Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year are we in now? 

Steven Job: While I was working those crazy hours, I developed a service called DNS Made Easy. It’s still around today. At that time, I was creating it as a side project where I could make a little extra revenue. It was a passion project.

It all started because I wanted to host a website at home. Back in the day, hosting was not for free, but now you can buy a domain name for ten bucks and get hosting and email for free.

Back in early 2000, it wasn’t that easy to put up a website. You had to pay a significant fee to host your website. You needed to have a technical understanding of it. It wasn’t meant for a hobby user. A Jane Doe down the street who couldn’t set up a store to sell her knitting.

It was nothing like today. You are like me. You have been around since Al Gore was stringing the fiber of the internet. It’s changed dramatically throughout the years. I started programming for internet services in 1996 and if I compare that to where it is today, the world changed. It probably changes every five years.

We look back five years and you can see the change. I wanted to host this website. I was working for this company in the DC area and the only way to affordably do it was to host it at home. You put it on a computer at home. If you had Linux administration skills and the ability to program, you could put a service up, but you can’t host it on your home computer because your IP address kept changing.

I wanted to create a service that allowed me and others like me to host a website out of my house and then if the IP address changed from my home cable connection, it would update the DNS, which then updates the IP address for your website.

I made that service in 2001. It was a free service at first, but then large brands started calling me at home saying, “I’m having a problem doing this, why can’t you help me?” It’s a free service, so I said, “You just had a SuperBowl commercial on, why are you putting your brand on this platform?” They said, “Well, your service works well.”

That was when I decided that I was going to start charging for it, because I wanted to make it a bit better. It was running out of a T1 out of my house which I was self-funding – paying the $650 a month for a T1 and I also had another $150 DSL line as a backup.

Once I decided that I was going to start charging for it, that was when I started hosting it in a facility called Equinix in Ashburn which is one of the larger carrier-neutral internet exchanges in the world right now. I started hosting it there, but at the time in 2003, it was making a whopping $1,000 a month.

At that point, I had just gotten married and I was looking at the demands and the amount of work I was putting in with the other companies. I decided that it was now the time to try this. The crazy thing is that the month after we got married, my wife got pregnant.

I figured $1,000 a month is enough for my wife and my baby. It wasn’t very smart, but that was what I did. I was living off savings for the first year. I went full time. I didn’t have another job starting in July of 2003. From July to December, I redeveloped DNS Made Easy. I put in everything that I needed to make it something that I could live off of. I remember in 2004, I had close to $40,000 worth of revenue, and I was so happy.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job
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