davidbgk
/
larlet-fr-david-cache

title: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
url: https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/mailoji
hash_url: 45af171610f986077420b27c2da46ec1

<p>TLDR; I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an <a href="https://mailoji.com" target="_blank">emoji email address service</a>. In the process I went viral on TikTok, made $1000 in a week, hired a Japanese voice actor, and learnt about the weird world of emoji domains.</p>

<h3>🌅 The setup</h3>

<p>Not long ago I decided it would be a brilliant idea to buy the domain name <a href="/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy" target="_blank">netflix.soy</a>.</p>

<p>Whilst arguably there are better ways to spend £17, I did learn a lot about domain names, including that it's possible to have emoji domains like <span class="domain">😊.ws</span>.</p>

<p>It's pretty hard to go a day without seeing an emoji somewhere on the internet. Yet, I'd never seen an emoji domain name before.</p>

<p>I wondered:</p>

<p>Could I buy an emoji domain name?</p>

<h3>💸 Buying an emoji domain name</h3>

<p>My goal was to buy a single character emoji domain name, like 💡 or 🍰. I didn't know what I'd do with it, I just wanted to see if I could get one.</p>

<p>I found a website that showed every available emoji domain for 4 different extensions.</p>

<p>Sadly, nearly every single one had been registered. I was late to the party.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/6aa39e2f0e8e2f9039b61c95ea360cb7.png" alt="Taken emoji domains">

<p>A simple mailbox emoji with a .ws extension was still available though, so I bought it.</p>

<h3>📪 The mailbox</h3>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/1b78a0aab3ca0b04649eacf46fd3bc0a.png" alt="Mailbox emoji domain in GoDaddy">

<p><span class="domain">📪.ws</span> was now mine. Mission complete.</p>

<p>I set up a website and felt rather accomplished with my tiny mailbox.</p>

<p>I could've stopped there and called it a day. But, then I had another thought:</p>

<p>Could I use my little mailbox emoji domain in an email address?</p>

<p>That'd be pretty cute.</p>

<h3>✉️ Emoji mail attempt #1</h3>

<p>I gave it a go. I setup an email forwarder to route all email sent to <span class="domain">📪.ws</span> to my regular email address.</p>

<p>Eagerly I typed <span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span> into the "to" field of gmail and hit send.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/3ab67d13bcfad786b7f3ba9a01968272.png" alt="Sending first emoji mail">

<h3>🛑 Blocked</h3>

<p>The email never hit my inbox. It was lost forever in cyberspace.</p>

<p>Turns out emoji domain names score very highly for spam and were going to be blocked to high heaven.</p>

<p>But, it was interesting that I could send mail towards an emoji email address.</p>

<p>So I wondered:</p>

<p>If a normal .com email address doesn't get blocked for spam, could I route my emoji mail through that?</p>

<h3>💌 Emoji mail attempt #2</h3>

<p>It would work like this: </p>

<ol>
	<li>Email sent to <span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span></li>
	<li><span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span> forwards to <span class="domain">nospam@normal.com</span></li>
	<li><span class="domain">nospam@normal.com</span> forwards to my email address and won't get blocked.</li>
</ol>

<p>I cobbled together something using AWS, and tried my experiment again.</p>

<p>
	</p><p>to: <span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span></p>
	<p>message: Hi Ben, how's it going?</p>


<p>Send.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/bdc529a214b0e2019a96a86c933c4bcb.png" alt="First emoji mail">

<p>It worked!</p>

<h3>🧨 Where things started to get out of control</h3>

<p>At this point I was inclined to stop and write a post about emoji email addresses. I'd had a good run.</p>

<p>But then I wondered:</p>

<p>My mailbox emoji email address is great and all, but do you know what would be better? <span class="domain">ben@⭐</span></p>

<p>Now how do I get one of those?</p>

<h3>🎣 Emoji domain name hunting</h3>

<p>Only 13 TLDs in the world accept registrations of emoji domain names: .cf, .ga, .gq, .la, .ml, .tk, .st, .fm, .to, .je, .gg, .kz, and .ws.</p>

<p>The website I had used to purchase <span class="domain">📪.ws</span> only showed 4 TLDs: .fm, .ws, .to and .ml. These are considered the gold standard of emoji domain name registrars.</p>

<p>Every emoji had been taken on these though. You could of course get multi-character emoji domains like <span class="domain">🎉🐢.ws</span>, but I wanted single character emoji domains only.</p>

<p>So I wondered:</p>

<p>Do any of those other TLDs have any emoji domains left?</p>

<h3>🔭 The great hunt</h3>

<p>I already had some code that performed WHOIS lookups to see if a domain name is available for a list of TLDs.</p>

<p>Previously I'd used this code to buy <a href="/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy" target="_blank">facebook.网站</a>, only for Marky Z to snatch it back from me. Cheeky bugger.</p>

<p>I booted up the code and loaded in some A-tier emojis (e.g. ⭐,😂,❤️) and the 13 TLDs that accepted them.</p>

<p><i>&gt;node search.js</i> [ENTER]</p>

<h3>🎁 The results</h3>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/6adaeb53f45f75605749f78d4dcac8c3.png" alt="Console output showing available TLDs for emoji domains">

<p>Instantly I was seeing results! .la, .ga, .gq, .je. There were plenty of emojis still out there on these alternative extensions.</p>

<p>An extension that stood out to me straight away was .gg, for the Island of Guernsey. "GG" is an acronym for "Good Game", and I say it often when I lose at online games. It was perfect.</p> 

<p><span class="domain">⭐.gg</span> was available for €29. I hit purchase.</p>

<h3>💔 No GG for me</h3>

<p>The next day Guernsey sent me an email.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/527c4941fbb3ddcffbc92a0c2ef1c828.png" alt="Email from Guernsey saying emoji domains not available on .gg">

<p>Long story short, although you could register emoji domain names with them, they didn't actually work.</p>

<p>Good game Guernsey. Back to the drawing board.</p>

<h3>⭐ Crazy for KZ</h3>

<p>With every other extension I kept hitting walls. A lot of the registrars wouldn't even let me search for emoji domains. Nothing was working.</p>

<p>One extension that kept cropping up was .kz of Kazakhstan. But, I headed over to their registar website and it was entirely in Russian.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/6c20c8eea912beb320555c0dace78b1b.png" alt="Russian domain name website">

<p>I do not speak Russian.</p>

<p>Using Google Translate, I tried to navigate the website and buy a .kz emoji domain.</p>

<p>It was a long, painful process. But, after phoning my bank to confirm I was indeed trying to make a purchase using Kazakhstani tenge, <span class="domain">⭐.kz</span> was sitting in my account.</p>

<p>I plugged it into my email system and <span class="domain">ben@⭐.kz</span> worked.</p>

<p>Very nice.</p>

<h3>💼 Let's start an email service</h3>

<p>Something excited me. Nearly all single character emojis were available on .kz, and they were only $8 each.</p>

<p>So, I wondered:</p>

<p>What if you could get an email address with any emoji you wanted?</p>

<p>I pictured email addresses like <span class="domain">bob@🚀</span>, <span class="domain">alice@🌸</span>, <span class="domain">melvin@🍆</span>.</p>

<p>All I'd need to do is buy every emoji domain to build a service like this.</p>

<p>It was insane, but it was possible.</p>

<h3>🌙 The night of 150 emojis</h3>

<p>I decided I was going to do it.</p>

<p>If I was chuffed with my mailbox emoji email address, perhaps others would be too.</p>

<p>I got out my debit card, and, one by one, started buying Kazakhstan emoji domains.</p>

<p><span class="domain">💡.kz</span>, <span class="domain">👑.kz</span>, <span class="domain">🌈.kz</span>, <span class="domain">😎.kz</span>. Buy, buy, buy, buy.</p>

<p>It was slightly painful watching my bank account going down, and the number of emoji domains go up.</p>

<p>80 emojis in, forking over money for a goat emoji domain name, you seriously start to question what you're doing.</p>

<p>$1200 later, 150 emoji domains were mine.</p>

<h3>💻 Building an emoji email address website</h3>

<p>Finally, I needed a website where you could register an emoji email address and it would forward mail like <span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span> did.</p>

<p>Using vanilla HTML, JS and CSS, plus Stripe's API for payments, I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks.</p>

<p>Once it was done, I bought one last domain name: <a href="https://mailoji.com" target="_blank">mailoji.com</a>. My new emoji email address service <a href="https://mailoji.com" target="_blank">Mailoji</a> was ready. Get your emoji email addresses.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/30c54b0bed4ffc85cb38940a2b26748e.png" alt="Mailoji emoji email address website">

<h3>📱 TikTok</h3>

<p>I'd gone from being curious about emoji domain names to now owning 150 of Kazakhstan's finest.</p>

<p>The next step was to convince someone else to buy an emoji email address.</p>

<p>TikTok seemed like a good place to start given its demographic. So, I recorded a short video advert and started a "TikTok for business" application to publish it.</p>

<p>On the final page of the application I was asked for a VAT registration number. Mailoji was not a proper business yet, so there was no way I could publish my ad.</p>

<p>Screw it, I'll post the video normally.</p>

<p>Upload.</p>

<h3>🎉 First sales</h3>

<p>Here is the <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@mailoji/video/6925405275201539334?lang=en&amp;is_copy_url=1&amp;is_from_webapp=v3" target="_blank">advert</a> if you're interested.</p>

<p>The video sat at 0 views for about 5 hours before the TikTok algorithm started to work its magic.</p>

<p>Slowly, the views started ramping up. 500 views, to 5k views, to 50k views. It was incredible to witness.</p>

<p>People were loving emoji email addresses, people were hating emoji email addresses.</p>

<p>It was like Marmite, a talking point. None of it mattered though because emoji email addresses were selling! <span class="domain">@🚀</span>, <span class="domain">@📷</span> &amp; <span class="domain">@💻</span> addresses were the most popular.</p>

<p>Over 2 days the TikTok video reached 200k+ views, and 60 emoji email addresses had been sold netting ~$300/yr in revenue.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/e33fb288704cc42f58e50ff4a5d33fa8.png" alt="Stripe graph showing first sales from selling emoji domains">

<p>I took this as a fantastic indicator. So guess what I did?</p>

<h3>💵 Buying more emoji domain names</h3>

<p>I decided to purchase 100 more emoji domains.</p>

<p>I cried into my keyboard forking out yet more money for a llama emoji that I probably didn't need.</p>

<p>In the end I had 250 emoji domains. If there was ever a moat into the emoji email address world, this was it.</p>

<h3>📅 Preparing for launch</h3>

<p>I figured the more people with emoji email addresses, the more people who would see them, and the more people who would buy them. A beautiful cycle.</p>

<p>My next goal was a Product Hunt launch to get exposure for Mailoji, and kickstart this cycle.</p>

<p>I prepped my launch post, carefully choosing each word and image.</p>

<p>I even created this over-hyped promotional video, complete with Japanese voice actor saying the words "Mailoji".</p>

<p class="video-container">
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JKxEXZv4G3c" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen>VIDEO</iframe></p>

<p>Mailoji was ready for launch.</p>

<h3>🚀 Launch Day</h3>

<p>At 12:03 AM PST Mailoji went live on <a href="https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mailoji" target="_blank">Product Hunt</a>. We had come a long way from that little mailbox emoji.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/0cf1d62b2d820c8f456a95da3cffda01.png" alt="Product hunt launch thumbnail">

<p>It was 8:03 AM UK time. Bleary eyed, with a cup of tea in hand, I watched as Mailoji did battle.</p>

<p>I had chosen to launch on a Wednesday against some stiff competition, but Mailoji really held its own.</p>

<p>At the end of the day it finished in 5th place. Here were the end of day stats: </p>

<ul>
	<li>🌎 6.7k website views
	</li><li>💌 150+ emoji email addresses sold</li>
	<li>💵 $830/yr ARR</li>
	<li>🔺 320 upvotes</li>
	<li>🏅 5th place on Product Hunt</li>
	<li>🎀 Most popular Mailoji: @🚀</li>
</ul>

<p>Over 150 emoji email addresses were sold in a day, and I received some fantastic feedback from the Product Hunt community.</p>

<p>It was done, Mailoji had officially launched.</p>

<h3>📙 The aftermath</h3>

<p>I wish this story ended with Mailoji blowing up and the queen registering an emoji email address or something (I'll reserve <span class="domain">Liz@👑.kz</span> just in case).</p>

<p>But, currently Mailoji is sitting at ~$1440/year in revenue. There's now 300 emoji domains to choose from though.</p>

<img src="https://i.gyazo.com/6eac0eb3bcdaa1ee78e57b6692ed9afc.png" alt="Final Stripe ARR chart for Mailoji">

<p>Even though I still haven't made the money back on all the emoji domains I bought, creating an emoji email address service was so much fun.</p>

<p>It was an adventure. A rabbit hole containing multiple rabbit holes.</p>

<p>This project started out as an exploration into emoji domain names; a weird, forgotten about internet feature that I've now become quite fond of.</p>

<p>Yes emoji domains are hard to type on desktop, yes there's too many variations, and yes, most form validations hate them.</p>

<p>But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun.</p>

<p>Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch, I've got a brand new email address at the bottom of this website.</p>