Run norbelys.com through our own WHOIS & Domain Age tool and you’ll see it immediately: this domain is eleven days old.

That’s usually the kind of fact a company hides. We build deliverability software — surely we should look ancient and established? But the whole premise of this product is that honest numbers beat flattering ones, and an eleven-day-old domain is the most honest test case we’ll ever have. Every receiver on the internet currently treats us exactly the way it treats any new sender: zero history, zero trust, prove it.

So here’s the diary. Everything below is what we actually did, in the order we did it, with the public receipts — because “new domain, day by day” is a path every founder doing outreach walks, usually blind.

Day 1: records before anything

Before the first email — before the website — the authentication records went up, because nothing else matters until they exist:

SPF, one record, includes only what actually sends for us, lookup budget well under the limit of 10.
DKIM at 2048 bits — 1024 is on borrowed time, and starting fresh means there’s no excuse to start on borrowed time.
DMARC at p=none with rua= reporting on from the first hour. Not because p=none protects anything — it doesn’t — but because the reports are the only way to know when we’re ready to climb to quarantine and reject.

You can verify all of it right now: drop norbelys.com into the Domain Health Checker. We don’t get to sell honest tooling and fail our own checks.

Days 2–11: the ramp, not the blast

The temptation with a new product is obvious: announce loudly, email everyone. The math says no. A new domain gets 2–4 weeks of patience minimum, and we’re following the same schedule our Warmup Calculator prints: single-digit daily sends in week one — real emails, to real people who know us — ramping roughly 20–30% at a step, watching bounces against the 2% line, keeping each mailbox inside the human silhouette.

Current status, honestly: small volumes, healthy responses, DMARC reports showing exactly the sources we expect and nobody else. Which is what “nothing to report” looks like, and nothing-to-report is the entire goal of a warmup.

The part that compounds while we wait: giving the checks away

A warming domain can’t do volume, but a website can do work. So days 2 through 11 went into shipping 26 free tools — the checkers, generators and calculators we’d want any sender to run before trusting a platform, no sign-up, running in your browser: blocklist sweeps, header forensics, SPF and DKIM checkers, a DMARC report viewer and the rest — plus one of these posts every day the domain has existed. (You’re reading day eleven.)

There’s no growth hack hiding in that paragraph. It’s the oldest organic play there is: be genuinely useful in public, early, before you’re owed any attention.

Why publish this at all

Because the advice ecosystem around cold email is allergic to receipts. Everyone says “warm up properly, authenticate, be patient” — from five-year-old domains. Fine: here’s a domain you can carbon-date yourself, following its own advice in public. If it works, the diary is the proof. If something breaks, the diary gets a more interesting entry.

We’ll update as the climb continues — p=quarantine when the reports earn it, real outreach volume when the warmup math says so, actual numbers when there are actual numbers.

Eleven days in, the honest summary: records green, ramp on schedule, nothing to report. Ask us again at thirty.