Today, I have some very exciting news to share with all of you.
One Word Domains is rebranding to Elegance. Along with our new identity, we also have a new mission — to help entrepreneurs build and manage world-class brands by leveraging the power of data and machine learning.
How It All Started
I started One Word Domains exactly a year ago with the goal of helping my fellow founders find brandable domain names of their projects.
Since then, it has grown from its humble beginnings as a database of available one-word domains to a full-fledged brand creation tool, with features such as the AI Name Generator and the Logo Creator being used by over 150 people every single day.
In fact, users loved our AI Name Generator feature so much that within the first week of beta, over 700 domains (worth a combined total of $6,000) were purchased using the tool.
In total, One Word Domains has helped over 2,000 users purchase the names they like, ranging from brandable ones like oasis.sh to word combinations like sendlunar.com.
As of today, One Word Domains is generating $3.5K in monthly revenue and has 5K monthly active users. Recently, it also won the coveted Golden Kitty Award from Product Hunt, and crossed 500 paying customers along the way.
Why Rebrand
If I were to be honest, I've been fiddling around with the idea behind Elegance as far back as August 2020 — or about 3 months into my One Word Domains journey.
As the initial hype and excitement for the "new domain tool in town" died down, I quickly realized a few things:
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One Word Domains, by itself, was never going to become a billion-dollar business (not that there's anything wrong with the contrary).
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Since I was relying mainly on affiliate commissions and lifetime deals, One Word Domains' revenue was not as predictable/dependable as I'd liked it to be.
However, there is still a huge underserved demand in the realm of digital branding. Sure, the naming of your company matters but there's so much more to branding that the name itself — everything from the color profile, typeface, and logo, to the brand story, positioning, and messaging.
As someone who just completed his undergrad degree in data science and brand management, I definitely see the appeal of using data to help users make educated design choices — allowing them to build world-class brands even if they don't know how to design at all.
It was time to pivot.
What Changes
Different, but better. That's the motto that I had in mind when designing the new brand identity.
Brand Makeover
It was going to be a challenge to get existing users to adapt to the new brand and the new layout, but my goal was to build such a high quality alternative that the benefits of switching over to the new interface outweighs the costs.
Our brand got a complete makeover — from the logo and brand colors, all the way to the typeface and the general UI of the app. In fact, there were a lot of dogfooding involved, so a huge portion of the work you see here was actually done by our AI — with me being the final approver, so to speak.
Our new logo, the Echelon, is a symbolism of a series of gradual improvements that can be made to a company’s branding in order to take it to the next level.
The same way Airbnb evolved into a globally recognized, multi-billion dollar business with its rebrand, we want to help startups & businesses achieve that with the use of machine learning and algorithmic art.
I won't get too technical about the new brand guidelines in this post but if you're interested, you can check out our brand book here.
Rebuilding in NextJS
Since I built the entirety of One Word Domains's frontend in vanilla Javascript, it took me a week or two to get used to the mental model shift of going from an imperative framework over to a declarative one.
Nonetheless, it was an incredibly rewarding journey. Also, since NextJS is pretty much the fastest frontend framework out there, Elegance's site speeds have been through the roof.
Vision
I touched on this a bit earlier but our goal with Elegance is to build a data-driven approach to branding. Think Canva meets OpenAI, with some Zapier automation elements in it.
So far, we've collected the data for the worlds top 350K companies to help you make the right branding and marketing choices for your startup. Some of the data points that we've collected include the domain, logo, brand colors, typefaces, and even tagline and marketing copy.
Machine learning and AI programming is more about the data and less about the actual algorithm, so our goal for the next few months is to build out a robust dataset that can be generalized to any startup use case out there.
User Experience
"So...what's gonna happen to the One Word Domains site?"
To answer the million dollar question: yes, it will stay up. The plan is to slowly transition existing users off the platform and into the Elegance ecosystem, and keep One Word Domains as a lead gen tool for the future.
If you're an existing customer, don't worry — we'll be grandfathering your membership into the Elegance system. We're more focused than ever on helping founders, creators and SMBs succeed in building an online business, and if that's you, we're more than happy to help.
Conclusion
One Word Domains is now Elegance.
Our name, general appearance, and even vision might've changed, but we're still a passionate team who's laser-focused on creating tools that will empower entrepreneurs build world-class brands online.
On that note, if you are interested in working with us, or if you have any questions about our rebrand, feel free to shoot us an email or reach out on Twitter — we'd love to chat!
As always, we're very grateful for your constant support and for following along on our journey. This is just the beginning, and we very excited to have you along as we achieve new heights.
