Ivan Messina, founder of SupportHost

I'm Ivan Messina, 41, Italian. I haven't lived in Italy for more than 15 years. I travel all year round, alternating intense periods of work with intense periods of travel. Last year, for example, I crossed Tajikistan by 4x4, including a stretch into Afghanistan.

In December 2010 I founded SupportHost, a web hosting and domain registration company serving the European market. It's been almost 16 years now. Over that time we've completed 13 acquisitions, the whole team works remotely, and we're a directly accredited registrar with NIC.it, EURid and SWITCH. These days I'm also building Billanz, our own billing platform.

Fifteen years ago, when I started, I was still living in Italy, and the hosting landscape there was honestly terrible. Even the "best" providers were bad: slow support, people who simply didn't answer you, poorly made websites, low-quality services. I was frustrated as a customer, so I decided to build the hosting company I would have wanted to buy from. The name says it all: support comes first.

“I decided to build the hosting company I would have wanted to buy from.”

Because we're better at support. There's a personal touch, and we put our own faces on it. Obviously we work hard, but that's the baseline; without it there would be nothing to talk about.

Nobody chooses a host because the servers are fast. That said, our servers are fast and always online, without problems. If you write to us, we answer quickly, 24/7. And we treat customers like friends. We give advice, often against our own interest.

“Nobody chooses a host because the servers are fast.”

These numbers are public on our website, so I'm happy to share them. We're close to 8,500 customers (around 8,400 right now), revenue this year will be around €1.2M, and the team is about 14 people. We launched in December 2010.

I'll be honest: this is the one question I'm not going to fully answer. I share a lot publicly, on social media and in interviews like this one, but only what I can afford to share. If a marketing channel works better than the others, that's exactly the kind of thing I keep to myself. Fifteen years in a competitive market teaches you that.

What I can say is that nothing replaced the basics. Good support creates happy customers, and happy customers talk. The rest stays in the drawer.

“Good support creates happy customers, and happy customers talk. The rest stays in the drawer.”

Honestly, there are problems every single day. An angry customer can make you doubt whether you're really doing a good job, even when you know you are. Then something breaks that you never saw coming, and suddenly you feel like an impostor, even after fifteen years.

My biggest failed experiments were side products. Over the years I tried launching extras on top of hosting: an autoresponder, an analytics tool, a few other add-ons. None of them ever took off. That was simply time lost, with nothing to show for it. The lesson for me was to stay focused on what customers actually come to us for.

“Stay focused on what customers actually come to us for.”

Did I ever come close to giving up on hosting? No, never.

For me it's already been worth it. I do things I enjoy. As soon as something becomes repetitive, I find someone to take care of it and move on to something new. That's how it went with customer support and with the content on our website. Today the company is almost entirely automated. Not completely, because I don't think anyone can fully disappear from their own business, but I run a company with over €1M in revenue in about 20 minutes a day.

Where do I want to be in 1-3 years? Honestly, where I am now. I set goals for myself in 2020, raised them in 2023 because I was already hitting them, and I've reached all of them. I could stop working tomorrow if I wanted to. I won't, because right now I'm building Billanz, a new billing system that I really enjoy working on, and I want to finish it. But if I work, it's because I like it. I'm not chasing funding or an exit. I'm already where I wanted to be, and I'm very happy about it.

“I'm not chasing funding or an exit. I'm already where I wanted to be.”

Like most people, I think. Friends first, then friends of friends, then people who were recommended by someone who was already happy with us. No clever launch, no growth hack. Just personal contacts and word of mouth, one customer at a time.

A mix of everything: SEO, content, social media, email to our existing customers, the usual channels. As I said, which one does the heavy lifting stays with me. The one thing I can tell you is that the best marketing we have is still a customer who recommends us to someone else.

I'll keep the same line here. But if I have to pick one thing that has consistently paid off over fifteen years, it's this: we sometimes tell customers to buy less. Many times we've recommended a cheaper plan to someone who was about to buy more than they needed. You lose a bit of revenue that day, but that customer stays for years and sends you their friends.

“We sometimes tell customers to buy less.”

Until very recently it was the classic hosting stack: WHMCS for billing and cPanel for hosting. We've now replaced WHMCS with Billanz, our own billing platform. After fifteen years of fighting with WHMCS, it was simply time to get rid of it and build something that works the way we want.

I used AI as a coding assistant to build Billanz, and I use it regularly as a thinking partner: weighing options, finding points of view I hadn't considered, stress-testing ideas. It's extremely good at that. The decision is still mine, but I make it with much more information in hand. This interview is an example: I answered out loud in Italian and AI wrote it up in English.

“The decision is still mine, but I make it with much more information in hand.”

I'll leave the general advice to others, but I can tell you what I'd do differently. My only regret, and I say "regret" very loosely, is what happened once the business started paying well, around twice what my friends were earning. Instead of investing more time and resources into growing and automating the company, I basically stopped pushing and enjoyed life for seven or eight years, maybe more. I climbed and travelled all over the world and worked less than 20 minutes a day. Not like today, where the business is automated and runs well. Back then I just didn't feel like doing anything.

That slowed our growth a lot, and I probably wasted some of SupportHost's potential. Fifteen years ago everything was easier: you published an article and Google found you, you wrote something and people bought. Today there's far more competition. If I'd pushed back then, ideally with what I know now, the result would be very different. Of course that's easy to say in hindsight, and impossible to do.

“Fifteen years ago everything was easier: you published an article and Google found you.”

This is my favourite question. The books that helped me most:

• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, Work the System by Sam Carpenter and Built to Sell by John Warrillow. All three are excellent, though a bit light on the practical side. That part you have to figure out yourself, by banging your head against it.
• Systemology by David Jenyns. The most practical of all for systemising a business. Some things are missing in my opinion, but it's the one I'd start with.
• Rich Dad Poor Dad and Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki.
• MJ DeMarco's first two books, The Millionaire Fastlane and Unscripted. Each one better than the other.