My Thoughts

Inc. Magazine: Webmail.us is the 217th Fastest Growing Private Company in America

According to Inc. Magazine, we are the 217th fastest growing private company in America. This also makes us the fastest growing email specialist on the Inc. 500 list and the fastest growing business overall in Southwest Virginia.

We believe that email is the most critical business communication tool in the world and luckily, a growing number of businesses don't want to manage it themselves. They turn to us because we're a specialist—we're 100% focused on providing email services to businesses.

I can't express how proud I am of our team for this accomplishment. And we are obviously growing, so, if you want to join the fastest growing email specialist on the Inc. 500, the fastest growing company in Southwest Virginia, and one of the best places to work in this region, check us out.

Blacksburg: Low Cost, Lots of Jobs

According to this article on MSN, Blacksburg is one of the top 10 "places where the cost of living and unemployment are low and the number of jobs is growing steadily." Blacksburg is #8 on the list.

Here is an excerpt on Blacksburg and the surrounding areas:

Blacksburg, Christiansburg and Radford, Va.
This tri-city area, located in a cluster of small towns, is best known as the home of Virginia Polytechnic Institute (better known as Virginia Tech).

Blacksburg is the largest of the three communities and combines a small-town feel and college amenities with a beautiful setting in the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains. A pleasant climate and proximity to nearby Roanoke, with its excellent arts, commerce and health care, are perks. The wooded area lacks some big-city hustle and amenities, and is isolated from air service. But it has a low cost of living, with a median home price of only $197,800 and great outdoor recreation opportunities to boot.

This is great to see.

We are surely doing our best to contribute to the increase in jobs.

Spam... Outside of Your Inbox

Spam sucks. Everyone hates it. And unfortunately, when people think of spam, they think of email. I can't tell you the number of articles I've read in the last few years proclaiming that because of spam, email is useless and will soon be replaced by chat, text and instant messaging, wikis, blogs, RSS, social networking, and the list goes on. Now don't get me wrong... I believe in these other forms of communication. I have a blog, I use IM all day, I'm a text messaging freak, we now use Campfire for group chats, I read stuff on Wikipedia all the time, and I've got a LinkedIn profile and a MySpace page. But I'm noticing something... while my email spam continues to decline, spam from all of these other forms of new-age communication tools are on the rise. I get tons of trackback spam, comment spam, and more than anything, MySpace spam. And not only are they on the rise, but in many cases, they are trickier and more deceptive than the spams that do make it to my inbox. Check out this spam email I just got on my MySpace profile:

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Subject: Hey Pat

Body: How's it goin? I'm Kristy, I just moved to the Blacksburg area and I wanna meet a nice guy around here :-). I moved here to Virginia a couple of weeks ago for work and now that I'm here I have nobody to hang out with! I read your profile... You're cute and I liked what you had to say :-).

I'm 24/F/single and I'm lookin for a guy who is a little bit older or more mature than me. You say you're 30 and you're cute so I guess you're qualified :-)

My friend Jen from back home suggested I tried using myspace to meet people in my area. I just signed up and my profile sux hehe. I do have a blog/profile page at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ... I have alot of photos and stuff up if you wanna see me.

I left you a personal msg on my homepage and I took a new pic for you today. Come check me out when you have a chance, k?

Lookin forward to seeyin ya,
Kristy

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This is unbelievable! This spammer (who is probably a guy running a porn shop out of his basement) knows my name, my age, the fact that I live in Blacksburg, the fact that I'm 30, the fact that I'm single... and that I'm cute (although I'm not sure that is a fact). Thanks MySpace!

Maybe email isn't so bad after all.

We Host Email for More Than 60,000 Businesses

We surpassed a huge milestone last month... we now host email for more than 60,000 businesses and more than a half million email users. All of these numbers represent paying customers as we focus specifically on business-class email and do not provide free email accounts to consumers like many of our competitors.

To put this in perspective, we hosted email for 10,000 businesses at the end of 2005 and 20,000 in June of 2006.

We Are One of the Best Places to work in Southwest Virginia

For the second year in a row, the Blue Ridge Business Journal named us one of the best places to work in Southwest Virginia. We work really hard to build an awesome culture at Webmail and we take a lot of pride in this type of recognition.

A business leader who I respect a lot asked me, "What's the secret sauce?"

Here was my response:

I think the key is to genuinely care about your people and the culture you build around them. I don't really believe there is a secret sauce though. I just think that most businesses don't genuinely care... and don't understand the value that gets created when you do build that culture.

In all reality, we work really hard on culture building. We don't always get it right and we're not doing close to what we want to be doing... but I definitely think we've built one of the best places to work in our region... and beyond. But don't take my word for it. Read some of our employee testimonials.

And by the way... we're hiring like crazy.