Joe Howard, welcome to the Indie Hackers podcast.
Gortland, thanks so much for having me, man. It's a pleasure.
You are the founder of a company called WP Buffs.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about what that is and why people will use it?
Sure. WP Buffs, as people can probably tell by the WP in the name,
we manage WordPress websites.
So we help small business owners, entrepreneurs with security,
speed optimization, updates, ongoing edits for their website,
so pretty much all the technical support they need with a single monthly subscription.
We also work with a few larger agencies and freelancers in the WordPress space.
So we have a white label program so that if agencies and freelancers
want to offer 24-7 support to their client base,
but they're a small agency or they're just a single person,
they can push their clients into 24-7 support for their WordPress sites
while also making a little bit of recurring revenue themselves.
So yeah, that's pretty much what we do.
Cool. So you basically have a business where you support people,
which is funny because a lot of founders start their business
and figure out how to minimize support.
It's the last thing they want to do, and that is the primary thing that you guys do.
How do you like doing it?
Yeah, services and support area of WordPress,
it definitely has its aches and pains, but I love it
because it's something that a lot of people don't like doing.
It actually creates a nice niche where people need support.
Some people want to outsource it, some people just want help with it,
and that's where we can step in and shine.
Probably what we do is just the fact that it's 24-7.
You should see our Slack.
It's people logging in, people logging out all the time,
people working in different time zones. It's pretty cool.
How much of a business like that is service-based
and how much of it is scalable?
Because it seems like in order to take on more and more customers
and provide 24-7 support, you'll have to hire an increasing number of people.
Yeah, it's a little bit of both.
The essence of a productized service like ours,
because at the core, we're really just a services company.
We provide support for people on the WordPress sites,
but we've used the business model of a more SaaS-based company,
which is why I'm such a big fan of indie hackers.
I learned so much just being in here,
learning from everybody else doing these SaaS businesses
when we have this SaaS-based pricing.
But yeah, the strength of what we do really comes from the fact
that it's a productized service,
and we really have to systemize everything.
We're fine-tuned so that we can just be as efficient as possible
with our care plans is what we call them.
That means that internally, you have engineers
that are basically building tools for yourself
to make you more efficient for supporting your customers.
Yeah, every day is kind of filled with having the day-to-day execution
of just the hundreds of tickets coming in a day.
We got to finish those up.
We got to make those updates for our client base.
But at the core of what we do, we always want to improve every day as well.
We have a lot of systems in place so that people are able to get the work done.
But we also want to have our team be able to take a step back
and really say, oh, where are the places where we really need
to improve our systems based on issues we're seeing
among a significant portion of our customer base?
So yeah, a little bit of both.
I am in Seattle right now.
On my flight here, I sat next to a nurse on the plane,
and I asked her, in all your years of being a nurse,
what are some of the best health tips that you've learned
that I should know about?
And she was very big on prevention.
I wonder how that plays into a services business like yours,
where you're providing support and help for people.
How much effort do you put into preventing them
from having problems in the first place?
Because I guess the ideal situation is people are paying you a monthly fee,
and you never need to really help them because things are just going well.
Yeah.
Most of our requests that come in are edits people want to make to their site.
So they want to update some content.
They need to add some functionality to their site.
We're happy to help do that in kind of a reactive way.
I don't have to educate you very much, Corlin.
You understand this requirement to be proactive in your business
and to try to get out ahead of things.
And that's kind of a big piece of my life, too.
I try to eat as healthy as possible.
I try to exercise.
I get mad when I go to the doctor and I ask,
hey, I'd like to do a kind of a blood test.
I kind of want to see how healthy I am just in terms of all my markers.
And they told me, well, insurance doesn't cover this because you're not sick,
so you'd have to kind of pay out of pocket for that.
I was kind of like pissed.
I was like, how does insurance not cover this kind of thing?
So yeah, it kind of applies the same to the business.
Our goal is to partner with website owners
so that they can avoid issues and technical issues with their websites altogether.
Let's figure out how to maximize and optimize uptime for your site
so that it never goes down.
You never have to email us and say, oh, my site's down.
Let's avoid that altogether so that people who are running websites
can make sure it's up, can make sure it's running.
A lot of people are running sites that are making them money around the clock.
So whether it goes out in the afternoon or in the middle of the night,
it's still really important.
So yeah, being proactive for that stuff and security stuff as well.
Much easier and maybe more importantly,
much cheaper to be proactive about security
and get a subscription with us and have your website secure
than to pay 10, 20, 30 times as much if your website gets hacked or compromised.
That's definitely not good.
Yeah, and the WordPress ecosystem is enormous.
There are many millions of people with WordPress websites.
So it's not like you're ever going to run out of clients.
You're never going to run out of work to do.
That's a pretty good business niche to be in.
I think one of the coolest things about your particular story
is I know that you launched your business
and got your first customers within a few days.
I don't know what that's a testament to.
Maybe the fact that you're kind of a productized service business,
maybe the fact that you have a huge market
and the business model is pretty obvious, you don't have to innovate a lot.
Maybe you're able to launch something and start generating revenue so quickly.
Yeah, if people want to kind of go on to indiehackers.com,
WP Buffs is up there and we published our kind of founder story.
I think it was like two years ago now.
Yeah, it was a long time ago.
Yeah, it feels like it's funny.
It feels like a long time ago but it also just feels like yesterday.
We have a lot of details there around how we launched and got started.
But one of the big pieces there that people,
one of the questions about this is that we kind of launched WP Buffs.
I think I built the website like over a weekend.
I copied and pasted some PayPal buttons up there
and I started writing a little bit of content.
And then I think within the first week, we got our first customer
and I think that was someone who had found us through,
I can't remember if it was really one of our pieces of content
or when I started WP Buffs, I was really kind of,
I was posting answers on Quora.
So I was kind of running around the WordPress area
and just kind of posting answers here and there.
I think someone found an answer, came through and clicked one of our
crappy little PayPal buttons and bought a plan.
And I had set up zero of the operations of WP Buffs yet.
So someone had paid us and I had to figure out like,
okay, how are we doing backups?
What are we using for security?
I pretty much had to build it for the first customer.
So I'm sure a lot of people listening have heard the,
you build the plane while it's running down the runway to take off
or whatever expression people have heard.
But it was definitely, definitely like that.
So yeah, the biggest way today we get customers is really through inbound,
inbound marketing, content marketing, whatever people want to call it.
It's all similar.
But yeah, we write a lot of high quality content in the WordPress space
and people find us, join our email list.
Maybe they'll download an ebook.
Maybe they'll check out one of our webinars.
And then if they show interest in what we do,
then they'll get funneled in the HubSpot
and they'll go through our sales process.
But yeah, that's how it started with the first customer.
And it took a little while for the SEO and stuff to get rolling.
But now our sales team kind of log in every week
and people just have meetings booked.
And it's all just because it's all pretty systemized.
So it took a while to get rolling, but definitely worth it at this point.
I was talking to Sam Parr, the founder of The Hustle a little while ago.
And I'm not sure if his episode will be out by the time this one airs.
Probably not.
But he had this great point that people in tech tend to overthink their businesses
and that to start a business, you don't really have to be that smart.
You don't have to be that clever.
You just really need to pick something that is kind of proven to work
and then just make the calls, put in the hours.
And generally speaking, you'll get somewhere just by doing that.
And in tech, we tend to overcomplicate things.
We tend to think that we need a brilliant idea
that the world has never seen before,
that we need to innovate in all these different places,
that we need to build everything from scratch.
And oftentimes that just slows us down
and makes our businesses take way longer to build
and makes them less successful.
Whereas when I talk to founders like you,
you tend to be more successful.
When I talk to founders who oftentimes don't know how to code,
who aren't building these big, hairy products,
who aren't entering totally unheard of markets with novel business models,
you tend to build bigger companies and find success way faster.
I mean, we're not the first company to do what we do.
There are a lot of companies, if people are listening
and you're in the WordPress space, you're part of the WordPress community,
you know there are a lot of companies out there that do similar work to what we do.
A monthly subscription, you get support with your WordPress website.
And you're right, Portland, a lot of people think
you have to have this totally innovative idea
and a year later you're a billionaire, like, wow, that was so easy.
But I have actually, I think you're right,
most successful companies, most of the successful companies you see,
they may not have the most innovative idea out there,
but the execution to me is really everything.
At this point, we're one of the leaders in the WordPress space in what we do.
And it's not from our innovative idea.
When I was checking out, do I want to do this subscription kind of business,
I saw all the competition out there.
And to me, having competition, other people out there doing what we do was actually nice.
I didn't really have to do much product market fit work.
I was like, okay, other people run these businesses, they look pretty successful.
I guess I'll jump in.
And pretty much my theory was, I'm a really good executor.
I think I can run a team that executes really well.
I have this strength in digital marketing
and I think that all those can come together and we can grow a business.
So yeah, I'm always of the mindset to kiss.
Keep it simple, stupid.
It's easier said than done.
But at the end of the day, it's much better to have a simple plan.
You can execute at an A level on than to have a really complicated plan
that you don't execute well.
I saw a tweet the other day that said,
what do you ask yourself the most?
And Paul Graham responded by saying, what can I cut?
And I think that just goes to show how important it is to keep things simple,
but also how difficult it is.
It doesn't just come automatically.
You have to remember to ask yourself this question of,
what can I cut over and over again no matter what you're up to?
Otherwise, you're probably going to waste a lot of time
doing things that seem important but actually aren't essential.
But yeah, you're totally right.
I like the way that you put it.
You kind of skipped over this whole product market fit step,
which is what kills so many businesses.
They just never build something that people actually want.
Analysis paralysis is a killer.
Yeah, you don't want to spend all your time trying to figure out what to do.
The essential stuff is cut everything else out
and just get started as fast as possible
and do what you did basically and launch in just a few days.
Yeah, I agree.
I think I'm a big fan of the Pareto principle.
And some people may be like, what's the Pareto principle?
But you've heard of it.
It's just the 80-20 rule.
It's really just like, what are the 20%
or what's the 20% of stuff I have to focus on
to have 80% of the impact?
And that can apply to a lot of different scenarios.
But really, it's just as a founder or early employee or anybody
who works at a startup, honestly, like any professional,
there's a lot of work they're going to be doing.
But what's the work you really need to focus on?
What's the work that's going to have the most impact?
It's not everything you do.
I think most people know that a lot of their day is filled with stuff
that doesn't really move the needle.
So finding the things that move the needle
and working on those often and early in your day,
that's what's going to move the needle on that day
and then move the needle in that week
and then move the needle in that month.
And then before you know it that year,
you've truly moved the needle.
So yeah, Pareto principle, big one.
We're listing all these principles,
we're listing all these snippets of advice.
And you mentioned earlier that you've learned a lot
from listening to Andy Hackerson reading the website.
One of the things that I found is that a lot of people know this stuff.
They've read about this stuff, heard about it,
but then they become founders and just ignore it.
It all goes out the window.
It's really hard to remember like a hundred pieces of information
that you've read over the years and actually apply them
when you actually run into that situation.
How do you think about that as a founder?
How do you make sure you're sort of following all the advice
that you've come across over the years?
Man, this is a super hard one because I really,
I as a founder get stuck between this.
I love to read and educate myself into a lot of self-education
and a lot of times I like to kind of just do that across the board
and just kind of learn new things that just sound interesting.
But then there are other situations where I really feel like
I'm having this certain issue with this certain part of my business.
I really have to like read up on hiring.
So I have to like buy like five books on hiring
and like read everything there is about hiring
so I can like not suck at that.
But it's always going to be an issue.
You're never going to remember to do everything.
You're never going to do everything perfectly.
But at the same time, as a founder,
it's important to do that high impact work.
I don't know if I have any like really solid advice here except,
I don't know, I think it's a good idea to keep a written journal.
I always have a little either like a blank journal
or I've got like a little Pomodoro scheduler.
So I'm always kind of writing little things down
because I'll forget them if I don't.
And yeah, just kind of reviewing my notes
and yeah, constantly having conversations with peers
and being honest and transparent about challenges we're having
and not being like ashamed or embarrassed by them
but just kind of being open and saying like,
how can I improve and you continue that conversation,
you know, that's how you move stuff forward.
So you're going to forget stuff here and there for sure.
But the right things will come up at the right times
if you put yourself in a good position to have them come up.
Being open and collaborating with others is such a good hack
because you don't have to remember everything on your own.
You can just sort of share what you're working on
and tell people what you're up to and what you're thinking.
And if you're missing something obvious, they'll remind you.
They'll be like, oh yeah, but what about this thing you're forgetting?
They'll be like, oh, yeah, I knew that. I was going to do that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I feel like I'm a pretty logical person.
I'm not like a very woo-woo kind of person.
But I do feel like if you put yourself in a good position,
things will come to you at the right times.
I've experienced that multiple times on my journey as a founder.
It's kind of like, how did that happen or how is this happening?
It kind of feels almost magical.
So I think recognizing that is not a random event.
It's really just putting yourself in a good position to be successful
and that involves surrounding yourself with good people, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, the phrase that comes to mind is making your own luck,
sort of developing the right set of habits and activities
that tend to make you lucky over the long run,
that tend to put you in contact with the right people
and the right ideas at the right times.
And it's why oftentimes certain people who don't seem to be the most well-read,
the most studious, the most academic, or the most hardworking even
can sometimes have these outsized gains
because they have these really good habits of sharing their work in public
and asking others for help and working on their thing every day
to just sort of help them quote-unquote get lucky over the long run.
Yeah, man.
You mentioned that you did an Indie Hackers interview almost two years ago.
That was November 2017.
You had just done $14,000 a month in revenue
and it was your biggest month ever then.
I think the month before that was something like $8,000.
Why don't you tell us a bit about how things have gone since then?
Yeah, for sure.
So yeah, we've got an Indie Hacker page up if people are interested.
And if you're not a member of Indie Hackers, you should totally join.
If you have a company, you should create a profile and a page.
We have this page up.
It hooks into our Stripe revenue.
So all of our Stripe revenue, all of our Google Analytics traffic,
it's all kind of up there for people to see
if they really want to peek into how we're doing.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy thinking like back two years
and like where we were two years ago.
We just in May had a 68K month.
So we've taken steps from where we were a couple of years ago.
And this is kind of Stripe revenue.
You could add, you know, I don't know, 5%, 10% for PayPal revenue coming in too,
which isn't really reflected here.
But our goal this year was to try and reach a million dollars annual revenue,
or ARR, and yeah, we're kind of on our way to get there.
So yeah, we're pretty exciting.
It's kind of, I kind of almost, I look at this and I almost like can't believe it.
It's kind of like, I kind of pinch myself like, is this really true?
Oh man, that's crazy.
Yeah, you're like five times bigger than you were two years ago.
And it's cool to go back and look at your business from your eyes back then
because you can kind of realize how far you've come and it kind of hits you.
Whereas in the present and your current day to day,
it's harder to really appreciate your growth and how far you're coming
because the changes are just happening so gradually.
Yeah, I think it's really intriguing thinking back to myself
because I don't feel like I'm that different than I was two years ago
where honestly like the business is that different than it was two years ago.
There are obviously some big changes that have happened,
but I think a lot of people, especially like in the indie hackers community
are starting to think like, when do I want to go full time on my business?
And it's kind of like, okay, like 5K to 10K MRR.
That's usually the time people are starting to think like, okay,
this is picking a momentum.
I can potentially start thinking about going full time on this.
The difference between 10 to 15K MRR and honestly like that 68 or 70K month we had,
we kind of talked about this a little already,
but it wasn't this hugely innovative idea or concept.
It was, we really just had a good plan.
I got lucky and hired some good people along the way, some good team members
and we just executed really well from 10K MRR to 83K MRR,
which is kind of like the million dollar mark for annual revenue.
If people can overcome enough challenges, you'll get there.
Obviously easier said than done, but that's all growing businesses.
You're going to hit challenges.
Because everyone hits challenges.
The successful people just kind of end up figuring out
how to overcome those challenges.
And people can look at our kind of revenue growth on indie hackers.
It's not, you know, we didn't shoot up.
We've had very gradual growth over two years.
It's pretty linear, a few ups, a few downs.
But overall, it's pretty linear.
Sometimes I'd like it to be a little more exponential,
but slow growth has been good for us.
One of the things that you guys have done to increase your revenue
is increase your prices.
You just posted a milestone recently to your indie hackers product page
for WP Buffs and it says,
executed major price increase.
You said you increased pricing for your care plans earlier this year,
but recently you've also increased prices
for your previously grandfathered customers,
which has to be a little bit nerve wracking.
But it seems to have gone well.
You said your churn barely increased at all
and your monthly recurring revenue increased significantly.
So tell us a little bit about how that went down.
Yeah, this was super scary.
And I had to, I feel like I had to crunch a lot of numbers
before I actually pulled the trigger on this.
Like, are you sure if I increase my prices by 25%, 30%
for all my existing customers, we're not all just going to leave.
We raised our prices probably six months ago or so
for all our new customers.
So we had new pricing in place,
but this was creating a lot of headaches
in account management stuff.
Who's on the new plans? Who's on the old plans?
This is starting to take up too much bandwidth on our team.
So yeah, we decided, okay, we've added a lot of value to our plans.
We provide all these kind of premium plug-ins to people for free
as part of our care plans.
We've really focused a lot on reply and resolution time
for our tickets and their desk.
And that's really, really, we've done really well there.
So yeah, I think that that justifies a price increase
to be able to make us more comfortable as a company,
honestly, to be able to invest a little bit more
back into our customers and continue to make improvements.
So yeah, we did a price increase for all our previously
fathered in customers.
And yeah, it's really interesting to see the graphs.
Maybe I'll tweet something out when this episode goes live or something.
But yeah, we did two price increases,
one for direct customers and one for our agency white label partners.
Both you can see within the two or three days
of actually executing the price increase.
You can see the increase in monthly recurring revenue for us,
about 5%, 6% for each of those increases,
so 10% to 12% after both were done.
And you can see kind of a small trickle of churn afterwards,
but it gets really nowhere near to where it was before.
So increased pricing, got a few complaints here and there,
but that's going to happen when you raise prices.
And yeah, got to the point where we actually had a few people churn out.
Most of those people were, in my opinion, kind of lower quality customers,
people who were kind of interested in the lower price,
but not as much as the value add in the value add for them.
But yeah, ended up with 10% or so increase in monthly revenue
just by increasing prices.
And additionally, kind of lower support loads
because we had a few people leave.
So in my books, it looks like a win.
I have to kind of see how churn works over the next couple months
because I like to see how churn kind of works out three, four months in advance.
But for now, seems like a win.
Yeah, it sounds like a win.
And my heart is warmed every time I hear a story
raising their prices and hearing that it works out in the end,
which actually it tends to do most of the time
because we as indie hackers tend to undervalue what we're building.
We tend to think that we can't charge that much
because we're not these big companies,
and these big companies are providing much better products than we are,
so we have to charge way less when, in fact, I think often the opposite is true.
If you are Amazon or Google or something,
you can charge very little for what you're building
because you can take advantage of these huge economies of scale.
You can do things very cheaply.
And if you are a small, scrappy startup,
you can't really take advantage of that.
Your advantage is not in low prices.
Your advantage is in high prices,
but also providing a more personal service,
a more customized service,
targeting a specialized niche,
having better customer support and things like that.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's 100% right.
And I used to be one of those people who was nervous to raise prices.
Almost, I'd say, afraid.
I thought I was going to raise prices and everyone was going to leave
and all my customers and partners were going to hate me.
Yeah. I mean, I think about big publicly traded companies.
They can afford to give away a ton of free accounts
or sell things super cheap because at the end of the day,
it's like they can report on how many users they got that month or that quarter.
And then their stock price goes up.
And so they've made money through that way,
but it's not necessarily literally how profitable were they
or how much revenue they brought in.
Yeah, you're right.
Small businesses don't have that ability.
So the advantage of a small business is you can actually charge people more
because you can give people a better experience.
You can really be agile in your movements.
We have 15 or 16 people on the team now or so.
So it's harder now than it was when we were three or four people
to make changes.
But think about how hard it is when you have 1,000 or 2,000 employees.
Then it's really hard to make big changes.
Yeah, you can provide people enormous value even if you're a small company.
So yeah, I would definitely urge people.
I heard the advice too when I was starting off like raise your prices
and it took me a little while to get into it.
So I understand people are different stages of their business.
But think about price increase in terms of like what more value can you add?
If you can add more value, you can raise your prices.
We raised our prices because our care plans were more valuable to people
and people will pay because they're getting more from it.
So it'll be hard to raise your prices if you don't give anything back.
But as you're building your company, of course you're improving.
You're finding new ways to do things.
And so it's probably kind of a good rule of thumb that every year or so
you should think about what does raising prices look like?
We've gotten better over the last year.
Should we raise prices?
That should probably just be kind of a...
You should add that as a repeating task for whoever's listening.
There's a quote.
I don't know who it's from.
It might be Charlie Munger.
It might be Warren Buffett or somebody else.
But they said the best way to get something in life is to deserve it.
And I think that's basically what you're describing.
You want to raise your prices?
Make your product better.
And then you can, of course, raise your prices.
Yep.
I could not have said it better myself.
I think a lot of people starting off do undervalue themselves
just because they're like, we're a small team.
Are we really providing that much value?
But I think trying to shake out of that mindset a little bit
and really at the beginning, people are going to pay you
and you're going to be amazed that people are giving you money for what you do.
But after your 10th customer or your 20th customer
or your 30th customer, that should probably wear off a little bit
and you should start to think, okay, people are paying me for this thing.
What else do they need?
You got to really be talking with your customers.
Getting feedback is essential to being able to raise your prices
because if you don't build more things or put together,
add more value to people, then they're not going to want to pay more.
But you have to know what they want.
Yeah, I couldn't have said it better myself there.
Another one of the milestones that you posted to your page on IndieHackers
is that you started a podcast.
Another thing that's near and dear to my heart.
Podcasting is fascinating because it's this newly popular media channel.
It's an old channel. It's been around for decades,
but it's just now sort of blowing up to the point
where lots of people are starting podcasts.
Lots of people are asking themselves, why start a podcast
and whether or not they should start one.
Why did you start a podcast for WP Buffs and how's it going?
If people also are like podcasters, want to do podcast stuff,
Cortland, you just started the first group in IndieHackers,
which is the podcasting group.
I'd urge people to go and check that out.
I'm in there kind of asking questions.
I also have to thank you, Cortland, for a nice recommendation
on someone to help edit our podcast.
It sounds beautiful because I went and found the person
who helps with the IndieHackers podcast.
I appreciate that.
Shout out to Bradley.
Shout out, Bradley. Nice work, buddy.
So WP Buffs, kind of people have heard what we do.
We manage WordPress websites.
We do this ongoing subscription.
Pretty simple business model.
We found that a lot of the white label partners
we were talking to, instead of wanting to outsource support
to us, they actually wanted to learn how to do
or they wanted to do ongoing support themselves.
A lot of people are like, oh, 24-7 support sounds cool,
but it also sounds hard.
But I think I can do that.
How do I learn how to do that myself?
So because we're listening to customers
talking with our audience, we said, okay,
so maybe instead of this outsource solution,
people may want to do it themselves.
So we put together WPMRR.
The WP is for WordPress.
MRR is monthly recurring revenue.
So WPMRR was born.
It's a video course all around pretty much open sources,
everything we do at WP Buffs.
And so it pretty much is a video course
around how to sell care plans, sell, execute, implement,
all of the above.
With that came a great opportunity to talk a little bit more
about how to use WordPress and different tools
in focusing on monthly recurring revenue
and building a sustainable business
and have your kind of work around your life
and not the other way around,
not have your life work around your work.
So I asked Christy, who's a good friend of mine,
if she wanted to start the WPMRR WordPress podcast with me
and she graciously accepted.
And 50 or so episodes later, we are live.
So yeah, we have a lot of fun with it.
We've done a few live episodes.
We have a few kind of WordCamp talks.
WordCamps are these conferences for WordPress people
that they go to these here talks about WordPress
and get together with other people in the community,
open source community.
So yeah, podcasting has been a bunch of fun.
So I've been digging it.
You put out a lot of content for WP Buffs.
That's kind of how you got started
and got your first customer
and you've continued since then.
How do you think podcasting compares to blogging
and SEO in terms of affecting your business
and affecting sort of your audience?
Podcasting up to this point has had a much lower
or much less of an effect than the kind of articles
you write for WP Buffs
and the webinars you do for WP Buffs at this point.
We've just been doing stuff at WP Buffs for so long
that that pinwheel has started to roll.
And so it just is pretty effective at this point
in terms of customer acquisition channels
and stuff like that.
Podcasting is kind of still in this point
where we just kind of do it for fun.
It has started to bear fruit.
Like we do hear from people who come to WP Buffs
and are like, oh, I heard your podcast over there.
Or people will buy the course at WPMRR
because they're podcast listeners
and they may get a little discount code
on the podcast and stuff.
So it started to turn into a little bit
of a financial ROI, but we pay Bradley,
the guy who edits our podcast.
His payment comes really from WP Buffs.
WP Buffs makes a revenue that powers the podcast.
So we don't really have any plans
to do any sponsorships or anything like that.
Honestly, for me doing the podcast,
I'm super happy to be able to do the podcast
because I really like it as a medium as opposed to blogging.
I think there are advantages to both.
You can blog and you can write.
When you do that and you click publish,
you really review that article
and you really know exactly what it says
and you pretty much say exactly what you mean.
When you do a podcast like this podcast
that I did not do very much prep for,
I'm kind of speaking a little bit off the cuff,
but I think that there's a lot of value in that as well
because you're not hearing my filtered voice.
You're hearing what I truly think kind of off the cuff.
This is Joe.
Yeah, this is it, everyone.
So yeah, I like the podcast format
because I get a lot of value in hearing
and the podcast I listen to where people are just kind of
shooting the breeze.
I think there's an enormous value
in hearing those little details about people.
So hopefully I've given people a few little nuggets
and a few of the things I've said.
But yeah, the podcast has been great for that
and we don't really have plans to do sponsorships
or anything like that or do any peer monetization of it.
It's really just for the audience and it's for me
and Christy to be able to meet other cool people
in the WordPress community.
Well, it's called the WPMRR WordPress Podcast.
I recommend you go check it out
if you're in the WordPress space.
I've listened to a few episodes.
I thought it was interesting just to really hear
other founders talk about their businesses
because you guys do a lot of that too.
The downside of this quick chat format
is that they're supposed to be quick
and we are now over 30 minutes.
I've got so much more I want to talk to you about
about how you have sort of got your content engine
spun up at WP Buffs and also maybe in the future
we'll have to have you back on to see
if the podcast is bearing more fruit.
But Joe, thanks so much for coming on
for talking to me about WP Buffs.
Can you tell listeners where they can go
to learn more about what you're up to
and where they can find what you're working on?
Yeah, for sure.
WP Buffs.com is everything WP Buffs.
WPMRR.com is everything monthly recurring revenue
around WordPress.
The podcast is there on WPMRR as well.
So people can go check it out
or in your podcast app of choice.
I'm on Twitter so this was kind of a short conversation.
Man, I could talk for hours about this stuff.
So if you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter.
It's Joseph H. Howard.
So there are three H's there in the middle.
So Triple H there.
But yeah, feel free to tweet at me
if you have any like questions or any comments
or anything about anything I said.
Whether you agree or disagree, I love to chat about it.
All right, thanks, Joe.
Thanks, Portland.
Quick note for listeners.
If you're interested in coming on to the podcast
like Joe to have a quick chat with me,
go to ndhackers.com slash milestones
and post a milestone about what you're working on.
It can be pretty much anything.
People have posted milestones about launching
or finding their first customer.
They posted about growing their mailing list
or hitting a thousand followers on Twitter.
They posted about getting to $100 or $1,000
or even $100,000 a month in revenue.
The sky is the limit.
So whatever you're proud of,
come celebrate it on ndhackers.com slash milestones
and other indie hackers will help you celebrate.
We love supporting each other
and encouraging each other when we hit these milestones.
And what I will do is at the end of every week,
I'll look at the top milestones posted
and reach out to people to invite them
to come onto the podcast for a quick chat.
So once again, that's ndhackers.com slash milestones.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you post.