Elevator Pitch is a regular feature on Lifehacker where we profile startups and new companies and pick their brains for entrepreneurial advice. we’re talking with co-founders Dan Norris and Alex McClafferty from WP Curve.
In 128 words or less, explain your business idea.
WordPress is powerful. You can post content, add plugins and install themes in one click. But from time to time plugins crash, themes break and you need a helping hand. You have a WordPress problem and you need it solved, fast.
So… what’s a business owner to do? Plead with a web developer to help and wait weeks for a solution? Give yourself a headache trying to find a trustworthy developer on Elance? Empty your wallet by paying for every single tiny tweak?
There is a better way. WP Curve delivers live, 24/7, unlimited small WordPress fixes from $69 per month. Business owners trust our world class developers to solve their WordPress problems because we are hyper-responsive and fix their problems fast.
What strategies are you using to grow and finance your idea?
We’re passionate about helping business owners succeed online, so we create useful, actionable blog posts, videos, podcasts and how-to guides every single day. We want our readers to build their businesses, grow their online audience and get traction. We briefly experimented with paid advertising and spent a grand total of $180.72! Creating useful content is 100 times more fun than writing advertising copy, so we’ll focus on what we are good at.
Our business is 100 per cent self-funded. In just six months, we have reached $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. We’re completely transparent and honest about our businesses and share monthly revenue reports on the Startup Chat blog. We do this so business owners can learn from our failures and successes.
What’s the biggest challenge facing your business?
We don’t have enough hours in the day! We’d love to create two pieces of useful content per day, but we need to eat and sleep too. [Dan and Alex also create daily content at Startup Chat.]
How do your differentiate your business from your competitors?
We assumed our customer service or world-class developers were what set us apart, but instead of going with our gut, we asked our clients what they liked about our service. Nearly all of them said that responsiveness is the reason they retain us and promote us to their network. Our team is motivated on providing world class WordPress support and maintenance, which means that quickly solving clients problems is our number one priority.
What one phone, tablet or PC application could you not live without?
We love Trello. It’s a brilliant, lightweight task management board that makes managing our 24/7, high-volume support desk a breeze. We’ve used a few tricks to automate our workflow, including pushing support tickets from our inbox, creating recurring tasks and tracking content creation on a dedicated Trello board. We have a team of five, have a lot of work to manage and Trello makes it easy.
What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?
“The best source of new customers are your existing customers.” This means that when do great work – your customers will refer you. It’s working for us.
Want to see your startup featured in Elevator Pitch? Get in touch using our contact form.
Comments