Natfluence: interview with Ben Dowling

Ben just had a nice interview with the Natfluence team, we decided to repost it to our blog too.

Career Clip

Ben Dowling is the Founder & CEO of IPinfo, the leading source for IP address data that processes over 40 billion API requests per month for more than 300,000 businesses and developers. Clients include Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Intel, Dell, CBS, Xerox and John Deere, among others.

Dowling is a former Facebook engineer and former CTO of Calm.com, a market-leading app for sleep, meditation, and relaxation. Dowling also founded host.io, a powerful and fast domain name data API built for cybersecurity, business intelligence, competitor analysis, and market research.

I founded IPinfo to meet the need for a trusted source of accurate and reliable IP address and geolocation data.

My AdVice

How did you get into the industry?

I started my career in London, where I worked for a few different startups. While I was working for Lightbox, an Android photo-sharing app, Facebook acquired the team. As a Facebook engineer, I worked on stopping bad ads and malicious advertisers. After that, before founding IPinfo, I was CTO at Calm.com.

IPinfo started out as a fun little side project and evolved into a more fully-formed product, eventually turning into a real business. All of our initial users joined us when we were a free service, and they helped spread the word. They were the ones tweeting about it, sharing it, and helping us grow.

In some ways, we feel a responsibility towards those early users and want to continue to support them. They give us great feedback and product suggestions, which helps us to make a better product and often encourages those users to become paid subscribers.

Inspiration for IPinfo, and your vision for the Business?

IPinfo prides itself on being the most reliable, accurate, and in-depth source of IP address data available anywhere. Our IP address-related APIs serve over 40 billion API requests per month for more than 300,000 businesses and developers. Some of the services we offer include IP geolocation lookup, which means the identification of an IP address’s geographic location in the real world.

We build and maintain our own proprietary database, which can be used to generate various forms of geographic information for your IP traffic. Our Privacy Detection API detects different methods used to mask a user’s true IP address, including VPN detection, proxy detection, tor usage, or a connection via a hosting provider, which could potentially be used to tunnel traffic and mask the true IP address.

Our APIs can be useful to every industry you can think of–cybersecurity, web personalization, financial technology, and so on. We’ve got great use cases and case studies on our site that showcase how our customers use IPinfo’s data for everything from simple purposes, like redirecting users based on their location, to more complex projects, such as creating their own in-house analytics dashboard.

Ideal experience for a customer?

Our customers drive what we do every day, and it’s important that we reflect our commitment to customers in all of our interactions. It’s not just talk. The ideal customer experience, to me, is when the customer is able to use our data to successfully solve their problem and benefit their business. And, if they’re 80% of the way there, but we’re not quite meeting their needs, they can come to us and talk through what’s missing, so we can work together to get them to 100%.

We want their feedback because it helps us come up with solutions that will better serve all of our customers. In fact, that type of collaboration with a customer is what led us to develop our Privacy Detection API, which turned out to be useful not only to the initial user who asked for it but for many of our other customers as well.

How do you motivate others?

IPinfo has been a global remote company from the start. I am in Seattle, or sometimes back visiting the UK, where I’m from, and we have team members around the world. It’s always been important to me to develop a strong culture, so our whole team feels connected even though they are so spread out.

Communication is obviously key — in fact, we operate under the assumption that over-communication is just right for a remote team. Remembering to have fun is also part of the IPinfo culture. Since we’re not meeting around an actual water cooler, we do it virtually in #offtopic Slack channels and schedule Zooms to take a break to share meals, talk about our non-work lives, and just be human.

The more we connect on that level, the better we work as a team, and always with the goal of providing the best possible data and service to our customers.

Career advice to those in your industry?

The important thing to remember is that APIs, dev tools, and even infrastructure-as-a-service are all “invisible” products. There’s no user-interface to show off in an ad and no tagline that succinctly sums up everything that the product can be used for.

There’s a huge time and attention commitment required from potential customers to understand what your product is even capable of. Unlike with traditional businesses, you can’t start with a product and then look for a market. There are too many hurdles to get over to put your product in front of a customer.

With invisible products, you have to start with a market, and you need to find an unquestionable need for your service. A few years ago, I stumbled upon one developer’s need on Stack Overflow. He was trying to customize his webpage, so he was looking for a way to fetch the location of a visitor based on their IP address.

I built an API in response to his question, posted it, and only months later found that hundreds of other developers also found my tool useful. I had accidentally discovered a need — that’s how IPinfo came to be.

My AdVantage

What do you do best?

Listen to our users. Their feedback, challenges, and ideas have always been at the center of what we do, and that is what drives all of us at IPinfo to innovate and improve. We take a genuine interest in our customers–we want to know how they are using our data, what problems they are trying to solve, and how we can help.

It’s a great advantage we have as a smaller, younger startup — we are approachable and accessible to our customers — they get to know us, and we get to know them, so we can better serve them. We want them to be able to pick up the phone or jump into our Slack channel to discuss a problem with us, and we want to work with them to figure out a solution. Everyone uses our IP data to serve different needs, and we love to share their challenges, successes, and stories with other customers and prospective customers who may find them valuable.

Most Challenging Moment?

As I mentioned, I’m lucky to have a really creative, hardworking team that also happens to be remote. When everyone is in the same room, stuff happens organically. You don’t have to necessarily be great at figuring out what the exact processes are when everyone is in the same place because you just chat about it, and it happens. With remote teams, you need to be more conscious about communication and processes.

I’m pretty anti-process, and I think, “We’ll just hire a bunch of smart people, and things will fall into place.” That’s possible with a small startup team in an office, and it works for remote work, but you do need to put in more effort making sure things are getting done, and everyone is on the same page. In an office, this comes freely, but when you are remote, you need to spend some extra effort around consciously communicating.

Motto?

What motivates me every day is the drive to create something meaningful and long-lasting.

Current Passions?

In the warmer weather, I love running and hiking–there are so many great trails in and around Seattle. In the winter I love snowboarding, especially with my kids who are great skiers. Pre-COVID, I loved traveling, so I am looking forward to doing more of that in 2021!

IPinfo is a comprehensive IP data and API provider with flexible pricing plans to meet your business needs. We handle billions of API requests per month, serving data like IP geolocation, VPN detection, IP to company, and more. Sign up for a free account or contact our data experts to learn more.