So you might not have heard about the WordPress security company Patchstack before, but you will likely know about them! You see, until recently, they were called WebARX, but they decided that this was a somewhat confusing, and hard to pronounce name, and so changed it to Patchstack.
We talk today to founder Oliver Sild, and one of the first things that we get into in the podcast is why this change came about. There’s more to this than meets the eye, and it’s a really great look into just what it takes to uproot a company brand a start over. How do you communicate this change to your current audience? What steps do you take to make sure that new customers make the connection with the old company and the new one? It’s hard enough to build a reputation right, so upending that could prove disastrous as potential new customers stay away, fearful that you’ve new and inexperienced.
Was there a radical need to update the UI of the product and how did they go about deciding what stays in the software and what hits the trash can?
It seems like they did a good job communicating this message as, at the time of recording, the number of subscribers to their offering are up from 10k to 16k.
Oliver saw this whole transition as a once in a lifetime chance to amend their branding, but also what features the platform actually offers. So we get into some of the new features that Patchstack brings to the table, like their new plugin database, and the Red Team.
This leads to a discussion of exactly what these features are and how the Red Team, a team of non-staff volunteers, help grow the ability of the product to react to new and emerging WordPress security threats. You can join the Red Team and offer your services as a plugin vulnerability detector, and possibly get paid for some of the contributions that you make to their bug bounty program, depending upon your ranking in their team leaderboard!
It’s an interesting episode, not just for the update on the current state of WordPress security, but also to see how a team is able to pivot their branding to offering something more attuned to the expectations of their potential customers.
https://patchstack.com/red-team/
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