A colleague emailed to ask me why I am not working with a specific landing page service he has been using. I neither have enough domain names to really give a company a fair shot, nor do I have the desire to set up many accounts at different platforms, giving access to private data to many companies.
The first issue is the primary issue. If I set up an account at a new landing page or parking service and only test 50 domain names, there’s a pretty good chance there will be very minimal impact – either positive or negative. Is that the fault of the service provider? No, of course not. I can’t pass judgment on the performance of a company with a limited number of domain names for a limited amount of time. If the service sucks or is bonkers, I won’t know if it’s the service, the names, seasonality, or a multitude of other factors beyond their control. It would be silly to test out a whole bunch of services when I can’t really determine why a test went well or went poorly.
I am unwilling to give access to my top performing domain names to a company with which I am not familiar. Some domain names may get one single inquiry from the best possible buyer, and it’s not worth taking a chance of losing a buyer or potentially harming a domain name to test various service providers.
I am not going to sign up for accounts at different platforms that would require providing my email address, phone number, banking details, tac forms, and other corporate information. When companies are acquired or retired, this data may be given or sold to other companies I might not want to have it.
I spend quite a bit of time connecting with colleagues either via email or social media, and I can get a pretty good idea about where people are finding success. A great deal of this success is due to the domain names these people own, but some of it is due to the platforms and services they use. If I have a need to fill for my own business, I will seek out one of these services based on my own observations.
There are quite a few new domain investor focused platforms and services that have come to market in the last year. This is exciting to see. I will probably never be the first to try a new service, but I will be happy to jump on board when I see colleagues doing well.
I am testing saw and domaineasy right now and love the customer service and the features.
Disclaimer- i don’t work for them nor getting paid to mention their good services.
SAW has a back end that can’t be beat in features where domain easy has a knock out pretty front end.
I am using both but my high value stuff is at SAW, you cannot beat the back end features when you get an inquiry. DE wont even give you the email address whereas saw gives you that and so much more, a crazy amount of information.
I would expect no less from saw given there are some uniregistry guys there.
Fun fact: NamePros Landers provide the same data and a lot more data with every inquiry, for free. 😊
Granted, if you want a brokerage firm integrated with your landers, then Saw.com’s brokerage is incredible. 👍
There’s another reason service providers may be asking you to evaluate their platform: you have a knack for providing open, honest feedback that’s representative of the larger community. If you indicate that the onboarding process is too cumbersome, for example, that’s invaluable information that a service provider would have difficulty obtaining from other sources. While it may sound selfish, usability feedback in particular isn’t reliant on your success or failure on the platform.
You spend a great deal of time writing about your qualms with the products you daily drive. Any good engineering team knows how difficult it is to get clear, honest feedback like that. A thousand users might be experiencing a small hiccup, and the engineers might never find out were it not for people like you. The polish you see in mature products—or lack thereof—often comes from how engineering teams solicit and respond to that feedback.
This feedback is especially valuable to free and inexpensive services that can’t justify expensive market surveys with the likes of Qualtrics.
Your point about providing feedback is valid and I can understand why that would be valuable.
I don’t think I spend that much time writing about qualms with products/services. In fact, I do my best to only write about those issues when the provider doesn’t fix them after sharing privately first – or possibly mentioning on social media. I’d rather not write about a flaw or shortcoming if it can be fixed. If something doesn’t get fixed after I highlighted it via other channels and others may be dealing with the same issue(s), I may put a bigger spotlight on it here.