Tony Perez On Security, Business, And Life
It’s only recently that I have grown a deeper appreciation for personal brands. Prior to 2010, the idea of establishing a personal brand was a foreign concept to me. In 2010 Dre Armeda came up with perezbox, and the rest is history. It’s perhaps the single most impactful thing I have done for my own individual personal and professional growth.
While I don’t believe everyone needs a personal brand, I do believe that as a business owner it should be part of your larger go to market strategy.
When we first started, our pricing by all accounts was absurdly low. In my last post I chronicled the details of our pricing journey at Sucuri. Developers were finding that the cost was low enough that it was easier to send websites to us rather than invest their time, that could, at the time, run $40 to $100 an hour or so. Also, contrary to the traditional Information Security (InfoSec) domain, focused on the enterprise, there weren’t that many players in the website security domain focused on the everyday website owners. There were a few competitors in name only, not in product or quality of service.
Here are a few things we were working with:
You will undoubtedly undervalue your product or services, and your pricing will be wrong; this I am sure of. It will be echoed by every seasoned business person, professional coach, and everyone in between. You will start researching and googling how to raise your prices and you’ll find over 7 million results offering you advice.
Your inability to make any sense of it will be frustrating, and with every article you read you’ll find some qualifier that holds you back. The fears you feel – “what if we’re wrong”, “can we just revert?”, “what will the impacts to the brand be?”, “will my market work with this change?” – never really go away. Your frustrations won’t be that you don’t understand the idea of raising prices, but more along the lines of how.
While we are all accustomed to reading advice that starts at the conclusion, I instead want to focus on our journey. Specifically our journey with pricing at Sucuri. The real insights come from analyzing how someone reached a conclusion, because what we’re really after is the thought process more than the end result. How do I navigate the process of raising or changing my prices? I honestly have no idea, but I’ll tell you our story.
We have all been in those talks. You know, the ones in which they are telling you to measure all things? Test everything!!! The one in which they share the secret to achieving a 300% growth! How it’s impossible to make a decision without data? How data will set you free? You know, the talks that make you question everything you’re doing and leave you so confused at the same time?
I’ve found myself in the same situation as most, struggling to grasp the discussion. Not because I didn’t understand what they were saying, or disagreed with the logic, but I was having very different results and the experiences with the journey of testing. My failures in the domain were overwhelming and exhausting, especially since the rest of the industry kept saying this was the way to go.
I had become content with my thoughts of confusion until I heard Beka Rice, with Skyverge, speak at WooConf this past week and was compelled to revisit my thoughts on the subject.
When was the last time you were in a cab? How awesome of an experience was it when you did? Was it memorable?
I’ve spent the past two weeks on the road, splitting my time between Las Vegas, San Francisco and Minneapolis. I found myself spending a lot of time getting from point A to point B and often using a cab, for a variety of reasons.
In Las Vegas, they are the only option; granted there are car services providers at the various hotels. In San Francisco they are just outside the hotel door and give the impression of convenience; at least getting around town. Same applies in Minneapolis.
It’s really no wonder that services like Uber have been so disruptive to the industry.
I spent this past week in San Francisco, attending events, meeting and collaborating with interesting people. To say I’m mentally tired would be an understatement.
On Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend an event called Sales Hacker Conference. I honestly had no idea what to expect. What I did know was that I knew very little of this weird, and what I left with after the event was that I knew even less than I thought. That unfortunately becomes harder for a number of reasons as your company continues to grow, and at some point you start to yearn for a more sustainable, repeatable, approach. Hence attending this event.
I was pleasantly surprised with the content and caliber of information being shared. Who knows, maybe it was my lack of knowledge on the subject that made it so interesting.
Whatever the case, I was especially keen on one talk by Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski.
I’m truly fascinated by the WordPress business ecosystem.
I’m frankly not sure why; when I look at it, it feels so young and at times exhausting, and yet so fascinating at the same time. I always want to fast forward 10 years, just so that I can look back and admire what it becomes and the trials and tribulations it went through. In my eyes the ecosystem is truly still in its infancy, and there is something beautiful as you watch it mature.
Yesterday I read an interesting article by the the SideKick team, titled Pricing Update: Feedback and Lessons. SideKick is a platform that allows you to create an interactive walkthrough for any website, plugin, theme or web-based platform. In reality, it’s a really cool feature set. I remember when it first came out, and I believe it was initially designed to target WordPress. They received advise from a number of folks and it looks as if they’ve morphed their model to be platform agnostic, I commend them greatly on this move.
I can’t stress the importance of being platform agnostic, it’s easy to be drawn the market share of 23% and growing, but never put your eggs in one basket.
By the way, looks like they’ll officially be launching November 14th or so, keep an eye out so you can try it.
To think I was not going to attend the event.
It was already later in the year, November, and besides, as my beloved friend Chris Lema pointed out, I had been rejected to speak.
Forgive @perezbox and his tweets. He got a rejection letter from #wooconf without even applying to speak.
— Chris Lema (@chrislema) November 3, 2014
I didn’t even get my name in the hello.
While in San Francisco this past weekend I had the opportunity to attend a conference, WordCamp San Francisco. I didn’t sit in on that many sessions, for a variety of reasons, but there was one that I attended, mostly because I know the speaker and he delivers a good and impactful talk – Chris Lema.
His talk was on Building Your Brand with a Blog – yes I stole the concept for the post title from that.
He defined 6 key elements to a successful content marketing strategy:
If you have never heard my Chilean friend talk, you really need to, oh and don’t worry you have a lot of opportunities to. I encourage you to grab a glass of your favorite drink and go through the various videos, he’s a phenomenal speaker, and he writes about it too. But look, this post isn’t about my friend, it is however about his 6 key points.
I was recently privileged to be sitting with friends and peers at the first private event designed and tailored for the WordPress business eco-system, Pressnomics. Of the various presentations given there was one that was of particular interest, the interview with Matt Mulleneweg. There was one topic in particular that appeared to catch most people’s attention – commercialization of plugins.
Before I start understand that this is all my own interpretation of what was said and in some instances things might have been taken out of context. I also had a follow-up conversation that helped me better understand, I think, the responses given.
I’m really excited to see the latest parody by the folks at NASA. With all the recent issues with budgets and the lack of attention they get for all their successes over he years, its good to see them make progress in the way people relate with them as an entity.
Kudos for not letting bureaucracy get in the way and actually putting out the video (obviously assuming some folks didn’t agree with it).
Following up on my post this morning, talking to my experience on WPLate Night, WPCandy released last nights live recording this afternoon, so go check it out.
Oh and special thanks to the guys at WP LateNight for getting my good side in the banner:
Look forward to feedback. I always feel funny listening to myself, but don’t think it came out too bad.
After my most recent Review of the WordPress WordFence Plugin post I felt it was only fair that I take time to review the effectiveness of other similar security focused plugins in the WordPress.org repository.
It’s important to understand that while I work for an InfoSec company my focus is not on whether its a competitive product, but rather how useful it is to end-users and how effective it is at detecting malware. The goal is to establish an unbiased review, leveraging the large repository of web-based malware variants I have at my disposal.
I stumbled on the AntiVirus plugin while crawling the repository and was naturally curious. The plugin repository description is not very exhaustive, but appears to succinctly articulate what it was designed to do.
As of late I have been seeing a lot of traffic on various mediums, WordPress.org, Twitter, and Facebook about this new plugin – WordFence. It hasn’t been around for too long I don’t think, maybe 6 months or so, and I have been getting a lot of questions around its effectiveness, etc…
I get this a lot and more often than not my answer is usually pretty neutral, “You know, I’m not sure I have not personally tried them, but I encourage you to and let me know how it works” or “Nope, no thoughts on it, but I hear good things.” Well today, for whatever reason I decided to give them a whirl. If you know what I do then you know web security is a bit of my life these days. Like many others I often obsess over would be competitors and its good to understand what might be chomping at the heels.
With that being said, this post will hopefully serve as an unbiased, hopefully, review of a plugin that is getting a lot of positive remarks from end-users. The focus will be to measure its effectiveness in detecting web-malware on a basic WordPress website.
Back in February I put out a post talking about Web Security: Managing Your Passwords, with the recent compromises on sites like LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.fm I felt it was appropriate to go back and look at some of the technical aspects of the LastPass solution. Specifically on whether it is secure.
This week I was sent a podcast, Security Now with Steve Gibson, that supposedly talked to whether LastPass is secure so I figured why not give it a go. I learned a few things from it and thought I’d share it in a quick post, especially being how relevant a topic it is right now. Password management that is…