One of our awesome users, Nate Graves, basically performed the web equivalent of taking the time to return some cash he found on the ground to whoever dropped it.
He landed on idonethistoday.com by mistake, realized it wasn’t registered, bought the domain name, and passed it onto us.
Here’s the email we got back in the beginning of this year:
So, today I got my daily reminder from you guys. I saw it pop up on my phone with the from address showing “IDoneThis Today.” Without really thinking I typed idonethistoday.com into my browser and off I went to…nothing. I realized and righted my mistake pretty quickly. But, later I checked the whois on idonethistoday.com and saw it wasn’t registered. It is now and is pointing to your site. I’ll be happy to hand it off to you if you’d like (free of charge of course). Just figured you might have some folks out there like me who wound up in the wrong part of town, and I didn’t want them to miss out on your great service.
By day, Nate is a product manager at Meetup.com and by not-day, he has a handful of other projects. One of those projects is Grammarize, which crowdsources copy-editing through a javascript widget, allowing people to correct mistakes on webpages inline and pushing those corrections to the website owner to accept.
With Meetup’s sense of community and a natural bent for crowdsourcing ideas, maybe it makes sense that Nate is such a good web Samaritan. Still, we were quite thankful for his gesture! We chatted briefly with Nate about his act of kindness and ideas for our shiny new domain name gift.
When many people would have input a web address to nowhere, shrugged, and carried on, what made you decide to actually act after landing on a dead end?
There have been times where I’ve registered a domain for a side project and hadn’t realized there was something I was overlooking that might have confused people, like whether it’s singular versus plural, or just how to spell it. There’ve been domain names that I’ve wanted that have been registered already and people are asking for just crazy amounts of money for not amazing domain names.
I thought if I were in this situation and there was a chance that I was losing some traffic because of a fairly simple thing, then I’d love to have that extra domain.
Have any ideas about how we could use idonethistoday.com?
It could be used for something like codeyear.com. Codeacademy launched it at the beginning of the year and said, if you’ve always wanted to learn how to code, here’s how you get started. Maybe idonethistoday could be something along those lines – a targeted landing page to get people to start using idonethis.
Great idea! And though we’re still sending out emails with the “from” field of IDoneThis today, how do you use the service?
I use it as a reminder to be working on something everyday, trying to push myself to be developing something. I started one also for Grammarize ‘cause there’s a friend of mine who lives in Oakland who’s been helping out. I can certainly watch his commits but rather than having to dig through messages or the actual code that he changed, it’s nice to have a summary.
It’s great that it’s so simple and that it lends itself to so many different uses. I’ll be interested to see what you do in the future and how you build out the product so that it continues to be useful but has more to offer.
There you go. Nate Graves, good web Samaritan and awesome iDoneThis user. Do you have ideas on how to use idonethistoday.com? Show us in the comments!