From Idea to 7 Figures in Two Years: The Story of Woothemes – Adii Pienaar – MicroConf 2012

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0:09so I've got CC my jokes I think the first thing is that Rob calls me an anchor probably because I'm a big guy and I think I can weigh things down if I act in certain ways the second thing is I since yesterday with this whole putting a baby in your slides thing I've been deliberating what to do about this right and I and I go between do I put it in I try and make a joke about it and it doesn't work or do I just leave it out and you know pretend to be ignorant and if I can now divert your attention to the back I've actually bought physical

0:46proof that I'm not a virgin because my

0:54so that just kind of happened there was a organic kind of thing that popped in my area a half an hour ago and while I effects you said so yeah so as Rob mentioned I'm here from South Africa my wife and I spent 31 hours in transit flying from Cape Town with a five month old baby it is actually if I can fit fine never do it in your life if you can't avoid that you know try and do that so so onto the talk I can tell you this about myself I am I'm always in awe when I speak to people or the caliber like my micro speakers and I listen to

1:32them just dissecting a very specific skill and I find myself like feeling overwhelmed because I've never been that guy I can't pinpoint one skill that I've applied in my whole startup journey that I would feel that I'm the expert on that I feel that I'd be able to write a book on but all I'm really good at is I'm good at telling story and I know that this is kind of the second day and I know my hair is you know spinning in so many different directions due to all the valuable stuff that's been said so what I'm going to try and do is I'm gonna try

2:09and tell you story about his thoughts up from South Africa and just how we did things differently and hopefully you will kind of find some inspiration in that so when when I greet speak here Rob suggested that I title the talk is being from zero to seven figures in in two years and then I was very blessed and privileged to actually you know when I did the math yesterday to do the title slide I found out that was thirteen months so and I can tell you I've never been the kind of guy to use revenues as a way to prove significance but I guess that you know it underlines partly what

2:52you know what we've done just to give you an idea where we are now we approximately four four years old now we've got a team of twenty two and we have exceeded 200,000 users and that's actually old slide since I've already mentioned revenue but we're still growing and that's the important thing I think for us is that we are Henderson bootstrap and we've never taken any funding which has worked out really well for us and in a couple of ways that is the thirteen months that I just mentioned I won't go into that too much just yet I just wanted to show that as well and before I go into all that I

3:34want to tell you a little story of a hack so when I initially planned this talk is you know I nobody planned it out as kinda this is a significance we did X amount of revenue in thirteen months whatever and this is what we learned from that and then I hope that you kind of feel that my lessons will help you do the same kind of thing right and then as I was doing my slides yesterday I realized that we recently experienced something that almost underlined anything and everything that I wanted to tell you guys today so I want to tell you the story last Tuesday evening

4:16so that's GMT +2 about 10:00 to 11:00 we were hacked and I was blissfully unaware of this I was planning to fly out to the States the next day so my wife and I were probably having a glass of red wine and we were in bed you know relatively early and I wake up to the shitstorm in the morning which basically goes something like this I see the site's been down for about eight hours I see that one of our you know junior support guys actually did log a ticket without a hosting provider they didn't resolve the query in eight hours so I wake up I'm really frustrated

4:55I escalated to you know our context that the hosting company within about half an hour things turn from well you guys aren't down to on just down to guys there's nothing on the server and basically what happened is someone had hacked the server gotten root access and they deleted everything files DB's everything so generally like and this was my this was my no first reaction was well that's okay we've got backups so then the hosting guys tell us tell me no you guys had our sync backups but they were using push technology so the server credentials were on the VPS that you were hosted on so the guys were very

5:41malicious and diligent they found that you know those credentials first so they deletes your backups as well so now I'm going yeah I wouldn't do it my sons in the back and and they they tell us that well guys you have a backup from 13 March and that's so it's about six weeks of data loss that we are you know talking about and just a funny story about the 13 March backup is that the only reason we had that backup was due to a mistake that the hosting company made on 13 March we're there to move us to different VPS and so he duplicated it and they never delete that old one

6:27meaning there was no logical reason for us to actually have that backup but what this did is it underlined how fragile our business really was that I can in terms of my personal finances I I can do planning and I can say well if my company kind of reaches the end of its lifespan I will likely see it coming like six to twelve months in that moment and this is what I've realized since we almost lost everything we talking about four years two hundred plus thousand users no way of recovering that so that's the context that's the severity the significance of this hack and then to link this to the

7:13kind of lessons that I want to share is what I've seen since in the week meaning I had to get on a plane and be out of touch with my company for about 30 hours at the same time one of my co-founders was already on her and on holiday in Portugal and our third co-founder just had a new baby and the baby's 3 weeks old so we were timing was really [ __ ] right but what we've seen was that we we will come out stronger and better than we were before due to a few things and those are the things that I want to share with you those are the things

7:53prior to me realizing this that I thought well those things led to us being really profitable but see this is the kind of worst case noise those are the things that are keeping us alive now and that's what I want to share to you you know with you today so I think that is one of the things that has helped us most right so if you have ever been in Africa you will realize that everything new reaches us like 12 months later so this is best evidence if I want the new iPhone I either need to fly somewhere else in the world or I need to wait six

8:32months so with you know no there's no tech bubbles in Africa for example due to all of this you know we don't yet understand these things but what happened is when I started the company well I did the first product that led into and me meeting my co-founders and we started to come to get together but when we started the company we understood obviously I mean I was I was a business student at vast he saw obviously knew what venture-capital was but I never thought that it applied to me so I didn't even think bootstrapping applied to me we just kind of did this thing and

9:10I think what has been great with that kind of ignorance is bliss statement is we managed to just do something without necessarily having to follow trends I think for example there's a big focus these days or I think it's trendy to raise you know funding it's trendy to raise money it's training to get onto TechCrunch and as a result and I'm not saying that's wrong but it is trendy at least and I think it's very easy to kind of be a sheep and just just follow into that and because of that a nine sir it almost feels like we were trying to build a company against the lords who

9:48would back you know a company from that's the worst thought sir and in k-town South Africa to make it as an international company and I consider all the things we were kind of up against in hindsight now and I realize that the odds were stacked against us one of the things one of the things that I found most challenging being in South Africa is we don't have any kind of mentorship network to do these kind of things I'm not the most intelligent you know person in this room unfortunately if I replicate this room with local people I will likely be one of the most intelligent people meaning I never had

10:29that help but start you know do a start-up and you know San Francisco and that changes right so there's all those kind of odds you know that's that's the one I don't even want to go into payment processing if you're not us-based it's an absolute nightmare finding proper payment gateway that has a proper API and and whatnot so those are all the odds that kind of stacked against there so with that said there was no kind of best practice you know formula or manual for us to follow we simply had to do things differently and I think what what's important is so much of what we

11:06did was just a result of our circumstances or situations at the time it wasn't like we that state decided well we're going to be different about this whole thing it just kind of happened we were so forced into that that that's what we needed to do it wasn't conscious decision to actually be different so these I've got ten lessons by the way so I'm looking number number every one of them I think that's been the biggest thing from years we we started the company and from the day from day one we were aiming to be international company to this day I would have bet that about ninety percent

11:51of our users don't know that we are from South Africa and yes we have a global team now and we have people I think in eight or nine countries now with only about 40 percent of the team in in in Cape Town South Africa but the core of it is it is in Cape Town and I think what's important there is it doesn't matter where you are from we have all the these examples of great companies online it is easy to to put out a design that's on par with international let's call it international standards alright there's no excuse to be [ __ ] like a good

12:29line of code is good line of code doesn't matter where you come from same with a bad line of code similarly a web 2.0 gradient stays with 2.0 gradient with you from SF or from you know wherever else and that's important I think people you know look at that and they see well you know I can't do this because I'm not an SF and that isn't true I think you can really do anything you just need to put your mind to it and I think with the internet it's just completely democratized and I think many of you have probably experienced that already you know from a smaller town you

13:04can still get things done there this is an interesting thing so when when we started the company we my co-founders and I we it took us 16 months from the very first day that we started working together for the three of us to be in one room together sixteen months before we met in person during that time we didn't like we were all a little bit younger and like our voices didn't break yet so we didn't even do Skype voice calls right it was all I am and you know base camp and and emails and we did that and we were at that stage I was the only one in South

13:46Africa I had my co-founders were in the UK and Norway respectively and we were using a company that I registered incorporated there and I was the only Sheldon so they were I treated them as equal shoulders and everything from obviously the management of the company to the financials and whatnot but I was the only one that had any kind of official claim to the company and they just trusted me and we built this company built you know on this trust and to this day and and this has been this has probably been one of my biggest lessons in the last week is I had two hours to spend with the team to put our

14:28emergency plan into process before I had to get on a plane last Wednesday two hours two hours that I needed to spend in such a way that I would feel comfortable knowing that they would execute on that knowing that that was for you know for if it was the most challenging kind of situation for me as someone that's done this for four years most of them because of the way we hired weren't you know well haven't been with us for more than three years it would be even more challenging for them I had to trust them and I think that helped the fact that we were that fact that I was

15:11from South Africa the fact that we were scattered the fact that we were working remotely meant that we had to trust in the people it wasn't just I didn't need to trust in the dev I need to trust in Jeff or in Warren and that is important nity I really believe that the team makes you know makes the company in the end the people behind it make the products and the services and again just kind of a result or consequence of the way we were set up any new startup that I do I will actively focus on this building trust building relationships from day one so I mentioned it a little

15:55earlier our very first product is I did the very first part of myself which basically meant and for the more technically minded amongst you you will offer this so what I did back then I'm very much a hacker in terms of my programming skills meaning I kind of get the lot new logic behind programming but I'm lazy meaning what I try to do at that stage was I try to take as many scripts as possible and put it into one word pristine because nobody else was doing that I realized while I was doing that why no one else doing it so I made the the it

16:36was a period of about three days that I just come across jQuery and I just come across new tools and they were doing all these flashy stuff in terms of effects and hour that's going to be amazing so what I do is I integrate the jQuery script and I see okay it's working at sass fantastic people and love this and then I go and I integrate the mood tool script and I see well something has broken the site now so I take new tools up and I see okay it's working in so okay so I kind of realized that the problem is mutants so I take out the

17:09jQuery and I put the mood tools in and it works like okay this is weird and I put the jQuery back in and then holds hard breaks him and it took me three days to realize that these two would just conflict and would just never work unless they kind of you know wrote a elaborate workaround so that is the kind of skills that I have in terms of design and dev but well I mean when I say DIY everything is those those early days I think we it was about eight or nine months since when we started the company to our first hire so those first few

17:50months the company was a combination of the skills of the three co-founders we did everything ourselves if we didn't know how to do it we either had to kind of outsource it which has its own challenges or we just didn't do it which is what happened in most cases because we were stingy as hell back then we weren't gonna pay anyone else money and that kind of meant that to this day I probably understand the challenges of the team individuals on the team in a very different way than I would have if we didn't do that and then when I started thinking about this in terms of

18:32so when I when I speak purely about bootstrapping this is kind of one of the things that stands out for me is we managed to save money because we let me did everything ourselves and I think especially with you know doesn't matter what kind of methodology you follow it it's absolutely critical if you do a v1 MVP of your of your next students thoughts just do it yourself if I'm looking at the point now if if you're a non technical co-founder you probably better off to teach yourself rails or PHP whatever when you want to do and just get v1 out there yourself you will understand the business in a whole

19:11different way going forward you don't have to do that for there still lives I haven't touched the line of code in about three years because we eventually hired people that were much better at that than I am but initially it made all the difference and just giving me that kind of intimate knowledge of the Challenger that we would you know we're facing then and would end up facing going forward I loved an story yesterday about you will succeed when you want that as you know as badly as you as you need a you know bit of fresh air and I know this for myself and this actually I kind of

19:51being a bit of a hypocrite in how I feel now because I had my prior to having a baby I was proud of doing that and now that's kind of changed because I realized that I compromised and everything else my life to do that so I'm still yet to figure out that kind of I don't even call it balance because I hate the word but that is what it comes down to and I think you know going back there to to my voice here so my wife tells me the story we we met in adversity and both of us were in long-term relationships at the time

20:29actually and she tells me that she remembers because I her ex was my roommate just to give you context and she can yeah so it's thinking school so she's I don't know how I went there so she tells me the story that she can remember that every single time she would come to visit him I would be in our little lounge watching some kind of series HOF watching series but I have a glass of red wine or gospel whiskey and I'd be working away that's the only thing I did and I remember my final year adversity that's literally what I did is I went to class in the morning I would

21:12come back home and I would work away at whatever it was at the time and then I would be cheap and I'd get drunk at home and then I go to bed and I kind of you know rinse and repeat the next day but that was my ethos back then I to this day I believe that because I was willing to work hard and compromise and some other things that my friends felt were important hence why they didn't work I thought I am where I am today and I I can't emphasize like you will never get anywhere unless you work hard doesn't matter how good you are we know

21:50you all know that the idea is they're exhibitors first way does says the idea is only a multiplier of they execute your execution or other way around rights but that's just hard work more than half of execution is just the hard work I just knew sticking at it because I'm not the best at what I do as I said there's so many guys that are much better at this I was just willing to put in hours to make up for that if there was any ever anything that I would claim to be close to an expert in and this is something I'm incredibly passionate about is branding so I spoke

22:31to some people yesterday and they asked me whether I was going to mention this and I said I'm actually embarrassed to do it but I'll ask you guys so how many of you know me as or someone like me that was ever called ad Rockstar yes okay there's a couple of hands so when I am when I started getting into the WordPress space and there was prior to booth eames I had a blog and I eventually came to a point where I used the kind of the moniker ad WordPress Rockstar so WordPress rockzo is a kind of tagline and the reason that kind of happened was

23:08because my name is actually Afrikaans which some is Dutch and I can't even pronounce it properly in English so I needed to figure out a way of being more English and then I got to a point where I didn't just want to be about WordPress I wanted to just be more general kind of entrepreneur guy so I shortened and I just called myself any Rockstar and back then if I would speak at a conference I wouldn't go by ATP know I would be 80 Rockstar and people would either either love that alright and they say oh this is such a cool thing 80 is a rock star

23:38or they would actually hate in there what the [ __ ] is going about and what that did for me though is it helped me stand out from the crowd and the reason I say I'm kind of embarrassed about it is I I would never necessarily do it again I think is a bit pompous and whatever but it helped me understand branding it helped me understand that I could create something that people could associate with and this is when we had the down time in the last week with whoo themes this is the one thing that I feel stood out people the reason our users were as patient and supportive of our

24:16effort to get back online our effort to recover some of the data that we lost was because they understood the brand they understood the values that we associate with they understood the people that built that brand and furthermore the reason I love it is branding for me is because it's free right because branding should never be an exercise it should always be kind of a byproduct of what you're really doing it should be a byproduct of of tweeting you know helping someone that is how you build a brand a branding isn't about you know being well-designed or having a mascot or anything like that it's about

24:53how for me it's about what you actually are and what you actually do right so if it's a byproduct and it's free it fits in perfectly with bootstrapping and I think this is one of the main things there's two things the that that helped us in this but there's one of the main things that helped us kind of limit our marketing spend and to this very day we spitballing here we spend less than 1% of our revenue on advertising because we don't need to do that because the brand speaks for itself the brand is inherently viral in terms of that and that's the second thing I think I think

25:35from day one we've had and we've knit so I'll say this when I read delivering happiness from Tony Hsieh it kind of shifted my world again about how I see customer service but from day one we try to give our users the best potential or possible experience they could whether that was from pre-sales to actually providing technical support and you know this along with the branding because as I just said the branding being an extension or you know of what you actually do customer service is one of those things that most users likely need and I see so I still do email support when I have the time and unfortunately I

26:18don't have as much time anymore but I love getting into the trenches because every single time a user emails me with a problem it is a marketing opportunity they are essentially giving me permission to sell my company to them and not enough spammy kind of salesperson way but it's about reinforcing that brand if they have a problem and I resolve it in the way that they would like then they leave with a better impression I always believed that you know with take restaurants fights a restaurant can [ __ ] up my food and I would be livid but if they manage to fix it the way in which

26:58they fix it would be my lasting impression and that's what I would end up judging them on it wouldn't be about the earlier mistake and that's how I feel you know about customer service online it literally is every single time you know someone opens a ticket it is a way to market to them it's a way of reinforcing their brand reinforcing the values being human I think for me as I don't know how many companies that I've got no stats on this I noticed that so about two years ago I started signing off on customer emails by including my title as co-founder so we don't actually

27:35have titles we don't have a CEO whatever as co-founders we just co-founders and but I started signing off as ad co-founder and the reaction I had that to that was immense I'd get so many emails back from people saying ad this is fantastic that you as co-founder of this company are actually still responding to to my email and I think the users felt special and yes that is probably more significant because I was co-founder but for me that just underline that kind of value that you can get if you do that right if you use that interaction and you optimize on that you can really reinforce the brand

28:13and sell the company so I I again I I was hoping to my something's gonna be yes I used decided to use more diplomatic language if I think I have it so if that's kind of so that was our kind of growth for the first 13 months and if I continue to plot that up until today it would be the exact same dunya curve its flattened down a bit it's not that steep anymore but it's been that linear curve and we've never had that kind of hockey stick moment where things just take off and yeah I would like that but I think someone needs to stand up and say

29:01something about just growing organically I think I mean and so my big fascination as an entrepreneur at this stage of it's more of session I'm totally addicted to figuring this out is literally getting to the point where I understand metrics and I understand to hack the [ __ ] out of that all right I've invested in company in a company that they have they fascinated me with the user acquisition models and how they've managed to get the cost down I don't understand that right so I would love that kind of hockey stick growth but I can't do it but that doesn't mean that our linear organic growth has been wrong I mean we

29:45economy or something ridiculous in those those first two years I think we were growing 30 or 40 percent month-on-month and we were just doing so organically by just focusing on building a great company building a great team behind and continuing to build great products doing all the kind of things that you would do anyway without trying to hack it and I think that's ok as well that's kind of where I make sure the same thing and I said about where you are based it's yes there are always better ways of doing this there's always an optimization for you know 99% of the things you're doing it's ok if you you know you growing

30:19organically it's ok if the growth is linear it's ok of 5 years 45 years down the line you still have never experienced at hockey-stick moment there's nothing wrong with that similarly it's ok if you never get you know written up on on TechCrunch it's not the be-all and end-all it's not gonna be the determining factor for your success in your business so I want to trademark that I hope nobody's done that I think this is my kind of unique input here so what we did is we've always what I call kind of be hire behind the curve and in other words where that means is we were literally like almost flatlining

31:03in terms of capacity before we even started looking for people and being from South Africa that is more challenging than being in some kind of tech up where there are just you know loads of great designers and developers to help out and just to visualize this for you is if you plot the kind of gap between the supply so the capacity at that stage to the demand and I mean it's just not just capacity it's always also in terms of features or new products so I know that and I still know that we can do so much more that would likely get traction but we simply

31:43don't have the time to do that and what we've basically done is we've hired there and I'll tell you why that's great is and again this fits and I I stole those slides from from a talk I did about bootstrapping why that's been great is it's done two things for us firstly it's saved us a hell of a lot of money I think this is the kind of this fits in perfectly with that kind of organic growth model we were able to do that we were able to take a bit of you know bit of bleeding before we needed to put a plaster or a bandaid on it and

32:17that obviously is kind of you know saves money and that it's less risky I don't need to hire a team of 20 and then hope to kind of grow into that capacity the second thing has done is we've had to be very critical in terms of how we approach prioritization and in the business prioritizing what what we do what we don't do which has been great I think all startups should do that instead of just trying to do everything is really thus far I told Amy just before I came up here I found it so fascinating and about two years ago I tried to do a side project to he themes

32:54because I was a bit bored at the time and I sank me to do currency conversion yeah probably our $200,000 into it because I was not prioritizing what I should have been doing with my time or my money I was trying to do the wrong things I was doing the eye things and that is I said that's not sticking to priorities at all that's not focusing and hiring behind that curve is has helped us it's just kind of if if we've been able to just kind of plot out the next two or three months that's the point where you're hired like if we know we can hire a dev right now and it's

33:35going to take him two or three months to knock off this thing taking your 10 things and that should influence revenue in this way then we've hired that's perfect for Bert you know for bootstrapping a business I am a I'm totally anal about efficiency I'm so anal and I I regularly piss off my wife because I would you know this Corden idea even before what happens because I think it's gonna be an inefficient but the great thing about efficiency and kind of improving efficiency is that it doesn't improve increase over it and I think for us and it's related to the previous point of hiring behind that

34:21curve is there's always that the question of so we've got X amount of problems why don't we just throw more you know more days of the problem but if you throwing more days of the problem your current devs are only working at 10% efficiency it's likely the new guys are only going to work at 10% efficiency as well and that's just luckily throwing money at the problem which is generally a bad solution for everything and we saw this about a year ago we actually worked with Sarah Hatter from Coast ports just off CC and she started go support and support has been the one area of the business where we've

34:56constantly struggled to scale as we've kind of grown we've constantly struggled in terms of pulling the trigger and hiring more people because supports unfortunately as one of those things that generally scales better with capacity instead of efficiency but Sarah for example helped us to understand that we could be doing so much more to improve efficiency and and what we try to do it on that is what I call passive support resources so it's resources we have that could solve a problem without people having similar so Akira's is perfect example of that knowledge base whatever but that is improved in efficiency that means that the same you know the support guy

35:44doesn't have to answer the same question ten times instead of just trying to figure out how you can do something once and then eliminates about 50% of of those queries and again this is difficult when you don't have development capacity which was struggling with as well so for about two years we had we had an issue with feels like I'm punching people though here but so for two for two years we had this issue where we would usually would sign up we would send them the login details and then they would email us and say so I purchased your product are you stealing my money because I haven't

36:20received the details to actually log in and download this and then about a year ago we switched to using postmark for all our transactional emails and I just solved the issue and postmark is great by the way and that's my pen but the thing is for two years we didn't know how to solve the problem and we just kind of didn't solve it which meant that I would need to go in query the users details reset the password give that to them and that took two minutes so if we did 20 of those a day that was immediately 40 minutes of someone's time that they can never get back and again

36:52those are the kind of efficiencies that you know Sarah helped point out and that we've managed to improve on without just necessarily hiring more people my last one some of the speakers mentioned when they kind of plot their journey is you know they mentioned the recession and you know bad economic times and how that's influenced the business I think for us the recession was the best thing ever so to give you context as we release products and the cheapest option to the purchasing of seventeen seventy dollars and if you had to get the same thing done in a custom project by a designer and developer you'd probably I'm talking

37:36reputable people you probably spend three or four grand on it so the recession was great for us because the value proposition was great the peer financial considerations made sense but it's not wasn't just about that though we were at that price point we were allowing other people to make money I know for a fact that people have bought our products for $70 they end up spending 10 hours customizing and then they like charge 20 30 X 2 clients and that's been great that is a recession-proof new business i hesitate about whether I would ever get into kind of a you know a consumer business I love the fact that we are

38:21kind of semi BTB you mean we have end users as well but a big chunk of our users are business people and if you allow them to make money you become an integral part of their kind of you know business model rights which means that they will pay for you even if money's tight they will figure out a way to pay for you for your service for your products because they need that to make money of their own and we've seen this over and over again I think again with with the act that we've had down some of that we've had in the past week this is

38:54why users stick to us we have become an integral part in their businesses we are one of the kind of cornerstones of their foundation they need to stand on us they need us to be on line for them to to to build their businesses and I think that is it so for me thanks for having me it's obviously always a pleasure to come out to the States thanks so much I think there's

39:28questions not directly related to your talk but how do you feel about the other African tech hubs at the moment I've heard that Nairobi is actually very vibrant I the same thing with with Cape Town could you talk about that so I think if we classify Africa is kind of developing you know continent developing countries I think is very interesting there's there's this great opportunity for anyone that wants to get into those spaces all see great opportunities the biggest being Mobile something that I am NOT interested at all in at all and then it's not even mobile like iOS apps right it's is really old uses the type SAP

40:16technologies and that's great and I think my opinion on that is Africa's biggest challenge and I think all the that's called non mainstream you know countries in terms of tech is it's not about building trying to build a Facebook for Africa right because African people already using Facebook it is trying to figure out again trying to solve a problem because the people are inherently different they have different problems that you need to solve Facebook is in one of them and 14 people still try and do that there's a lot of people it's sinking a lot of money into to trying to do exactly that but they

40:53always said they'll definitely excite the people doing great stuff in Africa their questions I'll come back to you next looking at that slide you had that was a very linear progression with the beginning of that was when you were talking about you didn't know how to program or was this a previous business before so no that was when I was still programming in C had that much of a linear start that's just amazing all that stuff that amy was talking about you know focusing on the customer were you doing that from the start I only found out what customer development is about a year ago so no I'm not even say

41:35that so I would like to claim that the reason we set up the company was and I do this sometimes because it's half truth at least was that we were doing custom WordPress projects for clients and we wanted to figure out a better way of doing it but the market was validated so I think the reason WordPress is successful was because of the free themes you could download WordPress and you can download a hell of a lot of free themes so we knew that people wanted to kind of skin their WordPress version and let's say it was just blogs so it was a validated market and we kind of linked

42:16that with the fact that we knew people are paying a lot of money for custom work and just I wouldn't even say we realized there was a gap we just kind of fell into that we just felt I felt let's try and charge for this and it was immediate valid validated and the only reason why we had that kind of steady incline is at that stage it was much easier to have a popular blog than is these days and I'd been a lot of writing back then and people I was a prominent person within the WordPress space and I actually launched the first product from my own blog I didn't have a separate

42:49domain for it you could only purchase it on my blog so I already had the audience then was that we just from day one you know putting it out there and we were I was cash profitable from day one I'm a customer I've gotten a few themes and I have one request yeah you have the beautiful gallery yes and then I just want to get a quick demo from the gallery because if you click it then you go to the theme page yes then I gotta click the demo and then the demo has a drop down of all the other themes but it's not as beautiful as the

43:25gallery so then I gotta go all the way back to the gallery and do it again and after manually write down the theme name so I don't forget the ones I want to buy can I ask you a favor sure don't embarrass me by having me actually do that demo so so I could just say thanks something generally about that and again this is something I know I should be fixing as an example as an extension of what you mentioned I know that once people reach our checkout page and they literally just have to fill in credit card details and they need to sign up we

43:58only have I think later stats about 22 people it's only 2% of people actually completing that and the reason I say that is I know that something is there are a lot of things messed up we should be doing much better in terms of facilitating that process from you know kind of reaching the site to making a complete purchase those are just kind of things we've never had the skills or the time to do and the business is still growing and I'm not saying don't focus energy on that that we'll be doing right now but it's just it's difficult prioritizing those things and again it's not necessarily be all and end all if

44:34you don't do it if that makes sense any more questions are you gonna run Rob go ahead and call it out yeah we have time for one more cool

44:54so brief story so I launched the first product in November 20,000 2007 and at that stage I was my final year adversity and I read you know taking a corporate job which I started in Jan of the following year and by February I was earning the same from the couple of products I had available at that time that I was working on the side at my corporate job so because we were cash profitable from from day one I didn't need to supplement that even though I still did consulting work for almost a year thereafter because I had at that stage I didn't know whether the product

45:33all the you know consulting business was going to be bigger but we were profitable from day one thank you very much Eddie [Applause]