The Common Good

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The Common Good Posted: 26 Apr 2010 06:28 AM PDT We’re working on a simple little initiative here that I’m excited about.  We’re putting together white-labeled tutorials and videos that guide end users through the process of transferring away from a bunch of top registrars.  The idea is that you can take these materials, maybe add your logo, maybe add specific instructions about how to transfer in on your end and publish them to your customers.  It’s just one example of a challenge that all our resellers have in common.  And there of are tons of them.  Make it easier for customers to transfer away from competitors.  Serve up more effective search results.  Convert better at checkout.  Increase usage of your services.  Improve renewal rates…. While we can pick a few obvious ones and try to provide you some resources ourselves, it occurs to me that there is potentially a bigger opportunity here.  There are 10,000 OpenSRS resellers all developing solutions to these types of problems every day.  You are writing bits of code on top of our API to improve your purchase paths and your control panels.  You are developing marketing materials and documentation.  You are experimenting with everything from pricing to promotions to newsletter subject headers.  Some of you are direct competitors.  But many more of you service such completely different geographies and customer segments and offer such different services that I don’t think you would regard each other as competitors at all. So, it seems like there should be some opportunity to pool solutions, materials, best practices and data for the common good.  There’s a bit of this going on in the discussion forums, particularly with technical solutions.  But I think we can be doing so much more.  And I think we can potentially find creative ways to solicit contributions and reward contributors.  Maybe we should have taken the money we’re investing in developing these transfer tutorials ourselves, for example, and offered it to whichever reseller contributed the best transfer tutorials.  Maybe resellers can earn credits or other rewards by making contributions.  Maybe you have to contribute something in order to access what others have contributed.  Maybe you’d be excited enough about the movement to contribute without any direct reward!  (”…a dream that one day on the OpenSRS Web site, the sons of small Web design firms and the sons of large hosting companies will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood…”) It seems to me that you are not only facing common challenges but fighting common enemies.  It would be so cool to fight them together. We’ll think more about structuring a real program here.  Meanwhile, we’d love to know how you would feel about contributing to something like this on a scale from, “Go to hell!” to “Hell yeah!”  Let us know.

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