This episode is sponsored by Kinsta. Between juggling client meetings, managing your website, and keeping up with everyday tasks, who has the time to stress out about website security? Well, with Kinsta, the technical stuff is taken care of so you can focus on what you do best. Kinsta provides managed hosting for WordPress, offering lightning-fast load times, top-tier security, and unmatched human-only customer support.
Whether you're a business owner, web developer or running a digital agency, Kinsta makes managing your website easy and efficient. Kinsta provides enterprise-grade security, being one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC 2 and other certifications, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website.
Thanks to their unlimited free expert-led migrations, Kinsta ensures a smooth transition for you from other hosting providers. Customers have reported 200% faster load times post-migration to their platform. What I find cool about Kinsta is their fast and reliable customer service and premium features that are included at no extra cost. Ready to experience Kinsta's hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at Kinsta.com today. That's K-I-N-S-T-A dot com.
This episode is brought to you by Propello. People take authentication for granted, but it's more than how customers log in to your product. It's how you manage your relationship with your users. The easiest way to make authentication your advantage is to use PropelAuth. PropelAuth is more than just functional. It's powerful. With tools like managed UIs, enterprise SSO, robust user management features, and actionable insights,
Propel Off adapts as your product grows. And the best part? When Off is effortless, your team can focus on scaling, not troubleshooting. That means more releases, happier customers, and more growth for your business. Save dev time, win over your customers, and propel your business forward with PropelOff. Check them out at PropelOff.com. That's P-R-O-P-E-L-A-U-T-H dot com. I was at the time using another domain registrar. I'll whisper it. Go daddy.
And I was like, wow, this experience is really horrible. And specifically the DNS part. I was really interested in the experience around managing my domain, not necessarily the registration part. The DNS part was really bad. And I said, why am I still using this? I should go build something.
On my own. So my brother and I got together and he did most of the early technical operations. So setting up servers and things like that. And then I wrote all of the initial front end software and we put something together. My name is Anthony Eden. I'm the founder and CEO of DN Simple. This is Code Story.
A podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries. Six months moonlighting. There's nothing on the back end. Who share what it takes to change an industry. I don't exactly know what to do next. It took many goes to get right. Who built the teams that have their back. A company is its people. The teams help each other achieve more. Most proud of our team. Keeping scalability top of mind. All that infrastructure was a pain. Yes, we've been fighting it as we grow. Total waste of time.
The stories you don't read in the headlines. It's not an easy thing to achieve, my dear. Took it off the shelf and dusted it off and tried it again. To ride the ups and downs of the startup life. You need to really want it. It's not just about technology. All this and more. on CodeStory. I'm your host, Noah Labpart. And today, how Anthony Eden built a simple and secure way to manage your domains and their DNS. This episode is sponsored by speak easy
Grow your API user adoption and improve engineering velocity with friction-free integration experiences. With Speakeasy's platform, you can now automatically generate SDKs in 10 languages and Terraform providers in minutes. Visit speakeasy.com slash code story and generate your first SDK for free. This message is sponsored by QA Wolf. QA Wolf gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship five times faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes.
With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Drada, and AutoTrader, you're in good hands. Join the Wolfpack at QAWolf.com. Anthony Eden is a gray beard in terms of internet time, being around when Netscape was released. He was studying music at the University of Miami and decided to build a website to show off his music and other people's work. And he was hooked.
Outside of tech, he grew up surfing, living in Hawaii, France, and now Florida. He enjoys writing software for fun when he has time and playing board games with his kids when they are around. Previously, Anthony was coming off of a failed startup. At the time, he was using a different vendor to manage domains and DNS, which he did not like at all. He decided to go forward and build a better solution, and one that is, you guessed it. Simple. This is the creation story of DN Simple.
So DNSimple is a DNS provider for authoritative DNS. That's how it started. And then very quickly after the beginning, I was polling some friends on Twitter and a lot of them said, oh, I just hate. the way domain registrations work. And I could feel that because I was with a domain registrar that kind of triggered me to start the DNS side. And I said, okay, we'll start looking into the domain registration. And so shortly after launch, I also added domain registrations.
And then at some point, we added certificate support so that we could issue certificates. And that's still what we do today. Our primary focus is authoritative DNS and domain registration and management. At the time, I was coming off of a somewhat unsuccessful startup. I was the CTO at it, and it just hadn't really taken off. Couldn't get another round of funding. And I was at the time using another domain registrar. I'll whisper it. Go daddy.
And I was like, wow, this experience is really horrible. And specifically the DNS part, I was really interested in the experience around managing my domain, not necessarily the registration part, which wasn't great, but at least it was usable. The DNS part was really bad. I said, why am I still using this? I should go build something.
On my own. So my brother and I got together and he did most of the early technical operations. So setting up servers and things like that. And then I wrote all of the initial front end software and we put something together.
I wrote the first line of code April 1st, 2010 and launched in July that year. Let's dive into that then. So that's the perfect segue into... my next question so i'm curious about mvp so that first version of dn simple that you built how long did it take to build which you mentioned i'm curious about what sort of tools you're using to bring it to life and and that whole story there So it did take about three months to get from first line of code to getting customers in the door.
At the time, and still today even, we used Ruby on Rails. So at that point, Ruby on Rails had already been fairly well established. It was 2010, and so quite a few companies... We're building on it and showing that it could be used as a web application framework that would actually withstand the test of time. This is about five years into Rails. I had been using it fairly extensively on the previous startup, and so I kept going with that.
We deployed out, I think, to Heroku in the very beginning, if I recall correctly. And then we had our name servers set up on virtual private servers on a couple of different networks. We were using PowerDNS at the time, which is an open source DNS software. And I spent most of my time focusing just on doing very minimalist web interfaces to everything, followed up shortly after by a REST interface so that you could have API calls for pretty much everything.
It was very bare bones. I am not a designer, so I hired somebody to build just one template and I just applied that to pretty much everything. And it was really just forms. There was no fancy JavaScript or anything. It was truly the most basic thing that I could come up with. with but it worked and I took away all of the unnecessary screens that I would have seen in other tools and just made it as simple to use as possible and hence the name and hence where the product went from there on.
So staying on that for a minute, tell me about some of the decisions and trade-offs you had to make, or maybe one or two, or maybe one big one where you had to decide around... how you're going to approach the problem, feature limitation or technical debt acceptance, anything like that. And tell me how you coped with those decisions. I think in the world of DNS, the most obvious one was that we had no money for infrastructure.
So we were running these name servers on the cheapest possible infrastructure we could at the time. I think we were paying maybe each VPS would cost between $10 and $15 a month. They were shared VPSs, so virtual private servers. We were running them in unicast mode, which means that there were four servers, there were four name servers, and each one was mapped to a very specific physical or virtual private server.
And so the performance was pretty pitiful. But at the beginning, that was fine. And that was the trade off because we did all this bootstrap. There was no investment from the outside. And we knew we had to do the cheapest thing possible to get up and running. And so the very first trade-off and the most obvious one was using the lowest cost infrastructure we could to get this out.
Very quickly that within the first couple of years that got to the point where it was no longer tenable and we started making changes to go into a more modern infrastructure for DNS. which included switching to Anycast. It included moving to our own infrastructure as well. So leased hardware in that case and a lot of other changes. But in the beginning, we just had no budget for it. So we really did the shoestring thing and did it on the cheapest budget possible.
This episode is sponsored by Speakeasy. Whether you're growing the user adoption of your public API or streamlining internal development, SDKs can turn the chore of API integration into effortless implementation. Unburden your API users from guessing their way around your API while keeping your team focused on your product. Shorten the time to live integration and provide a delightful experience for your customers.
With Speakeasy's platform, you can now automatically generate up-to-date, robust, idiomatic SDKs in 10 languages and Terraform providers in just a matter of minutes. SDKs are feature rich with type safety, auto retries, and pagination. Everything you need to give your API the developer experience it deserves. Deliver a premium API experience without the premium price tag. Visit speakeasy.com slash codestory to get started and generate your first SDK for free.
This message is sponsored by SnapTrade. Link in user brokerage accounts and build world-class investing experiences with SnapTrade's unified brokerage API. With over $12 billion in connected assets and over 300,000 connected accounts, SnapTrade's API quality and developer experience are second to none. SnapTrade is SOC 2 certified and uses industry-leading security...
practices. Developers can use the company's official client SDKs to build investing experiences in minutes without the limitations of traditional aggregators. Get started for free today by visiting snap trade.com slash code story. I'm so pumped about my new offshore dev partner. I'm saving a ton and they even signed an NDA. Wait, is that our financial statements on the internet? My dev partner has great communication. They can acknowledge an issue or email message super fast.
After they run it through Google Translate, of course. I have a call set up with my partner right now. Hey, guys. Guys? Are you there? Wait, did you just ghost me? Ever been in these situations? Yeah, me too. That is, until I found Tecla. Tekla is world-class, nearshore talent for technology teams who demand the highest standards. The platform gives you access to over 50,000 vetted Latin America technology experts, including developers, designers, and IT professionals.
all fluent in English and all in your time zone. In seven days or less, you can have your tech expert hired through Techla's fast, efficient hiring process, which helps you find and onboard top candidates. Get senior level talent at competitive rates, often half the cost of hiring in the US, but aligned with US work culture and time zones, making teamwork easy and productive. Hire the best tech experts today with Tecla. Learn more at tecla.io. That's T-E-C-L-A dot I-O.
This episode is sponsored by MailTrap, an email platform developers love. Try for free at mailtrap.io. That's M-A-I-L-T-R-A-P.io. Let's move forward then. You've got the MVP. It's working. You've done the shoestring budget. You've made the hard trade-offs. I'm curious about how you progressed it from there and matured it. You mentioned some of the steps that you took, but I think I'm interested in how you built your roadmap.
And how you went about deciding that, okay, this is the next most important thing to build or to address with the InSimple. In a lot of ways, it was our customers that guided us. So the first... Iterations of DNSimple were based largely on me as a customer. So as somebody who was a software engineer who was deploying things, I knew what I wanted from a DNS system.
But I also was heavy into the Ruby community at the time and going to a lot of events, whether it was for speaking or attending. And I would talk to pretty much every engineer that I knew or even didn't know. And I'd ask them what they were using. And then I'd ask them.
if there were things that were frustrating for them in their current provider, and then when they became D&Simple customers, they would bring ideas. So in fact, one of our earliest successes was with what we call the alias record, and that came from a customer who said, hey, wouldn't it be cool if... And that started the implementation of that particular idea. And so it was really heavily focused on what I wanted, what our customers wanted.
And then really trying to build on top of what we had. So I didn't try to expand out into a lot of different technologies or a lot of different problem spaces. I said, I want to remain focused on DNS and domains. And so if it fit within that space.
then it was fair game to work on. And that kind of just made the roadmap. I wouldn't say that we had a long-term roadmap. We also worked really short-term. So we would look at... near-term successes or near-term potential wins and do those first and then see how they would go and just keep building on that.
Okay, what about team? Tell me about how you built your team and what you look for in those people to indicate that they're the winning horses to join you. The product was launched with myself and my brother, and then neither one of us took a salary. For the first couple of years, we just worked on it as the side gig almost, if you will. Our first hire was actually through an aqua hire. We bought a company that was doing some interesting technology with.
Whois, which is a protocol that's now deprecated, but it was a way that you could find out information about who owned a domain. His product was collecting that information over time and keeping a historical record of it rather than what you normally get, which is the current time snapshot. And so he joined Dan Simple. We didn't actually end up using his product in ours, but he had a lot of knowledge in the domain space. His name is Simone Carletti, and he's actually the CTO even today.
Even though he wasn't there for the very founding part, he was really instrumental in building out some of the early, I would say intermediate steps for the technology. Then in 2014, my brother and I parted ways. He decided he wanted to go do other things. And that kind of forced me to figure out, now I don't have somebody who's going to run the infrastructure. I need to look at hiring at the infrastructure. So our next hires.
were really infrastructure folks who knew how to operate servers and knew some of the foundational parts of DNS and getting DNS systems that would run in a stable fashion. So we started hiring there and then that kind of just slowly kept growing a little by little. We hit about 11 to 12 team members, I would say back in 2015, 2016, and we stayed there for quite a while.
We got to the point where the team members, we had enough stability and the team members were interested in growing more. So they were saying, hey, we're at our capacity. Let's start adding folks on. And so just continued growing to where we are today. And today we have. 25 team members, which are a combination of independent contractors as well as full-time folks in the United States. This message is sponsored by QA Wolf.
If slow QA processes bottleneck your software engineering team and you're releasing slower because of it, you need a solution. You need QA Wolf. QA Wolf gets engineering teams to 80% automated end-to-end test coverage and helps them ship five times faster by reducing QA cycles from hours to minutes. With over 100 five-star reviews on G2 and customer testimonials from SalesLoft, Drada, AutoTrader, and many more, you're in good hands. Ready to ship faster with fewer bugs?
Join the Wolf Pack at QAWolf.com to see if they can help you squash the QA bottleneck. This message is sponsored by SnapTrade. Link end-user brokerage accounts and build world-class investing experiences with SnapTrade's unified brokerage API. With over $12 billion in connected assets and over 300,000 connected accounts, SnapTrade's API quality and developer experience are second to none. SnapTrade is SOC 2 certified and uses industry-leading security...
practices. Developers can use the company's official client SDKs to build investing experiences in minutes without the limitations of traditional aggregators. Get started for free today by visiting snaptrade.com slash codestory. Let's talk about scalability. And this will be interesting given the product you've built and the space that you're in with DN Simple.
I'm curious about how you approached scalability in the beginning, right? And you mentioned, you know, that infrastructure was a bit of a problem in the beginning. But I'm curious if there was if there was approaches that you took that made scaling easier or if they're interesting areas where you've had to fight it as you've grown. When running an authoritative DNS service, scalability is typically something that goes fairly slowly until you get attacked. And for us, that was in 2014.
We had a fairly major denial of service attack, which is interesting because we had put in technology to supposedly protect us from these types of attacks. And we got hit really with our first significant attack. That made us scared, if I will, if I could say anything else about it. The tooling that we had put in place, we had put managed hardware in place, couldn't even handle it.
So it was to the point of where we actually lost network. We got blacklisted in one of our data centers because this attack was overloading even the bandwidth available into our systems in that data center. So scalability in DNS. is a little bit of a challenge because it can be so spiky because it's not the good traffic that you're worried about. It's the bad traffic. Now, granted, as we grew as a business, we also had to scale up for the good traffic.
And what we ended up doing was we ended up designing our hardware so that we would have in each data center a similar set of hardware with two sides. So we call them the A and B side. We would... ensure that there were essentially similar setups in all of our data centers, which meant that if we found that one particular data center was getting more traffic than the other data centers consistently,
We could look for another data center in a similar region and use Anycast to reroute some of the traffic to that new data center once we installed new systems there. That was one of the approaches that we took early on was taking advantage of the design of Anycast networking systems that allowed us to scale them in a more organic fashion rather than having to...
heavily invest in a large amount of infrastructure up front, we were able to slowly step our way into more and more infrastructure. And we took that approach for everything, whether it was web systems or... systems that were managing APIs or our redirector systems. We built them so that they could scale up by adding more servers or more virtual servers as time went on and as the need increased.
So Anycast is fairly common in DNS space. Any DNS provider that has any history will most likely already be deployed to an Anycast network. We actually use the same technology inside our data centers as well for routing traffic to our web servers.
which was, I wouldn't say novel solution, but it fit very well for us because it avoided us needing to have single point of failure load balancers, which would typically be... physical load balancers or virtual load balancers, and instead we took advantage of Anycast inside of our infrastructure to allow us to load balance amongst web servers.
And that actually has worked pretty well also, which is not something you typically see. But our knowledge of Anycast allowed us to apply it also to that infrastructure. So... As you step out on the balcony, you look across all that you've built with DN Simple. What are you most proud of? The fact that the business has gotten here through healthy means.
And what I mean by that is we've never felt the need to go chase funding to try to make to the next step. We have gone slowly and steadily. We've stuck to our core mission and our core goals and our core technology. And we've done in a way that I feel like was healthy, not just for me, but for our entire team. Because I had kids at the start of DN Simple, and I was able to spend time with them as they grew up.
I'm sure there were some stressful times where especially things like those denial of service attacks and where my kids had to see me stressed out fairly heavily. But all in all, the majority of the time. I got to live the life that I wanted to live. And I think a lot of our team members had that same opportunity and still do today. And I think that's something that was by design. It was a choice made to follow a path. of slow and steady growth rather than chasing a unicorn.
Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it. And you mentioned the DDoS attack. I don't know if that was a mistake. I think you responded to it really well. But I'm curious about, you know, if you've got any stories there. At a high level, I think from a business choice, one of the mistakes that I made was waiting too long to really build a good accounting system.
for tracking all of our finances. I spent many years in the early days of the company essentially keeping spreadsheets myself. And all I would do was hire a CPA at the end of the year to do the taxes. And when I finally got a proper fractional CFO who started working with us, it really changed, I think, a lot about how the business operated. and made what was really a stable technical business also into a stable business as a whole.
And so I think one of the mistakes was taking too long to get there. I wish I would have gotten there a little bit earlier, found somebody earlier that I could have brought on board to essentially be that fractional CFO. Nowadays, I'm happy because we have somebody that's excellent.
And he helps out tremendously in helping the direction of the company. On a more, let's say, light note, recently, we were switching platforms for our transactional email system. Let's just put it this way. We had a mistake where someone... inadvertently sent out an email to all of our customers that said ASDF. That was all that was in the body of the email to every single customer.
And initially we panicked. We're like, oh my goodness, I can't believe this just went out to everybody. But in fact, we said, okay, you know what? We're going to take this calmly. We just owned up to it. We watched as the people were commenting. And what we did is we put out a post, a blog post, as well as social media around and say, hey, we made a mistake.
We sent this out and I just want to highlight some of the funny responses that we got from customers. And so we put those responses in the blog post. And we just turned into something which was an embarrassment into something was embarrassing, but it's funny at the same time, because it was just a silly thing. And I think that's a good example of taking something that was could be a negative and trying to make the most out of it when you've made a mistake.
So let's move forward then. What does the future look like for DN Simple, the product, what you offer, and for the company? So right now, we are focusing on three main areas. The first is really trying to grow our enterprise customer base. We've always been self-service first and foremost, and we see a lot of opportunities to help enterprise customers that want a vendor that's different than the...
sort of the ones that they're used to. So in our space, we have big competitors, right? We have Amazon, we have Microsoft, we have Google. They're all offering authoritative DNS products. They can't sometimes provide niche level services the way we can. And so we're trying to grow that opportunity. So that's number one.
The second item we've been looking into is trying to figure out how generative AI fits in at DNSimple. And we're an infrastructure company, so we're not gen AI from the beginning. It's not a core part of what we do. But we, as a team, we look at it and we say, there's some interesting things. So we've taken a very cautious approach and have focused first on ensuring that our customer data is kept safe, that we don't jump into something that will end up being...
problematic for the business, the team, or the customers in the future, and taking a level-headed approach to it. But we're still looking to see how it might fit, probably looking at our public information first, because we have a fairly large amount of public documentation in our support site. And it'd be really nice to make that easier to summarize and easier to search through with more of a generative AI flow to it. So that's one example of it. And we're looking into other things as well.
Generative AI is item number two. And then the third item is we're always looking to ensure that we can reduce our dependencies on any one vendor or any one system. We're in it for the long haul. We built a business that is really meant to stay and stick around for quite a while. And as such, it's easy to let a single point of failure sit there for a long time because it works.
we try to spend some time looking at those single points of failure and say, how can we add some redundancy with another vendor, with a different system, whatever it might be. So this year, that's the third pillar that we're working on. Okay, Anthony, let's switch to you. Who influences the way that you work? Name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why. I've always had trouble naming people that I look up to.
I would say that there are folks from some of the communities that I'm a member of, especially the ones around building sustainable businesses that I've always said, these are people that I think have similar ideas to how I believe a business should be run. And therefore, I'm going to look at the kinds of things that they're doing. There's a huge community of tech business builders who are bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped. And it's called the microconf community. And that community is one.
where I go to every one of their events that I can get to. I listen to the speakers because it's really tactical. I look at what a lot of them are doing and take the best parts of that and use that to help guide maybe what Dean Simple is going to do in the future.
There's also a lot of people from the technology community, especially the Ruby community that I really enjoy listening to and reading their materials that they're writing about. And so I try to keep looking at those things. And again, I...
I don't take everything and just jump on any particular bandwagon. I'm more interested in trying to take the best of it and seeing how we can apply that at D&Simple moving forward. So not really one particular person, but more communities that I'm interested in.
Last question, Anthony. So you're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it. They can't wait to show it off to the world and can't wait to show it off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?
My biggest advice is solve real problems. I think technologists or anybody in the tech space, sometimes we tend to invent problems that don't actually exist. The best success that I've ever had and the most successful companies I've seen. have solved actual problems that people have. And it makes sense if you think about it, right? You're building a business to satisfy your customers' needs and your needs. And if you have a product or a service that isn't really needed,
you're not going to have much of a business. So the key thing is make sure that you're talking to customers, make sure that you're out there in the world, make sure that you're listening to what's going on and focus on actual problems. And not what you think is the perceived problem, but learn how to ask the right questions to get the real problems that people are having. And then focus in. Work on solving a specific problem.
niche problem that you can essentially get to that maybe a larger company is not going to be able to do right now and then grow from there. I think it's healthier. than trying to solve the greatest problems that are really broad. There are some that it would be great to solve, but I think that most of us are not built to solve those types of problems. I think that's fantastic advice. Well, Anthony.
Thank you for being on the show today. And thank you for telling the creation story of DN Simple. Thanks for having me on, Noah. I appreciate it. And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Laphart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting app of your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously. And thanks again for listening.
According to Vanta's latest state of trust report, it's the number one concern for UK businesses. That's where Vanta comes in. Whether you're a startup, growing fast or already established, Vanta can help you get ISO 27001 certified and more without the headaches. Invanta allows your company to centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up to five times faster, and proactively manage vendor risk to help your team not only get compliant, but stay compliant.
Stop stressing over cybersecurity and start focusing on growing your business. For a limited time, our audience gets $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com slash go. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash go for $1,000 off. Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure.