A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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WP Engine passes $100M in revenue and secures $250M investment from Silver Lake

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

The Silicon Valley-oriented technology press outlets don’t cover us because we’re not in San Francisco, even though we’re more successful than most of the startups they cover. Every day, 5% of the entire online world visits a customer running on the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform. Period, full-stop.

Engineer 152
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Who’s lying?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Sometimes the simplest technology is best. We had been flying for four hours, but both gas gauges still read “full.” “Umm, this can’t be right” I said to Gerry, the real pilot. “Yeah,” he said, “the needles get stuck to the glass.” ” He flicked the glass a few times. .”

Analytics 248
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A Scorecard: Should a decision be fast, or slow?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Remember that it might take two engineers a week to implement something, but a few debates and some research might itself involve an entire engineering and product for a week as well. At WP Engine we’re extremely collaborative across teams. Huge effort. Some things take less time to implement than to estimate or to debate.

Engineer 264
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Not disruptive, and proud of it

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It's hard to think of disruptive technologies or products that didn't take many millions of dollars to implement. Most technology we now consider "disruptive" wasn't conceived that way. Google was the 11th major search engine, not the first. Their technology proved superior, but "a better search engine" was hardly a new idea.

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Pricing determines your business

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

1/mo means you can’t afford customer service and it must incrementally free to run the technology behind it, both of which have implications for the sort of product you have to build (e.g. This is often B2C because the value is in quantity of customers, and there’s 100x more consumers than businesses. $1/mo

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What’s The Important Thing, that is powerful enough to override all your deficiencies?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

No brand, no features, no customers, no money, no distribution, no search engine rankings, no efficient advertising, no incredible executive team, no NPS, no strategy. The Important Thing isn’t always a feature or technology. Do you feel the crushing weight of the disadvantages facing every new company?

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Hiring Employee #1

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

That is, when you have a candidate on the phone, you can use the resume to ask about previous experience, test their knowledge of technologies they claim to have, etc. Pick the weirdest technology in the list, or pick on one bullet point they listed two jobs ago that seems a little odd to you. .” Everyone talks to everyone.

Hiring 282