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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hi, and welcome to the Publish Press podcast. I'm Steve Burge And in this episode, I'm talking with Akshat Choudhary from WP Remote. I'm really glad I had the opportunity to invite Akshat on because he doesn't talk much. He's a self professed shy guy, and he's not someone you'll always be hearing from on YouTube, social media, podcasts.
Steve Burge:Instead, he's an engineer at heart who loves to build great products, and that's what he's done with WP Remote and the associated brands. We dig into his story on this episode and his philosophy of building high quality products that people love. I think you're gonna get a ton out of this interview. Here's Akshat. Hey, Akshat.
Steve Burge:Welcome to the Published Press Podcast.
Akshat Choudhary:Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me.
Steve Burge:So where are you today? Where are you where are you calling in from?
Akshat Choudhary:So I I'm in in our Bangalore offices. I'm sitting in our studio of the our Bangalore offices. So unlike, actually, most of WordPress, you know, companies, we work out of an office. Almost all of our team is working from a single office in Bangalore.
Steve Burge:Well, I I've met a a quite a few people who have started companies in India, Bangladesh, and places like that. And surprisingly, it's quite common, I think, to have to have an office. I I don't know whether maybe that's a reflection of bad Internet speeds in people's homes or why it is, but there seems to be a culture perhaps of working together and coming to the office.
Akshat Choudhary:You know, I would not yeah. I wouldn't blame any of them. If the if anyone gets a blame, that's me. If you're working remotely, you need to have really good communication, and you need to have very good processes in place. I think the kind of effort required to put in to any of those, I have not been able to do.
Akshat Choudhary:Given all of that, we have to realize that for the kind of products that we make and the kind of just the culture that we have, having everyone in a single single space, single office just makes collaboration so much easier, allows us to build products which otherwise is so much more difficult. And we learned it the hard way. You know? We we we did do the year long COVID experiment, and it was not fun at all for us.
Steve Burge:Oh, so there is a a single WP remote office now where well, how many people do you have on your on your team now?
Akshat Choudhary:I think we are almost 40 people right now.
Steve Burge:Okay. Can you give me a quick overview of how your products stack up? You have WP remote and Blog Vault and a couple of others. Is WP remote I mean, that's that's what you're wearing on your on your hoodie right now. Is that the the main product that you you centralize most of your efforts on?
Akshat Choudhary:Alright. So WP remote it's a it's a funny story. So actually, the lock logo that you're seeing here, that logo is originally for our main product our first product. I shouldn't even call it our main product. Our first product, Blog Vault.
Akshat Choudhary:So and that goes back to the origin of our company also. That is Block Vault was our first product. That was the backups product. Then we came to to MalCare, which is a security product. We did MigrateGuru, which is a free migration plugin.
Akshat Choudhary:We also had some other migration thing, which if you if you get a chance, we can talk about that, where we collaborated with a lot of the biggest web hosts in the world, including WP Engine, Automattic, Pantheon, Liquid Web, each of the like, you can you name a big web host, and they were all our partners' customer. They all are. So we did that. We are doing that. We have rupee remote, which is an agency product, and finally, Airlift.
Akshat Choudhary:And all of these are all tied together by by the hip, so we can talk about how all of these work together. But but yes. And all of them, at least for the time being, share the same logo. So that's the common thread. That's another common thread running joining all our products together.
Akshat Choudhary:So we just use that as one brand identity to say that, hey. That lock if you see that lock, you know that those products are built by us.
Steve Burge:Oh, so your products are they're interrelated, and maybe the different brands are targeting different audiences to some extent?
Akshat Choudhary:Different use cases, different needs. In a couple of cases, different audiences, but mostly different different use cases. I think I in my opinion, you know, it's most of WordPress products typically end up targeting two audiences. I think half of our customers tend to be agencies, and the other half tend to be DIYers, people who who run marketing teams, who run websites on by themselves. They are part of a team.
Akshat Choudhary:They're SEO people. They're content people. They're business owners themselves who love tinkering. So it's it's it's this mix of crowd where half the customers this and I I've been at least my experience says that this applies to every WordPress product. I don't know if it applies to you, but I have seen this apply to so many WordPress products, and it applies to us too.
Steve Burge:We try and be a little different in terms of aiming more directly at, say, universities or or government agencies or more more enterprise customers, but the end result seems to be that a lot of the purchases come through agencies in the end. That maybe this university or maybe this government agency is is working with a regular web agency, and so the purchase comes from them. So I think you're right. 50% of the business for me, for you, ends up coming through agencies.
Akshat Choudhary:You know, Steve, it's almost like and I know this is not the purpose of the the conversation, but I need to talk to you about how you sell to sell to universities and governments because there's so much we can all of us in the WordPress ecosystem can learn from that experience of yours. But that's a different conversation, I'm sure.
Steve Burge:Well, it's it's not easy. Just before getting on the call with you, I was wrestling with an enormous amount of paperwork for one university, and the the purchase they're making is only, say, $400. But they have all this standard paperwork to go through. It can be a painful process to target those kinds of customers. We probably need to do a little bit of what you do, which is try and move upmarket to increase our prices, say, hey.
Steve Burge:We're we're a higher quality product at a at a higher price simply because the difficulty of selling to those customers requires requires a higher price, we need to put more effort into selling to them.
Akshat Choudhary:Absolutely. You know, I'm one of the big proponents. I'm like, there are I keep telling, you know, whenever I meet I don't wanna name them now because, like, whenever I meet some of these folks who are selling other plug ins, I'm like, you guys need to increase your prices significantly because you guys are selling you are selling to, like, Microsoft and not just Microsoft as, you know, the it's short form for any large company. But and those guys are willing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars if you just need to raise the invoice correctly. And I'm sure they will spend thousands of dollars on your product.
Akshat Choudhary:And then if you sell for a thousand dollars, it gives us permission to sell for a lot higher also.
Steve Burge:Oh, like a rising tide lifts all boats, that the general expectation of WordPress pricing is higher, it'll be easier to charge higher prices. But if the general expectation of WordPress pricing is a lifetime deal for $30 that makes it more difficult for everyone to make a living.
Akshat Choudhary:Absolutely. We
Steve Burge:find ourselves often compared to products that are selling for $30 for a lifetime.
Akshat Choudhary:Absolutely. This this is this again goes back to our origin story, you know. We all our products are essentially SaaS products. Oh, okay. And sum.
Akshat Choudhary:So and and so I think, like I was telling you before just before we started recording is, you know, I consider myself a WordPress outsider because because of my origin. I come from you know, prior to building Block Vault, I was hacking a free BSD kernel for a high end networking device company, where we were selling products to the likes of Google and Amazon for extreme networking requirements and, you know, with extremely high performance. And so completely different world, not the kind of products that we build typically build for not the kind of web applications that we typically build. So that was my background, and I worked as an engineer for seven years before creating Blog Vault. We you dabbled
Steve Burge:in in your own business as well. Right? You had, like, a mobile startup, a kind of a WhatsApp style business for a while?
Akshat Choudhary:Oh, yes. Know, come again, coming coming from India, it's I was always interested in create starting my own products. Read all the great stories of, you know, the great businesses, the great software companies that had been created over time. So I always wanted to create something. And if you go back to 2005 era, this is pre iPhone.
Akshat Choudhary:So you what was SMS was a big deal then, and everyone had a mobile. Mobile was a big deal. SMS was a big deal. We built a product which let you and SMS used to be peer to peer, so you could message one person at a time. So we built a product which let you talk to multiple people at a time as a group.
Akshat Choudhary:And it was an it was really interesting product at that time. And we got, like, tens of thousands of users. We got a lot of love for the product, but we it was very difficult to sustain because with every SMS we sent, we incurred costs. So eventually, that thing didn't work out. But the buck to create good products was always there.
Akshat Choudhary:And I was just dabbling with different ideas. I think one of the ideas which we
Steve Burge:It must have got pretty big.
Akshat Choudhary:Sorry?
Steve Burge:The product must have got pretty big. I was doing my my research before getting on the podcast with you, and I was able to find several articles from newspapers back in, like, 2006, 2007, thinking about your product.
Akshat Choudhary:Yes. So, again, the newspaper thing, we got lucky to have, you know, good media coverage. You know, in India, at that time, having young people out of college creating products so enthusiastic about entrepreneurship, trying out different things, new things, not just copy you know, not just copying ideas, but repeating products which was tried and tested. There was there was a huge the people the press wanted to encourage that. And and we did see a large number of people use our product.
Akshat Choudhary:I think at our peak, we had, like, fifth 20,000 daily active users and Wow. 100,000 plus registrations. But it was super expensive. We were I was burning through all my salary trying to pay for SMSs, so it was it was insanity. And what we did see was, you know, what we see that what's with WhatsApp, the use case was very clear that people wanted many to many communication.
Akshat Choudhary:And in a group setting, it just led to a completely different form of communication. It's it took it was a beast of its own. And what we see today, what we take for granted at that time, you know, when we try to negotiate so we actually went ahead, and we negotiated with carriers. So it was it was super interesting. Just as an aside, actually, I was talking to my I was talking to my sister whom I was visiting in Bay Area last month and and my nephew.
Akshat Choudhary:And I was telling them and we were we were listening to a podcast which was about OpenAI for some reason. And I was telling him that I was visiting the area in 2007, and I happened to meet Sam Altman, or at least I can't remember if I met him in person directly, or at least I saw him. So they were they were doing something similar with their product at that time in 02/1967 time frame.
Steve Burge:They had a, like, a location product, I think.
Akshat Choudhary:Yes.
Steve Burge:Yours was similar to WhatsApp. I think Sam Altman had a product more similar to Foursquare, a kind of location finding
Akshat Choudhary:Exactly. Right. So so they had an open house at that time. So I went I drove down to their offices to hang out with them because I was trying to figure out how they cracked their deals with carriers. So we were able to crack a deal with one carrier because we didn't have any funding, we didn't have anything.
Akshat Choudhary:And we were trying to crack deals with bigger carriers, and it was a really uphill task. So we wanted to figure out, like, hey, what are these guys up to? How did they crack it? Little did I know that Sam Altman is like the greatest dealmaker of all time. So the
Steve Burge:I mean, you say you like reading biographies or hearing entrepreneurial stories. There was a book that came out recently called The Optimist about Sam Altman, and it basically tells this story. It it tells his life story, but it also tells the story of how he dealt with the carriers And, basically, he met one of the carriers and basically worked on this guy and sold him. And the guy was just amazed. He said, this guy, Sam Altman, is the greatest salesman of all time.
Steve Burge:Like, it it was an incredibly difficult task that it took a very special person. I mean, we talk in the WordPress space about it being very difficult to sell to hosting companies. I can imagine that selling to phone carriers is exponentially more difficult.
Akshat Choudhary:Yes. It is. Like, we had these conversations. Getting to meeting with them was incredibly difficult, and we got one carrier on board. So we got lucky again.
Akshat Choudhary:So a lot of things fell in place for that, but it was super difficult. And, like, to get a major carrier was yeah. It was it was really difficult. And we thought that maybe if I go and meet these folks in their El Camino Real offices, maybe something I learned from them. I didn't take away anything at that time.
Akshat Choudhary:I was too naive, too I didn't have any other not that I'm any much better, but yes, this book, I should I should give it a look because it dates back it it brings back good memories. Speaking of web hosting, you know, we did crack deals with some of the biggest web hosts out there.
Steve Burge:How did how did you approach that? Did was it a case of making sure you went to the same WordPress events as them and sitting down in person and trying to to strike a deal one on one? Because web hosting companies are notoriously difficult to to sell anything to.
Akshat Choudhary:Yes. No. So the store this is a super interesting story. I'm a big fan of and this is, again, prior to starting Blog World. I if you if you know Jason Cohen from WP Engine, I had been following him for a long time, even prior to his him starting WP Engine.
Akshat Choudhary:So one of the things so I would follow, like, any interview, any podcast, anything he was a part of, any of his writings. And in one of the podcasts, he had mentioned that he would get all these customers to use to join the Bloop Engine, and this is in 02/1213 time frame. So you can imagine, completely different era. And but they were still they were still that still built a name for themselves. And he mentioned that they would get customers to join WP Engine product, but they couldn't get customers to onboard simply because migrating a site was super difficult.
Akshat Choudhary:And I was like, that's exactly what we do because what we do is we have incredible backups, and we have incredible restores. And sometimes we, you know, we used to take for granted. We thought everyone has great backups and great restores, but it was not the case. And so we're like, what is a migration? Migration is great backups and great restores, and if we can solve that problem for them and package it in a way, maybe this is something I can sell to Jason Cohen.
Akshat Choudhary:So what I did was, oh, I saw the interview. I was like, let me drop him a mail. I dropped him a mail. No reply. Was like, okay.
Akshat Choudhary:Done. He's not interested in this. Okay? So I think six months later, I was at WORD Camp San Francisco. That's in 2013.
Akshat Choudhary:And there I there I see Jason Cohen. I'm like, hey, Jason. This is me. I've seen this podcast of yours. This is the problem I can solve.
Akshat Choudhary:And, you know, very casual. You know, again, very careful. Like, I wasn't sure. You know, very shy. But Jason is very very makes you comfortable, so I was able to have that conversation with him.
Akshat Choudhary:And he's like, why don't you drop me your mail? I'm like, okay. Fine. I'll drop him a mail. I dropped him a mail.
Akshat Choudhary:I think he acknowledged it, then I then I didn't hear back from him. And I was like, I thought, fine. He's not interested in this. A year goes by. I see him at WorldCamp San Francisco again.
Akshat Choudhary:And this time again, tell him the same thing. Hey. What happened? He's like, oh, I got busy. You should have followed up.
Akshat Choudhary:And that that that lesson of following up is something which still takes a long time for me to to come around to. Fortunately, again, I have a team which is much, much better at it. But but, yeah, that's like sales or any any kind of you know, just work one zero one. Right? You there's no such thing as people get busy.
Akshat Choudhary:People life comes in the way. If you're running a business like WP Engine, there are a million things happening. So, anyways, come next year, I meet w I meet Jason Cohen. I tell him this, and I'm like, okay. Fine.
Akshat Choudhary:I dropped him a mail. But at the same time, what happened was I think it was that year, or was it one more year? I don't remember if it was 2014 or if it was 2015. I think it was 2014. In San Francisco, I bumped into another customer of ours who was a large agency, and they had this event called WooConf, which happened in San Francisco.
Akshat Choudhary:So I met them, and there's this incredible couple. They run an amazing agency in UK called Whole Grain Digital, and they have been a customer of ours for a few years. So they have been using us for their backups. And we spoke to them. We told about this, and we we we just ended up having a nice chat.
Akshat Choudhary:What happened was that summer or a few months later, the WP Engine CEO oh, at that time, a CEO, I don't remember, either. He ended up visiting their offices, whole green digital offices in in UK, in London. And Vinita and Tom were really kind, and they were like, you guys need to work with Akshat. And had that not happened, I can tell you none of the partnerships would have would have happened. Like and that was the one clinching factor that then caused everything else to fall in place.
Akshat Choudhary:So then then I think Heather connected with Jason, and then we tried to we built a proposition for them, and then things fell in place. And then one thing led to another, and we created plug ins for not only them and then all the other web hosts out there. Then it became much easier.
Steve Burge:So how long did that whole process take from first approaching Jason to actually till now, it's
Akshat Choudhary:don't know if it was well, like, you can imagine the first meeting maybe, and simply because of my because I was not a good salesperson, but maybe two years. But that's I think it could have should have been much, much shorter. It can be much shorter because their pain point was very clear.
Steve Burge:And was that the the big break or one of the biggest breaks you've had so far building the business was getting inside hosting companies and getting those partnerships?
Akshat Choudhary:It's it's a pro and a con, okay, in hindsight. Obviously, getting a WP Engine brand played a very big role because it showed the quality of products we were building. It showcased that because now when you have a WP Engine kind of partnership, it shows the reliability of a solution. Others and people could see the the kind of seamless products we could build, and we got a lot of customers because of it. So that definitely helped.
Akshat Choudhary:But at the same time, it caused us to be a distraction because we thought that web hosts are an important customer segment for us, which was not true. I think web hosts are important, but our primary customers are still direct. As a business, we are a business that has grown in nine like, almost all most of our business comes from customers who buy our products directly. So so that was those that was an important partnership. Sorry.
Akshat Choudhary:Go ahead.
Steve Burge:Also, the hosting companies ended up being a percentage of the business, but maybe a slightly distracting percentage of the business. Mean, we all have some parts of our business, like 10% of the business that causes maybe even it doesn't cause problems, but it causes us to take our eyes off the ball a little bit.
Akshat Choudhary:Exactly. So I wouldn't call them problem. They're fantastic partners. And, again, there there are big benefits to having this partnership. But sometimes, as an entrepreneur, you make a bad call in terms of you think that's the part of business you should be focusing on, you should try and sell to more of those, whereas what you need to focus on is your customer base is slightly different.
Akshat Choudhary:Ideally, we should have focused more on agencies more aggressively upfront.
Steve Burge:Had Bo, I had a conversation with founders of Pagely a few years ago. We had Josh on the podcast, and he was describing his business philosophy, which was to move as strongly as possible to the top right quadrant of customers, the people who are willing to pay more and are looking for higher quality products. And I kinda get the same feeling from you in terms of how you run your business that you're you're not gonna be selling lifetime deals anytime soon. You're not you're not going for the most customers. You're looking to position WP remote almost in that kind of in the same quadrant as Pagely and WP Engine.
Steve Burge:More quality, perhaps higher prices with it. Is that fair to say?
Akshat Choudhary:Yes. I think those are incredible brands, and being associated with being in the same quadrant as them is something to be proud of. I would love to be a part of that. Yes. The goal is not to sell cheap solutions or low quality solutions.
Akshat Choudhary:I think the goal is to sell highest quality products. Personally, I believe that once a person opens their wallet, until and unless you're exorbitantly priced, if you're delivering value, then you should be able to charge a fair fair price because software the nature of software is that you should be able to charge a fair price for it. And there are obviously folks who just for whom it's outside the budget, and that's a different that's a different market, and we're not trying to solve for everybody. But what we know, what we are sure of is for quality product, the kind of value it creates, the kind of money we charge for it is is way smaller than the kind of value we can create. And because we we charge if we charge fairly, it allows us to invest in a manner which otherwise is not possible, and then that creates a that creates a flywheel effect.
Akshat Choudhary:It just causes you to create products which just completely stand out. And that's that's that's the reason why we have been able to, you know, invest in our products and build products which are completely different. And, again, on the surface, it doesn't appear so, but if you go into the details, you can see the see the difference. You can see the kind of effort we are able to put in, the kind of engineering team we can create, the kind of support team we can create, the kind of people we are working with. Like I mentioned, you know, I would not I am the last person to get in front of camera, and we have an incredible YouTube channel ourselves, and that is simply because of of the team we have.
Akshat Choudhary:And that is possible only because we are we have great customers who believe in paying for the value they are they are getting from our products.
Steve Burge:You are you've mentioned a few times that you're shy. Is that a maybe a a fair word to use that in doing the research for this episode, I was trying to find interviews with you. I I do that before every episode, try and see what people have said on camera before maybe so I don't ask the same questions all the time or just to get a feel for the person. And there weren't many for you. You're not one of those hyper social CEOs who is always tweeting, always on camera.
Steve Burge:You you post once every couple of months on LinkedIn or X or somewhere like that. But generally, you take a different approach. Quieter?
Akshat Choudhary:Yeah. It's More thoughtful? It's it's my niche. I would call it more thoughtful that not that's giving credit to myself. It is just my personality, my nature.
Akshat Choudhary:Tend to I tend to, yeah, I tend to be more inward focused, and that's not only the great thing. You know, as as an entrepreneur yourself, you know, being out there is super helpful to to your business. Often, I I especially in today's world, having a great public persona is a superpower. It it is one of the biggest things you can have for your business. And and, yeah, I I definitely need to do more of it.
Akshat Choudhary:Let me put it this way. And thank you again for having me. This gives me that opportunity to do more of it.
Steve Burge:Probably, it's your personality. You're kind of a maybe a naturally somewhat of a shy person. Does it make a difference being being based in India? I'm curious what it's like to to try and grow a company there when I mean, the the bulk of your com both bulk of your clients are in North America or Europe. There are there time zone challenges, and maybe you're a little some distance away from the hosting companies you may want to be working with.
Steve Burge:But I can imagine there are some some substantial advantages too. How has being based in Bangalore affected the growth of your business?
Akshat Choudhary:Yes, I think if you are in The US or Europe, which tends to be some of the largest software markets, you know, if you look at software markets in general, US accounts for 50 to 60% of all software. North America, generally, that gets bought. And that's true for our case. Like, North America is 50 to 60% of our market, and then Europe comes in close again.
Steve Burge:To 5% for us, I think. Right around the number.
Akshat Choudhary:Exactly. Right? So that I think and America has really created the software market, and it's it is one of the things which I I really think about and I read about as to what causes The US is such an interesting culture to to to I think very few cultures could have created software market or could have created value for us or understood the value of software. Unlike, US very clearly stands out for it, and then, obviously, the rest of the world has followed that lead. And but, yeah, US continues to be one of the largest markets for us also.
Akshat Choudhary:And being so far removed from your key market makes it really difficult to to understand it. You know? Internet makes it things much easier, but at the same time, you know, if whenever you get a chance to be in the same room as your customer, it's you learn things which you otherwise will not. Also, in terms of marketing, in terms of community, and things have changed in WordPress. Things have changed significantly in the past five years.
Akshat Choudhary:But if you go back seven, eight, nine years, I think that there was a huge community aspect to WordPress. And that aspect, I think being physically present, made things so much easier. Even, like, WP Engine, if you'll see WP Engine, speaks about I think Jason Cohen, at that time, spoke about marketing at different events and the value it created for WP Engine. So so, yes, being in India is a disadvantage. There are advantages also at the same time.
Akshat Choudhary:Those events are distractions. In some ways, if you're only networking all the time, your prod you can only spend so much time focusing on product. So but so yeah. But the reality is you need to be close to your customers as much as possible.
Steve Burge:So as the CEO, you've kind of got a team to do the marketing for you. You're not one of those marketing first CEOs as we've discussed. You have people to do the YouTube channel for you, for example. Where do you spend most of your time on the business? You you're an engineer.
Steve Burge:Are you are you spending a large majority of your time on the business processes, on the on the platform itself?
Akshat Choudhary:So talk working with different teams does take up a lot of time because, you know, at at the skills, working with all different all the different teams, making sure everyone is successful takes up a lot of time. I think AI has been such a big change to the whole world, to our industry, to the whole world. That takes up a lot of time simply because the thing is evolving so fast. You know that it's coming to affect you. You overestimate what's happening.
Akshat Choudhary:So that is taking up a lot of my time too. Just trying to understand, putting wrapping my heads around head around what is happening.
Steve Burge:So not not quite implementing AI inside the business yet, more kind of understanding how you could implement it. Where is where is WP remote with AI at the moment?
Akshat Choudhary:So, actually, we we have been spending a lot of time. So we recently released an incredibly new dashboard for our products, and almost every line of code of that dashboard was written using AI. Almost every I would venture to say 99.9% of all code there is written using AI. And this is precursor days. So pre so we have been focused following this trend for the past two years, and it is it has been one of our it's been one of our you know, some things which we got obsessed with in some way simply because it's so so interesting.
Akshat Choudhary:You could see the power. You know that the kind of abilities it gave you, it just otherwise was not possible. Things some things have worked out, but there are lots of things that did not work. It's been a lot of trial and error, and things take a lot longer because of it. I think had we not done it using AI, it might have been faster.
Akshat Choudhary:Picking up that skill is super important. And it's not that's the the platforms, everything is changing, but I think there are some underlying core tenets which we have understood, which, had we not gone through the trial and error, we would not have understood. And this is something which I'll tell every person, every agency owner, every WordPress site owner that you need to get your hands dirty. It is not it's not something you can just be, like, one fine day, wake up and discover, hey. Now I'll use AI.
Akshat Choudhary:At least not to the level not to its potential.
Steve Burge:How do you how do you think about rolling out AI to a team of you say you got 40 people in the whole company now. Say half of those maybe are developers. You could say just for for the sake of this discussion, say you got twenty, twenty five developers. Do you basically allow them to go and experiment by themselves? One developer might be with Cursor.
Steve Burge:One might be with Gemini at different tools, or is this a more top down approach? Hey. Here's the company cursor account. Here's a bunch of tokens for you. With something that's so fresh and new and still bubbling up, how do you how do you think about getting your company to experiment and learn?
Akshat Choudhary:Yeah. That's a great question. And, again, the evolution has been it has been an evolution. And what you think you are doing, it doesn't work exactly that way. So we built a lot of our own internal tooling first to build the engineering.
Akshat Choudhary:So we knew that we wanted to engineer using this, but the tooling was not there. So we built a lot of engineering processes and internal tooling just by trying to figure out, hey, this is the this is the potential. This is the way to achieve that potential. This is to ensure that the code you are getting is the code you want, and it's not just some random code or a code that you need to rewrite again and again or review or spend a lot of time working with. And we created a lot of those tools, and we used a lot of those tools.
Akshat Choudhary:So this is that part is top down. But at the same time, engineers will also use bottom up cursor, clot code, etcetera, etcetera, to fill in the gaps because what you see from from top down doesn't cover every every case. And if if an engineer has to rely on your understanding and your fixing of every process, then they were getting stuck because of it. So we had to give them that flexibility, or they almost went ahead and found that flexibility for themselves. So it's it is a it's been a very, very interesting learning experience of just how organizations also behave, how you will see AI adoption change.
Akshat Choudhary:So what how you know, when when we started to see when we saw ChatGPT for the first time, a lot of us had that, hey. World has changed today kind of feeling. But when you go through this process, you realize that the way world will change is not a linear path. It's going to be and it's going to take a long time. It's not going to be like the way we anticipate.
Akshat Choudhary:You know, it's not the way we anticipate it. It's just we are in our own we get super optimistic. We don't have an understanding of how humans behave almost, And then you get a reality check. And this was another reality check of another example of that reality check.
Steve Burge:So it sounds as if your answer as to how AI gets into companies like ours is through both directions. You need to push it from the top, some of the structure and some of the tools and also provide room for your individual engineers to solve specific problems and experiment?
Akshat Choudhary:Absolutely. But you cannot skip the top down approach simply because the bottom up approach believed in mostly and you can obviously actually, from what I have seen and I've spoken to a lot and lot of different teams, the bottom up approach almost always effectively leads to whiteboarding, which is not which is good, but it's not great use of AI, in my opinion, and it does not really give you the value that you can create. I believe that, you know, one of the things that we are working towards is we believe the cost of software is going to tend to zero. Okay? And prior to this, every decision so cost of software, we used to be like, is the single biggest cost we have.
Akshat Choudhary:And because software when you create software, you have to write the line of code which always takes, like, 10 times more time effort than you anticipate, but then main it's an it's not an asset. It's a liability because you have to go in and maintain that code forever. So cost of software used to be infinite, and which is why we used to charge such high we can we charge such high prices for software. Right? Because it's so difficult to actually maintain.
Akshat Choudhary:It's extra too expensive to maintain. I think that thing has turned on its head, and cost of software is going down to zero.
Steve Burge:Akshayat, I I logged into our BlogVault account last week, and I saw that you have a a new product. And you say you're shy. I'll help you with a promotion on this one, Although, you guys are doing great. I'm not sure you need it. But you have a product that is coming out called visual regression testing, basically taking snapshots of people's websites and looking for changes.
Steve Burge:Can you talk me through your process in building that? How much of it was AI driven for your newest product launches coming up?
Akshat Choudhary:Alright. So, no, that's a great question. And, again, tells you some some things about us. First of all, thank you for being a being a customer. So I'm glad to see that you are you are and I know that it's always good to good to hear someone say that logging into my blog will that feeling never goes away, you know?
Akshat Choudhary:That feeling just does not, that does not Still feels whenever you hear it. Still feels good, always feels good. I think that's the beauty of being a builder. You just enjoy that. There's no feeling better than that.
Akshat Choudhary:Now coming back to visual regression, that's a product we actually that's a feature that we have had for many years now. And it is but it was not very good. And It's difficult. It's Yeah. It's super tough.
Akshat Choudhary:It's super tough to get it right, but when it is not right, it is it's actually useless. And but today, what we have is incredible, and it is 100 times better than the next person. Today, it is a product which completely changes everything, and, actually, it has very little to do with AI. You know, taking a screenshot of a website is really difficult. We didn't realize how difficult it's going to be.
Akshat Choudhary:Taking a screenshot of a website is super difficult because there are so many moving elements. There are so many dynamic elements. Websites are have become super complex. There are parts you know, you had this interview with Andrew from Nerd Press, who's a longtime customer. He's an amazing person, and he speaks about visual regression testing in that interview.
Akshat Choudhary:And he spoke about the challenges with, you know, for example, there are ads on a visual in a way on a website. Now every time you load an ad on a website, that ad you'll get a different ad. And if you do a visual regression before and after doing an update, now the ad is going to change. Did the website break or did that website not break? How do you tell the difference?
Akshat Choudhary:So what we did was we said we'll black out the ads. Now that sounds great. Right? And that that that means that now if you black out the ads, now when you do a visual regression, you can easily catch items which are not changing. And when we tell you a pixel has changed, you can be rest assured that that pixel changed, and it's a valid pixel change.
Akshat Choudhary:Alright? Similarly, on a website, you can have, you know, a CAPTCHA. The nature of CAPTCHA is that it's going to be different every time. You automatically detect that it's a CAPTCHA. We will ignore the CAPTCHA.
Akshat Choudhary:Or if it's a slider, if the timing is because of timing, you'll get a different slider. So what we do is we freeze the sliders. We have this special code to freeze the sliders.
Steve Burge:So basically, a website is almost a whole series of traps for visual regression testers, and you have to try and overcome those traps one by one. So capture carousels, advertisements, any kind of rotation
Akshat Choudhary:And you and you and that multiplied by thousand. And I did not know it is so difficult. And so we spent months and months, actually, years to get it right. And so this is the and I'll tell you the funniest part about getting even after getting it right, why getting it right is not a great thing. But when people say that, Hey, I've got visual regression testing, WP Remote has got WP Remote, it's the same thing now.
Akshat Choudhary:Our products are the same. No, they are not the same products. And that's actually true for all products. We often you know, have broad strokes. We just be like, yeah, feature to feature comparison, but the features are the the value of the feature or or the quality of feature makes a big difference, especially for something like visual regression.
Akshat Choudhary:Because, you know, when somebody else tells you that, hey. Your website is broken, and you go in there and it's not broken because you can see that it's a slider, then you stop you start ignoring that warning. And in when we tell you that something is broken and even a pixel is broken, then you you are you know that something is wrong. Now this is great. Right?
Akshat Choudhary:And you would think that this is amazing, and and people do love that feature. But the downside of this whole thing is oftentimes we find small changes because the nature of plug ins, the nature of themes is that always something is breaking. You know? Elementor, Divi, these things have become so complex that they're always breaking something or the or the other in some website. So in our about our data shows is a website has at least four small changes happening in a year, which you do not know.
Steve Burge:Oh, just because the theme or a theme update or plug in update makes a small change?
Akshat Choudhary:Exactly. Now what happens is often see, people some people like, you know, someone like Andrew or or someone like Vale, they are or Kim from Vale, they want to know every change because they are they they they want to adhere to the highest quality. I think they speak about it also in their thing. They manually review everything. They are super careful about their processes.
Akshat Choudhary:Right?
Steve Burge:Yeah. Both of them do
Akshat Choudhary:our customer offers.
Steve Burge:Both both Valet and Nerd Press say no automatic updates. Everything is manual. Everything is done by hand.
Akshat Choudhary:Yes. Exactly. So now they they will these are folks who want to know even the smallest change possible. Right? But there are a lot of people who will see a small change, and they will not do anything about it.
Akshat Choudhary:They do actually don't even if they know it, they're like, hey. That text has moved a few pixels. I cannot the amount of effort it will take to identify that movement is not worth worth worth it for me. So often so now this is where we had had to use AI to determine if this is a change that you will actually care about, or will you just be like, It doesn't matter because I don't care. It's a small change.
Akshat Choudhary:And we'll give you some levers some So we'll give you the option to say that, Hey, using AI, whether you want to ignore that change or not. But AI cannot broadly, for example, you cannot just give it to images and say, Here is the diff. Tell me, is this diff proper or not? That does not work. At least, I don't see it working based on our analysis of AI.
Akshat Choudhary:So we have had to build a lot and lot of software to make it work. Yeah, this is something which we again, the amount of energy and effort we spend and we we how deeply we think about these problems, I think that has really made our product stand out. Sometimes sometimes it's really difficult to justify it, you know, because people come to conversations, they're like, hey. You've got this feature. They've got this feature.
Akshat Choudhary:Why do you cost so much more?
Steve Burge:It's it it feels difficult in the era of AI to to take time over a product as well. People seem to be assuming that with the era of AI and vibe coding that you should be able to take an idea from conception to launch in maybe not an afternoon necessarily, but two weeks, a month. I I saw open a OpenAPI launched a kind of workflow builder, and they were promoting how they had gone from initial idea to launching it to the public in two months. So there's a certain you're you're going against the grain to some extent by taking years to to really get every detail of a product right and to take a lot of care over it.
Akshat Choudhary:But, you know, if you don't do it and I've like, I would be happy if I could solve it in six weeks. If I was if I was as smart as OpenAI engineers and building that stuff, I would be happy to do it. But what's more important is you cannot launch a product which has so much false positives because your customers just turn a blind eye in their usage. So while they might purchase your product, it does not really deliver the value that it's supposed to. And one of our goals, and I'm not saying that we've we've achieved it perfectly, is we have to save you time.
Akshat Choudhary:If we cannot save you time, give you that peace of mind, and if we cannot use technology to do so, then we are not we are not delivered on our promise.
Steve Burge:This is a a product that should fit right right in your kind of your top right high price, high value targeting. We use a a visual regression tool right now, and I think we pay about $200 a month. And I've I I see the invoice every month and immediately have no problem paying it because I I think of the times when it's caught our checkout breaking or maybe our contact form breaking and absolutely worth the money. If you can nail this product, I think you have a winner on your hands.
Akshat Choudhary:Thank you again. It's great to hear that I'm going to share when when when this recording comes out, that clip of you. Because, you know, as product builders, when these things take so much effort, you need this encouragement. You need to, again, just keep getting the validation that there are people who value this so much because the cost of of checkout breaking or form breaking is so high, and we need to keep coming at it at this problem every day because, you know, you need that encouragement is required by the team. It it you cannot work in isolation.
Akshat Choudhary:It that though, that's not how good products get created over time.
Steve Burge:If you if you choose to build a product that's difficult enough to take two or three years, it can be a long and difficult process where you need a lot of encouragement, I guess. If you're vibe coding and one of those people that is knocking out five apps a week, maybe you don't need so much encouragement because there's always a new app. But if you're if you're really trying to tackle really difficult problems, it's a longer process, a a more difficult process, a more discouraging process at times.
Akshat Choudhary:Yes. No. The five apps, five plugins, you know, there are people who have multitude of plugins. I tend to discourage it. I think the big winners is what you should go after.
Akshat Choudhary:Obviously, if you do not have that yet, try and find one, but double down on it. It's worth it. Persistence pays. And people, you know, there's always a market for great product in whichever segment that you are in. Like you mentioned, right, your product.
Akshat Choudhary:You are going after some of the most discerning customers that there exist with your product, like, to selling to universities, to governments. That's and you cannot sell a crap product to them. You cannot sell a bad product to them. You have to
Steve Burge:Yes. I I'd say that our our thinking about this is probably similar to yours that in an era of AI when AI is eating the bottom end of the market, you said you you and your team believe the value of software is not the value. The cost of software is trending towards zero. That something like your positioning in terms of backups and security and visual regression testing are things that are difficult and indispensable. And if they go wrong, it's a real serious problem.
Steve Burge:And we kind of have similar thinking that our plugins will lock down your website and control what people can and cannot do. If that goes wrong, you're in big trouble. So a kind of for companies like ours, there's a kind of defensibility in being in the high quality, high value section of the market rather than in the mass market produce multiple features a week in that section of the market?
Akshat Choudhary:Absolutely. Obviously, it comes with its challenge because the marketing, the communication required for it is difficult, but there's a joy to it. You know, the joy of craft is is a joy. You know, it's a joy in itself. I think that's something which, again, we which we as a company, it's one of our values, where we want to enjoy the craft.
Akshat Choudhary:And you cannot enjoy the craft if you are if you are changing, doing not so great work. Craft comes by that joy comes by doing things again, like, you know, really and I'm not saying our products are perfect. It's far from product perfect. I started something I'll tell you is, when I started backups, I thought it's a six weeks project. How difficult can a backup be?
Akshat Choudhary:It's like just backing up a file and some database. And even until recently, even now, actually, even the day before yesterday, I was having another conversation to make some parts of backups even better. You'll be like because we just find ways I know that I can back up things which no one else in the world can. No one in the world can. Even today.
Akshat Choudhary:And it's astounding that someone can say that about WordPress sites because in theory, should not be backup should be a solved problem because we are making AI. We are making things which are magic. Like, not we as humanity is making things which are magic, and backing up a WordPress site seems so much so so trivial in front of it, but it is not. And that's the that's the strange part.
Steve Burge:Between hosting companies, between firewalls, between people having enormous, enormous websites with tons and tons of images and files, I'm surprised anyone gets it right still. I'm probably taking the opposite approach it seems. Do you
Akshat Choudhary:understand what you're saying?
Steve Burge:It seems an unsolvable problem to to try and reliably back up anyone's website anyway.
Akshat Choudhary:I should have you as my spokesperson.
Steve Burge:Akshayat, it's great to hear about how you think about this. I guess you started BlogVault as an engineer and still, what, nearly twenty years later, you're still coming at it as an engineer with the love of building products.
Akshat Choudhary:Yes. That's that's a joy. That's that's my first love. I think building is our first love. When we when we hire anyone, that's the thing that we talk most about.
Akshat Choudhary:Like, we love building. Whichever team we hire for, we love building. That's the approach. That's what we are about. That's what, as a team, that's the kind of person we want to hire, a person who wants to build this together with us.
Akshat Choudhary:So, yeah, that's the engineer, the builder, the tinkerer.
Steve Burge:So I I kind of downplayed your your presence on social media earlier, but you do post. You are somewhat active. And where can people follow you in terms of finding out updates from you and the WP remote team?
Akshat Choudhary:So I'm there on Twitter or X as my handle is Akshat C. I'm very reachable. I don't post very often. Just recently, Dustin Hile, day before yesterday, he pinged me, and he's like, Akshat, you need to post a thread on security. And I told I promised him, and then I very conveniently ignored him after that.
Akshat Choudhary:But but but, yeah, you know, folks are so good. That's that's another thing. The community is so encouraging, so so great in WordPress. But but, yes, I'm there on Twitter. On LinkedIn, you can reach out to me.
Akshat Choudhary:Again, I'm happy to connect with everyone. My email ID is akshat@blockwall.net. That's the one where you'll know that I'll always reply. So that's another one which you can reach out to me.
Steve Burge:We've done many episodes, and you're the first person to say that email is the preferred method for getting in touch. I appreciate that. Well, Akshay, thank you so much for joining us today.
Akshat Choudhary:Again, thank you so much for having me on, Steve. Thank you.