A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you go to work for them?

Jason Cohen: I did for just a little while, but at that time, I had already started another company with Gerry’s encouragement. In fact, when we started ITWatchDogs, I was hesitant to join a startup because I thought, “Maybe I should just increase my savings a little bit more by having a real job for a while.” He said, “Listen. Why don’t you come over and do ITWatchDogs with me?” ITWatchDogs was a month old.

He said, “At the same time, I have another idea for a startup.” That turned out to be Smart Bear. He said, “You do that and do ITWatchDogs. Maybe one of them will work and you can focus on that one.” I did and it turned out both of them worked. I had this insight about version control, which is a thing that software developers use to track the versions of the software that they write. Every time they edit some code, they save a copy of that. You can look back and you see years and years of all the code changing and shifting. They do this mostly to coordinate with each other.

If you have a hundred people and they’re all changing the same stuff, you need some way to coordinate that. There’s a lot of data in there and it’s useful. Let’s suppose I’m changing some code. I have changed this very same code several times just today. Is it risky or scary that I’m changing it? No, I’m clearly just actively developing it. Now suppose I’m changing some code and it hasn’t been changed in two years. No one has even looked at it in two years. Maybe the person who wrote it is not even here anymore. Now is it risky or scary that I’m meddling with it? Yes, because I could easily break something by accident. Maybe I should have someone check my work. That’s an example of if I know what the history is of the code I’m changing, I might take different actions. That’s useful. That was the insight that started the company.

I made a tool with the not very exciting name of Code Historian. This was, of course, bootstrapped again. All kinds of interesting things were happening at that time. This was early 2000s. One of them was that Google AdWords had just begun. I would take an AdWord on one of these version control systems I integrated with. For example, one was called CVS. I would get a keyword on CVS and ours would be the only ad on the page. There’s this something about being able to visualise your history. I get a lot of clicks. If nothing else, people are just like, “What’s that thing on the side?” It was novel. Plus, it was five cents a click.

Nowadays at WP Engine, the main keyword for us would be something like WordPress hosting. It costs between $20 to $40 a click. We did really well with AdWords. Of course, people ask, “You’re an AdWords expert. How can I do that?” AdWords are typically a low performing advertising system for most people now, and certainly for us at WP Engine. The lesson there is, when you’re using new forms of digital advertising or marketing, that’s the time to come up as a new startup. The bigger guys won’t be there yet because they don’t understand it and they move slowly. They won’t be able to do it until there’s a lot of inventory that they can get, because otherwise, it won’t move the needle.

At that moment, it’s not saturated by people with huge budgets that blow up things. They’re not there. It’s logical for them to not be there. They’re not being dumb. It takes a lot of momentum shift for them to create a new campaign like that. That’s the time, when a small company should want to go into that new space. Yes, you have to figure it out but you’re going to have to figure out any of them. You might as well figure out a space where there’s less competition. I was able to grow that company. I started getting some feature requests which I found bizarre. For example, I had a view where you could see before and after side-by-side. Nowadays, that’s not too amazing. At that time, it was new. People would say, “Can I take that view and print it? Can I email it to somebody?” So I made an HTML export.

Sramana Mitra: I’m curious. As somebody who has done a lot of coding at one point, why were they asking for this?

Jason Cohen: I’ll tell you. Then I get another request that says, “Can I write on this and give it to somebody?” What they were doing is they were doing code reviews. They were looking at changes that were either proposed or just happened. They wanted to review it. It turned out that code review was actually the interesting thing.

Sramana Mitra: So your killer app was code review and not code history.

Jason Cohen: Right. Code history was the way and code review was the code insight. We made a product called Code Reviewer, which sat on top of Code Historian. It turned out that was important. Nobody else was doing code review. It was not an existing market. It wasn’t clear how big the market would be. When there’s not market, you don’t know if that’s because there’s nothing there or because you’re first. Nevertheless, we went and did it. It turned out that there is a market and we were the first. We invented what code review is in a modern way.

We did the largest case study ever done on code review. I wrote a whole book about it. We’ve given away over a 100,000 copies of the book. We used that as a marketing technique. It was an incredible marketing technique. We made money by selling the code review tool that facilitated how people find each other, how they review the work, and how they communicate about it.

This segment is part 3 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine
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