Episode 71: Malcolm Peralty

Hallway Chats: Episode 71 - Malcolm Peralty

Introducing Malcolm Peralty

Malcolm has done a little of everything with WordPress and is currently the co-founder of PressTitan, a premium managed WordPress posting service.

Show Notes

Website | Press Titan
Twitter | @findpurpose

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 71.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm suggests that he is potentially known and forgotten in the WordPress community. He has done a little of everything with WordPress and is currently the co-founder of PressTitan, a premium managed WordPress posting service. Hi, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, hello.

Tara: Hey, Malcolm, we’re glad you’re here. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Malcolm: Sure. I’ve been using WordPress since 0.72. So not 1.72 or 2.72 but basically since late 2003 and like the intro said, I’ve done a little bit of everything. I kind of fell into this whole thing. I didn’t really expect to be doing this as my career. I was going towards computer networking and plugging computers and kind of fell into professional blogging for a little while and then taken care of websites. It’s kind of grown and moved from there and now here I am today, a little over a year into co-founding PressTitan. It’s been a crazy route.

Tara: Where are you located?

Malcolm: In Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Between Ottawa and Toronto. I usually say just outside of Toronto because that’s pretty much the only city that anyone outside of Canada seems to know so that’s what I usually say, but yeah, it’s Kingston. Really nice waterfront city.

Tara: Cool. Glad to have a Canadian on the show.

Liam: There’s a nice campus out there.

Malcolm: Yeah, Kingston University, right? Queens, yeah, Queens is an amazing university up here, yeah.

Tara: So 2003, is that when you said you started?

Malcolm: Yeah.

Tara: and were you in school at the time or were you in fifth grade? [laughs]

Malcolm: No. I was just outside of college, it was the height of the tech crash. I had my computer networking diploma in hand and there was really no jobs out there and I had done a little bit of PHP programming when I was in college and I decided that I had a lot that I wanted to say, of course, as every youth hopefully does. And I said a lot of horrible things on my first blog and found WordPress and fell in love with it. It just kind of spiraled out of control from there.

Tara: Well, you look young. You look like you would have been very young to be in that early version of WordPress but that’s cool. What were you blogging about? Was it tech stuff?

Malcolm: Mostly. I was covering laptops and cameras and what was happening in WordPress. A couple of my favorite sites have been purchased by this guy Jacob Gore. He came along and he purchased CSS Vault and Forever Geek, a bunch of these blogs that I was a huge fan of. So I reached out and I was like, “I want to interview you for my personal blog.” And I was expecting no response or him to be like, “Go away, kid.” Kind of thing. And he’s like, “Sure. Why?” I was like, “You just bought all these sites that I like.” And we got to talking and he said, “How would you like to run these sites? I bought them and I don’t really know how to do this.” That was kind of my first foray into professional blogging and how I started this whole thing.

Tara: That’s a cool story.

Liam: What was the turnaround between the initial email and you on the clock managing sites trying to figure out how to do it?

Malcolm: Probably three or four months from start to finish.

Liam: So not a ton of time?

Malcolm: No, no. It was funny, the reason that he ended up hiring me on full-time, he wanted to hire me on part-time at first. That was his whole idea. And I was trying to balance how I was going to work at Future Shop, which was Canadian Best Buy that no longer exists. I was working at Future Shop as a tech person and writing on the side. I actually had two part-time jobs. I was working Darron Rowse, who’s ProBlogger, a lot of people know him as ProBlogger, on his technology sites. He had a whole bunch of laptop blogs and camera blogs way back in the day that were really just about getting traffic to convert with Google AdSense. I was writing on his stuff while he was going on a vacation, and I was working part-time for Jacob. And when Jacob found out Darron was interested in hiring me on, he hired me on full-time and yeah, I was lucky that way. I was making probably around 3$ an hour when I started blogging full-time as a paid position. [laughs] I wasn’t rolling in the money or anything like that but I loved every minute of it. I was working long hours and publishing dozens of articles a day and just loving it.

Tara: Yeah, working long hours and loving it. Those things can go hand in hand, I guess.

Malcolm: Sometimes.

Tara: Tell us about what you’re doing now? You’re doing some hosting, it sounds like. Is that also long hours that you’re loving?

Malcolm: Sometimes. Thankfully, I’ve developed a lot of skills in WordPress over the decade and a half. So I find it pretty easy to do 99% of things I need to do. We currently only have about a hundredish websites that we’re hosting. Not massive like WP Engine or anything like that but enough that we can spend personal time with each and every customer we have, which is really great. I kind of fell into that as well. A colleague of mine, David Krugg, his wife was pregnant and it was a one-man show at the time. It wasn’t even PressTitan, it was just him kind of freelancing, hosting these sites. And with the baby on the way, he was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I need someone I can trust to do this for me while I’m on maternity leave. Who do I know that can do that?” So he contacted me and I said, “Well, I really only want to do this if we’re going to go 50/50 and actually make a real go of this.” At that time, I was ready to settle into a career for the long haul. I kind of bounced around, I had lots of jobs that were one-year, two-year, three-year, and I really wanted something that was going to last for long time. I figured that the only way I was going to have that is if I build it myself. It just seemed like the perfect opportunity at the time and so that’s what we’ve done.

Tara: There’s a lot of competition in that space?

Malcolm: Very much so, yeah. Thankfully, after the first couple of people that David Krugg had on his list of freelance clients, everything else has been good referral. We’ve grown entirely from referral. No advertising, no complex marketing beyond that. We’re kind of getting to the point now where we’re thinking about expanding into third or fourth person because it’s just the two of us still. So we’ve been starting to market a little bit more and try to figure out that space. I know it’s difficult. I’ve worked with WP Engine before on some projects for them and I have a good understanding of how they do what they do. And I’ve been very fortunate in my career to pick up a lot of unique set of skills. I think you can go to places and get a lot of package support for WordPress and you can go to a lot of places and get managed hosting. I think it’s a little bit more rare to find both with one billing cycle or one company that you can work with. That’s where we’ve hit that little bit of a unique selling point, a little bit of a unique stride.

Tara: I think about people who have hosting companies or who work for hosting companies as being sort of like doctors, especially like an obstetrician type of doctor where you’re on call and you have to get up at 2:00 in the morning when you get the call that the baby’s on the way or something bad has happened to someone. How do you handle that with two people and 100 websites? I imagine– and not necessarily the fault of your servers. Things happen, whatever. Somebody clicks an update and the site crashes, and they’re panicked and they need to contact support. Do you have the phone ringer on 24/7 and you have to get up at 2:00 in the morning when that happens?

Malcolm: Thankfully, Krug is in the Philippines right now so we’re on an exactly 12-hour schedule difference. When it’s noon here, it’s midnight there and vice versa.

Liam: That’s convenient.

Malcolm: It’s super convenient. He’s thinking about moving to Colorado and I keep trying to convince him not to because it’s just been so nice to have that kind of ability to bounce things back and forth whenever we’re sleeping our away. But yeah, we’ve had to get up in the middle of the night multiple times before. And it’s just part of the job. When you balance out the time you spend during the day dealing with that emergency stuff, it’s not really a big deal and it’s worth it.

Liam: So I want to go back a little bit and just talk again about getting into business with your colleague where he came to you and said his wife was pregnant and he was excited about that. “Can you help with this, this, and this?” And you said, “Yes, and here’s how I see it coming together.” Again, there’s not a lot of time. At the most, it was nine months that you had to figure out how to do business together and if he’s anything like me, he probably sweated it out for a month and a half or two before he realized, I’ve got to get on this and fix something.” Talk a little bit of how that came together because I’m interested in that personal dynamic.

Malcolm: Sure. We’ve known each other for going on 10 or 12 years. We’ve worked together on different projects here and there before for other companies and we’ve just been kind of like ships passing in the night over and over again always going, “We should really do something together.” And never really syncing up for the right time. I’ve always been kind of– if you look at my employment history, I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve always been employed. I’ve always had another career, another job, another company that I’ve been able to work with and learn from. I’ve never really kind of wanted to take those kinds of big risks before and say, “Let’s do it on our own.” This was just kind of the perfect time and kind of a lucky ask. When he asked me, we had maybe six weeks to figure it all out and what that would look like in a partnership agreement and introducing me to the few freelance clients that he had, and determining what name, and coming up with the logo, reassuring businesses, and all that stuff. The complexities there– I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur or a business owner. So being kind of thrown into that has been kind of ridiculous in a sense because Tara, you mentioned that I look young. In business, I feel very young, I feel very much like a six-year-old playing with little cars with a friend of mine and saying, “Hey, let’s sell these cars to a kid down the block.” I don’t really have a deep understanding of business and neither does David Krug, that’s probably been the biggest learning curve for us. It’s not been the technology and the hosting and the WordPress, it’s been understanding business.

Tara: Yeah. And as you grow, that will change even more as you become more– you’re hiring more people and doing human resources and benefits and all those things, too. You said you never thought of yourself as an entrepreneur. How do you like it? It sounds like this is a challenge. You’re not necessarily doing the tech stuff as much as your business grows, like I’m saying now.

Malcolm: Yeah, there have been points where we’ve had to do some cross-training between Krug and I because I quickly gravitate towards technology. It’s something that I’m very comfortable with and it’s very easy for me. Sometimes, he kind of got caught out at a loop on all these different things. And then six weeks would go by and he would go, “Wait, how do we do this now? What is the procedure for moving this site from one server to ours? What did you do? What tool is this? Where did this come from?” There’s been a lot fo cross-training between the two of us to kind of keep up-to-date on that. I’ve been kind of pushing like, “You do the invoicing, I don’t want to do the invoicing.” Now, he’s had the cross-training on that to make sure that I understand how he processes invoices and things like that. But we’re very fortunate in that, again, because we have such a limited client base. We can really dive deep into all these different things. If I worked– Some weeks, I’ll work a 20-hour work week, some weeks I’ll work a 60-hour work week and in the end, it mostly balances out. I mean, my wife kind of makes sure of that. But yeah, we get to spend as much time as we want on each of these things and I really enjoy that.

Liam: Is your business partner Canadian as well or is it at least a Canadian business or– no, you’re shaking your head as we’re chatting here. Tell me a little bit about that? Where is the partner from and which country did you decide and how does payroll work, all that kind of stuff?

Malcolm: Yeah. I mean, that’s only getting more complex as we’re getting ready to hire on. He’s born in the States, lived a lot of his life in Mexico and now lives in Philippines. He’s very much kind of–

Liam: Oh, so he’s not there just on vacation or on a kind of nomad–?

Malcolm: Yeah, he’s married with kids there and has his whole life set up there. He really would love to come back to the states and just is kind of in the process of making that happen. No offense to anyone who lives in the States, I don’t know why you would want to move there from the Philippines. I mean, he lives like a king in the Philippines making what we make.

Liam: Does he not pay attention to any news?

Malcolm: I can’t comment on that part.

Liam: Fair enough. No, I’m being a bit silly.

Malcolm: He’s a smart guy.

Liam: No, I know. I’m not insulting him.

Malcolm: He registered PressTitan in Nevada, so it’s an American business. And I registered it as Canadian business, and we just have a partnership between us. I basically invoice him as though I am a client of his business, and that’s how we worked it out. Because it’s really the easiest in terms of dealing with that kind of thing because just the whole Canadian-American business thing is not for the faint of heart at all.

Tara: Yeah, we won’t get into the whole trade negotiations. They’re happening there too, right? But it’s not a political show. So let me move on to something that we talk about on every show, which is success. I think it’s related to what we’re talking about. I’m really curious to hear what you’ll say given that you are sort of in this new territory, and how you would define success as it relates to your new venture as a business owner, as an entrepreneur? That’s something that you never really expected. And maybe how that ties into your view of success personally as well?

Malcolm: Sure. I would say in my late 20s, I started to have this vision of what success was for me. I had had a failed relationship and she had basically said, “You’re the kind of person that won’t be happy until you’re president of the planet kind of thing. You’re always trying to climb that corporate ladder really quickly. You’re always trying to move up too far too fast, and you’re never happy with the position you’re in.” That really got me to think, what am I looking for? What do I want? What is success? I really kind of defined it as this ideal of kind of being comfortable enough financially to take care of your family and friends without worrying about making ends meet while still having the flexibility to kind of spend the time diving deep on your passions. If I had to do 60, 80, 100-hour work weeks every week even doing something that I love, I think it would burn me out. I really want to kind of experiment and see what the cutting edge is and try to create the cutting edge. To do that, you need time, you need time to fail. Yeah, success for me has been– as we’ve setup PressTitan, we’ve been very careful about scaling, we’ve been very careful about which clients we’d take on, very particular. Even though it is a hyper-competitive environment, we really want to make sure that we have that balance to really explore and dive deep on our passions.

Tara: Do you think that your business partner and you have similar views of success as it relates to your business?

Malcolm: Sometimes. It can be hard to see eye to eye sometimes. David Krug really would love to be kind of that next WP Engine or that next major hosting company. He has had lots of smaller projects, smaller companies, lots of freelance work that he’s done. So the idea that we could do 1000 websites, 10,000 websites, or 100,000 websites really appeals to him, but his goal is similar to mine where the want to expand is in hopes that it will allow him to find maybe like a COO or someone to kind of run a lot of the show to let him figure out what’s next, what’s the cutting edge.

Tara: This idea of being big, being competitive with the big guys that you mentioned, that could possibly be a struggle because there is this– I have a business partnership and have a lot of entrepreneurial friends some of whom have made it clear that they really want to have an agency with the sign on the building, and office space, and employees, and Christmas parties, and all those things that you think of as a big company. I’ve had to say that, clearly, from the start when you’re starting a partnership, that’s not what I want. I don’t want that stress of making payroll and not paying myself. That’s a really important conversation that you’ve had with your business partner about what your goals are in terms of growth and size and responsibilities. It sounds like you guys have talked about it.

Malcolm: Very often, for sure, yeah.

Liam: Malcolm, within that definition of success then, what’s the most important thing you’re doing or can do every day to achieve that success?

Malcolm: It’s really been about spending that first hour to every day on myself, on the things that I want to learn, the things that I want to understand, the projects that I want to tackle, where I am with everything that’s going on in my life. Not just in terms of my work but my personal life. Looking at that calendar and understanding my position in it and booking my free time to play video games or watch a movie with my wife and just kind of having that complete understanding of what things look like and knowing that I can move those blocks around and that those things are all in there and important to me. I find too many of the people that I’ve worked with previously will put in their calendar all their work stuff and not any of their personal stuff, and what ends up happening is they just slide those little work lines longer and longer or all the personal stuff basically is forgotten because they’re not important enough to put in your schedule.

Liam: You say the first hour to the day. Do you mean quite literally your day? So waking up and the like or do you mean–?

Malcolm: Yeah, rolling out of bed kind of thing.

Liam: Getting into the home office kind of thing?

Malcolm: Well, I mean–

Liam: I appreciate it’s probably the same.

Malcolm: Yeah, it’s hard, right? Because my hobbies are really computer-related as well. So pretty much from when I get up until my wife says, “You have to get off the computer because I need to spend time with you.” I kind of sit myself in this chair and do various things. Yeah, pretty much the start of the day. When I get up, I roll out of bed and do all the morning routine stuff, sit in the chair with my bowl of cereal and kind of look at that calendar and figure out what my life looks like.

Liam: Cool, I like that. Let me kind of change gears a little bit with you and walk us back towards WordPress a bit. You said you’ve been involved since 0. something, long before any idea or concept of a WordPress community that exists, long before WordCamps, and meetups and probably even long before many people had even heard of it, much less using it. Are you involved with the wider WordPress community currently, and if so, where are you with all of that? And I mentioned in your intro that you’ve been known and forgotten within the community. Talk to me about what you meant by that and maybe relate it to whatever you do around that place?

Malcolm: Sure. I have been publishing my own kind of little WordPress podcast called the WordPress Minute or the WP Minute, and it’s a daily look at kind of what are the top news stories every day in one to two minutes basically. Cover the headlines, a little blurb about my opinions on each thing that’s happening. I publish that every day and I think I’m over 60 somewhat episodes now. I haven’t missed a day yet. I’m hoping to get to 100 and not mess a day. That’s my goal right now. I spend a little bit of time on WordPress Support forums. I did a live stream I think about two weeks back where I said, “Hey, I’ll answer anyone’s questions, and if no one shows up, I’m going to be doing WordPress Support forums stuff.” And I did. And it was really funny. One of the people came back and was like, “You answered my question.” It was like, “How did you find this video? That’s weird.” But you know, it’s really fun. I haven’t really made it as much of a priority as I probably should recently. Back when I started, I was on the WordPress Podcast with Charles Strickland, which was kind of the defacto original WordPress podcast. I did probably about 50+ episodes of WordPress Weekly with Jeff Chandler who– that’s kind of one of the more popular WordPress podcasts to the day. I worked for support for Gravity Forms, one of the big premiere or paid plugins for WordPress. I’ve released themes for WordPress back before 2.0 existed. I hope no one’s using them today because if you are, they probably are riddled with security holes and I would be very sad. I’ve done a little bit of everything. I was a pretty prolific WordPress blogger back in the day. I have probably written about 10,000 to 15,000 posts about WordPress news and WordPress community back in the early days like pre-2.0.

Tara: What happened?

Malcolm: What happened? In 2008 or whatever when the US kind of went through it’s little financial fun, a lot of the money in terms of advertising dollars just vanished overnight. That meant content creators that were in North America were kind of given the boot. Server managers in North America, a lot of them were kind of given a boot for cheaper places. And rightly so, at the time. Some of these businesses, they couldn’t have survived, had they not done that. I got it, it wasn’t a big deal. But I ended up working for the government for a while and working for some other agencies, and kind of working my way back into the wider WordPress community, but I felt kind of a little bit burned from the whole thing. Just because you are successful in a community, doesn’t mean that the community is necessarily going to find a position for you. You really have to kind of figure out how to carve that out yourself.

Tara: Yeah, interesting. You’ve come back. Are you reinvigorated with all the changes that are happening in WordPress? Does that motivate you? You’re in a different side of it now, right? You’re doing hosting, you’re not doing–

Malcolm: I will say, Jeff Chandler used to call me kind of the WordPress Curmudgeon and I don’t think that– all this stuff with Gutenberg hasn’t changed that at all. I am very hyp-r critical.

Tara: For Jeff to call you a curmudgeon, I think that’s maybe–

Malcolm: Yeah. He used to be a big WordPress fanboy back in the day. You go listen to the first 10 episodes of WordPress Weekly, man. He was all like, “This is the best thing ever.” He was sunshine, lollypops kind of guy back in the day. Everything WordPress. He was kissing the ground that it walked on. It’s been interesting to watch him as he’s kind of learned those deeper things. He’s been able to grow those opinions as I did back when I was on the show with him. Grow these opinions and have these discussions about where WordPress is heading, where we want it to be. How do you deal with the fact that there’s this lower-buried entry that continues to happen? How do we make it more accessible, get more developers on board, make it friendlier for users but also kind of continue to push the limit of what the technology can do?

Liam: Yeah, that’s not, I would have thought, a unique experience for person involved in WordPress. The idea of open source and concept in coming into the community, and it’s not necessarily WordPress experience. It’s anything that we as humans encounter. There’s– I don’t want to call it a honeymoon because that overstates the relationship, but some sort of– we find something new that we like, we enjoy it, we can get really excited about it. Then we use it a little bit more, we work with it a little bit more and we see it’s a little bit more of its nature. And nothing’s perfect, everything has challenges. I wouldn’t say the sheen comes off of it but we see it perhaps in a little truer light.

Malcolm: I think that’s one of the good things about WordPress though. If you have an issue with Microsoft Office, let’s say, it’s very difficult to go to Microsoft and say, “Hey, you really need to fix this issue. Here’s what you need to do.”

Liam: Right. “Here’s my patch. Can you release it?”

Malcolm: Exactly. “Put that in for your next release.” It doesn’t happen so it’s so great that we have this kind of publishing platform where we can all have a voice and have a say in what we want to have happened. I think it’s only made better by more people having differing opinions in these conversations.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. The idea that more people are trying to solve the problems and also more people are thinking about the problems. Because the way that the three of us in this call would position a certain challenge or problem could be useful but we might be totally missing the boat. And having more people think about that is really helpful. It’s good to get advice from other people and to hear their mindsets and the like. With that in mind, I’m going to switch it to another one of our more signature questions around advice. Malcolm, the question is, what is the single most valuable piece of advice that you have ever received personal or professional, that you have worked into your life and that’s really made a big difference to you? What did somebody tell you, what is something you read? What did you hear on a podcast, see in a video?

Malcolm: [laughs] I instantly think of Gary Vaynerchuk. I’m a huge fan of his style of business and motivation, which is kind of remember to go back to that old world business, that personal touch, that interaction and communication. I live on my computer. I’m surrounded by technology all the time. The best things that are stored in my brain are those personal moments, whether they happen on a computer or not, it’s those personal moments that mean the most to me. They’re the things that brought me the most success. Reaching out and asking how someone’s doing on Facebook and really wanting to know, putting out a response to someone’s Twitter message when they’re having a hard day, those are the kinds of things that can mean a huge difference to someone else. Rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing. If we all work together, we can do some amazing things.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really interesting, that point. I had a conversation over the weekend with a friend who was going through some challenges and I just wanted to give this front space. It turns out she was expressing some concern that nobody reached out from the wider community. It was only after she was kind of in a position to move forward that she was able to share that with people. And it’s just reaching out even just to say, “Hey, we’re thinking of you even if you can’t come back to us right now.” That’s a really valid point, thank you for sharing that.

Tara: Yeah, thank you, very sincere.

Liam: Let me swing it back to your new business because you’re– how long have you been in business now? How long has PressTitan been kind of public and running and bringing in clients with you fighting for control of the– jokingly, fighting for control of the helm.

Malcolm: About 14 months now.

Liam: Okay. How are you implementing that advice, that personal touch, that not just, “Hey, did we solve your tech support problem?” Obviously, you’ve got to do that. How are you doing that through PressTitan? How does that work through?

Malcolm: I mean, the big thing, all the beer companies are going to facepalm this but no standardized reporting. We custom write emails to our clients talking about what we’ve done for them, what we’d like to see them do, kind of any advice that we might have for them if they’re looking for more advice. None of our clients ever deal with us on that kind of, “Is your website up? Is WordPress up to date?” Kind of thing. We actually talk to them about their business and their business goals. I know most of their family members at this point because they’ve joined us on a Slack call or something. Having those personal experiences with them and not just form-lettering everything in the business has been a huge time commitment but it’s worth every minute.

Liam: Yeah, I can see how it would be building loyalty with your customers where it’s not just, “We’ll do the service that you pay us for.” But, “We do care about your family.” That’s really great.

Tara: That’s unique.

Liam: It is. This is a conversation that we can go on for for hours, but alas, I believe we are out of time. Before we say goodbye to you, will you share with us and with our listeners where we can find you online, please?

Malcolm: Sure. My Twitter account is at @findpurpose. Long story there. If you ever want to talk about it, go ahead and tweet me. Of course on Presstitan.com, go ahead and use the contact form for whatever, if you just want to reach out.

Tara: Awesome. I was intrigued by your Twitter handle when we were communicating about having you on the show, so maybe after we stop recording, you can tell us that story. [laughs]

Malcolm: Sure.

Tara: Thanks so much for joining us. It’s really great to meet you.

Malcolm: Thank you for having me.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Thanks, Malcolm. Bye, bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

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