How I Built It

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Jan Löffler and Plesk

May 28, 2019

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Jan Löffler is the CTO of Plesk, which is fantastic server management software. They’re rapidly growing set of sophisticated tools is inspiring., In this episode we’ll talk all about the history of Plesk, as well as what it’s like to manage software that powers hundreds of thousands of websites.

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 125 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Jan Loffler, who is the CTO of Plesk. Plesk has been a season-long sponsor, and I’m excited to talk to Jan today about all sorts of stuff. Plesk is a very interesting platform that is not just a single hosting platform, and it’s a management platform. It runs on all sorts of hosts, and he gives us a lot of insight into running software that is virtually everywhere. So I’m excited to talk to Jan today about a whole host, no pun intended, of things. We talk specifically about not just building Plesk in the history of Plesk, but we also talk about the WordPress Toolkit that they launched, which is super cool and a whole bunch of other things. So, why don’t we get right to it? Let’s get to the interview with Jan Loffler, of course, after a word from our sponsors.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. Let me tell you, I recently checked out their new and improved WordPress Toolkit, and I was super impressed by how easy it was to Spin Up new WordPress sites, clone sites, and even manage multiple updates to themes and plugins. With the click of one button, I was able to update all of my WordPress sites. I was incredibly impressed by how great their WordPress Toolkit is. You can learn more and try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Jan Loffler, CTO of Plesk. Jan, how are you today?

Jan Loffler: I’m fine. Perfect. Sun is shining. Happy to be here in your podcast finally, and looking forward to your good show.

Joe: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. As we record this, it is unseasonably warm here in the northeast of the United States, and after negative temperatures last week I will happily take that. So, today we are going to talk about the history and then future direction of Plesk, which has been around for a while. I remember using it on one of my first– Hosting my first real servers, my first real hosting companies. But why don’t we start out with who you are and what you do?

Jan: Yeah, sure. Hi, I’m Jan. I’m the CTO of Plesk, and I love WordPress and web development, and my professional career started by running my own web agency, building websites for others and for my clients. During my studies and afterwards, like 15 years ago, I joined one of the largest hosting companies in the world. Building their infrastructure, I quickly noticed that building the backbone of the web and being responsible for millions of websites makes me somewhat excited. Since then, I had the pleasure to build some of the most exciting hosting platforms in the world.

Joe: That’s great. So, you so you worked for a big hosting company before starting Plesk?

Jan: Absolutely. I was responsible for their whole hosting portfolio for ten years.

Joe: Wow, that’s great. What made you think, “I can improve this?” Like, what was the spark that started the idea of Plesk for you?

Jan: It was a whole journey. After building the hosting platform for this hoster, I joined one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in Europe. That was super exciting because it was a company– Or, it is still a company off of records, I have to say. The largest numbers, and that’s very impressive to build such a platform and being responsible for it. But when I was asked then to join Plesk and be the CTO, that was from friends. There is nothing better than working with friends and having a great team spirit and knowing each other very well. It’s like playing football and passing the ball blindly to your colleague because he exactly knows how to take it and score. That’s the feeling that we have at Plesk, so it’s an amazing team, and there you can only rock.

Joe: That’s great. So, let me clarify then. Plesk had already started before you joined, or were you on the core team that built up Plesk?

Jan: Good question. Plesk is actually, it was founded a long time ago. Maybe I’d tell a bit about what Plesk is?

Joe: Yeah.

Jan: It’s a website management solution that has quite some history behind it, and it has been on the market since 1999. Back then it was invented originally by a Russian guy who also owned a web agency that was around that time when I had my own. So I can absolutely feel with him how he might have felt. He was upset, or getting upset, setting up all the service [inaudible], over and over manually. Again, at that time, you had to do everything from the command line, and there was no automation available. He started automating all server management tasks and immediately noticed that there’s a market for such a solution. In 1999 Rackspace was one of our first customers to use our product, and today almost 20 years later Plesk is used or offered by more than 50% of all major hosting companies. So, it’s quite some past.

Joe: Wow, that’s incredible. Wow. Used by over 50% of all major hosting companies? That’s great, and I could see why. Full disclosure, for people who are listening, you know that Plesk is a sponsor of the podcast. But beyond that, just using your tool from the very first time I used it to most recently when I used the WordPress Toolkit, it’s always been very impressive and very powerful but still easy to use. Which I think is important, especially for those of us who aren’t– I don’t consider myself a server admin by any stretch.

Jan: Thanks a lot for this feedback. When I joined, I said– I knew Plesk for many years because at my hosting company I was reselling Plesk, so I knew it since very long already as being a customer. But when I joined, I said, “The user experience that needs to change, it needs to be more modern. It needs to be like people expect from Facebook or Google, and tools like this.” We made major changes in the last three years, and the best things are just coming up, especially this year. In the past, our passion and our mission was to simplify the lives of sysadmins, so it was more focusing on those guys who were very technical and know how to manage a server. We were helping them to automate building server tasks. But meanwhile, we have changed that. Our mission now is to simplify the lives of web professionals, which includes those people who are less technical, and they probably know how to build a website. They probably know how to either code HTML or PHP or even write WordPress plugins, but have no clue about how to configure fail to ban and firewalls, and keep their kernel maintained and stuff like this. This is something that we want to take away from them. It’s like a ton of mis-driving cars, where you don’t have to know how they work internally, you sit in and tell to the car where to drive you to. That’s why we are speaking more about the state of driving server now, where we develop Plesk in a path where it managed everything itself, and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Joe: That’s great. I love that, the self-driving server. It makes perfect sense. This is the March of technology before WordPress. People had to build their own login systems or content management systems, and now somebody said today, “Every website I do I build a CMS from scratch,” like that’s insane. That’s just a lot of, seemingly, wasted time. Then the same thing goes for– If you’re not using the tools that exist to help you manage a server, like I have a simple [linode] server, so I can do development on my iPad, and that is nothing like when you get a [linode] server, there’s barely even an operating system on it. You need to choose the operating system, and then install Apache, and then install everything else. That’s a little bit fun for me, but if I was doing this for paid work it would be– It would add so much to the budget, so much unnecessary time and money. Tools like Plesk definitely help people do their job more efficiently, and help bring websites to more people that way. That ‘s– The self-driving server, I think, is great. As we move on from when you started at Plesk, what was a project that maybe you worked on in the past or you’re working on now that you are excited about?

Jan: Plenty of things. My most loved topic is WordPress management, because I was using WordPress since– Very long. I can’t even remember when I started with it, and it was always complicated to make a website secure. Especially if you keep in mind that for every day there is between 60,000 and 100,000 servers hacked every day. A lot of them are WordPress sites. That’s not because WordPress wouldn’t be secure, WordPress is super secure if you know how to secure it well, and this is something that a lot of people don’t know. A lot of hosters, I speak with most of them, they have a severe issue that websites of their customers get hacked because the customers don’t know how to secure it. The hoster doesn’t do it properly, and that’s something that we want to solve. We don’t want to have people with hacked websites. We want to prevent them from that situation, and there we invest the most in. That’s one thing, keeping them safe, and on the other side keeping them productive. You just said you don’t want to waste your time with managing the infrastructure, and you want to work with your clients and help them to get online. That’s where you want to put your energy, not managing the infrastructure and running the updates, so you need a tool that does that reliably. In the end, the product that we build is the WordPress Toolkit where we put our main focus in to make sure that it covers the domain workflows of web agencies and WordPress users. It helps them to bring their site online fast and secure, and to also increase the site’s performance as well as help with search engine visibility so that your site ranks on the first page of Google, Baidu, Yahoo, Bing and so on.

Joe: Yeah. That’s great. Like I said earlier, I was playing with the WordPress Toolkit recently, and it does a good job of covering those things that I would want to do managing websites. How did you– Did you do any research to figure out, “These are the things that people need?”

Jan: Very good question. We do a lot of research, but let’s start early. So if you compare in 1999 when it all started, the hosting industry was completely different, it was small and just starting. There was not even WordPress, of course. Today as a comparison, the market is completely different. It’s super competitive, and technology is quickly evolving, whereas, on the growth path, we see cloud services everywhere. Now we’re talking about managed WordPress hosters that hadn’t been done ten years ago. The question is, “What kind of market research do we do, and how do we make sure that we stay relevant?” On the one side, having such a big market share which we obviously have allows us on the one side to gain precise insights into the market ourselves. For example, “Which web technologies are used and demanded? Which content management systems? Which web servers? Which operating systems? Which virtualization tools, coding languages, and so on?” On the other hand, we always strive to understand the big picture, and that’s why we also crawl the whole web, whether it’s 220 million registered domains, to follow the global trends and understand what is happening outside there. “What do developers around the globe do in their day to day business? Which tools do they use, how do they work?” To make sure that we always have the right solution for them. Our web crawler scans all the websites worldwide, like search engines like Google and Bing do as well. With that, we understand how those websites are built and what the most popular ones are, and how this changes over time. Additionally, we received feedback from more than 250– Sorry, 2,500 hosting partners and millions of Plesk users. But also closely following our competition belongs to our daily tasks, from other server management solutions over specialized WordPress hosters to full cloud platforms like AWS and Azure. That altogether gives us a very good insight into what we have to do.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch, and run websites. Get high performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security, and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers, and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon. You can head over to Pantheon.io today to set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

Joe: On top of having a big market share, which is always good, you have the data to help you back up your decisions. But crawling the web, getting feedback from your partners and your users, and then following your competitors. That checks all the boxes. You are here doing everything you need to know to understand the landscape, and I know that you’ve been involved in WordCamps a lot, at least recently over the past couple of years. So I’m sure connecting with people at those events has been incredibly valuable as well.

Jan: Absolutely. Since we especially provide solutions for WordPress developers and web agencies, we are closely connected with the WordPress community. We contribute there, and we continuously do interviews at every WordCamp with developers, designers, and agencies to understand their needs and requirements. We invite them to our internal [inaudible] lab, to beta test versions as well as let them participate in the development of VR. Our preview program, and additionally, we often contribute to open source projects at several hackathons. The next one would be, for example, the Cloud Fest hackathon. There we code with many developers together and create cool open source projects that make the web easier and more secure. This knowledge exchange with other teams allows us to test our hypothesis and generate better ideas in the end, and to give you an example last March, we wrote a domain connect integration. [Inaudible] together with colleagues from GoDaddy, from [inaudible], White House Europe, and Microsoft. That allows best users to add their domain names without having to configure a DNS at all. That is exactly what I meant with self-driving servers. It’s one of those parts, in the past, you had to change your record or define your CE name in a setting and your DNS server. Now, this is gone. If you have a domain at GoDaddy or [inaudible], then you don’t have to configure DNS anymore. Your server does that for you automatically. This fully automated, this whole process via the domain connect standard. It’s already supported by several large hosting companies. Plesk, of course.

Joe: That’s fantastic.

Jan: One other thing besides that, we speak with a lot of hosting companies and research companies and also end users to learn from their insides and their feedback. This helps us to continuously improve and build a great and highly demanded product in the end. One thing that I’m proud about is we measure also our success with the popular net promoter score. So, NPS. We see it growing quickly, despite already being pretty good with a score of 68 compared to the industry average of 31 plus off down apps in the US. So, it’s a cool thing. What we see there is that every press release that we bring out has a higher NPS. So, that also proves that our direction is the one and that our customers appreciate it.

Joe: That’s great to hear. Let me tell you, I have a free course on how to manage– Or, how the DNS works. That was sponsored by hover, and it was a little difficult trying to explain in plain terms all of the facets of the DNS. It’s a seemingly popular course, so I think people are getting a lot out of it, but it took an hour or so for me to explain how the DNS works. If you could eliminate just that it makes people’s lives a lot easier, which is cool.

Jan: Absolutely.

Joe: Let’s get to the title question here, how did you build it? Where “it” can be Plesk from the time you joined, or it could be the WordPress Toolkit. Whatever you are most comfortable with as far as answering this question goes.

Jan: Sure. Let’s speak about Plesk as a whole, I could deep dive and talk for hours about it, but to give you some overview Plesk is a web hosting control panel software that automates the server tasks and keeps the server secure. Users can automate everything via Plesk API and [Sealion], or by using the web interface. From a coding perspective, Plesk is mainly written in PHP, JavaScript, mainly [Rectus], C++, and on Windows we also use C#. However, our backend services are often written in Go, Java, [Catlin] and Python. There are some more, but these are the main languages that we use. All together that’s several millions of lines of code that were produced over the years, and the majority is changing just recently. The biggest challenge here is to keep up innovating on the one side, and delivering with high pace without collecting technical depth and getting stuck in legacy hell. Here we can say that just the introduction of reactors as a front end framework in Plesk, and you can see the user experience if you compare all Plesk versions with the latest one, this is– From a development side we are much faster now. The user experience is much better, and the performance of the UI is also much better. It’s so fluid, and it’s instant in the end, so you click somewhere, and it happens immediately. You don’t have to wait until the browser reloads the page. These were cool things. The most challenging part is maybe to make Plesk compatible with 14 Linux distributions, including [inaudible], Ubuntu and [Debian], as well as Windows on the other side. We had to abstract lots of system-specific cause and keep differences as low as possible to achieve this. On Windows, you would probably use the ISS web server, while on Linux you prefer Apache or Engine X. Another example is handling your file system permissions, where Windows and Linux are completely different and need to be managed by Plesk in an easy way on both systems. Our target has always been and is always to have feature parity between Linux and Windows. That’s a stretch for us, it’s complex for us to solve it, but it makes it, in the end, easy for the user because the user doesn’t see those differences too much because we make it easy for them and hide the complexity. From a development methodology perspective, we use HR methodologies. Like Scrum and [inaudible], as well as [inaudible] which is my favorite in the end. So, taking the best of both worlds, or similar depending on the team and on the product. The teams themselves, they work in so-called feature crews to deliver that product with as little dependencies as possible. We try to reduce the cross-cutting concerns, like the dependencies that might complicate the whole delivery chain.

Joe: You try to make it so that one crew doesn’t say “I can’t ship my feature until this crew ships their feature.”

Jan: Exactly. Then Plesk itself became more of a platform for those tools. We call those tools “Plesk extensions,” usually. That’s a bit comparable to WordPress and its Plugins, where you have the WordPress core, but everybody can build plugins to change the whole UI and add functionality, and so on. It’s just that here it’s a bit more extreme because Plesk represents the whole hosting stack from kernel and maintenance, up to application layer security, to professional WordPress management for our agencies and hosting companies. So, a bit more complex. On the tooling side, maybe somewhere internally we use tools like Confluence, Jaira, Bitbucket, Test rail, Jenkins and many more. As well as a huge farm of computer clusters to run hundreds of thousands of test runs per day on thousands of fortune machines. The biggest challenge for us is to test software that runs on 380,000 production servers hosting millions of customers websites. This is a completely different thing than in the pure SaaS world, where I have been before, where you can easily fix a bug on the go. Here you don’t have this luxury. A SaaS company, if they identified a bug, they fix it up in minutes, and then the customers won’t even notice. We at Plesk, we ship software to all these hosting providers in the world, and that powers thousands of hosting companies and web agencies. That means that we need to test as much as possible before actually shipping the software, and testing means on all different operating systems and hardware sizes, virtualization technologies, screen resolutions, browsers, [devisers] and so on. However, what absolutely excites me is that we are currently developing our next Plesk major release that’s coming later this year. Surprise, surprise. Joe, this is the first time I’ve mentioned this new release in public. So you are the first to hear it.

Joe: Wow.

Jan: The exciting thing is that we have already now thousands of beta testers that don’t even know yet that it will be the new major update. But to test our latest preview releases as we speak, and this gives us impressive feedback to continuously improve the product because they tell us exactly if we are on the right path. What’s good, what’s not, and so on. This is amazing for us and a great help. So, a big thank you to all beta testers of previous preview releases.

Break: This episode is sponsored by our friends Ad Weglot. Weglot is a WordPress plugin that translates and displays a website in different languages. Their seriously simple multilingual plugin lets you add and manage new languages for your WordPress site. It is by far the easiest plugin I’ve used for translation, and I’ve translated websites for Fortune 100 companies. When you think about translations in WordPress, there are generally two concerns. One, is it compatible with my theme and plugins? You don’t have to worry about that. Weglot has a unique approach that makes it compatible with all themes and plugins. Two, is it search engine optimized? Behind the buzzy SEO word, you want to make sure that your translated pages rank in search engines. Good news, Weglot follows Google’s best practices for multilingual SEO. If you’re like me and have a taste for simple and powerful solutions, Weglot is a no brainer for WordPress translations. The Weglot team has also put together a special opportunity for the show today. You can get 30% off with the code “BUILTIT19”. Head over to Weglot.com to learn more.

Joe: I love a lot of what you said here, and what you said about doing hundreds of thousands of test runs is incredibly interesting. Because even to some extent, as a web developer, you got a browser test and as an iOS developer, you need to device test. But it’s still a pretty controlled environment. You mentioned that you need to make sure Plesk is compatible with 14 Linux distributions plus Windows, that you want to have feature parity. It is running above the actual server level, and the lower you get down the stack, the more stuff your software affects. I think that was just incredibly interesting to hear. You must have lots of automated tests, and then the beta testers, and all sorts of other stuff. Right?

Jan: Yeah, absolutely. I could talk now for hours about things that I saw in the past 15 years from my hosting experience, like people winning the– How is it called in America? American Pop Idol or something like this–? Overnight becoming famous?

Joe: Yeah, American Idol. Yeah.

Jan: Their website is crashing and needing to scale, or customers getting hacked, users that had a bug in their PHP script, generating millions of supporters recursively, stuff like this. You can’t as a developer, and you can’t even think of things that happen in white life. You need that experience, and you need that testing and that understanding for, let’s say, customer’s creativity.

Joe: Yeah. That’s incredible. That reminded me of a story of when I was in college I majored in computer science and have a master’s in software engineering, and when we were first introduced to threads– For those who aren’t familiar, threads are basically a way to write a program that can do multiple things at once. When we were first introduced to them, we were encouraged to just run them on the computer science server. But what we weren’t told was that server was also running a bunch of websites and other external resources, so if our threads got out of hand, we crashed an actual live server. I’m like, “Maybe we should have this on a sandbox,  where it’s OK to crash this server.” I just thought that was interesting, and I was a junior in college crashing a production server because I had an infinite loop creating threads or something like that.

Jan: But isn’t that the coolest thing? Invite every new startup to crash a production system and learn from it?

Joe: Yeah. It’s a trial by fire because you need to figure out quickly what is wrong because other people are being affected by it.

Jan: Yeah, and how to build a system that is reliable and resilient from the start, and can’t be crashed too easy.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That was like 15 years ago or so, Or maybe 14 years ago now. Things have changed quite a bit since I was in college. But we are coming up on the end of our interview here, and I know that you mentioned the next major release of Plesk is being tested. But what are your other plans for the future of Plesk?

Jan: As I said before, at Plesk, we have the mission to simplify the lives of web professionals. To accomplish that we build services that help our customers to stay secure, run faster websites, get better search engine rankings, detect issues quickly with pre-warnings or even guarantee that their websites or WordPress updates never break their production sites. Many of those services run on large clusters, meanwhile on cloud infrastructure and are consumed by Plesk servers for best possible user experience. For example, we use in the background, and we use deep learning systems that benefit from checking thousands of websites in parallel. Here is the comparison, if you run a server and you have maybe 20 websites on it, then, of course, you can learn about updates that might crash your site. But this doesn’t scale, and it’s not– It will never be good and will never warn you from things that you haven’t seen before. This is different if we use both cloud services that do that in mass scale and given our size, it allows us to do that in mass scale. If we, for example, help with WordPress updates to our whole customer base and make sure we learn from what can go wrong in wildlife and transfer this knowledge into every single WordPress Toolkit for every single website, then this helps you to never break your site. There’s one example, the other one is our web crawler that scans the whole web and all search engines on a huge farm of servers, to have two examples, now. This means, as a result, it means Plesk is an on-premise software that merges more and more with cloud services to provide more user value in a seamless and very convenient way. That’s similar to what we’ve seen maybe with Microsoft or so, with their office products. Meanwhile, I get more and more power and convenience thanks to the integrated cloud services, but still trying to solve the very same thing. For Plesk, it’s still building websites, still getting online and building your online business. But with the help of your local environment of your server, with a maximum performance, combined with cloud services like a CDN like Web Application Firewalls or smart updates for WordPress updates. Like the CO2 kit for search engine ranking improvements, and stuff like this.

Joe: That is a lot of stuff to think about. I’m really glad that people much smarter than me are working on it. So, as we wrap up time here, I do want to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jan: Of course I do. Our developers are passionate about their product, and we all use it ourselves for building and hosting our own websites. It’s a natural thing that passionate developers, and they always put some Easter eggs into the product. Tell me one company where people don’t do that. The question is, how do you find them? It’s like finding the cheat code in some ego shooter in the past. We have quite a few of them, those Easter eggs, and I might tell you one. So if you double click the Plesk logo in the “About” dialogue in tools and settings, then you will see a greeting from our dev team. Or another one would be, it can be found actually by using the WordPress Toolkit, if you dare type in a certain keyword– Which stays a secret for now, then you see also some cool things. But I’m sure people will notice it once becoming a power user. So, it’s just a matter of time until you see it.

Joe: That might be my favorite trade secret. So if you are a Plesk user or are thinking about becoming a Plesk user, know that there are a few Easter eggs and Jan just gave us the drop on some of them. That’s fantastic. Jan, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Jan: You can find me on Twitter. I’m @jlsoft2, @jlsoft was already taken at that time. Or, write me an email to Jan@Plesk.com. I’m always happy to receive valuable feedback from users or learn how to make their lives easier and make them happier. If you found a new stack and want to share it with me, then please do so. Write me an email, and I’m happy to hear from you.

Joe: That is fantastic. I will include all of that, and everything we talked about in the show notes today, which you can find over at HowIBuilt.it. Jan, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

Jan: Thanks, Joe. It was absolutely my pleasure.

Outro: Thanks so much to Jan for joining me today. I enjoyed this conversation. We got to geek out about development stuff, and we heard a bit about their plans for the future, and testing, and all sorts of stuff. Then his trade secret is fantastic, and developers find developers that are passionate. He mentioned a few Easter eggs in and around the Plesk website and platform, so my question for you this week is, “Have you ever added an Easter egg to any of your products?” Let me know, or at least let me know where I can find– Or, I can attempt to find the Easter egg by emailing me Joe@HowIBuilt.it or @jcasabona. Thanks again to our sponsors, Plesk, Pantheon and Weglot. Their support makes the show possible. If you liked this episode, do me a favor and share it with somebody who you think will also like this episode. Sharing is caring, of course, and I love introducing new content to people. I hope you do too. So, that’s it for this episode. Until next time– Before I sign off, I should tell you that you could find all of the show notes and all of the links that we talked about over at HowIBuilt.it/125. Now I’m done. So, until next time, get out there and build something.

Stephanie Scapa And WEYV

April 16, 2019

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Stephanie Scapa is the Co-Founder and CEO of WEYV, a platform that aims to compete with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. They have a unique business model to help them do it! We discuss running a large-scale project, what deep product research looks like, and how they came up with the pricing plan.

[Read more…] about Stephanie Scapa And WEYV

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 119 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Stephanie Scapa of Weyv. I enjoyed this conversation because Stephanie is the co-founder and CEO of Weyv and they are backed by a large company. Which means that they conduct market research a little bit differently than myself or most of my guests, so I’m excited to share her story about that with you. She also talks about software development from a higher level with a larger team. She talks about things like the waterfall method and switching to agile. I like a lot of the insight that she’s able to provide for us today. We’ll get to her story in a minute, and if you do stick around till the end, you will hear the continued story of how I am building my podcast course and some insight into that. We’ll get into all of that in a minute. But first, a word from our sponsors.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. Let me tell you, I recently checked out their new and improved WordPress toolkit, and I was super impressed by how easy it was to spin up new WordPress sites, clone sites, and even manage multiple updates to themes and plugins. With the click of one button, I was able to update all of my WordPress sites. I was incredibly impressed by how great their WordPress toolkit is. You can learn more and try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Stephanie Scapa, and she is the co-founder and CEO of Weyv. Stephanie, how are you today?

Stephanie Scapa: Good. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m excited to talk about Weyv and exactly what it is, and some of your plans and business models. I don’t feel like the show talks about business models a lot, so I’m excited to have you on the show.

Steph: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Joe: Absolutely. So why don’t we start off with a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Steph: Sure, absolutely. I have dual roles, and it’s a little bit about the history of Weyv. Weyv is a subsidiary of a parent company named Altair. For Weyv I’m one of the co-founders and I’m the CEO, but I also within the parent company Altair, I run the corporate development department for all of the software companies that we engage with. So I split my time, which can be a little bit tough, but Weyv is my passion.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. What exactly is Weyv?

Steph: Weyv is a digital entertainment app. If you think about it, it’s really in comparison to other streaming applications that offer offline accessibility– Right now we’ve got music we’ve got magazines, we’ve got e-books, and coming soon we’ll have podcasts as well. The idea for us is this multimedia platform using a unique business model for users to gain access to all their digital media needs.

Joe: Gotcha. So, it does– It sounds like it’s in competition with a few of the other platforms that we will talk about shortly, but how did you come up with the idea for Weyv? What about it– What’s that different piece that you’re like, “This is going to be better than everything else?”

Steph: Yes. So, how we came up with it relates back to the parent organization Altair. The whole concept for Weyv centers around this business model, and the business model is the same business model the parent company uses for all the B2B interactions that it has with other distributed software. The idea was to take this same business model that has been successful for Altair in the B2B world and apply it for digital consumer content. Now at the time we were looking at the marketplace and seeing free music was at the height with Napster and ripping CDs, and slowly streaming was being introduced. But it still has a little bit of a challenge, where you still have a lot of these freemium models where it’s ad subscription based for the payment out to the artists, and so forth. So you see companies like Spotify who are struggling to turn a profit because of that, and for us, that’s how the idea originated, was really around this business model. But it goes a bit further for us because we view it in our vision for Weyv is to transform the digital economy to a new and more equitable model for artists, creators, and consumers. We believe in that because we think that it’s important in market for everybody to be feeling like it’s a fair model. The consumers need to feel like it’s a good model for them, but so do the artists and creators. It’s got to be something great, and we think that we can transform the digital economy here around that. In the music industry, it’s starting to transform already with streaming and page streaming becoming more and more commonplace, but you still have other types of digital economies out there that haven’t given that shift over quite yet. If you think about news or even blogs, podcasts, there’s tons of free content that’s available that we think we can change the way people are thinking about it and make it a more equitable model for everybody.

Joe: That sounds fantastic. I’ve been having this same conversation in the online course space because it’s either you sell your online courses on your own platform and spend all this time marketing and trying to do your best to sell the $300-400 course. That’s fine, that works. You can also take advantage of a platform like Udemy, but they’re going to take advantage of you too. They are selling your courses for a song, and you get $2-3 per sale on a course that took you 20 to 30 hours to develop. So, I can totally level with what you’re saying here. It sounds awesome.

Steph: Great. It’s all around what we’re thinking. I mean for us, we pay artists and creators based on the usage of their content. When users are accessing, they’re able to make money off of that, and that’s pretty standard I would say. But what makes it different is that we have the flexibility side on the pricing, because not every piece of content, not every song is equivalent. The challenge right now with a lot of the streaming mechanisms that are out there is that it creates this stream effect across everything, where every song is effectively equal in value. For us, we allow with the units model the ability to have different prices in different content, and so forth.

Joe: That’s great. As we talk about moving from how you came up with the idea to researching this product, you mentioned that you’re taking a business model from your parent company Altair. Then you’re also looking at the status quo in other markets. In the preshow, we talked a little bit about how you plan to compete with Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit? What research did you do to figure out how to best compete and how to break into this market that’s seemingly getting more saturated?

Steph: Yeah, absolutely. For us, you have to do competitive research. Anytime you’re going into a new market, which Weyv is a very new market from Altair, it’s now we’re going– Altair is B2B, and now we’re B2C with Weyv. We spent a lot of time understanding the other platforms that were in market already. We did a lot of market research with the users in particular, so that we could better understand the right age range we’re targeting and what motivates users, what features they feel are most important, and pricing. For us the biggest differentiation is based on the units model because we give users more flexibility to have more of a bundled package, so the closest competitor on the bundling side that offers you the multi-content would be Amazon. But they withhold content because you can’t get the right price effect across all the content. So Amazon doesn’t give you a full catalog of music, they only give you a partial catalog, and then you can purchase an additional package to have the full music catalog. For us, what we’ve done is by allowing for these different pricing, we let everybody have access to everything. It’s a question of the moment you’re using it. It’s all about simultaneous access and what you’re using it for, then, in addition, you can have up to 25 people in your group to share your units. So there’s no restriction on family, and so forth,  it’s a very open mechanism. Again it’s totally based on simultaneous access.

Joe: Gotcha. So, for example, I have let’s say 100 units for easy math. I want to stream the new Taylor Swift album the moment it comes out, so do a bunch of people, so maybe it’s going to be ten units on the day it comes out as opposed to 5 units 6 or 12 months down the line.

Steph: That’s absolutely the idea. At the moment though one of the challenges that we’ve faced, being very open with your audience here, is that it’s a bit complicated to introduce within the single type of content the different pricings because users are used to music all being the same price. So, while that’s our vision as we keep going, at the moment all music is priced completely the same at 10 Weyv units whereas magazines we’ve had more flexibility in. You find magazines within the application that might be ten units, and some might be five units, there’s more flexibility in the number of units. The idea is that while you’re accessing the content units are pulled from your group’s pool, and they’re held out to run the content if you think about it. But then as soon as you pause your music or you close the reader, then your units go back into the group’s pool and can be used again by anybody in your group, up to 25 people across any of the different types of content.

Joe: That’s super interesting. So, it’s not like you’re spending Weyv units, you’re actually– It’s almost like borrowing a book from a library.

Steph: It’s exactly like that.

Joe: That’s really cool. I can see why you would struggle with the music side of things, but that does seem to make it a lot fairer to the artists as opposed to getting some percentage of one cent per stream. Right?

Steph: Yeah.

Joe: If a bunch, if you have math worked out to say “This many units are currently going to this latest song, then we know how much that translates to for the artist.”

Steph: Exactly. For us, we’re– Weyv, the advantage we have of having a parent company and not being VC funded is we’re in it for the long haul. We’re slow and steady in our approach and the fact that on the music side that’s not the approach we’re taking right now, that’s OK with us. We’ll get there. It takes time to get users to understand the model and see the value in it, but we believe that over time as we continue to add more content as we ramp and more users that we’ll be able to make the shifts occur.

Joe: Yeah. That makes sense too, because if you’re VC funded there’s pressure to– If I start a company in Silicon Valley and I get some exorbitant amount of money, there’s pressure for me to either sell it to someone like Spotify or to go public and then be beholden to the investors, but also the board members. There’s a lot of pressure to make things happen more quickly.

Steph: Exactly.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch and run websites. Get high performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers, and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon. You can head over to Pantheon.io today to set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

Joe: I’d love to get to the title question at this point, which is how did you build it? This is a subsidiary of a parent company, and you’re the co-founder and CEO, I assume there’s a development team and a marketing team and a research team. I’d be interested to see at whatever level of involvement you’re at, how you put this whole thing together.

Steph: Yeah. I will tell you it’s very much a how “We” built it. I don’t think there would be any possibility of building anything without the entire team. We’ve got a really strong team, so my role specifically started where I did all the negotiations with the labels, actually with the publishers, to onboard all of the different content into the platform and then slowly– We originally actually outsourced our development, and it was a big lesson learned for us. We changed pretty quickly and built our own in-house development team because we realized that there are so many things that are unique for this product and for the industry that we needed to build ourselves, and have our hands on in order to better control. You can imagine recommendation engines, all of those things we’ve built from the ground up. So we built up each team, and you’re absolutely right, we’ve got a marketing team. We just hired somebody that focuses on user engagement and can help us driving where our users are putting their time and energy, and better helping our users within the app. There’s a lot of lessons learned. We’ve been doing this for 5 or 6 years now, and easy ones to see are from a development methodology standpoint. We started more with waterfall, and then as we got more established in our development process, we switched over to agile. We’re constantly making changes and adjusting, but for me having been part of the beginning, it’s interesting to see some of the shifts. It’s not like Agile process would have been better for us in the beginning. It’s more just over time you have to be willing to adjust to what you need in that moment, because sometimes what you need now versus in the future is going to be different. You have to recognize when you need to change and make those changes. So, it’s been quite a big process for us.

Joe: Absolutely. Speaking specifically to the waterfall versus agile process for listeners who are not familiar, those are two development methodologies where with a waterfall things have to happen in a certain order for you to get to a finished product. Agile is more fluid, where you get the requirements but then you realize maybe later you should change it, and things theoretically can happen more quickly. But when you’re building out a platform as big as Weyv seems to be, it’s probably really important to lock down those requirements early on so that you’re not dealing with scope creep and failure to launch.

Steph: It is. What we’re at right now is a little bit of a hybrid. With waterfall, it’s usually feature based, as far as your sprints and your releases go. But right now we’re more on a time-based sprint release, and what that means is if a feature doesn’t get in and doesn’t make the cut for that sprint, it pushes to the next sprint. So we’ve come up with our own hybrid model between a little bit, where we’re striving to lock down more of the features especially when we add a new big type of content in, like podcasts, which are coming. Because for us, if you’re constantly changing things, you’ll never get anything out. But at the same time as you start to implement and you start to get more and more prototypes then finished product builds done, you realize that now that design you put in doesn’t quite work the way you wanted it to and you have to adjust. For us at least, what we found is having a little bit more flexibility gives us just what we need to get the right product out on time.

Joe: That’s great. It allows you to iterate quickly while also making sure that for some of the major features that things are done the right way, and they’re not just shoved out the door for the sake of shoving them out the door. Cool.

Steph: Yep.

Joe: There’s one more question I want to ask you in this section, and that’s about your– You have somebody who focuses on user engagement. Something that I’ve been experimenting a lot with lately is hot jar and some other analytics tools to figure out for my site where people are failing to purchase, like where do I lose the potential buyer for my courses? Or, how are users who have bought the course using it? What kind of tools are you using to figure out how your users are using your platform?

Steph: Sure. It’s a good topic because we’re in the middle of re-evaluating our toolset here too. Historically we’ve used amplitude for all the in-app tracking, and then Google Analytics. But we also do, because of our licensing model with the units, we’re checking in and out content and the plays and all of that, we’ve got quite a bit of back end data that we collect just naturally. So, for us, we’re trying to figure out the right way to pair that back end data with a lot of the in-app data which is more about what the users are clicking on, and where they’re looking at, and things like that. We’re really in the middle of evaluating some of the different tools, and there’s millions of tools out there. It’s a question of identifying the requirements that you are looking for and then seeing all the way through the process because I think that’s the biggest mistake we made originally when we implemented some of these tools. We thought, “OK. This tool will give us that piece of information we’re looking for, and that tool will give us this piece of information we’re looking for.” Now we’ve got the information we need,  but you have to be able to connect it for it to add value. So it’s something that you don’t really think about when you’re putting the whole process in place in the beginning often, but now that we’re knee deep in it we’re realizing it’s really critical for us to be able to have the continuity of exactly what the user is doing from download all the way through purchasing, and playing, and all the activity that they’re actually interacting with.

Joe: That’s great. I love that we need to have the– We have the information we need, and now we need to connect it to add value. That makes sense. Because if you, if I have a list of everybody who visited my course and everybody who purchased the course, but I don’t know why they purchased the course, I can’t then change my copy to attract more people to purchase the course.

Steph: Exactly.

Joe: That’s fantastic. As we come to the end, towards the end of this episode, I like to ask what transformations you’ve been to versus what your plans for the future are? We’ve touched on them a little bit, but I would love to hear the big– What was the one of your favorite evolutions from the time you launched until now?

Steph: My favorite evolution? I don’t know about favorite, but one of the bigger ones I would say is a shift that we’re in the middle of making at the moment. When we launched it, we liked this idea of connecting charities into our app. So the concept was that we allow an artist to choose their favorite charity and then the more users listened to that artist the more that artist charity would receive from Weyv, and we are donating a half percent of our revenue and over time what we’ve learned is that by listening to our partners and to customers that’s not adding enough value and actually isn’t meaningful enough. So, on the partner side, artists aren’t engaged. It ends up just automatically going to a default charity which sort of defeated the purpose a little bit. We’re hoping to build more artist-fan relationships and connections, and then on the customer side users aren’t as engaged on it and aren’t as interested. For us, it’s one of the transformations we’re going to make. We tried it, now we’re hearing from everybody out there that it’s really not working, and so we’re going to try something new and we’ll pull that and see what else we can do. Another way to get engaged in society and so forth. But it’s really, and I have to admit, it’s a disappointing one which is why it’s not my favorite. But you have to be honest about what works and what doesn’t work, and it sounded like such a cool idea in theory, but if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Joe: Absolutely. I’m with you, and I would have thought that artists would have loved this, especially there are a lot of maybe politically active artists out there, and this would be an easy way for them to generate some extra donations to their charity of choice. Depending on what they like and what they want to promote.

Steph: Yep. But what we’ve learned is that really in the end, for the most part, we’re dealing more with the labels directly, and the artists aren’t as engaged on these platforms as you would imagine that they are. It was a big lesson learned for us, but we continue to make updates and improvements based on user and partner feedback and keep going.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes sense. If the labels aren’t telling their artists, they can do that or exactly how to do that, and the artists aren’t going to do that. Cool. With that in mind, what are your– You mentioned podcasts, but what are some of your other plans for the future as far as Weyv goes?

Steph: Within the app, you’ll notice we’ve got a videos tab. Certainly something top of mind for us on videos. We’re also thinking about news and other types of content that could be interesting for users, but to be honest, nothing is solidified. We’re still really constantly serving users to get feedback on what’s most interesting for them and making changes based on that, so we are surprised how popular podcasts were when we surveyed the last time. The time before that lyrics were the number one request, and so we’re slowly adding in the features that users are most interested in and keep moving.

Joe: Very cool. It makes me happy to hear that podcasts are very popular, naturally as I have my show.

Steph: Yeah.

Joe: I want more people to listen to it. So, that’s cool. I will say that one of my favorite features of Spotify that they took away at least from the desktop app was the lyrics or whatever song I happen to be listening to because I constantly go to Genius.com or whatever just to read the lyrics or the meaning of the lyric.

Steph: Well, you can get it in Weyv now. On all our platforms, mobile and web.

Joe: Very cool. I will ask you how people can get there in a second, but I do need to ask perhaps my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Steph: I would say the key is listening and hearing what other people are saying, especially your customers, and being willing to be agile and make changes quickly. Because if somebody is giving you feedback you need to understand why is that feedback coming. Is it relevant? Does it make sense? If the answer is yes, when you’re honest with yourself about it, you have to be able to move super fast because if you take six months to make changes or a year to make changes especially in a startup environment, it’s just not fast enough. You have to be willing to look at your favorite ideas like charities, and say, “Not working,” and move on and make that change super quick.

Joe: Yeah. That is great advice. As a software developer myself, I know there will be a feature or maybe even a plugin or an idea that I’m married to, I love that idea, and my mastermind group will tell me “This is not it, Joe. This is not a great idea. You should spend your time elsewhere.” I’ve listened to them in the past, and I haven’t listened to them in the past and turns out I should have listened to them when I haven’t.

Steph: It’s hard because not always is the feedback you’re going to be receiving the right feedback, and so it’s important to be able to recognize when to listen and when it’s OK to go against the grain. But it’s so important to be understanding where the feedback is coming from, and why they’re thinking the way they’re thinking because that can tell you and guide you “Should I be listening?” You have to be a little bit cut throat. If the answer is yes, then you got to move on.

Joe: Absolutely. On that, I had one more thought as you were saying that, and it’s because you mentioned the “Why.” It’s almost like when somebody recommends a TV show to you, and they’ll say “You know a TV show I think you’ll like?” And in most cases, it’s actually, “You know what TV show I like?” Unless it’s a close friend, who understands what I like. If they recommend a TV show, I’m more apt to listen to it.

Steph: Yep, absolutely.

Joe: Very cool. Stephanie, thank you so much for your time today. Where can people find you?

Steph: You can go to Weyv.com. We made a promo code for any of your users that would be interested in 2 months free. It’s HOWIBUILTIT. It’s as simple as that.

Joe: Awesome. If you are interested in trying out Wave.com for all sorts of content, magazines reached out to me– Jumped out to me, specifically. Two months free using the code HOWIBUILTIT. I’ll include that and everything that we talked about in the show notes today. Stephanie, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Steph: Thank you.

Outro: Thanks so much to Steph for joining me today. I appreciate her time and her advice on everything from deep market research to software development. Her trade secret rings true across several episodes of this show, which is keep listening to your customers, and hearing what they have to say. Be agile and make changes quickly. I like all of those things. If you want to try Weyv out, you can get two months free by using the code HOWIBUILTIT. You can get that by going to HowIBuilt.it/Weyv. Thanks so much to our sponsors, Plesk and Pantheon, their support makes this show possible and those are two tools and two services that I can highly speak to. I am a big fan of both of those. My question of the week for you is, how has Steph’s story changed your outlook? I know that she’s coming from a different perspective, being the CEO of a larger company, and I’m interested to see exactly what piece of advice you took away most from this. Let me know by emailing me Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona.

Miniseries: To continue my story of how I’m building out my podcast course, I told you a little bit so far about how I came up with the idea. I told you a little bit about the research or lack thereof, and in pivoting, I want to continue that story a little bit because I think it’s important in deciding to pivot the course. I realized that I need to look at the entire scope of podcasting, and the way I came to that conclusion– I want to make sure I’m answering the questions that people have, and my biggest hesitance in creating a full soup to nuts podcast course is that people much more popular than me are already doing that. Pat Flynn for example, John Lee Dumas is another person who’s already doing that, and they have a much bigger audience than me. Their courses come with a bigger price tag, and it’s because they’re giving their personal time. So as I’m pivoting my course, the way to garner feedback that’s worked best for me is with a lead gen for a podcast workbook. If you go to HowIBuilt.it/podcasts, you’ll be able to see the course. You’ll also be able to opt in for that free podcast workbook, and I give people who sign up to get that workbook a five day or seven-day sequence where the first question is, “What is your biggest struggle in podcasting?” A lot of people respond to that question, and I’m using those responses to build out the content for my course. Now over the next few days, they get more pointed advice that I’ll also integrate into the course, but those questions and hearing people’s struggles are the things that I know people are going to want the answer to and in depth. So, that’s been very helpful. The other thing and I ran this by a few of my friends in a mastermind group, is the idea of doing an air check. I want to provide some extra piece of value. My friend Ryan gave me this idea, and then I nearly simultaneously was reading a book about podcasting that talked about the idea of an air check, and as part of the value add for the course I want to physically help people improve their audio quality. I’m going to offer an air check which is where they’ll send me some piece of audio, and I’ll give them advice on how they can improve their audio quality. For the higher level bundle, I’ll listen to their podcast and give them advice on how to improve their podcast as well. That is part two of the research, the better research I’m doing to make my course better. Next week I will tell you in some detail how I’m building out the course, and that’ll probably take a couple of episodes because I want to try to keep it short at the end of these episodes. So, thanks so much for listening. If you want to learn more about my podcasting course, you can head over to How I Built.it/podcast. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Andre Gagnon and ProjectHuddle

March 26, 2019

Sponsored by:

Andre Gagnon has SaaS/Subscription fatigue and decided to do something about it. He helped create and launch ProjectHuddle, a WordPress/plugin-based competitor to the likes of InVision. At least, when it comes to getting design feedback. The tech in this episode is super interesting, and we get philosophical about owning your products and data!

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 116 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Andre Gagnon of Project Huddle. We’re going to talk about pretty traditional software development today, but a lot of what we talk about has more to do with the research process and getting an MVP out there. How he learned the skills that he needed to help develop this product. So he talks about how he has a bias towards action, how an MVP is better than something you write down. How an MVP is all, you need. Don’t make perfect software, but I don’t want to spoil this whole episode. So I’ll just let you get right to it. Of course, before we do that, we need to go to a word from our sponsors.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. Let me tell you, I recently checked out their new and improved WordPress toolkit, and I was super impressed by how easy it was to spin up new WordPress sites, clone sites, and even manage multiple updates to themes and plugins. With the click of one button, I was able to update all of my WordPress sites. I was incredibly impressed by how great their WordPress toolkit is. You can learn more and try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Castos. Castos is a podcast hosting platform built specifically for WordPress. Their Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin lets you manage all of your episodes and podcast RSS from your WordPress site, but have your files hosted on a dedicated media hosting platform. If you use WordPress, this is by far the easiest platform that I have used for podcasting. I also really love how the Castos team takes a commonsense approach to their pricing. You can create as many episodes and podcasts as you want and you don’t have to worry about how much storage you’re using or bandwidth restrictions. If you’re like me and you already have a ton of episodes from an old host, they’ve got you covered. Castos will import all of your podcast content into their platform completely free of charge. It’s literally one click of a button in your WordPress dashboard. I could not believe my eyes when I saw this in action. It’s stuff like this which is why I built my own podcasting course on top of Castos. They have put together a really special opportunity for the show today. You can get 50% off your first three months with the code BUILTIT19. Just head over to Castos.com/HowIBuiltIt to learn more.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Andre Gagnon. He is the self-described abstract concepts coordinator of a very interesting looking WordPress plugin called Project Huddle. Andre, how are you today?

Andre Gagnon: I’m great, thanks.

Joe: Awesome. Thanks for being on the show and for– I finally got into the habit of asking people how to pronounce their last name. So, I’m glad I asked for you. I was able to write down the phonetic spelling. But that’s not what– We’re not talking about my adventures in mispronunciation. We are talking about your plugin. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Andre: Currently I’m working full time on Project Huddle which is a WordPress plugin for getting design feedback from your clients. The best way I can describe it is it’s like sticky notes on your designs and web projects. Before that, I was doing a lot of WordPress themes on Theme Forest, and part of that was I had a freelancing business, which is how I decided to create Project Huddle. Like a lot of guests on your show, you end up creating things that scratch your own itch, and it seems to work out.

Joe: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Again it sounds really interesting, and I was checking it out a little bit before this show. You were a freelancer first, you were doing things on Theme Forest. So maybe, and I could probably guess a little bit, but how did you come up with the exact idea for this? You mentioned that you were scratching your own itch. A lot of people do that on the show, but what made you think “Sticky notes for my design projects?”

Andre: It’s a great question. There’s a lot of tools out there that already do this, I think people that are in the design realm are familiar with InVision is a big one for design, and there’s BugHerd and a few other ones for website feedback. But at the time, running my freelance business, I had what I like to call “SaaS fatigue.” I had all these micro-services I needed to subscribe to run my business, and if I decided I wanted to switch or customize, or I didn’t want to pay for one, all of my data was gone. Which was a huge bummer. I did a lot of research, and I couldn’t find anything self-host or white label that did something as simple as just point click feedback, so I decided to create something. I was heavily involved at WordPress at the time, and perfect timing is when WordPress came out with their REST API which made it more than just a blogging platform and started to become more of an application platform. That’s how it started, I could get more into the tech details, but maybe we will save that for later.

Joe: Yeah, we’ll definitely touch on that during the title question. Because that, again, sounds very interesting. I love what you said there, that you had “SaaS fatigue.” I think that’s something a lot of us are experiencing even more today. Because we’ve got all these services, all these SaaS products we’re paying for. A lot of them are integral to our business. We also have– I don’t know about you, but I subscribe to Netflix and Hulu, and Disney is launching their own within the next year or so.

Andre: No way.

Joe: I am 100% paying for that. There’s no way I’m not going to be able to pay for that one, I have a child, and I am a child. I love Disney. So, we’re just in a situation now where everything is subscription-based. Including WordPress plugins.

Andre: Exactly. Even researching a few these tools, there was a couple that just went down and never came back up. There was a very popular one that I forget the name of it. About a month ago, everybody lost everything, and they decided they were going to shut down the business. So, when you’re subscribing to these services not only are you locked in cost wise, but you’re partnering with a business that may not be there tomorrow or next month.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And then you’re also subject to things that the platform host wants to do. Famously over the summer, or maybe over the spring, Medium decided that they were going to change how their paywall worked. There were people, maybe 25% of their income relied on that. Just on a whim.

Andre: Absolutely. That’s a prime example not to hinge your business on someone else’s proprietary platform. I think that’s why people love open source and self-hosting and doing that stuff. Because they’re limiting that risk and they’re in control of everything. That’s a really good example.

Joe: Yeah. Thank you very much. I remember that, and I was like “This is the reason that you should self-host. Or, you should at least be able to get things easily out of the platform.” That day I made a video, and I’ll link it in the show notes, on how to connect Medium and WordPress. So no matter where you posted, the two websites would sync up.

Andre: No way. That’s a really good solution.

Joe: Right? I was thinking that, too. It’s a pretty popular video. I hit the nail on the head sometimes. So, you started to mention researching, and you mentioned InVision and BugHerd, but that there was nothing for the self-hosted person. What was your research process like? Were you looking at and trying other things, were you talking to people?

Andre: I didn’t talk to anybody. That would have been a good idea. I talked to maybe a couple of friends. I have a bias towards action, and I think even an idea can sound great on paper but then executed it could be completely terrible. I’m like, “Just get an MVP up and see if we can get people to buy it, and that’s the only way you’ll know if it’s going to work.” So that’s exactly what I did. I built the first version of the plugin, which was only feedback on mockups, which are like static images and designs. Something very basic, just put it out for sale and see if people bought it. Sure enough, they did. So I knew that there was value in it enough to keep investing.

Joe: That’s incredible. “I have a bias towards action.” I like that because you can go up to anybody and be like “Do you think this is a good idea?” And they’ll be like “Yeah, sure.” This exact thing happened to me at a Word Camp recently where I was like “There should be a place where people can go and upload talks, like rejected talk ideas to Word Camps.” So, I propose a talk, and it doesn’t get accepted, but now I can record and put it up on this website. Maybe an annual subscription is $20 dollars a month. It took a couple of my friends to be like, “Why? How much are you paying the speaker for uploading this?” And stuff like that. So, I’m glad I didn’t put any work into it.

Andre: I can’t take credit for all that. I think Tim Ferriss has a quote that “You don’t ask people if they will buy it, ask them to buy it. And that’s how you’ll know.” Even if you don’t have a product yet, I think you can sell preorders or something like that, to know if there’s value.

Joe: Gotcha. I think that’s a really good point. Troy Dean talked about that too. He put up a pre-sale page for his first webinar, and if it got less than some amount of subscribers, or buyers, he wouldn’t do it. I think that’s a really good point. I like that. When you were trying to figure out the feature set, was it basically what you saw in these other products? Or was it stuff that you knew that you wanted?

Andre: That was an advantage I had. I can look at all these other products, and I was the customer, so that made it easy to pair off features based on the products I was working on. I could decide to add a new feature because it was so small, it was just me. And of course, it’s changed. My opinion on adding new features has changed, but I think at first you have to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. You end up cutting some stuff, and you end up adding things. But then the most valuable feedback I think you can get– And I learned this doing WordPress themes too, is you have an idea of how people are going to use something. But then when they download it and use it, there’s all these other ideas and use cases that you didn’t think about, and there might be some really large ones that just totally you didn’t even think about. So listening to customers and even anecdotal feedback right away is super valuable too.

Joe: Yeah, that’s a fantastic point, and you’re absolutely right there. “The way I would use it is maybe not the way most people would use it,” or something like that. I like that. That’s a lot of really good advice there. So, as we’re talking, let’s get to the title question. We have a good idea of how you researched this and where the idea came from, but in the pre-show, we were talking about getting technical. You mentioned the REST API. How did you build Project Huddle?

Andre: This is exciting for us. I never get to talk about the tech side of Project Huddle on a lot of these podcasts. So, first of all, I used WordPress in a white REST API, and the reason I chose WordPress is there’s a lot of developer familiarity, it’s easy to install things, and it has everything you need to build a web app. It has a lot of really neat JavaScript frameworks and tools that ship with WordPress. Project Huddle was built with Backbone, and the REST API has a– Or, WordPress has a Backbone client that automatically turns custom post types into models in your Backbone app. So all that configuration is done for you. Then there’s a few other tools that are used. There’s subview manager which Mark Jake was head of a Word Camp talk about the subview manager that was extremely helpful. I think all these things are bundled with WordPress and people don’t know about them, which I found interesting. I think there’s a lot of popularity for the newer frameworks, like React and Vue, and those are awesome frameworks, but I think Backbone is underrated. Because it’s so non-opinionated, you can do whatever you want, and then there’s some other scripts that didn’t ship with WordPress that it needed to make it happen. There’s one called X domain, which is needed. Project Huddle by default, you can use it on other WordPress– Or, other sites, not necessarily WordPress. You can use it on a Squarespace site or Shopify site, and it communicates across domain. X domain lets you do that through Post Message, which is neat. You don’t need to do any special server configurations or anything like that. I think there’s a lot of really nice open source software that lets you build this stuff, and it’s like we’re at the prime time of open source software. Anybody can build anything, and all these things are available, and people are just putting it out there for people to use, and I think it’s a cool time in tech.

Joe: That’s great. I love that you’re giving me a lot of really good pull quotes for this episode, “We’re at the prime time of open source software.” I’ve been saying this to my students a bit for a while because when I started, there was no CodePen, there was no GitHub. There was just looking at people’s websites and trying to figure out what they did.

Andre: Yeah, me too.

Joe: Nowadays it’s like, “Here’s CodePen. I could fork this and see what happens,” or, “Someone has a gist on GitHub that allows me to take a look at some generalized code.” So, I think you’re absolutely right. People are willing to share more and open source has– Microsoft is doubling down on it. They bought GitHub, which I think a lot of people forget.

Andre: I didn’t forget.

Joe: Yeah, I didn’t forget either. Well, I forgot for a little bit. I was talking to somebody, and they were like, “Sometimes I forget that Microsoft bought GitHub.” And I’m like, “Yeah. I forgot about that until just now.” It is a really good time for open source. So, you built this with Backbone? I have a technical question for you now because as we record this WordPress 5.0 isn’t out yet, but Gutenberg is heavily– Is all React.

Andre: Yeah.

Joe: Are you going to make any architectural changes because of that? Or are you going to stick with Backbone for the foreseeable future?

Andre: I don’t have any plans to change, I mean Backbone has worked well for me. Especially with the Backbone client, WordPress still has an investment in it. The Backbone client’s part of core. I can see the benefits of going to something like React, but what’s nice about Backbone– It takes a little bit longer for me to write, but to extend it, and there’s a child template system within Project Huddle that you can modify. Ease of use makes it super easy to do that stuff, rather than if you were to do something with React and you’d have to do it all in one file, and you’d have to write JavaScript. If you’re not familiar with JavaScript, it can get a little bit complicated. But PHP developers can extend Project Huddle without knowing hardly any JavaScript, just because of a Backbone setup. So, I rather like it, but I can see the benefit of being like “There’s going to be more React developers and more expertise there.”

Joe: But that’s a really good point because up until advanced custom fields announced that they were making it so you could define blocks in PHP, a lot of PHP developers who don’t know JavaScript were freaking out. I’m not a JavaScript expert, and I know enough to be dangerous. I can definitely break the front end with some JavaScript, and I don’t know React, and I was like “I need to learn React, and maybe now with advanced custom fields I can still do stuff, but maybe delay that.” So your point is a very good one. Backbone is relatively lightweight too, and it’s extensible for PHP developers. I think you’re making a good choice. As long as WordPress doesn’t announce that they are removing Backbone from core in the near future.

Andre: Yeah.

Joe: You’re good.

Andre: Yeah, exactly. Which I can still ship my own version.

Joe: Yeah.

Andre: In the end.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Andre: But it’s like a lot of these frameworks are, React is more opinionated, but Backbone is very similar. It just doesn’t have– If people are familiar with the two-way data binding, the models aren’t automatically updated with Backbone. You have to add listeners and update what you want, which gives you more control. But you have to write more code.

Joe: It sounds a little bit like Angular. I hitched my wagon to Angular–

Andre: Yeah.

Joe: A couple years ago, and now I’m like “Now I’ve got to unhitch it and move to React.”

Andre: You’re going to be moving that hitch around a lot in the next couple of years.

Joe: I know, that’s why I’m glad I didn’t hitch it to Vue earlier. I was like, “Vue seems easier. There’s also JavaScript, and I like that.” And then if I want to stay in the WordPress base or develop in the WordPress base, React is the one I should learn. So I have Wes Boss’ course, which I will link in the show notes. He is very good.

Andre: Yeah, that just came out, didn’t it?

Joe: He just updated it. I have his node one, and his React one, and–

Andre: Have you taken any of them, or done any of them?

Joe: I took his free JavaScript 30 course, and as a course developer myself I love his style. We have very similar styles. He is pretty relaxed. I think he does a good job of demoing code because it’s hard. Talking about code in a course, I’ve done it, and I think I’ve done it somewhat successfully, I’ve gotten good feedback, but that’s a hard thing to do, and he does it very well. So, I appreciate the work he’s doing, and I’m happy to support it.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Pantheon. Starting a new project? Looking for a better hosting platform? Pantheon is an integrated set of tools to build, launch and run websites. Get high performance hosting for your WordPress sites, plus a comprehensive toolkit to supercharge your team and help you launch faster. On Pantheon, you get expert support from real developers, best in class security and the most innovative technology to host and manage your websites. You can sign up a new site in minutes with a free account, and you only pay when it goes live. That is my second favorite feature to Pantheon, only to the easy ability to create dev staging and live servers, and push to GitHub. It’s very easy to set those things up on Pantheon. You can head over to Pantheon.io today to set up a free account and pay only when it goes live. Thanks so much to Pantheon for their support of this episode and this season of How I Built It.

Joe: So, that’s cool. Are there any other notes on how you built Project Huddle before we move on to the next set of questions? Because I know we touched on a couple of things, but I feel like we could go pretty deep if you want to.

Andre: Yeah, I guess there’s something there if people are interested in this, but I never get to talk about it, so I’m super excited.

Joe: Awesome.

Andre: With website commenting there is a huge challenge. If you’re commenting on an image, you can, “This is the x y coordinate with the image.” But if you’re on a website and it works responsively, sometimes things move around. They disappear. That was a huge challenge to figure out how to stick a pin on a website and have it stick. Even when content changes, because it’s a feedback tool. You put a pin-down, it’s likely that content is going to change. I used something called Levenshtein distance, which is like– It does a percentage match between two strings. How it works is it stores the HTML that was clicked when the comment was left, and then when it needs to find that again, it checks the original CSS selector and figures out if it’s a good match. It’s not continuous up the [inaudible] tree until a good match is found, so what’s nice about how that works is if you move sections around on a page, or content changes or you look at it in a different device. The pin will 99% of the time stay where it’s supposed to stay. That was super hard to figure out. That took probably six to eight months to figure that part of the equation, and the rest was pretty easy. It still has some bugs here and there that are working on fixing it.

Joe: Yeah, I mean that’s what they say. “The last 20% of the project takes 80% of the time to do.”

Andre: Totally true. Yeah.

Joe: I loved that. I’m glad I didn’t just lead you to that question, and you brought it up because I was curious about that. Because doing that is hard, and what you just described is a very academic computer science-y questions. We talked about that, and I have a masters in software engineering, so “How do you math nodes and things like that? And find points and process images?” It’s not something that you get to talk about in the WordPress space very often.

Andre: Not at all, no.

Joe: That’s cool. The thing you said you used was Levenshtein distance?

Andre: Yeah. It’s very basic. Just give it two strings, “How close of a match are they?” It fuzzy matches them.

Joe: Nice. So, that’s a library and not an algorithm? It’s a library–?

Andre: It’s an algorithm.

Joe: OK, cool.

Andre: Somebody made into it, again, more open source software. Somebody made it into a JavaScript function for everybody use.

Joe: Nice.

Andre: Didn’t have to do anything super tricky on my end, just had to figure out what pieces to put together. Like adult Legos in a way.

Joe: Yeah, without a doubt. I love that. I had a student working on mapping shapes with JavaScript canvas to musical notes, because he needed some assistive technology, and we were in a web design class. The things he was doing was super cool, and we got to a point where he’s like “I have a question about this.” I’m like, “I know. I have to research this. I don’t just know the answer to this one off the top of my head, but I’ll see if I can dig up that project too.” But it was very cool, and we were working completely in CodePen which is an incredible learning tool for the classroom. So awesome.

Andre: I think it’s a sign of a good teacher when the student stumps you, and you have to–

Joe: Thank you. That’s what I told myself. I’m like, “If they only know as much as I know, then I haven’t taught them how to learn, I just brain dumped on them.” So, yeah. Cool. Very cool. I love that, and I could talk about that all day but we are coming up on time, and I do want to talk to you about your plans for the future. Now I will say that I used to have a question like, “How has this evolved?” And we generally talk about that in the first half of the show, but we did not talk at all about pricing, and I’m always curious about that. So, maybe we could talk in your plans for the future, and how things evolved, how did you come up with the pricing? And what are your plans for the future?

Andre: The pricing– That’s going to be the hardest part of selling digital products. That was just a shot in the dark. Looking at other plugins that weren’t even in my space. Figuring out what people buy and then probably increasing a little bit, because I was probably a little low at the time. But the current plan is there’s a base version of Project Huddle, which is going to get a lot of the core features, and that’s it. $89 dollars. And then there’s going to be some add ons that are coming like right now there’s a file upload add on that lets you upload files right into the comments. It’s great if a client’s like, “Let’s swap out this image. Here it is.” And they can upload it right in the comment. So that’s the next pricing tier, which is currently at $109 but will go up when more add ons are added. And then there’s– So, those are all yearly fees. And of course, like with any WordPress plugin, if you decide you don’t want to pay or you can’t pay, or you don’t want to renew, the plugin will keep work. It’s not like you don’t have access to any of your data anymore, you renew when you want a feature update or support.

Joe: That’s probably the best part about things. It’s almost like every year screen flow, or Camtasia comes out with a new version that you have to pay for. But if I don’t want to pay for it–

Andre: Exactly. It’s like how software used to be. You’d buy it, and it would come in a box.

Joe: Yes.

Andre: With a bunch of CDs, or whatever. I don’t know how old people are. Maybe a floppy disk.

Joe: I remember CDs. I remember being baffled by Zip drives like I was familiar with floppies and CDs.

Andre: Yeah, I forgot about Zip.

Joe: I’m like, “Zip drive? How does that even work? It doesn’t fit into my floppy drive, and you need a whole separate thing.” The computers in the 90s were a crazy time. But that’s cool, and I like that because you’re absolutely right. Pricing digital products is so hard. There’s no manufacturing costs.

Andre: Nope.

Joe: It’s just my time. And how long does it take for me to get my time paid for? How many do I have to sell, and then when I sell that many, I’ve made that money back. I’ve been told simultaneously that my prices for my courses are too high and too low. It depends on who I want to cater to. Do I  want to cater to the person who’s only willing to pay $10 bucks for a course that’s going to make them thousands of dollars, or do I want to raise the prices and sell fewer? It’s a very interesting problem, and I like getting different perspectives on that.

Andre: I’m sure there’s people way more knowledgeable about this than maybe you and I, but when I first released it people were saying it was too expensive. And now they’re saying, “Wow, what a deal.” So it’s like, “Maybe it’s too cheap now, I don’t know.” As more features get added, there’s more value. I don’t know how it works.

Joe: Yeah. And it’s finding the right person, the right persona I guess. Because I was having this conversation with a few folks and basically catering to people specifically in the WordPress space is very hard. People in the WordPress space think that they should get a lot of things for free, and they don’t necessarily see the value of things. This is not a knock on everybody in the WordPress space, and I’m in the WordPress space. But it is harder. Maybe a better analogy would be Android versus iOS users. iOS users are willing to pay for apps way more often than Android users are, because of the open source mindset. It’s very tricky waters that we’re in.

Andre: That’s a good example. I was just about to mention that. I even think like WordPress is the new Android, Google Play store in a way. There’s so many themes, so many plugins, and it’s becoming such a commodity to a really weird different space than when I started.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I would agree with that. Sure, we both have now ten years of insight to work on, but it is easy to see the change. I’ll leave with one more anecdote before I ask you what trade secrets you have, but I was doing– I was writing an in-person course. A four-week in-person training that I was charging $200 bucks for. The people who came were people from the enterprise space who wanted to learn about WordPress because $200 dollars in the enterprise space is stupid cheap.

Andre: Yes.

Joe: Then there were people who were like “Why would I pay you $200 bucks when I can just go to YouTube?” I’m like, “These are not the people that I want to work with if they don’t see the value in being in the same room as me for four weeks for $50 bucks a week? That’s crazy.”

Andre: That’s cheaper than a gym membership in some places.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m teaching you how to use a thing that will absolutely make you money. I guess you’re a bodybuilder or a model a gym membership, but–

Andre: You can make more money on WordPress than being a bodybuilder.

Joe: Yeah, right. I don’t want to be winded when I walk up the stairs. All right, thank you for letting me rant about that. I do want to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Andre: I don’t know how people usually answer this question, but it’s maybe not a trade secret. It’s like a motto I live for, that done is better than perfect. When I used to– When I first started, it was always, “It’s not ready. It’s not perfect. This could be better. Everything works great, but I’d love if it could do this.” But you have to get it done. Release it and then iterate. So, Done is better than perfect is my trade secret.

Joe: “Done is better than perfect.” Remember those words, everybody. Those are very important words. I think this, everything you’ve said up until this point, harkens back to that. You said, “You have a bias towards action, an MVP is better than just writing it down.” If you spend so much time making sure it’s perfect and release it and nobody buys it, that’s a big blow. But if you get it out, and it’s not perfect, you get feedback and if people don’t buy it– If I do a course in a day and nobody buys it, that’s one day. If I spend a year developing a course and nobody buys it, I’m like “I just lost all of 2018. That’s it.”

Andre: Yeah, that’s huge.

Joe: So, done is better than perfect. I love that. Andre, thanks so much for your time. Where can people find you?

Andre: Find me on Twitter @ProjectHuddle is a good one or my personal one which is at @AJGagnon. It’s my name.

Joe: Nice. I will be sure to link both of those in the show notes, and then, of course, you can find Project Huddle at ProjectHuddle.io?

Andre: Yeah. Perfect.

Joe: All right, cool. I will link all of that and more in the show notes. Andre, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Andre: Thanks for having me, it was a pleasure.

Outro: Thanks so much to Andre for joining me today. I hope that you enjoyed the interview as much as I did. His trade secret, as I alluded to in the intro for this episode, was done is better than perfect. Something that I need to remember from time to time as I build software or a website or a new project. Get that first iteration out there and start getting feedback. So, thanks again so much to Andre. My question of the week for you is, “What is a project that you just need to launch?” Let me know by emailing me Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. For all of the show notes for this episode, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/116. Thanks again to this week’s sponsors, Plesk, Castos and Pantheon. This show would not happen without their support, and support from you the listener. If you liked this episode head over to Apple podcast and leave a rating and review. It helps people discover us. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Mike McDerment and FreshBooks

February 12, 2019

Sponsored by:

Mike McDerment is the founder of the incredibly popular accounting software FreshBooks. His story is an interesting one – where he started with an MVP and then built it up from there. His journey relatable, and I’m really excited to talk to him today.

[Read more…] about Mike McDerment and FreshBooks

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode 110 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Mike McDermont of FreshBooks. I am so excited to talk to Mike because I have been using FreshBooks since 2008, or 2009. Something like that. Most of my adult freelance career outside of high school where I just used Excel. After a small journey away from FreshBooks to use QuickBooks online in 2018, like the prodigal son, I came back to FreshBooks missing what I once had. I am very excited to talk to Mike today about how he built up a company that I have been using for a third of my life, which is crazy. He offers of course fantastic advice on how he built the company, and how he is growing at a good pace with his customers now, trying not to grow too fast or anything like that. I just think that this is a fantastic conversation no matter what stage of business you’re at, because Mike has seen a lot of it at this point. I will get to the interview in a minute, but first of course we need to thank our sponsors.

Break: This season is brought to you by Plesk. Do you spend too much time doing server admin work, and not enough time building websites? Plesk helps you manage servers, websites, and customers in one dashboard. Helping you do those tasks up to 10 times faster than manually coding everything. As someone who just spent a bunch of time finding the right tools and automations to save myself time, I can tell you that Plesk is invaluable. You can try Plesk for free today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at Castos. Castos is a podcast hosting platform built specifically for WordPress. They’re a Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin that lets you manage all of your episodes and podcast RSS feeds from your WordPress site, but have your files hosted on a dedicated media hosting platform. I love how the Castos team takes a common sense approach to their pricing, too. You can create as many episodes and podcasts as you want. You don’t have to worry about how much storage you’re using or silly bandwidth restrictions. If you’re like me and already have a ton of episodes from an old host, they’ve got you covered there, too. Castos will import all of your podcast content into their platform completely free of charge. It is just one click of a button. The Castos team has put together a special opportunity for listeners of this show. They’re giving away their most popular package, the YouTube republishing tier where they automatically convert your audio files into a video format and publish them to YouTube completely free, for one listener. For a chance to win tweet at me @jcasabona, and [@castoshq], and tell us why you think you should win this free year of Castos hosting. On February 1st, 2019 they’ll pick one winner to get this $340 package completely for free. Thanks so much to the Castos team for sponsoring today’s episode.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Mike McDermont, founder and CEO of FreshBooks. Mike, how are you today?

Mike McDermont: I’m well. Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe: Thanks for coming on the show. I was saying in the preshow that I am a big fan of FreshBooks, I used you guys all the way back in like 2008 or 2009 or something like that. I’m excited to hear your story. Why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do?

Mike: I’m Mike McDermont, co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks. What we are is ridiculously easy to use invoicing and accounting software. 20 million people have used the software since we started, and what makes us different is we only build for folks who invoice their clients. We solve a whole bunch of billing problems in there, billing and accounting problems frankly. It’s available for desktop and cloud. If you invoice, you need FreshBooks.

Joe: Absolutely. I will say, I guess I’ll admit this to you on the air, but I used FreshBooks from like I said 2008 or something up until the beginning of this year, and I was like “I need something that can handle products,” because I’m moving mostly into the products business. So I moved to a competitor, and boy was that a mistake. I’m moving back to you guys at the beginning of next year and the next fiscal year. I’m just like, like you said, it’s ridiculously easy to use. Moving to your competitor I saw just how much easier FreshBooks is to use then what else is out there. So, I’ve seen the error of my ways and I’m moving back. I appreciate your software.

Mike: I am sorry for your trouble, but I am grateful for your support. We’ve actually done a lot in the last year that I think you’ll quite enjoy when you come back. So, we’re waiting for you. Thank you.

Joe: Awesome. I’m excited. This is fantastic. You have ridiculously easy invoicing software, and we were talking a little bit in the preshow so we’re going to talk about your accidental journey. Why is this called an “Accidental journey?”

Mike: The way we got started was I was running a small design agency helping small businesses build their websites and do internet marketing and logo design, all kinds of things. I was billing my clients using Word and Excel when I accidentally saved over an invoice, and I got super frustrated. I’d started building small web applications for my clients and figured maybe I should do that for myself. So, I built a simple thing and that became what is now FreshBooks.

Joe: Wow, that’s fantastic. We talk about this a lot on the show, for longtime listeners, I feel a lot of founders were solving a problem or scratching an itch that they had, and then it turns out that other people had this same problem. So you were using Word and Excel and you decided to build this for yourself, did you do any research into the feature set or what was out there? Can you give us a timeframe, we’re talking like 2006 or so, right?

Mike: Yeah, that’s that’s about right for time zones. A little over a decade ago. In terms of research, we took a very unassuming approach, so built the initial thing for myself, and then we did conduct structured research calling people up. You were in the basement, so I had surveys take people through “Why did you start looking for us? What would you call this thing?” Because we didn’t even know what to call it at that point, and then “If you had to describe it to someone else, how would you do that?” And then, “What else would you like?” That kind of thing. “What other pains can we help you solve?” Through a lot of customer service and through a lot of research we fleshed out what the product should be over time, and how to improve the offering we already had.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s great. So when you built this for yourself, were you immediately like, “This is something that I could charge for,” or what was the time between you built it, and started using it, and then you realized that this was a product that you could release?

Mike: About eight months after launch, about two years since we started it, we had like 10 paying customers. We started out, I think we had a business model applied to it, but I wouldn’t say we had things like pricing and packaging correct. The way we structured our packages basically meant a lot of people could use it for free. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It worked out well. But we were basically trying to figure out, “What is the product? What features are necessary? Where do people see value and what do they want to pay for?” All those things were, we were groping our way through the darkness trying to figure out how to find a sustainable path forward.

Joe: Gotcha. Again, just talking about my personal relationship with FreshBooks, like I said I think I got on it around 2008-2009. More likely 2009, my friend told me about it and I think she had an affiliate link. Did you have like an affiliate program at that time, to help you grow?

Mike: Yeah. It’s interesting. We had a referral program where people get links inside their own accounts, yes. It worked a lot like an affiliate program where you can share a link with somebody and that would be– Effectively, short answer, yes.

Joe: Nice. So you mostly conducted interviews, customer service, you said after two years you had 10 paying customers. You have like, 10 million plus now. I’m just curious to learn what the jump was. You had 10 paying customers, what would you say is the moment everything clicked for you and you started to grow?

Mike: I get that question a lot. The simple answer is, I’m still looking for it. I think success is doing a million little things right when nobody’s looking, and then all of a sudden it turns into a thing. Maybe those are occasions where there’s this major turning point, but I’d say we just kept going. The biggest thing we did was we just kept going, we kept trying to improve, we kept trying to get to know our customer better and serve them better. Over time there’d be like, “We’ve got a new– We worked on our pricing and packaging,” or “We added a feature.” But it’s hard to really see major changes in the curve even when those events happened. It’s really about the direction and the continued progress, and trying to get better all the time. That was our story, at least. I’m sure other people have this blinding moment that it all changes direction, but that was not us.

Joe: That makes perfect sense. People in the podcasting space, especially– I started off a lot in the WordPress space here. They’re like, “How did you grow your show and how do you get so many downloads a month?” And I’m like, “I don’t know the one thing I did to make that happen. It was just consistency.” Like you said, “Just keep going with it and keep working with it.”

Mike: Yeah. Then sometimes if you’re putting things out there, at least in a consumer product like ours, or maybe your show. I can think of times when people would point a link to us, like the folks at 37 Signals pointed a link to how we handled a challenge that we had that they liked. All of a sudden all this traffic comes over and more people learn about you, so those kinds of things do happen. But 100 of those things happen, so it’s not just 1 thing.

Joe: That’s really cool, and that’s really interesting. I think that’s good advice or maybe encouraging words for people who are starting a product and they’re not seeing the out of control overnight growth that you hear about. Back in Season 1 I talked about how– Or, we talked about how the Olympics were going on, and  my guests and I talked about how you see the gold medalist at the Olympics but you don’t see the years and years of practice that they put before that to get to that point.

Mike: Or the three Olympic Games where they didn’t even medal.

Joe: Right.

Mike: There are– I think this is a terrible thing that’s always happened with the media and these companies, like there are the odd company who’ve done it the first time, but a lot of the really big successes and most of the companies that happened really really fast are people who are repeat entrepreneurs. If I started all over again, could I do it better, faster and cheaper? Maybe. Almost certainly I’d either fail faster or I’d make something as big or bigger faster, but that would have been based on all this experience I’ve been getting doing this.

Joe: That makes perfect sense. My first, again, my first podcast was not great. I learned a lot of lessons, and then I launched this one and I was able to apply those lessons. Much like you are able to apply what you’ve learned over the last 10 or so years, which is fantastic. That’s what people need to hear, because they think– I still think that sometimes, “I’m going to launch a thing and it’s going to be a huge success, and that’s going to be my boatload of cash that I know I need, or deserve, or whatever.” You said that, before we get to the title question I do want to ask one more about the research and building up FreshBooks. You said that you were running a design agency and then you launched FreshBooks, at what point did you decide that this was the thing that you wanted to focus on full time? Or did you basically say, “I’m not going to do client work anymore. I’m going to focus completely on this accounting, invoicing software.”

Mike: Pretty quickly I was excited about the product and got about 80% of my time there, but it was years for that last 20%. I had some employees in that business so I couldn’t abandon them, but what I found was if I spent 20% of my time doing the other thing I could make enough money for them and me, so that I could focus on this other thing. So there was pragmatic reasons. But then there eventually, after probably two and a bit years, I started firing my clients which meant trying to find them good homes, like somebody else who could take good care of them. But that was a progress. That’s the one side that’s nice about a client service business is you can wind things down gracefully over a period of time, if you like.

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Joe: For anybody who’s trying to move from client work to a product, do you think that’s maybe the the best piece of advice you can give? Or is there some other thing you took away from that experience?

Mike: Just know that it’s hard, and the learning curve is really steep. They’re very different kinds of businesses and business models, and things that make them go. I think client service is a great way– If you’ve built a successful client service business, it probably means you have great customer empathy and you understand being able to deliver and focus and execute. Organizing resources, and time. You need all that stuff to start a product company. But the thing about a product company is the way you market is different, and the way you build the product is different. The way you– Everything about it is is different. I think just recognizing that you’re carrying two– They’re just not the same, and being prepared for that learning curve. “I need to unlearn a bunch of stuff here because it’s just not the same game anymore.”

Joe: Yeah. I wish that we had this conversation a year ago, because over the last year I’ve learned that lesson. Though I don’t know if I would appreciate that advice as much as now that I’m on the other side of it, I say “I’m able to sell a $5,000 dollar or $10,000 dollar website to one person, but I can’t convince 50 people to buy my $100 dollar course,” because it is very different. That is for anybody who’s looking to– That’s just fantastic advice. Awesome. Thank you for that. Now I would love to get into the title question, and this is very exciting, because a lot of people that I’ve been talking to lately are the visionaries for the product and then they hired a development team. But in your case, you are the founder and you also built the product. So, how did you build version 1? Then when did you know, do you still do hands on code? Or when did you know it was time to start letting go of that?

Mike: The first thing I should do is come clean and say that makes me sound like I contributed more to the product than I probably did in the end. I did build the first version, I built a prototype to bill my clients. But it was pretty soon after that, like a couple months, that I met my co-founder and he has a doctorate in computer science. He started building things, and then I went to more of a design role. Product design, product management, and then I focused on also marketing and trying to get the business operational and organized, finding customers, all that stuff. There was a division there. I think that’s probably a little more in line with what you’re used to hearing, that visionary that’s more about what the product is and who the customer is, connecting those things to build the right stuff. That is ultimately the role I played. So, sorry. With that clarified the question was, what?

Joe: How did you build it?

Mike: With great customer empathy over a long period of time. Those are some of the key ingredients. I don’t know how technical you want to go when there’s so many ways to answer that question. Is it like, the awareness of your product in the market? Is it trying to figure out what to build? Is it– These are the technologies we chose to build on. How would you–? Sorry to break it down, but that’s a big question to me, I don’t know how to box it into something that I can answer.

Joe: Absolutely. Generally the answer I’ll give, because I’ve gotten this question before, is whatever you’re most comfortable with answering. But I am super curious with the prototype, what technologies specifically did you use? And then, as you grew, whatever you’re most comfortable answering there. Like, whatever you touched the most as FreshBooks became FreshBooks.

Mike: So, my role in growing it up. I think, for whatever it’s worth, [Lamp Stack] at the start. Ruby on Rails didn’t exist, so it was actually pre-2006 when we got started. We were building our own frameworks to do these things and then by the time that stuff came out we were pretty committed already, so Lamp Stack. I think it was MySQL, and I think they had just came out with version three. To back there. Anyway, with that my role again became product management, voice of the customer, and also marketing. Also we started, once we had a website up, and we generated a lot of traffic through SEO and online stuff, and we still do. That was my responsibility as well. But then as soon as we had people coming, then we started having people want to talk to us on the phone, so I did some of that. I did some customer service there and learned about our customers, asked them how they heard about us and constantly asking similar questions. Like, “How did you hear about us? What could be improved?” All that kind of thing to keep furthering my understanding of, “How do we improve? How do we win? How do we go further?” And then bringing that back to the rest the team, like “Here’s what we need to build.” I was pretty prescriptive about, “This is how I’d like it to be built,” as well. Those are always fun, and we had good healthy discussions about that stuff over the years.

Joe: Gotcha. This is really interesting to me, it’s something I’ve been hearing more and more lately, and I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve noticed it more or because it’s becoming more important advice. But having conversations with customers on the phone is something that I’ve been hearing a lot more lately. Maybe it’s that people around my age or younger have an aversion to phone calls, they would rather just do things with email, but it sounds like phone conversations were integral to understanding your product.

Mike: Yeah, our philosophy has always been about customer proximity. Like, “How do you get closer to the customer?” Not only email, not only phone, we were one of the first companies or maybe even the first to do customer service on Twitter.

Joe: Wow.

Mike: They said, “This is another channel to communicate with people, or Facebook, or what have you.” So that’s the orientation. It’s like, “I want to meet you where you live and serve you accordingly.” And all of them are good. Now what I will say is, if you went from email to phone to in-person, and we did do in-person we went to conferences and stuff too. I find that each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses as a research tool. E-mail you’re going to find out about a volume of problems, phone is good for getting some color on those problems, and if you meet people in person you’ll find out what it is that they want that goes beyond whatever you’re doing today. Those are harder. That gets harder. You just don’t get that in email, you might get a feature request but that’s not the same as “I think your platform should be doing this other–” just live face to face is a totally different ballgame. So, I’m a fan of all those mediums for appropriate reasons in each case.

Joe: That makes sense. I think, probably in person people are more likely to be like “You know you should do–” almost like it’s conversational. Did you find that people are less likely to complain to you? Like, not complain. But give negative feedback in-person?

Mike: Probably. But like, my whole thing is like, I’m always asking for what’s wrong. So let’s just take the drama out of that. Be like, “I know we can improve–” I’m always, if people say, one of the things I find frustrating and the thing about me is now I’ll go out and let’s say I give a talk somewhere. OK, we get off this podcast and you say “Mike, great job.” That’d be wonderful. Let’s hope we get there. And I’d say. “Thank you. Why was it great?” Because that’s when you’re live, people will tell you, and saying that. I’ll be like, “OK, great.” Now I can say, “Great. You told me something we did well. Next question is, what can we do better?” I’d do the same thing with this podcast. It’s like, “OK that’s great. That went well. Thank you for telling me that, but what could I have done better?” I think that’s the seeking to understand, and constantly improve. To me it’s a hallmark of– I’ve heard it of other entrepreneurs as well. There’s no, I’m not precious about this thing. I find that so long as we can have a civil dialogue, and you’re not yelling, then I think we can both learn a lot.

Joe: Yeah. That’s great to hear. Because especially as a creator, you get attached to the thing that you build, and if you want it to be the best version of what it is you you have to let go of that. You said, “I’m not precious about this.” I really like– Is that what you said? Precious? I really like that. Because it shows that you know it’s a tool that people use and you want it to be the best tool possible.

Mike: We talk about that a lot with even our design team here, it’s like a lot of designers will come from elsewhere and they’ll be like “This is how it’s done. It’s perfect.” We have a thing called critique, which is you cannot be precious in that room. The idea is, “Nobody’s trying to internalize feedback on work you’ve done as an attack, or as input to help you get to the next level and next better place,” and I’d much rather work with people who are oriented in the second way.

Joe: Yeah. That makes sense, because you’re not going to grow unless you learn how you can do things better. If you just think you make the best thing right out the gate, where are you going to go from there? So, cool. I love that. Let’s talk about, as we kind of wind down time here. It looks like we’re getting close to the half hour mark. I’ve personally seen FreshBooks evolve over the last ten or so years, so maybe we could talk about what are some of the big evolutions that you really liked in the product and what are your plans for the future?

Mike: OK. I think we’ve had a pretty consistent track record of improvement, and sometimes I’ll say the improvements are not as visible, but they are impactful. Because you get a lot of people using your software, sometimes a little workflow we can tune and improve things. My favorite days are when we’re launching stuff, like that’s just my favorite stuff. Favorite days in the office, and I think the big one for me would be “We’ve gone and built a new platform. We decided after all those years, I don’t know if you know this, we have a new version and new FreshBooks.” Seeing the rate at which that is changing and improving is very exciting to me. So we’re now benefiting from the first version was built on frameworks that we built at a time before standards for building companies like ours existed, and now we’re using ember and a bunch of other just more modern technologies. So we can move a lot quicker and deliver better experiences, and that’s been my experience, where we’re not only doing invoicing at this point. We now have, for those who don’t know, and sometimes we’ve had people say “You don’t do double ledger, or bank racks, we can’t use you for accounting. We’ve scaled beyond you.” And we say “Listen. You don’t need to know that stuff even exists in our software today, you don’t need to. But guess what? It’s there. And if you grow to the point where you actually care about that, it’s right there for you as opposed to imposing it on you.” So I’m excited about that too, because we’ve had a lot of customers over the years who are great customers who for one reason or another decided they needed to move on to the next thing. That’s a big thing that’s happened now, and I think what we want to do once we have that that bedrock, “We serve companies that invoice,” now by the way this is a positive development for you as you’re getting into more product stuff. We can help you track other payments and sources of income beyond just invoices, so that’s good. We’re really focused on solving billing problems in general, especially for businesses that send invoices, and we have this accounting bedrock that you can build on and grow. So I think the question is, “Now that accounting bedrock is there, how do we really help you focus on more of your billing issues?” That’ll be the direction of our efforts.

Joe: That’s really cool, and that’s something that especially freelancers or entrepreneurs or maybe solo entrepreneurs are your target audience, that’s something that a lot of people have problems with. Maybe they don’t think to bill on time, or they’re a little tepid about sending that reminder, like “You haven’t paid. It’s been 40 days and you haven’t paid the invoice.” Focusing on, and maybe I’ve misinterpreted what you said, but focusing on billing problems I think really helped your customer.

Mike: Absolutely. I just want everyone to know, what you just talked about is our bread and butter, and that’s that’s there and available today. If you use our product and you send an invoice, you can set things up in an automated way where 15 days later or 30 days later we will take care of you with a simple e-mail saying “This email is now 15 days since sent, will you please–?” We can even help you collect payment. So there’s a lot we do there, and we just see there’s a whole bunch of ways to make your life even better in and around issues pertaining to billing, and we’re excited about that.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Just to bring it back, that competitor that I’m on now does not do any of that. I looked for the automatic late fees, or the late payment reminders. They’re like, “You can do that through a third party.” And I’m like, “Why?” I don’t understand why I would have to pay extra for basic invoicing things, but in any caseb I’ll be happy when the calendar turns and I’m back on FreshBooks. I’m not just saying that because you are on the show, I literally said this to my wife like a couple of weeks ago. I just can’t wait. So, this has been great. I think there’s a lot of really good insight that folks can take away, especially moving from client services to products. We focused a lot there. But just also the customer empathy things that I think people need to hear more of. But I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is do you have any trade secrets for us?

Mike: Trade secrets. Here’s the thing, I think the way we do customer service. One thing I was thinking is “When you’re coming back don’t feel shy about phoning us.” I don’t know if you ever have, or e-mailing us, if that’s your preferred medium. We’re here to help and we even have some services we can help you with your bookkeeping, and move some data from one to the next, so you don’t have to take care of that if that’s interesting to you. Just FYI.

Joe: That is interesting to me.

Mike: Yeah, but then as trade secrets, I think the thing about FreshBooks that’s sort of uncanny and unparalleled is we really care about executing extraordinary experiences every day. That’s what we call it, that’s our mantra. We want to build simple user experiences that exceed people’s expectations, and we love helping people on the phone with a level of customer service that frankly most companies aspire to and talk about. But you know, they really don’t execute against. I think that is– I don’t know. But what I’ve come to realize is that’s a culture thing, and you don’t necessarily get it. You just don’t. That’s our, I don’t know if that’s our trade secret, I think our trade secret is that people really appreciate– Customer service just really matters, and it’s hard to do repeatedly over time at scale.

Joe: Absolutely. I think that is great. Especially because it’s a culture thing, because it does start within the company and making sure that the employees and the founders and everybody are on the same page, about how they feel about a certain thing. When they feel that they execute on it better, so if customer service is the most important thing within the company and the company culture, then you will have good customer service. Mike, thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it. Where can people find you?

Mike: Thanks, Joe. Great being here. If you want to learn a little more about us, or try FreshBooks for free, you can do that at FreshBooks.com.

Outro: Thanks so much again to Mike for joining us. I want to repeat his trade secret, which is the way they do customer service. Don’t be shy about phoning them. They put a premium on good customer service, and between the conversation with Nathalie last week and some books I’ve been reading I think that this is incredibly key at building your own business. Especially for smaller businesses or freelancers, offering that close customer service is the thing that separates you and differentiates you from the larger companies, or the airlines, of the world. Who, for the most part, make it seem like they don’t really care about their customer. I want to repeat that and double down on it. To that end, my question of the week for you is going to be similar to last week. Which is, what can you do to improve your customer service? Or, what do you want to do to improve your customer service? Do you want to implement a ticketing system or do you want to offer phone support? I know that is something that I don’t necessarily want to do, but if my customers ask for it I would do it. It’s me just being me, email is better. I don’t have a support team. But what are you going to do to improve customer support? Let me know via e-mail at Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. I want to thank my sponsors once again, they are Plesk, Castos and Pantheon. You can find the show notes for this episode over at How I Built.it/110. If you liked this episode, be sure to leave us a rating and a review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcast, it really helps people discover the show. And until next time, get out there and build something.

Episode 16: Jackie D’Elia & What We Learned Podcasting, Part 1

December 6, 2016

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It’s the end of Season 1! In this 2-part episode, Jackie and I cover everything we’ve learned while starting a new podcast. In this part (part 1), we go over the ideas for each podcast, some early trial and error, pre- and post-production, tricks of the trade, and more.

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