Q&A Interview with Tom Fanelli Founder / CEO Convesio

Q&A Interview questions Convesio.

Welcome everyone. I'm Kyle Martin Financial Blogger at www.moneysensewithkyle.com. Today we have Tom Fanelli CEO / Founder of Convesio for a Q&A Interview to learn more about this startup company, What they do?, Where are they going?, How they will get there?, Obstacles along the way, and Why to invest in Convesio. Welcome Tom!

Thank you for having me.

Tom..tell us about yourself

Originally from Florida, I have been in technology, product and marketing roles over 20 years. My first real business was an agency in Southwest Florida that I started in the late 90’s. We eventually got into web design services way before there was anything like WordPress. I relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area over 10 years ago to join a software startup. That startup was acquired almost a year later by a company, RealPage. Not long after the acquisition, we took that company public on the NASDAQ (RP). After 6 years, I moved on to a large corporation that owns several hosting companies and currently hosts over 4MM sites. Throughout my career I have always been close to scalable web platforms, high volume hosting, and have had a passion for agencies. This is what brought me to the place of creating Convesio.

What does your company do?

We provide a scalable, high performance platform for agencies to create and manage WordPress websites. Technology for hosting really falls into two major categories. The first being legacy shared hosting, and by that I mean everything in that world from Dedicated, VPS, and Cloud Servers. Essentially this technology has not undergone any major evolutionary leap forward. The other category is where Amazon, Google Cloud, etc are positioned. The problem with these is they are costly and require special expertise to deploy and manage. This leaves many agencies in a really hard spot. Convesio is there to fill the void with a simple to use and cutting edge solution.

Where will your company be in 5 years?

I like to refer to Flywheel who was recently acquired by WP Engine at only 6 years old. When WP Engine purchased Flywheel they disclosed they were doing $18MM in Annual Recurring Revenue. WP Engine also indicated they were approaching an IPO and valuation of approximately a billion dollars. Once WP Engine goes public my thought is the market is going to heat up substantially. I see a lot of parallels between where the WordPress market is and where RealPage’s market was when we had our IPO. If you look at the PropTech market 10 years ago, it was not nearly as developed as it is now. VC money is pouring into it and more companies are going public, this was all facilitated by RealPage breaking the glass ceiling. I think a similar thing is going to happen in the WordPress space, but even more extreme.  

How far along are you? What's your biggest obstacle?

We’ve made tremendous progress in the last year. When we started we were not even sure this idea would make it out of R&D and now we are at a stage where we have raving fans who would be really bummed if they couldn’t use Convesio anymore. That proves we are delivering on our value propositions. In many ways we have the product, experience, and traction to build on our early stage success. The challenges now are staffing and providing a great customer experience as we scale. 

Who are your competitors? Who is the biggest threat?

Clearly WP Engine is a threat, simply because they have financial means and once they go public are going to likely be motivated to solidify their position in the market. Other competitors are companies like Flywheel (recently acquired by WP Engine), Kinsta, and Pantheon.

How will you make money?

We are a subscription based SaaS platform, so our primary means is to offer monthly or annual packages for our platform. In addition, we have several other revenue streams we will bring online as we grow to diversify our revenue.

On Wefunder.com Convesio has raised $713,218 of a $200,000 – $1,000,000 goal with 376 investors. How do you plan to spend the money raised?

The bulk of our funds will be used to scale marketing, sales, and support. We do have some continued investment in product and will need to scale servers as we grow customers, but the primary focus is sales and customer experience.

How are you different from other managed WordPress providers?

Our platform is very different. This is hard to explain without getting super technical, but we have built our platform from the ground up, designed to squeeze every drop of performance out of WordPress. Most hosting providers use the same legacy technology. So in this way we are very different, more scalable, stable, and faster.

What’s Next?

Our fundraising ends in October 2019, after that my focus is going to shift to scaling revenue and customers as quickly as we can without sacrificing quality of service.

Why should we invest in Convesio and how?

Hosting is a $100B a year business globally. There are no signs the growth in WordPress will slow down anytime soon. Over 75MM sites use WordPress and it’s the dominant choice by designers and agencies building websites. This is a rare opportunity to invest in a platform akin to Amazon Web Services but for WordPress. We have a very different approach the competitors in this space and our team is made up of seasoned experts. I’m confident this market is going to see significant growth during the next 10 years. Investing is easy, just visit our profile on WeFunder and you can start investing for as little as $100. Here's the Link: https://www.wefunder.com/convesio

Thank you Tom for sharing with us this exciting technology to create and manage WordPress websites. Audience, you now have the inside scoop on Convesio straight from Tom Fanelli the CEO / Founder of Convesio. Hosting sites can be costly and require expertise to deploy and manage. Convesio is there to fill the void with a simple to use and cutting edge solution. If you are interested in investing in this startup company the current campaign is at this Link: https://wefunder.com/convesio

Any questions contact Tom at Tom@convesio.com or use the Leave a comment on my website www.moneysensewithkyle.com That’s all for today. Thank you and we’ll see you in retirement.