Episode 124 – Akshat Choudhary

Introducing Akshat Choudhary

Akshat is the founder of BlogVault and MalCare. He’s been in the WordPress community for eight years. Mostly a developer, Akshat is also growing his team and dealing with the challenges that come along with that.

Show Notes

Website | BlogVault

Website | Malcare

Website | WPRemote

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

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.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 124.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Akshat Choudhary. Akshat is the founder of BlogVault and MalCare. He’s been in the WordPress community for eight years. Mostly a developer, Akshat is also growing his team and dealing with the challenges that come along with that. Welcome, Akshat. We’re so glad you’re here.

Akshat: Hi, I am glad to be here.

Liam: Well, we’re excited to meet you today, Akshat. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Akshat: All right. As Tara has introduced, I’m the founder of BlogVault and MalCare. We are a WordPress backup and security service. That’s essentially what we do. As the founder, I lead the team to make sure everything is happening on time. Actually, on a personal front, as you guys had mentioned earlier, BlogVault and MalCare have been my life for almost eight years now. That’s what I’ve been eating, breathing, and everything. All my life has revolved around it. And it’s almost sad in a way, but it becomes your identity to such a great extent because you’re so involved in your business. As of today, that’s how I would describe myself.

Tara: Well, BlogVault is a familiar term for many of us in the WordPress space. How did you get started with that?

Akshat: This is an interesting story. I’m an engineer by education and I was working as an engineer writing code day in day out. I can still consider myself a WordPress outsider to a great extent. But when we got started, I barely knew anything about WordPress.

Now, one of the bloggers I was following who was a really famous internet personality, he lost his website. That’s when I thought, “Okay, maybe if this guy who’s so famous and actually very technical, if he can lose his blog, then maybe there is something to it.” That’s how I got the idea. I thought it’s like a two-week project. Now, it’s been eight years and even now we are improving and building our product. I don’t think I am that terrible programmer. Just two things have happened. One, I think everyone estimates incorrectly but secondly, the space itself is so interesting, and so many things open up and to go deeper into it, that, it takes a long time to build a great product.

Tara: Were you already using WordPress at the time? Were you already familiar with WordPress?

Akshat: No. I’m sure I never heard of WordPress then. It’s been a long time. But I never really used WordPress. One of the reasons why we are called blogVault, had I used WordPress, maybe I would have called it WPwallet or something like that. I was like okay, “We need to protect blogs and what our blog’s made of. There’s a thing called WordPress, and how do we go about doing it?” That’s how I got into WordPress. I was a complete outsider.

Liam: I’m really interested in how you’re witnessing this famous bloggers website implode with no...