Who gave us the idea for our Domain Score API?

Do you have a large email list, but not sure if it’s worth anything? Do you have an active email marketing automation workflow, but treat all the emails / potential clients the same? Finally, do you treat all the people/companies that sign up, the same? No more! Domain Score API will help you score the quality of emails in an automated way! Now mind you, we still can’t tell apart from one Gmail address from another, but we are pretty good at rating regular business email addresses. Does this work? How did we get this idea?

You probably missed it, but back in May 2017, we launched a new API called Domain Score API. It’s using our proprietary technology and algorithm. After some improvement and usage of this API, I’ve decided to post a nice little write-up on how we got the idea. Or should I say, thanks to who?

How Domain Score API started

Back in 2012, I was in Silicon Valley going through 500 Startups acceleration. The project I was, and still am, working on, called WhoAPI was getting initial traction and people were signing up. I noticed that some of the companies were large, and to my surprise, I’ve never heard about some of them. That’s the beauty of building a global business, there could be a giant company interested in your service on one of the continents, and you’ve never heard of it!

Fast forward to 2016, I was still chugging along slowly with WhoAPI, with a small team. But with several large enterprises as our clients, Adobe, Google, (US) King (Sweden), Mercado Libre (Argentina), eWay (Australia). Pretty quickly I realized I should focus on those. One problem, I don’t know all the big businesses in the world, so I have to check sign-ups manually. Not to mention I actually have to log in to administration every day and check every signup. Sure, I could hire a dedicated account manager, but that would cost a fortune. Besides, if we get clients from Australia, EU, US, that’s going to work only in certain time zones if we want to follow up on the signup quickly. And, as the old adage goes, there had to be a better way!

Then I remembered what Isac Saldana (founder of Sendgrid) said when he invested in WhoAPI back in 2012. Perhaps we could use some of the data we are getting with WhoAPI and create something like a salesforce plugin that would help us rate important emails. If anybody understands emails, it’s Isaac Saldana! We started working, and during the initial phase, we just rated domains. So while we could make the difference between name@whoapi.com and name@gmail.com, we couldn’t make the difference from name@whoapi.com – name2@whoapi.com. However, we are able to rate differently name@whoapi.com from name@largecorporation.com or name@NewWebsite.com.

I’ve never heard of this big company…

So we created an initial service that was extremely simple. And then one day it hit me. Someone from Texas Roadhouse signed up. Being from Croatia, I’ve never heard of Texas Roadhouse. However, our little Domain Score API rated this email very high! I was excited, so I immediately proceeded to check Google for the validity of this score. I quickly realized this was a publicly traded company in the United States! Trading at around $50 per share, market capitalization $3.53 billion! Not too bad either!

From there, we kept improving our tool, which we used only internally. We’ve created an email notification when someone important signs up. “Important” deemed by our Domain Score API. This way, if I am awake, I can personally email or call on the phone this person who signed up just a few minutes ago. Also, inside our email marketing automation workflow, we can set an exclusive list of high profile potential clients. After a few months of further improvement and testing, we’ve decided to make this small but remarkable little tool, available to everybody.

Sign up today and give it a go. First 500 requests are free.