“What we are positioning the company for is to be in the three to five million registered domain name range in the next five years.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

Juan Diego Calle is the founder and CEO of .CO Internet S.A.S., the registry operator for the .CO top level domain. Under Juan’s leadership, .CO was launched internationally in July of 2010, and has quickly become one of the most successful domain registries in history, with more than 600,000 domain names registered by people and companies in 200 countries worldwide.

MO:
Tell us about your entrepreneurial background.

Juan:
Sure. Let’s see, I started off my first Internet company in 2000, when I was in college. I was doing a project for engineering school. At the time, we were in the middle of the Internet bubble, and I started a company called TeRespondo, which was a pay-per-click network for all of Latin America. Namely our core markets were Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. We went through the rough patches that most Internet entrepreneur went through during the bubble. We shut down the company for a little while around 2000 and the beginning of 2001. Then we restarted it seeing that our traffic on a search engine that we had built kept growing. We built this PPC platform, which was fully automated, very similar to GoTo and afterward, Overture.

At some point in time around the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004, Google and Yahoo started seeing Latin America as a market for expansion for their PPC operations. For AdWords, and in the case of Overture, at that point in time it had already become Yahoo search marketing. So that first company was acquired by Yahoo at the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005. That’s kind of how I got started on the Internet.

MO:
Who is behind .CO?

Juan:
Our company is a joint venture between Neustar, who’s the operator of .Biz and .US, those top level domain names, and a Colombian company. So we did a joint venture with Neustar to launch .CO on a global basis. Currently our company is staffed by 12 people, directly on our payroll. We have an extended team, so the extended team of Neustar in technology. We have an extended team in marketing. Our marketing is complemented by an agency where we have five full-time people. So in total, we have about 25 people working on .CO on a day to day basis.

MO:
Does .CO open up new opportunities to small businesses?

Juan:
At the most fundamental level, the reason why I got involved with this venture is because, being an entrepreneur and having started different companies on the Internet, one of the most challenging things that I went through was figuring out the right name for it. The right name is critical for the success of a venture, to have a credible, recognizable name.

Obviously, I have a relationship to Colombia. But the synergy between being an entrepreneur and having gone through the process of trying to find good names for my companies, and being Colombian, obviously the two combine to allow the idea of .CO to flourish as an alternative to some of the other domain extensions out there.

So if you are an established business or an entrepreneur who’s just getting started, .CO is an amazing option for you to get branded online.

MO:
To what do you attribute the success of the .CO launch as opposed to other TLDs?

Juan:
It was actually about two years of preparation where we studied very carefully what some of the previous TLD launches had gone through, some of the mistakes they had made and some of the successes that they have had. We studied those things carefully and applied them to .CO. I think every TLD, the previous TLDs are all very different in nature. All of the ones that are coming are all very different in nature.

So you have to grab what you think will work for your specific TLD. So in our case, we looked at where we thought we would have the most impact, what community we would have the most impact in. We thought that if we targeted .CO for, again, the entrepreneur, the person who is coming online for the first time, or an established business that is coming online for the first time, we would have great success. That is essentially what we did.

MO:
Where do you see .CO five or ten years from today?

Juan:
If I had a crystal ball, I don’t know. What we are positioning the company for is to be in the three to five million registered domain name range in the next five years. But the important thing for us is not so much the volume that we may have in terms of registrations. It’s the number of websites being built, the number of entrepreneurs that are using the .CO domain, and the impact that the .CO domain is having in the Internet economy.

If we can measure that somehow, and that is something that we are working on, on the sidelines, measuring the economic impact that we can have, not in terms of our revenues or in terms of the registrations, but rather the economic activity that is taking place on .CO. That is pretty powerful, and that is what we are trying to figure out as a next step.

MO:
We’ve seen o.co and t.co. What are some other big, big players using .CO?

Juan:
I think one great example is Angel.co. The actual name of the website is AngelList, and you can think of it as a marketplace for angel investors and entrepreneurs who are looking for a seed round, that initial round of investment. That is probably the best example that I can give you, and it is very specific to our target market.

Other examples are Cisco is about to launch CS.co, which could be pretty cool. It’s a social media hub, and they’re going to use it for all of their social media initiatives.

Another good example, and this is more of an international example, Enter.co. It’s kind of like the TechCrunch of Latin America. That’s pretty exciting. The sociable is pretty cool. So there are plenty of examples, growing every day. You can see most of them. We list them on our website, which is Opportunity.co.

MO:
Dot co names have a higher registration fee than some other TLDs. What is the reason for that?

Juan:
So that’s a very good question. The rationale is that there are multiple things to it. One of them is we truly believe that the entrepreneur, the small business owner who is looking for a credible alternative to brand themselves online, when they see the price tag of $20 or $29.99, whatever the case maybe, versus $5.99, won’t be deterred by the price. It’s really about getting a credible, recognizable web address. If you find that for $20 or $29.99, it’s worth paying for it.

So that is one side of it. The other side is, as you well know, in the domain name world, it’s very easy to just snap up thousands and thousands of domain names and not do anything with them. Our premium pricing sort of deters people from doing that a little bit. Again, keep in mind what I said earlier. We’re going after the entrepreneurs that want to build businesses online, not so much the speculator who’s going to buy thousands, if not tens of thousands of domain names in one shot.