If I were to make domain software, what would you want me to make?

[x11joex11]

In advance, I'm sorry if this is the wrong location for this. Moderators: Feel free to move this to the location that best fits.
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Hi Everyone,

I'm a full time entrepreneur, software developer, marketer and domain investor and I really love this industry. I'm asking for your help to be given an idea that I can create that will solve a problem you have. Maybe your problem does not have a solution yet? Or if it does exist could be better?

Maybe you have always wanted to make something cool and wanted a developer to help you with it. I don't mind, I'm willing to work for equity on great ideas and with an equally committed partner. I'm confident I can create just about anything you put your mind to, it's just a matter of time.

My entire life I've thought I had to come up with the idea and create the product and then try to sell it to you, but I see now that is wrong. I will only at best be able to 'guess' what it is you want and worse make something that no one understands or needed in the first place.

There is a big difference between what I think is useful and what people are actually willing to take out their credit cards for.

In that spirit, my goal is to find something in common between domainers right now that is a problem that perhaps I can solve with software, and that if I solved it, how much would you pay for this software? If perhaps the problem is not software I'm still open to it as I may be able to put together a human resource team to solve the issue as well.

Some ideas are good, but they may cost $10,000 or even $100,000 in development costs to create, and if you (or the market) are/is only willing to pay $5/month or a one-time fee for the idea, it's probably no surprise why it has not been created yet (since your pain/problem is obviously not great enough to warrant you pulling out your wallet for the required $ amount the product will require to sustain it's self).

If you give me ideas, I will give you estimations of the development cost and what I would need to sell it for to recuperate my costs, and if enough people support the idea I will do it. In fact the people that support the idea will be given a discount for life that start now or invest into it's creation.

But most importantly I need your HONEST opinions if you would REALLY pull out your wallet and pay for the software idea if I were to create it.

I'm looking forward to what you guys come up with, thanks!

 

[-Adam-]

Hey Joe,

What's your programming background? C, C#, PHP, IOS, etc..? Also would you be willing to sign disclosure forms?

 

[x11joex11]

I can program in PHP/C++/JAVA/Objective C. Other technologies I'm an expert in are the use of MySQL for proper database creation, Web Server Setup from scratch, and cross desktop application (via Realbasic or C++). I can also make mobile apps for iPhone (Objective C) or Android (JAVA), anything you can imagine (as long as it's realistic), I can most likely do if given the proper resources. My resume on vWorker is here by the way (http://www.vworker.com/RentACoder/DotNet/SoftwareCoders/ShowBioInfo.aspx?lngAuthorId=6699556), I am NOT looking to be paid for my skillset, I'm looking for a business partner on a good idea that can help this industry.

I don't mind signing disclosure forms however I'm not sure how much that really protects the idea or if it even does at all. I'm just saying this from experience and to give you my opinion but I'll sign anyways. When I get the chance later I'll try and link you to an article on this subject which may make you change your mind about spending time with that in the future.

 

[Kamikaze]

I don't mind signing disclosure forms however I'm not sure how much that really protects the idea or if it even does at all.

+1!

You are right. it's B.S.

 

[Dave]

Joe I too am a software developer and I have often pondered what software I could create to help others. Depending on the idea there maybe limitations. For example I had hoped to create software to manage and update all a user's domains from one interface across a wide host of registrars but the trouble was asides from Dynadot and Name.com no other registrar had a suitable API that could be used for this.

Here's one idea for you. I have recently heard LeadRefs.com will be shutting down but I still think it has potential. Perhaps come up with some ideas on how this could be improved and how to engage domainers and end users even more closely? Perhaps have two accounts (domainer and end user) and let each sign up. An end user can set keywords and receive alerts when domains that get added to the system match their keywords perhaps?

Anyway just throwing a few ideas and examples out there.

 

[Bannen]

engage domainers and end users even more closely?

When I saw your thread title, my first thought was the same - a more efficient tool to 'mine' end users from the search engines.

Leadrefs was fine but I found it quite limiting. Was thinking along the lines of a tool that would find your keywords in the domain name of other sites (like leadrefs), but also have the option/s of finding sites with your exact keywords used in one or more of their page titles, and/or as keyword metatags on at least one page, and/or used at least 5 times throughout their site, etc, then mine each of those sites and send you any emails found on the site. Might also mine the source code of any email forms on each site to provide you with any mailto: addresses it finds in a form.

Then a simple collation of each website name + plus all emails found on that site.

Something like that would be a tremendous end-user-finder, to me. I'd pay cash to use that tool

But that's a tool to find possible end users, and the other part of the equation is put more end users together with domainers. That's a million-dollar-question I haven't figured any angles to yet

 

[-Adam-]

Lol, Geez I just asked if he would mind signing the forms. I made no claims to their guarantees or effectiveness. Nothing more than a simple question to determine his stance on them people.

 

[x11joex11]

If you don't mind me asking Bannen and Dave, and please be honest with me, how much would you pay monthly for a subscription to a website service like that? What absolute critical features would the software have to have for you to pay that price as well.

I just have to make sure that if I spend my time developing a product that it's something you and people similar to you will actually want to purchase. I'm more than positive this is something simple for me to create and won't take to long to develop as I understand it now, maybe at most a month so far.

From what I can see the tool leadrefs appears to help you quickly acquire emails from websites for your use in emailing to try and get leads for your business. This is not that difficult to program. Perhaps leadrefs did not listen to what their customers wanted if they are truly shutting down?

If anyone else wants something made like leadrefs as how Bannen described please let me know and most importantly what you would be willing to pay monthly for a tool like this.

I have to make a profit or else how would I maintain it? and have to recuperate my costs from development that I will incur so really think about what would be reasonable to you and I will run the numbers and start putting a plan together here for a software product like that. I'd like to see at least another 4-6 people that feel the same way about this that are willing to spend money for a product that does what you describe. That will be a pretty good indicator that we are on to something that would actually be valuable (and hopefully get one step closer to the million dollar idea :P).

I'm not afraid to just the list the entire idea out here and project scope and work on this together or by email back and forth if you would like.

If anyone else can contribute some ideas or if anyone else agrees with a product like how Bannen described let me know please. My email is joe [at] itechware.com if you wish to contact me outside this thread or you can PM me.

P.S

Sorry Adam, didn't try to make a big deal out of it, just wasn't sure if you were aware about that.

 

[Bannen]

If you don't mind me asking Bannen and Dave, and please be honest with me, how much would you pay monthly for a subscription to a website service like that? What absolute critical features would the software have to have for you to pay that price as well.

I think $10 - 15/month would be fair for the following service, a little more if it worked superbly. Something where you'd put in your domain name or keywords, the tool would check search engine results, and return some stats for each website that met the selected criteria. Maybe come back with a list of stats for each site, like how many times your keyword/s were found on the first 10 or 50 sites or whatever. Results for each site could look something like:

(you put in your keywords like 'conan the barbarian' and receive the following info) :

keywords: conan the barbarian

First 20 websites found:

website 1: conanthebarbariannude.com
keyword in metatag keywords for: 8 pages
keyword in title for: 1 page
keyword in description for: 3 pages
keyword in content for: 18 pages

email addresses found: 4
admin (at) conanthebarbariannude.com
(3 others)

email addresses in forms found: 1
redsonja (at) conanthebarbariannude.com


website 2:
etc etc etc



Then another block of stats for the next website etc, that kind of thing. To list those email and keyword stats and have them all compiled clearly would give me a valuable overview of the strength of that website as a possible buyer/end user of my domain conanthebarbarian.com. That would be a killer tool. There are some tools that try to scrape email addy's from matching sites, but none (that I've found) that collate that keyword info to show you how well your keywords match with each site found, and collate the emails found on each site. Most such tools only find other domains with your keyword/s in their string, and then mine the whois for an email addy, but a tool like described above would be a strong step further. If it could be created effectively. I don't know what the hurdles would be to creating this kind of software or whether the SE's would like/hate it and block those functions. Just putting it out there because that would be a dream tool for me.

Right now myself and most others who are looking for end users are having to manually dig this info by strolling through a site and its source code, great to have a tool to save us all that time.

Just my 2 cents

 

[x11joex11]

I just want to say, THANK YOU so much Bannen for your detailed description for that tool, if you don't mind I'd like to talk to you more about this in person so to speak (via PM or Skype) to learn more. Sounds like something very interesting to create. Does anyone else agree that the idea is interesting and something you would be open to paying for?

 

[dtagr]

I would pay $15/month for that, perhaps more.

 

[x11joex11]

Great, I need as much support from users about this as possible before I start development to make sure there is a market for it. Looking good so far, I'll send you a PM dtagr.

 

[jideofor]

This is cool.. but I will suggest that you also reach out to other domain forum

 

[x11joex11]

Yeah I will ask around, what other good domain forums are there?

 

[DNabc]

I made some suggestions to Leadrefs, like the bulk tool, and some months later they added it. I didn't liked the 100 searches per day limit, I said I was willing to pay more to raise it, but there was no such option.

Listening to your customer's feedback is very important, I wish you good luck.

 

[x11joex11]

Yeah customer feedback is everything, I will keep the 100 searches per day limit in mind, how many searches per day would you require for that concept? How much would you pay for the increase in it?

 

[HostPoet]

In advance, I'm sorry if this is the wrong location for this. Moderators: Feel free to move this to the location that best fits.
-----------------------

Hi Everyone,

I'm a full time entrepreneur, software developer, marketer and domain investor and I really love this industry. I'm asking for your help to be given an idea that I can create that will solve a problem you have. Maybe your problem does not have a solution yet? Or if it does exist could be better?

Maybe you have always wanted to make something cool and wanted a developer to help you with it. I don't mind, I'm willing to work for equity on great ideas and with an equally committed partner. I'm confident I can create just about anything you put your mind to, it's just a matter of time.

My entire life I've thought I had to come up with the idea and create the product and then try to sell it to you, but I see now that is wrong. I will only at best be able to 'guess' what it is you want and worse make something that no one understands or needed in the first place.

There is a big difference between what I think is useful and what people are actually willing to take out their credit cards for.

In that spirit, my goal is to find something in common between domainers right now that is a problem that perhaps I can solve with software, and that if I solved it, how much would you pay for this software? If perhaps the problem is not software I'm still open to it as I may be able to put together a human resource team to solve the issue as well.

Some ideas are good, but they may cost $10,000 or even $100,000 in development costs to create, and if you (or the market) are/is only willing to pay $5/month or a one-time fee for the idea, it's probably no surprise why it has not been created yet (since your pain/problem is obviously not great enough to warrant you pulling out your wallet for the required $ amount the product will require to sustain it's self).

If you give me ideas, I will give you estimations of the development cost and what I would need to sell it for to recuperate my costs, and if enough people support the idea I will do it. In fact the people that support the idea will be given a discount for life that start now or invest into it's creation.

But most importantly I need your HONEST opinions if you would REALLY pull out your wallet and pay for the software idea if I were to create it.

I'm looking forward to what you guys come up with, thanks!

Hi,

I for one am on board with this. However please don't expect me to give away my big ideas of my lifetime (or at least the last several years) away for free on this public forum. Also for the record I am in fact responding to you because of your entrepreneurial spirit.

I have many good ideas, of course being that they are my ideas, I am bound to be somewhat biased. So allow me to propose this. Lets exchange our emails, via private messages (to and from each other) and then move forward with some general sense of what "we both may already have in the hopper" but have not yet figured out how to make these ideas into viable products.

I have read up on, and joined some entrepreneurial websites (threads) etc, and have learned much. My 1st basic assumption is that much of what makes me valuable is the ability to predict and extrapolate useful products based on current and future trends.

I can tell you more however I will leave you with this:

For me to be successful I need these following positions filled:

1) Co-Founder ( I was thinking maybe you).
2) A finance person- Obtaining seed funding is always essential
3) Skiled programmers- A prototype is always needed to get the idea into a product, and normally the programmers must be paid for their work.

:bingo:

I am sure there are other positions yet I can honestly say that most web based ventures will require people with these skill sets.

We need to start somewhere, and I thought let's for now focus on these areas and then make sure we have the basics to get things going.

Stephen
%%-

 

[x11joex11]

I'm open to working with people for sure. My goal is that it must solve a real world issue/problem that I can verify people have and that they will pay for, and not just think that they will pay for either. I mean people ready to drop their credit-cards right now just on the concept of the idea or product. I think that is when you know you have a great idea and a problem that really needs to be solved and the grounds for a successful business.

I'm always looking forward to more ideas, but mostly problems you face on a day-to-day business in domaining or anything you do along the way. I may be able to find a solution to helping.

 

[Bannen]

Another strong possibility is to create a dedicated domain escrow service. Escrow.com is kind of okay but is not complete (they don't take control of the domain and they don't speciallize in domains), and Sedo.com is great but their commission is pretty high.

I have a thread running about eCop.com here:
http://www.namepros.com/domain-name-discussion/738010-ecop-com-please-report-any-experiences.html

but eCop is not inspiring confidence and are not bonded etc. To create a dedicated domain escrow service with rates that are more competitive than Sedo, and to make the entire process secure, bonded, complete, etc, IMO would be a certain winner among domainers and end users alike, and a good escrow platform can be a real cash cow to the creators if done well.

Just another suggestion

 

[x11joex11]

Yeah I've heard there was a need for this from other users also. I heard the user-interface for sedo.com was terrible, and they are for sure expensive.

So in your opinion, the most important factors towards you wanting to use the service are...

1.) Bonded
2.) Complete
3.) Entire Process Secure (What would make you feel 'secure?', like an https link?)

What do you think inspires confidence?

Also what are the most CRITICAL factors to a domain escrow service. I noticed SEDO seems bloated with all this stuff, I would have to start out simple.

I'm just guessing but...

1.) A way to add your domain to my service (easily)
2.) A way for the end-user to purchase the domain on my service (in an easy manner)
3.) A way to safely trade money between the two parties through escrow (which I do have a connection to an escrow company for this. My cousins own there own escrow company. Does it need to be a particular escrow company to be trusted though?)
4.) A process for walking the users through the domain transfer and releasing funds when the process is complete. It will probably copy SEDO here.

Am I missing some critical features?

Does anyone know how expensive it is to actually get bonded? Maybe I can create a Kickstarter campaign to cover costs/raise capital for something like this if there is enough demand.

 

[HostPoet]

Joe,

I have now taken the time to read this entire thread along with the responses. The proposal that I have put together for I admit is not specifically targeting the needs of the domaining industry. Additionally, forgive me if I may have under-estimated your coding abilities.

The novel thing in my specific approach is that I have envisioned several different web based ventures, and have provided some information to get you on board with it. Please respond back to the email that I sent you to your email at itechware The landing page and the php forms should be relatively easy for you to code. If perhaps the equity does not appeal to you, then perhaps we coud figure out something else as long as I am not required to spend money which is currently in short supply.

 

[VegasCoupons]

Just sent PM, I need a LeadRefs.com alternative, asap.

 

[x11joex11]

Good to know, I am working on it as soon as possible. I already have some of it working in prototype, it's taking me some time to graph it all out, I'll put my progress on here as soon as I can.

---------- Post added at 01:40 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:52 AM ----------

By the way, does anyone have a good domain I could use with this? If you have a good domain and an email marketing list in the domain niche I'm down to partner with you on this project, otherwise I'll just get any old domain, I have a feeling it doesn't matter to you guys :P.

 

[x11joex11]

I've attached my latest user experience flow chart for the app, I'm going to go into detail on how the CRON job will work next. Don't worry if you don't get everything, I'll explain it soon.

 

[x11joex11]

I have have to raise my prices a little to cover some unexpected costs, we'll see though. I can keep the prices the same but i may have to limit the amount of pages everyone can search through.

Limited to 10,000 searches daily, and every 1000 cost $5 which could get costly rather quickly. I'll see what I can do about this though.

I'll take as much as advantage of that free 100 as possible though.

See the link here.

https://developers.google.com/custom-search/v1/overview