I found this article sitting in my Drafts today…who knows why I never published it, but here we go! I wrote it in 2018.
Be careful: I did not do any proofreading…because I might end up not publishing it again!
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Last December was the end of an era for us: my former partners and I decided to shut down our former company and to stop following HostingTalk.it. I haven’t been involved in that for a few years now as I went fulltime building Cloud Academy.
I have been procrastinating on writing a final article on the website for a few weeks now, and while I try to put together my thoughts, I wanted to share what I learned with that experience.
We registered HostingTalk.it in February 2006!
I owe a lot to HostingTalk.it, it helped me achieve much more I could have expected when we started it. Back in those days, I didn’t know anything about startups, venture capital, Silicon Valley etc. In fact, I didn’t know English at all! The web was a very different place 12 years ago, Facebook was just getting started and blogs were still a big thing. I was finishing my high school in Italy and spending most of my time in front of a computer, building things, experimenting, sometimes just wasting time and having fun.
Why HostingTalk.it
We started HostingTalk.it (we have always called it “HT“) for the best reason you can have to start a business: to solve a problem we had ourselves. Just a few months before launching HT, Luca and I were spending our nights on building a platform to host your own blog (it was called IlBlog.it). Based on the first alpha (!!) of WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) and hosted on one of the first virtual private servers available in the Italian market around 2004/2005. It was a mess, the site was continuously crashing and we didn’t know what to do. We had no money and definitely no idea of how to manage a Linux server. Even with that, we ended up having about 5000 blogs on the platform and we learned a lot about Google AdSense, interacting with users and the challenges of offering something for free.
Once we sold that platform, we felt we had a lot of fun and we wanted to tackle something new. We knew we could have done much more with that platform but our poor knowledge about web hosting solutions and servers ultimately didn’t allow us to develop it to the next level. Also, we felt like we took the wrong path deciding to build a free service and trying to make money just out of Google AdSense. We didn’t have much money and, to be honest, we were reluctant to hire external consultants or people to do it.
We loved working on websites and platforms and we started thinking about what was next for us. We ended up building a community for people that had our same issue: understand more about web solutions to host websites and build online businesses.
We had a few discussions about the name, remember talking about “hostingforum.it” and finally, we ended with “HostingTalk.it”, mostly inspired by “webhostingtalk.com”, a big community in the US. The initial community we built attracted several professionals from the webhosting industry. From there, we built a news section, reviews, business services and much more, transforming a small community in a business.
What I have learned with HostingTalk.it
A lot, it would be too much to list everything we went through, but I would like to underline a few lessons that proved to be critical in the next years building my entrepreneurial skills. Most importantly, I became aware of the importance of a few lessons really just years later, thinking about them in a much different context.
All the points are reminders to myself. They don’t necessarily work for everyone and I want to make sure, that from time to time, I can come back here and immediately remember what I already know is wrong.
Building a business is about selling a product. The sooner the better.
The first contract we closed with HostingTalk.it was worth 120 Euros! Holy cow! We couldn’t believe someone was buying our product! We didn’t know exactly what we were doing, we knew that we didn’t want to run Hostingtalk.it as a free platform as we did with other websites before. It turned out to be a critical lesson.
As an entrepreneur, you need to be focused on building something people want to buy. As soon as you have an MVP, a tool that works or just 10% of the product you would like to have, try to sell it. It doesn’t matter how bad you feel about it, how ugly it is, try to sell it to someone and learn as much as you can about it.
The sooner you start selling your product, the sooner you learn how to expand and build more of it. You need paying customers because they will give you a real and honest feedback and that will help you like nothing else does. The temptation of giving all of that away for free is very common: people that are not paying for your products will not give you a feedback as valuable as the one of your paying customers and ultimately it will be hard for you to understand if you are building something people want.
Bootstrapping your business is critical
I didn’t know this at the time, but this became very clear to me several years later while I was raising money for Cloud Academy in Silicon Valley. Our first angel investor was a very successful entrepreneur that built several businesses in the US. One day while we were talking about raising money, he told something that stuck with me since then: “Stefano, the moment you will have $10M in the bank you will just act in a different way. Everything will be feasible, you will spend 10K on this and that, just because it’s only 10k and you will lose focus on what really matters.“. Bootstrapping forces you to focus on what really matters for your business to keep it alive. Having limited resources and being extremely frugal is actually a great condition to create a successful business: you will focus only on what really matters and forget about every other possible distraction.
With HostingTalk.it this was exactly the case. We were young, brutally inexperienced and we did know about one and one only way to build a business: sell something and invest that money to build more. It worked extremely well and it’s been a key lesson for me since then on starting a new business.
Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want
This is hard and something I still remind myself today. Sometimes asking is the best way to get things. Around 2007 I wanted to have Aruba.it (one of the biggest European hosting providers) as a customer. I reached out to their CEO and offered to visit him to sell our services to him. He invited us, showed us the company, the data center and finally told us “sorry guys, we are not buying your services now, but thank you for the visit”. It took other 2 years to land them as customers.
This lesson is still something I have to remind myself constantly. It’s easy to see difficulties, to see why “he will never reply” or “they will never pay this much for our product“. Every time I ended up taking that risk, putting aside all my concerns and fears, I found an opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, it still requires a lot of work, but you will find it incredible once those people and opportunities will finally materialize.
Hire people that are 10 times better than you. Really.
Potentially our biggest mistake and the one I couldn’t see. We didn’t look for people better than us. In fact, we didn’t consider that. Hiring people better than you is just a fundamental step to build your business. If you don’t do it, you will end up with a bunch of people that are not helpful for the business and that, at the end, will just make it mediocre. Your job as an entrepreneur is to find people 10 times better than you and put them in charge of things you are not good at, you don’t like or you simply don’t have time for.
Hiring great people will have a strong consequence on your business: they will bring other strong and even better people. You will be impressed by how great that is for your business.
Build a product, not a consulting service
At HostingTalk.it we ended up building more a consulting company than a product one. We compromised on several things and we missed a big opportunity experimenting with more products. Our revenues were coming from advertising and consulting projects for web hosting companies. We were not really able to move on and we ended up building something that couldn’t scale and was not that exciting. We loved building products and communities, but we hated consulting.
A product will open more opportunities, will challenge you on finding a product market fit, but when you do you will simply love that and you will spend days and days building on top of it.
Build a global business and think big from the start
I have this funny picture in mind of myself coming home from school, having a quick lunch with my parents and rushing to my computer picking up an English dictionary and translating articles for our website. I was 16/17 and I couldn’t speak a word of English! Part of that was me being just a very young student with no clue about the world, another part was having just a tremendous relationship with my English teacher back then.
Years later, thinking about that always gives me a smile. HostingTalk.it could have been a very global business, writing that in English from day 0 would have opened so many more opportunities for us and today we would be in a very different place.
Instead, we focused on the Italian market and we built something that, by design, couldn’t become big. Today there is no reason why you shouldn’t target a global audience and a global market, no matter the type of product you are building. It will make your business bigger and not constrained by the conditions and limitations of a single market or nation.
Believe in yourself, no one else will do that for you
The big advice everyone should tell you right there when you start. The biggest challenge building something and scaling that will be dealing with your own psychology. You will feel in charge of the world some days and you will feel miserable for a lot more days.
Entrepreneurs usually get a ton of suggestions and advice. Being able to consider them and still make your own decision is a key, vital, aspect.
It can happen for a big number of reasons:
- People are telling you that you should things differently
- Your competitor is running faster than you, with new features, products. How can you win?