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Midano.com - Presenting Max Ralli, DomainsBot
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 Max Ralli,
DomainsBot.
"As soon as a company stops to innovate, it starts to die."
Superior Product + Great Team + Lots of Enthusiasm. Is that all that it takes to
succeed? Max Ralli is a living proof that age and borders have no relevance in the domain world.
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Max, you are arguably one of the youngest faces among serious domain players. Please tell us more about yourself
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| M.R. |
Sure! My name is Max Ralli, I just turned 24 (on January 20th). I started my first internet-based company in 2000. My first company, LocalWhois (now ExpiredDomains.com) provides advanced services and tools to help domain players find the best expired and expiring domain names.
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DomainsBot is fairly new on the domain landscape, but it seems to be taking the industry by storm. What's your secret?
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| M.R. |
DomainsBot introduced the FirstImpact technology in the market about a year ago, and is now being used by several of the largest industry companies, including GoDaddy, Tucows and BulkRegister. I'm pround and amazed of this. I think that there is not just one "secret", but a combination of factors that helped our company get off the ground so quickly. I would say that these factors include a good knowledge of the industry we were approaching, the identification of a common, still unsolved problem, a new way to approach, and solve, this problem, and of course a lot of enthusiasm, craziness and luck.
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There's no doubt that your success inspires many people to get into the business. What would be your advice to them?
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| M.R. |
Get in, the industry needs new products and new faces. There's a lot of possibility in the domain industry, and there's a lot of room for new ideas and new solutions to still unsolved problems. In addition, the industry will face a large growth in the next years, thanks to the expansion of the internet and the increasing interest in companies to take advantage of it to reach new markets.
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How do you handle the competition?
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| M.R. |
We know, and respect, the competition. I believe that as soon as a company stops to innovate, it starts to die. This is even truer for web-based companies. For this reason, we keep innovating, improving current products, and introducing new services and technologies to solve new problems. This is the secret - in my opinion - to be always on the edge and beat the competition.
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What trends do you predict evolving in the domain name industry?
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| M.R. |
I think the domains will play a large role in the overall online advertising, an industry that is experiencing an astonishing growth rate. The community started using them for this purpose by showing advertising links related to the domain concept. While I do not criticize or praise this practice, I anyway think this is a very primitive way to monetize out of domain names, and not only it doesn't add value to the domain name itself and the whole market, but creates confusion in the internet user as it finds advertisement while looking for content. I therefore believe the market will evolve this concept to a contextual adv and website-like parked domains, with content instead and associated to advertisement. This will bring several advantages to both advertisers, domainers and internet users. Specifically, the value I see for domainers is in increasing the CTR, adding value to the parked website which will not only be based on PPC income but also in a growing user portfolio and an higher returning visitor rate, and giving it a potentially higher resell value. I understand this may not be easy when you have thousands of domains, I'm therefore convinced this must be automatic.
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What are your future plans? Are you in this game to stay? Are there any more projects in the pipeline?
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| M.R. |
We are working on several different things. You can take a sneak peek at them in the DomainsBot Labs. They include - but are not limited to - secondary market domain sales statistics based on how semantics affect the value of a domain name; Word Trends which shows you how many domains contain a specific keyword over time and how different keywords compare (see how many domains contain coke versus pepsi); and Search Cloud, an innovative way to brainstorm to find available domains based on your original concept, and many more.
A couple of really interesting projects which are not available to the public yet include a domain categorizer which take advantage of our technology to semantically understand and therefore categorize domain names. Another tool is the DomainsBot zonefile search, which lets you search the entire database of registered domains for a concept (i.e. you type in Apple and it will tell you all the domains actually registered that contain the concept behind it - therefore it will also return domains containing Macintosh, iPod, etc).
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DomainsBot's team must be a really important part of your strategy. Tell us more about the crew.
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| M.R. |
Everybody in the DomainsBot team contributed in a decisive way to the growth we had and helps building the DomainsBot future. At the beginning, it was just Daniel and I. Then, we got more people in: Antony Van Couvering, who brought in the company his decennial entrepreneurial experience (he started and sold three Internet domain name companies, and founded the International Association of Top Level Domains); Emiliano Pasqualetti, an experienced business management engineer who now works as COO; the three guys forming Phatsoft, that brought an immense technological value in the company by writing all the code behind our technologies and services. I also called in different well known people that brought added value in their field of competence: Cameron Powell, who formerly worked at SnapNames, Jason Brightman, who took care of our image through his artistic skills – he is the designer of famous magazines including King Magazine, XXL and Vampirella. There are many more: while I can't mention everybody here, I know it’s thanks to everybody's contribution we got here!
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