 Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. So I really like the talk that Stephanie gave talking about the niche because this is something that we do, we have our own niche. And let me just start by talking a little bit about myself so you can actually know who I am, what I do. So you can just call me Eric. My Polish name is Arkadiusz, don't even attempt that. That's why I've been Eric for the past decade or so. Certain name is the same, so just Eric, good enough. So don't follow whatever I say just blindly or anyone else for that matter. Do your own research. Be very critical in thinking whatever it's being presented just because someone is on stage like me doesn't mean I know shit. Sometimes I don't. Which is gonna be probably proven later. So we are a small team of around 10 people and we come from all of these countries and our work with people from these countries. This is a picture from World Camps Jakarta this year. And it was great. So we were able to actually bring some of our team and those are the foreign Indonesian guys who work with us. We were able to bring them to the World Camp to actually sponsor it and we're very happy. Those I believe are first, the first World Camp that we actually were able to sponsor. Because for the first couple of years of our niche it was hard man, like that hard. Sometimes it was a printed photo because we didn't have phones. No, not that buddy, but yeah, it was bad. So our product, Pipso, you can Google that. It's a social networking plugin for WordPress and we do that, but I'm not gonna go into details of that. Just wanna talk about the business in general. So this actually started as a side project. We came from Joomla world and Pipso we were kind of forced to go into WordPress. So one time at the point, at the one time my boss came to me on Mondays like, hi Eric. So you've been working with Joomla for like five years now. So today you start on WordPress. I don't know WordPress, figure it out. That was it. So there was, there still is an extension for Joomla called JoomSocial. Some of you may know it or may have heard about it. So Pipso pretty much does the same thing. But it's for WordPress. It's a bigger market share, it's a bigger community, it's a better community if I say so myself. But the first couple of years were really hard to break into that WordPress niche to be able to find clients, to be able to market it properly. The big competitors like BodyPress, I think Ultimate Member, although they're not 100% covered in the same features. We did have very hard time breaking into the market. And the previous owner of the company treated Pipso kind of like a side project again. And finally she decided to kind of drop everything, retire. So me and Matt, we actually took over the company. We took over the project and when we took it over, this was our state. We were losing money. But we cut down costs, we actually were forced to have people work part-time for us for like a better part of a year, just to kind of break even and everything. But it actually did work out pretty well. So I'm here, I can talk to you guys and right now we're thinking about the first fine and actually trying to do so. So just talking about general business building. So what do you need? Do you need the websites? I'm not gonna go into the details because you all kind of have your own businesses, websites and everything like that. But you're using third party software. Sometimes you're using your own software but whenever you're using third party software, very rarely it's 100% matching features. Sometimes you wanna sell plugins online or sell your software online but the features are just not there. Not the ones that you need specifically for your business. So what you end up with is, well, you have a problem. This is what happens. You have a problem but problems are great because you can solve them. If you have a problem, you know that you can solve it like for example, we are using Edd on our website to sell our software. And one of our biggest problems was that we were selling licenses and people can do upgrades on those licenses but this is what Edd offers for you. So you have one button like a link hidden somewhere in the account and it's just there and people don't see it. They have no idea that they can actually upgrade their license after made the purchase, right? So they don't know how should they know. So our problem was, you know, do that. So possible solutions. I kind of had fun with this. So let's start with the first one. So we can have in-house crap. So code it rapidly and poorly. That kind of development. I think everyone has been there at some point in their like business development. Just get it done, get it kind of stitched together so it works. So it's quick to develop. It's relatively cheap because all you need to do is kind of like donate your time to make it work but it's very hard to maintain. It's impossible to package to sell to anyone. It'll get you there but, you know, you may not really survive. You will sleep every night and if you hack the code directly of any plugin theme or whatever you know, you cannot do updates because it will override whatever you did. So you're kind of stuck with it and you have to reapply the hack after every update and then you like run down. So you keep ending up doing the same crap all over again. The other thing is, so you can have the third party development probably already rebounding that yo. So you can have a budget ranging from $1 to $1 million per hour. There's really like no limit for third party developers. And you have to pay to maintain it because if I come to a third party developer, okay, so I have this problem. Can you fix it for me? He's gonna be like, yeah, sure. Here's the code, yeah? Okay, so let's do that. And after a month I need to do some updates or whatever but you have to pay again. And you have to pay again. And you have no control or very little control over the quality of the code, over the extensibility of the code. You have like pretty much nothing. And whatever you wanna do, you have to end up, you know, paying for it sometimes more than it's actually worth it. And just, you know, say it's very risky because there was a marked guy who also was a third party developer at some point. So you know, you might end up kind of having a great idea for your solution, hire a developer and it doesn't matter if the guy is from the US, some people say that Indian developers are not great, some people say people from Bangladesh are not the best, some people say Poland, whatever, it doesn't matter. Third party developer, you will always have these kind of risks. So then you can do the good in-house development, which is gloriously outstanding opportunity to do. It will not be fast, it just won't. It's gonna, you have to treat it as, I would say, regular product development because it's gonna be more expensive. You will need more than kind of one guy stitching everything together to make it work. But it's gonna be worth it because when you have a very nicely written piece of code, you can package it easily. You don't have to be worried that it's gonna explode. You don't have to worry about supporting it that much. You don't have to worry about third party incompatibilities or something else breaking your stuff or your stuff breaking something else. And when you apply it on your own website, you can actually sleep better because you know that no automatic update is gonna break your stuff and then in the middle of the night, your whole business kind of crashes for a couple of hours and some of us cannot really afford that. So it's, but this kind of development is suitable only for when your company can actually afford it. I can tell you that from experience when you're comfortable with it. Because when you're kind of starting and you have the bowl of rice with a picture of a chicken next to it, then you're kind of just wanna make it work. You're not really worried about a third party or extra development needs that you know to package to someone. You're just trying to focus on the needs that Stephanie described so well to actually make some money. And the other way to go is to go open source. So sometimes other users really can excite. So it's either cheap or free. You can open up your software if you have an idea for something, put it on GitHub, put it on GitLab. You can build a community behind it. And have people have fun with the idea, the code will contribute. It's not gonna cost you pretty much anything except for your time again. And if you open it, sharing is caring, but the other risk of this approach is kind of abandonable because we've all seen plugins which we're doing very well at some point, but they were free. Everyone's using them 80,000, 50,000, 100,000 installs. But then they were not updated for two years. It's a liability. So you need to also keep that kind of approach in mind. And that's why we believe as a company and everything, you should be actually paid for your work because when you are paid for your work, you do that work. When you treat it as a side project, you're gonna have a baby change something in your life. You're just gonna leave it. That's why it becomes abandonware. So we would rather have open source but paid software rather than just getting there. So our solution in the beginning was pretty much a mixed bag of crap that turned out good. But the problems that we've had with the licenses was, so we had the licenses being bought by clients. And as I said, we had very big problems in the beginning to actually be profitable and to actually be able to offer that chicken from the picture. So we applied the stitching and everything on our website. So we made the custom software and we actually hacked EDD and everything to make it look good, to actually push people into upgrading their licenses. They're already clients. They're already spending money. They already know you're doing a good job. You know, they have money so they might as well pay you more, why not? But we really do need that proof of concept. So this is what we created. So right now, as you remember, there's a little link that you had in EDD. Right now we can do this. So you have a pop-up and it's all in that plugin. I'm not gonna share the details of it if you want to do it after the presentation. Just so we have a pop-up. So when you visit a website, let's say you purchased a license on Monday, we can configure it so that when you see, when you enter the website like after a week, you can see the pop-up. Showing once, twice, three times. You can decide to show it after a week, after eight days, 180 days, wherever number of days. The pop-up is gonna show. And of course, since it's WordPress and it's very well coded, you can actually style it however you want as well. It's very easy templating. We do have the widgets, the blocks, this is a widget. So you can have, you know, did you know you can customize the message? You can customize the look and feel of it. You can template however you want. And it's one click to upgrade the license. So you click on the upgrade, it takes you to the cart, applies everything, and it's just a checkout process. And you already have that on your websites. We also added the blocks and the shortcodes so that you can put those messages into your regular blog posts. So you have a blog post announcing, oh, there's a new update to Pippsale coming out. But did you know that you can upgrade your license? You send, we send out emails to people, hey, there's a new version. The email is very simple, there's a new version. You should see the change look, you should upgrade today, they go to the website. They read the change look and all the announcements, and then they get this, but you can upgrade your license. It's kind of in line, all in their face. But it's very subtle in the sense of it flows very well and clients do upgrade way more, way more than they used to, because they didn't in the past, to be honest. But with this approach, we can actually, we can actually make money from that product. So why and when to do it? You really don't have much to lose, because you really don't. If you have a proof of concept, like I said, if you have your own need, like it started for us with that little link, but we hacked and stitched everything together, we saw that the leads are coming to us, people are upgrading their licenses, people are coming to us, and not saying in support, like how can I upgrade the license or something, they just do it, it's in their face. They don't have a problem with it. And that works for us, we thought, okay, we don't want to spend more time and money and work hours on like keeping EDD hacked enough, so that kind of works for us. So we decided to do it well, the good approach so you can package it. And if there's a problem, just install it, update the plugin, it's good. Plus, it's very easy to maintain, and if you already have a client base, like we do with Pipso, we have our clients who are willing to pay money, most of them are also businesses, so they have their own communities, they're using our software, they're using EDD, some of them are using WooCommerce, but those who are using EDD, we can target them. They already know us. So it's like, hey, would you like to grow your business more? Is it like licensing related? This is a very, very niche market. Don't get me wrong, it's very niche, but people will buy it, and they do. So this for us, which started, Pipso itself started as a side project that grew, and then from that side project, we have another one. And this is being marketed, not on the Pipso website, it's totally separate project, speaking and kind of relating to Stephanie's presentation. So do a different website. Make it branded differently. You can say that this website is a part of Pipso.com or Pipso Corporation or whatever, however you want to phrase that, so that people know like, oh, okay, it's not like randomly. So it's linked to your project, but it's linked to your project, it's not the main kind of target, so you don't want to end up as the website that she actually showed in the beginning, right? In her presentation. And of course, you need to have a proof of concept, because if you don't, if you just have an idea, it's, in my opinion, it's a bad choice to step out of that niche and kind of diversify too much, because if you lose your focus, you're gonna end up doing the 50 different things at the same time, and you're not gonna go anywhere with it. So you need to be very comfortable with the idea that you have. And these are some of the very famous side projects, like Twitter. It was a side project for the guys. They just needed, I mean, to express themselves. And it ended up being one of the biggest social networks we can platform some of the planet. Everyone's heard of it. I'm pretty sure like 99% of you guys have a Twitter account. You have Absumo. This guy, he was working for men.com. He saw the need for it, and he just created it. And it was a side project of his. Same with GitHub. These are all the side projects. Buffer, Slack, Twitch, all side projects. And these are one of the biggest companies right now in the IT industry. They just start from people who have a problem, and people who wanna fill in a small niche, but they don't really wanna break their focus. And the final thought for us, this is something that we really wanna stick with when it comes to our company. Yeah. But you know, if you do it like that, you kinda sleep well, don't you? And consider this, in the IT industry, you have a big turnover in some of the companies. Developers come and go, designers come and go. It's easier for them when the code is documented, when the code is tested, when the code is actually written well with some standards. That's why we do pay attention to standards. And Matt has, for lack of a better term, such an OCD when it comes to code, that yeah, it actually drives me not sometimes, but he does keep everything in check. And it's very easy for new people, because we did start hiring new people. It's very easy for them to just kinda jump on board, see what's going on, okay? Everything is well documented. Just move on over work. So you don't have to spend months of research trying to kinda break everything down and reverse engineer what's going on and what's this function doing. So doing it like that kinda works for us. And I suggest that you all kinda consider doing the same or a similar approach. I'd say thank you. And if you guys have any questions, I welcome them. Okay, any questions? Is that? Hi, Dr. Panang here. Hi. I'd like to ask, how do you carry out support for your customers? For example, talking to the earth, you have like maybe a disclaimer that you only do a certain amount of customized work and appoint John that they don't support. So how do you manage that? We don't really do custom work because we believe that we would rather focus on a product that we have. And if we did do some custom work, but it's always in line of clients need a feature and they're willing to pay for it, a feature that we could add to the code base and kind of like, you know, it goes to the mainstream product. That's what we can do. If they wanna speed up a development of a certain feature, then yeah, that's something that we would do and prioritize for money. But the whole client base ends up profiting from it. And the same way, just to kinda add on top, we did, like with Pipso, we did a lot of plugins for it, but we started, we feel like we wanna give back to the community because like a free plugin, you can buy add-ons on top of it. But after some time, we already managed to kind of take the paid plugins and put them into the free Pipso base so that people, more people in the free product can benefit from it more. So that after some time, we kinda like decide, okay, this is a great feature to just add to the free product, and give back to the community to people to just have. Yeah, but custom code, we don't really do in that sense of like random projects. It's not sustainable in our way, and it's not what we do. Let's say it's for a particular team or a particular conflict, other plugins, you're providing help for what? We, okay, so if there's a conflict with our plugin, right? Yes, that's right. Yeah, so you come to us, you have a website, there's a conflict, if we investigate it 100%, if it's a problem of our plugin, we fix it. If it's a problem of the third-party plugin in our solution, then we tell you, you gotta go to those guys because we cannot really fix third-party stuff. That's not really what we do, and this is not the software that we're responsible for. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Hi, I'm Robert. Hi. Hi. I do also come from the zoom lab to WordPress, okay? So I have a question. So what kind of site projects that actually work for you? Okay, did you guys do launch site projects or some of the site projects? Just like, you build it along the lineup, what do you do, or you build it? All right. So PIPSO is our flagship kind of main product and way to profit. And just recently, like in the few to three months, but we're not pushing it too much, we created a site project and a site, different website, different everything with different accounts, everything. It's totally separate, but it's kind of like made by our in-house guys, right? But it's marketed completely, completely separately. We don't put everything on one website. It's just, it doesn't work like that. Of course, when like email goes to the clients, hey, but you know, we also have this project. So it's kind of marketed in that way, but it's not being like all put together. So in fact, is how do you work on the marketing, but is it not adding two different extra marketing all day? Right now, to be honest, we don't do too much marketing for the site project because we think that it's a great solution, but it's too nichey and we don't feel comfortable enough yet to kind of step out from the very comfortable PIPSO, PIPSO, let's call it bed. But we are getting to the point, like I mentioned, we're hiring more people. When we get to the point, we can actually spare like one, two, three people to actually work exclusively on that. And the site project, then yeah. Then we'll do more marketing and everything else, but it needs to mature more for us. Would you advise in on doing a separate marketing for both, or it's like? No, it's separate, it's separate. It'll be separate. Yeah, it would be completely separate because you cannot really put, those are two different products even though the platform is the same. I wouldn't put them together. Okay, if you have questions, we shall, when you started out, when you took over. Yeah. How many developers were actively running the product? How many was? So Matt, since we are co-owners 50-50, he was working full-time 16 hours a day kind of thing. And we had four developers in Indonesia, so we kind of took over everything with the team. So we had four developers in Indonesia, one developer in Poland at the time, one admin in Argentina, but we had to cut them to like part-time. They were all working four hours a day. So it was like the bare minimum so that they didn't have to look for our job because we know that it was growing, but it wasn't growing fast enough to support that. But once we got to the point like everyone got raises full-time and whatnot. So, but it needed to be, yeah, we didn't have any extra funding or nothing. We were actually bleeding money. And how long was the time? What did you reach the way everybody was doing? Everyone was back full-time for after a year, I would say. Thank you. But just to kind of finish up when we were taking over the company, there was a problem with EDD on the website and that was probably the result of some hacking, a very dirty one. And some of the reporting because of the previous owner had few different businesses online. So the reporting for EDD for Pipsa was showing numbers, but those numbers were fake. There was like one-third too much of what actually ended up in the bank account. So we took over the company thinking, oh, it's profitable. We're actually like breaking even. And now not so much. And then the rise in chicken pictures, you know. We have questions. Right here. I think we've finished up a little bit early. So we've got, obviously we've got our next talk, which will be, will you read that? It's going to be on Pesio for Business. And in the next room, there's going to be a talk on Don't Fear Headless. So I'll just ask people if you are going to be up...