How Anthony Eden Built DNSimple to $7 Million a Year With a 19-Person Team

In this week’s episode of the Niche Pursuits podcast, Anthony Eden and I discuss how he turned frustration with DNS tools into DNSimple, a bootstrapped company generating around $7 million in annual revenue. We cover his software engineering background, early customer growth through public speaking, and why he initially kept DNSimple part-time.

Anthony also shares how he grew DNSimple to more than 19,000 customers with a 19-person team, why he never raised outside funding, and how AI is changing software development and customer acquisition. Listeners will hear lessons on sustainable growth, founder compensation, customer-driven product decisions, declining search traffic, and long-term business building.

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Building a Business From a Problem He Already Knew

Anthony had been a software engineer since the late 1990s, and domain names kept appearing throughout his career. Early on, he worked for Signature Domains, one of the first seven companies approved to sell .com domains after Network Solutions lost its exclusive position.

He later worked on the .mp top-level domain for the Northern Mariana Islands. That project began under unusual circumstances after the original developer encrypted the software, kept the key, and forced Anthony to rebuild the system from the ground up.

By 2010, Anthony was working on another version of the .mp project and thinking about what he might do next. At the same time, he was using another company’s domain registration and DNS tools and found the experience frustrating.

The problem was specific. Anthony wanted software that gave developers a clean interface, reliable DNS service, and the ability to manage domains through tools they already preferred. Existing options often came with:

• Cluttered management interfaces
• Frequent attempts to sell additional services
• DNS services provided free with little assurance around service quality
• No convenient command-line workflow
• Few useful APIs for developers
• Systems built around older assumptions about how customers managed infrastructure

Anthony already knew the industry well enough to see the gap. More importantly, he possessed the technical experience required to build an alternative.

That combination led to DNSimple. He wrote the first code on April 1, 2010, then spent about three months turning the initial idea into a public release. The first product focused on removing friction instead of trying to serve every possible customer.

Finding Early Customers Through Existing Communities

DNSimple didn't begin with a large advertising campaign. Anthony already participated in software communities through open-source development, conferences, and social media.

For years, he had written open-source software and submitted talks to conferences focused on languages such as Ruby and Java. That gave him access to groups of developers who experienced many of the same frustrations he was trying to solve.

One particularly simple marketing tactic involved conference lightning talks. Anthony could stand up for five minutes and show how someone could register a domain from the command line.

That was enough to introduce DNSimple to exactly the type of customer he wanted. His early marketing also included:

• Posting regularly about what he was building
• Sharing useful technical information
• Asking his Twitter audience direct questions
• Surveying developers about frustrations with registrars
• Using customer feedback to decide which features deserved attention
• Staying visible within communities where potential customers already spent time

Some surveys attracted roughly 100 to 150 responses. For a young company evaluating what to build next, that gave Anthony direct signals from people who could become customers.

The approach worked because the company and Anthony’s public presence were closely connected. He wasn't joining a community just to promote a product. He had already been contributing software, ideas, talks, and technical knowledge for years.

Growing Revenue While Keeping DNSimple on the Side

Anthony didn't leave his job immediately after DNSimple launched. For roughly the first three years, he continued working full time while building the company on the side.

One of those employers was LivingSocial, which was growing quickly during the daily-deals era. Anthony negotiated an exclusion in his employment agreement that kept DNSimple separate, allowing him to continue developing the company outside his primary job.

The financial progression gave him a clear basis for deciding when to leave employment. Anthony recalls revenue growing approximately like this:

• First year: Around $80,000
• Second year: More than $200,000
• Third year: Roughly $550,000 before reaching higher levels soon afterward
• Around the third or fourth year: More than $1 million in annual revenue

He had also hired two people before taking his own salary from DNSimple. Anthony’s decision was tied to his family and the kind of life he wanted. He and his wife valued the ability to relocate periodically, so replacing enough income to support that lifestyle mattered more than leaving his job as early as possible.

Once DNSimple generated enough revenue to give him confidence the family would remain financially secure, he left LivingSocial and began working full time on the company.

Changing His View of Founder Compensation

Reaching the point where DNSimple could pay Anthony didn't immediately resolve every financial question. He set his first salary and left it unchanged for several years.

Meanwhile, his children were getting older, and household expenses were increasing. Anthony described reaching a point where everyday issues, including an unreliable car that leaked badly in the rain, made it clear something needed to change.

The interesting part was that DNSimple itself was profitable. The company had enough cash flow. Anthony simply wasn't paying himself in proportion to the value of his work.

A conversation with a friend helped change his thinking. The friend pointed out that a business needed to support the founder’s life as well as its customers and employees.

Increasing his own compensation had another consequence. It reduced personal financial pressure and gave him more mental space to focus on the company. That eventually helped Anthony:

• Delegate more responsibility
• Hire people who could take ownership of important work
• Spend less time carrying every operational task personally
• Direct more attention toward the company as a business
• Separate healthy frugality from habits that could limit future growth

The lesson wasn't that founders should pull as much cash as possible from a company. Anthony’s experience showed that extreme restraint can create its own problems when the business already has healthy economics.

Scaling Without Chasing Venture-Backed Growth

DNSimple grew quickly during its early years, yet Anthony never designed it to become a venture-backed company chasing the largest possible valuation.

He never raised outside capital. From the beginning, he wanted a company that could support his family, give him geographic flexibility, and create a sustainable working environment. That goal influenced decisions about hiring, communication, and company structure.

DNSimple became a fully remote business. The team also preferred written communication over filling calendars with meetings. That philosophy affected several parts of the company:

• Growth didn't need to happen at any cost
• Profitability mattered
• Remote work was part of the company’s structure
• Written communication reduced dependence on meetings
• The company could remain relatively small while serving thousands of customers
• Lifestyle goals played a role in business design

Anthony isn't opposed to venture capital. He sees situations where outside funding makes sense. DNSimple simply wasn't one of them.

Creating Growth by Taking a Clear Position

One of DNSimple’s most notable early growth periods came when Anthony responded to controversies surrounding GoDaddy.

At the time, GoDaddy faced criticism for advertising that many in Anthony’s audience considered sexist. Its CEO was also photographed killing an elephant in Africa, creating another controversy around the company.

Anthony told his social media audience that if they disagreed with a company’s behavior, they could take their money elsewhere. DNSimple then ran a promotion that let people transfer domains from GoDaddy at cost.

The promotion lasted about a year and produced noticeable growth. Anthony’s approach included an important distinction:

• Criticizing conduct was different from exploiting technical trouble
• A competitor’s outage wasn't an invitation to aggressively pursue its customers
• DNS attacks and service failures could happen to any provider
• Customers who needed help during an outage could still be welcomed
• Long-term reputation mattered more than taking advantage of another company’s worst moment

For Anthony, there was a line between competing directly and becoming what he described as an ambulance chaser. That philosophy still shows in how he talks about competitors today.

Using Customer Feedback to Shape the Product

Anthony credits early customers with helping DNSimple become what it is today. The first version worked, though it had rough edges and a limited feature set. Early adopters were willing to use it anyway and tell Anthony what they needed next.

Many of the company’s more interesting features came from customer requests. That feedback loop gave DNSimple several advantages:

• Product ideas came from active users
• The team could see recurring requests
• Anthony could compare slightly different needs from different customers
• Features could be prioritized around problems people were already experiencing
• Early supporters became advocates for the service

Anthony also believes persistence played a major role. Running a company for more than 16 years means living through periods when progress feels satisfying and periods when the founder questions why the company exists at all. Getting through both sides of that cycle has helped DNSimple last.

Adopting AI With Deliberate Internal Rules

Generative AI created a new challenge for a company built by software engineers.

DNSimple initially took a cautious approach. Rather than letting every employee experiment freely with customer information and production systems, the company formed an internal group and set boundaries. Some early rules included:

• Customer data wouldn't be sent through AI systems
• Internal company data wouldn't be freely supplied for model training
• The company would use a limited set of AI vendors
• Experiments would happen within defined boundaries
• Human review would remain part of important work

Anthony’s opinion changed as the models became more capable. A major turning point came when DNSimple’s CTO demonstrated generative-AI tooling that would previously have taken days. The result went beyond what the CTO expected to produce alone and incorporated public data into the company’s own system.

From there, AI became a regular part of software development at DNSimple. According to Anthony, the goal isn't simply to produce more software in less time. The team uses AI to run more iterations on the same work and improve quality.

Redefining What Software Engineers Contribute

Anthony doesn't think software engineering can be reduced to typing code.

Code is one part of a much larger process that also involves deciding what to create, choosing the right timing, talking with customers, designing systems, resolving competing requirements, and maintaining reliable infrastructure.

AI may reduce how much code engineers write directly. Anthony can even imagine a future where AI systems produce lower-level machine instructions without traditional source code sitting between the idea and execution. That still leaves difficult work around:

• Choosing what deserves to be built
• Designing reliable systems
• Verifying software behavior
• Supporting large numbers of users
• Handling infrastructure at scale
• Resolving conflicting customer needs
• Maintaining systems after they reach production

Anthony sees a meaningful distinction between generating an application that works for a few people and operating software used by thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers. As usage grows, the hardest problems often shift from visible product features to system reliability, architecture, performance, and operations.

Responding to AI’s Impact on Search Traffic

AI has also affected DNSimple's marketing. Anthony said the company saw search traffic fall by roughly 30% within about a month after Google introduced AI Overviews. That matters for a company that historically received significant traffic from people searching for domain and DNS services.

The concern isn't limited to Google. People now search through:

• Google AI Overviews
• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Perplexity
• Other AI-powered discovery tools

These systems often summarize a small set of options instead of presenting a traditional page of links. For a smaller company, appearing inside those answers can be difficult when the largest brands have far more mentions across the web.

DNSimple has responded by experimenting with the same foundations that helped the company before.

Anthony still values good products, helpful current content, genuine customer advocacy, reputable review platforms, and traditional search visibility. AI systems still retrieve current information from web search engines, so conventional search presence still influences where brands appear.

He is far more skeptical about tactics that sacrifice trust. Cold email is one example.

Anthony says DNSimple has rarely used cold email, and one attempt by a team member performed poorly enough that he didn't want it repeated. He is even less enthusiastic about AI-generated outreach that pretends to know the recipient through automatically collected personal information.

For DNSimple, brand reputation is worth more than a short-term outreach experiment.

Keeping Public Speaking at the Center of the Business

More than 16 years after using conference talks to introduce DNSimple, Anthony is still attending events. He recently hosted a roundtable discussion at ElixirConf in Chicago. These appearances matter to him even when they don't result in immediate sales.

Domain and DNS services aren't impulse purchases. Someone hearing Anthony speak at a conference may not move a domain or change DNS providers that day.

The value comes from staying visible and trusted within the community. Public events let Anthony:

• Meet developers directly
• Demonstrate continued involvement in the industry
• Share expertise without turning every interaction into a sales pitch
• Hear emerging concerns from technical communities
• Give potential customers a person to associate with DNSimple
• Build familiarity that can matter months or years later

That strategy looks surprisingly similar to the one Anthony used in 2010. Technology has changed dramatically. The value of being useful in a community has not.

Final Thoughts

Anthony Eden’s story shows that a software company doesn't need outside funding, rapid expansion, or a huge team to build a lasting business. DNSimple has grown to around $7 million in annual revenue, more than 19,000 customers, and 19 employees while staying bootstrapped. That progress came from solving a clear problem, listening to customers, and staying active in the communities DNSimple serves.

Nearly 17 years later, the company is still adapting as AI changes software development and search. Anthony’s approach is to use AI where it improves the work while keeping human judgment and customer trust central. DNSimple’s longevity shows the value of patience, consistency, and staying close to customer needs.

Links & Resources

• Check out DNSimple
• Browse the DNSimple Support Center
• Get a simple introduction to DNS at How DNS works
• Explore HTTPS fundamentals
• See how DNSSEC works

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