Domains For The Masses

Today in Tedium: For obvious reasons, we’ve been discussing the work of web hosts lately. We kind of can’t get away from it. They’re essential to the way many people present themselves on the internet, and the best ones give us the platform … and get out of the way. But there was a time when hosting a website wasn’t trivial, and felt like a black box to the average person. Tools like, yes, WordPress helped us figure out that it wasn’t so scary, but we also needed web hosts that didn’t treat regular people like tech neophytes. Eventually, that web host appeared—and you’ve probably seen its Super Bowl ads. Today’s Tedium talks to Bob Parsons, the founder of GoDaddy, a company that probably did more than any other to reshape web hosting for the average person. Here’s how he did it. — Ernie @ Tedium

Bob Parsons, repping his modern-day company, Parsons Xtreme Golf (PXG), which specializes in customized golf equipment. (via Bob Parsons’ website)

Bob Parsons does not have the life story of a traditional tech billionaire. He has something way messier.

Look, I am not here to tell you that GoDaddy is the most beloved company in the world. It has its haters, in part because of its non-technical aim, and in part because of its once-edgy image (which we’ll get to). It is not, like, a cool developer-centric platform like DigitalOcean, Netlify, or Vercel. The developer bros of the world probably don’t take notes about the GoDaddy business model—not when the shiny metal object of generative AI has their attention.

(In case you’re wondering: Parsons is not a fan of the AI stuff. He used a profanity or two to describe it.)

But the fact is, it has held on better than nearly any company of its stripe, in part because of its broad market aim.

For better or worse, mostly better, it is the web hosting platform of the everyman, the place for people who need websites, but don’t want to think about whether they’re using Node.js, Python, or PHP to build that website. They just want to buy a domain and start a website.

And I think a big part of the reason it evolved this way was because of its founder, Bob Parsons. Talking to him over Zoom, I didn’t get the impression that he carried himself like a traditional tech CEO. He coasted through grade school, barely graduating, and when he finally made it to college, he was essentially handed a major because he had no idea where to start. His end goal was clearly not tech entrepreneurship, even if that’s where it led. During the call, he implied he stumbled into the lucky breaks that ultimately made him a billionaire.

One example was how his college experience, on a GI Bill scholarship, began at the registrar’s office. He went in after seeing an ad that said the option was available to him and did not consider old grades. He had been working in a steel mill at the time, and found out the opportunity was available to him.

“I didn’t even know what a major was—and nobody in my family ever went to college,” he recalled. “And so, eventually, they gave me this book of majors, where I could pick.”

The very first major in the book? Accounting. And so that’s what the person at the registrar’s office suggested. Good at math? Reasonably, he said. Like business? Sure, he replied.

Fire in the Hole, Bob Parsons’ new book, which only partly talks about tech.

“And then so he goes. ‘Well, you might want to take accounting,’” Parsons recalled. “So, I mean, that was the thought that went into it.”

(As we’ll get into later, that knowledge of accounting turned out to be his inroad into tech.)

But he’ll be the first to tell you that there’s some genuine trauma in his backstory, and that trauma has informed his life in complex ways. As highlighted by the title of his book, Fire in the Hole, he has a traditional military background, joining the Marines in the midst of the Vietnam War. He signed up, not the other way around.

But he did not get out unscathed. His time in combat was ended by a tripwire that triggered an explosion on the trail his squad was walking through. Had the explosion been under him, it likely would have killed him instantly. But it was just far enough away that he was seriously injured—though, given that he walked away with all his limbs, certainly less scathed than he could have been. (There’s that luck coming into play again, per Parsons: “The way I got wounded? I was jackpot lucky.”) And that effectively closed the door on his time in combat.

When he returned home, as a vet injured in combat, he was just 19. The emotional scars of his experience were just as messy as the physical ones. And arguably they lasted longer. From the book:

My experience coming home from Vietnam was hard—much harder than I’d expected. Because early on I had given myself up for dead, I could hardly believe I was actually going home. That was my gut reaction when I found out I was headed stateside.

For significant portions of his life, Parsons has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an issue serious enough to ruin marriages, one that Parsons often had to compartmentalize to make it through. It’s an issue he talks about at length in the book—and he makes it clear that just because he’s a successful guy now doesn’t mean he doesn’t carry that past trauma with him.

To be clear, Parsons grew up in a different era, at a different time of life, and before the rise of technology that ultimately connected the dots between his early life and later career.

And it turned out the decision to become an accounting major was what made it all work.

For much of her racing career, Danica Patrick repped the extremely bold visual style embraced by GoDaddy’s longtime since-retired logo. The mascot, by the way, is a visual representation of Parsons in the late ’90s. (John Steadman/Flickr)

The secret to Bob Parsons’ success: Cheap prices and in-your-face advertising

If there are two lessons to be taken from the life of Bob Parsons, best known for democratizing access to the domain, the first is this: As difficult to manage as PTSD can be, you can have a successful life—even a successful business career—while navigating it.

The second: The bigger the ad, the better.

This was a lesson you probably can grasp from GoDaddy’s 2000s-era Super Bowl ads, which leaned hard on edginess and sex appeal. They were very much responsible for turning his second company into a household name.

But it was a lesson he actually learned from his first company, Parsons Technology. You probably don’t know about Parsons, which built accounting software in the 1980s and early 1990s before being acquired by Intuit in 1994. (See, I told you the major came in handy!)

It was bigger than you remember, active during a time when the way to get attention from the computer-buying public was to advertise in magazines.

An ad for MoneyCounts, Bob Parsons’ first software application.

And yes, you could find ads for Parsons’ MoneyCounts in magazines of the era. While Parsons didn’t trade in shareware, he leaned on the consumer-friendly end of software sales, pricing his application reasonably and skipping out on the copy-protection schemes popular during the era.

At first, the ads were minuscule, and the software much more expensive, but by 1987, the company was getting more ambitious and running ads at larger sizes. The reason for this, recalled Parsons, was a success story with a small, mostly forgotten computer circular—an old rag, really—called Computer Bargain Line.

“They called me, and they said, ‘We had the outside front cover,’” he recalled. “That's like being on the cover of Time or something like this.”

He had already spent through his ad budget/nest egg, but was offered a discount. What was traditionally a $17,000 ad was being offered to him for $5,000.

“I didn't have any money then, but I just thought, you know, if anything's going to work, this will work,” he said. “And I took my software and dropped the price down to $12.”

A screenshot of MoneyCounts. It’s available for download online, in case you want to run your books like it’s 1989.

It worked, and by the end of 1987, he was able to quit his day job and sell accounting software full-time. (Three cheers for old computer rags.)

“I was on the front page of the Computer Bargain Line, baby,” he said.

When talking to him, I was struck by how neatly this lesson translated to his ads for GoDaddy two decades later. Despite the companies being sharply different in market and audience, his go-big-or-go-home philosophy felt like DNA passed down to GoDaddy’s advertising strategy, best exemplified by Super Bowl ads that were way edgier than the other advertisers.

The first one, airing in 2005, set out the template—a format heavy on sex appeal. This was a period where Paris Hilton notably washed a car in a skimpy bathing suit while trying to eat a Carl’s Jr. burger. GoDaddy’s approach, while not using a celebrity, was similar.

When trying to determine his approach to the Super Bowl, Parsons tried to put himself in the shoes of the audience.

“I'm thinking that most of them are at a Super Bowl party, they're talking and carrying on,” he recalled. “It's a social event, you know a lot of alcohol. How do I get their attention?”

He saw his moment of inspiration in a Mike’s Hard Lime ad. And like the Paris Hilton ad, it’s a highly sexualized talker. In the ad, a man with an incredibly long tongue licks the last drop out of his bottle. The camera pans to a trio of young women watching him in awe. One says, “I’d like one of those.”

“It came to me like God sent it to me,” Parsons recalled.

Parsons hired the agency that created it, The Ad Store, which then set him up with an equally provocative ad for the 2005 Super Bowl. The commercial, featuring a buxom model, a faux-Congressional hearing, and a broken spaghetti strap, was designed to upset the censors during the Super Bowl. And it ended up generating headlines well beyond what the company paid for, in part because the company actually bought two ads that year, one of which was banned.

In a CNN.com piece from the era reflective of the free media GoDaddy got that year, marketing expert Bernice Kanner said the strategy ultimately put the company on a lot of radars. "I have no idea what GoDaddy.com is," she said, adding that it likely drove massive website views. (Strange to keep in mind, but people at one point did not understand that web hosting was something you could buy.)

The strategy was so effective that other companies have come to emulate it—and some might argue the modern-day creator economy thrives on this dynamic.

“In college advertising, introduction to advertising, our first Super Bowl ad is taught in those classes,” Parsons said, proudly.

These ads were divisive, but the strategy continued. In one infamous example, the commercial showed a model making out with a nerd in an extremely up-close explicit way, with spokesperson Danica Patrick doing the intro.

The strategy worked for a while, as proven by the fact that you know the company’s name. But eventually, the company quit the provocative approach, acquiescing to parents who disliked the raunchy ads. GoDaddy, more recently, has stopped appearing in the Super Bowl altogether.

It feels like something companies couldn’t get away with today, given the culture wars we have long seen. Certainly in recent years, GoDaddy’s advertising hasn’t been so in-your-face. But it did what it set out to do—launch GoDaddy into the stratosphere.

Say what you will about it—Parsons made it clear that he has no regrets about the ad strategy. But it moved the website hosting and domain business out of the stuffy, enterprise-minded approach that ignored the fact that the internet was for everyone. Flower shops need website hosting, too.

And regular people need accounting software. The mixture of low prices and bold advertising is the thread that brought together Parsons’ two tech calling cards. Given the results, it’s hard to disagree with the strategy.