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One of my dumb moments – Fast Beats Free!

More than 15 years ago, a friend of mine pitched me this idea:

“Let’s band together and create a CMS (content management system) app that people can use to build their websites.“

My reaction?

“That’s dumb! Why would you create a paid CMS app when you have WordPress and Joomla that are feature-rich and free? How are we going to compete with that? Why would anyone pay for using our app?“

Time proved me wrong. 

My (no longer) friend moved on and partnered with someone else. They created the CMS, and they sold the service to lots of customers. 

Many years later, when I discovered this, I was confused. I could not understand who would pay money for a service that you could get for free elsewhere. I imagined that were regular users who were duped into buying this CMS app. 

But I was wrong again.

Eventually, I discovered on my own that I would pay for software that had a free alternative. Why? Because it saved me time.

“Fast Beats Free” – I’ve heard this line from Alex Hormozi, and it clicked so hard in my head as many puzzle pieces were falling into place. 

As a young person, when I had lots of time and no money, I would always go for the free stuff since I imagined I would have plenty of time to figure it out. But a paid service is for people who already realized that time is the most valuable resource, so they would gladly spend money to save time. 

So how do you compete with WordPress or Joomla!? You provide the same service faster and with customer support. And that is exactly what my friend did. And his customers were not duped, but they got immense value from building their website in hours instead of months. It was truly a win-win situation that I could not see.

I hope this story will challenge you to think differently about how you go around building your online presence. And to realize that if someone can help you do it in a few days, they are worth way more than someone who can help you do it in six months! Even though the six months person works longer and harder for you. 

It’s not about the effort; it’s about the results and how fast you get them. 

Community Software: FLARUM

My latest insight is that you grow faster, and it’s more fun (and challenging) when you have a community!

Because of that insight, I am consciously looking at how other people are building their communities, and, being the software nerd that I am, my attention goes to online communities. 

A new player around the block is making some noise when it comes to community software. And that is Flarum.

Here is the promise:

“Forums made simple. Modern, fast, and free!”

I have spent a couple of days taking this forum for a spin and testing out this promise. The short version is that I am impressed. 

Let’s break this down in a post that will be somewhat technical. 

Forums Made Simple

“Forums made simple” – I believe they fulfill this promise. The team behind Flarum chose to focus on what makes a forum a forum: the ability for users to create discussions and respond to each other. And that works beautifully well. However, to have great software, you can’t stop there. Otherwise, anyone who can follow a Larcast could roll out their forum in Laravel. The team made the forum simple and provided a scaffold and a framework so you can then make it as complicated as you need! 

Modern

“Modern” – This promise is also kept. There are two sides to this “modern” feature. 

First is the end-user: do they perceive it as modern? And I would give them a “yes” just by looking at the mobile experience. I don’t want to say that it is beautiful because that is too subjective. Instead, I would say the user experience is great: it works, and it works as you would expect it to work. Of course, any old software can hire a designer and create a “modern theme/look” for their forum, but that is only one part of it.

The other part of “modern” is the internal workings of the forum. And you would need to be a developer to appreciate the beauty of Flarum truly. The internals might be something that the end-users or community managers might not care about. Still, it will be important for the person in charge of maintaining the software on the server. 

To highlight a couple of things:

  • Using `composer` to manage the upgrades and the extensions – brilliant! I have not seen this done before in a forum context, but it is such a clean way to reuse code. It is different from what WordPress is doing, where every plugin has to install its dependencies, and you end up with loads of duplicate code and potential conflict that is sometimes very hard to spot and fix. While using composer makes me happy, I am also concerned with the possible problems that may show up in the future and that we cannot possibly see right now. 
  • Making this a Single Page Application. The front end is now a JavaScript client that consumes the API that the forum exposes. This pattern opens up a ton of flexibility on how this platform can be used – including completely replacing the front end if you are brave enough. The only issue that I see is potentially some SEO problems that plague all SPAs. 

Fast

 “Fast” – another kept promise. The lighting fast page loads were the very first thing I noticed about this software. It feels so snappy! Aven the search function feels fast. The high-performance is another result of the internals, and so it’s not something that older software can pull off just by “modernizing their look and feel.”

Free

“Free” – this is technically free… with a big “BUT.” 

To install Flarum, you need to run commands in your shell. And if you have no idea what that is, that is where the “Free” problem starts!

The power and performance of Flarum come at a cost. At the time of writing, you need to be pretty nerdy to install it and feel comfortable about it. Sure, you can copy/paste the commands in the tutorial, but if you don’t understand what you are doing, any tiny problem can be a game stopper for you. So even though the forum is free to install and use, you might have to pay for an installation service (that the Flarum team might provide in the future), and you also need to buy hosting where you can use the shell and the PHP composer software. 

All of this makes me think that Flarum might be best for companies that can hire such a developer and purchase a server with the required specs. 

And speaking of companies, this leads me into another potential trap of “Free,” and that is: you don’t want to build a community using software that will not be there for you in the long run. And if nobody is paying to help the software grow and have the bugs fixed, how long will Flarum be around? For a company, this is a risk that needs to be evaluated, and it can make a managed/established solution look much better in the long run, especially because it is not free.

I see the team behind Flarum making steps towards launching a managed solution, which will provide a stream of income and invaluable feedback on making the software better. And they may also establish a service of paid support that can provide additional incentive to keep this project going. 

Until there are some clear signs that Flarum is here to say, I believe it would be risky to build your community around it if you want to play a long-term game. But if you need to launch a project quickly that requires a community around it, you should give Flarum a try! 

The Competition

Flarum reminds me a lot about Vanilla Forums, and I believe that if they play their cards right, they could become their main competitor. 

You can get all of Flarum for free (if you have tech chops to install and manage it), while Vanilla OSS is very limited compared to the cloud option.

Send email reliably from WordPress

I am getting close to 20 years of putting together websites for myself and other people, and I have seen a shift happen with email, both in what is possible and what the expectations are. 

In the “old days,” you would get a hosting account for your site, and the email would magically work every time you would need to send one. 

This setup worked because the email protocol itself is very open and interoperable, so it is straightforward to send an email to someone, as long as you have their address.

This openness also invited spammers, who abused the system, making it harder for everyone to send and receive genuine and relevant communication. 

Today, most people expect that email will work “like it used to,” but what is more likely to happen is that all the emails you send out of our WordPress site will not reach their destination. You will not notice this problem unless you specifically test for it. Instead, you will see a lack of engagement or customers complaining they did not get their download links. 

There are a couple of solutions to this problem that are free, but I will present the most effective one: buy a paid email delivery service. 

When you pay for your email delivery service, there are some significant advantages over a free solution:

  • you immediately set yourself apart from the spamming crowd that is using the free solution
  • you have dedicated tools and reports to monitor that your email is delivered and reaches its destination
  • you get support with configuring the email sending process correctly, which is not trivial
  • you get analytics – which is essential for a business owner
  • someone (the service provider) is directly responsible for delivering your email and making sure the process works as expected

Unfortunately, I have seen a lot of people shy away from paying for email. Put your business hat on and think of it this way: how much money and (more importantly) how much time are you wasting with lost emails, with dealing with un-happy customers, with the uncertainty that your outbound messages reach their targets? I bet that the numbers you come up with more than make up for the cost of a paid email service. 

What email service should you use? 

In the past, I have worked with SendInBlue, SendGrid, and Mandrill. Today, my favorite one is MailGun. I am not an affiliate; I recommend them because (as I write this) they offer the best value for money. 

To connect WordPress to Mailgun, the plugin to use is WPMailSMTP.

Shopify – The cost of free

I am a long time user of WordPress and WooCommerce as an eCommerce platform. 

The reasons I got into using those two are likely the same as for everyone: both WooComerce and WordPress are free, so this leaves me with more money for marketing. And a secondary reason: both WooCommerce and WordPress are open-source, which means you can customize them to do pretty much anything you want. 

So what is my conclusion after over five years of using this combo? 

It is not really “free!”

There is the obvious cost of having to pay for hosting. And if you want to do anything useful with WooCommerce, you need to add up extensions and plugins that are not free. The same goes for professional-grade plugins that you will install into the main WordPress site. The total costs with software add to about $50/mo, and to that, you need to add your hosting, which for serious stores it will not be a “starter plan.”

But there is a hidden cost that I don’t see many people talk about. And that is the time and focus you need to put into setting up WordPress and WooCommerce and then maintaining it to make sure it remains secure and up to date. And when (not if) something breaks down, it’s up to you to fix it. 

As a software developer, I am OK with fiddling with tech, fixing bugs, diving deep into the code. But as I transition into being and thinking like an entrepreneur, I notice that instead of working on my business, on my marketing, on coming up with new ways to find and support my target audience, I spend a lot of time tinkering with code. And while it is fun, it does not scale. 

The web is changing at an ever-increasing rate. Sometimes just trying to keep up eats a lot of my time. And the thing with “time” is that it is a non-renewable resource. You cannot ever get a refund on a time you’ve spent doing something. 

So what do you want to do? Spend time learning how to put together the free tools and fix them when they get broken? Or would you instead spend time creating content, products or doing marketing, or simply taking some time off to spend with the family? 

For all these reasons, I am now looking into and recommending the Shopify solution. 

Shopify is right for you if:

  • you are serious about your store, so you will generate sales
  • you don’t have any tech skills, and you don’t want to spend time learning tech
  • you don’t want to worry about security, backups, performance, or maintenance 
  • you value time more than money

If you know of another eStore platform that saves you time, let me know in the comments below. I’d also like to know your experience with WooCommerce as it relates to this article.