Growth pains
We've all heard the ol' saying of "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger", and that's probably doubly true for business growth pains.
During the past couple weeks people have probably noticed the fluctuating setup and support ticket response times. This has been because we are overwhelmed with work. Yes, really. And it's all related to the immense growth, even the CSB merger has not caused much, it's been progressing steadily on the background, and been a marginal amount of work, as Josh keeps on helping with the merger, and early management of CSB merged into PM.
But the overwhelming part comes from the immense natural growth we've been experiencing. Infact, we had to even cut our marketing expenditure to slow growth down. We were literally getting too many orders in, all too fast.
At the fastest, the server count has been growing 15% per week during the past 2months. Yes, 15% per week. Thankfully, i (Aleksi) were prepared to this early on with 95% automated setup scripts.
But it's all good, and very positive. The growth pains help us grow, and manage things more efficiently. It's the little things, like how to manage 40+ concurrent SSH sessions on a daily basis? How much spare capacity is required for weekend sales, what are the monthly sales peak dates. With the larger things like "There seems to be a performance issues, but we cannot properly see it". Solution: More detailed monitoring. All PM semidedi/shared servers are being monitored in quite of an detail.
Also, it has been forcing us to solve some seemingly small, but increasingly annoying little things when it occurs more often. Such as the occasional failure of WHMCS extending service due dates. There was no common thread to that one, no error messages to look at. It was a combination of multiple bugs and WHMCS's lack of proper error controlling (which is worrying for an long-lived, widely adapted billing application).
The important areas are highlighted due to the growth, and patterns emerge to be recognized, further business & service development goals become clearer due to reoccurring patterns. It becomes visible just how immature the whole seedbox business infact is, how early in it's lifespan, and where the efficiencies can be found.
Pulsed Media has never been a slow growth or "miniature business" like so many beginning hosting businesses are. We've been from day 0 a very strong growth company, despite the shockinly, absurdly, insanely poor, fraudster provider we tried to use initially. They caused massive damages, it's even hard to calculate how much exactly, but latest estimates are in the 17,500€ vicinity of direct damages alone (not counting refunds and cancellations). But we came out of that stronger, despite every single expectation, we finally managed to clear the backlog of preorders and transfer from the miserable 2010 to 2009+ plan. A lot of that had to be done by getting outside funding myself. Afterall, the 2010 provider got approximately 90% of our funds during the launch which we never got back. Hell, they haven't even provided invoices so far for all the payments made to them. On top of that, we had to refund a lot of money due to inability to deliver. We lost roughly 60% of our customers who preordered. Any other startup would have probably folded over in such a case.
But we came through, we delivered upon our promises, and some more. We keep constantly enhancing our services and the word spreads. Now many of those who asked for refund, or left due to the initial provider woes have returned as well.
Every problem presented is an opportunity.
We will keep enhancing our services strongly in the future, and working very hard to deliver the best possible service, at the lowest possible cost. Every week we go through some studies, experiments or business development ideas to make our services better than ever. Many of the things we do on the background are not visible to the end-user - but rest assured: We are constantly making enhancements.
Customer feedback is one of the most important aspects for us, so please, if you do have feedback, do not hesitate to come to IRC and talk about it, or send an e-mail to support@pulsedmedia.com.
Best Regards,
Aleksi
Sunday, September 19, 2010
