Readit NewsTo answer Marco's question: It is hard to be a good domain registrar but not impossible.
Let me tell you my little personal story about bootstrapping iWantMyName. I left Germany at the end of 2007 after working for a German domain registrar for nearly 6 years. We were successful (2 million domains under management) and the big ones GoDaddy, NetSol, eNom, Register.com etc. just started registering ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) through us.
But something didn't feel right... Domain registrars were getting lots of bad press (frontrunning, parking) and I started thinking of building a new domain management service. In the meantime I moved to Australia and after 6 months of being with an Australian registrar, I had enough. It was time to finally take the plunge. So I moved from Australia to New Zealand where we launched iWantMyName with zero dollar investment in December 2008. I knew one of my co-founders from Germany (luckily he was the former CTO of a registrar back in Germany and had enough of Europe too).
The first year was hard. Really fucking hard. We still had to do some consulting jobs to survive and our service could do nothing but register domains. No transfers, only certain DNS record types were supported, no whois updates. But for me it was really surprising how few features people actually need. Our site architecture helps to keep design work at a minimum level too, it's intentionally kept simple. Actually, we don't even have a designer in our team.
So where are we now a bit more than 2 years later? Well, we're running a profitable domain management service which generates six figures in revenue. This currently supports three founders, one employee and every single cent that's left will go into improving the user experience. No upselling, no annoying ads, no parking crap, auctions and what have you. We have decided not to compete on price, features or add crappy hosting services but only to give customers what they really need and that is purchasing / managing domains. Having said that, there's still lots of room for improvement and we will not stop until we've build the domain registrar Marco is looking for.