Interview with Pingdom CEO Sam Nurmi

We have covered Pingdom several times on CenterNetworks. It’s a service I use on all of my sites to monitor uptime. I like the alerts via email and mobile when one of my sites is down. One key I have learned is to use a separate email that is not on the domain you are monitoring. Otherwise you might not get the email alerts when it’s down. I like what Pingdom is doing with their blog – they provide lots of stats on the big sites and the industry as a whole. To find out more about Pingdom, I spoke with CEO Sam Nurmi and our discussion is below. Pingdom has been kind enough to provide us with a discount code for CN readers, will be posted this evening.

Allen: Can you provide a brief bio about yourself?

Sam: I’m a Swedish, dyslectic 30-year-old of Finnish descent. I’ve loved all kinds of problem-solving ever since I was a kid, and I’ve always been very interested in what makes businesses tick and how to expand on those ideas. I feel that I was destined to become an entrepreneur from an early age.

I’m currently running my fourth business, Pingdom, which is an uptime monitoring service. Previous companies include Loopia, which I founded and grew to the largest web hosting company in Sweden before I sold it in mid 2005. At that time, Loopia had 30% of the Swedish domain and hosting market. I also founded Troxo, a software development company that focuses on web-related software.

These days my focus is 100% on Pingdom, which we intend to grow into a market leader.

Allen: What’s Pingdom?

Sam: Pingdom is a service that monitors the uptime and response time of websites , servers or any other device that is and should be accessible over the internet.

Allen: How does the service work?

Sam: Our service is a web-based tool that gives webmasters and other administrators of servers or web services an easy way to get detailed monitoring from our global network of monitoring servers. The monitoring from Pingdom will detect if websites, servers or online applications are having problems or are unreachable.

If we detect any problems, our customers are notified via SMS or email. They can also examine their historical monitoring statistics, which is very useful for noticing trends and locating errors.

Allen: Why do I need a service such as Pingdom? Doesn’t my ISP provide this?

Sam: There are a lot of reasons to use an external, third-party monitoring service like Pingdom. For one, you can’t always trust your hosting provider or ISP to inform you when they are having issues. Another is that an ISP will usually focus on the network, and there are a lot of other things that can go wrong with your website or web service that is outside of their control. For example, imagine you have uploaded changes to your website that breaks it, or makes it extremely slow. Your ISP will not notice this. It is your responsibility.

Allen: How reliable is your service?

Sam: It’s very reliable. We have built in redundancy in all critical parts of our monitoring network.

Allen: What does the Pingdom team look like?

Sam: We’re a team of nine workaholics. Three guys here in Sweden who manage marketing and customer care, and six in Serbia who handle development and manage our infrastructure.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Sam: Our industry is quite young and is still being shaped, so there is a good deal of difference between various uptime monitoring services, both in packaging and pricing. This makes it somewhat difficult to compare services. Feature-wise, I think we are aiming to be a hybrid between WebSitePulse.com and Alertsite.com. I’d like to think that we will be the ones to create a standard and shape the future of the uptime monitoring industry.

Allen: How do you monetize Pingdom?

Sam: Our business model is simple. We are offering an affordable, easy-to-use service that is in high demand. Our infrastructure was designed from the start to be able to handle a very large amount of users and still provide a high quality of service. In other words, we have a lot of users who pay less, rather than a few users who pay a lot. This has allowed us to establish ourselves as one of the fastest-growing uptime monitoring services today.

Allen: Can you provide some stats about who is currently using your service, large/small, usa/elsewhere, etc?

Sam: Last time we checked, we had customers in 127 countries. About one third of our users are located in the US and a similar portion in Europe.

We have a wide spread of "customer types". Some are large corporations, all the way down to individuals, for example bloggers. Examples of companies using our services are Alexa.com, FeedBurner, Foot Locker, Mosso, iStockPhoto and Canonical.

Allen: Do you find being located in Sweden and not Silicon Valley to help or hurt in buzz creation and grassroots marketing?

Sam: Actually, most of our customers don’t seem to realize that we’re Swedish. At least not right away. Even if they did, I don’t really see it as a problem.

The only negative thing I can think of right now, and this has more to do with being outside the US than Silicon Valley, is the time zone issue. We are six hours ahead of EST and nine hours ahead of PST, which can sometimes make it a bit difficult when you want to have meetings and the like with companies (or press) in the US. You get this time shift which can sometimes be awkward to deal with. We have also had to extend our business hours so that we cover daytime in the US as well as in Europe.

Allen: Can you provide some of the elements of your marketing plan?

Sam: We have a three-year plan that we are following, but of course it needs to be adapted along the way. It’s impossible to predict every twist and turn of the market that far ahead.

A key point that we try to apply to all our marketing efforts is that we should always get more than our competitors out of the money we spend on marketing. If we can get more effect for the same amount of money (not necessarily spent on the same things), this will give us an advantage. We try to be clever rather than just going for brute-force traditional marketing, though that has its place as well.

Allen: What’s coming next from Pingdom?

Sam: Pingdom is in a state of constant development. For example, we just launched a new monitoring package that is specifically aimed at larger businesses and web hosting companies.

We keep working on making the service as useful and user friendly as possible, and are currently developing several very nice features that will be showing up quite soon. They’re still kind of a secret, though. I’ll let you know once we are there.

Allen: What are the most important things that a startup must have to be successful?

Sam: If you ask me, the most important thing is to surround yourself with the right kind of people. As long as you’re working with creative, hardworking and determined people who can really deliver, the rest tends to resolve itself.

Allen: Which feeds are you reading these days?

Sam: I’m all over the place.

Thanks Sam for spending some time with us today!