Joe Howard, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.

Cortland, thanks so much for having me, man. It's a pleasure.

You are the founder of a company called WP Buffs. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what that is and why people will use it?

Sure, WPBuffs, as people can probably tell by the WP in the name.

We manage WordPress websites. So we help small business owners, entrepreneurs with security, speed

optimization, updates, ongoing edits for their website, pretty much all the technical support they

need with a single monthly subscription. We also work with a few larger agencies and freelancers in

the WordPress space. So we have a white label program so that if, yeah that if agencies and freelancers want to offer 24-7 support

to their client base, but they're a small agency or they're just a single person,

they can push their clients into 24-7 support for their WordPress sites while also making

a little bit of recurring revenue themselves.

So yeah, that's pretty much what we do.

Cool. So you basically have a business where you support people, which is funny because a lot of

founders start their business and figure out how to minimize support. It's the last thing they

want to do. And that is the primary thing that you guys do. How do you like doing it? Yeah,

services and support area of WordPresses. It definitely has its aches and pains. But I love it because it's something that a lot of people don't like doing. It actually creates a nice niche where people need support. Some people want to outsource it. Some people just want help with it. And that's where we can kind of step in and shine. The hardest part probably of what we do is just the fact that it's 24-7. I mean, you should see our Slack. It's people logging in, people logging out all the time, people working different time zones. It's pretty cool. How much of a business like that is service-based and how much of it is scalable? Because it kind of seems like in order to take on more and more customers and provide 24-7 support, you'll have to hire an increasing number of people. Yeah, it's a little bit of both. The essence of a product-tized service like ours, because at the core, we're really just a services company, and we provide support for people on the WordPress sites, but we've kind of used the business model of a more SaaS-based company, which is why I'm such a big fan of indie hackers. I learned so much just being in here, learning from everybody else doing these SaaS businesses when we have this kind of SaaS-based pricing. But yeah, the strength of what we do really comes from the fact that it's a product-ized service and we really have to systemize everything. I get pretty fine-tuned

so that we can just be as efficient as possible with our care plans is what we call them.

So that means that internally you have engineers that are basically building tools for yourself

to make you more efficient for supporting your customers.

Yeah. Every day is kind of filled with having the day-to-day execution of just the, you know, hundreds of tickets coming in a day. We've got to finish those up. We've got to make those updates for our client base. But at the core of what we do, we always want to improve every day as well. So we have a lot of systems in place so that people are able to get the work done. But we also want to kind of have our team be able to take a step back and really say like, oh, like, where are the places where we really need to improve our systems based on, you know, issues we're seeing among a significant portion of our customer base. So, yeah, a little bit of both. I am in Seattle right now. And on my flight here, I sat next to a nurse on the plane. And I asked her, you know, in all your years of being a nurse,

what are some of the best health I am in Seattle right now. And on my flight here, I sat next to a nurse on the plane.

And I asked her, you know, in all your years of being a nurse, what are some of the best health tips that you've learned that I should know about? And she was very big on prevention. I wonder how that plays into a services business like yours where you're providing support and help for people, how much effort you put into like preventing them from having problems in the first place. Because I guess the ideal situation is people are paying you a monthly fee and you never need to really help them because things are just going well. Yeah. Most of our requests that come in are edits people want to make to their site. So they want to update some content. They need to, you know, add some functionality to their site. We're happy to help do that in kind of a reactive

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