It’s time to nut up or shut up | Hacker News Reader

It’s time to nut up or shut up

blog.asmartbear.com

51 pointsjohns52 comments

I'm genuinely looking forward to watching this but to me it also demonstrates something about startups and silicon valley - who you are and who you're friends with matters almost as much as what you do. There's no way in hell he'd be launching with that client list if he was some random guy, no matter how awesome the platform was. The network effect of having the right early users increasingly seems like the dirty secret of the startup game. See: posterous.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that, I'm not certainly suggesting there's anything unfair about it - people work on trust networks, it's entirely natural and utterly rational - but it does make it clear how important it is to network, get your name out there and build reputation.

I agree (although I'm not in the valley).

It is unfair in the sense of "unfair advantage." Of course I'll exploit it -- I'd be stupid not to -- but it's unfair.

This is exactly why increasingly it's hard to do a startup without teaming up with someone with a reputation. Maybe this just proves that.

I think that many people are taking issue with the way you phrased your intro. Something like, "Hey, I'm launching a new startup, to prove to myself that I can do it again. Why don't you follow along because I'll be sharing each step of this journey on my blog!" may have been received better by the community. Nevertheless, the approach you took is a legitimate one. And of course, you'd be a fool not to take advantage of your notoriety as a means of propelling your new startup. You worked hard to get where you are, and fully deserve to take advantage of your position, connections, etc.

You can become Wordpress's Heroku if you play your cards right, and I don't see how you are not going to make big money out of this company as well. My only suggestion would be to reconsider your pricing, so as to make it more accessible (while also meeting the needs of those who don't quite require unlimited blogs). For example, you could charge $29 for a single blog, $49 for 3 blogs, $99 for "unlimited".

This is exactly why increasingly it's hard to do a startup without teaming up with someone with a reputation.

I'll be looking forward to seeing you mention this on your blog, perhaps even in the comments for the latest post.

Am I missing something? That client list isn't really that top notch(no offense intended). It's not like he is starting out with Techcrunch and Mashable as clients.

I haven't even heard about any of them besides balsamiq and his own asmartbear.

I'm sure if you hustled and offered those guys deep discounts you could get a few of them as clients too.

I'm not so sure. Assume you're at least a semi-serious blogger. Some person you don't know comes up to you and offers to take care of the blog that you already have and is already working, and charge you money for it. Are you sure you'd be interested, or that you'd trust him not to close shop in a month and leave you worse off?

why would you charge money of the first people you'd approach? The idea is to do give it to them for free and then you use their reputation to sell more of your own product.

Not if you are bootstrapping. That whole free forever thing has a way of backfiring (more often than not);

Plus, we offer EVERY customer 15 days free.

We've got quite a few clients who are currently not listed on our homepage (which we'll fix!) who are racking up some serious bandwidth and page view numbers (3TB - 5TB per month, 5+ million page views, etc). One of these IS listed on our homepage, NiceKicks.

They may not be "cool" but they are big and need to scale. We're in talks to add a few more "cool" startups soon as well.

Dude, that's a pretty cool looking photo you've got there.

+1 for the hat. :)

I'm glad my photo and hat gets us some extra points! Everything helps I suppose =)

To give credit where credit is due, my good friend Jay B Sauceda here in Austin took that photo (he's awesome): http://www.jaybsauceda.com/

And here's the photo DJN is talking about.

http://wpe.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/0...

I agree, nice photo.

We call him Oliver Twist. :)

I'm curious to hear what early users we got that may have helped us. OK, Arrington was a good one. =) Others?

Some thoughts on the WPEngine itself (or at least, the site). These are in order of thought, not importance. Also, these are purely my opinions so take with a grain of salt.

1. When I was starting my own blog, I looked around for exactly this. It didn't exist, or at least not in any form that looked worth doing, so I ended up (painfully) self-hosting.

2. Having said that, for a beginner like me, $50 is way too much to spend on the blog. I'm sorry, but I can host my not-making-a-cent blog on Dreamhost, and get the first year of hosting for $20 (the whole year, I mean). I really hope this is just the initial price plan, because I honestly believe that as you grow, it will make sense to let people host smallish blogs for less money.

3. Someone on the blog post mentioned that "one-click staging" is confusing, since the "one click" part is not important. I agree.

4. I think there's a small alignment problem with the prices in the pricing grid (they're top-aligned, not centerered). I'm on Windows XP + Chrome.

5. (This one is really nitpickity): on the pricing grid, the "explanatory" sentence in the first and last column have end-of-sentence punctuation, but the middle column does not.

6. I'd give more details and make it more obvious how to export. This will be a sticking point for people, so one of the major features should be how easy it is to import.

7. Make it really obvious that you can use your own domain name with this. This is important to people, and isn't obvious.

8. Part of your tagline is "We make WordPress fast, secure, and scalable". I would actually stress the "easy" part more. I can make WordPress all those things myself, I just don't have time/knowledge. Stress the idea that this is a convenience thing.

OK Hope that helps, just some of my thoughts.

Have to agree with the pricing model, I would host here 100% but when I hit the price, I can't validate the enormous cost - and this is coming from someone who has spent $220 getting my blogged fixed after incorrectly changing something and not being able to correct it.

Now, I'll have to be reminded of this down the line by some extraneous source if/when the cost drops.

I have another small idea that might help you gain some goodwill and some link-love.

You mention on your site that you have a "curated list of WordPress plugins", which I assume means that, for any request I have, you can tell me the best plugin to fulfill that request. Now obviously, since you're selling this as a feature, you assume (correctly) that this is a competitive advantage worth paying for.

However, you might want to consider releasing the curated plugin list. Maybe only parts of it, maybe not forever, but this is something that people often need, and if your site comes up first for every search of "best plugin for Wordpress that does X", you might get a lot of potential customers just through that.

This is AMAZING feedback. We definitely hear you on all of this and promise to get our website up to snuff. Customer support, on-boarding of new clients, and making things faster, more secure, and more scalable every day have all been our biggest priorities so far.

Something we've thought A LOT about is the pricing model. I completely agree with you that $50 per month is too expensive for a beginner. I was in the same place as you a year ago (and arguably would still be were this not my company) and would never had considered $50 for hosting. We think this is OK though. We don't want to compete with Dreamhost on price and as a beginner you shouldn't need all the extras we're providing (though I do understand the appeal of the "easy" part on it's own). Once you've actually gotten some significant traffic and you ARE making a buck off of your blog or site then suddenly we are affordable!

Essentially.. we don't want to be your training wheels or your used Honda Civic. We want to be your Ford F150 or Audi. Lame analogy but true!

All that said, we WILL listen and will provide a solution if there is enough demand.

RE #2, the price issue is interesting.

I could rewrite your point on #2 from a different perspective:

"$20/year 'dreamhost pricing' is way too little to spend my the blog. I'm sorry, but I rely on my blog for my entire income and so I need to know the support at the level I need is in place, the quality for the service I need is there, I have the kind of traffic that needs performance optimization and CDN, and I need to know that this is a clearly long-term viable business so you guys will be around in years to come as my blog gets even bigger. I really hope this is just the initial price plan, because I honestly believe that as you grow, it will make sense to let people host much bigger comercialized blogs on here."

The point is we're simply looking at the entire blogging space and carving it up into different market segments based on needs and then super-targeting one segment.

Tony Schnieder (Automattic/WordPress.com CEO) said today at TechCrunch disrupt that WordPress blogs power 8.5% of the internet's websites - so we think it's clear that one size does not fit all and there are opportunities for different services to cater for different needs.

Finally don't forget there are much more expensive options out there... we're not WordPress VIP either which is several $1000's/month for service and support (TechCrunch, GigaOm etc run on this).

You're absolutely right, segmenting the market and choosing one niche over another is great strategy. I wanted to point it out from the perspective of a "beginner" for one reason: lots of people won't move the blog after it gets started out of fear/inertia.

I just had a client asking for this service. Companies are completely price-insensitive about blog hosting; most of the time, they're getting screwed over by contractors building "custom" blog solutions. For sites with custom domains and no branding, you should price this mid 5-figures annually.

My only nit: I understand the high-wire act you're performing to message "security" on this, but your story on security (summed: "FUD. Everything's insecure if it's managed poorly. That's where we come in.") was a huge turn-off. Wordpress is distinctively insecure, which is why it needs hosting solutions like this. Your security graf made me think you don't actually know how Wordpress security works.

My only nit with your nit is that the security you are attributing to WordPress is more inherent with PHP and exists in any PHP-based CMS, including Drupal. Hate to be the guy that keeps defending WordPress but the problem is PHP and Apache and those file permissions... not WordPress itself. ;)

I think you're wrong about this. I've explained why many times on this site; here's the first one Google finds:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1328214

Now, PHP is definitely part of the problem. But there are huge PHP sites that manage not to have these kinds of flaws.

For a real challenge, do it without using your notoriety.

By far, the greatest challenge for any bootstrapped startup is marketing. Just from this blog post, tens of thousands of people will check out the site, blog and tweet about it, post links etc...

Obviously this is an advantage that you've worked very hard to gain and you must exploit, but you can't say you're standing in the same shoes as all of us other, completely unknown, bootstrappers.

You're correct!

But I didn't say I'm standing the same shoes. I said I'm going to see if I can do another startup.

That's a bit of a cop-out.

You did present it as following your own advice and seeing if it works. Seeing if it really works requires you to be in square one.

Just a very minor observation:

I've read this on the site : "15 years of combined experience". Lots of people find this 'n years of combined experience' pattern a bit lame.

For example:

http://www.socialsecurityinsider.com/2010/02/combined-years-...

I know what you mean. A team of guys at my old company had "40 years of combined C# experience." Not bad for a language released in 2002!

Doing something like Heroku for Wordpress is a great business idea. I have tons of clients I'd happily point to such a service if I knew it was solid.

Am I the only one who's a little disappointed?

Of all things he had to start another WP hosting company? He has the name and the money to do something bigger. I can't think of any motivation other than making money that went into this.

That being said, the staging area for testing changes seem like a really useful feature that I haven't seen in any other WP hosting service.

Do you also think Heroku is boring because it's just Ruby hosting?

Taking the largest, most vibrant blogging (and now general website and for some CMS) platform on Earth and trying to not only make it awesome but contribute new features and plugins back to the world isn't big enough for you?

Finally, you should know that for me "doing something bigger" isn't a motivation. I don't have a need to "change the world" or somesuch thing. I want to do something valuable, something understandable, something fun and interesting, and yes of course also make money.

Congratulations to your new business! I'm sure it'll be successful and I'm glad that you're happy with it.

I'm not sure if I'd call WP Engine whipping out your dick and getting a ruler, though.

I know we've been told to "double your price. then double it again." but does the same apply in hugely saturated market spaces like hosting? Lots of hosts will bill you $8/month, oversell their servers, but still give you big numbers AND install WordPress for you. I'm curious what kind of reasoning went behind the pricing model.

I do not know of a single $8 host that does the following:

- We upgrade the curated plugins we offer for you (though you can use any plugins you'd like)

- We keep WordPress itself upgraded (when ready, new releases are not always perfect)

- We make sure all the standard security stuff you'd read on any WordPress developers blog is in place (file permissions, admin account, etc)

- We go further by offering hardware DoS/DDoS mitigation, intrusion detection, and redundant firewall protection

- Aaron Brazell (Author of the WordPress Bible, http://goo.gl/mGgi) answers your support questions

- Speed. Tuning of various caches, memcache for database/object caching, modifications to your theme or plugins, and so on.

- Scale. We make sure your site stays up when you receive spiky or sustained traffic. Don't get Fireballed.

- On top of that, we're the only hosting company (that I know of!) who also puts your static content (images, CSS, JS) on a CDN for you as part of the base price! Which means even faster load times plus more scalability. (Granted we haven't advertised this on the site yet, something we'll be fixing soon!)

- Staging feature. Again, I'm not sure of any host who has something like this. We'll be adding more cool tools soon!

- We spell WordPress correctly =)

At the end of the day you shouldn't compare us to an $8 host. You pay for what you get. We go above and beyond regular hosting.

Good answer. I didn't know that—that should be on your site somewhere :)

Haha you are correct, we definitely need to update our site to avoid confusion like this! Thanks for the feedback =)

For one thing, you don't have to sell your CEO (who you just told blogging was key to your future growth) that the security of your blog is worth $8 a month.

Price is a signal.

Excellent point. It's like when I was selling education software to large schools. That startup never really succeeded, but they were more receptive to a $2,000 ticket than a $500 ticket. And even $2k was seen as cheap.

This to me sounds a lot like wordpress.com, albeit over-priced.

I did a cursory price comparison. WP.com is the most annoyingly secretive website I've seen about it's pricing, so all these are from the second hand accounts in the forums ( http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/please-be-more-up-front... ):

CSS upgrade $15 Map domain: $10 25GB space: $90 (I know WP Engine is 10GB) Unlimited users: $30 No ads: $30

$175, per year, which is roughly $15/mo.

The one thing missing from WP.com is the custom plugins and support. Honestly, if you're running my blog, why do I need support, really? And they have proven infrastructure, which is another selling point you're making. The plugins make for an interesting offering, but is it really worth it?

Please don't take this as me being rude. I just can't see much of a difference between WP Engine and wp.com after reading the websites to justify the price difference. Maybe that's something to work on?

WordPress.com is a great service and you can get a lot of the same "stuff" that we offer. Obviously, they've been around a lot longer and have a ton of experiece.

WordPress.com has, essentially, two pricing structures - free and custom pricing starting at $500 for VIP customers. They make a ton of money in upgrades, as you noted.

They don't give you access to the files, unless you're VIP, and then you're still limited. You don't have access to plugins of your own choice. The freedom that you have with WordPress.org (self-hosted) doesn't exist on the theme, plugin or user side. But you get an amazing architecture, with almost no downtime, and a crack staff that knows WordPress inside and out.

WP Engine targets an entirely different market. We're targeting self hosted WordPress and trying to provide premium value for premium blogs. You couldn't take my blog, for example (http://technosailor.com), and put it on WP.com. There's too much I've done with it for it to make sense even if I bought the Custom CSS add-on. I can put it on WP Engine (and do) and get all the stuff that is offered.

I don't know if I'm making sense. I hope I am. Certainly, we are still honing our messaging.

One big bonus that no one else will give you is free CDN. If you need it, you're going to start at $40/mo roughly. And maybe pay up to 20 cents/GB bandwidth. I think you can see where this, essentially, pays for itself.

Plus, we are working with Automattic/WordPress.com and our customers should be seeing the benefits of that soon. Stay tuned. :)

from http://blog.asmartbear.com/nut-up-or-shut-up.html#comment-15...

WordPress.com….

1. Doesn’t allow Javascript. (So no dynamic elements and no Google Analytics)

2. Doesn’t allow arbitrary plugins. (Because they severely restrict what they can do — many of the plugins I use on this blog are illegal there.)

3. Doesn’t do the speed optimizations we do (some of our WordPress.com refugee customers report 3x speed improvements)

4. Doesn’t put your media on a CDN for free (not yet announced but we’re starting to roll that out!)

5. Doesn’t have quality, email tech support (you have to troll around on forums)

6. Doesn’t recommend plugins (we know which ones are still supported and work well)

7. Doesn’t have the “staging” feature

To name a few.

I'm curious if you're using Wordpress MU for this or if you've built your own system. I built an app & plugin installer (flooha.com) which could be used to build, install and customize any php app, so I have some experience in this area.

It's a smart move to limit which plugins can be installed, to offer a very short trial and to have no free plans.

We allow our customers to use WordPress v3.0.1, which means either with OR without MU. Up to you.

We're NOT limiting plugins that can be installed. We're just building a list that we'll SUPPORT.

To further clarify, we're not using WordPress MU to power our clients. It's a custom system which allows us to deploy an instance of a customized WordPress install from an image when a new user signs up. We can bake in more security, curate plugins, and control the entire experience this way.

We don't actually stop anyone from installing a plugin, we simply suggest the best of class.

How much interest is there in following something like this? I've had some startup ideas I've been mulling around with for years and finally decided to jump in head first. One thought that crossed my mind was writing a blog detailing my progress, obstacles, thoughts, etc throughout the process. I feel like, whether successful or a failure, the process would be interesting and useful to others. Any thoughts on this? Anything you'd like to see specifically covered?

Looking forward to following behind the scenes on this. Saw the initial tweets about WPEngine and mighty interested in the 'lessons learned' re: using social for first block of customers.

From the comments: SmartBear's measuring initial success as $360k ebitda ($30k a month). While arbitrary, seems a smart goal. Makes for a sustainable and salable business (with room for a bit of R&D and bonus structure).

Oh, and Austin FTW.

Curious whether the just-announced partnership between Microsoft and WordPress will impact your new venture?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1732761

I was just about to ask the same question. If anything, this probably legitimizes the WordPress platform for thousands of small business owners - the very people who could be WPEngine customers.

If they were on the tipping point of this platform ("It's open source? Is it safe? I don't know if I can trust it."), they may be tipping now. ("Ah, Microsoft uses it. It must be safe.")

I think http://www.wpwebhost.com/ will likely be your biggest competitor (next to WP.com), however they seem more like a standard host that just installs WP for you.

Great Article! Obscene title. Best of luck with it.....

Startups: Not For Women.™

Reply on news.ycombinator.com