Dear entrepreneurs,
It is with great pleasure that I write to you today.
Squirrly.co is the home of many great products that have changed the lives of the entrepreneurs and marketers who used them.
Today, this home welcomes an important member of the Squirrly family of products: Hide My WP Ghost by Squirrly.
When did the Hide My WP Ghost project start?
The story of Hide My WP Ghost started way back in 2016 and it was created by a small development firm, under the leadership of John Darrel.
Squirrly Meets WPPlugins Tips.
WPplugins.tips has been delivering this wonderful solution to customers that came their way through the wpplugins blog. Members of Squirrly were invited to contribute to the blog and in time we started different collaborations.
We fended off attacks thanks to the Invisibility Cloak developed by WPPlugins Tips.
I am grateful to this very day for John who learned about how one of our presentation sites (we keep presentation sites completely remote from customer databases) was hacked due to an older WordPress plugin. The WP plugin that was at fault, was becoming outdated and had a terrible vulnerability. It opened the gates for hackers to come in and lay waste to the great work we were doing. Most of our pages were changed to contain some spam text for a services company in Italy.
Luckily, John helped us sort it all out and he couldn’t help himself but say: “None of this would have happened if you used Hide My WP Plugin. You could have kept the vulnerable plugin in, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because my plugin changes all the vulnerable paths.”
It was an interesting thing to learn about. John and his team were power users of our Squirrly SEO solution for WordPress, so i said it’s only fair to start using theirs.
I was surprised with the quality of work that was made on the plugin and our CTO, Calin Vingan, was also impressed.
Needless to say, we kept older themes and plugins and never got attacked again.
The WPplugins team kept telling us that they need more customers and we decided to offer them a deal to work on Hide My WP Ghost together.
Squirrly couldn’t resist getting in on this amazing product.
We’ve been selling Hide My WP Ghost since 2018 and we started doing that very close to our Squirrly SEO: Briefcase launch event. We had to keep all our marketing slots open for Squirrly SEO’s new launch, and we decided to keep the launch pretty quiet. But then it hit me: “why not do this completely outside of the Squirrly community?”
What we really tried to do was see if we can take this new plugin, make it better, help create more ways of getting customer feedback and sell it completely under the radar, without having to resort to our very big community of users.
A question remained.
Our question was:
Can we sell this [new plugin] without using our “Squirrly” or “by Squirrly” brand on it?
We didn’t mention our team, we kept separate support teams, etc. We shared marketers, designers and developers between Squirrly and Hide My WP Ghost. But otherwise we treated them as two separate operations.
In 2021, I could finally answer the question we had, which is why it’s such a great pleasure to write this to you today.
The MRR mark has reached $10,000 USD in monthly recurring revenue (calculated using averages and projections) for Hide My WP Ghost alone.
So I know and I can say for certain that we now have a product on our hands that really sells well, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t benefit from the vast package of Goodies that comes to every product published under the Squirrly brand.
There isn’t the slightest shadow of a doubt: people love it and it brings value. Receive a Hero’s welcome.
If it can do so well without ever being promoted to our 300,000 subscribers (email lists), or inside our other software products and without being on our social media channels, then that means we’ve managed to build something people love.
It’s not marketing Hype. It’s a fantastic product.
I already learned (the hard way) how much it can help our own sites.
It’s time it started helping all the sites inside our Squirrly Community.
We’ve done more than just publish the product. We came in with Product Management, Customer Development, UI, UX, Content for knowledge base, with new features we learned customers needed and with the roadmap.
After 3 years, we’re making it official and we’ll soon add it to our main store as well.
It’s time to give it the inheritance it deserves.
Hiding your WordPress is the best way to make sure you won’t go nuts when your 3rd party plugins start being vulnerable.
We’ll talk about this a lot.
