My Thoughts

My Parent Company is [Finally] Blogging

Rackspace launched a corporate blog today. I'm really happy to see this. Rackspace is a great company and I think they need a stronger voice in the industry. Blogging should help.

Here is the feed to plug into your RSS reader if you want to subscribe.

The Name Change: from Webmail.us to Mailtrust

Last week we announced that we've changed our name from Webmail.us to Mailtrust. Naming a business is an incredibly hard thing to do (coming up with a name is actually easy—coming up with the right name is the challenge). So I figured that giving the details behind our name change would make for a good blog post. Hopefully this will provide some good insight into why we changed our name and how we came up with the new one.

The first challenge in the naming process was coming to the realization that we needed to change our name. Even though we knew our name was flawed, we spent a lot of time, money, and energy building our brand over the years. And all things considered, I think we did a pretty good job. We’re no Nike or Yahoo!, but in our industry, people know who we are. Starting from scratch seemed like a daunting move. But then one of my business mentors said something I will never forget. He said, "Pat, it's never too late to change a bad name." He's right. As soon as I heard him say that, I never looked back.

The Old Name and Its Weaknesses
- Over the last few years, "webmail" became a generic term. For some reason, I thought this would help our cause. But the opposite happened. It caused confusion on many levels. When it comes to marketing and branding, confusion is really bad. For example, locally, everyone thought we were Virginia Tech Webmail. Since it seems that most students hate VT Webmail, this didn't really help our recruiting efforts. On a broader level, whenever I would tell someone that I work for "Webmail" or that they should consider "Webmail" as their email host, the responses I would get were "Oh, I've heard of Webmail," or "Oh, we already use webmail!" I always knew they were mistaken but it got so annoying that I just stopped correcting people. In a way it was pretty cool because everyone thought they had heard of my company. I was sort of a rock star wherever I went!

- The .us extension hurt us a lot. When we first bought the domain name for Webmail.us, I thought .us extensions would really take off. But the reality is, your everyday Internet surfer only thinks ".com." And since we called ourselves "Webmail," everyone would type "Webmail.com" in his or her Internet browser. I have even watched our employees do this so I know tons of people outside the company did it too. Lucky for Webmail.com people who make a killing by running pay-per-click ads on the Webmail.com landing page. The bottom line for all you Internet entrepreneurs out there: find a .com name—it really makes a difference.

- Finally, we felt that "Webmail" doesn't sound business-class enough and just didn't do a good job of displaying our commitment to business-class email. It sounds consumer-ish, like Gmail, Hotmail, or Fusemail.

The New Name and Its Strengths
Once we decided that we were going to go for it, the quest for the new name began. We put together a small task force to start the process. We locked ourselves in our big conference room for hours at a time, brainstorming, debating, and trying every possible method we could think of to come up with the perfect name. Finally, during one of these sessions in San Antonio, we came up with Mailtrust—and it stuck. Here is why:

- We thought long and hard about why our customers buy from us. The reoccurring theme that kept surfacing was "trust." With email being such a mission critical communication tool for businesses, businesses need to trust their email hosting company. And we felt that is exactly why we've been so successful over the years. Customers trust us.

- We thought long and hard about our competitive threats in the market place. We tried to figure out what truly makes us different and why our customers did buy from "us" instead of "them." Again, the trust component continued to emerge. For two reasons: first, we're a specialist. People tend to trust specialists more than generalists because specialists tend to be experts at what they do. And when it comes to email, businesses want to make sure that their email provider knows what they're doing. Second, our business model is very straightforward: we help businesses by hosting their email. We charge a fee for our services and we don't have any type of ulterior motive. Some of our competitors, on the other hand, host email so they can collect user data, learn as much as they can about their users, and make money from advertising to them.

- We want people to know that we're a specialist. Many people have criticized us for putting "mail" in our name because they believe it limits the markets that we can go into in the future. And they're right. But, we believe that keeping "mail" in the name demonstrates our commitment to email and we want everyone to see that commitment. Again, the fact that we're a specialist is what sets us apart and we want everyone to know that.

So there you have it. This is why we changed our name. Hopefully this name change will be the last one we ever have to do. Hopefully!

Other thoughts on the name change:

Bill Boebel: Update Your Links
Racklabs: New Look for a New Era in IT