Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, host Michelle Frechette interviews Remco Nieuwenhuis, a WordPress professional from the Netherlands and founder of WPSupporters and WPoptic. Remco shares his journey from military and police service to tech entrepreneurship, discusses the creation of WP Optic—a fast, accurate browser extension for detecting WordPress themes and plugins—and demonstrates its features live. The conversation covers challenges, future plans, and community involvement, ending with the host encouraging listeners to try WP Optic and announcing a brief podcast break for WordCamp US.

Top Takeaways:

• WPoptic is a fast, WordPress-focused browser extension: Remco Nieuwenhuizen developed WPoptic to quickly detect if a site is built with WordPress, along with its themes and plugins. Unlike broader tools like BuiltWith or Wappalyzer, WPoptic focuses specifically on WordPress and boasts near-instant detection speeds, currently identifying around 17,000 plugins with plans to expand to over 50,000.
• Development involved overcoming early challenges: The first version of WPoptic was built by an overseas developer but lacked scalability, security, and depth in plugin detection. After receiving feedback from a competitor-turned-collaborator, Remco decided to rebuild the tool from scratch, prioritizing speed, security, and accuracy. This pivot confirmed market demand and improved the product’s professional quality.
• Growth and monetization plans center on data and community: WPoptic has around 800 Chrome users and aims to monetize through features like an export function, AI-assisted plugin detection, and potentially dashboards for plugin developers to track installations and competition. Remco emphasizes organic growth, user feedback, and avoiding heavy reliance on advertising, preferring to fund development through his other business, WPSupporters

Mentioned In The Show:

• WPoptic
• Wave
• Built With
• WPSupporters
• Wappalyzer
• WPfounders article about Remco Nieuwenhuizen
• Elementor
• WPBakery
• Divi

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Remco Nieuwenhuizen (Founder, WPoptic)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:27  Welcome to Post Status Happiness Hour Live. And today I’m with a new friend. Sometimes I say I’m with a friend that I’ve met forever. But today I’m with a new friend and I’m going to say his name. And he could. He could correct me if I butcher it. But Remco Nieuwenhuizen, close?

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:00:45  Correct. Yes. Very good. Thank you.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:46  I try, I try. Welcome to the show. It’s really good to. Good to meet you. Good to have this opportunity. You messaged me on LinkedIn to say, hey, is there any opportunity for me to show you this and somehow put it before the Post Status audience? And I took one look and I was like, heck yeah, let’s get this out here and let’s get people looking at this. I love, browser extensions. So I love, you know, that Chrome has all these wonderful things. I use Wave all the time to look at accessibility on websites, especially my own, so that I can correct any issues that are on there. And I’ve used tools similar to your WPoptic in the past, like Built With, for example. I use the browser extension for that, but it’s so slow, and it’s not necessarily comprehensive, and it doesn’t tell you if something’s WordPress; it just tells you the things about it. And so sometimes you have to scroll really far. And all I want to know sometimes is this WordPress or not. And it’s like you have to scroll halfway down. It’s like, oh, another Shopify website kind of thing. Yours is blazing fast. Like, holy cow, is it fast. And it’s immediate. You can tell whether or not it’s a WordPress website. So tell me a little bit about yourself. I know that you have a background in military before you got into tech, and you have two companies. It isn’t just WPoptic, you also have WP Supporters. So tell us a little bit about yourself and where you’re located in the world, and then tell us a little bit about, you know, what you’re doing. And then we’re going to dive a little bit more into WPoptic.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:02:19  Yes of course. So yes, my name is Remco Nieuwenhuizen. I’m from the Netherlands. And right now I work in the WordPress space from 2018. I built my first website in WordPress in 2008, so it took me ten years before I got into professional WordPress game. But like you said, I was working in the army, later in the police, but in the evening, I was always studying, how to create websites, how to build websites, and got more confidence to, to build websites for companies. So that was, was what I first did when I started in 2018. And, I already saw quite fast that building websites is nice. It’s okay, but for the long term, you want to have some stable income. So that’s why I started WPSupporters, which is a WordPress maintenance company. And yeah, like maybe I think five years in with WP Supporters, I often got questions from my clients. They asked me, do you know how this website is built or how do you know how this feature is built on the website? And then I was looking in the inspector tool and other extensions in, theme detectors, everything. What I could try to, to see how the website is built. And it made me think, yeah. Is there not something better for the WordPress space? So, like you said, you have Built With you have Wappalyzer which are popular extensions to detect how websites are built. but none of them are really focused on WordPress. So that makes. Yeah. Sparked the idea of, for me, like Built With has only 500 plugin detections. Wappalyzer has 200 plugins detections and yeah, like I said, there are so many, WordPress plugins that could be detected. I mean, in the free WordPress directory are over 50,000 plugins, pro plugins, maybe 100,000 in total. So, yeah, a lot more than a couple of hundreds that the big companies were detecting. So that was the first spark for my new company, WPoptic, which I started I think one year ago, or maybe, a bit more than one year ago. Started this with Dia, like my client said, how is this website built? And, yeah, started to build the WPoptic Chrome extension. We focused early on on speed because we already saw that other tools were really, really slow. And it could take 30 seconds, 40 seconds just to see if a website, a website is built on WordPress and what theme it runs in, like everything like that. So yeah, we we focused on speed and yeah. Like right now it’s, I think almost instant that we see some results. Sometimes it’s 1 or 2 seconds, but it’s really fast. And that’s, what we like to see. And of course, we added detections are already much more than like a Built With and Wappalyzer web browsers.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:26  Absolutely. I, after you messaged me, I went and found I just googled your name, and I found this article on WPfounders, which is a very recent within the last month article about mentioning WPoptic. I strongly recommend people go learn a little bit more about you, because I think you have some fascinating history and things that people can learn from that. And one of the things that I, I felt your pain, but also understood the lesson was hiring the wrong person. To start the project and then having to start all over from scratch. Anybody who’s ever baked a cake wrong and had to remake the cake feels a little bit of that pain. Although baking a cake is a lot less expensive than paying a developer. So tell us a little bit about that process and how you went from this idea to being able to implement it and share it with others?

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:06:24  Yeah, sure. Yeah. So like one year ago when the idea sparked and I thought, okay, let’s build this. I was looking for a developer and then, yeah, the first thing I don’t know many like, developers in the WordPress space closed nearby. So I was looking, abroad, like, in countries like Indonesia and Philippines and countries like that. So I went to Upwork, on Fiverr, ask, a bunch of people for a quote and some of those quotes. Well, if you post a job on Upwork, you will get like 20 or 30 people asking for the job. So yeah. But the first people that were answering my question. Can you build this? They already shared a demo with me. So that was really cool already. But yeah. I was also talking to my business coach, and he said, maybe you must also learn it yourself. So I try to myself with AI like everybody does right now. And I already saw that the first demo that I got was already, the same that I could produce with AI. So I already thought, oh, that’s not like something that, someone that is skilled enough to build this. The second developer that I talked to was already creating a more advanced demo, so I thought, okay, this person feels like a good match. So I gave him the, the job he builds like the first version of WPoptic, and I think a week of or five days, or something like that. It was quite fast. and it was working too. But yeah, like the detections were still 100 plugins. 200 plugins, not really much. And yeah, the first version was working, but after that I said, okay, next function, next function. Let’s build a database, let’s build more detections. And like I want to do expand the whole project. And that was the moment that I felt okay, I think this this one, this this man is not like my developer for the future. He was for my feeling, asking really high prices. So yeah, I thought to myself, I need to look closer to a develop. I need to find someone in my own space that I can talk to, that I can visit, and then I can ask good questions because also the language barrier was a bit difficult between me, a Dutch guy, and someone in Indonesia. I mean, my English is okay, but still it’s, it’s difficult. So the first thing that I did was, message on competitor in this space.  Really. And I asked, the guy, he was a data expert, and I said, yeah, I have something unbuilt. Could you please review the code with me? He said, yeah sure. Let’s do that. And the first verse he said was uh oh.

Michelle Frechette 00:09:35  Oh, that’s not good.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:09:37  That is not good. And yeah, I’m more of like a designer and not like a developer. So I can see the code. I can understand the code, but I don’t really understand how everything functions still. Like, like in the in-depth. So the first thing that I said, uh oh, I thought yeah. All right. So this is not good. Yeah. The first version had no signs of security in place. Everything was out in the open. Every. Everyone could, downloads, like, everything that we worked for, and got all of the code for free. So yeah, he said, this is not not good. And I think if you want to make this still fast and secure and everything, we need to rebuild the whole thing. So, yeah, I asked him what was would his quote be? Of course it was a lot, again. But I thought, yeah, maybe you could do this better right now than, like, in 1 or 2 years after, the after this conversation. So I thanked the old developer, I said it was a valuable lesson. We built the first version, which already got me, I think, around 200 or 300 users. So that was still, still nice. And it was also the validation that the need for this product was there. But yeah, to scale up and to make it more professional and to do everything that I had in mind. Yeah, we need to step up the proportionality. And that was like this competitor that was willing to help me. Yeah. And he was just the right guy for the job.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:16  That’s great. Well, why don’t you do some demo show us exactly how it works? Because I think it’s incredible. Incredibly impressive. So here’s your website.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:11:26  So this is my website. The first thing that we built is like the, extension, extension is here for Chrome and for Edge. So Microsoft of, what is called. Yeah. Edge, sorry, I don’t use that browser very much.

Michelle Frechette 00:11:43  I don’t either

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:11:46  Those two browsers are available in the, in the App Store. And what we did was, built a plugin detector and theme detector right in your browser. So if you open WPoptic extension, you can see it detects a theme and it detects right, 11 plugins that are right now installed. If there are plugins that are installed but not yet described, we have like the additional technologies. So you see here WooCommerce subscriptions, which is of course a well known plugin but not yet described in our database yet. So this is yeah, you can see it’s almost instant that it detects it.If you go to another website, you will see again, what plugins it finds again, the additional technology. Also we have light modes and dark modes for. Yeah, for, for just functionality. I really like dark mode.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:49  A lot of people do.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:12:50  Yeah. So that’s always good to have in place. Like, you see, you just open a website and you see just in your browser what is installed. It’s not 100% accurate yet, because right now we are close to detecting 17,000 plugins. But yeah, like I said earlier in the conversation, there are 50,000, maybe 100,000 plugins there. So there’s still room to improve on your own website. You can see the theme, you can see the four plugins that are installed. So this is just the basics. Yeah. What we started WPoptic with, two months ago. Oh, yeah. Sure.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:32  For anybody that’s watching that thinks, well, maybe you already had those cached. So that’s why it’s going so blazing fast. Pull up a website that we know is WordPress that maybe you haven’t done yet. Like, I have a website, meetmichelle.online  and my guess is you have.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen: meetmichelle.online

Michelle Frechette 00:13:49  Yep. It’s my like a link tree that I built for myself. So this one’s never been browsed. And there it is. Look how fast that was.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:13:56  No, it’s already faster than myself. So sometimes you will see just a loading circle here, but often like in 1 or 2 seconds, there already. Yeah, the results are there. So yeah, like you said, it’s it’s really fast. We also hope to keep it fast in the future. It’s something that we find very important. So, yeah, this is, like you said, not the website that I visited before. I think so, yeah, you can see how fast it is.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:26  Exactly.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:14:27  Two months ago, we adjusted the whole website, and we also shared, like, plug-in information on the website. So if you go to info and go to plugins or plugin categories, you will here see a list of all the plugins that we are detecting. And we can just open one, for example auto optimized or this pro version. You see, it’s 271 installations. Not that much. Let’s check if we can find one that is more well-known.

Michelle Frechette 00:14:58  Like Yoast. 

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:14:58  Yoast or Contact Form 7.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:02  Yeah. There you go. Look at that. 

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:15:03 So we already detected it more than 4 million times.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:06  Yeah that’s crazy.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:15:08  Also, if you go to like categories and you go to design a page builders, you see that Elementor is the top page builder right now. WPBakery is the second that we are detecting. Divi is third. Then that’s for all categories. You will see what are popular plugins.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:27  That’s really cool. 

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:15:28  This is something. Yeah, that we just launched like two months ago. Yeah. I just find it very fun to, to show this data and to dive in and check out. Yeah. What is popular everywhere around the world?  And we are already, of course, thinking, okay, what could we add? What could we do more and make improve the whole platform?

Michelle Frechette 00:15:54  Yeah. So how are you monetizing this? Like, if you’re spending this money to create it. You’re putting it on browsers. How are you making any money off of this?

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:16:04  Well, not yet.

Michelle Frechette: Haha, are you planning to?

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:16:06  So? So, no one.  Yes, of course we are planning to. And that’s. Yeah. Yeah. Something that we also need to because. Yeah. Like you said, it’s already a big investment right now. The first thing that we are building on right now is creating an export function on the list. So like similar to Build With or Wappalyzer, is sharing this information with people that might want this for their company. So like you see here, we already have a build list function, but if you visit it, you will see that it’s still under development. So this is something that we are hoping to launch next month, which is hopefully the first thing that. Yeah we’ll, we’ll get us some revenue again. But we also are thinking of collaborations, partnerships, everything like that. Maybe advertisement. But I’m not a big fan of advertising. Because, yeah, it’s just it keeps the the mind off the thing that you are for the website. so there are still, things to, yeah, to monetize, in the future. But right now our first thing is the, the export function. Yeah. And then hopefully we will, can continue to, to build the platform even bigger.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:27  I think it’s fantastic. Now, this isn’t your only business though, so I’m guessing the first business helped fund this business until it started to make money. So tell us a little bit about the other business that you have and what you do with it.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:17:41  Yeah. So this was also the business that sparked like the idea. Like I said before, it’s WPSupporters. It is our, my, maintenance company and support company. And yeah, what we do is we help. Yeah. companies, other people with websites, web shops with maintenance and support. They can ask the questions that they have about their website to us. And we are with a small team of experts that are helping them. We also do speed optimization. We do security, hack removal. Basically, almost everything that you will find by every other maintenance company. We try to excel in customer support and in speed, in customer support. So right now, normally when a ticket, when we get a ticket in, we answer it within two hours, and often within two hours, the issue is already solved. So we use the first two hours to solve the issue. Make sure that the client is notified within the two hours. Of course, sometimes it’s more difficult than within the two hours. And then we notify the client. Okay. It will take longer, but that’s something that we. Yeah, try to to do our best for. So that, yeah. The company or the business owner is really feeling okay. There’s people working on my website right now to make it better. So that’s, yeah, that’s the company that I started in 2018. So, yeah. And yeah, it’s, it’s really funding right now, the other project. But that’s okay, that’s, no problem.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:28  That’s you have to start somewhere. You have to have those startup funds coming from somewhere. If you can do it yourself, instead of having to take out a loan from somebody else. Sometimes that’s better for sure.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen00:19:38  Yeah. And I already had people who are saying to me okay, maybe I want to invest. Maybe I want to, yeah, help you with the project. But for me, it’s better than I do it on my own pace with my own funds. And, I don’t like the pressure of someone else who is pushing me for the next level I want to make my own progress on my own pace.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:04  For sure. I just think it’s I think it’s phenomenal. I’m not always able to use every product that somebody shows me because I’m not a developer. But this product is absolutely amazing. I’ve already shared it with a few people who I know work at particular places that want to be able to look at a website quick and know if their plugin is installed, and so I check to see if it did. And it did. So I sent it to them. I’m like, install this now. You’re going to love me later.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:20:36  Yeah. And that’s also what we see with other users. They really like it. And they really like the functionality. And it’s also the, the way we grow our community right now. So we are, I think, close to 800 users, within Google Chrome. Still, if you look at our competitors, I think we are better already, but the competitors have more uses, so we are stil. Yeah. Room to improve.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:04  They’ve just been around longer.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:21:07  Yeah. That’s true. That’s true, that’s true.

Michelle Frechette 00:21:10  If people are interested, they go to WPoptic.com. Also you can just search for WPoptic in the Chrome, I’m sure Edge also, extension store? I think they call it in Chrome?

Remco Nieuwenhuizen: Yeah. 

MIchelle Frechette:  And which is how I found it very quickly and just installed it in a matter of seconds, and then immediately started pressing the button to see all the things and was incredibly impressed, as I said more than once, with how quick it was able to return that information and how accurate it was, given that I was testing on sites that I knew what was already installed, so I didn’t have to guess whether or not it was accurate. So very, very cool. So, so what’s next? Are you thinking about adding other things that we’re continuing to grow what we have, what’s on your roadmap besides the, you know, the being able to subscribe and find data and build your lists? Anything else that’s coming up?

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:21:59  Yeah, sure. So, of course, detecting more and more plug-ins. First thing what we want to do now is export function. That’s what we already said. The next thing after that is using AI to detect more and more plug-ins. So we want to do like 50,000 plug-ins and make sure everything is still fast. So that’s something that I think we will improve on when we launch our export function. Yeah. There are still such more things to, to detect right now. We already we have 13.5 million websites in our database already. So that’s also growing really, really big. yeah. And like I said before, make sure this is. Yeah, has a good, solid basis. Yeah. Something that I also have in my mind, and I don’t know yet if there are people who will want to know it, but I think our information is also very valuable for plugin developers. So, creating a dashboard for plugin developers to see. Okay, who has installed my plugin, who is leaving, maybe my plugin too. Who are they leaving to? Any competitors? I think that information is also very valuable for plugin developers. So I’m thinking creating a dashboard for that function. But that’s all on the roadmap for future things. But yeah, I, I find it really exciting to, to think about it, to create new, new things on this platform, using the data to, to share, like, researches and everything like that. So, yeah, using the data to, to improve the WordPress community, that’s what, what I try to do.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:56  That’s awesome. I’m very glad that you reached out to me, because I love being able to show really cool products off to our audience. So yeah. Anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up for today? I know it’s getting late where you live.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:24:09  Yeah. That’s true. Yeah. It’s already, yeah,  hald past ten in the evening. But, yeah, I’ll, maybe if people are watching this and they have more questions about WPoptic, they can always reach out to me. I  like to be, yeah. Asked by the community how things can improve, maybe suggestions that they have. We already had a suggestion to add, like a first version detection of the plugins. So that’s something that’s already on the roadmap. But, yeah. Share your idea with us. And maybe we could get it working in the future.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:46  So I’m guessing you have a contact form on WPoptic.com, so they can probably meet you there?

Remco Nieuwenhuizen: Yep. 

Michelle Frechette:  I know that you’re also on LinkedIn and Twitter and all of the places, so not difficult to find you as long as you know how to spell your last name.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:24:59  Yes. Nieuwenhuizen, correct. If you ask me.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:04  Go to WPoptic, it’s all there.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:25:05  Yeah.  Translated into English is called New Houses. My last name. Yeah. So that’s translation.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:12  Very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I really do appreciate that. If anybody has questions, reach out, talk to Remco on any of the places, look for the website, and definitely add the extension to your Chrome or Edge browser because it is pretty cool, even if you just want to see how fast it is. Like it’s fun to play with. So I’ll just say that. We will not have an episode next week or the week following because of WordCamp US, but we will be back after WordCamp US with a few people that have already got scheduled for the following weeks from there, and so we’ll take it from there. We’ll let you know who those are when we get a little bit closer to it. But again, thank you, Remco. Hang on for just a minute after we end the stream. I’ve got a couple of ideas for you.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:25:55  Very good, thank you. 

Michelle Frechette 00:25:56  Everybody else, we’ll see everybody else soon.

Remco Nieuwenhuizen 00:25:58  All right.