Over lunch in Charlottetown one day last summer, Scott Gallant and Jordan Patterson were grousing about one of the pains in their industry, and it resulted in the creation of their company, WP Status.

The company provides support for people who oversee websites using WordPress, and it was one of the eight companies that just graduated from the Launch36 accelerator. How it got to this stage is a great example of how a good accelerator will adapt to allow companies to change, break apart and come together.

Gallant is seasoned at web-design while Patterson’s strength is more at the back-end, such as writing code for websites. They work mainly with sites custom built on WordPress, and they understood the problems with using such sites.

People in this line of work worry about the sites being hacked, about having to back them up, and about the need for continuous updates to accommodate the evolution of the infrastructure.

“Often what happens is there is a conflict on the site because everything is so modular,” said Gallant in an interview, meaning parts of a website can work smoothly with updates and others are subject to old technology. “A lot of websites simply don’t get updated because nobody wants to deal with it.”

And so Gallant and Patterson created WP Status and its product, Guinea Pig. Guinea Pig is a tool that lets website developers using WordPress carry out all these tasks quickly and easily. They have about 150 site developers using WP Status around the world. The feedback so far is positive. In fact, 10 percent of the users that participated in the company’s beta-test are now paying customers. 

"Today I got to test it for the first time and it worked very well,” said one user, Jakob Wikstrom. “This is exactly what I have been looking for and I am sure it is going to save a lot of time and worries for me and our company.”

When the pair began working on the project, Gallant was already working with another startup called Maritime Rideshare, which lines up people needing rides between cities with people who have room in their car. Maritime Rideshare (now called Seeets) was accepted into Launch36 and learned the process of lean startups, including client discovery. Following the lean startup principals, Gallant and Patterson sent out emails to about 50 people they knew who used WordPress to solicit feedback on their idea. Almost half agreed to be interviewed.

When the Launch36 teams met lean startup guru Ash Maurya in Halifax in the autumn, Gallant spent much of the time running to the hall to interview people about the new product. The feedback he got was good. People liked the idea and wanted to be kept in the loop, possibly to test the product.

By late in the year, Gallant wanted to work on WP Status, and was able to do so and remain in Launch36. The accelerator began the cohort with one company from P.E.I. and ended up with two.

WP Status launched Guinea Pig to the public last week and will start its marketing campaign this week. The company is hoping to raise about $250,000 in financing, and would use the money to accelerate its marketing efforts.