2 brothers (born in Russia & brought up in New York) wanted to start a cloud hosting business…
But to grow at scale, they needed investment, so they applied to join TechStars programme, which help tech ideas succeed.
TechStars co-founder (David Cohen) originally laughed at their idea saying, “Rackspace & Amazon already dominate this market, how can you possible compete with that”.
To which Ben & Moisey replied, ‘We’ll love our customers more and give them what they want”.
You see, they’d spotted Rackspace and Amazon products were hard to use and that lots of people were complaining about the complexity of setting up the web servers required.
You had to be an engineer to have any chance of doing it correctly, and most got it wrong the first time, with little support to guide them through the process.
The idea from Ben & Moisey was to cut right through this complexity and make cloud-based web hosting stupid simple and so easy, their customers will love their service.
It wasn’t about having the cheapest price, their whole plan was to love the customer, and align themselves with customers by truly caring about them.
Today Digital Ocean is the 3rd largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers, with annual revenues circa $300 million.
This is brilliant story of how building a company to love customers can pay off big time and why it forms the core of our company too.
If you want to learn more about loving your customers and how you can incorporate it within your organisation, reach out to Anne Williamson of Customer Love.
…Anne’s a real expert in this field, even writing a book about it.
