Episode 149 – Ben Gabler
Welcome to another episode of The HERO Show. I am your host Richard Matthews, (@AKATheAlchemist) and you are listening to Episode 149 with Ben Gabler – Simplifying the Process of Accelerating and Securing Your Website.
Ben Gabler has been in the web hosting industry since high school. He has expanded market share for major global Web hosting brands and brought technology startups from initial idea to success.
In 2006, Ben launched the web-hosting company named Host Nine which was then purchased by Hostgator. He developed EasyRent.com, the first-ever all-in-one property management platform. Then took on a new role in late-2015 as a Chief Executive Officer at customer service software company at Help.com.
Upon completion of the Help.com Platform, Ben joined Lance Crosby and the team at StackPath as Chief Product Officer for over two years. Ben is now the Founder and CEO of Rocket.net — an all-in-one Managed WordPress Hosting platform built for WordPress Websites of all sizes.
Here’s just a taste of what we talked about today:
- Ben Gabler calls in from sunny South Florida in a town called Jupiter. We also talked a little bit about our travel experience in Kissimmee, Florida during the hype of COVID-19.
- We began our interview with how Ben started Rocket.net. The platform was born because he saw a lot of people trying to grasp what CDN (Content Delivery Network) was all about and how to configure it. This inspired Ben to simplify web security by focusing on WordPress.
- Then, we discussed the importance of including CDN or WAF in the hosting platform.
- Next, we talked about how Rocket.net interacts with PageSpeed tests and how it relates to great user experience.
- Ben shared how they hosted big sites like hannity.com during national events such as the election.
- Then, Ben shared his business origin story. We talked about his web hosting during high school through his friend, Adam.
- Next, we discuss bridging the gap between business, product, and engineering. This is Ben’s superpower that allows him to spur growth in web hosting companies.
- Product positioning was one of the things Ben had been struggling with in his business. Even today, he still tries to figure out the perfect balance in that aspect.
- And then, we discuss the things Ben constantly fights with in his business—Budget Hosting—and how most people don’t even understand the true value of what they are getting.
Recommended Tools:
Recommended Media:
Ben mentioned the following books on the show.
- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford
- Be Obsessed or Be Average by Grant Cardone
The HERO Challenge
Today on the show, Ben Gabler challenged Gary Simat to be a guest on The HERO Show. Ben thinks that Gary is a fantastic person to interview because got an amazing entrepreneurial story to share. Gary is the CEO of Performive, a company that he runs for a really long time.
How To Stay Connected with Ben Gabler
Want to stay connected with Ben? Please check out their social profiles below.
- Website: Rocket.net
With that… let’s go and listen to the full episode…
Automated Transcription
Richard Matthews 0:00
Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what I can fix that I can help people I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…
Richard Matthews 0:35
Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and today I am live on the line with Ben Gabler. Ben are you there?
Ben Gabler 0:48
Yes, I am.
Richard Matthews 0:50
Awesome. So glad to have you here, Ben. Where are you calling in from today?
Ben Gabler 0:51
Happy to be here. I’m calling from sunny South Florida in a town called Jupiter right outside of West Palm Beach.
Richard Matthews 0:51
Nice. Nice. I got stuck in Florida most of this last 2019 COVID season we got stuck in Kissimmee for eight months. In our travels.
Ben Gabler 0:56
Oh, wow. A little bit different. It’s more of the beach scene here in Jupiter. We’re pretty close to the water a couple of miles. So you know, it’s a little bit different than Kissimmee.
Richard Matthews 1:08
Yeah, we had planned most of the spring last year to go all the way around, the tip of Florida, down the east coast off the west coast, and everything. And then we didn’t get to see almost any of it until near the end of the year when we finally got to go down to the Keys when they opened up again. And we saw a little bit of the West Coast, but most of our Florida exploring didn’t get to happen. So anyway, maybe we’ll get to try it again this year if the world calms down a bit.
Ben Gabler 2:00
Yeah, definitely.
Richard Matthews 2:02
So what I want to do real quick, is just do a brief introduction for you so people know who you are. And we can get in and talk a little bit about your story. So you’ve been in the web hosting game forever. You helped launch the web hosting company, Host Nine in 2006, which was then purchased by Hostgator, you developed EasyRent.com, you were the chief executive officer at Help.com. And the Chief Product Officer at stackedpath. And now you are the founder of Rocket, which is a web hosting platform, a managed WordPress hosting platform, is that correct?
Ben Gabler 2:36
That’s correct. Yeah, the CEO and founder of Rocket.net.
Richard Matthews 2:40
Awesome. So why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you are known for now? What’s your business like? Who do you serve? And what is it specifically that you guys do for them?
Ben Gabler 2:49
Sure. So you know, over the last 17 years, kind of fell into the web hosting industry right out of high school. And over the course of the years, we’ve launch companies, I spent some time at some of the large companies, back in 2013, relaunched all the hosting products at GoDaddy.com. And most recently, the role I was under was Chief Product Officer at stackpath, where we had a CDN web application firewall and some edge computing products. And it was there that it was dealing with dozens of WordPress users every day. And I was no stranger to WordPress, been using it since its effective release. And the trouble that we kept seeing was people were trying to grasp, what’s a CDN? How do I configure it? How does it tie into my hosting, so that’s when the idea of a Rocket.net was really born. We wanted to simplify the process for accelerating and securing your website, and we decided to, focus on WordPress, it’s inching near 40% of all market share for websites today. And we’ve been working with a lot of very large agencies and different, you know, individual and hobbyists that have their WordPress sites. And one of the things that we specialize in is, it’s an all in one platform. So when you come to Rocket.net, you don’t need to bring a CDN, you don’t need to figure out what a WAF is, you simply point your DNS to Rocket.net. And your site’s already is accelerated, it’s secure as it can possibly be leveraging an enterprise version of with CloudFlare that we include in every package.
Richard Matthews 4:21
Awesome. So for the uninitiated among our audience, why would they care about things like having a CDN or WAF included in their hosting platform?
Ben Gabler 4:31
Great question. This year is going to be an interesting year, especially with Google and search engine rankings. There’s been a lot of discussion around the core web vitals. And what that means is Google’s going to actually start, taking into account your time to the first byte, which is how long it takes for your browser to actually get a request back and start loading your website and a number of other performance metrics that a CDN really is required for. And there’s some of these budget hosting companies out there, you’ll see time to the first byte anywhere from two to eight seconds, which means somebody types in your website URL, they’re sitting to eight seconds before they see anything at all. And it’s just a really bad experience. And today, if things aren’t as quick and instant as possible, you’re very likely to have a very high bounce rate. So from the CDN perspective, what our platform does is it effectively keeps a cached copy of your website and over 200 locations around the world. So what that does is it levels the playing field for all of your website, visitors around the globe, without having to go back to a single location every time they access your website. And then when it comes to the web application firewall or known as WAF. WordPress is a very popular content management system, it’s open source, there’s constantly exploits coming out, and websites getting hacked. And with our enterprise platform, it actually blocks all of those malicious requests and attempts at what’s called the edge of the network to where it never even gets close to your hosting or WordPress install at all. And all of that is baked in by default. And some of the important things around having a WAF is, let’s say you’re spending money on Google ads. If you get infected with malware or hacked, Google will actually stop your ads, which means you’re going to stop generating sales, and you’re going to not have revenue. And then on the flip side of that, if you might be in the AdSense network if you get infected with malware, Google will actually turn off AdSense, and you’re going to stop generating revenue from that as well.
Richard Matthews 6:28
Yeah, absolutely. And I know, we’ve seen things like that happened with hosting companies before. And it’s not necessarily hosting either. It’s things like, someone who’s not familiar with WordPress uses the default admin password and doesn’t have any brute force protection on the login screen. So they get hacked, and stuff happens on the back end, and then their e-commerce site goes down or starts redirecting to, God knows what, that’s right. So it can be a royal pain. And I know, like web designers or not. What’s the phrase I’m looking for the people who are running their websites are in the business of like, e-commerce or showing their business or their dentistry website, they’re not in the business of hosting and figuring all this stuff out. And a lot of the budget hosts that are out there, just leave sort of everything other than like, hey, we’ve got a place for your website to land. And they leave all the management of the servers and the security and the speed and everything to the business owner who’s not in that business.
Ben Gabler 7:28
Right? Yeah, I always like to say, with Rocket.net, you don’t need a Ph.D. in speed and security, we’ve taken care of that for you, you don’t have to worry about a bunch of different knobs to go configure to make sure things are as fast and secure as possible. So and it’s also not an additional fee with us, it’s included, by default, some of the budget hosts out there, like you mentioned, will offer some of these solutions, but it costs money. You have to go pay $20 a month extra per site for CDN and WAF. Not including your usage. It just depends on what company you’re with. But that’s absolutely right. What we like to say at Rocket.net is, we take care of the speed and security and we allow our customers to focus on what they are best at, which is content management.
Richard Matthews 8:11
Yeah. And one of the things I tell all of my clients is, if you’re running a website that is designed to help you generate revenue in some form or fashion, whether that’s leads, or phone calls, or actual sales on a website, you need to be with some sort of a managed hosting company that knows how to take care of your business. Absolutely. So yeah, it’s definitely something I think a lot of businesses need to know and need to know what’s available, especially with WordPress becoming as big as it is having a managed hosting company that knows how to do that. It’s really good. So my next sort of question for you, just because I get asked this all the time by people is, how much does what you guys do impact the Google PageSpeed scores that you see, because one of the biggest complaints I get from clients, or other people are like, hey, our Google’s PageSpeed score is like a C, or it’s a B, or whatever, we want it to be all green, we want all the lights to be green, on the page speed tests. How does your platform sort of interact with those? Are those PageSpeed tests, any good should people be even paying attention to them?
Ben Gabler 9:13
The Google PageSpeed is an interesting topic. What I always end up discussing with some of our customers is Do you really want to optimize user experience for a bot or a human? There are certain sites, I don’t know if you’ve ever gone to a site that I would call over optimized, and it looks like it’s broken for a second because the CSS actually hasn’t loaded yet. And then all of a sudden, the site looks like it’s supposed to look and for a second there, you thought it was broken. But the bot might really like that. And that’s where you have to find the right balance between, what are your success criteria? Do you have a specific position in Google you want to be in? Do you have a specific traffic number you’re looking for? Do you have a specific conversion rate? And I think really focusing on user experience and working backwards will ultimately get you the results you really want. And when our platform is used, there’s a lot of the factors that go into that covered with time to first byte being sub 100 milliseconds. That means Google’s happy about how quickly it was able to, get your website content. And then things like HTTP two and HTTP three, that’s going to start to come out allows browsers to really create more requests in parallel to the server to make sure they’re not very single threaded. So those things alone, we have websites that will be an F, in a page speed test. And it could be just because of time to the first byte, and they moved to our platform, and with no changes whatsoever, it’s a B. So there are two important factors to PageSpeed. And one, that’s your performance around your network server. And just how quickly you can deliver the website. And the second factor is really your content. There’s a lot of really good plugins out there, like flying scripts, and flying press, WP rocket, and a couple of other plugins that, are really about content optimization. And once that content is optimized, it’s then coupled with our platform and just optimize even further and serve as close as possible to the visitor, ultimately giving the best possible user experience. So I always tell folks to try not to get too beat up on the mobile page, speed score, try to focus on a great user experience, and tackling the obvious things like don’t take eight seconds to load your website.
Richard Matthews 11:30
Yeah, one of the things I like to tell clients is that what’s more important than the PageSpeed score you get is whether or not your website delivers the result you want, right? converting visitors into sales, or you converting visitors into leads, right, because that’s really the metric that you care about, it cares about what the PageSpeed score is.
Ben Gabler 11:50
And uptime, right? So we have a website on our platform, we actually host hannity.com is on the platform for a partner of ours, and they do 40, there are 40,000 hits in minutes, right, and we’re serving that at a 98% cache hit ratio. So what that means is, less than 2% of the time requests are actually missing the CDN cache and go into the server and during the election and things like that, no matter what type of auto scaling, or things you might have had in one region, for your server where WordPress was hosted, we were able to actually spread that out and give every visitor a consistent experience with 100% uptime through the entire election and beyond, and all the security metrics as well. So it’s something that, has really made a difference for a lot of our customers. And ultimately, that’s what we love to see.
Richard Matthews 12:43
Awesome. So just out of curiosity, because you’re one of the first founders I’ve talked to in the hosting company, when you guys are hosting a big site like hannity.com, during a big national thing, like the election, how closely Do you guys have to keep an eye on something like that, to make sure that everything is just firing as it’s supposed to?
Ben Gabler 13:00
It’s interesting when we work with agencies, they effectively keep an eye on things from their perspective. And, we’re monitoring the platform at a 50,000-foot view, so we can make sure there are no errors happening. There are no, security events happening. And we expose a lot of that data to our customers. Yeah, so the agency that manages that site, for example, can go in and run a report, see their CDN stuff, maybe there’s a certain URL that is dynamic, but should be static. And we also work very closely with our agency partners, we have slack channels, so we can provide real time support, instead of making people go through tickets or chat. And that’s really been super valuable because it’s not just about speed and security in it, I think one of the things that get overlooked a lot is the experience for the customer. And for us, you know, we have 17 years of experience in hosting, we’ve seen it all, we’ve seen tiny hosting companies, we’ve seen GoDaddy doing 1000s of signups a day. So we want to be able to take that knowledge and share it with the agencies and customers alike on our platform. And I think it’s a big value prop that we have that just doesn’t really get talked about a lot, we have a lot of calls. And people are just amazed by finally being able to talk to somebody that’s not just a salesperson, or whatever it might be like someone that I actually send a call to understand the platform. So that’s gone a long way. So
Richard Matthews 14:22
It’s a difficult thing to do in a customer service space is to find people who both know how to understand all the technical stuff, and then speak to someone who doesn’t know all of it. So that’s an interesting line, you guys probably have to learn how to walk.
Ben Gabler 14:34
Absolutely. One of the things we talked about in our recap of 2020 was the company culture we have here at Rocket.net. And one of the toughest jobs we’re gonna have is really scaling, people right, and finding the right fit for our team to make sure that there is a good balance of that technical aptitude when working with our customers. So, you know, when folks are like, well, you’re expensive, in reality, we’re not with everything. We include but there’s a reason why we have a high bar that we keep for support. And we want to make sure that we can effectively scale that.
Richard Matthews 15:05
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk a little bit about how you got to this point where you’re running a big managed hosting company. And that kind of stuff. We’d say on this show, every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made you into the hero that you are today, basically, we want to know that story, were you born a hero? Are you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into hosting? Or did you start in a job somewhere and eventually become entrepreneurial? basically, want to know how you got here?
Ben Gabler 15:34
Yeah, it’s funny. The comic book analogy. My wife actually makes fun of me every day, because I’m rewatching. Smallville, so we’re watching a lot of the origin of Superman. So for me, I fell into hosting when I was in high school, I delivered pizza for four and a half years. And I always joke that it was probably the least stressful job I had, but I had a buddy, I believe his name is Adam Tuttle, I think was his name. And I was on IRC a lot as a kid. And one day we were talking and he told me he had this hosting company hosting wizard or something. And I’m like, what’s that? And he says, Oh, you know, I saw web hosting. So people can put websites online, and I made a couple of 1000 bucks a month, like, Wait, how much? And you know, I’m delivering pizza at the time. So I ended up long story short, purchasing my first server from a company called FDC servers. And I made sure I could run IRC on it. And I had my IRC server, and then I think it was cPanel, version four, back then, I think this is right around 2003. And from there, I had a little company, I was 18 years old. And there was a big company being talked about a lot Hostgator Hostgator, Hostgator. And back then before Facebook was a thing, there was a site called web hosting talk. And I saw that Hostgator had posted an ad they were hiring. So I was like, let me check this company out and see what they’re up to, maybe I can learn a few things while I interview. And when I went down there, I met the founder, Brent Oxley, and we hit it off, and I ended up joining Hostgator, and kind of merging my little hosting company into that. And I think it was employee number 10. And just hit the ground running, and that’s really where I kind of saw the first scale of hosting. And I think that was around 2006. So Hostgator was just kind of hitting a stride and really starting to be something big. And they were headquartered down in Boca Raton, Florida. And I learned a lot there. And ultimately, Brent moved the company to Houston. So I stayed in Florida and started a company called Host Nine. And that’s where I really built my first company. We did just under 2 million a year in revenue completely bootstrapped. I was living with my parents again, to start the company, that whole story. And from there just spent four and a half years building that company, we did something very unique, which is kind of similar to what we’re doing today, we had a product called reseller Central, and it allowed people to spread their websites out across different locations and servers, as a reseller. So, in traditional reseller hosting, you were stuck on one server with 80 other resellers. And if you all grew, which we wanted you to, then it became a problem. So what we did is we allowed resellers to constantly spread their stuff out similar to what we do now. And worked really well, long story short, we sold the company to Hostgator, I joined Hostgator for the second time in 2010. And after close to a year there, Brent decided he wanted to sell the company. So I decided to take some much needed time off, I think I went fishing every day for six months straight, and then, kind of started getting bored and wanted to get back into it. So for me, it was really kind of luck, in the sense that somebody had mentioned this web hosting thing to me. And I started out on the internet back on bulletin board systems and prodigy and AOL. So I always had a knack for technology. And I was able to kind of pick up that the technical part of hosting managing my own servers, and then kind of moving to more of a business management role and kind of being able to couple both of those together.
Richard Matthews 19:08
Nice, nice. So just out of curiosity, what year did you graduate high school
Ben Gabler 19:11
2003
Richard Matthews 19:13
I graduated 2004. So we’re like, right in the same timeframe.
Ben Gabler 19:16
There we go.
Richard Matthews 19:17
But you know, I wasn’t doing nearly as cool things. Back then, I was trying to get into the business world and I was doing their stuff like selling candy to my friends on you know, buying wholesale, and selling it retail campus and I tried at one point to get into I think it was Herbalife, which was like an MLM thing, but they wouldn’t let me because I was not 18 yet you can’t sign documents when you’re too young. eventually ended up paying my way through college as a portrait photographer, but I didn’t get into anything really good business wise until post college.
Ben Gabler 19:51
Right. Yeah.
Richard Matthews 19:53
Anyways, it’s a really fascinating story, like you sort of fell into hosting and then have turned that into almost like a lifelong sort of mission to grow these businesses and do those things. So it’s really fascinating. But I’m curious what has really helped you in that space, we talk about superpowers, every kind of hero has a superpower, whether that’s, a fancy flying suit made by a genius intellect or the ability to call down Thunder or you know, Superman and his super strength. In the real world, Heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is a single skill, or it’s a set of skills that you were born with you developed over time, that really sort of ties all of your other skills together that allows you to do what you do. And with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower has been in the growth of these hosting companies?
Ben Gabler 20:40
I think it’s really been around bridging the gap between business and product and engineering, right. So kind of understanding the marketing aspect, the sales cycle, the technology itself, and being able to maintain a conversation with anybody from a CTO to a developer to a manager at a dental office. And even at StackPath one of the main reasons I joined with Lance Crosby, there was they had a really big need to kind of bridge the software and product organization, because, the product was more of a business approach with spreadsheets, and research, and things, which is obviously always needed, but then the software engineering, there wasn’t a good way to relay what was needed for the product itself. So when I got the StackPath, I was able to help bridge, the product and software engineering organization to where we could have the product managers and engineering managers working together in a cohesive way to understand exactly what was needed. And just taking a technical approach to it, and I think being able to have that technical understanding, especially in hosting really goes a long way. The whole Rocket.net platform was architected by myself, with help of our co founders, on using it and usability testing and things like that, it was just the ability to say, Hey, this is how we’re going to do it, here are the developers we’re going to use, here’s how we’re going to build it, and really being able to translate. I want to build a managed WordPress hosting company with CDNs WAF embedded to this is how we’re going to build it. And I think that’s what’s really helped me in my career is, having a little bit of everything, like some engineering, some business, some marketing, some sales, and being able to kind of see it from that 50,000-foot view.
Richard Matthews 22:33
And sort of like, combine those things together. Yeah, I had a similar story, I worked for a solar company. And they were a big regional company, and they did a lot of stuff with big commercial buildings. And one of the things that they were really, really good at was looking at the whole energy picture, and not just like, Hey, if you use this much energy, we can put solar on it, blah, blah, blah, that kind of thing. But they actually looked at all sorts of individual things. And they, their engineers built a program that allowed them to do the cost of energy on a product, like per product level. So like, say, a company like Safeway, making loaves of bread, they can tell Safeway, here’s what your energy cost per loaf of bread is, which is super detailed stuff. And they had the hardest time selling it because they could never figure out they’re like they the engineers would come and be like, we can do this. We can put all these monitors on him. He does all the cool stuff. And they couldn’t ever figure out how to actually get a company to bite and say, I want that until I sat down with the engineers for I don’t know, for hours and had them like give me their whole pitch on what’s going on? And I was like, Oh, you guys do ecogs. They’re like, what was like energy cost of goods sold? And like you give that to a business owner? And they’re like, Oh, I get it. Exactly. Its the cost of labor is ecogs now I know, my energy cost of goods sold, and it makes sense. So it’s like that ability to like bridge the gap between you were saying the Product Development and Engineering, it’s a useful skill to be able to help.
Ben Gabler 24:05
It’s funny listening to you say that makes me realize I’m like, you know what, we’re translators. It’s like translating, the same language, but sort of a more technical approach into a translated understanding, sort of a different way to explain something. And it’s, it’s, it’s interesting to see that happen in so many different verticals.
Richard Matthews 24:25
You have to be able to, what they’re saying over here makes perfect sense to them. But you also have to, you have to be able to take it to the market, who is going to buy it and say it in a way that they get it? And that’s how you get to that product development point. Because if you missed that mark, where people don’t actually understand what you’ve created, they’re not going to buy it, you won’t have a viable company. Exactly. So that’s really interesting. So the flip side then of your superpower is the fatal flaw. Just like every Superman has his kryptonite, or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going You probably have a flaw that’s held you back. Right? For me, it was a couple of things, perfectionism that kept me from shipping, I wanted to always tweak little things before we go to market. Or earlier, my career, lack of self care, which led me to let my clients walk all over me and not having any good boundary setup. But I think more important than sort of what the flaw is of how have you worked to rectify it or overcome it, so you could continue to grow, so maybe our audience might learn a little bit from your experience there?
Ben Gabler 25:29
I think when it comes to the fatal flaw are a couple of aspects. I mean, one of the things I’m even struggling with right now. We just talked kind of about being translators and kind of taking the product or the engineering aspect of a product and relaying it. If I’m on a phone call, or a live chat, I can get those aha moments all day long, I can have a great conversation and really drive the value proposition of our product based on the conversation I’m having. But one of the things I really struggle with, and I always kind of have, is the digital presentation of your product, right? So when we think about, even our website, Rocket.net, if I had a conversation, I can tell you all the great things that Rocket.net can do for you. But then on the flip side of that, if I don’t get to have the conversation, and I need the website to do that for me, that’s been a big struggle point for me. And that’s something that we’re working through, even at Rocket.net is, how do we take all of these great things like CloudFlare enterprise? A lot of people don’t know what that is. But there’s a lot of people that do. So it’s always trying to find that right balance of product positioning, and I listened to, obviously awesome by April Dunford. And that book was amazing, right? It was a great Listen, slash read. And, I highly recommend it to everybody. But I would say one of my biggest pain points is really that product positioning. When I worked with Lance Crosby, he used to always say, we can’t boil the ocean. And that really stuck with me a lot. Because, even as we look at Rocket.net, in my opinion, we’re kind of boiling the ocean with our messaging and positioning. And I think we need to kind of scale that back and think about who our target audience is without forgetting about, some of the other audiences. But, I would say, finding the right way to position your product, digitally, for me is something that, has always been a challenge, when it comes to the user experience of the product and making it simple. That’s, that’s always been awesome and super fun.
Richard Matthews 27:38
I have a story I learned in college that might help a little bit with that. So I went to college as a preacher. I got trained classically as a preacher at a Bible college. And one of our preaching professors did this exercise with us, which, to this day sticks with me, I’ve told the story a few times on the podcast, but what they had us do is get up in front of the classroom when we had, 40 other students in the room. And they were like, what I want you to do is ask a question to a specific person in the audience. But ask them not to respond. Right? So so like, what’s your favorite color? Right, something like that. I’m going to ask you a question. I don’t want you to respond to it and just look someone in the eye and ask them that question. And then, wait a few seconds, and then say, Now, who in the audience that I asked that question, too haven’t raised their hands. And when you look someone in the eye, and he asked them, what was your favorite color? And then you asked us the question to the person that you ask the question to, and then all the people sitting around them will all raise their hands, you asked me that question. And then we would repeat the experiment and said, Now look into the audience look in between two people ask the same question. And give it a few seconds and ask the people to raise their hand who you ask that question to? And nobody in the audience will raise their hand. Right? It was extremely consistent. And the reason for that is because you have to speak to an individual. And that’s the whole boiling the ocean metaphor, essentially, is that you have to have that one specific person that you’re talking to, that you’re going to solve all their problems, and all the people who are close enough to them are going to resonate with your message.
Ben Gabler 29:12
Yeah, no, that means, nail on the head, right? Totally makes sense. And it’s always the inner you that’s like, Oh, you can’t just, be that narrow, even though it’s not, right? You’re still like, I’m still kind of maybe missing out on, this, that or the other. And that’s always one of the tricky things that even from website content, it translates into what I love the most about this business is we have one product, and it makes it so much easier to optimize the experience for the user. But even at stackpath, we had multiple products, right? Like you had customers coming for edge computing, you had customers come in for CDNs, customers come in for this. And it was very difficult to really optimize not just the sales funnel, but the actual experience beyond the sales funnel. So you know. I love that it makes a lot of sense. And it’s totally accurate.
Richard Matthews 30:04
Yeah. And I feel like your business, at least in particular, with a lot of the market, the educational marketing would do really well, just because a lot of people don’t understand what hosting is and how it works. They just know they need to have it.
Ben Gabler 30:18
Exactly. Totally.
Richard Matthews 30:19
It’s probably why you’re out doing a podcast like this, educating people.
Ben Gabler 30:23
That’s right. I mean I have a couple of Facebook groups online. And I don’t do any shameless plugs, I just really want to help people, and Aaron makes a joke. I’m the king of CDN. And it’s always an internal joke that we hear. But I love helping people understand CDN, WAF, and the edge of the network and all these different things in these groups, just in my off time, and it’s really just nothing other than keeping a pulse on any part of the market that I can outside of what we see. But also just give back, you know, 17 years of experience and something I want to help share that knowledge and help people in any way that I can, even one of the moderators, Jeff he had one of the most optimized websites I’ve ever seen. And I’m like, Man, you don’t need us like you’re doing it other ways. And it’s great. But maintain a friendship from there, we continue to talk here and there, and it’s just keeping up on technology, and you make all these connections along the way. And it’s if I can ever help Jeff, or if he can ever help me, it’s great and it’s been nice.
Richard Matthews 31:26
That’s super cool. I think that fits right in with my next question, right? Where you’re talking about helping the marketplace. And I want to talk a little bit about your common enemy. So every, every superhero has an arch nemesis. And it’s the thing that they’re constantly having to fight against in their world. In the world of business, it takes a lot of forms. But generally, we talked about it in terms of your clients. The people that come to us, have a problem. And it’s a mindset, or it’s a flaw that you guys have to overcome so that you can actually get them the results that they’re looking for. And maybe it’s something you have to deal with in your marketing, or maybe something you just have to deal with on the phone all the time. But what’s the arch nemesis, that you’re constantly having to fight to get someone to actually say, yeah, we need to work with you, or we need help with our hosting and CDN, and we have that kind of stuff?
Ben Gabler 32:08
Budget hosting. Which is funny, because I was a huge part of it for a very long time. But no, I would say it’s budget hosting really, I think folks don’t understand the true value of what a managed platform even without some of the bells and whistles we have brings to the table. But it’s the sticker shock of, well, this company is 395 a month, and you’re 25 that’s a ripoff. It’s like hold on. Did you click to order and see what the order form total is? $800 for you to prepay for three years to get that price? Right? And did you also see it doesn’t come with malware scanning, you have to buy sitelock? Did you also see it doesn’t come with a WAP, you have to buy security? Did you also see it doesn’t come with a CDN? Do you have to buy another one? Right. And I would definitely say, I think people are coming around more to understand you get what you pay for. But even with our agency customers, we’re not that expensive. If you have 10 websites that you’re managing, you’re effectively paying us around $10 a month per site, and you’re getting CDN you’re getting WAP getting malware protection, all of that. And we’ve actually saved the majority of our customers a lot of money, they don’t need backup plugins, because we provide daily backups with a 14 day retention, they don’t need wordfence, which is a paid plugin, because we provide that at the edge, they don’t need a full on image optimization library with web piece forks, we give them Mirage by CloudFlare. So it’s just, we end up saving people money, and where it can come as a shock as people see, 25 or $30 a month for one website. Well, that’s just insane. And at the end of the day, I mean, if you’re one website doesn’t need sub 100 millisecond time to the first byte it doesn’t need image optimization, and it doesn’t need security, then sure. I mean, budget hosting is for you. But it’s really just how the unlimited hosting drove, you know, I always said, years ago, the web hosting industry shot itself in the foot by going as cheap and unlimited as possible. There was a couple of hosting companies that started doing unlimited. And then it was $6 $3 295 a month. And it’s just to the point where you guys did this to yourself. Now, this whole industry has to come in and say, well, we need to offer 395 a month. And it’s like, No, you don’t. We have customers that have a single website an art website in New York City paying, $300 a year for hosting with us because they don’t have to worry about anything and when they need us, they come in to chat, whether it’s a recommendation on an affiliate plugin, or how do I make sure only people that pay for my art can download it and we help them with all of that because that’s what we’re here for. So I would say that’s, that’s definitely got to be my instant number one response to that budget mentality.
Richard Matthews 35:03
I just had a conversation with a friend the other day, they were like, Hey, I’m starting a new, educational thing that goes along with your YouTube channel and all sorts of other good stuff. And they want to drive revenue with it. And they were like, who should I use for hosting. And my first response was, I gave him a couple of manage hosts that I really like. And they responded back to me, they’re like, those are all expensive. You know, it’s like Hostgator, and Bluehost is only like, 395 a month. And I was like yeah if you’re running a personal blog, and you don’t care whether or not you have uptime, that’s great. I was like, if you’re looking to drive revenue, you need to have someone who’s like, on your side, like it strikes bat for your revenue. Because on the web, uptime, and hackability, and all those things, they’re directly connected to whether or not you are able to drive revenue with your website.
Ben Gabler 35:53
Absolutely. Which all come back to user experience, like website visitor experience, right. And if you really care, to make the best possible experience to get the best revenue generated out of it, that’s where you just can’t go wrong with a managed platform.
Richard Matthews 36:09
Yeah, no. So and then the, I always tell people, there’s basically like, maybe five things that really go into your website, and one is going to be your host. So you have the speed and the security and then you’re going to have your actual user experience, which is your copying your branding, and your delivery on the back end, as long as you nail all those things, a lot of people, they’re like a host is just a host, and it’s not. Right. It’s like the foundation for your whole building is like you want to build this big enterprise, you know, building on top of it you’re hosting is that concrete pad, you’re sticking under it. And if you’re just gonna build it on sand or something, it’s all gonna come tumbling down someday, if you don’t take care of it.
Ben Gabler 36:55
That’s right.
Richard Matthews 36:56
So awesome. So the flip side then of your common enemy is your driving force. So just like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to indexing categorize all the world’s information, or lie to people about PageSpeed. I want to know, what is it you fight for with Rocket.net? What’s your mission?
Ben Gabler 37:16
Our mission is to deliver the best possible experience and kind of what CloudFlare is really the point is to build a safer, better internet. And we totally believe in that, I’ve known the team at CloudFlare for years and years since they kind of first got started. And we really believe in the mission that they’re driving towards, and it’s the same thing for us we want to help build a safer and better internet in the sense of, we want our customers focused on content, building that best experience that they can, we make sure it’s delivered as close as possible to their visitors and audience, and everybody gets a great experience, and everybody wins at the end of the day. So that’s really our driving force is to just kind of help the evolution of, I read a thing the other day by WP Johnny. And I think you actually use Johnny VPS super intelligent guy, he loves writing, he actually gave us a shout out in his most recent article about, kind of how things are changing. And CDN is a requirement these days and full page caching and all these different things. And it’s kind of an evolution in web hosting, is taking that next step, because it used to be okay to have your website located in the middle of nowhere. And visitors, if you’re in London, and you’re hitting a website that’s in Amazon in Virginia, every single person around the world going to Virginia, it used to be okay, and acceptable. But you know, as time goes on, and everything gets snappier and faster, somebody in London shouldn’t have to go all the way to Virginia to get your website they should get in London. And that’s what we do. And that’s something that we are proud to be a part of, to help kind of drive that initiative from our perspective in the WordPress community and make it as easy as possible for people to use it no configuration required, your site will be globally accessible right off out of the gate.
Richard Matthews 39:16
Yeah, one of the things that I found interesting is the metaphor for how CDN’s actually helped people. Talking a little bit about SpaceX’s new satellite internet that they’re doing and how much of a difference the distance actually makes in their speed capability. HughesNet their satellites are 300 miles out in space, and then I think I’m probably wrong on this it’s like 300 miles of space for HughesNet, and Elon are like 50 miles and the difference in their ability to deliver internet speed is just like astronomically different, where HughesNet has mini second latency where the satellites Only 50 miles have millisecond latencies. It’s like it’s the same thing with your CDN. Like if you’re in London, your host is over in America, that distance actually makes a difference for how long it’s gonna take someone to show up. You’re measuring in really small numbers, but still, milliseconds matter when it comes to revenue.
Ben Gabler 40:20
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny is milliseconds across the pond become seconds, but you know, I haven’t heard HughesNet in a while, I actually worked at us that early on, when I was starting my first hosting company. So very well aware of the phone calls, I’m trying to play Counter Strike, but I get into the game, and I just die, what happened, I’m like, you can’t play Counter Strike with a satellite, you know, like, it’s just
Richard Matthews 40:43
like, it’s 300 miles away from Earth.
Ben Gabler 40:45
Yeah, it’s not gonna happen. But, it really makes a world of a difference, when you can pull up a website and just loads, it’s like it was already on your device. And that’s between the content optimization and the advanced delivery methods, it makes all the difference. And one of my favorite ways to explain is, your convenience store down the street sells milk. But so does Costco, right, Costco is going to be farther. And you can still buy the same thing of milk at that gas station or convenience store, but it’s going to be more expensive because you’re paying for convenience. So when you think about kind of the edge of the network, and what we’ve been able to do, if you go directly to CloudFlare, and you want the enterprise plan, it’s 1000s of dollars a month per domain. And that’s what we’ve been able to kind of build into our platform and offer that to people at a very affordable rate, to where a lot of people don’t know this, but even the free and some of the lower paid tiers at CloudFlare, don’t include all 200 locations. With the enterprise plan, like there’s customers we have in India that will actually be able to, you know, use CloudFlare, India pops when on the free plan, they get routed to Singapore, and even that makes a huge difference.
Richard Matthews 41:58
Yeah, that’s really interesting, too. And it’s fascinating to know that you can do some of that stuff, where you’re using your buying power as a big company to bring some of those things, it would be out of reach someone like me, right, like my website doesn’t produce the kind of revenue to even afford CloudFlare enterprise. Right? That would just be throwing good money after bad kind of thing. But being able to use your buying power, and access some of those things is really a cool thing to offer people.
Ben Gabler 42:33
Absolutely.
Richard Matthews 42:34
Yeah. So my next question for you then is more on the practical side. And I call this the hero’s tool belt. So just like every superhero has a tool belt with awesome gadgets, like batarangs, or web slingers, or laser eyes, I want to talk about the top one or two tools that you couldn’t live without, in your day to day life for running your business. It could be anything from your notepad to your calendar to marketing tools you use to the products that you deliver whatever it is something you couldn’t live without on day to day basis to actually do what you guys do.
Ben Gabler 43:07
I think the cliche answer is Slack. I can’t live without it. No, you know, it’s funny, like, I’ve been using IRC basically, my whole life. And Slack is very much like IRC. So it’s great for us to have our agencies and customers inside of slack when it makes sense. And, they’ll slack us something and it’s just done right. And I think being connected, even with the team, just makes a world of a difference. Slack is definitely the number one tool, I think that helps enable me to do my job day to day and effectively communicate with my peers. Even some of our vendors will be in there. And it makes a big difference when we need something on the fly.
Richard Matthews 43:52
The funniest thing about slack was I feel the same way, slack has been huge for our company. And I just took over the CEO position of a big e-commerce company. And one of the first things that we did was I just got the whole team on the slack. And yesterday morning was our first day with everyone on slack. And slack went out globally for several hours.
Ben Gabler 44:17
Yeah, no, I mean, it’s interesting, too, because, like, Google had an outage, I think, last month for some amount of time, and everybody is like losing their minds. And like, let’s not forget, they’ve had 100% uptime for years, right on Google Drive, for the most part. So it’s always that critical timing and like, I can’t believe they’re down and then you start to get nervous about, how much are you relying on something and you know, like, we actually had a customer that needed some support yesterday and when slack was down, they had my cell phone number. It’s not unusual for a customer to have my cell phone number and they call me Hey, Ben slack dies, you needed some help with this, this plugin sure no problem. As much as we do rely on Slack, we also have other channels of communication. But slack is definitely up there for one of the more important tools. And I think the second one really is around all the different outlets of whether it’s Facebook groups, Twitter, or I keep CNBC on in my office at all time, his background noise and just kind of staying up to date on what’s happening in the technology sector. And also what’s going on with WordPress, and any kind of trends out there and just really trying to keep ahead of the curve on what changes might be coming down that it could affect our customers and things like that.
Richard Matthews 45:37
So just out of curiosity, because you guys are in a space where your business is based on serving a platform. So the WordPress platform, what do you sort of see as the future for WordPress, do you see it continuing to grow in market share and importance? Or do you see that sort of? What do you see in the future there? Since I know, as you mentioned earlier, it’s like 40% of websites are currently hosted on WordPress, what’s your sort of like? What are the next 10 years look like for websites and the internet kind of stuff when it comes to platforms like WordPress and other CDN is?
Ben Gabler 46:12
Yeah, I think WordPress is definitely going to continue to gain market share. And one of the recent announcements I saw is their Gutenberg editor is going to support full site editing. It’s in beta right now. So what that means is, it’s going to be a feature that competes with Wix and Squarespace and all these different website builders, that’ll be directly inside of the native WordPress editor. You don’t need to go by Divi or element or it’s going to be native inside of WordPress. So I think that’s going to help them kind of cut into the novice end of the market. I used to always say, when I was at GoDaddy, we were the stepping stone to the internet. And what I always meant by that is people usually always registered a domain at GoDaddy and got started there, maybe even on accident. And I think WordPress is a little more advanced. And traditionally, and I think, you know, for agencies that have a specific workflow down, and plugins and themes and things WordPress is awesome. But I think for somebody that’s starting a new business, or a restaurant that just needs to get online as quickly as possible because of COVID-19, or something like that. I think that’s where WordPress is really going to start, you know, competing against these Wix and web.com with that full site editing built into it. So I think that’s gonna play a big role in their growth, for sure.
Richard Matthews 47:37
That’s one of the things that’s always cracked me up about Wix’s commercials, or Squarespace, and they’re like on the YouTube thing and pops up and like, Hey, I run a bike shop, and I’m gonna set up a website, and then they’re like, watch me just build this amazing website. And I’m like, you have professional photography and videography, and well selected fonts, all pre done already. You’re leaving all of that out. And then I have customers who, like, I started a Wix site, and it’s hideous, I’m like, Do you have all the basics in place that they.
Ben Gabler 48:08
And even the SEO and PageSpeed I mean, that’s the other thing, those website builders have such strict training wheels on them, that it’s very hard to get a truly optimized site. So I think there’s gonna be one of the beauties of WordPress is that community driven plugin marketplace, there’s, there are different ways to take something that might be big and bulky, that was built with a DVR element, or, and use flying press, or flying scripts, or OT, optimize to really consolidate assets and make it a better user experience. So, you know, that’s, that’s what I like about it. It’s very pluggable, and it’s going to be interesting to see as they start to shift some of that full site editing stuff.
Richard Matthews 48:55
Yeah, it’s definitely something I keep on top of all the time, just because I help with clients a lot on it, and I’m really looking forward to I know, like, just over the last like three or four years, they really sort of came into their own, they hit that Like 20% market share thing a couple of years ago,
Ben Gabler 49:10
At the beginning of COVID, they were at 34%. It’s unbelievable, you know, and then here we are at 30. You know, 39% it’s, it’s incredible in a year.
Richard Matthews 49:20
Yeah. And it’s like I know a lot of people are super excited about like Shopify, for e-commerce and they don’t realize that like WooCommerce on WordPress is significantly larger market share. And there are more features and like, a lot of times I’ll have clients are like, Hey, we’re running this stuff on Shopify, and I can’t figure out how to do like a one-click upsell on the backside of my funnel thing and I’m like if you had WooCommerce it’s like there’s someone who’s built it, a couple of clicks. It’s all there and you don’t have the training wheels.
Ben Gabler 49:51
And it’s so expensive. Shopify is so expensive, you know, compared
Richard Matthews 49:55
It’s so expensive and they also that’s one of the things that I’ve always been bothered by Most of the other platforms, everything from Wix to Squarespace to Shopify is they have Honorius Terms of Service, where they own your content, or have some form of ownership of your content where they can, if you want to sell CBD, you can’t sell it on Shopify, they’ll shut your site down. If you were like you have this big, successful, e-commerce store, and then you add a CBD skew. Your store will go offline, they’ll take it down, then we’ll give it back to you. And so like that always scares me when you don’t own the platform. So that’s one of the things I’ve always liked about WordPress is you own your content. And then that comes down to is finding a host where, I always recommend my clients is like, even with your hosting company, if they offer you backups, make sure you’re taking one of those backups and sticking it on your own stuff every one a while for the same reasons.
Richard Matthews 50:51
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Richard Matthews 52:30
So my next question for you is about your own sort of personal heroes. So every hero has their mentors. Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi Wan, Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad, Spider Man even had his Uncle Ben, Who were some of your heroes as you grew your businesses? Were they real life mentors, speakers, or authors? Maybe peers? Who were a couple of years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far?
Ben Gabler 52:54
I’ve definitely learned a lot along the way. I would say real life, mentor style, working with Lance Crosby was amazing. If you don’t know who Lance is, he founded a company called SoftLayer. They were a dedicated server provider, I was a customer for years, I’m one of their larger customers. And over the years of working together, Lance ended up selling the company to IBM for over $2 billion. So he’s got more degrees than anybody I know. And there was a really good experience for me to working side by side with Lance at StackPath. I just learned so much one of the last things we did before I started Rocket.net was we went on a roadshow and raised, 165 million dollars, Series B round for stack path. And the experience gained and working closely with Lance on that was, you can’t go learn that at school, it was just, it was incredible. So over the years is kind of, being able to continuously work with Lance and kind of learn from Lance and also just different startups and things that I’ve done along the way. It is really picking up that knowledge, as far as speakers or famous people I somebody turned me on to Grant Cardone
Richard Matthews 54:15
Just curious who’s actually help you out?
Ben Gabler 54:17
For sure. You know, listening to be above or be average by Grant Cardone, was an awesome book and it’s funny I feel like a lot of people that really like it will say the same thing as I was listening to it, I’m like, Man, that sounds like me. And it was really cool. So yeah, I definitely keep a follow on Grant Cardone and you know love the stuff that he puts out. But yeah,
Richard Matthews 54:40
Just had a curiosity when you work with someone like Lance to go do investor funding investor rounds for StackPack. Did you use a lot of that experience? Did you invest your fund rocket? Are you guys bootstrapping that business?
Ben Gabler 54:51
So we’re bootstrapped? We wanted to bootstrap it and see where we could go Right. So as it stands right now, we’ve gone past 100,000 in revenue at Rocket.net fully bootstrapped in the first six months. And, we’ve kind of tested the waters like, what is our conversion rate what is our CPA, and really trying to find that groove to where if we did go out and seek capital, it would really just be growth capital to fund sales and marketing, we’ve got the platform built, there’s not a huge need for r&d at the moment. And it’s just really about, it’s a marketing play, like can you get the customers and we’re getting them. And we’re having some really impressive wins for the age of the company. And I always like to say, even though that brand, Rocket.net is new, we’ve been doing this for over 17 years. So we haven’t gone out and sought after funding yet. It may be something that we explore in 2021, it just really depends on how the growth goes over the next quarter or two, the more we can grow, before we need it, the less we’ll have to, the better our evaluation will be. So that’s just something that we’re kind of playing by year.
Richard Matthews 56:03
So how are you guys going to manage the growth with the customer service, because I know that’s one of the big things that happens with a lot of companies as they get big in their customer service tanks. like Facebook is dealing with that right now they’ve got more customers in their ad platform than they can serve. So they’re trying to build automated platforms, and nobody likes it. Right? And I know GoDaddy is kind of the same way they can be a sort of a royal pain trying to get a human being to talk to you. So how do you guys have a plan for like, okay, we want to grow, but we want to keep the service touch that comes with the size you guys are now?
Ben Gabler 56:40
We do and a lot of it comes from just seeing the scale, from the early days of Hostgator to 2000 employees at Hostgator. And even being in the GoDaddy call center, I spent hours and hours and hours in that call center working with the teams and just trying to understand the customer. Because from my perspective, it was hard for me as a product manager to talk to customers, because they were going through so many channels to the point where when we launched the cPanel hosting, I actually launched my own helpdesk built into cPanel. So I could have a team in front of every single request that came in while the product was new. And then so I’m just so we could make sure we didn’t lose sight of the customer experience. So I think the plan at Rocket is, we’ve also worked with a lot of really solid individuals over my entire career. So the top talent, GoDaddy Hostgator, all these different places that, we’ve maintained relationships with, it’s not necessarily us going out with an empty candidate pool, we have a good Rolodex of people that we can start to reach out to and recruit that we know will kind of align well with our core values and culture.
Richard Matthews 57:53
Yeah, that’s just it’s a tough line to walk. And I know, some companies make missteps there. So it’s cool to hear how you’re, you’re planning for that already. Because you want to hit the growth, but you want to keep the customer service forefront, because especially when you’re in a technical market, like hosting, your customers don’t actually know what’s happening with their site like they don’t get it. A lot of them, a lot of them don’t care, too. So they have to have the customer service there to like, hey, something’s not right. Can you tell me what A what’s not right and how to fix it?
Ben Gabler 58:25
That’s right. 100%, you know, and it goes into even our growth strategy. Like we could potentially drop some of the pricing on a single plan for the starter plan and create, like a mini-plan, but we can’t do that, because we don’t have the headcount right now to support that. So we’re being very, you know, cautious and smart with how we try to grow the business and targeting, fewer larger customers at the time being so we can build up that revenue, and be able to reinvest, every penny gets reinvested, and then some into the business today. And our goal is to really, you know, build that up with the right size client base, and continue to grow the staff, and maintain that experience that customers get.
Richard Matthews 59:12
I imagine learning how to how to measure your metrics for how much a particular client, like how much customer service hours are required, and whether or not the revenue supports it is a that’s probably a fun thing to try and manage.
Ben Gabler 59:28
It would be not so fun without the experience. But we’ve seen this a couple of different places and a couple of different ways to implement different customer service strategies. I actually had a high school friend of mine come out to Phoenix and go through the entire onboarding process to be a call center rep at GoDaddy, because I wanted to know, raw feedback. What are you being taught, how is this translating to customers? And I started getting into our KPIs at a higher level like hey this is happening because our onboarding is doing sales, focus stuff and not support focus stuff, and just allows us to really understand like, if we have x customers, we should expect x staff to support said, customers. And what’s really interesting about WordPress, and again, focusing on one product, is we can build a team of WordPress experts and hosting experts all in one. And your support, the biggest driver and hosting support, no matter what company works email, we don’t do email hosting, we recommend Google, we recommend office 365, insert email provider here, because it is 90% of your workload, if not more because it’s always a problem with email. And we don’t offer it. So, there are strategic reasons for that. And that’s one of them. But it goes into saying, the support requests we get are really around migration requests when people join the platform, and potential in some of the what I call the retail channel, ask questions about plugins, and how can they achieve X, Y, and Z. And then we have agency customers that just, we help them migrate onto the platform, and they continue to grow their business. And they don’t really need us.
Richard Matthews 1:01:12
Awesome. So it sounds like you’ve got a lot of this stuff really, really well planned out, I look forward to I know, I want to try out your platform here in a little bit. Because we have a lot of stuff that we run on various different managed WordPress hosting platforms. And I am not particularly happy with most of them at this point. So I’d like to see what you guys are doing and where it’s going. But I do have one sort of final question for you, which is about your guiding principles. And one of the things that make heroes heroic is that they live by a code for example Batman never kills his enemies, he only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, and talk about the top one or two principles that you use regularly in your life that maybe something first wish knew when you first started on your hero’s journey.
Ben Gabler 1:02:01
So, the first one I want to mention is I have to borrow it from Zach, it’s data greater than opinion. You know, I think that opinions really cause a lot of problems in business. You know, I think opinions are great as a hypothesis that you can then validate with data. But if you don’t actually do that validation, you’re building or working towards a single opinion. And that’s why when I saw the T shirts, data greater than opinion like I need to get those made, that’s amazing. I want my entire team to have that shirt. Because it’s just, I believe in being extremely data driven. And that’s one of the things that you can’t skip even at Rocket.net. We built the core set of features. We put the core platform out there started onboarding customers, and we talk and listen, what’s missing? What would make your life easier, then you start to kind of talk to other customers and see where the common denominators are, and really let the customers effectively drive your roadmaps. So you’re building to solve problems that are actual problems instead of opinionated problems. I think that’s, that’s a big one for me. Without question,
Richard Matthews 1:03:22
One of my mentors always used to tell me was, if you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it. And it goes right into that. So you have to have data, or you have to know what’s actually happening. And then the same, like sort of breath is like, if it’s not your fault, you can’t fix it. You have to have the data and you have to own the data. And then you can actually grow from it.
Ben Gabler 1:03:49
Totally. And you know, to wrap it up, I think the second one that is kind of follow me everywhere in my career is simple, keep things simple. I would argue that we have one of the most powerful WordPress platforms in the world. But it’s simple. It’s not intimidating. If you’re a CTO, or you’re a web developer or Joe’s pizza, it’s very simple. You log in, you create a site, you log in to WordPress, there’s a couple of other things, changing your PHP version, turning updates on and off, like all the core necessities, but there are not crazy dashboards with all of this data and all these configuration options. You know, we wanted to just really make it simple and simple always wins. You know, if there’s a developer that really wants to go beyond what our portal does, they can use WP-CLI, via SSH, like it’ll do it all but the initial presentation and the product itself is keep it simple.
Richard Matthews 1:04:44
Yeah, absolutely. That’s one of the hardest things to help people with is figuring out how to, one of the things that we do is a lot of copywriting for our clients, and the hardest thing is figuring out how to simplify what they do. into a brief two second thing someone can pop up in your website and the very top word they need to know, I can help them or I can’t, I think that’s the hardest thing to do is figure out how to take what you do and make it simple. And I say, it’s the hardest work there is to figure out how to how to keep things simple. Absolutely. So that’s basically a wrap on our interview. But I do finish every interview with a simple challenge called the hero’s challenge. And I do this as a selfish thing to get access to stories I might not otherwise be able to find because people aren’t always in the space of going to be podcast guests. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are the first names are fine and why do you think they should come to share their story here on the hero show?
Ben Gabler 1:05:53
So I think Gary Simat of the company performive, we actually get all of our servers through them, and they were formerly total server solutions. You know, he’s got an amazing story. You know, he’s run that business for a really long time. So I think he’s someone that you know, definitely would be great to talk to you.
Richard Matthews 1:06:12
Awesome. Yeah, we’ll see if we can reach out to Connect afterward and get him on the show. So in comic books, there’s always the crowd at the end, who cheers for the hero and their heroism. So as we close, our analogous to that is, where can people find you? If they’re interested in what you do? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak, and say, Hey, you know, what, we’d really like to get your help. I think more importantly, who were the right types of people to reach out to and see if your services are a good fit?
Ben Gabler 1:06:39
Sure Rocket.net I’m usually always around. It’s not unusual to find me in chat, and it won’t ever be, no matter how big the company gets. I love talking to customers, and I love helping in any way that I can. Obviously, LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn as well. But you know, as far as a good fit for our services, it’s anybody running WordPress, whether it’s an agency that manages multiple WordPress sites, or a single WordPress site, and anybody that just wants to kind of talk and share stories about, being an entrepreneur and business and I’m always trying to learn new things. So feel free to reach out on LinkedIn, even if it’s not related to WordPress hosting.
Richard Matthews 1:07:16
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us today, Ben, It’s been really fascinating to sort of hearing what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and how you got there. So, again, thank you so much for coming on. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience probably hit this stop record button.
Ben Gabler 1:07:34
Yeah, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. I know we’re all looking forward to a happy, healthy, successful 2021. So I really appreciate it and look forward to keeping the relationship going.
Richard Matthews 1:07:47
Absolutely. Have a good day.
Ben Gabler 1:07:48
Thanks. You, too.
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Richard Matthews
Would You Like To Have A Content Marketing Machine Like “The HERO Show” For Your Business?
The HERO Show is produced and managed by PushButtonPodcasts a done-for-you service that will help get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger after you’ve pushed that “stop record” button.
They handle everything else: uploading, editing, transcribing, writing, research, graphics, publication, & promotion.
All done by real humans who know, understand, and care about YOUR brand… almost as much as you do.
Empowered by our their proprietary technology their team will let you get back to doing what you love while we they handle the rest.
Check out PushButtonPodcasts.com/hero for 10% off the lifetime of your service with them and see the power of having an audio and video podcast growing and driving awareness, attention, & authority in your niche without you having to life more a finger to push that “stop record” button.

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