Create a Recurring Revenue Online Education WaaS with Roger Rosweide from Wildcloud

In this LMScast episode, Roger Rosweide discuss about Wildcloud platform, which lets users utilize WordPress to create websites that resemble Shopify or Wix. He also discuss about recurring revenue Online Education WaaS.

In response to user demand for Learning management platform creation, LifterLMS and Wildcloud have partnered to present the LifterLMS Blueprint on Wildcloud.

The goal of this collaboration is to make learning management platform development more accessible and user-friendly. Through a streamlined and customizable procedure, the collaboration looks to be focused on enabling users to create and sell online courses with ease.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Roger Rosweide. He’s from wildcloud. com. Welcome to the show.

Roger Rosweide: Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me and not a bad job on the pronunciation of my last name.

Chris Badgett: It’s not bad for my first try. Roger, tell us about wildcloud. What is it?

Roger Rosweide: Yeah, of course. Wildcloud is essentially a platform where you can build your own Shopify or Wix or Webflow using nothing but WordPress. So we used to be an agency and we felt, that we were reinventing the wheel with every project and we had to start from scratch. We wanted to productize.

And so the way we did that is by building our own. What is essentially a hosting platform, but has all the bells and whistles of like modern DevOps SaaS like development. And that’s what we built for ourselves in the first place. We were able to automatically sell sites via our own webshop, manage all the sites as if it’s only one and take care of hosting.

And then we had a lot of questions from people that were saying like, how the hell did you guys did this? And so we turned it into a platform, made it a lot simpler to use. So you’ve got all the benefits of modern DevOps standards and best practices, but in a very simple way. And so our, customers, they position themselves as competitors to Wix and Shopify, often very specific to a certain use case.

So they either build websites for golf courses, or they build websites for, I don’t even know why this pops into my head. We have one customer who’s building sites for OnlyFans creators. So you have your own OnlyFans platform and you’re not, you don’t have to pay. We have for some reason, many customers that do websites for print shops, which I didn’t know was a thing still but yeah they sell them automatically manage and improve on those sites as one rollout features to all your customers at the same time, do it very safely.

And then have a serverless platform so that you don’t have to worry about scaling.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I’m super excited to announce on the show that we’ve got a LifterLMS blueprint cloud option coming with wildcloud. Tell us about that. So you mentioned like you could build a shop like Shopify, but you could also build a site like Teachable or Kajabi or.

Thinkific and WordPress helps democratize things. And now here you are democratizing SaaS or software as a service so that others can do it more easily. I’m super excited about it. Tell us about how Lifter Cloud on Wildcloud works and how people can think about it.

Roger Rosweide: First of all, thanks for saying it this way. Because if I said it myself as a founder, it may sound fake. If you’re if, I say we want to democratize the way people build SaaS, but it is actually our mission statement. I don’t know if you’ve read that somewhere. I don’t think we have it published, but yeah, no that’s, the whole thing.

And so the, LifterCloud blueprint. Came to be simply from popular by popular request, honestly. So one of the, one of the main use cases that we see on the platform is that people want to build a community and they want to teach that community, whatever wisdom they have. And I think this is something that just came into popularity as the pandemic started happening.

Everybody’s now suddenly was a coach. And I don’t mean to say that now. Everybody should start being a coach, but it is some, anybody with a latent desire to preserve the knowledge, spread their knowledge and teach other people is is welcome to use the blueprint for LifterLMS and build their own learning management platform, just like a Javi.

But using the LifterLMS plugin suite. And the reason why I’m so excited about this whole Lifter thing is because it almost feels as if you’ve guys have built your whole suite. Knowing that we would show up one day because it works so well. And I’ll tell you why. So if you have for example, just one plugin, it becomes much harder for us to strip out the individual services and features that make up all the benefits that you guys have to offer.

But fortunately you haven’t, and you have all these different plugins. Some of them are free. Some of them are premium. And what we’ve done is we’ve taken your demo website, which has everything in it. And we’ve put that on the platform. That is the, product that people can sell. All our customers have to do is customize it to their specific niche.

Really, they can get going. But then the beauty is really in the storefront that we give you for free as well. So you have a storefront where you sell your products. And then we have your application where you manage your customers. And the storefront has all these different add ons. So it basically turns into a marketplace where you built, where you sell your basic product, your standard product, so to say, which is made up of the free LifterLMS plugins.

And then if you want to upsell your customers features that they need. You could do that by using the premium plugins. So you have this super accessible way of giving your value to your customer base and then create more value while stacking your bank account at the same time. And it just happens to be in the perfect way because this is how you’ve built your.

And it just works out of the box on our platform. I couldn’t be more excited.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I appreciate you saying that. It’s I’ve always seen LifterLMS as a platform, like it’s a complete solution. So we have all the, you want the coaching, we have the coaching module. You want the community, we have the community module, various advanced features and things.

But you could still custom, they could still customize the blueprint and add more to it. Two, right? Yeah.

Roger Rosweide: So the I think the reason why we compliment each other so well is because anybody who buys your plugins from the website and uses it on a, on what we now call a single tenant website because we have a multi tenant platform and a single tenant website is just one single individual website that isn’t connected to any other websites.

You have obviously the full range of whatever you want to build. And when you build that site and you give it to someone else, that someone else can also control and build and improve on that site, however they want to. And they can pick and choose whatever they want from your plugin suite as well.

The difference on our platform is that typically an agency or a freelancer builds a product on our platform. In this case, they use your plugins to, to build that entire product. Let’s say you’re, building Kajabi, so to speak. Then the end customer, so the customer of our customer, they get a site where they get a total solution, but they can’t delete or install new plugins.

So it is a solution that is managed by the vendor, which is the agency. And one of the features that our platform has is that you can manage all of those sites as one. But it also does impose certain restrictions on the end user because they can’t install or delete new plugins. It is very safe for them.

They can’t really mess anything up. They can’t really destroy the site and it gives. The management over to the vendor, but at the end of the day, it is possible that at some point, the end customer needs something more customized. They’ve become so popular, they want to dedicate a full team to this site only.

In that case, it breaks the uniformity that our platform imposes on those sites. And then you just take it out and it’s just a normal WordPress installation. And I think that’s one thing that demonstrates the mission that we have of democratizing SaaS. Which is if you have an account on Kajabi or Shopify or Wix, there’s this vendor lock in, you can’t go anywhere else.

If you need to have more performance or you need more features, you’re completely subject to whatever Kajabi is willing to do for you. And in our case, you can actually build a Lifter cloud solution. You can sell it to people who need something accessible straight away, something that is managed. And then at some point when they do become very popular with whatever they’ve bought from you, you could just move it somewhere else, dedicate a team to it, and it still works in exactly the same way.

Chris Badgett: That’s the best of both worlds, right? Yeah. Let’s talk about the opportunity a little bit, like the, niches, like your customer, the vendors or the agencies or the, coaches. I could see like somebody who let’s say helps life coaches in particular, like start and grow their businesses. Oh, and by the way, we now have this coaching course software in a box that you can just sign in, sign up for.

And now you have a fully functional website and LMS. I think about fitness coaches I think one of the cool things here is Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, platforms like that they, just focus on the whole market, like all course creators, but there’s this huge opportunity in all these niches.

For people that are already helping whoever their niche is to start teaching online as part of their value stack. What, kind of niches or types of people could you see vendor to become vendors of this that could really benefit? Yeah, thanks.

Roger Rosweide: Maybe to, start at something that you said in the beginning and then work my way towards your question.

This is exactly how we always explain it to our customers or anybody that we talk to. So if you look at the popularity of the big social media platforms, obviously there’s where you go to broadcast yourself to the entire world. And you would say, following that logic that then small membership communities would just die out.

But they’re not I’m on post that is the community of WordPress. Why wouldn’t I, why wouldn’t we do that on, on, on Facebook instead? And I think it’s because people still cling to this sense of specialism. Like we want to be in a small group of like minded people that share the same expertise and interests.

And that I think is something that we have to translate more generally to the SaaS ecosystem. WordPress for the longest time has been the biggest CMS platform in the world for building websites. And now we can actually.

And so what we always tell people is if you want to build a successful SaaS in this day and age, niche down as much as you can. Just niche down as much as you possibly can to get the first few customers for you to break even, and then expand from there. So we actually have an example of a exactly the, journey that you just mentioned, but then in a single customer.

So you have a company that focuses, that used to focus only on delivering sites to coaches. Then they expanded to coaches and, or rather it was physical therapists. That became physical therapists and coaches and that became physical therapists, coaches, and personal trainers. And then they adopted the, course building a product as well, and and they were able to deliver that entire product to all the three different dishes because they’ve already conquered that.

So obviously it makes sense. Anybody who is in the business of teaching people on a daily basis, whether that’s again, a coach. But it could also just be a lawyer, right? It could be anybody who’s in the business of providing services that have a bit of an onboarding ramp. So it could be mediators, it could be psychologists, it could be.

Doctors in general. Yeah. Real estate agents, obviously, of course. That’s something that I hardly know anything about and I’m always hesitant to to trust a real estate agent on his word, because it feels like all you do is sell all day, but obviously there’s more to it.

I have real estate agent friends. And there’s a lot of value to be shared. So I think in that sense, it’s not so much the niche you want to dive into. It’s the type of product that you want to offer. If you want to offer an accessible product, if you want to offer something that is. A full solution that people can onboard themselves on, often at a more affordable price point.

So our customers typically sell those prebuilt managed solutions between 80 to 250. And on average, they have about 14 websites. That they launched in the first two months. So that’s with all the new people coming in and all the people that graduate, that’s about the efforts that we have on the platform, but obviously we have outliers that exceed that 10 times or a hundred times even but at the end of the day, you’re offering something to people that they can just start building right away.

Usually all they have to do is upload their own courses and it really does become a SaaS instead of. A WordPress website that you then still need to learn how to use.

Chris Badgett: For someone who’s not as far along on the journey, if they’re running an agency in some niche, can you unpack like the fundamentals of a WASP or website as a service, like what?

Yes. Yeah.

Roger Rosweide: I seem to do nothing else, but it’s, it is a fairly new concept. I don’t think it’s a fairly new concept. It’s a, it’s a. It’s a concept that’s gaining notoriety because now the infrastructure is finally there to successfully implement it where it wasn’t before. So a WAAS or website as a service is basically a site that is prebuilt and managed for you that you pay for often on a subscription basis.

So instead of paying a couple thousand dollars or sometimes even a hundred thousand dollars for a site up front. And then often also after it’s been delivered in the form of maintenance, you get it. It is completely built already. Often the builder puts his experience into the product. Therefore it’s often specialized to a certain niche.

Or functionality. So we have our biggest use case on the platform is e commerce shops. Anybody wants to sell something, you don’t have to get a whole project up and running. You can just buy the full solution and just change the copy, change a few pages, upload some media, upload your products, and you’re good to go.

And in that sense, you’re basically using web development in a SaaS and then if you want to truly build like a SAS, or rather, if you want to sell like a SAS, you have to build like a SAS. So what are the three features of any SAS really? The first thing that people often overlook is that it’s hosted, right?

If you like any SAS, like literally name one. Is hosted somewhere. You didn’t have to buy hosting for it. So that’s the fundamental. That’s the basic thing. And then another thing is that you sell it automatically. If you go to a SAS, if you want to get notion, for example, you can buy notion. You don’t have to call someone.

And then that guy will explain what notion is like, and then go come over to your house and install it on your computer. So you sell, it via shop and then the people over at Notion don’t want to manage and maintain and improve the individual Notion users individually. You want to have a way to centralize that.

And there’s this cloud technology that wasn’t available up until recently. It’s called multi tenancy. And so basically what multi tenancy means is that all the functionality of all those customers is shared. So again, if you look at the example of Notion, I use Notion every day. I use it for my notes.

We use it for our entire company to schedule and plan our projects and features and roadmaps, whatnot. All that stuff that we’ve stored, that we’ve created ourselves, that is ours. That’s individual that’s on our environment, but all the features, all the databases all the folders that we create, those are features that are shared between all the users.

And that’s something that has never been possible for WordPress, other than on a multi site, which has numerous different downsides to doing in that way, but the multi tenant architecture makes that possible for WordPress. So again if you boil it down to its essentials, it is one master environment that you as a team can use to build out your product.

Then when you’re ready, you ship out the features to your customers, just like any other SaaS. And that’s truly unique. And that’s what enables the website as a service business model.

Chris Badgett: I know you’ve said that you’ve done that presentation a lot, but that is the best definition I’ve ever heard of a WAF, which is the backbone of what you do, but nice job.

That was really good. I wish I, I wish that wild cloud existed when I got started in WordPress. Cause I could see so much opportunity when I was just freelancing, taking any client I could. So for example, one of my early clients was an auto body repair shop and I built him a great solution with WordPress.

So I could take today, I could take what I learned in, in, in serving this niche and I could build. My autobody website, SAS and, then just target that market and sell to them through ads or content or whatever. And do it in for real, I did some stuff with real estate. I did some stuff with restaurants, I think restaurants, but particularly certain types of restaurants like, Oh, this is a restaurant website platform for.

Korean barbecue or whatever the niche is. There’s just so much, I can see so much opportunity for freelancers and agencies to provide the website as a solution. Yeah. Thanks.

Roger Rosweide: It I’m glad you didn’t because we wouldn’t have this awesome kick ass but now and, but yeah if you did, you could have a Podcast right now about odd auto body shops instead of doing the Lyft cast.

But anyways the funny thing is, and this is something that I’m truly passionate about because I wasn’t, we weren’t really aware that we were a WordPress company when we started this, we were an agency and we were using WordPress to build sites and we were definitely dedicated to building sites with WordPress.

We did buy into the whole philosophy of of, open source. But we didn’t feel like a WordPress company and we just build a tool to manage our own sites. And unfortunately, because we had a certain focus, we actually focused on restaurants and gyms. Okay. So we had this stack that we had developed at some point, but we were super annoyed that when we had this latest state of our preferred stack, we wouldn’t, we weren’t able to roll that out to our previous customers.

And so we had to continuously upsell the maintenance because it would essentially break down, but they weren’t getting all the improvements of the features because that’s not, that was not what they were paying for. We actually wanted to give that as part of our ongoing services to increase retention.

So that’s how we got into the mindset of actually building this. But fortunately, and this is where I’m so proud to say that we can actually make a contribution to the WordPress ecosystem. Instead of one company. Basically taking over and, I’m not vilifying like a Kajabi. They’re doing a great service.

I’m only saying if you don’t want to build everything from scratch and you want to own what you build. And you buy into the open source philosophy, then creating a product on wild cloud, using the plugin suite from Lifter, using some SEO plugins, using some caching plugins, and you could just curate it essentially, and then make it your own.

Create some extra custom CMS, CSS, or do something with a special theme, create a custom plugin, and then just give it to people or sell it, of course, but you you, sell them something that they own. And that’s something that I’m personally very proud of.

Chris Badgett: That is an amazing accomplishment to blend both of those worlds.

Let’s talk about pricing a little bit in terms of pricing a website as a service. Cause I think a lot of agencies and freelancers, they’re just in a different model, it’s like a 200, website, but if you’re actually, if you have a blueprint set up in wild cloud and. Your, niche can buy individual websites from you, the agency directly, like how much did they charge for it?

What are you seeing on your platform? Let’s use like a, learning example. Let’s say I, I help yoga instructors also teach online and give them business consulting and things like that. So if I had a, yoga LMS website in a box. How much should the end customer pay per month for that?

Roger Rosweide: So first off the mistake that I personally made in the beginning, say two and a half years ago was not only trying to change our entire business model and become solely product based, so no longer doing any services and then trying to convince our early customers to do the same.

I think it’s more of a, I think it’s more complimentary to the service model you have currently. And it’s, and it serves as a great lead magnet where your customers pay you instead of you paying for them to get the leads. And so what I mean by that is when we started adopting that model and, advising that to our customers, they actually blew up tremendously.

So what usually happens is if you build an LMS and it has What you described now is pretty basic features, right? You’re, dropping your courses, you’re enrolling people in your courses. You could game, gamify it a little bit but it’s fairly straightforward, right? It’s, you consume media and you don’t have to do quizzes, for example.

It’s, yoga after all. In that case it, is something that you, that a yoga teacher. If we if we keep it fairly straightforward and exclude any form of community for now, so it’s, truly, you’re selling a course and you don’t update that course on the regular, then it wouldn’t really make sense to charge too much for it for for the yoga teacher and customer.

So anywhere between a hundred dollars to 200, I think is a very fair price. In terms of receiving a community website where you can drop your courses, it’s managed, it’s update, it’s updated, and it’s hosted. But on top of that, this site still needs to be found. So you can upsell SEO. The agency often has a content arm, so you can either do social media content creation and or management.

You may want to help people with website assembly. So an example that I can actually come up with right now is one of our customers is is an agency in Houston, Texas. And I’m not sure if they do a platform for yoga teachers, but they do a similar thing. And I know that they sell the sites for 80 per month.

Then they have a service that they’ll assemble the site for 600. They sell social media management for an ongoing 500 fee and SEO for 500. So an 80 site that people can just buy and get on right away and possibly finish and customize themselves pretty quickly turns into one or 2, 000 per month in ongoing services.

That you sell from building the reputation and building the trust of selling this final product in the first place. And like I said it’s, almost a lead magnet where you just collect dozens of customers and get onto, and then you just keep an eye on them and they’ll, turn to you when they need additional services.

So it really scalable way to scale your agency, but it doesn’t mean that you have to forget and forgo any other, any of the services that. I’ve made you successful right now. I love that idea.

Chris Badgett: I think about that. That was spent our core philosophy from LFTR LMS since the beginning is that we put our customer at the center of the business, not the PR, not our product.

So it’s one of the reasons we do this podcast yeah, they need a LMS software, but they also need education on how to do other things like marketing, instructional design, work with technology. So we’ve just continued to add value around the customer. And so a WAAS business, a website is often just a piece of a bigger puzzle.

So if I could give people a word of advice from my agency days, where I did the real estate sites, the yoga sites, the restaurant sites, because I didn’t focus on a customer, I was just going wherever I could get paid. But once I started really focusing on the online educator, Then that’s when everything changed and I found my niche and that’s, you can do the same thing in any agency.

Roger Rosweide: You’re, getting me very enthusiastic right now. It’s one of my passion subjects you could say. So it’s basically the difference between selling a solution and building a solution, right? So if you’re selling a solution you’re, selling not just the product, but also your principles.

You’re selling your philosophy and you’re selling your perspective on how a problem should be solved. And you can actually scale that idea by creating content where you continuously implement the philosophy and the principles that you are using to approach the problem. And it doesn’t only have to pertain to your products and only has, doesn’t only have to pertain to your business model, but it’s something that is, that you carry out into all the aspects of your business in your life.

But if you’re building a solution, it’s just like you say, you’re basically going where the money is. And so you have to have to pick and choose your principles for that particular product project. People barely get to know who you are and what you stand for as an entrepreneur, as a specialist, as an expert on a specific subject.

It often takes years to establish that. And at the end of the day, also a few very difficult decisions on where you’re going to focus your energy. But if you do that by, by scaling the principles that you put into a product. It becomes much easier to focus on something. And again, it still doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t sell additional services.

It just means that any of the services, that you end up selling are going to be an extension of the product that you’re offering. So it’s again, something that is highly focused, highly efficient. And scalable at the same time. And it’s something that we try to implement in every facet of our own business.

So we do have a white glove onboarding service where we get people up and running. We’re going to launch our own marketing. Onboarding in a few weeks where we help people get to the first 10 to 20 customers. But again, that is always going to be focused upon getting you successful on our platform.

And so it’s always in service of the website as a service model. So I completely agree with your statement there. I think that’s I think that’s why you’re successful and why we’re having this podcast.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. One, one way I heard this described is you may have a solution looking for a customer.

But that’s just the wrong way to go about it. It’s start with the customer and then surround them with the solutions. Exactly. I know, because we get this question about people from people interested in building website as a service and adding it into their stack of what they offer. We talked a little bit about pricing, but another nuance question is what’s a healthy profit margin?

So for. If we’re just for the website piece how much should we mark up our our, what our WASPs are, the website per month. And I know that’s a, it depends question, but what, do you think is like a good starting point for people? Should it be like a hundred percent markup, 50 percent markup, like 20%?

Roger Rosweide: I think it’s very, yeah. Yeah. I think it’s fairly reasonable. to say that including all the plugins that you pay for and all the additional services that makes it a little bit of a harder estimate, but in terms of the relation between the price that we ask for a single website hosted on our platform in comparison to the retail price, because that’s something that we can easily measure and that we’re also very aware of.

We don’t, we have data on all the plugins that are installed, but we don’t know exactly which one are on the premium plan for every single plugin. I hope to get there one day. Anyways at 10 X multiplier from the cost that we charge to the retail price is, actually, I would say average, if not the minimum.

So for example, our our lowest price is 4 37 per month for one website. And if you’re not selling that site for at least 40 per month, then I would say you’re insanely underpriced because at the end of the day, you’re selling someone that is a solution that is prebuilt, that is managed and is going to be maintained if not improved over time.

So 40, I would say is the bare minimum of what you’re able to ask. There’s no upfront costs for people other than then the 40, 40 they own what they get and they can also just stop anytime they want. So from 4 to 40, I would say is a pretty interesting markup.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. Yeah. 10 X that’s, yeah, that’s,

Roger Rosweide: that’s, yeah.

And and it goes for so for example, if you’re on our most expensive blend, then you actually pay 21 for a site. You can make it much more expensive, but that’s where our like predictable tiers ends. And then you can get more custom. We are after all very scalable platform, but then that is so heavy that we actually call the container that the site is in a heavy duty container.

So like charging 200 for such a site that is so scalable and that is also undoubtedly going to get so much traffic. Is is, worth 200. Of course, 200 for a site per month. That is very popular. Why not? So yeah, 10, 10, 10 X multipliers.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I also think it’s important to realize if you’re in online business in any way, you probably pay a lot of money per month for some other SAS tool. Like I know I pay a lot of money to active campaign every month for my CRM and it’s worth it because that’s my email list. That’s my marketing automation.

It’s, worth it. Tell us some more, or let’s brainstorm some ideas around an LMS WASP that people could do. You’ve mentioned like university, like what are, besides like coaches and consultants, like what are some other ways to think about where you could use one of these blueprints?

Roger Rosweide: So something that I’m personally very passionate about and it’s maybe because my mother in law is a teacher at a Dutch.

High school which is funny because she’s from Suriname, which is a very small country and in South America, but she teaches Dutch at a Dutch high school is giving giving, teachers an LMS or a lifter cloud. Yeah. It’s something that I want needs there to be because I feel that at least in my experience, teachers are sometimes demotivated by the system that they’re teaching in, but they’re very passionate about their subject.

It’s what drove them to become teachers in the first place. So the school system can sometimes be a bit constraining. I know it’s a very hard job. They make very long hours. They have to grade all these papers. Kids aren’t easy. And I spend a fair amount of time on Instagram during my day to day, but I’m in the office, nobody’s going to reprimand me, but if you show weakness to high school, two teenagers for just a second, then you’re going to be demolished.

So, that being said, I would love it. If teachers started. If a history teacher started his own Lifter cloud teaching platform and started teaching about ancient. Egyptian architecture. And and this is why I think the beauty of, having a, specialized WAS comes from, if you want to do something on Kajabi and it’s very straightforward, then you’re competing with Kajabi.

So for example, yoga teachers in Kajabi, I think it can really work. If you choose Lifter instead, because there’s these other benefits that don’t really pertain to the actual features, but to the ownership, for example, and the philosophy that you buy into, but if you want to do something that’s very specialized, render 3d models of pyramids on your own was very hard to get from Kajabi, they don’t have that feature.

But it’s more than feasible on a WordPress site because that is essentially what it is. So I’d love it if, teachers got their own learning platform where they could not only make a few extra dollars and have a side hustle, but also motivate and inspire people in a way that is more free than the current school system is where they don’t, where they aren’t constrained by.

Exams and the way that should be done.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s a great use case. It’s funny. I was smiling when you said Egyptian, all the niches I see in, LFTR LMS. I remember this one person who specializes in this ancient Egyptian like hieroglyphic script style. And there’s people that are like keeping different languages alive and all these like niches.

There’s just so many teachers out there and very few of them are. necessarily the perfect fit for just a raw WordPress site and trying to figure all that tech out, but there’s so much pent up demand and energy for wanting to teach, wanting to build that digital asset. And maybe they feel they’re just not in that like creator economy course coach market, the Kajabi and teachable and everybody’s marketing too, but they care just as much.

And if somebody takes a stand and helps that particular sector of education, I think there is a huge opportunity there.

Roger Rosweide: You wouldn’t believe how many. I want to say amateur teachers there are that’s the one challenge that I want to tackle in the, in 2024 is connect the WordPress builders with these teachers.

I don’t have a, an actual word for it for them yet, I don’t mean to say that these are teachers that teach at schools. They are like intrinsic teachers. They are just born teachers and they might have a job as a plumber and they want to teach other people how to become a plumber, or they have a job selling cars and they are very good at it and they, just have this.

This intense desire to teach what they know to other people. It’s just what they love. And I can completely relate with that. I have the same thing. Anytime I master a subject, I’ve mastered it because I’ve taught it to other people along the way. That’s how I learn things. But they don’t always know how to build a WordPress website.

So they have, they struggle actually creating that, bringing the two together. I can imagine a future where we adopt a bit of a two sided marketplace element to our platform. I’m not quite sure if that’s going to be a paid thing or if it’s more of a community building exercise. I don’t want to charge for that specifically because I want to bring the people together and don’t necessarily want to make money out of that.

But I think it’s, I think it’s always a good thing when technical people and people with a teaching desire come together because that’s when everybody improves.

Chris Badgett: Just to build on that. I have a, this five hats challenge. I call it where you have to wear five hats in this industry. One of those is to be a technologist, one of them is to be a teacher or instructional designer.

I call it one of them is to be a subject matter expert, like with some deep knowledge on something. Another thing is to be a community builder. And then the, final one is to be an entrepreneur, like actually create a business, do marketing, if you want to scale, build a team and stuff like that. It’s very hard to find all that in one person.

Partnerships, connecting teachers and technologists with people that are good at building community with people that are like, even like you want to teach on a topic that you’re passionate about, but there’s these experts that are even bigger. Have even more knowledge than you. And just connecting all that together is where you make the best stuff.

Roger Rosweide: I agree. I’m unsure if I actually possess the five hats right now. Nobody does.

Chris Badgett: That’s the dirty little secret of the industry. I found is that that’s so rare. The bet, the people that are the most successful with LFTR as an example, there’s often like a couple people or three people and they’re sharing the hats.

They’re not doing it alone, completely alone. Though what I think is what’s cool about wild cloud is it takes that technology burden off the table. Like you’re letting technology where the hat and you get the the benefits of WordPress while having the SAS experience is, awesome.

Roger Rosweide: That’s something I almost say on a not maybe daily, but almost weekly basis is people often ask us if you’ll, if we also do email and we don’t because email is very hard and there’s other people that do email really well.

Chris Badgett: But at the same time, you mean, or

Roger Rosweide: No like, for example, we host sites. So people expect us to host email as well. But if you buy your domain, yeah, exactly like Gmail and we don’t because Gmail is there and we have the G suite. So why would we improve on the G suite? But it’s the same thing with WordPress, because why would you build your own Kajabi if you can get an LMS, if you can get Lyft or LMS, why would you try to do your own SEO if you can get Rank Math or Yoast, I hope you do Yoast.

Because he’s an investor but and I think that’s not, it doesn’t only just help you get to the first level, which is get the product, but it’s also, it delegates the burden of maintaining and optimizing and improving it. And I think it, it’s more fun if you do it in such a community manner because it’s.

I speak to a lot of product founders. I make it my job to, and you would be surprised, especially in the WordPress community, how many of them are focused on their customers. Just the other week, I heard the owner of WP Umbrella say that they have made a religion out of being customer centric. Like they’re so passionate about.

So letting their roadmap be decided by the customer requests. And they’re completely subservient to what the customer wants. How cool is that? How cool is it that you can just go to Yoast and actually ask if they could do this one thing. And in most cases, they’ll definitely consider and maybe even build it because it’s a good use case.

I think that’s, that helps you put more hats on or delegate those hats.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and also the WordPress versus Kajabi as an example. The WordPress community is so massive that there’s just a larger bank of people solving problems than work at one SAS company, even something big like Shopify there’s, way more innovation happening.

Inside of the WordPress ecosystem, because of the law of large numbers, how many people are like just working on e commerce or LMS or SEO? It’s a, you get to benefit from that. That’s cool.

Roger Rosweide: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you’re in control, which I think is a pretty big thing and something people shouldn’t underestimate.

The fact that if you’re on a Shopify or a Webflow site and they just decide to up the price, then that’s it for you.

Chris Badgett: I had this funny thought talking to you. Which is, I remember listening to an interview with Toby from Shopify, the founder. And he was saying their mission is to arm the rebels basically against Amazon, the small sellers, but then this wild cloud is like arming the rebels again.

But it’s it’s, just that’s innovation. That’s disruption. It’s, bringing the power to the people and. It’s a, it’s really cool. And that’s what I think the physics of business just flow that way. And that’s why WordPress has been successful on the macro.

Roger Rosweide: I agree with you. And I, it’s not necessarily our mission or strategy to oppose any of the proprietary SaaS builders.

But at some point what’s that quote, I think from Batman, like you live long enough to become the villain. Oh, and then, so the thing is the thing that made you grow is your innovative power and in the case of SaaS companies. It is all due to the fact that they have multi tenancy at the core of how they build the product.

The only way to build a SaaS is if you can ship. New features to all of your customers at the same time all the SaaS companies are built that way. So if, so that was not the problem for Shopify was to build their own CMS, but now they’ve basically kept that multi tenant architecture for themselves.

They’re the only ones using it. So if you’re an agency building sites on Shopify. There’s no real way to manage and maintain them the same way Shopify is maintaining their platform. And we’ve basically taken that architecture and, introduce it to WordPress, giving people all the power that Shopify has, but you build it with your own WordPress skills.

And I think at levels of playing field, I think it makes it easier for smaller agencies to compete with Shopify. Our, like I said, our customers position themselves as Shopify alternatives successfully. Because you can still remain a relatively small agency and with relatively small, I would say 50 to a hundred customers, which is very easily maintainable on our platform.

Whilst at the same time, still know the first names of all of your customers and be able to provide personal service. And that’s something that I think in this day and age. I still really appreciate going to my local coffee shop and them knowing my order as soon as I step in, I really liked that.

And I’d love my SAS provider to have a similar approach. But in this economy of scale that just isn’t feasible for Shopify, but it is feasible for an agency utilizing multi tenant architecture. So I hope to achieve that.

Chris Badgett: Well said. Even me, Roger is a long term WordPress person and technology guy.

I’ve learned a lot on this conversation. And, but I know some people out there, they might, who are listening to this right now. May still be a little bit new to the game of websites as a service, multi tenancy, SaaS or software as a solution, but they’ve heard this conversation and they’re excited.

But they want to learn more and dig in to what you offer it at wild cloud. There’s the website wildcloud. com, but do you have any particular resources or places for people to go to like really dig into the opportunity?

Roger Rosweide: Of course. If you wait one more week, we’ll have the Lifter Cloud Blueprint live.

So we’ll invite everybody to get on our platform, start a free trial, no credit card required. We don’t put up a paywall to make it hard for you. We just want you to try it out. Feel free to get in touch with our customer service. It immediately goes to the founders. We want, we need to see everybody.

And, see what they’re, what they think. But I actually try to be as approachable as I can, because I do understand that we’re introducing something new. And people often want to talk to a person that they’ve heard somewhere online. If you’re watching this, you can see my first and last name, which is Roger Rosweide.

If you type that into LinkedIn, you’ll find me if you connect to me. I’d be happy to have a conversation. If you’re listening to this, then I hope you can look at the show notes and still decipher my name. But in any case, if you sign up for a free trial on our platform and you ask for me specifically, I’ll get in touch with you because I, definitely I’m, curious and I feel like an ambassador of this.

Business model. And I want to promote it to as many people as I can.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah. I think there is an education component for people that kind of onboard into the, Oh,

Roger Rosweide: for sure. SAAS. Yeah. We’ve got like multiple webinars we’ve got. Yeah. We’ll, everything is on the website.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Roger, this has been an excellent conversation. Again, I wish I could go back in time and do, wild clouds. Think about productized service, picking my niche providing those. That website in addition to the services as a value to the client. So go to wildcloud. com, check it out.

We’re recording this on October 16th. So depending upon when you listen to this.

Roger Rosweide: The lift. Oh, it’s live then.

Chris Badgett: Oh we are live right now.

Roger Rosweide: No. Like when people listen to this, not live they’ll, be able to get again on the lifter cloud thing is immediately. Oh, that’s great. I’m happy to hear that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So that’ll go, check it out on wildcloud. com. Thanks for coming on the show, Roger. I love your energy and you’re in the innovative way you think about helping people and adding more value. Any final words for the people before we sign off?

Roger Rosweide: No, man, I’ve got some final words for you, which is thank you for having me on.

I love that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you’re welcome. I look forward to doing it again with you down the road. Cool.

Roger Rosweide: Sounds good.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.