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Verbatim text
Lee:
Before we start today’s show, let me share with you something super exciting that we are launching. That’s an event here in the uk, all around helping you transform your agency. So if you look back over the last year, maybe two years, and feel frustrated that maybe you’ve not moved forward, then this is the event for you. Check it out over on Agency Transformation Live. That’s Agency Transformation Live. We have got speakers from all around the world here to help you plan your next 90 days, your next three months, your next year, whatever that needs to be to help you get the level of transformation that you need in your business. That’s AgencyTransformation live. We’ll see you there. Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host, Lee, and on today’s show we are talking with Matthew Rodela and he is going to share how he launched his turnkey website business. And you can too. So, guys, sit back, relax and enjoy this crazy ride. Welcome to a conversation with me, Mr. Lee Jackson. And today we have on the Intersphere. I just made the one up. Is Mr. Matthew Rodela. How are you today?
Matthew:
Hey, Haley, how’s it going? Great to be here.
Lee:
I am. I’m honoured, mate, to have you around. It’s great to have someone who really believes in something as much as I do, which is awesome, except you’ve been creating content around it. I’ll tell you what it is, folks. Matthew is all about turnkey websites, that’s offering websites as a service. You can find out more information on turnkey websites, blueprint.com. that’s turnkey websites, blueprint.com. so that’s my intro for you, mate. But the best person to give us an intro, tell us a little bit about themselves and maybe their favourite colour and favourite drink is going to be you. So could you introduce yourself to our lovely listeners?
Matthew:
Yes, certainly. My name is Matthew Rodela. My favourite colour is red and my favourite drink is a good home brewed IPA.
Lee:
Oh, so you do home brewing?
Matthew:
I. I actually don’t, but I enjoy my friends home brewed.
Lee:
Oh, okay. So I’m slightly less impressed now. I was really impressed for a second. I was like, dude, he makes his own IPA.
Matthew:
It’s on the bucket list of things to start to get into, but, you know, business and all that.
Lee:
Isn’t it a little bit dangerous as well? Like, can’t they blow up? Or is that something else?
Matthew:
I think that’s. That’s a meth lab. I don’t think I was at a meth lab. Is it yeah, yeah, fair enough.
Lee:
Sorry, you’re going to say something. Carry on, mate.
Matthew:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I guess you want me to kind of give an intro about myself and, you know, how I ended up here on your podcast.
Lee:
Well, that, that’d be good, but I mean, what we can do, we can jump in a time machine. We. I know you were an agency owner, you were building websites back in the day. So if you jump in there, let us know how you got into this industry.
Matthew:
Yeah, so I actually started my entrepreneurial journey, as IT were, in the. In the IT space. So I started out as an IT consultant, you know, kind of repairing computers and helping people set up their networks and stuff like that. Because that’s what I did in my day job back. Back in the day. And as I was far back in the day.
Lee:
Is this like 90s or.
Matthew:
No, no, no, no, no. This was. Let’s see, it was 2011 when I started.
Lee:
Oh, okay, fair enough.
Matthew:
So not too, not too long ago, and I started doing the IT consulting. But I quickly realised that my favourite thing to do was to build websites for my clients. They would ask me to build websites for them and that’s something I had done as a hobby for myself, you know, for many, many years, since high school, you know, building websites. I’m a musician, you know, in my spare time, so I’ll build websites for my band and, you know, my various projects and stuff. That’s where I cut my teeth in with WordPress and learning how to set up WordPress websites. And then, you know, through that I started delving into PHP and CSS and teaching myself all that stuff. So by the time I started this IT consulting business and clients would ask me, hey, fixing my computer, can you also set up my website? I’d be like, sure, why not? Let me give it a shot. And so then I started, you know, eventually charging for IT and eventually realising that that’s really what I liked. I really liked the kind of the melding of the creative and the development and the technical and putting that all together and having this cool, beautiful thing that comes out at the end.
Matthew:
So I decided to start focusing on that. And this was around maybe four years ago, where I completely transitioned away from IT consult and focused 100% on building websites. And so I’ve been doing that for the last about four years now.
Lee:
That’s awesome. Now quickly back on the it. I used to be in IT as well. I managed to get to the realm of IT manager at some point somehow. Did you ever use a subnet mask, calculator. Or were you one of those geniuses that could just do it yourself?
Matthew:
Well, I wasn’t on the networking side. I was on the server. The server maintenance side. So I was, you know, rolling out patches. When Windows rolled out patches, I was testing patches and then rolling that out to the network. That was kind of the job that I had, which was super boring. And that’s kind of why I quit.
Lee:
I understand. The only time I ever got excited about that was when it was, you know, VMware came out and we’re able to do virtual machines, and then I could use the Windows Update Manager to push updates out across multiple machines. I got pretty excited about that.
Matthew:
Yes.
Lee:
That was about it. That’s as exciting as it got.
Matthew:
Yeah. And it was. It was. It was super annoying because half of my job was just filling out paperwork saying that I did test.
Lee:
Yes.
Matthew:
And that I, you know, change requests and change management and all of that stuff.
Lee:
Was that because of Sarbanes Oxley? You know, all the. Because that’s what we had to do. We had Sarbanes Oxley, which meant we just had to. Everything had to be every int. Dotted. Crossed. Whatever it is. It was all.
Matthew:
Exactly. And I was in the pharmaceutical industry, so there was a whole other layer of regulations on top of that.
Lee:
Yeah. That’s insane.
Matthew:
Yeah. No fun.
Lee:
No. I don’t blame you for getting into websites just. And quickly because it’s just of interest. What instruments do you play?
Matthew:
So I started out on trumpet. That’s my main instrument. I love playing jazz trumpet. It’s kind of where I sit with that. But I also, as any musician would, try to dabble in guitar playing and a little bit of singing. And I did the coffee shop circuit of playing 90s cover tunes and a couple of originals and. And had some fun with that before. I just ran out of time when I started my business and now I don’t have much time for that anymore.
Lee:
You’re going back up in the cool stakes, I think, with me now. I like the fact that you.
Matthew:
I don’t homebrew, but the.
Lee:
But you are cool still. You’re definitely cool. And the last question before we get into the real stuff, because I do have, I think, attention deficit disorder and go off on little tangents. Is there any videos of you on YouTube singing or playing music? Yes. Can we have some for the show notes?
Matthew:
You can search Matt Rodela in YouTube and some will probably come up.
Lee:
I am so totally doing that after this recording and putting some in there so that we can enjoy your musical charms.
Matthew:
You can’t see it now, but my face is slowly turning red.
Lee:
Okay, no worries. Well, I’m already impressed, mate. So. All right, well, let’s get into the real meat and potatoes. So you have, you’ve transitioned from it. Don’t blame you. And you’ve realised that you love building websites. Again, don’t blame you. It’s freaking awesome. So I assume, therefore you’re building websites in the good old fashioned way. So somebody’s like, hey, I need a new website. You’re coming up with a price for it and you’re building it that way. How was that going for you?
Matthew:
Yeah, so of course that’s kind of how I started out because that’s how we all start out and really, you know, you don’t know what you don’t know. So I, you know, would quote a price, build a website and over time you learn things like you learn, you know, it’s, you want to get as much upfront as possible, you want to, you know, maybe have milestone payments throughout the project, you want to have, you know, start implementing stuff. And, and that’s what I did. And then, you know, I eventually discovered the world of maintenance plans and care plans and that kind of thing which, you know, brought in some recurring revenue which felt super, super good and super nice. And so that was kind of the next kind of evolution of the business. And then eventually I stumbled upon this whole turnkey websites thing, which is just kind of the next level to me, I think, is the next level of recurring revenue and for web developers.
Lee:
So how did you discover the idea of a turnkey website? Can you remember that pivotal moment when you thought, hey, this has to change. Oh my gosh, look at this.
Matthew:
It kind of fell in my lap. I was lucky. And so because I had been running an IT business, I had, I had actually started a podcast for that particular industry. And I started it as just a way to kind of talk about my day to day running of an IT business. Eventually I kept that podcast going even when I started to transition over into web development. So I had this kind of following of other IT business owners, computer repair people, you know, folks who running their own IT businesses. And there was someone in that space who had this little project that they were running called Tech Site Builder. And it was a, it was a WordPress theme and training videos on how to instal the theme and then on how to like set up AdWords and do SEO and stuff. So it was kind of like a little package bundle that he would sell for one price and that was it. So he was a buddy of mine that I knew about and he knew about me. He ended up getting out of the space and he was looking to offload the Tech Site Builder product.
Matthew:
And he approached me because he knew I was building websites. And so I had a long think about it and I decided to take it on. So I acquired it from him for very low four figures. It was super, super cheap and he was frustrated with it because he was only charging one price and then yet he was, people were coming to him for support for this theme that he was selling. So that’s the first thing I decided was I need to find some way to turn this into a recurring type of product. And at the same time I had started learning about WordPress multisite and how you’re able to provision a bunch of websites that look the same and have the same plugins and stuff. And I was thinking there’s got to be a way where I can use WordPress multisite to deliver some sort of hosted solution, kind of like the Wix and Squarespaces that are out there for an affordable price. Because a lot of the folks who were purchasing TechSite Builder and who were listening to my podcast were either just getting started or really kind of scraping by and didn’t have much money to invest in marketing and stuff.
Matthew:
So I was thinking, let me try to put together a low cost solution for these guys. Take this tech site builder branding, make it, turn it into a recurring revenue thing. And so I kind of set on my. It was about a year long journey where from the time I acquired TechSite Builder as a theme to the time I relaunched it as a turnkey website platform. And during that whole year I was, you know, experimenting and trying different things and cobbling together a multi site turnkey kind of experience.
Lee:
We won’t tell your clients you said cobbling.
Matthew:
Well, if they were on the first version of techstype Builder, they would know that it was kind of cobbled together, no worries.
Lee:
But I think, I think that’s how we all started, exactly how I started years and years ago, trying to come up with a minimum viable product to see if there is this something people want to use, can they use it, etc. So that’s tech Site Builder. Can people Check that out? Is that techsitebuilder.com Yep, it’s there. We’ll pop that in the show notes then so people can go ahead and Check that out as well, which is awesome. So you transitioned into that you started offering that. How are you therefore marketing that and getting people to buy into the idea of having their IT site, their technical site with you guys?
Matthew:
Yeah, so the best, you know, way that I’ve marketed that is through the podcast. So it was, you know, I’d been doing the podcast for a while, so I was able to announce on the podcast, hey guys, I’ve got this, this new tech site builder platform that I’m releasing and I really pitch it as, you know, it’s for the business owner who doesn’t have time or the inclination to spend, you know, installing a WordPress theme on, you know, getting hosting, installing a WordPress theme, messing around with it and trying to get it configured. Because these guys are a little technical, you know, so they like to think that they can, you know, put together a website. But then you go and look at their websites and it’s. And they, they would be the first to admit. So I’m not like, you know, talking behind their back or anything, but they would be the first to admit their websites aren’t the best and they just don’t have time to maintain them and update them and make them look good. So I kind of pitched it as, hey, we can get you a clean and effective website.
Matthew:
It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, but it’ll get the job done and it’ll be a low monthly payment and you can just not worry about that part of your business. And so that’s kind of how I pitched it. The podcast has been great for that. I’ve gone on other podcasts to talk about it and then really the only other marketing I’ve done for it is kind of like a joint venture type of partnerships where you know, someone else in the space who has a membership product or some kind of product for IT businesses, you know, he’ll, he’ll, he’ll mention my product and I’ll mention their product and we’ll do like a joint kind of email blast. And that’s about it. I haven’t done any kind of like Facebook ads or any kind of, you know, paid marketing for it. It’s all been kind of the podcast and organic type stuff.
Lee:
So organic growth, content, value driven attraction marketing, that sort of thing based on building up your brand with your podcast, which is awesome.
Matthew:
Facebook Group is another one. What was the name of the Facebook Group? Computer Business Marketing.
Lee:
Oh, that’s your. I thought you meant the was Facebook Group. That’s someone else’s, isn’t it? I always get them so muddled up, no problem. Not at all. Okay. But you’ve got your Facebook group as well, which is awesome. So techsitebuilder.com folks, if you want to Check that out now, when you launch that, you’re putting that out over the airwaves, as it were. I know podcast isn’t a radio, but I like to think it is. You put that over the airwaves. What was the sort of take up and what were the first few websites like? Did, did you have to be very hands on with them or was this just like this amazing eureka moment where everything just worked perfectly and you floated on air for a few months?
Matthew:
So for a business owner, for an entrepreneur, I’m pretty risk averse. So I kind of take my time with things. So I forget how I did it. I think I announced it on the podcast or I sent it out to my email list. But I said, hey, I’ve got this, this thing that I’m working on and I’m looking for some beta testers. So I got maybe a dozen people who volunteered to be beta testers for the platform at first and I brought them on and had them, you know, go through the process and kind of set it up. And I was holding their hand through the process so I could understand what, you know, speed bumps they ran into, what questions they had. So that really helped to get those initial few beta testers on there, get their feedback and then understand that, you know, okay, great, once they’re in the dashboard of the website, what do they do next? They didn’t understand, you know, how do I get the initial setup of my website set up? So that gave me the idea, well, I need some kind of like onboarding videos that show up in the WordPress dashboard that are available for first time users to understand how do I get the first few things set up?
Matthew:
Something else I realised in that process was that people don’t want to necessarily write their content from scratch or they don’t know what they need to create as far as content is concerned. So that gave me the idea to, you know, have some pre, pre written content already loaded up on the site and then let the folks know, okay, hey, there’s this content here, you know, you probably don’t want to leave it there because it’s going to, you know, destroy your SEO. You want to, you know, put a, put, put the original content, otherwise, you know, there’s going to be hundreds of sites with the same content. But at least it’s, it’s a starting point. It gives people like A inspiration on what they can then put in for the content. So having, you know, pre filled in content was another kind of big thing that I learned through this beta testing process.
Lee:
That’s so cool. And then did you find, I mean, were you preloading it with templates as well, like a layout and design that and the pages already set up as well, so they weren’t necessarily starting from a blank space. Because I’m imagining, like you said earlier on tech people are tech, but they’re certainly not designers. And it can be overwhelming, can’t it? When you log into WordPress and you’re thinking, okay, well what’s next?
Matthew:
Right? Yeah. And I think, I think that’s a big key to being successful with this kind of platform is to have the website as close to finished as possible when the person signs up. And then they just need to go and kind of adjust it and add their logo and you know, make it their own. But the big heavy lifting as far as the design and the content and everything is already done. So that’s what I did. I made sure that the theme is fleshed out and, and could look good so that all they would really need to do is just swap out their logo and the website would work. It would be a decent website for their business, you know, we all know that then they need to go in and you know, update things further. But if, you know, they’re in a rush, they sign up, you know, and in five minutes they just need to swap out their logo and then they get distracted. They would still have a website that would, they’d be proud to represent their business.
Lee:
That’s awesome. And I think that is really important, giving them that head start because people don’t necessarily understand or know what they want and they do want to get started really quickly. And if you can’t get them started really quickly for their first month payment, they’re not likely to renew, are they, for the following month? If they haven’t at least built something that represents them enough for them to go, you know, to at least let it sit there for a while before they’ve got time to come back to it on that, then how have you found the churn rate? Do people have to sign up for a year? Is it monthly? Are you finding people once they’ve got their website? Pretty much stay with you. How’s that worked out?
Matthew:
Yeah, it’s, we, so we offer an annual or a monthly plan, so we give them the option and so the, you know, it’s, it’s interesting, it’s Definitely fascinating to see, like the trends over time of Churn and what type of customers stay on. And what we’ve noticed is there’s really no difference in Churn between annual and monthly subscribers. The only difference is if they do Churn, they’ll churn sooner if they’re a monthly subscriber, whereas if they’re annual, they’ll forget that they’re signed up and then a year later they’ll be like, oh, wait a minute, I didn’t want this. And then they’ll cancel a year after they sign up, rather than a few months. But really, the biggest factor that affects Churn is if they map their domain. So once they map their domain to the website, basically it’s their website, they feel like they own it, it’s part of their business. And once that happens, very unlikely to churn out or cancel. It’s those folks who just for whatever reason, either they don’t like the platform, it wasn’t what they thought, or they just had a hard time getting it set up that will then eventually cancel.
Lee:
Yeah, now that makes sense. So rewinding from when you first launched it to now, I presume you maybe didn’t, but I know when I did this I made a few mistakes. I’d be interested to know, can you think of anything that you did early on that you definitely wouldn’t. Wouldn’t do if you were launching this again from scratch?
Matthew:
Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing is I would not use any free plugins.
Lee:
Amen.
Matthew:
Yeah, there was one particular. It was a form builder plugin that I used that was free and it eventually stopped being supported and started breaking. And I had all these people on my platform that had built forums with this form builder plugin. So I spent a couple excruciating months transitioning everyone over to a new form builder plugin, Gravity Forms that, you know, of course is premium and is well supported and all that stuff. But that transition time was very rough. We basically had to just go one by one through people who had built a form and help them build out the form again in Gravity Forms. And it was messy. So definitely don’t use free plugins. And I mean, that can happen with a premium plugin too. We’ve seen those plugins that just disappear, but it’s less likely. And then, you know, I’m trying to think that was the big one. Something else that was a big headache, but I don’t know how I could avoid it was I used a. And kind of a plugin to provision and purchase websites that I ended up not liking and not working very well. And there were bugs that would affect the user.
Matthew:
So, for example, a user would. Their credit card would expire and no one would get a notice of that and they would continue to use the platform even though they weren’t paying because their credit card expired. And it was a bug in the plugin that once the bug was fixed, it didn’t retroactively fix the issue. So these people kept using the platform without paying. So it was a huge headache. And because of that, I had to switch to a different plugin for the onboarding and purchase of the membership sites. So that was a huge headache. But that’s just something that kind of happens and you have to handle it. So what I did learn from that is that I have to keep track of subscriptions outside of the plugin I’m using. So I do use. There’s a service called Chart Mogul and it’s kind of, if you’ve heard of BareMetrics, which is like a service for SaaS companies that helps you kind of see statistics about your recurring statistics. Yeah, but, but Chart Mogul is free, whereas barometrics, you have to, it’s, it’s pretty expensive. So I use Chart Mogul and it keeps track of subscriptions and Churn and all that stuff with pretty fancy little graphs.
Matthew:
And I can look at that and see, you know, what, what members have credit cards that expired and stuff. And I just, I have my VA go through that once a month and, and match that to what we have on the system in the plugin just to make sure that we didn’t miss anything. And so that was another kind of lesson I learned from that.
Lee:
Yeah, I totally agree. We can’t necessarily rely on everything all of the time. I’ll share one big mistake I made when we did ours very early on, I tried to offer all things to all people within our industry. So I installed way too many plugins. I was thinking, oh, and they’re going to need to do this and they’re going to need to be able to send emails and they’re going to need to be able to. And they ended up just adding and adding and adding until in the end we had this. The MVP was a monster of multiple plugins, which meant documenting it all was going to be a nightmare, which meant, you know, if plugins updated and changed, we were going to have to update and change our content. And it also meant it was a massive learning curve for clients who were just struggling to use it all. So that was thankfully Learned that really, really early on, but it was certainly something I did out of kind of the temptation of pleasing everybody as opposed to just making something simple that worked, that, like you said, kind of gave them everything they needed to get.
Lee:
Just switch out your logo, change some copy, bam, park your domain. I wish I’d done that early on instead of getting crazy.
Matthew:
Right. The simpler the better is what I found. And really that makes the user experience for the users so much better too. Every now and then I’ll get a user saying, oh, hey, can I instal this plugin? Or hey, can I have this crazy feature? And then I’ll say, you know, I mean, that’s just not what we’re set up to do. If you want to do that, you’d be better off just getting your own hosting set up and installing WordPress and then you can have at it, you can instal whatever you want. So, you know, you do every now and then need to say no. And not every user is right for your platform. And once you realise that, you can help serve the people who are right for your platform, those people who don’t have the time and don’t really care about those whiz bang features and really make the product super awesome for them, and then, you know, it’s a lot less stressful for you in the end.
Lee:
As well, I think, as well. That’s the beauty of this sort of setup as well. You know, offering it as a turnkey website. What you’re offering the website as a service, therefore people have got that understanding that I can’t log into Salesforce and ask Salesforce to change the way their system works for me, just as much as I can’t do that with Xero either. Obviously they give me the ability to customise the tools within the ramifications of their software, but I can’t make them change stuff. So when then somebody comes to you and says, when you’re offering them this website as a service and they’re saying, hey, can you add that plugin? It’s a very easy conversation to have. No, we offer this as a service, we can’t add more stuff because that will impact support performance, it will impact other users, etc. If you need to start doing that, perhaps you need to explore having a custom website built of which we’d either say, and we offer that service over here, or we would, you know, depending on what they’re after, or we can recommend this developer over here, or they may just say, you know what, that’s fine, it was only an idea, right?
Matthew:
Exactly, Yep.
Lee:
Yeah. And we’ll also take that on board and say, oh, with exit intent popups. Never really thought of that. Is that something we can provide at some point on the roadmap and then we can go and test that off site, take our own sweet time about doing it and then if we think actually this is definitely worth it, we might put something in and let them know when it happens.
Matthew:
But yeah, yeah. And you know what I’ve found is that the customer for my turnkey websites rarely ever crosses over to my website agency. It’s happened once or twice where they’ve outgrown tech site builder and then I’m like, hey, I can build you a custom website and here’s what it’s going to cost. And they’re like, okay, sure. They don’t bat an eye most of the time. You know, the price conscious folks are never going to be in a position at least anytime soon to afford the full featured custom website development. And that’s fine. And that’s kind of the beauty of these turnkey websites is I can have a product, a bespoke website development product that I can offer for thousands of dollars for certain clients, but then the clients who can’t afford that, typically I would just say, you know, too bad, hey, head over to Squarespace or Wix or something else and get set up over there. Now I can actually say, hey, I have this product that you know, that you can use, that you can stay in my ecosystem. You can still pay me, but it’s super affordable and for me it’s automated and totally hands off.
Matthew:
So I don’t spend any time on delivering it to the customer, but I’m still able to keep that customer in my ecosystem. And you know, another big thing with the, with the turnkey websites that I offer is add on services. So things like SEO setup and content writing, blog post writing, graphic design, those kind of things I offer as add on services. So anytime, you know, someone does need those services and they’ve got some extra money to be able to afford it, they’ll, they’ll order one of those add on services and it’s kind of an ad hoc thing. They just order it from me and I deliver it. I have a great process set up because it’s, it’s predictable and I’m delivering it on a platform that I know. So I know you know exactly how to get into their system. I know exactly how their website is set up. So. So for example, SEO, I don’t have to guess, are they using Yoast Are they using SEO Press, what are they, you know, what are they using? I know exactly what they’re using because I implemented it and then I can deliver these, these add on services and that’s a great way to get some more extra revenue on top of the recurring.
Lee:
I think it really helps as well. I always think of this as a ladder. So some people, they do need you and your services but they can’t quite afford you at the level that you’re at as an agency. But if you can help them get on that ladder and help them move up the ladder so you can help them at the low cost by giving them something, they can continue to grow their business. At some point they’re going to be ready to engage with you on the next thing, which might be those upsells of SEO content, writing, graphics, etc. And then eventually as they again, they continue to grow, they’ll get to that point where, okay, we’ve now outgrown this done for you service, as it were, or this DIY service. We now need the full works. And at that point they’ve already no like interest you. They’ve already worked with you for a couple of years. They already know that your output is good quality. So it’s a really good way instead of just saying no to people. I think it’s phenomenal. Now I do have a support, sorry, a support question now. So you know, I’m thinking, and I guess many other people are thinking, oh right, I can start this and I could get 20 people sign up, but wait a minute, will I get loads of support tickets, etc.
Lee:
And what will people do if the. I know the server goes down in the middle of the weekend and I’m away? Like how do you manage all of that? So how do you take the stress out of that for yourself? How do you minimise the amount of support tickets that you might get and continue to run that at a low cost without it being a stress or a drain?
Matthew:
Sure. And you know, I can say at this point, you know, I have about 200 active customers on my turnkey platform TechSite Builder and I’m averaging maybe, you know, between five and 10 support tickets a week. So it’s, it’s not crazy.
Lee:
Sounds very stressful.
Matthew:
Yeah, exactly, it’s, it’s totally manageable and a lot of those are really, you know, easy to answer. So the way I got there was just to make sure that, you know, you smooth. First of all, simplifying, like we talked about earlier, simplifying the whole thing so that there aren’t a lot of moving parts to it that can, that can cause confusion for the user. Those onboarding videos make a huge difference. So you know, right in the dashboard, as soon as they log in, I have a series of onboarding videos that walk them through getting everything set up. And so that kind of introduces them to the interface if they’ve never used WordPress before. And that, you know, talks about the different theme, setup, options and stuff. So there’s that and then having, you know, a good knowledge base of articles and stuff. And that’s just something you build over time. You know, as people have issues with things, you, you know, you get the same question twice and you create a knowledge article about it so that if a third person has that issue, you can just point them to the knowledge article. And really, you know, the biggest support question I get is around domain mapping.
Matthew:
That’s kind of the trickiest piece that you can’t automate that part. They have to log into their own domain registrar and update their a record in order to point it to your service. And you know, every domain registrar has a different interface and they call, you know, the value and the host different names. Those fields have different names. So it can be tricky.
Lee:
And a different order as well. So different order get really confusing.
Matthew:
Yeah, so I mean even mine, my audience, who is more tech savvy than most, still still struggle with that sometimes.
Lee:
So yeah, I’m surprised. Yeah. But no, it does make sense because they don’t do it every day, do they? So.
Matthew:
Right. So, so I do have a knowledge article where like I have about the most common dozen or so registrars. I have instructions for each of those so they can, you know, if they’re on GoDaddy or Bluehost or what have you, there’s instructions on exactly how to do it for each of those hosts. So over time I kind of built up that, that library. But you know, a lot of times people won’t read that and they’ll just contact support right away. So that’s, that’s the biggest issue. Otherwise it’s just, you know, the typical things you’d get with websites, you know, can I do this or how do I do this? A lot of it’s around like installing third party code for like a chat widget that pops up or something like that. How do, how do you do that? But you know, it’s, it’s super predictable and nothing groundbreaking. The things that kill me with support in my agency customers are when and they have, you know, a new they, they have like a feature request. They want to add a certain feature that is right on the line between like, you know, it might take me an hour or two to implement it.
Matthew:
Should I make this a separate project or should this roll into the care plan time and how do I charge for this? And then it just, it all that back and forth can take more time than you think it will. Whereas with the, with the turnkey, you know, the features are there that they get what they get and you know, again, like we said before, if they want new features you can say well, think about rolling that into the platform. But for right now that’s just something that’s not available.
Lee:
And then for like SLA wise service level agreement. Do you like cover weekends as well? Do you outsource that to a third party to cover things?
Matthew:
Yeah, no, I don’t cover it on weekends. It’s just me and my VA that handle the support. I do have a part time developer but he’s not in the support system. I’ll just send him issues that, that, that I want him to take care of. So yeah, it’s just, it’s, it’s the, the VA is kind of like the first level support person so she’ll triage stuff and, and she only works for me four days a week. I’m sorry, four hours a day, five days a week. So there’s, there’s no weekend support. Every now and then I’ll, I’ll stick my head in the support if I’m bored on the weekend and answer a couple, couple tickets. But I don’t necessarily have an SLA saying hey, we’ll get back to you in this amount of time or in this many days. I’ve never had anybody have an issue with the support time that we offer. I think people understand in a SaaS type of setup like we have that it’s support comes on as available basis. So they kind of understand that they’re probably not going to get a response on the weekends. And it takes us anywhere between a couple hours to up to 24 hours to respond to a new ticket and really haven’t had any complaints about that.
Lee:
No. That’s awesome. What we’ve done is kind of set up an SLA where we will respond within the next full business day. So that’s 24 hours as long as it’s not happening on Friday, you know, so if, hey, how do I do this is sent on a Friday evening, you are going to get an answer by Monday evening because obviously we don’t work Weekends and people are happy with that as well. They understand things happen at the weekend. What we have got is uptime robot and we’ve got a couple of people around the world who monitor the uptimes of all the different servers we’ve got going. So that worst case, at least if everything, anything was to go down, somebody is going to be notified, including myself, that something’s gone down. I’m a business partner. And then we can then get onto our hosting partner to say, hey, what’s going on? Sites down, whatever it is, you know, and they can get that back up quickly.
Matthew:
That’s actually a good idea. I’m going to make a note of that.
Lee:
No problem. Well, uptime robots, brilliant. Because it can, you can get it to text you anyway and you can get the app on your phone and make it make a really loud noise as well. So you can put that on. So if you’ve got an iPhone, for example, I don’t know if you have, but you can put that as one of the apps that can make a noise on the do not disturb mode. So in theory you can be notified anytime. I mean I don’t because I’ve got a person in Australia who monitors that time zone and then in America as well. So we’ve got that kind of coverage. But it’s certainly, it just allows me at least to sleep a bit better at night.
Matthew:
Little thinking mind.
Lee:
Yeah, if it goes down, it doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t know how to do something or if they’ve pasted the JavaScript incorrectly from the third party chat supplier and they’ve broken a page, that’s less important. But if everything goes down, which is all those hundreds of sites, it’s like that kind of fills me with dread. So yeah, that’s something we’ve done that’s really helped us. Well, mate, it’s been a phenomenal podcast, mate. Just listening to everything that you do, learning your journey. I am pretty sure people listening are really excited and inspired to do something like this, especially for when you do have those clients that you’d love to be able to help but that they just don’t have the sorts of funds and especially for people who are serving particular niches. So folks, if you want to know any more information and to get some really good help as well, Matthew’s put together a fantastic website called turnkeywebsitesblueprint.com that’s turnkeywebsitesblueprint dot com got the course in there. Do you want to tell us a little Bit about the course you’ve got.
Matthew:
Yeah, so just to back up a sec. So you know, I was running Tech Site Builder and as I was running it, you know, I was stumbling through the dark when I set it up right. There was no kind of resources out there to teach you how to set up this kind of turnkey website solution. So once I kind of had it figured out, had it set up and running well, I would talk about it to my web developer friends and web designer friends and they’d be like, wow, that sounds really cool, I’d love to set up something like that. But as soon as they, you know, start digging into WordPress multi site and they start looking at at what options are available, they quickly get overwhelmed and they have tonnes of questions. They’d come to me asking those questions. And so eventually I thought well hey, why don’t I put together a course, right? That’s kind of what you do when you get asked a bunch of questions and you have some knowledge in a certain field. So about a year ago I put together this video course Turnkey Websites Blueprint. Put together, you know, a website around it and we’ve done three intakes this year and so it’s a kind of on an intake model, once a quarter I’ll open it up for enrollment and then we’ll, we’ll go through six, six weeks of video modules that are dripped out along with coaching calls to really kind of support and answer questions on you know, A to Z from picking a niche to you know, installing multi site to what plugins you use to.
Matthew:
Once it’s set up, how do you sell it and then once you’re, you’ve sold it, how do you support it and scale it it? So we cover A to Z all of that stuff in the course and then of course we’ve also got like the free blog posts and the Facebook group that’s tied to the website. So all that’s available and you can just find it all at turnkey websites.
Lee:
Blueprint.Com and remember there’s an S in websites turnkey websites blueprint.com also if you’re looking at the website because obviously people will be listening to this in the future and the doors are closed currently on the course. Don’t forget you can also download the free, free technical handbook that you’ve put together. So just scroll down to the bottom I think of pretty much any page and you’ll be able to grab that free handbook as well. Oh actually it’s on the home page as well. Big bold, just Checked. There it is. Download the free guide. And that’s everything you’ve used to run a successful turnkey website, including recommendations for platform hosting, theme plugins and support. That sounds like a lot of valuable information for free there, mate. So yeah, go ahead, Check that out. Also, you’re launching a new business or a new platform. KeyPress getkeypress.com so by the time this podcast goes out live, I believe you’ll be having something. Can you just let us know what your plans are for that?
Matthew:
Yeah, that’s super exciting. So as I was running the turnkey websites blueprint courses, one of my students who is a rockstar developer named Azer Moreno over in Spain, he started work on developing a plugin for onboarding customers onto a turnkey multi site. So things like a onboarding wizard and an easy way to really kind of show and hide everything, even like in the customizer and stuff on the back end, he started working on that. But of course as we anybody knows who’s tried to develop a commercial plugin, lots of things can go wrong and it takes a lot of investment, a lot of time. So I decided to, we decided to partner together on that venture and kind of roll in the turnkey website’s blueprint into that as well and kind of help each other build that up. So we partnered on a new company, it’s called KeyPress KeyPress Media and like you said, you can find [email protected] and we’re about to release our first flagship plugin which is going to be a UI manager for Multisite, which will allow you to manage not only the admin menu, but also the toolbar menu, the customizer menu and all of the admin screens in the dashboard of WordPress.
Matthew:
So you can really, really simplify and customise as the way the WordPress dashboard looks. And of course all of our plugins are going to be multi site first, so it’s going to work on WordPress multisite out of the gate. And so if you want to learn more, go to getkeypress.com and sign up there. And then we’re going to be announcing all of this stuff here really soon, even maybe before this podcast is released, I’m not sure, but the timing is going to be right around the same time.
Lee:
Well, I’m definitely hungry for that plugin already. I do use a plugin that you have to put in the must use plugin area, which means you have to manually update it, which is quite frustrating sometimes to manage menus, etc. So I’d love to. Well, and to manage the toolbar and to manage kind of what dashboard elements appear. I mean, you can do it in code as well, but let’s face it, sometimes it’s just easier to use the tools than it is to just keep doing your own code all the time. So, guys, that’s getkeypress.com and don’t forget the turnkey website’s blueprint.com. mate, you are a legend. Thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate you coming on, sharing our story. How can people find you on the socials and then we’ll kick you off the show.
Matthew:
Yeah, well, hey, it’s been my pleasure, man. I love geeking out with this stuff and I love talking with someone who’s kind of been there and done that. Right. You have your own turnkey stuff you were working on as well, and so that was great. So you can find me. I’m more of a Facebook person than a Twitter person. So you can find me on Facebook. Just search for Matthew Rodela or we have the Facebook community, the turnkey websites, Blueprint community. Just search for turnkey websites in Facebook and that group will pop up. And we love to have you there as well, mate.
Lee:
That’s awesome. Thanks so much for your time. Have a, I think, afternoon. Wonderful afternoon.
Matthew:
Thanks, you too.
Lee:
Cheerio. And that wraps up today’s show. I’m sure that has given you some massive food for thought. How could you be helping those who maybe can’t afford the big custom websites? Perhaps you could be offering your niche a turnkey website. So be sure to Check out all of the information in the show notes over on agencytrailblazer.com Also, if you are not a part of the Facebook group, it’s really important that you are a part of this community. Don’t just listen on whatever device you’re listening on come and join the conversations that we have. That’s over on agencytrailblazer.com/group. We will see you either there or, of course, in the next episode.
