Destination: private beta!

Wow, it’s been an exciting few weeks! After launching our website earlier this month and then publishing our explainer video, we really hit our first big milestones.

In the last 30 days, we’ve been on a development sprint from our home offices in Groningen and Hong Kong working like crazy to get Efty ready for a private beta launch next month and we thought it’d be cool to keep you guys up to par on the progress we’re making.

All the core features (and quite a few nifty extra’s!) are there. Adding and managing domains, Efty market, dashboard, reporting and user management. The screenshots you see in our video are actually taken from our testing set-up, using co-founder Doron’s domain portfolio.

We’re confident that our users will fall in love with Efty when they start using the tool but our big challenge is to keep that love alive. We know that the average user won’t be F5’ing their Efty cockpit all day, so we’ve been thinking about ways to pull them into Efty in a friendly yet convincing way to help them keep their portfolio, marketplace and landing pages up to date.

One of the features we’re currently testing is the Efty plugin for Google Chrome which will allow you to quickly add a freshly acquired or hand regged domain into Efty straight from your browser. Furthermore, we’re working on doing reverse whois lookups. This allows us to inform you pro-actively after you’ve acquired (or sold) a new domain and will trigger an e-mail reminder and a notification in your cockpit to update your Efty portfolio with any new domains you’ve acquired.

We’re also putting the finishing touches on Insights, the feature in Efty that will help you gain more insight into your performance and financials. In Doron’s case, for example, he now knows July will be an expensive month when it comes to renewal fees and he also gets confronted with the fact that even though less than 15% of his portfolio are .co domains and only 5% are new gTLDs these extensions make up for a much larger percentage of his overall renewal costs.

We were very surprised to see that despite the fact that we haven’t been investing any time in promoting the upcoming beta, many domainers from all around the globe found their way to our site in the past couple of weeks and signed up for our beta. Among them is a few very prominent domain name investors and other high profile people from within the industry and we feel humbled and excited to have them on board.

We’ll make sure to get back soon with you guys for more updates on our development. Stay tuned!