Day 204 at BionicWP
Well, that’s a wrap for the first week of fully distributed work. We ditched our comfy office last week and went full remote for all our 40 employees from Monday this week. Our first week of remote work has concluded, and I must say, I’m more relieved than I thought I would be at this point. When going fully remote, there were a million questions I had. I was worried about the loss of productivity; everyone said, you’re stupid – you have such a nice office, why do you want to close it and move remote? Your team members will just sleep and not work blah blah blah.
One week in, I must say we have achieved a lot more than we usually do. Everyone has worked fewer hours than what we used to in the office (plus savings in commute time). Within one week, several of our processes have improved, which we as a team wanted to do for 6 months but “never found the time.” Now with remote work, just figuring it out by sitting together isn’t an option, so the team is consciously improving these processes to make their lives easier. Ironically, our communication quality has increased. One of the downsides I always used to hear and read about remote work was the obstacles and problems in communication due to working remotely. Still, this week, I noticed something completely opposite. The quality of communication has improved drastically. Everyone is making sure everyone else knows what’s happening, new development is getting documented, updates are being shared, and the overall vibe is just telling everyone this, just in case someone needs to know. This has resulted in the company and team knowing much more about all the happenings between groups.
Personally, for me, it has been pleasantly relaxing as well. I’ve had the opportunity to spend more time with my son, who now thinks I’m on vacation as I’m not going to the office, so he wants to play with me all the time. 3.5 years old definitely can’t process the word “No.” I’ve had to work lesser hours as the team who had been noticing my 16-17 hour days for the last year is making dedicated efforts to relieve me of some of my tasks, isn’t that the best team to have. Who think about your work and try to make your life easier.
Key Metrics:
🥷 Customers: 564 (+3)
🌐 Active Sites: 1340 (+1)
💳 MRR: $31,593 (+$153)
🚀 Production Commits: 2
Yesterday we had 18 new sites go active; today, we just had 1 more. So that’s a big dip. Need to focus more on consistent marketing activities to ensure that this number remains consistent. Our MRR grew by $153 even though we had 1 new site. Most of it is basically due to yesterday’s sites. It just wasn’t fully updated when I posted yesterday’s update. So counting it today.
New Features
Had a call with all our team leads and product team discussing two new features:
Test Backups
Picked up a much-requested feature from our support team. That is to test backups. This one has 2 main uses. One is to verify backups, so the support team can daily sample some sites and test one backup randomly to ensure it’s working and our system is generating backups correctly.
The second use case is when clients screw up their websites and ask us to restore backups. We need to check which is the correct backup because they might come to us after a few days, so we can’t just go to the last backup. We need to go day by day, restoring backups to get to the one they want or which was before things screwed up. Right now, this has to be done on the live site, as that’s where backups can be restored. With this feature, we would quickly launch new sites and restore backups on them to see which one is the right one and then restore that on the main site.
Each test backup will launch a new container and restore the backup on it. By default, the container would self-destroy itself in 48 hours unless the creator changes the date to allow for more time.
Discussed, going into dev next week.
Bulk Plugin/Theme operations
Another much-requested request from our support team. We already have bulk updates, where we can run updates to plugins or themes on all sites that have that particular plugin or theme. But we don’t have an option to add/activate/deactivate/delete plugins or themes in bulk. This sometimes becomes an issue when some client with 250 sites sends us a plugin to add to all sites. We have to do it manually. With this new feature, everything would be done in a few clicks.
These features are the building blocks for eventually making BionicWP a standalone WordPress management service that would allow our customers to manage their WordPress sites with us even if they don’t host them with us. Oops, I revealed a secret here! We aren’t planning for anything like this in 2021. But in 2022, I don’t promise anything. Maybe ManageWP and MainWP are in for some competition. 🤘
Billing Issues
Yesterday, in my update, I had mentioned two billing issues that had come up when we pushed our new billing module. One was setting a date for existing customers to 5th when their recurring invoice runs – this was fixed yesterday itself. The second issue was the creation of 3 invoices instead of one. That bug took its time; our developers worked for hours on it but were perplexed as everything ran fine on staging but on production, it created 3 invoices. Finally, we figured it out; our DevOps team was running some load-balancing tests on the platform’s back end and had created two more test instances. So we had 3 instances running hence the 3 invoices, as each instance was running the operation. Once we figured it out, it was definitely a facepalm moment as it was just a simple thing, and we had spent over 20 dev hours trying to figure it out, and we’re still scratching our heads. All good on this front now.
Eat the frog
I also had 4 frogs (tasks that I have been putting off for weeks/months) yesterday. Two were scheduled for today and two for the weekend. I have started the ones that I wanted to do today. I couldn’t complete them, but hopefully, spending some time over the weekend will allow me to knock them off. Still confident I’ll knock off all 4 by Monday.
New Company Name
My BFF: Farheen asked me for ideas to name her next company. She wants it to have the word “ventures” in it because, for some reason, she thinks of herself as some big-shot who has so many companies that she needs a holding company. Even her daughter, who is so little, is like this at hearing this.
So I suggested her 2 really relevant names for her personality:
Nesti Ventures
Dumbo Ventures
Which one do you all like? I like Nesti Ventures, which literally means Lazy Ventures.
That’s it for me today, have a lovely weekend to the ghosts that read this blog published on ghost!