Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 102 with Brad Mitchell (Part 2) of Mojohost

1 (7s):
This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk, where every week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry, and we discuss what's going on in our business. Plus we give you a tip on buying and selling websites this week. This week we'll be speaking with Brad Mitchell of Mojohost.

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1 (1m 40s):
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1 (2m 20s):
Only 1.5 million euros. Now time for this week's interview. So what would you call the turning points in the development of our industry as a whole in the last 20 years?

2 (2m 35s):
I would say three things. So first thing, right out of the gate, between in my ops, these are all my observations between course 2000, 2000 2006, probably 2005, 2006. For me, I remember it was significant because I had to move my data center operations from Michigan to a larger data center in a state that was better networked, but was when video became rich and big. So for those of you listening, you know, it wasn't always the case that there was free videos online, everywhere. Like it was actually the case back in those years, I recall all of the free galleries and promotions were images.

2 (3m 19s):
And I remember going to conferences where people were debating giving away seven to 15 second video clips saying, well, why would somebody, why would somebody ever buy if you're going to give them this much content for free, not behind a page. Right. So I think very, I think very early on that was a paradigm shift because all of a sudden we were changing how we were entertaining people behind and in front of the paywall. So I think that that was significant. And I would time that to 2006, because of the recent I moved my desk, my data center, and back then the 200 servers, 250 servers I had in Michigan down to Miami was I couldn't buy access to the internet at rates that would make me globally competitive.

2 (4m 1s):
And this was now relevant because we were pushing weight for it, a couple of gigabit, which, which back then cost very, very different dollars. Right?

1 (4m 12s):
So I remember that too.

2 (4m 14s):
So that was significant. I think the next paradigm shift happened quite literally about five years later. And this was the advent of tube sites. So this was the difference in mindset and, and delivery and site design between having reasonably sized promotions that were out there and given the whole thing away for free, so around. And I'm sure I'm, I'm, I'm not precise on the air, but sometime between 2009, 2011, this became prevalent. And the first tube sites that were online, they had all stolen content and the laws really weren't caught up with the technology. So there was no terms to enforcement, but basically the idea was let's go rip everyone's videos and, or log into their members, areas, download their videos, cause those are the best ones.

2 (5m 4s):
And then let's post them for free and then let's take their watermarks up and we'll put watermarks on for our site or other shit that we want to promote. And then let's design a website that has advertisements for everything else except for their website. So let's promote ed products, let's promote other video sites let's promote live cam websites. So this was a fundamental shift, right? So this in dating, right? Especially with dating and all this other stuff in life camps, right? So this was, this was what I considered to be the second paradigm shift in the adult internet of things. Because at this point you had a divergence, you had some people with new thinking. Basically, the guy is starting from zero.

2 (5m 44s):
It's like, Hey, I got nothing to lose and everything to gain, right? So, and a lot of them multinational, not necessarily based in north America. So not even, not even necessarily subject to these kinds of laws and things like this, right? So they go and they launch these sites and of course they get, you know, this is, this is a huge deal. And they start getting tremendous traffic and this starts growing. But that, that was significant because that was the first nail in the coffin to premium site owners, which was the way back then, there were not really sites that were huge, that were selling paperclip. I know that this was always a part of the business model for ABN and they're still successful. And they were then, and also for hot movies.

2 (6m 25s):
And I'm sure also for clips for sale at that time. But then, but then there was 10 or 20,000 other premium sites that charged 9 99 to 39 99 a month that didn't have any individual consumption. Right. And a lot of those site owners, I think that this is when their business started to change. Of course they were all infuriated and wouldn't everybody, if your stuff is being stolen, posted in someone else's profiting and you're getting nothing, but see, but see what happened in those moments. And for the years, the next couple of years that followed is what did those business owners do to react to a complete change in the environment.

2 (7m 6s):
You have the business owners that adapted, and those are going to be the ones, those are the ones that were Julie that are very successful today and still in business. And then you have the ones that didn't have the ones that

1 (7m 17s):
Just bitched the ones that just bitched. Yeah, I remember.

2 (7m 21s):
Yeah. And, and, you know, to their credit, a lot of them did what they were supposed to do. They went and they hired lawyers and DMC agents, and they started sending out notices to play whack-a-mole to get content removed. And that is certainly one of the right reactions is always to protect your trademark and your copywriting.

1 (7m 36s):
Absolutely.

2 (7m 37s):
But the ones that became the most successful are the ones that morphed and said, well, this is, this is really changing how everything's being consumed and I need to modify my business. So they started creating content, you know, and this is, I think really when we had at sort of at the same moment in time is when reality sites came a thing, wasn't a thing before then it became a thing around that. This is around that moment. You know, like, I, I don't know if it was bang bus or which way, you know, which one of the first ones we claim that notoriety, but a lot of sites got, got really, really smart. And they said, well, shit, these sites have all the traffic. And so instead of flight with them, let's focus on producing our good content. Let's try to partner with them.

2 (8m 18s):
And that's how they drove traffic to their sites. And that's how they got their tens of thousands of members. And that's how they wrote their history. So that was the second paradigm shift. I think the third paradigm shift is something that's happened within the last few years, but fully come to maturity probably started about five years at five to six years after that, but really came into its own and full maturity two to three years ago. And this is what we see with only fans and flip sites Because now everything has changed. Right? So now in this day and age, you know, we've all got an iPhone or an Android and we're all consuming all the time on our Netflix or, you know, using the apple store by eclipse and media and doing other things in music.

2 (8m 58s):
Yeah. So I think this is different because this shift takes power away from say the large monolithic platforms that owned the rights to all of the content and in a very certain way. Now there, of course there are new large platforms, but really what's happened is they've given the power back to the producers of the content because in this wasteland and devastation after tube sites happened, there was, you know, we went from having such a huge quantity of content producers to a much, much smaller quantity, right? So, you know, things kind of dried up before they started to expand again. And now what we see is, you know, there are all of these terrific platforms and, you know, there's five or 10 really big ones.

2 (9m 44s):
You know, obviously the largest one where everybody knows what that one is, but there are hundreds of thousands of content producers. And that's all very, very interesting. And the smart plug in this smart platforms realize they're not even going to try to fight the competition, even some of these campsites too. You know, if you go and you look at, if you go, when you look@myfreecams.com and you've got, you know, cam girls on there selling their entertainment services, they're not prohibited from promoting their, their eyeline Crips or their, their clips for sale or their only fans, or the fact that they might take money through that platform and then do a Skype show.

2 (10m 27s):
So I think that's very interesting. So I think that's, that's the most recent paradigm shift because that's the big deal.

1 (10m 34s):
Absolutely. Yep. So what are some cornerstone technological advances that has affected the business since you've been a web host, an adult?

2 (10m 44s):
So I think with this it's, I mean, obviously at mojo hosts, I've, I'm actually, so despite the fact that I'm fun to drink and party with and go out and have dinners and I like to go dancing and everybody knows that I'm actually the it buyer. So every like every hard drive CPU, motherboard choice that's ever been made, every nut screw bolt cable for all of the tens of millions of dollars in IQ buying, I've actually been the one that narrowed it out and figured out all of that.

1 (11m 10s):
Okay.

2 (11m 11s):
So the biggest technological advances of course have been in CPU speed and processing, you know, and Ram and costs of all of these things. And storage is significant. You know, how you've changed from spinning drives to now solid state drives all of these are huge technological advances, but as it would pertain it to the adult industry where that affects everybody is our, in our ability to delivery to deliver high quality live or prerecorded video at low latencies. So this is accomplished by obviously having the right software stack running, but also having complex global networks and the right kind of servers set up that can cache your content, you know, in different geos, if it's prerecorded video or if it's your desire to deliver live streaming video, then you know, you need to really have some also some great hosting and a lot of different places.

2 (12m 4s):
So, you know, the networking since I've started changed from servers with a hundred megabit ports to gigabit ports, to 10 gigabit ports, to 25 to 40, and now even a hundred gigabit networking on individual servers.

1 (12m 16s):
Wow.

2 (12m 17s):
And those kinds of changes at the edges of the network too. So

1 (12m 20s):
Well, the cost of, and the cost of hosting has gone so far down.

2 (12m 25s):
It has, it depends on which metric you measure that, you know, it's still costs for service and support. People cost more now good labor costs more than it's never cost of before. Right.

1 (12m 36s):
I mean, in terms of when you're buying data, I'm talking about,

2 (12m 40s):
Oh yeah, no, data's dead has changed. The data's changed significantly. Right? So when I started my business in 1999, I think I was paying $300 a megabit, no, by 2002, I was paying 70, you know, today raw average wholesale costs on bulk bandwidth are sub 10 cents per megabit.

1 (13m 3s):
Oh my God,

2 (13m 5s):
Mind you that's. But that's not the price that we sell to our customers app to buy lots of networks and you have to blend them together. And then you have to go fast and smart and all those other things. But yeah, all of these advances have essentially made it so that somebody can deploy a site today and have, you know, other, I've got a plan at 1599 and 1 99 a month that someone can go launch a tube site using mech money software, one of two Mojo's VPs or a dedicated server. And it includes at the $200 a month, it includes support backups, the software and a couple of terabytes of storage and like 20 or 30 terabytes of monthly transfer, which is quite a lot.

2 (13m 45s):
And that's on CDN for global delivery, not just from a server.

1 (13m 48s):
Wow. Crazy. So what forecasts, can you give them about the future of technology affecting the adult industry?

2 (13m 60s):
I think we're, I think in the next few years, I don't know. I don't know what it's going to be, or who's going to do it, but I think we're going to see some type of a paradigm shift in social networking. I'm not exactly sure what's going to transpire, but I think that while that isn't technology, like when I say CPU's is technology, I think that that's, what's connecting us all is social networks. And I think we've seen a lot of very large social networks have so much control and be on top for a long time. So it only seems logical to me that, you know, perhaps we can expect to see something new come to popularity.

1 (14m 40s):
Oh, sure.

2 (14m 41s):
So, you know, other than that, I don't think you're going to really see bandwidth will continue to get a little bit more competitive, but at, but now, like you remember even on a wholesale level, like when I look at some of like, when I look at what my costs are, I'm not looking at large double dip, I'm not looking at double digit decreases and bailiff costs year over year. Now I'm actually looking at like, you know, fractions of pennies. Of course, some of these on some of these metrics

1 (15m 11s):
Get minus

2 (15m 13s):
What, what is what's super interesting. And we saw it rear its ugly head with COVID is how completely dependent we are on some of these technology supply chains. So I can tell you right now buying and building servers right now is a bitch. And especially using what might be quote unquote latest greatest because all of the supply chains are messed up and actually everything is being priced out. So, you know, when I look at building a server and putting it online today, the relative cost is probably as much as 50% more than it might've been a year or two ago.

1 (15m 49s):
That's crazy.

2 (15m 50s):
So what's interesting is, is your servers that the servers that you're buying, they're not going to get any cheaper. In fact, I would tell you, honestly, they're getting a little bit more expensive. The great news is, is that things are so fast that obviously the newer technology does more than the older technology does. So we're sort of to a point where maybe it doesn't matter as much, you know, people often say, well, for example, Bruce, and we don't need to get into specifics, but I know I quoted something for you once. You're like, well, this other web host has this newer server and it's a little bit cheaper than what most wants to charge, but their question you really need to ask yourself when you're looking for website and technology is what's the end result to the customer? How fast is the patron, right? Because at some point with the technology, like, it doesn't matter.

2 (16m 31s):
Like if you're not loading your CPU's up to a hundred percent, it doesn't matter if one's a little bit faster than the other. If that's your demand for the server is, is never going to meet the maximum potential

1 (16m 42s):
Good things to know good things to know what are three habits you'd recommend developing to any business owner.

2 (16m 51s):
Oh gosh, Natalie, thank you for such an amazing question. Three hats, three habits. So I think on this one, I'm going to take, I'm going to take a slightly different approach. So I'm going to, I'm going to reflect on myself. Okay. So, so like what things do I need to focus on? What would be the three things that I could focus on to be a better Brad, as a, as a president for mojo host for my customers and for my employees, I think working hard and showing up and putting the time in

1 (17m 19s):
Sure.

2 (17m 20s):
Number one, you know, so being diligent, I gotta be honest, you know, so 22 years in, I've got an option. Like I can, I can make up six o'clock in the morning and go into the office or I can enroll in at lunch, But the best part, but the best Brad, the one that's best for his business and best for his customers is the one that understands what puts the food on his family's table. And that's the brand that sets us alarm somewhere in the middle to wake up at seven, to be in the office at eight 30 or nine and to have a full business day, most days, most weeks, Monday through Friday, you know, I think they, everyone needs to take vacations because that's healthy. But I think, I think staying,

1 (17m 59s):
And you're finally doing that by the way. And you, you remember the email that I sent you about that?

2 (18m 6s):
Yeah. So in terms, so in terms of habits, I think staying, I think staying diligent and actually, and actually questioning oneself, like, am I working hard or am I just doing the things that I want to do in passing time? Because I can, I can show up at the office and be there for six, seven or eight hours and not necessarily challenged myself, but I'll tell you what the, the days that I feel best when I get home after, after work at whatever time that is, are the days when I did stuff that I really didn't enjoy doing.

1 (18m 35s):
I tried

2 (18m 36s):
To talk to my teenagers about this, like do stuff that you don't like and do it often, because I think that that builds character and that feels rewards

1 (18m 42s):
Solutely absolutely.

2 (18m 45s):
So that's one habit. What's another habit

1 (18m 48s):
Days like that. I days like that. I usually have a scotch at night, by the way. But anyway, go ahead.

2 (18m 53s):
Yeah. For me, for me, something else, I would challenge myself to do better in 2022 is be smart and fail or quit things sooner. Hmm. Have those hard conversations. So when I reflect on my, on my business ownership the last 20 years, and I'm not necessarily the best manager of people, so I've tried to set things up now. So I don't have a lot of direct reports, right. So I've got a really wonderful management team and they do a lot of that day to day management and deploying a lot of those hard decisions. But one of the things that I would challenge myself to is, is following my gut. And when I hit, when I instinctively know that there are things I need to action on in my business, hard decisions that I need to make to force me to do it and to not put my head in the sand and delayed the decision.

2 (19m 40s):
Yeah. So, you know, without giving any specific examples, I would generally say like at each moment in time, over the course of my company, when, when an employee wasn't working out, I usually knew long before then. And for me that often met and from, and for me that often meant try to help them help themselves or try to find a resolution to something that just maybe wasn't meant to be

1 (20m 4s):
Brad. You're a nice guy. I could imagine how hard it is for you to fire someone. In fact, I, I know that for a fact. So I remember one instance. So anyway,

2 (20m 13s):
Well, none of that, but besides that

1 (20m 17s):
With, without, without getting to any specific,

2 (20m 21s):
I mean, there, there has been, there's been many, many over the years, so I don't just reflect on one. There's been many, there's been many of those. In fact, in fact, every single, every single salesperson I've ever let go, and there's been a whole handful of them has been, it has been a very, very difficult choice. And sometimes it's just, you know, the opportunity isn't right. For somebody with where they're at in life in life, or it's just not the right match. And so it's often my experience that as much as I might labor over this, like they also knew the whole time. So I've been punishing myself. So it's just easier to just be, be a man about it and kind of have that conversation. The other thing I would say is, I think similar to that would be maybe the third thing is killing new business ideas that don't get traction.

2 (21m 10s):
They take away from your mental energy to keep you off focus. You've got your core business. It's what you're best at. You know, some of us business owners ever get one breakout success and I'm a very much a visionary and I have lots of ideas all the time, but there, there are many things over the years that I've done and I've failed at and I held onto it for too long, for pride or for hope or, you know, something magical that clearly was never going to happen in that instance. And in all those instances, I wish I would have killed them sooner. Yeah.

1 (21m 42s):
So what would you call the pillars of a business, which require the most attention and are usually under appreciated?

2 (21m 51s):
Jeez, what a question. Pillars of business where the most attention, I mean the liveness test for me and my business is understanding my customer experience. And you don't really know that unless you talk to your customers or you inspect your, your staff and your employees work, or the quality of the service you're providing to actually have that customer experience. Like, so it's part, it's my it's in my nature to be very empathetic, right. So I've always had that sort of as a strong suit for me and being able to evaluate mojo host client experiences. But, but I think it's, it's very easy to be a manager or an operator in a business and be too detached from your customer's experience.

1 (22m 38s):
Absolutely.

2 (22m 39s):
I think it's, I think it's also, you know, in a good organization, you're empowering your people and those people that are working so hard for you. They're trying to take things away from you because they're supposed to, that means everything's going right. Right. Yeah. But really what's also supposed to happen is as a business owner operator at all of these levels, whether it's me or it's, it's someone that, you know, my vice president or, you know, one of the other VPs or managers, like, you need to get your hands dirty. Like you need to work, you need to engage with the clients. You need to like surf the website. You need to go look at things. You need to go. You know, like I get very, you know, we have like a once a month, all hands on staff meeting, right?

2 (23m 20s):
So there's 40, almost 40 people on the call every time, you know, everyone, that's a systems, administrator, everybody, a management billing, and we are largely a technical organization. So a lot of that costs upwards of 40 people, I would say like 35 or technical. Right. And then you've got like, you know, me a biller, you know, a VP of finance and you know, Natalie and sales and Jack, but everyone else's is super, super technical, but yup. It's important to make sure that when people have problems that you're dialed into that, like you have to, you have to, you have to know about it.

2 (24m 0s):
Like you have to make sure that like, that news gets passed up to you. Like, I have a lot of friends, tons of friends, like dozens, maybe even hundreds of friends that are, I would say more than hundreds of friends, of course that our customers. And I always say the same things in my phone calls. Like I hear a lot of times I'll like, everything's wonderful. Your staff is great. Like the support is really, really good. And I'm so happy about that, but I always make sure in every one of these conversations, when someone's giving us a compliment, I remind them. And I say, you know, when you eventually have that day, when something isn't going the way that you think or thought it should, or you don't know if that's how that's supposed to go, I want you to call me or message me Personally to tell me yes, because it's hard because a lot of times what happens is people don't want to bother you.

2 (24m 43s):
Like everyone, that seems just like you, that I'm too busy that I can't hear it, or don't want to hear it or that

1 (24m 49s):
I never assume you're too busy,

2 (24m 52s):
But a lot of people do or, or, you know, there's a mutual respect in your friends and they feel like they're afraid to bother you. And they don't want it to be a nag. Cause they generally like things. But I always try to encourage people the other way. Like that's how we make, that's how we stay really, really good at our business. Cause it's only when people raise a red flag and say like, Hey, was this really supposed to happen that way? Or you know, let's talk about this. Like that's, how

1 (25m 15s):
Can you improve? How can you improve otherwise? Right.

2 (25m 19s):
Sure. Of course. And we have a very complex deliverable. So we need that feedback. Like, and sometimes you need a common sense approach to going and reviewing someone, someone could have a support ticket with a hundred threaded responses in it. And it might have one, two or five system administrators that have been in there. And sometimes what needs to happen is either me or my vice president or the VP of support and operations. Like someone needs to go and look at this whole thread and read it, like they're the customer So that we can judge ourselves and say like, okay, like where did we go wrong in this? Or what could we have done better? Or why wasn't this escalated? Like, like there was a problem.

2 (25m 60s):
Something got pushed back. And then, you know, like I want to know when someone's having a bad experience because I also want to be the guy that reaches out and says, Hey, I'm really sorry. We made a mistake. We've looked at this. We understand how we did it. And we're going to do better next time. And I'm going to go put a credit on your account.

1 (26m 18s):
That's why, that's why you guys have the reputation. You have Brian, you know, The company is you, you are the company. I mean that's, and I know you take that. I know you take that serious.

2 (26m 32s):
I'm hoping to build, I think it's, I take it seriously, but we, to be honest, like the, really the core value is that like that, that whole that's good mojo slogan that we've got. I think, I think we've really built an hired and fired a team that, that webs by that my, my goal is to make it so that while I'm synonymous with the brand and maybe I don't always want to be, or maybe I would like it to be bigger than that. So

1 (26m 58s):
Of course, but still, but still people know you care and that's, that's the important thing. Okay. I got a question for you. Does profit always equal success?

2 (27m 11s):
No.

1 (27m 12s):
Y

2 (27m 13s):
Sometimes you make money and you don't feel good about it.

1 (27m 16s):
Hmm.

2 (27m 17s):
About how you earned it. And I wouldn't say that that's the case. I wouldn't necessarily say that that's the case, the motor hosts, but like in reflecting, right? Like I'm, it depends. The question is what, what does success mean to you? Right. Like that's really the question. The question is, is

1 (27m 33s):
Yeah. What does, what does success mean to you? Let's go there.

2 (27m 36s):
Well, to me it means a lot of different things. I mean, and at the root of it, I want to feel proud of what I do as much as I can. And you know, I'm still an employer and you know, a lot of the jobs that, that my employees do, just like some of the things that even that I do on a regular basis, some of them are pretty mundane and repetitive. It's not always the most exciting thing, but for me, for me, success, like even if my personal income hasn't grown in the last couple of years, I guess I'm not measuring it on pure profit. Right. Cause if it was on profit, right then I will be measuring what's Brad's bottom line. What did he take home? 2021, 2020, 2019. And I'm going to tell you, Bruce, I haven't, while I've grown my business, each one of those years by double digits, I haven't actually made more money.

1 (28m 21s):
Oh, you're putting it back. You're putting it

2 (28m 23s):
Back and putting, I've been putting it back in, but, but how, how do I feel like I'm still successful? So I gave, I judged that for myself and for Moja hosts first are my customers happy? So I believe the answer to that is yes. Yep. Second are my employees happy? And am I taking the best care of them? And you know, you have to make a lot of choices as an employer about how you take care of your employees. Like emoji hosts. We've more, we've more or less gotten to a place right now where there's a limited paid time off, You know? And no, it's not documented exactly like that in the handbook, but I make these exceptions all the time. And I always have, you know, especially with COVID and everything else and Burbank and people getting sick and ill.

2 (29m 8s):
Like I went and especially at the start of the pandemic, you know, I raised, there's just been a lot of exceptions for employment that we've made. And, but it's important to me because you know what I, I guess like secretly somewhere inside, like, you know, I want to be the guy that makes them that makes the most money and crazy successful, personal fortune. Like that would be awesome. And I, I truly believe with more hard work and what I'm doing, getting smarter and better at it, then someday I'll see fruition of that. But what makes me feel good is that I take great care of my employees as good as I can for them. And that for them and their families, whether it's they need a loan for something, whether it's, they need more paid time off than they're supposed to have based on their tenure at the company, whether it's the decisions I make from linear to the next, on which blue cross blue shield plan we're buying for everybody.

2 (29m 59s):
Like we have, I think probably I'm not going to say probably I would say almost certainly, probably, and probably most certainly in the adult industry, but probably by comparison to any other enterprise organization. Like I have the richest healthcare benefit that's out there. So it is the most expensive blue cross plan. And that has the lowest deductible and it has full vision and full dental. And I don't just buy that fully for my employee. I buy that for any spouses and dependents for their spouse and all of their dependents and they contribute nothing towards the premium. So that means for me, when I hire somebody that's married and has a family of four that that's 20 to $25,000 a year that we're paying for that.

2 (30m 39s):
But you know what I, why I do that because the same fucking thing I want for my family, because no matter where they are, whether they're making 60,000 a year for me, or a hundred thousand or $150,000, I want to make sure that when it comes to their health and their care and the care of everyone, that's important to them and their nuclear family, that they can have access to whatever they need. And obviously healthcare is very complicated in the United States. And if you look at the statistics, you would see that most banks, most bankruptcies are actually healthcare related. And so

1 (31m 13s):
I was telling you, I was telling you before our interview about that Andrew Yang book that I'm reading and it was, it was citing that statistic though, what I read just last night.

2 (31m 23s):
Yeah. I mean, very, very sad. So, you know, how do I define success? I look for, I look to see, am I having personal growth, my challenged by the work that I'm doing for my employees? You know, it didn't use to be the case. I couldn't have given you an honest answer eight years ago, Bruce, if you said like, is there opportunity for advancement at mojo host? And we were talking about a system administrator level employee, I probably would have said yes, but I don't know if it would have been true. Maybe even back then I would have thought it was true, but it has become true because we finally brought that to fruition with, with James that manages my business, my vice president. So now we have all kinds of opportunity for, for, for employees to advance, not just with their pay, but in their job and their skills and the responsibilities.

2 (32m 10s):
You know, the last few years we've been secretly building new products and new technologies and we have all kinds of stuff that's already happened and going to be happening in the near future. You know, so there's a whole dev ops team. Now there's a whole management tier of systems administrator to manage the different shifts for systems administration, right. And those, and those, all of those, all of these employees were promoted from those initially grinding jobs of, you know, systems administration, even in the systems administration, like the support ticket we've, we've taken the whole, what is support at mojo host and divided that out? You know, we have a network operations team now we've got, we have a team now that actually all they do is manage the monitoring and a words for all of your servers and services.

2 (32m 53s):
Wow. And we've got, you know, the team for provisioning and then we have, you know, the general support queue and then we have an escalations thing. So

1 (33m 1s):
Come a long way, man, definitely come a long way. You know, what's interesting. You were talking about, you know, the paid leave. I'll tell you the opposite of that. A guy that I know was working at a hotel part of a hotel chain and the worst possible thing you could imagine happened, his girlfriend diet in bed, sleeping next to him. Do you know what the hotel said? You don't get any time off work. So That's what you're competing with. I mean, that's an extreme example, but that's what you're competing with is companies that just don't give a damn about their employees.

2 (33m 42s):
Sure. And I think one of the inherent challenges to scaling any type of company is how do you actually manage to happiness and manage to unusual situations as an organization gets harder? So I expect that that will continue to be a challenge, right? So my challenge with 40 employees is very different than some of my friends companies that have two or 300 employees and very different from companies that have 1,005 thousand or a hundred thousand employees. But, you know, if given the chance and the opportunity, I would love to be the CEO someday of that company that has 10 or 20,000 employees and say, you know what, we're fucking awesome at that too.

1 (34m 23s):
Yeah. Yeah. You try to do that without losing control. That's the only problem.

2 (34m 30s):
Well, the only way to move forward is to give up control. But I think, you know, as I said earlier, you really have to inspect what you expect out of all tiers of your business, including all the way down to the customer or even the customer's customer experience. One of the things that people would never ever guess we've put our, our physical network, like how we connect to the internet through so many different phone companies. We've put this together in such an awesome way. And we don't talk a lot about that because most of the time when we're talking about posting, you know, people don't really want to get to get into the weeds of how it is. We build things the way that we do. But the truth of it is I have a network operations team that's so fucking good at what they do.

2 (35m 13s):
And we deploy such good technology and make such good choices about where we buy from and how we blend bandwidth. That I can have one of my $250 a month elevated acts, complete managed, hosting, special clients that, you know, basically your typical pay site, entry-level pay site owner that has a server for Moja host and elevated Xs or CMS. I can have one of those guys have a member that has a problem with a video buffering, and we can escalate that all the way to my network support team to troubleshoot that guy's home router and we've done. And we have, yeah, it isn't the same, but the only reason we can, we can do that is because we made all the right choices that all the higher layers of the network and deployed all the right technologies and investments.

2 (36m 2s):
What most people don't know is most hosts deploy what's effectively called least cost routing solutions. So we have extra, we have some extra special technology in play that most hosts do not deploy because it comes at quite a premium, but it actually is inspecting all of the traffic that enters and exits our network. And then, and then searches the whole internet to look for ways to reduce latency. Like if I can reduce latency by more than five milliseconds to any destination in the world, my network will do that.

1 (36m 35s):
That's all.

2 (36m 36s):
So we grabbed this regardless of cost. We'll even take traffic off of free network hearing to do it.

1 (36m 41s):
So what do you want to accomplish in the balance of this year? 2022?

2 (36m 47s):
The balance of this year, 2021, or what's my new year's resolution for next year.

1 (36m 52s):
Oh, see it. You just, you just blew it, man. Cause we're doing this in December and it's going to run in January. That's okay. Everyone blow, everyone blows it at some. Everyone blows it at some point, so, okay.

2 (37m 4s):
I'll give you both answers.

1 (37m 7s):
No. Just tell, just tell me what you want to accomplish. Business-wise in 2022,

2 (37m 13s):
I want to increase profits, Bruce.

1 (37m 15s):
Good.

2 (37m 16s):
I have a data center that I've invested so many, many millions of dollars to build. I have 900 unsold servers waiting there for me to sell. Wow, I've got 20, 30 petabytes of storage sitting there on pallets, waiting to be wrapped. I've got all this stuff that I either already own, or I'm already making payments on. And magically mysteriously wonderfully Moja host has grown enough where I'm not running in the ride. We're still doing all right. I've just, instead of, instead of paying myself more, the last couple of years, we've invested in all of these different things. So I'm really looking forward to 2022, sort of bringing the cattle home and, and seeing through what my vision of all of this has been and, and selling new service inside of our new data center.

2 (38m 8s):
And so

1 (38m 12s):
Really

2 (38m 12s):
Been a boon.

1 (38m 15s):
No, but he will be glad you,

2 (38m 17s):
We talked about all this. Well, we, you know, we talked earlier in the interview though, about what are some of the mistakes that business owners make or what advice would you give? You know, so I've been, I've been trying to run this very delicate balance of making sure that I'm not over-investing or overleveraging that we can actually afford. Like all of these are calculate our calculated risks based on return, but the great news, but the great news is my whole team is very focused and we're really ready for the new year with all of these new products and services. And so, you know, I'm hopeful that it's the case that next year we can, we can focus on selling into all of these great new assets that we have.

2 (39m 1s):
And if we do that, the way that I expect that we can, that should hopefully show some, some good profit from that.

1 (39m 9s):
I hope so for your sake. Well, Brad, I'd like to thank you for being our guest again today on adult side broker talk, and I hope we'll chant who will have a chance to do this again really soon. My broker tip today is part two of what to do to make your site more valuable. For one, you decide to sell it later, keep your website design up to date, do a redesign from time to time, people will tend to think your site is the same as ever and click out of it without even looking if something doesn't change. So keep it fresh and up to date times change. So should your website look at what your competitors are doing and see what it is you really like emulate success.

1 (39m 50s):
If you know a site to be particularly successful, look at what it is they're doing and do some of the same things. I'm not saying copy it. I'm just suggesting you improve your site by looking around a bit, you've got to keep up with the times or you're going to end up being left behind. Also keep an eye on your competition and make sure you're offering everything on your site that they are or more don't just look at their design, but make sure your offers are good. And you're competitive. The same goes for your content. Do you ever wonder why one site does well on the others? Don't check out the competition's content. What are they doing that you're not doing? Be willing to make changes.

1 (40m 31s):
People can't understand why they're losing sales to a competitor yet the competitors clearly doing everything better, emulate success. Make sure everything on your website works well. Make sure all of your links work properly. Check them on a regular basis. If things don't work, you're going to lose customers. People are not patient. These days. People's attention spans are like that of a gnat. They click out immediately and go to the next result in Google. If they don't find what they're looking for. If the site is hard to navigate, or if things don't work, check all of your internal scripts and plugins and make sure they're updated regularly as well. We'll talk about this subject more next week and next week we'll be speaking with Dominick Ford of just four fans.

1 (41m 21s):
And that's it for this week's Adult Site Broker Talk. I'd once again like to thank my guest Brad Mitchell of Mojohost. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I'm Bruce Friedman.