Day 202 at BionicWP
That’s a wrap for day 202 since 25th September 2020. That’s the day when we opened BionicWP.com for our Pre-Beta early adopters. Since then, we have come a long way. I’ll be trying to add a daily update, at least on weekdays, to showcase the challenges, successes, and key metrics encountered during the day. It’s very raw content directly from the battlefield. I’ll make no effort to polish or scrutinize this content. I’ll just post whatever was happening that day.
Why? Why am I doing this?
As a journal, I can look back at where our journey is documented
Share raw happenings from the frontlines of building a SaaS/PaaS company to fully embrace the Building in Public ideology
Hopefully, get feedback and support from the community whenever I make mistakes so I can learn from the collective wisdom of the community
Maybe something I post resonates with someone somewhere and helps them.
Some Key Metrics
🥷 Customers: 558
🌐 Active Sites: 1321 (+2)
💳 MRR: $31,257 (+$40)
🚀 Production Commits: 8
Remote First
Today was the 3rd day since we decided to ditch our office for good and move to a fully remote-first company. For the last year or so, we have worked out of an office in Karachi, Pakistan. We changed offices 2 times in the previous year as we hired more people than we had planned, so initially, we started with a 1400 sqft office, in 6 months we had no space. Hence, we moved to a bigger 3800 sqft office. All was going good, but 2 weeks ago we decided that we need to start hiring people from different parts of the country and other countries, especially our support department. We have 24/7 support coverage, and running an office 24/7 has its own challenges.
The more we discussed hiring people from different timezones to ensure we don’t have people from Karachi working night shifts to cover for the US timezone, instead of hiring in countries with more timezone overlap. It became more evident that this company was becoming what I didn’t want it to. It was being tied down to a location without much flexibility. The culture and processes built were assuming that we will always have an office and be dependent on people being in an office. I didn’t like that. I spoke with Michael about my concerns, and he was immediately on board. So within 2 weeks, we transitioned to a fully remote company.
We still have the office for the next few months to give us a place to meet quickly as the team learns and adapts to working remotely.
So today was day 3, and so far, so good. The team is adjusting well. I’ve already seen some of our processes improve to allow more flexibility, and the team feels more relaxed.
The UI Change
Today was the day when we were supposed to release 2 weeks’ worth of Quality of Life improvements, UI fixes, many backend stability improvements. Once the push was done and I was going through our production platform, I noticed the UI for Backups & Clone had changed. Before, we used to have 2 buttons to Download & Restore, now we had a drop-down. I had never seen this option before, nor was it in any of the demos. The team had just decided to do it to counter some responsiveness issues with the buttons. I was a little annoyed, as I thought changes like these should be discussed first or at least be part of the demo, so everyone knows they are coming. Had a quick discussion with the Platform team to re-align expectations. I might have been a dick today, but I just felt a little left out, that’s all.
Support Overload
BionicWP’s team prides itself on the quality of service we provide. We want it to be the best “hosting” support our clients have ever received, and our testimonials are proving it. Maintaining support levels is one of the most challenging jobs, as I’m finding out. When we were at 500 sites, it was pretty easy managing the “Yes” support that we want to provide, a team that says Yes, unlike other companies which just have a default response of No. As we offer Truly Managed services with our unlimited edits addons, it becomes a challenge to manage as we are growing. We are now at over 1300 live sites, so the requirements have changed a lot too. Our headcount has multiplied but scaling a support team is challenging and a big challenge (one reason we have moved to remote first to hire without any geographic limitations).
So today, one of our biggest clients with over 250 sites sent in 32 tickets all at once for 32 sites; each ticket had 6-8 edits for the website’s mobile version. Our estimate was each ticket would take an hour of our engineer’s time, so that’s 32 hours of work along with all the other clients and tickets coming in. As they are one of our biggest clients, we want to give them the same service level as always. I’m proud today because I didn’t have to manage the load or flow within the team. The team stepped up to the challenge, self-managed the load, and started working on it. One by one, the tickets started getting done, shift change happened in between, which was also handled well by both the outgoing and incoming shift lead, letting the incoming shift lead know what he was getting into so he was prepared. So far, it’s been 10 hours, and we have completed 18 of those 32 tickets. We are taking less time than estimated because my team 🤘(rocks) and we are the best support team in the WordPress hosting business.
This has shown me one thing: we have to plan for surges like this plus have some sort of SLA in place for tickets to ensure expectations are correctly set with clients.
When I started writing this update, I thought it would be quick. But here I am after a long winding essay. It’s my first, so don’t judge me. I promise I’ll get better. I always do.