Joe Howard (@josephhhoward) is the founder of WP Buffs, a productized service business in the WordPress space that he bootstrapped from $0 to over $70,000/month in revenue. We had a quick chat about how Joe launched his business and found a paying customer in just a few days, how to make more money by raising your prices, and why it's important to keep things simple as a founder.
Joe Howard, welcome to the Indie Hackers podcast.
Courtland, thanks for much for having me, man. It’s a pleasure.
You are the founder of a company called W.P. Buffs. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what that is and why people use it?
Sure. W.P. Buffs, as people can probably tell by the W.P. in the name, we manage word press websites so we help small business owners, entrepreneurs with security, speed optimization, updates, ongoing edits for their website, 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 word press 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 word press sites while also making a little bit of recurring revenue themselves. So, 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. That’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, service is the support area of word press. 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 kind of step in and shine.
The hardest part probably of what we do is just the fact that it’s 24/7. I mean you should see our slack. It’s people logging in, people logging out all the time. People working 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 kind of 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 product-tied service like ours – because at the core we’re really just a services company. We provide support for people and their word press sites. But we’ve kind of used the business model of a more SAS based company which is why I’m such a big fan of Indie Hackers. I learn so much just being in here learning from everybody else doing these SAS businesses when we have this kind of SAS-based pricing.
But yeah, the strength of what we do really comes from the fact that it’s a product-tied service and we really have to systemize everything and get pretty fine-tuned so that we can just be as efficient as possible with our care plans is what we call them.
So 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 hundreds of tickets coming in a day. We’ve got to finish those up. We’ve got to make those updates for our client base. But at the core of what we do, we always want to improve everyday as well.
So, we have a lot of systems in place so that people are able to get the work done but we always want to kind of have our team be able to take a step back and really say like, oh, where are the places where we really need to improve our systems based on issues we’re seeing among significant portion of our customer base? So, yeah, a little bit of both.
I am in Seattle right now and on my flight here I sat here 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 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, the most of our requests that come in are edits people want to make to their sites. They want to update some content. They need to add some functionalist 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, Courtland. 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 try to – I get mad when I go to the doctor and I ask, hey, I’d like to do kind of a blood test. I kind of want to see how healthy I am in terms of all my markers. And they told me well insurance doesn’t cover this because you’re not sick, so you’d kind of have to pay out of pocket for that.
I was kind of like pissed. I was like, what? 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 can avoid issues and technical issues with their websites altogether.
Let’s figure out to maximize and optimize uptime for your site so that it never goes down. You never have to email us and say, oh, you know, 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 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 word press ecosystem is enormous. There are like many millions of people with word press 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. It’s a pretty good business niche to be in.
I think one of the coolest things about your particular story is that 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 productive tied service business maybe the fact that you have a huge market and the business model is pretty obviously. You don’t have to innovate a lot. How do you think you’re able to launch something and start generating revenue so quickly?
If people want to kind of go onto indiehackers.com, W.P. Buffs is up there and we published our founder story. I think it was like two years ago now.
Yeah, it was a long time ago.
Yeah, it was. 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 – I get a lot of questions about this is that we kind of launched W.P. Buffs – I think I built the website like over a weekend. I pasted – I copied and pasted some PayPal buttons up there and I started writing a little bit of content.
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 we – I started at W.P. Buffs, I was posting answers on Quora [ph] so I was kind of running around the word press area and was 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. I had set up zero of the operations of W.P. Buffs yet. So, someone had paid us and I had to figure out okay, how are we doing back-ups? 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 you build the plane while it’s running down the runway to take off or whatever that expression people have heard. But it was definitely, definitely like that. So, yeah, the biggest way today we get customers is really through 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 word press space and people find us, join us email list, maybe download an e-book, maybe they’ll check out one of our webinars and then if they show interest in what we do, then it will get funneled in the hub spot 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 SCO 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 at 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 you know, 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 word press space, you’re part of the word press community, you know there are a lot of companies out there that do similar work to what we do. A monthly subscription, you can support with your word press website.
And you’re right, Courtland, a lot of people think you have to have this totally innovative idea and a year later you’re a billionaire and you’re like wow, that was so easy.
But I’ve 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 is – to me, is really everything. At this point, we’re one of the leaders in the word press 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 kid 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 have to do much like 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 – that’s – 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 I mean the people actually want …
Yeah, analysis paralysis is a killer. Courtland Allen [00:10:37] Yeah, you don’t want to spend all your time trying to figure out what to do. You want to just figure out what 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 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 an early employee or anybody who works at a start-up or honestly, like, you know, 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 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 Indie Hackers and reading the website.
One of the things that I’ve found is that a lot of people know this stuff. They’ve read about this stuff and heard about it, but then they became founders and just ignore it. It all goes out the window. It’s really heard to remember 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 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 and do 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 read up on hiring. So, I have to like buy like five books on hiring and read everything there is about hiring so I cannot 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 really solid advice here except – I don’t know, I think it’s a good idea to keep a written journal.
I always have 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 ashamed or embarrassed by them but just kind of being open and saying how can I improve and you continue that conversation. 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? And you’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 very – 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 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 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.
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 outside gains because they have these really good habits of s haring their work in public and asking others for help and working on their thing every day, just sort of helping them “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. 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. Yeah, we got an Indie Hackers page up and 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 up 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 a peek into how we’re doing. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy thinking back two years and where we were two years ago. We just – in May – had a $68K month.
Wow.
We’ve taken steps from where we were a couple of years ago and this is kind of Stripe revenue. You could add – I don’t know – 5, 10% for PayPal revenue coming into – it isn’t really reflected here, but our goal this year was to try and reach $1 million annual revenue. Our MRR.
We’re kind of on our way to get there. So, yeah, we’re pretty excited. I kind of almost – I look at this and I almost can’t believe it. It’s kind of like I kind of have to pinch myself. 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 form your eyes back then because you kind of realize how far you’ve come and it kind of hits you whereas in the present in your current day-to-day, it’s harder to really appreciate your growth and how far you’re coming because the changes are 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 or 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 in the Indie Hackers community, are starting to think 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 okay, this is picking up momentum. I can potentially start thinking about going full-time on this.
The difference between $10 to $15K MRR and honestly, that $68 or $70K a month we had where we kind of talked about this a little already, but it wasn’t this hugely innovative idea or concept. It was, you know, we really just had a good plan, 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 a business is. You’re going to hit challenges. Everyone hits challenges. The successful people just kind of end up figuring out how to overcome those challenges and people can look at our revenue growth on Indie Hackers.
It’s not – we didn’t shoot up. We 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 W.P. Buffs and it says executed major price increase.
And it says you increased pricing for your care plan earlier this year but recently you’ve also increased prices for your previous 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 kind of pulled the trigger on this. Like are you sure if I increase my prices by 25, 30% for all my existing, they’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 kind of creating a lot of headaches in account management stuff. Like 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 kind of 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 of reply and resolution time for our tickets and our desk and that’s really – we’ve done really well there.
So, yeah, I think that that justified 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 previously grandfathered-in customers. Yeah, it’s really interesting to see the graphs.
Maybe I’ll tweet something out when this episode goes live or something but yeah, it’s – we did two price increases, one for direct customers and one for kind of our agency white-labeled partners, both you can see – within the two or three days of actually executing the price increase – you could 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, increase pricing – got a few complaints here and there but that’s going to happen when you raise prices. 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 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 works out three, four months in advance. But for now, it seems like a win.
Yeah, it sounds like a win and my heart is warmed every time I hear a story of an indie hacker founder 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. 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, start-up, 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 to a specialized niche, having better customer support and things like that.
Yeah, I mean I think that’s 100% right. 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, they can kind of report on how many users they got this month and so – or that quarter – and then their stock price goes up and so they’ve made money kind of 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, you know, think about how hard it is when you have 1,000 or 2,000 employees. Then it’s really hard to make big changes.
So, 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. It took me a little while to get into it. So I understand people are at different stages of their business. But think about price increase in terms of what more value can you add?
If you can more value you can raise your prices, you know? 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 would 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 like 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 is listening.
There’s a quote – I don’t know who it’s from. It might be Charlie Munger. It might be Warren Buffet or somebody else. 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’ve got to really be talking with your customers.
I mean, 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, than they’re not going to want to pay more. But you have to know what they want. So, yeah, I think, I couldn’t have said it better myself there.
Another one of the milestones that you posted to your page on Indie Hackers 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 W.P. Buffs and how is it going?
So, if people also are like podcasters want to do podcast stuff. Courtland, you just started the first group in Indie Hackers which is the podcasting group.
Yeah.
So, I’d urge people to go and check that out. I’m in there kind of asking questions and I also have to thank you, Courtland, 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 Indie Hackers podcast. So, I appreciate that.
Shout out to Bradley.
Shout out, Bradly. Nice work, buddy. Okay, so, W.P. Buffs – kind of people have heard what we do. We manage word press websites. We do this ongoing subscription, pretty simply business model.
We found that a lot of the white label partners we were talking – 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 and talking with our audience, we said okay, maybe instead of this outsource solution, people may want to do it themselves, so we put together WPMRR – the WP is for Word Press. The MRR is monthly recurring revenue. So, WPMRR was born.
It’s a video course all around pretty much open sources, everything we do at W.P. 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 word press and different tool in focus in on monthly recurring revenue and building a sustainable business and have your work work around your life, and not the other way around, not have your life work around your work.
So, I asked – Christy [ph] is a good friend of mine. She wanted to start the WPMRR word press 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 word camp talks. Word camps are these conferences for word press people that they go to these care talks about word press 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 W.P. Buffs. It’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 SCO in terms of affecting your business and affecting 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 W.P. Buffs and the webinars we do for W.P. Buffs at this point.
We’ve just been doing stuff at W.P. 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 at this point where we just kind of do it for fun. It has started to bear fruit. We do hear from people who come to W.P. Buffs and are like oh, I heard your podcast or people buy the course at WPMRR because they’re podcast listeners and they may get a little discount code on the podcast.
So, it’s started to turn into a little bit of a financial ROI but we pay Bradley, the guy who edits our podcast – like his payment comes really from W.P. Buffs. W.P. Buffs makes the revenue that powers the podcast.
So, it’s not – we don’t really have any plans to do any sponsorships or anything like that. Honestly, for me, doing the podcasts – 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, right?
You can blog and you can write. When you do that and you click publish, you really reviewed the 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 there’s a lot of value in that as well because you’re not hearing my filtered voice. You’re haring 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 in podcasts, 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 in the few of the things I’ve said.
But, yeah, podcast has been great for that and we don’t really have plans to do sponsorships or anything like that or do anything 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 word press community.
Well, it’s called the WPMRR Word Press podcast. I recommend you go check it out if you’re in the word press space. I 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 it’s supposed to be quick and we are now over 30 minutes. I’ve got so much more I want to talk to you about that how you have sort of got your content engines spun up at W.P. Buffs and also maybe in the future, I’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 W.P. 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. Wpbuffs.com is everything W.P. Buffs. WPMRR .com is everything monthly recurring revenue around word press. The podcast is there on WPMRR as well, so you can go check it out or on 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 @josephhhoward. 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 questions or any comments or anything about anything I said, whether you agree or disagree, I’d love to chat about it.
Alright, thanks, Joe.
Thanks, Courtland.
Quick note for listeners—if you’re interested in coming onto the podcast like Joe to have a quick chat with me, go to indiehackers.com/milestones and post a milestone about what you’re working on. It could be pretty much anything. People post milestones about launching or finding their first customer. They post about growing their mailing list or hitting 1,000 followers on Twitter. They’ve 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 indiehackers.com/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 indiehackers.com/milestones. I’m looking forward to seeing what you post.
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Thanks for sharing, I like this episode. It is one of my favorite episodes.
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Thanks, Mervin. Onward and upward!
Awesome, Naya! See you in the podcast group :)
My Main Takeaways:
Awesome! Keep rocking it Joe. 💪