kombat remix, or personal introduction when visiting 17th-century Wampanoag tribesmen by time machine.

Hi Todd and thanks for your fantastic creation A little attention to UI goes a long way and I'm grateful that Dynadot gets this.

Are there any plans to partner with major credit cards to provide discounts/rewards for all domain purchases and renewals?​

If I could earn/save through a credit card rewards program, it would be easier to stay with Dynadot.

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Thank you for this interesting idea. I believe it is the first time someone has suggested this to me. I will look into credit card reward programs some more.

- Todd

fastcool said:

- how old are you?

- about how much to become an icann registrar that time?

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Thank you for your questions. I am 47 years old. The fee to become an ICANN registrar in 2002 was around $3000 I think. The fee is $4000 now so it has not changed much.

- Todd

Chacha Wixard said:

Please "merge" private seller auctions and expiring domains, so that we (private sellers) can get bid from buyers as good as expiring domains. Buyers do not like buying from other sellers. Unless buyers check whois and check the expiration date, they are should be equal chances.

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Thank you for this suggestion. I understand what you are saying. The expired domain auction page gets a lot of traffic. So it would be nice if user auctions received as much traffic. I will discuss with our aftermarket team.

- Todd

HotKey said:

Hello Todd,

Congratulations on your registrar's continued success, and sharing it's "garage-style" (bedroom) beginnings. From the Dynadot ui, it is evident you are as passionate about the user experience as you are about domain names.

If you may divulge, my question is;

What are the required total fees an ICANN-accredited registrar has to pay out yearly?

Thanks!

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Thank you for your question. There are actually 4 fees that an ICANN registrar has to pay:

1) One time application fee: $3500 (only first year)
2) Yearly fixed fee: $4000/year
3) Yearly variable fee: depends of zone size of registrar (for more info see second link below)
4) Transaction fee: $0.18/domain

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registrar-fees-2018-08-10-en
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/registrar-fee-approval-fy20-09sep19-en.pdf

- Todd

Steven McEvoy said:

What is your go to business tools?


What are you plans for Domain Reseller program?

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Thank you for this question. For internal communication we use Slack. For accounting software we use MoneyWorks. For email we wrote our own system.

Technical: Java programming language. Postgres DB, Linux operating system.

Regarding a reseller program, we have discussed it many times over the years, but as of right now we don't have any definite plans. Reseller registrars are B2B, with long sales cycles, which currently we are not set up for.

- Todd

Omer Doron said:

Hi Todd,

What's your biggest advantage over the other registrars, in your opinion?

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Thank you for this question. Our team is the secret behind our success. As a knowledge based company, our entire business is inside the heads of our employees. We try to set up a company culture where everyone is treated fairly. And people are given room to grow and to make decisions. We have a pretty high employee retention rate. The very first employee I ever hired still works at Dynadot.

- Todd

handpicked said:

Happy to say hello to an successful entrepreneur. My question is, GoDaddy and Bluehost have thier (.in) versions of their international website, and offices in India too. they accepts payments through local internet banking/banks with Indian rupees however, Dynadot needs an international credit card, and a hefty conversion fee / service charges are levied by the credit card company for payments in USD. India being an upcoming market, any plans to step in? locally, with an brick and mortar office?. presently, I only have around 12 domains on Dynadot, this will help me buy more.

I quote here an example of HP printer advertisement for diwali festival on TV during 2018 that was made in an Indianized way, which made HP Printer very popular here ever since, you may plan an entry something like that too. watch here (not affiliated). Thanks.

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Thank you for this question. India is a key market for us. India and China are our two fastest growing markets. We have attended domain conferences in India for a couple of years now. You are right though that we need to do more. We have some big plans for the Indian market this year, but I can’t announce them just yet.

- Todd

Samer said:

Everyone jokes about Godaddy acquiring you, since you do everything right, Mr. Han.

What about the other way around?

We obviously know Dynadot isn't for sale;
Any plans to acquire other registrars?

Samer

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Thank you for this question. We are not looking to acquire any registrars at this time.

- Todd

aelko said:

Mr. Han, some registrars offer a cheap .com domain, but only one or more per customer. For example, GoDaddy $1.17, Fasthosts £1.99, 123 Reg £2.99, Porkbun $4.15, etc. (a more complete list is in my signature). Why doesn't Dynadot have such an offer? Are you planning something like this in the future?

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Thank you for this suggestion. You are correct that we don’t have many below cost offers. I guess one reason is that you have to make up the money in some other way. For example by charging higher renewals or upselling other products.

Our current pricing philosophy is to charge a tiny margin on top of the registry and ICANN costs. Then we push costs down by automating as much of our business processes as possible. Finally we drive volume to get economies of scale.

- Todd

gabri3l said:

It's somewhat clear that Dynadot is your first love and you are emotional attached.
Did you ever bump into the downside of this aspect?

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Thank you for this interesting question. Burnout when starting or running a company can happen pretty easily. There have been some days that I come home and I am just exhausted. But it doesn’t happen that often. I am pretty good at telling other people to do things. So if there is problem, I usually assign an experienced employee to handle it. So I never get overly tired.

- Todd

Alex Solomon said:

Hi Mr.Todd,
Thanks for sharing the story behind Dynadot, truly inspiring.
I've used Dynadot for a while and it's great.
Thanks for the AMA!
I would love to know, how old were you when you started coding ? And have you thought of other projects besides Dynadot as a dev?

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The first code I wrote was during a summer vacation coding camp. I was probably around 11. We used Apple II computers to program a simple animation. My animation was of a spaceship. Dynadot has taken up all my time since I started it. By the time I come home I just want to watch TV or play a game. So I haven’t done any other dev projects.

However I did take up Argentine tango dancing about 10 years ago as a hobby outside work. And that has brought me tremendous joy.

- Todd

NameDeck said:

Out of curiosity, what's a superbulk user? Does it come with any perks?

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SuperBulk customers get a lower pricing level than Regular and Bulk pricing. They are also assigned an account manager. There are some smaller benefits like higher search, api, and whois quotas if you are doing any research or data collection.

- Todd

Edward said:

Hey Todd,

Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer questions from the domain community!

I have some questions for you regarding the scalability and growth behind the success of Dynadot:

1. Who was your second and third hire and their positions?
   
   
2. How large is your customer support team today?
   
   
3. I remember when your developers handled customer support tickets; do they still handle them? Did you find that it was worthwhile to have developers handling customer support? If they no longer handle them, why the change?
   
   
4. What's next for Dynadot in terms of a new service that you don't already have? For example, a CRM.
   
   
5. How many times have you needed to rebuild your codebase from scratch, if at all?
   
   
6. What's your typical pitch for prospective hires unfamiliar with this industry?

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Thank you for these interesting questions. Employees 1 and 2 were both engineers. Employee 3 was customer service.

Our customer service team is 15 people and growing fast.

Yes, everyone in the company used to handle customer support tickets. Especially on weekends or evenings the rest of the company would handle customer support, so the support reps could get time off. However about 4 years ago we reached a critical mass of customer support reps, and so they could cover most of the weekend and evening work. At that time the rest of the company stopped doing front line customer support. However more difficult technical problems are still escalated to the engineers. And more difficult disputes are escalated to our in-house counsel.

I would say that our engineers and customer support work pretty closely together, to this day. Customer service is pretty proactive at getting engineers involved if there is a problem. If there is a bug in our system we want it fixed by the engineers as soon as possible, instead of covering it up or ignoring it. This takes more time on the front end, but in the long run it makes our site more reliable and lowers support costs.

Our next big project is revamping our For-Sale page, our Make Offer system, and the overall aftermarket experience. After that we are investing a lot of time on our APP, which for domains now has feature parity with our website. Finally for our retail customer base we are in the process of re-architecting our email hosting system.

We have rewritten sections of our code base, but in general have managed to keep technology debt pretty low. So we have never needed a full rewrite. I am proud to say that much of the code I wrote 15 years ago is still in use today.

I actually have not hired anyone for many years now. But before I would tell them that the domain industry is in it’s infancy, with difficult problems to solve, interesting people to meet, and room to grow. What else can anyone ask for in a job.

- Todd

Thank you everyone for your wonderful questions. You really made me think. I enjoyed this AMA very much. I am out of time for now.

- Todd

I've really come to love Dynadot as a registar over the last few years (as I started using them for .co and .io registrations) and reading Todd his answers here (and meeting him at NamesCon in January) has even more confirmed for me what a great company he and his team have built over the years. Most importantly, many of the end-users I have sold domain names too are also happy to purchase a domain name that lives within Dynadot as the company has a great reputation with end-users, is US-based and free from any controversies.

Thanks Todd and @Dynadot for this AMA.