Top Level Design LLC

Most domain companies stick to one side of the business — either running registries or selling registrations. Top Level Design LLC took a different path. Founded in 2012 by Ray King and Peter Brual, this Oregon-based company dove headfirst into ICANN's New gTLD Program with a mission to create "passion-driven" domain extensions that would give the internet more expressive naming options beyond the traditional .com world.

Their vision paid off with creative TLDs like .design, .wiki, .ink, .gay, and .tattoo — domain extensions that actually meant something to the communities using them. But here's where Top Level Design's story gets interesting: instead of just collecting registry fees in the background, they built their own registrar called Porkbun to sell domains directly to customers. What started as a way to support their own TLDs grew into something much bigger.

By 2021, Top Level Design made a strategic decision that surprised many in the domain industry. They sold .design to GoDaddy Registry, followed by their remaining TLD portfolio (.wiki, .ink, .gay, and .tattoo) in 2023. Instead of doubling down on registry operations, they pivoted entirely to focus on what had become their breakout success: Porkbun.

Today, Porkbun manages over 3 million domains across 300+ TLDs and ranks as the ninth-largest new TLD registrar globally. What makes this transition remarkable is how Top Level Design turned their registrar — originally just a retail arm for their own TLDs — into a major player that competes directly with industry giants through transparent pricing and customer-first policies.

The company embodies an interesting evolution in the domain space: from registry operator focused on creative extensions to registrar powerhouse that proves you can build market share by simply treating customers better. Their tagline about "delivering a new generation of Internet naming" turned out to be prophetic, just not in the way they originally planned.