If you’d been reading in the last few weeks, you would have known:

1. We joined an incubator, INcubes.
2. We hired our first non-founder dev.
3. We just finished a Hackathon.

And if you read this/next week, you’ll see:

1. Security issues with current WordPress backup plugins.
2. Product launch.
3. Deal on product launch, until Feb 28th.
4. Product announcement.
5. Investor info.

So head on over to stay up to date! I’ll still feature big news here, but if you want to see how 23press continues to grow and evolve, head on over and subscribe, or follow us on Facebook!

Roughly 6 weeks ago, we announced the launch of 23press. The support from the community, friends and family, and our growing partner network was phenomenal. Since then Terry, Jason and I have been pushing hard on marketing prep, conference schedules, building out our full product roadmap and getting Move That Blog 2.0 out (more on that further down!).

But before we get into that, we want to talk about some top line changes over the last few weeks!

Save Some Money! Make Some Money!

We’ve done a few things recently to help you save money. First up, we’ve introduced a Tweet for Discount upgrade. Simply put, when you’re buying a 23press product just authenticate to Twitter, customize your tweet (or use our default) and get 20% off your purchase!

Second, we are currently in the process of beta testing our affiliate program. Sign up, and whenever one of your readers or clients (or yourself, hah) buys, you’ll get 20% of the proceeds from their purchase. Of course, you could combine these if you wanted to ;-)

Move That Blog Upgrades

For those of you who aren’t aware, Move That Blog was the product that kicked 23press off. It solved a “simple” problem: moving a blog from one host (like GoDaddy) to another (say, WPEngine) can be challenging. More challenging than you think it will be if you haven’t done it before! WordPress’s built-in Import/Export really just moves core data (posts, categories, tags, authors, etc). It doesn’t move themes, theme options, plugins, plugin options, widgets, widget options, etc. In short, it moves the “backend” of your blog, but not many of the items users interact with on a daily basis. Boo!

Move That Blog turns a 5 hour task into a 5 minute task. Not bad for $10, right? ;-)

Version 1 of Move That Blog was functional: solve the problem. Version 2, available now, makes several significant changes (obviously if you bought Version 1, the upgrade to Version 2 is free so feel free to download now!):

1. Login: Instead of supplying two keys to authenticate to your account, we’ll allow you to simply login with your 23press ID. This should be easier, but will also allow us to give you discounts in the future as we launch more products.
2. Progress info: Version 1 gave you a simple progress bar, while version 2 gives you much deeper information on where your move is at. Included in this is detailed logging, that way if something goes wrong with the move we can help you figure out what more easily.
3. Resume move: We’ve retooled the entire moving engine, including allowing you to resume a move that stopped or failed for some reason. Simple is good.
4. Support for more hosts: Several of our customers experienced issues with file transfers, and we’ve overhauled our entire file transfer process to make our plug-in work with as many hosts as possible.

Move That Blog: Host Edition

This is a big deal for us, and I talked about this high level in our last post, but we’ve now released our first custom version of Move That Blog to our first hosting partner. It allows them to either move a blog FOR a customer, or give them some quick instructions on how to do it directly themselves! Now that this is out, we’ll be reaching out to more hosts to allow them to offer their customers one-click moves to their platform. This will allow users to sign up, install the plugin on their side and have the host move and configure their entire blog for them.

Easy! (just the way we like it)

We’ll be continuing to release host tools as we release more products, to allow for simplified management of WordPress installs, greater security and speed for all users, etc.

If you’re a host interested in our Host Suite, let me know at jeremy@23press.com.

New Product Heads Up: BackupPress

Now that we have released Move That Blog 2.0, we are setting our sights on the next overly complex problem in the WordPress space: backups. We’ll be releasing our alpha to our internal testing team in the next week, at which point we’ll get everyone more updates on this. But suffice to say we believe this will be simpler (our motto!), faster, better and more cost effective than other solutions out there. And, as a bonus, all BackupPress customers get Move That Blog for free!

We’ll be launching this product publicly at BlogWorld LA, so come by our booth to see more if you’re around!

Funding

Since our last post, we’ve had several inquiries around our funding plans. As we mentioned last time, the founders put in the first round of money for technology, so Terry could work on 23press full time, and for us to amp up partnerships and marketing efforts (expect announcements on some of these in the next few weeks).

Our original plan was to raise an angel round in early 2012, however significant interest has meant we’re currently putting together a small convertible debt round with one or two investors with the angel round moving out to March/April. Given the number of folk who’ve asked to be involved, if you’re interested just drop me a line and I can fill you in quickly on our top line plans. Since we don’t need the money, we  want to make sure we don’t distract ourselves!

Conclusion

Phew! Not a bad 6 weeks, eh? We’re looking forward to more announcements later this week and next week, so keep an eye out here and on the upcoming 23press blog!

Thanks again everyone for your support! We’re looking forward to continuing to grow the WordPress ecosystem and, hopefully soon, to move beyond the walls of the WordPress community to begin working with folk in the MovableType, Tumblr, Posterous and other communities!

If you’re interested in any of the above, or other discussions, say hi@23press.com!

For the last couple of years, he’s toyed with starting a real new startup. But it wasn’t until today that he was ready to show it to the world.

Announcing: 23press, a startup focused on “making blogging easier for regular humans”!

23press - making blogging easier for regular humans

What Is 23press?

Quite simply, being a blogger is too hard. Even the simple things like finding the right SEO plugin, making a theme “really work”, moving a blog between hosts and backing up your blog… these things are just too hard! 23press will make all the stupid stuff that’s way too hard about blogging a whole lot easier.

Who We Are

The founding team is made up of myself and two other fantastic gents, as well as support from a LOT of friends and family. Terry Smith, who I hired at b5 and then became solid friends with, is our awesome Head Humanizer (ie: he builds the shit that makes your blogging life easier). Terry is easily one of the top WordPress guys in the world, and is super smart to boot, so working together on our own startup was a no brainer.

Second is Jason Hall. Jason’s a bit new to the social media world, but has started startups before, does serious marketing work and is one of the smartest and hardest working guys I’ve ever met. Jason not only makes sure the trains run on time, but in his role as Head Head, ensures marketing, planning and product are all well and truly handled.

And me? Well, I’m the Head Human. It’s my job to grow this puppy and hopefully learn from my lessons last time around!

What We Are Doing

Well, Move That Blog has been out for a few months now. When we released it, we knew we were solving a problem, but the response has been great! We will be releasing a few more tidbits on the rest of the MTB family later this week, including a dedicated version for web hosts (so customers can be moved, or move themselves, in seconds with no hassle).

Beyond that, look for our set of product announcements in the next few days!

The Basics

Wrapping this all up a little bit, here is a bit more info!

1. Funding:  Unlike my last startup, b5media (which raised, well, a lot of money), this project is currently funded by our own little group. We’ve been asked to allow outside investors in, though, as the vision is fun, so we’ll likely be doing that in January ish. Not that we’ll need it, but money to grow faster is rarely a bad thing.
2. Founding Team: With both me and Terry having deep roots in the social and blogging spaces, we’re both looking forward to tackling a fresh problem that we can brainstorm with our friends about all over again. And Jason? Well, he’s just happy he gets to come to Canada once in awhile ;-)
3. Launch Date:  September 1, 2011. Hence announcements coming “soon”!
4. Products: Well, you have Move That Blog already. After that will be stuff that all bloggers should have readily accessible and without any real work: security, speed, backups, etc. Boring, but important. And after that? Well, that’s when the magic happens. Just wait!
5. Branding:  We’re a startup. So we did our logo at 99designs. Cause we’d rather work than be super pretty. Besides, when we need pretty we have Jason!
6. Management:  Luckily, we have many people interested in helping with this project.  Some will be helping grow the effort on a volunteer basis.
7. Partners: Oh, yeah, we have some. We’ll announce those in the next couple of weeks too. Might be a bit surprising.
8. Affiliate programs: Yep, coming, any day now.
9. The name: Oh, yeah. We make stuff easier for “regular humans”. Humans have 23 chromosomes. Also, I have a minor thing for numbers in names!

Next Steps

In the next few days, we’ll be sharing our initial product roadmap for the Move That Blog suite, deeper details on our backup product, and top line info on our line of optimization and security tools. We are aiming to have our backup product in market in the next 4 weeks (let us know if you want to beta test!), and our optimization tools in market 4 weeks later (love startup timelines!).

We’ll also be at BlogWorld LA, making several rather significant announcements, planning and attending WordCamps and ensuring that the next time Jason hops in a cab, he doesn’t wake up in an entirely different city 7 hours later.

Wanna Chat?

Oh, fine, email me: jeremy@23press.com. Or skype: jeremy_wright.

Rest

I spent serious time on Workcation, consulting via netmobs on some really cool projects. Most of this was rest, though. Spent alot of time in the South of the US. Did alot of speaking. But mostly I rested, made new friends, found hobbies and generally rebalanced what was a very out of balance life. I wasn’t ever really sure I’d be able to get back to real startup life, ie: running my own company.

Rehab

As I left b5, I let folk know that with the right opportunity, at the right time, I’d go back to full-time work. I was lucky enough to have Joe Thornley reach out and offer me “something” at Thornley Fallis / 76design. It took til January for me to be ready and confident I could have a positive impact. Also, I really wanted to learn some new skills, so time on the communications side of things was fantastically interesting. That Dave and I became good friends over this period was just a huge bonus.

Practice

Almost a year ago, I joined BNOTIONS as CEO. They were a small, growing firm, that I was able to help along through what are normally very rough patches in a startup’s life (due to cash flow, hiring issues, visibility in the industry, etc). Most service startups in the 5-15 person phase can relate to what BNOTIONS was basically able to ignore. This was an incredible experience. The team, projects and process of (again) taking a startup from a few people to juggernaut stage was awesome. Not to mention that the leadership team of AK, Mark, Logan, etc were inspiring to see in action and the pure cultural drive at BNOTIONS will be more than enough to keep the company growing so I wasn’t worried about leaving.

And, yes, “practice” is tongue in cheek. This was one of the best experiences of my life!

Now

But eventually it was time to dig in and do something where I put everything into a company again. My company. Building something I loved and believed in. Not that I couldn’t have stayed at any of the places listed above, or any of a myriad of other opportunities at awesome companies. But fundamentally, I realize now, I’m at my best when I’m giving 150%, and the best way to motivate myself to do that isn’t with money or profile or power, it’s with it being something I’ve helped create.

My New Portfolio

That said, it was a flat out honour to work, train, grow, learn, screw up and help each of these companies. The honour is entirely mine.

However, it’s time for me to step up and swing for myself without a safety net. My philosophy this time around is a bit different than last time. Yes, I’ll be pouring everything into a new company (announcement on that coming Monday/Tuesday once we’ve signed our first two big clients), but I’ve also realized that I fundamentally need to clone myself. I need to extend, work with others more, and allow things to flourish even if I’m not involved day to day.

Hence, in addition to next week’s startup announcement, I’ve started investing (time and money) into spinning up several side projects. I’ll do full announcements of each of these over the coming weeks, but for now, here’s a brief synopsis:

• 23press: This was born out of a conversation with Aaron Brazell, and realizing that a lot of things in WordPress are simply too hard. I’m Head Human at 23press, while Terry Smith is the man with the muscle, Head Humanizer and general awesomesauce. Our first product, Move That Blog, will basically one-click move your blog from one host to another for $10 (or unlimited moves for $30). Every plugin, every setting, every theme, theme setting, plugin setting… It’s actually kinda magic and saves 2-10 hours work depending on the blog! Our goal is 5 products out by year end. Each solving problems with WordPress specifically and blogging in general to make your life easier!
• Naked Dating: Mel and I kicked this off in earnest a bit more than a year ago, then life got busy and we had to drop it. But we’re back, and working out how to scale this puppy since the need for new school common sense, social media dating tips and teaching guys how to date is pretty severe. Trust us. It’s bad. More on this soon!
• Clients are Evil: Sometime in the summer of last year, I started talking about this. Doing research. Planning stuff. While this isn’t ready for public consumption yet at all, it will be a significant new book (finalizing details with publisher stuff in next 2 weeks), with lots of speaking, webinars, and products associated with it. With any luck the first taste will be at BlogWorld East
• A game, an app, a new approach to agency life, and more…

Next Steps

If you’ve run into me in the last week or two and asked what’s new and I’ve said “whoa, too much for this casual hello, talk soon!” this is why! More details on everything in the next few weeks, but for now I want to thank my BNOTIONS crew, the Thornley Fallis team, my family and especially my friends for all being so awesome over the last 2 years!

Now for the real work!

So when I was invited, thanks to a strong nod from Henry Balanon (who rawks btw, if you dont’ know him! Can’t believe it took til BlogWorld this year to finally meet!), I knew right away I, and BNOTIONS, had to jump on! But we couldn’t just do it like everyone else, we had to make it our own cause, y’know, we’re weird that way.

First Up, The Team: Team Autofollow

Before we get into the “value add” that BNOTIONS is bringing, I thought I’d share our current team: Myself, Guy Gal from The Biz Media, Mark Reale from BNOTIONS and Sean Ward from Sean Ward. We will be leaving March 8th and absolutely booting it for 35 hours (almost straight).

So let this serve as notice to all the other teams: Canada is coming and we’re going to absolutely dominate. Unless you’re offended by that, in which case we’re really sorry for dominating, eh? ;-)

Also, we have one extra space in the car if anyone else wants to hop in!

The Chase Car

In addition to the standard Chevy car, BNOTIONS will be sending some help. Not with the contest, cause that’d be cheating (and we don’t need to cheat to DOMINATE), but with filming, networking and just plain awesomeness. So not only will you have Team Autofollow plowing it’s domination-laden path to Austin, you’ll also have our Chase Car there to document the whole thing (and clean up after us).

Oh Yeah Baby

<Insert conclusion paragraph with witty repartee and jabs at the other teams, especially Henry, here.>

She was 2 feet away. Impossible to ignore. Even when I tried. Eventually I gave up and just started tweeting choice quotes. What follows are some of her best quotes, and actions, archived for posterity. If they seem crazy, know that @hildavidson was sitting here for most of it and we spent much of the time trying not to lose it!

• Girl sitting beside me in coffee shop is doing her life plan. It’s entertaining. Married by 30. Done kids by 35. Gonna marry “best friend”.
• “I have 2 years to meet my best friend” she says. What is she the best in the world at? “Making friends”.
• She is now self-clapping. This is a bad sign.
• “Why do you have to wait for what you want?” she asks… “I want what I want now, there’s no point in waiting til I SHOULD have it”
• “I think everyone should commit themselves to just enjoying life” ed: this has been my problem all along, a big commitment to NOT enjoying life!
• “If I don’t tell the universe what I want in a guy, I’ll get whatever randomly comes out”
• “I am the soundtrack to my life”
• “I want to work for an animal activist company or help homeless people find more food… or get a nobel prize” ed: don’t put all your eggs in one basket, am I right?
• “20 years from now, I want my kids parents to come home and say ‘Your mom is a MILF’” ed: yes this is a quote, at least she included “parents”, right?
• “I want to balanace my life goals between stuff *I* want and stuff the world deserves from me”
• “In order to hit that goal I’d need to do 3 classes a week, and I”m afraid that’ll distract me from the actual goal”
• Poor girl. She’s stressing about whether she should do morning or evening classes. 7 years from now.
• “It’s just stupid career stuff, it keeps getting in the way of my life and goals”
• “Hot yoga, I don’t think I”ve ever spent that long on my back before”
• “I’m already stretchy. And bendy.”
• “I want to be the hawtest 80 year old woman ever, I just don’t know in the next 5 years what I can do to get there” ed: dream big #coffeelifegirl, dream big.
• “I’d love to live in Texas, but I feel like if I had a job in Ohio that’d take precedent”
• “5 years from now I want to be paid for the job I’m working”
• And her parting comment is……… “This is why I want to marry a jew”

And, yes, I managed to get two client proposals done while this was going on, so I was working!

The standount “what the hell is he doing?!” recipe was definitely my spicy cranberry stuffing concoction. I didn’t manage to take pictures, but it worked out really well (I saved some of the broth to ensure the stuffing stayed moist while baked):

Ingredients

• 1 package of bacon, lean
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1-1.5 cup celery
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1 medium onion
• 1 cup white wine
• 1 (16 ounce) can whole berry cranberry sauce
• 1 (4 ounce) jar jalapeno peppers
• 1 (4 ounce) can green chile peppers
• 1 cup chopped nuts (pecans, walnuts, etc)
• 2 (14 ounce) packages cornbread stuffing mix
• 1 1/2 cups chicken stock

Prep

• Cook bacon til crispy
• Drain bacon on towel
• Crumble bacon
• Chop celery, onion
• Mince garlic
• Dice jalapeno, green peppers, soak in honey
• Toast pecans, walnuts (together, cinnamon/nutmeg/butter)
• Mix stuffing per directions, add chicken stock, stir til moist
• Cook stuffing til brown on top, 30-40 minutes (9×13 baking dish)
• Cool stuffing, cut into small squares
• Prep chicken broth and heat
• Preheat oven to 375

Cooking

• Melt butter in LARGE skillet over medium-high heat
• Cook celery/garlic/onion until onion caramelizes
• Add wine until heated, then cranberry/peppers
• Cover til boiling
• Remove from heat, add nuts/bacon

Stuffing Mix

• Stuffing in bowl
• Add ingredients
• Add chicken broth to taste
• Bake if necessary (too wet)

Conclusion

While I wouldn’t actually recommend using this recipe, it was alot of fun, tasted nom (everyone but #thecrush enjoyed it) and had everyone wondering what “that silly Canadian” was doing.

Good  times!

You learn from your failures. In one of my last companies we had a saying: if we aren’t failing every week, we aren’t trying hard enough. Failure is a good thing, learn from it.

You learn from your failures. As an individual, a team, a company, hell even a relationship. When you well and truly fall on your face and it hurts is when you take a step back and learn because you never want to hurt like that again.

Which is where the project “post-mortem” (or debrief) comes in. Some companies do this when an issue is too big to ignore and it turns into a blame fest. Some do it every project but it’s just procedural and nothing is learned. Others try not to upset anyone in the room because after a failure can be an emotional time.

The Value of Learning

Real debriefs have real value, and you should never let a good failure go to waste. It is a chance to evaluate the people, technologies and processes that led to the failure.

I’ve been involved in dozens of project debriefs across a fair number of companies and agencies, and wanted to distill my learning on this both to get feedback from the world on how you do post-mortems as well as maybe just to help folk who are struggling with this issue. No, it isn’t rocket science, but open learning is almost never a bad thing!

Three Rules of the Debrief

There is a fundamental problem with most debriefs. They are too long, too personal, not actionable and demotivational. If you are going to run a debrief you need to focus. Get everyone to agree to these rules up front:

1. Keep it short: The tendency is for these to be 2-hour long meetings where you delve into everything. 2-hour meetings are always a fail because you never want to repeat them. Try to keep these discussions focused. Your first one might be long, but aim towards an hour.
2. Keep it professional: Especially in big projects that fail, there is the temptation to either attack someone else, defend yourself (or both). The moderator (independent non member of the team) may have to enforce professionalism brutally, but agreeing to this rule helps keep things from escalating into an argument.
3. Keep it actionable: Too many debriefs get lost in the minutiae. The goal of the debrief is to come out of it with things you can change, not just a list of what went wrong and who’s fault it was.

Three Tips for Successful Debriefs

1. Post-Its Are Your Friend: It is too easy to kill conversation. Whenever someone raises something irrelevant  (like an issue during the timeline phase), put it on a post-it and put it to the side. You never want to lose an idea to the ether, or ignore feedback after all.
2. Run by an independent: Someone in the project running it means someone with a stake, and something to lose. Independent moderators focus on value (and value their time more because they have nothing to prove). Ideally this would be someone with relevant expertise to keep things on track.
3. There are no seniors: In a debrief, everyone is equal. Don’t allow seniority, expertise or personality to allow someone to dominate the conversation or detract from team learning.

Three Phases of the Debrief

Since most debriefs lack focus, here is what you should be covering:

1. The Timeline: Develop a timeline of what happened. Both right and wrong, what was the story arc of the project? Every project has a story, so tell that story. If people start to get blamey or emotional or focused on the negative, shelve that til the next portion of the exercise.
2. The Issues: Dave Fleet once ran this section using post-its, and I’ve become a fan of this approach. Hand out a whack (technical term) of post-its to each person. And have them list every issue they can think of. Then put them all on a big board and group them. These issues can be actual challenges, technical issues, process issues, management issues, anything. Remember Rule 2: keep it from being personal (ie: not “Doug let the servers go down”, but “Server Uptime”).
3. The Actions: Actions matter. If there are issues identified in phase 2, they should have an action associated with them. Keep actions SMART. When you produce a list of actionable items, assign someone to check up on them in a month.

Ending the Meeting

At the end of every meeting, you should always know if the meeting has been valuable. So close off with focusing on wins not just fails. While the purpose of the debrief is to learn  from mistakes, anytime you leave a meeting talking about mistakes for an hour is demotivational. End with the wins and successes to remind you and your team that while things went wrong, that failures aren’t the whole story.

What Do You Do?

So this is what I like to do. What do you like to do? Do you love/hate debriefs? Had good/bad experiences with them?

Let me know in the comments!

Personally, I prefer to lead discussions vs canned presentations. I also prefer to ask the audience where they are at on a subject (show of hands) so we can tailor the discussion to their needs.

With that in mind, here are my rules for panelists (my rules for moderators are simple: provide value to the audience, make  the panelists look smart, be entertaining, keep the discussion on track):

1 HOUR PANEL

• 000-005 – welcome & introductions (30 seconds each) & audience polling
• 005-015 – Biggest Mistake & Most Important Win
• 015-025 – Discussion
• 025-035 – Awkward Questions From Jeremy AKA Continuing Discussion
• 035-050 – Audience Q&A
• 050-100 – Wrapup Statements & Thank You

JEREMY’s RULES FOR PANELISTS

1. Have fun
2. Don’t agree on everything
3. This is a DISCUSSION, don’t be too polite
4. This is a COMMUNITY, don’t be rude
5. Engage the audience, they’re not just relatively pretty faces
6. We’re guests, the audience is the star
7. Everyone has an opinion. Bring an example or twelve too.
8. Be funny.
   a. Don’t mock midgets (lessons learned the hard way…)
9. Ask each other questions, and ask the audience questions.
10. DO NOT CONFERENCE SPAM

QUESTIONS FOR PANELISTS

1. Are you okay with your short bio (provided earlier)
2. Official title, Twitter ID, website
3. Is there anything specific you’d like to cover
4. Is there anything specific you DON’T want to cover/to avoid
5. Is there a rumour about another panelist I should know about?

THOUGHTS?

I’d love your feedback on this, especially as I’m leading a bunch of discussions with this structure!

Too often, Social Media is about the MEDIA: spreading the word, getting more followers, making money, growing your traffic, blah, blah, blah, #facepalm… Every once in awhile, though, it’s nice to do the SOCIAL side of the equation, which is what I’m proposing today!

This is the 4^th BlogWorld I’ve been to. Each time there are lots of new faces, and everytime they’re just a bit timid, bit scared, bit confused or just a bit… special (sorry @tedmurphy). And while I try my best to show people where session rooms are, to recommend hotels and find cheaper airfare, to publish lists of parties and to hand out my phone number should people need help (416 726 3602 by the way), as Darkwing Duck said: I am the terror that flaps in the night, I am the batteries that are not included.

So, let’s scale this helping people thing. Lots of BWE veterans like to help, and even if you’re new you probably know more than you think you do, so let’s use and follow a hashtag on Twitter: #bwehelps. If you have a question, ask it of the hashtag and I will be checking it. Who else will be checking it? Well if you have more than just your mom following you on Twitter (to be fair, my mom stopped following me years ago!) then you should be. Follow it on your mobile and Twitter client. Give back. Be helpful. Smile!

Let’s be a community. Let’s help. Let’s have some fun. No blogger left behind!

Photo by nicht mehr hier @Flickr