DuoCircle didn’t start as an email company.

In 2014, what is now DuoCircle was a small web-hosting and design shop building custom solutions for e-commerce. One of our customers needed to switch their email hosting provider because the company that had been running it, Dyn (the dynamic DNS company), was getting out of the email business. They asked us for help with the migration. We reached out to Dyn.

Dyn had a problem. They had ten years of brand equity and a long tail of email hosting customers, but the average revenue per customer was low compared to where Dyn had taken the rest of their business. They needed someone to take over the book. The condition was non-negotiable: don’t damage our brand, don’t let our customers down.

We agreed.

The first operational decision after the acquisition was a survey. We asked the acquired customers what they were unhappy about. The answer was support. So we put 24/7 live support and an SLA in place for everyone, regardless of plan size. “If you’re paying us anything, we are going to be there for you.”

Twelve years later, that’s still how the company operates. Dyn went on to sell to Oracle for $800 million. We didn’t damage their brand on the way out. The 24/7 promise still applies across every product. And the operating principle from that founding transaction, take care of every customer that comes our way, has produced a portfolio of specialized email products and a customer base of more than 50,000 organizations.

Every product after the acquired book was built the same way. A customer came to us with an email problem. The existing vendors wouldn’t engage at the customer’s price tier, wouldn’t customize for the use case, or wouldn’t take the technical call. We said “we think we can handle that” and built it.

The first net-new product after Dyn was AutoSPF. Customers running on our outbound SMTP service were breaking their SPF records due to AWS architecture, and there was one major service in the market that did SPF flattening. We approached them about a partnership. Two or three sales calls in, the quote came back: $1,000 a month to fix the problem for one customer paying us $4 a month. The math didn’t work for anyone but the vendor. So we built AutoSPF instead. It now runs for a $16 billion IT services firm and tens of thousands of smaller organizations.

That’s the loop. Customer asks. Existing vendors won’t fit. We build it. The product becomes a real business. A few years later we look up and there is a portfolio.

The portfolio looks deliberate now because it is, just not top-down deliberate. Every product is a yes to a customer who couldn’t get one elsewhere. The shape only becomes visible looking back.

Maysoft, the email security specialist for IBM and HCL Notes / Domino, had served Domino customers for twenty years. When their team was ready to step back, they reached out to DuoCircle. Their reasoning: “You operate the way we do. We trust you to take care of our customers.”

That’s the same condition under which DuoCircle was founded. Don’t damage the brand, don’t let the customers down. Two transactions, eight years apart, both started with another email company choosing us specifically because of how we treat customers. The second one validated that the first wasn’t an accident.

The Maysoft customer book came over with the SpamSentinel and Verisend products, and we still serve HCL Notes / Domino environments today, alongside the modern Microsoft 365 and Exchange customers we have added since.