Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you doing this out of Washington DC? 

Steven Job: Yes, I used to live in a town called Centerville, a suburb of DC. By 2006, it was at a point where it was making several hundred thousand dollars a year, so I hired my first employees who still work with us today.

When you start a company, you never want to be the smartest guy in the room. You want to treat those people like how you want to be treated yourself. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the business that generated a few hundred thousand dollars? Was it people who are buying your domain name for hosting? 

Steven Job: It’s not really buying a domain name; it’s just a service. What we provide is DNS. It was just the ability to offer DNS services. In January 2004, the service that I launched and the one that caught on was called DNS Failover. It monitors your server for you. If your service goes down for any reason, it changes the IP address.

For example, you are hosting in one facility where the computers are no longer accessible. With the service, you can have it running on another circle. It moves your traffic there and changes your IP address.

At the time, people were asking me if I had that ability. This was in 2003 when I was still working with my employer. I said to myself, “It can’t be that hard to develop.”

I wrote that software in one weekend. That is the same software that is running DNS Made Easy today. It monitors multiple locations and then changes the IP. That was when I started getting big brands. That was when Heineken would start using us. 

Sramana Mitra: How were they finding you?

Steven Job: It’s called self-made marketing. You answer as many questions as you can and be polite to people. Until this year, we had never had any salespeople or marketing people. We have about 30,000 clients that use us. We do 150 billion DNS queries today.

It wasn’t until this year that I said, “You know what, we are not growing where we need to grow. I need to start focusing on getting the correct people in charge.”

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on the self-made marketing. Is it Google AdWords or content marketing? 

Steven Job: Yes, I probably had one of the first Google AdWords accounts. I remember when Google AdWords was nothing more than text ads and me writing them. They had a beta service and I remember writing to them. I remember asking if I could give them a credit card before they allowed credit cards.

It was the early stages of Google AdWords. Back in the day, there was a thing called newsgroups where I would answer any question possible about DNS, routing, Java programming, Microsoft administration, and anything under the sun. If I knew it, then I would do it.

When I was in college, I had three different jobs. One was a part-time networking job. The second one was as a full-time web app developer. The third one was as a part-time Microsoft visual basic programmer.

None of these were things that you went to school for. In computer science, you learn theory. You don’t learn practicality. You have to figure it out.

When I was hired for my first job, they said, “Okay, you are hired and you start Monday.” I asked what the job was going to be. They wanted a new type of program and it was in Pearl. So, I went home and learned Pearl that weekend. You can get a book to figure it out. Back then, Amazon only sold books. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job
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