WHOIS Leads — newly registered companies

Every day, companies register domains. A company that has just registered a domain has decided to exist — and therefore decided to buy: a website, email, accounting, payments, a CRM.

Why this signal is different

Most intent data is a proxy: somebody visited a comparison page, somebody downloaded a whitepaper. A domain registration is not a proxy. It is an action that costs money and is taken only by someone who has decided to do something. There is no incumbent vendor, no contract, no procurement process, and nobody has sold to them yet.

The catch, stated honestly

The signal-to-noise ratio is dreadful. Most new domains are speculation, defensive registrations, spam infrastructure, or someone's weekend idea. Filtering is the whole job.

The cheapest filter first: does the domain have an MX record? A domain with no mail server is not a business yet. And an MX record appearing on a two-week-old domain is the moment it becomes one — that transition is the buy signal, and it costs one DNS lookup to detect.

What to say to a two-week-old company

Not “congratulations on your new business”. That announces you are watching domain registrations, which is unsettling, and that you have nothing to say, which is worse. The founder is drowning in a list of forty things. Take one off it.

The whole argument is in newly registered domains as a buying signal.