E188: Billion-dollar lessons for your digital agency with Ben Gabler

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Ben Gabler is the CEO & Founder of Rocket.net.

He has spent the majority of his career building and managing various hosting companies/platforms including HostNine, HostGator, GoDaddy, UK2Group, IX Web Hosting, and StackPath.

He was employee #10 at HostGator.com and helped build a foundation that would ultimately scale to a $100mm business.

He sold his first company in 2010 for 7 figures.

Episode highlights:

• How Ben went from delivering pizza to starting a hosting company.
• How Ben got excellent customer insight with the assistance of an old friend.
• What happens when call centers have quotas and are a major source of revenue.
• How to balance listening to customers with what you need to do.
• Lessons learned from big-business experience.
• Best advice: If your product’s perfect, you waited too long.
• Habit that contributes to success: Love for technology.
• Recommended tools: Slack and CNBC
• Recommended book: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, Be Obsessed Or Be Average by Grant Cardone
• Run time: 33:49

Links:

• Rocket.net
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Slack 
• CNBC
• Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
• Be Obsessed Or Be Average by Grant Cardone

Quotes:

• “I would spend hours in the call center.”
• “I don’t know how to fix something if I don’t know the true pain points.”
• “I think that was part of the struggle.”
• “It sounds so simple—just go listen to your customers.”
• “ They didn’t know that a car was possible.”
• “You gotta listen to the customers.”
• “Growing pains exist because they’ve never had to deal with it before.”
• “It boils down to the people and the structure.”

Takeaways:

• Balance listening to customers with your company mission.
• Strive for an enjoyable experience for both customers and employees.