Running a business doesn’t exactly give you a lot of spare time, especially if you combine it with an active 17 month old daughter. I have decided however to take the time and launch my blog to share insight into SmartyHost, tips and trick to promoting and growing your business and to provide my own industry perspectives.
We have just launched our new website which also marks a new beginning for the company. SmartyHost started with humble beginnings and has grown to be one of Australia’s largest web hosting and domain registration providers, now with over 50,000 accounts. When I incorporated SmartyHost in 2002, my ambition was to create the largest hosting company. Today, we are neither ‘the’ largest hosting company, nor thinking about becoming the largest (although this could eventuate given our current growth rate). I have learnt that goals and ambitions change and you need to adapt and embrace change in order to survive. The important thing to remember is what your core competencies are and stick to them.
I remember reading a story about a tube manufacturer who made chairs. Every one in this organisation believed they were in the ‘chair manufacturing business’. Once they realised this was not the case and they were actually in the business of making sophisticated metal tubing due to their specialised technology they were able to move into other markets such as Defence.
When I started SmartyHost the market was controlled by a few large players. WebCentral was the largest provider and they had signed Telstra, OPTUS, AAPT and a range of ISP’s as resellers. There was no choice for individuals and businesses other than paying huge fees. MelbourneIT at the time was charging over $300 for a .com.au domain name, which had also signed all the ISP’s as resellers. Where was the ACCC? Interestingly MelbourneIT now owns WebCentral. One can only imagine the arguments in this marriage.
At the time I was running a number of technology start ups and had to use WebCentral to host our websites and found their fees to be outrageous. So I decided to launch my own hosting company but provide better prices than the big boys. I did some research and found these providers to be very inefficient. They had manual systems, support changes took a long time, and you had to contact their call centre every time you needed help. Their belly was full and they just didn’t care.
To become a serious player, I needed to be different and not just offer great prices but better user experience and more control. Also, we needed to be fully automated to save on cost, which could be passed onto customers. The automation needed to work in a way that gave customers control. Rather than launching a traditional web hosting company, I launched as a software development company with one customer – ourselves!
We created a technology that was later named Business Process Management (BPM). I am still amazed by what my staff have built and continue to build into this system. It has fully automated the entire business backend system such as billing, internal escalation procedures, staff annual leave reports, detailed sales and technical reporting, etc. Also, rather than use 3rd party control panels such as Plesk, Ensim or cPanel, which we find a real nightmare to manage due to their bugs, we created our own customer control panel that is easy to use and integrates our growing list of awesome products – giving customers control and reliability.
The impact of the BPM is amazing. For example in a particular month last year we registered 8.9% of new domain registrations in Australia, which was half of what MelbourneIT had achieved in that month. Yet we have 1/20 the number of staff as MelbourneIT. We also charge $100 less for domains!
Our core competency is our technology and products, we love building them and managing them and we get a real kick out of launching easy to use products with great prices.
