Moving Into Products with Vito Peleg

In this episode I talk to Vito Peleg, the founder of WP Feedback. Vito and his team launched WP Feedback in the summer of 2019 and it was one of the most spectacular and well executed product launches I've seen in the WordPress space. This was manifested in more than $100,000 in sales in the first month. Listen to Vito unpack the journey from freelancer, to agency, to successful product business.

Links

Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress
Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget!

➡️ Create a free Branch account

Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today on the show. I'm excited to bring on a Vito Peleg to tell the story of how he went from client work to one of the most eye catching product launches in the WordPress ecosystem that I remember at least Vito is the founder of WP feedback, a product that helps you systematize your website, project delivery process from start to finish.
From what I recall from my conversation with Vito at the hallway track at WordCamp Brighton, he started out busking in the streets of London, and I can't wait to unpack his journey on this episode. You can find Vito on Twitter at feedback WP. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch.
Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your work for science. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need, making it simple for easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines.
It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Why is this many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free and branch cei.com.
I started this episode by asking Vito to explain what his business looked like before he launched WP feedback. Vito, you want to try to explain how your business looked before you launched WP feedback, and then two weeks after you launched it. Like how did it look before and how did it look after?
Before WP Feedback I had an agency and we're working at 12 guys, a few was in London, but the rest were abroad, you know, like all around the world. And we were basically building websites for clients that was the day-to-day every day, full few years. And then having a few hundreds of projects that throughout this time. I was looking for a way to get out of the agency model for a while.
You know, when I was looking at all kinds of different aspects, maybe creating even a course. Or, you know, all of these kinds of channels that people look to scale up while I was doing my research and how I can actually do this. The problem with communicating with clients is always been there. Um, and you always jump around between a thousand tools and they, you know, they, you just don't get on the same page as they did.
But while I was trying to focus on finding a way to scale, this was actually really hurting our business and profitability on the other side. So I came up with the idea of how it should be laid out, and I asked the dev team to build it for us. You know, not even thinking about this as it's going to be the product, but actually thinking about, okay, let them fix this problem while I actually focused on what I want to build as a way to scale up, but it worked like magic.
And then it just kind of dawned on me that it's probably not a problem that only I am experiencing. We went on the market research and as soon as we launched it, we had a pretty nice explosion right at the beginning. We managed to generate six figures in revenue within the first 30 days as a new product in this space, this was groundbreaking.
Like no one did that before. And yeah. And so as soon as this happened, I was like, okay, no more client work. That's it. It was clear. Cut like that. You were just telling me before we hit record. That you're working on V2 of WP feedback and it felt like the way you described it, like, it feels like there's quite a big difference between mean doing client work and being product business.
So like what's the day to day difference between your old business and the business you're running now. Right. So in my previous business, I was the business. So I was in the middle of everything and I was the biggest bottleneck of the company. Everything had to land on my table. Well, it was distributed out to other people.
So my day to day was very much influenced by that. I was actually, yeah, talking to clients and sending out invoices and making sure that this task has been done. And following up with my team. Doing all of those, uh, repetitive tasks that are mind numbing. I even compare this. If you remember it back in the fifties, there was this lady is that the call centers, where they were just like redirecting the calls from one place to another.
And that was my day, you know, looking back, it's such a devaluation of my time. Doing this three hours out of every day, uh, that it's crazy compared to what I'm focusing on right now. So now I'm a lot calmer to be honest, but I was back then, you know, I delegate a lot more. So I'm totally aware that the way that this product has developed as evolved over the past year and a half, it brings it to a point where I am no longer the thing, you know, I don't matter.
In the grand scheme of things, it's all about understanding the client's needs, our user's needs. And trying to implement that. And when you're working as an agency, you only get to build the first version of the product. In most cases, you know, you build a website and then you send off to the client to figure things out on his own.
Of course you do care plans and stuff, but there's no continuous development in. Most of the projects, you know, which means that, um, for us, the client is the client, you know, is the guy that bought the website. But now the client is actually the user, which I think is a much more healthy, uh, way of looking at things.
So of course we were doing market research with our clients and asking them, who is your target audience and all of that. But, you know, you can't be as tuned into the end. Clients wants and needs as when you are the guy in charge of the product itself.
So we definitely going to talk a lot more about dopey feedback. I tease this in the intro, but you, your background is as a musician and it's kind of funny. Like, I feel like every time I talk to someone in Europe, the way they started making websites is because they built a band website. And when I talk to people in the U S it's always the church website.
So I don't know what that tells you about people, but it's just interesting. So you got started in music. I found your band on YouTube. JC ACE, right? It's the band. So people can go and check that out. We'll link that in the show notes as well. And somehow you ended up running WordPress agency. How did that happen?
I always want to, you know, since I was a teenager, I wanted to be a rock star. That was my kind of dream as a teenager. And that was my focus. So we were actually b...