One of the most frustrating things about the domain industry is the complete lack of innovation. This isn’t necessarily because companies don’t want to innovate but more because they are caught in a bind and can’t innovate. What do I mean by this?

Every company should be evolving. Evolution has the sense of slow change over a long period of time where internal processes are streamlined, website made “snappier” and customers are being looked after. These are all important things to do but they stem from the evolutionary basket not the revolutionary.

A revolutionary change is where a company completely transforms an industry, and everyone looks up and says, “Why didn’t we think of that?” It’s looking at domains and saying, “I think there is an aftermarket for them.” In its day, this was a revolutionary concept. It’s looking at domain traffic and matching it up with advertisers…..again, another revolutionary concept.

The problem the domain industry has is it’s been caught in the revenue bind. This is where the bean counters look at resourcing a new idea as a cost rather than as an investment into a competitive advantage. Serious innovation often means cannibalising existing revenue streams and this is regarded as a “no go zone” by managers that are given quarterly targets.

Over the years a number of people have asked me how to build a successful blog. I answered that it’s really quite simple. Write three to four articles a week for nine years and you’re guaranteed to achieve success. For some strange reason they normally go away with a downcast face at that answer.

Typically, instant success takes a lot of time, effort and discipline. All of these traits are things that most people really don’t want to hear about but needless to say are necessary for success. What they really want is the success without putting in the “hard yards”. I hate to say it but the world just doesn’t work like that.

Often to be successful it requires ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent inspiration. I recently watched the movie the Social Network again for about the fiftieth time and two things really struck me about the way Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. He worked during breaks while being deposed and there was one scene where it was clear that he’d put everything into the launch of “The Facebook” and just wanted to sleep. Facebook just didn’t happen. It took a huge amount of work from some very smart people.

As a serial entrepreneur nothing drives me more crazy than a person who wants the success without the work. I was chatting privately on Namepros recently and it was so refreshing to speak with a domain owner that obviously worked incredibly hard to improve the performance of his portfolio. I'm confident that he will become more and more of a success story for the industry because he has the right work ethic.

The second thing that gets me really frustrated is evolutionary versus revolutionary improvement in any business. Over the years my company, ParkLogic, evolved one step at a time to provide better and better results for customers. It drives me completely crazy! Why? Evolutionary improvement takes results from 100% to 102% improvement and in the short-term it barely moves the needle. Over the long-term the improvements are significant but short-term they are really quite disheartening.

So now, we are on the verge of the launch of ParkLogic Next…..it’s a revolutionary improvement in everything that we do from the backend right through to the client interface. It’s taken a long time to write and we’ve still got a little way to go but I haven’t been as excited about the domain industry as I am now for a long time.

The reason for my excitement is that revolutions by their very nature are rare but they are often transformational. We’ve been working on Next for a couple of years and so you can assume it’s one of those “instant” stories. What’s so good about the platform isn’t what’s in the front end (although that’s pretty darn good) but what is happening behind the scenes. More on Next another time....

If you’re wanting to achieve success in your own life then ask yourself whether you are really committed to it and willing to put the time in to match the inspirational idea you have? If you are then you’ll be a long way down the track to achieving your own goals for your domain business.  My advice though is when you’re successful……keep on looking for the revolutionary idea that may kill your business and launch something new…..better you sharpening the knives than someone else.

Have a great weekend!