.Ai end user domain stories – DNW Podcast #601

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Domain Name Wire podcast. I'm your host Andrew Olamin and this is episode number 601. Today I'm going to speak to two end users, two business owners who switched their businesses domains to.AI domains. One of them started on Somalia's.SO domain and quickly realized the limitations of that extension. And the other started on a.com domain but it was a little too specific. It pigeoned hold his business and so he found a much broader.AI domain to move into. After the new segment, I will be chatting with Felix Inglot and Anjali Angelos. So stay tuned for that. First, a word from our sponsor, our sponsor this week is Spaceship. Spaceship has a huge catalog of top level domains at the lowest prices around such as new.com domains for only $8.88. But with so many domains to choose from, how do you find the best domains to register? Well, Spaceship's beast mode is one of my favorite domain search tools. It lets you check up to 5,000 names at any time across multiple top level domains. You can even check variations like domain hacks and results with prefixes and suffixes. To try beast mode, go to spaceship.com, type a search term into box and then click on beast mode. Again, go to spaceship.com, type in a search term and hit beast mode to check it out. Before we chat with our guests, let's talk about a very busy week in the domain name world. It's the first week in a long time that I've written articles over the weekend because with new top level domain applications already do, a number of companies are disclosing what they applied for. Last Saturday, I wrote an exclusive about Oinkodot, a company that applied for 25 top level domain names. This is a partnership between Todd Hahn, who is the founder of Dinodot and Ray King, the founder of Porkbun. So they merged kind of their names together. They're a little bit Oink for Porkbun and Adot, kind of a fun name for a company, turned it into Oinkodot and applied for 25 TLDs together. A shit note, even though the name pays homage to their registrars, it is unaffiliated. They went after domains like dot dragon, dot anime, dot king, I'm sure Ray dot king will be reserved and there's dot wire in there. So maybe someday you'll type in domain name dot wire. To see their full list, go to my post from August 15th. Then on Sunday, a new website went live for end point domains. This is a partnership between Michael Blend. He founded the Domain Parking Company Hockey's, which he sold to Domain Media and Josh Jones, co-founder and former CEO of Dreamhost. They only revealed eight domains that they're applying for and all of the domains they revealed are potentially in contention with Link Freedom Group. You'll recall last Monday, I had Link Freedom Group CEO von Leileon. So they have other domains, but these are just the ones they're revealed. And yes, it appears that two applicants are going for the dot fart domain name. At least that's what we know so far, Link Freedom Group in end point domains. Other ones they have in contention with Link Freedom Group are big, fab, FTW, happy in SFW. So not say for work, private and dot true. On Monday, I wrote about two more companies and their domains, one is called suffix domains. And on their website suffix.domains, they listed 13 domain names, but they set it up so that it looked like they might have applied for as many as 89 strings. And I think they chose these 13 domains because they also are potentially in contention with Link Freedom Group's domains. Another company, Phoenix Domain Partners, also published 13 strings that it set it applied for and paid the application fees. Some of those are also in contention with Link Freedom Group, including dot merge, dot connect, dot therapy and dot vibe. They have something that don't think will necessarily be applied for by other companies, but we'll have to see. And this is part of the strategy companies took. How can they find a domain that maybe they won't fall into a contention set for? They have dot beach dot bbq dot quote. So we'll have to see if anyone else applied for those names. I should mention that both of these companies have founders that have history with new top level domains. Also on Monday, I came across a website for a company called Journey to the West Corporation. They listed 323 primary and replacement strings mostly related to China on their website. They broke it down into a bunch of categories such as what they call flagship domains, including dot panda and dot dragon, which will be in contention with oinkidot. Nature and geography like orchid and plum, craft and art. So dot porcelain and dot, frankly, I can't pronounce some of these other names. Zodiac in creatures, so dot zodiac, tiger, rabbit, cuisine, mooncake, hot pot, noodle, so other Chinese related foods. Boy, the list goes on and on here. There's so many different categories. And notably, they also had dozens of IDNs. Chinese character IDNs. I'm a little bit surprised there. IDNs did not take off last time. So to see a company go after so many is surprising. But here's the thing. I don't know much about the background of this company. The address on its website is actually for the government office in China that handles domain names, overseas domain names. But the site also says it's backed by domain investors in China, internet celebrities, which makes me think that address is just a holding address. And the strangest thing is that six of the domains it listed as being part of its applications are existing top level domains, like dot fan, dot furniture, dot silk, dot soy, which is one of Google's. So did they really apply for these? Did they put them as replacement strings? Did they not check to see if there were existing top level domains? Or is something funny going on here? We'll have to see. Another top level domain applicant I wrote about is called namespace. And this company is backed by investors in Latin America and applied for a 10 strings, including some that are, once again, in contention with Link Freedom Group. Five of their 10 domains have potentially been applied for by Link Freedom Group, although they could also be replacement strings at LFG. Telegram announced that it is applying for dot gram. And it envisions this as kind of a URL shortener, handles, and a way to create websites for its billion users. And then there's a dot brand application that was announced, Easy Group, which I think their most famous brand is EasyJet, said it is applying for dot. Easy, it does not plan to create sites that replace all of its individual company names, but it says it will complement them. And another exclusive last week, I wrote about name cheap applying for 40 top level domain names. They set up a company called Starlight Registry to apply for the domains. And I think they did a really good job picking their strings here. It's definitely tech forward, names like mesh, matrix, droid, foundry. But I think they found a number that won't go into contention. The only choice they made that I'm questioning a little bit is dot lab, as opposed to dot labs. I've found that most companies that are starting to use the lab term are going with the plural. That said, lab is a three letter and three letter domains are generally favorable. They will go into contention with LFG's dot labs, because this time around, you can't have singular and plural top level domains. Only one can win. And finally, one more dimension, Brian Harbin. He runs grit brokerage and he is applied for dot grit. You can read that story on August 20th. Now, the application date has passed, but I can't hasn't revealed all of the applications. And the guidebook says that you can't avoid auctions by having say your own private auctions like last time or entering into joint ventures. But the way I read the applicant guidebook, it's a little fuzzy on if that rule goes into effect before reveal day, hinges on when these names are technically in contention. I asked I can to answer the question. Can companies work on deals now before reveal day? And the answer I got, I don't think will satisfy a lot of people. They said, quote, I can cannot provide advice or interpretations for specific situations or requests. The applicant guidebook prohibits private resolution of contention sets accordingly, private auctions, joint ventures, and any resolution methods designed to resolve contention privately are strictly prohibited. But it also says contention sets don't really start until reveal day. And I find this answer to be a little bit wishy-washy. They could just come out and say, no, you can't. You can talk to people, but you can't do anything even though it's before reveal day. Kind of reminds me of talking to the IRS if you ask them how to account for your domain investor domain sales. They're not going to give you a straight answer. They're basically going to say, we're not going to tell you-- and we might come after you later. I think ICANN is really pushing a problem down the road here. I can definitely foresee some applications being stalled over allegations of companies working together. All right, for the rest of the news from last week, go check out domainnamewire.com. But now let's chat with our first guest. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm chatting with Felix Ingle of Pedra. Felix, welcome to the podcast. - Thank you. - So Felix, first of all, what is Pedro? - All right, so Pedro is an AI visual marketing platform for real estate and it's a place where all real tours can basically create all the materials for their listings. That means improving their photos, staging the photos of their properties, creating videos, virtual tours, social media content and so on. - Okay, so this goes beyond just virtual staging, but for those that aren't familiar, this is the idea of, you know, you have a picture of a room and you wanna make it look better. So you put the furniture in it and that sort of thing, right? - Yeah, exactly. - Okay. So you started your business at Pedro.so. First of all, how did you come up with the name Pedro? - All right, so Pedro is basically the Catalan word for stone. Okay, Catalan is the language of the, or Catalonia, which is a region in Spain, Barcelona is a capital. And I picked that word because stone is one of the basic materials to build houses and we wanted to build like a basic tool for people to sell houses. So we kind of made that play. It doesn't translate well internationally, but it's short and that makes it like brandable and easy to use. - Yeah, it's easy to spell and as you mentioned, even though it doesn't translate, it's not like your domain was real estate tools and Catalonia, you know, and that doesn't translate at all to anyone else where. So it's a nice short name. But you went with Pedro.so at first. And I'm curious, did you know when you registered that domain that it was the country code for Somalia? - No, so I didn't know. I really liked the name and I wanted to register the domain for it, but dot com wasn't available. And I couldn't even track the owner and this was a bootstrap project. So like actually like tracking the owner with like a budget and so on to buy the domain was just not like a feasible option, which is there was no real budget for this. So I picked that as so because some like famous software companies like Notion, which is like a productivity software was using it. So I said, okay, if they're using it, I might as well use it. Like it must be a normal thing to do. So I picked that because it was also very cheap. It was like 60 years a year, so that was fine. So I started the project off with that. - Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that because the same thing happened. You know, there is Bitly back in the day and all these ones ending at LY and dot LY is Libya's name space country code, which is also another country that's not particularly stable. So I'm curious what happened? Like you start using Pedro.so. Did you run into any issues using a dot SO domain? - Yeah, so for starters, it was hard to rank and we relied a lot of our growth on organic channels like SEO. And in that our domain ended on dot SO was not helping because Google and other website search engines were thinking that this was like a Somalian website. And therefore they were not showing this website to users in other countries who might be interested in a non-staging online services or video services for properties. So that was the main problem. The Google thinking that this was like a Somalian website and it should only be showed to some other people. Then another issue that we found was that some email servers were not really happy about the dot SO. Like they were thinking that this was not a right to use domain or like a fair domain and the domain was activating firewalls if that were a right way to say it in some company. So when I was in like big companies to offer the services and so on, some emails wouldn't get there. So these were the main problems. Also like people were very confused about the dots. I had so many questions about it when I was doing demos in the first year. People were like, okay, what does dot SO mean? And I would have to explain why it meant what it meant and why we put that name and so on, it was just not a helpful resource. Yeah. And then as soon as they hear Somalia, they're like, wait a minute. So you made the decision to switch domains. Tell me what you chose to go with. Yeah, so initially I wanted to go with dot com, but the budget wasn't there. Yeah, I made some investigations and I think the price would have gone between 50k cheapest to up to like half a million, because also paid that I mean, stone in Portuguese. And that's like a huge market in Brazil and Portugal combined. So for like such a simple word, word dot com in like such a popular language like Portuguese, it would have gone opportune. And it just wouldn't justify the price. So I divided between get data dot com and data dot AI. And since the product grew into the direction of dot AI, I thought it would be like the best path. Even though get data dot com was available already, and I could have bought it for like a very cheap price. But instead I went for for the data AI because it was more aligned with the product we're building. Also get Pedro sounds fantastic in English, but most of our customers are in Germany in Spain and then US, but the first two markets maybe would have been a bit confused about the get. So that's why we didn't go that route, even though the domain was available. - Interesting, yeah, because get, use, try, all of these things are common prefixes, but I understand what you're saying here, outside of English markets, I could add more confusion to it. - Yeah. - So the dot AI domain name, dot AI is very popular right now. Also, when did you acquire the name? - So I bought it in August, 2025. - Okay. - And it was a one time after market by, because normally a dot AI, even though it's very popular, it goes around $400, but I have to pay like around $2,000, okay? - Not horrible though, I mean, from an investment standpoint, the fact that now when you're on calls, you actually have a signal in your domain that's actually positive toward what you do, rather than what is that. So have you noticed some differences here after you've adopted this name? Yeah, like way easier to rank the domain and also like for search results in AI. It's hard to like attribute it directly because you don't have like the underlying algorithm visible to you, but yeah, it was like around in a lot of the search engines. - Yeah. And on those phone calls too, those initial phone calls now, it's probably a lot easier 'cause you don't have this hurdle to get over. - Exactly, so I stopped getting those questions about the data so people just get it immediately. What data I mean, like I'm not answering all questions, which is good. - Tell me about how the business is going here. So when did you found this? - So the projects, the first line of code started, was done in, if I remember correctly, let me check one second 'cause I want to be factual. Yeah, it was like May 2023 when I wrote the first line of code. First, it was like a floor plan drawing tool for like everyone, which was terrible to market. - No, I want to buy that. Made the first sale in January 2024 and then incorporated the company in May 2024. - Okay. - And what's your trajectory? - Like you have some big name brands in real estate agents, it seems at this point. - Yeah, so the growth has been quite linear and predictable. It hasn't been like, yeah, no hockey stick for me, which can't be a little bit boring, but it's good 'cause it's growing, it's predictable, it's bootstrapped, it's profitable, and we're kind of writing that AI wave on the real estate architecture. - Excellent. Well, for those listening, Pedro.ai, that's p-e-d-r-a.ai. Pretty cool stuff for real estate agents, so go check that out. And Felix, thanks for coming on the show and chatting with us about your domain change. All right, thank you, Andrew. - All right, that's a cool story. Go check out Pedro.ai, that's p-e-d-r-a.ai. Now, let's chat with Anjali Angelos of Swipe. I'm speaking with Anjali Angelos. He is the co-founder and CEO of Swipe. Anjali, welcome to the show. - Thanks so much, Andrew, for having me really appreciate us discussing Swipe. Yeah, so first of all, tell me what is Swipe? - So Swipeai is a package protection post-purchase solution for Shopify merchants. If an order gets lost, stolen, even damage and transit, we cover it. So the merchant stops really eating the costs of reshipping and instead, they're protecting the line item that really would cost the money. So it becomes revenue that actually gets paid to them. So we work on an insurance model and we actually market ourselves when I'm talking to a lot of Shopify merchants who are your most profitable app and it costs the merchant zero dollars. Because package protection really is a front door thing. It's not the whole house. So we're building an AI layer for the entire checkout experience. Protection was really the first product when we were thinking about checkout plus that we've been building an AI layer. So it's awesome that we were able to get the.ai extension because it's really a clear path for us because with every merchant having serious volume, they're losing money. every merchant is losing money to packages going lost. stolen or even porch pirates. I was just talking to a merchant. They sell sports cards online. And he was telling me, you know, I was working with the competitor of yours and they weren't protecting against porch pirates. I was like, oh my gosh, we love protecting against porch pirates. And most of the merchants just absorb it quietly. I think it's great that we have a solution for swipe in building swipe AI, all on the whole notion of getting paid with no minimums. I think I've seen this one. I've checked out at websites, you know, the same buying something for, I don't know, $20. It might say, you know, paying extra 80 cents to protect your package. And then that gets added onto my cost. So that doesn't cost the merchant anything. They're usually passing that through to someone like swipe, right? - Correct. - Okay. - So typically on the traditional model, the customer is opting in. And there was been some legal things that have happened recently in the space where Shopify has changed the way that the checkout process works. So you always, compliantly have to get that opt in. The customer cannot be automatically enrolled. And that's a big thing that we focus on at swipe AI is being compliant for all of our merchants and our solution that we're rolling out. So it's a small little checkout extension. It's a lightweight widget and it really is optional for the customer, but we've seen across all of our merchants over a 60% opt-in rate. I know it's not. It's not crazy, Andrew. But 60% of customers purchase swipe. - You know, I'm glad to hear that they now require the opt-in 'cause I did buy it once without knowing I bought it. And then I saw the line item on the receipt. I got, and I was like, wait a minute. And I felt tricked. So I'm glad to hear that with your solution and with Shopify now, that's how it works that it's on an opt-in basis. Always swipe, we're always super compliant. We love the opt-in. We actually were one of the first to markets providing the solution to have checkout plus with our opt-in. - Okay. - So tell me, did you originally launch on a different name? - We did. It's actually a funny story because we were thinking when we first came to market, yes, checkout plus is our technology, but what will we call our package protection business? So we were like, okay, post office, maybe post protect what happens when you know the box leaves were protecting post. That was describing a feature that we already outgrown. We ended up in this position where the name is actively arguing against our roadmap. So every conversation really started with a customer's assumption about what we do and then we're spending the first 10 minutes correcting it while we're also building out our full checkout plus product. And I think that was a great segue to having swipe, not boxing us in and swipe with checkout plus is really the moment of purchase. That's the territory we want. And that was big enough for us to build and think decades long, not just on a post purchased level. - Yeah, I mean, this is a trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into. Post protect is a great name for the feature you were describing, but it also limits you. You mentioned you have a looking at your site, sports card zone is one of your clients, right? If they were baseball card zone and then they want itself football and hockey and soccer and all that sort of stuff, it kind of goes against the name, it pigeonholes them. So very common. - Yeah, and postprotect.com was a great.com. I love the domain, but it's nice to now transition and fully move to swipe.ai. - Yeah, so tell me how this process worked. Did you come up with the name swipe and then looked for it? What did you do? - Yeah, so it's a funny story because I'm gonna just paint the scene. It was 3am at a hotel room in New York. I'm concepting with my friend, Dinylo, 'cause we were marketers and we were in New York for a conference and we're just talking now, okay, what's our roadmap look like for postprotect? And I was like, we gotta change the name. - He's a good friend and he just randomly threw out swipe. And it actually really landed. One word, I like the exact motion when you're buying something, you're swiping your credit card in a traditional physical brick and mortar world. And it's not talking about an entire experience, but I think when you think about the card, the checkout button swiped just worked. And the best part about what happened after Dinylo mentioned it, I immediately just went to swipe.ai and found a lander to purchase the domain. And the brokerage we used and the house we used, it's Adam, they were great to work with. Honestly, it was so seamless. We got access to the domain pretty quickly. It was awesome. And now Dinylo is actually a swipe client. - Nice. - The guy who named the company is now running it on his own store. You really can't script that. - So you mentioned AI, a lot at the beginning of this call and you're obviously using a.ai. When I look at your website, I don't really see mention of artificial intelligence. And some curious was AI was having.ai important to you? You had a.com before. What were your thoughts around that? - Yeah, so I love the.ai because it's the truth. And we're not following a trend. We're building AI protection tools for the e-commerce checkout, for our product checkout plus. And that extension is in just a decoration on the name because everyone's thinking AI is trending. It's really the second half of the sentence. And swipe AI really reads is what we actually do. There's a practical side because the one word like swipe.com was never realistically on the table. And I'd rather own a clean exact one word name with the extension that describes the category than settle for like a hyphenated or a padded.com that says nothing. And going back to your point about our AI tools, a lot of it's on our backend, on our dashboard, where we're building our fraud prevention because in this space we're in, there's a lot of friendly fraud. You know, when someone figures out, okay, I can protect. Or I can purchase something and just say it's lost, stolen or damaged. There's a lot of friendly fraud that occurs once they get their first payout. So it's super important that our AI system, every single day it's learning on every single order, on every single checkout, we're capturing data points. - I've never heard that term. What was that friendly fraud? - Friendly fraud, what does that mean? So friendly fraud is when a consumer knows that they can game the system. They're doing fraud, but it's friendly fraud. - Okay. - It's a common phrase in the, yeah, world. - Okay, yeah, I just never heard the term before. So interesting. But I mean, dot AI dimensionally aren't cheap either. No, it wasn't cheap, but you know, we were brute strapping the entire business and Adam had a great feature where they were allowing us to actually pay an installments. So we broke it out monthly. It was a pretty hefty price for the dot AI. - Are you still paying it off? Are you on it? - No, no, we completed that a while back, but it's been great. And we're actually about to, I'm gonna extend the name for 10 years or as long as I can. - Sure, yeah. - Renewal. So the Adam feature you're talking about, a lot of people refer to it as least to own and the sellers can kind of set the maximum terms they have. And then you can of course do it over a fewer months, that sort of thing. - You ended up paying it off over the amount of months you selected at first, or did you end up paying it off early? - We paid it off just on the plan, the set plan. Yeah. It was great, honestly, as an entrepreneur that it was bootstrapping the entire business. It was great not having to pay the full lump sum. So I really think the team at Adam, and it was just such a smooth process. Do you think you still would have bought the domain had that not been an option that payment? - I don't think so. - Yeah, yeah. I think we would have just continued running post-protect and eventually branched off into something else. - Yeah. - Well, tell me about the momentum you have now. You've got this great domain swipe.ai. Has the domain, has it helped you? Can you tell that having that versus post-protect has already helped you? - Yeah, so the rebrand actually did something I didn't expect. It shortened the sales conversation. Because with post-protect, we're always spending the first 10 minutes explaining what we're becoming. How are we going to get away from the traditional package protection? But with swipe.ai, it's actually when we hop on discovery calls, people actually lean in forward and they're like, okay, what is this? It's a one, you know, that one word, unlock really earns us the meeting. It really allows us to be bigger than we are. And it's, honestly, I think it's been game changer. And it allows us really to have such clean branding across all of our pitch decks on our video content. I'm so happy with where we landed. And our business has been just growing month over month. We're delivering happiness on every single order for all of our merchants. We're just so thankful to the less to be a part of the checkout experience. - Yeah, it sounds like you're saying that the one word.ai kind of lends an instant error of credibility. - It does, it does, Andrew, yes. - It's so right. - It's interesting because people in my space have known us about a good one word.com for a long time. But of course.ai has been exploding and importance and popularity in recent years. So it's kind of interesting to hear that from someone who uses, who bought a one word.ai, that you feel like you have that credibility, that instant credibility factor. So that's really interesting. - Yeah, and you know, I was going, I still had this convo actually like eight months ago where we're like talking.com.ai. And I was like, you know, after a while of owning the.ai, I really started to let go of the dot com is the only credible domain. I really believe now that these domain extensions, especially dot AI, is super credible. Yeah. Do you ever run into people who are like trying to email you at swipe dot com and it's bouncing or anything like that? You know, it's interesting because when I'm on the phone, I don't like a cold call and I'm like, oh, go to our website, swipe dot AI. They're typing in swipe dot AI dot com so they're going to AI dot com is interesting. I think it's just going to be something that traditional consumers have to get used to. But in my network, I've had no problems. If they go there, they're going to a domain that sold for, I think of 70 million something crazy. Yeah. It's funny that domain. I saw it on the Super Bowl commercial went to it, but it was, it crashed. Yeah. I don't even know if the guys launched it yet. I'm like, yeah, okay, 70 million plus Super Bowl commercial and he's just kind of getting the side out there. So it's interesting. Yeah. Well, this is great. Congrats on the good domain and everyone who wants to check this out. If you have a Shopify store, go to swipe dot AI or I imagine a Shopify, there's like a marketplace. That's sort of thing. There's an app marketplace. But if you'd like to just get a full demo, we'd love to do it. It costs you zero dollars. You can reach out to swipe at swipe dot AI and we'll take care of you hands on. All right. All right. Thanks, Angelie. Thanks so much, Andrew. Take care now. We're both of my guests today for coming on and talking about their domain transitions and what led to their name choices and how they acquired those new domain names. That's a wrap on this week's domain name wire podcast. You can listen to all previous episodes at dnw.com/podcast or on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]