This year was supposed to be a year of re-aligning the company for the “big push”. Having opened in 1997, we launched the same year (or before) many other companies that now dominate the hosting field. I started the same year as GoDaddy, the same year Dreamhost began hosting, and a number of years before Hostgator’s founding. We are, however, a small fraction of the size of all of the above.
Not that it means anything, really. But I’ve been around a while.
In all those years, marketing simply didn’t interest me (which is likely way we are a fraction of the size of the above). I’ve had a very old-fashioned view of my own business and an almost “divine rewards” view of its growth – if we do a good job, people will come. I’d rather take the thousands I could pour into marketing and put it into the technology and the servers. I wanted to grow like the old Faberge Organic Shampoo commercial all based on word of mouth. And it’s worked that way quite well for 13 years.
My company has honestly never really been marketed with anything remotely approaching a strategy – I do things in fits and spurts as the mood strikes me, and then I lose interest, preferring to tinker with my servers.
As I started coming up towards forty, my age started to work on my mind a bit – I don’t really want to be resetting passwords for people when I’m 65 years old. I thought maybe it was time to turn up the marketing, and push for a major expansion. See how far I could go.
I approached 2010 with that in mind. I went 24/7, got a staff, dusted off a lot of things and brought them up to an easily scalable point. I spent a half a year watching the new staff like hawks to show them how I wanted things done. I stripped off some outdated notions we had, and implemented some new, cutting edge technologies. I got everything pretty much where I wanted it to push forward into a massive expansion.
That I suddenly don’t want to do anymore.
As I automated and staffed out much of what I and a small handful of people had been doing, with each thing that was completed, I regained time and freedom I hadn’t had for many years. I was able to accomplish everything, see everything that was happening in the company in a fraction of the time it used to take me. My “mandatory” time went from 8 hours a day (or more on some days) to about 2-3 hours a day. Any other time I devoted was optional.
As I contemplated that massive push, I changed my mind about giving all that up again. It suddenly didn’t seem worth it anymore.
As a “small” host (I don’t know if we’re small or mid-sized, actually – everyone spits out different numbers for the cut offs), I can do so many things that seem quaint and old fashioned now – like manually installing new accounts. I’ve gotten hundreds of new accounts over the years, and the last time I installed a fraudulent account was back in 2003. I don’t face that challenge because I have the time to devote to stopping it before they get on my servers. As a consequence, my clients don’t face the issues so many other hosts have with abusers.
I can know my individual machines and their behaviors in ways that larger hosts simply can’t. Their fleets are too big – I think I know all my server’s little tics and idiosyncrasies as well as I know my kid. If I pushed for expansion, I would lose that intimate familiarity.
I see every ticket, and every answer given, and will jump in if I’m not satisfied with the response a staff member gives. I couldn’t do that if there were 100x the number of tickets.
I’m not sure why DrakNet has these disgustingly low churn rates that other people in this industry would love to have, but I have to think that it’s a combination of all of that – and much of that would change if there were suddenly twice as many servers, four times as many servers, overnight. I think we do what we do as well as we do it because we’ve grown organically.
So, I think that the whole marketing/expansion/oodles of money thing may go on the back burner for a while. Or forever. I think I kinda like being the little known secret that still has almost all their first 100 clients from 13 years ago.
Though I’ll probably keep feeding bloggers at Austin Blogathon, not because it’s good marketing, but because that was fun.
So, I spent some time dusting off the plugins since, apparently, people are honestly reading the blog. I also installed Google Analytics because I’m curious who the heck is reading the blog and how you people are getting here because two weeks ago, this wasn’t even a blog. I even stuck one of those plugins that will tweet when I rant. Which could be dangerous because I really do like to run my mouth – though with RSS now, no one can 
