How I Built It

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Growing Your Network through Community Involvement with Vito Peleg

March 31, 2020

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Vito Peleg runs a very popular WordPress plugin called WP Feedback, but did you know he also runs a community under the same name? In this episode we talk all about the importance of community in growing your business. Now, during this episode we talk a lot about in-person events, and as I record this intro, there aren’t a whole lot of events going on right now. But digital communities are on the rise and they can be just as powerful. Take Vito’s advice to heart because it’s good, and important!

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Vito Peleg: As a way of generating a bit of extra income, I started building websites from the van while we were on tour, and that was my first few freelance gigs. From there, it took off, and once the band split up and once we turned 30 and we had enough white hair to stop that, I started looking into “OK. What can I do with this web design business? How can I grow this up?” Within the first deal, I got to six figures with that business, and within three years, I had a team of twelve guys.   Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 162 of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today I’m talking to Vito Peleg. He runs a very popular WordPress plugin called WP Feedback. But did you know that he also runs a community under the same name? In this episode, we talk all about the importance of community in growing your business. Now during this episode, we do talk a lot about in-person events, and as I recorded this intro, there is a global pandemic going on, so there are not a lot of in-person events going on right now. But digital communities are on the rise, and they can be just as powerful, and they can help you connect with people all across the globe. Take Vito’s advice to heart because it’s good and important, and in these times where we feel a little bit more isolated than normal, know that a digital community can help you make connections and grow your business and learn a little more about people from everywhere.   Break: This episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that solves that problem. It gives you the tools you need to rank your website in Google and get tons of search traffic. As someone who struggles with what kind of content to create or what’s ranking best in Google, or anything SEO-related, Ahrefs has been instrumental in increasing traffic to my website over the holidays. I had my best quarter for affiliate income because Ahrefs showed me my most popular pages and topics, and I was able to optimize my content and my gift guides and update them accordingly. I would have never updated one of my gift guides because I didn’t think it was that popular, and Ahrefs showed me it is my most popular page. Ahrefs makes competitive analysis easy as well. Their tools show you how your competitors are getting traffic from Google and why. You can see the pages and content that send them the most search traffic, find out exactly the keywords they’re ranking for, and which backlinks are helping them rank. From there, you can replicate or improve on their strategies. Now, as I said, I don’t think I’m getting significant search traffic, so I use Ahrefs tools to help find topics worth creating pages or content for. I can easily see estimated search volumes and gauge traffic potential with their keyword explorer tool. It’s been a fantastic addition to my toolkit. Just this morning, I learned that My Everyday Carry post has been popular, and lots of people are coming, so I think it’s time to update that because it’s five years old. If you want to gain a following or just improve traffic to your website, Ahrefs is the tool for you. You can get a 7 day trial for $7 dollars over at Ahrefs.com. That’s Ahrefs.com for a seven day trial for $7 dollars. If you’re anything me, you’ll be hooked. Again, that’s Ahrefs.com for a seven day trial for $7.   Break: Before we get started, I want to tell you about a new– Or, newly redesigned resource I have called the Podcast Workbook. 2020 is sure to change a lot of things, including the podcast landscape. If you want to start your own podcast but you’re not sure where to start, check out my free podcast workbook at PodcastWorkbook.com. It will give you everything you need step-by-step to launch your show. With checklists and equipment and service recommendations, it’s everything you need to get started. It’s newly redesigned, so it looks a lot better, and it flows a lot better, and it answers some of the feedback and questions I got from people who have already started using it. So, go get it now. It’s the free podcast workbook I’ve put together to help you launch your podcast in 2020, and it is at PodcastWorkbook.com.   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 Vito Peleg. He is the founder of WP Feedback. Vito, thanks for coming on the show. How are you doing?   Vito: My pleasure, Joe. I’ve wanted to come on this show for a long time.   Joe: That is very exciting to hear, and thank you. We met in real life at WordCamp US 2019, but we recently started talking because you started an online community. What we’re going to be talking about today is the important role that communities play in growing one’s business, so before we get to that, maybe we can just go over a little bit about who you are and what you do?   Vito: OK, awesome. I started building websites from the back of a van. I used to be a musician, and we were touring the world, releasing albums, playing shows are all over. Even though it seemed from the outside like we were doing it and the audience is growing, and albums are selling, we were all dead broke. So as a way of generating a bit of extra income, I started building websites from the van while we were on tour, and that was my first few freelance gigs. From there, it took off, and once the band split up and once we turned 30 and we had enough white hair to stop that, I started looking into “OK. What can I do with this web design business? How can I grow this up?” Within the first deal, I got to six figures with that business, and within three years, I had a team of twelve guys. Through the experience of growing and scaling up kind of fast, it became really apparent that there is a huge problem with communicating with clients in our industry or in any service delivery. There’s always a lot of friction between clients and the guy that is providing the service, and when it comes to technical stuff like building websites and stuff like that, it’s even more emphasized. To bridge the gap between our clients and us, we created a tool, and this is what we call WP Feedback. That tool started as a tool for us, but it worked so well we decided to release it to the wild. Once we did, it grew fast. A lot of it is thanks to the power of the WordPress community and the connections that I made within this community. The amazing people that help us spread the word, and so on. We broke a record being the first company in the history of WordPress that reached six figures in revenue within the first 30 days. Then from that point, it was like, “All right, no more client work. No more websites. Let’s focus just on WP Feedback.” That’s what I’ve been doing since, for the past seven months, we’ve been growing this product, and now we have a team of 10 people here at the company, and it’s growing every day.   Joe: That’s fantastic. First I want to ask, what did you do in the band? Did you sing, or did you play the instruments?   Vito: I was the lead singer and guitar player, and I was the manager. I was what was driving this.   Joe: Very cool. I play the drums myself.   Vito: That’s awesome.   Joe: Yeah.   Vito: That’s awesome. You know there’s always one guy that is the guy that does all of the work.   Joe: Yeah, for sure. It’s like a group project in college. There’s always somebody that does the work, and then anybody else just kind of hangs out.   Vito: Exactly.   Joe: I feel like both of us were the people who always did the work, except for–   Vito: Yeah, I think so.   Joe: I got paired up with one person. She was super type-A and had to get straight “A’s” all through college, and I contributed, but she ended up doing most of the work because she needed that “A.” She was upset that we got a 96, and I was like, “That is still an ‘A.’ An ‘A’ is always good.” Anyway, so this is great. You started making websites, and you did that pretty successfully, I would say. Then you created a tool that scratched your own itch, but as somebody who’s been in the WordPress community since 2004 knows, it scratched the itch of a lot of people. That’s why it grew, and you hit the nail on the head. You built a great product that everybody needed. I remember hearing about it right when it first came out. Everyone’s like, “You’ve got to check this out.”   Vito: That’s awesome.   Joe: It’s exciting to hear that it was thanks to the WordPress community.   Vito: Very much so.   Joe: Let’s talk a little bit about that. Were you involved in the WordPress community before you built WP Feedback, or was this something that helped you get involved in the community?   Vito: I was, but I was more of a fly on the wall than actual participant within the community. I was going to meetups here and there, nothing religiously. I was active on Facebook groups for years, and I’ve been doing WordPress since 2009.   Joe: OK.   Vito: So when you need to grow, especially when you’re a freelancer, there’s no one around you to ask. Going into a community online is a very powerful tool for us. That’s where I learned, I learned through the community. But when WP Feedback came about, I had something to also market to the community, which changes your perspective of what it is, if you will. When you approach it like that, then you start engaging with other product makers, product makers from products that I used for years, and now all of a sudden, you are hanging out with them. Podcasts that I listened to for years, now you are you appearing on them. This is like, once you have something that adds value to that community and you’re friendly, basically, then you can make a lot of connections that will skyrocket whatever you’re doing. Going to WordCamp Berlin last year, that was the huge revelation for me. I went there literally on the month of the launch, we launched on the 28th of May and the WordCamp I think was around the 10th of June. So, that was close. The buzz was starting to build when I went there, but while I was there and talking up to as many people as I could stop along the hallway track over there. That just solidified how much powerful this is. If you think of working with companies like GoDaddy, Elemental, Main WP, all of these massive players in our specific space, you would think that this is something that you would only approach three years in or four years in to any business, to start playing in these leagues. But thanks to the WordPress community, there was no barrier to entry, if you have a good idea that could provide value to those companies users that they collected over years, they are happy to make a connection, and they are happy to discuss and have a conversation around this. This emphasized this, and that’s from the professional point of view but also from our side from day one because it’s a feedback tool. We gave a lot of emphasis of engaging with our users, listening to what they have to say. It’s in the name, and we had to. So literally from even before day one, we had a Facebook group with people that were joining there. Now, seven months in the Facebook group has 1,200 people that are members in there engaging and helping each other, and all of this stuff. The experience of what I saw, from our users now, it reminded me of my experience as a freelancer and as an agency owner. That’s what drove us to the next step, which is what we’re launching now with the idea of helping the entire WordPress community with one platform that is designated for them.   Joe: That’s fantastic. You said a lot of stuff there, but I didn’t want to stop you because I thought it was very well-told. I feel like you did a good job telling that story.   Vito: Awesome.   Joe: But before WP Feedback, you were more of a fly on the wall. You went to meet ups and talked in Facebook groups, but I like what you said that once you were launching WP Feedback, you had something to market to the community. This is important for a couple of reasons because I think your approach was the right approach. You didn’t just jump in and go, “Look at my product.” You were already involved, and you knew how to talk to people in the community. The opposite of that is we had– I used to run the Scranton, Pennsylvania Meetup group and we had people come, and a few times these people would just come and give their card. Like it was a networking event, but they wouldn’t contribute at all. There would just go, “This is what I do, and then I’m going to leave.” Nobody wanted to work with that guy. I think that contributing and being a part of the community and then saying, “This is something based on what I know about the community that adds value.” I think you hit the nail on the head there.   Vito: We also did something that was cool that I didn’t see a lot of other people doing at that event, exactly on the point that you’re making now because I agree with you 100%. If you go to someone and you just try to jump in bed with them, it’s probably not going to work. You’ve got to ease your way in, that’s how you play the game. So what we did is before we launched the product, we had a bit of a survey that we did with our beta users. We surveyed 600 WordPress professionals to ask them how they run their business. The information was for us to see if my idea has merit. If it’s not just in my head, basically market validation and a bit of research to see what people are doing. But the cool thing is that we got a lot of data on how the industry is operating in terms of what is the average business size in the space. What tools these guys are using, which is your favorite? What is your go-to theme? What is your go-to page builder? Once you’ve collected from hundreds and hundreds of people, then you can create really interesting benchmarks. My approach to adding value to the community, instead of going around and giving away business cards, we printed out these guys. I think I have one here. We printed out these guys, which is the ultimate WordPress survey, and we just took all of the results from the stuff that we looked at people’s answers. We just created the report from “How many websites have you built in the last three months? How many WordPress websites does your team manage on an ongoing basis? How do you collect content? How do you provide support? What is your theme? What is that?” This is super– When I saw it, when I broke it down after reading the results myself, I was like “I wish I could see that as a freelancer and as an agency myself because it gives you proper benchmarks to your business to see what is achievable within the space. We printed out 500 of these, and this is what I gave away instead of a business cards, of course, the final page had a bit of information about what we do, but you start with giving value, and then if people care, they will stick around.   Joe: That’s truly fantastic. That’s email marketing 101 as well, right? You don’t just say, “Join my mailing list.” You say, “Give me your email address, and I will email you this awesome PDF thing.” Then that shows, “I’m not just here to sell you things, I’m here to give you value and quick wins.”   Vito: That’s exactly true, and that’s why we’ve got the strategy. I used to do this with the band before, and we used to play the small stage at the Download Festival, which is a rock festival here in the UK. Over there, I even have that here. It’s a festival with tens of thousands of people, which are our exact target audience as a rock band at the time. You want to get the favor of this community. It all ties up basically to what we’re talking about, you want to be in the favor of what they want, and you want to track them to see the show and to buy tickets and to buy merch, and to do all the stuff that you’re trying to market to them. So what we did is we created a few thousand of bandanas with the logo of the band and that kind of thing. Like, a cheap giveaway with the website of the band. It paid itself during the first day that we did it by people going to the website and buying the T-shirt to match the bandana that they already have, or buy the album and so on. This was a cool activity. So I’m trying to follow the same steps, and a lot of the stuff that I’m doing got taken from the music industry because it’s such a competitive market. If you want to stand out, you’ve got to think outside the box.   Joe: That’s so great. I think that’s fantastic. I’m generating ideas of my own now, so this is great. You join the community, and you immediately gave value once you launched your product, which was super important, and then you decided to launch this online community. Now before we get to that, there’s a couple more questions I want to touch on.   Vito: Sure.   Joe: With the connections that you made in the community because I’m all about building networks and I’m a bit of a connector myself, I love meeting people, and I’m super extroverted. But how did you approach people in the community? You mentioned GoDaddy an Elemental, what was your approach to being like “I have this new tool. I think it’d be interesting.” What was that pitch like?   Vito: Before you pitch, you’ve got to– Again, it goes back to the dating game. Now I’m married, so I’m of out of practice on this field, but the rules still apply. You don’t want to go out and say, “Hi. I’m Vito, and I run a software company. How about you go to bed with me?” You go, and you ask questions, you develop the conversation, you develop true interest in the opposite person that is standing in front of you. Basically, you listen. The core of the partnerships that we did and all of the partnerships that we did are out of what these companies are doing with anyone else. Everything is unique, every opportunity that we got out there and made happen is not within a flow or system that these companies have. The reason for that is I found out what they are after. I asked them, and I still do that. I think that when we spoke, I asked you first, “Joe, what do you want to do in 2020?” Then I listen, and then I try to see where I can put myself in to add value to you while creating the collaboration for us.   Joe: That’s great. Again, you want to form a mutual relationship by going to events, meeting people, contributing things.   Vito: But it’s not, now that I’m saying it sounds a bit technical and maybe a little cold, but it’s not.   Joe: No, you’re absolutely right. Because look. People who are in business are in business, and I think that’s a mutual understanding. You’re not just walking up to people on the street going, “Let me get to know you, so maybe you’ll buy my product.” You’re going up to people–   Vito: Sometimes.   Joe: Maybe a little bit, but mostly, especially at WordPress events, you’re going up to people saying, “You sponsored this event. Obviously, you want to get something out of it. Let’s talk. What do you want to get out of it? What do I want to get out of being here? How can we work together?”   Vito: “Why are you here?” That is such an easy question to ask someone at the conference. “Why are you here?” It tells you everything.   Joe: I love that. You’ve decided to take the community aspect to the next level, and we’re talking as a result of a call we had a few weeks ago as we record this, where you showed me this community and then invited me to it. I was blown away by it. You described it as a Facebook for the WordPress community, I think. Or I am describing that in my head, but that’s exactly what it feels like to me. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that and why you created it?   Vito: OK. When I first joined the community, and as we discussed that was a little more than a decade ago, there weren’t many options for WordPress. You’d go to the forums, and that’s where you’d be, that’s the only place that the community hangout. But obviously, forums is so ’90s nowadays. It’s not really– We’re in 2020, so the community has for the past decade has tried to find a new place. You saw there are 180,000 people just inside Facebook groups related to WordPress, there’s 70,000 people in Slack channels and 60,000 people in LinkedIn groups, and 240,000 in WordPress-related meetup groups. I’m not even talking about Reddit and all of these standalone forums, and the WordPress forum that is still limping its way through. It was just too much, especially now that my day is mostly around engaging with the community. With our users, with our potential partners, with our existing budgets. People like yourself, that’s what I do on Facebook or on Twitter or on LinkedIn. That’s the only reason why I have all of these platforms. More than that, when I need to consume information, I go to WP Tavern, then I go to WP Mayor, then I go to Torque. I think I told you, and these are my big three. But why? Why would I go to each one of them and consume content based on just the relevance of what they decided at that moment, instead of based on the categories that I wanted to explore? Like you do on Netflix, for example. When you scroll down, it’s not about the publisher, or if Warner Brothers’ released something, it’s about “I want to watch a sitcom. I want to watch a comedy or a drama,” it goes based on that. I tried to take all of these aspects and bring it in. The main reason for this is because the mission for WP Feedback from day one was, “Let’s fix communications for WordPress professionals.” For my position as an agency owner when we started this business, I could only see freelancers and agencies under the definition of “WordPress professionals.” But now that I’m more immersed in what’s going on, I identify this term as a much broader term. I consider myself still a “WordPress professional” now as a product maker, and yourself as a podcast maker, you’re also a “WordPress professional” in what you’re doing. Hosting companies are “WordPress professionals” in what they’re serving the community with, and all of these people, they’re also touching this community from different angles. It’s not just freelancers and agencies, so this platform is our next level and how we want to fix communications for “WordPress professionals” globally. For every company that is out there, for every freelancer, for every agency, for every podcast, and so on.   Break: Today’s episode is brought to you by Smile and their product TextExpander. Save time typing and boost your productivity with TextExpander. You know I’m all about automation, and TextExpander is a great way to get started with automation. It allows you to create your own snippets for repetitive text that you tend to use everywhere. Add the text, create a snippet, and boom. Save precious time and keystrokes. One of my favorite snippets is for my address. Instead of typing out my full address and risking typos, I simply type “$ADDR” and TextExpander does the rest filling in my full address for me. I also have snippets for my street, my city, and my zip code. But that’s not all TextExpander does, with its advance snippets you can create fill-ins, pop up fields, and more. You can even use JavaScript or Apple script. Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is when I type “PPT.” That will take whatever text I have on my clipboard and convert it to plain text, so I’m no longer fighting formatting when I copy from a word document, a Google doc, or a plain HTML page like a website. I also use it for common links, email messages, which I can completely customize with fill-ins and drop-down menus, and even date calculations. I’m currently writing a book, and TextExpander has been instrumental with that. TextExpander is available on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, and iPad. So, pretty much anywhere you do computing. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or automation in general, now’s the time. As a listener, you can get 20% off your first year, just visit TextExpander.com/podcast and let them know How I Built It sent you. That’s TextExpander.com/podcast for 20% off your first year. And now, back to the show.   Vito: One thing that I would want to– Especially with the title of the podcast, I think that would be interesting. When this idea clarified that this is what we’re doing, because we didn’t really set out to build a social platform, but the need and the market drove us there. So, when this idea clarified and I accepted that this is what we’re doing, I went out, and I researched, “What does that mean? How can I make a successful social platform? What should I build into the tool, into this platform to make it engaging and useful to the people that land it?” What I found is that the interesting thing with social media is that all of them do the same thing, exactly, except for one or two unique features that each platform has. You must have messaging, and you have to have some kind of a profile and some kind of a feed or a message board, or some kind of area where people post stuff. But if you look at the Snapchat, the face filters and the stories were their differentiator. We even talked about Tinder, where you also have a profile and messages, but their differentiator is the use of discovery, which is a swipe right or swipe left. That’s what they put forward. LinkedIn, it’s about the community, but it’s more about finding a job. Or [BeHance], which is by Adobe now and all of this kind of stuff. It’s more about creating your portfolio, but also engaging with the community. That’s what we created here, and it’s not just about the groups and stuff, even though this is a huge part of what we’re building here to make it stick. The unique features are their feedback tool, and the sandbox, which give us differentiation over any other platform that is out there. The good thing is that now that it’s identified into a niche, we can keep building stuff that are relevant for us. Facebook will never do that. It will never build stuff that are relevant just to web designers and other people in the space.   Joe: That’s fantastic. A common theme that keeps coming up in these conversations is you did a lot of research. I love hearing that, because a lot of times it seems like you listen to the show, so you might have heard a lot, “I just did it, and then it turns out people needed it.” But the more I wade into being a “Real business,” trying to grow my business because I have actual stakes like a child and a house and another one on the way as we record this.   Vito: Congratulations.   Joe: Thank you. We’re excited. But I’m like, “I need to be a real business person.” Research is super important because you want to know what people want, and what problem you’re solving, what audience you’re serving. You can’t just do that based on your own headcanon. Right?   Vito: I 100% agree. I used to offer it the same way that you’re describing myself, being a musician is the worst product market fit that can happen in this world. You just do whatever you want and hope that people like it, and most times they don’t. But you never change because that’s selling out. But in business, I adopted a different approach, just because with the agency, I got to see hundreds and hundreds of other businesses that came to us with their ideas, mostly stupid ideas if I may say. You’ve got to walk them through why this idea is never going to take off, or if it is what we need to do to make it take off. That rapid experience of launching websites every single month and doing not only the [inaudible] but launching the strategies to take them to market, it created a scenario where I have a system that if I have an idea I just go through the system, and it just includes market research as part of it. You create a landing page, and you ask some questions, that’s done. That’s all of it. It’s not like you’re going out there and flying around the world and serving people one by one, you just post on a few Facebook groups and get about 500 responses. Which 500 responses sometimes is the amount that these surveys in the news channels, these are the amount of people that tell you if this guy is going to be president or that guy is going to be president. This number is easy to get to, but it’s deep enough to give you a real market image.   Joe: I love that. To bring it back, if you are involved in a community, you have the ability to do that because you are given a platform.   Vito: You just ask them.   Joe: Yeah, absolutely.   Vito: Exactly.   Joe: We’re coming up on our time here, and there’s a couple of things I want to get to. First of all, I need to ask– I don’t get to ask this too much anymore, but I do want to ask the title question. How did you build the social platform? Did you build it from scratch? Did you start with BuddyPress or something like that?   Vito: Initially, we started from scratch, and we wanted to build this on [inaudible] and React. Our cloud based system, like our dashboard area. So we started with this, but it took so long, it took ages to do any small things that we did not want to do. As we were building it and I was working with the dev team, I was like, “Why? Why are we spending so much time to create a “Like” feature when thousands of people before us already have a “Like” feature on a comment? Why would we need to build that, why would we need to build a group’s module? It already exists out there.” Then just around the same time, BuddyBoss, which is a great company, they launched a lifetime deal on their new theme, which is basically a fork of BuddyPress. They took BuddyPress, which was great for the beginning of 2000s, but stopped there. Then they just said, “All right, we’re taking over. We’re taking it. We’re going to take it from here.” They brought it to 2019, basically, to make sure that something is viable. That gave us a nice base for what we created, but as I described before, that is not enough to create a successful community because a platform like this gives you the social tools. It doesn’t give you a differentiator. Now that’s your job as– That’s my job as the guy that is running this show to figure out “What can we build that will be so unique, so specific that this will be our title, not the community?” Like LinkedIn with their jobs or Tinder with find a date. For us, it’s peer to peer feedback, and people can go in and share each other’s design, give each other responses. It works amazingly. I don’t know if you had a look this morning on what people tell to each other, but it’s incredible the feedback that people are giving. Super valuable from the first sentence you read. That’s the impact that you would want to illustrate with these additional features. So anyway, to make it short, BuddyBoss is the theme that is powering this. We’re also using Elemental Report to drive all of the custom pages around this. We took WP Feedback as the main differentiator and the feedback tool, and we broke it down. We incorporated it in there and then patched them all together, and 10,000 lines of code later this is where the platform is.   Joe: That’s incredible. I’ve got to say, and the feedback feature is fantastic. I will certainly be taking advantage of that.   Vito: Brilliant.   Joe: As we come to a close on this episode, I want to ask you if you could give the listeners two or three tips for getting involved in whatever community they want to get involved in. Whether it’s WordPress or some other Penn community, or something like that?   Vito: Number one, find the events that are around you. That’s the most important thing because a true relationship starts in the real world. You can talk to people online as much as you want, but as long as you’re sitting face to face in front of someone, it’s not real. That would be my number one. Then try and find local groups on Facebook or any other social channel and make yourself known. Just be there, provide value. It’s not about posting “Hi, this is my website. Come in and buy.” It’s about looking at what people are posting in there, trying to learn what are their concerns. How can you fit yourself into what they’re already thinking instead of trying to change the agenda of the day? This is what we did with both of these steps here with WP Feedback. Instead of trying to force a solution on the market, we figure out what the market needed, and we just built that. That’s exactly what has happened here with this community as well. That’s how you can get to an easy product market fit. Go meet people in the real world, engage online in these groups, go to podcasts, and do PR stuff. This is all stuff from the music world. You go to the shittiest– Sorry, I don’t know if I can say that.   Joe: We’ll post it.   Vito: You go to the most random radio stations, local radio stations along the road when you’re traveling when there’s going to be two listeners, but you’re still there doing your thing, spreading the word. That’s how it goes.   Joe: I absolutely love that. A true relationship starts in the real world. I think that’s so fantastic.   Vito: Awesome.   Joe: Love it. Vito, thank you so much for your time today. I do need to ask you one more question, of course, which is my favorite. Do you have any trade secrets for us?   Vito: I’m pretty transparent about what I’m doing. I think I have a bunch of trade secrets, but I usually don’t– I’m happy to share them. That’s part of the community vision. I don’t know, nothing that comes to my mind, but I can share our strategy of how we got to six figures within the first 30 days. That was a collection of trade secrets that were all bundled up together, and instead of sending to my website with the power [inaudible] let me send it to Vova’s website to Freemius.com, where I collaborated on a massive blog post over there. I think it is like 7,000 words breaking down each step of our launch strategy. How we did the market research, how we took the product to market, how we built the community around this, and how we got press mentions and all of this kind of stuff. Since then, I’ve seen a lot of people started to follow these articles and getting some awesome results, so I hope that more will do the same.   Joe: Awesome. Love that. First of all, we are going to link to that article I’ll also linked to Vova’s episode. I interviewed him on the show, but I also feel like this could be a trade secret. I’m pretty transparent about what I’m doing, and I’m happy to share, I think a lot of people feel like they need to keep what they know close to the chest. I’ve been preaching to my students and my mailing list, “Share what you know, because people are going to see what you know. Then if they need to hire you or buy your products, they’ll do that.” Because sure, I could watch a YouTube video on how to refinish my bathroom or something like that. But I’m not going to do that, and I’m going to hire a professional to do it.   Vito: Yes, I agree. I think that it also goes to the fact that if you give people something, they would want to give back. Being business owners, no matter what sector and what kind of industry you’re working on, we never know. We never know anything. We only figure it out along the way. That’s how this whole game works, so I don’t know a year from now, but someone has already been there. If I would share my knowledge with people that are a year back from where I am at this stage, hopefully, that will give me the ability to reach out to people that are useful now. It works like that, and when you send something to the world or to the universe, it comes back in the same form.   Joe: I love that. What a great place to end. Vito, thank you so much for your time. Where can people find you?   Vito: My pleasure, Joe. Join the community, WPFeedback.co. It’s completely free. It’s growing fast, and we have some amazing people like Joe and like all of the other community leaders that we have in there. Anyone from Troy Dean to the guys from Quotable that our managing groups in there, to [EV Cha and Davinder], everyone is– Nathan and all of the guys, everyone is in there running their own groups in their unique specialty. It’s the best place to gather WordPress knowledge out there at the moment.   Joe: Fantastic. I will link to that, and everything we talked about in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it. Vito, thanks again for joining me.   Vito: Thank you. It was a pleasure.   Outro: Thanks so much to Vito for joining us today. I liked his story from the beginning, where he said he started building websites from the back of his van. Some of the more, “Guerilla marketing” things that he did, and then how he built WP feedback in less than a year to make it an extremely profitable business. I loved his motivations for starting the community and things like that. I am part of that community if you want to join it and say “Hi” I will link everything in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it/162. That’s where you can get everything that we talked about over there. Thanks again to Vito for spending some time with us, and thanks to this week’s sponsors Ahrefs and TextExpander. Those are two tools that have helped my business considerably by saving me time and helping me write good content for people who are visiting my own websites. If you liked this episode, be sure to rate and review it on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to subscribe to the show. You can get all of those links again over at HowIBuilt.it/162. If you are interested in starting your own podcast, like I said at the top of the show, check out my free podcast workbook over at PodcastWorkbook.com. I think that’s everything that I have to request of you right now, so thanks so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.  

Using Social Proof to Improve Your Sales with Tevya Washburn

October 29, 2019

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Tevya Washburn reached out to me over the summer and asked if I might be interested in having him on the show – it turns out his timing was great. See Tevya created a WordPress plugin to help gather and display social proof, and I had just finished read a book that talks about the importance of social proof. So we chat about how he came up with the idea, why he built it, and of-course, how. This is a pretty traditional episode of the show, and I hope you enjoy it!

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Tevya Washburn: We ran it for about six months, and I think he increased his reviews by like 100 reviews on Google, and he increased his overall rating, which was already fairly high. But he moved it up even higher, so he looks really good on Google, and it helped his website rank better too as he did all this. So that’s when we started to see those results on his site, where I was like, “I should sell this to my other clients.”

 

Joe Casabona: Tevya Washburn reached out to me over the summer and asked if I might be interested in having him on the show. It turns out his timing was great. See, Tevya creates a WordPress plugin to help him gather and display social proof like reviews and things like that, and I had just finished reading a book that talks about the importance of social proof. So I have him on, and we chat about how he came up with the idea and why he built it, and of course, how he built it. There’s a lot of really good advice about getting reviews, and getting that really important social proof that you need to sell your product or service. This is a pretty traditional episode of the show, so sit back and relax. I hope you enjoy it. We’ll get onto it right after a word from our sponsors.

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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 Tevya Washburn. He is the creator of Starfish Reviews, which is a social proof plugin for WordPress. Tevya, how are you?

Tevya: I’m great, Joe. How are you?

Joe: I am doing fantastic, thanks very much. For those listening, at the time we are recording I just got back from Orlando where I got to try out– I got to preview Star Wars: Galaxies Edge at Walt Disney World before it opens, and I’m a big Star Wars fan, so I’m in a fantastic mood.

Tevya: I’m jealous. That’s awesome.

Joe: My brother works at Disney World.

Tevya: Sweet.

Joe: It was great. The stars aligned, and I happened to be there anyway for a conference, so it was a fantastic experience. You could see it up on my Instagram story, which I’ll link in the show notes. But that’s not why we’re here today, and we’re here to talk about building social proof. Tevya, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Tevya: Sure. I’ve been building WordPress websites for about a decade now, and recently– I say “Recently,” but a few years ago, it came to my attention how all these SaaS services were helping people do their review marketing or social proof, as you mentioned, through their services. Where they could help encourage the positive reviews and maybe capture the negative ones for internal review, and the more I started looking at it, the more I realized there was no affordable option on the low end. Especially, specifically, there was none that ran on WordPress as a plugin or whatever, so that’s how it started. That’s a brief vision of how Starfish Reviews is born, and that’s what I do at least part of the time now, is to help build and market the Starfish Reviews plugin.

Joe: Great. So you noticed that there wasn’t something out there that was specifically on WordPress, what did you find as far as looking at other tools? Is there a popular social proof plugin that a lot of people use, or is it industry-based?

Tevya: There’s a number of popular SaaS, software as a service, solutions out there. There’s a ton of them. If you tried to compile a list, it would be quite long, but in case any listeners are a little unfamiliar, social proof is just anytime you can use your user’s or customer’s input or feedback to show other people how they feel about your business. In this case, what we do is we encourage online reviews. That is a big part of social proof, and it also plays into SEO and things like that. Most of the platforms out there are fairly broad, and they’ll cover everything from Google to some very niche ones that have to do just a specific industry, or whatever. Most of them are– We’ll cover all those, but most of them if they have a WordPress integration, it’s just a little bridge or something that pulls in some of your data from their platform. None of them run on WordPress.

Joe: Gotcha. I see. So there are plugins that will sit on their server, and through some connector WordPress plugin, it’ll pull all of the data from their server, etc.

Tevya: Yeah, and usually, it’s just to display the reviews. There are a few reviews plugins that will pull in your reviews and display them, but there’s none that are helping you manage and encourage getting new reviews or “Generating reviews,” as we sometimes call it.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes sense. So, what made you want to create Starfish Reviews? Which is maybe the opposite, you have a plugin sitting on your WordPress site where– Can people fill out reviews through the WordPress site, or does it pull–? Exactly how does that plugin work?

Tevya: Sure, that’s a great question. At its most basic, and right now, our plugin is basic, and I’ll be the first to admit it, but it’s getting better all the time. It just creates these little landing pages that we call “Funnels.” The funnel is essentially a form stepper where people can– It asks them right up front, “How do you feel about this product or service?” And people can decide how they want to word it, so they can totally customize it. That’s another great feature of ours is we made it totally customizable, so they can put in whatever wording they want, whatever audience they’re trying to go after. They know their audience better than we do, and so they can totally customize it to fit that audience. But it basically, the idea is it just says, “How do you feel about this product or service or business?” However, they’re using it, and then they can give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down or a smiley face or frowny face. Then if it’s the thumbs up, for example, then it encourages them, “Go leave us a review.” And then it takes them to Google reviews or wherever the user wants them to go, or the I should say the “Website owner” wants them to go. Or it can give them options too, so they can choose between say, Google and Facebook, and TripAdvisor and wherever else they want to offer to their clients. Then if they give negative feedback, if they say thumbs down or whatever, then it will offer them to submit the feedback internally. It’s trying to counterbalance that tendency that a lot of us have to go leave a review when we’re ticked off and we’re unhappy about it, and instead capture that for internal review. Then the website owner can review with their team and say “OK. We need to do better in this area. Here’s how we can get better.”

Joe: That’s fantastic. There’s a couple of things at play here, and the first is that if it is negative feedback, you can immediately open up that dialogue without having to stumble upon it.

Tevya: Yes, exactly.

Joe: I want to say Amazon. Somebody reviewed my book, my most recent– My last book, and it’s not very recent anymore. They gave it zero stars, and they said “It doesn’t teach the things that they wanted to learn.” But it’s because she didn’t read the description of the book, she’s like “It was too developer heavy,” and it’s called Building Themes. But there was nothing I could do about that. Especially Amazon, they really won’t let you refute reviews from what I’ve seen, or at least the little guy won’t. But the other thing that I like about this is if they click the thumbs up, now you’re giving them the option to review where you want. That plays into this like psychological technique for people wanting to complete the task they start.

Tevya: Sure. And it’s so easy too because all they have to do is click thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s all it is. But then they’ve started, and then like you say, they want to finish. So they’re much more likely to go through and leave a review and do all that stuff.

Joe: That’s fantastic. Because aside from actually getting people to review products and services, which can be hard, you’re also getting that immediate feedback from them by making it as easy as possible. Especially on a podcast, I try to make my calls to action as easy as possible because I know that people are probably on their phone listening or they’re doing something else, and I want them to remember– I don’t want it to be a multi-step process.

Tevya: Yeah, exactly. Ours is easy as just sending them a link in an email or a text message. They just hit it and then decide thumbs up or thumbs down. We even have added a feature where you can construct a link in such a way that the thumbs up or thumbs down is pre-selected, so if you want to put the thumbs up/thumbs down, indicator right in your email, you can do that. Then when they hit it there, you’re even eliminating one more step there and one more click there and shoot them straight into the funnel with one or the other already selected. If that makes sense.

Joe: Yeah, that’s perfect. It’s funny you mention that because we’re going to go on a little bit of a tangent right now.

Tevya: OK.

Joe: Today, as we record this, about two hours ago, I was looking for a solution just like that because I am trying a new format. By the time this episode comes out, I will have tested this format a couple of times here on How I Built It. I want people to either say, “Yes, they like it” or “No, they don’t.” And I couldn’t find anything really good that was just like, “This link is ‘Yes,’ and it logs yes, and this link is ‘No’ and it logs no.” It sounds like your solution will do that, so my follow up question now– And this is completely for me, when a user hits thumbs up or thumbs down, is that logged somewhere? Or is the second step the one that’s logged?

Tevya: No. Each step is logged as it occurs, so if they abandon at any point, you have whatever data you got up to that point. It’s designed to send them to a review platform, but the destination is just an open URL field. If you want to send them to another page on your site and say, “Thanks so much. That’s the feedback we needed to have.” Then yes, it will do exactly what you want to do.

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Joe: To bring it back, you have a lot of amazing– A lot of features that I guess I would expect to be here as part of a plugin that also curates reviews. What kind of research did you do to get to this point? You said it was simple, but it does a lot already. I know you looked at competitors, and there’s tons of SaaS services, but how did you determine what features would be in it? Did you talk to users, things like that?

Tevya: That’s a great question. I gave the brief overview of how it started before, and I’m going to go into a little bit more detail here to explain some of that. What originally happened was I had one of these SaaS platforms that contacted me, it was one of their sales guys who I assumed was commission only. He contacted me because I also run a website maintenance business, so we maintain and manage WordPress websites, and he’d found that and contacted me and wanted to sit down. So I went to lunch with him, or whatever. We’re talking, and he’s telling me about their product and how it works, and he basically described the funnel similarly to how I just described it, but it was running on their funnel or their platform. They wanted to charge, and the base price was $300 bucks a month for this. Now they had a nice analytics dashboard, and there was a lot of value there, but for my clients who were paying me maybe $200 bucks a month tops for managing and maintaining their website, another $300 dollars was a pretty big upsell. It was more than what I was already charging them. And so I was like, “That’s cool, but I don’t know. We could talk some more, but I’m not terribly interested unless one of my clients expresses a lot of interest here.” And then, as I left, I started thinking about it, and I’m like, “I could probably build something like that runs on WordPress. Now before you assume, “I’m just going to go code it,” a little new information for you. I don’t code. I’m not a developer unless you count CSS and HTML. What I was thinking in my head is I could probably build this on GravityForms. Fast forward about nine months later, one of my clients came to me– Actually, he texted me, he forwarded me a text message that just had a link to one of these funnels in it that one of his vendors had sent him to get a review from him. He’s like, “Could you do this for me on my website?” And I was like, “I think I can because I’ve already thought about this a bunch.” That’s how the very first version of Starfish was done, the “Early alpha,” you might call it, is I just built it all in GravityForms. It didn’t have a lot of the features it has now, but it did the very basic functionality, and it worked, and we could run it on his website. We ran it for about six months, and I think he increased his reviews by like 100 reviews on Google, and he increased his overall rating, which was already fairly high. But he moved it up even higher, so he looks really good on Google, and it helped his website rank better too as he did all this. So that’s when we started to see those results on his site, where I was like, “I should sell this to my other clients.” And then the obvious and logical next step was, “I don’t want to have to reproduce this on every single site in GravityForms, we should build a plugin.” And then it was like, “Duh. We should sell a plugin.”

Joe: That’s so– Actually, I’m going to stop you right there because I want this point to land. You don’t write code, but you did build this out. You prototyped it in GravityForms. I think that’s really interesting because as a coder myself, when I have an idea I always think “Here we go, I’m going to start laying down some code,” without really thinking about what’s it going to look like and how it’s going to get laid out, I make all of those– For an idea I have, all those decisions in the shotgun, we’ll say.

Tevya: Sure.

Joe: But the fact that you laid it out in GravityForms first meant that you had zero technical debt, you got to see how it worked, and you got to see if GravityForms was sufficient enough for this before moving on to coding a solution yourself. I think that’s a really good takeaway.

Tevya: Cool. Yeah, it made me a big believer in prototyping and testing just the “Minimum viable product,” as they often say. That’s basically what I did. I just built in the very minimum, and it just worked, it just barely did exactly what we needed it to. Then we saw how well it worked, and I was like, “This is an idea that I think could have some legs if we wanted to build a real plugin and add some features to it.”

Joe: Yeah, that’s fantastic. First of all, I interrupted you, so I just wanted to make sure you completed the thought you were trying to complete. I’m very sorry about that.

Tevya: No worries at all. The next step was to find a developer, and I had a developer I’d worked with for some time and was able to do a profit-sharing arrangement with them, so I didn’t have to come up with a bunch of funding upfront to get it built. Then after a while, we seemed to hit the limits of his technical knowledge, so I gave him a big payment buyout and then made a similar arrangement with another developer who has a lot more experience and has been doing this stuff for a long time. His name’s Matt, and Matt’s my business partner now on all this, and he has helped rebuild the foundation of it. So it’s much more reliable, much more consistent, and much quicker action, too.

Joe: Again, that’s cool. Because I feel like profit sharing is always something that’s proposed when somebody has an idea, it’s been proposed to me a few times. I’ve never taken the risk of doing the profit-sharing model, but it sounds like, in both instances, it’s worked out for your developers. Can you talk about how you pitched the profit-sharing model and how you persuaded these developers to do it?

Tevya: Sure. The first step, at least in my mind, was I had a great relationship with both of them already. I’d hired them to do other work for me and stuff like that, so they knew that we worked well together. Matt’s a great guy, and we were like-minded on a lot of things that are important, but I think different enough too that we’re not too locked in. That we’re able to explore new ideas and bounce ideas off each other and stuff. I think just that, and then all the stuff that I realized. I was able to go to him and say, “OK. Look what I already did with the prototype for this one client. I think I can sell it as a significant upgrade to my other clients, but more importantly, I think we can sell it just as a WordPress plugin to any website owners or marketers or whatever out there.” And then showed them the market that was out there and showed them how many other of these SaaS products out there, that were doing the same thing but weren’t doing it on WordPress, and how we could very likely come in, much cheaper than them because we didn’t have all the overhead of the servers and the hosting, and all that stuff. But also give people control, it’s their data, and it runs on WordPress on their website, etc. I think just all that, it was pretty clear that there was some real potential there, and they were able and willing to get excited about it. Plus, I didn’t ask either one of them to leave their day job to do it. It was like, “Can you put some time into this on the side? Then if it starts paying you, maybe you’ll drop some of your other freelance projects that you were already doing on the side.”

Joe: OK, so there’s a lot of great advice there. The first, and I think this is the most important one, is that you already had a great relationship with both of them. You’ve hired them before, so they know you’re not just out to make a quick buck off of them. To the business owners out there who are looking for a profit-sharing model, I think this is important because I’ve had basically people who have proposed this thing to me and wanting me to sign an NDA first. Then they wanted me to say, “Do profit sharing.” And I’m like, “I already don’t– You clearly don’t trust me. Why should I trust you at all?” So I think that’s important, you built that trust, and you had a working prototype, so you’re showing that you’ve already put hours and thought into this. I like that.

Tevya: In both cases, too, I was able to say, “Look. I’m a decent marketer. I know how to do SEO and that kind of stuff, so I can get this in front of people, but I can’t build it. So I need you to build it, and I think you need me to market it.” And so that makes a really good relationship that way.

Joe: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. You’re playing off of each other’s strengths, and again, since you had that working relationship, you both knew what the strengths were. Now when it comes to marketing, this is a social proof plugin, how important–? I’ve got courses, I’ve got the podcast. I know people listening probably have their own plugins or maybe even their freelancers, how important is social proof, and is it more important in certain industries than others?

Tevya: It’s extremely important. Yes, I do think it does vary somewhat from industry to industry. I’m trying to order my thoughts here real quick. So, it’s very important in that it affects your SEO, at least as far as we are applying social proof to online reviews. Online reviews can affect your SEO, so it’s really important there. We’ve got a bunch of stats and stuff on our website, but there’s been a bunch of studies done, and most people these days read reviews. Not only that, but they’re increasingly savvy about those reviews. They know that if product or service or a plugin or whatever it might be that’s being reviewed has 100% five-star reviews and there’s 50 of them or more, they know right off the bat that there’s something going on. They’re like, “Nobody’s perfect. Nobody gets it right all the time.” There’s always somebody, like in your example, Joe. There’s always somebody who didn’t read the description before they bought it. It’s not that the product’s not amazing, it’s just that there’s always some situation that can’t fit perfection. So they’re very savvy about that, and it becomes very important because people do spend time on that and start reading through those reviews and looking at it. But it does depend on the industry as well, because if something is wildly popular, and all their friends are telling them “You’ve got to try this thing,” then it’s really not that big a deal that you have a million reviews or whatever telling them the same thing that their friends are already telling them. On the other hand, if they’re hiring a local contractor or they’re buying a newer product, then it’s really important what other people have said about it because that’s going to determine how they feel about it and whether or not they’re likely to buy it or not.

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Joe: I’m sure we’ve all done this, where something has a lot of really good reviews, but you have the one bad review, that has made me not want to buy a product. Because everyone’s like “This is great,” and then one is like “This was broken in the box the day it arrived,” and I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to buy this now.” But to your point, first of all, it informs people about a product that they’re not seeing in real life. You can’t just go to the store, or when you’re online shopping in most cases, you’re not going to the store first to look at it. But the other thing you mentioned is that it can affect your SEO. So, is that to say that search engines like Google are crawling not only like the Google reviews, but Yelp or other ones to surface that and effect the page rank at all?

Tevya: Yeah, exactly. The old adage is “Content is king,” right? Every review constitutes content, it’s additional content about your business or product or whatever it might be, and that includes your replies as well. You can even go in and reply and make sure you’re using relevant keywords as you reply to those reviews, positive or negative. We encourage people to reply to all reviews, positive or negative, and make sure you talk about your business as you’re replying. Or talk about what you did well, or whatever they mentioned in their review. That’s going to have relevant keywords in it, and that’s more content that’s related to your site and your business, whatever, and can help you rank.

Joe: I never really thought of that. I know it’s important to have reviews for the social proof if people happen to come, or I’ve got the testimonials. But I guess I’ve never really thought of it in that sense, that every review constitutes content. My last question in this line of questioning is, are there certain review sites that digital businesses or online entrepreneurs– Are there review sites that those folks should focus their time on?

Tevya: Again, it can be somewhat industry-specific. So depending on what industry that is, Google obviously always loves Google’s stuff. However, Google reviews are made more for local businesses. You can say, “I don’t have an actual physical location, and so I want it everywhere.” You can do stuff, but that’s probably not going to help you as much as if maybe you get them on Trustpilot. I’m not a big fan of Facebook personally, but Facebook is still huge. If you can get reviews on Facebook, that’s always very helpful and then anything industry-specific. Like I said, if you’re selling an e-book on Amazon, then you want Amazon reviews.

Joe: Yeah, gotcha. That’s fantastic information, so thank you for that. Now moving back to Starfish Reviews, this is running right on your WordPress site. Is it something that encourages reviews at other places? Does it curate those reviews on the site itself, or does it just basically say, “Check out my reviews in the places where I’m sending people?”

Tevya: At this time, it doesn’t pull in reviews from other websites, but we are hard at work on that, and that’s going to be releasing very soon. In the near future, you’ll be able to have a dashboard telling you when you get new reviews, and this will probably be– We’ll release of a few features at a time. It’s not going to all come in one big update, but you’ll be able to see your new reviews from various sources on your WordPress dashboard. You’ll be able to see some analytics and stuff like that, you’ll also be able to use a short code or a Gutenberg block or whatever to display your latest reviews on the front end, and all that stuff is coming. We intend it to be a full-featured review marketing plugin by the time– Well, I won’t set any dates. But it’s going to be awesome, and we’re hard at work on the next big features there.

Joe: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I usually ask what your plans for the future are, and it sounds like you’ve laid them out, but I think this is a good strategy. First of all, you got your minimum viable product out. You’ve got the important part out, which is encouraging people to leave those reviews. Then once somebody like me has reviews to display, this new feature will roll out, and I can go ahead and display them. I think that’s a good plan.

Tevya: Yeah, exactly. There were already some plugins that would display them, as I mentioned before, and there are some great ones out there. But we intend ours to be the most full-package, once we get all those features added on.

Joe: Awesome. As we wrap up here, you have those “Funnels” is the term that you mentioned. What kind of wording should I use on a final page to encourage people to get reviews? Is there some magic language I could use, or is it just the constant ask?

Tevya: I would say something that’s personal. You know your audience better than maybe anybody else, and they have certain expectations of you, like how you talk to them. I would say customize it to you, make it sound like you when you ask them, and they’ll feel like it’s more personal that way. I think that’s the best thing you can do. Now, if you try to encourage reviews on Yelp or certain other platforms that have restrictive rules about what you can ask, then you can’t necessarily outright ask. You have to be sneaky about it, or not really sneaky, but don’t ask. Just let them know that you appreciate reviews and leave it at that. I would say the specific wording is only when you’re trying to be compliant with the terms of service or something like that, but other than that, make it personal. Make it sound like you. People love doing business with other people, not faceless corporations and stuff like that.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s a really good point, and we should parse that out a bit. Because if I’m asking for reviews on my own site or if I’ m– For a while, I had a call to action at the end of this, “Leave a rating and review on iTunes. It helps.” But if it’s something like Amazon, Amazon’s the one I keep going back to because that’s what I’m most familiar with. There are certain restrictions like I can’t send you a product for you to then review. You have to buy it through Amazon to review it. Is that right? Something like that.

Tevya: I believe so, but I’m not real clear on all Amazon’s review rules there. But I believe that’s correct.

Joe: I’ll link to an episode of Smart Passive Income where he has an Amazon guy on talking specifically about that.

Tevya: Cool.

Joe: Because I know it’s different for books because it’s just you’ve always been able to send out review copies. But other physical products, I’ve seen people reach out to me and say “We want you to review our product, can you buy it through Amazon and then we’ll PayPal you the money?” And I’m like, “No. Just send me the product. That’s weird.” But they never explained why, and it’s probably because of that.

Tevya: Yeah, I think they want you to be a verified buyer is the thing, because those things get more weight than the ones that aren’t.

Joe: Gotcha. Because that’s another thing, if I’m sending– If I’m giving people access to my course or whatever, or sending a copy of my book to somebody, they might be more inclined to say something nice about it because they got it for free.

Tevya: Sure, yeah.

Joe: Awesome. This has been great, Tevya. I do need to ask my favorite question, though, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Tevya: Trade secrets. I think we’ve covered several of them throughout this, some of them maybe I didn’t mention, or I didn’t emphasize as well as I could have. One is replying to positive reviews, and the reason is that as I mentioned before, it’s content, and it can help with SEO but it can also– Another form of social proof, in that you’re showing that even the people that love you already, you’re still willing to follow up with them and have that conversation and show them how much you appreciate what they said about you. You’re not just saying, “They’re already in our camp, so I’m not going to waste any time on them. That shows another that you’re willing to go to another level of service there, and makes you look all that much better. So that was one we mentioned, but I think it is a well-kept secret. It shouldn’t be a secret, but it’s a pretty good one.

Joe: I think that’s great because you’re right. I see the good reviews, and I’m like, “I don’t need to convince them. They’re already convinced. I’d rather–” and maybe incorrectly, “I’d rather spend my time on the one-star review figuring out why they gave me a one-star review,” when maybe there’s just no convincing them that my product is good.

Tevya: Yeah, and there’s nothing wrong with replying to negative reviews as long as you’re always kind and positive and trying to encourage them to reach out to you so you can make it right. But everybody wants to reply to the negative reviews because that’s the one that gets to you.

Joe: Right. Yeah, absolutely. That makes perfect sense. Tevya, thanks so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Where can people find you?

Tevya: Starfish.reviews is our main website, that’s the best place. You can follow me on Twitter @tevyaw. Feel free to contact me through the Starfish Reviews contact form, or whatever works best for you.

Joe: Fantastic. I will link to those and everything we talked about in the show notes over at HowIBuilt.it. Tevya, thanks again. I appreciate you taking the time.

Tevya: You’re welcome, Joe. I appreciate you and your awesome podcast. Thanks for having me on.

Joe: Thanks so much to Tevya for joining me today. I loved his trade secret about replying to positive reviews and being kind with the negative reviews, that’s something that I need to work on. I always feel the need to defend myself when I get a negative review when I should be killing them with kindness. That’s always the best way to flip the script and other colloquialisms, at least here in the United States. Thanks also to our sponsors Pantheon, Gusto, and Ahoy! Without their support, this show would not happen. For everything that we talked about and to learn more about our sponsors, you can head over to HowIBuilt.it/144. There you will find links to subscribe as well, so be sure to subscribe if you like this. You’ll also find a link to my latest resource, and it’s the podcast workbook. I’m working on a new course called Podcast Liftoff, where I will show you how you can get in front of the mic and get over that stage fright, get over the fear of pressing record and start your own podcast. If you’re interested in doing that, head over to HowIBuilt.it/144 for the link to a free podcast workbook. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, get out there and build something.

Building Better Marketing Automation through WordPress with Adrian Tobey

September 10, 2019

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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!)

[Read more…] about Building Better Marketing Automation through WordPress with Adrian Tobey

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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.

 

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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

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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.

[Read more…] about Building the State Department’s Website with Tracy Rotton

Alex McClafferty & Productize.co

July 30, 2019

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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.

[Read more…] about Alex McClafferty & Productize.co

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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

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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.

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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.

 

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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?”

 

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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.

 

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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

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

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Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe: That’s fantastic.

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

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

Jan: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

Joe: Wow.

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

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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:

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.

[Read more…] about Brad Touesnard and SpinupWP

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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:

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.

[Read more…] about James Kemp and Iconic

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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.

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: 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

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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!

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