#353 PageLeap’s Founder Will Pemble: The Journey from Web.com to Lightning-Fast Landing Pages

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Mehmet: Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today I'm very pleased joining me Will Pemble, who is the founder of PageLeap and also Will was the founder of web. com. You know, like I like usually to keep it to my [00:01:00] guests to introduce themselves, but today, you know, Will is a special guest.

Mehmet: So I, I did you a favor today, Will, but still, uh, thank you for being on the show. So for the people who might not know you, tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you are currently up to.

Will: Sure. Well, thanks. Uh, it's, uh, it's good to be here. Um, okay. I'll give you the, I'll give you the quickie intro version.

Will: My name is Will Ble. Uh, I've, I've spent my entire life trying to kind of avoid real work and do things that are interesting and exciting to me, and I haven't, I've never really paid a whole lot of attention to, uh, what. What the mainstream normal, uh, grown up folks would want, and that's, that's worked out for me.

Will: I was the founder of several technology companies, technology training companies, the most notable among them web. com, which started in the basement of my house here in Connecticut and grew to be the 19th biggest web hosting company in the world. Um, the day I, uh, the day I got acquired, um, and, uh, And about 19 days before I got fired.

Will: So that's another story [00:02:00] though. Um, today I spent a lot, it's a true story too. Um, I spent a lot of time after the web. com adventure. I spent a lot of time in the management consulting business trying to figure out answers to questions like, how did you do that? And it was, uh, it was a really good question and I didn't really know how I did it.

Will: And so I dug all the way to the bottom of the pot and researched things like organizational psychology and got some education in that space and learned how to learn how I sort of intuitively built and scaled a successful company. And then I spent the next 10 or so 15, maybe years working with other technology companies, helping them to grow and scale and realize efficiencies and, um, and, and play better than they thought they could.

Will: Was it was essentially, uh, the, that's kind of the key to it is making people play better than they think they can. Um, COVID happened and that was like most people that was a, that was a shift for me and what [00:03:00] I ended up doing is I ended up like stopping kind of everything. I stopped spending 48 hours a month on airplanes.

Will: I stopped traveling to two or three different continents every month. I stopped working with people. I stopped talking to people. I would just like was all by myself. Um, I built a couple of sprinter vans during that time where you convert a cargo van into an RV. I did some of that because I do silly projects.

Will: And, um, and then I, a friend and I got into, uh, kind of back to web hosting and coding and, and doing things that didn't require a whole lot interaction. And, um, and, and I, and I rediscovered my love for Writing software, my love for building hosting systems, my love for automation. Um, and I, and I also kind of satisfied my, my, like my deep desire to like just have something to do what I said, right?

Will: Because if you tell a computer to do it, it'll do it. [00:04:00] Right. I mean, you, and, uh, it's not the same with people. Um, out of that came this, came this platform called page leap, which is, which is what I'm working on today and have been for the last couple of years. And, and page leap at its core is an automation platform.

Will: It's a web hosting landing page hosting platform that just flat performs better than any other hosting platform doing landing pages. And that's, and that's, it is me bragging. But it's also an objectively true measurable fact. Um, and, and that goes kind of all the way back to my roots, uh, of, of building one of the first big web hosting companies that ever got built.

Will: Uh, I'm, I'm good at that stuff. And, and so is my partner, Chris. And so that's what we're working on today. We're, we're, we're serving up landing pages, um, for that, that are optimized for local SEO. And we're just, we're just doing it better than anybody else. And it's a, it's a joy. It's a, it's a heap of fun.[00:05:00]

Mehmet: Absolutely. You know, like a lot of things we can discuss today regarding this. So multiple points you mentioned, you know, they triggered a lot of things that honestly, I didn't prepare before. And, you know, the audience know that sometimes, you know, things pop ups during the conversation. I want to revert back to one thing I prepared, which was related to the story you mentioned.

Mehmet: So, you really discovered the passion you set for web hosting and coding and all this stuff. But you decided to enter, you correct me if I'm wrong, to kind of a crowded area with, with a lot of, you know, other players in, in, in the landing page space, right? So, but I'm sure as someone experienced, and you have done this a couple of times, multiple times, you've seen some missings in the current offerings that You know, encouraged you to say, [00:06:00] Hey, hold on one second.

Mehmet: There's a need in the market for something different of what is currently presented. So what was that exactly? Well, I'm always curious to know from every single founder I speak with to know what was the aha moment that say, you know, yeah, we need to do this because yeah, it's crowded market, but we can do it in a better way.

Will: Sure. Well, great question. So the first part, um, when you mention a crowded market, what I think of is there's a, there's a, uh, there's a saying that says like, you know, as soon as everybody thinks it's a good idea, you're probably too late. Right. And so, you know, Bitcoin, uh, you know, just like pick a, pick a stock, you know, uh, but, and so as soon as, as soon as like, you know, You know, the people at the checkout counter in the grocery store, as soon as they're talking about it, it's probably too late, right?

Will: You're not, you're not there anymore. But, and so, yeah, the landing page of business is an incredibly crowded market. And there's a lot of companies in, in that space that are doing kind of different versions of it. And [00:07:00] that's, and that's for absolute sure. But on the flip side of the crowded market, it's too late argument is, um, If that market is so crowded, why and what are they doing that prevents an apple from emerging in that space?

Will: Right? The computer, you know, the personal computer market is pretty crowded. The, the, the cell phone market is pretty crowded, but like apple just like kicks the hell out of anybody who tries to get in that space. And the reason I think that apple does it, Is they do it better than anybody else? So, which takes me to the next, the next question.

Will: What was the, what was the thinking? What, what made me think it was such a good idea to get into this space? And it's a particular thing. I worked with a client, a management consulting client of mine, and he is, uh, SEO guy, this guy, he's a, he's a real SEO expert. And, and one of the real SEO experts, like an enterprise level, seriously [00:08:00] talented guy, and his job was to create SEO strategy, figure out what, you know, in the landing page business in particular, what should be on the landing page, how should it be coded?

Will: How should it be deployed? What kind of content, what kind of engagement, all of the things. And so this, this consultant knew exactly how. This product should be produced, how this landing page should be deployed, how fast it should go, all the things. And then he went to one of the biggies in the landing page space, right?

Will: One of the big providers in the space. And I won't mention their name because I wouldn't want anybody to go there because they don't do it particularly well. But, um, and, and, and also, you know, you should talk to you, maybe you talk to me instead, but what happened was, um, my buddy would call. These, these landing page guys, you can say, Hey, I needed to do this in this.

Will: Can you change this? Can you fix that? Can you move this piece of content over here? Can you put a button there? Can you speed up just [00:09:00] like the basic performance of the thing? Because the page speed scores are terrible. Um, and the response that he got from this. Company and and I was in the room on the call.

Will: The response that he got from this company was, Oh, we'd really love to do that. We really don't have that feature yet. But you know, that's a really great idea. Why don't you go to our website and fill out a feature request? And then we'll put that with all the other feature requests that we get. And with this one we do.

Will: But I'm afraid you're out of development hours for this cycle. So you'd have to it. Renew your contract for another year and then we'd negotiate the cost of putting this button, um, above the fold, um, or making the, or making the, the menu, you know, stick to the top, you know, just like different kind of, you know, basic website stuff and, and this company who's supposedly an expert and a leader in the landing page business, they were just torturing the hell out of my friend and, and not, you know, Allowing him to execute the SEO strategy that he knew would work [00:10:00] and and that was a problem for me and so I so we get to the end of the phone call and hangs up the thing and I'm like, Steve, you know, I could maybe build you one of those.

Will: I'd be happy to do it. I know what it is that they're doing. I understand their technology and probably patented some of it. Um, yeah. And, uh, and, and like, you know, web. com owns a jillion patents for web hosting, automation and different things like, you know, like over the years. And so like there's, there's nobody that uses the internet that doesn't use something that was invented by web.

Will: com, like nobody. And, um, and so you're welcome and I'm sorry. Uh, how, whatever, whatever suits the story. Um, you know, automated, uh, recurring credit card billing. I'm sorry. So, um, so. I asked Steve, I was like, maybe I could just like build one for you. And Steve goes, no, we're not a software developer. We don't do that sort of stuff.

Will: I don't understand hosting. That's not our business. We're consultants. We tell you what to do and then you, and then you do it. And if they can't get it done, that's too bad. And then, so, okay, fine. A couple of months go by. [00:11:00] Same client, same provider, same phone call. Hey, could you do this and this and this?

Will: Oh, feature request. Why don't you go to our website and do the feature request? Why don't you F off to our website and do a feature request? And um, and then you, you know, renew your contract, pay us more money, and then we'll talk about whether or not we can put the button above the And um, and then that phone call ended and I'm like, Steve, Please, can I just build you one of these things?

Will: I it's there what they're doing. If you're me, it's not hard. And Steve was like, nah, we're not a software developer. Really don't want to get into that. I don't want to manage those kinds of systems. I don't have any expertise in that. And you know, it's like, I'm a consultant. I'm a consultant. I'm like. And then I was like, okay, and then I went home for the weekend and I just like spun up, uh, just like a basic little thing, right?

Will: I spun up a server. I put some together some code. I put this thing together and I and I used some, you know, an example of of the client and and where this big bad landing page provider [00:12:00] Was serving up landing pages for this restaurant chain in, in say like five seconds, right? Takes five seconds for a page to load.

Will: Now, if you're on TikTok, five seconds is an eternity, right? Um, so my little monkey version that I just spun up on a very, very simple instance, because I didn't have anything to do on a Saturday afternoon, 0. 86 seconds, right? And so I'm, I'm in a day, I'm able to serve up these landing pages at scale. In in less than a second when the great big giant provider can't get it together in less than five.

Will: And, and, and so you have a context for what one second means in the landing page business. If you can shave one second off of the load time of your landing page, you're going to increase your conversions by 17%. So one second equals 17%. Um, and that's a, that's a massive, massive number. It's not my number.

Will: It's Google's number. [00:13:00] Uh, it's Google's, it's Google's stat. So I built the thing. I went and I showed it to Steve. I was like, Steve, here, here's this, my gift to you here. And he was like, Oh my God, that's so amazing. That's fantastic. But you know, I'm still not a developer. I really don't want to get into that business.

Will: I'm like, okay, I'm going to go ahead and build a company around this because what I've seen in this crowded market. Which is where this whole story started. You have to think way back to when I started. But, um, in this crowded market, there's no company that's doing it well. And by well, I mean, there's no company that's doing it blindingly fast.

Will: Which is critically important to search results and there's no company that's doing it the way the client wants. They're just one size fits all in the thing and they're jamming customers into a product that's needed but nobody understands it. Well enough to [00:14:00] do it incredibly well and so page leap is built to solve those two problems page leap is insanely fast and we build it exactly the way the client or their marketing consulting team we build it exactly the way the client needs it and wants it built and.

Will: It's pretty successful.

Mehmet: That's amazing. And I will give you my, you know, like my two cents here with to what you mentioned. And I know like it's a Google stats. But for me, if I go to a landing page and it doesn't load fast enough, I'm going to skip it. I would say what a crap service these guys have if their landing page is not loading fast enough.

Mehmet: Of course, if I know like my internet is stable and fast enough, of course, like I'm not prejudged. But to your point, like very, very important. So this is from the speed perspective. Now, [00:15:00] SEO by itself. It's a large topic. I tried to cover a couple of times here on the show, but in the space of landing page, well, why it is important because when you say SEO, people thinks about blog, Posts and keywords in the main page and all this.

Mehmet: So enlighten us will, and I think this is important for the audience that I like to target. So I like the startups, scale ups, you know, these, these guys, because I think they, they need also to, to, to hear from you about this.

Will: Yeah. So, so SEO is a very, very tricky topic, right? Um, my, my joke about SEO, if you, if you want to be a search engine optimization, well, we'll start SEO means search engine optimization, which means building your web pages so that the search engines can most easily understand the intent of the web page.

Will: So Google knows what the page is for. [00:16:00] Um, if Google knows what the page is for. Google will show that page to people who are searching for that page. We'll use as an example, you know, chicken sandwich near me. A lot of people like chicken sandwiches and all day, every day people Google chicken sandwich near me.

Will: Whoever gets to the top of those search results is going to end up selling a chicken sandwich. And so you want to build your webpage so that when one types, chicken sandwich near me or just chicken sandwich. Or if you're really good, just chicken. Um, your restaurant shows up at the top of the top of the stack.

Will: It shows up in the maps section. When you look at the, when you look at the Google, maybe there's a frequently asked question, what's the best chicken say, you know, whatever. Um, so, so SEO search engine optimization is the art. And science of making that come true, and it's and it's pretty straightforward.

Will: Now, here's where some of the problems show up. Um, being an SEO expert is, you know, [00:17:00] being a professional SEO expert is Exactly as easy as being a professional life coach. You just self declare, I'm a life coach. Really? What are you? I'm a life coach. We'll talk about your life and I'll coach you. Okay. You know, there's, there's a number of issues that could come up if you, if you're trying to be a life coach and you haven't had like, I don't know, psychological training or, you know, business training, you know, it's like, okay.

Will: But, and the same thing goes with SEO. You can be a self declared SEO expert. And there's no requirement. There's no certification, right? You're a pilot or you're not right. And that's, and that's a very easy distinction to make, right? I am a commercial instrument pilot, um, which I happen to be, cause I studied that once upon a time.

Will: So like I'm a pilot and some people aren't, but there's no question as to who's a pilot and who isn't. You can check the certification, SEO experts, not the same thing at all. So that's the first [00:18:00] problem with SEO. It's real easy and usually. The right answer to say, you know, you say you're an SEO expert, but I just, that's kind of bull gets gotta be bullshit or at least partly bullshit.

Will: And so the first problem is how do you find a great SEO expert? And there's ways to do it, but it's not. Easy. Um, the, the best way to do it is to ask an SEO expert. Who are your clients right now? And if the answers are things like, Oh, Disney, Rivian, you know, Adobe, right. Apple. If those are your clients, then yeah.

Will: And you're getting paid to do SEO. Maybe, you know what you're talking about. If it's Joe's screen doors in Biloxi, Mississippi, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not sure I want that guy to do my SEO because nobody's ever heard of Joe's screen doors. So. So that's part of the big problem of SEO and page leap. And this is a, this is an important distinction.

Will: Page leap is not an [00:19:00] SEO consultancy. We are not search engine optimization experts. Our job is to execute the strategy that an SEO Expert or an SEO consultant creates, and we're really good at that. And we know all the best SEO experts on the planet, but, and, and so what we do for the SEO experts is we make sure that what they want to happen.

Will: Actually happens and we don't question them and we don't push back and we don't send them to a feature request page and we don't hold them hostage and make them pay us more money to put the button above the fold. We just do it the way they think it should be done and what we see. is is incredibly great results, and we we make life easier for the client so they don't have to work as hard.

Will: They don't have to understand things that are hard to understand. We make it easy for the SEO consulting team and the web development team and the web design team because we just do it the way they want it done. We don't. We don't [00:20:00] try to talk them out of stuff. Um, and then on. And then again, kind of back at the core of the thing in the data center, I We build our own machines.

Will: We build our own servers. We put them in the same physical data centers as Google servers. We, we use all the same hardware. I know this landscape, I know this business. And so our hardware is as close to Google machinery as hardware can be. Um, and that makes a big. That makes a big difference to Google. A millisecond matters.

Will: So that's, so that's kind of the, the puzzle of it is where, where do the individual pieces of this, you know, local marketing supply chain, where do they exist and who does what? And a lot of times the landing page business is just ignored.

Mehmet: Absolutely. So Will, walk me through where the AI plays the role here in, in, in PageLeap.

Mehmet: So what exactly, um, I mean, or how you leverage the AI? With these landing pages.

Will: [00:21:00] Well, that's, that's a moving target question, obviously, everybody. Um, you know, we've, we've been using, we've been using AI since the beginning. We were not the beginning of AI, but we've been using AI since the beginning of, of PageLeap for a couple of years now.

Will: Um, the main place where our Um, our version of artificial intelligence comes in is we use large language models to help writers, right. And it's not the same thing as our, what our system doesn't do is it doesn't just like automatically generate tons and tons of automatically generated content. Right.

Will: We're not, we're not a spam factory. Uh, the jury is, Really and truly still out on, on what Google thinks about AI content, right? Google doesn't want spam. Google doesn't want just tonnage for the sake of tonnage. What Google wants is helpful content. And so, so when you use Pagely, you can in the, uh, in the [00:22:00] editor.

Will: There are fields that are just, you know, just think of it as like a GPT prompt, right? Write me a headline about the best hot chicken sandwich in Los Angeles and make, you know, and then, and so, so it's just a prompt. You'd write it in and then, you know, you, you tell it what you'd like, and then it drops that text.

Will: It drops, you know, sort of a starting point of that answer. Into the place where you'd want it in the editor. So you ask it to write something and it writes something we are, we're always saying to anybody who asks this question, we use, we use AI. We use large language models and we use a couple of them.

Will: Of course we use open AI and we use a couple of other providers as well. We use AI to help writers, right. To help writers get things done quickly, but we always want. A human being to like put eyes on the content, read it, you know, it's just like, you know, you'd, [00:23:00] you'd certainly check your hotel bill before you signed out of the hotel, right?

Will: Because it's very hard to fix it afterwards. So, so AI tools in PageLeap help you write things, AI tools in PageLeap also help with, um, identifying. Images to make sure that the images that are going with the content are appropriate and and helpful and and back up and support the content. One of the things that we're super, super passionate about is accessibility.

Will: We want we want if if there's someone, you know, there's a whole lot of people searching the Internet who don't have the power of sight. They can't see they're blind and there's a bunch of tools that allow. The blind or, or the, or the, just the vision impaired, right. Somebody who just can't see very well, um, who allowed that allows them to see it.

Will: Right. And so there's, there's readers and all sorts of braille things, and there's all sorts of machinery and. HTML is set up. [00:24:00] So, so a perfect example of that would be like alt text for an image. If you have, uh, if you, if you put up a picture of a chicken sandwich restaurant, there's a place in HTML where you can put alt text, alternative text, and the alt text is designed.

Will: It's there to describe an image if the person can't see the image, or if for some reason the image is broken. And so a lot of times people will put no alt text. At all because it's not required in HTML. Um, the code in which web pages are built and and it you can get there without doing it. And so so one of the things page leap does is it make sure if you put up an image of, you know, um, And, uh, you know, an exterior shot of a chicken restaurant in Los Angeles at night and inside the chicken restaurant, you can see tables and happy people eating and enjoying food, that's what our alt text is going to read because our AI [00:25:00] is going to look at that image.

Will: It's going to see what it is. And it's going to enter that alt text so that we describe what's on the page as much as we possibly can. Because a percentage of people looking at web pages can't see that picture. They either can't see it cause it won't download, but, and, and a lot of the time they can't see it cause they can't see, um, Accessibility is incredibly important.

Will: So we've got a bunch of our AI tools that are designed to help with that and do that work.

Mehmet: That's really fantastic. And, uh, you know, um, great things to think from UX perspective. I had like other guests as well. You know, where we said, like, we need as much as possible to focus on people with disabilities.

Mehmet: And that's great to see, like, how you leverage AI for, you know, uh, these people. Now, couple of times when you mentioned something very crucial, and this is, I think everyone thinks about it when they are building something from scratch, how you can scale [00:26:00] and target as much customers as you can. So of course, I know, I know, like you have the, the, the, the knowledge of this.

Mehmet: So how much your experience with web. com helped you in, you know, when you started to think about the design, okay, I can build this, To be scalable, because a lot of people I see the problem they do, they build cool things, nice things, but they don't think about scaling this later on. And then they started to have, you know, sometimes they need either to shift the whole technology to something else.

Mehmet: So how, how was like this, uh, I would say journey for you in, in the sense of designing from day one, a system that can be scaled to be serving hundreds of thousands, maybe of customers.

Will: Yeah. Okay. That's a, that's a great question and a great point. Um, and going all the way back to the web. com days, if you can't scale it, it, [00:27:00] it's not a thing, right?

Will: If you, if you can't, if you have to retool something in order to scale it to the next level, it's not a thing. And so, so PageLeap, so the PageLeap system, the PageLeap core, the PageLeap software platform, whatever you want to call it, we started With a design and, you know, a result specification, we want to serve up landing pages faster than anybody else.

Will: And we want them to when we want them to save our users time. And we had a couple of a couple of things we want to. Basically, we want to save time. We want to build a time machine. We want to save our users time by never asking them to type the same thing twice. We want to save our servers time by serving up only the very, very necessary code without sacrificing quality or or UX or anything like that.

Will: And so we want to do it all. We want to do it all well. So we start out with our specification and then we build an API, an application program interface, which is a piece of software that allows other systems to talk to our system. So page leap is what what marketing people like to call a headless CMS, a [00:28:00] headless content management system, which means we can have Any kind of front end talk to page leap that we want.

Will: And so that's one important part of scale. Um, we don't, we don't require you to use WordPress. We don't require you to use Drupal. We don't require you to use, you know, Sitecore just like it doesn't matter what system you're using. What we're going to do is we're going to make sure that what you're using.

Will: Can connect to our system without adding any work to the, you know, the marketing team who never have enough time in the day, um, at the at the platform level. It just sort of the core hardware level. Yes, it really, really helps. That I ran one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world. It really, really helps that I've built data centers and I know how scale works.

Will: Web. com again, web. com owns patents for web hosting automation. I mean like we invented that stuff. [00:29:00] So, so when I built page leap or when my, you know, when Chris and I built page leap, We built it with a million websites in mind, literally, how do we run, how do we build this thing so that it'll host a million sites?

Will: And so what, so from day one, from the very first line of code that we ever wrote for this system, we built it. We built it so that it can scale to 1, 000, 000 domains and it could probably scale to 10, 000, 000 domains. Although we'd want to start paying attention to, you know, things like database systems and stuff like that.

Will: But like a million is a lot. I, I, it's not hard to do something well. One time what's hard is doing it well. 10 times, a hundred times, a thousand times, 10, 000, a hundred thousand, a million. And so we start with a million as the number, and then we build a system to support that. Maybe we get there, maybe we [00:30:00] don't, but we're not gonna fail in, you know, we're not going to fail because of.

Will: Scalability. It's the most important thing. And it's also like the hardest thing to do. You just, you need to have, you need to have worked at it for a while to be able to make it come true.

Mehmet: Absolutely. Now we'll tell me something which I, you know, I got this question out of curiosity. So you, you were at web.

Mehmet: com, I think the end of the nineties, right? So, so how the technology and you said like you were far from coding and all this. So when you came back now with Pagedeep, so how was like this experience from pretty much use using like physical servers and bare metal and you know, and now we are in the era of the cloud.

Mehmet: So, so how did you find this? The shift in technology between back and now

Will: great. Another great question. So, so [00:31:00] you, you reminded me of a joke. It's a, it's a little cartoon and it's a picture of this, um, of a dad and his little boy is like, you know, like a 10 year old kid and they're walking along the beach and the kids staring up at the sky and they're holding hands.

Will: And, and the kid says, uh, the kid says, dad, what are clouds made of? And, um, and the dad looks down at the kid and he says, well, mostly Linux servers, son. And, um, and that's, and that's the answer to that question. Right. And so, so the cloud, it's just a word for data centers and mostly Linux servers. Um, the cloud is.

Will: A marketing term for the most part cloud is a marketing term that was devised to make it easy for non technical people to have conversations about distributed services across multiple data centers using various protocols, right? It's, you know, the cloud is incredibly complicated. You know, [00:32:00] actual clouds are also pretty complicated if you think about thermodynamics and such.

Will: And so we just needed a word so that we could talk about it. Just like you could talk about car. Well, what's a car? Well, a car is what? Cheapers. 2, 500 different parts. We just got it. We just need a one word for that. So car is the 2, 500 parts that gets you from here to the office. Cloud is the 2. 5 million Linux servers that get your information from, you know, from your office to, uh, to mine.

Will: So, so what we do is we don't use. We don't use any cloud services to run page leap because we build cloud services, right? And so yes, our system is its own cloud base. It's a private cloud page. Leap lives in a private cloud, but it's a private cloud built up of hardware and software that we have built ourselves.

Will: And the reason we do it that way is we know how to do it that way. And we [00:33:00] don't want page leap to run on any shared. infrastructure. Um, there's a big, there's a big WordPress hosting company whose name I won't tell you, WP Engine. And it's renowned to be one of the fastest WordPress hosting companies out there.

Will: And it may be one of the fastest WordPress hosting companies out there. Um, but it's a shared hosting infrastructure. You've got your website sitting on the same machine next to somebody else's website, sitting on the same machine next to somebody else's website. And when you have A lot of tenants in a particular on a particular server on a particular group of servers.

Will: You've got to install guardrails, safeties, checks security. You've got to install a whole bunch of systems that are designed to protect. Your infrastructure from the user because not all neighbors are good neighbors. Some of them are not so good, and you've got to [00:34:00] protect your users from one another so that I can't, you know, create a hosting instance on on the same server as some other guys and then and then maybe try to hack or just by accident screw it up.

Will: So. So we manage all of that. We are the only tenant on our platform. PageLeap is the only customer of PageLeap. And then we run all of our pages for our customers. But so, so cloud services is the same thing as shared web hosting and shared web hosting. There's a place in the world for shared web hosting, but if you want the fastest landing pages on earth, you're not ever going to get it.

Will: to happen on shared infrastructure. And so that's, that's the story of clouds. Clouds are made of mostly Linux servers.

Mehmet: Absolutely. And, uh, I tried it myself just, you know, I can, uh, social proof here. Like even when you try to upgrade to the next tier and the next tier and the next tier, still you are using shared compute, shared [00:35:00] memory, shared disk.

Mehmet: So, uh, and sometimes I tell people you cannot break the law of physics, right? So, so it's, it's, it's, it's a law of physics. Yeah. They, they give you maybe more memory, but still this memory is shared with someone else. And for example, the disk is the same thing. So unless you get a dedicated server for you and then you can control and you can have, you know, Whatever resources you want to allocate, it's hard really to get good performance.

Mehmet: I would say so. So I tried this also myself several times. Now, I want to hear the story you started with a little bit, uh, well, at the beginning about the exit from, from, from what. com. So tell me what happened.

Will: I'll tell you part of this. I'll tell you an abridged version. Once we turn off the cameras, I'll tell you the real story, but I'll tell you the whole story. So, um, but, but essentially what I [00:36:00] learned, um, You know, the, you know, we built web. com. It was profitable. It was growing. It was fantastic. It was a wonderful adventure.

Will: There's a, there's a, there's, well, not a million, but there's, there's 20 people that, uh, made that thing come true. 20 people without whom, you know, my life would not be. The way it is today. And so, so like, that's, that's like the most important is, is the brilliance and generosity and kindness and insanely hard work of so many people around me made that come true.

Will: And then one day somebody comes along and says, Hey, we'd like to buy your web hosting company. And I was like, Oh, that's so cool. I've read about that. The exit, let's do that. And, and so we negotiate and we go through and we make the deal. And, um, and then they say something to, Hey, we want you to stay with the company.

Will: I'm like, do you really, I don't know. I'm not that good an employee. I'm much better at running my own thing. Sometimes don't play well with others. Maybe you could just like not have me stick around and they're like, no, no, no. We want you to stick around. We really, really do. It's like, are you sure? Like, oh, we really do.

Will: And I'm, I'm pretty sure they were already short. Um, so I, so [00:37:00] I, you know, we closed the deal. I go with the deal. I end up being, you know, executive vice president of came with the deal or whatever my, whatever my job title was when I, when I like joined the new. And, um, and my office wasn't at the end of the hall in the corner anymore.

Will: My office was kind of down that way somewhere. And I went and sat in my office and I was just, dude, I was just miserable, right? There's there's founders and then there's people who aren't founders and I'm. I'm a founder, right? I like to grow stuff. I like it to, you know, I like to become, um, and this is what PageLeap will do.

Will: PageLeap, you know, I love to grow PageLeap. It's fantastic. It's better than any other product on the market. And that is a measurable, objective fact. And what's going to happen is we're going to become a terrible pain in the ass to the competition, and they're going to come along and buy us. That's what's going to happen to PageLeap.

Will: And I can tell you that right now. That is just. It's the way it's going to go. And that's what happened to web. com. We were just a pain in the ass to the competition. We had better [00:38:00] product. We had better service. We had a better name than anybody else out there. And even though I'm a pain in the ass or like, you know, we got, we got to get this, you know, we got to like take this guy off the field at very least.

Will: So, um, so I, I went to work there and then through a series of conversations, which I will describe to you after the cameras are off, um, through a series of conversations. We decided that maybe it was best if I were to move on and do my next thing, whatever that was going to be and leave the, uh, and leave the grownups to, uh, you know, take it from here as the, uh, as they say.

Will: And so that's, so that's kind of the thing. I was just, I'm not, uh. I, and you know, that was my thing. That was my, you know, I grew that business and I was, I was, I was kind of emotionally attached to it, which I try to avoid, but I was, I was, you know, engaged, I was emotionally attached to the people that, that also came along with the deal.

Will: Right. That's, that's like a thing. When you sell a company, you're also selling your people. [00:39:00] And that's, that's a very, very difficult concept, uh, to talk about in any. And then it's a very, very difficult thing to live through and go through. And so you've got to detach yourself from quite a lot of humanity of your own humanity to make that come true.

Will: So that, so it was a tough. It was a tough thing in all seriousness. It's a difficult thing to, to sell your company and there's, there's good news, but there's also bad news. And so I just, I just moved on to the next thing. And it was like, it was the best for everybody. I'm a terrible pain in the ass if I'm not happy.

Will: Um, I'm awesome if I'm happy. People love me if I'm happy and, and things get done if I'm happy. So I just, I work really hard to make sure I'm in exactly where I want to be. Cause if I'm where I want to be, everybody around me will thrive. And if I'm miserable, everybody around me will not. That's kind of the story.

Will: That's as,

Mehmet: that's as much as we're getting on the cameras. [00:40:00] Okay. That's fine. No, no, no. That's good. And, uh, because you, you know, at least I get from you the answers that I was looking for. Um, Um, you know, because founders, they need to know all these, uh, scenarios that they can happen later on in their journey.

Mehmet: So of course, the one thing that we don't wish to them is to fail as a product or service, of course. But if, if they manage to survive, so at some stage they got to become either acquired or maybe they're going to exit somehow. And I was reading a lot of books and I think you are one of them. Well, so majority of the people who have the founder DNA, they cannot survive after a merger and acquisition because, you know, you have this itch to to go and start the next new thing.

Mehmet: And, you know, like, uh, and I believe you need also. So the freedom to take the decisions the way you want to do so. So this is a common trait. And this is why people like yourself are called serial [00:41:00] entrepreneurs. Well, right. So you, you, you just build exit and you jump on the other one. Um, so staying in the entrepreneurship and, you know, like building, um,

Mehmet: what do you see the biggest challenges that founders face today to start really something that can be successful. Be different from all what others are trying to do. So how they can really, if I want to make it more simple, like, Some, some traits that, that they need to have so they can really have a good chance to succeed.

Will: Um, and that's, it's a, that's a good question. It's a hard question to answer. And my answer is no, my answer is no different from really anybody else's for me, I guess, I guess, you know, I'm not going to tell anybody what to do, uh, which, which might be part of the answer. Um, for me. [00:42:00] What I need is, uh, okay, okay.

Will: I'll tell you, I'll tell you a thing that I've kind of recently, I've recently come up with. So, so after web. com, I built a company called goal boss and goal boss is a management consulting firm. And we had a little bit of code that helped support that, but basically just management consulting, right?

Will: Think McKinsey, but, um, uh, fewer conflicts of interest. And, um, and so. So I would travel around the world and help founders and help CTOs and help, you know, the C suite and help folks do better at what they did, right? To get people to play better than they think they could. And that was kind of the core of GoalBoss.

Will: Um, GoalBoss started because Um, and, and the core product, by the way, the actual, so the benefit of goal bosses, your business grows, your people are happier, blah, blah, blah, all the, all of the things that a management consultant would say to you, that's, that's the, that's the benefit, the feature or the product of goal boss is actually [00:43:00] meetings.

Will: It's and they're called goal boss meetings and so they're, they're, they're very nearly scripted, but they're structured. They're designed to be super productive. They're designed to not waste any time. And so a goal boss meeting will allow you to get done in about two hours. What the rest of the world is going to take two weeks.

Will: So, so a goal boss meeting is, is time compression and communication, right? Communication, delegation, time management. Those are the three things that you need to understand in business and do really well at communication, delegation, time management. Those are the three killers. Um, the reason I designed goal boss.

Will: Is because I hate meetings. I hate being told to sit down and be in a space. And I especially hate meetings if I don't know when they're going to be over. It's like, I, I'm going to die someday, bro. You can't just sit me down and tell me, Oh, you'll leave when you leave. Fuck that. I can't live like that. And so, [00:44:00] so I designed.

Will: Goal boss because I hate meetings straight up and that's and that's where it came from. Um, I designed so, so it was a problem, but it was like it was a very personal, you know, problem deep inside my soul. I'm going to die someday. I don't want to die in a meeting. I need to fix this. And so goal boss solves meetings.

Will: So that, so that they're productive. Everybody knows why they're there. If only the people who need to be in the meeting or in the meeting, we've got goals that happened in the meeting. We've got followups. So we're not just like bullshitting each other to feel good for a couple of minutes. It's like, if we're taught, if we're in a meeting, shit's going to happen after this meeting because we had, you know, it's like, it's a very serious thing.

Will: And the, and I built it all because I hate meetings. I hate meetings. Here's the thing that I sort of shouldn't say. I don't say it often, but I, but, but I do. Well, I don't say it often, but I am saying it more and more. I built [00:45:00] page leap because I kind of hate SEO.

Will: Right. So search engine optimization, right? It's confusing. It's incredibly complicated. It's easy to bullshit your way into an SEO job and to lie to people. And to, you know, it's, it's, it's a place where scumbags can thrive. The SEO industry. And so you've got to be very careful. And so you can get scammed and you can get ripped off.

Will: And for the people who really are really incredibly amazingly good at it, it's hard for them because of all of those reasons. And three months from now, a lot of it is going to be completely different. A lot of the answers in SEO that are right today are going to be wrong answers three months from now, because Google Is Google right and is it is it mean this is it whack a mole is it I don't know whatever but like SEO is really hard and a lot of times your actions have random results over [00:46:00] time and dude I hate SEO it makes me mental and I and and and then SEO people.

Will: SEO experts, the really, really qualified ones. They're always incredibly smart and they want to explain to you. They want to teach you so much, right? Oh, let's talk about taxonomy. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about keyword discovery. Let's talk about this. You know, they give you so many things and I've sat in meetings.

Will: Which I hate, by the way, where people, SEO experts will try to explain SEO to marketing people, and marketing people also hate SEO, generally speaking. They don't want to learn what taxonomy is. They don't care. They don't want to learn what keyword cannibalization is. They want to sell more chicken sandwiches.

Will: And so Pageleap is built so that, unless The client wants to. They don't ever have to talk about SEO. They [00:47:00] don't ever have to learn it, right? So, so Pagely, here's one really good example. Um, we've got a customer. There's a company called BirdEye, which does directory management, listing management, review management.

Will: BirdEye is if you have A multi location business. You need to use BirdEye. Um, and we've got a customer who uses BirdEye and you can type in the name of your location. You can type in the address, you can type in a description, you can enter photographs, you can put all sorts of information and then all of that information goes out to 50 different directories and Google My Business and all the places.

Will: So BirdEye transmits all your crucial business, all your crucial Uh, business information out to the Internet so that when people search chicken sandwich near me, you find we had a client, have a client who uses BirdEye a lot for all of their locations. And so what we did was like, wow, they use BirdEye.

Will: Why don't we do this? Why [00:48:00] don't we, because Page Leap is built to scale. Page Leap is built on an API application programming, programming interface. BirdEye also has an API. And so what we did was we built a little piece of code called Magpie. Magpie is an Australian bird, and my partner lives in Sydney.

Will: Um, so what Magpie does is Magpie connects page leap to bird eye. So anybody who uses bird eye, they can just enter the information into bird eye. And then Pageleap will go get it from there and build all the landing pages that are all SEO optimized and everything without the marketing people at the client side ever having to log into Pageleap.

Will: They're already doing the work in BirdEye. They're already typing it in. We'll just go get it from wherever it is. And that's the core fundamental difference between page leap and every other company in this [00:49:00] business is we don't want you to use our software. If you don't feel like it, we don't want you to understand SEO.

Will: If you don't feel like it, we know you're already doing the work that needs to be done to win in the space. We're just going to go find the work where it is and pull it into our system and you can just keep doing what you do. That's

Mehmet: fantastic. Amazing. Well, um, so I think, you know, the website is pageleap.

Mehmet: com, right? Yeah. And any like other directions, any things that people can do to get in touch with you? Well, before we, we, we close,

Will: I'm, I'm super easy to get ahold of. I'm, I'm like, uh, yeah, if you, if you Google me, you'll find really weird, crazy stuff. And that's probably not going to change anymore. But I'm, so I'm, I'm pretty easy to find, but yeah, Paisley.

Will: com is a great, is a [00:50:00] great place to start. Um, We, we want to save our customers time. We want to save everybody time. Cause it's the only thing you can't get more of. And so page leap is just, it's, it's just another expression of my, um, of my existential sense of urgency, right? I just, I want people to get what they want and I want them to get it really, really fast and page leap is a, is a great way to make that come true.

Mehmet: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for your time today. I really enjoyed, uh, and by the way, I hate SEO as well, so

Mehmet: um, for a reason, because you know, also as a someone who comes from technical background, why I need to care about the, you know, the hidden, it's exhausting. Yeah. You know, anything that has a lot of jargons. Uh, even from a technical perspective as a technical guy, I don't like it because you know, like this, he keeps, you know, keep the weight of people, as you mentioned to go and claim that they are expert in [00:51:00] things that I bet themselves they don't understand what it is, but nevertheless, of course, I'm not saying that are not expert in their fields.

Mehmet: Don't get me wrong. Yeah. But, but to your point, I'm doing a confession

Will: over here. They're experts, but like nobody, you know, I don't care what somebody else is an expert in. I care what I'm an expert in. And since I know that I don't want to try to make somebody else understand me. I want to help them. And so like, yeah, how many sandwiches you want to sell?

Will: That's, that's what I want to talk about with my customer. I want to talk about their thing and I don't want to make them adopt mine.

Mehmet: Absolutely. And you know, like the point you mentioned also is, and this is why every single project starts, whether it's a startup, whether it's a project within the organization to either make something faster, cheaper, sometimes not all the time, but faster, more efficient and more cost effective, I would say.

Mehmet: So, and [00:52:00] this is why I like, you know, to hear these stories. So again, well, thank you very much for being with me here today. And this is for the audience. If you just discovered this podcast, by luck. Or by SEO, which I hate. Thank you for passing by. And I would ask you if you like this episode today to subscribe and share it with your friends and colleagues.

Mehmet: And if you are one of the people who keeps coming, thank you very much for all your feedbacks, your questions, your suggestions. I read them all. Keep them coming. And we'll meet again very soon. Thank you. Bye bye.