Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress, your favorite podcast, I hope for all things WordPress and WordPress related today I have Mikhail Stoichev as my guest.
You may know him from Nitropack and you may know him from some news around that.
But welcome Michael.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Is there.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: For those who don't know you fully yet, or maybe not even what Nitropak does, can you please introduce yourself?
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Yes. My name is Mikael. I'm born and raised in Bulgaria. I'm one of the few co founders of Nitropack.
What Nitropak is about is it helps your website become faster, load faster, it helps you pass core web vitals. So it helps you run faster, run better as well. And we've been doing this since 2013 for various platforms, since 2019 for WordPress. And I'm super happy to say that now after a few years around, nitropack has become a part of a pretty well known company in the space called WP Engine.
And I'll be very happy to talk answer discussion points on how we started that company, how we grew it, and why we decided to partner up with DOP Engine. My general thoughts on WordPress as an ecosystem and anything else that the viewers might find interesting around that.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Yeah, well I'm sure they'll have plenty of questions. My first curiosity is you say you started in 2013 on various platforms and then in 2019 you started Nitropack as in the WordPress service. I'm very curious to learn about the first years like you started in 2013. What was the platform you focused on then or was there a specific focus?
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so open source was part of our DNA from the get go. We started for an open source e commerce platform called OpenCard.
That was the main platform that we were building different solutions for. We built around 140. 140, you heard right. So we built around 140 different small plugins. 2012 all the way till 2019, I guess so for seven years.
And the way that we built Nitropack in particular was that besides creating those apps, we also had a development studio where different customers will come and they would commission us to build websites or products or projects for them. So we had a pretty big customer based out of the Middle east and they were one of the foster developing companies in the Middle east back in the days.
So they were something like Amazon for different cool gadgets and their website was amazing. They had a pretty talented team, they were growing very quickly and what they realized was that the website was not very fast and the main culprit for this were images.
So they asked us to solve it. So the way that we solve back in the days was we were creating like, you know, a sprite with different images. So we would kind of like load the images. That was. Oh, that's all the technology was back in the days.
And besides this, we started applying some different layers of caching to this solution. And we, since it had more than one optimization back in the days, we called it Nitro Pack Nitro, because we were inspired by Fast and Furious. So being a kid that goes to the movies quite, quite a lot.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Still unmarried back in the days. So we were very inspired by the cars that were racing and, you know, the moment that one is just lagging behind, they would press this nitro and then they would get an instant boost. So speed, boost, fast. Those were the words that we were playing with. And we put pack in the ends just because it had more than one feature. So this is how we came up with the name Nitro Pack. And the original logo of the company, I think up until this date is actually the gauge for the RPM and then go all the way to the red, which means that everything is running as efficiently as possible.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: So I have to ask you though, if Fast and Furious is an inspiration, then I have to understand if you are more of a JDM, American muscle or European?
[00:05:10] Speaker B: I would say 100% European.
No offense to the American muscle cars. They make a great show and great noise, but in terms of performance, just feeling the car, making sure it's lucrative in the corners, I will definitely go Europe. Team Europe.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: I'm right there with you.
Sorry for that interruption. For those who are not aware, I am quite the petrol head and you are as well, so I know where you stand on that.
But when you say when you launched Nitro pack, that was 2019, you started with Open cart.
Were there any other platforms you had a strong focus on?
[00:05:56] Speaker B: So originally, the main thing with OpenCart was that the platform did not grow as exponentially as WordPress. So we were like, we love open source, we love what it stands for. We just want a bigger playground. So we decided to essentially repack Nitropack and launch it for WordPress. With everything that we've learned throughout the six years of development, we focus mainly on a couple of things. Number one being we wanted it to be very simple to use. So you set it up with a click of a button, you have the mode pre selected for you and then you don't have to do pretty much anything. So we noticed that A lot of the plugins and solutions were with a lot of tinkering, a lot of setting, which was, you know, great if you're a technical person, but the majority of the users of a platform are non techies. So we actually wanted to make their life easier if that was an option. So this is how we originally launched Nitropack. We also wanted to make it a SaaS.
One of the main things which we didn't see working quite well in opencart was people actually committing to software. When you commit with your money, month over month over month, you want solution to work. So this was also a responsibility on our end to make sure that every month we push the boundaries of what's possible, we bring new features and the team is motivated to essentially develop this standalone solution. Now being on WordPress more and more and more, rather than pay and forget and then deal with pirated stuff and then, you know, obviously have all of the trades of free versus premium, how are you going to handle the support, how did you have an extra license and all of that. So we just wanted to make it as simple and modern as possible. And that was, that was the main thing and the main idea behind us wanting to launch on WordPress, most popular platform in the world, community that we know, open source enthusiasts, SaaS blood and just bring it, see how people react. And also going back to our rules, we wanted to make sure that there is a forever free version and this forever free version was that. So people who want to test, who cannot afford or not of a size to become a paying customer, can enjoy something for free forever and benefit of a lot of the features that we have built forever, basically. So if you don't need to upgrade, you don't have to upgrade. And I think this is, this was the core of why we wanted to stay true to our roots of open source rather than being safe.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: That is very, very much in line with the general thought of open source.
Apart from the solution that you provide. I think a lot of plugins, certainly premium ones in the WordPress ecosphere, start out like that and stay like that for the same reason.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Hey, why was Nitro Pack interesting for people? First of all, because it was inexpensive, there was a very low barrier to entry. Everyone can test it out if it works for them. And why else? Because unlike other solutions available on the market back in the days, what we wanted to give is as many premium features available under the free plan. What I mean by that is, even to this day we see that a lot of the caching solutions on the market would ask you to pay additional if, if you, if they want to use a cdn, for instance. And what we wanted to build from scratch is make a very profound research onto what is the best CDN on the market, just available for everyone, regardless of the plan that you're on making that we take care of the heaviest resource for the majority of the blog websites, which is images, videos and stuff like that, and then again make it available on the free plan. So I think this is how we started to. And this combined with the simplicity on the user interface end and the nice user experience, at least we'd like to think it's nice. The, let's say intuitive user experience on the back, I think was what was able to win a lot of leads who later turned into users paid or.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: I think that's a huge determining factor to wanting to solve stuff for everyone and then depending on whatever version of premium you have, it's just better or it's more complete or anything like that. So I like that approach.
I think one of the biggest problems for any solution that is meant to work together with an open source solution, whether that is Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, whatever, is that you have zero control over what else is running on that server slash application layer.
SaaS I think is something, I mean there are silly SaaS solutions, right? There's stuff that really doesn't need to be SaaS.
But I see like a more mature approach in terms of, okay, these things make sense to be as a SaaS, built as a SaaS because you have full control and you need full control to do something fully and proper.
And have you ever considered not doing the SaaS version?
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Yes. We used to be known SaaS for the first six years of the development of Nitropack. And one thing we realized is that Nitropack will not work with the backend. So we will not do anything on the database, we will not mess up anything in terms of servers and all of that. We would work only on the front end. Which is why I think this general approach was great for being a SaaS. Because in the end of the day there is a lot less stuff that can go wrong when you put our solution compared to someone that starts messing up on the backend. And in this way I think it's easier to also build bridges with the ecosystem. I think if you want to be part of the ecosystem, you have to have a approach where you identify potential problems and then you work out on solutions openly with the other part. For instance, Nitrify has an issue. A customer has an issue with a given slider or with a given builder. So instead of us saying, it's not us, it's the builder, go talk to them, we would be like, all right, we investigate what the problem is and then we will try to get in touch with the company that produces the other product. And we were like, listen, we're growing, we're in this situation. We have a customer, you know, they're experiencing this problem. Let's create an integration so we can solve it on both ends. And then in the end of this customer will be loyal to your brand and to our brand because we would be able to have one plus one equals to two and a half or three.
So we always apply this approach.
We always try to be varied, cooperative. We always try to view the competition as not an evil or someone who is unethical, but as opponents, which in the end of the day, while we compete, the customer gets the biggest value and then the platform flourishes because the solutions become better and better. Yeah. So this was kind of like the approach we took.
And to fund all of this development, we decided to use the SaaS approach because this is sustainable month over month growth. And by being able to be sustainable, you're less dependent and have less excuses not to be at your very best.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: Agreed, Agreed. I like that, I like that philosophy. That's, I think it goes a little bit beyond just I want to be a SaaS because I then have control over my stack. But it also means as a SaaS, it's way easier indeed to get more into the collaboration mode. Right. It's because it's a side effect, but at the same time it's also a philosophical approach of how, you know, how can we make the Internet better?
And that is through collaboration. There's, you know, we can discuss all day about what is the smartest way to build a solution and all of that. But if the end goal is, look, we just want to make this better and the this in that sentence is the Internet, the application, the, you know, however you want to define it, you are forced to collaborate because if not, you just end up being your own little island, your silo. And the impact you can have is just never going to be what it, what your full potential can be.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Exactly. And I'm talking about this level of sustainability. What I mean, check sustainability. By sustainability, I refer to the notion that you would be able to build an efficient organization and scale it whenever needed from the get go. And based on our previous experience, especially in the years Prior to AI support was make it or break it by being able to get customers that have questions that are able to get responses sooner rather than later. This acted as a huge leverage for us. Why? Because from the early on, the more we grew, the more support members we were able to hire asap. And then we would always see what is our first response time, what is the time to close, what is the time and how many hands does a certain ticket change before it gets closed. So even though we are not perfect, we were always measuring those and we were always trying to provide live support. So I think we were one of the first to implement live chat support. Then for the time that we were outside of the I pack, which I can talk about a little bit more, somehow it changed to ticketing system, which we hated. But the moment we came back to the company again, we immediately changed it back to intercom because I think it's just asinine. It's ridiculous to not provide support at the spur of the moment whenever a customer has a question and make them wait days and days and then being able to provide answers only via email and then having your customers being the second or third priority besides anything else. So being a SaaS also helped us a great deal to build a sustainable company so that if tomorrow I need to hire three more folks in order to cover the 247 promise that we do, I am able to do this. And I'm able to do this because I can see how the cohorts are growing. Cohorts meaning the numbers of customers that signed on a certain month and how they developed. So based and based upon this, based upon the month over month growth that we see within the app, I can say okay, now it makes sense. We see that we're getting an increased amount of questions so we can of course optimize by using some knowledge base or we can fix those issues or we can make the interface a lot better. But customers need to be answered as soon as possible. And I don't think that there is a customer in the world that wouldn't prefer a product that has super nice, friendly and on time support rather than having go through tons of documentations and issues to get to a live person to tell them that.
[00:18:49] Speaker A: I think the only caveat in that premise for me is always I know some companies that have live chat as well, meaning within the minute you'll have a response, but then you're basically talking to somebody who just is accepting the first response, right? And that's it. And then you have to wait through the layers of getting to a person who understands your level of understanding the application, the problem and everything like that. So you end up, you know, spending a couple of hours in emails and chats back and forth. I don't like that version of hey, we have a response time within 30 seconds. Great. But it's not really helping me.
That's a side rant. But that's, you know, a support, knowledgeable support that can actually take away the, oh, shit, I have a problem.
I don't know how to figure, how to figure this out.
Can I please find somebody to talk to that is, I think that is aces. That is the most determining factor in the success of.
You are running into different scenarios. You are running into different levels of understanding how the application works, how the principle of the problem that you're trying to solve, how that works.
But then talk to somebody who just takes that anxiety away from you. I think that is so key.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: I think it's very important to hire leaders that are compassionate and that have a high standard as to what they wish to see whenever they're dealing with customer service or customer support in their life.
It's exactly what you said.
So if you are a larger organization, you would have KPIs and then you would live by those KPIs. But are you getting the same level of service that for instance, the original founder of the company wanted to get or that you would like to get if you want to change your back because there is a scratch in it. So would you like to talk to someone who's knowledgeable and who lost their job and said, it's all right, let me take care of this, let me take care of that, and actually knows how to solve the problem, or if they don't, they set the expectations in a proper way. Or would you like just people who are acting like robots or events?
Or would you like someone that actually replaced the problem and can provide an in depth solution and then be like, all right, I'm actually happy that I helped this customer and I had a very meaningful conversation with them. So I have, I'm fulfilling my role as a customer support, which is the first entrance.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: I think the, I think this is actually regardless of what your application does, what your solution does, the understanding that the support is not necessarily, it takes away pain, right?
You're reaching out to support because you're running into something that you need to solve.
But to do that from the understanding that you have somebody knowledgeable right off the bat, instead of having to wait for, oh, this is the first line I've taken in your. And then moving it on to the second line or even the third, that whole process. I'm a very strong advocate for having support that in a way has the capability of being the developer.
Right. So they actually understand the complexity of the thing that they're supporting.
I think that's a, that's a key instrumental part of how to solve your customer's problem. I have a curiosity because I think I've heard or seen or read that you have worked with Shopify as well.
That is a closed system for one. I'm curious about your experience in terms of a closed system as a whole, but I'm also curious in terms of the support.
So for the last five years it's been open source mainly. So WordPress, is there a difference in approach in terms of support and in terms of how you need to build your application and communication in terms of closed source and open source? Because I think a lot of, you know, a lot of people listening to this podcast, understand WordPress, understand WooCommerce, add shortcut, all these wonderful e commerce solutions that we have. And closed source Shopify sounds very attractive, but I can see many downsides. But I'm kind of curious how that works as a. From your perspective in this. Did I remember correctly?
[00:24:01] Speaker B: Shopify, Correct.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: So before we. So we launched Nitropack and the other company which we developed on Shopify, which was called SMSBump at the same time. And since we were originally two co founders, we divided and split the work. So Georgie, who a lot of, you know, in the ecosystem actually took care of Nitropack and then I took care of the other offspring which we call called SMSBump. What is SMSBump? It was Melchum for text messages. So pretty much automation, text campaigns, signup forms, flows, and all of that chat as well.
We originally developed this product in 2017 and the notion behind this was SMS is a tested and true method of communication, even though ever less popular in Europe. But it's something that they use quite heavily in the states for any sort of messaging. So everyone reads text messages.
All of the phones come with this functionality enabled by default. You don't need to install software, yada yada yada. So we started this product for Shopify because we identified that Shopify was growing back in the days we originally did the Google Trend search and just juxtaposed the different platforms and we saw that Shopify was one of the fast growing ones.
And our bet was that we don't know exactly what we're doing with Shopify open source. We know, but let's just see how it works and let's, let's, let's trust our gut that there is something interesting. And at the same time it was type of hedging because you know, Google Commerce and WordPress is growing and then at the same time if one fails, probably the other one will outweigh the loss.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:05] Speaker B: So immediately everything was, I would say, very different. You work with APIs primarily, you have a lot of, a lot less flexibility just in terms of being a creator, a developer.
In the same time there were similarities in terms of the App Store being the central department store in the big city. So everything goes through the App Store. This is the place where you need to rank higher. And for the past six or seven years we pretty much became experts into how to rank higher on the App Store. So the moment you're able to realize this, you pretty much are off to a very good start in terms of being accessible to the customers, being easy to find.
What Shopify told us is that it's, I mean again, support is super, super important. It's essential to making it or breaking it.
It told us the importance about under promise and over deliver.
And it told us also how important it is that someone voted their money on your product and how important it is to essentially have not a great vision, but be very consecutive about developing. It certainly helped a lot with the payments. So Shopify have a billing API, so they handle all the payments. So you didn't have to integrate Stripe.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: Or it's pretty straightforward.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Yes, or any of the other solutions available on the market.
And the main takeaway from Shopify as the ecosystem is that people like stuff that can be operated by non techies. So design always around the user, make sure that it's as simple as possible, deliver as fewer options as possible and have a very well defined aha moment. Aha moment means at what point in the product onboarding or in the actual usage of the product. I see value in it. So for us being a SMS company back in the days was when did they send the first text message. So in the signup form we would essentially allow for the customer to send a message to themselves just so they can see that this works. All right. For Nitropak was the moment that you actually choose a mode for optimization and then you see that there is a bar that actually goes through and optimizes your website, you know, so we always need to have a moment where the customer actually can see that the product works and then being able to present this at first and then think how you can make the customer actually take the hard action to put their credit card and load some funds. I think that was the. I mean, it's defined as product marketing, but that was the very important step towards actually being able to monetize a product. Not only have a great product, but also think how you can add enough value so the customer would choose to vote their money on your product versus something else on the market.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: Do you think that being a closed source solution helped you in that regard? Like, could you, could you have done the same thing in, in WordPress?
[00:29:50] Speaker B: I think yes, but if I have to go back to the year when we started, the answer would be no. I think Shopify helped us learn a lot of the basics as to how you become successful in an ecosystem in general. And then a lot of the things that we learned in Shopify we were able to put into WordPress with a twist, of course, because there are some differences between open source and. And flows of opportunities. So with this in mind, I think it was a stepping stone for us and we wouldn't be able to be successful with Nitro Pack 2.0 if it wasn't for the experience that we had in Shockify as well.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: Yeah, interesting.
Is the crowd different, Is the type of person on Shopify very different from the type of customer? I should say, is the type of customer, the Shopify customer very different from the WordPress customer?
[00:30:58] Speaker B: I mean, in a sense that Shopify is an E Commerce Platform and WordPress is a platform where you can make anything from a photography website to a blog like WooCommerce. Yes. All right, so if I have to go into the comparison of Shopify to WooCommerce, I would say that there are some differences. So the area for error, I think, is far less on Shopify. Since almost everything is paid for, people are a lot less likely to give you leeway with you screwing up something with their sales.
So you have to have for a great sense of quality and to be very assertive as to what you expect from the team and what you stand for as a company. And the whole ecosystem is built around you running a successful business with as little of a technical hassle as possible. So you can be pretty much on your way as to only having an idea and dealing with manufacturing and then outsourcing everything to different agencies who run this for you. They run the marketing, they run everything. And one thing which I found different between the ecosystems was around the agencies part. So I learned that a lot of the agencies on WordPress WooCommerce are having a hard time putting a retainer after they finish a certain project. And this in Shopify was a must have. So you would almost never see an agency that was not becoming involved into the success owning of the brand as the time progresses. Just because you start with a small idea and then you grow it with the time and it's a lot easier to have the professionals run the business, the E. Com side of the business, for instance, while you're trying to scale and deal with everything else, incoming opportunities and hiring new people at the same time.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Interesting. Would you. Would you attribute that somewhat to the. If you're on Shopify, you have to pay by the default a higher fee thus, and therefore your site's already kind of forced to make more. More revenue.
Is that possibly a determining factor? Because that's an interesting observation.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think every time you decide to invest or put money, there is a certain level of uncertainty around it and you're always like, am I going to make this bag? Oh, this better be worth it. So everyone is trying to make the biggest bang for their buck. So they would always try to gather around resources which help them into this. And by helping, this means that you need to have a pretty good and versatile ecosystem of experts that were able to solve your problem for.
So I think immediately people don't feel the huge pain.
I'm not sure what the statistics is of businesses starting on Shopify versus WooCommerce, but I'm pretty sure that at one point hosting solutions provides a pretty good case for you actually carrying their business over knowing that you're able to offset some of the higher costs for monthly by not having to deal with that many technical things on the backend of the website and making sure that things would work as default. And to be honest, I think branding is almost everything. So the more WordPress/WooCommerce can go up front with the nascent of the world, with the business of the world and all of those nice brands that are actually using the platform, the more people will appreciate it. And the latest barriers to switching will there be. I think logos are very important and for instance, you being able to take care of a certain brand just because they're on a platform is you. You feel good as well. For instance, we were dealing with the Cristiano Ronaldo's brand while we were on Shopify. So as a person who is crazy about soccer, you know, I was feeling super proud. I met with their manager in the States. And I was like, tell him we need to do in order to, for him to record just one story, you know, I'll give you everything you want. And he said, sorry man, but everyone is giving the same things. Like they work, they operate this as a family. Business decision makers are in Portugal. All the friends that he rocks around with are his childhood friends. So it's a very, I would say family bound circle. And whenever he goes somewhere for shooting, everyone is bringing people. So he said, I cannot promise this, but we can continue being your customers and by the way, give us a bigger discount because we're seriously not. So it didn't go as planned, but at least, you know, it's, it's, it's experience.
[00:36:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't have a rockstar comparison like that, but one of my clients for the longest time was Blackboard.
If you don't know, Blackboard is essentially the software that most universities and colleges use where their students log into and have everything available to them from grades to whatever.
And then when Blackboard became my customer, like you quickly learn, my kids included, how many people actually use that piece of software. And I had direct access to people, you know, building it. It is certainly again, not a rockstar comparison like yours, but having a brand working with a brand that is so recognized is a huge push in every direction because I got a lot of extra work from just working with them and I didn't even have the logo on the site.
But people knew, people figured out and.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: You know, yeah, well, listen, man, I think it's for a founder, for someone who works in the company, it's an immense level of pleasure and satisfaction to know that those huge brands among all the competition in the world chose you. And yeah, pq. So just for us, as a small company based out of Bulgaria, we were 15 people, as in 15. So it was, it was crazy. Like to be able to work with Kylie J was one of the Kardashians, to be able to work the brand of Lady Gaga. She launched the cosmetics brand. To be able to work with Ellen DeGeneres for the People that still remember her show, we were able to get some pretty huge international brands with zero salespeople in the States, only folks based in Bulgaria. So I want this to be kind of like a statement that people need to remember. It doesn't matter where you based that in the world and what platform you decide to build. And as long as you're compassionate and working really hard, eventually things will happen. Always make sure that you are part of the community that you Ask a lot more than you talk to.
And I think this is how you will be able to find your way a lot quicker. No matter if you're going from one country to another or from one community, in our case, closed source to an open source community, you will become mistakes. People will be frowning at you for stuff that you're not doing right. But in the end of the day, as long as you don't repeat it and, and show a path of earning, learning, pardon me, and as long as you are very open towards being able to share and to explain why you did what you did and make sure that it doesn't happen and then you actually help those folks make this a rule which they didn't think about. I think those, those, those paths are inevitable. No one is perfect. But as long as you learn from your mistakes and work hard, I think things are happening in life.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: I agree, I agree. It's like I try to, I'm trying to recall who started this whole.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: Be.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: 1% better today than you were yesterday thing because you see it on social media happening. They talk about a lot now. But it's a true principle and certainly in terms of working with customers and stuff that are repeatedly in contact with you or your service, the gradual improvements, the listening to feedback, not just listening, but also the processing the feedback into a better version of a feature.
As you may know, we launched scanfully not too long ago and we launched with version 1.0, but we're currently at 1, 2, 3 or something.
And that is to show that we are constantly improving. Sometimes it's a small bit, sometimes it's just an email template, sometimes it's the feature that becomes a little richer or a little bit more functionable. Sometimes it's an entirely new feature.
But the continuous I want to improve should be part of anybody's DNA working in producing software for the masses. I agree. If masses just in general, if someone.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Is listening and they're contemplating if they should switch from team developer or from someone that does gigs on WordPress WooCommerce and they want to build their own scanfully, what advice would you give them?
[00:41:47] Speaker A: That's a good one.
I think the most important thing is to understand that the road to version one will take you three times as long as you plan to.
The launch that you do will never be close to what you wanted version one to be. But then chipping away and slightly and slowly improving your next version continuously. That needs to be something that you like doing.
Because if your idea is to build it, launch it, market it and then, you know, those are the three sequences and that's it. You're. You're not going to enjoy the process.
We. So Badi and I are.
I know Buddy, certainly. So Buddy is the original developer for the Yoast SEO. When he was working for Yoast, he's worked at WooCommerce, he's built stuff for Amazon, Twitch and stuff like that. So he has a very diverse background in terms of what's possible. I have a more performance, large project type profile.
You need sort of that there's overlap and there's absolutely different skill sets. And I. I think if you're doing this, have somebody, even if you're the solo entrepreneur, but have somebody that understands more than a little bit the roles that you have. So you find people that are complimentary to you, but have some overlap because I've seen too many times there's people who are just working in very strict silos and then you sort of get lost what the other person is actually doing. I think it's a huge benefit to understand what the other person does, but you don't necessarily need to do, because I can't build software like a Buddy does. I can't, nor do I desire to.
Those days are behind me.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: So there you have it. Find someone that is complimenting you and that has a rather different skill set than looking for an exact replica yourself.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: That's not going to work. Yeah. So I think it's important to find someone who has some overlap with you. So you can talk in a rather straightforward way.
But yeah, I think.
And you know the product you're working for, the thing you're going to build.
Find a niche. But that niche, if well defined, can be a huge market.
[00:44:26] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:44:28] Speaker A: We're focusing on performance monitoring and site health monitoring now, in essence, those are very simple things, very straightforward things. But when you start really brainstorming on what is the health of your site, what are things that are determining your site's health and you know, you'll quickly learn that it's a lot more complex than what you thought it was. If you do your research for Core web vitals for us are just as important as they are for you, but we look at it differently. We are not going to fix it, but we're going to tell you where you are.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:08] Speaker A: An overview of your history. And yeah. So have a. If a change happens on your site and then a change in core web vitals happens, then those are probably related. Right. Our current version doesn't show it yet, but one of our Next versions will have the correlation very visible. You did this and that resulted in that.
So finding those types of niches, finding those types of problems that happen for a lot of people is probably a good way to start looking into it. Yeah, I agree.
[00:45:44] Speaker B: Awesome. Great.
[00:45:47] Speaker A: So you were having high profile clients, you were having a very mature product, you were essentially exactly on the right path and then you exit it.
[00:45:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:45:59] Speaker A: How did that happen?
[00:46:01] Speaker B: So that's our second exit. The first one was with this company that we build in Shopify.
We were able to get acquired by their unicorn company, which is called yachtpo. And we work for them for two years and almost three years.
I can say that was a school of thought.
We increased the team from 15 to 105 people. We were able to grow the revenue by 1200%. So it's 12x for the crypto guys. And we learned so, so much. Um, I think this, those three years were probably the most prolific years that we had at that time. Because you were able to not only bang your head across the brick for problems that you don't know how to solve, but you were able to essentially gain knowledge from the collective wisdom of a company that has existed for 10 years and that reached undisputed success.
We came back to Nitro. So we started applying pretty much everything that we learned. We saw a lot of things that could be improved and we started doing this continuous changing by, let's say 1% a day, which accumulated for the success that it had throughout the time.
There was always huge interest towards nitropack. And the reason was the pretty good status of the company, the big market, the unique way it was solving the problem. It being a leader in the space. By being a leader in the space, how are we defining who's who? So there is the Google search console where you can run and see how websites are performing in terms of core web vitals. And then you put Nitro Pack and the other solutions on the market. You would see that eventually we were drunk the highest for the different type of metrics that Google follows through. And that was our source of truth.
So essentially a lot of the things were working for us and we came back from an exit. And then on the second day that we started our new job, by the way, for the folks that are interested, we actually had only a weekend between the two jobs. So we took a look. Thank you. And the second day that actually we presented ourselves to the company, we spoke with some investors who are ready to invest in the company. Then the third day, there was someone that was interested into buying Nitro Package actually. So we're like, we just came here, the company is not, we're not interested into selling the company.
Um, so what happened essentially was that we were able to transform Nitropack in a number of ways. We took a very data based approach where we were just going through the biggest pain points. We created a strategy where, where we see the biggest potential for growth. We opened an office in the states, we hired salespeople, we started materializing on this potential that WordPress has some pretty big customers and they want a solution. So how we can bring this solution for them and how it can be priced reasonably and how would they take us seriously? So we created a strategy around this and the company started growing pretty positively, I would say, in, in a couple of quarters. So the way that we set this thing up was that we started going to events a lot more. So we visited cloudfest Europe where we were able to meet with a lot of hosting providers. As everyone knows, hosting providers are kind of like the whales or sharks. Depends what type of event you are in the deep sea exploration. So those are the companies which I believe are the engine and the ones that actually are doing the majority of the acquisitions, slash aggregation in the ecosystem. So in order for you to understand how to play this card, you have to understand what are the motivations behind the players and where they stand.
[00:50:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:50:55] Speaker B: For us it was important to see if we can create a product for hosting providers that will be risk free, that they'll be able to set up easy, and that would allow them to use our solution without us being able, without us cannibalizing our customers. What does cannibalization means? So if I have a plan which costs $20 and if we offer our solution somehow to hosting provider that costs $10, then we're opening room for competition with our own product. This is called cannibalization. So we can eat up from some of our customers and this will be hurting our mrr. MRR means monthly recurring revenue. This is the amount of money we generated every month. So originally there were some ideas that we developed such a solution, but we never actually materialized it. We started talking to WP Engine about potentially us bringing such a solution on the market. Because there was huge demand. Most of the hosting providers didn't have the proper infrastructure to have a front end caching layer that they can offer to their customers free or paid.
So we saw a big niche there. Again, I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation that luckily in the beginning we decided the product to Work only on the front end, which was limiting the amount of damages which you can run on the backend. Also forget the majority of the costing. Providers already have some layer of caching that they provide on the backend. So we didn't want to actually mess up with this as it can create more product more problems than solutions.
So we decided to create this product which was additional to our offering. We called it Nitropack One Click and it was called One Click because you can install Nitropack like a very essential version of Nitropack to a customer with only a single click. They have to click a button and then they have to click install and then it's all up and running.
So we originally developed this with Dallip Engine in mind, but I don't know how to this date. But somehow hosting providers were learning about this so they were coming to us and asking them to install it. So by the time we were able to sell to a few hosting providers, which was pretty good proof that we were looking into the right direction, then what happened is that after we were able to set it up on WP engine, they started seeing some pretty good results. They started seeing almost no support issues.
They were seeing how good it's accepted by the community there.
At the same time we got featured into the Google I O conference. I think yeah, it's a first company, at least from where I'm born. I think this is a great, great success for the whole region, the whole community. And I'm so happy and thrilled that we, as a small team out of Bulgaria and someone doing business from Europe, were able to be in the, I would say one of the most important conferences in tech around the world. So shout out WordPress.
[00:54:34] Speaker A: That was a hell of an achievement.
[00:54:36] Speaker B: Thanks. Thanks man, I really appreciate it. So we installed this solution to Dao Engine. They started seeing some pretty good results and you know, we started thinking whether we can do something more strategical together around the product.
And we started thinking whether we would be able to accelerate the growth of Nitropack being able to be handled by a slightly larger company being RP Engine. So I mentioned cloudfest Europe, which is an amazing event held into Germany every year. So I would recommend everyone in the ecosystem who can attend, apply and schedule as many meetings as possible in advance in order to make the most out of the event. So don't leave anything to serendipity because nothing will happen. Yeah, so I started actually getting opinions and talking to different hosting providers and one thing I found in common is how everyone is taking Dall VP engine as a ecosystem player that they really know what they're doing.
And little by little we became open to listening what their idea would be for this potential partnership or merger, or however you wish to call it. We found a lot of common points into how they see things and how we see things. And we saw that nitro pack will be in again, a nitro mode for quite some time if we give it to again, people who know what they're doing and have been doing for ages.
So we became very open to the idea. We started discussing the details. Of course, I had the privilege to share and discuss with some of the successful entrepreneurs in the WordPress ecosystem who gave me very good advice. Again, this is a huge advantage. Everyone in WordPress is so open, so approachable. So as long as you're not trying to sell something to them directly in a very blatant way, if you ask for advice and if you ask the proper questions that you're always, you're going to get. Yeah, you're going to go and get it. So always be respectful of people, try to build bridges. And again, those bridges helped us to essentially have our second exit to DAO VP engine. Now Nitropack. The WordPress caching is part of WP engine and it has been so for the past one month and we're very happy with the progress. We are navigating and helping with quite a lot of stuff because we want this to be as successful, if not even more compared to our first exit. This is our child now it's in the university, so we wanted to, we wanted to see it very successful in life as well. We think it has the proper framework that you did.
[00:57:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a nice comparison. It is our child, but it's now in university, it's grown up.
[00:57:51] Speaker B: Grown up.
[00:57:53] Speaker A: So you had one weekend of rest for when you had your first exit. You've now had your second exit. How much rest have you taken? Have you?
[00:58:04] Speaker B: One week.
[00:58:05] Speaker A: One week, wow. So from a weekend to a week, that's huge.
[00:58:10] Speaker B: That about, what is it? 350% increase.
So, yeah, I mean, the reality is that those exits always take a lot of energy.
It might sound very renaissance like and very honeymoonish, but it's serious business. You have to take care of a lot of details and stuff and you put a lot of effort and extra hours making sure that both sides consider this as a win.
Again, I use the word partnership because this is a partnership and things always work whenever they're bound to be long term and not tactical.
So again, a piece of advice is that I would, I mean if you're an entrepreneur, always try to look long term and always try to be marriage minded and not one night stand minded. I think this allows you to really bring the best of a person and to be able to build a relationship with someone is something that cannot be bought with anything in the world. It requires investment, it requires a lot of your time. But I think this is what essentially makes as people and great people like to not feel exploited when they invest their time into something. So agreed, my advice is just try to go the hard way, not the easy way because usually it's the one that gives you the most benefits. So rested for one week remcos. Now we're starting a new company so I'm super excited.
It still doesn't have a website, we're working on it but it's been around for three weeks now. So it's brand new essentially the great product that we were mentioned on the Google conference for which is called Navigation AI, this is the product that we want to continue building on and this is where we're going to put our efforts. So the team that was this product, they came with us as part of the deal. So we're calling the new company Uxify as Uxify and we believe we'll be live by the end of the year. Now as you said, maybe we will do our very best to make sure that we're live by the end of the year. Twitter is going to happen. We'll be subject to how much of compromise we're willing to make with the initial version which is again comes to show how truthful you are when you're speaking out of hard onto launching a brand new product. So the new company will again be on the performance space. We want it to be platform agnostic. So I think you and I will be meeting again around different conferences as WordPress is part of our blood circulation right now and we would like to be able to offer this to wordpless WooCommerce folks as well. So yeah, something that we're super, super excited about, Navigation AI and real user monitoring will be our two flagship products that we're going to offer here and.
[01:01:46] Speaker A: Rum and Navigation AI. Yes Keith, for those who don't know what rum is, real user monitoring, can you give a little hint of what the types of things that's going to do and allow other people to do?
[01:02:03] Speaker B: Yes. So the one liner it is going to be Google Analytics for performance.
So it pretty much is going to measure the impact of your real users and why those two things work together. Because one of the products will be optimizing your navigations and the other one will actually measure what the business impact is as a result of those optimizations. So this is how they're going to work together.
[01:02:40] Speaker A: I like that. That's an interesting.
It's actually two different. By the sounds of it. It sounds like there's two. There are two different products, but I'm very much aware of how both. How they interact.
That's interesting.
And you say you'll launch by the end of the year.
[01:03:04] Speaker B: This is the plan that we have.
[01:03:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
I'm going to take a wild guess you have some resources to speed things up if needed.
I found the process myself in terms of when launching scanfully and just the two of us.
I think we actually had internally rewritten it twice before we actually launched the first version. So I hope you don't have to go through that pain because I didn't like that process one bit.
[01:03:45] Speaker B: It takes a toll.
The biggest benefit here is that the teams that were working on those products are again together. So they.
[01:03:56] Speaker A: Oh, that's a huge one.
[01:03:58] Speaker B: It's like bringing the superstars of a soccer team together to play under a.
I don't know, in a different how league.
[01:04:10] Speaker A: Let's say it's why the 1988 team of the Netherlands football team won the European championship, because large portions of them were already playing in the same teams throughout Europe.
[01:04:25] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
[01:04:26] Speaker A: And I'm. I'm. I'm sorry to say I have to hearken back all the way to Alate. Um, I guess 2006, we were. We were doing fine as well. But that's the one I remember most.
[01:04:38] Speaker B: Actually. You were doing fine the last two championships as well. I think you reached very far against Argentina.
[01:04:46] Speaker A: I believe you lost on the SE88 was fun to watch. I don't think everything ever came after that was fun to watch. But.
But yeah, that's. That's football. That's soccer. That's you. You get where you can take.
[01:05:07] Speaker B: No, but that's. That's.
[01:05:09] Speaker A: I'm happy for you that you took a full week. I mean, that's very admirable.
I hope you coincided with your vacation.
But congrats on both the. The exit as well as the new venture. I think it's a very interesting one. And when you launch, I'd love to have you on the podcast again. I think today this podcast has been very insightful. I think you've shared a lot of insight and knowledge and experience, which I'm sure many people can learn many great details from.
So thank you.
[01:05:50] Speaker B: Thanks a lot. Remkus, I just want to say huge congrats again on the Nitro Pack team. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you folks, so forever grateful. Huge shout out to the WordPress community. We would never be here if it wasn't for WordPress and all the awesome people like your remcos that were navigating and helping us and explaining how things work in the Word Camps.
And for everyone listening, just try to meet as many people as possible and form relationships. Be genuine, and it's always where it's at. Yeah, always look into the future, not into what you can get at the moment.
[01:06:37] Speaker A: I think that's excellent advice to end this podcast on. Thank you so much.
[01:06:41] Speaker B: Thanks a lot. Thanks for Carey.
