For example, should I offer a bigger range of features (Mobile Server Management, 24 Hour Live Support etc.) or should I focus entirely on simplifying the process of getting one's website online fast? I want to go from Good to Great.
If the answer is yes, find four more people like that. If the answer is no, thank them for their time, forget the conversation happened, and talk to someone else.
If you go haring off into feature-land you'll find that nobody who cares about Mobile Server Management will pay you money for web hosting. The ones who need it won't trust their businesses to you. The ones who don't need it but like the idea of the feature have no money to spend but feel like they have all sorts of useful feedback about webhosting, including why they should have dedicated server performance with the responsiveness of their own engineering and ops team for no more than $4 a month. The people who urgently need better hosting will probably not even understand what that feature means, because it includes at least two works of tech gibberish.
P.S. Before you try selling a new hosting solution to anyone try selling a currently existing solution. If you can't do that, you have no hope of selling a new solution. You can learn this without spending six figures in hardware and engineering costs to build a new solution.
That means: - Help me point my domain to your service. - A built in CMS that humans can actually use, not a directory where I'm expected to shove html (What the fuck is html and can word make it?) - email: Make my domains email, work without hassle - file sharing - let me share stuff with others in my business. - calendaring/meetings - duh, just make it work. - wiki - built in, from the ground up.
None of this is technically difficult. But no one has put in the effort to make these things frictionless yet.
When I brought up the subject of a turnkey linux distribution for business 12 years ago at a meet up I got violently shouted down. I was told businesses HAD to have an LDAP administrator otherwise they would cease to function immediately.
I disagree. Huge amounts of effort have gone into making things technically possible, but very little has gone into making them _useful_ to the average business user. Have a look at hosted wordpress as a model for this sort of thing.
All of the above are leading or close to leading in their respective niche areas. Their innovations and key differentiators appeal to different types of customer, product and price range, neither which you have stated. It is difficult to give advice on this basis, are we advising how to innovate $x/month bargain hosting or $xx,xxx/month enterprise solutions?
I think you have to identify these clearly before proceeding.
Basically I've got a dedicated server and a virtual server which I use to sell $x/month bargain hosting, just not basement bargains. Short-term goal is to be slightly premium as in $xx/month. I feel that fanatical support and stellar uptime on well-managed servers will make me a fortune in time.
So all that is identified already. In fact, I'm up and running. I just need a better way to get to my 20,000 accounts goal sooner rather than later.
I like that motto. My mantra was all about keeping it simple but that might be worth weaving into my support setup. Thanks for your input!
