wordpress

Building Better Marketing Automation through WordPress with Adrian Tobey

September 10, 2019

Sponsored by:

Cloudways: Use HIBI20 for a $20 Credit!
Ahoy!: Use code HOWIBUILTIT for 20% off!
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Adrian Tobey is a young, energetic entrepreneur who’s build a pretty cool WordPress plugin in Groundhogg – something to help with yout marketing automation. On top of creating the plugin we talk quite a bit about college and higher education. He talks fast and offers some great advice so be sure to pay close attention (or slow the episode down!)

View on separate page

Transcript

Adrian Tobey: Development only started in August of 2018. I built it myself in two months, and then we brought on our first employee, and then him and I rebuilt it again for our 1.0 launch.

Joe Casabona: Adrian Tobey is a young, energetic entrepreneur who builds a pretty cool WordPress plugin with Groundhogg. On top of creating the plugin, we talk quite a bit about college and higher education. We run the gamut, we cover a lot of stuff here from development to higher ed and learning, and dropping out of school. I think it’s a very interesting conversation in general. He talks fast and offers some great advice, so be sure to pay close attention or maybe slow this episode down a little bit so you can get all of it. We’ll get into that in a minute. But first, a word from our sponsors.

Break: This episode is brought to you by our friends at Ahoy! The easiest way to increase customer engagement on your WordPress site. Install Ahoy! Create a message box, configure a way to display it, and start seeing conversions come in. You can create messages for cart abandonment, up-sales and cross-sells, custom support, and so much more. Ahoy! Has flexible conditions that let you choose exactly where and when you want your message to be displayed. I’ve recently installed it on my own WooCommerce site, and I’ve already seen increased engagement. I know this because of Ahoy! and it’s powerful analytics and reporting. You will see ROI within days of installing Ahoy! If not sooner. That’s even more true for listeners of How I Built It. You can get an exclusive 20% discount on any plan. Visit UseAhoy.com/HowIBuiltIt and use the code HOWIBUILTIT at checkout. Use those today and increase your engagement in sales on your WordPress site. Thanks to Ahoy! for their support of this show.

Joe: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Adrian Tobey, the CEO of Groundhogg Inc. Adrian, how are you today?

Adrian: I’m doing great, Joe. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I’ve listened your show before, and it’s great to be on. It’s great what you do sharing with the world how we built it, and I’m so excited. Why don’t you lead the way?

Joe: Awesome. Thank you so much for those kind words. I appreciate that. Sometimes I feel like I’m yelling into the void on the podcast, but hearing– I get a lot of feedback when I go to WordCamps and stuff like that. It’s always nice to hear that people do listen and appreciate. Cool, so let’s talk about your product Groundhogg. Let’s get into who you are and what you do first, but I do want to ask you though– I didn’t ask this in the preshow, and you don’t have to answer it because some people might think it’s rude, but you look pretty young. Are you a young guy or do you take care of yourself?

Adrian: I’m 22.

Joe: OK, you’re a young guy and a CEO of a company. It looks like it’s doing pretty well, you have a cool product as we’ll learn. I just wanted to get that out there, and I’m really bad at telling age. But maybe in my infinite wisdom in my 34th year, I can tell now. So, awesome. Let’s start off with who you are and what you do.

Adrian: Yeah, absolutely. My name is Adrian. I’ve been in the digital marketing and e-mail marketing industry for quite some time. I may only be 22, but I’ve been in it for about seven years. I went to university here in Toronto at the University of Toronto for computer science for about three years until I dropped out to focus my efforts in the WordPress community. I used to be a certified partner for a company called Infusionsoft. If you’re not familiar with Infusionsoft, they have many similar competitors out there that you’ve likely heard of. MailChimp, GetResponse, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, for example. All of those are in the same vein, they all do marketing automation as a service, and I was a certified partner in that community for about five years. In that time I built several WordPress plugins catering to people who used those tools to integrate those tools with WordPress a little bit easier, until finally I took all of that knowledge that I learned being in that industry and building WordPress plugins to build a WordPress competitor for those that people would be able to just install on their website. I think that’s a little of what we’re going to talk a little bit about today.

Joe: Yeah. So already there are a lot of really interesting things you just mentioned there. First of all, you have been doing digital marketing e-mail for about seven years. If I do my math right, we probably got started in our professions at the same time. When I was 22, I was like, “I’ve been doing this for almost a decade.” And people were like, “That’s insane.” And I’m like, “It’s true.” You also did computer science at the University of Toronto for three years before dropping out. What led you–? You said you wanted to focus your efforts in the WordPress space and on development, things like that. But what was the ultimate decision? Because when I went to college, I did my master’s program too. I’ve got double the amount of years of college, and I think at no point in that journey I would have been like, “I got to drop out of college.” So what was the thing that led you to do that?

Adrian: As I was going to university, I was also working part-time in a digital marketing agency. Which was, as I was saying, I have that seven years’ experience in the industry, but I was doubling up that time at the same time going through university. I was doing that full time and then doing school in the nights part-time, and I just found that as I was going through it I wasn’t getting the amount of value that I wanted for my dollars spent from the university that I was getting just learning as I go through the agency or through the industry, and going to conferences and all of that super cool stuff. So at one point in my last years at university, I started to develop my first WordPress plugin, which is called Form Lift. Form Lift currently has about 1,000 users and makes modest passive revenue for my current company, and it is a form builder specifically for the CRM and marketing automation tool Infusionsoft. So what people can do is they can essentially install this plugin on their site, and they can import their forms directly from their [inaudible] after going through the authentication process. They can import it directly, then use a shortcut to paste it on their website. Otherwise, without Form Lift, you’d have to do the “Send this code to your developer so they can install it on your website,” type deal, which is not the best user experience. But that’s what I built, and I was focused on making that the best that it could be in my last year, in my third year of university. So much so that I neglected some of my university responsibilities. Because I was looking at– I was looking at, “Wow. The user count is at 100, and it’s at 200, it’s at 300. This could be something, maybe. That would be super cool.” I was all excited about it, and it was just studying for my 301 class exam was just so much less sexy than bumping up the user counts. So at the end of the third year, it was the first time I had ever failed a course ever, I failed 263 which is one of the classes where you learn a lot about optimization and runtime and all of that good stuff. I failed that course, and it’s the first course I’ve ever failed in my entire life. That was basically at that point, I’m like “Obviously if I failed the course I’m not really in it, and I’m spending all of this money and tuition at U of T is not inexpensive.” So I’m like, “I’ve learned a whole lot from this whole WordPress plugin adventure and the digital marketing, and I can honestly say if I put the same amount of effort into something that’s like its own business and doesn’t rely on any others, then maybe I could actually grow something relatively quickly that would help a significant amount of people. Rather than just spending all that time and energy sitting in a classroom somewhere at nine o’clock at night.”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That makes perfect sense. I think the divergence in our journeys was that I was self-employed through college and I went to get my master’s in part because it would help me stay in school while also building the business before I went into the “Real-world.” I was teaching, and I got an assistantship for the master’s, so it didn’t cost me any money. I was getting a free education, building my business and getting paid, which was nice. I do have one question about the education, the higher education system in Canada though. It sounds like it is very similar to the United States. It’s like–

Adrian: There’s–

Joe: Go ahead, yeah.

Adrian: The only difference is that you call everything “College,” and we have a very distinct line in between college and what we call university. College is very much focused towards the actual practicality of the workspace. Trades, journalism, event management. It’s very focused on the practicality aspect of it, while our university system is very focused on the academia. Almost zero practical application whatsoever in any way, shape, or form. Unless you do the university programs that offer co-ops and stuff like that, but while you’re in the classroom, it’s extremely focused on the academia portion. So that’s what I would classify the distinction, and if I were to do it again, I’d probably go to college because I’m much more of a practical person myself. There are lots of people out in the world way smarter than I am that could go to university.

Joe: I think that probably the more nuanced description here in the United States is a trade school sounds like college. You go to a trade school to learn a specific craft. Unfortunately, trade schools are still associated with manual labor or out in the field. I don’t feel like there’s widespread popularity for trade schools for programming, for example. Then with college, this is my perception, and I think it’s a pretty good one, a college is a fairly focused– The university will say, so it focuses on– There’s a college of business, there’s a college of sciences, and a bunch of those colleges tend to make up a university. So at the University of Scranton, you can go to the College of Arts and Sciences within the University of Scranton. You can go to the KSOM, it’s the Kania School of Management, which is the business college within the University of Scranton.

Adrian: Yeah. We have that too, in a sense, in university we’re broken up into colleges, although that distinction isn’t as clear. There’s nine colleges, but usually, they are really more just for boarding than they are for the actual academia portion. That system also exists here, but it’s not as fine-tuned as it sounds like it is in the United States.

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, so you can head over to Pantheon.io today. Again, 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: Then, as far as the financials go, you mentioned that you weren’t getting the value versus dollars spent. Is college, or is university, extremely expensive there in Canada as well?

Adrian: Yeah, it’s not cheap. International tuition is ridiculous. Fortunately, I’m not an international student. But yeah, I know it’s not inexpensive even if you’re going part-time. But yeah, that was my university experience, and it was fun. I would do it again. I was in a fraternity, so that was cool. After that, it was just that I wasn’t getting– As I had mentioned, it was focused on the academia, but I was focused on the practical applications of it. Because at that time a lot of the people or a lot of my peers, they were focused on these small projects while I was out building people tools that people were using now. That felt so much better to me than spending the time, and fine-tuning n squared runtime to get 2n.

Joe: Right. “What’s the big O time?” Or whatever.

Adrian: Big O or Big– What’s the other One? “Big N?” I don’t know, and I don’t even remember.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Adrian: I have to– I think the biggest thing I got from my university education is don’t put [for each loops] inside each other.

Joe: Yes. You’re going to crash servers that way. Absolutely.

Adrian: So, I don’t do that.

Joe: Good, perfect.

Adrian: We learned something. After that, I focused on Form Lift for a couple years, and I built it to a thousand users that it’s at now. A modest revenue and it powers a thousand Infusionsoft run businesses, and then after that, the growth stagnated because you can only have a certain percentage of the customers that Infusionsoft has, essentially. Or that if you build a product that is based off of another product, the maximum amount of customers that you can have is the maximum amount of customers that they have. I started to think about ideas that would allow me to grow beyond because 30,000 customers is not enough, and not all of those customers use WordPress, and not all of those customers need your form solution. They already have other solutions, or they have developers. So it gets broken down, and we needed a product that would be available to more people, that would be a lot more accessible– Infusionsoft is the most accessible platform on the planet. It does cost you monthly fees, and those monthly fees aren’t accessible to a wide range of people around the world. It’s not translated into every single language, it’s not all of those things. So I started thinking, “What if we focused our efforts and time into a solution that was like Infusionsoft, HubSpot, GetResponse, and ActiveCampaign, but built it into WordPress? Which over 75 million businesses around the world use, can be translated into every language, is the most accessible CMS on the planet and is free?

Joe: I’m going to stop you right there for a minute because I do want to get into this. We’re getting into the research portion of the show. I do want to put a bow on our previous conversation though because I wanted to– That line of questioning with college and university was to point out something that I think that’s important, especially in the year 2019. That you don’t necessarily need a formal education to be successful, as we will see. So as we’re moving into now, you building Groundhogg, you had three years of college or university under your belt, but you also were a certified– You mentioned, I don’t think I wrote this down right, but you’re a certified–?

Adrian: Infusionsoft certified partner. Was, formerly.

Joe: Right, absolutely. So you had the formal background in working with Infusionsoft?

Adrian: Yes.

Joe: Now I’m sorry to interrupt you there, I just wanted to put a bow on that topic.

Adrian: No worries.

Joe: As we’re building up, you saw that there was a need for something that was different, perhaps better than Infusionsoft. Right?

Adrian: I would say different. Don’t get me wrong, Infusionsoft is a great tool, and all of their competitors are great tools. They all do amazing work, and they help businesses grow, and they fulfill their mandate in a lot of ways. The only thing is that it’s just that a lot of them just weren’t accessible enough for your average small business. Because the reality of the situation is if you’re a small mom and pop shop, you are both the CMO, the CTO, the CEO, as well as the sole employee of your business. You’re responsible for sales, marketing, fulfillment, and all of that good stuff. If you are that person, then you do not necessarily have the time that it takes or the financial resources that it takes to go out, spend a bunch of money on a bunch of different tools, connect them all together, integrate it with your WordPress website, learn how to use all of those tools and just take the time that it needs to learn them, and then implement them, and then act on them. If you were in that position you simply just do not have that amount of time or that amount of financial resources in lots of cases, and especially if you’re in another country where your primary currency is not the US dollar and your primary language isn’t English and all of those things. Then again, that whole process gets even more cumbersome in order to again buy all the tools, implement them, learn them, and then connect them to your WordPress website. That’s why we chose WordPress as our method of distribution for our product. One of the biggest questions that I get is, “You obviously know how to build a tool like this. Why didn’t you build it as a software, as a service? Because you could charge monthly and you could make more money, and you would control all the data and all of these things.” And it’s like, “Yes. While that’s true, that would make it different than any of the competitors that currently exist. What makes it different, not necessarily better but different, is that it is so much more accessible for the much wider community that’s out there. Because it can be– Its open-source, first of all, we take great pride in the fact that anybody can contribute. It’s translatable, it is a freemium plugin, by the way. So our base product, which we give a ridiculous amount of value away with, is absolutely free in the WordPress repository. Those are the things that make it what it is, and that allows businesses who are in that position that they can’t spend the time to learn, they can’t spend the resources and all of that, then they can use a tool that just installs into the WordPress website that looks like WordPress and feels like WordPress, acts like WordPress, and that decreases the learning curve, decreases the cost and all of that good stuff.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. So you actively made the decision to put it on top of WordPress to differentiate it from Infusionsoft? It sounds like you have a good idea of the competition in the space. I like to ask what kind of research you did, but you were in that space, and you saw the differences. The main one I think is really good, because Infusionsoft costs what, $99 dollars a month or something like that?

Adrian: At a minimum, yeah.

Joe: $99 dollars a month is a lot of cake for a small business. It’s the same reason that I don’t use Basecamp because that’s about the same price. Excellent tool, a lot more than what I need and a lot more than what I’m willing to spend on a product like that.

Adrian: Yeah. It’s a question of how much value are you able to extract from it for what you’re paying, right? At $99 dollars a month, until you can get any system set up and working for you, you are essentially just making your monthly donations.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. If Infusionsoft is making me $200 dollars a month, then Infusionsoft is– Or, $300 dollars a month. Then I’m starting to see the value in Infusionsoft. But your product is free to start, so let’s walk through. I’ll link to the website in the show notes and everything like that, it’s Groundhogg.io. You can look at the feature set there. I want to talk about the title question, which is how did you build this? You actively made the decision to make a WordPress plugin, you had experience making WordPress plugins, but making something like this performant, efficient and working within the WordPress ecosystem seems like it could be a little challenging. So I’d love to talk to you about that specifically.

Adrian: Absolutely. I would like to start off by saying that this entire project would not be possible if PHP didn’t get it to 7.0.

Joe: Awesome.

Adrian: There is a lot of back end stuff going on here. We keep it as lightweight as possible, and a lot of it is– If you’re familiar with the WooCommerce subscriptions plugin, what they do is they have this back end event queue manager type deal, and they have a cron job that runs every minute to check if there’s anything going on that needs to happen. If there’s something that needs to happen, then it executes it at that time. We were in a very similar system, so all of the automation and all of the e-mails and all that stuff that needs to happen gets added to a queue. We have a cron job that you can choose what time you want to run it off. If you want to run or off the regular WP Cron, or you want to use an actual cron job, you can choose. We basically collect anything that needs to happen, and we essentially iterate over whatever needs to happen and send it out. That process can be pretty heavy on PHP 5.6, but thankfully technology has gotten to a point where that whole process is, in terms of time and computing power, has been essentially cut down by a third. So it makes it possible in a lot of cases, and then beyond that, I just borrowed a lot of the UI and the experience that I had from building my previous plugins. I learned that custom post types in this instance was not the way to go.

Joe: All right.

Adrian: So our– One of the neat things about Groundhogg is that the database is completely separated from anything that’s in the WordPress default. So a lot of our queries and lot of our stuff is a lot faster than other plugins because we don’t use– Because you don’t have to search through the massive post database. All of our stuff is completely separated, so if you wanted to migrate your Groundhogg installation completely from one website to another website, completely separate it. If you wanted to delete Groundhogg for whatever reason and you say “I never want to see this thing again,” then you would be able to do that because it just wipes all the databases and those are gone.

Joe: I’m going to stop you right there because this is very interesting to me. Did you try it with custom post types first?

Adrian: No, we did not. I skipped that process entirely. Form Lift uses custom post types, and that’s why I decided to go a different route.

Joe: I see. So you have the experience to know “I’m tied a little bit too much to the posts and post options table.”

Adrian: Yeah, essentially. I figured out how to integrate with the– I built my own metadata DBs and all of that stuff. It works well, and that allows a ton more flexibility for Groundhogg to essentially grow without being hindered by performance and stuff like that. We have a lot of add ons as well that again install their own databases just so scaling doesn’t become a problem, because when that post types table gets big then you start to experience that performance hindrance and we didn’t want to deal with that. If you have 20,000 contacts and those 20,000 contacts are in your post type table, that’s problematic.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you’re running this in conjunction with an online store, an online store with WooCommerce, you can blow out a database quickly. You keep saying databases because I want to understand the technical details as best as possible, do you mean tables within the WordPress database or a completely separate database with the same user?

Adrian: No, it’s tables within the WordPress database.

Joe: OK, cool. But it’s your own table set, your own prefixes, stuff like that?

Adrian: Correct.

Joe: Cool. I figured that, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding you. Cool, so in not using custom post types it looks like you have a pretty good tabs interface. How much WordPress core code are you tapping into? Obviously, you’re generating the admin screens and things like that, but do you have your own whole set of classes that you’re using to generate certain functions and stuff like that?

Adrian: We try to use as much core functionality as humanly possible. Again, one of the big things for us was that it looks like WordPress, feels like WordPress, and acts like WordPress in order to cut down on the learning curve as much as possible. If you go to the e-mail screen, you’re going to expect to see a list table of all of the e-mails that you’ve written. No fancy stuff, It just looks– If you go to your post screen, you want to see all your posts, you go to e-mails, you’re going to want to see all of your e-mails. It acts in very much the same way. There are, however, a ton of custom classes and stuff that we built in order to make building out extensions as easy as possible, so another huge thing for us is we are a freemium plugin. We offer extensions and add ons as our revenue generator, and we want to be able to build those as quickly and fastly and easily as possible, so all of the databases are extendable and all of the admin pages are extendable, and all of that stuff is extendable. It was super important for us and for other developers as well who want to create their own additions to Groundhogg, that is where we want to end up. We want to have a community similar to that of Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce, or Gravity Forms. With all of these third party developers also building their own solutions, we want that. So we’ve made a ton of extendable classes and stuff so that people would be able to create those things and then add them to their own store. They can sell them on our store or anything of that nature. That being said, we use as much core code as we possibly can, but there’s, of course, things in WordPress that is limited in, and we’ve built classes and functions around that. One of the big things that we’ve done is I built– Or, we’ve built Groundhogg twice already. So from the ground up, we actually– Development only started in August of 2018.

Joe: OK.

Adrian: I built it myself in two months, and then we brought on our first employee, and then him and I rebuilt it again for our 1.0 launch. Because it wasn’t– The first one wasn’t object-oriented at all, it was all functional, and that was a haphazard mess. It worked, though. It did work.

Joe: You got your MVP out the door, right? That’s the important thing.

Adrian: We got our MVP out, exactly. It did work, and then we’ve rebuilt it as object-oriented for our 1.0 release, which was our first time we ever made any money.

Joe: Nice.

Following that, that one also works well, and that one is currently the one that’s available in the repository.

OK.

But for our 2.0 launch, we’ve gone– But that was old world. So all the classes are like prefixed, and you have your giant includes file, and a bunch of admin checks and all of that good stuff to load it in as efficiently as possible, but still not as efficiently as possible as it could be. Our 2.0 version, I checked out how Elementor goes about their inclusion of files and their structure and how they do it. I also checked out some of the newer versions of some of the fancier plugins that are out there, and they’re all using auto loaders and name spacing and all that stuff. Our 2.0 version is going to fall in line with the new way of developing WordPress plugins, which is auto loading and name spacing, and all of the syntactical sugar that comes around with our 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 PHP versions and a lot of the later WordPress core that’s now available. Gutenberg, blocks, and React, all that good stuff. So that’s our 2.0 version that’s almost done. It should be released in about Q3, which will be nice and we’ll come with a lot of those extendable classes that I was talking about earlier to allow developers to create the tools that they need.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Cloudways. Are you facing performance and security issues, or launching your ambitious project with WordPress? Look no further, Cloudways has got you covered. Their managed WordPress hosting is the best choice for websites looking for ultimate speed, advanced security, and 24/7 expert support. Now a lot of hosts promise a lot of things, but they have a whole bunch of features to choose from including cloud providers like Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud. You can quickly and easily get up and running with your WordPress website without the need to be a system admin. You get a CDN, scalability, staging, and backups out of the box. I recently set up a WordPress website on AWS with Cloudways, and it was by far the easiest experience I have ever had with AWS. Cloudways works as an extended team for individuals and businesses, handles all of the server management, and lets you focus on building amazing websites for your ever-growing business. If you like what you’ve heard, start with a three day free trial of Cloudways now. Don’t forget to use the promo code HIBI20 for a free $20 dollar hosting credit. Head over to HowIBuilt.it/Cloudways today.

Joe: Do you find keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of development is hard? Again, not to draw attention to our age difference, but when I was 22, I was fairly into like whatever the latest new shiny was. But even then, I was very like, “I don’t know, the way I’m doing it works now.” And now at 33 years old, I’m like, “Do I need to learn React? Is that going to help me in my day to day life?” But you mentioned that this is iterated pretty quickly, and you’ve adopted– I think that the main difference is you’re not adopting the new shiny, you’re adopting the best practices. Do you find it’s hard to keep up with that?

Adrian: It’s certainly difficult because what happened was in for our original– Our 1.0 build, which was our first foray into proper object orientation. So prefix and class names and having a super huge includes file, which is the way that easy little downloads did it. I don’t have original ideas. I adopt the best practices that I see other people doing, and I’m like, “If that works for them, that’ll work for me.” And then I do it that way. I modify it to whatever my own needs are. First, what I did first was I checked out the current version available for easy digital downloads, without looking at what they were building. So I built it the way they built it, but not the way that they’re about to release their new version. But, I digress. They did all the prefixing, and the huge includes file and our original actual plugin instantiation file is also built very similarly. I copied a lot of their– Or, modified a lot of their database files which are way different now than they were originally. But to begin with, they were pretty similar. Going through that process, I’m like, “This is looking good. This is looking good.” And then Elementor came on the scene for me. It was on the scene before I started, but I didn’t know about it. Then I started using it like “This is super-efficient, super-fast. How did they do that?” I started checking their back end out and like, “This is so much cleaner. There’s a whole ton less code. I can find files so much easier.” If we built it this way, I believe that developers– And that’s who we want to attract, would find it way easier to work with our tools. I made the decision at that point. It’s like, all right. I found this as a developer to be so much easier than the way that we’re currently doing it. So we’re going to spend the time and the due diligence that needs to happen in order to be able to convert our code base to this. Problem is, we have twenty-five add ons that also need to be converted. Fortunately, there’s not a whole lot of extensions in the wild at the moment, so developers don’t need to be angry at me. Hopefully, this will be one of the last reiterations that takes place. It’s a big one. Hopefully, we’re able to stick with this for a good long while, but we ourselves need to go back and rewrite essentially twenty-five extensions. Some of which are fairly heavy in terms of the amount of code that they contain. We built a calendar extension, so a booking calendar. Something like you use Calendly, for example. If you didn’t want to use Calendly, then we would offer an add on for that, and we’d built it. It is– It’s pretty monstrous in the back end, but it needs to be converted now. That’s currently what [inaudible] over there is doing.

Joe: But you make a good point here. You’ve iterated over these things quickly, but now you’re finding what you believe is the best architecture to take you through to help other developers. Because that’s a great point. You could have held off and then maybe you could have blown up and gotten popular, and then 100 developers created extensions, and then you would have 100 or probably 90 developers being mad at you that you’re changing the architecture to make your product better because it makes more work for them.

Adrian: We don’t– We’re doing that now so we can avoid it later.

Joe: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. As we move into the tail end of this episode, we talked a lot about– You covered the whole gamut pretty much that I like to cover, which is your pricing structure, the architecture behind it a little bit and what you’re working on. But what are your plans for the future of Groundhogg? As far as features go, you’re working on this big architectural redesign, and you have all of the core features are free. So if people want just a simple sales pipeline or marketing automation tool for WordPress, they can go and download it. I’m probably going to download it shortly after this interview because I’m looking for a good tool. Then the add ons are where you make your money, but what are you– What are your plans for the future as far as features go?

Adrian: One thing that we’re working on right now is a partner certification program. There’s not necessarily any code involved in that, but one of the things that we want to do is build a community around this product like WooCommerce has done, and Gravity forms has done. We want a community to surround this because when there’s a community around it, it can only make the product better and it can only benefit more people. What we’re working on right now is a partner certification program, so if you want to implement Groundhogg for other businesses or you want to learn how it works, or you want to get some good tid bits of information, then someone would be able to sign up for that. It’s a 10 part course of which 30% is now recorded and is currently being edited. Go through that, you can get your badge and your certificate, and you can essentially go to your clients if you’re a freelancer or go to a business and say, “Listen, I know. I have my certification. Would you like me to help you implement this tool? And you can make residual money that way. One of the other things that we’re working on is our open marketplace. So we currently sell all of our add ons through our marketplace, but we don’t only want to sell our add ons, we want to sell everybody’s add ons as well as our funnel templates. One of the big things that was super important for us was templatization and importing and exporting, which was one of the biggest drawbacks that I found of any software as a service tool was that sharing was complicated and difficult and costly. One of the things that you can do is if you build a pipeline or a funnel or an e-mail in Groundhogg, you can export that to a JSON file and bring it to whatever other WordPress website that you want and install it there. You can also sell those on our store and then you can make money that way. We’ll write you a check essentially for anything that you sell and send it to you, or PayPal or however you want to get paid.

Joe: Kicking it old school.

Adrian: Probably, PayPal.

Joe: You avoid fees with a check.

Adrian: Right. So, we do it that way. Again, it all comes back to building that community. The tool is great. The software, the code base, is getting there. The add ons are being all that, but right now we’re focused on building community. Because if there’s a community surrounding it, then the only people that can benefit from that is the community.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I think that it’s true that we’ve seen products grow because of their community. Elementor is several years younger than Beaver Builder, for example, but it’s grown a lot faster than Beaver Builder. I think in part because of the community and the audience that they’ve been able to appeal to. So I think that’s a really good point. We’re going to wrap up here with my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Adrian: Yes, I do. I teach this, or I just stuck this into one of my videos for the partner certification program. The biggest thing that holds people back with our product or any product for that matter is the inability to launch. Usually, this stems from “It’s not ready, it’s not good enough, it’s not perfect. What if people fall through the cracks? I haven’t thought of everything,” and all of those doubts or self-doubts stem from fear. But here’s the deal, and the hard truth with that is that you’ll never know unless you show it to somebody. So when we had our minimum viable product of Groundhogg, I knew that it would have to be redone eventually. But I needed to get it out there because I needed the feedback from people to let us know what we could improve on, the feature set that needed to be added, I needed to hear from developers and hear of some different ways of approaching object orientation or functionality or anything. And that goes for the e-mails that I write and the funnels that I build as well, you will never know, or you will never as a person be able to think of everything that could possibly go wrong or anything that could possibly go wrong when you launch something. The only way to find out is to actually do it and then get that feedback, to get those responses, get the angry customers that want to chew your ear off and get the happy customers that are super glad that you did what you did. It’s super hard to please everybody, but at least you’ll know how you’ll be able to optimize it after you’ve shown it to the world. So if you are sitting on a product or a service or a funnel or a campaign right now and you’re trying to think of all of the ways that anything could possibly go wrong and fix it before you launch, stop what you’re doing right now and go launch it anyway. Because I promise you that if there are holes to fix, they will become apparent, and you will be able to do that as you go. But you will never know until you do that. And you might be surprised, maybe it’s accepted well and there’s nothing that you need to change. Then you could have saved yourself a whole lot of time.

Joe: That’s great. I love that a lot. It goes back to what we talked about before, launching the minimum viable product and getting it out there in people’s hands. So Adrian, thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Adrian: If you want to find me, you can reach out to us @GroundhoggWP on both Facebook and Twitter. Keep in mind that Groundhogg is spelt with two G’s at the end, so that’s Groundhogg on Facebook and Twitter. If you want to reach out to me personally, my e-mail address is info@Groundhogg.io. You are more than welcome to reach out to me. Ask any questions that you have, I make myself super accessible, and if you have any questions, feel free.

Joe: Thanks so much to Adrian for joining me today. Like I said, it was a really fun conversation. We probably covered more ground than usual. He talks fast, and I talk pretty fast. But I liked our conversation around higher ed. I thought that was just super interesting. I also love that we get pretty technical in how he built his product and how they had to refactor it. I thought that was cool, and how he pulls inspiration from other places too. So if you liked this episode, I would appreciate if you subscribe to the show. You can head over to HowIBuilt.it/Subscribe to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks so much to our sponsors for this week, those are Ahoy! Pantheon and Cloudways. To learn more about them and get all of the links to everything we talked about, head over to HowIBuilt.it/137. Before we go, I want to tell you about a free workbook that I’ve put out about how to launch your own podcast. Lots of people have been asking me how I’ve launched my podcast, so I put this free workbook together that’ll help you make some decisions. It has some worksheets and checklists and things like that. You can download that, again for free, over at HowIBuilt.it/LiftOff. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, get out there and build something.

Building the State Department’s Website with Tracy Rotton

September 3, 2019

Sponsored by:

Cloudways: Use HIBI20 for a $20 Credit!
Ahoy!: Use code HOWIBUILTIT for 20% off!
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Tracy Rotton is a longtime friend of mine from the WordPress space – we met because we happened to be writing similar books around the same time! Well, Tracy has gone on to do some very cool things – one of which is leaning a WordPress development team for the Federal Government – specifically to completely redesign state.gov – the State Department’s website. We talk about lots of stuff, from the actual development, to working for such a huge organization, and how to handle working with different corporate cultures.

Alex McClafferty & Productize.co

July 30, 2019

Sponsored by:

Ahoy!: Use code HOWIBUILTIT for 20% off!
Creator Courses: Access every course, now and in the future, with a membership. Plus, get 15% off for listening.
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Alex McClafferty has a wealth of business experience to share with us this week. Not only did he build a successful business within the WordPress space – WP Curve – he ended up selling it to GoDaddy. That experience showed him that the number of resources for selling your business were scarce, and now he’s doing that – completely embracing the “teach what you know” mentality.

View on separate page

Transcript

Alex McClafferty: When you sell your company, what some people don’t understand is that you let go of a piece of yourself because you’ve put so much effort and time and love into the company. It’s quite an emotional rollercoaster.

Joe Casabona: That was Alex McClafferty. He has a wealth of business experience to share with us this week. Not only did he build a successful business within the WordPress space, WP Curve, but he ended up selling it to GoDaddy. That experience, which we’ll talk about, showed him that the number of resources for selling your business were scarce. Now he’s creating those resources, completely embracing the teach what you know mentality. We’ll get into all of that and more. But first, a word from our sponsors.

Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Alex McClafferty, a CEO coach of Productize.co. Alex, how are you today?

Alex: I’m great, thanks for having me on.

Joe: Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Based on your accent, I’m going to say that it is later in the day for you? Maybe it’s early in the morning for you now?

Alex: You know what? I’m actually in Arizona.

Joe: So it’s earlier.

Alex: We might be in the same time zone.

Joe: I think there is a 2 or 3-hour difference, depending. I’m on the east coast of the United States. That’s what I get for assuming. Is your accent Australian?

Alex: Yes. You got it. I’m glad you didn’t say New Zealand.

Joe: I think at this point, I can differentiate between the two because I’ve gotten in trouble for that before.

Alex: We’re a little bit precious about that, for sure.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I imagine it’s like if– I’m from New York if you accused me of having a Deep South accent I probably would take some offense to it. Not real offence, of course. We’re not here to talk about accents. We are here to talk about building and selling WP Curve. WP Curve was a product or service that you had that you then sold to GoDaddy, is that right?

Alex: Yeah, that’s correct.

Joe: Awesome. Why don’t we start at the beginning with a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Alex: Yes. Today I’m working with a bunch of different entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs who are building and scaling their businesses. The reason that I do that is because when I was going through building, scaling, and then selling my business, I wished there was someone that was doing what I did. I couldn’t find anyone. I could look for advisers, and I could look for blog posts and those things, but I didn’t know of anyone that was boots on the ground that could serve the stage in the phase of the company that I was in. The quick summary for my background is in 2013 I co-founded WP Curve with an Australian co-founder, I was based in San Francisco, and he was based in Australia. We grew it for 3 years and then sold it to GoDaddy. GoDaddy came by way of introducing themselves to us, talking about a partnership. Then that escalated into the talk of an acquisition. End of 2016, the company was acquired. Later on, probably late 2018, I resigned from GoDaddy and went full time to coach founders and CEOs. The way I explained it is “I have the best job in the world. All I do all day is help those folks solve their business problems.” I get to do it face to face. I get to do it over the phone. It is a whole ton of fun.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I like that what you’re doing today is something that you wish you had when you were going through it. That’s often how I start a lot of my online courses or even blog posts, educational material. It’s stuff I wish existed when I was doing it. I think that’s cool. You co-founded WP Curve in 2013, for those who don’t know, what does– What did or does WP Curve do?

Alex: We did 24/7 WordPress support. The premise of the service was basically if you had WordPress, you would get frustrated with WordPress, trying to change a theme or update a plugin or do some CSS. We had a team of developers that were on standby that could solve that problem for you. Very simple monthly subscription model where you would have a headache or have a problem submitted to our team, we’d turn it around really quickly and then let you know that it was fixed. The reason that I was interested in that type of business is that I dealt with WordPress months and months before deciding to partner up on the business. I realized how frustrating it was. Anyone that knows WordPress knows that it’s a bit of a nightmare of a platform to get your head around and you need some level of technical expertise. When I had my headache of trying to update an image that was in a blog header, and then it looked worse off 4 hours after me tinkering and tweaking it, I figured there’s probably a lot of other people out there that have the same feeling, the same problem. It turned out there was. It was a painful problem, an annoying problem, but we tried to take the headache out of WordPress.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I feel like you hear echoes of people saying, “The great thing about WordPress is it’s so easy.” It’s easy if you, just like anything, if you’ve been doing it for a long time. Sure, it comes easy to you, but I think that with 5.0 out it’s a little bit easier for new users. There’s a lot of stuff that you need to know about WordPress. There are a lot of unique problems because there are so many themes and plugins and ways to add content that it’s almost like being a mechanic. There’s not just one model of car that you can work on, there’s tons of models of cars, and they all work the same way, but a little different. It could be frustrating.

Alex: The reason that this service was sticky and the people raved about the service was because the pain was so great. They would get that frustrated and that upset with dealing with, I don’t know, like a hack site or some conflicts that they’d been working on for hours and hours. Or they’d go to a marketplace to try to get the problem solved. Then they’d have to send all of their credentials across to a developer. The developer would disappear for two or three days and then come back, and the site would be worse off than when they started. I was stoked to see customers that we had would say, “I love your service.” They were using the word “Love,” which to me was a good indicator of product-market fit. When people rave about it and get emotional, which is cool.

Joe: That’s fantastic. One of the important things about having a product or a service is defining the problem that you solve for your potential customer. I made this mistake up until very recently. I think a lot of people make the mistake where they tell you, “What is this thing? What does it do?” But really, you want to tell the customer the problem you’re solving. With WP Curve, it sounds like the problem revealed itself with a vengeance and WP Curve solved that problem.

Alex: It was really clear. What I look for in products that become sticky is that it solves a problem that elicits some emotion out of someone. Something like WordPress makes you that frustrated, makes you that upset that you will pay, at some levels, an inordinate amount of money to have the problem solved. We didn’t push too hard on pricing or doing any pricing around urgency or severity of fix for the problem. People will pay hundreds of dollars to have that problem solved because it just gets people so upset. For anyone out there that’s listening to this trying to hone in on a pain point to build a product or service, look for emotion. Look for upset people who are complaining in forums or taking to Twitter and just ranting, that’s usually a good signal.

Joe: That is excellent advice. It flows perfectly into what I like to ask next, which is about research. You mentioned, with WP Curve, that this was a frustration that you experienced personally. How did you know that this was a service that went beyond what you experienced and you knew that it would be a good business model?

Alex: I used some rough approximations. I figured that I was technical enough to be dangerous, but didn’t have a high enough care factors to figure out how to learn HTML and CSS. I tinkered for a while, but my working assumption was that there would be at least a thousand people in the world out there who were in a similar position to me. That was at a level of expertise, which was like I could set up a blog, I could write posts, I could like make some tiny updates. Anything beyond that would be too time-consuming and frustrating to learn. I was messing around with a personal blog that didn’t even generate any income. Looking out at the market. Look at how many web design agencies there are. There are already people doing some level of retainer support. Before us, there were a couple of companies like Maintain, WP Valet, WP Site Care, a couple other folks. What we looked at to do was figure out how to have a scalable model, to be able to serve thousands of customers. That came back to how the business was built, as far as having a remote team and figuring out processes and systems that enabled that.

Joe: Yeah. That’s great. Having 24/7 access requires a team around the world, right? Or at least a big enough team that people are willing to work the night shift in some cases. What was that like, exactly? Remote teams are something that’s becoming increasingly popular. It sounds like you decided to build one right from the outset.

Alex: Yeah. The interesting part is I’m a real people person, and I love being face to face because I’m a big personality and I love bouncing ideas off people and getting energized and being in a room and coming up with ideas of how to build and grow a business. It took me a couple of years to figure that out about myself. It was great to build a remote team. We had probably like 70 or 80 percent of the people that were based out of the Philippines. Then we had a guy in Costa Rica. We had a couple of folks in Africa, Hungary, a few other countries. What was fun about that was seeing the diversity and the cultural melting pot that was the Slack channel, because you’d have all of these different cultures, all of these different points of view and personalities commingling. It was just fun to sit back and watch this big social experiment. Part of the things that I learned about building a remote team is that the culture– you have to basically triple down on the culture, because you don’t have the opportunity to stand around the water cooler and have those conversations or get that interpersonal connection that you have when it’s a physical thing in an office. You need to figure out ways to recognize your people and celebrate their success and do all of those good things but in an online fashion. We used to goof off with stuff, and if it was a team members birthday, we’d have the entire team sing them happy birthday and record it on YouTube and then send them a link to a playlist. People would lose it. It’s just little things like that would get people super engaged. I think that was a huge learning. Ultimately, what I found for myself is that I love to be face to face with people, and I can help people build remote businesses and help them grow remote businesses. My personal skill set is being face to face. I can rock out all day and hang out with someone and jam on their business.

Joe: That’s fantastic. I feel the same way. One of the reasons I have this podcast is because I like talking to people. I’m a very extroverted person, and I’m self-employed and work from home. It can get a little bit isolated. But having that personal connection, no matter what you do, is incredibly important. As you decided, you knew you wanted to build this highly scalable business, and you created this remote team. Then over the course of three years, you built it to a point where GoDaddy came to you and said “We think what you’re doing here is special.” They were interested in an acquisition. What kind of research did you do around that? How did you figure out if you were getting a good offer and stuff like that?

Alex: That was a crash course in mergers and acquisitions. The first thing that I did was I bought a book off Amazon. I think it’s a 400 or 500-page book. I basically sped read that across a weekend, to get myself up to speed and familiar with all of the terms and all of the conditions and all of the different vernacular that was used as part of working through the deal process. If you’ve seen the scene in The Matrix where Neo gets this information uploaded to his brain, I basically did that with M&A, where I went into vacuum mode and tried to consume as much information and as many blog posts and things as I could to get my head around what would be a workable deal. What would a good valuation be? What would make everyone happy? How would I make sure the team was taken care of? That was a five-month process. As soon as there was an opportunity to engage on that level, I dropped everything else that I was doing and worked on that deal for that period of time. I’m super glad that I did it, because now with the business that I run today I have helped a couple of folks through their acquisition and through the process, helped them get more money on the table, helped them navigate the turmoil that comes with going from a small company to a big company and all of the change that’s associated with that. Also supporting founders through the back of that, because when you sell your company what some people don’t understand is that you let go of a piece of yourself. Because you’ve put so much effort and time and love into the company that it’s quite an emotional rollercoaster. I’m very sensitive to that now. I’m stoked that I get to share that wisdom and pass that on in whatever form I can with the folks that I get to work with.

Joe: When I was in college, this place approached me to buy a couple of Facebook apps that I wrote. It was modest offers, what they offered was more than I was making, but I couldn’t relinquish control of this little application that I wrote. I’m sure if they offered me enough, I would have said yes. It’s just very interesting. I’m sure there are a lot of emotions in that process. You’re excited and nervous and, like you said, you have to let go of some piece of yourself when you make the sale.

Alex: Yeah, totally. The thing that I advise people on today when they get into the acquisition process is basically, “The deal is not done until the money is in the bank.” At any point, up until you see the dollars in your bank account, I assume that it’s not going to go through. That’s not in a way where you dismiss it and say, “This is not a chance.” When you start to become attached to the outcome, rather than focusing on working through the process, it clouds your judgment. I’ve seen this a couple of times where you future pace a little bit and you go “Once I have this money, then I can pay off this, or buy this, or do that.” It becomes a real distraction from figuring out, “What do I need to put in place to make sure that the team is successful when they land? What does that integration plan look like? How are we going to support our people through the turmoil of this change?” All of those things. If you lose sight of that, then you shortchange yourself, because one of the weirdly fun parts of going through the acquisition is learning the process. Understanding how a company would run a process to figure out “Who’s the target company in this space? What’s interesting about this company? What levers do we need to pull, once we acquire them, to make it a successful transaction? What are the motivators for it?” One thing I let founders know is that you can pretty quickly become a deer in the headlights when a big company comes and knocks on your door and says, “We’re interested in you.” You get a little bit starstruck, and then you start to see dollar signs, and you get carried away. Ultimately, it’s a financially motivated transaction. I try to level people out with that, which is to remember that “You’re in business. It is nice to get the kudos of having a company that’s interested in acquiring you. If you are going to sell something that you poured your heart and soul into for that period of time, then you need to be measured and patient and disciplined and think about what you want and get clear on the outcome that you’re looking for.”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. As you’re saying this, I’m in the middle of buying a house. A lot of what you’re saying resonates with me on that level. It is a long process. We see a house we love, and then we need to put an offer on it. The seller probably wants more than we’re willing to pay because to them it’s their home. To us, we’re trying to get the right deal. Like you said, the deal is not done until the money’s in the bank. We’re 24 days from closing as we record this. They have accepted our offer. They have accepted our requests for fixes and stuff like that. I’m not confident in saying “I have the house” until we sign that last document in settlement and the lender gives the money to the seller. It’s looking good right now, but I’m still nervous to say, “Yes, we have a house.” Because money is not in the bank yet.

Alex: Yeah. It’s easy to get carried away and also emotionally attached to what the outcome could be. See yourself in the house, and you’re going to make all of these improvements, you can see the kids running around in the yard and all that good stuff. It’s easy to walk that path and especially when it comes to an acquisition, because often that’s one of the biggest financial transactions of someone’s life, depending on the scale of the outcome. Emotion is absolutely going to play into it. What I advise people of is not to try and shut down or avoid the emotion, but be super aware of what is driving the decisions that you’re making and how you’re thinking about things. People will come to me, and I’ll become the sounding board, and they’ll say” This is happening,” or “That is happening. How do I think about this?” or “What should I look out for?” I can be the impartial observer and say “Given my experience, being on the sell-side of an acquisition and also looking at some deals from the buy-side of an acquisition, I can tell you that these are probably the things that we’re looking at. Here are some stumbling blocks that you might approach. This is probably the timeline that it will take if things go as planned. These are some signals to look for whether the deal is going to be cold, lukewarm, or hot.” There’s a lot of different angles to look at it from. When you’re a founder, and you’re selling your own company, it’s hard to have that level of awareness because you have tunnel vision on trying to get to the outcome.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. As we get to the title question, I want to focus more on building an acquisition plan. There’s one more point I want to touch on here, which is I suspect most founders think their business is worth more than it is. I have no data to back this up, but if GoDaddy were to come to me and say, “I want to buy your courses.” I would think, “How much money will they give me?” They have so much money, but they’re going to look at the hard bottom line. How much did you make over the last few years? How much can you expect to have made in the next five?

Alex: Well, it depends. The answer to that question is, it depends. I think, in short, my experience is founders expectations are often either really on the low side of what’s possible or really on the high side. That’s because they don’t know what the comps are, the comparable sales in their market. A good place to figure this out or a good way to figure this out is to look at similar companies with a similar size and try and piece together data that will help you understand “What is your company worth?” There’s different ways to do this. For online businesses, you can go to website brokerages, and you can go to places like FEI International or FAA International, rather. Flipper, QuietLight brokerage. There’s a handful of these guys that are in the business of buying and selling, transacting businesses through a marketplace. They’ve got their own multiples so they’ll do a multiple of seller discretionary earnings, depending on the business, or they might do a multiple of revenue if it’s a software company. The other X factor in a deal is sometimes revenue, for a company like GoDaddy, is not a huge motivator. What they would look for is, “What’s the potential for scalability of the business?” When I was talking to those guys, the question that I had to answer is “What does this model look like with 10 times the amount of customers, with 50 times the amount of customers, with 100 times the amount of customers? Do I have confidence that I’ll be able to help to take it to that level?” When you look at it from the buy-side, as far as the company that is acquiring, trying to try to understand their motivators of what they want to do with the product. That helps you as a founder to understand how to best position your product for sale. If you think it’s all about dollars and cents and that’s everything that they care about, and what they want is an amazing team that they could maybe point out another product or integrate your product into, understanding what motivates them, I think, is even more important than understanding what motivates you. Because it helps you to think about “If I’m trying to maximize the outcome from this exit, what kind of language do I need to be speaking when I go into these discussions and meetings, and talk to corporate development and so forth?”

Joe: That’s a great point. I always look at the bottom line of things. If you along with the acquisition, you’re bringing an amazing team of developers that your acquirer can employ in other places, if you have the best community in a specific space and your acquirer is using that for a jump-off, then that’s the X-Factor or the motivator that you’re talking about.

Alex: Yeah. The interesting part is I’ve seen acquisitions that range from anywhere from a couple months’ worth of revenue, to 50 times annual revenue. The spectrum is that large, and obviously, the outliers are towards the far end of that, but as far as a software company goes, it’s reasonable to expect anywhere between three to eight times annual revenue depending on the space, depending on how hot it is, depending on a number of different factors. The other elements that you take into consideration with that is, as far as the deal is structured, do you get all of that money upfront? Are there, earn-outs? Are there performance kickers, other clawbacks? Are there other terms of the deal that you might not be aware of, or might not have visibility of? Someone could say, “I got six times annual revenue.” But they’re locked into a four-year earn-out, and they have to hit performance bonuses to unlock half of that money.

Joe: Yeah, that’s interesting. Let’s get into this. You could talk specifically about WP Curve if you can, but if you can’t, we get to speak more generally. How do you build an acquisition deal?

Alex: An acquisition deal in so far as like positioning a company for sale, do you mean?

Joe: Yes. Let’s say I want to position my company for an acquisition. How would I get to there? Then briefly, what are the things that I should look for when some company approaches me or whoever about getting acquired?

Alex: Sure. The thing that I think that every founder should do is they should look– Even have it on their radar, to start to build connections with competitors and to start to build connections with the big boys in the industry. Whether that is the senior leaders at a particular company or other folks that are involved and invested, it’s just starting with networking and getting to know who’s who in your space. As far as reputation goes, that is a big driver of a deal, because when you think about it GoDaddy the company doesn’t buy the business. What happens with my acquisition or any other acquisition is there’s a leader within the business that has a strategy that they need to execute, and then they need to figure out how to marshal their resources to make that happen. What they’ll look for is “I need to add this much revenue to the top line or the bottom line by whatever time period. These are my goals. How do I go about doing that?” What you’re looking for is that internal motivator for that individual. I think what can happen is you look at a big company, and you go “It’s such a big company. I don’t even know where to start.” You start with the individual, start with the person that runs the department, or is a leader in the department or is even in the department to help you to start to build relationships with folks. That would be the place that I would start if I was looking to pursue an acquisition. This is a long time, and it’s a big-time investment because a bunch of different things have to line up for you to even be in the crosshairs to have an acquisition. Other ways that I’ve seen it happen is people will build a prospectus for their company, and they will have and build relationships with corporate development at each of the potential acquiring companies, and say “We are looking to sell. This is what the business looks like. These are the financials. We’re seeking a valuation in between this range. We’re running a process, and we’ve got a handful of other parties interested. Let’s move forward and see if this is something that you’re interested in.” This happens a lot more than you might think. I’ve seen some acquisitions happen where I know that the founder has been looking to get out for 18 months, and they’re trying to figure out a way to exit the business. What will happen is an announcement will come out, and it’ll be like “These guys got acquired. Good for them.” They’d been in the background either working with a banker or working with an advisor to figure out, “How can we exit the business and who are our natural acquirers? Then what do we need to have in place to be made whole from the transaction?”

Joe: Gotcha. That’s super interesting. I love what you said about starting with networking because it’s always about that. If people don’t know about you, then they’re not going to buy you. Reputation is incredibly important. Building a prospectus. That’s almost like listing your– If we’re going back to the house analogy that I can relate the most with, it’s almost like listing your house for sale. Saying “I have a company, I want to sell it. Here’s how much I think it’s worth. Is anybody interested?”

Alex: Yeah. It’s that simple. Funnily enough, when entrepreneurs get into their first or second business, they’re thinking about sale. I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs. I always ask them what they’re building it for. They don’t usually say, “I’m building it to sell or to make a bunch of money.” We’re that narrowly focused on getting through the next day, or the next week, or the next month, or quarter. We’re not usually thinking that far out. It’s not that it’s a bad thing, it’s just a thing that I’ve noticed with a lot of folks that are early stage. They’re going to be pouring months or years into the business, but they’re not thinking about what outcome they want from it.

Joe: Yeah. That’s interesting. That reminds me of business plans. I wrote a business plan for a potential business. It was a business plan competition when I was in college. The last section that we had to fill out was, “What’s your exit strategy?” I thought, “Why would I have an exit strategy?” I’m building this business because I want to have this business. I want to run it. This section implies that I’m going to sell or leave or something. To that end, if people are going to be investing in your business, they want to know when are they getting their payout? If you are a business owner and you grow to a size that’s either too big for you or you want to move on, then it’s something that you should have in the back of your mind, right?

Alex: That advice and that point of view is consistent, whether or not you want to sell. If you’re in a business if you’re in a relationship with the co-founder. My recommendation is always have a buy-sell agreement in place, should anything happen. Whether your personal circumstances change, or something happens within your family, that each partner knows, how you will value the business and how you will offload that portion of the business to either another party or the other founder in the business. The way that I think about it is like signing a prenup. It’s not to say that you are expecting the thing to crash and burn, but the same thing applies to having that level of clarity is super helpful, because it keeps everybody on the same page and the same level. Also having an internal valuation for how you look at what you value a company at. If there’s, and this is where other people get tripped up, there’s some inbound interest. They’re trying to figure out “What would a fair offer be? There’s all the emotion flying around because they’re feeling really happy that a big company has reached out to them. All this stuff is happening, and it’s hard to make a rational judgment on what is a reasonable multiple, given their size and the scope and the market. All of those different things that feed into figuring out what a company is worth. If you have a number in the back of your head, and you say “I would be happy with one times annual earnings, or five times, or whatever that number is.” An acquirer comes along and says, “We’re interested, here’s a term sheet, let’s move forward.” It takes a lot of pressure off, and you can start to focus on other parts of the deal versus going “Did I leave too much money on the table? Now I’ve got to scramble to do research to look at comparable deals or other things.” That would be my advice, as far as getting into any business, understanding what’s a reasonable multiple for it? If someone came along and they said “Here’s a check for whatever it is.” Would I be happy with that? Because it just it saves a lot of time.

Break: This episode is brought to you by Creator Courses. Do you feel confused and overwhelmed by the amount of tools to help you build websites? Are you worried that you are not using the best tools for the job? Do you feel like you ought to spend more time building and less time researching? Like you, I thought I needed to learn every tool, language, and platform under the sun to be a good web professional. As somebody who’s been doing this for 17 years, I can now tell you, you don’t. Creator Courses offer short focused courses, tutorials, and webinars to help you learn the right tools quickly. Then you don’t have to waste any more time researching, and you can get back to producing billable work, confident that you’ve made the right choice. Now you can access all of those resources by becoming a Creator Courses member. You’ll be able to take any course we offer, including member-exclusive mini-courses on how to use specific tools. You’ll also join a great community, and listeners can get 15% off the already low price by going to CreatorCourses.com/Build. Spend less time researching and more time building. Visit CreatorCourses.com/Build today.

Joe: As far as the second part of my question, let’s say now somebody has approached me and they are interested in an acquisition. What are the top X things I should think about? Are they just going to say straight out, “We want to buy your company?” Are they going to court you a little bit and test the waters? What’s the 10,000-foot overview of the process?

Alex: It depends on the acquirer and the company. I would say that it’s unlikely that a big company is going to come out and outright say, “We’re interested in buying you.” Because they need to do their due diligence and research on their side to understand “Who are the founders? What is the team like?” It often starts as “Let’s explore a partnership. Let’s see how we can work together.” That’s probably the introductory phase. When that happens, it’s unlikely that you’re the only person that’s being reached out to. You can get a little bit starstruck and feel like you’re Cinderella going off to the ball, or whatever else. Oftentimes there’s 5, 7, 10 other companies that are having the same conversation with the company. As you think about that, my advice to people is to try and understand what the motivation is for getting the deal done. Hone in on “Why does the company care? Why are they pursuing us? What does it mean to their business?” Understand what success is going to look like for them? Instead of worrying about all the things that you want, you care about, actually try and dig into questioning, “How would this look if this was to come off? What’s the business benefit of pursuing this acquisition? How big do we think we can grow that business?” The reason that matters is because it gives you something to anchor towards, as far as what the value of the company is going to be in the eyes of the acquirer. Assuming that you’re past that stage and that dance of “Let’s maybe partner, it looks like there’s something more here we can explore.” Then remember that if you are going down that path on the buy-side of the deal from the acquirers point of view, they have a model in place. They know what they’re willing to pay. They’ve got a range which they will work within. It’s not a guessing game. They have a spectrum. The first offer is never going to be the offer that you should take. That takes a little bit of courage because you do you see a big number on the screen. Then you go, “I’m going to say no to that. Am I crazy?” That’s just how negotiation works. If you’re not comfortable having that conversation, then that’s the time to engage a professional, whether it’s someone that works on deals, or is a commercial banker, to be able to go in and negotiate on your behalf. As far as it goes getting into the deal and looking at these different elements, there is the courting. There is whether there’s going to be an offer in between some of that. There’s going to be “Let’s talk about some of the history of the business.” I advise people not to give away all of their information until you actually have a term sheet and you’re actually in the process of due diligence. This is another common mistake that founders make. I’ve seen prospectuses that people have put together, which are long and detailed and give away all of the secret sauce of the business. Unfortunately, there are some companies out there who will– it’s basically information gathering. They will say, “We’re interested in partnering, or we’re interested in acquisition.” They’ll get you hot and bothered and learn about the ins and outs of your business, and then it’ll immediately go off the boil. You’ll be like “Huh, that’s weird.” We experienced that, as well. I went through that with another company, and I’ve seen that happen. It’s a theme. Keep your eyes on the prize and remember “It is a dance. It is a slow dance.” Entrepreneurs try to force things and push things quickly. As far as it goes, be patient, don’t expect something to happen. As you work through it, go slowly and move slowly and be patient. It’s hard because when there’s millions of dollars on the table, you’ve got dollar signs in your eyes. It’s hard to hard to go slow.

Joe: Yeah. You get excited. Don’t give it all away in the first date, I guess. The first offer should never be the one you take. I think that’s important for people to hear because even though it may look like a gigantic number to you, they are probably giving you the lower end of their range. Not because they’re trying to lowball you or anything, but their job is to make this as profitable as possible for them. Just like buying a house. I’m never going to go in and ask for asking price right off the bat. I’m going to figure out, “What are other homes assessing for?” I’m going to make a reasonable offer, based on that. Then if the seller comes back and says, “We think we can get this much.” Then we negotiate. It could be really hard if you want something.

Alex: I never work in absolutes, so the caveat to that is if you’ve got a multiple in mind and then the offer comes in way over multiple of what you’re expecting, then get on with it. That’s the exception to that rule. I don’t know that that often happens. The goal here, if you are serious about the acquisition, is to sell the company. If you get what you need, you can move forward. That’s not a stumbling block. I would say that the vast majority of the time, those early offers are bottom finders. Where it’s enough to get you interested, but then you’re like “That’s not going to work out, so let’s revisit, and we’ll go back and forward with a couple of counteroffers on each side.”

Joe: The other thing there is that if they come in with a lower price, now they’re anchoring you to that lower price. It seems like “Anything more than that is a steal for me.” Those are things that you should keep in mind. Maybe it is worth it to engage an objective third party to help you work through that stuff. When they’re offering a number that you’ve never seen in your life before, then it could be very hard to stay objective.

Alex: It’s not impossible to stay objective, but you’ve got to be extremely disciplined. You will want to move things quickly because you’ll create your own sense of urgency because you will be like “The door is closing.” This is another thing that happens in a lot of deals, which is pacing. There’s pacing that happens where there’s certain phases of the process where things will speed up or slow down. Ultimately, once you get past a certain phase, which is maybe a term sheet getting into diligence, that is exclusive, and there’s certain terms around exclusivity, and you can’t shop your company anywhere else. According to the terms of the term sheet, or whatever else is in place. You are basically beholden to the process for that window of time. That creates some intrinsic urgency in getting the actual deal done, but you have nowhere else to turn. Because you have committed to not shopping the company anywhere else, so you can stay focused on the deal. The point of all of this is there is a lot of nuance to the process. It is a dance. It is hard to be patient when you’re an entrepreneur. If you get into this process, and you feel like you’re going to get too excited to get too carried away, find someone that’s been down that path before or find a banker or find a coach, find an advisor, find someone that’s had their company acquired and engage them and ask them questions. Again, is just another business process. It’s like a sales process or a marketing process. It’s something that you can learn. It’s not a dark art that only certain few people are gifted with.

Joe: I love that. This is definitely something that can be learned. We are slightly over time, but I do want to ask you one more question before we wrap up. Aside from the money side of an acquisition. What are other things that you should look for? I assume that stuff like helping with the transition from your team into the bigger company. Do you have to stay on for a certain amount of time, are there other things that you should think about, other concessions you might have to make, as far as an acquisition outside of money?

Alex: It depends on the individual. A lot of acquisitions will come with strings attached, which will be– you’ll be golden handcuffed into a very attractive looking offer, based on staying on with the company for a period of time. That’s a really hard thing for an entrepreneur to stomach because they go from being the master and commander to then working in a company that’s got a completely different culture and a completely different way of doing things. That is totally a consideration, and it depends on the phase of your life. I know entrepreneurs that have been happy to sell and happy to go and take a desk job because they’ve been grinding for 5 to 7 years, and they feel like that’s a break. That’s a holiday from working 18 hours a day, or whatever crazy stuff they’ve been doing. That’s one thing. Also remembering that once the deal is done and the money comes and hits the bank, or whatever the timing of the transaction is. That’s where the work begins. “You’ve sold your company. Now it’s on you to go and make it successful at scale.” That was something that I learned post-acquisition, which was that the first 18 months of WP Curve, I was super involved and super active. I scaled myself out of the business in the second 12 months. Then I came back around and got involved in the deal and then post-acquisition getting into GoDaddy. I had to be all hands on deck to get the business back up and built because obviously, I wanted to be successful and not fail. That’s also a little bit of risk mitigation for the acquiring company, which is to say that the entrepreneur wants their company to be successful and they don’t want it to crash and burn because that’s what happens with a lot of acquisitions. They don’t integrate well. The product gets shuttered. The entrepreneur will leave. For someone like me, I had to commit to relaunching the product, figuring out how to scale it, figuring out how to sell it in a completely different space. I learned a whole lot. I learned just as much before the acquisition as I did after the acquisition because that’s where I truly learned how to scale. Probably the summary of all of that is, take it as a learning experience and go into it with eyes open and look at it as how you can learn rather than what’s different. You’ll be in good stead.

Joe: That’s great advice. It reminded me of two competing, very public acquisitions, as far as success and failure. Disney and their acquisition of both Pixar and Marvel has been very successful, but Flicker, every acquisition, it seemed, it tends to get worse off. One that got me was LaLa, and I don’t know if you remember LaLa, it was this online web-based music streaming service where you basically paid 10 cents per play, or you can become a member. Apple bought it, and I’m like “This is great. They’re going to rebrand it as iTunes in the cloud, or whatever.” They just shuttered it. It was like basically an acqua-hire. I was bummed about that.

Alex: That happens. I think one happened with maybe it was Google or Apple. There was a calendar app called Sunrise. People were crazy about how cool this app was. Then it just went nowhere, and it disappeared. I think it got shuttered as well. It does happen, and it’s totally a thing. This is what I mean about the strategy. If you don’t understand the underlying reason that you’re being bought, that can totally happen. That can totally happen.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. You just gave us tons of great advice, but I always need to ask my favorite question, which is, “Do you have any trade secrets for us?” What’s this one overarching lesson maybe that you’ve learned in this whole process?

Alex: I would say that doing work that you would do for free, is probably a good litmus test to see if that’s something that you would want to continue to do. Whether you’re going to be successful with something. I found myself coaching entrepreneurs for free in 2015, just because I loved it. This was slapping me in the face the whole way along. The WP Curve path. It’s because it filled me up. I enjoyed helping people. If you can anchor into that and figure out what it is that you love and then how to get paid for it. You probably won’t feel like you do any work. I don’t feel like I do any work, because I love the work that I do so much. I don’t know too many people that can say that, especially folks in office jobs who have to follow the TPS Reports, or do whatever other stuff they need to do. Meanwhile, I’m hanging out, chatting to you and talking about entrepreneurship and trying to help people. I love it. That’s probably my trade secret, which is anchor into the things that you truly love and enjoy. Then you will reap the rewards if you keep showing up day after day.

Joe: That is excellent advice. I can totally vouch for that, because when I first started making websites, I could not believe that people would pay me to do something that I enjoy doing, like a hobby. Fantastic advice. Alex, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Where can people find you?

Alex: They can go over to my site, it’s Productize.co. If you load up the site, jump on my mailing list. I’ve got a couple different resources, depending on the stage and the scale of your business, whether you’re starting out or you’re all the way down the path of potentially being acquired. I’ve got something that I can help you with, and it’s all free content. Get over the Productize.co and check it out.

Joe: Awesome. I will link that and a lot of the things that we talked about, in the show notes today over at HowIBuilt.it. Alex, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

Alex: Hey, great to be here. I’ve got to give Jaclyn a shout out to making this connection happen. She is an awesome person. She is at PodReacher.com. I love her work, so I had to make that connection, too.

Joe: Awesome. Thank you so much for shouting that out. Jacqueline is also going to be a guest on this show, so be sure to look out for her episode. Thanks so much to Alex for joining us today. I liked his story because it is different from the stuff that we normally talk about. We usually talk about building plugins or a small business. He built up maybe the first WordPress maintenance company and then sold it to one of the biggest hosting companies in the world. He decided to take what he knows and teach it to all of us. His trade secrets are very unique because of the uniqueness of him being on the show, especially the “Understand why you’re being bought” part. You always want to know what motivates someone to act the way they’re acting. The more you can understand about why somebody wants to acquire your company, whether it’s for you and your specific talent, or the brand you build will help you come to a better agreement that works for both you and the potential buyer. My question of the week for you is, “Would you ever consider selling your business?” Let me know by emailing me Joe@Casabona.org or via Twitter @jcasabona. Thanks so much to this week’s sponsors, Pantheon, Ahoy! and Creator Courses. They make this podcast happen. Of course, thanks so much you for listening. If you like this episode, share it with somebody. Maybe they’re going through an acquisition process right now, and Alex’s advice can help. Thanks again so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Michelle Schulp and Staying Fit While Freelancing

July 16, 2019

Sponsored by:

Ahoy!: Use code HOWIBUILTIT for 20% off!
Creator Courses: Access every course, now and in the future, with a membership. Plus, get 15% off for listening.
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Michelle Schulp is a fantastic web designer in the WordPress space – you make have seen her work on the WP Hierarch chart. Recently she’s launched a new initiative talking about fitness and freelancing. Last week we touched a bit on mental health. This week we’re going to dive into physical health, especially when running your own business.

View on separate page

Transcript

Michelle Schulp: I also just tried to find things that gave me joy. As much as exercise can give you joy, because I’m not going to lie, I’m not inherently in love with exercising, and I do it every day. I don’t want you to feel like you have to love it either if you’re trying to do it, it just has to be something that you want more than the alternative.

Joe Casabona: You just heard from Michelle Schulp. Michelle is a fantastic web designer in the WordPress space. You may have seen her work, which includes the WordPress hierarchy chart. Recently she launched a new initiative talking about fitness and freelancing. Last week we touched a bit on mental health with the Allie Nimmons episode, this week we’re going to dive into physical health, especially when running your own business. This is another episode where I open up a little bit more than I’m used to, talking about my own journey to become healthier and my pitfalls, especially. Michelle offers some fantastic advice on what you can do and the mindset that you should take when approaching getting healthier. We’ll get into all of that in a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

Joe: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is my good friend Michelle Schulp, the designer, developer, founder, main person at Marktime Media and Fitness & Freelance. Michelle, how are you today?

Michelle: I’m doing well. How are you?

Joe: I’m fantastic. You live in what I think is like the middle of the country.

Michelle: The upper part of the middle, yes.

Joe: Yes. So I’m sure the weather is generally worse for you than it is for me, but it’s finally becoming nicer as we record this.

Michelle: As of right now it’s beautiful and sunny outside, and here I am sitting inside with you, so that goes to show.

Joe: It’s about the same for me. Of course, I have terrible allergies, and so I’m taking respite inside my air-conditioned house until everything is fully in bloom, but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about you and everything that you do and build, so why don’t we start off with who you are and what you do?

Michelle: Sure. My background, I am a designer and developer, and I have been independent for the last 10 years. Prior to that I worked at a small agency, but one of the things that that’s not– Obviously I’ve been able to do a lot of interesting work, a lot of existing clients, I’ve been able to travel and I’ve been able to speak, I’ve been able to help organize events, I’ve gotten really involved in the community. But one of the things that has been in the background of all this that was very important didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the technical part of my job, but it had everything to do with everything else in life. Noticing that all of my peers and myself included were very sedentary, we were eating a lot of crappy food, and the lifestyle promotes that. Because at conferences it’s all snacks and junk food and late nights out at the bars, and lots of coffee and glorifying the Mountain Dew-Doritos life. As I was growing in my career, as I was growing in my background, I was also noticing all of these other patterns happening in mine and other people’s lives. That’s what got me to where I am now.

Joe: Very cool. I should say that I was very big into the Mountain Dew-Doritos life in high school and college, and now that I’m an adult and a lot more sedentary– Less sedentary than I was two years ago before my daughter was born, but I don’t think I can drink Mountain Dew anymore. I used to drink it by the two-liter bottle. Now I’m– It’s too sugary.

Michelle: Fun fact. When I was in high school pretty much every day for breakfast during second-period math class one year, I would eat Cheez-Its and a can of Coke. I remember we were learning about multi-variable functions or something, and I remember that it got so bad that when I was taking a test later on that topic, it was like “You know what I want right now? Cheez-Its and a can of Coke.” So I feel you on the lifestyle. I was pretty hard into that too.

Joe: It’s super easy too. In grad school I would drink a Full Throttle, like those giant cans of Full Throttle, it’s Coke’s energy drink. In between our break, I would get it before class, and then I would drink it at the break because our class was 7 to 10 PM, and that’s a very long time, and I can’t stay awake for that amount of time. I would chug a Full Throttle. It was rough, and it was a rough life. I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person who has noticed this, you’ve obviously noticed it and taken action. Your background is in design and development, and you are– I think your designs are awesome. I think they’re fantastic. Would you say you’re more of a designer or more of a developer, or do you do both nowadays?

Michelle: I’d say probably visual UX strategy straddles that pretty well because I do design, but I would say I’m not necessarily going to win a design show award. I’m not doing fancy groundbreaking design that other designers are going to be impressed with, and I’m not doing complicated backend development that other developers are going to be impressed with. So basically what I’m doing is I’m solving some problems, and I’m doing functional visual design, strategy based user experience, and then semantic front end development.

Joe: Nice. I’ll add the caveat as a guy who has his Masters in software engineering and knows a lot of developers, is nobody is ever going to impress the developer except for the developer himself or herself. “Why would you do it that way when you could do it this way?” “They both work reasonably well, so I did it this way.” “No, my way is better.”

Michelle: That’s why we have the internet.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. When I had to defend my master’s thesis, I got ripped apart for this one area. My friends came to it, and they were like, “Why were they so mean to you?” I’m like “A little they had to be, and a little hubris that comes with being a software engineer.” I like the way that you described what you do. This new website that you’ve launched, fitnessandfreelance.com is a relatively new endeavor. Marktime Media is your freelance arm, that’s where you do client work through. Then Fitness & Freelance is this whole other endeavor, can you tell us a little bit about this based on what– You’ve noticed the poor lifestyle stuff that came with the territory of our career, and then you decided to launch this website?

Michelle: Sure. I didn’t do this on purpose, so a lot of it, like a lot of our journeys, is partly curated and partly falling into a situation. In my case, maybe 5 or 6 years ago I decided I could just let myself go, or I could now while I’m young start building good habits that will be easier to maintain later than it is to try to start when I’m older and more beat up. It was very much a personal journey, and I started doing a lot of research into dietary systems and different exercise systems, etc. But it was all very internal and very personal. Maybe 3 or 4 years ago, I started incorporating that into my life to the point where other people started noticing. Because I became that person that would start doing workouts in the middle of the field at a WordCamp, or in the speaker room, or talk about leaving a party early to go workout, or having long conversations over meals about what we’re eating and different stuff. It wound up that this personal thing that I was doing for me wound up being this thing that I talked about with a lot of people and people started associating me with it. They’d be like “You’re the workout person.” Which was hilarious based on my previous recounts of my life. This is not inherent to who I am as I was growing up. I started thinking about a year or so ago, “I’m doing this. I’m spending hours of my day dedicated to this. I’ve done all this research. I know all these things and people are always asking me questions. I should put something together.” It was really important to me to be different than– There’s infinite resources out there for learning about fitness, about health, about anything. It was important to me to not evangelize. That’s the thing, how do you know somebody is involved in whatever fitness trend? They’ll tell you. That’s a thing. I didn’t want to be that person, because what I also understand about my life is that I do come from a place of privilege. I work in the tech industry. Hashtag privilege right there. We have a lot of opportunities afforded to us and a lot of flexibility. I’m a Caucasian, and I’m from upper-ish middle class. I don’t know what the qualification is, whatever. But I have a lot of time and resources available to me. I wanted to be able to share my story. I wanted to be able to help people, but I also didn’t want to be like “I can do this, so you can too.” I wanted it to be a lot more inclusive than that. That was the struggle and getting started with this, is figuring out how to tell that story without evangelizing, without telling people what they should be doing. But just saying “Here’s something I’m doing and it’s working for me, and here’s why. Maybe this could help you?”

Joe: We were both at WordCamp Miami back in March, I thought your talk had some of the most actionable advice because it wasn’t just like “You need to wake up at 5:30 in the morning.” You know all those people who are like “If you wake up at 4 AM, you’re going to be so much more productive.” You did that, but you didn’t say, “You need to do that.” You didn’t say I’m on this– I don’t even know what diet/eating methodology you use, but you didn’t mention it during your talk. You were just like, “Here’s some things. Here are small changes, some of these you can choose to make, some of them you don’t. It’s all about you.” I think you do that well, and it got me a little bit more energized. I think later that day I was going to drink a Coke and I decided not to because of your talk. I think you do that well. I did have a question about this, and I think the first time I noticed your dedication to this type of new lifestyle we were at some WordCamp. We tend to go to a lot of the same WordCamps, and you started working out in the speaker green room.

Michelle: That was at WordCamp DC, I think.

Joe: Yes. I thought that was super– I don’t want to work out in front of anybody. Nobody needs to see that. I thought that was interesting that it was so important to work out. Was it at a specific time, or just that you hadn’t done it that day?

Michelle: It was mostly trying to fit it into the day because that was prior to my being capable of getting up at 5 AM thing that I started this past year, which is awful and great. I needed to find a way to fit something in. I started traveling with resistance bands and stuff, so to paint the picture for people that are listening I wasn’t getting ridiculously sweaty and gross and horrible, but I brought a change of clothes.

Joe: You weren’t doing CrossFit in the middle of–

Michelle: No, I brought a change of clothes, and I was doing a series of bodyweight and calisthenic exercises that get my heart rate up, do some resistance training stuff. Funny story too, I have a couple of different airport workout routines that I do. It is a thing, and if you travel with me, I’m probably going to be working out for at least 10 to 20 minutes in the middle of the airport. We’re just sitting there at the gate waiting and doing nothing. I could sit there and stare at my phone, slouched over like a lump, which is great. Or I could get on the floor and do like 400 ab exercises. You definitely have to be the kind of person that either doesn’t care what people think, or pretends not to care what people think when you do that because everybody loves to stare at you and comment on it. Mostly they’re all like “I’d look like that if I did that too.” I’m like, “Yeah.” The whole get comfortable being uncomfortable thing is definitely a big part of all of it.

Joe: That’s super interesting for a couple of reasons. I love “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.” I’m writing that down in my notes, so that’ll probably be the quote tweet that I send out. I love that because you’re right, even though I’ve got TSA precheck, I always need to get to the airport two hours before my flight. Just because I don’t want to be in a situation where I miss my flight. Usually, with TSA precheck, I am checked in and through security in 10 minutes. Now I have an hour and a half before I board or whatever. I feel gross the whole time I’m at the airport too, and I don’t feel like there’s any really good healthy food options at the airport. I find salad in most places that don’t specialize in making salads suspect. I feel like doing something like that would make me feel a little bit better because by the time I’m off the plane I’m a sweaty disgusting mess and I have done nothing. I might as well be a sweaty disgusting mess and have done something.

Michelle: Even if you’re not going to be like me and literally do crunches on the floor, if you’re at an airport you’re usually carrying some extra stuff with you. Whether you checked a bag, but you have your carry on, or whatever, just walking around extra with some extra weight that you’re carrying around is a good way to get your heart rate up. Airports are big, and there’s lots of space to walk around. Especially if you’re at Atlanta or something. Take one lap of the terminal, and you’re good.

Joe: To that end, there’s also lots of corners. There’s lots of places that are hidden away in most of the airports I’ve been to. Especially if it’s early in the morning or late at night, which is generally when I like to fly. Generally, when I choose to fly to make the most of wherever I am. It’s not like you have to work out right next to the bar, where everybody is. You can find a place where you can do some exercises. That’s cool. Why don’t we, since we are now about halfway through, let’s get to the title question. I’ve got two facets of this. How did you– I’ll let you answer the way that you think is best. How did you build your workout routine, or how can one build out their own fitness routine? Then, how did you build the website?

Michelle: The first part of the story, how did I build where I’m at, in terms of my routine. Definitely over years of trying a bunch of things and research and stuff. I’ve been a tangential beach body person since college. I never got involved in the MLM side of it, but I’ve been doing the workouts. To me, it was about finding the thing that I enjoyed. I tried group classes, and I found that I did not enjoy them. Some people need that because they love the collaboration and the being around each other and pushing each other. For me, I like to be inside my own head when I work out, and so the group classes didn’t fit. Video classes were a great alternative to that for me, and that worked, but for some people that doesn’t. I had some sessions in the past with personal trainers and stuff, so I learned a lot about good form, which enabled me to be able to do stuff like build a weightlifting routine for myself that I could do. I also tried to find things that gave me joy. As much as exercise can give you joy, because I’m not going to lie, I’m not inherently in love with exercising, and I do it every day. I don’t want you to feel like you have to love it either if you’re trying to do it. It just has to be something that you want more than the alternative. I ride my bike when it’s warm out, and there’s lots of biking here in Minneapolis. I go on lots walks during the day if I’m at an office job, I’ll go on a walk during lunch. I get up in the morning, and I do weightlifting. When I travel, I do different bodyweight stuff. It’s basically been a matter of constantly doing research and constantly learning. Same thing on the diet side, I’m roughly in the paleo-school, but I believe everybody needs to find a diet that works for them. The best way to do that is to write things down. Write down how it makes you feel and then experiment from there. Use the scientific method on yourself. Do something, and then change one variable, and then see if it’s different. That’s fun. I think it’s fun because I’m a nerd. It is fun to be able to experiment a little bit on yourself and see what makes you feel good, what doesn’t, what impacts something else. That’s what it’s all been, and that’s what it’s going to keep being. There’s a lot more experimentation I need to do going forward.

Joe: Absolutely, I like that too, because as you alluded to earlier, people would be like “I do this, and this is the best one.” Everybody leaves off the caveat, “That works for me.” My wife and I have successfully done a Whole 30 two or three times now successfully, where we did it for 30 days, and we saw measurable gains or losses depending on what you’re measuring. I felt better, and I lost weight, it was wonderful. We’ve both realized that’s not sustainable for us, or maybe for anybody. I think the diet just straight up says like “You’re going to do this for 30 days, maybe 45. Then you’re going to want to reintroduce certain things.” We like that, and it’s worked for us in the past, but it’s not something we’ve been able to fully integrate. Now we’re trying this like paleo-ish, we’re not strictly following paleo, but the snacks that we eat are all paleo snacks instead of getting a pint of ice cream. We make these key lime paleo bars which are crazy delicious, so I think you’re absolutely right. You’ve got to find something that works for you. In the summer, I do a two-mile walk every morning. Hopefully, before my daughter wakes up. Only when my wife is home, so if my daughter does wake up before I get back someone’s there for her, but that worked especially well for me in the summer. In the winter, it’s a little bit harder. I like experiment and write it down because then you get to see exactly what is working for you, how you felt in the moment vs. what you think you felt a month later.

Michelle: Yeah, exactly. In terms of the website, being a WordPress person, I built it in WordPress using the same custom base theme that I use for all of my client work. It’s always interesting when I am building something to use as the administrator, as opposed to building it to hand over. I deliberately chose for all of my internal pages to 100% use Gutenberg so that I can make myself use it. Make myself eat the community dog food. I can use it then to teach myself how to work with that from an administrative perspective, and maybe more from a developer perspective as well. Also in terms of the website another thing that I’m trying to build around, aside from just the tooling that I used to build it, it’s pretty standard stack WordPress. I’m also trying to build community around it. I’ve had a lot of conversations with other people in the WordPress space that I know are going on their own fitness journey, and there are several people that I’m friends with that have done a lot of things. [Mark Benzageen, Mike Hale, Shada], they’ve all done these things, and they’re talking about it. I ultimately want it to be not just me talking about stuff I do, but a place to showcase a lot of different community members stories. Because they all come from different backgrounds and have a different story and are at a different place in their life, and if someone can’t relate to me, the 30-something white female in a city, maybe they can relate to somebody else who’s in an entirely different place. The more stories we share, the more we can normalize all of these things, the more we get it out in the open, the more we talk about the successes and the struggles. I think the better off the whole community will be.

Joe: I love that. You named a lot of really cool people there, too. I haven’t talked to [Shada]– This is just a sidebar for everybody listening. I haven’t talked to [Shada] in a while, so I hope she’s doing well.

Michelle: She seems happy with her latest venture.

Joe: Good, excellent. I will link to [Shada’s] Instagram in the show notes for this, so you can see what she is up to.

Michelle: It’s very beautiful.

Joe: It is, it’s fantastic. I like that because I think with the way that people do social media, they’ll show the before and after pic. “I lost 50 pounds doing this over the last however many months.” You only see the before, and after, you don’t see what happens in between, and you don’t see what happens after. If I’m going to be true to myself, I’m going to post the before, and the after, and then the after-after where I fell off, and I gained 20 of those pounds back. That’s not the things that people want to highlight, but talking about the struggles– Part of the reason I started this show is because you want to hear the failures along with the good because you hear the success story and then you set a unreasonably high bar for yourself.

Michelle: Exactly. I’m actually about to publish this week a long recap post on the results of religiously tracking every single thing I ate for an entire year. That is, as of Saturday this week, that we’re talking. That will be 365 days of not missing a single thing. There is a lot to unpack about that. I’m doing a scientific method-style write up about it. That’ll be hopefully eye-opening for people in good and bad ways about what that does.

Joe: I want to touch on your WordCamp Miami talk a little bit. I tried to find my notes, but I think I wrote it down in a paper notebook that I always have on me except for this very moment. I’m going to ask you the trade secret later, but what’s some actionable advice that you usually give to people who are like “You seem to be crushing it with the fitness stuff. What can I do? I’m a overweight 30-something year old man with a kid. It’s hard for me to wake up at 5:30 in the morning and workout.” What do you recommend for people in those situations? I know you had really good actionable advice in that talk.

Michelle: Sure. I do have a corresponding blog post that outlines all the stuff in that talk if people want to read it and they don’t like watching stuff– I’m one of those people too, so that’s there. I would say for people that don’t know how to get started, and it just feels overwhelming and insurmountable, I’m already– I just can’t. It’s simple, but not easy. The best way to start is to start. Any small change is still a change. If we’re talking the scientific method, you only want to change one or two things at a time and see how that makes you feel. If you’re completely sedentary, adding in daily movement in terms of walking is great. You don’t have to jump right into 5 AM 60 minute workouts seven days a week like I do, that would be a terrible idea, I would not recommend it. If you’re used to eating whatever you want and not thinking about the nutritional content or whether it’s going to make you feel good later, swap out. I think one of one of the big things I mentioned in my talk was “Eat the rainbow.” It’s hard to think about eating healthy, but you can think about eating a whole bunch of different colors. As long as those colors are coming from natural sources. We’re not talking a bowl of Skittles.

Joe: Eat the rainbow, not taste the rainbow.

Michelle: Correct. If your plate has a lot of different colors on it, you’re probably getting a variety of nutrients. We could talk about dialing in different– You don’t have to go all the way to the level of where I am, where I’m looking at macronutrients and blah blah blah. Even just starting with “Is my plate kind of beige, or can I add some reds and greens to that?” That’s a great way to get started. It’s really just incremental change and not necessarily focusing on numbers or aesthetics, but focusing internally on how you feel. Because the other stuff will reflect how you feel.

Joe: I love that. That reminds me of the book Atomic Habits, which I read at the end of 2018. He basically says the same thing. He’s like “Don’t go change everything today because you will fail.” But if you make these small changes, instead of I don’t know– Instead of texting somebody downstairs to get something for you, walk downstairs and get it yourself. That’s some movement that you get in the day. You make these smaller changes first, I think that’s just fantastic advice. I had another thought which completely escaped me, but I found the blog post, and I will link that. The other thought I had was, “Don’t do the stuff that you’re doing today.” You weren’t doing the stuff that you are doing today when you first started. It’s like people who look at like Lindsey Vonn, and they’re like “I want to ski like that.” Lindsey Vonn skis like that because she was doing the pizza, french fry thing when she was two years old. Don’t compare yourself with somebody who’s a lot farther in the journey than you are. Start where you are and like you said, see how it makes you feel. If eating a whole pint of ice cream makes you feel like garbage in the middle of the night, speaking from personal experience, then don’t eat a whole pint of ice cream the night before and you’ll feel better. Cool. This is great. As we’re winding down, I know you mentioned a couple of plans for the future and that you want to try to build a community around this website fitnessandfreelance.com, which I will also link in the show notes. What are some other plans for the future, as far as your own fitness journey and this website goes for you?

Michelle: I feel that right now, I’m very much at a crossroads. I’ve been doing this thing for a year, this personal experiment that was supposed to last three months and went a whole year. I feel like I’m at a crossroads, trying to define where all that’s at. I feel like the next step is going to be more holistic. I feel like I’ve got my habits down pretty well, I go through all the right motions, I eat the right food, I work out, I do my work, I try to go to bed a reasonable hour. I do all these things. Then doing the work inside myself to make sure that it’s all coming from a healthy place mentally, rather than just doing healthy actions but still feeling terrible. That’s probably the future of that. I think that is also another great thing that the tech community has been very much in need of, and a lot of people are doing some great stuff in the mental health space as well. Incorporating that holistic physical plus mental health thing is a great place for the message to go.

Joe: Yeah, that’s awesome. I will get more personal than I normally get ever. In the times that I’ve worked out, like “I’m going to go to the gym and work hard.” We’re always following some– Usually with my love life because my love life was terrible before I met my wife. I would face rejection from somebody I was in love with, and then that would follow three months of working out hard. I think, “Am I doing these healthy actions to be healthy, or for some other reason?” I was working out for the wrong reason. I was like, “I am mentally in pain, and so I want to put my body through this physical toughness.” Of course, that doesn’t last. I’m happily married with a fantastic daughter, so that driver is no longer there for me. If I do it right, it will never be there for the rest of my life. That’s another great piece of advice. Put these habits in place, then take a big-picture look at “Why am I doing this?” I love that. Let’s wrap up then with my favorite question, which is, “Do you have any trade secrets for us?”

Michelle: I do. The trade secret to doing this successfully is this, “Remember that every moment is a choice. You can make any of the choices, and all you have to do is fully own that choice. It doesn’t mean that if you make a particular choice or not, that you are good or bad, or otherwise.” If you choose to get up at 5 AM and work out, you made that choice. If you choose to get some extra sleep because you feel exhausted, you made that choice. If you choose to eat a cupcake at your friend’s birthday party, make that choice. Don’t feel like you’re bad. Don’t berate yourself. Don’t say, “You shouldn’t have done something.” Fully embrace whatever choice it is that you made and the results of that choice, that’s the only way that we can do this and still feel good about ourselves and still have joy because we get one life. It’s not just about beating our bodies into submission to be perfect. You can’t take it with you, so be purposeful with your choices and own them, embrace them, enjoy them.

Joe: That’s excellent advice, something I will definitely have to remember. I do beat myself up when I eat too much. Usually, if it’s early in the day, I’m like, “This whole day is gone, so I’m going to eat like crap the whole day.” If I remember every moment is a choice, I made a bad choice for breakfast, let’s make a better choice for lunch. Well Michelle, thanks so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Where can people find you?

Michelle: I am @marktimemedia pretty much everywhere on the internet, so anywhere you go I’ll probably be there. Then fitnessandfreelance.com, if you would like to follow along or contribute to this community resource about fitness journeys in the creative and tech space.

Joe: I will link that and everything we talked about in the show notes. Michelle, thanks so much again. I appreciate it.

Michelle: Thank you.

Joe: Thanks so much to Michelle for joining me today. I loved all of her advice. Honestly, it’s something that we don’t often talk about on this show, and I often don’t talk about in public spaces. I’ll talk to my wife about it, but I love her trade secret, “Remember that every moment is a choice.” I like that because often what I’ll do is I will make a bad choice and then I’ll think “My whole day is ruined, so I’m just going to eat whatever I want.” If I have a bad breakfast, with this advice, I can say, “I can at least recover for lunch.” Again, thanks to Michelle. Definitely check out all of her resources that will be linked in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it/129. Thanks again to our sponsors, Ahoy! Pantheon and Creator Courses. Their support is what makes this show happen. I want to thank you for listening, and I do want to ask you a question of the week. That question of the week is, “What big takeaway did you get from this show? How are you going to try to be healthier? What encouraging advice did you get from Michelle?” Let me know, either on Twitter at @jcasabona or by emailing me at Joe@HowIBuilt.it. That’s it for this episode if you liked it, please share with somebody who you think needs to hear this message. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Jan Löffler and Plesk

May 28, 2019

Sponsored by:

Weglot: Get 30% off with code BUILTIT19
Plesk: Get set up for free!
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

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.

View on separate page

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.

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.

Brad Touesnard and SpinupWP

May 7, 2019

Sponsored by:

Castos: Click this link & enter win a FREE year of podcast hosting!
Plesk: Get set up for free!
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Brad Touesnard is a well known developer in the WordPress community, and CEO and Founder of Delicious Brains, a company that makes fantastic WordPress products. You might know them best from WP Migrate DB Pro, but they do lots more! Brad tells us all about their new product, SpinupWP, why they decided to solve this problem, and lots of other great advice for both business and development.

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 122 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Brad Touesnard, the founder and CEO of Delicious Brains, Inc. I’m a big fan of Brad and his work, and they do some fantastic stuff in the WordPress space. You probably best know them for their plugin WP Migrate DB Pro, an incredible and invaluable tool. If you are moving databases, I can’t stress enough how much time that plugin, in particular, has saved me. Doing things the manual way, versus doing things with WP Migrate DB or WP Migrate DB Pro is just so different. We talk about a lot of things, and we talked about SpinUpWP, a relatively new project of theirs. We talked about doing things on iOS. We talked about projects that they launched that then didn’t work out, and why. We talked about a whole wide range of things from development to running businesses, to helpful tools to help you be the best that you can be. So, let’s get into all of that with my interview with Brad Touesnard. Of course, first here’s 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 Freemius today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is also sponsored 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. If you use WordPress, this is by far the easiest platform that I have used for podcasting. I also really love how the castoffs team takes a common sense 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 Freemius 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, and 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 Brad Touesnard, the founder and CEO of Delicious Brains and SpinUpWP. Brad, how are you today?

Brad Touesnard: I’m great. Thanks for having me.

Joe: Thanks for coming on the show. I’m glad you’re feeling better, I know you had to cancel last week. As we record this, of course, so I’m glad that you’ve gotten rid of whatever it is you had.

Brad: Yeah. I’ve been struggling with my health for the last few months, and I think I figured out that I added something to my diet a few months ago, and that’s what it is. But it’s something– I am gluten free, and so gluten will make me sick. That kind of thing. I’m not doing it because it’s trendy, or anything.

Joe: Right.

Brad: But it’s one of those things where I was eating something that says it’s gluten-free, but there’s something else in it that must be buggin’ me, because– So I’ve been dealing with that for last three months and finally figured it out, at least hopefully.

Joe: Good. I hope that you’ve gotten to the bottom of it. I always worry about that, like eating something, or something in my diet changing and then it making me feel terrible.

Brad: Yeah. You think software is complicated, but then your own body is a lot more complicated than that.

Joe: Absolutely. Again, we’ve created software, and we can understand software. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today, specifically about your new product SpinUpWP.

Brad: Yes.

Joe: Cool. So, why don’t we start with who you are and what you do?

Brad: Yes. I am the founder and CEO of Delicious Brains, Inc. We have a couple of WordPress plugins, WP migrate DB Pro and WP Offload S3– Or, sorry. WP Offload Media now, because we rebranded it just a couple months ago because we’re going after– it we used to be a plugin just for offloading your media library, your WordPress media library to Amazon S3. But now we support digital open spaces, and we’re going to support– What’s it called? Google Cloud Storage, we saw all the object storage providers. So, those are our two main products, then I’ve got a team of eight behind me as well, and we’re a fully remote team. There’s four guys in the UK, there’s two in Pennsylvania and two in Ontario, and I myself I’m in Nova Scotia.

Joe: Nice.

Brad: Our new newest product is called SpinUpWP, and it’s currently in beta, and it allows you to Spin Up a server that’s fully optimized for WordPress, for hosting WordPress in just 10 minutes or so. It’ll set up all the server software and configure it so that you can start adding sites to it after 10 minutes. It’s something that normally would take a few hours if you’re doing it manually, just logging into the CLI and running commands, and we have– The reason it came about too is we have a series of blog posts that one of our team wrote for our blog, and they do really well, and we get a lot of traffic to those blog posts. So that’s one of the reasons why we thought of this idea, that this would be a good idea for us.

Joe: Nice. I’m a big fan of your blog, I subscribe to your newsletter, and it’s one of the few newsletters were read what comes to my inbox. So, this is cool, and I kid you not, I just struggled with this sort of thing recently. Like, last week. So you’re definitely solving a problem that needs solving, which is very cool.

Brad: Have you used some of the other–? SpinUpWP is very similar to Laravel Forge and Server Pilot is another one, but they don’t cater to WordPress. Laravel Forge is specifically designed for Laravel.

Joe: Right.

Brad: Server Pilot has traditionally just been for PHP apps in general, although they’ve made some moves in the last little while to be more WordPress, and to do more for WordPress. But have you ever used either of those services?

Joe: No, I haven’t. I’ve used the local ones, like [VVV] to do it locally, but I just set up a load server because I’m trying to go to the iPad-only lifestyle. If I want to develop on the iPad, I need to connect to a VPS. So I went through the rigamarole on [inaudible] of installing Ubuntu and installing Apache, and then getting WordPress just there but without any of the bells and whistles that I normally like to have in WordPress, and no WP CLI, I didn’t install that either. So, it’s cool. This product seems like it would have saved me a couple of hours while I was sitting in the Starbucks trying to get this to work. I was high fiving myself in the Starbucks, running Unix commands from my iPad, I thought that was pretty cool.

Brad: Nice. Where did you get this idea for running everything off an iPad? Where does this come from?

Joe: I listened to a couple of podcasts, which I’ll be sure to link in the show notes. But the main one is connected from RelayFM. Those listening to Season 6, you might have heard of Mike Hurley, he kicked off this season. He’s the founder, but he’s pretty much an iPad-only, in the iPad-only lifestyle. His co-host [Federico Veticci], also iPad only. I say only, but only is a little bit of quotes, because they still do their podcast recording and editing on their Mac Minis. So, I’m trying to go iPad only when I’m travelling. I want my iPad to replace my MacBook, and then I’ll have the iMac pro to do the video editing and podcast editing.

Brad: Right. I think Curtis McHale has some blog posts about that as well, and I think I saw he posted about it.

Joe: Yes. I used his recommendations for development specifically as a starting point. I know he used Digital Ocean, [inaudible] it was running a promo when I got them, so I got like four months free or something like that. But it was basically all of the apps that he recommended. Cool. So, I like this idea. You mentioned that you were blogging about this, and this was essentially how you realized this would be a good product for you guys to develop. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I’ve had guests on the show, like Justin Ferryman talk about how he blogged about an LMS for WordPress for two years before he built LearnDash. So, was that your market research?

Brad: It definitely helps. It’s a really good way to plant that first seed to see “What’s the uptake? How much traffic does that article get from Google?” So, we weren’t– When we published those series of blog posts we weren’t expecting anything. We were just– We have this blog, what is it called, the treadmill. The content creation treadmill where we’re committed to posting every week, so our team’s biggest problem and one of the biggest problems our team has is coming up with ideas for the blog and what to write next. So, this was just one of those instances. But it turned into a series, and then the series grew to– I think it’s eight, I think we’re up to eight articles now, and they’re pretty lengthy. So, it takes you through starting at your node or your Digital Ocean droplet or whatever it is. Firing that up and installing step by step all of the software you need to host WordPress efficiently, and at a pretty high scale actually, we’ve done some benchmarking. We have posts that benchmark how much traffic just a small VM can handle, and it’s remarkable how much traffic a cached WordPress site can handle. If you heavily cache a WordPress site, you’re just serving static pages at that point. So Engine-X can handle that without breaking a sweat. It can handle that. We’ve gotten our posts to the top of Hacker News before and stuff. It’s never– Our web servers have been fine with that. The problem would be if you’re someone like Ticketmaster or something, where you have to have the dynamic parts of your website serving a massive influx of traffic, then things get a lot more complicated. But for 99% of websites out there, hosting it on a VM, even like a two gigabyte of memory VM with one CPU core. That’s going to be plenty for even if you end up on Hacker News by chance.

Joe: That’s great. That’s a very good insight because I think a lot of people do worry about performance. But first of all, if you’re getting the traffic that Ticketmaster is getting for your dynamic site, presumably you’re making a ton of money so you can upgrade whenever.

Brad: I would hope so.

Joe: Yeah, right? Second, it seems like Ticketmaster hasn’t even solved that problem well. So maybe that’s just a tough nut to crack.

Brad: It is, it’s a very tough nut to crack. I think optimizing– It’s still difficult to optimize database rights.

Joe: Right.

Brad: The only way to do that, that I know of effectively is called database charting. Which I’ve never done, I’ve only ever looked into but never actually done it. But the basic concept is when you need to write to the database, depending on the data that’s being written, it goes to this database server or a different database server or another database server. So the rights gets kind of filtered off into different database servers, and there’s a whole bunch of complexity that goes with that though as well.

Joe: Right.

Brad: Once you require that, you need a team you and you need a DevOps team manage that. Most people are never going to get to that stage with their website.

Joe: Right, and to maybe give a good analogy of what database charting might be, it’s almost like if I have– My daughter’s big into these YouTube videos now where people are just sorting candy into the same color buckets. So, it’s almost like that. You have a red bucket and a green bucket and a blue bucket, and you’re not just going to like dump a whole bag of M&Ms into the red bucket. It’ll be hard to find the right color, so you want to put the red M&Ms in the red bucket and the blue M&Ms in the blue bucket.

Brad: Yeah, exactly. That’s a great analogy.

Joe: Thank you. That is brought to you by my two year old watching YouTube. So, that’s cool. This very popular blog series that I’m going to link to in the show notes as well, this is going to be a show notes rich episode. What else did you do to– As you set out to develop SpinUpWP, what did that look like? Does that–? You have a big audience already, especially because of WP Migrate DB Pro. Is this basically the same audience you’re talking to, or did you set out to build a whole other audience that you wanted to market to?

Brad: We definitely leverage that audience. But actually, the first– to go back to the genesis of this project, it was an idea that we had kicking around. The member of our team, Ashley, who wrote these articles for our blog, he actually had the idea of making basically SpinUpWP, and he had actually built a prototype of it, but just abandoned it at a certain point. It wasn’t until our retreat about a year and a half ago we were in the car on the way to the airport after, at the end of the trip, and some of the guys were just talking about like “I wish there was a WordPress version of Laravel Forge. Forge is great, but it just doesn’t go that extra mile for WordPress. Several other guys in the car were agreeing with this, and I’m like “This is an idea. If you guys all need this and want this, then you are the audience. You guys are developers.” Then the more we thought about it, the more it made sense to do this, so we have these articles that are bringing in customers from Google, and there’s our marketing problem half solved. Then the next step was to get outside the company and talk to potential customers, so what I end up doing is scraping the contacts off of the comments from our blog posts. Those are all people that were interested in building their own servers using our tutorial, so they should be pretty interested in this product. We did a survey and sent it out to those people, and I think maybe some other folks from our audience, I can’t remember if we took a subset of our audience and maybe sent them the survey as well. But anyway, we got a good number of survey responses and very good positive feedback that this was a viable project to pursue. We launched our beta when was it– Probably three weeks ago now. We’ve had great uptake, and we were accepting sign-ups. So, we’re in a paid period right now, and it’s not a free beta. That’s saying a lot, that we’ve had like actual people coming in the door paying us and are still using the software, but not churning out. I’m pretty happy with where we’re at this stage. Things are good.

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.

Brad: I like that the takeaway here is that you blogged about this thing you need, you also have a team of people who for all intents and purposes are dogfooding your own product. Then you worked with part of your own audience, and I think people have a hard time, myself included, leveraging or building an audience to leverage. So, I liked the things that you said, and they’re scraping the contact info from the comments. I like that a lot. People are commenting on these tutorial style posts, probably asking questions, trying to do stuff. You’re telling them how to do it, they have problems with that, and then you’re like “I have a solution to your problem.” That’s very online course-esque.

Brad: Right, exactly.

Joe: Where you teach an online course, and then you say “I just taught you how to do it, but if you just want me to do it for you can pay me to do it for you too.”.

Brad: Yeah, exactly.

Joe: So, let’s get to the title question which is, how did you build it? I’m particularly interested about this from the standpoint of you’re building a tool that is designed to work with all sorts of VPSs. It’s not like this is a thing that can sit on top of [inaudible] or sit up on top of Digital Ocean. What did the compatibility look like? What did the development stack look like? You can get super nerdy here if it was super developer-y, I would love to hear that.

Brad: I can’t get too technical anymore. I’m still a developer, I can still write code, but the reality is that I’m not. It’s my team that’s writing the code nowadays, and I’m just making sure that everything stays on track and the trains run on time. But yeah, we built it using Laravel, so that was the framework we’re using, so we’re still on PHP. I think we started working with Google Cloud because of a previous product we built that we ended up shutting down. That was built on AWS and used auto-scaling and elastic beanstalk, and all that business. Our team was not big fans of that tech stack, it was cumbersome to use, and just janky is the way they described it. So we decided to use Google instead to see if their stack was any better, and although it seemed a little bit better it still wasn’t– It wasn’t what we were expecting. We felt that it was a bit cumbersome to use, and the other thing is that our app we don’t think we need auto-scaling. We probably won’t need it for a long time, if ever. We decided to go with good old Digital Ocean droplets, so we have just one droplet running our app server, and then we have multiple worker servers to perform the tasks that are being requested from the app. So for example, if you want to create a new site on your server, that gets queued to a worker server, and then the worker server does the SSA chain into your server and performs the tasks that need to be performed. Then you get a nice app, and it still shows a nice print out display of the commands getting executed and all that stuff.

Joe: Cool. So, just to just a backup for a minute there, this is not like a thing that I download and install on like some fresh version of Ubuntu, this is all run– This is a SaaS, right? Like a login and I say “I want to Spin Up a WordPress over here.”

Brad: You got it. It’s a SaaS app, so you sign up online and plugin your Digital Ocean key. You go to Digital Ocean, create a new API key, plug it in and then you can choose what size droplet you want from our UI. The alternative to that, so right now just in beta period, we support that one provider at the moment. But we support every provider, because we have a second option which is custom server. So if it has an IP address and it’s got a fresh Ubuntu 18 install on it, then it’ll work with SpinUpWP.

Joe: Perfect.

Brad: So as long as we can get to it and it’s running the software we expect, it should work. That includes like a local VM. If you have a local VM with an IP address, you could potentially point SpinUpWP at it, and it should be good to go.

Joe: I was going to say, it sounds like it could work for that.

Brad: Yeah. I’ve never tried that, we haven’t tried it yet, but I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t work. Like I said, if it has an IP address and we can connect to it, it should work.

Joe: Yeah. For those listening now, I presume by the time this comes out somebody will have tried it, but if somebody hasn’t you can be the intrepid user who gives it a go.

Brad: That’s right.

Joe: Cool.

Brad: If you do, please let us know about that. We’d love to hear about it because it’s always interesting to hear from people who are using your product in atypical ways. If you always get that from people, like you have this vision of how the majority of your customers are going to use your product, so you’re building for that. Then every once in a while a customer comes along who’s using it some for some crazy setup, and you’re just like “Yeah that’s something I could never have imagined.”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I can– I’ve developed some software in the past, but nothing commercially really. But even when I first launched my online courses, I got two pieces of feedback. One was that you need PayPal, and I was like “I’ll just do Stripe because it’s easier,” but people love having PayPal as an option. The other was like somebody said, “How come I have to take your course in order?” And I’m like, why would you want to take my course out of order? Like, aren’t you trying to learn something? But they just wanted to learn some specific aspect of Beaver Builder. Apparently, that’s a common use case, so it’s is very interesting. It is like you said, it’s very interesting to hear stuff like that.

Brad: PayPal is funny because it’s a love-hate relationship. People love it because they feel secure using it, and there’s all kinds of reasons why they love it. Then everyone who accepts PayPal hates it, on the other hand.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

Brad: Same with credit cards too though. People who use them, love them But the people who have to take them and get dinged all the fees, not such a big fan. I tried because I know that because I’m a business person I try to use debit whenever I go out to eat or whatever because I know that the local businesses are getting dinged every time.

Joe: That’s a good point.

Brad: Most people don’t know that, though. Most people have no idea that their credit card is charging the person that they’re using it with 2-3% of the bill, and they have no idea.

Joe: Right.

Brad: It’s like this dirty little secret the credit card companies have that somehow has remained outside the public sphere.

Joe: Yeah. That’s so funny. I never thought that people don’t know that, but they must, and credit card companies make money come and go, and they make money off people who can’t pay their credit card on time, and then they make money off the people who are using the credit card to make money.

Brad: They make more money every which way.

Joe: Yeah. What a racket. With PayPal, I thought it was interesting to hear that there are a lot of freelancers who use PayPal as like fun money, like funny money. It’s not real, and it’s not real to them. I thought that was interesting because that’s not how I manage my money at all. As soon as I get, as soon as I have money and PayPal that is outside my refund window, it is in my account, and I use my American Express card to pay for all of my business expenses. I don’t know, to each their own, but that was also a weird use case to me.

Brad: Right. Are you going to Word Camp Europe in June?

Joe: I am. Well, at this moment I’m not. As we record this. But it’s–

Brad: Sorry, I put you on the spot there.

Joe: Yeah, no problem. It’s in Germany this year?

Brad: Yes. The reason I brought it up is because it’s very apropos. So, apparently I’ve been told– I’ve never been to Germany yet, but we’re going to be doing our company retreat in Berlin before Word Camp Europe. Apparently, Germans, a lot of German businesses, do not accept credit cards. You have to go there with cash. You do, is what I’ve been told. But I have it under good authority that’s true, and I think that is one of the main reasons. That the German businesses are– They don’t accept the fees that the credit card companies require.

Joe: Yeah, I can understand it. I try to consider cost of goods, so I want to make it easy for anybody to give me money. But I totally understand it. If I do end up going, it’s like right around my anniversary, so maybe I can convince my wife it’ll be like an anniversary trip for us.

Brad: That’s a great idea.

Joe: Absolutely. But I try to work the fee into cost of goods sold, but I am Italian, so I always have cash on me anyway. That is– That’s a New York Italian stereotype, at least.

Brad: Is that right?

Joe: Yeah. Cool. So, we’re coming up on time. We’ve covered a lot of ground, and I’m curious to hear, this is a new product. We’ve talked about launch and stuff like that, but what are your plans for the future? As we record this, you’re still pretty much in beta, but it seems to be going well. Do you have a roadmap of sorts?

Brad: We do. We’re still in beta, and we’ll probably be in beta for another couple months at least, and the main reason for that is we’ve got a couple additional features we want to build before we officially launch to you our greater a wider audience. Those features are teams, support for teams. Currently, you can sign up, and you have your own personal account, but you can’t invite anybody to collaborate with you on servers and share access to servers or anything like that. That’s an important feature that we’re going to add. Backups, even more important. We currently– You could always set up something yourself.

Joe: Sure.

Brad: We don’t have any backup feature built into the platform yet. So, that’s something we want to have for launch before we make a big push to let everyone know about the product. Then the other thing that happened was when we launched the beta, and we discovered something that was completely in our blind spot that we did not anticipate at all. That is having multiple SFDP users per server is very important to people, is what we’ve discovered. Which it seems so obvious now in retrospect because you can imagine someone– A freelancer or an agency using our platform to host their client’s sites. They would want their clients to be able to SFDP to the server and upload files, or what have you. That’s obviously something that we should provide, but we just completely blanked on that. I think maybe it’s because we were looking at Forge and how Forge had things set up, and they don’t– Forge doesn’t have that. They don’t have multiple users where you can log into each site and upload files to each site. They’re for one app per server situation, but Server Pilot is more setup that way. They’re set up for multiple– I think they do for each site that you install, they create a new user on the system, and that user has SFDP access and they can upload files to each site, is the way that they do it. So a lot of the customers that were on Server Pilot that were on our interest list, they immediately noticed that we didn’t have that feature. So we’re in the process of building that at the moment. Glad we did the beta because it’s the perfect time. It’s a pretty major change to our architecture to be able to support that, so it’s good to be able to do that during a beta instead of after launching to people. Once we get those three things out of the way, it’s launch time. Probably the first– Definitely the first half of next year, hopefully, the first quarter of next year.

Joe: Nice.

Brad: We’ll be trumpeting.

Joe: Cool. That sounds great. The idea of doing a beta program, it sounds like it’s paying dividends for you. I think people wonder, “Why not just launch?” Or whatever, and I think you have a very good use case for why not. “Why do a beta program?” Especially cause I think people who are doing the betas are probably going to be a little bit more vocal than the run of the mill user, there are people who are more willing to give feedback and saying it’s a beta puts that upfront. Like, “This is a work in progress. We’re going to take care of you as our beta users,” or whatever.

Brad: We mix the two paradigms. So there’s the free beta, a lot of people do that, they tend to have free beta. But then you don’t get to test whether or not people are willing to pay for you, so what we did is we just did a deep discount. Your first three months you get half price for three months, your first three months half price if you sign up for our beta, and then we go from there. At least then we know people are willing to trade dollars for this solution, and that it’s not just a bunch of freeloaders getting on board.

Joe: Absolutely. Also if someone’s paying for it, they’re more likely to use it. I’ve signed up for betas that were free and never used it because I wasn’t committed.

Brad: Exactly. A previous product we launched we did a free beta, and that’s what we ended up with. Just opened a bunch of people on it silently and just not giving any feedback. So, that’s a good point. That’s another reason why we chose to do a paid beta this time.

Joe: Cool. That’s a great piece of advice for anybody who’s looking to launch a product. Do a paid beta if you can. Obviously everything in development, it depends, but if you’re weighing free versus paid I think we have a few good pros for paid. As we wrap up here, I do want to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Brad: Trade secrets? I keep going back to mailing lists because I think they’re so undervalued. I’m just starting a mailing list. First of all, you need to provide something of value to start your mailing list. In our case, for example, we did the tutorial to set up and host WordPress yourself. So we had those articles, and then as you get down towards the bottom, it would pop up and say “Are you interested in more articles like this,” or whatever. You have to provide something useful, so write an article that does well, but then capture email addresses. You have to build that email list, and then you can launch something. I am guilty of building hobby projects in the past just because I love to build them, and that’s fine. But once you get serious about wanting to start a business, you have to build an audience before you build the product, because there is no point of having a product and then hoping that people are just going to show up because they won’t, of course.

Joe: Yeah. That’s excellent advice. That’s the advice I would give two years ago me, as I was launching my online courses because I was just like “I’ll build it. It’s a $50 course, and people will buy it.” Nobody will buy it. Nobody trusts me, and I don’t have anybody to market to, so yeah. Two years ago I would take that advice in a heartbeat.

Brad: As an exercise, think about all the businesses locally that you visit and stuff, and imagine if they had an email list and how that might affect your purchasing decisions with them in the future. Right. So, if it’s a pizza place maybe you would order pizza more often if every week you got an email that said “12-inch pizzas are on sale this week,” or whatever. But there’s so much emphasis, especially local businesses I find, to focus on social media and they ignore email entirely. But there’s so much noise on social media that no one’s paying attention, so the opportunity lies in email. That’s where people are paying attention.

Joe: Absolutely. Imagine trying to have a conversation with the baseball stadium versus the people next to you on the train going to the baseball stadium, or something like that. There’s just so much going on, whereas if you’re sitting next to somebody on the train, you have a better connection. I love that. Cool. Brad, I appreciate you taking the time. Where can people find you?

Brad: I’m on the Twitters @bradt, DeliciousBrains.com is our website, and I blog there occasionally. That’s about it, nowadays.

Joe: Awesome. I will link that and everything else we talked about today in the show notes. It’s like I said, this is going to be a very show notes rich episode, so be sure to head over to HowIBuilt.it to get those. Brad, thanks again so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

Brad: Thanks, Joe. My pleasure.

Outro: Thanks so much to Brad for joining me today. I loved his trade secret about mailing lists, and it’s something that I have been hearing since the very first few episodes of this podcast. Your mailing list is invaluable, and I have found that to be true. I have put some great advice into motion lately with my mailing list, and I have seen it grow considerably as I start to launch more of my own courses. I’m going to see exactly if this strategy pays off, but I am confident it will because I’m reaching the right people. So, my question of the week for you is “What are you doing with your mailing list? Do you have one? Do you need to build it better? What’s your strategy?” Let me know by emailing me, Joe@Casabona.org or via Twitter @jcasabona. I want to thank my sponsors for today, Castos, Plesk and Pantheon. Their support means the world to me, and I deeply appreciate it. If you liked this episode, be sure to give it a rating and review on Apple Podcast. It truly helps people discover us, and I feel as we’re reaching the end of season 6 here that the show has grown considerably thanks in part to you, the listeners, giving ratings and reviews and sharing the episodes that you like. So, I deeply appreciate that.

Miniseries: With that, we’ll end the normal episode, and we’ll continue talking about how I’m building out my podcast course. Over the last two episodes, I talked about building the course itself, and in the next two episodes, I want to talk about building the tech stack. So, I went through a couple of iterations of the tech stack. My core sites started off as WPInOneMonth.com, and I intended to do actual in-person courses and in-person workshops, and I was living in Scranton, Pennsylvania at the time. I didn’t have access to a big community of people, and I certainly didn’t have the reach that I had online, so that model didn’t work out for me. But as a result, the first iteration of my online teaching website was really an events manager, and then as I decided to move more towards online courses, I looked at a few different tools like Sensei, which is an LMS that sits on top of WooCommerce. AI thought that would be a good route because I wanted to use WooCommerce and I figured “Why not have something that tightly integrates with WooCommerce?” But as I started to use Sensei, and this was a few years ago now, I realized that it didn’t do a lot of the things I wanted it to do. That’s when Justin Ferryman from LearnDash reached out. So, for the LMS I’m using LearnDash, and I’m a big fan of that. It does everything I need it to do and more, and it integrates with a whole bunch of other tools. In the next episode, I’ll talk more about the e-commerce side of things, but I am still using WooCommerce for a number of reasons. The high-level overview of the tech stack, of CreatorCourses.com, now is, LearnDash WooCommerce for e-commerce, Affiliate WP For the affiliate program, and bbPress for the forums to build that community aspect. The theme is Academy Pro. So, I will link in the show notes for this episode of a place where I list out all these tools, but that’s the general tech stack. People buy the courses through WooCommerce, and they automatically get registered. When they’re registered, I use an extension of LearnDash called LD Notifications to automatically email them. Inside of LearnDash I build out each course, each course has lessons and topics, and I try to keep the courses like I said in an earlier episode pretty focused. I try to keep them around an hour and a half or two hours if I can. But LearnDash helps me with that, and every course has a video component, and the videos are hosted by Vimeo. So, Vimeo Pro specifically, because I can lock down the videos to a specific URL so they can only be embedded in specific places, which is nice. That’s very important to me. So, that’s the general tech stack of Creator Courses. Now in the next episode, I’ll talk specifically about WooCommerce and everything that WooCommerce has to offer me and why I’m using it. But LearnDash, WooCommerce, bbPress and Affiliate WP, and then Academy Pro by StudioPress for the theme. That’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time get out there and build something.

James Kemp and Iconic

April 23, 2019

Sponsored by:

Castos: Click this link & enter win a FREE year of podcast hosting!
Plesk: Get set up for free!
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

James Kemp is the founder and lead developer of Iconic, a popular WooCommerce extension shop. James has managed to do well in an increasingly saturated space. His approach to solving problems and determining if there’s a market for his new ideas is an interesting one. He offers lots of great advice on everything from research to development, and launching.

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 120 of How I Built It. Today my guest is James Kemp of Iconic. James has built a fantastic plugins business selling WooCommerce extensions, and he’s doing incredibly well. He offers us a ton of great advice in this episode. We talk about all sorts of things, like how he comes up with ideas, and he even gives us a fantastic tip on how to validate those ideas relatively easily. We looked at his research into choosing Freemius to sell his plugins, and we got pretty deep into some development territory for how he builds his plugins. He also has some great plans for the future. He talks about live chat and a whole bunch of other stuff that I don’t want to spoil, so I think we should get into the interview. Of course, that is 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 Freemius today at Plesk.com/build. This episode is also sponsored 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. If you use WordPress, this is by far the easiest platform that I have used for podcasting. I also really love how the castoffs team takes a common sense 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 Freemius 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, and 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 James Kemp of Iconic WP. James, how are you?

James Kemp: I’m great. Thanks, Joe. How are you?

Joe: I am fantastic. Though it has been raining a lot here on the East Coast of the United States as we enter the fall, but that’s OK. At least it’s not oppressively hot.

James: It’s not much different here, to be honest. You’re not missing out.

Joe: Awesome. Before the show started, I asked if you’re based in the UK. What part specifically of the UK you based in?

James: I’m in the Midlands. Pretty much as far from any coast as you could be in the UK. Right in the middle.

Joe: Cool. I’m going to ask you one question that is totally unrelated to anything, but for my own edification I think, and I think it’s a fun thing that Americans mess up a whole lot. The United Kingdom is made up of Britain, Great Britain, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Is that right?

James: Yeah. I believe so.

Joe: Britain and Great Britain are two different things, right?

James: Yeah. I believe Britton is– No, I think you mean England in Great Britain.

Joe: England in Great Britain.

James: Yes, England is just England. Great Britain is England and Scotland, and then the UK is England, Scotland, and part of Ireland.

Joe: OK, gotcha. I always– I watched a seven minute long video on that a while ago that I will link in the show notes, that I–

James: You probably know more than me, though.

Joe: That’s good to know. For fairness. Like, I barely know about anything that’s like west of New York and Pennsylvania, because that’s where I’ve lived. Everything is just the Midwest to me here in the United States. But we’re not here to talk about geography, and we are here to talk about Iconic WP. So, just for some backstory, James and I were connected thanks to Vova Feldman and the Freemius Slack for people who use Freemius. He mentioned that I was looking for people for the show, James kindly reached out and volunteered. Why don’t you tell us, James, a little bit about who you are and what you do?

James: As we mentioned, I’m James Kemp, based in the UK. Currently, I build a lot of e-commerce plugins under the name of Iconic. I’ve got eleven or twelve premium e-commerce plugins that I sell on my website. As you mentioned, use Freemius to fulfill those payments, and also the licensing and subscriptions, and things like that. Currently, that’s what I do full time. Before that, I was working with clients building websites, building e-commerce sites using WooCommerce. That lured me down this path of using WordPress and building plugins and software for WordPress.

Joe: Nice, very nice. I feel like that’s maybe a good common path. People start doing freelance work and then try to move into the product space, and it sounds like you’ve done it successfully. Just looking at your website, you have a couple of really good testimonials from friend of the show and personal friend of mine Chris Lema, and it sounds like you dig in on specializing with WooCommerce. Are you a one man band, or do you have a team of people that you work with?

James: It varies depending on workload, but in terms of building the core plugins and releasing new plugins, that’s all me. I do have a couple of support people, I’ve got a guy who handles front line support, and I’ve recently started working with another Freemius user called Jose, who is in the Slack group as well. He’s helping out with a bit more of the technical support that I get through. But in terms of actually building the plugins, and coming up with the ideas, and releasing the plugins, that’s all on my shoulders.

Joe: Cool. Very cool. When we’re talking about some of the plugins that you have, I’ll mention some of the featured plugins on your website, WooCommerce, Show Single Variations, WooThumbs for WooCommerce, WooCommerce Delivery Slots. How did you come up with the ideas? Were these based on needs that you had for clients or customer requests, or just ideas that you had?

James: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It started– WooThumbs that you mentioned there was my first plugin for WooCommerce. It used to be under a different name, which was “Multiple Images per Variation,” which was a bit of a mouthful, so I decided to change it. It evolved from that initial concept, but the concept was that you could have the ability to add more than one image to a product variation, which you can’t do by default in WooCommerce. That came about as a request from a customer. I believe I was doing some web work for them, or at least freelancing at that time doing web work, and they approached me with this request. So that initial plugin came from that, and as well Delivery Slots that you mentioned was something that I built for one of our clients when we had a web agency. They’ve all evolved from client ideas, or the customer comes to me and says “We need a plugin that does this.” If I feel like it’s got legs, then it’s something that I would do.

Joe: Nice, very nice. That’s a great follow up question I had, was how do you determine if it has legs? Do you do some research to figure out if it’s something already out there, or something close, or is this something that other people need?

James: Yeah, exactly. I do some research, and there’s a few ways you can go about it. One great thing about WooCommerce is that they have an ideas board, so people will go there and post ideas of stuff that they’re looking for, and you can gauge how popular that idea is by how many votes it’s got. So, that’s a good initial way to validate an idea. Another thing is just based on the number of people to ask me for the same thing, and you get that quite a lot where people ask for the same thing in slightly different ways. You can build up this idea of a product from that. I have a massive list of stuff that I could build and don’t have the time to, and there’s plenty of stuff that I don’t build out. My next product is going to be a wish list, which obviously has quite a bit of competition. But through my experience I know the customers quite often like to have all of their software from the same company, and if they know that they can trust that company and they get good support from that company, then they’re going to come back and they’re going to want more products that might already exist.

Joe: Gotcha. Two great pieces of advice there. The WooCommerce ideas board, something I had no idea existed, I will make sure to link that in the show notes. Because as you said, James, that is a great way to validate an idea initially. People are probably posting there and asking for it, and it’s definitely not going to be in WooCommerce if it’s got some amount of votes.

James: Exactly. You can also see if the people at WooCommerce are planning to implement that into WooCommerce, to avoid wasting a load of time working on something that is then going to be added anyway.

Joe: Totally. We’ve all seen at least situations where there’s some market place plugin or app in the Apple App Store, for example. It basically gets implemented into iOS or into whatever the core version they’re working with. Jetpack maybe introduces features that were once a standalone plugin, or iOS has a new sharing feature that kills an app or something like that.

James: Exactly. It has happened to me a few times. I had a free plugin that added pagination to the WooCommerce short codes. So, if you display like five products, you can add pagination to that. WooCommerce recently actually added a pagination attribute for the short code, so you can turn it on now. Fortunately, that was a free plugin, so it’s not a massive deal breaker for me, but there has been some scares. Like WooThumbs for example. WooCommerce released, I think it was earlier this year, maybe late last year they released an updated image gallery which used a lot of the stuff that WooThumbs used. But it was still kind of restricted, so, fortunately, WooThumbs still has a pretty solid place in the market.

Joe: Nice. Have you thought about what you would do if one of your premium plugins just wholesale got built into native WooCommerce? Would you shut it down, or tell people “We’re not going to support this anymore because it’s native.” Or would you keep supporting it?

James: It depends. If I feel like it still adds some value to people, to the customers that use it, then I would continue to support it of course. If whatever WooCommerce implement is pretty much exactly the same or better than what I’m offering, then it feels right to stop working on that plugin and leave it at that. The customers that have used it will have got their use from it anyway, and you’d hope that they’d see the value in what they’ve already used. But you’d have to do it based on how they implement it, I guess. Hopefully, that doesn’t happen.

Joe: Absolutely. Last question around this topic is– I thought about this, and I should make clear that there’s no evidence that this happened. But there are features that get released into the core of open source projects that are strikingly similar to plugins. Do you ever worry about that? Since we live and work in an open source world, the core plugin or the core product– I won’t name names, to avoid drama, but it could just take that and put that code right into core.

James: It is a bit of a worry. It did feel like that when the WooThumbs update came out because I used exactly the same full screen galleries that I was using in WooThumbs and had been using for a while. They definitely didn’t take my code, but I feel like they might have got a bit of inspiration from it. Which is flattering, in a way. I don’t believe that they would take my code and drop it straight into core. I speak to Mike jolly sometimes, he runs the show, and I also contribute to core myself. I feel like if they did think this plugin would be great and cool, that they would approach me. I think they would.

Joe: Absolutely, and any–

James: [It’s probably a good start as a fork in something else, so you never know.]

Joe: Yeah, right. That is their track record. Again, this is just some deep seeded fear in the back of my mind, because I want to get into premium plugin land. But traditionally, with Automattic, WordPress, WooCommerce, when they’ve seen something they like they generally have gone out and bought– If there’s something that works exactly like it, they’ll buy it. They’ll try to buy that first.

James: Yeah. I think they would do that, and I think they would respect the open source nature of it all. I think the thing to worry about, or maybe not worry about, but to think about is because it’s a derivative product of WordPress that it also has to have the GPL license. So, someone could legally take the plugin and redistribute it, and they do. There is places where you can download it for free. But I think the value that I add and that my team adds is the level of support that you can receive, the continuous updates that you’re going to get. Just knowing how the product works and how it can benefit people from its inception. Give me the one up on those worries.

Joe: You mentioned that specifically with your new product that you’re working on, customers like to have software from a company that they trust, so they try to buy software from the same company. I thought that was great insight. I sell online courses, and I think, “Why should I make this course if somebody else has already made it? If it exists on Udemy or on [Linda.com]?” Or whatever. But if people like my teaching style they’re going to want to get that course from me, because of the way I approach and present the topic.

James: Exactly. That’s one thing that you have that no one else has, is that you’re you.

Joe: Absolutely. We’re halfway through the show and already two fantastic pieces of advice, and because we’re halfway through the show, I need to ask the title question. So, you have a shop full of plugins. Maybe we can focus in on WooThumbs or some other plugin that you’re working on right now as I ask, how did you build it? And, what’s your developer workflow like? Stuff like that.

James: We can talk about them as a whole. Because I’ve built it in a way, especially recently within the last week, I’ve built out libraries that I can implement into all of the plugins. To start with I would build them one by one, and over time I’ve realized that in order to optimize my processes I need to have a process in place. So, all of my plugins are heavily reliant on package managers, they all use Composer which is a PHP package manager. That pulls in– For example, it pulls in the Freemius code that I need to install in the plugin, and I’ve just built out what I call “Core classes.” So I’ve got classes in all of my plugins that handle the settings pages, the license activation, just some helper methods that all of the plugins use like checking if a plugin is active or not, that kind of thing. So I’ve got this Composer task that pulls in those libraries from my GitHub account, or my BitBucket account I should say. Because you can host private BitBucket repos on BitBucket, whereas I think you have to pay on GitHub.

Joe: Yeah. I think it’s a prohibitively expensive amount now for private repos on GitHub.

James: Yeah, I can imagine. I have always tried to reduce costs where I can. So, BitBucket is good. Although I do pay for BitBucket as well, for the pipelines.

Joe: Nice.

James: So, I’ve got a Composer task that pulls in those files that I need, and then I use Gulp. Gulp is probably an even bigger component to my plugins than Composer. It does so much stuff that would take way too much time if I didn’t use it. So, Gulp. I run a task called Gulp deps, short for “Dependencies,” and that will copy the files from the Composer folder, and it will rename the classes as I use an order plugins so that they’re specific for that plugin. It will move these files into a nice tidy folder so I don’t have to commit or I don’t have to release all of the Composer files, because you often get a lot of stuff that you don’t need. By doing that it means that each plugin is sharing these libraries, but they’re also independent because they’re all renamed. If I release an update for WooThumbs, for example, and someone is using Delivery Slots as well, I don’t need to do any checking to see that they’re both using the latest version of the library. I can know that independently they run as well as they should be by themselves. So, Gulp is a massive part, and I also have Gulp tasks that watch the SCSS and compile the JavaScript. They create the final plugins zip and push it to Freemius via Gulp, so I can just run Gulp compile and Gulp deploy. You can imagine, this is probably like a year ago I was doing most of this manually for every plugin, and you can imagine that it takes a lot of time.

Joe: Absolutely. Because even renaming the classes for each plugin, like generally when I start a plugin I get the WordPress plugin boilerplate that Tom McFarlane originally released. Part of that is making sure that everything is renamed properly, not having to do a find and replace to do that and then essentially waiting for it to error out in case you have a collision. Even creating the final zip and pushing it to Freemius automatically, like a big step in my podcast process is exporting from Audacity and then having to manually upload it to Lipson, which is my audio host. That takes– It’s like a couple of minutes, but it’s a couple of minutes here and there to do this and a couple of minutes here and there to do that. It sounds like you’re saving a huge amount of time by using just Gulp.

James: Yeah, 100%. Also something for your show notes, that Freemius deployment via Gulp is on the MPM repository so anyone can use it.

Joe: Nice.

James: But that saves a ridiculous amount of time.

Joe: Awesome. We didn’t touch on Freemius, which I would have liked to ask in the research phase. What made you use Freemius? Did you look at other options? You’re a WooCommerce developer, so naturally, I would imagine you looked at WooCommerce, but–?

James: I did. I looked at a few options. Like you say, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Paddle. I think I looked at [Fospring] for a little while and Freemius. The issue I was facing is being in the EU, basically. I don’t know what it’s like over there, but if we sell a digital product to a European country we have to pay their tax or charge their tax, and then pay it to that country using a system called [VAT] [inaudible], which is a massive headache to manage. Primarily I was looking for a system that would handle that [VAT] stuff for me, even down to just charging [VAT]. I’m not [VAT] registered, so at the time when I was looking, I was making $4,000 dollars a month which isn’t enough to be registered for [VAT] anyway. So it wasn’t worth me doing that, and going through the hassle of doing that. I was looking for a system that would do that for me, which WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads don’t, which is why they were rolled out. If I went with them, I would have to basically have a good accountant, because I don’t want to be doing that stuff myself. So, I looked to Freemius and Paddle my last two options, and Freemius just seemed to make sense because of how intertwined with WordPress it is. On top of handling the [VAT] stuff for me, they would offer me subscription payments and actual deployment processes, managing customer licenses and things like that. It was all contained within this one package that I wouldn’t have had if I used Paddle, for example.

Joe: Gotcha. So, with Freemius, basically you sign up for Freemius, and they take a cut of your sales, that’s on essentially a degrading scale. The more sales you make, the smaller percentage they end up taking. You deploy to Freemius, and they handle the software licenses. If you upload an updated version of the plugin, do they push it out automatically as well?

James: My deployment process, when you run it will upload it to them and then it gives you a link in the terminal that you click, and it takes you to the Freemius dashboard where you can then publish it. When you publish, it pushes it through to the WordPress update mechanism, so it’d just be the same as updating any plugin in WordPress.

Joe: Awesome. So you don’t have to be like, “Plugin’s updated. Come download the new version here,” or whatever. It just gets pushed out.

James: Which I was using Code Canyon before this, and that was the mechanism for Code Canyon. Where they send out an email saying “There’s an update available.”

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. That’s fantastic. Freemius is probably the lead contender for me as I get into this, because there are certain things I want to focus on, and building the infrastructure to sell premium plugins is not part of that.

James: Exactly.

Joe: As well as, I’m not an accountant. I sell online courses, and I’ve definitely sold to countries that require a [VAT], and I don’t know. I haven’t charged extra for it so I might get– I don’t know if I’m going to get hit. I have to talk to my accountant about that. But something that handles all of that for me sounds fantastic.

James: Exactly. You’ve got the Freemius team behind you as well. If you feel there’s something missing, drop them a message, and if they feel like it’s a good idea, they’ll implement it. They’re very responsive as well.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. In a previous episode, I talked to Vova Feldman who is the founder of Freemius, so I will link to that episode in the show notes as well. You can hear all about how Freemius was built.

James: Great.

Joe: Cool. So, as we approach time here, I know that you mentioned that you’re working on a few things. What are your plans for the future as far as Iconic WP goes?

James: What I’d like to do is expand the plugin collection. Like I said, I’m building out a wish list plugin, and I’ve got– Like I said before as well, a big list of plugins that I want to build. I want to expand the collection, I want to keep bringing value to the customers that use me currently, and that might use me in the future, and then on top of that I want to have another developer or two that work with me on the plugins. More outside of a support role, but as part of the core team that build out these plugins and comes up with ideas and releases them. So that eventually as a WooCommerce store and you could cover off most bases by just using Iconic.

Joe: Nice. That sounds awesome. I have a couple of follow up questions on that because again, these are things that I think about. They’re these mental hurdles for me because I am a developer, I have a bunch of plugins, and I could probably make premium. But as you expand your plugin collection, what does support look like? Do you find that there’s like, “If I add X plugin support, requests will increase by Y,” or something like that?

James: I don’t have any particular equation that works out how much support I’m going to get, but yet it will naturally increase as the plugins increase. But so will sales, which gives me more money to pay a technical support person. Up until a few weeks ago, I was doing all of the technical support, and it was taking up pretty much all of my time, which was good and bad. It was good because I was able to see which bugs were there and you could constantly be fixing these bugs in the plugins and pushing out updates. But you do start to focus on the top selling plugins, and the ones that aren’t selling as much or don’t have as many support requests fall behind. I had some that hadn’t been updated for ten month that I’ve just updated now. So, it was– It came to the point where I needed to have someone else on technical support in order for me to make sure that everything’s working as well as it should be. That the company is running as well as it should be, and that I’ve got time to push out more plugins. I think it is something that’s going to come naturally as I release more plugins, I’ll need more technical support, and over time I should hopefully need another developer on it full time rather than just support. At the moment it’s just a “Do it and see.”

Joe: Cool. I wish you a lot of luck with that. Do you use some tool, like Help Scout, to manage support requests?

James: Yes. Help Scout.

Joe: Nice. Help Scout was top of mind because that’s the one that– It’s very popular in the WordPress community, I think.

James: Yeah, it is.

Joe: It’s the one I hear about the most.

James: Help Scout is great. Also, Freemius integrates with it, so you can see the status of the license in the sidebar.

Joe: Wow.

James: I also use Drift for live chat on my product pages, which is pretty good as a pre-sales tool. You do get people that come on asking for support, which is OK, but it’s just me on Drift at the moment. So it can be quite distracting, I find.

Joe: Sure.

James: I also use Help Scout Docs for all of my documentation.

Joe: Awesome. Cool. So, last question on here before I get to my favorite question. I’ve been hearing a lot that live chat can help increase sales. Have you found that to be– Have you found Drift to be a good–? You mentioned it’s good for pre-sale, but have you noticed an uptick in sales because of it?

James: Yeah, 100%. I don’t have any stats to back it up, but I know from the conversations I’ve had, if there wasn’t a live chat there I think a lot of the people I speak to would think “This plugin doesn’t do what I need. I’ll go find another one.” Whereas if you’ve got live chat there they can ask the question and you can give them an answer straight away, and a lot of the time the plugin might do something that they didn’t realize that it did based on your landing page. That gives you actionable things to do based on that because you can you can convince them that it does do what they need, and then you also know that you maybe need to update your landing page to include that information.

Joe: That’s another great tip. I think right after this I’m going to go install Drift on my website. Awesome. You’ve given us tons of great advice already, but I do want to ask, do you have any trade secrets for us?

James: Any trade secrets. For me, it’s all about persistence. I started my first ecommerce plugin, WooThumbs was built in 2011. So, it’s been around a long time. It’s the first of its kind, and in my opinion, still the best. But it’s taken a while to get to where I am now. Now I’m running this business full time, my wife is on maternity, so it’s our only income, and it’s good. It gives me the freedom to do what I want, to work when I want, to not work when I want. It’s all been about persistence. We’ve been– Those years I’ve had other jobs, I’ve run a web agency, and this has always been a side project for me until the beginning of 2016 where I started to focus on it full time. I think if you can get to the stage where you can focus on it full time, keep pushing, keep iterating and trying different things. Using Google optimized to run A/B tests and things like that, really push what you’re doing with the product and try and increase conversions. I think most importantly, listen to your customers, speak to customers and communicate with customers, and find out what they need and how they found you, and what you can do to make your offerings better for them. That’s probably quite a lot of stuff.

Joe: Yeah, but lots of really great advice. Definitely, everybody heed that advice. Keep pushing. I think a lot of people feel like, “I’ll start my own business. It’s online, so it’s easier,” But it’s not easy by any stretch. Listening to your customers, what they need and how they found you, that’s something I’ve been hearing a lot lately. Talk to your customers. Maybe even have real phone conversations, or person to person conversations with them when you can, because it will unlock a goldmine of information for you to help you with your business.

James: Definitely. If you can get on the phone, you can get a lot more information than you can via e-mail, so that is that is a great way to do it.

Joe: That’s great.

James: I think another thing is as well, I think you’re never going to feel like you’re finished. There’s always more to do, and I think you’re always going to think “I should be doing better than I’m doing now.” There’s always going to be people that– One offs in the industry that are just doing amazingly, and you don’t have to be them. You have to be as good as you can be and know that what you’re doing is working.

Joe: Those are words to live by. I don’t think they need– I think you said it the best way possible. So, James, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

James: You can find my website at IconicWP.com. I’ve also got Twitter, @iconicwp or my personal one is @jamesckemp. Just Google my name, and there should be some stuff.

Joe: Nice. I will include all of that in the show notes. James, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time.

James: Thanks, Joe. It was great.

Outro: Thanks so much to James for joining me today. I loved his advice about using the WooCommerce ideas board as a great way to initially validate your idea. He talked a bit about Drift and how he saw an uptick in sales after integrating live chat. This is something that I’ve thought about doing for a while, and I just– For whatever reason, either I wasn’t convinced, or I’m suspect of the performance hit my website will take, I just haven’t done it yet. Perhaps I will do it now with James’ advice. I also love that he has a bunch of trade secrets from persistence to A/B testing, but I like what he said about how you’re never going to feel like you’ve finished. I think that is great advice for you to go and launch because if you wait until you feel like you’re finished, you’re never going to launch. My question of the week for you is, do you use live chat on your website? Or, did this episode convince you to use live chat on your website? Let me know by sending me an email, Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter, @jcasabona.

Miniseries: Now, I want to continue my story my little miniseries on how I built my podcasting course. Over the last two weeks we talked about research, and the research I did or didn’t do, and how I evolved the process and how I’m evolving the course. Over the next few weeks, I want to tell you about how I built it. I want to answer the title question, “How did I build this course?” I’m breaking it up into how I built the course itself, and how I built the tech stack on top of which the course is made. So, let’s start with how I built the course. As you know from listening in previous episodes, the first iteration of the course I made a very cognizant decision to only focus on building the podcast website. Because of that, and how that shaped my outline, I created an outline for the course, and I decided to build out a full website step by step. All of my courses are learn by doing, so in that first iteration of the course, we don’t go over things like recording or choosing gear. I’ve assumed that you’ve done those things already and now you’re ready to put your website online. We start with things like choosing a domain and choosing website hosting, installing WordPress. Each section of the course has a specific goal in mind that builds towards the overall goal of the course, which is to launch a website and submit your podcast to iTunes. My general course building process is to write an outline, refine that outline, and then come up with a goal for each lesson that builds towards the overall goal of the course. I wanted to do some value-adds in this course. Anybody– I shouldn’t say anybody can figure out, but there’s a lot of resources out there on how to set up just a simple WordPress website. I wanted to deliver a bunch of value in this course, like “Why do we need a separate website for our podcast?” I answer that question. “How do I evaluate audio hosts? How do I know what plugin to use for podcasts? What theme should I use, and how do I submit my podcast to Apple Podcasts?” That’s a that’s a common question, and I want to show you exactly how we do it with the website we just built. I also show people who take the course how to submit it to other directories as well. Apple Podcasts gets the lion’s share of the publicity, but there are several other directories out there that are worth submitting to, and in this course, we submit to all of them. So, that’s where I want to leave this conversation. But I will say that in my research and feedback I made a pretty bad decision in not showing the entire podcast process, so next week we’ll talk about how I’m revamping the course and how I’m rebuilding the course to build around the website but give users or students a more full picture of starting a new podcast from scratch. So, that’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, please give me a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people discover the show. If you have any questions, feel free to write in, Joe@HowIBuilt.it or @jcasabona. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Sam Brodie & Selling Your Business

April 2, 2019

Sponsored by:

Plesk: Get set up for free!
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.

Before Sam Brodie founded OffSprout, he successfully sold a niched business that focused on websites for lawyers. Sam generously shares his advice and experience with us, from niching down to how to properly keep your books. There’s tons of great advice in this episode, so make sure to listen to the whole thing!

Jan Thielemann and Selling WordPress Plugins

March 19, 2019

Sponsored by:

Plesk: Get set up for free!
Pantheon: Get ready for Gutenberg. Sign up for a FREE account today.
Hover.com: Get 10% off your first order!

Jan Thielemann is a plugin developer who got his start as a digital nomad who wanted to make enough money to fund his adventures. So he started a small side business selling plugins for Divi, where he found a good niche. He offers great advice about starting on your own, and the difference between truly passive and “half-passive” income.

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 115 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Jan Theleiman. I met Jan through the Freemius Slack channel, and you might remember the episode where I interviewed Vova Feldman. He invited me into the Freemius Slack channel, and I got to meet a lot of really cool people there, and Jan is one of them. He was a bit of a digital nomad for a while, and he started making money writing pro-Divi modules which he uses Freemius to sell. So, if you are thinking about getting into plugin development or premium plugin sales, this has been an insanely helpful episode for me. It’s always something I think about doing, and then I can never make the jump. “Do I do too much?” Or whatever. Jan offers a lot of really great advice. We’ll get to that interview in a minute, but first a word from our sponsors.

Break: 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 Jan Theleiman. Jan, how are you today?

Jan Theleiman: Good. Thanks for having me on the show.

Joe: Thanks for being on the show. We were connected through the Freemius Slack team, so we’re going to be discussing an interesting topic today. As you’ll learn very soon, Jan is a Java programmer by day and then sells products on the side. I’m very excited to talk to you about this. Why don’t we start off with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, and maybe more specifics about what you do?

Jan: My name is Jan. I’m from Germany. For the past three years, my wife and we’ve traveled around the world. Three years that is a long time. Originally we planned to only travel Australia for one year. But our car broke down, which we bought there, and then we decided to visit as many countries as we could with the money we saved. The money we saved, it lasted for about one year. But we didn’t want to stop traveling, so we had to come up with ideas to earn money while we travel. This brought me to the Divi WordPress premium theme. Some of you might know from Elegant Themes. Since I’m a programmer I started developing modules for my own blog, we had a [inaudible] blog, and I posted one of these modules in a Facebook group, and then some German guy told me, “You can’t give away this great module. You have to sell it.” This brought me to selling my modules, which made quite a good amount of money on the side compared to the amount of work I put into it. Especially if you travel in Asia and South America, you don’t have to do a lot of work to afford a very good life down there. Then my wife got pregnant, and now we are back in Germany. I’m back to developing Java during the day for a bigger company here in Germany, but I never gave up on developing my modules. That’s what I still do on the side because when I come home, developing my passion. Other people sit in front of the television and watch stupid shows, I rather do some developing, because it’s just so much fun and having the money on the side is also nice, so I can afford a good life for my newborn.

Joe: That’s fantastic. We were talking before the show, at the time of this recording Jan has a seven week old.

Jan: Yes.

Joe: So, I remember those days pretty well. Sleep deprivation makes it hard to completely remember them. But, that’s cool. That’s such a cool story. You traveled around the world for three years, after one year you were like “Let’s keep the party going.” So you decided to sell modules for Divi. Had you used Divi before, or did you like stumble upon this in your quest to make money?

Jan: Yeah, it’s a little bit of a funny story. When we created our blog for the first time, I had no idea what themes to use. We also had a YouTube channel, and one of our viewers had a marketing agency in Germany, and she owns a limited license of DVDs. So she said “I have this super cool theme. Do you want to use it for your blog?” She basically gave it to me for free. So, that’s how I came to review it. Then at some point, I needed a certain module which did not exist, so I’m a programmer, and I thought “You can make this.” So I wrote it myself, I looked at the source code, dug through it, learned how everything worked together and then just came up with a plugin. Then I wanted to share this plugin with the word. That’s how I came to this.

Joe: That’s super cool.

Jan: After that time I created a second plugin, and then the third plugin it really– I don’t know how to say it. In Germany, we say, “It hit the tooth of the time.” I don’t know if that makes sense, but it was–

Joe: Gotcha.

Jan: It was exactly on point and what people needed. Suddenly, I had all the income I needed to do full time traveling, and I only did a few hours of work per week instead of eight hours per day as before, when we lived in Germany. I only had to work maybe one or two hours a day and do some updates every now and then, and give some support. It was a great time. We had all this free time, we could see things and places, and it was wonderful.

Joe: Wow. Can you say that statement again? What was it? “It really–?”

Jan: “It hit the tooth of the time.”

Joe: “The tooth of the time?”

Jan: Yeah. I don’t even know if that makes sense.

Joe: In America we say, I think probably what you’re saying is, “Hit the nail on the head.” It was– Cool.

Jan: Yeah, that would be appropriate, I guess.

Joe: Very cool. So that was your third one. I have so many questions right now because I think this is very cool. First of all, how long did it take you before you developed that third plugin that helped your shop take off? Was it weeks, days? Did you develop three right in a row? What was that like?

Jan: It was really funny. The first module I published on a marketplace site four or five days before the end of the month, and in these four or five days, it made like $50 bucks. That’s not very much, but it’s nice to see “I created something for myself, by myself, without being employed by somebody else. It made some legit money. The next month I started developing the second module and published it maybe a week or two after I published the first one. During that month it made like $250 bucks. So, I saw “The income is getting bigger by a factor of five.” In the third month I released the third– Actually, it’s the second month. Because it was only a few days before the end of the month when I released the first one. So, the second month at the very beginning of the month, I released the third module. I think it made $1,050 dollars. It was only like five weeks or so, and ever since I think I had not a single month since then that I earned less than $1,000 with these modules and the beauty of it is once you release a module it stays online. You only have to make sure that you update it if something breaks, but then your portfolio gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Which means that with less and less and less amount of time you spend working on it, you’ll get the same income or even more because more modules means more income. At the very beginning, my business model was a little bit different. It was the first time I ever sold something by myself online. I only sold VR unlimited license, unlimited site licenses with lifetime support, but now with Freemius, I switched to the yearly reoccurring payment. Because it after the first year it became clear that if I want to make this a sufficient source of income and I want to provide long term support for these modules, I need a way to make the income, and the Freemius model where you have these yearly recurring payments. It’s really beautiful. I still sell lifetime licenses, and they normally have three times the price of a yearly license. If you plan on using one of my modules longer than three years than it would be smarter to invest in the lifetime license. But depending on which module you want to buy, that can become expensive quite fast.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. I like some of your insights because I’ve been saying this to a few people now that I’ve been interviewing for this show. I have an idea for a plugins that I use personally that I think probably could sell okay, but I’m worried about the support aspect of things, or I am worried about the amount of time it will take me to get these to market and then marketable. But, it sounds like, at least initially, just some effort to get them to market, and then they can maybe start making money, and I can refine as I see fit.

Jan: During my travels, I learned a lot about a thing called “Passive income,” which you surely have heard of. People are always talking, especially in the digital nomad groups, they are always talking about the passive income they make. You have the active income when you sell your time, and you have a passive income when you let your money work for you. I believe that there is a third thing, which is the semi-passive, or half passive income. Which is what I am doing currently. I can’t stay away for a year and expect it to make the same amount of income every month. I still have to put some effort in it. Truly passive income is for example if you buy stocks and they give you a dividend each quarter, or whatever. That’s truly passive income because you don’t touch it at all anymore. But what I do is what I enjoy, and spending these few hours every week. Maybe half an hour a day, or maybe sometimes two or three hours depending on my mood, it makes me happy, and I can ensure quality. The downside is, of course, you need some initial time to put a new product into the market, and you never know if it really will hit like you expect it. So, with my third module which made this big impact in my life, I was really lucky. I still don’t know how I did this, because it was a quite simple module. It was a blog module which let you configure different level of elevation according to the material design from Google. So, when you hover over the module, it appears that it is coming closer to you by changing the box shadows around it. I thought it was not so difficult to make, and I would have never thought that people would appreciate this kind of module so much. Again, it was more something for myself, which I said, “I saw a similar thing on another page. Not as a module but they implemented it with CSS.” I saw it, and I thought, “It would be cool if I could have a module for my pages so I could easily implement this without writing the CSS every time.” So I developed it, and people liked it so much that they bought it over 400 times now.

Break: This episode is brought to you by our friends at Hover. I’ve been using Hover for as long as I can remember and I couldn’t be happier with them. As a matter of fact, I’ve switched all of my domains from wherever I had them in the various places to Hover exclusively. I know you probably have a ton of ideas for domain names, I do too. Whenever I have an idea for a domain, I go straight to Hover and purchase that domain. I even have them bookmarked on my phone, on its home screen, so that I can quickly and easily get the domain I just got an idea for. They make the process as easy as possible with no up sells, just pure domain purchasing. My absolute favorite feature is the free WHOIS privacy. Not only do they protect your identity, but they do so without some added cost. That means when I buy a domain from Hover, I don’t get spammed the next day by people trying to sell me services, or mail from scams trying to get me to pay more for my domain than I need to. With Hover, WHOIS privacy is free. I could probably do an entire episode about Hover and all its great things, but for now, I will tell you that if you want to learn more and get your domains from an honest, great, domain registrar, you can head over to Hover.com/BuildSomething. You’ll even get 10% off your first purchase just for being a listener. Now, back to the show.

Joe: When I’m looking at other products, like what you just said, “Something so simple, how can it make such a big impact?” It has a very obvious application. People can search for a module that does this, and that comes up. “This is the exact thing I needed to do.” So, maybe that mental block is another thing that plugin developers need to get over. It’s not it’s not the simplicity of the thing you’re making, it’s the value it provides to the customer.

Jan: Yes, exactly. I think that is the point. If people need it and it makes their life easier, then they are happy to spend a few bucks on it. It doesn’t have to be a super fancy suit of different modules and everything, which takes you three years in development. Sometimes it can be something really easy. I made a second product off the blog module, which is a collection of CSS classes you can simply add the style sheet to your site, and then you have one class which is a cut class, and you can edit to any element on your page. It will apply the hover effect with the elevation. I offer it for a really low cost. I think it’s $3 dollars or so, but people like it so much because they can do so much with it, which they can’t with Divi out of the box, so they simply they only have to remember this very one class. Put it in the field, on the theme, on a module, on a row, on a section, a column, whatever they like. It just works. So it’s really simple to use, and the effect is cool, so they keep on buying it, and I think that’s the– How do you say? The hourly wage of this particular product. It’s the best I’ve ever had in my life because the hourly wage it grows and grows and grows. I spent like half an hour to develop this style sheet, but it already brought me like $300-400 dollars or so, so that’s an hourly wage of like $800. Please tell me where you get $800 dollars an hour.

Joe: That’s incredible. So, maybe for the–, We’ve been talking for most of the show about different aspects of the business and how you came across this, but I love the topic. I usually like to ask what kind of research you did for the product, but we got a little bit of that. I’d be interested to know what kind of research you did for pricing, or maybe how you decided to price your plugins? Because some people are like “$99 bucks. If it saves somebody an hour of work, $99 bucks, it definitely is.” But you also mentioned $3 dollars, which was clearly totally worth it for you. So, how do you come up with pricing?

Jan: That’s a difficult question actually, I’m still looking for ways how I can do this, because normally what I do is I sell myself underpriced. For me, it’s really hard. I’m a very helpful person, and if somebody asks me anything in my support, I will help them no matter if it’s the fault of my plugin. Today I had a customer, and he bought one of my plugins, and he put it on his site, and the plugin didn’t work. So I checked out his site, and I saw that he put some strange J query script tag on his page, which is absolutely not necessary because Divi comes with J query built in. But he told me, “No I need this or this or that won’t work.” I told him, “Then whatever you do there is not working properly, and it should work like this or that, and I’m happy to assist you to make it work so that it works together with my plugin.” It’s basically not my plugin’s fault, but I’m happy to assist. I won’t charge him any money for this, and that makes it difficult for me to put the right price tag on my stuff. What I normally do is I think about what would I spend for such a plugin, and I normally don’t spend much money for things. Especially if I can do them myself, so normally I put them a little bit underpriced. Recently, I tried one thing out which is making one of my products ridiculously expensive, but apparently, it gives so much value to people that they still buy it. I think you can try a little bit out, and you can– If you say, “OK when I make it this price I get around these many purchases a month. Then next month I maybe make it a little bit more expensive, $10, $50, $100, depending on how much value it adds. Then you can see if people still buy it, OK. If nobody buys it at all, make it cheaper again until you hit the sweet spot. I wish there was a recipe for finding the price, but that’s simply not possible. You can guess and see if people are willing to pay whatever you will want to charge.

Joe: Nice. I like that a lot. I especially like the part where you said that you raised your price of a plugin significantly, but people still found a lot of value in it. So, there’s nothing wrong with price experimenting.

Jan: Right. I read a blog article from Freemius, and it was also about product pricing. The story goes that he goes into a meeting with a corporation and he has a super awesome plugin, and when he came to the slide with pricing nobody said anything, and he never heard back from them. The problem was that it was way too cheap, and big businesses, they expect to pay a good amount of money. So before the next meeting, he quickly added two zeros to the price. The business, they just bought it. They didn’t even cringe or whatever, they just said “Looks good. We’ll buy it.” After I read this, I as well, I added a little bit to the pricing. Before it was, I think, $39. I raised the price to $299, and people keep buying it. I couldn’t believe it. But apparently, it’s so much of value for them that they’re willing to pay it. That makes me think if I should maybe play around with pricing a lot more. One particular pricing tip I have is that if it is possible always try to display a higher price and cross it out, so people think “That’s a limited offer.” That’s one thing I now do with each of my plugins, even if they are not on a special deal or whatever. It’s the psychological effect.

Joe: People are always willing to get the deal. I’ve learned the opposite, in that when I first launched my online courses I had a bunch of coupons and things like that, and then when I got rid of them, I had people who only wanted to buy my course if there was a coupon. I made them think that there was always a deal, and when I got rid of that deal, it backfired a little bit. But I found a good happy medium there though, so that’s interesting. I would love to get to the title question now which is “How did you build it.” I want to talk specifically about your online shop, and you use Preemius– I’m sorry, Freemius. You mentioned that you might use other marketplaces as well, so maybe we could talk about some of the decision making that went in there.

Jan: First of all, of course, you have to know where you can sell. Do you want to sell on your own website? In your own shop? Do you want to use a provider like Freemius which handles all the value-added tech stuff? Especially here in Europe, that’s a real pain if you want to do it yourself. You have to get a lawyer, which is expensive to write terms of service for your shop. You have to check where the customers come from, and then each European country has a different value-added tax rate. In Germany, it’s 19%, and in Spain, it’s 15-16% or whatever. That alone made me think, “No thank you. I never want to have my very own shop. I’d rather pay the 30% for a platform which takes care of everything, and I get my pay out which I put in my income tax, and I’m good to go. I don’t have to take care of anything, and I don’t have to deal with refunds and stuff like this. So at first, I didn’t even know that Freemium existed. But this German guy, he told me “There’s this page called ElegantMarketplace.com,” and at the time it was the one of the very few or maybe the only marketplace especially made to buy and sell Divi related products. Like plugins, modules, themes, courses, stuff like that. That’s the first one I started to sell on. Then later there I was contacted by the owner of another page called Divi cake, which is also a site especially for Divi products, but it’s newer and smaller. The good thing is they have the customer base. When people in the Divi community look for a plugin or a theme, they first go to Elegant Marketplace because it’s such a name. They had a Facebook group with some 30,000 members, and if you search for custom Divi modules or whatever you would normally find them in Google on the top places. That alone adds so much value over selling on your own page because you can have the very best product at the cheapest price. But if people don’t find you, you will not make a single dime. Then later I started to think “What if Elegant Marketplace suddenly starts to raise their share?” Or, “What if the owner runs away, saves the income for two months from all the developers selling there, and then just goes wide?” Or what if, I don’t know, a fire destroys all the backups they have, and the site goes down? Or, Google decides to delist them? Things can happen all the time, intentionally or not intentionally, it doesn’t matter. But it’s always good to put not all your eggs into one basket. So I stumbled across Freemius, which was recommended from a friend, and that is when I started to rebuild some of my old plugins to another structure. Because what Freemius allows you to do is you can put your premium code in the module, and then you upload it to their page, and you put your premium code in between an if and a statement and they have a compiler which strips out all the premium code. Then you get a plugin which you can upload on the WordPress plugin directory. So now, I not only have an Elegant Marketplace with their huge user base, but I also have– I can advertise my product directly on WordPress. So if you go to plugins at new search for Divi, you will find my plugin. You can install it, test it out, get the free modules I have added there. Then there’s this wonderful add on architecture which allows you to purchase different add ons. So I already converted two or three of my modules to add ons, and that is a nice distribution of your risk. You also get all the people who might not know about Elegant Marketplace, but who regularly search the plugin directory for Divi modules.

Joe: That’s cool, so I like that. You’re piggybacking off of other audiences like Elegant Marketplace and Divi cake that have that trust in the specific industry that you’re trying to be in, but also I didn’t know that this was a feature of Freemius that– I guess it makes sense, because their name is based on like “Freemium model.” It lets you easily up sell your add ons. Because that’s another hard thing if you have maybe a free version of the plugin and then you need to convince them to go off somewhere and pay for the premium if they want.

Jan: Freemius makes it simple when you write the code on your computer you only have this one code base. You don’t have to do any branching with good, and you develop as normal. Simply put it in the bracket, zip your product, upload it to Freemius. There’s even command line tools which can do this automatically for you. You download the free zip, put it in your WordPress repository and you’re good to go. Then when people decide to buy it they have two different options. You can have a free version of your plugin, and when they buy it, they get a premium version of the plugin. I didn’t want that, because I didn’t want people to have to re-download, remove the plugin, and download a new premium one. I have a free one which everybody can use. Everybody has the same features, but there is the add on structure, and this is also built right into Freemius. They even provide you with the manual structure so you don’t have to do anything, you just upload your add ons onto Freemius. And when I add a new plugin I just flip a switch, and it will appear in the list of add ons at your back end. So it’s always present, people know “OK. This is the free version, I can use it. Everything is good.” But there’s always this little add ons menu, which you can click and then you see all the beautiful add ons I created. The third really awesome thing about Freemius, which was also one of the main reasons I started using them, is they have affiliate program built right into the platform, so people can register themselves and become affiliate marketers for your plugin, and they can start earning money with your plugin, and if they recommend your plugin people will get plugin recommended are more likely to buy it if somebody they knew recommended it, over when they find themselves. Then they might be a little bit skeptical. But if I say to my friends, “I found this super awesome plugin. It’s really helpful. You should check it out.” It’s a lot more likely that he’s going to buy this plugin.

Joe: Very cool. It sounds like, I sell online courses and I do it through WooCommerce. I spent a lot of time getting the right infrastructure, and I’m glad I did that for this particular case, but if and when I start selling premium plugins I think Freemius will be the way to go because I would want to focus all of my development time on the premium plugins, and not any development time on the actual shop.

Jan: Right.

Joe: That’s very cool. We are coming up on time here. What are your plans for the future? I know that you have your full-time job, you just had a baby which I know probably affects the way that you approach certain things. I left my full-time job when my daughter was three months old to start my own business because I wanted to have as much time as possible with my child. But what are your plans for the future? Are you going to continue doing the full-time gig and then this on the side? Or do you eventually want to make this your full-time gig?

Jan: The plan is to do both right now, for a while until the boy is a little bit bigger and fit for traveling, and then maybe in two or three years or so I want to have my business grown so much that I can quit my day job and then I want to buy or build adventure mobile and drive around the world. See places and show my baby boy the giraffes in Africa, the zebras and the lions and the kangaroos in Australia, and the giant guinea pigs in South America, and all the cool things my wife and I have already seen. That is a dream of mine. Divi is not the only business I’m doing. I’m doing a lot of other things, but talking about them would probably take a few hours.

Joe: Gotcha. It goes back to what you said about having a nice distribution of your work, not putting all of your eggs into one basket. That’s cool. I love that. My wife is a nurse but I work from home, and so we do have a little bit of flexibility. We want to do the same thing for our daughter. We want to travel as much as possible with her, and give her the same travel bug that we have. So, that’s cool. I’m going to end with my favorite question to ask which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jan: I’m not sure if I understand the phrase “Trade secrets” correctly, but the secret I would like to share is that you should go out there and try things out. Don’t be afraid to fail. Just try it out and see what works for you and what makes you happy. I hope that makes– Answering the question.

Joe: That’s perfect. That’s great advice. I feel like you were talking directly to me, but I know that this is stuff that is applicable to everybody listening.

Jan: I wanted to talk to the listener.

Joe: Yes.

Jan: With you, I mean you, my very dear listener.

Joe: Yes, absolutely. Definitely, advice that I need to take advantage of too. Especially in the premium plugin space. Jan, thanks so much for joining me today. Where can people find you?

Jan: They can find me or my Divi related modules on my website, Divi-Sensei.com. I’m also on Facebook, search for Divi Sensei. I’m hanging around in the Freemius Slack channel so we can have a chat there, I also have a website, [inaudible], but it’s in German so the audience probably can’t make much sense of it.

Joe: The Hoff didn’t take advantage of Google Chrome’s auto-translate feature. I will be sure to link all of those in the show notes. Jan, thanks so much for joining me again, I appreciate it.

Jan: Thank you for having me.

Outro: Thanks again to Jan for joining me today. He offered a lot of really great advice. I loved his story. I like what he said about premium plugins being half passive income, because investments are truly passive, selling digital goods are about half passive. Because yes you do make money when you’re not there, but you have that support aspect, and some of the things he said, like him being happy to assist people even if it’s not the plugins fault because he knows overall it will leave people with a good impression of him. Lots of great advice, you should definitely check out Jan and his work. If you want to find all of those links that we’ve talked about you can do so over at HowIBuilt.it/115. My question of the week for you is, “Are you thinking about selling a premium plugin? And if so, what is it? What’s stopping you?” I can wax poetic about that for a long time, but let me know. Email me Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. Thanks so much to our sponsors, Plesk, Pantheon and Hover. Be sure to check them out and thank them for their support, because the show would not happen without them. If you liked this episode be sure to leave a rating interview on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people discover us. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Turning the Tables: Joe Casabona & How I Built It

December 24, 2018

In the last episode of the year (and a bonus one, to boot), my friend Jeff Large interviews me as a follow up to the 100th episode. Jeff is a great interviewer and I really enjoyed the conversation we had – he even gets me to say, “trade secret…” I think you’ll like it too!

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to a special episode of How I Built It. My 100th episode came out earlier this year, and my original plan for it was to have somebody interview me, turning the tables where they are the host and I’m the guest. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get something like that done in time, due to schedules and a bunch of things. But my friend Jeff Large recently reached out to me and asked if it was something I’d be interested in doing. Naturally, I said yes. He listened to the 100th episode and then asked me a bunch of follow up questions, digging into my history as a web worker, a podcaster and an educator. And of course, he asked me if I have any trade secrets, and it’s a good one that I haven’t shared on this show before. If nothing else, be sure to listen to at least the trade secret part. That’s it. There’s no sponsors or anything like that in this episode. This is a bonus episode. And with that, I will turn it over to Jeff.

Jeff Large: Hello, Welcome to How I Built It. The show where we interview product owners and developers about how they built specific products from idea to execution. I am your honorary guest host and podcaster, Jeff Large. My guest today is someone you know and love if you’ve been listening to this show for any amount of time. He is a college professor, online course teacher, web developer of over 17 years, and the otherwise normal host of How I Built It, Joe Casabona. Joe, welcome to your show.

Joe Casabona: Thanks, Jeff. I’m happy to be here.

Jeff: This is funny. We jumped on– Just for context for the audience, we’re friends in real life, and we were talking on slack. I pitched the idea to him that to end the year we did an interview, and then you were just telling me that you wish you would have done this. Or, you wish you had reached out to me already for episode 100.

Joe: I had this grand vision of somebody interviewing me for episode 100, but then a lot of things happened and I was delayed, and I was like, “I don’t want to have to try to schedule somebody, and rush,” and stuff. So I did a scripted version of that. But I’m happy that we get to do this, because I would love to answer questions that people have about the show.

Jeff: 100%. Especially if you have listened to episode 100 already, I just listened to it and used it a little bit as a launching point. But we’re definitely going to get into, you and I were talking beforehand. I want to get into more of your actual business. The podcast is one side of it, and I have a feeling that it’s a little more of the marketing piece as opposed to the actual moneymaking business parts of it itself. For you to be running this show for so long and to be interviewing so many amazing people, I assume that your listener base would like to know a little more detail than you share on a regular basis about what’s really going on about your journey, about the stuff behind the scenes. That’s some of what I want to get into with you.

Joe: Awesome. That sounds great.

Jeff: All right. To begin with, this is something that I like to ask people on my own show. You’re responsible for multiple things, like I alluded to in the intro. How do you normally introduce yourself?

Joe: This has changed recently. I used to tell people, “I’m a front end developer that also teaches and podcasts,” but over the last few months people have asked me, “How come you’re not telling people that you’re a college professor? How come you’re not telling people that you created these accredited college courses?” Now I say, “I’m a college accredited professor who creates online courses, a front end developer and a podcaster.” That captures a little bit better my core competencies and the stuff I’m focusing on a lot more now.

Jeff: Do you feel–? One thing I was wondering about even that sort of branding. The word “College accredited,” has that made a difference? Does your audience, and the people in your target audience, do they get it? Because even for me, being in the education space, I had to double– You saying “I’m a college professor” registered, but “College accredited course creator and professor” threw me off a little bit. It almost felt too wordy.

Joe: It’s funny you mention that, because I was just talking to a coaching client that I got recently who hired me because of my college background. She asked, “What do you mean by college accredited?” Perhaps in a future bio will remove that, and then just mention that I’ve developed middle-states accredited college courses. Because that’s what I mean, is that I have developed courses at the college level that have gone through the rigor of getting certified and accredited.

Jeff: Because that is a valid point. I don’t want to discredit it, I just felt the wording of it didn’t mean anything to me. I was like, “What does this mean?” That’s why I was curious. Because you do get set apart in the sense of– I don’t know. You and I have talked about this as well, this is a tangent for a second, but it seems like in some circles and in some aspects of the people online to be an expert all you have to do is say, “I’m an expert.” That’s frustrating for the people that actually know what they’re talking about, and for you to have these credentials where you have a master’s degree and you’ve been teaching at the collegiate level. It seems like to be able to convey that in some way is important.

Joe: Definitely. A lot of people, I have fallen into this myself too, “I do something and now I can teach it.” I built a single website with some WordPress plugin, therefore I am qualified to teach a course on it. I’ve tried to step back from that a little bit, but I do want to convey to people that I am a web developer. I’ve got all of these 10 years’ experience teaching college students and developing college courses, where people are learning a real tangible skill for their professional life.

Jeff: That’s a big deal. To run down your background then, because I want to focus a little bit more on how you built the business that you have today, and this year. But to give context for the listener, if this is someone new or maybe they don’t know, I’m going to run down and feel free to correct or clarify anything that I’m saying. You have your degree in information technology, and a master’s in software engineering. You originally got into web development when you were 15, for your church you built your first $200 website. You have been teaching college level courses since 2007, so a little over 10 years now, and you spent a significant amount of time working for Crowd Favorite building enterprise level websites. This means big sites for important people, is what that comes down to. It wasn’t until, it looks like last year, June of 2017 that you left Crowd Favorite in order to pursue your own projects. Is that a good snapshot?

Joe: Absolutely. As you mentioned, I’ve been freelancing since I was 15. But the whole full time business with real stakes, let’s say. Because after college I freelanced a little bit before getting a job at my alma mater. But I have a family, and rent, and bills and stuff now. That I’ve been doing full time since June 2017.

Jeff: OK. That is a big difference. Is there anything–? I don’t want to spend a ton of time here, but what do you feel were a few, three at the most, top takeaways from that period of time? From the time that you got your feet wet, you got into web development, started teaching, and you were working for this big company. What were a couple of things that you were able to– The wisdom that you were able to take with you from that experience as you started your own thing?

Joe: That’s a great question. The first bit of advice is something I got from Mr. Joe Rizzi. He owned the deli that I worked for. I am a stereotypical New York Italian, so of course I worked for a deli.

Jeff: Is your accent going to come out in the story?

Joe: It might, a little bit. We’ll see. I’ll try to keep it to a low burn. When I first started making websites, I was charging $10 an hour. And I told him this, and he said, “Joey. Do you do good work?” And I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “Why are you only charging $10?” And I’m like, “Because I don’t think people are willing to pay that much more.” And he said, “If people see your prices are too low, then they won’t go with you. They won’t think that you have good quality.” That was the first time I raised my rate to $25 an hour. That advice, and basically all of our conversations, I would always stay and clean up on Saturdays and he would give me business advice. But that was my first big takeaway is that price communicates value, and that people don’t just want to– Real people don’t just want to go for the lowest price. They want to go for the price that will deliver the most value for them. That was one of my first big lessons. The second big lesson I got is something I was told when I was about 21 or 22, and didn’t realize until I was about 30. Because you don’t know anything in your early 20s. That was from a family friend who said, “Look, Joe. I know that you want to start your own business, and that’s great and everything, but when you get out of college you should go work for a company in the same line of work that you do. You can network, you can learn those processes. You can get real world experience. Then when you go out on your own you’ve built up this network of people who then you can tap into.” And I thought, “I don’t need to follow that advice. I know what I’m talking about. I’m in my early 20s, I know everything.” Then when I was about 30, working for Crowd Favorite, and seeing all of the things that I didn’t know. I thought, “Man that was advice that I wish that I took.” Those were two lessons I learned in my teens and early 20s that helped shape my business, and the third bit of advice came towards the end of my time at Crowd Favorite. Maybe right after I left Crowd Favorite. That was that your messaging needs to be right. To expand on that, all of my client work has been word of mouth since I was 15. My first paying gig was my first gig because my church said, “We’ll pay you.” I didn’t even make websites, they were just like, “Will you make us a website?” And I said, “No.” And they said, “We’ll pay you.” And I was like, “OK.” So I never learned the lesson of the hard fought client, or at least not really. That is something that I’ve learned over the last two years is that people who don’t know me, I need to gain their trust first before they’re willing to give me any money, because my cheapest courses are $20-24 bucks and if they don’t trust me, they’re not going to hand over that $20 bucks. Those are maybe the three best lessons that I’ve learned over the last 17 years.

Jeff: That’s fantastic. For context, if you don’t mind sharing, how old are you?

Joe: I’m 33.

Jeff: OK. Cool. That gives us a little bit more of a timeline. So, that moment. Tell me about the moment that you knew you needed to leave Crowd Favorite.

Joe: This is something that I remember in a haze of not remembering much, because it was a couple of months after my daughter was born. She was our first. She still is our first, and I was doing a lot of things. First of all, Crowd Favorite generously gave me one month paid family leave. That’s not something that you see everywhere, especially for the guy. My friend who just had a kid said he had one day. That is insane. But that’s grandstanding. So, I had a month off where I got to spend time with my family and I got to work on my own projects, and I liked that. Then about two days before I came back, about a week before I came back, somebody put a meeting on my calendar for before I was supposed to come back and I was like, “I’m still on family leave,” and she’s like, “Can you just–?” And I said, “No.” Then when I got back, everyone was like, “We’re real glad you’re back.” And I’m like, “That’s not a great sign.” I got handed these four projects, I had just got a promotion and I got handed four projects that needed some love, to put it nicely. So I had a newborn, I had my side business which was these courses and the podcast, and then I was doing the agency life. I was working until 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning just to get up at 7:00 or 8:00 and do it again, if I didn’t get up with the baby at all. I know that GaryVee endorses that lifestyle but I don’t. I thought, “All right. I either need to give up my side hustle, spend less time with my family, or quit my full time job and pursue this full time.” I had some conversations with some friends, and I thought, “I can do this.” I gave my notice in May and I left in June.

Jeff: How far after then, if you left in June and you gave your notice. From the time that you gave your notice, how far after since when you went back? You went back, there was a period of time, then you gave me your notice. How long was that timeframe?

Joe: Good question. My daughter was born on March 6th of 2017. I had a month off, so I came back on April 6th or April 7th. Something like that.

Jeff: It was within a month, then, of coming back.

Joe: I realized pretty quickly. Because that whole month I was like, “This is so nice. I’m working on my own stuff. It’s making some money. I’m doing really well.” To be totally frank, this was at a time where a lot of WordPress agencies were having trouble getting work, so some paychecks were delayed. I thought, “I’m not suffering at all because I’m bringing in enough money from my side work.” Then when we got to a point where it was like, “Finish this project or payment will be delayed again.” I was like, “I would just work for myself if I had to do that. Like, I’m working for a company so I don’t have to worry about that.” And again, this was not a strictly Crowd Favorite thing. This was something that was common among a lot of WordPress agencies at that time. I knew pretty quickly that I either had to work myself to the bone at this job, this agency job, and lose time with my family. Or, see if I could make my own lifestyle business and spend time with my family and make enough money to support the family as well.

Jeff: What was it like to submit that notice? How about that?

Joe: It was a little– It was tough in some regard. But I was also, I was also already unhappy. So I knew I had to give the notice soon if I didn’t want to end up completely resenting Crowd Favorite, because I wouldn’t be where I am today without Crowd Favorite. The skills that I developed and the network that I developed while at Crowd Favorite has done wonders for me since then, and I didn’t want to end up resenting the company. So I spoke to the then CTO, he still is the CTO, and I aired my grievances a little bit. I said, “Look. Agency life was great when I was a single man. I didn’t mind staying up super late to do work. I didn’t have much of anything else going on. But if I missed my daughter’s first steps because I had to work late, that’s not something I’m OK with.” And he was so cool about it. He was like, “There’s no convincing you. We’re going to miss you and I wish you all the luck in the world.” I’m still friends with everybody at the company. There was no bad blood there. But they were cool and super understanding, and I think that I happily got out before I was mad about it.

Jeff: OK. Overall it sounds like it was a pretty– I don’t want to say it was easy. It sounds like it was understandable, and an OK decision to make.

Joe: Of course I had conversations with my wife, going out and starting your own business with a three month old is not desirable. Especially because my wife was still on maternity leave and FMLA only covers so much. We’re going to be only my income for a while in this brand new business, and she was fully supportive. Because she saw how much doing all three was wearing on me.

Jeff: That’s absolutely tough. I look back at even my own experience and having to turn in that letter, and having a family that depends on you. At the time we were a single income family and we had– I don’t know what your situation was like, but we had about six months’ worth of savings. My wife and I were running the stoic philosophy of, “OK. What’s worst case scenario? I have to go back to work in six months if I get no jobs whatsoever. All right, let’s do it.” Did you have some money in the bank, or did you have any much of a runway at that time?

Joe: We had about the same. Granted, that was also money we were saving for a house. So I was reluctant to have to pull from that. But I said, “Look. The money we have in our savings will get us through December. If I completely fail at this, worst case scenario, I’ll get a job.”

Jeff: Definitely scary. I wanted to dig into it because I know other people, I’m sure there’s listeners that you have, like you’re listening right now and you might be debating this. It’s definitely a big jump and it’s a scary jump, and sometimes you hear about the more romanticized version. When it’s like, “I was making more money in my side hustle than I was at my job. So I knew. Forget you people, I’m doing the side hustle.” But when in reality most of us are like, “Well. Here we go.”

Joe: I was definitely helping make ends meet with my side hustle, but it was definitely better as a side hustle than as a full time job at that point. Because any money on top of my salary and my wife’s salary was great. That was extra money. But then it was like, “This is the only money we’re making for a little bit.” I had a better first year than most, but I’ve also been doing this for a decade and a half, in some capacity. I have a big network. I’m an outgoing guy and everybody I meet, I talk to and I know their story. You asked me at Podcast Movement, “Do you consider yourself a connector?” And I didn’t, but now I do. I like connecting people. I like knowing people, and I do good work. That’s helped me do more than just start from scratch or ground zero. I’ve had a better first full year than many, and I’ve been able to support my family, and my wife is not saying “You need to find a job, a real job.” But it is a grind. There are some slow months where you’re like, “Am I doing the right thing?” Just keep that in mind if you’re going to start your own business.

Jeff: For sure. In that vein then, you leave. How did you know what the first thing to work on was?

Joe: Luckily, I had that lined up before I even gave my notice. I spoke to my friend [Sean Hesscath] from WP101 and I laid it all out on the line. I’m like, “Sean. I don’t know what to do. This job is killing me, I’m doing too much. I’m sleep deprived because of the baby. I want to go out on my own but I don’t know where to start.” And he said, “How much money would you need to get started?” And I gave him a number, and he said, “I think I can give you that much in work.” Right after I left we got started on collaborative courses that I did for WP101. That meant a lot to me because I was able to make the income I needed while also working on my branding, working on the podcast, LiquidWeb has also generously sponsored this show for a few seasons, and their full season sponsorship hit the July after I left. So, Sean and LiquidWeb floated me through the end of the year and that gave me enough runway to understand what I needed to do with my business.

Jeff: Interesting. OK. Do you feel like you would have been able to–? That’s hypothetical.

Joe: I don’t think so. But that goes back to the network that I built. I’ve known Sean and Chris Lema from LiquidWeb since PressNomics 2 in 2014, and I’ve maintained that relationship. They know the quality of the work I do and they trust that, and I deliver for them. It seemed like luck at the time, like we hit at the right time. But those were relationships, and also they’re both insanely generous, don’t get me wrong. But they’re running businesses too, and they have families to support. Those were relationships that I cultivated over three years or so, that I’ve been able to work with them and partner with them, luckily still today.

Jeff: That’s going to be a common thread that’ll come back up, because it’s even something I just had– I jumped on a call with a friend of mine who’s acted as advisor here and there, and I haven’t talked to him in a year and a half but I had a question come up that I knew he was the key person for. I emailed him and I was like, “Can we chat?” Even some of the advice that he gave me was just building those more long term relationships. It’s not even– It’s weird because on one hand you know you’re going to benefit from it, but at the same time that’s not why you’re doing it. You’re doing it because they’re cool people and you want to be part of that group, you want to be part of that network because you know there’s things that you can contribute and you know there’s things that you’re going to gain. Hopefully it’s the rising tide philosophy, where everybody is going to benefit from being able to rub shoulders with one another.

Joe: Definitely. Again, I was on a coaching call before this and it’s a little bit weird sometimes, taking someone’s money for them to ask me questions. It is a service and I’m saving them time, but she said, “The best relationships are win-win. I’m getting a lot from you, you’re getting a lot from me. We shouldn’t feel bad about benefiting.” I agree. If you are doing it for the wrong reason it’s super obvious, like I used to run a meetup group in Scranton and this guy came to the meetup group. He just looked smarmy. He went over and shook everybody’s hand, gave everybody his card, and then left. Like, you’re not there for the community. You’re there to try to piggy back off of and make money off of these people you just met? People see right through that. Even if they don’t realize it, they’re like “Something’s off about this dude. He’s not somebody I want to work with.” But if you’re genuine and you want to help, then people see that too.

Jeff: Be a good human.

Joe: Yeah, be a good human.

Jeff: So much of life comes back to, “Be a good human.” That’s awesome. So, I want to fast forward now. We had this, you were able to float that first year and start to get your legs underneath you with it. When do you feel like you had your first major breakthrough of something– I don’t want to discredit what you gave us, having Sean come in and having LiquidWeb come in and help in certain ways. Not that you didn’t earn it, but there’s a reciprocity there. What was the first project or the first thing that you came across where you were like, “This is my doing and it’s working.” ?

Joe: That’s a great question, because you’re absolutely right. Even as recent as over the summer, I was like, “I don’t know if I actually know what I’m doing.” But the first big hit for that was I did some work with WordPress VIP in January-February. They reached out because of the courses for Gutenberg that Zack and I did, and they liked it, and we were first to market. Sure. But they knew that we were good educators and they wanted to bring us on to create educational content for their clients. And I thought, “This is great. Automattic and WordPress VIP are reaching out to us for the work that we did,” but also at the price that we gave them, they said, “That’s above our budget but we definitely know what you’re worth. We understand what you’re worth, so can we just cut some stuff to get it within the right budget?” That was so much better than just saying, “I can’t afford you,” which is what a lot of freelancers hear. “Can you do it for less?” No. The way that they handled it was they were like, “We understand the quality of the work that you’re giving us, and this could be a win-win for both of us.” And right there I was like, “This is going to be a good year.” It happened in January and it made me feel good about the rest of the year, and I’m pretty optimistic as we end 2018 moving into 2019 that I’ve learned enough to continue that trend and finding the right people to work with.

Jeff: That’s fantastic. That’s great news, and even as a freelancer. If you’re a freelancer listening to this, don’t discount. Remove aspects of the project if that’s what you have to do. Sometimes you won’t get a prospect or a client that’s as gracious to understand, and they’ll just say, “Can we take 10% off the top?” Then unfortunately, especially when you’re in a tight spot or if you can be in a tight spot, you’re like “Sure.” Where it’s like, “No. I’m not going to do that. But what we can do is these two parts aren’t necessary, so let’s go ahead and remove those. That’ll get it into the price that you want. Will that work?”

Joe: I’m a big proponent of setting up Phase Two. “We’ll do this now. This is what we need to launch. This is our MVP. Then when you’re ready and you have the budget, we can do these in phase two.” You’re guaranteeing yourself more work, you’re working within the client’s budget, and hopefully you’re forming a good relationship around the first project that they want to come back to you for more. In college I used to fix computers, and for a long time I did it for free. I would go visit my friend and then her whole floor would come over and say, “My computer’s not working. Can you help me?” I was like, “I’m going to start charging.” And I started charging some insanely low price, like $5-10 flat. Like, “Give me $5 and I’ll fix your computer.” Most of them took less than a half hour. I could do it pretty quickly, but nobody really wanted to pay that because we’re all poor college students and they would rather frankly go and spend the money on booze. Somebody very snarkily said to me, “So how’s that charging $5 for fixing computers? Are you getting a lot of money?” And I’m like, “No. But I have a lot more time on my hands to work on things that people actually see the value in.” So, definitely don’t discount that. Work with people who value your work because those are better relationships.

Jeff: 100%. To fast forward now, to roundabout back to the beginning. You’re doing some freelance work, you’re creating your own courses, you have the podcast and you generate some income from that with your sponsorships. How do you see this? How’s your time breaking down? Think of it in terms of percentages. How much time percentage-wise in your day, like your work day, do you dedicate to those different things?

Joe: I dedicate 60-70% of my time to my courses. And that’s an umbrella term, that’s an umbrella percentage for planning and recording, learning the thing that I’m teaching. If I’m creating a custom course for somebody, and then the marketing stuff. Getting the marketing message right. Building the landing page and communicating the problem I’m trying to solve and not just what you get. 60-70% of my time goes to that. Thanks to a bunch of automations and hiring the right people, podcasting probably takes up about 15-20% of my time. It’s mostly just the interview now. Again, that’s thanks to automations. I touched on this in episode 100, but I’m going to work on a blog series about this too. The rest of the time, which if I do my math correctly, leaves me with 15-20% or maybe 20-30%, that’s hired work. Custom courses that I develop and custom video trainings that I develop for people who own product. Coaching, I’ve been doing more of that lately. Maybe 33 is the magical age where people feel you know enough to help them now, or what. But I’ve gotten a lot more organic traffic to my coaching services lately, and that’s going to be a big part of my 2019. This one-on-one teaching style that I really like.

Jeff: All right. That’s cool. I don’t need to know the actual numbers, but do your finances reflect the same percentages in terms of your income?

Joe: No. My courses make the least amount of money right now. And that’s because of some lessons that I’ve learned this year. My courses would be– Let’s take the my podcasting one. Build a Podcast Website with WordPress. Nobody cares about that. That would be like somebody saying, “Learn how to build a car with steel,” or something like that.

Jeff: “Learn how to draw with a pencil.”

Joe: Exactly. Nobody cares about the tool that you’re using. People care about the problem that you’re trying to solve. People are buying a solution. I’ve pivoted a lot of my copy in the last few months to reflect that. So now, it’s “You have a podcast. How do you get it into the ears of people? You need a good website.” “But I don’t want to hire a developer.” “Don’t you worry, my course will show you how to launch your podcast in three days.” “Three days? That’s not that much time. Great.” That’s the problem that’s being solved. I’m optimistic. First of all, from 2017 to 2018 my course income quadrupled. Don’t assume I’m making a million dollars off my courses, assume I made shockingly little off my courses in 2017 and I’ve gotten much more in 2018. I’m hoping to double or triple that again in 2019, maybe even more. Because I’m working on a couple of in-person-ish coaching courses to supplement my pre-recorded stuff. But the short answer is, no. My courses make the least amount of money but they take the most amount of time.

Jeff: But you’re looking at it, what I’m hearing though is that your business plan is for that to change. For the courses to be able to take more of the– Provide the bulk of your income.

Joe: Exactly. I want to teach people the things that I’ve learned over the last 17 years. I want to help them. If you can imagine a freelancer takes one of my courses, maybe the Beaver Builder course. They take it they like it, now they want to go to the next level. Now I can do one-on-one coaching with them. I want to fast track the site builder or the freelancers career to accomplish in two years, maybe, what I accomplished in 10 years.

Jeff: That’s cool. Is that built into your–? This is a side question. Is that built into your funnel, then? Do you have hopes or intent of people to go through your courses, and then they all of a sudden have this opportunity to get personally coached by you?

Joe: Again, that’s a change that I’m making. My 2018 was the year of understanding the people on my list and in my funnels, because in 2017 I used MailChimp and up until recently MailChimp didn’t allow for any of that. So I got ConvertKit. I’ve had ConvertKit for a little bit over a year. I’ve tagged everybody appropriately, I know what my audience looks like now, so the two weeks between Christmas and before Christmas and right after New Year’s, I’m going to spend some of that time working on my funnels and getting my messaging right. Making the next steps explicitly clear. “You haven’t bought a course from me, here’s some free resources. Do you like these resources? Maybe look at this course, because this will really help you.” “You’ve finished the course. Congratulations! What questions do you have? Maybe let’s schedule a call, 15 minutes, and we can talk about it more.” “How can I get you to the next level?” That sort of stuff.

Jeff: That’s so big. Understanding the audience and understanding who you’re talking to, it’s some of the lessons even that I’ve been going over lately. They come more from a marketing space and more from a really good copywriting space, of stuff that I’ve learned from say Joanna Wiebe from Copy Hackers or other people that are in her group. Where instead of just waking up and being like, “I got an idea,” and then writing about it. Or, “I need to sell this thing. Let me talk about it in the way that I’m going to talk about it.” Spend time understanding who you’re talking to, what their pain points are, the actual language– The verbatim phrases and words that they’re using to describe these issues, and then incorporate that into what you are doing. Care deeply about them. Care deeply about the people you’re already working with even more, and then secondary, start caring about that target audience or the people that you’re going after. Really understand their world because there is a certain amount of, some people refer to it as the curse of knowledge, or things like that. Where you’ve been in a space for a while and you just forget. You forget what it’s like to learn, you forget what the problems are, because you’re just beyond that. It’s not really even a hierarchical thing, it’s just you’re better because you’ve done it longer. You have to almost look at it like a kid or look at it how like a child would.

Joe: Absolutely. I realized that teaching in the classroom. My time teaching in the classroom has been insanely valuable to me, because one day I was like, “I’m going to set all my students up on WordPress.com. They should all know this.” I talked about your personal brand, and what that means in the 2010s. I said, “OK. Here’s WordPress. Here’s a post and here’s a page.” I went through the stock description that I gave, because I assume everybody knows what a post and a page is, and one of my students raised her hand and said “I have no idea what you just said. What you said makes no sense to me.” And I said, “Yes. Let’s step back.” Then I brought up BuzzFeed and I said, “Here’s a post. It’s an article. Here is a page, you’ve probably never gone to the BuzzFeed about page because it’s irrelevant content to you, but this is a page that never changes. Your articles, see how they’re all listed in a certain way, and categorized and stuff like that?” Then it made a lot more sense to them. “Talk to your customers, have phone calls,” that has come up in conversations I’ve had a lot this year. Don’t just email them and say, “What’s your biggest problem?” Actually have phone calls with them and have conversations, and write down the terms they use, because that should be your marketing copy. Because now you’re speaking the language of your target audience and they’re going to know that you understand their problem.

Jeff: Do you consider yourself a specialist?

Joe: I don’t call myself a specialist, but I specialize in certain things. I’ve been working with WordPress for 14 years. I’ve been working with WordPress almost as long as WordPress has been around. So, am I a WordPress specialist? I guess so. I’ve been teaching for 10 years. Can I show people how to teach, or can I at least show them my teaching method? Yeah, I guess so. I don’t call myself that, but I wouldn’t– If somebody categorized me that way I wouldn’t say they were wrong.

Jeff: One question that I had come up with another person who I was telling that I was going to interview you, is they were curious on how you do your pricing. Actually, let me pause. Will you answer that with what you learned from Cabo?

Joe: Yes.

Jeff: All right. Let me ask a different question. Let’s hit the brakes on that one. I know you’ve done some different things this year, and that’s what leads me into the Cabo thing. You’ve done some different things this year that you’ve shared, just in some of our personal conversations, that have really made a big difference in your business. CaboPress seems to be one of those events that’s helped you on a personal and a professional journey. First of all, for somebody that doesn’t know, what’s the two sentence pitch on what CaboPress is?

Joe: CaboPress is a conference for business people, and it used to be specifically around the WordPress space. But it’s– Let me rewind, actually. Because I don’t think I’m doing CaboPress justice when I say that. CaboPress is like a hyper-targeted networking event. The attendees are curated, the hosts are curated. And yes there are sessions in the morning, but the big value comes from the conversations that you have outside or during those sessions, because even the sessions are supposed to be conversations. You can think of it as a four day hallway track in paradise.

Jeff: I love it. OK. All right. So, that’s what CaboPress is. You can learn more– I’ll just plug it right now, we’re not getting paid for this or anything, I just know it’s cool. CaboPress.com if you want to learn more. So, how many years have you attended so far?

Joe: This past year was my second.

Jeff: OK, the second time. Is it worth focusing any time on year one, or is it better just for us to talk about year two?

Joe: Year one was insanely valuable to me, and we already talked about it. Year one is where I decided I was going to use ConvertKit to understand my audience.

Jeff: OK.

Joe: CaboPress is what convinced me that I need to do that.

Jeff: Who convinced you? Was it a group of people, or a specific conversation that you remember?

Joe: It was the knock on effect. The first the first talk of the day, of the week, was Chris talking about understanding your user’s lanes. Or, user lanes, and understanding who your audience is so you can better talk to them. He mentioned ConvertKit and Drip and a couple of other ones. Then I was talking to other attendees later, [Erin Flynn] specifically, and she was telling me how she loves ConvertKit. So she gave me her affiliate link, I was like, “Do you have a link?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I signed up right there in the pool.

Jeff: The things we can do with technology. Year two, how did year two make a difference?

Joe: Chris looked at Joe Casabona and where his business is, and what he learned in year one, and then said “How can we improve it in year two?” Because in year two we talked about personalization. This is airing at the end of 2018, and I’ve heard more than once, 2019 will be the year of personalization. We’ve been talking about getting the message down. Getting your messaging right for your target audience. I now know who my audience is and I need to talk to them in the way that they want to be talked to. Part of that was, “Who cares if you’re using WordPress for this course? That’s not the problem they’re trying to solve. Maybe they even have a predisposition against WordPress. So, don’t tell them you’re using WordPress. Just tell them you’re going to help them launch their podcast in three days. That’s the thing that they want to know.” There was that, then there was the messaging around my identity. I was talking to a guy, Justin Wise, he’s like “What are your problems? What are your big problems? Tell me about yourself.” And I was like, “I make online courses. I was a developer, I taught at the University of Scranton and I was moving, and I wanted to keep teaching.” He goes, “You’re a college professor.” And I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Does it say that anywhere? In your bio, on your website, anywhere?” And I’m like, “Nope.” He goes, “Why aren’t you telling people that?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” So there was that, and then there’s the question about pricing. I was pricing my courses at between $20-50. Multiple times I was told, “Why are you charging so little? If you charge $300, $400 for a course you’re still charging 10% of what a developer would pay to set up a website for them. You are saving them time, you are saving them money. You’re delivering this amount of value, right?” “Yes.” You’re again going back to the very first lesson I learned in business, that my prices needed to communicate the value that I was providing to the student.

Jeff: I was going to say, I worked at this deli in New York, and I remember distinctly this guy was like “Jeff. You prices.”

Joe: It’s so interesting, because all of the lessons– Have you ever heard of the phenomenon that you say in one room you need to remember something, but then as soon as you walk through the doorway you forget it. This is apparently a phenomenon that happens where, because you are changing contexts, you forget the things that you were just thinking about. I feel like that happened in business for me. I moved from a client services business to a product business, and then promptly forgot all of the important lessons I learned in the client services business. Like, “Charge the right price. Build the relationship first.” Stuff like that. So it was interesting re-learning those lessons in a much shorter timeframe.

Jeff: I know of the phenomenon of your wife telling you something for years, and then some other business friend of yours mentions the exact same thing and you listen. Then your wife tells you about how she’s been telling you for years. I know that phenomenon.

Joe: Yes.

Jeff: I’ve had a lot of that happen. My wife is just awesome. She will see something way before me, and for whatever reason, I just don’t hear or act, whatever it is. Then it’s like, four months later and the same people telling me this stuff all the time, and then I’m like “I had this great idea!” And she’s like, “I told you that idea four months ago.” It’s the best. It’s become a trolling joke at this point. What about otherwise this year, have you had any other what you felt– I don’t want to blow up the Cabo realizations too much, but have you had any other life changing moments or conversations or conferences that you went to that you walked away from and knew, “My business will be better because of this.”

Joe: CaboPress is the one that drives home this fact, because again, Chris curates everything. The audience, the hosts. He knows what people are looking for and what is being taught. But that said, Podcast Movement this year was also insanely valuable for me, because I got to see– I’ve told you this before privately, maybe I’ve said it publicly. People at Podcast Movement were way more interested in the fact that I was a developer than the fact that I was a podcaster. Because everybody at Podcast Movement is a podcaster or an aspiring podcaster, but very few people are web developers and fewer people were WordPress developers. Just getting that perspective of, “I had such a hard time with my website. What would you recommend to fix it?” Somebody said, he is a current coaching client of mine, at the conference he said “I will gladly pay you hourly to show me how to do specific things with my website.” And he is doing that. He followed up on that, and that was monumentally helpful in figuring out exactly who Joe Casabona is in a post-developer life. If that makes sense. That’s weirder than I normally word things, but it makes sense.

Jeff: I heard CaboPress did some good things for you, it sounds like Podcast Movement– You and I attended together and were able to hang out there. That was able to give you some insight. Going back to the target audience, if you want to service the podcast community that would be one really natural way for you to do it and give you some insight there. Do you feel like–? Have you had– What are some other ways that you try to improve or to learn? Conferences are one of them. Is there anything else that is stand-out to you this week? Conversations, books, online courses–?

Joe: I try to consume all of those and don’t consume enough of any of them, except for conversations. I love having conversations. Part of the reason I started this podcast is because I was having conversations and I thought, “This would be good public conversation.” Longtime listeners will know that I’ll say specifically during the interview, “This is for me and hopefully it’s helpful for other people too.” I am learning from my guests while creating this content, and I love that because it’s natural and the audience, the listeners, get to hear my surprise and delight in learning something new in the moment. But this show has been valuable for me in that aspect too, but I try to read a lot. I try to take online courses, I’ve been trying to be better about that because I offer them. So now I treat it as I’m learning a new skill, but also I’m getting ideas for how to improve my own.

Jeff: 100%. It’s so funny. I’m going to go back to another story of my wife and I, we just went down to South Carolina to visit some family for Thanksgiving. That was right around the time of this recording. What you just said in terms of how you see things and how you watch on one hand, you’re just watching it however anyone else would. Just for the sheer entertainment value or for the knowledge you’re gaining. But then there’s also this element for me, also being a podcaster and for creating content, and especially I’m really interested in the public speaking side of things. I’ll watch people for not only what they’re saying but how they’re saying it, and how they go about their execution and if they did a good job in that sense. We were both at the hotel laying on the bed, and my wife turned on a video from Vice and they were talking about the living situation in China. There was something about it, within the first few moments of the music they were using I knew, “This is some awesome documentary piece.” I rolled over and quickly started watching with her, and then she knew that I was– She’s like, “Did you even like it. Did you even like the content, or did you just think it was a cool story?” And I’m like, “Yes. It was both.” Having a handle on both of those things, that’s a cool point.

Joe: Absolutely. Since Podcast Movement, there was good advice there. But then I started listening to some well-known podcasters, and again, longtime listeners will notice that I started introing the episodes instead of just going right into the music and the sponsors. That was something I picked up from Pat Flynn, and advice that was given during one of the talks that both you and I attended. The one where radio people critique podcasters. They said, “You have 30 or 60 seconds to hook a listener–”

Jeff: And you spend like 30 of it with intro music.

Joe: Exactly. There were some real changes that went through the show after Podcast Movement and those conversations, and then listening to podcasts from people that I met at Podcast Movement.

Jeff: That’s great. That’s good. As we start to wind out our time, I’m going to spin back to you the question that you ask everybody else. What is a one trade secret that you have for our listener? And I do not want you to share the same one that you did with the podcasting stuff. Like, specifically for these things you’re doing now, for the goals that you’re shooting for, what is one trade secret you’re comfortable sharing?

Joe: Trade secret…

Jeff: Should have saw this coming, man.

Joe: I know. I definitely should have. That’s also my favorite part of the interview, when people do the whole, “Trade secret…” and really think about it. You’ll have to refresh my memory, I don’t remember what I gave as the trade secret in episode 100.

Jeff: I disagreed with you, to be honest. You said, “Everybody should podcast. You should start a podcast now. It’s time consuming but it’s not hard.” I was like, “I don’t know about that one,” but–

Joe: I probably should have picked my wording. Because it’s not a learned– Well, it is a learned skill. It’s not a–

Jeff: Starting a podcast isn’t hard. Running a good podcast is incredibly hard.

Joe: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly what it is. So, based on the stuff that we’ve talked about today. The trade secret, the thing that has helped me the most in the last 17 years of business, then starting my own and getting that running start. Build your network. I know that it’s hard to start a conversation sometimes, I think it’s hard to start a conversation sometimes too. I always open with a joke. I make some crack and then we start talking, I start talking to somebody. But that has been hugely helpful. I met Sean and Chris and a group of people at PressNomics because they were smoking cigars and I just walked over and I said, “Mind if I join you?” And then we started talking. Or, the same thing, if you go to an after party at a bar. “Mind if I join you?” You don’t have to drink, you don’t have to smoke. It’s just a way to meet new people and build that network, and provide value for that network. Don’t be a leech. Make it a symbiotic relationship. That’s the most important thing that’s helped me, and that is my trade secret.

Jeff: Cool. I’ll take it. All right, you have been listening to How I Built It. If you want to listen to more episodes about how entrepreneurs built the products and services that they’ve come across, you can listen in at HowIBuilt.it. Also, I’ll plug myself a little bit. I’ve been your host. My name is Jeff Large, and if you enjoyed this interview I invite you to come on over to my podcast. JeffLarge.com/podcasting. I interview a lot of people in the same fashion that I did Joe on this episode, and it’s like you said earlier, the amount of knowledge and things that you’re able to glean from these people is tremendous. The podcast just becomes an avenue to share really amazing conversations.

Outro: Thanks so much to Jeff for doing that. That was a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed having the tables turned a little bit, and getting to tell a bit more of my story. Jeff is an excellent interviewer of course, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to him. In the show notes for this episode I will link to his stuff, his podcast bytes and the interview that I did with him earlier this year so you can go ahead and listen to his story as well. That’s it for this episode, and this year. Thanks so much for making 2018 the best year for the podcast yet, and I will see you in 2019. Until then, get out there and build something.

wordpress

Sponsored by:

Transcript

Share this:

Sponsored by:

Share this:

Sponsored by:

Transcript

Share this:

Sponsored by:

Transcript

Share this:

Sponsored by:

Transcript

Share this:

Sponsored by:

Transcript

Share this:

Sponsored by:

Transcript

Share this:

Sponsored by:

Share this:

Sponsored by:

Transcript

Share this:

Transcript

Share this:

Follow / Subscribe