If you've searched for a domain name in the last twenty years, you've probably used one of our free tools. Instant Domain Search has powered nearly half a billion searches across 80+ countries.
Today we're introducing instant.ai, a research lab building more tools to go from idea to something real.
What's worked
Instant Domain Search started as a tiny Web 2.0 project: a single page that did one thing incredibly well. Twenty years later, it's still one of the most-used domain search tools on the internet.
If we learned anything from this, it's that speed wins.
When tools keep up with your thinking, you try more ideas and build momentum. You keep pulling the thread 🧶🤏
We made it faster, simpler, and even built within modern workflows. Behind the scenes, some of the hundreds of technical improvements include:
- Tim Baker engineered our web experience to truly feel "instant": gutting our JS bundle, eliminating cascading re-renders, and hunting down every main-thread blocker killing performance.
- Rudi Floren architected our availability data more accurately by building a Rust service from scratch that pools EPP connections across registries for real-time registry checks.
- Antonio Stoilkov rebuilt our search UI to feel thoughtless with a rebuilt, modernized experience across desktop and mobile.
And many more. That work compounded into 2.5x growth over the last 12 months. Now, we're expanding into more wicked fast tools: Instant Registrar, API, and much more.
What's next
Instant sits in a really special part of the internet: people come to us when an idea is cooking. A new startup, side project, newsletter, or even a name they can't shake.
Now that AI is making it dramatically easier to build, the hard part now isn't if you can make it. Instead, it's whether you can keep the idea in motion enough to ship.
Our goal with instant.ai is to build small, mighty fast tools that help you go from "I have an idea" to "it's on the internet."
The new branding
Here's a teaser of our new branding. We kept the lightning bolt because that's the ethos to everything we build: speed and momentum.
What's new is making our design system even more obvious, and almost invisible when it's working. Our tools feel magical, and we want our branding to reflect that too with a creative, human feel.
A huge amount of this came from Paden Spencer's artwork and world-building, Spencer Alexander Marsh's logo illustrations, and Jordan Clarke's simplification of our UI/UX. We'll be sharing more of their work as we roll the new system out.
And of course, there's explorations of new mascots (Jiffy!) because why not.
About Instant
Instant started as a Web 2.0 side project back in 2005 out of the first Y Combinator batch.
Now, we're a small (but mighty!) team of designers, developers, and marketers obsessed with building simple software.
If you're curious about anything we're building, we'd love to hear from you. Send me an email: matt@instant.ca 🫰
