Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the narrative around which you’re building the product portfolio is increasingly getting online and getting the word out about the fact that you’re online.

Steven Aldrich: From the small business owner and the folks who are getting ready to start their business, that is the number one outcome that they want. They don’t have enough customers or revenue, and they need to be found on the web or social media. As they start to bring those customers in, they need to communicate and build the brand. Then the business grows. Now, they need to communicate and collaborate. Grow is a relative term in this case. Most of these business owners rarely get above five employees. Very few people get above 20 employees.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very interesting segue into a question that you just made me think about. You said you have 17 million customers. What percentage of that is solo entrepreneurs?

Steven Aldrich: It mirrors the population of business owners in general. I’ll pick the US as the representative market. In the US, there are 30 million businesses today. Within that 30 million, roughly 23 million are solo entrepreneurs. They might bring in contractors or work with other firms if they have a bigger project or initiative, but from an employee perspective, they don’t have any formal employees besides themselves. The remaining 6 million firms have fewer than five employees. GoDaddy’s customer base mirrors that distribution.

Sramana Mitra: You have many millions of solo entrepreneurs.

Steven Aldrich: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Are you interfacing with these people or are you interfacing with somebody that they’ve hired to work on their domain name?

Steven Aldrich: Almost all of these folks are doing it themselves. Our customer care team talks to over a million customers a month. It’s almost always the business owner calling on behalf of the business. The outcomes that these business owners want are growth and more customers to sustain the business, yet they don’t have staff to delegate the work that has to get done.

One of the things that we see, time and time again, is just the number of hours in the day aren’t enough for these individuals. Things that are proactive to help the business be more effective sometimes get pushed to the very bottom of the list. They hope to get things done like build the next version of their website or make another post on a social media platform, but something urgent gets in the way from an existing customer.

We see these business owners struggling to manage their time between proactive activities to make the business and the reactive activities more successful. That tension is there in all the discussions that we have.

Sramana Mitra: This notion of virtual companies is very active right now. We, ourselves, have set the company up as a virtual company. People who work on our team are all over the world. Most of them work from home. Then we have some small offices in India. We are getting a lot of scale using virtual companies. That trend is very active right now. Even if they are solo entrepreneurs, they’re getting scale out of virtual assistants in the Philippines.

Steven Aldrich: Or hire a designer to help on a project. Those are the realities of these individuals. When I think about our innovation activity, we have that customer in mind. When we think about what we need to do with our existing products to make them deliver more value to customers, we talk a bit about time to value and value achieved. When someone buys a product from us, I want to see them use it.

I want to see them use it in a way that delivers the expectations that customers have. Hopefully, it blows away those expectations as they’re getting their company either up and running or making sure their brand is representing them in a way that they’re proud of. We look at existing products and we think, “How do we innovate on the existing product line?” We look at new areas that we either are solving a partial need for that customer or maybe aren’t even delivering at all against a particular need. I’ll tell you a story as a representative example of how we do this.

For most of the history of GoDaddy, we have thought about the identity of a small business owner revolving around their domain. That made sense. There are lots of folks who have to get online and, still, half of the world’s population is yet to get to the web. When we started talking with business owners over the last couple of years, we found another trend that we were surprised by.

As much as we see electronic communication, whether it’s people in social media or email, or going to your website, we saw a growing amount of communication on people’s mobile devices. Some of it was voice. Some of it was texting and messaging, but it all revolved around a phone number.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy
1 2 3 4 5 6