Domainer Engine

Modern, AI-powered domain portfolio engine for domainers

Productivity

Investing

Shopping

It all started when, as a web developer and domain investor, I vibe-coded a portfolio website for my domain names because there simply weren’t any good ready-made solutions available. I built it for myself, so most things were changed directly through the code, and the admin panel was extremely basic. Then I came across a post on the NamePros forum where someone was looking for a platform to showcase their domains portfolio. It turned out that there were almost no ready-made solutions on the market. There was only an outdated, abandoned PHP script that had somehow generated massive sales. That was the moment that pushed me to act. I decided to occupy that niche and build the *magnum opus* of domain portfolio platforms — using a modern technology stack and advanced features such as built-in AI generation — something a hundred times better than that old PHP script, with the goal of becoming the de facto standard for domain portfolio websites. Before I started coding, I spent about a week designing the platform with AI. Even though I already had a fully working custom-built domain portfolio site, I decided to rebuild everything completely from scratch so I could fix the architectural mistakes of the previous version, incorporate everything I had learned from using it, and build the new platform on a much more solid foundation. Since I was unemployed at the time, once the design was finished I started vibe-coding every single day, and eventually even without weekends because I was literally running out of money to live on. I spent more than two months working intensely on the product. During development I refused to compromise: no matter how long a problem took to solve, I would solve it properly because I was trying to create the de facto standard for the niche. For example, I almost completely rebuilt the entire frontend twice (I ended up with 23 blocks in the built-in drag-and-drop page builder alone) to make sure everything had a consistent visual style, loaded extremely fast (I spent an enormous amount of time optimizing PageSpeed), looked modern (the first version looked like terrible AI-generated slop), and could be customized directly from the admin panel. I also redesigned the admin panel countless times; by the end, there wasn’t much of the default Payload CMS left. And that’s not even mentioning the many other problems I had to overcome during development. After I finished the core platform, I still had to write documentation — something very few solo developers bother doing. But I was aiming for a product that could become the standard in its niche, so I wrote extensive, detailed documentation that is permanently available online for customers. At that point I was finally ready to release it on CodeCanyon — only to discover that they had closed registration for new authors. Overnight I lost the main marketplace where I had planned to sell the product. As a result, I spent more than a month building my own website to sell it myself. Creating the landing page was painful. I eventually rebuilt it from scratch as well because the original version looked unmistakably like AI-generated slop. As it turned out, the landing page wasn’t even the hardest part. The hardest part was implementing payments. Since I live in a not-particularly-welcome third-world country (Ukraine), I couldn’t simply integrate Stripe or PayPal in an evening — they don’t operate in Ukraine the way they do elsewhere — and the local financial restrictions made everything significantly more complicated. I had to implement a much more robust payment solution, and I spent more than two weeks integrating and testing it. Payments are the one place where mistakes are unacceptable. If someone bought the platform but couldn’t access the files afterward, it would have been a disaster. So I tested the purchase flow over and over again before I was willing to launch. --- Then came the big day — the day I could finally start selling the platform. I imagined that after months of relentless work the money would finally start coming in, that sales would begin, and that I would be able to support myself by improving my own product. No more full-time job. I launched the landing page, created a thread on NamePros, and waited… Nothing happened. More than two months later, I still hadn’t sold a single copy. Either I built a product for an audience that was too niche, or my potential customers simply don’t know it exists because CodeCanyon still doesn’t seem interested in allowing new authors to register, and that is exactly where my target audience would normally look for a product like this. --- Even so, I’m not discouraged. I just need to keep building. A product not taking off immediately doesn’t mean it has no potential. I believe that sooner or later my landing page will start ranking well in Google, and I’ll begin getting customers through organic search traffic. Products like this can also grow through word of mouth — the domain investing community is surprisingly connected, and recommendations spread quickly. At least, that’s what I believe. I’m also developing a WordPress version of Domainer Engine because I think the main reasons the original version failed commercially are: 1. It’s simply too difficult for an average user to install. A modern stack requires a fairly complex setup process, and it can’t be deployed in one click the way a WordPress product can. 2. There are very few places to sell it. WordPress products have hundreds of marketplaces, while products built on modern stacks have very few, and my target customer is unlikely to go looking for one there. In hindsight, I should have built it on a simpler stack from the beginning and thought much earlier about *where* I was going to sell it and *where* customers would actually buy it. Instead, I built it using one of the technically strongest stacks available — incredibly fast and highly optimized — but those advantages don’t matter nearly as much to the average customer as I originally thought.