Technical Lead — HubSpot
FAST FACTS
Session Name: Easily Putting Your Domain to Work Using Domain Connect
Location: Somerville, MA
Currently reading: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Currently watching: Parks and Recreation
Q&A
Describe your company and how long you have been there.
HubSpot is inbound marketing and sales software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. I’ve worked here since 2014 on various projects, but I’ve had a hand in our domain management tools since about the end of 2015.
What can attendees look forward to during your session?
During the panel, we’ll be talking about our own experiences with the Domain Connect standard and how we’ve applied it in our products. We can share information about the benefits of Domain Connect and things to keep in mind when integrating it into your app.
What can attendees do in order to prepare for your session? Are there any questions or scenarios they should consider in advance?
Look up the domain connection instructions for several popular cloud-based content management systems. Now imagine following those instructions as a marketer who is relatively unfamiliar with DNS. Imagine the opportunities for errors and frustration that exist: typos, forgotten credentials, and unfamiliar UIs. As a customer looking to connect your domain to one of these providers, you’re well served by being kept in a single, simple UX as much as possible.
What would you like attendees to learn or take away from your session?
I’d like to impress upon people in the domain industry the reality that even somewhat technical users are often unfamiliar with DNS. I would venture that a significant fraction – perhaps most – domain owners don’t feel fully confident in their ability to configure DNS. A simple standard to help service providers get DNS right is more than a nice to have for service providers who deal with domain on-boarding on a regular basis.
Can you tell us about how your service or product helps deliver value to your customers?
Our Domain Connect integration lets HubSpot customers connect their subdomains to our CMS with a single button push. If we detect that a customer’s DNS provider supports Domain Connect, we don’t present our standard connection instructions and instead encourage them to use this easier method. It’s helped us dramatically reduce our DNS-related support volume and improve our on-boarding experience.
What are your thoughts on the new TLDs?
I like them! They do present some concerns—maintaining control of your brand across the additional TLDs is obviously more difficult, and it’s somewhat harder to code against for the purposes of input validation. But I think it’s necessary to avoid an exhaustion of desirable names under the more popular TLDs.
What are you most looking forward to at the upcoming NamesCon?
I’m looking forward to hearing other peoples use cases for Domain Connect, and to networking with professionals in the domain industry!
How would you describe what you do in a single sentence to a stranger?
I build tools to help people set up their websites, secure them, and put the content they want on them.
If you had 15 extra minutes each day, what would you do with them?
I’ve been meaning to try out some silent meditation at the beginning of the day. Whenever I do this, I find I’m much more productive.
What was the best advice you were ever given?
Get enough sleep.
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