Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This week I talked to a founder from Northern Ireland who dropped out of university to become an entrepreneur.
He struggled for four years and had several failed businesses, but he kept going.
Today he's running a seven figure software business with over 30,000 customers and 35 employees.
All right, today's guest is the founder and CEO of Thrive Themes, a company that produces conversion focused WordPress tools such as Thrive Content Builder and the Thrive Leads plugin.
The company was founded in 2013 and is based in Switzerland.
So today I'd like to welcome Shane Milach to the show.
Shane, welcome.
Did I say your name right this time?
Guest (01:16.370)
You know, your attempt before we were recording was much better, but it's fine, don't worry about it.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Omer (01:24.980)
Let me try one more time.
Guest (01:25.940)
Shane Milag, closer.
Yes.
You're getting there.
Omer (01:31.140)
Okay, maybe we'll keep working on that.
I'll try again at the end of the show.
All right, welcome.
I always like to ask my guests just what drives and motivates them, what gets them out of bed?
Some people have a quote, some people just talk about what drives them.
So what is it for you?
What gets you out of bed every day to do what you do?
Guest (01:49.540)
Well, for me, the basic motivation to do this stuff is just essentially the amount of positive impact I can have on other people.
To me, that's the most gratifying thing.
The most gratifying thing about making good products is that you put a product in someone's hands and it makes a difference to them.
Their lives are in some way a little bit better than if they didn't have that product.
And also on the other side, building a team, you provide good work for people.
To me, that's, that's the most gratifying thing.
Omer (02:22.620)
I kind of introduced Thrive themes and sort of told the audience a little bit about it.
But can, in your own words, can you tell the audience a little bit more about what Thrive Themes does and maybe how it's different to other potential solutions out there?
Guest (02:41.820)
Yeah, sure.
So I think in the WordPress space there is, because of its nature or because of, first of all, it's a huge, huge marketplace, like whatever half the Internet is running on WordPress now.
And because it's open source, very low barrier of entry, there's an immense Amount of choice.
When you build your WordPress website, there's immense amount of choice of how you want to set that up, what kind of theme you want to use, what kind of plugins you want to use.
And there's a positive side to that, which is you have all this choice, you have a lot of free stuff you can use.
And there's a negative side to that, which is that most people's websites, you know, your typical online businesses, WordPress website, your typical online marketers, WordPress website is basically loaded down with dozens, sometimes into the hundreds of plugins that for the most part don't interact with each other very well.
Right.
There's various conflicts, people often have to write custom code and the stuff is just hanging together by a thread.
And with Thrive themes, our goal is to for specifically for the marketing and conversion aspects of your website to give you really high quality tools out of one hand that integrate with each other.
And this is something that a comment that we get a lot, you know, in emails and comments and so on on our blog posts is how it's kind of this feeling of relief of okay, I could delete, you know, I could delete a dozen plugins, some of which I haven't updated in years because I'm afraid it will break my website.
And I know I can install Thrive themes, I can install the Thrive plugins and this covers the most important needs I have for the marketing part of my website.
And they don't have to worry about, you know, oh, this free plugin is the author just disappeared and it's not never going to be updated anymore or I have this one plugin from one side, this other plugin from the other side and you know, one of the plugins breaks the other plugin.
All this kind of stuff, I mean we've seen this, we've seen this far too often.
And so a big thing is obviously, as the tagline says, conversion focused WordPress tools.
It's all about conversion focus, it's all about that marketing focus, but it's also about giving you something that's like out of one hand, well integrated and where you can click on that update link without having to sweat bullets every time.
Omer (05:09.110)
Full disclosure, I use Thrive themes on my site and in fact a couple of sites and what I've been kind of struck by is how much flexibility there is with, you know, whether it's you want to have a theme on your WordPress site or you want to build a landing page or you want some kind of email opt in form or widget or you know, a bunch of other things that you guys do.
But the fact that it's packaged in a way that, that makes it fairly simple to manage.
Guest (05:48.570)
You mentioned the lead generation, for example.
Right.
Opt ins.
And I think that's actually a really good example because one thing that we, we saw on a lot of sites was that people were using multiple plugins for lead generation.
So, you know, maybe you have a plugin that inserts an opt in form at the bottom of your blog post and you have another one that makes a pop up appear somewhere and you have another one that makes a ribbon appear at the top of the screen.
And it's one of the things that happens is, well, first of all, again, there can be conflicts and stuff, stuff breaks.
But also it can be almost comical because none of these plugins talk to each other.
So you come to a site and like a pop up appears, you close the pop up, A thing slides in from the side, you close that, a thing slides in from the top, you close that, you're like, what's going on here?
In our opt in plugin, which is called Thrive Leads, you get all of that stuff.
You can basically delete all of your opt in plugins and just use that and you can create logic which says, well, if I'm showing the pop up on this page, maybe don't show the other five things.
And you can't do that if you're using separate plugins.
Omer (06:50.640)
Yeah, totally.
Now, how did you.
I know you've worked on several businesses before you launched Thrive, but how did you come up with the idea for this particular business?
Guest (07:06.080)
It came out of, I think, like many business ideas, like out of a need of our own.
Because I think that the source really is that I was building many websites that were marketing websites.
So I had this need, which is something that WordPress isn't fundamentally built for.
WordPress is still fundamentally a blogging platform.
And so when it comes to building a website that is supposed to be streamlined to get sales core WordPress it doesn't really offer much for that.
And because I was doing this so often because for a long time I had various affiliate sites and I was releasing products like as individual products.
So for each product I would build a new website and I would be confronted with the same problems again.
It's like, how do I create a sales page that works, how do I create landing pages that I need and so on.
And it would just be the most frustrating thing ever because.
And I actually did this.
I mean, I shuddered think of it.
Now, but I actually built sales Pages in the WordPress Editor, which is absolute nightmare to do, right?
Like just where you just, you end up with this enormous list of short codes.
There was this enormous, you know, jumble of text essentially where you have to figure out, okay, this short code is a box and then inside that box is another short code which represents a button and so on.
It's just an absolute mess.
And so that kind of thing was really frustrating.
And another thing was also frustrating is just basically every time I did this, I tried a bunch of themes, none of them worked the way I wanted.
I had to do some customization just to turn a page into something that is suitable for a sales page.
And I thought, well, that can't be right.
And so that was a need that we had ourselves.
And then we found out that we're not the only ones.
Obviously now we thought, okay, let's provide something that is made for people who want to sell stuff effectively.
Because in the WordPress space there is a lot, a lot of stuff.
For people who want to have a fancy looking website, there's a lot of stuff who want to have.
If you want to have image galleries and portfolios and things like that, there is an enormous amount of stuff you can get.
But if you want to have an effective, simple sales page, there's surprisingly little on offer.
So we wanted to be the people who offer that.
Omer (09:33.240)
Did you have experience with building software or building software on WordPress before you started thrive?
Guest (09:41.480)
Yes, yes.
So that's very important.
I mean, for me, I had the idea of wanting to build software years and years ago and I had no idea how to do this and, and it was just trial and error and basically, I mean, I probably went about it in the stupidest way possible, but basically pretty much all of the money I made from my information products, which I was, you know, which was my main source of income before I pretty much burned all of that money on learning how to get software developed.
You know, I'd hire freelancers and try them to build, get them to build something at higher agencies.
And I just, at one point I just had about five software products going at the same time.
Because I just thought, listen, I just have to get through this learning process.
I have to get to the point where I actually can take a project from start to finish.
And I think, you know, for someone who hasn't done this before, that maybe sounds ridiculous, but it's actually very possible to hire someone to build a piece of software and end up with, with something that's Technically a piece of software, but that's not usable in any way.
Omer (10:51.320)
Totally.
Guest (10:53.000)
So I have a lot of those on some hard drive somewhere.
And it was just like this, learning by doing.
I kind of just brute forced my way from I have no idea what I'm doing to I'm ready to build Thrive Themes.
Omer (11:05.800)
So you kind of go through the experience, you've got the idea, and what did you do next?
Like, you know, we often hear about prototyping, building an mvp, going and talking to customers, customer development.
In reality, I find a lot of entrepreneurs didn't do any of that.
But.
So what was your experience?
Guest (11:26.440)
Most of those things are important, but because of the way I built this business, our approach was a bit different, which was that I already had a large audience.
That's quite important.
Right.
I started with.
I started with a blog and giving away some free products to build a small mailing list, then learning and then doing all of the stuff you just mentioned, essentially, you know, customer development, stuff like that, finding out what the people on my small mailing list needed the most, creating an information product to serve that need, selling that information product, getting more customers, building my mailing list, finding out what they need next, building that information product, and so on.
And so at the point where we started Thrive themes, and when I say we started Thrive Themes, so Thrive Themes, I started together with Paul McCarthy, so it was a team effort from day one, whereas a lot of the stuff before was just me doing it.
So at the point where we started Thrive Themes, we had a mailing list of.
Actually, I have no idea, but something like 20,000 people or so.
And we had.
And not only did we have a mailing list of 20,000 people, we had an audience with whom we had an active regular exchange.
Okay, so this was happening all the time and still happening all the time on a regular basis.
We would send emails and get replies, we would write blog posts and get comments.
We would send surveys and get replies.
We would get on the phone with people and talk to them.
This was already happening to a great degree.
So we were not in a position where we had to go, oh, how do I, you know, how do I validate this product?
We were in a position where we could very easily find out, what are people screaming for?
What, what do people need the most?
Because they were asking us to make solutions for them.
Right?
And so it was quite easy for us at that point.
We'd already launched a few other plugins, a few other WordPress software things, and it was really mostly just a question of figuring out, okay, here's all the stuff that people are asking us for.
Here's the stuff that, you know, in our past products, here's the stuff that sold well, the stuff that didn't sell well, that gave us a pretty clear direction of what we could do.
And the validation of the product was essentially, yes, a lot of people agree that they want this.
And then building a first plugin, which was the first early version of Thrive Content Builder, launching that to our list, got a hugely positive response.
That's it.
That's the idea validated.
And it's the idea validated with money.
Right?
It's basically money in the bank says, yes, this is a good idea, which is the best way to validate something.
Omer (14:04.560)
Totally.
What was the blog that you had up and running before you launched?
Guest (14:11.120)
Yeah, that was IAM Impact.
So IAM Impact was a blog that I launched a long time ago.
I think it was like 2008, where in the beginning I simply started talking about, you know, I was learning myself about online marketing and I wanted an outlet for basically the stuff I was discovering.
So I have.
I've generally often used writing as a tool, like as a learning tool and so on.
And so I thought, you know, if I'm doing all this research, I'm trying stuff out with online marketing, a good outlet would be I write about it on a blog.
I basically write, know what, what I'm up to and what's happening.
And it turned into.
It actually went through many evolutionary stages.
At one point it turned into a review site because I was trying all these software tools and I was reviewing them.
And then it turned into kind of an SEO blog where I was doing all this affiliate marketing stuff with SEO and I was writing about that.
But it's always kind of just been, in a way, if you read through Iam Impact, you see the different topics I cover, you can kind of see it's all almost like a documentation of my journey.
Omer (15:16.990)
That wraps up part one of this interview.
If you enjoyed this episode, then please do consider submitting an itunes review to show your support.
It really does mean a lot to me to hear your feedback.
And it's even better if you post it on itunes.
Just go to qonversionaid.com iTunes.
In part two or episode 120, Shane and I talk about how he found a technical co founder and what you can learn from that.
We talk about a specific tactic he uses to hire the right developers and a concept he calls Positive Gap, which has been hugely important to building customer loyalty and growing to 30,000 customers.
So thanks again for listening and come back and join us as we continue the conversation on episode 120.
