Michael:
Hey, I’m Michael obviously you know of dual as well. We’re here gonna just talk a little bit about why we’re building the WP and how the next 12 months look like so depending on when you view this video, it could be day zero or it could be month nine. Yeah, as you’re looking through this, and we’ll see how close we get to what we’re thinking right now. And I think every day things change. So I’d be surprised if we’re nowhere close to where we think we’re going to be here. So, um, you know, I just want to say first of all, welcome, you know, we’d love having this team. I think it’s been really fun to build something together. And we’re excited where we’re going I think we’re going to see a huge shift to this type of product. And it’s something we’re we’re gonna go after
anything you want to add before we kind of jump in here.
Abdul:
No, I think like you said, like, It can be today is I think fifth 15th of may just to put this on record that 15th of may 2020 that we are making this video and we have just started we have just completed a sprint one right in the company. So we’re not complete yet. Yeah, we are like at the end end of the A at the end of it, we completed sprint zero now we are almost at the end of sprint one. So we are just making this video to just tell you like our concept of what we are trying to do and how we look of how ionic WP will be externally and internally both because both are very important for us, like how we come out how our customers users, and how we kind of develop our cells and our culture, development culture. Basically, that’s the main idea of this video here, like a development culture that we want to bring in the company. Yeah,
Michael:
yeah. So I think the first thing to kind of talk about is why we’re building this right.
We’re kind of fed up with the current managed WP hosts out there. You know, I was fed up with it. I tested you know, probably Five or six different ones and continued to have the same issues where they kept telling me to talk to my developer, when that wasn’t always the issue, right? You know, I think I tried, you know, the one that’s, you know, true to some people’s heart in our company, and I still didn’t have that necessarily the best experience, even with that one as well. But, you know, I think, for us, keeping the customers at the forefront of everything that we do, is going to be very important. I think this is probably where Abdul and I butt heads the most so far, is, you know, I’m way over delivering to our clients, and Abdul wants to help put some parameters around that it’s probably the same problem that I have with our main agency as well, where I try to do so much for our clients. And I don’t know if you want to kind of hit on that as well. But I think putting customers first, you know, almost to the point of where I’m doing it, and I think is I would say maybe taught you of how I look at it. as well, but now you’re kind of pulling me back a little bit closer to yours. So why don’t you just kind of give you a couple thoughts?
Abdul:
No, I think definitely like for both of us, one thing is very clear, like, why we are building this, we fed up with the current scenario of managed hosting providers, and not just us, you just go to Facebook or any Reddit communities, like, it will take you like 30 minutes to understand why we are building this kind of thing from an agency from a customer point of view, because none of us like have been made, or we’re not like those people who have like, we want to be coming from big hosting company and stuff like that we like okay, we are customers ourselves, right? I was with a hosting company, I saw how it works. So good things that we have to do there to improve it. Things like that. And now we look at other customer we’re putting ourselves one thing that is very important and how we’re building it is that you don’t have like an external kind of visionary persona in their mind, right? That Oh, this is some fictional fictional person has a persona and we are building for them. We actually have real people internal users because We have all agency like the 50 on blogs. So that’s like kind of in our mind as one of our customers like they Okay, how does 51 blogs want to use a platform like bionic WP, but then coming to the point of customer service and like putting the customer first, I think one thing very important is that Michael and me both kind of put customers First, there’s only a difference of how much we kind of look at it. Okay, how far we have to go. So I think there is no kind of, and I think this will be with the team as well, that will always expect like them putting the customer first. Like if there’s something that customers bring up in happy having NPS meeting stuff like that the whole kind of the process that we want to follow to make sure that the customer feedback comes to us. So I would say that that would Trump a lot of things that happened within the company of how we do things and make and that’s why I like next points that we’ll be discussing also kind of from a customer’s point of view, making sure that our product is simple a product is usable. But when it comes to customer service, definitely they are some difference of opinions that I have. You have as well Michael. So I don’t like I think we both see now that once you tell us because we have talked quite a bit about this so we both see like where the both of us are coming from. I think that is one of the good things that our customers will feel with bionic web right? Because like, they will always feel that because from an operations point of view, I sometimes want to push back like Okay, next next next contain this let’s set a parameter this then you come in on a logon Oh, we need to we need to do this. I mean, you do that so I think that’s always good for customers, right? Like, whatever happens between us kind of a thing but the customers will always get a better experience because of that. I think that’s what’s something that should always keep happening. And like I think I think we both agree that this is like an ongoing kind of a conversation. What do you think?
Michael:
No, I hundred percent agree. I think even the the situation we had was it this weekend where you were like, hey, of course I’m gonna do it. Right. But we need to let clients know that this is not the norm. Yeah, right. Like, we can’t be you know, at like, we Have a migration team that works Monday through Friday, right? But if somebody wants a migration on Saturday or Sunday, we probably shouldn’t always be able to jump and do that just because the client needs us to we have to be able to set some parameters around that. But we still did it in this case, because it was we were around with the right team, it was the right thing to do for this client. And, you know, I think I was having those conversations back and forth made me realize that hey, yeah, I am. I have to do set I have to set parameters for our clients, but at the same time, try to set but do better than most told us is what
that is near like nothing.
Abdul:
Yeah.
Michael:
I would say even better, not even just better than most of us. We are going to do it better than most of us. That’s my goal. Right? Like, yeah, so, you know, the other thing I think, that we want to talk about is you know, we’re going to develop a tool that’s simple for customers. We have a customer in our head that we are focusing on and a certain person actually, and this person’s technical knowledge that will allow us to get to, you know, to allow us, hey, can this person run the platform by themselves? Without us at all right? And that’s kind of the you talk about user cases or personas. That’s one of the personas, we’re going after that we have will say two other guys that are very, very technically advanced. And Will they be able to use the platform and do the things that they want?
Right. So one, the first guy not as technically advanced, I think we will every the second, the second group very, they can do everything we know. They know just as much as we do. Right. But can the platform support them as well? Yeah, but also making it simple, right? to us. That’s like you and I have seen with usability, how much how much of a big deal that is for us how we had a project management system previously, never used it, because of usability. And now we have a new one and we use it all the time. I don’t You wanna chime in there?
Abdul:
Yeah, I think I think we can even tell people the names as well. Like before it was your we used to split up, right? And I remember, like, I think in like six months ago, like when I was there working closer I think I hardly used to like kind of look at it. I used to kind of, I would say like, let’s do it on slack kind of thing. Let’s do it in messages rather than me. It wasn’t that bad. I don’t know why, like,
Michael:
I don’t know why either. I don’t know why. It’s just, I guess soon as, as soon as we saw the other platform. Yeah, we both realized like, wow, we really weren’t using this other platform yet.
Abdul:
Right. Oh, and we now use monday.com which is amazing. And like, like right now it kind of runs the whole kind of all almost all of our processes for us and with this automations is amazing. So we definitely understand the usability part. And like you said, we have maybe two set of personas right now in front of us one technical one non technical. So the thing The difference is that for us these people are real, like these are people we can talk to like these are not Fictional kind of characters that we’ve developed. These are real people. And these people will be they’re testing the platform, right, they will be doing the test on the platform seeing. So why we’ve chosen one technical and not one non technical persona is also I think, I think we should clarify on that as well. Because the thing is that okay, we have to make sure that we balance both of them, right, but like, because we will be having customers that are non technical. And we will be having customers who are technical or who have developers doing stuff for them who are technical, right? So we don’t want our platform to be so like sold kind of say like, simple or so like dumbed down like we don’t even have the features that these people need. So making sure that we have the features are there so these guys psychotechnical can any everything that they need, but at the same time, those features are so simple to use, right? That someone like who’s non technical can use it so I think that’s the kind of thing I see that the features are they’re not we will never compromise on the features. The only thing that will kind of be there is like I think Me personally, and I think Michael as well, like I think we’d be very tough on how simple those things are to use, right? Like meaning the feature. But we needed so simple, like maybe click and go kind of a thing, like you click on it, and it just does it, taking the kind of the, I think that’s where something’s happened because I You should tell the developers when he started that we have to take the app, like the technicalities on our site, right? If we are building a feature, we have to give the customer the simplest experience we can give, but take the technicality on our side. And then I remember that when we were discussing the sprint last time, I’m telling them, make sure that you keep the technical stuff simple. Make sure that so that I will I will stick around Okay, like, because then the thing is that even though we are taking the technicalities on our side, the solution that we come up with should be elegant. It should be simple. It should be maintainable on a technical side as well. We don’t need technical debt. That’s what we call it. Because and that’s what I’ve been telling the team from day one that please don’t keep any technical debt. Don’t Try to do stuff in a hacky way or lay kind of things around that. If we have to fix three months later, the technique, we’ll have to pay a big interest on that, right? technical debt is like the highest interest rate loan, you can get kind of a thing, right? So you know, you have to make sure that you don’t kind of get that. And that’s, I think, the lead developer that we have is like making sure that we don’t do that. And like kind of a font is his name. So he’s making sure that we make sure that the product is simple. And then with me and Michael, I think kind of making sure that this usability part, things like that are simple. So I think for us, it’s very important. And like I think we said that for as well like, for simplicity is the litmus test. If, like me and Michael, maybe if the product is technical, like features technical, we can use it. But like, I interviewed when I’ll be looking at the product, I won’t be looking at it as myself. I will be looking at the simple persona that we have making sure that he can use the product
Michael:
So, since we are creating this for an internal audience, right, and we may push it live, but at the same time, I hope, whether it’s people looking at this from outside our company, or people inside of our company they’ve heard like if they were to do a key word cloud right now, yeah, hopefully the two key words that would come up with is simplicity, and customer, right? Those would be the two words we want to say, has to be the biggest, I don’t know, biggest key words that we’ve used so far, because that’s what needs to be emphasized. So if you’re in our company, and you don’t believe about customers, or you don’t believe simplicity, please raise your hand so we can talk to you, right? Like, because that’s, that’s what’s our driving forces are those things are those two things and you’ve talked about simplicity, you know, as our litmus test and using some of those, like even it’s almost I won’t say, I’m a little more technically I’m more technically advanced than the non technical person.
So it’s almost like me and you looking at the platform, right? That’s kind of how
we’ve positioned it. Whether we want to use that people’s names or not it, can Michael use it and can have dual use it right? Like because I’m not as technical as you are more technical than most of the agency owners, but I will both be able to pull ourselves out and be like, Hey, can we get FTP access easily? Can we turn off or restart nginx if we needed to whether I know what that means, or you know what that means or whatever, right? We got to figure those things out. I think so. The next thing, I think that is going to make us unique, and we see it with Monday, comm is the ability to ship fast, right? We’re not going to have any release cycles. And everything is based on like Sprint’s. Right. So I want to talk to that a little bit about our Howard focusing on that.
Abdul:
Yeah, I think the thing here is that we I personally and I think Michael has been we don’t believe in release cycles like big release cycle. So we are building this product Release it, like will push the code or we release that three months, six months down the line, I think not both of us like, we really don’t believe in that. And it’s not just us. That’s not how products are made now, like this is this isn’t the norm. Now, this used to be the norm, maybe six years, five years ago when they were big enterprise products, it might be still for enterprise products, where you have like a huge product, you cannot ship out a small version, you just have to, like it’s a banking product or things like that, where you have to ship out the whole version. For us, it’s very important. That’s why the kind of we right now have an alpha MVP that we’re doing right? At the alpha MVP, the minimum viable product we’ve renamed alpha because it’s like it’s a very basic version. Then we have a beta MVP, the next phase, and then we have m hp. So what I named that it like it’s a minimum happy product, right? This is the product where if we give it to both of these personas that we are if we give it to Michael, or if we give it to up to like they will be happy with using Okay, this test most of the things that I think it doesn’t do everything I need right now, but it does okay. It lets me do the core functionality, right? So, because that’s how the three first three phases are. But the first three phases don’t mean that we release the product on those phase and days, right? The idea is that we enter into the phase right now in the alpha MVP phase right now, which ends on the 31st of May, the release date is first of June, that’s when we will go into the time with details for June and in July and the MSP fees. So the idea is the end date of that phase means that that phase has to complete. Now for that phase to complete. It doesn’t mean everything gets me is at that time, it means we’re in that phase and we keep releasing the product as we get developed. So now right now, okay, right now maybe it’s like we are releasing code or merging code into a master branch at the end of the sprint, because the features in itself up quite big right now because they are the core features. But going forward as our Sprint’s go forward, we will even be pushing code every day, like if a front end developer if you’re a front end developer and you have a task of creating a new page. It’s done. excluded, it’s pushed, it doesn’t wait for all the other things that have to be done in the sprint. If it’s done if you’re on Monday, and you get it done on Monday, excuse me on Monday it gets pushed. so customers can start using it. We have we are implementing ci CD systems, we are implementing versioning systems. So if something goes wrong, it will be very easy to push pull back as well, right. But we won’t wait for all let’s complete everything at the end of the sprint, and then push it we have five day sprints right now. So even though and that’s the reason we like the standard is 10 day sprints is calculated five days, it’s just to kind of push that agility mindset that we have to do things fast. You’re not waiting for 10 days to think of something. It’s just getting them done pushing them so right now I understand that the code is pushed at the end of the sprint. But as we go forward, like in MHP five I’ll be expecting and I think Michael like you also expect that is that we will be looking at new features new small things like definitely those features won’t be huge. We will be releasing those things. We will be reviewing small things. That’s what I think we’ve told told the team as well, that don’t take on huge features. If there’s a huge feature divided down, make it into smaller parts that can be done into into sprints in Sprint’s you can do it and you can push it.
Michael:
Yeah, exactly. And I think the last thing you want to mention here is everyone as a product owner of their modules, so why don’t you dive into that? And talk a little bit of what that means. So,
Abdul:
yeah, so I think this is something that we will be getting into as we go forward. Right now this doesn’t kind of it’s not like, right now, I won’t say it’s like, there. We’re there yet, because this is like we’re just starting. So I think the main thing is that, where how I see every developer, every team have levels for that. That’s how Like, right now the team is 15 people growing and the numbers that we’re seeing and how we think that bounded WP will go like we talked about 12 months 12 months down the line, the team structure might be very different. What it is now because we do what I personally like, I think this isn’t a discussion that we’ve had a lot, but I think we will be handling it when we get there. But either I see it as scores, scores of developers, small teams to developers, three developers, or, and each code is responsible for few features on the platform. So you like that code? Is the product owner for that? They have to think of, Okay, what are the new things we can add to this? Happy? How can we improve this feature? Okay, let’s say you were you were Scott, you are three people, you are responsible for the DNS feature, the redirection features, and let’s say you’re responsible for the user logs. So bringing in all the logs from the servers, if these three, so it’s your job to think, Okay, how can we make this better? How can Oh, this chart, let’s make this chart better? Like, see user feedback, because we’ll be collecting a lot of user feedback for that. And, like, I think this is I think, I mean, Michael, I think on transparency, we’ve been kind of like we are very transparent on these things. So it won’t be like this user feedback comes to me or Michael or the product, guys. And it does, and we feel everything will come down to everyone. So it will be ruled out, we will see it, everybody will see it, like what people are saying, and any feedback that come for your features that your squad is responsible for, you can pick it, you can make out features and you can work on it. So it’s your job kind of, Okay, this is the feedback I got, how can I make sure that I improvement my modules on this? So that’s idea, making each score the product owner of their modules, whatever modules they work on. So the idea like we have so many simple small, small scores, improving each part of the platform, each functionality of the platform so what happens after that if I can feel five, eight scores, each of them thinking on their own improving their own module that just keeps the whole platform being improved? Yeah,
Michael:
no, it’s great. I think, as we wrap up here for these for you know, people that are support people, developers on our on our team here Do we know What’s the next day necessarily? What’s the next 12 months looks like? No. Do we have projections? Yeah. So far.
Knock on wood, we have meat and and beat those projections at this point. Okay, hopefully that we maintain that and continue to see that we’re going to be very transparent with our team in regards to our revenue, number of sites, that we’re hosting all of this stuff so we can all see the power and growth that we’re having. And I don’t one thing I know that won’t change over the next 12 months is our focus on clients and a focus on simplicity. Like we’ve said, there’s a reason we talked about that over and over and hopefully you hear that throughout all these videos that we create that hey, we had this customer journey or Hey, this customer blah, blah, blah, or Hey, this needs to be more simple or this is how simple it is. This is why we use it or whatever right? simplicity is key. While it might be a complicated problem, it might it needs to be simple to the to the customer and I think your tech your tech that are your technology debt is like the worst that you like get to
pay the interest later. I think that’s such a good great visual
for everybody. So, as we build out things, or as we, you know, support our clients, let’s do it right the first time, so we don’t have to come back and do it again. Yep. Any last parting words that you want to kind of shout out to our team?
Abdul:
No, I think, again, like you mentioned, technical debt. So I think I’ll just mention that, that this is a debt that we’re ready to pay kind of a thing because, yeah, because the problem is that right now, with industry, there are so many options, right? So people will come, they will test if they don’t get what they need. We lost that customer only thing they leave, right? So we have to make sure that whatever we are doing, it’s not. There’s nothing that will be fixed that later, right. We have to like make sure that that’s not a mindset, but we have to take one more day, take a few more hours to the job right the first time, right? Because as you if you do something in a hacky way it would come back and you will have today you save maybe a day, you’d have to give it a week next time when it comes around, right. So it’s better to just do it. And to make sure that it’s done properly The first thing
Michael:
And you know what we hope to do in the next 12 months and what it looks like. Glad you’re part of the journey. Let’s, let’s crush it. That’s all I’ll say.
Thanks. Have a good one
