Smash Notes
272 - Anthony Eden, Founder of DNSimple
In this episode I talk with Anthony Eden about building DNSimple, a DNS provider and domain registrar. We discuss his 25 years in the domain industry, technical challenges, and why specialized niches create natural competitive moats. DNSimpleAnthony Eden on LinkedInanthony@dnsimple.comNonsense Monthly
People
Notes
-
DNSimple bound each user to an account at the start. Login credentials were tied to billing and access control. Over the years the binding blocked new work, so DNSimple decoupled users from accounts into a many-to-many relationship. Many users can now belong to many accounts.
People use DNSimple for personal domains. The founder has domain names and also works on DNSimple domain names. DNSimple segments domains for set reasons: production domains sit in one highly restricted account, and other domains are experiments for fun. The founder says DNSimple might build a site or run something off an experimental domain without knowing whether it will live. A single user reaches each account under different access control. When a user was an account, separate access was impossible. The bigger application code gets, or the longer it lives, the harder a fundamental design decision becomes to change.
A business that must race toward the next round of funding, the next round of debt, a public listing, or the next revenue target will build around a core system instead of updating it. DNSimple never raised any funds, is profitable, and chose to change the core user-and-account relationship while still servicing customers.
-
On the show, DNSimple has used the Shape Up process from Basecamp for a couple of years. Framing, added to Shape Up after the original book, means writing the problem in a document and iterating until the understanding feels solid enough to design a feature. The team lacked that step at first, and adding it made the workflow make sense.
DNSimple is staffed almost entirely by engineers working at the product level, so the group had to retrain. People stopped themselves from writing solutions and focused on the problem, the people impacted, and the world people imagine after the problem is fixed. Only then did shaping begin, with the feature designed from that understanding.
A frame that is off sends the solution design off as well, and the result can look weird. More often, being forced to work in that order has helped DNSimple build better systems and understand the kinds of problems in front of DNSimple.
-
On the show, scalability is kind of irrelevant in the beginning. The point is to get somebody and form a kernel of a user base. Expanding the kernel by ten percent is enough, because what reaches one stage is different from what reaches the next stage. One approach will not run from zero all the way to a hundred million dollars.
A completely different strategy has to take over every couple of months or every year. What fits a move from a hundred customers to a thousand does not fit a move from zero customers to ten, or from ten customers to a hundred. Every added zero, whether customers, revenue, or traffic, brings very different requirements for the next step and for what comes after getting there.
Zero to one and then one to N is the dream. On the show, the reality is that a move from one customer to a hundred might open a scalability problem that was not foreseen, a move from a hundred to a thousand is a different problem, and a move from a thousand to ten thousand is a different problem.
-
A sale into an organization depends on a champion inside the business, even when the champion will not write the check. The champion has to be clearly identified, and the seller has to build a relationship with the champion. Champions are the ones who get the seller in with the gatekeepers and the buyers. Without champions, the seller pretty much has to have a much bigger marketing budget, because reaching the buyers and the gatekeepers takes a massive amount of marketing and sales.
The path is to find the champion, know who the champion is, and treat the champion well. Champions then take the seller into the businesses where the champions work and stay with the seller for a long time, even when a deal in a particular environment does not close. The host says the familiar advice to get in front of the decision maker is good advice, and also says it seems a little lacking in nuance. Getting in front of the decision maker is not always realistic. Many times the purse string holder is the official decision maker and does not really care. The champion is the one who cares and has to make the case to the purse string holder.
Look for champions. Champions are how a seller gets into a business once direct access to the person who writes the check is out of reach.
You might also like
- How Did Dnsimple Limit Automated Clearing House Payments to the Yearly Business Plan After Larger Customers Refused Credit Cards?
- How Did a Few Months Building a Knowledge Base Pull Dnsimple Back to Staying Focused?
- How Did Anthony Eden Get Introduced on Geek at Sea as the Person Behind Dnsimple About 10 Years After He Started It?
- How Did the Last Couple of Years of Registrar Investment Make Dnsimple Split Almost Evenly Between Domain Registration and Operational Domain Name System Work?
- How Did Dnsimple's Domain Control Plane Let Zones at Azure and at Dnsimple Sit Side by Side and Move Back and Forth?
- Why Does Dnsimple Push Record Changes to Eight Points of Presence, as Far as Australia, With Its Own Transfer System and a Low Time to Live Instead of a One-day Default?