An old Chinese saying.
There’s an old Chinese saying that I believe is so true. It goes like this: “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.” I found this to be true for each of my business startups.

The temptation to quit is always there.
At both Parsons Technology and GoDaddy.com, the desire to throw in the towel was the strongest for me just before each business took off. In each case, because I didn’t know how close I was to succeeding I came very close to making very poor decisions. These decisions would have either had drastic consequences with respect to my control over my business (Parsons Technology), or, completely eliminated the possibility of success (Go Daddy). Fortunately, the fates smiled on me each time and I managed to avoid those wrong decisions and hang on until each business became successful.

A string of failures at Parsons Technology.
Before I had any success at all at Parsons Technology, I endured a series of failures which strung out well over two years. During these two plus years, each and every thing I tried in order to sell my software program failed to make money. At the time, I felt like I had tried everything. I tried selling direct using small or very small magazine ads. I tried selling at retail. I tried selling using network marketing. I even tried pitching the program directly at small trade shows. It just didn’t seem to matter what I did. The cold, hard fact was that nothing worked.

I almost sold part of Parsons Technology.
Not only did everything I attempt not work, but I also was flat out of cash and credit. So as you can imagine, I was quite discouraged. This is when I almost made a colossal mistake and sold part of my company. To add insult to injury, I was ready to sell half the company for peanuts.

I was so desparate that I offered a friend half the company for only $5,000.
Back then, one of my good friends was a guy named Dave. Dave was familiar with what I was trying to do with Parsons Technology and was one of the few people who was, in spite of failure after failure, always supportive. So during a period of time that I was very discouraged, I offered Dave the opportunity to invest in Parsons Technology. I offered him half of the company for a grand total of five thousand dollars. I was so beaten down by failure after failure that I would have sold half my interest in my little company, something I worked two years to create, for only five thousand dollars.

I was actually relieved when he said "no."
After I made the offer, Dave said he’d think about it and let me know. He got back to me a few days later and told me that he felt the investment really didn’t make sense for him, so he told me “no.” Interestingly enough, after I got Dave’s answer I was disappointed a little bit, but in another way I was relieved. In the pit of my stomach, I knew that selling part of the company was not the right thing to do.

Then my break came.
Just a few months after Dave declined to purchase half of Parsons Technology, I got the call from Computer Bargain line with the opportunity to purchase a full page magazine advertisement at fire sale prices. I took the chance and purchased the ad (on trade credit). The ad worked and Parsons Technology not only took off, but became viable. Parsons Technology was eventually sold to Intuit for $64 million dollars.

Sometimes I wonder what things would be like today had I sold half the company.
Every now and then I think back and wonder what I would have done if Dave came back to me, and instead of saying “no,” had agreed to the five thousand dollar investment. Would I have taken it? I think I would have, if for only the reason that I gave him my word that I would have sold it to him for that. The important thing to realize here though, and the whole point of this post, is that if I had only known how close I was to succeeding, I wouldn’t have even considered selling part of the company.

When Parsons Technology was sold to Intuit for $64 million dollars it was pretty big news in Cedar Rapids Iowa. Everyone in Cedar Rapids knew about the sale. It was a matter of public record. Not long after the sale, I ran into Dave at a cocktail party one night. When it was just he and I standing together, I recalled the time 7 or so years earlier when I offered him half the company for just $5 thousand dollars. I asked him if he ever thought about that. Dave smiled and said, “Yeah, I think about it.”

The temptation to quit was also there with Go Daddy.
Unlike Parsons Technology, the temptation to quit got to be tremendous with Go Daddy. In fact, it got to the point where I actually decided to shut down the company.

After selling Parsons Technology, according to the contract I signed with Intuit, I remained an employee. I became Chairman. That meant that pretty much all I did was order lunch. All I could take of this was about a year, so when my contract permitted, I resigned.

My contract with Intuit said that during the first year after leaving them I couldn’t, in any way shape or form, work for profit. I was required to take a year off. Also at that time, my wife and I decided to hit the crossroads, so we went through the customary divide by 2, and went our separate ways.

I moved to Arizona and played golf.
So I moved to Arizona and played golf. My friends told me that by playing golf every day my game would get really good. Most days when I went to the golf course, I would wonder: “Is today the day I’m going to become a good golfer?” Well, if you are familiar with the game, you might know that it doesn’t necessarily work that way. At the beginning of that year, my golf game sucked. It still sucks today.

I needed to be active.
After that year of required downtime ended, I realized that I really needed to be active. I had enough money certainly to retire, live extremely well, do whatever I wanted to do and never work again. But that comfort zone just wasn’t for me. I literally missed the adrenalin flow that I received from having everything on the line; being completely at risk.

I decided to start another company.
So in 1997, I decided that I would start another company. The purpose of the company was to get back into the technology business, and to commit enough of my net worth to it that I would have to be concerned about making it work. I wanted to once again feel the adrenalin surge that comes from being outside my comfort zone with the stakes being very high. We all know that old saying….”Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.” Well I certainly got what I wished for.

I opened an office in Scottsdale and named the new company Jomax Technologies. I named it after a dirt road I passed on the way to work. When I opened the doors I hired a dozen good people, committed that I would fund the company entirely with my own money, and that we would eventually find our niche.

My new company was unlike any other.
We were unlike any other startup. Most startups have very definite business plans, but no money. We had all the money we needed, but no idea what we were going to do. We only knew that we needed to try a lot of things. And try a lot of things we did. My thoughts were that once I somehow got back into the technology business, that I would have a better perspective of what the real opportunities happened to be.

We became an ISP. Want to lose a lot money? Try that. We tried building custom web sites, we tried teaching high tech education, we tried building networks, and on and on. Nothing worked. So after about 4 million in burned cash, I stood back and took a sober look at what I was doing. I remembered something my father used to say. He said “A smart dog chews his own bone.” Basically, that meant to do what you know how to do. And for me that meant developing software or intellectual property.

I decided that I needed to develop intellectual property.
The neat thing about developing technology, is that it’s one of the few products that after you sell it, you still have it. And if it’s structured right, you can sell it around the clock, over and over again. So we decided to get back to my roots, stop running in all those directions and focus on developing software.

We decided to create a program that would let an individual, any individual regardless of technical knowledge, inexpensively create a web site. It took a year to develop the first cut of this product. We named it Website Complete and still sell it today. It is now in its 5th incarnation.

The noise from the dot com boom was loud.
That was back in early 1999 and the noise from the dot com boom was loud. Business in the tech arena was nuts. Every pinheaded idea in the world was getting lots of money, was getting lots of advertising, and everybody was giving everything away to get customers. It was just crazy.

When we started to sell Website Complete we realized that the “Jomax Technologies’ name just wasn’t going to get it for us. We needed something easier to remember and more fun. We worked on coming up with a new name for a week or more. It seemed that every turn was a dead end, names were either taken or not what we wanted.

The "Go Daddy" name literally fell out of the sky.
Then one day, someone joking around said, “How about Big Daddy?” and then “bang” the name “Go Daddy” fell out of the sky. The name has no meaning other than we thought it was kind of cool, and it was available. So we renamed the company Go Daddy.

The Go Daddy name has played a key role in our success. When people hear it for the first time, we’ve noticed that two things usually happen. First, is that they smile. They’re amused by the name. We like that. Second, is that they almost always remember it. We love that. We think that what the Go Daddy name does for us is pretty much all any business can expect from any name. We were indeed very lucky to stumble upon the Go Daddy name.

Go Daddy continued to lose money — and lots of it!
So even though the company was now focused, had a good product, and a great company name, we continued to burn cash — my cash — and there was no real end in sight. Our monthly cash burn got up to about $390,000 and our daily sales were typically less than $1,000 bucks. There was just too much noise in the dot com arena for us to overcome.

We decided to become a domain name registrar.
So we made another decision. We decided to begin the process of becoming a domain name registrar. For those of you that might not know, a domain name registrar is a company that is authorized to sell or register new web site or internet names. Godaddy.com or bizaz.com would be examples of domain names.

We felt that by being a domain name registrar we would be able to provide inexpensive domain names that would both provide us with a small profit, and also attract prospects who would purchase our other software.

The other factor that was behind our decision was that we looked at the players in the registrar market and it was obvious that it was overpriced. Every registrar had the same cost for a domain name. That was $6.00. Yet most registrars sold their domain names for $35 and sometimes even more.

We decided to enter the market, and in sharp contrast to the $35 price, sell our domain names for under $9.00 each.

We heard the old question "how come somebody isn't already doing it?"
One of the questions that inevitably came up when I made this decision was, “If it makes sense to sell domain names at less than $9.00, how come someone isn’t already doing it?” I thought about it quite a bit and decided that we would eventually find out.

The decision that made the company.
This decision was not a trivial one. It meant that to create the systems, pay the various fees and post the letters of credit required to be a registrar, the cost would be over $1,000,000. It would take about a year to develop the necessary systems, with of course, no guarantee of any type of success. This was while our monthly cash burn, my monthly cash burn, was well over $300,000. It would turn out that this was the decision that would make the company.

So we began developing our systems to become a registrar. A year and another $4,000,000 or so evaporated. We were within a month or two from becoming a registrar when disaster struck on another front. The dot com bust and ensuing stock market dive started.

Like many people I suppose, I had most of my money in the stock market. And for that matter, most of the stocks I owned were tech stocks. Not a bright move on my part. So when the implosion happened it hit me hard.

I watched my net worth evaporate quickly.
There were a number of months, after adding my loss at Go Daddy to the drop in my stock portfolio, that a million dollars or more of my cash vanished. Yep, I got what I wanted when I started Go Daddy. I got to look up at the ceiling at night, wondering what was going to happen and feel that adrenalin surge through my veins. I got it in spades.

Lines in the sand.
Both before and throughout this entire time, I would maintain my focus by drawing imaginary lines in the sand. Once I remember saying to myself (“always just to myself”) I’ll stick with Go Daddy until my net worth gets below $20,000,000.

Then after reaching $20,000,000, I’d spend time alone, think more, come up with more plans, and draw a new line. This time at $15,000,000. My imaginary line eventually went to $12,000,000, and then the line moved to $10,000,000.

We moved to an old horse ranch to save money.
To cut expenses, I moved the company from it’s offices at a plush location in Scottsdale and put it in a house on an old horse ranch in Cave Creek (both locations are in Arizona). We installed cubes in the house, completely wired it for our intranet, and because the property was zoned for horse ranching and not software development, we put up a big sign that said “Welcome to The Go Daddy Ranch.” When we moved to the ranch, we were at a low of 12 loyal employees. Each of these employees knew that the company might make it, or it might not. This was from a high of over 30 employees during the previous year.

After moving into the new offices at the ranch, we finally became an accredited registrar and started doing business in that quarter. We debuted with very low rates and the promise of good service. We wrote hardly any business. And I crossed the $10,000,000 line in the sand.

Sometimes I would realize how much money I was losing.
Sometimes it would really hit home with me how much cash I was losing with Go Daddy. A few times I found myself inside some other small apparently successful business, and I’d think that with the cash I lost that month I could have easily bought that particular business and still maybe have cash left over.

After I passed that $10,000,000 imaginary line in the sand, we started a new form of advertising using other on-line sites and our sales started to grow. So there was still some promise, still some hope. So I made another line in the sand, this time it was $8,000,000.

I became really discouraged. I decided to close the company.
When I approached the $8 million dollar line, I became really discouraged. So I made the decision to close the company. This was in early 2001. I never told anyone. The decision to shut it down was important for me, it allowed me to let go for a while. The decision took me out of the fire. So I flew to Hawaii for a week. I went there by myself to think it over, how I would close Go Daddy down, pay severance, that sort of thing.

I discovered a new resolve.
As time went by in Hawaii, I started feeling a new resolve. I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was to close Go Daddy. And then the epiphany happened. I was at a resort, and it resulted when a guy who was working valet took my car and parked it. The guy was obviously very happy doing what he was doing. I thought that was pretty cool. In fact, it occurred to me that if I lost everything, I could park cars and be happy doing it.

Failure wouldn't be so bad.
I also thought I could just as well go to Las Vegas and get a job at one of the casinos. I’ve always thought it would be kind of fun to be the stick man on a craps table.

I decided I would rather lose everything than shut down Go Daddy.
So I made the decision that I would rather, much rather, lose everything I had than shut down Go Daddy. And that if I lost everything I had, I’d just start again, somewhere, doing something I liked. Really, the more I thought about them, the consequences weren’t so bad. So I returned to Scottsdale with the resolve that I would strap myself to Go Daddy’s mast and if the company went down, I’d go down with it. But if it sailed, we’d sail together.

Go Daddy turned the corner several months later.
Later that year our business finally gelled. The company became cash flow positive in October 2001 and has been big time cash flow positive ever since.

The temptation to quit will always be greatest before you are about to succeed.
Similar to Parsons Technology, I experienced the strongest temptation to give up on Go Daddy just before the company became successful.

I know that that old Chinese saying about the temptation to quit being the strongest just before you succeed is absolutely dead on. The problem I have to admit is how to realize that success is just around the corner. With both Parsons Technology and Go Daddy, when I experienced that strong temptation to quit, there was no way I could logically see success on the horizon. However, when the chips were down and I was ready to bail (at least with Go Daddy) my stomach somehow knew that success was in the making and that the right thing to do was to hang on.

Trust your instincts.
So if you find yourself in a situation where all the cards seem to be stacked against you and quitting seems like the right thing to do, my advice would be to remember the old Chinese saying and trust your instincts. As you might have already surmised, nothing is ever easy, is it?