Should You Run a Lifetime Deal? WP Umbrella’s Lessons

[00:00:00] Aurelio Volle: If I had to do an AppSumo campaign again, I will do it every single time.

[00:00:04] Alex Panagis: I think it is something that is characteristic of the types of people that look for AppSumo deals. They actually saw the vision of WP Umbrella beyond what perhaps even you and your co-founders saw in the very early days, as growing to be a product like ManageWP and not just out of the lifetime deal.

[00:00:22] Aurelio Volle: Our pricing is still at $1.99 and we have not increased our pricing ever since. Despite everybody else increasing pricing,

[00:00:31] Alex Panagis: Like when you go on the funding treadmill, you’re ultimately running a race against time, of how long can you not run out of money or how long does it take you to become profitable?

[00:00:41] Aurelio Volle: What you said about lifetime deal versus raising capital? ’cause I’d rather raise my capital to toward my users than toward investors, I think

[00:00:49] Alex Panagis: If you’re running a software company, at some stage of your product’s lifecycle, you will almost certainly have given a shred of consideration to the concept of running a lifetime deal. That is, taking your recurring revenue product and selling it as a one-off purchase to early users as a way of driving adoption and revenue, typically early on in your company. In this episode, we talk to Aurelio Voll, the founder and CEO of WP Umbrella. If you’d like to see more interviews on the topic of lifetime deals, please reach out to us at [email protected]. I’d like to release more episodes on this topic in future so that we can make it as easy as possible to help you watching this video make a decision for your own software company, so please sit back and enjoy. But before you do so, I want to take a moment to point out that there is an element of bias, or perhaps more so self-selection in the sense that the founders who choose to come on here and talk about lifetime deals are also the ones who are happy to share their stories.

We’ve worked with both companies doing millions in ARR as well as countless startups and working with startups to evaluate the feasibility of a successful lifetime deal, as well as success beyond the lifetime deal, which let’s be honest, is often the more complex part is something we’ve come across more times than I can count.

But while it may seem like we’ve seen it all, we haven’t because you and I haven’t met yet, and there is absolutely no surefire way for us to qualify whether running a lifetime deal makes sense for you without actually getting to know you. So if you have any questions, please feel free to drop a comment and join the conversation publicly or email me personally at [email protected].

And without further ado, let’s get into the episode.

Alright, so welcome to the show, Aurelio. You’re the founder of WP Umbrella, a WordPress management tool for agencies and freelancers that I think is this fair to say, has taken the industry by storm. And from the outside looking in at least, there are quite a few reasons that this is the case. The core ones being your radical transparency and relentless commitment to shipping what customers want.

Going back to WP Umbrella’s early days, you ran a lifetime deal on AppSumo, which prior to my understanding from our quick conversation before the recording was to drive adoption, boost early revenue, and grow your user base. We’ve already had the pleasure of meeting in person at WordCamps, but before I get into the questions I have, feel free to add anything to the, to the context for this conversation because I think there is quite an important note you made before we started recording.

[00:03:20] Aurelio Volle: Thanks for the invitation, Alex. Delighted to be here about WP Umbrella, it’s B2B SaaS. So we provide, like you said, WordPress management tool for people whose job is to make websites. So web agencies, freelancers, solo developer, designer, like all those people who try to earn passive recurring revenue. I mean passive, it’s not passive, but through what we call WordPress care, WordPress maintenance.

So just to, to add to the context, it’s a B2B SaaS for people whose job is to, to make websites. And we did a lifetime deal in the very early days of WP Umbrella, but to be fully transparent, it was not like a strategy to, it was not something super, extremely that we, that we fought for. Uh, at that time, WP Umbrella was just the side project of a side project, and we were doing uptime monitoring for WordPress sites.

So the IT costs were quite low. Uh, if I can say we were not doing much, we didn’t have customer support and it just came out of an idea. I mean, because the people of AppSumo, how can I say? Because we use AppSumo to do our, to do our lifetime deal, and the team behind AppSumo is relentless. And they reach out and they reach out and they reach out again.

And at some point I just told my cofounder, hey dude, let’s give it a try and we’ll get a few user, we’ll get a few thousand of Euros and, and we move on. And that’s how it started. Yeah. And so we went on AppSumo with few features like uptime monitoring, PHP monitoring, performance monitoring. But we were not doing Google PageSpeed core monitoring, which is very, uh, resource consuming.

And we, were not doing backups, we’re not doing reporting. We are not doing plugin management. Like we are not doing anything close to what WP Umbrella has become.

[00:05:33] Alex Panagis: The stage when you decided to run a lifetime deal, WP Umbrella was a, would you say rock solid product or was it treated more like a side project and in terms of, ’cause now I think of all the products in the category of WordPress management, your care and attention to detail is a lot higher than most other companies, especially in WordPress. I don’t think that standard is unfortunately high, but companies like WP Umbrella are actually just raising the standard. At the time, was that the case though?

[00:05:59] Aurelio Volle: First thing? First, thank you for your very kind, very kind words.

It means a lot. Back then. WP Umbrella was not anything close to what it is today, and I wouldn’t even call it an early stage product because it was like, you know, we were two friends building like Indie Hackers projects to have like a passive recurring revenue. And this is why we didn’t have like a launch strategy.

We didn’t think pricing through that much. Uh,

[00:06:32] Alex Panagis: So what, what was the goal behind the lifetime deal? Because at the time you were running another business, I assume as your full-time focus. So was the goal, or at least the ambitious thinking perhaps that if we run the lifetime deal with AppSumo, let’s give it a try.

The best case scenario is that the revenue allows us to take it full time and then grow it from there.

[00:06:51] Aurelio Volle: This was not the goal. It was no goal to be honest, but this was the consequences of the AppSumo campaign, which is why I always tell people, if I had to do an AppSumo campaign again, I will do it every single time, because it gave us the traction to actually go full time on WP Umbrella and, and it changed everything.

But business wise it was a terrific mistakes. Uh, but at that time we couldn’t know because we were not doing backups and backups. I mean, when, when you have like storage cost, infrastructure cost, things like this, you shouldn’t do a lifetime deal, final stop, like one of our competitors is managing backups and, and did a lifetime deal campaign knowing that, and

I don’t think it’s wise or sustainable final stop? Because then you create a debt and the company that create debt is in a bad position. And so going back to to our own AppSumo campaign, at that time we doing like very few things, but we got so much traction. Like people were, oh, but you should do plugin management and then you should do backups and you should do restoration and you should do reporting.

And they got so psych. Which is something I don’t understand, I still don’t understand, but we saw something in the product. They became crazy on the deal that we, I mean, to the point that we had to shut down our own deal. So I think after 48 hours in the beginning, people were allowed to stack code and, and we had like people buying 20, 30 codes, which was about 200, 300 websites.

We’re like, but there is no way we were able to manage the scalability of this, you know, so quickly. Um, again, it was in the early days of WP Umbrella and we are managing 50 to 60,000 websites almost on a daily basis. Back then, it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is going too far. We, we don’t know what we’re doing.

Let’s prevent people for stacking code which make, which may burden our own deal, almost irrelevant. Because you don’t do much with 10 websites if you’re an agency or WordPress developer. This said, people were so enthusiastic and everybody was telling us, guys, you should do Manage WP again, because those people, they let us down when they were acquired by GoDaddy and, and we see so much potential in what you’re, in, what you’re building. And then the idea started to grow on us. Like, oh, but if we do that, it’s not a side project. It’s a full-time job. And at, at the exact same moment, the co-founders of WP Rocket contacted us and say, guys, uh, those people on AppSumo, they are so right. You, you two, me and my colleague Thomas, you’re able to do something.

We believe that you’re able to achieve something meaningful and you should go full-time on WP Umbrella and we are going to help you. So AppSumo business wise was crazy mistakes.

[00:10:13] Alex Panagis: This was in 2019. So was it before WP Rocket was in Group One or they were already as a part of Group One?

[00:10:21] Aurelio Volle: Um, thing things, you know, I, I think we already, I think at that point we already sold WP Rocket.

They were very advanced in the process of, of selling things, and it was clear to us that they would come and help us after the full acquisition. I, I can’t even, I don’t really remember the timeline, but they were in the process basically, and they had already became investors and advisors in some, in some startups.

Um, but so to answer your question, AppSumo gave us a momentum, a roadmap, and a direction, which is all what you need to start a company. And my advice to founders would be if you don’t have huge infrastructure cost and basically if you don’t have variables, IT cost. If you know your fixed cost and then going on AppSumo in your very early days is a fantastic way to get a user base that’s going to try your product, tell you what you’re doing wrong and correct you in what you should be doing. And AppSumo user are amazing because they live to the to their promises and they give feedback. And we are still constantly talking with some of them, like not on a daily basis, but I can think of five users that were from AppSumo back then, and I know their first name and I know their last name.

And they have been so instrumental to the progress of WP Umbrella, so it’s a golden mine of users. If you know how to exploit them, if you know how to talk to them. And if you also know to understand that they do not necessarily reflect your whole user base, because not all your user base has the time to hunt for deals on AppSumo.

Some people are just ready to pay upfront. And those people on AppSumo, they are after the, after the money, which you should not forget, after the early stage startup. Like they like, they like to live the excitement and this is not your whole user base and it’s not the whole user base you are going to get as you are growing.

[00:12:37] Alex Panagis: Yeah, I completely agree. I also think a lot of founders fall into the trap of thinking that because they price their lifetime deal a certain way and the type of customers that they attracted from the lifetime deal that they’re boxed into being like that. And perhaps by, I would say luck, but not, not luck.

I think it is something that is characteristic of the types of people that look for AppSumo deals is they actually saw the vision of WP Umbrella from what it sounds like you’re saying, beyond what perhaps even you and your co-founder saw in the very early days as growing to be a product like Manage WP and not just out of the lifetime deal, as in like growth beyond that, do you think that not having the full product was part of the reason this was the case?

Because a lot of founders, they launch with something which is, they have all the features built in, so they, they have, like you said, a competitor, which I think I know which one you’re talking about. They launched with backups and everything included already.

[00:13:34] Aurelio Volle: Yeah. It means a very good. It’s a very good take.

You just have two reason to go for a lifetime deal. I think the first one is that you, you urgently need money to bridge, to be, even to, I don’t know. But you, you need like cash, like right now. Otherwise, it means that you don’t believe that your, that you have a product market fit, you know, or that, or it’s a clear testament, a testimonial pattern.

That are too expensive or that your product is not worth the price you display on your website. So either you need money, either you, you are not pricing your tool right, or you don’t, yeah, you don’t mean too much the value that you promise to deliver. The other one, which is a good one in my opinion, is that you’re in an early stage.

You need a user base and you need feedback, and you need traction, and if this is the case, and if you can think that your costs are not going to explode, then going on AppSumo or doing a lifetime deal is a fantastic idea. And that’s what we did. But at that time, we didn’t know that it would be like the reason why we would do everything unless it was like a, just to move

[00:14:55] Alex Panagis: Just an experiment basically. So that’s the, so first reason is basically the company needs the cash influx. The second reason is the company is early stage and the vision is not 100% there. I do think if I’m just as a more for like a note for the audience, I think that the advice could be misunderstood to mean if you don’t really know what you’re building, then you can launch an AppSumo with like a few features and then figure it out.

I think that that worked for WP Umbrella because of a unique market opportunity in WordPress in relation to the features you had. I think if you go out and you build like a, like a calendar SaaS and you don’t have a unique value proposition of what it could be or why somebody would pay for it, I think the transition to building a, you know, product that would become a successful or, nearly as successful as something like WP Umbrella would be more difficult. So after the lifetime deal, then, if I remember correctly, this was when we met the first time I believe was just around the lifetime deal, having ended in the WordCamp Europe in Greece, and you were doing subscriptions at $1.99 per month per site.

I’m curious if you could share a little bit more about the, was this a transitionary thing?

[00:16:09] Aurelio Volle: So our pricing is still at $1.99 and we have not increased our pricing ever since, despite everybody else increasing pricing. And we decided on that because that, mostly because of Manage WP and the add-on base slash, monthly slash fairly slash you pay for, I mean, if you look at, in, if you look at the space in which you operate, you have two pricing model. One is based on the number of websites that you use, and it’s giving users a fake idea of they’re saving money while actually the price per website is going up.

Because if you are, so basically it’s like 10, 50 and 100 websites, three basic packages that you have. In our space pricing are based on the number of websites, and then there is like an alternative with features available or not. And then if you have like the chairs pricing, like 10 websites, 50 websites, 100 websites, you end up paying the 100 website package only if, and you only have 70 websites.

So in the end, the cost per website is super high and we have always tried to be fair and transparent with our users, and we didn’t consider this as something fair. In my opinion, this is some kind of misleading marketing and my marketing team, my marketing team, might disagree with me, but it’s something super deep in our DNA.

Like, we try to be transparent. We are a valuable cost. Our costs are based on the number of website, and this should be reflecting in our pricing. So we were frustrated by this on the first hand. And on the other hand, WP, which is like a fantastic product, like I’m always saying this in interview, like what this all built back then in PHP is terrific.

But Manage WP is add-on based. So it’s website, it’s based on the website you connect, and then on the feature you activated. And this is kindly becoming a nightmares. If you manage many sites and you don’t know what you have activated, and it came clearly out of our user interviews that people were so frustrated by addons.

And so you say, okay, let’s make something super easy. It’s going to be pay as you go. It’s going to be transparent and almost everything will be included. And I say almost because for instance, we have an add-on for the hourly backup frequency. Which we didn’t have in the early days of WP Umbrella, but because it was free, people were activating hourly backups on 15 websites, and it was not meaningful for their server.

It was not meaningful for our server, and at some point we had to make some feature available on, on another, on an add-on based. But basically for $2 you get everything included. And because it’s easy. The adoption was super easy. What we do, like you said, it’s a big market. We have new competitors coming out every day, but what we do is extremely hard at scale because we are doing the worst thing that we can do, which is communicating with thousands of thousands of WordPress website hosted on share hosting, which is, like I can make myself WP Umbrella working on 100 website that would be hosting on a nice place with few plugins, and that would be, but the beauty of what we do is that it works almost everywhere. And this is super hard. And the adoption rate for our users, because our tool is like core business to them, that’s how they earn a recurring revenue, which is super important when you run an agency because for instance, at the moment the market condition are bad and if you don’t have like a recurring source of income, then your agency is at, is in jeopardy, is in danger, pardon. And so it’s core business and the pay as you go pricing was a very good way for people to start small and grow big. And it’s also in our DNA, like our, we are transparent.

We have a pay as you go pricing. And if you grow. We’ll grow with you. And this is something, some of our key user like complain like, guys, the bill is too expensive. We are managing 800 websites, blah, blah, blah. But in the end, it’s all very clear, it’s very easy to understand. And the value beyond the WP Umbrella for $2 per month is insane.

And if you’re managing 800 or 1000 websites with WP Umbrella. It means that we’re probably making $10k a month ish on WordPress month now, so it’s a big deal, you know?

[00:21:23] Alex Panagis: Yeah. Next, I think that you may disagree on this point because in WordPress it is probably one of the spaces which is more open to the concept of lifetime deals. In other categories of products, the perception of doing a lifetime deal, it typically has quite a negative view. From people who then subscribe later on. And I think I have my own opinion on this, which just briefly is that it’s actually overstated. I don’t think that most people actually have a very negative view of companies that do lifetime deals.

The negative view comes from companies that continue to do lifetime deals. But for WP Umbrella, would you say that there was any perception impact long-term that you had to fight away from that? You know, WP Umbrella is not a lifetime deal product. It is a premium product or was that happening very naturally throughout the course of running the company anyway?

[00:22:18] Aurelio Volle: No, for us it was super smooth because we are building in public every six months. I share like everything mistakes, what we learn and I was very transparent and we did an AppSumo to get some traction and that was it. And I don’t think people should have an opinion or this company did a lifetime deal and it’s terrible.

This company did a lifetime deal and it’s… because if you think about this, like in our market, we have two competitors that have been doing lifetime deal Main WP, and Modular DS. Main WP is an, if I can say, an open source, self hosted solution. So the only cost over time of, for Main WP that are linked to the lifetime, it is customer support.

They’re providing community customer support most of the time. So for a company like Main WP doing a lifetime deal, it’s not a bad idea if you think about this, you are selling your product like three times, four times. I don’t know the pricing of Main WP, but I guess it’s that like three years or four years of pricing of your pricing.

And people are good to go and since they don’t have any variable cost. Cost over time that are going to grow and then it’s pay for business. I don’t think it jeopardize the future of the company and I think it’s a good move. And if I was Main WP CEO, I would probably do that. On the other hand, if you have like cost for it to backup storage, just, just this thing, doing a lifetime deal means that you are growing debt and a company that is growing debt either going to go bankrupt.

Or is there going to play an unpleasant surprise to its user? So I guess if tomorrow is starting to, hey, I’m going to do lifetime deal, I’d be very worried, that’s my point. Like, I’m not sure people should have like a good or bad perception. Perception of lifetime deal. It’s more about understanding the business model of the company we are working with.

[00:24:23] Alex Panagis: And does the company understand? ’cause you and your co-founder saw when the lifetime deals on AppSumo was doing really well, that actually it wasn’t just, oh great, all the extra revenue. You actually saw this is gonna be a problem, let’s scale it down instead of letting it grow out of, you know, to the point where we won’t be able to serve the customers.

So I completely agree. I think the way people deal with it is what people should be judging the companies on is the company operationally ready to deal with the lifetime deal, or are they taking the wrong steps? So if you, I mean, and you see it outside of WordPress, but you see lifetime deals where the founders don’t consider the fact that they have to serve these users and then they abandon the users.

And I think that is what should be giving a company a negative perception, obviously. But if a company is doing what WP Umbrella did and many other companies before have done as well, is that they’re actually taking the steps to make sure we’re doing the lifetime deal with the common or not common sense, but rather the business intelligence to know we can actually serve these users long term, assuming not just assuming we hit like some massive growth rate and raise seed funding from a, you know, VC firm.

It needs to actually be sustainable without all of these other prerequisites.

[00:25:39] Aurelio Volle: This is a very good point. I mean, we are bootstrappers, and we created WP Umbrella in our thirties, like, okay. We’ve been there, we’ve done that. Let’s try to do something our way. And we didn’t want to raise money and to answer from investors.

So when we saw that we couldn’t make the AppSumo model scale, we just blocked it because we don’t want, I always tell my co-founders, I don’t like problems and neither do he. So let’s not create ourself a problem out of nothing for a few thousand of Euro. If you have to answer to investors and if you are racing for a of financing, and I know that Lemlist, which is a very good outreach management tool, did an AppSumo in the early days and, like documented very well, like why it was a good idea and you would not do it again.

Which is my take. It makes sense. Like you need to show people that your proof of concept is working so you can secure more money and so on, and so on and so on. But it, it’s not what we did and what we are doing at WP Umbrella. And it didn’t make any sense to, yeah.

[00:26:55] Alex Panagis: I think the same way that I’m not trying to compare a lifetime deal to raising funding, but in some respects it’s a different treadmill.

Like when you go on the funding treadmill, you’re ultimately running a race against time of how long can you not run out of money or how long does it take you to become profitable? And in a way, the lifetime deal is kind of the same thing, but it just, but very different in obviously in many other ways in that you get a cash influx and you’re now either able going to make the recurring revenue to continue serving the customers or you’re gonna have to shut down the business because you don’t have the money to keep it up.

And I think a lot of companies, they don’t give themselves enough runway so that they can run the lifetime deal and they don’t suffer in four months the fate of a company that cannot continue serving their users. Which brings me to perfectly, my next question, which I don’t know if you’re comfortable sharing, but if you are, because I know WP Umbrella is already quite transparent.

Would you be willing to talk about how much revenue the lifetime deal did bring in in the period that it was running?

[00:27:55] Aurelio Volle: I can’t even remember the exact numbers. But I think we, we’ve made about like $30k, $40k, I can’t remember at all, but it was not that much. If today we were, I mean if, like, I like what you said about lifetime deal versus raising capital.

’cause I’d rather raise my capital toward my users than toward investors. I think

[00:28:21] Alex Panagis: Sell the company.

[00:28:22] Aurelio Volle: Yeah. And today I’m very, I’m sure that if we’re doing a lifetime campaign we could raise, and I’m going to use the word raise 1 million of Euro ish, which is a bit less that our current annual recurring revenue, which is a nice a seed if you, if you, if you think about it nowadays. But that’s it. That’s not what we, what we, what we want to do. And so back then it was about, between $20k and $40k. We didn’t choose this money. You know.

[00:29:01] Alex Panagis: So the money in a way was, the money in a way was irrelevant. Yeah. It, from what it sounds like, I mean, not to say that $30k is nothing when you’re as an early stage company, but you and your co-founder didn’t look at that and think like, oh yes, you know, finally, now we have this, it was actually not, you weren’t, you weren’t doing it as a desperate measure. Which is, I think also a thing I want to emphasize. ‘Cause I see a lot of founders ask me if a lifetime deal is a good idea and it is when it is that they are backed into a corner and it is possibly their only way out. So they try to dig out of their, the hole that they’ve created for themself by running a lifetime deal.

At which point the money becomes important. Very, in fact, the money becomes the sole reason. Whereas for WP Umbrella, it wasn’t that. It was actually more so the users and shaping the future of the company because those users, referred users, they were passionate, super fans. I would even say from the looks of it. Yeah.

[00:29:58] Aurelio Volle: I couldn’t agree more.

[00:29:59] Alex Panagis: Awesome. If you have another company you think we should talk to about whether or not to run a lifetime deal or not run one. So if you know a company that did one that was successful or failed, I think there’s a bit of a inherent bias with the video that we’re producing here is that most of the founders that wants to talk about the lifetime deal have gone on to be successful, whereas the ones who ran a lifetime deal and it ultimately didn’t work probably will not be willing to talk about it. And in the case of WP Umbrella, it’s unique because in a way, the lifetime deal was a success, not revenue wise, but a like in a massive way, but a success in a massive way with the early traction that it gave you to shape the rest of the company. And then WP Umbrella was successful afterwards.

And I think it’s hard to actually, probably a unique space that WP Umbrella sits in there because it’s like, a lot of them value success on the actual financial impact of the lifetime deal versus what I think is the most important thing, which is what WP Umbrella has achieved.

[00:31:02] Aurelio Volle: My advice and one recommendation for our for a company who has been doing great lifetime deal.

My advice for founders is that if you go an AppSumo and you do a lifetime deal, you will face, and if you’re in your early stage, you will face, what your daily operation will look like when you grow, which means that you need to be ready to face like customer support at scale. And this would be the most precious advice I can give to someone who is deciding tomorrow to go and to go on a platform for lifetime deal coming back, pardon, to your, to your question. I think Loïc Blascos, who is the CEO of WP Grid Builder. He is running every year for Black Friday a lifetime deal. And he is super happy about this and I strongly disagree with him on the take, but he has so many extremely interesting to say he in extremely bad, interesting things to say about how lifetime deal operates and basically I think Loïc Blascos is like, half part of your users are going to stop using your product in 12 months. So you’d rather have them paying for five years. And that’s it. It’s a very poorly sum up of what he’s thinking and what he, what he can explain you better face to face. But that’s one of the reason why if you see you have a great churn rate because your product doesn’t have like a monthly usage or because your market is changing, then it might be a good thing to do a lifetime deal, but at WP Umbrella we have like 2% of churn monthly. So it really doesn’t make any sense to do a life a lifetime deal. And most of the founder I know, if you talk to them privately, they would always tell that lifetime deal sucks. Besides Loïc.

[00:33:07] Alex Panagis: Yeah, there’s one other company in WordPress, GridPane, which I mean, they’ve gone really quiet now, but they did like also like two times a year or even, or once a year, at least every year for the last three, four years, they were doing lifetime deals and then they would kind of like, you wouldn’t hear about them for a long time again, and it’s hard to know from the outside looking in. I know, my opinion and my view of it and that I share with quite a lot of other people as well is that it’s an interesting way, I think like you, I don’t understand and necessarily agree with the view.

But obviously something has “sort of worked” in quotations. I dunno the degree to which it has been successful for them, but obviously there is something to learn from what they have done as well.

[00:33:49] Aurelio Volle: And you know, Apple doesn’t do lifetime deal. SemRush doesn’t do lifetime deal. And if your product provide a tremendous value to people, then you should probably not be doing a lifetime deal.

That’s, that’s, that’s one of my take

[00:34:14] Alex Panagis: And it’s not a recurring one. Maybe before you know that it provides this value, yes. But once it does, if you continue doing it, to me, then that’s where I get, that’s where I think the judgment is actually more justified because I think I would have a negative impact of a company, a negative perception of a company that does the lifetime deals consistently.

Because to me it, it signals that they haven’t figured out how to grow the business’ recurring revenue to sustain it. So they need to keep, basically, keep doing a launch every year or twice a year to keep the revenue coming in, which to me is a red flag. I realize that there’s some people that don’t care because they, their logic is as long as the money works as a user, they don’t care if the money the deal is good enough, sometimes that’s okay with them, but for me, I wouldn’t commit and I think like inside WP Umbrella, if you’re looking at a tool for like Hrefs or Semrush, you probably are not gonna go for a tool that’s doing a lifetime deal still because you don’t think that that’s gonna end up being the right tool for the job, which is like a, it’s a perception, which you could argue is wrong, but I think it’s tends to be a good way to measure it.

[00:35:23] Aurelio Volle: You mean what you described? If you listen again, what you said is very close to a Ponzi scheme, you know, so it works still it for, I mean, it works till it’s working. One day it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean that all the people doing lifetime deal again, I think Main WP is a very good and I’m making way too much, advertisement and publicity of my competitor.

A good way to, good way to a lifetime deal. And it’s sustainable way as soon as you are starting to have high cost and it doesn’t make sense within your business, have any. Just doesn’t make sense and user are going to suffer at one point of the lifetime thing.

[00:36:08] Alex Panagis: Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for your time, Aurelio.

And I’ll say that one of the things from having watched a couple of interviews of yours online, I think the way that you talk about competitors as well is something that as a bootstrapped founder, I think it’s a credit to, you’re not disrespecting other players in the space or coming in and saying like, oh, our product is so much better than all of these other folks.

Honestly, you are probably, at least in WordPress, I would say you are the textbook example of how to communicate with about other competitors and also just generally how to bootstrap a company because it is, I would argue, a more difficult space to bootstrap a recurring revenue business in WordPress than in a lot of…

It presents unique challenges, but with the WordPress audience and the user base, because of their perception of spending money and wanting lifetime deals, the fact that you are able to off the back of the lifetime deal, build an extremely successful recurring revenue business without raising funding and without continuing to do lifetime deals after that, I think is a huge credit to you and your team.

So

[00:37:13] Aurelio Volle: Thanks, Alex. Thanks a lot. And it’s easy to say high thing about competitors because what the folks of Main WP, Manage WP, WP Remote have been doing is like, it’s incredible because what we do, it’s super hard and what they do, it’s super hard too. So our, and like you said, the market is very big. All those people are super nice thinking Akshat Choudhary from WP Remote who is like someone way smarter than me.

Extremely kind and only thing I can do is to give back to them for all what they have given us. So try, if you don’t use our WordPress management tool, adopt one. Whether it’s WP Umbrella, Main WP, WP Remote, Manage WP, it’s a no brainer if you want to scale your agency. And that’s the only thing matter because you can only thrive in an ecosystem if the ecosystem is thriving, you know, so.

That’s what I deeply think.