Jason Cohen Interview On Bootstrapping To 132 Million ARR

okay guys so I'm kind of giddy if you can tell because I'm interviewing an entrepreneur I've been wanting to talk to for a very long time today I actually walked past their offices every single day and when I first moved to Austin I was like now that that office looks cool owner who works there and I looked it all up and long story short I've reached out to the founder of the company Jason Cohen and we're gonna be interviewing him today and he's the founder of WP engine just to give a little bit of background on what he's accomplished WP engine is a wordpress management hosting company that last sir numbers were checked in 2018 was worth over five hundred million to a billion dollars and that was 2018 2020 right now middle last year was doing about 132 million in annual revenue so I'm probably guessing they crossed the billion dollar mark right now so if you're looking for someone to listen to when it comes to building businesses Jason is a pretty good track record I'll leave it at that and I'm so excited about this interview because if you go into the Jairo slack which is my company if you don't know it's full of these videos from him where he's talking about how to grow a company correctly ethically honestly and a lot of the things he shared have helped me so much as a SAS entrepreneur and if just this video talks which I'll link to below this videos helped Hirose immensely growing so I reached up to him I reached out to my I reached out to him and he finally agreed to an interview so we're just gonna get down to it and what I want you to pick up from this is just like how much how different people that have these type of businesses behave from people that talk and talk talk if you go look up Jason comb anywhere he doesn't have some big famous YouTube channel cuz I'm a giant Instagram he just has a giant building in the middle of downtown Austin and the reason why I like sharing interviews like this is because it's so hard to find these people over the noise and and all the shouting that's going on a social media and find out like who really should you be listening to and this is one of the top voices that I listen to when it comes to building my business so I wanted to sit down talk with them for me and for you guys today and so we're gonna get started the one last thing before we get start whenever I do these interviews I like to offer you guys a really cool special WP engine actually is the best place you can host your WordPress sites which is basically what a lot of our site on hi Ross is based off of and most blogs and most ecommerce stores they're all based off WordPress and if you want faster hosting more secure Hosting I would definitely check it out and if you go check out WP engine and hop on to their hosting send us a receipt at WP engine at high risk calm and you'll get a reply back with over two thousand dollars in courses on how to build your business how to run email marketing how to run a lot of the advertising I do and these are full fledge it's like 48 hours worth of courses at your beginning and so just send the receipt to that email and that's just non-affiliated I think it's a great company and if you have a wordpress site you should be hosting it on there so that's it guys I hope you guys enjoy the interview as much as I do and let's just get going okay guys so I'm super excited to have the guest that we have on today this is Jason and I actually discovered I'm not really discovering but I walk around us in every single day and I was walking down the street in the city and I saw this big building with wpengine on the side of it so I was thinking to myself you know I'd really like to get jairo saleable where I have a big building with a end with a big logo on the side yeah this one is showing in the background right now and so I looked up on my phone like okay what level do I need to get to the reach then so I looked up on my phone and I saw WP engine and I'm like how much they're doing every single year and they're doing about glass I checked on this article it might be different now 132 million in revenue per year and it really talks about the billion dollar valuation so that kind of disheartened me a little bit because I'm only at like 3 million air are but I started going around YouTube and I like to look up the founders of companies whenever I you know see some cool things going on and I still upon Jason on YouTube and the talks that he's put out and some of the information he's put out in his talks have just helped my company so much and so I reached out to him and I managed to get him on today and so Jason is the founder of WP engine and the CTO and bass I just want to get him on and ask him some questions for you guys because it's been super influential on my company so Jason thanks for coming on is for having me cool so I'll just kind of kick it off a few things that really really interest me is first off you've managed to bootstrap a lot of companies successfully you've had two exits so far with with watchdog and in smart bear and so the first thing I wanted to ask is that usually when I when I talk about SAS where I think about SAS companies or software companies usually a lot of people think you have to lose a ton of money up front it takes years to get profitable and that's kind of what I've experienced at one of my companies but you've been able to start companies fairly quickly and pinpoint what companies are gonna get a proc market fit and get them revenue pretty quickly so I kind of want to talk about that first because a lot of people are intimidated by starting software companies because that so I think the most general question is I think you have you've had multiple SAS companies that have broken the million dollar mark and you've exited two of them you have an extremely successful one now at WP engine how do you decide what to make how do you decide what the market needs and and think about you know what proc should I make they can get a product market fit yeah I can I can actually answer that in detail because I went through that process they specific process in vetting WP engine and I had an idea before it which I also vetted with this and decided that other idea was not a good idea in other words I'm capable of deciding my ideas are bad which is hard they probably took me at least a decade to realize that sometimes I'm not right and I'm not totally convinced that's still true yeah I would say though that there's so many different paths that companies take to success sometimes you find people who get really lucky they get customers right away revenue right away it just starts exploding and it's really obviously a good thing sometimes it takes a really long time this is sort of the point of Seth Godin book the dip and the problem with that is how do you know the difference because they kind of look the same in the years 1 & 2 the ones that will never get off the ground the ones that do kind of don't look different that's a that's a big problem so hence the need to be more systematic and figuring out is this a good idea which is what your question is for something to answer again in detail but I think I think this is a critical point that the people because because people who are on a bad path will often use the excuse well company's off and take a long time to get going and yeah right and so it I did that with my first SAS company like hard core three years and like then found like this we need a pivot and that's a huge I mean wasting a couple years of your life on something that's the wrong thing is a huge there's probably no more expensive thing to do like in your life right so that's a really important point and worth spending the time and effort to try to try to systematically do something better or try to figure it out okay so the first thing is that you are your idea is probably pretty good or you wouldn't be so excited about it so the goal up front is that it the problem is people often want to just have confirmatory evidence so in other words I'm going to talk to someone for 45 minutes about how good my ideas and don't you hate it when X you know in other words leading questions well yeah I guess I hate it when X um and then what happens is you end up in a sense selling them for 45 minutes maybe even by accident and you're probably a decent salesperson and you probably have an okay idea and so you'll probably be reasonably successful and none of that is helpful in figuring out if this is actually a good idea yeah so this is I would call that sort of the crux of the of the typical customers quote-unquote customer development conversation that's the problem and that's why it doesn't lead to okay so how do you have a how do you do the customer development any how do you test or have those conversations so that you're not fooling yourself in this sense that you're actually learning something so here's what I did and continue to do by the way at WP engine as we continue to launch products or think about different personas and so forth so first of all coming at it as a scientist what is this what you do first is you write down your theories and then you go test them if you don't write down your hypotheses then you're not it's not clear what it is that you're testing or it's not clear what you're learning so the way I write that down as simple like literally just a list that's a column in a spreadsheet like this is not rocket science or magic technology and I just write down the things that I think I think that I'll just of course use a current examples because it's handy I think that the a freelancer who builds websites has between five and ten clients I believe that that person has to manage passwords to get into those sites and and they don't have a good way to do it and they hate it they they're annoyed by that I also believe that they think that that's a security problem they actively think that's a security problem that they probably want to solve because it keeps them up at night what if someone gets like that and so forth this is obviously a hyper specific example of like password manager right but it's fine because it's it's it's a it's illustrative okay so then you go to then the next thing you do is you say what could I ask that would not lead the witness that would try - that would probably evaluate this theory so I can't say so how many clients you have like it a couple dozen I can't say things like do you worry that putting passwords in a word document is insecure because man if you put it that way uh yes actually so that's what I mean by leading questions so I can't ask though so what would I ask you know an obvious one be like how many active clients do you have there's obvious or open-end one is like do you ever think about those passwords is it you know does it ever cross your mind and if so like what are you thinking so these are open-ended questions they may not even talk about security that's kind of the point is you're trying to find out what they think but you have in mind what you're hoping right that's important where you're not learning something but at the same time it has to be open-ended so that you discover what really happens only an open-ended question will lead to discovery of what's really in the other person's head also they may think security but they don't use the word security they may mate and that may be the topic but they use the word hackers or they use the word compliance if it's a big company say um so in other words even if you were right about something like security your words might be wrong and when you go to write that add word to get their attention you have to use their words when you go to your home page to capture their attention say toe bounce you have to use their words so even if your ideas are right you still need their words so that you incorporate that so that it's more effective and so forth right because because you need it a lot when you're you're thinking about what features that of the software as well you can kind of tell users what they want but you kind of have to yeah that's really it's a really interesting way to look at so you basically find your market and you have a general idea and you ask them questions but they have to lead you back to your yeah originally here's what will actually happen some of your hypotheses are right and you'll confirm it at least and be proud and you'll have some detail you didn't have before which is extra helpful like like terminology but also numbers for example in our case I discovered there are freelancers who have a few customers and freelancers that have dozens and very few that have twenty it turns out there's these different business models so even though I was kind of directionally right on this number and I actually learned something new that it was this bimodal thing that from there what do you do with information well of course that's up to you you could decide oh good well then I'll have two different messages and advertised in two different places or oh I'm gonna focus on this one segment of the market maybe someday I'll expand the other one but I'll be really clear and when I'm focused on blah blah blah so so even when your quote-unquote right that doesn't mean you can't learn details that are really directly useful and whether the thing you build or the or the techniques for going to market remember that's half battle um it will be right of course like a thirty or things around thirty your things will be wrong good thing you ask open-ended questions to figure it out and then the third of the things are just like crap happens when you ask open unto question so you didn't think about if you're like whoa wait a minute sad of thing so here's what I do with all that with the things that are wrong or new app after the conversation I go update my theories yeah it's just again there's no science there's no like here's how many some get a good feedback loop going course right so that conversations evolve based but but i but I've set myself up to kind of more objectively than otherwise see what that evolution looks like now what it looks like when the idea isn't that good is that the hypotheses do not converge on one truth so like wow there's there's some people care about security so I'm doing and some actually care about some people have SSO you'll have this tool and some people like surprisingly hate technology and some people like Jesus like it's not I can't find a persona or pocket or you might say a market in here so although you have this great idea and you're probably not wrong directionally about the idea or the problem it may not fit what the market cares about or what they say or what they want to pay for like that's another thing as I absolutely think you have to talk about price in these conversations there's very good arguments not to so I'm not I'm not trying to put down the advice that is out there from very smart people that say this is the time to figure out pain and and and and the customers life and circumstance not price but I'd so I think there's rational he was there but I disagree I think price is just as much of what the product is as anything else I think when you say blah blah blah and also it's $1,000 a month it totally changes the conversation the fact that it totally changed the conversation is why you have to bring it up at the beginning because if you go through the whole thing it turns out oh I would just expect to have that for free because reasons then then then who cares like all the rest of it is who cares so of course it's not exactly who cares it's just that you can't leave out the price it's just as much of a feature or aspect of the product as anything else it determines who's gonna buy it determines how they're gonna buy what like how much lot they they put into it like oh I'll just you know try it because what the hell versus like wow I'm gonna have to really consider what I'm getting up I'm gonna have to stop paying for this other thing I'm going to get permission if it's a larger company versus I'm I can do it without getting vision like price is a really big thing that has to be figured out for it so anyway so it could be that you have this good idea but the price just doesn't work out or the knee doesn't work out where they agree there's a pain they just don't really care it's not in their top three things in their life that they really care about it's like yeah I guess I I guess I agree that putting pastors in a word knock is bad but you know what the Packers are crystal my damn word document then they may be wrong about that but if they don't care then they don't care that's that so that is that's all quickly cuz I vlog thought about it in like different ways and that ants are really like I never thought about I thought I have like an idea and then I just would usually try to test sell the idea and I kind of end it there but how you say you know how you have the hypothesis then you get to open any questions that I always lead question people when I'm doing like a sales pitch or something like that you let the person kind of tell you what's important to them and you kind of go back and form yet the feedback loops develop the idea that's really interesting I just look for ideas so there's conversations where you do want to lead the witness because you're making a single totally fine right it's just that's not what these conversations are if you're trying to evaluate the big idea there as a business right and so it's easy to get trapped in my ideas are generally good this is a pain and forget about but the price is to make sense the go-to-market has to make sense the customer I still already think they have this problem because otherwise it's too hard and expensive to convince them that they have the problem they're to already have the budget in the will blah blah blah blah because it's the only way that an ad word is gonna catch your attention or an emails gonna catch your attention or the home pages are not going to bounce there's so many things you have to get through obviously that's not gonna happen if you involves evangelism you could but that's a whole nother business to build that's if you have lots of time and money you can get away a lot of stuff maybe it's freemium for a while because reasons like because they made then they figure out the you know but they actually do need it or whatever like that those are all perfectly valid businesses but but yours you started by what about bootstrapping for bootstrapping having massive freemium stuff that goes on forever and cost many millions of dollars of support it's not impossible again there's no such thing as impossible in this world I'm just saying it's generally incompatible with strapping because you got to make money and you can't afford this throw away money I'm free free crap like in general like you can't afford to acquire things that don't have generate revenue in general and so that's probably not the right model for you you probably need a model where people are already ready to go in terms of willingness to fatal things I just listed yeah so just okay it's possible in fact likely it's likely that you have a decent idea you'd have identified a reasonable market but it's not a business or at least not a bootstrap business or not of cost-effective business that is actually the most likely scenario how many projects they're on github they're not bad ideas but they're not the whole rest of the business can't be built around it where isn't anyway the answer is the vast majority of ideas are like that and so you have to expect that so it's hard to find something where all those other pieces are there so that's like and I had this idea where again it didn't converge in that sense like I like I have these like there's these nuggets a good ideas but it's not converging on this thing that's going to work in all these ways and therefore it's fun I think and then with with wpengine it did work it was converging and by the way the wet convergence feels like is the conversations are boring because here it's like you ask this opening question but you know they're gonna answer a or B because it's become addictive like this is like boring good boring means you're not learning anymore which doesn't mean there's nothing left learn it means this process is not useful for learning this particular way and actually building the damn thing is probably what you have to do right and so and of course the agile iterative wha-wha-wha but like you probably need to start doing that and because just talking isn't working anymore in terms of learning so so boredom is good you know in a sense like that's what convergence looks like and so how many of these conversations do you need it depends some people tell you crazy things like a hundred I guess you know that more is possibly better if if you believe you're still learning although I would argue again like if you're still learning brand new things in the hundred conversation maybe it's not converging like this isn't maybe it's not obvious enough and I do that's more obvious but but but but I did 5504 wpengine so but here's the benefit forty forty were relative interested anyway even though it wasn't a sales call and thirty were customers at launch yeah I was selling one of your talks why did you talk to a lot of people about it but then they're like they came on board too at the same time yeah because it because like does it converge on something right and there was actually a thing well now that's not so bad so if you're gonna get some customers and Chris launched a silly not the launch but if you're gonna get some customers out of it actually well then having you know a couple you know a couple tens more than you would otherwise that's maybe not such bad idea so I think you have to feel it out I'm not sure there's a rule but three or five is the wrong number right and a hundred maybe it is but I'd question okay you just prove are you just stalling look one way or no that you know at that point okay so two other questions that come up a whole whole lot when I see people saying you know should I start asking Michigan a software company the first one being off so you start off you're an engineer and you Benjen eared other companies so you didn't have to particularly find an engineer we were getting off a lot of people who want to start sass companies they don't really have an engineering background they maybe have I have a marketing background come a product background so I the hardest time finding a good CTO for a long time what suggestions would you get because I feel correct me if I'm wrong but when you're bootstrapping a company the most essential worlds you're gonna need are probably the CTO of course and then usually you'll have the marker who might be starting the company and so you can kind of build something with just those two how do you find that that yin to the marketer yang if you watch shows we used to say everyone here is either building it or getting rid of it meaning yeah you're making or you're selling and those physical stuff so he really did get rid of it like we put in envelopes is it away yes so I agree like especially at first you just need to build or get rid of it and everyone else is not useful at the beginning I don't know that there's a there isn't like a definitive answer on how to find that person it's sort of like asking okay listen I want to get married how do I find the perfect soul mate there's like well there's not going to be a magic formula for you right I will say a few things though anyway one is like the Fight Club thing or not if I go the matrix thing if you do not know someone until you fight them so you probably don't really know someone until you work with them so having worked with someone even at a distance at another company is a good way because you know something about them is there a way to trial working together as opposed to jumping right in so one problem people do is there's often like the person who really is the the founding concept they just can't really do anything unless they have a co-founder so they go find the co-founder now after that it's equal right its co-founders and that's good because you want that sort of personal buy-in and so forth that's good not no problem but if it doesn't work out one of them one of them is the one who is really screwed here right yeah so if that person's the marketer especially like if this doesn't work out in three months how is it that you can break up and the company is not totally dead because if because that question is usually not answered in the same way that most marriages don't have a prenup and then yeah it's probably just game over at that point so just like a prenup it's hard to have that conversation especially because you're trying to go into it saying let's be optimistic and nobody wants to screw each other and yet you're saying yeah but but what if it doesn't work down and who gets to decide that you know does if something's built as the marketers still just get to the site it's not working out anyway and then what so that's difficult but having some way to undo it without kinking the company is is a way to de-risk it working with the person is a good way and then the final problem is as a marketer you can't interview that person I mean you obviously do but all you know is it's like personal interpersonal stuff right you can't evaluate like do they get things done can they solve crazy problems did they are they gonna work really hard you know like these are you can't you can't evaluate their you know coding skills or engineering skills or decision-making skills in terms of architecture like these are things you can't really about it so do you have friends who can help do that you know because yeah cuz usually what happens is people just hook up they're like he seems really smart it's like right that's how I pick that's why I pick a doctor too because I don't know how to ask about anything either so so you know background checks are very important I don't mean background like that they that they go to jail I mean like your reference check really those are super important other other peope trust you themselves our CTO czar people of this position who would be willing to do an interview or otherwise like try to help you evaluate really spending some effort on that instead of just you know hoping it's probably useful because it is a blind spot so you've got to like intentionally go make up for that blind spot and some other things if you want to de-risk the situation cool awesome yeah that's that's uh I didn't go through all those phases and I don't wish I had with my current CTO but the prior ones I had like we got together first few businesses the first lesson I learned was like you got to have that prenup I'd start these SAS companies and the guys I won't get into it just doing some wonky things so yeah alright so you got the idea you got a you got an engineer you have the ability to start coming this point how when you're bootstrapping I haven't seen you talk too much about paid traffic when you're starting off maybe a few AdWords ads how are you getting these you said maybe you want to get your first hundred fifty customers and have that kind of equate to ten thousand a month in one of your talks how would you go about getting your customers at first when you're when you don't have the ad budget you don't have money to dump on stuff and you don't have a huge amount of investment money so first of all I'll just say I'm not the I'm not the leading authority on that kind of like you want to call it growth hacking you want to call it just you know just you know make making it happen I have done that but the here's the issue each time there's something that that I did which today you couldn't repeat it was smart bear ad words were brand new it was 2001 so like it was it was no joke people would say things like I didn't know what that box even was I clicked it yeah you're just like and also the ads were fit five cents to click every one you know cheap as hell people were like just fascinated by it and it like it was just totally different so who cares what I do I guess I grew swipe every business and who cares cuz like none of that's relevant today yeah in fact it was not relevant when I started wpengine which by the way is ten years old so even then my own experience with AdWords is totally irrelevant then and now of course different again so I feel like I feel like even where I've had success that doesn't mean that that what I did then or is that kind of things like applicable and I'm not like one of these like growth hacker people so I will say this though back to I'll we recall that pricing is critical if your price is ten dollars a month you're gonna have a problem because whatever you spin and do whether it's social media and you're spending your time or in your writing or your online or whatever or you are doing paid acquisition and you're spending some money whatever it is is just the equation to make it cost-effective to get a $10 a month customer especially if your cancellation rate it starts high which again when you're small that's often the case it's just not going to work like the met that the equation isn't going to work it's going to be too expensive so that is an argument for price not being ten dollars a month yeah for a bootstrap company because so hard to get through that those stages and get to things at scale and even at scale that often doesn't work like there's there's famous companies a scale like Constant Contact for example with literally millions of customers we're still just wasn't working like a stupid spaghetti look at some point it's just it's not as effective man you know and so so as a bootstrap company if the price is more like fifty dollars a month or better yet you know seventy and ninety nine then all kinds of techniques are positive answers to your question spending the time to write stuff on blogs actually can convert doing straight up paid ads on supersaturated mediums like AdWords actually work like so so I would say you box yourself into a place where you better have magic hacking skills if your price is $10 a month or the possibilities are wide open to you if the price is $70 a month I'm not exaggerating that much if you do the math on for example that the typical conversion rate of a website like I just a hit - a website - to an online purchases of 1% and it really is about that for in for many bootstrap companies I've actually done a survey in the past about this and like it's a pretty reasonable number it's not point when it's not 10 it's one right so for $10 a month and let's say you need a six-month payback period okay so you can spend $60 on this but only what you know to get that customer but only 1% convert so that's 60 cents for the click and write up right off the bat very few adwords are that cheap if they're any good yeah well crap like like I can't even like buy an ad word and that's if the traffic's pretty good like one percent conversion rate it's decent so the ad word you know the ad word traffic has to be ex and you know you keep multiplying back out the other side of the funnel and it's like this is too hard this is too many clicks too many views too many clicks too much money I'm making this too hard on myself so on the other hand you might say but that's all people okay and again I go back to well then it's probably not a good bootstrap business idea like like that's why price is such a critical factor here so I don't mean to just rehash what I just said I really I'm trying to connect it to the question of growth because it dramatically changes the aperture of what's possible that's probably the single best thing strongest thing you can do for yourself think the company of the ground is to have a wide aperture of possible ways to acquire customers yeah that's that's probably the way to do you risk it the best that's so funny cuz I always thought like about tactics and like some tactic to grow my company and so I watched her one talk where he talked about you know getting the higher price and setting people to pay the Europe front and even by having like animal wonky monthly prices and so at my company we're having trouble growing when it was like the lower prices and stuff like that and I thought well you know how can we make the base price $350 a month and get everybody to pay a year upfront and so by doing that and unlocked every tactic because we can just roll just by sending messages I think this is a good thing for you yeah everything it's so that optionality or that that wide aperture those all the possibilities that things don't have to be as cost effective to still contribute to growth just though it's just saying that feels like that's probably the strongest thing for me to do you risk my business to add growth to give myself the most chances of success that's just what it sounds like so I'm a huge advocate obviously you can tell and it's common advice charge more right that's common device I'm trying to really tie it into practicalities of what it means to grow whether it's the first hundred customers or the next thousand coasters but especially the first hundred if you want to de-risk in that light like it it really it really is that and so if it's like but I don't know if they'll pay that they will then do something that's more valuable that they will pay for because by the way it's more gratifying anyway to make something more valuable and or simply in a market where people have more money to spend or want to spend money already are spending more money whereas the VC is like to say have more money than sense yeah that makes it that makes so much sense that's kind of what I've done with my layers coming so I just I've never I never thought about tying the price to growth film so that's really interesting so the other question I have also my face might come in right now we're at the face we're still doing a lot of things manually when customers come on and so in past SAS companies or I see other SAS entrepreneurs and they they don't realize how much you need to work with the customer when they first come on so their thought is like get a thousand customers on and then use little metrics to like analyze them in the back and never talk to a customer um when you were starting your companies I think I've seen you talk about this a little bit where you have to do a lot of things manually and just work with every single customer how do you how would you onboard your first customers and and understand how they're going to behave and then how would you make sure they get a result because that for exists an example is to give some context my company person comes on and we have an onboarding rep walked them the entire way through until they see a really good result and we're trying to kind of transition it's the point out of that how did you do it at that point and make sure the customer gets it and then want doesn't churn so a couple things and this is this is a great thing especially because in the VC world and the TechCrunch world the idea of spending time with customers is anathema like no no support no no human touch because that comes out of your growth margin and you can scale Yatta Yatta I do believe there's a trap that you could fall into where you become a consulting company and as soon as you're charging for time you're you're either you are a consulting company which is great just just know that and build your business the rest of your business model around that no problem but if your business model is product and yet you're doing that then there's probably a problem because you're you're mismatching your business all your actions but I'm a huge fan of spending time with customers to make them successful and I don't believe in this like mantra like all that time is waste so if you do think that let me at least convince and try to convince you that early on you should do that even if later on you never talk to a customer Burley on you don't know anything so every time you take that every moment you spend with a customer to onboard and understand like you said but you just said for them to see success the hello success mean to them I bet you it means different things to different customers I bet they see that differently they measure that differently they understand that differently for some customers just ticking a box that they bought a thing for a thing might be success and they don't care about the rest okay interesting for some customers they need to see certain metrics even if it's on their side and not even part of your tool laughter that's interesting because what if that's a feature in two years where you're optimizing that and by the way you could search ten times as much if you're optimizing that thing they actually care about then the thing that you started with like that's possible like all these are possible and my point is you won't find out unless you're in the customers head all the time a way to do that early when you have more time than customers is to is to do this with that so think of it as being selfish for yourself number one getting a successful customer it's gonna give you money that's worth more time at in the beginning when you have more time than customers the second thing is this learning about what is valuable and papapapa super just like the cover just like the other conversations we were just saying it's so valuable so just selfishly to figure things out for yourself before you're scaling why wouldn't you avail yourself of this opportunity to get a customer that that stays and gives you money and do those learnings now later if you say I've learned everything I don't need to talk to customers okay fine I would sort of argue that shirt you should evolve like the amount of time you spend and who's spending that time should evolve if you know right now we have about 900 people at WP engine if I'm onboarding customers is probably a problem but learning about onboarding is probably something we should never stop learning about this technology's changed markets changed customers where you tap a new market there's new learning all kinds of things are changing it's pretty it's either arrogant or naive or both to think that like I got it wired now so that's that now I know that's really that's the can't be right in marketing we know that we we ever stop baby testing we found the best headline and that's in your head like the next five years like that's ridiculous like come on so this probably needs to be that somehow and of course sure it can scale it can be delegated and can and certain things should be automated or certain things are just busywork just toil not hoping you learn Roger that so that we might want to turn into a video or automate with a tool or like yes of course but up front you know get all that value in all that learning because that is valuable upfront you have the time for it and when you scale then you can use the then you can use the excuse like you can't physically do that you need different techniques but you know most companies don't get to that point so how about what how about we maximize our chance of getting to the point of having the problem with scale instead of right out of the gate just saying all I have to build for scaling by the way I don't really know what my customers are doing and that's probably makes me dumb if I don't know that yeah so obviously with WP engine I mean setting up WordPress hosting it can be rather complicated I would imagine especially when you guys got first started getting a person to come on not only buy the software but then follow all the steps to get the hosting up and then get the result what we have to do a little bit right now is we have a pretty technical software as well and so we have to kind of prod the user and like Oh have you done this thing have you done this thing right here how what things did you see that allowed you to kind of automate the onboarding process and minimalize your need to contact the customer not from not wanting to talk to them but just you can't really scale it if you're doing everything man yeah yeah yeah so if we go to the scale problem yeah we don't want to lose like one hour coming right now we work really close to the customer but we don't want to lose that that love the customer feels but we also need get to the point where the customer can sign up without talking to anybody and get from point A to point B yeah so that's yeah I try not sitting really obvious things like automatable of you know have checklists and send emails like these these are all the obvious things obvious things work I mean I'm glad these things are always obvious okay well the obvious things are you know number one measure what it is that the customers are doing like why are they keep talking to you where they get stuck what are you having to remind them that you know and categorize them so like so-and-so s so when you're in the scaling part before you're in the scaling part it's all anecdotes anyway this customer did this this customer did that and that's still sufficient for you to realize there's probably a really glaring problem that you can go fix so that's fine that's scale the anecdotes are not as important what you're like no I've got I've got too many things to actually address all these things so I need data I need to be more data-driven to be data-driven I have to have data that means I have to categorize these things so I can't just say like there's there's support tickets or there's chats that's not gonna help me know what to do I'm gonna need to categorize those chats and then I can say oh wow this is what people talk to us about or I get data from my my let's say web portal or something like this whatever you have right and you're like oh here's where people get stuck and by the way there's lots of tools out there for measuring this for you you don't have to write this code this is this there's there's plenty of tools that let you that that um but you see what customers are doing sometimes literally taking a video of what customers are doing so you can see like you know but also they know like oh here's this forum and most people most people get stuck on this part of the forum or spend a lot of time there and by the way here's some videos of people actually getting stuck all these tools exist like full story and there's many of them and so go invest in a cup in one or two maybe even just one see what you can learn from it maybe a second one if you realize there's still a gap right like and that's what I mean by going and getting the data then you can start figuring out okay well now here's where I should invest in automation or if some of this automation like something should happen sometimes it's a problem that actually it takes some weird technical thing to prevent the problem in the first place as opposed to automation on the front end or maybe at automation means sending emails because you really really do need the customer to do it there's nothing you could do about it but you can automate the conversation like sending an email and if you know if if is not done in a day send the email in if you know like again there's tools that do that so you know you used them that that's what automation can look like not all support contacts are necessarily bad I feel like sometimes it's better if the customer has a slight problem but that has a fantastic experience with your company in solving it because then they come away going like oh good like even if it's not totally conscious it's like these people at my back if I run through another problem I think they've got me and and it can be a good experience and on if they have to contact you at 9:00 time to sit I bet smell being on a good but like a little bit of it actually could be long-term retention and if it is it's not necessarily a problem to go optimize away maybe maybe not now of course that's now getting to the art a little bit but the data will not tell you the answer to what I just said I just want to put it in your brain so that as you're analyzing you you know that's art but you could still think like ultimately is this a better experience for the customer a couple of things to think about I'll give you some I'll give you like a little framework also to think about the customers experience this will also maybe help evaluate this data the value of what we done what does it mean for something to be a great user experience an effortless obviously lots of frameworks out there here's a really simple one one is the customer needs visibility what is happening what stage my app what things are not done where things are broken what parts of my plan am I about to hit a limit or can I reduce a plan because I'm so under limit visibility what is happening cus people feel good when they understand what's happening it's it's happy and they don't have to ask you so that's support your kids right and it indicates it like it like sort of indirectly indicates you've automated the data that the customer needs and perhaps that you yourself making for that matter so that's also a good sign so visibility that's that's one step of a great effortless customer experience that goes to these questions of automation okay second one is control I want to do it can I do it I want to do this step of the process am I even capable of doing it are you giving me the ability to do it sometimes control means like there's a button or a page or something in which I can do it and if there's not cuz it's some exception or some and I have to call tech support there's the failure mode you're not letting me do it myself it could be that like I don't have the information to do it myself in other words you need them to do something but your knowledge base articles aren't sufficient or your information isn't sufficient so they can't do it you know like there could be other modes other than a button in your screen that would mean they don't have control but control means I decide what plan I'm on I decide whether this feature is on I decide whether make some sort of trade-off like this makes my thingy faster or sorry this isn't my thing slower but also more secure I decide you know this kind of thing I give permission for this other user to do this thing or not like so so controls that other thing people when people are in control like one of the experiences you hate online is when like you click a button and then just like a revert uh I don't trust this I can't do it I have to call support but I don't I don't believe you know like it's it's so aggravating but so controls another fugitive besides visibility patrols integral and the final one is intuitiveness it could be that the data is there it could be that they have control what if they don't know it so so I don't need to belabor at that point but that goes to both what you would call UX which in an ia information architecture which is like how does it work how is the information organized how is the things work but also even visual and continui with colors words icons you know things like this then the whole package goes to like do I understand do it isn't into it or doing where and again when people feel like I get this it's good you know you can tell when people have like when people switch phones they're like I don't want to do anything I mean surely the Android from can do everything that the iPhone can surely in terms of visibility control it's about the same I get a high level but the intuitiveness oh my god right like that's what's that you know and it's just so devastating right so so yeah there's there's like UI rules here like no support don't know surprise the surprises are probably bad unless they're super gleefully Ben official if it's if if the surprise is because this is how you've always wanted it then that's great otherwise don't suppress it so that you know that's just another way of saying what I'm saying of course so I think that that's an interesting way to think about so if we're talking about a scale then you need frameworks and data to sort of like sift through and figure out what to invest so I think that's interesting framework that puts the customer in the center and asked like what makes it the best for them and not calling support number yeah right but because life is good for that right right like not because there's something you're barrier becomes poor but because life is actually good so I think that's a that's a framework she use to evaluate those things but again you need some tools and data to ask what is really going on because it's too invisible otherwise okay cool that makes a lot of sense nice you said the obvious stuff all that stuff is like I look we need to be doing that transitioning more just for the same time kind of skipping them the middle parts are like the growth part so at your company you said you go to managing about 40 to 50 employees and then you you don't think you're the best CEO or maybe you just want to go to the CTO world because that's where you love to be so my company what I'm also finding a lot of is I'm kind of more marketing in product I saw you talk about I'm like thinking they'll the CEO job is turning into a whole bunch of different things and so my question to you is when you got to about 40 to 50 employees how does the CEO job transition to something how does it change and basically yeah so I think there's these break points in companies growth of course they're not precise of course they there is ranges and so forth but I do think that within the ranges that's pretty accurate and so what what probably a lot of people right now can relate to who is listening is there's this great point around something like 12 or 15 people we're like you it's not possible for everyone to know everything all the time and we need a manager like our first manager the first time someone's not reporting the CEO and that's a big moment right there like nobody wants to not report to the CEO and Founder anymore so that's already not good and and to be did not be in the middle of all the information exchange feels different and so already it's sort of like the beginning of something else from that point on to like you were saying maybe you're gonna could depend on the company I can explain why but 30 50 80 I know that's a big range but like something in this like made hundred like like it like like 50 plus or minus 20 let's say at that moment what's happened is that other than perhaps like a special co-founder or some special person the the CEO only has managers reporting to them maybe even one level deep if it's something like well in this case we have a deeper or again you know tech support so there's a couple layers there's two layers there or in you know engineering is this too late or whatever right like there could something might have went more than one layer and hiring managers to do a thing is extremely different than managing ICS extremely like every instinct you have as a founder and CEO to go decide or go do or micromanage or author instead of edit every one of those instincts which you needed to start the company like if you didn't have that you never got this company off the ground those instincts are all incorrect ok at 30 wrong because your job at 50 people is to build teams mm-hmm and if you can't if if you're not hiring a manager who is better at building that team than you are you have failed as a CEO because it means you are not up levelling the abilities of the company if it's only as good as you then you're not up leveling your talent and not up leveling your talent is a cardinal sin of the CEO one is running out of money right and one is not a constantly up leveling talent there's no other way to grow and it not be a disasterous it's constantly up leveling out some of that may be people within the company are growing awesome that's enough leveling talent also when you're bringing in people of course that has to be up leveling as they come in your problems are harder you also have more money to pay them right the problems are also different like of course you have to up level or your ending job that includes your own area of expertise if you have not hired a let's say director of marketing or whatever who is better at building an a let's say an acquisition funnel then you are even though you're expert at it you've still failed because otherwise what you're saying is my marketing department I still have to run it effectively and as a seat at 10 people you're damn right you do you're the best person to do it you're damn right at 50 you if that's still the case that's a failure mode because you don't have leverage you have an Italian you don't have enough space yourself because at 50 the CEO shouldn't be working on freaking a composition campaigns you have different units to think about like talent on every department and at any given time various various things around fire a product's on fire science on fire HR oh we just an instant we never have HR like that's actually a problem like there's constantly things all around the business they have to think about an AdWords campaign just because you're a marketing expert is certainly a failure mode if those are the problems that you're now faced with if that skill you also have things like you prompt you probably did not have full time HR before 50 but by that but but now it's a problem because there's an incident where people are worried about medical or someone had a baby and everyone goes oh yeah do you get to leave but you're this is this is a matter like what your role is and having that maybe what if you're adopting what if it's like oh my god we're missing HR so so these things there's enough people that there's enough things that happen that you start them you're going oh man and Finance like it's not enough to just do you know QuickBooks anymore you got it like there's things to do oh and and like do you need you know insurance at this point well again a 10 hell no that's not what's gonna kill your company freaking getting sued about something like that's not you're gonna kill yourself at fifty or hundred there's all kinds of things that can happen and actually and round at something like that point again you're probably negligent if you don't have certain kinds of protections like that whereas at ten it's crazy to be spending your money on right like this is way I don't buy things change them and try to you know list some of those very things right so that's where your head SP as a CEO is deterring what that word means in those kinds of ways course if you keep talking about but these are the kinds of ways the board needs to be maturing at that point so for you to still be you know editing a blog post or you're like that's crazy like it you better have hired someone who's even better than you with that stuff so that that continues to grow and get better despite the fact that you can't be you know you know micromanaging and now of course you always have your specialty and that's fine that's of course not what I mean I mean you have to be spending your attention on these new things these different things so your attention can't be on that maybe 20% of your attention can be but it can't be like this thing that you have to drive where else it's not that good that's that means you're not building a great team and that's a cardinal sin of see you so there's more great points because there's the old like after 150 ish you know you don't know everyone's name anymore and so forth so there's like a brick there's some break point also at that scale whether you're virtual in which case you definitely don't know everyone you haven't even seen their faces probably yeah um or its physical you'd like you can't you can't be on one floor you so there's still like a lot of people you don't even see so even if you're in the same building much less different buildings like it's still like a different feeling and of course there's all these studies that shows people that are different floors are communicate just as little as people in different different cities like so even the floor like that it doesn't really matter exactly how the physical thing is the fact is like you run into this physical problem and just because you're online doesn't magically fix that you still also don't know 200 people in slack that's not the case no and so and so again communication changes it's so difficult to just just communicate a simple fact to 200 people it's like almost impossible so you have to do in different ways in different times and then record like it's just basic communication is hard so if that's true how do you communicate strategy how do you align on strategy what about culture how would how do you have culture growing if just communicating like one date to somebody to everyone is hard then how the hell do you communicate culture to everyone which is it's ongoing that's another thing we talk about for a whole hour is culture especially at scale but anyway and so what the hell like that's completely different and so right so so so I think there's these different roughly speaking a break points and that's why like that they they're they naturally occur of course there's been various attempts in the past to say no we'll break that trend by having these things like whole list the holistic lock Rossio whatever that could and of course they've all failed like every single one has failed and so even though probably a lot of people that's calling me to feel like the traditional command and control feels old it feels military it feels disempowering it feels like this can't be the right way and you see various problems with it which are very true and then you like well surely this can't be sure leave the bulb and yet all these other ways seem to fail even when you have super smart people that are completely into it and they cannot make it work it's like well that doesn't mean command control is is good and it doesn't mean that like we shouldn't keep trying different things and certainly there's different ways there's literally the military community control that's that's not an empowering although the military is much more empowering now and it used to be and now it is true that the troops on the ground who are in the thing in a skirmish should decide what to do and like that's that's understood now right so even they're like actually some of these learnings and so she's of course there's different structures but the bottom line is so far we have we as a human race have not have not come up with substantially better things in this day and that doesn't mean you won't come up with a better one but when you're at 8 and you're looking at someone would even 50 much less 500 and like they're dumb they're doing all the stuff we'll never do that don't be so quick do yeah keep the skepticism that's healthy that's healthy don't give up right but but no it's not true that everyone else is dumb that's not true so maybe it's more like okay these things are coming what shall we do to take the edge off or do a little bit better or handle it better rather than like the whole wrist the world's done except us which come on that's not true yeah okay yeah no that makes a ton of sense and I think what you said about if you're not focusing your time building teams you'd fail as he own so like for example my company I'm the best marketer there but I also find myself it's the the job is pulling me way more from you know it was first ten of us all working together just anyone can do any role to the point where I'm like I'm flexing way too much in other roles I'm being dragged in more of a manager of manager direction and said of like product and marketing so I found your transition really interesting and really smart to keep the company fun to work at because that's what I enjoy working on I don't really enjoy like hiring or managing or like creating communication systems I like working on the product and marketing so yeah me too so then you have to have the humility and introspection to say wait a minute I just said I don't like hiring and communication systems and HR and some of these other departments in detail so if I hold on to being the CEO despite having just said but I don't like doing the things that a CEO at 50 needs to do not just do do really well like they like the success of the company depends on that being done well right like if I'm not willing to do that then aren't I putting aren't i hurting the company by being in the position anyway and that's the conclusion I came to it very true right and so but that's hard to say but I don't want to give me somebody else because it's my company and that's very true right and it's hard and then what does everybody else the company think because they're you even see they're thinking the same thing right what if just like we were saying with founders what if it doesn't work out is there a breakup clause LinkedIn is a really good example of they you know the founder Reid Hoffman super famous and blah blah blah super smart all the things then they bring in a professional CEO for all the reasons we just said and it didn't work out but they had the date were able to recognize that they said it didn't work out since either way it brought in a second one and this time it was you know their current CEO and incredible wonderful success marriage made in heaven with the CEO and the successful business just absolutely phenomenal so like great lesson of like okay you're absolutely right it might not go well so how do you set this up so that if it doesn't you can undo this without breaking the company and get to a place where like me with Heather at W engine or like Reid with Jeff at at link then of course I fortunately I didn't have a misstep first but that you could say that was luck it's that again you think you think the LinkedIn board and Reid Hoffman were dumb no of course not like it's possible of a misstep give me a break right like so fortunately we didn't but having that ability to undo without breaking the company's super important for that kind of move okay cool yeah no like I said it all just blows mine so I'm gonna I'm gonna leave it to one more questions just so we can respect the hour so obviously you got that when you got the company to 50 80 employees I think that you're first and I don't know how many smart bear had but like this the first time the company's really reached this right escalation for lack of better words so this is all just brand new territory and I'm and the amount of people that actually reach this point or even get to like five million a or something that's very very tiny so it's kind of just a no-man's land right and even at the point I'm right I'm at right now there's not really too many people there's it's just you're in this no-man's land you have to pick the right and path to go down yes there's no science or anything so how do you guys navigate that how do you decide what the focus on and what to do when there isn't really a clear path no it's well in there so are you asking what we what we do today like what does it look like at some scale at nine hundred people or are you asking that would be super interest looking for 250 150 typical and then nine hundred people like that's both super injuries okay okay um I find that most small companies don't have a strategy and if you don't have a strategy then it's really hard to know what to do and it's really hard to say what to do because there's there's no basis why is there no strategy because when you first start out it by the way me too I didn't have it either I'm not like putting anyone down that's me too okay because when you first start out you don't know anything what are you basing a strategy what data do you have what knowledge of the markets you have what customer information based on what assets do you currently have like these are the things you use to build the strategy and the answer is I don't know anything about the market I don't have any customers I don't really even really have a product I have no I have no advantages I have you know or assets let's say I know ask that's to leverage so what the hell my building stands you about instead you're learning like crazy you're following your nose would be a good way to put it you're just oh okay this is good I'm gonna do this like anything and you should like again I did too like that nothing wrong okay and our current size you know we're hiring say multiple dozens of people a month we project things out a couple of years we we talk about hiring you know we don't let me talk at a high level we talk about hiring numbers of teams as opposed to people you know the entire initiatives that are company-wide and so forth so at that point so you fast forward all the way to there at that point if we're just like we're just following their nose whenever we see a bread can we eat it it's like there's no way that's a good idea there's no way you can align nine other people around back so that means at some point between you know one percent of the company and the phazon like that strategy has to be you do have to invest in a strategy you have to have it so that it can be the guiding way to make decisions like where do we need to invest next is that an engineering as any product is I didn't go to market is that in the net when do we build the next product versus the appropriate now do we expand who we're attacking what what is it whatever what is the competitive intelligence and what is their strategy these of the our competitors these are all the kinds of questions you answer in a strategy that's at the beginning you can't answer those who don't have the raw materials at some point it's again you might say it's negligent to not have it and of course you're adrift I don't know what to do and people aren't aligned and it's you're not clear on what's important which means you can't prioritize and so on so at some point you have to build it now where's that point actually I'm not sure I would bet it varies by company I bet there's companies where at my 10 people it's actually actually you do have enough information to do it and it's kind of time so you have the North Star and there might be other companies just in the nature or the product or how how fast you're growing like we were growing so fast at say 10 to even a hundred let's say 10 to 50 people but like we didn't need a formal strategy like it was so hard to keep up with the demand which of course is the best possible problem it's like oh my god just just try to get ahead of this in terms of product in terms of hiring in terms of support in terms of technology so like it's okay like Jessica Jessica so like we we maybe didn't need a formal one till we had a couple hundred people and and that was okay it would have been better if we had one before yes it would have been better but we could kind of get away with it but you could say at 10 you need it and you could easily argue at 10 we should have had one and various things would have gone better had we had one like you could easily make the argument so that's what I'm saying i'm not i'm not quite sure it might be kind of company dependent win you need to do it but know that maybe that's not a sense yeah sorry yeah so that's the thing our company having a strategy then then you can make this decision the problem with his thing strategy is is people don't understand what a strategy is like people say things like our strategy is to grow 2x this year that is an outcome not a strategy right so when I thought strategy is this it is first of all a really sober collection and then analysis and I gestation of facts these are the facts for customers these are the facts of the market these are the what's happening with our competitors this is what's going on with is our market commoditizing is it expanding is it consolidating you can use things like the porter five forces thing and go through every one of those bullets those are it's a beautiful framework even though it's 50 years old in fact that's part of why it's so good answer those frickin questions about stuff and be super honest Reagan has a great quote see and don't be afraid to see what you see really as objectively as you can here's the good bad and the ugly so it is good because some of its opportunity oh my god this mark this part of records explain like crazy it's nothing but opportunity some of it is scary we are not doing this or our customers are leaving us because of that so the from customers leaving the data from support tickets like we were talking about stuff the surveys you could do the NPS data that you might do it against your customers and what they say when they fill in the blank surveys you can do people who are not customers that would be interesting to see ok so there's lots of places to go get data some his objectives I'm a subjective but anyway you go collect both the objective is subjective and you try to analyze it down the last time we did this and I ran this process by the way myself which is with this framework them I'm now kind of your lading it was a hundred page document of references and drew graphs and all with the kinds of things I'm talking about of course again this is at scale so of course it doesn't the under pages but you get the idea to say what the hell is going on we need to shared the whole company it's a shared understanding of the truth so that all of us can reason about it right and and that it's very easy to deceive ourselves well we're the best at this are you sure where the markets doing that are you sure all right it's really easy so it's really important to do that there's no judgment oh marketing so bad because blah blah hell no absolutely no judgment this is we have to get a shared understanding of the truth or we can't make the best choices so that's like this collection announced space then from that you have to analyze what are like if you're small I would say one at our size we still only have four key challenges the key things that facing us that we have to address and if we address this pretty much everything else you do doesn't matter if we kick ass at this one thing and and it's a problem and opportunity typically in other words the problem is we have these headwinds from these competitors or whatever doing XYZ but the opportunity is the you know what happens if we solve that as we grow like crazy because this is our biggest growth opportunity or whatever or another example might be a challenges we try to be everything to everyone and and so the output the opportunity and so the we have to focus and the risk of course is we're wrong or we shrink but the opportunity is if we're if we're killer there we could 10x the company even hundred x the company because because this is the best one to go to how did we know that because that analysis I just said that's why we know this is actually the best ok so the challenges can come in lots of different an opportunity forms and just the basic SWOT is not what I'm talking about although it is true that you want to take take stock of these are our assets we should leverage and lean into these are our weaknesses that we should avoid because trying to do that like we're just not going to be that good news or competitors are doing that doesn't mean we should or shouldn't do it it should just be part of our analysis of what's the right thing okay so that all goes into this what is the fundamental challenge really articulated and referencing the data that prevents you from these wishy-washy things challenges we're not growing fast enough that's not the challenge that's not within saying nothing no specifically the market the people the competitors that the motions the trends the data that's that's what I'm talking about right for us we still only have four right like so just a few us of one two three four maybe something like that of these things that are the critical things then finally the part strategy is what are the coordinated actions that the whole company's going to take finance marketing product and engineering etc what are we all good support what are the coordinated things we're all going to do to meet this challenge you get this opportunity all of us and those now and by the way how fun to invite the whole company in this whole process is it because you know no one person thinks of all the good ideas there was a little good answers to this all the more reason to have that alignment on what's true and then have the alignment on what the key challenge is so that everyone's empowered and able able to it to have those ideas because they're so they're so clued in on what the challenge is to go solve now everyone is really empowered to go solve it together and of course there's a leader your job is to arrive at everyone's ideas obviously but you have to Rive but you know the actual work and the priorities and stuff like that and make sure that's lying but now if you have that now that's a lot of stuff I just said I know but I was also very specific about how to build right there's no no was she watching this year if you have that hopefully it's clear like well that's what it means have a strategy to know why you're doing it and then now the question is like so who do we hire what are we doing oh my god now you it's still not trivial to figure out what to do I'm not saying that at all but at least you have this framework now to say now we know what's important what is now we know whether a some proposal can I hire these two engineers to do X now I have a theme to hold that up to and ask is this the best way to attack this thing and now you're having that conversation you're having it with your other people at the company too that you're arriving at it together your line that's great so can you afford to take all the time to do it now I don't know again I sort of figure it out there I don't really know when when is the best time and of course you're gonna refresh the strategies aren't aren't fixed you're gonna refresh all this stuff over time anyway so maybe you do a simple version in a month and then maybe a year from now you do a more complex version three years from now you a big one I don't know very like that's probably all reasonable ideas but I know we just went on and on about it but I feel really strongly that people don't know what a strategy is they certainly don't have one and these questions this life the ones who just asked what do we do now like yeah do get a strategy and then you have a litmus test for what what are the reasonable things to do next and I think I know I went on and on but hopefully that was hopefully the detail was helpful in really painting a picture of like how to go do this well no it wasn't on and on it gave a very clear process and so yeah but my company right now we're growing really really quickly at the point we're like we're trying to keep up with the man but at the same time you know that's a clear way to actually you're in no-man's land but you can kind of paint where the mountains are and where the hills are and where the lakes are metaphorically yeah so yeah that's um incredibly helpful I want to respect our because I know your time is very valuable so I'll let you go but I just wanted to thank you so much for coming on and you know everyone check out WP engine it's a very cool company there's something I have special for you guys after the video ends but um yeah so that's it great thank you appreciate it what's awesome oh and that's all there is to it guys I hope you enjoyed the interview could you please go in the comments section and just leave a big thank you for Jason at times very valuable of course and like I said before if you do go sign up for WP engine for your WordPress hosting which is pretty much what I built all my websites on much faster much more secure and if you go check it out and put your hosting on it and you've sent us a receipt to WP engine at high roast com well fire back with an email deliver you almost two thousand dollars of course is about 48 hours and training on how I do my email marketing my my copywriting my sales techniques and it's basically everything you need to know marketing wise to start a business so that being said guys be sure to LIKE subscribe hit notification bell if you like interviews like this you get notified when we put them out on top of that when you're de liked and subscribed and hit the notification bell I do make post on YouTube they give away lots of other courses as well for free but I only leave them up for about two hours so if you want to see those she may be like subscribe and hit done of cash bail until next time guys um I don't have anything else to say I'm just happy with how the interview went and I'll see you well you know the next time I see you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Alex Becker's Channel

Views: 58,176

Rating: 4.9483366 out of 5

Keywords: alex becker, jason cohen, start ups, saas, entrepreneurship, marketing, business, wp engine

Id: MWXBWLTcmn4

Length: 70min 33sec (4233 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020