WordPress Plugin or SaaS—Choosing the Right Model for Ecommerce Products

Robbie: Hello, and welcome to Do the Woo. I’m Robbie Adair, one of your co-host. I’ve also got Robert Jacobi with me here today, and we’ve got a very interesting topic that we want to discuss with our guest. And that is, well, how do you make the decision between taking your product as a plugin for WordPress or WooCommerce, or versus becoming a SaaS product? And so we’re going to have a… We’re going to hear both sides of that story. Robert, before we get introducing our guest, how are you doing today? And what do you think about SaaS versus plugin too? I think it’s interesting coming from a hosting side as well.

Robert: I think it almost speaks for itself. I love to kick some SaaS. That’s what needs to be done. It’s a great business model. It affords immense amount of upgradeability, updatability, all that good stuff without having to worry about all that core stuff on a day to day basis.

Robbie: You were waiting, weren’t you, all week to use that line, weren’t you? You’re like probably were thinking it through yesterday like I’m going to get that line out there.

No, the line actually comes from a session I did at WordPress Costa Rica, and I had a live signer/translator. And when I said kick some SaaS, she gave me a look like, did you just swear? And I’m like, look up at the sign, and she looks up, oh, yep, kick some SaaS. No, that’s been a phrase of mine for a while. We’re talking like four or five years now.

Robbie: Oh, awesome. Well, that was very convenient then. So let’s introduce our guests here today. So first of all, Vito. We’ve got veto from Atarim. And so did I say that right? I hope I said it correctly. So, Vito, tell us a little bit about yourself and about Atarim.

Vito: I’ll start with the meaning of the word. The Atarim, as I say it, is actually, it actually means websites in Hebrew, which is my native language, and I always like to think that as long as people say the name, it doesn’t matter how. But I started building in WordPress more than 13 years ago now. Started as a freelancer, grew to an agency here in London in the UK. We built more than 800 websites for clients. And as we were struggling with collaborating with clients, getting them to give us the content, the quality feedback for the designs and quality support requests, we tried to think of a better way. And that’s how we created what used to be a plugin, then evolved into a SaaS that is now called Atarim, which helps web agencies, freelancers, and basically every digital team to collaborate visually with their clients, consolidate all of the communications in one place and makes it a breeze to work together.

Robbie: Awesome. Thanks Vito. And Vito and I were booth neighbors at WordCamp Europe. And so I’ve seen the product firsthand and it is amazing. And I think that the SaaS route was the correct way for you to go, which we’ll talk about more as we go along. But next let’s introduce our other guest. We have Danni and Josh, and you guys are also were at WordCamp Europe with Acsell. And so you, I’m going to go ahead and let you guys introduce yourselves. We’ll start with Danni and then let Josh come in and then tell us about yourselves as well as the company.

Danni: So I’ll just introduce myself because Josh actually didn’t make it to WordCamp, so I had to go in his place and hold the flag for us. But I’m Danni. I’m the digital marketing lead. And I’ve been part of the core team that have brought Acsell from concept to reality. Over to you now, Josh. You can do your bit. It’s your chance.

Josh: Thanks Danni. So my name’s Josh Barling. I’m the CEO of and founder of Acsell. Acsell is actually a brand within a bigger company. So I’m the CEO of Sellerdeck as well, and Sellerdeck’s got quite a long history. Acsell is relatively new. We’ve got the startup mindset. But Sellerdeck has been around for over two decades now. We’ve had a pretty crazy history. We actually float on the stock market at $200 million at one point. We were called Actinic. So if you’ve been in the eCommerce game for a while, then you may recognize that name and that product. We rebranded as Sellerdeck. And over the years, we’ve serviced our customers with eCommerce solutions platform and additional services. And collectively they’ve transacted over 11 billion through our platform. And we created Acsell as a brand within our company to service the WooCommerce market.

We saw an angle, which we felt we could bring our experience in static site generation; e-commerce static site generation, which we all know as fantastic performance improvements. And to take that and package it up in plugins and provide a more enterprise solution at a plugin price for customers in the WooCommerce market. So what Acsell actually does is it’s a… the first product we’ve got is a product filters plugin, and it’s in-browser caching. So it’s extremely fast, inherently fast, and we all know that slow sites lose customers fast. So that’s the problem we wanted to solve.

Robbie: Yes. Yes they do, especially in the eCommerce world. We don’t want to have a slow site because we will lose our customers. And, Josh, I really appreciate you giving us the background too about your… the Sellerdeck company, because what I think is really interesting in this discussion is that you actually have even a third level of delivery, which is actually software; downloadable software. So, downloadable software, versus SaaS, versus a plugin. And so I think that that’s really interesting that you’ve got the full spectrum experience there. So, let’s talk about when you were looking at your products.

Started as an in-house agency solution

Now, Vito, we’ll start with you here. You actually, I think, acquired a plugin and then took that plugin and decided that SaaS was a better route. Is that correct?

Vito: No. We actually developed it in-house for us as an agency, just as a way of working with our own clients initially. And because we were hyper WordPress focused, the path was let’s just create a plugin, because we did that for our clients in all kinds of different ways before moving to a product. And then when it worked like magic for us internally, I started thinking maybe this could help some other people in the industry. So, before we brought it out, we ran a bunch of surveys in Facebook groups and we did some market research to tap into other people’s experience and how they’re working with their clients and what works, what doesn’t work.

And that fed into what was then released as version 1.0, which was not that dissimilar from what we were using internally in the company. But now, three years in, it’s like a completely different beast that it has more than 100 different features that look into every click of an agency and a freelancer’s workflow and try to systemize that through automation and through systemization of the workflow itself. So it really did evolve a lot, but it definitely started as something that we built for ourself, very, very scrappy version of the current product.

Market research and customer outreach

Robbie: Awesome. So you did do some market research there by going out and asking people in your Facebook group and other places?

Vito: Yeah. Well, we had no Facebook group, so we relied on a few other people, but I was already active in the space more as an agency owner. So it didn’t seem like I was just coming in and spamming. It was more like asking friends for advice, and what do you think about this? And so we created a little form and had people fill out what do they use and how do they feel about this? And really we realized that more than 83%, I think, it was back then of the industry, were using emails for collaboration, but 95% of them were complaining about it. So we said, all right, there’s an opportunity here, because that was our experience as well.

Robbie: Cool. And so Josh and Danni, did you guys also, when you were getting ready to venture into this new, your startup here, did you do some research with your current customers? Did you reach out to WordPress and WooCommerce users?

Josh: We did quite a bit of a mixture really. We’ve had a lot of experience in using SaaS products and we always try to build our contracts with our customers in a way where you can forecast much more easily than on projects and plugin. So we knew that that’s a model we wanted to consider, but we also felt that in the space that we wanted to move into, there were existing SaaS solutions and we wanted to differentiate ourselves. And one of the models for that was not to tax customers on their success. So a lot of the providers for search extensions and solutions under a SaaS model are based on volume as you would expect with a third party server. And so we felt that actually going in with a plugin gave us an angle which maybe would get people more interested.

Now we are at the start of our journey with this brand. So I think we are always looking at how would a SaaS model fit within that? And we’re open to that, but we’re also looking at other ways to manage it, for example, possibly as a SaaS model, but the infrastructure. So approaching hosting companies and static site generators and looking at being part of the infrastructure that could be offered as well.

The WordPress plugin directory

Robert: Given that both Vito or Atarim and Acsell have plugins at some point, there’s some good marketing you can make out of the fact if you’re in the WordPress plugin directory.

Josh: Yeah. We are not actually in there, surprisingly. So we did bring in a marketing company who, they’ve been involved in WordPress for a long time and they basically said, don’t go on wordpress.org, which I was quite surprised at. But the reason why is that they said there’s just so many new plugins that are added that you just get lost in the noise. And they’ve done some research on the number of downloads for new plugins and they’re just such a smaller scale than they were five, 10 years ago. So that was the recommendation is that actually you won’t get much traction from that. So we sell from our website, we integrate with Freemius actually, and we just push through different channels that way. So that may change, but that’s our current position.

Danni: We’re agile, remember. We are an agile company. So maybe next week you’ll see us on the WordPress market.

Vito: And for us it’s been a similar journey. I knew as a person that is using WordPress that if you see a plugin that only has just a few installs and it still sits on version one point something, you’re probably not going to be too keen on installing this on your website. But we did know that we have a solid solution that could help people, and I think that this is something that a lot of developers just start from the repo and expect it to happen. If you build it, they’ll come, type of mindset. But we took an opposite approach and we started premium only. We launched our free plan just two months ago, almost three years into the product, and we kept going as a premium only product direct from the website, working with our users, improving this and basically creating our own community, like you said, Robbie, on Facebook and just getting some feedback directly from them instead of relying on the repo.

I think that now that there is a following to our solution, I don’t only think this is actually in the process. Now we’re launching this inside the repo as a way of taking this to the next level, because now it’s just going to be more of an easier user experience that they can just go to their own website and just one click to download the plugin that integrates into the SaaS. But if you were to do it the opposite, I think it would’ve been quite of a different journey for us compared to how it went.

From WordPress centric to non-centric

Robert: Well, you’re not telling the whole story though, because you had a product beforehand, which you had a different name and brand around it that was much more WordPress specific if I could say.

Vito: Very WordPress centric. Yeah. WP feedback was the name back then, but still it wasn’t on the repo. It was all done through our website and just through mostly Facebook groups and 95% of it was word of mouth. Like, we’re a bootstrap company, so there’s no actual marketing budget, especially in the early days. So you have to rely on people’s will to talk about this and really on the quality of the product to drive it forward. And that’s what we did. But I still think that if we were to launch it on the repo too early, it would’ve worked against us instead of just, let’s say maybe controlling the narrative on your own website.

Josh: I agree.

Controlling the narrative

Robert: Danni, so controlling the narrative, word of mouth, limited budget, how does that work with Acsell?

Danni: You’re speaking my language at the moment. I’m hoping that maybe in the future we can get to your level and I’m taking this as advice, but we’ve done similar things by looking at groups and relying on word of mouth and any feedback that we can get back, any testimonial that we can use and abuse and almost extend the life of it. So we try and make micro content of the smallest of things from a small budget. It’s probably more work for us, but then also there’s a lot of learning, isn’t there? And from the learning we’ll adapt and we’ll be agile and push ourselves forward, but that’s why we are here today. Isn’t it, really, to get the word out?

The benefits of a WordCamp

Robbie: Yes. And both companies were also at WordCamp Europe, which I think is interesting. You’re not in the repo, but yet you were there with a booth at WordCamp Europe. And I don’t know if you guys are planning on going to WordCamp Asia or WordCamp US, interested to know, and did you feel that being at WordCamp Europe helped you spread your word better than you’ve been able to in say Facebook groups or things like that?

Danni: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s the face to face connection, isn’t it? And then relationship building as well. And then when you are in front of people and you’ve got the right narrative, you can engage with them, and we’ve got a great narrative, as Josh said. We’ve been around since ’96, before Google was around, that’s quite a strong message. And I think that got people hooked on. So yeah, that’s why I’m pushing Josh to go to US, San Diego.

Josh: Yeah.

Robbie: And so Vito, did you also find that it was very beneficial for you to be at WordCamp Europe?

Vito: Well, the booth was, and you saw because you were right next to me, there was a constant flow of people that were coming in, checking out the product. It was really awesome to meet a lot of our existing users and shake hands and meet in person. But really the way that I look at WordCamps for us, it’s mostly about creating relationships with potential partners rather than the singular user. I think that there’s better places that you can get a faster return because if you’re sitting at the booth and you’re just doing demos, mostly you do them one at a time. So there is a really finite amount of time that you can do this. But finding the right partners in these events, working with them after, and then creating something a lot more substantial for both of our user group sakes, just introducing both products to our audiences, I think that that was the biggest impact. And this is why I love going to these events. And I try to go to as many as possible. I won’t be at US, because I’m going to have a new baby at the same time.

Josh: Congrats.

Vito: Thank you. But this morning they released tickets for WordCamp Asia and I woke up and I was super excited and I went in and it was all sold out. So I’m now waiting for the next batch to open up. And we’re also going to hopefully sponsor, we applied to sponsor that as well. And we were meant to sponsor in Asia back in 2020 before COVID canceled the event. So I’m looking forward to maybe coming.

Flexibility with WP specific plugin and a SaaS with a wider user base

Robbie: All right. So Vito, you did mention that you have a WordPress plugin, but your SaaS model actually will work with other types of websites. They don’t have to be WordPress, but you have a WordPress plugin. So that does give you more features I suppose, for WordPress users?

Vito: Yeah. So the way that we look at this, Atarim what it does, it allows you to do this visual collaboration, right? So you can click any part of the page and leave a comment where the problem is directly on the website that reduces all of the back and forth and all of the mess of trying to communicate something not visually. And so the way that we look at this, we have the two solutions. One is URL based where you can drop in any URL to any website in the world, and then you can get started in six seconds and start collaborating straight away. And then we have the WordPress plugin, and as we know, installing a WordPress plugin doesn’t end with uploading the plugin, you got to activate, and you got to set up the license and you got to set up all of the settings and all of those things, and you go through a wizard.

So there’s more actions to be done by the user compared to the other solution. So we’re looking at the two as the URL based is the quick solution and the WordPress is the deep solution, where we’re actually integrated into the website deeply. So a lot of people start from the quick one, which is one click, and then they see that it’s awesome and then they move on to getting more out of our product by installing the plugin and integrating it into the SaaS dashboard.

Robbie: Awesome. And so your product also then for WordPress people allows them to make comments on WooCommerce areas as well?

Vito: Yeah. And this was a really cool use case that we noticed coming up because initially I was looking at this as a solution for freelancers and agencies, just looking at my own, tried to scratch my own itch. Right? But as people started, or agencies started installing the plugins on eCommerce site or WooCommerce sites, then we would start seeing users using it like the PPC guys, talking to the stock manager that is talking to the shop manager that is sending a message to the content guy that is talking to the web designer. And it’s all happening directly inside the website where the work really happens. So that was a really exciting use case that we’re starting to expand on over the upcoming year.

Thanks to our Pod Friends OSTraining and Iconic

Performance, SaaS vs. plugin

Robbie: And so now Josh, let’s talk about your solution that you have your plugin that works inside of WooCommerce. Now I did get to go over to your booth. I know you weren’t there, but I got to go to your booth at WordCamp Europe and see Hugh, your developer was there showing the speed and the, he had I don’t know how many thousands, 10,000 products in his demo, I think, but it was pulling up in microseconds, search results. So do you think that that is something that you could only accomplish with a plugin? Or do you think that is also something that I know you said maybe either SaaS or perhaps something that’s embedded in the infrastructure of a hosted solution, but do you think that the plugin gave you guys an advantage because it’s directly running in the WordPress?

Josh: Exactly that. The technology or the methodology of the technology is completely different to what most websites on the internet, especially in WooCommerce we’re yet to find someone who has adopted the same method. I challenge everyone to find that. So we do an in browser caching, which is essentially at its core. Ultimately what it does is download the product data as HTML, and it’s there in the browser. So every time you click, the data’s already there, there is no latency, there’s no lag at all. And this is a methodology we have in our own in-house platform. So we’ve essentially taken a use case, which we have across five, 600 websites, and brought that into the WooCommerce community.

And it would benefit from being on a plugin, it meant that we didn’t have to try and figure out the infrastructure and all the costs associated with that. It meant it was quicker to market as well. So what you saw was our currently available plugin, which is, I can say this it’s the fastest WooCommerce product filters plugin on the market today, but we are working on things in the background. We’ll make it even faster. So we’re going to beat our own records. So it’s incredible. And…

Danni: We’re competitive.

Josh: Yeah. So its speed is so important to us. And we want to dominate the product discovery space and just make finding products fast and ultimately take lag away from customers experiencing that on websites.

Danni: Yeah. We want to bring product discovery to the SME market and that’s why we’ve chosen plugin, because great technology at a plugin price. That’s where our top level methodology came from, or enterprise solutions for a plugin price.

Josh: So an example of that is one of the bigger providers out there is Algolia which I’m not sure if you guys have heard, they’re quite substantial. They do a lot more than what we do. But if you look specifically at product filtering, we think we’re quite comparable and their solution is fast, but a lot of the time their solution requires server caching. So actually you can find a lot of scenarios where it really just isn’t that fast. Whereas ours is always fast regardless of server caching, and that’s something we wanted to bring to the market. And we know that if we provided a SaaS model, the cost can be quite substantial. So we had one of our customers chatting with you, our CTO, they’re both engineers. So they were getting quite technical quite quickly.

But he had been quoted from Algolia for £40,000 per year for the solution. Now they do offer search and all other things. So there’s a lot of value they offer, but it just wasn’t appropriate for the WooCommerce business that he was working for. They just didn’t have the turnover to justify that level of investment, but speed was so important to them because they have a very large database and they wanted to have a catalog that they could show product listing, lots of products with a lot of data and they needed that to be quick, but they didn’t want to spend £4,000 a month on that. So in comes our plugin for $99, too good value if you ask me and it saves the day exactly.

The cost to build out plugins and a SaaS

Robert: I’m so glad that you brought up cost and value in infrastructure. So for the customer, there’s potentially different types of costs, whether you’re on a SaaS or on a plugin. Many plugins are almost like SaaSs because there’s a recurring expectation. A lot of them are billed monthly or annually anyway, even though they’re a plugin, but so let’s dive into that business perspective of when you decide to build out a SaaS or plugin, what is the cost to make those things happen? If you’re going to go the SaaS route, are you spending 10 times as much? Are you spending, how much more on a monthly basis to maintain that infrastructure versus a plugin where it’s like, okay, we built the code out, run with it, go for it. I’m going to pick on Vito first because you’ve really done both sides of the equation.

Vito: So for us, there’s a huge difference and you hit the nail right on the head there, because when we started as a plugin, you have no concern over the infrastructure really. You’re providing a piece of code that is then embedded into the different websites. The user has the responsibility, or at least we think that the user has the responsibility over their infrastructure until something happens. And then you want to make sure that you can help them as well, so you have to jump in as well. So there’s a few sides to it. First of all, a huge challenge that every plugin out there is facing, especially font end related plugins is compatibility, and not only compatibility with WordPress at its core, but compatibility with 69,000 other plugins that are potentially being used on the website. Not all at the same time, right, but on different environments. But then also…

Robert: It looks like some people are really trying to hit that 69th in plugins.

Vito: I know, and this is another thing that we saw. We have one website that came to support and they literally had 1,003 plugins installed, and we had to figure out what’s going on. So it became a meme internally in our slack channel, but the thing is that not only the plugins are the challenge, but then you also have a bunch of different themes that were created by different developers, even within the same third party product. You have different developers that sometimes don’t adhere to the same coding standards, but then I’m not even talking about different hosting infrastructures, that sometimes you have people that are using shared hosting to host like 40, 50, 100 websites on a $5 a month type of a host, and then it all affects.

So essentially there is an infinite amount of variations that you need to account for when you’re releasing a WordPress plugin. And it took us a couple of years initially to get to a place where it’s stabilized in a way that it works throughout, but even now and then you still see all kinds of different things, for example, even there’s another layer, which is caching that you also need to account for. So I’m sure with Josh’s solution as well, if you have caching down on the browser and then there’s also server side caching and there’s also inside caching and the whole thing starts to become a bit of a mess, right? So there’s a lot of challenges on that front, but when you go into your own environment, first of all, I’m not sure why that is, but the cost of a WordPress developer is substantially cheaper than the cost of a react or laravel or a sysadmin type of developer, that really makes a big difference as you start the scale and as you start to build a team around you for SaaS versus plugin.

And that is something that I don’t know why that is, but it is just part of the industry. WordPress developers really charge pretty much [inaudible 00:29:12] on a monthly basis compared to other types of technologies. And then also you have infrastructure concerns like maintaining security on a SOC two level, for example, that just that alone is a few tens of thousands of dollars a year that you need to pay out. And then, of course you have your own AWS servers or whatever servers, but you have your own infrastructure that you need to make sure that is running smoothly and efficiently, and that adds to the cost as well. So definitely running a SaaS is more expensive than running a plugin by far on all aspects, really.

Robert: I love that you mentioned SOC two, because that is probably going over the heads of half of the core WordPress developers. Because it’s just one of those things that you have to add into your business model of how you maintain that kind of standards.

Vito: Which is a US security standards that people, enterprise level clients expect you to have in order for them to count on your software, really.

Robert: So it sounds like it’s a lot better to go the Acsell route with just getting that plugin out the door, right, Josh? Right, Danni?

Josh: Well, I think to begin with, when you look at your budget and you start looking at the costs and the return, yes, definitely. And I think the point there is getting to market quickly, keeping your costs low to begin with and building up a brand, and revenue is where you want to start, really. I think you don’t have to build up an infrastructure and then fail before you’ve even started because your costs are mounting up each month and your sales aren’t matching that. So that’s ultimately one of the key decisions that we made is we wanted to build this brand and justify this investment, get feedback in the market before we looked at higher, ongoing costs for the SaaS model.

Robert: So it prevents you from worrying about SOC-two and just for the audience that’s SOC-two, as well as PCI compliance for making sure that all transaction logs and histories are safe and good.

Vito: And privacy laws and yeah.

Josh: Yeah, exactly. We passed a lot of that on.

Danni: That’s why we’re not doing SaaS.

Josh: Yeah. So we passed that on, but we are more than happy to take it all board at the right time. It’s just about finding the right moment within the business’ journey. But we do have costs with, I think Vito mentioned that compatibility, that’s probably our biggest frustration, is trying to be compatible with all the different scenarios and then finding some prospects during the trial, and they’ve got a very unique environment, which we’ll never, ever come across ever again. And they’re asking for support and that can always be challenging as well. And our development team are engineers. They have an approach and they will not compromise. So their idea of compatible is very thorough. When I look at it, it’s very costly, but it means it builds good infrastructure from the beginning.

Vito: A speed to market is a big part of it really, like Josh was saying, if you were to start with building a SaaS compared to a WordPress plugin, that’s a completely different ball game to get started. So I think that for a lot of people, even if you’re planning on building a big business out of this and serving, and making a big impact in the space, I think that starting with the plugin is a good way to test the water before you start investing more and more into the back end of it. But I can also tell you that the transition between one to the other is pretty painful. All the way from migrating subscriptions because you start with something like easy digital downloads or like Josh, using Freemius or WooCommerce for selling the solution. Then you move on to a direct Stripe API integration and then what happens? And then you have your licensing feature that you’re reliant on and you need to migrate everyone in a way that makes sense. So there’s a lot of challenges of making that transition, which means a lot more costs as well to make that step.

Robbie: I’m glad you brought that up Vito. We actually, Robert and I just had on some guests where we were talking about license managers inside of your e-commerce world and how you’re doing that. And one of our discussions with them too, was about subscriptions and moving subscriptions and how sometimes, like someone is moving from Freemius on over to something else, but there’s not even a migration path for them. So they’re going to have to let old users expire out of Freemius before they can move them, and their new ones will be in the new model. So I think, I’m glad you brought that up because it’s a huge discussion, which by the way, there’s a Do the Woo podcast about that. Hopefully it’ll be out there when this one’s out there, where we talk to some people about that same headache and pain.

The metric that starts the thinking of switching from a plugin to a SaaS

Robert: Yeah, these tie in perfectly because so much of the economics are very close to each other. I want to start with Josh and Danni in this one first, at what point do you… what’s the metric that says, you know what, we need to really start thinking about turning this into a SaaS model? And then I’ll let Vito finish off with, this is the point we decided to switch between the two.

Josh: That’s a good question and I’m looking forward to having to answer that internally with the team. In honesty, I don’t know. I think we need to increase our volume. I think we need to have a much clearer roadmap and understand what that would look like and how that would fit within a transition to SaaS. We’ve just gone through a migration of billing system and yeah, moving across contracts and it’s painful and it’s scary as well when you look at potential renewals not happening. So yeah, I think I’m not 100% sure. I think in a way we probably would want to look at SaaS early on so we could avoid a lot of the pain, and it’s about the reaction in the market.

So it depends on how quickly the brand spreads in the market. We are trying to speak with a lot of people with big audiences as well, and as I say, we’re speaking with a few hosting providers in static site generators. And I think those conversations and where they lead could end up helping us or allowing us to possibly change our pricing model at the same time as doing a few activities. So in summary, I don’t know, I think it will answer itself as things pop up.

Robert: All I heard was we can’t tell the entire Do the Woo audience exactly what your secret plans are.

Josh: Exactly.

Robbie: So Vito, what was the turning point for you?

Vito: It was really based on the user’s needs. That was the only decision that drove this, because as it started as a plugin, basically what it meant is that you’d install these communication systems or the collaboration systems in each one of the websites that you’re running for your clients. But then it means that you need to go into each one of the client’s websites to actually see the different requests, or rely on email, which is what we were trying to kill. And so having a centralized location that consolidates all of those different websites, all of those different assets that you’re managing, became very apparent very early on that this needs to be a step that we need to take. And so we looked into, basically there is two paths of doing this in the WordPress world.

And I was looking at it more based on tools that we were using. So there is the MainWP versus ManageWP concept, right? So just for people that don’t know, MainWP and ManageWP pretty much do the same thing. They are to update plugins and check security across multiple websites. And then only that one of them is self-hosted so that you have a plugin that you install yourself that creates these centralized location while the other one is a SaaS solution where you log in and you have all of your websites already listed there. After battling with compatibility and knowing that our users are going to be relying on API requests, and I’m sorry if I’m getting a little too technical, of basically relying on pushing information back and forth between the main platform and all of their client websites, we decided that creating an environment where we control the experience, we can optimize it to the best of the user’s needs compared to letting them deal with all of the mess, because driving APIs and you don’t know where they’re going to install this master plugin and all of those things.

So we decided to go down the SaaS route. Then it created a different challenge because people still saw us as a plugin, even though we still encountered all of the costs and responsibility that come along with being a SaaS. And that is what drove the rebrand, because first we were called WP feedback, which by all means signals to the general user that this is a WordPress feedback plugin, right? But we were no longer a plugin pretty much a year before we did the rebrand and everywhere we went to, it was still referred to as the plugin, the plugin, it’s a great plugin. This is what the plugin does, instead of people understanding that it made this transition. So we took the opportunity with the rebrand to announce that it’s no longer a plugin. It’s now a SaaS platform that helps consolidate everything in one place. Even though it already happened pretty much a year before.

Robbie: Oh yeah. I could see that, Vito. I think the rebring was an excellent idea for that, so that people did get the big change. It’s a massive change to go from plugin to SaaS model, even though you still had a plugin that works with your SaaS model, you are a SaaS model overall. By the way, in what you were talking there, I think you just came up with a new marketing slogan for yourself too. We’re trying to kill email. I love it.

Vito: Right?

Robbie: Because we all hate email, right? So I want to thank all of the guests for coming on today and discussing this with us. I think it’s a very interesting topic, especially for people who are new to this and they’re getting into, am I going to make this a plugin? Am I going to make it a SaaS model? And I do believe from listening to both companies here that starting out with a plugin, if you’re a startup, it may be the best route to go for cost, and then it gets you a really good use case study to see, is this something that needs to grow into something that’s larger than maybe even just the WordPress space. So I think that SaaS may be the next logical step after that. So thank you all for coming on. Robert, thanks for being my co-host again today. Always take some pressure off of me for coming up with questions. I love it.

Robert: And before we let you all go from our wonderful Do the Woo, what’s the best way to reach you? I’ll go in random-ish screen order. Vito, what’s the best way to reach you and connect with Atarim?

Vito: You can go to atarim.io, A-T-A-R-I-M.io. And if you want to see it even faster, do the same with a forward slash start. That’s going to take you to just inserting any URL and get started straight away. And if you want to engage with me and just introduce yourself and I’m always open to meet new people, and that would be on Twitter, VitoPeleg.

Robert: Awesome. Danni.

Danni: Yeah. So you can visit acsell.com. That’s A-C-S-E-L-L.com. And you can visit our demo store directly from the site and actually check out how fast our product is from there. You can follow myself or Josh on LinkedIn. I’m Danielle Di-Tamaso. We’ll leave that in the notes, because my surname’s a bit of a handful and Josh Barling.

Robbie: Anyway, we will possibly see you guys back on another show at some point. I know that there’s a lot more we could discuss with all of you. So thank you again and all the listers out there, keep listening, because there’ll be another Do the Woo next week.