Smash Notes

Geek at Sea

Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple

This is a story of how Anthony Eden founded DNSimple to become the fastest DNS management solution provider in the world. He built himself a company that not only cares about their customers, but also created the perfect place for their employees. They work hard, but they also do it remotely, from around the globe. How did he do it, and what lessons does…

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  1. How Did Anthony Eden Get Introduced on Geek at Sea as the Person Behind Dnsimple About 10 Years After He Started It?

    at 0:00 · Transcript

    Anthony Eden is the founder of DNSimple. Geek at Sea introduced him as the person behind a simple place to buy a domain and manage domain name system records in one spot, already about 10 years into the work.

    DNSimple was started to fix a problem Anthony Eden had himself. The team stayed small, profitable, and independent, and the conversation was about building that kind of life while raising a family.

  2. How Did a Horrible Godaddy Interface and Constant Upsells in 2010 Push a Domain Veteran to Start a Registrar?

    at 1:44 · Transcript

    GoDaddy was holding a personal domain in 2010, and the domain name system screen was horrible. Constant upsells made the setup feel pointless for someone who had already worked in the domain space since the late 1990s.

    The response was to stop using GoDaddy for that job and start a registrar instead. Years of working for other people had supplied the experience, and 2010 felt like the moment to take the work into his own hands.

  3. How Did Nights and Weekends at Living Social Lead to a First Paycheck Near the End of 2012?

    at 4:14 · Transcript

    The opening stretch was independent contracting, about a year and a half of software work to pay the bills. Living Social came next. The registrar was carved out in the contract as pre-existing work so it would not conflict with the day job. Nights and weekends went into growing it, and the first three years paid no salary at all.

    A Florida limited liability company in 2010 was the legal start, using an entity that already existed. A paycheck began near the end of 2012, or maybe early 2013, once revenue could pay the other people on it. The person taking that salary was the third employee.

  4. How Did a Developer Niche Hold for 10 Years Beside Godaddy, Amazon Route 53, Google, and Microsoft Azure?

    at 10:00 · Transcript

    The niche was engineers and developers building web apps. They wanted to set domain records and leave, without hosting and without an email provider bundled in. The same approach was still the plan 10 years later.

    GoDaddy was already a giant. Amazon Route 53, then Google, then Microsoft Azure each took plenty of business. The bet was that a developer niche still had room, because developers do not want to think about domain name system details.

  5. How Did Anthony Eden Turn a Perl Alias Script Into an Erlang Name Server So a Naked Domain Could Point at Heroku?

    at 12:20 · Transcript

    DNSimple customers could not put a CNAME on the apex of a domain such as dnsimple.com. A Heroku customer wanted the naked domain to point at a Heroku site. The alias record started as a Perl script running inside PowerDNS, with a MySQL backend, and it worked until growth made it stop scaling.

    Lua and another attempt did not fit. Anthony Eden learned Erlang to solve the scaling problem, using a library that already parsed packets, and built the name server DNSimple still runs in production. The language was learned to fix that problem inside DNSimple, not to start the company.

  6. How Did Dnsimple Limit Automated Clearing House Payments to the Yearly Business Plan After Larger Customers Refused Credit Cards?

    at 23:28 · Transcript

    On the show, DNSimple changed billing so larger customers could pay by ACH. A credit card was the only payment option in the early days. Bigger companies refused credit cards because procurement and billing follow a structured process, and ACH became a feature only at higher tiers.

    In the early days, the only way to pay DNSimple was a credit card. As the years went on, larger companies said a credit card would not work and they needed to pay by ACH. A $5 a month plan paid by ACH every month does not work, because the bookkeeping alone is a nightmare. DNSimple limits ACH to yearly plans that exceed some amount in a year. ACH stays off a yearly professional plan and stays on a yearly business plan.

    The speaker had no idea how larger customers would run procurement. Designing for the real constraint let DNSimple grow slowly into larger customers, rather than building every feature up front.

  7. Why Did a Mentor in Hawaii Say Not to Raise Money Unless One Dollar Could Turn Into Five?

    at 31:50 · Transcript

    A mentor in Hawaii gave the rule early on: do not raise money unless one dollar can turn into five. Other people's money is not for building a product or buying equipment. Capital is for making more money.

    A channel that returns five bucks for a dollar in is worth spending on until the channel is used up. Profit from customers is itself an investment in the work, and many cases call for a little money or no money at all.

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