Macit Tuna of Dofo.com – Domain Info and Branding a Startup

This is my first post on DSAD.com and I’m happy to be here.  It’s exciting to join a group of like minded individuals with diverse backgrounds, each contributing their own bit of uniqueness to the formula.  I think what you will continue to see developing here will be unlike anything previously seen in this space.  Now, on to the interview…

Macit Tuna is the Co-founder of dofo.com & dndisputes.com. Dofo.com collects information on domain names. Their engineers comb the Internet using unique algorithms they have developed and provide you with an overflow of data on more than 350 million domain names.  All in a truly clear way. Dofo.com saves you the time of sifting through multiple sources, and it’s free.

Mike: Tell us a little bit about Macit Tuna. What’s your background and how did you get into domaining?

Macit: I’m a computer scientist and did my master in cybersecurity. My brother Sacit and I have developed dozens of web projects through the years. We are interested in domain names since 2003. I was blogging about domain names between 2007 and 2013. I was also one of the organisers of Turkey’s first domain name events in 2012 and gave some courses about domain names and domain disputes in various universities. We founded Dofo in 2016, but the idea was in our minds for years.

Mike: Dofo.com claims to have a vast amount of information available. What types of information are we talking about and how is this helpful to the end user?

Macit: Our aim is to position Dofo.com as the starting point for people that are building new brands, projects and start-ups and for those looking to register or buy a domain name.

The most important feature of dofo.com is the powerful search. By entering a keyword, users are able to see whether any domain with that keyword is registered, get a list of registered domains containing the keyword and among them, see the ones that are on sale. There are tens of filters you can use to refine the domain names.

As for the domain pages, you can see almost all the information about any given domain name:
Registration info (registered or not)
Sale info (listed for sale or not, if so price, etc.)
Whois info
Website info (active website or not, Alexa info, etc.)
Domain info (language etc.)
Sale history
Dispute history
Whois history
Other extensions
Similar domain names

Another powerful feature of dofo.com is the “Trends.” You can see the registration trends of any keyword on the trends pages.

Our goal is to bring all domain name related information into one place and to present it as easy as possible for everybody, for free.

Mike: Can I buy new and aftermarket names on dofo.com?

Macit: Yes, absolutely. Thanks to our partnership with more than 20 marketplaces and registrars, we cover almost all of the domain name aftermarket on dofo.com.

If the domain name you are looking for is for sale in any marketplace, we direct you to this marketplace to buy the domain name. On dofo.com, we list almost 40 million domain names for sale.

If the domain name you are looking for is available (not taken) we are directing you to a registrar.

Moreover, if the domain name you want is taken and not for sale in any marketplace, we direct you to a domain name brokerage company such as Lumis and DomainAgents.

Mike: Are domainers and business people looking for domain names finding your service helpful? What type of feedback have you received?

Macit: Yes, we have been getting awesome comments from the domain name ecosystem, and that motivates us to make dofo.com better. These are some of the comments we’ve received until now:

Doron Vermaat (Co-founder of Efty.com): Excellent job. Nice to see some innovation in our space and fresh ideas being executed!

Reza Sardeha (Founder and CEO of Undeveloped.com): What I love about this product is the way they bring together data points in an elegant and simple UI.

Abdulbasit Makrani (Founder of Abdulbasit.com): I’m really impressed with your service.

Michael Sumner (CEO of Namebio.com): What you’re doing with Dofo, looks amazing!

Hobi Michalec (Co-founder of Lumis.com): I love the way you’ve designed the platform.

Darryl Lopes (Domain Name Broker): I have tried it, very interesting and useful site for looking up domain names.

Arif Şengören (Domain Name Broker, Uniregistry): Great product overall! It’ll be your number one tool. Congratulations!

Bora Öztunç: As an agency, this is a great tool for us. Today we searched various domains for our customers, matched domains for national and international registration searches, get directed to the source and purchased some of them.

We have been getting some other comment and feedback on Producthunt, Namepros and via social media & email.

Mike: What is your business model? Do you make an affiliate commission on sales through the partners you work with?

Macit: As you know dofo.com is completely free and will always be. We aim to democratize the way people access domain name data and let everyone discover the Internet freely.

Referral commission is one of our revenue models. We will also start to offer some advertisement/sponsorship opportunities to registrars and registries.

Mike: You recently recently released the latest version of dofo.com, what’s next?

Macit: These days we are testing some new features we have been developing for months such as semantic similarity (similar domain names based on meaning and context), powerful language detection and more.

“Domain follow” and search saving features are being tested for a while and will be fully functional soon. You can follow any domain name and will be notified as soon as an update occurs on this domain name such as whois change, sale info change (on sale, price change) and more.

We are also translating dofo.com UI for more than 30 languages because our goal is to democratize the way people access domain name data, in their own language.

We have a plan to launch Smart Name Generator for Startups as part of dofo.com.

We also want to more focus on Dofo Blog and share interesting articles about domain names and the Internet ecosystem for everyone. We already started to post articles on blog.dofo.com.

Dofo users share awesome feedback and feature requests with us. We are always open to hearing your ideas.

Mike: Lots of features to look forward to.  How did you choose the name dofo.com and why? Can you tell us the cost of the name?

Macit: We were calling it as “big-project-d” before naming it (d for domain name). After starting to develop it, we thought we are bringing all the information about any domain name into one place so the name should be something about domain + info.
(A slide from Dofo’s first presentation, at that time the name wasn’t decided yet.)

We generated and looked at dozens of domain names: domaininfo, domainfo, domain + (two letters), etc. Of course with .com 🙂 As a domain name startup, you just cannot launch without a .com extension.

Then we decided to call it as dofo (domain info). The dofo.com domain name was owned by French domainer Francois Carrillo at that time, and interestingly enough he has used the domain name for a basic domain info service. We emailed him, negotiated and then bought the name. We spent more than $30,000 for the domain name. It was high for a non-funded startup, but we took this risk.

Mike: Great use of the name. Dofo.com is not your only project. Tell us about DNDisputes.com as well.

Macit: Dofo.com is our main project, it constitutes the basis for other projects of ours.

We launched DNDisputes.com in 2017 to help domain name professionals to search and analyze domain disputes. There are some other domain name related products we are working on especially for domain registrars and registries but dofo.com will always be our flagship product, and it will always be free.

Mike: Macit, thanks for your time and the insight on dofo.com.

Macit: Thank you, Mike, for this interview. It is a pleasure for me to talk to you. We are always open to hearing your readers’ ideas and comments. Find me on Linkedin and let’s keep in touch.