Today we have selected Perry Toone to take his interview. He is the CEO of THE XYZ.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
We are all doing okay, most of us were already working remotely before the pandemic started and we were early to adopt a mandatory work from home policy that continues to remain in place. I can remember being quite worried about the future when the lockdown orders started, I was concerned about businesses going out of business, people losing their jobs, the general health, and the wellbeing of people. I was expecting the worse and a general decline in the number of people using our email service. I recall there were quite a few cancellations in those first few weeks and things seemed very bleak. Fortunately, this did not last, and demand quickly turned into a demand for our service that I don’t think we have ever seen before.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
I basically just started helping people with their email accounts and websites. I was in a completely different industry and transitioned into IT full-time mostly due to my problem-solving abilities. Through providing dedicated and reliable support to people and businesses that use email, I have grown this from a side-business, into a career, and a growing company.
How does your company innovate?
I think ‘innovation’ is one of the most misused words in the English language, just behind ‘unique.’ Innovation is often used in marketing slogans but I think few things actually are innovative. To be innovative a product needs to be a real disruptor to an industry. With that being said, I don’t find Thexyz really fits as an innovative product. Email is nothing new and has been with us since the early ’70s, what makes our product stand out is our early adoption of various security policies and best practices. We are driven by helping our customers with email and adopting these best practices to enhance web security and online privacy. Many of our new features are also driven by customer requests, rather than striving to innovate, our goal is to simply meet customer demand with a secure and reliable product suite.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
Our team has since doubled in size to accommodate a large increase in customer requests. Those first few weeks of lockdown also saw an incredible increase in phishing and spoofing emails related to the pandemic. I think we recorded something like a 700% increase in malicious emails during that time. In general, I think life is much simpler during the pandemic, it has been very busy for my team and myself as very adapt to increased demand. I think we have not only been busier, but more productive also. We have made some key security enhancements over the past year and have some great new features planned for 2021.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
Something that stands on to me, is having to consider how to assist someone whose relatives have passed away and wished to close their account. Those first few weeks when the pandemic hit 2020, it
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
As we were already working mostly remotely before the pandemic, we were already set up for this. Our Webmail app has a handy real-time team chat which is a great way to stay in touch without leaving Webmail. We use Nextcloud and Ring Central for video calls and meetings, these services have been used heavily over the past year.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
The two biggest would be Google and Microsoft, with Google Workspace and Office 365. Our service offers the same core email hosting functionality as these two mainstream products, at around half the cost, and with better reliability, if you look at the problems both of these platforms have experienced over the past year. **
Your Final Thoughts
Thexyz provides paid email hosting services, competing directly with the likes of Gmail and other free email services. We attract and retain customers by providing a service that delivers value to them. People are happy to pay for services that respect their time and maintain their privacy.
People choose Thexyz for the speed and usability of our products, our uncomplicated approach to privacy (you pay an affordable fee for 100% of our efforts without advertisers in the mix), and of our fantastic customer support (it’s truly wonderful!).
- Spokesperson: Perry Toone
- Company: THE XYZ
- Website link: https://www.thexyz.com/