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

[Dynadot]

APA will begin Friday, May 22 from 4-6pm PDT, but wanted to open the thread now in case you're unable to join me during that time. If you have questions or comments you would like to make, feel free to submit them here and I will try to address them during the interactive interview session.​

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I started Dynadot in 2002, in a spare bedroom at home. I still remember getting my first order for $7.99, and jumping up and down in excitement. Back then Verisign charged $6 per .com domain, and there was no ICANN fee yet. In those early days I did everything: customer service, website programming, accounting, and marketing. As the business grew I eventually rented an office and starting building the excellent team running the company today.

I have loved computers since I was a child. Writing code and solving technical problems always came naturally to me. I studied computer science in college, and spent many hours in the dark underground computer labs at UC Berkeley. Sadly I stopped coding about 2 years ago, to focus on strategy and management. But someday I plan to return to my first love, computer programming.

Why did I start Dynadot? I was building a website for my mother for her vacation house. I was using another registrar, and thought to myself I could write a better control panel. Being young and naive, I didn’t think that much and just jumped in and applied to be a registrar. It is a competitive and difficult industry, but I have enjoyed all these years, and am proud of what we have built.

Ask me anything.

 

[Dynadot]

Thanks for sharing your Dynadot story! I see now why you have built a successful Registrar, because you have built it from the beginning!
If some day you leave the company because it becomes too big that you sell it to a group of investors that don't have a clue about coding or running a Registrar, that day will be the end of Dynadot. I hope that case never happens!
But you just have to see what happened with Yahoo (not a registrar ok, but it works here), NetSol... etc.

I agree with you that who owns the company is very important. I get emails every week from people trying to buy Dynadot, or people trying to lend us money. I have never responded to a single one of these emails. My priority is to serve our employees, and to serve our customers. I don’t want to be serving investors.

Dynadot was lucky in that it was slightly profitable from the early years. So each year we took that profit and hired a new person, or bought a new server. We could build the company the right way, with rock solid foundations. Each year we invested in ourselves and the success of our customers. Now our patience is starting to pay off, and I am grateful to say that we have seen impressive growth in the last few years.

Also long term we plan to become an employee owned company.

- Todd

 

[Dynadot]

Hi Mr. Todd, honored to meet you. Why the name, Dynadot?

Thank you for this question. Dynadot is a word I made up. Dyna is short for dynamic. Dot is short for domain name (dot-com, dot-org). So Dynadot is meant to imply a dynamic domain name platform. From the beginning I wanted to build a powerful, flexible, automated, well-designed system for domain buyers. So hopefully the “dyna” part of the name captures that feeling a little.

- Todd

 

[Dynadot]

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?

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

 

[Dynadot]

Best & worst business decision you have made as Dynadot CEO?

The best decision I ever made is to not take any investor money. Our headquarters is based in San Mateo, which is right next to Silicon Valley. There are about 100 venture capital and private equity firms within a 30 minute drive of us. Let’s just say that it would have been extremely easy for us to get investor money. But then we would have lost control of the company. My goal is not to grow as fast as possible. More than anything I want to build a long term business with solid fundamentals.

My worst decision is to continue writing code for as long as I did. I am an excellent coder, so this seems counterintuitive. However by spending time coding, I was not spending time building our team, and writing our strategy. I finally stopped coding around 2017. Since I stopped is when we have seen the most dramatic growth.

- Todd

 

[Bravo Mod Team]

i have yet to see your photo, Mr. Han

 

[Dynadot]

Nice to know the dynadot story Todd, congratulations !!

Here is my question:
Revenue-wise, how much has the company grown in all these years?

Thank you for your question about our revenue growth. In 2018 we grew 33% and in 2019 we grew 69%.

- Todd

 

[dande]

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.

 

[Dynadot]

I am really glad that you are doing this Ask Me Anything. Thank you! Congratulations on the success of your business, and the fine service you offer to domain investors.

The user interface for your service seems to me to work very smoothly. Nice User Experience. I wonder how large is your technical staff team?

I am glad that you offer marketplace and auction options on your site, as well as being partners for Afternic and Sedo, so lots of sale choice options for names registered there. Any plans for changes in your marketplace?

Thank you,

Bob

ps loved the story of your mother's vacation house website and why you started!

Yes staffing distribution is a very important question. You can tell a lot about a company based on who is on the payroll. We have 28 engineers, and 4 designers. Our product teams comprise the majority of our staff. The second largest team is the customer service team. Almost all the money we make is invested back into developing our products and supporting our customers.

Thank you for mentioning our Afternic and Sedo integrations. We did the complete integration for both (with fast-transfer). In fact we were amongst the earliest registrars to integrate Afternic and Sedo. Here is a photo of me getting an award from the Afternic team (scroll bottom):

https://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2020/dailyposts/20200207.htm

In regards to changes in our marketplace, yes we have complete overhaul of our marketplace currently being coded up by our engineers. We will be implementing a brand new For-Sale landing page, an improved Make-Offer system, and historical sales data.

- Todd

 

[Dynadot]

There was a time i used to have 100's of domains on dynadot,
Really nice to have you open-up on Namepros and tell your story.

I still have few domains with you guys..

Sorry we lost most of your business.

Domain transfers is the great equalizer in our industry. Adding transfers to the domain name system was probably the best decision ICANN ever made. It forces registrars to compete to keep the customer. It gives new registrars a chance to compete against the existing registrars.

- Todd

 

[Compassion]

Thank you for your presence here, Dynadot has a solid reputation on NP!

 

[Dynadot]

Also, what was your age when you started Dynadot?

Dynadot was started in 2002. At the time I was 29 years old. For the first year it was just me at home, reading technical APIs and coding up the website. I launched the website in 2003.

- Todd

 

[Dynadot]

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

What other registrar do you look up to and why?

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

 

[Dynadot]

What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?

My favorite “meaning of life” message is from Steve Jobs:

I show this video to my daughters every few years.

- Todd

 

[NickB]

What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?

42

 

[Dynadot]

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?

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

 

[Cryptotoda]

Hi Mr. Todd, honored to meet you. Why the name, Dynadot?

What i can Guess: @Dynadot

Reverse the name "TODD" to "DDOT" and then elaborate it, which then becomes - "D for Dyna" + DOT"

 

[Dynadot]

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.

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

 

[Dynadot]

You dont have to answer this;

What is your best domain?

Samer

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

- Todd

 

[Sutruk]

Thanks for sharing your Dynadot story! I see now why you have built a successful Registrar, because you have built it from the beginning!
If some day you leave the company because it becomes too big that you sell it to a group of investors that don't have a clue about coding or running a Registrar, that day will be the end of Dynadot. I hope that case never happens!
But you just have to see what happened with Yahoo (not a registrar ok, but it works here), NetSol... etc.

 

[Edward]

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?

 

[Dynadot]

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.

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

 

[The Durfer]

Hi Mr. Todd, honored to meet you. Why the name, Dynadot?

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I am really glad that you are doing this Ask Me Anything. Thank you! Congratulations on the success of your business, and the fine service you offer to domain investors.

The user interface for your service seems to me to work very smoothly. Nice User Experience. I wonder how large is your technical staff team?

I am glad that you offer marketplace and auction options on your site, as well as being partners for Afternic and Sedo, so lots of sale choice options for names registered there. Any plans for changes in your marketplace?

Thank you,

Bob

ps loved the story of your mother's vacation house website and why you started!

 

[Dynadot]

Hi Todd,

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

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