 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 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 and 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 going to be probably proven later so We are a small team of around 10 people and we come from all of these countries on and or work with people from these countries This is a picture from World Camp Jakarta this year and 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 we were able to bring them to the word camp to actually sponsor it and we're very happy That was I believe our first the first work comes 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 I know that buddy, but yeah, it was bad. So um Our product peep. So you can 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 want to talk about the business in general so this actually started as a side project we came from Joomla world and Peep so we were kind of forced to go into WordPress So one time at the point at one time my boss came to me On Monday, it's like, um, 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 a there still is an extension for Joomla called Joom social Some of you may know it or may have heard about it. So peep so 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 dare 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 body press I think ultimate member although they're not hundred percent covered in the same features we did have very hard time breaking breaking into the market and the previous owner of the company treated peep so 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 To have people work part-time for us for like a better part of a year Just to kind of break even on 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 verse fine and actually trying to do So so just talking about general business Building so what do you need you need the website? I'm not gonna go into the details because you all kind of have your own businesses website and everything like that But you know 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 a hundred percent matching features. Sometimes you want to 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 our 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 there 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 plug-in theme or whatever You know, you cannot do updates because it will override whatever you did So you 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 over again The other thing is so you can have the third party development probably already rebranding that yo So you can have a budget from ranging from one dollar to one million dollars per hour there's really like no limit for third-party developers and You can pay you have to pay to maintain it because if I come to a third-party developer. Hey, so I have this problem Can you fix it for me? He's gonna be like, yeah, sure. Here's the quote. 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 want to 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 mark 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 Higher developer and it doesn't matter if the guys from the US Some people say that Indian developers turn out 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 dude. It will not be fast It just 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 It's gonna, 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 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 want to make it work You're not really worried about a third-party Or extra development needs that you know to package someone you're just trying to focus on the niche 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 githlab you can build a community behind it and Have people have fun with the idea the code contribute It's not gonna cost you pretty much anything except for your time again And if you open it, you know sharing is caring but the other risk of this approach is kind of abandon where 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 stalls, 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 like 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 abandon where So so we would rather have Rather have open source, but paid software Rather than you know, just just getting there So our solution in the beginning was pretty much a mix bag of crap that turned out good but that the problems that we've we've had with the licenses was so we had the Licenses being bought by clients and as I said we we had very big problems in the beginning to actually be profitable and to actually be able to afford that chicken from the picture and so We applied the stitching and everything on our website. So we made 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 all this spending money They already know you're doing 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 this is what we created So right now as you remember the little link that you had in EDD right now we can do this so you have a pop-up And so in that plug-in I'm not gonna share the details of it if you want you're gonna 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 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 custom 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 takes you to the cart applies everything and it's just a checkout process And you already have that on your websites Ah We also added the Blocks and the shortcuts 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 peep sale 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 from that 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 proof of concept like I said if you have a 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 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's kind of works for us So we decided to do it well the good approach so you can package it and you can 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 peep. So 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 work commerce, 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 peep so 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 peep. So 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 peep. So dot-com or peep. So corporation Whatever however you want to phrase that so that people know that 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 networking platforms on the planet everyone's heard of it I'm pretty sure like 99% of you guys have a Twitter account Absumo this guy he was working for men.com. He saw the need for it and he just created it and 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 want to fill in a small niche But they don't really want to you know, break their focus And the final thought for us that this is something that we really want to stick with when it comes to our company Yeah But you know if you do it like that you kind of sleep well don't you and Consider this in IT and 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 that yeah, it's actually drives me not sometimes But he does keep everything in check and it's very easy for a new people because we did Start hiring new people. It's very easy for them to just like kind of jump on board to see what's going on Okay, everything is well documented. Just move on work. You don't have to spend months of research trying to kind of Break everything down and reverse engineer. What's going on? What's this function doing? So doing it like that kind of kind of works for us And I suggest that you all kind of consider doing the same or a similar approach That's a thank you. And if you guys have any questions I welcome them I'd like to ask how do you carry out support for your customers for example We don't really do custom work Because we believe that that we would rather focus on a product that we have and If we did so 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 want to speed up a development of a certain feature then yeah That's that's something that we would do and prioritize for money but The whole client base ended up ends up Profitane from it and the same the same way just to kind of add on top we did Like like with peep so we did like a lot of plugins for it But we started we feel like we want to give back to the community because like a free plugin You can buy add-ons on top of it, but after some time like we already managed to kind of Take the paid plugins and put them into the free peep so base So that people more people and the free the free product can benefit from it more So that after some time we kind of like decide, okay This is a great feature to just add to the free product 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 We okay, so if there's a conflict with our plug-in right Yeah, so You come to us you have a website There's a conflict if it we investigate it hundred percent if it's a problem of our plug-in we fix it If it's a problem problem the third party plug-in our solution Then we tell do you'd like you know 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 Welcome So I have a question so what kind of site projects that actually work for you you guys Love site projects are some of the site projects Just like you build it along the lineup. What do you do or you build it? It's so peep. So is our flagship kind of main product and way to profit and just recently like in there Few two three months, but we're not pushing it too much We created a side project and a site different website different everything with different accounts Everything it's totally separate, but it's kind of like made by 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 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 nishi and we don't feel comfortable enough yet to kind of step out from the very comfortable peep. So peep so let's call it bad 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 You know doing a separate marketing for both or No, it's it's separate. It's separate Yeah, it would be completely separate because there's you cannot really put those are to the two different products Even though the platform is the same. I wouldn't put them, you know together Okay, we have questions Hi Yeah So so Matt since we are co-owners 50-50 he was working full-time You know 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 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 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're actually bleeding money And Everyone was back full-time well for after a year I would say Yeah, and but just to just to kind of finish up when we were taking over the company There was a problem of Edd on the website and that was probably the result of some 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 In the next room there's gonna be a talk on