My name is Zach Hendershot, founder of Miruni. I grew up in Ohio, but have lived in Denver, Colorado for the last 17 years.
I’ve been a life-long technologist. I started with my dad’s BASIC how-to book late in elementary school with little demo programs and fun little text adventures (big Sierra games fan!). Then I graduated to modding games (Doom, Quake, and everything in between), and then building 3D games in the early days of new graphics cards and the exploding 3D space. I even had a stint launching an early regional dial-up ISP – for a reason I still don’t understand.
As time went on, I went into more ‘serious’ business endeavors and over time I started to lead cross functional product teams in large enterprise businesses and learned a lot about what it takes to make a product, team, and initiative successful. But the draw of getting my hands dirty building software solving some hard problem is always pulling at me a bit back to the startup world where I am today.
The Journey Began
I’ve had a diverse digital life before WordPress, but WordPress has reared its head on and off as a thread throughout. I’ve been involved in or build custom software ranging from adventure travel management platforms, to self-service customer support portals serving 30M+ customers and a little bit of everything in between.
Throughout the journey, I’ve either started or have leadership roles with consulting and agencies businesses on and off. That work has often involved some deep work inside the WordPress ecosystem. The reason we continued to come back to WordPress really centered on its rich ecosystem of tools, platforms, infrastructure, and community. These attributes have been the lifeblood of WordPress’s long term resiliency and continues to make it a go-to for organizations that need a dependable platform to build mission critical web experiences on top of. It’s certainly the reason that I continue to leverage WordPress over and over again.
The Need for “Miruni”
Miruni logo
Miruni started as a capture tool on the web (supported by a Chrome extension). The main idea was to streamline and simplify the ability for customers and clients to document bugs, design feedback, and general feedback. After talking to customers and prospective customers we learned a critical thing about behavior in the agencies we serviced: capture is great, but the real problem is the hundreds if not thousands of hours spent actually resolving the issue the client is sending them.
So we pivoted, and built an AI agent orchestration platform inside Miruni that initially plugs deeply into the WordPress platform to automate 80-90% of the requests that your customers and clients send you. Miruni leverages the capture engine to extract critical contextual information (screenshots, device and browser information, javascript logs, etc) and passes it through our AI agent system to recommend precise edits to the WordPress site to resolve the issue in 1 click vs sometimes dozens of clicks and hours of time to do it manually. So our mission is to radically reduce the amount of time agencies and freelancers spend doing manual, boring, and non-strategic work for their clients.
It’s been a long journey for Miruni, from starting life as a Y Combinator startup (under a different name) through an acquisition, rebranding, and relaunch to a new AI-native future. We’ve learned a lot of lessons about listening to customers, making hard prioritization decisions, and a rabid focus on quality. But we’re excited about the future and our new mission to transform how websites are maintained and evolved to serve their customers.
Myself with my Brilliant Team
We’re a small startup team working remotely. Right now we’re trying to create this magic with myself focused on sales, marketing, and product strategy and our lead developer Dave Cook focused on building the infrastructure and product code to make it all work.
Advice for Business Owners
The biggest advice I usually give is to distill, distill, distill. So many businesses fail because they try to be everything to everybody before you’re actually able to do that with their limited resources. So pick a focus, do your research on how large the market of that focus is, shrink it a little bit more and THEN go after it. If you’re successful you can scale it up quickly. If you’re not successful you can pivot, tweak and improve a lot faster than if you started bigger.
In the WordPress space, especially with AI tools that make it even easier to get started small. It’s got a great ecosystem to build on top of and I think plugins are a great place to start. There are a ton of problems to continue to solve and it’s easy to plug into the ecosystem and find an audience. But listen to your customers, often and deeply and don’t be afraid to pivot your approach to meet your customers where they are at.
WordPress & Beyond
We’re excited about the future of Miruni and see a lot of opportunities to automate more of the end-to-end activities of agencies. We’ve built a pluggable platform that will allow us to explore a lot of different ways of ‘making insights actionable’ in an automated way. So we’re always on the hunt for useful and interesting ways to help organizations get work done with less friction and frustration.
Within WordPress we see a lot of challenges in the coming years, with AI in general but also with a growing shift and expansion of the platform. I think WordPress and the community around it will continue to evolve in the age of AI and new upstarts. But I think how we manage content and build web experiences are going to fundamentally transform in the next few years – so it’ll be interesting to see how WordPress evolves to meet the new changes, competitors, and ways that people consume and produce content.
Stay in Touch
My Love for the WordPress Community
WordPress events are awesome – there is such a sense of community and helpfulness. It’s a great place to build products and find others to work with to collaborate on ideas. Out of all the communities I’ve been a part of in my career, WordPress stands out as a community that supports itself, pushes growth, and creates a community that you want to be a part of and build in.
The exciting thing to watch as AI and other transformations occur around the WordPress ecosystem is how this community will come together to keep the platform healthy and growing throughout.
I think in a lot of ways the events around WordPress serve more as an effective catalyst to growth of the platform and ecosystem than simply places to talk about the product itself.
How I Keep Myself Updated
To stay on top of everything WordPress and beyond, I follow a few newsletters like The Repository, and a series of podcasts like WP Builds, and WP Minute.
Beyond that I do a lot of general technology and world news via podcasts these days. I like to bounce around mediums just to catch new things I don’t get via one type of way of consuming content – and it matches my busy schedule better that way too.
I Have a Life Other Than the Work
When I’m not building products, I’m usually on the bike. I’m a big Road, Mountain, and Gravel cyclist. I spend a lot of time in the saddle training for events, or just exploring my city.
I love to be outdoors here in Colorado with a lot of hiking, offroading, and anything else that gets me out of my office chair every once in a while.
Zach with his wife
I also have a great family with a 10 year old daughter, an amazing wife and a Bernese Mountain Dog named Olive.
Zach’s dog, Olive
I Reward Myself by
When I need to take a step back from wins and reset a little bit I can’t really beat spending time with my family and getting outside. A long bike ride or a weekend adventure with my wife and daughter is the best reset I can ask for. I also find a lot of satisfaction in celebrating wins with the team—whether it’s a small Slack shoutout or something bigger. Startup life is a grind, so making space to appreciate the progress is key.
Connect With Me
You can find me posting a lot of content on LinkedIn primarily, but I’m easy to get a hold of. Feel free to reach out to chat, even if it’s just to hang out and learn more about what we’re all working on.
Contact details:
