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[00:01:00] for years, accessibility was something that was just not in my wheelhouse. I didn’t know how to explain it to customers. I didn’t know how to implement it in web projects. I’ve got quite the education from this very podcast with previous guests, like Rachel Cherry and Amber Teaching me a little bit more about accessibility.

[00:01:19] Today’s guest is Anne Bovill. Colette. And she’s going to talk about. Accessibility. And wait a minute. Ella mentor. I never thought that we could be putting page builders together with accessibility, but boy. Was I wrong and we’re going to learn more about that today. We’re gonna learn more about, uh, her Oscar winning father as well. It’s a fantastic conversation. I hope.

[00:01:39] You really appreciate it. If you do buy me a coffee.com/matt report, support the show for as little as $5 per digital. Copy. Okay. Here’s our interview. With Anne.

[00:01:50] Anne: I’m mainly a WordPress user and I contribute in smaller ways. Translations. I uploaded a photo to the new photo directory was very exciting, but mostly I’m trying to contribute by teaching people about accessibility connected to WordPress plugins, page builders, stuff like that because page builders are not going away and There’s millions of sites out there with page builders.

[00:02:21] So, we can all get very mad at page builders for not creating accessible output, but I think if we make a fist and people learn how to know how to make a fist that can change and then the world is going to be a better place. And last year I had the massive honor of being on the organizing team of ward camp Europe.

[00:02:42] And that was an insane ride. At times it felt.

[00:02:46] Matt: event.

[00:02:46] Anne: it was, but it was wonderful. And especially, you think, I don’t know all of these people, and then you come to Porto, there’s almost 3000 people there. And every third, every fourth person, I [00:03:00] was like, I know you, I know your face. Hey you’re so and so, and it was like, like being on this incredible reunion with friends they’ve never met before.

[00:03:13] Matt: I’m Portuguese, but I’m not from Portugal though. I have many friends who are originally from Portugal. The Portuguese community where I’m at in the us is pretty large. The city I live in is a sister city to one of the Portuguese islands. And it’s funny to see. All of my WordPress peers go to Portugal, love the Portuguese well culture food.

[00:03:35] Of course, the geography and, and the venue and all that stuff. Some folks are moving to Portugal. Like Bob WP, Corey Miller, I know, loves Portugal. It looked like a great place and it, and I think it was one of those things that really brought, I think, word camp Europe really brought back. Well, the vibe that everyone was missing from being in person, because we literally couldn’t be in person for many, for many years.

[00:03:55] So, congrats to, to you and, and the team who put that together.

[00:03:58] Anne: Thank you so much. I I actually compared that event to standing when you’re wa watering the garden, you’re standing on the hose very long, and then you suddenly let go. So the hose was two years of COVID measures and it, it was. Insane. But yeah, it was, it was a fantastic event and I think it brought a lot of people back together.

[00:04:21] Again, some had to get used to being together again. Yeah, it was, it was much, much better than I could have reimagined.

[00:04:29] Matt: Tell me why accessibility is so important to you. I’ve had Amber Hines on the show, Rachel Cherry, before. Other folks who drill deep into focusing on accessible design development, sustainable development, all that stuff, I think for most. And I’m speaking for myself as one who used to run an agency

[00:04:51] so 15 years ago when I heard accessibility, it was like, man, this is just another layer that I know nothing about. So I was afraid of it. That was like in my full transparency, like I was afraid of it because I knew nothing about it. 15 years later, I’m a little bit more versed than it . But why is accessibility important to you and why do, why is that a core focus for you?

[00:05:12] Anne: Well, The first thing that woke me up was a tweet about two years ago. I have it written somewhere on my site where this girl spoke about her blind father and how he was on the phone crying for needing help again with a website. And whereas you begged people make your site accessible. I don’t know why I have seen similar messages like that, but that one just hit me so hard.

[00:05:38] It made me cry. And that’s where I realized I don’t know much about accessibility at all. I knew about out descriptions and do your headings order. All right. But that was it. And then the second realization was, oh my, I am actually part of the target. I have cognitive issues. I have ADHD. I have a [00:06:00] very rare form of dyslexia.

[00:06:01] And I have hyper accuses, so I hate sharp sounds for example. So videos usually go without sound for me. So, and when the captions are crap or missing, I just feel very unwelcome myself, but I never.

[00:06:16] And then I went into that deep Printy print. Suddenly I realized that there are fantastic people. Exactly like Rachel and Amber, and so many of the others who are absolutely excelling at teaching people. How, and one of the things that kind of, addressed my passion at heart was. Let me be the one who teaches people.

[00:06:42] The why in an unorthodox way, because when you’re the designer or you’re the content maker, or you are that accessibility consultant, that technical consultant, you’re always pushed in the corner. It’s a harsh truth, but you are, and I’m trying to be outside of that. So I am free and able to confront people with the importance of accessibility in a way that others maybe cannot do because of the, how do you say that the restrictions in their job, or if it’s out of their, how do you say that?

[00:07:19] Not jurisdiction. That’s legal talk, right?

[00:07:21] Matt: Could be jurisdiction, I guess, for

[00:07:23] Anne: what do you call that? Me? Yeah. If it’s, it’s not their place.

[00:07:26] Matt: right. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think it’s, do you think it’s like me when, when I first started out where I, I steered away from it because. I just knew nothing about it. And I didn’t. I remember my first, one of my first larger projects when I ran my agency was for a local art museum and public funding by the state and all this stuff, the grant we’re doing the website for them.

[00:07:49] They started asking about accessibility, ADA compliance, like all this stuff. And. I literally turned right in the face. Cuz back then I was like, I, I don’t know anything about this. And I felt foolish not knowing about it, not being prepared for it and not even knowing how to explain it.

[00:08:04] Do you think it’s, Hey, no more excuses. We should all know this stuff these days or is that still linger where people don’t even understand how to approach accessibility for a website?

[00:08:12] Anne: Yeah, it’s the latter. First of all, people get overwhelmed. They’re like, ah, I don’t know, all that stuff. I can’t know all that stuff. How am I supposed to learn all that stuff? and this is because accessibility is like one phrase, but it applies to several departments. It applies to design to how content is written, how content is made, the descriptions for, for images, but also in the code.

[00:08:41] But it’s very easy to get. This scary feeling like, oh man, I have to understand everything. And in touch, we have this expression. If I try to translate that freely, we say what the farmer doesn’t know, he won’t eat. Okay. [00:09:00] So this is already difficult in itself. And then you’re talking to companies who know they have.

[00:09:07] Be focused on accessibility in their online projects because the government, forces them to, which is sad enough as it is right. That the government has to force companies to do that. But there you are as a consultant and they’re going to ask you questions about everything and you don’t have to know everything.

[00:09:27] There has to be someone there who explains to. A customer or a, a, an agency that you’re working with that I’m going to tell you, this is what it’s all going to result to. And then going to talk to the design department, I’m going to talk to the coding department, to the content department, to all parties involved.

[00:09:49] Even marketing is involved. Everybody is involved and it needs to be split apart. And if that. Isn’t made clear in the beginning. Accessibility is incredibly scary. And another thing is accessibility is, always a work in progress. It never stops.

[00:10:06] Matt: Yeah. I remember

[00:10:08] Anne: that’s one of the things

[00:10:09] Matt: I remember Amber sort of, I’ve talked about this before, opened up my eyes to, it’s not just, screen readers, color blindness. It’s usability in. In rare, like in, in, I don’t know what the professional term is obviously, but in rare moments. So she used the example of think about having I have three young, young boys.

[00:10:30] I remember my, my oldest now when he was super young, bad sleeper, like one point we thought he was like choking. So we’re trying to call the doctor’s office. and it’s the middle of the night. I’m trying to find the button on. On their website to, to dial in, and to use moments like that, where it’s not just, it’s not just, the screen readers and maybe colorblind and colors and things like that that we maybe think about on the surface, but it’s usability in all aspects for different contexts of using, using the web or using a website.

[00:11:01] So there’s a lot to explore and it is constantly evolving cuz probably your, your website is constantly evolving at the same.

[00:11:09] Anne: that too. And you’re creating new posts. You’re creating new social media. You’re create, you keep creating and, and yeah. And another thing is people, a lot of people in accessibility work, and I’m sure I’m not making friends when I’m saying. But since I got into this on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on there is also a lot of anger and aggression that I read about accessibility.

[00:11:35] I wish that would stop because I understand the frustration. I understand. Even, I forget to add alternative text to an image every now and then when I write on Twitter and post an image, but there is a lot of anger and this is also scaring people, the scaring scaring companies like, oh, [00:12:00] if we have to be accessible, we’re going to be put under a magnifying.

[00:12:04] And the biggest magnifying glass is actually the, the people who work in our field. And I’m not saying everybody is like that. Absolutely not. But I think this needs to be said,

[00:12:14] Matt: this is going in the opposite

[00:12:15] Anne: it’s difficult.

[00:12:16] Matt: not doing it. You’re not doing it right. You don’t care about it. That kind of, that kind of, approach.

[00:12:21] Anne: Yeah, exactly. And I think this is also partially why I took the standpoint. I have a cornerstone piece on my site that says why I seem mainly seem to be on the cold side of accessibility because I use eCommerce as an argument because the sad thing in life is small changes happen through love and big changes happen through greed and capital.

[00:12:45] Matt: Mm

[00:12:46] Anne: and, I don’t, I don’t give a, I’m not gonna say something bad. I don’t care. If if for example accessible output from generally used open source software, for example is going to be made. Going to be done correctly because people start to understand that they are actually missing out on customers, or if it’s done by the goodness of people’s heart, as long as it gets done.

[00:13:14] So. That is where I come from. It gives me opposition sometimes because people say, yeah, yeah, you’re only in it for the commercial stuff and I’m actually not, but for me, the end justifies the means.

[00:13:27] Matt: Let’s take that world of accessibility standards, WordPress, and then layer on Elementor I think for most people they hear that and they go, oh my God. How do you do that? I’m interested to see or hear from you the intersection of accessibility in Elementor. And, and maybe the, the headway you’ve made there with maybe even Elementor have you worked with the team and, and explained to them from an accessibility angle, how they can improve their product?

[00:13:55] I know improving their product is a hot topic these days, but accessibility in Elementor explain that to me. Was that any kind of turbulence there, any kind of feedback with the team that you’ve worked with before?

[00:14:05] Anne: I’m probably one of the most obnoxious fleas in their fur.

[00:14:09] Matt: Please in the fur. I’ve never heard that one, but I.

[00:14:11] Anne: comes. Yeah. It’s, that’s also a literal translation of a Dutch saying, Yeah, they are very much aware. They are like, like so many. And one of the reasons why I chose to focus on elementary is because I love that tool. And there are, I don’t know, 12 million sites by now made with elementary, 12 million.

[00:14:34] That’s, that’s insane. Because it is, it has become one of the go to systems for what, what you call no coders. I think you carry the responsibility to output accessible code. At least you can’t be responsible for people using the wrong color contrast or, or tiny fonts or. but at least let the code be accessible. And so we’re [00:15:00] continuously in a dialogue about things, where I, where I talk to them.

[00:15:04] I’m part of the moderation team and the global Facebook community. It’s it’s a very lovely community. I have to say that, And there’s also coming a lot of feedback from there. And I try to channel that towards elementary and the development team. It’s not always easy, but on the other hand, they too have to deal with an incredible technical debt.

[00:15:25] And when I look at other page builders and elementary you can actually do pretty well with elementary. My website was built with elementary and There will always be issues in any kind of, of software. But I think, I’ve been able to create unaccessible website with elementary for my website.

[00:15:48] I could have taken the easy road and just created my own flat, really safe design and my own code and everything. But no, I wanted to prove that you actually. And so that’s why I’m sticking to them. And of course I use other page builders, but I just love this one because it enables other people to create.

[00:16:10] Nice websites for themselves. The one thing I would see to love in elementary, but that goes for almost every plugin in bigger plugging in WordPress is I wish the backend were accessible. I wish I could hand elementary over to friends of mine who have a much worse vision than I do. And mine’s not fantastic.

[00:16:30] I can tell you that. And who can. Work with that and who can keyboard navigate that? It’s something I dream of and I’m sure it’s going to happen. I hope the same thing is going to happen to other page builders. And I hope that Gutenberg is going to do a good job in that regard. And yeah, girl can dream.

[00:16:50] Right.

[00:16:50] Matt: Yes, we could, we can all dream. I remember when Gutenberg was alpha, alpha phase beta phase, when it was coming, we all kind of knew it was coming. There was quite an a stance on. On focusing on accessibility before it launched. Now, I don’t know if it’s worth rehashing that debate, but I’m curious, has it gotten better from, from your view these days speaking strictly WordPress core Gutenberg?

[00:17:18] Has it gotten better? I, I don’t follow it closely, so I’m just curious if you’ve seen an improvement since, Ugh, what was that? Four or five years ago at this

[00:17:26] Anne: I haven’t, I haven’t fall out that either, because that was one of the mistakes I made in the beginning. I was focusing here and there and everywhere. So. I was walking around like an exploded Guinea pig, dressing and trying everything.

[00:17:40] Matt: So I wanna talk about the size, the sheer size of Elementor and, and this is something I’ve never understood a tool that is quite affordable. If you’re an agency or maybe even a freelancer doing WordPress building as a side gig, ah, man, it, it comes under a lot of pressure and maybe [00:18:00] some of it is valid.

[00:18:02] Let’s say accessibility, let’s say major feature enhancements. , I don’t know. I see on Twitter, people complaining about global styles or the lack thereof. Look how hard it is to develop WordPress. And now you have this tool that’s layered on top in my head.

[00:18:18] The challenge is double . Everybody calm down. You’re I think for most of us you’re making a living using this tool. Is that fair or, I’m not in Elementor I’m not building and selling websites anymore. Like, should everybody relax on Elementor a little bit. I can’t see you, but I can imagine the look on your face.

[00:18:36] Anne: Yeah. Yeah, of course. This is a hot topic. Very hot topic. So I’m just gonna share my, my personal point of view. I do not work for elementary. I’m a volunteer within a lovely team of moderators and online meetup leaders and stuff. I think they have to deal with an incredible sickening amount of backwards compatibility.

[00:19:00] How do you say that? Not problems, issues? I mean it’s and of course it’s very easy for other page builders. I think this is coming up because other page builders who do not have this incredible technical debt from five or six years of coding they can easily develop a lightweight system that does something similar.

[00:19:23] , but I think for the fact that they are running on literary, I don’t know between, I think it’s between 12 and 13 million sites. I’m not sure I don’t have the exact numbers. I know it’s way more than 10 million websites. The fact that they manage to still make progress without breaking millions of websites.

[00:19:43] Admirable. And I know there’s a lot of anger from the community because they’re very community driven, it’s, it’s, it is, it’s one of the words they taken their mouths a lot. And the community is now, going into riots over updates, for example, that don’t work well. Interesting enough is that, My sites, rarely break on updates, but I don’t use a lot of third party add-ons and I think this is where a lot of pain is.

[00:20:13] For users, they use third party add-ons and it’s like, we used to have this commercial for DHL, the, the

[00:20:20] Matt: Delivery

[00:20:21] Anne: transportation company delivery service, they had this commercial where they said we will do what you promise.

[00:20:26] Matt: said, said everyone, but no one delivered, but yeah.

[00:20:29] Anne: Exactly. And, and it’s, it’s like, it’s like being Microsoft, Microsoft had the same problem for years, where they had to preserve backwards compatibility at, for software. They didn’t write, know, from other, so the same things is same thing as with the add-ons and there is, I’m, I’m I’m a bit torn sometimes because I am very fond of the people within this company.

[00:20:54] And sometimes people forget, we’re all human, we’re all human. And we all try our [00:21:00] best. And sometimes good people do stupid things and sometimes bad people do good things.

[00:21:06] Matt: It’s a, there’s a balance.

[00:21:08] Anne: so. Yeah. And, and. I get it, as an agency on, on one hand, I just want to provide the tool that’s best for my customer.

[00:21:17] And sometimes my customer is I, I, I give training in elementary in WordPress. Sometimes my customer is this really happy marketing agency who are so happy that they do not have to hire. I don’t know what kind of people to create. Very simple one pagers elementary enables them to do that really. So for them, it’s absolutely great.

[00:21:39] And of course the developer part of the community is less happy because we know how much dynamic capabilities WordPress has. And we want that to use those capabilities within elementary. And right now, for many of those, we depend on third party add-ons and this, this is where the party begins, right?

[00:22:00] When the third party add-ons do not update their. And, and in spite of people within elementary are telling them, Hey guys, check it out. We’re going into beta. We’re going into beta, go check, go check, go check. Something goes wrong. And none of the, none of the how do you say that? Configurations are the same. It’s difficult. So, yeah, I think the far right now is. 3.7 update, blowing up in some people’s faces and that’s hard.

[00:22:34] Matt: Yeah.

[00:22:35] Anne: That’s difficult. And I’m, I feel really sorry that this is happening and I get the frustration and, and it comes on top of people wanting, all kinds of dynamic stuff. This just, I just wish elementary was a bit more talkative to the audience.

[00:22:51] Matt: Well, we hear that too. We hear that too, with, with WordPress core and with, with Matt Mullenweg. And there’s like this communication level that I think we all desire and that we’re all very much hoping for in, in an open source. Movement, we, we, we kind of expect it. We, the ones who like really love WordPress, we’re not just, the, the pizza shop owner.

[00:23:12] They’re just like, I don’t care. Just gimme my website, but the ones that who are really involved in this, like, we kind of expect open source if, whether it’s coming from Elementor or WordPress core, or heck wordpress.com jet pack, anyone who touches it, go daddy, anyone really we expect this open communication.

[00:23:28] And I think that. I guess it’s challenging for, for these businesses and these commercial brands, to do that, whether it’s a, a resources thing or they don’t know what to say. I, I, I’m not quite sure where they feel they don’t need to. I, I don’t really know, but I, I think it’s impacting a lot of us.

[00:23:45] Anne: Yeah. That’s you know, that is the, the big game, this is, but this is an issue I see in general, not just in WordPress, but everywhere around us. There is a lot of assumption based communication. and that always leads to trouble. And, and I [00:24:00] want to emphasize to everybody listening. I understand you’re pissed off.

[00:24:05] I get very pissed off myself. Of course I have customer projects that blow up, but I also have had customer projects blow up when I was still using divvy or I. Other other stuff, I, I used to use these super duper cruise ships size templates, like unfold, where I only needed a row robot,

[00:24:24] Matt: Right.

[00:24:25] Anne: but I just used fold.

[00:24:27] So I knew my customer could create a new page. Everything, every one of these has an upside and a downside, and I actually believe. Because as a company, they are so visible, they catch a lot of wind. That’s why, and I just, I just really, I want everybody to remember, no matter who you criticize on the web, anyone that provides you with a tool, a free tool, a paid tool, it doesn’t matter.

[00:24:57] These are people they’re all doing the best they can. They work very hard and, and sometimes people get so personal in these things and it’s just business. If my car is broken, I can be really mad at, at how do you say the manufacturer, but I’m not taking it out on the garage.

[00:25:19] Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s like, it’s remember that it’s the same thing. It, I feel that the past two years with all the tension that we’ve been under, people are so vocal and so aggressive. It’s like we need a valve. People are looking for a valve to let out air and apparently getting. About page builders or, or about WordPress or about whatever is one of those valves really?

[00:25:45] Matt: Before we let you go. I want to know about your parents and about how you get into this. It, it, it possibly your parents influenced you into this space maybe, or maybe not, but tell me the, tell me the, the fun story we started to chat about before we hit record.

[00:26:05] Anne: Ah, yeah. I come from this very very multi-layered collared family of artists, musicians, a couple of nutty professors. I always say, I think also wrote this in my biography. Nobody knows where the commercial genes come from. Although I kind of suspect my grandmother. But as, as artists, my parents never told me.

[00:26:29] When I wanted to do something, oh, be careful, honey, you might run into this or you might run into that all my life. They said to me, oh, great. You wanna do that? Have you figured out yet what you need to do to achieve it? And so. I don’t see bears on the road. That is again, another Dutch expression, when, when you come up with an idea and someone else says, yeah, but this problem can arise and that problem can arise.

[00:26:55] It’s for me, it’s never about why you shouldn’t do something, but it’s about what you [00:27:00] need to do something to get something done. And for example, my brother and I, we wanted. create a big painting. So my mother just made this wooden frame and put a bat sheet on it and she had a DIAP projector. You call it DIAP projector?

[00:27:14] I forgot what they’re called, in the seventies and the eighties, you had these pictures in this machine and then, and then it would light the image on the wall.

[00:27:23] Matt: yes. I remember that in my classrooms.

[00:27:24] Anne: Yeah. I don’t know what they’re called in English. Anyway, but most people would know, and then she would project Mickey mouse or Donald doc or whatever. And my father was also working with a lot of guys from Disney. He was very old. He was from 1921. And so things were always possible. And I think that’s what I got from growing up in this family, making music, making art.

[00:27:48] Go out there and do your thing and find the tools that enable you to be as creative as you wanna be. And I think this is one of the things why I am so, enthusiastic about page builders, for example, because, Hey, I know they can create a lot of bloat, but that’s like playing with a Swiss knife. That knife can, be your tool to create this beautiful wood.

[00:28:11] artwork. You can also cut off your fingers and

[00:28:15] Matt: great.

[00:28:15] Anne: And, and yeah, and being with my dad, he was working all over the world. And we used to travel with him. So it also made me and my brother feel very comfortable speaking English being in other places, we have never asked ourselves. If another culture is disturbing, another country or another religion, we were open to everything.

[00:28:44] And that has, that has given me a fantastic base in life to be open to others and to feel a lot of happiness. When you can give that to. That feeling that it is safe to experiment and try and do, and, stop putting yourself under that incredible magnifying glass of other people.

[00:29:06] Matt: This has been a fantastic conversation. It’s Ann bette.eu. That’s the website. Go there. Visit her on Twitter at Bette. Is that correct? That’s a great

[00:29:19] Anne: Yes. Yeah. B O V E L E double T.

[00:29:23] Matt: Fantastic stuff. Thanks so much for hanging out today and shedding some light on accessibility, what you do in the WordPress world, what you do with Elementor and the fantastic backstory of what made you, who you are today. Everyone it’s Matt report.com. Matt report.com/subscribe to join the mailing list.

[00:29:44] We’ll see you in the next.

[00:00:00] Akshat: So I go by founder because I think there’s still a very small company to take the mantle of CEO. I barely do the job of like founder. Well enough.

[00:00:09] Matt Medeiros: when you started? Were you the one coding, everything or did you start with a team? 

[00:00:13] Akshat: So I started quoting everything. So I still ended up coding occasionally, which I should not do at all. But, but yes I started as an engineer and yeah, that’s that’s the origin.

[00:00:24] Matt Medeiros: What’s the interaction with your team when they do catch you coding. And they’re like, Hey man, you shouldn’t be doing this or is it, do they ever turn to you and be like, no, go focus on the CEO stuff or go focus on. What’s that interaction like, do you have boundaries that you set for yourself and encourage your team to tell you when to stop? 

[00:00:44] Akshat: So there are occasionally team members who come in do mention it. Unfortunately I think I was not done a great job of giving up all the technical responsibilities. The team is excellent and they can manage a lot of it, but sometimes you, it just, it does bad habit.

[00:00:59] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, this was you. As soon as they question you, you just fire them on the spot, get out. And I’m, I’m the boss. I’m still coding this. 

[00:01:07] Akshat: Yeah, honestly, this is again, I’d advise you hear so often that you should give up all of these individual responsibilities early and you do see the benefits of it when you give it up. Like when, whenever you are more focused on the business aspects of it, you see, you see the impact of it also, but a. But the discipline required to manage it.

[00:01:28] And that’s, that’s the trick like building that discipline and it’s easier said than done.

[00:01:33] Matt Medeiros: I should just preface dear listener. Actually that is the, the, the gentleman who runs the team behind Mulcaire blog vault. We’re gonna hear about some other stuff that they’re building as well. Backup security high-performance websites. This is the stuff that he focuses on. And I want to, I want to get to that in a moment, but one of the big discussions in the WordPress space these days, especially. Well, developers who have been around for forever since the inception of WordPress and new developers coming in, they feel that WordPress’s is changing pretty rapidly. I’m not a developer. I know it’s a lot of JavaScript. Now I know that you’re not going to get by with just the basics of HTML and CSS.

[00:02:12] Anyway. How has the software evolve for you? Are you finding it to be just a different challenge, more challenging? Is there anything that you see with your developer hat on? We, you say, wow. WordPress is really moving in a different direction, then say, at say, when you started out protecting and backing up WordPress website,

[00:02:30] Akshat: So what Chris obviously has changed a lot. I’m sure you have also seen it over the past 10 years. And now we feel like really old people. When we are discussing like WordPress circuit, 2010 and earlier, versus what it is now, there’s significant changes. And obviously there are also aspects of it which have not changed at all.

[00:02:48] It’s still the, the soul of it is still the same of the word for software. Okay. So that’s, that’s one aspect of it. There’s a lot more JavaScript stuff going on for sure. But I would also like to preface that, we are

[00:02:59] [00:03:00] We bend it. Any WordPress code? Most of the code we write are actually not nothing related to what dress we, and because our products are a SAS as you may call it. But the way we look at it is we, we create software which enables WordPress to perform better and do better things. So we ended up barely writing WordPress software and VR, not in the thick of it.

[00:03:23] So if you are, for example, building team related, some, anything that touches the front end, you we will have stronger opinions. We don’t do any of that.

[00:03:33] In fact, we almost allergic to making any changes. Changes WordPress in the front end of WordPress or anything, how WordPress find it.

[00:03:41] And does we try and be like, that’s not our strong spot. So we tend to focus more on the backend and the infrastructure less.

[00:03:49] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. None of this stuff is, is impact-wise I say this such an easy, easy phrase for me to say none of these changes to how I don’t know, WordPress is now moving into full site editing and Gutenberg is getting better. Like none of that, aside from maybe the, the vulnerabilities that come with that, none of that extra code is really changing.

[00:04:08] How you. Operate the business for lack of a better phrase. That’s not changing the way you’re coding. You’re not keeping up with maybe what full site editing is doing, because it doesn’t impact The front end of your stuff.

[00:04:19] Akshat: The kind of software, if you’re focusing on it, doesn’t impact us very much. And and other, that soul of a company also is slightly. That’s why it’s slightly different. We we, we are unlike most WordPress companies in that sense,

[00:04:33] Matt Medeiros: I obviously, I talked to a lot of WordPress companies, product companies, service companies, freelancers, and the service companies, at least here in the us like the agency. Are certainly finding a hard time keeping their employees these days. It seems like employees are at a premium, they have lots of opportunities.

[00:04:53] It’s in their favor, right? If you’re a great WordPress developer you have lots of options or so it seems I’m not seeking our jobs. So I can’t tell you, I just hear it from the agencies. Tell me, they say, man, it’s tough to hold somebody and find somebody and get them into a. Is this good or bad for you since you’re not looking for the WordPress developer type, maybe you don’t fall victim to that, or it was just finding a good developer.

[00:05:14] Tough for you. 

[00:05:15] Akshat: So finding good engineering is really difficult anywhere today and India and Bangladesh, there is a mad rush. I think the world has changed significantly in the past two years. Some, I think the influx of money everywhere has our capital has changed a lot of behavior. I don’t know if it is going to sustain for.

[00:05:36] But definitely they’re not going to go back to the 2019 era. It’s going to land somewhere else in WordPress space. It’s actually particularly interesting. And while we don’t actively hire WordPress engineers specifically I also think that because engineering has a, there’s a premium associated with engineering now, and engineers are more yeah, every salary is everything have gone up [00:06:00] significantly.

[00:06:00] I think what plays companies also need to evolve, even agencies or agencies could get by, by paying significantly lower salaries. I think David starts seeing impact of it impact of this inflation essentially at every level. Yeah. Yeah. Things will need to change significantly because our typical WordPress engineer, even if they learn, for example, if they run, react and react, developers are in huge.

[00:06:28] Yeah. There’s a huge need for react developers. If they pick up those skills and what was engineer, that’s smart enough, then they will, they’ll get a whole load of other opportunities, which pay significantly more. And the other thing that happens in WordPress and with you, I’m sure versus. Is what is one of the people who really a pioneer remote working.

[00:06:49] So now I’m in a WordPress engineer who knows react or other skills JavaScript. Well, they can work remotely and everyone is hiring remotely so they can get like much better salaries and I’m sure agencies and even plugins and other software developers in WordPress.

[00:07:06] Matt Medeiros: I’d say even all the way, all across the board, right? Even from your, your simple, small boutique agency who not doing anything, like you deal with a lot of high-performance. So you’re, you’re dealing with agency like large agencies, probably large tech companies, things like that. But I think it’s going to start to impact even the lower end sub $20,000 websites, because it’s just, it’s going to be harder to find good help at sticking around.

[00:07:31] I think. 

[00:07:31] Do you think that’s fair to say like the lower end might start to get impacted?

[00:07:35] Akshat: I think every level will get impacted, but also what will happen is this might create an opportunity for word press to get disrupted. Because there’s always a need for a low end website. And then maybe if development becomes more expensive, then a more ready-made solutions might come in. And so, yeah, so there’s a lot of flux.

[00:07:58] There’s a lot of change that’s going to happen. Maybe things would have this, some of these changes would have happened in. It has definitely accelerated.

[00:08:05] Matt Medeiros: Do you think that full site editing will. I know it’s very early. Like quite literally, we are recording this, I think like roughly a month after full site editing came to core, maybe not even, but do you think that full site editing in the direction of WordPress and where it’s going, we’ll solve for the basic website? Or do you think It’s really only going to continue to get more complicated for, for users?

[00:08:28] Akshat: It’s a full site editing again, let me, let me, I, as I said earlier, we are not, we don’t have a very, very strong opinion on it though. It’s I don’t think you’re competing on the, I don’t really think you are competing with a Vicks full site editing. That’s not the, maybe that’s the that’s what you’re trying to do, but it’s, that’s a losing battle.

[00:08:48] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:08:50] Akshat: That’s not the way to compete with them.

[00:08:52] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Do you have an idea on how to compete with them besides sending out free headphones? 

[00:08:55] Akshat: Honestly I think we should stick to our strengths. I think the community is very [00:09:00] important. The plugins plugins and the ecosystem is very important over, make it easier to build and maintain websites and run with them and do a better job of so. It makes it easier. Yeah. Keep focusing on making it easier.

[00:09:14] And there are, I think we spoke about it earlier. There are challenges with WordPress handled. We need to, while we investing in full site editing and that’s important, that might be important, but there are other aspects of it where we obviously have weaknesses. We need to keep investing in those aspects and making sure that our, our customers, our users have the best experience.

[00:09:35] Matt Medeiros: I want to start to transition to talk about what you do with malware and blog vault. You’ve told me, Hey, Matt, when you talk about my products, just say that it’s the easiest way. Like we don’t want people to think about. How did you come across that, that feeling for your product? Because a lot of security problems plus plugins that I see, they want all the bells and whistles, they want to show you graphs.

[00:09:59] They want to show you all these, rules that you can set up and deny lists and allow lists and all of this stuff. They want to throw all of this stuff in your face, but you want to do it easier. How did you get. 

[00:10:09] Akshat: All right. So, there’s there’s actually been, we should take, take a step back and go back to the thing I said about making WordPress easier, because that’s the way that’s the only way or make it easier to use. That’s the only way to get, continue expanding WordPress and having it grow and not making the, that experience.

[00:10:27] And vile V a lot of us in the WordPress ecosystem we are swinging to have, et cetera, always tweaking it and doing things as a business owner, as a veteran, I don’t know you have your own lives to lead you don’t frankly, your website isn’t really important to you, but you don’t really want to be playing around and messing around with it every day.

[00:10:45] And that’s, that’s, that’s the origin for whatever we are doing. So we are anything we build, we keep in mind that move website or. Actually that should not be doing anything, the job of a website or not a person. We didn’t even as an agency who, who does this for a living, they don’t want to continuously maintain old websites and tweak around and deal with the problems every day.

[00:11:07] So we have to make that job easier. It’s it is like when you run Gmail, it’s not that you’re fixing and editing and solving daily problems. With the infrastructure. That’s the same thing should apply to 

[00:11:19] Matt Medeiros: I could argue that point with Gmail. I feel like I’m always in there having to delete things and move spam around, but I feel you. 

[00:11:26] Akshat: Did he think that moves paramount? Those are frankly, if you look, look at it in the bigger scheme of things that are very, very small, like we have been almost trained into, if you remember three g-mail, the situation was completely different. So it’s almost like we are spoiled. 

[00:11:43] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. 

[00:11:43] Akshat: But we are spoiled by, by the, by the grid software that Jima is.

[00:11:48] And so again, so coming back to, so that’s the, that’s the whole essence that why should you even have to configure anything? And does it mean that you need to configure? So that’s that’s step one. The second thing, if [00:12:00] you actually think about it deeply, you will realize. With a WordPress site, if you have if you, if you think about it enough, you’ll realize that you should not be configuring anything.

[00:12:09] We have seen enough number of WordPress sites. It’s not that WordPress sites differ so much across the, across the spectrum. So once you understand that, then you know that you can, by just having a good sense of what kind of , what kind of secure. You can auto configure everything. And the other aspect of it is a security companies also they’re they tend to do fear-mongering.

[00:12:31] They want you to feel that, oh, yes, I’m doing this 20 things and send you all sorts of alarms that are okay. We blocked. A hundred problems then frankly, it’s a nature of internet. If you have anything publicly available on the internet, people will always try and looking at if you have this insecurity, then that that guy will just blocked out.

[00:12:54] The security plug will take care of everything you should not that there’s no need to create that fear and for a good experience you should not. Bombarded it is alarms and alerts and that’s the approach we have taken. We want you to, if at all think about your website is when things really go wrong.

[00:13:11] Otherwise the software should take care of it automatically.

[00:13:14] Matt Medeiros: At what. And I know the marketing. When you take your developer hat on you put your business marketing hat on the, answer’s probably gonna be, I want everybody to use blog and Malecare or one or the other. But at what point does it make sense for an agency or freelancer to start. you for these licenses or maybe how do you see the best fit for an agency to communicate this to their, to their clients?

[00:13:41] Because arguably, I would say that, if you can address. Security and get the freelancers to understand it, both understand what security means and how they should protect their WordPress website, but also financially, like when does it make sense to invest in this? What, what’s the best step for you to say?

[00:13:57] Here’s when a website needs a proper now care solution and not your shared hosts. Run of the mill clam AAV, running on a Cron job sending you emails every night. What, when does somebody, when should somebody invest in better? 

[00:14:12] Akshat: So you should always invest in better security. That’s one way now whether you should pay for Medicare or not is a completely different thing, but definitely don’t rely on your web hosting security and I’m not even going to shut on the cloud. Maybe even the best in today’s best web hosting, the more expensive ones do a very, very limited job in my opinion of of securing your WordPress.

[00:14:34] Alright. So if you think about how our parasites get hacked, and then when you look at these this whole, the best posting companies, then you realize that while they do make an attempt, they only do something. Okay. And you are, so if you are, and I’m not going to take any names, but if you are on, even on the more expensive hosting, if they’re even on the most expensive hosting, please do not be under the impression that all my website is secure.

[00:14:58] Now, in fact, [00:15:00] their malware scanners, they use some version of plan, view, or equivalent, and which only finds catches affection of them. Okay. And this is again something which is NC that people don’t, because there’s so much noise in the security ecosystem. They don’t understand this well enough. The thing that all securities does, and some of it is, I think we as Malka should do better marketing around this, but also it’s complex because how do you know it’s very difficult to create, to judge these.

[00:15:31] A lot of these hosting companies focus on performance and those matters. Easier to showcase. Securities are much more complex metric having said that now, where does a vendor, or when does an agency, if an agency, and if you have maintenance packages, then we believe you should always be investing in good security.

[00:15:49] Because 

[00:15:50] Matt Medeiros: built build it right into that pricing, right? 

[00:15:52] Akshat: vendor tried into the pricing and you think maintenance for every identity, they should be. Maintenance packages. It’s it’s the future. It’s it’s actually, I wouldn’t even call it a future. It’s the present. And it’s also the past in many 

[00:16:04] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because the obvious when there is, is you have the customer, sticking around and listen, I’ll tell you when I was running my agency day to day now this goes back quite a few years. I’ve been out of the agency game for sheesh, four years, maybe even more at this point, ran it for 10 years.

[00:16:22] And it wasn’t until like year five until I actually started taking security. Seriously. I used to be, if anyone can believe it. I don’t even know if I’ve said this out loud on my podcast before I used to be a systems administrator back in the early two thousands, I was running a, a cluster of Linux servers.

[00:16:39] And then I went to C panel and C panel was invented because I was like, wow, this is gonna make my job so much easier. 

[00:16:44] You have those few sleepless nights where, the the lymph node server that you’re running your, your customers on crashes and the CPU is going through the roof and you got like your Linux Bible out at two in the morning, trying to figure out, how to kill processes.

[00:17:00] And that’s what I literally did, for years. And, and then it finally, once you go through it, you start to realize, oh yeah, this is why I need that. I would assume in your line of work. That’s how you get a lot of customers, the ones who are now like reacting to a problem, or is it more proactive?

[00:17:17] Akshat: So we do see a lot of reactive customers. It happens a lot though. Some, I think in WordPress, the good thing is, or the bad, the good for good thing. In many ways, for us, it makes our job easier or selling is that almost every person has seen a hacked site, which is not a good reflection on WordPress, but the reality is everyone has seen a hacked site and because of it, they have had those sleepless nights.

[00:17:41] They have. Now how they attribute what they think about how sites got hacked is a completely different answer, but people have suffered every, almost every agency owner has seen the problem. And yeah, so that makes our jobs slightly easier. Do at the same time, creating the distinction that how our product [00:18:00] is significantly better than anything else out there.

[00:18:03] That’s, that’s a challenge.

[00:18:05] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. How do you, how do you position it now? How do you tell people that. I’ll I’ll let you, I’ll let you give me the hard sell right here 

[00:18:11] Akshat: honestly, we do, actually we do a shit job. We do a terrible job of it. Sometimes I, I think the thing that works for us is you get agency customers. We’re like, okay, fine, fine. Don’t you just put in 50 sites of yours on our platform. We’ll scan it for you. And we’ll find at least one or two of them often.

[00:18:27] It’s more than that. But conservatively, I say we’ll find one or two of them that you, which will have malware on your teacher. Didn’t.

[00:18:33] And this 

[00:18:34] Matt Medeiros: crypto mining script. 

[00:18:36] Akshat: the guidance. Honestly, crypto mining scripts are, or I think they are overrated. They’re barely any crypto mining script. There are a lot of, a lot of other better ways of for hackers to to to basically exploit. Crypto mining script. Yeah. The sounds might this sound smarter and the sound like, oh yes, but I, I, I don’t see too many of those.

[00:18:58] Matt Medeiros: Yup. 

[00:18:59] Akshat: But, but yeah. So once we show, once someone sets up like a funeral, a few, quite a few websites, then we find the Melbourne, clean it with a click of a button. And that, that becomes a very easy sell for us then.

[00:19:10] Matt Medeiros: Yeah, I would imagine. So I think a lot of agency owners these days, Start to, they understand that the monthly maintenance fee, they understand how they can support their customers. I want to hear it from you. Do you see agency owners or agencies still running like their own, whatever digital ocean server, Amazon, easy to instance, like hosting it themselves.

[00:19:37] With whatever 5,000 a thousand customers, and they’re doing all the infrastructure support themselves. Is that still a thing? Because that’s pretty lucrative as an agency owner. That’s what I did and the agency still runs and that’s what they still do. They didn’t offload it to. Big brand web hosting company, they did it themselves and the customer paid them because the customer was going to call the agency.

[00:19:59] Anyway, they were never going to call WP engine or Kinsler or anything like Pagely they were never going to call the hosting company. So the agency ran it themselves. Is that still true today? From what you see? And do you have a, an approach to how you want to address that with a with agency owners and like what they should be doing to secure them? 

[00:20:14] Akshat: All right. So actually this is again a whole spectrum and I can start at WP engine. We’ll want you to just offload everything to them. And, and there are agency owners who want to do that because at the end of it, this guy these are like single person shops and they don’t want to hold it. The customers hostage because they also want to lead an actually a somewhat normal life.

[00:20:36] Because if you have a hundred 

[00:20:38] Matt Medeiros: a great way to say it. 

[00:20:39] Akshat: because you told me a perfectly normal life, let’s be clear. It’s like as a, as a small business owner, as an agent signed up for the.

[00:20:45] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. If you’re not in the.

[00:20:47] agency space, that phrase of you want a normal life. You have no idea how much that hits, because it’s just not a normal life. Go 

[00:20:56] Akshat: So that’s the, yeah, absolutely. When we, when we speak to our [00:21:00] customers, we see this, we hear this often. So there are agency owners who who will try and offload everything to consent. They’re still available there. And sometimes you will see it into another buyable plan with a WPN can stop any of the other flywheel, et cetera.

[00:21:14] And then. Basically charge their clients directly. And it is what we see more and more often happening. The reason why, I’ve personally, and this is again, something I spoke to a couple of a few agency owners and they told me like, I was like, why the hell do you want to take up the hosting space? It’s not, this is, it’s a commodity.

[00:21:32] While selling maintenance is important and lucrative, and it’s something which every web host every customer also should be doing because they need to run updates. It’s a more complicated sell, because how do you explain to a normal, you, you are running a bakery. How does sell them that?

[00:21:49] Okay. Or your website needs to be updated all the time. You need to make sure it’s secure and backups that as if you bundled in hosting, then there’s something very, very tangible. And, 

[00:21:57] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Everyone gets 

[00:21:58] Akshat: And everyone gets it. There’s some server, there is a real cost associated there, and then you can build on build the story from there.

[00:22:06] So then that recurring revenue story becomes much more common. So, hosting and what we are seeing as well, the more expensive a host would like you to get pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars, even agency owner. What they’ve done is they’ve gotten they have realized that a lot of it has been commoditized, so they go, they tend to use us lower cost.

[00:22:28] Which, which does not have a huge markup over what you did, what a DigitalOcean or other charges. And they still get a solution we’re just somewhat good enough. And then they bundle it with something like a product to make a complete solution.

[00:22:44] Matt Medeiros: I thought I knew what high-performance a word high-performance WordPress website. In fact, I thought I was building high-performance websites for my clients until I got to Pagely and then I saw just this whole other spectrum of not only price point and agency fees and all that. But just like the, how many page views I’ve seen WordPress sites push especially on the page, the infrastructure I’ve seen e-commerce stores at the page level, just wow. This is a whole different level of high performance in WordPress. What are your conversations like around that phrase or that term, maybe with your customers and, and how do you align that with, with your solution?

[00:23:22] Why is it not. The mom and pop shop. Why is it a high performance solution.

[00:23:27] Akshat: It’s a high-performance is it’s again, there is the connotation of high-performance is often associated with the likes of millions of views and stores e-commerce stores. Millions or 10 minutes or tens of millions of dollars a year. And those things put a lot of load on the website or on the infrastructure.

[00:23:48] But if you ask me today, every business needs a high-performance website and high-performance in every domain. No, high-performance not only in terms of, [00:24:00] in terms of the speed of the website, but high-performance in terms of SEO, you need to have high-performance SEO and you need to have hypophonia security.

[00:24:08] No, your security cannot be lagging behind, right on your website itself. Once you have a high profile, you want to have a high-performance website. Which is key to your business, right? Any vendor website becomes key to your business and it’s it’s, it’s a significant driver of revenue or customers for you.

[00:24:28] And it is that’s, that’s the website, which we call the high-performance business of high-performance website. Even if it’s a mom and pops. Even that can be a high-performance website or the need for it to be a high-performance website, because you might be getting traffic from Google to who finally visit your store.

[00:24:47] So again, I’m being very general and, but, but that’s, that’s my, my understanding of high-performance website and that’s, that’s, that’s something which we feel like to solve for people for whom. The website is key to their business. Now there are a lot of places where your website is important.

[00:25:04] You have put in a lot of blood insight onto it, but you don’t want it. You don’t want the best in class solution for everything. 

[00:25:11] Right now, in those cases, I would, that’s the only thing that I would say you’re not like a high-performance you’re not a high-performance. But and sometimes, at this distinction is if you can make this distance clearly, whether you really need the best in class solution or not, then you also know that you might be able to invest that money somewhere else, because if, if it is not, if, so, if you have a simple outside, which gets a few reps that does, I don’t even know, even a few thousand visitors a day, but you don’t need to be the best in class you can get by with pretty good.

[00:25:41] Without spending a lot of money on it, and maybe you can invest that money in other parts of your business. Whereas if you’re running a website, for example, if you’re running a website for our products, then you need your website to be the best in every dimension. Because if it is not the best in every dimension, then they’re losing money.

[00:26:00] Matt Medeiros: I’m looking at the pricing page of Mulcaire and I’m seeing things like, and for the $149 a year, that the plan that’s right in the middle for one website, you have integrated staging site activity, logs, and visual regression testing, and daily automated backup. Like that alone for that type of customer who starts to freak out that the world is ending because his website went down for two hours or an hour. It’s 150 bucks for the year. So like you can replace high performing or high-performance with critical customers that you don’t want to have you calling at three in the morning because that’s the, the normal life we talked about as agency.

[00:26:40] That’s what makes it super tough is when you have customers who don’t get it, they don’t understand what’s hap what’s happening. And they’re calling you, looking at you to solve a problem where you’re like, I don’t, I don’t know why this site got hacked or why it went down. 

[00:26:53] Akshat: So yeah, that’s the plus pricing plan. The middle plan that you’re seeing, that’s, that’s the pricing plan, which is which we think is the right pricing [00:27:00] for almost any website, any high-performance website or any website, which, where the person thinks is important to the, to the business, where we offer excellent security. So we’ll do mat daily malware scan in particular side with an excellent. And then we offer backups. So backups again, if you think about it, backups are the fail-safe when anything goes wrong and we don’t say that if you, yeah. They’re the ones which will really save your bacon when things really go bad.

[00:27:27] And then we also have an integrated activity log in there and visualization, and I’ll talk about both these things. So the actual log, the very interesting. Is, especially as an agency owner, you said that you have clients who goes in and messes around with the website and every single agency owner.

[00:27:43] If you talk to them, they will tell you that this happens. And when things go wrong, they came and blame the agent, the cust clients will come and have something went wrong with them. I said, what the hell did you do? And you’re like, I didn’t. And so having an activity log, which keeps a track of what is happening on the website.

[00:27:58] And being mega can find at this time, see you logged in there from this location, and this change helps you avoid difficult conversations. And then being able to test, show that, go back in the history and create like a staging site from from the backup to show that, okay, the website looked fine before this change is really.

[00:28:20] , 

[00:28:20] Akshat: If you are facing these issues, it becomes really easy. It’s almost like it’s like a time machine and you can just go back in time and without changing the main website. So you’re not even playing Russian roulette with your website. Let’s say you have a live website is in its place and quickly on our staging servers.

[00:28:34] You can create these restorative, et cetera, snapshot, and it becomes really powerful. 

[00:28:40] The one last thing before, sorry, go ahead. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. So just one last thing is the visualization testing is super, super interesting, and this we think is the first step towards what we want to do even more is again, when you look at the VIX, remember I’m excited about updates, that hardware bond security there.

[00:28:57] Updates. And there is somebody I need to do that, that these are, these are real problems and that’s, every time we run an update on our own website, we’re always worried that really break the website, ask my, my marketing team and they will, they’re always worried there. Okay, fine. How often should we run, updates really break the website or not, and for sure in integration tests, It’s one of those things where we let you create a staging site, run a update there, do a visualization test on that update.

[00:29:26] And then once you’re happy, then you can run the update on the live site. And we allow this entire thing to be like a single trick. 

[00:29:32] Matt Medeiros: . And that’s something that’s that your, your web host hosting company isn’t doing, they might be giving you staging sites for like deployments and things like that. And, and, but it’s not this solution to really make yourself feel comfortable. And again, this is where that high-performance com.

[00:29:48] And then when I was at Pagely, you’d have marketing teams running WordPress sites, and it was always this battle between the marketing team and the it team or the InfoSec team. And it’s now [00:30:00] every time we need to do something, we gotta run it by InfoSec or the it team. And everyone just was at odds with each other, a solution solution.

[00:30:07] Like this could kind of bridge that gap for some and to say, Hey, look, we’ve got this integrated solution. It’s super easy. Just look at this test here and then go ahead and update the website. 

[00:30:17] Akshat: Exactly. And a lot of their posts do a lot of these things, but you know, they do it for the common denominator. So that I can solve the problem in the most basic level. So they’ll provide you backups, but backups, which only provide you so much visibility, they will provide some security, but they can not invest as much as we can invest when it comes to security.

[00:30:37] Same thing with staging, same thing with with visual regression tests. So this integrated solution that we are creating helps you, especially if you are, if you’re running a website, which brings in the hundreds of thousands of millions, of dollars of.

[00:30:50] Matt Medeiros: Awesome stuff. I’m going to close out by asking you one more product question. And this is sort of a call to action for this episode for you, but what product do you want people to sign up for most blog vault or Medicare? 

[00:31:04] Akshat: So actually as a multi-headed. So the, the base is the same and they have like multiple heads. So they are I think it’s a good start. Starting with Malika is a good solution with the plus plan with the middle class. I think if you’re, for most websites, that’s the best solution out there. And if you’re an agency, we also have bulk plans, which are which are very, very reasonable if I may say.

[00:31:26] So it comes up to like up to $2 on. Per site and it covers backup security, staging activity, loud, the whole thing. So it makes it yeah, I, if you had an agency, then that’s the best plan to sign up for.

[00:31:39] Matt Medeiros: Fantastic. And you, and I save this to the end because we can edit this part out if you want. But I know you’re working on us. You’re working on a new product. 

[00:31:48] Akshat: Yeah, none of 

[00:31:49] Matt Medeiros: to hint at anything we can hint out here. 

[00:31:51] Akshat: no, no, please don’t edit this part out. We are more than happy to talk 

[00:31:54] Matt Medeiros: Okay. 

[00:31:55] Akshat: but yes. So the last part we are, again, making sure that the behalf high-performance website, we take care of great security gate backups, making, letting you. With without worrying about your website, the final part is speed and speed is speed is becoming is a very visible aspect of our website.

[00:32:14] Security backups is very difficult to do yet, but speed is much, much easier to that. You can feel it yourself when you’re visiting a website and web hosting covers one aspect of speed. But when you talk about over professor outside, there is so much more to making it. Today, it loads so much scripts, images and everything else.

[00:32:32] And then what, what has happened is there’s a concoction of solutional. Then you can get a caching plugin, you can get an image optimization plugin, you can get something like a performance optimization where club JavaScript and offload our script and do all of these things to make your accent fast. But it’s a lot and a lot of effort.

[00:32:49] And even then, even the best of people really. At it, and then you to do it every three months, every, every month, every second month, because [00:33:00] people are dating websites, installing new plugins, et cetera. So it’s, it’s a difficult task. Now, when you scale it up to a hundred websites or many websites, then it becomes even more difficult.

[00:33:10] Even our sell the blog world, we have, I think about four or five websites, keeping it from. It’s a difficult job. So what we have done is we are like, okay, fine. How can we make our monthly solution to make your website like, as fast as it can. And that’s, that’s something that we’ve been working on.

[00:33:27] Hopefully we have already actually started testing it out in an alpha thing. Hopefully beta will start by end of month. And yeah, this is something we are really, really excited about. We, yeah, we want to bring it to all our customers and also actually offer offer hopefully be able to offer a free solution.

[00:33:45] Even the lower even a website without that kind of a budget can still have an extraordinarily fast website without, without having the technical understanding or without even spending the time and effort in having having having to deploy. I’ve been satisfied.

[00:34:03] Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Yeah, I it’s fantastic. Another head to the dragon, right? It’s coming 

[00:34:08] Akshat: it’s under the head or the it’s another head to the dragon, and then we’ll be able to offer all of this together under one roof.

[00:34:14] Matt Medeiros: That sounds amazing. All the stuff you were telling you about it off air sounds really cool. And it’s really exciting. My friend, this has been an amazing conversation. You’ve brought me back to my old days of agency life for better or worse. Every living those days. And my God, I would not do it again without using malware and blog vault to get this stuff set up.

[00:34:32] If you’re out there. Head on over to actually that said at least check out mouth care, security backups, the Cod the activity log. I’m just thinking about so many times the customer was blaming me for something and it was them that they installed a different plugin in a different theme. That’s just sounds amazing and worth all of it right there.

[00:34:51] mulcaire.com. Where else do you want folks to go to say. 

[00:34:54] Akshat: No. Maca is good. Thank you so much. A bank is a great place to start to learn about what we are about 

[00:34:59] Then feel free to ping me at any time. So I’m on Twitter at hit me up actually that blog world. That’s my new lady. So yeah. Happy to hear from anyone. If 

[00:35:07] you 

[00:35:07] have any questions.

[00:35:08] Matt Medeiros: Awesome stuff. It’s maryport.com airport.com/subscribe to join that mailing list on emailing. Again, this is a whole other show, but I’m finally emailing again. Maryport.com/subscribe, everybody. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you in the next episode.

[00:00:00] Matt: I think you said you maybe own a little interest in a, in a pizza shop at one point. I think 

[00:00:04] Andrew: Yep. Yep. No, we started a pizza shop, my friend, Danny, and I started a pizza shop six years ago now. And I still have a little interest in it, but basically after about seven months when it paid everything back, I said, look, I need to concentrate on other stuff. And he said, yeah, that’s fine. And bought me out of my shareholding more or less, but, I still get free pizza and I still have to manage the point of sale system and stuff.

[00:00:29] So I’m still involved in the business, which is, which is great. But it’s a, it’s a nice distraction as well when you’re, when you’re involved in a bricks and mortar business and, meetings, ad hoc meetings or phone, I get a phone call from Danny and say, what do I do about this? It’s nice to feel a little bit involved and but I’m not in it now really.

[00:00:47] I still, I still own a bit of it, but not much, 

[00:00:49] Matt: I feel like the customer service from selling a $5 slice of pizza can scale infinitely to even a $5,000 website or a $50,000 project. There’s so much to know about the basics of customer service that happens in the pizza. Shop a sandwich, shop a bakery. That a lot of us in the software world just don’t get, because a lot of the software sales are just done behind the screen.

[00:01:15] It’s through email. Now it’s more zoom and maybe face to face, but still largely it’s social media interaction and just selling through text on a screen. There’s probably something to be said. I don’t know what there is to be said about selling a slice of pizza is like selling a $5,000 website, but I’m sure there’s like a thread of commonality in that 

[00:01:34] Andrew: well, actually quite you’re really on point there because pizza’s pretty much on demand. And especially through COVID, we had a. Very lucky escape as a pizza restaurant because we immediately transitioned from a 42 cover restaurant to just take away and collection and delivering through Deliveroo and Uber and all that kind of stuff.

[00:01:54] And also, now there’s a seven drivers of our own, so, that’s a, that’s an all-in cost. But pizza’s on demand and look at the web world, how much on demand it is. I want a website now, especially during the COVID period of, of, of the real lockdowns, we were doing websites on demand and we’re building them in a day.

[00:02:15] Just to get them out there and then obviously maintaining them and getting them there. Social media, Twitter, you’ve seen Twitter, the, the, the almost instantaneous response that people require, people telling people that they’re not doing things, so those people then have to act on that and then do a blog post to say that we are really trying to do things right.

[00:02:35] Over the last few weeks we’ve had a few spits and spats going on. But running a business is the same, whether it’s brick and mortar or not with brick and mortar, you have a lot of overhead. You have the heat, light power, especially a pizza place. You have the food supply issues. We’ve, we’ve had food supply issues in this country for a while.

[00:02:56] People have blamed it on Brexit. It’s not Brexit. It’s just that [00:03:00] there is a food supply issue. Flour is difficult to get over from Italy. Not because again, not because of Brexit because of the demand fruit, fruit, and veg potatoes. When it’s up, for instance, From, let’s say five bucks for 56 pound sack of potatoes.

[00:03:17] They went up to 15 bucks overnight. So it’s just the way. And then you’ve got to put that into margins. If you’re a fish and chip shop, or if you’re a restaurant you’re using fresh potatoes, do you really charge $5 for those chairs? Or for French fries as you guys call them or do you continue, charging $3 50 or three pounds 50?

[00:03:39] So you have to make those kinds of decisions. Wages have gone up because people are working longer hours, staffing shortages as well. So that’s, we’ve, we’re experiencing that in the web world. And one of the things that I’ve seen is hosting companies, buying plugin companies and, and other companies and effectively.

[00:04:01] Because they have the money they’re buying out the developers that we, that I want to use. And I can’t go to the hundred and 50 grand a year with the benefits and with the holidays and with everything in there. So you still have to, you have to run your business very, very carefully, very properly.

[00:04:22] Matt: I recently interviewed Brian Gardner and I kind of said that to him. Brian Garner build out, built out what was known as studio press eventually sells it to WP engine. Works there for a stint leaves, creates. Sells it back to WP engine and then gets a job or they didn’t maybe fell out of that order, but it’s still what I said was, Hey, this product game, I’m creating micro products.

[00:04:44] Not that frost is a micro product, but even today’s in today’s world, you could build a micro product. To, to get Aqua hired. Like almost it’s you’re, it’s almost like your resume to build a little product to show off what you can do and then sell that to get hired. Like it’s almost like people will, brands will buy that these days because it’s so hard to get somebody, even if you only have 500 customers. 

[00:05:08] Andrew: Well, that’s exactly what extended. If I did. We had a vendor on the elegant marketplace who became a very good friend of mine. Munia come out who built editor plus, which he’s celebrating today. He has off today, the 14th of whatever date you’re putting this out, but 7,000 downloads on wordpress.org.

[00:05:25] And I introduced him to Chris Katz of extend defy. Chris ends up buying. Page editor plus, 

[00:05:33] . 

[00:05:33] whatever minerals money is doing. So that’s, that’s how this happens. People go out and they see, they see these developers doing great work and they say I want, I want him on my team, or I want his team on my team because many of how the team has got a team behind him, as well as I have I’m not looking to get bought again.

[00:05:53] Quite so soon, we’ve got, we’ve got bertha.ai, we’ve got WP plugins plus.com, which has got [00:06:00] 23 plugins for elements and Devi serving 200,000 people, we’ve got 200,000 active plugins out there. So, we, we’re quite busy just getting.

[00:06:12] Matt: What have you thought about going there? With adding to the portfolio of, and look, I, I, this is a preface to get into. I want to talk about like the competitive landscape of Gutenberg. I put out a video over the weekend about Gutenberg and how I think that it’s actually. A different future for page builders.

[00:06:30] And we can talk about that in a moment, but do you, have you felt like the need to, okay, man, It’s tough to hire somebody just straight salary. Maybe I have to go that route and knock on a small plug-in or product creator’s door and say, Hey, I’ll buy those 4,000 installs from you. And you joined the company as a senior developer or anything like that.

[00:06:48] Is that something, you’re actively exploring?

[00:06:50] Andrew: something, it’s something I do, but I do it during a different way. With SMM, Danny who lives in Pakistan, he approached me and said, look know I’m, I’m a. Building this thing out, but I need some finance behind it and I need to, I need to get it. So we’re basically a joint venture, both co-founders of it, and it’s good.

[00:07:07] And ai.com, so if people go to try dot Gutenberg, ai.com, you can see if you upload in elements, allow you can see the progress that we’re making. We were selling it. And then I decided not to sell it because it wasn’t, it. 99%. Perfect. And for me, it needs to be, to keep the support burden down, to, to keep the complaints down the, the, the user experience, as best as it can be.

[00:07:33] It needs to work as a plugin. But if you go to try.gutenberg.ai, you’ll see that it actually does work with most elements of layouts and things missing. But, if you’re, if they’re using third party plugins, we can’t. Be perfect, but we’ve got blocks bakery as well, which is on WP plugins plus.com.

[00:07:51] And that’s a, that’s a good one. Blocks plugin that works with Guttenberg AI. So, when I’m looking to increase on that, but my focus really is on my agency, which is WP plugins and Bertha. That’s, that’s the real focus because my agency is. I’m like what 500 websites that we host, if we’re stuck for a bit of web design, we’ll just ring one of those guys up and say, look, we noted a couple of grand, we’ll redo your website and people can only have great.

[00:08:17] I can’t won’t do 

[00:08:17] . 

[00:08:17] Andrew: But I do, I get approached all the time by playing, your plugin developer, who a theme developer approached me the other day and said, how can we work together? And I said, after I finished with everything else that I’m doing, because. Too busy. Really? You’ve gotta be, you’ve gotta be focused on what you’re doing.

[00:08:32] If you’re not focused, you will, you’ll lose. You’ll lose traction more than anything else. 

[00:08:37] Matt: I, and I’ve been saying this for a while and it’s good to hear that people are knocking on your door. I’ve talked to other folks, the same thing is happening. We’re look, if you’re in this game, it’s, it’s easy. To sit behind your computer and say, man, I’m going to build this product. It’s going to change the world.

[00:08:53] Everyone will want it. I will just price it at $29 for the year and I will just, I’ll just sell a [00:09:00] whole bunch. And that’ll be the, the, the ticket to the promised land, sadly these days it’s going to be quite challenging to do that. And you know what there’s I look at now with, the, the products and the services that I’ve built. Sometimes you just have to be real with yourself, partner up with somebody and you don’t have to try to own the world with your, your one thing. And especially if it’s your. or two products that you’ve ever created. You know what, you’re going to learn a lot. If you try to partner up with somebody and even just get acquired by, by somebody to stay on the job and build it out because there’s so much to learn still.

[00:09:37] If you’re a young product owner. Unless you’re building this unicorn thing.

[00:09:41] if you’re a slow paced in the, in the WordPress space, I say partner up with somebody, partner up with an agency and marketer, somebody that offsets your, your skillset for short, because it’s a long road, 

[00:09:51] Andrew: Like I buy one, I, 100% agree. And I had my, my, my, one of my, one of my best friends, Sean Barton. Who’s a fantastic plugin developer. But he’s not a marketeer or a marketer, however you guys want to say, but it, with those, with the plugins that I own, I’ve, I’ve acquired them from him because he’s busy doing other stuff.

[00:10:13] So I said, look, I’ll, I’ll take him over. I’ve got the, I’ve got the platform. I’ve got the easy digital downloads license. I can, I can do everything on that. You’ll just start pay you out over time, whatever. And I did the same with page builder, cloud and lounge. And I sold my half to Melissa Love.

[00:10:29] Who’s who’s in partnership with Sean because she’s the marketer, he’s the developer and he’s an awesome developer. And I think that’s the way it should go because you need, you need somebody to do the marketing, you need somebody to care about the product. Whereas a developer will kind of think, it does this. Yeah. But why, why does it do that? What’s the, where’s the. What was the need was the desire for somebody to use this, so, okay. So, there’s a new plugin come out today. It lets you read the SQL queries in WordPress in in the actual dashboard. Why would you want to do that?

[00:11:05] I just don’t get it. You could just log into your hosting and view the SQL and do it, do a, do a query. Somebody wants to do it, but you know, I don’t really see why, then that opens up the dashboard to maybe another, if you get hacked, everyone can see your SQL.

[00:11:20] I don’t get it. But for useful plugins and now we’ve gotten both blocks coming in. Big time, cadence and block C and all these, these great people that are really working hard on that. What is the differentiator going to be? If you, okay, I’ve got a great block. Plugin Saguan is 750 out there already.

[00:11:41] You’ve got to make it so good these days. And also WordPress as WordPress. It doesn’t really let you market it. You can put it on.org. You can try and SEO the heck out of it. You can tell people it’s [00:12:00] on there, but you’re not really allowed to put any marketing speak in there or upsells or, or anything like that.

[00:12:06] And I think WordPress as WordPress, the repository kind of needs to revisit that for people, if automatic are allowed to make money and upsell. Austin us mere mortals need to be able to do that as well.

[00:12:22] Matt: I’ve seen other folks say it as Well, as, Hey, can we, at least if we’re not going to build a proper marketplace, and I know you have experience in marketplaces, if we’re not going to build a marketplace because it’s. For us to say yeah, dot org should just become a marketplace. But at that scale, I’m sure you’re laughing to yourself saying yeah.

[00:12:39] Good luck. It’s yeah, it’s a great idea, but it’s just not going to be a flip of a switch and then all of a sudden billions of dollars. Cause you know, I think there’s a billion dollars running through.org. A billion dollars is not going, it’s going to get processed overnight or have the staff or the search or the, the deliverables of.

[00:12:56] You know what like ThemeForest did, and this would be theme forest on steroids times 20 is 

[00:13:03] Andrew: also you, you would also have the marketplaces rebelling against you for doing that because it would immediately, elegant themes. The, the owners of Debbie started a marketplace. That’s a proper kick in the shins of people like Devi cake. Devi.space, elegant marketplace because we help them build up, but they saw the value of a marketplace and people are making fortunes on there.

[00:13:28] So I’m not too distressed because I don’t know elegant marketplace now. I kind of, the timing was right when I saw when I sold it. But, for a theme like Devi, 750,000 live installs to actually have a built-in marketplace was a kind of a kick in the teeth to the people that help them grow that business to 750,000.

[00:13:49] I’ve said this to Nick personally, in frame, I met him, met up with him in I kind of re rephrase that. I said, do you want to kiss me foot before you kicked me in the nuts? So it’s kind of just, it’s just a, a kind of a thing, but fair place for them. It’s a massive success.

[00:14:05] And it’s making a lot of people and lots of money, which is great, but the same kind of criticism might go through to wordpress.org. What I want to see is. For wordpress.org. What are, why they prefer to see is the ability to actually say or highlight the fact that the pro version is so much better and you would be supporting the developer rather than that donate button that you can put on, which is great.

[00:14:35] People can donate, but make people realize that WordPress is a comer. Opportunity for people. I did a talk years ago at Bristol meets about if you’re a developer, a coder, don’t be afraid of page builders, use them to be able to monetize your other skills. So build out your website really quickly with beaver builder, DV elements or [00:15:00] whatever was around at the time.

[00:15:02] But then. Make your difference by being that code or that can build out a website really quickly and then build in the functionality and wordpress.org really needs to allow people to build in the licensing properly into the PR the plugins on.org. Freemiums have kind of got around that by, by, I don’t know how they’ve got round it.

[00:15:23] I talked to Overby went Teleo, he’s got round it. I kind of sussed it, but but we we’re allowed to. Upsells into the plugin itself, but I don’t like them appearing on the dashboard. I’m I’m against, I’m kind of on the fence with this I’m against plugins promoting in the actual dashboard, but I’m, I’m for plugins promoting in their own dashboard.

[00:15:43] So for instance, Bertha has its own dashboard and it tells you upgrade if you want to, if you run out of words, upgrade, and I think that’s, that’s completely fine, 

[00:15:53] Matt: I was thinking the other day that, well, maybe page building. Like right now, we say what’s the best WordPress page builders or building a WordPress page. Builder is very difficult because there’s a lot of competition. I started to think, well, gee, Matt, the other Matt, the other day in the state of the word said that Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress. So I started thinking, well, maybe the issue is for page builders specifically.

[00:16:16] Where you’re trying to build your page builder solution inside of word. And oh, by the way, full site editing just got released. So layout changes and customizing templates is going to be happening by core. That was largely a value add for page builders, maybe page builders just have to be called page builders now, and immediately go the route of self hosted SAS solution, because that’s what they’re all aiming for.

[00:16:40] Anyway, as an eventual outcome And then just adopt Gutenberg as your open source tooling to make the job easier. Like they all pick WordPress because you’ve got the distribution, you’ve got the platform, you’ve got user logins and all that stuff, and everybody’s hosting their sites. Well, maybe page builders could leverage whatever fast technology they want to build the framework of a website.

[00:17:03] And then they just adopt Gutenberg as the editing experience for that way. Which kind of gives back to mats, future vision of Gutenberg being bigger than WordPress. Now we start to see in a future where the numbers get lopsided, where the internet has a bigger distribution of Gutenberg than there are of WordPress websites, big grenade tossed your way.

[00:17:27] What do you think about monetizing the future of page builders or just seeing Gutenberg extend itself beyond WordPress? 

[00:17:35] Andrew: I don’t know how good and Berg where we extend itself behind WordPress, because it’s it’s core to WordPress. So I, I’m not that technically adept to think about, think that questionnaire a bit of a drive by shooting. Thanks for that. But page builders, the beauty of page builders, when I discovered divvy, it was, it was a block.

[00:17:52] So they should have patented the thing called block, but Nick missed a trick on that. When I looked at BeaverBuilder and elemental, when it first [00:18:00] came out, I had a good old chat with Johnny and Ben, when they, when they first launched, we actually interviewed them on elegant marketplace. And I thought it was absolutely phenomenal because you can drag and drop and place and do columns and do nice, easy mobile first.

[00:18:15] Design, which is, I think we should all start and we haven’t gone. My developers are saying, so mobile first idiots, what’s going on? And oh yeah, because you can, you can build a great website on a desktop. It will look great. And then you, you throw it on a mobile. I know there’s 84 different devices out there, but you know, you still gotta think mobile first and it will look crap.

[00:18:35] And that’s the problem with, with WordPress Gutenberg, making it mobile friendly. Frankly a nightmare and they they haven’t thought about that. So the page builders had thoughts about that, that you can have, with Devi, you can have different views, they’ve got different techniques for unlearning for making your site pretty much word work.

[00:18:55] Mobile friendly Devi. Also, I seem to remember have a. Block or a DV module as they now call them for a good and boat block. So you can place Guttenberg within Devi. But if you go back to the fact that WordPress was originally my little and Matt Mullenweg designed it as a blogging platform or came from the blogging world.

[00:19:22] I think page builders should stay away from, from the, from the posts, right? Not CPT, not custom post types, but from posts. So allow people to blog using Guttenberg. Cause I think it’s a phenomenally fast way to, to blog out there. And keep the page builders for the theming and for the prettiness and for the motion and for the popups, elements as a, as a plugin couple of years ago, I think put popups into.

[00:19:53] The page builder, so that destroyed all the pop up market, pop up, plugins walk and an all, and we designed the DV, the sort of the elements are form plugging, which allows you to capture the data on actually within the website, lo and behold, six months later, it’s in core of elements, and that’s, that’s the risk you take as a, as a plugin developer.

[00:20:14] And that’s the risk. You’re going to take Matt as a good and bug block developer because. Matt might look at it one day and go, oh, we can do that. We can put a slider in. We can, we can put, multiple columns. We can do the mobile stuff, but the, for the, for divvy itself, elementary has done it. $89 a year.

[00:20:33] You get elements of pro and hosting. I haven’t, I’ve come, I’m going to spend $89 and do it, because I want to see what our hosting is like. Cause I use grid painter to manage all my hosting on different servers and stuff like that. And I love it, but I want to see what the speed is like and what the, what the actual experiences like DV.

[00:20:56] I think we’ll go that way. They offer hosting through SiteGround even [00:21:00] blue host and even HostGator. I think they recommend these people because if you’ve got a license, you can install it on anyone. Those hosts and they’ll installed divvy. And then all you do is you copy and paste your, your license. So it’s a one-click install.

[00:21:12] And a lot of the hosts have going that way. Look at CloudWave is doing the, the, the, they’ll install the visual connection. Onto it onto a thing with you. So I think that’s the way the market is going hosts and hosts to provide host type providers like grid pane, cloud ways run cloud.

[00:21:32] They will also install the theme of your choice. The page builder of your choice on the hosting. So I’m not sure the page builders are too worried about Gutenberg becoming the defacto, but they working towards putting it, making sure that they work together in, in, in sync, if you like, rather than making good and both come to the top, otherwise the differentiator isn’t there and good and bug you.

[00:21:58] Can’t dragon. As yet you can in the sidebar, but you can’t really manipulate it as you would a page builder

[00:22:07] Matt: I think he looks at Gutenberg as look, I can actually make this thing. Impact the internet versus WordPress, just impacting websites. Like he’s accomplished that with websites to a massive degree with this 40 last I checked was 43% for websites. And I think there’s a future where he sees Gutenberg just being, could possibly be the interface on an apple device.

[00:22:32] It could be the interface on a refrigerator that you’re typing or moving blocks around. I think that’s the kind of crazy vision he might have for 

[00:22:39] Andrew: well, I think you’re right, because it’s built on react and JavaScript, isn’t it. So, when, when I think it was one word camp, it was a US-based word camp. Probably the second one I went to could have been St. Louis or it could have been. Boston where, or, or one of them, a big one where he appeared.

[00:22:58] And I remember him standing up there and some that he doesn’t really shout, but he shouted out, literally shouted out, learn Java script. It’s important. So everyone remembers that. But it would be interesting. Now I’m thinking about it because I know I’ve just remembered how it was built. It could go into.

[00:23:18] Anything, could it go into Shopify? Could you have gotten both blocks in Shopify or Squarespace or Wix, even that would be amusing. So in Gutenberg, in weeks, when that.

[00:23:28] Matt: A hundred percent. All right. So instead of solving the world’s problems through page builders and visual design and, and your agency, you come up with this crazy idea to say, to create texts through artificial intelligence. How the heck did you land on this idea with bertha.ai? 

[00:23:47] Andrew: Wasn’t my idea. I hate to digest really hate to say it’s just not my idea. Dammit. It was the animus. VSO Pele, who is a very [00:24:00] great friend of mine and my business partner. So we have no 

[00:24:04] Matt: Are you local to each other? Like 

[00:24:05] Andrew: we, we are now because I’ve, I’ve recently moved house, so we’re now An hour away with 30 minutes away from each other, but he, he doesn’t drive as me.

[00:24:13] That’s got to do all the traveling, cause he’s, he’s, he’s glued to his desk, man, he’s just had a baby throws, froze the lovely live out to, out to a childminder and just get glued to his desk all the time. Because, because of answer him and stuff like that, but he, he approached me because he’s obviously got after rim.

[00:24:30] That’s doing pretty well. And he wanted to have artificial intelligence on the notepads of matter in which is, which is basically a feedback tool. And then. I could make this bigger. So he he’d already done all the research with open AI. He’d already written a couple of prompts and and then decided that he was just his, his team of, I think he’s got nine now.

[00:24:52] We’re just too busy. So it came to me and just made me busier than I am. And I just said, yeah. Okay, I’ll do it. And I’ll finance it. And yeah, of course, I’ve got to 

[00:25:01] Matt: hold on. Why order this sack of 

[00:25:02] Andrew: Yeah, exactly. I’ll 

[00:25:03] Matt: and some lettuce and 

[00:25:05] Andrew: But it was an N it was, it was an instantaneous decision. He said, I got this, I got this nowhere.

[00:25:10] Okay. What is it going to cost? And he told me what was going to cost killed. That’s my holiday on the window for the next five years. But it basically my team. I had to learn open AI. I had to learn open. Now I had to learn how to write prompts. I’ve written out three of them and Vito’s written about 80 19, 80 5%.

[00:25:29] My guys have of studied intently and everything and how to get the information back. But because we build websites and we have built websites, there’s, I’ve built over 2000 websites in my career. So it’s been a, it’s been quite a long career. Bill 1500 or something, in a very short period of time.

[00:25:49] And we know that what people want is pretty similar. It’s a, it’s a header, it’s a footer, it’s the middle, it’s the blurbs, it’s the calls to action. It’s the, paths, it’s the ADA marketing frameworks that you want to use and it’s just generating texts quickly. So we built it out and we, so we started in may and.

[00:26:13] We launched in September and we’ve now got two and a half thousand users, which is great because we came up with a phrase. We have marketing meeting every Tuesday or dev meeting, straight marketing meeting every Tuesday. And I came up with the phrase that I want to be. I want Bertha to be the Grammarly of AI for WordPress.

[00:26:33] So we’re basically giving everything away for free apart from long form. And for a thousand words, For the time being, I just want people to see the power of it, but effectively, I’ve now built 12 websites with it since we launched it. And my clients are amazed at the fact that I can put content in there at the same time, without any kind of delay, because as we’re building out, we’re putting in the CTO, we’re putting in the call [00:27:00] to actions.

[00:27:00] We’re putting in the blurb information with this is from cryptocurrency as well, right through to. Florists catering restaurants. One of my niches is restaurants because I used to be a chef. I used to have a couple of restaurants as well, and obviously the pizza place helps. So I help restaurants market themselves as well on the web.

[00:27:19] So there is nothing that Bertha can’t write about. You still have to think of birth or is that person sitting next to you? That comes up with the idea. And frameworks for what you want to say, and you are the editor. So she’s the, she’s the journalist going out there saying, writing all this stuff, doing all the research, because all the research has been done.

[00:27:39] You, you put in one sentence or paragraph. Press a click and your, your blurbs done your paragraphs done. And with long form, you can literally write thousands of words in an hour, it’s it really and edit it and stuff like that. So that’s really quite intriguing. 

[00:27:56] One of our clients came up with the lower birther is the lorem ipsum killer. And to be able to kill lorem ipsum how many times, man, have you seen a Shona allowance or a customer, a website to a customer? And they said, why have you put Greek in there?

[00:28:13] And that you’ve gone actually is Latin, but it’s lorem ipsum 

[00:28:15] you can write a blog post about anything. One of our, one of our greatest decisions was to employ Imran Siddique, who is a, a great element of use and a great teacher on, on web web squadron on building websites out. And he did a review screaming about how good Bertha was, and it was really funny and it was lovely.

[00:28:36] So we asked him last month, literally last month, beginning of January. Is it February and earlier beginning of January. And he has done the 51 tutorial videos already because he absolutely adores the product. So we’ve got the learning academy there with, slowly, slowly teaching people how to do it.

[00:28:54] So it’s that’s what, that’s how it started. And that’s how it’s going to continue.

[00:28:58] Matt: So it’s just like one of those things where now you’re, you’re not just creating a block. I’m sure.

[00:29:05] you’ll have more competition in the future, but this is not something that is as easy for somebody to put together as like I’m going to do another pricing grid block, and I’m going to build that to compete with you.

[00:29:17] This is a space that you can really sink your teeth into. Of market leader specifically, as we all know who listening to this podcast specifically in the WordPress sector, because no one else is really doing it. Like you said, there’s a couple of other plugins that do it in a different way, but this is something that you can really start to recoup that holiday money back on it.

[00:29:35] I would 

[00:29:35] Andrew: Well, we got that too, to be honest, to be honest, birther is now paying for herself and she has paid me back. So all of my investment has been. Come back over the last couple of months, which is good. And now it’s a question of the money that’s coming in now go straight back into development. So we are developing something else, which I can, I can, I can tell you it’s we, we are building out a SAS version.

[00:29:59] It’s going to [00:30:00] be a while because. Sasha is hard. I don’t care what anybody says, and it takes a lot. It takes a lot of money and a lot of investment in time and efforts and learning. We want it to be as comfortable to use as anything that you would, you would use out that. Chrome extension is going to be coming out as well.

[00:30:19] Pretty much the same as S same time as the SAS, but also the WordPress plugin. And we’re celebrating this week particularly because we’re on the org, 

[00:30:27] Is great. So, you can install it straight, install birther straight from your WordPress dashboard. Now just search birther or AI. Even we come up as well under AI being on there for three days, we got 270 active.

[00:30:41] Matt: Nice. 

[00:30:42] Andrew: Downloads just on, just on that side, which is crazy. 

[00:30:45] Matt: Yeah. I was telling you the other day when we were chatting I had somebody, a friend of mine reached out and I kind of just help him with his website. He’s also my barber. So, I wanna make sure I get a good haircut. So I, I kind of help them with a site, but anyway, just like you eat dabbles in a bunch of different types of businesses and he, he owns.

[00:31:01] With a partner, a ice cream shop, which is obviously closed now, here in the Northeast, but he’s getting ready for the spring time and all of that stuff. And he’s Hey, I want to add this content to the site. Is that something you want to do? And I’m like, no, this is not something that I want to do. Like I’m not going to be writing pages about ice creams and events that people can hold and birthday parties and all this stuff.

[00:31:18] In fact, I don’t even know where to begin if I were to do something like that. But. With a plugin like this? Well, maybe I can kind of guide him to, to do it or even take it on myself and help him out a little bit without worrying about, okay. Blank canvas staring in front of me, ice cream tastes good.

[00:31:36] You should have a birthday party here. I could get something. I can get Bertha to prompt me with all of the, the, like the content. I just kind of feed her the topic ideas and enroll with it that way. 

[00:31:46] Andrew: Well, she can come up with a topic idea. So you can say, I want to talk about the history of gelato, for instance, how did gelato get started in, in New York started actually, I know it because it was started in New York city by a couple of Italian immigrants and it was actually ice. They were selling, they were just selling blocks of ice and then somebody decided to flavor it and then they decided to crush it up and mix it up and birth and those, all that kind of stuff.

[00:32:11] But that could be. In a, in an about us kind of page that can help you. You get a little bit of history and then you can go. So we decided to do our own version of gelato or whatever. It both helps you. With your mission statement, it helps you with your Pass frameworks, which is basically you’ve got forgotten what passive stands for.

[00:32:32] Now, let me just cause I’m, cause I’m excited to be on your blog, your podcast, but it’s basically, persuasive bullet points, product descriptions. So you can, you can put in a this gelato is made with strawberry and fresh strawberry and that there’s, there’s a, this in it and that any and everything, and both will actually come up with a recipe as well.

[00:32:50] You can, you can come up with anything. So. It’s so she is so clever and let the power of, of AI and the power of the prompts. [00:33:00] You’ve got to give some kudos to Vito here because. Dove deep into writing the prompts. And I’m not that way inclined as far as logic goes on quite an illogical guy, that’s why we built birth 

[00:33:14] Matt: in the right 

[00:33:14] Andrew: of just made it.

[00:33:15] Yeah, exactly. I just made a, I just made a choice. Yeah. Okay. We’ll do that. And it’s worked out and it’s working out for a lot of people. 

[00:33:20] Matt: I do want to. Poke and prod just one final question here. Because it is something that’s on my mind is what happens when all the robots take over what happens if you’re an agency owner? So many of us are, it might be listening to, and we do have a half, a dozen restaurant clients, 12 accountants a couple dozen lawyers and, and this. Crucial to maybe our copywriting service that we provide customers. Is there a way for lack of a better phrase to not have Bertha compete against itself or create the same content across the board? Or is that Hey, you have to make this decision. As the person who wields the power of Bertha 

[00:34:00] Andrew: Well, there is some of that going on as well, but you’ve got to think about how, how AI copywriting works and all the AI copywriting people out there. And I don’t mind saying who they are. Copy AI word, AI, Jarvis Jasper, or Jerry. You will probably be the next name of Jasper on the night. That they’re all doing a fantastic job and they’re all writing things in, or they were giving commands to birth or sorry to open AI in a different way or in some different ways, but effectively as a human being, I don’t know what I’m going to say in 10 seconds, time or three seconds time or a milliseconds time.

[00:34:35] I really don’t. I know. Well, I know what I’m going to say, but I don’t know how I’m going to structure it. And AI works in exactly the same way. It doesn’t work word by word or paragraph by paragraph or sentence by sentence. It works letter by letter. So it basically creates, so it’s T what am I going to say there?

[00:34:55] And then looks at the context and it’ll go there. This VAT, the restaurant is in. Whatever serves Mediterranean style food, but in a different, so it will do it in a different way. So it’s pretty, I would say it’s plagiarism free. You can have plagiarism checkers on it, but it’s the, every test that I’ve done and I’ve done over a thousand tests.

[00:35:22] On all of them, not just birth and I’ve tested for plagiarism. I’ve used premium plagiarism checkers as well. They have all been 100% plagiarism. Because that’s the way I, AI works. It works the same as our brain in as much as forming a sentence, forming a paragraph, forming a story. So I have no real concerns about Latin.

[00:35:46] In fact, there is, as of today I read there’s a really great character out there that knows so much about AI. I called Matthew wrens. And he’s He’s a lovely chap and had a cocktail cup cup of cocktails with [00:36:00] him in London a couple of few months ago. And he just posted a thing that there is an AI now building AI.

[00:36:09] So it’s examining all of the, all of what the AI is doing and, and, and basically making all these neurons, these new neurons. So I think AI will power us in so many different ways other than copywriting. And I don’t think. Copywriters need to worry if you’re a copywriter. And I know a few, and I know a few that rebelled against me and said, what the hell are you doing?

[00:36:31] You’re putting me out of a job. And I said, well, actually, I’m not. Because if you use AI to write your copy, we’ll be back. And also you’ll be able to pat it out in a better way. I spoke with a very good journalist friend of mine who writes for crypto now, most people know that open AI stopped scraping the web in 2019, and it’s only scraped 10% of the web.

[00:36:57] We know how big the web is, it still knows about crypto. And I’m still, I built a crypto website the other day for a client in four hours. And wrote the copy. All of it. They didn’t change it, not one word. I didn’t know. I don’t know about, I, I do know a little bit about it, so, but I don’t know the technicalities of it.

[00:37:16] So the short answer to your question is don’t worry about it because there are things that make, if a lawyer talks about his law practice or her law practice. They will talk about their law practice in a different way. And that’s exactly what birther will do. 

[00:37:34] Matt: Andrew Palmer Hey, you’re leading us to the promised land or to extinction with birth.ai. I’ll let the consumer decide. Check out bertha.ai is the fastest way to create content for your WordPress website. You can try it for free. By searching for, I assume, bertha.ai and wordpress.org. And you can give it a go for free start checking out what birth it can do for you anywhere else you want to point folks to

[00:37:59] Andrew: Well, I wouldn’t mind, Debbie, Debbie users can go to WP plugins plus.com and we still sell our plugins obviously on Navigant marketplace.com because I still support those guys. They, they, they acquired me and hopefully it will continue the success that I had with it. And go to go buy our plugins on elegant marketplace.com or WP plugins.com and have a chat with me on Twitter at Arnie Palmer.

[00:38:23] Matt: Matt board.com airport.com/subscribe to join the mailing list. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you in the next episode.

[00:00:00] Matt: The two of you are cooking up something called, get deliver it.com. Get delivered it.com. You can find a special link. Get delivered.com/matt report. That’ll be in the show notes, really interested to learn more about email marketing.

[00:00:14] The two of you. Quite literally in stereo, in my ears over the last few years, telling me about email and I’m just sitting there quietly, collecting a list, doing absolutely nothing with it, including for this show. So I’m really excited to talk about that today. Let’s talk about this, this partnership that the two of you have formed.

[00:00:35] I think partnerships are awesome. I think people should partner up more instead of trying to coddle their little ideas together in the closet by themselves. Who wants to take it first? Who came up with this idea? And why did you, why did you partner together? 

[00:00:49] Jason: Kim.

[00:00:49] Kim: going to jump in Jason. See, I told you I’m new to this whole, like two people trying to answer a question. You notice how I rephrase that fellows anyway. So, what’s funny is it was about almost a year ago and I have known Jason A. Long time too. And he was totally into email marketing.

[00:01:07] And I’ve said this so many times. It is the only regret I have in my business that I did not put more time and attention into this. And so I reached out to Jason, I’m like, Hey, You want to collaborate on an email marketing summit was the original idea. And when I say this was a year ago, I was in Boise, Idaho.

[00:01:26] We started doing at the time, it was like bi-monthly calls because it was really about, how do we make this different and how can we get this to stand out? Because COVID era so many summits and. Trusted. We just kept working on it, working on it, and then I left Boise and wins California and then moved to Costa Rica.

[00:01:43] And we were originally going to do it this fall and this last fall, excuse me. And we pivoted, and I can, I can let Jason pick up with the direction we’re going now with it, but yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a fun journey.

[00:01:56] Jason: Yeah. And I think we pivoted in a good way because. Yeah. We each had our own audiences and our own following in a certain kind of way. And yes, we could have had just a summit. Right. And, but then as we started to unpack a little bit of what the summit was supposed to be like, what the actual attendee would have gotten out of it, we realized that what a lot of people suffer from is.

[00:02:23] The one it’s a mindset thing is that push, push, send button that you have to push on an email that a lot of people just like they can’t do. But then at the same time, on the other side of things, they’re like, I don’t have a list or I have 17 people on the list or. I feel like this is too small.

[00:02:44] Why am I going to send an email? And so we both have both. I, I, to say that the only regret I have in my business is not doing email marketing sooner. And as having put a major focus [00:03:00] in on it over the past, I would say. 15 months or so I’ve seen the huge impact and I don’t have a large list at all. So, we just said, Hey, why don’t we instead of the summit, maybe that’s further down the road.

[00:03:14] Why don’t we try to build a list from scratch with various different experiments and strategies all the way from beginner to advanced and. With all sorts of creators. If you’re a musician, a podcast, or if you’re a developer or a designer, marketer, writer, whatever it is, staying in your lane, do what you do.

[00:03:34] But we can also help you build your email and email list and your email marketing in a smart way.

[00:03:41] Matt: I want to unpack each of yours. Superpowers and I’ll give you sort of my take on it first. You can agree or disagree. This is where I wish I had like game show buzzers that we could kind of press here. But you know, Kim and cause I can see, you having known both of you forever and kind of just like seeing this come together, I can see how.

[00:04:00] Both of your powers come together to make something great, but I want to illustrate this to the audience. So they know that the both of, what the heck you’re talking about when it comes to email growing a list and turning that into a business, Kim over the years, I I’ve seen you sort of evolve into much more well, you were hyper-focused in the WordPress space for a while and you were kind of just you know what, I’m sick, sick and tired of talking about.

[00:04:22] Let me zoom out and make this much more branding. And I think that’s where, where maybe you’re at with F the hustle and sort of this approach to the broader gains of, of email and marketing and messaging and branding and Jason, same thing with you. You started off in where it’s so funny, how both of you have started off in WordPress and now you’re like, screw WordPress I’m off.

[00:04:44] And I’m the only guy in the room. I just realized that I’m the one in the room who was making the wrong decision. Jason, you started off in WordPress and, and, but you, you have sort of hits yourself to a tool. You can correct me if I’m wrong, hit yourself to a tool, maybe convert kit, and really focusing on those customers in that crowd and built a bit.

[00:05:04] Around that, but let me kick it to Kim first. Your superpower. Am I close, accurate inaccurate? 

[00:05:13] Kim: Yeah, I wasn’t sure what the superpower was specifically. 

[00:05:16] Matt: The, the sort of the branding zooming out and being like the brand creator, the, the messaging F the hustle like that, kind of tell it. how it is in your face. Branding. 

[00:05:30] Kim: Yeah. It’s so funny too. Yeah, for sure. And I think for me, it’s been about helping people to kind of find their voice, which is, you go further back. That’s what my podcast did for me. It’s that’s when my business started to take off is when I just started showing up and genuinely being myself and communicating and it’s funny.

[00:05:46] Like I always joke. I’m like, can I look back? Did I even pay attention in English? Because I swear I was a horrible writer. You start using Grammarly. Jesus. So, but over the years, and that was like 2013. I started [00:06:00] podcasting, but I, because of the way I talk, I knew I needed to write my show notes out first.

[00:06:04] And so it’s helped me evolve and I sort of fell in love with the writing process and be able to get clearer. And, it’s interesting. I just had a coaching call with a client earlier and this idea of creating content and writing for search versus. Writing for people. And, there’s, there’s such a balance with both work.

[00:06:24] But where my stuff has taken off is genuinely being myself, talking about the struggles, the challenges that, and then F the hustle, because I’m just tired, I was about to swear, but do not tell me I have to get up at 4:00 AM and accomplish 80 things by six to I’m living a pretty good life.

[00:06:39] I’m not complaining. So it’s just finding that balance. There is no one set way to do that. So, yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. I would say that is my superpower.

[00:06:48] Jason: I think, I think for myself, you’re spot on like I’ve I, WordPress was a general tool for me and then I, I hyper-specific. Well commerce and then even the subscriptions plugin. And I saw how that could being so specific with those kinds of customers could elevate me like as a big fish in a very, very small puddle.

[00:07:11] Right. And so, so for me, I always always attracted as a developer towards e-commerce and that was more for me being able to see the impact that I have on a business. Do you optimize checkout processes or re you know, and all of that kind of stuff. And then actually see what that resulted in at the end of the month.

[00:07:36] So when email marketing and the website started talking together a lot better about seven ish, years ago, eight years ago. That’s where I went because one of the superpowers that I have. I didn’t realize it until maybe about five, six years ago was that I had a director of it 15 plus years ago.

[00:08:00] Tell me you’re a strange breed because you can, you can talk the King’s English and you could talk geeks. And you can have everybody in the room and you can almost translate for one another and make things happen. And so that’s kind of how I look at it from where I am today is I do a lot of email marketing.

[00:08:23] I’ll do a lot of email automation, tying systems together and all of those kinds of nuts and bolts kind of stuff, and making the magic happen. But. Where I feel that that D what that does is actually takes the communication aspect, the English, and then figuring out how to marry the humans to the computers in a way that makes sense to the humans.

[00:08:47] Right? So putting the right offers in front of people, putting, figuring out who they are and what makes them tick and what are their desires. And then. Figuring out what sequences on the other end that we can actually push out an email to. So, [00:09:00] that for me is I, I get up all day and every day I work on that stuff all day long. 

[00:09:05] Matt: And I think the other thing that you both bring to the table, which cannot be overlooked is the fact that neither of you have given up since I’ve known you. Right. Which is like a huge thing that a lot of people, they just experiment, they try and they give it a year maybe. And I was like, okay, that didn’t work out.

[00:09:23] I was fine if you want to just sort of expire that, that time. But I know the two of you, you certainly. You have evolved, maybe even rebranded to a degree, but you haven’t given up right. Promoting and creating content and, following a north star and letting everybody know about it. so that’s an, can be sometimes underappreciated, like that ten-year overnight success thing that, that we hear, how do they do that?

[00:09:45] It, I don’t know. It just took 10 years to do it. That’s, that’s all, I’m not saying it’s taking you guys 10 years, but you know,

[00:09:50] Jason: 13,

[00:09:51] Matt: Yeah. 

[00:09:52] Kim: Yep. Mark marches 14 years for me. 

[00:09:54] Matt: I’m 10 years. So this is all complete. So let’s just talk about email marketing in 2022. I’m the person that you illustrated. Jason, like I have an email list it’s on that report and I send exactly zero emails. zero. And it just, it continues to build and, and I have those same fears of, I haven’t done. Why would I start now? Because I’m like quite literally afraid to see like the MailChimp report that I sent the email in 70% of the, the lists were unsubscribed Because they’re like, who the hell are you?

[00:10:29] I haven’t heard from you in three years. I’m 

[00:10:32] Kim: it makes sense to pay for them and not talk to them any. 

[00:10:34] Matt: Right, 

[00:10:38] Kim: unsubscribe, but you’re never going to hear from me because I liked that number. 

[00:10:42] Matt: And that’s, and that’s literally what it is. It’s Ooh, I got a list. I don’t want that list to move. I just want to stay right there. So let’s talk about that in 2022, the obvious is yes, we should be doing it when somebody comes to you and I’ll, I’ll kick the answer to Jason first when somebody comes to you and they say, I think the list is too small, or I don’t think anyone’s going to tune in or open up.

[00:11:03] Piece of advice to that type of person. 

[00:11:05] Jason: Tiny is it just another four-letter word? Right. And for me, I have two lists. One list is. around 2000 and I have another list that’s just around 200. Both of those lists make six figures on their own. So there’s no such thing as a tiny list, as long as you communicate and engage with them and what they want from you.

[00:11:28] Right. And so I always say Our job as a marketer is really just to figure out and communicate a solution to somebody who comes to us. And so that’s what email does ask a lot of questions, find out what they’re looking for and then toss them and offer whether it’s yours or somebody else’s. You can do affiliate marketing and or your own services and products and things of that nature.

[00:11:50] But For me, it doesn’t matter because like I’ve seen lists that have had hundreds of thousands of people on it and [00:12:00] make five figures. Then I’ve seen six figure lists that have a hundred people on it. So. It really depends on really getting over that mindset. Like you said I think I did even say that a couple of months ago was like, do you send emails?

[00:12:15] Is it just going into my spam or in your like, no, I don’t send it. I’m like, oh, okay, well good. But I 

[00:12:26] Matt: spent, 

[00:12:27] Kim: Totally getting roasted.

[00:12:28] Matt: I’m an old social media curmudgeon. I only spend my time in podcasts, YouTube and Twitter. And I know no one does that anymore. That’s the only place that I spend my time. Cause it’s all. 

[00:12:38] Jason: So I’m in Twitter and email. Like I, I went down the YouTube rabbit hole and I do see that, but for me, it’s just like people can I find that I get replies on my emails? Can I share this on social? I say, all right, sure. And then they’re like, oh, it’s not on your website. I’m like ma too lazy to put it on the website.

[00:12:56] I’ll just write the email and. Just, it works. It works. I switched to daily emails about 15 months ago from weekly. That was the only other time that I had that scared moment. And I thought it would just tank the list, but engagement went through the roof. So.

[00:13:12] Matt: And now I want to take that same point. Bring it to Kim. Now I see the stuff that you and Jason put out with your, with your email newsletters. So.

[00:13:22] One, I have that fear of just got this, list. I don’t do anything with it. And then the other fear is, okay, I’m ready to do something with it.

[00:13:29] And then I look at what you do, Kim I’m like this, I can’t, I can’t even keep up. It’s you’re, you’re, running a marathon and I’m just like tying my shoes and I don’t even know where to begin. I start thinking of automation. I start thinking of, okay, like Jason, he’s got to do it daily. Email me, God, I, how do I even approach this stuff?

[00:13:45] Any advice to somebody like me, who’s just I don’t even know where to get started. Where do I begin if I want to restart my email list? 

[00:13:54] Kim: Yeah, well, first of all, to Jason’s point too, it’s a, it’s a mindset completely. A hundred percent. I did. I called them my almost daily emails because I didn’t always email on the weekend. I don’t, I’m not doing it right now, but probably four years ago. And I had watched what Ben settled in for a year before I even became a customer.

[00:14:09] And I was. Okay. And it’s kind of a atomic habit of who you want to become. So I just simply made a commitment to myself that I was going to show up and write the email. And it’s a story-based email with one call to action. I’m like, this is not crazy formatting. And as much as I like some formatting, it’s text-based emails do better, but it was, that was it.

[00:14:28] I’m like, I’m going to share stories and I’m going to put one call to action. And it was simply an exercise. Yeah. Practice to myself to commit to that. And so I think when people get in the way, because you hear some, I’m not a writer, I don’t know what to write about. Talk to me. Talk to people. Like I jokingly tell people I could’ve convinced anyone to go see Avengers end game.

[00:14:47] I thought three times in the theater, it was a brilliant movie. And I’m like, tell that story get excited about something and talk like you’re talking to people. Some things will work, some things won’t. But the thing is, the piece with email that I think is [00:15:00] magical is that you start focusing a little bit more on the mastery and you’ve got this whole tech side, but it’s like when you start understanding that you can change a sentence and a headline or.

[00:15:10] And double your sales. Like you lose those inhibitions really fast. I jokingly say I’m like, this shit works. It just works. And so you’re going to be uncomfortable. That’s it? I don’t, there is this element of when you’re starting something new, I don’t know why we think we’re supposed to be good at it, or there’s going to be a discomfort.

[00:15:28] But if you flip it, it’s kind of the James Clair with atomic habits, right. You’re not somebody who’s trying to quit smoking. You’re someone who doesn’t know. So you get to choose and you get to reframe. I’m not somebody who’s going to try to email I’m somebody who sends an email. It may suck. It may be brilliant, but it’s just start by talking to people.

[00:15:46] One of the emails that I got amazing responses on it’s hysterical was my headline was I literally fell down. And I did because I was going to walk the dogs and God forbid, I wait until I get to the bottom of the stairs to pick a podcast to listen to. And it just, the whole thing happened in slow motion.

[00:16:02] I was like, I could feel my foot Mrs. Step, but I’m in my head. I’m like, this is not going to end. Well, I didn’t hurt anything. I broke my sunglasses. That was my subject line. And so I told this story and I just pivoted it to how many times do we do that in our business? We’re not looking at what’s right in front of us.

[00:16:18] I don’t even remember what the call to action was. It was the exercise of sending an email. I got tons of responses. Are you okay? People who know me are like, I can totally hear you. That was hysterical. So, but the point is it was engagement and I’m creating that relationship piece. So people are overthinking email from.

[00:16:33] You’re talking to people. You can have fun. You can come from the heart. Some of my more personal stuff that has nothing to do with my business is what is blown up and driven traffic to my site that brings people into your world and connect. So you have to get over yourself. You’re going to be uncomfortable and you do it anyway.

[00:16:48] Like it’s, it’s just adulting. Entrepreneurial adulting is what I call it now. 

[00:16:53] Matt: Yeah.

[00:16:53] for years. And this is something that, that you both might hear quite often, I’m curious to get your opinion on it. For years, I use the crutch of starting an email list as a call to action for. People building businesses, new businesses, right? So I mentor at a local accelerator, there’s small sort of mom and pop businesses.

[00:17:14] Sometimes there’s like a tech business in there, but generally it might be somebody starting a bakery trying to sell something at a local farmer’s market, but there’s a dozen or so of these local entrepreneurs that come through this cohort twice a year. And I say, if anything they don’t even have websites yet.

[00:17:28] So it’s get a website, get a domain up. And the first thing you do. Is put your email sign up and just get people on a list so that you have something well, what do you do when somebody doesn’t have a call to action? But they’re building an email list. Do they, what comes first chicken or the egg, a call to action.

[00:17:47] Does that have to come first? Does the thing that somebody buys or signs up for? Do they have to figure that out first before building an email list? So that there is a CTA that they can introduce through their storytelling.

[00:17:59] Kim: Are you [00:18:00] asking CTI? Are you referring to a lead magnet having, 

[00:18:02] Matt: Well, if I have a list and I’ve been gathering a list for a few months, people have been signing up. But I’m just blogging and sort of general audience building, but I don’t have a product yet. Should I be figuring out like what that product or service is before I start email marketing? 

[00:18:18] Jason: Nope.

[00:18:19] Kim: yeah. Go ahead, Jason.

[00:18:20] Jason: I would use the email list, figure out what you’re going to. Right. And so in the case of online businesses specific specifically, cause you mentioned local businesses, they have something to sell. They’re doing that. They have a widget or something. So that’s different, right? There’s, there’s some connection that they can make to a sale.

[00:18:39] However, if you’re online and this is like specifically like creators that I run into a lot is that they don’t know what. Or they feel like they have to have something to sell. Like you said before, they actually start emailing people. And I say, well, if you have a social media following an audience could be 1,000 people.

[00:18:58] It doesn’t matter. Start collecting those email addresses, but then start asking questions. Like, why did you sign up today to list? What cha what challenge do you have today that you want to get over? Right. And then it doesn’t have to be the immediate questions, but these are some of the questions that I ask over time.

[00:19:14] When I started daily, I was just like, Just wanted to get that practice of daily. I didn’t really have too much of a call to action to things. And even though that had, did have products and services to pass too, I just wanted have that practice and engage people. And people came, they’re like, Hey, I’ve been on your list for years.

[00:19:33] And I had no idea who these people are and I have a small list. Right. And so. When you start asking questions, the cream rises to the top and then you’re like, okay, well, a lot of people are starting to ask about proposals. If you’re in a freelancer space. Right. So, huh, that’s interesting. Maybe I could sell them, templatize my proposal and sell it for 50 bucks or whatever.

[00:19:54] Right. And so you start to start to see what kind of rises from rises to the top, just based on those replies.

[00:20:03] Kim: Well, and the other piece of that totally agreed. That is one of the. It’s more pressure off if you don’t, if you’re not trying to get them to buy something from you right away, it is that practice. It’s a practice of getting, sending quality content that will improve over time, but also getting people to click the email.

[00:20:18] But what I would suggest is there’s another way. Well, in terms of what to include is the link is. Share other people’s stuff. You become such a trusted expert in your space. When, and there were times where I was like, I don’t even know where to send today. And I was like, I remember finding an article about the creator of Calvin and homes and his journey as a creator.

[00:20:37] It was great article. So I shared the link to the article. That was it. And so when you find things that speak to you or resonate with you, or you just like what someone else is doing, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of Instagram rails. Okay. And there is a couple songs that are in the ton of reels and whatever.

[00:20:53] Is it takes, so it costs so much because it takes me effing hours. Right. I don’t know if you guys have heard that song. It’s hysterical. I’m like, I know the [00:21:00] people on my list are gonna love that. There’s another one that’s drink water and mind my business, but I’m like, I’m gonna sh they’re funny.

[00:21:06] Right? So it’s simple. Even just telling a story about just staying focused and in my space. And I have to have a clear water bottle. So I see that I’m getting my water done. Oh, by the way, this will brighten your day. And it sounds funny, but those are connection and it’s, it’s almost like a breath of fresh air in your inbox that it’s not a pitch and it’s not whatever.

[00:21:25] And so you become a trusted person in their inbox so that when you do have something. Oh, well, she’s not always selling to me. It’s a weird psychology that happens, but there’s a practice and I, and you know what, and celebrate day, if, when you get to that point, because I’m not, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either, but when you’re getting started, just be of service.

[00:21:43] It’s, it’s so much easier you get out of your own head. 

[00:21:46] Matt: Yeah.

[00:21:48] As you both were talking, I’m like thinking again, thinking of that third fear in my head of sending that email and somebody not caring and not subscribing, like we were joking about Hey, I’ve got this vanity metric. It never moves, but that’s because I never send an email. It’s the same way I feel about, with YouTube videos where man, I know.

[00:22:05] People on Twitter and colleagues of mine. They’re like, I don’t watch a video if it’s over five minutes, but nearly every video I put on YouTube is 10 minutes because that’s the, that’s the person I want to watch my YouTube video because I watch 30 minute videos like of reviews. I want every ounce of a review or a detail.

[00:22:26] And that’s why I consume a YouTube video. So you have to, I guess correct me if I’m wrong, but you have to sort of get yourself out of that mode. The people on this list want to be here. if they unsubscribe good, you’re going to lower your costs. You want the people tuning in and reading it and taking actions.

[00:22:43] It’s a fair statement, right? 

[00:22:44] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Look, look, you mentioned Ben settle, right? And he says once you unsubscribe, you’re done. Right. Like I’m not letting you back. I blacklist you out. Right.

[00:22:52] Kim: true. I’ve

[00:22:53] Jason: I know it’s not true. But, but, but that, but that’s the PR that’s the persona that he comes off with. Right. And so. One of the things I tell clients all the time is don’t chase the unsubscribes.

[00:23:05] Don’t worry about the unsubscribes. Don’t even look at open rates. That’s another kind of fuzzy metric at best, but what was the purpose of the email that you wanted? Was the thing, a question. Did you have a question at the end that you wanted to replies back to? Was it a link to a podcast or a blog post?

[00:23:21] Was it a link to a product what’s the end result of every single email that you send out? Look at that because yes, the open rates, the unsubscribe, all of those numbers are right in front of us when we log in to any, any mail platform. And that’s what we see first. But then it’s if you dive deep into the emails oh man, I got zero clicks on this email.

[00:23:43] Yeah, because you didn’t have any links in there. I hit, so you’re not going to get any clicks. Right. But how 

[00:23:49] Matt: That’s probably would have been what I would’ve said. Nobody’s clicking on anything is there’s not one link in the, in the email. 

[00:23:55] Kim: Outside of the unsubscribe.

[00:23:57] Matt: Right, right. 

[00:23:58] Jason: And so that’s, that’s, [00:24:00] that’s the reality of the things like I, I manage client lists and they’re like, they pop in from time to time and they’re like, how, how come there was no, what happened here? Well, there was no, we asked the question. How many replies did you get in your inbox?

[00:24:11] Oh yeah, I got a lot that day. Okay. So that’s when you kind of like, stay, stay focused on what your intent is on it. Every email, whether it’s weekly, daily, whatever, but that, that gets you over that mindset of okay I I’m afraid of the unsubscribes and seeing that tank or the mindset of pressing send because you’re being of service to somebody else that’s on the other end.

[00:24:35] Right. And if that mindset is the big blocker for you I’m sorry. The New York in me is also going to say kind of get over yourself a little bit and give it a try. Right. So.

[00:24:47] Matt: Yeah. 

[00:24:48] Kim: Well, and you have to remember really quick. There are billions of people on the planet, right? There are so many people. And when you were talking about, about like colleagues who don’t do that, it’s funny. That’s why I do an hour long podcast. I get bogged and I’m like, well, it’s only 10 minutes.

[00:25:02] I’m going for a walk. I want to listen to you longer. Right? So that’s why I did an hour long podcast. I like listening to longer shows. And so there are so many people that you can do business with. And so that was kind of circling back to not to plug, deliver it, but we’re going to do this from scratch.

[00:25:18] We both have audiences, we have friends, all of those things, we both done paid traffic at different times. So it’s there is a way to do this. And it’s funny. I actually was testing something, sinking to a Twitter opt-in for a newsletter that linked to convert kit. I sent out like four emails to my entire list.

[00:25:33] Like one afternoon, three weeks ago, I got a ton of unsubscribes, but guess what? Then my click-through rate and the opens went up. I’m like, oh, well that just cleared those people out. So that’s good. Now I need, so it’s just, it’s a game. It really is a game and you don’t have to know it all together.

[00:25:49] You don’t, you just have to get started. 

[00:25:51] Matt: Oh, you’re listening to Jason Resnick and Kim Doyle. We’re about to talk about their new venture, deliver it at, get, deliver it.com/maryport head there, and a link in the show notes. But real quick, before we transitioned to this new open experiment, taking P working in public too, as a building in public to the next level, before we get there real quick Jason, I would guess your favorite tool for this stuff is. you have anything else to recommend or. 

[00:26:16] Jason: Yeah. I I’ve always said look, the technology fit the business. Right. I like converse. Because it basically fits my business as well as my client’s businesses. Have you used active campaign in the past? I’ve used drip. I still do on some clients for both of those things, but if MailChimp works for you, great do it because I just want somebody to the tool.

[00:26:39] Shouldn’t be the stopping point. But yeah, if it was me, I would recommend convert kit because. It would give you the nice, robust platform that you’re actually looking for from not only email, but also automation side of things.

[00:26:53] Matt: And Kim for you. 

[00:26:54] Kim: Ditto I use convert kit also. Although, we use active campaign for the planet. Because it has a deep [00:27:00] integration with WooCommerce. So I think it also, you want to look to your point, like what Jason just said, the business, but for creators, whether you’ve got a handful of products or courses that are, I think convert kit is personally the easiest active campaign with the amount of money they do.

[00:27:14] I still don’t understand why their UI looks like it’s from 1995, but that’s okay. So, I agree and honestly, the best tool is the one that. 

[00:27:21] Matt: Yeah. a hundred percent. It’s like they say like photographers, say the best camera you can have is the camera that’s on you. Right? Whether it’s your phone Or any camera, cameras just as like a side note, like cameras are just the thing that people chase new cameras come out every year.

[00:27:34] People think they can take better photos because they get better cameras when really has nothing to do with the camera. That they have in their hand, it’s about composing the image, telling the story, et cetera, et cetera. Almost I came to this email stuff delivered. This is a public experiment.

[00:27:49] You both are going to be doing the proof is in the pudding thing. Right. You’re both going to build an email list. We’re all going to see it happen. We’re going to see how good you both are way better 

[00:28:00] Kim: aren’t,

[00:28:00] Matt: I was 

[00:28:01] Jason: I was just going to say aren’t.

[00:28:03] Kim: I’m like gonna throw a disclaimer in here somewhere, Matt. 

[00:28:05] Matt: yeah. Yeah. You’re walking across a tight rope. Did you have a strap to hold yourself just in case you fall?

[00:28:10] Explain the experiment to me. What can we all expect to see as you build this delivering. 

[00:28:17] Kim: Well, so what we’ve done together so we did like kind of a. Spreadsheet where we basically have listed all the stuff we’re going to try. And so then it’s Jason’s already been deploying some of, so he’s we’re just going to alternate. We’ll go, he’ll do a few, I’ll do a few and kind of bring it back together.

[00:28:32] So it’s they’re going to be where we are going to put it up on a site. So we’ll have, so you can go back and read it too, and may as well get a little search love and hopefully use a website to grow subscribers also. So, yeah, I don’t even want to jump in with some of the stuff, Jason, it’s just, we really thought let’s, we will own also that we can drive our independent audiences to this as well.

[00:28:54] So we’re not going to pretend we don’t have that. But you’re, we’re only going to promote it to our audiences. It’s not going to be the driving force on a regular basis.

[00:29:03] Jason: Yeah, I think what we want to kind of convey and help is this idea that email is very complex, very technical. It’s a mystery to some people, as far as getting to the inbox, like people worry about spam filters and all these other things, but it’s just like, all right, that stuff aside, let that stuff shake out as does.

[00:29:26] How do we grow a list? Right. And how do we then take that list and actually use it for. Whatever we want, like for business, for personal reasons, whatever you’re looking for, but there’s things that are just as easy as posting on social. That’s a tactic, let’s be intentional about doing that and sharing our newsletter through that means.

[00:29:50] And then there’s complex things like, buying ads in another newsletter, like how well does that work? Right. And so you [00:30:00] could, we’ve got this list. I think last check there was like 23 different kinds of little strategies that we’re going to do, but we’re going. We did walk you through the strategy, the hypothesis, what we think could happen would give the recipe, the step-by-step and then the results good, bad or otherwise.

[00:30:19] And so, it’s kind of like you said, a building public, and we’re gonna just kind of walk the tight rope with every experiment and yeah, I like Kim mentioned, we have audiences, she’s got a bigger Facebook. I don’t ever log on Facebook. I’m more on Twitter.

[00:30:34] Kim: how much I’m in there, but.

[00:30:37] Jason: But so it’s like we can test multiple different things with the same kind of strategy and kind of see what works and what doesn’t work.

[00:30:47] And like you said, at the top was like joining, joining together in this venture kind of like helps, weigh things out and scale things out at a level of. One, I’ll tell you this. I wouldn’t do it myself. So, like it’s just for me, I think that it’s going to be helpful for anybody to kind of stumble upon this. I’d say, yeah, I’m on my podcast and I just started my podcast. How do I grow my email list? What do I want to do with that? How do I then turn that audience into a business, right? Or if you’re selling things on Etsy what does that mean? Now? It sees a closed market or Amazon’s a close market.

[00:31:25] How do I get those email subscribers? So all of these kinds of things, we’ll, we’ll try to unpack. And so. 

[00:31:31] Matt: A user comes to your site. They pay to get access to this information question, mark. 

[00:31:38] Jason: not 

[00:31:38] Matt: Completely free. can people buy? 

[00:31:43] Jason: nothing

[00:31:44] Kim: be determined.

[00:31:45] Matt: To be determined. I love 

[00:31:46] Jason: So we’re 

[00:31:47] Matt: you’re like me. 

[00:31:49] Jason: exactly right. 

[00:31:49] Kim: Oh,

[00:31:51] Jason: yeah.

[00:31:51] Kim: sorry. But, but the thing is like the original thing was a summit, right, Matt. So that was kind of the piece. So we thought, okay, well we can build our own audience to sell the summit too, because again, and we were looking at integrating even. Physical with, with digital, for a summit delivery. We’re like we have to create an experiences, has to be different.

[00:32:09] And so we thought about that at the same time, we’re going to talk about different tools and platforms and stuff. And so now we’re like, okay, now we need to do like a whole. Deliver it, email address for affiliate stuff and see that. Cause then we can share the monetization piece of this as we go, and the thing that I want people to really buy into and hopefully, us doing this, people are gonna buy into email marketing.

[00:32:31] They’re going to get this has to be done. Your email list is an asset. Yes, it’s it’s it is people in relationships first, a hundred percent. But you know, I did a newsletter. I think it was just last week. I was talking about Dan Kennedy uses the phrase income events. If you do not have a list of customers and understand the lifetime value and recurring revenue, you don’t have a business, you have income events and it just kind of slapped me in the face a little bit.

[00:32:55] Okay, well, income events should be the icing on the cake. I want, this is, this needs to be a [00:33:00] business. It really, I joke around that nothing is more, more powerful than notification of payment when you’re doing something else because you have automations running. And I saw the power of that so much with the e-commerce brand, where we had all these up sequences and set out for six, nine months down the road.

[00:33:18] We’re still getting sales from all these people, and these automations are still driving sales and we can go in and look at that. And so, if you’re outside of e-commerce, you can still do that as a creator with, with automations and, oh, I saw you about this. You can buy this, but you know, once you get better at it, but you know, your email list is an asset.

[00:33:36] It may all of a sudden you become a salable business. If you so choose. When you can say, I have a database of 10,000 customers. 52,000 subscribers. I know it was crazy numbers, but the whole thing is the better you get at this, it, you literally can send an email, make money. It just works. And I’m not, I’m not trying to gain from the relationship building piece, but we’re all in business because we have bills to pay and we love what we do hopefully.

[00:34:01] Right.

[00:34:02] Jason: I think, I think to your point though, that that’s, that relationship is why the sale happens. Right. And so, like I switched from weekly. To Daley about 15 months ago. And over that course of that year, I three X my digital products. I didn’t do anything. In fact, I basically scaled back that side of the business, but I three X the digital product and two X my affiliate income.

[00:34:26] And so it was just in creating that relationship that I had with the list and the engagement went up. On a random Wednesday, I would just throw a link. Hey, here’s this thing, I think this can help you. But I was talking about it in the email before, and it was a lesson probably of my kids doing something crazy and that I tied into the business end of things.

[00:34:49] And so you can, that relationship is why the sales happen at the end.

[00:34:54] Matt: Hmm. Have you thought about I’m sure you have, but maybe you just have to put it into practice first, but have you thought about like how long an experiment might run before you report on it? For example, Hey, you might run an experiment on here’s. How many emails signups we get with deliver it when we post to social, when we post a Twitter for a week is that a, an example of something that you might run in this program to report on?

[00:35:18] Five posts Monday through Friday of the signup link, we get 20 subscribers. That was the outcome. Here’s the call to actions we use is that the kind of reports with air quotes that you might be presenting to folks 

[00:35:32] Jason: Yeah, I 

[00:35:32] Kim: I think any data we can pull in, we want to pull in as much data as possible. I would think. Well, it’s sorry. It, and it’s going to depend, like some of it’s going to be more relevant than others, right? Like we’re talking about paid traffic and a newsletter. Okay. Well, I ran this once and that the email list for that newsletter was this many people.

[00:35:52] It averages this many clicks. I got this many clicks. I got this many subscribers. So, it’s, some stuff is going to be lengthy. Other stuff will [00:36:00] be, I ran a contest for seven days. This is what happened. So, but I think as much data that we can pull in as possible.

[00:36:07] Jason: Yeah. And I think, I think from the data itself, I think we’re also going to what the benefit of reading these experiments is. We’re going to evaluate what worked within work and maybe what we change next time we run this. Right. Because without that, the actual thought process around what happened you might just run into those same problems again.

[00:36:31] I, and so like I’m running an experiment right now. That’s I basically gave it 14 days on. And it’s a specific strategy and I’m trying it out and seeing what works. And so today, this morning I went into my data to take a look at what was going on. And I was like, okay, I bet you, next time I could probably do it this way.

[00:36:49] And it would increase the conversion rate. So that’s the kind of stuff that we want to come out of these things. And people say, okay, you know what? I’m not going to do what they mistake made the mistakes on. Now I’m going to do the thing. I’m going to try. The things that they think is going to work.

[00:37:06] Matt: Kim Doyle, Jason Resnick get deliberate.com/matt report. Any final words, any other place you want folks to go to find you on the internet? 

[00:37:16] Kim: We’ll link to our own stuff on this site too. And they can find us that way. So, yeah, I don’t think so. I just think. You’re not going to get comfortable emailing until you start doing it. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

[00:37:29] Matt: Just them. I’m just already thinking about it. 

[00:37:32] Jason: Yeah, look, here’s the thing. Right? So for me, I was like, okay, how am I going to write daily? I don’t have time to do that. You’ve got one more boy than I do, right? So like our boys kind of straddle each other, we could feel like a basketball team. Right. But I was like, there’s no time for this.

[00:37:48] I don’t have time for this. So what I said, and we were talking about atomic habits before I said, I’m going to give myself that first cup of. When I, right. When I get that first cup of coffee there, put it down on my desk. That’s the email session when that’s done, whether the is done or not. That’s, that’s the outcome.

[00:38:07] So I started doing that now. I bought a half a cup of coffee and I get an email out it’s about 15, 20 minutes. And just that practice, just doing it. It just works. 

[00:38:19] Matt: God, those aren’t all. Pre-written every time I get and I’m like, this guy has got a, an archive of how does he do it, doing it, 

[00:38:27] Kim: You’d be surprised. It’s the practice of

[00:38:31] Jason: you go back like you’re, come on your podcast, what’s go back to the first map. And let’s look at today’s right? So I got to look back at that first daily email and I’m like, oh my God, what the heck was I thinking this is terrible. What? And the typos are in there.

[00:38:44] Like I had no workflow, but I started and I just pushed send, let it go. We’ll see what happens. And I told my list. That’s the other thing I think that people forget is tell your list when you’re going to send and commit, commit to it. If you can’t do daily, say I’m going to send it [00:39:00] week. And then they know when to look for.

[00:39:03] Matt: Yeah, 

[00:39:04] Kim: I just want to add one more thing with this. When you were talking about the like with us collaborating and doing this and stuff. It’s so funny because I’ve seen this term come up a lot lately, lately, and it’s called permissionless marketing it’s joint ventures, right? Like we’ve got to reinvent everything and make it, I guess, less markety, but it’s people forget, like with email marketing, You can collaborate and not just on a project, but there’s no reason.

[00:39:30] I’ve promoted Jason in my emails, he’s done it. I’ve thrown a new mat. Like it’s just find people who have your audience and go be people again and start sharing value. Right? Like it’s okay. Not everything. I think when paid traffic blew up, people forgot to lean into people with like-minded audiences or complimentary audiences and just getting in front of people.

[00:39:51] Again, I think that we’re going to bring both sides to this where. I really just want people to get out of their heads and just start, you have to start, and then you can focus on mastery, and, and so I think that’s kind of where we marry this together too, but just, there are so many ways to grow an email list and I dunno, we just overthink it.

[00:40:08] And again, it’s an asset. Your email is as an asset.

[00:40:13] Matt: I promise I’ll send an email. So by the time somebody hears this episode, I’ll send an email. You’ll have it in your inbox. It will probably say

[00:40:20] Jason: This episode.

[00:40:21] Matt: Yeah about, yeah. About This episode. That’s what I’ll do. There you go. You’ll be the first episode I email email out and about. I’m not even joking. Three years.

[00:40:30] Oh boy. Get delivery.com. Get delivered.com/matt report. That’s where you can find out more information with what Kim and Jason are up to. I’m excited to follow along and learn a bunch of stuff if you want it. The Matt report, buy me a copy.com/matt reports by me. A copy.com/mat report for $79 for the year.

[00:40:48] You can join our discord server and chat about the WordPress news every week, every Wednesday. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you in the next episode.

[00:00:00] Matt: so many folks who sit on the sidelines and Monday quarterback like me I see folks sell their business and , and they joined the team and I know in my heart that as a builder, as an entrepreneur, , they won’t be there that long.
[00:00:14] And they’re there for a year. I think roughly you were at WP engine for a year after selling studio
[00:00:20] Brian: press to them longer than that. But it sort of been to which in and of itself as a piece of conversation. Go ahead.
[00:00:26] Matt: And then I saw you sort of leave P and L I was like, yep. I knew it. And there’s nothing wrong with that because God that we have such a passion to build something, but I don’t know of anyone who’s who sells it to the company, leaves built something else, sells it back to the company and.
[00:00:41] You’re going for a hat trick question, mark.
[00:00:44] Brian: No. No. And in fact, it’s, it’s funny, you are the only person who, with the exception of Bob Paul, Lacey, who had months ago made a kind of comment about that. You’re the only person in this round when I got hired and when Frost was acquired to actually have.
[00:01:01] Pointed that out. And of course I took that bait and this is why we’re on the show today. But I talked to our PR team and I was like, look, this is just something that could be a thing that people might talk about or in this context. And surprisingly, and that’s fine because it’s really, it really was a news event.
[00:01:16] This time around Yeah. I was just like, okay, what are the possible negative reactions? People might have to something like this. And I was like, that’s about the only thing I can come up with. Well, people may point out that this happened and it, whatever, it’s all good. Everyone’s happy. You’ve built a
[00:01:31] Matt: lot of stuff from digital products to courses, to eBooks, to blogs, to knit mail email lists and newsletters, like all things that were in some form or fashion, a business, a micro business.
[00:01:43] When I saw you. Go back to a WP engine and they had acquired frost in my head. I started thinking, you know what, these, and this is my words, not yours. And I hope it doesn’t offend you. But these micro products are almost like a fantastic calling card to get an awesome gig. Right. Ha had it not been you, but somebody else in this position, it could be like, I built an awesome little product.
[00:02:11] And sometimes the weight of that is like, oh God, I got to S I get up market. I gotta sell it. I gotta promote it. I gotta support it. I got to take over the world. But then sometimes it’s like, no, I can actually use this in place of a resume and get an awesome job somewhere. Is that a fair statement?
[00:02:27] Brian: I would think so.
[00:02:28] I don’t think that that necessarily applies to everybody. We know right now, Matt, that the competitive landscape in WordPress is off the charts, especially in light of the behemoths. And, and we’re one of them, right? WP, engine, GoDaddy, liquid web, all those it’s really difficult to, and I’ll conversely, make a counter argument here after this.
[00:02:47] It’s very difficult to like create and launch something new and have it be successful and widely adopted and so on now, conversely. That is also, if you have the idea, something really, really brilliant, that really solves a problem that catches a lot of users and stuff like that. Then it becomes because of aforementioned behemoths, a very interesting acquisition piece, right?
[00:03:07] Go to liquid web. They’ve bought a lot of things lately. None of them have been, well, that’s not true. Some have been larger, right. Eye themes and so on. And then some of them are just like smaller pieces that kind of fill a niche that allow them to use their sort of their. The abilities to reach and build and support from an infrastructure standpoint, a subset of people.
[00:03:28] And so it can work. It can be, I wouldn’t necessarily say that should be someone’s business plan. Just given my tenure in the industry and the success I’ve had, it’s been helpful to have that sort of be true.
[00:03:41] Matt: Web hosts, obviously WP engine being one of the largest, if not the largest managed WordPress hosts in the industry GoDaddy liquid web.
[00:03:49] I think a lot of folks myself included have sort of illustrated this picture, that well, we all kind of hypothesized that they’re all looking to build and curate their own WordPress experience. Without giving away the secret meetings, maybe at WP engine and the secret sauce. Is that, is that something that you see coming down the pipe, maybe if not WP engine others, and maybe why they acquire fros and studio presses to sort of put these pieces in place.
[00:04:19] So when you come to a WP engine, you experienced WordPress. You go to liquid web, you experience it that way. Is, is that something that you see as holding true in the year 20, 20
[00:04:28] Brian: a hundred percent, a hundred percent. I think we see it on several levels. And even outside of the WordPress market, just the, sort of the consolidation, the platform building, go daddy sold domains back in the day.
[00:04:39] Then they went to hosting. And then when they realized that the people who are buying those things would buy other things or are doing other things. Then all of a sudden they’re an email marketing company and then, oh, WordPress explodes. Now we’re going to be a WordPress hosting email, but like, like, and so yes, it makes sense.
[00:04:54] And everyone’s good at what they do. And when you really find what you’re great at, then you sort of, I wouldn’t say exploit, but then you really sort of double down on that by looking around in the space and saying, Hey, are there products that align with what we’re trying to do? And is it, is it better for us to acquire those products?
[00:05:10] Because it takes us less time to build. We can go right to market. We can, there’s an existing audience as studio press was a huge audience that WP engine picked up and things like that. So yeah, I would say that’s a fair state. Do you know,
[00:05:21] Matt: there’s in the news and the courting eh, in the week of this week, it’s January 13th.
[00:05:27] And we’ve seen over the last week, just a lot of discussion of paying contributors in the WordPress space. It’s something that I’ve always thought of too, like going way back, like how. All these folks volunteer. They all have to go through the stress of like a theme developer. Like I was way, way, way back in the day, asking them why didn’t this team get approved?
[00:05:47] Why are you telling me I have to adjust this tab space in the functions file. Like it’s so subjective. I should just be like, lots of stress. That folks don’t really need to go through as volunteers now resurfacing again, how to get people paid. I think hosting companies are in a good position since.
[00:06:06] Winning off of the back of WordPress, that there could be something there, more sponsored contributions more ways to it doesn’t doesn’t maybe always have to be about payments. It could be about featuring or highlighting or spotlighting folks because not everybody wants to make money off their volunteer ism with WordPress.
[00:06:25] Is, are there any efforts or maybe. Contributing more to core with paid positions, let’s say. Is that kind of a topic fall under a principal developer advocate at WP engine? Are those the kinds of things you hear in field for the company?
[00:06:41] Brian: Yes. WP engine did not hire me so that I could go write code for WordPress.
[00:06:45] Let’s let’s be clear about that. Damn they did. However, Hire me because of my expertise, my tenure in the field, my ability to understand the value that I could bring through the WordPress and WP engine sort of relationship. And as part of the leeway and the latitude I’ve been given to go do my thing. I brought on Nick Diego, who is an engineer.
[00:07:07] And I learned V and he, he actually was supposed to backfill me with frost before the acquisition for us was going to be a side project. And because of my job, I brought in Nick to help sort of carry the load until I realized how much Nick and I aligned and what a resource he could be. And so I made the recommendation that we hire him as part of a developer relations so that we could do the very thing, right.
[00:07:28] Part of his responsibilities and part of what I pitched was. There is an opportunity for us to sort of lead the space from a thought leadership perspective to help contribute code as he and I were both knee deep and code following along, the Gutenberg development where press 5.9 and stuff.
[00:07:43] And I said, there’s a lot of things that we’re finding as we’re working through building our thing that instead of just trying to like make a fix or a hack inside of our product Contribute that code or that patch or the fix, or the suggested way of doing things upstream back to WordPress.
[00:07:59] And so a lot of the work that we’re doing now is in fact core contribution stuff. Nick is also going to be doing some stuff with learn. And so w. WP engine just really understands the value of sort of the five for the future stuff. We’ve got several members committed to that. We just recently did it contribute to WP day where we really encouraged a lot of the folks in the community to do stuff like that.
[00:08:20] And so I’m because like you said, I have one with WordPress for 15 years now. Right. It helped me leave my day job. Provides for my family and stuff like that. So I always have a place in my heart. It’s easier now because I have the backing and support of WP engine and our resources to kind of make that move.
[00:08:38] And I’m not getting any resistance from the higher ups there. They, I think they see the value and the contributions and sort of the, the PR that comes from that. There’s some, there’s some benefit there. But we just want to see WordPress get better. So our products and our customers experience.
[00:08:54] Matt: How does frost fold into speaking of customer experience? How does frost fold into the. The existing suite of softwares that you sold them studio press. How does that merge? Is, are we still too early on, on those days for those, for those discussions, but how does it fold into the experience of WP engine users or potentially even studio press users?
[00:09:15] So
[00:09:15] Brian: this pet, let me give some context. So th this past summer after a sort of a failed attempt at doing something in the real estate space I came across an article. Written by Justin tablet on WP Tavern. And in that article, he was talking about block patterns and this is sort of as like the patterns kind of were hitting their infancy and they talk about there being a pattern directory and stuff like that.
[00:09:38] I’ve obviously followed WordPress even while I was sort of away doing some things with real estate. I was like, okay, we sold studio press in part because I had no idea what the future of WordPress was going to be. Right. That was part of the reason we just didn’t have the resources. We weren’t sure we, we didn’t want to compete.
[00:09:52] And so we sold that.
[00:09:58] We talked, I’m a creator. I’m always thinking I always want to build and do stuff like that. And so, so when I was on this article, I went over to the, the pattern repository or the directory and it, there was like a little tile of patterns and there’s a button that said click to copy code or whatever, copied it.
[00:10:13] I went into my blog, so I was doing something and I just hit paste. And like this thing showed up like this arrangement of design. And I was like, wait a second. I like that. That’s like a theme agnostic design agnostic thing. And I think it was like, at that point was when sort of, it was very, very like original epiphany that kind of backed the frost project.
[00:10:33] When I was like, wait a second. Now I understand where we’re presses going. Right. These idea of blocks and styles and patterns and layouts that like kind of all these words being thrown around. And I was like, wait a second. So I can create these sections of. Website and in one click allow people to import them into a page.
[00:10:50] And like, if you did that five or six times, you could essentially allow people to build a homepage and like literally 20 seconds. And I was like, okay, so that that’s sorta was the, the original fire that was lit around frost. And so, because at the time it just made sense. I built frost originally as a Genesis child theme, just because right.
[00:11:08] Part of the family. It was what I’ve always known. And so we launched a paid product called frost and it was a theme and it was a corresponding plugin that had all of the designs and the patterns and stuff like that. And then full site editing started to become more of a thing. And so I installed Gutenberg and realized.
[00:11:25] There’s going to be life after Genesis the framework, because a lot of what full site editing does is what Genesis did it handled markup and the ability to move things around. And so I said, well, Let’s do what I did back in 2006, let’s open up a bunch of blank files and start writing a theme from scratch.
[00:11:43] And so current version of frost, probably three months ago was literally just sort of modeled after stuff I saw. I think it was on Carolina’s full site editing or some tutorial on like, what is. Full site editing theme, look like it’s got to have these files, the structure, it’s a complete paradigm shift from where it was.
[00:12:00] And I was like, let’s just see if I could do this. And so I basically replicated the design of the Genesis child theme version of frost and started building out current version of frost. So that became a thing. And we launched it, started selling it. I was trying to extend a little bit of financial runway so that I could keep playing around with what I was doing.
[00:12:17] So I reached out to Heather Bruner, our CEO just to say hi to check in and just see if she knew of anybody in the industry who might be looking for some contract work. And at the same time internally, they were talking about WordPress developer relations. And she says, funny, you should ask because we’ve been thinking of this position and I don’t know.
[00:12:34] That there’s anybody better suited for it than you, which is the intersection of what I told her design community and WordPress. And so, we worked out something that made a lot of sense at the time frost was on the outside which I felt conflicted about because a lot of the work I was going to be doing was around WordPress and building and stuff like that.
[00:12:50] And so, ultimately I made the recommendation that we just bring it into. Into the fold so that I can work on it. Full-time we can use that as a way to demonstrate where WordPress is going to teach folks in the community what’s going on. And so on.
[00:13:02] Matt: So it doesn’t detach from you. It’s not like, okay, now it’s gone into the abyss of WP engine.
[00:13:07] My
[00:13:07] Brian: is not. And Nick and my F yeah, no, it’s under our full control. It’s a developer relations project.
[00:13:13] Matt: Yeah. Did you, when you sat back, did you have those same feelings of okay. I going to do this again. I have to build, well, you already have a headstart with your brand and recognition and followers and all that stuff.
[00:13:26] But even that, I’m sure you’re still like, oh God, I gotta, I gotta do this all over again. I gotta set up a checkout system. I have to set up a licensing system. I, I have to market this thing. I gotta support. And I
[00:13:36] Brian: gotta do all this stuff a hundred percent.
[00:13:38] It was exciting just because it had been since studio press formed way back in the day where I was really fully in control, as we merged into Copyblogger in 2008 or nine, and then for like 10 or 12 years, we had sort of the infrastructure of the company and stuff like that.
[00:13:52] So I didn’t have to like, bear that load independently. As I had at the beginning of studio press. And so like, it’s a different space than it was back then. And, and thankfully I have the cloud, the email lists sort of the reach, the exposure to WordPress. So it made sense. It didn’t quite hit the way I was hoping that a studio press did back in the day, but again, we’re in different times and that’s okay.
[00:14:16] But you know, like at the end of the day, what it came down to was for the last 15 years I’ve been doing sort of the self-employment entrepreneur things start up, you feel sort of a thing. And even like early on into frost, I was like, this is going to be another long thing and that’s fine. I like this kind of thing.
[00:14:33] And I think it would have done well on its own. But I was just ready. I was ready for, and I wrote about this on a torque article about seasons change. I was just ready to finally work for somebody else to, to have access to team members, to be fully supported, to get good benefits, pay, like all of those things.
[00:14:48] I just, I needed a mental break and, I foresee this break being of several years, not just like a couple months, so
[00:14:54] Matt: you said, I feel like frost didn’t hit. Maybe like studio press fell, but different times, is that a gut feeling?
[00:15:02] Did you measure it , instinctually as somebody who’s launched so many things, did you just kind of know like, okay. I’m not feeling that momentum as I maybe did 10 years ago, Yeah.
[00:15:13] Brian: Like when you sell something, when you build something and sell something, like you kind of get into this mindset, like, oh, I could do it again.
[00:15:19] Right. Once lucky, twice. Good. And, and had I stuck with it, like just me and or Nick at that time, it would have taken probably some time to really get it to a point where it was humming WordPress itself sorta was getting in the way, because it just, it wasn’t delivering things that we were looking forward to using and stuff like that.
[00:15:35] So it was part gut. , okay, this isn’t going to make me a hundred million dollars. Like maybe even a hundred dollars would be great sort of a thing. But I just, as like, like I wanted, I wanted power behind it, not just to have to rely on me. And like I said, I was ready, it was serendipitous me reaching out to Heather, her coming back to me, presenting the offer.
[00:15:55] And it’s kind of like, she was like, basically let you do what you want to be doing and what you’ve been doing for 15 years, just under the guise of WP engine and, having gone through the acquisition and the transition for the year afterwards. I had a ton of insight into their culture. And that made it a really easy decision to make, because that was not, is this a company I want to work for?
[00:16:15] Cause the answer is hell yeah, I knew, I know how the cultures there. I think a lot of people on the outside don’t understand how, how cool and great it is, especially we’re 1200 strong. But I was like, wow, this is like almost a dream.
[00:16:26] Matt: Yeah. I remember people talking about WP engine, just like when, when they hit 400 people, they, wow.
[00:16:32] Like, that’s amazing. And now it’s like triple and probably just chasing automatic, which I, I think just hit the 2000 mark or just under 2000. So, it’s pretty amazing to see like pure. Play companies. Because again, WP engine is only doing WordPress, right? You haven’t introduced at other CMS yet.
[00:16:50] Right? There’s nothing they’re getting into headless that might introduce some stuff that might be outside of the realm of WordPress, but you’re certainly not hosting Drupal anytime soon,
[00:16:59] Brian: correct? Correct.
[00:17:01] Matt: That’s awesome. Can we chat about the real estate endeavor for a moment? You said it fair.
[00:17:09] Anything that you can point to as to maybe why wrong time global pandemic, what was going on with that, with that real estate endeavor of yours. And why did you decide to just exit it?
[00:17:21] Brian: So I’ve always been interested in real estate. We’ve bought and sold houses over the years, probably 10 over the last 20 years and an agent press, which you may remember was a thing that we did a copy of.
[00:17:31] For a few years. So we dabbled in it and I realized just how bad design and marketing is in that space. Generally speaking compass being the exception and maybe a few others. And so I was like, okay, well I have, through the years, I’ve made several relationships with people sort of higher up in the real estate industry.
[00:17:50] So I knew I’d kind of have like an easy launch pad. I get design. I could build it on a WordPress. I’ve got some spokespeople people who could sort of be advisers to the company who are, experiencing Zillow and all that kind of stuff. And then the pandemic hit and what happened really was probably a couple of things.
[00:18:04] One, it probably just wasn’t built in packaged the right way. But number two real estate agents got really, really busy because of the housing. They, they, everyone, you would follow it. Oh, I have 36 offers today. Like nobody has time or at the time they didn’t feel the need to have a website because their business was exploding.
[00:18:24] I don’t have time for a website I’m standing in line at open houses. Like, and the sad thing is like in six months or a year, whenever the housing market comes back to earth. Done dental need it, then they’ll be like, oh crap. Cause now that you’ve got a bunch of new agents, people who jumped into the market because of all of what was going on.
[00:18:41] So then like the, the demand will go down, but like the supply of agents then is there. And so there’s more competition, but I was like, I, I don’t have time to weather, all of that. And then frost kind of came up and, things with agent engine, just kind of, weren’t really doing its thing. And I was like, I was okay with that.
[00:18:55] It was a good college try
[00:18:57] Matt: because it was more like it was more agency. Experience than just a product, right? Cause
[00:19:02] Brian: you were, I know it was more product based. It was more, we call it digital spaces where we sort of built Jason Schuler of WordPress fame sort of built this profile management system, which I thought was really gonna take off with like associations or, brokerages that had teams of people that wanted to sort of showcase them individually.
[00:19:21] Like the idea on paper was really, really good. I think we just poorly executed at the wrong time. So. But I’m okay with that. Like lessons learned, right. We’re here where we are.
[00:19:29] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I tell you it’s what an interesting time, because you had real estate agents who, you know, probably whatever, maybe not immediate at the pandemic hitting, but a couple months in just being just the fish were jumping into the boat.
[00:19:44] You didn’t even have to cast a line in they’re like website. I don’t have time for a website, but then. This whole range at an opposite end of an industry restaurants who are like, oh, we never launched that website. And now we have to do takeout a hundred percent of the time. I know I had, I haven’t been in the, my data.
[00:20:04] I, my dad runs the agency. I’m well beyond that at th at this point, but it still runs. And I had tons of people calling me at that moment. Literally watching the news restaurants are shutting down, calling me up. Like, I need that website, Matt. , where, where are you? Five 10 years ago when we were telling you to do this a crazy, crazy time for web and for people who haven’t caught up at that point.
[00:20:26] When I look at. You were saying before, like one of your aha moments with Gutenberg was I copied and pasted and it was kind of like, wow, I can see where the vision is going. Matt Mullenweg could always talk, has always talked about WordPress being like the operating system of the web. That was something that was always interesting to me is what really kept me motivated with WordPress.
[00:20:48] I now see this hearing him say that Gutenberg is bigger than WordPress, sort of, kind of nonchalantly in the state of the word. I kind of see maybe that same thing of fusing, like the operating system with code. So Genesis studio press remember back in the day, you’re building it all through the functions.
[00:21:06] PHP file. I can imagine a world where now you’re just copy pasting snippets of code, like the query blocks and stuff like that. Pre pre queried for you. Like all the codes there. Boom, copy paste it. And now I’m developing air quotes to the listener. Who’s only listening to audio. Developing by copying pasting snippets of code and dropping blocks in do you have any other future out look on, on where Gutenberg might be going?
[00:21:31] Maybe things you might be looking at to build into Gutenberg. Into frost that would push the boundaries.
[00:21:38] Brian: Nothing monumental. I We’re just obviously following along where WordPress is going, this it’s taken us three years to get here. We’re working through this now full site editing thing, which I th I think is still gonna take some time.
[00:21:50] Right. Which we’ve already seen the delay from December to January. And I was in full support of that. Cause I didn’t think it was going to be ready and I’m more than okay. Especially now that I don’t have to. Like obsess over building a product and like put food on the table based on what I sell. Now it’s like kind of a kickback and just follow along as it’s happening.
[00:22:09] And, Nick and I are on get hub and select daily, oh, do you see this commit? Do you see this change? And I’ll be honest. I don’t know that there are many people in the group of people who are at the forefront of what’s going on with WordPress. Then he and I right now, because we are so. We practically have alerts going off, in our own heads.
[00:22:27] I just posted 30 seconds ago. How would I see that? Because we, we love it so much. We, we absolutely are infatuated. We call ourselves black editor, fanboys. Like it’s, it’s kinda crazy and almost embarrassing the extent, but 15 years later, I’m still in love with WordPress. The way that I was and even more so now, because I’m starting to see.
[00:22:46] WordPress itself, starting to solve the problems that we tried to solve back in the day with like magazine style themes and stuff like that. It’s so easy to want to still primarily build your own thing and around it. And, we’re presses now making it so easy with where it’s going. It’s not perfect and never will be, but they’re doing things in a way that make it really easy for people like me to sort of identify where the opportunities are.
[00:23:10] And especially those who love design. I could do so much with just WordPress core and a simple theme so much. And that’s how I felt back when I launched revolutions. Like, Hey.
[00:23:20] Matt: And as a product owner and business owner, software developer, you kind of get that this stuff iterates over time.
[00:23:28] And when Gutenberg first launched and everyone just like flipped the table, which, I was one of those folks too, but it was more about how, it was being communicated, how it was being like, whatever the Pictet at the time and enrolled that it had nothing to do about. You know the features of Gutenberg.
[00:23:43] Although I still struggle with trying to like grab a block and put it in between two columns is like still a thing that I have to like wrestle and throw my computer with. I always knew like, Hey, this thing’s going to get better.
[00:23:54] It’s just version 0.0 0, 0 1 that we’re at like, don’t we all like, there’s so many software people in this space. Why was everybody losing their mind? That it wasn’t good enough yet? This software’s never good enough day one. It always gets better over time. Any thoughts on like the iteration of Gutenberg or how you looked at the launch of Gutenberg when that.
[00:24:12] Yeah,
[00:24:12] Brian: I was the same way. I wasn’t sure it was very clunky. I think it kind of got rushed out back in that, that one December. But I think it had to be, I at some point we met that’s written before about 1.0 and shipping and iterating and stuff like that. And so I think it was a necessary evil I think Gutenberg, the plugin being a thing now sort of, kind of pulls up.
[00:24:30] From the core and like the general consumer standpoint, like seeing these sort of iterations and breaking changes and things like that, they’ve put it in the plugin, which, which is helpful because it allows people who are developing for WordPress to see what’s coming to know how to address it. When it looked like a lot of people, when 5.9 launches, they’ll be like, oh, w what’s changed since 5.8.
[00:24:50] Oh, my God, if you even knew, like so much has changed, but like, we’ll be ready for it. Like frost will be 100% production ready when five, it is already, but you know, when 5.9 ships will be fully taken advantage of all the things. Cause we’ve been on the Gutenberg daily trail ever since then.
[00:25:06] But speaking of Sarah McLaughlin, one of the 11 tweets I’ve favorited in my 15 years of Twitter was her response. She did ask me anything and I said, what’s your favorite quote? And she quoted Gandhi’s be the change you want to see in the world. And , obviously that that’s sort of ubiquitous and we see it all the time.
[00:25:21] But when it comes to WordPress and the direction, and this is sort of like Nick and my north star, which is, oh, this isn’t working, we’re frustrated with how this works. Well, you could do two things. You could piss about it and like, go on Twitter and talk about how bad it is. Or you can roll up your sleeves and figure out how to make it better.
[00:25:36] And that is a lot of what we’re doing. With developer relations at WP engine, we’re teaming up with people on automatic side where other people’s sides, rich Taylor is a good friend and we’re trying to figure out how do we, universalize some things and just like really be that change.
[00:25:50] And, we hope not only will that make WordPress better, maybe some of the people on the sidelines, these Monday quarterbacks as you call them, maybe it’ll say, Hey, maybe there’s something to like, Approach that they’re taking, and maybe it’s less about, dogging the platform that helped us win and helping it when, when, when for others and stuff like that.
[00:26:09] Matt: Yeah. I can tell you that the one thing that Sort of afraid of is just the the pollution, I guess, of the block directory and what that potentially leads to in a customers. I say customer, I’m thinking I have agency on my mind, but thinking of you logging into somebody’s website, who’s not a WordPress aficionado.
[00:26:28] And then. You have a thousand plugins installed. What’s wrong with you? I can see that same thing happening with like the block directory, especially some of the things I’ve already starting to see where product companies are starting to inject their icon into like a, I don’t know. I’ll call the task bar.
[00:26:46] I don’t know what the official WordPress name is for that tray that sits above the editor where you can expand in different. And then, like I w installed a couple of themes the other day on one of my test sites. And it was just like, it looked like the bottom of my windows machine. Like all these icons, , oh, crazy.
[00:27:01] We go again. , I don’t want this. I can see some people doing like animated gifts now. And , oh, come on. , this is bad enough. Notifications already bad enough. Those types of things that you, you hope to maybe standard eyes across other product companies, is there like an official place you start to document this kind of thing to get everybody together or in a perfect world.
[00:27:20] Is there a place you’d like to have for folks to rally around these types of things?
[00:27:26] Brian: A good question. W we are guilty of that. Nick, Nick built a black pattern Explorer plugin. That adds a very I think we just recycled one of the core icon components that are part of WordPress. So again, we’re not trying to do anything proprietary, so, we’ve created.
[00:27:41] Block pattern, explore that very much is maybe maybe inspired what WordPress itself did in core. And we’re looking to sort of expand on that and use that sort of in an experimental sense to help inform how things work, how it can be used, and then to take the things that we’re building and push them upstream into WordPress, via pull requests.
[00:28:01] And so, we are trying to, again, it’s easy because for us, it’s not a product that will. WP engine over any kind of metric. Like this was sort of brought in with the intent of, it’s not gonna make any money, just use this to help go and grow and do all these things. And so, we’ve always back when Nathan and I Nathan Rice and I built Genesis, like we always sort of defaulted to WordPress core practices and standards and design and UX and all that kind of stuff.
[00:28:28] And so. It’s just an eight and eight at this point, for whatever we’re working on to not be like a blinking Marquis across an admin notice thing. But I understand that it happens and why it happens. And, I think WordPress adding more capabilities to the core software, kind of. To be perfectly honest, that it knocks out the need for a lot of things.
[00:28:49] Some of the black libraries that exist and things like that, like we’re pressing now has that in core. So like, I’m hoping to, like, as we’re press gets stronger with functionality that some of the needs to, to like to do what you said, won’t be there. And I don’t know if I answers the question, but are you happy to see the customized.
[00:29:08] 1000%. I, I hated it from day one. I hated it from day one. I know we did some stuff with it and studio press. I was never a part of that. Cause I refused I’ve used it for a few things like custom CSS when I was in an emergency or, header, photo, script kind of stuff. But like I hated it. I never liked it.
[00:29:27] I’m thrilled.
[00:29:28] Matt: Yeah. . Amazing times, Ryan, what would help you and your role at WP engine call to action? Where can folks find you to connect with you to help the cause to join you at WP engine?
[00:29:41] Anything or anywhere you want to point people
[00:29:42] Brian: to a yes, the Twitter is probably the place that I’m most I’m most active and most available. At B Gardner, you could put that in the show notes, if you want. Tweet me, follow me, DME, whatever. Twitter is usually where we hang out. I’m on Instagram, that’s more personal Starbucks shots and baseball things.
[00:30:00] So that’s less interesting to people in the space might not be tweeting about baseball. Yeah, no kidding. I’m on LinkedIn and I think it’s B Gardner 27 and I was late to that party, so I didn’t get the handle I wanted, but but Twitter is the place. I’m, periodically dunking [email protected] actually working on a new design, kind of using that as a sandbox.
[00:30:19] Yes. Oops. I’m doing it again was always sort of the tweet when you saw that tweet, I redesigned it. And so people have, I’ve trained people to never, ever think that there’s going to be the same design as, as was there the last time, but that that’s how products get built because I use my own site as a sandbox.
[00:30:34] So, but yeah, Twitter is the best place. Obviously or for WP engine, we’re always looking to build our team, not necessarily developer relations quite yet, but The Genesis team is hiring for an engineering person. And just whether it’s support. I We see a number of people come up through the Genesis community who are now working there, lots of rock stars.
[00:30:52] Like it’s just a great place. So, if you’re a WordPress person and you’re looking for a job, hit me up on Twitter and I’ll see if there’s something that’s Always hiring great people. I think David Vogel, Paul once said we don’t hire something to the effect of, we don’t hire qualified people. We’ve hired great people.
[00:31:07] Like it kinda just works itself out that way. So, or we don’t hire out. I can’t remember what he said. I don’t, I don’t wanna mess up that quick, but it was really, really good. And I was like, wow, that’s really cool. So quote here
[00:31:17] Matt: pretty much. My report.com maryport.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list.
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[00:31:41] Five minutes is your favorite five minutes of WordPress or on the WP minute.com. Check it out. Join the. Get your name heard in the credits of the show. Talk about WordPress news. That’s fun stuff. Thanks for hanging out today, Brian. I’ll see everyone else in the next episode.

[00:00:00] Matt: my words, not yours. , the bottleneck at mid-level management. Is that because most, if not if, if, because most of them are volunteers. 

[00:00:07] Josepha: I, in my copious research about this. Last I took any, any kind of canvas of it was that in-person events. So 2019 in my research about this, there are a number of things that do this for one, when you are a contributor and, and it’s clear what you’re supposed to be contributing to, you can submit your changes and then something else helps it get done.

[00:00:34] Something else helps it get into core or to get into the handbook or whatever it is. It’s really difficult to know how complicated that that middle area is. And so it’s a little bit that the it’s a bunch of volunteers and, and I hate asking them to do that kind of work because it’s hard and in a lot of cases, The community of users is mean to you.

[00:01:02] So like who does want to ask volunteers to do that? But it’s also a little bit that there is some sticker shock. When you, when you get there, like you have shown up as a contributor, you have just kind of low access, low knowledge. You don’t really know what’s going on, but you’re ready to give back to this thing that made your business possible.

[00:01:19] And like the more that you learn things, or the more that you gain trust in the ecosystem, there is this moment. That’s like a cliff where you’re just like, okay, now we’re going to talk about conflict resolution. And people are like, oh, no, 

[00:01:36] Matt: yeah. Right. 

[00:01:38] Josepha: like there’s the step between between really active and valuable contribution and helping to keep WordPress moving is, is quite steep.

[00:01:50] And so it’s a lot better.

[00:01:51] Matt: Some of the topics that I’ve heard people talk about myself, included on con contributors or, or folks who are not just contributing to core, but writing support docs, answering questions, helping with the learn team. So on and so forth is the the idea of some form of compensation.

[00:02:08] And I’m curious if that ever gets talked about in any, any meetings ways to compensate. It doesn’t always have to be, I guess, money but a trade a coupon, Right.

[00:02:18] To a learning, a learning curve or something for thanks for your time. You get this and I’ll say I’ll preface this with yes. Contributors are taking the heat for things that they’re just given their time.

[00:02:32] Like, why are we yelling at them or the real extreme sides we’ve seen with folks who are on like the.org and plugin, repo and theme repo who actually get threats. And I say look at that level, we should actually have employees who are in the way of that kind of communication who are getting paid to deal with some of this stuff.

[00:02:55] Not that anyone should be dealing with it and any of that stuff, but folks who are, Hey, we’re [00:03:00] getting paid to do this, and we’re going to shut this person off. Have rules, have channels, et cetera, et cetera, on the topic of compensating contributors. Has that ever come up? And is there anything we can 

[00:03:11] Josepha: Oh, constantly. It comes up constantly. It’s a good question. 

[00:03:15] Matt: Get an NFT? 

[00:03:18] Josepha: everyone gets a word press coin now. So there, there are two things I want to address here. And the first thing that I want to address is only semi-related, but it’s short. There is a misconception about what I hope five for the future.

[00:03:33] Company sponsored contributors are offering to the project in that it’s like doing all of the things that just, I don’t know, Google wants our automatic wants. And that’s like, that’s, that’s not the bulk of the work that I want those contributors to be doing the bulk of the work that I want those contributors to be doing.

[00:03:54] Is that kind of really not glamorous fully in service to self sponsored, volunteer kind of actions that we have to take to make sure that everything’s moving forward. And so like, I agree that in the cases where we have people who are actively getting harassed or receiving threats, like that should not be a self sponsored, volunteer every single time.

[00:04:18] That should be somebody who is sponsored in full by a company. And I, and I will believe that forever. And so there’s that blanket statement. I know that there is a lot of, of mistrust of my many years running a call to increase the fight for the future program, but it’s not a nefarious call for me.

[00:04:38] It is to cover situations like that. Absolutely. Every single day. That’s why I want that program to be bigger. So period, 

[00:04:46] Matt: And nefarious in what like that fight for the future is just to give back to go upstream, to. 

[00:04:52] Josepha: yeah, go upstream to automatic or to have an unnecessarily large voice for corporations because if you’ve got. 10,000 contributors who each can give one hour or 10,000 hours, which are in 40 hour chunks.

[00:05:11] Like you can accomplish more in a 40 hour chunk of time for a lot of reasons for one, because like it’s just been 10 years, since one person could see everything that was happening in WordPress all the time. And, and probably longer than that before, since you could just be like, I have an hour, so I’m going to go research the history of this, write a patch and submit it to be committed and get that done in an hour a month.

[00:05:38] Like that’s like, there is an imbalance in that. And so there is a healthy distrust of that, of that reality, which I understand, and there should be. And I never tell people to start. Asking me those questions, because it’s important for everyone to feel like they can help [00:06:00] provide checks and balances for, for their leaders.

[00:06:03] I think that’s true. But anyway, I got really sidetracked on the question of compensation. Yeah, it comes up basically every year and has come up basically every year since I started doing this work. And, and I don’t ever have a good solution and, and the primary solution that people offer to me every year, which is a fine solution at a specific scale is to just like, make a.

[00:06:30] And give money to people and yeah, I appreciate it. That’s a great suggestion at a specific scale, and that’s not necessarily the scale that WordPress can function at at this point. Like there probably was a time when that would have worked for WordPress, just like it works for various other open source projects that, that handle supporting their contributors that way.

[00:06:51] But if you look at WordPress like estimating and, and I don’t have much in the way of data because we collect almost no data on anyone, but estimating based on the number of, of contributors that we list per release. And also the activity of contributors that I see on the make network of sites in slack, things like that.

[00:07:13] We have probably 15 or 1600 active contributors over the course of the year. 

[00:07:18] Matt: Yeah. 

[00:07:20] Josepha: And that includes also the, the teams who are sponsored by companies. But that’s a tiny fraction of them. If you’ve got 150 people who are sponsored by companies and 1600 active contributors over the course of the year, like, yeah, that’s a teensy teensy group and there is not a good way to manage a program like that at a global scale while also paying attention to all of the rules and regulations that exist in the world.

[00:07:48] Like we would need to have a WordPress HR department, which we don’t have 

[00:07:53] Matt: Right. 

[00:07:54] Josepha: is no one is here that way. And so like, yeah, it. It’s a good idea. I want it, I want more companies to, to sponsor more people and I don’t have a sustainable way to do that for WordPress as a project from a WordPress back to entity.

[00:08:16] Matt: Yeah. 

[00:08:16] Josepha: That’s a good answer, but it is the true answer.

[00:08:18] Matt: listen, so as more and more. That I talk to more people outside of like the WordPress entrepreneurship bubble. There are folks that, like you said, let’s just use the number 1600. Not everyone wants money.

[00:08:32] Number one, like that’s not what they’re there for. Two you probably couldn’t pay them enough anyway. It’d just be like a nice little thing and you can, oh, here’s a Starbucks card. Great. I don’t even have Starbucks in my country, 

[00:08:43] Josepha: Right,

[00:08:44] Matt: right.

[00:08:44] Okay, great. So there’s that, that thing. And like not it’s difficult.

[00:08:48] I get it. I, I also look at.org as as the repo anyway, as a way that, that. a ton of money. If it were a true marketplace, like a ton of money, [00:09:00] because there’s billions of dollars or a least a billions, a billion of dollars that, that actually funnels through that by, by upgrades and upsells.

[00:09:09] So if there was a 20, 30% tax the foundation could have enough money to employ people is one way is, is how I has as I, how I would approach it. But to maybe there’s something there where folks can be recognized, which I, I, again, I also know is very difficult. And I don’t want to simplify it as like, Hey, there’s a leaderboard, but if folks could get recognized for their efforts in some kind of way, then we’d all see. Or have the ability to shine spotlight on people who are contributing their time that don’t want to be paid, but they’re like, Hey, I wrote 15 documents this month. I’m winning the document leadership, round or whatever, something like that, that shines light. And like I said, it doesn’t have to be here’s $5 for your contribution.

[00:09:51] It could be you get a Skillshare as the first thing that comes to my head. Like you get a free Skillshare account, Matt knows the CEO and hooks up, a hundred free accounts for people, right. And they get to learn and educate and make improve themselves. 

[00:10:04] Josepha: yeah.

[00:10:04] Matt: So, again, I also know it’s, it’s insanely difficult to, to rally that together, wrangle 

[00:10:09] Josepha: worth, when I’m going to tell, I’m gonna tell all y’all listeners, cause like, I’m sure you have hundreds of thousands of people. So when the fight for the future program, 5,000 episodes, that’s really good. When the five for the future program, Was was being architected. So like Andrea Middleton and her team were the primary drivers in that one of the, so they did a bunch of research by going out and looking at how other open source CMS is like ours.

[00:10:40] We’re not necessarily incentivizing their contributors. But certainly how they were recognizing them if there was an incentive involved what sort of alternative economies were available in there and how it compared to WordPress. And one of the suggestions that that team did bring forward at the time was like, what if we had a leaderboard where every month we could just like snapshot the top 10 contributors on the thing.

[00:11:07] And. I don’t recall why we didn’t move forward with that at the time. And I will have to see if I can go back through my thousands of pages of notes from, from working with WordPress and see if I left myself a breadcrumb anywhere. But that was at the end of the day, something that, that was decided against.

[00:11:30] I know that Drupal does that and at their Drupal con they’re US-based Drupal con I think every year when they have the DreeZ note, they put up the leaderboard for who was the best this year. And, and we, we decided to go against it. I think it’s a little bit, because like, there’s this feeling of excessive.

[00:11:50] Competition there that we don’t necessarily, we don’t want to instill in the community. Like we want co-op petition where we make [00:12:00] each other better. 

[00:12:00] Matt: Right, right. 

[00:12:02] Josepha: but not necessarily people being like I have a thousand hours to give to WordPress. I’m just going to make a bunch of tiny polar requests and get to the top of the leaderboard.

[00:12:10] Like, I don’t know how that would work, but yeah. 

[00:12:13] Matt: Not, not easy for sure. Wrapping up I want to talk quickly about the podcast that you do. How do you fit that into your crazy schedule? What do you record fortnightly? Is it, 

[00:12:22] Josepha: Yes. Yeah.

[00:12:24] Matt: Is that one of your initiatives? Was that something that somebody was like, Hey, you should really do a podcast.

[00:12:28] And you’re like, eh, okay. I guess I’ll try it. Is that something you’ve always wanted to do for, for the WordPress, 

[00:12:32] Josepha: I’ve never wanted to be a broadcaster. It seems so hard.

[00:12:37] Matt: One day, Matt was like, come on, just do this podcast. And you’re like, you do a podcast. He does. It’s called distributed. I can’t wait to be on it. 

[00:12:44] Josepha: He does. Yeah, he actually is the one who suggested that it would be useful. And a good thing for me to do for the project. And he was right. But at the time I was like, oh no, I don’t want anyone to see me. And I don’t want them to be looking at my work. And, and like knowing how hard it is. I don’t want them to know how hard this is, which is not fair.

[00:13:03] Like people should know how difficult it is to manage a project of this size because it is incredibly difficult. But yeah, I just, I don’t, I, I worried a lot at the start that it was going to look like this vehicle for me to use WordPress’s success to my advantage. And, and I just struggled so much with that.

[00:13:25] It took 

[00:13:25] Matt: Why not everyone else does it. 

[00:13:26] Josepha: Not everybody else. Wouldn’t be holding themselves to their conflict of interest, internal policy that I hold for myself. 

[00:13:33] Matt: True. 

[00:13:33] Josepha: But yeah, it actually took me like six weeks to really commit to doing this. Like he suggested it, he, he made an excellent argument for why I should, and I was like, okay, but I’m going to make it, you and me.

[00:13:47] And he’s been on it with me twice, but he was like, sure, make it, you and me just slowly boiling this frog of not wanting to do podcasts, but to answer your question of how I get it all done. Obviously it’s quite short, but. I sit down at the start of the year and map out the most likely major conversations that are happening in those moments across the year and do light outlines and also make notes for myself at the start of the year of the events and, and likely incidents that I should probably look to to inform that particular podcast.

[00:14:23] And then I take about 30 minutes, write it down and record it in about 17 minutes. So, yeah. 

[00:14:31] Matt: Cool. Yeah.

[00:14:32] it’s great. I, I tune in as I, as as I do. And as I mentioned before, I’ve, I’ve clipped, you have quoted you a on the WP minute and I appreciate the fact that you do it. I’ve said it for, oh, I say, I say a lot of people have said it that they’re, that they’re should have, there should be another vehicle for communication coming out of.org.

[00:14:50] Because your average user, the thousands of people I’ve helped get online before with WordPress are not logging into slack. They’re certainly not going to make that wordpress.org. [00:15:00] Good luck getting them on a newsletter. Maybe they’ll listen to a podcast. Where are you going to do all the things to reach, all, all the people, 

[00:15:08] Josepha: Yeah. I used to be in marketing, as I mentioned before I got here. And, and one of the guidelines at the time was that, like, you have to say things to people seven, seven different ways or seven different times, depending on who you’re talking to before. 

[00:15:28] Matt: so well. 

[00:15:28] Josepha: Exactly before, like they’re ready to give it any attention and, and WordPress.

[00:15:36] Has always really thrived on, on word of mouth marketing, but you don’t have any opportunity to like put forward your best foot as a product when you’re just like, Hey, tell your friends what you love the most about us. And it could not possibly be 100% of the time. The thing that I love the most about WordPress, cause you’re a different person.

[00:15:59] Like I, there are many things that I think are the best parts of WordPress that probably half our users don’t even know exist. 

[00:16:07] Matt: Yup. 

[00:16:08] Josepha: And so like, I don’t want to say that, that maybe I just shouldn’t say it if I don’t wanna say it. I think that WordPress as, as an entity, as a community of contributors and also users.

[00:16:23] They’re they’re owed a bit more dignity than to have people say, like WordPress is my least favorite thing, but users wanted, I guess, so I guess I have to use this stupid software. Like there’s so much more dignity to what these contributors are enabling in the world. Then, then those people that benefit from their time are willing to comment on either because they don’t know that these 1600 strangers made sure that we patched the latest vulnerability or built the future of content management or whatever it is.

[00:16:56] Like they maybe don’t know. But even when they do know it’s the same sort of problem with helping people move toward a different type of leadership in an open source project. Like you think, you know what it is all the way until you move the curtain aside. And then you’re like, oh no close that up.

[00:17:13] It’s not what I bought it was. And then it’s, it is. Really, it’s a really big problem, I think that can be solved by having more vehicles for WordPress to say who it is and who it wants to be. I think this is all in my opinion. Anyone can have a different opinion today. But yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s more important for the world to know what these great group of volunteers and contributors are doing.

[00:17:42] Then, then for me to be an important person of WordPress. And so like around the whole, like, did you always want to do a podcast? No. Did I do it anyway? Yes. Why did I do it? Because I know that these people deserve more than just a stack exchange, [00:18:00] a survey that says we suck every two years or whatever it is.

[00:18:04] I don’t mean to call anyone out.

[00:18:05] Matt: Yeah.

[00:18:05] You’ve got to, you need to write because a Wix is going to hire a Kevin Hart to do a commercial at the super and Squarespace is going to pay every YouTube personality to advertise Squarespace. So there has to be they, you just have to, you just have to kind of make that effort to be everywhere and everything. 

[00:18:24] Josepha: And from a final philosophical thought on it, like the freedoms of open source and of WordPress and the open web. Are are there within everyone’s rights. And it doesn’t matter whether people know that or recognize it. They still deserve to have that. And the rights of anything, the rights of any one person that they should have that are inalienable to them, only matter as much as they can apply them.

[00:18:52] And so like, just because WordPress believes that there is a bill of rights that exists for the open web and for anyone who wants to use our software and are willing to fight about it only is as important as, as getting people to come to WordPress, for whatever reasons they have. Like, they don’t care about the overall philosophy of open source and they don’t have to in order to be able to take those rights that exist and apply them in their own lives.

[00:19:25] And I think that that’s why we have to do that.

[00:19:28] Matt: A hundred percent, a hundred percent last question of the interview comes from it comes from the WP minute, comes from a producer over the WP minute, Michelle for chef, actually what, what also happens over at the WP minute is we syndicate content from around the community and actually have coming up next week.

[00:19:46] How a Shaya talking about the learn.wordpress.org, how to get involved, how to contribute and she can, as she contributes to that that theme a one minute clip once a month. It’s pretty awesome. Okay. Michelle.

[00:19:59] for shit asks, would you consider starting a taskforce for engaging a younger demographic and using, and contributing to words? 

[00:20:10] Josepha: I have tried test runs of that in the past. Yes, I would.

[00:20:15] Matt: He started, he started a Fortnite league and you say, Hey, jump in with me. Have you heard of this thing called WordPress? Do you have a blog blog? I’ve 

[00:20:24] Josepha: What is that? So yes, I, I want that actually aging, aging out and age-ism in general was one of the first questions that I had when I came to automatic in 2015. Like, do we have anything on our radar about that? Do we have any concerns? Is there a reason to be concerned? And I was told at the time that there wasn’t, and, and it may be true that there’s not.

[00:20:47] But I, despite being told there wasn’t I have done two or three pilot programs, one directed by somebody else. And one that I [00:21:00] directed where we got into middle schools one in a high school, one just kind of like a community space and then one in a college where we. People from, from the automatics.org, not.org open-source group go out and like teach these kids and teach these students about what it is to be a good citizen of the web.

[00:21:23] And also how WordPress can help them build skills for the future. And also how contributing can help them to learn things passively or learn things actively, depending on what’s happening to kind of build the 21st century skills that everyone needs now in order to be an excellent employee. But certainly in the current context, things that, that are wildly important for people who are learning to work remotely for the first time they did not necessarily turn out the way that I, that I wanted.

[00:21:54] Like I didn’t meet any of those metrics in the, I. I was directed to run about four of them. And then I directed someone else to lead the fifth one. None of my metrics landed where I wanted them to. And so I didn’t, I didn’t feel like I could continue and say like, okay, let’s give it a second try. Cause I didn’t necessarily have the skillset to make that more fruitful in those, in those environments.

[00:22:18] The collegiate one actually went really very well but was so much time from the person who was managing it on our side, that it basically was a second job. And like we really just needed them to be able to do their job of working on WordPress. And so yes, I’ve entertained it over the years. I have tried a few different configurations.

[00:22:39] We as a group have tried a few different configurations and nothing that I feel really. Made the impact that I wanted it to make. That doesn’t mean that it’s not worth trying again in the future. But I, I don’t know that I, I could confidently say that I would know what that needs to look like, especially right now with a lot of distance learning happening.

[00:23:00] So did that answer it?

[00:23:02] Matt: maybe some blue hats to say, like make blogging. Great. Again, that’s a terrible idea.

[00:23:06] Match. Jesus. Why would, why would we do that? Although, what you could do is. you could get Matt to say, Hey, maybe we introduce Gutenberg to tumbler and maybe make Tumblr more of a social thing for fun in young kids and be like, oh, what’s this word?

[00:23:18] What’s this Gutenberg thing, powering tumbler. And maybe that’s the gateway drug, huh? Tumbler. Oh, 

[00:23:25] Josepha: I went on record somewhere that I have never been able to find again, saying that tumbler was the last bastion of the indie web and, and we should be good stewards of the platform. I can’t remember where I said that or why.

[00:23:39] Matt: listening to a three doors down album while you, while you said that Joe Joseph, a Hayden chump, Posey Joseph, thanks for hanging out today and talking about what you do as an executive director. Where else can folks go to say. 

[00:23:54] Josepha: They can find me on Twitter at Joseph Hayden. You can also find me over on my blog where I talk [00:24:00] mostly about leadership stuff often in the context of WordPress, but general leadership knowledge to [email protected]. And of course in slack where I have a screen name, John to Boone, which is very difficult.

[00:24:13] But if you look for Joseph you can probably find me I’m waving from a presidential thingy. What are these podium? Yeah. 

[00:24:20] Matt: And everybody else, Matt report.com mat report.com/subscribe. Shout out to Jeff. Who also asked the same question we were talking about paying contributors. That was his question from the w P minutes go to the WP minute.com/subscribe. Listen to that five minute weekly WordPress news, and don’t forget to support WordPress news [email protected] slash my report.

[00:24:41] Thanks everybody for listening. We’ll see you in the next episode.

[00:00:00] Josepha: You say that’s the easiest question, but like anyone who has spent any time with me knows that I also spend a lot of time, like, considering, like what, what, what are my, what am I doing? What, what purpose do I bring to the world? Who am I when I’m not trying to accomplish things? Like, yeah, it’s easy, but it’s not easy.

[00:00:17] So yeah. I show stuff. I Hayden jumbo, C a WordPress projects, executive director since 2019. So I’m starting my what third year of it is that right? Yeah. Starting my third year of it, time flies. 

[00:00:29] Matt: That’s 30 years in COVID years, by the way. 

[00:00:32] Josepha: ain’t that true? Isn’t that true? And before I did this, I actually was as my Twitter bio suggests very much into.

[00:00:43] Digital literacy and making sure that that communities were safe and sound, because I think that communities are the foundation of everything that we try to do in the world. And so, yeah, that’s me.

[00:00:53] Matt: There’s a lot of folks who think of community as well. It’s a big marketing buzzword for sure. Right. Everyone who has a product company wants a community. But they are looking at community in probably a very lesser form definition in a silo and something to just kind of prop up either their brand or product.

[00:01:12] Maybe get some feedback and get really interested. Customers. Community is a whole different ball game and scale at your level. Give us a sense of just like the daily routine. One has to go through to manage what you have to manage. 

[00:01:29] Josepha: Gosh, from a community aspect or just from like me as a 

[00:01:33] Matt: you wake up and you’re and you look at your wall-to-wall meetings. Cause I, I imagine largely that’s what you’re doing is meeting talking to people, fusing ideas, together, shaking hands, dealing with folks, maybe crying and laughing and arguing. How do you do it? 

[00:01:50] Josepha: I’ll tell you, number one, that only about a quarter of my time, these. Is spent in meetings, which is really different from, from how it used to be. I used to spend about 60% of my time in meetings. And that was really hard just cause when you’re in a meeting, you really have to stay present to, to really support the people that you’re there with.

[00:02:09] And, and also to really get that work done and be as fruitful as you can with it. And so about, about a quarter of my time now is in meetings. And actually like I’ve got, I’ve got a number of hats obviously, cause I’m the executive director of the WordPress project, but I also lead the source practice at automatic.

[00:02:29] And so there’s a lot going on there. And the best way that I have to manage it at the moment is to just kind of set focus intentions for my day. Like I used to have a day where I just worked on automatic things or when I just worked on community things. And like that’s still documented out in the world, like the, the themes that I have for each day, so that like, if people had had to work with a deadline, they knew what.

[00:02:55] Going to probably get to on various days so that they could time their information. To [00:03:00] me, it was super useful when I didn’t have quite as big a job as I have now. But now I kind of have a day where I focus on meetings. I have a day where I focus on the strategy. I try to make sure that if I have any community things that I’m blocking, I try to get those accomplished, like before the big meetings, which generally is like Wednesdays and Thursdays.

[00:03:19] So try to get and get everybody the information that they need to keep moving on time. But I actually start basically every day with about 30 minutes of mindfulness. Just no meetings, no slack open, no anything else. And just making sure that I understand what my goals are for the day, what my tasks tend to beat for the day.

[00:03:41] And then I end every day with about 30 minutes of what I like to call my ta-da list instead of a to-do list, things that I got done and that I need to get done tomorrow.

[00:03:51] Matt: Little positive affirmation to end the and the day you say that the open source practice is sort of a different approach. Maybe something that you wrangle are managed differently. Can you give us give the listener a sense of what that might be 

[00:04:04] Josepha: At automatic or just generally do I approach open-source differently? 

[00:04:07] Matt: You mentioned that you, that you either manage or work on the open source practice of WordPress is that something different than the, than the day-to-day role of the executive director? 

[00:04:17] Josepha: Huh. Yes and no. So on the one hand I do, we technically are referred to as a division inside automatic. It’s the open source group division. And I just, I don’t know, saying division seems very clinical and. Very divisive, like splitting things into when maybe we, we need to do a bit less of that right now.

[00:04:38] And so when I refer to it as open-source practice, it’s a little bit, because I’m trying to make it clear that it’s like an ongoing thing that we work on an ongoing thing that we do, but also to identify that it is that yeah, we do. We kind of approach it differently. So open source as a practice rather than open source as just a general methodology, I think has a wider application than just software or adjust your product.

[00:05:04] I think that open source, many of those 19 lessons of open source that exists out there could be seen as just like core intentions for how to accomplish things. And when you move it away from just like, this is a core directive for how to build software and instead think of it as this open source methodology that you can use to coordinate an.

[00:05:30] I think it makes a big difference to how you accomplish things in open-source projects. And so, yes, that’s, I wouldn’t say it’s different from my work as the executive director, but I do know that people don’t necessarily identify that work. 

[00:05:44] Matt: Right. How big is that division? 

[00:05:46] Josepha: that particular division is just over a hundred people at this point.

[00:05:50] And then we also have we, the WordPress project also have the five for the future contributors who work with me and that’s a little lighter [00:06:00] touch. They get about a ping or two a week from me just asking what I can help them work through. And just checking in with them generally. And there’s probably like 20, 25, maybe 50, if we’re generous outside of automatic that are doing that.

[00:06:16] So yeah.

[00:06:16] Matt: And do the core contributors that contribute to WordPress open source, open source wars, WordPress from automatic. Do they fall under that division or can folks be from any division in, at automatic to contribute? 

[00:06:28] Josepha: Yeah. Most of them do a lineup in this division, but there are also because so many of automatics products are, are part of the WordPress ecosystem. There are also plenty of people that are just in automatic as a whole that are contributing to core. So,

[00:06:43] Matt: And if I could just illustrate that from a non not automatic company, this could be something like a GoDaddy might have a open source division 

[00:06:53] Josepha: Right.

[00:06:54] Matt: and their objectives or mission would be to give back to open source. And they would say, Hey, let’s give back a little bit to WordPress. Let’s give a little bit to whatever Joomla or PHP or something else.

[00:07:06] That’s open source. You’d have this collective that, that their mission is to, Hey, we’re part of this bigger company, the bigger company, isn’t all about open source and we’re missioned to go out and contribute to open source. 

[00:07:18] Josepha: Exactly. Right. So blue host has a group like that. Goat GoDaddy does have a group like that. Google also Yoast all those, all those folks in there, others as well. I’m not, I’m not intentionally leaving other people out. It’s just that there are probably like a hundred different companies and I will not be able to just rattle them all off that way, 

[00:07:38] Matt: Eh speaking of GoDaddy, looking at con core contributors I don’t have the pie chart in front of me. In fact, it wasn’t even a pie chart, but there were lots of circles. with automatic representing the largest piece. If you were to give advice to other companies to, I don’t know, spin up divisions, give more spin up open-source divisions, give back more to whether it be WordPress or another division.

[00:08:00] Are there one or two, like key things. If I want to form an open-source division or to contribute more, what’s the best step forward for an organization? To either measure it or approach it to rally people around it. Do you have like one or two things that you look to as a north star? 

[00:08:20] Josepha: Yeah. So, firstly, if you’re, if you are thinking about creating an open source team, who’s either planning to give back to WordPress or just planning to give back to open source in general. There is actually a five for the future white paper that exists to just like essentially take to your, your corporate entity that says, like, this is what it means to give back to this product that has given to us.

[00:08:45] And it’s, I think on wordpress.org/five, I think there’s a link to it right there. But if not, We’ll get it done. 

[00:08:53] Matt: sure. 

[00:08:53] Josepha: And, and that in the end does direct you kind of, to me to make sure that you have all of the information about [00:09:00] the open source philosophies that we’re working with in the WordPress project.

[00:09:03] And also make sure that that, that we all kind of understand what the goals of the WordPress project are at the moment. And so there is kind of just like a kickoff call with me to see if everyone agrees, it’s like any, any relationship that you’re entering into, everyone should understand what we’re working with first and then make that choice together.

[00:09:20] So that’s one thing that anyone can take a look at also if. As an employer or just as yourself, want to contribute from like a five for the future pledging perspective, but don’t necessarily have the time or resources to commit like a whole team’s worth. There is actually a contributor training series that you can go through that gives you the basics of like how WordPress does open source, how open source functions in software, and also covers things like how we make decisions in WordPress, all of that stuff.

[00:09:54] I believe that’s on wordpress.org/contributor, hyphen training or something like that. We can find the link for your show notes, but yeah, those are both excellent ways to just like take stock of what that kind of contribution tends to look like. And see if it’s a good fit.

[00:10:11] Matt: I I’d imagine that part of your role or part of your efforts are to knock on the doors of, of big businesses that might be leveraging WordPress and saying, Hey, I think you can donate another person or two or 20 to the cause. Do what, what, what is that like? Are those efforts fruitful for you or are there certain strategies you try to put in place before you knock on the door of, I don’t know.

[00:10:35] I use GoDaddy just because it’s the top of mind Right. now, but I’ll go daddy or Bluehost or whomever

[00:10:39] Josepha: Right. Yes. 

[00:10:40] Matt: government. 

[00:10:42] Josepha: the government, 

[00:10:43] Matt: Right. 

[00:10:43] Josepha: I have never knocked on the door of the government to ask them to contribute 

[00:10:46] Matt: me know when you find that door, which door is it? I don’t know. Neo find another one.

[00:10:51] Josepha: find another door. Yeah, no. So, yes, there is general. I don’t, I call it fundraising just because I understand that like, there are. Four-ish different economies in the WordPress ecosystem and not all of them are about money. A lot of them are about time and, and other things. But so yeah, I do that outreach every year for the most part.

[00:11:14] And actually met does that as well. So Matt often we’ll start with like the highest decision-making levels. Cause you, you do kind of have to get some buy-in on that. Not, not this Matt, dear readers other Matt, Matt Mullenweg what was I saying? Yeah, he frequently will start at like the CEO levels of having those conversations and then they move to me to kind of have a better understanding of what it looks like, what it could look like, what we want it to look like, all of that stuff.

[00:11:42] As far as like, do we, do we, do I do anything to like prepare companies for that? Not really. The fight for the future program has been an excellent experiment and has been growing for years. And, and I don’t know that I have ever [00:12:00] felt the need to like prime prime, anyone for the ask of like, do you have anyone who can help us with these security patches?

[00:12:09] Do you have anyone who can help us with these design issues that we have? Like, I’ve never felt the need to do it necessarily. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. As I mentioned, like Matt does that also, he does that outreach as well. And so if there’s priming for that call from that, that outreach from me, it’s probably happening there.

[00:12:27] Matt: Forgive my not understanding fully of how the inner workings of automatic works, but from executive directors that I’ve worked with in my local community, a lot of them are for nonprofits and a lot of them are, are raising money and that’s a whole large part of their job.

[00:12:44] Do you do that at all for any degree of the work for the WordPress foundation or is that completely separate? Not even in your purview. 

[00:12:52] Josepha: I used to do that. Yeah. is not in my purview anymore. We actually have some community folks that really have done excellent work to keep that program moving all of this, the global sponsorship programs. They do that work these days. I did use to, but, but not now. 

[00:13:09] Matt: Okay. Fantastic. And speaking of the, of the foundation word camps coming back. Question, mark. We just had word camp us last year. And now I think Birmingham is next. If I, if I have that correct. Is there other others coming? Is that something that you’re looking forward to proceeding cautiously with?

[00:13:32] Again, I know there was something on the Tavern about no or little to no masks at the last camp. A lot of folks worried about it. What’s your prediction or what’s your outlook on local meetups or local camps? Sorry, 

[00:13:45] Josepha: So word camp, U S actually was, was a virtual this year where it can’t one state of the word 

[00:13:50] Matt: state of the word, sorry. Yep. It felt like a word camp because everyone Was. celebrating it. 

[00:13:55] Josepha: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was it was an excellent experiment and it actually was not our first in-person event. There was a word camp in severe. I want to say that that weekend right before state of the word, that was our first one back.

[00:14:09] And then yes, we’ve got Birmingham on the calendar. We have WordCamp Europe on the calendar as an in-person event. And we have word camp us 20, 22 on the calendar as, as an in-person event. Cautiously with cautious optimism. Is that a thing I can say? We’re proceeding forward with cautious optimism about it.

[00:14:27] Matt: in San Diego was cautious. Optimism. 

[00:14:31] Josepha: Excellent. I’ll let them know. Yeah, like. I have been, I’ve been talking to people about this a lot this week. So much of the information that we get from, from everyday users of WordPress, about what they love and what they don’t love, what they need and what they want with the software comes from those events and not having them has certainly been very difficult for the community as a whole, to, to keep on [00:15:00] top of their own resilience.

[00:15:01] But, but the community of contributors, as it relates to the support of the community of users, like it really, it’s very clear to me that all of our contributors feel a little bit, I don’t want to say hamstrung, but like they don’t have the same touch points that they used to have to make the decisions that we all have to make.

[00:15:22] And so. That’s the optimistic side. Like I’m optimistic that we can get back to in-person events so that we can have that, that high value information from our users of the CMS more and, and faster and better. And the cautious side is of course, that everything is changing with this from week to week.

[00:15:42] At this point, like for a while, it was month to month, things were changing and now it’s week to week, things are changing and, and I never want to put people at undue risk and so am prepared to make the best call that we can make in the moment. And as things move as quickly as they are. It has made it more difficult when things were just kind of progressing on a month to month scale, you had time to, to cancel things or to move them or, or whatever you had to do.

[00:16:15] But in the case of Omicron that moved so quickly that, that there was a little bit of blind sightedness happening on it. So 

[00:16:24] Matt: is 

[00:16:24] Josepha: I don’t know if I’ve answered your question.

[00:16:26] Matt: no that you have, or you’ve let us to at least maybe the next question. or the maybe just helping me define a better question. Is is there more stress on the local volunteers to raise more? Because one, there might not be enough ticket sales for enough people to maybe businesses have retracted from sponsoring camps in three.

[00:16:50] I think that there’s less money at hand, right? To, to Dole out to word camps in the fund, for lack of a better phrase. 

[00:16:57] Josepha: in the fund. Yeah. So, That’s such a complicated question. We, the, so the, the WordPress community support entity has been providing still a good portion of, of the infrastructure that people need in order to organize a WordPress event. And as far as like getting fiscal sponsorship, getting financial sponsorship from local entities, I am sure that it is more stressful, but I don’t know that, that we, as like the stewards of this community have said, like, you have to find more local sponsorship because we cannot commit to as much global sponsorship.

[00:17:40] I don’t, I don’t recall that happening with any of the events that we’ve seen lately. 

[00:17:46] Matt: got it. Got it. Let’s let’s shift gears back to to WordPress to Gutenberg we think back well, we have WordPress 5.9 in 19 ish, 19 [00:18:00] ish days. Right? 

[00:18:00] Josepha: no one be scared. That’s great.

[00:18:02] Matt: Thinking back three and a half years ago, whenever Gutenberg was announced, there was mass chaos, massive stereo. My God, we’ve got this Gutenberg thing.

[00:18:10] What is it? Don’t want it everyone up in arms about it. I, for one while maybe I didn’t enjoy the way it rolled out and the way it was communicated as a non-developer. Yeah.

[00:18:22] And when people started using it, I was like, this is, this is, this is just software. It’s going to get better. I think here we are three and a half years later, it’s a much different product.

[00:18:32] It’s much more refined from obviously when it started. Cause it’s been three and a half years. Although 

[00:18:37] Josepha: you’ve been working on it in the background.

[00:18:39] Matt: Yeah. if you were, if you were, if you were in the early beta access, you were, you were playing with it. If you knew how to download it from GitHub

[00:18:46] Josepha: Those fancy people. 

[00:18:48] Matt: Those fancy people.

[00:18:49] I don’t even know above my pay grade.

[00:18:50] Although I still struggled to drag some blocks in between columns. Sometimes that’s a little bit frustrating, but do you think the the time that you think it’ll take the same amount of time basically is what I’m getting at for full site editing to mature and to be adopted? Or do you think this is going to be fast paced because now we’ve kind of experienced Gutenberg. 

[00:19:08] Josepha: My short answer is I do not think it’s going to take as long and I’m going to give you a long answer now. So on the one hand, I think it’s true that people are now a bit more bought in. Like our users are quite a bit more bought in on on this. Change than they were in 5.0, there’s, there’s a reason for them to trust that it’s the right direction.

[00:19:29] We have consistently been showing that ever since 5.0, came out and so like, yeah, I think that on the one hand, there’s a lot more willingness in public sentiment and public grace that we have at the moment. And so from that aspect, I think that that we’re in a much better position than we were when we were merging things in 5.0, but also between 5.0.

[00:19:50] And now we have actually heard and by we I’ll just be super clear. I have heard so much that it’s not necessarily the change that upset people. It was how we made the change. And I totally understand that people felt left out. They felt like it was forging ahead without them, like, there was no way they could keep up with it.

[00:20:10] And I, and I understand that it like it’s the Gutenberg project was and is moving along a lot faster. Then WordPress core moves along from the, from the standpoint of like how frequently they have releases. So releases every two weeks is very different from releases every four months. And so having heard from so many people in so many different areas of the project, that, that it was the way that we did it.

[00:20:37] That was so upsetting. Between 5.0, and now we actually have done together a lot of work to change the way that we talk about it. And so there are a lot more consistent updates from the folks who are working consistently within the core Gutenberg spaces of things, including stuff like our performance metrics that we are [00:21:00] gauging all of the features that we’re planning, the features that did get in there.

[00:21:03] And the last two weeks, like we’re just communicating more in that space, but also we have really re-invigorated the testing area and the triage practice, both of those practices across the WordPress EcoSys. And created a number of different places for anyone to get this kind of information and sponsored a number of different spaces, where users and developers and agency owners and, and decision makers, technical, or not have been able to get better information about what they need to know about the software.

[00:21:37] And so when was 5.0 at the end of 2018? Yeah. So. Yeah. Since 2018, I would say that there are probably four or five really big projects that have helped us to move past that whole, like it’s the way you did it. Like we figured out the ways that we did it, that made people mad and we’ve made changes to fix them.

[00:21:59] They’re four or five large scale things that you can see, but also a lot of just small individual things that each team or any contributor does to make that whole process a little less scary, a little more tidy, little easier to see everything that we’re doing on learn right now with trying to get more and more workshops and courses and lessons out for people like, yeah, we’ve done a lot of work based on the feedback that I got.

[00:22:24] I did a six month listening tour after 5.0, to hear how mad 

[00:22:29] Matt: That was. said with a big site. 

[00:22:31] Josepha: Yeah, it was, it was hard. I it’s like a listening tour is hard anyway, but I spent six months going to the events with people who were the maddest at WordPress and at me and at Matt and, and did nothing, but like tell me how much you hate this.

[00:22:50] And that’s all I wanted to hear it. I didn’t have reasons or explanations or excuses for anything like their feelings of anger were because they felt like we hadn’t heard them. And so I was showing up to hear them and, and in that six months time, that is when I identified, these are the things we need to fix in the future.

[00:23:10] And we have spent years fixing them and I’m very proud of that work, so. 

[00:23:13] Matt: It’s a perfect segue to a couple other questions. Let’s get the pitchforks and the torches out folks. No, I’m just kidding. Surprise. You’re on a game show. Have you seen running, man? No, I’m just kidding. 

[00:23:20] Josepha: No.

[00:23:21] Matt: On the listening tour I’m sure you heard things like, Oh, what we’re doing here is we’re just competing against Squarespace and Wix.

[00:23:28] Why do we want to, this is, I’m sure you’ve heard that. Right. We’re Prestos wants to compete against Squarespace and Wix. My response is duh 

[00:23:36] Josepha: of 

[00:23:36] Matt: duh. Yes, I do. Like, I want to compete against Squarespace and Wix so that we can, because I want WordPress to survive. Do you think that did one, did you hear that sentiment two, do.

[00:23:48] you think that’s kind of going away and feeling like, Yeah.

[00:23:50] actually we do want to compete against them to, to win. 

[00:23:53] Josepha: I definitely heard it a lot and I hear it a lot even now. There are, there are two sides to that [00:24:00] conversation. Cause sometimes people are like, you’re competing against these things that are so tiny, why bother. And sometimes it’s, you’re competing against something that is not the group of, that’s not catering to the group of people that WordPress wants to cater to.

[00:24:14] And so like, there are two different takes on that particular argument and I see both sides of it. But also like, technology always, you have to stay relevant and you have to move fast enough to be if, if not a competitor to a tiny thing that exists now. Cause like, sure, it’s not a threat if it’s 1% of usage across the web.

[00:24:36] But, but there is something to be said for self disruption in that way, like I like this is my favorite example to use. So like when the iPad came out and there were just. Tablets everywhere. And the iPad mini came out and everyone was like, there’s no point in having an iPad mini, we do not know why apple is doing this.

[00:24:56] This is the most useless thing. Like people were like, why are you even bothering? No one wants this one. Plenty of people wanted it. And to taking the opportunity to, to, to disrupt what’s happening in your own ecosystem before other people can show up and, and do that disruption to you, like that’s smart.

[00:25:18] That’s a good idea. And so I do know that Gutenberg has been a really disruptive change and that for a lot of people, it also has been a breaking change. Even if it’s not like breaking websites or breaking the code or breaking your dashboard, a broken workflow is still a breaking change for you.

[00:25:35] And like, that is why Gutenberg is, is as a project being done over so many years. Right. If, if you feel like asking me about, about the reason that that was the right call, I would tell you, but most people don’t care. But yeah, like moving fast enough to stay relevant, slow enough to bring people with you where you can is so smart and not only for the project, but for the people who rely on the project to have better lives.

[00:26:05] So,

[00:26:06] Matt: True or false. This is this is not about open source WordPress, but this is about automatic. And I would say that about true or false, the challenge true or false in your opinion 

[00:26:14] Josepha: We’re building some caveats in here. I like it.

[00:26:17] Matt: I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna like put you too much on the spot, but you have walls. Your opinion.

[00:26:22] The challenge for automatic is on innovation and pushing the software forward and fricking everything. Woo commerce, Gutenberg, wordpress.org, jet pack. The challenges still not enough people I’d imagine to, to help produce push code to, to improve everything across the board. 

[00:26:42] Josepha: you threw so many pieces in there that I cannot give a true false cause that’s probably true for some and less true for others would be my guests right now. 

[00:26:50] Matt: let’s talk about, let’s say Gutenberg true or false, not enough people to, to really refine the whole thing. Fast enough, 

[00:26:59] Josepha: I don’t know if you [00:27:00] can hear my stomach growling. Cause like my microphone is right down by my stomach. I apologize if you can, like, I don’t have a monster in the room. It’s 

[00:27:06] Matt: your, your stomach. cannot answer the question. 

[00:27:10] Josepha: It tried real hard. It had so many things to say. Yeah. So for gluten, so you’re asking true false for gluten. Is the limiting factor that we don’t have enough people.

[00:27:18] Matt: Let me frame some context around it. When I interviewed Matt when I interviewed Matt back in January, 2021

[00:27:24] There’s just, there’s so much on the plate for automatic in terms of.com jet pack, VU, commerce, which is just a sleeping sleeping giant we don’t have anything close to a WooCommerce Shopify yet. And I look at automatic and I say the biggest problem for Matt right now is just, there’s just not, he can’t hire fast enough to, to iterate and develop these products. There’s just. It’s just impossible for somebody to hire this many folks and get them up to speed to push these products.

[00:27:53] I feel the same for Gutenberg. And I guess the open source answer is yeah.

[00:27:58] more, maybe more people should step up or more brands and organizations that have the money hosting companies should step up to to contribute to this right. To refine the product. Like I wanna be able to drag my block in between three columns without me losing my mind. 

[00:28:14] Josepha: Oh man, I have a very complicated false for you. I know. So, okay. So there are a lot of people contributing to Gutenberg and, and while we can always use more people contributing that we can not contest there is actually a different limiting factor. That’s not necessarily about developers. And so.

[00:28:37] I’ll just get real clear. So I don’t, I don’t know that other people agree with me about this and, and that’s their prerogative. But as someone who is looking across our entire ecosystem across our entire project from a substance, a pretty high level, with a huge number of, of data points that are coming to me from, from the community, I can say with pretty high confidence that some of the more pressing limiting factors are things like we don’t have enough.

[00:29:11] Essentially mid-level deciders who can say confidently, these are the black and white questions that have already been answered. This is the answer and move everybody forward. Like we have a lot of bottlenecks that are still built into that, into that product. There is also an incredibly limiting factor of our user outreach, like are unactivated community members, as I like to call them in my notes to myself are the, the community members that represent our community of users.

[00:29:42] So people who don’t necessarily know that the project exists, they don’t necessarily know that they can like provide feedback about what is working. What’s not working, what’s broken. What is what could be made better? Like the lack of feedback from them. Frequently is something that is more of a [00:30:00] limiting factor than not having enough developers.

[00:30:02] Now, if the entire WordPress user base showed up and was like, here’s all of our feedback, like for sure, we would suddenly discover that we don’t have enough developers to get those things done can confirm. 

[00:30:13] Matt: Yeah. 

[00:30:13] Josepha: But, but yeah, I think that our more pressing issue is around the people who can help us, like confidently say, this is the most likely decision based on what we know from Mathias, who is our primary kind of Gutenberg architect or Riyadh or whoever it is.

[00:30:31] We just have such a small group of people who can do that. And that’s true to an extent in the WordPress project as well. There are various things that we could blame that on COVID is a great example of a thing that might cause people to be less. Less engaged in that level of, of contribution.

[00:30:52] But yeah, I think that in the hierarchy of things where I would say, yes, we definitely have a dearth of those. Those two would come up prior to developers on the open-source side. 

[00:00:00] Rae: It’s a completely not in the WordPress world at all. So our processes is, as you said, an experiential design and creative technology company, and we develop experiences for cultural and tourism organizations.

[00:00:14] So, you might go into a gallery or museum and experience an audio tour and we create immersive experiences where you can. Wander around a space and he audio that that’s designed, especially for that space. It moves with you around, around the gallery or exhibition. We do precinct technology, virtual queuing, augmented reality experiences, and we do exhibition design in.

[00:00:40] A lot of different spaces, for example we’re doing a a brand new exhibition smack bang in the middle of Montana at the moment for there for first street project there. We do we do the audio guide for the Getty in Los Angeles. So that’s an example of the kind of thing I do for my, my day job.

[00:00:58] There is communications manager. So I look after Publicity marketing anything to do with words, I guess, on the website? Yeah. That’s, that’s kind of what I do for a day. 

[00:01:09] Matt: Does anybody ever give you like a side eye when maybe a customer comes in and they’re like, we have a WordPress website that they look at you and be like, Hey, we think we know somebody who kind of knows this to implement whatever project we might have.

[00:01:23] Rae: I don’t know. I, I, to be honest, I kind of played down what to do with WordPress, because I don’t want to be that person that people kind of like go to asking for, help me with my website. Yeah.

[00:01:33] Oh, I I hate to say, but our website and our process is actually uses Drupal. So I’ve had to learn that this year not, not my decision, but yeah, it’s been interesting seeing what the competitions. 

[00:01:44] Matt: Yeah, that was the, the second, most serious application I used to build websites was Drupal before or slightly after a front page.

[00:01:51] Well, I guess throw Dreamweaver in there too, but we went front page Dreamweaver and then Drupal and then WordPress triples, fantastic platform. I think I wouldn’t use it today, but I th I still think it’s a very powerful 

[00:02:04] Rae: platform using it compared to WordPress at the moment. Very different platforms.

[00:02:10] Matt: How do you find time to to do the repository and works by birds and you have a family? How do you, how do you structure your day with all of this stuff? 

[00:02:20] Rae: The honest answer is I have no idea.

[00:02:21] I, I think over the past couple of years I don’t know if you’re aware, but Melbourne where I live here in Australia has been the most locked down city in the world. We’ve had the most restrictions lockdowns out of everywhere. It’s just the circumstances I guess, here, but it’s given me a lot of time to look at.

[00:02:36] To spend on side projects, I guess. So when so the, the repository I started that with came guest star from male poet back in November, 2019. And that was just before the pandemic. And so I guess the repository in a way became a bit of a handy pandemic passion project that I was working on while in locked down and has continued through to now.

[00:02:59] And. [00:03:00] Yeah, I was, I was also on maternity leave from my day job throughout 2020. So that gave me a lot of time and focus on building up the newsletter and yeah, since returning to my day job part-time I’ve, I’ve just I guess structure my week so that, Part time work and also have the repository for a Dane half a week.

[00:03:21] So just try to split up the weight to fit everything in. And also I’m very fortunate to have a partner who. Who I cope? Well, shouldn’t say co-parent with where to very much together, but we split our parenting duties 40, 50, 50, which is we’re very modern family in that respect. So yeah, we both prioritize our careers, but also our son.

[00:03:44] So, yeah. So there, there is a way for moms with a lot of things on to, to do all the things that they are passionate. 

[00:03:53] Matt: Do you have a certain structure and I can, I can share mine as well for, for the WP minute, but you have a certain structure that you would, you wouldn’t mind sharing on how you keep track of all of the news.

[00:04:05] And this obviously is happening throughout the week. Are you jotting things down and the to-do lists in a notion document. And then at the end you go to write up the email and you just sit down with all of those notes in front of you. How does this all come curated? 

[00:04:18] Rae: Yeah, look, there’s no pulling back the curtain.

[00:04:21] There’s no special, fancy way that I do it. My background is, is in journalism. I studied journalism at uni and so I naturally just do a lot of note-taking all the time because I’m just every time I see something, I think, oh, that’s really cool. And I use apple notes on my my medical kit or my iPhone, I’m an apple person and everything sinks.

[00:04:44] And so I’m constantly taking notes. And I guess with the repository I use feedly.com to track something like 70 or 80 different websites and blogs. And so I go through that periodically throughout the week just to track what what’s happening and keep on top of everybody’s latest updates. I’m also checking Twitter all the time on my phone.

[00:05:06] And it’s a bit harder to save tweets, so I have to yeah. Finding a way to do that really well, but I’m always checking Twitter, whether I’m No throughout the day or in the evening while I’m watching TV, having having a scroll. And that’s mostly, I guess my research for the pository just between those two, just seeing what’s going on.

[00:05:27] And I guess also just catching up with people throughout the week in the WordPress community, whether it’s just aiming on on Twitter or chats over emails and Coles. Those are the kinds of ways that I keep in touch with what’s going. 

[00:05:42] Matt: Sure the the newsletter there’s. So there’s a, you just said that there, you’re probably tracking 70 to 80 sources of, of news or at least new news that you can throw into an RSS feed and put into.

[00:05:53] Feedly probably 20% of them. I would reckon are [00:06:00] our newsletters or have a newsletter component to them. Your newsletter is unique to, to me, by the way, or listen, let me take a step. I’m honored for you to be here. I’m not a journalist, I’m not a great writer. I struggled with words, in fact and I look at your piece as something that is it’s fantastic.

[00:06:19] It’s unique. It’s creative. I look at it as a conversation that, that ends up in my inbox. Before I knew who you were. I had some other voice in my head, but then I realized that then I found out who you were. And I was like, oh, now it’s your voice. Every time I read the newsletter, like I’m hearing it with this Australian accent.

[00:06:37] And it’s fantastic. But it’s, it’s much more of to me anyway, like a S a conversation, maybe a story. Was that on purpose? Is that a strategy? I don’t want to slap strategy on art, but is that a strategy of yours to make it different than. 

[00:06:53] Rae: When when Kim and I originally started the repository, or at least before, actually before we started the repository and we were talking about ideas because Kim and I are both journalists in previous life.

[00:07:05] And we wanted to bring something to the WordPress community. Then I guess, in a way there was an ulterior motive of showing off male poet platform, but also. Well, as, as former journalists, we just wanted to put something together that brought the WordPress news in a way that was, I guess, a lot of new stories in WordPress tend to include a lot of opinion, but we wanted to bring other people’s opinions to the fore as well.

[00:07:27] We wanted to increase the diversity in the news, but not just by having lots of different new sources, but bringing people’s opinions that you might. You might not otherwise see. So the, the format that we came up with and, we still have to this day was looking for looking at a particular issue from a lot of different perspectives.

[00:07:52] So we, like a story recently, like I know the word, it’s not just the actual state of the word video, but lots of different blog posts in opinions, from different people and what they make. Of the state of the word. So you can kind of, read about read about a new story, but also get the context of where that story fits within the WordPress world and then varying opinions on what people thought about that.

[00:08:15] So, you can get that kind of more nuanced viewpoint from, from different people and, and have that way of understanding any issue. From different viewpoints because not everybody looks at things the same way. It’s nice to kind of read something, but then understand where, where it fits in the ecosystem.

[00:08:31] And that’s, that’s the approach that we were going for. 

[00:08:34] Matt: This is a huge question and I’ll let you dissect it and define it and pull pieces out of it as you see fit. 

[00:08:41] WordPress news, like what is somebody with a journalistic background? What does that really mean? Or what should it really mean? And maybe even before you answer that, can you help clarify, like what at journalists [00:09:00] produces versus let’s say an opinion piece or a commentator might produce, because to be honest with you I didn’t discover this recently, but for many years I was just like, oh, I don’t know the difference.

[00:09:12] I didn’t know that you, that a journalist doesn’t really put opinion into their, into their piece. And there are certain guidelines that one should approach journalism with versus, I would say like somebody like a Kara Swisher, who’s what I would say is maybe a celebrity journalist, but no longer a journalist I think is much more on the commentator side.

[00:09:33] For probably many different reasons, but anyway, could you help us define what journalists means to you should mean in the WordPress space? 

[00:09:41] Rae: Yeah, it’s interesting because there’s definitely. Of everything in the WordPress community. I worked in, in newspaper journalism, and so it was very, and I guess the newspaper I worked for, it was very straight in that it was, new stories to get one report on one side of the debate and the other side.

[00:09:58] Of the debate. You make sure you have balanced views on a topic and you present that and that’s purely without any kind of opinion. And you try to be as objective as possible in the way that you present it. So that’s, I guess, very traditional old fashioned old school journalism. That’s kind of where my background is, I guess, in that, in the WordPress community.

[00:10:22] I don’t really have anything, I guess the closest to that would probably be Sarah Gooding at WP Tavern. And even then some of her pieces can have some opinion inserted here and there for, for her context. She’s, she’s been in the community for a really long time. So her opinions, I, I find it fairly valid, but but yeah, that’s not really, I guess, old school journalism as, as a lot of people would say it And then you get.

[00:10:47] Yeah, I think blog, blog posts and things like that, where people offering an opinion that’s I wouldn’t really class that as news, so much as it’s opinion and people adding their perspectives to the debate. It’s, it’s an interesting one in the WordPress community. We don’t have a lot of new sources.

[00:11:03] A lot of people have tried to start WordPress news over the years. Haven’t been, haven’t been that successful because it’s. It’s not a business that is profitable as we’ve seen more broadly in, in the news industry with the rise of the internet and, the fighting for advertising and paywalls and, and all of, all of that kind of thing.

[00:11:23] In in WordPress, we could, we could definitely use more new sources, that the greater diversity you have with news the more accountability businesses have to have to operate in this environment. The more and more scrutiny, the better, I think, in terms of, businesses operating and, and making sure that they’re operating above board It would certainly be nice to have more new sources.

[00:11:45] It’s, it’s certainly great that there are a lot of people who, who blog and share their opinion. But yeah, I think there’s definitely room for, for more harder news in the WordPress community, particularly, over the past year, how we’ve had so many [00:12:00] acquisitions, right. And we were going from an ecosystem full of, I guess, small to medium businesses to, we’ve got big corporates and multinationals, I guess, like Google that are operating in, in our in our ecosystem.

[00:12:12] And, we want to keep those businesses to. No, around what they’re doing. And I, I’m not saying way to, to scare them, that they shouldn’t be in our ecosystem, but, just to, people want to know what’s what’s going on and, and, and make sure that they’re operating in a, in a fair.

[00:12:27] Matt: Let’s say news article or piece or research even if you went to an acquisition that happened a year, two years ago we might be checking in on, let’s say something like an eye themes was probably the one that I can think of at least off the top of my head, that dates pretty far back, big company getting picked up by a hosting company.

[00:12:46] And now Corey who started that company now runs both status. One might say. Let’s take a look at what happened with these acquisitions in terms of employment. Are the people still there? Is the products. What it was when they acquired it. What is the price point look like? Have these, big hosting companies, which catch a lot of heat because they are big hosting companies.

[00:13:08] Did they just roll it into their mega solution? And the once artismal piece of themes is just gone and it’s just another toggle, it’s just another toggle on the dashboard, right? Is that a fair assessment to say that’s the kind of news that we were journalism that we would want to see in the space, or at least maybe you would want to see in the space, not trying to put words in your mouth, but 

[00:13:30] Rae: yeah, I think that kind of journalism would be good.

[00:13:32] I guess, It’s interesting because we work in a space with some really big companies and there are lots of acquisitions going on. It’s it’s it’s, that would be interesting to say, the, the, the the quality and the end product that’s offered to, to users is that being maintained, as I know there’s been a bit of angst with also motive of buying out people plugin, Sandhills development it’d be interesting to go back in, as you say, in 12 months time.

[00:13:56] And from looking at that story as a journalist, you’d probably want to Find long-term users and get their perspectives, whether that’s on the record or as background for a story and maybe speak to stuff. If they’re happy to speak, even anonymously, get their, their views on how they think the.

[00:14:16] Transition has been yeah, those are the kinds of interesting stories that we’re not really seeing so much, we’re saying the, the, the acquisition and the sale, but we’re not really seeing the I guess the journey of how acquisitions are tracking. We’re not seeing what’s happening to, particularly with automatic buying out so many distances, what are happening to those businesses?

[00:14:36] They bought quite a few in the, in the past year and the past few years have been interesting to say, what’s, what’s happened to the end product house has been absorbed into it, automatic and wordpress.com and, and it has it, has it been for, I guess, the greater good in supporting those employees and, and the businesses, but also providing a a more polished product for the end user.

[00:14:57] If that, if that was the purpose of the, of the equity.[00:15:00] 

[00:15:01] Matt: I think another, another topic would be something like a core, core contributors, which companies are funding core contribution to the WordPress core. I think in Matt’s state of the word, which I do have the slides on the WP minute.

[00:15:15] So I’ll try to link up in the show notes. I think he showed a graphic of automatic somewhere in the seventies. Person, mark a Yoast coming in again, this is just off the top of my head. I think second place with maybe 14 people. And then it’s like GoDaddy who just acquired Pagely who’s a multi-billion dollar publicly public.

[00:15:36] Are they publicly traded? I better not see, this is what, this is what makes a real journalist. They don’t just say things like, I think they’re a publicly traded company. If they’re not, they’re really big. And they’ve got billions and billions of dollars, but I think only four or five people. Actually contributes to core and word press is a massive part of their business.

[00:15:53] Why aren’t they doing? Why aren’t they doing more for, for WordPress what’s, what’s the reason. And how much are they really benefiting off of open source? I think a lot of people give Matt an automatic, a lot of heat around the fact that, well, this is an open source product and, and this is just all funneling to the top of wordpress.com to make wordpress.com more money, but it’s oh, by the way, There are billion dollar hosting companies leveraging this to who are not giving back.

[00:16:20] Yeah. And don’t 

[00:16:21] Rae: forget Google as well. They’re, they’re pretty massive company. And, and I’m not sure exactly how many people they’ve contributed to the, how are they contributing to WordPress 5.9. But. Yeah, it’d be interesting, but you also mentioned Yost in there and I wonder if they’ll increase their contributed the numbers now that new fold digital has acquired them.

[00:16:39] It’d be interesting to say, how that contribution space changes and, and also in the state of the word Matt shared how he liked to see that landscape of contribution change in the coming years. So, Yeah, it would be, it would be great to see those big businesses putting back more in as far as five for the five, five for the future goes it’s great to see so many smaller individuals and businesses contributing.

[00:17:04] But also another interesting story I think is over the, over the past year, there’s been a drop in, in volunteers and contributors to the project. And an automatic is picked up the lion’s share of that work, which, you can’t fault automatic for, stepping in and, and supporting the project in that way.

[00:17:22] It would be great to say. Nice. Some of the bigger businesses stepping in and putting out resources for that too. I was really pleased to say XW pays as has, has put up contributors for the performance team and it’d be great to see more businesses like that who have that kind of expertise to be able to, to.

[00:17:39] Could contribute their people to different parts of the project. Would that help? Because it’s not really just about developers. It’s also about marketing and design and mobile. There, there are a lot of different end-to-end education. There are a lot of different spaces that need country.

[00:17:54] Matt: And what we’ve I’ve hoped we’ve just done is illustrate how important WordPress news [00:18:00] is and could be if there was more funding in the space. So how do we make money doing this? Ray, I wanna, I wanna pivot and talk about that a little bit because you, you, you have. The, what I’m going to say, the only vehicle for content you put out for WordPress is the newsletter, the repository.

[00:18:17] You’re just sending out email. You’re not doing a blog, you’re not doing a YouTube channel. You’re not doing a podcast yet. And you monetize that through through sponsorship. It’s. Well, I’ll let you, I’m not, you don’t have to say any numbers. It’s not a full-time job for you. In other words, it’s not supporting you.

[00:18:34] Full-time compared to your day job. Maybe one day will like, what do you think it’s going to take to make the repository of full-time job? Is there another. Of an audience in the WordPress news space to build a true air quotes, air quotes business, or should it be selling NFTs to support this 

[00:18:55] Rae: maybe, but who knows how long that’s going to be around for?

[00:18:58] To be honest, I don’t see their positories a full full-time job for me. I started it as a bit of a side gig. I thought that would take four, maybe four hours a week. And, and how it’s more like a donor. So it does take a bit of time to put together because it’s, it’s solo single stories, reading everything.

[00:19:16] And in making sure that, I don’t want to just pick any, tweets to include in the newsletter. I want to make sure that I’m trying to find as many views as possible. And the ones that I’m including in the newsletter, a representative of, of the, of the views that you know, are in the community as well as any of that.

[00:19:32] It might be a bit unusual. The, I think that it’s an interesting one funding. I’m very lucky to have GoDaddy in element or sponsor sponsoring the newsletter this year. They’d been fantastic sponsors. One thing I do is when I enter into an agreement with a sponsor, I make it clear that.

[00:19:52] If that, I want to retain editorial independence. So if there are any stories that involve them good or bad, I’m going to include them in the newsletter. Even earlier in the year when automatic mail poll was sponsoring the newsletter for the all of last year and, and And that was fantastic.

[00:20:10] It allowed the newsletter to really great. But then when automatic bought out male poet automatic began took over sponsorship of the newsletter for the first quarter of 2021. And that was part of the agreement as well. I made sure that any stories involving automatic rules, you were going to report on those.

[00:20:28] I think it’s really important. If any publications have sponsorship agreements of that type, that it is very clear that editorial independence is important and, and that’s separate from sponsorship. There are lots of other different models as we’ve discussed before as well, of the podcast.

[00:20:48] There are lots of different models for, for funding use. It’s, it’s a bit of experimentation, I think there’s philanthropy as we’ve seen that philanthropic or philanthropic funding [00:21:00] model. There are a crowdsourced kind of funding models. It’s, it’s an interesting one because at the end of the day, P everybody wants news, but not everybody’s willing to pay for it.

[00:21:10] And that’s, that’s the struggle is real there. It’s really hard to overcome that because for a long time, these is. Well, my speed. Well, it’s been free on the internet. It’s easy to find sources. A lot of people think that they can find it themselves, but the convenience of having a newsletter letter, like the repository brings it all together and makes it more accessible.

[00:21:30] Yeah. 

[00:21:31] Matt: How do we encourage, ah, I’ll I’ll fall on this grenade. You don’t have to agree with me. Okay. I’ll be, I’ll be the guy who says it out loud, but. How do we encourage better content? To be made. And I say content specifically, because I know not every, not everyone doesn’t want to cover the inside baseball of, of WordPress.

[00:21:58] They don’t want to dive deep into stories. I get it because it’s a very small audience. And maybe we’ll talk about that in a moment. Like it’s kind of a small audience who really cares about this stuff versus like, how do I build this element or site to make a thousand dollars a month? That’s a much larger audience who cares.

[00:22:16] Again, air quotes cares about WordPress. How do we encourage others to create better content? Or do you have any, any words of wisdom on how to create better content so that we all the content creators in WordPress, whether it’s a journalist, a, an opinion piece, or maybe even a tutorial. That businesses take us a little bit brands that sponsor us or donate to us.

[00:22:39] Take us a little bit more serious because I’ve overseen. I’ve. What I’ve seen is the over-saturation of asking for like donor donations and sponsorships, and then the content never gets made. And what I feel like is that kind of hurts us. Maybe not, I don’t know, but it kind of hurts us where we knock on that, that brand’s door.

[00:23:02] And we say, Hey, we got this great thing. We’re pouring so much effort into it. And they go, yeah, that other person burned me for $5,000. And they didn’t really, they didn’t do the ad read. Right. Or they didn’t create the amount of content that we thought, or, the content didn’t bring us that much traction.

[00:23:18] So, you have this, I’m giving you 5,000. I want 5,000 in one. Any words of wisdom for elevating the quality of content or is it just like survival of the fittest? 

[00:23:29] Rae: Yeah, that’s a really interesting topic. In the good question. The only way I guess I can answer that is, is from my own experience.

[00:23:36] When. I started the ripples of trails or, really fortunate that I guess I was the writer for the project. It was a collaboration between myself and Kim. So I was writing, Kim was basically bankrolling. He didn’t, he was, running his own company, didn’t have the time. So, there was a collaboration between the two of us.

[00:23:53] We talked, discussed the news and, and made the website and we kicked it off with, I think, seven subscribers. I [00:24:00] can’t remember in the first issue, not many And we got, got up to about a hundred subscribers and it kind of just plateaued for a while, but we kept on going and slowly and it snowballed, but it took probably a good year of, of the newsletter to really get into.

[00:24:21] To really start growing our subscribers. I think by that stage, we might’ve had two or 300 subscribers by the end of the first year, we were a bit deflated. We thought we’d have more subscribers. And we were trying to try to, become more well known and, and get more people reading. But it’s a, it’s a pretty hard thing.

[00:24:39] And so. When it, when it came time for came to step away when male Paul was acquired and then automatic finished sponsoring after they acquired male poet. I was kind of in a spot where I didn’t know where I was going to go next with sponsorship. And it was that, that good year of very slow growth and just focusing on writing something quality that attracted GoDaddy to, to sponsor they would, at their hour, they were our first sponsor who really saw what we were, what we were aiming for with the newsletter or by that stage.

[00:25:14] No. I was really luckily. So, Laura Nelson, who works at a male poet in their marketing, she’s now at world commerce. She was absolutely critical in helping develop that relationship. She’s a fantastic member in the WordPress community, so she helped introduce us and yet he’s still a sponsor and it’s, it’s there.

[00:25:34] Adam and Courtney and their belief in the newsletter and, and, and wanting to, they also have a sponsor section in the newsletter that allows them to share events and, and, and other pieces with the community. That’s, that’s been critical in the, the ongoing. Publishing of the newsletter.

[00:25:51] Yeah, these kinds of projects can’t really can’t happen without money family to support. So it’s, it’s an interesting one in terms of, how do we keep these kinds of things afloat? And as far as going back to your question about quality content, I think I think a lot of people want to make money really quickly.

[00:26:10] And yeah, of course, who doesn’t, everyone wants to make money, but sometimes it does take a slow burn and working on something with the aim of producing something high quality. Is going to make some money in the end. And I’m happy to say the, and happy to share that. Then the repository is profitable for me.

[00:26:27] It’s not going to be a full-time job, but for what it, what it is at the moment. And I don’t have plans for, major expansion, but it is not well, I, I don’t have big plans to have a podcast or a big website and do lots of reporting. People subscribe the same, pretty happy with what it is at the moment.

[00:26:48] And, and I am happy to share that in, in the new year, Allie Emmons is coming on board to help with community outreach and in increasing the number of voices that are in the newsletter. That’s really important for me to make sure we not just, rinse [00:27:00] and repeating the same voices over and over again, the newsletter.

[00:27:03] We want to make sure that people. Who are doing awesome things and they might not be as vocal. We want to make sure that they’re included as well. And, and I want the newsletter to be a source of, of amazing work that’s happening across the community, not just the same things over and over again as can happen in, in some spaces.

[00:27:22] Yeah. Other than 

[00:27:25] Matt: one of the things that I think is a challenge is, is that I think. What we want is we want the, maybe not even average WordPress user, but maybe above average WordPress user to want to turn into the news, like turn excuse me, tune into the news. Right? Because Hey, maybe the above average WordPress user is an it professional and she manages a hundred multi-sites for a university.

[00:27:53] And. Not in the WordPress community, but my God, wouldn’t you like to know when awesome motive buys those, the suite of plugins that you use, and suddenly you’re like who the heck is awesome motive. And if I was tuning into a news coverage, maybe somebody doing a piece on who automotive is and the background and the history, et cetera, et cetera Yeah.

[00:28:13] I don’t know if you’ve thought about this. I don’t know if this is something that maybe you even plan to go into with the newsletter is like, how do we, how do we dip into that segment of the reader of the demographic? I think of a local newspaper, all of a sudden. We’re doing fashion week and it’s I know what’s going on here.

[00:28:32] Right? One, you have advertisement that to hope. You’re, you’re hoping that you’re doing fashion week and you’re getting some new eyeballs on the, the, the baseline publication, maybe at that it raises more readers in the long run. Is there something like that that we can do without, selling ourselves to affiliate links 

[00:28:49] Rae: in?

[00:28:50] That’s a tough question. How do you, how do you broaden your own. It’s a hard one because we’re pressing uses so smaller niche and how you reach that kind of other level of, of, users is a, is a tough one. I don’t know if I have any answers today. I’d be interested to hear from other people who might’ve done it successfully, because I can’t think of how it, it just feels like there’s a, almost like a Seton barrier between.

[00:29:18] The people who, who read S I guess, serious WordPress knees that, core contributors and developers and small business owners and people who are very involved in the community. And then everybody else, it just seems like a big step. And Yeah, I don’t know. I just don’t feel that they’re that necessarily interested in, in how WordPress comes together or if people who you use a platform like that, every will be.

[00:29:47] That’s a, that’s a really interesting area to explore. 

[00:29:50] Matt: I’m going to say, I’m going to say something in hopes that Sarah Gooding is listening to this and she, and she uses this in the, in the headline. But I think that the cap on the audience [00:30:00] and you could probably. Again, you don’t have to reveal anything from your side, but I think the cap on the audience of people who really care about the inside WordPress news is probably right around 3000 human beings on the face of this earth is the number that I would say of people who actually care about.

[00:30:21] What Matt says in the state of the word and how it impacts WordPress, for, for, for years, I was gonna say most months, years to come or really care about, themes getting acquired. I think my number is about 3000, maybe on a good day, 3,500, but I’d say 3000 is the global reach of WordPress news.

[00:30:41] Yeah, I can use that, Sarah, if you want. 

[00:30:45] Rae: Well, I’ll tell ya. I don’t have that many subscribers to the newsletter. It’s it’s, it’s an interesting one. Like how, how many people are really interested in WordPress news because I’ve spoken to. People who work at automatic and some other WordPress businesses who work with the community, but aren’t necessarily interested in the community or kind of want to be kind of that stick away because they don’t want to be too involved in it.

[00:31:12] So it, it, it is an interesting number, but also, we’ve got the English speaking people who are involved in the community, and then we’ve got the non-English speaking people who have communities in other parts of the world. So who knows, if I assume that number, you’re thinking probably English speakers.

[00:31:29] So if we think about the people who are non-English speakers and are very involved in WordPress, like you can see all the amazing work that Mary job is doing in Africa. And, The amazing word camp that was held would would camp Spain recently, and the community’s just so passionate over there that they even produce a live late night a late night show pre recorded.

[00:31:52] But. There, there are people really passionate about WordPress and the community. Oh WordPress the recent word camp in in Portugal, Portugal recently. Yeah, looking at just their their daily schedule of, of, of. Throughout the the two days it was all very community-based and the events I had on day two, where, where everybody getting together and doing things in person together the whole cop that, that whole event was around community and nurturing, connections with people.

[00:32:22] And, and so there. You, it could be 3003 and a half thousand people who are really just in WordPress and, and know knowing more about WordPress news. But I would say that number would be. A lot bigger. Once we start thinking about non-English speakers. And I think that’s an interesting area to explore that.

[00:32:42] How do we kind of bring the, those communities together, the English non-English speakers? How do we bring those people? As just, people who interested in WordPress regardless of language, and that’d be an interesting one to explore the next year or two, as we get closer to exploring when, [00:33:00] when language and translation becomes the, the dominant focus of the program.

[00:33:06] Matt: Piggyback off of this conversation of how many max amount of audience I might have the WB minute who has only been around for about six ish months. The biggest piece that it saw was big story that it, so I was Paul Lacey story about Gutenberg and how that Gutenberg has impacted himself, but also his, his opinion on how it impacted.

[00:33:25] The community at one saw about 2200 2300 views to the, to the article and about almost 400 downloads to the podcast episode. And of course, anything that you bring up around Gutenberg and. It’s impact on whatever mean Gutenberg’s impact on whatever the community, the software performance is always going to get a look or view.

[00:33:51] Are there any other hard hitting topics you think that might be that we haven’t explored yet? By the time this episode goes out, it will be 20, 22 something this year you think, which is kind of interesting that folks should be paying attention to, or the next time. 

[00:34:07] Rae: Oh, yeah. I’m interested to see how the acquisition train goes next year in terms of more acquisitions in the space.

[00:34:16] And also you can’t really get away from Gutenberg. That’s going to be a big focus of next year. It really jumped out at me during the state of the word. When Matt was saying, we only have a handful of, of block themes and you’d like to see 3000 by the end of next year. So, interesting to see, I, I guess one of the interesting stories will be how, how blockchains become more commercialized as well.

[00:34:39] Are we going to see. More, same authors once w 5.9 comes out are they going to feel ready to really explore that space? We’re going to see a lot more of those themes on, on ThemeForest and other kinds of Marketplaces like that. Be interesting to say how that rolls out next year, because after that Matt was talking about, venturing into collaboration as the focus of the next phase of the roadmap for, for WordPress.

[00:35:03] So are we going to see blocks wrap up next year or continue, kind of fall into the, into the following year? Yeah. And I, I think the, the other thing is also probably most seriously thinking about volunteers and contributors to WordPress, that was a big focus of the state of the word.

[00:35:18] And, and with the lack of volunteers, thanks to you, the pandemic, that’d be an interesting thing to watch next year. Where are we? It’s, it’s mostly sponsored people who are contributing to WordPress. We, we see a lot, a lot of that. I was going to say, more of a drive to have more sponsored people working on the project, or, we’re trying to recruit more people who, who aren’t sponsored.

[00:35:40] That’d be interesting thing to watch next year, as far as contributions go and how that increases or potentially decreases, I guess. 

[00:35:49] Matt: Gutenberg everywhere blocks. Give me all the blocks. Ray, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really can’t. Thank you enough. I could go on for another hour, but I’m sure you’re sick and sick and tired of hearing me.

[00:35:59] Where can folks [00:36:00] go to sign up to the newsletter and say, thanks online. 

[00:36:03] Rae: Well, if you interested in joining the repository, it’s it comes out every Friday, go to the repository.email to sign up. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Matt. I’ve been listening for years and yeah, it’s, it’s really an honor to, to 

[00:36:18] Matt: be feeding.

[00:36:19] No, I, I, I, it’s a pleasure and an honor having you here as well. I also love the repository. Go sign up the show. The links will be in the show notes. Hey, if you want to support independent WordPress news or content number one, sign up for the repository. And if you are a big business and you’ve got some bucks, make sure you knock on raised door to say, Hey, I’d love to sponsor the news.

[00:36:44] And then when you’re done with her, she will send you my way to spend $79 to join the WP minute membership. Get your hand in the weekly WordPress news in our private discord interact with folks like Ray and others who produce the [email protected] slash Matt report. We’ll see you in the next episode.

[00:00:00] Sam: Storage scholars is a door to door, white glove service for college students. So basically the way that the service works it’s generally for out-of-state or international studies.
[00:00:09] I was from New York. I went to a school called wake forest, North Carolina, and I had two international hallmates, one from China, one from Ethiopia, and I would stereotypically see them bring over two large suitcases overseas. They’d bought the rest of the stuff that they needed at target bed bath and beyond, et cetera.
[00:00:24] And there was just no way they were going to ship back their bedding or school supplies back to China. Right. So I thought, had to be a better way type deal. So the way the service works now is students receive boxes and packing supplies that we prefer finalists. They packed up their stuff. They snap a couple photos of the items.
[00:00:39] They’re looking at store add any extra insurance, lock up their room and go home. And then we generally have contracts with these universities. We get key access from the dorms. We use students on those campuses to do a contact us, move out about a 24 to 72 hours after campus closes, store it for the summer, however long they need to store it for and then have it ready and waiting in their new room pre delivered when they arrived back on campus.
[00:01:01] So that’s some storage scholars in a nutshell.
[00:01:03] Matt: Yeah. When I first, before. You and I chatted. I was like, okay, moving. Like I say, moving company. And in my, in my head, I’m like, big industry makes sense. But then when we chatted and you’re like, yeah, but people don’t need to bring all their stuff back.
[00:01:17] They’re gone for whatever a month, 45 days, a half semester or whatever the thing is. Ship, all this stuff back. And I was like, wow, this is really interesting. You mentioned that there were some competitors out there kind of doing this same thing, but just kind of half asking it. Right. It was just a little bit of, one thing, a little bit of the other, not the full, the full compliment.
[00:01:38] What are you doing better than the
[00:01:39] Sam: current. Well, yeah, definitely shout out Nick hubris, sweaty start up. He was one of the first people I met doing this up at Cornell and that’s kinda how I ended up on Twitter and probably my view as well. He, he sold a similar business up in the Northeast, so we were more so in the Southeast, we actually just recently signed a contract with a school in Pennsylvania a couple of days ago.
[00:01:56] So making an expansion there watch out during removers, but a lot of it has to do with not only the university partnerships. So we’re doing everything by the school’s books. There’s some others kind of, Companies out there that will just farm emails blast to a school and just figure they can get 30, 40, 50 customers per school and say that they operate at 80 a hundred institutions across the country.
[00:02:16] We’re more about building deep in Beth’s in-depth relationships with those schools. And not only with the administration, but then also. Really fostering entrepreneurship on these campuses and kind of in two to three students, generally sophomores, they have some long longevity and bring these kids on board.
[00:02:31] Having them shadow us, they can learn really important, like marketing operations, entrepreneurial type skills in school and ideally pay the wafers their way through college, kind of the same way that I
[00:02:40] Matt: did. Yeah. So it’s like, it’s I don’t, these are my words. You tell me paid internship. Is that how it.
[00:02:47] Sam: That’s funny. You say that that’s actually quote unquote what I just put on our handshake profile. Some of these schools, cause it was not getting accepted before as more of like a high paying job. I figured not only is that what’s more appealing to a college student nowadays. They want something for their resume, but also something they can make money on it, but it’s also kind of the way we were able to get it out of these universities and getting on those job boards in the shop postings.
[00:03:07] But, but it’s very valid to,
[00:03:08] Matt: so to my dedicated audience, so. Of what Sam just said is probably clicking to you. Why? Sam is here generally, I’m interviewing somebody who has a digital product, a digital service and agency software as a service. We’re going to get to that in a moment, but I really love the, because again, people who listen to this know that I’m a huge proponent of entrepreneurship, but learning the nuts and bolts of it, rolling up the sleeves and getting to work.
[00:03:33] It’s a fantastic model. So I applaud you for like having this platform for people to. Really figure things out. I don’t want to say the hard way, but like, you’re getting them a job. They’re learning all of this stuff. Have you been able to measure that? I know it’s kind of early days for you, but how have you measured the success of people actually learning the business side of things, even if they’re not sticking with you, for years as their end, is there anything like that, that you have a feedback loop?
[00:03:59] Sam: Yeah. I mean myself. I The reason why I started this business was to pay my way through school. I did it more out of necessity. But my business partner, actually, he was a year younger than me. He’s across the room over here. He’s probably got his headphones in, but he was a biochemistry major coming to school, like 4.0 student, like probably could have gone to Stanford med.
[00:04:16] But really got the itch, got the bug working with. And decided about halfway through his junior year to tell his whole family, Hey, I’m putting my medical career on hold. I really want to actually make, not necessarily to make a difference, be able to actually do things with my, with do things with my time, like immediately, as opposed to going to medical school residency and not be able to actually have a career until 10, 12 years after school.
[00:04:36] So he was probably like the first one. And then. As we went out and started hiring these co-founders, I’m going to had kids that were sophomores, juniors, seniors, and they graduated and they all wanted to had three of them wanted to then work full-time afterwards. We ended up doing that. He ended up running like a residential, commercial moving company that we had for a little while.
[00:04:52] Other ones have then worked for a little bit and then gone out and worked for companies like at JP Morgan. And truly, I think the biggest thing about this is a lot of times people will have things on the resume. And, but they don’t necessarily have the ability to talk about it. Like, Hey, I worked at, I intern at UI Parthenon.
[00:05:07] That’s been amazing, but like, what did you actually do at Eli Parthenon? Right. And when they work at storage scholars, they have such a breadth of actually what they did. They went from they’re calling the customers. They’re actually meeting the customers. They’re executing tons of marketing strategies are actually learning sales experience directly from us.
[00:05:25] Full-scale entrepreneurship and we’re taking all the tools that we’ve had found successful on campuses in the past, give them that playbook, but then also giving them pretty much unlimited budget to then do whatever they feel is best on their campus. And they feel really empowered. That’s really where we found most of our success.
[00:05:40] Matt: That’s awesome stuff. A listener. You might hear some noise in the background. Sam is sitting in his common area of his apartment building, but I’m happy to report if you’re watching the show on, on YouTube, YouTube, youtube.com/uh, the Matt report. Sam has a professional microphone in front of him. Thanks to thanks to me, urging him to get one, because he’ll be doing a round of podcasts and you’ll realize how good it is for his business and the marketing side.
[00:06:02] In our pre-interview you mentioned Excel. I want to talk about the software side of it, and then we’ll talk about more of like that marketing and branding stuff. Cause I think your, your branding’s on point and I want to learn a little bit more. How you got to that point, why you realize that’s important, but in our pre-interview you mentioned that your brother helped build some of the software.
[00:06:21] Of the business. A lot of my listeners are into that and to the software side, how they’re making things click. Is there a certain tech stack that you can talk about that you’re using to build the inner inner workings of the business or even the public facing one? Are you using WordPress for the website?
[00:06:38] Sam: Stuff like that? I guess I’ll start with the part that I’m more knowledgeable, but the front end was at one point it was WooCommerce when it first, first. Went to Squarespace. And then actually I’m probably about 80% done with migrating over to a web flow. Sorry, escaped my mind for a second. So the,
[00:06:58] Matt: that you for leaving woo commerce.
[00:07:00] And then, then now you’re kind of, okay, he’s going back to Webflow. So at least it’s something that’s.
[00:07:04] Sam: Yeah, so more so from the aesthetic design aspect, we go into web flow mean not, we were kind of reaching our capabilities a lot more of like block tacks and block images on Squarespace. And I just wasn’t able to kind of take it where I want it to go in terms of the branding.
[00:07:17] But then the backend is, has gone through. A ton of different iterations. A lot of it had to do with, we had one business model and then you get key access from the universities. You go to a different business model, then you have COVID and you have to start doing like shipping packages. And my five brothers listened to this.
[00:07:33] He definitely was a little frustrated. His, his, his answer was always, yes. Yes, we could do that, but w I don’t think we really understood exactly what yes, Matt and all the work that went into that. And we have, I think 287 custom fields for each associated account for different like yes-no formulas and stuff like that, too.
[00:07:50] But it’s, it’s basically built mostly on PHP angler a and my SQL eight in terms of the, kind of the front end of the database, and then AWS as well. So we’re actually, he’s stepping in. He’s coming more of like a CTO role. And we’re bringing in kind of like a development team. So we have two full-time developers, as well as somebody who’s kind of managing them as well.
[00:08:10] And they should be coming on board in the next couple of weeks. It will be the real test of all the feedback we’ve gotten is that he has really clean code. And I really hope that to be true, but
[00:08:18] Matt: if not, why not? Brother’s not getting anything for Christmas. Coming
[00:08:21] Sam: now. He’s, he’s, he’s an incredible mind.
[00:08:23] So I would assume all of that stuff is.
[00:08:25] Matt: I, I want to talk about this software segment for a little bit here. When you left WooCommerce, what were your reasons? You’re not in an uncommon, a lot of people listening to this too. There’s a segment who are agency owners, freelancers. They talked a lot of folks who hop through different CMSs.
[00:08:40] They hear a bunch of different things. You’re not in an uncommon seat to be making these jokes. But what was it for you to leave WooCommerce to begin with?
[00:08:47] Sam: Yeah, you have to appreciate that. I was 18 and I was better than my first ever website. And I just had my brother at the time because he was the only like technical person.
[00:08:54] I knew, Hey, like what should we build the website on? He kind of helped me build the WooCommerce website to begin with. And then I had a friend that was working for kind of a different startup. It was more, it was a food and Bev startups with a little more of a prettier interface. He’s like, you gotta use Squarespace.
[00:09:07] You gotta start using canvas. This is mind blowing to me like, oh, I can actually just drag and drop and make this as opposed to relying on my brother to actually go in and design something where he was extremely technically sound. But aesthetically is probably is more of a secondary. So that was more so just the ability for me to do it myself.
[00:09:23] But I’m sure now, five, six years later will commerce would, it would have been more of a drag and drop. It just was a little more intimidating at the time. Yeah, for
[00:09:30] Matt: sure. For sure. Is the software side without revealing the secret sauce. Is that a secret sauce for you over your competition?
[00:09:39] Like what technologies or how do you simplify this experience for your customers through the avenue of.
[00:09:47] Sam: A hundred percent. It’s definitely, there’s no reason to fully reinvent the wheel. Storage and moving companies existed obviously for decades, what we do. It’s, you can’t buy some off the shelf software.
[00:09:58] That’s actually going to work for exactly what you’re looking for. So we’ve definitely, scoured the competition. We’ve built our own software and then we’ve also kind of taken probably some of the 10, five, 10% from these other. Worked for them. And put it into our platform. Of course they can kind of like a, a Frank and business of, of storage scholars for the college Jordan’s game.
[00:10:17] But I think a couple of the things are you market to the college students, but the real customers are kind of the parents. So that was the biggest lesson we learned in terms of making accounts that can give both parent and student access where the student come on, they can make the account, the parent that doesn’t have to like contact the student to find out their log.
[00:10:34] The parent can pay. The student can edit the pick-up drop-off information. It’s a whole open flow of information that in the past it would be that scenario would be that Jane Smith is a divorced mom and she made an account for her son Johnny Maxwell and. The account would say Jane Smith, but it’s actually for the sun and it’s like, what is going on?
[00:10:54] Right. So being able to really be flawless in the flow of information and then that way we actually know exactly who we’re communicating to, and we can also communicate both to the students and parents and keep everybody in the loop is it’s probably the biggest differentiator.
[00:11:05] Matt: Is this all website on the website or is there a mobile.
[00:11:08] That everybody has instant access to.
[00:11:11] Sam: Yeah, it’s a mobily optimized website right now. That’s actually where we’re stepping into as well as making an app. I think the initial instinct was why do we need an app who wants to download a storage app and have it on their phone at all times? But at the same time, there is definitely limitations with websites and being able to upload images quickly.
[00:11:27] And just more so the speed of the site is what’s holding us back right now from not necessarily a customer standpoint, that’s a lot simpler, but more of a managerial standpoint because customer they’re uploading. Five images, total where the managers are going in, potentially looking at 600 orders in a one or two day period and just the load speed and the page speed needs to be increased.
[00:11:44] So making a oh an app first for the managers where they can also integrate all the software, use it right now, like off the shelf in terms of time tracking payroll and also integrating our actual software altogether to have one harmonious unit.
[00:11:58] Matt: What challenges are you finding? Kind of like you’re almost in that marketplace.
[00:12:04] Conundrum where you need to kind of serve two different crowds, right? So in a, in a marketplace standpoint, you need the customers to show up and you need the inventory to sell them in your case, you need the customers to show up, but you also you’re like, so you’re building a software for these customers to snap the photos of the stuff.
[00:12:21] People need to pack up and move for them. But then you’re also trying to build software for your team to use, efficiently and effectively. How is that process? Like, you get customers that give you feedback. Hey, this experience was great. This experience sucked. And then you get the same feedback from your, from your employees.
[00:12:35] Or like, I can’t find the stuff fast enough, or I can’t see all the orders coming in. Has that been a challenge at all or fairly smooth sailing so
[00:12:43] Sam: far? Yeah, definitely. Always been customer first. I think the customer experience has not been sacrificed by any means, but it’s been the iterations of the business.
[00:12:53] So like right now, About 80% or sorry to say it’s about 50, 50, I would say at this point, because we keep changing of our business is key access schools, kids leave their stuff in their room. They go home. We do big mass move-outs in 24, 48 hours. That has, Boriso been put on the back burner because we have a little more time and autonomy.
[00:13:13] We’re not dealing directly with the students. Face-to-face where we can kind of sit back and wait for the website to load or just kind of go on your computer. Make that work, but then you have an entirely different way. We built it where it’s like a by appointment where you meet the customers at the door, they pick up time, they’re on a alive queue and then there’s worklist associated with that.
[00:13:30] So the by appointment has been perfected, but then now that we continue to evolve and make the business model better, it’s like actually having them make two different work lists, one for like a one day, move out and one for like a 10 day move out. And with, with all the things that have obviously happened in the last 12 months, we had to.
[00:13:46] Make some other things become priority, but I think, I don’t think, this year is exactly what we’re doing. We’re actually going to make that. So they’re both working and you can have a work list. You can download that. You can search by it. You can filter by dorm. You can filter by floor of the dorm, and then you’re just going through and just crushing dorm by dorm, as opposed to like looking at specific dates or people are signing up for their move-outs.
[00:14:05] I want to
[00:14:05] Matt: move on to talk about the challenges of running the business. Aside from the software and talk about these logistic things, part of the advantage. I remember you telling me and you, I think you mentioned it before in the pre-interview is that you do go into the room, right? They, you get access to the room to grab the.
[00:14:21] And your competition doesn’t do that, right?
[00:14:25] Sam: Yeah. So, some. Some of these schools have access to the dorms. But the thing is, is that a lot of them are, are basically more so high level marketing companies. And then they’re farming out the actual, moving to local moving companies and with what’s going on with COVID and stuff as well, in terms of like having, being coming vaccinated, that’s one big barrier to entry at like, well, how are you going to trust us outside moving company to walk into your dorms, but who can you trust?
[00:14:49] The students on your campus because they’ve been vaccinated. So that was kind of one way for us to get a backdoor approach to that. And then on top of that too, if you’re an 18 year old girl and your father is sending you to school, does your father really want you to have, 40 old man walking into your room stereotypically, right.
[00:15:03] And walking into that dorm and picking up your stuff and moving it out when you could have a kid that was in your calculus class. And we definitely do struggle with the kind of balancing that image of peer to peer, but also. Kind of perfection and, level of quality because some people are like, this is awesome.
[00:15:18] You’re my, your. Current, classmate at the same time, my mom doesn’t mind if I can trust you with my stuff. So that’s another reason kind of behind the branding and trying to make us see them a more of like the Uber black premier service. We’re not a discount service, we’re charging a premium price and, our level of service should be reflected in that just because we’re using students, that doesn’t necessarily decrease the quality.
[00:15:37] It’s just increasing the personalization. Yeah.
[00:15:40] Matt: And, but the particular challenge getting to was is you have to make these, not only do you have to make that I guess, sale or relationship to the customer, but you also have to make it with the school because it’s not like the school is just going to let you do all this stuff without, I’m assume without them knowing who the heck you are and like what’s going on.
[00:15:56] They start seeing all these black t-shirts rolling in the nice logos on it. Like what’s happening here. I’m sure you have to try. Again, like a couple sides of the fence that the end user customer, and then the place that has the inventory, which is the school and in it, you have to build up those relationships on both sides.
[00:16:14] The, and then the next challenge, which popped into my head when we were chatting earlier is just the, student, what I’ll say is a paid internship. These student body employees, if you will, across the country how are you managing. Scaling that like, do you have to start having regional managers, people, once they do graduate school, they become an actual full season employee with you.
[00:16:38] And now they’re managers of that school. How does that ramp
[00:16:41] Sam: up? Yeah. So we call those internships. We call them campus co-founders because we truly believe that they are kind of co-founding in some ways like franchising their campus, and they can either get an inflated hourly upwards, 15 to $20 an hour at a base, or they can essentially get like a percentage of revenue.
[00:16:57] And then of course, they’re going to see that increase the more years that they’re actually operating. So when you have, like, for example, you had a kid who, a soft. Junior senior. By the time he was senior year, he made $20,000 in a single move out based on that revenue schedule. And then he wanted to continue working full time.
[00:17:14] So I think you have the people that are naturally interested. But the challenge with that of course is when we were kind of under a million dollars in sales or a couple years ago, it was all right. Well, we want to bring these people on, but the beauty of this business is seasonal. And as a full-time student, it was.
[00:17:28] But like now that we’re graduating we’re no longer in school. We have all this extra time and like, to what you alluded to, we’re spending a lot more of that time actually selling universities and kind of university sales, as opposed to just, building up this marketing and then trying to do the move out and then do the move in and.
[00:17:42] Taking a rest because we actually have school to do it. It’s finding a job to do the rest of the year. So as we’ve been able to grow, I think the beauty of this is that the more people that have actually wanted to work full-time we’ve been able to give them full-time opportunities. So we heard a gift from Milan.
[00:17:55] We hired a kid actually just from college of Charleston a couple of weeks ago. He came on full time and then we have two more in the pipeline, one from Richmond and one from Washington and Lee university that are currently seniors in. There if express interests and, and working post-graduation I think for the first time, I’m really excited that we actually will be able to give them full-time opportunities as just like you said, as regional managers and one region managing their region physically, but then also helping to then manage remote.
[00:18:20] No another five or 10 that are schools under their domain.
[00:18:23] Matt: Do you look at certain areas? So I’m south of Boston, there’s a billion schools here. Like, do you look at areas that you want to go into that maybe you haven’t found any organic interest from? Is that a thing? Or is it like, Hey, I’m just like this natural growth just works and it’s way easier to manage or do you look at territories that you want to get into and, and how does.
[00:18:44] Sam: A hundred percent. So I went to school in North Carolina, so natural expansion was Virginia, South Carolina. Saw a competitor that had a school in Texas at SMU. So that’s how we went down to Texas rice and that’s to me this past year, I just moved down to Texas to expand that. Texas and Florida. But I’m from New York, my business partners from Boston too.
[00:19:01] So we definitely have our sights set on the Northeast. There’s just actually a little more competition up there. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Mean being a fast follower is definitely a lot easier than trying to educate not only the school, but the customer on what a valet storage service is.
[00:19:16] So I’d rather just go in where they’ve had a previous, service provider that’s just bad. And then we can just go in and take over. But where are we? Found kind of those pockets is actually we started going to housing conferences. So conferences that have the residency, I, the operations people.
[00:19:31] And that’s actually where he met this one person from Pennsylvania, where by no means were we meaning to expand there. But we developed a great rapport. She loved what she heard and she was like, yeah, I’d love to sign an exclusive contract with y’all. That’ll happen in the last couple of weeks, but now it’s like, oh, well now that puts some eyes in Pennsylvania.
[00:19:47] Maybe we need to expand there a little quicker and. Pennsylvania’s got probably 20 schools that we could expand to. And once you have that kind of density, there’s no reason not. Yeah.
[00:19:55] Matt: I’d imagine and correct me if I’m wrong. Like I, I would imagine when you go into expand into a new territory, your biggest or potentially your biggest spend is going to be marketing and advertising.
[00:20:05] Just to get the word out there. It’s not like you’re having to ship a bunch of product or these amazing boxes that we’re going to talk about in a second. But is there any kind of like thing you have to ship in? And store your own storage stuff, something really meta, like, is there a thing you have to ship out there?
[00:20:20] A box of stuff and people just have to.
[00:20:23] Sam: Yeah. So yeah, I’ll ship a box or two of our storage scholars boxes to the co-founders tell them to go out and buy a table, give them their corporate credit card to go do that. And that’s going to have shirts, cups, stickers, banners, film backs, kind of that, that kind of marketing material.
[00:20:37] But the beauty too, is that on any first year campus, whether we’re talking about marketing materials or whether we’re talking about. Storing kids’ actual things is that, there’s a really nice thing called self storage. That’s usually five minutes from campus. So when we’re not necessarily sure about a market, the numbers can look great, but it doesn’t assign me.
[00:20:54] People are going to use the service. So we’ll use self storage almost exclusively for the first year. And then once you have that market proven, then you’re going to go out and you’re going to find an industrial warehouse lease. But that being said, it’s also another challenge of the business because we might have.
[00:21:06] 10 15,000 square feet from the four months of made August. But then all these kids move back in. You might have a couple of students that store longer. You might have some marketing materials, some extra boxes, but that’s going to come down to a maximum, thousand square feet. Right. So then you’re kind of downsizing either to self storage or coming up with a really creative lease with the landlord.
[00:21:22] But that’s a, that’s definitely a, a tough aspect of the business too. It’s finding that space.
[00:21:27] Matt: Oh, when you raise a billion dollars, I hope it’s not one of those. We work stories where you set out to be a coworking space, but you ended up being a real estate company. And then why the hell do you own all this property?
[00:21:36] And you’re like, oh, we’re really a moving company. And then sheets are all imbalanced. Let’s talk about, let’s talk about marketing for a second. Toward the end of the show, a great marketing. I think I know the answer, but why did you focus on, how did you feel? How did you know that, that marketing’s really going to work for something like this or branding and your logo and stuff is really going to work for something like this?
[00:21:57] A competitive market.
[00:21:59] Sam: Yeah, the way the business was started, as I printed out some flyers that I’d probably throw up out. If I looked at today, I’m there pretty embarrassing, but I went door to door. I saw all my freshmen, hallmates and freshman classmates, and they knock on the door and they say, come in.
[00:22:13] I’m like, no, that’s, I would knock on the door again to come in. And I’m like, no, I’m not who you think I am, but sure. I’ll come in. So I, I definitely had some tough conversations at the beginning and got some raw feedback on what was what they were looking for and what they weren’t looking for. But I think initially too, in terms of like a branding aspect after kind of doing that customer discovery was.
[00:22:31] The best advice that I got from one of my entrepreneurship professors is there was a competitor on campus and I was like, oh, they’re charging $14 a box. I’m going to charge 13. Oh, he’s like, do not be the discount service, like always charge more and, but provide more too. Right. So I from, I wouldn’t say day one, but from day two, it’s like, okay.
[00:22:49] Yes, we need to be out there. Be the premium service and service, the top level customer and give them the service that they, that they desire. And the whole black and white was really trying to be the. Premium futuristic, Uber black type experience, luxury experiences, as opposed to being, I don’t know, like a green eco-friendly moving company.
[00:23:07] We are. Absolutely. You can find that. I don’t mean to say it like that, but I think sometimes there’s, there’s definitely certain colors that elicit certain emotions and I, I want it to be more of a sleek elite luxury brand.
[00:23:17] Matt: Yeah. The do do when every time you’re moving students, You always rocking the branded boxes or is it like one branded box on top and the rest of them are
[00:23:26] Sam: brown?
[00:23:27] No, absolutely. So not only does that give you the brand awareness, but actually, so we used to use obviously brown boxes, right. And we would buy these stickers and they put the sticker on top of the box. It also put the sticker on there, out of box item, their TV, their refrigerator, whatever. But in terms of like an inventory perspective, if you imagine you have a box and then you’d stack another box on top, And you have a sticker on the top.
[00:23:49] Well, you can’t see it. Right? So those boxes were also designed because you have their writing, their name, the order number, the item number on the top of the box. They’re also writing it massively on the side of the box, actually in the storage facilities. They’re lined up. Yeah. I see all their names very, very clearly.
[00:24:04] So from just like an identification standpoint, that was the purpose of it. And then of course, yet when you walk around with black storage, collar shirts, white shirts, white shorts, and these big black boxes, and then you see them in the, in the dumpsters for two weeks after, and the recycling bins, after everyone leaves and comes back, it’s like, it’s great branding.
[00:24:19] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. People wonder what the heck’s going on. I want that, like, that looks easy. Speaking of looks easy. I’m looking at the. Archive a web archive.org site. And I’m looking back to August, 2018. Your tagline for the site back then was easy, effortless and economical live the scholars. How did you change that from a marketing perspective?
[00:24:40] You started talking to customers, you chatted with them. They were like, no, we’ll pay you a little bit more money. And you got rid of the word economical. How did that all play out? Changing that.
[00:24:48] Sam: Yeah. I thought alliteration was more powerful than value at the time. So that’s probably why I went with that.
[00:24:53] But yeah, I it was, like I said, I, I want it to beat out the competition because also at the same time, I didn’t, I wasn’t confident. Like I knew it was confident in myself, but I’d never, I didn’t want to over promise and under deliver. So to say, Hey, we’re the best service we’re better than the competition.
[00:25:06] I’d never even moved to box before. It’s like, that was kind of tough. So that was year one. And then once we, server. 64 students at wake forest university. I was like, all right, well, this went well. We made it happen. I touched every single box. I know exactly how this works. I shook probably half the kids hands and the parents hands that use this service.
[00:25:22] All right. Now I’m confident we can go out there and start to spread what we’re doing and do it in a, in a much better way and be able to charge that premium price tag, Sam,
[00:25:30] Matt: this doesn’t sound like it’s your first rodeo. Who do you have? Have you ran a business before somebody, your dad, your parents, a great mentors.
[00:25:38] You’re just born with it. What is it?
[00:25:40] Sam: So my parents are both public high school teachers in New York. I’m the youngest of three. My brother is a web developer, my sister’s a and in fashion. So I, I didn’t necessarily get it from them fully, but definitely the fiscal responsibility absolutely came from my parents, actually my grandfather mostly, and from, at a young age.
[00:26:00] Kind of the quintessential story would be, and maybe two of them was that at five. I was like, Hey mom, dad, like, I want to have a lemonade stand. So great. Okay. So you’re going to go out. You’re going to buy the paper, the markers, the plastic cups and the, lemonade powder. And w we’ll we’ll lend you the money in the beginning, but you got to pass that back.
[00:26:17] And to like be, $18 in debt at five years old, it’s like, shit. Like I gotta make this happen. Right. So I’m standing out in the street and I’m flagging people down. And, and from that point on, even at age nine, I’m like, oh mom, like Frankie wants an Xbox for Christmas. Okay. Well, how are you going to get that for him?
[00:26:33] Right. Well, it’s like, I wasn’t poor, but it just kind of given him. The fiscal responsibility at such a young age, what kind of drove me to, to start develop these skills very early on and start flipping ATVs cars and stuff like that in high school and selling candy out of my locker and middle school. I was always kind of hustling.
[00:26:49] Matt: Are you, have you raised money? I don’t think we, as we talked about this in the pre-interview raising money, organic bootstrap, I should say, or do you plan on raising money? What are the cards hold.
[00:26:58] Sam: Yeah. Currently exclusively bootstrapped. Like I said, too excited for aside from a little PPP, but it, the, the business motto is structured such as, and the reason why I started this business was, Hey, I need to make money.
[00:27:10] Like today. I need to pay for my school today. So how can I do that? And so kids would pay a $50 deposit, which they still do now. And that for me covered the initial cost of the boxes, the tape, the storage units, the trucks, and that’s, what’s been able to catapult. As far, I don’t think we could grow to 150 schools next year without raising money, but that’s not really the purpose or really the path right now.
[00:27:33] Like I said, building deep in-depth relationships with the universities and the life cycle of a, of a university sales cycle is, is pretty it’s pretty. Oh, it’s more of a relationship driven business. So trying to figure that out along the way, and at this point where we’ve been able to bootstrap it and keep it going that way.
[00:27:49] Matt: Sam chase and storage scholars, storage, scholars.com, Sam, anywhere else you want folks to go?
[00:27:56] Sam: Yeah, definitely follow us on socials on on Instagram, on Facebook, LinkedIn, we are definitely trying to be a young company. So give us some rod feedback. If, if you’re in that age, demographic 18 to 21, let us know what we’re doing.
[00:28:10] Right. Let’s know what we’re doing wrong. Love to hear from you,

[00:00:00] Matt: Welcome back to the Matt report podcast, special guest today, a man that I met God, I don’t know if I had my notes in front of me. If I was a professional podcast or years ago at PressNomics spoiler alert, there was some stuff in the news about pages. And maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that today, Jr.

[00:00:17] Jr. Welcome to the program. 

[00:00:20] JR: I know, man. Thanks for having me again. When I 

[00:00:22] Matt: interviewed you last time, I think it was right on the heels of you selling your company and you’re back building another company. You are the co-founder of a man. I was just trying to think of, of a great word. An Avengers team.

[00:00:37] You certainly don’t want to be like, I dunno, the guardians of the galaxy co-founder and CEO of make lemonade recently launched something called lemon squeezy that we’ll talk about today. Yeah. How many, well, actually, let me, before we get in. Was it two years ago. I remember taking a phone call from you.

[00:00:57] You were asking me about starting a podcast. You started a podcast. Oftentimes I would broadcast that podcast onto my big screen TV. And watch you drink old fashions talking about startups. What 

[00:01:10] JR: happened? Yeah, no, that’s a good question. So, like, So me and you go way back, right? Especially in the WordPress space.

[00:01:17] Mojo was, was a good ride. Built a marketplace up, went and did the executive life at endurance for a long time, and then wanting to go on my own again. And so I got way into SAS customer attention because of what we were doing at Bluehost and things like that. Anyway, I was trying to get into that space and trying to find lightening in a bottle like I did with WordPress so quickly.

[00:01:40] Right. It’s so fast. It’s like, oh yeah, I can do this again. And starting a company again is hard. And so, we tried to get into that space and it just kind of fell flat. And so yeah, I did a podcast for it around it, and we broke down a lot of different SAS companies, onboarding, offboarding, things like that.

[00:01:56] But yeah, it was a good, it was fun though. I felt like I learned a lot, especially. Podcasting and being able to articulate things with words right. A lot better. So yeah, it was a great, it was a great production. Yeah. Thanks man. It was actually believe it or not. It was in my basement. Oh, wow. There you go.

[00:02:11] Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:02:12] Matt: Awesome. What’s the. In that world, let’s say the SAS world that you learned. I mean, you came from WordPress through WordPress, into endurance, arguably the largest corporation that touches, well, I don’t know if it’s the largest, but a large corporation that touches WordPress. Then you go in and try to do like, what many of us might listen to this week in startups, tech crunch.

[00:02:34] And we’re like, Hey SAS, world. What’s the biggest, what’s the biggest difference that you found from that world versus the WordPress world? 

[00:02:44] JR: I mean, obviously the community is way different, right? Cause because there’s so many different sounds. So you got, you got enterprise, mid market, small market SMBs got bootstrap, versus most people in the WordPress space are bootstrap.

[00:02:54] So that was like, everyone was on like some of a playing field back in the day. I would say the [00:03:00] end of where I come from, everything has been bootstrapped, so I, I don’t get me wrong. I definitely had opportunities. I still do to, to, to go raise like most of us, I guess, but I just it’s in my roots, right. To like, just build it and self-fund it and grow it.

[00:03:14] And so I would say that’s like a big thing, like when you’re getting into that space, Man, you gotta, you going up some big boys that have a lot of funding, even if they are in the SMB or mid-market or enterprise, right? Like you kind of get there’s just, the playing field is so much bigger, 

[00:03:28] Matt: so it might be, this might be a softball question.

[00:03:31] I mean, I kinda know what it is cause I know that you’re going to have a bias question, especially now that you’ve launched a lemon squeezy and a side note. It’s not just an easy digital download rev. Okay. Yeah, we’ve got a lot more that we’re going to cover about lemon squeezy in a moment, but I’ve been having a lot of folks on my podcast recently in the no-code space, I’ve been fascinated with the no code space, no comes low-code space.

[00:03:53] For me it sort of like brings that same energy back when I first discovered not even WordPress, but Drupal when I could do things with Drupal as like a non-developer with CCK and views. And we’re talking almost 20 years ago being like, wow, I can code this. Knowing this PHP thing. It’s interesting that, Well, here’s the question.

[00:04:14] What if you were to start, and I know this is, this is the softball moment. If you were to start a little bit more of a technical company today, maybe not WordPress, would you start with a WordPress framework or would you combine a couple of no-code apps that you really love to do something else? 

[00:04:29] JR: Well, I think luckily for me, like the teams that I have along the rides with me, they’re technical enough that I don’t have to, but I definitely think I would.

[00:04:39] I honestly would maybe pick something else. I built mojo on WordPress back then, and that was before WooCommerce and before, easy to download. So like it was all custom and just the limitations sometimes in, around the database and queries and stuff. It’s, it’s not built for that. So. Maybe it’s a marketing site it’s different, but when it comes to a full blown app, I just think there’s way better options out 

[00:05:02] there.

[00:05:03] Matt: Yeah. So there, there are. So it just seems like there’s a no-code app coming online every single day to try to like compete against air table and Google sheets and collide in bubble. Right. And I’m looking at it. Like I was looking at Pais builders rising three years ago in the WordPress space. I’m just like, damn man, you all going to survive this?

[00:05:21] Or there’s this like, The, survival of the fittest and that’s just the market plays out. Yup. Yup. How did you get, so the, the parent company make lemonade, how did you form this team? Because I’ve had four out of five of you on my podcast. 

[00:05:40] JR: So yeah, the founding team there, they’re the co-founders, there’s four of us and it was.

[00:05:45] There was a, quite a bit of work. It was, it was probably at least a year and a half in the making of just chatting and what, what are you working on? What, what are you building and what do you want to do? And so real quick, just talking about, let me just name the, if people don’t know who we are.

[00:05:58] So make lemonade was the [00:06:00] idea of it is when we were all talking before we were kind of in the thick of 2020, where it was just. Shit, right. It was just a lot of sour lemons kind of getting thrown out everyone. Right. All of us were getting hit with this. And so that’s kind of where it was born. It was like, well, let’s take these lemons and let’s make some lemonade, and so we kind of, like you said, formed this quartet or a vendor group, or we call it a collective, which is Orman Clark. Yeah. It was known for donkey was also the, kind of the guy that set the tone on theme forest years ago. And then Jason’s jeweler theme garden, press 75. And Gilbert who was a nivo slider for the OGs and spin up WP delicious brains and myself.

[00:06:42] So yeah, we kind of all came together and we kind of started to really get excited about this, make lemonade idea. Let’s bring all of our brands together. Let’s bring all of our things we have together, and let’s really see if we can build a collective and launch some pretty kick ass products. And the first one is the biggest one that we’re really, I guess, leaning most of our resources into is, is limits.

[00:07:03] Matt: Talk to me about how you kept these conversations going. I think that’s one of the most unique things about WordPress is you have communities, like, let’s say post post status and stuff like that. But I think that it goes even beyond that, where you see folks at a word camp, you see what they’re doing in our space and you just it’s so easy to reach out.

[00:07:21] Was it like that for you? Or are you guys all in like a mastermind and connected in some other way? Like who sparked the first conversation? 

[00:07:27] JR: It was actually so Jason and Orman and Chris Malter were actually having conversations as well. And then Chris Malter and Jason were actually building a product called rivet, which was a therefore, a outside of WordPress as well.

[00:07:41] Kind of, it was, you could take your YouTube channel and build a site from it. I don’t know if you guys ever saw that, but it’s really cool. And I actually ping them and said, Hey guys, what are you doing with this? Like, can I help in any way? It looks like. Maybe I could help with the marketing side, stuff like that.

[00:07:54] And so that kind of like kicked off a conversation and an Orman got back involved and then it was actually, the four of us were chatting and then eventually Gilbert kinda got brought up and that’s kinda how we kicked things off. But yeah, like it’s funny because it goes back to where, I mean, Jason and I, we met similar to you.

[00:08:11] I mean, how me and you did, which was years ago at a conference. I think it was the first PressNomics, which was forever ago. And so, yeah, we’ve just, it’s all about relationships, right. And I would say that I really pushed hard to get everybody, like, I think that’s one of my strengths is like being a connector and like making, getting, allowing things to connect and, and kind of glued together.

[00:08:34] And I would, I like to think that I really helped be influential in getting us all to finally do what we’re going to do. Even bringing Gilbert over full-time he was at delicious brains building. They just launched spin up WP. So. We had to convince him to come over. And so that wasn’t some easy task, right.

[00:08:51] He was happy with where he was at and, but it’s, it’s, it’s worked out and I think we’ve got a pretty solid team. We’ve actually brought in a [00:09:00] few more makers into the collective which I can briefly mention, which is Mike McAllister, James Kemp, Patrick Posner. And there’s a few guys from the old Moto team that are actually helping with us too.

[00:09:12] So got a nice little squad. That’s working on stuff together. 

[00:09:18] Matt: Lemon squeezy. The, the H one is sell digital products. That easy-peasy way e-commerce space, digital download space, massive untapped, I think in the WordPress world. But before we talk about that, I want to talk about all of these products that are listed on the make lemonade.wtf.

[00:09:37] That’s the URL. If you’re listening to this, make lemonade.wtf, it’ll be in the show notes. I’m on I’m on the webpage right now, iconic app. I remember watching that launch and thinking that’s pretty awesome. Positive notes, dunked, premium pixels, kick link, a whole bunch of stuff. And this new digital S download product.

[00:09:56] How do you keep focus? Is that the magic of a collective, like everyone gets their own little, territory to cover, break that down for me. 

[00:10:04] JR: Yeah. So it ebbs and flows, right? So there’s, I mean, to be fair, some of these products were existing. So dunked obviously was Orman’s he brought that into the collective.

[00:10:12] And so as we grow that, as a team that’s, that kind of works its way into the collective iconic was new. But to be totally honest right 

[00:10:20] Matt: now, 

[00:10:23] JR: The focus thing has been brought up. It’s it’s, it’s been a subjective. Like what do we do? Let’s be realistic. We are bootstrapped. There’s only so many of us are we being silly by pulling ourselves to sin across everything.

[00:10:36] And so, we continue to maintain the products that we have launched. So dunked and iconic and things, but right now the focus is a hundred percent limits with you for the team 

[00:10:44] Matt: I interviewed. Well, before I get there, let me ask you this question on the collective. Is there a way, like when you look at that and somebody’s like, Hey man, I would love to be part of this team is like the application process.

[00:10:58] Is your resume, an existing product you’ve already built and you bring that to the collective to show it off. And how do I get my podcast in there? No, I’m just kidding. How do I like when you bring it there? Like, is that the process, is that how you look for a new member of the collective? 

[00:11:13] JR: So it’s actually, I take a really good question.

[00:11:15] I didn’t even think about that before we came on, but that is a lot of it. I mean, we do have some. I’ve kind of put together how people come into the collective. There, there is a process to it. That’s not the only way. So obviously if your skillset is what kind of we’re looking for at the moment, we’ll bring in there’s different ways that we can kind of bring you in the collective where you can to participate in all the products with us, as well as if you have your own product, then that gets the power of the collective, right?

[00:11:42] Like, I mean, look at premium pixel, for example, that’s a really old brand. I mean, as you can, there’s a sh there’s tons of people on an email list, right. That just get featured into the rest of our products. But like iconic app was very similar. That’s James McDonald. Who’s you don’t know him. He’s an amazing icon [00:12:00] design.

[00:12:01] And he wanted to do an icon set. And so the team kind of got together with him and he did all the icons and then we built everything else. And so, and it leverages lemon squeezy to sell it. So that was like a really, really cool way to bring someone in, to work on just an individual product with us. And then the other team members like Mike and James and Patrick, they’re helping us limit squeezy, but they’re also gonna get the benefit of the rest of the collective too.

[00:12:24] So. It’s it, it can go either way. It just really depends on the person. Yeah. 

[00:12:31] Matt: I interviewed Matt Mullenweg earlier this year. And I think that, well, maybe not, it might not be obvious to everyone and maybe some of you out there are thinking, well, we’ve already got woo commerce. We don’t need anything else who could survive an e-commerce play in this space up against the giant that is Rue commerce and alternatives like Shopify.

[00:12:54] I know that. And I am by no means trying to give you a veteran and proven CEO slash entrepreneur, any advice, but I know that it’s either going to take a boatload of money to compete or just a bad-ass product that is just hitting it on all cylinders. I think this is, this is not really a good question.

[00:13:13] This is me just like pontificating this on a soap box. Like I think this is gonna be a bad-ass product. I think this is going to be the home run side of it. S inside my gut says, you probably feel the same way, because if you just execute on an amazing product, you can compete and you can win. Look at all the foreign plugins we have.

[00:13:33] Right, right, right. Look at all of the similar stuff we have that’s out there. This is, just because the giants out there doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build it. Your thoughts. 

[00:13:43] JR: Yeah, no, I it’s a really good, and obviously we’ve got to be realistic, right? Like we are going up against some 800 pound gorillas.

[00:13:49] Which is fine. I’ve done it before. But I think where lemon squeezy was different, is it is, it is a SAS first. Right. So we, we kind of have this unique ability to package in a lot of features that as much as I love WordPress, like, you do have to put together like a decent amount of plugins sometimes for something to work that costs money, that constant that’s maintenance, that’s conflicts, that’s, maybe opening yourself up to some security issues depending on what kind of plugins you’re getting.

[00:14:19] If it’s not from a reliable source. So. I think that’s a unique thing that we do have. And then I think the team that’s building the lemon squeezy plugin, right. Even though it’s V1 and it’s not extremely powerful at the moment, but it gives you all the power lemon squeezy from day one, which I think is super cool.

[00:14:37] It’s a totally different way of thinking about building it. And we can just totally, supercharge your WordPress site with lemon squeezy. So I think we’re coming at it from a different angle. Which is exciting for me and it doesn’t kind of pin us into one thing. But you’re right. I mean, we’re going to have to just iterate fast and quickly on this thing.

[00:14:57] So, when we first came out, it’s interesting, now that we’re getting in the [00:15:00] WordPress space, when we first came out, it was looked at us, it will be looked at like a, like a Gumroad alternative. Right. It was just, that was kind of the feature set, but we’re releasing some pretty big things around our website.

[00:15:11] And so that’s kind of positioning us into a different market, the WordPress space. Now we’re getting positioned in there against easel downloads. But I will say one last thing about digital products is all of us come from that space. And it’s, it’s complicated. Yes, there’s WooCommerce, but it’s primarily, it’s meant for physical stuff.

[00:15:27] It does do digital stuff, but there’s a lot to think about, right? Like security and how those files are delivered and software verges. I mean, even just the, the auto updates and. You know how you deliver the license keys. Like there’s a lot of stuff to think about. And then that ties way into support. How do you support the product?

[00:15:47] And so I think we’ve got a good, like view, a very good focus view on like how to tackle. 

[00:15:53] Matt: How do you manage, who gets to say, who gets the say in which features to add into a product like this? Because the Gumroad alternative, they easy digital downloads, alternative, the lightweight version of WooCommerce.

[00:16:08] Again, as somebody who hasn’t had the same product successes, you, but have been in companies that have had products assess, I don’t mind those comparisons because it’s just easy for customers to understand, but then there’s like that 20%. Month after month or a year, quarter after quarter, you’re like, okay, but we still need to keep edging our way to a differentiator, a different value prop.

[00:16:30] So who gets this, who gets to lead that with this product? 

[00:16:36] JR: Man? That’s a good question. So right now I think we’ve done a decent job with the four of us of allowing us to. Really give our say, I think when it comes down to like, if, so, let’s just talk about design first for a second. Like how it looks that’s we all know that that’s Orman Clark.

[00:16:51] I mean, the guy. Seriously brilliant when it comes to sign. So we’re only going to push it so far. And then I think it’s pretty, like, it’s just like unwritten code that like Orman’s going to make that decision, but then I think when it comes to like marketing and positioning, I think a lot of people look at me for that, and just, how do we position this business and this product, or.

[00:17:10] And so I think it’s just, it really falls in more of a skillset, right. Gilbert’s CTO when it comes to anything technical related in the product, Gilbert’s probably going to have the final say in that. And so, yeah, so that’s kinda how we’ve handled it so far. 

[00:17:23] Matt: Yeah. When I, when I did talk to Matt as part of what I was getting at before is I told him that I still think woo commerce is even though it is the giant, it’s still a sleeping giant.

[00:17:35] Like I don’t feel, I don’t feel like automatic has really started to tap the potential of, I agree how flexible WooCommerce is going to be. And I think that, you, you said before, this is a SAS first product. We’re launching this. I, these are my words, not exactly yours, but we’re launching SAS because we can just control it a whole heck of a lot easier than if it was just a pure plugin.

[00:17:57] There’s was a pure plugin. We get to do the security patches, [00:18:00] the updates, the UI updates, people start falling off. They haven’t updated. It’s a nightmare when you’re trying to make a cohesive experience. And I think no code. Heck even Jetpack is and tools like yours. Aren’t going to condition the users over time, where once we really wanted our plugin and own it and have it in our WordPress site to be like ass, screw it, just make it work.

[00:18:27] Like it’s all a plugin. And I just want access, just give it to me because I think we’re all just fed up with it, to that up until this point. I don’t know if that’s good or bad for the longterm success of WordPress, because that’s what us. But your 

[00:18:40] JR: thoughts? Well, this is so when I first sat down with the guys and we started talking about lemon squeezy, and this is what we always go back to.

[00:18:46] This is like, if this is the punchline, so, and this is going to sound kind of silly, but this is how I literally described to the team. And this is what we, we say. Say, we say, whenever we start talking about the product, we’re like space. Space mountain, which sounds weird. Right? So that ride in Disneyland.

[00:19:03] So if you were to go to that ride to picture it in your head, you, you walk up, you see the entrance and everything, and you’re walking through it. It’s really a whole experience from the moment you see it and you walk through it, right? It’s all dark. And then you go through the ride and it’s pitch black and there’s lights, and there’s all kinds of things, but you can feel it as you’re going through it.

[00:19:18] Right. But you don’t really know how this is all happening, but think about it for a second. If everybody flipped the light. That’d be rods and wires and it, probably bolts and dust and everything looking at right. And that’s kind of the experience today still after all these years, right? It’s like, get your hosting, get your domain name, get your plugins, get your you’re like putting together all these things with the lights on.

[00:19:41] And so in our mind is like easy peasy, lemon, squeezy. Let’s just fast forward this thing a little bit and create a space, mountain experience where you just hop on the ride and you’re just enjoying the experience. And you’re just, you’re just there to have fun and have a good time, or you’re just there to make money or you’re just there to sell this product or this widget or whatever it is you don’t have to think.

[00:20:00] And so that’s kind of how. Are building the product. So I will say from a feature standpoint, we’ve got a long way to go, right? Like right now you can get on there, you can sell anything, subscriptions memberships. We’re also the merchant of record. So you don’t even have to worry about setting up payment processors or anything like that.

[00:20:17] It’s all taken care of. And so I think as we add more features like email marketing and the builder. Themes and stuff like that. I think people are going to really start to be like, oh, wow. Like this is just all here with a click of a button. So 

[00:20:31] Matt: you don’t have to comment on my crazy conspiracy theory, but I’ll ask it and we can cut this guy, a segment out of the show if you want.

[00:20:41] I really think. Th this concept the space mountain rides, fantastic metaphor for all of this stuff is also how jet pack is attempting to win in the long run. And I’m of the mindset that I don’t know, two years from now, you’ll go [00:21:00] to wordpress.org and it’ll say, download WordPress with Jeff.

[00:21:05] Download free WordPress open source version of WordPress, whatever sounds uglier for you to say, I don’t want that. I want this because this is the best way to experience WordPress’s with Japan. And I think that that’s the, the model that, that Jetpack will ultimately win with as much as we all are like, oh, not on our lawn, this thing here, but I think that that is how WordPress wins.

[00:21:32] Are automatic wins in that space. Thoughts on, on that WordPress experience is jet pack in the front row seat for a wind like that. 

[00:21:42] JR: Oh man, I have so many thoughts. I mean, I’ll say, I’ll say a couple of things on it. It’s really interesting to think about that from Matt’s perspective because Matt always said he wants to get to 50% of the internet uses work.

[00:21:58] But I don’t know what he’s thought of after that. I don’t know what happens when he hits that goal. Right? Is he. Does does there’s IPO’s there’s, then what happens like that? What starts to take shape for this business? And so I think me, and you’ve always seen it from afar, right? You, you look at the way, they kind of their copies changing on jet pack and the way they kind of position the way it should feel like the, like you said, it, like, this is the way you should experience WordPress.

[00:22:24] I actually think they say it on the jetpacks website. So I think we’ve always thought that was going to happen. It’s just when and if, and, and I don’t know if. If it’s going to be triggered more around what happens with Matt and automatic, right. With the IPO or when it hits the 50%, or is he waiting for something like that for, in order to have to do it at that time?

[00:22:47] Yeah. 

[00:22:48] Matt: A friend of the show, I don’t know if you know him, Jordan gall, he started cart hook, and now he’s on onto another e-commerce product called rally.io, which is a. I hope I’m getting this right. It’s either, either says it’s a decoupled or headless e-commerce experience. Okay. He was building a product.

[00:23:08] I think it started off as cart abandonment or cart recovery. Hence the cart hook name, built it in Shopify as playground and eventually. What I’ll say is crushed by Shopify. He’s not a happy camper. Really? Yeah. He’s been a lot more vocal about it. There’s a great business insider article, which I’ll try to remember to link up to it here in the show notes.

[00:23:30] And I’m going to have him on the show actually next week to kind of talk about a little bit of that stuff, your thoughts on playing in somebody else’s playground. Is that something that ever comes up or you’re like, do you look at this as it’s? Okay. This is why we’re building it as. We start with WordPress.

[00:23:44] We build up there, we springboard to full on just come to our website signup. 

[00:23:50] JR: Exactly. And even right now, I mean, even before we came into WordPress, right. Lemon squeezy has been live. It’s been launched. We have paying customers that are just coming to us from their own ways. [00:24:00] Right. Not WordPress. So we already have that going.

[00:24:03] I look at WordPress is like our biggest integration, right. Or biggest extension. And it’s been interesting because ever since we’ve launched the API, we have like, is it stamp, stamp MADEC is that the shoot? I think it’s the CMS. There’s other people. Are you building plugins around other platforms? So, obviously we’ve been talking about maybe an integration with or the Shopify has people have wanted to do Shopify plugins for lemon squeezy.

[00:24:30] So I think we’ll continue down this path. Just as a way for distribution, that’s the way I’m looking at it. Not so much a risk to the platform. Cause right now we’re like you said, it’s SAS and we can kind of control our destiny, which is 

[00:24:42] Matt: nice. Just too. Recheck myself, dear listener, it’s rally on.com, not rally.io, rally.io, creator coin economy.

[00:24:50] A rally on.com is Jordan’s next venture. You’ll hear him probably coming up on the next episode. Cool. The, the, the future for a WordPress in full site editing. I mean, is this anything that. It comes up on your on your calls at all with the team. Like when you talk about the space mountain ride, like, is this, does this matter to you like full site editing, Gutenberg, Ella mentor, and like this massive whirlwind of stuff happening?

[00:25:25] Does it matter to you or 

[00:25:26] JR: not? Not so much. Yes. Yes it does. I think that, cause I think the approach we want to take. And this is what I mentioned about the plugin, right? Lemon squeezies plugin today, you can connect your store and then you, you, you really experienced lemon squeezy over lemon squeezy, but then you use your WordPress website to kind of display it, right?

[00:25:44] So it’s not. We would like to maybe look at bringing some more stuff. So we’re not having to force people to come over to us. Right. If they don’t want to. And I think that’s how we’re thinking about it is how do we, do we look at some lemon squeezy powered themes? Probably not. There’s an element or ad-ons we’ve discussed.

[00:26:01] So yeah, we’re absolutely thinking about how do we make it, but it’s more in the sense of like that customer, right? Like, What are they experiencing and how do we make this nice for them? Right. Rather than forcing them to come to lemon squeezy, if they don’t want to, that’s really how we think about it.

[00:26:15] But I think in terms of the plugin to start, I think we’re gonna focus more on features that people really want to leverage, like restrict content has. The really exciting one is migration tools for the other popular providers. Those are the things that we’re working on now. And then from there, we’ll kind of see what the, what people want.

[00:26:35] So 

[00:26:36] Matt: I don’t have any segments on the show, but if I did have one, it might be like, read mean WP Tavern comments, like this read mean tweets like celebrities. Yeah. When this was announced and launched, which was what? Two days ago, right? The 10th. 

[00:26:50] JR: Yeah, the plugin. Yeah. 

[00:26:51] Matt: How was the reaction good or bad, otherwise, anything surprised you both positively negatively that you’d like to talk about that you saw from [00:27:00] Twitter comments or anything like that?

[00:27:02] JR: So it’s, it’s, it’s interesting, right? Because for the most part, I would say it’s 99% excitement. Everyone’s super excited. Mostly probably because the team, I think they see the team, they’re like, oh wow. I had no idea that this is who’s behind this. So that’s been really cool. And, but there definitely is like coming back into the WordPress space after being here for so long.

[00:27:23] And I did take a break for a while coming back into it. I did forget, like, there’s definitely people that are. If they don’t know us, so they don’t know where we come from. Right. There’s definitely been like. Well, what is this? And who are these guys and who did, how, how could they possibly think they could do this?

[00:27:40] And so there’s been a few of those and I just kind of laugh it off, but I think we’ll eventually, hopefully win them over. But if not, there’s always a Pepsi and a Coke and you know what I mean? And I don’t mind being a Pepsi, like if, if there’s already a Coke, I have no problem with that.

[00:27:54] And so we’re just giving people options. So 

[00:27:56] Matt: lemon, squeezy.com. I’m looking at the pricing starts at $9 a month. No free. 

[00:28:02] JR: Yeah. Yeah. And I can talk about that. Yeah. So we, so we did, we did have a free plan. We did the transaction model where you would pay high transaction fees on a free plan. And it, we had, oh man, like tens of thousands of people literally using the platform.

[00:28:18] It was a lot. And so we just, and it’s great, but like, you need a ton of volume for that model to really play itself out and time. And so being bootstrapped, it’s like, let’s just focus on building a product that people want to pay for. Let’s make everything SAS. And there was, we had to kind of roll back and there was, there’s been a lot of angry people about that.

[00:28:39] And so we’re trying to find the best pricing. And so this is what’s working at the moment. I think, as we add new features, maybe maybe prices go up maybe, and there’s a new plan that gets introduced. I don’t know. But we’re the right now, I think we’ve found a good price that, because what we did actually is we looked at.

[00:28:55] We did look at, if I was going to do a digital download store or sell something digital using WooCommerce or easy digital downloads, we wanted to make lemon squeezy. So not for a race to the bottom, but just, we were trying to be realistic with the features that we do offer right at the moment. And so, so that’s kind of where we’re settling.

[00:29:14] It seems to be working on, like I said, outside of WordPress, we’ve had plenty of sign-ups and so we’re doing well, but I’m really excited to see this get into the WordPress ecosystem and just, just offer something fresh and new and that’s that wasn’t built, Forever ago. So yeah, 

[00:29:32] Matt: $9 a month is still pretty darn affordable.

[00:29:35] It’s only 90 bucks for the year, sands a transaction fee for selling, which you’re going to get no matter where you go. Unless you only accepted check by mail, which you’re still going to be paying a fee on that too. Did you find, and again, like with with the prefix, that $9 is still pretty, pretty affordable, did you find a better.

[00:29:54] More qualified type of customer from moving away from free. It’s always like the most demanding [00:30:00] customers want things for free. And then as soon as they start to pay them, they’re a little bit better. 

[00:30:04] JR: Yeah. Like, yeah, exactly. And our support totally changed too. Like it was actually just, like a lot of bottom feeding, right.

[00:30:11] Kind of things going on. And the support is actually way higher now, but it’s really good. Like questions, like people are in a trial or they have questions about this or that, or we’re getting way more feedback on the product and like, well, if you guys had this, I would sign up or, you know what I mean?

[00:30:26] Like. Yeah, you’re right. It’s attracted the right people. And then we’re, you know what I mean? Like we’re, it’s like the Henry Ford thing, right? It’s like, if I listen to my customer, just build a faster horse, but now I feel like we’re listening to the customers that are really willing to pay and they are paying, and it’s cool to see.

[00:30:42] Yeah, man. 

[00:30:42] Matt: I mean, you say that there’s not a lot of features or, you feel like you might have not have as many features as the rest. It’s. I mean, what you look like, you get a nice feature set here. 

[00:30:50] JR: Well, yeah, so I guess so let me actually rephrase that. That’s a good. From a, from an e-commerce perspective, selling things.

[00:30:57] We, I think we’re, we’re really good. We do a ton of stuff. And especially for someone that’s just like, doesn’t want to have to worry about anything with the merchant of record. I think it’s like super slick to sign up for lemon squeezy and just, you can just start selling where we’re really gonna double down on next.

[00:31:14] The editing publishing and editing experience where you can actually have your own storefront and website with themes, Orman Clark and Jason and Mike, they’re all going to have some pretty amazing themes that you can be able to use this lemon squeezy. And then Gilbert’s been working on a full blown, like e-commerce email marketing e-commerce solution.

[00:31:32] So think about filtering and segmentation around your user base. Right? Whether they’re. Coming in our landing page subscribing to a newsletter, or if they’ve purchased a product or multiple products where you’re going to be able to filter a segment, send emails, take actions, depending on who they are, what they are, what they bought, so that’s the kind of stuff that I think we’re moving into next, but you’re right from a e-commerce perspective, I think that, you can do pretty much everything except for selling online course at the moment.

[00:32:01] Yeah, that’s the only real feature left, 

[00:32:03] Matt: Semi hot seat question. The usual suspects aside in the software licensing key plugin space software licensing. I don’t really see that come up on other e-commerce platforms. So prominently is this the easiest way to kind of break into. What I’ll say is the available customer base of WordPress.

[00:32:27] JR: Oh, that’s funny. 

[00:32:28] Matt: Really it could be that I don’t, I don’t, I’m not looking for software licensing on other platforms, but maybe other platforms are doing it and I just don’t see it. I just see this as a very WordPress thing. Ah, you know what? I didn’t 

[00:32:40] JR: even think about it that way. I think, you know why it’s maybe so important to us?

[00:32:43] Cause maybe where we come. Maybe, because we are so heavy from the WordPress space. It’s like what we’re used to, but I will say like people that sell, tailwind components and things like that, they want to, they want to have licensing stuff done. So it’s, it’s applicable other places, but it’s funny you [00:33:00] say it that way, because I guess it could look like.

[00:33:02] I think a lot of it was just influenced where we came from. Yeah. 

[00:33:05] Matt: So who man, a lemon squeezy.com. Check it out, starting at nine bucks a month. I mean, it looks pretty fantastic to me. Any, I mean, I was about to say any black Friday deals, but how cheaper, cheaper could you get for nine bucks? 

[00:33:17] JR: Yeah, I think we’re going to avoid it.

[00:33:19] Actually. I think we’re going to try to, I don’t know. Not do that. See how it goes. Cool, man. But 

[00:33:26] Matt: yeah. Jr. Far, anything else that you’d like to leave the audience with anywhere they should go to? Oh, 

[00:33:33] JR: man. Just, yeah, I really appreciate you bringing them mat. I try to listen to your show and everything that you do.

[00:33:40] And I think you’re, you’re, you’re definitely the best at this. So, it’s exciting to to, to have to be back in the WordPress space and Be with our community again, and maybe went over a few new hearts that don’t know us yet. So, but now thanks again, man. And Yeah, definitely follow along.

[00:33:56] Matt: Absolutely everybody else. Everybody listening, check out lemon, squeezy.com, check out everything Jr. And his team are doing. If you want your weekly dose of WordPress news in five minutes or less, go to the WP minute.com. Join the private discord $79 for the year. You get to get your hand in the weekly WordPress news.

[00:34:14] Get shout outs, help shape the news part of the team. Hashtag link squad. You know who you are. All right. We’ll catch you in the next episode.

[00:00:00] Maciek: some people are afraid when it comes to version control system. This is a command line tool. So it’s scary and it’s only for developers now. That’s not true. We can use get crack and it’s really easy. We can use tower and there are probably some other tools also even using a gift and their web version.
[00:00:20] This, this is also a really friendly approach
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[00:01:25] Hey, do you like WordPress content in media? Like this? Do you like WordPress news and getting the hot takes community journalism and op-eds from your peers and colleagues in the WordPress space. Consider supporting the WP minute and the Matt report. By buying me a coffee [email protected] slash Matt report.
[00:01:45] You can join the membership, which also has a private discord you can chat with like-minded injured individuals and get your hands in the WordPress news every single week in our discord server. Going to buy me a coffee.com/matt report that’s buy me a coffee.com/matt report There’s no better feeling than when you launch something that just clicks with people. I guess at the end of the day, folks that build businesses or create content are simply seeking acceptance. We want to see our ideas flourish, to be adopted by the masses and to leave an impact. When launched WP hours with his wife. Agneshka it was instill is a publication that served the Polish community.
[00:02:22] But it clicked. People clicked literally onto the website and their stories. So the co-founding duo decided it was time to go global. Combined, they published over 200 articles about WordPress and the community on the blog with no signs of stopping. Oh, and if you’re wondering how to get a job like WordPress ambassador.
[00:02:41] At buddy get, you’re going to learn a lot about that today, along with continuous integration and continuous development. If you’re a small agency or a freelancer, it’s time to start getting serious about how you manage code. And that’s what today’s lesson is largely about. Okay Onto today’s episode
[00:02:58] Matt: one question I didn’t throw at you. How did you become a WordPress ambassador?
[00:03:02] I see a lot of folks these days on my Twitter stream saying I would love to just work for a brand and talk about WordPress and talk about their products, any insights into how to land an awesome job like yours.
[00:03:13] Maciek: To be honest, it’s walls a bit of coincidence because. I was working at WP M Def as at their second line of support.
[00:03:22] So I was mostly a developer and at some point Rafael, the CTO of Bobby, just reach out to me and asked, Hey, would you like to become our ambassador? Because on one hand, the day learned that WordPress is really getting bigger and bigger, and it would be a great idea to I have someone promoting their, their tool in worker space.
[00:03:44] And on the other hand, we had the, we had the chance to meet earlier on because one of the organizers of a word can Poland it will be the last word component. So it was 2019 and there were one of the sponsors right then. So we had the chance to talk to meet. And I was using body for many, many years.
[00:04:03] I was always asking questions asking for some new features. So, so, so they remembered that there, that there is one month. Of the dirt and he knows WordPress, and he probably likes our tool because he worked at a few companies and every time he asked us about something, because every company I switched during the first few years, it was one of my first decision.
[00:04:28] Maybe let’s try to adopt the body because it will speed up. Rework. So in the end, I, I have a chance to work here. And this is what I would say. This is a really a dream job.
[00:04:40] Matt: Yeah. We’re both biased because we both work for companies that represent WordPress in some either direct or indirect fashion.
[00:04:46] And I have for many years now but this is a, this is a role that I think. Whether it’s an ambassador hat or a title or some other title that, that you might get. I think this is a smart move for a lot of other WordPress companies to really invest in is you need to bridge that gap as we’ll talk about in a moment, you need to be able to bridge that gap between that technology and that sort of average consumer of that technology, because it can’t just be developer speak and it can’t just be the marketing speak some at some point, these brands need to cross over in the.
[00:05:17] And shake hands and agree that somebody can speak both sides of it. Exactly. And, and this is just an amazing time in WordPress. This space was so much acquisitions and, and big money coming into the space and bigger brands adopting. I think folks like you and I are going to be much more valuable.
[00:05:32] Maybe we should ask for raises as you and I
[00:05:36] Maciek: wait w with all our taxes rising in Poland, this, this is for sure what the, what I will do at the beginning of the next year
[00:05:44] Matt: you were in here first. Okay. So let’s talk about CIC D I know the definition, I’ll let you define it. And more specifically why it’s important for.
[00:05:55] Let’s say the smaller agency, who’s starting to grow their business and take on bigger projects. Why should they invest in these areas?
[00:06:02] Maciek: Yeah. So, CIC, D H first of all, it has nothing to do the CD part with compact disc. So don’t worry. And I also heard that it sounds a bit like COVID and that’s true.
[00:06:14] It’s it sounds a bit like this. And I think this is the biggest problem of Of our company of our world because this definition is everyone who hears this aggravation just don’t know what are we talking about? Because some folks just won’t do. I think they want to use this word just to feel more important or better or something like this.
[00:06:37] To tell it more easy. It just automation it’s just deployment automation. That’s all because the CACD means it’s continuous integration and continuous deployment. So, it’s everything about testing and deploying in, in an automated manner
[00:06:54] Matt: and to, and to illustrate, sorry to cut you off, but to illustrate like the typical.
[00:06:59] The typical sort of a WordPress boutique agency, myself included. So I started an agency. I started with me and just my dad and I’m the technical one. My dad’s helping him like run the business. We start growing an agency. We start selling more projects. Now I have. Relinquish my, my development skills with air quotes.
[00:07:16] This is like 20 years ago and hire other developers and designers. Suddenly we have this small team of people and just sharing a single FTP account is no longer the answer to scaling in the same way of building websites and more complex websites. As we started taking on bigger projects over time, investing in a tool like this, whether it’s buddy get or.
[00:07:38] Is a smart move for anyone who’s starting to grow a larger team and get on bigger projects. Cause it’s just going to keep everything organized to a degree. Exactly.
[00:07:46] Maciek: Okay. I work at body and this is my favorite tool, but it doesn’t matter which one we will use. The whole CICT is not the tool it’s a methodology or some would call it.
[00:07:59] It’s a philosophy of how we work. It’s just about about the fact that we should test everything on one end and on the other end, on the other hand the way how we deploy stuff to the server is in an automated manner. The only thing that can be done manually is just the is just approving the.
[00:08:19] Should we release this version. The rest should be automated in some way. And this is something perfect for also first of all agencies, because everyone also thinks that CIC D is just for those enterprise with like zillions of people and stuff like this. And that’s not true. CIC, it will be also perfect for smaller companies because we don’t have to invest for example, in in QA, because we can write some tests because there are so many methods and so many tools, thanks to which we can test our, either our code, either how our page behaves.
[00:08:57] We can even Some part of accessibility testing only for dental or for 40% if I remember, but still it’s more than, than, than a quarter of possibilities and we can test it everything. Each time we deploy our code and this can make not only our product better. It can be Teper because we won’t waste so much time doing the boring stuff, because let’s be honest testing at this point.
[00:09:31] It will was
[00:09:32] Matt: for everybody. Don’t worry. You’re not alone. Yeah.
[00:09:35] Maciek: Probably saw it’s, it’s one of the most horrible things I could do. It’s boring. It’s repetitive. I just hate it. I just hate it. And every time I can create a short script that can do something for. I’m trying to do this, and this is exactly the same what most big open source project do, because could you imagine developing WordPress without having any tests and believing that moving something in Wandon of WordPress won’t break something in the other.
[00:10:08] So, especially that, yeah. Let me put
[00:10:11] Matt: my business hat back on my agency hat back on. And I remember back in the day when my developers would, bring this to me and they’d say, Hey, we have to implement, of course the ICD, this methodology we have to do testing. We have to do all of this stuff. And the only thing that ran through my head was, oh my God, how much time and money is this going to cost me?
[00:10:30] And how much is this going to slow down? The the timeline to launch a project or, get this iteration out to the customer who, only has a certain condensed budget is this thing is this of the mindset of look, it’s going to be a little painful now, but in the future, it’ll be much easier if that’s how I’ve.
[00:10:49] Digest that over the years, a lot of pain now, but a lot less stress in the future.
[00:10:56] Maciek: Yes, that’s it? Because this was a problem. I also had that one company I worked at that every time with other developers, we try to, Hey, maybe let’s try and add some tests. We will. We’ll benefit from it in the future, because right now, probably it will take us some time, but there are also like a few methods of writing tasks because we can either try to have like 100% coverage, which I think doesn’t have a sense in any situation.
[00:11:29] Or we just could try to focus on those critical parts of our website of our application. So if we know that. Some part of our website is critical. Let’s say we know that our contact form is like the most important thing on our side. We should just write that small as using, for example, Cyprus testing.
[00:11:53] If everything is working after each deployment, we don’t have to cover everything. This is the only critical part we will need. Of course, the more tests, the better. And as you said, This is the problem that some agency owners or business department have that this is one more thing that the developers have to create.
[00:12:16] So it will take much more time. And that is true. That is that’s really true because this will take some extra time, but on the other things,
[00:12:26] Matt: Sorry, go ahead. I just want to just ask the interject in this one question, cause I’m actually just really curious of, as, as I hear you talk about it and framed in a different way than I’ve heard over years, but a business owner again says, Hey, that con that sales lead form very important to our business.
[00:12:43] That’s where all of our sales contacts come in or our checkout page. Very. Business owner puts his hat on and says, Hey, isn’t this why we’re here in WordPress? We have gravity forms. We have WooCommerce, or these well-developed plugins. Isn’t this code tested before it’s shipped. How does something like this solve against that?
[00:13:00] When we might be saying, boy, we just paid 200 bucks for gravity forms, license, what do we need to test this for?
[00:13:06] Maciek: Because there are, there are few reasons. First of all, Gravity forms. Developers are humans and they also sometimes make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. This developer in the middle name.
[00:13:20] Yes. This guy at get lab once just like destroyed their whole database and then they learned. They don’t have backups. So yes, every wild makes
[00:13:31] Matt: sound for six hours the other day. Yeah.
[00:13:34] Maciek: And to be honest, after like removing the whole database, being down only for six hours. Great. Really, they, they get a tremendous job with with restoring everything can and stop.
[00:13:45] But yes, they are humans. Second of all, our website runs on. Which can also break. There are so many moving parts. Also, there are other blockchains that could conflict with our plugin. So it’s always better just to add this one extra test for our critical parts, because okay. That deployment will take, like, let’s say five minutes longer, but I think it’s much better rather than losing like $200.
[00:14:17] Just like that before releasing the hotfix. So, so yeah, this is, this is something that, okay. It will take some time, but in the end, especially when we w when we plan to have a longer collaboration with, with this client, this will be something that all those tests will really help us in, in, in many things.
[00:14:39] For example, if at some point we will want to. Like refactor some parts of the code then refactoring without having tests. It’s maybe not impossible, but this is a very dangerous task because then we want to know anything about those loose ends. And so yeah, this, this artist situations, when, when, when this are something really, really.
[00:15:01] Matt: Before we get to talking about you, co-founding, WPLS a couple of other questions here on the CIC D stuff. Is there a particular, so in podcasting, right? So I help [email protected], getting them set up with podcasting. And it’s not just, Hey, here’s how you use Castillo’s. They come to me and they say, oh my God, how do I start?
[00:15:23] How do I get a podcast off the ground? How do I create content? How do I interview people? There’s all of these other questions that come into creating an account at cast. Those that we have to submit. Things like testing and training and education and stuff like that. How do you all solve that at your day job?
[00:15:39] How do you help people sort of on onboard to this new methodology, if it’s new to them and make them successful so that they’re not missing the things that really make it a valuable, a valuable solution?
[00:15:51] Maciek: There are very few things that, that we can do. First of all Foundation of using CICT is using any version control system.
[00:16:00] So this is the first thing we have to educate people on is using get just like this. If someone isn’t using any version control system then this is something. Th this person has, has to learn. That’s why we, for example, had this webinar together with get crack and because they have a really great tool for forget.
[00:16:22] And yeah, because this is also a thing that some people are afraid when it comes to version control system. This is a command line tool. So it’s scary and it’s only for developers now. That’s not true. We can use get crack and it’s really easy. We can use tower and there are probably some other tools also even using a gift and their web version.
[00:16:45] This, this is also a really friendly approach. I, so many people who wrote books using good using markdown and using pull requests for, for comments from, from other. And this is a really interesting method to do this, and it’s, it’s, it’s totally possible. And like I said, this is the foundation of CIC D without it, we, we just won’t know what changed and thanks to version control system.
[00:17:10] We can, we can see those things on the other hand, because. That’s beyond the CACD. It’s kind of boring like that because CAC just connects the cool parts because we have this like cool server. We have this, our cool website and deploying one from the other, like this is the boring part. So, so I also try, especially on my Twitter sometimes to show some cool ways what we can do which I see, for example I think that the last week I posted how to, how to connect our pipeline.
[00:17:47] So every time that our deployment is successful, it will lounge. I have the tiger on my, on Spotify, on my phone. And it works. Yes. It’s useless in a way it’s warm.
[00:18:00] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. You don’t want that going off on like a board meeting and we launched a new website and like I had the tire comes on, like hired this
[00:18:07] Maciek: guy, I say, okay, this is a really great sign.
[00:18:10] It’s working. Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s really terrific. And I also discuss with, with one of our, of our writers at the body he created an action to start a game server. I just don’t remember in which game does by like in a press of a button and just like that, it just automated everything, created some balls that lounge everything on amazing.
[00:18:34] It was working. So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s not only about moving files from one place to another. We can just do so many interesting things. It’s just up to us. And because there are so many tools that have some open API APIs, CLS or anything. So it’s so easy to connect everything with everything. So, so it’s really great.
[00:19:00] I. Even, like I said, I, now I have this, I have tiger, but I could, for example, using IFT T connect to. Our pipeline with like changing color of lights at my house, because why not? Again,
[00:19:17] Matt: but again, of course, open API is automation. All of this stuff is fantastic. It’s fantastic because. It allows you to have like this creative sense to unlock things that even the companies who are creating don’t even haven’t even realized yet.
[00:19:33] Right? Like you were able to do things like notify your team about deployments that happen in different channels and different methodologies. Yeah. It’s, it’s fantastic. When you start to unlock all of this stuff, that creative mindset that you have that interest to explore and to develop and investigate I’m sure is what led you to releasing WP owls, right?
[00:19:56] Like you’ve loved WordPress. You wanted to explore more of it. I assume I don’t want to put words in your mouth and I’ll let you explain it. But you know, here you are. I think 50, at least at the time of this recording, 55 issues published on WP owls.co walk me down that path. When did this start and who did you start it with and why are you still doing it?
[00:20:20] Maciek: So, yeah, this is, this is a funny story because the Polish version has. More than 150 issues already. So it’s much older. And it started with with the fact that I didn’t listen to my wife carefully because at some point she asked me, Hey, maybe we will run a WordPress newsletter or something like this.
[00:20:43] I’m using Facebook, just, just for our Polish community. And I wasn’t listening. I just said, yeah. Great idea. Yeah. Let’s do it. And yeah. And now we are those more than 100 episodes of the Polish issues of the Polish version, more than 50 of the English one. So yes, yes we are. We are still doing it. And when we started, especially because the Polish community.
[00:21:12] Even if it’s quite big, we all knew each other. So it was rather simple when we just posted that, Hey, we are starting the published version of WP hours. Many people are like at start started to follow in gas. And at some point we realized that Facebook wasn’t the perfect choice. So we created our own website.
[00:21:33] And when we have hit the 100 episodes, we decided, okay, it’s time to go global. It’s time to go global let’s let’s lounge, the double owls English version. And we fought that. Okay. We will have a bigger community, so it will be much, much easier to promote because we saw how it works with with our Polish community.
[00:21:57] And we were a bit mistaken with some of the assumptions because for example, the most important marketing channel when it comes to the Polish version is. Estelle it’s Facebook and for the English version, Facebook just doesn’t work. I could almost remove it. And I think that no one would even even care about it.
[00:22:21] Twitter is the most popular mediums here, which is great because I learned that I really loved with her opposed to Facebook, which I, which I really hate with all my heart.
[00:22:34] Matt: Well, do you think it’s, do you think the. For the Polish version is more successful because it’s just where you started or are Polish people more, especially in the WordPress space, more tied to Facebook as it communications?
[00:22:48] Yes.
[00:22:48] Maciek: I figured that because in Poland looks like the Twitter is slowly mostly used either by politics or by a journal. So everyone is arguing with everyone and that’s all when it comes to using our polished weeder. So yes, I, I really fully understand why people don’t want to to use it.
[00:23:12] And they like, especially Facebook groups because those are closed communities. But with CA when it comes to the English version The whole WordPress Twitter community is very open is it’s really great. And I really loved it. I really love it. I really like hanging out there. So just, just, just like this enter, I think that I, I’m not sure when, when will, it will be published, but tomorrow, so it will be 19th.
[00:23:43] It will be the first whole year of WP hours. We will be celebrating our first, our first barge night. And and I must say the going global was, was, was a great decision. It was a great decision. Okay. It is some ex it needs some extra work because every time we have to translate everything to English, because still thinking in our native languages much easier.
[00:24:11] Yeah. But but like I said, it, it was worth it. We could lounge our our guests editors let’s call it program. And w w and this is really the part of which I am so proud. This is working so great. And and yeah, we are. W we are hoping that it will, it will only get the better,
[00:24:31] Matt: oh, congratulations.
[00:24:32] On a year. I just celebrated nine years, a couple of days ago for, for this particular show. Once you pass a year, there’s no turning back. They say you cannot stop at this point. Yeah, that’s
[00:24:44] Maciek: true. That’s true because. Th we already see how much work we have put into something. And it would be a shame just to stop at that point.
[00:24:53] Matt: Did, how do the goals change at all? Like what was the original goal for the Polish. Was it for you to just maybe get exposure to lead into maybe hiring you or something like that? And how do the goals change if at all shifting to a global presence?
[00:25:07] Maciek: We have only one goal and it was more of a contribution towards WordPress.
[00:25:13] That’s all. We fought for a short while about monetizing it, but we. Once we decided that we don’t want it. We don’t want it. We, we want a WP hours and the Polish version to be our hubby rather than our our job B like, how is this nicely called? And This was the only thing that we want to achieve.
[00:25:34] We wanted to give back something from, from us. And we know how many things are happening in the, in the worker space. So putting everything in one place I think it’s a, it’s, it’s a nice contribution that that, that we are doing with the English version that all living that we that we wanted is just to, just to continue.
[00:25:56] Doing this contribution about in the, in, in the larger scale. And even if we did not fault and we are, we don’t want to monetize it. I, I would lie if I would set that it didn’t help me with my, with my job because it’s so much easier to connect with people because If I would be just much upon Muskie from, from body, less people would know.
[00:26:22] And when I’m contacting them like, hi, I’m I work at at body, but you also may know me from WP ALS and many people already know me. So which ma it’s so easier to connect with. If you saw our guest editors list, like there are, so I would call them workers, rock stars. We had, we had yells, we had Mar YAG.
[00:26:47] We had so many interesting, interesting people from, from the workless world. And without WP ALS, I don’t think I would even have had the courage to talk with with some of them, because why? Because. I am. I’m just, I wouldn’t be just a workers ambassador and this makes me, and this makes it a bit easier, but I still remember the moment I wrote wrote an email asking Demariac from, from yells to be our guests to Dieter.
[00:27:18] For sure. I had the small slip deprivation because I would never do it being like, because this is Marielle from yellows. This is yeah. I am here and she’s right. So the interesting thing and the surprise in the morning.
[00:27:34] Matt: Yeah. The, the interesting thing, and I sort of alluded to this earlier.
[00:27:38] How this is an interesting time for like content creators, especially in, especially in the WordPress play space, in any space in every space. I should say. It’s just very apparent in WordPress because content creators can get jobs for brands to, again, bridge those gaps between marketing and product or especially marketing and technical.
[00:27:56] The other interesting thing, I think, which is going to carry through. Forever at this point, I think is folks like you and I, and some folks listening who are content creators who have a body of work that is valuable, but more importantly, an employee. Somebody who hires you to work for them, sees that as valuable and allows you to continue to do it.
[00:28:19] Let me frame this from some experiences that I had when I got out of the day job, running my agency and looked for a full-time job back when I was having kids five, five or so years ago at this point, that body of work like you were saying, allowed me to, talk to other companies to get jobs.
[00:28:39] I’d say 80% of them back then were, were like, yeah, this is awesome. Like continue to do the Matt report. You can work for us and keep doing it because it’s a benefit to us really at the end of the day. And I get to retain that ownership. And it’s not looked at. Oh, you’re doing like a side hustle while you’re working for us.
[00:28:57] Like, no, that’s not gonna apply. And I did have some of those conversations with very notable WordPress companies, I should say, which I won’t say on air, but a few of them were like, no, no, you, if you work for us, you’d have to stop doing the mat reporting. And I was like, oh, okay, this, this conversation’s done pretty quick because that’s just not going to happen.
[00:29:13] But what I’m getting at is I think content creators have this advantage from here on out. Like you can continue to create. Have it as a valuable asset to yourself, to the company you’re working for. If both parties can agree that this is a, an okay relationship. I think the future is pretty bright for content creators to continue to love, like do this hobby thing, like as you put it and work for a company, but find mutual mutual benefit.
[00:29:40] That was a long way of getting to that is no real question. But do you have any thoughts around the future of like content creators and how you can leverage that as an additive?
[00:29:48] Maciek: Yeah, I think that, that, that, you’re absolutely right with this because I think that many, because when, when I started my, my job in with workers, I remember that every time when we were creating sites, that there were like three types of of let’s call it workers.
[00:30:04] We had graphic designers, we had developers and we had the marketing team and there was. There were so many gaps between all of those teams. And now when I w when I look at some work titles of different people, I see that are more and more jobs that are connecting those gaps. We have now, all those the developer relations jobs, oldest, embassy leaders, advocates, and so on, I would still like to be called, I dunno, I worked with you in the corner or something.
[00:30:36] Matt: Because why your pay rate keeps going up every time, the longer this conversation goes on, you and I are going to be getting paid a lot more money.
[00:30:42] Maciek: Yeah. So, but, but, but this is Suffolk, this that I think that many companies started to realize that it’s not so easy that, that the job we are doing became more and more complicated in so many on so many levels.
[00:30:58] Not only when it comes to the technical stuff. But here, here also, we have all those headlights, not headless, so many approaches of doing our, our workers is right. But on the other hand, there are so many approaches when it comes to communication to writing content and. So for sure there will be more and more jobs that will be doing that, that will specialize in one small thing and it will benefit for forever.
[00:31:30] Because really having specialists on things that may sound stupid for someone it’s sometime maybe a big win. I don’t remember who, but someone in our corporate space is is, is promoting himself as an expert about, about pages. And, and this is a great approach because the about page is something really useful.
[00:31:55] Yeah, and it can get, it can build that relation between the reader of the website and to do, to become a future client or something like this. So, so yeah. Maybe a few years ago, hiring someone who calls himself an about page specialists may sound, let’s call it weird, but now why not? Right. It may have sense.
[00:32:21] Matt: Yeah. A hundred percent. I want to turn our sights on. Talking about creating content in the WordPress space, maybe WordPress, journalism, news, podcasting, and all the, all of this fun stuff you say that you, you want to keep it as a hobby. You don’t want to turn it into a jobby, which I I’d imagine.
[00:32:37] As soon as you first, as soon as you take your first payment, and let’s say an advertiser suddenly, now you’re sort of thrust into this area of like, okay, now I have to turn this into a business. I know this really well because I take sponsorship money. There is a need, I think. And again, there’s not going to be a direct question here.
[00:32:52] I’m just going to frame it and then happy to get your thoughts. I think there is a need for like great for great WordPress content, not just tutorials, not just interviews but content lead with opinion, journalism research, et cetera, et cetera put out there into the world because there are.
[00:33:11] Sponsors out there. There are businesses out there that would like to support it. There’s also businesses and brands out there that want to get their product or service out in front of other readers, listeners, viewers, if you’re doing stuff on YouTube, there’s plenty of, of market share out there. I don’t think our particular space has matured enough.
[00:33:34] And I mean that for both parties on one hand, I think the product owners that are out there are simply just looking for, for numbers, right? They want, they want clicks. They want page views. They want downloads, they want views. They want all of this stuff. Rightfully so. And there’s less concern of great quality content.
[00:33:53] And then. There’s the other side of the product owner, who’s like, Hey, I got this great product. How do I get it out there? I want the world to know about it, but the taverns not talking about it, I guess my work here is done. I think they just give up. Right. And there’s no formal outreach.
[00:34:10] There’s no real true effort to reach out to folks like you and I to. To really do that. And if it is, it’s just like this, please talk about my products. So you can promote me thing, which also sucks. Right. And then we flip that sphere around to the content creators, like uni where, ah, yeah, some of us, we, we get burned out from doing these projects because.
[00:34:31] Whatever it’s, it’s just not enough people paying attention to it. There’s not enough money in it. The WordPress world is largely out of our control to, to a degree. So there’s things moving that we just can’t control. Can’t use the word WordPress or in, in any of our commercial endeavors there’s stuff like that.
[00:34:48] Fairly chaotic world. How do you see bridging the gap between, product companies that want to support great and unique content and want to get their product out there and the content creators like you and I, and others that are listening to this to like, keep things going and get valued at a particular.
[00:35:07] Level that they should be valued at a big, huge topic. I just threw at you. But your thoughts on any of this?
[00:35:13] Maciek: Yeah, that’s right. It’s, it’s huge. Maybe I will start with a little background because for, for few years I had the chance to work at one of the biggest Polish technical portals and. There were, there were a lot of advertisement or, and I had the chance to contact with so many media agencies, advisors, and so on.
[00:35:36] And this was the point when I realized I really hate advertisement in like any way. And when I am still thinking when it comes to WP ALS how to. Get some money, but not for me because I’m, I I’m earning enough at, at, at my day job, but to get some money just that I can found something something else for, for example, I could pay money for, for writers and like still trying to find the way, how to, how to make an advice advertisement that won’t lose.
[00:36:14] Like it’s, it’s an ad it’s it’s, it’s, it’s something really difficult. It’s, it’s something really difficult because like I said, I had banners, I had, I hate sponsored tags because in many cases you can feel that someone paid for it and it’s it’s, it’s not real. It’s not real. It’s it’s it’s it’s, it’s just fake.
[00:36:37] So
[00:36:37] Matt: yes, this is, but don’t you think in the WordPress world? Don’t you think specifically in the WordPress world, we have an advantage as creators to either write or say ads that we really care about. Like if you’re using, your particular buddy, get a software or if let’s say gravity forms, sponsor the show, like I could really talk well about, gravity forms.
[00:37:00] Cause I know that. Don’t you think we’re in a particular advantage to the make advertising?
[00:37:05] Maciek: Yes. That is true. That there are many products that that I could advertise with. We’d like. Can you heart or anything? I would, I won’t have to worry about that. I am, let’s say lying to the people because yes, I could say those words, but this is, this is one problem about me because I always were at minimalist developer.
[00:37:27] I use as few plugins as possible. So I could say great words about advanced Gusto fields. I could say great words about the body. About timber, but it’s an open source project that wouldn’t advertise in any way and maybe about Yoast because I always use them too. So there are not many products that I could advertise in a way.
[00:37:53] And on the other hand, I know that there are so many services that are probably great, that are that are really far towards the users. And if I could find a way to. To figure out how to create those advertisements in a way that. Th that’s will look more real more for, to, to, to my top, to my readers.
[00:38:18] And it will be a great moment for me when I, when I, when I figured it out, I’m still trying to, to do, to find a way how to, because like I said for, for me, it would be great if I could sponsor some other people to, to, to write some great tax to to develop their. Stuff like this,
[00:38:37] Matt: because there are so many, it sounds like advertisement and sponsorship is, is still on the table.
[00:38:42] Like you’re still exploring it. It might be something that you do with th
[00:38:45] Maciek: this bout. Yes, it, it, it is it’s but like I said, it’s, it’s not for me. I would just like want to have the possibility to, to pass the money, to, to, to people that. That needed more because like I said, I’m, I’m really happy with, with how many money I earn each month still.
[00:39:05] If they want to tell them to give me a raise, I’m still open. So
[00:39:09] Matt: they definitely will after this call Machek thanks for hanging out today and talking about all of this wonderful stuff. Listen, if you’re a small agency boutique agency, you have a few developers on your team starting to take on bigger projects.
[00:39:21] You’re starting to punch above your weight. Sign those 20, 30, 40, 50, a hundred thousand dollars deals. It’s time to get serious. Find my check. Well much I can tell us where can they find you to connect on the CIC D software that we talked about? And then where can we find you? If we want to write a post on WPLS
[00:39:37] Maciek: I’ve instilled, the best way would be to connect with me through fruit for Twitter.
[00:39:42] You can find me my nickname is . I hope that maybe you will, you will provide them. My link to my Twitter and accounting in a written way. And I think this is this. This is the best way to connect with me because it’s, it’s universal for all my worlds.
[00:40:01] Matt: Fantastic stuff. Everyone else listening to this, my report.com report.com/subscribe.
[00:40:06] If you want your weekly news delivered to you in five minutes or less, the WP minute.com. Sponsor us over [email protected] slash Maryport. Join our private discord. Join the conversation, get your hand in the. WordPress news. See you in the next episode.

[00:00:00] Alexandra: JAMstack is really the new hotness. Now it brings speed, which is an essential law with ACO, with the new Google measures about about some core vetoes for us that now are really essential. So we’ve we’ve Gatsby and JAMstack. Really really super fast website.

[00:00:20] You check. Pages instant, it’s static. brings all sorts of security because your database is not exposed, but have more flexibility great developer experience because now most developer. Learning react, not PHP. So people want to learn. We react. So it brings a lot of advantages.

[00:00:42] Matt: This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by foo plug-ins or specifically foo plugins, foo gallery. You can find [email protected]. There’s a new pro commerce plan, and it gives you two way integration into WooCommerce. So if you want to sell photos, you can sell photos with foo.gallery and woo commerce.

[00:01:04] It makes your job. Super easy, especially if you’re a photographer. I just had family photos taken the other day and I looked at the big conglomerate website that my photographer sent me. He said, man, it would look so much better if you. Right through WooCommerce, especially if you use something like foo gallery, check out food, art gallery, and learn more about their pro commerce plan.

[00:01:26] Check out their WooCommerce integration. They have a great way to watermark and protect your photo galleries. Check them out and thank them for sponsoring the show. It’s food, art gallery go-to food art gallery today. Start selling images with foo gallery and.

[00:01:44] Now that the WordPress acquisition market has cooled off a bit. It’s time to stoke the fire on all things Gatsby in jams, tackiness. Again. Don’t let full site editing, steal all of the thunder. There’s still so much happening around headless WordPress and the ability to integrate third party API APIs to take the place of plugins and look. 

[00:02:02] I know it’s a polarizing thought process to some of us. But if we want WordPress to continue to grow, we need to give it some room for new use cases. 

[00:02:11] I’m joined by Alexandra Salado to talk about her company Gatsby WP themes over at Gaspe WP themes. Dot com and how this hotness comes with some red hot opportunity. If you’re wondering how to make money in WordPress theme space headed into 2022. Look, no further than this conversation. Get schooled on the technology and learn how the heck she found her co-founder along with the recipe to success, splitting the responsibilities. 

[00:02:36] This is the Matt report a podcast for the resilient and business builder i’ve launched something new you might have heard called the wp minute and you can join us as a member to get into our private discord server and take part in crafting the weekly wordpress news check out buy me a coffee.com/matt report join and thanks to food plugins fu gallery for sponsoring my work here on the mat report and the wp minute okay here’s [00:03:00] alexandra’s blotto on jamstack and Gasby wordpress themes

[00:03:04] Alexandra: JAMstack is really the new hotness. Now it brings speed, which is an essential law with ACO, with the new Google measures about about some core vetoes for us that now are really essential. So we’ve we’ve Gatsby and JAMstack. Really really super fast website.

[00:03:24] You check. Pages instant, it’s static. brings all sorts of security because your database is not exposed, but have more flexibility great developer experience because now most developer. Learning react, not PHP. So people want to learn. We react. So it brings a lot of advantages.

[00:03:46] . Then in my dream, Always been to, to make a product in some development, to be honest, I really wanted them to create the way I went into development because I’m a creative person. And when I was in what brands I wanted to do themes, but the market was crowded.

[00:04:01] And then I discover, I begin working with react NSC. It was, this is my bad, this is what I want to do.

[00:04:07] We need premium themes with nice designs with options. So people. Especially developers or agency can have some things. They can, they, they can reuse pre-made designs, but not only that, because myself, I use my own themes for projects to not reinvent the wheel. I have a developer team that I can modify everything, but it contains another themes that get all the data and all the options and And I work really faster with that.

[00:04:39] Matt: Here’s what I see. I’m not a developer and the WordPress world is still heavy on the, the development talk, right?

[00:04:47] The interest of WordPress is still largely for developers. First and foremost, and I see a lot of people. Hey, this whole like learn JavaScript, deeply thing. Gutenberg, Gatsby. I feel like some people there’s a camp of people who are like, oh, that’s that’s too technical. Like I can’t even enter in WordPress anymore.

[00:05:08] Because it’s no longer just modify some HTML and CSS and know a little bit of PHP lightly. Like that’s how I got into the WordPress world. So I could kind of relate with that, but I’m not a developer. So I haven’t been practicing this skill for like the last decade. What’s your thoughts on somebody from the outside, just getting into WordPress development?

[00:05:27] Is it that much of a challenge or if they’re starting fresh, you kind of just learn this language and your.

[00:05:33] Alexandra: So is that?

[00:05:33] different type of developers and What you want to do myself? I’m self-taught then I, when I begin with WordPress, I did have not shaman and CSS. I just began taking themes and playing with them. And. Yeah, the design sense. So deep things begin to work and I begin to learn as GMs, CSS, and begin to, to my themes and, and I love, and I discovered I’m a developer and I love that.[00:06:00] 

[00:06:00] So I wanted to go deeper and I wanted more. So I did a JavaScript bootcamp and I react and I, that was that’s me. Okay. Now there is a, of a type of developers and there is WordPress implementers. Doesn’t that blob, but they do great things to Wednesday address to work different type of clients. I think. So I think there is place and things for really different type of person.

[00:06:26] Like there is different type of developers we’re in front then backend there’s dev ops people

[00:06:32] and now we have this possibility of the wing doing jump stack. So no people is a great thing we’ve worked with. 

[00:06:39] It depends on who you are and why you want to go. For me, it has been an opening. Yeah. And now I’m very creating a product in reacting, never expected that 10 years ago. So

[00:06:49] Matt: What was the job? You mentioned you, you took a JavaScript course. What was that course for folks who might be interested in it?

[00:06:55] Alexandra: it was in Barcelona and it was in Spanish. So it was a bootcamp in russula the Skylab I’m, I’m a, I have to that language one, French one is Spanish. So I speak English as you see, but taking one in Spanish, it was a burden less for me, for my brain learning that, but it was a great one. It was freelance full time, full stack.

[00:07:16] So it was react. No, they, everything. And zip center. It was more to find a job. So all of them find a job at the end. So bootcamps are a really great, I think in my case, it was more to have to learn new things, to have more fun, developing and doing new things and flex to that. I’m there. So yeah, some bootcamps are nice.

[00:07:38] I think my opinion, it was in person. It was not online. 

[00:07:42] Matt: Sure when we had our pre-interview, we talked about this being your very first product, that’s not your first foray into a business because you’ve been running a business. But talk, talk to me about this whole first product thing, any fear around that, and how did you prepare yourself to launch your first.

[00:08:00] Alexandra: Oh not fear. No. And I just been. The path it’s interesting. It happened what happened, even if it doesn’t the work or whatever, I have learned so much at a great time, as I say them are creative. So creating a product is, is great. I am. I had a lot of fun enjoy doing it. I saw I’m very lucky because I didn’t want it to do it alone.

[00:08:26] When we begin with with Zach, but then I really needed a partner to develop with and I found he spent harm on Twitter. I knew where before from word gap in various she’s polished. And she lived in various I contacted her and she was immediately okay. She already had a thin business in forest, but she wanted to do new things.

[00:08:47] And especially in JavaScript, she was more with view and she, she learned react with me and she’s super talented in design and in coding, in everything. We met at Gatsby days in London when I was doing a talk [00:09:00] and we begin the next day immediately. And it was, yes, a lot of fun. Enjoy Zen. We are not marketers.

[00:09:09] So for the lounge to clot off more times than we thought, and when we decide, okay, we are going to launch, then you realize all the little things that you have not done in coding, in documentation, I was taking care of the commercial part, so, okay. For sales first.

[00:09:27] we choose a Stripe, but then, oh, okay.

[00:09:30] As a reason, all these data protection things and taxis and all, or no, I don’t want to deal with legal things. 

[00:09:37] So you have all these things to think. And, and before I think before you decide, okay, now we are going to launch you don’t think about them. And they said go, oh, there is that. That’s not the fun 

[00:09:54] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, worry about to sell this thing. And now we have to do support. I forgot about. 

[00:10:00] Alexandra: Yes. I also allowed the support, a website with bathroom circles that I think it’s also Ballina was responsible of the documentation. And she did an amazing work on that. It was really to document well things. And is there any, so they, we pushed the button, to, to, to, to say. Okay.

[00:10:21] Now it’s slides a burden.

[00:10:23] It was really, really something. And we had no idea our sales going to what was going to happen. But the first day I happened to have the five minutes. So it was really a nicer and I sign 

[00:10:36] Matt: talk to me about just picking these tools really quick. I know that I think a lot of WordPress people immediately go to , oh, I’m going to, I’m going to launch a theme or a plug-in business. I’m gonna. Well, what’s been in the news recently, easy digital downloads. Maybe they pick woo commerce, the deliver the product.

[00:10:53] And then some folks who are like, Hey, I’m going to do support. They might be picking, BB press or they might be doing slack or something like that. You chose two fairly different tools. I love circle. I think it’s a fantastic tool. I’ve never used your merchant before. Why not something that was attached directly to WordPress.

[00:11:11] Was there some overhead there that you were like, yeah, I don’t even want to deal with that side of it on.

[00:11:14] Alexandra: But first I wanted to, to do the sales website. We have the project, with gets you WordPress. So it’s not your WordPress where we don’t have each other downloads, et cetera. And all the thing that even, I don’t know if it’s digital downloads take care of the taxis and, and data protection. For me as you think as really a nightmare

[00:11:39] is there an about, about the support? I know a lot of people now are on discord or slack and. Slack is nice, but what do you want to make part? If people ask questions, then if you want to retrieve the message for other people, that will be, that can be useful unless the kids have been version.

[00:11:58] It doesn’t work for me. [00:12:00] Slack works better. For example, I am a team from my agency and then I ask the people on slack. That’s different. This is nice on so far for community. But not for support, and when you want to, to have something well done with people can reach into the message, et cetera.

[00:12:15] So I searched, there is discourse. That was great. And it’s very sort of use that. And I discovered circle because I am, I’m also at both the courses. I hate tomatoes and I love this this courses with Peter. And I think it’s really nice.

[00:12:32] So I just search for what they need, and so, 

[00:12:37] Matt: It’s nice to see people in the WordPress space. So I’ve been talking to a lot more, no code, low code people on this podcast and, circle. Third party merchants, web flow. Like this is what everyone else is using. It’s it’s only really in the WordPress world where you just find everyone saying, I will not use anything unless it’s GPL and I can find it from wordpress.org.

[00:12:58] So it’s nice to see, tools working really well. And you voting with your dollars because it’s common sense. It doesn’t have to glue into word press. If it’s solving your need it’s, it’s good. And I just want to highlight that because I think it’s, it’s sort of understated with a lot of folks these days, or maybe even some folks in the WordPress world are afraid to admit it.

[00:13:18] I’m running a discord server for my membership at the WP minute and I’m just like, I love it. It’s fantastic. Of course, there’s the fear that they get bought up by Microsoft, but you know, I’ll deal with that when I get there. How has the marketing gone since it’s been, what roughly, well, how many months has it been?

[00:13:34] Like five, six 

[00:13:35] Alexandra: three months, three months.

[00:13:36] we launched every bottle that we launched on the 3rd of June at the beginning of the summer. So we didn’t choose this day. We were just ready then, but there’ll be less bucket is that’s not the best moment for lunch, but whatever. 

[00:13:54] Matt: And, and how, and what, what are your plans? Now you, so summertime is famously very low in sales. I mean, just speaking from experience, it’s very low in sales. Everyone’s out. COVID, I don’t know what’s happening in your part of the world in America. A lot of people went outside cause it was the summertime and they were ready to ready to go.

[00:14:12] And now I, already seeing, even podcast listens are starting to go back up because everyone’s like, Hey, summer’s done. We’re back to work, starting to become a fall, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, getting to that famously a low season in the summertime. What’s your plans now going into sort of October and the holiday season.

[00:14:29] Alexandra: Okay though, for us, it was not only is a seminar, but what happens it’s and one thing, when you launch a product and you begin, of course, you don’t really make enough money to live only on that. So for me, this summer has been super active because I had tons of. Freelance work, and really, really there’s been some more heavy peer relationship.

[00:14:52] My carrier, it was terrible. So I didn’t take holidays or nothing, but we could not really work more on the things, but that’s good [00:15:00] because I realized that, okay, that’s really. I crave and want to work on, and realize that, okay, it’s, that’s my baby. I really want to work on that. So now I’m going to really put my, my, my, all my time on that and Paulina too.

[00:15:15] So we realized. 

[00:15:17] Matt: up the role? How do you split up the responsibilities before you continue? How do you split the responsibilities? Who does, what on the.

[00:15:22] Alexandra: Okay. We are both developers and designers . Paulina is is better than me at something sad, debugging and tracking documentation. She’s really great developer. And. 100% the proper, and she’s designed design to me, I’m a developer, but I also, as a business side I’m more extrovert ones that like yes, to talk to here in podcast she will do blog posts and they will do videos too, to show you the, but the great thing is we agree on most of the things and and we.

[00:15:54] It has been a flow since the.

[00:15:55] beginning. And I think that’s very rare and very precious to to have, so we didn’t think it, it just thing has been flowing between us. So now we talk, okay. I do that, that then Yeah. So marketing. Market neither her or neither me. So we have the Bridgette we are, which is, she is great.

[00:16:15] And we really love her feeders that somebody was part of the team. She’s taking care of Twitter. And I have my life partner, Darko is taking care now of SEO, of main marketing of all that. We are preparing that now, because we realize it’s not enough to have a good product. You have to promote, you have to market because.

[00:16:41] This is baby doesn’t work alone.

[00:16:43] Matt: Yeah.

[00:16:43] Alexandra: So we, we had a really lot of sales of first month Zan. Yes.

[00:16:47] July, August. And as you say, yes, summer is really calm, even in the tweaking, the matching subscription it began to get accepted. At first is really dead. So yes, we have already things to do, do a, we are planning to do also webinars making these team and make some tutorials to meet.

[00:17:08] Matt: W I think one of the hot trends now besides getting acquired from, from like hosting companies. Cause it seems like all these plugging companies here now are just getting acquired by bigger players is as knocking on the door of like, a hosting company maybe like a strata WP who focuses on like headless WordPress or static WordPress, stuff like that.

[00:17:31] What about that route? Have you been thinking about, maybe I can do. Even like this free theme as a framework. I know some people don’t like that word, but bring it in as a framework to a hosting company, be like, Hey, partner up with us, include this as part of your suite of services for your hosting company or for your hosting customers.

[00:17:50] And then, oh, by the way, just let them know that we have a pro version if they, if they want something else. Is that, is that something that is maybe too far off or like not on the radar yet? Or is that 

[00:17:59] Alexandra: [00:18:00] Oh,

[00:18:00] Matt: want to.

[00:18:02] Alexandra: I have not think about it, but it can be an idea. you you’ll give me ideas. I’m very close from WP and gene because of course , that was at Gatsby. Karen Mason I’m, I’m, I’m really close to them towards the folks that work there. I was thinking, I was thinking. I was very inspired by by Genesis and studio press, but the way of doing things.

[00:18:27] And I think the people that can use it, it’s, people’s that want quality. We want things that don’t do, it’s not a multi popper films. I can Tim forest, not as I do one things they do well. And we have themes for everything and also. This is the type of people that use it. They’re like even if they don’t 3d codes, they like to.

[00:18:52] enter in code and, and modify things themselves.

[00:18:56] So, for me, it’s a, it’s a great great model. And I was working with Genesis when I was in WordPress. I was I was a Genesis developer too. So, and so and WP engine as all noses to your breasts themes that Brian Gardner now is that WP engine two. So I don’t know if say I, if there is ideas that come, why not now we are beginning.

[00:19:18] So we will see. Yes, everything is open.

[00:19:22] Matt: So we’ve talked a lot about like how to develop these themes or like how you thought about the development of it and like Gatsby and JavaScript and all the stuff in the WordPress world when it comes to marketing, understanding who your customer is, is one of the most critical pieces. You’ve mentioned like Genesis and studio.

[00:19:41] That crowd of users, they were all fairly technical. Cause you’re doing like hooks and actions, filters, like all these things. And you’re always like modifying the functions, PHP file. They w you know, people who were born from those days and that. We’re not the people who like guts started using Elementor where all it was, was like a drag and drop interface.

[00:19:59] Have you started to really think critically about who your customer is? Is it more technical? Is it more of like an agency that would be purchasing your product and not, sort of somebody who wants to launch a pizza shop website and they’re just like, give me Gatsby. Like, they wouldn’t even know how to do this yet.

[00:20:17] Have you.

[00:20:17] Alexandra: Yes, yes, no, I really think it’s. More for professionals. I don’t say that the professional can advise you to know that they’ve of people that we wanted. We’d be more an agency, a developer that want to, to enjoys a mix of WordPress where we’ve we’ve to It’s not, yes. The person, I think who launches pizza, burbs even on know about Gatsby.

[00:20:45] So, so yes, and Zay they’ll have to be super technical because if you follow our recommendation, you don’t need to know coding, but you need to use a console. You need to install, know the [00:21:00] gaps between style, get two of your score to settle, get, and everything is explained.

[00:21:06] Every beat of things you Have Right into Consolo into editorial. You it’s to be based. So that’s why they think of what people of Genesis that and a about three Dar website with all these tutorial or you.

[00:21:20] notice recipes. I think this type of people will love to work this way. And it’s not code because you don’t need to call, but you need to do the things that can afraid some other type of things. 

[00:21:34] And then more technical people of course will do much more things than what they have no dice into support of the client. We have. There is people that are already technical and that technical questions at that come here. 

[00:21:50] Matt: One of the, I can’t remember because time is so elusive these days. I don’t know where times time span was, but famously I think like a year ago Matt Mullenweg. Sort of had like a little open dialogue with one of 

[00:22:07] Alexandra: bill, man, from from from Netlify. 

[00:22:10] Matt: right and about like this whole, like JAMstack versus WordPress, people like people still struggle to get the average person still struggles to get WordPress up and running. Even if they have like a one-click button in their hosting panel, they still are challenged with that. JAMstack is still going through.

[00:22:28] A hundred times more challenging. Like if you ask the normal person to do the console stuff and even maybe some power users, they might struggle with that. Do you see the JAMstack world getting a, getting easier from your point of view? Like, are they making it a little bit easier for folks or look, these are just the things we have to put up with to, to boot up against.

[00:22:50] Alexandra: I remember I was talking for people from the Gatsby team and they say, yeah, Is there is a lot of things, that are seemed out there. He seems very struggling, but they I’ve been observing WordPress.

[00:23:03] So it’s a good thing. So I think it will take time, but yes, I think it will become JAMstack it’s really takings a web, so it would become easier, but it’s into their proper things. So. And I think people like me, we develop the themes and that will grow and it will be other people’s that will develop morphemes and weave ideas to make it simpler.

[00:23:31] And Gatsby will also make things to integrate better with a CMS like WordPress. I think that will come. Yes, honestly, but. 

[00:23:41] Matt: When you say JAMstack is, is sort of, winning the web or taking over the web, is there a particular, is it because developers are liking that sort of approach better? Or is there something really powerful for the end user? That like the visitor of the website, the buyer of the product who is in an [00:24:00] e-commerce site or something like that.

[00:24:01] Is there something consumer facing that is a real advantage in that?

[00:24:07] Alexandra: Yes, it’s both. I think, yes. Developers love it, but user, just for example, now I have a. A client. Now we are building a huge website about traveling to know a sort of travel advisor. We are featuring five custom post type featuring that?

[00:24:21] People will make a search and they get fitter. We, for many, many criteria’s Yeah. For a lot of images. And he didn’t know about WordPress. He didn’t know about about JAMstack and. I explained him how it goes. He said, oh my God said, solve all my problems. Speed security. Although then, and even if somebody is not technical, show them a Gatsby, your next website and shows the speed and change page is just instantaneous.

[00:24:51] And then explain them. The security’s improved because we were static website, a hacker jet, and just the face, your website. He will not touch it at the base. And even if your WordPress is down, your city is up, you will not be down if it’s static. Then yes. And the speed for SEO. It’s crazy. that’s super important now and to flexibility.

[00:25:14] So you can you can have your content also marketing page, the blog from WordPress, but perhaps you prefer having a Shopify. Oh, big commerce. Even if we have a will covers, so you can have your shop on Shopify you can have some data in a, in a Google sheets and things that come from other API and all that in a consistent theme, in one website.

[00:25:43] Matt: Yeah. That’s, that’s the exciting part. That’s what like the whole, the whole like WordPress crashing, but my website still being up, like, that’s all you need to tell 

[00:25:52] Alexandra: Yes. Okay. 

[00:25:54] Matt: I like perfect. That’s exactly what a.

[00:25:57] Alexandra: Yes. You can crush a WordPress. You can destroy your WordPress and in your files, you’re sitting there. 

[00:26:04] Matt: All right. So for the listener today, if, if they want to get started with, with Gatsby or with your theme, it’s Gatsby, WP themes.com, Gatsby, WP themes.com, go and visit that site. Anything else they should prepare before they had purchased? Like what should they have? Should they have a special hosting account before?

[00:26:22] Alexandra: Yes, we have interns on the dock. There is a link, I think, I think, yes. What you should do prepare your computer because he has one of our fears, but it didn’t happen. It’s they need to

[00:26:40] they need to prepare their computer. And nobody has a problem with that and different on mark and on windows. Everything is under the Gatsby, the commendation. So we explain it on our documentation and we link it to get me. So is that. They can do that before buying, because somebody was [00:27:00] suddenly is going to have, oh, is that too complicated for me?

[00:27:02] It will not be good. So after that, yes, I can. And then just, they can read the documentation and we are going to Vince is three themes, so they can play with that. It will have nods options, nods comments not also fancy things, but it would be totally, totally usable where they want it to say. 

[00:27:28] Matt: Bye. Bye bye. Go buy the theme 

[00:27:30] Alexandra: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. 

[00:27:33] Matt: WP themes. Calm Alexandra, where else can folks say thanks on the web, 

[00:27:40] Alexandra: to say thanks? Oh my yes, we have a Twitter. It’s art. WP

[00:27:53] Matt: we will link it up in the show notes. We’ll have a link.

[00:27:58] Alexandra: that’s, that’s better ESN visits. We have the support website we’ve circle, which is nice as I can say, can subscribe that and subscribed as a website because this is where we are going to send a free team and also goodies, and also in our newsletter. Now we are going to begin also to inform people about things about JAMstack.

[00:28:21] For example, now we have the. Just get to be camp just happen and say announced gods before, which will have SSL, server-side rendering and many things. And of course, as soon as it’s stable, we will implement it in, in our themes.

[00:28:40] Matt: I love me some server side rendering. Tell ya. I don’t know what it does, but it sounds powerful and it sounds fast. And that’s what I like. Gatsby WP themes.com. Alexandra. Thanks for doing the show today. Everyone else has report.com. Matt report.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. Don’t forget to support the show by heading on over to buy me a coffee.com/matt report.

[00:29:01] Buy me a coffee.com/maryport report. That’s where you can get connected to our membership powered discord. I love it. You want to be part of the weekly news, check it out. Buy me coffee.com/matt report. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. We’ll see. In the next episode.

[00:00:00] Dave: switching tools is, is not for the faint-hearted, it’s quite an expensive process, isn’t it? In terms of well sunk cost in terms of what you’ve already.

[00:00:08] Put into the amount of time and energy that you’ve put into learning tools that you’ve previously used. I also had have still, a multiple six figure a year business teaching WordPress teaching, very specific tools, WordPress and elements are, that combination elements or page builder.

[00:00:25] Matt: This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by foo plug-ins or specifically foo plugins, foo gallery. You can find [email protected]. There’s a new pro commerce plan, and it gives you two way integration into WooCommerce. So if you want to sell photos, you can sell photos with foo.gallery and woo commerce.

[00:00:47] It makes your job. Super easy, especially if you’re a photographer. I just had family photos taken the other day and I looked at the big conglomerate website that my photographer sent me. He said, man, it would look so much better if you. Right through WooCommerce, especially if you use something like foo gallery, check out food, art gallery, and learn more about their pro commerce plan.

[00:01:09] Check out their WooCommerce integration. They have a great way to watermark and protect your photo galleries. Check them out and thank them for sponsoring the show. It’s food, art gallery go-to food art gallery today. Start selling images with foo gallery and.

[00:01:27] As designers or developers, even product makers when WordPress is your hammer, everything looks like a nail. WordPress is certainly in an inflection point right now. Whereas the software is evolving Reed Gutenberg in full site, editing the community of users grapple with what WordPress really is. I feel like that’s a statement which has lingered in the air for a few years.

[00:01:50] When you unlock its power custom post types and fields with a dash of rest API magic, the CMS can become a neural network for your data yet with an interface that I struggle to drag and drop a single block into a third column of my page layout today’s guest has mastered the teachings of WordPress specifically with Elementor for his students over the last few years.

[00:02:12] But the usability struggle that I just met. Yeah, that’s caused him to pivot his teachings to a hosted platform. You may have heard of before on the show web. Welcome today’s guest Dave Foye, as he unpacks the challenges of not only learning a new CMS, but the challenges of devising a curriculum for new students seeking to become proficient in it.

[00:02:34] You’re listening to the Mer report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. If you’d like to support the show, please visit buy me a coffee.com/matt report. And buy me a digital coffee or joined the membership to jump into our private discord server with others. Chatting it up about the.

[00:02:48] And greatest in our crazy WordPress world, that’s buy me a coffee.com/maryport. And thanks to Fu plug-ins for supporting today’s show. Check out food gallery food art gallery for more. Okay. [00:03:00] Here’s my interview with Dave. 

[00:03:01] Dave: I had a lot of resistance, a lot of inner resistance to partly because, switching tools is, is not for the faint-hearted, it’s quite an expensive process, isn’t it? In terms of well sunk cost in terms of what you’ve already.

[00:03:15] Put into the amount of time and energy that you’ve put into learning tools that you’ve previously used. But I mean, I also had have still, but, I had at the time, like a multiple six figure a year business teaching WordPress teaching, very specific tools, WordPress and elements are, that combination elements or page builder.

[00:03:35] And so it, it really was kind of. It, it, it was, it was a real kind of crunch time for me for thinking that I have got to the point where I cannot use these tools anymore. I’m finding that I actually I’m finding that. I’ll talk about the details in a moment, but I can’t in all conscience recommend this particular combination of tools that I am well-known for and, very well paid for I can’t carry on.

[00:04:05] So, believe me, it was quite a, quite a risk. I think I remember one of my students say, and I’ve mentioned it’s something in, in the, in the little private Facebook group that I’ve got for one of my courses. And he just said career suicide. Nice. So,

[00:04:23] Matt: for thanks for the vote of confidence.

[00:04:25] Dave: Awesome. I mean, it, it probably had a point, you probably had a point 

[00:04:29] Matt: What was that? Oh, just real quick. What was that concern for you to say? You know what, I don’t feel like I can recommend these tools anymore. Was it more a, an ELA mentor thing? Was it more a WordPress thing? I mean, we’re in this chaotic times where it’s like, Gutenberg is still trying to get better full site editing’s coming in.

[00:04:48] You layer on the complexity of a piece of software that wants you to build a website a certain way? Are we just hitting a perfect storm here? Or was there something specific?

[00:04:57] Dave: Yeah, possibly. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I had got to the point where I started, well, I’ve, I’ve been using WordPress since 2007, something like that, so for my own personal projects and my own client projects, I’d use WordPress for, for a good long time. It was when I actually decided to teach online. I long story, I think we’ve covered this plenty of times before, but for 10 years I was actually a school teacher.

[00:05:23] I’m a, I am a qualified teacher, so I was a qualified teacher, teaching young children in the, in the UK. Like in the nineties and early two thousands. And I then got into web design and build up a great business, but it just decided that I just miss teaching so much. So for me, around 2016 ish, I decided I actually want to get back into teaching, but I want to teach the thing that I’ve been, I’ve been working with the web design tools that I’ll be working with for, for, for many years, what, what a perfect combination.

[00:05:54] So, I did a lot of research, long story, but I’d discovered elements or which was [00:06:00] just in its earliest stages at the time. And thought this combination of tools is brilliant for, for my target market. My target market is always non coders. People who don’t want to code and probably feel a bit nervous about the prospect of.

[00:06:14] Th they, they want to build websites, but web design technology, web design tools, web development, isn’t something that is natural to them. It’s not something that they are completely off-air with. And. So I always see my job as taking people who look at all this stuff and think, oh, wow, this is so complicated.

[00:06:35] And possibly quite scary. It’s my job to say, it’s all fine. Just do this, this and this. And it all works out. So in a sense, I’d particularly chosen WordPress and elements or that particular combination, because it just seemed right for my target. Now over the gears, elements or has added on features and features and features WordPress itself, as you say, is changing dramatically.

[00:07:02] I think ultimately that will be for the good of WordPress. Definitely. I know a lot of people complain about Gothenburg, but I think it is getting there, but it got to the point where I started to think would I in, in, in all kind of conscience, I suppose, would I, conscious now. Recommend to somebody who once frost-free hassle-free stress-free web design experience, where basically stuff just works.

[00:07:30] All of the scary kind of hustle behind the scenes all the kind of configuration, all the. The, the stuff that people complain about WordPress, which is actually a strength at the same time, which is it’s plugin plugin system, plugin architecture, but I’d got to the point where, for my own use of WordPress, but also just being sensitive to the needs of my students and the needs of the people who I work with day in, day out to help with this stuff.

[00:08:01] I just saw massive frustration. Massive massive frustration with constant plugin updates, constant issues with plugins. It’s not new in WordPress at all, obviously, but you know, updating plugins to find that something’s broken, there’s a conflict with something else, finding websites that now this is, I think, quite a bit of elemental issue cause they do, they have had a history of releasing some quite buggy releases in in more recently.

[00:08:30] But you know, finding that a website that worked perfectly well, last time they logged in now, suddenly it doesn’t work in, in some way there’s some functionality broken or there’s a, there’s the layout that’s suddenly off. Issues with hosting and all the RS, all manner of different things. It’s kind of like that little drip, drip trip, the, the Chinese water torture, I think is called, the, the drip, drip, drip, drip of, of, of, of constant issues where I just thought there’s, there’s gotta be a better [00:09:00] way.

[00:09:00] I know that, for instance, like I use Thinkific for my online course. And it’s just all done for me. I can get on with actually creating courses, uploading the courses and teaching, there are, there are, I don’t know, email marketing platforms where that the heavy lifting and the stuff that I don’t need to know is done in the background so I can get on with my job.

[00:09:22] And I started to think that there must be something better than this constant stress and worry and, and hustle. And maintenance and all of these other things, which is what led me to start looking at other possible or the solutions. 

[00:09:39] Matt: I’ve seen the love, hate relationship with Gutenberg, how fast this piece of software has been iterated on. And just all the changes you couple that with ELA mentor, which is also on a rocket ship ride, they’re growing, they’re adding new features. They’ve hit a bout of turbulence, I guess is probably the nicest thing that I could say.

[00:10:01] I know I’ve seen you and Paul on Twitter really hammering it home with element or for good reason. And they have to be conscious, I think, of element or they have the conscious of just not throwing the kitchen sink at everything for the sake of the kitchen sink. 

[00:10:17] I feel like folks who are looking for a web flow solution understand that they should invest some money in a platform. That’s just going to do it without the FOS updates, hosting issues. Incompatibilities with other plugins, like I will pay the, have that done on Webflow versus the WordPress side of it where it’s like, man, there’s so many variables that, that can be thrown at this.

[00:10:46] Where are you getting that feedback from your audience? 

[00:10:48] Dave: Yeah, it was it was, as I said, at the beginning, it was a very, very reluctant look looking for something else for very, very lots of, lots of reasons. I didn’t want to be looking anywhere else. Yeah. Partly it was, it was my. And it was partly because of elements or boogie releases. So I got on with, for instance, I needed to build a new website for myself late last year, and they installed a new instance of WordPress and elements.

[00:11:14] I was like, global colors just didn’t work at all, just broken. And so, so w there were several issues like that just personally for myself, as it was like, oh, what, what is it now? There was not, and it’s not just, it’s not just elements or, I think. Lots and lots of other, other plugins as well, but let’s, I’m probably focusing on elements are maybe a bit too much, but, but yeah, it certainly wasn’t a good feeling from my audience and students by, by any means.

[00:11:43] I mean, my, my group, I sort of private group was just every day there was just something of like, why isn’t this working? Why is this thing broken now? Or it wasn’t just necessarily as WordPress. It was like hosting as well, or. I think because. Because the, [00:12:00] because of the plugin architecture and there are plugins coming down the pipe every single day as you.

[00:12:04] And I know constantly with, with new features and, potentially solving problems with SEO and page speed and everything else. So th th there were those issues with stuff just being broken and being hard. And, people struggling just to keep up with a frantic pace of change. I think that that was partly the thing, but I think also it was just, I think, yeah, just, just, I, I suppose people just I’m just trying to think of the best way to put it really.

[00:12:33] Yeah, just, just gen general kind of anxiety about, about stuff being broken and stuff. Just not being easy, I think is the easiest way to put it. Yeah.

[00:12:43] Matt: I want to ask you this question. This is going a little bit deeper in sort of like the creator in the, in the creator mindset, the, the business of being a creator and monetizing on, let’s say YouTube and affiliate sales. It probably wasn’t an easy decision to make either because one would imagine knowing what I did with affiliate sales, for elements.

[00:13:06] Which was a flea on an elephant’s ass, probably compared to what you and maybe others have done. It was probably a tough business decision to write, to be like, look, I’m making money. And I think you and Paul and, and, and the other folks that I communicate with on, on YouTube, you do affiliates. Right. I think of immediately when peoples think affiliates are like, oh, what are you trying to sell me?

[00:13:29] What kind of cloaking device are you using on these, on these links? Like at one point in your, in your career, you’re like, Elementor is a fantastic tool at this time. And they have an affiliate program. Why not recommend this and make money? It’s a legit way when you’re doing it a legit way. I don’t have any other better way of saying that.

[00:13:49] So I’d probably, at some point you were like, oh man, like I will be turning off this. Potentially of money. What was that like? And did you have, do you have any thoughts or feelings around affiliate sales and how this helps make the decision 

[00:14:01] Dave: Yeah, well, I mean, affiliates, the affiliate business model was never ever my intention when I first started my thing was I’m going to sell courses and affiliate sales were have always just been a bit of a nice to have. When I first started my YouTube channel started making videos about this fairly brand new tool called elements or at the time I happened.

[00:14:22] I mentioned my affiliate link. I think it just dropped it in the description. Sometimes I would, occasionally when elements I had an offer, I would let my email list know which was regrowing. My, my business model was growing my email list to sell courses in a nutshell. That’s it. And it still is. Grow the email list to sell courses.

[00:14:41] But thank goodness that I was an affiliate for elements or in those early days, because in the first kind of nine months of me getting to the point where I even had the confidence to make a course and to feel like I could sell it at all, we’re going back to 2017 now, which seems so long [00:15:00] ago, it was only a few years, but yeah, the, the, the, the affiliate income from I was an affiliate for very, very few.

[00:15:07] Elements or generate press. I don’t know, maybe a hosting platform as well. Well, the income from that was better than I’d been making, working full-time as a web designer. And it absolutely saved my ass because if I hadn’t have had that income I think the whole online course thing probably would have failed.

[00:15:28] Now. I say that because I. Way too long to actually make a product and offer it to my, offer it to my audiences, to my MLS. So these days when I mentor and help people create products and make online courses, one of my first things is to say, is this a build. As a small and email list, as you can get away with find a hundred people and sell something, make something to sell.

[00:15:55] It can be very low value, not low value, low, low price. It doesn’t matter, but start making something and start selling something straight away, because it’s only then that you can start getting true feedback about what people actually want, what they’re prepared to pay for and where you?

[00:16:11] should put your energies.

[00:16:13] But yeah, the affiliate thing was, was massive, but. W my, the income of saying about, I’m not, I’m not saying it’s a brag, but it’s a multiple six figures a year. Business is mostly from courses. It’s mostly from selling courses. I’d say 90% is from selling courses about WordPress and elemental, specifically about using those tools.

[00:16:36] And yeah, to say that it’s career suicide, there’s the phrase, career suicide.

[00:16:42] Matt: And you were, you were lucky enough to get to a point. Did you turn ads on, on your YouTube 

[00:16:48] Dave: No, no, no, no. Never never had no, no, no, 

[00:16:51] Matt: Just because you didn’t want the experience or the user to have that experience of ads, or you were never looking at it 

[00:16:59] Dave: I think, I think what I wanted to do was just to make sure. The foolishly probably, this is, this is not a savvy business head talking, but I think I just want to, just to make sure that when people watch my videos, that we’re just not being interrupted by ads and, they could just actually enjoy the experience of, of watching the videos.

[00:17:18] And I suspected that probably the income from that wasn’t particularly going to be too great anyway. So I just always kept monitorization off for that reason. Really. 

[00:17:27] Matt: My YouTube story is like, how do I get into this game? How do I create this content? And I quickly, but I don’t say quickly, it took me six months to burn out, doing like three videos a week or maybe three or four videos a week. I had this ambitious goal of doing it like every day. And I just flatlined burned out.

[00:17:46] I didn’t literally didn’t touch it for a year. And then all of a sudden. Ad sent, sent me the first check for a hundred bucks. Right. Then I logged in and it was, I had tripled my audience without uploading a video in a year, just because of SEO.

[00:17:58] The light bulb went off. [00:18:00] Like you fool, you shouldn’t have given up, you should have done it less. So you didn’t burn yourself out, but you shouldn’t have given up. And again, like life gets in the way YouTube stuff is so far away. My daily routine that I haven’t uploaded episodes. And, but I still am making three or 400 bucks a month in ads.

[00:18:19] And I have a lot of kids, so diapers are expensive. So I leave the ads on, but I, I, I can certainly, I can certainly see in your world where these bigger products, bigger prices, the brand, the value, there is a target for you to focus on.

[00:18:34] Dave: Yeah.

[00:18:35] definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I was the one that I think I wanted that sense of kind of trustworthiness. Yeah. just that experience. Really. I was not to say that people with ads, I watch, oh, I’ve got YouTube premium now, so I don’t see any ads, but seeing ads on people’s videos, I actually don’t, I don’t personally tie that into a decision that’s made by the creator of the video at all.

[00:18:55] It doesn’t, I understand how it works as well, but I don’t ever think, oh, they’ve, they’ve got ads turned on. They obviously don’t care about my experiences as a viewer. It doesn’t enter my head, so 

[00:19:06] Matt: side note, I also signed up recently for premium, like late was finally one of those things where, you know, before you sign up for premium, every time you logged into YouTube, they’d be like, do premium, do premium, do premium. And I’m always like clothes, clothes, clothes. And I tell you, Dave, I am like, screw it.

[00:19:23] I’m going to do it. Right. Like finally, you got me YouTube, literally a thousand pop-ups later is probably what my conversion metrics were. You finally got me and I signed up and I watched my first video with no ads. And I was like, wow, 

[00:19:41] Dave: Yeah, well, consider the side. 

[00:19:43] Matt: brain, because my brain was trained so much now with like their three pre-roll ads and then the, the pop-up in the middle of the banner and then like the mid roll.

[00:19:53] And when I’m doing work for Casto, sometimes I’m in the Castle’s account and I’m uploading my videos for Casos and I’ll be watching something. And I’ll be like, what is this ad? Like, my brain is like, what is this? Like, it was happening. And like, oh yeah, I’m not in my premium account.

[00:20:08] Dave: It is awesome. I think it’s. worth every single 

[00:20:11] Matt: It is, it’s. it is. 

[00:20:13] Dave: Yeah, definitely. 

[00:20:15] Matt: when I go on vacation with my children and recently w we’re going to, we were in Florida and they’re watching TV, cable, TV, and there’s commercials. And my kids are literally asking me what dad, what is this? Why, why isn’t the show playing? Because they’re so used to Netflix and Disney plus.

[00:20:33] Dave: Yeah. 

[00:20:34] Matt: And they see a commercial and they are freaking out. They’re like, what, what is a show? Where’s the show? And I’m like, it’s just a, it’s a thing called commercial kids that you didn’t grow up with. Welcome to my world. 

[00:20:46] Dave: Oh, wow. 

[00:20:46] Matt: All right. As we get into the back half of this conversation, web flow, did you, you said like, I want to find a platform that is easy, all encompassing.

[00:20:59] Was Webflow [00:21:00] is in the back of your mind or did you start doing some homework and then you settled on Webflow?

[00:21:04] Dave: Yeah, Well, I had, I’d actually been recommended Webflow several times over at least two years, probably more. And every time somebody said to me, you’ve got dude, you’ve got to check web flow out. And these were people that are trusted and respected friends of mine, colleagues, people all over the place.

[00:21:19] And people who had never looked back, it would just adopted it for their agency as their go-to tool. And they moved from WordPress. And every single time somebody recommended it. I said, well, yeah, I’ve heard of that. I’ll check it out. And then I would immediately toss the idea in the bin and think there is literally no way I am looking at any of the tools because I’ve got a lot of, as we’ve said, a lot invested in, in WordPress and everything.

[00:21:44] So yeah. Yeah. So, so actually choosing Webflow. I, I had a little look around to see anything else. I obviously don’t, didn’t bother looking at the Squarespaces and the Wix and things like that. But yeah, the web flow was pretty much, pretty much the only one that I considered now, I actually tried it and gave up three times, like completely just thought, right, come on, come on.

[00:22:07] You can do this. I mean, how hard can it be and gave up three times because it’s not actually. It’s not actually, it’s not a beginner’s platform. It’s not designed for people who that, that Squarespace is designed for. You don’t get a lot of pre pre-made designs and in fact, it’s harder to use done.

[00:22:26] I would say a WordPress page builder, probably not oxygen because oxygen is based very, very, very much on web flow as I understand. But yeah, it was, it was hard. And what I also found as well is. I well, partly so, so what would happen is I’d give it a try and think, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I just, haven’t got time.

[00:22:46] I’ll persevere with what I’m using. And it was the third time there was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ve got to figure this out. And in some ways it really appealed to me because when you start, well, we’ll go into the details too much. But when you style anything in Webflow, you literally click on it.

[00:23:04] A podcast doesn’t make this a very good visual medium for me to explain this. But when you click on anything in web flow and you want to style it, it could be literally any element whatsoever. You give it a name, like a class, a, you give that class, whatever styles you like. You’ve got all the styles at your disposal, really easy, nice UI.

[00:23:23] And then you just use that class on anything else that you want to give that, that that’s those, those same styles. The sense of having literally on, con on limited global styling, not having to go to some separate styling panel somewhere to constantly kind of keep going back and sort of adjusting things.

[00:23:46] And also not being out there, I suppose. Th the page, whatever the page builder developers decided the global styles are that you’re going to have is what you’re stuck with. You’re limited by that. [00:24:00] Usually we web flow. You can just do what you like now as a, as an, actually like a dinosaur old school, HTML and CSS hand coder back in the day, this really appealed.

[00:24:12] Because I used to write CSS and I’d have one single CSS file, which I could just create as many styles as I liked, and I could control them all from one place. So it was that particularly about web flow. That just super appealed to me, the lack of the lack of limits, really. I’m not being, I’m not being, I’m not being hampered by.

[00:24:32] I mean, it’s great. For instance, elements are just as an example, the whole load of widgets and know there are probably a million different third-party add-ons as well. It will all bring a load more widgets as well. And it is amazing. You can drag a widget on the screen, just onto the canvas. It just produces, your tabs or your, your posts Lao or whatever it is.

[00:24:53] But you still fairly limited by the styling options that that developer has decided to give you where it was with Webflow is just completely open-ended. The problem, the problem it’s like everything in life, concentrate offs. The problem with that beautiful open-endedness is that you can make a real mess.

[00:25:14] If you’re not careful, if you’ve not kind of got a system and a workflow and a, an a way that you decide that you’re going to name classes and use them and reuse them, it can be a bit of a mess. And that’s the issue that I hit immediately. The wet floor. The Webflow university, which is web flows own a free training is absolutely brilliant.

[00:25:36] I mean, as, than, as an educator myself, as a teacher myself, I mean, I, I just think those videos are astounding. They’re incredible. And I think it speaks volumes about a company like that who have invested so much time and energy into training their users. So that stuff was helpful. and it kinda got me got, definitely got me so far, but I was, I think because my teaching in WordPress and other mentor was all about, you’ve got all these tools, you’ve got all the colors in there, all the crayons in the box, but you need a system, you need a workflow, you need it.

[00:26:16] You need, you need to set yourself limits. So. Yeah, you can produce sites really quickly, really productively, profitably and not have to think too much, you’ve got a system and you just do it and you just build them. So I, that was, that was the, that was the sticking point with Webflow. And it’s what I ended up actually building a framework myself though.

[00:26:36] There isn’t anything really, there are web flow frameworks out there, but they all had issues for me. So I ended up building my own,

[00:26:43] Matt: I’ve tried Webflow before. And me it’s as much more of a like shiny object syndrome and a little bit of like this whole, like no code. Movement where it’s like, I don’t know. Sometimes I’ve thought of sat back and be like, man, if I could just have like a database that I use, like connected with Zapier [00:27:00] and I could like automate these things, I see all these other people do it, like in two seconds on the back of a napkin.

[00:27:04] And I’m like, I want to do that too. And then like, I jumped into like web flow and I’m like, oh God, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m just going to sound, I’m going away from this, this leads. And what I’m getting out of here is like, You tried it three times, whatever failed. And you’re like, ah, somebody could just teach it my way you built it.

[00:27:22] Right. You built the course to like, get people over that hump quite literally coming from WordPress to web flow. The name of your course is there a particular. Cut like a WordPress user or WordPress stack that somebody might be using. Who’s like the perfect fit to, for your course number one, but for web flow, like certainly somebody who’s us, I’m just a simple lowly WordPress blogger is probably not gonna need your course is probably not going to need web flow, but is there a certain, a certain avatar that is a perfect fit for your course, but for also to, to, to reap the benefits of web.

[00:27:59] Dave: . I would say that people who I mean, if somebody is a WordPress developer, right? So we’ll, we’ll, we’ll discount those people immediately, people are building their own themes and things like that then. Absolutely. Definitely not. I’m sure that WordPress gives you all of the, all of the control and the power and everything that you need.

[00:28:14] So I would say more people who are trained to be. I’m trying to build full, fully functional websites using WordPress under page builder. I would say the people who definitely need a page builder of some kind. Now, when I’m in Gothenburg , is a page builder and it’s developing fast as well. So I would say people who are using those tools particularly you, I, as I said, in a sense, web flow is a bit more complicated.

[00:28:42] So it’s, it’s not just the. It is in some ways, but there isn’t, the, the pre-built here is everything done for you. Aspect of quite a lot of the stuff that comes with a page builder. So there are certain things that you need to understand in the background. You need to understand what’s going on. You need to understand a little bit about.

[00:29:03] HTML and CSS as well. So just an, an understanding of just like how HTML interacts with CSS, just on a very basic level to understand things like inheritance, so when you set a style on the body, for instance, that is going to trickle down to everything underneath it, all the content and everything underneath it all, unless you override it.

[00:29:26] So there are, there are concepts like that, that in a page builder, those people. I don’t really even need to ever think about particularly, you can just eat just budge, something together quite, quite easily. I would say though that I, I do know of quite a lot of, of from end developers I suppose, backend developers as well, who really enjoy using web flow because it allows them to effectively write HTML and CSS without having to actually write HTML and CSS.

[00:29:54] Cause like a graphical user interface for, for. Well, for me, [00:30:00] I am more than happy to recommend web flow to my audience, which are, as I said, non coders, they need a page builder and they’re a little bit nervous about, all the multitude of different tools and, and, and things that they need to know.

[00:30:15] Matt: I’m curious. I mean, I know the, as of, as of this time, which is September 17th at 11:30 AM Eastern standard time in new England, which is where we, we won’t get into the 

[00:30:28] Dave: I mean I’m in the old one. 

[00:30:30] Matt: in the old one. You’re in the original one. The, I know the course is not for sale yet. I’m curious. And I’ve seen it.

[00:30:37] I think I’ve gone through the first two modules and, and, and, for the listener out there, like when Dave says he takes time, like it took me so long to do this. Yeah. But the quality is just mind blowing and I can’t even imagine Dave, how much time you’ve spent on it. I don’t, I don’t know if you have a number of hours counted or if you even want to admit how long you’ve been into it.

[00:30:57] I know it’s not for sale yet. Do you, as of this recording, but maybe when we launch this recording do you anticipate. The some turbulence there. Right? So people in WordPress they’re very much used to free or low cost web flows, paid the pain for your course. What are your thoughts? What’s the gut tell you on promoting this as a business owner.

[00:31:17] Dave: The first thing I would say is that when I started thinking about building a business, making online courses at all, my first thought was who on earth is going to pay any money for the learning, any of this stuff? And there’s, there’s this thing called YouTube. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s just full of all the free advice and tutorials and walkthroughs.

[00:31:37] You could, you could ever hope for I purposefully, actually, I got over that mindset issue quite quickly, it’s nonsense, but people are prepared to pay and they’re prepared to pay good money as well for an investment in their career and their time and their stress levels and everything else. So, in terms of me worrying too much about people paying for a course or even paying for a platform, doesn’t really worry me too much because the people who buy.

[00:32:04] My course is our people. They are. I always think that out of my email list, probably, I don’t know what the numbers are. 5% will buy something that I’m I make and those people are prepared to pay. I don’t know how much my courses have been. I think, I think, I think the highest price, no stress WordPress was, which is discontinued now.

[00:32:26] Not in know fairly indefinitely. I think there was about 800. For that. So, between sort of 4, 5, 6, 7, 800 bucks for a course, those people are absolutely. I mean, the web flow, cause it isn’t that at all. I think it starting at two nines. So that’s, that’s, that’s a bit lower just to, just to get started with at the moment.

[00:32:48] But I’m, I’m, I’m fairly convinced and I am delighted to appeal to people who are willing to invest in their education and their professional development and the tools [00:33:00] that they use as well for an easier life. And so actually ultimately get a return on that investment, in terms of faster builds and not having to worry.

[00:33:10] About updating plugins and maintenance and stuff, breaking and having to fix things and all that sort of thing. So, yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t really worry me. It’s all.

[00:33:19] Matt: Yeah. I mean, when you have somebody who’s already, I did an article. I, again, if I was a professional podcaster, I would have this up, I think element or web flow. Let’s just see if my site ranks first. It 

[00:33:31] Dave: Oh, oh, harsh, 

[00:33:33] Matt: Element or web. Oh yeah, it does. I’m on the first page. Okay. A little, a little bit down on the first page, if you Google element or web flow, but I say in defense of element or versus web flow, and this site publish this February of this year, God man, you just, I didn’t even understand time anymore.

[00:33:48] February 11th, 2021. When folks were talking about the price hike of element, or now I’m not here to argue whether or not the. The approach of what Elementor was doing with bugs and features and whatnot is fair or not. I didn’t have anything against the price hike, if you will, for ELA mentor, because man, I feel like so many people are making money with elementary or.

[00:34:12] That even if you bought their $1,000 a year for a thousand websites, I mean, if you’re somebody who’s producing a thousand websites, you’re at least charging $2 for one of those websites, right. You’re selling these websites for at least $2, you’ve doubled your money. Right? So I was never against the raising of the price because hopefully that raises value of all things WordPress.

[00:34:34] But my point here is people are already spending money in the web flow world. Whereas. Hats off and kudos to you. You’re selling courses in the WordPress world where a majority of people are used to free. So you already were fighting a battle that I’ve not been able to solve 

[00:34:51] Dave: Yeah, there is. I mean, there is a sense isn’t there because WordPress is open source. Everything should be. And you, you hear that all the time. And I think that’s just going to be a constant issue. Really. One thing that when I actually looked at certainly for, certainly for the people that I’m M in my course out, and the people that I kind of want to help when you actually look at the price of Webflow, cause people say, God, man Webflow is so expensive.

[00:35:13] I think, well, if you look at it, you pay an account. I won’t go into all the massive details, but you pay an account plan fee, which is basically a single monthly families, about 24 books. Which allows you to build, buy all, to build onstage on a, on a web flow.io domain all your web flow sites you’ve got in development, and you can share those with clients and you could even just make those live on the S on the staging sub domain, if you didn’t want to point a live domain of them.

[00:35:41] So that’s 24 bucks a month. It’s basically similar to, if you’ve got like an Adobe creative cloud subscription or you’ve got an elemental license on it and a theme license, and it just allows you to use the platform. So that to me is like, well, that seems perfectly fair. And then you [00:36:00] pay a per site site plan fee as well, which I think is about 20 bucks a month.

[00:36:05] Now people who are hosting. Crumbing websites onto, I could attend books a month hosting plan, and they’re quite happy with all the configuration and the setup and everything that, that entails and possible performance issues and whatever, then absolutely. I mean, knock yourself out.

[00:36:23] Brilliant. But if you compare to, I mean, let’s just take a WordPress managed host, like Insta, for instance, I think Ken stir last time I looked, it was 20 bucks a month. Now w so, so for each live site, you’ve got a domain pointed to, to web flow. You’re paying 20 bucks a month for that. I mean again, if you’re not making at least $20 a month back from the website, then there’s something wrong.

[00:36:48] You, you, you really should be a book. Also with that. You also get like the CDN, you get all of the page speed stuff set up for you, and it’s all done for the, the sites are blazing fast, absolutely brilliant. All green, like top of the range, kind of page speed scores, the host inside and out for you.

[00:37:07] Security. So sorted out for you. All of the functionality seems to me in many ways, if you were a person who would appreciate managed hosting, and it seems to me that that is actually a pretty good deal overall, 

[00:37:21] Matt: I tend to agree things get a little crazy when you start getting into the e-commerce world with web flow the way that they do pricing, I broke it all down in this, in this post. Although this post is now a few months old and I’ll link that up. I’ll try to link that up in the, in the show notes.

[00:37:34] But 

[00:37:34] Dave: was a simplified. 

[00:37:36] Matt: Yeah. At the end of the day, like the trade-off again is support all in one platform. If you really wrestled with, I want to own everything for the sake of owning it, and it’s a whole mind, it’s hard to make that mental leap and appreciation leap. I don’t have a better word right now, but like, it’s hard to make that leap from WordPress if you’re really stuck in that, in that 

[00:38:01] Dave: Yeah, absolutely. And I would, I would say to anybody that it’s not like, I certainly don’t set say to everybody, you must use Webflow is far better than WordPress. That’s actually not what I’m saying. He probably comes across that way. There are trade offs with everything, and if ownership. Or certainly a feeling of ownership anyway and having control over every single aspect of that, of your website and website workflow and everything else, if that is important to you, for whatever reason, that’s great, but there’s a trade off in the maintenance and the plugin updates and stuff, breaking and everything else.

[00:38:37] That’s the that’s that’s, that’s the deal, you w you can’t have your cake and eat it kind of thing. I think he’s just true of everything in life. Same with Webflow, yep. You don’t have all of those hustles, but Yeah.

[00:38:48] you’ve got a platform where you are in a way renting the site from, from Webflow.

[00:38:53] What if Webflow disappears overnight? There were all these concerns. I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got kind of, answers for all these [00:39:00] objections, but There are also just very, very quickly. One of the biggest objections is she’s quite funny to me is about recurring income from care plans.

[00:39:10] So people will say I’ve got a pretty good business making recurring easy money every month by charging clients to keep the website updated the WordPress website update. And make sure it doesn’t, it doesn’t break for them. What am I going to do about that with Webflow? Because he just works, what’s the, what, what, what, where am I going to make this money?

[00:39:29] My short answer is always, well, first, if all things were equal and you could build a website in WordPress or web flow, and let’s also say that either of them would be appropriate for the project, Really recommend WordPress because it’s prone to problems, it’s prone to problems and it, and it breaks.

[00:39:51] And you can charge the client forever in order to, just to be basically lightly. No, let them have a working website. It sounds a bit harshly. It sounds like I’m kind of over again things, but that’s kind of how it is really. Now my view is the client, your clients don’t care. About how you did something, all that, how long it took you, all the steps you took, they are, they only care about the result on all the clients are paying you for, for, for a care plan, just in terms of the maintenance side of it, not talking about anything else.

[00:40:24] Well, the maintenance side of it, they are paying you so that their website is rock solid. Isn’t down works perfectly, and it just doesn’t have any issues. Well, why can’t you charge the client for the. You’ve found a better or the best platform that you think for their particular needs for their project that has all that in place.

[00:40:46] You’ve spent all this time and money learning the platform. Why not charge clients for that? I, I don’t think clients particularly cared that you’ve got to update plugins. You’ve got to spend X amount of time doing that. I think it’s a bit of a non argument, rarely. 

[00:40:59] Matt: I think at some of the tiers on web load, there’s a little phone number you can call, right. So good luck. Yeah. Calling yeah. Calling you got a dozen plugins doing. Things, you’re not going to call PIP in and, and, WooCommerce, you’re not going to call these people and get them on a conference call to figure out what your site is at the end of the day.

[00:41:18] You look, you’re paying for that support. And web flows. As far as I know, in the news web flows slated to be a IPO and, and be a publicly traded company here in the states. And they’re a private company now, but they’ve raised over 140 million. So they’re probably valued at billions. I don’t even know what money is these 

[00:41:33] Dave: Probably, yeah, exactly. yeah, MailChimp is worth what was it? 12 billion, or something like 

[00:41:37] Matt: half the half the banana industry or the entire globe? 

[00:41:41] Dave: So, so w what is money. 

[00:41:43] Matt: yeah. What is money via Canva? Just raised Canva just got another 400 million [email protected]. It’s just, I don’t know, Dave, what are we doing wrong here?

[00:41:57] Dave: Well, I’m I think I’m going to hang these [00:42:00] headphones up. 

[00:42:01] Matt: I’m going to make a canvas course. What am I doing with Webflow? Here’s how to make a template in Canva. Oh man. It’s called WordPress to web flow. His name is Dave Dave for you can search for Dave for you can go to date for.com. You can search him on YouTube. You can go to WP two w f.com or pressed a web flow.

[00:42:21] Dave, anything else that any other place that people should find you? Yeah.

[00:42:24] Dave: The other thoughts that you’ve covered up. So everything there, my friend. Yeah.

[00:42:27] Brilliant. Thank you very much. 

[00:42:29] Matt: Fantastic stuff. It’s my report. My report.com my report.com/subscribe. Hey, if you want to support the content happening here at the Matt report, go to buy me a coffee.com/matt report. You can join the membership there and be part of the, the news right now. It’s about the, the WP minute. If you want to be involved in the news, you wanna have your hand in shape.

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[00:00:00] Hey,
[00:00:01] Matt: everybody. Welcome back to a special episode of the Matt report, breaking news almost. And not this one’s not erring on the WP minute, but we broke a lot of news on the WP men. They go to the WP minute.com. If you want your weekly dose of five minute WordPress news delivered in your inbox every week, uh, this episode is sponsored by easy support videos, easy support videos, support your WordPress users right inside the WordPress admin.
[00:00:23] Using videos. Check out easy support. Dot com why am I doing this in line with the episode? Because we have a special guest today, Pippin, Williamson, Pippin. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Matt.
[00:00:35] Pippin: It’s great to be back.
[00:00:37] Matt: I woke up writing my weekly script for the WP minute and I was getting all of the acquisition news in there.
[00:00:43] I was getting all of the liquid web and learn dash and what WooCommerce was up to and I was ready to send it to my executive producer and I looked on Twitter one last time. And there you were saying that Sandhills was acquired. My awesome
[00:00:59] Pippin: motive. Sorry to screw up your, uh, your scheduling plan.
[00:01:04] Matt: I had a donut in my mouth and I’m trying to type in like, oh my God, what’s happening.
[00:01:08] I was real newsroom, uh, breaking moments here. First of all. Congratulations. Thank you. Um, at the top of this episode, what I want people to do is an, a link this in the show notes is please. For the love of all that is holy. If there’s anything you do with what I say here at the med report, read the blog post on Sandhills dev.com that Pippin wrote about the breakdown, phenomenal piece, one of your best, the best that you have written, uh, you know, uh, to, to bookend this, this, this book, this chapter of your life.
[00:01:49] Uh, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s actually an emotional thing for me. I don’t have a question straight away. It’s an emotional thing for me. I feel like I’ve been part of this journey with you. Have you felt that same vibe from others in the WordPress?
[00:02:02] Pippin: You know this entire morning, um, when we publish the, the announcement that all of the WordPress products were joining automotive and that after a transition period that I’m retiring from WordPress, um, and moving onto some other things, uh, it has been pretty much a constant stream of messages from.
[00:02:25] Friends colleagues, people that we’ve met once or twice at word camps and, and so many friends. And, um, from over the years, just, you know, saying hi, saying congrats, mentioning, you know, something about, you know, what we did together. You know, there’s so much. People that we have worked with over the years and that I’ve had the amazing opportunity to get to know.
[00:02:51] Um, so yeah, it was it’s, it’s been a pretty wild ride and a journey and hearing how many different people, um, have been impacted by the work that we’ve done over the last 10 years is an amazing way to, um, you know, maybe conclude this part of it.
[00:03:14] Matt: They’re in my, in the WP minute, uh, script that I wrote today, I said that you are your Sandhills and you specifically are either one of the most respected.
[00:03:30] Product companies in the WordPress space, if not the most respected, uh, WordPress plugin company in the space. There’s yeah. There’s such a deep connection that I think a lot of people share this. It’s what makes WordPress special, I guess, is because we all get, so the reason why we’re all so emotional about it, or at least I know I am is because we all get so connected with one another.
[00:03:51] We want to see each other when we want to see the software do well. I’m retiring from work. I was, I just ran to grab a coffee before we hit record. And I was thinking about some of the questions that I was going to ask you. This is probably a pretty blunt question to ask, but there’s the side balconies of the world.
[00:04:13] And then there’s you and me, right? How do you frame yourself to be able to say, okay, I’m retiring with WordPress from WordPress. I don’t even think the word retire is. In vocabulary. What do you think makes the entrepreneur your yourself as an entrepreneur versus SIADH maybe so different and has that played a role into making this decision?
[00:04:40] In other words, we’re world domination,
[00:04:43] Pippin: really? So it absolutely played a role. You know, one of the, one of the most challenging parts of, of this type of transition is we have this, this huge history of, of, of customers, of our team, of our products that, you know, those don’t just turn off those don’t just suddenly go away because I’m moving on to other things.
[00:05:11] What we have to try really, really hard to do. I spent an enormous amount of time on over this last summer is finding the best avenue for those to carry on for the products to carry on for the customers to continue to be supported better than we were ever able to do. And, you know, finding the right fit that ensures that that will happen.
[00:05:34] Truthfully requires someone like CYA, you know, SIADH is extremely laser-focus. And driven for his mission of helping small businesses. And he, his, you know, the first thing when, when he, and I started talking about this in depth over the summer, one of the first things that I, I asked him is, you know, what are you, what are you going to do?
[00:05:58] And what is the time, um, you know, do you plan to continue working on these and building these for years to come quick answer was, yeah, for at least this next 60 years, uh,
[00:06:12] You know, that is something that is a huge amount of reassurance for someone in my position that is, you know, knows that it’s time to move on to something else, but also, you know, agonizes over the details of how do we ensure that the customers and the team and the products are taken care of and, you know, knowing that he is committed to the long-term future, um, is extremely important to me.
[00:06:36] Um, You know, I, I recognize a couple of years ago that while I have had an amazing time and I absolutely loved the last decade, I’m not ready to keep doing it for another decade, you know, I need to do something else. Um, so
[00:06:56] Matt: yeah. I mean, it takes a lot of courage to admit that you’ve always been one, that’s been transparent with your posts and, you know, income reports and all this stuff with, with the product and the services side of the product services side of things.
[00:07:08] Uh, but to sort of put your entrepreneurship. Scars, you know, in front of everyone. Right? Cause I know what it’s like to run a business at a very much smaller scale than obviously you, you and I had spent some time in a mastermind years ago where we were just banging heads with things that were just so uninteresting, probably to both of us, like talking about taxes and like when VAT came out and you’re like, good, I don’t want any of this.
[00:07:36] I didn’t choose to be the janitor and the tax guy doing this stuff. It’s not fun. I just want to code and. You stumbled onto the success that you had, and it is, it’s a totally different weight. And I think a lot of people are jaded in this space. Sometimes myself included saying he’s got everything he wants and needs right in front of him with this busy.
[00:08:00] But sometimes it’s not what you want. And, and what you wrote in this piece. Uh, again, please read this people about family, your father, your grandfather has a deep connection to me because I started a business with my father. He started a business with his father and it’s this lineage that has, you know, gone on.
[00:08:20] So, I mean, it really hits home with me. But I think a lot of people just want you to keep going. And sometimes it’s, it’s not what you, what you want. And, uh, again, no real question here just like applauding you to,
[00:08:32] Pippin: you know, the thing that I think so often people don’t realize or think about enough until they find themselves in that position.
[00:08:40] Is any, anybody who is, is heading a team or a company. When they no longer have the passion for it or the drive, or maybe not that their passion for it has gone away, but maybe passion for something else has eclipsed. It is the longer that they stay in that seat, the more disservice they are going to do to their customers and their team and all of the people that they work with in some capacity or other, you know, anybody who leads a ship needs to be the best of themselves.
[00:09:16] As much of a time as they possibly can. Um, because that’s the only way that you can do your absolute best to take care of, of your team, of your customers and of your business. And when you are no longer your best in that seat, the best thing you can probably do, if you can, if you know that that is a permanent thing and not just a transitory.
[00:09:40] It’s put someone else in that seat. Uh, it’s hard to do, and it’s really, probably even harder to admit to yourself when you reach that point. But if you don’t, you know, that that’s what causes amazing things to decline over time. That’s what causes businesses to slowly fail and, and start to suffer is when, you know, obviously there’s other factors too, then, you know, there’s other things that can cause somebody to go downhill.
[00:10:03] But when, when the captain of the ship is, is no longer. Wanting to be there, no matter what their level of dedication, you know, it hasn’t been.
[00:10:12] Matt: Yeah. How does that unfold internally at, or how did it unfold internally at Sandhills? Like when you got the gut feeling, did you gut check and, uh, you know, talk to the, the, the top brass at, I dunno, what, what you, what you title them, but do you talk to the top brass and say, I got this feeling.
[00:10:31] What do you all think before. Dispersed
[00:10:33] Pippin: everywhere for this one. It, um, it unfolded in a couple of ways. So first, uh, you know, a much longer string of events is I’ll say that it first started to happen years ago for me, which was basically the day that I, you know, one day I recognized I had hired myself out of it.
[00:10:54] ’cause I had, you know, we had, we had grown the team. We had hired, we had grown the dev development team, the support team, the marketing team, even the leadership team. And I re realized that like, I don’t, everything that I did, everything that I used to do that I was passionate about is now somebody else’s responsibility.
[00:11:13] So that happened years ago. Uh, and that was probably one of the first periods where I started to like really recognize that, you know, I don’t know that being a CEO is. What I desire to be in the long-term future. I just want to write code again. I spent the next few years trying to get back into code and it, it never happened for one reason or another.
[00:11:36] There’s lots of reasons. Um, you know, here, here and there, I would, I would dive back in and have a little bit of, of success building something for fun. Um, but like on a day-to-day basis, I never returned to being in the. And it, and that was where my, my true passion was. I loved writing code. I loved the, you know, just cranking something out and, you know, more or less building something from nothing.
[00:11:58] It was so fun and magical. So that when realizing that that had happened, that, that transition where I was no longer doing that. Is the first step to what got us to today. And that was years ago, much more recently. Um, basically, uh, when my, my dad’s health issues that I mentioned in the blog post popped up, that was when I, I think I really got serious with myself to admit that it was probably time.
[00:12:31] Um, at that time I wrote out a message to my partners, um, and. Basically told them. I wrote, I wrote up this very, actually a very short message and it was just titled the exit is near and FYI. Here’s basically the way that I’m feeling now. And I think I’m going to start having conversations. And, and that was, it was very, it was very brief, but then we, you know, we followed up and had a lot of in depth conversations as, as a partners group for the next several months.
[00:13:05] And then, you know, I kept wavering. I kept going back and forth and, you know, deciding to, to sell something you’ve spent 10 years building isn’t some, like, at least I don’t maybe, maybe some people, it happens this way, but for me it was not like a light bulb moment. It was not this, you know, one day I just know, you know, okay, that’s fine.
[00:13:27] Let’s do it. No, it wasn’t that at all. It was, you know, it’s this, this inkling, this feeling, this, this like weight in your stomach that says. I think it’s time, but I’m a F I’m truthfully terrified of that commitment of that, you know, actually making that choice. So over, over a couple of months, you know, trying to figure out if that was the right move or not, I finally decided, you know what, I’m going to take a sabbatical.
[00:13:54] I’m going to take three months off the entire store. I’m going to close slack, I’m going to close base camp. I’m going to close emails, disabled, all notifications. I’m going blackout mode for the next three months and see what happens that the, you know, our, our team was set up and so effective that, you know, I was able to do that.
[00:14:17] Um, I was not necessary for the day-to-day operations. And so I knew one of two things was going to happen. Through that sabbatical either. I’m going to go out, get refreshed and decide, you know what? I love this. I want to keep going. Um, I’m back, I’m 100% committed and let’s put the pedal to the let’s hit the gas, or I’m going to know for sure that this is the right move.
[00:14:44] Um, and obviously with today’s new news that we announced, um, we know how that ended. I knew that it was the right move after I’d spent several months away from it. And you know, it just helped me realize that I’m ready for this.
[00:14:59] Matt: Yeah. I mean, and again, I’ve known you for awhile. A lot of people have known you for awhile, but if you haven’t known PIP in, um, You know, just all like the moments at word camps, replaying in my head with like sitting with you and you sitting with your team and just like whatever diving into code features, new product announcements.
[00:15:18] How are you going to market this? How are you going to grow the team the whole, how do I get a great team chemistry? Like your. Like the painting that I have of you over your time in this space has never been like, how do I build this thing to sell it? Right. And over the years I’ve seen which I guess, like, I don’t fault anybody anymore.
[00:15:35] I used to have like really strong opinions on it, but now people want to build a business and sell it, whatever, Hey, that’s just another way of going about it. Like you’re building it to sell it, to acquire it. And it’s all strategically done. Thumbs up, Hey, that’s your way of doing it. Um, you know, and, and just seeing the way that you’ve done over the years, you know, knowing that this was, this wasn’t the intention, although as you highlight, it was
[00:15:57] Pippin: a reality that was known to have a strong likelihood of happening,
[00:16:01] Matt: right?
[00:16:01] Yeah. There’s a, there’s a point in the, um, in the blog post where you say every business owner knows or will eventually learn that there are three possible fates for their. One one day it’ll be passed on to someone else perhaps whose family inheritance, uh, to it’s solely or rapidly decline at some point, uh, be shut down entirely three.
[00:16:22] It’ll be sold to a new owner, uh, for one reason or another. I want to just shift gears a little bit in the conversation. Get a little bit more like strategic businessy, uh, on number two, uh, it’ll slowly or rapidly decline at some point be shut down entirely. Um, before we got on, I was talking to somebody else.
[00:16:39] Who’s going to be writing up a piece on the business of WordPress space. They asked me a couple of questions about what I think about this and why acquisition is so hot right now. Um, I think that there are a lot of mature businesses like yourself, or like Sandhills, where you get to a certain point where, Hey, it’s successful.
[00:16:57] It’s good, but you hit this plateau. And in order to get to the next step, the next stage. You have to almost build a whole other business model or hold a product whole or business. It’s not just, Hey, two X, my effort now it’s like 50 X my effort to get to that next point strategically that did that have a, a role in this.
[00:17:20] And then we’ll talk about awesome motive and how I feel like you slot into that, that suite of services. But was that a thing for you?
[00:17:26] Pippin: Oh, absolutely. Um, you know, like any, any business that has been going for. Uh, while, you know, and, and at this point we were, uh, almost 10 years old. Um, the sandals development as a, as a company, as a brand is eight years old.
[00:17:41] But the products, you know, it’s been, I think, 10 years since we launched EDD, um, or close to it, um, you know, what, what used to work, what works when you’re really, really small and you’re new and you’re growing. It’s not the same thing that works today. You know, when, once you reset maturity point, um, it’s a totally different set of challenges.
[00:18:05] Um, and the consequences for getting your approaches wrong are a lot more significant. Um, you know, w at our peak, we were a team of 28 people, you know, if we, if we screw up and we do. Aim for the future properly. And we don’t manage our growth and we don’t recognize where our pain points are. You know, the consequences of that are a lot more significant than when, you know, it’s just two or three people that are, you know, mostly just late night keyboard hacking and having a good time doing it and, you know, have a little bit of success with it.
[00:18:41] Yeah. So, you know, when I said that when I, when I went on a sabbatical, I knew one of two things was going to happen. And one of those possibilities was that we were going, I was going to come back refreshed and ready to just hit the gas. We have definitely been at that stage for the last couple of years where we were trying to figure out how do we hit the gas?
[00:19:02] You know, we’re, we’re still doing good. We’re still comfortable, but the signs are there, that what we’re doing. Is not going to sustain us for the next 10 years or even the next five years. There are, there are changes that we’re going to have to make. Um, you know, we didn’t, we ended up going through this process with automotive before we really had to dive into what those changes were going to be.
[00:19:27] And so, you know, I honestly, I can’t tell you what they are cause I, cause I don’t. Um, but we knew that we were going to have to adapt our approaches and adapt our strategies and adjust, um, and do things in a different, in at least some form of different ways. Um, because it wasn’t going to be enough to get us through the next five years.
[00:19:46] Matt: I think a lot of successful. And this is, and again, these are just my opinion and obviously happy to hear yours, which just, you just hinted that really. But, you know, you get to a certain point where it’s like, Like, if you looked at EDD or your suite of prod products, let’s say affiliate EDD. So you have like the affiliate side of e-commerce you have e-commerce, but then it’s like, okay, what does everybody want?
[00:20:10] You know, with e-commerce is, I don’t know, maybe like the hot thing of, uh, customizing checkouts or lead gen or all of this stuff. And it’s like, man, That’s like another 10 years, right. To like, think about how to build that, like the thought process on how to succeed with that. Yeah, man, it takes so much time and money, um, to really get to that.
[00:20:34] So, and I
[00:20:35] Pippin: thought a very careful planning. Yeah. I had
[00:20:37] Matt: a lot of planning. It’s. It’s not like the concept of cowboy coding in the early days where it’s just like, yeah, just throw another feature and see what happens when you say throw another feature. It impacts 28 employees that you’re responsible for tens of thousands.
[00:20:52] I’d imagine customers that you have, and it’s not just as flip, flip of a switch. That is, is that easy to just change? Oh, that feature wasn’t good. Let’s pull it back out. Like no, maybe nobody will notice. Oh no, it doesn’t work that way. Uh, it’s very hard. Uh, I want to talk about finding a suitor for the company.
[00:21:11] Now I know how SIADH found you because quite literally, I was at a word camp where I think SIADH was walking around, asking if anyone was for sale. This was like five, six years ago. And I think he would literally walk around, Hey, you want to sell? Hey, you want to sell? Hey, you want to sell? So I know he’s got into your ear years ago.
[00:21:31] I wrote a blog post back in February, 2020, where I predicted they would buy e-commerce. And I had a discussion with somebody privately that they would probably look to EDD to sell, to, to acquire. Did you look at anybody else? Did you have those conversations and what was
[00:21:45] Pippin: that like? So when I first announced, uh, to my partners team, that I felt it was time for me to, to find an exit, uh, immediately after that.
[00:21:58] I started reaching out and having conversations with people. Um, and I talked to quite a few. Um, I had. Uh, and I, I mentioned this a little bit in the, in the blog posts, but there were a couple, there are some requirements that I really needed to have met. Um, and so as I, as I started to reach out to, you know, people that I thought might, might be interested, I had a, I had a list of, you know, maybe 10, 10 companies or individuals that I felt.
[00:22:29] Would fulfill the requirements that I needed. So number one, that, you know, obviously they had to be capable of doing it. Um, and, and both, you know, both from a finances perspective, but also from, you know, their ability to carry on what we had built. You know, I had no interest in. You know, selling, selling this to a private equity group that, or venture funded group that their goal is just to, you know, cash cow and kill and shut it down.
[00:22:56] No interest whatsoever. So I had, I had a few requirements. The, I had to trust and know that their ability. Was there to carry on what we built to. They had to take all of the products. Um, I was not interested in piecemealing, the suite of products that we’ve built. We have a lot of overlap between our products, between the team that works on the products, um, and our customer base.
[00:23:25] I did not want to, you know, send one, one, place one to another one to another, and then try to figure out, okay, what goes there? What goes there? What goes there? That just sounded like a disastrous nightmare that wasn’t going to end well for anyone except maybe myself, maybe. So they had to take the whole suite of products.
[00:23:43] They had to take the whole team, you know, no acquisition is perfect. No transition is perfect, but I needed them to commit, to taking the whole team, be willing to take everybody, you know, if somebody didn’t want to go over, that was, that was okay. That was understandable. But they needed to have that commitment from day one.
[00:24:00] If we’re taking this as a complete package, um, and. You know that as we, as we had those requirements, um, it, it, we, it, it narrowed down our candidates list, if you will, um, pretty quickly, um, because for one, you know, we’d go in, we’d have a conversation and then somebody would be like, this is great. I really love this stuff.
[00:24:24] But honestly, I only want to feel like it’d be cool. Thanks for your time. Maybe I’ll circle back to you if you know, if something else doesn’t work out and we repeated that quite a few times, uh, CYA. And I have known each other for a long time, uh, actually fun stories at site. And I have had conversations in the past, um, specifically around EDD.
[00:24:45] Um, and I turned them down early on and that was several years ago. Um, so it’s kinda fun to come full circle now, but with when, when I approached SIADH, um, and I, I told him very bluntly said, are you interested having a conference? If the answer is yes, here’s my four main requirements. And if the answer to any one of those is no thanks.
[00:25:09] Um, let’s not waste each other’s time and it was immediately. Yes. Um, so he, he was very, very interested and was immediately happy and will in knew that he wanted to meet all of those requirements.
[00:25:22] Matt: Yeah. I mean, I could see, I could, I could definitely see like the negotiation room where like you’re both in the room and then SIADH leaves and his lawyers come and you’re like, Hey, we say, Hey, where are you going?
[00:25:32] Like you leaving, are you staying up, stay around for this conversation. How long did that process take? Was it months Fido two months. But
[00:25:39] Pippin: so, um, it, it’s, it’s funny the way that you characterize it, because while like, I think that’s probably how a lot of people expected negotiations with sign to go.
[00:25:48] Honestly, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Um, it’s when, when you negotiate with SIADH, when you sit down and have a conversation with him, it’s a very one-on-one candid conversation. We hopped on a lot of zoom calls and we chatted face to face, and I never once negotiated with the attorneys or anything.
[00:26:06] You know, it’s always cited is extremely personable actually. Um, and he and I have always had a really good relationship. And so we were able to be very candid with each other and, you know, share what we, what we need. What we wanted, what our, what our desired outcomes were and what our challenges were. Um, and then, you know, when an issue was raised, um, you know, whatever it was, we addressed it and we worked through it.
[00:26:30] Um, it was, uh, it was a wonderful experience. Honestly, I would, I would repeat the process with SIADH again in a heartbeat. Yeah.
[00:26:40] Matt: Uh, we, uh, you know, Matt report listener, you can look forward to a, uh, interview with Saya next week. He’s a little. This week. I don’t know why he does things on his plate, but we are going to S we are scheduled for an interview next week.
[00:26:53] So look forward to that PIP and wrapping up, wrapping up here. Um, yeah. So the hinting at the size of the deal, I won’t directly ask you the questions. I mean, you are retiring. Life is probably pretty good for at least the next couple of years. Yes, no, we’ll be, we’ll
[00:27:12] Pippin: be. Okay.
[00:27:14] Matt: Uh,
[00:27:14] Pippin: we are plenty to put our focus on you.
[00:27:17] Matt: I like in the blog post, uh, you sort of say, uh, in the section, what’s next for Pippin, uh, after finishing the transition period with automotive, I’ll retire from WordPress, then put my focus into spending time with family nature conservation efforts, which I know you’ve been big on even years ago. I remember you talking about some of the stuff you were doing in Kansas, uh, in Sandhills brewing.
[00:27:40] Listen, you, I like how you just threw that in there, kind of the Sandhills, really. But if anybody who does, like, I follow you on Instagram, right. For Sandhills brewing. And I remember it’s this like, Hey guys, like on our mastermind calls, check out these bottles I made. Right. And it’s just like, you know, You got like a six pack and like I made these bottles and then like our next call, you were in like your tub in the bathroom.
[00:28:01] Like, look at my tub full of beer. And then it was, Hey guys. Uh, I got so many crates in my basement. Like I have to get like a rental store. And then now, like Instagram, you have people working for you. I see the, you know, the Instagram models holding the beer there’s food. There’s build-outs, that’s like a whole, like you’re not retiring from businessman.
[00:28:19] You get a whole.
[00:28:20] Pippin: Other big things. It’s a pretty, pretty hefty operation at this point.
[00:28:24] Matt: I mean, that’s going to probably still take up a lot of your time, I’d imagine. And you run that with your brother.
[00:28:29] Pippin: I do. Yes. Uh, my, my twin brother and one other business partner. Um, so we, we built two different locations.
[00:28:36] Uh, my brother and I live about three hours apart and, uh, we, we really wanted to build this brewery together. Uh, and then we realized like, well, I’m not going to move and you’re not. So obviously the next best thing is we build, do locations. Let’s do it.
[00:28:53] Oh, COVID tool is a interesting monkey wrench. You know, all of them. Everything about COVID aside. I will tell like the, the health and the, the stupid politics around it and all of the worries and the concerns and the financial sides I was telling you that that is one of the most interesting business challenges I have ever gone through is trying to run a hospitality business during a global pandemic.
[00:29:16] I have no interest in repeating it. But it is something that I think has been a very, very valuable experience because of how many different things it taught us. You know, if you want to see a great like years from now, we’re going to go back and look. At businesses that, that survived businesses, that failed businesses, that thrived and businesses that you know, everything in between.
[00:29:43] And we’re going to have so much valuable learning about building resiliency and flexibility, and like the ability to pivot in businesses, because that was what, you know, March, 2020 was like, that’s when, when that happened. Your businesses that succeeded and made it through were those that had some level of financial resilience because do the hit the hits to the hospitality industry was brutal to had the flexibility and the willingness to change.
[00:30:20] And then, and three, just the, the wherewithal to. Chug on and no pun intended, but like seriously, like that was a drag. That was probably the hardest thing that I’ve ever done in business was surviving COVID as a hospitality business. Um, and, uh, yeah, there’s, there’s gonna be so much to learn from it in the years to come, uh, as we, you know, are able to take steps further back and reflect on it.
[00:30:50] Matt: Yeah, man. Uh, yeah, even, I mean, congrats on that. You know, as somebody who. Again, has been in a S has seen a small, uh, portion of your experience growing a business. When I see these things, when I see like the success of like, where you’re going with that brewery, like as fast as it happened, I felt pretty fast to me.
[00:31:11] I’m sure it felt, I dunno, maybe fast to you, but yeah, it depends on the day I looked at that. I was like, man. Yeah. This, dude’s not long for WordPress, because like I know like, man, if I could just give up everything, I would just go cut people’s grass and just be like, there’s no worries about the colors I’m picking for you.
[00:31:28] There’s no worries about like sound audio quality. I just go cut your grass. You just tell me where to cut the grass. And like, that’s what I would do for the rest of my life. If it could sustain, uh,
[00:31:37] Pippin: you know, three kids you’re years ago when, when my brother and I. Well, we’re getting ready to commit to building this brewery.
[00:31:45] Um, he, he said something to me. I think we were just sitting down late at night. One time. He was like, you know what? I realized why I liked beer and he wasn’t talking about the why he likes drinking it or making it, it was why it likes the business of beer, you know, in the software world, we get this opportunity to work with and keep my, my brother runs a software company, 3d animation, right?
[00:32:05] Yeah. Uh, so, you know, we get this opportunity to work with. Amazing customers and amazing people. But do you know what the truth is? Like the only time that we actually get to talk to customers, unless we, except the outreach that we do do with them is when there’s a problem at the end of the day, all I am is a problem solver.
[00:32:27] People bring me problems. Good, bad, enormous, small. It doesn’t matter, but I just, I solve problems. You know, like if you’ve ever heard somebody describe themselves as, you know, like a code janitor or something like that. Like I was not for the longest time that my, my role as, uh, as the CEO of this company was basically to be a janitor, you know, because at the end of the day, everything that comes to me is typically a problem.
[00:32:52] I’m kind of tired of solving problems. So the beautiful thing about. Do you know what happens? People come to celebrate. People are happy to see you. You know, when you work customer support, most of the time, people aren’t happy to talk to you. People are doing so begrudgingly because there is a problem and they want, and you have the ability to fix their problem.
[00:33:14] But with, with beer, people come to celebrate, they’re happy to see you. They’re thrilled to be in your space, you know? Yes. There’s the, there’s some darker sides to it. They come to more and they come when they’re sad or upset. But in general, you, you are a bearer of good news and they’re there because they want to be there.
[00:33:33] Um, and that is a very interesting, like psychological difference in the industries. Uh, And it was so refreshing. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:33:42] Matt: I can imagine. And look, if I had beer in front of me right now, I would raise a toast to you and everything early in the morning. Well, you know, it’s never too early when you’re selling beer.
[00:33:53] Um, I’d raise a toast. To you and everything that you’ve done over the years, uh, you know, we hopped on this call last minute. I feel like I was rambling with some of these questions as a seasoned podcaster, but I feel like I’m just trying to hold onto the final threads of my Pippin in the WordPress world.
[00:34:10] Um, like, like the Sopranos ending and just watching that last episode, like, I can’t believe it’s over. Uh, w will you show up at other WordPress events and do you have any final statements for the WordPress community?
[00:34:22] Pippin: It’s been an amazing journey. Um, you know, my, my current intentions at this point are, you know, truthfully to see what happens.
[00:34:33] I don’t have any short-term plans to continue working in WordPress, but I don’t know what the future is going to hold. Uh, My, my goal and my hope is that sometime in the future, be it in six months in nine months, in 10 years, the itch to code again will strike and I’ll build something completely for fun.
[00:34:55] Uh, and it might be a WordPress. It might be something totally unrelated. Um, but if it does then, you know, I’m, I’m looking forward to that. Um, so truthfully, I, I don’t know, uh, it’s been work. WordPress has. Been a wonderfully weird world. And, uh, some of my best memories, the best people I’ve ever met are from WordPress.
[00:35:20] Um, it’s given me the opportunity to travel around the world and visit so many amazing places and see, and meet people from all of them. Uh, I, I realized something a few years ago. That was really pretty cool. Is that because of WordPress and because of what this. Community has made possible. I think I know somebody in probably every major city of this world, you know, I may not realize they’re there, but I think it’s pretty darn close because of just the connections over the last 10 years that have been made.
[00:35:58] And that’s amazing. And so fricking cool. Um, so you know, this might be the, you know, the end of my WordPress experience, uh, And I will miss it. I will, but I’m happy to end it on a high note where I know my team, the customers and the products are an exceptionally good hands. You know, the truthfully the future for them has, has never been brighter.
[00:36:32] And, uh, I’m really looking forward to watching what they do.
[00:36:36] Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Bravo to you, sir. Thanks again for everything. Uh, Twitter, I guess now is probably the best place or do you know anyone? You don’t really want to talk to people anymore? Stay away from me. I’m come
[00:36:46] Pippin: buy some beer, email me, uh, you know, my Twitter account is still active.
[00:36:51] But, uh, I, I’m not very active on Twitter. I was very active today for the first time in months and months and months. Uh, but so contact me via email. Um, it’s [email protected]. Uh, you can find [email protected]. That is that’s still my place. Um, and, or you can find me at my personal website.
[00:37:09] Matt: Fantastic everyone else.
[00:37:10] matterport.com airport.com/subscribe. Don’t forget to miss. Don’t forget to miss. No, don’t forget to not miss your, your weekly dose of WordPress news. [email protected]. Support the show by buying me a coffee. Buy me a coffee.com/matt report. Thanks everyone for listening. Thank you again, Pippin. And for the last time, please read the blog post, which will be, uh, linked up in the show notes.
[00:37:33] Fantastic PR. To the saga that is Pippin Williamson in the WordPress world. Thanks everybody for listening. And we’ll see you in the next day,
[00:37:42] Pippin: everyone. And thank you. Ma’am.

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[00:00:56] Matt: Even with all of the WordPress consolidation happening, there’s still plenty of opportunity ahead for them. There’s lots of potential users, customers, and room for investments notes. We just saw the acquisition of Yoast happened by new fold, formerly EIG. If I had to guess a deal somewhere between a 30 and $50 million acquisition, if you thought the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically, the membership and LMS vertical is crowded.
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[00:02:09] We’d love more listeners around here. Okay. Let’s get into today’s episode.
[00:02:13] It almost feels like a SAS software as a service. Tell us about that, that moment when you realize I’m teaching people, I might as well build the software too.
[00:02:22] Nathalie: Yeah, absolutely. So I was in the like marketing and tech space and doing videos on like, how to build a popup and how to do things on your WordPress site and how to market your courses and all of that stuff. And I was teaching. In courses and also on YouTube and people who were, signing up to our free challenge.
[00:02:42] We had a challenge called the 30 day list building challenge to help people build an email list and they were signing up. And it was, becoming pretty popular. So we had a lot of people logging in at the same time. And at the time. I thought we were getting attacked by hackers or something.
[00:02:56] Cause we have so many logins and the way that our plugin that we were using at the time it kept pinging our CRM and every single time somebody went to any page on that site. So, we were having nightmares basically. I would wake up every morning and have to call my host to have them. Unlock us, essentially, we put my website back up and then all the people who were signing up were upset with us because, they signed up and they couldn’t get what they were asking for or what we had promised.
[00:03:21] So essentially my husband and I were like, okay, let’s just quickly whip up a plugin to replace what we have right now, just to stop this problem. And so that’s literally in one weekend we wrote the first beta beta version of access ally. And it was just to solve our own problem. Yeah. But then after that, we kind of realized like, Hey, okay, this gives us a lot of, interesting options.
[00:03:40] And we started adding on and kind of building other things that we thought would be very useful for the people going through our courses and content. And that was kind of the start of what you see today.
[00:03:51] Matt: So you ha I, I didn’t write this down in our peer review, but what was the timeline you had popup ally first and then.
[00:03:58] Then we created access ally, correct?
[00:04:00] Nathalie: Yes. So we built SSLI first just to solve this problem. And we knew that someday we might release something like this, but it just felt like too big of an undertaking to do a whole like online membership or LMS or anything like that. So we ended up building popup ally next and releasing that first because we knew we could do a free version.
[00:04:19] We could see how that went. Then we could do a paid version and see how that was. Being responded to and how we could handle support and all of that. And then we realized, okay, yes, we can actually do this. We have the chops. And so let’s go all in on SSLI and kind of build
[00:04:33] Matt: that. And I’ll, I’ll paint sort of the the, the picture at least of the way that I see it in my head is pop-up plugin a very, very broad market, big market.
[00:04:44] Chances are anyone who might be selling courses or digital content is going to be attracted to a pop-up to use on their site to capture the visitor’s attention. And, oh, by the way, we also. Have this LMS plug-in fair statement.
[00:04:58] Nathalie: Yeah, it totally started off that way. It’s a much broader, pop-ups are much broader.
[00:05:02] And then, yeah, like you said, people who are using them to build an email list and audience, they probably will want to sell something online. So, so that pretty much leads to access ally.
[00:05:12] Matt: Yeah. I want to start with something that I won’t say it’s a curve ball, but a little bit on the hot seat, but something that I totally enjoy what you’re doing with access ally is the pricing.
[00:05:22] And I think I know a lot of Plugins in the space a lot of, well, let me ask you this question. Before I dive into that, do you refer to it as a plugin or software? Like how do you feel about the product itself? I don’t want to just say plug in if you feel like you’re greater than that.
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[00:06:37] Nathalie: Yeah. So it is technically a plugin, right?
[00:06:39] So people download it and install it. But we do see it as software, as a service, just because we are constantly developing and people have so many feature requests and things that we’re constantly updating. So, and then we also offer a lot of support. So that’s the service side as well. So I do feel like it’s a little bit more than just like here, download this plugin and good luck.
[00:06:57] It is like a real partnership. And I think that’s why the price, in my opinion reflects that when people will come to the website and people also do think so. I mistake that it’s a platform and that it’s totally hosted. And we’ve talked about potentially doing that, but we do also appreciate that it’s a plugin and they could work with other things.
[00:07:13] And there’s a lot of benefits to being in that WordPress ecosystem too.
[00:07:18] Matt: That’s sometimes it’s a disadvantage for a bulk of visitors that come to the site and they go, oh, wait, I was looking for a plugin. This looks like a platform. Do you, have you ever noticed that a drop off in the quote unquote funnel at all, that, that you’ve actually paid close attention
[00:07:33] Nathalie: to?
[00:07:33] Usually it goes the other way where they wanted a platform and then they’re like, oh wait, I need to WordPress. So most, most of our marketing so far is kind of the opposite, but yeah.
[00:07:44] Matt: Yeah, I wanted to give you a sort of a fair chance to see how you disseminated between the plugin and the, and the soft.
[00:07:51] As a mindset, because I think a lot of us, myself included, like I have a tiny little plugin, easy support videos. I’ve done other plugins in the past, which have burned a miserable failure of a death. And, but the fact of the matter is I was always kind of just like, oh yeah, it’s just, it’s just this plugin.
[00:08:08] And I think a lot of us just have to say, no, This is a software business. Like let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s give ourselves a little bit of credit here. Like this is a software business that we’re in. We’re not just like this little throw away plugin, even though that’s the technical term for it. And I think we could do a lot for ourselves mentally.
[00:08:24] If we just have a little bit more of that, that confidence boost when, and when we look at it, because it changes the mindset, it changes how you approach it. And that’s what I want to talk about with your. $99 a month. That’s what access ally essentials starts with. That’s one website. Very far beyond what, you might see from just, let’s say a free LMS or an LMS plug-in that’s $79 for the year or something like that.
[00:08:49] How did you get to this pricing? Was it immediate or did you have some bumps and bruises along? That’s
[00:08:55] Nathalie: a great question. So we started off at 79 a month. That was before, that was the first price that we started originally a couple of years ago. But yeah, we’ve, we’ve had a lot of conversations internally and a lot of it really comes down to what value I think we really provide to people.
[00:09:10] So we are pretty close to making people money, right. So we help them take payments. We have an affiliate program built in and we basically help them sell courses. All kinds of other things. So that to me shows me that we can provide a lot of value for them. And when you’re comparing, what other tools they might be purchasing to do with something similar, sometimes they might be purchasing, multiple things like maybe it’s multiple plugins, or maybe it’s like one thing for a shopping cart, one thing for this other thing.
[00:09:36] And then by the time you add up all the time, Invested in making all of those things work together. That’s kind of to us a lot of value, so that’s kind of how we thought about it. And then we were also just looking around at some of the competition and also what we knew we needed to charge to provide the service that we wanted.
[00:09:52] So that also came into it a lot. So we have two full-time support people and US-based, they we love taking care of our teams, so they have, good salaries and benefits. And I don’t think we could do that if we were trying to charge less and try to compete on the, on the pricing side, we wanted to really provide more value and then also charge well for it.
[00:10:12] And there is also something that changes when somebody pays more for software, which is that they’re a little bit more committed. They’re really in it for the longterm. Most likely to stick as well. So like, obviously if it’s too expensive for them, they’re not going to sign up in the first place. So we kind of lose people that way, but we do have more people signing up and staying long-term because they know we’re kind of in that partnership.
[00:10:33] And a lot of times people tell us we love access ally because it lets us do all these great things. But also because every time we have a question or we have something we want to do that just quite do yet, it comes out like a month or two later. Right. So that’s something we couldn’t do if we were, trying to appeal to too many people at a lower price.
[00:10:51] Matt: You have a degree in software engineering, this, that answer and the way you’ve positioned the product is what I’ll say. And these are my words, not yours is a much more mature business answer than what I normally see in the WordPress space. Again, myself included, you build a product you’re like, oh my God, does anybody want to buy this?
[00:11:11] And then you say to yourself, I know what I’ll do. I’ll just make it cheap. Then somebody will certainly buy it. But you, you jumped in at an eight. 860 ish dollar a year or a little bit more at my mass. Not really good right out of the gate at 79 bucks a month. Is this the first business you’ve launched or this you’re a second, third, fourth, fifth business.
[00:11:29] Cause it sounds like you’ve gone through the paces a little bit before.
[00:11:32] Nathalie: Absolutely. So yeah, this is not the first business. And I started off with my very first business out of college. It was all in the healthy eating space and that was kind of my training business. So I just learned like marketing and like I built my own website and all of those things.
[00:11:45] And then. The kind of teaching of the online stuff and the online marketing was kind of the next one. And then this is sort of the third business I would call it and yeah, it, it definitely like we learn so much. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:58] Matt: And this is a great thing because I think this is hard to just like, this is not a question, but much more of just like a general statement and then interested on your thoughts, but it sort of raises the value of all of us, right?
[00:12:12] When you price your product like this. Well, you’re getting true value. You’re asking for true value. And on the other end, it’s a, it’s a solid business. Like you said, there are people working for us. We’re paying them well, you’re going to get great support. You’re probably getting a higher degree of customer as well.
[00:12:30] Like they’re not coming in, just like, give me all this free stuff. Cause they’re already paying a hundred bucks a month. So there’s a different level there. There’s money out there that I think a lot of people just get a fee. I get that fear factor where like, oh, I guess I do have to do a hundred bucks for the year because my God, nobody will buy it otherwise.
[00:12:46] But yes, there are people who just want good stuff with great support. And that’s the most important part for them is to like have somebody that’s going to be there for them and stand the test of time. Right. Especially if they’re a long-term WordPress user who has seen other places come and go or freelancers come and go, they don’t want that.
[00:13:08] Their vote of confidence is I will pay you a solid amount of money. So you stay in business and support me. Well, But it sounds like you’ve learned that over the years and that’s how you’ve got to this point.
[00:13:18] Nathalie: I literally had customers tell us that we know you’re not going to disappear overnight because we’re paying you well, and that’s worth it to me.
[00:13:24] Is that kind of security. And yeah, absolutely. We have that long-term vision and that long. Yeah. Stay in the game kind of energy. And I think that definitely comes across with the people that end up signing up for us. Yeah.
[00:13:37] Matt: To that. I was going to put you on the hotspot, but then we kinda, we kind of shifted a little bit on your pricing page.
[00:13:42] One of the check marks is top of the line support. I feel like everyone might say top of the line support, or we have the best support. What does top of the line of support mean for you and for your customers?
[00:13:53] Nathalie: Yeah, we have a lot of things that we do for our customers. So everyone gets a free jumpstart calls.
[00:13:58] So that means after they purchase, we get on like a zoom call with them. We help them get everything set up. We answer any questions they have. We make sure it works with the things that they’re currently using or planning to use. So that’s a big part of it. And then we also have a tune-up calls. Three times a month right now.
[00:14:14] And so they can jump on any time they have questions or want to walk through something that they’re trying to accomplish, that maybe they got stuck on. And then in terms of actually, if you get into a situation where you’re stuck or anything like that in between, then we also have email support. And like I said, we have two people dedicated to that.
[00:14:30] And obviously our response time varies, but right now it’s like averaging at eight minutes, which is kind of crazy. So during this. So, yeah, we do have, we do a lot and then we also have really robust, message-based and videos and all of that stuff to make sure if you’re more of a, self-serve kind of like, I just, I’m working at midnight.
[00:14:47] I know you’re not gonna be online. I’m just going to finish this up and watch this video kind of thing.
[00:14:51] Matt: Yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s one of the things I do as part of my role at cast dose is we do two weekly calls, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:00 PM, Eastern, same kind of thing, open office hours, or show up.
[00:15:02] If you have a question, you can answer it there. We don’t do phone support, which is still like a thing these days. Like people still are like, why can’t I just call somebody? It’s like, well, we have these two dedicated hours where you can hop on a zoom call and you can chat with us, which I think is a fairly fair approach.
[00:15:16] Plus. Nearly 24 7 help desk support through Zendesk and an email and chat. So, that’s a fantastic approach. I certainly like your approach of having that onboarding call that kickoff, call that alone, which I know developers, the more developer mindset folks who don’t want to talk to anybody. I just want to print money with my product that I’m selling.
[00:15:36] Don’t ever talk to me, just buy it. Man, you can re like that’s literally what you can charge. Out of the gate. Like if you just tell somebody that you buy this and I’ll hop on a zoom call to help you set it up, whatever that means for your product, that’s worth so much money to somebody. And it’s just that one hour of your time.
[00:15:53] I know there could be some chances where they knock on the door against, Hey, we’re going to hop on another call. I think largely 95% of your customer base will never knock on your door again and just email you. And I think that’s a fantastic approach. I applaud you for that. What else do you provide on those tune-up calls?
[00:16:10] Is there anything else that you do in a more structured approach? I just leave the door open. I say, come in and show up and ask anything you want, but do you approach it with any more structure than that? Yeah,
[00:16:19] Nathalie: for the most part, we just talk about what people bring to the, to the call, but sometimes we do have like new features or new scenarios and things that we’ve kind of seen people creating and we want to share it with them.
[00:16:30] So sometimes we’ll do like, okay, you’re doing a teams kind of feature. So that basically means, you’re selling to a bulk group of people and then here’s how you set that up. And here’s how they would assign other team members to the courses and that kind of stuff, or we’ll do like, okay, here’s what you need to know about doing this summit.
[00:16:46] If you’re using XSLT to run your summit, like how you do that. So we’ll kind of talk about a little bit about those scenarios that are kind of either popular or that we’ve seen someone do really well and kind of want to share with the rest of the community.
[00:16:57] Matt: Gotcha. No, that’s awesome. I will, I will write that down or release it to my episode and then apply that to cast those next time.
[00:17:04] I’m on my next time. I’m on my call. You started to, to say that, look, we know who our customer is. One they’re paying a little bit more. We’re helping them make money. Who would you say your best customer profile is for accessing.
[00:17:19] Nathalie: So some of our best customers are people who are in the business space.
[00:17:23] So they may not be like teaching business, but maybe they have business processes that help other business owners. So kind of that team aspect I was talking about. So, we have people who are, let’s say a sales trainer, and then they’ve got a program that they’ve developed that they sell to other companies to train their sales teams.
[00:17:38] Or we have someone who’s doing a coaching certification. So she’s a coach and she’s teaching other people how to become a coach. So they will become certified in her method. So there’s a lot of that kind of teaching something, but two groups of people that tends to be one of our bigger people. So we have like a dog trainer and I think, she comes in and she’s, she’s got groups of doc trainers in other businesses learning her methods and that kind of thing.
[00:18:01] So that seems to be one of our, our ideal.
[00:18:04] Matt: Yeah, no, that’s awesome. That’s awesome that you can identify. How can you paint the picture of how that has changed if at all, from when you first started the business? Like, did you go into the business thinking, yeah, we’re going to serve this one particular set it’s changed.
[00:18:18] Nathalie: It’s changed a lot over the years. Mostly our understanding of it. I think kind of similar people have been coming to us just based on like, who knows us and who they’ve recommended it to, and that kind of thing. So we’ve got a lot of authors and speakers and podcasters, and basically the content creators do come to us quite a bit.
[00:18:34] And over the years we realized, okay, the ones who are really doing well are the ones who they have a little bit more of that leverage. They can kind of sell to more people. So that’s. Evolved over time. We definitely have people who are more of the, do it yourselfers or who are just getting started.
[00:18:47] So that that’s great too, but I think our kind of top customer, those people who are a little bit more established and have that credibility and can kind of scale a little bit faster that way.
[00:18:56] Matt: One of the questions I have written down from our pre-interview was how you navigate the competition.
[00:19:00] And as we’re talking, like, I’m thinking about. Like boy I don’t know if you compete against anybody in the WordPress space, just because of your positioning, your brand value statements and who you, who you’re serving now as customers. Do you find yourself competing with more WordPress or more SAS based or is it just a, a good 50 50 mix?
[00:19:18] Nathalie: Yeah, it’s a little bit of a 50, 50 split. I would say. We definitely could be more with like Kajabi and teachable and Thinkific for the most part. But we also have a little bit of competition on the WordPress side too. It just depends on like what people are familiar with when they find us. So a lot of times if they aren’t familiar with WordPress and they’ve probably looked at LearnDash or number press or lift your LMS or something like that.
[00:19:39] So they’re kind of familiar more with that. Or if they’re kind of. Sort of, they don’t quite know what they’re doing, but they just know they want an online course and they might have already looked at Kajabi or teachable or Thinkific. And so they’ll kind of compare us very differently based on their background and kind of where they’re coming from.
[00:19:55] So we do have a lot of developers who are more comparing us to WordPress versus business owners themselves tend to compare us more to the class.
[00:20:03] Matt: Yeah. If you grew up in WordPress and you only knew of the WordPress LMS plugins, you’d be like, yeah, it’s a decent size market, but then once you get into like these SAS based businesses I’ll keep the name.
[00:20:15] I won’t say the name, but I worked with a hosted LMS. It wasn’t really even an LMS. It was just a membership. It had nothing to do with like learning modules or structures or anything like that. It was just a membership site. I’m trying to say this without revealing who it is, there was nothing wrong, but yeah, so it was like this blanket membership thing.
[00:20:34] And it served all kinds of anyone. And I, I talked to this person and I heard what they were doing for revenue. I was like, Wow, the space is that big. Like, I can’t even imagine what these other platforms that are doing that have, like, hyper-focused got great product, great marketing after this person had anything wrong, but it just made me and my eyes wide of like how big this market is.
[00:20:57] Do you have a sense? Of how large the market is numbers wise for outside of the WordPress LMS
[00:21:03] Nathalie: world? Yeah, so I don’t know the exact numbers, but I know that sort of the LMS, like in general market is like billions of dollars and just continues to increase year to year. So it’s definitely growing and obviously like with COVID and like a lot of things have changed more and more in the online direction.
[00:21:20] So. Only going to keep growing in my opinion. But yeah, I don’t know the exact numbers for each individual businesses, but I know that, some businesses are going public or, so there’s definitely a lot of growth in this space. For sure.
[00:21:33] Matt: You said you started a business with your husband.
[00:21:35] Labeled co-founder too, or just painting.
[00:21:40] Nathalie: He’s definitely my co-founder, but I would say he is more like head of engineering and just focused on development and kind of making sure that that sort of thing is solid
[00:21:49] Matt: with everything that’s going on. With, COVID weird to say, cause we’re like for two years, I feel like we’re going two years into it, 20 years into it feels like, but at least in the podcast world, we saw a huge rush to private podcasting company.
[00:22:01] Only podcasting a way to communicate internally with your organization instead of just video calls all day long. I’d imagine there’s a market there for you where people started knocking on the door saying, Hey. It w maybe we don’t want to sell this, but we need software that structures education to our organization out.
[00:22:18] Do you feel like you’re at a point where maybe having a sales team knocking on enterprise doors and like playing that game, is that something that you’re interested or exploring or already doing?
[00:22:28] Nathalie: That’s a great question. So we do have one person on our team who’s in sales, but we haven’t done as much of the outreach piece.
[00:22:34] So that is definitely something that is kind of. I think on our horizon essentially so far, we’ve been just working with the market that we know and kind of just building for them, but there’s definitely a lot more potential for where we can go. And we’re actually just trying to figure out like what what that looks like and kind of what, what those, like other verticals might be as well.
[00:22:54] Cause we are trying to just stay focused just because I think that’s easier to grow, but once we’ve kind of figured this out, then I do think we can kind of open up to the other verticals.
[00:23:03] Matt: Is this a fully bootstrap business? Or do you have investors that salesperson when, what is their responsibilities now?
[00:23:11] Is it just answering questions? Inbound questions. Does he, or she like structure custom agreements extra support, that
[00:23:18] Nathalie: kind of thing at the moment, it’s basically she does demos. She’ll do some of those onboarding calls. So it is half, I would say customer support, half sales in that way. And then we have marketing that does more of the, like getting people to book those demos and kind of come to the website and all of that.
[00:23:34] But yeah, that’s something that we’re like definitely like all eyes and ears open for how to, how to do that slightly
[00:23:39] Matt: differently. Have you had any requests from bigger enterprises or brands, could pay more than a hundred bucks a month?
[00:23:46] Nathalie: I have we’ve had some clients and part of it is like sometimes like a school would be interested, but then we, there’s a couple of things that don’t quite work.
[00:23:55] Either. Have certain requirements and that we’re not quite fast enough to be able to like, get up to speed on what they’re needing. So we, like, I think it’s kind of that tricky thing is like, we built it really for entrepreneurs. So when we have different types of institutions that come to us we might not have exactly, exactly what they want, but we have like 80% of what they want.
[00:24:12] So this is kind of the, the balance of what we’re working
[00:24:15] Matt: on for sure. Put a an identifier on whether or not that’s like a feature that you don’t have, or like an administrative thing you don’t have like SOC two compliance or something. Ridiculous.
[00:24:28] Nathalie: Yeah. A lot of times it’s like SCORM type stuff and like more more things that I don’t personally have as much experience.
[00:24:35] Yeah. Even just having a conversation about it is kind of like, okay. Tell me exactly what that means. It gets a little bit tricky versus where if they’re talking to someone who has that experience, they’re just going to be like off to the races with that. Yeah.
[00:24:47] Matt: Yeah. It’s another lesson. Again, just looking at your site and listening to you and how you position yourself.
[00:24:53] Like, there is lots of opportunity there. And, and for other folks who are listening to this in the WordPress space, 90, but I don’t wanna say 90%, but 70% of the time, like when a big enterprise knocks on your door, Your price could literally be 10 X, what you’re charging now. And it has nothing to do with the features.
[00:25:13] It is the time that it takes to sell them. Right. It’s just the sales process. It literally like six months to a year for most of them. And then it’s all this administrative stuff back and forth. And then it’s your terms. How can we pay you? Right. And. People are like, wait, we don’t have a credit. We’re not going to give you a credit card for a month.
[00:25:32] We want to pay for three years. Like, where’s the, where’s the legal ease around that. And it’s like, if you just had like all of this templated purchasing or procurement structure in place, you could be off to the races without even adding features. And in fact, I’d say features ends up being. Down the totem pole because a marketing person gets excited and they’re like, yeah, this is a great product.
[00:25:54] Oh, by the way, here’s the procurement team. And then you’re just like, oh shit, I got to go through legal now than I have to go through InfoSec, and then I get to talk to like the CFO and they get to talk about like, structuring a contract. So, again, no real question there, but just from my own experience, like I think WordPress can do WordPress products can do better by satisfying some of those needs that just doesn’t have anything to do with.
[00:26:15] At the end of the day. Yeah, absolutely. You your husband to support people? I heard the sales person. That’s five, a marketing person is six. How much more on the
[00:26:27] Nathalie: team? Actually two marketing people right now. One person who is in people ops, and then we have two development interns as
[00:26:36] Matt: well. Nice. How do you recruit the interns locally?
[00:26:39] Nathalie: Yeah, so they’re at the university of that. My husband and I both went to, so they have a really great program. That’s like a co-op program. So we basically just post and interview and hire and it’s been going really well.
[00:26:50] Matt: Yeah. I would definitely say a lot of that. Some agencies and product people should definitely look locally.
[00:26:55] For developers, especially in that sort of intern phase, it’s great to sort of educate people locally and pray to God. They stay, don’t leave the area when they graduate, because where I’m from, they leave the area when they graduate and we lose that, that great talent. When you started, how big was it?
[00:27:08] Nathalie: When I started, it was just me, my husband, and an
[00:27:11] Matt: assistant any, and this was going to be a broad question. Thoughts on hiring people, growing the team? What was that? Was that stressful at all? Turbulent at all?
[00:27:22] Nathalie: Yeah, it was a huge learning curve. So I feel like some of our best hires we figured out. A little bit late was it was already in our community.
[00:27:31] So they were already, super fans or maybe they were building websites for people using our plugin. And so they already have the talent and the know-how and he just had to like recruit them. And that, that was a big learning curve because we were posting on these very broad job boards and finding people who were just looking for a job and they don’t really care about us.
[00:27:50] And so when something else comes along, The end. So, that was a big kind of ruining her for us. And yeah, we’re doing a lot in that, in that way. Like how can we nurture our community? How can you make their lives easier and better? And then, if they’re ready for a different kind of position that fits what we’re looking for, then yet we’re definitely super excited about.
[00:28:09] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. The whole, like, I don’t know if you hear it, but I’ve heard it before I started or when I was starting my businesses, like hire slow fire fast and I’m like, yeah, Yeah, you just got to laugh at that. I’ll be like, I just need people now. Like I don’t have time to slow this process down. And then you realize that six months into it, you’re like I pick the wrong person or this or this person picked the wrong place.
[00:28:32] And now what do I do? And that is so true. I mentor at a local accelerator in the, and it’s a nonprofit accelerator for sustainable businesses in my area and the company that I’m mentoring. Now, they’re trying to launch a nonprofit for daycare for disabled children. And. They’re raised. They’re, they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to get money.
[00:28:51] And they’re talking about grants and funding and all this stuff. And they’re like right out of the gate, we want to hire 10 people and I’m like, man, that’s going to be tough. Like you don’t like that process of just getting people in, especially 10 of them is going to take you. It’s going to take a thousand people to talk to literally quite literally to get these 10 perfect people in the door here.
[00:29:11] And it’s, it is not easy. What’s the next role that you think you’d be hiring?
[00:29:13] Nathalie: We’re actually hiring right now for a product manager and that’s sort of. Me cause I’ve been head of product for quite a while. And it’s great because I talk to our customers a lot. So I kind of know what they were looking for and how to build what they want.
[00:29:27] But I also know I could be doing other things too. So it’s kind of just freeing myself up a little bit so I can do more of the marketing and the sales and kind of the things you were talking about, like, okay. Like what’s next, like lifting my head up a little bit and yeah.
[00:29:39] Matt: Looking bigger picture. Is that where you would focus more on marketing sales?
[00:29:42] If you were to alleviate
[00:29:44] Nathalie: yourself? It, yeah, more marketing and sales, more interviews like these, more things like that where I can be a little bit more publicly visible and kind of get the word out for access to LA. Yeah.
[00:29:55] Matt: Let’s talk about the marketing side of it. How, without giving away the secret sauce, what, what has been your best approach to reaching these customers?
[00:30:03] Previously you built your own audience. I assume you still leverage that same audience. What other areas are you getting into or how are you expanding that?
[00:30:11] Nathalie: Yeah. So a lot of, I think my success is from list-building and building that community in the beginning and just having a lot of alignment with what they wanted and also like what we were offering.
[00:30:22] And so we’ve done so much in the list, building realm, like we did a free challenge, we’ve done a like free, essentially a free video course where people like opt in and then they get a free video every day for 30 days. And that was probably. Lead magnet that was so super successful. And then, yeah, like, YouTube podcasts I’ve pretty much done all of the marketing things and kind of took a break for the past year and a half just because I had a baby and then obviously pandemic and so many things happened, but yeah, I feel like there’s so much in the space of marketing that works really well.
[00:30:52] I will say I don’t tend to jump on. Like flashiest things. So I deleted my Instagram account. I’m not on Tik TOK, I’m not doing it clubhouse. Like I know there’s been quite a few trends of like new platforms and new things, but I try to stick to things that work long-term. So for me, that’s like SEO, YouTube videos.
[00:31:09] Like those are the kinds of things that once you put it out there more and more people will find them over time. So to me, that is a really good long-term kind of investment on the marketing.
[00:31:18] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I find Instagram to be challenging personally myself, even though I shouldn’t, I just like podcasts, you should be able to, like flex in that area.
[00:31:27] Is that what the kids say on Instagram? Like flex in that area and it should work well, but it doesn’t, especially on like the WordPress site. It’s like, there’s nothing really flashy. That’s going to be like excited. Like here’s a picture of the dashboard with a filter on it. Like, what are we going to do here?
[00:31:40] I get so jealous when I look at like other companies and other brands, right. Cool, like collabs, like backpacks, collabing with like these other makers or creators, like, ah, it’s such an awesome way. You can’t do that with WordPress is nothing there. It’s fun and exciting. It’s a challenge for sure.
[00:31:54] What about you hinted before. That maybe you kind of explored the world of SAS. I know you said you wanted to be hyper-focused or you are hyper-focused even if it wasn’t full on SAS, would you go and kind of pivot to supporting a Drupal or Joomla or another platform at all? Is that anywhere on the radar, SAS or otherwise?
[00:32:14] Nathalie: Not so much the other off of WordPress. If we were to do more of a SAS, we would probably just take WordPress and host it and kind of do it. Like plug and play one click button. Your site is ready kind of thing. Which I know other platforms like Rainmaker have done, like they took WordPress and they sort of, Close it off a little bit.
[00:32:32] So that’s something we thought about and we’ve tested doing like hosting with the seam and things like that in the past. But also we know that our people tend to be power users and they want to be able to install other things and kind of make it work with other stuff. And that’s kind of the beauty of WordPress.
[00:32:45] So we don’t want to like cut off the best part. So yeah, we kind of, we explore it like almost every year. We’re like, what about now? What about now? But I don’t think it’s really the right move.
[00:32:56] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. What about this is also kind of marketing kind of product, but what about partnerships in the WordPress space?
[00:33:05] Advice or success that you’ve seen or not that you’ve seen in the space that you can speak towards partnering other plugins and, or e-commerce plugins or marketing plugins or anything like that.
[00:33:15] Nathalie: Yeah. There are certain plugins that are positioned to do amazing things in terms of partnerships. So I know like WP fusion is an amazing one that they work with so many different things.
[00:33:25] And so we’ve integrated with, with them. And there’s a couple of other plugins that we’ve integrated with. But I would say our biggest integration partners are actually the CRMs and the email marketing systems that we integrate with. So they’re kind of outside of WordPress, but we do integrate tightly with them.
[00:33:38] So that gives us that ability to like co-market with them. And we’re all listed on their websites and stuff as an integration options. So that has been really nice for us too. And people who are really looking for something that deeply integrates with that, they tend to come to us because of that. So.
[00:33:53] Yeah. I almost feel like WordPress is awesome. And also there’s other tools that most people are using. So just thinking about at that level too. So for example, we don’t have an integration with zoom, but we used to have an integration with Google Hangouts. And so we would have, people could start a Google hangout from inside their membership site.
[00:34:10] And so I think that’s something too it’s like, how can you connect to things outside of WordPress? Sometimes that people use a lot as well. So those are some, some things we’ve done in the past and some things that are still working well for
[00:34:20] Matt: us, this seems to be a recurring. Trend in my last few interviews.
[00:34:25] Is is integrations. Ad-ons, when to make those there’s a million places you probably want to integrate with, I’m sure there’s a million people who have requested things to integrate with. How do you find that balance? Because at the other end of it, and people are probably sick of me saying this already.
[00:34:41] Is there is that the, the overhead of an integration that just doesn’t become as popular as you thought it was going to be MailChimp, even though MailChimp’s popular, let’s just say MailChimp fell off the face of the earth. Then it’s like, man, I got a half a dozen people over here using MailChimp and I still get to support this.
[00:34:55] Add on how do you make the decision on when to support one or when to make one? And co-brand with one, two at the same time. Yeah.
[00:35:03] Nathalie: So we currently integrate with five different email marketing systems. And the first one, we just build it for ourselves. Like, like I said, so that one was an easy, easy. Yes. And then after that, we looked at their biggest competitor essentially.
[00:35:16] And so we went with that one and then. We noticed a trend where a lot of people were switching from both of these two to a third one. So then we integrated with that one. And then the next two are kind of just, they were all being compared a lot. So that kind of made sense to integrate at that time.
[00:35:30] But yeah, we have, we have people constantly asking us to integrate with new payment systems and some people maybe in Europe can’t use certain systems or in other parts of the world where they can’t use Stripe, for example. So we definitely get a lot of. And I think it’s exactly what you said.
[00:35:46] Sometimes it comes down to numbers and if we’ve only had one person ask for it, like, I’m sorry, it’s just probably not going to have it right now. And also integrations do change, right? So they changed their API and then we have to test and maintain and make sure it still works the way that promised or, that used to at least.
[00:36:01] So that’s been a bit of a trick. The situation over the years, because as those companies that we integrate with change and mature we have to kind of keep up with that. So that’s definitely been a bit of a tricky thing. And we do have a whole backlog of integrations that people have asked for.
[00:36:14] And we did keep our ears open. We keep track of each person that asks for it. And then when the numbers kind of tick up high enough, then that’s kind of, usually when we pull the trigger on them,
[00:36:22] Matt: I’m looking at the integration page now. I actually don’t see a MailChimp. Has MailChimp not been requested or you just refuse to support the monkey?
[00:36:29] Ah, yes.
[00:36:30] Nathalie: So we’ve had a lot of people ask for it. I’ve never
[00:36:32] Matt: said that on the air before it refused to support the monkey. I don’t know where that came from, but sorry, go ahead.
[00:36:36] Nathalie: That’s hilarious. Yeah, no, we’ve definitely had. For MailChimp and our reasoning for not integrating so far is that they didn’t have the functionality that we needed in terms of tagging and automation.
[00:36:47] So we tend to integrate with the kind of more advanced CRM that do a lot of like cool things. And that basically think back to access LA after. And I know they’ve added a lot over the years, so we’re probably gonna be revisiting, revisiting that again soon, but yeah, for now yeah, there’s definitely people who’ve asked for it and.
[00:37:02] Matt: I noticed that the footer there’s a page called discover experts. Find an expert. I forget the title of it. It looks like there’s a 20 ish or so maybe more if I actually filtered through and started searching how does this program work and what have been the, the positives and negatives of trying to build something like this off the ground, get something like this off the ground, because I know it’s difficult to wrangle folks together to really get something of value here.
[00:37:30] Yeah.
[00:37:30] Nathalie: So we started our certification program. I think it was. Six years ago. So, it’s been quite a few years in the making and the first round of it was in person, you had to fly out, we taught you everything there was to know about access ally and building sites and really kind of digging in. And it was a huge, it was a $10,000 program to sign up.
[00:37:51] So it was definitely like, you’re jumping in all in and that commitment level kind of connected with the people who were ready for it. So that really jumps start the program. And, a lot of those early people have had, hundreds of clients sent their way because of, being early adopters and kind of pioneering some of the things that we did with them and giving us feedback to improve the product and all of that.
[00:38:11] So that’s kind of how it started and then it’s really kind of shifted over the year. So now it’s an online things, so they don’t have to come and fly out and meet us and learn the software. We actually teach them online. And basically what we do is we. Make sure they’re really great at what they do.
[00:38:25] And then we kind of filter them out based on what they’re focused on. So some people only work with one CRM, that’s their jam. They’re super awesome at it. Other people love to do the design aspect of the site. Other people are more on the course development. So how to design the course in like the content and modules and all of that.
[00:38:41] So we kind of have people doing different types of things. So we know kind of who to recommend when somebody comes to us and doesn’t want to do their own setup and do all that.
[00:38:49] Matt: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And putting a price tag on it is very smart and I’m just like thinking in my head, how can I, how can I do that too?
[00:38:58] Like, that’s such a, that’s such a great idea. I I’ve, I’ve, I’ve known about obviously certification programs. A lot of them again, when you’re looking at the top it’s it’s, it’s all paid. I again, when I look at the things happening in WordPress, because we’re so I don’t want to say desperate, but we’re just so like desperate to get people excited.
[00:39:14] We’re like, just any, if you could fill out this form, you’re a partner. Like if you can get through the capture, you win. They’re like, okay, that’s the bar we’re setting for ourselves. But no, it’s great that it’s paid. And then, obviously don’t have to tell you, but once people are paying for it they’re spreading the word.
[00:39:29] They want you to succeed. You want them to succeed and it’s just those positive inertia in, in that direction. So that’s fantastic. That’s great to see that, that program, that program working before we hit record, you mentioned that you have a F potentially a new theme coming, anything that you can hint at about that release and why you started to be.
[00:39:48] Nathalie: Yeah. So we’ve actually been working on it for about a year, which is like insane, but it’s one of those things where we wanted it to be just right. And there’s a lot of options for themes and builders and like Burke and so many things that people can choose from to make their sites look great. And the reason we decided to do our own theme is really just menus.
[00:40:07] I know it sounds so simple, but when you have a course and you have our multiple courses with a different menu on each course, it’s a lot of work to set up those menus on all those pages and. So that’s kind of one of the biggest benefits it will save then you access LA theme. And then it also integrates with all the progress tracking.
[00:40:23] So you can kind of see, like, as you’re going through like little check marks show up beside your menu and you have your little progress bar that shows you how far ahead you are in a course or program. So we just wanted to make it easier for our customers to make things that look great out of the box if they don’t want to hire a designer.
[00:40:38] So that’s kind of our thinking with that.
[00:40:40] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. That’s no, that’s great. That’ll be a huge, I’m sure, again, and just from my work with other LMS plugins, that’s, that’s always the hangup. It’s like, I’ve got this perfect theme and it serves like all of my marketing and how I want my blog to look and how I want my homepage to look.
[00:40:55] And then you install the LMS and it’s like, that is the ugliest progress bar I’ve ever seen in my life. No, it looks like, I don’t know what it is like this looks like a geo city site that I built, 30 years ago. Why is it looks so terrible is because it’s not styled for it. Right. And it’s, that’s a huge crux of WordPress and plugin integration.
[00:41:13] Are you excited about anything Gutenberg related? That’s going to make your life easier for the plugin, for the theme.
[00:41:19] Nathalie: Yeah. I really want to love Gutenberg and I think it’s getting there, like, no, no, I really think it’s we’re close. And I think that a lot of people had a lot of. Emotions, let’s put them around.
[00:41:32] And and I think that we’re really, really like if we’re not there yet, I think we’re like super close to actually having that. So we’re actually going to be recommending people, use Gutenberg with theme. So if people don’t have another option that they prefer, and I think that’s going to be really amazing.
[00:41:46] So XSL, it comes with blocks already, so it can do all the things that it needs within that area. I like kind of your main part of your content for your courses and stuff. So I’m super excited about that. And it’s actually something I want us to go into more, like, I think that’s direction. I really want the plugin to go into Morris, making the blocks even better.
[00:42:03] So yeah, I’m definitely all in on Gutenberg, but I think that there’s still a lot of resistance from people who are more familiar with it, or maybe haven’t played enough with it and feel a little bit of that. Yeah, not too sure about it yet.
[00:42:17] Matt: Yeah. In the beginning, everyone was sort of just, throwing their hats off saying why, why, why, why, why do we have this?
[00:42:23] But you know, over, over time, like we all should have known like any soft first version of a piece of software. You, we all know it’s not, it’s not the, the version we are really gonna fall in love with. And it’s taken a few years. I certainly enjoy it, but yeah, there’s still some things where I’m just like, I literally can’t drag this block into a column.
[00:42:42] Like the most basic thing I should be able to do ever. I can’t do those are some frustrating points and then there’s some other awesome points. And I was making a landing page for, at castles today. And, and like the quick commands of like the forest lash and you just hit I, and an image pops up or P for power, like that stuff navigating that is it’s fantastic.
[00:43:06] Like, it just makes that stuff so much easier, but yeah, there’s still some pain points and I think, I think it’s going to be another year, maybe two until it’s really smooth, especially with full site editing.
[00:43:18] Nathalie: Right? Yeah. I feel you on that. And I think it’s like, just. Keeping the hope right. That we’ll get there and like, just keep them at it, keep it going and just putting our support behind it too.
[00:43:29] I think as business owners, we have to say like, no, this is the direction we’re presses going in. And we have to put our support behind that too. So that’s. Yeah,
[00:43:38] Matt: for sure. Natalie Lucier is founder and CEO access. ally.com checkout access, ally.com. If you haven’t, if you have a customer or a client or you want to launch your own LMS, check out access, ally.com, Natalie, anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks.
[00:43:52] No, that’s
[00:43:53] Nathalie: that’s fine. Thank you
[00:43:55] Matt: stuff, everybody else. My report.com my report.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. And if you want your weekly dose of WordPress news and under five minutes, the WP minute.com.

Recapture – Dave and Matt – Matt Report

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[00:01:52]I appreciate a good side hustle story. Someone’s slogging away in the cubicle, but slowly building up an audience on Twitter on the weekends. I’m sure you know, all about the building open movement and today’s guest really shocked me with that. See maybe like you I’ve listened to Dave Rohde and bond his podcast with my boss, Craig rogue startups for years now. 

[00:02:12] But what really got me in today’s story is that he was never really even part time into his business. recapture.io. In fact, the way he put it, he was only devoting 10% of his energy into the business. While being contracted at a corporate gig, he recently had the chance to exit from there’s a lot of fun stuff in today’s episode, covering everything from managing and day job to which marketing skills you need as a developer. 

[00:02:38] To kickstart your business. I hope you really enjoy it. You’re listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the [email protected] slash subscribe and follow the podcast on apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet. 

[00:02:54] Please share this episode. On your social media. We’d love more listeners around here. And side note, [00:03:00] I had to rerecord with Dave after some Zen caster snafoos so we’re picking up from our conversation a little bit, warmed up. Okay. I hope you enjoy.  

[00:03:09] Matt: [00:03:09] One of the things that I caught you at a great time last time because you were only, I think like two weeks a free man on your own you get out of that sort of day job slash consultancy that you were in. I had you at an interesting moment where you were like, everything’s coming at me. This is exciting.

[00:03:28]I, I’m kind of like looking to go to the next chapter of, of running recapture. Is that feeling still here or now that we’re like a month into it, things have settled, like, oh my God, you 

[00:03:39] Dave: [00:03:39] know, it’s kind of funny. It hasn’t really, I have not felt that euphoria lift yet. I imagine at some point it probably will.

[00:03:48]No, th this is, this is definitely the honeymoon phase, right. And at some point the honeymoon phase will always go. But I still feel it. In fact, I was just having breakfast with my wife this morning. We were sitting outside and, I noted her. I said, Hey, it’s been, almost two months since I left the freelance job.

[00:04:03] And she went, I know. And I was like, and it’s still great. So, I still, I still get up in the morning and we go do our walk and I come back and I have breakfast and coffee and I’m like, I get to spend my day on whatever the hell I want to today, which is of course recapturing my business, but there’s something still very energizing about that.

[00:04:27] Like, it’s all, it’s my own experience. I’m not really beholden to anybody other than the customers. I don’t have to do. Stupid bullshit meetings and phone calls and status reports and just all of that stuff that I had to deal with in the corporate world. It’s just all gone like that lift that sh that weight has still lifted off my shoulders.

[00:04:47] And I am just as happy then as I am. One 

[00:04:51] Matt: [00:04:51] of the things I think you hide really well. And I don’t know if this was intentional or I maybe just never even saw it because I’ve always been just looking at what you were doing with the recapture. You’ve been on the show, my podcast, before you have the podcast with Craig, who’s a happens to be my boss.

[00:05:07] I never knew how much. And then we had our discussion more in depth. I never knew how much that freelance gig. Was sort of like weighing you down or how much it consumed when you and I chatted. I think you, throughout the, the ratio of like, it was 90% day job in 10% recapture, and that was kind of mind blowing, like how you manage that, how did you manage like so much of recapture with only 10% of energy.

[00:05:37] Dave: [00:05:37] That’s an excellent question. And some days I’m amazed that things were able to progress along as well as they had because of that exact issue. And in fact, that was one of the main things I think that sort of drove me into this direction, like recapture could be doing so much better and here I am barely giving it enough oxygen to survive.

[00:06:00] [00:05:59] Why, why can’t I do more? So, but it wasn’t always this way. The freelance thing, it was probably at one point it was like 40% freelance and 60% everything else. But at the time that 60% was a good chunk of the WordPress plugins. I had that I sold last year and recapture, that was the directory, a business directory plugin that was business directory and AWP PCP.

[00:06:25] So. Those were things that all consumed my time. And I think when you said, hiding, I think that’s an excellent observation because I. I definitely compartmentalize when it comes to things like here’s this chunk of my business, here’s this other chunk, here’s this other chunk. And, I could operate in each of those worlds fairly separately without letting them bleed into each other.

[00:06:52] But there came a point when the freelancing just was such a mentally taxing thing to deal with. I had. Just all kinds of toxic stuff going on in the corporate culture that I was there and the project that I was working on and the direction that it was all going. And it just, at some point I was like, this is too much.

[00:07:12] I can’t deal with this anymore. I can’t keep it in the box. It’s bleeding out into everything else. So usually when I got onto podcasts, like the Matt. It would give me an opportunity to express the enthusiasm for that box that I didn’t get to really express any other way. So, it was like my brief window into positive energy venting, if you will.

[00:07:34] And then it was back to the slog of the corporate world and yeah. So 

[00:07:39] Matt: [00:07:39] that’s tough. How much of the success of recaptured thus far? Is because you chose, these are my words. These are not your words. So obviously I hope for you to color in the lines here, but how much of the success of recapture is the market and the product that you chose.

[00:07:58] And I’ll preface that with saying is like abandoned cart problems are or solutions. I should say. There’s a lot of them. I feel like it’s a big space, which is. Some people might look from the sidelines going, God, I don’t want to get into that space. There’s so much competition, but I feel like maybe in your case, it is, and was a good thing.

[00:08:19]If you look at I think cart hook probably was where you were at and then just matured into a much larger product and solution, I think right on the heels of. Recording that we had Jilt shut down, which was a sort of like another, I guess, benefit to you. How much of the success do you think has, has leaned on, Hey, I picked the right product and the right market, because sometimes I think that could be something that kind of goes under the radar.

[00:08:44] That a lot of people aren’t aware of. 

[00:08:47] Dave: [00:08:47] Well, I talked about this on other podcasts and I’ll mention it here as well. I believe very heavily in the notion of luck, surface area. So just quick definition for [00:09:00] somebody who might not be familiar with this, basically. Everyone in business is going to encounter some level of luck and whether you’re prepared for that luck or unprepared for that luck has to do with the surface area that you’ve created.

[00:09:17] So in other words, can I capitalize on this lucky opportunity that comes around at this time because. I’ve made some kind of preparation for it. I’m ready to accept it. I’ve got the bandwidth to deal with it. Like all of these things have to kind of line up. I’ve had opportunities that appeared in my space and I wasn’t ready to capitalize them.

[00:09:37] So they weren’t within my luck surface area, but being, being ready for those opportunities makes a huge difference in whether you’re successful or not successful. So, there were definitely lots of. We’ll call them lucky moments. We all want to think that entrepreneurship is solely about hard work and hard work is a piece of it.

[00:09:57] And you can’t succeed without the hard work, but at the same time, every element of luck that you encounter that you can capitalize we’ll will level up your business. And the more of those that you can do, the better off you will end up. The same thing is true of Castillo’s when Craig and I have talked about this on the podcast.

[00:10:15] I Craig, you and Craig have encountered many lucky moments in Castro’s getting into tiny seed, him having an opportunity to hire you when you were available. Each of these helps build on all of the previous moments that you’ve had before. And the same thing is true with recapture. So like for example, When I was able to acquire a recapture back in 2016, that was a lucky moment for me because I happened to have the money to do it.

[00:10:41] And I was looking specifically for something that was, e-commerce SAS, recurring revenue. And it was in a space that I understood and it was a space that I could be passionate about. So that is a lucky moment where all of those things that kind of I’ve been preparing for came together in one shot.

[00:10:58] And then after that, like the pandemic was another lucky moment. I know this is not lucky for a lot of people that lost loved ones, but if you were in e-commerce. Everything kind of took off in certain verticals and certain services, right? Capture was one of those services. And because we had been spending a lot of time, integrating with woo commerce, integrating with easy digital downloads, integrating with restrict content pro being on Shopify at that point and optimizing our listing all of these things, when that massive uptick in e-commerce store interest went on.

[00:11:33] We were there and able to capitalize on it because we were available to people. We, we had enough interest and awareness in the community that people were able to take us and, and use the service at the time that they needed it the most. So that’s another lucky opportunity we were able to capitalize on.

[00:11:53] And, it’s just building on moments like that again and again and again, in your business. [00:12:00] Entails, like I said, a lot of hard work and you’ve got to get out there and you’ve got to do the homework. I had to network with, the, I have a relationship with nexus and liquid web, and I think I was trying to, I was badgering poor Chris lemma for life.

[00:12:14] 12 months, no joke. Like every two months, I just like ping out and say, Hey, what’s going on? Are you guys ready to integrate this yet? And they were like, yeah, no, not talk to me in a little bit. And I just kept doing that and kept doing that and kept doing that. And eventually it turned out. Initial relationship and then Jilt shut down.

[00:12:31] And now it’s a bigger relationship cause they were relying on Jill. So again, it’s about timing and persistence and hard work. And the more you can make that surface area, big, these lucky events that come flying through your space, you can grab a hold of them and, let it ride your busy. 

[00:12:49] Matt: [00:12:49] Where do you rank the priority of.

[00:12:52]Like developing features versus being. Social and networky and markety in the grand scheme of your luck surface area, like if you were sitting in front of a class of one year WordPress plugin entrepreneurs who are mostly developers, Would you tell them to increase the lung surface area by creating those integrations or, Hey, you got to blog more, you got to outreach more, maybe start a podcast.

[00:13:24] Where do you set those priorities to, to increase that luck surface? 

[00:13:30] Dave: [00:13:30] I would never prioritize features on that list until I had some understanding of what’s out there in the space. Like we didn’t integrate with WooCommerce and easy digital downloads because I love those two so much. It happens that I do, but that’s not why I integrated with them.

[00:13:48] I integrated with them because there was a huge market opportunity and doing that. That I can go after those opportunities and it allows me to be in other spaces. So I understood the market well enough to know that those were good plays, but part of what I would say to that, younger group of plugin authors, is that the reason that I knew those things is that I created relationships first.

[00:14:14] So I had attended events, like word camps, and PressNomics where I talked with these others. Hosting companies and plugin authors and agencies and all of these other things to understand what are their concerns, who are the people in the space that are the movers and the shakers that I can learn more from that.

[00:14:34] If I connect with it’s going to, improve my sphere. Of being able to do better things in the world, right? It’s not about, me personally, it’s about how can I improve my impact on the world and that, you’re not going to get that sitting around typing features out on a keyboard.

[00:14:50] So those things matter, but they don’t matter first. Like you need to get the other things before you can get. The features, because you won’t know the right features [00:15:00] to build until you’ve talked to people, talk to your customers, talk to other people that are going to use your tool. Talk to hosting providers that might find a way to use you to improve the offerings to their customers.

[00:15:10] If you can make somebody better with your product, then they’re going to be interested in you, but you’re not going to know that unless you get out there and talk to other people and find out what the hell they’re doing, right. Podcasting is another great way to do that. 

[00:15:22]Matt: [00:15:22] I forget which episode of. Rogue startups.

[00:15:24] It was, but it might’ve been a more recent one when you were talking about the new SMS functionality of the product. And you’ll have to remind me of like what the context was, but you said something like here I am working on something else. And like the SMS stuff is just sitting, waiting to go, or at least that’s how I kind of remember it.

[00:15:45] And you were, you were like, oh God, if I just, I just got to get out there and launch this, like, what am I doing? Spending all this time in this area when I can just, this features almost kind of ready, let me just launch it. I think that that’s. Such a common, well, first of all, am I getting that right?

[00:16:00] Am I remembering this, this tug of war you had at one point with releasing that feature and other things you were doing? 

[00:16:06] Dave: [00:16:06] I think so. So there was a, a combination of forces that were coming in at the time. And we were talking about trying to release SMS first. It was going to be an April, then it was going to be in may and then it was going to be in June.

[00:16:16] And it finally got released on July 1st. So I don’t have to say that anymore, but thank God. But it. I got distracted by a bunch of other things. And one of the things I think that kills us as entrepreneurs is lacking focus. So you see, and I, I’m as guilty as anybody else. Here’s a new shiny object over here.

[00:16:34] Ooh, look at that. If we develop that boy, that would really make a move on MRR. Oh wait. But we could be doing this marketing hack right here instead. And all of those things are just constantly coming up in your, your field of view and you’ve got to, nail it down and say, look, I did this. If I don’t shove it out the door now I’m in big trouble.

[00:16:54] So, for me, with the SMS stuff, what that came down to was that I was distracted by content marketing. And I spent like a month trying to hire a content marketer. And then the Jilt shutdown came along in June and all of a sudden everything got shuffled. Right. So then it was like, oh, geez well, SMS, isn’t going to really move the needle with Jilt customers because Jilt didn’t support SMS.

[00:17:15] So now what do I need to do to make it. Jilt customers would be better served by recapture. Well, I gotta add marketing emails, broadcast emails. And so we were really close on that one too. So we just bundled it all together. SMS was done. And so we just put these two and said, all right, July 1st is when we’re launching.

[00:17:32] We finished that up inside of a week in June and then pushed it out the door. But yeah, focus was killing me there and that was totally my bad. 

[00:17:42]Matt: [00:17:42] Back to, I guess, the, the luck surface area. And you hinted about this before too, is, you have a plan. And we, everyone says good, create a plan, create a calendar, like have these automations in these processes and everything will be running smoothly.

[00:17:56] And then suddenly it’s like, okay, well maybe this. [00:18:00] Yeah. And it blows up and you’re like, oh, maybe new feature. And then like you start building a new feature, then suddenly Jill shuts down and that’s just a matte, like now you have to be like, okay, I literally have to drop all this other stuff because this is just now a massive opportunity.

[00:18:16] And, and this is not really a question, but more of a statement just to frame it. Like we went through this, we’re going through this at  and I’m only bringing it up because you talked to Craig every week, but it’s like, we’re doing all of these things where new products, new features, new things are rolling out new enhancements, and then suddenly it’s.

[00:18:36] There’s an opportunity to buy another company. Well, that’s pretty big deal. And like, now we do that. So it’s just like, there’s that? And then there’s right. Craig working in is working his butt off to raise money and he raises money for the company. And then it’s just like right back to the feature grindstone have finished the migration.

[00:18:59] Now we’ve got this app that just launched literally yesterday. Yesterday. Yep. Monday. And now there’s just like right back to the feature grindstone and you’re like, wow. Like things move at a pace. That’s it’s exciting. But also, man, there’s no plan for this. There’s no playbook, there’s nothing, there’s nothing.

[00:19:17] Dave: [00:19:17] There’s no question. Yeah, no. There’s, there’s a certain chaotic insanity to the whole entrepreneur journey. And in some ways you can do all the planning you want, but no plan survives first contact with the customer. And in many cases, no plan survives first contact. Random events that happen out in the real world, acquiring companies, getting funding, Jilt shutdowns, all of these things, just things happen.

[00:19:47] And the speed at which you can react to something is definitely whether your business lives or dies in these events. And it definitely is also whether the business grows or fails in these times as well. Those that were not able to. Advantage of the dynamic nature of the e-commerce, if they weren’t pivoting hard during their vertical, like if you were in the travel vertical during COVID shutdown, people were just pounding on you with a sledgehammer into the ground, like six feet deep.

[00:20:16] They didn’t stop, but if you were in like like a lounge wear sweat pants, hoodies, things like that, you couldn’t keep the stuff inside. Your warehouse long enough to sell it. So, you had to be reactive to the act of circumstances there, or it kills your business and, that’s what Craig’s doing with Castillo’s and that’s what I’ve tried to do with 

[00:20:36] Matt: [00:20:36] recapture, for sure.

[00:20:37] Yeah. I want to go back to talking about partnerships which will eventually segue into word PR into woo commerce versus Shopify. But before we get to that flaming ball of chaos, Navigating partnerships in WordPress. I’m interested to hear just your opinion on it. Sometimes. I think, especially for somebody like you with a product that could [00:21:00] really latch onto a hosting company, those are very tricky waters to now.

[00:21:04]I know I used to work at Pagely and it was just like, man, like people wouldn’t even say WP engine around me. Like it wasn’t like, 

[00:21:13] Dave: [00:21:13] like we don’t talk about that. No. Yeah. 

[00:21:16] Matt: [00:21:16] It wasn’t on any of those podcasts where there were other web hosts. Like, it is a very, I feel like in the hosting world, maybe it’s getting a little bit better that it was like, you gotta be in a camp and that’s the camp you’re in and there’s isolation there.

[00:21:28]Any thoughts around navigating. And also just like critical feedback on products and services in the WordPress space. I feel like doesn’t exist in the normal zeitgeists like, I’m looking at my Sony camera right now. And like, if you went online to YouTube and you looked at, or a forum and you went to Sony versus Panasonic and there would be like great debate.

[00:21:54] Like critical. Like, but every, at the end of the day, everybody’s fine about the two companies. But I feel like in the WordPress space, you don’t get that like damn EDD for doing this. And this is why I’m woo commerce. I don’t have the right phrase for it, but I feel like that partnership slash criticism in the WordPress space doesn’t exist.

[00:22:14] Maybe. We’re all too friendly with each other. Can I say that like, we’re all friendly? I dunno, it’s just a weird thing. Like I feel like if you walk down the hall. And talked about your favorite brand of anything else. There could be clear debate, clear, concise, love it, hate it. I could go without it, but in the WordPress space that doesn’t exist.

[00:22:33] Am I making sense with that? Like, do you feel that thing in the air, like I do. I, I 

[00:22:37] Dave: [00:22:37] totally hear what you’re saying on that one and I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, there’s, there’s definitely this weird space where it seems like. You can talk about one hosting company, but you can never say hosting company a versus B, right.

[00:22:50] Or if you do like that discussion gets shut down real fast. And I don’t think it’s a conscious thing, but I’ve seen it on chats. And just over the years on blog posts, like it’s very rare that somebody sits down and truly compares one to the other. Head to head and say, look, if you really like these things, this hosting company makes a lot of sense.

[00:23:11] And if you like these things, then this other hosting company is a better fit for you. But yeah. So, you were talking about navigating partnerships. I think it’s kind of the same thing. Like as soon as you declare allegiance to one. It’s almost like the others kind of look at you with a little side eye and with a little bit of stink-eye on top of it.

[00:23:32] And they’re like, well, you’ve already got them in your camp, so we can’t be in your camp at the same time. I think that goes to the detriment of all WordPress users. Like there’s nothing that says you can’t be friendly and competitive in the same thing. And I think when you say that they’re overly friendly, I wouldn’t characterize it like that.

[00:23:55] I would characterize it. Yeah. Unwilling to criticize in general, it’s something about the [00:24:00] community. I don’t know what it is. If they are looking not to drum up drama and they feel like that’s going to create unnecessary drama or unhelpful drama, it probably could. I definitely could see that that could get into some real nasty debates that just degenerate into ad hominem attacks.

[00:24:16] And, you suck because you picked oh, well, okay. Yeah. Back off, man. That’s it. That’s that’s not necessary. So yeah, I don’t know. I’ve, I’ve felt that and it’s weird, but the partnership thing. 

[00:24:31] Matt: [00:24:31] Because it’s farther back now. Like, I’ll say, well, you can do, you can define it. Is it a, is it a partnership with nexus?

[00:24:38] And if so, like, do you feel like one, maybe you can’t because you’ve signed something or two, like, do you feel like, ah, man, it’s gonna be a little bit harder for me to knock on the door, WP engine to do this because they see me over here with nexus and Chris. So like that kind of friction that you think that holds you back.

[00:24:55] Dave: [00:24:55] It doesn’t hold me back. Let me say that. Okay. To sign because like the stuff that I set up with nexus, it wasn’t exclusive anyway. And it was very friendly. Like, look, I’ve got this thing, your customers can use this thing. You got this offering and it makes it more valuable to your customers. If we say we put this on your dashboard here, like, it was very much like how can we make this a win-win thing and like help.

[00:25:15] I will be happy to help create content to make your customers more successful. Like at the end of the day, That story should play well with any hosting company, right? If I can give you something that helps your customers be more successful and you help me bring more customers, and we’re both winning in this relationship, it shouldn’t matter how many people I’ve set that deal up with because your customer success should be the foremost thing at the top of your mind.

[00:25:42] But, I don’t know from if I have this deal going on with nexus, does that make me. A bit of a hot potato with WP engine. I don’t really know. I noticed that before I had any deal in place of any hosting company at all, like just getting to the right person who was interested in what I had to say, and that saw the value of it.

[00:26:02] Was kind of a non-trivial thing to navigate, especially when, folks are coming and going and coming and going. Even if you have the right contacts at these companies and the network relationships I’ve made gives me some ins to most of these hosting companies where I can say, Hey, I want to talk to so-and-so.

[00:26:20] It still doesn’t necessarily mean that that company is interested in your offering or that they’re thinking about things the same way that you are. So. It kind of is another thing where it has to all line up. They’ve got to be thinking about this the same way that you’re thinking about this. And that’s where I’ve met.

[00:26:39] The most resistance, I think is that, I say, Hey, are you thinking about a managed WooCommerce hosting? And I’m like, okay, well, we’re, we’re already missing this each other here. And I don’t, maybe it’s going to be a better fit in a year or two years or something like that.

[00:26:53] So with nexus, they were very much like, yep. We’ve got that. Yep. We want this. All right. Let’s make it all happen. [00:27:00] With a little bit of persistence. It’s so. 

[00:27:02] Matt: [00:27:02] It almost, and really almost makes you appreciate like a bigger business. Right. You kind of have an appreciation for it. And, and again, I’ll frame that is when you look at somebody like Austin, like SIADH from awesome motive.

[00:27:16] Right. And you see. Well, the, the sheer size, the competency of business and you have a relationship there because that’s where you sold the plugins to. Right? So you kind of see there’s a trust there. And then you can kind of make sense, because if you’re just solo developer, Dave knocking on the door of, big web hosting conglomerate.

[00:27:38]They’re going to look at you and be like, well, man, we can’t, this is way too much of a risk to just take your software, slapping it in front of 30,000 customers potentially. And we are just going to trust you. You start to kind of appreciate, okay. The bigger businesses can kind of win. There’s more sustainability, there’s better trust.

[00:27:56]There’s just more invested in the whole thing. And as a small business owner, like you kind of get it once you start going through the throws of, of navigating those, I dunno, corporate waters, enterprise waters whatever you want to call it. Kind of appreciate a little bit more, at least I do anyway.

[00:28:10] Yeah, 

[00:28:11] Dave: [00:28:11] no, I would agree with that. And it’s interesting. These larger companies. Because they’re so big, like, it’s the difference between moving like a cheetah and moving like an elephant. You’re the small start-ups. So you can navigate pretty quickly make the fast sprints and turn quickly. They’re kind of plotting along in a very straight direction and they’re not going to change their direction very quickly.

[00:28:34] So it takes them awhile to get going in a direction. And then once they’re going in that direction, it takes them a while to change directions. And the bigger the company gets, the bigger the elephant gets, right? Yeah. So by bringing in small companies, I think a lot of them want to increase their agility in that sense.

[00:28:53] But of course, there’s that whole trust aspect. Like we know you’re smaller than us, but are you big enough that you can handle what we hand the hand over to you? And if that trust isn’t there, then yeah. That’s, that’s all gone. So again, this is part of the networking aspect. If you can have that relationship with another person and that they get to know your business and they’re like, oh yeah, you’ve been around for awhile.

[00:29:13] Oh, look, you’ve got some customers. Oh, look, you served a lot of customers. Oh, you’ve done a pretty decent volume. Hey, maybe you not, might not be a fly by night. Business and we might be able to trust you like that. Trust isn’t something that just happens overnight. Right? You got to build it slowly over years.

[00:29:28] Matt: [00:29:28] Yeah. Shopify versus a woo commerce when we chatted. Yeah. Forget 

[00:29:33] Dave: [00:29:33] it. We’re done. Now. I have a lot to say about this. Go ahead. 

[00:29:37] Matt: [00:29:37] We chatted last time. I think one of the things now, look, I have only set up a handful of Shopify. Generally out of just helping some friends and some local entrepreneurs in my area do it.

[00:29:47]I think one of the things I’ll try to make this a quick question. Like one of the things I really appreciate from Shopify is. On the outside anyway, like their partnership program looks more mature. Like the way they work with [00:30:00] agencies looks more mature. And generally, I feel like they’re willing to work with the freelancers of the world versus.

[00:30:07] WordPress and WooCommerce is kind of just like, see you later. Bye. Like, we’ll see it at the end of the road, by the way, we’ll sell $5,000 [email protected]. Right. And to me, that’s like, man, like I look at it Shopify and I’m like, yeah woo commerce, WordPress should have something like this. But I guess at the end of the day, it’s not all roses and rainbows from the outside because Shopify is going to.

[00:30:35] I guess watch like a watchful eye of, what you’re doing as an, as an app, as an integrator, as an agency. And if they see something that’s super profitable, I guess they could just go. Yeah, we’ll just do that. We’ll just do that in house and just demolish your app, I guess in the matter of seconds is what they could do.

[00:30:52] So again, sharp road to navigate. I like it from the outset. Like it’s an opportunity for a freelancer or a small agency to get more work. But curious on your thoughts on partnership program in generally working with a Shopify versus a WooCommerce. 

[00:31:09] Dave: [00:31:09] Yeah. So you wanted a short answer, right? Well, I 

[00:31:14] Matt: [00:31:14] was, I was trying to make a short question, 

[00:31:16] Dave: [00:31:16] which is okay, so I can have a long answer.

[00:31:18] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Let me talk about the platforms first in general. So I think when you’re picking Shopify versus woo, there’s a lot of things that go into that decision in general, that should make you, focus on what are the strengths of each of those platforms. So with Shopify very easy to get started, low tech threshold, to understand there’s lots of stuff that you can do without being a full stack developer.

[00:31:47] Integrate apps and just basically get a store up and running. So if you aren’t sure, like you’re doing it drop shipping or it’s a new product and you’re trying to find product market fit or product audience bit or whatever it is. I think Shopify gets you up and running quicker to something that’s pretty polished that comes at a y’all are costs.

[00:32:10] So, the hosting that Shopify, the apps that you’re adding on and all of that, but. That can be managed and I think it’s simplifies things and gets you going pretty well to where you want be. With that said, once you reach a certain point and you’re like, now I want my store to do this. And I want my checkout to have this in it.

[00:32:32] And I want to use these payment methods, but not these other ones. And I also want this post purchase, checkout flow to be going on. And I want these kind of abandoned cart emails, and I want this, and I want that like for somebody who knows exactly what they want, Shopify can be incredibly expensive and very frustrating because it has been traditionally difficult to cut it.

[00:32:53] So, this is where Woo’s strength comes to play. In my opinion, is that, if you’re on the right hosting provider [00:33:00] and you have a good agency that you can work with, that knows what they’re doing with Boone. These are out there. You can do a nice build and you can customize the hell out of it.

[00:33:08] Yeah. And get exactly what you want. And if you’ve got a good developer on Wu, you can make it run as fast or faster than a Shopify store. So performance, isn’t an issue necessarily if you’ve done the right things and you’ve done your homework. And, there are plenty of smart wound stores that do that.

[00:33:25] The downside to that, of course is complexity. And you got to have a higher threshold of technical knowledge either for yourself or a team to put that together. And, you’ve got to find the right agencies and the right developers. And if you’re talking about the energy and the Wu space and the energy.

[00:33:43] Shopify space. They’re pretty different. And there’s a lot of energy in Shopify and it’s hard to ignore that and there’s energy and Wu too, but to like sort out the wheat from the chaff is a little more challenging because those really good Wu developers aren’t necessarily out there trumpeting themselves, talking about how great their agency is.

[00:34:04] I can tell you the top five shops. Development agencies right off the top of my head because of what I see on Twitter, because of what I see in their blogs and just general social media activity, I would have a harder time doing that for woo commerce based on those factors. I know a few of them, but they’re harder to pick out.

[00:34:21] Matt: [00:34:21] Right. So do you think that’s because Shopify helps prop those agencies up to part of their marketing and sales? 

[00:34:28] Dave: [00:34:28] Yes. So WooCommerce as a platform, doesn’t do enough for partners and agencies, not the way that Shopify does, like here at Shopify at unite announced that they were abolishing the 20% at a revenue share on all of their partner apps up to your first million dollars a year.

[00:34:49] So basically it’s like everybody on the platform got a 25% raise, including recapture, which I was thrilled about. WooCommerce. If you want to go to their store, there was this discussion in post status that I was contributing to. If you are exclusive to the woo commerce store, 40% revenue share. If you’re non-exclusive it’s 60%.

[00:35:09]I understand why WooCommerce didn’t want. To just let every person possible onto the platform and turn it into the repo, like the repo turned out to, it’s kind of a, we’ll call it a mixed bag. I think that’s the, the most politically correct way I could say it. Yeah. There’s a lot of garbage out there and there’s a lot of good stuff and it does take some time to sort through it and figure out, I think they were trying to curate the woo commerce store experience to be a little higher quality than that.

[00:35:41] But I think they went about it wrong. And it’s 

[00:35:43] Matt: [00:35:43] been it’s 60% to automatic 

[00:35:45] Dave: [00:35:45] or 60, 60% to automatic. Yes. Wow. Which is, like, come on really. You’re taking more than half of my business. How am I supposed to be profitable at that point? It’s not this isn’t a charity to you. So these numbers are just [00:36:00] wrong in my, like, they don’t encourage 

[00:36:02] Matt: [00:36:02] catches a lot of flack for 30%, right?

[00:36:05]Dave: [00:36:05] Come on, apple, apple at 30 bucks percent is considered untenable and you all at WooCommerce that are doing 40 and 60%. Come on, give me a break. That’s why my plugins are never going to be on the WooCommerce repository. I know I’m not alone in this. So, there are some plugins that are there, but guess what?

[00:36:23] They’re all free. 40% of zero is still zero. So you’re good. They’re, they’re asking for me to share my revenue 60% a month. You just killed my profitability to the point where I can’t run my business anymore. So it’s that sort of mentality. That I think is hurting the Wu commerce ecosystem. Like there isn’t an agency support program.

[00:36:44] There isn’t a big conference every year. That has the energy of Shopify unite. There isn’t a partner program that really nurtures everybody along. Like with Shopify partners. Like you sign up, you’re getting an email a day for like 30 days telling you here’s some partner tips. Here’s this development thing.

[00:37:01] Here’s this resource. Here’s this? Here’s this here’s this guess how many times we got from WooCommerce? Zero. Yeah. Yeah. I, it they’re very different ecosystems and I think it’s to the detriment of WooCommerce, that they are not putting more energy into that, that piece of it, because that is a big part of why Shopify has been successful.

[00:37:23] Matt: [00:37:23] Yeah. I agree a hundred percent. And again, I have very little experience from the Shopify side. I just know from what I don’t receive from support from WordPress and seeing what everything else is happening. And I guess look at when you. Zoom out and take a look at the sheer size of WordPress compared to Shopify just I’m talking like installed platform based like that kind of thing.

[00:37:46] Yeah. The, the, the play for WordPress and automatic is when it comes to open source. How are you going to monetize it? It has to be done through like that trust factor. So it’s open source. It’s super flexible. It’s the same message. Automatic and you and I can go out and tell a customer and they’ll just win by having the most trusted plugin, a jet pack or a premium ad-ons from woocommerce.com or something like that.

[00:38:17] And they’ll win. On that trust level where Shopify, you’re just going to go there and spend money. Like you’re choosing that platform. So you’re you, you’ve made the decision to go there and they’re telling you, the whole platform is trusted with WordPress it’s. Hey, it’s great. It’s open source. Do whatever you want.

[00:38:34]But by the way, Jetpack is the most trusted way to secure and manage your site. And that also comes with whatever WooCommerce add ons that you buy for those bundles that they have for like 2 99, 3 99 or whatever. And their argument will be you trust it because it comes from ashore. You can go get Dave’s go ahead and get Dave’s.

[00:38:53] But you know, you’re going to trust us better because we’re the, the company behind it kind of thing. So I can’t fault them [00:39:00] for it. It’s just, one of those things. So many people have pushed towards jet pack or excuse me, to WooCommerce and WordPress because they love the software and there’s no, there’s that love doesn’t come back to us.

[00:39:15] What are we going to do? 

[00:39:16] Dave: [00:39:16] Nothing we can do. There’s nothing we can do, unfortunately. And the other thing. I, I don’t like, is that w well, so to contrast this, let me say, oh, Shopify does this. So Shopify does do acquisitions on things, but not like, not at the same level that I’ve seen automatic do it, where they pull in things like mail poet, right.

[00:39:35] Or there pull all this stuff in and turn it into Jetpack. Like Shopify is not doing that. They build stuff and they’ll build it to a level like, there was a year, I think it was like the first unite I went to and it was me. Two years after I’d acquired recapture and they released the abandoned cart emails.

[00:39:52] And those that knew me at the conference were like, so how do you feel about abandoned cart emails on Shopify now is like, I feel okay about it because they’re just, they’re 60% solution and I’m a hundred percent solution. And I can tell you like all the shortcomings, it’s great for people getting started out and it gives you those tools to get going and get your store off the ground.

[00:40:14] It’s never serious enough to like take you to the next level. So it’ll get you to like the 5,000 a month rate. But after that, it’s going to break down pretty quickly. Cause you’re just not doing as good of a job as you could be with other apps that are more professional. And I’ve seen this a little bit in big commerce, too, where they build in these features and then know they’re okay, but they’re not great.

[00:40:35] And you build your store up to a certain level and then you get these other things and you use them instead. I don’t see that with WooCommerce. They’re trying to pull in everything and say, okay, we’re going to be really good at email. We’ve got mail poet now, but are you really the best at email? Because you got all these other things you’re doing too.

[00:40:54] And you’ve got this team, that’s doing mail poet, and I don’t want them to fault the male poet folks. They’re a great plugin and they do a lot. It’s just, your priorities are going to be driven by the platform, not the customers that are using it. So. Is that going to make it the best it could possibly be and truly drive be driven by the needs of the customers on the platform, as opposed to the benevolent dictator for 

[00:41:18] Matt: [00:41:18] life.

[00:41:19] Yeah. What’s next from, is there a next platform play for you to integrate with? I think I was looking at another W3C techs report the other day and it for specifically for, e-commerce and. I would have to go back and dig this report out. Maybe, I saw woo commerce and in the Squarespace, e-commerce almost like neck and neck.

[00:41:41] Is that true? Is there square? I was like, suddenly like what Squarespace e-commerce is this big and even realize it is that like an area you’re going into or another platform? That’s interesting. 

[00:41:50]Dave: [00:41:50] We’ve, I’ve taken a quick look at Wix and Weebly and Squarespace, all kind of in the same breath.

[00:41:57]There is definitely a. [00:42:00] We’ll call it an economic shift on this platform where it is. It is aiming for a tier of store that doesn’t want to pay as much as you get in Shopify, or you want to get in Wu. And it’s difficult for me to convince a customer who’s paying $4 a month for their e-commerce website to pay 29 for mine.

[00:42:23] And I know this because of how the pricing worked in Shopify, like the base level in Shopify as 29. And the fact that I aligned with that. It makes it easier for me to sell my product because they’ve already made that mental commitment for 29. They’re getting another 29. Isn’t that bad. But when you’re at four and you jumped to 29, that’s too big and that’s not a, that’s not a battle I want to fight.

[00:42:45] That’s not a set of customers that I think are easy to deal with in that regard. So, I’ve looked at other platforms where we can head up markets. So our other e-commerce spaces. So things like Salesforce, cloud commerce. Things like that, but it’s a little trickier to get into that because you kind of need to know some stores to have the testability.

[00:43:09] Cause it’s not like you’re just downloading this, installing it and testing it out. You kind of have to work in tandem with somebody else. So, I I’ve got some plans. We’re kind of cooking that up right now. I don’t see, I’m keeping an eye on Squarespace and Wix and Weebly. And if they start moving up market.

[00:43:25] Mid tiers, which is quite possible. They could, then it would make a lot of sense to integrate because there’s going to be a large customer base there, but right now it doesn’t look economically viable. Yeah, yeah. 

[00:43:37] Matt: [00:43:37] Yeah. That makes, that makes total sense. I guess that’s probably why I was so shocked at the footprint of the Squarespace.

[00:43:42] Cause I was like, yeah, it makes sense. Because then you’re like, well, what are these people selling? They’re really seriously. Probably something like photo prints, and a couple of handmade things. That’s probably about it, certainly not an apparel line or kayaks, which you’ll probably find on Shopify, right?

[00:44:00] People who are manufacturing, things, stuff like that. Very cool. Dave wrote ball, recapture.io. Congrats on being a free man than the last time I talked to you running the business day to day. Where else can folks find you? What else can they look forward to from. 

[00:44:15] Dave: [00:44:15] Well, we just did our big release the 1st of July for SMS card abandonment and order notifications on recapture.

[00:44:23] So if you’ve been itching to try that out or see what that’s like, come to recapture.io and check that out. We also have broadcast emails out after Jill announced their shutdown, we had to make sure that was working to be able to seamlessly migrate folks over. So if you’re. A former Jilt customer and you’re looking for a place to land.

[00:44:41] We’d love to talk to you at recapture and see if we can make things work for you. If somebody is looking to get a hold of me, you can find me on Twitter at Dave. 

[00:44:51] Matt: [00:44:51] I heard you’re actually making phone calls too. Right? You’re calling people up, doing it the old fashioned way 

[00:45:00] [00:45:00] Dave: [00:45:00] because your cell phone fashioned way, I would like, knock on their doors and press the flashes as it were, but that’s not happening.

[00:45:08] Matt: [00:45:08] Everyone else. Matt report.com maryport.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. Don’t forget to tune in to your weekly dose of five minute WordPress news every [email protected]. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you. In the next episode.

This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by how to market your plug-in dot com a framework for the sleep deprive developer. If you ask yourself, how do I get more downloads for my plugin? What about more sales? Should I do this lifetime license thing? You need to pick up the book, how to market your plugin over app. How to market your plugin.com.

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This episode is also brought to you by media, ron.com media ron.com Ronald Ereka he’s back. He creates WordPress plugins. In fact, one of his plugins I was searching for the other day. Totally forgot that he made it called highlight and share. He creates a highlight and share plug, and you can highlight sections of texts and share them with your network right on your WordPress website.

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Probably just like you, the exploration for the secret ingredient to running a successful business is a tricky one. Speaking for myself. I can tell you that I’m constantly trying to learn and dissect what some of the most successful brands are doing in my space. How did she do it? What does the website look like?

Product I service or digital product. Smash that like button on a secret formula to generate $5 million in Facebook ad sales.

And all of this with our blinders on. Sometimes the real secret is just staying in the game. Today’s guest first joined us eight years ago. Right? When he and his wife were making the transition to full-time product sales, leaving custom client work behind. Now paid memberships pro has over 100,000 active installs, according to the wordpress.org directory and his business is getting a lot more focused on doing what works.

Has Jason considered converting, paid memberships pro into a hosted solution. What about outside acquisition? You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out. You’re listening to the Maryport.

A podcast for the resilient digital business builders. Subscribe to the newsletter at maryport.com/subscribe or follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Share this episode on your social media. We’d love more listeners around here. Okay. Let’s get into today’s episode.

With Jason.

hey, Jason, welcome to the program.

Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m a big fan, a big listener, and it’s good to just get to chat with you again. Um, I’m going to do this every couple of weeks.

Like there’s a thunderstorm today and I’m going to, you know, the thunder storm is gonna cancel this one too, and I’ll have to reschedule for next week.

so I last had you on eight years ago, when you were one of the founding. Interviewees of the Maryport podcast, a lot has changed. And a lot hasn’t changed. Uh, for paid memberships pro and your business. Uh, and for WordPress. Chris lemma re recently wrote a post about, uh, the future success of WordPress, which we’ll get into in a little bit and sort of how he sees hosts playing a role in the adoption of WordPress, uh, streamlining WordPress onboarding, even specific flavors of let’s say membership sites, e-commerce sites, that kind of thing.

But go back in your time machine and let me know, where were you mentally? Eight years ago with the business. And when we first interviewed.

Yeah. Um, so that, that would have been 2013, which would have been a couple of years after paid memberships pro launched. And at that point PM pro was really a loss leader for our consulting business.

So it was mostly just Kim and I, and we had a couple of contractors, um, you know, who helped out with random things. But we, you know, we had a membership plugin for WordPress and we parlayed that into, you know, 10 to $30,000, you know, gigs installing WordPress from membership sites and things like that. Um, and we were, we were doing that transition of like, Hey, how do we transition from a consultant company to a products company?

We were just starting that around 2013 and, and also like figuring out our first hire. I remember how hard, like the first hire was, um, And now it’s kind of like, you know, we’re hiring all the time. It’s like, it has to be a process where we’re constantly, like we have relatively low turnover of employees and we’ve been like, grateful for that.

But even that, like just growing and, you know, people go occasionally that, you know, we have to, as a process now, like hiring people as a process, it was like a huge deal. The biggest thing of the year, you know, in 2013. And now it’s just another process. Yeah.

Probably one of the most, uh, popular, free membership plugins that are out there.

I know there’s a lot of plugins out there that sort of skate by semi membership. You know, they’re doing like log-in and access control, but certainly not to the degree of integration, ad-ons support general reach that you have memberships a hot space. Uh, when we’ve chatted a little while ago, I was curious of how do you.

Competitively make the distinction between membership LMS. Like how do you fit yourself in the market so that you get the right customers and not the wrong ones?

So you’re arguably the most popular free memberships plugin. Um, you know, and there’s some other plugins out there that are sort of like a third degree from a membership, like they do user profiles and they’re also a membership. But a pure membership platform play that is you.

How do you make the distinction amongst the third party competitors? The ones that have kind of sorta a membership plugin. And those have like an lms like a lifter lms a full-fledged learning management system where do you make the distinction with your marketing and your messaging?

Yeah. So there’s a ton of competition. And I remember one of our first, uh, kind of big web ventures for Kim and I was a wine website, like a wine tracking website, and that was another kind of niche.

That like every week there was a new competitor and people like, what about this? What about this one here? Like, it’s just part of business, like they’re here. Um, and I feel like membership plugins are the same way. And maybe that’s just because it’s what I’m focused on. Any business is the same. Um, but yeah, there’s a lot of membership plugins and they specialize, we like to call our homepage.

We’ll say that, you know, we’re the most complete membership solution for WordPress. Um, and we really focus on. Members as like the core unit. And so you mentioned like LMS plugins, we integrate with LMS plugins. Um, you know, a lot of people who run membership sites want to also have courses. A lot of people who run core sites also want to have memberships.

And so when we’re talking to like a prospective user and trying to figure out if our solution is good for them, you know, we like to ask them like, what’s the focal point of your business? Like, if it’s. The members are the focal point of your business. Like you’re an association or just, you know, in your mind, do you think about your members as like the important component and then how do I sell them things and how do I give them lessons?

Like you might want to start with paid memberships. Pro is like the center component of your website and use like our courses add on or use an LMS that integrates with ours, you know, but focus on PM pro. And similarly, if you start with like a course and you really care about all the features that they have, like quizzes and progress, right.

Um, you know, certificates and all the things that they do really well, like that’s the most important part and you really just want to charge monthly for access to that. You could probably get by just using their membership add on. Um, and there there’s so many different ways to like build these things.

I really feel like that’s, our job is to like find ways. To cut through all the options for the customer. Cause it’s like overwhelming, they’re overwhelmed with options and they just like, just tell me what I’m supposed to use. And we’d like to be the default choice, but you know, sometimes other solutions are better than ours in cases.

So it’s really like a conversation has to happen to figure that out.

It seems like it’s balancing. Being like the core engine I’ll call it. I’ll call it the engine of a membership for somebodies WordPress website. It’s a fine balance to say that we’re the engine, but you can also use lifter or you can use our ad-ons. Maybe you can even use another membership plugin, if somebody’s crazy enough.

So, how do you balance that? Uh, that messaging to say, look, we can act as the core component, almost like the routing. Of the commerce section, maybe even the permissions and access, uh, section. Of your membership site

man, it’s tough. Like, cause we early on, so like 2013, we would have been just getting into it.

We had a plan called like do it for. Uh, so we offered for like $500 at the time, like, Hey, we’ll install, paid memberships pro for you and do like a little bit of coding. And a lot of those little bit of coding were kind of these add ons that we’ve developed like, oh, integrate with, you know, event plugin integrate with BB press.

Um, and so we, we built this footprint of integrations that kind of worked if a developer would wire it up for them. And the most popular ones were like, well, everyone keeps asking about this and they say, it’s complicated. They don’t know how to code, so we try to make it easier. And so, yeah, we kinda have that process of like, it’s a platform where a press can do anything.

Let’s kind of have a, just that does it. Then when the just becomes popular, let’s kind of streamline it into a plugin that still has some. Potentially like settings or it needs a developer to set up and then let’s try to streamline it into something more user-friendly because as you go up that scale, like, it definitely becomes more and more to develop and maintain and support.

Um, and we had ad-ons like our MailChimp add on early on was like more fully featured than the general MailChimp add ons that were out at the time. And we were like, Hey, let’s build this in a way that you could use it even without paid memberships. But we didn’t really market it that way. Um, but then it was kind of like, so we see this again.

And again, like people will build a plugin. That’s like one of our ad-ons, but in a general way. And it was like, it was as much work to build it for PM pro in the sense. And now I’m, you know, uh, not giving them credit for everything they have to do. And all the MailChimp solutions are kind of, you know, have surpassed our ads.

Now, but at a time it was like, oh, like we could, so it’s tempting to like, oh, we should just start an LMS business. Cause our little, you know, courseware plugin is pretty close to what they do, but we’re kind of finding our space where like for the courses plugin that we built, we built it’s launching soon.

And it’s um, you know, we tell people who want a course, like maybe you don’t need a plugin. Maybe it’s just a PDF or a page with content or a video. Like if your course is pretty straight forward, you don’t have to conflict. But the, the plug-in that we have, we’ll just add CPTs for like the basic structure of a course in the lesson and have a little bit of kind of progress tracking.

And we felt like that’s the bare minimum and we don’t want to get into anything else. So if you want anything more than that, that same plugin will just integrate with learn dash lifter, um, learn, press, and like the most popular LMS. And that way we have kind of one plug and the maintain integration with all those LMS plugins, instead of like a bunch of different integrations went off with each one.

So we’re hoping that’s easier to maintain,

I’m just going to speak as a product maker and owner in a very small scale compared to what you’re doing. But going back to my days with a conductor. I know one of the challenges is when you try to stay lightweight and you try to have like this modular approach. Like you could get into LMS, but that’s another add on.

Uh, the ad-ons and extending your core product. It can be another tricky thing because you have both, you have customers that request ad-ons Hey, it’d be great. If we worked with MailChimp convert kids, Salesforce, like all these other add ons that work. That customers are requesting. So you start looking at that as like market opportunity, and then you have the ones that you build and like, oh, wouldn’t it be great to again, have that LMS section.

Um, Is there a process that you work with internally? To reign that in. Because I know from building conductor. Creating ad-ons is a, is like, It’s another micro product that you have to support in the sustain and look longterm. For example, when we were building conductor, we were building out Genesis templates.

Um, before it became studio, press. So it was one of those things where. It was. Before, you know, it was like six months to a year to two years and like, oh God, like. This add on, hasn’t been touched. It’s no longer. Really doing what it was supposed to be doing, but we don’t really have that many people using it. Uh do you have a balance to that is there a way to work through that methodically

Yeah. Um, we try, I don’t know. Yeah, it’s a challenge. I don’t know if we handle it.

Well, a couple things that we do differently that maybe some other companies are coming around to as well. Um, but definitely like we have one big bundle. Um, like one price for everything. And so we don’t have a marketplace. Like we have more, there are third party plugins, but they’re like outside, you know, we don’t have a marketplace where we sell the third already plugins, which is a good thing and a bad thing.

So like it’s bad in the sense that having a marketplace really does encourage developers to get involved because they’re going to get paid. And I remember back in the day of like, I made a Jigoshop plug. Uh, for Braintree integration. And I think it sold like one copy per month, but like it just the fact that there was a marketplace encouraged me to kind of like generalize it and push it out there.

Whereas I wouldn’t have done that otherwise. So it encourages involvement, but what happens then is it’s really hard to manage all these different people. You don’t really have control over the add-ons that are important. And we saw companies like EDD and WooCommerce did this too, where they bought up a bunch of the most popular ones to kind of bring them in house.

So we started with that. We were like, Hey, we kind of get it. Important to us and we, we bring it in house. Um, and we just try to like tell the developer community like, oh, we’re working on, of course this plugin, you probably shouldn’t or like, you know, if you want to help, this is what it looks like. It’s all open source.

Um, the other thing we do with that with integrations is I always try to make those plugins available for free and in the.org repository. So our rule of thumb is if it’s an integration with another service or. We’re not going to charge for, we’re going to make it free and.org. And that incentivizes like both us and the other party to kind of maintain the plugin, the integration plugin, because sometimes it’s awkward.

Like if they’re selling it for $50, but you know, you’re not. And so you’re like, wait, why am I helping to maintain like the thing you make money on? But I don’t, or like, It’s open source. So I could take your code or if I really feel like you’re not doing it well, I’m going to make my own version. And so that’s awkward when like, you know, who’s plugged into you buy ours or theirs, or it doesn’t encourage us to work together.

Whereas like upfront, you know, when I reached out to integration partners, I’m like, Hey, we’re going to make it free. We’re going to make in.org. And the business model is not to sell this integration. It’s, you know, the support, both our platforms. And in some ways that’s leaving money on the table because it’s a little bit opposite of how.

The market has been, you know, how things have been in the past or what they expect. And it feels kind of right where if you’re like, Hey, I don’t use MailChimp. I use convert kit. So I’ll just buy the convert kit one, you know, I don’t have, instead of like, I’ll pay $300 and I get all of them, but I only need one, one of the ad-ons.

So, um, I guess, I mean, if it’s free, it’s free, but like, so like people are kind of trained to pay. It’s it’s such a great value. If they’re like, Hey, for $50, I solve exactly the problem you have. Like that, like that business transaction is so much better than kind of like supporting the platform and all the crazy things you might do, you know?

So it’s, so we give up the opportunity to sell something like really direct to just say, but it it’s better for the unuser and that, you know, we may we’re the incentives are in alignment for everyone to maintain that integration. Yeah. And that’s the most important we feel like at the software level is good.

Like the business will work its way out.

So I’ll pull from the hint of Chris Lemon’s article and I’ll, I’ll have that linked up in the show notes. But what is your opinion on web hosts being in the perfect position to. Well, not only own the customer, but be able to own the experience. So if they own. A web hosting customer who maybe isn’t even using WordPress right now. No.

Oh, okay. I’ve got the static site. I’ve got this other thing that I’m using. Uh, and I’m going to launch a WordPress site. I can click a button launch, a WordPress site. And what I feel is like what Chris and many other folks are leaning into in the hosting space is we’ll have these ready, built. Websites for you. So in the case of membership sites,

Uh, you know, they’ll want to click of a button and you’ll have all your membership plugins ready to go. Ready to host. Uh, without all of the fuss of going too well, folks like you or searching the directory and knowing which pieces of the puzzle they have to put together as the end user. And, um, you know, controlling that experience for, you know, for the better of the customer, it’s less stress for the customer, less head-scratching. Uh, but it could eventually take money out of your pocket from some never having to search for paid memberships pro because they clicked a button. They got. Uh you know uh, another membership plugin powering their website so your thoughts on the hosting market creating these experience for customers

I think it makes sense, you know, this kind of, uh, you know, um, what do you, bigger businesses are buying up the smart businesses and consolidation that’s happening in the space.

Makes sense, because from, uh, from my perspective, um, There’s a couple of things. One is like, as our business grows, we kind of need more middle management. We need more kind of structure. Um, you know, I, I sometimes joke like, oh, the next, you know, four hires are like, you know, like a lawyer, an accountant and an HR person.

And it’s like, not really stuff that like, you see, like, Producing in the company. Um, and so like it’s for companies of our size, it’s like, oh, instead of doing that, you know, just, you know, sell yourself a bigger company and adopt, you know, their management team. So that’s enticing, like from a business perspective.

Um, but then also like hosting, like a hosted version of a product makes a lot of sense. Um, we capture all these customers and a lot of them already have a website or they’re transitioning, but some of them don’t and it’s like kind of weird to be like, okay, well, like go build a website and then come back to me.

Um, or like, we start to like help them earlier in the process. And we’re like, you know, Hey, we could take it’s really then tempting the business opportunity of like instead of $300 a year, take like a hundred dollars a month and give them like a standard hosting package. It makes our support a little bit easier in the sense that like we know exactly.

You know how they’re set up. We kind of cancel a lot of issues. Um, but then we have all these hosts, like hosts have fake. Whenever people say, just do that. I’m like, that’s actually really hard. Like, you know, I’d have to like, You know, help support people’s email and, uh, you know, cashing on their server and like when they want to do crazy things and if they get hacked and the security, and I was like, we’d have to figure all that out.

And the host I’ve already figured that out. So it makes sense to partner with them. So that’s like our perspective. And then I think on the host side, like hosting has become commoditized. So they need things to differentiate themselves from their competition and they need kind of products. People like both the products themselves, but also I think the personnel is important too.

Like we need people who can like think from a product perspective, um, to build solutions for the end-users. Like, I think. Some of the hosts. I mean, they had some really great people inside, but they need more of those people, you know, thinking in that, that way. And I’m in alignment with, with Lama that, you know, a lot of end-users don’t, they’re not buying hosting, they’re not buying WordPress or paid memberships pro they’re like, you know, build me a, uh, you know, a trade association website or build me, you know, like a website for my business guru business, or build me a newsletter subscription website.

And if we can connect with the customer at that experience, you know, It’s a, it’s a more direct sale. And part of that, like a huge part of that stack is the host and, you know, you know, they fill it with the product. So it all makes sense to me, I guess,

So just lots of competition coming at you everywhere you have other free. Plugins competing with you in the WordPress repo. Now you have potentially have web hosts coming with pre-packaged membership plugins. You have standalone membership. Software as a service solutions that are out there already.

Tons of competition. Have you ever just thought about like picking up your toys from this playground and going and building your own playground and doing the hosted route? Uh and going that maybe more traditional software as a service model with paid memberships pro

Yeah. Uh, so still now committed, like our goal is to be the default membership platform for WordPress sites. Um, like if you are going to do memberships on WordPress, like we should be in the consideration.

Like we should be one of the ones that you think about using. Um, and when, like I said, we’re not going to always be the perfect fit, but we’re good. And we’re, we’re pretty tied to WordPress. Like it is tempting, but like I said, to kind of, you know, build a hosted solution because. There’s like when you do the math in a spreadsheet, there’s kind of money there.

And then it’s kind of a simpler experience for the customers. Um, but to do that, well, we’d have to kind of joint venture with at least joint venture with a hosting company or someone who knows how to handle that. I think, um, which is like a little daunting. And like, whenever we really toy with those ideas, I feel like I’m taking my eye off the ball.

You know, it’s kind of like the, the core business we have. Is isn’t stable enough that, you know, to take all that attention away and try to like build basically competing business. Um, so we’re like really focused on WordPress and I feel like we’re like, has a spot, like definitely like the competition, you know, like Stripe itself as a competitor.

Like when we built Stripe integration, we were like probably the first membership plugins. Um, I almost said like e-commerce player. I don’t know. Like we really jumped on strike really early. Um, probably when they were like beta labeled, but we built tripe integration and like Stripe, just handle payments and subscriptions.

And like, if you wanted to cancel your subscription, we built a GUI for that. If you wanted to see your invoices, we had to gooey for that and we kind of managed everything, but now Stripe has like, um, it’s called like Stripe payments or billing. I forgot how they brand it, but it like, they have more of that UI on the stripes.

Um, and you can envision a plugin that kind of is way more bare bones than ours. Um, that just everything’s in Stripe. And like, so like a Stripe straight up Stripe, WordPress membership, plugin, um, could compete with us where people just use Stripe. They don’t even have to use a WordPress plugin, you know, they just put the button on their site.

Um, so there’s just, but anyway, yeah, there’s, there’s competition like that. And there’s other competition of like all-in-one solutions, but there’s always going to want to be a type of site, especially ones that are being built by agencies. That need more control and need more flexibility, want more ownership of their data and how things work.

One, to be able to scale up in a certain way and kind of. We’re going to just keep trying to target that user both like on the DIY side, you know, so it’s like a lot of stuff is easy to set up, you know, just out of the box and follow our instructions and our videos. Um, and then the beauty of WordPress is, is flexible and you can make it, do whatever you want.

So it’s like, ah, I got a really cool idea to integrate with this thing and I can get to the code it’s open source and we can have a developer do it. So we’re always going to be focused on that, that user and. We’re tempted and we build proof of concepts and we think about it all the time, but we’re kind of focused actually on like the WordPress experience for now.

Let’s shift gears just a little bit, instead of talking about only the challenges. Uh, assess where you are. With the success of your product. Through the lens of what you’ve done with marketing, messaging, content, social. What have you done really well there. And I’m also thinking of. I know what it’s like to operate a product, not even just with like my own stuff, but what we do at, at Casos is.

We’re always at that stage, like, man, what? Just one more, one more feature. If we just add this one more feature, we’d have X more sales or X more downloads or many more customers, and then you get that feature built in. You’re like, oh, One more feature. I just want to add. One more feature to this list.

When a lot of us should take a step back and say, look, I’ve got a solid product. I mean, you’ve been proving it now for eight plus years. Uh, maybe we should be focusing more on messaging, marketing, outreach, distribution, that kind of thing. So where are you with that? Uh mental tug of war as a owner and product create.

So, I guess like the pat myself on the back, we did do a great job of like content marketing, you know, Kim, myself, you know, Travis and other team members that helped, like, since 2013, we were just constantly blogging.

And the method works is like, when we get a question, like we’re like, oh, let’s answer that question and make a blog post where we answer it and put it out on the website. Um, and there was good tips in that area where like, you know, We would always try to generalize the questions, like solve a very specific problem, but yet don’t say like, you know, doing X, Y, Z with paid memberships pro it’s just doing XYZ.

Um, yeah, it kind of increases the range of people who like one of our best performance. Blog posts is like how to name your membership level. And so if you’re not using WordPress or paid members for anything, you just started trying to figure out, do I call them my tribe or my peeps? Or like, you know, like Kim did a bunch of research on like what the most common words are and kind of ways to brainstorm it.

Um, so that, I mean, that post gets like, I don’t know, like a few dozen, a hundred visits a day. And so it’s posted like that, that kind of drove traffic. And we, we played the long game with developers in terms of like, I remember talking with agencies and developers, like our solution is the best you should use it.

And they’re like, yeah, sure. And then like a year later at a, at a conference, like you’re still not using our plugin. And it’s like, oh yeah. I mean, to do that. And after a while, you’re like, we’ve kind of, we’ve kind of survived into our success, you know, but marketing could be better. Like we were focused on it.

We’re focused kind of on a lot of stuff, but marketing general, we just hired like, uh, Patrick Rolin to help out with marketing and we’re hitting, you know, we’re going off to a good start. I’m trying to figure out. And there’s lots of little things like. We, you know, we struggle with like who our audiences, because like we’re a platform and it’s like, who uses your website or your, your software?

And they’re like all kinds of people. And you’re like, you know, the marketers and the business people say like, well, just focus on one, you know? And it’s like, well, how do I do that while also keeping them, you know, a platform because WordPress did that. Well, automatic did that with WordPress and WooCommerce did that, but full commerce, like they, you know, I was like, we want to still keep a platform.

But there are things we could do. Cause I was sitting here just thinking about like, we really are like probably like the easiest way to just charge for access to a post page or category with WordPress and like our homepage we’ll get into the technical stuff and the, you know, the kind of important stuff.

And I was like, oh, there’s a customer that just wants to charge $5 for access to a page. And like our homepage doesn’t sell that really well to that customer. So we’re figuring it out, both like. How do we take our levels and make them products and know who to target audience of all those products are and kind of sell that better.

How do we, we also like there’s kinds of all this data collected and we’re going to do like, um, you know, tagging and kit or we’re, we’re switching to convert kit, but MailChimp has tags and other ones too, where it’s kind of like, Hey, if you read this blog post, if you kind of click this button on our site, if you read this email, okay, we can guess that, like, you don’t even have a WordPress site yet.

And we should just send you our affiliate link for liquid web, um, you know, or something like that. They were like, you know, oh, you’re, you’re importing from something else. So let’s kind of show you. Our tools for importing from our competition and stuff like that. Um, so kind of gathering more data so that we can send more specifically targeted messages, uh, is something that we’re working on and that that’ll probably help us get to the next level in terms of competing with the other membership.

How much do you look at the success of your customers? Uh, membership sites. And how does that weigh into the overall success of paid memberships pro. And again, I’ll preface this with a couple of things. So at Casos, one of the things I’m always challenged with was, well, if you don’t. If you never create a podcast and then you’ll never be successful with a podcast because you haven’t found the time to commit to the podcast. So I can’t help you be successful as a podcaster. If you can’t.

Manage, uh, the time commitment you, you need to put into creating at least one episode a month. I recently spoke to Dave Rodenbach, recaptured.io, sort of the same thing. If his customers aren’t selling. Uh, product through their e-commerce store, largely in his world. If you don’t have a good product or you don’t have a good price or a good experience, and you’re not going to buy in, how can we reclaim and help you reclaim sales? If you’re not selling any product?

How do you measure that in the marketing world of membership sites, digital products, digital access to content. Um, that seems even. Harder of a uh, of a challenge because of the just the wide breadth of that marketplace

Yeah. I mean, that is an issue. I know, um, you know, we get like churn stats and we share some of them and I forget exactly where it is, but it’s. W I think we retain like 60% of people who sign up pay this year, or six only 60% will pay next year.

And people will be like, oh, SAS industry standards or something is like higher. Um, and it’s like, so we’ve got to, we got to do better. There’s stuff we could do better, but I’m like, how many of those just are not in business anymore? Like, you know, like you can’t get that customer. Like they don’t, they’re not making money anymore.

They’re not, you know, no matter what you’re going to do, like, you know, their business failed. Um, so that’s definitely an issue. There’s a couple of things we could do is like one is like help them. So one thing that’s exciting is an update that’s coming out for paid memberships pro, which like almost every other e-commerce related WordPress plugin did is how we integrate with Stripe in particular called Stripe connect so that our Stripe account is kind of linked to theirs.

Um, so that when we get a percentage of the, you know, it’s like a half a percent or something of what comes through, um, we’re launching this and, um, so. That aligns you with your customers. So it’s like, oh, the more money they make, the more money we make. And it’s kind of exciting once it gets to scale is that, oh, we can just like put out a seminar for free that helps people do better and be more successful with their business because it’s going to benefit us in the end.

Um, so that’s exciting. The other thing we try to do is, um, potentially focus on customers where that’s less of an issue. Like I never got into the, what do they call it? Kind of like the entrepreneur or the kind of like hustle porn or, um, You know, like I’m not a fan of selling in that way where it’s like, I know you don’t have a business now, but you know, it’s really easy.

And like, you can have a business. I think if you, yeah. I mean, I like to joke about, so some of those, like here’s a car I bought my mom. Um, but yeah. So I think like not marketing to them is like a first step. And instead, like there’s, especially in the membership space, like there’s associations that like, yeah, we have 5,000 members.

We’ve had 5,000 members every year for the past 20 years. Like never changes and like, we’re just going online. So it’s kind of like, you can find those businesses that are already successful. Um, and I was just saying this to him. Another, like a presentation for like GoDaddy’s a webinars series that was targeted at agencies.

And I think for consulting, it’s important to like, I mean, if someone wants to give you money to build a website from scratch that may or may not work, like take their money, set their expectations and try to do a good job. But if you focus on customers that, you know, already have a business already have, um, you know, some kind of a relationship with a potential customer, like to have a mailing list or, you know, um, You know, so, so we will try to focus our marketing on those marketing, on those kinds of customers that already have a business that’s working, um, which should help that.

Like it’s when sometimes when I’m. Uh, when people are. Are are, are complaining and griping because something’s difficult about setting up a website, which I, I tell you, I relate to you by the way.

Cause it’s like, I do this for a living. I wrote a book on WordPress, but like I was helping a friend every once in a while. I don’t do it for paid, but I’ll help friends set up websites sometimes. And I’ll just be surprised at how hard it is for me. It’s hard for me. It takes a lot of time. But when people gripe about the effort that’s involved, I’m like, did you realize like you’re starting a business and it’s not easy.

Like, I don’t know where you got, like, just wait until you, you have your own angry customers or like. Other stuff, you know, you got to deal with taxes and all the random stuff and in part of business. ,

Speaking of business, not being easy recently talked about this on the WP minute podcast. Uh, WP engine did a report that the WordPress economy is like $600 billion. Uh, right around that, that mark. Lots of talk recently with acquisitions, um, you know, smaller developers picking up even smaller developer plugins, hosting companies like nexus purchasing every plug and that they can get their hands on. I’m sure this is not.

Done, uh, automatic acquiring, um, Day one journal, like so much acquisition happening. In this space. Have you ever thought that? Well, maybe we can build a bigger business with PMP. If we went that route, we were able to go. To nexus and joined them with a membership plugin or wp engine that kind of thing what are the cards hold for acquisitions or investments in that space

Uh, yeah, we have thought about like acquiring, um, other plugins products and, you know, it’s kind of sparing some of that potentially is that the programmers are in demand. Um, and so. It feels, uh, like I feel bad about it, but I see some products that are, yeah, I’ve actually, I see products that people are side projects that people are doing.

And I have a saying that like when they get to a thousand dollars a month, Sometimes it’s really tough. And they’re like, this isn’t enough. You know, I think I’m going to stop. And I’m always like, no, a thousand dollars a month. Like you’re halfway to $10,000 a month. Like you’re not halfway to $2,000 a month.

Like all that work you did to like collect any money whatsoever and build up to a thousand. Like usually if you have a product that’s going to fit like your, at the time, it took you to get to a thousand dollars a month. You’re going to get the $10,000. Um, so that’s me like pumping up other entrepreneurs and trying to push them at the same time.

I’m like, man, if it doesn’t work out that guy’s really sharp. And like, if he he’s, he’s, he’s kind of shown that he can think product minded and build something. And like, if he can’t make enough money to make a living, like, Hey, let me like give you a salary and kind of give you a job, you know, and you can build cool stuff for us.

So I, yeah, I’ve kind of had that thought, um, of like, oh, like, Product people, if it’s not working out their side gig, like when they look for, you know, a salary job, like, Hey, we get like a really smart developer that proves that they can ship. Um, and so I think there’s some of that mindset at every scale, you know, I’m sure like, you know, something, some of the size of automatic would just by people or by business for the people behind it, you know?

Um, and that’s part of liquid, but like I said, hosting companies want product people, um, and people who can handle that to kind of, you know, maintain things. Um, and then. If you ask me, like any business idea, like, have you considered, like, it’s almost funny, like, yeah. I consider everything, man. Like I love the staff.

I probably have a spreadsheet that models it. And like, I’m like, I’m always talking and like, um, you know, like I can’t wait to get back to like the conference circuit and like, you know, having drinks with Chris lemma late at night. Cooking up schemes of, you know, like, I feel like at one point I said, like, I was like, oh, can I just like sell my company to, and then work on machine learning.

I was like nerding out about machine learning. And he was like, I have an idea for a machine learning thing. And it was like, yeah. So like, have I talked to Chris Lama about like quitting my job and like doing machine learning stuff for him? Like that happened once. Um, yeah, but we haven’t really ever been serious about it.

I did take a month earlier in this year where I was like, Hey, I’m going to have kind of informal talks, you know, with different people that just see. What might happen. And I was like, I gave myself a deadline of a month and made that clear. Um, and at the end of the month where like, no, like the current plan of like, you know, hire really great people, kind of get them handover the responsibilities that Kim and I have so that we don’t have to spend as much time on kind of like maintaining what we have and we can push out a new directions.

Like I like being my own boss. I like having control and I think we still fit and we it’s good to have independent businesses in the WordPress space. Um, Yeah, but like, I mean, this space is valuable and all these companies are valuable. So it’s, it’s kind of exciting from that sentence.

I mean, you know, a market is really growing booming even is when you see. I saw recently a small product that was announced in January of this year. So 2021. Um, already being sold. I mean, it has a nice website, has a nice name, nice brand. You know, it looks good, but it probably has less than a hundred customers. If that may be, I don’t know, unless it’s really doing much better than I thought it would be.

Already for sale. And like in the back of my mind, I already know that somebody’s going to buy that. Uh, there was, uh, on startups or the rest of us. Uh, Rob walling. Had I think he tweeted something or somebody sent him an email. I forget where it was, but somebody who was doing like 80,000 ARR in their business sold for one point something million.

And it’s almost like if you’re a product maker, developer, this is almost like your way in. You know, to get acquired. So it’s like, it’s almost like the absolute best sort of resume. So if you can build like a micro product, get some traction and then turn to a business that you would actually like to work for. And there is some synergy between your little product and their big product. You could even sell that to them.

As like a signing bonus, almost like here, I’ve already proven this. And I’ve got a customer base that comes with me and I can develop it for you. Uh it’s an interesting world for the small product creator uh at the end of the

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s analogous to like how not, you know, Programmers and people who can build products on demand, like people who can, you know, build engaging podcasts are in demand. And there’s like a big gap between like building it and then making money for it and, you know, running a business.

I mean, I’m spoiled that, like I have Kim as a partner who is like COO of the company and like get stuff done and can handle, you know, a lot of the, the business end and the accounting and stuff like that. And like, we get help for a bunch of individual things, but it’s like, if I was like, just me by myself as like, I’m, I’m a pretty creative person.

I can like build stuff and think strategically and stuff, but like actually like keeping the business running and not falling apart, I would have been lost like years ago without someone like him. So. Um, it’s hard. Yeah. To make that leap from building something cool that people can use to like making enough money on it, to make it your data.

But it’s still really hard to make a compelling podcast. So I’m with you like people and there’s demand like, you know yeah. Instead of finding something and hoping they can build a podcast, you know, the resumes they’ve already, you know, shipped a podcast.

Jason Coleman everybody. Jason, where can folks find you to say thanks.

Yeah. So I’m on Twitter, Jason underscore Coleman. Um, and my blog is the real Jason coleman.com. And yeah, we got a courses out on that’s shipping in a week or two, and we have a big, like a 2.6 update, the paid memberships pro, which is wrapping up some, some features and, um, uh, it’s got better Stripe integration, you know, that’s going to be good there.

Fantastic stuff. Everyone else. matterport.com. airport.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. Don’t forget to tune into your weekly dose of WordPress news in five minutes or [email protected].

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[00:02:02] Welcome back to another episode of the Maryport podcast. This is a topic that we’re going to talk about today. It’s called something. I call founder marketing. Uh, my friends, Brian castle and Jordan Goll recently talked about this on their podcasts. They’re both hiring. For this media creator role.
[00:02:19] And I guess it’s going to come in many forms. Uh, and fashions. This is something that I do here at my day job at Casos where I create the podcast. I do the YouTube channel. I do some marketing stuff generally is about creating this content. To help. Not only promote, uh, the Castle’s product and the brand.
[00:02:38] But to know where the synergies needed to create. You know, sales. Um, onboarding product enhancements, support enhancements, building out community. It’s not just do a podcast. Get listeners get downloads, that kind of thing. Or do a YouTube create a YouTube video. And try to get likes and views and subscribers, although.
[00:03:03] It does contain the sum of those many pieces. This founder marketing thing or this creator It’s a bit of a unicorn. If, if I pat myself on the back just a little bit, it’s a bit of a unicorn. Because when you’re hiring for this role, As Brian and Jordan, uh, find themselves in. The challenge is to find somebody who can, can understand.
[00:03:25] The business and the opportunity in the market and the customers. Just like the founder. So, this is where I get the founder marketing title from it. Maybe could be ironed out a little bit more, you know, into something else or a little bit something more direct that you could put into a job listing. But the way I see it is as you have to.
[00:03:44] Feel like the founder and know the market and the product and the customer, like the founder in order to create the content that attracts. And the customers to it. Otherwise you’re just telling somebody to go create this piece of content and they can shoehorn it. Right. And they people do it all the time. People outsource this to agencies and there’s nothing wrong with it.
[00:04:04] But it’s very much from a. A strategic standpoint. Uh, almost utilitarian, I guess, where you make a top 10 list or, you know, do a tutorial or a how to, or comparison piece of content, which can be researched. And understood at that capacity, but the emotional side of it is, is very hard to fine tune.
[00:04:28] So on bootstrap web, where Jordan and Brian host their podcast, uh, I’ve had both of them on the show before countless times. They started talking about this journey of hiring this media creator person. So number one, if that’s you check out that episode, it’ll be in the show notes. And reach out to either Brian and Jordan for a potential role. It’s going to be kind of interesting to see them.
[00:04:48] Going head to head. In this space and seeing who they hire and how they hire. Uh, I think it’s a great time. It’s a great opportunity for us creators that are out there. So if that’s you. Creating your own little, uh, YouTube channel or podcast. And by little, I mean, maybe you’re just starting out and you’re trying to gain traction, but this could be a great opportunity to say, you know what.
[00:05:09] I have a small audience here it’s growing might not be growing as fast as I’d like, but this is an opportunity for us. It really puts the power in the hands of the creators. I think. When software businesses, or any businesses in general think like media companies. Because if you looked at. Traditional Hollywood, let’s say.
[00:05:28] And how much of a closed ecosystem that. Well, probably still is, but was definitely 20 years ago. Four. You know anybody to produce a movie, any actors to show up comedians, et cetera, et cetera. And then you look at. Introduction of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon. Everybody is now. Now has this secondary market of content.
[00:05:53] Where it’s not just the big television channels and the big movies. So that’s the only distribution points anymore. There are far more distribution points, far more opportunities. For creators to create no, the traditional media that we, that we think about movies and television. Let’s break down a few clips. Uh, I also have a Twitter thread on this, which will be in the show notes. If you want to engage with the Twitter thread and see some of the activity happening over there. So we’re gonna play each clip from.
[00:06:20]This episode, the most important clips I think from their conversation. And then i’m gonna break it down uh verbally here okay so let’s dive into the first clip
[00:06:28]Brian Casel: The first and most important position I think is, is the media creator, uh, role. And so this is a person who I’m, I’ve been talking to a couple people, but it is a really difficult one to find potential candidates.
[00:06:42] So I’m looking for somebody to essentially like co-host podcasts, be a show runner for, for new podcasts, video content produce videos. Um, so somebody who is like a great storyteller and has the technical chops, like the video production podcast, chops, you know, doing interviews with other people, uh, coming up with creative, uh, premises for a new show and just, you know, being like just driving the creative content that comes out of this.
[00:07:10]
[00:07:10]Matt: So we go back to, this is the founder marketing role, right? This is why it’s so important to me. For somebody to have that founder, like experience. Which again, I know it was very difficult. It’s that unicorn position, but I think the best candidate for what Brian. Is looking for. Is going to be somebody who has, uh, that close relationship to the customer, to the product, into the market. Somebody who’s as excited.
[00:07:37] For his product. Uh, as they would be, if it were their own product now, again, very difficult to find, but I think that’s where he’s going to find. Uh the best candidate for
[00:07:47] Jordan Gal: it feels like what you’re really what you’re saying is that there needs to be a function. That creates an audience and does that by understanding what the audience wants and providing value to it.
[00:08:00] And then the media that supports it and delivers that value,
[00:08:04] Brian Casel: I would say yes. And coming up with creative, new ideas, like a new new premise, not just find a hundred founders to go interview every week. Like. New angles, new, new premise.
[00:08:18]Jordan Gal: that you, you emphasize that in the job listing where it was like, we don’t want to do the same stuff.
[00:08:24] We want to really think about why we would do something. And then, and then look at the format that way. Not just, well, let’s just do another podcast because that’s what everyone does.
[00:08:34]And this is on the flip side. This is where a great creator is going to really enjoy a role like this because. Which, and I’ll preface this preface, this breath preface with saying that. This is also a challenge for, uh, Brian and Jordan. I feel. Because they have to be hands off. They have to let the creator create because that’s, what’s going to yield the best result.
[00:09:01] And if you’re a creator out there, Doing your thing. You know this, you know, that. If there’s less restrictions. Uh, You know, unless sort of control and you have more autonomy to do. What you need to do to create a great piece of content. That doesn’t have to be just a podcast. It spans across podcasts, audio, video.
[00:09:21] Written, uh, email newsletter, even if you were doing some kind of like social campaign. You understand where. Your strengths are and how you’re going to communicate this message. And if Brian and Jordan can, can let the creators create, I think that’s going to be the best outcome, but also the hardest for them.
[00:09:42] To not manage, but I have expectations for, because I think so many founders might be. Uh, so goal oriented or developer oriented where there’s sprints and there’s sales goals. And there’s marketing goals where like visits and conversions that the creative side is very hard to measure, especially when you turn to them and you say, Hey, I need, I need time.
[00:10:05] To do this. The more time you give me the better it’s going to get, but it’s not going to be like this constant production wheel happening. I mean, it eventually will write, like I found a pretty good stride at Casos. But in the beginning it’s like i just need time to absorb this I need the time to look at my creator canvas and i think that’ll be the biggest challenge for brian and jordan moving forward
[00:10:27]Jordan Gal: So first step. Audience. And now this technical marketer role is really the transition between the audience and the product.
[00:10:37] It’s like the bridge on identifying some people in the audience. Are are, are going to be interested in what we’re doing as a product, not everyone. And, and you’re not building the audience solely for the purpose, like, cause that people see through that you want the authentic version of media and an audience and value and then allowing for a bridge from there over to the
[00:10:58] Brian Casel: product.
[00:10:59]
[00:10:59]Matt: And just to wrap some context around this. This is Jordan, uh, explaining back the technical marketing role that Brian also wants to hire. So he wants to. Hire it in tandem. This content media creator, plus a technical marketer to sort of carry the ball. The other. Uh, half of the way down, down the field to use a sports analogy, terrible one at that. But.
[00:11:23] Hiring the media creator go out and do the creative. Do the show running, create the actual content, hire a marketing technical marketing lead. To help distribute the content, help convert the content and, and measure the success. Of the content. So number one, very smart move for, uh, for Brian to be thinking that because it can’t, it can be two people.
[00:11:47] In a very low pressured setting. Um, and by pressures, not even just the pressures of, uh, of the owners or the other teams, but just the market in general, like how much content do you need to create to compete with others? Uh, how much time do you need for each piece of content? Having somebody else carry the ball. The rest of the way on the marketing side is very smart.
[00:12:09] Uh, you definitely gonna need a budget to do that. You need to be able to hire two people at once. Um, you can do it in the beginning. It really depends on what your capacity is as a creator, but also, uh, how you can streamline your processes and, and what the actual overall goals are. So very smart to have these two separate roles, because largely they are two separate. Parts of your brain thinking about how to approach this stuff
[00:12:33]Brian Casel: it’s about thinking about that target audience and distribution before we even create. The content. So if the technical marker and myself are in the mix on coming up with ideas in collaboration with our, with our, uh, media creator, It’s about, we know that at the end of the day, we want to reach this segment of people.
[00:12:57] So how can we start to come up with creative ideas for, for a show, with an awesome premise for, for that, that, that, that audience would just eat up every single day. And the technical marketer can think about as we’re ideating on this stuff. Okay. If we’re going after that audience, these are the types of channels that we can go to distribute that, that show and grow the audience for it.
[00:13:19]
[00:13:19]Again, this is where I go back. Let the creators create. This will be the challenge. All right. How do we give somebody the freedom, but also at the same time, like push this marketing and promotional thing forward so that we know it’s working. I would say it’s going to take a solid six months in order to really hit a stride.
[00:13:37] You know, working together. How content calendars are created, how content is created, how it’s shipped, how it’s promoted, how it’s repurposed. Which is very, very difficult. Two. Even like, think about and make time for it because you, you create so much content. That you just don’t want to let it.
[00:13:57] Be done. Right. You spend all of this time, all this investment in it. How do you keep that? Content fresh. Newsletters communities, et cetera, et cetera. So things like that big challenge, but good that Brian’s thinking about it as two independent. Uh
[00:14:12] responses.
[00:14:13]Jordan Gal: I’m going to argue that there’s a third function, a third role that we we’re going to bump up against immediately.
[00:14:23] And that is of community. Because it is a really tall task to ask someone to lead the media creation efforts and also focus on community. Some people are like magically talented and do that almost like inherently. They just can’t even help it. They just create media and form an audience around it and communicate with that community at the same time.
[00:14:49] And it can be the same person for a certain amount of time, but they are like, Uh, there’s a third element there around community and fostering it and, and kind of
[00:15:00] Brian Casel: communicating with, for that community piece
[00:15:03]
[00:15:03]So my last comment, just foreshadowed this clip. Uh, in, it’s interesting to see Jordan already with the wheels turning you’re you’re already thinking about, okay, what’s that third pillar that comes next and he’s saying it’s it’s community. And it most certainly is maybe not for every product and brand that’s out there.
[00:15:22] But the key thing here is that, that. That, even those two people, the creator and the technical marketer. Can not be responsible for. Building and cultivating and supporting a longterm community. Again, everything can be done temporarily. Just won’t be done. Great. And it. Won’t be done. Very organized.
[00:15:44] And there’ll be a lot of pressure on one person to do everything. But hopefully what this does is bring it to light. Because a lot of people just say, oh, I’m going to hire somebody who does marketing, oh, by the way, do a podcast, do a YouTube channel, do this marketing thing, report on the metrics. Tell me what the conversions are, do the email newsletter. And can we do it a community with that? I mean, sure. Anyone can tackle all three of those at once, but it’s just going to be done poorly to the point where the person who’s responsible for it is ultimately just going to burn out because.
[00:16:16] Uh, approaching a community, which is something that I even struggle with at Casto. So it’s something that I want to do, but I’m quickly realizing I can’t do all the content creation. And do the community well. What I can do is I can see the foundation of the, of the community. I hope. And then that can be carried through.
[00:16:34] By somebody else in the future. Uh, or I take it at a really. Minimal viable product approach, where it’s just very, very. Small chunks of what a community aspect might be. And that could just be conversations that are happening. Uh, in a circle app. Right. But a true community is going to be just constant engagement.
[00:16:53] Constant engagement, constant, you know, pruning and supporting and making sure people are engaged and that there’s. Value being taken away from it, because if there’s not somebody doing that, it’s very, very hard to get the momentum for our community to take off where it just supports itself. I think a lot of people think community cause they’re like, oh great.
[00:17:12] This will be interaction that’s just on autopilot. Yeah, everybody gets into a room and of course they want to talk about. The product, the brand and you know, what their experiences are. But you need somebody. Constantly engaging in that. Again, whole new responsibility, smart to think about it. Smart to think about it as an independent responsibility
[00:17:32]Brian Casel: My thinking on that is now if you want like a, like a, an engaged community who, who is interacting with each other. The audience has to come first,
[00:17:42] Jordan Gal: the audiences, the is the raw material in some ways that, yeah.
[00:17:46] Brian Casel: And, and like for a brand new community, like if you want to start slack group or a circle or whatever you’re going to use for your community, it’s just such an insanely difficult Boulder to push up a hill.
[00:17:59] If you don’t have an audience to begin with, or if your audience is very small, because truth of the matter is for every hundred people who follow you. Only five of them or less are the type of people who will actually leave a comment in the community. The other 95 might lurk. They might watch, but they’re just not commenters.
[00:18:18] That’s just the nature. So you need thousands and thousands of followers to just spark a community
[00:18:25]I think that too early on trying to create a community out of a very small audience, you’re going to waste resources.
[00:18:32] You’re going to waste like people or waste hours waste money on a extremely difficult uphill battle.
[00:18:40]And that’s Brian, just proving my point. He’s been doing it now for a while. He understands. Um, The challenge of community so i have nothing much more to say on that other than what i just said previous to brian what brian just said in that statement
[00:18:56]Brian Casel: especially for that media creator role, it’s a really difficult, I am talking to a couple people, but I think what I’m also starting to look at, I don’t even know how viable this is, is to sort of be like a scout and try to find.
[00:19:10] People who have like a small, like a young podcast or YouTube channel or both sort of in the space. And maybe look to acquire them and that show and, and enroll with that, you know, but like how do you find someone who hasn’t blown up yet? You know, um, this is what we talk. You can see, you can see the talent, like on the page and it’s.
[00:19:36] So, yeah, so about that
[00:19:38] Jordan Gal: too, and this is kind of an opportunity for someone listening or someone that they’re familiar with to just raise your hand and basically say, well, I’m talented. I just need a chance. I just need some budget. I need, I need a bigger stage to perform on
[00:19:53]
[00:19:53]Again, finding this person is. We’ve been talking about all these challenges, but it’s going to be finding this person who, who meets this criteria. Who’s able to produce this kind of content. Uh, it’s just a super challenge. So I’ll speak towards just who the creators are. If you’re a creator out there listening to this, and I can tell you from my firsthand experiences,
[00:20:13] You start running with a project. You love the project. You never want to see that project go away. Uh, or yet you could never consider yourself part of another brand. You just let it go. Right. Like at some point you realize like, okay, In order to get better as a creator in order to challenge myself and then move on to something else.
[00:20:33] Then, if this is something that’s interesting to you, what Brian and Jordan are talking about. Look. Being able to, Hey, I got my, my YouTube channel up to whatever, whatever your number is, a thousand subscribers, 5,000 subscribers or whatever it is. And you’re, and you’re feeling like you’re hitting a plateau, both from the growth side and from the creative side.
[00:20:54] Then you have leveraged there. So I guess what I’m getting at is if you’re building something and you’re not super happy with it, It’s valuable to somebody else valuable to somebody in this position and Brian and Jordan, aren’t going to be the last brands, hiring somebody to create content for them and create to create content well.
[00:21:11] That you can leverage that. And I’m not even saying you necessarily get rid of it. Uh, or give up on it or, or, or sell it so where maybe you do sell it. Right. So if you are in the technical space, cause there’s lots of us. That do the technical review, the software. The plugins, the tutorials, that kind of thing.
[00:21:29] This would be a great. In road to say, well, look, I’ve, I’ve built up this. Audience. This brand, I have this many subscribers. I’ve had this many videos or this many listeners. Let me sell this value to you and, um, I think that’s perfectly fine. And one that you know is only up to you as a creator, whether or not you want to do it.
[00:21:49] But the options are there and the options are, are going to keep coming. I think. Um as more people invest in this space
[00:21:56]Jordan Gal: I can’t help, but I keep going back to news, like what’s happening here, industry. Who’s doing what who’s collaborating with, who, who raised money, who hired, who, who left this, who starting something new? Like that’s the stuff you talk about on a day-to-day basis. And I think there’s an opportunity.
[00:22:11] To create media around that, that turns that media brand into a destination and somewhere that people look to regularly, and that would be, that would be power.
[00:22:24]
[00:22:24]Uh, the context around this clip. From Jordan was he’s looking for something that’s that’s unique. Like what could he produce? At his new company rally, that would be a unique twist on content creation that isn’t just the interview trans. Uh, the interview podcast or even well, a high produced podcast where it’s more storytelling and engaging.
[00:22:46] Um, you know, in much, in much higher production. Is thinking about news and sort of just staking a claim in whatever market you’re in, you can’t report the news and have your unique angle on it. And I totally agree. This is a huge opportunity in this space. For many reasons. One it’s more topical and.
[00:23:05] When you’re creating content like this, like I do with the WP minute.com podcast. It’s very specific. It’s very specific to WordPress news. It’s very specific to only five minutes. And that is. The premise there because. I’m serving. I have clear definition of the audience that I’m serving no more, no less.
[00:23:26] It’s it’s targeted. So. I know who I’m serving. I know why they listen. And I know how to produce it on repeat. Whereas even a show like this, which is much more long form. Sometimes it’s solo shows sometimes. We’re talking to somebody and doing an interview. You know, it’s 30, 40, 30 to 45 minutes, maybe sometimes an hour. There’s a lot of stuff that can happen. It’s it attracts different types.
[00:23:52] Uh, of listeners production is always different. Uh, shownotes are always different. Value is always different. And while it’s it’s great. And it’s, it’s a brand building experience and it’s engaging for a lot of people. Uh, the audience that tunes in and the brand awareness that it raises can kind of be all over the board, which is.
[00:24:14] It’s good. It’s still good. Um, but when you do something hyper-focused as a news, Or a super, super hyper-focused, um, maybe educational podcast. Then you just have clear definitions and things or. Are much easier that way. Um, From, uh, from an audience perspective, maybe from the creator’s perspective.
[00:24:36] A little bit harder to just stay within those lines all the time. Depending on what it is that you’re, that you’re doing and covering. Uh but definitely easier to create a process for and ultimately uh raise awareness
[00:24:49]Jordan Gal: This is the same thing that we talked about with Barstool. Sports wear is a draft Kings, right? The gambling site, they just bought the exact audience that gambles. So it’s very natural alignment. Yep. Yep. Cool man. Well, I have a feeling we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk a lot more about this and we’re going to pretend not to be fighting over people for the same world.
[00:25:13] Right. But we,
[00:25:17] Brian Casel: so, uh, yeah. What, what else you got going on?
[00:25:19]
[00:25:19]So I’m really interested to see how Brian and Jordan end up, uh, sort of tongue in cheek here, like feuding with one another. Right? Sort of you think about like big Hollywood executives sort of sparring over the, the, the, the best actors and actresses and best, uh, directors and, and scripts to buy. And, and, and it’s almost like that huge.
[00:25:40] You know, world of Hollywood that’s feels so water out of touch being really shrunk down to this, you know, finite thing that could be. Uh, happening across many brands trying to hire talent. Um, trying to find the talent is a challenge at a higher them trying to acquire them. Put a number on it. It’s very difficult.
[00:26:01] Uh, and to find the right person to do it all. So it’s, uh, I I’m sitting here smiling ear to ear because I’m really interested to see this challenge unfold for both of them and how they both go about it. And interested to see if they do cross paths and find somebody who has applied to both because they have a strong listenership. And if you are listening to this, you could be applying to, to their job openings as well.
[00:26:23] Um, But at the same time, lots of opportunity in this space now. And I think this is sort of validating it. This founder marketing role. Um, And I think that there’s going to be a lot more of this happening. Because there’s a lot of, at least in the WordPress space. And even the people that I talk to now and know code and software as a service.
[00:26:44] Founders are either. Hyper-focused on sales. And growth. So that’s the other angle of it. This is stuff that you need sort of after, I’ll say with air quotes, after the content creation. Um, or they’re they’re founders and they’re the founder developer, right? So they’re actually building the product. There’s no time.
[00:27:00] Uh, there’s no creative aspect. There’s no social aspect for some to just get out there and create that content. So. Big big opportunities ahead. I don’t know. Let me know what you think if you, uh, are interested in, uh, number one, applying for that role, check out the bootstrap web podcast. What Brian and Jordan are doing. Jump on that Twitter thread, click on that in the show notes. And you can just engage with them right there. If that’s the quickest route to it. I have a let me know what you think about founder marketing right on twitter okay that’s it that’s the Matt report. we’ll see you in the next episode
[00:27:30]

Tara Mindful School Marketing Matt Report + 2

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[00:00:56]Matt: [00:00:56] episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search WP. Find search [email protected]. Let’s talk about the power of their metrics. Add on for a moment. Since I redesigned the Matt report website, I put search front and center on my homepage. Why search WP metrics metrics. Give me the inside data to what visitors on my site are looking for.

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[00:01:49] Forming a successful partnership in business might be the most powerful, yet most challenging things to do. Right. That’s probably an understatement of the year. This goes beyond simply linking to each other’s businesses or handing over the occasional customer referral. I’m talking about two or more partners, both handling responsibilities and working towards a shared goal for the overall mission. 

[00:02:10] Tara clays, founder of design TLC has a certain knack for this stuff. She co-hosted the WordPress podcast hallway tracks alongside Liam Dempsey, and is now laying down roots with a new partner in podcasting, Aubrey Birch. So I think it goes a little, something like this. Aubrey invests her knowledge and experience with easy school marketing into the podcast content while Tara flexes her strengths and design compassion, and years of podcast experience. Together. They host mindful school marketing, the go-to podcast for independent school professionals. 

[00:02:40]You’re listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter at maryport.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Please share this episode on social media. We’d love more listeners around here. 

[00:02:56] Okay. Let’s talk to tara and aubrey and why they started this [00:03:00] crazy podcasting thing that they 

[00:03:02] Tara: [00:03:02] First of all. Thanks for that. Nice mention and hallway chats is really a labor of love that Liam Dempsey and I did for three years. And I think that was it a great experience for us and introduced me to podcasting and it was a complete community donation, there was no business development involved with it at all.

[00:03:21] And so, and we loved it and I continue to love it. But As time went on during that three-year period of time, I started niching down my own WordPress agency to do work for mainly schools and nonprofits. And as part of that process reached out and met other people in the school, community, marketing community, Adria among them.

[00:03:38] And she and I have been in a mastermind for over a year now. And so we struck up a good friendship and also collaboration, our services sort of overlap. And so the long answer is that we in that. In that relationship that we built as hallway chats was sort of winding down. I really didn’t even miss a beat before reaching out and seeing if Abby would like to do a podcast that that was directed toward our, our common target audience, but also that we could have fun doing as well.

[00:04:12]So there is a business development aspect of this for us, as well as a community aspect as well.

[00:04:18]Matt: [00:04:18] The, yeah, you’ve obviously have a knack for finding.

[00:04:25] Great co-hosts, which is not an easy feat in the podcasting world. It’s one that I have failed miserably at for about nine years as a podcast. It’s like just trying to find somebody who just wants to talk to me for an hour every week. What’s wrong with that.

[00:04:39] Shouldn’t be that difficult. It’s very difficult. Aubrey, I’m going to pass the question over to you. Is this your first time into podcasting? And if so, how did you feel 

[00:04:49] joining 

[00:04:50] Aubrey: [00:04:50] And it’s been a blast. And I am so thankful every day that Tara actually asked me to do a podcast with her because I was thinking around February, 2020, I was like, I should launch it. Podcast. And I’m so glad I didn’t act on that first impulse because Tara’s kind of taken me under her wing and really like showed me everything that goes into, preparation for a podcast, execution, everything.

[00:05:15] And it’s just been a great learning process for me. And also Tara?

[00:05:19] is one of the most generous, amazing. Like solid people you’re you’ve ever met. I, as you probably know, Matt. And so we just kind of hit it off in terms of, understanding each episode and what our flow was with the episode.

[00:05:34] And so we jumped right in and she’s been just such a great guide and such a great co-host. I couldn’t have asked for a better one and I’m so grateful for the opportunity for sure. 

[00:05:45]Matt: [00:05:45] I’m looking at the website right now. Mindful school marketing.com seven episodes in you probably have a couple others you haven’t finished and uploaded yet. Has there been one major surprise to you Audrey about this whole podcasting thing, [00:06:00] something more challenging or more exciting than you

[00:06:03]Aubrey: [00:06:03] Well, I would say the challenging

[00:06:04] thing is I guess when you have a co-host and it’s not a challenge, it’s more like putting together the pieces, right? Like we’ll be talking and we’ll be typing in the chat. Sometimes we’ll be like, oh, like, okay, this is conversation is going. Do you want to ask the next question?

[00:06:17] Or should I, and so that I had never, I’ve never, Co-hosted or co interviewed anyone. So that was, I don’t want to say it was a challenge, but it was like a new experience. And just what was it challenging and rewarding? I would say this whole, just the people we meet, it’s just amazing, like the, the little hidden gems that they sprinkle throughout their conversation.

[00:06:37] I just feel like, my bookshelf has grown tremendously because we always ask like a question about like, what’s your favorite book? Or like, what book would you Recommend for the high school curriculum or something like that. And we are getting some great books in there and like, there’s, what is it?

[00:06:52] The anglers fly fishing, person we add on. That’s just fantastic stuff. Things come up like really good conversations that, in this busy life that we live, it’s so rare to kind of dive deep in like center and focus on, on someone for like 30 or 40 minutes. So it’s been fantastic. 

[00:07:08]Matt: [00:07:08] I feel like just picture like a smoke-filled bar and me and Tara, just sitting at the bar with our whiskies going, oh, she’s got, oh, that’s what she thinks right now until, until we’re on like episode 20. And, and then Arby’s. The whole demeanor changes about podcasting. This sucks. Why didn’t you tell me to do this, that’s exactly what we’ll hear in about three months, but Hey, everything’s great right now. 

[00:07:30] Tara, how much of your. Of doing the hallway chats and, and marketing and everything you’ve done up until this point in your career. Did you, how did you funnel into, I’m going to read the byline of the podcast right now, the go-to podcast for independent school professionals.

[00:07:45] There’s no messing around. We know what this is about. How did you come to this and what are some tips for people who are struggling to get a premise 

[00:07:54] Tara: [00:07:54] well, I think there are a

[00:07:55] couple of things. Aubrey has a great personality. She’s got so much energy that I think it’s really easy to work with her and to have a team that way. So thinking about going to your question about, choosing co-hosts and Liam and I had a similar kind of, we each covered the basis, I think.

[00:08:10] For this podcast, positioning ourselves that way. One of the things that we thought about a lot was the fact that there were really no other women in this space doing a podcast. And that a lot of the people that, that do these jobs, these marketing jobs within schools, private schools, independent schools are women.

[00:08:28]So we saw an opportunity there to bring a sensibility that we have as moms, as women entrepreneurs, as women in general too. Should this space. So I think that sets us apart from there. Aren’t that many, to be honest, like enrollment related podcasts for schools like this. So, there was an opportunity there, but I think what we wanted to do was to, to feed our own sensibility that we learned about each other during the, our mastermind.

[00:08:56]As we’ve gotten to know each other, is that. We’re both super [00:09:00] interested in. Self-improvement like, we both love all the books about that. Oh, we’re we just are. Really can’t get enough of that kind of thinking , and to have that mindset and apply it to any job, you can, this podcast could be the, anything mindful school marketing podcast, really, because it is about, I there are specific things, certainly that we.

[00:09:21] Talk about that are related to challenges that schools face, but in general, to do a good job at anything, you have to be mindful about it. And so it’s been really fun for us to talk to people who, who deal with that. People who work with different personality assessments and continuous learning and self-improvement type stuff.

[00:09:43] And it also has helped us. I think we identify. The roles that we play in this podcast partnership based on those types of personalities. So it’s a really, well-rounded I think conversation that we have in general on the podcast. And that’s what I think makes it a go-to podcast is that it’s not one, it’s not one week after another, about Facebook ads and marketing funnels and stuff like that.

[00:10:05] It’s it really, we touch on those things, but we also bring into it lifestyle stuff, which is really 

[00:10:10] great. I think. 

[00:10:12] Matt: [00:10:12] is this a fair statement? In the WordPress space? And RB, I’m not sure how much you know about WordPress podcasts, but there are many, there are many, sometimes too many, sometimes not enough, but there’s like probably 20, at least reoccurring WordPress podcasts and as exciting and as large as the WordPress market is.

[00:10:34]Folks like Tara and I, there’s very few of us who actually care so much about the inside baseball of WordPress to do a podcast. And that is to say that a lot of folks show up on Tara’s old podcast, my podcast, other podcasts, it’s the same person doing the same, routine and there’s nothing wrong with it.

[00:10:51] It’s just that the listener, the audience says. I heard her story on this other podcast. I’ll skip this episode or I heard his thing over there. I’m going to skip this episode. Do you feel a little bit of that? Not to put words in your mouth, Tara, this is a long way of getting it. Do you feel like that’s alleviated when you’re doing a podcast like this?

[00:11:10] Because it’s so concrete, it’s so precise versus the

[00:11:14] hallway chats. 

[00:11:14]Tara: [00:11:14] I would say what hallway chats was designed to absolutely. Get around that. So we talked to people who didn’t share their story before in this case, I think because we’re not talking to people who are only in that space. We the people who are listening to our show, maybe haven’t heard that story before, because they’re not familiar with that person.

[00:11:35] So, in WordPress, there are the WordPress people who, people, the stories who we’ve heard and who are super smart and have great things to share on podcasts. But if you brought in somebody from Squarespace or, some other kind of web world, they would. They may be famous in their world or popular or well-known, but they’re coming into a new environment.

[00:11:55] So I kind of see that. I don’t know ABI 

[00:11:57] if you agree, but we’re not just talking to 

[00:11:59] people in the

[00:11:59] school 

[00:12:00] [00:11:59] Aubrey: [00:11:59] yeah, I would absolutely agree. I think that’s what makes it really interesting. And I think valuable for people listening are independent school market because they are used to hearing from the same people over and over in the space and by Making our podcast about so much more than just, delivering the hardcore marketing behind and for independent schools, I think that’s really opened the doors to some very interesting conversations and some unique guests that our audience would not hear from 

[00:12:27] otherwise. 

[00:12:28]Matt: [00:12:28] Aubrey on the marketing side, pass the questions back to you on the marketing side. Is there anything that you’re doing on a. Or how you think or how you approach or how you edit the show on either a per episode base or just podcasts from a 50,000 foot view. Anything you’re doing specifically on marketing to make sure that I hate to say the word return on investment, because a lot of people in the podcasting space get caught up in that three letter acronym, but is there anything you’re doing hyper-specific on the marketing side to say every episode that goes out is a chance for us 

[00:12:59] to get 

[00:13:00]Aubrey: [00:13:00] And please tear, add to this. I would say it’s a lot about brand awareness for us at this point. And we’ve strategically made sure that? we’re sending to an email list. We share it on our email lists. We have our guests share the podcast on their platforms. We use it at least I use it as an entry way also to other speaking engagements too, because it adds to your credibility in the space.

[00:13:22] Immediately. Oh, you have a podcast. It’s a great conversation starter too. So, we’ve definitely utilized obviously the social platforms to promote it. And then some of our colleagues have shared it on their lists too, which they have quite large lists. So it’s really been quite easy. I would say to promote at this point just naturally using using the resources we already have. 

[00:13:44]Matt: [00:13:44] Yeah, my full-time job is at a podcast hosting company and fielding questions from, beginner, podcasters and veteran podcasters alike. And a lot of the questions are around monetization advertisement, sponsorship. How many downloads do I need before Coca-Cola knocks on the door and says, we want to sponsor your podcast.

[00:14:01] It’s like, well, get in line with the rest of us. So you’re either going to do direct sales or you’re going to find a creative way to do it. What people often forget is the relationships that you build in the random opportunities that show up because you have a podcast.  I can’t even account how many dollars that has added up for me over, eight or nine years as a podcast, or it’s tremendous, very hard to measure, very hard to rely on, but it happens.

[00:14:31] It’s almost like if you. Yeah. Like you can do a podcast and nobody can listen, but they just know you do a podcast. And they’re like, oh yes, they’re putting in the work over there. But if you ever stopped doing a podcast, they’d be like, oh, they gave up, oh, why do they give up? Just the mere fact that you do a podcast heightens your investment in. 

[00:14:50] Tara: [00:14:50] Yeah, that’s an interesting point. Actually, when you say that I’m thinking about it because our podcast is relatively new. We launched with four episodes and we’ve had, about, we’re doing two per month. So yeah. When we [00:15:00] look at the download numbers, it, they’re not huge at this point. And so if you focus only on the download numbers, I think then you’re, it’s going to be harder to translate that to that return on investment.

[00:15:11] But what you’ve described, what ABI was talking about, just the, the authority that it brings to each of us and to us as a team is I think not measurable, but really, really helpful. And that’s probably right now at this phase in our. Podcasting career is, is the key. And then once that grows and then the downloads, I think will follow because people will know more about us.

[00:15:33] So, and we haven’t delved into sponsorship yet, but that’s on our list. That’s something I don’t have experience with because we didn’t do that on holiday chat. So 

[00:15:40] I’ll be reaching out to you, Matt, for help when we get to that point. 

[00:15:44] Matt: [00:15:44] Yeah, well, this is an, it’s an interesting segue, cause I literally have your sponsorship page in front of me. Cause I wanted to talk about this. It’s sponsored by of course the both of you. So you have easy school marketing and design TLC, but this is very interesting because I’m interested to know how you balance and I know you.

[00:16:01] I know you’re obviously both not shouldering to have the best call to action up in front of everybody every time. Like it’s my turn this week, or maybe you do a interested to learn like design TLC has a special offer. Take our free website test, right? So you can click and get that. Or easy school marketing has joined our free virtual monthly school leaders, power hour meetups, two vastly different sort of call to actions and values split amongst two.

[00:16:26] Co-hosts kind of interesting. Have you seen some good. Return on. I know it’s young, still seven episodes in, but it’s an interesting way to think about it. How did you think about it? And will you go to the

[00:16:38] paid sponsorships? 

[00:16:39] Tara: [00:16:39] Do you want me to answer that Aubrey? So I built the website and we did is, did a sponsorship page. And so it was really, to be completely blunt, it was the natural way to put content on that page was to have us each put our own information because right now, yes, we are funding it and producing it.

[00:16:55] And so we are the sponsors of it. We’re not driving traffic to that page. I think. Once we have a little bit more time and downloads under our belt, then the plan is to go to some authoritative companies within the school marketing space and, and, and share some sponsorship package ideas with them. But we are not quite there yet.

[00:17:19] And I think That’s something that we need to think about and plan, I always had this issue with, with hallway chats or issue concern. I want to make sure that any sponsorships, I see them also as endorsements. And so, I think you have to be particular about that. And especially in these times that you’re choosing companies that you feel good about having involved this year podcast.

[00:17:43] So that’s, that’s a key element 

[00:17:44]Matt: [00:17:44] When I booked on your calendar, it was like three months out or something like that. You had, you have a pretty good pipeline already of shows. Do you feel like you’re already getting booked too far out ahead?

[00:17:55] Aubrey: [00:17:55] Think we’re in the sweet spot 

[00:17:57] right now. The w w what we did was we [00:18:00] actually intentionally batched as many episodes as possible, and the first couple of months it was a whirlwind, but actually it was really good. And I think good practice for me being new to podcasting. To do that.

[00:18:12]And we strategically set the episodes to go the more timely ones, obviously we’ll go before the ones that are more timeless. So I think we’re set and we’re set for the summer, which I think was key to both of us who are looking for work-life balance which we talk about on our show. So we’re living it too.

[00:18:30]And then we have a funnel for potential guests that we want to have on. Moving forward into the fall, like, and we’ll start reaching out to them and then creating another batch wave. I think that’s key for us. My schedule is incredibly busy. I know Tara’s is due. So it’s, it’s really planning strategically and then making sure we have the right people in line next. 

[00:18:50]Matt: [00:18:50] Aubrey as the marketer in you, or does the marketer in you scream to say, look, I got all this content now. Like I can do clips. I can do Instagram posts. I can do top 10 episodes. Like there’s all these things I can do. Is that starting? Are you starting to get the itch for that already? As, as you start to plan and plot going into the fall 

[00:19:09] Aubrey: [00:19:09] I talk to my clients about all the time. I think we have to look at our bandwidth, and what’s realistic. So what can we do given the time and the energy and the resources that we currently have, and then figuring out strategically. Okay. Obviously I would love to do all those things, man.

[00:19:24] I’m a creative by nature and I’m a marketer and terrible tell you I’ll throw a million ideas to Sunday, right? So it’s picking and choosing which ones to use and then, putting those into practice because we can all try to be perfectionist and try to create the perfect podcast plan with the top 10 list and everything like that.

[00:19:43] But that’s, it’s just not. It’s not going to be executed well, and it’s either going to burn us out and then we’re going to lose the joy for what we’re doing. So I think that’s the key and that’s how the mindset I’m going into it with. And Tara, please feel free to chime in, but I think that’s really important.

[00:20:00] It’s like we’re doing it and we love doing it. And so we want to keep looking, do we want to keep, keep loving doing it? And so, we’re, we have to just be strategic about where our time and energy goes and what, and how we’re going to market, how we’re going to market it. 

[00:20:14]Matt: [00:20:14] is there an inverse there where the, where. I remember when I, the reason why I started well, the podcasts that we’re talking on today was to try to find a way to grow my, at the time WordPress agency, that I was running day to day. And I use the episodes as leverage in, in sales, not. You’re not a known agency, didn’t have any real brands or logos in the portfolio of recognition.

[00:20:37] So the only leverage I had was, Hey, check out these at the time, whatever 50 or 60 episodes, that was an iTunes. If you like what I’m talking about there, maybe we’ll, we should be pretty good for doing business. Have you seen it the other way around where you’re now leveraging this podcast for the business in, in specifically in sales opportunities for people to get to know you a little bit better?

[00:20:57] Tara: [00:20:57] Yeah, I think we talked about before this whole [00:21:00] idea of authority and, our tagline is the go-to podcast and there’s a great book called be the go-to that I’ve been reading, as I explored diving into this, this vertical of schools and how to, how’d you approach that it’s a very, it’s a very small market, I think relative, relatively, so becoming known in it.

[00:21:21] Requires putting your name out there and in a certain number of ways, speaking at conferences well, COVID, kind of has put the kibosh on that. And and so the podcast is a way. To build that authority. So I think I’m not sure if that’s answering your question, but I do an Abra does when, whenever we do presentations, we mentioned this podcast.

[00:21:38] I mentioned it when I’m chatting with clients about about our services prospective clients. And then there are episodes also that have good pieces of information that I think are, are easy to share. As well with existing clients. And I will point them to this episode. This is a great tidbit that we heard about Facebook advertising, check it out, that type of thing.

[00:21:59] So yeah, it’s, it’s multilevel something that will help our businesses grow. We hope right. And if not, we’re having fun and we’re sharing great information with people and meeting really cool people. So that’s, I think you have to have that perspective. We committed to a year of doing it and we’ll see what happens and, and 

[00:22:16] hopefully it’ll go on from there. 

[00:22:18]Matt: [00:22:18] Remember when you said you 

[00:22:19] Tara: [00:22:19] We did. Yeah. Each year, one at a time.

[00:22:22] Well, like you said, you have to, like, if you can’t commit to a year, you’re you shouldn’t be doing it. So 

[00:22:27]Matt: [00:22:27] Let’s shift to the, to the business side of the businesses that, that you both run. And specifically in that, in the market of, let’s just say educate, and maybe I can’t bucket this in to this category, but education school, the school department, school systems. I remember when I sold a WordPress hosting for a company called Pagely primarily to higher education, like the sales process. Was like year and a half long, to just to get, Hey, we’ve got this idea. We want to switch hosting to a year and a half later, they finally made the switch. If I was lucky when I was selling websites at my agency, just local school systems, nothing major, but local school systems, same thing, huge long drawn out decision by committee process, I guess.

[00:23:11] Rightfully so. Has COVID changed this at all for web and marketing, from what you both see in, in your respective spaces, are people moving a little bit faster or are they a little bit more open to being flexible or is it same thing? 

[00:23:24] Same day

[00:23:25]Aubrey: [00:23:25] COVID change has changed many things in the educational space. Both public and private. And so. The clients that I work with, which are mostly private school heads of school for small and medium sized independent schools. It, I think this time period has, has opened their eyes to the necessity of marketing.

[00:23:46]A lot of schools unlike businesses. Well, that’s not true. Some businesses are like this too, but haven’t really expanded their marketing dollars or marketing team. To meet the new needs of what marketing looks like [00:24:00] now. And with independent schools, what a lot of schools saw was that in spring 2020, They sell massive attrition.

[00:24:06] And so there was a scrambling during that summer to really market hard. And then a lot of what happened was, some public schools went back virtual and so then the private school sector saw a swing in the opposite direction with enrollment. So I do think there’s, there’s been at least over the past two years, I’ve really seen schools more likely to embrace.

[00:24:28] Marketing efforts. And to truly understand that they might have an admissions team of like two, but the marketing is like half a person. Who’s also the receptionist who does like 18 other things. Like they’re seeing the need to really grow, grow that and expand and use strategies that are not necessarily used traditionally in independent schools. 

[00:24:50]Tara: [00:24:50] Yeah, I would echo that and I work specifically on their websites, obviously. So, I’ve seen. I’ve seen people holding off and also refreshes and updates are tricky because all of the content that they have is from the past year, if they want to update their photos and stuff, all the kids have masks on.

[00:25:08] And so how do you deal with that? You have to bring in people over the summer and do different Photo shoots and things like that. So I think schools are trying to balance the reality of the future with the present and the recent past in their communication strategy and in their messaging and their imagery and all of that type of thing too.

[00:25:29] So, and, and because we work mostly with small private schools, it’s different than higher ed for sure. Way different. I’ve done a little bit with higher ed and yeah, that is a whole different ball game. One of the. One of the blessings. One of the things I love working with the organizations that I work with is that they are small.

[00:25:47] So they actually can pivot really fast. And that really helps them during COVID because they were able to make really quick decisions. And they were the schools that were doing hybrid or doing in person. And so a lot of them had a really great year with enrollment because a lot of families wanted their kids in school.

[00:26:04] it’s really makes it easier working with them because they can make those decisions. They don’t have to go through five levels, same way with a public school. Also, you have boards and, and, and just word of education and all of that to go through. So, so they’re nimble, which 

[00:26:17] is nice.

[00:26:18]Matt: [00:26:18] I had some friends that I have young children. They’re not, my oldest will be going into kindergarten this year. But I had some friends that have their kids are older, but they’re in private school like elementary level private school. And they were in, they were in class, I think probably like 90%.

[00:26:36] Throughout like this whole COVID thing. Whereas the flip side is like all my friends who have kids in private, in public schools, everybody was home losing their minds, trying to balance this and then the hybrid stuff. And that was, and the thing, luckily I avoided that I think going into the fall, I don’t think I’ll be dealing with that for like a kindergarten level.

[00:26:58]But it’s amazing how things like [00:27:00] this. I don’t really have a question here. It’s more of just like a. Noticing this it’s amazing how COVID shook up things that you’d never expect till it, for it to unearth like, like private schools, right? You might all of a sudden find more private schools coming online.

[00:27:16] Because of what just happened, where maybe it was reserved for high income, communities. Now you might have somebody like, Hey, it makes sense now to put my kids in private school, because it’s just a different level of service with air quotes in the air. If you’re not watching this, it’s amazing what COVID did to shake up all these different impact, these different industries,

[00:27:36] education 

[00:27:37] Tara: [00:27:37] yeah, for sure. Yep. And also doing more online stuff too. I have some clients that do after-school programming and so they had to completely pivot to offer online learning, offer cooking classes, online, developing whole curriculum. In a totally different way than they were used to doing with videos and all that type of thing.

[00:27:56] So pivoting has been a key word and in the past year, and it’s been, it’s been exciting to see some of these smaller businesses organizations accomplish that pretty smoothly. 

[00:28:08] Yeah.

[00:28:10] Matt: [00:28:10] I assume you’re still using WordPress. Aubrey, are you a diehard WordPress 

[00:28:15] Aubrey: [00:28:15] but I always send all my WordPress questions to Tara. 

[00:28:18]That’s pretty much it. I my website platform is don’t. I feel like uttering, these words might, hate mail might come my way, but like right now, my platforms on Kajabi, just because I started building out online courses on the backend, but I am not selling Kajabi, nor am I.

[00:28:34] Saying that’s your go-to WordPress is much more functional and you can do all sorts 

[00:28:38] of cool stuff with it. 

[00:28:41] Tara: [00:28:41] I’ve trained her very well. You can see. 

[00:28:43] Matt: [00:28:43] I was just about to say that sounds like Tara speaking right through her. 

[00:28:47] Tara: [00:28:47] Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:28:49] Matt: [00:28:49] so you haven’t, so you haven’t convinced Aubrey to switch to like lifter LMS and build all her 

[00:28:54] Tara: [00:28:54] no, her website’s great. And I think, I actually am looking into Kajabi a little bit just to understand what it does, because I think it is a good resource. WordPress is not for everybody and for everything. And I think we learned that more and more now. And so a lot of times. Third-party platforms that are built for a specific purpose, like membership or online courses.

[00:29:14], it’s a lot easier. It’s a lot more user-friendly and they don’t have the maintenance to have to deal with. So yeah, I think that’s fine at WordPress is a great solution for the target audience that we serve. And there are a lot of small schools who use WordPress. There are some third-party CMS is out there that that do.

[00:29:35] A really great job and they’re really, really expensive. So, some schools use Wix, some use Squarespace. Most of them use the third party system or WordPress. So there is, there is definitely a good opportunity there to, to help schools with 

[00:29:49] their WordPress websites. Yeah, 

[00:29:52] Matt: [00:29:52] it’s always interesting to see WordPress users, heads explode when they’re like somebody pays for a CMS. Well, yet, because it works and it [00:30:00] works well. And then that’s what they need at the end of the day. It’s, it’s, it’s amazing. I’ve been interviewing a lot more folks on no-code platforms, bubble web flow.

[00:30:09] And there’s another one that’s escaping escaping me right now that is very popular, but that community loves the tools that just empower them to get the job done. And they’re happy to just give up that ownership side of the code to just

[00:30:27] have it work and do the

[00:30:29] thing that they’re paying for it to 

[00:30:30] Tara: [00:30:30] I just, yeah, I just talked to a PTA president this morning, whose website I’ve been managing for a while and they had a parent redesign it and. So the licenses are all out of, they’re not on the site anymore and I’m trying to manage it and it’s just kind of a headache. And when you have organizations like a PTA that you have transition in leadership, and then you have loss of information and continuity, something like WordPress.

[00:30:54] If you don’t have a con a con. Continuous person managing it like an agency, then you can really be in trouble because all that information gets lost. Whereas if you put it on Squarespace or something like that, sorry to mention that. But I think Squarespace has a great, it serves a great need. You don’t have any of that.

[00:31:11] It’s all there. It’s all. Or some or Kajabi or whatever. You don’t have any of that. Plugins to maintain and licenses to update and all that kind of stuff. So there definitely are use cases where WordPress is not the best solution. And I’m the first person to say that as much as I love 

[00:31:26] WordPress 

[00:31:26]Matt: [00:31:26] mindful school marketing.com mindful school marketing.com. Get the podcast where everywhere, right? What else? What else can people say? Thanks. Where else can people go to say thanks for joining us on the show today.

[00:31:38]Tara: [00:31:38] I’m Tara clays on Twitter. I am a LinkedIn and design tlc.com 

[00:31:44] is 

[00:31:44] Aubrey: [00:31:44] Great. And I’m Audrey [email protected]. You can find me ABI Bursch at LinkedIn. That’s my platform of choice. 

[00:31:50]Matt: [00:31:50] Go subscribe to mindful school marketing on apple, Google, Spotify, wherever you find your podcasts, leave them a review in iTunes. Build that up. And as soon as they have their pod chaser account, okay. Even leave them a review there. It’s going to be an amazing way to find and discover other podcasts, airport.com/subscribe.

[00:32:08] Join the mailing list and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Lindsay Halsey PathFinder SEO

[00:00:00] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by mal care. Learn more about Malik here at Dot com. You’ve heard me talk about mal care before, but they’re back with some interesting updates. Not only are they the WordPress plugin with instant WordPress malware removal. Let me read some of these features. 

[00:00:14] Deep malware scanning. They know about malware that other plugins don’t. Number two, that one click malware removal process makes it super easy to remove from your WordPress website and number three, a new feature called auto bot ultra defense system. Okay. I made that ultra defense system part up, but get this, it automatically blocks the bots hitting your website. 

[00:00:34]So, not only does that protect your website, but in the long run, it’ll improve speed of your site from not letting those bots through the doors. Check out mal care at care.com that’s mal care.com. I don’t want to be a malware specialist. You don’t either check out mal. care.com. thanks for supporting the show

[00:00:55]Matt: [00:00:55] episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search WP. Find search [00:01:00] [email protected]. Let’s talk about the power of their metrics. Add on for a moment. Since I redesigned the Matt report website, I put search front and center on my homepage. Why search WP metrics metrics. Give me the inside data to what visitors on my site are looking for.

[00:01:17] I love the graphs and the actionable advice that it provides me. I can make informed decisions to create new content or optimize existing content that my audience is searching for. Remember when Google gave you all of that search data? Yeah, it was great. Back then, way back then when they gave it to us, they don’t give it to us anymore.

[00:01:35] Put on-site search front and center for your visitors. Get that data back. Get searched [email protected] along with their metrics. Add on that search wp.com. Thanks for supporting the show. 

[00:01:49] There’s a fine balance between optimizing your services for profits and providing satisfactory value for the money you charge your customers. Let me frame that for you for a second. High touch white glove service business is [00:02:00] people in time intensive. Anyone that has run a small boutique agency knows that the time and money you invest on all processes around building a website is hard to prove value for. And if you’re launching something like a done for you service. 

[00:02:12]Chances are there’s less customer interaction and handholding, but at a price point that reflects that value. You’re doing something, the customer perceives as valuable for the money they’ve agreed to pay you. And your internal processes are efficient enough that you’re profitable. Every time you repeat this type of work. 

[00:02:28] Lindsay Halsy co-founder of Pathfinder. SEO is taking this to the next level with a guided approach. You get a valuable product with a valuable service. And then you sprinkle some controlled face to face time on top. I guided a product I service. I’m absolutely fascinated by this. And it’s the natural step to increase value in a world now saturated by product I services on one side and software as a service on the other. 

[00:02:53] Marry, both worlds and you get an extremely happy customer. You’re listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the [00:03:00] resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the [email protected] slash subscribe and follow the podcast on apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet. Please share this episode on social media. We’d love more listeners around here. Okay let’s dive into today’s episode with lindsay 

[00:03:17]

[00:03:17] Matt: [00:03:17] One of the things I want to dive right into this, because Pathfinder SEO is not just. Hey, come hire you to do SEO stuff, right? It’s more than the services side. What is, what do you compliment the services side 

[00:03:30] Lindsay: [00:03:30] with that Pathfinders? We consider our approach to be a guided pathway. And when you think about the SEO world if you’re a business owner and you’re looking to get found on Google, you essentially have two options.

[00:03:42] One go and hire an agency. Have them build the traffic for you and engage in SEO. Or to take a, do it yourself, approach, take courses, install, plugins and learn your way through the process of growing your own traffic. And, and so we for many years for about 10 plus years have been over on the agency [00:04:00] side, delivering SEO services.

[00:04:02] And one of the things that we heard from business owners is that sometimes they can’t afford a professional to hire. And, and they can’t outsource that piece of their marketing. Other times they can’t find an agency, they can dress. To deliver sound SEO services, and yet the courses and things that, that take them out there and give them a lot of information.

[00:04:18] A lot of insight, the software out there gives a lot of insight, but doesn’t always actually show them the process to follow. So they didn’t really know what to do. And, and so that process-based approach to SEO is really what we specialize in over at Pathfinder on this guided approach. And so we share our process that we developed over 10 years break SEO down into a series of easy to follow steps.

[00:04:41]We include coaching because who doesn’t want to jump on a call with a mentor coach friend and, and get your answers answers to your questions and get held accountable for kind of going to the gym and doing the workout of guided SEO. And then tools. So you can do your keyword research, get your monthly reporting, track your rankings all in Pathfinder.

[00:04:58]And, and so that’s really where, [00:05:00] where we’re coming from is that happy medium between hiring an agency and going DIY. But then we also kind of discovered along the way that a lot of freelancers and agencies would like to offer SEO services to their customers. And they needed sort of the same solution that the site owners did, the process and the coaching and the tools.

[00:05:17] And so we actually work with quite a few WordPress and beyond designers and developers who are actually offering really great SEO services now as sort of an add-on package to their website development.

[00:05:28]Matt: [00:05:28] I have two major questions, but let me start with this one and sort of diving into your mind as, as a product owner, as a business owner, do you feel like it’s more pressure for you to do, to do it this way? Like, I feel like if you were just an SEO. An SEO, right? That’s the thing. That’s what people, that’s what SEO is refer to themselves as just an SEO, not an SEO or not an SEO is just an SEO.

[00:05:52] If you are just an SEO providing services, you could be learning SEO because it’s always changing. You could [00:06:00] be learning SEO in the background and then doing the service work for a client. But I feel like in your business, you’re onstage a little bit more. Because now you have all these people looking at you to say you best be keeping up with all the trends and teaching me, teaching it to me the right way.

[00:06:17] Do you feel just a little bit of angst, a little bit of anxiety around that. 

[00:06:21]Lindsay: [00:06:21] Definitely, of course. So anytime you go from helping one website and one website along to starting to scale and, and giving advice to others, which then they’re going out and deploying, of course you start to question, Hey, is, does this really work?

[00:06:34]And, and we all have those moments in, in in our days where we questioned that level of expertise and at the end of the day that that concern is there, but then there’s education out there, their fellow SEOs to, to rely on. And we’re actually in the business of doing SEO.

[00:06:49] So it’s still, I’m in a partner, in an SEO agency. I’m still hands on. I talked to a client this morning about keyword research, page titles and meta descriptions. What’s happening with core algorithm updates, et [00:07:00] cetera. And so we’re practicing SEO on one side and then just taking that same practice and saying, okay, now I should spin that into Pathfinder and make sure that we’re teaching that skill set so that somebody else can have that conversation with their customer.

[00:07:11]So it’s a matter of kind of staying, not getting rusty keep, keep kind of going to the gym and doing the SEO so that we know what’s happening out, out there in the industry. As we’re putting that advice out there.

[00:07:21]Matt: [00:07:21] I think this is an interesting trend in service slash product based businesses. And by that, That guided approach or, or keeping a connection. Dare I dare. I call it. And without insulting you in many others, a membership for your, for your customers I had a previous guest on Kristin Youngs.

[00:07:40] She’s a no code, low code, no code coaching apps.com. And she has the same approach with her business partner where. They no longer build apps with no code tools, but they train and educate their customers. So they can go out and deploy their own apps, but they have this, I’m going to stick with you [00:08:00] approach because the industry’s always changing.

[00:08:03] And there’s so much to building an app that they don’t want to take on all of that risk and all of that time overhead they’re like, Hey. I’ll help you get it off the ground. I’m going to stick with you. Have you noticed this as like a, obviously you have, but just your general thoughts on like where the industry is going.

[00:08:18] Will we see more of this? Not to take your key phrase, but that guided approach that handled, 

[00:08:24] Lindsay: [00:08:24] I would hope so because I would certainly be a customer of other people’s sort of guided approach to different tools and email marketing is one for me. I can stumble my way through email marketing software and, and get an email out to my audience and have forms on my website and things like that.

[00:08:39] But wow. It would be sure, really, quite nice to have a monthly session where I can actually walk through what am I doing with automation? And am I evolving from just having a little form on my website to say, sign up for my newsletter to following the current best practices around automation and customization and more.

[00:08:55]And so I, I would hope that in the industry space, we’re going to see more of this kind of initial [00:09:00] heavy lift. Like we’re going to jumpstart and build a foundation together and then, oh, wait, it’s going to evolve. And so you need to kind of stay on board in our ongoing process, keep working at this.

[00:09:10] And and we’re going to come alongside you in that journey and be giving you kind of those three minute lessons that we all need to keep progressing over time as industries evolve.

[00:09:19]Matt: [00:09:19] It’s maybe it’s also a Testament to the evolution of software in applications, too. Right? As the technology gets cheaper, faster, more available tons of plugins in the WordPress space at a SEM. SCM rush, I think is the, is the tool and, and H refs, like all these tools are affordable with air quotes.

[00:09:38] I’m holding up air quotes for those just listening. Like this stuff is getting faster, cheaper, better from just the, the, the software side of it. Yeah. It might be more challenging as an SEO or an agency. To walk up to somebody who just let’s say used Ella mentor to build their website. And then you turn to them and say it’s $10,000 to build.

[00:09:56] And they said, wait a minute. I know I just built this [00:10:00] in like a handful of hours using elementary. Yeah. Versus if you walked up and then said, Hey, it’s a thousand dollars to get started. And then a few hundred bucks a month to stay connected with me. And I’ll just, it’s less overhead for you as the service provider and more value.

[00:10:14] To the end user, because they’re like, Hey, I can learn this and you’ll be there to help me copilot it. 

[00:10:19] Lindsay: [00:10:19] And and one of the things that I noticed over the years of course businesses have hired me to do one time projects. They’re launching a new website, they want an SEO. And so we go in and we do a one-time project.

[00:10:30] And the experience is always the same. It goes pretty well. We establish a rapport. We get them through whatever the hurdle is that they’re facing. We stay in touch for months, six weeks after the project. Everybody’s happy. And then about two years later, I get an email and in the email either says, oh my gosh, my traffic just tanked or, Hey, I thought you did semester ago.

[00:10:49] Work for me. Why am I not getting more business? And, and, kind of, easy response as well. You didn’t hire us for that ongoing piece. Like we did SEO for you years ago, and things have [00:11:00] changed. Your businesses evolved. The search engines have evolved and now we’re behind the times.

[00:11:04]And so. That, that kind of dynamic of putting in a lot of effort first and then just maintaining is, is really what I think we’re seeing a lot in SEO, but then across across marketing, we’ve built a new website for Pathfinder about a year ago and hired an agency because I’m not a designer or developer.

[00:11:21] And now that that amazing agency purple Finch is, is doing a great job, evolving our websites so that I’m not going to have to rebuild the website in five years. Instead every, we just launched an updated homepage and, and we’re working more on how we want to structure our blog content. So we’re always kind of iterating on, on that site.

[00:11:39]And for me as a business owner and, and as an SEO, that that model really makes sense in SEO and beyond.

[00:11:45]Matt: [00:11:45] I’m gonna take a quote from our pre-interview. At least I hope this was a quote when I wrote it down correctly building software, when you know nothing about software that resonates with me because I do and have done the same thing. Like [00:12:00] I get it. I know it from, again, that 30,000 foot view, but I’m not a developer.

[00:12:04] Can you expand on that? What are you doing? Building software there as the product and what’s your whole thought on balance? So, 

[00:12:12]Lindsay: [00:12:12] About four years ago, we had the idea for Pathfinder SEO. Of course at the time we didn’t have a brand name. We didn’t have the phrase guided SEO. We just had a problem that we were seeing that we wanted to solve with this kind of dynamic of sharing our process, getting coaching and building tools.

[00:12:28]And and I had young kids at home. And, and I started literally just remember sitting back as summer. Sketching things out on a piece of paper while my kids are crawling around in the backyard. And in diving into this idea of building a software we hired the best developer we knew at the time and said, Hey, I know you built our WordPress site.

[00:12:45] Do you think you could build this software? And and he said, yes. And we, we showed them these literally like hand drawn. Mock-ups not a designer. Don’t even know how to use Photoshop, and said, Hey, let’s go build this. I worked on all the like education content, basically the [00:13:00] coaching or the, or the course side.

[00:13:02]And he built the software for us. And in four months we brought this software to market not knowing what we didn’t know at the time. And we went to word camps of, of many of the different events that we attended. And and that’s where we started to test drive everything that we had built.

[00:13:17] And, and find all those areas of weakness and and unbeknownst to us, but we should have guessed it. We ended up rebuilding our software over the course of the next six months. Once we started to understand many of those things that we didn’t know. And so to be a non-technical founder, This was the WP SEO SEO hub.

[00:13:36] This was WP SEO website was all 

[00:13:38] Matt: [00:13:38] blue. And you said, you mentioned everyone thought it was a plugin at the time. You were like, oh, this is a plugin. 

[00:13:43] Lindsay: [00:13:43] It’s not a plugin for us at word camp and say, why did you build a, an SEO plugin? There are already great ones out there like Yost. And we’re like, oh yeah, we love Yoast.

[00:13:51] We use Yoast all the time. It’s, all of our coursework and stuff is, is tied to Yost here. And, and so we kept having these conversations over and over again and, and [00:14:00] to get to some of those aha moments we needed to meet people like Chris, lemme who, who knew everything about product and, and were able to give us those bits of feedback at the most important times so that we could we could basically evolve where we were.

[00:14:13] And and so we got confirmation that we were in the right space. Once, once we could tell our story, but it just took a really long time to, to tell that story with our marketing materials and, and then the software had its own problems, not knowing how to build software means you make mistakes along the way.

[00:14:29] And so, that was the other kind of piece to the puzzle is that we have actually built our entire software now. We work with Zeke interactive, who we love. And so we are, non-technical, co-founders my, my business partner and I Laurie, and and yet we can build and scale a software product based business by finding the, the great partners that are out there in the ecosystem to do what they do well and allow us to have the time to, to do what we do well

[00:14:54]Matt: [00:14:54] is speed and iteration on the product. The biggest challenge for you as the [00:15:00] non-technical. Co-founder in other words, you have to ship it off to the agency. They have to scope it, develop it kind of up to them to get it done, even though they probably have a commitment to you. Is that the biggest challenge for you when you want to get 

[00:15:12] Lindsay: [00:15:12] something new in market?

[00:15:13] One of the biggest challenges when you don’t have, a software engineer sitting next to you in the office that you can say, wait, stop what you’re doing. I want you to work on this. That’s the risk you run, right? If you’re, if you’re outsourcing that to a a different agency is what if that’s not possible for them in, in their ecosystem.

[00:15:29] And so for us, that was a big challenge with our initial development team is that we were in a queue amongst a lot of other, customers and something could be broken today and not fixed for like two weeks. And that does not work in the software space. If it’s, if it’s something really broken.

[00:15:44] And so what we found though in our partnership with Zeke has been a totally unique experience where they have the ability and the team size that if we raise a red flag, at 8:00 AM on a Tuesday morning they have eyeballs on it at eight oh five. So that’s about the same as tapping on somebody’s shoulder.

[00:15:59] Next to [00:16:00] me in the office is, is when we escalate something, they can jump on it. And then we can kind of be marching on the longer-term projects together and just communicating about timelines.

[00:16:10]Matt: [00:16:10] Yeah, for sure. For sure. What do you think the bell, or is there a challenge in balancing is what I was going to say. Is there a challenge in balancing the S still remaining on the services side and having this guided. SEO product where the challenge is there. I think I know of some that might be there, but I’m interested to hear.

[00:16:31] Sure. So when we 

[00:16:31] Lindsay: [00:16:31] started this endeavor, we were of course hoping and planning to sunset the services business and become a product people. And, and there are. That’s everyone’s right. That’s why we were doing it was move out of services in the product. After 10 years of services work, you start to feel a little bit of burnout.

[00:16:47] And the idea of getting into something flashy and new was always really appealing. But there, there are a couple of things that we learned along the way that have changed that dynamic. The biggest thing is that SEO evolves and that to stay current, [00:17:00] to give sound advice at the right time and to teach SEO to others so that they can do it themselves.

[00:17:05] We have to be hands-on and doing SEO and, and we can’t be, hands-on just in our website or in a handful of websites. We need to be working on sites across platforms, in WordPress and beyond, we need to be working on small to large projects so that we understand, SEO for a local business versus enterprise level.

[00:17:22]And so to get that hands-on experience and to stay current we, we just basically find that, yeah, we’re, we’re still running our services company to have those experiences. Even though there are challenges of, of switching hats between working on something web shine oriented, and then jumping over to Pathfinder.

[00:17:40]Matt: [00:17:40] Is there any kind of difficulty moving the, and, and I don’t want to just, I want to get into the, the wins of, of the business too, but I, I do and like exploring the difficulties with founders that we’ll share, because I think there’s a lot of great lessons in there. Difficulties in, in platform.

[00:17:57] Platforms to educate people on for [00:18:00] SEO. Obviously WordPress is the biggest, but do you ever find yourself like running out of that runway to be like, okay, I guess we should do Drupal now or web flow or something 

[00:18:09] Lindsay: [00:18:09] like that. A lot of people focus on what’s the best content management system or platform for SEO.

[00:18:14]And so they feel like, Hey, you can only, optimize a site and get a lot of traffic out of a WordPress site versus Squarespace or something like that. And, and what we’ve found over the years is that, I would say like 90% of what I do for a client in terms of SEO work creating content drafting, page titles, and meta descriptions offsite, SEO, think about link building and getting more reviews on Google maps.

[00:18:38] These things are all platform agnostic. They have nothing to do with the infrastructure of how the website is built. And so they don’t even need a log into a website. You’re just doing that work on an external, in an external world. And then you come to implementation, it’s time to publish a blog post it’s time to add a page title and meta description.

[00:18:56] And that’s the 10% of the time you’re actually in in the [00:19:00] platform. And so the way we approach that is as we support with a lot of tutorials, the mainly know the most commonly used platforms, like a WordPress and a Squarespace. But anything that we’re doing, it’s only 10% of the game can usually be explained with a quick Google of, Hey, how do I add page titles and meta descriptions in bubble or in web flowy or something like that.

[00:19:21] So as long as the infrastructure behind the site has SEO wiring, I guess, would be a way to think about it. Then I can implement my suggestions in a no-code environment. And like 1% of the time a site will be built in a way where I can never get my hands on it. And, and it really has to go back to a dev team and that’s where collaboration comes into into the mix.

[00:19:44] And, and you simply collaborate with whoever built the site. To do the icing on the cake, which is getting everything kind of live that, that you’ve strategized and crafted.

[00:19:52]Matt: [00:19:52] I’m looking at the pricing page right now. Pathfinder seo.com/pricing. You have a June promotion, 

[00:20:00] [00:19:59] Lindsay: [00:19:59] the 15th. So check out the site. Stay tuned for that promotion. It’ll run through the course of the summer to about August 15th. And, and really, we want to get get some new site owners on board with this guided approach to SEO and then also freelancers and agencies, because there’s so much recurring business opportunity out there to help businesses get found on Google in, in go beyond kind of offering WordPress care plans and things like that to offering recurring SEO services.

[00:20:28]So yeah, check out our, check out our site and stay tuned for that upcoming sale. 

[00:20:32]Matt: [00:20:32] I’m looking at the standard price, a hundred dollars a month, $99 a month for one website comes with 45 minutes of SEO coaching 45 minutes a month. And then like, that’s. I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw my framework around it and then you correct me where I will definitely go wrong.

[00:20:48] But there’s the 45 minutes of SEO coaching on top. That’s the probably in-person I’m talking to you. I’m giving you that advice. So then what looks like the rest of the bullet points of monthly reporting? SEO checklist, monthly tasks. We have [00:21:00] 300 keywords, 300 tracking. This is all this stuff in software.

[00:21:03] How do you scale that top line there that’s a human talking to somebody else. Are you delivering video, like static videos and ship it off? Are you doing zoom calls? How do you grow that? 

[00:21:15] Lindsay: [00:21:15] Yeah, that’s, that’s a concern of ours and, and kind of in our business modeling is, Hey, this is how we want it to be, because we think this is good for business, good for our customers, but how are we going to deliver on this long-term and how are we going to scale?

[00:21:26]And, and that SEO coaching component is the piece of it where it’s our time. Not just our trainings and our videos. And so all of our coaching sessions are 45 minutes long. Depending on what package you’re in, you get a certain different number for a month. Assuming that as you do SEO for more websites, you’re going to need to talk to a human more and get more coaching.

[00:21:45]And, and so, those are all one-on-one over zoom. They’re not prerecorded. And they’re scheduled, just like you schedule these days in, in a Calendly or something like that. All in our platform and in terms of scalability, the first thing that put my mind at ease when we came up with this business [00:22:00] model was that All product based businesses have support.

[00:22:03] They all have humans that interact with customers and have to put in time to maintain relationships and to troubleshoot things. In our case, our support is what I consider proactive. We spend very little time and invest very little in support behind the scenes, like emailing our customers because we have these recurring calls.

[00:22:22]And so in that sense we’re dedicating a specific amount of time to a customer. And, and that’s usually our only touch point with that customer over the course of the month, because they’re up and running and have everything else they need directly in the platform. The other thing that we find is that over time we don’t know necessarily work ourselves out of a job because there’s always more to learn and always more to do, but a site owner, let’s just say, you’re an interior designer.

[00:22:43] You come in and you hit it hard during your low season. And you go through our SEO checklist. You build that foundation, you meet with your coach each month for three months, and then you get into your high season while the reality is you have less time for SEO. You have less time to talk to us. You’re often seeing the results you want.

[00:22:59] And so [00:23:00] instead, you’re getting your monthly reports from us. You’re seeing that traffic is still growing and looking good. You’re getting monthly communications from us saying, Hey, there’s something new happening right now. We need to grab your attention so that you can invest in our this month and say, setting up Google analytics for, and here’s how, and then we might move into to talking to that customer, like once a quarter because the, the demand and the need for them, isn’t there.

[00:23:22] So. We certainly, if we do the math at the end of the year on how many coaching sessions, we would need to deliver based on our customer base and how many we actually deliver there is a gap there. And so not everybody takes us up on, on all of the minutes of coaching. They can get each.

[00:23:37]Matt: [00:23:37] Yeah, I’ve been on this. Warpath of local contractors. Who’d never call me back. Like never, they don’t do they have a website? Barely. I sent them an email. I get no response. I send them a phone. I call them no response. Like, I don’t know what I, I smoke signals to get you to come to my house and give me a quote.

[00:23:58] But there is one [00:24:00] that. Redid exterior of my house a couple of years ago and I paid top dollar for it, but they have exceptional service and they have a 15 year old warranty that comes with the workmanship. And the other day I walked out in my deck that they built me and there was a board loose and I called them up.

[00:24:19] And I said, Hey, this board right here is loose. And I paid for this thing and I have a 15 year warranty and I will not be the guy who screws it in himself. It uses some kind of X thing, which I didn’t have. And I was like, you know what? I paid for it. Let them fix it, call them up. They sent a guy out.

[00:24:36] And what I’ve noticed, that’s just a rant. What I’m really getting at here is what I’ve noticed is that the workers that work for them. Many of them had their own businesses for like a decade 20 years. And they love working at this business because they don’t have all the overhead of running a business any longer.

[00:24:59][00:25:00] Presumably they treat them really well because these guys, they love it. Like when I, I I’ve talked to a handful of them and they I’ve asked them about doing like any of my bathroom down and like, I don’t do it anymore, which I did. And to the point where they probably can’t, maybe there’s like a NDA or not an NDA, but not a non-compete whatever, they probably can’t do it, but they’re also probably like, nah, I got this great job now.

[00:25:19] Like, I don’t want to do your work. And I kind of see that this is a long way of getting to the question. I kind of see that with what you’re doing. I clicked on the SEO coaching section of your site. You have like a featured coach featured coach Eric Wardell. I assume that maybe as this scales and grows, you could attract.

[00:25:37]to come join you who don’t want the overhead of running their own practice and you can kind of get that there. I say, marketplace of sorts going for, 

[00:25:46] Lindsay: [00:25:46] yeah, that’s exactly sort of what’s in, what’s in the cards is when we hire a new SEO coach, they need SEO experience. So, we, we just hired someone about six months ago who, who joined our team.

[00:25:56]And, and we’ve gone through the training process. He’s out there coaching, four or five [00:26:00] hours a day. And, and loving it. And so far what we’re hearing from him about his experience of kind of joining our team and what it looks like is, yeah, he likes the predictable the predictability of the work.

[00:26:10]He likes the team and collaborative environment kind of behind the scenes and the people he’s working with, which is good. And the biggest thing that we’re hearing is that he loves the customers. So he’s getting direct feedback when he does a coaching session from our customers on how things are going for them, and he’s hearing these big wins.

[00:26:26] So he’s like, it’s hard not to get jazzed up when you get off the phone and you talk to somebody and they just said, wow, I disclosed $3,000 a month SEO contract. It’s my biggest recurring revenue, thing I could never imagine, I could never sell this in, in, in any other business space.

[00:26:40] And so he hears these wins along the way and he gets really excited. And so we really like. That, that customer interaction. But we’re also trying to, to kind of balance that with the side that, that we all have sort of are extroverted and introverted components, obviously, to, to jump on a call and do coaching sessions kind of hour after hour during the day, you gotta be really neat to get [00:27:00] on the call.

[00:27:00] You’re on zoom. People can see you and, and wave hello. But they also need to be doing SEO. So they need to be hands-on because they’re answering people’s questions on the fly. So they need to be in Squarespace. They need to be in Shopify, in WordPress doing SEO. And so we balanced that by actually executing on the services side.

[00:27:18] When we’re delivering SEO work, our coaches are doing a little bit of both a little more coaching than doing, but definitely a couple hours a day. Essentially in the gym doing your own SEO. And, and doing it for our clients sites so that they’re nice and fresh and they’ve they have a lot of experience to, to be sharing with our customers.

[00:27:35]Matt: [00:27:35] How important is partner? There’s so there’s like partnership, I guess you could almost call that a partnership with these customers they’re paying you. They probably feel like partners and you probably feel the same way, but what about you from path from Pathfinder SEO partnerships that you find success with?

[00:27:51] Regardless, like, sometimes I feel like we have our. Or tunnel vision on it. And it’s just like, oh, who do you partner with in the WordPress world? But SEO is massive. There’s plenty of other [00:28:00] places for you to partner with who are not in the SEO world, where, where do your best partnership wins come from for a product 

[00:28:06] Lindsay: [00:28:06] currently our best partnership wins are in the WordPress space.

[00:28:10]And I think it’s for a couple of reasons. One, as I mentioned, our original brand was WP SEO hubs. So we built this WordPress specific when we first came out. So our initial relationships in our business space were all in the WordPress ecosystem. And so naturally we’ve been there. We also like WordPress for SEO, the best of all the platforms.

[00:28:28]So we do work on everything and, and we don’t say, Hey, you have to move from Squarespace to WordPress, but, but we love WordPress. And, and so that ecosystem has naturally created a lot of partnerships. The other thing that we’ve noticed is that WordPress is extremely collaborative. So when you shoot somebody a quick message on Twitter and say, Hey, I want to be on your podcast.

[00:28:48]Or you’re like, Hey, do you want to do some webinars together this summer? Let’s, let’s get out there and cross promote some stuff and get our businesses working together. You get really a lot of instant reception and people are [00:29:00] really excited to partner and, and cross promote businesses.

[00:29:02] And that’s not something I’ve found personally in the business ecosystem in general, anywhere else. And, and so, I’ve, I used to work in Drupal a lot. And go to, Drupal events and things like that. And like, I didn’t stay in touch with a single person from those events. Not that they weren’t great people, but I didn’t feel that collaborative environment.

[00:29:20] And when you go to an SEO conference, let me tell you that levels up. Like one more notch, everybody’s got their tricks, their back pockets. They’re only willing to share at a conference, a certain amount of information. And they’re certainly not. They’re exchanging contact information saying like, Hey, when I’ve got more business than I can do, or, Hey, I don’t work in that, that industry space.

[00:29:40] I want to make sure I have a good partner to refer my people to. And so that for us, that has naturally meant that our best partnerships come out of WordPress because we love WordPress and in the community is I think unlike anything else, 

[00:29:52]Matt: [00:29:52] you have the head, in the SEO world, I guess you have to hedge against that volatility because you don’t.

[00:29:57] Country like this Google doesn’t print [00:30:00] you the blueprint. Right. And you’re constantly, I spend all my days now in the podcasting world, especially obviously a castles.com where my day job is, and it’s like apple with podcasting. You don’t know what the heck you’re doing. Like you have zero control over it, and we’re still going through, they released a new update to podcast connect, used to be called iTunes connect.

[00:30:21] Now it’s podcast connect. They’re rolling out, paid subscriptions to the podcasters and it’s just an absolute. Joke mess. It’s terrible. And for like two weeks, people couldn’t even in upload their new podcasts into apple and you have people yelling at us going, it’s your fault. My podcast is an acceptance.

[00:30:41] No, it’s apple. And it’s the biggest company on the planet and we have no control, no connection. And it’s, they’re just. Doing whatever they’re doing. And you’ve got Google, probably feeling the same thing in the SEO space, right. You’re constantly guessing. Again, these web vitals amp, is that a sing anymore?

[00:30:59] At [00:31:00] one point I heard amp was taken over the world and now, no, I don’t hear that. Like, I don’t know what’s happening and and it’s just, I guess you’re in that moment where these are the platforms and, I guess again, go back to WordPress is why people love owning their platform. To a degree, right?

[00:31:14] Cause we have this control and this ownership, and we don’t have to guess as much to where, where it’s headed. No real question. They’re just venting about the open web and big players 

[00:31:25] Lindsay: [00:31:25] in the, in the, in the website. I think our, our day jobs in different industries are probably very similar in that there’s a big entity and apple or Google, and they have so much control over the success on a day to day basis for our, for our customers.

[00:31:38] And. And, and then it changes the platform changes, something changes and you log in and you’re like, where did that button go? Oh my gosh, I can’t do this. Or that button used to work. Why doesn’t it work now? And, and so that can be really frustrating. And yet at the end of the day, when I think about SEO and then there’s noise, right?

[00:31:52] Like. Should I think about amp, should I think about core web vitals? What is Google analytics for? And do I have to sign up for it? There’s so much happening out there, all [00:32:00] this noise around you. And so what we really found at our agency over the years was that what I talked about, five, 10 years ago about SEO is still pretty true today.

[00:32:09]It is, that the search engines really value content because it’s how you share your expertise. And then they need to figure out the who behind your website. And so they look to backlinks and reviews to understand authority and trust. And so whether you’re a small business or a large business, what makes a site Excel is, is that sort of eat framework that you mentioned earlier, expertise, authority, and trust.

[00:32:28]And so what we’re always trying to teach businesses is that we’re trying to just level up continually in all three of these areas over time. And that creates a holistic SEO strategy. And so when I’m executing on monthly SEO for my customers, a lot of it is really boring to the customers. If I meet with them, we’re talking about content.

[00:32:47] Link-building and, and reviews. Right? So we’re talking about the same things. Of course, we’re still talking about technical infrastructure and making sure a site is fast and things like that. But. The big pieces of SEO. The [00:33:00] things we work on month in month out are all the same now as they were a year ago.

[00:33:04] And as they were five years ago. And so that, that steadiness doesn’t change and that’s where we need to actually focus our efforts. I think what happens in SEO is because there’s so much publicity out there. And, and a lot of fear, right? Like what if, when the page experience algorithm updates come out in mid June, my site traffic tanks, what am I going to do?

[00:33:24]And what if I show up to work and all my clients drop their rankings I have to prevent against that is, is we get worried about some of the noise, not to say that this example is noise. Cause this stuff is really important. But it’s easy to get pulled away and that to focus on, amp or to focus on something that’s shiny and new when what’s really working is, is sort of that mundane routine stuff.

[00:33:45]And so to me, it’s all about finding a balance. It’s about, keeping moving forward in parallel on the things that work. So you keep blogging, you keep, trying to get more reviews from your customers. You keep getting out there in the world, getting on a podcast, writing a guest blog [00:34:00] posts, that’s all the bread and butter.

[00:34:01]And, and then you got to, to be kind of heads up and looking around and say, okay, but I also need to be thinking about my core web vitals and page experience right now. And speed and security because that’s going to become increasingly important. And so for, for us, and, and sort of that leadership role at Pathfinder is, is we’re trying to keep people motivated on the stuff that works, that 70%, that’s kind of mundane and boring that you’ve got to keep working at while letting them know when something new comes along, that we think they need to start to address and giving them a roadmap on how to address that.

[00:34:32]And it’s that balancing act that happens. And so when I talk to clients, it’s not all about new and new and change. Every time I chat with my clients, a lot of times it’s, here’s our monthly report. Here’s what we’re seeing in the industry. Here’s what I think we should be blogging about.

[00:34:47] Here’s how I think, we should change this page on the site to, to, to do better. And, and it’s not, it’s not new. It’s just it’s just steady work. 

[00:34:55]Matt: [00:34:55] If you’re sitting at your computer right now and you’re like, ah, yeah, I don’t want to do this SEO [00:35:00] stuff for my clients anymore. Or like, I don’t want to have to read every newsletter under the sun to keep up with this.

[00:35:06] I logged into Google analytics the other day and I was, I hadn’t been in there in years and I was like, what. Nope. I’m outta here. Like this, this looks like something like I’m a NASA controlling a spaceship. I don’t even know what the where’s the graphs. I was like, I’m out. I’m done. Go to Pathfinder, seo.com.

[00:35:20]On June 15th starts their summer sale. Lindsay Halsy co-founder Pathfinder SEO. Thanks for hanging out today. Where else can 

[00:35:28] Lindsay: [00:35:28] folks from so on Twitter and accessible via email. [email protected]. Drop me an email and happy to answer SEO questions and chat. 

[00:35:38]Matt: [00:35:38] Awesome stuff. Everybody else.

[00:35:39] matterport.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. Number one way to stay connected. And don’t forget to listen to the WP minute podcast. It’s your weekly news dose weekly WordPress news dose in under five minutes every week. I got to get that tagline a little bit better. The WP minute.com. All right, everybody.

[00:35:56] Thanks for listening. And we’ll see you in the next episode.

Brian Jackson Forgemedia Matt Report

[00:00:00] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by mal care. Learn more about Malik here at Dot com. You’ve heard me talk about mal care before, but they’re back with some interesting updates. Not only are they the WordPress plugin with instant WordPress malware removal. Well, let me read some of these features. 

[00:00:15] Deep malware scanning. They know about malware that other plugins don’t. Number two, that one click malware removal process makes it super easy to remove from your WordPress website and number three, a new feature called auto bot ultra defense system. Okay. I made that ultra defense system part up, but get this, it automatically blocks the bots hitting your website. 

[00:00:35]So, not only does that protect your website, but in the long run, it’ll improve speed of your site from not letting those bots through the doors. Check out mal care at care.com that’s mal care.com. I don’t want to be a malware specialist. You don’t either check out mal. care.com. thanks for supporting the show

[00:00:56]Matt: [00:00:56] episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search WP. Find search [00:01:00] [email protected]. Let’s talk about the power of their metrics. Add on for a moment. Since I redesigned the Matt report website, I put search front and center on my homepage. Why search WP metrics metrics. Give me the inside data to what visitors on my site are looking for.

[00:01:18] I love the graphs and the actionable advice that it provides me. I can make informed decisions to create new content or optimize existing content that my audience is searching for. Remember when Google gave you all of that search data? Yeah, it was great. Back then, way back then when they gave it to us, they don’t give it to us anymore.

[00:01:36] Put on-site search front and center for your visitors. Get that data back. Get searched [email protected] along with their metrics. Add on that search wp.com. Thanks for supporting the show.

[00:01:49] today’s guest used to sit on the opposite sides of the WordPress hosting competition table. For me, at one point in his career, he was pumping out content on  blog, like an absolute machine. [00:02:00] Well, I was raging against that machine selling would be customers on Paisley’s hosting stack. So where is Brian Jackson?

[00:02:06] Former marketer at Kinston now. He co-founded forge media with his brother, Brett and have released three unique plugins, two of which help WordPress site owners optimize their sites for ranking and social sharing. Oh, they tossed that coupon plugin in there too.

[00:02:20] To help affiliates increase their sales for good measure. Once frenemy now, Matt report guests. I’m excited to share this conversation with you today. You’re listening to the Maryport podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter now. report.com/subscribe and follow us on apple podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, better yet.

[00:02:40] Please share this episode on social media. More love we get more listeners. There are around here. Okay. Don’t forget to listen to the WP minute podcasts. It’s weekly. WordPress news. And under five minutes while I just said it every week, the WP minute.com. It’s the WP minute.com. Subscribe to the [00:03:00] newsletter there.

[00:03:00] Brian Jackson, here we go.

[00:03:02] Brian: [00:03:02] I am running just a small little agency with my brother. We’re both the co-founders of forge media is what it’s called.

[00:03:09] And we have a, kind of a marketing blog where we talk about WordPress related stuff in marketing and SEO. And then our main focus is actually our, we have three different WordPress plugins that we develop. One is a coupon plugin for like affiliate marketers, and other one is a social sharing plugin.

[00:03:27] That’s really kind of focused on the performance aspect of it. And then we have our perf matters plugin, which is basically trying to tweak, WordPress to get it to be as fast as he can kind of a compliment to. Some of the other performance plugins that are already out there. So like we see a lot of people are using ours along with another one.

[00:03:47] Matt: [00:03:47] \ I’m going to take this in the reverse order when we had our pre-interview something that just struck me. What is the attraction to. Social sharing plugins. I feel like it’s one of [00:04:00] those things, whereas , isn’t this solved already. Shouldn’t it be solved by WordPress at this point.

[00:04:06]Social media is obviously here to stay. We’re recording this in the year 2021. You’d think that those buttons, those things for sharing your articles and your posts out would have been solved already. What is the attraction to that? What’s so good about that. 

[00:04:22]Brian: [00:04:22] And actually. I would actually say since we’ve been in developing our programmatic plugin for a while, and now we’re developing our social sharing plugin, the social sharing plugin is actually more complex to develop than our performance.

[00:04:36] One sounds strange, but behind the scenes, there’s a lot more that goes on. Especially once you get into. Doing the social share counters and how to make that work for performance stuff. And then just Pinterest is just a nightmare to work with because you have your things, like you click a Pinterest image and it brings up all the images on the page.

[00:04:57] There you can select there’s different [00:05:00] things you have to go through. And WordPress is just never going to be up to par compared to The social sharing plugins. I think WordPress will get to the point where you’ll eventually have a nice block with, I want these three buttons. Here’s my block.

[00:05:11] I’ll drag it into the widget. We’re pretty much close to that. But as far as going beyond that, I don’t think we’re press ever wants to even tackle what we’re kind of doing with the social sharing plugins. And as a marketer, I’ve always liked sharing plugins because especially working at Ken’s still, like, we saw a lot of the data, like lots of people shared our content.

[00:05:30] And so I, I know they work. And then you have other people using tools like buffer, that maybe don’t click the buttons, but they do it a different way. So yeah. 

[00:05:38]Matt: [00:05:38] I’ll become, come clean on this conversation. Like I never use a social share button on a site, largely because I just use the native integration with my iPhone.

[00:05:49] Generally when I’m reading something or from on my laptop, I copy paste or hit the old buffer. Buffer icon in my in my brief extension. And I, I run it that [00:06:00] way, but all of that is to say that probably there’s some psychological sense in the mere fact of having an icon on a page to remind somebody like, oh yes, you should be sharing this.

[00:06:11] Don’t don’t forget it. So there’s probably a little bit of that baked 

[00:06:14] Brian: [00:06:14] in, even if you don’t use the button and what’s the social share counts too. I’ve actually, I wish social share counts never existed to begin with. I just. I w I hope they all die eventually in my opinion. But the reason they work is like you said, that there’s a psychological thing behind seeing like, oh, this post has 1200 shares.

[00:06:31] Like maybe I should actually read through this or something. See what’s what is in here. So yeah, a lot of it is psychological, I think, with the social sharing for sure. 

[00:06:38] Matt: [00:06:38] Product owners slash make, or I presume that. You’re the sort of like the, the architect, you sort of do the blueprint, but then your brother goes in and  develops the features that, that you might, sketch out let’s for lack of a better phrase sketch out.

[00:06:54] And then you say, Hey, this would be a great way to use it. I assume something like the Nova share plugin, [00:07:00] like you said, it’s a complex plugin behind the scenes, but at the same time, like you’re trying to dumb it down. To as simplistic as possible so that somebody who’s just, futsing around.

[00:07:10] Like, I need to get a social share plugin on this site right now. I need to activate it. Like you have milliseconds to. Get that person to experience adding a social share plug in, or they’re just like, Nope. The activate delete one to move onto the next one. Like it’s, it’s a fine craft in order to get the most simplistic plugins activated and usable 

[00:07:31]Brian: [00:07:31] One thing that works in our advantage, I think is neither of us are good designers. We’re just, we can’t do it. If you give me a blank slate, I can’t do anything with it. Now if you give me blank slate and I have to write something, I can do that, but I can’t design worth crap and neither can my brother.

[00:07:45]So we actually take advantage of the native WordPress UI in all of our plugin settings. So I actually like it that way better because then you don’t have to learn a whole new UI all over again. I hate these plugins with these brand new UIs. You have to learn like where’s all this [00:08:00] stuff. So we just take advantage default WordPress UI for all the settings.

[00:08:03]And works for us. Cause we’re not designers. It just looks like word press still. And then I actually think it improves the onboarding because you’re not like where’s w why does this looks crazy? What are these toggles? All this stuff. So, yeah, so I, it, like you said, though, you have a few seconds until you lose someone.

[00:08:19] I’m the same way too. I’ll go into a new plugin, I’d try it. And like, if I can’t figure out something or see it, a doc explaining how to do it, like I’m, I’m probably gone. So. 

[00:08:29]Matt: [00:08:29] So th this is a good segue into just talking about like all the plugins that you’re building including the, the perf matters plugin and the coupons plugin.

[00:08:39] How do you allow yourself, or how do you wrangle in that expectation to just put all the features and everything, the kitchen sink into all of these. Plugins. 

[00:08:51] Brian: [00:08:51] Yeah, that’s a good point. And I think what has worked. Well for us in the past, and hopefully we’ll continue to work is being a WordPress user for so long myself [00:09:00] for like over a decade. I’ve used every social sharing plugin in the book, try them all.

[00:09:04]And I’ve used all the performance optimists as you plug in. So I’ve used them all. And just over the years, finding things that really annoyed me. And I couldn’t do easily. That’s kind of what we’ve started our business around. Like here’s how I would do it myself in a different way. We started building on that kind of methodology.

[00:09:20]And then right now it’s kind of morphed into what are we still trying to do? Because, because Google’s constantly changed stuff with performance, you have the web vitals stuff coming. So like, there’s things constantly changing. Like Facebook’s updating their share API. You’re always having to change and adapt as the plugins go on.

[00:09:37]But I think we, my brother and I just always looked at it like, how would we do this if we were the user? Because we are the user still. And that’s worked really well for us in the past. So 

[00:09:48]Matt: [00:09:48] There’s an overhead to this stuff that a lot of people are not aware of. The more features you put in. Especially in your case where not only do you have to build the feature and support that feature, you [00:10:00] also have to be aware what Google’s changing, what Pinterest is changing.

[00:10:04] You start rolling features and you’re like, Hey, there’s 15 social media sites we integrate with, and now that’s 15 API or whatever you have to, you have to watch. And I think a lot of people forget about that. And also to the point of view or UI decisions. Not being a designer. The worst thing the product makers do is attempt to be a designer.

[00:10:27] And then they’re like, they, then they make those interfaces and you’re like, why did you even just use what WordPress gave you? You would have saved time, money, and no, one’s trying to figure out how the heck do you use this thing? 

[00:10:36]Brian: [00:10:36] The UI is actually a good point too. With, if you keep adding features over time, say you want to move this stuff to a different tab. Usually it’s stuff like that’s going to actually require a Migrator is what we call my brother. And I call it a Migrator on the backend running code to migrate the feature as that person talks at all in there.

[00:10:54] To get rid of the old one. And that Migrator code has to stay in there. Until [00:11:00] I’m pretty much forever, or you can rip it out like two or three years later and say like, I think everyone’s probably gone and toggled this on here and moved. But like all of that stuff adds overhead. So like, we are always thinking like, where can we put this longterm?

[00:11:13] Because we don’t want to put migrators in here later down the road to move everything again. So like, Lots of people don’t think that through even we were consumed with that a little bit. I was like, wow, this is, yeah, this is hard to change later down the road too. So, 

[00:11:26]Matt: [00:11:26] so let’s talk about perf matters, plugin.

[00:11:29]It doesn’t seem to me anyway, like the easiest plugin to bring it to the market. I feel like it takes, not taking anything away, I think away from you and your brother, but it takes a lot of technical stuff that one would look at and be like, man, do we really want to build and test this, trying to find market adoption at the same time of as developing.

[00:11:48] And it’s like, Hmm, social plugin or another form plugin, probably, sometimes it’d be sometimes you’re like, I should have built a form plugin. How did you prepare to jump into the market with that? What did, what did you do [00:12:00] in the past that said, you know what, this is the plugin for me.

[00:12:02] Brian: [00:12:02] And I think that plugin itself. We actually started developing it while I was at Kinston. And mainly because, you know how hosting goes, like, no matter how good the host is, it doesn’t fix all the WordPress problems it on the site itself. So like a host won’t fix all the code issues. Usually it will help speed it up to as fast as you can get it.

[00:12:22]And that’s why I always recommend using the host, like, can store a page the, or. Even, even WP engine, like any of those bigger tier hosts. But I just kept seeing thing to like, I need to tweak this and tweak this. And so over time I there’s a free plugin, like called code snippets. I don’t know if you’ve ever used that one, but I ended up with, 20 to 30 code snippets, running all these different filters and functions on my side.

[00:12:43] And I was like, This is getting ridiculous. Let’s and so I actually asked my brother if we could put it into a plugin and then I started using it myself just on our own sites for awhile, and eventually it morphed into, like what if we just package this up and. Actually, maybe other people would be interested in it.

[00:12:59]And what we [00:13:00] found was a lot of other developers and agencies were doing the same thing. They had like all these code snippets, running all these different places and just having one plugin where they could kind of do all these tweaks just with little toggles, made it a lot easier. , 

[00:13:12] Matt: [00:13:12] Was your brother already doing your 

[00:13:14] Brian: [00:13:14] business development?

[00:13:14] He was a full-time WordPress developer, but for a He was in like the health space for a different corporation. So, got 

[00:13:20] Matt: [00:13:20] it. So you didn’t really have to twist his arm to convince you or to convince him 

[00:13:25] Brian: [00:13:25] to join. He actually used to live out here in Arizona and he worked there based here locally. I actually used to work for the same company too.

[00:13:32]But he used to work in a cubicle and all this stuff, and eventually he moved back to Washington state. But still was like, when you’re coding things to help fix people’s back pain, it’s just, it’s not as exciting as a, it gets old after awhile. And that’s actually why I left that company venture too.

[00:13:49] Cause like I’m trying to market cert back surgeries and all this stuff is just like, I don’t really, I want to help people, but like, yeah, I don’t have, I don’t know. I can’t put my whole heart into [00:14:00] this really. So, Finally started getting into the performance stuff and left that place.

[00:14:04] And, but yeah, he, I didn’t have to twist his arm at all. He was ready to do his own thing too. So it kind of worked out great. 

[00:14:10]Matt: [00:14:10] So for the person who’s listening, who’s developing her new plugin right now, or her new SAS service or some service from product based in the WordPress world. If you can recall back to , when you first launched.

[00:14:21]The plugin. What was on your to-do list first in terms of marketing blog, email. If you could do it again, would you do something different in order to get the word out, 

[00:14:31] Brian: [00:14:31] one thing I’ve never done. And I hate myself for doing this as a marketer, especially is I should never set up an email list for our plugins.

[00:14:40]And then over time it morphed into like, well, now I don’t have half the people and I just never did it. So. I wish I would have done that from day one, because we were so heavy into email marketing at kids. So I know it works. It’s one thing I do email marketing from day one, like have a checkbox there.

[00:14:57] If they buy your plugin or product, [00:15:00] whatever it is, like, have them at least the ability to opt into your newsletter. It’s I wish I had done that from day one. I might still go back and do that, but again, you’re like, I’ve lost two or three years worth of people in there. So that’s one thing.

[00:15:12]I think choosing the right e-commerce system is really, really important. I don’t regret what we did. We went with easy digital downloads. I’m not a huge fan of WooCommerce just cause it’s, the overhead is a lot more than EDD, but it depends on what you’re selling to. If you’re going to a physical product, I would have probably gone with WooCommerce.

[00:15:29] So, if you’re yeah. And 

[00:15:31] Matt: [00:15:31] by overhead you’re PR you’re probably referring to like the same thing we were just talking about. Like, it’s not even just like the price, but it’s, it’s just like all just the way that approaches digital sales and like all the stuff you have to do to just get a 

[00:15:43] Brian: [00:15:43] digital  too. Like, it just has to run more with all that stuff.

[00:15:46] It’s a bigger product. And there’s no way you can get the scripts, as small as like easy digital downloads. Cause there are a lot more niche focused. So. But if you’re doing just digital stuff, I love you to never have regretted that decision. They’re about to roll out. They’ve [00:16:00] been working on like EDD 3.0 for like a year plus now, and it’s going to be really cool.

[00:16:05] So I’m excited. Well, yeah, it gives them the benefit of the doubt, but yeah, it really has been like five years, but it really is. Yeah. Cause I’ve been playing with the beta of that and it’s really cool reports coming in. So, but. E-commerce platforms definitely important. I probably, I, so what I did was I’m a big fan of SEO and content.

[00:16:25] And what I did was I actually strategically wrote our docs. To rank, instead of doing the blog route, I, I do like keyword research on every documentation thing we write. So if there’s different ways I can word it slightly to kind of a keyword that better. I do that. So that has kind of been like a replacement for a blog.

[00:16:45] And if you have that’s worked really well. For us. So like maybe if you’re a developer have a plugin, if you don’t have time for a blog. Cause really we didn’t, we didn’t either, but I knew content works. So we kind of went with the documentation approach. Just you can [00:17:00] go like treated as a 2000 and 3000 word documentation post.

[00:17:05] Awesome. 

[00:17:05]Matt: [00:17:05] Yeah. And as it might be like how to optimize or how to optimize the WordPress site on kin sta. And it might be, your article talking about your documentation article. Maybe you have a special API key that integrates with Kinsler, something like that. But, you’d have those keywords where you’re answering what, will be an eventual question from a customer, but you’re, you’re also, giving it that sprinkle on top where.

[00:17:29] If somebody’s searching for it in Google, it’s also gonna, solve that 

[00:17:33] Brian: [00:17:33] fall. We have seen from that is, and it’s not really a huge issue, but if you have any like voting system in place, we have a little like thumbs up, thumbs down thing on our docs that if you put the thumbs down, it just lets you like put in a comment to say like, why you didn’t like it or what we could improve.

[00:17:48] We get a lot of thumbs down because I guess I’ve done too good with documentation or something. So like people like how to disable emojis and WordPress. And like our documentation is how to use our plugin [00:18:00] to disable emojis and WordPress. And everyone wants to not buy our plugin, but figure out how to disable emotions.

[00:18:06] WordPress still they’re like thumbs down or joining us up on your plugins. And I was like, I’m sorry, I re too good of a dog, I guess. Sorry. That’s Google’s fault. In my opinion, the, the 

[00:18:16] Matt: [00:18:16] internet. The Internet’s a funny place. I have a eight year old gravity forms video that people still comment on this.

[00:18:23] Isn’t like, how did this wasn’t even look the same? Like, did you look at the date of the YouTube video? It’s eight years old? What did you, what did 

[00:18:30] Brian: [00:18:30] you think was going to happen regardless? Free traffic is free traffic, so it’s never a bad thing.

[00:18:36]Matt: [00:18:36] I’m just going to pause for a second here. I don’t know why this AC units making the sound one second and it’s back it’s it’s on the phone. I don’t know why. All right. The, the YouTube viewers will enjoy that. Cause the YouTube is totally unedited. That’s the value of watching the YouTube, watching the YouTube channel.

[00:18:53]Let’s talk about the product market fit itself. You start writing the documentation. It starts [00:19:00] ranking. What was your first order of operation to get connected with agencies and hosting providers? 

[00:19:06]Brian: [00:19:06] A lot of it was cause again, we, with our first plug in there, we started building it while it was at Ken star.

[00:19:12] Ready. So like, I would say we had a little traction when we finally left. Like we had been, I had probably been writing docs for like a year, like just in the evening, slowly building it up and stuff. So. Our Nova shirt. One is probably a better example because that one we launched after I left Ken’s to.

[00:19:28] So like that was a brand new play we launched just with nothing. And that one we’ve slowly just been ranking the docs. Huge, important thing. Social media has been another thing. I love using Twitter and Facebook, so that’s not a hard thing for me because I actually enjoy doing it. And another thing was affiliate marketing program.

[00:19:46] That was, that’s been a huge thing for us actually. We saw it work. I saw it work pretty good at Kinsa and I’ve seen it actually even work even better with the plugins. So I’m not sure, maybe it works just better with plugins in general all the time, or I’ve [00:20:00] seen that work really well for us.

[00:20:01] So, so, oops. But yeah, reaching out to bloggers and letting them know we have an affiliate program and kind of describing like our our plugin and what it does, and like how it might stack up to, some of the other ones that are out there already. And then just kind of going from there and then kind of building all the affiliate marketers, and that kind of will snowball over time, but it’s not, there’s no overnight easy success.

[00:20:22] So just a fair warning to everyone. It’s like, it’s a slow, it’s a slow grind. 

[00:20:26]Matt: [00:20:26] Yeah. I Especially affiliates, right? Cause you, you want to try to reach out to the air quotes, good ones that are out there. Right. And you want to make sure that they’re providing the most accurate and up-to-date information, which plugin did you use for affiliates in the back?

[00:20:40] Also Pippin’s 

[00:20:41]Brian: [00:20:41] affiliate VP. That’s where we usually WB works really great. We’ve I’ve never had a single problem with it.

[00:20:46]Matt: [00:20:46] The. Supporting the business let’s move into or supporting the plugins either one was that new to you? Coming from Kinsel, you probably saw what it was like to support a WordPress website or an end-user. You start marketing, you [00:21:00] are ranking, you’re making these connections, you’re selling it now.

[00:21:03] Any surprise on supporting this stuff. Because again, I feel like at least the perf matters is. You’re gonna, you’re gonna, you’re probably going to have people ask you some real technical questions where it’s not just restart your laptop, try it again. It’s going to be something like, Hey, these three lines of my JavaScript file are getting corrupted.

[00:21:20] Every time I hit, it’s like, oh man, like I have to get really deep with 

[00:21:23] Brian: [00:21:23] these customers. So like for our providers, I would say we get 10 times the amount of tickets as we do for our social media plugin or a coupon plugin. And we knew that was going to happen. Optimization is tricky. And even if you make it a single toggle, like it might not work on someone else’s site, it might need a slight fix on our end to work with that theme.

[00:21:44] Or there’s all sorts of different problems that can go with performance optimization. And so like a part of my day is doing support tickets. Like every single day. Like I wake up and basically my brother and I wake up and we try to bang out support tickets, first thing. So by noon, we can [00:22:00] actually.

[00:22:00] Like, he goes back to like coding and I don’t really hear from him for a couple hours. And then, yeah. And then I’ll go back into, in documentation and like whatever’s in my Trello board. But yeah, I would say a good half of our day now is spent just doing tickets and we use just a shared Gmail inbox.

[00:22:17] We found that it works really great for us. With two people. I know that doesn’t work once you get lots of people, but we use ’em. The filters aggressively. And then we have our contact form push in different labels, dynamically based on what they choose. So when it comes in, we can see like, oh, this is a feature request for perf matters.

[00:22:35]And then a filter is applied to it in Gmail. And so when we get up, like we can see boom, boom, boom, like kind of what we have already without, without any work. So, 

[00:22:43] Matt: [00:22:43] There’s a, there’s a lead of customer success right now. Just throwing a laptop around the room going, I can’t believe they just use a single 

[00:22:50] Brian: [00:22:50] g-mail inbox.

[00:22:51] Yeah. Well, coming from Kenzie, we used Intercom and all of these crazy tools to do the, to do the support and stuff. And you had, and then just [00:23:00] going to a shared Gmail inbox, it’s kind of refreshing to be honest, because it was very, very simple. But yeah, that’s our workflow. And like, I have my Trello board, my brother has his development, Trello board.

[00:23:10] So that’s how we do that. But yeah. 

[00:23:11]Matt: [00:23:11] What does a long-term what does a long-term vision of this? This company with your brother look like, like, are you, are you looking to just keep it you and him? Or is it you starting to feel like, okay, we’re growing this whole, like nine to 12, just doing support. We need to bring somebody on.

[00:23:28] Is that a, is that in the cards in the future, 

[00:23:30] Brian: [00:23:30] or I think we’re going to try to see how it goes here within the next year or two. We. We’re trying not to bring anyone else on board because I’ve seen at multiple startups, how that works and it just had so much more complications to things like, and then if you grow too big, you got to do an HR department.

[00:23:48] And it just gets out of control really, really fast. So like we’re purposefully wanting to stay very, very small. And the nice thing about that is our overhead is also really small too. So, that’s one [00:24:00] reason why we’re, we’re also not just trying to add every single feature in the book to try to just get every sale we possibly can.

[00:24:05] We’re we’re more specific about what we’re adding and trying to stay small and nimble. I would, I would say for people out there staying small and nimble definitely has a lot of advantages. Even things like, yeah. Taking advantage. I’m not a big fan of lifetime deals. But you know, I snagged them when I see them too.

[00:24:23] I’m not, you’d be stupid if you don’t. And so, like EDD had a lifetime sale last year, they ran. I was like, okay, I know I bought it without hesitation within minutes. And just. Yeah. It’s like, it’s got bills like that, that you can just get where of live wife amount, forever.

[00:24:39]If you’re small and nimble, like, it makes a huge difference. Whereas, if you’re a 30 person company might not, might not matter as much, but yeah. So yeah, staying small and nimble has advantages, I would say for sure. 

[00:24:49] Matt: [00:24:49] Yeah. How do you balance the, the response of the, of the folks? Well, let’s talk about how perf matters sits into the overall competition of plugins.

[00:24:59] And when [00:25:00] we had our pre-interview, I asked you about like the caching plugins and stuff like that seems to be a booming market. If there, if you’re doing it well, Do you have customers who come to you who are like, even on this whole thing of, of pricing and value and lifetime deals, I feel like sometimes people go, we’re average, WordPress customers go, oh, a hundred dollars for this.

[00:25:19] All it does is this one little thing. I’m not going to pay a hundred dollars when X plugin does it. I bought a lifetime license for $49. I’ll never have to pay again for free. How do you position. Perf matters to a caching plugin, heck even, even a Yoast SEO, because I think sometimes people throw that into the mix of, of site optimization.

[00:25:39] How do you position it to your customers when they ask you that the 

[00:25:42] Brian: [00:25:42] differences first off, I think with all of our plugins, we’ve approached them in a slightly different way. So like, and I probably every in the battle for I’ll say that, but I, I think we do have some things that are unique to us. But another thing that is another advantage of staying small and nimble is like, I, [00:26:00] I think our support is hands down the best out of.

[00:26:02] Probably any of the other plugins out there. And it’s, we clear our tickets out by noon every single day. We respond typically within 20 minutes sometimes to people like your ticket will be solved the same day. Regardless. I won’t go to sleep until it’s solved. That’s that’s one advantage to us. And so, we get a lot of people reaching out saying, can you do this?

[00:26:20] Or can you do that? And I’ll take the time. I’ll take 20 minutes and respond to them with a lengthy email. Sometimes here’s how to do this. And then, we’ll win over a customer that way. So, once you grow too big, you have to bang things out quicker and as fast as possible, and the quality just goes down.

[00:26:35]And so I don’t mind taking more time out and, doing emails like that. So that’s one advantage. I think we have over some of our competitors. And another thing is we’ve kind of put ourselves in the niche to kind of work alongside. The competitors. So like WP, rocket. Great example, everybody has it.

[00:26:53] I was probably on 90% of the sites I work on for clients. But like they started primarily as a caching plugin. [00:27:00] That’s how they started. And they started adding, all the optimizations after that. But for us. We’re like there’s already all these great caching solutions hosts, like Kinston Pagely WP engine.

[00:27:11] You don’t need a caching plugin. So we’re like, you know what, we’re not going to do caching, skip that. There’s other, there’s other great people doing it, hosting providers now do it. So, we’re not going to spend time on that. And that’s kind of how we’ve approached everything out there. Like. Image optimization, never going to do it.

[00:27:27] You have, you have short pixel. Imagify great plugins out there already that do that. Do it really well. We use those plugins. So you know what we’re to going to do that. We then focus on things that other people aren’t doing. We’re trying to fix problems that haven’t been solved yet. So.

[00:27:43]Matt: [00:27:43] Yeah. And you mentioned to me that your best customers are agencies, obviously they’re, well-informed, they’re developing the sites, they understand WordPress. So it’s a great sort of, and you saw firsthand that other agencies were using the code snippets. Plugin. So you’re like, yeah, this makes total sense.

[00:27:59] And if I [00:28:00] can address that market and shape my messaging to it, chances are the support won’t be as challenging. You still probably have challenging support, but at least if you’re focusing on agencies, they have some money. Yeah. 

[00:28:12] Brian: [00:28:12] Yep. No, exactly. And we do get all sorts of users. I We’ll get the, I’ve had people email us saying.

[00:28:18] I just created my first website, WordPress website today. And for some reason they bought our plugin. I would be like, you know what, I, I think you need to learn a little more before you go down, even the optimization route. Like so, but and then we have people that have installed like literally like 10 different optimization, plugins thinking, the more they install the faster it will get, which it doesn’t work like that, unfortunately.

[00:28:41]And so, we have to help those people. Fortunately, I. Being small and nimble, I can take the time and help those people that need a little more help than, like the agencies that, sometimes we’ll probably never hear from them because they already have a developer that knows WordPress knows what they’re trying to do.

[00:28:55] And yeah, we just never even get a ticket from them ever. So. 

[00:28:58]Matt: [00:28:58] Yeah. You mentioned in [00:29:00] pre-interview something about Google core web vitals and how your plugin will at least help you get started, not solve it. I don’t think unless you, unless you do solve it through your plugin or solve a ranking well or optimizing well do you have any thoughts that you would like to share with people who might not.

[00:29:18] No much about what this upcoming Google core web vitals is including yours truly because I haven’t really dug into any of the stuff that they’re rolling out. Is there anything that you’re plugging aides with that folks should get 

[00:29:31] Brian: [00:29:31] chance to viral? So there’s all these different kinds of warnings and rules they want you to meet or thresholds.

[00:29:38]And so basically with our plugin, that’s, we’re entirely focused on Google core web vitals. That’s all we’re focused on. And we’re looking at each individual, one of those kind of born into the scene, how we can fix those basically on people’s sites. So yeah, are a lot of people are buying a plugin, installing it to help increase their scores with Google core web vitals.

[00:29:55]Now if you had asked me five years ago, I would’ve told you don’t use page speed [00:30:00] scores at all. Don’t scores don’t matter. Unfortunately the times have changed and I will be the first to a minute. You need to go by the scores now. Unfortunately, that’s where we’re at. And. 

[00:30:10]Matt: [00:30:10] Which is a whole different conversation on 

[00:30:13] Brian: [00:30:13] like Google.

[00:30:13] Yeah. Oh yeah. 

[00:30:15] Matt: [00:30:15] And 

[00:30:15] Brian: [00:30:15] antitrust. Sure. It is. And, but you know, the times before, when I started at kids to, this Google core web vitals wasn’t even existing, you had page speed insights. But it wasn’t really a ranking factor. So like, then you were like looking at total load time now. Load time matters, but you don’t look, I don’t look at that metric ever.

[00:30:33] I haven’t looked at load time for. Probably months what I’m looking at or the Google core web vital scores. Now they do correlate pretty well. So if you score high there, you’re probably in loading fast anyways. So, but it’s changed into before is how fast is your site load? And now it’s about. How well does the code on your site run basically?

[00:30:52] Like how, how are you loading the code? It’s a lot more complicated than it was three or four years ago. So [00:31:00] that’s what we’re focused on now. And a lot of the optimization plugins are, are also focused on that too. Now. 

[00:31:04]Matt: [00:31:04] Yeah. Yeah, for sure. What’s next in for marketing for you? Sounds like it’s still probably documentation building.

[00:31:13] You have that chunk of the third of your day or whatever, doing support. Do you have a next big idea without sharing maybe the secret sauce of what you’re doing, but maybe giving people some, some framework of. Of what you think you’re going to do next for the company, because we’re about what two, two and a half years 

[00:31:30] Brian: [00:31:30] company.

[00:31:30] Yeah. Yeah. Raleigh legally. Yeah. On paper. So like this. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:31:36]Matt: [00:31:36] So at this stage of the game, like, it’s not just the, a beta test anymore. Like things are rocking and rolling for, for what we can tell you and your brother, you spending time supporting people. So you got customers you’re rolling out products, rolling out new features.

[00:31:49] What does marketing look like next for you? What’s the next big leap you think you’ll 

[00:31:53] Brian: [00:31:53] take not a podcast. I’m going to leave that to people like you, that are professionals that I know nothing about podcasts. [00:32:00] So, I kudos to you cause it’s one thing, man. I, I could not do that. I, I wouldn’t even know where to start, but it’s the same with like YouTube.

[00:32:06] I, I’ve never done YouTube videos in my life. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I’m a blogger. That’s what I know what to do. So I think a big focus for me is actually more content this next year. We actually, my brother and I got into a, kind of a bad habit this last year with partially, maybe because of COVID too, we got into a slump of like, I was just doing primarily most of the tickets trying to get them off so he could just do development.

[00:32:32] And most of my day was just doing tickets and then, and I wasn’t doing any writing. And so this year we’ve kind of been like, okay, let’s both wake up. We’re both hanging out together. And that way we can both, I’ll go right then, and then you can go do a element. So that’s actually worked better for us.

[00:32:48] So rebalancing our kind of workflow. And so yeah, I have a Trello board with probably like, Over a hundred topics I want to write on. It’s just, for me, it’s always a matter of a time. It’s never of what to do. It’s [00:33:00] just a matter of time. 

[00:33:00] Matt: [00:33:00] Yeah. Yeah, because you’re not, you’re not the type to just rip up, but like a 300, three to 500 word article, like you’re putting a lot of meetings 

[00:33:09] Brian: [00:33:09] when you’re creating a blog post.

[00:33:11] And that’s another piece of advice for anyone listening. Yeah, I would two blog posts that are like 5,000 words. Each are way, way better than 10 blog posts that are, three or four, 500 words each. So just spend more time and less is, is, is fine. Yeah. 

[00:33:25] Matt: [00:33:25] For sure what’s next for product development, anything new and exciting coming a plugin we don’t know 

[00:33:31] Brian: [00:33:31] about yet or a new product.

[00:33:34] We have enough under our boat for right now. As long as we can keep continuing seeing growth, being small and nimble, we’re really not looking for new, new plugins to drink and more money because we’re really focused on these right now. And I think for perf matters we have new features coming for.

[00:33:50] Google core web vitals, everything we’re pushing out is how to solve more of those crazy warnings or how to fix things. So definitely be that that update [00:34:00] is coming in June. So yeah, everyone listening, just, I would take time, look at your sites, see where you’re standing at the moment. You don’t want to get caught off guard with that stuff.

[00:34:07]And then for our social sharing plugin we’re actually going to be doing probably more focused on some block stuff. With Gutenberg. So, like widgets, I think here in five eight, or I forget if they delayed it again, they keep delaying stuff, but if it. There’s going to be blocks and widgets eventually.

[00:34:23] And so we’re going to be doing some stuff with that. Taking advantage of that stuff that way, because right now we have a widget and like short codes, but it’s kinda, like the old school way of doing things. And I’d love to, drag a block here or drag a block there. Like it’ll, it’ll be awesome.

[00:34:36] I think so Be focused on that. And then that’s pretty much it, our other affiliate marketing plugin. We don’t have any new, crazy, huge features that one’s pretty well built out. So we’re kind of just adding things as customers request it kind of getting feedback, fixing bugs, obviously here and there.

[00:34:52] So.

[00:34:52]Matt: [00:34:52] Well, I’m going to do a new segment, which I have. I haven’t done segments in my podcast in, in literally years, but you know, there’s all of this [00:35:00] WordPress consolidation happening. I’ll predict that you will get acquired by. Insta in a year. That’s, that’s my prediction because what’ll happen is Chris lemma from liquid web will come knocking on your door and say, Hey, this is a great plugin that would work amazing with our hosting stack.

[00:35:18] And then you’ll take his offer and bring it back to the kids, the guys, and say, Hey, remember me, I get this offer from your competitor, Chris. Wouldn’t you rather buy me instead. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw that out there on May 27th as we 

[00:35:31] Brian: [00:35:31] record it. Well, I can’t tell you, I don’t mind sharing. We’ve had multiple offers already.

[00:35:35] And I’m pretty, probably every plugin developer has at this point. But the thing is we don’t want to sell because we don’t want to work for other people again, that’s, that’s the reason we quit our jobs was so we don’t have to work for other people and have a more chillax, like, if I want to leave in the middle of the day to go get food, I can do that.

[00:35:52]So. Just cause he worked from home for another company, it still doesn’t mean you can like your schedules that July sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:36:00] [00:36:00] Matt: [00:36:00] Well, you, you just respond to Chris and say white Nia chillax check. I want chillax bucks. That’s what I want. I want it. So I don’t have to work for you. And then I can take a couple 

[00:36:07] Brian: [00:36:07] of years off, but the, the one thing people might not realize about those acquisitions is that.

[00:36:12]A lot of times you can’t just step away because a lot of times they won’t have developers that understand your plugin or like there’ll be a long lead time to where you can step away from. And so, like, that’s something not either of my my brother and I are interested in, but yeah, you never know what’s going to happen five years from now.

[00:36:29]Liquid web has been smashing up things left and right. Cadence. Good. Yeah, the list goes on and on. It does actually worry me a little bit as far as what WordPress is going to look like, like five, 10 years from now. Like, is it going to be more just like Google, Amazon, Facebook?

[00:36:46] I You’re just going to have these huge companies running everything and no more little small guys anymore. So. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. We’re going to Brett and I are my brother and I are just going to chug along until we ride the wave until we maybe if, until it [00:37:00] ends or so.

[00:37:00] But but yeah, it will be interesting to see what happens. 

[00:37:04]Matt: [00:37:04] Yeah. I think not to go into another segment, which I call the tinfoil hat segment is the I think. Jetpack and automatic and Matt have sort of brought this a little bit. More to the forefront or, brought it upon themselves kind of thing.

[00:37:20] When you see Jetpack doing absolutely everything. I think when I interviewed him, he might’ve called it like a market correction. I see that as just big dominant player, rolling out a feature that small player can’t compete with from everything from CRM to CDN to whatever, everything.

[00:37:39] Literally in jet pack. And this will be the natural reaction to web hosts from web hosts because web hosts look at that and they go, well, we see what’s coming. You’ll just in another year or so, make a click and host your free WordPress site on wordpress.com with a click of a button. A lot of web hosts are going to get scared from that or of that.

[00:37:59] Right. There’s [00:38:00] just this quick mechanism. They have to start to connect in, right. Or serve static. You serve your site static with Jetpack CDN, right. And which is all already, almost there kind of thing. And there’s less of a need for that host and their plans and all this stuff. So yeah, I can definitely see this all happening.

[00:38:17] It’s going to be interesting to see how we react and, that’s why I always say it’s fine to start at a foreign plug these days who cares because someone’s going to acquire someone and then they’ll, you’ll just slide right into that next spot and say, Hey everybody, I’m here to. I, come and get me there’s plenty of opportunity to, 

[00:38:32] Brian: [00:38:32] at least at this stage actually chatting.

[00:38:34] I won’t say who, but chatting with another plugin developer that was actually asking my advice about an acquisition, like, and they were running into the problem of how to scale to the next level, essentially. And like they were running into things that I’ve dealt with myself as far as like, how do we handle all this tax stuff, all the VAT stuff, all the, they’re a smaller team and they were wanting.

[00:38:57] They were just getting inundated with all these random things that [00:39:00] like, if you like take an acquisition, you do get the benefit of they handle all the taxes, they handle all the accounting. So, there are definitely advantages to say, like, maybe you don’t want to go work for another company, but like maybe, maybe your day would be easier because all you have to worry about is, oh, okay.

[00:39:17] I can keep helping code the plugin, but I don’t have to worry about any of the other crap that comes, comes with it. So, there’s another, yeah. 

[00:39:23]Matt: [00:39:23] Yeah, we eventually, we eventually see these, these founders come back around, right? They, they do their year stint or two years at, at the company, whatever the contract states and they’re back again, developing something, All over again.

[00:39:34] I, really depends on, on your taste as a founder and as a business builder, Brian Jackson, everybody, you can find him well, you can find them in a lot of places. You can find that perfect matters.io, Nova share.io forge media.io. You can find them at those three websites anywhere. 

[00:39:50] Brian: [00:39:50] Yeah, I, I pretty much live on Twitter.

[00:39:52] It was just Brian Lee Jackson. You’ll find me Bri and, and yeah. Send me a tweet or DM or if you’re ever in Scottsdale, [00:40:00] Arizona tweet me, we’ll meet up for coffee. I try to meet up anyone that twists me here. I always meet them for coffee. It’s kind of like a little thing I like doing so genuine in the area.

[00:40:08] I’d love to meet you. Hm, 

[00:40:09]Matt: [00:40:09] cool man. Everyone else. All right. put.com. airport.com/subscribe to join the mailing list. Don’t forget to tune into the WP minute [email protected]. We’ll see you in the next episode. 

[00:01:39] Matt: [00:01:39] It took me a while to draw out what I wanted to say in today’s monologue about our guests. This will be a six appearance on the show. With this episode, we’ve covered four different SAS based businesses with a handful of digital products and one service-based business. That’s still running of which I’ve never really fully interviewed them about. I really should. Since it’s the cashflow center, he has [00:02:00] to fund all of these business experiments. He’s chasing.
[00:02:03] Can you guess who it is? His name is Brian Casel. He’s trying something new. It’s called zip message. It’s an async way to share videos with customers and colleagues. Out of everything he’s worked on. I think this will be the software project that defines his career in the software business.
[00:02:19]Just like I called it with Paul Jarvis and fathom analytics taking over his product world. I bet we’ll have Brian back on for a seventh time when he sells this business to Microsoft. You’re listening to the Maryport a podcast for the resilient digital business builders. Subscribe to the [email protected] slash subscribe and follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet. Please share this episode on your social media. We’d love more listeners around here. Okay.
[00:02:46] Let’s talk to Brian and find out why he’s launching yet another product. Hey everybody. Welcome back to what I’m calling the Brian report. Brian. Oh man. Welcome back to the podcast. You’ve [00:03:00] clearly won the, a amount of recurring times on the, on the merit port show. I should just have applied for all of the products that you launch. I should just have a podcast all to yourself and everything that you have going on today.
[00:03:12] We’re talking about. If that’s
[00:03:13] Brian: [00:03:13] not a sign of failure, I don’t know.
[00:03:15] Matt: [00:03:15] What is failure show castles here to talk about what might be another failure, the message you can find zip [email protected]. I’m going to open this up. I think a lot of people know your backstory. If they haven’t, they can listen to the half a dozen shows that you and I have already done on this podcast.
[00:03:33]Why this product last time we. We chatted. You were just getting your, you were, you were getting that sort of Ruby on rails, getting your chops down on that, like learning how to build whole other platform and suddenly zip message appeared out of nowhere. How, why, when did it come about, why did you pursue it?
[00:03:51] Brian: [00:03:51] Yeah. I don’t, I don’t remember exactly when our last show here on a I’ll call it Matt report aired. It must’ve been [00:04:00] probably around 2018 or 2019. I can’t believe it’s actually been that long, but you and I have chatted since then. The, so a little bit of of the timeline process kit, which is, you know, I still run and still going that product.
[00:04:15] I basically started working on it really full-time in January of 2019, I kind of started planning it in 18, but really got full-time into it in January 19. Launched that to first paying customers by around June of, I want to say, yeah, 2019, and then really focused a hundred percent on that. Throughout 19 and 20 and into 20.
[00:04:40] And then at the end of 2020 you know, process kit just got to the, to that place where a lot of SAS get to where, you know, a couple thousand in MRR it’s really slow to grow. It has some. You know, so some, some challenges I tried a bunch of stuff and I’m still trying some stuff, but I decided at, [00:05:00] in around December of 2020 to just take a step back and start to open my mind to like, maybe I should try another product or two or three.
[00:05:12] And actually like back in, back in, you know, back in January, the idea was. Let’s let’s throw a couple of ideas at the wall and see what sticks, but there was really this one idea called zip message, which I had the idea and midway through 2020, but I, you know, I shelved it along with all the other shiny object ideas in my long list of them.
[00:05:29]But I was like, let me just try this. Take a little breather from, from really pushing on process kit, put it, put the roadmap on process could a little bit on, on maintenance mode. And and I went into zip message and, you know, I really liked the idea. I was attracted to the idea because a number of different things.
[00:05:46]First of all, you know, in, in a lot of ways, it’s sort of really every business that I ever get into, I’m trying to course correct from something that I learned in the, in the previous one. Right. One of the big challenges with process kit [00:06:00] has been that it’s a really big. Product, which means it’s a really big task to adopt.
[00:06:05] If you’re a new customer, like it literally takes new customers a good month, at least of. Of like everyday work on their part to, to
[00:06:13] Matt: [00:06:13] really, they have to appeal the process out, template it out into your system, if you will, and then engage people to, to use it. And I remember you and I chatting a lot PR you know, privately between the two of us, like, wouldn’t this be a great idea, like free templates to like kickstart that and nurture.
[00:06:30] Yeah.
[00:06:30] Brian: [00:06:30] And, and we have templates in there which really did help a lot in, in late 20, 20. Added the templates and put them like front and center in the onboarding experience. So actually since then we’ve had, you know, more customers, self convert without, without the heavy customer support load that it did have for a while there.
[00:06:45]And that, that continues, I guess it’s just super slow, you know, to, to grow and, and become a thing. And for those that don’t know, like in the background, I also have audience ops, which I’m not super involved in day to day, but that, that is the other business that I have that, that sort of.
[00:07:00] [00:06:59] Funds all the runway for, for getting into SAS. So it gives me a little bit of space and time to be able to explore different ideas which is, which is really nice. But with zip messaging, I really liked it because the first things that really attracted to me as the business idea is that it’s so fast to get value from, you know, like again, process kit is like, you got to really commit like a good month to get, to really start to get value.
[00:07:23] Like you’re automating operations in your business. Whereas with zip message. You could sign up and have an, an asynchronous video call with one of the person and you just got. A bit of value from this tool. Is that something
[00:07:36] Matt: [00:07:36] you, you sort of stumbled upon? I know countless products, services and stuff that you’ve, that you’ve gone through.
[00:07:42] And I, and I want to kind of break that down of like what your best, most valuable lesson is thus far in your career, but will you like sort of. You know, midway through or three quarters way through here with process get going. You know what I think I missed, I think it was that I think it was that quick, easy, instant gratification to a [00:08:00] customer.
[00:08:00] I feel like that’s what I’m missing and, oh, that’s right. I get this thing called zip message over here that I was thinking about doing
[00:08:07] Brian: [00:08:07] learned. It it’s, it’s never just one thing. There’s always, you know, there’s, there’s really probably like 10 big learnings that I’ve taken out of process kit. And some things that I, that I learned.
[00:08:17] That, that we did really well, but yeah, that was one of them definitely is that activation adoption sort of thing. The most common , churn reason that I hear from people is you know, really it’s so more of a challenge of, of getting new people to adopt it. Cause cause once people do do get like sign on the, the lifetime is really great and they actually do expand that they add, you know, team members and stuff like that.
[00:08:41]But they, they basically stopped like the people who turn, they, they basically stop using it after a few months. So, you know, obviously there there’s. There might be some like product market fit issues there, but there is a core customer base that is like power users on it and they really love it.
[00:08:55] So it’s sort of like a question of like, what do I do with that?
[00:08:59]Matt: [00:08:59] This is a [00:09:00] reaction to just like, it’s not even just whatever audio video tools to do apps and like all these other spaces. This is just everything. Every product in the world competing with that I need to, it needs to be instant or the customer.
[00:09:15] They’re out. Like it doesn’t matter what kind of tool you’re launching
[00:09:17] Brian: [00:09:17] here. Yeah. The thing that I saw with zip message that, that got me really excited. Number one, was that like speed to get getting value from the tool. Number two is it’s, it’s heading into a space of software tools. That is, is not brand new.
[00:09:33] So like loom is probably the most common call it competitor. And, and which, you know, lots of people use, I use loom as well. And so this idea of like video recording, video messaging tools, the thing that I saw with loom, and this was actually the, the way the idea for zip message came about was that I would commonly be on a customer support call for process kit, and ask the customer, Hey, I [00:10:00] need to see what you’re seeing.
[00:10:00] Can you record your screen for me? Can you, can you go use a tool like, like loom or, or record your screen and send me a Dropbox link or whatever you might do. And, you know, that’s a lot to ask for, for customers. Like maybe they do use loom, maybe they don’t. But it’s just friction there. Right? So I wanted to, like, I, I started thinking like, man, there’s gotta be an easy way for me to just send somebody a link.
[00:10:22] They click it, they come to a page, they could start recording their screen. And that was the original idea for zip message. And that’s what it is. You can, you can do that, but, but what it quickly evolved into was okay, they could re it’s easy for somebody else to record, but I can record my response right back to them.
[00:10:42] And now we have this asynchronous conversation on, on video or just audio camera, screen screenshot, or just text. And now is literally flowing down the page, like a conversation. But we’re asynchronous. We don’t have to book a live zoom call, you know? I don’t have to [00:11:00] ask somebody to get on their calendar, all that.
[00:11:02] It’s just like, here’s a link. Let’s talk when it’s good for both of us. And, and it just flows right down the page. And, and that idea of the asynchronous conversation turned out to be the thing that people are starting to really latch on to, you know, because. And that was a little bit to my surprise, you know?
[00:11:20]And, and I’m finding all these other use cases. My original use case was like customer support scenarios, but. All these other use cases are coming up like, oh, I want to, I want to use it to, to take requests for my podcast. I wanna, I want to use it to, you know, collaborate with my team, my freelancers, talk to my customers, or use it in a sales situation to have asynchronous video chats with, with sales prospects, hiring, like getting, you know, video responses from applicants and stuff like that.
[00:11:49] So, I’m sort of fielding all these different use cases right now, but it’s, they’re all interested in, I, I keep asking people, like, why are you interested in zit message? Why, why don’t you just use a loom? [00:12:00] Right. And, and they all come back saying, this is the one that has that, that conversation, like a threaded conversation view.
[00:12:08] And so we’re really sort of leaning into that. And I’m pretty excited about it. I I’ve been. Ha having conversations with, with customers like using zip message. It’s a
[00:12:18] Matt: [00:12:18] really cool
[00:12:19] Brian: [00:12:19] tool. Totally. It’s a really cool way to actually communicate,
[00:12:23] Matt: [00:12:23] you know? Yeah. Before we keep drilling into the product and how you’re approaching it, , what has been the most valuable piece of education to Excel your career?
[00:12:33] I’m going to bet that it’s learning how to. Amy, you always know, you’ve always known how to develop, but I feel like this progression into learning Ruby on rails and becoming a a better developer has been something that has really skyrocketed your ability to launch and iterate and feel more confident in products.
[00:12:52] Is that, is that true?
[00:12:53] Brian: [00:12:53] A hundred percent. Yes. Yeah. I love it. And it has skyrocketed my enjoyment of what I do [00:13:00] with, with products. Yeah, it has really, really removed such a huge barrier. Cause I’ve, I, I have been a front end dev my whole career. I’ve been a designer. I am a designer.
[00:13:11]And, and when I say designer, I, you know, as, as any designer knows that that doesn’t mean. Picking colors and picking typography. Like that’s just one detail of it. What you’re really doing is as a designer, you’re solving a problem. And so when you’re designing for the web, especially if you’re designing software, you’re really designing the whole system from the way that it works.
[00:13:34] In the database to the way that the user interacts on the, on the screen. And for years, I, you know, probably one of your mat reports, we talked about like ops calendar when I was doing that. And that was 2017. Yeah. Back then I couldn’t develop backend. So I had to hire out. Help with that. Right now, I, I also have a developer that I work with them and we can work really fast together.
[00:13:57] Another big benefit of being a developer myself [00:14:00] is I can collaborate on such a deeper, more productive level with him. He’s in India and we, and we are hashing out every single feature together. Not to mention working You know, like two tracks, like we’re, we’re able to ship twice as many features in a week because it’s both me and him working on it.
[00:14:20] Yeah.
[00:14:20] Matt: [00:14:20] So, I I’d say also one of your super powers, it’s kind of funny. Not to get sidetracked on, on products. I’m looking at our 2017 episode on the Maryport building ops calendar. And one of the channel under the challenges bullet point section there’s here’s a bullet point. It says there’s a side plugin business that is also being created from custom tools by audience, which I think was like your opt-in forms on WordPress, the content upgrades.
[00:14:44] Yeah, it just goes to show like all of these different things that you would fragment and spider out too.
[00:14:49] Brian: [00:14:49] That one was funny because we had that’s a pair of, of WordPress plugins. And we, you know, some, some customers bought it, but we mainly used it for clients and audience ops. And then I think it was [00:15:00] around 2018.
[00:15:00] I ended up selling those to liquid web. Which came about really randomly, but but it was nice to sort of just
[00:15:07] Matt: [00:15:07] let those go. I’d say also one of, one of your super powers, which might often get overlooked is your ability. And this is just something that I’ve admired your ability to do. And I just don’t know if I have the patience like you to do it, but as hiring people is higher as being able to find and hire and train people up to.
[00:15:25]To help you develop these, these products. I think that’s a skill set that is very difficult to hone over time. I’ve seen plenty of blog posts that are like, here’s all you have to do, make a couple of test projects and hire and go through 12 of them and hire that one person. It’s like, it never works for me.
[00:15:41] Works for you. You
[00:15:42] Brian: [00:15:42] know what? It’s interesting you say that because I think, I think I’ve done okay with hiring over the years. In, in, in certain types of hiring, but, but now I’m in a different place with trying to build a small team to grow this SAS company that I’m working on [00:16:00] now. Right. So, and, and that I’m finding a lot more challenging to hire for.
[00:16:04]I’m still figuring it out. I like, it’s literally on my plate this week, like a problem that I haven’t figured out yet. So, the what, what I’ve always felt pretty comfortable with is. Okay. I’ve got a service. I figured it, the process for delivering the service. I’ve documented the process. I set up the systems.
[00:16:23] Now I need to hire people to plug into the process. And carry out specific roles. That’s that’s what audience ops is. We’ve got a team of about 25 people, writers, copy editors managers, assistants, and they, they just kind of carry out their tasks. And that has grown to where we have like a, a higher level manager.
[00:16:41] We’ve got a sales person, we’ve got, you know, different stuff. So you know, that, that. I think, I think I’m an okay manager. Maybe not a great manager. I don’t know that. I’m great. Yeah. Yeah. Like building a a strong team culture something I w I always want to try and get better at, but, but my team there is, has [00:17:00] been with me for many of them four or five, six years, you know?
[00:17:03]Yeah. And, and that’s gone, that’s gone pretty good. And developers I’ve, I’ve had generally pretty good success with sometimes it’s initially hard to, to find the right person who has the right skillset, but being technical now makes it so much easier, frankly. I haven’t done it that much because I’ve just been working with this one developer.
[00:17:19] Who’s been awesome.
[00:17:21] Matt: [00:17:21] One of the challenges for me. When I’m looking to, to work with a developer especially in the past is I feel like I should be finding somebody who just cares as much. About the product and like the vision and the future as I do about like, whatever product that was, or is that I was working on, that was a lesson that I learned really early.
[00:17:42] Like, man, you got to just pump the brakes on that. A lot of people just want the task, want to get it done and do a good job, but they’re not going to care about the long-term vision of where you want to go. Is that something that you wrestle with at
[00:17:54] Brian: [00:17:54] all? With developers. We were just talking about how I’m, I’m still relatively new to learning how to build and Ruby [00:18:00] on rails, like backend development.
[00:18:02]I am still in a newbie. I could technically build an app, but the code will be ugly that like, I don’t have all the experience that that an experienced dev has. So. So it’s actually nice to be able to work with somebody who’s really strong career experienced backend developer. Like I, I I defer to him too.
[00:18:21] Like we have, we actually have a lot of issues in our get hub where I built and finished a feature. It’s all done. It’s working tested. Good to go. And then, and then I just pass it over to him. Just, just go clean up, whatever. I just built here, like, you know, fix it, fix all the mistakes, like and keep it work in the same basically.
[00:18:40]And then I get to learn from, from what he did and and so that that’s been really good. So mostly I’m just sort of deferring on the technical side to him, but I’m D I’m directing him and managing like w what we’re going to work on, how the is going to design, how, how it’s going to function, all that kind of stuff.
[00:18:56] Matt: [00:18:56] And one of the challenging roles, I think we can talk about it because I saw you [00:19:00] tweet about it is trying to find somebody to be like that. Content creator, video podcasts, blogging tutorials. Front-facing it’s quite a unicorn. If I pat myself on the back here, because it’s something that I do for Craig at Casos it’s been a challenging, I don’t know how long it’s been, but it’s been a challenging proposition for you.
[00:19:21] How’s
[00:19:22] Brian: [00:19:22] that? Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up. I did. Want to talk about that. Cause it’s something that I’m looking for right now. Just generally hiring marketers in general. Right? Most marketers are really good at what they do. But I think these days when it comes to marketing, excuse me, that’s why I shouldn’t drink coffee while I’m in the tunnel pockets.
[00:19:45]Like most marketers. Who, who, who call themselves either a freelance marketer or a full-time marketer. Yeah. Hold on. Right. You know, most marketers are, are good at what they [00:20:00] technically at what they do, whether it’s writing or or using analytics or SEO, research, outreach, whatever, whatever type of marketing they do.
[00:20:11] It’s usually a mix of things. They’re technically good at that. But right now in 2020 or 2021, B2B SAS is. Just a really, really difficult from a marketing standpoint. And I’m mainly talking about like new entry, SAS products, very early stage SAS products like mine. Right. It’s just the, the competition is just insane.
[00:20:36] You know, it’s one thing to S to S to market and sell a service, you know, because you, you just need a handful of good customers. To, to make it a really viable business, but, but for a SAS product to break through, like really no matter how you price it, even, even if you’re pricing several hundred, a customer, even up to like a thousand or two per, per customer per month, like you [00:21:00] still need a lot of customers and a lot of traffic and visibility to make it work.
[00:21:05] And. And, and it just, and there’s so many other things that, that go into building a SAS product tech, like technically the product and all that. So with collaborating with a marketer, what I’m finding, I had a tweet about this today, or this week is I think it’s a lot more about brand than people like to admit.
[00:21:26] And we think about branding, like it’s logo design, or it’s our colors or something like that. Or you think about brand like it’s. Like it’s Budweiser in, in city field or something like that, but it’s, but for SAS, it’s really like, what are you known for on the internet, even, even within circles. And, and pop, like podcasting is a big part of that.
[00:21:47] Like I think to this day go historically across all my products, the number one. Source of new customers is hearing me on podcasts either in my own or somebody else’s right. [00:22:00] Like by far. And that’s one of the hardest things to even track and measure. But I know when every time I ask someone, 90% of the times, like I heard you on a podcast or I follow your podcast.
[00:22:11]And and so I, that’s not just podcasting specifically, but. I just think that when, when you’re talking about brand, like we need to be creating really interesting, unique things for the world for our people that are different, that are worth talking about that are worth sharing. And that stuff has to be more creative today than ever like, yeah.
[00:22:31] Like you can’t just put out the same stuff that everybody else is putting out. Like you have to, you have to have. New ideas. You have to be advanced. You have to be out there like making arguments for something, you know, you gotta be out there you know, advancing a brand new idea. And in, in a, in a, in a way that’s like visually appealing, that’s fast to get, to get it.
[00:22:50] Like, usually that involves, you know, video and and things like that. And so. So what I’m looking
[00:22:56] Matt: [00:22:56] at, can’t be just one thing. It can’t be one thing anymore, right? Like it [00:23:00] has to be the podcast. It has to be like at minimum it’s podcasts, YouTube channel newsletter, blog, blogs sort of fell to fourth place recently, but still like, you need to do it.
[00:23:12] And it’s almost like one of those thankless you know, like those thankless. Jobs or, or whatever, like you have to keep producing it. Even if people aren’t tuning in. This is the funny thing with audiences and content that I’ve learned over the last few years is. You better keep doing it, even if they’re not tuning in, they want to know that you’re still doing it because if you stop, oh, if you stop that podcast, they’re going to judge you.
[00:23:39] And they’re going to say like, you didn’t do it. Like, even if they’re not listening, they know, I know Brian’s doing a podcast. That’s all I need to say that he’s doing it. And he’s putting in the
[00:23:47] Brian: [00:23:47] effort, you know? It’s so, it’s true. What you’re saying, because like, Like I said, like, podcasts are like impossible to track.
[00:23:54] Like you could sort of see how many listeners you’re getting, but you don’t know how many of those listeners are turning into customers [00:24:00] or leads or whatever, whatever it might be. Or listeners referring other customers. Like that’s actually usually how it happens. Right. You know, you can’t really track that, but I know for a fact, I have this other podcast, I haven’t done it in a while.
[00:24:13] It was called a productized podcast is basically an interview show that I’ve had, it was off and on from my 2017 into 2018. And a little bit in 19, I think. And, and I would go off and on with it. I would do like six, eight months of it, and then I’d do a hiatus and then another six or eight months. And then it’s, it’s weird.
[00:24:34] But I look at the sales graph on like my productized course and my other stuff. And sales go up when I’m podcasting and sales sort of trend down when I’m not podcasting. Like, I don’t know, like the trend is definitely there though, you know? Yeah.
[00:24:48]Matt: [00:24:48] I want to put on girls’ hat for a second here. He would tell you, Brian, why don’t you just do the podcast, the YouTube, the content for zip message and hire out.
[00:24:59] The [00:25:00] development and the management of like the product itself. So why not? Why not
[00:25:05] Brian: [00:25:05] do that? It’s a good CR you know, it’s funny, I, I sort of joke about this lately. Like the more that I get into product development and, and code it’s like the worst I am at marketing and the less interested I am in doing marketing work and content stuff.
[00:25:20] So. That’s basically it, it’s not that I have no interest in it. Like, I, I do enjoy hopping on the mix and getting on podcasts, but I don’t enjoy the, the, the grind of, of especially video. I don’t mind going on camera once in a while. But I that’s, that’s one thing is the actual production work. I’m not that interested in doing, I don’t, I don’t think I’m very good at it.
[00:25:42] I could hack through something, but I’m not a professional video person. I’m not also, I’m also very much not interested in being a personal brand. You know, I know that gets, that term gets thrown out, thrown around a lot. And I think to a certain extent, everybody is a [00:26:00] personal brand, whether you like it or want to be or not.
[00:26:02]And I’m not denying that, but the company that I’m trying to build right now is a small software company. I don’t want it to be. The Brian castle show. I want it to be, we make awesome products and, and we put really cool stuff out into the world, you know? Yeah. That will involve people like, you know, my, my team myself on camera on microphone, but it should be more about the product and the ideas or the questions we’re asking to the world then Then then just, just me all the time,
[00:26:36] Matt: [00:26:36] you know?
[00:26:36] Yeah. I feel, you know, again, it just kind of resonating with what we’re doing at Casos and, and, you know, although Craig might not openly say it, like, I think part of the strategy behind it was that because he hosted the audience podcast, which is from Casos and now I largely do that along with a YouTube channel and all this stuff, and it allows that separation.
[00:26:59] For [00:27:00] him to just show up on podcasts and show up on the audience podcast where we just recorded one before you and I started jokingly. Like he only shows up when he buys something, right? So we’re going through this, this acquisition of podium another podcast hosting company. And when he, we acquired three clips, he came on the show and we talked about like broad visions and where the company’s going.
[00:27:20] But then the day-to-day is me. And, and on the YouTube channel, I’m largely showing off the products and where we’re going with the product. And it allows that separation. So, I totally get it. I’m
[00:27:31] Brian: [00:27:31] a different guy and hire for, and the other thing is I really, really love working on product. I like that.
[00:27:37] That is, that is me. That is what I do. You know, people might see stuff that I do on like, Productized services and other stuff that that’s, that hangs around on the internet for, for many years. But honestly, what I am is I’m I designed software products and that’s, that’s what I, I love to talk to customers and take customer feedback and [00:28:00] plan and build features that that’s what I like to do, you know?
[00:28:02] And that, that takes so much time and energy. That there’s no way I could do the production, but the content grind and do
[00:28:11] Matt: [00:28:11] that, you know, spearhead right back into zip message. And I want to talk about some of the, the, the challenges there in some of these wins that you’ve had. Let’s start specifically with the way you onboarded zip message.
[00:28:24] I think I heard you talk about this on your podcast with Jordan. Like, the way that you’ve done surveys, this isn’t the first time you’ve done this, right? Like you had this onboarding. It’s not just, Hey, I take an email. Off they go and they’re in the system and then you’ll, you’ll reach out to them when it’s ready.
[00:28:39] But you asked a systematic questions here, like, who are you? And you had one specific question. It’s not, is it, what are you going to do with the product? Right. When you get access to it, it was a question like that. Like tell me exactly and what you’re going to do with it.
[00:28:52] Brian: [00:28:52] Yeah. Let’s see. Let me pull up one of them today.
[00:28:55] See what, see what I actually had on there. So, so [00:29:00] basically the way that it works is you today, you come to the homepage and I haven’t yet opened it up for anybody to sign up for zip message. You have to sign up for the early access list. First, you know, you put in your email now, now you’re on the email list.
[00:29:11] And then on the back end of that, it takes you to this survey page. And the questions on the survey are First, how did, how did you hear about, does that message and vast majority of them say your pockets? What does your business do? What’s your role or job title? I like that too, to understand, like who, what do they call themselves?
[00:29:29] Right? Are, are they a founder? Are they a marketer? Are they whoever a manager, right. And then in which situations do you prefer to, this is specific to that message, but which situations do you prefer to communicate asynchronously and with who? So I want to start to hear like, and what I’m asking there is how do you currently communicate asynchronously, right?
[00:29:49] Not like, would you do this or that in the future, but like H how are you currently doing it? Or have done it in the past. I get a mix of different use cases there. And then which tools. If [00:30:00] any, do you currently use for recording, sharing, receiving video messages? Again, I’m, I’m trying to understand their current or past behavior, not like, would you use this tool in the future?
[00:30:11] And then the last one here is how do you think zip message might help you and, and be specific? And so that’s where I start to try to get at like, You just told me that you’re using these other tools. You just told me that you do a synchronous in these, in these other ways. Why are you even looking at zip message right now?
[00:30:30] Right? Like what, what is it about it that you, that you hope would, would be helpful for you? Right.
[00:30:35] Matt: [00:30:35] Are you usually this information to reinvest into the product? Or are you at the, at least in the early days saying, you know what, this person, they just might not be. Really, and they might be kicking tires, right?
[00:30:46] The old sales term, they might just be kicking tires. Is that what you’re trying to do here?
[00:30:50] Brian: [00:30:50] It’s mostly just research into the market, you know? Cause I started this survey and this list before, before I even really started building it or as I was building it. And it’s still up there [00:31:00] today. So, so really I’m just trying to understand like who, who are the people who are interested in this thing that I’m building and, and what are their commonalities?
[00:31:07] So, so I have the survey comes into my email, but it also feeds into a spreadsheet. I’ve done some like, like taking all the data in the spreadsheet, trying to. You know, group, group it like, okay, this percentage of people are in client services. This percentage are in SAS. This percentage are loom users.
[00:31:25] This percentage are not, or, or they’re using some other tool. Right. And I’m trying to see where the patterns are. And then that helps me understand, like, I’ve already done this, right? Like the homepage on zip message. Now I’ve gone through probably three iterations on the whole site already, just in the last couple of months.
[00:31:43] And. The F the very first version was just sort of like my gut idea for this new, this new product idea. And after getting feedback from surveys like this, I realized like, oh, there’s a whole lot that was wrong in the way that I wrote and presented the [00:32:00] idea. And there’s all these other really common things that people latch onto.
[00:32:03] I was talking about like the, the the, the conversational aspect of it, the, the threaded conversation. That was not front and center in my first take at it. And that quickly became the thing. So now it’s like this big animated thing on the, on the top of the homepage, that’s shows you that the conversation.
[00:32:21] Yeah.
[00:32:22] Matt: [00:32:22] You can get a feel for, you know, if everybody’s saying, let’s say loom, we’ll use them as an example. Again, you can bucket and find trends in pricing in their own marketing, you know, and you can quickly find out if somebody says loom, like, let’s say six months from now and you say, okay, loom user comes in.
[00:32:38] They might expect a free plan. Cause loom has a five minute free thing and you kind of understand. From a, you know, whatever churn and conversion ratio you can say, okay, a hundred people sign up looking for loom. I know that these people are gonna be the hardest ones to sell. Cause there might be expecting free and we don’t have free here, so we can kind of gauge our interests.
[00:32:59] And you just got to this
[00:33:00] [00:32:59] Brian: [00:32:59] stage right now, you know, we’re still early on, we’re recording this when I’m only about five months into zip message. So at this stage, it’s, it’s really more, more about. What, what should I prioritize? And what should I not prioritize in terms of which things to build, who, who should we be speaking to on the marketing site?
[00:33:20]That, that’s what I’m looking for in, in the surveys. And then I, and then I do read all the surveys and then I invite a lot of them to calls and I, and, and the surveys reading, what they wrote is a, is a way for me to understand, like, I have a few hundred of these people. I can’t talk to all of them. I shouldn’t talk to all of them.
[00:33:38] I need to know who are the best people from this group that I, that I should be talking to and, and reading their responses helps me kind of narrow that down.
[00:33:47] Matt: [00:33:47] This looks like the, and I don’t mean any offense by this of your past products, but this seems like the most simplistic, yet powerful tool that you’ve built.
[00:33:58] Right? Like, I feel like from what I’ve seen [00:34:00] you launch. Interface wise branding wise. Like I get it. It makes total sense. I understand the use case, the user interface. Like I was just saying, it’s super easy to understand, you know, what you’re going to press in order to get a result. It looks like the most lightweight, yet most impactful product you’ve ever you’ve ever built in a short amount of time.
[00:34:22] Is that yeah.
[00:34:25] Brian: [00:34:25] Yeah. Really? That’s what I’m going for with this To be honest. I didn’t, I didn’t know. Again, it’s super new. I didn’t know that, like right now you can call it a pretty horizontal product. It, it, I’m already seeing like many different use cases and different types of customers who were interested in using it.
[00:34:44] And once I saw that sort of horizontal nature start to. Reveal itself that got me a little bit worried about zit message. You might’ve heard on the podcast with Jordan. Like I, I was starting to say like, how can I niche this down? How can I talk to this [00:35:00] niche or that niche, and then really make that message, the tool for whatever coaches or teachers or podcasters or whatever it might be.
[00:35:08]I explored that a little bit, but at the end, but I’ve come around since then to say, like for right now it just is horizontal. And, and we’re going to see where this goes. Like it has, you know, a bunch of first customers right now. We’ll see how this evolves over the rest of the year. And then if, if there is.
[00:35:27] One or two groups that emerge of like, these are the best customers, then maybe we’ll double down on that, but maybe not, maybe we’ll, it’ll just be horizontal. And then we’ll have like niche use case pages on the site and stuff like that, but I’m sort of still still exploring. And there’s so much, it’s a very simple product in terms of it.
[00:35:48] It basically does one thing really well, this asynchronous conversation, but within that, there are so many little details. We’re not even close to having built everything [00:36:00] that we need to be building. So it’s like, yeah.
[00:36:02] Matt: [00:36:02] It’s of many products and, and this is the challenge, right? This is going to be the challenge for you.
[00:36:09]You know, moving forward, I don’t know of many, you know, paid for products. In other words, a customer has to go and pay for it that really can survive the simplicity of where the product. You know, starts off. Look at loom as an example, my God, there’s like 50 billion things that it does now. I’m just like, I don’t need all this.
[00:36:31] And what happens is the customer like myself goes, I don’t, I don’t need all of these things, you know, popping out at me telling me what I should be doing. Like inviting collaborate. Like I don’t need all that stuff. Where is the product that, let me just record that video and quickly share it. I guess the challenge is, is once you start getting to a certain.
[00:36:52]User amount of users, capacity network, capacity, storage capacity. I don’t know what the costs are internally, but then it’s like, [00:37:00] how do we monetize this play? So that’s another simple note is the only product I know that has survived, like being simple. As a product, but they’re also not charging for it and it’s owned by automatic.
[00:37:11] So there’s a billion dollars behind it. It doesn’t matter.
[00:37:13] Brian: [00:37:13] Yeah. You know, task managers are just, yeah. You gotta, you gotta have huge pockets to make that work. Same thing with loom. They’re, they have a very generous, free plan. And it is difficult for someone like me to compete with them, you know, just be perfectly honest.
[00:37:27]And, and I thought about doing free, not close to the idea someday, but right now it’s not, we’re not doing a free plan. Yeah. And you know, we’re, we are differentiating in certain key ways that, that a certain set of customers seem, seem to be perfectly fine with, you know, and I’m still experimenting with different pricing, but it’s But it has paying customers already and it’s growing.
[00:37:50]So we’ll see. I, wasn’t going to say the the, the simplicity thing is hard. Because, and I think this goes back to like choosing to get into zip message coming from process kit. Right? Cause one of the, [00:38:00] one of the challenges with process kit was like, it started getting first, very first customers like that.
[00:38:08] Just a very small handful of first paying customers within like six, seven months or so after, after breaking ground on, on the code really call it like eight or nine months. If you include the early research but it wasn’t until well, over a year of building features before process kicked got actually like really useful for people.
[00:38:26]Cause cause that product is so much more complex, you know, complex that like you can’t just have a glorified to-do list. As a, as a process tool, you know, there’s, there’s no reason to pay for that. When you could just use any other to-do list, you have to have the automations, the conditional logic, the, the, the reason why people want to use like smart SLPs, which is what process kit does.
[00:38:52] We need a really, really robust Zapier integration and all this different kind of stuff. It took well over a year to get there. And then even [00:39:00] into the second year, there were a lot of important. Features that, that added value in that. And then that’s where the, where the customer base, you know, likes to it has that like automations people who are super into auto automating everything in their business, they love process kit, but like, yeah, it took a good year and a half to really have a product to give them, you know, whereas like zip message.
[00:39:23] It was, I was able to build, I guess, call it an MVP. Within a couple of months, And and now we’re just trying to refine and build that, build that
[00:39:32] Matt: [00:39:32] out. Yeah. And you can see the excitement. Like I can, I can, obviously, if you’re watching the video, you see the excitement, but if like I can hear the excitement when you talk about it and your other podcasts.
[00:39:43] And when I see you tweet about it I can always tell the kind of good mood you’re in when I see your Twitter, when I see your tweets coming out, but even go down to like the branding. And like your approach to this, like the branding stuff that I put out publicly. You don’t,
[00:39:57] Brian: [00:39:57] you don’t see me like throwing chairs in here the rest of the day, right?
[00:40:01] [00:40:00] Matt: [00:40:01] No, but it, it, it comes across and like your approach to this product. I can tell that you’re, you’re becoming much more mature, you know, from, from when I first met you, which I probably say every time I interview a you at this point, cause like when I first met you onstage at WordCamp Providence, talking about restaurant engine, which was your, which was your original foray into SAS.
[00:40:22]You know, this one is definitely something that looks like you’re, you’re really passionate about. Like, this will be the one that, that the history books really write a big chapter on you about you know, it
[00:40:31] Brian: [00:40:31] seems like a well it’s, it’s funny to hear you describe that. I’ve have heard similar things from people like listening to the podcast and stuff.
[00:40:40]And, and I, I appreciate that really. And I, I, a lot of it, I do feel, but. Also at this stage of trying many different products over the years the maturity thing I think has leads to what I actually think is pretty healthy skepticism of, of everything. I think you do need [00:41:00] to go into a new product with a lot of skepticism, you know, I’m, I’m still skeptical.
[00:41:04] Like I’m still trying to understand that question. Like why, like people who are interested in that message. Like convince me, like, why are you really interested in this product? Like, why are you interested in it? I need to know that. And, and and I need to prove that and continuously, you know, it’s It’s just a process to, of like building confidence in like, okay, I think there’s something here.
[00:41:31] I think there’s something here. Okay. Now I’m going to really double down investments here and, and, and that sort of stuff, you
[00:41:38] Matt: [00:41:38] know, I think in a space, a final sort of final question thoughts around around this I’d imagine that. The pandemic COVID audio video, very hot spaces. Now that everyone was forced to work from home.
[00:41:53]I think the video space obviously is going to be interesting. Audio is going to be interesting. But also probably quite challenging was, you know, [00:42:00] building process kit out is probably just a lot of thought. A lot of logic. You probably don’t need a lot of CPU and infrastructure around this stuff.
[00:42:07] Video, I’d imagine maybe a little bit more right. And storage, bandwidth, conversion, all this
[00:42:12] Brian: [00:42:12] stuff. It, it definitely is more complex. I do have a great developer working with me. And I have learned a ton about handling video on the web in the last couple of months. It, it’s definitely a challenge for sure.
[00:42:26]There are some aspects of it that were a little bit. Easier than I, than I expected. And, and when I did some early technical research on it, it was part of, part of the reason why I decided to go into it and not be completely scared off because it’s video. I started researching it a bit. I was like, oh wow.
[00:42:45] We can actually do this sort of thing in browsers these days, which wasn’t exactly possible even like one or two, three years ago. So that’s kind of cool, but there’s definitely. There, there are definitely costs in terms of bandwidth and processing of [00:43:00] videos and storage and, and playback. And there are just reliability issues of, of making sure that every time you hit record, no matter which browser you’re in, it works.
[00:43:10]You know, we’re, we’re constantly working with users to, to, to smooth that out and, and make an, and, you know, you might, you might think that everybody is using Google Chrome, everything it
[00:43:21] Matt: [00:43:21] is. God, I hope
[00:43:24] Brian: [00:43:24] not. You know, I’m, I’m literally seeing from from the user base, the, the small user base here, was it messaged that it’s a, it’s a good mix of Chrome safari Firefox.
[00:43:34] You know, iOS, Android, like it’s, it’s a mix we’ve got to make them work. So that’s a challenge,
[00:43:40] Matt: [00:43:40] basic stuff. Brian castle zip message.com, a sync video conversations with customers and colleagues. I love the fact that you have the little arrow that points to what’s. This led async to help define asynchronous, because I tell you that if I told my dad, Hey, check out this asynchronous video conversation tool, you might be like, what the hell is?
[00:43:59]He’s [00:44:00] not. And competent, but he might be like, what do you mean asynchronous? But he screen-sharing video sharing. He would get it. But I like how you define it there so
[00:44:07] Brian: [00:44:07] that, you know, and that came out of the feedback. Because the very first, I think the very first version of the homepage, I did use the word asynchronous.
[00:44:15] Maybe not in the H one, but somewhere around there. And, and I got a lot of feedback saying like, ah, I don’t really know what, like literally people would ask me, like, what does asynchronous mean? And then other people would be like, I, I sorta know what it means, but I think most people don’t know what that means.
[00:44:30] And then, and then I backed off of it for a while. Like, oh, it’s just for video conversations or video messaging, something like that. And I just didn’t use the word asynchronous, but then it occurred to me that like, No, like we should own the, the term async, you know, cause that is growing in popularity.
[00:44:48] Like people are starting to use it more often. So, so I want that message to be known for async conversations. But we have a little definition there for computer skills. You’re [00:45:00] brand new to it. You know,
[00:45:00]Matt: [00:45:00] Zip message.com. Request an [email protected]. Brian, thanks for hanging out and talking to us today on your podcast.
[00:45:07] It’s your podcast at this point go, go to dot com and request an invite and maybe we’ll see Brian again. Hopefully not, hopefully not. We don’t see you in another six months talking about the
[00:45:16] Brian: [00:45:16] product goal is to never be on that report. Again,
[00:45:20] Matt: [00:45:20] it’s amazing stuff. Everybody else, Matt report.com airport.com/subscribe to join the mailing list.
[00:45:26] We’ll see you in the next episode.

Kristen Youngs Matt Report Podcast

[00:00:00] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by mal care. Learn more about Malik here at Dot com. You’ve heard me talk about mal care before, but they’re back with some interesting updates. Not only are they the WordPress plugin with instant WordPress malware removal. Well, let me read some of these features. 

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[00:00:56] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by gravity forms. One of the [00:01:00] most trusted longest lasting oh geez. Of the WordPress product space, gravity forms. 2.5 has arrived. All new builder experience, tons of certified developer. Ad-ons. And the most accessible form plugin in existence. If you’re doing complex form stuff on your WordPress project, user registration, storing data, connecting them to other automation workflows, you know, not to look any further than the plugin I’ve been paying for since 1997. 

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[00:01:39] I came across Kristen Young’s YouTube channel while I was exploring the popular no code bubble.io platform. At first, I thought she was creating the typical tutorial videos around this very popular app building platform. But as I explored more, I realized she was building a very unique business behind the scenes. I think most of us in the client services or consulting space long to have an additional stream of income [00:02:00] that isn’t directly tied to our consulting hours. You’ll often see a digital download a one-time course or a finely tuned productized service that effectively optimizes. 

[00:02:09] Our work to profit margin ratio. But what Kristin and her partner are building at coaching no-code apps is something of a hybrid. It’s a coaching series, a course, and a recurring consulting for customers that need help building out their bubble app. In the WordPress world, this might be like selling a web design course for Ella mentor. While you do monthly check-ins to help your client build out new pages and, or add new functionality. 

[00:02:33] Needless to say, I really liked this model. Kristen brings the knowledge in today’s episode. I’m going to leave you with this one question to ponder as you continue on, what do you think the most challenging part of her business is? You’re listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder, subscribed to the newsletter at 

[00:02:51] port.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet. Please share this [00:03:00] episode on social media. We’d love more listeners around here. 

[00:03:02] Kristen: [00:03:02] I am the co-founder of a company called coaching no-code apps, and we essentially help entrepreneurs, business owners, people who already have existing businesses or people who are looking to launch new businesses.

[00:03:15] That are app based. We help them go from their idea stage to having that first version app that they can either launch within a business and help scale their operations or launch as a brand new business. And they don’t need any coding backgrounds, no technical skills in order to do that. 

[00:03:37]Matt: [00:03:37] We chatted in our, pre-interview talking about like how excited I was when I first discovered bubble. And I was like, Hey, coming from the WordPress world, this is in my eyes. I was like, this is going to be like a page builder. I can just drag and drop things around and I could build myself an app and I’ll, I’m going to be a superhero.

[00:03:52] And I was like, wouldn’t it be nice to connect up to a rest API of WordPress or like my podcasting host company [00:04:00] and get this data. I was like, how do I do that with bubble? And I started like researching it. I started doing it myself and I was like, God, no way, am I going to be able to do this by myself?

[00:04:09] And then I found your video and I was like, Oh man, there’s, there’s a lot of stuff to this, no code. And this bubble thing is there, like one thing that really sticks out. In your engagement with customers, that same feeling that they share with you, thought this was going to be easy and Oh my God, I’m going to need your help with this.

[00:04:27] Is there like one or two things that you come across every day with this stuff? 

[00:04:30]Kristen: [00:04:30] Yeah. And I think it’s less about specific technical functions and more so just because when people hear about no code. They think that it’s going to be easy. And I think it gives the impression that you can kind of just come on board, whatever platform it is, and have a custom application up and running within, maybe a few hours or a few days.

[00:04:58]A lot of people, they don’t [00:05:00] realize how complex the thing they’re wanting to build actually is. And so anytime you want to customize anything, you have to actually know how to do that on a platform. And even though you’re not coding there, you still have to understand development, processes, development strategies.

[00:05:19] You have to understand how to. Explain what it is you’re even trying to do, or even ask the right questions. And when you’re coming in without a technical background, I think it’s just kind of like all of a sudden, a surprise of, okay. There’s, there’s no coding, but there are still technical components to this.

[00:05:37]Matt: [00:05:37] When we chatted, you mentioned that one of the things that you do is it’s not even before we even get to like development in the scope of, most listeners of the show might be thinking like we scope out websites, we scope out e-commerce sites. We scope out, small ish web apps, and we get that from the customer for you.

[00:05:55] It’s like, how do I extract this idea? From this person coming to me, [00:06:00] like, how do I get that out of their head and put this on to paper before we even start talking about, the technical requirements, bubble, web flow, like whatever tools you might want to use. How do you pull that idea out of your head?

[00:06:11] Do you have any advice for people who might be in the WordPress world designing and developing for WordPress?

[00:06:17] Kristen: [00:06:17] Yeah, that is a really great question. And I think that’s honestly, half the battle is someone coming in.

[00:06:25] And I think that’s where there’s a lot of disconnect with development agencies, or even if someone is building their app themselves is they have an idea, but they don’t necessarily know how to correctly explain it to someone. They don’t even know what that idea should look like when you’re actually looking at a website or an app or something like that.

[00:06:46] And I think, we personally have a system and a process in place where you can kind of think about every single one of the features or, the pages or whatever you want to have on your app [00:07:00] or your website. And then start going through and scoping out what are the must haves? What are the should have, could have the won’t have, so which version do you need to put these specific features in?

[00:07:15] And I think, and this is in reference to the Moscow matrix where you’re essentially thinking through, okay. What’s a feature or a functionality that a user must have in order to achieve their number one goal or the number one goal that your app or your site is there to help them achieve.

[00:07:32]What, what features aren’t, maybe aren’t necessary, necessary to reach that goal, but are necessary to reach that goal in an ongoing matter, like over and over and over again consistently, how can you make that? Maybe more convenient or maybe more user-friendly or something like that.

[00:07:49] And so you kind of take an entire idea and it doesn’t really matter if someone can explain it in a technical way or not. As long as they know what a user needs to be able to achieve, then [00:08:00] you can start breaking all those features down into. I really like testing phases. Can you accomplish goal number one, can you accomplish goal number two?

[00:08:09] And you can kind of expand like that from there, really? Regardless of which platform or tool that you’re using, 

[00:08:15]Matt: [00:08:15] what what’s the majority that your customers come to you? With in as preparation. And I’ll preface this with my own experience. Quite literally when I used to run a web design agency day to day, people would just have all of the ideas up into their, in their head and that’s all they had and they just come to me and just like vomit this stuff out and all over my desk 

[00:08:36] or it’d be like the literal back of a napkin. Is there, is there a common thing that people come to you in the no-code world with? Is there, is there something really meta is there a no code tool for no code buildings that even exists? Should it exist? How do you like to have this, these ideas delivered to you?

[00:08:52] So you could scope out a project when you were doing projects day to day? 

[00:08:56]Kristen: [00:08:56] Yeah, that’s a, that’s a really good question too, in terms of [00:09:00] trends. I think it spans across the spectrum. You just described some people that are coming in and they know what they want to achieve. But they don’t know how that’s going to be achieved in terms of features.

[00:09:13] Yeah, they might, they might have an end goal, but they just don’t really know what needs to be in place. And then some people come in and, they’ve spent the past year, wireframing things out already hiring designers. And they have everything, but the functionality and I think. The, the ideal is a happy medium where you, what you want to achieve and, generally what you need in order to get there, but, spending a year or more, which I often see, and you maybe have before, too.

[00:09:47] Spending that much time planning something out before you even start building this first version, which you, you technically can build pretty quickly if you, if you know how right. No code tools [00:10:00] are there, you spend all that time planning. There’s just, you can be leaps and bounds ahead of where you, where you are now, if you had just kind of gotten started before going that far.

[00:10:11] So the answer to your first question is just. Happy medium would be ideal, but I do see both. I see both ends of the spectrum in terms of cool. 

[00:10:21] There’s not one specific one that comes to mind, although I think that would be interesting, but I do like to see people putting together kind of like.

[00:10:33] Business model canvases. We have a process when someone’s coming in to work with us, where they fill out a form that kind of translates over to something like that, where you nailed down each main component of, the app or the site or whatever it is you’re building. And that can be helpful in, in kicking off a project.

[00:10:52]Matt: [00:10:52] Yeah. Yeah, I guess people could even come to you. Well, w we’re going to get into your business model these [00:11:00] days. Cause you’re not building apps for a majority of your business. Isn’t about building apps for clients anymore. It’s about training and education and coaching, but I guess with the.

[00:11:11] The way that bubble is maybe people used to come to you with like half made apps and they were just like ice. I sketched us out in bubble. Please help me finish this. Has that ever been something that’s come about? 

[00:11:21]Kristen: [00:11:21] Yes, it certainly has. And it actually still is. And I think it just kind of goes back to people, come in and no code is just it’s associated with DIY.

[00:11:33] And so people come in and they start going down the DIY path and then they get to a point where they actually start thinking about bringing users on board. And they’re like, I don’t think this is, I don’t think this is going to work. I need to take a better approach. And so they take some steps back and then either, bring someone on board, join us, something like that to actually move forward with more concrete steps.

[00:11:56]Matt: [00:11:56] So explain the business model that you [00:12:00] and your co-founder operate under. Again, like I just mentioned a second ago, it used to be building apps for folks. And if it still is, what’s the percentage of that, but you, you shifted to training and coaching coaching. I’d love to understand why you did that and why you made that transition.

[00:12:17] Right. Cause there’s a lot of folks who listen to this who were like, I would rather just teach people how to use WordPress instead of building them, their websites. 

[00:12:23]Kristen: [00:12:23] Yeah, it’s it was an interesting transition from us. And right now we’re not doing any development ourselves, so we’re not taking on any outsource type projects.

[00:12:35] We’re just training and coaching. We have some standalone courses and training, but we also have a training. It’s like a mentorship program where we work directly with these entrepreneurs and they’re the ones building their apps, we’re coaching and training them. And. The, there are a lot of reasons why we switched to doing that.

[00:12:56] But first and foremost, it just came down to [00:13:00] the client’s results, both in the immediate and in the longterm. We were looking at app development and with no code tools, there’s so much more availability now for people to launch their own apps. But it’s, it’s certainly not free. And so when people are coming in and they’re outsourcing to no code app development agencies or freelancers, it’s still a big investment.

[00:13:27] And we kept seeing people where they would have the first version of their apps in hand, but there’s been no testing on their side. No, no initial test users brought on because. They don’t have, they don’t have the app yet. And so they can’t do that during development, they get the app. And then, as soon as you start testing your first version, you have immediate iterations.

[00:13:51]Like you bring one user onboard and you’re already going to have things to change. And so that would start happening and then they, [00:14:00] they still can’t manage their apps, even though it’s built on no code, no code platform potentially. And so it kind of felt like we were. Handcuffing people to us in a way by giving them an app, but then them having not really any idea of what to do with it from there.

[00:14:19] And so we decided to start enabling people to build their own apps so that they could have more control both in the immediate, because, going back to the question you had asked about taking an idea out of someone’s head and actually building what they were envisioning. It’s so hard. It’s so hard to do that.

[00:14:41] And, even with the best intentions and no matter how hard you try, there’s still going to be some disconnect between what was living in their head and then what they see in front of their face, at the end. And so we started training people to build their own apps, so they can number one. Get their own processes out of their mind and build them exactly how they [00:15:00] wanted and then actually be able to do something with the app afterwards on their own really quickly with a lot of flexibility, a lot of control, if they want to hire junior developers to bring them in house, they can, but they still have the control and they have options.

[00:15:14] And I think that’s the most important thing. And the, the results in terms of how many people were actually launching their apps. And bringing people onto their apps, bringing users on, and then growing their apps that went way up. And that’s why we made the full transition. 

[00:15:30]Matt: [00:15:30] I would also probably imagine that as when you were doing that, when you were building apps for folks, we’ll just say you were an agency, right?

[00:15:37] You were just, you were running that agency model customer came to you. They had a problem. They wanted you to solve it. They probably put you up against a bunch of other agencies and RFPs. There’s all that BS of an agency you just don’t want to deal with in the long run. And then it’s also like expectations.

[00:15:54] I’d imagine that. Customers with these apps probably are, are. [00:16:00] Are trying to monetize this app. I’m just guessing here, but at least for those customers that want to, as an app, maybe they thought well, look what I built in bubble. It took me like a weekend. So I should only have to pay somebody, a few more weekends to finish it.

[00:16:16] And the. The expectation was we’re probably way lopsided, which isn’t different. So, which is not so different to the WordPress world for customers that used to knock on our door. And they were like, well, I bought a $50 theme from ThemeForest. My website is only, only, you only need to do that 10%, that 10% should just be a few hundred bucks.

[00:16:33] Right. Did you, is that an experience that you saw and you just really wanted to get away from? 

[00:16:37]Kristen: [00:16:37] It’s absolutely something we experience. I think people. They don’t know how development works when they’re, when they’re first stepping into this space, they don’t, they don’t know what goes on behind the scenes.

[00:16:51] They don’t know how to even really ask for, they don’t know how to ask about quality. They don’t know how [00:17:00] to expect or set the right expectations around quality or cost or timeframe. None of it, because they’re so disconnected from the processes that are actually happening. And so. Usually what happens is they just read something somewhere.

[00:17:15] They see someone’s pricing and then maybe they think that’s the norm. Like you said, they, buy a $50 template and they think, okay, well this is easy. This should be a really quick fix, but there’s just, like with any, anything with any market, any type of service, there’s so much variation.

[00:17:34] And so, yeah. Having. Have in, in making this transition that we have and having training versus development services, it also has allowed us to kind of. Package up what we’re offering, which also helps with pricing structure. There’s, we don’t have this long list of services that we [00:18:00] offer or, it’s not like we’ll build this for this much, this, for this much of this, for this much where it’s just like a bunch of numbers out there.

[00:18:06] It’s you’re going to learn how to do this one specific thing. So you can achieve this one specific result. And it’s, it’s a lot easier to. Price that as well, without so much variation, too, if that makes sense. 

[00:18:18]Matt: [00:18:18] , that was actually a perfect segue into my next question is cause you can really start to maximize and optimize your internal process to serve these clients so often.

[00:18:27] And I am fully guilty of this and, and maybe you are too. When I started out in my agency. I would just say yes to everything. Of course I can do that. And it was like, yes, give me the money and I will build it for you. I don’t care what you’re asking for. I’ll do it. And then you start finding, as time marches on you start to find more technical clients or, or, or bigger budget clients.

[00:18:49] And then suddenly you find yourself like implementing an intranet in a university, and then there’s all of these things you’ve never experienced, never thought of. And you’re like, Oh my God, I’m. Over my [00:19:00] head in this project. And I only priced it for 5,000 bucks. Right? So in your world, you can kind of remove that stress of, I don’t know, an insurance, a mega insurance agency comes to you and they’re like, Hey, we want to build an app using bubble and you can say, perfect.

[00:19:17] I’ve got this way that I train and educate people. You don’t need to know. Maybe SOC compliance and all of this stuff that goes into that sector of insurance, because you’re just training them on how to launch this thing. You don’t have to be responsible maybe at the end of the day of how they secure data and all of this stuff.

[00:19:36] Am I getting that fairly accurate? 

[00:19:39]Kristen: [00:19:39] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s. It is when the, when the client is the one who’s building their apps and these different responsibilities are, are on their shoulders because we are helping them to create their app. But you can, you can be coming from lots of different [00:20:00] industries and you might have different regulations of your own that we have.

[00:20:05] No experience with, but as long as you know what they are, and if you’re building an app that relates to them, you probably should, then, you can handle those aspects and. I think it makes it so much easier and so much better for the client too, because you don’t need to, as a client, you don’t need to find someone who does know all of these really niche things specific to your industry, which, makes your options just really narrow.

[00:20:35] And so I think you, you definitely hit that on the head there. 

[00:20:39]Matt: [00:20:39] I’m redoing my bathroom or I’m planning on having my bathrooms. We’d done in my house and I’m out there getting quotes and I’m like every other web person who’s ever come to us and be like, well, I just watched this on YouTube.

[00:20:48] This should be easy. I’m just looking at everything I don’t know about this stuff. And I’m just looking at the quotes that are coming through. I’m like, how did we get to 40. A thousand dollars when I’m looking at this guy on [00:21:00] YouTube, who did it in a half an hour, you know what I’m like? What’s the difference.

[00:21:03]Let’s, let’s I open a pry, opened the business a little bit, your business. That is what have you learned since you first made the pivot to let’s call it purely education and coaching from, the days of past where you’re doing the consulting work from where you started education, maybe like price points.

[00:21:21] What have you learned in that? Like how have you gotten better at that? How have you maximized that whole process for the business? 

[00:21:27]Kristen: [00:21:27] Hmm. That’s interesting too. I, I think the, one of the ways that we’ve looked at it is, what’s involved in the training in terms of the outcome. So. When you’re doing training, yes, you can be offering hourly services, but we’re offering more of a package service.

[00:21:48] And so when you’re looking at training and you’re not charging by the hour, it’s helpful to look at the, the outcome that you are enabling your clients to achieve. So what’s the result [00:22:00] and what’s the general value of that result. And so we can. You can have standalone training, training, videos, training, tutorials, courses, things like that, and the client’s outcome or the student’s outcome is going to be better than if they are just watching free tutorials.

[00:22:20] Ideally, it’s going to be better than if they’re doing something in a complete DIY way. But it’s not going to be as good as if you’re working hands-on with them. And so. Pricing that obviously lower than if you’re working hands on with them is a good starting point, but that’s really how I’ve looked at it.

[00:22:41] And then, when we first launched our, our program where we’re working with our clients directly, it’s, we learned so much after that. And there were so many iterations with that, that. Initially, it’s like you look at the result that you’re intending to help a client [00:23:00] achieve. You have to go through a first round of testing, like a beta round, just like you would with your app or a website or whatever it is you’re doing.

[00:23:07] And then you have to look at the results from there and then you add on iterations and you see, okay, do those enhance the results? And what value can I attach with that? And that’s kind of what we’ve done over time is just, how can we make this better? And now what is that worth? And what’s the value that’s tied with that.

[00:23:25]Matt: [00:23:25] Is there one thing you’ve experienced that you remove from the offering of today that maybe you started with like unlimited revisions and then you realize, Oh God, this is the worst idea ever, because they never stopped asking us about these iterations or revisions. Is there one thing like that you’ve removed.

[00:23:40]Kristen: [00:23:40] Not like that. Not in the sense that there was one thing that we just offered way too much of, we have removed at time because we realized that more is not. Better in, in all situations more is not always better. And so I think [00:24:00] when you are helping a client or creating training, instinctually instinctively, you just want to add more and more and more and try to pack it with value, but it can end up just kind of muddying things and confusing people.

[00:24:16] And again, going back to the outcomes, they just. It’s harder for them to get there. And so a lot of the changes we’ve made is just stripping it back, removing the noise, taking away the things that aren’t like, they, they look like good additions and they sound like good additions, but they aren’t really serving a solid purpose.

[00:24:35] And so we just stripped things back so that they can take the simplest path forward and just achieve the, the easiest outcome. 

[00:24:44]Matt: [00:24:44] I think one of the most challenging things of a coaching business or consulting business and especially when you start to intermingle I dunno what I’ll call digital deliverables.

[00:24:55] Like you’re delivering, you’re probably reviewing somebody’s like bubble account or [00:25:00] whatever other apps that you, that you consult with. So you’re doing that. You’re you’re, you’re probably helping them scope. These projects out, but then there’s the coaching aspect? Like the mindset, like how do we pull these ideas out?

[00:25:10] I think one of the hardest things in these types of businesses is staying connected to a customer. And keeping them engaged, especially a student, if somebody’s here and they’re a student trying to learn, it’s like keeping them going, keeping them engaged. How do you do that? Like how do you keep people going in let’s say a coaching program, like your most entry-level customer who might flake off and be like, Oh God, this whole thing isn’t really, for me, like, how do you keep them going?

[00:25:37] Zoom calls circle apps. What do you do to keep them connected? 

[00:25:40]Kristen: [00:25:40] We do, we do a lot of things because that’s such a common thing you see, because no matter how motivated someone is, everybody’s a human. And so everybody’s going to have other things going on in life and, and that pull them away. And a lot of it is just communication.

[00:26:00] [00:25:59] So constantly staying in touch with people. I think that’s one of the biggest things that we learned is that. When someone sets out to launch an app or, or launch a site or a business or anything there, no matter how excited they are about it, they’re going to have a hard time getting there by their own self motivation and self-will, and no matter if they invest in doing it, no matter if they set aside the time, it’s just hard to do.

[00:26:29] And so. Staying in constant communication with them, whether that be in, in groups or an email or on calls, which we do all of tracking them, like literally tracking how they’re doing, how active they are, which milestones they’re achieving. We do that, holding them accountable, yes, they’re coming to you and they’re paying you for your help, but we don’t see it as them just.

[00:26:57] Paying us to help them with their app. We see it as [00:27:00] them also coming to us to be held accountable and to have someone there saying, Hey, you’re not making enough progress. You need, you need to take this step or you need to do this thing by the end of tomorrow or something like that. So I think just setting expectations, setting boundaries, and then committing to those yourself helps the client commit as well.

[00:27:20]Matt: [00:27:20] What tools do you focus on with the coaching? And the training side of the business, is it, is it just bubble? Will you take anyone that has a no-code tool or, or is that how you found your way to hyper-focus on a customer, but also a way for you to scale the business in the future? Like maybe you don’t do web flow now, but in the future, you’ll have a web flow module.

[00:27:39] I’m simplifying it, but is that how you look at it and what are the tools that you’ve primarily primarily focused on? 

[00:27:45]Kristen: [00:27:45] So we, we use bubble at the hub of everyone’s app. So anyone who is working with us is using bubble. Now they might be adding on other tools and other apps. On top of that, but the [00:28:00] hub of their app lives on bubble.

[00:28:02] And the way we look at it is less. So which tools should we teach and more. So which existing tools are the best fit for the types of apps our clients are building. And so I don’t see us necessarily adding on just more platforms, just for the sake of having more platforms. If there was at some point a better platform for the types of apps our clients were building, then we could potentially switch over to another platform, but we’ve chosen bubble just because it’s, it’s such a powerful platform and there are so many capabilities on it and it really serves our clients really well.

[00:28:43]Matt: [00:28:43] What are those types those most popular types of apps that folks build people in the WordPress space might be, they’re not used to hearing about bubble or what public can achieve. What are the handful of most popular apps that people build with it? 

[00:28:55]Kristen: [00:28:55] There’s a lot of different types of apps.

[00:28:57]You’ll see marketplace [00:29:00] apps dashboards, internal systems, any. Any, any type of app, really? I think less so specific on the type of app. We see people who are wanting to be able to really customize what they’re, what they’re building. And that’s one of the things that bubble is really great for.

[00:29:22] It does have a higher learning curve, but the higher learning curve is there because the platform gives you so much power. You, you can. Build your own database. You can build your own front end. You can build your own logic. So when people are wanting something that is not cookie cutter, that’s not template and that’s not so out of the box.

[00:29:42] And they just want to create something that is really specific to their own needs, to their own market, their own situation. That’s where we see people coming, coming to bubble. Even if the, the app itself is. Pretty simple. Even if it’s just a really [00:30:00] simple marketplace app, for example, it’s the customization and the capabilities that it gives you that we see as being one of the really big benefits and draws.

[00:30:09]Matt: [00:30:09] Bubble seems to me like it’s like, it’s like the most note, it’s the most code, no code tool that’s out there because from my experiences, like I started looking at what I could do with bubble as a hoop, what is a little bit difficult for me. And then I found things like glide apps when it’s Hey.

[00:30:25] Make an app from a spreadsheet. And I’m like, ah, this is more my speed. Like these are some gotchas out there in the, in the no code world. Right. These things that look super easy, even easier than bubble. And you’re like, Oh, this is very limited to what I can achieve with or achieve with. 

[00:30:39]Kristen: [00:30:39] Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s exactly it.

[00:30:41]Matt: [00:30:41] I want to talk a little bit about like marketing the business and standing out. I found you through, through YouTube where you put out a lot of free content and it’s not just like short stuff. You have some long form content here.

[00:30:54]And you’re putting a lot of effort into it. Is YouTube the best channel for you to market in and find [00:31:00] people to funnel into the business. 

[00:31:01]Kristen: [00:31:01] We like using YouTube. We have various places where people are coming in. People are finding us. We like YouTube because it’s so fitting with what we do.

[00:31:14] It’s so visual. Video is just great for that. We also. I just like video. I like connecting with people in that way. I use YouTube a lot and I just think video is such an excellent marketing tool. And so it’s something that we’ve put a lot of time into and, and built up and it’s worked well for us.

[00:31:36]Matt: [00:31:36] Your most popular video the indepth bubble.io tutorial, how to build any type of app, 183,000 views published two years ago. Some might say, wait, you’re giving away the content that you that you’d otherwise be coaching somebody to do. Obviously I know the obvious answer to that, but how do you set.

[00:31:56] How do you get your mind around free content? Like how do [00:32:00] you sit with your partner and say, here’s what we’ll do for free? And here’s the content we’ll put out in only the coaching course. Let’s say 

[00:32:07]Kristen: [00:32:07] there’s, there’s not one specific process that we have for that. I think our mindset has always just kind of been, what’s going to help people and.

[00:32:20] There are always, always going to be people who are only ever going to use the YouTube content and that’s it. And if the YouTube content is there and it’s helping them more so than if they were just to kind of click around and try to figure it out themselves, then that’s, that’s great. There will always always be people who still want to pay for a more hands-on experience.

[00:32:43] No matter how much free content you put out. Like there, there are just people who will always do that. Even if you put, 99% of your content out there for free, there’s still going to be people who want to pay to work with you. And if you can provide someone value with your free content, and [00:33:00] they’re the type of person who do want that a more in depth experience or that more hands-on experience.

[00:33:06] And if they find even a little bit of value from some of your free content, Then who are they going to ask when they need that higher level experience? So they’re going to come to the person who has helped them initially. 

[00:33:17]Matt: [00:33:17] Yeah. And so it’s so hard for people that. Might be in your position or just starting out in your position and they’re starting to think, okay, maybe I can get into coaching and digital downloads.

[00:33:28] And then you sort of wrestle with, do I put this content out for free? Do I have it paid? And then largely it’s put it out for free because anyone that you’re really trying, like anyone who. You’re wrestling with, so they just pay you a dollar to learn something. You don’t want them as clients. You want the client to say, saw what you did.

[00:33:50] That was amazing. I never want to go down that path, just take this money and teach them, how to do it right. Or how to put this together, give me a structure around this stuff. And [00:34:00] those are going to be your best glance, which I’m assuming you’ve found, over the course of this time. 

[00:34:04]Kristen: [00:34:04] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:34:06] It’s people, they see you doing it. So that builds trust with them and that they know that you know how to achieve what they want, but if they just want an easier path to get there versus trying to do it on their own, then yeah. It’s an easy way for them just to say, Hey, I saw you did it. Can you help me do it?

[00:34:27] And yeah, those are great clients for sure. 

[00:34:31]Matt: [00:34:31] One of the final questions here. The WordPress world loves WordPress because it’s open source because we can kind of control it. We can move it around. We can put it on any web hosts. We’re not locked into anything. I’m curious if your clients have. Any take on the ownership of committing to two bubble, or if you have any thoughts on sort of that open source take on ownership and portability, do your clients, or number one, do you have any concerns [00:35:00] about that with the no-code and bubble world and into your clients?

[00:35:02] Have any concerns like that? Either? 

[00:35:04]Kristen: [00:35:04] That’s a good question. And yes, there are clients and just people in general. People actually all the time who asked about it. I think it’s a thing that just comes up constantly. And it’s a big fear that people have. And I think it just stems from them. It’s like you’re making a commitment to build your thing on a platform and well, what if that platform goes away or what if it changes somehow, then what’s going to happen?

[00:35:35] I don’t personally have concerns about it because. Yes. If you’re, if you’re building an app on bubble, any platform where you don’t have the source code and that goes away, then you, you have to do something. But it’s just, I just think it’s so, you’re not, [00:36:00] you’re not stuck. You have somewhere to go. You, you already have your app idea.

[00:36:04] You already have. Your app and most platforms they’re going to let you, they’re probably going to help you if, if something happened to them. So let’s say that bubble went out of business. Well, they’ve already made the commitment that they would release the source code. At least that’s what it says in their documentation.

[00:36:24] They would release the source code to all of their users so that they could go somewhere else and host their apps. And with bubble specifically, You you’re paying for the convenience of the platform and you still own your data. You can still monetize the app. However you want it. It’s still your app.

[00:36:44] You’re just paying for the convenience. And so the way I look at it is if you are scared that something is going to happen to the platform and you don’t have access to your source code and you, and you don’t use the platform because of that. What are you going to do [00:37:00] otherwise? Are you going to outsource to traditional development agencies?

[00:37:05] Are you going to find some other way to build it? And the difficulty of doing that, is that going to hold you back from building the app at all? And I think that’s what a lot of people don’t realize is that yeah, you’re, you’re building something on top of a platform. But you’re actually able to build and launch an app and a business really, really easily, relatively speaking because of it.

[00:37:29] And so look at the pros and cons like, look what you’re actually gaining from this. And if something happens again, you, you have options. I think if you get to the point where you have this, this app, you have users, something happens. You need to change platforms. If you’re at the point where you do have your users.

[00:37:50] Like your, your business has scaled and look thinking forward to the potential of something like that happening. It seems like a really massive problem, [00:38:00] but every problem that could happen seems really big until you’re there and something has happened and you just solve it. You just do the thing you need to do.

[00:38:09] You take the next step. And a week later, a month later, a year later, It’s that problem is so minuscule now that that’s kind of how I see it. 

[00:38:18]Matt: [00:38:18] Have you ever had to deal with and WordPress agency folks or freelancers, whatever, and know the problematic WordPress web hosts, where they like, they know the website’s always going to go down and their customers are going to call them.

[00:38:31] How, how, how has the reliability of bubble been. From you as somebody who used to do the consulting or the actual development work, is anyone ever knocked on your door? Hey, my apps running slow and you’re like, I can’t really do anything. It’s just bubble. Right? Has that ever happened to you and how have you navigated that?

[00:38:45]Kristen: [00:38:45] Yeah. The bubble, the bubble of team has always seemed to be very open in their forum and emails and things happen. It’s usually less, so bubble [00:39:00] related it’s often has to do with just, AWS, something happens. And so that affects bubble or, or something like that. And, I just think that no matter what platform you use there.

[00:39:12] There can always be issues. With bubble I’ve at least seen that they’re very forthcoming and vocal and quick to fix things when they do happen. And they also are improving and expanding the platform in a lot of ways. And they’re just really communicative. And I think that’s one of the benefits is that it’s not like.

[00:39:36] A silent platform, or it’s not like a platform with no face or a voice behind it. You know who the founders are, you see their names in the forum, you see, and you see all of this. And so I do think it builds a sense of trust. And my experience has had been positive, even when things do happen. 

[00:39:55] Matt: [00:39:55] Awesome stuff. Kristen, Young’s coaching, no code apps.com. Go to the [00:40:00] coaching. No-code apps.com. Click on the start, my free training up at the top. You can just dive right into learning some bubble. Goodness. If you’re listening, if you’re a WordPress developer out there an agency, there’s nothing wrong with complimenting your skillset with this no-code stuff.

[00:40:15] I’ve certainly Dove in, got a little scared, back out a little bit, go to as far as setting up an air table. And I was like, okay, I’m feeling good. I’m feeling good. But check it out. Coaching, no code apps.com Kristen, anywhere else, folks can find you to say thanks. 

[00:40:29]Kristen: [00:40:29] No, that’s it just had to, yeah.

[00:40:31] Coaching no-code apps.com and you can reach us there. 

[00:40:34] Matt: [00:40:34] Awesome stuff. Everyone else, Matt report.com. airport.com/subscribe. To join the mailing list. Don’t forget to check out the WP minute.com podcast for all of your WordPress news in under five minutes. See you in the next episode.