Jason Cohen AMA

As a devil's advocate -- because I'm genuinely trying to help by challenging, not trying to shoot you down -- I would say:

The well-documented financially super-success of that company demonstrates that CUSTOMERS DO NOT CARE about the things you list.

If you think they SHOULD care, you need to be able to articulate that in SECONDS on a visit to the home page, and in interesting stories which can be spread in the news, on social, etc., so that it "gets around."

If you think they DO care, but there's no other choice, then you need to tap that desire directly and strongly.

But I would say the evidence until proven otherwise is that they do NOT care.  It's hard to educate.

You might start in a niche that already DOES DEFINITELY CARE about the things you offer, and try to own that niche.  Then expand outside that once you have some stories and advocates at your back.

If you think that, you're probably right.  :-)

I say that as someone who writes about running businesses and hopes for the sake of my ego that you in fact continue reading.  :-)

I do try to keep reading to stay fresh, think of new things, etc..  Sometimes reading other forms of writing also helps you think though.  Business writing is best if you're researching a specific question.  Maybe find some bloggers/sources who write infrequently but high quality so you can keep reading but not too much and not wasting time on fluff or "news" or fads.

For me personally, the only way to help/mentor is to have a two-way conversation.  I do very much like the detail you provide -- awesome!  That gets a lot of mundane stuff out of the way and gets the gears turning.

But for many things the answer only comes by asking lots of questions of the founder. Their goals, their market, their perception, what they've done or seen, what they mean by "validation," and so on.

I find lots of so-called "mentors" give advice without seeking to understand first, which means you have no idea *really* whether that's the right advice *for you*.  I refuse to follow that fallacy -- it's just an ego-stroke for the mentor and a crap-shoot for the founder.

We do all sorts of unsuccessful things!  :-)   The first time we did affiliate marketing was an abject failure.  We tried really hard too.  The second time almost was, but then it caught on a bit and now it's successful.  It took 2 years and a restart for that to work though.

Second huge failure was Facebook ads.  We've restarted that attempt maybe 4 times.  All complete failures.  Maybe FB is just not a good ad channel for us, or maybe we just suck at that.  Don't know.

Third was AdWords.  We still do AdWords but we've alternately had great success but then great failures there.  Some campaigns have good ROI but some of them are $1000 to acquire a customer.  Some of that is other companies doing weird things with the auctioning, but some is probably just us.

There's a lot more. Of course the key is to test with an amount of money you can afford to lose so that the "failures" are not really company failures.

QUESTIONS ARE NOW CLOSED.

It was supposed to be 1 hour, but here it is days later and I'm still answering!  :-D

I'm not complaining, it was fun.  And we'll do it again!

Meanwhile, you can schedule one-on-one time with me through Clarity (https://clarity.fm/asmartbear) and please follow me on Twitter @asmartbear and my articles at http://blog.asmartbear.com.

Thanks! See you next time.

Correct, customer support volume.  About 50% of our employees are in support, and scaling that team is the biggest single challenge we have today.  Ticket surges can bury the team because of the size of the customer base, often due to things like a 3rd-party DNS having trouble or WordPress releasing a new version or something like that.  Sourcing, recruiting, hiring, training, etc is a difficult but primary focus for us, so *predicting* the ticket volume is vital.  Analyzing the nature of the tickets is the #1 thing for building new tools for customers and for support to reduce tickets or reduce the time it takes to resolve a ticket properly.

Focus on profit.

Focus on getting to $10k/mo in revenue / founder (or whatever amount actually makes it stable and has a few dollars to put back into the company).

Only pick a business model that CAN be profitable at small scale.  There are tons like that, but often people select different ones anyway.

Some people make a good living blogging, but it's extremely small compared with the number of people who try, and most of them have been blogging for years.

I think most folks will tell you that a "career" in self-publishing needs to be a combination of blogging (for attention), social (for attention), eBooks and other digital products (for regular revenue), and speaking (for the real money).

You can't ask folks whether your idea is good.  You can only validate whether people who OUGHT to like it actually do, and use it.

It will indeed fall on deaf ears.  Usually the marketing -- not the code -- is the hard part.

There cannot be a single simple answer to your question, because what you're asking is "how can any new business get attention," which doesn't have a simple easy answer.

Given that even Drupal's penetration is almost two orders of magnitude smaller than WordPress, *any* newcomer is not a threat until/unless they prove themselves at scale.

Even Tumblr didn't stop WordPress's incredible growth.

I actually don't think a USP is always necessary.  You need to be compelling by yourself, but customers don't necessarily know whether you're "unique," but just rather whether you're "right for them."  Focus on being that, and then communicating it so they know it.

Thanks for the kind words!

My blog doesn't generate many leads. In fact, here's an article about how it didn't, even though I expected it to: http://blog.asmartbear.com/reputation.html

I first had the need in my own blog, going down every Monday when it got on HackerNews.  I asked around to see who else was doing this so I could just pay $50/mo and not have the WordPress blog go down, but everyone said "don't know, but tell me if you find it, I need it to."  So it converted into customer development and it looked good.

Here's the story of the vetting: http://blog.asmartbear.com/vetting-startup-ideas.html and in general how to tell when customer development is going well (like WP Engine) or not (as with other ideas I had before that): http://blog.asmartbear.com/good-startup-ideas.html

To your last question:  WordPress today powers 20% of every domain on Earth, and nearly 20% of the top 1,000,000 domains by traffic.  That means: both large and small.  Enterprise WordPress penetration is nascent, but being on the front end of a new and growing market is valuable.  "Bloggers" indeed don't spend much money on hosting, but few of those top 1,000,000 domains are for "bloggers!"

WordPress has an (old) reputation as "blogging software."  It's not, it's the largest general-purpose website CMS platform on Earth, by an order of magnitude.  The market is amazingly large.

I'll try, but know ahead of time that this might not be the sort of thing I'll have insight on.  If I don't understand the business already, that's probably a bad sign that I'll be able to help.

I'm confused about what it is.  If you're selling mailing lists or other "attention" from certain segments, that just sounds like purchasing attention in the usual way.  An interesting question is why those same people would want to give their attention to random companies who would like to tell them things.

That's like asking "what's your go-to technology?"  It depends on the details.

At this time I won't have the time.  Before WP Engine, and when WP Engine was new, I would do that a lot.  Here's my tips for how to get time from me and folks in similar circumstances: http://blog.asmartbear.com/email-pick-brain.html

Right now between WP Engine and my family, I'm completely full.  So there's things like this forum.  :-)  I've also experimented with Clarity (https://clarity.fm/asmartbear) so that's a way to chat on the phone.

You are correct indeed!  Of course I share in forums like this, and only when in fact it is an exposition of the answer.

What I mean is to "go viral" or get "distribution" I've found that self-promotion doesn't get me anywhere.

Correct, I haven't submitted it to HN in years.  Of course articles are submitted by readers every time I post, and often (>50% of the time) it makes the front page.

We build out the model from a few different directions.

First, revenue is driven by various channels, each of which act differently.  Word of mouth is a "viral" component whereas e.g. AdWords is "spend $X and make $Y/mo" where X and to a small extent Y can change over time.  So we model what revenue we believe we can cause to occur, which results in top-line goals and sales/marketing goals.

Then there's GPM, which for us is primarily servers and customer support.  Server cost needs to not-grow as a % of revenue (and goal of shrinking if we have a specific initiative that's supposed to shrink it, like new hardware).  Support cost goes off expected revenues, since we need to hire ahead of need to keep good customer service while also hiring and onboarding new folks.

Then there's goals for G&A and R&D which are generally independent from that.  R&D goals are around innovation and specific initiatives we want to implement.

There's also the top-down -- what kind of growth rate, cancellation rate, ratios, etc are needed for our long-term health.  If the bottom-up doesn't achieve the top-down, we need to understand why.