Day 203 at BionicWP
That’s a wrap for Day 203 at BionicWP. It’s 7:24 am in Karachi, where I’m writing this post. In my bed, after a long 16-hour work shift writing this down to document the day. It’s Ramadan going on right now; I always feel I have more time in Ramadan to work as I don’t have to worry about meals. Sleep schedules are changed due to Suhoor and Iftar, along with prayers. Making use of all this time to catch up on some long-pending tasks.
This is the week of eating all my frogs. I have been delaying 4-5 tasks for several weeks now, procrastinating on them, and keeping snoozing them ahead. This week I decided to focus on them and get them done, so I start next week fresh without these old lagging tasks. Planning to work over the weekend as well to ensure these get done.What are those items? Let me state them here so I can be accountable for them:
Vultr – Shut down more servers as we have moved most of our clients to our new platform. We need to clean up, consolidate, and shut down these servers. Scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. Dragging my feet for 7-8 weeks now. Did some work on it last month but then didn’t complete it all the way.
Support Team Management Tool – Been building a small tool to enable our growing support team to track themselves more fluidly. Allowing us to quickly get stats on the types of tickets we are getting the most, which clients take the most time etc. Ongoing for 5-6 weeks, still struggling to stop procrastinating and actually do it. Scheduled for the weekend
Team Structure and Processes Planning – Several key processes are undocumented along with the team structure. Been pending for over 5 months now. Want to get this done as well. Scheduled for Friday
Heartbeat – I have done works in patches for this, never completed it. A daily email to the whole team with crucial stats for the platform. Need to start it with whatever I have. Scheduled for Friday
Key Metrics
🥷 Customers: 561 (+3)
🌐 Active Sites: 1339 (+18)
💳 MRR: $31,440 (+$183)
🚀 Production Commits: 1
Support Load
Yesterday we received 32 tickets from one of our larger clients that completely changed our support load averages. On average, that client sends 3-4 requests a day. Yesterday, we had 32 because they are changing some items on the mobile versions of their sites. While our team was working tirelessly to get those tickets done, we received 20 more tickets today. It’s good we have the weekend coming up, which will allow us to catch up on them as our usual load is much less on the weekend.
This constant load has definitely brought the support processes and structures out in the open for us to evaluate and see how we can keep scaling our team to keep up with the demand and the “Yes” support we pride over.
New Sites
Our active site count increased by 18 today, which is the highest ever. Out of the 18, our team migrated around 12 of them while the rest 6 were directly managed by the clients. As our daily migrations are growing, which also falls under the support team’s duties, I have been thinking about maybe creating a separate sub-team within support that just handles migrations.
This should allow a better experience for our customers and will make the process smoother internally as well. Something to think about when I tackle Support Processes in the next few days.
Billing Change
Earlier this month, we decided to make a significant change in our billing to make it simpler for our customers. How our billing worked before? The day a customer signed up was the day set as their recurring bill date. So every month on that day, the customer used to get charged for all active sites within their account. If they launched a site mid-month, they would be charged pro-rated till the billing date for the days remaining and then charged fully for all sites on the billing date. This sometimes used to confuse our customers and us as well.
We brainstormed and came up with a solution, which we got good feedback on when discussing with some of our clients. We are changing everyone’s billing date to the 5th of the month. When new customers signup, their billing date is the next 5th of the month. So any sites they launch are pro-rated to the 5th, and then from the 5th, they are charged for all active sites. We pushed out this update last week for new clients, so since last week, all new clients signing up were having their bill dates set to the 5th. The real challenge was existing customers. For them, we pushed out an update yesterday.
Any customers that have recurring invoices being created from today are being pro-rated to the 5th instead of being charged for the whole month. And then, on the 5th, they will be charged month to month for all active sites. Or so we thought…We pushed it out last night, and we were in for a surprise this morning. Each client that had a recurring invoice for the 15th of the month had 3 invoices created instead of one. So triple duplication, and on top of that, it wasn’t changing their billing dates as well, so instead of 5th May as being the next date, it still was 15th May. We quickly did a hot-fix to fix those clients. At the same time, we tried to find the bug, it was the typical case of everything working in staging, but the moment it goes to production, it decides to not work. By the end of the day, the bug which wasn’t setting the correct date of 5th has been fixed. Dates are correctly setting, but the bug causing the duplication of invoices still exists and is Priority #1 for the team today.
As I wrote the whole billing scenario, I can see it’s a little confusing to understand. I’ll have to think of a better way to explain it and have something on the site which explains our billing. I guess for new clients, it’s simple. You get billed on the 5th of the month for all active sites. Any sites you launch mid-month are pro-rated to the following 5th. There you go, simple. Let’s forget the complex mind rambling I did above for existing clients.
We use Stripe as our payment processor; we don’t use any other stripe features apart from payment processing. The whole invoicing and billing module was developed in-house for the platform. We did look at Stripe Billing but decided not to go with it due to the flexibility we needed based on our requirements.
Product Hunt
As we come closer to 27th April – the day we launch on Product Hunt the excitement is growing, and time is running out to get all our marketing assets ready. We have the content and the images ready while the video is still in process. We are getting a 2-minute introductory animation video created that explains the platform and takes much longer than expected. Our deadline for that video is the 20th. I’m hoping we can get it done by then.
Our target is to get 500+ upvotes to ensure we land in Product of the Day, which would be huge for us.
Ok, time to stop. Looks like I have written too much again! Will try to shorten it up as we go forward. Thank you for being part of this journey.