Small Town, Big Ideas

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

Netscape Founder on How to Hire Great People

Marc Andreessen, the guy who founded Netscape and several other really successful companies, has a great blog post on "how to hire the best people you've ever worked with". I agree with everything he says and I think that no matter how good you are at hiring, there are several things you can learn from this article. I like to think that we do most everything he writes about, but the reality is, we do not (but we need to). It's a long read, but worth it.

More on Recruiting

After my blog post yesterday in reference to the recruiting article in the Roanoke Times, an employee sent me the following email:

This confuses me a little bit. It almost seems like this "check everything you have out there and judge you by it" stuff doesn't really match our actual attitude. If you take 50% of the people that work here now and are great employees, and look at what they have on the Internet, they probably wouldn't get hired by the standard mentioned in that article.

I think it's a great point. In fact, I love it. Here was my response:

You bring up a good point.

But... I think it all depends on the judge. The reality is, most recruiters are going to look around to find out as much about you as they can. It's what they do with the info that [hopefully] sets us apart.

If I were giving advice to someone looking for a job, I would urge them to make sure their online profiles (websites, myspace pages, etc.) are professional (or at least aren't extremely unprofessional). Just like I would urge them to dress professionally for an interview (even though most people at our company wear t-shirts, jeans, and sandals). First impressions do matter. People will judge you even if its not company policy. And while we may not care about a lot of things that don't matter, most companies unfortunately do.

Note to employees: please make sure your online reflection doesn't represent you in a negative way. The last thing we need is another HR policy to follow. ;-)

Q2 Goals

Q1 is over and Q2 is off to the races. Let's see how I did against my Q1 goals:

My top five Q1 goals were:

1. Eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner, at least once, with every employee

- No, I didn't quite achieve this one. I was pretty aggressive but nevertheless, I didn't each with everyone.

2. Call every customer that gives us a bad score on our customer loyalty survey

- Yes, I did achieve this one. Luckily there weren't too many.

3. Review every employee that reports directly to me

No, I didn't quite achieve this one.

4. Attend at least one out of state tradeshow or networking event

Yes, I did achieve this one.

5. Confidential

Yes, I did achieve this one.

So I hit 3 out of 5. Pretty good by some measures, pretty bad by others. As we move into Q2, I plan to pay more attention to my goals and make sure I hit them. I also need to make them more achievable from the get-go (I would argue in hindsight that the breakfast, lunch, dinner goal was close to unachievable). And finally, I will circle back and make sure I finish up my Q1 goals in Q2.

Here are my Q2 goals:

1. Commit to the best financing path for our company

2. Integrate our newly hired Vice President of Marketing into the company; I want to be able to fully hand-off at least three marketing functions where I currently spend my time.

3. Eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner with every new full-time employee at least once

... and finish:

1. Finish reviewing everyone that reports directly to me

2. Take everyone I didn't take in Q1 to breakfast, lunch, or dinner at least once

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.

Quarterly Goals

Inspired by Verne Harnish, we are adopting a quarterly goal system at Webmail. We're going to put together, and publicize internally, five goals each quarter. We're also going to ask each employee to come up with three to five personal goals that they would like to achieve. Each goal needs to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and tangible. They also need to be goals that are outside of the daily, routine tasks that are going to be accomplished regardless of this goal setting activity. For example, a salesperson's goal shouldn't be to meet quota for the quarter just like a developer's goal shouldn't be to finish a project they are already scheduled to finish. They need to be stretch goals. And at the end of the quarter, we need to be able to look at our goals and truly determine if they were accomplished, or not.

In order to create an accountability system, we are asking everyone to print their goals out on a colored sheet of paper and hang them near their desk. This will provide everyone with a constant reminder of what they need to accomplish, and as importantly, it will expose their goals to others.

Here are my top five Q1 goals:

1. Eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner, at least once, with every employee

2. Call every customer that gives us a bad score on our customer loyalty survey

3. Review every employee that reports directly to me

4. Attend at least one out of state tradeshow or networking event

5. I can't tell you about the last one yet, but if I get it done, it will be something I will talk a lot about later. If I fail to get it done, I will let you know that, too.

I really like the idea of a quarterly goal system. Everyone needs to have longer-term goals as well, but breaking goals down by quarter really puts the pressure on to get things done… and I love to get things done.

Impact of the Month Award

Over the years we've worked really hard to figure out how to properly reward employees and acknowledge their accomplishments. We've tested out a number of award systems to help recognize accomplishments but many of them haven't worked that well and have fizzled away (you could even call them failures). But recently, we came up with something that has worked well and is becoming a monthly ritual. What we do is give out what we call the Impact of the Month Award. The award consists of a small monetary bonus, a nice looking engraved desk plaque, and a spot on the Impact of the Month wall, which is the first thing people see when they walk into our office. We give the award to an employee who we feel added the most distinct, significant value to the company in the given month. We present the award at a monthly-catered lunch and a member of our leadership team gives a short speech, acknowledging the accomplishments of the winner, and explaining what they did to deserve the recognition.

It’s a relatively small thing but it makes a pretty big difference.

Long Term Product Roadmaps

37 Signals has a good post today on how long term product roadmaps don’t work very well in software development. We’ve also learned this over the years. We get a lot of pressure from the outside world to “provide our product roadmap” for the next few years, but we just don’t do it. This has nothing to do with being secretive—in fact, I think we’re as open as anyone else out there. We even list the projects we’re working on currently on our website and we blog about them frequently. We just want to make sure that we keep our finger on the pulse of what we believe the market wants as opposed to getting stuck on delivering things we promised in a long term product roadmap which at some point we’ll have made a long time ago. 37 Signals’ advice:

Instead of the roadmap, just look out a few weeks at a time. Work on the next most important thing. What’s the point of a long list when you can’t work on everything at once anyway? Finish what’s important now and then figure out what’s important next. One step at a time.

I couldn’t agree more.

How We’re Going to Win in the Face of Increased Competition

It’s no surprise to anyone in our industry that the email hosting world is a competitive place. I’ve mentioned before how competitive of a space it is, how the big boys can overshadow the market, and reasons why I believe we can survive (and win) with such thriving competition. But now, things are moving faster than even I thought they would. For example, Microsoft is about to launch their suite of “Live” services. That is a threat. Google and others will probably follow suit. So I’ve been forced to do a lot of thinking as to how we’re not only going to survive in the face of growing competition, but how are we going to win.

First of all, here is my disclaimer: I respect the hell out of Microsoft, Google, and all of the big Internet companies. Contrary to what anyone thinks, Microsoft builds some of the best software in the world, Google’s search engine is second to none, Yahoo provides great media services, etc. Our goal is a lot more modest. We just want to be the #1 email hosting company in the world. Here is how we’re going to work on achieving that goal in the face of increasing competition from the biggest software companies in the world (most of this is nothing new):

1. Focus

We’re going to continue to further strengthen our focus on email hosting. Its always tempting to branch off into other areas (like web hosting), but we’re not going to do it. We believe that by focusing on one thing and doing it really well, we’ll be able to compete with anyone in the market no matter how big or well financed they are. Think about it… everyone in our organization from executive management to software development to customer service and support goes to work everyday thinking about how to provide our customers with better email. Do you think Bill Gates and team think about email hosting all day, every day? What about Sergey and Larry? What about big web hosting companies, telecommunication firms, and internet service providers? I don’t think so… in fact, knowing how big companies operate, I’d bet anything that you’ve got to go multiple layers down into all of these organizations to find anyone that even knows what they’re up to in the email hosting space. Do you want to trust a company with your mission critical email system when most of their organization doesn’t know a thing about it?

2. Service

As much as we love building awesome software, we’re a service company first and foremost. Providing the highest level of service and support to our customers is part of our DNA. When you get started in a basement and every dollar counts, you learn quickly that customers are important—each and every one of them. Microsoft, Google, and others may be able to meet or exceed us on the software side, but they’re not going to beat us on service. It's just not part of their DNA. With mission critical email, service is important. It doesn't take long to realize that.

3. Market Reactions

I still don’t believe that the thousands of service providers throughout the world are going to bow down to the big boys. They’ve lived with basic email offerings for a long time but as the big boys continue to raise the bar, the market is going to have to respond. Service providers simply cannot let their email hosting customers slip away. Once they lose the email accounts, they’re most likely going to lose the domain name registration as well. Once they lose the domain name registration, they’re most likely going to start losing a lot of the value-added, revenue-generating services that keep them in the game. What is viewed by many as a commodity service, email is becoming one of the most critical service offerings on the web—service providers will realize that soon enough and we’ll be a great partner, waiting in the wings. The reseller market has been great to us over the years and I believe that as the big boys continue their push into this space, the reseller market is where we’ll continue to thrive.

Most of the time when you hear me talking about our strengths you’ll hear me talking about our people. We’ve got an awesome team and we work really hard at improving it with every new hire. But, when we’re talking about competing with companies like Google and Microsoft, I think it goes without saying that we need great people to even play in the game. Google, Microsoft, and the rest of the bunch hire the best and the brightest in the world. If we don’t aim to hire the same caliber of people, we’ve already lost.

Now don’t get me wrong—as these companies further inch their way onto our turf, they’re all going to have some level of success… maybe even lots of it. As one of my sales executives likes to remind me, “nobody ever gets fired for picking Microsoft.” I’m sure that can be applied to a lot of big companies. But I think times are changing. I think service is king and specialization is going to win out. I hope I’m right.

- Written in Little Rock, Arkansas

New Year's Resolutions

I recently discovered a blog authored by Scott Maxwell, an east coast VC based in Boston. He's got a great list of possible New Year's resolutions he recommends for Emerging Growth Company CEOs. I think the list can be applied to others within a growing organization as well. While I have goals around most everything on his list, I especially like the Customer Focus, Service Focus, Employee Focus, and of course, the Have Fun while nailing your goals.

Here is the full post. He says to focus on a maximum of three from his list—yeah right! :-)

Happy New Year!