425 - What's Different about WP Umbrella (vs Manage WP, Main & Infinite WP, etc) with CEO Aurelio Volle

Over the last several months, I’ve seen more and more chatter in my community Web Designer Pro about WP Umbrella – a new platform making quite the dent in the WordPress site manager space.

Personally, I wondered how there was even room for a new tool for managing WordPress sites (updates, optimizations, backups, reporting, etc) when it’s already a crowded market with tools like Manage WP, Main WP, Infinite WP, and many hosts that offer automatic backups, updates, reporting, etc.

But it just goes to show…when you have a new, fresh, innovative tool that’s customer-focused and is designed with best, modern UX practices, it can absolutely start to make waves in the market.

That’s been the story of WP Umbrella so far and in this exclusive interview, I got to sit down with their CEO and co-founder Aurelio Volle.

We covered a lot in our time together, including:

• The opportunity that he saw which led him to start a WordPress website management tool in an already competitive landscape
• How they made it past the first phase of growth where most SASS companies die
• Why UX design and customer focus are more important than EVER before
• Auerlio’s personal philosophy for vision and goal setting
• How to run a successful online business of any size in today’s market

And a whole lot more.

It’s not every day you get to sit down with the CEO of a major SASS product in the WordPress space so it was so cool to see and hear how thinks about vision, goals, customer service and product-market fit in today’s competitive web design space!

P.S. Big thanks to WP Umbrella for being a sponsor of our upcoming Web Designer PRO CON 2026 event! I took notice when members of my community started talking about the tool and their experience with the team/support behind Umbrella and I can tell you, they are the real deal! Great team and a SOLID product that I’m excited to keep a close eye on moving forward.

Head to the show notes to get all links and resources we mentioned, along with a full transcription of this episode at joshhall.co/425

Transcript

Control What You Can

Aurelio Volle 0:00

Give yourself a break on the thing you can't control and go hard on the thing you can. That's that that's my day-to-day motivation, you know. In the end, when you run a company, you are just juggling problems, you know. And good moment, of course. But you're juggling situations, someone wants this, someone wants this, and then you can end up being uh stressed uh very quickly. Um and I think the solution to many problems is to ignore the problems uh on which you don't you cannot have any impact and to focus on the one where where you can. Um and that's kind of my uh my mantra uh every every day.

Meeting WP Umbrella’s CEO

Josh Hall 0:44

Welcome to the web design business podcast with your host, Josh Holland, helping you build a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love. Hello, my friend. It's so good to have you here. All right, we got a fun one here. And I think it's really interesting because there's a tool that has been popping up inside of my Community Web Designer Pro a lot recently, and it is WP Umbrella. It is a platform for managing WordPress sites. And I was personally very curious about this because I didn't think there was even room for a new tool to make a dent in the market of WordPress website management. You've got managed WP, you got main WP, you got infinite WP, you have a lot of hosts that have backup and update options and reporting. So honestly, I wondered how could a new platform, yeah, like make a dent and make waves in this? But it does go to show, it goes to show you that if you have a fresh, new innovative tool that is innovating quickly and that is very customer focused and that has incredible UX and design principles in 2026 and beyond, you absolutely can make a big dent in the market. And that is exactly the story of WP Umbrella. So I saw this just popping up left and right, got to know the team a little bit, and I in this one had a chance to interview their CEO and co-founder, Aurelio Voile. So, oh my goodness gracious me, what an awesome opportunity to hear from a CEO of a SaaS product of this level. And it was really, really cool personally to hear how somebody at that level is thinking and how they are planning and casting vision and leading a team and building their business in a very, very competitive market. So I think you're gonna get a lot out of this one. And I just want to say I heard really good things about WP Umbrella from my members. So when I checked it out, aside from the design and the innovations that they're making on WordPress site managers, I just heard about how good the team was and the support was. And I can tell you after talking with Aurelio and working with some of the team behind Umbrella, they are the real deal. I'm very, very excited about them. And I want to give them a public shout out and a thanks for being a sponsor for our upcoming Web Designer Pro Con 2026 event. They are kind enough to invest in my community. And I'm telling you right now, they are the real deal. So without me just talking about it, why don't you hear from their co-founder and CEO, Aurelio, on how WP Umbrella is different than other tools like Manage WP Main, et cetera. So here we go. Check them out and be sure to go to my link, joshhall.co slash umbrella, which will give you a full month free of WP Umbrella if you'd like to check it out. All that will be linked to the show notes for this episode of joshhall.co slash 425. So head over there after this. Well, Aurelio, it is so good to have you on the podcast. I was just saying before I hit record. Uh, it's so awesome to have you guys a sponsor for our upcoming community event for Web Designer Pro. I've really enjoyed getting to meet the team behind WP Umbrella. Um, I've realized over the years, I think the thing I value most about the tools I use and the brands I trust is the team. Like it is just and to be able to have a CEO on the podcast is really cool. So, all that to say, thank you so much for taking the time and for hanging out today.

Aurelio Volle 4:21

Anytime. Uh thank you for inviting me. Uh, thank you for the the opportunity. Uh I'm super excited.

The Gap Left By ManageWP

Josh Hall 4:30

Um well, like I said, it's not every day you get to talk to you know the CEO and the founder of something. I'm kind of curious to kick off. Well, let me just share just brief context. Um, over the past few months, I started seeing Umbrella in my community web center pro. And I had a lot of members switch from either manage WP or main WP to Umbrella. And it just like one by one, I just kept on seeing more people talk about Umbrella. So that's when it kind of really piqued my interest. And then uh when Manuela reached out um to talk about you know potential collaboration, I was like, okay, you know, obviously there's something to this tool of my community's uh, you know, using it like that. I wanted to check it out. I'm curious, with so many options for managing sites with WordPress, like like managed WP, like main WP, like Infinite, but also in hosting platforms, why WP Umbrella? What was the genesis of you guys you know taking off? And what did you feel like why uh what how did this all come about for you?

Aurelio Volle 5:35

Um we've grown uh on the ashes of manage WP uh because since the acquisition by Godaddy, uh the tool is not being maintained, and if you think about it, if you sell WordPress maintenance, uh you have to use a tool that's up to date. Um and going back to what you said uh about the fact that you choose software and tool based on the team behind um this question that you I could talk about features, I could talk about the benefit of not uh self-hosting uh your um WordPress management solution, and I could speak about all of this. But at the end of the day, uh when people asked me why uh WP umbrella, I said because we care. Um I was at Word Companies uh in France last week, and and this question came up uh many many times, uh, and they were like, but what is the the one thing that should convince me to switch from manage WP or main WP to WP umbrella? And I'm always telling people um because I am the CEO, and if you are having a bad experience, I don't sleep well because we care about the success of our users, and this is reflected inside our pricing. Uh, we do something that's not very common inside the WordPress space, we don't do yeah, uh we don't do tier uh with yearly commitment and stuff like this, like this. We have a pay as you go pricing. So if you're successful with your agency, we are successful. And if you are having an attrition uh in your business, we are having an attrition too. Um and and I think this is uh I mean this is the reason why uh WP Umbrella is different and has uh grown inside your inside your audience, I think.

Josh Hall 7:36

Yeah, that's a great answer. It and it's it's very transparent as soon as I started talking with you guys that you do truly care. And I know some of the folks in my community, when I asked them, like what why why WP Umbrella versus Manage WP or some of the other ones, one thing they said was how communicative you guys as a team were, and that you were launching features and doing stuff based off of like real-time feedback from from your customers, which I'm a huge fan of. Um, and I use a platform called Circle for hosting Web Designer Pro, and they're the same way. They're like, you know, all the team members, they are like ruthless about getting like honest feedback. They're like, what do you like, what do you don't like? And yeah, I mean, I I'm in the transition moving away from man's WP now. I started using them back in 2014, like right, you know, early, early WordPress maintenance days. Um, but to that point, like they got sold to GoDaddy, I believe it was. And then yeah, like I don't know. It definitely feels like uh a dated corporate suitcase tool. Uh, you know, I don't know who the team is. I innovation has been, yeah, not there. Um, so yeah, that gets me excited to see like you know a startup like this, or I don't know if you consider a startup, but it gets me excited to see how like front lines you guys are with with your customers.

Aurelio Volle 8:57

Um I mean Manage WP is a great tool, you know, and what they built 10 years ago uh was truly amazing. Um and then the acquisition and what you said, like if you look at the team uh on the about us page, they have support, they have marketing, and there is nobody in product or or or tech. Uh but it's still a very solid, uh, a very solid platform. Uh and we are not really a startup because we are not VC funded. So uh when I was in my 30, I was like, okay, I'm done with the corporate life. I want to to create something. I had a friend from childhood uh with whom I worked on a previous project, and I was like, okay, let's go. It's now our neighbor. And we got help. Uh we have two business angels, the founder of WP Rocket, who had just uh sold WP Rocket to group one.

Josh Hall 9:58

Oh, okay.

Caring As A Business Model

Aurelio Volle 9:58

Um and they were like um big brothers, you know, and they they put us on the right track. Um but yeah, we don't we don't have investors, we are not backed by VC or hosting company. Uh we are profitable and we are healthy, and I think that's also what um our user help uh because we can build in public, so we share everything, uh, uh growth, mistakes, uh, everything. And they can relate.

Josh Hall 10:30

Well, and I really do like what you said about the model of like if if your customers do better, you do better. And the pay as you go, pay as you need kind of mint, you know, mentality, which is quite different. Uh, I mean, obviously, WordPress is probably the gold standard for having a suite of products around a community and and having that like customer-first mentality. So I do feel like in most cases, most themes and products outside of WordPress have a through line. But what I've seen is when a lot of companies do get purchased or they do get so big that it becomes very, very corporate, yeah, the first thing to go is that customer-facing relationship feel. Um, so it is really cool to see that that's like your a core mission and value for you. I'm kind of curious. Um why WordPress insight maintenance, why uh with the other options out there, aside from being more focused, you know, customer focused, uh, you know, first focused, for you, why was it this category of tool that that got you excited?

Aurelio Volle 11:36

Um because we started uh building uh a plugin that was optimizing image for SEO using AI um 10 years ago. Uh and so we had like uh a knowledge about WordPress, we had a knowledge about SEO. Um my CTO was uh uh he built uh the WordPress plugin of Wiglot. Uh he was working at SEO Press as well, so he was deep down inside the French community. Uh and that's how we we started, you know. We we had connection, uh people were nice. Um and and this is a kind of a game changer. Um because we like, I mean, it's it's easy to listen to your users when they are nice people, and and I think among our audience, um it was the same for everyone. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, even 20 years ago, back back in the day, you started to build one website, and then two websites, and then it became a job. Uh and then you had you had to hire someone and your business, and and so you move from you moved from uh people with a hobby to successful entrepreneurs, but people never lose lost uh this this part of their soul where they like to share, they like to give feedback, they are genuinely nice uh because they were computer people at some point. I think we all are computer people to some extent in this market, uh, which make us nice by necessity, uh, I'd say, you know, I don't know. Uh that this is one thing that was important and that kept us uh through the journey. Um yeah.

Josh Hall 13:26

Gotcha. Was there any other mission for you in the beginning or reasons why uh a WordPress, you know, website manager tool was such a priority for you? Because I imagine anyone who gets into WordPress, you could go a lot of different areas, the different plugins, themes, builders, add-ons. Um yeah, was what I guess, yeah. What was it about this particular space that was of interest for you too that you felt like there was room for Umbrella?

Aurelio Volle 13:56

Um the fact that uh the entry cost was high. Because I mean, building a building a backup platform where you have to process uh several thousands of backup every night, dozen of thousands of backup every night between midnight and 4 a.m. Uh, this requires some deep uh technical knowledge, you know. Like we we have an engineering team. Uh so this is what this was one thing uh because if it's easy to do, everybody is going to do it. And building WP Umbrella is not uh something you can do uh overnight. Uh so the SaaS dimension as well was important. Uh so we own our our code, and again uh we saw a huge market opportunity uh on the fact that Manage WP was uh left where it was. And this was the the main reason why. And then we fought we we felt in love about our users, about the topic, uh, and I think uh but we are going to speak about perspectives uh in the in the coming minutes, uh but I think it's a very sweet spot, yeah. Uh WordPress maintenance, like nowadays and in and in the next five uh five years.

Josh Hall 15:21

Well it's cool too, I imagine, to have a tool in a product that isn't reliant on uh a certain like theme or builder, because uh yeah, I use Divi, and Divi is in the middle of of transitioning to Divi5, which is a uh totally different ball game. Um and a lot of people left Divi as Divi4 was was getting just kind of left in the in the dust, as it looked publicly at least. Uh and it's gotta be cool to have a tool where like if somebody changes their theme, they're still using your tool. Uh I imagine that's pretty cool too.

Why WordPress Maintenance Sticks

Aurelio Volle 15:57

We we don't we don't have any churn, I mean we have a very little churn. So people when they sign up, they stay at WP Umbrella because this is core to their business. You know, they're using the tool every day or every week or every month. Um and we don't break websites. You know, this is one thing I told our first employee was in customer support, uh, and we were very clear on the fact that you should never troubleshoot anything on a client site because we do not affect them. Um, yeah, that's that's nice, you know, and our only uh bottleneck is WordPress itself, uh, which is half part of the internet. Uh so that that's a nice place to be. I agree.

Josh Hall 16:43

I'm glad you mentioned that because there's obviously so many different options now for web designers. With obviously WordPress is still what do you know the latest statistic of where it's at? I mean, last I heard it was at least 43 to 44. Is that about what you've heard?

Aurelio Volle 17:01

Yeah, it's it it I last thing I heard was 43.

Josh Hall 17:05

Yeah, so 43% of the internet. I mean, it's for anyone who feels like WordPress is dead or dying, it just is not the case when you think about how many. I can only imagine how many millions of websites there are, you know, on WordPress. I mean, obviously there is real competition with things like Wix Studio and Webflow and Framer and Squarespace and Show It. But um I imagine even a smaller slice of Pi for WordPress is still a huge area of the market.

Aurelio Volle 17:36

Yeah, and and I don't think WordPress is going anywhere um anytime soon, you know, and and I think the use case uh of WordPress is so big because it's about uh uh data sovereignty. So you you own your code and you own your content. Uh it's about empowering your marketing team to be autonomous on a website. And if you compare about Webflow or Framer, I mean this kind of new tool, uh they probably compete with Elementor to some extent. Uh but when it comes to why is WordPress so strong, uh, I think WordPress remains the best option in many, many cases.

Josh Hall 18:19

I'm glad you mentioned that because I was gonna ask you about where you felt like WordPress was in the market today. Um and it is interesting. Do you I guess I so I just for context as well, I've been using WordPress since 2012. So I mean, back when I I'm already like back in my day, when I got started with WordPress, it was you went to Theme Forest, you'd buy a theme, and then that was pretty much it. Obviously, page builders took off. There's so many tools. I feel like I'm at a place now to where I've been in the industry for so long. I don't have a good sense of the new tools coming up unless it comes up in my community. Are you seeing is there still a gold rush in a sense for like new plugins and and tools? Or do you feel like a lot of the established themes and tools are taking up most of the market? I mean, I think Umbrella to me strikes different just because you guys are uh I guess a quote unquote a newer tool that is in a busy market of WordPress Manager sites, but have made a you know a big, big impact in the last year, from what I've seen.

WordPress Versus New Site Builders

AI, Security, And The Shift

Aurelio Volle 19:29

Yeah, there is not many tools uh to the extent of my knowledge, and I don't know uh and I don't know everything for sure, uh, that have managed to create themselves a space in such a competitive market. Uh I mean we were one of the ones Wiglot uh was also one of the ones. Um and I when it comes to plugin teams, I mean when it comes to teams, Elementor is so big uh and and there is no room for for anyone, anyone, pardon. And when it comes to plugins, you have well-established competitive um solutions, they are working well. Uh and if we were able to take market share, it was only because uh manage WP was uh was abandoned, I think. I mean if they had maintained the solution the way we are maintaining the WP umbrella, we would have had no chance, you know, for final stop. Um so so this is one of the one of the reasons why. And I think with AI, um things are going to change. Uh, because if you think about the dynamic of WordPress, uh last year we were still in the middle of the automatic uh versus WP Engine drama. Um we don't hear about this anymore. Um and it was all this noise coming from Chat GPT, cloud, and everybody was waiting like, hey, what will WordPress do? You know, how should we switch technology? What's going to happen? And and two things actually happen. Uh WordPress is taking an amazing AI uh curve. Um and I think the future actually belongs to WordPress, which is something I was not really sure about a few months back. Uh and the other one is that uh all the valid coded tools, uh things that you can have fun with uh at the moment have huge security concerns. And if you balance the two, you now have a very solid, secure, open source backend powered by WordPress, WordPress pattern, and you have the ability to create uh on top of it amazing, on top of this pattern, amazing AI generated websites content that are secured and so on. Um, and if you come back to the designer position. Or to the hey, I manage websites for client position. Uh your job is going to slightly change from production because back in the day we were producing a design, we were producing code, uh, we were producing visual and s and so on, and now you can produce them um with AI or you can be assisted by AI, and your job is going to switch from production to care. How do you help your clients to succeed online? How do you take responsibility for the website of your clients to load fast, to stay safe? And I think uh we talk about WordPress maintenance, how to maintain WordPress websites, but the topic is how do you offer care to your client? And WordPress maintenance is a little part of care. Um and it's important that I think everybody who is working in the web at the moment uh realize this. You need to add value to people, and it's a job that's much more interesting, in my opinion, than just like you know, pushing an update button or doing a backup or stuff like this.

A Cautious Approach To AI

Josh Hall 23:09

You mentioned a lot about AI there. How are you guys thinking about AI with WP Umbrella? Um, are there is it implemented currently in some ways? How do you feel those are gonna marry together moving forward?

Aurelio Volle 23:22

Um we have to so people trust us with their data. Uh and there is no way uh there is not a world where implement AI to everybody uh overnight. Um and at the moment we use our tech team is using AI a lot. Uh we have a very well-structured code-based, we are shipping fast, uh, we have a giant infrastructure, we own dozens of servers, and and we have always something running in the background. Uh but when it comes to the users, at the moment, we have not implemented any kind of AI inside the product because most of it can be can be can be done through automation. You know, what is the point to have an AI to run plugin updates? Uh, we've created a safe update technology where we take a little backup, we take a screenshot, we do the update, we clear the cache, we take another screenshot, we compare them. Uh and this doesn't require AI. Uh so inside WP Umbrella as it is today, we don't have AI. Uh, and what we are working on right now is an auditing tool for agencies that will probably be uh uh put inside WP Umbrella. And this tool will have AI, but this tool will be an opt-in only for the website where you want us to look at. Uh and we will do our best to mitigate the impact uh on some data processing and stuff like this. Um, and I think we need to be careful with AI because what we are using right now uh doesn't cost what it should cost. And I think we everybody is getting used to uh AI. Uh but one day, cloud, you know, entropic, um uh open AI, they are going to increase their pricing, you know, and we need to to to adopt um a good way of using AI uh already, because then you we will have a huge dependency and people will not be able to do to do anything by themselves and they will not be able to afford to afford AI.

Josh Hall 25:30

Well, a couple important things you mentioned there. One was if it's already automated, yeah, there's almost not a reason to have an AI agent do something when it's already automated, running automatically. Also, the very thought of a web designer who has you know, say 50 clients and updating their sites, to have an AI agent having control of that is scary. Like that is something that I mean, there's just there's understandable apprehensions and lack of trust with it's one thing to pop on Jet GPT and Claude and get some advice or help with your copy, but it's one thing to have it inside of something like WP Umbrella doing tasks and taking control of a site, potentially taking it down. Um, if I I mean, you know, if there's anything political or there's any messaging that a tool isn't aligned with, the thought of like potentially that taking your client's site down and then you don't have any say or control, that's terrifying for a web designer.

Aurelio Volle 26:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't see uh I don't see any value to have AI uh and I would uh I feel I would feel much more confident to use update all on 100 website on WPM Brother with our safe update activated rather than rather than asking an AI agent to hey uh update my 100 website safely, uh because we've spent so much time designing processes that would scale, you know, because uh if you are uh hosting uh those 100 sites on the same VPS, which happens from time to time, you know, uh then the server is going to go down. So for instance, we have mechanisms in place to make sure that when you update too many things at the same time on the same server, uh we don't get your server down. And uh we have troubleshot uh during the last five years, five years, so many edge cases uh that make our technology today uh so reliable. I mean, last example I can give uh we had a backup that was in error and we couldn't find uh where it was coming. And we went down to uh one of our support guys, he opens the WP config and he saw some uh symbol in Japanese. Long story short, the WP config file uh had a wrong uh uh encoding. And and you cannot you cannot find this with with AI or the cost of finding this is way too high.

Josh Hall 28:18

Interesting. So you're seeing also the the fact that like AI could potentially increase in price like dramatically, I imagine, pretty quick. So basically, like if you get somebody dependent on a tool and it's like super cheap, suddenly there's leverage to jack up the price basically and like lock people in.

How AI Companies Will Monetize

Aurelio Volle 28:40

Yeah, I mean I think this is not uh uh uh this has been discussed a lot uh in the Silicon Valley, and and it's going to happen at some point, you know. Uh mostly because it cost uh 25. I think the ratio is 25. Uh the cost it it has for Anthropic is 25 higher than your subscription-ish. That's what that's what I saw on on X uh last uh last week, and it was like an actuate uh an actuate data, you know, it was not some uh what's your sense?

Josh Hall 29:16

This is kind of off topic from WP Umbrella, but what's your sense about some of these AI platforms and and ads and what that would look like for them? Like I'm wondering, like, aside from charging users more potentially dramatically all at once, what are some of the different revenue streams that you would see that they could potentially like I've heard a lot of talk about whether ChatGPT is going to do ads or some of these other platforms will do some sort of different monetization model?

Aurelio Volle 29:43

Um I don't know. Uh ads uh is definitely one of the options. Uh selling your data, even though I think they are not going uh to that path anytime soon could be an option. Um increasing pricing. You know, I'm on this I have absolutely no uh no idea, no clue. Uh but yeah, I think it's an interesting it's an interesting moment. We are all being addicted to uh to to this kind of tools. Uh and in the end, uh what I said about care, it's actually about liability. Uh and tomorrow when you will be building sites for your clients, you will be liable for what you've built, and you will have the ownership of making this project live through the time. And so you need to build it on technology you understand, on technology you are able to maintain, uh, because whatever you build, you will need to maintain this. Uh and because if you don't, trust with client is going uh to sink uh and you will be out of out of business. I think we are in a moment where trust and care are more important than never because production is easy.

Why “Free” Websites Cost More

Josh Hall 31:03

That is well said, that's such a good point. It's I think it's often missed, especially for folks who are vibe coding and who are getting into web design or they're doing marketing and doing website and forgetting that like invaluable lesson of if you build it, you gotta maintain it. And I what's interesting, like even just from a pure subscription idea, like a lot, I I just this is timely because somebody, a personal friend of mine, commented on Facebook last week and said, Hey, we're looking, we want somebody to build a website uh ideally cheap or free. And my first thought was aside from just the typical, like of course, but also I think people think you can just put stuff on the internet and it's free. But if that's not the case. But they they may not realize that they are the data. Like their data is the the price. You're you are, you are at the will, the whim of whatever social media platform you're on. You are the the customer. Um, your data is the customer. I don't know if people understand hosting and the fact that even if you were to just have a website, like you need to buy a domain name, you need to like a file on the internet is like going to have physical implications. It needs to be somewhere on a server in the real world. I I feel like, you know, in the WordPress realm, we know that it doesn't take long to realize that, but I'm I'm reminded that so many people who aren't in the online space, they just don't know how the internet works still. I feel like um that's like that's news to so many people who aren't in as a web designer or even on aren't online much.

Aurelio Volle 32:43

Uh and it's even news uh for you know well-established uh agencies, uh, to be honest. Um hosting uh is I mean the computer, the server, not not the hosting company, but the server is the main bottleneck of every single thing that you can do on the internet. Um and people don't most of the people uh and it's normal because it's not their job, but they don't understand that a browser, that your browser has to communicate to another server who returns something, and then the size of the uh of the tube. Uh I don't know if I can say that in English, but the bandwidth, uh the the space on the hard drive, uh it matters. Uh and people lack the one-on-one uh basic knowledge about uh hosting how to host a website and what it means. Um this was my uh most uh astonished uh this was in my astonishment report uh when I started WPM run because I'm not really a tech person. I mean I know how to I understand coding, I can read some piece of code just enough to know that it's not my job. Uh and I was impressed, um not in the in the good way, by the level of understanding of uh the O-screen industry by by our by our users. And it's so interesting at the end of the day, you know. Uh and and people should uh learn this and how it works, and they should learn how uh LLM are working too, because it's also super interesting, uh, and it's going to shape uh the way uh in which we are going to live tomorrow. So I I I just agree with you.

Josh Hall 34:35

Yeah, it's a it is just it's you know, when I saw that comment, I was like, oh my gosh, I just I have to be reminded, like so many people just don't understand the very, very uh the basics of like how the internet works in that there are there's a cost for everything on the internet, there is no free on the internet, there's just not. Um, and I the cool thing I think for WP Umbrella and other site managers, because a lot of people I'm sure would say, like, you know, WordPress client-wise, if they feel like I want to get a WordPress site done, that way I can just pay once and then I don't have to you know to do anything after that. But it's just like anything, any software needs updated, any software needs maintained. Otherwise, as we've seen with managed WP, which again I've been using for a long time, but I've definitely seen this happen. Like there was a big breach recently, there were there was a hack. Like if something is not maintained on the internet, it something's gonna happen. It's either gonna go down or it's gonna get hacked. Um, so I think that's where most of I feel like the DIY market and small business owners at least understand, working with web designers for a while, that you need to have care, you need to have maintenance, you need to have support, because everything needs to be updated at some point. Uh and not everyone understands that, but that's why like if somebody goes to Webflow, like they're paying ongoing because it needs to be supported, maintained. So again, you know, there's no free. There's no free on the internet.

Aurelio Volle 36:03

Uh just like with your with your mobile phone, you know, you need to you need to update uh your your software every two or three weeks, uh, whether it's feature or security patch, uh, you need to clean up your hard drive because otherwise it's becoming slow because you have too many pictures, and you need to take care of the of the device. And your website is nothing else than uh a digital device.

Roadmap, API, And Better Interfaces

Josh Hall 36:28

Yeah, so true. That's uh I feel like that's the easiest way to tell clients and small business owners who may not understand. It's like, yeah, if you can compare it to your phone, that you know how your phone needs a software update? So too does the website. Um gosh, so true. Now I'm kind of curious. Speaking of updates and features, with WP Umbrella, how long have you guys been in existence now?

Aurelio Volle 36:52

Uh we created the company in 2021, and we started to work full-time on this in 2022.

Speaker 3 37:01

Wow.

Aurelio Volle 37:01

Uh, my CTO in January and myself in April.

Josh Hall 37:06

Gotcha. So it has evolved and innovated very, very fast. And again, I've been on the receiving end of this just by you know hearing customers, there was no, you know, they weren't being paid to say this. They just were kind of like raving about like the team and how innovative it was and how um like fast things were moving as far as your guys' production and your features. So what's the next like I don't know how far you look out, but what um we could talk about features, the product in general, but what's the next you know, couple few months or however far you want to go? What's that look like for you guys? What are you focused? I guess what are you focused on here in the next near future?

Aurelio Volle 37:45

Um three things. Uh the first one is to deepen our uh open API so people can build on the top of uh WP Embra, whatever they want. Um the other one is to have interfaces, uh, because what people also like, because we have a lot of uh of designers, uh, is user experience that we offer to them, uh which doesn't uh feel like WordPress, if I if I can say that was the number one thing I heard, by the way, was the UX and just the interface. Yeah, we we spent a lot of time fighting on whether the button should have a border radius 3 or border radius 5, and I'm not kidding. Uh just because the call I was doing ping pong, uh we call it ping pong with my CTO uh because I'm acting as CPO and we always take fight on where should things go. Um long story short, the second point is that we want to have interfaces that make the management of hundreds uh of sites so easy for everyone. Uh and we are almost done. We have like four or five interfaces to clean, uh, and we have introduced a new way of uh working, like thumbnails, where you know what you need to do, you have one click button, and if you want to um go deep uh inside the stuff, you you can. Uh and this is almost done. Um, and the first thing, uh the third thing, pardon, uh, is to uh add a few features such as a broken link checker, a contact form testing. Um we already have visual regression testing, but it's only working uh upon upon an update, and your website can break uh without any kind of updates, you know, just someone updating a dependency on the server, I mean whatever. So we are going to also introduce a standalone uh visual regression testing feature and few things here and there that will make the value we deliver to people so big that if you are managing websites and if you don't want to self uh host it, then you should be at WP Umbrella final stop. And even if you are self-hosting it, uh you might want to be at WP Umbrella too. Uh it just come at a price.

Josh Hall 40:08

Gotcha. Very cool. Well, I appreciate hearing kind of behind the curtain on what you guys are working on and looking to implement here soon. I I know some WordPress site managers have the ability to add a non-wordpress site if it's pure like domain and reporting. Is that the case with Umbrella? Is it pure WordPress?

Aurelio Volle 40:28

It was in the early days, uh, and we've killed it uh because most of the agencies we know are only working with WordPress. Yeah, you know, and so um okay, you could add another website, and the only thing that we could do about it would be probably to monitor the uptime and performance, uh, which had which has value still, uh, but then it complexify all the message, you know. And my niche is web agency working with WordPress.

unknown 40:56

Yeah.

Aurelio Volle 40:56

Um and and that's why we are only uh accepting WordPress sites at the moment.

Josh Hall 41:03

No, that makes sense totally.

Aurelio Volle 41:04

And I do feel like if somebody else has a site that's not on WordPress, it's likely whatever platform it's on is going to be there's gonna be some level of reporting and futures that and and at some point we thought, okay, maybe we can we can do Shopify, maybe we can do uh Webflow and so on, but then uh like you said, it's already managed. So we don't really have value. Uh there is no point for us to do a backup of a Shopify website, though they already have backup, everything is managed. Uh they manage updates inside Shopify too. So, you know, uh we we are sticking to WordPress because agencies uh they have built their processes around WordPress. And because they have processes, they were able to scale uh and to start managing dozens of dozens of clients at it. Because if you are a solopreneur and you are doing a bit of WordPress, a bit of Webflow, a bit of framework, a bit of um whatever the tool, actually you you cannot be profitable because every time you need to jump into a new tool, rediscover what happened, uh, and you don't have standardized processes. So it might be very cool and very interesting from a research and development point of view, uh, and also to have fun. Yeah, but when it comes to business business, um I think you need to have the fewer tools possible. Yeah, and the CMS is a big jump, you know, uh from WordPress to Shopify or um that's but that's my thing.

Josh Hall 42:38

Yeah, no, I totally agree. Um, you mentioned the the design, the UX and the interface. That was like again, the number one thing I heard was about how how many people just appreciated that because it didn't look clunky, because WordPress still looks quite clunky on the back end, but yeah, WP umbrella feels modern, a more modernized way to design that. Even Mans WP, I know they recently did a quote unquote refresh, but it really wasn't any. It was like it wasn't even really anything. They were made a big announcement, and I was like, yeah, this is literally just like the exact same thing. Um but I want to know, let's have some fun here. What what's another one of your favorite features of WP? What's something that you're proud of? What's something that you know, if you look at some of your competitors, what's something that you like to show off in WP Umbrella?

Aurelio Volle 43:23

Uh our reporting feature, uh for sure. Uh uh because I think uh our users, not all of them, but uh agencies overall, are very bad at understanding the tremendous value they have uh for people. And um for instance, um some people don't want to manage hosting because they want the user to not be like I think the motivation is very good. It's like hey, if my user Want to go, then I don't manage the hosting, so we can go. Actually, you should be managing the hosting and have a very clear offboarding process for your users. My point is you don't understand how hard it can be for your user with a businessman who might be doing 10 other times, uh 10 other things at the same time, just to log in your hosting provider and find the FTP access. You know? And and our user, they have been, you know, for them it's super easy to update a plugin. It's super easy to restore a backup, especially with tools like WP Umbrella. And so they have never taken the time to communicate properly on the value of what they do. And that's what we've built, uh, the reporting feature. It was one of the very first features of WP Umbrella. Um because I wanted our user to say, hey, we are maintaining a website. Hey, this is what we have updated last month, and maybe the user doesn't care. But it shows commitment, it shows professionalism, and it helps you to have uh a clean process. So it will be our reporting feature. Um, and we've spent the last six months working hard on our backup and restoration feature. Uh, and we have built something that's quite um amazing. And we did that because we had feedback that the backup technology was not uh as reliable as it should be on very messy websites because it's always the same, you know, it's working perfectly well on 99% of your website. But when you need a backup, it's always on the one website where nothing is working and because the backup is not working, and so we spent so much time uh and resources on our backup and restoration technology, and I'm very proud of what the tech team uh actually built.

2026 Goals: ARR, Churn, Team

Josh Hall 45:54

That's cool. Very cool. Um where do you foresee? Do you have any goals or metrics? Like what what would 20 what would 2026 look like as a as a successful year from Brell? As the CEO, I'm I'm fascinated by I think now and the just I've been an entrepreneur for 16 years now. So I've I've went from essentially being a cabinet maker and a drummer to being a designer and then realizing that I accidentally created a business and now I'm like a full-blown entrepreneur. So my I feel like every couple years I I like level up with just being a yeah, an entrepreneur and vision and goals look way different now. So for you, it's kind of more of a personal thing. But as a as a CEO of this, what's yeah, what do you have like a certain number of customer base that you want to hit? What I guess how do you set goals? That's that's the question I'm curious about. We don't need to talk revenue or numbers if you don't want to, but I'm kind of curious, like, how do you as a CEO set goals at this level? Um this is a purely selfish question, by the way.

Aurelio Volle 47:01

No, no, no, no. We can uh and we can also talk about um about revenue and numbers because we uh we share everything online. Um so there are very different things. Um if you if you think about revenue, uh every year we grow uh by something which is 100% uh-ish. So last year I think it was 90%. So monthly recurring revenue-wise, it was 67, but accounting-wise, it was you know, like this kind of uh so growth must be here. Uh but growth is a consequences, it's not something you hey, I want to grow to 100%. Uh this is not the this is not uh a compass. Uh the compass is hey, what do I want to do to reach um to reach that point? But so we have like a target of growth uh and for 2026 it's to close the year uh with at least 2 million of annual recurring revenue. Um and we are well on track to do that. Uh the ambitious goal is to do that in euro. Uh so 2 million euro is not 2 million dollars, uh, and that's our uh benchmark between a good year and a very good year.

Josh Hall 48:20

Gotcha.

Aurelio Volle 48:21

Uh we we will see uh it's to keep the second one is to keep the churn uh at a very low level. Uh because like I said in the introduction, uh we are a core tool for our users. And if we fail them, we make look them stupid in front of their clients, which is not acceptable. You know, so churn is a very good matrix uh to follow. Um last but least, I want to you know churn but in the team. Uh we've created a very nice team with people with a lot of ownership, and I think it's very hard to find in a full remote setup people who can consistently show up in the morning, uh work between five and nine hours based on what they have to do, uh, with a fuller level of fuller level ownership. Uh and so success would also be not to have uh anyone leaving the team uh in 2026. Uh and I think we are on uh I think we are on track. Um managing our cost. You know, in the end, we uh we created the company in our 30s to do things the way we wanted to do them. Uh and many people offered us to invest in the company. Uh VC uh even in the WordPress ecosystem, like many people came very early to say, hey, we would like to buy some share and blah blah blah, and uh and we were yeah, but that's not why we why we built WP Umbrella. And I like to also be able to spend some time with my uh family uh to do some climbing, you know, and and at some point uh I we discussed this with the team, uh, but we don't want to be more than 10. Uh and I think nowadays with AI you can run uh dozen million dozens million dollar company with 10 people, uh and that's what we are on track to do, uh I guess, uh, with the same level of obsession. Because for instance, uh, this is something that we learned from the founders of WP Rocket. Um when they had bugs, they hired support agents, and they told us, you know, if we had to do this again, we would have hired developers to fix the bug. So we would have not hired many, many support agents. And we've been obsessed with this, and one of the metrics I follow is the number of uh tickets per project.

Josh Hall 51:06

That's interesting.

Aurelio Volle 51:07

This number is consistently going down uh because we spent a lot of time uh improving the tool, improving our documentation, improving our chatbot, uh so people can self-service if they want something faster. Um and at the end of the day, uh my co-founder and I uh we meet uh in so this year it was in in November, but end of year, we have like a two-pager of hey, are you still happy with what you do? Um do you want to change position? Do you want to move from CTO to CPO? Would you like to and we rediscuss everything? Uh and so far uh it has been very fun. And I think everybody in the team uh feel it's a safe place and that we have uh a free communication. And and I have no clue about what people are doing, uh, which is we have flexible hours, uh, they set their goal, they assess their goal. Uh we have some kind of um, you know, so it's we want to work within this framework, yeah. Uh and that's my metric of success. And what's hard, what's because it's super easy to say, what's very hard is to give people enough clarity within this framework so they can deliver. Because it can be very overwhelming to have your big boss who say, Hey, uh what do you want to do with marketing? Uh what's your target? Okay, and then you report, and then you are not matching your goal because uh when you took this uh marketing executive position, you were not thinking that it would uh be that much of autonomy. Um and so we spent a lot of time uh discussing clarity with the team and and also uh uh switching the roadmap, the roadmap switch every two weeks. This is also because we we listen to people, yeah. Uh and I I've came to the conclusion that you don't really need to have a plan. You know, I mean we know where we are going, but there are so many opportunities, you know. You meet what you you had planned something, and then one user tells you, hey, but why don't you do that? This is super important, and like, oh yeah, he's right. Uh and my vision is to follow whatever our users want.

The Real Pitch For Care Plans

Josh Hall 53:32

That's great. And I I appreciate getting kind of a an inside look at how you think about goals and plans and vision moving forward. Actually, it reminds me of the importance of what sounds like a lot of your success is just working on things you can control, which is churn, customer churn, reducing, yeah, like keeping your team happy, stuff that like because you can only control marketing so much. You can't force people to buy. Um, you know, there's some things you can get pretty good ideas on what's going to happen. But you know, as soon as like the algorithms change or meta messes with their ads, it affects like you really have no control of a lot of the the marketing side of things. But it's a great reminder, I think, just a business principle in general, which is you can really do a lot to have success by just yeah, reducing churn, working on care. I love the little tip of the support tickets, and what a great little measure of success I hadn't thought about. But if you're getting less support tickets, that's a really good sign.

Aurelio Volle 54:32

So you know, and and if you think about the fact that market conditions are a bit harder for everybody, I think, you know, like after the COVID, uh after the pandemic, where uh uh everybody wanted to go online and everybody was like to too much business, things are being normalized a bit. Uh and if you've built a website and if you have not sold a care package to the website owner, uh this is your tomorrow action. It's not to find a new client, it's not to you have all the material. Hey, I built your website, it was two years ago. We should really move to something new, and it's just a care plan and just going to cost you 20, 30, 100, 200, 1000. I don't know your pricing, your customers, but it's going to cost you this. So you can also earn a recurring revenue, uh, which is very important, I think, uh, and which will be more and more important.

Josh Hall 55:32

Yeah, that was my first course that I ever created was uh on building a website maintenance plan, which was based off of what I did. As my my world was changed when I started my maintenance plan. So uh and yeah, learned about this lovely term called recurring revenue. Uh so it's awesome. Yeah. Well, this Ariela, this has been great. I really, really appreciate you taking some time. And like I said, it's it's rare to be able to talk to a SaaS CEO in this context and really appreciate you being transparent about yeah, your vision, your goals, your your numbers, um, a lot about the tool. I'm very, very excited for WP Umbrella. Again, awesome having you guys as a sponsor for my upcoming event here. Um, so I'm excited to dig it even further. And it's it's been really cool. Like I said, the team's awesome. So um man, man, do I appreciate good people more and more? It's just I I like you said earlier, there's such a lack of trust online now. So I couldn't agree more. Do you do you have a a final, I don't know, a final motivational thought? What would you like to end off with today? I'll leave it completely up to you.

Migration Help And Listener Deal

Aurelio Volle 56:35

Um oh, uh, you said something, and I really want what what you said about what you can control and what you can't control. Uh give yourself a break on the thing you can't control and go hard on the thing you can. That's that's my day-to-day motivation. You know, in the end, when you run a company, you are just juggling problems, you know, and good moment, of course. But you're juggling situations. Someone wants this, someone wants this, and then you can end up being uh stressed uh very quickly. Um and I think the solution to many problems is to ignore the problems uh on which you don't you cannot have any impact and to focus on the one where well you can. Um and that's kind of my uh my mantra uh every every day. Uh and and we have a free migration service if you're using a competitors, blah blah blah. But you know, uh that's not uh what it what it was about.

Josh Hall 57:38

That's great. No, we'll definitely we'll definitely uh link that in the show notes. Uh that was awesome. Yeah, no, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for the time. Uh I'll make sure my link is there for everybody because I know uh we're currently doing a deal where anyone who uses my link at joshhall.co slash umbrella gets an additional free month uh to just play around with WP Umbrella off of the free trial. So definitely gonna recommend everyone check that out. And yeah, good to know the migration service. Is that something someone has to opt into or uh is that available so someone moves forward?

Aurelio Volle 58:10

You just have to shoot a message to the support team uh and we will be in touch and we will migrate everything you need us to uh to to migrate. Cool. Uh basically awesome.

Josh Hall 58:21

All right, well, it's been awesome chatting with you. Thanks so much for the time, and uh, I'm excited to see 2026 what the uh what the end of the year looks like for you to buy all this metrics. So I'm pumped for you.

Aurelio Volle 58:33

Thank you, Josh. It was uh it was a bit uh there we go, my friends.

Josh Hall 58:39

Hope you enjoyed this one. Again, go to the show notes for this episode at jockshall.co slash 425 for all the links that we mentioned. And if you would like to give WP Umbrella a try, you can get an entire month free after your free trial when you use my link, jockhall.co slash umbrella. That will be linked to the show notes. Be sure to hit the team up. And if you enjoyed this episode, let them know you heard their CEO and co-founder Aurelio on the web design business podcast. Such a good time to chat with him and just I really just personally enjoyed hearing about how a CEO at that level is thinking about business and planning and leading a team. So I would love to hear from you on what you got out of this one as well. You can drop a comment at jockshall.co slash 425. Again, all the links that we mentioned are going to be over there. And don't forget to check out the special deal they've set up for you using my link, jocksell.co slash umbrella, to get a full month free. And lastly, again, huge thanks to Umbrella for being a sponsor of our upcoming Web Center Pro 2026 Procon event. Cannot host such an incredible in-first event without our sponsors. So big thanks to Umbrella for investing in the community and just in awesome, in awesome tool, in awesome team, in awesome people. I love working with awesome people. So go give WP Umbrella a try. Alright, my friends, I will see you on the next episode.