I Built WordPress Tools That Have Been Used By Millions
Hi, my name is Avi Klein, I’m an entrepreneur, a father, a husband, and the founder of OK Digital Ltd. which has created many online tools and blogs over the years, mainly aimed at online marketing/web development/web design industry. One of our most familiar tools is Scan WP.
Unlike traditional online or offline businesses, this business is not product or service-based, it relies solely on other businesses to grow and make money. Our main source of income is affiliate marketing which in a nutshell is pointing our users to a product on a third-party website and if the user ends up converting - we get paid.
Within the rise of online businesses, especially since Covid-19, several of our websites have seen a significant increase in traffic this past year, even to the extent of a 100% increase in traffic year by year.
What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?
My entrepreneurship story began over 15 years ago when I first became familiar with the ability to make money online. I remember reading an article about how many people were making money by selling products on eBay that they didn’t even have to buy first. That’s the first time I heard the term “Dropshipping” (I guess it was pretty new back then LOL) and I remember myself dreaming of laying back on my couch and just “watching” people pay me money while I do nothing besides sending emails/invoices etc. Ever since then I have tried to learn as much as I can about that, I even went to a course to learn things that I might have missed. I wasn’t very successful at selling on eBay, I was able to sell some products but it never turned into anything serious.
While I was learning all I could about eBay and making money online, I started learning about how to create landing pages, what SEO was and that got me to learn about affiliate marketing. That caught my attention and I started reading lots of blogs about it and opened up many free blogs and thought that was what will make me rich. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. But - that’s where my love for the entire industry started. A few years later I was able to get my first job doing SEO, which is where I got the beginning of my knowledge of SEO and website building.
While working there we needed to track our SERPs (search engine results page), i.e where we ranked on Google. Back then there weren’t many very good tools like today - so we decided to build one ourselves which did lots of other things like evaluating link prospects based on parameters we agreed on. I was not the one to build it since I barely even knew how to build a WordPress website, but I was part of the team - and when I realized that any web developer with the right knowledge can build a tool that will pull in information about other websites, I was kind of shocked and mesmerized.
To make a long story short, after 2 years of working there I decided to become self-employed. While doing SEO for several clients I went to a web development course and when I had to decide what project to build for my project at the end of the course - I thought of building a tool that will detect the WordPress theme being used on other sites (Since by then I was very familiar with WordPress), I did a ton of research and one of the things I learned was that I can also detect what plugins are being used. That project’s name was - Scan WP.
It took me a few months to perfect it to the fact that I was comfortable taking it live. I paid someone on Fiverr $50 to design the site, I bought the domain, paid a few bucks a month for hosting, and took it live.
That’s basically how my journey started.
Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?
At the point where I just took Scan WP live, I was already self-employed however I wasn’t making enough to justify the fact of being self-employed. The hardest thing for me (till this day) was to find clients and try to “sell myself”.
Even the fact that I spent $50 on the design of Scan WP and paying for the server was a leap of faith since I had no idea if I’d ever see that money again.
Just like with any other website or business, it took a while to start making money. Since by that point I was somewhat an SEO expert, I knew what I had to do to get the site going. It took several months to start seeing actual traffic to the site, but once it started it hasn’t stopped.
Once Scan WP started to bring in actual traffic (which means I started making some money from the site), I realized that there was a real interest in tools that can figure out information about websites. There are many of these kinds of websites these days. Sites that monitor your SEO presence, tools that can tell you how many backlinks a website has, and many more. So I wanted to see what else I can build in this field with the knowledge that I already had. At that point, I decided to build a website that would detect what CMS a site was using (WordPress.org, WordPress.com, Wix, Joomla!, and more...) and developed a new website named CMS Detect. The idea behind this tool is the same - MANY people (especially web developers and SEOs) go to a whole lot of websites daily and are interested in what they are doing and how they did it. This tool can help them do that.
While building this tool I found a new platform I never heard of before called Shopify (I know I know, this was a while ago), and I saw its rising popularity of it, so I decided to mimic Scan WP and do the same with Shopify, that’s when I created ShopThemeDetector. To this day, this is one of the sites that I put most of my effort into. We will end the year with about 800 posts on our blog with a lot of valuable information.
Since the “easy” part was to build the sites and the hard part was to promote them and make some money - it took me a while but I ended up building the most robust detector site (at least when it was built that was the case) and I built a detector site that combines everything I have done thus far - a tool that can detect the theme and plugins (on some platforms) on several platforms, such as WordPress, Shopify, Drupal, Joomla!PrestaShop and Squarespace - at the time of developing this, no tool could detect a WP theme and Squarespace template in the same place. This tool I called Gochyu.
Since then I have built several tools and websites, some of them were promoted more, some were less - but what I try to do to this day is find the trends and stay ahead of them. For instance - a while back I noticed that Squarespace has been gaining a lot of popularity and having a website around that subject could be a good direction, so I developed WhatSquare.spce. I have several more such as a site that can detect what hosting company is being used and a site dedicated to Wix. I think the most important lesson here is - to keep your eyes open and be able to spot trends.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Today I run a very profitable business with considerably low overhead. Since the entire operation relies on organic traffic - I have no ad expenses whatsoever.
The entire business expenses are:
- Content
- Tools
- Some APIs
- Server & domain costs
- Regular business expenses such as an accountant, supplies, etc.
Nowadays as I’ve mentioned above, the traffic on all sites is growing gradually and when looking at the entire operation - we are seeing traffic of around 200k users a month and due to the massive amount of content, some of the sites have an average time on site of 15 minutes (meaning there are posts that the average there is 30 minutes and even more).
“Mindset”. If your mindset is in the right place, everything else will align.
Looking forward, the short-term plan is to increase traffic on some of the newer sites in the network, and in the long term - the plan is to build a few more websites in a similar niche.
The majority of my efforts at the moment go into producing new tools and constantly improving the existing ones.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
“Mistakes” are all part of the process. I would hate to look back at everything I’ve gone through and regret doing things. Sure - I’ve tried many things that didn’t work, sure I’ve made my share of mistakes - however - the “mistakes” are what made me who I am today. Mistakes are what enable you to grow - I say “Embrace the mistakes, don’t regret them”.
I must have made some good decisions along the way. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in business and personal development is that things don’t just happen to you - you make them happen. Even if your success is due to someone else - you were smart enough to make that happen or to be in touch with that person.
One of the things I’ve been doing for the past several years is “creating my future”. Every year I make a list, sort of a vision board but it’s just a bullet point list with everything I want to achieve in the upcoming year. If I write that I want to make another $100k - I will write exactly how I plan on doing it. I try to aim high but not too high. More times than not, this works perfectly. It helps me personally, it helps my business and it helps my overall growth.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Nowadays I love developing my websites on Laravel, but in the past, all my websites were on WordPress. As a developer, I feel that it gives me much more control over what I’m doing. Yes, it’s much more work but I feel that it’s more worth it and I love the outcome.
I’ve hosted my websites on many hosts in the past - though I’ve been hosting them on Cloudways in the past year + and am very satisfied with them.
One tool that I use that I cannot see my business the same without it, is Semrush. I use it for so many things. Rank tracking, backlink tracking, keyword research, competitor research, and much more.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Unfortunately before becoming an entrepreneur, I didn’t read books that were relevant, however in the past few years, I have read several books that are great for personal growth and mindset. For example:
- Retire Young Retire Rich / Robert Kiyosaki
- The 4-Hour Workweek / Tim Ferriss
I never take these books as a whole but I make them my own. I take what I need and ignore the rest. That works well for me.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
There is a saying in real estate: “The best time to buy a house is 20 years ago”. Same in business. Just start. We all want to live in this imaginary world where we want everything to be 100% ready BEFORE we start, and only then we will start. Unfortunately, that world does not exist. We need to start and get our ducks in line later.
There are so many mistakes I see people making along the way, if I can sum it up and give you one piece of advice it would be: “Mindset”. If your mindset is in the right place, everything else will align. If you are not in the right headspace, it will be extremely hard for you. You will blame everyone for your mistakes, you will always have an answer as to why things are not working out for you, and overall you will be pretty miserable. Remember what I wrote above regarding “creating your future” - this is it. Just do it. Decide what needs to be done, be in the right headspace, and go for it.
Where can we go to learn more?
Here are some of our active websites:
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