[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 454, entitled Innovative serverless solutions for WordPress with Carl Alexander and Paul Carter. It was published on Thursday, the 29th of January, 2026.
And a few bits of housekeeping just before we begin. The first thing to mention is that in order to keep the WP Builds podcast alive and kicking, we're looking for some new partners, some new advertising, some new sponsors, Companies who can see the value in getting their message out in front of a widely distributed WordPress podcast like WP Builds is.
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The only other thing to mention in the housekeeping section is don't forget we've got a very popular show. It's called This Week in WordPress. We do it live every Monday, 2:00 PM UK time. You can always find it at the same URL wpbuilds.com/live. Come and join us. It's a bit of fun. We are taking things, not all that seriously, but we do get into a few of the news stories from the previous seven days, and it's very, very welcome when people drop in and give us their commentary. So once more This Week in WordPress, wpbuilds.com/live every Monday, 2:00 PM UK time.
Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today I bring you two guests. I've got Carl Alexander and Paul Carter. They both have fairly different backgrounds. We've had Carl on the podcast before talking about Ymir. But today really the conversation is all around a new collaboration between Carl and the new up and coming hosting platform called BuiltFast.
And the idea really is to make it so that your website never, ever, ever can go down. It seems like a promise, which is unkeepable, but that is the intention. So really very technical stuff going on in today's podcast. It's a little bit beyond my pay grade, but there you go.
So Carl and Paul are discussing how it is that they met. How it is that Ymir fits into the BuiltFast network. Technically, how does it all work? The expectation of people in the year 2026, the fact that they're used to SaaS platforms, never, ever going down. And also how they're going to grow this and a sort of slightly unique positioning. They're not trying to grow it in terms of revenue handover fist. The idea really is that they're going to try and grow their loyal customer base in a much more slow and deliberate fashion.
So, like I say, a pretty technical episode. I hope you can cling on for dear life in the way that I did, but very, very nice to hear about some innovation in the WordPress hosting space, and particularly the idea of making sure that your platform is infinitely scalable. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by not one, but two guests.
I have got Carl Alexander and I've got Paul Carter. Hello. Both.
[00:03:44] Paul Carter: Hey, Nathan.
[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: Nobody knows.
[00:03:46] Carl Alexander: happy to be here again.
[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: knows who's gonna talk first there, do they?
[00:03:50] Carl Alexander: It is always
[00:03:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We're, we're gonna talk today about, the, beautiful, synchronicity that we've got between these two fine individuals. EA has recently been, I don't know, they're, in some sort of partnership.
We're gonna find that out in a moment, with built Fast. So let's get. Before we get into that, let's just find out a little bit about the two guests, who they are and what they are doing. So let's start with, well, let's go with Carl. Carl, tell us a little bit about you, who you
[00:04:19] Carl Alexander: I'll keep it. I'll keep it really simple. I work on Emir. it's pronounced, it's with a Y, but you spell it with a E. You pronounce it with an E. it's a platform to run, PHP, but specifically right now, WordPress, on basically AWS in a way that allows you to scale and not go down when you have SA sales or, like live events or things like that, when everybody's showing up and you don't want your site to go down.
This is the technology for
[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I, happen to know that it's, slightly more complicated than that, but, honestly, we could do nine hours of Carl explaining it and we probably would still only get a third of the way through. But anyway, what I'll do is I'll put a link to the show notes, sorry. I'll put a link in the show notes to the ammo web, the AMEA website, and you can go and check it out and understand all that Carl has been doing.
And, let's move over to Paul. Paul Carto joining us from Built Fast. Hello. Tell us about yourself.
[00:05:21] Paul Carter: Hey, so I've been in hosting for a little over two decades. we recently were with a two before its recent acquisition, and then my two, co-founders, myself, Justin Mazzie and Josh Priddle, founded built Fast back in June, as a sort of a new type of hosting company. More focused on partnerships, and building not to sell.
That's our goal, is to actually provide the service to customers. And, and we're excited because this new partnership with Amir allows us to do some interesting technology things that we think solve some interesting problems, that have been plaguing some of these customers with the larger WordPress websites for a while.
[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's fascinating. So kind of, although you've obviously got a lot of heritage in the industry, this company itself is fairly new. Did that, so we are gonna talk about you joining and partner partnering up with, Carl in a moment. But did, the fact that you are new allow you to have some sort of flexibility that you might not have done if you were some, I don't know, 10-year-old company with a bunch of stuff all, all on your back already?
[00:06:26] Paul Carter: A hundred percent. So I mean, that was part of our ethos when we were starting is like we, all of us have been at multiple hosting companies over multiple years, gone through multiple exits and we said, okay, we, think we've seen all of the things we've screwed up that other people have screwed up and we could do better.
And now we have an opportunity to use new technology, new thought processes, new partnerships, and just do it a different way. And so that was, our ethos when we started, earlier in the year and then launched in
[00:06:52] Nathan Wrigley: that's neat. 'cause you just get this one sinner one in a business. Opportunity, don't you? When the, everything is in front of you and nothing is behind you. And, yeah. So I'm just going to let you know a little bit about my sort of backstory with Carl. I, I know Carl, I've met him in person, but Carl has been working on this project for the longest time.
I dunno exactly how long, but it's many, Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's a long, time and, and I got really curious about it. I can't unders, I can't pretend to understand the technicalities of it. It goes way above my head. But Carl produces a newsletter periodically, in which he has been,
[00:07:32] Carl Alexander: I try every two weeks. I try every two weeks, but it's two weeks to a
month, basically. Two
[00:07:36] Nathan Wrigley: But it's a very frank appraisal of how life is going. So Carl is brutally honest actually. sometimes it's use, sometimes I think, it's fair to say when things haven't been going well, that you've written that up as well, and it's, firstly, I would commend you. I think there's too much.
In the world of pretending that you've got this social media face and everything's fine, nothing's problematic, but you haven't been that. And, actually to be truthful, that's made me more, more curious in what you are doing than if you'd have just pretended everything was fine. And then I got sight of, I.
I guess it was a tweet, or maybe it was in your email, I, caught site that you had partnered up with, built Fast and I was like, there was a bit of me, which was just delighted for you because I realized that there's been this struggle. So firstly, I guess you are delighted as well, right?
[00:08:33] Carl Alexander: I'm delighted. you could probably put that, I'll share you, there's a report, the last report, the 91, the previous one before that where I talk about the partnership. I think a lot of what we're gonna talk in this podcast relates to this, but yes, obviously I'm delighted. it's. Hard to work on something where like, I never fully understood, like when, you talk about like people like innovators, right?
Where they can see a future and the future's not here yet. And you have to have this tension between, am I crazy, right? You have this tension whether am I crazy or is it real? Right? And that tension is hard. Right. it's hard and it's harder than ever I find like to find people that are talking about that, that are trying to do it, not because it life is hard, like life is hard and being able to survive and do that for a long time, it's challenging and you really have to have a kind of fate
[00:09:37] Nathan Wrigley: But also
[00:09:38] Carl Alexander: hard to.
[00:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: I'm kind of guessing Carl, that there's not many people. If you walk into a room at Le, let's say some where I know you're from is a word camp, right? I'm guessing there's very few people in that room who can speak your language about this, that, I mean, I imagine that the hosting companies, there's a lot of salespeople there and things like that.
have a deep understanding of what they've got, but maybe not a broader understanding of the technicalities of things. So I,
[00:10:03] Carl Alexander: I mean, even in the PHP space, we're like maybe five.
[00:10:05] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. So there you go. So I got the feeling that you had this thing every time we met, you explained that, you'd been working on it and you'd put your foot on the pedal and taking your foot off the pedal and so it goes, but it always felt like there was never, the destination had never arrived.
There was always this light at the end of the tunnel somewhere, but you couldn't figure out how to navigate to that.
[00:10:28] Carl Alexander: Yeah. Yeah, and I, there's another person that's been working at longer than me, his name's Matsu Napoli. He does, the, it's the breakfast, what it's called. It's an open source project in PHP, and he's been doing it. He's the OG and w. It's hard because a lot of people are technical like me. The big difference between me and a lot of the other technical people that do this kind of stuff is I go to event, you see me all the time, right?
I'm talking to everybody that will listen to me. Like I, I have a, you haven't seen the most recent version of this talk, but I have the meme of the drunk guy talking to the girl, and it's like me talking to the WordPress community and then everybody's like. Can you just like stop talking about this? Like, we're tired of it, and I just won't stop talking about it.
And, but that's, but it got me in contact with a lot of people in different spheres and that's part of why I wanted to come on the podcast because it's not to talk about the technical stuff, it's to talk about where customer expectations are and why this technology is really important and what built FAST is trying to build, especially with this partnership is so
[00:11:36] Nathan Wrigley: Do, you mind if for just one or two minutes, we just put that technical stuff to one side and I ask you the fairly brutal question, how close on occasion were you to just giving up
ne Oh, you are remarkable.
[00:11:50] Carl Alexander: I mean, I was like, I mean, this year was tough. I mean, you saw me on my
[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:11:55] Carl Alexander: lowest probably when we were at CLO Fest. Like I'm starting my year in review. My year in review is gonna be insane. It's gonna be probably 15,000 words, but I was at my lowest because. I was like, okay, I'm gonna have to get a job and do this on the side because continue doing it on the side, but like, have a four, like a 40 hour week job.
I've haven't held a 40 hour week job in like, almost 15 years. Right? Like, it was just like, I was like, oh man, this is gonna be a lot to like keep, Chugging on this and getting some stuff out and keep working on it and going to events and talking about it and being that. But no, I and I talked to you get all the reports, right?
The one I said last year was there was a one in enterprise software. It's like, don't die. Like the longer you stay there, you even said it yourself at the beginning. There's a, there's something about
[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yep.
[00:12:55] Carl Alexander: That people see. And that was part of the, I'm sure that was part of Paul's decision factor as well.
as
[00:13:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. let's pivot into that a little bit then. So, I'm curious, Paul, as to what's the story here? How did you come across, Carl in the same way that I did by reading the newsletter.
[00:13:14] Paul Carter: Yeah, that's exactly how it came. So, when, I think someone had forwarded it to me at some point and said, Hey, this is interesting tech. I had been involved in some serverless stuff before, not to this level obviously, and not nearly as depth. And they said, Hey, you might be interested in this. and then our executive team at the last company I was at, we started following the newsletter sort of as a whole and we're like.
This guy seems smart. He seems like he's got an interesting product. we really struggled at the time to figure out like, how would you deploy it? But I think in my own head, I, knew that there was something there. 'cause we, followed him for a long time, Justin and, and Carl had a great connection at I think one of the events.
At some point they connected his individuals. and, for us on our team, it is really important to partner with people. Who we see the same person in. And we spent, several months getting to know Carl here at Built Fast before we decided to par. We're like, Hey, you should know us. We should know you.
[00:14:08] Carl Alexander: Yeah, we sussed each other out. Like, like we bo like, like the, he mentioned at the beginning like the not selling, like, I don't want to sell. Right. Like that. That was a very important part of the negotiation. 'cause like, I want to build this. To something that goes beyond WordPress. and so I'm not done, and neither are they.
They're just starting, so it's just like, but the way the hosting industry is, it's really important to like, make sure that it's not just like, you're spinning it up to sell it, up,
[00:14:43] Nathan Wrigley: Well, 'cause that's the,
[00:14:44] Carl Alexander: that, there's a lot of
[00:14:44] Nathan Wrigley: that's like the Silicon Valley model, right? Isn't it? Is that you build the thing with a, I don't know, an off ramp of five years or whatever it is, and it's kind of, I'm, fascinated to hear that you, you say that because that's really different. This is, I mean. Your baby, I guess in a sense.
you've got so much time put into it, so much blood, sweat, and tears into it. It's nice to hear that you don't have an intention to get rid of it. You want to kind of keep going with it.
[00:15:09] Carl Alexander: Yeah. Well, I talk a lot about the garden, right? We've talked about this before, right? Like for me, this product's kind of like my garden. Like I just like going and puttering
[00:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: Tendering.
Yeah.
[00:15:19] Carl Alexander: it's, yeah, it's like there's a, there's, it brings me joy, like, and it's fun. Like I found a couple of companies that are like making a million more a year, and they're one person, one's called Bento.
Email and it's this guy that lives in rural Japan. He's Australian, lives in rural Japan and runs a million dollar plus email CRM business solo.
[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: That's good. Good for him. That's all I can say.
[00:15:49] Carl Alexander: Yeah. but to me that's so
[00:15:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.
[00:15:55] Carl Alexander: Because that's all I want to do. Like all my life, all I wanted to do is like build tools for people and just sustain myself and go to events and talk to people. And Amir seems to be the way I'm gonna be able to do it. Like I can't see another way of doing it, so there's no, that's why I never could imagine quitting.
[00:16:13] Nathan Wrigley: So just shifting it back to Paul from a technical point of view, but obviously it's an audio podcast. I guess the technicalities mostly have to be left on the table. what, what did Amir bring? What is it that you figured you could implement from this that you could bring to the table for your customers in the short
[00:16:31] Paul Carter: Yeah, the vision that we saw, and, having deeper conversation with Carl that I saw was if, you think about it in an analogy, he had built this beautiful engine that was finely tuned, but there were no wheels on the car. There were nothing, no body around it. And and we said, we, have a vision for customers to be on a platform that just infinitely scales is secure.
things, again, you go back to problems. You have normal hosting where you've gotta migrate customers as they, grow, or if they, and, hosting customers or hosting companies struggle with this where we think, oh, we always have a solution for them to grow as they grow. But that's not true.
When they actually get scale, we're scrambling to put multiple servers together or clusters or whatever to solve a problem, and it gets ridiculously expensive or complicated, to do. And so what we saw in Emir. Was the ability for us at its core to have a very simple way to scale this. And then for us to bolt on all of the product stuff that we are really good at.
the product building stuff, right? The CDN, the waf, the security, the DDoS, the API that allows you to do this, the control panel that actually makes it accessible for a hosting company to be able to sell this or for an individual customer to click a button and deploy it. Emir's product's great. But he'll even say to you like, Hey, if you're a, he offers a self-service option, but you have to be fairly technical to get that up off the ground.
and what we saw was an ability to offer that through other hosting companies and direct to customers with. All of the polish you'd expect with an Apple product or or something like a UI interface for a chat GPT, something much more approachable and simple, with this technology in the background.
And I think it analogously is like, you might use chat GPT, it just works for you, but you have no idea the complexity of the work that's happening on the backend. And that's what we're trying to deliver. and Carl was able to provide the technology for the actual scaling that allows us to do that now.
[00:18:30] Nathan Wrigley: So how
[00:18:31] Carl Alexander: I never wanted to build a hosting company. I've been offered a lot of money to build a hosting
[00:18:36] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Customers and
[00:18:37] Carl Alexander: I was, and.
[00:18:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:18:39] Carl Alexander: Well, it's not the come to company. I want to, I think, like for your listeners who wonder about this kind of journey, I think if you're gonna be in it for as long as I'm gonna be in it, you have to really think about who your customers are, and you should really love and cherish the type of customers that you want to have.
And the type of customers I wanted to have was like Justin, like CTOs developers, directors of engineering, like way more technical people. But this technology is very important to the whole spectrum from developers to non-developers. and that's been the big change this year is people are starting to realize that the way things are working right now.
it doesn't work. Like it's not gonna keep working. customer expectations and things like that are changing, but that doesn't mean I wanna build that
[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:33] Carl Alexander: Right. And that was like the best, that was the best thing. And I've talked, you've gone to reports. I've talked a lot about, like, I was trying to talk to hosting companies and stuff like that to figure out how do I get to partner with them, so that they can leverage this technology.
And they have the domain expertise. They know what the customers want. they know it way more than I ever will or care to. Right. and that's really important because that's how you get the best
[00:20:02] Nathan Wrigley: I really love in the WordPress space when two things that don't compete, but but help one another when they collide. And it's not that often, actually, often you get an acquisition where one big thing consumes another big thing or a smaller thing, and then, one of them goes away and it's all strange for a bit.
But in this situation, it sounds like both of you are just gonna carry on doing what you are doing. going back to, Paul, how, much of a Christmas present has Carl bought you here in, and, how, in other words, did you just. Pull the paper off and Emir was good to go, or has there been quite a lot of back and forth trying to make it work in the way that you need.
[00:20:38] Paul Carter: Well, I would say like finding Carl is like me, waking up to the bicycle and the train and all the toys I wanted for Christmas. So, and that's important for us, right? From a partner perspective. he has been an amazing partner in this journey. Now, the, and like I said, he has built a technical, and this is why the partnership works, right?
He's built an engine. And us. Now being able to build around that engine is really important. And he's been invaluable in helping us to understand, okay, how do I attach the wheels? How do I get the body wrapped around, how do we do, whatever, X, Y, Z. but that is what our team is good at, right? And so we didn't wanna spend five years figuring out the serverless at scale that he did, and he doesn't want to do the hosting stuff, and so, It is, it has been invaluable, but it is one piece of our larger project, and we have other partners we bringing in to make the full product, right, to offer, all the solutions, for things like CDN, waf, et cetera. And then we, our expertise is pulling all those things together to make a product.
[00:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: If I was to come to your website, so if I go to the Built Fast website, I, is there any bit of EMEA that sort of pokes its head above the parapet, or is it just entirely disguised? Nobody would know what was going on. It's just part of the backend and Mm-hmm.
[00:21:51] Paul Carter: explains a little bit about what our product is. And we're a little bit in, early beta stealth mode on some of the stuff. So we started with the top end folks. People who have real scalability problems. They're spending thousands and thousands of dollars a month.
With other hosting companies and they're not getting the scale. And so that's, who we're working with and we're building the product, based on their feedback and the things that we know that they're gonna need. but our goal is, I think, and this is where I think it gets interesting, we're we wanna build this so that we can push down into the mid-market a bit, because we think those folks who would have a traditional managed WordPress.
Deserve to have scalability and it solves a lot of problems that hosting companies like having been a hoster, a traditional one where you have to start them on shared and then you have to migrate the VPS, and then you have to migrate them to dedicated, if you're more like Wix, Weebly or Shopify, no one ever calls you up and says, let me move you to another server.
It just scales automatically. So our current focus is with these large customers have real problems with scaling. That's really easy for us to solve, but it's a smaller scale. But the goal is to be able to push down into a little bit of the mid-market. So if you're an e-commerce site who might have, or
even let's say you offer licensing ED or whatever, and you have scalability problems, or just spiky traffic.
You can only, you can have a plan that is always there. It's, effective, it's costly, cost effective, but it will immediately scale with you as you need
[00:23:18] Nathan Wrigley: so does it scale in, does it scale in every which way? In both directions. So, at that moment before Black Friday, where, up it goes and it goes back down when the Black Friday traffic disappears again. yeah. It's beautiful.
[00:23:29] Paul Carter: difference you'll see between like always on infrastructure, it's expensive. Those servers dedicated to you, right? Especially if you don't need 'em all the time. And that's what, one of the reasons when we, we reached out to Amir and said, Hey, we wanna talk to you about this.
Because we would see people over at larger managed WordPress solutions, who are paying tens of thousands of dollars or thousands of dollars a month just because they have to have always on. They don't need it always on. They need it when they run a marketing campaign or they need to run it when there's like a, during the holiday season or, or they get a lot of press or something.
They can't have their site go down, but they also are having to pay ridiculous amounts of money to keep it up
[00:24:09] Nathan Wrigley: What's kind of curious. Yeah, what's kind of curious here is I think like in the case of WooCommerce, one of the big things which I think prevents people from using WooCommerce is the bit that you are talking about is that whole, oh, what if it goes down, massive server resource and in a sense it like makes the pie bigger because if you've got this thing that can just grow seamlessly, totally reliably.
It's like, well, why not WooCommerce? Why, not a massive LMS system or whatever it may be? because we know that piece of the jigsaw puzzle is in place, we'd have to think about the server anymore. And I'm curious on the back end, if I was to become a customer of yours, is there any level of technical expertise that me or my team need to have?
Or is it basically just pay the fee, toggle a switch, and you're good to go? Is that the intention?
[00:24:55] Paul Carter: so at the moment we've gone into sort of more of this reseller mode because we found a lot of hosts who have this problem and so we are building it for
[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Yeah.
[00:25:03] Paul Carter: Yeah. And so that's where we started. We pivoted, we were gonna go more retail first and then go into this sort of white label environment.
And then we got all these people who are like, no, wait, I have that problem right now with my customers. Can, what can we do for that? So we're, so the answer is, that, we're providing APIs and access and control panels. For those first, and then they can make it accessible to their customers any way they want.
When we launch it retail, which will probably be after the first of the year, it will be just like signing up for a normal hosting plan and we're trying to make it so you don't even have to know the neir. Is on the backend, right? So right now there's a bunch of deploy stuff. We're trying to make it so you just upload, like you normally would upload your plugins, add your content to whatever it is, and you never understand that it's being pushed to a serverless production environment for scalability.
you just know you're paying your fee and if you scale. You can scale. And WooCommerce is a prime example of why we wanted to do this with Emir because his solution specifically handles that. A lot of people will just throw a CDN in front of it or just throw a lot of whatever, but it, but you have problems if you're caching things that need to be dynamic or whatever.
and that's where again, my Christmas present with Carl under the tree, is, like he's actually solved that problem in a real. Elegant way, not the more crude way that hosts and, even us in the past where you just throw a CDN or you throw more hardware at a problem, it actually, and so it makes it more cost effective.
It makes it easier to manage, it makes it infinitely scalable. Carl can give you all the stats on, how many thousands of PHP workers it can scale through and how many seconds
[00:26:38] Carl Alexander: not really important. It's actually, it's irrelevant actually at this point to the moment. because, yeah, so he was giving examples like one of Amir's biggest customers, they can't even, the way they work, I, unfortunately, for privacy reasons, I can't name them, but basically they can't, they, obviously, they have Black Friday and stuff like that, but their sales are tied to the stock market. So there's no way you can prepare.
[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Right. It's like
[00:27:09] Carl Alexander: There's no way you can prepare.
[00:27:11] Nathan Wrigley: on.
[00:27:11] Carl Alexander: do. You've No way. If the market goes down that day it, or goes up like it, it might flood their sales pipeline. They have no way of preparing for it. It's not like when you're like, because Paul's saying that, but like, that was like the real, it, happened in 2019 before I started working on Emir actually, but.
I remember talking to an executive, do you remember War Camp Berlin?
[00:27:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was at that
[00:27:36] Carl Alexander: like a side event that was called Host Camp. It was like they did it one time and I remember I talked to an executive there and I remember talking to them because I was already aware of like WooCommerce. I was like, that's when Managed WooCommerce came out and I was like, this is fantastic.
Like how did you solve the scaling thing? And then they're like, oh, we didn't, we just expect them to tell us and then we'll upscale them. And I was like. Oh, so this problem's not solved. Like it was never solved. It's still not solved. You're, except for the people that use my thing y like, it's, not solved.
But what's changed between 2019 and today, and I wish you could have been at Cloud Fest, the, Miami one, because it's the second time in two months that I gave this talk. Like I could not finish it. I gave a pretty technical talk. He warned me about it, and it went over time. Both times I could not finish because people, the, customer, the, reason I wanted to get on this podcast, why the technical stuff doesn't matter is because he, Paul mentioned it.
It's like when you sign up to Squarespace or like executives in the, those companies call it ification, basically, but they're not talking about ification, the price model. They're talking ification. the expectation. When you pay for a SaaS, do you ever expect it to
[00:28:56] Nathan Wrigley: No. In fact, it's like total, if it does go down, the world is ending.
[00:29:03] Paul Carter: That's right.
[00:29:04] Carl Alexander: Correct, but that's the expectations for everyone now, not just from the developer. So in my talk now I have a slide that said I wanted the Versel experience, which if you know, and I had some young developers in the back in Miami and they were nodding their heads so hard that I thought their heads were gonna fall off.
So developers don't want to hear about servers and customers sure as hell don't want to hear about what a PHP worker or A CPU or that stuff is. What they expect is, even if I pay $5 a month and I make it to the front page of Reddit, the site will stay up. And the executives in these companies are like, that's why the title of the, report in two, from two weeks ago was the moment is here because.
Like Paul said, we were gonna do retail first, and now we're reselling because they're falling over each other. Because they're like, yeah, no, we see it. Like we see this expectation around, scalability and uptime.
[00:30:05] Nathan Wrigley: the, if you've more or less cracked this knot, where's the, what's the roadmap for EA then? Like what are the bits and are there still things like in your bucket list of things that you wanna achieve or do you see some sort of moment in time where you're like, Hey, I did it.
[00:30:22] Carl Alexander: Well, I mean, products like this, I think unless you're like on the VC, growth at all points are kind of asset total, right? Like there's, you're gonna do most of it and then you're gonna do, but the interest for me that was interesting is at Work Camp Canada, where I went and I gave the talk the first time Acquia was
[00:30:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:44] Carl Alexander: And they were like, we need this. Like, so it's all of PHP. That's why like, I'm, I've done the hardest one. I did WordPress. Nobody wants to do WordPress. Even the five people in PHP that know that this technology, if somebody's like, Hey, how do I get that working with WordPress? They're like, talk to Carl.
Like, like, because it's the hardest one, but they're all seeing it because like, that's what I'm saying, the customer expectations. Is what's happening. Nobody wants to hear about you going down. Nobody wants to hear about, oh, well, you're not on the right plan and stuff like that. No, I made a front page of Reddit and like, stay up.
if I was on Squarespace, I'd be up. If I was on Shopify, I'd be up.
[00:31:33] Nathan Wrigley: Paul, like how do you market a thing, which is kind of not a thing. What I mean by that is if the idea is invisibility, how do you, sell that invisibility? How do you like, 'cause everybody says we'll scale, everybody says YouTu. Your site will be up no matter what. They're all saying the same thing.
But if you've got a legit. Differentiator here, which it sounds like you have. How do you, cut through that noise and make people aware that, okay, this is real. This is a thing.
[00:32:02] Paul Carter: I, for us, it's gonna be testimonials right there. There's nothing better. So for a great example is we have somebody who, basically, tried to go with the cloud solution previously, then they tried to solve it themselves. They maybe looked at clustering something else, and it didn't work.
They couldn't make it happen. And now they're looking at the EM mirror product and the built fast factor product, and they're like. Oh, this actually solves the problem. Like this actually does it. And, Carl has clients who couldn't stay up before and now they can stay up. And then Carl has quotes like, oh yeah, sleep.
I don't, worry.
[00:32:37] Carl Alexander: my God, I wish I could get that E-commerce site. They have had zero
[00:32:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. You need these
[00:32:43] Carl Alexander: Zero downtime since they
[00:32:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:32:46] Carl Alexander: that like, like zero. Like, I've had other ones, but it's like, it's, they're not thinking about moving. Obviously, there's some pain points because scaling means distribution.
Distribution, like without getting to technical stuff too much. Obviously things change when you do something like this and you have to adapt and you have to learn and all of that, but they're not thinking about, oh, this is not right for me. They're like, I've never slept
[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah,
[00:33:16] Paul Carter: Yeah.
[00:33:17] Carl Alexander: never slept better.
[00:33:18] Nathan Wrigley: you want. I
[00:33:20] Carl Alexander: I mean, that's gonna be, no, but that's, I'm reworking my marketing 'cause I'm gonna shift to WordPress to all of PHP and it's basically ship scale sleep.
[00:33:29] Nathan Wrigley: that's actually very nice. I like that. I used to run my own house and that was the thing. it was the sleep bit. It was the being woken up when you were on holiday with your kids at like four in the morning and,
[00:33:40] Carl Alexander: my whole talk. I'm my new talk. The one that won't end, that people don't stop. Like I'm testing all the marketing on it. And like I talk about being an accidental cisman, think of all the PHP devs that started and they're like, oh, you understand PHP, you put it on this server, you must know how servers work.
And they're like, and then next thing you know, you're on PagerDuty.
like that, like my, I'm Yeah, go ahead Paul. No, go.
[00:34:04] Paul Carter: say as a hoster, this is, this solves our problem, right? So this is the AWS to Amazon thing where we, have to solve our own issue. How many times do you get customers who's like, yes, you can upgrade when you need it, but they're on shared and then they gotta go to VPS or overnight they explode and you gotta put 'em onto a, box, or they're down and there's a problem because they've got a mass amount of whatever.
You just don't wanna upgrade them. This solves that problem that hosts have and that, when I mentioned that to hosts, they're like, no more migrations from platform to platform. A huge selling point
[00:34:34] Nathan Wrigley: Do, you know what's really interesting though? it's kind of like you need loads of bit. Well, I say you need, like, I know what I'm talking about. It feels like from a marketing point of view, it feels like you have to do the before and after because. The after sounds like you're never going down.
You're never you. We basically won't be hearing from you again. It's gonna be kind of hard to drag a testimonial out of those people because it's just up. Whereas if things are always down, at least you're in dialogue with the customers. but the other thing I'm guessing though is that you've probably got some data, some stats, some actual metrics, which you can throw at the people who want more than just the testimonial.
They want the real, I want the spreadsheet. Of the numbers of how many, like this is the kind of spike in traffic that we reliably have dealt with, that kind of thing. So I'm guessing you're leaning into that a bit as well.
[00:35:23] Paul Carter: A hundred percent. But I think, again, like when I talk to other CEOs of other hosting companies or either SaaS companies we're having these conversations with, they already see it like the hosting seems to have been lagged behind for some reason. As we were just talking about, like even example, like lovable, right?
You can build an app on Lovable, which was great, but you had to move it off to its own host. And one of these partner hosts, well now they just say no, click a button and we'll host it for you. Like it used to be that hosts were concerned about Wix. We believe spare Squarespace come to eat our lunch, but AI is gonna be in the same vein in less than two years, where they'll never need to move off of that platform.
And so they already know that the system exists. This technology. Scales in other ways. for other, SaaS solutions, it seems like the hosting is what's lagged behind, and so when they see it, they don't even need to understand the tech. Like I literally had conversations with the CEOs who are like, no, I get the technology.
Can you prove that it works? We can show them that it works. And they're like, that's it, I'm done. Because they know it already exists in other oth other spaces, it just seems as, for some reason, it's lagged behind
[00:36:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So I guess, I guess, in amongst your, cohort of friends in the hosting industry, it's probably relatively straightforward to explain. 'cause, over a beer, you can do the, you can get into all the technical stuff and on you go. I guess the difficult bit will be just marketing it to the WooCommerce.
Person who's got like one or two sites, or the agency who's got 50 websites or whatever it may be, because their thing is not hosting. They'll probably see you like every other host. And so they'll need that kind of reassurance and massaging along the way and kind of trying to figure it out.
Yeah. And.
[00:37:00] Paul Carter: And if they're hitting a pain point, that's usually where we see folks, right? That's also where people will move from host to host is like, Hey, I'm struggling with something. So the people who would be, let's say I'm a host using Vector as a platform, you'll be like, oh, I've got a customer who's got a WooCommerce solution that's not scaling.
I can put you on this for less money and it will scale. And they're like, usually it's like their hair's on fire, like whatever solves the
[00:37:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:37:24] Paul Carter: and then it, goes quiet. And they're like, oh, that was it. That's, I'm never moving
[00:37:28] Nathan Wrigley: I am kind of curious to see if it, so if, the promise of this pans out and you get people on there who, f whatever the heck happens, their website is up and viable, it'd be kind of interesting to see how they adapt their usage. In our case, we're talking WordPress, the usage of WordPress. To allow it to do more stuff, to push into other markets, to, I don't know, go to other countries and launch their products over there, whatever it may be.
Because there's that one bit, oh, I don't have to worry about the server anymore. I know it's kind of a nothing, but at the same time it's a thing, right? That whole thing of, well, we can't infinitely scale. We're a bit afraid. We need to be cautious about this. Well, if you can throw caution to the wind with your marketing, that's an interesting,
[00:38:09] Carl Alexander: a hundred percent think that's why WooCommerce is being
[00:38:13] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. But yeah, be because there's that fear. Right? Okay. If we do, if we did do this thing, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:38:19] Carl Alexander: like, why do I take this look? It's one, my favorite example doesn't come from me. I heard at Work Camp Canada, it's like there's a site that sells a hundred thousand dollars a month in worms.
[00:38:35] Nathan Wrigley: it doesn't surprise me,
[00:38:36] Carl Alexander: And worms. And worms, but it's this worm farmer, and he is like, I don't understand why my psychos down.
All I, want to do is sell my worms. And he does, and, it's exactly that, and it is not their job. To solve that, and that's why they're going to Shopify because Shopify's gonna be like, you can, you wanna sell $200,000 in worms? Like we're talking to hosting people that their site, their customers are revenue capped
[00:39:04] Paul Carter: Yeah.
[00:39:05] Carl Alexander: by their hosting.
[00:39:07] Nathan Wrigley: So that you've encapsulated in that one sentence, what I was clumsily trying to say. The hosting is the glass ceiling that they can't push
[00:39:15] Carl Alexander: Correct.
[00:39:16] Nathan Wrigley: because they can't push through it 'cause they can't afford it to go down. So there's this kind of chicken and egg problem. by the way, if, you totally should get the, worm guy to do a testimonial.
[00:39:30] Carl Alexander: I love, look, I know who has it like it. It's not, maybe one
[00:39:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you
[00:39:36] Carl Alexander: move, but it's just, but it was just such a good story. It's such
[00:39:40] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, I sell two. I used to sell a hundred thousand dollars of worms now. Now with this new
[00:39:45] Carl Alexander: Now with Vector, I sell, $300,000 a month at Worms, but it's,
[00:39:51] Nathan Wrigley: Carl, how are, you, Like how are you getting this into their hands? Is this something like, are you selling it to a variety of different places or have you got like an exclusive arrangement?
What's the deal? How do you
[00:40:02] Carl Alexander: What? Sorry? The, their hands, you mean like, other people? right now, the partnership with Built Fast is exclusive. So the only thing that's on the only thing, I mean, I already had provisions because I was warned that people could build like a hosting product like on $39 a month. So like, I have stuff in my terms of service, but I, the idea is that I was always wanted, part of the negotiation is I always wanted to keep the self-serve.
like, and the reality is just that the people that are gonna come to the self-serve are not the customers that, Paul wants, or that would be interested in Vector or Vector Pro, which is like the reseller product. so we I always wanted to keep that part, because I like talking with developers, and developers are my.
People and they're gonna give me ideas for things to build and all that stuff, and I want to keep to have these points of interaction. So that was really important. The rest they have exclusivity
[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay, so in the bits where it matters, the built fast implementation is an exclusive thing, but you've kept other bits back that you are curious about and Yeah. Okay, got it.
[00:41:16] Carl Alexander: And honestly, you know what they're building. Like I think the analogy's correct. Like yeah. obviously, like I built the engine, but there's more to a car than just the engine, And there's more to hosting. That's the main reason I never wanted to get into the hosting business because I know what's involving the hosting business.
And it's, there's a
[00:41:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:41:40] Carl Alexander: and part of the negotiation too, and why we worked super well together is that. The product boundaries are very clear between us. Like, I want to tackle this stuff. You tackle this stuff. Even stuff like, here's an example of one that we talked about is backups. I will want to do ba, I don't do Mio doesn't do backups right now, but the way I'm gonna do backups will probably be not the way that a hosting company wants to do backups, for example.
And that's perfect because. I'm doing it for, myself and my technical customers, and they're doing it for their customers, which are, non-technical customers, like resellers and all that stuff. And they're different needs, they're different products, at the end of the day. And, having this clear product boundary is really important.
again, because I'm happy staying, it goes back to your Asim total, comment. like I have my Asim tote of where things land and they have their own. And because the product, I'm just one part of the product. I'm a key part, but I'm not
[00:42:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, that's nice. I mean, it's nice that you all of, you have got like irons in the fire basically. you've got some sort of agency yourself there, Carl, to keep things going. But also, you've got this nice relationship now with, bil fast as well. So, Paul just closing out a little bit, obviously you're a few months into this headache free so far.
Have you managed to get it into the, into the hands of a bunch of people to test it? Just be brutally honest with us. Tell us how
[00:43:14] Paul Carter: Yeah, no, look, if I was to say it was headache free, I might be mobbed by my co-founders, quite frankly, to be honest with you. But, here's the thing, is that we have a really clear RO roadmap. Carl Amir has been just amazing in terms of partners. and so when you're building a product, you, as you build a product, you learn, oh, we miss this, or we need to tweak the, I was literally having a conversation with our, with Justin, our CTO yesterday.
And we're like, oh, we want to do this. And it was like, can we do that? We think we can do that. Oh yeah, we can do that, but it's gonna take a little bit of work. And so, so as we bring on new, resellers, hosters, et cetera, we'll build based on their need and then, and so always be evolving. I expect that the product we have now, that'll be in January.
With our first couple people out the door is not gonna look, it'd be 10 times different when we get to a year from now. 'cause we'll be constantly iterating on it. So I wouldn't call it headache free, but I think this is what's interesting and, for us, this is really important as a company.
We think that the best products are made. Like, Carlos focused on this one thing and he does it exceptionally well. To the exclusion of all the other things. And then we go find other partners that are doing the same thing. And then we are really good at productizing that, providing support and interface and tooling for those things.
And so if we're all doing what we're really good at the end of the day, I think we come out with a really good product. and because we're all builders that the headache is okay because you're working through the product. So no, not headache free, but we're ex, we're still very encouraged to get
[00:44:43] Nathan Wrigley: Are you, are you VC funded or are you bootstrapped or is it private investment or how's? Yeah.
[00:44:49] Paul Carter: yeah. Bootstrap with no intention to try to sell or take on additional
[00:44:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Interesting. Okay. honestly, I fascinating. I, there's a bit of me which wants to get into the weeds of the tech, but it is not this episode. we'll leave that for another episode, but fascinating.
into the show notes. I will drop all of the bits and pieces that I've got in terms of emea, also the stuff. That I've read, Carl's newsletter, things like that. But I'll put the, the built fast URL in there as well so that you can go and check it out. We're recording this in December, 2025.
Dunno exactly when it'll come out, but no doubt things will change at a fair rate. I would've thought So go and check out all of the different bits and pieces in the show notes to find out more. Carl and Paul, thank you so much for chatting to me today. Really appreciate it.
[00:45:35] Paul Carter: Thanks.
[00:45:36] Carl Alexander: Yeah, all is good. Coming on without the audio
[00:45:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Woo-hoo.
Okay. That's all we've got for you today. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you've got any commentary on that episode, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 4 5 4, so 454, and leave us a comment there. We would really, really appreciate that.
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