A Little Recognition

I got an email tonight from a good friend who lives in New York. She said:

I’ve been meaning to write to you because I wanted to tell you about my experience at a tech conference in NYC a couple of weeks ago. This one was targeted to financial firms, but as you know there are always companies that specialize in email archiving, monitoring, etc. One of the companies specifically talked about email hosting. Of course being the expert that I think I am, from learning from you, I spoke with them and eventually asked them about your company. And they knew exactly what company I was talking about. They consider you a direct competitor. Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was so impressed to hear that you’re really a major force in the market (not that I ever doubted it). I don’t know why I find this so exciting, but it was just so cool to really experience what you’ve been doing out in the actual field.

It doesn’t surprise me either—anyone who does a lick of market research knows we exist. But at the end of the day, it feels good to be recognized in the market and even better to have friends who care enough to take the time to understand what we do and connect the dots like this out in the real world (being an entrepreneur and the CEO of a technology company that isn’t Google, Yahoo or some really big consumer brand name, it’s interesting to me how hard it is to get people to understand what it is we really do—and hell, we’re an “email company” and everyone gets email, right? I can’t imagine trying to explain to normal people what we did if we were a wiki company or a blogging business or a web analytics firm).

Thanks Kern, I appreciate your support. ;-)