Dear Blog Sceptic;

You raise some great points and they haven't gone unnoticed over here. I wanted to respond with something sooner, but last week was nuts and I'm just digging out now...

To recap, you recommend that we;

1. Ditch the reseller route. 
2. Launch a branded hosting service* that competes head-on with Typepad, offering more features at a slightly lower cost. Leverage your robust scalability. MT's home-brew Perl implementation is probably hurting them right now.
3. Offer Blogware to institutions at a reasonable price that undercuts MT 3.0 significantly. Every company has an intranet. Run it on Blogware.
4. Add friends/ communities for user lock-in through social means. 
5. Promote it! Why on earth was there no announcement on Boingboing when Blogware was launched? You need a marketing guy. Hire somebody like Jason Kottke to spread the word online. Or Cory Doctorow. Actually Doctorow would be ideal because he travels a lot and has a high profile.
6. Hire some professional designers. Add some curves, some shading, some oomph. Right now it looks like a bunch of geeks cooked something up. This will make a BIG difference in standing out.

Let me peg these off in semi-reverse order...

6. Designers. Tucows has always needed some of that oomph. Point well taken. We will improve as time passes. I would say that we are more interested in function than form right now. Not to the point of creating an insuffereable user experience but rather that the function of the application needs to be driven by useful features and not pretty widgets. Pretty widgets can be built over time as we iterate on the UI. You think this looks like it was designed by a bunch of geeks? Boy do I wish that I had screen caps of our first alpha ;)

4. Social networking stuff. We recently implemented the start of this. Its not fully baked, nor am I happy with it fully yet. But the start is there. Now it just needs some care, feeding and weeding to make it really sing. You can sign up and check it out at http://www.blogware.com/users I'd love to get your feedback and suggestions for improvements.

5/3/2/1. Ditch the resellers/launch a hosted version/offer to specific verticals/promote it...

Never gonna happen.

Here's why: Internet services providers represent the most powerful distribution channel on the internet. No single company can compete with the marketing muscle of 30,000 ISPs** who sit right in front of end-users and assist them in making critical technology choices and guide them as they dive into the internet - usually for the first time. No other channel can put you in front of individuals and the Fortune 500 simultaneously and no channel can better address the fickle needs of their local markets in a more appropriate fashion.

To get a better sense of this, take a look at our track record with domain names. In 1997, we were (according to the most liberal definitions) #85 in the domain name registration market. Today we are solidly #2 and we've been there for a couple of years. How did we get here? We dealt exclusively with internet services providers to the exclusion of all other market opportunities and we nailed their service requirements. By choosing and sticking to our distribution model very early in the game (some would argue that it chose us) we were able to focus on very specific attributes of our products and processes and build some truly excellent structures around everything. In other words, because we weren't trying to be all things to all customers, we were able to do some very amazing things with some very specific customer segments. And they responded in spades.

Our resellers kick serious ass in the market place. This because the Tucows way of doing things gives them  the luxury of being able to focus on very specific and important things. Think of every other blogging company out there. They each have to a) be technical experts, b) be sales experts and c) be marketing experts just to ship one unit to a customer. Now take a look at the symbiotic nature of the relationship between Tucows and its direct customers. Our resellers have to be sales & marketing experts and develop strong customer service skills and Tucows has to focus on maintaining world-class technical services. Who would you bet on, the jack-of-all-trades or the team of specialists?

The downside to this approach is that it lacks the glitz and glam that retail oriented services employ. You will never see a full out PR blitz from Tucows and Blogware will never be a household name.  All wasted money. Remember, we're not the marketing brains in this relationship. We're the technical muscle.

Does that mean that our resellers are idly sitting by doing nothing? Nope. Right now, they are working on developing the right messages to direct at very specific markets - some are doing the institutional angle, some are going after telecommunications firms, others are targetting specific home-user verticals and others still looking to make quick wins at the expense of those with existing market share... And what I've seen so far looks great. Think of this as true "end-to-end marketing" Marketing at the edges. Clue-train compatible distribution. Teamwork. Focus. Whatever you call it, it works.

For us, this isn't a question of strategy. We're fully committed to our wholesale distribution model and we're fully committed to the blogging market. More importantly, Tucows is fully committed to winning in this market and we are doing what we need to do to make it happen. Heads-down, block-and-tackle, stick-on-the-ice, wholly tactical execution. Execution of our plan to give our resellers what they need to continue to kick ass in their chosen commercial pursuits. When they win, we've won.

*Blogware is a hosted application, not a standalone tool. "Branded", well that's another matter entirely. We chose the name "Blogware" because it is the most generic expression that could be used to describe "weblog management tool". Is that our brand? Nah. It's just a convenient label we use to refer to the product. The first thing our resellers do is rip this tag off and replace it with their own....

**(For the sake of this entry, ISPs should be read as "ISPs/Web hosting companies". I use the term "internet services providers" in its truest sense - those companies that provide internet services...)