Founder of DNSimple, vendor of duct tape, purveyor of UDP packets.

[aeden]

I don't really sell duct tape, but given I work on tech that makes the Internet run, I often do feel like it. I run a domain name registrar and DNS provider. We enter our tenth year of business this year! I built this business to be fully remote, sustainable, and profitable, and it is all of these things. I'm 43 now - the mathematically inclined here will note that I did not start my business until I was 33 - first I needed 17 years of real experience watching other businesses fail... and then I found new ways to fail in my own business.

I went into business with my brother and no longer speak with him except to take care of family matters. Don't partner with family unless you are prepared to be estranged - it may succeed, but if it fails there is a chance you'll end up being pissed off at your family members for a long time.

I have been writing software systems since 1995. I write less software now than I did when I was younger, but I still manage to build some things. I have written software in Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Erlang, Elixir... and probably others I'm forgetting. I've worked for a few companies you've heard of and a few you haven't. I once worked for a government contractor for 3 years and hung out in the Pentagon - wonderful people in the US DOD, but the US Federal Government is so wasteful.

I've spoken at a many technical conferences over the year, but I'm down to one or two speaking engagements per year, usually based on events I really want to attend myself. You can probably find videos of me speaking on YouTube if you're inclined to do so.

I have been an avid surfer since the age of 13, and a snowboarder since the age of 16. I once broke my arm playing soccer (football for the non-US types) as a child.

I'm here to help and learn. AMA.

 

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[Kid]

Hi @aeden !

Not sure if you were welcomed already so Welcome to the Forum!

My question is combination of tech and biz.

Recently stumbled on the article stating that Firefox did turn DNS over HTTPS
for every US user.
How that affects (both technically and business wise) DNS providers like your company?

 

[Tourmaline]

Random, I looked into how to create a domain name registrar just yesterday!

With so many different domain name registrars out there, how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors and compete?

Welcome to TFF!

 

[Boogie]

Hi, glad to have you here.

In the last few years, the cloud has turned out to be an event horizon. Someone made a point of saying that businesses of under 100 people are foolish if they aren't using some sort of central provider for their services like mail via gmail or Microsoft or using cloud based centralized storage or for something more technical like your business.

In addition other software that used to be managed internally by companies or homegrown can now upscaled and provided as a service on cloud platforms. So instead of SAP or other homegrown applications being on your servers, they are going to the cloud and providing to many companies. This is removing the need for as much IT staff for corporate computing. This seems to be where to offer services that scale as opposed to just becoming a body shop.

Azure, AWS, etc. have taken a lot of the need away for having a data center and local hosting. Large integrated systems can be hosted by a managed provider as well. The ability to plug and play with different languages and different technologies to produce a powerful corporate system has never been greater.

Based on your experience and your constraint of making your business fully remote, sustainable, and profitable , what kind of shift do you see smaller scale companies entering tech spaces having to make to take advantage of these trends? What are the best ways for those companies to not just be pulled into staff augmentation positions within their customer base?

What technologies do you see as having a relatively high barrier of entry but still exploitable by entrepreneurial efforts by small start ups?

You've posted before about enjoying erlang. Can you elaborate on what languages/environments you enjoy the most for your own interests vs what are most useful in your line of business? Languages with libraries of existing code are worth gold, but so is the fun of having a language that really fits how you think.

Thanks

 

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[aeden]

Hi @aeden !

Not sure if you were welcomed already so Welcome to the Forum!

Thank you for the welcome.

My question is combination of tech and biz.

Recently stumbled on the article stating that Firefox did turn DNS over HTTPS
for every US user.
How that affects (both technically and business wise) DNS providers like your company?

We provide authoritative DNS. DoH is between client and resolver, so the only technical impact it has on us is we will see more resolver traffic from fewer providers. From a business perspective, there is no immediate impact.

 

[csalvato]

Welcome! Been using your SaaS for years at my employers, and plan to move all our DNS over to you for my business shortly.

I am surprised and delighted to see you here.

What are you hoping to bring to and get out of the forum?

 

[aeden]

Random, I looked into how to create a domain name registrar just yesterday!

If you want I can explain all the reasons why creating a domain name registrar is challenging. We leverage other registrars for the registration side of our business because dealing with many registries is expensive from both operational and administrative perspectives. We have ICANN accreditation, but we will likely *still* use other service providers for the technical integration with registries.

With so many different domain name registrars out there, how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors and compete?

We niched down. We position ourselves as a Domain Management Automation platform, which allows us to focus on what we do best (which is provide APIs and features that automate away much of the manual processes around domain acquisition and DNS operations.

Welcome to TFF!

Thanks!

 

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[aeden]

Based on your experience and your constraint of making your business fully remote, sustainable, and profitable , what kind of shift do you see smaller scale companies entering tech spaces having to make to take advantage of these trends?

Embracing automation for all aspects of business is the major shift I see. A willingness to niche-down and then offer awesome support without ballooning staff is another. Finally, only building value-add systems and taking advantage of all the SaaS options is a key for small businesses in tech. These are our super powers, use them.

What are the best ways for those companies to not just be pulled into staff augmentation positions within their customer base?

Same as above: automation. Focus on operational efficiency through good processes, and then automate the hell out of those processes.

What technologies do you see as having a relatively high barrier of entry but still exploitable by entrepreneurial efforts by small start ups?

That's a really good question and frankly one that I have a tough time figuring out. Anything that is operationally challenging has a high barrier to entry, but with good systems and processes small businesses can probably build successful enterprises as long as they are good at automating operations as much as possible.

You've posted before about enjoying erlang. Can you elaborate on what languages/environments you enjoy the most for your own interests vs what are most useful in your line of business?

I use Erlang, Go, and Ruby. These are the three languages I generally reach for first, depending on what I'm building. Erlang is very good for some things, like systems that need to process a lot of independent requests. For us that's our authoritative name servers. Go is our glue language, especially where we want a small memory-footprint, small CPU-usage agent on lots of systems. Ruby is great for building things where you have no idea what your inputs and outputs look like. It's super malleable.

HTH.

 

[aeden]

Welcome! Been using your SaaS for years at my employers, and plan to move all our DNS over to you for my business shortly.

Thank you, that's awesome to hear!

I am surprised and delighted to see you here.

I'm glad to be here.

What are you hoping to bring to and get out of the forum?

I want to bring my experience of 10 years of running a lean business and see if I can help others do the same.

As far as what I want to get out of the forum, expanding my current business is always a good thing. Beyond that I am also interested in seeing what kinds of challenges others are facing to see if I can identify future useful business ideas. I may not be ready to chase the next shiny thing today, but I have a feeling I will be interested eventually.

 

[eliquid]

Crazy you are here.

I loved RoboWhois. So much so, now that it is gone I am coding up my own SaaS version of it to be released in a few weeks.

No hard feelings, not trying to compete. It's just that the product was gone and I needed it and decided to build one out and you just joined the forum....

Anyways, glad to see you here and wanted to know I loved your product ( before it was taken down ).

Thanks!


.

 

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[Kid]

We provide authoritative DNS. DoH is between client and resolver, so the only technical impact it has on us is we will see more resolver traffic from fewer providers. From a business perspective, there is no immediate impact.

Cool, thank you for answer.

 

[sinj]

Wow nice to see you here! I have heard of DNSimple before. I am really curious, what made you decide: You know what, I am starting a name registrar and DNS provider when you were 33.

Did you envision your company how it is right now, or you had a completely different idea where to go when it started? I mean, of course technology has changed but do you think the need you are serving has been mostly unchanged in all these years?

 

[aeden]

Crazy you are here.

I loved RoboWhois. So much so, now that it is gone I am coding up my own SaaS version of it to be released in a few weeks.

No hard feelings, not trying to compete. It's just that the product was gone and I needed it and decided to build one out and you just joined the forum....

No worries, I have no hard feelings. We made the conscious choice to shut it down for several reasons:

1. we knew we couldn't focus on multiple products at a time with the size of the team we had and the growth of DNSimple
2. whois systems severally rate limit requests so acquiring whois data automatically gets harder and harder
3. there weren't enough people getting enough value out of it to justify the growing costs of acquiring and storing the data

In many ways it could not have turned out any better for us than it did since GDPR forced ICANN to enact new policies that resulted in almost all whois data being redacted. Whois now is basically useful for a small number of operational tasks, so we still use it, but everything else about it is gutted and is in the process of being replaced by RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) - ICANN).

Anyways, glad to see you here and wanted to know I loved your product ( before it was taken down ).

Thanks!

Thanks for the kind words and I wish you the best in your goal of getting something similar working.

 

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[aeden]

Wow nice to see you here! I have heard of DNSimple before. I am really curious, what made you decide: You know what, I am starting a name registrar and DNS provider when you were 33.

In 2010 most of the registrars just flat out sucked. The company I was using (I won't name them, but you probably know them since they are the largest company out there in this space) was pretty horrible at the time in many ways, technical and business-wise. I got fed up and decided I had enough experience in the space to create may own authoritative DNS system, and that was that.

Did you envision your company how it is right now, or you had a completely different idea where to go when it started? I mean, of course technology has changed but do you think the need you are serving has been mostly unchanged in all these years?

I had no idea where it would go, I was just hoping it'd be big enough to live a comfortable life on the income. Funny enough the need we were serving then is pretty much the same one we serve now. The audience has grown, but the concept is still the same. I've spent more time over the last couple of years refining what my vision is for the company and it turns out the vision is still pretty much the same as in the beginning: Anyone, regardless of skill level, can use DNSimple to connect their domains to the services they use without thinking about DNS.

 

[sinj]

In 2010 most of the registrars just flat out sucked. The company I was using (I won't name them, but you probably know them since they are the largest company out there in this space) was pretty horrible at the time in many ways, technical and business-wise. I got fed up and decided I had enough experience in the space to create may own authoritative DNS system, and that was that.



I had no idea where it would go, I was just hoping it'd be big enough to live a comfortable life on the income. Funny enough the need we were serving then is pretty much the same one we serve now. The audience has grown, but the concept is still the same. I've spent more time over the last couple of years refining what my vision is for the company and it turns out the vision is still pretty much the same as in the beginning: Anyone, regardless of skill level, can use DNSimple to connect their domains to the services they use without thinking about DNS.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Rabby]

Oh, and you're in Florida too. High tech corridor ftw

I love Erlang, and functional programming generally. Nice to see it mentioned here.

Welcome!

 

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[aeden]

Oh, and you're in Florida too. High tech corridor ftw

I grew up here and couldn't wait to leave. Then I realized that Florida is actually a really wonderful place, so I came back. Go figure.

I love Erlang, and functional programming generally. Nice to see it mentioned here.

Another Erlanger. I would have never thought I'd see that in this forum.

Welcome!

Thanks!

 

[Dignium]

Fastlane Entreprenuership is my career path, and I'm looking towards the unsexy, internet backbone & backend digital sectors - because the majority of entreprenuers want to serve sexy, consumer facing sectors, hence I feel there will be less interest and competition.

1: Have you seen anything around your space that is poorly served, or served so poorly that it's disruptable?

Digital products and services are where the Fastlane potency is. I have chosen Fastlane Entreprenuership as my career path.