WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Than A Year

http://mixergy.com/jason-cohen-wpengine-interview-2/

by tswicegood • 14 years ago

69 39 14 years ago

redguava3• 14 years ago

I stopped watching very early on. It really bugs me in interviews when the host does too much talking.

I hope it balanced out as the video goes on, but if you have a guest on that has valuable information... let them speak.

taylort• 14 years ago

I could not agree more. I kept fast-forwarding the interview to find where the guest started talking.

jyap• 14 years ago

Or just read the transcript on that page.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

I don't mind an interviewer talking if they're providing value to the interview, but when they interrupt the guest when the guest is providing information to give their opinion or ask a question it's incredibly annoying. I also quit watching after about 10 minutes for the same reason.

jgmmo2• 14 years ago

I remember in the Rob Walling interview the Mixergy host stops Rob mid-sentence in order to talk about his hair and to play with his hair.

Good content, but yes -- more guest less host.

AndrewWarner3• 14 years ago

Damn. Have I gone that far?

I have to pull it back.

I used to get criticism for not saying anything about myself. Maybe I'm going too far again.

Thanks. The specific example was especially helpful.

Ecio78• 14 years ago

as a side note: afaik Rob Walling moved his blog to WPEngine some months ago and he's also a (small) investor

AndrewWarner3• 14 years ago

I don't want to do too much talking.

Do you have any specific examples of where I did that?

mgallivan3• 14 years ago

I think the two points that seemed different than your previous interviews:

1. The story about your wife's WP hosting was a bit long. It seemed like you were trying to sell the purpose of Mr. Cohen's service but the story was a bit long-winded.

2. I liked that you summarized the video at the start of the interview - but you should do the summary before your interviewee is on-screen. As soon as his face hits the screen I want to hear him talk...

Other than that, I enjoyed it!

steveplace• 14 years ago

It seems the criticism goes away once they realize you're a real person.

redguava3• 14 years ago

Great to see you respond here. The time that lost me was when you were telling the story about your wife's issues. I understand your intent with that story, but it was quite long winded and it looked like a few times your guest went to speak and was effectively cut off.

I didn't watch the whole video, I was put off by the signal to noise ratio in the first few minutes.

pabloIMO• 14 years ago

Here's an example:

> Andrew: What about this, is it an advantage that you have over a newer entrepreneur or one that is not as well known is, that if you would have called me up at 1:00 AM, I would have taken your call. I would have woken up and made myself a cup of coffee so that I could be fully aware and give you ever ounce of attention that I could, because we’re friends, but also because you have a reputation in this space, and I know that at some point I’m going to want to work with you, and so the guy who has that has the advantage over the no-name entrepreneur who’s building his first company who then has to talk to 50 people and just getting 50 conversations would take forever because no one knows him and no one has any reason to be there for him.

All this could be shortened to:

> You have been a tech entrepreneur for quite a few years now and you have a massively successful blog which is read by thousands of people. How much of an advantage is the fact that you already have a reputation and a following? How would a newer entrepreneur go about finding 50 people to have these conversations with?

There are many similar examples throughout the transcript.

IanDrake2• 14 years ago

I'm guessing people here aren't that familiar with Andrew's work. I've been listening for a long time now and can tell you that few people have done for start-ups everywhere what Andrew has done.

He's interviewing people just about every day, people who are making money, people with stories that can help others looking to do the same. Not every moment is gold, but Andrew is contributing in a major way and it cost you nothing but your time.

It's just upsetting to me to hear these comments on HN. While criticism is good, I'm afraid some of these just sound too unappreciative for me to take.

Andrew - Keep up the good work.

redguava3• 14 years ago

I am not familiar with his work, but I also don't think I should need to know his reputation in order to watch the video.

To me it seemed disrespectful to the person he was interviewing, and honestly a bit egotistical to be talking so much.

Hopefully this feedback reaches him and it's something that can be considered.

zedadex• 14 years ago

To me, the phrase "While criticism is good, I'm afraid some of these just sound too unappreciative for me to take" is far more upsetting than anything redguava said.

Redguava - I watched the whole interview. While I was not previously familiar with "Andrew's" history I'm reading about him now, as I somewhat agreed with your take on him and became curious over the course of the interview about his qualifications/accomplishments.

However, do watch the whole interview. Jason Cohen had some great things to say. By the end I felt it had strayed off topic but that it was definitely worth hearing, especially when he got to speak on how he'd have changed the interview.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

Holy cow. $1M for SUCH a simple concept. Offering reliable WP hosting is about as easy as changing batteries in a smoke detector. Not bitter about this, rather, nicely done capitalizing on such a simple thing.

mhp• 14 years ago

Do they say anywhere whether they mean $1MM in total sales or that they are now doing $1MM per month in sales? Those are two totally different concepts and I'm not sure which hurdle WPEngine has crossed.

dotBen2• 14 years ago

It's $1MM year (although we're now way past that milestone)

jacques_chester3• 14 years ago

> Offering reliable WP hosting is about as easy as changing batteries in a smoke detector.

Please excuse me while I laugh bitterly and slightly hysterically.

sedev• 14 years ago

I was just thinking something similar. Did we all learn nothing from the recent spate of PHP critiques? Wordpress has several delightful qualities, but "runs easily and smoothly with minimal maintenance required" is not among them unless you are among the least demanding possible users of it.

ezequiel-garzon• 14 years ago

And they are rather pricey: $29/mo. for 1 domain and up to 25000 visits... I would expect personalized design in addition to hosting for that kind of money.

Of course, all the power to them if they make their customers happy.

bigiain2• 14 years ago

That's the thing - they're not trying to compete with GoDaddy hosting and offshore WP stock template design firms, or to sell to personal bloggers with a cpanel account and "Teach yourself Wordpress in 21 days" books.

They're offering a reasonably priced service to people who've tried that route and found it enough grief that it's worth a few grand for a decent web design and Wordpress config/integration, and $30/month to host it.

If a business can't justify those sorts of numbers on 20,000 visits a month, they probably need to rethink their whole web strategy.

dotBen2• 14 years ago

If I may answer that with a link, this is why we start at $29/mo (and most people pay us more), and why we're not trying to compete with the $5-$10/mo type hosts:

http://wpengine.com/special/

larholm• 14 years ago

25,000 might sound like a lot of visits, but I have been beyond that in mere hours with a single slashdotting.

Well, that was in 2004 when /. was big. Today, I would fear the Reddit frontpage.

The next step up? Going from $29/mo. to $99/mo.

I might just not be their target customer.

bigiain2• 14 years ago

True.

The smart thing here was recognizing that it's such an obvious pain point to people in purchase decision advising roles. As a Wordpress dev, do you advise your clients to save a few bucks by using shared GoDaddy Wordpress hosting @ ~$5/month, knowing you'll end up needing to field support calls for GoDaddy problems and spend ongoing time securing and updating the site (and _still_ end up p0wned because some other GoDaddy customer hasn't updated), or do you tell the client "You can have inexpensive hosting, but the support comes at $~100/hr, or you can buy business-grade hosting from wp-engine and you'll almost _never_ have security/uptime/speed problems".

I know what _I've_ advised people recently (especially since the lowest wp-engine plan dropped to $30/month. That's a no-brainer in my opinion!)

patio11• 14 years ago

There is some serious infrastructure ensuring that that smoke detector is not overwhelmed by the roaring pyroclastic cataclysm that is having lots of Wordpress sites with arbitrarily well-coded PHP running in themes/addons/etc

Simplest example off the top of my head: there's an automated system which will kick you emails saying "You're sending MySQL ORDER BY RAND(). Not a great idea. We told MySQL to ignore it. There's a setting you can configure to override this if you're confident you know what you're doing. Site outages caused this year by people flipping that switch: 5."

pchristensen• 14 years ago

This article from his blog a while ago is also useful: http://blog.asmartbear.com/vetting-startup-ideas.html

jacques_chester3• 14 years ago

I'm currently working on a startup in an only tangentially related field.

One line item of my capital plan is to relocate a small blog network I run (http://ozblogistan.com.au) to WPEngine. There's enough traffic that I'd need the $249/mth plan.

That's how badly I want not to be a WP administrator. And how much better I think full time professionals could do it.

tedunangst• 14 years ago

Can you explain why you wouldn't go with wordpress.com? As someone who's not running WP, I'm curious how you differentiated the services.

jacques_chester3• 14 years ago

My users want custom plugins and themes. Wordpress.com doesn't offer that for less than $500/mth, last I checked. WPEngine will, within reason.

I don't charge for my services, though the various bloggers have made donations out of niceness.

It just sort of ... grew.

tobyjsullivan• 14 years ago

I just spent about $2000 worth of my time watching this video and it was totally worth it! P.S. If you don't get that reference, you didn't watch the whole video. ;)

WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Than A Year

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