 Just a second, I check a clicker. Yeah, that's me. That's so nice to see you all here at WordPress Camp Brighton. My name is Sabrina Zidane. I'm WordPress Multi-Site Consultant. I help development teams to build network of websites using WordPress Multi-Site functionality. We all know, here we all know what kind of powerful tool WordPress may be. You can run a personal blog. You can build a spectacular portfolio and make ready to go online store with forms, newsletters and coupons and everything in no time. But there is another way to use WordPress that is not so obvious. You also can produce a solid web application with it easy, fast, and a significantly lower budget than custom development. Nowadays, when it comes to e-commerce development, clients are already prepared and know about WordPress and WooCommerce and are eager to use these tools to build online store. But when it comes to some project that is more specific, you may have hard times pitching WordPress as a flexible and powerful platform. As people may be determined to use some custom solutions because their project is not like others. Recently, I joined a startup, SR startup, actually. It offers meal plans for different diets. User signs up and he or more possibly she picks a diet and gets ready to go meal plan according to that diet. She gets the ready to go plan for the breakfast lunch with detailed recipes with gross release for the day and for the whole week. The idea is to free her from worries and to let her do the things she likes to do and not thinking about the food, whether she can eat something today, what she'll be having for dinner, what she should buy for tomorrow. As soon as I've heard the logic and the structure of this project, it sounds to me like it was created to make the most of WordPress multi-site, WordPress core, custom post types, advanced custom fields and so on. But the team have already started custom development and of course they were eager to continue custom development. I would lie if I say that it was easy to persuade them to switch to WordPress. But after all negotiations, doubts and fears, we managed to do this. What we've done, we installed WordPress, set up network, set up WordPress multi-site network. So now every diet has got its own sub-domain but they're still with, has the same theme, the same admin dashboard, the same user base, the same code base. We set domain mapping, so every diet has got its own sub-domain and that's, oh, and also one more thing. We tried few membership plugins, so to manage user subscriptions and picked the one that fit our pricing model best. So this is how we've got half an app actually working in less than a day and the development became easier and faster in no time. Finally, we use custom post types for meals, products, meal plans and used advanced custom fields and taxonomies to connect them all together and then add some spices like bringing everything to front-end, so user never get to back-end at all, adding favorite recipes, advanced search queries and finally, at the end, we've got an awesome, powerful SAS app in a short time that is ready for the further improvement according to the user's needs. This talk is aimed to present the idea of using WordPress Multicite for building SAS app and to making it really lean startup and we'll see why we might consider to use WordPress Multicite for this purpose, examine some tools that can make the development even easier and of course see the examples of what is possible, life examples of what is possible. Keep in mind that it will be a fairly general talk as we've got 25 minutes or so. SAS, you probably know what I'll say that SAS is the acronym for software as a service. It's a way of delivering service via cloud, taking monthly or yearly fee for using the software. Users don't need to install and maintain software, they just access it via internet. It's easier if I present an example for you, just think about WordPress.com. We all know how easy it is to set up a website with WordPress, but a lot of people don't want to bother with it. They don't want to set up DNS, think about database connection, security plugins, theme updates, core updates and everything. And WordPress.com offers users the service of installing WordPress, taking care of service, databases, security and everything. While users just have an opportunity to access his website, we have a browser or mobile phone and start writing posts or whatever. So that was the slide for that. Other examples of that I can think of, Slack, GitHub, Dropbox, Evernote, every startup founder has the same worry. You fear that your product won't take off before you run out of money. So the traditional approach is to build a product completely and then present it to the market. But the problem is that after months of work and tons of money spent, you may find out that the product you've built doesn't meet market expectations at all. The limited methodology is aimed to hedge your risk and to help you find the right product market fit as soon as possible. The idea is that everything starts with minimal viable product. You built a minimal viable product. It's a basic form of your product that will become more completely with time. According to the feedback of your existing customers. Then you use this loop, this built measure learn loop is a heart and soul of Lean Startup. You built a minimal viable product. You present it to your market, measure the result and learn from that experiment. The effectiveness of the model depends on how fast you can iterate through this loop. This is how step by step you'll be making your minimal viable products more complex. But first, from the beginning, it should use as few resources as possible. The rapid iteration of this process can lead you to the short way to the money. Because you understand what your customers expect from you, what features they want and you are not guessing. The idea of Lean Startup, the aim of Lean Startup to build the product your customers want, not the product you think they want. So in order to deliver the minimal viable product as up and getting the point of making money, sales application should be easy to build, it should be customizable, and of course, it should be scalable. And the question is whether WordPress Multisite is an appropriate platform to do something like this. Yes, it is. As a matter of fact, that was exactly what WordPress co-founder Matt Mallon would have done with several of companies he runs. Jetpack, WordPress.com, WordPress, Acchismat, that's all WordPress Multisites, and SaaS apps. Multisite can be an ideal platform for developing SaaS application. And this is why, first of all, it's very extremely scalable. These numbers of WordPress.com, just look at the slide. 117 million sites in the network, 136 million users in it, and over 1 billion visits per month. These numbers for the April of this year, so they might be even bigger now. WordPress Multisite is a short way to minimal viable product. That's why, this is why, we have our five minutes install, mind 10 minutes for WordPress Multisite. And right after this, you have fantastic built-in user system with multiple roles and capabilities at once. Now you just need to couple it with appropriate membership plugin, and you can turn your website into subscription-based application. There is a number of membership plugins that offer different features, so after you defined your pricing model for your SaaS app, you can find the right fit for you. You can take money for paid memberships, access to restricted content, upgrades, priority support. The opportunity to set top-level domain names, the opportunity to switch themes. That's all about your imagination. The next thing is separate environment for each site. With WordPress Multisite, you can do this. You can set separate environment for each site. You can change theme. You can add different sets of plugins and themes depending on your niche. For example, free plan may include one default theme, but you can allow users to pick another theme for additional charge. And domain mapping. Extremely cool that we have domain mapping opportunities with WordPress Multisite. For example, you give yourself an ability for wedding photographers to create their own website and use your premium plugins and themes as their own. You can let them make this as subdomain, for example, johndown.wedding.com, or use top-level domain name, johndown.com, for additional charge. WordPress Multisite is customizable. First of all, because of plugins, you don't need to custom code everything because you can use free or premium plugins that already exist. That way, you can get the job done and done it well. You can use themes to set any appearance you want, move login and registration areas to the front, so user will never even guess he is using WordPress site. Using custom post types, you can create different types of content in your app and connect it together as we have done in our startup. Custom fields let you customize any area you need. The cool thing about custom fields that you don't really need to customize everything at all, but you can let users use custom fields, just give them the opportunity to say, hey, this is custom fields, or at once custom fields customize whatever you want and take additional charge for that too. And of course, WordPress hooks and filters give you unlimited opportunities to integrate far beyond WordPress. This is how you can get minimal viable product in surprisingly short time. The co-component of flint startup is build, measure, learn, loop. Oh, well, WordPress, lose the letter, okay. Build, measure, learn, loop. And there are a lot of third-party services that will help you to understand your users better for services, for audit, user tracking, analytics, feedback systems, and most of them already have integration with WordPress, so you will be able just to plug in and go. This saves you development time and lets you run a linear startup and create a solid product market feed. Also, WordPress MultiSight is easy to use. It's the same familiar user experience that we all love about WordPress, so it's just easy to use. WordPress MultiSight is extremely scalable, customizable, flexible, and easy to use platform for building SaaS apps. Let's see some life examples of what is possible with it. For example, niche blocks and directories. With MultiSight, you can allow people to register and create their own website. They will be given a unique URL, sub-domain or top-level domain depending on your settings. Some niches I can think of are hotels, restaurants, doctors, artists, photographers, travel agents, you name it. Money is made via paid subscriptions and advertising. For example, EventSmart is an online event registration and ticketing platform. It's created for event organizers. Imagine you are going to organize some dance classes in your city. To start sell tickets, you have to do a whole lot of things. Set up a website, set up DNS, think about the way you'll be getting money. Think about ticket management system and everything. It may take a certain time and technical knowledge to do this. Instead, you can sign up to EventSmart, for example, and start to sell tickets to your event right away. After you sign up, the website with chosen name created for you and you can start creating an event right away. You can feel venue, date, time, description of the event, and it will take you just few steps to sell tickets for your event. You can customize everything, including messages that you send to your customers. That's all in free plan. For example, in paid plan, they offer change the appearance of your website. There are some additional payment gateways and what else, more storage, more payment methods and using promotional and discount codes. If you're organizing events, such kind of software as a service application can make your life much easier and let you do what you really want to do while they take care of technical part. Another example, our press services. The business idea here is to take care of critical issues for you, but you still do whatever you want to do with your theme, plugins, and your website in general. Besides hosting and server, they take care about security about backups, updates. While it's not too difficult to set up a website with WordPress, many people prefer not to do this and are eager to pay someone to do this instead of them. Companies like WordPress.com, Pressable, WP and Jane have successfully built software as a service businesses by offering such kind of service. Some of them are aimed to offer very simple process of creating a website in few minutes at low cost, for example, WordPress.com. Other found their niche in offering service for high traffic and demanding application. For example, Pagely, the cheapest plan costs $300, but for this amount, you'll get consistently fast performance in any usage scenario. Also, software services, it's the most classical example, the most obvious example of software as a service app. For example, you've got some software business, software for generating invoices, for example. The old way of selling it was to sell the whole package to the user once, but instead, you can let user use your service and take monthly or yearly fee for that or additional fee for some services. For example, Pressbooks is a software that lets you create eBooks, professional design eBooks online. If you have your content ready, you just need to register, you've got a website ready for you. After you register, you've got a website ready for you and you just start creating a book, arranging your content into chapters and parts. I tried the service. It's really easy to create a book. It takes you only a few steps. You don't need any technical knowledge or anything to do these. You've got EPUB and mobile formats ready for you and it will be watermarked in free plan or while we're upgrading, you get PDF version of your book for the print of the month later or on the month later. And also you've got your domain name public so other people can access your eBook via internet too. That's how they work and such kind of service, with such kind of service, you can get eBook ready in no time with no special skills and without usage of professional software like Adobe InDesign, for example. WordPress Multisite is flexible, easy to use, scalable system and it may be a great choice for developing software as a service but despite of my personal affection for WordPress, in general and for WordPress Multisite in particular, I have to mention that it's just a tool and tool should be picked according to the task, not vice versa. So not like this. Here are some links where you can find out more information about Lin Startup, about WordPress Multisite. I'll tweet them later today, a few plugins that we used. Also, I am excited to announce that I'll be offering free Multisite consultations so if you want to build something with WordPress, not something, if you have a project in your mind, software as a service or something else that you want to build with WordPress Multisite, feel free to contact me with Twitter or my website or anything. Thank you all for listening. I hope it was useful questions. Thank you, Sabrina. Any questions? Anybody? Raise your hand. Oh, we have one over here. Oscar, I believe. That was a great talk. Have there been any big stumbling points for you using WordPress Multisite, things that you didn't know about before you started using it that you'd advised people to take care of now? Sorry, the things... So like problems that you ran into that you hadn't anticipated that turned out to be quite problematic? I'm sorry, the problem that I have before I started to use Multisite? Nope, just during the course of using it, did you run into any big problems? I into big problems. There are some problems when you're using something, right? Sometimes, yes, there are problems with saving cookies across domains when there are top-level domain names, when you have... We have two types of installation, right? Subdirectors and subdomains. But then you can turn subdomains into being top-level domains to switch. It's not easy sometimes to set up this cookie thing when you are switching between top-level domain names, but now when the main mapping tool is inside Corel for WordPress Multisite, it became easier, so the problem is solved. But sometimes, yes, there are some particular problems according to the project itself. Cool, thank you very much. Thank you. Anyone else? Any more for any more? No? Okay, so I suppose I've got a quick question. So do you have any, like, SAS project on your mind at the moment that maybe you'd like to start, but you're not quite sure if Multisite would be a good fit for that? Me? Yes. I recently joined another Multisite... SAS Multisite project that I was... that I was sharing in the beginning of my talk. Yes, so I don't have any other on my mind right now, because I'm completely in it, that Milplan... Diet Milplan project, so not right now. So you're in the zone? Focus. But maybe you guys have some project on your mind that you are not sure if WordPress Multisite fits right and you have some doubts, so you want to know if the project that you are thinking about is good, WordPress Multisite will be a good fit for it. Feel free to ask right now. I believe we have a question. Hi, Sabrina. It's a really good talk. One thing you didn't ask at the beginning was, how many people in the room have already launched a software-as-a-service Multisite application? Okay, that's an interesting... Is anyone here? How many? Five. Six. Okay, so Oscar, come and talk to any of us. Seven. Seven. Wildcard SSLs are a bitch. And we'll see how many people will be after the talk. Will there be a try? Yep. Any more? Oh, right over there. There we go. Thank you. Just thumbs up. Right, okay. Good job. Okay. Okay, round of applause for Sabrina. Thank you.