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Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the WP Innovator podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies. Exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson.
Vinodh David
Welcome to episode 98 of the WP Innovator podcast.
Lee:
Today’s show has me and Vino David from Infinite WP WP. Now, I do apologise. There is a couple of points where the audio quality does degrade just slightly, but if you bear with, the content is, as always, fantastic. It’s brilliant learning all about Vino history and the evolution of the products that they sell for WordPress. Enjoy. Don’t forget, we have a Facebook group over on Wpinnovator.com/group. In the meantime, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. You are joining a conversation today with me, Lee Jackson, and Vinodh David from Infinite WP and an exciting relatively new product called WP Timecapsule. Mate, how are you doing today?
Vinodh David
I’m doing pretty well.
Lee:
Pretty great. Pretty well? Does pretty well mean average, or does it mean you are having the best day ever?
Vinodh David
Not the best day, but a pretty nice day.
Lee:
A pretty nice day.
Vinodh David
Not the best, not the worst. Yeah.
Lee:
So average. Hopefully being on the podcast, mate, is going to just help you turn that corner and create an average day into an awesome day. That would be fantastic, wouldn’t it?
Vinodh David
Yeah, I’m hoping for it.
Lee:
Mate, Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? What’s your favourite colour, favourite type of music? Anything you want. Just tell us some random cool facts about you.
Vinodh David
Cool. So I’m from India, and South part of India. I stay in the city named Chennai. I’m 30 years old. Yeah, getting a bit old. I love computers a lot. I was actually planning to do forensic science I wanted to be a detective. Nice. But life had a different path. After a few hiccups with my… Actually, I wanted to do it in the UK as well. I had some issues with the visa and stuff. Then my other passion was computers. I was crazy about computers. I used to do a lot of hacking and back then learn a lot of white hacking stuff, the positive side of hacking, of course. That was the initial excitement about computers for me. Then I learned programming, PhD, and then came into WordPress.
Lee:
I can just picture you. You know the movies or the TV series, and they’ve got all the cop dramas, the police dramas, et cetera, and you doing the genius forensic scientist guy who actually finds the evidence on one tiny speck of skin cell or something, and the entire case hinges on what you are doing and you win the case all because of, you know David. And then everyone stares at you. I’ve got the answer. And everyone stares at you, and then suddenly it’s like, find out next week. And it was like, No. No. What’s going on? Well, I’m obviously sorry that you didn’t get to enjoy that, but it sounds like you are creating a really exciting life for yourself anyway. Chennai is a really cool place. I’m a little bit jealous you’re out there. We were going to meet up. Unfortunately, I had a family illness in my family, which meant we actually weren’t able to travel over to India. So still waiting to meet up with you over in Chennai. We’ve got a few friends out there as well, Kannan and Karthikeyan, who lives in Vellore. He actually works for us. And Vellore is also a cool place to be.
Lee:
I know a lot about it, just never been. Really, really want to go. It’s not fair. But it’ll happen soon. It’ll happen soon. So you say you were into computers. How early did you get into computers? Was this like a childhood passion or was this something that happened later in life?
Vinodh David
Yeah, it happened later in life. My brother got a computer to learn. So I was around 13 or 14 when I I saw the computer first time. Back then it was Windows 95, I think.
Lee:
Cool. You’re showing your age, mate.
Vinodh David
It was pretty exciting for me to create a website. I was like, That’s a crazy idea, right? You could create something and the whole world can go to the address and read or learn about what you did. I was like, My brother never created. He was not really into it, so he used to learn, but then I’ll never do it. I’m like, You’re wasting it. You should be creating awesome websites. That’s when I got really curious, started to learn. From then, I used to… I mean, every night, I used to spend a lot of time learning stuff or trying different things.
Lee:
Can you remember the first website you ever built?
Vinodh David
I think it was a geoCities website.
Lee:
Again, showing your age. I’m loving this. Geocities. Again, that brings back a lot of memories. I actually built my first website on Tripod. Do you know if your site actually exists still on archive. Org? Because we were having a great time in the WP and Averta group the other day, just all looking back the early 2000s, late ’99s, looking at all of our old websites.
Vinodh David
No, I I can’t remember even the website you are. It’s been really old.
Lee:
I built my site. I remember it was all just… It was HTML and frames and tables and background colours to table cells, etc. When I was first learning, I never really understood the concepts of CSS. Everything I was doing, there had to be a frame or a table and background colours, and it would take me ages, and it would be so super complicated because it was tables stacked within tables and cold spans and everything. It was just a complete nightmare. Later in life, you said was 14 for you to get into computers. That still sounds pretty damn young, mate, and you’re only 30, so just remind yourself of that. You’re still young. Okay. I’m 35 now and I’m starting to feel So now obviously got into computers. You’ve built websites. You were saying to other people as well, come on, guys, you should be building websites. And you saw the value of the Internet and an early age and have pursued that passion over time. What was your first business in relation to computers and the Internet?
Vinodh David
Yeah, so most of the childhood, till I went to college, I was just hacking around, trying to learn stuff. And Before I was getting into my college, I wanted to… I figured out that I could build my own business, at least freelance. I didn’t know it was called freelancing at the time. I was looking at opportunities to see how I and pay my college fees myself and see how I can also get excited because I knew college was here. At least they have all the outdated information. I learned information technology there. Everything was outdated by the time I started learning it. I started looking into rent a quarter, I think, and now it’s called freelancer. Com. It was rent a quarter. Got my first job there. I think it was $5 was the job that I bid and got it. That’s when I was really excited that sitting in this corner and going to college, I could make money. I started slowly taking more jobs there. I’ll My dollars became like 10, 15. So once I got good ratings, I was able to get bigger jobs. So I was also building a team. I think in my college, I found my two cofounders, which I’m still working with today.
Vinodh David
So we started building stuff together. So one guy was a designer and two of us were developers. So we started taking more jobs. And at one point, we were able to take jobs as big as $1,000 and $5,000.
Lee:
Wow. So you’ve gone from $5 all the way up to four figures. How many years was that over then? Was that over a year or over several years?
Vinodh David
It was like two, I would say two years.
Lee:
And if there’s anything you could go back and tell your your original self when you were first starting out? Is there any advice you’d give yourself with regards to freelancing?
Vinodh David
If I had to change it, I would say design and communication was the key that I learned a little later, so I would have done that better from the beginning. It’s a cultural problem or the way we are brought up here. We try to always give the good news. So when it comes to bad news, we try to keep it quiet.
Lee:
I’m laughing because I know it’s true.
Vinodh David
I was doing the same thing and I literally realised there’s going to be always some bad news, but it’s better if you could tell it upfront and do something about it rather than trying to hide behind it. So that would be one thing that I feel many people who are doing freelancing, especially in India, still do that. So that would be my advice for anybody who’s doing freelancing.
Lee:
That is really good advice. Good communication is key. I mean, you guys have since pivoted and run two amazing products where you obviously have to run a good support team as well who are communicating with people all the time. But I think Yes, culturally in India, I know a lot of Indian programmers who have tended to give me the good news only, and then we’ve found the problems out later and it’s been stressful. But also it’s tempting no matter where you’re from in the world. I myself, I’m totally guilty of trying to hide the bad news in and amongst all of the good stuff, to try and buy me time to then try and fix whatever the bad news was so that I never actually have to tell them the bad news. It can get so stressful. Whereas, I mean, nowadays we try and put everything out there. We’re open and honest and our clients have to, well, essentially become a part of the team, I guess, as it were. So they share in the good and the bad news. So that’s really, really good advice. Now, I’m a user of InfiniteWP. Chronologically, I’m trying to work this out.
Lee:
You guys were working on projects for clients. Eventually, you were able to start charging the thousands rather than just small amounts, which is fantastic. You and your cofounders, at what point did Infinite WP come into the mix? Why did you build that product?
Vinodh David
Yeah, with agencies, it started to saturate a bit for us. It’s We try to be creative and we try to put ourselves in their shoes and think with ideas or features. Every time it’s a new product and some clients do ship the product, some clients, they shut it down after it’s developed for various reasons. So we felt that we never felt satisfied with our work. The clients were happy with what we did. We never felt great that it was shipped and we were not able to see the first-hand feedback from the users who are using the product that we created. So we felt we need to build a product to get that whole effect. So that’s when I started to go crazy over building products, some product that we need to build. So Infinite WP was an idea which came through a client request. So they wanted to build a WordPress project with a CadePHP to connect and do multiple posts to multiple WordPress sites. So we came up with the idea of InfiniteWP. So we started developing it in 2011, December, but we came up with the idea around 2008, but we shelved it.
Vinodh David
We never had the time to build it. We had the designs and everything mapped out, but we never got the time to build it because the agency was keeping us busy. So I was also sure that if we are going to keep doing the two things together, we would never make the product or we never ship the product. That was also a concern that was growing. This was something that was making money as well. It was a crucial moment. I would say it’s the trickiest moment in my life. I was about to get married. Then I was also given the choice whether to do the product or also do agency together. It was like someone is coming with the adding to your life and your financial responsibility is also about to go up, and you’re also in the verge of taking an important business decision. But I was like, give it a lot of thought with the bullet and went for it. So I closed all the agency side, had a few projects which were spending. I told them that I would finish it and started building the product. So before Infinite WP, we were trying to build e-commerce skin for mobile e-commerce shops.
Vinodh David
That was a product that we were trying to build, but we knew that we didn’t have enough funds to keep it going, and we got to figure some way out. And then InfiniWP idea came in. And it was really tough. First 8-12 months, we never made any money. We were just keeping on building. But thankfully, we launched the first version in three months, and we started iterating from there. But we were not making a single dollars from that. Thankfully, the old client jobs that we took added a few features or functionalities, and it gave us enough revenue for the runway. And I think September 2012 or ’13, we launched the lifetime licence. That’s when we made the first dollar out of InfraWP.
Lee:
Wow. You From closing off products, you still then had that three months. That’s scary, isn’t it, as well? Getting married, something huge changing in your life and also making such a massive business decision. It seems to be a It’s a common thread, though. Even in my own life, several major things are happening at the same time. Also, you have to make one of the biggest, scariest decisions of your life. When my daughter was born and I had a huge business decision to make as well, it’s all of these scary moments. It just all seems to happen at the same time. I don’t know why, but sometimes I feel like all that happening at the same time makes us a little bit braver and more determined to make it work as well. You’ve not got a reason to make something work. If you didn’t have a reason, i. E, you married and had a bigger responsibility. If you didn’t have that reason, sometimes you wonder whether or not you would have put as much effort into it. I do think we can draw a lot of energy from what is going on in our lives, even things that might seem scary, etc.
Lee:
Will actually help fuel us over time. Now, I’m interested, your lifetime licence, did you launch first with a lifetime licence to get exposure? Is that the way it was working?
Vinodh David
No, we launched the free version, which we still have a free version. We launched it on March 2012, I think. We started getting users. We had around 12, or I think 6,000 users before we launched the premium version. We were iterating, fixing bugs, making it better, making it work. 8-12 months, we were just spending constantly on getting that going.
Lee:
Yeah, that makes sense. With InfiniteWP, it is modular. Was that purposeful from the beginning or did How did you evolve the modular structure as an afterthought?
Vinodh David
It was tricky. This was our first product, so we had no idea how we’re going to sell it, how we’re going to build it. So everything was new. So first I wanted to make this as a product as a single product for around 699 dollars as a yearly fee and sell it to bigger agencies and stuff was my initial idea. But then I was investigating and I was curious how other WordPress products evolved and how WordPress market is looking at these products. So that’s when every day I used to sit and brainstorm on how best we could do. That’s how freemium evolved, and then that’s of the modernity of the plugins and even lifetime licence at all. So one of our customers came up and he was excited and he was suggesting, Why don’t you go this way? So this will give you a little bit of exposure and People would invest because they’re getting the value for lifetime. That has been an interesting ride. We see lifetime users as investors, just like we would have got money from investors because they trusted us without the product, without knowing us a lot. And we still grandfather them.
Vinodh David
We have made a lot of changes in pricing and business model along the way, but we still have kept the promise of serving them for life.
Lee:
That’s brilliant. I like how you’re seeing them as, I guess, would you consider them like an Like you said, initial investors or founder members, so they will forever receive your gratitude. You guys will forever honour the solution. That’s really lovely, mate. I love that. It’s nice to know that there is still honour in the world. There’s so much bad news on the television at the moment, and it can really be depressing, but it’s great to hear that there is still honour in the world, and that’s awesome. Now, when you decided to go freemium, I I presume you mean that you put a version online on the WordPress repository. How did you decide what to make available for free? Because obviously, this is a very powerful product. And was the initial reaction that you had millions of downloads straight away, or did it still take a long time to build up?
Vinodh David
Yeah. We launched a free meme, and we were not sure how this is going to take off, but we were sure that we need to give some of the basic features for free for people to see the difference and people to try it. So at the point we just had, I think we had two competitors at that point, and we wanted to hugely differentiate for the audience, what was the product of this concept we launched. So when we launched, the momentum was really slow. We launched and we waited. Then we had, I think, first web designer back then was writing blog post of our products. So I contacted one of the editor and he was excited to write about us. So he wrote about us and that’s when the ball started rolling. And we got a few instals and then the next web covered us. So then the momentum picked up and we started moving a little faster. So since it was a self-force product, we did have a lot of technical issues. One thing works on one product, I mean, one server and it doesn’t work on another server. The functionality of the product is also a bit resource-intensive.
Vinodh David
It takes backup across multiple sites, it runs updates across multiple sites. That was pretty challenging for us to go through. But the initial users helped us figure it out, and they were patient enough to work this issues out and get a better product.
Lee:
Sometimes I think about the WordPress repository, and yes, it is a great way of getting exposure to your product. But I think what you’ve unpacked there as well is that it’s actually a great way of getting R&D because people are going to be downloading your product on different environments and that’s going to force you guys to learn more about different architectures and to find all of the problems that you guys may not necessarily have been aware of. It’s invaluable. Instead of paying other people for testing, you’re actually getting testers from all around the world. With the nature of it being open source, you’re even getting some people, I or hopefully we’re at least contributing some code to you as well saying, Hey, I found a way of fixing this. And that really helps you improve the product. So although it seems quite scary giving something away, at least part of your product away for free, there are, I imagine, a whole lot of benefits that come along with, obviously, the stresses of all the extra support, et cetera, you’re trying to do. Now, you’ve gone on, you’re growing the product. It is brilliant. There are other services available like ManageWP, which have been, I believe, taken over by GoDaddy.
Lee:
I think they got bought out, et cetera. Have you guys struggled to compete with the other services online? Have you struggled to stand out? Or are you just finding you have a good niche that you guys are able to stay steady Yeah.
Vinodh David
The product is a bit… It’s a complex product. So there are different… Each company do it differently. Also, ManageWP was a hosted version of the same concept. But we were more into privacy and you host it, you get on your data. That was our goal, keeping it self-hosted. So both the product comes with its own challenges. So for them, it’s privacy. For us, it’s most of the server environments. So we try to innovate and keep building features differently and making their workflow better and stay on top of the market. Right now, we are still… It’s been almost three and a half years into the product, but we still We do a lot of R&D and innovation inside to see how we can improve our backups, how we can make them efficient, how we can change the UI, UX. We try to make it simple, easy, and feature-rich. Many of the users have tried different products from different vendors, and they’ve still come back to us and said that they like what we have built. We still have that edge is what I feel.
Lee:
I like it. I can certainly vouch for that because I’ve got experience with you guys. You and me have become friends over the last year as well. Adam Prizer introduced us originally, and he speaks very highly of you guys as well. I know when you say this, that you’re not just saying it for the sake of it, you guys do invest in your product and you invest in communication. I, for one, certainly appreciate that. Now, you guys have not pivoted, but you’ve at least added another string to your bow, which is WP time capsule. When did that happen? Because that took me by surprise. A few months ago.
Vinodh David
So WP then came out of frustration from InfraWP. So we were building backup and some server was great, some server fails. And the whole idea of backing up zip and compression and then combining all the files. Everything has been server-intensive and always has the opportunity to fail on some certain situation. So I was like, Can we make this better? So I was looking at other providers like WordPress, blogWalt. So these people are doing incremental backups back then, but we were still excited about keeping the data for themselves, on your Google Drive or Dropbox. So no one was doing that as a primary thing. We were like, why don’t we make it simple? Why don’t we just back up the changes and still give them the option to keep it in Google Drive, Amazon, and Dropbox? Along the way, we try to tackle multiple issues Why backing up when you’re updating, why backing up should be an extra option? They should remember and do it. Why can’t it be automated? We went, did that. We’re also building another feature called rollback, which is like you update a plugin, which is different from restore, which is like you update a plugin, and two days later, you got transactions, comments, and everything on your website.
Vinodh David
But two days later, you find out that update is breaking some part of your site. If you restore, you they with your transactions or comments. But when you roll back, it just rollbacks the plugin update, still keeping your site alive to the current date with the data. We’re trying to innovate a lot along this space, trying to improve their workflow, improve their… I mean, security of the data and also trying to make them update WordPress sites more with more confidence than before.
Lee:
That’s brilliant. I love the idea of being able to roll back just the plugin as well because we’ve done full… I’ve used data in the past and we will then just run a full backup every night and then only keep… Because the amount of storage it uses on a shared drive, we end up then saying only keep so many versions. So that might mean we only have up to seven versions of the entire site zipped. If you’ve got a huge site like 900 megabytes or something like that, that’s going to use a whole load of your storage pretty quickly. Multiply that by the amount of clients you’ve got, and that can be quite a phenomenal amount of space on whatever third-party hosting system you’re using, like AWS or Dropbox, etc. I’m trying to get in my head how on Earth you could even begin to write a product like this, incremental backup. It sounds really stressful. It’s something you can’t afford to get wrong, isn’t it? When you’re making this product because so many people are going to be relying on you guys, how did you find you handled the pressure? How long did it take you as well to build this product?
Vinodh David
It took us a lot of time. It was a lot of R&D and evolution on this. It It was almost like one and a half years it took us to develop in-house. We never launched a version. We had three iterations internally. One version, we tried to ask them until the backup got completed. Another version, we were trying to build our own system to run the whole backup on the background. It was a lot of work. We killed our own ideas internally and came up with the best when we launched. It was a lot of work to get it When we thought about it, we thought it would be easy, but everybody thinks of it. But when we got around it, it was way too complex, but we were able to nail it after a lot of trial and error.
Lee:
I’m impressed when you say that you actually had the I guess, the strength of character to be able to go through two versions before you rewrote the third version. A lot of people will start with a product and then you feel like once you’ve started it, you just have to keep trying to make it work until it works. Whereas I think I think what you were saying was you actually tried two versions and then settled with the third version. Am I right there? Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s good. And that’s, again, some advice that we could all take because I slaved over a product everyone knows about this. I built a Twitter management tool about four years ago, me and Karthike and built it. We slaved over that, trying to make it work and trying to make it work and trying to make it work instead of essentially going back to the drawing board and writing in a more efficient way. So we’re We came back to it, was it about a year ago, and rewrote it from the ground up, learning all the lessons of the initial mistakes that we’d made. So I just wish we’d done it a hell of a lot earlier rather than trying to make the old thing work.
Lee:
So guys, you can find both of these products that we’ve talked about. First of all, InfiniteWP, that’s going to allow you to manage multiple WordPress sites. That’s their updates, etc. And a whole heap of add-ons. That’s over on infinitewp.com. There will be a link in the show notes. And you can also find WP Timecapsule with that brilliant incremental backup over on WPTimecapsule.com. Mate, over the last 30 years, many of them being in business, what would be one piece of advice for a WordPress agency that you could share?
Vinodh David
All right. So that’s a tricky question. So I think as we spoke, perseverance is the key. I think right now, the technology is evolving. So earlier days, people who knew servers or who are investing on servers were able to get more business because servers were costly. Right now, AWS gives it for $8, $7. So the technology is evolving, and right now, the development is getting a lot easier and easier. So more competitors are entering into the field of any field, right? Especially in IT, it’s even more higher with the evolution that’s happening. So I would say, perseverance is the key and being different When I started my agency, I wanted to be unique. Every time a client asks something, I try to add a little extra. They may not ask for any design, but I try to present it in a beautiful way. So Try to add that unique sauce of whatever your unique sauce is on top of it. Being unique and not giving up would be key because as we move forward, the competition is getting tougher and tougher, and we got to be really unique to make a difference.
Lee:
I love what you’re saying. A lot of people know I’m a huge Disney fan. Perseverance, that’s something that Walt Disney did all of his life, persevering through a lot, but also adding that little extra plussing an experience. So what you were saying, presenting something in a unique or special way, just making things extra memorable, extra magical for the client so that you guys will stand out. Mate, thank you so much for your time. You are a legend. Guys, remember, all of the links are going to be in the show notes. David is also a member of the Facebook group. You can head on over there to WpInnovator. Com/group where you can find him in there. David, where else can people find you on social media?
Vinodh David
Twitter. We know David is the Twitter handle.
Lee:
We’ll put that one in the show notes as well. So make sure you tweet this guy. Thanks again for your time. You are a legend. Take care, buddy.
Vinodh David
Awesome. It was great talking to you as well. Thanks for inviting me to your podcast.
Lee:
Pleasure, buddy. And that’s a wrap. Now, don’t forget, guys, we do have a YouTube channel. Head on over to WPInnovator. Com/youtube, where you can find tonnes of content for designers, for agencies, for WordPress enthusiasts. We talk about agency life. We talk about the stresses of agency life. There’s a few good ones about that, to be honest, because it can be stressful. So go ahead and check that one out. And if you then want to talk about the content, you can either hit us up in the comments on those videos, or if you prefer a more private chat, then head on over to Wpinnovator. Com/group, which is the Facebook group for us to go and have private conversations about what is going on in our world and essentially help each other out, support each other. It’s a really good, safe environment. We’ve got a few community members now as well who are helping out to keep it a good, safe and clean environment. Also, make sure you post funny gifs because that’s what the internet’s for. Cat pictures are out, gifs are officially in. We will see you next week in episode 99, Over and Out.
