Meet Michael Goldstein

michael photo Hi, I am Michael Goldstein, the new VP of Marketing at Tucows. This is actually an exciting return to Tucows for me. I was here 10 years ago, first promoting the software collection, then launching OpenSRS. I left soon after we hit 2 million domains under management. (I gave away two cows at ISPCon in San Jose to celebrate the occasion.) I since spent a few years on the retail side of domain names and Web hosting at Register.com and then several years at ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, managing campaigns for TD Ameritrade, Doubleclick, GlaxoSmithKline and Kraft Foods. From Web hosting to breakfast cereal and back again.

My goal here now is to do a lot of what I think we did quite well 10 years ago. I want to inspire and foster conversations. I want to learn from you about how we can improve our services. I want to offer you thoughts, observations, customer insights, data, tactics, anything I can to help you grow your businesses. (I’ll be spending part of my time experimenting with our Hover business, largely in hopes of sharing any successes.) I would even love to get you swapping more ideas among yourselves. Of course, I also want to get us some more resellers. Toward that end, I figure I need to do all the above really well and then inspire and foster conversations between you and our prospects.

I am really happy to back. (I suppose I should mention that I have also crossed a border, from New York to Toronto, to come here. It’s a big career move and a big life change, for me and my family.) My email address is mgoldstein@tucows.com. Please email me anytime with thoughts about your businesses, OpenSRS, marketing, the good old days, the future, New York, Toronto, breakfast cereal or anything else on your mind.

http://somaegroup.ca erich nolan bertussi davies

I strongly recommend tossing anything that was learned @ Ogilvy & Mather, there are reasons dinosaurs like them are having record losses.

none the less I am extremely curious to hear of any details of what, if you would counter were indeed valuable Marketing insights from the Dinos?…

cheers

enbd…//
Michael Goldstein

Ha! I appreciate the advice. I can’t disagree. Although we actually had groups within Ogilvy that did solid, hard-working stuff like search, site optimization, direct response (DM, email, even TV) and CRM. Those groups were still having some success and they were growing. But their growth was completely swallowed up by the losses of the big old ad campaign part of the business. As for the big old ad campaign part, I’ll say this. I think we were good at thinking about a brand, an audience and a category and coming up with some real, salient, differentiating messages. In execution, the messages just came out too often like we were talking to ourselves. And spending irresponsible amounts of money doing it! That’s actually why I highlighted “conversations” in my post. And why I came here. I don’t want to broadcast to customers any more. I want to talk to them.
http://vppm.shopco.com/ Pradeep

Hi Michael,

I just have few concerns/requests hope you will address it.

I signed up with opensrs recently, was excited to be with tucows but honestly a little bit disappointed. there’s a few reasons:

1) I feel that the set up interface is not that easy to use.
2) The price, the wholesale price is really high.

I am a go daddy reseller for a while now. and the price I sell is lower than the price you offer us.

but go daddy’s high reseller fee is too much. that’s why i was looking for a trust-able alternative.

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Happy Holidays…
Michael Goldstein

Hi Pradeep. Man, when I said I wanted conversations, I meant mostly flattery and best wishes and stuff like that Seriously, though, you raise a couple of hot items.

- The setup interface. This is a priority for us. We watch how long it takes resellers to get up and running and we talk to resellers about the issues. We intend to make this friendlier in 2010. We’re going to do it with upgrades to the interface itself. And we’re going to do it with more, better communications to guide you through the whole process – emails, documentation on the site, Webinars, etc. Meanwhile, we do have people here who can help. If you have specific questions, always please let us know.

- Price. First, I think it’s really important when you’re comparing price to look at the WHOLE picture, from signup fees to whois privacy to prices across TLDs. We start to look a lot better that way! Also, you really have to consider how important it is to you to work with a pure wholesale partner. In other words, what is it worth to be sure you’re acquiring customers that won’t ultimately transfer to your partner (for domains and more)? Pure wholesale actually costs a bit more because we’re never going to take the opportunity to acquire or upsell your customers. Finally, we do have tiered pricing that kicks in as your volume increases. We’ve always just sort of surprised and delighted resellers with that but we’re thinking we probably need to reveal it upfront (so folks like you coming in can build it into your calculations).

So, not quite a solution or an apology. But an assurance that we hear you and we’re thinking about the same stuff you are.
http://domainsmatter.com Galganov

The service is incredibly poor. I’ve been talked down to and, when asking for a support supervisor, hung up on by [redacted]. Now I’m trying to see if Tucows likes my business or if they want me to leave
Ken Schafer

Hi Galganov,

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with OpenSRS Support. If you like, you can send me details (a ticket number would be particularly helpful if you know it) and I can look into it for you. ken (at) opensrs (dot) com.

Meet Michael Goldstein

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