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Relentless personal and business growth.
That’s what ConstantGrowth is all about.
Everything starts with the human — YOU! Grow the human and the business will inevitably be successful. And for the record, the business we’ll be discussing here are small businesses.
There
I’ve
said
it…
If you want to (1) improve yourself as an individual and (2) consequently grow your business, I’ve created this site especially for you. (yay!!!)
For others not interested in these 2 things, I’m afraid I have nothing here that will be of value to you. Sorry to be blunt, but I really don’t want to waste your time any longer. I wish you every success!
One more thing I should let you know. The things I write here are based on my experience (i.e. things I’ve actually did and tried), not just theories.
Hello my name is Welly Mulia. I love the internet (who doesn’t?), Formula 1, traveling, improving myself (duh), small businesses, and of course my beloved family. Ohh I also love the idea of working from anywhere in the world with just a laptop and internet → amazing isn’t it?
We live in an information age where this is entirely possible. And it’s not just an idea for me and my team to work from anywhere… because we all work remotely to deliver awesomeness for our customers 🙂
My introduction wouldn’t be complete without showing you a cheeky picture of me, so here you go.
My First Business
I remembered the year 2004 like it was yesterday.
It was the last year that I would be working for someone else.
I never had any formal education or training with regards to running a business. I’m also not any smarter than the average person. But I was determined to run my own “show”.
So I started my first business anyway (while working full-time in my last job)… despite not having any special talent or skills.
It was an event organizer for seminars and workshops.
Though the business did not work out, I learned tons of valuable business and life lessons, which proved to be useful as I’ll explain below…
Make Money Online? Sounds Scammy…
The next phase of my business journey probably sounds cliche, but (yes) I was browsing aimlessly on the web when I saw an ad promising anyone can make money online.
As you can already guess — much like everyone else — I was hooked on this idea. Can I really make money on the internet? Or was it just a scam?
To cut a long story short, the concept of “making money online” was definitely not a scam because I wouldn’t be here writing this if it were.
My first try on “making money online” was Google Adsense. Took me 11 months to earn my first paycheck from Google. But even after that, I wasn’t having much success with it.
Upgrading to a ‘Real’ online business
After those Adsense days, I went on to sell HTML landing page templates. Mind you, back then if you weren’t a designer… you wouldn’t be able to create beautiful landing pages quickly. Nah, WordPress landing page plugins didn’t even existed. This was 2010-ish.
Not long after… the whole WordPress plugin and theme “revolution” for online marketers and entrepreneurs was just about to start…
We followed along with the crowd and developed our first WordPress theme (called Profits Theme) that allows any newbie to easily create landing pages in record time. At that time, we only had 1 competitor. No one else was providing this solution, not at the level of product quality, detail, and support we were providing.
From Profits Theme, we developed a few more WordPress plugins that cater to online small businesses and marketers.
Taking On More Complex Projects
And after “WordPress life”, my partner and I started a much more challenging business in the form of a SaaS.
For those unfamiliar with the term, SaaS stands for Software as a Service — and it basically means providing on-demand software for a monthly recurring fee.
This is how Wikipedia defines SaaS:
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”Wikipedia”]Software as a service is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.[/pullquote]
On-demand software is typically hosted in the cloud, which means you don’t have to install anything on your computer. You just log in to a web portal and start using the software. It’s always available 24/7, and you can access it anywhere and anytime you want.
(how awesome is that!?)
Our SaaS is called Zaxaa and it was actually born out of necessity rather than for profits.
So here’s what happened…
Back when we released Profits Theme, we got such an overwhelming number of folks purchasing… that we have to temporarily close the cart down because we weren’t able to support any more customers after this huge spike.
There were only 2 of us running the show at that time — me and my partner. I remember every day we were handling 100+ support requests.
A few weeks went by and things started to stabilize. We were planning to re-open our cart to take in more customers and we looked at a few alternatives for our cart. At that time we were using aMember — which was great — but we wanted something that was more robust and easier-to-use (and hence faster setup time).
We searched for a solution and it eventually came down to 2 options — software X or Y — that can do what we want them to do. X was way out of our budget and we’ve also heard horror stories of how difficult it is to use, even for simple tasks.
So we went with Y. After 2 months trying it out though, we weren’t happy with how we wanted it to work.
Hence we decided to create our own cart to do the things we wanted it to do. This cart was originally planned for our internal use — to be used when we re-open Profits Theme.
Along the way as we started developing this cart… we thought to ourselves… “hey if we’re having trouble finding an easy-to-use but robust cart, I bet other small businesses and marketers like us would love to have access to it as well!”
And so we decided to make our in-house cart — Zaxaa — available to the public as well.
We eventually shut down our WordPress business and solely focused our time and efforts on Zaxaa.
And in April 2018, we beta-release another new SaaS in the email marketing automation “arena”, called BirdSend.
Speaking
Sometimes I do speak at events to share my knowledge and experience with others. But very seldom. I’m an introvert and like to work by myself behind a computer than ‘going out there’.
So… that’s my story in a nutshell. I hope you find this site useful! To start growing, go here.