Small Town, Big Ideas

Rackspace Cloud Event

2008-10-19T22:47:20-04:00

Check out the Rackspace Cloud Event this Wednesday at 1pm est / noon cst. Should be a great event as we've got lots of cool stuff to talk about. If you can't make it to Austin, don't worry--we'll be streaming it live.

Web 2.0 Parody

2008-10-01T13:14:09-04:00

Great video for all of you Web 2.0 dreamers and 37 Signal fans. Haha, I love it.

Ads Around Town

2008-09-16T23:00:59-04:00

Some ads around town from the coolest company around!

Twitter

2008-06-14T11:32:48-04:00

I obviously haven't been blogging much lately. That's mainly because I've been so busy, but its also because everything I have to say I say on Twitter. I've even been thinking lately that Twitter might make blogging irrelevant--at least for me, for now. I guess I just like micro-blogging better.

I do plan to blog more in the future. But for now, you can follow me on Twitter--if you're interested.

Look Up, We're Hiring!

2008-03-18T13:00:31-04:00

We recently hired two Virginia Tech students to help us find creative ways to spread the word about some of the jobs we're looking to fill here in Blacksburg. Here is a picture of the first project they pulled off. Pretty creative, I must admit!

My Parent Company is [Finally] Blogging

2008-02-27T11:40:22-05:00

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

2008-02-09T15:23:05-05:00

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

Rackspace, One of the Best Places to Work in America

2008-01-28T22:57:21-05:00

We decided to merge our business with Rackspace last year for many reasons. One of the biggest reasons was the fact that Rackspace was actually a place where we wanted to work (if this wasn't the case, it would have been an instant deal breaker). In fact, one of the questions that Bill, Kevin, and I constantly pondered during our "should we sell the business to them?" meetings we had throughout 2007 was, "do we really want to go work for them?" There are very few companies in this world that I could see myself working for, but Rackspace is different. When you walk into Rackspace headquarters in San Antonio, it feels remarkably similar to when you walk into our offices here in Blacksburg. We share the same vision, the same values, and we hire the same types of people. The end result is that our cultures end up being very similar, i.e. awesome! Although Rackspace is much bigger and a little more "corporate", you can tell it's a unique place to work. So it was no surprise to me when I found out that Rackspace is now ranked # 32 on Fortune's Best 100 Companies to Work for in America.

Now we've been recognized locally as the best technology company to work for in Southwest Virginia and nationally as one of best companies (of any kind) to work for in America. Congratulations to all of us. This is a huge honor and just a little more validation that joining forces was the right choice.

Here is a Rackspace video talking about the award.

Webmail.us + Rackspace: The Most Dominant Force in Business Email?

2007-10-01T12:10:07-04:00

I think so! But maybe I'm a little biased.

As you may have seen, we announced today that we are merging with Rackspace. I am extremely pumped about joining forces with the Racker crew and continuing to build our business with such a great group of people. This is a really exciting time for our company, all of our people, our community, and our customers.

Inside Webmail, we have been positioning this as Phase II of our company history. We believe that during this phase the market is really going to open up, leaders are going to emerge, and followers are going to fall behind. We thought long and hard about how to make sure we're positioned to be the leader in our space and we feel that aligning with Rackspace is the answer.

One thing I want to be really clear about: this is by no means an exit strategy for any of us. Bill, Kevin, and I are super-driven and so is the rest of our team. We are as bullish as ever about where this industry is headed and the leadership role that's at stake.

The last few months have been an unbelievable time for me personally. I feel extremely privileged to be going through these times as an entrepreneur and I am excited to share my experiences with many of you in the coming months and years. Stay tuned!

If you would like to learn more about our merger with Rackspace, here are some helpful links:

The Webmail Blog: We have merged with Rackspace!

The Roanoke Times: Webmail gets ready to grow

Racklabs: Welcome Webmail!

News Channel 7 Video: More jobs coming to Blacksburg company

Rackspace: Webmail.us Joins the Rackspace Family

Read/Write/Web: Webmail.us Acquired by Rackspace

GigaOM: Rackspace Enters Small Biz Email Race

I will continue to update this post with more links to further coverage.

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

2007-08-28T14:42:51-04:00

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

2007-08-13T00:50:45-04:00

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

2007-08-07T21:02:38-04:00

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

2007-08-05T22:28:37-04:00

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

2007-08-05T21:35:52-04:00

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.

Netscape Founder on How to Hire Great People

2007-06-23T23:21:05-04:00

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.