Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you own an e-commerce or a large-sized business, an outage is challenging. 

Steven Job: Yes, it’s a huge problem. For instance, Amazon was down on October 22. Their DNS provider had a full day outage, so no one was able to buy any products from Amazon that day. This was a big loss. This happened because they had a single DNS provider. They had a single solution and they had no redundancy.

Sramana Mitra: I understand the value of what you are doing. I’m assuming that you bootstrapped this whole thing from revenues, right? 

Steven Job: Yes, it’s completely bootstrapped. 

Sramana Mitra: How many employees do you have? Are they all in the Washington DC area?

Steven Job: We have 37 people. Since COVID, we decided to say, “Why stay in Washington DC?” In the last seven months, we’ve had 9 people within the US. The whole virtual environment is a good thing for us. For me, it’s not so much about the cost.

I would rather pay people good salaries and give them good benefits to hire the best people than worry about people coming to the office. As long as you are being productive and passionate while working at home, then there is no problem. When you are an entrepreneur and you are funding it yourself, you want to hire people that have the passion.

Sramana Mitra: Our company is virtual. We have people all over the world. I’m a big believer in virtual companies and COVID has accelerated that trend big time.

One of the nuggets that I have seen many times before is this web self-service model of customer acquisition. Google AdWords plays a big role in that. I’ve seen this content marketing in many case studies – answering questions on newsgroups.

I love the fact that with such a small team, you can build nice businesses which are bootstrapped. 

Steven Job: I will say that the one thing that I did learn is that you sometimes need to step back when you are so far into it. You need to adapt. DNS Made Easy was running for so long and we were getting all these questions and the name was hurting us. It was killing us.

The name Made Easy sounds cheap and unprofessional. When we started coming up with all the newer solutions, we decided to rebrand as another service. We never got rid of the first one, but now we offer a new service called Constellix. We invested over $15 million of R&D in that.

We are now developing ways of computing the cost of traffic, routing around cloud outages, and moving decisions based upon what provider you are one and everything like that. Learning and stepping back and asking what is not working is sometimes the hardest part.

For us now, Constellix is our fastest-growing product. That is the one product everyone contacts us for. It has allowed us to take off to new levels and that is why we are hiring more employees and expanding more.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time. 

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping to $7 Million: Constellix CEO Steven Job
1 2 3 4 5 6