This is a short background story of how I went from idea to service with FixHackedWP.com which was launched a couple of weeks ago. Enjoy!
I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting products and services to develop and offer that has a fit in the marketplace. As an agency owner I’ve been thinking about the offering of maintenance plans for a long time. They are useful but sometimes tricky. At the same time, I was getting a few emails from people who had their sites hacked.
Out of this, the idea of FixHackedWP.com was born. After looking around for a bit, I realized that very few people in the Swedish marketplace were offering a standardized cleaning service for hacked websites, as well in the global market.
All said and done, there is an idea which is definitely needed. Many people see their sites hacked for various reasons, although most often it is because of poor maintenance and not applying updates. The aim of FixHackedWP.com and its sister sites HackadWP.se (Swedish) and WP-Gehackt.de (German) is to first offer a cleaning service, and then offer an ongoing maintenance plan. This way, we want to prevent hacking from happening in the first place.
This idea came to me because it is an extension of what I’m already doing at my agencies XLD Studios and Bernskiold Media. By packaging this service that we are already doing into a productized service, it is my hope that it will be easier to purchase and thus make it easier for people who need help.
All in all, it took me about a weekend to get everything together. It’s a simple WordPress multisite network powered by WooCommerce and processes payments by invoice and credit card (Stripe). For this kind of service, the terms of service are of high importance and I spent a few hours getting them together and having them proofread by a lawyer friend of mine (yes, I take pride in the fact that she deemed them mostly good from the beginning!).
With all the great services and products out there, it is easy to set a business up. Apart from the website, support is quickly and nicely set up to go through HelpScout and online chat to help users right on the site is powered by Olark.
Now, the site is out there and we have already signed a very exciting partnership with the Swedish web host Oderland, who will be offering the services of HackadWP.se to their customers if their WordPress sites are hacked. I couldn’t be happier!
Let’s see where this takes us, but I think this episode illustrates how it is possible to take something that you’ve learnt, package it into a nice offering and launch it quickly and easily and use that to gauge and see how the market will react. I’ll be sure to follow up soon again with another post.
