WP Engine: How A Startup Reached $1M In Sales In Less Than A Year
mixergy.com
mixergy.com
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.
I don't charge for my services, though the various bloggers have made donations out of niceness.
It just sort of ... grew.
I hope it balanced out as the video goes on, but if you have a guest on that has valuable information... let them speak.
Good content, but yes -- more guest less host.
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.
Do you have any specific examples of where I did that?
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!
Glad you said that about the summary. I've been thinking about the comments and assuming the summary is what everyone was talking about.
I didn't watch the whole video, I was put off by the signal to noise ratio in the first few minutes.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Why?
I think criticism is good. I also think being a troll that contributes nothing and blindly criticizes people who do contribute is bad.
Please excuse me while I laugh bitterly and slightly hysterically.
Of course, all the power to them if they make their customers happy.
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.
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.
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!)
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."