New year, new company, same dream

First off, Happy New Year everybody!

Well, it's official.  For the first time in my career, I have a boss.  It's kind of fun, actually. (I always wanted to know what it felt like to talk about the boss behind his/her back!  Oops, guess we'll see if he really reads my blog...)  Our acquisition by Intuit officially closed in mid-December, and for all of our customers who expressed some doubt, the earth still appears to be rotating around its axis!

I have gotten many comments from friends, family and customers along the lines of "man, this must feel SOOO good" or "how long until you buy your <insert material sign of wealth here>?" or "so you're totally checked out about now, right?"  Not exactly.  I appreciate the sentiments, but it doesn't really feel like that.  The people who have best related to our range of emotions are other entrepreneurs and very close friends/family who have watched us care and feed Homestead over the past ten years.  The simple fact is that selling your baby is hard and, once you do, it doesn't make you care about it any less.

No question, it does feel good to have external validation for something we've worked so hard to build.  But, as I shared with you in my original post about the acquisition, this is not why we strap on our boots every day.  In fact, having a third party pay a significant amount of money for our "work in progress" actually makes us feel even more of a responsibility to keep building.  We don't really know what else to do in both good times and bad, except keep building. 

I think this explains why people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Richard Branson keep showing up for work every day.  You get addicted to building things, not just for the financial reward, but for the feeling you get when you see employees loving their jobs, or customers who are addicted to your products, or a world that--in some small way--has one less problem, or one more smile.

So, I know I speak for all 150 people on the Homestead team when I say that selling our company doesn't mean we've reached the destination.  It's just a big milestone on a long journey.  And it hasn't changed our dream, except to make it bigger.

Thanks for all of your continued support, and we look forward to lots of exciting new adventures in 2008.

--jsk

Comments

[Kalia]

Thank you so much Homestead. You really took the fear out of setting up the website for our music label. My wife and I are your clients for life.

Sincerely,

Pharoah

Kalia "Pharoah" Gabrun, JD
CEO | General Counsel
Morehouse Music Entertainment
Morehouse Entertainment Group
Los Angeles, CA

[Mark Cadle]

I have a client that utilizes your platform. Do you allow integration of your store with another website? How can my client expand their business by selling the same products, in your store, on multiple sites? Is there a methodology of passing parameters to a service that will let a customer create a shopping cart via your site? Specifically, a customer on a remote site chooses items that are in the store on your hosted platform, they choose the item and it takes them to the homestead shopping cart for checkout? If this mechanism is available, it only helps business for everyone. Additionally, how come there is not an e-mail address for people to contact homestead?

Thanks

[Francis Chin]

Congratulations to Justin and the entire Homestead team for being bought up by Intuit, which I think is an intrepid software publisher that has fought off the 800-pound Microsoft gorrilla.

I've been using Homestead's WYSIWYG Web-building and hosting service for years, after trying out the "free" but crappy Web hosting services. So far, I have not come across any other application like Homestead that allows you to create a Web page in minutes, intuitively.

I work as content manager of a company that produces and operates several complex government-related portals. When revamping a Web site, I sometimes use the Homestead WYSIWYG features to design and produce instant online Web pages to illustrate to our Web designers the new ideas and concepts for the revamp. I can use Dreamweaver but it's tedious and I can never remember its nitty-gritty commands.

Thanks, Homestead team, for a great Web service. Now, if only you guys can figure out a simple solution on installing Sitebuilder on my Windows Vista computer...

[R. B. Chandler]

First, Mark, one way to do what you want is through the use of Frames or Iframes. You can have your Homestead store appear on any number of web sites as part of that site as long as you design your pages to fit within the Frame. If you setup your Homestead store to operate within Frames (or Iframes) to begin with you won't need to duplicate your pages to fit within the Frames. And/or, you can just supply a custom link to your store from other web sites. No matter how you do it once on the Homestead site the shopping cart and everything that goes with it stays on the Homestead platform.

I'll be interested to see how Homestead changes in the coming year with a larger source of funding and resources for R&D. I figure it can only get better with time.

[Kent Bettisworth]

Hey Justin,

Back to reality. I think your e-commerce and website services are good, but there is always room for improvement. Let's start with StoreFront.

I have been using the StoreFront product (which I now understand is not your company's product, but one you purchased, rent, lease, etc) and overall am happy after a year of using it, but becoming less so each day. There are several significant issues.

I will list the most important one here: Member only products do not work as described. Members can purchase any member-only product whether or not they have bought the designated trigger product. It would be really great to fix this, and, at least change the instruction manual to be more clear as to the limitation so that others are not disappointed also.

And, your billing department needs some training, in my opinion. I requested a partial credit for the missing functionality that I thought I was buying.

Here is the response from billing.....
"...... wrote on 1/28/08 at 12:31pm:
Our products and services are sold as-is, and the decision to use them is up to the member.

We are not able to place a value on either a feature, lack of feature, ease of use, or lack of ease of use and compensate you for any perceived value of these aspects. It is up to you to decide whether the product as a whole meets all of your needs for the stated price, or not. If you do not feel it does, we can cancel the service and refund you. In the case of the Storefront service, we feature a risk-free 30 day money back guarantee. There are no refunds beyond the 30 days however, and we also do not furnish partial refunds."

Ok, so I hope you put some of the money into making the StoreFront an even better product, or at least fixing it so it delivers what is advertised.

Regards,
Kent

[lan Cayton]

Once the email changed to Zimbra it became so flooded with junk that it lost all it's usefulness to me.

[Guilherme Geronco]

Hopefully Intuit is going to be smarter than Homestead and make site builder available for Mac. When the world is going apple (mac), Homestead wants to stay in Vista. I'm switching to mac this year (about 8 macs) and never going to windows again and if Homestead makes the switch. i'll stay with it, if not, see ya lata! And I hope Intuit's customer service is better than Homestead's. Thanks :)

[Katherine Likely]

How am I suppose to set up this store - if I have no idea what these are. The profile is invalid Invalid API profile: API username is blank Invalid API profile: API password is blank Invalid API profile: could not find SSL certificate for profile.

And what happened to all the fancy store fronts I viewed. I don't see them for the store?

[Ryan Harrell]

Hey! I just wanted to leave a note saying how cool it is that you've got this whole blogosphere thing happening. It's refreshing to see a company's C.E.O. interacting with every day society (aka customers). Congratulations on your merger and good luck on all of your future endeavors. I'm still trying to figure out how to login so once I do then I'll tell you how awesome your service is :). Peace...*distant echo*

[John P. Martin]

Dear Justin

Thank you very much for Homestead. It gives me something to do and it helps me promote some of the businesses in my community of Nicholasville, Ky.

I don't know very much about websites, but I have had a great time with this product. It is extremely easy to use.

I wish you the very best.

Thanks again.

God bless,

John
http://www.citynews-johnpmartin.com

[la somebody]

I have looked in vain for an abuse link or email to allow reporting of illegal content being spammed/hosted out of homestead.

If your business model doesn't include such considerations, I put it to you that you may quickly find yourself marginalized in terms of connectivity; responsible internet administrators don't have time for hosting sites that are unaccountable for their users' behavior.

[Justin]

John,
We take abuse of Homestead's services very seriously, and have an entire department dedicated to preventing this when possible and shutting offenders down otherwise. Please email abuse@homesteadsupport.com with your specific complaint. Thanks!
--jsk

[katherine tasheff]

Belated congratulations to you for finally working for the Man. Here's to keeping your momentum going.

[Per]

No matter how many times I have contacted Homestead support and finally you Sir, I never get a proper answer, only machine ready-mades. I'll now send a mail to the abuse@homesteadsupport.com
and attach the matter I seem to be a subject to; some people seems to be "hitch-hiking" on my computer system at every time I get in to my account with Homestead. The Tracker is telling a very confusing story and this is annoying and the tracking person is completely flooding on my websites and my movements while I am there working. It is a serious matter so I expect Homesteads staff should put attention to it in case it is a hacker operating under the false pretence and the name Homestead, who is the service provider in this case.
Cordially
PTS

[Taj]

Flat fee mls sites like http://www.listingflatfeemls.com and http://www.mlsflatfeefsbo.com are possible thanks to homestead.com !

Try them !

[Ian Lowman]

A technical support phone number that is technical would be a great start.
My domain transfer is stuck because I failed to cancel my domains by proxy that was not mentioned in the store builder. I have been waiting for two days for your technical staff to restart the domain transfer process now that I have cancelled my domainbyproxy account. I will wait one more day for some action and then I will go to the competition.

[Sazi]

Can you please specify whether the certificate that Homestead has with Verisign is a Shared Hosting Security Service certificate or a Homestead dedicated SSL certificate? I've been trying for months to install the Verisign seal on my site to no avail.

Customer service indicates that I should follow instructions on Verisign's site for seal installation. I've done that multiple times to no avail. Verisign initially suggested that Homestead's certificate is an SHSS certificate and that Homestead would have to provide the seal info for me to install. Upon further investigation, Verisign customer service indicated that this will not work because Homestead's certificate is dedicated to Homestead, thereby making it impossible to authenticate individual member's sites. They say I must purchase a seperate SSL certificate in order to add the seal to my site. In response, Homestead's customer service states that there is no way to add an additional SSL certificate to my site and that I can definitely use Verisign's seal (apparently it's been supplied to many Homestead customers in the past.

How do I proceed with this conflicting info? Please help! It's important to me that I have this seal displayed on my site. I can't convey an acceptable level of security to my customers without displaying this seal. Feedback has been that they're not comfortable purchasing from a site that they can't verify is secure.

At this point I'm so confused that I'm more than willing to pay someone to fix this simple issue for me. I've asked Homestead customer service via Help ticket if I could pay the design department to install this for me. I didn't receive a direct response to my question, so I've asked again and am waiting for a response. I've also asked if I could install an additional certificate, willing to absorb the cost, and this doesn't seem feasible. It seems that the only solution invariably offered is to refer to the design guide. However, after reading through the entire design guide, no solution is presented.

I thought maybe I could find an answer here. What type of security certificate does Homestead hold with Verisign? Which seal can I use on my site? Which pages can I display this seal on? How do I obtain this seal? If customer service does not have access this information can they find out? If that's too time consuming and not cost feasible, can I pay someone to find out?

Thanks in advance.