Testimonial.to buys its typo domain to catch visitors who mistype it

What they ran

In 2020, Damon Chen was a Cisco engineer, and that is where the Testimonial story starts. He saw that many visitors typed testimonial.io when they meant testimonial.to, so he paid $35,000 for the .io address. A newsletter breakdown of typo domains adds that he registered both common misspellings: the .io version and one with an extra s. He hired his first employee, for marketing, at $400K ARR.

What happened

In his own account of the purchase, Damon says the .io domain has earned $80K in lifetime revenue, more than twice what he paid for it. The newsletter gives a different number: it says that 18 months later he was $100,527 better off from the typo domains.

What the account does not show

One figure is self-reported and the other comes from a newsletter, and the two do not match. The $80K is revenue, not profit, and it covers only the .io domain. The $100,527 figure covers both typo domains, and the newsletter does not explain how it was counted. Neither source says when the domains were bought, so the 18-month window has no clear start date. The sources also give no baseline for how many of these visitors would have found testimonial.to anyway.