Can’t decide which podcast format to use? Darth Sidious has come to your rescue.

Today on the WPMRR podcast, Joe is joined by Joe Casabona, an online course creator, podcast host, and web developer, to talk about podcasting from scratch, professional audio editing, and repurposing content for different mediums. 

Listen in for some pro podcasting tips!

Episode Resources:

• Here’s Joe Casabona’s Blog Page
• Resources from Joe Casabona
• Catch Joe Casabona on Twitter
• Joe Casabona’s Youtube Channel
• Send in your questions to yo@wpmrr.com

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Joe Howard:

Hey hey, good WordPress people. Welcome back to the WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Joe.

Joe Casabona:

And I am Darth Sidious.

Joe Howard:

And you’re listening to the WordPress Business Podcast. Darth Sidious on the pod this week. I love when people pick dark characters or evil characters, because most people pick the good characters. But you went with a dark one this time. You were BBA last time. You get to be a bad character this time. What’s going on?

Joe Casabona:

Not too much. Yeah, Darth Sidious, that choice is brought to you by my daughter, who tends to also like the dark characters.

Joe Howard:

Nice.

Joe Casabona:

She loves Darth Vader and Darth Sidious and Count Dooku. Got to represent the Sid.

Joe Howard:

Totally. The dark characters have a place in this too. It’s this balance of good and evil. You can’t have all the good without some of the evil as well. Plus, some of those evil characters are some of the coolest. They have some of the coolest makeup and costume stuff, so I’m down with that. It sounds cool.

Joe Casabona:

Sidious is just a… talk about bad guy who executed his plan nearly perfectly, over the span of like 60 or 70 years. Just impressive.

Joe Howard:

That is totally true, yeah. Almost exactly, nailed it exactly over a long period of time. He was senator. Man, he played the game pretty well, you have to admit, even though he was a bad character. Darth Sidious on the podcast this week, also known as the one and only, the great and powerful Joe Casabona. What’s going on, Joe?

Joe Casabona:

Not too much, I’m good. I’m glad we could get together back on the pod. I’m glad to be here.

Joe Howard:

Yeah, man. It’s your second time on the pod. Man, we’ve known each other for a long time. It even seems weird to talk about how we met and that stuff, because we’ve known each other in the WordPress space for so long. You’re always up to something new in the WordPress community, or with your WordPress work. People can go and listen to your last episode and hear about all of the amazing stuff you do in WordPress. Maybe let’s do an update. Tell people some of the new stuff you’re working on now.

Joe Casabona:

Yeah. The things that I do mostly these days are podcasting, course, and video creation. As we record this, I am sending the last of my new book to layout with my publisher. I’ve got a book coming out on HTML and CSS that’s being published through Pearson. I’ll be happy to wrap that up. As we record this, I’ll have a second child on the way very soon.

Joe Howard:

That is a big new thing for sure. Listeners know I’ve got a six-month-old at home now. I’ve got number one. You, Joe, were actually one of the people I was talking to before Morrison was born being like, “Okay, what’s it like to have a baby? Can you still work? Can you do anything? What’s going on?” You were one of those people that definitely guided me through this. Hey, if we decide we want a second at some point, I guess you can be my guide again. Tell me about what it’s like to have two. Let’s start there. How are you feeling? Are you feeling a little nervous? Are you kind of feeling cool, calm, collected? What’s going on in your head right now?

Joe Casabona:

I’m feeling a little bit nervous because I have two major projects I need to wrap up, pretty much before my son comes. That added pressure, because I don’t want to work once he’s here. Especially because it’ll be, now we’re going to have to switch to man to man defense, because we’ll have two. I want to be there as a supportive father and a supportive husband. I don’t want to be distracted by the major projects. I’m going to barrel through and get all this done, so I can be fully present when my son is born.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. That’s always a little bit stressful, because you don’t really know when the baby is coming. Sure, it could be right at nine months, or nine and a half months. But also, it could be a little bit early. When does the deadline come? Correct me if I’m wrong, but your wife is expecting in the next couple weeks, few weeks here. You have kind of a deadline here coming up, right?

Joe Casabona:

Yeah, she is 39 weeks today as we record this.

Joe Howard:

Wow.

Joe Casabona:

The due date is exactly one week from today. Theresa was right on time. She was born at 11:06 P.M. the day before her due date, so just an hour before her due date, because Casabonas are always on time. He could come early, or he could be right on time. But yeah, we’re in crunch time right now.

Joe Howard:

Nice. All right, well, by the time this episode goes live, you will probably have two kids. You’ll have your new one here. If you’re listening to this episode, go and give Joe a congratulations. You can probably hit him up on Twitter. He’s just JCasabona, right?

Joe Casabona:

That is correct. Thank you.

Joe Howard:

No problem, yeah. Give him a little shoutout. I’ll be on Twitter. I’ll be like, “Hey, Joe. How you doing? Everything good?” Man, two is more than one. I like that expression that people say. Going from one person, you have one kid at home. You have one person in the game. One person is on the bench getting a breather, or you have two on one. Now it’s one on one.

Joe Casabona:

It’s one on one.

Joe Howard:

The next step is totally zone defense.

Joe Casabona:

You’ve got to go zone defense, yeah. My father-in-law said you’re not a real parent until you have three. I’m like, “Great.”

Joe Howard:

You think your skills are advanced with one or two. Oh yeah, just try juggling with three. Cool, well, congratulations, Joe. That’s really exciting for you, man. I’m pumped.

Joe Casabona:

Thank you.

Joe Howard:

Finishing up a few projects before that gets done. Obviously you’re a podcaster. People know you as being a podcaster in the WordPress space. How I Built It is pretty popular. Now you’re not just running a podcast, but you’re actually helping other people with podcast stuff too, which I think is pretty cool. Tell us a little bit about the kind of work you’re doing there too.

Joe Casabona:

Yeah, for sure. I’ve been podcasting for seven years or so now. I’ve had a successful one for… it’s for years this month actually that I launched How I Built It.

Joe Howard:

Nice.

Joe Casabona:

That’s been a lot of fun. I do get a lot of questions around, how do I start a podcast? What do I do? How did you grow? And things like that. How are you making money? At first, I figured that the market was pretty saturated with podcasting courses, because lots of people have those. I decided to just launch a build your podcast website course. Then I realized that nobody needed a website for a thing that they didn’t have.

Joe Casabona:

If we’re going back to the Star Wars analogy, I was sending Luke to fight Darth Vader, not without mastery of the force, without a light saber. I was just like, “Go fight Darth Vader.” I took a step back, and I created a new course called Podcast Liftoff that shows you everything you need to do to plan, produce, and publish your podcast. Then you get the website course for free. Once you have your show, if you want to build your own website, then you can.

Joe Howard:

Cool. It’s everything podcasting. I remember starting this podcast, and it was a lot of work. It was a lot of stuff to do, and a lot of things I didn’t know. When you’re going through and saying, “Okay, I have an idea for a podcast.” Okay, how do you get from I have a great idea for a podcast, I’m motivated, I want to go do this. Actually get from there to having your podcast on all the players, and having a system down for how you’re publishing? What’s my content about? How am I targeting an audience and giving valuable content? Am I planning out each episode? How do I edit my audio? Those are all questions I had to answer along the way. I remember totally flying by the seam of my pants and being like, “This is the decision I’m making today. This is the decision I’m making tomorrow.”

Joe Howard:

It would’ve probably been helpful to have a pretty good guide of someone who has done it before, and has run a successful podcast. Maybe our next podcast will have a little bit more help doing it this time. I’d love to chat about starting off with a podcast. I’m sure that there are other listeners here who are like, “I would love to do a podcast. I don’t even have an idea for a podcast.” What are good first steps people should be taking in terms of making it easier to actually get started with podcasting?

Joe Casabona:

Yeah, for sure. Well, let me just say that you’re absolutely right. I had no idea what I was doing when I first started either. I didn’t even know I needed a separate audio host. Jackie D’Elia informed me of that. She was like, “Who are you hosting your audio with?” I’m like, “I don’t know, WordPress.” She’s like, “Probably don’t do that.” Shoutout to Jackie for making sure that I got off on the right foot.

Joe Casabona:

Starting a podcast is… choosing your topic and your format are critical. Everybody says this about everything. Don’t just start something to make money. But don’t just start a podcast to try to make money, because you’ll be disappointed in the beginning. You will lose steam quickly. If you’re not passionate about the topic, then you’ll have no drive whatsoever. The first thing I tell people is, podcasting is a great way to grow your business. I believe it’s the next content plane. I am proof positive of that.

Joe Casabona:

I would not be self-employed without my podcast. That’s how helpful it’s been for me. The topic I picked was one that I was passionate and curious about. I was having conversations with people about how they started their businesses, to get insight on how I should run my business. I thought this should be a podcast. It was a topic I was passionate about. I was asking the right questions. You should make a list of topics for yourself when you are ready to pick yours.

Joe Howard:

Totally.

Joe Casabona:

Things that you’re interested in that you want to be known for. Especially if you are going to try to grow your business here. How do you want to establish yourself as an expert? In what field do you want to be seen as the go to person? That’s where I would start with picking a topic, because it’s something that you’re going to have a depth of knowledge of, that you won’t need a ton of motivation to talk about. If you are an expert in the field, you won’t necessarily need to do a ton of research in the beginning. We’re lowering that barrier of entry for you.

Joe Casabona:

Then the second part of that, before I stop on this very long winded answer, is your format. A lot of people are like, I should just do interviews, or I need to do one specific format. You don’t. Mix it up. Do solo shows where you talk about some topic for 15 or 20 minutes. Bring on guests that can help reinforce your points, or teach your audience and you about something new. I learn so much from my guests on how to run my business better that I can then pass that information on to my audience. Mix up the format. Make it easier on yourself, and pick a topic that you know a lot about and you’re very passionate about.

Joe Howard:

Yeah, I love all that advice. It’s all resonating with me so much thinking about starting this podcast. One thing I’d add to that is, because you mentioned be flexible around your formatting of your content. I think this is super, super important. Because I think a lot of people start a podcast and say, “I have to keep it super consistent. I have to deliver my format the same way every time.” There are some established podcast you listen to that have the exact same formatting every time. It’s really well produced. It’s really nice to listen to. That’s great, but it does not have to be everybody.

Joe Howard:

If you decide after a few episodes, I want to do a guest appearance, go do it. See what works, see what doesn’t work. Our podcast, I think listeners know at this point. We’re a pretty informal podcast. It has good audio production, but it’s not formatted, or it’s not engineered like some of these super TED Radio Hour podcasts. Kristie and I started the podcast, and we did the first 10 episode or so together. One day I was like, “I want to talk to some other people.” I started having guests on. That’s literally how it started. I didn’t put a ton of thought into it. I was just like, “I want to talk to more people. I want to put more people in front of other folks, in front of our audience. Selfishly, I want to learn from them.”

Joe Howard:

I totally agree with you, Joe. So many people I have talked to in the podcast, I’ve learned so much from. I would never know anything about the iPad Pro or what pen I should use to write beautifully had I not talked to you last time. These are things that help me. If you can help yourself, you’re helping your audience. After episodes I’m like, man, I just learned so much. I know that’s a good episode, because the audience is like a kid in the room who is brave enough to ask the question. 10 other kids probably have the same question too. I totally agree with all that stuff.

Joe Howard:

I think the place where a lot of people get stuck is the audio engineering piece, or the editing of the audio. Anybody can sit down and record a podcast episode by themselves, with someone else. That part is actually not too hard. You get the recordings together and you have audio. You can turn that into a podcast. But how do you do the audio editing piece? For some people, they may want to learn it. Maybe that’s something that you go over a little bit in your course. Some people may want to try and find someone to hire who can… maybe not the $100 an hour person. But maybe there are some folks out there who can, for $10 or $20 an hour, do a little audio engineering for you and make your podcast episode sound good. What do you recommend about bridging that gap for folks who are like, I have a podcast. I can do all the recording. How do I go from having my audio to making it sound good, and putting it out there in the world so that people won’t hate it because the audio is so crappy?

Joe Casabona:

Yeah, for sure. I would say absolutely, you do not need to sound like Joe or me when you’re first starting out. Again, I’ve been podcasting for a long time. This is not my first podcast microphone that I’m using. I am a stickler for my own mic quality, more than I should be. You will spend a little bit of money here, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a lot. For $60, you can get a decent built in… I’m sorry, a decent external microphone. For let’s say $300, you can get an upgraded microphone and what’s called an interface. It’s an XLR microphone. That’s what you see on stages if you go to a concert or speaking event. It’s a microphone that can go into a piece of hardware that will make your voice sound better right off the bat.

Joe Casabona:

That’s the next step. I think if you’re starting out, the ATR 2100 is the microphone for you. It is, again, $60, $70. It’s a USB microphone that actually converts to an XLR microphone. It’s going to give you a much cleaner sound going into your computer. It’s pretty forgiving of the environment too. That’s the second thing that you want to do to make your life easier, is try your best to treat your environment for audio. Don’t be in an echoey room. Make sure you have at least some way that the sound is being deflected away from your microphone. This could be bookshelves behind you. Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, if he is recording at home, he will record in his closet with a comforter over him. Because clothes are a great way to dampen sound and echo.

Joe Howard:

Totally.

Joe Casabona:

I’ve recorded a course like that, where I’ve put a comforter over my head and I record it. Anything to make your audio sound better going into the computer is going to make your life a lot easier. You have two paths, as Joe alluded to. If you want to edit your own episodes, I would recommend Audacity. It is free. It’s open source and cross platform. There are a lot of tutorials on it, including one in my Podcast Liftoff course, in how to remove white noise. How to cut and do transitions and things like that. Or you can go the hired editor route. Again, you don’t have to pay $100 an hour to somebody.

Joe Casabona:

I pay my editor something like $30 or $40 an episode. He just puts my guests’ audio with my audio. He cleans it up a little, and he inserts ad spots. That saves me hours a week. I found him on Fiverr. If you want, I can give Joe a link to him in the show notes or whatever, but you don’t have to spend a ton. If you’re starting out, try it out and see if you’re going to edit. But treating your audio going into your computer is going to massively help you in the editing process as well.

Joe Howard:

I have a lot of thoughts there. But two are, one, when I started doing podcasting, I always hated the sound of my voice. Which I think a lot of people can resonate. It resonates with a lot of people. I remember hearing my voice on an audio message machine growing up. I couldn’t stand it. It’s cringe worthy. It really turns out, it’s just that the audio quality was so bad. Yeah, maybe some people have better speaking voices for radio or podcast. Maybe that’s true to a certain degree. But when we got our audio engineer to produce our podcast, I remember the first time I heard the final version of it with the really cleaned up audio, really high quality and thinking, oh my God. I actually kind of sound good. This is great. I’ve never heard myself sound like this.

Joe Howard:

It really does make a huge difference. Not just for the quality other people are listening to, but for liking to do the podcast, and liking to hear yourself on the podcast. That’s just something that I always remember. Still till this day I’m like, how do I sound like this on the podcast? It sounds good. High quality audio is really the answer. I think for people starting off, I did a podcast before I did this podcast, which was totally a warmup into podcasting. It was called The Walking Marvin Podcast. Marvin is my dog.

Joe Casabona:

Yes.

Joe Howard:

I don’t think the website is up anymore, but it was WalkingMarvin.com. I’d just walk Marvin and talk about stuff, business things, etcetera. It was not a great podcast, the quality of the audio, because I was just talking into my microphone on my… Back then, there was no AirPods. It was with wired headphones for my iPhone. It’s fine to get started with something like that. I would for sure say if you have $60 to invest in it, it will really help the audio quality to have even a basic microphone.

Joe Howard:

If you’re starting podcasting, you’re not going to be great at it your first episode. You’re probably not going to be great at it your first 10 episodes. This is going to be episode like 100 plus, 103 maybe of the podcast. I don’t really consider myself that great at it. It’s a work in progress. If you start off with that expectation, I think you’ll be much better off. Like you said, Joe, it’s hard to build a business on a podcast. You have to grow a pretty big audience to do that. This podcast, it throws a few customers to WP Buffs. It throws a few people to WPMRR and the stuff we’re doing there. We probably, at the end of the day, lose money on it. I don’t know.

Joe Casabona:

Got you.

Joe Howard:

I don’t know, it’s a complicated equation. But it’s not a profit center for sure. It’s not a place where I’m like, “We’ve got to keep doing the podcast because we’re making so much money on it.” It’s like, I like doing it. WP Buffs helps to fund it, and that’s great. I get to talk to cool people like you. At the end of the day, I think yeah, I just talked about a lot of thoughts. I have thoughts apparently.

Joe Casabona:

Yeah. I think you’re right. You need to get your reps in. That’s what I tell people. I was asked about this at a Word camp in September in the before time, when we could go to Word camps. They’re like, “How do you get comfortable in front of the microphone?” I said, “I was in drama club. I have always been comfortable performing or being in front of people.” But being in front of a microphone is a little bit different. You need to practice and do it.

Joe Casabona:

Record a few demo episodes for just you, and listen. They never have to be released if you hate them, but you will find your sea legs. You will become better. You’ll understand what you can do to improve some of the things that you do that you might want to stop doing. The more you do it, the better you’ll get. We’re not all going to be Joe Rogan as far as making money is concerned. But this can be good, consistent content for you.

Joe Casabona:

One of the stats that I keep saying is, there are 31 million YouTube channels. There are less than one million active podcasts. Only about 50% of Americans listen to podcasts right now. There is plenty of room to grow in this field. If you start now, then you will be on a new platform, a new plane of content where you can grow your business. Especially as more people start to listen to podcasts.

Joe Howard:

Yeah, totally. I don’t know about you, but I just got offered a $100 million deal by Spotify. Maybe you’re not the biggest podcast, but this podcast is huge, man. I’m good.

Joe Casabona:

I’m hoping. I think they’re just snatching up all the Joes right now.

Joe Howard:

Yeah, right. There you go. [crosstalk 00:24:16] Joe Rogan followed by Joe Casabona followed by Joe Howard, obviously. That’s a good strategy for them. Another thing about podcasting is, I feel like having a podcast in the WordPress space, and you know this very well, it gives you this platform and this voice to speak to people. As you grow your audience a little bit, you start to get shared around the WordPress space. This could be in any industry. But you start to become someone that people listen to in their industry. I find that very interesting for the reason that I know a few things about entrepreneurship.

Joe Howard:

I’ve grown a semi successful business. I know some things, but there is so much I don’t know. I started a podcast which I think I’m supposed to be an expert in stuff, because I started a podcast and I talk about things. That makes me an expert, but it’s kind of the other way around. If you just keep doing a podcast and you kind of grow into your space, you’ll start to gain a smaller audience and maybe a medium sized audience. It’ll grow. But it’s almost like you become whatever “expert,” or you happen to know things, and it’s become of the podcast.

Joe Howard:

I don’t know things and I’m giving that to people. It’s more like, I think people think maybe me and you, we know stuff. But it’s because we have a podcast. Of course they must know stuff. But it’s not really like that. People who listen to this podcast know, I don’t know about a ton of stuff, because there’s a ton of stuff I don’t know about. I would for sure advise people to… don’t worry about being an influencer, or being one of the voices in your industry. That will come once you’ve done a podcast for a year.

Joe Howard:

I’ve only been doing it for a year and a half. You’ve been doing it for years. At this point, people know us from the podcast. But it’s really just because we did it for a while. People eventually were like, “Fine, I guess I’ll listen.” Now we have a good amount of listeners. When you-

Joe Casabona:

That’s like… Sorry, you’re in the middle of a thought. Keep moving with it.

Joe Howard:

No, go ahead, go.

Joe Casabona:

I think that’s so powerful in podcasting. It’s a more intimate medium. People who are listening to this right now, they’re probably listening on headphones. They’re hearing the inflection in our voice. If we wrote this stuff, our personalities wouldn’t shine through as much. As a result, people feel like they know us a little better. Therefore, they trust us a little better and they view us as experts.

Joe Casabona:

If you’re thinking about starting a podcast, this is really important for you. You are always going to be ahead of somebody. You don’t need to be the number one businessperson on the planet to give out advice. Again, this is stuff I learned from my podcast. Brian Krogsgard just said this to me in one of our interviews the other day. You’re always going to be a step ahead of somebody. Somebody will be able to learn from you. If you make your content relatable and give them quick wins, they will absolutely trust you and view you as an expert, because they are learning from you and growing with you.

Joe Howard:

That’s a really good point, because the world is so big. The podcast space is so big, and the WordPress space is actually pretty big. There are always going to be folks who are just a step behind you, or a few steps behind you. What’s also interesting is that your content, once you put it up there, can last forever. Someone in 10 years could come and find something that’s useful to them. Some evergreen content that you wrote or put in a podcast.

Joe Casabona:

People prefer different content in different ways. Some people prefer to read because that’s how they consume information. If reading is cognitively taxing for people, or they are driving somewhere and they can’t read, but they still want to consume some content, a podcast is perfect for that. They can listen and consume the content that way. Cover your basis. Make sure that you’re catering to all of the people who want to learn from you in different ways. Whether that’s having a podcast and a transcript, or taking a blog post and turning that into a podcast episode, and repurposing that content.

Joe Howard:

Yeah, that’s a very interesting point about the purpose of repurposing content. Which is that people absorb… it’s not just people with different learning methods. Some people are visual, some people are audio. Some people want to read. Obviously that’s one reason to put content in different mediums. But also, people just absorb content. It’s not just a learning method, it’s the time of day. Sometimes I’m on a walk with my dog, and I want to put a podcast on. That would be audio. But when I’m walking my dog, I’m not going to put a YouTube video on.

Joe Casabona:

Right.

Joe Howard:

But if I’m working on my computer, I’ve got this big huge gaming monitor. I’ll have my work on one side. Maybe I’ll want to listen to something while I’m working. Then YouTube is going to be better because I can literally just go to YouTube.com, I’m subscribed to Joe Casabona on YouTube. I can just go and listen to his recent podcast episode or his recent unboxing or whatever. I think having content for those different pieces is also super important. That’s a good point.

Joe Casabona:

Absolutely. It’s a quick win for people who are wondering, how do I come up with consistent content? Unless today is your first day on the internet, you’ve probably created content in some way. That is prime for repurposing and resurfacing. Because you put out a podcast episode about a five year old blog post, guess what? You can send more traffic to that blog post too.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. It’s a snowball effect of… When I started WP Buffs, it was nothing. I had to work every day to write another blog post. Please don’t go to the first 20 blog posts written at WPBuffs.com. They’re so bad, but that’s how you get started. I actually keep them up for that reason, because yeah, maybe people find them and they’re like, “This sucks.” Good, yes, it did suck at the beginning for sure. That’s how you get started. I’m fine with people seeing that stuff actually.

Joe Howard:

When I started the podcast, we got started somewhat more quickly because we already had a small email list in WP Buffs. It kind of snowballed into other things. I think it’s important for people to keep that expectation. If a podcast is that first thing you’re starting, no one is going to listen to it for a long time probably. Maybe not a long time, but you should be expecting your first year not getting a ton of traction.

Joe Howard:

If you can keep that expectation in your head, because I feel like a lot of people will get down on themselves. After a month, I did four episodes and no one is listening. I got like 10 downloads. Three of them were my long, which was how a lot of our stuff started too. My mom recently replied to one of WP Buff’s tweets. I was like, “Thanks, mom.”

Joe Casabona:

Nice.

Joe Howard:

Helping us get that engagement. You’ve got to be ready to put that grind and work in. It’s like what people say about being a professional athlete. All the work you do when the cameras are off is what makes a difference. Being a podcaster is no different than being a professional athlete. We’ll make a good parallel there. You’ve got to be working.

Joe Casabona:

That’s exactly what I tell people too. “I am a professional athlete,” is what I tell people.

Joe Howard:

A professional audio athlete. There you go.

Joe Casabona:

Yeah, exactly. But you’re right. Instead of saying, “I only got 10 downloads,” you should be like, “I got 10 downloads. 10 people were interested enough in me to listen to me talk for 20 or 30 minutes.” That’s really nice. Because time is, I think Bill gates said this, time is the only thing that you can’t buy more of, right?

Joe Howard:

Yeah.

Joe Casabona:

The fact that anybody is willing to give you their time, especially when you’re first starting out, is something to celebrate. Whether it’s 10 people or 10,000 people.

Joe Howard:

Yeah, I agree. People like Joe, and me Joe, and anybody who is a huge podcaster or a huge anybody in their space, they started with 10. I remember getting our first email subscribers and being like, “Oh my God. People are giving us their email address?”

Joe Casabona:

Yeah.

Joe Howard:

You dummies. I can’t believe you actually did that. Now we get a bunch every day. It’s kind of an afterthought. But it all started there. That’s where everybody starts. If anybody is out there who has got 10 listens and they’re feeling a little down or something, that’s good. You have to be there and go through a little bit of that struggle period to get to where you want to be.

Joe Howard:

I studied math in college. I was a mathematics major. It was hard, very hard. But my dad always said, “If it was easy, everybody would do it. You would see a ton of math majors out there.” It’s not easy. That’s why it’s good that it’s hard. Think about that. That’s good, it’s good that things are hard. Let’s wrap up a little bit, and talk a little bit about video. Because I think video is a cool area that you’re also into.

Joe Casabona:

Sure.

Joe Howard:

I don’t know if I’d say another step up from audio. Maybe it’s a similar step. I don’t know how you would think about it. But to me, video is like not only do people have to hear you, but they see you on video. That’s a little bit more pressure. It’s like, okay, obviously you need some sort of video equipment to do this sort of setup. Let’s keep with the basics and just talk about what kind of video can people get started with? Since video is such a huge, growing piece of marketing and just the internet. Video has always been big. It will continue to grow, I think. But how can people get started with video in a somewhat simple way?

Joe Casabona:

Yeah. If we’re talking about professional services that I offer, the video startup is a much easier sell right now. I think more companies and brands are realizing that they need video. It’s because YouTube is so huge. It’s easier to discover videos because there is YouTube. There’s not a YouTube of podcasting yet at least. I think Spotify is probably trying to be that, but we’re probably a couple of years out from that still.

Joe Casabona:

There’s a whole YouTube algorithm thing. To answer your question, if you don’t have a rocking camera, if you have something that is just a built in camera, I think that if you want to do in front of the camera stuff, you should probably at least get a webcam. But if you can’t, lighting I think is the most important thing. Because if you’ve ever taken a picture, maybe not before the current set of phones that have that night mode now. But if you’ve ever taken a picture with a camera in daylight and then at night, the night picture is going to be grainy because the camera has to work harder to get a clear picture. Same thing for your webcam.

Joe Casabona:

If you are in a dark room, you’re going to just look bad because the camera has to work harder. Make its job easier by setting up a couple of lights. For like $20 or $30, you can get a couple of white lights that you can put on your desk. That’s going to improve your picture a lot. But if you could do screencast stuff, it doesn’t matter what camera you have. Most computers come with screen recording software. On a Mac, you can use QuickTime. If you want to step up a little bit, you can get ScreenFlow or Camtasia, which is both Windows and PC. I’m sorry, Windows and Mac.

Joe Casabona:

When you’re thinking about what kind of videos to put out, again, determine how you want to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Then figure out what you want to teach people. If it’s a screencast, walk them through something step by step. Narrate everything that you do. Script if you need to. If it’s a talking head video, again, dole out some advice. It’s not going to be as long as a podcast. Three to seven minutes, three to 10 minutes I would say. I think the YouTube algorithm favors… it changes all the time, so who knows? I’m not a YouTube expert. But it seems to favor that seven to nine minute content.

Joe Casabona:

That’s probably the amount of attention that you have for a viewer as well. Some of the YouTubers I like have 17 minute videos. Sometimes, I break those into two sessions. Because I’m eating lunch, and I watch half the video. Then I come back later. That’s kind of sad that I’m only taking 10 minutes for lunch. That’s a whole other thing. The point is, determine what kind of content you want to put out. If you’re doing talking head videos, make sure if you can’t get a really nice camera, at least have good lighting. Or start with screencasts where you show somebody step by step how to do something with the tools that you use on your computer.

Joe Howard:

Yeah, I think all good advice. Cool, man. I think that’s probably a good place to wrap up. We talked about audio, we talked about video. Let’s tell people, where can they find all the stuff you talked about? Your course, some of your video stuff. Also, maybe some of the tools that you use. Because I know we didn’t talk a ton about tools. People are always like, “What does Joe use? I want to know what he uses.” I know you have a page up with all the stuff you use too.

Joe Casabona:

Yeah, for sure. All of my stuff you can find at… We talked about a lot of things actually. By the time this comes out, there will be a page on by website, Casabona.org/… we’ll just say Joe. Hopefully that’s not taken already. Make it really easy. Casabona.org/Joe. That will take you to a bunch of resources. But if you are looking for anything that you want to do right now, my blog is Casabona.org.

Joe Casabona:

My podcast, course podcast, Liftoff, is at PodcastLiftoff.com. You can get 25% off with the code Bufftastic. Then I’m on YouTube. If you search for Joe Casabona on YouTube, I’ll have breakdowns of my recording gear and my video gear. Again, if you’re looking for a hub, Casabona.org/Joe will have everything.

Joe Howard:

Nice, cool. And he’s JCasabona on Twitter.

Joe Casabona:

Yes.

Joe Howard:

If you want to give him a follow, he’s a WordPress influencer. He’s one of the people you have to follow, so give him a follow.

Joe Casabona:

You’re making me blush over here.

Joe Howard:

Last thing I ask guests for is just to ask our listeners for a little five star iTunes review. If you wouldn’t mind giving them a little ask, I’d appreciate it.

Joe Casabona:

Yeah, definitely. Give this a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, because it helps people discover the show. Please do that.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. Thank you, man. In the comments, leave something you learned about this episode. Maybe a “Thanks, Joe.” Joe C., because you’ve got to be explicit about which Joe you’re thanking. We’ll shoot him a screenshot and say, “Thanks for the review.” It’s cool to hear what you learned so we can do more episodes about these kinds of topics. If you’re a new listener to the WPMRR WordPress podcast, go through some old episodes. We’ve got 100 plus old episodes for you to binge. We’ve got any topic you probably could have thought of. We’ve got some content on it. Go through and check out some older episodes. If you have questions for us at the show, shoot them in to Yo@WPMRR.com. We like to answer questions live on the podcast. Kristie and I have a few Q&A episodes that have been really fun to do. We’d love to do more.

Joe Howard:

Any questions you have around monthly income or revenue, or podcast, video, or anything around growing your WordPress business or business in general, just let us know. We’ll answer some questions. That is all for this week. We’ll be in your podcast player again next Tuesday. Joe, thanks again for being on, man. It’s been real.

Joe Casabona:

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

What’s been your experience with the WordPress community?

Today on the WPMRR podcast, Joe and Christie are joined with Alex Denning of Ellipsis Marketing and Tom Fanelli, CEO of Convesio, to talk about WordPress hosting, how to get investors, and the close ties between WordPress and WooCommerce

Listen in for some advanced WP hosting tips!

Episode Resources:

• Check out Convesio
• Send Tom an Email
• Tom is on LinkedIn or Twitter
• Visit Ellipsis Marketing
• Read Alex’s Newsletter
• Shoot Alex a Tweet  
• More episodes on iTunes
• Get infos on Liquidweb
• Check Nexcess
• More WP details on WPBuffs
• Send in your questions to yo@wpmrr.com

---

Christie:

Hello, WordPress people. Welcome back to WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Christie.

Joe:

And I’m Joe.

Alex D.:

I’m Manny from Black Books.

Tom F.:

And I’m Neo from The Matrix. 

Christie:

And you’re listening to the WordPress Business podcast. What is going on this week, everybody?

Joe:

We’ve got two fictional characters, Manny and Neo. I know Neo. I think people are familiar with those characters, but Manny. Who’s Manny? I don’t know that one.

Alex D.:

Shout out to listeners who got that. Manny is from a cult TV show Black Books where they run a bookshop. My name is Alex Denning.

Joe:

Yeah. We’ve got Alex Denning on the pod this week, who we’ve known for a little while and then we’ve also got Neo. Neo, why’d you choose that character this week?

Tom F.:

Huge Matrix fan and I’m actually outside the Bay Area and before all this crazy COVID stuff started happening, they were filming actually the next Matrix, so I think it’s good timing to revive the Matrix fandom.

Joe:

Nice. I’m a big Matrix fan too. I’ve always been, ever since the first one. I think my dad and I always went to see the new Matrix when it came out in theaters and stuff, so I definitely remember Matrix Reloaded and that highway car chase. I was like, “Yes, excellent.” Cool, we’ve got Alex and Tom on the pod this week. Why don’t we, Alex first, give people a quick intro to who you are and then we’ll go to Tom? Then we’ll just kind of get into today’s episode.

Alex D.:

Sure. My name’s Alex. I run a marketing agency called Ellipses Marketing and we do marketing for WordPress businesses. I have been involved in WordPress for 13 years maybe, so just a little while and also, co-author a weekly newsletter for WordPress people called MasterWP.co, the people say it’s good and that they read.

Joe:

I second it. I say it’s good. Christie, I think-

Christie:

I third it. It’s good.

Tom F.:

I fourth it.

Joe:

Yeah, and we talked about MasterWP… I mean, I think we’ve talked about it in multiple episodes, but in the funding episode we did recently, we touched on a big topic in the MasterWP newsletter that was actually authored by our other guest today who is Tom. So, Tom, give folks a little intro about who you are as well.

Tom F.:

Sure, yeah. Thanks. My name’s Tom Finelli. I’m the CEO of [Convesio 00:02:56] and we are sort of trying to revolutionize WordPress hosting. We’re a container based, highly scalable, highly performant hosting platform for WordPress and we’re basically trying to rewrite the book on how to host WordPress.

Joe:

Whoa, tall order for this week. It’ll be interesting to have a couple hosting folks on the pod this week, Christie. We’ve got obviously [inaudible 00:03:23] nexus and then we have Convesio too so we can talk more hosting stuff that goes way over my head.

Christie:

Ooh, hosting.

Joe:

Yeah. Cool. Convesio, what’s the… Man, you’re talking a big game about changing the world of hosting. What makes Convesio different than other hosting out there?

Tom F.:

Yeah, so let me give you a little history of the genesis of the idea of how we came up. It’s awesome to be here with people that have been working in WordPress for a really long time. I’m going to date myself a little bit, but I started building websites in the mid to late ’90s and so, before WordPress was, I don’t know, maybe even an idea in someone’s head. But I was using a product called Adobe Pagemill, so I started my career in the agency space and I transitioned into tech companies and really my DNA is product marketing and technology. 

Did some executive roles at sales companies. 11 years ago, moved to California to work for a startup. A year into the gig, we sold the company and then a year later, the company that bought us had an IPO and I stayed there for another, gosh, five years, I think. I was very fortunate. I did the whole startup to exit to IPO thing in a short period of time, coming out to California.

I worked in enterprises for the following, I don’t know, eight or ten years. That experience showed me this huge chasm between what enterprise hosting has, disaster recovery, scalability, containerization, all of these really cool things that you can do at the enterprise level and when you see where shared, VPS, dedicated hosted, all of this stuff I put under legacy hosting, it really bothered me that so many hosting companies just “me too” one another. They license [c-panel 00:05:40], throw it on some servers.

They’re literally the same thing from one company to another. The only thing that is different is the marketing. So, as a product person, it really bothered me that there was so little innovation taking place in the hosting space. Three years ago, I decided to see if we could completely rewrite the book on hosting with a custom tech stack and using containers and all the latest technologies available since it felt like hosting was stuck in the 15 years ago time space.

So, we did that. We went to beta, we got some raving fans, and what we do that is really different than other hosting providers is we’ve broken the entire tech stack of WordPress into different layers and microservices. We deploy sites not on one server and share the resources, but on a cluster of servers and the database is replicated across multiple nodes in the cluster.

The WordPress instance can scale up in seconds across multiple servers in the cluster and then everything is load balanced natively, so your WordPress runs in this multi-instance type of environment, which helps remove single points of failure traditionally associated with WordPress, like my database goes down and my entire VPS is offline with all my sites.

We’ve tried to flip the model from going from all of these single points of failure associated with shared and VPS hosting and make a redundant, very resilient, and highly native, scalable WordPress platform and that’s what we’re doing. As you guys know and you mentioned, we just raised just over a million dollars with 800 plus investors. We just closed that in December and that’s been an exciting journey for us and a lot of validation that what we’re doing…

Basically, we’ve come out of beta and we’ve started hustling, so everyday for me is a sales, marketing, keeping customers happy, hustle and trying to continue to evolve our platform to fulfill and deliver on those promises.

Joe:

Yeah. Cool, man. You just talked a whole ton about hosting infrastructure and as a non-technical person, I’m like, “That sounds cool. Yeah.” I’m like, it sounds very impressive and I’m sure that it is. I’m also just like, “Oh, yeah. I guess I’ll take your word for it,” because all the container stuff, I’m like, “Yeah, sure. Sounds great.” Christie maybe will ask some better questions about it than I could probably.

Christie:

I think that for both your sake and the thing about having questions is that when you have a question, most likely other people have a question. For our listeners, let me give it a stab at simplifying it.

Tom F.:

I love this. This is always fun.

Christie:

Yeah. My job at Liquid Web is as the single product manager for the Manage WooCommerce line, so in terms of the skills that I bring to the table, I bring sort of what the organization would call WordPress and up the stack. I’m talking about WordPress sometimes, but really I’m talking about the plugin ecosystem most of the time, so Woo Commerce and up. Thinking about WooCommerce, thinking about the other plugin ecosystems that exist, thinking about the WordPress ecosystem that exists and the types of people who buy Manage WooCommerce hosting and bringing in market understanding to do competitive analysis and things like that.

That’s a lot of what my job is. Liquid Web is a very market driven IT services company, but as part of my job, I have to understand everything Tom just said because if I don’t understand everything Tom just said, at some high level, I don’t know what technologies you’re deploying and how, but I have to get why that’s better.

Essentially, I’ll encourage you to think about it this way. In the traditional paradigm of WordPress hosting, you would at the cheapest level get space on a shared VPS. There is a box. If you get it from Liquid Web, it’s in Lansing or somewhere else, depending on some of our international locations but centralized in Lansing. If you get it from Nexus, it’s in Detroit. There’s a box.

Although with Nexus, that’s different and we’ll get there but with Liquid Web, traditionally, there’s a box and multiple people are on that box and multiple websites are on that box. If somebody else says, “Hey, we’re having a viral campaign and ten million people are going to come to my site”, the box is like, “Nope, we’re done. We can’t do this. This is too much.” Okay. Our first solution to that was, “What if you had your own boxes?”

Yeah, nobody can bring you down if you go viral if you have your own box. Dedicated VPS hosting. That’s the enterprise, that’s the high end solution, it’s a dedicated box. Well, the problem with the dedicated box is that it still has a number of limited resources, so even if it’s just you in the box, if you get 100 million views because your Instagram post went viral, you’re bringing yourself down.

The next space there was what Tom is talking about. How do we dynamically allocate resources to different requests across multiple servers, whether virtual or physical, to make sure that everything has what it needs and that everything stays up and has maximum stability, point one. Then you also said something about replicated databases. That sounds to me like maybe a way to distribute the kinds of queries that we do.

WordPress asks for a lot of different stuff. Many of us use WordPress for both external calls, what we see on the page, what we see on the checkout, but also internal calls like what do we have in terms of our order data, what do we have in terms of analytics in the WordPress dashboard. At scale, that kind of stuff gets super slow and I can give you the world’s biggest, greatest, shiniest box ever but I can’t really. Not when you’re running millions and millions and millions of requests a day.

When Tom were talking about enterprise hosting, he was talking about the way in which we hear all these things that we pair with them of Time Magazine uses WordPress, Beyonce uses WordPress, right? But the reality of situations like that is that there is a lot of custom infrastructure work that goes into making sure that that works. At the enterprise level, that happens because there is a team that is standing up container based cluster on cloud stuff and again, I have to understand this at a high level, right? To make sure that those WordPress websites stay up reliably, usually we’re using something like AWS or GCP to make sure that that is custom created.

But that means that you are going to be responsible for that entire custom infrastructure instances. So, what companies like Convesio…

Tom F.:

That’s correct, yeah.

Christie:

What [inaudible 00:13:28] like Convesio are doing is productizing that concept. How do we give you that whole thing at scale? What’s interesting is that, and the community is slowly learning about this, which is that Liquid Web acquired a small company in Detroit called Nexus and Nexus is essentially that. So, we are figuring out the ways to describe how and why and the different ways in which that is better and can be done at scale and Nexus in particular hit this nail on the head with Magento.

Right? So, the thesis there is well, they did it really well with Magento, how do we bring that to WordPress? This is actually super cool. I hope that helps bring some clarity to the people like me who are operating in the site implementor and you know the products and you know the ecosystem and you know the concept of grabbing the right tools to put together a pretty looking website using minimal code to understand how a company like Convesio is bringing you something really exciting.

Joe:

Yeah, super cool. That was actually super helpful for me, Christie. I think what you and Tom both just said kind of came together in my brain and helped me to understand a little bit more about the scalability of hosting and how that works. That’s cool. Tom, I do want to come back and talk about the funding stuff at some point because Christie and I just had a great episode all about funding in the WordPress space and I think both of us would like to dive into that a little deeper.

But Alex, I also want to talk to you a little bit about the part you’re bringing to the equation, just the helping of the marketing stuff with Convesio. Maybe we can talk about that for a few minutes here.

Alex D.:

Yeah, so I have been working with Tom for nearly two years now, I think and yeah, it’s a lot of… I guess it’s developed a bit in that it was a lot of education to start with. People understand what they have to the extent that they need to and this is something new, so we need to talk about why that’s different, why that’s better. Specifically for Convesio, it’s quite interesting in terms of the benefits that you can bring that are non-technology to the target audience.

If I run an agency and I have 100 sites and I get a phone call in the middle of the night because my client’s site’s gone down, I get blamed for that but I don’t get any sleep and that’s just a bad outcome. If your hosting provider is taking care of that kind of thing automatically for you, then I can sleep better at night and that’s great because I love my sleep. You can apply that across all sorts of things.

That’s good for your MRL. It’s good for that because your clients are going to stay and spend more money with you, et cetera, so you might be able to [inaudible 00:16:46] your support in making that contract or whatever it looks like. Yeah, we’ve done a lot of that. At the moment, we are supporting Convesio in their efforts to get people to join. Yeah.

Joe:

Yeah, very cool. Alex, had you done marketing for a hosting company like this in the past? Is this something you had to pick up on as you were trying to market? Because a lot of marketing is learning the product and how it works and I’m hearing this as a marketer and I’m like, “That sounds kind of hard to market because I don’t really know much about the technical aspects of hosting,” and I probably lean more towards what are the non-technical benefits like getting more sleep and having your clients’ websites stay up more and that kind of stuff. Was this your first time doing hosting stuff, Alex?

Alex D.:

Yeah. We have internally a big cheat sheet on the technical stuff [inaudible 00:17:39] Tom. The non-technical benefits are important and to some extent, resonate more with the specific target audience right now, I think. Yes, you and I can understand that sleeping is good and how being phoned in the middle of the night because the site has gone down is bad.

Joe:

Yeah.

Tom F.:

I think there’s two aspects to this, which is the question of how are we different and how are we disrupting the marketplace and then what’s the… We do that through our technology and then the other aspect is the one that really resonates to the masses, which is what’s the value of that difference. It’s a bunch of these short little snippets of things like we’re 239% faster, we take complete accountability for your sites being online, we monitor sites at every minute. If anything happens, our team intervenes 24/7 and so, that’s the kind of stuff that I think goes from a feature to a benefit and that’s what Alex has really been great at helping us figure out.

Joe:

Yeah. Go ahead, Christie.

Christie:

That’s also a lot of my job. At a larger company like Liquid Web that is trying to innovate the best that it can at its size and scale, what a product manager does effectively communicate and build bridges between marketing and engineering and sales so that everybody can understand what we’re selling and so that we can look at market perspectives and product descriptions to sell something and grow something effectively.

In a setting where product managers aren’t needed, Alex’s and Tom’s are talking directly to each others which creates efficiency and then in large, big, slow, bumbling corporations, you have little Christies running around talking about an Instagram post bringing down boxes to help people across the entire organization understand. 

For example, one big challenge that we see and that we’ve started to see as we’ve started to shift from, “Hey, Liquid Web is good because you get your own dedicated server on every single high end Manage WooCommerce plan,” to, “Hey, Liquid Web bought Nexus and Nexus is good because you get this auto scaling Nexus cloud platform.”

Now, people will say, “Well, it’s dedicated,” and we’re like, “Well, no, it’s better.” They’re like, “Oh no, it’s not dedicated. It’s shared. Shared is bad. Bye.” It’s like, “Wait, no, no, no, no. Hold on, hold on. Wait, wait, wait.” Right? The big conversation that we have is how do we work the innovation against the status quo of what this product ecosystem and what this market is used to. I’m sure you’re all dealing with that and trust me, we’re dealing with it too.

Tom F.:

Yeah, I mean I think of people like Elon Musk, right? Before I moved to the Bay Area, I was in Florida and I remember a time 15 years ago where people were just downright anti electric vehicles. You think about how long he’s been working at changing the tide of perception to now these things have become like a status symbol. That’s a great example of how sometimes, believe me, I know what we do is complicated and it’s hard.

I remember when I first started building websites for people. Do you know the biggest challenge people had when we would build a website was setting up their email? Now, people rarely ask for help with how do I configure pop servers and iMap servers because collectively, the community as a whole, the world has gotten much more tech savvy. I see that kind of paralleling hosting a little bit in the fact that there’s such an entrenched standard of shared and VPS hosting that when something new comes along and it’s drastically different, there’s a bit of an education curve to it.

Right now, I would say we’re getting the early adopters, the people who get what I said and they’re like, “Wow, that’s cool.” Alex is trying to broaden that for us but it’s certainly people who are open to going with something that’s still new and still evolving.

Joe:

Yeah, hosting is such a big… I mean, every website online needs hosting and it’s such a big industry that it’s hard to move the entire industry away from something like c-panel. Not everything’s bad about c-panel, but Christie and I definitely talk about c-panel in our last Q&A episode and we’re like, “There’s some definite issues with it.” Yeah, Tom, I would also love to talk about the funding stuff because Christie and I got a lot of great feedback from our funding episode.

We had a ton of listeners and we got a lot of people that were like, “That was a really good episode”, so I think people probably are hungry to hear a little bit more about that. It’s interesting to hear someone from your background coming into the WordPress space and trying to innovate on something like hosting, especially someone with more of a tech background. A lot of WordPress folks have WordPress backgrounds. Alex and I have been working WordPress for Alex for a long, long time.

Christie and I, probably for somewhat similar amount of time. I don’t know, I’ve been eight years or so but a lot of WordPress, but not as much in the more tech scene, like the bigger tech scene. As someone who raised money to build a company that’s working in the WordPress space, it’s very interesting to us. Christie and I literally said that in that episode. We were like, “We want to talk to more people who are doing more funding stuff. That’s super interesting to us.”

Could we talk a little bit about the million dollars you raised? From 800 people, that’s also… I want to touch on that because you’re not raising from [inaudible 00:24:04] two people, you’re probably raising $10,000 from smaller maybe angel investors. Can you tell us the walking through of how that worked and how you came out the other side of it?

Tom F.:

Yeah, sure. I’ll start with the fact that when I had mentioned earlier I moved to the Bay Area 10 years ago, 11 years ago now, that was in a space, the prop tech industry. So, it’s a subsection of real estate dealing with usually rentals. So, that space, the company that we took public was the first unicorn in that space. Now, fast forward eight, nine years later, that space has blown up. There’s conferences with hundreds of startups that attend. There’s billions of dollars in VC money that’s getting poured into it and it’s this flourishing industry that people now purposely go into with the model of raising money for a startup, a more traditional-

Joe:

It’s pop tech, you said?

Tom F.:

Property technology.

Joe:

Prop tech. Property technology.

Tom F.:

Right, and so basically, I see this type of thing happening in WordPress because I think the big shift in prop tech was that when we went public, which WP Engine I predict is going to be the first to do this in the WordPress space, now you’ve got EIG and GoDaddy and other web companies that are public, but when the institutional investment community starts to see that there is a unicorn in the WordPress space, it’s going to change the dynamic of the industry.

WordPress is very grassroots because it’s an open source industry and while there’s some great examples of open source industries just blowing up, I think that the investment community is still unsure exactly how, especially the non-tech investment community, is still unsure how to wrap their head around it. I think WP Engine, when they go and they have their IPO, we’ll be able to see man, there’s now a billion dollar company in the WordPress space. Automatic is going to follow it, maybe Pantheon with follow them, who knows?

But there’s going to be a string of IPOs and people are going to start to realize the profound nature of a platform controlling 35, 30 some percent and growing of the web. Okay? You look at people who get super excited about the Wixs of the world. They’re around three percent market share, compared to WordPress’s 30 some, five percent, whatever it is. It’s going up every month. 

I think that that has made it both traditionally difficult to raise money, because we started pitching angel investors and I pitched for some angel groups and they’re like, “Wait, what’s WordPress?” So, I immediately realized, “This is the wrong crew. I’m not in front of the right people. They don’t get this. They don’t get what we’re doing.”

So, we decided, after sort of trying to find some people in the VC community to partner with, a buddy of mine came to me and said, “Hey, you should check out what’s called equity crowdfunding. I just raised a million bucks on it for my startup. You should check it out. I’m going to introduce you to some people that can help you.” He introduced me to a company called WeFunder.

In 2016, Obama implemented the JOBS Act and as part of that, they lifted the restrictions on being what’s called an accredited investor to investing in startups. To be an accredited investor, you need a million dollars in net assets or three years of 200k or more verifiable income. Then they basically say you know enough or you have enough wherewithal to invest in startups. 

With the removal of that limitation, it’s created this hybrid where sites like Kickstarter, where they’ve got massive amounts of people wanting to help start startups, and investment community models have come together and they’ve created these sites like WeFunder or Start Engine, they’re both the two big guys in the space but there’s dozens of other ones. Basically what they do is they allow hundreds of investors, thousands of investors to make micro investments.

But unlike Kickstarter, and by the way this is one of the biggest things we struggled with was explaining the difference to people investing because a lot of people are like, “Wait a second, this is like Kickstarter, I’m just making a donation”, you actually own equity in the company that you invest in. It’s a real funding vehicle, it’s regulated by the SEC and Finra and we basically leveraged that through what’s called a regulation CF or regulation crowdfunding campaign. That allows you to raise somewhere around a million dollars.

That’s what we decided to do. There was a lot of work launching that campaign and I’m happy to talk about that if you want, but that’s really what we used and we used WeFunder to run our campaign.

Joe:

Gotcha. Yeah, cool. I figured it was something like that, but I didn’t know about WeFunder specifically and that model of buying equity in the companies and stuff. I mean, that’s a cool model for people who may not have a million dollars in assets or whatever. I think you said they make $200,000 two years in a row.

Tom F.:

Right.

Joe:

Most probably haven’t done those things and still probably want to maybe do a little more than getting out the Robin Hood app and try and do a little [inaudible 00:29:54] company, so…

Tom F.:

It lets individuals invest in companies they believe in and that they want to get behind and they want to go on this and that’s why I love it for WordPress. WordPress is so community driven. For us to be able to give people the ability to get into actually own a piece of hosting company that will hopefully turn into the next WP Engine, Pantheon, Flywheel, is a really cool way to I think keep your customers and your fans close to you in a way where you have this shared success.

As we grow, we have the ability to bring people along on that journey with us, so that’s a really cool proposition that I hope more WordPress businesses and companies take advantage of this. By the way, if anyone’s interested and wants more details on this, you can reach out to me. I want to kind of be an advocate of WordPress businesses using this to help generate capital for them to make more investments, because that’s going to make the overall ecosystem of our products and services much better.

Joe:

Yeah. This is becoming very interesting to me hearing this because, because like Christie and I on our last funding episode were talking about, big companies coming in and changing the WordPress space and maybe not for the better. I’m hearing a lot of ways for us as a WordPress, like you said Tom, grassroots community to have more financial control over the future of WordPress just because a lot of us aren’t these top investors or have a hundred million dollars to invest in the WordPress space. We can still invest in companies and have a financial stake in, albeit a small one, but have a financial stake in companies we want to see do well. I don’t know. That has some positive connotations in my mind. Christie, what do you think about that idea? You think that’s something that would be welcome in the WordPress space?

Christie:

Here’s a fun fact about me that you don’t know because, I don’t know [crosstalk 00:32:06].

Joe:

We’ve done 100 episodes and [inaudible 00:32:08] episodes, I learn something new about Christie. I didn’t know that before. Okay, cool.

Christie:

It’s because I am an idea a minute type person and every once in awhile, I act on them, you know? Here’s the fun fact about me that you didn’t know. My Master’s thesis was actually on alternative methods of new venture financing back in 2015. Yep, and I looked deeply into both crowdfunding but also equity crowdfunding and also a lot of zero percent loans, Kiva.org, things like that and all the different methods that are existing beyond sort of the first round of alternative methods of new venture financing, because it’s an interesting topic both in economic development and also business development.

It’s a whole rabbit hole that we should totally do multiple episodes on. It’s super interesting. I’m sure that the things that I learned and dug up in my interviews and research in 2015 are all now just completely obsolete, because it’s such a space that’s changing so quickly. But one of the things that really stood out to me in that research was that your success with these kinds of methods right now is actually closely tied to your existing social capital.

We tend to think of these methods of democratizing the ability to fund raise and they are, but in addition to that, we have to put in other efforts to make sure that people engaging in these alternative fundraising methods are able to leverage people of more privilege and people who have access to resources, right? The thing is when you have money, you know people who have money type situation. And making sure that we make that playing field as level as we possibly can was a big part of the conclusion of that paper for me, which brings me back to something that really caught my attention which was WordPress seems particularly positioned for that because there is such an ability to enter. All you need is time and a computer.

There is such a propensity to help others. I had a call yesterday with someone who is building a new WordPress product and wanted just some tips of getting those first few customers. One of the things that I kept drilling on is you’re going to be surprised at how willing people are to help, to help you, to be advisors to you, and to support you just because you are new and this is a community that believes that everybody rises together.

I was surprised when I started working with WordPress at the way in which my top competitors all wanted to give me good advice. I was like, “What? What’s happening here?” One of the most incredible moments I think in the WordPress ecosystem that I had was I spoke at WordCamp San Jose and I got to meet the creator of Gravity Forms while I was working on Caldera Forms, Carl Hancock. He was kind, encouraging, had lots of good advice and lots of positive spirits to give me.

This ecosystem knows that there are billions of people in this world and they all need websites and it doesn’t see what we’re doing as limited pie, which is the perfect foundation for an equitable and democratized system for new venture financing. So, I love everything about this.

Tom F.:

Yeah, well said.

Joe:

Cool. Alex, as someone who writes this super popular newsletter in the WordPress space that I think most people in the WordPress community who I knew subscribe and read and check it out, as someone who puts that newsletter together and putting together Tom’s update on Convesio and this thought on companies potentially IPO’ing and that bringing a lot of attention to the WordPress community, is that something you’re starting to see and hear more rumblings about?

[inaudible 00:36:38] that in general but also funding in the WordPress space just as someone who does a lot of gathering of information and delivers it to folks.

Alex D.:

I’ve been running this newsletter for just over three years now. We do it every week and that probably coincides with when this has really taken off. There was I guess a slow down the last couple of months but there was a time at which every week, there was someone’s raised $100,000, not even worth mentioning. Come back to me when you’ve got a million.

There was a time when 100,000 was very exciting and everyone dropped everything for that. Automatics invested in whoever. Two years ago, I would’ve known exactly all the details. There was something last week, I didn’t even look. For me, I’ve accidentally become a source of news for people.

Christie:

[crosstalk 00:37:46]

Alex D.:

People increasingly leak us stuff, which is fun and yeah, there’s just more and more and more and it’s not going to stop and we’re going to see hopefully more equity crowdfunding but also more just straight up, here’s a big pile of money, go ahead and do something with it. There’s been a lot this year. Elementor, $15 million. Stratic, I think $6.5 million. Others who I forget the names of, my apologies, and we’re just going to see more and more of that and those numbers are going… The baseline for what is a normal amount is just going up and up.

Tom F.:

Yeah, and what’s interesting is if you look a little below the surface of those, what I look at is who is investing. Excuse me. You take Elementor for example, their lead investor was Lightspeed. That’s a top tier VC in the Bay Area, okay? And beyond. You look at Stratic and they had some lesser known ones but they had participation by Excel. Excel is one of the top three venture partners in Silicon Valley. I mean, they were Spotify, Facebook, early stage. I mean, they’re a titan in the VC world.

If these guys can get validation of these top tier VCs, that is a really big sign that these more traditional sources of venture capital are wising up to the maturity of the WordPress space. The other thing that I would say is the fact that while Stratic and Elementor are both WordPress companies for sure, I think a lot of the buzz around Stratic is the serverless possibility and I think a lot of the buzz around Elementor, quite frankly, is the notion that we help people built websites, okay?

I think there was some hinting at their press release on this that the story that they’re talking about is something that goes beyond just WordPress, right? It starts to touch into this notion of where Wix is at, which is we make it easy for people to build websites and get online. Make no mistake, that market is massive, okay? Lots of people want to get online but it’s a totally different animal than the agency developer space who’s building five WordPress sites a month and they’re totally baked in on that.

I think that while WordPress is definitely a narrative in those and a very important one, I think it’s cool to see how we’re attracting these more traditional VC sources and the valuations, to Alex’s point, just keep going up, up, up and up. I think those are all really encouraging signs as to where the market’s heading.

TechCrunch posted an article in the beginning of 2018. They said WordPress was the most underfunded, one of the most underfunded VC segments of the technology landscape. Now, 300 million from Salesforce into Automatic skews those numbers, but you take that out, it still remains there’s very, very minimal VC investment into WordPress companies. 

Alex D.:

Something else that’s exciting about the Elementor and Stratic deals is those are not US companies which, for me as a European, is very exciting because I don’t think… They’re isolated examples before, but for those two to come along quickly was very exciting and that paves the way I think for more of those.

Joe:

Yeah, for sure. I had not looked a ton into the actual funders or the people behind the VC money but that is super interesting to me. Thank you both for talking about that because I have not really thought about it in that way and it is enlightening to hear that wow, some of the top VC firms, some international VC interest is coming in. All these different companies you’ve talked about getting VC funding, they’re all somewhat in different spaces. Convesio is, as you know, doing funding and there’s kind of the headless WordPress stuff with Stratic and then Page Builder potentially aiming more towards a closed system in Elementor.

I mean, all kind of in different spaces. Tom, what you said made me think that maybe this is VCs kind of dipping their toe in the water and seeing what’s going on in the WordPress space. Obviously, these companies have a lot of money they’ve invested in things like Facebook. They probably are doing pretty well financially. This may just be the first step for some of these VC firms and then they may start looking for bigger options. I don’t know.

Tom F.:

Yeah, the ecosystem is so broad, I think that’s absolutely going to happen.

Alex D.:

That’s a very important point. We think of it as WordPress, but that WordPress market splits out so many different ways. I run a marketing agency that obviously can’t work with two people doing the same thing, so we have a conflict of interest rule and we basically never have to deal with it. I can think of twice in the last three years where we’ve had two people who are actually doing the same thing because WordPress splits out so many different ways. You look at your form plugins, which you would I guess think is a fairly narrow space, but no. 

Christie:

No, no, right? One of the big things there was why are WP Forms and Formidable Forms now under the same thing? What? It’s like, because they’re completely different. There’s so much space and that is only thinking about the people who even identify as being WordPress related, because before I was involved with the WordPress community, I was working with WordPress every single day and at no point was I like, “I am a part of the WordPress community” because nonprofits don’t think of themselves as part of the WordPress community, agencies serving major NGOs building WordPress websites don’t think of themselves as part of the WordPress community. They’re the nonprofit tech community.

Associations don’t think of themselves as part of the WordPress community. The people who serve the technologies required for associations which mostly leverage open source technologies and member plugins and things like that to run association websites do not think of themselves as part of the WordPress community, so it’s huge. Because it’s distributed, we haven’t seen the way that all the links fit together, but they’re all there under the hood if you understand the market and you understand the products.

Tom F.:

Yeah, think of how many companies have… We just participated in the Ecom Services Summit just a couple weeks ago and I was on a panel there and one of the companies was this company OmniSend and they do multichannel ecommerce and I don’t think they think of themselves as part of the WordPress community, but they have a deep WordPress integration plugin and I think I’ve seen a bunch of companies like that before and it’s almost like they look at WordPress as an extension to what they’re doing, but they don’t realize, “Man, I could actually go into the community and leverage that a heck of a lot more as a channel to engage people than I could just going, oh, I’ve got a few WordPress users, I’m going to build a plugin for them.” You know?

So, I think it’s mindset in some of these bigger companies as to do you want to part of the community and contribute or do you just see it as something that’s this, I’ve got a need for a plugin so I’m going to build one and you never even think of yourself as part of the community.

Joe:

Yeah, that’s totally true. There’s so many companies that try to, I don’t know, get into the WordPress space or do more WordPress. Well, you’re right. There are a lot that don’t take advantage of it and just kind of almost even know the communities there. A lot do, but they don’t really know how to get into the community. Tom, I think it was very smart of you to work with someone like Alex who has a lot of experience in the WordPress community because I’ve seen a ton of companies try to come in and it’s like, that’s not really-

Christie:

Yikes. Yeah, I’ve seen that so much. It’s so cringey, right? Hiring Alex was such a smart move because Alex deeply understands the ecosystem and it is more common than not to watch outsider companies come in and just be cringey in weird, small ways, like not capitalizing the P and other things that are so inconsequential and yet mean the world when competition is high and details matter.

Tom F.:

Yeah, I don’t know who this guy Alex is. I hired Manny and so, Manny’s awesome. You should check him out. He’s great.

Alex D.:

That’s a good point about the capital P though. That’s just the single biggest thing. Single smallest biggest thing that you can do to signal that you understand what’s going on.

Christie:

Or the C in WooCommerce. That’s one that I end up dealing with now or even the understanding of how WordPress and WooCommerce fit together, right? With the larger ecommerce world, the larger ecommerce world is looking at WooCommerce like, “Whoa. Okay, hold on, that’s a thing.” Then they try to market to it and without understanding the deeper ecosystem around it, it just seems weird. Right? If you don’t understand that WooCommerce subset of WordPress and how, you’re going to put your foot in your mouth in lots of awkward ways which is why you need competent and… I don’t think competent is the right word. I think involved is the right word, people on your team.

Tom F.:

Can I ask a question of Christie? I mean, I know I’m not the host.

Joe:

Turns the interview on Christie.

Tom F.:

This is something that… Christie, I was really hoping when Automatic took the 300 million from Salesforce that… In my mind, I was telling myself this narrative that they’ve seen what Shopify’s done and they’re just angry about it and they basically have taken this investment capital and they’re going to crush Shopify with WooCommerce and then the Tumblr thing came into play. I’m like, I want to know your opinion being so close to WooCommerce. Are we just going to let Shopify eat our lunch for another 10 years or what are we going to do here?

That Shopify situation is… I mean, it’s an amazing story but it’s also bittersweet because I’m like, “Man, that should be WooCommerce.” What’s your thoughts on that?

Christie:

Tom, let me start by saying that my hair is full of secrets I can’t disclose. That’s why it’s so big.

Tom F.:

That’s not fair.

Joe:

She’s going to drop Alex some secret [inaudible 00:49:49].

Christie:

But in terms of the question, for real, for real, I think that’s exactly what we’re doing. That’s what’s going to happen. Now, the problem is that you want it to happen faster. We all want it to happen faster. We want to see the turnaround overnight and that is what we’re not seeing and why is that? I don’t know, because we need more hurried, spazzy people in there. That’s okay. That is the nature of these things is that change happens slowly and all at once

I do think we’re going in that direction. The conversations that I’m internally from my boss and my boss’s boss all are throwing me in that direction. The innovations that we’re seeing surrounding WooCommerce and then also surrounding… I just lost my train of thought. The innovations that we’re seeing surrounding WooCommerce, both itself and also the companies that exist around to prop it up, are all about that. 

Within WooCommerce, we just saw WooCommerce payments roll out. That’s a clear attempt at moving in that direction. Within the innovations surrounding WooCommerce, I just told you all what the hosting end is working on, right? Liquid Web sort of was the first one to hit with this Manage WooCommerce idea and now we’re making the underlying infrastructure even bigger and better while continuing to add stuff to the top so that it’s an all inclusive feature rich platform. That is also going after the Shopify lunch.

Then the last thing that I look at is numbers. Shopify has lots of money, so it feels like they’re everywhere and they have lots of reach at the lower end of the market so it feels like it’s absolutely everywhere, but Shopify only maintains a third of the market share that WooCommerce maintains right now. So, WooCommerce kind of came in and took over. Why? Because of the proliferation of WordPress.

If you already have a WordPress website, you can install WooCommerce on there and then there you go, you have an ecommerce store now. That is not to say that that means anything. Actually, that means nothing at all. You could overtake that with enough money. Boom, bye. Knock WooCommerce out of the park, which is why WooCommerce needs to catch up with all the other feature functionalities and quickly. That’s what you’re feeling. That’s exactly where everybody’s minds are. We just need to move faster.

Tom F.:

Yeah. Cool. I’ll sleep a little bit better at night knowing that you’ve told me secretively it’s happening.

Joe:

Christie’s [inaudible 00:52:25] the WooCommerce train. Cool. That’s probably a good place to start wrapping up today’s episode. This was super informative for me. I had a ton of fun talking with all three of you. This is, I think, our first episode with four people and it actually went pretty well, I think. Awesome. Let’s wrap up. Tom and Alex. Alex, you first. Where can people find you online if they want to catch up with you?

Alex D.:

I run Ellipses Marketing if you would like some marketing. 

Christie:

Please buy my marketing.

Alex D.:

Our website is getellipses.com. I’m also on Twitter, just my name, @alexdenning and I run MasterWP.co, which as we all agreed, is a pretty good newsletter that you may like to read.

Tom F.:

Go sign up.

Joe:

[crosstalk 00:53:17] good. Cool. Thanks. How about you, Tom?

Tom F.:

Yeah, you can find me at… My email is tom@convesio.com. Feel free to email me if you’ve got questions and you can find me @tfinelli on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Joe:

Right on. Last thing we ask our guests to do every episode is to ask our listeners for a little five star iTunes review, so Tom, maybe you could ask our listeners here for a little review for the show.

Tom F.:

Yes, so to all the WPMRR listeners, please go to iTunes and give us a five star rating for the awesome job Joe and Christie are doing with this.

Alex D.:

I listen to no podcasts apart from yours, pretty much. So, five stars.

Christie:

Special.

Joe:

Thank you. If you’re giving a review, make sure in the comments, you leave obviously your favorite emoji but also something you learned from this episode, something you took away, maybe Tom and Alex’s names so we can send them a screenshot and say thank you for the review. Poo poo. How else do we wrap up the show? If you wanted to leave that review, WPMRR.com/itunes. We direct you right there. 

If you’re a new listener to the show, if this is your first episode or second episode or third episode, go back through some old episodes. This is going to be episode 101, so we’ve literally got 100 other episodes for you to listen to. So, go back and check out some old ones. Got a ton of content there. Q&A episodes. Christie, you want to talk about Q&A episodes?

Christie:

I want to talk about how I just followed Tom on Twitter, who was the only person on this podcast that I didn’t already follow on Twitter, so if you want to be just like me, follow Tom or I don’t know. If you don’t want to be just like me, still follow Tom. What was the real question? The real question was if I want to tell people about…

Joe:

Q&A episodes. [crosstalk 00:55:23] should they reach out to us for [inaudible 00:55:25]?

Christie:

Hey, if you have questions about what you heard today or anything else that you hear in the binge listening of WPMRR that you’re going to do because we recommended it, let us know. We have an email inbox where you can send your questions and it is yo@wpmrr.com. Why? Because we are hip and cool and totally not in our 30s or old. I love answering questions. I think Q&A episodes are super fun, so that will make me really happy.

I’ve been pushing Joe for the past month now on letting me do a WPMRR episode that is just bad advice with Christie [Churinos 00:56:03], so if you think that would be funny, you can send your questions and we will do a bad advice with Christie Churinos episode.

Joe:

Yes, love that. It’s coming. Cool. Check out Convesio, check out MasterWP, check out Ellipses Marketing, check out Nexus, Liquid Web, WP Boss, WPMRR, all of the above. We’ll be in your podcast player again next Tuesday. Tom and Alex, thanks again for being on. It’s been real.

Tom F.:

Thanks so much.

Alex D.:

Thank you, guys.

Obi-Wan stops by today taking a small break between helping others save the galaxy.

In this episode of WPMRR, Jay discusses his thoughts on annual recurring revenue, having a business mindset, and his book “Building a Business that Lasts.”

Tune in to learn how to be the best guide for your customers.

Episode Resources:

• Get your copy of Building a Business that Lasts
• Check out Jay’s website
• Listen to Jay’s Building a Business that Lasts podcast
• Follow Jay on Twitter
• Send us your questions to yo@wpmrr.com

---

Joe:

Hey, hey, hey, the WordPress People, welcome back to the WPMRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe.

Jay:

And I’m Obi-wan Kenobi.

Joe:

And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. We’ve got Obi-wan on the podcast this week. What’s going on, just saving the galaxy this week or what?

Jay:

Yes. Yeah, man. That’s all I do, help other people save the galaxy ultimately.

Joe:

Ah, there you go. I’ve had people pick Obi-wan before, and a lot of the reply is, “I’m a background character that helps other characters to be their most powerful.” So as an owner of a design agency, I totally get that.

Jay:

Yeah. That’s kind of the ideas. We always talk about being the guide for our customers and helping our customers be the guide for their customers, versus trying to be the hero of the story. So instead of being Luke Skywalker, I picked Obi-wan.

Joe:

There you go. You are the chosen one. I’ve got my high ground. Yeah, nice. Okay. We’ve got Obi-wan on the pod this week, also known as Jay Owen. Jay, I feel doing a little intro here and tell folks the stuff you do with WordPress.

Jay:

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been building WordPress websites for, I don’t know how long, ages. I’ve run this agency for over 20 years, and we’ve developed hundreds of WordPress websites, which we host, manage design, develop, the whole thing from beginning to end. And I remember back in the day doing things in plain HTML and we don’t do that anymore. So it’s nice to have a platform to use, and WordPress as our platform of choice.

Joe:

Yeah. Very cool. So one thing I wanted to touch on, was you mentioned you build about 50 or so websites a year. Is that a strategic amount of websites that you’re, maybe we could build 75, but they wouldn’t quite be as good. Is 50 a number you were going after, or is that just how it ended up?

Jay:

Yeah, it’s really just how it ended up right now, based on our current team size and structure. It’s a great number as far as profitability goes. It’s a great number as far as producing the right quality. And I think at the end of the day, it’s about trying to balance all those elements together, right. Can we provide the right customer service? Do we have the right team? Can we produce the right quality? Can we do it in the right timeframe? And so, just from our workflow standpoint, it works really well for us to be working on a blueprint, which is basically what we consider to be the front end messaging, website, wire frame, all of those details. Then it goes into a website kickoff the next week. Then it goes into actually building it. And then as one website is getting launched in, another one’s getting kicked off. So it’s this pretty steady cadence. It doesn’t always work as perfectly as that. I wish that it did. But that’s the idea anyway.

Joe:

Yeah. Very cool. I feel there are listeners out there who, they’re at the stage we were at some point of our careers, where they hear this 50 number, and you’re, “It’s the great number for profitability, it’s great for customer support, we can maximize everything we do with that, doing around that number of sites.” And maybe people starting are, “Okay, I need to be doing all this immediately.” I’m sure you grew into the 50 sites per year model, and you had to get there over months, probably years. What was that process earlier in the agency career, maybe when you weren’t doing as many sites and you were still trying to figure things out?

Jay:

Oh man, it took me a long time to figure things out. I don’t know if I’m slow or what. But I mean I started really young, so I started building websites when I was probably 12 or 13 years old. I started the agency that I run today when I was 17, which was almost 21 years ago. And there were years where I wasn’t even sure I’d have enough work to keep myself busy for a week.

Jay:

I mean, I remember I was about 22 years old and I had just gotten married and we wanted to have some kids. And the business really was not doing very much at all. I mean maybe we were doing 25 grand in total revenue. And it was just me, but I was also waiting tables, and my wife was waiting tables. And now will we do millions of dollars in sales a year now, but back then I didn’t I didn’t think I could provide for a family. I went to work in the insurance business, put my web agency on the back burner because I didn’t think I had what it took.

Jay:

I knew I had married the right woman when I came home and I was upset and I was crying, because I’m a little bit of a crier, and she said, “What’s wrong?” and I’m, I hate this work. I can do it and I can make a lot of money at it, but I hate it. And she said, “So quit, and do what you love.”

Jay:

And I was 22 years old, and I’m 38 now, so that was the day that I said, “You know what, I’m going to make this work. I’m going to go as hard as I can and try and find a way to turn this into the thing that provides for our family and creates the future that we want and we dreamed of.

Jay:

But I remember telling her back then, “I just wonder if I’ll ever have enough work just to keep myself busy all week.” Because I didn’t back then. And now, I mean we have a full time in house team of about 17 people, plus tons of contractors and other services that we use to help support our clients and work. And everybody’s got more work than they’ve got time to do. Even in the midst of the current chaos that we’re going through globally, everybody’s still crazy busy, which I’m just really, really thankful for. But there certainly were plenty of seasons where 50 websites a year would have been totally insane. I couldn’t have done it to begin with, but the idea of just producing that much revenue. And that’s only a piece of the business of what we do as well. So it’s definitely changed over time.

Joe:

Yeah, totally man. I think back to even three or four years ago for me, because [W Bluffs 00:05:48] is coming up on six years old. And thinking back to even earlier days, man, it was so different. And I’m on your website right now, designextensions.com. You’ve got this great video on the homepage. It is super tight. When you come to this site, you’re like, “Yeah, I want these people to design a website. Their design for their own website’s killer. They’ve got this awesome video. Yeah, I’m going to do this consultation with them.” But it wasn’t always like that. People would hop on the site and be like, “Okay, I have to build a site exactly like this.” Well, Jay has been doing this for 21 years. He knows a little something about what works and what converts, how to put a site together and that kind of stuff.

Joe:

Yeah. I feel like most people hear these stories, I love hearing your story of going through tough times or the growing the business as well. A lot of people, they see people with medium sized businesses, maybe businesses doing $500,000 a year or millions of dollars a year, and they say, “Man, how can I do that?” And the answer almost everyone I hear give is, “Suffer through a few years of not doing so well, and figure it out along the way. And one day you’ll wake up and just be there. And you’ll question, I don’t know really, how I did this. And maybe I made a few right decisions, but also got lucky here.”

Joe:

Sounds like your wife, your partner was a big help in that, which I will have to say the same. I have a very supportive partner. But I would love to hear any other small pieces of, I don’t know, small details of something that happened that helped you to move things forward and get past some of those tough times.

Jay:

Yeah. There’s a lot of things that I’ve learned along the way. And I’ll give you two specific ones. The first one’s an easy one. It’s not really necessarily easy to grow, but it’s something that you have to think about. My uncle told me very early on… We were just going project to project. So, I’d do a project and I’d make 500 bucks. I do it for another project and I’d make $1,500. And I’d do a project and I’d $5,000. And when you’re 19 or 20 years old, $5,000, is like, holy smoke, this is a ton of money. And now it’s like I have 17 people have to pay for it.

Jay:

It’s not a ton of money anymore. But one of the things he said to me at that time was, Jay, you’ve got to find a way to create recurring revenue. And that has been a godsend of the sustainability of the company from a growth standpoint. Because every month, you’re not starting over. Every year, you’re not starting over. But I remember, the very first thing I ever sold that was recurring was website hosting. Naturally, if you’re selling a website, the next thing is website hosting. Now, if you’ve done website hosting long enough, you know there’s a lot of pain out there that can be involved with hosting websites.

Joe:

Oh yeah.

Jay:

But thankfully the hosts that exists today that are out there are so far superior to what existed back then. It makes it a lot easier, especially on WordPress. But I remember selling a website hosting for 10 bucks a month. And I think it cost me at that point, I’m using some cheap budget host, it cost me like $4 a month. So I had $6 a month in profitability. That was it.

Joe:

Yes.

Jay:

$10 a month in total revenue that was recurring. But every month I got $10 a month. I think they paid it annual. So I got $120 a year. And I got another one and another one and another one and another one. Now we have almost $2 million in annual recurring revenue. But that started with $10 a month. So finding ways to develop recurring revenue and then varying those revenue streams, can be so powerful in business because it’s not just hosting. It’s hosting and it’s maintenance and it’s coaching and it’s consulting. And it’s all these different pieces of the puzzle.

Jay:

Each of which produce a different revenue stream for the business, which is really important as we go into economic recession type seasons. Because the only way that you make it through that is diversity in revenue. People say all the time that you have to niche down in order to be successful. That is not true. You do not have to niche down to be successful. You can scale more quickly. That’s true. But you don’t have to niche down. Because why? Because I haven’t and it’s worked perfectly fine. We’ve grown every single year, top and bottom line for 20 years in a row. The second thing that I would say is extremely important in seeing sustained success without totally losing your mind in the process is you have to have the right people around you. So there’s four people always say that you have to have around you if you want to grow successfully without losing your mind.

Jay:

Number one, you got to have somebody to look up to. So somebody that you’re learning from. Somebody that’s ahead of you in business, you’re reading their books, you’re following their webinars. You’re listening to their podcast, whatever it is. Somebody that’s ahead of you that you’re looking up to. You need somebody that’s standing beside you. And what I mean by that person is, other business owners, other people that are in a similar line of work to you. You could have a little bit of a commiserating in the tough days but also celebrate together in the good days. And you need somebody that’s looking up to you. So somebody that’s learning from you. I think we should all be teaching all the time. And if we’re all teaching, we’re going to actually learn the most.

Jay:

So we need somebody to look up to, somebody to stand beside us, somebody who’s looking up to us. And the last one is, this is my wife from earlier that I was talking about. You need somebody that believes in you when you don’t believe in yourself. Because along the way, regardless of how good you are, how smart you are, or how whatever you are, there are going to become seasons where you go, I’m not sure I can do this. There are going to be seasons where you go, I’m not sure I have what it takes. I’m not sure I’m smart enough. I’m not sure I’m as good as this person. Especially in the midst of the climate that we’re in with today’s social media world of all you got to do is flip on Instagram and there’s all these mega successful people.

Joe:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jay:

And the truth is often much, much different. We very rarely show our behind-the-scenes on Instagram. And that can make us feel like we don’t have what it takes. So those two things. Recurring revenue and having the right people in your life can make all the difference around long-term business, success, and growth.

Joe:

Yeah. I love that idea of having the right people around you. I think that’s quintessential to being successful and becoming the success you want to be in life. I have this kind of thought that any big business or successful business or business you see, you’re like, I want to be that someday. They’re not all that much different than where you are right now. In fact, they were probably where you are today 5 years ago, 10 years ago. You know, however long ago. And all they’ve really done is they’ve persisted and overcome a lot of challenges to get to that point. That’s all to me like building a business is. It’s like experimentation and figuring out what works, what doesn’t work, and overcoming challenges. And if you overcome enough challenges, you eventually continue on and get to the point where you want to be. But to do that is a whole other story.

Joe:

Like talk and talk is different than walking the walk. And when it comes to actually doing those things, nobody can do it themselves. And if you are somehow an Elon Musk, sort of just pushing everything, doing everything myself, you’re probably like an extreme, extreme exception to the rule. Most people need support and the right people around them. So I love that idea. And obviously I’m a big fan of monthly recurring revenue. And I love hearing about like, starting so small. Because a lot of people are at that starting point where they’re like, I’ve only got $100 monthly recurring revenue.

Jay:

Yeah.

Joe:

Like I’m like in the Indie Hackers community and I get emails from them every once in a while, and people celebrating like, $100, monthly recurring revenue. And obviously to us, that’s not a lot of monthly recurring revenue. But in some ways, it’s the most important amount of monthly recurring revenue. Because you can’t get to $2 million or $3 million annual recurring revenue without hitting those first steps. And figuring out how to get from zero to one can sometimes be the toughest point.

Jay:

And the biggest thing about that too I think is, when people start to give you their money, that’s the greatest sign of like, hey, I actually do believe in your product or service. Because people give lip service to this all the time and it’s one of the biggest dangers that people have when they’re starting a business or trying to run businesses. Oh yeah, I would pay for that. Oh yeah, I think that’s great. Okay, well, will you pay me for it? Oh, well, no, that’s not really for me. You know?

Jay:

And so, when people actually start paying you, I don’t care if it’s that first ten dollars or if it’s the one hundred thousandth dollar or if it’s the millionth dollar, you can always have these milestones that you’re reaching for, but there’s so much trust in somebody actually giving you that money. And then being as good steward of that money and caring well for it to make sure that you’re delivering the value for them that hopefully it’s going to be more valuable than what they’re paying you. I mean, my uncle told me a long time ago, just do a good job for people and ask them to tell somebody else. You’ll never run out of business.

Joe:

Oh man, that’s great advice. I like little mantras like that that keep things simple for me. Because if things get too complex, I’ll get lost, I can’t follow anything. I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on. But if I can follow simple formulas, then I’ll be good to go. I wanted to touch on a little bit more. You talked about different ways to run agency models. You know, there’s niching down into different areas. And then there’s staying somewhat more general, like it sounds like you have at Design Extensions. And I love that you said like, there’s so many examples of people being successful both ways. It’s not like you have to do this to be successful or you have to do that to be successful.

Jay:

That’s right.

Joe:

It’s all about learning and executing in a way that makes sense for your business. I’d love to talk a little bit more about Design Extensions kind of not niching down. You mentioned that you have a lot of different, or a few different areas for monthly recurring revenue and just driving revenue in general for the business. How did you decide what new monthly recurring revenue area you wanted to add to your business? Like you started off doing hosting and design. When did you decide to start getting into consultation and things like that?

Joe:

And I’m kind of asking on a personal note because WP Buffs does website management. Like that’s what we do. We’re the technical partner for agencies and freelancers and also business owners and entrepreneurs, startups, those kind of things. What if we wanted to do a little bit more than that? What if we had customers who were asking us for other stuff and we wanted to go into other areas? Like how did you decide what’s the best new areas we should go into now?

Jay:

Yeah. I think there was a couple things. I think number one it’s just a matter of what are people asking for that you’re already doing business with? So we’re already doing business with these people, and they need this service over here, and I’m having to tell them to go use this company over here. And maybe that is the best thing for now, because sometimes if you jump too quickly into something that you really don’t have enough knowledge base on, it could be a real hot mess. And then you can damage a relationship that you could’ve kept perfectly fine by just doing what you were already good at. The problem is you never grow or stretch yourself that way. So I’m not an aggressive risk taker, but I want to explore new frontiers. That’s my personality type. I want to kind of try a new thing.

Jay:

So that’s always making me look around and go, all right, what do our clients need that we can provide? But we also have to be really good at what we’re already doing. And that comes down to systemization of process. Now I used to be a big anti-process anti-systemization kind of guy, because I felt like it made everything cookie cutter. And I felt like it made everything not unique in some way, because it wasn’t this organic, creative process and we’re following these stringent rules, if you will. And I’ve learned over time, that’s just not really true. Creatives can still be creative within constraints. And then sometimes those constraints actually create great value. And so now that we have better systems in process, I’m able to step away, number one. I’m not involved in building websites anymore. I used to. I used to do the whole thing.

Jay:

I would design them in Photoshop and then I’d slice them up, and then I’d export the images, and write HTML, and put the tables together back before we had CSS. And I did all of that, but I don’t do any of that anymore. Shoot, I barely even know how to use half the editors that we use now for client websites. But that’s my job. My job is to not know how to do those things. That’s hard for people as you scale and grow a business. And so having the right systems in place and knowing what we do now really well allows us to go, all right, that is working really well. That’s working like clockwork. Now I can go do this thing over here. And to me, I don’t have a ton of other businesses that I operate. I have a few that I kind of have a little bit of ownership in, but this is my primary baby.

Jay:

But with inside of Design Extensions, there’s all these little extensions, for lack of a better word, that we kind of operate that are almost like micro businesses within the businesses. Like our hosting, we do enough website hosting. That is a business by itself. We do enough maintenance, that’s a business by itself. We do enough website building, business by itself, consulting, application development, all these different things. We didn’t use to do all those things. So I think you have to get good at what you’re doing first. You have to have good systems in place to optimize and automate that stuff. And then you can look at, all right, what other services can we provide? And that’s ultimately dictated by what people need and what they want.

Joe:

Yeah. I guess that’s kind of what we’re up to. We get a lot of feedback from customers about, “Hey, can you help me with this? Or can help me with like X, Y, or Z?” And we can be like, “Yeah, sure. We do X and Y, but oh, we don’t really do Z. Here’s one of our partners we can do that with.” And so we’re always thinking about, hmm, what are some other areas we can start to dive into. And I always, I guess, thought that the reason I didn’t want to jump too quickly into doing other things is because I wanted to make sure that WP BUffs was really, really, really good at the one thing that we do. And then maybe we’ll jump into something else when we’ve kind of hit that point of what you’re talking about, this really highly systemized. We’re nailing this month over month, and now maybe we’re more comfortable maybe doing a second thing or a third thing.

Joe:

But I mean, I love the idea of just listen to your customers. And if you’ve done a good job building monthly recurring revenue in one area, and you have enough customers where you can get good feedback from them about maybe some other things they need. Hey, 20% of these folks need more consultation when it comes to marketing and growth. Hey, we already know there’s money to be spent there because, like you said, there’s the huge step of them paying you money. If they’ve paid you money, they’re probably willing to pay money to do other stuff. So, hey, if we can step into that role, then it lowers your risk, I guess, because you already know there’s, one, a market there, and two, you already have customers who you already have their credit card information. All you have to do is just get them to agree to more stuff to do when you’re already doing good work for them in this other area. So it’s a pretty easy bridge to get there.

Jay:

Yeah. And it also goes back to really just asking the question, how can I help this customer? How can I help them succeed? We were joking about the whole OBI-Wan, Star Wars thing, but seriously, that’s the idea. That’s it. OBI-Wan’s responsibility in Star Wars was not to be the hero of the story. It was to come alongside Luke Skywalker and help him succeed. What does Luke need to be successful? Well, he needs a light saber. He needs some training. He needs this, he needs this. And so you look at your customer and go, how can I help them? And that’s what sales is, ultimately. People get uncomfortable at sales. Especially I find people in the design realm or even in development realm, they just feel like there’s something icky about sales in general.

Jay:

But there’s not good. Good sales is just helping other people accomplish their dreams and desires. That’s it. And if what you offer is actually going to help them succeed, I believe you’re morally obligated to convince them to buy it, not the other way around. And so there’s so much confusion, because plenty of us have had bad salespeople sell us bad products at some point in life, and so that’s why we feel like that. So there’s a reason behind it. But good sales, if you know you’ve got a product or service that’s going to help somebody, we’ve got to convince them to use it because it’s going to be helpful for them. And if it’s helpful for them, it’s going to be helpful to others. And that’s how you grow a business.

Joe:

Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t agree more. I think you’re going to feel icky doing sales if you’re selling some crappy product or a crappy service that’s not that doesn’t work. But if you’re selling something that’s truly going to help someone, I almost think of sales as more just like an educational tool. It’s like someone hops on a discovery call with us, we’re going to talk about the benefits of what we do. And we’re pretty upfront and straightforward in our sales calls. If this subscription isn’t the right fit for you, we’re not going to push it on anybody. It’s almost like we’re not even here to sell it. We’re just going to get the information out in front of you and help you make the right decision. And if that right decision is a subscription with us, that’s great for us. But if not, that’s actually not good for anybody.

Joe:

But I totally agree. Sales sometimes feels like maybe if you’re cold calling or email outreach, that can feel a little bit more intrusive. And it’s one of the reasons why we’ve done more of the inbound marketing, because we just kind of every week we look at our calendar and it’s like, oh, we’ve got 30 discovery calls this week because they just came in through organic search. And they’ve already gone through that vetting process of saying they want what we offer already. And that also seems like, I don’t know, a nicer way to do sales for me as opposed to picking up the phone and giving random people calls. Maybe it’s just not my style. I don’t know.

Jay:

Yeah.

Joe:

I’d love to talk about the footer of your website because it looks like you’re on the Inc. 5000 list for 2019, which is super cool. That’s one of my goals for WP Buffs is to reach this point of hitting that list. Not that, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s somewhat arbitrary. Right? And it’s kind of like, I don’t know, like it feels somewhat like an arbitrary gold hit, but there’s something about achieving that, that to me would signify that we’ve done something great with our business. And I just see you’ve already made it in 2019. So first, congratulations. And second, what was going through your head when you got that whatever email notification it says, “You’ve made the Inc. 5000 list?”

Jay:

Full transparency, it actually makes me really nervous. Here’s why. The Inc. 5000 list is based on the country’s fastest growing companies. The way that they do the math, for anybody that’s not familiar, is I think you have to have over $2 million in revenue, and then you have to have grown a certain percentage over the previous year in comparison to every other company in the country. That’s essentially how it works. You can’t go from $1 in sales to $5,000 in sales and then be like, “Oh, 5000% growth,” or whatever that is. It’s not like that. You have to have over a certain amount and there’s a trigger point.

Jay:

But I have actually always been a big believer in slow, consistent growth. When I start hearing, “Hey, you’re one of the fastest growing companies in the country,” I go, “Whoa, hold on.” That makes me a little nervous, because I want to make sure that that speed is not costing quality, because you’re going to bleed. When you’re driving really fast in a car and you get in an accident, the likelihood of severe damage is very high. But if you’re driving very slow and you get in an accident, the likelihood of severe damage is very low. The same is true in business. If you’re moving exceptionally fast, there’s high risk. But if you slow down a little bit, there’s less risk. The problem is, in our society, we don’t have the patience for slow growth.

Jay:

I was excited about it, I was honored to get it, and it’s definitely gotten us a lot of attention. It’s one of those things that’s like, everybody knows what the Inc. 5000, Inc. 500’s even better, but we didn’t make it that high on the list, is everybody knows what that list is, that you’ve heard of it before, so there’s notoriety in it. There is something as a business where you go, “I’ve accomplished something.” But I also think that there can be false positives that we have to be careful of in business and in growth.

Jay:

I’ll give you another example. We were distributed, we didn’t have a central office for 16 years. Never had a physical office space, all worked remote, it was fine. Finally decided to put an office in, primarily because a bunch of us had a bunch of kids and working from home became very difficult in order to do that. I’ve got five kids at home, another guy had four, another guy had five. We were making a lot of babies around here. We needed a place to go work. Now we have a great physical office that we love, but when I built that office, all of a sudden I had all these people be like, “Oh, congratulations.” They were all basically praising me as a business owner as if I had just started the business.

Jay:

Which was good because it created attention, which is valuable, but it was actually the first time in the company that I had ever been in debt. I had been totally debt free as a company for 16 years. And then I bought an office and bought all this equipment and stuff, and I took on long term debt, I have a mortgage, I took on some short term debt, I have a bunch of equipment that we needed to buy. To me, I was actually less successful in the moment than I’d ever been, but all these people were giving me all these accolades. I think we have to be careful of stuff like that, of not letting these trophies be too dangerous. The Inc. 5000 is great. I’m proud that we hit that level, but it also makes me cautious. That’s how I think as a business leader.

Joe:

It’s really refreshing for me to hear as someone who’s not hit that list yet. Maybe you’re the person I’m talking to now who’s the person who is ahead of me who I need to talk to about this stuff, because it’s nice to hear… Because as a business owner, I feel like I’m always growing and putting myself outside of my comfort zone, and there’s always something going on that I’m stretching myself thin and learning in that area. This is a good example of that, especially in terms of being able to see around corners and know, when something happens, there are always positives and there are always negatives and they are always a few things probably in between those two things. To take things as they come in the right way is really important, especially when it comes to mentality.

Joe:

I remember I tweeted out once that we’d earned our millionth dollar on Stripe, which was really cool. Again, somewhat arbitrary number, but still cool. That’s a cool number to hit, and I remember getting a ton of positive feedback, “Oh my God, that’s so amazing. So amazing.” But also thinking, “I don’t feel like I’ve done anything that special, that I’m that different than I was when I made my hundred thousandth dollar.” I just kept going. But having that mentality of staying grounded, I guess, staying humble and making sure that while this is a great accolade, there’s more to do.

Joe:

Also, I’m interested to hear, because you mentioned that around that time you weren’t technically as financially successful because you had gone into debt on a few things. There are a lot of companies out there with two employees that are maybe more profitable than a company with 20 employees. I get this all the time of, “How many people do you have on your team?” That’s to some people, a measure of success. Probably to a lot of people that’s a measure of success. They’re like, “You’ve got 20 people? That’s twice as amazing as 10 people. Wow, congratulations.” As you grow as a business owner, you realize, “Man, I’m trying to do the opposite. I want to hire less people to do more and pay them more and be more efficient.” But people outside of this realm don’t really realize that. Is that something that you had to grapple with as well?

Jay:

Yes. It’s such a pride and a ego thing as a business owner. One of the most valuable things… But money and people are the biggest thing. I hit a certain revenue mark, which revenue is crap anyway, it’s really profitability that matters, Let’s be honest. Number of people, that’s one of the reasons I started hiring people is I wanted to create jobs for people. I love creating jobs for people, it’s one of my favorite things to do. But I will say that there is a big level of pride there that’s not necessarily healthy. I remember back in the day, there’s a conference that I go to every year. Well, back when we used to get to go to conferences. Everybody there owns an agency of some size.

Jay:

Some people are there as they got two people on their team and other people there and they have 200. I remember, before we had even 10 people, that there was this next layer where you got into this club almost once you passed 10, and another club once you passed a certain level. Now that we’re around 20, we’re at 17 right now, it’s a really good size for us. Growth just for growth’s sake is really, really dangerous. It can put you in a very bad situation. You should only hire when you really need to hire, and when you hire, you should hire very slowly. Then when you have to fire, you should fire even slower because you’re the one that hired them in the first place.

Jay:

Now, people have different opinions about that, but that’s mine, it’s worked for me for a long time. I think there is a lot of pride. That’s not inherently bad, it’s not bad to want to have more people, it’s not bad to want to have more money, but it can be dangerous if that’s our only focus. Because for me now, I felt like I had to get the team to a certain size so it could operate without me. Because that’s a big differentiator between sub 10 people and over 10, is that most companies have to be at a certain size so that you can step away. For example, I’m about to take a month long RV trip next month with our whole family. I’ll still be around and available, but I’m certainly not working five days a week, six days a week, full time. That’s not going to happen. There has to be a team in place that can operate without me.

Jay:

Plus, if I’ve got a team and I go get hit by a bus, God forbid, and don’t make it, what happens to the company? What happens to our clients? What happens to the rest of the team? If the whole thing is dependent on me and I’m the linchpin of the entire organization, then the amount of suffering that happens as a result of that is much higher than just my own death. I don’t want that. That gets a little morbid, but these are the things we got to think about when you’re in charge of people.

Jay:

That’s a responsibility as a leader and as you grow, especially those people out there that are just sole entrepreneurs running single person WordPress shops. Man, you could be so successful doing that, and it’s a lot of fun the hard thing is, unless you develop good recurring revenue, which is what we were talking about earlier, when you stop working, the money stops coming too. And so that’s all that has to be factored in. But going back to what you’re saying a minute ago, I do think there is a real danger in the praise that we get for awards, for number of people and number of dollars, that aren’t always actually the most important thing. So those are the things to think about, for sure.

Joe:

Yeah. I couldn’t agree more with that. It’s just funny. The whole time we’ve been talking here, I’ve been like, Man, Jay reminds me of somebody. I can’t pin it on the… I can’t nail it, but he reminds me of someone. And then I was like, Oh, Dave Ramsey. He sounds a lot like Dave Ramsey. I’m feeling a lot of resonation, like the way you talk and the way you put things, like, Oh. And I’m on your website right now. You have this book that’s out. It said, getjaysbook.com. And I hear it. I see a picture of you and Dave Ramsey and John Maxwell here. And I’m like, Oh yeah, okay, now this is making sense. Something now is completed. So it seems like this… Is this the conference you were talking about? I listen to the podcast [crosstalk 00:33:08].

Jay:

That’s one of them. That’s not actually the conference I was talking about previously, but I absolutely love the EntreLeadership tribe. And when I was talking about people that I look up to and people that I learned from, I mean, Dave is certainly one of those people. That particular book, EntreLeadership has been one of the most foundational documents for me, because it’s just real practical. A lot of business books you get a lot of theory in, versus here’s how you run this business. That’s how I tried to put my book together too. The idea behind building a business that lasts, is most businesses don’t make it past the first year and even fewer make it past the fifth year. Once you get past the fifth year, there’s a lot more stability. And once you get past the 10th year, you’re basically as stable as you want to be, unless you make some real catastrophic choices.

Jay:

And so for me, I wanted to give people practical strategy around how to build a business that lasts. And Dave, that entire organization at EntreLeadership certainly has been that for me. It’s been a huge catalyst for my own personal growth and our growth as an agency.

Joe:

Yeah. I’m a big listener to the podcast. I go hot and cold on podcasts, where sometimes I’m listening to it more, sometimes not, you know how it is. Sometimes things are in, sometimes not as much. But that’s one of the core, when people have questions about what podcasts I listen to as a business owner. I mean, there are a lot out there, but like EntreLeadership’s one of those super solid. You could listen to any episode and gain five or 10 gems from that episode. And if you have a specific challenge you’re having right now, that’s a library definitely to go look through. And maybe, I don’t know if they have search on their website, I’m sure they have something where you can have a certain challenge you’re looking for and find 10 episodes that go through something like that.

Joe:

So cool. And the book is called Building A Business That Lasts. You mentioned earlier, you’ve got five kids at home. So yeah, working 60 hour work weeks probably is not as much of an option anymore. So I guess yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit more about what’s in the book and how to, I’m sure it matches something, has something around as you’re growing a family, how to run a business and that has to do with building a business that lasts. But yeah, I’d love to hear a little more about the book and what’s in it.

Jay:

Yeah. So the subtitle of the book is actually Without Sacrificing Family. So Building A Business That Lasts Without Sacrificing Family. Yeah, I do have five kids and they range from seven to 15 right now. And one of the questions I always ask at the end of my podcast is around work-life balance. What does that mean to you? It means something different to everybody. In my book I actually have a chapter I call the work-life blender because I don’t think it’s about balance. I think that in certain seasons of life, it is all out Gary V style hustle. 24-7, 365, you got to put the pedal to the metal to get the job done. In other seasons of life, you just need rest. In other seasons of life, there are other people that need your time and that’s different for everyone.

Jay:

And so when I was in my early twenties and I wasn’t married yet, or even right when I first got married, I didn’t have any kids yet, I could put a lot more time, a lot more screen time in than I can now. Because ultimately I have a vision for my life that is bigger than just a successful, scalable business. I want to be married to the same woman when I’m 75 years old. I want our children to bring their children to our house. I want to have a place where we can all be together. And I also want to build a business that’s successful and scalable and helps tons of other people, both the people that work for the company and the people that are clients of the company. And I believe all of that can happen together.

Jay:

And I think in our society right now, we have this pendulum of either have to be this, or you have to be that, you have to sacrifice this to have that. And I just don’t believe that’s true. And I don’t only not believe it’s true, I know it’s not true. Because, I’m not saying I’m the end all be all of success. Lord knows I have plenty of really, really hard days in my marriage and in my parenting and in my business. But it is about looking at the whole of everything, going, Hey, what do we need right now? What’s the most important? And a lot of it comes down to communication. My wife knows that there’s some days and some weeks where ahead of time, I’ll go, Hey babe, I got a lot going on, I am not going to be very available this week. She’s like, All right, as long as I know that ahead of time, I know what the plan is. And I think everybody has to have that communication cadence. That’s the big piece of the puzzle.

Jay:

And one of the stories I tell in the book, I’ll round out this section with this is, so often we treat those that we would say are the most important in our lives differently than we do our own clients. And I give this example, I say if you were sitting at dinner with somebody who you’ve been trying to get as a prospect or as a client for years, it’s a perfect connection, it’s exactly who you want to be connected with and you’re having a great dinner with them. And some random person calls you, maybe it’s even just a lower level client that’s not as important as this person. Would you pick that phone up and walk out of that dinner to go talk to that person? And the answer is no, of course you wouldn’t. But how many times do we do that with our spouses? How many times we do that with our kids?

Jay:

So be where you are and look, my wife will tell you, I struggle with this. I’m preaching to myself as much as I am to anybody else. But be where you are in those seasons, because especially for those of you that have kids or are thinking about having kids, I know people say this all the time, but man, they grow up so fast. My 15 year old, it seems like yesterday that he was a fat little chunky baby, rolling around on the couch and he’s about to start driving. And I can see him leaving now for the first time ever. And it’s like, Holy smoke. So I can work whenever. I can work till I’m dead. Thankfully with digital work, we’re not exactly attributed by how exhausted our bodies are. Hopefully my brain lasts long enough to make it. But I can work forever.

Jay:

My kids are growing up and so work-life balance is not about balance for me, it’s about looking at the season and going, Hey, some seasons, you need a little more sugar in your blender. And some seasons, you have a little more spinach and you got to figure out what that is for you. And not based on what anybody else tells you. Just because Gary V wants to work 24-7, that’s him. Just because somebody else tells you, you got to take three nap breaks or you’re not being successful, that’s up to them. You got to figure out what works for you in your season of life. And that’s okay.

Joe:

Yep. I love the idea of having work-life balance. And what’s the point of building a big, awesome, amazing business, if you’re going to be working a hundred hours a week, trying to get it figured out. That being said, everything you’re saying, I love it because it’s like shades of gray. It’s like, it’s never all one thing or all the others. Of course, there are times where you’re going to put in a lot of time to building a business. In my opinion, especially when you’re starting something out, just to get from zero to one, it requires a lot of work and the one way you can differentiate yourself is just putting in a ton of time, maybe … For me, it was like, well, I was with my wife, but I didn’t have kids at home. And there were some things that didn’t have … I didn’t have as much pressure financially.

Joe:

And so, that was a good time to say like, “Hey, in five years I kind of want to have this business that somewhat runs itself and I can work on this stuff I want to work on, but I also get to work from home and I can spend more time with our kids. So, is it okay if I work really hard for the next year and then build into that future?” That’s a great reason to want to spend a ton of time on something right now. And so, I think that’s a great place to wrap up the podcast.

Joe:

Jay, thanks again for being on, man, this has been awesome. A couple of quick things before we sign off. Tell people where they can find you online, social media, websites, that kind of stuff.

Jay:

Yeah, my own personal website, which has links to my book and my podcast and all the other stuff is jayowenlive.com, so that’s J-A-Y O-W-E-N live.com. You can find all the links to everything else on there. If you want to get a copy of Building a Business that Lasts, you can find it on Amazon or you can just go to getjaysbook.com, just cover shipping and handling and we’ll send you out a copy.

Joe:

Cool. While we were chatting here, I grabbed a copy for myself so I’m looking forward to reading it. Last but not least, I always ask our guests to ask our listeners here for a little five-star iTunes review, so if you wouldn’t mind giving a little ask, I’d appreciate it.

Jay:

Yeah, absolutely. Go out and get five stars on iTunes. It makes a big difference for those of us doing podcasts. So, help Joe and his team out by going out there and giving them five stars.

Joe:

Yeah, I appreciate it, man. And when you’re leaving a review, make sure you leave something you learned from this episode in the comments or something like, “Jay is awesome. You should have him on again.” And so, we’ll send him a screenshot and thank him for the review. You can go to wpmrr.com/iTunes, it redirects you right there to leave your quick review.

Joe:

If you’re a new listener, tough times during this Covid outbreak and all that, it’s pretty easy to sit around and binge Netflix or Hulu or HBO or whatever you’re watching these days, why don’t you binge some of the WPMRR WordPress podcasts? You can go through some old episodes. Jay, I think you’re actually going to be episode 99 so you’ve just missed 100, but 99, still probably a pretty cool one to be.

Jay:

It is, I’ll take it. I also started my business in 1999 so that kind of works out.

Joe:

Oh, there you go. We’re coming full circle here so there you go. Yeah. So, folks who want to go through and listen to some old episodes, feel free. If you have questions for us at the show, Christie and I are going to do another Q&A episode coming up so email questions to yo@wpmrr.com. That is it for this week. We will be again in your podcast players again next Tuesday. Jay, thanks again for being on, man, it’s been real.

99 topics and thousands of podcast minutes later, there’s still many burning questions left unanswered.

To celebrate WPMRR’s 100th episode, Joe and Christie weigh in on premium hosting, how often to send client reports, and why you shouldn’t worry about c-Panel hacking. 

Listen now to fill the gaps in your WordPress knowledge. 

Episode Resources:

• Leave us a 5-star review on iTunes
• Send your questions to yo@wpmrr.com
• Check out our Care Plan course
• Binge on past episodes you missed

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Christie Chirinos:

Hello, WordPress people. Welcome back to BWPMRR WordPress business podcast. I’m Christie.

Joe Howard:

And I’m Joe.

Christie Chirinos:

And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. What’s going on this week, Joe? Joe, I think I messed that up.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. That’s okay. It was going to be fine but you can do it over. You added an extra business in there, which is good. Extra business-ing. Who doesn’t want extra business-ing. That’s excellent.

Christie Chirinos:

Maybe we’ll just keep going then. How are you?

Joe Howard:

I am excellent. We got double business podcast this week.

Christie Chirinos:

Double business.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. I’m good. We’ve given updates in the past like, “What’s your update?” Just another week in Covid world but my week is a little bit different this week. I am traveling down to Texas with Sterling and Mo and we are doing a safe as possible family visit down there. Sterling has done a ton of research on how to keep ourselves as safe as possible and clean circulating all the air in the entire cabin every three minutes and all this stuff. And so we’ll be as safe as possible. Their grandson is here and they’re aching to see him and of course we want to follow all the protocols as much as possible but we feel at the same time that we are not putting ourselves out there at a huge risk or anybody out there at a huge risk as long as we’re being very safe about the way we’re traveling. We were going to fly on Saturday actually, but we changed our flight to Friday because we bought Southwest flights, which you can change pretty easily. We changed to a Friday night flight because it was less than half full and the Saturday flight was actually a fuller flight, which I was kind of surprised about. I was like, “Oh, some flights are full?” I guess some people are flying still.

Joe Howard:

But yeah, so we’re flying on a flight that’s not packed and Sterling has all these, we won’t use public bathrooms, only family bathrooms because there’s something about the flushing of the toilets that sends air around and spreads stuff. So yeah, we’re pretty ready for it. And honestly, it’ll be nice, I think, to be down in Texas. We’re going down for two weeks and it’ll be a little bit of a nice change of pace for me. So that’s what’s up with me this week. Just getting a little work done and then preparing to fly Friday night. Yeah. That’s me. How about you?

Christie Chirinos:

Oh my gosh. That’s crazy. So you’re flying tomorrow, basically?

Joe Howard:

Oh, yeah. It’s Thursday.

Christie Chirinos:

Tomorrow night.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. Tomorrow night.

Christie Chirinos:

Whoa. That’s soon. Okay. I mean, we are starting the reopening phase tomorrow as well. I read that in the news this morning.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. DC is technically this phase one of reopening is beginning, which I think is parks and stuff. I think maybe some businesses at like whatever, 25% capacity and stuff. Yeah. It’s starting. We’ll see how it goes. I like to be able to trust in people in positions to make these decisions. If they’re making good decisions, doesn’t always happen, but hopefully.

Christie Chirinos:

Our local government is good but hopefully. Well, best of luck staying sanitized during your trip tomorrow night. I totally get I though. You have a cute, adorable little newborn. Of course his grandparents want to meet him. I think that if you’ve done the research and I’m sure that the airports are also taking precautions. Knowing that the flights are full means that, “Hey, other people are doing this.” People like to go places so it makes sense. Best of luck though. I will not be traveling. I will be once again inside of my small, studio apartment for yet another weekend. But I am looking forward to the slow reopening of our world and I think to a degree, I’ve given up hoping for a quick return to normal. I just don’t think it’s coming. I used to think that once a date was over, things were going to reopen and we were all going to go out and now I’m sort of realizing that until there’s a vaccine, things might open but they’re going to reopen after being shut down to prepare for operating in an environment where there’s a deadly virus running around. And that’s scary. That feels a little apocalyptic movie but we got to do our best and protect our communities. So, things that are new with me, I don’t know, absolutely nothing. I got an iPhone, I’m really excited about that.

Joe Howard:

You switched from Android to iPhone?

Christie Chirinos:

Yeah. I switched from Android to iPhone.

Joe Howard:

I can text you with blue text now.

Christie Chirinos:

Yes, you can text me with blue text. I’m very psyched about it. I have been thinking about it for a long time. I’ve had an iPhone before. I was a big fan of the iPhone SE. I think it’s sort of … I’m the target market for that device. You know what I mean? It’s nice and fast and has all the fun, cool iPhone features but sort of makes a lot of sacrifices to be in a budget range but don’t really feel like sacrifices. And for me, who has a whole bunch of other very expensive Apple devices, having an Apple device that integrates with my very expensive Apple devices but doesn’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles of every single phone, works really well for me because all the bell and whistle stuff, I do on my iPad or my iMac. So having iPhone SE, the second generation one, I bought it once they announced it and I finished setting it up last night. So I’m very pumped about that. But that’s about the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in the last five weeks.

Joe Howard:

That’s a big change. Technology. New technology.

Christie Chirinos:

Yeah. And it’s a big purchase. You know? Devices like that. So I’m really excited. I think it’ll be fun.

Joe Howard:

Very cool. Well, when you … iPhone stuff is pretty intuitive. It’ll probably take you a couple weeks to get used to the new UI and know how to do certain stuff but maybe when DC starts reopening, we can hang out and have an iPhone teaching and learning session. Here’s how you use this thing.

Christie Chirinos:

That would be awesome. And some iPhone photo taking sessions because definitely this phone has a much nicer camera than the old Google Pixel that I had.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. The newest Google Pixels have pretty good cameras and the new iPhones do too. A lot of the new premium flagship phones all have pretty premium cameras.

Christie Chirinos:

Yeah. They do.

Joe Howard:

Got to snap some photos. Okay. Well, we have some big news today. Today is a Q&A episode. We’re going to answer some questions from listeners and folks in WPMRR.

Christie Chirinos:

I love these.

Joe Howard:

I know. It’s going to be excellent. These are some of the best episodes. The most fun to do too. But before we dive into that, we are doing a little episode 100 celebration. Yeah. We were talking offline about what we wanted to do this episode on and we were like, “Do we want to do a review of 100 episodes or do we want to do a regular episode?” And we decided, “Let’s just do a regular episode. In the pre-Q&A section we’ll just give ourselves a shout out,” a little pat on the back for me. You get a pat on the back too, Christie. We get collective pats on the backs. And yeah, I mean, it’s been an awesome time building this podcast and getting to do it. We’ve talked to some cool people, honestly we’ve gotten a lot more face time in than we would have in the past, year, year and a half, had we not done this podcast, Christie. We totally would not be as good of friends also, if we had not done this podcast. So that maybe is the biggest thing I’m thankful for. We get to talk every week. It’s just an excuse to get to talk every week. That, to me, is awesome. So thanks for doing this with me. It’s been fun.

Christie Chirinos:

I totally agree with that. I’m so glad that we have developed a better working relationship and friendship over this podcast and I just think back to how when we started and you sent me that email asking me to be on the podcast. I thought it was a mass mailer so I didn’t answer.

Joe Howard:

Gotcha.

Christie Chirinos:

And then Joe was like-

Joe Howard:

I asked 100 people and only Christie said yes.

Christie Chirinos:

That’s how the podcast started. I just immediately assumed you were very popular. You know what I mean? You have popular vibes. I was like, I’ll get to this mass mailer later. And then Joe is like, “Christie, you didn’t answer my email.”

Joe Howard:

Hey, I asked you very specifically and I want you to do it with me. Okay. Fine. I just bug people until they do stuff with me.

Christie Chirinos:

The origin of the podcast was that peak awkward Christie moment. There’s many of those in my life.

Joe Howard:

Those are the best moments and it’s good to reflect on that too. Because I mean, this is one of the more listened to podcasts in the WordPress space and it came from nothing. It came from, “Hey, you want to do this podcast?” Sure. It sounds cool. You’re cool. I’m cool. We could do a cool podcast together. We’re good at talking. We could do a podcast. And then 100 episodes later, it seems like we just were at episode one yesterday. It’s pretty crazy it’s episode 100. Yeah. We won’t do a whole episode on it but I think it’s just nice to put it out there. Pretty crazy that we’ve gotten to this point and I guess here’s to 100 more episodes. I’m excited. Maybe we’ll do something special for 200. 200 is like, a good number of podcasts get to 100 episodes. Well, let’s get to 200. Let’s see what happens then.

Christie Chirinos:

Here’s my dream, okay? I’m going to speak it into existence. I want to do one of those live podcast recordings that people go to, you know? Not just at a Word camp or something but have an event. You know? Have a WPMRR party and an audience and go full on talk show host.

Joe Howard:

Oh, I like that. I’ve done some, what’s the NPR show? The Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. I went to a live recording of that here in DC and that was a lot of fun. That would be super cool if we could do that.

Christie Chirinos:

That’s going to be my goal.

Joe Howard:

Camps come back, we could apply to a Word camp and do the 200th episode at one of the bigger regional Word camps. That would be fun.

Christie Chirinos:

When Word camps are a thing again, I would love to organize a post Word camp event that’s a live taping or something like that. That’d be cool. Okay.

Joe Howard:

I like these.

Christie Chirinos:

Three years from now.

Joe Howard:

Yeah, right? Stay tuned.

Christie Chirinos:

Stay tuned.

Joe Howard:

All right. Cool. Let’s dive into the episode today. We’ve both got a hard stop in like 35 minutes so we’re going to run through questions but if we don’t get to all of them then, hey, we’ll do another Q&A episode soon.

Christie Chirinos:

This is good advice, right? Not bad advice? Because I still really want to do Bad Advice with Christie Chirinos.

Joe Howard:

Bad advice, five cents. I think as long as you, before each answer, clarify whether this is good or bad advice, then we’ll be good to go. So you’re choice, dealers choice.

Christie Chirinos:

Perfect.

Joe Howard:

And we’ve got some hosting questions in here too. So actually perfect for you and I’ll probably not know good answers and then chime in with bad advice. First piece of advice here. Hello there, I’d like to offer three hosting and maintenance plans for clients. I’m very tempted to use Kinsta as a hosting provider. However, I wonder if it’s not overkill for my smaller sites. Would I be better off taking shared hosting for those clients? Is it just not worth the hassle? I mean, is saving a little bit of money there worth it or should I keep things nice and efficient with one great hosting provider? Thanks for any thought and insight. I mean, this question Kinsta hosting. I mean, the real question is, smaller sites that I’m running for clients. Do I want to spend more on a higher quality host or is shared hosting maybe okay for those clients? I think this is a perfect question for you and then maybe I’ll chime in as well but you probably get this question a lot.

Christie Chirinos:

I need so much more information to answer that question helpfully though. And yeah, we can use Kinsta as an example of a placeholder of do you pay the premium for managed WordPress hosting? Right? And I mean, I’m obviously biased but I’m like, yes. When things go wrong, you’re going to be very upset that you’re on that VPS running a bunch of WordPress websites and you’re completely responsible for all of them. But I spend all day and all night, not all night, just all day, working on managed commerce solution built on top of a managed WordPress solution exactly for this issue. Right? And the reality outside of the work that I do is I’m sure that there are instances in which it makes sense to maybe put your higher traffic, higher demand clients on managed WordPress, managed commerce hosting, depending on what they’re running so that you can have access to all of those additional features and benefits and whatever Kinsta offers. And then maybe have one VPS where you sort of put on all of the sites that are local, don’t get that much traffic, are portfolio sites, whatever. Right? I know that as a web professional in general, that’s sort of how I operate in terms of the access of two accounts that I have. Right?

Christie Chirinos:

But with that said, I would question why you’re not just working with clients that are worth managed WordPress. Right? Why do we have clients on a VPS? Why is it that the price difference isn’t a completely surmountable, inconsequential thing? Because ultimately, I don’t know exactly what Kinsta costs but Nexus managed WordPress starts at $19 a month. Managed commerce at Nexus starts at $19 a month. I’m pretty sure Kinsta is at something similar. I think it’s like $29 or something like that. So if a VPS is something like $10 or if you’re looking at cheaper shared hosting which is something like, I don’t know, $3 a site or something like that. Why is $15 a month a make it or break it? Why is it that $15 a month, saving that amount of money makes it okay to not have any access to WordPress core support, to application support, to potentially the different little bundles and things that different managed WordPress plans come with.

Christie Chirinos:

Sometimes they come with premium products like Nexus Managed WordPress comes with iThemes Security Pro. It comes with [inaudible 00:15:08] Builder. It comes with things like that. It just doesn’t seem to me that there are a lot of arguments for that particular cost cutting measure. The cost versus benefit. Or the potential risk versus benefit doesn’t seem worth it to me. Again, understanding that I’m sure there is a strategy in which you can have the bulk of your low traffic sites on something cheaper and then the three big clients that need attention and need the 24/7 support on something more premium like Kinsta or Nexus or WPGen or whatever.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. I think you answered that pretty comprehensively. I don’t have too much to add. I think that you’re totally right. It’s like, if you’re deciding between those two things, I think you’re probably asking the wrong question. I think the right question or the right thing to think about is, you should probably be able to sell a managed hosting over cheaper hosting and pass that cost off to your client and it’s not that much more of a cost anyway. It’s totally worth the investment to them. And that should be part of the sales process whether it’s in your proposal or when you’re talking to them on a discovery call. It should be pretty easy to upsell that fully managed WordPress hosting. Especially if it’s a serious website. Why would you want to build a website for $10,000 and then put it on $3 a month hosting? Probably not the right move.

Christie Chirinos:

No.

Joe Howard:

And so yeah. That’s something I think about and also, if your client is bulking at that, then yeah, looking and making sure you’re attracting higher quality customers is always a big priority. Obviously when you’re starting off, maybe you’re working with some lower quality customers but as you move along, you want to be targeting people who know if they want to invest in better infrastructure for the long term. This question also may not be about selling it to clients. It also just may be about me as the freelancer or me as the person managing this website, is it worth it for me to invest more in my business in doing a fully managed set up than cheap hosting? I mean, it’s kind of a short term, long term thing also. It’s like, if you go with shared hosting, you’re definitely going to have to probably upgrade people in a year. It’s going to cause you 20, 30 hours of BS, bullshit work to do over the year. Is that really worth not paying $150 a year for the fully managed version? Maybe that’s like $500 a year for three sites or whatever. In my opinion, very much no.

Joe Howard:

I’m not personally … I don’t know everything about hosting. I know basics but I’m not a super hosting expert. I’d rather the host fully manage that for me. I trust a Nexus or a Liquid Web to, “Oh, you guys know commerce hosting. Yeah. You guys handle the scaling stuff when I’ve got 100 people on my website checking out at once.” So, yeah, I think in most cases it’s worth it but I think you’re also right. I’d love to sit down with this person and get a little bit more information about exactly who their clients are and help them dig it out a little bit more. But this question, by the way, was send in by Laurent. So Laurent, thanks for the question. It was a good one. Hope that answers it for you. Anything final to add, Christie, or do you want to move to the next one?

Christie Chirinos:

Yeah. I think the final sentence I might add there is that there is maybe an existing lingering thought that manged WordPress hosting is considerably more expensive than something like shared hosting or putting a bunch of WordPress sites on a VPS or something like that but at the beginning of 2020, and this is something that I know because I look at this every single day, right? We say a lot of the managed WordPress companies plummet their prices, Liquid Web included. Why? Because we’re trying to compete in a more competitive, larger market. There’s more and more potential for units, there’s more and more of an addressable market every single day, right? More people are getting online and then right now it’s just up and to the right. And so I think maybe there is a reservation there because you’re thinking, “Oh, it’s going to be $50 per site. Or I can just have everything on shared hosting.” And that’s just not the case at this point.

Christie Chirinos:

With Nexus, I think if you’re looking at multiple site managed WordPress plans, the five site plan is like $79. It’s not insurmountable and the difference in expertise that you’re getting and the number of things that you can hand off to people are so valuable. Right? Even if you’re building sites for people, something that a good managed WordPress host will do is give you the ability to have different kinds of users on the account so you can be the administrative user but your client can also have a limited user profile. And that means that if they have a problem in the middle of the night, they’re not calling you. And that alone can be worth $15 a month or whatever. But yeah. Let’s move on.

Joe Howard:

Cool. Let’s do it. Okay. Next question. Hello, I’m wondering what are others using for support ticketing relating specifically to content update requests. So I guess it’s a software question. I’d like to streamline mine for future growth. I’m not excited about the current set up. I would greatly appreciate any input. I guess this question is kind of asking about what ticketing software folks are using for support. This is from GreenEx Media asking the question. Christie, what do you use for support?

Christie Chirinos:

I don’t think they’re asking about support ticketing. I think they’re asking about ticketing and request tracking about content updates. So when you see things in your KB, when you see things in your website, how do you track the different things that you notice need to change? And honestly, this is such a good question. Let me tell you that Liquid Web, a very large company, has not cracked this. It is so hard. And I have worked however long I’ve worked on this kind of thing now and I have used so many different strategies for this. [inaudible 00:21:27] Boards, Google form that feeds into a request tracker, we have used Base Camp. We have used everything to figure out a good and easy way to track and execute on our content update requests. We have tried outsourcing the whole thing. We have tried everything in the different places that I’ve worked and it’s a really interesting challenge.

Christie Chirinos:

With that said, I do believe that the two key things for tracking this kind of thing are, one, easy input. You need something where it’s very easy to create a new problem when you notice it from whatever device you’re on, from whatever site you’re on. Right? So things that have browser extensions, things that have mobile apps, software that has easy entry input would probably be my first consideration. And then after that, you want to use what your team will use. That’s really it. What’s the best? Base Camp has this, this, and that feature. And [inaudible 00:22:27] has this, this, and that feature. And [inaudible 00:22:28] has this, this, and that feature. It really … They all do the same thing. You want to use what your team is going to use. That’s my two cents on that one.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. I think that makes sense. I’m kind of glad to hear that Liquid Web has not cracked this yet because we for sure have not. It’s tough. It’s more like, I feel like this is a better question for someone who runs more of a pure SaaS company. This is something that we want to do better for just general content updates. Because we have such a huge library of content at this point, it’s hard to keep everything up to date, not just the content and the advice but the screenshots and everything in content. How do we keep everything updated? One thought I have is trying to just create something that’s user generated that’s super easy and minimalist and easy for everybody to use. I mean, you kind of said this but it’s like, if something is complex and complicated, I’m not going to use it and it’s just going to blow up. So trying to find the easiest most streamlined possible way to do it is usually going to be the best route. Yeah.

Joe Howard:

I don’t know if I have any great advice for this but I think probably some of the things you actually mentioned here would work better for a smaller company or a smaller agency even. Maybe companies that get five or 10 pieces of feedback a month. Companies that scale to 100s, that may be a different monster. I think also at then end of the day, it may just require one, someone’s time just to figure it out, and two, just someone’s time dedicated to going through all that and organizing it. And maybe trying to create a more streamlined process. If you’re a small agency or something, you may have to, yourself, just take five hours one day and just organize everything you’ve gotten in the last month. You may have to. If you’re a bigger company, you may have to say, “Hey, someone’s time is dedicated 20% to this feedback thing. We just have to dedicate the time to get it done.” So that’s a solution. It may not be the most elegant one but just spending time enforcing it can work.

Christie Chirinos:

I think the last thing I would add to that before we move on would be just an appreciation for how hard this question actually is and how this seemingly simple thing is something that a lot of companies struggle with. Like I said, I just got an iPhone and so I’ve been looking up how to do new things on my new iPhone and how to have it do those new things well with my iMac and my iPad Pro. And let me tell you, there’s a lot of outdated documentation on Apple’s website. If Apple is struggling, it’s okay if you’re struggling too.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. This is not solely a problem of small companies that just don’t have maybe the manpower to do this as efficiently as they want to like a lot of companies have issues figuring this out. Yeah. I think there’s probably some room here for software maybe to be created. Maybe there’s a new SaaS company that really needs to bridge this gap around users needing updates to content and generating that and organizing it in a way that allows your team to implement it easily. There are things like, one other quick thing I’m thinking about is like, Hot Jar has this little sidebar thing. I forget what it says on it. I think you can customize what it says but it says Feedback or something.

Christie Chirinos:

Feedback Tool. Yeah.

Joe Howard:

Feedback Tool.

Christie Chirinos:

We used to have that on [inaudible 00:26:23]forms.com and it would ask you for feedback after checkout. And then we would get that feedback and I had somebody coming in and copy and pasting the stuff we would get into a Google Sheet so we could track it.

Joe Howard:

Google Sheets, right.

Christie Chirinos:

Yep.

Joe Howard:

So that’s a manual way to do it. But hey, that’s a good start I think. Maybe using Zapier to send some of that information into a Google Form or something and then you can actually manipulate the data. I don’t know. That sounds like probably what I would do if I was using it that way. If I wanted a little feedback thing on my website. Which I don’t know if I want that right now but yes. That’s a good way to do it. All right. Sweet. Anything else to add or should we move on?

Christie Chirinos:

Let’s move on.

Joe Howard:

Moving on. Client reports. Monthly or weekly? We send them out monthly but I see WCP Buffs does weekly. Any pros, cons? Thanks. I’ll answer this question too but you from a web hosting background but also from a ran Caldera for years. Wanting to give feedback to clients, what did you prefer? Did you prefer weekly or did you prefer monthly?

Christie Chirinos:

I need so much more information about this to answer this question. And I know that’s a cheap answer but I really do. It’s like, what industry are you in? There are some products that do not need to be sending client reports at all. There are some agencies that should probably be sending a monthly report about what you accomplished and what you did and where your billable hours went and I’m sure clients appreciate that.

Joe Howard:

Have a little bit of background information. It is a WordPress maintenance and support company.

Christie Chirinos:

Got it. Okay. I think that may be a better question for you then.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. I didn’t want to take over the answer. I wanted to give you a chance to answer too. Yeah. This is a good question. I think it is, yeah, again, somewhat of a cheap answer but it’s totally dependent on your clients and what they want. We have clients that probably want the weekly report because they wan to stay up to date on things. We have clients who want to receive monthly reports because they don’t want to receive an email every week. Probably we have a lot of clients who don’t read the reports. I guess I’m probably assuming there but I would assume most people get the reports, how many people actually click through and read them? I don’t know. Probably not all of them.

Joe Howard:

I think that the reason I like to do a weekly email, we do weekly emails, which Danielle here mentioned. I like weekly because we send emails out every Monday morning to all of our clients with the report of all the updates we did last week to their plugins and to the security scans. And speed scans and uptime monitoring scores and all that stuff. I like sending that out every Monday morning because I want all our clients to feel like their website is top of mind. This is a high priority for me. And when you get an email on Monday morning, that’s how you start your week and so yeah. It kind of makes your website top of mind for them.

Joe Howard:

So I like sending it out weekly for that reason. We actually have certain clients who tell us, “I don’t need a weekly report. Just send it to me on the first of every month.” And so we just adjust their settings in our software and send them monthly reports. So it’s kind of customized. But that would be one reason we like to send weekly. It’s also just higher touchpoint which usually, if I had to learn one way or the other, there’s a lot of context, like we said here, but if I had to lean one way or the other, I’d probably want to lean towards higher touchpoint because the more positive touchpoints you have with your customers or clients, more often than not, the lower the churn is going to be and the higher the lifetime value of that customer is going to be.

Joe Howard:

You’re going to be less likely to cancel a subscription if you have positive interaction after positive interaction after positive interaction. If you look at your report every week, it’s like, “Oh, here’s all the stuff they did. Guess I can’t cancel. Do I want to do all these updates? Do I want to monitor the uptime? Oh, I don’t want to do that. Okay. Oh, and it’s had 100% uptime this week. Okay. I guess, keeping it forever.” Hopefully. So yeah. I think that having more positive touchpoints, as many as possible, is a good thing.

Christie Chirinos:

I will say that from a customer perspective, right? As someone who has been a customer of a maintenance company, I like what you said about options. I would love that my account, by default, sends me weekly reports. And then I can opt into, “Hey, I don’t need these. It’s fine. Give me monthly.” Or, “Give me none. Just don’t email me. I have too much email. I’m sitting on 85 emails. I’m very stressed out about it.”

Joe Howard:

Yep. It’s always good to give options and get options, shout out to the Get Options podcast. You said options and I’m totally liking the Get Options podcast. What’s up, Kyle? What’s up, Adam? All right. Sweet. Danielle, thanks for the question. Good one. All right. Let me mark that one as complete. It is, we’ve got about 15 minutes let so maybe let’s do one more question and then we’ll wrap up. We’ll save the other questions for another Q&A episode.

Christie Chirinos:

Love it.

Joe Howard:

This is another hosting one. Good for you and I will chime in as well. The question is, how difficult is it for a hacker who compromised one C Panel account to gain access to the other C Panel accounts on the same serve? What can I do to make it harder? This is an interesting question coming off the back of the first question we did here, which was, this is another risk of shared hosting is that you’re hosting alongside 20,000 other sites on the same server potentially. There is the possibility for someone to gain access to C Panel and gain access to everybody else’s C Panel. So Christie, as a hosting person who-

Christie Chirinos:

Go in on this question.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. I can already see your willingness to want to attack this question.

Christie Chirinos:

I’m like a cat. I have a ready to pounce position and people know it.

Joe Howard:

And quickly before you answer the question, this is sent in by Nate. So, Nate, thanks for the question. It’s a good one.

Christie Chirinos:

Cool. Thank you for the question, Nate. This is such a good question and there’s also so much to it, right? All of these questions have a lot of different components. The first thing that comes to mind to me is, well, how difficult is it for a hacker to compromise another C Panel? How easy did you make it to compromise the first one? If your C Panel account was easily compromisable because you used insecure security practice because your password was your dog’s name and because you weren’t mindful about using a password manager and because you also weren’t mindful about your hosting password management and because I don’t know what else you could be doing but because you just were … I don’t want to use the word careless but that’s the word that comes to mind, about your own security management because you responded to a phishing attack, I don’t know. Right?

Christie Chirinos:

Then it’s going to be just as easy to gain access to the other C Panel accounts on the same server no matter how technically difficult or not difficult it is to do something. Right? Number one thing about security, and web hosting security, is that it’s primarily driven by human behavior. We can take on a lot of different precautions to protect you from malicious attacks, but we can’t stop you from giving up your information or protecting your information poorly. So on and so forth. That’s the first thing that comes to mind when I see that. And then when it comes to the actual technical aspect of it, I wonder it really does depend on how your host implements C Panel. Right?

Christie Chirinos:

And then it depends on what you mean by compromise. If you are talking about a C Panel account getting hacked and then what’s the hacker doing on that account? Are we attacking it with insane amounts of load and making it do crazy stuff? Then yeah, it’s going to bring down the whole server and all the other C Panel accounts on that server and it’s all going to be compromised because one thing was compromised. Right? Especially if you’re operating under a completely shared server and in a limited server resources situation. It’s all going to go down. If one thing has been compromised and then the other C Panel account we’re worried about that same hacker being able to get access to the same account and also upload malicious files or whatever, again, depends on the configuration and how NCP settings are set up and things like that among the C Panel accounts.

Christie Chirinos:

I’m not a C Panel expert or security expert but it’s absolutely possible which then brings me to the last new ones of this which is, why are you worrying about this? You could pay an additional $7 a month and this problem could be a support ticket. Right? You fire up an email from your iPhone while drinking your morning coffee and you’re like, “Hey, why was my C Panel account hacked?” And then again, I’m like, the majority of managed WordPress and definitely managed commerce are not even using C Panel anymore. Right? With the C Panel price increases, a lot of different web hosting companies chose different vendors or even rolled out their own that have different security practices and account for this sort of very 10 years ago type problem.

Christie Chirinos:

So when you’re concerned about this, I’m like, oh my gosh. Pay for a better host. Right? Pay for managed WordPress so that, on whoever, right? Like Nexus, Kinsta, WPN Gen, all of them would include within their scope of support, to identify, protect against, and clean up malicious scripts. And so I’m very much like, oh my god, what can you do to make it harder is the last section of this question. It’s, this takes an adjustment in thinking buy this is so not a problem that you could be worrying about in 2020. Security is complicated. It is an ever, ongoing and active process that you constantly have to stay monitoring and you can pay someone $20 a month to worry about it for you. And when we’re talking about building businesses that have recurring revenue, a key part of doing that successfully is realizing that our job is to do what we’re good at and outsource everything else and sell the things that we’re paying for plus our time for more money than they cost.

Joe Howard:

Cool. I don’t think I could answer that much better. Or add much to it I think. I was like, I’m just going to let Christie nail this one because I knew you’d know the answer.

Christie Chirinos:

It’s honestly so crazy how much I’ve learned about web hosting in the last year though. I’ll add that for the listeners, right? That I started working at Liquid Web March of last year. We’re recording this May 2020. Almost June. And I started in March 2019. Before then, I understood web hosting like a consumer. And I knew that with this new job, I was being hired for my knowledge of WordPress and the plugin ecosystem and Woo Commerce and that I would have to learn the nuances of what lies beneath that surface. And it’s super complicated and there’s so much and there’s so much history but I tell people who are working in that same sphere where they’re thinking about WordPress and up in the stack, pay someone else to worry about this. There’s so much going on there. Just pay somebody else to worry about this.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. Ask someone who runs a support company. I know for a fact that a lot of people pay us to handle things and take care of things that they don’t want to. Including security issues. I mean, there’s a reason that managed hosting has exploded the way that it has. I can’t remember the last time I talked to a WordPress professional that really considered using shared hosting/C Panel stuff. Most of the people I talk to, again, I can’t remember the last time I talked to-

Christie Chirinos:

Oh, I can.

Joe Howard:

Who was like, “I host everything on a shared hosting.” I mean, actually, full transparency, I have a shared hosting account where I host a dinky couple little websites that I don’t even run anymore that are just kind of out there but like anything serious that I’m doing or anything professional that I’m doing is always going to be on fully managed hosting. So I think that this is … I mean, just the fact that managed hosting has become so big and popular [inaudible 00:39:32] and one of the biggest reasons is because it allows me to not have to worry about answering this question anymore. And like me, as a business owner, I’m always looking for ways to get time back and not spend time on things that don’t matter. And this is a great way to not have to spend time on something that doesn’t matter. Or something that doesn’t matter, just to invest in better infrastructure and this question become vacuous. Yeah. That’s why I’d answer it.

Christie Chirinos:

I agree.

Joe Howard:

Cool. All right. I think it’s time to wrap up for the day. We have a few more Q&A here. So yay, we have enough or another episode which will be fun.

Christie Chirinos:

Yes. I love these Q&A episodes. They’re so fun.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. Excellent. Love it. Cool. Let’s do our usual wrap up which now I have to look up in our show notes because we’re still getting back in the swing of things. Cool.

Christie Chirinos:

How do we podcast?

Joe Howard:

If people want to leave a review for the podcast, feel free to go to WPMRR.com/iTunes and give us a nice little review there. Comment something about this episode or something you like about the podcast. Leave your favorite emoji that’s a totally random one that gets used very infrequently.

Christie Chirinos:

Like the bread.

Joe Howard:

Oh, yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever used bread emoji. But now, okay. It’s in my head. Bread emoji. Go back and binge some old episodes of the podcast. This is episode 100. You’ve got literally 99 other episodes to go and listen to and we’ve talked about all sorts of things on the podcast with Christie. So if people have a specific challenge, they can probably find an episode on something we talked about. Right? And if you have more questions, you can-

Christie Chirinos:

Please have more questions.

Joe Howard:

Yeah. Send us more questions. We like doing these episodes. Have fun. Send us more. [inaudible 00:41:27]@WPMRR.com, that’s all. Anything else from you Christie?

Christie Chirinos:

Last but certainly not least, go to WPMRR.com and check out the course and the series and the content and all the things that have to do with [inaudible 00:41:44] WordPress and using [inaudible 00:41:46].

Joe Howard:

Yeah. Exactly. Cool. And we’ll be your podcast players next Tuesday. Thanks again Christie. This has been fun. We’ll talk next week.

Christie Chirinos:

Woo.

People of color have been put through systematic oppression for many centuries, and today we look at how it reflects in the WordPress space.

In this episode of WPMRR, Christie and Joe discuss their background, encounters with discrimination, and their experience in the WordPress community as people of color.

Tune in to know more about the history of your favorite hosts and why you should be giving opportunities to minorities.

Episode Resources:

• Allie Nimmons How to Be a WordPress Ally
• Listen to episode 65 with Allie Nimmons
• Listen to episode 51 with Leah Knobler
• Listen to episode 97 with Kyle Maurer
• Send us your questions to yo@wpmrr.com

The dwarf warrior Gimli stops in after helping save Middle-earth to speak on affiliate marketing management. 

In this episode of WPMRR, Logan discusses how affiliate marketing works, affiliates point-of-view on business relationships, and where the industry is heading.

Listen in to get a full sprint on affiliate marketing.

Episode Resources:

• Check out Weglot
• Send Logan an Email
• Check out MalCare
• Go here for the WP Remote MalCare
• Contact Logan here about MalCare 
• Find Logan on LinkedIn 
• Send us your questions to yo@wpmrr.com