In Episode #18 of the WP Elevation podcast I had a great time talking with fellow Australian WordPress entrepreneur Dan Norris from WP Curve. Dan has built a service as a service company offering WordPress maintenance and support services as a monthly subscription product. He also runs a podcast called Startup Chat and is quite transparent with his efforts, successes and failures as a start-up entrepreneur. I played poker with his business partner Alex McClafferty late last year when I was in San Francisco and this is how I came to know Dan.
Dan is giving away a website conversion assessment session valued at $200. Watch the interview for details on how to enter.
Dan is a huge fan of the recurring monthly income business model and has lots of great insights into how to make this work. He talks about the importance of podcasting to the business (if you are not podcasting yet you really should be thinking about it seriously). Dan also mentions his favourite podcasts are:
Dan suggested I interview Brendon Sinclair who wrote the web design business kit. Brendon, I’m coming to get you.
Hint: to enter the competition, tell us the #1 fix you’d like to use WP Curve for.
7 Responses
Enjoyed hearing Dan Norris mention how he wanted to move forward in his business but could only do that by bringing the right people around him – “You can’t expect to do everything and move forward”. Makes me want to punt the web maintenance jobs to you for my sake!
I haven’t figured out a good “fix” for WP Curve since you do a lot of what I’d like someone like you to do. My issue is that I want to give you business with my clients and not have them feel like I’m not in their lives. They turn to me for advice and strategic planning. If they are paying for you to do site updates and me for consulting separately, and I was there to begin with, they may want to look for a place that does it all under one roof. That’s my dilemma. Have a solution for that? (I know you mentioned White Labeling was a failure so I hope there’s a better alternative).
If I were a client myself, I’d want to have my PageRank and YSlow grades go up with JS and CSS minification that doesn’t break themes or plugins. As well as reduced HTTP requests.
I’d leave ManageWP for you!
Hey Jonathan, thanks for the comment. No we don’t really do any white label or agency stuff. We prefer to work direct with business owners. Our affiliate program is the only offering for consultants.
Great interview! Dan I think you are on to a real winner, it was interesting to hear your view on agencies near the end and how you have developed wpcurve.
I have a small issue with the CSS of the buttons across my site, they look great in Chrome but Firefox not so great and would be great to get this fixed!
Thanks Dan. I couldn’t help thinking how different our political landscape would be if our politicians were as open about govt financials as is WP Curve. I digress. A great solution to lumpy project income.
A perennial issue I have that WP Curve might efficiently resolve, stems from installing new plugins.
Some have settings that refer to system attributes and/or other plugins, with which I am not familiar. e.g. my FAQ manager has this setting ”
Disable content filter on shortcode output (Use when certain plugins add sharing buttons, etc)”. I cannot find any reference to those ‘certain plugins’ so play safe and disable. Maybe performance suffers?
Others refer to taxonomies and SEO ‘nofollow’ etc. I wonder if I have introduced any conflicts across a range of WP and plugin settings.
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There could be an opportunity for WP Curve here in ‘performing beyond expectations’. If a job was under say 10 minutes, maybe the developer can select a plugin, check the settings, make any necessary fixes and report that back with the job report. The report might just say, “Gratis – inspected plugin XYZ and no issues found”
Hi Ken, we do some pro-active stuff for people on our pro plan. The other thing we do is send a weekly email with a different idea for improving a site. Our customers can then just reply to those to have us to the job. It might be setting up YOAST or setting up Google Authorship, that type of thing.
Hey Andrew glad you liked it mate. That sounds like the sort of thing we’d fix for our clients.
Great interview Troy. I’ve been following Dan for a few years now but haven’t had a good look at what he’s currently working on so this interview is a good catch up and also has some great insights. Rocking beard by the way Dan, you should check out local Adelaide band “The Beards” who are taking the world by storm 😉