A Journey to Improve the WooCommerce Onboarding

Jonathan: Welcome to Do the Woo. I’m your host today, Jonathan Wold, and I’m joined by Vikas Singhal. Vikas, how are you?

Vikas: I’m doing good, Jonathan. Thanks for having me on the pod.

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s fantastic to have you. You’ve been in WordPress a bit. When did WordPress first come onto the radar for you?

Starting with WordPress

Vikas: It was actually an interesting story, especially given the context because when I started building… So I’ve been building websites and I’ve been programmer my whole life, right from college I was building software, but back about six, seven years ago I was building, my brother has a brick and mortar store and he requested, can we do an online store? And then we explore PrestaShop. So PrestaShop is famous in, I think more in European part of the world and it’s great. It’s in same format, open source, self-hosted, all that good stuff. When we built his store, there was obviously a lot of features with the code was missing, and then I discovered that there is something called an add-on, which you can build on top of set software, which I didn’t know before. And then I built a couple of add-ons for him and then I posted those add-ons in the PrestaShop forum and started getting popular. And then I put some paywalls in front and started making some money.

And eventually I figured out that PrestaShop is just a small fish in the bowl, but there are other CMSs. So CMSs was also kind of a new terminology for me at that time. And then I discovered the content manager system, they’re called, and then there is something of a sort called work test, what it is, I wonder. And then same format, Salesforce trade open source and I thought, let’s start to tinker with it. So I actually installed WooCommerce and set up a store for him, but as time will have it, we installed over 100 plugins into the work. So as all people do when they kind of see the plugin repo and then just click install, click activate, right? So eventually we realized that this is not the right way to build a store and then we figured out a way. But I was fascinated by WordPress at that point. Yeah. So that’s where I discovered WordPress.

What drew an early interest into technology and entrepreneurship

Jonathan: You came into it through the WooCommerce route. So it sounds like you had just a long-term interest in or a very early interest in technology. Where did that start for you? Was there anything about it in particular that drew you to technology, to programming?

Vikas: I was always fascinated by computers even in my school days. So when I was in grade 10 or something, I was always fascinated, how does this thing work? And then I had a great teacher back in high school who taught me FoxPro, I don’t know if FoxPro or Visual Basic 6.0. So that was amazing. VB6.0 kind of gives you the wings when you are a kid and you don’t need to know a lot of stuff, but at the same time you can do a lot of cool stuff with it. You can build. So I built an invoicing software with VB6.0 and sold it for $100 when I was 14 or 15 something. So that gave me a lot of perspective on what can be done with software.

Jonathan: Okay, that’s awesome. And you also had, it sounds like a fairly strong entrepreneurial sort of base from a young age. So bought and sold the software. You referenced with PrestaShop that you got into the add-ons pretty quickly. So you finally make your way over to WooCommerce and WordPress, you’re in that ecosystem. Where did your entrepreneurial interest there start? When did you start to see opportunity in that?

Vikas: Entrepreneurially, I was actually, back in my college days only, I was building a lot of projects as a side project. So I started learning PHP, built a lot of websites. My first website was while I was in college, I built it for engineering students in our area and it got over 100,000 registrations and mentioned in newspapers and so on and so forth. So that was my shot to fame at that point. And then I realized that this can be really, really big, but I didn’t have the vision at that point, but I kept building side projects, a video library or whatever, a book review site or whatever you can imagine. I was just building with raw PHP.

Then I discovered frameworks, then I discovered WordPress. So with WordPress, the journey is a little bit interesting because by the time when I discovered WordPress, I was also doing website flips. So I was buying website, basically growing them and then selling them. One of the things which we figured out is bootstrap templates. So if you remember CSS templates, ACM templates, so that was a big thing back in the day. Through that I realized that there is something called flipping. And in WordPress, when I discovered WordPress, I already had a prior knowledge of that you can buy websites and sell websites. So I figured, can I actually buy WordPress plugin?

So that’s what I did back in 2017. I bought a WordPress plugin that was a popular security plugin in the Envato marketplace. So that’s still a thing, but at that time it was actually really cool, and I started building on top, realizing what their challenges are, what is the plugin, and what is the plugin… I had no knowledge about the whole ecosystem at that point. I just started doing that. It was actually a big step from my perspective, for everybody whom I know at that point, “Why are you investing such a big amount?” Because it was, I think about 15K to 20K kind of investment. It was not a small investment because you’re starting out something, but I thought, this is a popular product. I had confidence in my flipping abilities at that point because I have flipped almost five to six website for profits. So I kind of knew how to look the graphs, how to look like the history of a website and then figure out whether this is going to work or not. And I was a programmer also, so combined these two knowledge together, I went with it.

WordCamps and the community

Jonathan: So you mentioned the ecosystem, what was the first WordCamp, if you recall, that you attended?

Vikas: This actually can be surprising because my first WordCamp was WordCamp Asia this year.

Jonathan: Really?

Vikas: I never attended a WordCamp. Yeah.

Jonathan: Oh wow, okay.

Vikas: I was kind of away from the WordPress ecosystem in a way of participation. I was just, I had a business, that’s it. I started with WordPress. I didn’t know anybody in WordPress. Nobody knew me personally and I didn’t know how big the open source term meant to the WordPress community. I thought this is just another open source project, but it is not that kind of project which just goes on a GitHub report and then people start little bit of contribution. It has a whole ecosystem around it. So that is something kind of new to me, new means this year new.

Jonathan: Okay. So going to WordCamp Asia, which was your first WordCamp, which is awesome. That’s kind of cool, of all the WordCamps, it’s going to be interesting to see how your perspective shifts as you experience different types of WordCamps. So that’s a new thing. What was it, if it’s as early as this year, what were some of your first clues that there’s a whole lot more to this than it just being a project? What were some of your first clues to the potential of the community?

Vikas: Yeah, definitely. So biggest thing, which I noticed while I was in Bangkok that this event was totally organized by volunteers, point number one. Point number two, it was so well organized. Point number three is how well the commercial aspect of sponsors and people who are actually volunteer are also working for some of these sponsors and some of the large companies in the world. And there are a lot of companies who actually sponsor, through sponsorship meaning in WordPress terminology, where they sponsor people and then they work on these projects. So it was interesting to see how the open source community and how the commercial aspect of it worked together to launch such a big event, such a well organized event. That was really nice. I was blown away by it.

What the next two years looked like after purchasing his first plugin

Jonathan: Cool. Okay, now, so 2017 you purchased your first plugin. We’re going to talk about what you’re doing with Insta in a bit here, but what did the next couple of years look like? Where did you… Yeah.

Vikas: Next couple of years I was, as I said, fascinated by WordPress and flipping and combined both these together, I started buying a lot of plugins. So acquiring, when I say buying, I mean acquiring. So I acquired at least I think by the end of 2020 or early 2021, I acquired about 10 to 15 such projects, both small and big. And in the meantime, I built a team of about 30 people, completely remote in India, which I never imagined which will happen. In the same time I was able to leave my full-time job, so I actually left my full-time job I think about one and a half years ago, right about when I started InstaWP.

And InstaWP was kind of a hook when I was leaving the job because it was a very long shot in the dark. We never know it is going to work or not. We’ll obviously talk about that in a bit. But my wife and I kind of argued. She was always in favor of, you should have, obviously every family member wants to be a safety net, but I was more towards like, “No, I can do it because I think this can work.” Especially when the early preview of InstaWP went online and people loved it.

So in the meantime, I built a theme, built a fairly successful plugin, some theme business and a lifestyle, it was a lifestyle business. I was well off, I had no problems with it. My main strategy of growth was to acquire projects and then start building projects. So we also did couple of SaaS, we did Shopify apps, which can be an interesting crossover in our discussion, especially given the context about the WooCommerce thing. So I can share some of my insights, what I learned from the Shopify ecosystem. Right now I’ve exited from Shopify, I have sold two apps which I bought. If the community is open, which I can also share my experiences on flipping websites, how to build, how to see from when you are exiting something, how to build that business for an exit perspective. So obviously I have all these things are small to medium business scope.

Where the idea of InstaWP came from

Jonathan: So you have this background. At this point, you’ve bought and sold quite a few. Well, so mostly acquired, you’ve been acquiring and growing the portfolio, you gained a lot of experience, you have a full-time job while you’re doing this, then you make the move to leave. So where did this concept, so first tell us briefly what InstaWP is and then I want to get into where the idea came from.

Vikas: Okay. So InstaWP is like a dev tool. It can help you get websites created, WordPress websites created really quickly in a couple of steps and you don’t need to install a software or you don’t need to buy a hosting account to create a WordPress site. That also bleeds into the fact that, how did InstaWP started. But that’s what it is about in a nutshell, but it goes a lot further. You can do sandboxes, demo sites, you can connect your hosting account, things like that. So what I like to call now is it is an all-in-one tool for WordPress. So, it can help agencies, it answers and a lot of folks to build with WordPress.

Jonathan: So you’ve been putting a bunch of work into it for a while now. Where did the idea first come from? When did it first come onto your radar?

Vikas: The idea was always there when I started with Workplace, because I always kind of a knack for quick automations tooling. I have building while I was working with Cisco. So I built a tool which can automatically do large-scale testing on thousands of routers and network devices. So when I started with WordPress, I realized that when I tell a friend, what is WordPress and then they say, “Can I go somewhere and try out what WordPress?” And then there is 10 steps download as a zip file and things like that. There is always WordPress.com but it’s not the same experience of a true WordPress experience.

So I built a platform called CMS Launcher back in the day about, I think three, four years ago, and I combined, a basically duct tape solution with cPanel. It was like a clunky WHMCS interface where you can create WordPress, it worked, but it was not as polished as what InstaWP is today. And then I had some traffic coming in from a partner who was sending free WordPress site traffic and then everybody wanted a free WordPress site. So I didn’t have the positioning right, I didn’t have the product right, and it kind of failed. So I sold it for 10K after six months or eight months. But then I always kept on thinking, how can we do it better? Can we create a WordPress launcher which actually works?

Going all in on a product

Jonathan: Okay, so you had a great job, things were going well, you’ve been buying and selling. This idea for Insta’s been developed in the background a bit, you have the CMS Launcher experience. At what point, what was it for you that said, “You know what? This is something that’s worth going all in on?” What was that moment for you where you’re like, “Yeah, this is worth leaving my job and putting my entrepreneurial efforts focusing on this Insta concept?” What was that?

Vikas: It was a good feeling to be honest because by that time I had MVP out on Post Status, on Reddit, on Twitter, I was not engaging too much on Twitter at that time, but that itself was a moment where people started to recognize that this can be a potential tool and I got a lot of feedback and early customers. So I think the moment when it switched was when I put a payment gateway and there was first subscription, I think within 24 hours. That was amazing because I thought I was always been building sites my whole life, which never worked. Then I was acquiring projects and then finally I built something which actually people are liking because of all these, it’s over a period of time you acquire this kind of nuggets of information and knowledge and that it kind of manifests itself into something and then you have that, “Man, this can work.” And then I think that was the trigger for me.

Where WooCommerce came into the picture

Jonathan: Now, let’s talk about WooCommerce for a moment in this context. So you started out with WooCommerce, that was your kind of entryway into WordPress. Of the years in the years between, were any of the products for instance, that you worked on Woo focused or where did WooCommerce show up over the years?

Vikas: Except the initial building a shop for my brother kind of engagement, I never had too much deeper into WooCommerce, like a plugin or a theme for WooCommerce. We did have, in our themes, we did have integration for WooCommerce. I didn’t know about a lot of stuff about WooCommerce, but I never had a deeper engagement.

On a flip side, when we talk about Shopify, I had a lot of experience with Shopify. I wish we had done couple of plugins for WooCommerce. I had, it’s that wonderful idea to convert our Shopify apps to WooCommerce, but then I completely moved into Insta at that point.

Jonathan: So we have the advantage in this case of you starting there, so WooCommerce, it’s fairly unique. It has an incredibly large market share relative to Shopify. In your Shopify experience, what stood out to you? What was it about, anything in particular that stood out to you from your time buying and building apps in the Shopify marketplace?

Vikas: Right. When I was doing Shopify, I had a lot of experience in terms of building a shop, not as a developer but as a user. And that itself was a good perspective to have because when I use Shopify, I always, because I have a big business in WordPress too, so I always kept on thinking, “Why can’t we do this? Why can’t we do that?” Things in that nature. For example, Shopify has a nice onboarding. It is completely combined into one single package. So why can’t we do that? And we can talk about this, some of the stuff which we are doing with Insta, which does that. But that was first.

It was so easy to, so it is meant for e-commerce, right? So basic e-commerce tooling is already there, basic shop is already there. All you need to do is import some products and you’re good to go. You just need to connect a payment gateway, maybe a shipping provider. That’s it. And I think that’s how Shopify got a lot of popularity of their ease of onboarding, ease of activation, ease of use, but their app ecosystem kind of, it works and broken at the same time I think in my opinion. The code itself is good, but the app ecosystem, the shop itself becomes very expensive at some point. So you need to give thousands, not-

Jonathan: Every little add-on has a high price to it. Yeah.

Vikas: Exactly. And that was one of our motivation to go into Shopify to be honest. But at some point I started realizing that not every merchant can afford this. You are charging $50+ for every add-on and if you have 10 add-ons, you end up paying $500 for a shop every month, which is not doable for very much. And that’s why you see a lot of deactivation in the Shopify space. So we had a track history of Shopify activation deactivation for our app and then we saw a lot of deactivation, especially after COVID, everybody wanted to get out, because it’s a lot of investment every month. If you don’t have orders then it’s a lot of investment.

Thanks to our Pod Friend GoDaddy Pro Hub

Shopify, easy but highly commercialized

Jonathan: So, now this is an interesting contrast here because on the one hand, Shopify has its ease of use. You can get it up and running quickly, but it is a highly commercialized business. It doesn’t have any open source aspect or ethos to it. And so the incentives for both the business and people building into it, like your own experience highlights, is to get the most that you can out of it. So you’re going to charge, I recall some of my Shopify experience early on of like, “Wow, this little add-on here is 30 bucks a month, 50 bucks a month.”

Whereas on the other side with WooCommerce, you have much more price accessible functionality, you can find plugins for very low cost, but the ease of use is quite different. It’s not trivial to get up and running. Like you said, there’s at least 10 steps. Like with WordPress, but even more, it’s like, okay, you got to find a host, what add-ons are you going to use? There’s this whole process that you have to go through.

Last week we had on Bo from WooCommerce and they’re working on WooExpress, which is great, it’s a great move in that direction of, how do we make it easier to get it up and running? The fact that we’re all these years into WooCommerce and that’s still a thing, it’s an interesting challenge that we have in this space. And with what you’re doing with Insta, that’s one of the things that drew me to it immediately.

So first you have that instantaneous click, now you’re in WordPress experience, which is a little bit magical. When I remember first seeing your demo early on, I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s cool.” Sometimes you just want to see something in WordPress and you don’t want to have to go into, you certainly don’t want to have to go pay for another hosting account just to get WordPress up and running. I wanted to see something, right? So for many people, a local solution can be great, but then you can’t share it. So I remember when first seeing the demo there was like, “Okay, this is interesting, where do you go with this?”

Tackling the Woo onboarding experience

Now, when you take an application like WooCommerce, there is this inherent, it’s typically not just going to be a little experiment, there tends to be an intention of like, “Okay, there’s going to be a business behind this.” And you mentioned onboarding, I know that’s been a focus of yours with Insta. I guess, why does that matter? Why do you care about the onboarding experience into something like WooCommerce?

Vikas: Yeah. I think you mentioned the right word, which is WooExpress. So I have some visibility around it. So they’re building something where people can easily onboard, but still I think we are still a little bit away from it. With InstaWP, what we are trying to do with onboarding even for WooCommerce, and we are also working with the WooCommerce team in some aspects, so we are doing some demos. So what we are trying to do is having a fully built website connected to a hosting provider. And if somebody wants, let’s say for example an e-commerce site for a beauty product, an e-commerce site for a dog brand or a pet store basically, they can get that with the theme, with this plug-in stack, and with the core in one shot hosted on a hosting choice of their choice. It can be WP Engine, it can be anywhere, or it can be a recommended hosting because sometime people don’t know what a hosting provider is itself, they don’t care, they just need a shop.

So that is what we are trying to do and we are working with WooCommerce themselves, we are working with the hosting providers so that the onboarding becomes more like a Shopify-esque experience for end users and they get onboarded really quickly, really easily, all they need to worry about is next two steps rather than the full 10 steps. So last two steps is what they need to do, like importing a product. We also can give demo content and things like that. So this is all built inside the platform. It is open to anybody.

Jonathan: That’s one of the things I’ve appreciated about your approach is this, I think a mistake a lot of people make about the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem is to ignore its decentralized nature, which has trade offices, things that make it difficult, but it’s a big benefit in terms of its resilience and diversity. And that’s to say that there are a lot of different hosting choices. And especially in e-commerce, there’s a lot of value in really embracing that, right? Because the needs for a shop, especially if there’s any physical presence to it, can be quite varied from one region to the next and from one market type to the next. And what we’re seeing more of, which I’ve really appreciated, are hosting providers who are beginning to focus in on that and who are in a great position to beat proprietary platforms like Shopify at their own game for the markets that they’re serving.

And at the same time, so on the one hand that’s great, and on the other there are still a lot of challenges that would be benefited that you could address more readily with a more centralized approach. And with that and at least what I’ve seen so far, you seem to be doing a really good job or there seems to be some clear intention to take that middle ground of saying, “Hey, we want to help you get up and running and succeed. We want you to be able to spin up a WooCommerce store. We don’t care where you host it and we’ll do the work to help you get connected to wherever you want to go,” which gives you that benefit of embracing the strengths of a local provider, of a more specialized provider.

At the same time, you’re doing work that allows you to be in a position to take insights gained across the different providers and provide a more streamlined onboarding experience that isn’t… This is one of the challenges because I’ve seen hosts make some good moves in that direction of improving onboarding, but somewhat by nature, because they’re competitors, there’s a de-incentive for that to be shared with others. So you end up having much more bifurcated experiences where one host may be doing this, they’re doing some bundling here and then over here, and it’s much less efficient. Whereas, at least the position that I’m seeing that you take so far, it’s like you can innovate and make onboarding smoother and smoother yet be agnostic about where they end up and really empower users to make the best choices for them.

Vikas: You have summarized better than I could have. So thanks for that. Yeah, we are taking a position of being agnostic, and that’s on purpose because this is more about empowerment for the whole community. So we want to empower everybody and we want to be a platform, not just a hosting provider on itself, not a product developer on itself. So you build on InstaWP and we give you the vehicle because the packages are ready in the workplace ecosystem. Whenever I meet somebody, so whomever I met in WordCamp Asia or in CloudFest, I always kept repeating, “We can do it better than what Shopify did.” And I can tell you this firsthand, because I have experienced both platforms very closely and I’ve seen that we have a lot of flexibility, that actually works against us in some cases. But if we can do a prepackaged solution, at least for the onboarding, smooth onboarding experience, that will get a lot of users excited.

And if I can, so I was actually when… This is actually relevant to this context, I had a conversation with a very large hosting provider just before this call and when they saw the onboarding step-by-step onboarding and then they said, “Can we actually hook it to our hosting APIs and then make it a new customer account every time somebody creates a site?” Not just create a new site, but actual new hosting account and a site inside that account. So I said, “Yes, as long as there is an API,” and we are doing this with couple of other hosting providers already, and then this becomes a dedicated tool for that company. And then the company two, company three, company X, Y, Z, everybody can do it.

So I think the biggest thing would be how they can tailor made this experiences. So let’s say they can make a e-commerce store for a particular niche, they can do a membership site, they can do a wedding site, they can do a photography site. So you can just imagine the end number of use cases which gets unlocked. And at the same time, our agency customers are building these nice templates, which I think we can connect between the two, and a huge marketplace gets unlocked. So there are consumers, there are providers who are providing these nice templates which has the full website, full stack, full plugin, full themes, everything is completely prebuilt and that the hosting provider can pick and choose from these template if they want to or they can build their own. So there are n number of permutations in combination, sometimes it actually blows my mind while thinking about it. I think you got the point.

Building out the product into the future

Jonathan: So, you had this gut feeling when you went into it. You’re now, is it a year and a half into this process with Insta give or take?

Vikas: Yeah, about that.

Jonathan: What’s your gut telling you now about the direction?

Vikas: When I started, I thought this is going to be just a small tool and now we are talking about being a platform. I think we are going to change, I hope, I hope we are going to change the way WordPress is perceived in the world and how people actually create websites with WordPress. When setting up WordPress, messing around with WordPress, getting frustrated with WordPress is going to be a thing of the past. That is what my aim is.

Jonathan: So you had some early building experience and then mixed results, you began to buy, now you’re building something. How are you thinking of this? Is this just a quick flip for you? Build it a bit longer, sell it off? What about this or is it something more that you think of much longer term? How are you thinking about what you’re building now?

Vikas: This was actually in my thought process when I started building this. I was done with quick flips. I was done with buying and growing and selling kind of stuff. I always meant, even before my flipping days, I always wanted to build something big. Acquiring gave me an opportunity to get a headstart always. But in this case, I actually have a head start in the way that I know WordPress needs, at least from my perspective, everybody has their own perspective. So I know what WordPress needs when I build that plugin and team business and I do, when I started it I had a big vision that there has to be some impact of what we are going to do.

I think, if you remember our chat early on when I posted on Post Status and then we talked, so I thought, I remember distinctively that we had this conversation where you said, this can be really big and that also get me like, okay, that was a big confirmation coming from a person like you because at that time I didn’t have any idea of what is going to be like, it was just a disposable WordPress service and now we kind of despise that name. We want to be a dev tool or a platform for WordPress. So it is going to make a huge impact and it is going to be there, it’s not a quick flip.

Jonathan: I’ve always appreciated the energy that you’ve brought to the work. I remember when you first came in, like you said, you didn’t have much context for the community. WordCamp Asia ended up being your first WordCamp. What was it that, and you joined Post Status, you’ve been building some context, you began to get this sense of potential because, like you said, it just started out as a tool and as you got feedback from early users, your sense of its potential grew. So as you think about it today and you look into the future, I guess share a bit more about when you say platform, what’s your vision? What’s your intention for it? If what you’re doing goes really well over the next couple of years, I guess, what’s the impact potential that you’re looking forward to?

Vikas: The impact potential will be that, so I see WordPress as a fragmented ecosystem. So on one end you have the core, other end you have the plugins and things, which completely work on its own isolated environments. So the plugin companies, they do need to work along with other plugins, but they work on their own in a way, 99% of the time. Same goes with hosting companies. They work on their own, they have their own stack. Everything works together in a good amount, but not the best what it can be.

So instead of a B, it can be that thread which ties all these components together in a nice presented to you in a three-course meal. So you get the core served with hot plugins, served with the side of theme, right? And then the ambiance of a hosting environment. So that itself gives you, it draws you a picture of what we are trying to do. So we are that restaurant which hosts all of these things, activities inside and then gives you a place to start your business, not just set up all these things, but also the main…

So at the end of the day, a website, a WordPress installation gives a website owner some kind of output. So it can be business owner, it can be a blog. So that needs to be accomplished is my end vision. So if we can be that platform which connects all these components, the Lego boxes, together and then build whatever they want very easily is our long-term vision.

From bootstrapper to fundraiser

Jonathan: I like that and I like that you have the SaaS experience. You’ve played in the Shopify ecosystem. Onboarding’s an area where we have a lot of room to grow and improve. WordPress, we were originally famous for the five-minute install, which was great and accurate when blogging was the only output that you’re after. And these days people are using WordPress, and WooCommerce especially for far more than blogging and it is not a five-minute install. You can get a Shopify up in a couple of minutes, but WooCommerce generally, and it’s great, so we have initiatives like WooExpress taking us in that direction. There’s still a whole lot of room to improve and I like the position that you’re in where you can work directly with product authors, you can work directly with hosting providers to create these much faster, smoother onboarding experiences. I like that potential a lot.

So you’d had a fair amount of business success prior to this. Did you decide, and initially you bootstrapped Insta, kind of got it up and running and then ultimately you raised money for it. What was that process like? Why’d you decide to do it and what was the experience of fundraising like for Insta?

Vikas: I was a bootstrapper, I mean that was my philosophy also. I didn’t want to raise money at any point because raising money, it gives you discipline, but it gives you a lot of headache at the same time. It means you just are working for somebody else, I had that kind of immature feeling at that point. When I started building InstaWP, I realized that this is not going to be a bootstrap business. It needs that discipline, it needs that funds, it needs that visibility. And I was not looking for just any kind of VC, I was looking for someone who can give us a brand or who has some strategic thinking to give us that kind of push.

So yeah, and it was just shot in the dark. I wanted to find out if this kind of project can get funding, especially from VCs who do WordPress-related funding, not just a generic VC. We got a response from Automattic and there were a couple of other parties at that point who were interested, especially from the WordPress ecosystem. I hope we’ll get them on board at some point, but that itself was a surreal experience for us. I did not, at any point, anticipate that this is going to happen and when it did, it was just never looking back from there.

Jonathan: So Automattic comes on board as an investor in this, it sounds like that gave you more confidence in the direction that you were going.

Vikas: Exactly.

Jonathan: And so you go to WordCamp Asia, are you planning to go to WordCamp Europe?

Vikas: Yeah. So we are going to go to WordCamp Europe. We have a small group there and very excited about it.

Advice to the entrepreneur on buying and building WordPress products

Jonathan: So for others who are thinking about building, let’s take the WooCommerce space, if someone’s interested in building a product in WooCommerce, you’ve got this extensive background in buying products and growing them and now building a platform business, what are some of the guidances that you would offer to an entrepreneur starting out in this space?

Vikas: When you are building, this applies to more generic product building on WordPress, not just a WooCommerce brand. So I think there are two ways to build a product in the WordPress ecosystem. One is, you either copy a popular product, not just a proper copy copy, you take the feature set, you realize the potential of the market and then you start to copy what they’re doing overall and then you do it on your own, you do it like somebody how you can innovate the shortcomings and then you solve something in the ecosystem, which is already solved and then you carve out the market for yourself and then that itself becomes a product.

And then there is second approach to it that would become an active member of the community in Facebook groups, in forums, and then you start to find a gap. Try to find a gap. And that gap finding can be through many, many approaches. One is to find reviews for your competitors, analyze those reviews, see where they’re lacking. Even support can be a big differentiator in workplace. So if you offer proper good support and people will switch to your product. And finding the gap can be the best thing, obviously. If you can find a gap, build a product, and then engage with the community with a pre-product.

But the best thing about WordPress, a lot of people actually assume it is actually the worst thing. Because when you build a WordPress plugin, it is difficult to monetize initially. You have to build a lot of features into it and then it starts becoming monetizeable at some point. But at the same time, we had had successes where we were able to monetize very quickly for a free product because of the quality of the product, because of the support which we provided. So the WordPress ecosystem has all kind of users. So when I compare WordPress with other platforms, I actually always say that this is a mixture of iOS and Android.

Jonathan: Ah, interesting.

Vikas: So there are users in WordPress who don’t want to pay. So it’s okay, they can be your good feedback customers who like the product, can be champion of the product. But there are iOS users who do a lot of selling in, let’s say in WooCommerce, there are large merchants, there are small, medium, large merchants who can recognize the quality of the product, who can recognize what it is solving for them, and then start paying for that.

And especially with WooCommerce, right? The specific thing about WooCommerce is that when you build a WooCommerce plugin and it works and merchant actually survive the economy which we are in, it’s difficult out there. So if they do, they will end up renewing the plugin license, which in WordPress is difficult to do. It’s less than 50% of the renewal credits. But if you build a quality product and solves the problem, especially in WooCommerce, as I say, it’s very easy to get above 80% renewal rates. That itself is a big thing.

Jonathan: Yeah. If they’re succeeding, if their store’s growing, there’s no good reason for them not. And if you compare to Shopify in general, I think there’s a lot of room for WooCommerce products to go upmarket and command better returns and charge more, but you have a lot more scale that you have access to as well.

I’m curious, on the investment and fundraising side, that’s a newer territory for WordPress broadly. It’s not as much of a stretch, like in Shopify for instance, there’s a lot of business that will raise money and build and do all this stuff. It’s newer in the WooCommerce space. If you look at, and WordPress broadly, are any lessons that stand out to you that you learned from your experience? If someone’s thinking about raising funds, any guidance that you’d offer?

Vikas: There are some apps in Shopify and some companies in Shopify which had a larger impact on the overall Shopify marketplace. So I think if you have a larger impact on overall merchants, so let’s say you built a payment aggregator, right? Let’s say you built something which cuts across every merchant, let’s say a backup of all the orders or whatever products. So the app which we owned was a fee generation app and SU app. So these are also generic products. So it’s difficult to build or find these kind of companies. But once you do, I think… So, and you know that, right?

So as an investor, so whoever is an investor will look for their returns and then the impact of the product. So if your impact is such that you are not just a small tool, like a small utility tool, but you can actually make a lot of impact in the whole ecosystem for all the merchants or majority of the merchants, I think it’s getting investment in the workplace ecosystem is similar experience in a SaaS world, it is going to exist similar. So you just need to position, how you’re positioning your product I think can be very important when you go to an investor. And also, at the same time you’re targeting the whole ecosystem. So both from a commercial standpoint and also from an investment standpoint. If you can visualize your impact on the overall ecosystem, that will get the ball back is my personal feeling.

Guiding a product founder in the WooCommerce space

Jonathan: So you started out with an initial concept, you gathered feedback. What did it take for you to go from the idea to where you felt like you had the positioning strong enough with Insta to where you felt confident raising money? Because it doesn’t sound like you started that way. You started out with exploring, gathering feedback. I think, yeah, what did it take for you to get there and what guidance, this will be my last question on this, how would you guide a product founder in the WooCommerce space to get to that point where their positioning’s clear? Because I think for a lot of people that’s not trivial.

Vikas: It was not trivial for us also, right? As you rightly said. So I think the best way for you to figure, to take a step back to go, as they say, 30,000 feet of what you’re doing. So for example, let’s say you are doing social proof for WooCommerce, people buying products. I know this is not a very good product example, a lot of people hate it, I do too, but just take just an example. So if you go a step back and then you realize what you’re trying to solve for the ecosystem, you’re actually trying to increase sales by word of mouth, by referrals for these merchants.

So if that becomes your vision, and then with that vision comes a roadmap of the product and then you showed that roadmap with this little bit of first step, which it took, and that became a little bit of success that had some success, that itself becomes a recipe of investment. Then you don’t need to do much exploration. People can visualize your vision, people can see the MVP, the product, and then say, “Okay, these guys are going in the right direction. These folks are going in the right direction.” Right?

Jonathan: Okay, I like that. I like that. So you play with it, you find a gap, you have a clear vision and initially you might only have an initial piece. We’re only solving this problem today, but we have this clear trajectory where we can go, which is part of what justifies investment, right? It’s like there’s a horizon, there’s more that can be done.

Vikas: Exactly.

Jonathan: Vikas, thank you. I appreciate your insights and perspective. It’s going to be interesting to watch Insta develop over the next couple of years. If someone wants to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

Vikas: So I’m always available on Twitter and Post Status, if you are there, otherwise you can always email me at vikas@instawp.com.

Jonathan: Awesome. Thank you for joining us. See you again.

Vikas: Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan for having me. Talk soon. Bye-bye.