[00:00:00] Maciek: Managing all of those websites can become a burden very quickly and working on it fully, manually. Let's be honest, it's a not good.
[00:00:15] Maciek: Let's not be afraid to say that it's taking the world by storm. Why? Why did this happen?
[00:00:21] Aurelio: I think we are becoming popular because we, we are listening to our users.
[00:00:31] Aurelio: 99% of our growth, despite a few welcome sponsoring, has been coming from word of mouth. And I think we fix real problem for real people. We listen to them. I spent a lot of time managing our public roadmap, talking to our users. And I think that's the reason why
[00:00:57] Aurelio: I talk to a lot of users. I listen to all what they are telling. That doesn't mean that I follow, what they want, so I listen to people and then I trust my guts. And this is because I'm acting as chief Product Officer. In our tiny team. I have no clue. It's moving too fast. This said, WordPress has one amazing strength, which is it's an open source platform, which means that with AI and with page builder and with all what's going on, data privacy and data sovereignty, and you know, where, where is the data stored?
[00:01:47] Aurelio: What do I do with my data? Will become more and more important. And, and so I think like within two years, we should not see like a crazy market change in how our prices is doing, how it's being used.
[00:02:10] Maciek: Hello everyone to yet another episode of the Patchstack webinar. Today we are going to talk about the, some consequences that can happen if your agency becomes successful, because we all know it's really fun to have all, all the clients and earning money from them, but managing all of those websites can become a burden very quickly and working on it fully, manually, let's be honest, it's a nightmare.
[00:02:42] Maciek: But luckily thanks to our guests our Aurelio Volle, the creator of WP Umbrella we'll learn a bit how to automate the process, how to make it better, simpler, and what most important, less boring. So let's start with the basic question. WP Umbrella lately is becoming more and more popular. Let's not be afraid to say that.
[00:03:12] Maciek: It's kind of taken it, it's taking the world by storm, why? Why is this happening? Why has it become so popular?
[00:03:20] Aurelio: I think we are becoming popular because we are listening to our users and 99% of our growth, despite a few welcome sponsoring has been coming from word of mouth. And I think we fix real problem for real people.
[00:03:41] Aurelio: We listen to them, I spent a lot of time, managing our public roadmap, talking to our users. And I think that's the reason why because if you look at, at the current market, there are three kind of agencies, the one that still does thing manually. And, and I know agencies with hundreds of websites while dating plugins, manually, making backups,
[00:04:11] Aurelio: I mean, you know, like the world, the world struggle. They're doing it manually. And this is insane. You have like one third of the people, like big agencies, they have developed their own tool which is not safe, which requires maintenance, which is not worth it. And they start to realize that WP Umbrella might be a better solution even cost wise.
[00:04:34] Aurelio: And we have the people that are using ManageWP and MainWP mostly who are like two fantastic tools, created 10 years ago, but with interface and innovation pace is a bit too slow. And when you look at all what's going on nowadays, like every day we have a new AI agent, every day there is something new.
[00:05:00] Aurelio: You want to be using a tool that's actually up to date and keeping the pace with, with what's going on. And I think that's the reason why, like, we had a very good market opportunity because the market was failing and we have been listening to people. So the secret sauce was very, very easy to make.
[00:05:21] Aurelio: You know, like, no crazy marketing budget. We didn't raise money. We have a fair business with fair prices and we listen to people and I think that's what people want, a company like them.
[00:05:34] Maciek: Okay, so you're telling that it's that simple, right? Just listen to others and and have a normal pricing.
[00:05:44] Aurelio: Yeah. I mean, and, and then we have like a brutal tech team which helps a lot, but but yeah, simple things.
[00:05:55] Maciek: Mm-hmm. Okay. And you mentioned this one thing about those distractions and, I can imagine that right now it's a true problem because some time ago we were having this joke that every day there is a new JavaScript framework, and right now every day is like a new AI model.
[00:06:14] Maciek: Constantly something is changing, something is happening, and as a product company, how do you manage? Not to get distracted by all those shiny things, because I can imagine that every day you wake up, you open your, I don't know, social media or whatever, and you learn that are so many new, amazing things that you could integrate inside of WP Umbrella, but you choose very often not, I mean, sometimes you have to because they are very useful.
[00:06:44] Maciek: But how do you manage to choose the one that truly matters for the users?
[00:06:50] Aurelio: So first thing, first when it come to AI implementation, we don't think about our users, we think about us because AI is an an enabler and we use AI in everything we do internally to gain productivity. When it come to our users because we are managing their websites,
[00:07:14] Aurelio: and AI is fantastic, but it also has some privacy issues, concern, whatever you call this, so we've decided not to add AI in WP Umbrella as of today. Also, because we believe, and we are obsessed with AI, but we believe that with maintenance the impact of AI would be very slow. We are more into automation automated, safe update, backup automation etc, etc, etc, rather than AI.
[00:07:59] Aurelio: We will probably release new AI-oriented feature in the coming month, but they will not be linked to link a burden to WordPress maintenance, because if we want to use AI, it should not raise any GDPR or privacy law issue, so we have to, to make sure that the scope in which we use AI is not in the pure scope of WP Umbrella.
[00:08:30] Aurelio: And we see so many applications. And once again, there is not much to be done with with AI in a plane like WP Umbrella. Because you would need to add the server, you would need to analyze log, you would need to do like so many things, and we don't own, we are not a hosting company. We will never be.
[00:08:50] Aurelio: So it's a bit, it's a bit tricky for us to actually implement AI the right way. Okay.
[00:08:56] Maciek: Yeah. I fully understand. And out of the, all the other things how you make sure that you choose the one that that matters for, for the users. Do you I mean, you already mentioned that you very actively listen to your community.
[00:09:12] Aurelio: Yeah, yeah. But, but here is the thing, like I talked to a lot of users, I listen to all what they are telling, but doesn't mean that I follow what they want. And there is this story about Henry Ford and he was saying like, back in the day, if you would ask people what they wanted, they would've say like, faster horses and he made cars.
[00:09:44] Aurelio: And, and I listen a lot to people, but the thing is people are so used to ManageWP or MainWP, and while those two tools are fantastic tools from what they offer you to do, I think we can help people in, in ways that are much more meaningful than, for instance, doing a slow broken link shaker. Or to implement like a malware scanner on the website, which is like a bad idea in my opinion.
[00:10:20] Aurelio: So I listen to people and then I trust my guts, and this is because I'm acting as Chief Product Officer in our tiny team, I talk a lot as well with Thomas, my other co-founder and CTO. And we make most of the decisions together based on our guts and our feelings. Because it's hard because as a founder we are not managing 500 websites.
[00:10:52] Aurelio: And we have like big accounts managing like thousands of websites, and we need to make a tool that's working for them and for the people that are managing only twenty. And it's a lot of go and back discussions. And in the end, I rely a lot on instinct, which might not be the an insightful answer, but that's what we do.
[00:11:20] Aurelio: Common sense and an instinct.
[00:11:24 Maciek: I mean, currently, let's be honest, it works.
[00:11:26] Aurelio:Yeah, yeah. And it does work because once again, like it's not me waking up one morning and telling, hey, we are going to do a safe update. We are doing, we are going to do a safe update this way because it's going to be better.
[00:11:40] Aurelio: It's me talking with a lot of people discussing my ideas with them, and we have created this kind of transparent community with our users where we involve them a lot. And just this morning I got like a one page email from one of our key user, who was asking me like a whole new feature, something I would've never thought about doing.
[00:12:08] Aurelio: And I was like, oh, maybe we need a small pivot in our in our roadmap. So that's, that's how we, we are making the call and we are super agile. So we make like quarterly planning.
[00:12:24] Maciek: Okay.
[00:12:26] Aurelio: But we don't respect the quarterly plan. Never. That's never happen.
[00:12:31] Maciek: That's good. That's really good to hear. So we can say that, yeah.
[00:12:37] Maciek: WP Umbrella is this gut driven company, right?
[00:12:44] Aurelio: It's a user company.
[00:12:48] Maciek: User and
[00:12:48] Aurelio: gut driven. Yes. Yeah. But everything happened because of the users, and we have the gut, the gut and the momentum because our users are giving us, giving us so much love, if you go on G2, we have about like 100 reviews and if you looked at them, they have all of this in common.
[00:13:09] Aurelio: Like they listen to what we are telling. They're improving the product so much, and customer support is great and fast because that's exactly what we do, those three things.
[00:13:20] Maciek: Amazing. Amazing. And one side question because this is something I found on your website that you are, you promise to deliver updates every two weeks?
[00:13:34] Maciek: Is this still a thing and you are still delivering updates every two weeks?
[00:13:40] Aurelio: Well this is probably something that we wrote in the past. We are more on a, actually we do, I think we do update the product every two weeks and even more. But what we commit to do right now is at least one big product update per month.
[00:14:00] Aurelio: But what's funny is that we are shipping way faster than this. And so I actually already have like my three next, the three next product update of WP Umbrella are already live. We have just not communicated on them. So yeah, we are still very aligned to this. Like
[00:14:23] Maciek: I can, based on what you're talking, I can't even tell that you,
[00:14:28] Maciek: decided that, yeah, this promise is, is not enough. Let's, let's make it better.
[00:14:34] Aurelio: Yeah. But you know, we have like a, we have a no estimation philosophy, so we never commit on a deadline because then the tech team is doing quick and is not good, doing good, and we work on a sequence. So this is what, like right now we are working on update automation.
[00:14:52] Aurelio: Update automation will be released very soon. And then, the next item is in the pipe, and if you manage to clean up and to release update automation faster than expected, then you can work on the other item faster. And this is how we work. Like we don't tell people, Hey, let's do a very big sprint and update automation should be released at the end of July.
[00:15:16] Aurelio: And then people do nothing. They get stressed. People have a lot of ownership in our team, and this is probably one of the reasons why WP Umbrella has been working well as well. We do things and we also like give room to people so they can make mistakes, because what I said about update automation, maybe it's finished two weeks earlier, and this is amazing because we can start shipping something else, but maybe it's also really is like one month later and it's okay because it means that
[00:15:48] Aurelio: to do something good, you need time, and this is okay, and we praise like mistakes and stuff like this.
[00:15:58] Maciek: And also I think it's really worth to to mention that while you tell that you ship really a lot of updates, you are really growing and everything your team is still relatively very small.
[00:16:12] Maciek: So how is it possible, because you are a team of five, if I remember correctly.
[00:16:20] Aurelio: No, we are six and a half, which is a big difference from five, and we should be like nine the end of year. I think we will see we, the thing is as a founder some time you want to hire a lot of people and have a company with, with many, many people.
[00:16:49] Aurelio: Because the first question people ask you when you are in a dinner is like, oh, what do you do? So you tell them that you're building a software for web agency and they don't understand, and then they ask you, is it going well? Meaning like, can you pay yourself? And if you say yes, the third question is like, oh, and how many people are working in your company, and in the eyes of people, this is like the success metric everybody can understand.
[00:17:16] Aurelio: In my day-to-day life, this is not a success metric. Because more people means that you need to share more clarity. Because my job is to make sure that at the end of the month I can pay the people working at WP Umbrella and that the people working at WP Umbrella have clarity on what they must do.
[00:17:39] Aurelio: And the more people I add, the more clarity I must give and the more return on investment I must expect. And so we only hire people when we have a big pain or when we want to do something that we believe will be like super meaningful because we will need to spend time as a founder and as colleague to make sure that this new person is well on board.
[00:18:06] Aurelio: And I'm always telling the team that I'd rather pay them for more hours if they want to because we have a very strict like work-life balance policy. Which is why I didn't accept the podcast earlier, my sake. I'm sorry I was on holidays, but even, even for us, like we apply these kind of things rather than having a 20% company and with AI, everything is easier.
[00:18:38] Aurelio: Like AI is now closing about 40% of our customers support tickets. But because we spent a lot of time training the AI with our customer support team and with Cursor, and everything new, the coding pace is faster, the content producing pace is faster and probably we would need, without AI, we would need to be more than 10 already.
[00:19:05] Maciek: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
[00:19:06] Aurelio: Which is why I was telling you before that AI is a, when I think AI
[00:19:12] Maciek:Enabler Yeah. That AI is an enabler.
[00:19:04] Aurelio: We are, yes.
[00:19:16] Maciek: Rather than a replacement.
[00:19:17] Aurelio: We are obsessed with how to use AI in our own processes to be more productive.
[00:19:25] Maciek: Mm-hmm. Amazing. And tell me, because yeah, as you mentioned, you are constantly
[00:19:33] Maciek: observing your community and listening what they are, what do they want, and what right now is like the trending topic in your community. Are they mostly interested in automation and also no code workflows, AI, whatever is, what, what now is trending?
[00:19:54] Aurelio: Two main trending topics, the first one, the market is stagnant.
[00:19:59] Aurelio: So it's not like how it used to be during COVID. And, and I know many agencies are like struggling to get new clients which is a huge question mark for the industry. I guess, and the first one is like the debate between page builder, like Lovable versus WordPress, and it's interesting to see
[00:20:29] Aurelio:what people are getting from this, you know, and in the end it's only about how do you add value for your clients. And maybe if you just need a one page website, maybe you don't need a WordPress website, and you should be super transparent with your client with this because that's not how you build trust.
[00:20:54] Aurelio: Pardon. That's how you build trust. It's super interesting to see, you know, because I have no impact on what CMS or technology people are using, and we are just working with WordPress. But if you're an agency, you need to be transparent with your clients and you need to push for WordPress 95% of the time, in my opinion.
[00:21:19] Aurelio: But you should also explore other things when it's meaningless to use WordPress considering that it's an open source solution that can be moved and owned which matters a lot in my opinion. But those are the two most trending topic. It's not about technology nowadays, I think,
[00:21:40] Maciek: And honestly, this is, this is very fascinating because
[00:21:47] Maciek: when I was kind of working on those questions, I kind of thought that you will mention about something from, from this technology bubble. And when you started telling about that it'll be something connected to kind of their everyday work, right? That kind of how to make sure that
[00:22:10] Maciek: we will stay on top and still keep maintaining our clients and do it in a proper way, when you're started telling this, I was like, yeah, that's obvious. That's obvious that this is more important than some sort of technological bubbles we are constantly living in. That's true.
[00:22:32] Maciek: And tell me because WP Umbrella is in the market for already a few years. Right. And I'm also guessing that your experience when it comes to WordPress is even longer. So tell me what changed in the last years that, what wasn't normal say few years ago and right now it is, for example, I don't know, let's how securities handle, how the support will.
[00:23:04] Maciek: What, what can you tell, what changed the most?
[00:23:07] Aurelio: I can tell one funny thing and one that matter. The first one is that when we started WP Umbrella, we had a lot of people using the WP I'm sorry for, for what? I'm going, what I am about to do for the great people of the WPBakery who created something good a long time ago with no.
[00:23:34] Aurelio: Not, but good. I think we can all agree on this. And then in the early days of WP Umbrella, we had a lot of people using WPBakery and obviously nothing was working on the websites. And we had a lot of customer support coming from people using WPBakery. And nowadays we barely see a website using this page builder.
[00:23:57] Aurelio: So, and this is something like, I think. And now you have a lot of competition among WordPress, page builder and among plugins and the quality has significantly raised which is very good news, and we can also see this in our own market where we have a very nice competition with tools like WP Remote, for instance which is
[00:24:25] Aurelio: upgrading the global playing field of the market. So this is one trend how the global playing field of the market has evolved and how WordPress is becoming more and more professional, mostly due to the money invested by hosting providers, I think even if we all like to hate them because there has a bottleneck of everything.
[00:24:55] Aurelio: They have contributed a lot to how to what price and the ecosystem. So this is one thing, and when it comes to security in the early day people had the belief, and some of them still do, but I can see that the trend is shifting. They had the belief that malware scanner plugins were something good, which is wrong, which is false.
[00:25:34] Aurelio: And nowadays I can see that people don't really, are not like attracted to malware scanner that much. And when they do, if you take the time to explain them, why it should not be handled by a plugin, but it should be handled at the server level with something super solid like Imunify, they do understand it.
[00:25:59] Aurelio: And the question they still have is, oh, but I was selling malware scanning to my clients. What can I do? Because they don't want to stop selling something. They have been, selling for so long, and they don't want to say to their client that it was useless. And when we come back to the transparency with your client and honesty, because this is how you kept them not by lying to try to protect margin that are going to disappear if you lose your client because you have been bullshitting them.
[00:26:33] Aurelio: But that's that's, that's a take for me.
[00:26:40] Maciek: But I want to say that I totally agree with the thing that you mentioned about the how WordPress market is becoming more and more professional. I really see how a lot of those, especially those bigger companies how much they're investing, how much their development flows, security approach to how their plugin industries changed.
[00:27:07] Maciek: It's because I also remember WordPress many, many years ago when it was when a lot of plugins were kind of built out of passion and fun and that, that's great. That's great. But on the professional level, there was, I really like to use this term, yellow coding, right? So it was like yeah, I did it, it works.
[00:27:34] Maciek: I put it on the repository. That's great. That's it. And right now we see how everything has become much, much more professional. How, how it evolves. And it's really great to see how kind of the ecosystem system is maturing as a whole. So that's a really good thing. So,
[00:27:53] Aurelio: Yeah. Yeah. I mean
[00:27:55] Aurelio: and we are in mind how GoDaddy acquired and ManageWP and left abandoned the tool and no, it's not being maintained, and this is very sad, I mean, this is good for us at WP Umbrella, but this is very sad for for the people who loved using ManageWP in the past. But on the other hand if you look at how tools and company like Elementor,
[00:28:24] Aurelio: like Groupon, how they have like, invested in WordPress, how they are like securing everything. Because if you think about it, like WP Rocket is installed on 5 million website, I think something like this, like I saw a LinkedIn post few, few months ago and in the past it was just two founders behind WP Rocket.
[00:28:49] Aurelio: And I know them very well and they're amazing people, but. The best factor is super high.
[00:28:56] Maciek: Okay. So yeah, we talk a bit about what is happening, I mean, how you're growing WP Umbrella and how you're listening to your users. But lately one of the things that you integrated was the Patchstack, real time protection.
[00:29:12] Maciek: And, can you tell me how many users are already using it and how does it work generally?
[00:29:20] Aurelio: So I am a terrible guess and I didn't check before coming. The last time I looked at it, it was about, it was installed on a bit more than 2,500 websites, I guess. So this is not bad because it was released like a month ago.
[00:29:38] Aurelio: So the adoption rate is very, very nice already. And we have like release integration. Actually, we, we should announce it and we should have told this to you, but last week we released our reporting integration, so no people sending reports from the WP Umbrella with the virtual patching add on.
[00:30:03] Maciek: Amazing
[00:30:04] Aurelio: Have a beautiful new pages in the report they send to their clients which will help a lot to foster conversion as well as well. And from where I stand this is an amazing addition to the WP Umbrella. And it should be adopted much, much more in my opinion. 'Cause if you think about it, when you're an agency, you have two job and half.
[00:30:36] Aurelio: First job is to make the website according to what your clients want and advising him based on what you know about how the web is working. So this is one thing. And then the second thing is to make sure that the website is up and running and that it never goes down. And the half thing I mentioned is that the website is loading fast and it stops there from freezing, you know, like making a nice website.
[00:31:04] Aurelio: But your clients want, that's always up and loading fast. And then you have WordPress maintenance. And actually, when you do WordPress maintenance, it's mostly to keep you the website up and loading fast by ablating plugins, so there is no security flow. And then you have like, as a nice new functionality and things like this.
[00:31:29] Aurelio: But client-wise. The website needs to be up and it need to work and to load fast. And the one thing that can go wrong, actually, and this is why we update plugins, is because from time to time plugin has a vulnerability flow that can lead to a hack. Or an exploit, that can either lead to data stealing or a website going down or a website becoming more and more slow.
[00:32:06] Aurelio: And WP Umbrella is providing people with all what they need to keep websites up to date and while performing and running, and they have backups and they're safe. But with virtual patching, but we have slightly rebranded as Site Protect because it does like a few more thing on our end. With Site Protect you put website security in a new dimension because as of today, all the security player in WordPress, there are only about reactive miseries and they try to do something when it's already too late.
[00:32:52] Aurelio: With Site Protect slash virtual patching, you make sure that as soon as the flow is discovered, it cannot be exploited. And if you think about this, it's insane. It would almost mean, please don't do that, but it would almost mean that you don't need to update WordPress anymore and your plugins anymore.
[00:33:15] Aurelio: That's not true, but this can give you the peace of mind that you need to make sure that you can have a clean and neat update process, and you don't just push, like, “update all” every, once in a while which is what a lot of agencies actually do, this can give you everything like protection, peace of mind and a nice break of reporting to your clients.
[00:33:50] Aurelio: For, for me, it's a game changer, and while the adoption rate has already been very good I think we should be doing much better at the premium rate to promote our integration because this is a fantastic way to keep websites safe.
[00:34:08] Maciek: Yeah, I do agree that the short time protection is something, it's something amazing because , and this is something that I very often hear from people taking care of e-commerce, that they are always quite afraid to press the update button because if something breaks, there is a huge chance they will
[00:34:32] Maciek: literally lose money. And that was always the thing for them, that for them using this real time protection, always give them this time buffer to test something throughout the end, make sure that it's working, but the thing that I often had talking with with other for example, hosting companies, when I mentioned that yeah, we have this
[00:34:59] Maciek: really cool tool called this real time protection. And it can help your users make them more secure, one of the things again that I constantly hear is, yeah, but it costs money and we would have to pay for, for each user, but in your case from what I heard, it's additional way to earn money, right?
[00:35:27] Aurelio: It's not how I see things. I, okay, I'm not going to make a lot of friend here, but hosting providers, they are like very complicated to work with, they want everything for free, they want to kill your margin. And, and for them it's very fine, which is something I don't understand when you know that they are so.
[00:35:56] Aurelio: The way they manage bandwidth on shared hosting is so insane. And please don't go for a shared hosting company. So I don't want to talk about how hosting companies make their decision. What I can tell is that Site Protect, or WP Umbrella, or hourly backups, whatever, it's not about how much cost.
[00:36:22] Aurelio: It's about how much value it adds to you or adds to your client sites. And if someone has a 20,000 e-commerce website, 200K e-commerce website, then you would be foolish not just to add like a $2, $4, $5 insurance per month. Because if you think about this like we have, I will speak about something I know better.
[00:36:53] Aurelio: We have an hourly add-on for backups, and we, in the early days of WP Umbrella, it was included in our pricing, and because it was free, we were making backups on umpteen websites, you know, and it was like so pointless. So we put a price, and it's $2.50 per month if you want hourly backups and,
[00:37:19] Aurelio: we get from WooCommerce website owners that it's too expensive. But if you think about it you can lose just one order and then the add-on is worth it and you don't get the frustration that you have lost an order that can be much more expensive than the $2 per month subscription. And I think it's the same with Site Protect.
[00:37:44] Aurelio: And I think you have to, I'm talking a lot these days about total cost of ownership which is not, okay, there is how much a tool is costing but there is also the cost of not having this tool of doing things manually, and in the end do you want to maintain your WordPress management tool on your own server and have your own backup plugins and have your own security stack,
[00:38:18] Aurelio: and you send your report manually and you make export and you spend a lot of time doing like things that don't really, that are not fun. And that could be done automatically by a tool like WP Umbrella or not. And, and I think it's very linked to the DIY nature of WordPress, you know, because we all started WordPress that way.
[00:38:43] Aurelio: And it was fun and it was cool. And it was no other way to do things, but now we have like fantastic tool and it's probably the right moment if you are earning a living about WordPress not to think that a tool is costing you 40 bucks per month, which is a lot, but about how much time you can free yourself per year with, with those 30 bucks per month.
[00:39:12] Aurelio: And at the end of the day, it's on how much do you value your own time and peace of mind. And I think this is a huge difference between the agencies that are successful businesswise, like the big one, and the tinier one, and no judgment on this but just an insight on how you see expenses and as a business founder,
[00:39:42] Aurelio:, I also saw a shift in myself, if I can say so on this kind of things when in the early days I saw everything as a cost. And nowadays I see things are as investment, and the question is, is it a good investment for me or not? And this is a question people should ask when they are considering a tool like WP Umbrella or activating the Site Protect addon that you guys are powering.
[00:40:17] Aurelio: I think it's only about that. Like this is an investment. Investment costs money but they are supposed to bring you something in return. With WP Umbrella and Site Protect what you give in return is a fucking great peace of mind, if I can say, and a lot of time saved at the end of the year, and this is the only calculation you should be making.
[00:40:42] Aurelio: Hhow much time it's going to save me at the end of the year for what it costs me. Yeah. And for me, Site Protect and WP Umbrella, t's a no brainer if you just go for it.
[00:40:55] Maciek: Yeah, I totally agree about this approach that yeah, it's an investment. It's an investment, or a better word that you use that it's an insurance because that's why we use insurances for most of our time
[00:41:10] Maciek: we hope we will never have to use them. But in those rare cases we really become very, very happy and grateful to ourselves that we have this insurance in this time of need. It helped us and it saved us. So that's true. How did you decid to add this realtime protection to your product roadmap?
[00:41:38] Maciek: What was kind of the trigger? Because I know it wasn't like that you woke up one morning and you thought, yeah, realtime protection. This, no, probably not. Probably you had some voices from a community.
[00:41:51] Aurelio: So it has been in our roadmap for a lot of time. Like I think I signed the contract with Oliver like two years ago
[00:42:01] Aurelio: to have, like, Site Protect deployed on WP Umbrella, but then we have a public roadmap and we follow what people wants. And so we have been cleaning up like most of the item that were more voted than the virtual patching integration. And came the moment where it was very high in the list along with update automation and for technical constraint
[00:42:30] Aurelio: it made more sense to ship the virtual patching addon before the update automation that's going to be released like in a couple of weeks. And that was like, natural for us. I am sorry. I don't have like a magic, like I woke up one morning and I, no, no, you know, but that's how we build WP Umbrella.
[00:42:52] Aurelio: Like we listen to what people want. We try to make them in the order that matters the most for them. What they don't know often is that to do one thing we need to develop first some blockers. So we can do what they want. And it was making a lot of sense to do virtual patching at that moment. And then we had an opportunity with WordCamps to make sure that would be released, like before WordCamps, so everybody would speak about this at WordCamp Europe, which actually happened.
[00:43:23] Aurelio: Every single person I met talked to me about the virtual patching addon and our integration with you guys. And everybody was happy about this because I think we are some kind of sister companies, in term of values, in term of how we do things, because if people want to know the release was so messy so quick
[00:43:47] Aurelio: and that was only possible because Patchstack and WP Umbrella are both two super flexible, friendly user driven companies, so that's how it happens.
[00:44:04] Maciek: So apart from the fact that it was kind of done on the last minute because, it was, let's be honest was the integration difficult to, to make or,
[00:44:17] Aurelio: It was not, it was actually very easy because we are not an API driven company.
[00:44:25] Aurelio: And everybody in WP Umbrella has been built to integrate with other party providers. And the integration was easy because we had like a joint slack channel between our CTO and your CTO. And it was a piece of cake, you guys did a brave work with your API.
[00:44:52] Maciek: That's, that's really, that's really nice to hear.
[00:44:54] Maciek: I will pass it to our developers and everyone that they are doing a great job. And tell me, and do you see already some change after this month? Are are those users that are using this real time protection, do they already see the value? Did they…
[00:45:19] Aurelio: I think most of the people who activated the addon were already very familiar with Patchstack, so they knew the value.
[00:45:27] Aurelio: And as of this month like I said, I didn't check before coming, and it was a big sequence with work in Poland and a few days off. So I will need to look into the figure. But I'm working on a use case with Lana at Patchstack, and all of this will be like, very well documented.
[00:45:53] Maciek: Amazing. Amazing.
[00:45:55] Aurelio: But yeah, I mean, long story short, yeah. I'm sure obviously this is value and what I can tell
[00:46:00] Maciek: Mm-hmm.
[00:46:00] Aurelio: Is that we have had no churn on this addon so far. Nobody, so nobody cancelled I mean. Till five days ago when last time I checked that nobody cancelled the Site Protect addon in WP Umbrella.
[00:46:17] Maciek: This is also a really interesting thing to hear that really more and more agencies seem to kind of take care about about security, which, let's be honest, for the whole reputation of WordPress security happens for a reason. Also the agencies that didn't always cared about their client websites, but also a part of it.
[00:46:44] Maciek: And right now we do see a shift that that everything is getting more and more professional, including their approach to security. And let's be honest, that's great news that can say, yeah. Finally. Finally. And to kind of, start start wrapping our talk up. Tell me how do you see how would WordPress ecosystem will evolve in the next two or five years?
[00:47:15] Aurelio: I don't know. It's a question I'm being asked in every single podcast I make, and I'm like, I have no clue. It's moving too fast. But this said, WordPress has one amazing strength which is it's an open source product, platform, which means that with AI and with page builder and with all what's going on, data privacy and data sovereignty, and, you know, where is the data stored, what do I do with my data will become more and more important.
[00:47:55] Aurelio: And, and so I think like within two years we should not see like a crazy market change in how our WordPress is doing, how it's being used. Of course it will decline because nowadays with like own label, visual, I mean there are so many tools that you can use to… so many, Wix, Webflow. I mean there are those kind of
[00:48:24] Aurelio: shiny things that you can use to make a website, but I think WordPress will very fairly remain the most important website provider, if I can say so in the world within two years, I have no doubt. And what the world will look like in two years from now with all these AI agent and stuff like this
[00:48:51] Aurelio: I don't know either. But I'm confident mostly because of its open source nature, and the project that just started in Italy, I don't know if you're familiar about this, but you know and if you can, maybe if you want to speak about this or it's, it's too far from our podcast, but WordPress is investing
[00:49:14] Aurelio: in students for the future in Italy, the bulk started in Italy and I think it's a beautiful initiative. Something that was like really needed, and I'm super excited about this because when you go to WordCamps it's mostly people like you and me, Maciek and we start to be old.
[00:49:39] Aurelio: It's very nice to see like young students, that has the future to be sensibilised and to start using open source products like, like WordPress.
[00:49:53] Maciek: Yeah. And you mentioned this, about this, it was, I also forgot the name about how it's called about kind of giving points to students for contributing to WordPress.
[00:50:09] Maciek: And that's one thing. And on the other hand, it's also great to see that there is also another, kind of set of actions started about making sure that there is always this kind of, let's call it WordPress Academy, at the beginning of every WordCamp. So, yeah. Finally we see those investments in new people to join to see how WordPress works, and that's great.
[00:50:38] Maciek: That's great. And to kind of. Yeah, yeah. Please, please.
[00:50:41] Aurelio: And the technology behind WordPress is already very very forward, and it's not like we would need those end of new major release to make it even better, WordPress is already like a fantastic tool, you know?
[00:51:03] Maciek: Yeah, it is, it is.
[00:51:04] Maciek: I mean, let's be honest. It is. There is no other CMS that handles 40% of the market. That's yeah, for a reason. It's for a reason and it's not an easy thing to do and to maintain. True. And last thing I wanted to ask to kind of end this and I will talk with something optimistic in the history of WP Umbrella,
[00:51:31] Maciek: What do you consider as the thing you messed up the most though. Let's end with a nice horror story.
[00:51:45] Aurelio: When we created WP Umbrella, we didn't create the concept. It's a technical, it's funny because it's going to be a technical answer. Funnily we didn't think about the concept of organization.
[00:52:03] Aurelio: Which made the release of our team member feature a fantastic nightmare. But we've overcame the issue. But that is the biggest mistake we made when along the way and no doubt 100% this answer. Like the fact that we created a tool for agencies without thinking that people would need to invite their colleague to the platform.
[00:52:40] Aurelio: And it can, looks like a minor things, but it was big, and this is the thing, like when we talk about our user. Often they said, Hey, but I would like this to be added to the pattern, to WP Umbrella. And it's probably just a few hours of development. I know how to do it. And the truth is like, yes, but it's not that easy to do because it needs to be made at scale.
[00:53:08] Aurelio: And it need to work on, we make 50,000 backups every day before, between midnight and like 5:00 AM. This is the kind of topics we have to deal. It's not about how you make WP Umbrella works on 100 websites. It's about you make sure that it's available every day of on 50,000 websites and end of year, we should be close to 100,000.
[00:53:36] Aurelio: And this is what we have to deal with, but yeah. Long story short, the way we didn't think about team member in the very early day of WP Umbrella, and it's the tips I would give to anyone creating an application.
[00:53:59] Maciek: Okay. Aurelio, thank you so much for sharing a lot of your insights.
[00:54:04] Maciek: Also, it was nice to see a bit more how the outside and in the out looks like. So iit was very, very nice. And what, what can I wish you like this 100,000, right?
[00:54:20] Aurelio: Indeed, before end of year, finger crossed. Of course. No pressure, no pressure marketing team.
[00:54:29] Maciek: So thank you. Thank you so much again, and, yeah, have a great day. See ya.
[00:54:34] Aurelio: You too Maciek. Bye-Bye.
