Macit Tuna is the Co-founder of Dofo.com & DNDisputes.com.
Dofo.com is a free search engine for domain names. You can search among more than 350 million registered domain names in seconds and find 40 million domain names on sale.
DNDisputes.com is a free search engine for domain name disputes.
DNJ: What gave you the idea to create Dofo.com and DNDisputes.com, two highly popular websites?
Macit: It was annoying that all domain name information was scattered across different platforms. We decided to solve this problem and founded Dofo in 2016.
After two years of hard work, we launched Dofo.com a few months ago. You can see almost all the information about any given domain name on dofo.com: registration info (registered or not), sale info (listed for sale on marketplaces or not), whois info, website info (active website or not, popularity rank info), sale history, dispute history, whois history, other extensions, similar domains and more.
Of course, one of the most important features of dofo.com is the powerful search. By entering a keyword, you can see whether any domain name with that keyword is registered, get a list of registered domains containing the keyword and among them, see the ones that are on sale.
We aim to position Dofo.com as the starting point for people that are building new brands and projects and for those looking to buy or register a domain name.
As for DNDisputes.com, I was also interested in domain dispute cases for years, but as you know it wasn’t possible to search and filter to see what’s going on clearly. So we created DNDisputes.com because we needed it and then opened it to the public. We have been getting excellent feedback for both dofo.com and dndisputes.com, and that motivates us very much.
DNJ: What is your monetisation model for these websites?
Macit: As you know dofo.com and dndisputes.com are 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 for dofo.com. We will also start to offer some advertisement/sponsorship opportunities to registrars and registries. DNDisputes.com doesn’t have any monetisation model.
DNJ: What is your background (business, engineering)?
Macit: I’m a computer scientist and did my master’s in cybersecurity. My master’s thesis was about domain names and cybersecurity issues.
DNJ: How did you get into the domain name industry?
Macit: Naming has always been interesting for me. I was generating some brand names for my small projects and then started to check the domain name availability of those names. It was interesting to see that “all good domain names have been taken,” but of course there were some very good ones not being registered. I still keep the first list of domain names I used for checking their registration status in 2003.
I started to blog about domain names in 2007 and published more than two hundred articles (in Turkish) in a few years.
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.
Lastly, my brother Sacit and I founded Dofo in 2016, but the idea was in our minds for years.
DNJ: Do you invest in domains or do you focus on development work?
Macit: I haven’t invested in domain names in the recent few years because I’m more focused on domain name centric product development. I still own a few hundred domain names, but I’m only buying and registering domain names for the new projects, such as dofo.com, dndisputes.com, and dofo.blog 🙂
DNJ: Do you have any other ongoing projects that you can share with us?
Macit: We are mostly focused on making dofo.com better, and there are still too many things to do.
We will launch the multi-language version of dofo.com with more than 30 languages soon. This is one of our most important agenda because our goal is to democratize the way people access domain name data, in their own language.
Smart Name Generator for Startups will be another important feature of dofo.com. Almost every startup/company founder has the pain of finding a good name and of course a domain name. We want to solve this problem with a smart solution.
DNJ: Anything else you want to add?
Macit: We started to share interesting articles about domain names and the Internet ecosystem on dofo.blog. Please follow it and share your comments with us.
Thank you, DNJ, for this interview.
We are always open to hearing your readers’ ideas and comments. Find me on Linkedin and let’s keep in touch.
If you have seen dofo.com or dndisputes.com be sure to check them out they are a very valuable resource we find our selves using regularly.
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