Going From Startup to a Large-Scale Corporation

Hello everyone. I just wanted to create a blog to share my knowledge about e-commerce with the rest of the world. I've been involved in e-commerce for about 5 years now, and I've learned quite a bit throughout the process. I'll get to that stuff later. For now, I want to give you a background of my experience of going from a small company to a large corporation.

I started out working for a company called MonsterCommerce back in January of 2003. I started when they brought tech support in house, and was one of 13 people working there at the time. I have been through the struggles of a small company, and helped it develop into a medium-sized business with a couple hundred employees. I've seen all the growing pains associated with that development.

For those of you that don't know, MonsterCommerce was purchased by the giant company of Network Solutions in 2006, and a lot has changed since then as well. So I've seen what most small businesses go through, all the way to a large-scale corporation, and all over the course of just over 5 years.

As I said earlier, I started with MonsterCommerce in January of 2003. The owner of the company (who was the only member living in California. The rest of us were in Illinois.) was sent to train 4 of us on the shopping cart software we would be supporting. Now, I was fresh out of college, and had no experience talking to people on the phone, let alone providing tech support for 1000 store owners. In fact, I just received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, so tech support was completely new for me.

I only took the job because I was a month past graduation, and I still haven't found anything. I knew of people that graduated 6 months prior to me that were still looking. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do for a living, but I knew I didn't want to program. I didn't see any benefit of programming while I was in college, and just majored in it because it was harder than CMIS. I remember thinking it was cool that they had dogs running around the office, but at the same time saw some potential in the company. The pay wasn't very good, but I figured I'd try it out and see what it was all about.

The first week was pretty rough. Just so everyone knows, I'm pretty good at adapting to different situations, and I really like to know everything there is to know about whatever I'm doing. But I knew NOTHING about tech support. So, here's how my first week went. We started on a Monday, and were supposed to start answering calls the following Monday. On the first day, the owner ran us through all the menu items in the back end of the shopping cart, and gave us the details about each one. No overview of the company, or an overview of e-commerce in general. Just straight to the details. So he got through the menu in just under two days.

Now that we had a general idea of what the product had to offer, we were told to memorize the menu, and we would be quizzed on it Friday. Keep in mind that there were about 15 main menu items, and about 10-15 sub menus under each one.

So now it's Wed of my first week, and I have some of the menu memorized. The owner is dealing with something on his own, while we are all memorizing the menu. He walks away, and comes back a few hours later. He says we might not wait until Monday before we start answering calls; it might be Friday. Then he disappears again. The four of us start discussing what we're gonna do, because we have no idea on what to expect, or how to handle the calls. He comes back about another hour later, and says that we are going live in 15 minutes. My phone didn't even work yet.

They quickly get my phone working, and all these calls start flowing in. I think every call I took that day, I had to put them on hold and ask the owner for the answer, or how to figure out how to get the answer. I did so bad that he actually told me I wasn't going to make it here, because I didn't know how to control the conversation. Of course I didn't; I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be doing.

Anyway, a month goes by, and we're all pretty much experts at the product. I picked it up so well that I was the first promotion he gave. I became the Assistant Manager of Tech Support, and got a raise of $50/month. I was really on my way now, and the job was becoming fun. I got to be really good at handling upset people calling in, and helping them fix their problems.

Since that time, the company started growing. Tech Support got larger, and needed some tools to help it run more smoothly. So I moved to a new position, which was coined Technical Operations Specialist (it made us feel like a big company to have big titles). I created some tools to make tech support run more efficiently, along with finding and fixing issues others couldn't figure out.

During this time, we had two Server Administrators that worked out of state, and nobody wanted to call them, because they were difficult to talk to. Once our support team got large enough to handle themselves, I decided it would be best for the company if I became a Server Administrator, as everyone in tech support had a good relationship with me. I did, and in doing so fixed that problem with the company.

So now that I was in tech support and server administration, and both areas were off and running smoothly, I thought "What do I want to do now?" When I was in tech support, I would find bugs that people were reporting, and go into the code and fix it. I'd then pass that off to the development team to fix, and started noticing my exact code (comments and all) were put into the core code of the cart. Granted, that's natural for me, since I majored in Computer Science, but it still made me feel that I was contributing. So I became a developer.

I liked developing, but I really liked developing things that would please our customers. I was a developer for about two years, and became a team lead. When we started rewriting the cart from the ground up (after the Network Solutions acquisition), I led the team that continued to develop the existing cart. It made me feel good to take the feedback people requested, and implement it in the next release. I wanted to stay under the radar, as far as the rest of the company was concerned, because there was too much red tape to work around. I liked the small, fast-paced environment that MonsterCommerce was all about.

So I took the lead for the final three major revisions to our legacy, version 4 shopping cart. During this time, we hired someone to lead the direction of our e-commerce platform. He was focused on the new version, so I gave him my ideas for each release within version 4. He basically looked at them, and told me to go ahead with them every time.

I could only live in this dream world for so long before the rest of the company takes over, right? Well, that day had come when we were told that all developers will start working on the new version, so we can replace the old version. All hands on deck. It was at this time when I started helping the team work on version 7. As we developed each new feature, I was involved in making the key decisions as to how to implement them. During this time, I also gave my feedback to the person making the decisions on what we should do next, and we had some good discussions.

Once version 7 was out the door, the person leading the direction of the e-commerce was tasked with leading more areas of the company, so he needed some help. I applied for the position, and got it. So now, I'm the Product Manager of E-Commerce for Network Solutions. I'm the one that gets to officially make the decisions of where we're headed.

I was still focused on the development and quality assurance teams here, and tried to avoid the rest of the company for a while. That was pretty much what my role was, for the most part, though. Then we got a new CEO who was focused on growing the business. He changed the whole role of the Product Managers, and changed the focus of the company. Now I'm in the middle of the whole company, and am the point man for everything that has to do with e-commerce. I have to interact with a different person for each aspect of our product, whether it's developing, QA'ing, marketing, selling, tech support, or whatever. I'm the glue that holds everything for e-commerce together now.

It's a little different than it was just a year ago, let alone the first week of when I started. I've learned a lot throughout the process though, and growing through all that helps me understand what small businesses go through. Ok, so this was a little longer than I originally planned for my first blog, but hopefully it helps you understand some of my background in e-commerce. There's so much more I could talk about with it, but I digress.... for now.