Sam Mulaim – 40, founder and CEO of FixRunner – first came up with the idea of FixRunner in 2013.
“Back then, I was doing affiliate marketing for over 100 WordPress websites I owned and I was making most of my income from selling leads in different industries. While I was managing so many websites I saw how much time it was taking out of me to manage and maintain all of the websites I have, so I hired developers full time to do the maintenance for me. Every time I needed support they were available for me, I got what I needed quickly and efficiently.”
At this point, Mulaim was already thinking that it would be nice to provide a service that will offer quick, reliable and affordable 24/7 support. “Back then there were only a few sites that offered this type of service and it seemed like a good idea,” he recalled. “However, after the website was complete it was just one more website in the sea of other websites I owned. I wasn’t completely focused on FixRunner and was still doing mostly affiliate marketing. All this time I knew that I need to focus on FixRunner and in order for it to be successful I need to be 100% committed to it.”
In the beggining of 2016, he decided to stop everything he was doing and work on just developing FixRunner.
“It wasn’t easy to make this decision but today I can say it was probably the best decision of my life. Today I have (over 20) great people working at FixRunner providing premium WordPress support and I just love my job.”
FixRunner, according to him, is different from others in the market because of two things.
“Our business model of ‘let us give you the service first and you can pay for it later’, and even more important is how fast we reply and fix the issues at hand,” he said. “I don’t know any other WordPress support service that offers the same model.”
For instance, “when a new client comes to ask for help, we understand that the priority is to fix the issues as soon as possible, so we will provide a quote and if it’s approved we fix the issue immediately. Only after the client is 100% satisfied (will) he pay for the service. As a result, many clients that come for a one time fix, end up purchasing a monthly subscription with us and we provide them with 24/7 support.”
FixRunner’s business model, he added, “is something that I wanted to do from the start. Many people that come and use our service for the first time don’t really know who we are, so offering them the fix first and then going forward with the payment makes the whole thing much easier. I firmly believe that we should charge the customer only if he is 100% happy.”
Now why the focus on WordPress?
“WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world and it keeps growing. I’ve been using WordPress for many years and I believe that nothing comes even close to it,” Mulaim said, adding that “it’s the most simple CMS with the biggest room/potential for growth.”
This specialization means that, yes, “we provided only WordPress support and we do not plan to provide support for any other platform.”
In fact, “the only new service that we will add in the following year is our own Google cloud-managed WordPress hosting. We offer support plans that include managing WordPress hosting, but we do it with our different hosting partners. We feel like its time to build our own super-fast, reliable and secure WP hosting.”
“Our business model of ‘let us give you the service first and you can pay for it later’, and even more important is how fast we reply and fix the issues at hand,” Sam Mulaim said. “I don’t know any other WordPress support service that offers the same model.”
A big issue is security – since clients will, basically, put their trust in FixRunner by providing the company with information they would otherwise not provide to other people.
In the case of Fix Runner, “most of our customers… create a unique user for us from their WordPress dashboard. This gives them the option to remove access to the website at any time. That makes the process very simple and secure. As for our members, we connect their website to a management software with a plugin where all login info is hidden and we can login with one click. Our system also monitors everyone that logs to the clients website from our system.”
For Mulaim, this is a win-win approach.
And so for panicking WordPress users if or when they encounter issues, Mulaim has this to say: “You wouldn’t believe how many people simply aren’t backing up their websites. This is the first and most important thing every WordPress user should do. The second thing is to keep everything updated – WordPress, theme and plugins. This will help with website security. If you are running into issues with your website and you don’t have the budget to hire professionals you can easily find a lot of free guides online, or you can also visit our blog where we offer many free guides and tips on how to fix different WordPress issues.”
For more info (or get that needed support), head to FixRunner.