Wordfence is a solid product. I 'inherited' my wife's business's website a few years ago from a small marketing firm. It was heavily infected with malware. I tried several tools to clean it up and Wordfence is the one tool that consistently helped me remove all malware and keep it off. I was using the free version for quite a while and just upgraded to a paid license yesterday as a matter of fact.

In the world of Wordpress plugins it is a gem in the rough.

Thank you, and thanks for your business.

Should have mentioned, but it's probably obvious, that we also don't need funding. So won't be raising VC with the pressures that come with that. Nothing against folks who do, but that's our situation.

> We actually created this as an internal tool because there wasn't anything that would give you a clear indication of site performance from DNS lookup to connect to TTFB to page render from around the world.

Out of curiosity, did you look into any paid services like SpeedCurve or Calibre? There are also OSS projects like SiteSpeed or WebPageTest.

Full disclosure: I work at SpeedCurve. We've had customers cancel their accounts in the past because they wanted to build their own performance monitoring tool. To the best of my knowledge, most of those customers have come back because building and maintaining a tool like that is no easy task.

...Which I guess is a strange way of saying congratulations on building a performance monitoring tool!

A WAF specifically marketed at WordPress is a clever idea.

You mentioned that Wordfence has a team of 35 behind it. This seems like a large team, and I'm curious to know what the distribution of roles is like? Also interested to know how many users and paying customers Wordfence has?

We focus fairly heavily on engineering, particularly on QA. My co-founder Kerry Boyte ran QA at Symantec, eToys, BBC, and a few other well known companies. She actually built BBC's digital TV testing lab herself. Ran testing for the MS Exchange version of Norton back in the 90s. And ran the web QA team at eToys before the suits messed things up there.

I'm a dev (ceo these days) and I wrote the first version of Wordfence. Also worked at many big and small companies in South Africa, London and USA. We're US based now. And so we're both engineering focused, and our process is to only ship rock solid code via excellent QA.

Funny thing. Finding vulnerabilities is actually just QA. And a vuln is just a celebrity bug. So this culture really helps foster great security research too.

Another big area we invest in is customer service. Our CS team does a great job and we also focus substantial energy on community support in free forums, which really helps foster goodwill from the community and build a relationship with folks who use our free product, many of whom become paying customers.

I started my career in ops in the 90s before moving to dev and am passionate about high performance (as you can tell from fastorslow) - and so we spend a lot of energy and budget on solid operations to support our products.

Kerry is kind of a math guru and is our COO and CFO these days. So we run a tight ship in terms of financials, which is pretty much why we're still around. Cashflow plan updated daily. Awesome projections. Awesome granularity. Sorry if I'm over-sharing, but I love entrepreneurship and perhaps this will give other folks starting out some insight.

We have around 3 to 5 million free customers. Can't share how many paying, but it's a lot.

I haven't coded for some time now. In 2015 I completely handed off coding on Wordfence to a brilliant developer named Matt who is still with us. I've moved my focus 100% to leadership, strategy and somewhat of a CTO role, but I share that with the strong tech leads in our engineering team.

Hope that helps. We're a private company, so I couldn't just dump our internal data, but I hope that gives you some flavor of who we are, our focus, team distribution and culture.

Regards,

Mark.

Thank you for sharing the history of the company Defiant, about the people who develop WordFence, and the guiding principles and approach in management.

The overview was insightful, to see what makes up a well-run operation: how the engineering, tight financial management, quality assurance, performance, security, customer support and fostering the user community - all tie together to make a solid, growing business.

It definitely earns trust and respect for the company's culture and decisions. As a dev learning the ropes in a CTO role, this kind of open communication about the internal workings of a successful company and product is great food for thought.

To decisively not seek acquisitions and venture capital, and instead value independence, profitability, good finances, engineering, QA.. This will stay in my mind as a role model.

If there's an opportunity where I work, I'll likely recommend WordFence or other services by the company. (In fact, performance profiling of large/heavy sites has come up a number of times this year.)

Elsewhere a possible blog post on migrating to AWS was mentioned. I love that style of articles, describing the thought process that goes into technical decisions, how it was planned and implemented. Hope I can catch it here if/when it's published.

I feel that half my job as WordPress developer is knowing or finding quality plugins. It can be a real jungle sometimes. Reading your posts leave no doubt in my mind that Wordfence should be my go-to security plugin in the future.

Sounds like a good product, with a well thought-out process/vision, and a great team that enjoys working on it.

Congrats on the success!

Thank you.

You're saying all the right things :) thanks for the awesome level of detail, too! You guys seem like a really cool company. I'll definitely be making good use of this product in the future; thanks for making it and sharing it!

Thank you! We're hiring!! (Sorry, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that). We're currently hiring PHP developers and for QA. visit our company website at https://www.defiant.com for details.

Darn, if I were in the US I would have applied. Fantastic website!