Small Town, Big Ideas

"My computer died and I lost all of my email!"

I had an appointment with an executive of a fast growing company in Blacksburg yesterday. When I showed up, one of the first things she said was, "my computer died and I lost all of my email!" I could definitely empathize with her as the same thing has happened to me several times over the years. And when it happens, it's not just email. It's email messages, calendar appointments, contacts, tasks, etc. However, its not going to happen to me again because in August, I switched from using Outlook as my email client to using webmail as my email client. As a webmail user, all of my data is stored online and backed up nightly to three data centers managed by Amazon. So even if something happens to one of our servers (servers are just computers and computers do die!) my data is still available.

There are many reasons to move your email to the web. This is just one of them.

PS: the executive at this company is a customer. She just happens to use POP3 to download all of her email from of our servers to her computer.

Executive Promotions

We recently promoted two people here at Webmail to VP-level positions.

Ben Hubbard is now our Vice President of Business Operations. Ben is in charge of customer care and SMB sales and scaling those teams with the growth of our company while ensuring high quality at every level. Ben is going on year #5 at Webmail and has been instrumental in helping us establish ourselves in the email hosting market.

Adam Williams is now our Vice President of Partner Relations. This is a newly formed division within our company. Adam is in charge of ensuring the success of our reseller partners by making their transition an easy one and then maintaining relationships post-partnership. Adam is going on year #3 and has helped us establish our successful reseller program in his previous roles.

Here is a nice write-up by theWhir on the two promotions.

I'm very proud of both of these guys. Both individuals have been with us for a long time, have been very loyal to me and the company, and have achieved a tremendous amount of success—within Webmail and beyond.

How They Hire at SmugMug

One of my favorite things in business is hiring people. I'm constantly reading as much as I can get my hands on to figure out how we can hire the best people to work at Webmail. So far so good.

I came across a great blog post tonight written by Don MacAskill, the CEO of SmugMug, about how they hire. I love many of the points he makes, especially:

- Get the right people on the bus (and get the wrong people off)
- Hire for passion first, talent second
- Passion for the job, not passion for the company
- Getting stuff done

His point about "Passion for the job, not passion for the company" is especially intriguing to me. I think that we get too stuck on passion for the company during our interview process. But, if I look at our top performers throughout the company, almost all of them were initially (at least) passionate about what they do and how their efforts could contribute to our overall goals and objectives. This makes sense if you think about it. People want to build software, sell stuff, or help customers, more than they want to work for an email hosting company or a photo sharing website. So from now on, I'm going to try to push everyone (starting with myself) to focus on passion for the job, more so than passion for the company.

If you're involved in hiring people, or if you're wondering what employers [should] look for in employees, I recommend reading Don's blog post.

IT | Redux: Email Roundup

IT | Redux included us in their Email Roundup article the other day. While I was happy to see us on the list, I wasn't too excited about the summary:

Webmail.us is yet another generic online email provider, but delivers a fairly comprehensive set of features, including company directory and shared calendars. It’s also the only application that provides data migration services.

I'm not really sure what "yet another generic online email provider" really means, but it doesn't sound too exciting to me. I think what they meant to say was, "one of the only two email hosting specialists on our list of 10 email companies, most of which aren't really email companies." But close enough. ;-)

Creating a Successful Email Archiving Service with the Amazon S3 Storage Grid

Bill will be speaking at ISPCON about our relationship with Amazon and the data backup service we built on top of their S3 platform. Here is the description of that session:

With the advent of utility-based services such as the Amazon Web Services S3 Storage Grid, new applications and economics are emerging that enable point solutions and services when coupled with an API such as S3. In this session, we'll review some of the examples and uses of this technology and delve into the experiences of deploying a large-scale commercial service.

ISPCON takes place May 23-25 in Orlando, Florida. Here is the website for more information and here is a blog authored by the Jon Price, the guy who runs ISPCON.