 And welcome back. All right, everybody. So we are ready to keep going. And for those of you who have been in the WordPress community for a while, obviously the next gentleman needs no introduction, but for those of you who are new to the community, there was a first mover in every great technology in space. And 10 years ago, Josh Strebel had an idea about changing the way to do hosting for WordPress. So he started Pagely. And basically, he's become a rock star. But we all start somewhere, right? So we've taken you through the journey of thinking about how to start the business and work with clients and how to try and stay sane while doing it. Now let's take a look at a retrospective of where somebody can start and how they can become an overnight success. Yeah? All right. Thank you. Josh Strebel, everybody. If you guys were looking around on Twitter, I promised everybody a Lamborghini if you attended. Up here in front, pink Lamborghini Countach for everybody. Who didn't have that poster on your wall as a kid? All right. So overnight success, right? You hear that expression a lot. Like, wow, where did this guy come from? I went to high school with him, and then all of a sudden, boom, he's on the cover of Fortune or something. That's not what this story is about. This story is about the 15 years of working hard to then get called bad. Let's start with a little story. I graduated college on a Friday. On Saturday, I married my wife Sally. The next Saturday. Three months later, working as an intern in a web design business, we took the last of our money from our wedding and incorporated our company. So for the last almost 15 years, I've only been an entrepreneur. I've never had a real job. So every mistake I felt, every success I felt, every win I felt, every kick in the face I felt, and it's been quite an interesting journey. But as Karim alluded to, 10 years ago we came up with this idea to do WordPress hosting. Managed WordPress hosting was invented in our dining room in Scottsdale, Arizona about 10 years ago. And now it's a multi-billion dollar channel. I wish I had some of those billions. I don't quite have them all, but we can keep working towards that. So this is going to be a little talk. It's going to be kind of two phases. One, motivation, which is actually quite key to actually getting up every day is somebody asked our last speaker what it takes to get up every day to go and do that grind. And then the second half of the talk we're going to discuss two things you should never do as an entrepreneur and then two things you should always do as an entrepreneur. So why do we do what it is we do? This is my friend Seth. He's a U.S. college swimming champion. This is close to going to the Olympics. His daughter and my son go to school together and he is like my motivational muse. We sit around and have beers and he pulls out all these great quotes about when he was on the swim team and the coaches would tell him how to visualize and see himself on the victory stand on the podium later when he was getting his medal. So this isn't fake until you make it. You all heard that expression? You don't fake anything. But what you can do is kind of reach out into the future a little bit and borrow some of that future success and bring it into the present and use it to kind of motivate you and give you some energy to power through. So there's two types of motivation, I think, in this world and if you're interested where I'm getting some of this information 10, 12 years ago I had a business coach who was an NLP practitioner, neural linguistics programming. It's kind of brain hacking and this is some of the things that he helped me work through that I think were pretty insightful and helpful to my journey. So external motivation. Motivation that comes from external sources. It pushes you to do something. What's an external source of motivation? Getting fired. The threat of getting fired is an external source of motivation. Keeping your water lights on or your water running or your lights on at your house. If you don't do your work, negative things happen. That's an external source of motivation. That is a very useful source of motivation. If it's your only source of motivation, though, you might be in trouble because what happens is your success curve in life if you're relying strictly on pain avoidance looks like this. This is the classic procrastinator, by the way. You have a problem. There's a fire under your ass. You need to do something or you lose your job or your car gets repossessed or you don't get the new widget that you've been looking for. So you work and you buckle down and you hustle and you grind and you stay up late and you get your ass out of the fire and you're happy. But now you're lazy. Now you're done. Man, I forgot my bills paid for the month. And what happens? You get lazy, you get back in another situation where your ass is on fire. Well, you see how this pattern repeats. So over time, your trend line of success is flat. Nothing good is happening because you're only motivated enough or you're only relying on motivation that it's like pain avoidance. So if there was a better type of motivation, what could that be? Yes, things that motivate you internally or pull you forward. This is how I use it. There's things I want in life. Sometimes it might be material things. Sometimes they may be experiences that I want to have. My wife and I, we were able to take the kids to Japan in January. Just totally on a lark. Hey, let's go to Japan, okay? That was an experience I wanted to have in my life. But it was out there, it was out in the future and I had to go get it. So the thought of that experience out there, the thing I was working towards, I'd go grab it and then I'd pull myself up towards it. And the way this works is rather than relying only on force under your butt to push you, you're now grabbing something out here and pulling as well. So you essentially will yourself to achieve. And this is what that sort of success graph may look like. You know, you're starting early, you just want to buy a house. Then you work towards maybe starting a family. So while you're buying the house, you're thinking forward, okay, now I want to start a family. What do I need to do in life and business to get to my next goal? And then you work backwards into that situation to find that success. Then maybe you got the house, you got the family, maybe you want a nice car. I love cars. I want that car right there. And then maybe you work towards owning your own brewery. That sounds funny, but a friend of ours, are you guys familiar with Pippin's plugins? Pippin just bought himself a brewery and started brewing his own beer. That was a life goal Pippin had and he's now achieved it. So even though there's fires in your life and you're still going to have those events where if you don't do something, a negative consequence is going to happen. You're still going to have those, but those are no longer the motivating factor in getting something done. You're still anchoring yourself to future success and future events and pulling yourself towards them. The key point here is you notice the valleys are not... I'm sorry, you know what I'm trying to say here. The peaks are consistently higher and the valleys are consistently less or shallower as you go on. So your trend is obviously up and to the right. You guys can see this in your life and you've known for a while. I'll be 40 this year. If I went back to the town I grew up in, there's people my age I went to high school with doing the exact same thing they were doing 20 years ago. In the same place, doing the same things, having the same battles and the same struggles. So they haven't quite figured out how to move beyond that and maybe start something different or something new. So the best people or the most successful people I know use a combination of push and pull motivation, internal, external. Because sometimes you need a fire under your butt to get something done. But to be really successful over the long term, you need to pull yourself forward into your next situation. Or as you could say, you're reaching to the future, grab it and pull, then intentionally light the fire under your ass. Make sure you do it in that order. So you've got to visualize. I want to be here in a year. I want my company to do this in 18 months. I want X material object. I want Y material thing. Grab it, anchor it, burn it into your brain, and then kick the seat out from again. Now you're working, right? You've got no choice but to succeed now. Don't ever do these things that I'm about to tell you. Don't ever emphasize the wrong stuff. We run a little conference you may have heard of called Pressnomics, the business of WordPress. It's a little chilly in there, isn't it? This is Chris Wallace at Pressnomics talking about being a workaholic. This is an example of emphasizing the wrong things in life. And I'll apply it strictly to, in this case, working too much and neglecting your family or neglecting your health or neglecting your kids because it takes so much out of you to start a company. And in the 15 years that we've been doing this, Sally and I have had our battles and we've had our struggles, and a lot of it was because I was unavailable. My head was in a computer writing the next line of code or doing the next thing that I thought was the most important thing in the world. I was emphasizing the success of my mind or the push of getting pages going and letting things that are ultimately way more important in life fall to the wayside a little bit. So we were having some difficulties in our marriage because I was sleeping three hours a week. Imagine what that did to my health. I was getting ulcers. My back was just killing me because I was just bent over working. In hindsight, maybe I had to do that to get pagely over the hump to where it needed to be, but I don't think I did, to be honest with you. I think I just told myself I emphasized the wrong thing that I have to do this. I have to be this warrior that can just work incessantly. I don't think so anymore. So be sure you emphasize the right things in what you want to accomplish. In your job, in your life, there's nothing more important around you and those people. Never do this either. We have 35 employees now. And it doesn't sound like a lot for a hosting company. But we're a hosting company that is entirely revenue funded. Every dollar we spend is the dollar we've earned. We don't have investment money behind us. And we've been fortunate enough for the last several years. That's millions of dollars we get to play with and apply towards new tech and hiring. But this is the number one killer I think of a company's culture. If you're firing slow. That's a great quote right there. It's a great quote right there. And I think you guys kind of get what I'm getting at. We've had some employees over the years. Some of them wonderful people. But man, we just let them go on way too long. We had a guy who was added a lot to our bottom line in terms of sales. He was moving a lot of business for us to the tune of several million dollars. But I hated his guts. I did not like this guy. I did not trust this guy. I wanted to punch him in the face every day. But I somehow convinced myself that I had to have him, that he was integral to the company. Well, as you may find, we often delude ourselves. So, it went on way too long. I should have cut him loose. But no, we kept him. Morale started to suck. The rest of the team was coming to me and was like, Josh, why do we have this guy? What are you doing? Get rid of him. Anyways, I fired too slow. I fired him slowly. And that had a bit of a lasting impact on our company where it may have set us back eight, ten months. And most definitely it created an incongruent message out to our community as well as our customer base. Because if you get to know Sally and I, which I hope you do, we have a very unique perspective on the way we run a company and the culture and how we talk about things and how we value relationships. But then when you got the douchey, smarmyish guy on the planet out here selling the product, there was an incongruency there. More recently, we hired a great friend of ours. And to this day, I love the man to death. He's a good friend of mine. But he was with us about nine months and that was about eight months and 28 days too long. And also, it will literally suck not only does it cost money, but it costs time, energy, culture. All these things are invested into an employee. And if it's not working out, you need to cut bait as soon as possible. But on the bright side, you should always do these next two things. Always. Okay? You can never stand still in business. You need to iterate all the time. And I'm not talking about feature sets. I'm not talking about adding a new slider to your plugin. I'm not talking about yet another options page for your theme. I'm talking about iterating your value proposition, iterating the value that you're delivering to the customer and iterating the way you're presenting it. In the short history of 10 years of managed WordPress hosting, you ready? In 2009, the only thing going was like a $4 shared hosting account at GoDaddy. And WordPress is famous five-minute install. Easy for a guy like us or gals like you that knew what a database was and how to FTP files. Then we came along and we said we're going to make this install a whole lot easier. We're going to manage the technical aspects of WordPress. Give us a credit card, choose a theme, hit Go, WordPress comes out the other side. We charged $15 for that, $15 a month. We got hate mail. The WordPress community at the time was pretty small. We got hate mail from the WordPress community. Like, what are you doing charging for WordPress? Anybody can install it. Greedy sons of guns or whatever. Well, lo and behold, 18 months later, a competitor came in the market. They took a big round of funding. They started educating people on what managed WordPress hosting was, how it's valuable, how it's useful. Three months after that, we got another competitor. Eight months after that, another competitor. And now there's what? 15 managed WordPress hosts that you can probably name off the top of your head. Every time a new competitor came into the space or every time a new technology, like the WordPress 2.9 to 3.0 switch was actually a big deal in our industry. We had to figure out where does Pagely fit. We had to reiterate our value prop and where we fit in this ecosystem. So as I mentioned, we're revenue funded. We don't have a huge war chest that we can just burn through to make mistakes with. So we have to be very careful and deliberate on where we go. So as the floor was kind of $20 a month, we decided to move it to like $80 a month. Well, then the competitors moved it to $80 a month. But then they added a few features. Then we added a few features. Okay, well now it's crowded here. I can't compete with MediaTemples advertising budget. All right, so where does Pagely fit now? Well, okay, let's focus a little bit more on the developer and we'll charge a little bit more for our package and we'll provide more access. So we iterated again away from mass consumer hosting over into this little niche. Fast forward a couple more years. All right, we're getting creamed again. We're getting squeezed out by the big money players. Where do we need to go now? So we iterated our value proposition once again and to what it is today, which is essentially we help big brands scale WordPress. We don't help realtors scale WordPress. We don't help auto body shops launch a website. We help places like Disney and Comcast and Janice Financial and huge universities run entire departments of WordPress. And we do it all on Amazon and the cloud. So we like the big nasty, gnarly, complex WordPress sites. The ones that don't fit in a hosting box somewhere else. And so over ten years we've iterated starting the market and charging $15 to it to now we're this interesting edge case over here where people bring their sites that don't work anywhere else to us and we make them work and we're a very low volume high margin, high price product. Had we not made those zigs and zags every couple years we would have been done. We would have been squished a lot sooner. And it would have been ugly. You know? So as I said iterate your value proposition your marketing story where you fit in the ecosystem you need to seek the blue ocean. That's essentially what I was talking about that ten year journey is seeking the blue ocean. Today WordPress hosting is a red ocean. It's highly competitive. There's blood in the water. WPNs and Pantheon are attacking each other. They're broadside pirate ships. They're pulling their swords out. Where would I if I was starting a hosting company want to compete? Not in a red ocean. I would go look for open blue water. I would find a new unique novel spin on the industry. Maybe it's plugins, maybe it's themes, maybe it's consulting what's going to differentiate you from your competitors. Go compete in that empty blue water and stay out of the sharks and the circling sharks in the red ocean. This is, I think the most important thing I learned in 15 years of business is that you need to invest in your team always. We owe every bit of our success to the people who work for us because I thought I could do it alone and obviously I couldn't so I had to get some help and without that help we wouldn't have anything. And when I say invest in your team I'm not necessarily talking about financially. I'm talking about investing them as people. Investing in them as humans. And yes, part of that is financial. We pay significantly above market for people who work for us. We also have a 401k plan and health benefits and a limited vacation. All these, a benefit package which would rival a Fortune 500 at a little company. That's part of the equation. But when I mean invest, I mean invest in their success. Not just in their labor. What we've managed to do at Pagely is design a corporate culture which we call leader-leader. Instead of leader follower it's leader-leader. And there's a great book called Turn the Ship Around that you can go find on Amazon which is essentially our field guy for how we run our company. A recent employee, a recent hire of ours, a good friend of mine, he says, whether you know it or not, this is how you run the company, hand me this book. But essentially the leader-leader philosophy is that authority should reside at the same level of responsibility. How is this work in practice? In a typical corporate situation you have a CEO or a C-suite or a manager, somebody up here making all the decisions and he has all the power. But then the workers down here are held responsible for the outcome of those decisions. So they're the ones getting in trouble getting fired or losing their bonus if the other guy's idea doesn't work out. It sounds a little backwards in my opinion. So what we've done at Pagely is we've taken the authority to make decisions to act to use the gray matter between your brains to address any situation that comes up in the company. So the authority resides here with the layer of responsibility and accountability. So even our newest hire, first day on the job, we hand the guy SSH keys to about 1,800 Amazon EC2 instances. We say, don't break it. There's some guide rails. He's not going to really break anything, but it's an interesting psychological test to watch the guy go, whoa. No one's ever trusted me to do anything before. I've had to read a script and I've had to always check with management. Okay bud, that's not how we work here. I wouldn't have hired you if I didn't trust you to make decisions because I can't make them all. Sally can't make them all. Our other staff can't make them all. So if you can somehow figure out as you grow your companies to empower and entrust everybody on your team to make decisions against the corporate goals, you know. You want to be here in 18 months financially. You want to do this in 24 months. And this is our values. This is what we stand for. We don't cheat. We don't steal. We don't murder. Whatever those values are in your company, hopefully there's something like that. As long as you can trust your employees to make a good judgment call in the situation, everything works out a whole lot better. So the the end result of this is as I said, we have about 35 employees which somehow managed to do the work of about 100. I don't know how it happens. But the productivity at our company is amazing. It's because everybody's engaged mentally. Everybody's appreciated. Everybody fiercely protects the culture at our company. I don't, you know, maybe there's discipline situations at a company you work at. That doesn't ever come up at ours because they're keeping each other accountable at all times. If somebody's taking a vacation as a group, they decide, okay, how are we going to cover that shift? What are we going to do in this situation? If there's a crisis or something that comes up, there's some kind of written crisis protocol. But as a group, everybody from the bottom up figures out what we're going to do about this. How are we going to address it? How are we going to improve process so it doesn't happen again? And at the end of the day, my job as a CEO is to just quietly encourage this behavior and then nod my head, guess when they're doing good. Because what happens is rather than me saying, hey, we need to do this or hey, I need you to go here and they come to me and they say, hey, we think this is what we want to do. Here's the reasoning behind it. Here's what I expected outcome is. I say good. So all the thinking is happening at the entire strata of the company instead of just at the top. So and always, always, always live by the golden rule. If you want anybody to work for you and respect you, you need to treat them like you would want to be treated. And if you're a dick about things, they're not going to want to work with you. And your company's not going to work out well. Here is Seth again. Seth is a great guy. I have a very fast car that I really enjoy driving. And I took him out with him. I took him with me out to the drag race and we were drag racing my car to see how fast we could get this thing going. And every after every run, he'd say, OK, that was pretty good, Josh. What are you going to do different? Are you going to time that like different? And he was like coaching me and trying to help me get a tenth of a second faster. I was like, dude, I didn't know I was getting a coach here today. I thought I was just having a buddy. He's like, no, man, you've got to visualize success all the time. You know, 10.92 seconds. No, we can do 10.91. We're going to do this. This is what he says about his career, is that he felt like a sham when he was swimming. He felt like he was kind of faking it. But then he put in the time and he worked hard and over time, over his swim career, like I said, he was a U.S. and this close to making the Olympics. And he always laughs that, you know, in hindsight, people are always telling him he couldn't do it and then he proved him wrong and how great that felt. So what does success mean for you? I don't know. I'm going to be on the cap cover of WordPress Fortune Magazine someday. And it's going to be awesome. And if you guys the other headlines, Brad Williams with Cheesecake Glory, not Cheesecake, he's diversifying. But here's some final thoughts. 15 years ago, right after Sally and I got married, we created a dream board. You guys know what that term is? Essentially a tack board. And we put things on this dream board that we wanted in our life. And as two recent college graduates, you imagine things, it was like a temporary mattress. That seemed out of reach for us at the time and we had to work towards it and find it. We wanted a home with a view of the city lights. Sally wanted lasix surgery for her eyes because we wore contacts. These things seemed so big out in the future. Year by year, month by month, day by day, we worked towards them. And we got our temporary mattress. We got our lasix. We got a beautiful home in the hills overlooking the city. So then you should create another dream board. Maybe this one's bigger. Maybe now it's a cruise around the world. Maybe it's a first class travel. Maybe it's a beautiful family. But essentially it points throughout your life. You need to stop. Take count of where you are and then visualize where you want to be. Put it on a tack board in your room and call it a dream board and then work towards it. We've been very fortunate. We've hit every goal that we've ever set for ourselves. And the sad thing with that though is then your goals just keep getting bigger and you feel like maybe getting a rat race a little bit. So take stock of where you are at, what's important to you and just keep working towards it. I'll be 40 this year and my goal is to retire at 42. So I got a little bit ways to go but hopefully we'll get that. So as I said we started Managed WordPress hosting 10 years ago. We're now a global team. We grew 900% over 3 years in the most competitive time of the market and it's been one hell of a ride and then we got a long ways to go still. But every day I get up and I'm just thankful for the ability to work in a industry in a community that allowed a kid like me to get Lamborghinis and talk in front of you guys and share hopefully some wisdom that will improve your guys' chances of success. So good luck out there and thank you very much. Thank you, Josh. Thank you. I got a couple of follow-up questions for him but don't anybody leave because I have a couple of new surprise announcements. Give me a second. Some cool stuff. Ryan, you had some questions for Josh before I get to that. Yeah, you discussed with us some of your firing processes and people you didn't particularly care for. As an entrepreneur and freelancers kind of new to the business it might be helpful for us to have you describe what that firing process was like for you. There's a couple things to be aware of. There's some idea of HR process because a bad firing can be a lawsuit that can sink your company. So make sure you follow it and do it by the book. But most of it from a people person perspective it's really shitty. It sucks. But you have to put the health of the greater good over the temporary inconvenience of having to ruin this person's day. Because we look at it as there are 30, 40, 50 other people's lives, mortgages school tuition payments, all these things are relying on the success of this company and I'm sorry if you sir today are no longer going to be part of this journey. Thank you. You also discussed iteration iterate, iterate, iterate and chasing that blue water. Could you describe your process? Ian I got a I got a fine art degree and I would go to my art class in college, my undergrad and they would say, okay we're going to do a logo design this week or something or we're going to work on Intaglio print. But the first thing you're going to do is sit down and do 100 thumbnails. There you go, right? That's an iterative process. That's the start of it. Before you even get started on whatever your work is you just take out a pencil and start drawing and do 100 examples, 100 ideas, 100 brainstorms of whatever you're going to try to solve and then understand that that is just the beginning. Because you're going to be doing that as you refine it. Out of that 100 you might come up with an idea for a new marketing message or a new design or a new brand or something and then you should do 100 variations of that. Then you should do 100 variations of those and you slowly narrow it down and then you test it and put it out there, see what people think. AB testing is really helpful when it comes to marketing and branding communications on the web. You can serve a variation of a message to the same audience back and forth. So essentially the method is always be iterating I guess. Cool. Thank you. Thank you very much.