While re-organising some stuff in our offices one of our staff came across some really old paperwork. It made us feel a little nostalgic ..
Back in 2003 we were just starting out. We’d been in business in some form for a while, but we only started “getting serious” about the business in 2003.
I resigned from my job in Milan and moved myself back to Ireland in August of that year.
Sometime after that I got us setup as a “reseller” of IEDR in order to be able to sell .ie domain names. This was prior to the introduction of a proper registrar contract, any form of API or other levels of automation.
In 2003 the landscape was quite different.
Here’s a few snippets from the “application” I sent them at the time:
My handwriting has always been a mess – note the stupidly long email address I was using at the time. This is probably before we registered blacknight.ie and definitely before we finally acquired blacknight.com
On the application form we had to specify how many domains we expected to register per month. We were just starting out and the entire process around .ie was much more manual than it is now (and we still think it’s overly manual today!) so my predictions were rather conservative:
These days we handle more .ie registrations per day!
And yes, we did promote .ie domains the way we outlined – we still do.. (see our current offers!)
About the Author: Michele Neylon
