Inside GoDaddy’s Mission To Get Entrepreneurs Of Every Ilk ‘Up And Running Fast’
It ought to be reemphasized GoDaddy is more than a domain registrar.
When I sat down with GoDaddy’s Gourav Pani several weeks back, the Seattle-based president of US independents at the company explained to me everything about how GoDaddy is building products meant for small businesses. The team, he told me, defines small business as those which make “up to a million dollars a year” in revenue. These entrepreneurs hail from places all over the world, but Pani and his stable is specifically tasked with helped such go-getters here in the United States. They do “a lot” of market research, he said, in determining the correct market fits for various products. In his organization, Pani identified three types of people: product managers, engineers, and commercial leaders. The backbone of Pani and team’s work, however, lies in diversity and inclusion. In particular, GoDaddy wants a broader swath of people, especially those in underserved communities, to thrive in running their small business in the purported Land of Opportunity known as America.
“In terms of inclusion, when we think about small businesses, it’s the backbone of our country—essentially the economy survives and thrives on the basis of the success of small businesses… that’s what makes up the success of individual communities,” Pani said. “It’s been very much part of GoDaddy’s ethos to be inclusive in helping all small businesses succeed, no matter where they are and what means they have.”
Pani described his team’s top job as “[making] ure we can get the best and most affordable products available to customers so they can use them and be successful on their own.” Simplicity is key, he added, because the expectation should be that not everyone is technically savvy even to a small degree. The technology that powers someone’s business, Pani said, should be relatively unimportant. An implementation detail. What should be important is someone bringing their idea (and passion) for business to life, with Pani saying success is a person choosing GoDaddy’s suite of tools to do so and being “absolutely simple to use.”
One of the ways in which GoDaddy achieves its goal of empowerment is through awareness campaigns, not to mention talking with reporters like yours truly. According to Pani, the company runs programs such as Empower By GoDaddy, which helps provide training to prospective entrepreneurs on how to get up and running with becoming a small-time mogul. The work is interesting from a disability perspective partly because, as a logistical matter, those in the disability community are disenfranchised financially to name but one barrier people face. To that point, it’s entirely plausible a disabled person may want to sell a good of theirs as a means of supplementing their income. Likewise, it’s also true a home-based small business may be the only tenable way a person can work due to logistical and/or medical concerns that may impede access to the outside world. Whatever the circumstances(s), the truth is entrepreneurship could well be a means with which a disabled person leaves their dent in the universe, all the while reaping the benefits of more accessible pathways to day-to-day survival in this life.
Another powerful tool GoDaddy leverages is—what else?—artificial intelligence. AI, Pani said to me, plays a pivotal role in coalescing a bunch of information that someone may otherwise have had to stitch together piecemeal (an accessibility gain unto itself) in efforts to learn about starting their small business. All told, Pani said he believes society is amidst a “transformative time” technologically because software such as AI has the potential to drastically reduce “the burden of ideation [and] lower the barrier to entry” for people. In short, AI can help make business more egalitarian and, in terms of disability, more accessible.
When asked about feedback, Pani told me GoDaddy has internal teams which are responsible for reaching out to customers and organizations like advocacy groups in order to glean insights about what people need and, more crucially, how GoDaddy’s tools help or hinder. Pani emphasized people don’t necessarily need to be using GoDaddy products; the important part is learning how and where entrepreneurs succeed or fail. Generative AI has, again, proven instrumental to GoDaddy’s ambitions insofar as the company felt it could be a “great equalizer” when it comes to giving and receiving feedback from the small business community writ large. Additionally, Pani said the company does a lot of qualitative and quantitative research, which entails methodologies such as A/B testing. All this happens “on an ongoing basis,” according to Pani, with GoDaddy running “hundreds of different experiments” at any given time conducted by GoDaddy researchers.
So why choose GoDaddy over its competitors in the market?
“As a company, we’ve always been the champions for the small business and small-scale entrepreneur trying to work and build something up from scratch,” Pani said in articulating why people should go with GoDaddy in starting up their small business. “Number one, it’s very much in our DNA to champion the smaller business, more so than any other company I’ve worked in. One area that makes it very useful for small businesses is when someone comes in, they know the company they’re working with will champion them. The second is the way we build our tools and capabilities. We try to make sure all the tools are integrated with one another; what that does is it actually helps our customers spend less time trying to figure out how to make things work, how to configure them, and more time on running their business. When we [at GoDaddy] think about our principles of why we exist, we tell ourselves the first purpose is to help our customers save time and reduce stress of getting up and running. The second purpose is to help them get more customers. If we can do those two things, then we’ll set our customers up for success. In my opinion, that worldview we have, and of our purpose and how we want to work in service of our customers, makes it highly beneficial for our customers to work with us—because we have their best interests at heart when we build our products.”
Looking towards, the future, Pani alluded to the sentiment I made in the lede. GoDaddy may have begun as a domain registrar for websites and email addresses, but its aperture has widened considerably in the years since. Pani told me GoDaddy fancies itself “a place where people go with their ideas” and an entity which will “nurture the entrepreneurial spirit.”
Domain names are important, but they don’t make the world go ‘round.
“We truly want to be a collaborative partner with our customers in nurturing their ideation process,” Pani said. “I think technology [enables] a massive opportunity for these customers to take advantage of and get up and running fast. We’re here to help them in that process.”
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