I couldn't be happier right now.
I've been working on www.namy.ai for a while, and yesterday I finally finished making & training an AI model that I was happy with, and deployed it to live. Then I made a small announcement on Twitter (~300 followers) about it.
Some people visited and entered prompts, loitered around, but I didn't see anyone actually buy a domain. "Oh well" I said, I still needed to improve my SEO anyways (barely have done anything on that front😅)
BUT TODAY I log into my dashboard, and I see:
balance: €0.99 EUR
😲
It finally happened!!!!!! My FIRST internet money that I earned on my own!!!!
I know it's not a lot and that I have a long way to go (and just making twitter posts is not sustainable. I need to improve SEO.), but damn does it feel good!
It's definitely validating that someone, somewhere paid money for something you built. Great feeling!
Anyways I just wanted to share this little victory with the community here. Wish you all the best!
Top comments (29)
Awesome, congrats!
It happened to me last week. I started my new blog and somebody just bought me a coffee :)
Keep up the good work!
Ooooh Awesome!!!
Where's a link to your blog? Send me one :)
Also, are you going to continue blogging? I wrote one blogpost last year, but then got overwhelmed and never again ^^
Here is the link to the blog:
uselessdivs.com/
I will continue blogging. There is only one post yet, but a new one is on the way. :)
Love the Halo effect on your buy me a coffee. Did you do that yourself? (I imagine so, mine doesn't have that ahhaha)
Dude I love your blog. Super super clean design, and good content.
You need a subscribe box asap. I want to put in my email and be notified when you write something new.
Substack, Revue, mailchimp, tinyletter, etc...
Get it!
Yes, I did the halo effect myself, I like when every interactive element has a hover effect.
Thank you for the kind feedback, it means a lot to me.
To start a newsletter is on my todo list since the beginning, but I wanted to create a few post before i start it.
Now I think I have to give it more priority :)
I followed you on twitter. Follow me back if you want to be updated about the new blogpost, until I start the newsletter :)
Yeah it takes you 20 mins to make one and you can just add a little box at the end.
I literally just dropped a link at the bottom that leads to tinyletter.com/hugomontenegro, and about 20 people subscribed after reading my blogpost.
Do it!
Thank you for the tip and the reccommended services, I will add it to my blog soon.
Are you for real, 🤯 this is actually really interesting that you can do that!
Yep, it suprised me too. :)
I added a newsletter form. I choosed Mailchimp. Thank you for the tip :)
Dope dude.
Nice project man, congrats! I checked out the website and I think there's a business case for it (although that's just a wild guess). Hope you get more sales soon, let us know how it goes.
Thanks Karel!
That's what I'm hoping for :P I know today's revenue wasn't a lot, but at least it validates (for me) that someone is interested in this. They find namy useful.
So I'm going to continue building & marketing it, and see where it goes.
Further question: Did you find it useful? Would you use it yourself? Any negative (or positive) feedback?
If I had a (mainly online) business, I would probably use it yes. Just to check if there are available domain names which either match my business or the category which my business belongs to. Maybe they're a bit goofy so they don't speak to me right now, but they might in the future. And since domain names are cheap, it could make sense to buy them early.
Plus, what users search on today might be different tomorrow. And I guess (since it's nearly impossible to know) that match between search term and domain name remains relatively important as to where you end up in the search results.
As to my feedback: the returns I got were perhaps a bit far-fetched, but could be useful. If I was a marketing manager who had to use this (and in my mind, they're the ones who decide over domain names, not the IT department), what I'd like to have:
Man, thanks SO MUCH for this detailed feedback. Thanks for taking the time to write this all out.
Super useful!! I'm saving this all in my feedback folder.
Thanks again!
You're welcome! If you ever need more feedback, feel free to ping me on Linkedin (linkedin.com/in/karelds).
As a final note: I believe a lot of domain name registrars (take GoDaddy just to name one) would love to have what you're building. They already recommend other domain names based on a customer's search, but you can (over time) provide significantly better results with AI. Then you could probably convince registrars to use your API for a fee (granted it's reliable and meets modern standards) instead of them having to build their own tooling around this.
Also know that this is just my view on things (but without trying to sound arrogant: I've worked for a registrar before, and I've also worked on a product launch for which we had to find and register domain names). There might be others who have another take on this and it's worthwhile to have as much feedback as possible. But since you're actively asking for it, you seem on the right track.
You're awesome, I'll add you on LinkedIn.
Yes, I was thinking of offering an API. If services like GoDaddy used it, that'd be a dream come true!
Congrats Hugo! May this just be the start of many more that follows!
Let's hope that ahahha
Thanks Motabar!
Fingers crossed 🤞 You're welcome! :)
Congrats!
Thank you Corey! Long way to go, but it is a good start I think :)
Congrats! Waiting for the story of your first $100!
Congrats!!!
Thank you Tu!
🍻
Congratulations that's a really good sign, if one person thinks it has value, then the rest is a bonus 🧘♂️
Right? That's what I've always heard. It's much easier to scale from 10 customers to 10.000, than it is to scale from 0 to ten.