Meet Prakash, Afternic’s Product Manager – What’s in store for 2025?

As the world’s premier domain marketplace, Afternic has scores of staff focused on bringing domain sellers success. From engineers to designers, to support staff and sales, Afternic’s a sizable operation.

At the helm of the platform’s development is Senior Product Manager, Prakash Sadarangani. Leading backend and front-end operations at Afternic, Prakash brings a wealth of experience this highly demanding role.

Here, we find out more about Prakash, his role leading Afternic, and what’s in store for Afternic in 2025.

Tell us about your professional background, and how it led to working for GoDaddy?

My career has been quite a journey, and it’s shaped who I am today, leading me to my current role at GoDaddy. I started off in the tech industry, working in tech support at a company recognized as a leader in the design and manufacturing of networking equipment across the world. That job was a great way to hone my problem-solving skills and taught me the importance of finding practical solutions that really work for customers.

After that, I ventured into software engineering at a globally renowned technology services and consulting firm. I worked my way up through various technical positions, which really deepened my technical expertise and broadened my skill set.

A big turning point in my career was when I decided to switch gears and dive into product management, especially in the fast-paced credit card industry. Over the years, I found myself working closely with clients, which ignited my passion for customer success and support. This mix of technical knowledge and client-focused experience has given me a well-rounded perspective. It helps me understand the complexities of domain investment and fuels my drive to create innovative solutions.

What’s your role at GoDaddy?

At GoDaddy, I hold the position of Senior Product Manager for Afternic, the world’s premier domain marketplace.

In this capacity, I leverage my expertise to assist domain investors in optimizing their portfolios and achieving their financial objectives. I collaborate closely with a team of skilled professionals to enhance our platform and maintain its competitiveness in the rapidly evolving domain industry.

My extensive background in technology and product management, along with diverse professional experiences, equips me with a unique perspective and the necessary skills to drive success and innovation in this field.

Prakash Sadarangani, left, with members of the GoDaddy team, and DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris at NamesCon, 2024

What do you like most about your role supporting domain investor success?

What I find most fulfilling about my role is the opportunity to make a tangible impact on the success of our domain investors. Witnessing our clients thrive and expand their investments through our guidance and the tools we provide is incredibly rewarding.

The ever-evolving nature of the domain industry keeps me on my toes, constantly learning and adapting, while the collaborative environment at GoDaddy fuels innovation and excellence in everything we do.

Since you started leading Afternic, a lot of positive changes have happened. Can you recap where we’ve come from, and where we are now?

In a few short years, we’ve certainly come a long way. Most noticeable are the user experience interface changes, modernizing the whole platform from its original 2013 design. Behind the scenes, this work also included revamping our backend and moving to a new inventory management system, which has set us up for faster iterations and updates.

We’ve also integrated some of the best features of Dan.com and Uniregistry into Afternic, something we’re continuing to do through self-brokerage and transaction assurance updates in 2025.

These integrations have seen plenty of new features come to market, including Lease to Own, Custom Checkout Link, and more.

In that time, what have been your favorite products or features to launch?

Definitely Lease to Own. We initially launched Lease to Own at Afternic through an integration with Dan.com, but our team moved quickly to build Lease to Own natively in Afternic, with deep connections to GoDaddy.

This means that buyers throughout the world can now purchase a Lease to Own domain name through GoDaddy search and pay in their local currency. This is a first for the domain industry: integrating Lease to Own into a leading registrar at scale.

Lease to Own continues to present opportunities for Afternic, as well as investors, and I’m excited to see so many customers enabling it for their domain names.

Which features do you think are underrated that sellers may not know about?

Custom Checkout Link is a feature we launched in 2023, bringing a 5% commission rate to use Afternic to close your negotiated sales.

We moved the service from Dan.com’s checkout to GoDaddy’s checkout in December 2024, but the feature is something many sellers may not be leveraging.

We see products launching, and then further updated post-launch. What’s your philosophy on releasing and iterating products?

We’re really focused on what we call the magical staircase experience. This lets us release a product and continue to build on it further over time, bringing additional features to each release based on what our sellers need.

How does user feedback enter into the magical staircase experience?

User feedback is absolutely essential to the magical staircase experience, and our whole product development process. Throughout the past couple of years, we’ve brought new features to Afternic that have directly answered user feedback, and continued to iterate based on what our sellers tell us they need.

We want to hear from you with your views on Afternic, and what you’d like to see in the future. You can submit your feedback to us through domaincommunity@godaddy.com.

Where’s Afternic heading in 2025, and what themes will we see from the upcoming releases?

We have a few focuses that you’ll notice coming to the forefront of our product releases throughout 2025.

Firstly, a focus on self-serve operations, bringing our sellers more and more tools to help them manage and sell their domain listings with less reliance on our support teams. You’ve seen this already with our pending review tool release in January. Based on feedback, we added to this tool recently, by bringing Fast Transfer resubmission.

We’ll also be bringing enhanced communications on both buyer and seller sides, as well as bringing more features into the GoDaddy investor ecosystem to serve domain name investors. It’s going to be an exciting year.

How will Afternic fit into the investor ecosystem more deeply in 2025?

A deeper integration into the GoDaddy investor ecosystem means reducing the friction between GoDaddy and Afternic by bringing a closer connection between the two.

This includes making sure that if a domain name is in your GoDaddy account, it will not require additional nameserver or TXT verification to list it for sale at Afternic.

What other updates may investors expect to see coming?

We’re bringing self-brokerage to Afternic, answering a regular request from our sellers. Alongside that, we’re introducing a new TA process that brings increased automation, which we expect will speed up the average domain transaction closing process at Afternic.

You can also expect us to implement more and more AI into Afternic through experimentation. Experiments are key to learning and growing as a platform, and bringing AI into Afternic to help our domain sellers wherever possible is going to be hugely rewarding.

Speaking of AI, we recently saw Afternic integrate its first AI experiment into the user interface with AI price suggestions. How do you see AI playing a part in empowering Afternic sellers in the future?

At Afternic, we have a lot of plans for where AI can bring new levels of assistance to sellers. Our first experiment saw us add Pricing AI to 50% of user accounts to give enhanced valuation estimates based on a number of different data points we have.

The domain investment space is fertile ground for bringing AI into products to manage, buy, and sell domains. Introducing AI to help with data driven decisions and reducing the steps in workflows will change the domain investment landscape in the long term.

Do you have feedback for the Afternic team? Email domaincommunity@godaddy.com.