Interview with Ted O’Neill, CEO of InfoPop

It was started in 1996, more or less as a hobby. I had created a freeware program called the Ultimate Bulletin Board. At the time, I had no intention of making a business out of it. I was working a day job, and after two years or so the program had continued to grow to the degree that I couldn’t support it. By that time we had hundreds of thousands of users in my free time. The only way I can make life easier for myself is to start charging for this program. I was thinking that people wouldn’t want to buy it, and would let me have my free time back and I could focus on my day job. Just the opposite happened. People started buying it, and I had even more pressure to the make the product better than it was.

It forced me to make a decision about whether I was going to turn this into a real business or not.

We actually went straight from freeware to a downloadable product that customers had to purchase. We didn’t have a gradual transition with us supporting the freeware to the program that had to be purchased. It was strictly a matter of necessity to begin charging for the products, simply because I didn’t have the time to continue supporting the freeware.

We have really transitioned from downloadable products to hosted services. A couple of years ago we launched a hosting service called OpenTopic, and we launched full service web hosting about a year and a half ago.

OpenTopic is a service where we host the bulletin boards for a site on our servers. We were experiencing issues with support. The downloadable product required that we support not only the product itself, but also the installation process. You are dealing with hundreds of different configurations and no control of the hardware, so the software can be perfectly fine, but the user can still be experiencing issues. It was difficult to assist web owners with issues that were out of our control, and so we transitioned to a hosted service where we control the process.

Our service is much more comprehensive than general web hosting. It includes services such as the bulletin board service UBBx. UBBx was the next generation of OpenTopic, designed more for a traditional web-hosting environment. OpenTopic was more of an Application Service Provider (ASP), which is nothing but a message board. Customers were paying for uptime for that application. With InfoPop web hosting we launched UBBx as part of the overall service. It was a unique hybrid between traditional web hosting and ASP type services. We provide full service web host hosting as well as enterprise level UBBx application as well.

Eve, which we recently launched takes the system well past being a simple message board and turning it into a whole community platform. One issue we have faced with our customers is that they enjoy the message board product, but they also want to be able to do many more things with it. All of our customers have web communities and want to include chat, email, member management services, etc. In our opinion it is all about connecting people and all of our products focus on that goal. Eve represents market research that we have been collecting for the last six years and what our customers are looking for.

That has definitely been the most difficult part of the business. We have a hybrid of a couple different services. We have to compete against web hosts, which is a commodity-based business. People are looking for the most amount of web space for the least amount of money. It is tough for us to compete on that level, because our applications are fairly robust and require high quality equipment.

Most of our customers come to us from the community background. We don’t get a lot of customers who are simply looking for a web hosting solution. All of our traffic is generated by word or mouth, and by individuals seeing our software on other websites. Also, due to this, we have no advertising budget, and have never advertised. Every customer we have, has come through word of mouth. It has been an amazing model, in that it keeps our costs down.

Excellent support, and continued innovation in the product. We have to keep pushing what we provide to our customers. You have to keep focused of providing new services, new products, new benefits, and new capabilities. Eve represents a whole new level for us, because it integrates message boards, chat, member management, and a way to monetise their community.

The largest factor is our huge base of customers. We have been at this for a very long time and we receive a great degree of feedback from these customers, which allows us to focus on their needs. They tell us exactly what they need, and how we can provide it.

Time, more than anything else. Money was never a big issue, because it was totally an improvised self-funded effort from the start. We have never have any outside investment and have been profitable from when we initially founded the company. We wanted to stay true to the vision we had of the company, which we may not have been able to do if we had received venture funding.

It is a struggle day in and day out. We don’t have the huge bankroll to count on and have to ensure that we are making the right decisions. We can’t afford to make a number of bad decisions, because ultimately that impacts our bottom line. We need profits in order to succeed.