Podcast appearances and mentions of matt report

WordPress Media Corps — you might even chuckle when you hear the phrase.This experimental initiative is a team that replaced the WordPress Marketing Team. Not commercial WordPress, mind you, but the open source dot org side of the house. If you've been following me for any amount of time, you don't need me to spell out how important this initiative could be.A chance to legitimize the work only a handful of people across the entire globe have dedicated their professional careers towards — myself included.Before we dive deeper into what the Media Corps could accomplish, lets take a look at the outgoing struggles with the Marketing team:How could a volunteer-lead marketing team accomplish the fundamental responsibilities of marketing with no access to website traffic data, survey results, or have a stake in the product? That's right, it's nearly impossible.I know some of the people that were leading the charge with that effort, and lead it with great care and intention — but they were handcuffed. Lets face it: Open source WordPress doesn't function like a commercial product, because it isn't, which is why it has succeeded.Marketing has to come organically. With no budget or access, you're basically building out tasks for a team to accomplish. Tick the box, keep moving, but don't you dare critically think about how you can impact the brand sentiment of WordPress.In my previous post, Who is Responsible for WordPress Marketing, I reported on the Media Corps initiative stating that I'd reserve my opinion until I saw the process mature a bit more. Consider the rest of this my reaction as the dust settles on the Media Corps contributor kickoff call. A North Star I've been following is how do we keep WordPress thriving?This was a call to action put out by Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress in the State of the Word 2023. It's recognized that in order for WordPress to escape a growth plateau, that the community needs to go beyond code quality and features. Humans need to recognize WordPress core worth, importance, and benefits for the greater open web. Simply put: People need to recommend WordPress more.If you can't do it with a volunteer marketing team, forge a bond with the people that have been the biggest cheerleaders for WordPress — WordPress Media.But this is open source WordPress, why do we need an official team to wrangle the media? What even is WordPress Media?I've been covering WordPress for well over 10 years and whenever I needed anything, I reached out to the person and asked. If dot org was releasing something new, I read about it, decided if it was newsworthy for my audience, and then reported on it or shared my opinion.Yes, something like the WordPress Media Corps helps galvanize the work I've been doing here at the WP Minute and my previous podcast Matt Report, but the approach has been opaque at best.Starting with the initial WordPress Media Kick Off Call. Based on the call to action to comment if you want to be involved from the Initial Roadmap post, I was under the impression that the kickoff call was going to include media folk and the contributing team. I wasn't alone on that assumption, check the comments.The kickoff commenced in a private call with the contributing team — and Bob Dunn founder of Do the Woo, who somehow found himself with the "Media Liaison" title.record scratches.Where did that come from? Was it voted on? Did WordPress media folks put Bob's name in a hat? I have nothing against Bob, everyone loves Bob, he oversees some solid content that helps WordPress thrive. That said, this was the Media Corps first shot at launching a meeting and threw transparency out of the window.We'll get to the Media Corps media partnership requirements in a minute, so hold that thought, but there's another issue at hand that I've talked about ad nauseam: “WordPress media” is tiny, impossible to turn into a sustainable business, and largely depends on in-kind sponsorships that genuinely see value in this type of content existing.That's if you define WordPress media like we do at The WP Minute versus what WP Beginner would publish. Remember: The Media Corps team still hasn't released how they will definitively define this.One only needs to look at the lack of effort to turn around the WP Tavern to see the proverbial proof in the pudding. I do this work because I love WordPress and because I think people should be informed on certain topics on the most widely used web publishing software.Do the Woo and WP Minute both jockey for those in-kind sponsors to keep us afloat. To help pay our writers, production teams, and other overhead. To be included in the Media Corps kickoff call is the equivalent to the Theme Team holding a private meeting to change how themes get included and only inviting Sujay Pawar to the Zoom call.But that's just my opinion, which is also my self-imposed job to analyze these community events. I'll reiterate: nothing against Bob, it's just the media business. Brand and trust are really the only things we have — and it goes both ways.This isn't the only time I've seen favoritism play out in WordPress media. I recall my team being rejected as a Media Partner for WordCamp Europe 2023, while I sat back and saw other brands have their logos added to the website with barely a peep out of them on social media or blog posts covering the event.WordPress media is a perfect storm: There's only 10,000 English speaking people in the world that actually care about this type of content, 8 people in the world (myself included) who actually care about covering it, and so few people that know the brands like WP Minute and The Repository who tirelessly cover it. I miss Sarah Gooding.There's only a handful of WP Media types, as I see it:Independent WordPress news sitesPaper of record, The WP TavernGeneral WordPress tutorial and information blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channelsPeople that do it for funsiesPeople that do it because their company tells them to blog about WordPressWhich brings me to the current Media Corps' requirements on how they are evaluating us:Have a focus on producing content that is at least 80% about WordPressReport factual news or produce relevant educational contentMaintain high standards of content quality/journalismAdhere to WordPress community guidelinesRespect information sensitivities (if any)Have you ever come across fake WordPress news? Who decides what the standards of content quality and journalism are? I mean, I lost that WordCamp media partnership slot to a tech YouTuber and I know I barely passed high school, so maybe I won't cut it?There will be another debate: Report news OR relevant educational content. There's a huge gap in scrutiny and body o...

In this episode of the WP Minute+, Matt Medeiros interviews Rafal Tomal, co-creator of the new Rockbase WordPress theme. Tomal, a renowned designer in the WordPress community, discusses his journey from working at Copyblogger and StudioPress to founding his own agency and eventually creating Rockbase with his partner, Chris Hufnagel.Tomal shares his experiences working with clients, noting that the industry has evolved to better understand the distinctions between design and development. He highlights the importance of providing a complete service to clients, rather than just delivering a final product.The conversation also touches on the rise of AI tools and their impact on the WordPress ecosystem. Tomal believes that while these tools are valuable for smaller websites and businesses just starting out, there will always be a need for custom design and development services as companies grow and require more advanced functionality.Tomal explains the concept behind Rockbase's "playbooks," which are designed to provide users with a complete mini-website rather than just a child theme. He also shares his hopes for the future of the WordPress editor, emphasizing the importance of simplicity and user experience improvements without overloading the core with unnecessary features.Key Takeaways:The WordPress industry has matured, with clients better understanding the distinct roles of design and development.Providing a complete service, including communication and guidance, is crucial for client satisfaction.AI tools and advanced WordPress themes are valuable for small businesses, but custom design and development remain essential for growth.Rockbase's "playbooks" offer users a complete mini-website solution, going beyond simple child themes.The WordPress editor should focus on simplicity and user experience improvements while avoiding feature bloat.Important URLs Mentioned:Rockbase: https://rockbase.co/Rafal Tomal's previous interview on the Matt Report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5MhogzU0Y4 ★ Support this podcast ★

This episode of The WP Minute+ podcast features host Matt Medeiros in conversation with guest Marc Benzakein.Marc is currently involved with two WordPress-related businesses – MainWP, a self-hosted WordPress site management plugin, and Site District, a managed WordPress hosting company.Matt opens the show recapping his previous interview with Marc on The Matt Report podcast, where they discussed Marc's former business ServerPress which has now shut down. Marc shares what he has been up to since closing ServerPress, including taking a 6 month sabbatical away from WordPress, before getting involved again working with smaller bootstrapped companies in the WordPress space.Topics Discussed:The high sponsorship costs for events like WordCamp make things difficult for small companies in the WordPress ecosystem. Marc and Matt debate whether the platform can sustain if sponsors pull out.They discuss the necessary move towards block editors and full site editing for WordPress to stay competitive, even though some developers dislike it. The focus needs to be ease of use over speed.Marc highlights the existential threat of keeping websites relevant when social platforms like Facebook offer quicker user engagement. All of WordPress needs to address this issue.The dominance of big tech platforms and algorithms threatens the open web, as most content is now filtered through them rather than accessed directly. Podcasting faces similar challenges.Key Takeaways:Opportunities for WordPress pros with strong personal brands to work with multiple niche companies rather than one big corporate roleNeed to make WordPress site building competitive with social platforms for ease of useAll of WordPress needs to band together to demonstrate the benefits of owning your data with a website ★ Support this podcast ★

I wanted to take today off, to have a bit of a reset from the weekly grind (often chaos) of WordPress stuff.Instead, I'm hoping I can reset expectations with you, my valued reader/listener/viewer of the WP Minute. We're going into our 4th year of publishing content for the WordPress Professional. I quietly stopped publishing content at the Matt Report, my first “big” WordPress media brand, with a rebranding goal that was simple: Get my name out of it. The WP Minute was born.One thread remained, which pulled on highlights of WordPress the software and WordPress the community.It was important that I challenged myself creatively — can I make WordPress media a sustainable business? — and keep things fresh for the consumer. There are a lot of options for you to choose from. My peers at WP Tonic just covered a bunch of them.So what makes the WP Minute different?The WP Minute 5 minute briefing (what you're reading/listening to now) which covers a variety of topics including “WordPress in the news”, important trends in the market, opinion pieces from yours truly, and a collection of links that you might find interesting.Freelancer articles written twice a month by our Editor, Eric Karkovack.A membership, a space for WordPress professionals to gather and talk about the latest and greatest of WordPress.The WP Minute+ a longer form podcast where I interview other WordPress professionals. It's what I did with the Matt Report for a decade.Our YouTube channel where we produce tutorials for WordPress beginners and share interesting parts of our beloved software.It's a well-rounded approach to publishing content for a variety of WordPress media consumers:5 Minutes for the busy professional.Thought provoking blog & newsletter for freelancers.Long form discussions that inspire, educate, and entertain those that want more of WordPress.Video tutorials for WordPress newbies and end users just starting out with WordPress.We're less flashy; fewer listicles.We aim to take a more professional, often opinionated approach, to supporting the blue collar digital workers of WordPress.To criticize WordPress, to be critical of its direction in open source, but not cynical. To make this a resource I wish I had, when I had started my agency back in 2007. We want WordPress to thrive, and we hope that the leadership at Automattic/.org who have outlined that path for us, truly lead us in that direction.Most of the problems we face as a community have been less about the software, and more about us interacting as humans. If the software is going to continue to thrive, we need to build relationships, improve communications, and build the infrastructure necessary to handle the hard parts — again, with us humans.It's easy to label the friction we see on Twitter/X or in Slack as WPDrama. But tossing the WPDrama hashtag on to the flames doesn't put out the fire, often times it can 10x the size of it. Humans love drama. The issue is, the more we use that label, the more WordPress culture gets known for it. It can be a gut punch to those who feel struggle at the core of the issue, leaving them gasping for air. Then all parties who are overwhelmed by the drama, quit.I know this because people quit my content because of it. Overwhelmed and overstimulated, even if we weren't the outlet covering it.I miss the WP Tavern because Sarah did a fantastic job covering tough times like these. I've decided to draw a line in the sand and only cover the topics that will hit home with the WordPress Professionals in volume.I encourage you to care about WordPress, care about each other, and stay committed to keep WordPress thriving. Tune out, but don't give up. Respect others, and give space when needed. Understand that some people face day to day challenges that you don't, regardless of their position in the community, or the dollars in their bank account.I think the future is bright for WordPress. We'll continue to be challenged, both internally and externally for years to come. The chaos that helps shape us, is part of the process, wether we like it or not.I just hope you're with us when we cross that bridge — together. ★ Support this podcast ★

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Aaron Eckhart's version of Harvey Dent said that in Christopher Nolan's penultimate Batman film, The Dark Knight.Since its release in 2008, that quote has been referenced and misappropriated to fit situations because, let's be honest, it's a cool quote.Well, you can add another reference to the pile because it's the first quote that came to mind when I thought about prolific podcaster Matt Medeiros: “You either podfade or you podcast long enough to try every format.”Matt has certainly been around the block. He had perhaps the first popular WordPress business podcast, The Matt Report. He has a short-form news podcast called The WP Minute. Finally, he has a locally focused podcast, We Are Here, celebrating businesses from South Coast, MA.And now he hosts Breakdown, a podcast by the popular forms plugin, Gravity Forms, for Gravity Forms users and web builders.Even though podcasting has been around for a while, most brands are just now coming around to their importance as part of a greater content strategy.I wanted to capture Breakdown's story as it's starting. It's easy to say after it's worked that it was the right decision. We're still at the point where Matt and the Gravity Forms team are experimenting. And that's a great thing for brands and podcasters alike to see.IN THIS EPISODE No matter how many downloads your podcast gets, it can be an integral part of your overall content strategy. Create case studies from interviews you publish on your podcast — whether you're a brand or a solopreneur. Be open to experiments. You never know what will resonate with your audience. Read the full article here: https://podcastworkflows.com/branded-podcast-case-study/ Get your free Podcast Process Templates at https://podcastworkflows.com/templates ★ Support this podcast ★

If you're sick and tired of the WordPress dashboard, maybe you want to give Eric's post, The WordPress Dashboard Needs Some Love, a read. Also in today's episode, I'm reminding you about our other podcast feed The WP MInute+, a free podcast that covers the long form WordPress discussions like my old podcast, The Matt Report. The conversation I just published featuring CliftonWP highlights a lot of what a modern day WordPress entrepreneur is thinking in this fast paced iteration of our favorite CMS. Be sure to add us to your podcast app! Search for "The WP Minute" and you'll see both podcasts available to follow. ★ Support this podcast ★

Be sure to subscribe to all long-form WordPress interviews, The WP Minute+: thewpminute.com/plus Get a weekly dose of your favorite 5 minutes of WordPress news: thewpminute.com/subscribe Stay connected to Matt Report podcast for more "Blue Collar digital worker" content throughout 2023! https://twitter.com/syedbalkhi https://thrivethemes.com/ https://awesomemotive.com/ https://thewpminute.com/support ★ Support this podcast ★

Been a while right?!I'm back with an update to what's going on with Matt Report, and a potential new direction I'll be taking the content through the new year. While I love all of the deep conversations I've had about WordPress, the new home for that is The WP Minute.That's where I've been focusing all of my WP energy these days, with lots more fun stuff to come.I also wanted to take an opportunity to share one of my favorite episodes ever, with Jose Caballer. It's over a decade old but it's SO worth listening to again. While some of the websites and links he's mentioning no longer exist, the content of providing great web services is still very relevant in today's world.I hope you enjoy it (again) and thank you for being a loyal listener of the show! ★ Support this podcast ★

Been a while right?! I'm back with an update to what's going on with Matt Report, and a potential new direction I'll be taking the content through the new year. While I love all of the deep conversations I've had about WordPress, the new home for that is The WP Minute. That's where I've been focusing all of my WP energy these days, with lots more fun stuff to come. I also wanted to take an opportunity to share one of my favorite episodes ever, with Jose Caballer. It's over a decade old but it's SO worth listening to again. While some of the websites and links he's mentioning no longer exist, the content of providing great web services is still very relevant in today's world. I hope you enjoy it (again) and thank you for being a loyal listener of the show!

On the podcast today we have Matt Medeiros. Matt is the driving force behind many WordPress initiatives. That could be the creation of plugins, WordPress news media, as well as podcasts about all manner of WordPress specific subjects. He likes to juggle multiple projects at once. Currently he's the Director of Podcaster Success at Castos, which is a podcast hosting company with a WordPress plugin. He's on the podcast today to give his take on the past, present and future of WordPress. The Matt Report and The WP Minute have enabled us to hear about what the community is doing, what it wants and where its points of friction are. He's talked to hundreds of people about what WordPress was, is, and might be, and so is in a unique position to pontificate about what WordPress, beyond the software, is. It's a lovely chat with a thoughtful and far sighted member of the community.

On the podcast today we have Matt Medeiros. Matt is the driving force behind many WordPress initiatives. That could be the creation of plugins, WordPress news media, as well as podcasts about all manner of WordPress specific subjects. He likes to juggle multiple projects at once. Currently he's the Director of Podcaster Success at Castos, which is a podcast hosting company with a WordPress plugin. He's on the podcast today to give his take on the past, present and future of WordPress. The Matt Report and The WP Minute have enabled us to hear about what the community is doing, what it wants and where its points of friction are. He's talked to hundreds of people about what WordPress was, is, and might be, and so is in a unique position to pontificate about what WordPress, beyond the software, is. It's a lovely chat with a thoughtful and far sighted member of the community.

Editor's note: How I imagine the background music to WordCamp US 2022 News The new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, will be a stripped-down base theme with many style variations built by the WordPress design community. This theme is being released to make theme development exciting again. Jump over to the Gutenberg times to read about variations and see the latest on the “good and bad”. WordPress.com has announced that they can build and design a website for new business owners, in four business days or less. If you are on a budget, the cost is $499, plus an additional purchase of the WordPress.com premium plan. It will be interesting to see how this will grow and if it has any impact on the WordPress professional freelance community. Security Wordfence PSA: on September 6, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team was alerted to the presence of a vulnerability being exploited in BackupBuddy, a WordPress plugin that has around 140,000 active installations. This vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated users to download arbitrary files from the affected site which can include sensitive information. There is minimal sharing about the details of this vulnerability as it is still an active threat. If you are interested in reading more jump over to the Wordfence website. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article that WordPress' Security Team announced it will be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 on December 1, 2022. Events WordCamp US has started! Michelle Frechette writes about how to make the most of your Wordcamp US experience with fewer participants and dealing with COVID restrictions. Use the official #WCUS hashtag to follow the online WCUS conversation. If you are there, say hi to Raquel Landefeld who is our community lead at the WP Minute. If you are a new camper, go listen to the Matt Report and Gina Marie Innocent to get more ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp experience. From Our Contributors and Producers Phil Crumm has a thread on Twitter that the WordPress community is uneasy about the growing pace of acquisitions. His hot take may be correct as the news that GridPane has completed a seed round of funding, including a significant strategic investment from Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, and Jetpack. Another acquisition Rocketgenius, the company behind Gravity Forms, has acquired Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts. The acquisition will help the Gravity Forms community by strengthening the portfolio of WordPress product offerings.

News WordPress 6.0.2 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is available for testing. Testing is so important with this release so please go over to make.wordpress.org to help. There are also a lot of exciting things happening with the block editor. Birgit Pauli-Haack shared that there is a new call for testing by Anne McCarthy for Full-site Editing and another one by Justin Tadlock for the Fluid Typography in themes. Go check out the Gutenberg Times table of contents to see all the new things. WooCommerce WooCommerce is bringing back the sandbox environment that makes it easy for a customer to test extensions before purchasing them. Select extensions can be loaded up on a private test site for 30 days before the site self-destructs. Sarah Gooding covers all the details over at WPTavern. From Our Contributors and Producers Digital Ocean Holdings Inc. will acquire Cloudways. The purchase will enhance offerings for small to medium-sized businesses. Under the terms of the transaction, DigitalOcean will acquire Cloudways for $350 million in cash, including a significant portion of the consideration to be paid over a 30-month period following the closing. It will be interesting to see how all the implementations will occur as some of the competitors are going to now be on the new host. Matt Medeiros interviews Yaw Owusu-Ansah over on the Matt Report.  Yaw says that: there's something nice and freeing about [owning] an agency, being able to make your own decisions and call your own shots. If you're creating content for your WordPress website and need to try something different, go check out Bertha AI. There is a new pricing model and you can pay as you go with a subscription. WP Minute member Sam Munoz is having live conversations with Brian Gardner over at WPEngine about the WordPress community, the future of Full Site Editing, and how it all impacts business owners. It is called Build Mode live and worth a visit. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Birgit Pauli-HaackEric KarkovackAndrew PalmerSam MunozDaniel Shutzsmith

Gutenberg News Last week there was a bunch of new stuff with Gutenberg 13.8.0. Birgit Pauli-Haack discusses all the new features with Grzegorz Ziolkowski over on the changelog podcast. You can hear about Fluid Typography, updates to Block APIs, and WordPress 6.1 Planning. The Gutenberg Editor is testing On Tumblr and Day One Web Apps. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern writes about the details of using the betas on Tumblr and Day One. Check that out. WooCommerce WooCommerce 6.8 has been released. Smart Shipping for new sites has been added to this release. You can see all of the recent updates by checking out the WooCommerce site. Events WordCamp Asia sold out of tickets on their first batch of standard and micro sponsor tickets in just 1 day. The second batch of tickets will be available soon. From Our Contributors and Producers The Free Rider topic around WordPress got a lot of discussion going in the WP Minute Slack channel. Joe Casabona published a podcast episode on why free riders are necessary and really not a problem that needs to be solved. If you really want to democratize publishing, then you can't expect everyone to contribute. You have to accept and welcome the free riders. Eventually, they may want to contribute and be part of the open source community. Joe was also interviewed by Brian Coords over on MasterWP. WordCamp US is right around the corner. If you are an introvert that will be attending, you may want to listen to the Matt Report podcast with Ken Elliott. Ken is a self-described “networking introvert” that built a WordPress agency with his co-founder and he will be emceeing WordCamp US next month. WordCamp US is sold out but you will be able to live stream for free. The first beta release of Advanced Custom Fields PRO 6.0. is now available. It has improved performance for Repeater fields with large datasets, and a new generation of ACF Blocks with block JSON support. Go check that out if you are interested.  Marie Comet shared on Twitter a little experiment of bulk converting Classic WordPress posts to Gutenberg posts. You can check out this tool for converting classic posts to blocks and provide feedback. Wordfence has looked at the threats to Ukrainian websites since the invasion of Russia. This cyber-war has been going on since mid-March and this blog post shows the statistics for the threats. For WordPress developers that have been using Desktop Server for many years, it was sad to see ServerPress is closing. If you are a Premium Subscriber, you will have support until your subscription is up. Check out the just-released int

Five for the Future is back on the radar, surfacing more clarification and criticism. Here's snack pack of links from around the community addressing various opinions on the subject: Five for the Future's True Intentions by Josepha Haden ChomphosySarah Gooding summarizes the link aboveJoe Casabona compares 5FTF to the Creator EconomyRob Howard warns of “toxic scorekeeping.” Gettin' Guten with it Gutenberg Times will host a livestream July 22nd featuring PEW Research Lead Developer and Director of Digital Strategy on how they use WordPress core + custom blocks. Want to know where FSE is headed with all things media? Anne McCarthy posted the FSE Program All Things Media Summary. Product updates LearnDash has taken to the clouds with its latest hosted version of the popular WordPress LMS plugin. SpotlightWP has launched a new analytics dashboard for those of you posting to WordPress and the gram. Pure HTML and CSS WordPress builder LiveCanvas has launched their builder version 3. Product acquisition Amber Hinds' Equalize Digital has sold their WP Conference Schedule plugin to Events Calendar: “Earlier this year, we realized that continuing to support WP Conference Schedule no longer made sense,” said Hinds, “It was a distraction from our mission to improve accessibility in WordPress and took development and marketing time away from Accessibility Checker.” Events A call for organizers has been placed by the WordCamp Euorope 2023 team. The Grab bag! Call for sponsors for WordPress Accessibility Day 2022See what it looks like for a hacker to attack a WordPress wesbite.Congrats to WordPress Historian Jeff Chandler for taking on a new role at WP Engine.Part 2 with Corey Maass on Matt Report, Building Amazing Products. Next up! Michelle Frechette with the Community Minute! New Members This week we welcome two new members to the #linksquad crew: Jonathan Wold and Juan Hernando! You can meet them in the Slack group and if you're not a member yet, go to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport to join. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Joe CasabonaBirgit Pauli-HaackDaniel SchutzsmithEric KarkovackAmber Hinds

News WordPress 6.0 "Arturo" was released. This release was named for the Latin jazz musician and director Arturo O'Farrill. With nearly 1,000 enhancements and bug fixes, the second major release of 2022 is here. You can watch the official release over on YouTube. It is a minute and a half of great jazz and cool features. There were some interesting numbers on Gutenstats.blog of what blocks are used for with .com and Jetpack. The stats are interesting showing 76.6 million active installations and it is exciting to see where all the common blocks are being used. If you are interested to see where Gutenberg is headed, make sure you keep updated at make.wordpress.org. Are you interested in starting a new site with your idea or small business? WordPress Starter is a new, beautifully pared-back plan designed to put that idea center stage. For just $5/month you get fast WordPress managed hosting, unlimited site traffic, and reasonable startup prices. This is the new price point for WordPress.com that Sarah Gooding, over at the Tavern, and I have been waiting to hear about for some time. I've reached out to Automattic for a comment. Events WordCamp EU will be happening next week. There is an interesting panel discussion with the global lead Taeke Reijenga on “Acquisitions in WordPress”. The WPMinute has been covering these acquisitions individually over the past year but you may want to check out this panel to hear their takes on some of the major changes and takeovers within the community over the past year. From Our Contributors and Producers Speaking of acquisitions, Adrian Tobey of GroundHoggWP tweeted that his team has acquired Scott Bolinger's plugin, HollerWP. Bolinger exited the plugin space recently joining the team at GoDaddy. Would you like to see a practical use of Gutenberg in the digital news space? Check out this Twitter thread by Seth Rubenstein where he explains how he has gone all in on block development and what is possible in Gutenberg. Tom McFarlin shares his perspective of WordPress as an application. He goes beyond the latest published newsletters, tweets, blog posts, podcasts, etc., around Full Site Editing and Headless options. He points out that we may be forgetting the fact that WordPress is far more malleable than FSE and Next.js. The WPTavern jukebox recently interviewed Ana Segota and Kelly Choyce-Dwan about how the WordPress pattern creator works. If you want to hear how you can submit your patterns and the constraint challenges around the submission, go take a listen to that episode. Joost de Valk warns us to optimize crawling to save the environment:  Every time they find a URL, they crawl it and if it's interesting to them, they'll keep crawling it basically forever. The bigger your site, the more URLs you have, the more likely every individual URL is to be hit multiple times per day. Speaking of the environment: Over on the Matt Report, “Can WordPress save the planet?” Hannah Smith talks to Matt about how web sustainability can save the planet. This is a very unique approach for a

News Want to find the latest with Gutenberg? You can quickly find the updates on the Gutenberg Hub. where can check out the latest resources or tutorials. Maciek Palmowski tweeted this resource where you can create a Gutenberg page quickly by using the builder. Not WooCommerce related by very interesting Bloomberg Technology reported that Shopify Inc. shares plunged below their pre-pandemic level after the company missed revenue and profit estimates, prompting some analysts to dramatically change their outlook on the Canadian e-commerce company.  Shopify fell 14.7% to $413.64 on the New York Exchange, bringing this year's decline to 70%. The stock is now 2% below where it closed on the day in March 2020 that the World Health Organization called Covid-19 a global pandemic. Events Wordsesh is scheduled for next week May 16–20, 2022. This is one of the first virtual, free seminars for WordPress professionals and has some great speakers scheduled. Head on over to the site to get signed up. From Our Contributors and Producers Lemon Squeezy just became free. Instead of a monthly cost, there will just be a larger percentage of each transaction kept by Lemon Squeezy. They have announced two major releases on their Lemon Drop. According to their website, if you already have a subscription, you will be grandfathered in.  There has been a leadership change announced over at Yoast. After joining Newfold Digital in August 2021, they have seen a lot of growth. Thijs de Valk picked up a new role as CEO after Marieke van de Rakt decided to step back from this position. You can see the updates over on the Yoast blog. WPSiteSync reported that they will no longer be updating the plugin and its Premium Extensions. There are plans to integrate some of its functionality into DesktopServer. Currently, if you use WPSiteSync for your workflow, the current plugin and its Premium Extensions will be free to the public. Vikas Singhal tweeted that the Chrome Extension for @insta_wp is now a little more powerful. After you install the extension, you will be able to launch instances “without” registration for any wp.org plugin or theme. Ellen Bauer announced on Twitter that a new FSE (full site editing) theme, Kori has been released. It is a cool one-page theme for resume websites. You can read the blog and try it out on ainoblocks.com. Ines van Dijk, was interviewed on the Matt Report. Go check out this episode to get some great ideas on how to help WordPress product owners get better at customer support. This interview covers many issues that come up with support and may be familiar to you. But if you need help you can hire her team or get support templates from her site Quality in Support. Joost De Valk wrote on his blog that the WordPress market share appears to be shrinking over the past few months. Could it be that WordPress is being out-innovated or could it be site speed? You can

For the past decade, Matt Medeiros has become an expert when it comes to podcasting and building audiences. Within the WordPress eco-system, Matt is a staple in the community where he runs The Matt Report and The WP Minute.Today, Matt is the Director of Podcast Success at Castos where he helps new and existing podcast shows become successful. I can't think of a better role for Matt. If you're lucky enough to get 30 minutes with him — you'll be in good hands.  Links mentioned:Matt's thoughts on the future of WordPressMatt's favorite business podcast — This week in startupsFollow MattTwitterPersonal websiteCastos - Podcast Hosting=============================Show notes:(3:25) typical day for Matt(6:00) what makes a podcast successful?(10:40) how the platforms will influence what's next for podcasting(13:40) what's next for WordPress(18:25) balancing day job and side hustles(21:25) how to get started with podcasting(25:20) wrapping up=============================As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr — brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. If you're looking to sell digital products online, be sure to check out Lemon Squeezy or follow us on Twitter @lmsqueezy 

“We're only going to be covering the most impactful news items that we feel are the most impactful news items.”  Matt MedeirosIn today's episode, we are joined by Matt Medeiros. He is a well-known member of the WordPress community and has been producing one of the longest and respected podcast, "The WP MInute", a podcast that explores anything about WordPress. He also hosted "Matt Report", a podcast that talks about online entrepreneurship. As one of the many hats that Matt wears, he is also by the way the  "Director of Podcaster Success" at Castos.Tune in now and learn how you can make a high quality podcast!Watch this episode on YouTubeIn this conversation:Matt Medeiros:Matt's Company: CastosMatt on Twitter: @mattmedeirosMatt's personal siteBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations.  Use it for free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes:“As long as you're on this pursuit of of enjoying number one, but number two, you're you're on this pursuit to improve things. That's all you need to worry about. You don't have to be perfect.”“WordPress has been around for a few years before that. So I felt like I was playing catch up in terms of like, who are the big players? What's happening? What is what here? And that's, that's when I was hungry for that sort of information.”“It doesn't have to be like you have to worry about it. You just have to be on this pursuit to constantly get better. ”

News WordPress 6.0 Beta 3 is now available for testing. These releases are moving along and testers are needed for the most recent release. If you would like to check out the release schedule you can go over to make.wordpress.org. It was just announced that Matt Mullenweg will be speaking at WordCamp Europe in Porto, Portugal June 2-4 2022. If you plan on attending this event you may want to listen to a podcast from Delicious Brains that gives some great ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp visit. WooCommerce WooCommerce has released 6.5 RC2. This puts them on track for the May 10, 2022 release date. Testers are needed for this release as well. From Our Contributors and Producers Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern writes about how the WordPress subreddit blew up this week with reports of MemberPress locking users out of the plugin's admin if they do not renew their subscriptions. MemberPress is a popular membership plugin for WordPress that does not have a free version available. They do clearly outline the subscription policy but cutting off access to the plugin's admin screens leaves users without the ability to manage the membership functions of their sites once their subscriptions lapse. It will be interesting to see if this “change” impacts their customer base. David Vongries tweeted that he is looking for a new home for Kirki. If you are looking to venture into the Gutenberg product market this may be a great opportunity for you. Reach out to David if you're interested. Amber Hinds also tweeted about two plugins that need to be rehomed. They have become a distraction from the main focus on accessibility. Go check out the thread on Twitter and reach out to Amber if you're interested in her plugins. MasterWP has announced their WordCamp US 2022 Travel Sponsorship Program. Rob Howard explains how to apply. Go check out his blog post to apply to be a speaker to WordCamp US and possibly receive sponsorship. If you would like to contribute to helping send somebody to WordCamp you can head on over to DonateWC. Chima Mmeje was interviewed over on the Matt Report about how and why to raise your freelance rates. Go listen to this interview to discover how entrepreneurs can raise rates through grit, perseverance, confidence, and ultimately discovering self-worth. Next up: Block Editor Dev Minute by Aurooba Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Daniel SchutzsmithEric Karkovack

News Julia Golomb over at make.wordpress.org has posted a new Proposal with Steps to Integrate #WPDiversity into organizing WordPress events. All new WordCamp and meetup organizers would automatically receive an invitation as they are onboarded to make sure the diversity consideration is addressed. Could it be lucky #13 for testing FSE (Full Site Editing)? Anne McCarthy over on make.wordpress.org posted that testers are needed and you can follow the instructions to create a template for author pages and learn how to unlock the UI for blocks. You have until April 21, 2022 to provide feedback. Anne also answers questions from the FSE Outreach Program. The post provides answers gathered through the program that started on March 16th and ended on March 30th. Sarah Gooding over on WPTavern wrote about the most recent changes made on WordPress.com. There were major unannounced pricing changes along with the 500 mb free storage change. It took many by surprise and frustrations were expressed by users on Twitter and other forums. WooFunnels, the popular sales funnel and automation plugin was added to the WPBeginner business through their Growth Fund. Syed Balkhi announced that he will be advising the team on how to expand their WordPress Product business. WooCommerce Beta 1 for the April 2022 release of WooCommerce is available for testing. You can either download it directly from WordPress.org or install it in the WooCommerce Beta Tester Plugin. From Our Contributors and Producers WP Migrate DB Pro is Now WP Migrate. WP Migrate dropped the “DB Pro” in their plugin to better reflect what the product does. The latest release of WP Migrate 2.3 gives you the choice to include or exclude the database. Migrate just the database, just your files, or both. No more workarounds required. David Lockie announced that he has joined the Automattic family as a Web3 Lead in the WooCommerce Transact team. Fast tweeted an announcement that they will be closing their doors. Fast had stood out in the crowded field of one-click checkout startups after it landed a $102 million infusion of cash in a fundraising round last year led by payments giant Stripe. It appears that the product was generating very little revenue. Check out the latest episode of the Matt Report with Joe Howard where we learn you can find someone else to run your business. Joe is stepping aside but is still a majority owner of the business. He is now focused on a new SaaS startup.&n

News I'm sure you've been paying attention to the war. A pro-Russian war plugin appeared in the WordPress plugin repository resulting in a lot of heated conversation on the Internet. It was finally removed by the plugin team in the WordPress repository.  Heather Burns covers a non-US perspective in her article. Weglot, a popular WordPress multilingual plugin, has raised €45M from Partech Partners. Sarah Gooding, over at the WPTavern writes how this is the first time that Weglot has taken outside capital to expand its translation services. The WordPress Performance Team has published a feature proposal that would enable WebP images by default into WordPress 6.0 core. The performance team has published their proposal over on make.wordpress.org. Events WordCamp Asia is tentatively back on the schedule of in-person WordPress events with new dates: February 17-19, 2023 in Bangkok, Thailand. It will begin with a Contributor day, followed by two conference days. From Our Contributors and Producers There is a technical discussion over on WordPress Gutenberg GitHub on the Dynamic replacement of server-provided content in blocks and in HTML attributes. The proposal uses Dynamic tokens which read like Shortcodes 2.0 but with a much better interface. If you need to manage photo/image source attributions and licenses in WordPress go check out the premium version of Image Source Control. This plugin manages and displays image credits which have been an issue for years. If you enjoy founder stories, the article is worth a couple of minutes of your time to read. Jamie Marsland submitted his 100th YouTube video on Gutenberg. If you are in search of a charity form for Gutenberg blocks for your site go check out his video. Do you want to know how Crocoblock is doing in Ukraine? Lana Miro has a video on YouTube that you should go watch while they continue to work during this frightening time. WP Minute Writer Eric Karkovack wrote a new Freelancer's View: Overcoming the Challenge of Selling Clients on WooCommerce. Listen to the latest podcast on buying a WordPress media property with Rob Howard on the Matt Report. Matt and Rob explore building an agency, how to hire, and Rob's latest purchase of MasterWP. Joe Howard took to Twitter to state that he's working on a new product that isn't the company he founded, WP Buffs. Stay tuned to the Matt Report for a full interview.  Next up: Block Editor Dev Minute by Aurooba Ahmed WP Accessibility Minute” by Amber Hinds Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: Birgit Pauli-HaackRaquel LandefeldThomas MaierMatt Cromwell

News Is it finally time to retire WordPress Multisite?   Rob Howard wrote an article over on MasterWP that Multisite is a solution to a problem that no longer exists. The cool things that Multisite offered like sharing themes and single sign on just don't seem as important to developers these days. Rachel Cherry tweeted a response that it may just be too early to consider removing Multisite as there is still a big audience in higher education that would be impacted by this. (p.s. Subscribe to Matt Report to hear an upcoming interview with Howard, new owner of MasterWP.) Early in February the community had many discussions about Diversity in WordCamps and Meetups. Allie Nimmons wrote a great post on MasterWP about a better journey to diversity. Go read Allie's important article to help get a better understanding on how to approach and discuss diversity. Sarah Gooding over on the WPTavern writes that Strattic has acquired the WP2Static plugin. Strattic plans to relaunch the plugin on WordPress.org to improve its discovery, installation, and update process. From Our Contributors and Producers Jetpack has released a new way to build your own Jetpack. Release 10.7 includes My Jetpack, a brand new dashboard for managing your Jetpack products and plans in a single place. With all of the nervous watch on the war in Ukraine, it seems that Namecheap is kicking out their Russian customers, with a 6 day notice. Konstantin Kovshenin tweeted the news.  Andrew Palmer was recently on the Matt Report discussing Artificial Intelligence for WordPress. If you want to check out the exciting direction of AI you can download the bertha.ai plugin from the repository and listen to this podcast to see what's next in WordPress & Gutenberg. Ryan Breslow continues the Shopify discussion this week on how they are eating their ecosystem. This is another interesting thread/perspective on Shopify's end-to-end commerce platform. Next Up You are on the Creator Clock with Joe Casabona “YouTube Thumbnails” by Joe Casabona Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Jeff ChandlerBirgit Pauli-HaackDaniel SchutzsmithMichelle Frechette ★ Support this podcast ★

Hey listener, before we get started, if you'd like to support WordPress community member Andrey Savchenko or anyone else currently in the Ukraine, please donate here or here. (read his original tweet https://twitter.com/Rarst/status/1497516263597387782) I can comfortably admit that I didn't see Artificial Intelligence as the next big thing for WordPress in 2022. The march to Gutenberg and FSE adoption across the product landscape is sure to reveal new opportunities to be introduced to our favorite low-code software. AI, however, wasn't even close to what I was expecting to be the next big thing for us. Bertha.ai is an all-new solution for helping users craft a near infinite amount of text for your WordPress website. From H1's to entire blog posts, what Vito Peleg and Andrew Palmer are creating with this tool is quite impressive. Let's get the elephant (yes, the real one) out of the room first, shall we? Bertha isn't leading us to copywriter extinction. Hearing from Andrew in today's interview, Bertha should still be used as your writing assistant — not your writer. You can give the AI assistant the ideas, the direction, and what you want to focus on, but will still require some editing chops to refine it. It's still a darn good tool. You can download Bertha for free from WordPress.org to try it yourself. Consider supporting the Matt Report before the robots take over at https://buymeacoffee.com/mattreport ★ Support this podcast ★

We hosted our first WP Minute Live Twitter Space covering learning WordPress. It was Bring Your Own Link (BYOL) style where our guest panelists brought a link to share with the audience. Here were the guests that appeared on the live show: Hauwa Abashiya, Freelance Project Manager transitioning into the WordPress space; Board Member and Volunteer at Big Orange Heart including WordFest and one of the Make Training Team Reps.Joe Casabona, Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting and course creation to help creators, and business owners.Birgit Pauli-Haack,  Birgit is the curator of the Gutenberg Times and co-host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast with Greg Ziolkowski. Automattic sponsors her work as a full-time developer advocate for WordPress. Daniel Schutzsmith, Web Manager at Pinellas County Government, one of the Producers at The WP Minute, maintainer of WP Livestreams Directory, and soon to be launched WP Developer's Toolbox.Matt Medeiros, Director by day at Castos.com; Creating community contributed news and journalism at thewpminute.com part of Matt Report media network.  Links shared from the guests Hauwa Abashiya: https://learn.wordpress.org/| https://make.wordpress.org/training/2021/08/08/who-can-learn-help/ | https://learn.wordpress.org/social-learning/Joe Casabona: https://wplearningpaths.com | https://maven.com Birgit Pauli-Haack Gutenberg Developer Hours 2/8 WordPress Social Learning Spaces. https://fullsiteediting.com/block-theme-generator/ Block Theme GeneratorDaniel Schutzsmith: https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/18/training-team-goals-for-2022/ “Especially certification!” Episode transcript [00:00:00] Matt: This event is brought to you by malware and blog vault. Check out mal care.com and blog vault.net, helping you secure and restore your WordPress websites. Quite literally thank them without them. I wouldn't be able to be doing the WP minute live and Daniel wouldn't have that nice new gold chain around his neck. [00:00:18] Moving forward. I'd ask all of you to join the link squad, hashtag link squad, producers, and contributors, and the discord server share, vote and discuss their newsworthy links with others. When you're part of the link squad, you're part of making weekly word, press news. And we're talking about one of the, one of the biggest topics, 5.9, and learning a little bit more about 5.9, Daniel, your segments. [00:00:46] Daniel: Yeah. And really what we're doing here too, for folks that don't know the w the WP minute is that it's contributor, sourced news. We provide links basically every week of what we see out there in the industry. And so we often have discussions around those links, similar to what you'd see in a newsroom. [00:01:04] It's just done a discord. And so we're, we're talking with each other and talking about the various things we like about a link or whatnot  [00:01:11] Matt: WVU minute live is bringing you that discussion right here on Twitter spaces and streaming platforms across the internet, someday discuss hashtag link squad topics with us live and follow at the WP minutes. [00:01:23] Stay.  [00:01:25] Daniel: Yeah, given the, the new release of WordPress 5.9, we're going to focus on this week's topic, being, learning WordPress. And so everyone's brought at least one link, perhaps two or three that that share a little bit about learning WordPress. And so we're going to go through once and we're going to see how that goes and how long that takes. [00:01:43] But first, let me introduce our folks here. We already know kind of Matt, Modaris our fearless leader here, director by day at dot com. Creating community contributed news and journalism at the WP minutes. Part of the Matt report media network. We also have how ABA Shaya freelance project manager transitioning into the WordPress space, a board member and volunteer at big orange heart, including word Fest, and one of the make training team reps. [00:02:10] Thank you for being here. How all the way from London, I believe. Yep. That's right. Alright. Joe, Casabona coming straight to us from Pennsylvania. Punxsutawney Phil come up soon. Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting, and course creation to help creators and business owners. [00:02:38] And I'm subscribed to seven of his podcasts. They're all amazing. So checking out a peer get ball. They have. Beer is the curator of the Gutenberg times and co-host of the Gutenberg changelog podcast with Greg Koski automatic sponsors for work as a full time developer advocate for WordPress[00:03:00]  [00:03:01] and my cell phone, Daniel should Smith, a mild-mannered web manager at Raquel's Pinellas county government down here in Florida by day. But I'm also one of the producers at the w few minutes and a maintainer of WP live streams directory, which you may have heard me talk about before. And since we launched WP developers toolbox, so let's get to it. [00:03:23] We're going to go through each person. They're going to share a link. We're going to tweet out that link. So as you're going along to speakers, let me know if you've already tweeted it out and I'll go into your profile and find it last year. How you're up first?  [00:03:39] Hauwa: So I've just tweeted my now. And of course I have to tweet out the.wordpress.org, because I think it should be the number one tweet that goes out anyway, resource for everybody coming to learn about WordPress. [00:03:53] So if you don't know about it, it's a resource that's been built by the community and we have got lesson plans, workshops, and courses, and we also have social learning spaces on that.  [00:04:11] Daniel: That's great. And what what kind of things can we find there specifically, like on courses and such as it, is it like Courses around full site editing and things like that, or,  [00:04:20] Hauwa: yeah, so we as part of a 5.9, the training team, so I'm one of the reps on their make training team, along with Courtney Robinson and Pooja discharge. [00:04:31] And we took an undertaking to actually get content out ready for 5.9. First time we've done it and, please see that we did get some contacts out there. And one of them has been a course that was done by Roxy and it's about full site editing. So it's from a user's point of view and it's the first part. [00:04:49] And I believe the second part should be coming out later this month. And we do have a couple of workshops and lesson plans are out there as well, that are like 0.9. [00:04:59] I'm just going to tweet out that actually you said I can only do one thing. Can I have the link to the course? Sure.  [00:05:06] Daniel: We can do  [00:05:09] Matt: more  [00:05:09] Daniel: speakers, feel free to ask any questions or give any thoughts to these things. The I'm looking at the workshops here and I don't know how I missed this, that there's so many workshops. [00:05:19] Hauwa: The workshops work came about just around during the pandemic. So we'd always have lessons and obviously the lesson plans have been there to help meet up organizers. You couldn't get it. Speaker didn't know what to talk about and you could just go and get a lesson plan and walk through that during your meetup. [00:05:39] And I believe some people have used it in training general training of law students as well in bootcamps and things like that. I know Courtney's used it quite a lot as a resource and she has contributed quite a lot. And then she's in here listening. Yeah. And then yeah, workshops. So workshops, you can watch one of the videos and you can join a social learning space to [00:06:00] discuss it. [00:06:00] And I know we've been doing a lot more with social learning spaces now. So the formats of those could slightly change. It's experimenting with different ways of delivering special learning spaces. [00:06:15] Joe: I know that a other kind of core space like websites that have a lot of WordPress stuff have the notion of different. Tracks, I guess like UTA at word camps is, are there plans for that@learndotwordpress.org? Because I know that you cover a wide range of topics. It says here from first-time blogger to seasoned developer will, there'll be some guidance coming down the pike on if you're a first-time blogger, where do you go versus if you're a seasoned developer, where do you,  [00:06:41] Hauwa: yeah, so we've just sending out the latest course now we have been doing some work or the Sierra on looking she started last year in terms of defining what our goals are. [00:06:53] And I do believe dining, you might be bringing out a link up or on but we've been looking at what our goals are in terms of the training team. So one of the things that Courtney has done, she did a high level roadmap, which looked at it. So it's essentially, you could possibly think about it as planning your own. [00:07:10] If you are starting from a user or you're starting from a developer, it's a one room that you could look at  [00:07:19] Daniel: that shit. [00:07:23] I didn't even realize there's quizzes on here. Yep. You can take an actual  [00:07:28] Hauwa: quiz, test you to make sure that you're doing it properly now. Just checking. Yeah, there are quizzes on there. Each of them have quizzes a week within the lesson plans. We also have exercises that people can follow as well. [00:07:41] Yeah.  [00:07:44] Matt: How does one apply to be a teacher, somebody to present one of these workshops, so  [00:07:51] Hauwa: on Mary with me, we do have, and I will take you to, I wish I could type as fast as I talk. [00:08:02] Okay. So I would just share it out the link for the high level roadmap that Courtney did. So on. We do have a way that you can contribute and get involved. That link is right on land, but I will share it. And so if you want to be a facilitator and submit your workshop or create a social learning space, there are some guidelines, but essentially you just walk through and submit your application and the team reviews it and just puts you in. [00:08:44] Daniel: That's pretty cool. I know there's a few folks in the community that have said they were at least helping proofread and things like that. And to, technically read to make sure things were correct. And they were put together the past few weeks. So it sounds sounds like I need to get involved, actually [00:09:00] do some  [00:09:00] Hauwa: stuff. [00:09:02] Every month we, as a team, we discussed what we were going to do for that month. So we're looking at, we essentially, we run a sprint every month and we post out on make what we're actually working on for that month. So anyone came on, they would have seen what we were working on for January. And a lot of it was geared towards five point. [00:09:23] We're going to continue with that for February, and also look at some of the things that we identified during our team goal setting. That we're going to target for this month as well. So that should cause tomorrow, February, so we should be releasing that out tomorrow, but I will post the link just in terms of, if anyone wants to know what we're working on. [00:09:44] This is what we're working on.  [00:09:48] Daniel: Great. Let's let's move on to the next Joe you're you're on  [00:09:53] Joe: deck. All right. I, this feels like shameless self promotion, but it's something that I think about hopefully as evidenced by my question to how it's my website, WP learning paths.com where I break down. [00:10:07] Resources based on where you are in your WordPress journey. So I've got three resources for beginner, two resources per site builder, and then three resources for a developer. The reason I built this and the most lacking section is actually the site builder section. I don't, I haven't come across a lot of resources specifically for the site builders, the no code WordPress folks. [00:10:35] I was asked in another event the go WP, happiness hour last week who is full site editing for. And I think it's for a whole sect of no code people who can now make their way to work. 'cause you don't just need to know a page builder or you don't just need to know a specific theme to build sites without code. [00:10:56] I put this resource together. I actually I'm going to be, I'm going to see how far I can get with full site editing with just full site editing, even though I'm a developer. So I'll be using 2022 to customize this as much as possible without code. So it'll be my learning journey being built in real life, but it's also a resource for people who are looking to learn WordPress. [00:11:21] Daniel: Fantastic. And I mean that, this is awesome.  [00:11:26] Matt: The ban testing,  [00:11:30] Joe: this is this is  [00:11:31] Daniel: something that I've been tweeting a lot about in the past week or two. And I hear it. In your podcast to how you mentioned some of the same things and it's that it's that path. It just doesn't, it doesn't exist for some folks that are coming from outside of the space. [00:11:48] If you're not, and if you're not understanding the WordPress vernacular, if our jargon even the fact that.org.com are different, these are all things to people when they first come in. So [00:12:00]  [00:12:01] Joe: it's definitely, I've definitely made it a mission for 2022 to get some more pers perspective swapping. [00:12:11] I'm going to say between inside and outside the WordPress space, because I think you're right. People coming from outside the WordPress space the straw man is probably people who write WordPress with a lowercase P but it's the people who don't fully know the terms. They don't really know what to look for on the same token, the people who have been entrenched in WordPress for almost 20 years, I started using it in 2004. [00:12:32] Probably can learn a lot from people who have just started in the no-code space or who've been using Squarespace or something like that. So I think my mission is to connect the two this year and help them learn from each other, which hopefully makes a more rich community in both places. [00:12:53] Daniel: Yeah. Matt, did you have some say some? Did you have something you want to say?  [00:12:58] Matt: Yeah. I was, there's actually, and a question for Holly as well as which profile and I think Joe started to address it, but which profile of end-user. Do you, what do you see both of your the official learn path or Joe's path? [00:13:12] What type of WordPress user is this? I guess more specifically for how it's like WordPress sees every type of WordPress user. How do you even begin to prioritize the type of content or the type of educational content that you create, but show first to you developer, web professional end user, like, how are you categorizing your type of [00:13:49] Birgit: how to use one  [00:13:53] Hauwa: to get involved? Great bye. Make  [00:13:57] Daniel: cool. I know there's a few folks in the community that have said they were at least helping proofread and things like that. And I guess technically read to make sure things were correct. And they were put together the past few weeks. So it sounds sounds like I need to get involved and actually do some stuff. [00:14:15] Hauwa: Every month we, as a team, we discussed what we were going to do for that month. So we're looking at, we essentially, we run a sprint every month and we post out on make what we're actually doing. This is awesome.  [00:14:28] Joe: The ban, some more rich community. How do they use WordPress training teams  [00:14:34] Daniel: most I know you need people. [00:14:36] I know you need people to keep making content, but it's also, I think it's a marketing thing too. I'm like  [00:14:42] Joe: how do I learn it? [00:14:49] How do you how to use WordPress? Or it could be the official learn path pers perspective actually developer, so great.  [00:14:59] Daniel: [00:15:00] Let's let's move on to the next Joe, you're on  [00:15:02] Joe: deck. All right. I, this feels like shameless self promotion, but it's something that I think about hopefully as evidenced by my question to how it's my website, WP learning paths.com where I break down resources based on where you are in your WordPress journey. [00:15:20] So I've got three resources for beginner, two resources per site builder, and then three resources for a developer. The reason I built this and the most lacking section is actually the site builder section. I don't, I haven't come across a lot of resources specifically for the site builders, the no code WordPress folks. [00:15:44] I was asked in another event the go WP happiness hour last week who is full site editing for. And I think it's for a whole sect of no code people who can now make their way to WordPress, because you don't just need to know a page builder or you don't just need to know a specific theme to build sites without code. [00:16:05] I put this resource together. I actually I'm going to be, I'm going to see how far I can get with full site editing with just full site editing, even though I'm a developer. Using 2022 to customize this as much as possible without code. So it'll be my learning journey being built in real life, but it's also a resource for people who are looking to learn WordPress. [00:16:29] Daniel: Fantastic. And I mean that, this is awesome.  [00:16:33] Joe: The fan  [00:16:35] Matt: testing,  [00:16:38] Joe: this is this is  [00:16:39] Daniel: something that I've been tweeting a lot about in the past week or two. And I hear it in your podcast too, how you mentioned some of the same things. It's that past. It doesn't exist for some folks that are coming from outside of the space. [00:16:54] If you're not, if you're not understanding the word, press vernacular, if our jargon even the fact that.org.com are different. Like these are all things to people when they first come in. So  [00:17:07] Joe: it's definitely, I've definitely made it a mission for 2022 to get some more pers perspective swapping. [00:17:17] I'm going to say between inside and outside the word space, because I think you're right. People coming from outside the WordPress space the straw man is probably people who write WordPress with a lowercase P but it's the people who don't fully know the terms. They don't really know what to look for on the same token, the people who have been entrenched in WordPress for almost 20 years, I started using it in 2004. [00:17:40] Probably can learn a lot from people who have just started w in the no-code space or who've been using a Squarespace or something like that. So I think my mission is to connect the two this year and help them learn from each other, which hopefully makes a more rich community in both places.[00:18:00]  [00:18:01] Daniel: Yeah. Matt, did you have some say some? Did you have something you wanted to say?  [00:18:06] Matt: Yeah, I was, it was actually a question for Holly as well as which profile and I think Joe started to address it, but which profile of end user do you, what do you see both of your the official learn path or Joe's path? [00:18:19] What type of WordPress user is this? I guess more specifically for how it's like WordPress sees every type of WordPress user. How do you even begin to prioritize. The type of content or the type of educational content that you create, but Joe first to you developer, web professional, and user, like how are you categorizing your type of your  [00:18:44] Joe: yeah. [00:18:44] My, I mean like the courses that I create, or this site specifically that we're talking about now, this site specifically yeah, so I'm I'm going to say I'm optimizing it in search, but I don't know really how to do that properly. But I want this to answer the question, how do I learn WordPress? [00:19:01] This could be somebody who for a beginner, right? If they're like, I have no idea how to use WordPress or it could be the developer. Who's like, how do I make a WordPress theme? So I guess my target audience is people from outside the WordPress space who don't necessarily know. [00:19:18] Where to look to find something to learn. I wouldn't to say that this is probably not somebody who's like already a LinkedIn learning member, because they're probably just going to go there. Or not necessarily even somebody who who already knows who I am or my Gutenberg courses, because they're just trying to answer this question. [00:19:36] WordPress was dropped in my lap. How do I learn it?  [00:19:40] Matt: Gotcha. [00:19:40] Hauwa: Yeah, it's it just brought me to where I just tweeted out who can learn help. Cause we looked at this a while ago back August because the vision for land leasing and the training team is huge because you can impact so many different people. So you do have your users. Your extended, whether that is freelances or designers or developers. [00:20:01] And you've also got your contributors and your leaders as well. So it's highlighting, there are many different paths. And I think that roadmap that I shared earlier breaks down in terms of the sort of people that we think learn can help and the different pathways that they could go through or they could come from. [00:20:20] And to add to that, part of, like I said, when we had our goal team goal setting is looking at well, what are we actually going to focus on? Because it's so huge and it's looking at well, we need to have a needs analysis and determine what it is that people want. And by people, just not just our users, but also our employers, what are they actually seeking for in terms of the skills that they want to actually see candidates coming to them have. [00:20:47] Daniel: There's so much, there's so much content to it learn, but it's almost I know you need people. I know you need people to keep making content, but it's also, I think it's a marketing thing too. Like getting [00:21:00] people really to understand that exists there and in a way that, a similar thing that Joe has and here's the path that you should follow. [00:21:09] And I do see you have some things laid out like that there. [00:21:15] Hauwa: Yeah. In terms of, we, we do need a lot of bodies to help. So yeah, we need everyone really. It's not, the developers, the marketers, the designers, because, at the moment when you look at that and I know after the needs analysis, and there was a UX audit that was done last year, so that look and feel of learning and also change because obviously at the moment, when you go into it, it's just, you just see lesson plans and workshops. [00:21:42] So there is work on that needs to be done. But the training team is a small team at the moment. And so shout out to anybody wants to come and join and help me be more than happy to have you.  [00:21:54] Daniel: And I put a beer, gets link up top there to, for folks to who are interested in becoming a facilitator. [00:22:03] Matt: It's funny. I was on a webinar the other day for a piece of software called de script, which was very popular. And in the podcasting space, basically trans transcribed your audio when you edit audio through texts, instead of visually through wave forms and the CEO does this webinar, maybe once a quarter or something like that. [00:22:22] And I think it's one of the better pieces of software that I use fairly straightforward, pretty easy to use and understand there's a slight learning curve like everything else, but it's not tremendously difficult. And they have a ton of content and a ton of content. That's actually in the context of the app. [00:22:40] So wherever you're in the app, you can always get access to a knowledge base, article, a video. It's a tutorial and they do webinars all the time. At least two or three a month according to my inbox. And the CEO pulls up a person from the audience to ask questions. And that person says, gee, I wish you could sh I wish you could create more content around using this piece of software. [00:23:05] And I could see in his eyes, he just wanted to be like, do we not create enough already? And it's just, every person is going to want to learn it a different way. This particular person was like, yeah, but I want to start from scratch. And he's there's a whole course over here. There's an academy over there. [00:23:22] There's this three hour long video on YouTube. And it's, every person is always going to want something different. And even for an app like de script, the challenge for WordPress is just, wow, there's just, it's just a big challenge, I think for WordPress, but you guys are the team and everything is just doing an amazing job. [00:23:46] Daniel: Yeah. And to be fair too, there is a. Because I'm doing the WP live streams directory. I'm seeing all the different things that are coming across my feeds that I'm putting into our calendar and the social learning team there. They must [00:24:00] have at least four or five webinars a week, basically. [00:24:04] That's our kicking out. So it's been very fast and furious and they look like really good, attended webinars too. We're talking like, 70 plus people almost every time. So when people are interested in it, [00:24:19] Matt: Hey, if you're just tuning in, this is the first WP minute live session on Twitter spaces. WP minute is an experiment in community journalism and reporting news for WordPress. You can find us at the WP minute. It's hosted by Daniel shoot Smith. He's your navigator today. And the hashtag is hashtag w. [00:24:42] I am the creative genius behind that hashtag that is the value that I bring to the show. [00:24:51] Daniel: Absolutely. And it works well. Beer  [00:24:57] Matt: let's hear from you.  [00:24:58] Birgit: I'm going right into the social learning spaces, which is a meetup group, and it's also on the longest learn. There's a social calendar. But a lot of these social learning spaces, or actually there, I'm here to share a link to the first event of the Gutenberg developers hours an event where developers can bring their the problems, the questions, the code, that demos to an expert panel and then get answers from the various people and February 8th event, we'll have Nick Diego developer advocate at WP engine and plugin developer and theme developer, and then also Fabiana Kagy who books 10 up and has done quite some Gutenberg demo. [00:25:48] Development and also some great apps around and always keeps the conversation flowing. And then the third panelist will be Tammy Lista, who is one of the designers of the Gutenberg project. And also now works for SWP and trains developers there and has some interesting ideas on gradual adoption of Gutenberg depending on your skill level. [00:26:15] So that's what we're going to going to discuss on February 8th 11:00 AM Eastern and 1600 UTC. And that's all on the the repressed learning, social learning group on a meetup, you can do that, or there is also a post on the make blog. Because I put a proposal together to actually rally some experts together who wanted to be participating. [00:26:40] This is only the first of four events. We will do it every other Tuesday. So it will be a February 8th, then February 22nd, March 8th, and then March 22nd. And we will have a changing panel. And also after that, we do a recap with the [00:27:00] panelists, with the participants and see how we can improve the event. [00:27:03] And then continue doing that also in an Asia Pacific. Comfortable time zone because this is in the middle of a night for them. So that's my link today. And I'm just yeah, totally amazed. How far the learn dot WordPress team came with all the content that they put out just about for WordPress 5.9. [00:27:27] Yeah. There's a lot of yeah. How to use the navigation, navigate a blog, how to use drop patterns, how to use all those on the site too, there are some great events coming up.  [00:27:39] Daniel: That sounds great. And that is quite a lineup is so that I hear you. So that's the lineup for the first one on that changes each session. [00:27:47] Is that right?  [00:27:48] Birgit: Yes. Yes. Yeah. Some of them are repeaters. I said, okay, I will do all four. Yeah. We will also have George mama dish villain. Is there also Joni Halabi and I forgot, sorry.  [00:28:04] Daniel: Oh, that's great. And next here in the audience. So hello, Nick. The so at this, it looks like you can actually bring your questions that you might have. [00:28:13] So if you're trying to figure something out, if you're looking to get more clarification on something, like actually getting the folks that do this regularly to walk you through it, that's pretty awesome.  [00:28:24] Birgit: Yeah. And I think that's a missing piece on the parts because we develop us, we are mostly trying to figure it out themselves. [00:28:32] Get some examples, go out in stack overflow or wherever, but there is not a whole lot of there's a lot of documentation out there, but never for that specific use case. And sometimes you just need have an expert kind of walk you through an approach. Like I want to do this kind of blog or block, what would what would be necessary? [00:28:50] I do I use the sidebar. Do I use a tube Quantway extend the core block or do I create my own block? Can I do this what I'm doing with custom fields, what I'm doing with custom post types, all these kinds of questions. And yeah, those panelists will have some answers for you that you can make a better decision on how to approach things. [00:29:09] Because of course there are always 15 ways to skin the cat. But what is the best one for you? Is hard to find out something.  [00:29:18] Daniel: Yep. And that's where I'm at as a developer. Like I'm the, yeah, I'm still the PHP based HTML developer. I didn't hate anyone's warning to learn JavaScript mowers though. I'm playing catch up as we go along most my, and [00:29:39] I think it goes back to what Joe was saying before, too, about, the different pathways and people coming to WordPress. I also feel, the questions around JavaScripts specifically in react and how we can use it in the block editor and also FSC I think is really important as well. [00:29:53] So to have folks that have actually worked on this a bit to give that clarification that's true. [00:30:00]  [00:30:00] Birgit: Yeah, that feeds right into, if I may, she has taken link, which is a block seam generator that Carmelina NEMA she has been on the representative for a long time. Also has a website called full site editing and she just published a block theme generator. [00:30:20] And you can create different levels of the theme that you want to try out. And if you want to have an empty seam, you get the six normal templates like index single page archive for four and search the theme, Jason file. And that. Yeah. No patterns, no block style. If you want to have a more elaborate theme that you want to learn from then you can get the basic theme, which also has a custom template. [00:30:46] Has two template parts three block patterns, and then also custom block styles that you can put in the sidebar as well as additional styles for the form elements. And the theme gees on that comes with it has quite a few different variations there that you can adopt there, be it custom colors or being dual tones or being stylings for for specific blocks on a general basis. [00:31:12] And the best one to learn from is probably the advanced theme that you can download there. That has seven templates has four. Templates for pages and posts, but also seven block patterns. Custom styles shows you how to include Google funds, how to create a unregistered block styles and patterns, and also how to ha have filters on there. [00:31:36] That's a quite learning tools when you know how to code, but you also want to look at code and see, okay that's interesting how she does that, or that's interesting. I've never thought that would work. Yeah. But here it works. And these are great examples.  [00:31:52] Daniel: That sounds great. I'm going to check that out. [00:31:53] Matt, did you want to say something?  [00:31:56] Matt: Yeah. So just quick question, maybe maybe you're just using zoom for now, but I'm curious because of the lack of WordCamps and meetups around the world. Is there a different tool being used other than let's say just the zoom of screen-sharing something that is more geared to, when I think back to work camps, when obviously when the most powerful thing is being in person, but I would just see people, sitting side by side laptop. [00:32:18] Side-by-side, here's how you code this, pointing to that. Obviously in person, much easier to do that. Is there a different tool in place for this sort of like side-by-side coding, learning, or maybe not yet? And just sort, just zoom sharing for now?  [00:32:31] Birgit: No fun for now though. You mean you couldn't work developer hours? [00:32:35] Those are zoom meetings. They're not webinars so we can see each other. Everybody can share when they want to. And but it's relatively informal, but it's not a kind of sit next to me and to coding, what you, what is out there are several Twitch streams. I know Ryan Welsh. Has Ryan Welches, R Y a N w E L C H E R. [00:32:59] On [00:33:00] Twitch. He does every Thursday morning at 10 30 Eastern. A livestream about two hours where he codes certain yeah. Problems. So yeah. Approach a certain things. Here's done yeah, block, how you create a meme block or how you create a poll block and how to yeah. Walks through on the Gutenberg release kind of thing. [00:33:21] So it's and it's interesting to see how he approaches every project pretty much the same way. And then leads down. Okay. Yeah. For this blog we need we need to enter some PEX controls. We need some we need to add work with data. We need to display something like for a poll you need to display some hierarchy some bar charts and all that. [00:33:41] There are quite a few interesting Streams out there they're recorded. And then he puts them up on the YouTube channel on his YouTube channel. If you follow the Gutenberg times weekend edition, I most, most of the time I have his link in there. So you can go to the Gutenberg times the last Saturday, a weekend edition, and you will see a few links that you can follow on the Twitch stream. [00:34:06] I know Helen who Sandy did a Twitch stream on where she tried to figure out full site editing for own blog. It was last summer, so there were still a few bugs in there, but there was an interesting of yeah. Follow along. So that kind of thing is out there right now. Yeah, [00:34:27] Joe: one of the things. That I think going going back to learning JavaScript and code one of the things that excites me a lot about full site editing, especially as we look at the preliminary roadmap for 6.0, is that I feel like we're getting back to basics, right? Justin Tatlock had a really good article on the, on WP Tavern. [00:34:53] This is, if this is modern WordPress theme development, sign me up where he was happy that he didn't have to spin up no JS or whatever, anything. And that, that really excites me too. Cause like I'm a. I had Pippin Williamson on my podcast like ages ago and something, he said that stuck with me. And it's like the thing that I carried through as a developer is if he dropped his laptop in a lake, he wanted to be able to walk into an apple store, buy a new one and have it up and running in an hour or less. [00:35:27] And with some of these developer tools, I don't know if that's possible. So it's cool. That theme development is getting easier. I think it's going to decrease the the learning curve, especially for first-time WordPress theme developer.  [00:35:41] Birgit: Yeah, I totally agree, Joe. There is no built step in there. [00:35:45] There is no note jazz. There is no big rap pack kind of thing. It's really relatively clean in HTML CSS and maybe a little bit PHP for the functions PHP, if you need it. But other than that, you [00:36:00] could do this. You could even create a theme in the full site editor, the site editor on once you log into WordPress and then export that and then use that same on another page or site Rather it's not completely perfect yet. [00:36:15] Of course, it's the first first version that's I don't think it's ready for production. And it still has the beta level beta label. But it's going there. It does not need the full JavaScript on, but it also means that theme the, a lot of themes have a lot of plugins territory in their theme packed in like custom post types and additional custom fields and all that kind of build into their themes. [00:36:44] So this method of theme developing is more for. Let the theme be a seam and everything else goes in plugins a way. And that's right. Yeah. Joe, you got it. It's back to basics. That's what a seam theme supposed to be.  [00:37:01] Joe: Yeah. I love that. That's something I thought too, is that this is, I think this is the next step in the, the great decoupling, the true decoupling of themes and plugins and layout and functionality, which is great, which is absolutely. [00:37:14] Daniel: It's a big a big proponent. I love the whole MVC framework, the whole concept of you have the model, you have the view viewer, and then you have the control and basically it's separating those different pieces to it. And we always had that with WordPress, but not completely, but now it really feels that we're going into that direction, that you truly could separate, the functionality from the design especially with what we're seeing with the Jason and all that. [00:37:38] So it's a very, it's a very exciting time to be working with that. You get, was  [00:37:42] Birgit: there something else you want to mention? [00:37:46] Any questions?  [00:37:47] Hauwa: No. I just had one thing to add to when I think Joe was asking about, or maybe it was UMAT about the different streaming platforms. We do have a post out that is asking for guidance on that. We recognize that, it's not just that when people do want to use Twitch and whatever other platform you want to use. [00:38:06] So there is a person I think Courtney's shared it out on the space. So if anybody wants to contribute to that, so things that we just need to consider around, if you're using your logo use and subscribing asking people to subscribe, that sort of stuff, but just the different platforms that people want to actually use. [00:38:23] Birgit: Just a comment from Courtney Robinson that she would love to see learned over P kind of work with code spaces and be as code and have a way to actually have code along that line. I think that's an interesting idea. Fabulous. Yeah. And I know that Favian, Peggy was also working on a tool that lets you when you do a tutorial that lets you embed some code with all the yeah. [00:38:49] Where you can change it on the browser. And then copy paste that into your own environment, but you don't have to just to do the example, you don't have to spin up all the things that you need [00:39:00] even for block development, but he's working on it. And I talked about it on the latest, a change log because he was. [00:39:07] I guess on there. And it's a very promising development there. He got the inspiration from the react documentation beta that they have published right now. And that is definitely going these places. Yeah. Thanks for the reminder, Courtney.  [00:39:26] Daniel: No, while we're, while you're mentioning it too, I think react is another area that I just keep thinking has so much potential to bring in a flood of new folks into WordPress. [00:39:38] And I figured this, something around that to me is very interesting and almost exciting about the fact that it's this wide open frontier, but, we really haven't had any, large as far as they know any large, JavaScript agencies come in or any of the larger movement other than, the, we. [00:39:59] The whole concept of Gutenberg around react. But now it's if you think about opening it up to people who were doing other types of status apps and the types of things out there, and they realize the potential that they can do inside of WordPress with what they already know about react, that's where I'm, to me, I really hope that we can attract those audiences as well and bring them over into the fold. [00:40:19] They're [00:40:26] very  [00:40:26] Birgit: exciting. [00:40:26] Daniel: Let's see. We just had me left. Matt, did you want to reset the room? Are we good?  [00:40:32] Matt: Let's reset. Because we're professionals around here. This is the WP minute alive Twitter space talking about learning WordPress with WordPress 5.9. That happened last week. There's less alert and we're excited to have three great panelists on to to help us learn WordPress. [00:40:50] You can expect to see us maybe once a month around here doing some live Twitter spaces with Daniel shoot Smith at the helm. Join the hashtag link squad@thewpminute.com. The WP minute.com. Your experiment in WordPress, community, journalism and news. I think now, if anyone has any questions about learning WordPress or any reactions responses to what our panelists have shared today, feel free to raise your hand request to speak. [00:41:20] And as long as you don't come at us like crazy folks in the movies on. We'll bring you up on stage.  [00:41:30] Daniel: Yup. No pitchforks. And also too, if you have a link that you'd like to share, feel free to tweet that out and then hop on here to ask the speak. I'll go and do mine now. So share mine. [00:41:40] And I got to preface this by the fact that none of us talked about our links ahead of time. It just so happens that a lot of shows like that were from the make team and the specifically learn WordPress team mine as well. So mine was specifically about the training team goals. And again, you'll hear [00:42:00] her name mentioned a lot, but Courtney was the one who showed this to me. [00:42:04] And I think it was maybe even yesterday or the day before that That the trading team goals for 2022 there's some really great things in here talking about the represent representation of stakeholders and making sure they have the right the right people at the table to be able to be involved. [00:42:18] Also talk about the different methods and priorities and what obstacles they're dealing with. But one of the things that really stood out to me, and it was almost a footnote that I heard was the whole concept of certifications that that we are experimenting, or looking into kind of certifications in Q4 20, 22 around around learned WP. [00:42:38] And this is something I think that's, everyone has their own opinions about certification. The reality is people do get attracted to having certifications, especially if it's done by a body that, that everyone sees as the expert or the lead, body and whatever that industry is. [00:42:52] And so to me, it just opens up another avenue of just, professionalism and also just the that capability there to attract, those folks coming from other industries and other areas where they're focusing on web development to now realize that they can do this type of thing over here. [00:43:07] I know it'll be a slow roll and it'll be something that'll have to be done over time. But I think it's just very exciting to see that coming, seeing that as a possibility here and putting things together. And Courtney is actually requesting, go ahead, Joe.  [00:43:22] Joe: I just want to provide a little bit of context for this cause I'm sure Courtney you'll probably remember, but. [00:43:29] Actually, I don't, I can't remember if you were at the 2015 community summit, but we we talked about certification, like official certifications. At the community summit where you there Courtney? I  [00:43:42] Courtney: was, yes. And so community summit, if people are listening that aren't familiar community summit happens every few years before one of the international level word camps, I would say. [00:43:56] So for a continental level, they've held it in us. And also EU I was not present for EU and I was petrified my mind during that conversation. And there are those that have spoken about WordPress governance that were very involved with. That was terrifying me at that point in my journey. I will be the first to tell you as a side note I later went on to teach at a bootcamp and my bootcamp organizers, where I advised how much PHP individuals would need even front end devs seeking beginner entry-level roles in the WordPress product space and that involved sufficient amount of PHP for plugin troubleshooting type of things. [00:44:40] And we went through a course about underscores and learn the template hierarchy and template tags, but the students still were not yet at a skill level where they would be able to. Apply and pass the tech screening questions for one of the plugin companies. I'm not [00:45:00] naming names in this one, but they wouldn't have been able to pass that exam. [00:45:03] And I told my bootcamp, organizers, look, this is problematic. If we're tacking WordPress development onto a front end bootcamp. And they're like we need some official direction or guidelines for that. And I am very thankful and fortunate that my role now means helping create some of those resources for outside of the WordPress bubble. [00:45:25] Those that would do that training.  [00:45:29] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I was. I remember I remember everything that you spoke about. I was pretty warmed up at that point because we also talked about dropping the B this is the first time that we had like a real community discussion. Banning certain venues for word camps, local word camps. [00:45:45] And I was pretty heated about that. So this was like a cakewalk for me. But I know the big question was who would be the the kind of arbiter of certification, right? Because automatic was ruled out because this was more of a open source community thing. And there was no real arm or a governing body, to use maybe not the best term, but there was no arbiter for that. [00:46:11] It looks like, learned that WordPress is the thing that could serve in that capacity as the place that can determine what is certification and it's backed by the open source project and the foundation. But I know there were a lot of concerns around. Who's going to be the person who says that this is a certificate, right? [00:46:28] Cause like Microsoft can give out certificates for Microsoft CIP systems and Oracle can give out certificates for Oracle systems, but who's going to say this is an official certificate for the open source project.  [00:46:41] Daniel: Yeah. So  [00:46:43] Courtney: in that context, learn is a great segue for that and why the training team will be conducting first a needs analysis and then forming a curriculum advisory board. [00:46:57] And then further down the road, we're only talking in Q4 about doing discovery and discovery would look like learning what has worked and what did not work from other open source and proprietary organizations that have pursued certification or what was great and what was not great. And. Tapping into other places that have navigated those waters and also hearing the concerns for instance of web development related careers, the training programs for those. [00:47:31] So whether people take a pathway of design, develop content marketer, factoring in what the needs are for guidance from those types of organizations, what do they need to get their trainees up to jobs, sufficient, ready to apply. And I think that's a really big area to consider. And I always say you could get the jobs, whether you have gone through and gotten the degree or taken a couple [00:48:00] of Demi courses, LinkedIn learning courses are great to books, whatever method it is that you learn, you can still get jobs without these certifications, but I see certification as more of a framework for here is what would help someone be proficient in various. [00:48:16] John pathways.  [00:48:18] Joe: Yeah. It almost goes back to answering the question that we opened this whole space with. Which is what, who are you? And where do you go to learn? What? If you have a certification path, then all right, I want to be a WordPress content editor. Here's the path I want to be a WordPress developer. [00:48:35] These are the things that according to the open source project, or according to whomever that you should know to be a proficient WordPress developer, I think that's, I love seeing that on the roadmap for the learn team or the training team.  [00:48:49] Courtney: Yeah, but we're interchangeable, but I, again, a huge, thanks. [00:48:53] I see quite a few people that drop in through the training team. And Joe, I know that you were part of the training team in those early years, too. We were a group that was centrally based out of DC and all of those areas. So it's been exciting to see the work that this team has put in and the meetings that took place to form that goal-setting were three weeks, three hours ish, each time. [00:49:20] So there was a lot of work. I want to make sure that others are credited and attributed to that. That's not just Courtney sat down and whipped out a post. That was a lot of effort across at least a dozen people there in the meetings. [00:49:38] Daniel: That's great. That's, if it's things like that, that I think it's really exciting to know that. There are folks that are interested in this kind of thing. And if any of you are interested in this, we talked a lot about learning WP here, and we've put different links up top there that you can also get involved with some of those things. [00:49:56] Matt Madeiros any final parting thoughts?  [00:50:01] Matt: No, this has been fantastic. I learned a lot as I normally do. It's pretty easy for me to learn from smart folks that come together on Twitter and in the WordPress space. So I appreciate a beer get Joe and how how I can't wait for you to start a podcast because you have the podcast voice. [00:50:16] It's about time. You start the podcast. But I appreciate everything that you do there. Everything you share on the WP minute same with you, a beer get with all of your Gutenberg knowledge Joe give or take, but Daniel, thanks for hosting today. It was fantastic. Everyone follows. Daniel beer, get Joe and Howard on Twitter and follow us@thewpminute.com. [00:50:40] Daniel. Thanks again for everything you do here.  [00:50:44] Daniel: Oh, [00:50:48] Joe: thanks everybody. ★ Support this podcast ★

Welcome back to the Matt Report, where we continue our special 2-part series with Josepha Haden Chomposy. If you haven't listened to the previous episode, I suggest you go back and learn what the WordPress Executive Director does on a day to to day basis. Today, we'll be exploring some meatier topics that come up in the community like contributor compensation and Five for the Future. If you didn't already know, Josepha leads a podcast of her own. We'll find out why Matt Mullenweg nudged her into that journey. Thanks to folks over at Malcare for supporting this episode of the Matt Report. If you want to support me, you can buy me a digital coffee or join the super-not-so-secret Discord group for $79/year at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport Episode transcription [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 know@josepha.blog. 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 over@buymeacoffee.com slash my report. [00:24:41] Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you in the next episode. ★ Support this podcast ★

If you're like me, you know Josepha Haden Chomposy is the Director for WordPress the open source project in title, but you probably don't know what she does on a day to day basis. Or that she's part of the Open Source Group Division inside of Automattic. Something I always knew, but once framed that way in discussion, was more interesting to hear. I was lucky enough to chat with Josepha for nearly an hour, so I'm breaking up the conversation in two parts. Today, part 1, we'll cover the logistics of her role, bringing WordCamps back, and the challenges with Gutenberg. Thanks to folks over at Malcare for supporting this episode of the Matt Report. If you want to support me, you can buy me a digital coffee or join the super-not-so-secret Discord group for $79/year at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport Episode transcription [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.  ★ Support this podcast ★

WordPress news is hard. I mean, it's hard to turn it into a real business. I get away with covering WordPress here on the Matt Report because our guests share lessons on how they built their business or spend time telling us how they navigated the community, until they found their way. But news? Well, that's why The WP Tavern has been the only name in town for a while, loaded with two critical components: A dedicated staff and they are funded. If you want to make it, you do things differently, you do things like Rae Morey‘s The Repository newsletter. Today we'll chat about building her WordPress news newsletter, background as a journalist, and explore what it really takes to make all of this work. Thanks goes out to Malcare today for sponsoring a month of Matt Report and The WP Minute. You can help us by visiting buymeacoffee.com/mattrpeort Episode transcript [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 show@buymeacoffee.com slash Matt report. We'll see you in the next episode. ★ Support this podcast ★

A tricky part about all of this stuff we do in business and online is to not let the work consume you. I know people say that your work is not your worth, and I get it, but it's really hard for me to disconnect from that. To show the world what you've built and put it into the hands of your super fans. To punch up as the underdog and prove to the Goliath that you can win in this arena too. It's addictive, it's fulfilling, it's enriching for us and hopefully those around us. Jordan Gal returns to the Matt Report to share in his next chapter, Rally. Jordan brings the passion, he's a business builder I'm on the sidelines rooting for. We'll explore his challenges with building on a platform like Shopify and how he plans to disrupt that with his latest play in decentralized (and headless) e-commerce. ★ Support this podcast ★

“Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in” a famous line from Godfather Part III and a recurring theme I've noticed for those of who have used WordPress for a while. No matter how much we might moan about the shortcomings of WordPress, it's still pretty darn powerful. The core of WordPress is getting better, read: Gutenberg and Full Site Editing. Some sharp edges, yes, but software is software — it will iterate into something great. Maybe you left WordPress a few years ago because of Gutenberg, but I bet you second guessed yourself when that Netlify CMS lacked a user and permissions system, custom post types, and an easy way to install a contact form. Oh, and what about ecommerce? Yeah…well…what about it?! WooCommerce, still the sleeping giant, is about to get some lemon squeezed right in the eye. JR Farr returns to the Matt Report to talk about his latest product, Lemon Squeezy. A NOT Easy Digital Downloads alternative that's looking to take it's share of the e-commerce market. Learn more about the collective and the other products JR is a part of over at https://makelemonade.wtf/ Episode transcription [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. ★ Support this podcast ★

Today's guest used to sit on the opposite sides of the WordPress hosting competition table from me. At one point in his career, he was pumping out content on Kinsta's blog like an absolute machine while I was raging against that machine, selling would-be customers on Pagely's hosting stack. So where is Brian Jackson, former marketer at Kinsta now? He co-found Forgemedia with his brother Brett, and have released 3 unique plugins, two of which help WordPress site owners optimize their sites for ranking and social sharing. Oh, they tossed a coupon plugin in there too to help affiliates increase sales for good measure. Once frienemy now Matt Report guest, I'm excited to share this conversation with you today. Transcription 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] wp@searchwp.com. 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 wp@searchwp.com 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 podcast@thewpminute.com. We'll see you in the next episode.  ★ Support this podcast ★

In this episode, Seth talks with Matt Medeiros, the Director of Podcaster Success at Castos (who just so happens to be our podcast hosting provider). He is also an avid podcaster himself. His main podcast is called the Matt Report, where he interviews influencers in the WordPress, open-source, and business/technology ecosystems. He also has two other podcasts. One is a local podcast focused on the small businesses in his local area, just south of Boston called Southcoast.FM and the other is  on WordPress called the WP Minute. Intro: Seth: Hey, Everyone, and welcome to season two, episode twenty-one of the Digital Marketing Dive Podcast. I'm Seth with Goldstein Media, and usually with me is the always amazing and talented Shannon of DIAM Business Consulting, but unfortunately her computer decided to self-destruct and she's currently on the hunt for a new one. She'll be missed, but will be back on next week.  Today we have Matt Medeiros, the Director of Podcaster Success at Castos (who just so happens to be our podcast hosting provider). He is also an avid podcaster himself. His main podcast is called the Matt Report, where he interviews influencers in the WordPress, open source, and business/technology ecosystems. He also has two other podcasts. One is a local podcast focused on the small businesses in his local area, just south of Boston called Southcoast.FM and the other is  on WordPress called the WP Minute. He also does the Castos podcast called Audience and the Random Show. Today we're going to talk about podcasting and how it can be used for business to drive traffic to your site, increase ROI and brand awareness and so much more. Welcome Matt! Topics & Links This is a real thrill to have a veteran podcast on the show. Let's dive into the podcasting side of your repertoire first. How did you first find your way into podcasting?Podcasting can be daunting for the average business owner. How do you suggest business owners and entrepreneurs get started with podcasting?Once a podcast is recorded and distributed, what tips do you have, from your experience as a podcaster and your work at Castos, for people getting the word out to the world about their show?Is podcasting something every business should invest in?Tell us a bit about Matt Report, Southcast FM, The WP Minute, and all the other content creation you do online.What do you think about Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces? Do you think the business owners should look at those platforms too? Outro: Well, that was so much fun Matt.  Reach out to us on DMD's social media channels and let us know what challenges you are having with digital marketing.  If you're enjoying the season, please feel free to give us a review in Apple Podcasts or the podcast directory of your choice. We appreciate all the support. If you feel so inclined checkout PodChaser and give us a review there! That's it for this episode, but we want to hear from you. Drop us an email at hello@digitalmarketingdive.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I came across Kristen Youngs' YouTube channel while I was exploring the popular no code Bubble.io platform. At first, I thought she was creating the typical tutorial videos channel 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 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 our work effort to profit margin ratio. But what Kristen and her partner are building at coachingnocodeapps.com is something of a hybrid. It's a coaching series, a course, and 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 Elementor while you do monthly check-ins to help your clients build out new pages or add new functionality. Needless to say, I really like 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. Subscribe to the newsletter at mattreport.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 your social media! We'd love more listeners around here. Episode transcript 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.  [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] 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.  [00:01:25] Okay. Maybe not that long, but it's the first plugin I ever bought and happily renew every single year checkout gravity forms, 2.5, all new builder experience. At gravity forms.com. That's gravity forms.com. [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. ★ Support this podcast ★

I had the chance to sit down with Devon Walker and Matt Cromwell of GiveWP to talk about their sale to Liquid Web. GiveWP has been the dominant WordPress donation plugin over the last few years. This move makes sense for Liquid Web as they continue to round out a complete managed WordPress solution for their customers. Liquid Web acquisitions have been on a steady increase lately, with their most recent large acquisition of the Events Calendar plugin. I hope you enjoy today's episode with Devon and Matt. Transcript Liquidweb acquires GiveWP [00:00:00] Matt Medeiros: [00:00:00] We were just chatting before we hit record. Devon, you were mentioning that things were getting wrapped up started to get almost wrapped up last week. [00:00:06] I'm sure this has been a process. When did this start? What does the timeline look like for some kind of acquisition this size?  [00:00:15]Devin Walker: [00:00:15] We've known Chris Lema for a while now. I've known him probably 10 years almost.  Around November of last year, I received an email from him that said, Hey, would you be interested in talking about how potentially we could work together, more liquid web? And what does this look like? And throughout the rest of 2020, we kind of went back and forth , “Hey, what does this look like?” [00:00:36] What it, what does it potentially mean for you? What does it mean for us? And then come the new year we landed on. Okay. Potential acquisition could be in the cards. And then a lot more negotiation around that into the LOI phase. And eventually we settled on something that made sense for the both of us  our company and liquid web, but our entire team. [00:00:59] And [00:01:00] then once we went through that, we got into more of the due diligence process, which was a very interesting and. A good learning process for everybody involved and then eventually closed on April 30th of last month.  [00:01:12]Matt Medeiros: [00:01:12] Same brand new parent company, more resources to the customers. [00:01:17] As people listen to this today, not much is going to change. Matt, Devin turns to you and says, “Hey, we're thinking about getting acquired by liquid web from a CEO's perspective, where do you start going to dot the I's cross? [00:01:27] The T's? What was that whole process like as somebody who kind of sees every oversees, everything?” [00:01:32]Matt Cromwell: [00:01:32] Don't mess with my tools. I got stuff going here. The biggest thing Devin and I always have been on the lookout for is more resources. The ability to, to inject more energy into the stuff that we're doing. [00:01:43]One of the most important resources we have all the time as our team. So that was definitely my very first thing is do they want the whole team? And the immediate question answer to that was, yeah. They understand. And they see that the team makes the product.  [00:01:57]Most folks, I think listening here know what it's [00:02:00] like to, to run their companies on their own and bootstrapping all their resources as best as they can. And it, stretches everybody thin, but we're always trying to look for the best way to support our people. [00:02:11] And I do feel like this is a win-win across the board for all of our team members. [00:02:16] Matt Medeiros: [00:02:16] Devin when you first start to have these conversations with Chris and you say, Hey, it's great to add more resources, but man, this is my baby. I mean, you and I, you were a guest co-host of the Matt Report for a little while years ago, when you started giving WP, we've obviously met up at word camps and certain sort of senior journey highlighted your journey. [00:02:35]How do you start putting up the mental guardrails to say. Okay. This is, this is for the greater good of everyone. [00:02:41] I'm sort of giving this up. This, this passion, this dream, how do you do that?  [00:02:47] Devin Walker: [00:02:47] Yeah. Well, one, one major thing was they want the leadership to come along with the product. And so. Matt and myself, Matt C CommonWell here, and me are not going anywhere. We are still fully in charge [00:03:00] of the destiny of our product, and of course we'll have lots of good advice and good, good mentoring that now we don't have to pay for  [00:03:08] Matt Medeiros: [00:03:08] using Chris's clarity line. [00:03:10] Devin Walker: [00:03:10] That was, that was painful to pay that bill every month. But no, we, we Yeah, you're right. Like my ownership and mats ownership. We, we no longer have that any more, but we have great incentives in place to meet certain goals that they've set and we've sat and and a lot more resources to do that. [00:03:28] So, while w it was sad to see kind of my ownership go away in the product. It was, at least gratifying to know. We're we still have. The ability to pull the levers that we've always  [00:03:39] Matt Cromwell: [00:03:39] had. Yeah. It's a really good question though, because I feel like folks who build things that grow and scale and get larger. [00:03:50] At some point you do start to recognize that this actually is. Larger than me. And one thing that, I already mentioned, one thing we're super proud of is our [00:04:00] team. We start to recognize that our team really is the people that have built this over time. And, and no product that has this much success is, is, is just on the back of one person anymore. [00:04:11] So, But the ability to just say, okay, I'll just do this different with our business. We don't have that ability anymore, but give in itself really gets to continue and and go strong and probably stronger than we could have done it on her own. So, yeah.  [00:04:26]Matt Medeiros: [00:04:26] We've the three of us have chatted personally about the business and some of the clients you've had, I won't say the names here, but I'm sure they're on your website and you can feel free to say some of your notable clients, active WP, but you have some. [00:04:37] Really notable clients, some really big brands use your product and something like this, like you said, this is, this is bigger than us. There's no longer can we just play with some of these not plays, not also, not a great word to use, but we can't just focus on, on, maybe even doing things the WordPress way anymore. [00:04:55] Maybe we have to broaden our horizons, open up the different technologies and in [00:05:00] a place like liquid web is going to have. Some real broad reaching technologies. Cause they don't just do WordPress. They do all kinds of things. So, yeah. You start to really sit back and look at this and say, yeah, if we're going to turn this into a air quotes, serious business, we need some serious support, whether that's other minds of the brains pumping into this machine or dollars, right. [00:05:21] To help support and grow this infrastructure. No real question there, but just sort of phrasing that. I don't know if you have any  [00:05:28] Matt Cromwell: [00:05:28] thoughts around that. I mean, for sure, like in many ways A struggle that a lot of WordPress folks, WordPress products have is that we are, we get inserted into a giant stack that you don't have control over. [00:05:41] And anybody who's been watching liquid web for a while knows that they're really attack. They're really tackling, managed, hosting in a serious way. And honestly, that's something that. That we are really excited to keep talking about and see if there's a way that we can make sure that there's a kind of managed nonprofit stack that we could be talking about. [00:05:59]Th [00:06:00] that give isn't just one of the plugins, but it's basically the engine behind the whole entire stack, and it's a lot more predictable. It's a lot more manageable that would ease the pain of a lot of. Folks, a lot of our customers that we've had over the years. And that is the kind of thing that's really hard to accomplish just on your own. [00:06:18] That liquid web really is primed to already do. .  [00:06:21]Matt Medeiros: [00:06:21] Everything sounds great. So far but Devin, from a product builders perspective, what have been the big challenges for you over the last couple of years to even entertain something like this and say, you know what? [00:06:32] Yeah, I do want to have that, that conversation as something in the market, something in the WordPress market. Anything in, in technology or, or donations at large that are, that make this a challenging space, if any,  [00:06:45]Devin Walker: [00:06:45] One of the challenges that we've been trying to overcome is providing a solution for those folks outside of the WordPress space and trying to learn about SAS and, and what our market fit is there. [00:06:59] And really bringing a [00:07:00] solution that doesn't compete with, give it up a, but compliments it. And and we think we know what the answer is now with the help of liquid web. Now we really feel strongly that we could provide a real good solution in that space. It's going to be something that we're not used to, but having people on our side that have done it before and done it successfully will definitely help us. [00:07:20]Get over there the Hill on that one, I'd say that was probably one of the main challenges, but also, growing and scaling the development team and recruiting and all these things yet at the point where we hit around 25 total team members Matt, Matt was going crazy playing the HR game. [00:07:39] And we had to do everything under the sun as partners to keep things rolling. And it's really hard at that point to continue growing when you're bootstrapped.  [00:07:47]Matt Medeiros: [00:07:47] As soon as you add somebody else, it's scaling that. Very difficult to find out why. I think a lot of people just overlook because they don't know, they don't know, like they just get over the hump of I finally optimize my Google ads. I've just got [00:08:00] a marketing machine running and now I have to manage people and figure out pods and stuff like that. [00:08:05] Pods, like in, from a human resources perspective, very challenging. Speaking of the team, how did you present it to the team and what was their reaction?  [00:08:13] Devin Walker: [00:08:13] Yeah. So I'll answer the first part. Matt, you can kind of jump in after. So we, we thought a lot about this because we have a lot of team members. [00:08:21] We don't want to rub them the wrong way. If we told them at the very last minute, some companies you show up. One morning and they said, Hey, we've been acquired, sign your new employment paper right now. It's, they don't give you any chance. But we have a couple of key leaders on our team. [00:08:34] Our head of support had a customer success, lead developer. We pulled them in and told them weeks in advance and made sure they were in the know plan accordingly with the team members. And then we let the team know the same week, a couple of days before the entire team, explain our reasoning there. [00:08:51] And. Yeah, I think it went over really well.  [00:08:53] Matt Cromwell: [00:08:53] Yeah, for sure. I mean, anybody who's employed and either as an employee or as a [00:09:00] contractor at their employment is, is important to them. And learning that essentially. Well, I mean, literally what happens for the folks who don't know is that you, you let all of these people go and they get hired by the other company. [00:09:13] And that is a jarring experience, no matter who you are. And so being able to talk to that and be really upfront about it, that LiquidWeb has guaranteed that every single one of you are coming on board, whether you're an employee or a contractor or not, that was really important to us. But it's still something that they have to wrestle with. [00:09:29] So it was really. Good and fortunate that we were able to basically give the news on a Friday essentially. And give them time to, to, to, to at least think about it just a little bit. I think they appreciated that some of them didn't realize that like when Devin said that. That it literally could, like some folks really do give you like an hour to make sure decisions. [00:09:48]And we're giving them a whole weekend. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it, it, it does make a big difference. So, I mean, the contractor experience is different than the employee experience. Everyone had their own [00:10:00] concerns, but the best thing was essentially that, that I really. Worked hard to bring the HR team from like web into the picture and for them to get to know them and to really work with them directly. [00:10:12]Misty in particular was just awesome, really helping out a ton. Once they saw the effort that we were all going to, to really. Kind of help them in the transition. It really, really ease things up quite a lot. So, by and large, I think 92, 93% of everybody was, was basically like, yeah, I'll sign that. [00:10:30] No problem. There's others that had questions and concerns. But we were really happy in the end that we got them all addressed and all onboarded.   [00:10:37]Matt Medeiros: [00:10:37] Who do you turn to in these moments? I know Chris is such a, a mentor for a lot of WordPress companies. [00:10:44] Your mentor is essentially buying you, which mentor  did you turn to to say we're making the right decision here.  [00:10:48]Devin Walker: [00:10:48] So we have a long-term mentor that has been with us for many years, that we we consulted with quite a bit on this, but also our, our attorney for a long time as well helped us start the [00:11:00] business years and years ago, then using a member since, and those two have really helped quite a bit, get the deal done, evaluate the deal, figure out if it was a good thing, work  [00:11:09] Matt Cromwell: [00:11:09] through it. [00:11:09] [00:11:09] Matt Medeiros: [00:11:09] I heard some folks in some other podcasts say that their attorneys have felt like they've become their best friends. I'm like, yeah. Well, if I was paying my best friends, tens of thousands of dollars, maybe pick up the phone every time I call too. [00:11:19]Final question here, payments or, or the donations In WordPress, where do you think it's going? As there's so much competition, I feel, and I'll throw out everyone's favorite,  jet pack, woo commerce automatic owned entities, I feel like there's always just a new payment thing coming out, whether it's for donations or for simple, I'm throwing my air quotes against simple. [00:11:39] E-commerce where do you think this is all going in terms of making it easier for the customer? Are we just going to see. Easier integrations into PayPal. Stripe is, is web. We're going to launch their own sort of one click checkout thing. Like this world is so crazy moving so fast. Where do you see this all going for the [00:12:00] end user? [00:12:00]Devin Walker: [00:12:00] With the pandemic hitting last year, it's never been more important to be online, whether you're doing e-commerce fundraising membership sites. E-learning what have you. So people are going to build around that and simplify it and try to get more of that market. So you're going to see major players like automatic, bring more of that into whether it's Jetpack or a new product or acquire stuff. [00:12:21] You're going to see large families of brands like liquid web. Continue to invest into products like us so we can continue innovating and growing our already substantial market share. But then I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the new products coming out and I'm trying to capture some more of that. [00:12:37] So, Stripe and PayPal lead the way Stripe being, every developer's favorite. And then I would see a lot more popularity with that. A lot more solutions come out for that.  [00:12:47]Matt Cromwell: [00:12:47] In general, like a lot of folks, we really are imagining that there we're going to have a one button solution for, for payments in general. [00:12:53] I don't know if they always think about what it takes to make that happen and what it takes is sharing a lot of private data in order [00:13:00] for that to happen. And so at the same time that we want things to be a one button thing. Everybody also has a lot of privacy concerns right now, too. So how do you have your cake and eat it too? [00:13:09] Well, just making a really streamlined, simple form because. If you enter in the information yourself, then you know, that it's that it's information that you provided and not just gleaned from your phone or gleaned from your account or anything like that, like that. So being able to continue to do the best forms possible is really right now in the immediate, I think still the most optimal path that, that everybody's going to still continue to need. [00:13:33]The day when we all just can show our phone and just be like, here, I'll give you money. Is the day when honestly there's sources that have all of our private information about everything we're doing. So, it's a mixed bag. It's a careful balance trying to try to have our cake and eat it too in that  [00:13:47] Matt Medeiros: [00:13:47] scenario. [00:13:48]At least try to take some of that cake back from Apple, Google. Facebook and all these other places that have our information in our payment sources, Devin Walker, Matt Cromwell… Well, give wp.com. We can still go to give [00:14:00] wp.com. Right.  [00:14:03] Matt Cromwell: [00:14:03] Please do  [00:14:04] Matt Medeiros: [00:14:04] forwarding to liquid web signup page gentlemen, thanks for taking the time to hang out. [00:14:09] Tell us all about your wonderful news being acquired by liquid web. Congratulations. It's been a long time coming to see the success of you guys and your team. Is, is quite phenomenal. And I'm happy for you guys anywhere else that folks can go to say, thanks.  [00:14:23]Devin Walker: [00:14:23] Well, we have a town hall coming up on Tuesday, May 18th. [00:14:26] At what time again, Matt 11:00 AM Pacific time. So if you want to join us, ask us any questions. It'll be a great format. Come on over.  [00:14:35]Matt Medeiros: [00:14:35] Thanks for listening to everybody. The WP minute.com. Sign up for the newsletter and the podcast. See in the next episode.  ★ Support this podcast ★

We have a quick run down this week…let's Do the Woo! (Hi, Bob) WooCommerce has invested in one-click checkout platform, PeachPay. According to PeachPay's PR post: Cart abandonment is a significant problem for eCommerce businesses – in 2021, the global average rate has risen from previous years to 78.65%. PeachPay aims to significantly reduce this by providing shoppers with a frictionless, one-click checkout experience. Robert Jacobi covered the investment: So if we do a little math, the investment for PeachPay is no more than $450,000 (assuming that the 30% filled of $1.5 million includes the recent investment). View his link in the show notes to read through his interview with David Mainayar, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of PeachPay. Other Woo news: Automattic purchased woo.com for an undisclosed sum of money. Yoast has re-shaped their Diversity Fund project in the wake of COVID and the challenges of travel, stating: We want to keep our Diversity fund alive and we want to keep helping people in the WordPress community. That's why our Diversity fund will now be used to sponsor people that work on a project that benefits WordPress. This can range from teaching a group of people anywhere in the world how to use WordPress to writing patches for Core. Speaking of travel, Will We See In-Person WordCamps in 2021? An Open Discussion on a Path Forward, asks Justin Tadlock of the WordPress Tavern. One commenter states: I don't see why this is so complicated. If large, indoor gatherings are legal in the host country, then WordCamps should go ahead with no extra restrictions beyond those prescribed by the local law. People can then decide to attend or not. Matt Mullenweg replies: “This is a good way to approach it.” FluentCRM wins Torque Mag's Plugin Madness 2021 — congrats FluentCRM, but I still can't wrap my head around putting my CRM into my CMS… I stumbled across WPStackable which is setting its sights on launching a new v3 for Gutenberg soon. Which looks like a competent suite of Gutenberg blocks. Finally, WordFest Live call for speakers is now open, The festival of WordPress kicks off July 21, 2021. This week on the Matt Report, I ran a “play it forward” episode highlighting 3 other podcasts in our space, WP Coffee Talk, Women WordPress, and Hallway Chats. That's it for today's episode, if you enjoyed please share it on your social media, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser! ★ Support this podcast ★

Podcasting in the WordPress space can be a thankless job. It's a labor of love — or pain. I've talked about this before, it's not something that is driven by huge financial gains and certainly not backed by huge financial interest. If you want to earn a living with podcasting about WordPress, you best read up on many multiple streams of income. One of the most underrated victories a podcaster can claim is that of opportunity. Resiliency as a podcaster — about any topic — often leads to an introduction, a lead, or as today's guest found, a new gig. Nathan Wrigley is a seasoned podcaster who produces the WP Builds podcast, recently featured here on the Matt Report in January, and returns with a new title: Host of the WP Tavern podcast, Jukebox. By the way, when did they drop WP from the site title in favor of WordPress tavern? Is that legal? Anyway, in today's special episode, we talk to Nathan about getting the gig and how many coins it takes to spin a record in the ‘ol jukebox. ★ Support this podcast ★

If you've skipped around the catalog of amazing episodes published this year, I've gathered four here today that should entice you to binge a few more. I stitched together clips from the years top shows in terms of download count and compelling conversation. Simon Bruce on where he draws his passion for the product space. Amber Hinds talks about her reasoning to form a Certified B Corp. Matt Mullenweg shares where WooCommerce is in the lifecycle. Miriam Schwab discusses how she thinks about raising money from venture capital. I hope you enjoy the first Best of I've ever published! Please share it on social media. ★ Support this podcast ★

What a difference 3-plus-something years makes. Remember the Page Builder race? Then remember when Gutenberg came on the scene smashing the ground, cracking the earth beneath her like Wonder Woman in Zack Snyder's cut of the Justice League? Okay, well, maybe not that glorious of an entry but mirroring the audiences continued mixed reviews… It seemed like only yesterday that my friends at Beaver Builder were on a rocket ship ride to the moon and the likes of using Gutenberg were slim when you saw the install count of the classic editor plugin. Here we are nearing the tail-end of Q1 in the year 2021, and Elementor recently crossed over 7 million active websites, made a not-so-smooth pricing update, and enter into any Facebook group to the bemoaning of users looking to switch to Oxygen builder. Gutenberg has gotten largely better over that time, but still with some massive gaps in its usability. Even tasks like dragging blocks into columns is not as effortless of SiteOrigin's page builder from 6 years ago…okay wait, could you drag blocks in that? Anyway, full-site editing is the next contestant sure to be challenged like the past Core Champions that fled the arena — I'm here rooting for it. I do want this stuff to get better even if I'm not the ideal user for it. I still want advanced tools and themes that get the job done without all of the overhead, but that's just me. Which leads me to the discussion part of this podcast: choosing the Best WordPress theme…for me. You're listening to the Matt Report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter at mattreport.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 your social media! We'd love more listeners around here. Here are the themes I mention in this episode: Anders Norén — Chaplin & Eskell Neve Theme GeneratePress Blocksy ★ Support this podcast ★

It's all fun and games until the business starts to grow, and I mean, really grow. From 1 to 2 people, 2 to 10, 10 to 50 these are moments in your career that not only make or break the company — but will deeply challenge yourself as a business owner. One of the reasons why I'm personally so attracted to creative agency offerings are there are “no rules.” Meaning, you can provide whatever service you'd like, build any product you desire, and then sell it to any customer you're willing to chase down. But no rules also means no blueprint either. It's exciting but potentially dangerous, as you dodge some of the pitfalls that client services work can lead you down. Appearing on this very podcast 3 years ago to talk about her methodology to maximizing profits for website projects, Lisa Sabin-Wilson returns to share how her position as WebDevStudios COO has expanded. How do you navigate a global pandemic for your customers and your employees — all while hitting record setting revenues? Well, we'll find out in today's episode. You're listening to the Matt Report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter 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. ★ Support this podcast ★

Welcome back to the Matt Report podcast, it's the show for opinionated resilient business builders. How's that, “opinionated resilient business builders.” Anyway, we'll keep working on it, I like it and that's what is leading us into the 2020 year in review! 1. Finding the Premise for the Matt Report There's 1.8 million podcasts out there and about 20 of them are about WordPress. You'd think that made for great odds, but not that many people actually care about WordPress at a global scale. It's a topic I've covered at length before — being a content creator in the WordPress space — you either do it for the love, or do it for the affiliate links. But as I've labeled myself a content creator and an artist — the topic of just WordPress is less interesting to me — maybe even you. So as I work out my premise — the show for opinionated resilient business builders — new guests and content will be produced. I feel like I've been telling you this for a while now, at least ALL of 2020, and that's update #1 — that's where I'm at with the show. I'll continue to deliver interviews and solo episodes, with the occasional roundtable show. Some of the tools people are using to build businesses and websites these days are very intriguing. Webflow, Airtable, Notion, are all very exciting to me. And to be honest, I think WordPress is moving in that direction. Sponsorship will still be open and I'm happy to say that over the course of the year, I've raised over 2000 dollars for Big Orange Heart. Side update to the update? December was insanely busy — and I will be working on the videos that people purchased from me in January. That effort raised a lot more money than I expected, but also created a lot more work! 2. Business5000 At the end of 2019, heading into 2020, I started shopping around my idea for the Business5000. It is…was? an idea accelerator. I grew the email list of interested people to 100 and I felt like I could get the chips to fall where I needed them to — but then COVID hit mixed with a heap of social unrest in America and it was just a shitty time to launch something like this. Plus, I didn't want to. I lost the interest in all of it. I still think it's a strong idea, and creating a community of people that achieve results in a particular area is something I'd still like to create. But for now, Business5000.com is shelved. 3. Easy Support Videos You know, that plugin that sponsored the show! We launched ESV back in 2016. Four years ago. I'm a nontechnical product maker. It started with Drupal themes, then WordPress themes, then Conductor plugin for WordPress, and now Easy Support Videos. I took a lot of the lessons learned from Conductor, like not tackling an overly complex product that needs to be deeply integrated with WordPress core, 3rd party themes, and other plugins in a hyper-competitive market. I've talked about this experience in the past so I won't go too much deeper on this podcast about it, but I highly recommend keeping your first — or next — product as lightweight as possible. The biggest challenge here is that my lead developer for the plugin, Scott, is still 98% of the time, working on Slocum Studio client work. We never could get themes + conductor to outpace services work in order to flip the switch to just product. The cash flow wasn't the only reason, but it was a big part of it. We now have version 2.0 slated to release in January with a whole new set of features and a website that I've — slowly — been working on. I'm envious of the WP developers out there that can code their own product, and don't need to spend resources directly on that area. Either way, I'm excited to launch version 2.0 of Easy support videos, so look forward to more updates around the success of that product in the future. 4 the move to Castos The move to Castos was the right one for me. Selling WordPress hosting isn't for the faint of heart, and it's market that wasn't all that interesting to me. Being able to sink my teeth into product development, marketing, and of course podcasting is a dream come true. The team is great and we're growing really fast. It's great to work alongside someone like Craig, the owner of Castos, that really wants to see the product improve. It's not just resting on the laurels of the industry, but we're creating something that solves a need for lots of podcasters. I'm also scratching the creative itch and it's been a huge benefit stress-wise. I've mentioned this on other shows before, but I haven't been producing nearly any videos for the youtube.com/plugintut channel and I feel okay about it. I love growing out the Castos YouTube channel — youtube.com/castos — and I'm happy to say I've doubled it since I started contributing there. I can't wait to see where we're at when I do my 2021 EoY review. That's all I have today. I hope you were able to pull some threads of commonality out of today's discussion and it shines some light on the similar challenges you might be faced with. As always, I appreciate you listening to the show, subscribing, and if you do one last thing before the year is out — leave us a five-star review on iTunes. Alright, that's the show, see you next year. ★ Support this podcast ★

Welcome back to another episode of the Matt Report podcast. Thanks for tuning in nearly every week and staying connected at mattreport.com/subscribe Hey, look, if you have a moment — please drop us a five-star review on iTunes. It's the lifeblood of the show — right next to all of you fantastic listeners that send me tweets and DMs. I'm always looking for the next great story, so keep them coming. I love talking to that resilient business builder and today's guest fits that persona — perfectly. I mean, he's runs buildupbookings.com, a Vacation Rental marketing & SEO agency amidst a global pandemic. Not only is he figuring out how to survive in this new normal, he brought on two new team members at the top of 2020 and just made an acquisition of a productized service, guesthook.com It's a service that focuses on creating copywriting for the vacation rental industry. We're going to talk about what that's like to be a small boutique agency acquiring another business in this space, with a world on lock down. His name is Conrad O'Connell he's been on the show before and I'm excited to have him back to talk about his new chapter.

WordPress journalism and news coverage is making a comeback. I'm delighted to sit down and have a chat with my two friends in the WordPress space, Brian Krogsgard and Cory Miller, now partners at Post Status. I often joke that Post Status is a competitor to the Matt Report, truth be told, Brian and Cory are valued voices among the WordPress discourse. For people like me, publishing opinions and content that express my position in the community are the few ways I can contribute to this crazy world. When a “frienemy” joins the fray it amplifies awareness that voices & opinions truly matter. Setting aside my critique of the WP Tavern re-brand and this recently published topic, I feel it's important that more WordPress outlets lead with something other than The Top 14 Gutenberg Themes. There are more ways to contribute to WordPress than just lines of code. Your means of communication can contribute, or even shape, the path to 50%+ of the web. Spin up a blog, a podcast, a YouTube, a TikTok — let your voices be heard. ★ Support this podcast ★

The art of pricing your WordPress freelance projects is forever in motion. I guess that's why it's an art, you spend months crafting a new pitch or approach, and when seasons change, you start from a new blank canvas. Continuously unearthing new ways to position yourself and your projects to the right set of customers. In this Matt Report exclusive, I've invited Keith Devon of the PricingWP podcast to publish his episode with Elliot Taylor founder of Raison.co to explore his methodology of pricing WordPress projects. This was an amazing episode for beginners and veterans alike. Don't overlook Elliot's position for leaving time to promote and find new customers — this is a HUGE one I see many consultants stumble on. Enjoy the break from the mini-series on my product journey! ★ Support this podcast ★

In part 3 of my journey into digital product sales, I share the experiences of launching Conductor to $4,000 in sales on day one, only to watch it slowly plateau and fall short to bigger trends in the market. I encourage you to listen to the first two parts to get up to speed: Part 1: Creating products that empower users Part 2: Biggest lessons learned with $15k in seed funding Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Watching a $4,000 launch day fade away Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:26:02 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:26:02 I've come to grips with the fact that this product will only serve a niche market of customers, do it really well, and do it all with a particular — purpose. Maybe you're feeling the same way about your product? Leave a comment. The mini-series will continue sometime after paternity leave and a few Matt Report exclusive episodes from an up-and-coming podcast: The Pricing WordPress podcast See ya! ★ Support this podcast ★

Did you know I started Dropbox before Dropbox was — Dropbox? I'm sure you invented Facebook before that existed too. Be an entrepreneur long enough and you surely see ideas come and go, learning the execution game the hard way — or so they say. In the second episode of this mini-series trip down memory lane, I dive into how I started a company with a friend, received $15k in seed funding, spent it, and folded it all down. What lesson did I walk away with? Well, for that, you'll have to listen. Hope you're enjoying Season 9 (I guess I'm calling it that) of the Matt Report, don't forget to leave us a review or share it with others! Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Biggest lesson learned with $15k in seed funding Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:19:30 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:19:30 ★ Support this podcast ★

The Yoast plugin is arguably one of the first plugins most WordPress site owners install once they get up and running. I know it's been a staple for the small business websites I've consulted on over the course of many years. Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Marieke van de Rakt CEO of Yoast Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:23:59 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:23:59 I was honored to sit down with Marieke van de Rakt to learn more about her role as CEO of the SEO software and training company as it sits in the WordPress product space. We cover everything from taking over the role this past January to the future of the product across many CMS platforms. Oh — and it wouldn't be a Matt Report podcast without talking about the rollout of Gutenberg last year. If you enjoy this episode be sure to say thanks to Marieke on Twitter and leave us a five-star review on iTunes! ★ Support this podcast ★

We're back with another amazing episode of The Matt Report! Paul Jarvis, the author of Company of One and creator of Fathom Analytics & WPComplete, joins me to talk about his new journey of publishing a “real” book. I mean, he's published e-books before but surely this is *more* real because it's printed on trees and he has an agent now — right? ★ Support this podcast ★

Matt Medeiros continues Season 8 with his interview with Birgit Pauli-Haack. Birgit is a web developer in Naples, Florida and started as a freelancer in 2002. She became a developer because there was not enough software to do what she wanted to on the web. She uses WordPress and Cold Fusion on a few sites in her agency. In addition to working with non-profits, small business and government agencies, she is very instrumental in the WordPress Community. Listen to the episode Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Birgit Pauli-Haack on Serving Nonprofit & Community Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:50:24 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:50:24 WordPress – The Non-profit space  Matt – The world of non-profits has changed. There initially was not a lot of money in non-profits but they have developed over the years. (4:00) Birgit – There are a lot of donations being taken online so websites need to be able to handle that. Non-profits that adopted technology are the ones that are hiring consultants.  If the leadership of the non-profit sees the perceived value of having a strong website you will be more successful building and maintaining sites for them. If you are working with a non-profit, you must be able to present before the board and be able to manage many people that represent that board. (4:37) Changes in WordPress Matt – Page builders have changed the adoption and price point for non-profits.  Page builders have become a good entry point for web developers. (9:41) Birgit – The release of page builder software has changed the conversation with the client, as they can now see what the software can do. WordPress was still difficult to understand for a non-technical person that needed to create content or newsletters. Birgit is a supporter of Gutenberg and the transition that it is allowing the non-profit client to create content.  Once Gutenberg was released as a plugin in 2017, she wanted to learn as much as possible about it. (10:40) Matt – We need something in the core of WordPress that users can just use without a huge learning curve. Many new brick and mortar stores are just going to Squarespace or WIX because of the ease of it. (14:41) Birgit – The page builder business is going to be a very interesting transition, especially with hotels or restaurants.  There will be layout standards that start to come through for different businesses. When innovation is adopted by a community the early adopters push the boundaries (as is the case with Gutenberg). The innovators are typically 15% of the user base. The rest of the community comes along later with different levels of participation. (16:33) Matt – Reviewed the 2019 core theme that comes with core WordPress 5.0. He waited before he weighed in on the theme.  There were still some struggles to create core things and move blocks around. (21:46) Birgit – With early releases of the plugin, there were things that did not work or “broke”. If your agency or business has many websites that you maintain, keep the Classic Editor because there are many things that are not ready in core. It takes time to teach clients how to use Gutenberg if they are heavy editing users. (22:41) Matt – The decision making to release Gutenberg into core upset some of the WordPress community. There was not great communication and there was a lack of clarity about where WordPress is going. (28:23) Birgit – There did not seem to be a strategy around the communication from Matt Mullenweg. Gutenberg Times was an attempt to get out in front of the software changes. There is not mainstream communication for the open source software but it looks like it is being worked on. Communication can always be better especially when change is occurring. (33:57) Matt – This Gutenberg editor release is being treated as a product within a product. It might be helpful to have a product person to communicate what is happening. (34:17) Birgit – it seems as though the Gutenberg editor is not being adopted by the enterprise yet. (35:50) It is important to remember that there are people behind the changes and it is wise to remember that when posting something publically. WordPress leadership has much to deal with while keeping the focus of the team. (39:30) Episode Resources: Gutenberg Times Genesis Gutenberg Jeff Chandler of WPTavern Elementor Pagely Morten Rand-Hendrikson Gutenberg Times YouTube Laravel Drupal WooCommerce Shopify Rachel M. Smith Gutenberg nested blocks Join the Gutenberg times mailing list To Keep in Touch: Birgit on Twitter Gutenberg Times paulisystems.net To Stay in Touch with Matt: Watch the panel discussion on Matt's YouTube channel. To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. ★ Support this podcast ★

Matt Medeiros starts 2019 and the second part of Season 8 with his interview with Dan Maby. Dan is a self-described wearer of many hats and is the director of Blue 37, a digital agency based in London. He recently founded a new community called WP&UP that supports and promotes positive mental health within the WordPress community. Through Dan's agency Blue 37, he helps WordPress users move forward with their business. In addition to ALL of that, Dan is the Lead Organizer of WordCamp London and four meetups across the UK. Listen to the episodes Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Mental Health with Dan Maby of WP&UP Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:42:15 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:42:15 What you will learn in this Episode: WP&UP Matt – Why WP&UP? What started the initiative for this organization? Dan – Realized that there was a real need for WordPress users working in isolation. There can be a lot of issues working alone either as a Freelancer or an employee of a company. After working in the WordPress Community for 8 or 9 years, Dan decided to start a charity that could address some of these issues. He brought the non-profit charity, WP&UP to the WordPress Community to help with all types of mental health issues. The organization started with friends and trustees who wanted to help. Matt – Discusses how difficult this is to set up for the WordPress community because many remote workers work in different countries and in different cultures. It would be great for the WordCamps to participate and announce this help at their conferences to raise awareness. Dan – The charity was difficult to set up for a global community. Because of the physical locations of many remote workers, you often don't know the struggle of the person who may be afraid of the stigma towards mental health in their country or culture. Social media does not really help entrepreneurs who work alone. WP&UP operated unfunded for 12 months. The organization recently passed as a charity in 2018 and a video was created and posted to the community. This opened the floodgates to the WordPress community. WPMUDev started the monetary support with the initial contribution. Many other companies have opted in with support. Now programs are in place to keep the charity funded over the long haul. (10:38) Matt – There are many areas to address with working in isolation.  How do you approach connecting and mentoring people virtually? Dan– The challenge is to find the “right” level of support.  You can offer a mentor or buddy, but it is such a sensitive subject. Support can range from professional help with your business to psychological services that a person may be struggling with.  Mental health struggles may impact a person at any time with no outward signs of a struggle. There is an additional impact on the broader community when they have no idea that somebody is struggling and would also offer help. (19:08) Change in WordPress and the Blue Collar Digital Worker Matt – The market has changed a little which is impacting the lower end of the WordPress market. People are finding it easier to build websites. (26:44) Dan – Because of the changes with WordPress the digital agency is now challenged on how to market to clients. The clients are changing and the tools available to them have broadened. The freelancer and agency need to concentrate on providing great services. (27:11) Matt – The release of the Gutenberg editor is creating a level of reeducation with the change of the editor to blocks. A user needs to understand how the front end and back end work together. There is a learning curve with Javascript development. (29:03) Dan – Education is always a good thing and evolving. Education is not new and the new projects coming in are very interesting. It may be rocky for a while and some people may leave WordPress and dive into something new. It is important to not go after the shiny new toy when diving into something new. (31:37) Marketing: Matt  – There are challenges around marketing. Dan– WP&UP really wants to work with individuals in the community.  The organization is set up around 4 Health Hubs: (33:00) Code Health – improve the quality of your products through training courses. Business Health – develop your business further with a mentor, Mental Health – receive support through those dark times, Physical health – build emotionally and physically. There are individuals in the WP&UP organization with specific skill sets. There are four legal trustees.  There will be additional individuals added as the need of the community continues to grow. The challenge for 2019 will be continued monetary support and the growth of the WP&UP program. It is a great program for the WordPress community who may find themselves struggling. Episode Resources: Blue37 WordCamp London WP&UP Cory Miller Dan Maby WordCamp US WPMU Dev GiveWP Gatsby Expression Engine Press Forward Campaign To Keep in Touch: To give: WP&UP WP&UP Slack Channel Dan on Twitter Dan Maby To Stay in Touch with Matt: Watch the panel discussion on Matt's YouTube channel. To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. ★ Support this podcast ★

Matt Medeiros finishes Season 8 with this interview of Robby Mccullough, who is a co-founder of the Beaver Builder page builder and is from the Bay area. Matt and Robby discuss how the Gutenberg release in WordPress 5.0  may impact Beaver Builder,  whether Automattic could have looked at purchasing Beaver Builder, and how a small business owner deals with the ups and downs of running and growing a  remote business. Listen to the end of the episode to find out the original name consideration of the Beaver Builder theme. Listen to this episode: Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Beaver Builder in a Gutenberg world Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:56:05 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:56:05 What you will learn in this Episode: Future of WordPress with Gutenberg changes: Robby – Realizes that it is impossible to predict the future of WordPress. He supports the Gutenberg editor with the block approach to the editing experience. The Beaver Builder page builder was created because of the demand in the WordPress space where the need for faster and easier website building was not being met. There was a real concern of what would happen to Beaver Builder once Gutenberg launched. (1:46) Matt – Asks the question of whether Beaver Builder could have been bought by Automattic. (3:22) Robby – Explains that the discussion of the purchase of Beaver Builder by Automattic never came up. (3:40) The vision of the Gutenberg editor in the latest update of WordPress did not line up with how Robby sees Beaver Builder growing with the community. (6:00) Matt – The innovators of WordPress (people who have created and supported page builders) have come from third-party developers. (6:47) Robby – Beaver Builder has been in the problem-solving space. Big companies can absorb smaller companies but this was not to be with Automattic and a page builder. (9:15) Software creators with SaaS and WordPress: Matt – created a query builder called Conductor years ago. The direction will not be putting that product into a Gutenberg block to monetize it (as Jetpack). The Conductor widget solves a tiny problem for the client and can be considered a niche product. How will Beaver Builder continue to monetize the product? (10:56) Robby  – Beaver Builder started as a web development agency and built Beaver Builder as a product offering. As the growth took off, the web agency was closed. All the focus has been on the page builder but now we are looking into other products that can be viable outside of the Gutenberg audience. The Gutenberg editor does not seem like it will serve clients who need customized solutions or large customers that need an advanced feature set. (13:00) Forecasting the Future of Beaver Builder: Matt – Third party markets have expanded the Beaver Builder experience. These vendors drive a lot of traffic to Beaver Builder but it does not seem that these offerings have been incorporated into the core product. (16:35) Robby – Beaver Builder uses the WordPress model to build and support it like a platform. Beaver Builder supports third-party developers that have been building on Beaver Builder by allowing them to build and extend using the brand. The Beaver Builder community has been the judge of whether or not they want to use those third-party products. Beaver Builder is a bootstrapped team and still has the flexibility to make adjustments to monetize products they see as successful. (17:00) Matt – The concern with open source is that there are many opinionated ideas that may impact theme creators and plugin developers. Open source does not always adjust to everyone's request or concern. Matt Mullenweg with Automattic is in a unique position by remaining approachable and adjusting to requests from WordPress supporters.  This is the first experience for everyone with the Gutenberg editor coming into core. (19:54) Robby – Matt Mullenweg has been on many podcasts and YouTube channels speaking about the WordPress 5.0 release with Gutenberg in the core. He has been participating in groups such as WPTavern to address concerns and is making the attempt to communicate the changes and strategy of WordPress moving forward. (24:00) Marketing and Messaging of a Product: Robby  – Marketing and communications are difficult to continually do. Robby has done this in his role with Beaver Builder and sometimes go through waves of participating and communicating in social channels. It is important to keep getting information out there when you are feeling burned out. (25:11) Matt – There are ups and downs in every project. The ups and downs always occur so know they are coming. Create a contingency plan for the dips. Not everything will be a “hit”. Just do not stop working on it. (27:13) Beaver Builder as a SaaS or Standalone CMS: Robby – The idea of a SaaS actually came up during the early development space of Beaver Builder. The architecture and expertise to support it was the issue. There was not a partner that was really strong in the server and network side. (30:28) Hiring and expanding a team: Robby – You finally reach a point where you want to empower people to take over different or new roles as the business is growing. (33:50) Matt – As you are expanding the business how do you find talent to fill the positions you want to hand off? Is it an outreach through a service or do you start with a social media platform?  You need to address whether you can hire and afford a candidate. (34:12) Robby – It is difficult when growing and building a product. When creating a position, it is important to hire with a culture fit and diversity in mind. You want somebody who can broaden the Beaver Builder message and grow the community. (36:44) Matt – Small companies are able to offer a good product and people will buy it when they know what is being offered. It can be very difficult to hire a person who can perform in many areas. It is important to give new employees enough time to deliver in the WordPress space. A 90-day review may not be long enough to determine if a person is a good fit because the return of investment may take a while to measure. (37:26) Robby – When creating the Marketing job posting for his company, it was important to consider the changes that are needed for a small growing business. A person hired for content marketing must have some sales experience or perform in many areas. (40:21) The Beaver Builder Theme Matt – talks about the outlook for the Beaver Builder theme. It looks like the latest release of the Beaver Builder theme will be addressing design aesthetics. (44:11) Robby – discusses how the Beaver Builder Theme is intentionally not marketed as the shiny object. The Theme is offered as a solid framework that is consistent and is easy to use. Once you learn the theme, it can save you so much time on additional projects. Beaver Builder considered naming the theme Chameleon where the theme could change and adapt with a design aesthetic. (46:26) As Gutenberg grows it is interesting to see how WordPress supported themes will change. It looks like there are many changes coming into the front-end space with styles and design. (47:15) Resources: Morten Rand-Hendrikson WordCamp 2018  Beaver Builder Conductor plugin Gutenberg Jetpack WooCommerce Grado Silicon Valley Gilfoyle Gary Vaynerchuck Beaver Builder Theme Flexbox Pagely To Keep in Touch: Beaver Builder Robby on Twitter Beaver Builder Facebook group To Stay in Touch with Matt: Watch the panel discussion on Matt's YouTube channel. To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. We are looking to reach 200 reviews on iTunes, so please help us out. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. ★ Support this podcast ★