DNSimple makes managing domains and DNS effortless with fast, reliable hosting, automated SSL, and powerful APIs for developers. Whether you have one domain or 100,000, you can register, secure, and automate everything from a single, intuitive control panel.
In this episode, we speak with Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple. The episode delves into the intricacies of domain management and the Domain Name System (DNS), highlighting DNSimple’s role in simplifying these processes for engineers and developers. Anthony shares the company’s journey, emphasizing their focus on providing robust APIs and interfaces tailored for technical users. The conversation also covers the importance of security, especially for high-stakes domains like .Bank and .gov, and the company’s commitment to supporting remote work and global operations. The episode concludes with insights into DNSimple’s customer-centric approach and their innovative use of the Shape Up framework for product development.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- DNSimple was founded to address the lack of good APIs for domain management.
- The company prioritizes remote work and asynchronous communication.
- Integrations with tools like Terraform and Kubernetes are crucial for DNS management.
- Security measures include multi-factor authentication and strict access controls.
- The Linux Foundation is a notable customer that has successfully integrated DNSimple’s API.
- Customer support is a shared responsibility among all team members at DNSimple.
- Feedback from customers directly informs the product development roadmap.
- The Shape Up framework has improved the efficiency of their software development process.
- Onboarding includes a free plan and a sandbox environment for testing.
- Common misconceptions include the belief that any registrar’s DNS will suffice for business needs.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Domain Management and DNS
01:11 – The Birth of DNSimple
04:42 – Building a Remote-First Company
06:40 – Simplifying Infrastructure Management
09:56 – Integrations and Automation in DNS Management
10:25 – Ensuring Security in Domain Management
15:36 – Working with High-Stakes Organizations
20:26 – Transformative Customer Success Stories
22:00 – Building a Supportive Culture
23:59 – Customer Feedback and Its Importance
25:57 – Shaping Product Development with Customer Insights
30:01 – Onboarding and Customer Engagement Strategies
31:59 – Common Misconceptions in the Domain Industry
35:55 – Impactful Changes and Lessons Learned
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:00.622)
Hello everyone and welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions.
All right, today we are talking about something that doesn’t always get the spotlight it might deserve, but is absolutely essential to how the internet works. And that’s domain management and domain name system or DNS. And joining me is someone who knows the space very well and can talk a lot about that subject and that’s Anthony Eden, Founder and CEO of DNSimple.
If you’ve ever dealt with setting up a domain, you know, wrestling with the DNS records or trying to scale infrastructure without like pulling your hair out, losing your mind. I think this episode is going to be for you. We’re to get into just how DNSimple came to be, how it helps teams move faster without getting too buried in a lot of the technical complexities and also why security is front and center, especially for some of the high stakes domains out there like .bank and .edu or .gov. There’s a lot of them nowadays. We have a lot to talk about, so let’s just get right into it. Anthony, welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us.
Anthony Eden (01:11.338)
Thanks for having me on, Beau, appreciate it.
Beau Hamilton (01:13.506)
Yeah, so let’s just lay the groundwork for listeners first and foremost. What is DNSimple and how does it simplify domain management and DNS?
Anthony Eden (01:21.608)
Right, so DNSimple is a domain registrar and authoritative DNS provider. We’ve been in business now for 15 years. And really we came about because of the lack at the time of anyone who was doing good APIs and good interfaces that were really geared towards engineers and developers. As a developer myself, I was coming off the end of a project and I was using a competitor at the time.
And I was like, this is just really, really an awful experience. I’m being upsold constantly. The interface doesn’t make any sense. It’s missing half of the technology that I need. There’s no API whatsoever. And so I started working on the Incivil with my brother back in 2010 to see if we could build something. There’s more geared to folks like us who are engineers and operators.
Beau Hamilton (02:07.982)
That’s very cool. So you had some kind of the sort of family connection there to help get things started. And then you just noticed a problem and realized you can do a better solution. Yeah.
Anthony Eden (02:19.678)
Yeah, I’d been working in the space for many, many years. was actually involved with a domain registrar when .com was deregulated back in the late nineties. It was one of the first seven domain registrars. And so I’ve seen it all the way from when it became something that could be done by multiple companies when it was no longer just a monopoly all the way to where it is today. And I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly all throughout that time.
Beau Hamilton (02:43.918)
I bet. Yeah, I was going to say, DNSimple was founded in 2010. Then, now correct me, maybe you can help kind of explain this a little bit, but what was the company you founded before that sort of was the original, developed the original API for DNSimple?
Anthony Eden (03:01.248)
So the way DNSimple worked is DNSimple used to be under a company called Atrion and that company no longer exists. It basically sold the assets over to DNSimple. So DNSimple Corp has been around for quite a while now, but that was developed under that original company. And then we turned it basically into a C-Corp and made it something that was a little bit easier to operate as far as a business because an LLC is great when you first start out. It does initially hold up as you start to grow. And if you want to have options for outside investors and things like that. We generally haven’t needed that and we’ve been profitable from day one, but we always wanted the options there in case we needed it.
Beau Hamilton (03:39.234)
Very cool. Okay. Thanks for clearing that up. was just, I was coming through your LinkedIn and noticed, noticed the previous organization’s name. So you’ve, you’ve obviously weathered a lot of different trends. Now, one thing I also picked up on too, when I was looking into your background is you wanted to have a company, you wanted to work, basically have a position where you could value your time, right?
Like you, I wanted to be able to kind of travel and work remotely anywhere in the world while also still being able to, to run a company.
Anthony Eden (04:12.916)
That is correct. And that’s one of the founding ideas behind DNSimple was structurally it turned into how we were going to run the organization was we were going to build it remote first and async first. So in other words, we were going to prioritize communication through writing through now through video recording. We’d use a lot of loom videos inside, but back when we first started, it was a lot of communicating by writing. And that was that way, because I knew that my wife and I and our kids, we would be traveling quite a bit.
We have, I was born in the States, my wife was born in France. And so we have like this desire to, we love both countries and we want to be back and forth between them. So we just knew that was what was coming and designed the company to support that. And it’s interesting because it’s allowed us to build a company that can support sort of a global service.
that runs 24 seven 365 that otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to run as easily had we sort of been in one single location, say like the East coast of the United States.
Beau Hamilton (05:13.324)
Yeah, that’s great. I would love that sort of perk with a modern day, you know, online business, internet business. It has pros and cons and that’s definitely a pro. I love just, I have, and as somebody who got bit by the travel bug a couple of years ago, I’ve just like trying to just travel everywhere. And so I think being able to, to work and, for anywhere in the world, and especially now with like Starlink and these other, you know, services, it makes it a lot easier.
I think that’s really rewarding.
Anthony Eden (05:44.064)
It definitely has its benefits. Like you said, there are a lot of challenges that go along with it as well, but that’s something that we continuously work on internally and with the team and try to find ways to get around those challenges that we run into, whether it’s because often it’s because of time zone differences. I mean, we have folks that are working on the other side of the planet. And so we really have to lean into that asynchronous nature of communication using tools like Slack, GitHub, Loom, things like that.
Beau Hamilton (06:10.86)
Yeah, well, thankfully too, like, you know, as, more and more people kind of work with these remote jobs, they’re more kind of lenient and able to work around different time zones, but it is, it does get complex, you know? but one thing, so I don’t have a lot of first hand experience managing infrastructure at scale. but from the stories I’ve gathered and the people I’ve talked to, it can be a rather complex process. So similar to sort of the complexity of dealing with the time zones. The complexity involved there can, can really slow down other goals and business operations, if not managed well. So how do you just keep things simple and moving fast for companies as they scale?
Anthony Eden (06:49.364)
Right, I think a lot of it comes from starting, making it easy to get started. So for example, a simple, nice user interface that somebody who is sort of new to the space can work with is great for getting started, but then not stopping there, moving towards the ability to have external tooling with APIs. For example, we have a Terraform integration that allows folks from Terraform to manage not just the DNS side of things, but also the domain registration. So in other words, confirm that domain contacts stay correct, make sure the domains are renewed, although generally we recommend folks auto renew them. And so you’re handling both the operational side as well as the intellectual property side. And so allowing companies to go through those phases of growth and kind of supporting them along that entire voyage, I think is an important part of how we set up the experience with the DNSimple.
Beau Hamilton (07:47.064)
Yeah, so you mentioned that integration with Terraform. How important are integrations when it comes to DNS management? Are there some tools that your platform plays nicely with that helps fit better into the broader DevOps or cloud-native ecosystems? Yeah, how do you approach that?
Anthony Eden (08:03.328)
For most of the big automation tools, there’s always going to be an integration. Either it’s something we’ve developed or have taken over, or there’s going to be somebody from the community has developed. So for example, from the Kubernetes community, there’s this whole thing called external DNS, and DNSimple has an adapter inside there as well. It’s same with Chef. So we actually built the Chef one ourselves many, many ago, and we continue to maintain that one.
So if you’re doing sort of configuration management through tools like that, that’s already going to be set up. If not, there’s also API clients across nine different languages and it’s a REST API. So there’s plenty of plenty of ways to integrate. And we’ve actually seen successes both using off the shelf tooling like Terraform or like Kubernetes, as well as full integrations, you know, companies and organizations that are integrating with DNSimple and providing their folks a custom experience that is really geared around their workflows that they never even see the DNSimple. They’re just basically managing domains as if it’s one more asset inside of all the other assets they have at that organization.
Beau Hamilton (09:09.998)
Interesting. Yeah, that’s great. I it’s not really a matter of if you have integrations or whatnot. It’s like, which ones are you integrating with? How well you play nicely with the existing tools out there? Because like you said, there’s a bunch of them. And you kind of have to work with what’s already established.
Anthony Eden (09:27.966)
Absolutely. And there’s a number of open source projects that have come out over the years. we’ve tried to sort of, when each one of those comes out and gains some traction, we try to make sure that we have a team member who understands what it looks like, potentially builds the integration or owns an integration from another, if somebody else built it and they can’t maintain it anymore. We try to make sure that there’s lots of ways, because we understand different companies are going to do things in different ways. And we just want to be there to support them throughout whatever their domain automation journey looks like.
Beau Hamilton (09:56.858)
I do have a question about some of the open source customers you work with, but before I get there, I do want to briefly talk about the security for a moment because I know we’re seeing an increase in a lot of top level domains like .tech, .dev, .ai. You have these location-based domains like .london and .nyc. And then you have, of course, like I mentioned in the intro, you have these highly regulated domains like .bank and .gov, .edu, etcetera, etcetera.
So I’m curious what kind of policies do you have in place to make sure DNS management just stays secure, especially for these regulated domains like .bank or .gov?
Anthony Eden (10:34.982)
Sure. So one of the key things is ensuring that every person that’s going to access it can basically access only the things they need to access, ensure they each have their own set of credentials. And there’s a surprising number of organizations that even today are sharing credentials because they’re forced to by a company that they’re using. for example, there’s a lot of companies out there that have been around for 30 years and have never built multi-user authentication systems, which seems kind of odd, but it exists nonetheless. so one, Dchain has that, allows each one of your folks that’s going to use the system to have their own credentials. Multi-factor authentication is an important part of that as well.
And notice I say multi-factor, I mean, we support not just a single factor, but you can add an additional types of factors as well, whether that’s a token that’s generated, or if it’s a hardware key, whatever it might be, those are all supported as you go in through DNSimple. Or we integrate with certain outside third-party providers that allow single sign-on. So we’re seeing as organizations get larger, they need single sign-on. So one example is with Google. A lot of people will be using Google, especially sort of small to mid-sized organizations that are going to use Google for their authentication.
They want to make sure that they actually control who has access through their typical Google management. So that’s one thing that we allow as well. And I think a lot of it is just ensuring that the right people have access to the right domains at the correct time and that they are limited to what they can do. Now, that’s what we can do on our side to help our customers. The other part, of course, is making sure that we have internal policies, which are very strict about what we can and cannot do when requested by customers. Some people still believe that they can write into support and say, hey, can you add this DNS record? And the answer is no. I mean, we’re not going to do something like that because the risk of that being an intact vector is too high. So essentially our policies are designed around letting the customers have controlled access for what they can do. We do not make changes on their behalf.
Anthony Eden (12:50.852)
And that’s worked pretty well to ensure that the customer’s systems are secure. Obviously, are other mechanisms, standard mechanisms, like when they go in through API calls with the web interface, it’s all over HTTPS. They, let’s see, I’m trying to think of what else is important there. Essentially, we have access logs so we can see who’s doing what, when people are doing, so all these are different features that ensure that we have like a paper trail essentially of what’s happening on any domain.
And then on the specific regulated domains like .Bank, they actually require multi-factor authentication for anybody who’s going to access a .Bank domain. So that’s an example of something that we, as we move towards, and in fact, we’re in the process now of actually supporting .Bank registrations, ideally at the end of this upcoming cycle. That’s one of the things that we have to factor in. We have to ensure that it’s not just optional MFA. If you’re accessing a .Bank domain, you have to, you must have MFA enabled in order to do that. So that would be one thing that they do. They also require DNSSEC, for example. And so what we’ve done there is we’ve ensured that every .Bank domain has to have DNSSEC enabled. And that DNSSEC, we do DNSSEC key rotations in a lot of ways like Let’s Encrypt does certificate rotations. We require it to be done automatically every 90 days.
Beau Hamilton (14:09.922)
Interesting. Okay. So you have multifactor authentication required. And what’s the, what’s the DNS sec.
Anthony Eden (14:14.826)
So DNSSEC is the DNS security layer. Essentially what it does is it ensures that a DNS message wasn’t tampered with in transit. It cryptographically signs the response and therefore a man in the middle can’t say change the response because they wouldn’t have the correct cryptographic signature. so .Bank requires that every .Bank domain has DNSSEC enabled.
Beau Hamilton (14:42.99)
Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I never do that. That’s great. And I, I mean, I wish every domain had multifactor authentication required, or I just, you know, some more of these required security measures, but, it’s good to know that these, these regulated ones have that as a requirement.
And I also know, you know, just generally speaking to its it’s, there’s a lot of different attack vectors, and a lot of, you know, avenues and chances for bad actors to kind of infiltrate, but the fact that you have what you just talked about, kind of built in from the DNS level, I think should be pretty reassuring for customers listening and prospective customers as well. So great answer. And I do want to talk about two, because obviously you work with a lot of high level organizations and the stakes are large too, especially when you’re working with financial institutions. But one organization that really caught my eye was the Linux Foundation.
So which manages over 1,500 domains using your company’s API. I think that’s very neat. Maybe they even manage more. I’m not sure at this point. Yeah.
Anthony Eden (15:45.226)
They probably manage more at this point. I think you’re, I imagine you were looking at the case study that we did with them. They’ve been a fantastic customer and they’ve done something. They’re a perfect example of doing, like taking the ability to do an integration and making it part of their standard workflows. So essentially for those who don’t know Linux foundation has hundreds, maybe even thousands of open source projects that are under their umbrella. They essentially provide an environment and all kinds of systems for open source projects to.
live and operate in an ongoing fashion, especially those that become critical for larger organizations, so for larger enterprises. And what they’ve done is they built a system in-house that allows every one of those projects to see the domains that are associated with each project, the SSL certificates that are associated with each project. They can manage their own DNS records inside their interface.
And all this is contextually with the projects that people are actually working on, which to me is fascinating and awesome. And the most awesome thing about it was they did it all by using our API. They didn’t need to do any sort of manual interaction. They were able to integrate fully into the API to do everything they wanted. And that was the original idea, and that was the vision. And they executed on it perfectly on their side. Yeah, we do love them.
Beau Hamilton (17:01.902)
Wow. That’s very cool. Yeah, I didn’t know that. Yeah, well, we love them too. I know we were big proponents of Linux and we always joke over on our sister website, slash.about, you year of the Linux desktop is a constant, you know. Yeah, this is the year. Now, are there certain organizations that, you know, you work best with or more closely with than others or you sort of just open for all different types of users and platforms?
Anthony Eden (17:30.352)
We’ve pretty much kept it generic to that we have certain packages that are specific to types of companies. So for example, we talked about banks already because the dot bank TLD is regulated and it has certain requirements. We have specific enterprise level packages just for them that are priced competitively so that they can come in and they can manage their dot bank domain in a way that is compliant with the regulations. And they have access, of course, to all of the APIs and everything else that they need to.
So that’s one area, but we’ve really, we built our bread and butter by helping individual engineers to be able to manage their domains. Whether that’s, like that’s where we started from. I was like, okay, what do I want as an individual engineer from my domain registrar and DNS provider? And then we worked our way up from there. We have small businesses, we have big businesses. We have a ton of businesses nobody’s ever heard of and quite a few businesses that folks know very well.
And so we’ve tried to keep it open and make it so that there’s a clear path from the developer to the small part in the organ, maybe to a subset in the organization to finally providing a home for the entire or the enterprise as a whole, if they want to move domain management in there. And we’re also cognizant that in the DNS space, it’s often a good idea to not have just one provider. I mean, DNS has built in this whole notion of multiple DNS providers working together and synchronizing zone data between those providers. And it’s something that we’ve supported for many, many years and will continue to support. And we took it a step further with this thing that we call the domain control plane. So that now, for example, for certain providers, let’s say Microsoft Azure or Amazon Route 53, you can connect to those providers and you can actually see your zones from within D and are in those providers and you can synchronize them back and forth. So it’s not just at the protocol level, it’s actually a direct integration with their APIs and our APIs making that work together. And so our dream, our vision ultimately is anybody should be able to connect a domain to a service that they want to use. And it should be extremely easy. It’s still too difficult. Even with us, it’s too…I keep pushing every day. How can we make this easier? How can we make this easier?
And it should work this, it should be the case whether it’s an individual developer or an entire Fortune 500 enterprise.
Beau Hamilton (19:56.812)
Yeah, there’s always room for improvement. Things can get more simple, more refined, more efficient, etcetera. Yeah, OK, that’s great. So yeah, you’re open to basically any and all different organizations. Now, you gave a great example talking about how the Linux Foundation worked to transform their operations using your API. I’m curious, do you have any other examples of customers who have or a customer that comes to mind that’s transformed their operations? You know, after working with DNSimple.
Anthony Eden (20:29.12)
I’m trying to think of somebody who would be a very good example. And I don’t want to say a name of an organization that maybe doesn’t want us talking about it because for a lot of organizations, they keep that very private. But for example, there was a company that we started working with a few years back called Spice House.
They actually, they had stuff kind of in several different places and they moved everything into DNSimple and they automated it and essentially our champion inside that organization, the person who started using us first, who brought us this, what he said is, honestly, this is the best system I’ve ever used for this because I was able to get in, I was able to do all of this, it was very clean, it was very clear, I was able to move my domains from different providers. We were there to help them along the way. This was probably…six, seven years ago, I was actually on a Skype call with them, just kind of making sure that they were comfortable with the transition.
And I think that’s the kind of experience. I mean, how often is it that you get to talk to the CEO who’s going to say, don’t worry, it’s cool. I’ll help. We’ll watch all of this. I’ll explain how this is going to work. Now, obviously that’s not going to happen as much these days. But the point is, we built the systems so that all of our team members could help out, could help people get on board. And it has helped.
A lot of smaller organizations become confident that they’re not going to lose their domains, that their DNS is not going to fail. And that’s really what they care about, right? At the end of the day, they want their intellectual property to be protected and they want their DNS to operate 24/7/365. If they have those two things, then an individual all the way up to a big enterprise is super happy.
Beau Hamilton (22:07.788)
And then having your support team just be available and answering any questions, concerns as they come up, that’s huge, right?
Anthony Eden (22:15.124)
Yeah. And it’s not just, it’s not folks that were hired just to do support. It’s all the engineers inside of DNSimple can be called into a support. have essentially a matrix of who can do what and who has, who has extensive knowledge in what areas and are to support folks that sort of handle and triage that they can either handle it themselves if it’s an obvious answer, or if it needs to be investigated, they can handle it off to pretty much any engineer in the organization.
That’s also been part of the culture of DNSimple is that everybody should have access to customer support and everybody should be able to do customer support. So it’s part of our onboarding and training process when anybody joins DNSimple is they go through a process of learning how our support works. And again, also back to security, that’s a perfect time to train them about what not to do as well.
Beau Hamilton (23:07.094)
Right, right. Yeah. also, too, we see this migration of replacing customer support with all these automation tools and AI. it’s like, got to having a human in the loop and a human connection representative, I think, is really important.
Anthony Eden (23:22.214)
Agreed. Yeah. We have specifically not adopted sort of generative AI based automation for support because the chances are too high that a hallucination is going to end up causing some serious impacts. And we don’t want to be part of that environment. We don’t want to create an environment where a hallucination can make something go awry. So we still have humans in the middle on all this.
Beau Hamilton (23:49.582)
Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. I think about it just from the feedback customer satisfaction standpoint, but from the security standpoint, yeah, there’s some big risks involved there. Now, when you’re gathering feedback from customers, is it mostly concerned with, well, I imagine it’s mostly concerned with the kind technical issues that show up, but outside of those, do you get a lot of feedback regarding just how they can improve efficiency or improve their workflow with using DNSimple or did they mention other things?
Anthony Eden (24:22.664)
I think when they’re, especially for sort of mid to large size organizations, when they start coming in and we talk to them, so we have a sales cycle with them, where, because self-service, which we offer, is not necessarily going to work for them. It might work when they kick things off, but eventually they’re gonna wanna have an account manager to speak with. They’re gonna wanna ensure that they have invoice billing, that they have a contract that works for their needs, things like that. So when they go into that phase, often the question is, how do we consolidate?
How do we ensure that we have access to all of our domain assets? Because businesses have been running 15, 20 years, they probably have domains in lots of different places. So we are trying to actually work with them as well to identify where those things are and how to get access to it.
And I think that’s the first and foremost thing they’re looking to do is how do I make sure that I understand the entire picture of domains we have from the stuff that we use that’s core every day to things that were registered for a project 10 years ago that’s running, but that really nobody really maintains anymore. How do we get all this together? And that usually requires navigating a bit the space with some deeper knowledge. And that’s one of the benefits of having team members that have deep, long experience in the domain space.
Beau Hamilton (25:38.038)
And what about the feedback that translates into future development? I imagine you probably have a long list of various features to work on and roll out. So how does the feedback inform your roadmap or future development?
Anthony Eden (25:57.226)
So what we do is, so we develop using a technique called shape up, which came out of the folks at Basecamp 37 signals. And essentially what we do is before we start thinking about building something or changing something, we do what’s called framing. So we frame the problem. And it’s during that phase that we look at sort of the most requested features that we have in our backlog. We have an air table that we have everything that we track in.
Anytime a new feature request comes in, we sort of connect it with existing feature requests and try to unravel what the customer wants or what they’re saying they want versus what they actually want. And so then before we start framing problems, we look at that and we say, what is the biggest concern from our customer’s perspective? Is it adding a specific TLD? Is it implementing a specific feature? Is it fixing a specific issue? What is it that we’re hearing most of?
And then we do that across each group. We have our customer support folks will say, this is what we hear as the number one complaint. OK, that’s something we frame. And then the engineering team says, this is what we see as the number one thing causing alerts from our internal monitoring systems. So then that gets framed. And so that’s how we approach it. And then on the product side, we look at that long feature list and say, what have people been asking for that are interrelated, that are interconnected, that we could frame as a problem statement, that we can then shape into a solution statement and then build as an implementation.
Beau Hamilton (27:29.39)
That’s neat. I’ll have to look up that shape up framework. I think that’s great that you follow that.
Anthony Eden (27:33.736)
Yeah, and we switched about three years ago, think now two and half, three years ago, we ran a pilot program with it with one team. We were very pleased with the results and then we started advancing throughout the entire organization. And now we’re on a cadence essentially where we do six weeks of build followed by two weeks of what we call the cool down. And that’s where you deal with the kind of those remaining issues that were on a project or the nice to haves.
And then we put a two week break after that where we call it the cycle break. And that’s where folks can work on things that have nothing to do with a project. All those little issues, the things that crop up during that, during the regular development cycle. And while they’re working on the building, we’re working on framing new problems and shaping new problems. So we have like a 12 week lead in to every next cycle. So we can get five cycles done a year essentially. And it’s worked out pretty well. It’s allowed us to have a consistent and release space and also for us to evolve how we develop software and systems over the last couple years in kind of an organized fashion that you might not have otherwise. So we’ve been very happy with it. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty darn well.
Beau Hamilton (28:42.552)
Very cool. Well, yeah, nothing’s perfect, but, you know, it works for you and it’s, I think it works for customers. I mean, they can, they have stuff to look forward to. Do you have a certain, kind of release cadence or is it sort of just as, as they’re, finished being developed?
Anthony Eden (29:00.106)
So what we generally do is during the build cycle, every project has what we call an appetite. So that’s from a business perspective, how much time are we willing to invest in it? And so it might be two weeks, four weeks, or six weeks. If it exceeds six weeks, then we probably haven’t drilled down into the problem well enough to be able to solve a portion of it that will actually help our customers. And so then we go back to the drawing board. Once that appetite is specified, the builders, so the software engineers or whoever it is on the team that’s building whatever it might be, they get to negotiate the scope of the project. So they can actually say, well, if you want it done in two weeks, we can do X, Y, and Z, but not A, B, and C. And then it becomes a negotiation. Is that good enough? If it is, we go ahead and go forward with it. When they hit the end of that two weeks, four weeks, or six weeks, it’s shipped. The cadence is when they’re done, it is essentially available for our customers.
There’s all the documentation that goes along with it, updating support docs and all that. And that happens usually at the tail end during the cool down phase and beyond. But the actual release happens essentially when they’re done building. If a project is successful, it’s because it’s in our customers’ hands.
Beau Hamilton (30:16.024)
Very cool. OK, I love getting that behind the scenes look of how you do things. Well, I usually I save this next question for the very end of our interview. But since we’ve been talking so much about customers and kind of the upcoming features and whatnot, I think now is a good time to capitalize on that and ask for a lot of the listeners right now who might be customers of yours already, but others who might be curious to give you guys a try.
Can you talk about maybe some of the typical onboarding? Well, actually, you talked about the onboarding process for new customers. Do you have maybe a demo or a way they can sign up and give DNS, DNSimple, a try?
Anthony Eden (31:00.724)
Yeah, so there’s a couple options. The first option is our cheapest plan is literally free to sign up. It’s a solo plan. You go in and you get one user at no charge. And you only start paying when you either add a zone and activate it, or you purchase a domain, or you get a SSL certificate. So before that, essentially, you’re not going to pay anything. And then the zones are very reasonably priced at that. So that’s one option.
The other option is we also maintain an entire sandbox. So we understand that a lot of engineers, when they’re going to do an integration with our APIs, they need an environment to test. They basically have what is a sandbox environment where they can go in, they can hit its API, and it essentially behaves like DNSimple.com, with the exception that the domains that are registered aren’t really registered because they’re also in sandbox registration systems. And no DNS is resolved because we don’t want to pay for the traffic and have customers pay for the traffic in the sandbox environment. But you can mess with the user interface. You can work with the API. You can do almost everything that you can do in our standard environment, in the sandbox environment. And it’s at no charge. And that’s a nice thing to help folks to get integrated. If they go that route, they just go to developer.dnsymbol.com and it has all the documentation on how to get into the environment and how to set everything up.
Beau Hamilton (32:28.27)
Perfect. So developer.DNSimple.com is a good place to go to. And I think there should be links down below in the description and on the source forage article. So people should be able to find it easily. Now, I want to pivot slightly at these last couple of questions I have for you to just sort of pick your brain about your past experience some more and your sort of unique perspective, right? Working in the software space for the last few decades, at least, right?
I guess the first question is, is there a common misconception about our industry that you wish more people understood?
Anthony Eden (33:06.366)
I think for the longest time, the most common misconception was if I buy a domain, I could just use the DNS from the registrar. It’ll be great. It’ll work fine. And I think that unfortunately has led to a lot of unnecessary outages for companies when, I mean, when frankly they are using a DNS that maybe isn’t, it wasn’t really designed to be high level of production. Now for some folks, if you’re just setting up a personal website, sure. Okay. I get it. Right.
But if you’re gonna operate a business, you need a partner that you can really trust. And the registrars aren’t necessarily, they’re just a pure registrar. They’re not there to provide operational DNS support. They’re really there to sell domain names and often hosting and all the other things that go along with it. But that was, I think, one of the things that took a while for us to sort of get into folks’ mind, but we actually designed it this way from the beginning, is that we’re a DNS company first. So our first product was authoritative DNS. And then we started doing domain registration, not the other way around. And so we were thinking operations matter first because we’re ops folks.
Both my brother and I at the time had operated companies for many, many years and we’re down in the trenches of running servers and doing all the things necessary to make sure everything works constantly. And so we came in with an operational mindset and getting people to realize that that’s how they need to think about things, especially when most of the marketing is done by domain companies who are like, buy domain, domain’s free. This is that, right? The challenge is not finding the domain. I love that people think that. That’s not the hard part. The hard part has been operating that for many, many years to come as your company grows and as your needs change.
Beau Hamilton (34:57.516)
Yeah. And I think there’s something to be said, obviously, about having an all-in-one platform that does a bunch of different things. Customers can stay on one domain or one platform and not have to switch. I think it’s also true that you should be really good at one thing before you start pivoting to these other areas. And that’s not always the case when you see a lot of these all-in-one solutions.
Anthony Eden (35:29.182)
It’s one of the things that’s been, it’s a blessing and a curse, right? We at DNSimple said, we are going to focus on domains and DNS. So we said, first, we’re gonna focus on DNS. And then we’re gonna talk about the intellectual property side, we’re gonna make sure that we work really well on both of those things. And that’s essentially what we do. And so sometimes we have folks who come to us and say, but you don’t do hosting? No, we don’t do hosting because that’s a whole different business.
Right now, maybe someday when we feel that our, when we say DNS and domains, we’ve got that cracked enough so that we don’t need to focus as much time and energy there. Maybe we will do something aside in some other space, but we haven’t reached that point yet. We still, every day we still strive to make the experience around managing domains and DNS better and also kind of fight against the entropy that constantly happens when you. Run a business in a space that’s been around for 30 or 40 years. So it’s just inevitable.
Beau Hamilton (36:28.728)
So true. Now, the other question I have for you, and I love asking this because it’s, you know, it could, think a lot of listeners could have some big takeaways here, but it’s, if there’s a small change you made and applied to DNSimple that ended up having a really big sort of domino effect, a big impact. And it could be a technical component aspect specific to DNSimple, but it could also be something like, you know, incorporating more employee feedback. Is there anything that comes to mind when that you implemented that’s really had a big impact?
Anthony Eden (37:06.41)
We’ve already talked about it, Shape Up. I mean, in the last few years, Shape Up had probably the largest impact on our ability to ship the right things in a reasonable amount of time. So we went from having projects that were overrun in terms of how long we thought they would take to get out. They were taking quite a bit longer. They were shipped in a way that we weren’t really thrilled with. We went from that to having a much more reliable method of building and shipping software. So I would say recently that’s probably been the biggest thing that we did. Prior to that, probably the next largest thing was the switch from being just a small person, like a three person company, and to the point where we actually turned and got a little bit more mature and started hiring folks to be good at one specific thing. A lot of startups when they start,
Anthony Eden (38:00.96)
They, you have to be a master, like Jack of all trades, master of none, right? Like that is something you have to be able to do. And the great founders, I think, and I don’t consider myself to be one of them because it took me a lot longer than it probably should have, but the really great founders know the, like they know the moment where they need to stop doing what they’re doing and they need to start delegating to people that can do it better. It took me a while to learn that.
Beau Hamilton (38:23.308)
Yeah. have no, think, I think you’re, I think you’re just being humble. I think that the proof is in the pudding and the fact that you’ve been, operating for 15 years and then, and some with the previous, work in previous organizations you’ve, found it. I think that speaks volume, but yeah, just instilling that trust in, other employees, other people to, really, get the important work done, I think is, it’s a big leap, but, very important and finding the right people for the right job. It’s just as huge makes all the difference.
Anthony Eden (38:51.838)
Yeah. Yeah. And for an engineer, engineer giving up the engineering side is going to be the hardest thing for a salesperson giving up some of the sales sides can be the hardest thing. Each one of us have that thing that we believe we do best. And as a founder, it’s really easy to keep pushing as long as we possibly can doing that thing. And so probably the third and final thing that was the biggest change was when I finally said, I’m going to be a CEO and I’m going to stop for me. It’s probably better if I don’t spend my days writing code and trying to operate. So I took myself out of the pager rotation. I said, okay, folks, I trust you team. You are excellent. You all have this. You’re going to do a better job than I ever did. And the good news is they’ve proven me right. They constantly make things better than I could have ever done on my own. That’s for sure.
Beau Hamilton (39:39.054)
That’s great. Well, that’s a great note to end on, I think. I appreciate all the insights there, the behind the scenes look, and just all the information you shared. I really appreciate it. And I’m going have to look up shape up, too. I think the fact that you mentioned a couple of times, I think, is a testament to just how important it can be. If you’re a founder listening, I think it might be wise to look up shape up as well, too, and maybe think about implementing it into the roadmap development process.
Anthony Eden (40:07.712)
Yeah, if you’re running into cases where you feel like you’re not able to ship in a way that you’re happy with, either you’re not getting the right stuff out or it’s taking too long, or your team members are just exhausted and they say, we can’t do this anymore, maybe you have issues about retaining good quality developers, look into it just as something worth investigating.
Beau Hamilton (40:31.854)
That’s great. All right, well, that’s Anthony Eden. Anthony, thank you again for your time. I really appreciate it.
Anthony Eden (40:36.98)
Thanks for having me on, Beau. I appreciate it. And if anybody has any questions, they can reach out to me directly at DNSimple. I’m really easy to get at anthony at dnsymbole.com. Just don’t spam me. That’s all I ask. I respect my inbox. But if you ever see me at a conference or an event, so we’re going to be at ElixirConf here in Florida at the end of August. And then we’re going to be down in Miami for CloudFest in November. Please come say hi. I’ll be wearing a shirt probably a lot like this and walking around. I love talking to customers and non-customers alike and just chatting about whatever interests anybody.
Beau Hamilton (41:15.662)
That’s great. All right. Anthony at DNSimple.com and just generally DNSimple.com is a good resource. That just reminded me, your shirt just reminded me of some of the infographic videos you guys have online. Very well produced. Highly recommend. Yeah. Yeah. Send my feedback to the, to the team who thought of that and developed that as great. Yes. All right. Thank you.
Anthony Eden (41:30.198)
Thank you, yeah. I will, I will let everybody know that the videos are working out well. All right, thanks, Beau.
Beau Hamilton (41:41.902)
And thank you all for listening to the source forage podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.