TL;DR – Our dev team shipped lots of awesome stuff, our customer support team is stronger than ever, and my solo marketing efforts are paying off.
This is my tenth year in review post since I started writing them: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
Team
We started the year with a new strategy:
Get even leaner. Get back to basics.
Unfortunately this involved laying off a couple of folks in February: a devops engineer and a marketing assistant. It’s always difficult to let people go and I hated it, but looking back from here, there’s no question that it was the right move for the business.
I also put the writer’s program on pause indefinitely and stopped working with the few writers that we had recruited. We could certainly have done a better job managing the writers and the projects, but ultimately I wasn’t happy with the quality of the work and their availability was often an issue as well. I’ve also been reviewing articles for many years now and I hate it almost all of the time.
Our dev team of George, James, and Lewis was unchanged in 2024 and I was very happy with their work and what we shipped (more on that below). I’m so grateful to have such a solid, consistent dev team to work with. It really makes SpinupWP a pleasure to work on. As a bonus, Ash, our former lead developer joined us for a few projects as well.
In May, we hired another talented system administrator, Jaime, to help Andre out with customer support and cover more of the clock. He has been an excellent addition to the team and I couldn’t be happier with his contributions. More on the support team below.
In November, we started receiving applications for a Senior PHP Developer position and had a strong batch of candidates, the strongest ever. I’m really excited to have one of these folks starting a trial project with us when we come back from the holiday break and fully expect to extend him a full-time offer in January.
Product
I’m very proud of what our tiny team shipped in 2024. Daily/weekly/monthly backup schedules was easily the biggest release of the year for us. It was a long time in development and something customers had been requesting for years so it felt great to get it shipped. It also feels good that our backup system now outclasses most of the competition.
The Refresh Site tool was another big one as it was the final piece for our staging sites feature set. The ability to replace a site’s database and/or files with the database and/or files of another site is an important feature that surprisingly few of our competitors have.
In 2023, I identified some missing features that were causing customers to cancel and prioritized them for 2024. We managed to ship WordPress Magic Login and phpMyAdmin and started on a Cloudflare integration. I’m hoping we have time to ship a config files editor as well. However, we have two major initiatives that we’ll be occupied with most of the year.
The first major initiative is a new dashboard. We’ve been working on it on and off (mostly off) during the past year but we’ll refocus on it to kick off the new year. It will have separate Servers and Sites screens and the ability to sort, filter, and customize what’s shown in the table (customers can check out a preview in the community).
The second major initiative will be improving Todos. First we’ll ship a few bug fixes and replace some notifications (e.g. server reboot) with a weekly or monthly (your choice) email summarizing your prioritized todos. Then we’ll work on adding buttons for the todos that currently link to documentation and require you to SSH into your server to complete. Finally you’ll be able to tell SpinupWP to perform this maintenance for you on a schedule. You’ll be able to define which servers SpinupWP will automatically update (YOLO mode) and which servers you perform the updates yourself.
Here’s the complete list of what we shipped in 2024:
- Daily/weekly/monthly backup schedules
- Refresh Site
- WordPress Magic Login
- One-click install of phpMyAdmin
- Vultr integrated server provider
- Hetzner integrated server provider
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS support
- Unique git deploy key for each site
- Brotli compression
We also have PHP 8.4 support ready to ship, but didn’t want to push it out before the holidays.
Marketing
In addition to laying off a marketing assistant and putting the writer’s program on pause (mentioned above), in April our marketing manager Caillie went on parental leave for the remainder of the year. I’ve been handling all the marketing since and believe it or not, I’ve been enjoying it.
The marketing strategy has changed. There’s no way I’m cranking out multiple blog posts every month by myself. Instead, I’m going for quality over quantity. Focusing on what has worked and making it better. Reorganizing and curating our existing content.
In June, I shipped a major update to our Install WordPress on Ubuntu guide:
- Ubuntu 22.04 => 24.04 LTS
- PHP 8.0 => 8.3
- SSL ciphers updated
- OCSP stapling added
- opcache.enable_file_override added
- ssh-keygen command updated
- All screenshots have been refreshed
I plan to do another update soon with the following:
- Brotli compression
- HTTP/3
- Block storage volumes
- Independent PHP worker pools for each site
Lewis and I worked on replacing our biased, self-serving competitor comparison page with a fair and balanced VPS Control Panel Comparison Tool. There are still plenty of competitors to add, but I’m chipping away at it and enjoying the process. It’s time consuming work but satisfying. Keeping it updated will be a challenge but I’m optimistic. I’m hoping this will become a tool that’s shared with people asking which VPS control panel is the best.
I spent a lot of time on new pricing in 2024. In February, we emailed Personal plan customers about an upcoming price increase and received a few excellent replies to that email, explaining that they love SpinupWP but wouldn’t be able to recommend it anymore as it would be too expensive. After a ton of analysis of our customer usage and the competition’s pricing, we came up with new pricing and just launched it a few weeks ago. I’m very happy with it but I think there’s still room for improvement. It makes us more competitive for folks with one or two servers but less competitive for those with more servers. We may adjust our volume discounts to be more competitive for folks with 4+ servers.
The past year I’ve found doing marketing much more enjoyable than directing and reviewing marketing. When I’m in it, I seem to have better ideas, and the end results have been better. I’m pleased to say that our lull is over and we’re growing again. I plan to continue doing the marketing work myself in 2025 and hopefully a full year of it will result in even better results.
Customer Support
Over the past few years, we’ve been working on improving the quality of our customer support and I’m very happy to say that we’re finally in a really good place. We have two talented system administrators who can dig into issues and provide a quality, timely response to customers.
In addition to improving the quality for customers, this has greatly reduced the number of tickets that are escalated to our developers, freeing them up to put more time into developing the app.
I’ve also noticed that our improved support team has been relaying more feedback from customers, identifying bugs and pain points that customers are experiencing with the app. This was happening before, but it’s happening more now and at a higher level, resulting in more profound improvements to the app.
I love where we’re at with customer support, but there’s certainly room for improvement. I’d like to carve out some time each week to review the team’s responses and coach them on how to improve. I did this for a while this past year, but then let it fall off.
I’d also like to add another member to the support team to cover more of the clock, but I doubt it will make sense this year. If you ask ChatGPT to look at reviews of SpinupWP and summarize the customer support comments, you get the following:
Customer reviews of SpinupWP frequently commend its responsive and helpful support team, though some users express a desire for 24/7 availability.
If you do the same for competing products, you get some variation of “the reviews are mixed.” So despite the challenges we’ve had, it seems we’ve done exceptionally well serving our customers compared to the competition.
Thanks
I’d like to thank my team for all the awesome work they’ve done in the past year. Especially George, James, and Lewis for their awesome work on the product. I’m very proud of what we’ve been building together and looking forward to continuing that work.
I want to thank those who brought things to my attention that were difficult to address. I’m grateful to have a team that isn’t afraid to speak up when something is bothering them so that we can constantly be improving things.
And thanks again to my fellow entrepreneurs for helping me work through the typical struggles of a solo founder and those unique to me.
Finally, thanks to our customers. Without you none of this would be possible. I feel very fortunate that you love SpinupWP, appreciate the quality, and are willing to reward us with your hard-earned dollars. We’re aiming to greatly improve the product you know and love again this year.
I’m looking forward to building SpinupWP in 2025, making it appeal to more people, and hopefully seeing an improvement in our growth.
