Episode 64: Interview With Vito Peleg

Show Notes

00:00

Good as Rob Karen CEO and Chief creator of amazing ideas of stunning digital marketing.com, the digital marketing agency to help you fulfill all your business needs. today’s podcast is with my good friend Vito pay like Vito is the founder of WP feedback. Please keep in mind that this podcast interview was recorded before wordcamp Asia was canceled. So there are some references in the podcast to wordcamp Asia. I truly believe that the press community I did the right thing and canceling it yet some of the semantics which I’ll get into later show what they should have been. Without further ado, please enjoy the great conversation. Thanks for joining us.

01:01

Good day everybody. Rob Sharon. Sharon, I’m here with my good friend Vito Pelayo. Now if you don’t know Vito, he is the founder of WP feedback. And I thought we’d have a bit of a chat today. How are you today?

01:14

Hey, how you doing, Robert? Thanks for having me.

01:16

Doing well. And you?

01:18

Great, great. Yeah, the day is almost over Friday. Yeah, it’s been a it’s been a busy week. Yeah.

01:28

And for those who don’t have reserves in London, so he’s like, five hours ahead of me. So it stays almost done. Mine is still chugging along here. We were kind of talking offline a little bit about backgrounds and stuff. So can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background, where you’ve come from and some interesting things about you,

01:50

please? Sure. So I actually got into the web design business, while I was touring the world with a band that I used to play in, is to Singapore. And we’re touring Europe during the world, releasing albums, and all of that kind of stuff, which seemed kind of awesome from the outside. But basically, we were still dead broke doing all of that. So. So just as a means of generating a little more income, I started building websites, from the back of the van, you know, stopping every time there’s a McDonald’s to steal some Wi Fi, and continue to the next to the next venue. And then once the band kind of split up, I started looking into how can I grow this thing? How can I move on from being a freelancer a to an agency. And that was the transition that within the first few I got to six figures in revenue here in the UK. And within year three, we already had a team of 12 guys, some remote, some local, and some in house, some some remote. And through our activity with the agency, that’s when we started realizing that there is a huge gap in terms of working with clients efficiently in our space. And especially when you’re working with a with such technical elements or design elements like building a website. The client is rarely has any idea what the hell is going on on the other side. So that’s where WP feedback came about. We created a tool for ourselves initially, to help us systemize our service delivery and the feedback process with clients. And it worked. So we decided to release it. And that took off really, really fast. So we launched that seven months ago. within the first month we broke a record in the WordPress space, being the first plug in by a new company to generate six figures in revenue in 30 days. And then from there, it just kept growing until while we launched last just the beginning of this week just on Monday, which is the new WP feedback. The feedback tool that we were that we marketed until now. That is now WP Pro, and the network which is what we call the new home for the WordPress community. That is what WP feedback is now.

04:08

Yeah, and anybody who’s in the WordPress community and design community needs to get over there and get involved in that community. I think it’s a really good resource designers do tend to talk a lot even though they know the WordPress community is a little different than a lot of other communities. We all talk online and we all have conversations like we’re doing now. We all share what we’ve done.

04:34

This is actually very rare. You know, Robert, I think you came from a few other industries before going into this game as well. So you probably know embedded I bet is the same in the IT game that everything is very secretive and everyone is just keeping to themselves. And the opposite. The opposite is true when it comes to WordPress. Everyone is so open and and I love that I very much embraced it and if someone wants to reach out to me And, and, and have a little talk, I’m always willing to find the time to do that. And it’s been this my same experience with some of the people that I look up to, and that I want to speak to just sending a message on Facebook or finding like, finding that email for that contact. And everyone were very open to this. So this is the power of the WordPress community. And this is why I think that this is kind of one of the reasons why we dove into creating something like this to create a home for us to actually take what we’re already doing naturally. But take it to the next level.

05:36

Oh, I I agree with you so much. I mean, the power of the community is incredible. I mean, working here, take your community, and I’ll throw a guy out there who’s a good friend who I’ve talked to many times over the years guy like a bob Dunn, who’s big into the WooCommerce space. Yes. And Bob and I have known each other online probably for over 10 years. Yeah, we have conversations every couple of months. Right. And, you know, and and that’s how this community grows, take take another person, our mutual friend, Kim Doyle, and she’s another one. And you know, Kim, and I have many conversations. And you know, it’s the same thing. And half the time, it’s not even WordPress related. Yeah. It’s the agency struggles. It’s a business discussion. It’s the how’s your family doing discussion?

06:30

It’s like, it’s people to people. That’s the that’s the beauty here. And yeah, like, I want to try and nurture this even a lot more, I think that this could have could have been a lot more done by a, you know, by the top players in the spirit or by WordPress themselves, to help us create that kind of environment. When I saw no one is doing it. And I saw that I own my team and I have the power to make it happen to make it a reality. It just made complete sense. And it’s free. Yeah, I

07:05

would, I would agree with you. I mean, I think some more stuff could have been done at the top. And we’ve all questioned things that have happened at the top end with automatic and, you know, frankly, Gutenberg and many things. And I’m not going to beat that discussion. Because it’s been beaten to death. Well, 14 months. And, and but that all said, I think what we need to do is keep building this community and not keep ripping it apart. And that’s important.

07:41

And that’s another thing that I’ve kind of started recognizing in that in our space, a, a over the past kind of yield, so that this kind of like some cliques that are forming and all this kind of stuff. And I wanted to, to bring back the the common denominator, right, that’s the term, hmm. To make sure that we all understand that we’re in this together, or remind it to all of us that we’re in this together. And it’s not about competition, it’s about all us all of us growing.

08:14

I would agree. I mean, I know, you and I are both in numerous Facebook groups. And the one thing most of us do is recognize we’re all in this together. And we actually share information on a pretty regular basis, instead of saying, No, I won’t help you. You’re my competitor, I won’t help you. You’re making better No,

08:33

I just enough for everyone.

08:35

Yeah, yeah, I so agree with that. Um, let’s move on to a topic I wanted to get to. And that was talking about scaling your business a little bit. And you talked about how your team is now 14? How did you get to the 14, we know recently, you’ve hired a CTO, we both know very well. And we’ll get better. And I wanted to talk about why why now and this whole? Why did you scale your business?

09:10

Sure. So I think that a I’m a facilitator, you know, so as I kind of like look at what is my biggest strength is taking something and executing a vision. And, and, but in order for you to do that, you must have help in kind of comes back to that realization of community or the power of, of groups or people working together. And so to me, it was kind of a natural a transition to go to that route. I don’t think it’s the right way for everyone. You know, if you if you feel that you move into condition and you enjoy doing the work, you know, you would actually enjoy sitting on the tools and doing that kind of stuff, then I wouldn’t mess with that. And you know, I would say just like keep at it and increase pricing. Instead of Increasing the team, as you become more more of a pro with what you do, but if you’re more of a business owner and, and and then then scaling up is like the natural progression that you will do. I even think and look, you know, again, if you’re going back and looking back into the music world, and I’ve always had a band, you know, like, since I was 14 years old, I was part of a band. And I was always the leader of the band, but I was, I was always, I always had people around me that I kind of had to drive to do stuff. And with music, it’s even harder, because it’s free that they never get paid for anything. So they need to travel the world carry equipment, wake up in the middle of the night, do all of this kind of stuff. And it’s all for free. So that kind of taught me how to lead and how to become an efficient manager that I now apply to our startup here.

10:55

And being a manager, I’m, I’m a pm or project manager by trade is tough. And it’s not easy, sometimes to be that facilitator and then make sure a is talking to be and all the pieces are in place. That’s a skill in itself that most people don’t realize, that are freelancers that work for themselves. And they don’t always understand that

11:20

managing skill and a tough skill, a true virtue, and it’s a skill that you improve over time, like, you know, like anything else, you know, like, I’ve done a lot of mistakes with my early employees, you know, that I just learned from and tried to not repeat when I did the same process again. And, and I totally agree with what you’re saying is that because it’s more about seeing the bigger picture, and how each element communicates all integrates to another within the business. So having this granular look over things, to see how it all interacts to make sure that there are no breakage that everything flows smoothly between the different aspects of the business. Yeah, I loved I love doing that. And what usually happens is you start in because because the natural progression is starting as a one man show one man band, and then you start bringing more people on board and so on. And you remain in the set in the center. So you are meant like everything just comes out, all of the communications are coming out of you like you know, if you imagine like imagine like a circle with arrows going out, you know, all around it, instead of you being the, the main circle that everything happens inside. So like things are moving from one place to another, but you’re just overseeing the whole thing. So it’s like, you’re looking at it from above instead of being the core of it. And

12:51

yeah, and the hardest part there, unfortunately, when you go from being a one man band hiring people is writing goes sometimes Oh, yeah. You know, I went through that in health care where I ran million dollar projects. And I’d have a team of often 567 people in it working under them. And it’s like, I know, I can jump in and do that. Yeah, I know, I can do that. And I know I can do it faster. But that’s not your goal will become that facilitators to facilitate your team to grow and do everything and say D jumping in and doing it all the time. And that’s the hardest thing I find for people that make that shift is they they’re still micro managers, or micro doers, instead of saying, Let me develop my team for the benefit of this.

13:39

I totally agree. And what I tried to do, and this kind of challenge that comes in, comes in front of me I try to look at this is okay, I can do the work right now. And it’s gonna take me whatever, 30 minutes or one hour, or I can just let it go and go do something else that will leverage us by another hour, instead of just doing it like that. So this way, if you can do the work in an hour, but by not doing the work and delegating, you’re actually accomplishing five hours worth of work instead of just one

14:08

that that is so true. Because also to switch into a task and switch out of the time isn’t just the hour, it’s the half hour before the half hour after. So the hour turns into two very quickly. And yet, we all get what I’m saying. And it’s funny because we talked about that. We were talking offline. Now I’ve just taken on a pm to do some of my stuff. And one of the reasons I did and I’ve shared this pretty publicly in a couple groups is I have a goal to take a 32 year off this year. Okay, the only way I can take a 30 year off to run the business is to have people to do the work for right. So your goals, everybody’s goals are different.

14:54

Yeah, I think that this is a very smart move. If you start with that you start with the vision and the idea and the And, and just choose the model that works for you.

15:05

Yeah. So one of the things you did recently was the hire the CTO. And the CTO for those who don’t know, is Yang. And Yang said to Germany, and I know Yang very well, yen’s been on with me, we’ve had many conversations. He’s a smart guy. Yeah. How did that come about? And how did that play out?

15:30

And yeah, of course, so I met Yan in Berlin in wordcamp, actually, last year, and I was just before the launch, you know, like a bit. But we were literally on the first couple of weeks of what was going on with web feedback, I went there to talk about what we want to do, you know, is a due on that event. And that’s where we kind of like got together and we kind of clicked and I think that this is the first thing that should happen, especially, you know, I’m not talking about if you’re going to bring one support guy out of 10 people, it doesn’t really matter. If you have good personal rapport with that with that guy, it would help but it’s not going to be essential. But when you’re bringing key positions into the company, communication, flow of communication, and the ability to openly talk about things is super important. And to do that, you must have a high quality rapport between the two individuals. So that was the first thing out of the way, because we just got along really well at the beginning. And but the main reason was that I saw completing traits in his personality that I don’t have. And he saw the same thing in what I have, that he doesn’t. And that’s kind of like what drove this home, basically, you know, because I started as a web designer, you know, more on the design side. So I see things like as an artist more when I look at a website, sometimes. And while young came into it from the development side of things, so we see things differently, our perception of reality is completely different. More than that yarns kind of like, approach to things is more detailed oriented, he likes to dive into things and explore them in and you know, like, pull out whatever he can get out of them, which is awesome. And that’s, that’s exactly what you need when, when a product starts to become more mature. And I’m on the other side, on the other side of the spectrum, so I just run, you know, I run fast and as fast as I can, and, and sometimes I break things along the way, but I get to where I needed to go. So So that’s kind of the that’s been a lot of the approach so far. But as, as the company kind of stable, already have a 1000s and 1000s of websites using our solution. Now it’s time to dive deeper. And I think that this is exactly the right time to bring someone that will have the capacity to do that. Plus, you know, as the team grows, and as the as the customer base grows, my time gets fragmented. So I don’t get to do more, I don’t get to give the same amount of focus into what’s going to be the next update. You know, most of my week, this week was dealing with with the lawyers and the privacy policies and the cookies policy, you

18:30

know, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.

18:33

Yeah, but it’s sure that’s true. I’ve had so, so having someone that will sit on that will kind of work a lot better, then even more, you know, like, it’s just it’s just like a match made in heaven. This thing because Yon did the WordPress agency summit last year,

18:52

it was very good, actually. Yeah, yeah,

18:54

it was a huge success. You know, like, in terms of attendees, in terms of the of the people that he got on both to speak in terms of the sponsors, in terms of the media coverage for this thing, he created something awesome. So we kind of also connected on the fact that we were both a I don’t know, you know, quote unquote, kind of rising stars in the ecosystem. Yeah. And and, and we could see a huge a value add or even like a very tight synergy with the summit that is doing and with the network that we just released. So all of the upcoming summits instead of people needing to log into yet another platform to consume that videos is just going to be part of web feedback. So again, it still works with our mission of breaking down communication breakdowns and bringing it all home. Yeah.

19:47

And the other thing I should mention that you mentioned right off the top on this discussion is you and I had met at wordcamp Berlin. Oh, yeah. And what was really important though, that I’ve been there’s a lot of talk about Water designers and developers, they don’t get out in front, they don’t get to work camps, they don’t get to local events. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of local Toronto events that are different. So not so much WordPress events, but more business events. And it’s the people you meet. And there are people that you, you meet and you say hello to, and you hit it off like that I’ve met a couple people have become very good personal friends that we met at networking events. And so what I’m trying to put out there is for listeners is get out to some local events, they don’t necessarily have to be WordPress related. Find a business group, find a group for your library, find something on meetup.com Yeah, get out and put yourself out there, the first couple of times is tough, but it gets easier.

20:50

That’s very true. And this is a kind of a practice that I that I had to put myself into, when we started launching this thing. But I did this as the in the agency, you know, not not necessarily going to WordPress related media back then. But more stuff that were around our target audience at the time. And you know, even going back to the music thing, once you play the show, you got to go out and hang out with the fans, you know, that’s the, that’s, that’s where the real relationship building process happens. That’s where they’re gonna really buy the album and keep it for for years to come. Yeah, so nurturing this relationship is super important is another thing that I’m gonna, that we’re going to encourage through the platform. Because as people sign up, we ask them where they’re from, like a city and a country. And then now we can recommend related events in our space when they come. Because we found is that the biggest reason when I was talking to a lot of WordPress, meetup, organizers and word camp organizers, their biggest challenge is getting the word out there and making sure that people interact.

21:57

No questions,

21:59

of course. So yeah, so hopefully that will solve that problem from that end as well.

22:03

And what people need to remember you’re talking about nurturing relationships. And I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this. But I attributed a marketing’s like dating, you know, you don’t like it doesn’t kind of happen. Right away. It takes time to build that relationship and the more important relationship, the longer it takes. And I think, I think people need to realize that and so was networking. I mean, it takes time to go trust level,

22:31

I felt I felt like the impact of it between the two big word camps. So I went to Berlin last year being like, a complete unknown in the space. And just walking around with my I had my little booklets that I was. And I was just, you know, I got rid of 500 of these tried to speak to every person that I saw over there. Hi, look into Chicago. And you know, as she was, you know, doing outreach, basically. But then when I came when I came to St. Louis in November, that was us, yes to wordcamp. us, I saw the same people. But the the approach was completely different. Now we’re equal, you know, we’re, it’s not me trying to talk to them. It’s us talking as friends. And you see the kind of people that I would imagine myself being nervous speaking to now because of the traction that we got in the thing. And because I was adamant about the fact that I want to build relationship. So people that I didn’t get the chance to meet yet, I saw that they were kind of looking up and a, you know, with those big eyes trying to get something from me. And I was in exactly the same position six months before that. So it’s just really interesting to see the two approaches and how impactful networking and building relationship really is.

24:01

Yeah, it’s relationships. I can, you know, I hear you. Um, last year, we didn’t have a word camp Toronto, they put it on hiatus for a year, the year before I went, it’s usually a one day. And I think I spent the whole morning in the break room kept track of people on relationships. And it’s not that the speakers weren’t good. It’s just, I, I know a lot of people in the Toronto space and it was a time to catch up. And before I knew what one o’clock had rolled around, I think I had sat through half a talk. And I think that’s the real value of workcamps. Is networking, not the talk See, we can get the talks online. Yes. The seeing of people still getting together and sharing it.

24:48

Yeah, you learn so much just by being in the company of people that already walked the same steps that you want to walk. And you know, like, I remember I was sitting with With Robbie from Beaver Builder, and we started about, about about their company and how they built it up how they also started as an agency and went into kind of like this kind of stuff. And he even started as a freelancer before that. And Justin came even from the music business before that. So we found a lot of kind of like a common ground there, which was very inspiring for me starting a brand new company in the space, and being able to talk to a person that started a product that we were using on a literally hourly basis, for for a long time. And he was so open about this, and you just get to get a glimpse into people that are like four or five years ahead of your business goals, you know, not necessarily ahead of you, but ahead of your business goals of where you want to get to, and just learn and listen and learn.

25:51

It’s incredible. You always learn. I mean, before we got offline, we were talking about people we knew and want to and I’ve mentioned them in this podcast when the guys I talked to buy the biggest bb gun. And and you know, as I’ve gone through the podcast journey over the years and done stuff, I’ve bounced off of Bob, all the government say right, what do you think about this? And but the point is, she’s a great resource and a great friend. And, and that’s the way we develop this relationships. It’s so important. It’s so Yes. Where is now that you’ve had all the success? Can you share where you’re going? in the future? Sure. So

26:35

like last last year was like we were saying it was very much insane, you know, like the the growth and traction was not was not expected at this scale. And, you know, on month two, we already closed down the agency completely and started focusing just on it on a product, which I thought would take like about a year to get to that that to that transition,

26:59

I remember that post action.

27:06

Yeah,

27:07

so so that was the kind of a that was a very humbling experience on its own. So when I was kind of looking into what happened, and I was recapping 2019, for myself, and to see what’s going to what we’re going to do in 2020. And I found that there’s two things. First of all, I want to continue the growth, but I want to do it bigger and faster this year. And so I needed to think of a mechanism that will allow me to accelerate this even further. And then another thing is trying to figure out what can I do with all of these amazing partners that helped me put this solution out there. You know, people like the window, we’re talking about the vendor, or even the job that is inside that network. And people like David, Frum for pbf. And yeah, all of our friends that just just believed in, in the solution that we tried to create, or that we created, and, and just volunteered to share this with their networks, all the way up to GoDaddy and elemental, and, you know, we were building stuff. So like companies that you would imagine it would take years to even reach out to. So what can I do to provide value back to all of these people so I can continue these relationships into 2020. And that’s when the kind of I noticed that there was a there’s only two ways to go about it in our ecosystem, which is kind of interesting. It’s either you do a free plugin, or you create content. So about even for you, for example, you decided to go the content route with this podcast. And, and you see there’s loads of there’s, there’s very high quality blogs that are out there in our ecosystem, high quality podcasts, and in and then that’s from the content marketing side. And from the product side from the free offering. You see companies like Yoast, and elemental and wordfence that have built mega companies based on a free plugin.

29:09

That’s wordfence they’re

29:13

at with, with Mark over there. So we were I was and that’s the kind of level that I aspire to. So I look at these companies and I see all right, to get to 4 million installs it which elements have just reached last week, if I recall, to get to 4 million installs or 7 million or 9 million that some of these up. I think wordfence has 22 million lifetime downloads or something like that.

29:38

It’s huge. They were talking about that on a recent podcast before Christmas and yeah, and their community is born. And they’ve had enough convert me included from a free version to a paid solution that that drives their business and they’ve done they’ve done theirs very smartly. What they do is they actually give They’re free community updates, but not as frequent as they do the page source. Hmm,

30:05

that’s interesting. That’s interesting. Great if you’re stressed about that security breach well,

30:10

especially on the firewall side, and, and I just know that product, I use a lot as an example, because it I talked about this recently kind of saved my hide a couple of times, for clients. So, you know, you got it, but I agree with you, you got to decide which way you’re going to go.

30:29

So when you when you’re looking at what companies like that have done, and you know, to serve a solution that has a few million installs on, it takes a lot of resources, a lot of manpower, even we can, we can confidently say that it takes approximately 50 people to maintain a multi million installs solution in our ecosystem, they do it because it’s viable, you know, and if you get to that point, you’re good. So it’s worth it. But I was thinking like, Alright, if we’re already gonna get to that level, at some point, I might as well create something that will not be just another plugin out of 60,000, and will not be just another blog out there, out of millions of articles in the space, very, very saturated on that front. I wanted instead of creating like a little step for our ecosystem to create, like a huge leap forward with whatever mechanism we would build as our top of funnel as our like others have the free plugins or the content strategy. So that’s, that’s what I noticed that people were doing online, and they were sharing our plugin inside social media groups, basically, installing the plugin on the websites, turning on what we call guest mode, and sharing this in the Facebook group or a Slack channel, and getting peer to peer feedback. That’s where they kind of concept came from. And I just wanted to award this functionality to the community. And we kind of kept adding more and more stuff to it, until we ended up with what is now the feedback, which is, essentially, it’s a social platform that is designed specifically for our ecosystem. And and, and it still continues on that mission. It just that it broaden. So this is actually another interesting thing going to continue on what we said in the beginning as you grow, your perception of your mission changes. So you don’t know. And other people kind of resist that, you know, when you’re saying no, no, no, no, I build websites. So that’s what I do. I build websites, that’s all I do. But that’s not the case when when you evolve you, you your your vision broadens. So what I consider our mission from day one was let’s fix communications for WordPress professionals. Yeah, that was the that that’s the one liner, that’s our note style. And everything we do we check against this note style. But the definition of what is a WordPress professional, that that is a kind of a that is open to interpretation. So when I was building this tool, to me, a WordPress professional was only freelancers and agencies. That was my reality. And that’s how I saw it. But now from where I stand, I consider myself a WordPress professional as a product maker. And I consider yourself as a, as a WordPress professional, as a publisher in the space. And I consider the hosting companies, also WordPress professionals that are serving us. So the org and course creators in our space. They’re also WordPress professionals that help us grow within this ecosystem. So I tried to look at this now from a broader point of view, and how can we serve each one of these functions in our space? That’s what the network is all about.

33:46

Oh, I agree. And you know, it’s funny, people do resist pivoting or changing where they’re going. I mean, I know when I started, I started doing websites, or probably 12 years ago on the side 10 years ago on my own. And then I’ve kind of transitioned into realizing, I don’t want to do just websites, I want to do more than that. So that I’ve transition. And I think most big companies do evolve. I don’t think that they stay the way, especially for five or 10 years, your duration has been shorter up to now but there’s always evolution and people have it all the time. I mean,

34:30

you know, you look at Amazon, it’s just a bookstore, you know,

34:33

that’s what it is. You know, Amazon’s my go to store for everything.

34:37

Yeah, it is but it that’s that’s the that’s the the initial mission. The mission was to create efficiency buying a book. But, but that that terminology just changed from book to product that everything else remained. So the view was the way I see it like businesses perspective was Around solving the problem around books. That’s that was his kind of like a reality at the time. But the more he did it, he said, Okay, I can do it with book by I can also do it with a computer. And I can also do it with a baby stroller, you know.

35:14

And I can deal with it services and yes, do it with food. And I can do it with natural foods. I mean, they own they own Whole Foods in North American culture, which does delivery, I mean, but it’s the same process, it’s just branched out into different things.

35:32

So he kind of brought in division to everything in the world. And eventually, you know, but it took time, and it was it happened step at one step at a time. And we were all witness to the growth of, of that vision. But it’s always about creating efficiency in delivering a product. That’s the kind of

35:53

thing Yeah, and that’s one reason why Amazon has delivery centers all over the world. And an interesting note, I don’t know if you notice, they actually bought many of those delivery centers during economic downturns to save money on real estate. And right now Bezos running around the US buying derelict shopping malls that are dead. Oh, yeah.

36:15

So that’s interesting.

36:16

So he’s actually taking advantage of the economic times to help the company and he’s a smart man,

36:23

there’s a way I can talk about business for hours. But there is like one kind of really strong principle that, that I adopted from, from the way that he kind of observes business as well, which is basically eating your clients complications, yes. And, and they there is a really interesting story as to what he did with the first Kindle, to actually make it this make this a reality. And I keep going back to this story, because we tried to do the same thing with everything that we do, it’s trying to break down the complications for the other side. You know, instead of trying to enforce rules on the other side, you want to consume the problems, and make sure that they get a smooth experience, what they did with back then he had the idea of, alright, I need to deliver book books efficiently, right? That’s the mission, how can I do but there was still a problem that it took, if you wanted the book back then even through Amazon, you would go to the website, and you needed to order it, and then you wait until the book came. So you wait a few days, so he wanted to make it instant, that’s when the kind of concept of the Kindle came about. So we reached out to all the publishers and tell them listen, guys, we’re releasing this device, and it’s going to basically carry our entire library into a to allow people to just read on the spot. And so can you please send me the transcript of the books? No one had it. No, not have the publisher. That’s not the way that they were working back then. So and they were like, Yeah, I don’t know, it’s gonna take time. And you didn’t wait, he went on, he already had all the physical books. So the initial versions of the Kindle was he shipped hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of books to centers that he set up in China, with literally like warehouses and warehouses of copying machines, machines, yeah, people that are sitting there and scanning each one of the pages of hundreds of 1000s of books. So he had the database himself, to create that initial kind of proof of concept, then he had to, he needed to build the mechanism that will translate scanned paper into actual, you know, code. So it’s so it’s actually like a, a text, you know, like, dynamic text

38:46

to the point with printed books, like if you order, say, a printed book, he doesn’t order from the publisher, he has printed them from all the publishers to print it, and you’re on the spot on demand. And that’s why they’re never out of stock.

39:02

Right? And so, exactly, so he solved the complications, not only for us, as end consumers, but for the publishers and for the authors, and for the distributors and for the shipping companies. And he just goes on and breaks down breakdowns. And I love that.

39:21

Yeah. And he also owns the world’s biggest audible store in automobile.

39:26

Yes, that’s true. I’m, I’m a I’m an avid member. Yes.

39:29

So I mean, he does, he does a lot of things, right, what he’s done, and what you’ve done with your businesses, you’ve gotten your customer or potential customer and said, not, here’s what we have, and it can do all these 10 things for you. That doesn’t work anymore. What you’ve done is gone. Your customer said, This is why you need a product in your service businesses. And anybody who doesn’t understand that concept should go the the start with why by Simon Sinek very good TED Talks. coming online. The TED Talk is a much watch and sort of understand that whole concept once you start doing that, which Faisal has done, what she’s done, which many people have done, then you become successful.

40:15

Yeah, just listen, it’s all about like, just opening your is finding that real problem and figuring out a way that will solve it, but in a way that is collaborative with the market. And you know, even with with a first initial launch, before we actually built, we had our very, very scrappy MVP that we did for ourselves. But for the for clients, before we lost it as a product, we launched a survey. That’s what got us this little book that I was talking about before. And we surveyed 600 WordPress professionals to see how they run the WordPress business to see how we can fit ourselves in there, instead of completely change in and enforce rules on them. And we did the same thing here now with people. We opened for early access signups a couple of months ago, and we’ve been collecting surveys from hundreds and hundreds of WordPress individuals to see what do you need in a platform like that? And that’s exactly what we built.

41:10

Yeah. I mean, keep building. Before we go, is there anything else you’d like that we haven’t touched on or work and

41:19

no, just come join us. It’s free. And it’s fun. And there’s a happening going in there. And it’s only going to grow? We launched it? Literally earlier this week, we already have more than 700 signups within just a few days. And, and it just keeps on it just keeps on growing like that, starting to build that momentum. So yeah, come on board and join the party.

41:43

And you know, to kind of wrap up How can people get ahold you? How can people join the free community, people.

41:52

So just visit wp feedback.co. And you will see you will join, you can join for free. And you can also check out our premium while we’re talking about the premium tool, and that allows you to communicate with clients efficiently. And yeah, so that feedback.co if you want to reach out to me join in and post a message on my full file. I will answer for sure.

42:16

Yeah, and I can attribute the you know, video and I have had Chad’s videos pretty approachable so everybody get in touch with thanks for joining me Vito. Thanks everybody.

42:31

Thank you for joining video and I for this great podcast. For more digital marketing information please hop on over to stunning digital marketing.com digital agency to help make your business soar. To follow me on Twitter. I’m at Rob Cairns. I can also be found on many other social media platforms. Have a great day of this podcast day cake my late father Bruce carrots, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars make your business succeed.