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vor 3 Jahren
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  1. title: I bought 300 emoji domain names from Kazakhstan and built an email service
  2. url: https://tinyprojects.dev/projects/mailoji
  3. hash_url: 45af171610f986077420b27c2da46ec1
  4. <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>
  5. <h3>🌅 The setup</h3>
  6. <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>
  7. <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>
  8. <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>
  9. <p>I wondered:</p>
  10. <p>Could I buy an emoji domain name?</p>
  11. <h3>💸 Buying an emoji domain name</h3>
  12. <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>
  13. <p>I found a website that showed every available emoji domain for 4 different extensions.</p>
  14. <p>Sadly, nearly every single one had been registered. I was late to the party.</p>
  15. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/6aa39e2f0e8e2f9039b61c95ea360cb7.png" alt="Taken emoji domains">
  16. <p>A simple mailbox emoji with a .ws extension was still available though, so I bought it.</p>
  17. <h3>📪 The mailbox</h3>
  18. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/1b78a0aab3ca0b04649eacf46fd3bc0a.png" alt="Mailbox emoji domain in GoDaddy">
  19. <p><span class="domain">📪.ws</span> was now mine. Mission complete.</p>
  20. <p>I set up a website and felt rather accomplished with my tiny mailbox.</p>
  21. <p>I could've stopped there and called it a day. But, then I had another thought:</p>
  22. <p>Could I use my little mailbox emoji domain in an email address?</p>
  23. <p>That'd be pretty cute.</p>
  24. <h3>✉️ Emoji mail attempt #1</h3>
  25. <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>
  26. <p>Eagerly I typed <span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span> into the "to" field of gmail and hit send.</p>
  27. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/3ab67d13bcfad786b7f3ba9a01968272.png" alt="Sending first emoji mail">
  28. <h3>🛑 Blocked</h3>
  29. <p>The email never hit my inbox. It was lost forever in cyberspace.</p>
  30. <p>Turns out emoji domain names score very highly for spam and were going to be blocked to high heaven.</p>
  31. <p>But, it was interesting that I could send mail towards an emoji email address.</p>
  32. <p>So I wondered:</p>
  33. <p>If a normal .com email address doesn't get blocked for spam, could I route my emoji mail through that?</p>
  34. <h3>💌 Emoji mail attempt #2</h3>
  35. <p>It would work like this: </p>
  36. <ol>
  37. <li>Email sent to <span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span></li>
  38. <li><span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span> forwards to <span class="domain">nospam@normal.com</span></li>
  39. <li><span class="domain">nospam@normal.com</span> forwards to my email address and won't get blocked.</li>
  40. </ol>
  41. <p>I cobbled together something using AWS, and tried my experiment again.</p>
  42. <p>
  43. </p><p>to: <span class="domain">ben@📪.ws</span></p>
  44. <p>message: Hi Ben, how's it going?</p>
  45. <p>Send.</p>
  46. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/bdc529a214b0e2019a96a86c933c4bcb.png" alt="First emoji mail">
  47. <p>It worked!</p>
  48. <h3>🧨 Where things started to get out of control</h3>
  49. <p>At this point I was inclined to stop and write a post about emoji email addresses. I'd had a good run.</p>
  50. <p>But then I wondered:</p>
  51. <p>My mailbox emoji email address is great and all, but do you know what would be better? <span class="domain">ben@⭐</span></p>
  52. <p>Now how do I get one of those?</p>
  53. <h3>🎣 Emoji domain name hunting</h3>
  54. <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>
  55. <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>
  56. <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>
  57. <p>So I wondered:</p>
  58. <p>Do any of those other TLDs have any emoji domains left?</p>
  59. <h3>🔭 The great hunt</h3>
  60. <p>I already had some code that performed WHOIS lookups to see if a domain name is available for a list of TLDs.</p>
  61. <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>
  62. <p>I booted up the code and loaded in some A-tier emojis (e.g. ⭐,😂,❤️) and the 13 TLDs that accepted them.</p>
  63. <p><i>&gt;node search.js</i> [ENTER]</p>
  64. <h3>🎁 The results</h3>
  65. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/6adaeb53f45f75605749f78d4dcac8c3.png" alt="Console output showing available TLDs for emoji domains">
  66. <p>Instantly I was seeing results! .la, .ga, .gq, .je. There were plenty of emojis still out there on these alternative extensions.</p>
  67. <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>
  68. <p><span class="domain">⭐.gg</span> was available for €29. I hit purchase.</p>
  69. <h3>💔 No GG for me</h3>
  70. <p>The next day Guernsey sent me an email.</p>
  71. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/527c4941fbb3ddcffbc92a0c2ef1c828.png" alt="Email from Guernsey saying emoji domains not available on .gg">
  72. <p>Long story short, although you could register emoji domain names with them, they didn't actually work.</p>
  73. <p>Good game Guernsey. Back to the drawing board.</p>
  74. <h3>⭐ Crazy for KZ</h3>
  75. <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>
  76. <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>
  77. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/6c20c8eea912beb320555c0dace78b1b.png" alt="Russian domain name website">
  78. <p>I do not speak Russian.</p>
  79. <p>Using Google Translate, I tried to navigate the website and buy a .kz emoji domain.</p>
  80. <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>
  81. <p>I plugged it into my email system and <span class="domain">ben@⭐.kz</span> worked.</p>
  82. <p>Very nice.</p>
  83. <h3>💼 Let's start an email service</h3>
  84. <p>Something excited me. Nearly all single character emojis were available on .kz, and they were only $8 each.</p>
  85. <p>So, I wondered:</p>
  86. <p>What if you could get an email address with any emoji you wanted?</p>
  87. <p>I pictured email addresses like <span class="domain">bob@🚀</span>, <span class="domain">alice@🌸</span>, <span class="domain">melvin@🍆</span>.</p>
  88. <p>All I'd need to do is buy every emoji domain to build a service like this.</p>
  89. <p>It was insane, but it was possible.</p>
  90. <h3>🌙 The night of 150 emojis</h3>
  91. <p>I decided I was going to do it.</p>
  92. <p>If I was chuffed with my mailbox emoji email address, perhaps others would be too.</p>
  93. <p>I got out my debit card, and, one by one, started buying Kazakhstan emoji domains.</p>
  94. <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>
  95. <p>It was slightly painful watching my bank account going down, and the number of emoji domains go up.</p>
  96. <p>80 emojis in, forking over money for a goat emoji domain name, you seriously start to question what you're doing.</p>
  97. <p>$1200 later, 150 emoji domains were mine.</p>
  98. <h3>💻 Building an emoji email address website</h3>
  99. <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>
  100. <p>Using vanilla HTML, JS and CSS, plus Stripe's API for payments, I cobbled together an MVP over a few weeks.</p>
  101. <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>
  102. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/30c54b0bed4ffc85cb38940a2b26748e.png" alt="Mailoji emoji email address website">
  103. <h3>📱 TikTok</h3>
  104. <p>I'd gone from being curious about emoji domain names to now owning 150 of Kazakhstan's finest.</p>
  105. <p>The next step was to convince someone else to buy an emoji email address.</p>
  106. <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>
  107. <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>
  108. <p>Screw it, I'll post the video normally.</p>
  109. <p>Upload.</p>
  110. <h3>🎉 First sales</h3>
  111. <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>
  112. <p>The video sat at 0 views for about 5 hours before the TikTok algorithm started to work its magic.</p>
  113. <p>Slowly, the views started ramping up. 500 views, to 5k views, to 50k views. It was incredible to witness.</p>
  114. <p>People were loving emoji email addresses, people were hating emoji email addresses.</p>
  115. <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>
  116. <p>Over 2 days the TikTok video reached 200k+ views, and 60 emoji email addresses had been sold netting ~$300/yr in revenue.</p>
  117. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/e33fb288704cc42f58e50ff4a5d33fa8.png" alt="Stripe graph showing first sales from selling emoji domains">
  118. <p>I took this as a fantastic indicator. So guess what I did?</p>
  119. <h3>💵 Buying more emoji domain names</h3>
  120. <p>I decided to purchase 100 more emoji domains.</p>
  121. <p>I cried into my keyboard forking out yet more money for a llama emoji that I probably didn't need.</p>
  122. <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>
  123. <h3>📅 Preparing for launch</h3>
  124. <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>
  125. <p>My next goal was a Product Hunt launch to get exposure for Mailoji, and kickstart this cycle.</p>
  126. <p>I prepped my launch post, carefully choosing each word and image.</p>
  127. <p>I even created this over-hyped promotional video, complete with Japanese voice actor saying the words "Mailoji".</p>
  128. <p class="video-container">
  129. <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>
  130. <p>Mailoji was ready for launch.</p>
  131. <h3>🚀 Launch Day</h3>
  132. <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>
  133. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/0cf1d62b2d820c8f456a95da3cffda01.png" alt="Product hunt launch thumbnail">
  134. <p>It was 8:03 AM UK time. Bleary eyed, with a cup of tea in hand, I watched as Mailoji did battle.</p>
  135. <p>I had chosen to launch on a Wednesday against some stiff competition, but Mailoji really held its own.</p>
  136. <p>At the end of the day it finished in 5th place. Here were the end of day stats: </p>
  137. <ul>
  138. <li>🌎 6.7k website views
  139. </li><li>💌 150+ emoji email addresses sold</li>
  140. <li>💵 $830/yr ARR</li>
  141. <li>🔺 320 upvotes</li>
  142. <li>🏅 5th place on Product Hunt</li>
  143. <li>🎀 Most popular Mailoji: @🚀</li>
  144. </ul>
  145. <p>Over 150 emoji email addresses were sold in a day, and I received some fantastic feedback from the Product Hunt community.</p>
  146. <p>It was done, Mailoji had officially launched.</p>
  147. <h3>📙 The aftermath</h3>
  148. <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>
  149. <p>But, currently Mailoji is sitting at ~$1440/year in revenue. There's now 300 emoji domains to choose from though.</p>
  150. <img src="https://i.gyazo.com/6eac0eb3bcdaa1ee78e57b6692ed9afc.png" alt="Final Stripe ARR chart for Mailoji">
  151. <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>
  152. <p>It was an adventure. A rabbit hole containing multiple rabbit holes.</p>
  153. <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>
  154. <p>Yes emoji domains are hard to type on desktop, yes there's too many variations, and yes, most form validations hate them.</p>
  155. <p>But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun.</p>
  156. <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>