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Back to Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple, with Anthony Eden.

How Did DNSimple Keep Its Developer Niche?

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.

Transcript

Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple ·

Geek at Sea

More from this episode

  1. How Did Geek at Sea Introduce Anthony Eden?Anthony Eden is the founder of DNSimple.
  2. How Did GoDaddy Push Anthony Eden to Start a Registrar?GoDaddy was holding a personal domain in 2010, and the domain name system screen was horrible.
  3. How Did Anthony Eden's Living Social Nights Start Paying?The opening stretch was independent contracting, about a year and a half of software work to pay the bills. Living Social came next.
  4. How Did Anthony Eden's Script Become DNSimple's Name Server?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.
  5. Why Does DNSimple Take Bank Transfers on Only One Plan?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.
  6. Why Did a Hawaii Mentor Want Five Bucks Per Dollar?A mentor in Hawaii gave the rule early on: do not raise money unless one dollar can turn into five.

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