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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:00)
Zach Stepek, welcome to the WP Minute.
Zach Stepek (00:02)
Thank you, Matt. It's good to be here.
Matt Medeiros (00:05)
You and I have been chatting and running into each other at word camps for decades, it seems. It's good to have you on the show to find out more about what you're up to these days.
Zach Stepek (00:14)
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity.
Matt Medeiros (00:16)
You're at Big Scoots. We're to learn more about what your title and day-to-day is for the FCC. I must disclose that Big Scoots is a sponsor of the WP Minute. We appreciate Big Scoots sponsorships. It really helps us get great content like this out and helps the team for sure. Thank you Big Scoots. Thanks to all of our sponsors at the WPminute.com slash sponsors. Zach, what do you do at Big Scoots these days?
Zach Stepek (00:43)
So my title is Director of Partner Programs. Basically what that means is that I help all of our partners find success working with our team. That extends to agency partnerships and technology partners. So ⁓ we work with a number of WordPress related organizations that create plugins or SaaS products that tie into WordPress. And everyone from Memberful, which is a division of Patreon, all the way to... ⁓
know, form plugins like Formidable. You know, we have a whole bunch of people that we work with and then on the agency side, my job is to help our agency partners to succeed with our platform, ⁓ get to know our team, and really just ⁓ turn hosting from this thing that overwhelms people into a profit center.
Matt Medeiros (01:40)
I, by the time the listeners are watching this, there will be a new course on the WPMinute.com slash courses, and it'll be about choosing great web hosts, especially if you're a freelancer or an agency. We don't point to a specific ⁓ web host or show control panels. we're trying to illustrate is how one goes through the thought process of picking a great host. And part of it is ⁓ for the agencies, that relationship.
with the customer is so important. I wanna talk about transparency ⁓ from your experience in the WordPress world. I know when I started my agency many, many years ago, ⁓ I had a different tact because I was a system administrator at a hosting company before I started my ⁓ agency. So I knew that web hosting was important for us as ⁓ a revenue stream, right? As a profit center, as you put it. ⁓
But the thing I was really kind of lacking because I kind of knew what I was doing to a degree was I wasn't transparent with the customer. I wasn't saying that we were the ones running the infrastructure, which I should have. So that was a lesson learned early on. I'm curious how you think about transparency with the agency partners that you have. Do you encourage them to say, hey, customers, you're on big scoots. They do the infrastructure.
Zach Stepek (02:47)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (03:01)
You don't have to call them, you can still call me as the agency owner. How does that relationship and that transparency work in your world?
Zach Stepek (03:09)
Yes, there's a couple of things there to unpack. One is that, you know, individual agencies have different ideas on how much they want to share with their customers about what they're doing. Right. And we give agencies the option of either having their customers work directly with us and have the bill come from us to them or reselling our services and, you know, having the hosting plan be with the agency. ⁓
The cool thing about that is we've set it up so that either way the agency wins. so every agency in our agency partner program gets a direct Slack channel where they can talk to our support team about any problems that are happening for any of their customers. All their customers are flagged as theirs. And so if a problem happens that we notice proactively, which normally is the case, ⁓
We will reach out to the agency and let the agency know. We generally know there's an issue before the customer does in most cases. So ⁓ we're very proactive in that way and we keep the agency involved at the level they want to be. ⁓ So yeah, that's the first thing to kind of unpack there. The other thing is that you came from hosting to agency ownership. I came from agency ownership to hosting. So we have similar perspectives in that.
You know, we've been on both sides of that coin. And ⁓ as an agency owner, I was always looking for partners that were true partners, not just a vendor. And that's what we're running here is a true partnership program.
Matt Medeiros (04:53)
Yeah. How does, I wanna have you define what true partnership program means. I remember my days at Pagely, which came after running the agency. ⁓ This is before they sold to GoDaddy. I was an account executive. A lot of the partnership stuff that we did with agencies was a lot of pre-sales, a lot of supporting the customer, helping them, ⁓ whatever diagram or blueprint, a hosting solution might look like for an enterprise client.
and then hopefully seeing that all the way through to onboarding the client onto our infrastructure where the agency would then take and do their thing with it. ⁓ What does the partnership mean to you? Just unpack that for Big Scoots.
Zach Stepek (05:36)
Yeah, so the first piece is really being that support system that they can count on. So if ⁓ an agency wants to have me co-pitch hosting with them, I'll go in and do that. ⁓ If they want our team to go and do an audit of a website and tell them what we see that's wrong, ⁓ pre-launch, post-launch, whatever, we'll do that too.
We don't want to be just a vendor that provides hosting, right? We could do that all day. But we know that the true success of hosting comes from that personal relationship. so, you know, we have a support team that has 90 second SLA for ticket responses and they meet that constantly.
We have a net promoter score of 95 average for the year right now, which is insane. It's really, really high. So 95 out of 100 points. And that's the average for the year. We have some support reps on our team that have a 100 for the year right now. We have some that have a 100 for their entire time with us. And the reason why is we're so focused on being a help.
not just a vendor. So that's what partnership means to me is really digging in, fixing problems together, being a trusted partner, not just someone who you reach out to when things go bad. ⁓ For example, we have a performance team run by another Zach. There are actually three Zachs at Big Scoots, which is weird. I've never had that happen before.
⁓ And so Zach Alfort runs our performance services and that performance team can take the headache of monitoring Core Web Vitals and do that for our agency customers or for our direct customers and they proactively monitor and watch Core Web Vitals to make sure that changes to the site haven't had a severe impact on
Core Web Vitals and rankings. so little things like that go beyond just hosting to providing a more complete solution. And that more complete solution is designed to assist agencies in running better businesses, having better relationships with their customers. If you know you never have to worry about hosting and you know that the support team is always going to have your back.
you stop having to babysit hosting as yet another thing on your to-do list and you can just sit there and let it passively assist your customers.
Matt Medeiros (08:38)
So for the agency or freelancer ⁓ owner that's listening to this now, they might be thinking, okay, this is great. Like I am looking for a partner. I'm looking for a host that can help me ⁓ solve my problems and hopefully my client problems. Is there a best fit for Big Scoot's customer? Put you on the hot seat a little bit. Is there one that's like really good for the Big Scoot's infrastructure or control panel? Like what fits the mold best at Big Scoot's therefore?
Maybe the agency owners listening to this go, I've got those types of customers. Let me bring them over to Big Scoots.
Zach Stepek (09:12)
Yeah, I mean, we've we really started. So first of all, Big Scoots has been around for 15, almost 16 years now. And not a lot of people know that because we've only really focused on marketing and external outreach for like two years. And so that was when Tim Monter, our CMO, joined. And we started to actually try to participate in the community a little further than we had before. The business was built on Word.
and we really built around content creators, a lot of food bloggers and that kind of site. And some of those grew to be rather large. So we got really good at hosting large content websites. ⁓ That extended really well into large dynamic websites, things like learning management systems or e-commerce on WooCommerce.
We've had some really huge success stories running highly dynamic websites. ⁓ One of the differentiators for us is we actually own our own infrastructure. We have our own data centers. Like this is weird to me because I've been at four hosting companies now, but this is the first time that I've had a badge to walk in with a badge and a fingerprint to actually access a physical data center with servers. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (10:39)
Yeah, yeah.
Zach Stepek (10:41)
Because of that, we can deploy hardware to fit a need. So, we had a WooCommerce customer that had pretty significant traffic at bursts and we deployed a 200 core server for them. ⁓ You can't do that on AWS or Google Cloud right now. That's just not, it's not reality. And then...
we can physically locate a database server next to a web server and network them up to each other because we control what's in the rack, right? And so we're able to do things in a way that other people just don't. And our modern architecture makes us fast. ⁓ We're doing things like working with Ceph storage and ⁓ we have 400 gigabit
connections and the network layer across our entire data center. ⁓ We were the first host to work with Cloudflare, so we have a direct fiber connection to Cloudflare's network, one hop away, and every customer gets the benefits of Cloudflare free because all our traffic's routed through it no matter what. So it's really cool to like say that we can do the really hard stuff. We're also really good at
the really easy stuff too. So, you know, our plans run the gamut from $35 a month for a single site all the way up to thousands of dollars a month for a dedicated server. And generally we come in 30 to 40 % cheaper than the competition. So.
Matt Medeiros (12:24)
Yeah, I remember some of my best days, my most fun days at the hosting company I worked for many, many, years ago when ⁓ the co-location that we had our servers, or one of them, was, I don't know, like 20 minutes away, and it was in Providence, Rhode Island, and I would love it when there was like a ⁓ disk failure happening, we'd get the reports, this is like, this is long ago, right? This is like when,
people weren't as concerned when the hard drive started to die. It wasn't like this massively urgent thing. And it was like, yes, I get to go to the co-location to swap out this disc. And I would get to see, because it was a shared co-location, I get to see all the other tech that people were putting in their cabinets and their racks and stuff like that. it was great because one, could go for lunch in downtown Providence, which was great. But it was also cool to go and see all that.
Zach Stepek (13:00)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (13:19)
that tech in a data center. you actually have physical access to the data center to do this stuff.
Zach Stepek (13:25)
Yeah, we have two that are currently spun up in the Chicago area. We're ⁓ expanding with a fail oversight in Virginia. We have some presence in Europe. So, and we're looking to expand that further in Germany specifically, either Hamburg or Frankfurt. ⁓ So it's really cool to be at this inflection growth point with the company too, where we're...
starting to expand outside of just the one Chicago data center we started with and ⁓ do things like high availability failover for a site. So even if the entire Chicago data center ⁓ over by McCormick Place went down, ⁓ we'd still have Virginia up and running or Elk Grove up and running. And we'd have
the ability to keep sites up and have a disaster recovery plan for things like that. So, you know, for those enterprise and mid-market workflows where, you know, uptime matters more than anything because you're losing money every second the site is down, we're really well equipped to handle that.
Matt Medeiros (14:38)
Yeah, I'm curious if you have a take on how the agency owner, again, freelancer, should be thinking about their business differently, if at all, or maybe it's the experience or the touch points with customers. know, when maybe many of them starting off, they're very used to like, hey customer, it's like 20 to 50 bucks to host your WordPress site, it's managed, they do the updates, backups, staging sites, et cetera. But like,
Zach Stepek (15:03)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (15:05)
Eventually that agency is like, need to grow. I want to get into these enterprise plans that Zach's talking about, like 20 core server installs or like replicated databases and failover and all this stuff. How should they think about going after that type of larger business or enterprise type of business? What do you think has to change in the mindset of approaching that kind of customer?
Zach Stepek (15:32)
⁓ I think it's being risk-averse helps a lot. When I was running my agency, the size of the projects we were doing grew exponentially from the start. Right away we were working with six-figure, seven-figure contracts. And when you get to that point, you have to look at every opportunity
and see if your team fits it well. But also, you have to sometimes just jump and hope that the parachute opens. Because if you don't, if you stay risk averse, you're going to stay at the size you are. Growth requires risk. ⁓ So that's part of it. But how can you temper that risk? ⁓
Part of what I'm building here is a way to temper risk by having a trusted partner that you can go to that can make sure that the infrastructure side of how the site is served is just handled. ⁓ That way you don't have to worry about it. You just build good websites. If you build well and you lean on our team for performance optimization or at least just advice on how to...
optimize further you can you know the sky's the limit you can launch a site into outer space and we've seen it happen numerous times you know the shark tank effect is real right
Matt Medeiros (17:09)
Yeah.
Yeah. One of the things that I've seen recently is this is a bit of an aside, but still still part of this conversation is I've seen WooCommerce ⁓ come out to be more squarely competing against Shopify ⁓ and actually yesterday recorded an episode that will would have aired before this one with Brian Kordz. He's now one of the
Zach Stepek (17:29)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (17:38)
developer advocates at WooCommerce. And WooCommerce is really putting ⁓ the marketing speak behind ownership and total cost of ownership. ⁓ But they don't really say anything about hosting so much. Because I think with my experience at Pagely seeing people spending thousands if not tens of thousand dollars a month for big e-commerce. ⁓ I mean...
Stuff does get pretty expensive. Doesn't mean you're run a multi-million dollar WooCommerce store on 50 bucks a month. So I'm curious, your take on how agencies should prepare the mindset of the customer to go, hey, we can do this for you, we can grow, but it's not all just cheap and free, because I think that's the thing that happens with WordPress. You might start to spend some money as you grow.
as you should, you know? But I'm just curious your take on like how agencies should accelerate that thinking for their customer to massage their way into understanding these costs.
Zach Stepek (18:44)
Well, I like to use analogies a lot and ⁓ the analogy I like to use for hosting is that if you were running a retail business and you were looking for a location for your storefront, you would go out and look for a place with good foot traffic, with anchor stores that are going to bring people to you. ⁓ And those things still exist in the virtual world, right?
there are ways to be able to handle more traffic and hosting has a lot to do with that. ⁓ So when a business is first starting out, they likely don't need a Madison Avenue address.
But eventually, you know, if they're in Chicago, they're going to want to be on Michigan Avenue and the Magnificent Mile eventually, right? That's the goal. That's the retail dream. And so when you're first starting out, yeah, sure, you can run a WooCommerce site on a $35 a month server. You can run it on less than that if you wanted to. I wouldn't. But you can. And then from there, you know,
you're gonna grow and as you grow the needs of your space will change. And so the cool thing about websites is that they operate kind of as a 24 hour a day, know, 365 day a year salesperson. So it's like having a staff member that's constantly pitching, right? And so you need retail space for them to pitch in and you need to keep them, you know, in a place where thing
Matt Medeiros (20:16)
The
Zach Stepek (20:24)
The lights are on, things are working so that they can show off your product. So those two things matter a ton. ⁓ The cool thing about WooCommerce is anybody can start for nothing, right? And a lot of people compare that to Shopify and they think, ⁓ Shopify starts out cheap too. Well, yeah, they do, but...
With that comes a percentage of your total sales going through ShopPay. ⁓ And they take an additional percentage of your business in addition to just hosting the site, right? And then you can build up to different tiers from there where that amount goes down. But in all of those cases, you're using ShopPay or you're paying to not use ShopPay.
and Shopify makes their money off your growth. So once you get to the enterprise level, they're owning a significant percentage of your business that could be millions of dollars in revenue.
So if you look at that and you compare that to the hosting cost of, you know, 20, $25,000 a month free Madison Avenue address or a Michigan Avenue address, right? When you compare that, you're paying significantly less to own your own data, to own your site, to own your destiny. And you're not subject to the whims of a company who may decide.
They no longer want your market segment because there might be a problem with, you know, something's legality or, you know, there's this whole concept of restricted products that are very hard for Shopify to host. You know, there are a number of categories ⁓ that have traditionally been difficult. Cannabis is one of them, right? ⁓
Shopify doesn't like to host that kind of stuff and their agreements with you know shop pay and the providers that power shop pay Don't allow them to So there there are restrictions there that you might run into as well So really having control of your destiny owning your data Not living in somebody else's black box if you want an address in the mall by all means
Shopify is a great mall.
If you want that high profile address with great storefront, with the ability to grow and scale to whatever limit you want, then WooCommerce might be a better choice. So that's what I've always liked about Woo is that freedom. It's the freedom of open source, right? It's the same freedom that we talk about when...
we're talking about WordPress in general. ⁓ You own your destiny, you own your site, you don't have to, you know, stay where you are. If you want to grow and you want to go somewhere else, you can take your business somewhere else. When you build on a SaaS like Shopify, you can't take your business somewhere else without hiring a construction crew to rebuild your store.
Matt Medeiros (23:56)
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I wonder, like as you were explaining it and using those analogies, it's. I mean, we've got for for decades again, we've talked about WordPress as a marketing problem, like what is it, who's it for, like all this stuff. And like as you say all that about commerce, it's like, well, that's that's also the argument for WordPress in general. Right. So ⁓ I'm I'm wondering, this is not really a question. This is just thoughts that came into my head as you were talking, but.
Zach Stepek (24:10)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (24:26)
like seeing the new direction of WooCommerce or Woo's marketing, I'm wondering if it works better for what I'll call the average user because it's business now. So it's, this is, now that I'm talking business, you've got my attention, right? As like the small store owner, ⁓ somebody who makes arts and crafts all the way to somebody who's selling auto parts.
They're like, okay, you've got my attention because this is for business. But before when we were trying to tell you about WordPress and like owning your data, they're like, ⁓ the hell do need that for? I'll just use this Weebly thing. And you're like, no, no, no. Like you need to use something that's open source so you can move this data. But now that it's business, I'm wondering if, I don't know, just a general thought, like, do you think people pay attention more to that because it's business?
Zach Stepek (25:00)
Right.
I think they do to a point. ⁓ The thing about Shopify is they've got a ridiculous amount of money and they translated that into a ridiculous amount of advertising, right? You can't go anywhere without hearing about Shopify. I can't even listen to a podcast about crime without hearing about Shopify. that's...
Matt Medeiros (25:34)
Ha
Yeah,
I just want to jump in for a second. I'll tell you what they're doing, which is the fricking worst thing as somebody who is listening to a lot of podcasts, probably just like you, who's been podcasting now for almost 20 years. They use the some intern at Shopify said, let's do these host read ads or these dynamic ads and go find a free bell checkout sound to put in all the ads. It is the most annoying.
Zach Stepek (25:49)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (26:06)
sound signature I've ever heard because it's just the worst. It's so loud and not like you're probably listening to a crime and all of a sudden you hear ding ding and it's like this is the worst thing in the world. It's not like the days of like everyone probably knows like the Intel chime or HBO when HBO starts like the ton ton of the Netflix same thing like you you understand it you hear what's happening. Shopify has made something so terrible that some intern picked it drives me nuts anyway.
I have to get off my soapbox. yes, continue. Lots of advertising, lots of podcasts.
Zach Stepek (26:36)
No, that's funny. Yeah, so they do all of that and it makes them seem like they are the solution because they're just everywhere, right? It's kind of like a few years ago when you used to watch late night television and ShipStation would have an ad and you'd see Eric from Beardbrand on there, right? I mean that it was ubiquitous. It was everywhere and ⁓
Matt Medeiros (26:56)
Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.
Zach Stepek (27:04)
And that's great because it's good for them, it's good for their investors, but remember, they have investors. That's who they're trying to help. Open source, we're trying to help you. The end goal is that the users of open source have the ability to grow on a platform that they can control and own. That's a huge difference. ⁓
No arbitrary rules that are going to hurt you in the long term or have the potential to hurt you in the long term. It's just a much more open, and for lack of a better word, way to build a website. And having run an e-commerce focused agency that did a lot of WooCommerce work, we had customers that were forced by acquisition or by whatever to...
move from WooCommerce to Shopify. In one case, the migration of the subscription data for a website was so badly migrated that they lost 40 % of their business as the migration happened. Why? Because their entire business was built on subscribe and save. And the tokens for those payments didn't move over the way that they were promised they would when they moved to Shopify.
⁓ So, you know, it's really just about in that case, them trying to get logos. That's their job. The Shopify sales team is getting logos. That's the whole job.
Matt Medeiros (28:41)
Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah. Yeah, it's funny you say that, I was talking to somebody earlier today about enterprise sales and stuff like that. It's just like it has nothing to do, you know, with the I mean, this is just my take. guess people can disagree. But I think like in the enterprise space, when you're selling into the enterprise space, it has less to do about the product than it does about you getting in and adhering to the buying process of that enterprise. Can you find the right people? Can
Zach Stepek (28:56)
⁓
Matt Medeiros (29:16)
Can your legal team agree to their terms? Right? Then can your info team or info sec team adhere to whatever security scrutiny's or processes that this enterprise has and then they agree on price and then it's the product. It's like all of this stuff and then the product and that's why enterprise is so slow but also so lucrative once you get in, know, get these hooks into these enterprise because like you said, you get the logo.
Zach Stepek (29:19)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (29:44)
You take that logo, you go to the next enterprise and you go, hey, look what General Motors just bought for me. Don't you want this too, Hyundai of America? And they're like, well, I guess if General Motors bought it, you know, and then the whole process starts again. ⁓ It's a machine I'm glad I'm not in anymore, to be honest with you.
Zach Stepek (29:52)
Yeah. ⁓
Yeah, I mean, if
you look at the just, you know, picking on our own industry here, if you look at the highest end WordPress agencies that are out there, what do their sites lead with? Logos, right? Because at that level, the logos you have matter to the people making these purchasing decisions. And
You know, it sucks that that's the case because it's hard to break in to that space unless you are really good at selling. You know, you have to be a really good salesman. ⁓ I've had the opportunity to work with some really good salesmen over the years, you know, work directly with Jake Goldman at Ten Up, now fueled for a while. ⁓ And Jake just operates at a different level than most people.
And you know, that's why Ten Up has done as well as they have and why Fueled is continuing to grow. That is a very specific skill set that you have to develop by jumping in. You can't learn to swim without getting in the water, right? And so that's a big thing. ⁓ And I've learned a ton from other people that have jumped in, started at the deep end and learned to swim.
Matt Medeiros (31:13)
Yeah. Yeah.
Zach Stepek (31:24)
And so it's really cool, but yeah, is that pursuit of logos is a really big thing. And the enterprise procurement process is crazy. The government procurement process is crazier.
Matt Medeiros (31:40)
Yeah, yes, for sure. Yeah, we could run a whole podcast episode on that. ⁓ But speaking of procuring logos and showing off logos, where can folks find Big Scoots next? Events, online webinars, and then where can folks go, especially agency owners, where can they go to learn more about partnering up with Big Scoots?
Zach Stepek (31:47)
Yeah.
Yeah, so we're going to be ⁓ pretty much everywhere we can be for the foreseeable future, but the next show for myself and the team, we're actually splitting, we'll be in two places at once. ⁓ I will be with James Webb, our COO, at... ⁓
My brain just stopped. Let me reset. I will be at CloudFest USA with myself and James and then Tim. ⁓ Tim Monter and other members of the team will be at Mediavine's conference MediavineCon because like I said, we have a lot of people in the content creation space and we have a partnership with Mediavine where we provide hosting that optimizes ⁓ the delivery of those sites for revenue.
Matt Medeiros (32:24)
host ⁓ CloudFest.
Zach Stepek (32:52)
So ⁓ ad networks take pixels and things, and those can have an impact on performance. So we've been working with Mediavine to lessen that. And we're seeing 5 % lift in some of those ⁓ properties in revenue just by switching hosts, which is pretty cool. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (33:11)
And
that's going to be in, that's actually the same time, so November 5th to the 7th.
Zach Stepek (33:14)
Same time. Yeah, so that MediavineCon
is in Boston, I believe, and then we'll also be in Miami at the same time. ⁓ We'll be at Tastemakers in January. ⁓ I believe we'll have people at WordCamp Asia. We'll have people at WordCamp Europe. ⁓ I'm gonna try to go to as many WordCamps as I can next year just to be out there because I love the community and...
I've missed it. ⁓ We'll be at WordCamp US. We should be at PressConf ⁓ in the spring as well. So pretty much anywhere you can think, we'll try to be there. ⁓ If you don't meet up with us at a show and you just want to reach out and talk to us about agency partnership or about hosting in general, you can go to our website at bigscoots.com.
You can find us at Big Scoots pretty much everywhere. ⁓ If you want to email me, like I said, there are three Zacs in the company, so I had to find a way to ⁓ stand out from that. you can go to z at bigscoots.com, z at bigscoots.com to reach me. ⁓ And if you don't want to talk to me about any of that and you just want to talk to me about concert photography, you can follow my Instagram, ⁓ at zsteppic.
Matt Medeiros (34:40)
stuff. Go to bigscoots.com, there's a little button too, click to talk to a human. It's a very rare thing these days, but I think very important, especially... yeah, that's good. That's gonna be the value driver for the next five to ten years. All humans know AI. I love it. I mean, I think that's important. Thanks, Zach. Thanks for hanging out today. Thanks Big Scoots for sponsoring the WP Minute. Thank you for listening at the WPminute.com slash subscribe.
Zach Stepek (34:48)
Yeah, no AI all real people
I think so.