The Secret of Our Succe$s

October 19, 2005 on 7:28 pm | In Insider View, Musings by Josh Jones |

There's no such thing as an overnight success. Brantley Foster took two weeks.

Get out your pencil$ and notepad$…

Recently Joel $polsky put up an article about how to pick what features to include in $oftware.

I read it accidentally, and it turns out he almost exactly describes how our $uggestions Area works!

We one-up his method though… rather than just having employees “buy” features they like, we put them up there for our entire customer base to vote on!

In that way, they (you!) do the most important thing to our entire company’s survival for us… you tell us which features we should work on ($ubversion) and which features we shouldn’t (Donate idle CPU time to BOINC).

(Oh, you want to know the most-suggested suggestion that we will never implement? I’ll tell you anyway: Allow seeing how many votes suggestions have. HA! I don’t THINK so! The only way we can be sure that we’re getting an accurate view of the wisdom of crowds is if everybody’s votes are independent. The last thing we want is people voting for something just because it’s ALREADY popular, or NOT voting on something just because nobody else has yet.)

But you know, just having customer-votable suggestions does not instantaneously imply succe$s (especially not the $ part)… there’s one more critical missing element. And that is the true “Secret of our Succe$s”..

HA! You think I would tell you all our secret$?!

You’re right. I will. Here it is:

We then actually implement the features!

But.. how we actually get done the things you know you need to do… THAT is our real $ecret!

HA! You think I would tell you all our secret$?!

Okay fine, I will.. one last time.

It’s the newsletter.

You see, just under 8 years ago a customer wrote in to me (yep, yours truly, the founding member of the Happy DreamHost $upport Team) suggesting we have a newsletter, because she didn’t get much email and would like to know what was going on in the company and things like that.

Well.. at the time we didn’t much need a newsletter… since there wasn’t much going on in the company.

Fortunately for DreamHost, my ego grabbed me by the throat, wrestled me to the ground, and said “Jo$h, write this newsletter. YOU WILL BE AN INTERNET GOD!” And that’s how the newsletter was born.

I don’t think I’ve ever told that story before.

But what does the newsletter have to do with us implementing new features, you ask? Well, since I decided to make it a monthly publication, each and every month I began needing what we in the business call “newsletter fodder.”

So now, around the 28th of each month (the 27th in February) I realize once again we’ve done nothing all month, and so frantically get everybody to $lap together some half-baked features from the top of our suggestion list, copy them live, and dump them in the newsletter!

We then generally spend the next month (up until the 28th) fixing those features.

$urprisingly, it actually kind of works. It sometimes makes for some ugly bugs, but hey, we’re not making pacemakers or space shuttles here. We’re providing $7.95/month web hosting. Not to mention, the uglier the bug, the quicker the fix.. and thank heaven we’re entirely web-based: bug fixes are “distributed” to all our customers in about 2 minutes.

So there it is.. the only thing keeping DreamHost competitive in the fast-paced world of Cheap Web Hosting… is Josh’s all-encompasing fear of an empty newsletter.

And you can take that to the bank$.

21 Comments

  1. 1

    I love the birth-of-the-newsletter story; it answered so many questions that I’d always been dying to know! ;D

    Comment by Pange — October 19, 2005 #

  2. 2

    Wow, I knew you guys were lazy bums - that do nothign but sit around the office all day getting high on all the free soda, but now I have written proof. You guys really ARE lazy, and wait till the end of of mothen to acutally move your little fingers and hands over the keyboard and mouse to make magical things happen! Man, I so want to work for you guys… If only I lived in LA.

    LOL

    Great update. Love it. :)

    –Matttail

    Comment by MattTail — October 19, 2005 #

  3. 3

    You totally are an internet god.

    Comment by Jack — October 19, 2005 #

  4. 4

    So, when *are* you guys in fact going to install Subversion (mod_dav_svn and mod_authz_svn) for us?

    Comment by Mikael Jansson — October 19, 2005 #

  5. 5

    The whole time I was reading that all I could think was, “Why not put the dollar sign at the beginning of Sucess?”

    A good read, I espeically liked the newletter story, and thanks for the link to the £uggestions area, I didn’t even know that place existed until now.

    Comment by David Harrison — October 19, 2005 #

  6. 6

    *Success (Note to self: proof read.)

    Comment by David Harrison — October 19, 2005 #

  7. 7

    [...] DreamHost Blog: The Secret of Our Succe$s : …Oh, you want to know the most-suggested suggestion that we will never implement? I’ll tell you anyway: Allow seeing how many votes suggestions have. HA! I don’t THINK so! The only way we can be sure that we’re getting an accurate view of the wisdom of crowds is if everybody’s votes are independent…. [...]

    Pingback by Kishore Balakrishnan’s Blog » Blog Archive » The secret of a web 2.0 company — October 20, 2005 #

  8. 8

    I think the newsletter is the secret of your success, but not for the reason you think it is. The newsletter is part of DreamHost’s persona - DreamHost has a face. The face talks to us all the time, expresses opinions, chastises us when we do naughty things with our accounts, and keeps us generally amused. This is a good thing, because it makes us feel like DreamHost is actual people, with feelings and stuff, instead of just a faceless corporation. DreamHost acts more like the matriarch of a family. Of course, the drip-feed of new features helps too!

    Comment by Simon Jessey — October 20, 2005 #

  9. 9

    The last thing we want is people voting for something just because it’s ALREADY popular, or NOT voting on something just because nobody else has yet.

    I think the opposite would be generally true. I, personally, would probably be less likely to spend voting points on something that already has a lot of support. I’d rather use them on something that doesn’t, where my votes might help get it noticed.

    Comment by Kenn Christ — October 20, 2005 #

  10. 10

    If the newsletter = success, the weblog = customer appreciation. I don’t know of any hosts with a weblog this personal, and I appreciate it.

    Comment by C Montoya — October 20, 2005 #

  11. 11

    Hey! How come I’m still paying $9.95 a month, huh?!

    Comment by Mandy — October 21, 2005 #

  12. 12

    yeah but, yeah but, but, paying us carp loads of money to refer other users certainly doesn’t hurt biz none :p

    Comment by riki — October 21, 2005 #

  13. 13

    Ehm… did the whole crew go out fishing or something? It seems support mails are being ignored totally.

    Comment by Marco — October 21, 2005 #

  14. 14

    what mandy said.

    Comment by vinnie — October 21, 2005 #

  15. 15

    Mandy, $9.95 / monoth really isn’t a lot for the package we get.

    Comment by David Harrison — October 22, 2005 #

  16. 16

    What are the system spec’s of the web servers? The deals are extremely good but I can’t seem to find what the server spec’s are or how many clients exist per shared-server solution.

    Does anyone know?

    Comment by JasonG — October 23, 2005 #

  17. 17

    processor : 0
    vendor_id : GenuineIntel
    cpu family : 15
    model : 2
    model name : Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz
    stepping : 9
    cpu MHz : 2400.127
    cache size : 512 KB

    Thats from annie. 4 processors total
    load average: 1.40, 1.41, 1.32
    2GB of memory

    Comment by nick — October 24, 2005 #

  18. 18

    It actually depends on the machine you are on.

    http://www.wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Server_Statistics

    Comment by Will — October 24, 2005 #

  19. 19

    [...] DreamHost Blog » The Secret of Our Succe$s the most-suggested suggestion that we will never implement? I’ll tell you anyway: Allow seeing how many votes suggestions have [...]

    Pingback by The Unkaizened Life » Blog Archive » links for 2005-10-21 — November 1, 2005 #

  20. 20

    Jack, I agree with you =) They are!!!

    Comment by interlocutor — December 3, 2005 #

  21. 21

    Great Site!

    Comment by Alaska Joes Fishing Trips — January 26, 2006 #

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