Spaceship Doubles its DUM

At the end of July, I wrote about Spaceship surpassing 100,000 domain names under management (DUM). The registrar continues to grow, and its Founder Richard Kirkendall announced it has more than 200,000 domain names under management:

In a few short months, Spaceship has surpassed 200k domains under management. We have had 63,000 domains transferred to us with over 90% of those transfers being from registrars other than Namecheap. Big thanks to all of our customers!

— Richard Kirkendall (@NamecheapCEO) October 2, 2023

As it continues to grow, I am sure there has been some speculation that Spaceship would cannibalize its sister registrar, Namecheap. That doesn’t appear to be the case at this point. According to Richard, 90% of the most recent 63,000 inbound domain name transfers came from registrars other than Namecheap.

I asked Richard why he thinks Spaceship is growing so rapidly. “I believe we are the best value out there to start but what we’re finding is that when people use us and start to see the beautiful user experience we’ve built along with the powerful tools and innovation we are bringing to domain management, they end up immediately transferring their domains to us,” Richard told me.

I have always admired Richard. He is an active, hands-on CEO, and he is also approachable. He actively engages with customers and critics on Twitter, and he seems willing and interesting in receiving and accepting feedback. “Right not we are focused on building, we have a team of over 250 UX designers and engineers focused solely on Spaceship so we are laser focused on gathering customer feedback and shipping features fast,” Richard also shared with me.

Spaceship has a long way to go until it becomes a top domain registrar by DUM, but it is neat to see it taking off (pun intended).