 Hello everyone. So we can start now. Usually a crash at Microsoft even is considered lucky. So I just ask some people if, okay, sign that one. So as my topic title is very long, it describes pretty much what I'm going to cover. And while we were sorting this crash, I asked like how many people are from South Asia or how many people run a word-based agency. The number is quite less. So I think most of the people find it a big deal. Like, is it a big deal to have a agency like high quality agency in South Asia or is it different than having a high quality agency in developed world? Like we can consider Euro, US or even Australia. So is it a big deal? So my point is like first, let's describe the problem. So I want to make this such a collaborative. So anybody who has ever run agency in this part of the world, what are the issues you have faced? Can anyone tell me? What is the key challenges you face like when running an agency from a developing country in a better world, not only in South Asia? Any answers? A lot of things. Still if we can list it down into a few things. I was expecting like it might end up without an answer. So I have built this image. So when we say high quality, it requires top developers like you can't get an amateur to give you high quality. So there are many things like it could be a working PhD program, but it could be a better program like just the Yoda condition. That is something most PHP developers are not even aware about. Like they don't forget comparing a value with variable or vice versa. They don't even know the difference between 2 equal to science and triple equal to. So definitely like to build a high quality agency, you will require some great developers like great as in like not in terms of experience like experience in years, but some kind of passion for PHP language. And now the like high quality depends on the top developer. But this top developers requires a lot of page and books because they are like endangered species. So they are in demand. So like so every company wants to have them. And while if we look at the job market is flooded with resume, top developers are very rare find like whenever we find one, I call Hey with the jackpot. That's what I like. We have a hiring management system and whenever I interview somebody who I believe would turn out to be a very good developer, I put in remark just a one word jackpot. And then HR knows how aggressively they should on board that person. Now as these people are rare, they are in demand. So you need to pay them very well. And apart from that, they will require a lot of perks like free MacBooks, maybe iPhones and maybe other like free tickets to international travel conferences. So many perks, which are actually good things. Having your team on a better hardware improve works good for your company, but it all cost money. Now you need a decent amount of funds to get a good developer. Now how do you get that funds because you would require good clients as in you would require clients which pays very well. And then it again comes to the full circle. The good clients want high quality because you just can't, hey, we are starting today and you can't just work into public listed companies office and say, hey, we are a new workplace agency. And if you're going to give your project to workplace agency, why not us? It doesn't work like that. Like when you are hiring your developers, you require some kind of validation from them. As in you require, you would like to see their portfolio skills. Similarly, a good client will test agency. They rarely bargain about the rates. They will check if you qualify. So an agency itself gets interviewed when working with big enterprises as well as top clients. So then you need to showcase your top quality work. So how you will, sorry, so how you will do that? So this circle is many people. I have seen many of my friends who have work positions in India and they couldn't escape it. Like it was like constant struggle. We face same for many years because it first it was very hard to find developers. Then it was very hard, even harder to retain them. And it was all going again and again. So how did we break it? Any idea? Do you think like anybody feels this is the right problem? Like is anyone experiencing this problem? No one. So, okay, there's one hand behind. So what could be the solution for this? See, don't look at from the big company's perspective. Don't look at from the atomics perspective. Look from the perspective of a small agency which need to, which want to be big agency. As in big as in size, work, the name they make for themselves. But they don't have funding. Actually, I don't think anybody like most service companies ever get funded properly. Like VCs don't like service agencies. They prefer products. So how do we go about this? So we had the same situation for years. We wanted to go and figure out. So we tried many things. We tried so many things that at some point our team got irritated. Like on glass door, we got quite a bashing. Like hey, the company keeps changing their HR policies too often. So, but while we were experimenting, we found one thing that worked for us. And that is the thing I wanted to share with you. So I will again go back to the problem. So first, we have to enter this circle. We have to break this cycle. So we have to start something. Good clients out of the question because why they will hire an agency which is not known, especially when they don't have budget issue. So, so especially if you want to work with the top clients for spending millions on their websites, people spend millions. Like we know that WordPress is free and there are $1.10 or $1.15 themes available on ThemeForest and elsewhere. But there are clients who don't go with those themes. They would be happy to spend millions on their web presence. But then they won't, they will want best agency to handle their project. Now, so good clients is out of the question. So if we, so we started reverse well like, okay, we can't get good clients on day one. So can we pay good salaries from pocket? As I said, VC funding or all that kind of funds are not available for service agency. Okay, let's go one step back. How do we get top developers even when we don't have a lot to offer? And this is where we could crack the problem. So what we did, basically, I'm an engineering student myself and I remember like from my engineering experience that I had many good students in my batch over my classmates. They were very good at engineering skills. But I won't blame it on the education system, but there is some flaw somewhere that our academic achievements are not reflection of our skill set all the time. I'm not saying the person who talks doesn't deserve it. But there are people who are good at something, but it doesn't reflect in the exam process. So I had some friends which I know that he's a good programmer, he's a good system admin. He can play with hardware very well, but they struggle to get engineering degree. Like some of them had to spend six years for the four year course. So with that in mind, and also like I had another data point that in India, I'm not sure about the global scene, but in India, top agencies or even top IT companies, they hire only people who had certain points or marks in exam system. So I was looking at two points. These are the people. I know they are good at it, but they are not even eligible for a set of companies. And I saw an opportunity there. So while big companies in India were hiring, hey, we want only first class. We want only eight by 10 score people. We started hiring differently. Our initial ads that were mostly on Facebook and social media, they ran like we are hiring all dropouts. You don't even need to be engineer to become a workplace engineer. You don't need engineering degree to become a workplace engineer. So we run those kind of ads and we attracted people. For system admins we run ad. If you can hack into our server, you are welcome to join us. You can skip the entire interview process. And we did got one. A person somehow figured out a back door or like a way to access our server. And he uploaded a file just to showcase a proof. And very scared he sent us. Actually he already applied, but as we were busy with job application flood, we couldn't respond within seven days, seven to eight days. So we literally hacked into our server and put something there and said, hey, check that. And like shall I assume like I will get hired. I just called him and I asked like what did you do? Obviously I'm not going to reveal how he did it. But I found it interesting and I told him like you can hire him. That person wasn't engineer. I don't think he was even graduate, but he was very passionate. And later on he went on to become our easy engine project. That is one of the very famous project for our company. So we hired like this. So we hired people which were mostly rejected. Not even qualified to work at big organization. But now how do we filter those people? Because not everyone disqualified was skilled. So we had a large amount of resume to filter. So what we thought like how does client hire us? Did client ever ask for my degree or my qualification? The clients asked for showcase, like show us your portfolio. And at that point I thought like let's ask them to showcase their work. So we created some mini assignments like a problem statement and which were designed in a way that will give us understanding of four or five skills. Like can they use Ajax, can they use background processing, can they use PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS. Little bit of everything. And the assignment is open-ended. It's not like there is anything like a right solution. The assignment is more like ice breaker. So if somebody is doing assignment we will interview them. And during interview we will see how they approach the problem. The approach was the only deal breaker thing. Because there is nothing like the perfect solution for a problem because it was a dummy assignment. So based on that we got those people. Now this is how we got initial people. But now we want to scale. So now we should have some kind of motivation for others to join our company. And in my opinion your employees are your best marketing team during the hiring scene. So while I do not want to criticize any particular company but it's very common in India that companies demand that their employee, even if they contribute to the workplace core, the purchase will be submitted in the company's name. They create a WordPress.org account in company's name. And all patches are submitted by their company name account. Yeah, that's common. I know you're surprised but it's quite common in India. So we went other way. We told people that create your own account and contribute in your own name. And it's free. You are free to use company's hours. Like if you are free, you don't need to wait for a weekend. You can solve a problem and submit a patch whenever you want. So obviously the client work is going to be the first priority. But it's not like you can't do core contribution in the office time. And the people who were not developers, we asked them to find out other ways to contribute. So somebody got involved in translation. Somebody got involved in team review team, plugin review team, different teams. So people found ways to contribute. And we made sure as an agency, we will give them due credit. Now this might sound like a very small deal in the developed world. But this is very, very common that people don't get credit for their work. And that is the typical problem for the South Asia. And employer also has a reason. It again comes down to this cycle. It's like I was also got criticized by some of friends in a positive way. They were saying, why do you make it easy for other companies to poach your people? But my goal was different. So I wasn't part of the race to the bottom. It was fine for me. Almost 20 people we lost because we couldn't return them. So at some point it become a trend. Like the moment we publish a word-based post about, hey, these three people contributed to the word-based core from our company. We used to tell HR, hey, now get ready for the replacement. But I don't know from where I got this wisdom, but I was very clear there. I shall not restrict anybody's path. If I can't return them, I should work on sales strategy and find better clients so that I can complete this circle. But I can't sleep stealing anybody's credit. So that's out of the question. Even people are leaving, it's fine. So we shall wait. So it took some time, but over the time the exposure we gave to our team and the trouble we didn't create. The second part is the common in South Asia is when an employee wants to leave your company, the employer really makes their life hell. In fact, some of the top Indian IT companies which has revenues in billions of dollars, not just single billion, billions of dollars, they have terms that once you join their company, you can't leave for two years. That's called employment bond. I'm not sure if it's common across the other part of the world, but it's very common there. So another advertising point we had that, hey, we don't run in bond. You can leave anytime. So you don't need engineering degree. You don't even need to be graduate. You can leave anytime. You can contribute to open source and get credited for it. So many times we got people who are skilled but had no idea about the open source. So we kind of showed them like, see how many people are using WordPress. So just imagine every time the code you have written gets executed. So how much people's life you are making easier. That's kind of a motivation we did. So we solved this top development problem. So even when we were having two or three resignations with every WordPress code contribution release, we were able to hire much faster. So it's more like a... So number of developers remain steady. Good developers remain steady. So now the next point we attack is good clients. So now with all these top developers, I think we are now... We have code contribution to the WordPress from last 11 release. Every WordPress release we have patches. And at some point this acted as biggest portfolio item. So usually we complain that clients do not understand technology much. But when you get into enterprise, they have somebody called CTO. And most likely he is the person who understands WordPress as well as other technologies very well. So you get to work with... At the upper end, you get to work with people who are technically very skilled themselves. So they understand what does it mean to contribute to the open source, contribute to the WordPress core. And that acts as a validation that this company knows WordPress inside it out. And that is how we got some very good clients in the early days. We set up our base. And that is how this circle got completed for us. So if I have to take one point, then this is the one slide that describes our solution. So what are these images? You must have familiar with this number. We just showed this five digit number in this slide. So with every WordPress core releases, we used to order a cake with patch numbers that our team has contributed to it. And the team who has contributed patches would get to cut it. So it was their honor. It was their achievement. It's not the CEO will cut every cake. Whoever is the core contributor will get the honor to cut the cake. So this tradition help us reinforce the idea that open source contribution is a big thing. And to balance it with the non-developer people, because at some point we become too developer centric that we were facing manpower crunch in other departments. Because it was like only if you are a programmer, you can make a career at RTKM. If you are not a programmer, then RTKM is not for you. That was a perception that was getting created. So we started this second thing that we will celebrate other contributions also. So these are localize the translation project. In 4.6, our team contributed a lot in translation. So we celebrated differently this time. But the idea is that we just like that two or three ways. Either you can shut it down. You will make sure that whatever contribution your team is doing to open source will never get revealed. As in their names and their work. Or you can be neutral about it or you can go other way. Which also this way that we will encourage contribution and we will go aggressive about it. And this acted as a biggest advertisement for us. So this help us get too many job applications. Like for a company of our size, we get way more job applications than we can handle. And then going back to it, as we get more job applications, we get to choose good developers. And like it's all in other way. Now we have good developers. We get to work on high quality course. That high quality work help us get good clients. Good client pays nice so we can manage pays and perks for our developers. So it gets completed for us at least. So there might be birth like as I said like some agencies, especially in South Asia are apprehensive about it. Because they might think that by being too open company. You will end up giving too much away. But just imagine as an employee what kind of company you would like to work in. And build that kind of company yourself. This is specially for the business owners. If you don't like somebody stealing credit for your work, don't steal credit from your employees. That's it. Thank you. You have any questions? I think we don't have time for questions, right? I think we can still squeeze in some questions if anybody has any. Any questions? You talked a lot about hiring as a seller agency. What about selling work as a South Asian agency? Yeah. You talked about that selling in the market. Selling as in... Selling services locally. Actually that point I missed. Unfortunately you have to forget that you are Asian agency or even Indian agency. We are based in India. But not a single day we think that we are Indian company and we should sell to the Indian businesses. We think like we are global agency and we should sell to the clients globally. More than 80% clients are from US, Europe and Australia. Because to complete the circle we have to charge above certain limit. So local client in most cases find it... India has a certain reputation. How do you overcome that? About that question, first we don't do any spamming. That is really work for us because usually agency is back on spam a lot. So we avoid that very carefully. Even if we find this could be a right match for us. Even if we see their ad, we wait for next work camp. So we meet in person. I travel to work camp US every year. More than that the open source portfolio. We have many plugins on wordplay.org. Now having a plugin on wordplay.org is not enough. How you are publishing them is something that client looks. Because we don't have a lot many upsell options in the plugins. We are very cool about it. If there is a free plugin free as in here you can have it. If you find it there is a contact form you can get back to us. So these are like small signals like how we are contributing to open source. Many American agencies or American companies which have worked with Indian agencies. They found this different that this company is pretty much open about its culture. So open source and there is something we can say open culture. So open culture shows that we are not insecure. We are strong and we believe what we are doing. So when the exposure we give to our clients the contribution we make to the wordpress. It basically acts a big portfolio and then if required we also give references. Like we have many of our clients are very happy with us. So they are very open like if you need any reference just let me know. And we use it very sparingly like because we value our clients privacy as well as time. But it works for us that way. So open source contribution plus previous client reference. And no spamming. Not at all. Yeah. Questions. I have noticed that on your website you are also open source experts. Yeah. I am more interested in what your client's privacy asks with WooCommerce experts. What do they need mostly? Sorry I couldn't understand your question. WooCommerce? Yes. I mean three things important to WooCommerce for your clients. WooCommerce actually I am not able to understand. Okay. Okay. The first question is always scalability. And I really be upfront that I have no data to prove that it will scale more than Magento. But do you anticipate you will have like 100 orders per minute? If you don't have that much volume you are targeting the wrong problem. So maybe we can start small start quickly. And the hypothetical case because 100 orders per minute is a decent volume. And I am pretty much confident WooCommerce can handle it very nicely. Then portfolio also matters. Like we have a very good client WooCommerce client from Singapore itself, Rotimatic. Which was mentioned by Singapore prime minister in national day speech. So we have clients, we have case studies. So when they are not convinced with that argument we use case studies also. So usually like enterprises don't want to be the first. They want, they lead by example. Okay. They are using WooCommerce. They are using WooCommerce. Fine. We can also try that. So yeah. But most of the concerns we get only for the scaling WooCommerce. And in the end that it's about it reduces to how much your client trust you. Because in the end you are going to, we are the people who are managing servers. So as long as they don't get any helpers request from a customer saying hey, I wanted to order but your checkout page was returning 500 error. So as long as there are no incomplete orders or broken shopping cart, nobody complains. And it's our job to make sure that no errors are thrown during the checkout process. So our critical tool is currently Slack. But even when we were not on Slack, we were using some kind of gamification or some kind of in-house collaboration. Currently we use P2 theme for internal site and Slack. Before that we had a body press site but we found that people were not getting engaged there. The idea is to get your team at one point and make sure that you reward people, not only core contribution but even the small achievement. Like somebody shares a link to a very good article. So you just thumbs up. You just like it. So that encourages more people. And we have something called TGIF. We have weekly or monthly meetings where we encourage people to share what they have learned. And we maintain all these data points. Not in a very formal way but some kind of notes in a document so that during app results we remind them hey, you did that great work. Better app result for you. And we make it public. That guy got better app result because he was involved with that project. He did that open source contribution. He helped learn that new technology and things like that. So we have some kind of reward system which is not a very formal one. But in the end you need to gamify something in some way so that you will get best out of your employees. And initially if you even get two or three employees which are contributing, later on other start contributing looking at them. So can we take that? We can discuss that, right? Yeah, I mean I'm sure many of you have questions. I should get more time. We have a team where you can catch all of them. Thank you.