Bootstrapping a Successful WordPress Business Through Customer Feedback and Iteration

Mark Westguard:
You’re listening to WP behind the Builds, part of the Open Makers Channel and Open Channel’s FM production. I’m Mark Westguard and in this series we go behind the scenes of WordPress plugin businesses to explore the journey from concept to creation, as well as the ongoing work involved in maintaining and running these businesses. Today my guest is Aurelio Volle, co founder and CEO of WP Umbrella, a WordPress management tool for agencies. Welcome Aurelio, how are you?

Aurelio Volle:
I’m doing good. Thank you for the invitation. Delight to be here.

Mark Westguard:
Great. So you’re. I’ve got a quote here from one of your other podcasts which said, or maybe it was a blog building in public the company I wish I had when I was an employee. And I know that you’ve got a very long career dating back to I guess, 2006 when you were actually promoting accessibility on the Internet. Quite unique back then in 2006. And you’ve had a career in law. You’re also a lobbyist for the European Union, I believe. So can you give us a bit of background on your career and how you came to being in the WordPress space?

Aurelio Volle:
So back in 26, I mean 2014 years old, teenager playing with Internet, learning how to code. It was the beginning of what we called at that time web 2.0. And I was young, I was wild, I was making friends on the Internet, starting coding and quickly I started to hang in communities of designer and they were making super nice layout for companies or NGO and these layouts were not being used by anyone. And discussing with friends we said but we should turn this into templates that people could use for free. And that’s how everything started and that’s how I learned the Internet. I think back then WordPress was not a thing or it was very early, so I didn’t know about WordPress. So it was old style HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. And when came the moment to choose what I would do in life? My mother told me, but you already spend all your free time on the Internet and on your computer, so maybe it would be more interesting for you if you study something else. And I think it was a very good advice. And so I went to law school, I graduated in law and then I did a master in political sciences and I worked a bit for the EU institutions, but then I was a lobbyist mostly for French companies or the French government for a couple of years, a bit more than a couple of years and with the COVID 19 crisis, I left Paris, started to live in the ALP and I was okay, I’m done with the corporate life. And at that moment I started to bootstrap WP Umbrella with a friend from childhood and who he’s actually at the moment our cto. And so I’m the non technical co founder of WPE Umbrella.

Mark Westguard:
Cool. And you started development of WPE umbrella in 2020, is that right?

Aurelio Volle:
Yep. First line of code was written I think in September 2020.

Mark Westguard:
And you’re a fully bootstrapped business. Correct. So there was no venture capital or capital injection at the beginning. So you’ve built it from the ground up?

Aurelio Volle:
Yeah, which means that for two years WP Umbrella was a side project, you know, so we kept our job, we worked at night under BG Umbrella to be fully honest and transparent. We also work at base and I could remember myself writing SEO contact in meetings for my former employer with the camera off, you know, and starting to grow the content, starting to work on the product. I mean, I did side projects for two years before going full time on WP Umbrella. And so I’m officially working only for WP Umbrella since April 2022, which was the moment where WordCamp Europe happened in Porto.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, I remember it well. I probably met you in WordCamp Porto, that’s been my go to for marketing. WS form has been doing WordCamps. I’ve tried to do as many of the flagships that I can. It’s been a great way of meeting people, great way of meeting customers, great way of learning what your customers want. Right. So what was the problem that you were trying to solve with WPUmbrella?

Aurelio Volle:
When we started, we were just doing uptime monitoring in WordPress and our idea was to use the plugin repository to distribute an uptime monitoring solution. So kind of doing uptime robot again in WordPress. And we started like this and people quickly started to ask, hey, can we have reports? Hey, it would be nice if you could actually do backups and updates. And actually we’ve been using another tool named ManageWP for years and it was great, still is, but we feel it has been abandoned and it would be terrific if you guys could start to build it again. And so we did and for the past four, we released most of the feature ManagedWP had. And since a month ago we are feature equal, if I can say. And we are now working on new stuff that the WordPress industry has not seen yet. And I’m so excited about this.

Mark Westguard:
That’s awesome. And how long did it take to go from concept to launch? You said that you’re kind of the non technical side of it nowadays. But how long did it take to go from concept to launch? And did you have an in house team that built it or did you outsource that development?

Aurelio Volle:
We built everything from scratch and ship fast, fail fast, quick and dirty. That’s how we’ve built WP Umbrella. We broke so many eggs. We put into production until very recently without staging. So on Friday evening asking like hundred of user to do real time QA with us, this was so exhausting, but that part part of our DNA, like not too much concept, not too much thinking. Quick card in githubs and let’s go and we will see because you can spend like days or weeks planning the perfect plan. And that’s what we did with the release of our Safe Update feature. We work on four, I think we work on this during four months, something we thought was perfect. And the first tickets after the release was from a customer named Gabriel and maybe we’ll listen. And he was like, guys, what you did is nice, but it’s not useful and you need to do this, that and this. And we were like, oh damn right. And we did wrong. And ever since we associate users and everything we do the earliest as possible and that’s how we do things like we ship fast, we get feedback fast, we fix things fast. And it’s super important because WordPress is revolving super fast and we need to be very close to our customer support and our ecosystem because one morning hosting company can block you and you need to be super reactive and we need to be in this constant like quick iteration in everything we do.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, I’d imagine with your product. Do you have relationships with hosting companies to ensure that your product works well with their platform? Because I mean certainly I’ve had experience where requests coming from my plugin can get blocked by a hosting company. Not through my fault. It could be something else that’s, you know, maybe a server platform that is renowned for hackers to use and your IP address can get blocked. How is your relationship with hosting companies important with what you do?

Aurelio Volle:
So we do have to communicate with thousands of websites every 10 to 30 minutes. We do backups, remote backups, which is the hardest thing I think you can do in IoT. Hosting providers are our main bottleneck in everything we do. Which means that in local and on very good hosting company like Kinsta Cloudways, WP Umbrella is working flawlessly. As soon as you start going into the worst kind of share hosting company. We have challenges because they are restrictive of their bandwidth because of how it is working. And so we have had to build relationship with not every single hosting company out there, but we have a network of people in the customer support team of hosting companies that we know that we contact and with whom we fix problems super quickly. I think the last big incident was with SiteGround when they did their role. We block all AI agents and LLM things to whatever reason they gave and we got blocked without any warning or notice. And when it’s like your user contacts the super of the hosting company and the hosting company tells you, oh no, we are not blocking anyone. You know, like that’s not, you know, you have a picture, you are communicating with 50, 60,000 websites every 10 minutes. So you know when you are blocked and when you know when it’s on you or when it’s an existing company.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, yeah.

Aurelio Volle:
And because we have these good relationships with so many customer support agents in so many hosting companies, we learned that we got blocked and we kindly asked you to be unblocked. And we were unblocked. It’s funny because if you think about this in what we do, relationships is so important.

Mark Westguard:
Very important.

Aurelio Volle:
Knowing someone in every single customer support department of hosting companies would be such instrumental in the flawless functioning of my product. But it is what it is and to some extent it’s very reassuring. You know, at the end we are still talking to real people.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah. And I guess that’s where a WordCamp comes in. Right? Because there’s a lot of hosting companies at a WordCamp so we can go around and say hello to these people and become friends with them. We are not enemy. We are not enemy. How do you handle customer support and what have you learned about handling user feedback?

Aurelio Volle:
You need to talk to your users. This is like very abused to every funder, I guess. But it has to be a religion because for so many reasons, when you’re a founder, everybody is asking you something. You know, it can be technical, team, marketing team, external stakeholders. And this is noise. And the only thing you should actually listen and be obsessed with is people’s feedback. And when you have this feedback, it doesn’t mean that you need to do what people want because most of the time people don’t know what they want. They know the issue they have, but because they are so obsessed with the issue, they are short sighted about possible solutions, in my opinion. So you need to listen at what people are telling you when they say, hey, I have this pain And I need this pain to be fixed. And you have to listen to the solution, but you also have to be creative about the solution. I mean I’m talking all day with people and they often tell me, oh, your tool is great, this is missing and you should do that. And I almost all the time, say almost all the time I’m telling them, okay, but what is the problem? What’s your issue? Then I can try to bring a fresh eyes and a fresh perspective and probably a fresh Solution because with WordTrace I’m not going to make a lot of friends saying that. But I think people got so many bad habits in the way they are like doing development, cloning, migrating website from localhost to hosting company with a plugin while they should be ssh or you know, like I think because of plugins and plugins are amazing and this is why we are earning a living. So. But I think people rock some bad habits and we need to okay, this is your problems and maybe this is the solution, right?

Mark Westguard:
A better way of doing it. I find customer support unexpectedly for me because I’d never built a plugin before, didn’t realize how much time I would be focusing on customer support and how valuable it is. I listen to people all the time. I’ve learned also not to jump on everything that everybody says. You know, they sometimes someone can say, hey, it should do this. In the past I maybe would have jumped on that, made the product do what they wanted to keep them happy. Whereas like you say, there are other ways of approaching things and listening and maybe implementing a much better feature that can fix that and other things can be the way forward.

Aurelio Volle:
And probably your prize after three years of entrepreneurship would be how I like doing and reading books, customer tickets. Because if you had asked me five years ago, customer support department were trash. You know, it’s because you have this idea of the customer support department of your Internet provider, you know, where it’s outsourced, scripted and there is nothing to learn because this is not used to fix problem. This is used to manage expectations around problem, you know, but there is no we are doing to improve our service based on what you are going to tell us. And when you see customer support as an investment, as a local research and development center, it starts to be the most interesting. It’s where the most interesting discussions happen in the company. It’s not between me and my CTO or me and my marketing team. It’s between me and those thousands of people who are using my tool every day and ideas, feedback, fresh perspectives from all over the world. And this is priceless and this is so enjoyable.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah. And it’s also, I think a valuable source of marketing as well because if you’re giving, you know, good customer support to people, helping them out, helping them to use your product, it will encourage those customers to talk about that with other people. So if anybody says, hey, you know, I need a WordPress management tool, they’ll recommend you. And Word of Mouth Traffic is just the most powerful marketing tool out there as far as I’m concerned. When other people are talking about your product, both customers and other people in the WordPress space. So in, in your most recent update, there was a little quote in there I liked which was no launch hype, no paid ads, just solid progress week after week, which is very much the way I like to do business.

Mark Westguard:
What marketing channels and strategies have worked best for promoting WP umbrella for you? I know that you target agencies, right?

Aurelio Volle:
Relationships with what you just said. I think we don’t have cracked any marketing channel in the sense that it’s relentless work week after week. Just like for product. You know there is not. When I started I thought okay, I just need to crack the one channel and double down and go harder. And I’m not sure that’s how marketing works in the end you need daily, weekly, monthly iteration again and again. But to answer your question, we have had I’d say four good acquisition channel. The first one is word of mouth and it’s my favorite. The second one is SEO. So we’re ranking first. If you are having an issue with a WordPress management tool or if you ratio looking for a solution to manage multiple WordPress sites, we rank first. The third one was WordCamps that we’ve been sponsoring. And on WordCamps, we have always had some kind of return on investments, which was very surprising to me because everybody would tell me WordCamps is not about getting new clients, which I agree. But business wise, this is not true for us. And the last acquisition channel is probably my LinkedIn profile where I build in public. So we share everything. Revenue churn, new feature, success, failure. And I came to realize that I was. That I had became a LinkedIn influencer, which is something I. I don’t like, to be honest. I think compliment you can make to someone, you know, oh, I wish you to be a LinkedIn influencer would be to my worst enemy, you know, but business wise, it has. It has proven to be a useful acquisition channel.

Mark Westguard:
Interesting. Yeah. My. If I look at my revenue through the year, I definitely see peaks of when I’ve done work, particularly WordCamp Europe has always been really successful for me. I guess it’s got a very big crowd. There’s. There’s a lot of buzz at a WordCamp Europe, but I, you know, it’s a great WordCamp to attend and to sponsor. The ROI is difficult to measure directly, but I definitely see a little peak there. So there must be something going on. I think it’s brand awareness. I don’t sell license on the spot at a WordCamp. I do a lot of demos and I enjoy doing the demos because I love sharing what I’ve done. I kind of find it a moment where I can look back and say, hey, you know what? I’ve actually built something. This is cool. And people enjoy seeing it and using it.

Aurelio Volle:
You get so much love in WordCamps. And because again, in relationship with what I said on customer support, you get frustration. And when you go to WordCamp, suddenly all this frustration is turned into love because you also get to meet with all the silent users who never contact customer support and would just enjoy your product very much. And we get people who just. And I’m sure it’s the same for you. We get so many people who come at the booth and say, hey, guys, thank you so much for what you’re building. And as a customer myself, I think I’ve never reached to any company to thank them for the product, you know? No, this is amazing.

Mark Westguard:
I had a guy come up to me at WordCamp us last year, and he ran up to me and said, are you the form guy? Well, I’ve never been called the form guy before, but I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I haven’t adopted that Persona, but it was quite fun and my wife was with me, laughing at me. But yeah, day to day stress of running a business. Right. I mean, it’s not easy. I know that you build in public and I’m very grateful for that because as a fellow plugin developer, it’s always nice to see how other people are doing and you kind of compare yourself as a benchmark and see how other people are working. So that’s greatly appreciated. But I know behind the scenes the stress of running any business, not just a WordPress business, it’s difficult even with a bricks and mortar business. How do you deal with the day to day stress of running the business? I know that I’ve seen a mention that you do yoga as well or maybe skiing in the Alps. Hopefully that helps.

Aurelio Volle:
I do a lot of yoga and a lot of high intensity sports, if I can say. But in the end, I mean, we are not saving life building a software and that’s okay, you know, that’s how I, that’s how I deal with this anxiety. You know, we are building software, we are helping people, but nobody is going to die in surgery because of us, which you get the metaphor. So this is one thing and the other thing because for instance, after WorldCom US last year and the whole WordPress drama, I was a bit stressed, you know, like everybody like, okay, what’s going to happen?

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, there was uncertainty there. Yeah.

Aurelio Volle:
And it was a lot of uncertainty. I think we created ourselves in our own brain and talking on social media because nothing happened in the end, you know, like.

Mark Westguard:
Right, right.

Aurelio Volle:
And Syed from WPBeginner that you might know was telling to me and to someone else I was with and he was speaking about something else. I think it was investments, broader investment. And he was like, about market condition. And WordPress is my market condition. You cannot do anything. So ignore the thing on which you don’t. You cannot have an impact. Accept one and focus on the thing on which you have an impact. And this is how I cope with this kind of stress, you know.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah.

Aurelio Volle:
And quite a lot. And it’s an advice I apply in every field in my life. You know, ignore the thing which cannot have an impact because they are as they are and focus on the thing on which you can maybe make a little difference.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, you know, something like that happens. I mean like the WordPress drama, everyone was like, okay, how is this going to impact WordPress? For me, it didn’t really have a big impact at all. I didn’t see a sudden slump in sales or anything. And the Way I approach it is I’ve got two options. I can either stop what I’m doing and do something else or I can keep pushing on and carry on the way I’m going. And that’s, I always keep pushing on and just keep at it. Don’t stop what you’re doing and just kind of stay in your own little bubble and keep growing. And that’s what I’ve done with WS form. I just felt that, okay, there’s a lot of drama and noise going on social media, but at the end of the day it was down to me to keep the product going and that’s what I did.

Aurelio Volle:
So, and this is the right attitude in my opinion, because what we do is not a sprint. I mean, what like running a business? It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And there are moments when you start or when you’re, it’s easy and there are moment of failure and of difficulties and you need to keep your head in the game and be relentless, you know, every day and you keep pushing and you keep hammering and this is how you build success. I think nowadays with social media people think of instant success, but I don’t think there are any instant success. And the people who give the illusion of instant success have probably worked a lot to reach that point.

Mark Westguard:
Absolutely. I don’t believe there’s any get rich scheme out there at all. And most of these people that are advertising it, probably not rich, they just simulate they’re rich. There’s a lot of hard work that goes into it for sure. So here’s a question for you. If you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?

Aurelio Volle:
I would do two things actually. One would be to hire customer support specialist a bit before because we hired and he’s our first employee still with us, amazing guy. And he has been instrumental on the success of WP Umbrella. But basically when we hired him we were only doing customer support, nothing else anymore. And we should have probably hired him a bit before to speed up the development pace and get more professional in customer support, by the way. So this would be one thing and the other thing would be very boring and technical which would be to create the concept of organization inside WP Umbrella from day one, which is something we didn’t do and it’s something most SaaS business don’t do to think about how to turn their tool into something collaborative. And the best way to do that is to create a main organization that have users and wouldn’t think about this in the first place. And we wasted a lot of time doing integration, finding, workaround and it’s something that affects and that has affected so many SaaS business, most of them actually. This is the only real big flow that we had back in the day in the BNP umbrella and cost us a lot of development time.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a very cool product. The amount of stuff that you can do with it now compared to where it was a few years ago is quite incredible. I watched a product demo that you did with Kyle from the admin bar. So if Anybody is on YouTube, do a search for that and a really good demo of the product and talks through all the features, I’m sure it’s got even more now that was a few months ago from when we record. But you don’t stop. I know that if you could give one piece of advice to other WordPress product developers, what would that be?

Aurelio Volle:
Be fair and transparent. Because I think when you try to be fair and honest and transparent with your user, with your team member, everything is so easy because when you do, I think when you do like shady marketing like this, maybe you get on the short term a short amount of revenue, like if you do an app sumo or something cool, some magic money, but then you create yourself a debt and I think it’s not worth it. And I like very. I always, you know, like when you speak with business owner they tell you that oh, this is hard, I work a lot, I have problems and I think the fact that we have been building in public, sharing everything with the team makes everything easier including the hard conversation we have to have. But I think WPM Ray is a very cool company to work with, to work at. We have flexible hours, it’s full remote, people are well paid, we give people a lot of ownership. Downsides of this is that if you don’t deliver or if you hide or if you don’t fit into that, we give you a shit ton of trust model, then you’re being fired. And it’s super easy to let, when everything is transparent, to let someone go because it doesn’t matter he or she doesn’t match your expectation and the company stand out. And I mean transparency, you know, like there is like the public oversight and blah blah blah, which is good. But it’s also a good way to tell people, hey, if this KPI is not being matched, we are going to discuss the reason why of course. But maybe it means that you are not a good person for the company and we can do that because we are being Very fair and very transparent. We have a public salary grid, like the whole package. And I think it helps a lot not to have problems.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah. And I think so important when you’re a new company, bootstrapped, being very public shows how genuine your company is, you know, and one thing that has been important for me, which I didn’t expect, actually, was originally I was all about promoting the brand, right. And then found out that in the WordPress space in particular, but, you know, also working with agencies and developers, they want to be in touch with the person that’s building the product and having that personal touch with people. It’s almost like I’ve become the brand as opposed to the name I gave the product. And I think that’s been really important. And you see, like you said before, with WordCamps, people coming up to you and saying thank you and wanting to talk to you is such a rewarding thing. And I. It took me a few WordCamps to get to the point where people were coming up and saying hello and saying thank you, because I was building the product very slowly. But when that started to come through, that was an unexpected high from talking with customers that, you know, I’ve solved a problem. I think the first guy that ever came up to me said, hey, I was using a form, and I had something like 50,000 transactions go through this form without no problem at all. And I was like, cool, that’s really great to hear. And, yeah, being accessible to customers, I think, is a great thing to do, actually.

Aurelio Volle:
Well, Boris, our first employee, came to work with us. He came from Cloudways. You know, they had a massive layout, and he was part of.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, yeah, I remember. I remember. In Bangkok.

Aurelio Volle:
Yeah, exactly. He was one of the people who. That they let go. And I told Boris on his very first day, when we will go at World Camp, you and me, I don’t want the people to come to the booth to speak about WP Umbrella. I want them to come to the booth to thank you because you help them. It’s something we. It’s in our DNA. It’s the very first thing I told to our very first employee. Like, we stay close to the people and we show up. We are accountable for them. And this has some downside on my personal life, I think. Few weeks ago, a guy had an issue with a plugin update that broke the website. I mean, I. And he put a message on the admin bar because we have opening hours on the customer support, and it was a Sunday morning, and he said, okay, so I have A broken website for what can I do? And he tagged me. And so on Sunday morning, me and my CTO opened the laptop and we fixed the issue and that’s what we do. And when it’s not us, it’s Boris, our customer support agent or Dorothy. I mean, we have passed this into the Our users know it and our team member knows it and when it’s needed and it’s something I’m so proud of, they do this tiny little extra mile to hang on Facebook on Monday and help and we are very chill on other side of the business. So they can do this without burning out Important.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah. And I think that’s something you’ve retained even as you’ve grown into a team of, you know, quite a few people now, you’ve managed to keep that kind of small business mentality where you can be flexible and will jump on things like that. And that’s definitely evident in things that I read about WPUmbrella. So that’s great. What’s next for the product? Is there any new features you’re able to talk about? Or maybe not, maybe they’re under wraps. But what’s next for WPUmbrella?

Aurelio Volle:
For once I will not speak in public about this or I’m going to betray all my belief in entrepreneurship. But we are working on something super cool that’s probably going to make a lot of noise when it’s being released, I hope.

Mark Westguard:
Fantastic.

Aurelio Volle:
And it’s a matter of a couple of months, I think maybe end of year. The worst case scenario, Q1, 20 Q1 next year. And in the meantime we’ll be releasing quick wins. So for instance, I think last week going to be announced actually tomorrow we release like a proper plugin activity log. So not the application activity log we already had. But if you want to see the whole life cycle of a plugin, you can now see this into WP umbrella which helps you to debunk when a client broke the website and told you, hey, I didn’t do anything and you realize like the world is sovereign and this is going to help. We are working on this and I think next month will be mostly about stability because Black Friday is coming and we want to make sure that everything is under control and working well. And then we have these big we are releasing some bulk view and new dashboard we are working on. So for instance, at the moment you want to manage the security of a project, you need to go inside the project, but you cannot manage the security at scale. So we are creating a security management section and we create bulk views but something else very cool is also going to be released in the coming months.

Mark Westguard:
Great. I can’t wait to hear about it and hopefully we can talk about it on here one day. So how can our listeners learn more about your product and connect with you-ubrella.com.

Aurelio Volle:
To learn about the product? We have a two weeks free trial, no credit card required and we do apply monitoring and we have a safe update automation so we you can Automate update on WordPress and hopefully not break your website. We do backups and based on everything you do we send care report to your clients. So this is about privilege Umbrella and about me. LinkedIn is the best way to be in touch. Aurelio Vole and I accept basically everyone and I’m engaging with most of the people. My LinkedIn inbox is a bit crazy.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, mine is too. Loads and loads of people wanting to connect. Yeah, check out the WP Umbrella website, check out the blog on there as well because Aurelio does build in public and a lot of useful information out there. So if you’re an existing plugin developer or somebody wanting to get into the space, have a look through it. Some really valuable information on there. Aurelio, thank you for being on the show.

Aurelio Volle:
Thank you.

Mark Westguard:
I look forward to what’s coming up with the product. I’m going to keep tabs on it and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.

Aurelio Volle:
Thank you so much and hopefully see you in a world camp very soon.

Mark Westguard:
Yeah, hopefully Europe next year. I think that’s the next one I’ll be at. Unfortunately I can’t make World Camp Asia because I’m going to be at Press Conf again. I’d already committed to that. But yeah, hopefully I’ll see you at work Camp Europe.

Aurelio Volle:
Let’s do it. See you there.

Mark Westguard:
Take care. Bye.