Affiliate Payout Update

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Hey everyone!

I updated you a while back on the closure of our affiliate system. There are still many of you who have pending payouts, and I wanted to post an update to let you know that I have not forgotten about you. I'm trying to balance a few things here, and for transparency I'll share them:

  1. Growing our outbound infrastructure to sustain our current customers and some growth beyond it.
  2. Paying for additional help on support.
  3. Costs associated with migrating infrastructure (with overlap).
  4. Affiliate payouts.

Now, in all honesty affiliate payouts are last on that list because they are last in priority. The reason being that those payouts rely on the previous 3 items going over well, and being well paid for. The first and third on the list are temporary, and they ensure the continued funding of MXroute. That continued funding is what ensures the payouts.

We're by no means in any financial bind or at risk of failure, simply prioritizing the items that ensure our continued success. At the latest, we expect to have these affiliate payouts completely resolved within a few days after Black Friday.

Thank you so much for your patience. We're not going anywhere, we haven't forgotten about you, and we're so incredibly grateful for you.

Jarland

 

Affiliate System Shutdown

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Greetings friends!

It is with great regret that I announce today that we have had to shut down the affiliate system on MXroute. All amounts owed are pending payout and will be paid out. We will always make good on our promises, even if it takes some time for this to happen.

We greatly appreciate every one of our affiliates who recommended customers to us, and we have been thrilled to share the wealth throughout this process. However, we are noticing that the amount to pay out is increasing while our profits are not. You have likely also noticed the high support wait times as we continue to struggle on that front, offering support mostly through our Discord chat. It has been decided that this is in the best interest of both MXroute and it's customers, that we move toward paying for additional help with our support.

Thank you all for your wonderfully kind words about us, we do hope that you will continue to recommend us, and we hope to grow into the kind of company that you will want to recommend for years to come.

Kind Regards, Jarland

 

Admitting failure and moving forward

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Admitting failure is an extremely vital part of running a business. Often we tend to double down on our failures in hopes that more effort will convert them into success. That, however, is a great way to take a business toward it's end. That is especially true when the business is small and run by few people. Failure will happen often and repeatedly, if you're doing anything that is even worth doing. You must continually recognize it and choose how to move forward after it.

What I'd like to talk about today is where I've failed, and what I'm doing next. You most likely read my previous blog entry about our issues dealing with support workload and meeting my own expectations. While I stand by the concept that was outlined for repair, but I failed to recognize that I lack the resources to turn that concept into reality. As a result, these are my current failures: Handling support requests, resolving product issues.

To address these failures, three things will be happening. The first has already occurred, but will be made more clear with the others.

Support

I have split up support ticket categories into specific ticket types with specific input fields relevant to that topic. These are things like product bug reports, email delivery issues, feature requests, etc. This allows better prioritization of tickets based on the actual issue type and severity. This also allows us to set more clear expectations. For example, I can say that a feature request is the lowest priority up front. I can also say that a bug report clearly identified to be a client side issue can be lower priority than a platform wide issue. The remainder of issues will be handled as community support, via our Discord chat. Community support does not mean that I will not be present there myself, merely that the support will be a community and as we grow customers will be able to offer assistance to each other as well.

Product Simplication

We are going to make a sweeping change to our product offering that will impact all new orders. By lowering the complexity of our product offering in general, we will eliminate a variety of reasons to need support. This is not live at the time of this post, and you will know it is live by the third change.

New Expectations

A new website will be launched with the simplified product, outlining more clearly what is to be expected of us, what items I will support, and what product functions exist. This reduces the need for new customers to require support with things I consider basic like configuring their DNS, their email clients, etc.

With these efforts I hope to take what is growing failure and instead grow with new expectations of myself and my customers, clearly communicated and outlined, so that it instead becomes success. This is a top priority, and more will be visible over the next few weeks.