4 ms·

This is a really cool tool, and seems much more polished than other similar sites I've used in the past. So first, thanks! Second, though—this seems really exp

This is a really cool tool, and seems much more polished than other similar sites I've used in the past. So first, thanks! Second, though—this seems really expensive to run, based on what you're saying here. How are you monetizing or otherwise funding it?

mmaunder 6y ago
FYI, if you don't want to wait for results (because we're slammed right now via HN) here are a few examples: www.wordfence.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/f5fcf22f-8daf-5567-b301-dad0c42cb8ce https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/f5fcf22f-8daf-5567-b3... cybersecurity.miami.edu: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/5ad00348-8c5d-566c-8adb-9c795401962d https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/5ad00348-8c5d-566c-8a... apple.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/a8f2f34f-b695-5ce9-b699-99a0ec4c6989 https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/a8f2f34f-b695-5ce9-b6... facebook.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/afffcc61-4eb9-5e6c-8840-cd62cea8d84d https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/afffcc61-4eb9-5e6c-88... Thanks!! I run Wordfence which does quite well. Profitable and the team is around 35 really great folks with a focus on solid engineering. So we fund it ourselves. For a going concern like us the costs are very modest and we can afford to run it indefinitely without charging. In fact just the bit of brand awareness we get for our main product, Wordfence probably more than justifies the costs. We actually created this as an internal tool because there wasn't anything that would give you a clear indication of site performance from DNS lookup to connect to TTFB to page render from around the world. Our own market is global and even a 1% drop in conversion really costs. After building it we realized that it's very little incremental effort to make it available for all. As I mentioned we're about to migrate into AWS where we run much of our other infrastructure. The financial model and eng design we came up with keeps our costs surprisingly low. We can handle huge traffic spikes and it roughly doubled the cost, even with the spikes. So I'm confident we can run this for the long haul as a free product. A few things I can commit to: Firstly, it's extremely unlikely that you'll see ads on FastOrSlow other than our own company name. That's never been our model and I can't stand when a great site or service gets smothered in ads. In addition, our company has been around since 2006 and we've been made acquisition offers many many times by large companies that you know well. We've consistently turned them down and will continue to do so because we are profitable, love our independence and I think we all know what happens to many great products after acquisition. I'm telling you this because I want you to know that this won't be changing hands to a company that will try to monetize it in obnoxious ways. No plans to offer a paid service right now. Our next release is for internal use and will allow us to do performance surveys across large numbers of sites and present statistically significant insights as research to the online community. Happy to answer any other questions. Thanks for your interest!
- mmaunder 6y ago
  Should have mentioned, but it's probably obvious, that we also don't need funding. So won't be raising VC with the pressures that come with that. Nothing against folks who do, but that's our situation.
- twicetwice 6y ago
  You're saying all the right things :) thanks for the awesome level of detail, too! You guys seem like a really cool company. I'll definitely be making good use of this product in the future; thanks for making it and sharing it!
  - mmaunder 6y ago
    Thank you! We're hiring!! (Sorry, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that). We're currently hiring PHP developers and for QA. visit our company website at https://www.defiant.com https://www.defiant.com for details.
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Darn, if I were in the US I would have applied. Fantastic website!
- GordonS 6y ago
  A WAF specifically marketed at WordPress is a clever idea. You mentioned that Wordfence has a team of 35 behind it. This seems like a large team, and I'm curious to know what the distribution of roles is like? Also interested to know how many users and paying customers Wordfence has?
  - mmaunder 6y ago
    We focus fairly heavily on engineering, particularly on QA. My co-founder Kerry Boyte ran QA at Symantec, eToys, BBC, and a few other well known companies. She actually built BBC's digital TV testing lab herself. Ran testing for the MS Exchange version of Norton back in the 90s. And ran the web QA team at eToys before the suits messed things up there. I'm a dev (ceo these days) and I wrote the first version of Wordfence. Also worked at many big and small companies in South Africa, London and USA. We're US based now. And so we're both engineering focused, and our process is to only ship rock solid code via excellent QA. Funny thing. Finding vulnerabilities is actually just QA. And a vuln is just a celebrity bug. So this culture really helps foster great security research too. Another big area we invest in is customer service. Our CS team does a great job and we also focus substantial energy on community support in free forums, which really helps foster goodwill from the community and build a relationship with folks who use our free product, many of whom become paying customers. I started my career in ops in the 90s before moving to dev and am passionate about high performance (as you can tell from fastorslow) - and so we spend a lot of energy and budget on solid operations to support our products. Kerry is kind of a math guru and is our COO and CFO these days. So we run a tight ship in terms of financials, which is pretty much why we're still around. Cashflow plan updated daily. Awesome projections. Awesome granularity. Sorry if I'm over-sharing, but I love entrepreneurship and perhaps this will give other folks starting out some insight. We have around 3 to 5 million free customers. Can't share how many paying, but it's a lot. I haven't coded for some time now. In 2015 I completely handed off coding on Wordfence to a brilliant developer named Matt who is still with us. I've moved my focus 100% to leadership, strategy and somewhat of a CTO role, but I share that with the strong tech leads in our engineering team. Hope that helps. We're a private company, so I couldn't just dump our internal data, but I hope that gives you some flavor of who we are, our focus, team distribution and culture. Regards, Mark.

mmaunder 6y ago

FYI, if you don't want to wait for results (because we're slammed right now via HN) here are a few examples: www.wordfence.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/f5fcf22f-8daf-5567-b301-dad0c42cb8ce https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/f5fcf22f-8daf-5567-b3... cybersecurity.miami.edu: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/5ad00348-8c5d-566c-8adb-9c795401962d https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/5ad00348-8c5d-566c-8a... apple.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/a8f2f34f-b695-5ce9-b699-99a0ec4c6989 https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/a8f2f34f-b695-5ce9-b6... facebook.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/afffcc61-4eb9-5e6c-8840-cd62cea8d84d https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/afffcc61-4eb9-5e6c-88... Thanks!! I run Wordfence which does quite well. Profitable and the team is around 35 really great folks with a focus on solid engineering. So we fund it ourselves. For a going concern like us the costs are very modest and we can afford to run it indefinitely without charging. In fact just the bit of brand awareness we get for our main product, Wordfence probably more than justifies the costs. We actually created this as an internal tool because there wasn't anything that would give you a clear indication of site performance from DNS lookup to connect to TTFB to page render from around the world. Our own market is global and even a 1% drop in conversion really costs. After building it we realized that it's very little incremental effort to make it available for all. As I mentioned we're about to migrate into AWS where we run much of our other infrastructure. The financial model and eng design we came up with keeps our costs surprisingly low. We can handle huge traffic spikes and it roughly doubled the cost, even with the spikes. So I'm confident we can run this for the long haul as a free product. A few things I can commit to: Firstly, it's extremely unlikely that you'll see ads on FastOrSlow other than our own company name. That's never been our model and I can't stand when a great site or service gets smothered in ads. In addition, our company has been around since 2006 and we've been made acquisition offers many many times by large companies that you know well. We've consistently turned them down and will continue to do so because we are profitable, love our independence and I think we all know what happens to many great products after acquisition. I'm telling you this because I want you to know that this won't be changing hands to a company that will try to monetize it in obnoxious ways. No plans to offer a paid service right now. Our next release is for internal use and will allow us to do performance surveys across large numbers of sites and present statistically significant insights as research to the online community. Happy to answer any other questions. Thanks for your interest!

mmaunder 6y ago
Should have mentioned, but it's probably obvious, that we also don't need funding. So won't be raising VC with the pressures that come with that. Nothing against folks who do, but that's our situation.
twicetwice 6y ago
You're saying all the right things :) thanks for the awesome level of detail, too! You guys seem like a really cool company. I'll definitely be making good use of this product in the future; thanks for making it and sharing it!
- mmaunder 6y ago
  Thank you! We're hiring!! (Sorry, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that). We're currently hiring PHP developers and for QA. visit our company website at https://www.defiant.com https://www.defiant.com for details.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Darn, if I were in the US I would have applied. Fantastic website!
GordonS 6y ago
A WAF specifically marketed at WordPress is a clever idea. You mentioned that Wordfence has a team of 35 behind it. This seems like a large team, and I'm curious to know what the distribution of roles is like? Also interested to know how many users and paying customers Wordfence has?
- mmaunder 6y ago
  We focus fairly heavily on engineering, particularly on QA. My co-founder Kerry Boyte ran QA at Symantec, eToys, BBC, and a few other well known companies. She actually built BBC's digital TV testing lab herself. Ran testing for the MS Exchange version of Norton back in the 90s. And ran the web QA team at eToys before the suits messed things up there. I'm a dev (ceo these days) and I wrote the first version of Wordfence. Also worked at many big and small companies in South Africa, London and USA. We're US based now. And so we're both engineering focused, and our process is to only ship rock solid code via excellent QA. Funny thing. Finding vulnerabilities is actually just QA. And a vuln is just a celebrity bug. So this culture really helps foster great security research too. Another big area we invest in is customer service. Our CS team does a great job and we also focus substantial energy on community support in free forums, which really helps foster goodwill from the community and build a relationship with folks who use our free product, many of whom become paying customers. I started my career in ops in the 90s before moving to dev and am passionate about high performance (as you can tell from fastorslow) - and so we spend a lot of energy and budget on solid operations to support our products. Kerry is kind of a math guru and is our COO and CFO these days. So we run a tight ship in terms of financials, which is pretty much why we're still around. Cashflow plan updated daily. Awesome projections. Awesome granularity. Sorry if I'm over-sharing, but I love entrepreneurship and perhaps this will give other folks starting out some insight. We have around 3 to 5 million free customers. Can't share how many paying, but it's a lot. I haven't coded for some time now. In 2015 I completely handed off coding on Wordfence to a brilliant developer named Matt who is still with us. I've moved my focus 100% to leadership, strategy and somewhat of a CTO role, but I share that with the strong tech leads in our engineering team. Hope that helps. We're a private company, so I couldn't just dump our internal data, but I hope that gives you some flavor of who we are, our focus, team distribution and culture. Regards, Mark.