Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 4)

Steven Job: I would answer any questions. When I answered those questions, I had my name and the name DNS Made Easy on the footer. I would also recommend my services there. It was hours and hours of answering questions and putting my name out there.

I remember when someone said, “What are DNS providers? I’m having problems. Who would you recommend?” I was so excited. I said, “Hey you know what, I launched this new service. Give it a try.”

It was the best thing in the world. Seeing the first person use the service is exciting. You probably experienced that when you got your first one thousand subscribers. You get that huge surge of excitement.

For me, it was when I was looking at my server and I saw traffic come through. I saw traffic come through and I said to myself, “Look at this. If that server wasn’t running, then that website wouldn’t be functioning right now.” If they went to www.heineken.com, they had to hit our servers for their website to work.

Now, we are doing 400,000 of these lookups a second, so it’s not that exciting anymore, but that first initial traffic was very exciting. That service took off. The DNS Failover service in itself was the main reason that DNS Made Easy took off.

At that time, there was one other provider that did it horribly wrong. It did not technically make any sense and they charged $2,000 a month. The service is not that costly, so I charged 40 cents a month for it. It takes a lot of people to make up a few hundred thousand dollars a year with 40 cents a month.

It grew from that and then we realized that the biggest impediment to be considered an enterprise was the network. It was the network on which your service runs on. It’s like the foundation of your house. If you build this gorgeous house on this bad foundation, then eventually it’s going to fall.

We realized that the network was the biggest thing. I was sleeping in the data facility for several days while setting up computers. I’d start talking to other night grinders in the data facility. These are the guys who figure stuff out and learn how to build networks. They would say, “Hey, you should contact this guy or that guy to figure out how to do your network.”

First, we’d buy from their network, then try to incorporate it into our own. Then we learned how to build our network the right way to offer an enterprise service. That is our biggest focus. We’ve always put so much in R&D. 

Sramana Mitra: You operated on 40 cents a month at this point and you have collected a few hundred thousand dollars worth of revenue. What year are you talking about?

Steven Job: Yes. In 2006, we had a couple of hundred thousand dollars of revenue. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job
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