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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

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.

ayoubElk 6y ago
Sounds like a good product, with a well thought-out process/vision, and a great team that enjoys working on it. Congrats on the success!
- mmaunder 6y ago
  Thank you.
slowwriter 6y ago
I feel that half my job as WordPress developer is knowing or finding quality plugins. It can be a real jungle sometimes. Reading your posts leave no doubt in my mind that Wordfence should be my go-to security plugin in the future.
lioeters 6y ago
Thank you for sharing the history of the company Defiant, about the people who develop WordFence, and the guiding principles and approach in management. The overview was insightful, to see what makes up a well-run operation: how the engineering, tight financial management, quality assurance, performance, security, customer support and fostering the user community - all tie together to make a solid, growing business. It definitely earns trust and respect for the company's culture and decisions. As a dev learning the ropes in a CTO role, this kind of open communication about the internal workings of a successful company and product is great food for thought. To decisively not seek acquisitions and venture capital, and instead value independence, profitability, good finances, engineering, QA.. This will stay in my mind as a role model. If there's an opportunity where I work, I'll likely recommend WordFence or other services by the company. (In fact, performance profiling of large/heavy sites has come up a number of times this year.) Elsewhere a possible blog post on migrating to AWS was mentioned. I love that style of articles, describing the thought process that goes into technical decisions, how it was planned and implemented. Hope I can catch it here if/when it's published.

ayoubElk 6y ago

Sounds like a good product, with a well thought-out process/vision, and a great team that enjoys working on it. Congrats on the success!

mmaunder 6y ago
Thank you.

slowwriter 6y ago

I feel that half my job as WordPress developer is knowing or finding quality plugins. It can be a real jungle sometimes. Reading your posts leave no doubt in my mind that Wordfence should be my go-to security plugin in the future.

lioeters 6y ago

Thank you for sharing the history of the company Defiant, about the people who develop WordFence, and the guiding principles and approach in management. The overview was insightful, to see what makes up a well-run operation: how the engineering, tight financial management, quality assurance, performance, security, customer support and fostering the user community - all tie together to make a solid, growing business. It definitely earns trust and respect for the company's culture and decisions. As a dev learning the ropes in a CTO role, this kind of open communication about the internal workings of a successful company and product is great food for thought. To decisively not seek acquisitions and venture capital, and instead value independence, profitability, good finances, engineering, QA.. This will stay in my mind as a role model. If there's an opportunity where I work, I'll likely recommend WordFence or other services by the company. (In fact, performance profiling of large/heavy sites has come up a number of times this year.) Elsewhere a possible blog post on migrating to AWS was mentioned. I love that style of articles, describing the thought process that goes into technical decisions, how it was planned and implemented. Hope I can catch it here if/when it's published.