Sav.com - Redesigning a Domain Platform for the AI Era

Sav.com is a domain registrar and marketplace serving customers in 90+ countries, managing over 2 million domains at peak. Founded in 2019, the platform disrupted the domain industry with the lowest marketplace commission (4%) and a frictionless approach to buying and selling domains.

But by late 2022, the platform had outgrown its UX. The interface was outdated. Friction was high. Churn was high. Retention was low. The product had scaled fast — 1 million to 2 million domains in six months — but the customer experience hadn't kept up with the growth.

Sav needed a design leader who could rethink the entire customer journey, unify the experience across the platform, and set the foundation for what was coming next: an AI-powered website builder that would transform Sav from a domain registrar into an all-in-one platform for building your online presence.

Diagnose

Embedded remotely with Nick Roskam (CTO, based in Chicago) and the development team (based in India) to map the current state. The platform had grown rapidly, but the UX hadn't evolved with it. Multiple features had been added over time without a cohesive design vision — creating a fragmented experience.

The core problem: the platform worked technically but felt disconnected. Users could buy domains, sell domains, and manage their portfolio, but each flow felt like a different product. Friction compounded at every step.

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Align

Worked directly with Nick to define what mattered most: reduce friction across the entire customer journey, unify the visual and interaction design, and create a foundation that could support the planned AI website builder.

The north star: make domain management obvious. If a user can go from searching for a domain to owning it to building a website on it — without confusion at any step — the design is working.

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Design & Build

Redesigned the entire customer journey across ~20 months:

• Domain search and discovery — streamlined for speed and clarity
• Marketplace flows — buying and selling with minimal friction (supporting the industry-low 4% commission)
• Domain management — portfolio view, DNS settings, transfers — unified under one design language
• Onboarding — reduced barriers to first action
• Platform-wide UX — consistent patterns, interactions, and visual design across every touchpoint

Design leadership across a distributed team — CTO in Chicago directing engineering, development team in India executing. Ensuring what shipped matched the design intent, resolving UX/engineering trade-offs, and maintaining quality across a distributed workflow.

The Compound Effect

Six to nine months after the platform redesign shipped, Sav came back with the next phase: the AI-powered website builder.

This was planned from the start — the platform redesign was always intended to set the foundation for what came next. The AI builder turns Sav from a domain registrar into a complete platform: find a domain, buy it, and build a website on it — powered by AI.

• AI website builder UX — designed the user experience for Sav's patented technology (US Patent awarded June 2024). Users enter a description, the system generates a complete website with original content, multimedia, and optional e-commerce.
• Domain + builder integration — connecting the domain purchase flow to the website builder seamlessly. Users who don't have a domain get relevant suggestions as part of the build flow.
• Domain tokenization — platform expanding into blockchain-based domain tokenization through the D3/Doma Protocol partnership (October 2025).

The clarity from Phase 1 compounded: because we built a unified, friction-free platform first, the AI builder had a solid foundation to integrate into — not a bolt-on to a fragmented product.