 So now here on stage you see the Dutch guy explaining you how to make money. So true Dutch fashion. It is exactly what we're Known about I see some people coming in. I'm very happy that you're joining me here today I know you've could have been doing other things like Printing a t-shirt with go daddy or expanding your collection of socks for example. I know I have So yeah, my name is Roger. I am indeed the CCO of WPCS and today We're going to be talking about MRR for WordPress agency. So I'm going to step outside of the light for just a second and by show of hands Who are the agency owners in the room, please? All right, that's great. Thanks. Thanks for being so honest. You can stay For the rest of the people I think it's pretty clear You can go it's it's fine now. I'm trying to be you know create a moment here with my peers Obviously not all of you are agency owners but I think Most of us are trying to predict our revenue I was just having a meeting with a very interesting other agents owner from Portugal and to be quite honest with you The reason I wanted to do it is because I wanted to be a digital nomad I just wanted to know how much money I would have in the next six months So that I could go to Thailand or Bali and enjoy my life building websites And so I want to start this slide by addressing the elephant in the room I'm obviously not talking about Vika's by the way. He is not an elephant He is why he's like an elephant and he eat predominantly leaves But I'm obviously talking about Shopify. So Shopify. I notice is something that we are not allowed to mention You know and obviously I'm not here to promote Shopify or sell you WordPress But I do think that there's a lot to learn from Shopify and we can only do better than Shopify if we can first learn what they do really well and So as far as I'm concerned in the way I look at it Shopify is what I see as the ultimate website as a service They give you a website and they pretty much sell you the whole solution and they provide value upfront Which I think is very valuable and something that is sometimes missing in WordPress it takes a it takes a while even if you are an Experienced work as developer to put something in the site and then sew it to your customer and then they are like wow this is awesome and I think the work is community can actually do better by adopting a product-based mindset So like I said you deliver value upfront you wow them and then you go from there and the way that I've Personally experienced how you can do that is by creating a website as a service So website as a service is quite simple I know sometimes it's a little bit confusing as per the definition, but it really is you Give people the total solution in a often standardized, but very niche specific way in a way that they can onboard themselves and then You skill that up and that is something that I've experienced personally as being the best recurring revenue model for agencies but that Didn't go easy or as planned really and so to give you a bit of context as to where I come from this is what Amsterdam looks like during the pandemic and We had been an agency for quite some time We transitioned from a marketing agency to also include selling websites and at the same time. We were building a startup for hotels And also our agency was serving mostly gyms and restaurants Yeah, and on The 23rd 23rd of March, we were supposed to launch our app Which is my birthday and on the March 17 The whole country went into lockdown So within the course of a week our entire business the app that we were supposed to launch and the agency that we were successfully running collapsed and You can imagine that to be a shock We weren't even panicked because we were just basically way too shocked So we had to let go staff we had to leave behind The app somebody asked us today if we did something else with it We did we transitioned the app to help people Get things nearby and it really didn't work But at least we tried What we noticed looking back is that we were mostly serving or building projects, right? And I love projects I love the fact that you can really focus on a project for a customer look at it from all angles and then just absorb all the work right and then build the hours, but now we had a much smaller team and morale was pretty low and we had to find a way to pivot out of a crisis and Trying to find a way to do so Some guy trying to give good advice said it sounds like you're giving away free nachos to sell more drinks and it was a bit of a weird statement, but he said it in the context of You're often selling websites for a very low price so that you can then upsell services on the back end And that is exactly what we were doing We were very often just giving away websites for free and then upselling marketing services content or whatnot on the back end So now we were back at square one We needed to find a new way to scale up our agency Obviously, I still wanted to go to Bali or Thailand even though it was completely forbidden at the time and we started looking at MRR generating revenue models and I'm sure you recognize most of them So let's talk about the first one right development retainer model Great model if you are a big agency already if you have the staff on hand that can immediately service the customer And then build those hours going months forward build some pipeline You know, that's great. If you can also target larger agencies. I love that I actually see somebody in the room right here is doing that Jimmy Yeah, that's a great. It's a great model didn't really work for us with a small team But it was it was it was pretty good when we were doing it at the time Maintenance is something that I cut my teeth in and also cut myself with It's really fun if you're selling people plug-in updates and then something goes horribly wrong I think we've all seen this year a Fair amount of vulnerabilities with plugins and then you have to spend significant time fixing those So the small retainer model that you that you charge on a monthly basis We doesn't cover all the extra effort that you then suddenly have to put in let alone the The weekend spent because you auto set your plug-in updates on Friday Which is always a lot of fun I love it when hosting companies say you can automate your updates with us and just set it on Friday And then you can spend your entire Saturday afternoon not with your friends Reporting one of the less scalable models that we thought was a really great idea at the time Sebron who's my co-founder in the back here. He loves creating dashboards and he built a really really great dashboard Metrics are his thing not so much for our customers though They often couldn't really understand what the metrics meant and so you spend most of your time Explaining a standardized dashboard, you know, that's perfectly and beautifully draws in all their metrics into Reporting and then you have to explain what conversions mean or what top of funnel and bottom of funnel really is time spent on site how that actually leads to more conversions and You actually only can Really skilled that model if you have a sophisticated customer. It seems to me and then my my favorite For sure the least Scalable model at the time. Obviously. We now are all using AI to generate content even though we are hesitant to admit it But yeah, I'm a content maker by trade. I wanted to standardize the content I thought it was a good idea to just charge a monthly fee and then generate blogs and photos and videos and Then you have scope creep because they want another video or they want more photos or they want different angles Or they want a blog updated every month It's it all works right it all kind of works And you can charge a few thousand here and a few hundred there But at the end of the day, it's really hard to predict whether or not they're going to stay because you spend most of your time on the phone Discussing or arguing with angry customers about what the reporting means or whether or not the Hours in your development container really are amounting up to what you promised So we needed to shift we needed to shift that project-based focused to a product-based model And on the photo right here. You see another one of my co-founders in the crowds by nonce and I Challenging you to pronounce that name if you're not Dutch and he calls me up about two weeks into the pandemic and He says to me We're probably going to be selling more websites, right? And I say yeah I'm pretty much pretty sure we we have to because you know, we're all stuck at home And he says yeah, I think I'm going to build a platform that will allow me to spin up sites Automatically and then let customers or users rather onboard themselves And then we can charge a monthly recurring fee and then as they qualified themselves because they need more stuff We can upsell more marketing services and I was like that sounds really cool But it's never been built before and he says now I have no idea. I'm just going to build it And so the moment I slam down the phone I pick up the phone again and I call a friend of mine who has another agency and I say Hey, look, I my other co-founders just pitched me an idea for this platform I really no idea what it means But we can standardize sites and it sounds like that's what you're doing as well in a very unscalable way we want to partake and Before we knew it. We were supposed to launch a tool for ourselves and attorney to cloud platform pretty fast so Over the past few years, I've spoken to hundreds of agencies first because we didn't have self activating You couldn't activate your subscription yourself. So you had to literally go through me and After because we were interested in the agencies actually building a website as a service and what I know from experience and from the conversations that I've had here is that of The few agency owners that are actually in this crowd Pretty much all of them have considered the website as a service model at some point if only we could make it work so again, the last model is The complete opposite of what most agencies are doing these days And I want to take an analogy that I borrowed from a friend Vito from Atorim who is solving a similar problem in a different way they're standardizing the collaboration and communication with the customer and We are standardizing the building of the product and scalability itself But he likened agencies with Michelin star restaurants, right? I'm guilty of that. I tried to turn every project into a multi-course meal and A multi-course meal is great because it you know is more more expensive But it's also very unscalable. I don't know if Michelin star restaurants are your thing But they are pretty much always empty and that's not because they are unpopular It's because they have very few tables and that's really what it is, right? You have to spend so much time on the actual product itself And there's so much scope creep and your customers get so much more demanding because they're paying for it that it's a very unscalable way of doing it and most restaurant owners burn out I Personally to regret never being able to eat at Noma. I would love to On the opposite of that you have the product-based agency and I honestly just spoke to an agency owner who has a similar idea of doing it But he's approaching every project as a product Which means that he's looking at it from how can we create as much value to the user as soon as possible? And I'd like to slightly adapt that What if we could just build one product one time and then distribute that to as many users as possible and Then make it as low-touch as possible So then you can truly offer more salty nachos and sell more drinks on the back end, right? so We started looking at other successful business models Outside of WordPress and so we've returned again to Shopify again. We didn't want to do Shopify We wanted to be in WordPress But we did want to take the scalability of Shopify and then turn ourselves or rather our users into Shopify But using WordPress instead Pretty soon we found out that three guys building a cloud platform is a little understaffed So we were fortunate enough to get Dexter on board. He's wearing black in this photo It was also a very old friend of ours. I've known these guys for 20 years so I can truly say I have a company with my best friends and We started building it Now there may be some of you in the audience who are thinking hold on I know how this works I can also do this with a WordPress multi site, right? Because I can just build a product and then spin up new subsites and I can even automate that with some tools and that Yeah, sure that works for a while fair fair enough But at some point it is going to have some sort of scalability conflict, right? You if you're familiar with WordPress multi site, you know that all the subsites are in the same WordPress installation and Within the WordPress installation. They share the same database and the same file system. They're also on the same server So as your file system becomes more complicated and you're basically sharing all the user data and the same Database and your scalability is very difficult because you have one customer becomes really popular And it basically breaks the scalability of all the other subsites on the same server That results in security concerns and technical issues, which is not what we wanted and to be be clear I'm not a hater. I love multi-site Maybe not for the WAS model then So instead we did something else. We started looking at Kubernetes Which is the dominant and scalable cloud infrastructure of SaaS companies and with it We were able to build a containerized platform and this containerized platform introduced something called multi-tenancy And with that we were able to combine multi-tenancy with WordPress So now you've got the scalable infrastructure of SaaS companies, but you're using it to scale WordPress instead So how does that work? So we were able to identify three scaling challenges that WordPress has if you're using it for a website as a service First of all Operational scalability we want to be able to do exactly what SaaS companies are doing which means we want to unify the development Like I said earlier, we were building a single product and we're distributing that product And then we want to continuously update and upgrade that product as we go And for that we need individual WordPress installations that are still unified in development So the way we do that is we combine the code so the plugins the language files and the theme files But we keep the databases separate that means that after we spin up a site whatever the customer is doing in the site remains there But we have control over the code base. That's predictable That's something that we can organize and therefore we have security your scalability All right, cool. So we've tackled how we build and maintain our product So now we want to sell it. We want to sell it fast. How do we do it? We automate it So we build a storefront and the storefront connects to an API with the API you can sell your sites automatically Yeah, it's just a WooCommerce store. You're selling products These products, however, are websites. These websites are loaded with content with plugins with themes That you as an agency owner have configured because you know your audience You know exactly the type of service that you are giving that has been working for you in the past All you need now is a scalable way to build your agency So cool. We have an API. We can sell websites automatically. Maybe we use it also to update our CRM Everything works finally We do not Want to mess around with servers? Maybe you by not not me Also, I hardly know what they are And I'm pretty sure there are plenty of agents Jonas here Maybe except for Jimmy who also really have no idea how they work or how they skill So we're doing a containerized platform that results in serverless scaling so that I don't have to worry about that anymore cool so if you transition From an agency a project-based agency to a product-based agency and you're Dutch like me So you're focused on recurring revenue Then you suddenly find yourself in the startup space and you can actually go the VC route and I was talking to a lot of other agency owners and product companies in the beginning of this week and One of the things that we can all agree on is that we're pressed historically has not prioritized business models after all We're still selling yearly licenses and then a Company like nitro pack comes along and they start charging monthly and everybody gets upset But we are actually providing the value we are actually improving the product Why not be compensated for that and then we can thrive together? So then the question becomes are we wazzing or are we sourcing? Sorry. All right cool. So in our case We wanted to be Neutral in the beginning. We didn't want to Join with a particular investor that made it hard for us to partner up with other companies after so we went for Axel Springer, which is a very big media company in Germany and another company that you might have heard of and and after a while Emilia capital, which is by the founders of Yoast and we were able to And by the way, I'm not plugging Yoast even though they have a booth here at Emilia And you can actually pitch or start up there and they'll say yes on the spot So if you have a startup idea or you want to build a product within WordPress and you're looking for funding Please go over there and you might find yourself with a new investor But you can implement SAS methodology for WordPress and then start building products And you can SAS if I your wordpress portfolio or you can build an actual SAS With wordpress and that enables predictable recurring revenue and then we can all go to Thailand So one of the case studies that I'm personally very proud of and I also have a booth here at WordCamp Athens or Europe rather is Oliver So what Oliver has done is they filled a POS that is very much integrated with WooCommerce and based on that They've built what they call as commerce development kit So they've built a total solution with a curated library store of plugins that you can use and upsell to your customers and the WooCommerce store seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce or with rather with the POS and they've built out so many different products that are completely Sassified so they manage the infrastructure. They manage the products and all you have to do is build the perfect Site for your customers whether that is in retail or if you're doing it for restaurants or whatever whatever you need they got it for you and It just happens to be hosted on our platform. So What is the big takeaway here why do I think that WordPress agencies should adopt a product-based mindset? If we can offer a standardized and accessible product It doesn't mean that we should do away with projects like I said in the beginning. I love projects. I love looking at it from all angles But if you can sell Sites that are standardized and they're completely ready their solutions You can give that to your customers straight away and you don't have to onboard them They'll onboard themselves and then you can create sustainable MRR because they've got something that they can start using It's fair priced much lower than when you're selling a big project It's almost in the range of maintenance, but a little bit more and then as they Become more successful You'll upsell the services that they need based on the data that you're getting from how they're using the product From the interactions that you get with them, but you start with the value first Which is one of the big problems that weren't purpose currently has if you look at the churn that hosting companies have I mean we're looking at what 30 40 percent in the first month That's because it just takes too long before there's value in your workers installation And as I said earlier that counts for people still starting out, but also the experienced developer So then We find ourselves back in the WordPress community and this is where all of you get involved And by the way, it was just said that I was going to launch a live product And I don't know how many of you are here to see me crash and burn But I'm not allowed to so After this presentation, I'm going to go over to the inside of EP booth And if you want to see me crash and burn there Feel free to do so So okay, so what do I mean with a product-based mindset for the workers community? So what's so cool about WordPress? Obviously, and I'm not trying to sell you this because you are already here is that we have this Ecosystem of companies that are doing what they do best and then agency owners such as the few people in this room can actually Combine that can implement that for their customer that they have been serving for so long that they know how to build value for And then what you can you don't have to do all of it But you can take what you need and then turn it into a product And so it lends itself as a perfect vehicle for a thriving ecosystem If you can deliver the value upfront if you can stack it with whatever they need to solve the problem right now And they have less churn more activation and you have so much less work because you're just developing one product, right? And we all focus on what we do most or love most and do best and so therefore finally We the WordPress community can do better in their Shopify by focusing on our customer Which is a niche right on this one single audience that we have been serving for so long and that we love so much Instead of building this very big thing or doing this one single big project But doing this one big Product and serving a lot of people at the same time so in Light of that collaboration. I want to finish this Presentation with a bit of an overview of a way that you could do that So you I've mentioned because before our wise elephant in the room or maybe not in this room, hopefully and What they do is they launch short-lived websites, right? Which are which lend itself really well if you want to launch a demo Right now they're launching integration with our platform that allows you to turn Incitwp into a storefront so you build a site with incitwp. You save it as a template You create a storefront on their platform and you spin it up on a platform such as WPCS and then you can manage and maintain all your sites as one again, I'm not allowed to show you that live, but I think I've made my point and I hope that Recurring revenue could be something that is within our grasp if we take the right approach Which I hope you'll agree with me is product-based That's it. Thank you everyone and thank you Rooja now we have 15 minutes they're about to Rooja to answer your questions If you have any questions, can I see your hands, please? one Okay. Hi Really interesting project mandatory question. What about GDPR? Yeah, what about GDPR? Like for all different websites you have like different builds like usually or maybe it's soft for a three like your method but usually like with each project there's different requirements to put everything together data privacy imprint and all of that and Like what's your solution for that to cater to the different needs? Yeah. Yeah, thanks. What's your name by the way? Ollie or Oliver Right, cool. Oliver, Ollie All right So let me answer this question by talking about our platform as little as possible, right which is kind of the Beef that I have with multi sites because what you're saying is what if we accidentally or maybe a little bit on purpose shared user data, right? Which is definitely not what we want So let's just say you're building websites or you're building a product and you can automatically provision those So you you have the foundations of a website as a service Well, one of the things that we definitely need to get in order is that those sites need to be separate So well, fortunately, we have built what I wasn't gonna mention our platform But we've built a way to actually spin up individual sites. So they skill independently, but they're also shared We're actually rather they're not shared. They're individual. They're isolated But yeah, like you say you want to do that on in a data center in the region where you're serving it instead of in some shady Country where you don't know what they're doing with your are you from Germany by the way? Yeah Very great country for GDPR. You should all host your sites in Germany You're not allowed to do anything. Yeah, I know it's great And then and then second of all you need to have individual sites so that they don't interfere with each other But yeah, no, it's a great question. It's very important Thank you. Yeah, thanks Thank you very much. Okay person, please Yeah, thank you for sharing is really interesting So what you're saying is like as as they first come on they unbought themselves like Okay, so we're automating and we're standardizing that framework So what I'm saying in this particular model is you're using it as your most accessible product offering So you have a product that you can deliver to your customers straight away They onboard themselves and you're standardizing that so you're unifying the development and the maintenance and at some point That portfolio might have a few outliers So it could be that they are so popular that they're basically just they require so much effort from your site Or they just demand so many different resources and at some point they Develop themselves into a project So the idea is not to just forgo any form of project But to use it as a platform from which your customers turn into projects and then become more dedicated more of a spoke So yeah to basically summarize your question Yes, you would offer them a product that is easily onboarded to you know easy enough to get started with Sometimes by themselves sometimes with a little bit of hand-holding and then at some points They might turn into your you know more your bigger customer as it were. Yeah, that's great. Thanks. What's your name? By the way, Josh Thanks Thank you any more questions, please Okay, just the mic you can shout Yes To be able to Make this, you know sustainable as a business and where does Shopify fall down compared to the model that you're trying to incorporate And do you see it as you know lots of agency owners trying to do Asking me to compare workers with Shopify and now, you know, I'm I'm supposed to sell you WordPress at WordCamp So let me maybe phrase it a little differently or put it in a different angle I think what we can learn from Shopify is that it's an all-encompassing solution, right? So one of the few things that one of them one of the things that I really admire or rather Respect about Shopify is you get one bill so I was talking to Yoast from Yoast yesterday and They have a Shopify app and It shows it doesn't show up on your bill. You just get one bill from Shopify So you'll pay it for sure because otherwise your site goes down and it's a it's an e-commerce site So you're not going to not pay it So that's great, you know, it's it's a solution. It's it's all encompassing I'm not saying that there should well, I'm not also not saying but I'm not saying Just to make that a little bit more complicated That we should have an app store with some form of control or oversight from some form of entity That kind of just goes against the open-source nature and the distributed, you know way that we do things But what I am saying is that we can work together more by adopting that mindset and then this work can becomes more about Hey, how can we partner up and build a product for the end user and not so much about abiding by some form of rules? Thanks All right, please someone at the back, please Other either my name is Henning Really good presentation. Thank you so much One question that I didn't quite catch You have a product for onboarding a lot lots of new clients on a daily basis, I'm assuming How do you handle when those become projects? Are they still on the same platform or do you kind of move them to a new environment? We can do more customization and kind of adapt to their needs, right? Cool. Thanks Yeah, that's one of my favorite questions Because it's it's the it's the question about vendor lock-in, right? Yeah Not only but Kind of the flexibility that you need to add to the clients that have particular needs. Yeah So I don't think there's a company that can be the end-all be-all of anything And so the way that we've approached it is I hope in true WordPress manner By touching WordPress course less as possible. Actually, we don't touch WordPress core at all So in our case if you take out a site, it's just a site You can use it anywhere else. And so the way that we see it is we offer a way to productize WordPress But at some point in time if your customer is successful They'll leave our platform at least it always should remain your customer if you're doing a good job Okay, so your target audience is agencies primarily our kind of resellers Well, if our audience was primarily agencies then I some of these people in the room wouldn't have much use for me But fortunately now a lot of plug-in companies are using our platform to turn their business into a sauce So for example, if you have a plug-ins like an LMS or a WooCommerce store or you make Marketplaces, this is perfect because you can just satisfy it straight away. If that's you by the way Let's talk after I'm happy to show that. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks Right any more questions, please good because I'm Yeah, we still have some time so one quick question for you What are the typical like most common? Use cases you see for WordPress as a service. Yeah, I mean, it's maybe a bit obvious because I've mentioned Shopify so much But it's mostly WooCommerce optimized websites. So say for example, you want to build a Shopify alternative We have many customers who have started to lose Customers to Shopify and so what they do instead is they build a Shopify alternative But using WooCommerce instead or something else like North Commerce, for example I mean, it's it's important to have some form of balance in the ecosystem and they optimize it completely So that's just you know ready to go And that's something that they they offer. That's the number one use case I see the second one obviously portfolio sites because it's usually the most accessible thing that people need It's the first thing you think about But the thing I like them a lot lately is LMS so learning management tools Especially during the pandemic everybody suddenly became a coach and a mentor and a consultant So obviously we have a lot of wisdom to impart on our fellow neighbor So, yeah, no if you wanted to build a SaaS that you know makes it easy to sell that set wisdom That's something that you that we often see as well Great, so you would say that there are other niche that's Steak that are not explored yet that people can still you know build solutions for for sure We we so when we built the platform We knew for sure that there were going to be use cases that we hadn't even thought of before So for example a ready to go podcasting servers. I'd never expected that Many people were suddenly in the linking bio industry Or we have people building sites for what they call again dark kitchens You can say we have sites for municipalities that do something with ticketing. It's I don't know. I don't get into all of it But yeah, no, it's it's very wide. It's very very broad Anything you want to do or you can productize if you have a particular customer or a cousin that you know really well And you think I can build a site for him. I might as well build a site for all my cousins Then you can definitely productize that as well. Oh great. Thank you very much Thank you for We are grateful for having you here with us and there are a plot for him, please I want to hear a round of applause. Thank you very much