Episode 76 – Akshat Choundry on Running a WordPress Business in the Silicon Valley of India

Jean Galea and Donnacha MacGloinn, standing in for James Laws this week, go deep into the fascinating story of Akshat Choudhary, founder and CEO of blogvault.net, a WordPress backup service and the most successful WordPress-related business in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India.

Among the topics covered in this free-wheeling, wide-ranging discussion:

* How Akshat started off in WordPress, what he did before and his future plans.

* How, as a lone founder with no previous experience of WordPress, he grew BlogVault to a company of 13.

* How he managed to juggle a demanding day job with working on his WordPress startup every evening.

* What he doesn’t like about the name of his company.

* How it felt when a massive competitor launched a very similarly-named product just a week after his, but how it turned out to be a good thing.

* How to deal with the pressure of being a small fish in a rapidly-changing business environment.

* Why it is worth doubling down on the WordPress market.

* The quality of Internet service in India.

* Is India a scary place to visit? Will a taxi driver punch you in the face and take your Macbook?

* What are the best Indian destinations for digital nomads?

* How Akshat’s new malware protection service, Malcare, grew naturally from BlogVault.

* What is the difference between Blogvault’s malware removal feature and Malcare, his new service.

* Why he should have released Malcare six months ago.

* Donnacha’s suggestions to improve the marketing of Malcare.

* How Jean met Akshat, and what most impressed him.

* The importance of traveling to meet your customers in person.

* Bringing the atmosphere of WordCamps back home to India.

* Gaining big customers such as WPEngine, Godaddy, LiquidWeb, Pantheon, FlyWheel, Cloudways, WPServeur and Savvii.nl.

* Advantages of running backup and malware-detection tasks through a service, rather than with WordPress plugins on your own hosting.

* Why continual, incremental backups are vital for eCommerce websites.

* Is it better to be good at tech or good at marketing?

* Finding good programmers in Bangalore, and how to retain them.

* Why, despite oversaturation in the WordPress market, there is always room for another good product.

* Why Akshat is pretty sure that one of your WordPress sites has malware that you are unaware of.

https://blogvault.net/

BlogVault

Malcare

Migrate Guru - Free WordPress plugin

blogVault (@blogVault) | Twitter

Akshat Choudhary (@akshatc) | Twitter

https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshatchoudhary/

https://blogvault.net/