69: Automate Your Web Properties with Tigran Nazaryan

05
Oct

Tigran Nazaryan is the Co-founder and CEO of 10Web.io, an automated WordPress platform powered by Google Cloud that helps relieve the burden of manual website building operations. We talk about website automation, disruption-led growth, and the difference between shared and cloud website hosting.

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Automate Your Web Properties with Tigran Nazaryan

Our guest is Tigran Nazaryan, an astrophysicist turned co-founder and CEO of 10web.io that hosts and automates WordPress websites on the Google Cloud using AI, artificial intelligence, to relieve the burden of manual operations. Welcome to the show, Tigran.

Thank you, Steve. It’s my pleasure to be your guest.

Yes, very excited to have you. I think you’ve got a very exciting topic and business. So let’s dive in. Let’s dive right in. And first of all, you know, describe me your entrepreneurial journey. How did you get to running 10 of them IO and think from an astrophysicist background that’s that’s pretty unique.

That’s quite unusual part of the folks who find the same part. was we had core team and we had previous around seven, eight years of experience in WordPress and web development. So all this science related stuff, it was before that at some point in my career, I turned to web development. And two years ago, we thought, can we really create a big scalable company in WordPress development? And we established TimeWeb for that purpose.

That’s really cool. So you basically jumped from your career as a scientist into a web company, and then with three co-founders, you founded 10Web.io. And why did you found this company? I mean, why wasn’t the previous company good enough for you to carry on?

That’s a great question. A previous company was WordPress plugins company. It was quite successful. We had millions of customers using our plugins, but we thought about something that can be really scalable, something that will have much more impact than just building plugins. Software as a service platform was a type of business that we were really interested. This is great solution. We think that 10Web can be scaled up to millions of customers and have a huge impact on the way people develop websites, people manage websites, and generally do their WordPress-related businesses.

Okay, well, that’s definitely good to dive into that. But before we go there, I’d like to ask you about how you built this business and specifically whether you have used any business frameworks, I call them management blueprints, that helped you. You read it somewhere or someone told it to you and you implemented the whole thing or elements of it into the business, which helped you grow 10Web.io or your previous business?

We actually put automation as a core value and core feature of our platform and also core thing we do both externally and internally. And we have a framework of priorities. We call it 4P, people, processes, product, and then profit. So by their order, first people, because people are the greatest value and the asset of our company, and we’re proud of having such a great team. And they are responsible for executing our vision and mission.

Then processes, and this is what I’m gonna focus more on them. So these are keys to successful execution of our vision and mission. And we wanted to organize all our activities for well defined processes and effective processes. So in this regard automation is a key thing that we implemented internally. That’s kind of technology but yeah, so that team that is what works with a well built processes, but technology team engineering team and the rest of the team.

And this is processes, I want to talk more about that. our customers, and we think about automation as something that can revolutionize web development, because a lot of manual work happens there in that development. And then profit, we don’t focus on profit much. We think about growth, we think about playing a good foundation of the company, then profit will be a direct by-product of the processes we built. So, we can talk more about processes and automation with internally and externally.

Maybe that is what I like you to tell us a little bit more about how do you look at process? What is the, without being technical, so what is your philosophy around processes? And do you have an approach, a structured approach to implementing processes in your business?

So first we prioritize the goal. The goal is our customer. And we set up processes to talk to customer to get their feedback in a systematic way. to do whatever we did always, but try always to adjust our way of thinking, our vision of product according to the market and the customer’s expectations. So this is a central part of processes. First talk, getting feedback of customers. And then we have a lot of processes set up internally, especially in our engineering teams.

We have five engineering teams, around 25 folks doing development and R&D. So we set up processes so that their work can reach our customer as easy as possible. There are a lot of technical things there such as Scrum, Kanban, or CI-CD, and other automations engineering-wide. And we also want to make all these foundations scalable. Because we think about 10Web as a company that grows fast and that will continue to grow. That’s why we put such type of processes and such type of architecture in the product as well, that everything could be scalable to say hundred times without any burden.

Teams should be self-organized so there is no need always to manually fuel the growth. Click To Tweet

And one more thing. We put a system, the system, such system that a lot of stuff won’t depend on a single person. I mean, there is concept in engineering is called bus factor, you know, that someone is going to be hit by bus. Can his or her projects continue, survive and grow. So that’s why we built such systems that people try to do, try to replace each other’s each other well and try to do great teamwork. So, and such a way that teams should be self organized so there is no need always to manually like fuel the growth. This is the core concept of our internal processes.

There is a concept in engineering called bus factor, you know, that someone is going to be hit by a bus. Can his or her projects continue, survive and grow? Click To Tweet

Ok, so just to summarize my understanding. So what approach is to make sure that you communicate with the customers, get their feedback. That’s step one. Step two or approach two is to make sure that the engineering work reaches the customer in a form as easy as possible. So it reduce the pain of the customer in.

Right. Yes. And as fast as possible.

Fast and painlessly. So, the delivery, it’s kind of delivery process. And then you talk about the scalability. So, it’s not just communicate value, deliver well but it has to always be scalable too. And then you have this bus factor I like how you phrase this. So to eliminate dependence of a single person. And I don’t know if that relates to your company, how you deliver it, or the customer or both.

That relates to the company, to people in the company, including myself. So imagine, let’s say I don’t say I took a vacation, everything should work smoothly, the way it worked before.

Yes. And if you use public transport, then you really have to make sure that no, you know, no hiccups happen when a bus hits you. Got it. Okay, so I understand, So, this is your approach. Is there some place where people can read more about this? So, is this a type of framework that you picked up somewhere or is it something that you developed yourself. So, if people really would like to dig in deeper into this mental framework. 

No, we build it custom by trying to adapt the experiences of other companies and adapt our culture and the values we have in our company.

Okay. All right. So, so that’s kind of your processes building blueprint. Now, let’s talk a little bit about the processes in the WordPress environment, which is your main area of activities, So, what kind of process can be leveraged, it can be automated in the wordpress. I’m using WordPress for my website. I’ve developed a web portal, but I’m not aware of the automation opportunities there. So, can you can you share a little bit about that?

Yeah, as a lot of people know and use WordPress, it’s the most popular site building tool. And this is open source, really powerful tool backed by million people and large community who built also plugins and templates on top of this. So, this huge ecosystem and there is core WordPress and there are additional services, additional software that extends the WordPress core functionality.

Are these the plugins that people hear about. Are these the additional software. Or?

Plugins themes, or so called templates that are called themes and also there are companies who provide SaaS services, WordPress related SaaS, for example, like backup solution for WordPress websites. So, all this stuff, It’s, it’s really popular to revolutionize the internet and kind of democratize the site building web development. But there is a lot of stuff for the potential for automation. Why? why I’m saying this, because, like, a lot of stuff is done manually.

It's really popular to revolutionize the internet and kind of democratize the site-building web development. Click To Tweet

For example, building websites, people either code it or code the templates from scratch, or code some custom functionality, or even if they use pre built templates or ready templates, they still customized. And it’s possible to automate what people do. For example, there are more modern type of site building tools that are called site builders, which are drag and drop provide drag and drop experience.

And this is quite easy solution right it’s better rather than like code HTML, or other than create templates from scratch, but still a lot of stuff here is manual, for example, you’re not going to drag and drop certain widget and customize its styles or features, and then built that layout or page from piece by piece, block by block. And we thought about automation, what can be done there. And is there potential for our grids to automate that? And so that yes, it is. It’s not so easy, but its possible. And we created an AI solution which is called AI builder.

I would say this is kind of the holy grail for every web development to automate that manual boring stuff of dragging, dropping, tuning. You know, people, you can describe the expected result in a couple of words, like high level. Yeah, I wanna have a page with certain menu here with blue, white colors or a certain layout. And then someone can build that. So, AI Builder does the same work, but taking all of the existing website as an input.

So basically I would say to summarize in this sentence, create me a website like this one, similar to this one. Okay, the result is that that website is customizable, it’s responsive, it’s WordPress website. So you can turn any website in the world into WordPress. This is first type of automation like template creation or site building. Second automation we implemented is optimization of websites. It’s super crucial for websites to be really fast. It directly affects ranking of websites, it affects how effective ads run or the conversion. So, and this is no single solution for optimizing website speed.

So there are a lot of solutions that add on top of one another and we have good speed of site, which can be measured by a single metric called page with score, which is implemented by Google. And we created a solution that automates site optimization. And this is a very interesting solution for developments.  And for anyone, including not not take savvy people, because optimizing website is technically quite challenging you know to you need to understand some, not only basics of JavaScript and start CSS but do a lot of stuff which requires advanced level, and automated that but just enable it works. So this second type of automation we provide. And there are other automations as well.

So, if someone wants to take advantage of your technology and maybe their site is not in WordPress, they have a different site, maybe VIX or Site Builder, you mentioned that’s also brand. Then you say, okay, the first step is, I want this website to converted onto WordPress, and you have an automated process to do that. Or they say, I want to upgrade this website to here is this major law firm which you have super sophisticated website and you can essentially use AI you can upgrade the website into that kind of functionality. And is this what you can do and then the other thing I understood was accelerating the speed to 90 plus percent, or whatever, the score is 90 plus on Google Page View. So do I understand it right or there’s more to it?

I wouldn’t call that upgrading, but converting to WordPress. If the original website is not WordPress and for some platforms it’s quite struggling to convert them to WordPress. There are millions of people who build websites with VIX or other solutions who are quite easier than WordPress, but then at some point they understood that there are limits. You can’t continue to with that platform. And you want to turn to WordPress, which is the most powerful platform. And you see that it’s not quite easy. It basically the same as you would build a website on WordPress with Scratch. So our solution allows them to convert to WordPress. But on top of that, you just spend your convert to WordPress, you get hosted website with automatically as 90 plus people.

Okay. All right,

So you can get both benefits together.

So, you can convert it and you accelerate it. Is there anything else that can be automated, or maybe potentially in the future, maybe there’s something you’ve worked in the future to automate beyond converting the websites and accelerating them.

So, this website conversion, it’s not only about building websites, but also to help agencies or freelancers to create quick websites. It’s not necessary that the website should be like final website, but sometimes there is a need for sales or for if you want to have that kind of demo call for customer acquisition, you need to have a quick solution to create certain websites. So, this is automation of agency sales process in some sense. This is first one.

And secondly, we thought about those people who drive the web development, who do the hardest part of that development and related stuff in the world they are professionals, we know a lot of a majority of websites are built by professionals. So we thought about what can we do for them, what can we automate in their workflow and there are there are certain solutions we can automate and we already started working that direction. For example, an average web developer, they may have thousands of websites. Solet’s assume each wed developer builds one website per month.

So we get 1000 of websites they manage, or an agency, they may have hundreds of websites. So for them it’s quite desirable to have a one stop shop solution that will help to automate management of their customers. You know, instead of doing from scratch and doing every stock stuff manually you can automate that. Providing kind of accesses to each website according to permissions or role. Or automate the reporting stuff for customers. It’s a lot of manual work. We see people who struggle. It’s not difficult work, but it’s time consuming. And this is where technology and where AI can help people and their automation can help people, instead of focusing on like low level tasks or tasks with which do not require quite a lot of creativity and repeating. You can do much more interesting stuff and automate that so living to all grades.

Technology and AI can help people to focus on low level tasks or tasks with which do not require quite a lot of creativity and repeating. Click To Tweet

So, okay, so if I run an agency and we have 50 customers and each of them have on average three websites, 150 websites, basically you can help me maybe have one person who will be able to using the automation, the automated processes to manage this whole portfolio and to do the updates and do the reporting and to the access, providing access to different people in those organizations on a much faster scale so it frees people up to do more creative work and and more consulting work. That makes that makes a lot of sense.

So, one of the questions I want to ask, but maybe this is not the greatest question, but I’m going to ask it. So what I understood was that you also help people host on Google Cloud or this website and you kind of provide. So I was wondering whether your service is similar to what AWS does on a smaller scale and a more narrow niche, because what I understand they do is when you have a SaaS company, you go there on their platform and they give you a lot of automation tools so that you can develop and pay as you go and scale your business. And essentially, they give you a lot of tools that you can leverage without having to build them yourself.

In some sense, we’re similar, but the main difference is that, of course, the AWS or Google Cloud or Azure Cloud, very wide package of solutions. So that’s platform where you can build your own infrastructure on top of that platform. And this is what we did. We built our infrastructure, for example, the hosting part on Google Cloud or other services or other parts of infrastructure on Azure and AWS. But the main difference is that we are specialized for WordPress, on WordPress and we provide custom solutions for WordPress with AWS, you need, there are solutions of course, like to quickly build WordPress websites, but they’re not managed.

They are kind of, I’ll say OS level or bare metal level. It’s not bare metal, but it’s cloud, but they require a lot of things to do manually, to customize, to set up right environment to make optimization, or to configure hosting. We did we do all this stuff so our customer doesn’t need to worry about it’s pre built and it just works for WordPress. That’s why we are very flexible in this regard because we built all this solution for WordPress, it should not be generous, it’s just for WordPress and it works very well with WordPress, we have no goal to make it perfect for any platform.

So what are the opportunities in WordPress if let’s say I have a website. I go from a brochure website to a more interactive website where people maybe they can comment on my blog. And then maybe I want to implement some gamified tools on my website. Is this possible on WordPress? Are there limitations or there is a big growth opportunity in a WordPress environment to develop a more interactive or maybe a gamified, technologically advanced platform?

WordPress is so powerful that basically it can power 90% of websites in the world. There is a category of websites for which WordPress perhaps is not the best solution. For example, if it’s a very small, very simple site, perhaps you would prefer Wix, or if it’s a huge portal and there are issues with scalability perhaps you need to put a lot of service across the globe you need to deal with large databases and a lot of data or other stuff. Perhaps you would prefer to do custom stuff but it’s for this is for enterprise level companies and large businesses are very custom problem. solutions. So most of the small and medium businesses, they are, there should be, WordPress should be okay for them, including e-commerce websites. We know WordPress plugin called WooCommerce is the most popular site building, e-commerce shop building tool in the world. It’s not Shopify, it’s not other platforms, but just WordPress plugin. That’s why we can say it’s multi-purpose, a general purposes solution.

So what are the disadvantages of WordPress for e-commerce, WordPress compared to BigCommerce or Shopify or some other, you know, Magento, whatever the big brands are in e-commerce? What would you say are the limitations of a WordPress e-commerce site?

Basically, I wouldn’t say that WordPress has any limitation, but if you need some custom things to create, for example, if you need certain customized payment system, or if you have special requests regarding the database or the storage or something else, you need to build your custom solution on top of WordPress. So this requires hiring a developer. But for example, with Shopify, certain things are more easier. For example, like payments, they are perfect in payments. They have all possible payments in the world. But of course, you can build your own with WordPress as well.

All right, so WordPress is kind of a general use platform for most professionals, most medium-sized businesses, and to the degree it can even serve simpler e-commerce businesses or maybe more regional, local e-commerce businesses. But if you want to be at a global business, then you need a more sophisticated platform. Okay, so let’s switch gears here. So a couple of things that you mentioned on your website, which I’d like to understand a bit more. One of the things you talk about is disruption led growth and the importance of disruption led growth. Why is it important to have a disruption led growth?

Right. That’s that’s a great question. We see a lot of things are changed by new technologies causing disruption in already existing markets. For example, like classic case with Uber and taxi services. Or in web development, I would say majority of websites, this is just one example, but majority of websites are hosted on shared hosting platforms, which are cheap and for, are not very bad, but they have a lot of drawbacks. But, and this technology is basically from 90s, but there are clouds now, clouds penetrated in different industries. So hosting on built on cloud, it’s much better than shared hosting.

So there is a potential for disruption. Why it is so why so that majority of websites are hosted on shared hosting providers, it’s it’s kind of inertia. And price is not the problem here. We built our solution is basically as comparable price with shared hosting, but it’s much better. So the point is not price, but I would say perhaps it’s default positioning and default market. Cause like they are made big companies like GoDaddy, like Bluehost. And when just people Google for good hosting or cheap hosting, they go there, and they do not discover that are much better possibilities.

So, referencing is so for example I use go daddy as well so the difference is that if Google Daddy hosts my website. between the share hosting and the cloud. Is it just that Google is a bigger company, then Go daddy and they have more data centers, or there’s there are the differences.

Now, the main difference is that we share hosting many websites share the same system resources. So basically, if you have hundreds of website and one of them has, like a traffic spike or consumes two more resources it cause other websites to become slow. And it also prevents building custom configuration for your website, which is the best configuration perhaps for your website. You can’t do that because the same configuration is shared with hundreds of websites. But this is cheap because you basically squeeze the, it’s kind of hostile. Yeah. But with clouds, you can build a solution that each website runs inside its own container it’s called containerization technology. So, and it’s scalable so it doesn’t supper from that problem that shared hosting has. It still can be really cheap, and it’s scalable. So it’s much more better. And it has also the benefit that because there is a cloud, you can take your container migrated to any other data center issue, perhaps decide at some point that you want to move your website somewhere else.

Okay, that’s cool. And maybe through Google Cloud or AWS you can access some of the automation tools that you couldn’t access to Go daddy because they didn’t have it. Okay, that’s really interesting. And so if someone wants to do the migration, then you can help perhaps do that because you’ve got these automated tools. At least if they are in a WordPress environment, you can migrate them into the WordPress environment and even recreate the site in a WordPress environment. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, and maybe that’s similar, is that you talk about fast growth approaches for SaaS companies. So what are those? What are some of those more most popular fast growth approaches? If if I am a SaaS company, a small flagging SAS company, how can I grow faster? What can you do for for me?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So this is what makes startups different from other companies. Startups are fast growing companies and their main feature is fast growth. So, for, to reach fast growth there are a lot of things of course, it’s not a simple solution, but you need to get to understand your market well, you need to solve specific problem that market, for the same type of customer or across different industries. And the important part here is that you shouldn’t act like a big enterprise company. You shouldn’t, you should do as fast as possible. You shouldn’t think about doing everything perfect or you should create MVP, minimum viable product. And then try to find the right customer for that product, try to solve his or her problem, specific problem, and then move one step forward. And I would say that getting fast feedback and creating loops for customer feedback, for customer acquisition is the essential part here. This is what makes startups different from other companies, the ability or the processes that the product built in such a way that it can grow fast.

And so how can you help? How can your company 10webi.o help startups to be able to get the feedbacks loop faster, to be able to get this MVP, this minimum viable product, to perhaps refine their positioning. What can you do for them?

We provide limited services. Our solution is software as a service for different companies, including startups. But the ability, like having a fast, small website or ability to scale their website is essential for startups, because you don’t want to put a lot of efforts, then later discover that for example that landing page was not what was good, you want to do quick experiments, you want to build content fast, you want to build templates fast and get fast feedback. For example, our AI builder, it has the ability to create it provides the ability to create the pages and websites really fast. So, why struggle to do the best. The perfect solution later discovered that was not what was expected by customers.

Okay. All right, well, that’s really fascinating. So if the listeners would like to learn more about how to maybe transition to a WordPress environment, how to automate their WordPress websites, how to improve and accelerate their websites, how to, you know, grow faster, build a SaaS platform on on WordPress, I assume this is also possible, then where should they go? How can they find out more?

We have a lot of resources, including videos on our YouTube channel and a blog articles, for example, how can you build headless solutions with WordPress? This is a quite trendy thing for startups. They, to build a solution kind of API for other companies to build on top of that. So basically this is for headless WordPress. Or for particular need to have fast website, we have several videos and recently we produced a log like this kind of 20 minute video with detailed explanations. What does it mean to have fast websites? What techniques and technologies there are to optimize your website speed? So I would refer all our viewers listeners to come up YouTube channel for that.

Okay, so it’s called 10web 10 with the number that web W-E-B YouTube channel is this where, where we can find you?

10web.io, YouTube.

Okay, YouTube. All right. Okay. And if they would like to personally reach out to you and connected you, where do they find you.

I’m happy to share both my experience and be helpful in any way on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Okay, awesome. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you for that. It’s fascinating and obviously, you will want our websites to be faster to be less hassle automated and to grow and to provide the essential technology framework for growth, the technology blueprint for growth, I guess, maybe to call that. So thank you. Thank you for coming on the show and to you, the listeners, if you enjoyed the show, please rate or review or rate and or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel, you know, and stay tuned for next week because I have another exciting entrepreneur come to the show. So thank you Tigran for coming and because I have another exciting entrepreneur come to the show. So, thank you Tigran for coming. And everyone has a nice day.

Thank you very much Steve.

 

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