Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, I’ve asked everyone in the company to take the weekend off. That means it’ll be me alone who’ll try and answer tickets, and solve issues if and when they arise. So, apologies in advance, if the level of support goes down, or sucks, I know with between Kai, Roberto and Heidi, expectations are very high.. this is my warning for the next 5 days. What follows is a bit more detailed explanation of why I’m doing this.. and how do I expect to run a world class hosting company, by reducing support levels for 5 days.
It’s been a great year for ZippyKid. As founder and CEO I have a lot to be thankful for. To recap, I started off 2011 with ZippyKid as a profitable side business.
- Started January 2011 with the goal of making ZippyKid my primary business/work by end of 2011.
- Was convinced to raise some money two weeks prior to SXSW 2011
- Had 2 term sheets in a matter of hours after the initial conversation/pitch
- Raised money (April 2011)
- Hired Kai, Roberto, Heidi, and John .. no longer profitable (May 2011)
- Had about 80 sites hosted on ZippyKid back then
Fast forward 6 months
- Profitable. Again
- Over 1300 WordPress sites hosted at ZippyKid
- Growing at an average of 60% month over month
- Donated over $2100 to SNIPSA (Animal Shelter) as part of the ZippyKid Team that ran a 5K
So, with that in mind, I think it’s obvious, I have a lot to be thankful for.
None of this would’ve been possible without the support of my wife Erin. She had plenty of occasion and reason to throw my phone across the room, when a customer called at 3am, she put up with me and my crazy schedule. She gave me the strength to keep doing it, and more importantly, a reason to not just give up and get a high paying job at some large company. She’s sacrificed a lot, and she knows this is just the beginning, we’re going to have a crazy 2012, and my schedule is just going to get worse.
Apart from Erin, I have Kai, Roberto, Heidi, John and Wes to thank, they’ve made me look so much better than I am. They’re the reason 80% of our new customers come from word of mouth, they’ve made being a customer of ZippyKid such an awesome experience, that customers have called us the Zappos of WordPress hosting.
How can I not reward my team with the deserved time off? I hope you all have had a great year like I have, and I hope you all get to enjoy Thanksgiving day as much as I will.
Oh, and for the people wondering if I’m looking for side work or available for contracting.. no I’m not 
.
@vidluther that’s a good blog post and an extremely nice thing for you to do for your people.
[...] with online and offline engagement, and you too can grow at the 60 percent month over month rate ZippyKid is reporting on their blog. I should add that this growth resulted from almost entirely word of [...]