This year MXroute has grown exponentially, to the point that “the way we’ve always done things” is being tested in many ways. We always knew this was coming, and we would continue to work on processes that we believed would scale in ways that avoid the mistakes that so many businesses make when this time hits. Things like:
- Hiring unskilled support agents just to be a voice, even if the voice couldn’t actually do anything.
- Overloading servers to maximize revenue to pay for the previous line item.
- Increasing pricing for existing customers to pay for the things they didn’t see coming.
- A gradual decline in service quality that appears, whether true or not, to be in service of profit over reliability.
All of this time, since late 2013, we’ve been preparing for the times when the business would scale to the point that our plans were tested. Sometimes we failed. Sometimes we succeeded. One plan actually upset a customer so badly that I’ve never been talked to so angrily by anyone in my entire life. We’ve tried a lot of things to avoid going down the same paths that everyone else did, the paths that resulted in the loss of that “small business” feeling everyone loved so much about them before.
As we’re growing so much this year, I just wanted to let you all know that we’re going to be tested. A lot. Sometimes we’re going to fail. Sometimes we’re going to succeed. Sometimes we’re going to piss someone off. We’re not doing it to lose who we are, we’re doing it to try to keep it intact. It’s going to be stressful on us, and we’re going to continually refuse to solve everything in the way that everyone else always does. Anyone love GoDaddy these days? You get what I’m saying.
Throughout all of this, remaining stable is the goal. There might be bumps along the road. There may be things that scale in ways we hadn’t imagined or planned for. But every time we’ll learn, we’ll adapt, and we’ll do better.
Thank you all for joining us on this journey. I know at the end of the day you just want your email to work and you don’t want to have to think about it. Giving you that is always the primary goal.