Episode 349: WPCS.IO With Roger Rosweide

Hey everybody Rob Cairns here and today I’m here with my guest Roger Rosweide.

They get that right Roger?

Yes, just about

I’m sorry. It’s one of those names. It’s really tough and Roger is the co-founder of WPCS.io. How are you today? Roger?

I’m fine. I have to admit though. It’s very hard even for me to pronounce my last name in English

So only if you’re a native Dutch speaker will you ever have a chance? So I don’t hold you responsible. Oh, thank you

I appreciate that. So to want to pronounce it for us. We we get it right?

Sure. So my name in Dutch is actually a French name. So it’s actually Roger

But I always pronounce myself in in English

Also for some reason because my Dutch friends always call me Roger

An abbreviation of Roger. So that’s my first name and then the last name is

which is like I said very hard to pronounce

There you go. Thank you. Thank you for the humor and for being so kind this morning. I appreciate that

You know, I’ve got a partner my life was Italian and I go I go through the same thing

By the way, so I should tell you that up front in a big way. So

Yeah, I

I did my masters in Italy and

At some point I had a girlfriend an Italian girlfriend and she was like

Italian is so easy

All you have to do is pronounce the letters in the alphabet correctly and I was like

Then first you need to know how to pronounce every letter in the alphabet in Italian. You’re making it’s so hard right now

So yeah, I get it completely

Yeah, we all get we all get it

Um

Thank you for joining me this morning and today I thought we’d talk about why did you go and create a sass product and

Tell us about that journey a little bit

It’s a very good question. Uh, why would anyone anyone really want to you know start a sass?

Um

So I think the I think we started at a position where many people in the WordPress scene find themselves initially

uh, we were an agency

And so most of the product company owners or even hosting company owners

I speak to at some point started as an agency

They started building websites often you start with one for yourself obviously and so it’s the same thing for us

Uh, we weren’t actually a web agency initially. We were an agency specializing in advertisements in the content. I myself am a content maker by trade

Uh, but we noticed at some point that websites were just an easy foot in the door

Right you sell someone on website and then you have a lot of upsells on the back of that

and also additionally, um

Because I just mentioned I I did my masters in um in in Italy and my other co-founder

He’s traveled extensively in vietnam and and south america as well

And we had a lot of friends always wanted to stay over in uh with us in amsterdam and I I don’t know if you’ve ever been in an amsterdam house

But it’s it’s very very small. It’s a very old city and so all the houses that were made at the time are just very small

So obviously you want to be hospitable and invite people to your home, but it gets crowded real fast

So we started developing this

App for hotels. We had a lot of friends who owned hotels and we knew that at some point after eight usually

The reception goes home and you have a night manager and they don’t really take new reservations

So we started making an app that would auction off empty rooms late at night

And so I got one of my best friends attached to the project

And he’s a cloud engineer and a full-stack developer

And uh, and then we started making more websites simply because that was one of the things that would tie us together

So now we we were building a sass and at the same time develop transitioning our agency from content and marketing to

web or to to websites and

Then and then the pandemic happened. We were but we were supposed to launch the the app

on 23rd of march 2020, which is my birthday

And on march 17 the entire world or at least in the Netherlands went into lockdown

Um, so we were in lockdown at that point too. So yeah, right

We were already like we were on the cusp of launching our sass and you just it’s and it became completely redundant

In the scope of 24 hours. Yeah, but also

Uh, the websites that we were building were mostly for gyms and restaurants

Uh, because that’s those are the places that we most often frequent

So it was just you know one of those things where your agency is very much connected to your personal life

And then your personal life collapses and your agency does the same thing

Yeah, so a week later

Uh

Vainant who has also an almost imprenounceable name

Uh, who’s the the the the the developer attached to the sass and the agency

He uh, it calls me up and he says we’re probably going to be building more sites, right? And I say yeah for sure

Everybody’s going online

Websites for us again are an easy food in the door

And he says yeah, I’ve got an idea to

Build something that lets us easily spin up new sites

And then manage them all as one

Develop them centrally and then do it serverless so that I don’t have to worry about hosting

And I was like that sounds awesome. That doesn’t exist yet

Is that no not that I can find

And then before we knew it

We actually had attached a couple of agencies who were you know had been looking for the same thing over and over for years

And uh, we decided that we were actually going to steal launch sass

And and fully leave behind the agency ruled

Um, even though we are very much still connected to agencies and we facilitate agencies and help them

Start, uh, sass

Uh, we ourselves no longer are an agency and uh, so yeah, that’s our our origin story

That’s so interesting and you mentioned you were connected to the hotel space in your original sass

And one had like changed it had a terrible time during the pandemic was there B&B, right?

Their numbers dropped off like they almost died to non-existent

And you know, it’s funny. I was looking at them the other day because I’m an avid traveler

I know like we can get away soon on terry. I think i was telling you I like to get around this province a little bit

And one of the things I noticed is

Air B&B is not even in the price market these days. It’s almost cheaper

Believe it or not with all the fees and all the add-ons to go stay in a hotel

If you want to stay in air B&B, that’s a lifestyle issue that is not a money-saving issue anymore. Unfortunately. Yeah, I think that’s a very astute comment

Um, it truly is we we booked a we booked an air B&B for work camp europe next week

And I noticed the prices are basically similar

But it’s like you say it’s a lifestyle thing siebrin again an almost imprenounceable name

um in Dutch is

one of my other co-founders and me and van ont and siebrin are growing and

It just so happens to be our favorite way of traveling because you want to feel like you’re in someone’s home in another country

Like you’re like you’re like you like you live there

um

You know and and and and a hotel often feels more distance

from from from from the reality of the ordinary greek person in this in this case

Yeah, you don’t do it for the money anymore. Yeah, I would say the only

SaaS that in terms of the hospitality restaurant

Transportation that’s really for the money is uber to be frankly uber is certainly

A money difference if you’re going there. I know when the greater toronto area

I haven’t set foot in a traditional taxi cab in probably five years, but what I’ll also tell you is

Some of that’s a lifestyle too because some of the drivers that drive people think oh guys who drive rideshare aren’t educated

Uh wrong

You know people make these preconceived notions and it’s just so interesting, right?

Yeah, again fully agree

Um, I think actually you can tell how much you’re right by whenever there’s a competitor

In the market, especially when it comes to Amsterdam

They always start by offering huge discounts and then everybody transitions to this competitor

And then at some point obviously it’s financial a financially unsustainable

So they they often die and just go away and then I think uber in Amsterdam is still the the leading taxi service

Um, but every time on the competitor

Enthirstom market they always shift towards the competitor simply because they’re cheaper

It’s it’s nobody’s really tied to the brand’s per se

It’s really a money issue in terms of transportation

In toronto, it’s mostly uber and lift. They’re the two big competitors in the right share game

It’s funny before uber came on a share with tissue

In toronto getting a taxi cab plate was such a gold send drivers used to spend the money on their plates

It’s because they would sell them as their retirement for like hundreds of thousands of dollars

And uber instantly overnight killed that market. They made those plates basically utterly worthless. It’s it’s so ironic. It’s not funny like

Yeah

I don’t think we have lift yet

Uh, but I wouldn’t really know because as a true Dutch person. I ride my bike virtually everywhere

Uh, even if it’s

A little too far away. I still try to

Um, I think it’s a part of the Dutch pride

To be able to uh to go anywhere on a bike

Obviously our our country lends itself very very well to it. It’s so flat

So

I’m a walker and to be fair in the gk

We also have a fairly extensive regional transit network. Canada’s known for its regional transit

And it’s transit compared to the us. So like getting around here is not a problem. So, you know, it just

So let’s jump in a little more

In to your sass. So you decide to create the sass you talked about your origin story. Where did you go from there?

Um

So and so again initially we thought we were building a tool for ourselves

Uh, but that didn’t last long very soon. We found out that it was something that most but a lot of people were looking for

And uh, we didn’t really do much research

Uh, because again, we wanted to build something for ourselves. So the research that we did

was

geared towards how can we build the coolest solution that we can think of

Um, so very quickly

We decided we were going to use Kubernetes as the as the way to orchestrate the containers

Used to uh to spin up sites or to scale sites rather

um

And then very quickly we

We had research multi site in the past and and don’t get me wrong because it sometimes comes off as if I go on some

some sort of

Multi site brand. I’m I’m fond of multi site. I think it’s great

But for the proper use case and the use case that we were after at the moment

Uh, because now it’s it has expanded significantly

But at the moment we were looking for a website as a service, right? We were we were interested in selling people on individualized website

Um, that is a total solution

Uh, but i’ve actually recently only learned a new term

um credits to marika

funda rakt

uh, the the wife of yostafok from yost

And um, she she dubbed it the digital experience platform

Uh, I’ve I had never heard of that

Okay, no, I was just

Yeah, it just goes to show how how how little research we really did in terms of competition or whether or not this solution already existed

We just wanted to build something that would suit our needs

So again, it would be

You spin up a site that is virtually completely done

um

the the customer can

Stat can can customize based on the template that you provide and

Every time you want to update or maintain or upgrade

The sites

Plural you obviously don’t want to go into them individually you want to centralize so really in a get like fashion

So that’s what we wanted to do and then we we started looking at sass companies

So how do they how do they scale how does Airbnb or how does uber really get as big?

um

Technically and so very very quickly we and we learned that we had to introduce multi-tenancy

To WordPress and and I used the verb

Introduce but at the time we had no idea that it wasn’t introduced yet

So we build a cloud platform that spins up multi-tenant websites

So basically you have a version that you develop

And the version becomes the template that you use or rather you create a version and then you create a template based on that version

And the template you use to spin up new sites and then every time you want to improve on your product you create a new version

So that new version then becomes the version two as it were so you have your version management system

From that new version you create a new template and then you can spin up new sites, but if you transfer the old

Tenants sorry websites

We call them tenants from the older version to the new version then you automatically upgrade your existing sites because they receive all the new

Code changes that you’ve done it. So that’s what we build for ourselves

and so

We we knew we didn’t want to do something with multi-side because you you were unable to do any of that

Because what i’ve just explained really is is devops which is also another thing that’s virtually

not existent in WordPress like only if you use something with git then you know devops but most agencies don’t

And we wanted to do something that is completely scalable completely safe. You can continuously update your sites without

Breaking them or if you do break them, you know being able to restore them quickly and safely

um

So, you know just thinking out all those features really quickly

Let us into conversations with others agency owners that we knew just to get feedback and that’s when we realized hey

This is much bigger than what than us

you know, I agree

And so yeah, so at some point we realized also that

um, we were too small to build the entire platform

which is when we

Approached one of our best friends Dexter

I’ve known him since kindergarten and he had been a cloud engineer at a company for the past 12 years

Which you know, it’s very a very long time these days people working at a single company and we just wanted some advice from him

And as it turned out he actually had been planning to leave the company or he was

Looking for a new challenge for quite a while

And so now suddenly we are four founders

But we are four founders

Of an agency that pretty much just collapsed due to the pandemic and this guy

Uh, it’s too expensive, you know

He’s got a commitment. He’s got another life really

So that’s when we know that’s when we knew

We had to go the venture route. We had to do the whole startup thing. So my best friend

suddenly became founders co-founders

And uh, and we did the whole adventure building program and we turned into a startup and um, that’s been a really fun but very

roller coaster ride

Now i’m sure i don’t know if you know, uh, i was going to share with you before we went to record

Toronto is one of those

Big startup cities in north america. I don’t know if you know that or not, but if you get downtown

There’s communities to start up upon startup and

And it sounds like you’ve looked at things differently than the traditional startup like i

You know, you’ve done a little bit more homework

You’ve done a little bit more in tune of what the market is is doing instead of just launching and saying we’ll figure it out

Yeah, I think so

Um, I actually did know uh, Toronto is uh the start of capital of canada

So vanant actually has a girlfriend in uh, vancouver

And so when any of he goes there every two months and we were like, oh, that’s great. So many startups. She’s like, nope

Those are in toronto. So

Um, so he so when he goes to canada’s it’s nice and quiet, uh as opposed to if you were in in toronto

but um

I’m sure she said i’m over

I think I think we did things differently

Than most wordpress companies

Uh, traditionally the the venture route the vc route is not

Well traveled but also I think we did it differently than most

Uh, you could say traditional startups

Because we utilize wordpress which you know is very uncommon for startup usually you have your own sas built

You have your own tech stack and we we you know, we built for the the largest open source community

Which we very much believe in the the democratizing the internet

Um, so yeah, it’s uh, it’s it’s a it’s a very interesting hybrid of uh of the two cultures coming together

Yeah, most wordpress companies are different. They start off as individuals. They’ll create a plug-in. They’ll create a theme shop

And then they’ll stand there and say okay, which one of the big

Hosting companies is going to buy me. I mean look what’s done on in our sector. Look what

But stellar and liquid web have done stellar so what could web rem buying out the events calendar buying out

Um

You know, uh, i themes and that whole stuff look what um new fold is done by buying out year thin yost

Uh, yost as in the um

The seo plug-in. I mean what’s going on in that space and it’s going on all the way through our space

That’s the aim of most people and then I know some

um

business founders and uh shout out to my good friend mark west guard at ws forms

Um strange enough. It just happened to be wearing a shirt today

Um marks created a plug-in because again like you he had a need

But he’s decided to keep it in the house where he hasn’t gone out looking for an investors

And that’s typically the word press way right it’s build something and then find out

Who is going to buy me like even brian gardener over at studio press studio press was bought right at one time

So you kind of look at the cycle and you guys have gone about it totally different

Yeah, true. Um

I got to say it’s um, I don’t think that was too intentional

um

as opposed to how we

we we

Because we were building the hotel sass and uh and and researching the the vc landscape

I think that was a model that was very much set in our minds. So I think from the beginning

We weren’t going to do the traditional wordpress thing. Um, but at the same time

Uh starting to raise capital we quickly started speaking to hosting companies and uh to large product companies

And investors in the wordpress space and we learned that if you if you take money from a wordpress

Company or investor early on you might close doors with other companies and we didn’t want

We wanted to build a platform for everybody and not alienate anybody

Um, and I think at some point you probably have to embrace the the fact that you’re probably going to

You know shut some doors along the way

Uh, but we we were still finding out what the platform was and for for because it was it’s so broad

It’s like you can do so much with it

That we we couldn’t even envision all the use cases yet. So that being said, um, we we chose to go for the most agnostic

Uh vc that we could find

Um, and then be sure that they wouldn’t interfere with our strategy at the time

But also not alienate any other company that would wouldn’t want to work with us in the future

It’s that juggling act, isn’t it?

Sometimes and we were talking before we went to record. You just took on some investment

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, of course. So, um, I I mean actually I think the the segue, uh, is is a perfect

Uh a perfect moment in in in the story

Because like I said, we uh, we raised our first round about two years ago

Um, which was first with a german vc

funded by portia the car and oxal spinger, which is the largest media firm in

You could say europe even by day up

Way my favorite car for the record

Mine too everybody everybody at the porch and i’m like no

Not yet at least

but um for sure

um

So and and the reason we chose them is um because they have what they call a venture building program

So most vcs they try to help you build

You know revenue build your business, but what they focused on mostly they they called themselves a very early vc

And uh instead of focusing on the business itself

They help you

Find your feet in the in the startup space. They help you connect to investors. They help you understand the terms of contracts

They help you you know understand how to raise capital for what valuation and and you know reserve

Stocks for your employees and whatnot. They really help you professionalize as a company as you prepare for

You know becoming a unicorn or whatever

Um, and so after we did that venture building program. We were much more equipped to actually start approaching other investors

which is when we

uh

Reengaged a Dutch fund that we have been talking to for a bit and um, and they were actually

the best partner in terms of how to

Launch the business at you know after you know understanding how it actually all works

And because they both were very agnostic

We could easily

Get in touch with all workers companies that we wanted to speak with in possibly partner up with

Um, and that’s what we have been doing for the past few years

until the moment when we realized

Who are the players in the worker space who are loved

Who are neutral who don’t close doors who everybody knows

And uh, it just so happens that

a fellow Dutchman

Um, it was already very available

To us whenever we needed guidance or ask questions

I could always just approach him on slack and and just send him random stuff honestly

Sometimes I look back at it. I’m like, how is this guy?

You know taking the time to look at this new idea and uh, and it’s and it’s yours

so um

So I’m very very happy that we were able to formalize that relationship

um because um

The guy is a absolute treasure to the to the ecosystem

Um, and uh, and also a lot of fun to to be around

As is his wife by the way who I met a bit after

So, um, so so so the reason to to choose you as a depth point is because we were more experienced in the in the ecosystem

Uh in general and we were yeah, better equipped to make that decision

That’s that’s interesting one and he has such a reputation in this face of being that open guy

By being really on top of stuff

So those who don’t know him should get to know him because he didn’t get to worry

He got to by having a close mind at all. Hey, renter

Yeah for sure. Um, uh, actually I would be remiss if I didn’t say that

He has a booth at word camp europe next week where you can actually pitch your startup to him

And he will tell you on the spot if he will invest obviously, you know, depending on

So you’ll you’ll figure out the terms after but he will express an interest to invest on spot to just

I’m actually been so

Yo, so inversion a dragon standard shark tank just for fun

You know those two shows you know the reference

Absolutely. I love that show

Yeah

Dragon stand interesting is the Canadian merchant and shark tank of course is the us company because they didn’t want to pay

For all the dragons then licensing, right? So really

Yeah, that’s what I thought that uh dragons then is is is uh from the the uk

Actually, it started in uk, but there is a canadian version of it that runs on cbc

Which is our national broadcaster and has run for many many years and has had some big investors on

Big investors on a canadian show is kevin oh weary goes in the us soon. All me john shark tank

He’s been on past robert her verchak who’s originally uh Croatian

He’s on both shows and then other notable over the years. So yeah, it’s it’s it’s

Fy’s mind here, but you those who watch the shows will get the reference. I’m sure

So so the reason why I think that

Yoast is actually in a great position to

Make a sudden decision to invest and when I say yoast, I actually also mean marika

Yeah, um, she’s as brilliant and as important in this duo as you know, they’re both equally

but um

What where it’s sometimes a little um

Hard to believe that for sharks, you know instantly understand the industry

The product you know that is being pitched in, you know and all the upsides and downsides and the market potential

So I find that hard to believe but the us the marika really know the industry, right?

So when you come and you pitch the next

Forms plugin, they’ll be like yeah, sure, uh, you know pass

But they’ll they have their own hypotheses of where the word persecosystem is

What it’s developing towards and where the um the potential and also where the downsides of it are

Um, and they they’re truly trying to fortify the um the the community

So I think if there’s

There as

Equipped to make that decision as anyone on the spot. So I think it will be I will it will prove to be a very interesting

Boot

I’m sure well

So let’s now dive into your product a little bit and

One of the things that always concerns me about sass products and I have to tell you

I’m a security guy

So you know where this conversation is going to go very quickly

And I came out of a background where I did before I got in the running my own marketing agency

I did security on enterprise servers. So how does your product sit with security, roger?

Um, well fortunately, I’m not the one to ask

Uh, well at least I’m not the one to answer that in detail

Um, but I have to admit it is uh, it is for sure something that every

SaaS is often

Worried about um

I can I can remember

At time when we were being bombarded with um data us attacks and that was way in the beginning before we even launched the beta

And we just had our first couple hundred sites on the platform

and um

That was you know because you’re you’re trying to defend to something that you’ve never really had before

Obviously, you know about it, but it’s not something that you’ve you’ve experienced

Uh, previously and as it happens it was a customer that

Um had their name and logo under every website that they produced

Uh, so really all you have to do is just google the company and find out that they have a couple hundred sites

And that they also do book armors transactions. So then you start

They didn’t happen to be on our service. So yeah

That was uh, you know

But I’m not laughing with you

Um, I’ll share with you one that you might want to hear is one of the major domain registers in north america

The canadian is the company called hovered you’ve probably heard of hovered there there being

Well, my mom

For business hosts her email on hovering uses amstr

Due to a dewass attack. It was that bad. So

I mean, it’s just I hate to tell people it’s the state of the world we live in and it’s no longer

We take those attacks is how do you deal with them and how do you recover kind of things? Right? Yeah, I agree

fortunately

So we are forefounders two of them commercial me being one of them and two being technical

And so you’ve got bynond who is I always call him the dreamer

He’s the guy who drent up the idea of multi-tenant wordpress and exposing that to the ecosystem as a whole for two leverage

But daxter and daxter and bynond and I have been friends since kindergarten three of us and daxter is almost

the

The perfection is to make sure that whatever being drent up is actually

sustainable and robust and he does not take any risk whatsoever and having worked at a large

cloud company for 12 years as a as a lead developer will will teach you

how to implement the best practices and prepare for eso certification straight from the beginning

so

if if if we’re currently secure, which we are then

The two of them together, you know being able to take risks and at the same time cover your

your basics is uh, I think due to the fact that they’re together in this

You can use those words on this podcast

If you want

All right, cool. Um, no, but I think I think they’re together in this

Yeah, I hear you so

Moving into product a little bit

Um, what’s the typical agency that comes to you and says we want to buy your product

And how many average instances do they spin up?

Like do you have any sense of what those numbers are or can you share for sure?

So on average, I believe

So we have a metric we call average tenant pair customer so tenant being website

Uh, but because you can do much more with a WordPress instance on our platform then build a website because you can build a sass

Um, we call them tenants

Um, and I think it’s the numbers

Four or 16 or 17 because it recently increased from 14 to 16 or 17

That’s a big number when you think of it your average customer is spending up 17 instances. It’s quite a bit

Yeah, but I mean obviously, um, I would say

80% of all customers

Start with one

Yeah, so you’ve got customers that you know launch hundreds of sites

And most of them

Most of those customers have already adopted a product led mindset

They do they already sell products and not projects

Um, and so they just you know start

Or adopting the platform and then they go about the business as they’ve had it before just in a more scalable and robust way

Uh, but most so so I would say so if you ask me the question like what typical agency approaches us then 80% of eight

Eight of eight out of ten times

It is an actual traditional agency and I don’t mean that in a directive way that the word traditional

I mean they make websites and they organize themselves in projects

And and and that was me for the longest time and um, it is it is the most fun

Uh, I think because every project is its own unique

Um, uh, you know almost piece of art, you know, you get to look at it from a whole and through the eyes of the customer

And that’s a lot of fun

But it’s also very unscalable and I often say

Uh, an agency either has too much work or too many employees

Um, and it’s it’s it truly felt that way, right? It’s very hard to prepare for skill

No question in my case is probably number one. So yeah, right? So so so if you like if you if you want to talk about product

Then I think you have to talk about scale and scaling a business

And so

Um, the agencies that we have signing on

Um, a lot of them are trying to

Adopt a website as a service

But they don’t intend to shift entirely to a website as a service. So what they do

Is they adopt, uh, a method of selling sites automatically that are standardized

And that sometimes the customer can start start customizing themselves

Or they still have this sort of onboarding experience where they help you customize the site for the for the customer

And then at some point

Some customers they they they you know have enough they they want a standardized site because it’s optimized for a certain niche or it’s optimized for a certain functionality

Say a a web shop or an LMS

But sometimes the customer becomes very successful in the business and the site grows and the and the demand grows

And so they need something more bespoke

So they migrate this site off our platform to another hosting company where they have an individual instance

Um, and they can dedicate a team to it. So it’s so it’s often a way of attracting more customers in a predictable way

Uh, gaining additional recurring revenue

Uh on the front end and then upselling projects on the backhand and I think that’s the

The I think that’s the coolest use case that I see on the platform and unfortunately, that’s like I said 80 percent of the time

Um, but again, we have those large

Uh companies that come in and just you know already have these complete product led mindset adopted and they just

They go they launch and they skill I get that. What is the cost you charge like

Do you charge in like buckets? So I

10 instances is say 500 bucks or do you charge by the install? Like how do you how do you drop

That was it’s it’s I never expected this to be my favorite subject

Um, but it’s but it has become my but it’s it’s so hard. I know price

Products, which is why it’s my favorite subject because it’s the it’s the subject where I need to learn the most still

And it’s uh, and it’s also like if you if you’re talking product markets fit

It’s in my experience. It’s the it’s the price that still needs the most

Optimization before you actually can say that you’ve reached product markets fit because our product I believe strongly in in this perfect for the

For the ecosystem, but how do you how do you make it accessible?

By by you know by having

Certain price points and certain products that have a certain price and so when we launched the platform

Um, we introduced a lot of new concepts, right? So I talked about the versioning system. I talked how we call

websites tenants

And then there’s this thing called snapshots, which is basically a template

But you make a snapshot of a version and then that snapshot is used to create new tenants

And we have an API which for some

Is also something that’s new and they need to learn. So there’s a lot going on

Um, uh, and we help you, you know get used to that and

And then and we help you get started but we wanted to keep the pricing simple at least

So initially when we launched the platform, we said all sites are 15 dollars

Per month

But we charge by the hour because we want to encourage people to spin up new sites so that they can test features

Okay, so if you delete it after an hour, you only pay for the hour

And uh, and that really helped us get started and get going but then we really

I was

Interesting

Yeah, but still I mean it it did we realized that it was um

Sometimes a bit overkill for people like not everybody meets all the bells and whistles and needs

Needs all the performance and all the scalability they want something that’s you know more accessible

And and obviously we

We we came up with a price point that you know at your startup. So you’re trying to you’re not

uh charging the rules for a site and it’s highly competitive still with other solutions in terms of

The price per site. So we needed to find a way to make the product more make the platform more accessible

While not becoming while not

Uh cutting into any profit margin. Uh, we would have in the future

so um

So we actually started stripping down the product so at them at the time we were offering one container

Uh that we choose for you and then we scale your sites

And so now we came up with a new pricing model where you can actually choose from three containers

And you can also choose a scalability plan on three

three levels

And then also you can actually skip the the scalability plans and go for metered instead

And metered means that you get to decide the minimum number of containers and the maximum number of containers that we can skill to

At any point in time. So if your websites are really busy will scale up

But if everybody’s asleep will scale down

And so our lowest price point now is I believe four dollars per site

And it go it can go up to 40 dollars if you want to

um

And so now we’ve become

Much more accessible for people to get started with and and to scale as they grow

Uh, so like I said

I reuse case as we as we talk about this. It’s interesting

So if you’re an e-commerce site and you know you get busy in sept and november in december because christmas is coming

Wouldn’t it be feasible to get on a variable plan with you guys

And then you can scale up as the traffic goes and then scale down as the traffic comes up

Isn’t that a good use case when you think about it?

Absolutely. Yeah, and and interestingly enough. That’s not a use case that I would predict

Going in

um, and that’s also why we are

very surprised by how people are using the platform because we just

We just implemented basic best practices from sass into WordPress and now you come up with a use case

That is actually suitable. Yeah, I get that. That’s really cool. Um, how many clients do you have on your service right now?

For what we did that

Uh, I don’t keep track, uh, because uh, you go nuts if you do, uh, but I believe it’s

No, it’s a couple thousands

I could have a look now I go nuts. Yeah, so it’s uh in the range of a couple thousands

So it’s in that range then that’s not bad that’s growing

It is actually growing quite rapidly. Um

I want to know

Um, how fast we are growing on a month by month basis because the kpi’s that we track are different

We look mostly at conversions by funnel phase

Um, and also because our biggest growth comes not from the total number of users

But from the number of sites that is

Of course

Yeah, so that’s why

If you have one user that has 50 sites and grows to 60 there’s growth right

Exactly. So that’s why I can I can say I can tell you in one breath how many

Tenants per user we have

Uh, but I’m not overly interested in how many users we have at this point. Yeah

Hey, this has been like such a real interesting conversation about your product and about the whole

Investment startup side. I mean, it’s kind of a multifold conversation

I think you guys have done a really good job roger and kudos to you your co-founders and your team for what you built

Thanks. Thanks. I regret that we don’t get to see each other in

Um in Athens next week. Um, I

Enjoyed

I did too and i’m sure we’ll have many more of them if somebody wants to get a hold of you and talk about

Your product or anything else WordPress. How’s the best way?

Yeah, good question. I think um, I’m fairly active on linkedin

Um, so you can just google my name, uh, and probably my linkedin will pop up immediately

Uh, but really twitter linkedin

Uh, my handle is roger roshida. Um, so that’s that’s quite easy. No boost guy yet for you. I take it

No

I’m discovering it. I’m researching

Yes. Yes. Yes

Thanks roger, uh, having an amazing day and good luck to you and your team and enjoy word camp here

Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me on

My pleasure. Thank you