My cell phone number went onto the sales page of actium.dev at 18:49. It came off at 04:11 the next morning. I wasn’t working for most of the nine hours in between, and that’s where the replacement came from.
There’s a good argument for publishing a number, and it’s in the commit that added it. Owners who buy a small-business website have been sold to by agencies that hide behind contact forms. A number they can dial answers the “will this person still be here in six months” question before anyone asks it. Publishing something that costs you signals that you don’t plan to disappear.
That argument holds for a lot of businesses, but it isn’t why I took the number down. I took it down because I didn’t like how the page read with it there. A phone number says call us, we’re waiting, which is right for a plumber’s site. I find Actium’s client work by going out and looking for it. The number on the sales page doesn’t help with that.
The reasoning came afterward, and it went further than the feeling had. The argument assumes a reader who needs reassurance, and on the sales page, that’s someone I cold called. That reader already has my number, because I read it to them during the call. So the number on the page could only reach a stranger who found the page without me.
Which address?
So the page needed some other way for people to reach me, and email was the obvious one. That left a question I expected to settle in about two minutes.
The instinct is dante@actium.dev, because that’s my address and I’m the whole
company. It’s already in the footer of every page, so it’s public either way.
For the sales page, I still wanted an address I could change later. You can
delete an address from a site in ten seconds, but it stays in the lists it’s
already been sold into.
Mail for the domain runs on iCloud, which has a catch-all setting called Allow
all incoming messages. All it does is put mail for any address at your domain
into your inbox, whether or not you ever created that address. sales@,
hello@ and xyzzy@ all reach the same inbox.
So I could publish an address I hadn’t created and still read the mail sent to it.
Who answers
The sales page now publishes websites@actium.dev. There’s no mailbox behind
it. I answer it from dante@actium.dev, by name.
A stranger on /websites
Reads the page and decides to write. Sees one address.
websites@actium.devdoes not exist
Published on the page, with no account or mailbox behind it.
iCloud catch-all
One setting sends mail for any address at the domain to a single inbox.
dante@actium.dev
Where the mail arrives, and the address the reply comes from.
The idea arrived whole, a few seconds after I stopped trying to solve the scraping problem. I’d started picturing the person on the other end: what the address tells them, who answers, and the gap between the two. I saw its cost at the same moment, and that’s why I trusted it. An idea that shows up without its downside already visible is usually a preference wearing a reason.
A role address tells you what to expect before you’ve typed a word. Writing to
websites@ or info@ or support@ feels like writing to a queue. You expect
an autoresponder, a ticket number, and somebody whose job is the first fifteen
seconds of your problem. People who email info@ don’t expect the founder. The
address sets that low expectation by itself, for free.
Then a reply arrives a few hours later from a named person who has opened your site and looked at it properly. They can tell you the homepage weighs eight megabytes, and which photograph is most of that.
The gap between those two moments makes the impression, and I didn’t have to claim any of it. Agency sites claim you’ll work directly with someone senior. A reader can’t check that claim, and owners who have been burned before read straight past it. Here, the first reply shows it before anyone has paid or signed anything.
Why I’m not trying to look bigger
A better-funded competitor can buy a nicer site, a support desk and a team to staff it. They can’t buy a founder with enough time to answer the mail himself. This only works for a company small enough that it’s true. The advantage shrinks as the company grows, so it makes sense to spend it now instead of saving it.
Most small operators push the other way. They write “we” when they mean “I”, invent a team page and buy an office address. They try to look like the companies they compete with. I understand the instinct, but I think it’s backwards. Suppose the reason to pick me over an agency is that you get the person who builds the site. Then every dollar I spend to look bigger hides that reason.
I didn’t invent anything here. Catch-all addressing has existed for decades. A
small company gets this effect by accident the first time its founder answers
info@. I noticed that the accident worked better than the configuration I was
about to build, so I didn’t build it.
What it costs
The first cost is that websites@ isn’t disposable. That was supposed to be
half the point of a separate address. If it gets scraped and buried, you delete
it, publish a new one, and the junk stops. With the catch-all on, deleting it
has no effect, because every address at the domain resolves whether it exists or
not. I gave up a disposable address to keep the personal reply, and I’d make
that trade again.
The second cost is that it doesn’t scale. At ten emails a week I can answer each one personally within a few hours. At fifty I can’t, and by then I’ll have spent months teaching people to expect that I will. What I have to watch for is that it stops working after it has already made a promise.