 So, hello JB. Hello. It's a pleasure to meet you here at World Camp Paris for the first time. Yeah. So this is JB, he is the CEO of WP Rocket, of WP Media and products WP Rocket, Imagify and coming soon, Rocket CDM. Exactly. Yeah. So it's nice to meet you here. Yeah. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for being here. Yeah. So it's five years since WP Rocket hit the market, right? Yeah. And last year you've done 2.6 million dollars of revenue. Yeah. For WP Rocket, yes. Yeah. That's a great number for the plugin. So what, how did you do that actually? Yeah. A lot of work, I guess. Now the first thing I would, I would say is just to, to give a bit of history because of course you don't arrive to that numbers and to that result like, like that and without work, without a huge team and a great team. And also without a huge market because so WP Rocket is a caching plugin and everyone needs to have a faster website, you know? Right. Better SEO, better traffic and so people are really looking to improve their websites. Yeah, but there are a lot of options. Exactly. Exactly. Free and really good options. The thing is we are providing something a bit different because we choose since the beginning a premium model because we want to afford an excellent quality of service. I mean the product, it's a plugin, but also providing an excellent support because since you're a caching plugin, you know, you change everything on the website. So and there might be conflicts, it might be issue and when a customer is using it and he has an issue, he won't be happy. So our job is to make him happy even if he has an issue. So basically it's to solve his issue and for that we need to have a great support and that's something I really believe that we have. So that helps help us a lot of having a lot of new customers. But the support for WP Rocket is not just support for WP Rocket but for all issues customers have. Exactly. Yeah, since a caching plugin is in the front of the website, everything goes through the website. So it can be difficult for the support as well because every time a customer is having an issue, he can think this is because of WP Rocket because since he installed WP Rocket, something has changed on his website. So they contact us. So we have a lot of tickets which is not directly related to WP Rocket but we have to solve the solution also for them. But where are the boundaries of this support? I mean, you can go very far away from the project like this. Yeah, exactly. And especially on support, you know. So we really need to have a strict limit on the support to, I mean, as soon as it goes outside of WP Rocket, when it's not related to WP Rocket, we are very clear with our customers saying that, okay, this is not related to WP Rocket. We can't help you. However, we are always providing them a solution. We can't say it's not our fault. Just go away. So we don't solve directly the solution but we give them something for them in order to have a solution for them at the end. Yeah. WP Rocket Block has about, I think, 500,000 visitors a month. So this is a big work to do. This is to lower the support tickets to educate customers. So this is the acquisition channel. It's multiple. Of course, I mean, it's really both. This is something we really implement lately is to really focus on content marketing. And this has helped us so much on having much more new customers, much more new with new because we have invested a lot on creating content and created great content. So of course, this is for SEO, this is for having new visitors which will maybe become new customers for WP Rocket. But also we have a lot of content which is to educate them about performance. Because performance, you know, is something very complicated at the end. It's difficult. It's technical. And there are a lot of things where people think they know, which is not necessarily true. So we need to educate them a lot about, okay, should I use a CDN? What is minification? What is bother cash? I heard that I should enable jzip. But what is jzip? So there are so many things that you can have and sometimes it's really complicated, especially with the tools which give you performance feedback like PHP, like JTemRatrix because it's really global. So they will say, okay, you don't have jzip compression enable. But if you look at the details, your website have jzip compression enable. But it's only because you are, for example, loading Google Analytics which doesn't have jzip, for example. And the customer will think, okay, but I have enabled WP Rocket and I don't have, why is that? And because they don't look at the details and it's not very easy to look at the details. So it's like a private caching consultant every time. Yeah. And how big the team is? About support, about WP Rocket? About WP Rocket and support. Yeah. So we have 10 people on the support and it's always growing because recently we have really a huge cost on WP Rocket. So we are growing a lot our support team. Right now, at the time we are talking, we are hiring three new people for coming on the support. So it's going to be bigger. We have two developers working on WP Rocket. We are also hiring new developers as well. We have two people working on the product. We have one people working really specifically on the marketing, one on the applications and one on the content. So as you might see, there are a lot of people and a lot of people working on different things like marketing, like development, like support. So it's really a different kind of people and that's really interesting because it creates something different and very unique which comes into WP Rocket. How do you collect people, write people for you? How do you hire people? How do you know the people is right? Good question. It's really complicated. I mean, hiring is one of the things which is one of the most important, especially for my job because you are creating a team and you need to have really best team player to do great product and to have a great company. We have invested a lot into hiring. I mean, changing our hiring process, investing a lot of time because at the beginning, we were totally inexperienced, first on running a company because that was our... You and Jonathan, you are developers originally. Yeah, mostly developers and even if we love entrepreneurship, it was really our first song experience and we created just a few people and then we're a team of 20 people in like three, four years. So you need to learn in a very fast way and there are so many things to learn because there is the products, there is management, there is hiring, development, so many things. At the beginning, we were mostly focusing on hiring people based on feeling which works and we have been able to create a great team thanks to that. Were those friends? No, we didn't really hire friends. We hired people we knew most of the time, especially on the beginning and especially from people of the WordPress community because that's a great community and that's a great solution to find. Great people always have more or less the same mindset, the same vision and so that's really good. But we were a bit more focused on hiring based on feelings and not based on what did they do, how they really work because that's really what matters at the end. Of course, they should have the same focus, the same vision as you. So we have recently changed the way we are hiring. So we have... Completely, we widened our whole process which is now a set of three interviews with a lot of different people and this is everything is written and that's really working well and we are really focused on the past, on the people who are hiring. But how did they do on their previous job? How did they react on a specific situation? Because you know, usually we were asking, okay, if you have this situation, how would you react? And they were giving a great answer. But the truth is if you never expect something... Restitutionary situations. Yeah, exactly. Now we are really focused on the situation which has existed for these candidates. On this situation, how did you react? Which is much better than asking how would you react? Because of course they would give a perfect theoretical solution. Yeah, you know what to answer. In fact, how did you do when it really happens? And with that, it helps us a lot on finding the good candidates. And the thing is we are totally remote, so it helps so much on creating a great team because you are not limited geographically. You know, you can hire great people from the US, from Canada, from Colombia, from Spain, from so many countries. I mean, all the countries, and that's really great and that's great, a unique team and I would love it. Yeah, you said you had to learn a lot of things. What was your channel of learning mostly? I would say experience because I mean, you know, you are directly into it. And most of the time, we don't necessarily have time to read books and to see how it's working. You just, you are confrontated to the new thing. So, okay, let's do it. And of course you will fail and we have failed so many times, but you're learning. And this is, yeah, I would say this is how we learn by failing, you know. And I think Jonathan and me, my co-founder, we are quite lucky to have some good guts, you know. Most of the time we have good feelings, which seems to be good. And that helps us a lot of having good solutions. Of course we fail, but we learn. But speaking about fails, what are the wrong decisions you remember? So many. But like, name the few the most. I think there is something quite common in an entrepreneur is we are strongly positive and we have the tendency to forget what was bad. So I won't give you so many answers. I remember a few technical things, but what I would say the biggest mistake we did was to try to do too many things. Because at the beginning, so we created WP market. And then we created Imagify and we have been in a way successful in both. And we say, okay, that seems quite easy to create successful products. That would be great if we could do so many other products. So let's try a security plugin. And so we hire people to create themes, open themes. And, you know, we were too many distracted. We tried to do too many things. At the end, we lose what we really know, it was performance. And that's what we know, what we are really good at. So like one year ago, or two years ago, we really decided to focus on what we are good, which is performance. And so we stay on performance and we do WP market. Imagify our image optimization service. And in the next, some other product, but which will be very focused on performance and to not do so many things. And, you know, when you have, even if you are only one product, you can do so many things to improve it. Yeah, the support, the marketing. But you have the like transport roadmap, like the Github issues, everything is like open. This is where you will get the ideas how to develop WP rocket from customers, from where? Yes. Yeah, so we can talk a bit more about transparency. That's very interesting, because the company has everything open, like numbers, salaries, like everything. Yeah. Not many companies do that. Yeah, that's unfortunate. To give you a bit more context of why we did that. So we have been very lucky to learn, we're back on the learning, thanks to other companies, which was sharing things, like Buffer, like all the friends I knew, like Bear Metrics, they were sharing everything. And like the way they were hiring, and we took that. We said, oh, that's great, we are learning and let's, it seems to work. Let's do the same. At the beginning, it was not transparent. And at the point we say, okay, we have been able to gain so many value because of companies who have shared things. Let's do the same. I mean, we have, we have learned so many things. And that could be really great if we can. What is the decision just to open everything? Yeah, I mean, there is no reason to hide things. I believe that if more people would be transparent, that would help so many things. And it's important to be transparent for a good reason. And our reason is based on the more information you have, as an employee, as everything, the easiest it would be to take the good decision because usually bad decisions comes because you don't have enough information. So we share the more information in order to people to take the good decision. And so it helps us internally, but externally, especially on support, for example, when people were saying, hey, you are doing something bad. And we say, okay, look, we are sharing everything. So if you want to, to, to, to share your negative feedback on WP rocket, please do look, everyone is doing and we are sharing everything. So we really don't have issue with that. And I believe this is something very strong because with, you know, the more social networks, the more visibility now there are a lot of customers when they don't have what they want. So we'll say, hey, if you don't give me that, I will publish on Twitter or Facebook that you're a bad company and that everything is bad. And it's really. Yeah, company often gets scared about things and want to hide these things and keep their privacy and make everything not to go this out. Absolutely. So and our, our vision is that, and it works most of the time is, okay, do, please do it, please share. We would be very happy to see what you say and to answer objectively things we are sharing everything. And most of the time, it's really, really effective because they don't expect that most of the time when you say that to companies, they execute because they are afraid of bad, bad, of bad content. And we are not because, I mean, when everything is shared, there is no, no issue about that. Yeah, so this was one of the right decisions. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, fortunately, there are a lot of right decisions we've been able to take. Yeah, I checked, like, Google Trans for DemolipiRocket and there were kind of three, three, like, crucial points, like, turning points. I think it was March 2014, then end of 2016 and end of 2018. What happened then? How, how would the graphics go, like, with some magics? So what kind of magic is that? Yeah. So to, to, to go back to the, to the beginning of WPWocket, we started in France, as you can see with my strong accent, I'm French. And when we, when we launched WPWocket, we really wanted to launch it only in France because we knew that our product was really small, was really not perfect. And so you saw yourself as a local company? Not necessarily. We, we, we knew that US people, but let's say international market would be more, would weight more from a caching plugin, like more features. And we, at the beginning, we really didn't have any big features, just caching basically and unification. And so we wanted, it's so more important to, to try. And it was to, to be the fastest. It was really easier for us to just have a French website, French communication, French support. So we say, okay, let's do everything in France. And, and it was really a side project at the beginning. So we didn't want to invest so many things. So we say, we say, okay, let's try in France. So it was at the beginning. And the review was okay, we were doing like 5,000 per month, which was really wonderful for us. We were the first surprise, but it was We were able to put stripped. Yeah. Yeah, no unification. No. No. So it was, it was great, but it was really flat. And at a point we say, okay, we see it's, it's, it's, it's get some revenue. But if we want to, to, to be full time on it, we need more because with 5,000, reviewing to a company, you don't pay a lot of things and you don't pay salary. So we say, okay, let's, let's go international. Now we have improved our product. We have collected so many feedback from our users. Let's translate our website and let's communicate outside the world. And that's what we did. And slowly, slowly, it's, it became more and more famous. And that's where the big international community as well. Exactly. That's where the growing comes from because we, we started also to have feedback from big, big websites, like WPTAR and the wide, and that's, that's brings us a lot of new customers. And since our product were great and our support for great, it was like snowball, you know, the more customers you have, the more recommendation you have and it's getting bigger and bigger. So this is the, this was really the first peak and the first huge growth was simply because we translated our website and we really communicate internationally. So first it was a really good product, then it was translation. Yes. Yeah. And what next? What next? So we, on the, on the, on the beginning, we focused so much on the product, product and supports, because it was really the core of what we wanted to do. And we were really, it's how it goes now as well. Yes, but with a new thing, which is marketing, much more. So our growth at the beginning and since, like one year ago was focused on just recommendations, supports, but also contacting like a press relationship, you know, PR. We were contacting so many bloggers to, to simply say, hey, this is, we are WP rocket, we do that. If you want to try, I can provide you a license. And if you like it, that we would be so happy to have blog posts. And this works so well. But at the point, and this was last year, in the last two years, we were really at the top of the revenue. We saw that we were doing $200,000 per month. But it was not growing that much. And so we really decided, since our product was better, and I mean, everything was well organized to really invest into marketing. So. Have you had any marketing strategy before? It was, but not, we were like really focused on product and the marketing was minority and we really focused on our existing customers to have good retention to a lot of, we knew all upgrades and to create the best product. And the thing is, we were not expert at all on marketing. So we were doing ourselves, but not necessarily good. So we really decided to, to invest into it. So we hired a few profiles, like someone to manage our affiliate program, someone to manage all our marketing, and also someone to avoid the content. And starting to that, of course, after a few months, because, you know, there's a time people come to your company and start working. And a few months after that, we have seen so many great results about that and we were like double the revenue. So what part of the revenue marketing, of course, what part of revenue they take right now? It's, it's complicated. I mean, that's something we don't really calculate and want to calculate because it's always difficult to, I mean, you can create the return of investment here. Yeah, I mean, you can know how many specific action could bring you in terms of revenue, like upwards, like Facebook ads, but I mean, all the marketing investment is really complicated to measure. And at the end to know which action, yeah, it's impossible. Yeah, because you see the tweet on Twitter, then you see it on Facebook, and then suddenly you find out that you're reading the blog post. And that's how, okay, so what are the channels mainly? Yeah. The affiliate program is really big, and it's bringing a lot of new customers. I was contacted in the world for Rocket Wave a few years ago. I was curious if you guys have an affiliate program, but you didn't. At the time we didn't want to have and we didn't. Yeah, why did you decide? What persuaded you? We, I mean, we, at the beginning, people were providing feedback and were promoting WP Rocket for free, because the product was excellent, still excellent, but we really wanted to help these people to promote it at WP Rocket more and to have new people who were able to promote WP Rocket. So that's why we decided to have this program and this work very well. And sometimes I don't like personally affiliate program because people are recommending things not because it's a good product, but just because they are going to earn money. But since I strongly believe that WP Rocket is a great product, which helps customers and all our customers, most of our customers are really happy about that. And we have so many great feedback about that. I mean, it's really good to have an affiliate program to think, so people who are recommending WP Rocket. Yeah, and it's just another good reason to write a blog post instead of a short tweet. You can tweet like, oh, that would be great to make my website faster three times. But if you enter an affiliate program, there is a good reason for you to write a blog post, to make screenshots, to work with the idea. Yeah, and to have partnerships with all the plugins, with the hosting, it helps so much to have an affiliate program because you have something to give to them. So affiliate program, a lot, of course, a lot of SEO, we are writing a huge amount of content. On WP Rocket blog or guest posts? No, mostly on WP Rocket blog, plus on our website, we create new content. We do add words with you. We are experimenting Facebook ads a lot. And of course, all our work with our customer space, because we are providing them a great product and great support, and they are recommending us. So basically, what WP Media is selling, it's not product itself, right? It's support. Exactly. Especially with WP Rocket, which is GPL, what we are selling is simply the support and the update. The product is free and it's on publicly on Meetups. You can directly download WP Rocket. Yeah, but to get support and to get updates, that's what you are selling, right? Exactly. And of course, since we have external services, like Critical Plus, CSS Generator, we need to be linked to the website. So we are selling so that all the service related to the WP Rocket. Speaking about pricing models, it was from the beginning that WP Rocket will be premium plugin, no free new model, no free version at all. It was from the beginning. Yeah, from the beginning. So the first reason was to know that we didn't want it to do a free plugin. Yeah. Why? Because we wanted really to create something great and to do that, we need time. And for that, we need money. So we really needed to focus time, to focus on development and support. And for that, you need to pay. So we wanted to get directly money from customers in order to create them a great product. Yeah. Do you remember the first purchase? Yes, I don't remember the name, but I remember. I mean, we were like refreshing all the time. Oh, I appreciate it. Really nice. And the question about freemium is interesting. We really thought about that while not doing a freemium plugin. First, it's really, it's our opinion. It's not worth it for cash for a cash in plugin to do a freemium model, because what will have the most impact on the performance is create a static cash. Okay. And everything will be, of course, better with less load, with minification, with all that stuff. But the main impact is static. Yeah. And so, which means that if you want to do freemium, you need to put free the static cash. Otherwise, you won't have really great value. So now it brings you to the paid features. Yeah, which won't be that much. Yeah, like, let's say 10 or 20 percent. Exactly. Exactly. And this, of course, is great to have a freemium model creates a lot of usage, a lot of support. We really wanted to force providing great support, which is for us possible, since we have a premium model. But speaking about support, you're providing support right now in French and in English, right? But there were different languages before, right? Yes, we were providing by randomly in a way, and that was one, some mistakes we did, I believe, is so we are working remotely and we hired people from all around the world. And one day we hired a German guy. And he said, hey, I can speak German. So we say, oh, let's do German support. Yeah. Yeah. And people were really happy to create a ticket in German and to have an answer in German. You always have some customers from Germany, right? Exactly. Yeah. And we did the same with someone who was speaking Spanish and Italian. That was really good. But at the end, that doesn't really enter into a strategy. And something we can really afford, because when the German guy is living for holidays, you don't have any more German support. Yeah. I tell you the same. And that's really complicated and that brings so much difficulties to manage multiple languages, especially for a small company like us. So that's why at the end, we decided to remove these languages and to do army support in English and French. But you came to the French? Yeah, because it's, we, I mean, we created WPWalking in France. We have used people, people are used to create, to submit tickets in French. It's kind of made to here, right? Yeah, exactly. And French people don't necessarily talk very well English. And I mean, a lot of recommendation we had on French blog posts, they were saying, okay, and they have a French support and this is a huge loss. I see. Some people expect to have support in French. Exactly. So that's right. For now, we still do French tickets. Yeah. But you still target markets that don't speak English? I mean, they speak different languages, right? Like Spanish, Portuguese, South America? Yeah, I would target every, all around the world. I mean, we, and that's a good thing. We don't have a specific country as a target. Of course, the US is the biggest market. So it's the biggest market. Yeah, of course. And so we are targeting more US because if you target them, you know that you are going to touch more people directly instead of doing small countries. What about other English speaking countries? I mean, Canada, UK, Australia, are there big markets as well? Yeah, there are big markets, but smaller than US. So yes. What part of all customers, US customers represent? Yeah, unless, yeah, I think if I remember the numbers, it's about 30% of our customers are from US. Okay. And what kind of customer is typical customer for the world? That's the good and the bad thing. Because it's basically any WordPress user, any people who has a website. And that's a good thing. And the thing I love with WordPress is you can have like local restaurants, who has his own website, the bloggers, photographers, of the huge agency, all the big government websites. That's all that comes out of me, exactly, exactly. And so these are our customers. But is there some typical image of customer for the WordPress? Yeah, of course, kind of, you know, we have bloggers, which is quite niche. We have the agencies, we have hosting, so different kind of customers, which will buy different kind of licenses, for example, the restaurants, we know, which is not very techie, we'll buy a single license for its own website, and we'll need a lot of support and help when the developers, when we'll buy more unlimited licenses and are more techie, so it will be much more easier for them. But we don't really focus on specific people. Because there are so many differences, and that doesn't really work it. I see. So we focus on WordPress users. Yeah, just WordPress users. Speaking about marketing, I just remember, as we're here at World Camp Paris, and you're sponsoring, I wanted to ask, how do you feel about sponsoring World Camps? Does it bring any revenue to company? Or it's just like giving away? Yeah, good question. So we experimented a lot about that, especially at the beginning, when we wanted to be known outside of France. So to do that, we sponsored World Camp. From our feedback and from our stats, we have seen that in terms of revenue, for us, it didn't really worth it. Because the way we sponsor is big in a way, because we always prefer to take one of the biggest sponsorships, which allow us to have a table when we can talk to people, we can show exactly. And to be able to talk with customers and talk with people, to explain them, because usually it's something technical and complicated for them. And so it's important to show them. And we have seen that it's quite costly, because you have to sponsor, you need to bring the team, you have to pay the hotel. So it's really a big budget. And at the end, if you can have like five, six customers, it's quite big. And for business, I guess, where the cost is not very expensive. By year, you know, so the revenue per user is not big. Investing multiple thousand of dollars to have five customers is really not a good solution. It's a much more better way to invest money if you want to really return on investment. And we try in different countries. So that's the feedback for us. It doesn't work. For other companies, it can work very well, especially for hosting. I have a lot of examples where some hosting were really not known from the workplace community and they invest a lot on all the French World Cup. And now there are really a reference in the workplace community. That's because they invested. So to be known, it's really, it can be useful. So we love WordPress, we love WordPress community. And we have so many things to give it back, because we are living, we're creating a company thanks to WordPress. That's quite crazy. If you think that's something free, something open source, and we are living, we are like 20 people living thanks to that. So we have decided that we sponsor all the French World Camps. Just in order to give it back, we know that it's not going to bring us customers, but we sponsor every French World Camps. It was a solution of facility, because a lot of World Camps are contacting us to sponsor. And sometimes we will say, yeah, so it seems like a nice World Camp. It was difficult to choose and at the end to say no, to explain the reason. So we decided to only sponsor a French. And now it's really clear. And if people are asking, we say no, we sponsor only a French World Camp. Yeah, I see. But now, after the WProcket, it's five years old. Yeah. A big baby now. Yeah, a big baby. If you know all the story before, what would you change in your strategy in marketing and hiring process, I mean in development model? I think I would change nothing, because we never know. If you change things, maybe that would have, I mean, it's like butterfly effect. I guess you have seen the movie. Yeah, sure. You change one thing, but you change everything. So I mean, with the result we have today, I'm extremely happy with what we have been able to build, with the great customers, with the great team, I mean, with everything. So I wouldn't change anything, because you don't know the impact. And even if we fail things, we have been able to, we have learned so much about that. So I would keep like the same. Yeah, you said that in the beginning there was so, you made WProcket and you made Magified and you made something else. And it wasn't like a great decision that time to spread between different directions. But now, Magified is developing as well and you're preparing another product. Yes. By WP Media is Rocket CDM, right? Exactly. So this is your strategy for the future? Yeah, our strategy is really to focus on performance and to find pain points for users, which is difficult for them. They don't necessarily understand... To target the same users, but with different products, right? Exactly. We want really to target the same users, performance, and with WP Rocket, we really want to make performance easy and understandable, and I mean, you enable WP Rocket in its working most of the time. And we build, we modify things to the feedback of our customers. They'll say, what kind of, how can I optimize their images? I don't like what, what exists. And we say, we looked a little bit to the other product, they're really good, but we wanted to do something a bit different. So we say, okay, give us six months and we'll provide you something and you provide them, you modify them today. We are optimizing more than one million of images per day. That's working pretty well. And we are preparing to release WP at CDN because we see that people don't necessarily understand CDN and it can be complicated for them to have a CDN on their own website. It can be complicated for developers? Yeah, even for developers. I mean, you need to register to an external service, create a CNM and then modify your DNS and then, I mean, configure it because by default, the performance is not necessarily good because they dissolve everything and then add it into your plugin which handles CDN. What we want to provide is one quick solution for CDN. So directly from WP Rocket, they enable the CDN, that's all. Oh, that sounds really cool. I mean, that sounds like logical after we've seen WP Rocket. Imagine if I, it's logical but sounds really cool. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we thank you very much for this interview, for this information and so I'm so honored to be here to talk to you and I'm a fan of WP Rocket since I don't know, maybe 2016, 2015 and I'm working in WP Rocket actually and I can prove that it's a great place to work, a great place to be with team and a nice place to be a nice company to be in a customer. So thank you very much. Yeah, thank you so much.