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

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. 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.

Anthony Eden 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.

Transcript

Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple ·

Geek at Sea

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  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 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.
  5. 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.
  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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