013: Service More Than Software with Blair Williams

The SaaS (Software as a Service) Business Podcast

Blair Williams is a software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the owner and lead programmer for Caseproof.

Caseproof has four products on the market Pretty Link, MemberPress, Affiliate Royale, and Buy Now for Stripe. Pretty Link is a WordPress plugin to manage link redirection on WordPress websites, MemberPress is a product to manage membership sites, Affiliate Royale is a product to manage your affiliates, and Buy Now for Stripe is a product that allows integration with Stripe to sell products on a website without an SSL certificate.

Please see Disclosure* (below) concerning affiliate links on this page.

Key Segments

• [0:02:39] After getting a degree in computer science, Blair worked as a programmer, software architect, and CTO at various companies. But while he was working these jobs, he was moonlighting on Caseproof doing freelance web development for clients and then got into WordPress plugins.
• [0:03:56] His passion was all about the web. He created Caseproof to both learn about the web and get started helping people build websites. When Blair first started building web apps, he thought he needed to use the most bulletproof technology he could find, something that could scale massively and be solid. He chose Java Struts [see Apache Struts] and Enterprise JavaBeans. It took him about a year to create his first web app, which was basically a file browser. After that experience, he switched to PHP. He wasn’t sure how PHP would scale but felt that he would be able to get things done in a reasonable amount of time.
• [0:06:16] While working at Franklin Covey, he started working on larger applications that had been written in PHP and were out of control. He heard about Ruby on Rails. Since Rails uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) as Struts does, he felt it had the strength of Struts while using a beautiful scripting language. He switched to Rails for several years, even using it after he started working with WordPress, and today still uses some Rails apps to facilitate the sale of MemberPress and other plugins.
• [0:07:21] He later began to work for a client doing more Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Internet marketing work and started fiddling around with WordPress to develop microsites. As part of this, he wanted to start tracking links in pay-per-click campaigns independent from Google to have secondary confirmation. That’s when he wrote Pretty Link for WordPress. He also wrote Pretty Link in such a way that he could use his own domain name instead of Bitly, or something like it, to shorten links. He put Pretty Link on the WordPress Plugin Directory and found that other people wanted to track their links too.
• [0:08:58] After Pretty Link, came Affiliate Royale, MemberPress, and Buy Now for Stripe. Pretty Link is a WordPress plugin. MemberPress is also a WordPress plugin but uses a license server on the backend running a Rails-based service. The backend issues and revokes licenses, and facilitates updates. Upgrades and support for a year come with a license.
• [0:10:30] “When I first got into this, I thought this was gonna be this primarily programming job. I was gonna just be in my basement coding all the time, and it was all about the software. I was just gonna make the software better, and that is a really important part of the business, but the thing I have found is that it’s really not a software business; it’s a support business [slightly edited].” MemberPress handles e-commerce, protecting pages, and keeping the life-cycle relationship with the customer intact. People use it to run their businesses. Blair’s team takes support seriously, and that costs money.
• [0:12:36] “We take it just as seriously as you take your business, and we wanna make sure that you’re up and running, that you are able to make money. That’s our whole goal: to help you make money.”
• [0:12:51] Most of Caseproof’s support team are developers. They can go in and fix things for people. Ron had a very positive support experience with the Caseproof team and, knowing how expensive support is, felt a little guilty for the time they spent fixing the problem [relative to the cost of Pretty Link Pro]. Blair’s response was: “But that’s what they’re there for, and we try to fix as may things as we can.”
• [0:13:51] Blair attributes part of the strength of MemberPress to WordPress but notes that there are thousands of plugins, themes, and web hosts in the self-hosted WordPress environment. Testing every permutation is impossible. Support in this environment requires masterful troubleshooting skills.
• [0:16:04] Pretty Link, the free version, will do basic, server-side redirects (301, 302, and 307), which Blair explains.
• [0:19:15] Pretty Link Pro also allows JavaScript redirects, meta refresh redirects using HTML, cloaking, pixel tracking, Tweet automation, social bars, Tweet counters, keyword replacement, alternate base URLs, and geographic redirects. Cloaking is a technique to hide target URLs from the user. Cloaking is legitimately used to retain branding when redirecting but has also been used for questionable reasons to trick people. Pretty Bar Redirect is a form of cloaking that puts a bar at the top of a linked page with brought-to-you-by branding. Pixel tracking, where a one-pixel image is loaded with a page, is also provided to track page views and hits. Tweet automation tweets to connected Twitter accounts when designated pages are initially published. Keyword replacement will replace occurrences of keywords throughout a site with a predefined link (such as an affiliate link). An alternate base URL can be used to provide a short URL for a long URL, such as SaaSBP.com as a substitute for SaaSBusinessPodcast.com. Geographic redirects will redirect based on a user’s location.
• [0:31:11] With MemberPress, you can control who has access to content by limiting access according to rules established by the admin. Access can be granted or revoked for posts, pages, categories, tags, feeds, communities, digital files, and custom taxonomies. Community access allows integration with BuddyPress or bbPress to limit access based on topics. You can manage subscriptions, manage transactions, and resend welcome emails. MemberPress centralizes the rules for access to all of your content. There are also developer tools to integrate with external systems such as SaaS products. MemberPress can revoke access if payments lapse. Membership levels control price, subscription period, trial period, access to content, and recurring billing. Registration pages can be set up for each level. Customers have account pages to view billing history, edit their information, and can be given the option to cancel subscriptions. The admin can also manage coupons with options to define the frequency of use, expiration, discount levels, applicable products, and trial periods. Members are not restricted to a single subscription level but may have multiple subscriptions defined within the site. MemberPress can calculate proration for membership level upgrades.
• [0:43:49] If customers require custom MemberPress development work, Caseproof maintains a list of trusted vendors and can provide referrals. These are vendors who are familiar with MemberPress and maintain a relationship with Caseproof to resolve problems. Caseproof does not receive payment from vendors for referrals made.
• [0:44:43] For payments, MemberPress integrates with PayPal for Business and Stripe(and Authorize.net for the developer version). Caseproof is working on integrating with Braintree and, for Australia, eWay. With Stripe and PayPal, the integration is tight, so you can tell if someone has purchased or canceled, and an admin can manage subscriptions from the membership site without needing to log into the gateway. All three services can notify MemberPress of payments made; MemberPress can then issues receipts to the user.
• [0:50:17] MemberPress also provides analytics to see how your membership site is doing. It will report by week, month, year, and product allowing you to see who has been buying what and when. You can measure traffic, money coming in, and lifetime average value of users. The data is live and displayed using Google’s Visualization API [see Google Charts].
• [0:52:28] Affiliate Royale allows you to manage a complete affiliate program. It will track affiliate commissions, and if you refund a transaction, it will automatically calculate the correction. Currently, it only supports payments to affiliates using PayPal. You can have a tiered commissions structure of up to 100 levels. It generates a dashboard allowing affiliates to see how much they have been paid or are currently owed, to see a leaderboard, to get affiliate links, banners, or other assets you have provided, and to enter an SSN or EIN for tax purposes. In addition to MemberPress, it integrates with Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, Shopify, and other e-commerce platforms. And since Affiliate Royale is a WordPress plugin, all this is managed from your site with the same look and feel of the rest of your site.
• [0:56:00] Blair’s software products came about organically. He started by searching for a tool that eventually led to the development of Pretty Link. He tried to find solutions but found none that completely solved his problem.
• [0:57:07] “Initially with Pretty Link, I didn’t even have any idea that it would make money. I just put it out there on the repository thinking: well, this is what you do. You put software back out there into the community and give back a little bit. And there was kind of a big uptake. I think the first day there were almost 200 people who downloaded it. Just the first day! I was pretty excited about that, and over the next few months, I thought: ‘I wonder if there is a way I could make money at this?’ [slightly editted]”
• [0:57:43] “WordPress, in general, does not make it easy to monetize plugins.” Anyone who sells premium plugins that can do automatic updates has to reverse engineer WordPress a little bit and create their own server that the plugin can talk to and get updates from. “It’s pretty involved.” Initially, they were using FTP to copy files into WordPress, but over the years, they have gotten better at utilizing the plugin management facilities of WordPress.
• [0:59:07] Affiliate Royale and MemberPress were also needs that Blair had identified while working with other software or clients in those fields. He found things that were good, but not exactly what he needed, so he decided to build it himself. With the update mechanism from Pretty Link in place, he had an advantage with the other products. For the most part, the products were a “scratch-your-own-itch kind of thing.”
• [1:00:54] For resources, Blair recommends the book The Personal MBA, getting a good accountant, and GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping. The Personal MBA is his number one from the many business books he has read. “If anybody has one book to read, they should read The Personal MBA.” GoDaddy Bookkeeping integrates with Stripe and PayPal allowing them to track numerous small transactions. With BuyNow for Stripe, Caseproof gets a couple of cents per transaction as a fee. They must have software to track thousands of transactions. He has also heard good things about Xero and Less Accounting. FreshBooks is another great resource. Concerning accountants, Blair feels that you can’t replace the in-depth professional knowledge of a good accountant.
• [1:05:03] Buy Now for Stripe is a plugin that allows users to accept credit card payments from a WordPress website without an SSL certificate. It’s the most SaaS-like of their products. The backend is a Ruby-based application. For a credit card payment, it redirects to a secure payment server for the payment and then back to the original site when complete. It is similar to a PayPal flow without a PayPal account. It uses Stripe Connect, so it uses your Stripe account and is connected to the Buy Now for Stripe service. They facilitate the transaction, but the money goes straight into your account minus a small fee. They assess a transaction fee on top of Stripe’s fees (for which they have gotten some flak), but if you weigh the transaction fee against the cost of an SSL, it’s less expensive in many cases. If you’re doing high volume, investigate getting an SSL. Buy Now for Stripe also has some features to facilitate the delivery of products; for example, it will send a receipt to a user with a link to where a product can be downloaded. They have had a lot of requests to integrate with MemberPress to allow transactions from MemberPress without an SSL, so they are looking into that.

Resources Mentioned

• Affiliate Royale – a WordPress plugin that allows you to manage a complete affiliate program. See above or listen at [0:52:28].
• Apache Struts – an open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating web applications based on Java. It is extensible using a plugin architecture. It has plugins to support REST, AJAX, and JSON.Java Struts – see Apache Struts.
• Authorize.net – credit card processing.
• bbPress – a WordPress plugin to create online forums.
• Bitly – a link shortening and tracking service.
• Braintree – online payment processing.
• BuddyPress – a WordPress plugin to help you build a community website with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
• Buy Now for Stripe – accept payments on your WordPress site without an SSL certificate
• Caseproof – Blair Williams’ company, makers of Pretty Link, Member Press, Affiliate Royale, and Buy Now for Stripe.
• Easy Digital Downloads – e-commerce web app for digital products.
• Enterprise JavaBeans – server-side software based on Java to encapsulate business logic.
• eWay – online payment processing.
• eWay Australia – online payment processing for Australia.
• FreshBooks – small business accounting software.
• GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping – online bookkeeping.
• Google Charts – interactive charts for use in browser and on mobile devices.
• Google’s Visualization API – API for Google Charts.
• Java Struts – see Apache Struts.
• Less Accounting – online accounting software.
• MemberPress – WordPress plugin to manage membership sites allowing you to accept payments, control access, and sell digital products securely.
• PayPal – web app to pay for online transactions.
• PayPal for Business – a service to accept online payments using PayPal or credit cards.
• PHP – a script-type programming language used by WordPress and widely used on the web embedded in HTML.
• Pretty Link – Caseproof’s WordPress plugin to manage affiliate links on WordPress sites.
• Pretty Link Pro – the paid version of Pretty Link. See above or listen at [0:19:15]. AddsJavaScript redirects, meta refresh redirects using HTML, cloaking, pixel tracking, Tweet automation, social bars, Tweet counters, keyword replacement, alternate base URLs, and geographic redirects.
• Ruby – a script-type programming language with an elegant syntax. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, has said that he is “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple.”
• Ruby on Rails – on open-source Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating web apps based on the Ruby programming language.
• Shopify – e-commerce web app.
• Stripe – web app to accept credit card payments.
• Stripe Connect – service to enable payments for sellers, vendors, contractors, etc.
• The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business – book by Josh Kaufman covering the essentials of business.
• WooCommerce – e-commerce web app.
• WordPress – software to create web pages (websites, blogs, and apps).
• WordPress Plugin Directory – the official WordPress repository for plugins.
• Xero – online accounting software.

*Disclosure: Some of the links on this page may be affiliate links. I may earn a commission if you purchase through these links. These commissions help to cover the cost of producing the podcast. I am affiliated only with companies I know and trust to deliver what you need. In most cases, affiliate links are to products and services I currently use or have used in the past. I would not recommend these resources if I did not sincerely believe that they would help you. I value you as a visitor/customer far more than any small commission I might earn from recommending a product or service. I recommend many more resources with which I am not affiliated than affiliated. In most cases where there is an affiliation, I will note it, but affiliations come and go, and the notes may not keep up.