Podcasts about pressnomics

In this episode of LMSCast, Chris Badgett interviews Raquel Karina, the founder of Wonderland Curious and the creator of PressConf, a new WordPress conference aimed at businesses that seeks to replace PressNomics. She shared how to build a community. Raquel recounts how the concept for PressConf was ignited during a 2023 hike in Taipei, where […] The post How to Design Event Experiences and Build Community With Raquel Karina appeared first on LMScast.

PressConf, reviving the essence of Pressnomics, is an upcoming business-centric WordPress event from April 23-26, 2024. It focuses on networking, curated speakers, and compensating organizers, fostering community innovation.

Say thanks and learn more about our podcast sponsor Omnisend. In this episode, I sat down with Raquel Manriquez, Community Manager at Elegant Themes, to discuss her exciting new venture - PressConf. This event is a spiritual successor to the legendary Pressnomics conference, which was a cornerstone event for WordPress business professionals. Raquel shares her journey of launching her own business, Wonderland Curious, and how the idea to revive this beloved conference came from a genuine need in the WordPress community for a dedicated business-focused event. What makes this particularly special is that Raquel secured the blessing from Pressnomics founders Josh and Sally Strebel before moving forward with this new iteration.What really struck me during our conversation was Raquel's authentic approach to honoring the legacy of Pressnomics while bringing her own vision to PressConf. The event will maintain key elements that made Pressnomics special - like hosting it at the Mission Palms Resort in Tempe and keeping presentations exclusive to in-person attendees (no recordings). But she's also adding her own touch with structured networking time to maximize the valuable connections made at these events.The WordPress business community has been missing a flagship event focused purely on the business side of WordPress, and PressConf aims to fill that void. Hearing Raquel's passion and seeing the talented team she's assembled gives me confidence that this will be a must-attend event for WordPress professionals in 2024.Key Takeaways for WordPress ProfessionalsPressConf will be a single-track, business-focused WordPress event with no recordings - you must be present to experience the contentThe event features invite-first speakers, targeting industry leaders and known names in WordPressUnlike WordCamps, this is specifically designed for "hallway trackers" - people who value high-level business networkingThe venue (Mission Palms Resort in Tempe) is specifically chosen to create an intimate setting that encourages networkingThere will be structured networking time built into the schedule, separate from talks and social eventsThe event runs April 23-26, 2024, with two full days of talks and one day for activitiesImportant URLs & ResourcesPressConf website: https://pressconf.eventsTwitter: @Press__confInstagram: @pressconfEarly bird tickets available at $680 for VIP access and $580 for general admission ★ 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 ★

I appreciate a good side hustle story. Someone slogging away in the cubical but slowly building up an audience on Twitter on the weekends. I'm sure you know all about the “build in open” movement, and today's guest really shocked me with that. See, maybe like you, I've listened to Dave Rodenbaugh on his podcast (with my boss Craig) Rogue Startups, for years now. But what really got me in today's story, is that he was never really even “part-time” into his business Recapture.io. In fact, the way he put it, he was only devoting 10% of his energy into the business while being contracted at a corporate gig he recently had the chance to exit from. There's lots of fun stuff in today's episode covering everything from managing a day job to which marketing skills you need as a developer to kickstart your business. I hope you really enjoy it. Transcription Recapture – Dave and Matt – Matt Report [00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by paid memberships pro well, actually it's their other product. Site-wide sales at site-wide sales.com. It's a complete black Friday cyber Monday and flash sales tool for WooCommerce or paid memberships pro. Before, you know it, the deal day holidays will be fast upon us. And you want to prepare your WooCommerce or paid memberships pro website.  [00:00:20] With the site-wide sales plugin, use it to make custom sale banners, targeted landing pages or apply discounts automatically in the cart. Use it to track the performance of all of these promotional features using the reporting feature, which will paint the picture of your black Friday and holiday shopping sales. I use it to help make your woo commerce or paid memberships pro store more money.  [00:00:43] Get the first 30 days for free. And then it's an easy $49 a year. Check out site-wide sales.com. That's site-wide sales.com to make more money. This holiday sale season.   [00:00:56]Let me tell you about creator courses.com/matt and how you can save 20% off using code mat to grab a hold of the great courses instructed by none other than Joe Casabona. So, what can you get from creator courses.com/matt. Courses to help business owners create stuff with absolutely no code. Learn how to build a website using beaver builder, Gutenberg, or both.   [00:01:23] [00:01:23]And that's not all visit creator courses.com/matt and save 20% off Joe's other courses on PHP, full site editing in my two favorites. Podcasting in automation. I think learning the automation stuff is well worth the ticket in my eyes. Go to creator courses.com/matt. Right now. Seriously, stop the podcast and use code mat at checkout to save 20% off that's creator courses.com/matt and use code mat to save 20% off today.   [00:01:52]I appreciate a good side hustle story. Someone's slogging away in the cubicle, but slowly building up an audience on Twitter on the weekends. I'm sure you know, all about the building open movement and today's guest really shocked me with that. See maybe like you I've listened to Dave Rohde and bond his podcast with my boss, Craig rogue startups for years now.  [00:02:12] But what really got me in today's story is that he was never really even part time into his business. recapture.io. In fact, the way he put it, he was only devoting 10% of his energy into the business. While being contracted at a corporate gig, he recently had the chance to exit from there's a lot of fun stuff in today's episode, covering everything from managing and day job to which marketing skills you need as a developer.  [00:02:38] To kickstart your business. I hope you really enjoy it. You're listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter@mattreport.com slash subscribe and follow the podcast on apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet.  [00:02:54] Please share this episode. On your social media. We'd love more listeners around here. And side note, [00:03:00] I had to rerecord with Dave after some Zen caster snafoos so we're picking up from our conversation a little bit, warmed up. Okay. I hope you enjoy.   [00:03:09] Matt: [00:03:09] One of the things that I caught you at a great time last time because you were only, I think like two weeks a free man on your own you get out of that sort of day job slash consultancy that you were in. I had you at an interesting moment where you were like, everything's coming at me. This is exciting. [00:03:28]I, I'm kind of like looking to go to the next chapter of, of running recapture. Is that feeling still here or now that we're like a month into it, things have settled, like, oh my God, you  [00:03:39] Dave: [00:03:39] know, it's kind of funny. It hasn't really, I have not felt that euphoria lift yet. I imagine at some point it probably will. [00:03:48]No, th this is, this is definitely the honeymoon phase, right. And at some point the honeymoon phase will always go. But I still feel it. In fact, I was just having breakfast with my wife this morning. We were sitting outside and, I noted her. I said, Hey, it's been, almost two months since I left the freelance job. [00:04:03] And she went, I know. And I was like, and it's still great. So, I still, I still get up in the morning and we go do our walk and I come back and I have breakfast and coffee and I'm like, I get to spend my day on whatever the hell I want to today, which is of course recapturing my business, but there's something still very energizing about that. [00:04:27] Like, it's all, it's my own experience. I'm not really beholden to anybody other than the customers. I don't have to do. Stupid bullshit meetings and phone calls and status reports and just all of that stuff that I had to deal with in the corporate world. It's just all gone like that lift that sh that weight has still lifted off my shoulders. [00:04:47] And I am just as happy then as I am. One  [00:04:51] Matt: [00:04:51] of the things I think you hide really well. And I don't know if this was intentional or I maybe just never even saw it because I've always been just looking at what you were doing with the recapture. You've been on the show, my podcast, before you have the podcast with Craig, who's a happens to be my boss. [00:05:07] I never knew how much. And then we had our discussion more in depth. I never knew how much that freelance gig. Was sort of like weighing you down or how much it consumed when you and I chatted. I think you, throughout the, the ratio of like, it was 90% day job in 10% recapture, and that was kind of mind blowing, like how you manage that, how did you manage like so much of recapture with only 10% of energy. [00:05:37] Dave: [00:05:37] That's an excellent question. And some days I'm amazed that things were able to progress along as well as they had because of that exact issue. And in fact, that was one of the main things I think that sort of drove me into this direction, like recapture could be doing so much better and here I am barely giving it enough oxygen to survive. [00:06:00] [00:05:59] Why, why can't I do more? So, but it wasn't always this way. The freelance thing, it was probably at one point it was like 40% freelance and 60% everything else. But at the time that 60% was a good chunk of the WordPress plugins. I had that I sold last year and recapture, that was the directory, a business directory plugin that was business directory and AWP PCP. [00:06:25] So. Those were things that all consumed my time. And I think when you said, hiding, I think that's an excellent observation because I. I definitely compartmentalize when it comes to things like here's this chunk of my business, here's this other chunk, here's this other chunk. And, I could operate in each of those worlds fairly separately without letting them bleed into each other. [00:06:52] But there came a point when the freelancing just was such a mentally taxing thing to deal with. I had. Just all kinds of toxic stuff going on in the corporate culture that I was there and the project that I was working on and the direction that it was all going. And it just, at some point I was like, this is too much. [00:07:12] I can't deal with this anymore. I can't keep it in the box. It's bleeding out into everything else. So usually when I got onto podcasts, like the Matt. It would give me an opportunity to express the enthusiasm for that box that I didn't get to really express any other way. So, it was like my brief window into positive energy venting, if you will. [00:07:34] And then it was back to the slog of the corporate world and yeah. So  [00:07:39] Matt: [00:07:39] that's tough. How much of the success of recaptured thus far? Is because you chose, these are my words. These are not your words. So obviously I hope for you to color in the lines here, but how much of the success of recapture is the market and the product that you chose. [00:07:58] And I'll preface that with saying is like abandoned cart problems are or solutions. I should say. There's a lot of them. I feel like it's a big space, which is. Some people might look from the sidelines going, God, I don't want to get into that space. There's so much competition, but I feel like maybe in your case, it is, and was a good thing. [00:08:19]If you look at I think cart hook probably was where you were at and then just matured into a much larger product and solution, I think right on the heels of. Recording that we had Jilt shut down, which was a sort of like another, I guess, benefit to you. How much of the success do you think has, has leaned on, Hey, I picked the right product and the right market, because sometimes I think that could be something that kind of goes under the radar. [00:08:44] That a lot of people aren't aware of.  [00:08:47] Dave: [00:08:47] Well, I talked about this on other podcasts and I'll mention it here as well. I believe very heavily in the notion of luck, surface area. So just quick definition for [00:09:00] somebody who might not be familiar with this, basically. Everyone in business is going to encounter some level of luck and whether you're prepared for that luck or unprepared for that luck has to do with the surface area that you've created. [00:09:17] So in other words, can I capitalize on this lucky opportunity that comes around at this time because. I've made some kind of preparation for it. I'm ready to accept it. I've got the bandwidth to deal with it. Like all of these things have to kind of line up. I've had opportunities that appeared in my space and I wasn't ready to capitalize them. [00:09:37] So they weren't within my luck surface area, but being, being ready for those opportunities makes a huge difference in whether you're successful or not successful. So, there were definitely lots of. We'll call them lucky moments. We all want to think that entrepreneurship is solely about hard work and hard work is a piece of it. [00:09:57] And you can't succeed without the hard work, but at the same time, every element of luck that you encounter that you can capitalize we'll will level up your business. And the more of those that you can do, the better off you will end up. The same thing is true of Castillo's when Craig and I have talked about this on the podcast. [00:10:15] I Craig, you and Craig have encountered many lucky moments in Castro's getting into tiny seed, him having an opportunity to hire you when you were available. Each of these helps build on all of the previous moments that you've had before. And the same thing is true with recapture. So like for example, When I was able to acquire a recapture back in 2016, that was a lucky moment for me because I happened to have the money to do it. [00:10:41] And I was looking specifically for something that was, e-commerce SAS, recurring revenue. And it was in a space that I understood and it was a space that I could be passionate about. So that is a lucky moment where all of those things that kind of I've been preparing for came together in one shot. [00:10:58] And then after that, like the pandemic was another lucky moment. I know this is not lucky for a lot of people that lost loved ones, but if you were in e-commerce. Everything kind of took off in certain verticals and certain services, right? Capture was one of those services. And because we had been spending a lot of time, integrating with woo commerce, integrating with easy digital downloads, integrating with restrict content pro being on Shopify at that point and optimizing our listing all of these things, when that massive uptick in e-commerce store interest went on. [00:11:33] We were there and able to capitalize on it because we were available to people. We, we had enough interest and awareness in the community that people were able to take us and, and use the service at the time that they needed it the most. So that's another lucky opportunity we were able to capitalize on. [00:11:53] And, it's just building on moments like that again and again and again, in your business. [00:12:00] Entails, like I said, a lot of hard work and you've got to get out there and you've got to do the homework. I had to network with, the, I have a relationship with nexus and liquid web, and I think I was trying to, I was badgering poor Chris lemma for life. [00:12:14] 12 months, no joke. Like every two months, I just like ping out and say, Hey, what's going on? Are you guys ready to integrate this yet? And they were like, yeah, no, not talk to me in a little bit. And I just kept doing that and kept doing that and kept doing that. And eventually it turned out. Initial relationship and then Jilt shut down. [00:12:31] And now it's a bigger relationship cause they were relying on Jill. So again, it's about timing and persistence and hard work. And the more you can make that surface area, big, these lucky events that come flying through your space, you can grab a hold of them and, let it ride your busy.  [00:12:49] Matt: [00:12:49] Where do you rank the priority of. [00:12:52]Like developing features versus being. Social and networky and markety in the grand scheme of your luck surface area, like if you were sitting in front of a class of one year WordPress plugin entrepreneurs who are mostly developers, Would you tell them to increase the lung surface area by creating those integrations or, Hey, you got to blog more, you got to outreach more, maybe start a podcast. [00:13:24] Where do you set those priorities to, to increase that luck surface?  [00:13:30] Dave: [00:13:30] I would never prioritize features on that list until I had some understanding of what's out there in the space. Like we didn't integrate with WooCommerce and easy digital downloads because I love those two so much. It happens that I do, but that's not why I integrated with them. [00:13:48] I integrated with them because there was a huge market opportunity and doing that. That I can go after those opportunities and it allows me to be in other spaces. So I understood the market well enough to know that those were good plays, but part of what I would say to that, younger group of plugin authors, is that the reason that I knew those things is that I created relationships first. [00:14:14] So I had attended events, like word camps, and PressNomics where I talked with these others. Hosting companies and plugin authors and agencies and all of these other things to understand what are their concerns, who are the people in the space that are the movers and the shakers that I can learn more from that. [00:14:34] If I connect with it's going to, improve my sphere. Of being able to do better things in the world, right? It's not about, me personally, it's about how can I improve my impact on the world and that, you're not going to get that sitting around typing features out on a keyboard. [00:14:50] So those things matter, but they don't matter first. Like you need to get the other things before you can get. The features, because you won't know the right features [00:15:00] to build until you've talked to people, talk to your customers, talk to other people that are going to use your tool. Talk to hosting providers that might find a way to use you to improve the offerings to their customers. [00:15:10] If you can make somebody better with your product, then they're going to be interested in you, but you're not going to know that unless you get out there and talk to other people and find out what the hell they're doing, right. Podcasting is another great way to do that.  [00:15:22]Matt: [00:15:22] I forget which episode of. Rogue startups. [00:15:24] It was, but it might've been a more recent one when you were talking about the new SMS functionality of the product. And you'll have to remind me of like what the context was, but you said something like here I am working on something else. And like the SMS stuff is just sitting, waiting to go, or at least that's how I kind of remember it. [00:15:45] And you were, you were like, oh God, if I just, I just got to get out there and launch this, like, what am I doing? Spending all this time in this area when I can just, this features almost kind of ready, let me just launch it. I think that that's. Such a common, well, first of all, am I getting that right? [00:16:00] Am I remembering this, this tug of war you had at one point with releasing that feature and other things you were doing?  [00:16:06] Dave: [00:16:06] I think so. So there was a, a combination of forces that were coming in at the time. And we were talking about trying to release SMS first. It was going to be an April, then it was going to be in may and then it was going to be in June. [00:16:16] And it finally got released on July 1st. So I don't have to say that anymore, but thank God. But it. I got distracted by a bunch of other things. And one of the things I think that kills us as entrepreneurs is lacking focus. So you see, and I, I'm as guilty as anybody else. Here's a new shiny object over here. [00:16:34] Ooh, look at that. If we develop that boy, that would really make a move on MRR. Oh wait. But we could be doing this marketing hack right here instead. And all of those things are just constantly coming up in your, your field of view and you've got to, nail it down and say, look, I did this. If I don't shove it out the door now I'm in big trouble. [00:16:54] So, for me, with the SMS stuff, what that came down to was that I was distracted by content marketing. And I spent like a month trying to hire a content marketer. And then the Jilt shutdown came along in June and all of a sudden everything got shuffled. Right. So then it was like, oh, geez well, SMS, isn't going to really move the needle with Jilt customers because Jilt didn't support SMS. [00:17:15] So now what do I need to do to make it. Jilt customers would be better served by recapture. Well, I gotta add marketing emails, broadcast emails. And so we were really close on that one too. So we just bundled it all together. SMS was done. And so we just put these two and said, all right, July 1st is when we're launching. [00:17:32] We finished that up inside of a week in June and then pushed it out the door. But yeah, focus was killing me there and that was totally my bad.  [00:17:42]Matt: [00:17:42] Back to, I guess, the, the luck surface area. And you hinted about this before too, is, you have a plan. And we, everyone says good, create a plan, create a calendar, like have these automations in these processes and everything will be running smoothly. [00:17:56] And then suddenly it's like, okay, well maybe this. [00:18:00] Yeah. And it blows up and you're like, oh, maybe new feature. And then like you start building a new feature, then suddenly Jill shuts down and that's just a matte, like now you have to be like, okay, I literally have to drop all this other stuff because this is just now a massive opportunity. [00:18:16] And, and this is not really a question, but more of a statement just to frame it. Like we went through this, we're going through this at  and I'm only bringing it up because you talked to Craig every week, but it's like, we're doing all of these things where new products, new features, new things are rolling out new enhancements, and then suddenly it's. [00:18:36] There's an opportunity to buy another company. Well, that's pretty big deal. And like, now we do that. So it's just like, there's that? And then there's right. Craig working in is working his butt off to raise money and he raises money for the company. And then it's just like right back to the feature grindstone have finished the migration. [00:18:59] Now we've got this app that just launched literally yesterday. Yesterday. Yep. Monday. And now there's just like right back to the feature grindstone and you're like, wow. Like things move at a pace. That's it's exciting. But also, man, there's no plan for this. There's no playbook, there's nothing, there's nothing. [00:19:17] Dave: [00:19:17] There's no question. Yeah, no. There's, there's a certain chaotic insanity to the whole entrepreneur journey. And in some ways you can do all the planning you want, but no plan survives first contact with the customer. And in many cases, no plan survives first contact. Random events that happen out in the real world, acquiring companies, getting funding, Jilt shutdowns, all of these things, just things happen. [00:19:47] And the speed at which you can react to something is definitely whether your business lives or dies in these events. And it definitely is also whether the business grows or fails in these times as well. Those that were not able to. Advantage of the dynamic nature of the e-commerce, if they weren't pivoting hard during their vertical, like if you were in the travel vertical during COVID shutdown, people were just pounding on you with a sledgehammer into the ground, like six feet deep. [00:20:16] They didn't stop, but if you were in like like a lounge wear sweat pants, hoodies, things like that, you couldn't keep the stuff inside. Your warehouse long enough to sell it. So, you had to be reactive to the act of circumstances there, or it kills your business and, that's what Craig's doing with Castillo's and that's what I've tried to do with  [00:20:36] Matt: [00:20:36] recapture, for sure. [00:20:37] Yeah. I want to go back to talking about partnerships which will eventually segue into word PR into woo commerce versus Shopify. But before we get to that flaming ball of chaos, Navigating partnerships in WordPress. I'm interested to hear just your opinion on it. Sometimes. I think, especially for somebody like you with a product that could [00:21:00] really latch onto a hosting company, those are very tricky waters to now. [00:21:04]I know I used to work at Pagely and it was just like, man, like people wouldn't even say WP engine around me. Like it wasn't like,  [00:21:13] Dave: [00:21:13] like we don't talk about that. No. Yeah.  [00:21:16] Matt: [00:21:16] It wasn't on any of those podcasts where there were other web hosts. Like, it is a very, I feel like in the hosting world, maybe it's getting a little bit better that it was like, you gotta be in a camp and that's the camp you're in and there's isolation there. [00:21:28]Any thoughts around navigating. And also just like critical feedback on products and services in the WordPress space. I feel like doesn't exist in the normal zeitgeists like, I'm looking at my Sony camera right now. And like, if you went online to YouTube and you looked at, or a forum and you went to Sony versus Panasonic and there would be like great debate. [00:21:54] Like critical. Like, but every, at the end of the day, everybody's fine about the two companies. But I feel like in the WordPress space, you don't get that like damn EDD for doing this. And this is why I'm woo commerce. I don't have the right phrase for it, but I feel like that partnership slash criticism in the WordPress space doesn't exist. [00:22:14] Maybe. We're all too friendly with each other. Can I say that like, we're all friendly? I dunno, it's just a weird thing. Like I feel like if you walk down the hall. And talked about your favorite brand of anything else. There could be clear debate, clear, concise, love it, hate it. I could go without it, but in the WordPress space that doesn't exist. [00:22:33] Am I making sense with that? Like, do you feel that thing in the air, like I do. I, I  [00:22:37] Dave: [00:22:37] totally hear what you're saying on that one and I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, there's, there's definitely this weird space where it seems like. You can talk about one hosting company, but you can never say hosting company a versus B, right. [00:22:50] Or if you do like that discussion gets shut down real fast. And I don't think it's a conscious thing, but I've seen it on chats. And just over the years on blog posts, like it's very rare that somebody sits down and truly compares one to the other. Head to head and say, look, if you really like these things, this hosting company makes a lot of sense. [00:23:11] And if you like these things, then this other hosting company is a better fit for you. But yeah. So, you were talking about navigating partnerships. I think it's kind of the same thing. Like as soon as you declare allegiance to one. It's almost like the others kind of look at you with a little side eye and with a little bit of stink-eye on top of it. [00:23:32] And they're like, well, you've already got them in your camp, so we can't be in your camp at the same time. I think that goes to the detriment of all WordPress users. Like there's nothing that says you can't be friendly and competitive in the same thing. And I think when you say that they're overly friendly, I wouldn't characterize it like that. [00:23:55] I would characterize it. Yeah. Unwilling to criticize in general, it's something about the [00:24:00] community. I don't know what it is. If they are looking not to drum up drama and they feel like that's going to create unnecessary drama or unhelpful drama, it probably could. I definitely could see that that could get into some real nasty debates that just degenerate into ad hominem attacks. [00:24:16] And, you suck because you picked oh, well, okay. Yeah. Back off, man. That's it. That's that's not necessary. So yeah, I don't know. I've, I've felt that and it's weird, but the partnership thing.  [00:24:31] Matt: [00:24:31] Because it's farther back now. Like, I'll say, well, you can do, you can define it. Is it a, is it a partnership with nexus? [00:24:38] And if so, like, do you feel like one, maybe you can't because you've signed something or two, like, do you feel like, ah, man, it's gonna be a little bit harder for me to knock on the door, WP engine to do this because they see me over here with nexus and Chris. So like that kind of friction that you think that holds you back. [00:24:55] Dave: [00:24:55] It doesn't hold me back. Let me say that. Okay. To sign because like the stuff that I set up with nexus, it wasn't exclusive anyway. And it was very friendly. Like, look, I've got this thing, your customers can use this thing. You got this offering and it makes it more valuable to your customers. If we say we put this on your dashboard here, like, it was very much like how can we make this a win-win thing and like help. [00:25:15] I will be happy to help create content to make your customers more successful. Like at the end of the day, That story should play well with any hosting company, right? If I can give you something that helps your customers be more successful and you help me bring more customers, and we're both winning in this relationship, it shouldn't matter how many people I've set that deal up with because your customer success should be the foremost thing at the top of your mind. [00:25:42] But, I don't know from if I have this deal going on with nexus, does that make me. A bit of a hot potato with WP engine. I don't really know. I noticed that before I had any deal in place of any hosting company at all, like just getting to the right person who was interested in what I had to say, and that saw the value of it. [00:26:02] Was kind of a non-trivial thing to navigate, especially when, folks are coming and going and coming and going. Even if you have the right contacts at these companies and the network relationships I've made gives me some ins to most of these hosting companies where I can say, Hey, I want to talk to so-and-so. [00:26:20] It still doesn't necessarily mean that that company is interested in your offering or that they're thinking about things the same way that you are. So. It kind of is another thing where it has to all line up. They've got to be thinking about this the same way that you're thinking about this. And that's where I've met. [00:26:39] The most resistance, I think is that, I say, Hey, are you thinking about a managed WooCommerce hosting? And I'm like, okay, well, we're, we're already missing this each other here. And I don't, maybe it's going to be a better fit in a year or two years or something like that. [00:26:53] So with nexus, they were very much like, yep. We've got that. Yep. We want this. All right. Let's make it all happen. [00:27:00] With a little bit of persistence. It's so.  [00:27:02] Matt: [00:27:02] It almost, and really almost makes you appreciate like a bigger business. Right. You kind of have an appreciation for it. And, and again, I'll frame that is when you look at somebody like Austin, like SIADH from awesome motive. [00:27:16] Right. And you see. Well, the, the sheer size, the competency of business and you have a relationship there because that's where you sold the plugins to. Right? So you kind of see there's a trust there. And then you can kind of make sense, because if you're just solo developer, Dave knocking on the door of, big web hosting conglomerate. [00:27:38]They're going to look at you and be like, well, man, we can't, this is way too much of a risk to just take your software, slapping it in front of 30,000 customers potentially. And we are just going to trust you. You start to kind of appreciate, okay. The bigger businesses can kind of win. There's more sustainability, there's better trust. [00:27:56]There's just more invested in the whole thing. And as a small business owner, like you kind of get it once you start going through the throws of, of navigating those, I dunno, corporate waters, enterprise waters whatever you want to call it. Kind of appreciate a little bit more, at least I do anyway. [00:28:10] Yeah,  [00:28:11] Dave: [00:28:11] no, I would agree with that. And it's interesting. These larger companies. Because they're so big, like, it's the difference between moving like a cheetah and moving like an elephant. You're the small start-ups. So you can navigate pretty quickly make the fast sprints and turn quickly. They're kind of plotting along in a very straight direction and they're not going to change their direction very quickly. [00:28:34] So it takes them awhile to get going in a direction. And then once they're going in that direction, it takes them a while to change directions. And the bigger the company gets, the bigger the elephant gets, right? Yeah. So by bringing in small companies, I think a lot of them want to increase their agility in that sense. [00:28:53] But of course, there's that whole trust aspect. Like we know you're smaller than us, but are you big enough that you can handle what we hand the hand over to you? And if that trust isn't there, then yeah. That's, that's all gone. So again, this is part of the networking aspect. If you can have that relationship with another person and that they get to know your business and they're like, oh yeah, you've been around for awhile. [00:29:13] Oh, look, you've got some customers. Oh, look, you served a lot of customers. Oh, you've done a pretty decent volume. Hey, maybe you not, might not be a fly by night. Business and we might be able to trust you like that. Trust isn't something that just happens overnight. Right? You got to build it slowly over years. [00:29:28] Matt: [00:29:28] Yeah. Shopify versus a woo commerce when we chatted. Yeah. Forget  [00:29:33] Dave: [00:29:33] it. We're done. Now. I have a lot to say about this. Go ahead.  [00:29:37] Matt: [00:29:37] We chatted last time. I think one of the things now, look, I have only set up a handful of Shopify. Generally out of just helping some friends and some local entrepreneurs in my area do it. [00:29:47]I think one of the things I'll try to make this a quick question. Like one of the things I really appreciate from Shopify is. On the outside anyway, like their partnership program looks more mature. Like the way they work with [00:30:00] agencies looks more mature. And generally, I feel like they're willing to work with the freelancers of the world versus. [00:30:07] WordPress and WooCommerce is kind of just like, see you later. Bye. Like, we'll see it at the end of the road, by the way, we'll sell $5,000 websites@wordpress.com. Right. And to me, that's like, man, like I look at it Shopify and I'm like, yeah woo commerce, WordPress should have something like this. But I guess at the end of the day, it's not all roses and rainbows from the outside because Shopify is going to. [00:30:35] I guess watch like a watchful eye of, what you're doing as an, as an app, as an integrator, as an agency. And if they see something that's super profitable, I guess they could just go. Yeah, we'll just do that. We'll just do that in house and just demolish your app, I guess in the matter of seconds is what they could do. [00:30:52] So again, sharp road to navigate. I like it from the outset. Like it's an opportunity for a freelancer or a small agency to get more work. But curious on your thoughts on partnership program in generally working with a Shopify versus a WooCommerce.  [00:31:09] Dave: [00:31:09] Yeah. So you wanted a short answer, right? Well, I  [00:31:14] Matt: [00:31:14] was, I was trying to make a short question,  [00:31:16] Dave: [00:31:16] which is okay, so I can have a long answer. [00:31:18] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Let me talk about the platforms first in general. So I think when you're picking Shopify versus woo, there's a lot of things that go into that decision in general, that should make you, focus on what are the strengths of each of those platforms. So with Shopify very easy to get started, low tech threshold, to understand there's lots of stuff that you can do without being a full stack developer. [00:31:47] Integrate apps and just basically get a store up and running. So if you aren't sure, like you're doing it drop shipping or it's a new product and you're trying to find product market fit or product audience bit or whatever it is. I think Shopify gets you up and running quicker to something that's pretty polished that comes at a y'all are costs. [00:32:10] So, the hosting that Shopify, the apps that you're adding on and all of that, but. That can be managed and I think it's simplifies things and gets you going pretty well to where you want be. With that said, once you reach a certain point and you're like, now I want my store to do this. And I want my checkout to have this in it. [00:32:32] And I want to use these payment methods, but not these other ones. And I also want this post purchase, checkout flow to be going on. And I want these kind of abandoned cart emails, and I want this, and I want that like for somebody who knows exactly what they want, Shopify can be incredibly expensive and very frustrating because it has been traditionally difficult to cut it. [00:32:53] So, this is where Woo's strength comes to play. In my opinion, is that, if you're on the right hosting provider [00:33:00] and you have a good agency that you can work with, that knows what they're doing with Boone. These are out there. You can do a nice build and you can customize the hell out of it. [00:33:08] Yeah. And get exactly what you want. And if you've got a good developer on Wu, you can make it run as fast or faster than a Shopify store. So performance, isn't an issue necessarily if you've done the right things and you've done your homework. And, there are plenty of smart wound stores that do that. [00:33:25] The downside to that, of course is complexity. And you got to have a higher threshold of technical knowledge either for yourself or a team to put that together. And, you've got to find the right agencies and the right developers. And if you're talking about the energy and the Wu space and the energy. [00:33:43] Shopify space. They're pretty different. And there's a lot of energy in Shopify and it's hard to ignore that and there's energy and Wu too, but to like sort out the wheat from the chaff is a little more challenging because those really good Wu developers aren't necessarily out there trumpeting themselves, talking about how great their agency is. [00:34:04] I can tell you the top five shops. Development agencies right off the top of my head because of what I see on Twitter, because of what I see in their blogs and just general social media activity, I would have a harder time doing that for woo commerce based on those factors. I know a few of them, but they're harder to pick out. [00:34:21] Matt: [00:34:21] Right. So do you think that's because Shopify helps prop those agencies up to part of their marketing and sales?  [00:34:28] Dave: [00:34:28] Yes. So WooCommerce as a platform, doesn't do enough for partners and agencies, not the way that Shopify does, like here at Shopify at unite announced that they were abolishing the 20% at a revenue share on all of their partner apps up to your first million dollars a year. [00:34:49] So basically it's like everybody on the platform got a 25% raise, including recapture, which I was thrilled about. WooCommerce. If you want to go to their store, there was this discussion in post status that I was contributing to. If you are exclusive to the woo commerce store, 40% revenue share. If you're non-exclusive it's 60%. [00:35:09]I understand why WooCommerce didn't want. To just let every person possible onto the platform and turn it into the repo, like the repo turned out to, it's kind of a, we'll call it a mixed bag. I think that's the, the most politically correct way I could say it. Yeah. There's a lot of garbage out there and there's a lot of good stuff and it does take some time to sort through it and figure out, I think they were trying to curate the woo commerce store experience to be a little higher quality than that. [00:35:41] But I think they went about it wrong. And it's  [00:35:43] Matt: [00:35:43] been it's 60% to automatic  [00:35:45] Dave: [00:35:45] or 60, 60% to automatic. Yes. Wow. Which is, like, come on really. You're taking more than half of my business. How am I supposed to be profitable at that point? It's not this isn't a charity to you. So these numbers are just [00:36:00] wrong in my, like, they don't encourage  [00:36:02] Matt: [00:36:02] catches a lot of flack for 30%, right? [00:36:05]Dave: [00:36:05] Come on, apple, apple at 30 bucks percent is considered untenable and you all at WooCommerce that are doing 40 and 60%. Come on, give me a break. That's why my plugins are never going to be on the WooCommerce repository. I know I'm not alone in this. So, there are some plugins that are there, but guess what? [00:36:23] They're all free. 40% of zero is still zero. So you're good. They're, they're asking for me to share my revenue 60% a month. You just killed my profitability to the point where I can't run my business anymore. So it's that sort of mentality. That I think is hurting the Wu commerce ecosystem. Like there isn't an agency support program. [00:36:44] There isn't a big conference every year. That has the energy of Shopify unite. There isn't a partner program that really nurtures everybody along. Like with Shopify partners. Like you sign up, you're getting an email a day for like 30 days telling you here's some partner tips. Here's this development thing. [00:37:01] Here's this resource. Here's this? Here's this here's this guess how many times we got from WooCommerce? Zero. Yeah. Yeah. I, it they're very different ecosystems and I think it's to the detriment of WooCommerce, that they are not putting more energy into that, that piece of it, because that is a big part of why Shopify has been successful. [00:37:23] Matt: [00:37:23] Yeah. I agree a hundred percent. And again, I have very little experience from the Shopify side. I just know from what I don't receive from support from WordPress and seeing what everything else is happening. And I guess look at when you. Zoom out and take a look at the sheer size of WordPress compared to Shopify just I'm talking like installed platform based like that kind of thing. [00:37:46] Yeah. The, the, the play for WordPress and automatic is when it comes to open source. How are you going to monetize it? It has to be done through like that trust factor. So it's open source. It's super flexible. It's the same message. Automatic and you and I can go out and tell a customer and they'll just win by having the most trusted plugin, a jet pack or a premium ad-ons from woocommerce.com or something like that. [00:38:17] And they'll win. On that trust level where Shopify, you're just going to go there and spend money. Like you're choosing that platform. So you're you, you've made the decision to go there and they're telling you, the whole platform is trusted with WordPress it's. Hey, it's great. It's open source. Do whatever you want. [00:38:34]But by the way, Jetpack is the most trusted way to secure and manage your site. And that also comes with whatever WooCommerce add ons that you buy for those bundles that they have for like 2 99, 3 99 or whatever. And their argument will be you trust it because it comes from ashore. You can go get Dave's go ahead and get Dave's. [00:38:53] But you know, you're going to trust us better because we're the, the company behind it kind of thing. So I can't fault them [00:39:00] for it. It's just, one of those things. So many people have pushed towards jet pack or excuse me, to WooCommerce and WordPress because they love the software and there's no, there's that love doesn't come back to us. [00:39:15] What are we going to do?  [00:39:16] Dave: [00:39:16] Nothing we can do. There's nothing we can do, unfortunately. And the other thing. I, I don't like, is that w well, so to contrast this, let me say, oh, Shopify does this. So Shopify does do acquisitions on things, but not like, not at the same level that I've seen automatic do it, where they pull in things like mail poet, right. [00:39:35] Or there pull all this stuff in and turn it into Jetpack. Like Shopify is not doing that. They build stuff and they'll build it to a level like, there was a year, I think it was like the first unite I went to and it was me. Two years after I'd acquired recapture and they released the abandoned cart emails. [00:39:52] And those that knew me at the conference were like, so how do you feel about abandoned cart emails on Shopify now is like, I feel okay about it because they're just, they're 60% solution and I'm a hundred percent solution. And I can tell you like all the shortcomings, it's great for people getting started out and it gives you those tools to get going and get your store off the ground. [00:40:14] It's never serious enough to like take you to the next level. So it'll get you to like the 5,000 a month rate. But after that, it's going to break down pretty quickly. Cause you're just not doing as good of a job as you could be with other apps that are more professional. And I've seen this a little bit in big commerce, too, where they build in these features and then know they're okay, but they're not great. [00:40:35] And you build your store up to a certain level and then you get these other things and you use them instead. I don't see that with WooCommerce. They're trying to pull in everything and say, okay, we're going to be really good at email. We've got mail poet now, but are you really the best at email? Because you got all these other things you're doing too. [00:40:54] And you've got this team, that's doing mail poet, and I don't want them to fault the male poet folks. They're a great plugin and they do a lot. It's just, your priorities are going to be driven by the platform, not the customers that are using it. So. Is that going to make it the best it could possibly be and truly drive be driven by the needs of the customers on the platform, as opposed to the benevolent dictator for  [00:41:18] Matt: [00:41:18] life. [00:41:19] Yeah. What's next from, is there a next platform play for you to integrate with? I think I was looking at another W3C techs report the other day and it for specifically for, e-commerce and. I would have to go back and dig this report out. Maybe, I saw woo commerce and in the Squarespace, e-commerce almost like neck and neck. [00:41:41] Is that true? Is there square? I was like, suddenly like what Squarespace e-commerce is this big and even realize it is that like an area you're going into or another platform? That's interesting.  [00:41:50]Dave: [00:41:50] We've, I've taken a quick look at Wix and Weebly and Squarespace, all kind of in the same breath. [00:41:57]There is definitely a. [00:42:00] We'll call it an economic shift on this platform where it is. It is aiming for a tier of store that doesn't want to pay as much as you get in Shopify, or you want to get in Wu. And it's difficult for me to convince a customer who's paying $4 a month for their e-commerce website to pay 29 for mine. [00:42:23] And I know this because of how the pricing worked in Shopify, like the base level in Shopify as 29. And the fact that I aligned with that. It makes it easier for me to sell my product because they've already made that mental commitment for 29. They're getting another 29. Isn't that bad. But when you're at four and you jumped to 29, that's too big and that's not a, that's not a battle I want to fight. [00:42:45] That's not a set of customers that I think are easy to deal with in that regard. So, I've looked at other platforms where we can head up markets. So our other e-commerce spaces. So things like Salesforce, cloud commerce. Things like that, but it's a little trickier to get into that because you kind of need to know some stores to have the testability. [00:43:09] Cause it's not like you're just downloading this, installing it and testing it out. You kind of have to work in tandem with somebody else. So, I I've got some plans. We're kind of cooking that up right now. I don't see, I'm keeping an eye on Squarespace and Wix and Weebly. And if they start moving up market. [00:43:25] Mid tiers, which is quite possible. They could, then it would make a lot of sense to integrate because there's going to be a large customer base there, but right now it doesn't look economically viable. Yeah, yeah.  [00:43:37] Matt: [00:43:37] Yeah. That makes, that makes total sense. I guess that's probably why I was so shocked at the footprint of the Squarespace. [00:43:42] Cause I was like, yeah, it makes sense. Because then you're like, well, what are these people selling? They're really seriously. Probably something like photo prints, and a couple of handmade things. That's probably about it, certainly not an apparel line or kayaks, which you'll probably find on Shopify, right? [00:44:00] People who are manufacturing, things, stuff like that. Very cool. Dave wrote ball, recapture.io. Congrats on being a free man than the last time I talked to you running the business day to day. Where else can folks find you? What else can they look forward to from.  [00:44:15] Dave: [00:44:15] Well, we just did our big release the 1st of July for SMS card abandonment and order notifications on recapture. [00:44:23] So if you've been itching to try that out or see what that's like, come to recapture.io and check that out. We also have broadcast emails out after Jill announced their shutdown, we had to make sure that was working to be able to seamlessly migrate folks over. So if you're. A former Jilt customer and you're looking for a place to land. [00:44:41] We'd love to talk to you at recapture and see if we can make things work for you. If somebody is looking to get a hold of me, you can find me on Twitter at Dave.  [00:44:51] Matt: [00:44:51] I heard you're actually making phone calls too. Right? You're calling people up, doing it the old fashioned way  [00:45:00] [00:45:00] Dave: [00:45:00] because your cell phone fashioned way, I would like, knock on their doors and press the flashes as it were, but that's not happening. [00:45:08] Matt: [00:45:08] Everyone else. Matt report.com maryport.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. Don't forget to tune in to your weekly dose of five minute WordPress news every week@thewpminute.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you. In the next episode. ★ Support this podcast ★

I appreciate a good side hustle story. Someone slogging away in the cubical but slowly building up an audience on Twitter on the weekends. I’m sure you know all about the “build in open” movement, and today’s guest really shocked me with that. See, maybe like you, I’ve listened to Dave Rodenbaugh on his podcast (with my boss Craig) Rogue Startups, for years now. But what really got me in today’s story, is that he was never really even “part-time” into his business Recapture.io. In fact, the way he put it, he was only devoting 10% of his energy into the business while being contracted at a corporate gig he recently had the chance to exit from. There’s lots of fun stuff in today’s episode covering everything from managing a day job to which marketing skills you need as a developer to kickstart your business. I hope you really enjoy it. Transcription Recapture – Dave and Matt – Matt Report [00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by paid memberships pro well, actually it’s their other product. Site-wide sales at site-wide sales.com. It’s a complete black Friday cyber Monday and flash sales tool for WooCommerce or paid memberships pro. Before, you know it, the deal day holidays will be fast upon us. And you want to prepare your WooCommerce or paid memberships pro website. [00:00:20] With the site-wide sales plugin, use it to make custom sale banners, targeted landing pages or apply discounts automatically in the cart. Use it to track the performance of all of these promotional features using the reporting feature, which will paint the picture of your black Friday and holiday shopping sales. I use it to help make your woo commerce or paid memberships pro store more money. [00:00:43] Get the first 30 days for free. And then it’s an easy $49 a year. Check out site-wide sales.com. That’s site-wide sales.com to make more money. This holiday sale season. [00:00:56]Let me tell you about creator courses.com/matt and how you can save 20% off using code mat to grab a hold of the great courses instructed by none other than Joe Casabona. So, what can you get from creator courses.com/matt. Courses to help business owners create stuff with absolutely no code. Learn how to build a website using beaver builder, Gutenberg, or both. [00:01:23] [00:01:23]And that’s not all visit creator courses.com/matt and save 20% off Joe’s other courses on PHP, full site editing in my two favorites. Podcasting in automation. I think learning the automation stuff is well worth the ticket in my eyes. Go to creator courses.com/matt. Right now. Seriously, stop the podcast and use code mat at checkout to save 20% off that’s creator courses.com/matt and use code mat to save 20% off today. [00:01:52]I appreciate a good side hustle story. Someone’s slogging away in the cubicle, but slowly building up an audience on Twitter on the weekends. I’m sure you know, all about the building open movement and today’s guest really shocked me with that. See maybe like you I’ve listened to Dave Rohde and bond his podcast with my boss, Craig rogue startups for years now. [00:02:12] But what really got me in today’s story is that he was never really even part time into his business. recapture.io. In fact, the way he put it, he was only devoting 10% of his energy into the business. While being contracted at a corporate gig, he recently had the chance to exit from there’s a lot of fun stuff in today’s episode, covering everything from managing and day job to which marketing skills you need as a developer. [00:02:38] To kickstart your business. I hope you really enjoy it. You’re listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter@mattreport.com slash subscribe and follow the podcast on apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet. [00:02:54] Please share this episode. On your social media. We’d love more listeners around here. And side note, [00:03:00] I had to rerecord with Dave after some Zen caster snafoos so we’re picking up from our conversation a little bit, warmed up. Okay. I hope you enjoy. [00:03:09] Matt: [00:03:09] One of the things that I caught you at a great time last time because you were only, I think like two weeks a free man on your own you get out of that sort of day job slash consultancy that you were in. I had you at an interesting moment where you were like, everything’s coming at me. This is exciting. [00:03:28]I, I’m kind of like looking to go to the next chapter of, of running recapture. Is that feeling still here or now that we’re like a month into it, things have settled, like, oh my God, you [00:03:39] Dave: [00:03:39] know, it’s kind of funny. It hasn’t really, I have not felt that euphoria lift yet. I imagine at some point it probably will. [00:03:48]No, th this is, this is definitely the honeymoon phase, right. And at some point the honeymoon phase will always go. But I still feel it. In fact, I was just having breakfast with my wife this morning. We were sitting outside and, I noted her. I said, Hey, it’s been, almost two months since I left the freelance job. [00:04:03] And she went, I know. And I was like, and it’s still great. So, I still, I still get up in the morning and we go do our walk and I come back and I have breakfast and coffee and I’m like, I get to spend my day on whatever the hell I want to today, which is of course recapturing my business, but there’s something still very energizing about that. [00:04:27] Like, it’s all, it’s my own experience. I’m not really beholden to anybody other than the customers. I don’t have to do. Stupid bullshit meetings and phone calls and status reports and just all of that stuff that I had to deal with in the corporate world. It’s just all gone like that lift that sh that weight has still lifted off my shoulders. [00:04:47] And I am just as happy then as I am. One [00:04:51] Matt: [00:04:51] of the things I think you hide really well. And I don’t know if this was intentional or I maybe just never even saw it because I’ve always been just looking at what you were doing with the recapture. You’ve been on the show, my podcast, before you have the podcast with Craig, who’s a happens to be my boss. [00:05:07] I never knew how much. And then we had our discussion more in depth. I never knew how much that freelance gig. Was sort of like weighing you down or how much it consumed when you and I chatted. I think you, throughout the, the ratio of like, it was 90% day job in 10% recapture, and that was kind of mind blowing, like how you manage that, how did you manage like so much of recapture with only 10% of energy. [00:05:37] Dave: [00:05:37] That’s an excellent question. And some days I’m amazed that things were able to progress along as well as they had because of that exact issue. And in fact, that was one of the main things I think that sort of drove me into this direction, like recapture could be doing so much better and here I am barely giving it enough oxygen to survive. [00:06:00] [00:05:59] Why, why can’t I do more? So, but it wasn’t always this way. The freelance thing, it was probably at one point it was like 40% freelance and 60% everything else. But at the time that 60% was a good chunk of the WordPress plugins. I had that I sold last year and recapture, that was the directory, a business directory plugin that was business directory and AWP PCP. [00:06:25] So. Those were things that all consumed my time. And I think when you said, hiding, I think that’s an excellent observation because I. I definitely compartmentalize when it comes to things like here’s this chunk of my business, here’s this other chunk, here’s this other chunk. And, I could operate in each of those worlds fairly separately without letting them bleed into each other. [00:06:52] But there came a point when the freelancing just was such a mentally taxing thing to deal with. I had. Just all kinds of toxic stuff going on in the corporate culture that I was there and the project that I was working on and the direction that it was all going. And it just, at some point I was like, this is too much. [00:07:12] I can’t deal with this anymore. I can’t keep it in the box. It’s bleeding out into everything else. So usually when I got onto podcasts, like the Matt. It would give me an opportunity to express the enthusiasm for that box that I didn’t get to really express any other way. So, it was like my brief window into positive energy venting, if you will. [00:07:34] And then it was back to the slog of the corporate world and yeah. So [00:07:39] Matt: [00:07:39] that’s tough. How much of the success of recaptured thus far? Is because you chose, these are my words. These are not your words. So obviously I hope for you to color in the lines here, but how much of the success of recapture is the market and the product that you chose. [00:07:58] And I’ll preface that with saying is like abandoned cart problems are or solutions. I should say. There’s a lot of them. I feel like it’s a big space, which is. Some people might look from the sidelines going, God, I don’t want to get into that space. There’s so much competition, but I feel like maybe in your case, it is, and was a good thing. [00:08:19]If you look at I think cart hook probably was where you were at and then just matured into a much larger product and solution, I think right on the heels of. Recording that we had Jilt shut down, which was a sort of like another, I guess, benefit to you. How much of the success do you think has, has leaned on, Hey, I picked the right product and the right market, because sometimes I think that could be something that kind of goes under the radar. [00:08:44] That a lot of people aren’t aware of. [00:08:47] Dave: [00:08:47] Well, I talked about this on other podcasts and I’ll mention it here as well. I believe very heavily in the notion of luck, surface area. So just quick definition for [00:09:00] somebody who might not be familiar with this, basically. Everyone in business is going to encounter some level of luck and whether you’re prepared for that luck or unprepared for that luck has to do with the surface area that you’ve created. [00:09:17] So in other words, can I capitalize on this lucky opportunity that comes around at this time because. I’ve made some kind of preparation for it. I’m ready to accept it. I’ve got the bandwidth to deal with it. Like all of these things have to kind of line up. I’ve had opportunities that appeared in my space and I wasn’t ready to capitalize them. [00:09:37] So they weren’t within my luck surface area, but being, being ready for those opportunities makes a huge difference in whether you’re successful or not successful. So, there were definitely lots of. We’ll call them lucky moments. We all want to think that entrepreneurship is solely about hard work and hard work is a piece of it. [00:09:57] And you can’t succeed without the hard work, but at the same time, every element of luck that you encounter that you can capitalize we’ll will level up your business. And the more of those that you can do, the better off you will end up. The same thing is true of Castillo’s when Craig and I have talked about this on the podcast. [00:10:15] I Craig, you and Craig have encountered many lucky moments in Castro’s getting into tiny seed, him having an opportunity to hire you when you were available. Each of these helps build on all of the previous moments that you’ve had before. And the same thing is true with recapture. So like for example, When I was able to acquire a recapture back in 2016, that was a lucky moment for me because I happened to have the money to do it. [00:10:41] And I was looking specifically for something that was, e-commerce SAS, recurring revenue. And it was in a space that I understood and it was a space that I could be passionate about. So that is a lucky moment where all of those things that kind of I’ve been preparing for came together in one shot. [00:10:58] And then after that, like the pandemic was another lucky moment. I know this is not lucky for a lot of people that lost loved ones, but if you were in e-commerce. Everything kind of took off in certain verticals and certain services, right? Capture was one of those services. And because we had been spending a lot of time, integrating with woo commerce, integrating with easy digital downloads, integrating with restrict content pro being on Shopify at that point and optimizing our listing all of these things, when that massive uptick in e-commerce store interest went on. [00:11:33] We were there and able to capitalize on it because we were available to people. We, we had enough interest and awareness in the community that people were able to take us and, and use the service at the time that they needed it the most. So that’s another lucky opportunity we were able to capitalize on. [00:11:53] And, it’s just building on moments like that again and again and again, in your business. [00:12:00] Entails, like I said, a lot of hard work and you’ve got to get out there and you’ve got to do the homework. I had to network with, the, I have a relationship with nexus and liquid web, and I think I was trying to, I was badgering poor Chris lemma for life. [00:12:14] 12 months, no joke. Like every two months, I just like ping out and say, Hey, what’s going on? Are you guys ready to integrate this yet? And they were like, yeah, no, not talk to me in a little bit. And I just kept doing that and kept doing that and kept doing that. And eventually it turned out. Initial relationship and then Jilt shut down. [00:12:31] And now it’s a bigger relationship cause they were relying on Jill. So again, it’s about timing and persistence and hard work. And the more you can make that surface area, big, these lucky events that come flying through your space, you can grab a hold of them and, let it ride your busy. [00:12:49] Matt: [00:12:49] Where do you rank the priority of. [00:12:52]Like developing features versus being. Social and networky and markety in the grand scheme of your luck surface area, like if you were sitting in front of a class of one year WordPress plugin entrepreneurs who are mostly developers, Would you tell them to increase the lung surface area by creating those integrations or, Hey, you got to blog more, you got to outreach more, maybe start a podcast. [00:13:24] Where do you set those priorities to, to increase that luck surface? [00:13:30] Dave: [00:13:30] I would never prioritize features on that list until I had some understanding of what’s out there in the space. Like we didn’t integrate with WooCommerce and easy digital downloads because I love those two so much. It happens that I do, but that’s not why I integrated with them. [00:13:48] I integrated with them because there was a huge market opportunity and doing that. That I can go after those opportunities and it allows me to be in other spaces. So I understood the market well enough to know that those were good plays, but part of what I would say to that, younger group of plugin authors, is that the reason that I knew those things is that I created relationships first. [00:14:14] So I had attended events, like word camps, and PressNomics where I talked with these others. Hosting companies and plugin authors and agencies and all of these other things to understand what are their concerns, who are the people in the space that are the movers and the shakers that I can learn more from that. [00:14:34] If I connect with it’s going to, improve my sphere. Of being able to do better things in the world, right? It’s not about, me personally, it’s about how can I improve my impact on the world and that, you’re not going to get that sitting around typing features out on a keyboard. [00:14:50] So those things matter, but they don’t matter first. Like you need to get the other things before you can get. The features, because you won’t know the right features [00:15:00] to build until you’ve talked to people, talk to your customers, talk to other people that are going to use your tool. Talk to hosting providers that might find a way to use you to improve the offerings to their customers. [00:15:10] If you can make somebody better with your product, then they’re going to be interested in you, but you’re not going to know that unless you get out there and talk to other people and find out what the hell they’re doing, right. Podcasting is another great way to do that. [00:15:22]Matt: [00:15:22] I forget which episode of. Rogue startups. [00:15:24] It was, but it might’ve been a more recent one when you were talking about the new SMS functionality of the product. And you’ll have to remind me of like what the context was, but you said something like here I am working on something else. And like the SMS stuff is just sitting, waiting to go, or at least that’s how I kind of remember it. [00:15:45] And you were, you were like, oh God, if I just, I just got to get out there and launch this, like, what am I doing? Spending all this time in this area when I can just, this features almost kind of ready, let me just launch it. I think that that’s. Such a common, well, first of all, am I getting that right? [00:16:00] Am I remembering this, this tug of war you had at one point with releasing that feature and other things you were doing? [00:16:06] Dave: [00:16:06] I think so. So there was a, a combination of forces that were coming in at the time. And we were talking about trying to release SMS first. It was going to be an April, then it was going to be in may and then it was going to be in June. [00:16:16] And it finally got released on July 1st. So I don’t have to say that anymore, but thank God. But it. I got distracted by a bunch of other things. And one of the things I think that kills us as entrepreneurs is lacking focus. So you see, and I, I’m as guilty as anybody else. Here’s a new shiny object over here. [00:16:34] Ooh, look at that. If we develop that boy, that would really make a move on MRR. Oh wait. But we could be doing this marketing hack right here instead. And all of those things are just constantly coming up in your, your field of view and you’ve got to, nail it down and say, look, I did this. If I don’t shove it out the door now I’m in big trouble. [00:16:54] So, for me, with the SMS stuff, what that came down to was that I was distracted by content marketing. And I spent like a month trying to hire a content marketer. And then the Jilt shutdown came along in June and all of a sudden everything got shuffled. Right. So then it was like, oh, geez well, SMS, isn’t going to really move the needle with Jilt customers because Jilt didn’t support SMS. [00:17:15] So now what do I need to do to make it. Jilt customers would be better served by recapture. Well, I gotta add marketing emails, broadcast emails. And so we were really close on that one too. So we just bundled it all together. SMS was done. And so we just put these two and said, all right, July 1st is when we’re launching. [00:17:32] We finished that up inside of a week in June and then pushed it out the door. But yeah, focus was killing me there and that was totally my bad. [00:17:42]Matt: [00:17:42] Back to, I guess, the, the luck surface area. And you hinted about this before too, is, you have a plan. And we, everyone says good, create a plan, create a calendar, like have these automations in these processes and everything will be running smoothly. [00:17:56] And then suddenly it’s like, okay, well maybe this. [00:18:00] Yeah. And it blows up and you’re like, oh, maybe new feature. And then like you start building a new feature, then suddenly Jill shuts down and that’s just a matte, like now you have to be like, okay, I literally have to drop all this other stuff because this is just now a massive opportunity. [00:18:16] And, and this is not really a question, but more of a statement just to frame it. Like we went through this, we’re going through this at and I’m only bringing it up because you talked to Craig every week, but it’s like, we’re doing all of these things where new products, new features, new things are rolling out new enhancements, and then suddenly it’s. [00:18:36] There’s an opportunity to buy another company. Well, that’s pretty big deal. And like, now we do that. So it’s just like, there’s that? And then there’s right. Craig working in is working his butt off to raise money and he raises money for the company. And then it’s just like right back to the feature grindstone have finished the migration. [00:18:59] Now we’ve got this app that just launched literally yesterday. Yesterday. Yep. Monday. And now there’s just like right back to the feature grindstone and you’re like, wow. Like things move at a pace. That’s it’s exciting. But also, man, there’s no plan for this. There’s no playbook, there’s nothing, there’s nothing. [00:19:17] Dave: [00:19:17] There’s no question. Yeah, no. There’s, there’s a certain chaotic insanity to the whole entrepreneur journey. And in some ways you can do all the planning you want, but no plan survives first contact with the customer. And in many cases, no plan survives first contact. Random events that happen out in the real world, acquiring companies, getting funding, Jilt shutdowns, all of these things, just things happen. [00:19:47] And the speed at which you can react to something is definitely whether your business lives or dies in these events. And it definitely is also whether the business grows or fails in these times as well. Those that were not able to. Advantage of the dynamic nature of the e-commerce, if they weren’t pivoting hard during their vertical, like if you were in the travel vertical during COVID shutdown, people were just pounding on you with a sledgehammer into the ground, like six feet deep. [00:20:16] They didn’t stop, but if you were in like like a lounge wear sweat pants, hoodies, things like that, you couldn’t keep the stuff inside. Your warehouse long enough to sell it. So, you had to be reactive to the act of circumstances there, or it kills your business and, that’s what Craig’s doing with Castillo’s and that’s what I’ve tried to do with [00:20:36] Matt: [00:20:36] recapture, for sure. [00:20:37] Yeah. I want to go back to talking about partnerships which will eventually segue into word PR into woo commerce versus Shopify. But before we get to that flaming ball of chaos, Navigating partnerships in WordPress. I’m interested to hear just your opinion on it. Sometimes. I think, especially for somebody like you with a product that could [00:21:00] really latch onto a hosting company, those are very tricky waters to now. [00:21:04]I know I used to work at Pagely and it was just like, man, like people wouldn’t even say WP engine around me. Like it wasn’t like, [00:21:13] Dave: [00:21:13] like we don’t talk about that. No. Yeah. [00:21:16] Matt: [00:21:16] It wasn’t on any of those podcasts where there were other web hosts. Like, it is a very, I feel like in the hosting world, maybe it’s getting a little bit better that it was like, you gotta be in a camp and that’s the camp you’re in and there’s isolation there. [00:21:28]Any thoughts around navigating. And also just like critical feedback on products and services in the WordPress space. I feel like doesn’t exist in the normal zeitgeists like, I’m looking at my Sony camera right now. And like, if you went online to YouTube and you looked at, or a forum and you went to Sony versus Panasonic and there would be like great debate. [00:21:54] Like critical. Like, but every, at the end of the day, everybody’s fine about the two companies. But I feel like in the WordPress space, you don’t get that like damn EDD for doing this. And this is why I’m woo commerce. I don’t have the right phrase for it, but I feel like that partnership slash criticism in the WordPress space doesn’t exist. [00:22:14] Maybe. We’re all too friendly with each other. Can I say that like, we’re all friendly? I dunno, it’s just a weird thing. Like I feel like if you walk down the hall. And talked about your favorite brand of anything else. There could be clear debate, clear, concise, love it, hate it. I could go without it, but in the WordPress space that doesn’t exist. [00:22:33] Am I making sense with that? Like, do you feel that thing in the air, like I do. I, I [00:22:37] Dave: [00:22:37] totally hear what you’re saying on that one and I know exactly what you mean. Yeah, there’s, there’s definitely this weird space where it seems like. You can talk about one hosting company, but you can never say hosting company a versus B, right. [00:22:50] Or if you do like that discussion gets shut down real fast. And I don’t think it’s a conscious thing, but I’ve seen it on chats. And just over the years on blog posts, like it’s very rare that somebody sits down and truly compares one to the other. Head to head and say, look, if you really like these things, this hosting company makes a lot of sense. [00:23:11] And if you like these things, then this other hosting company is a better fit for you. But yeah. So, you were talking about navigating partnerships. I think it’s kind of the same thing. Like as soon as you declare allegiance to one. It’s almost like the others kind of look at you with a little side eye and with a little bit of stink-eye on top of it. [00:23:32] And they’re like, well, you’ve already got them in your camp, so we can’t be in your camp at the same time. I think that goes to the detriment of all WordPress users. Like there’s nothing that says you can’t be friendly and competitive in the same thing. And I think when you say that they’re overly friendly, I wouldn’t characterize it like that. [00:23:55] I would characterize it. Yeah. Unwilling to criticize in general, it’s something about the [00:24:00] community. I don’t know what it is. If they are looking not to drum up drama and they feel like that’s going to create unnecessary drama or unhelpful drama, it probably could. I definitely could see that that could get into some real nasty debates that just degenerate into ad hominem attacks. [00:24:16] And, you suck because you picked oh, well, okay. Yeah. Back off, man. That’s it. That’s that’s not necessary. So yeah, I don’t know. I’ve, I’ve felt that and it’s weird, but the partnership thing. [00:24:31] Matt: [00:24:31] Because it’s farther back now. Like, I’ll say, well, you can do, you can define it. Is it a, is it a partnership with nexus? [00:24:38] And if so, like, do you feel like one, maybe you can’t because you’ve signed something or two, like, do you feel like, ah, man, it’s gonna be a little bit harder for me to knock on the door, WP engine to do this because they see me over here with nexus and Chris. So like that kind of friction that you think that holds you back. [00:24:55] Dave: [00:24:55] It doesn’t hold me back. Let me say that. Okay. To sign because like the stuff that I set up with nexus, it wasn’t exclusive anyway. And it was very friendly. Like, look, I’ve got this thing, your customers can use this thing. You got this offering and it makes it more valuable to your customers. If we say we put this on your dashboard here, like, it was very much like how can we make this a win-win thing and like help. [00:25:15] I will be happy to help create content to make your customers more successful. Like at the end of the day, That story should play well with any hosting company, right? If I can give you something that helps your customers be more successful and you help me bring more customers, and we’re both winning in this relationship, it shouldn’t matter how many people I’ve set that deal up with because your customer success should be the foremost thing at the top of your mind. [00:25:42] But, I don’t know from if I have this deal going on with nexus, does that make me. A bit of a hot potato with WP engine. I don’t really know. I noticed that before I had any deal in place of any hosting company at all, like just getting to the right person who was interested in what I had to say, and that saw the value of it. [00:26:02] Was kind of a non-trivial thing to navigate, especially when, folks are coming and going and coming and going. Even if you have the right contacts at these companies and the network relationships I’ve made gives me some ins to most of these hosting companies where I can say, Hey, I want to talk to so-and-so. [00:26:20] It still doesn’t necessarily mean that that company is interested in your offering or that they’re thinking about things the same way that you are. So. It kind of is another thing where it has to all line up. They’ve got to be thinking about this the same way that you’re thinking about this. And that’s where I’ve met. [00:26:39] The most resistance, I think is that, I say, Hey, are you thinking about a managed WooCommerce hosting? And I’m like, okay, well, we’re, we’re already missing this each other here. And I don’t, maybe it’s going to be a better fit in a year or two years or something like that. [00:26:53] So with nexus, they were very much like, yep. We’ve got that. Yep. We want this. All right. Let’s make it all happen. [00:27:00] With a little bit of persistence. It’s so. [00:27:02] Matt: [00:27:02] It almost, and really almost makes you appreciate like a bigger business. Right. You kind of have an appreciation for it. And, and again, I’ll frame that is when you look at somebody like Austin, like SIADH from awesome motive. [00:27:16] Right. And you see. Well, the, the sheer size, the competency of business and you have a relationship there because that’s where you sold the plugins to. Right? So you kind of see there’s a trust there. And then you can kind of make sense, because if you’re just solo developer, Dave knocking on the door of, big web hosting conglomerate. [00:27:38]They’re going to look at you and be like, well, man, we can’t, this is way too much of a risk to just take your software, slapping it in front of 30,000 customers potentially. And we are just going to trust you. You start to kind of appreciate, okay. The bigger businesses can kind of win. There’s more sustainability, there’s better trust. [00:27:56]There’s just more invested in the whole thing. And as a small business owner, like you kind of get it once you start going through the throws of, of navigating those, I dunno, corporate waters, enterprise waters whatever you want to call it. Kind of appreciate a little bit more, at least I do anyway. [00:28:10] Yeah, [00:28:11] Dave: [00:28:11] no, I would agree with that. And it’s interesting. These larger companies. Because they’re so big, like, it’s the difference between moving like a cheetah and moving like an elephant. You’re the small start-ups. So you can navigate pretty quickly make the fast sprints and turn quickly. They’re kind of plotting along in a very straight direction and they’re not going to change their direction very quickly. [00:28:34] So it takes them awhile to get going in a direction. And then once they’re going in that direction, it takes them a while to change directions. And the bigger the company gets, the bigger the elephant gets, right? Yeah. So by bringing in small companies, I think a lot of them want to increase their agility in that sense. [00:28:53] But of course, there’s that whole trust aspect. Like we know you’re smaller than us, but are you big enough that you can handle what we hand the hand over to you? And if that trust isn’t there, then yeah. That’s, that’s all gone. So again, this is part of the networking aspect. If you can have that relationship with another person and that they get to know your business and they’re like, oh yeah, you’ve been around for awhile. [00:29:13] Oh, look, you’ve got some customers. Oh, look, you served a lot of customers. Oh, you’ve done a pretty decent volume. Hey, maybe you not, might not be a fly by night. Business and we might be able to trust you like that. Trust isn’t something that just happens overnight. Right? You got to build it slowly over years. [00:29:28] Matt: [00:29:28] Yeah. Shopify versus a woo commerce when we chatted. Yeah. Forget [00:29:33] Dave: [00:29:33] it. We’re done. Now. I have a lot to say about this. Go ahead. [00:29:37] Matt: [00:29:37] We chatted last time. I think one of the things now, look, I have only set up a handful of Shopify. Generally out of just helping some friends and some local entrepreneurs in my area do it. [00:29:47]I think one of the things I’ll try to make this a quick question. Like one of the things I really appreciate from Shopify is. On the outside anyway, like their partnership program looks more mature. Like the way they work with [00:30:00] agencies looks more mature. And generally, I feel like they’re willing to work with the freelancers of the world versus. [00:30:07] WordPress and WooCommerce is kind of just like, see you later. Bye. Like, we’ll see it at the end of the road, by the way, we’ll sell $5,000 websites@wordpress.com. Right. And to me, that’s like, man, like I look at it Shopify and I’m like, yeah woo commerce, WordPress should have something like this. But I guess at the end of the day, it’s not all roses and rainbows from the outside because Shopify is going to. [00:30:35] I guess watch like a watchful eye of, what you’re doing as an, as an app, as an integrator, as an agency. And if they see something that’s super profitable, I guess they could just go. Yeah, we’ll just do that. We’ll just do that in house and just demolish your app, I guess in the matter of seconds is what they could do. [00:30:52] So again, sharp road to navigate. I like it from the outset. Like it’s an opportunity for a freelancer or a small agency to get more work. But curious on your thoughts on partnership program in generally working with a Shopify versus a WooCommerce. [00:31:09] Dave: [00:31:09] Yeah. So you wanted a short answer, right? Well, I [00:31:14] Matt: [00:31:14] was, I was trying to make a short question, [00:31:16] Dave: [00:31:16] which is okay, so I can have a long answer. [00:31:18] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Let me talk about the platforms first in general. So I think when you’re picking Shopify versus woo, there’s a lot of things that go into that decision in general, that should make you, focus on what are the strengths of each of those platforms. So with Shopify very easy to get started, low tech threshold, to understand there’s lots of stuff that you can do without being a full stack developer. [00:31:47] Integrate apps and just basically get a store up and running. So if you aren’t sure, like you’re doing it drop shipping or it’s a new product and you’re trying to find product market fit or product audience bit or whatever it is. I think Shopify gets you up and running quicker to something that’s pretty polished that comes at a y’all are costs. [00:32:10] So, the hosting that Shopify, the apps that you’re adding on and all of that, but. That can be managed and I think it’s simplifies things and gets you going pretty well to where you want be. With that said, once you reach a certain point and you’re like, now I want my store to do this. And I want my checkout to have this in it. [00:32:32] And I want to use these payment methods, but not these other ones. And I also want this post purchase, checkout flow to be going on. And I want these kind of abandoned cart emails, and I want this, and I want that like for somebody who knows exactly what they want, Shopify can be incredibly expensive and very frustrating because it has been traditionally difficult to cut it. [00:32:53] So, this is where Woo’s strength comes to play. In my opinion, is that, if you’re on the right hosting provider [00:33:00] and you have a good agency that you can work with, that knows what they’re doing with Boone. These are out there. You can do a nice build and you can customize the hell out of it. [00:33:08] Yeah. And get exactly what you want. And if you’ve got a good developer on Wu, you can make it run as fast or faster than a Shopify store. So performance, isn’t an issue necessarily if you’ve done the right things and you’ve done your homework. And, there are plenty of smart wound stores that do that. [00:33:25] The downside to that, of course is complexity. And you got to have a higher threshold of technical knowledge either for yourself or a team to put that together. And, you’ve got to find the right agencies and the right developers. And if you’re talking about the energy and the Wu space and the energy. [00:33:43] Shopify space. They’re pretty different. And there’s a lot of energy in Shopify and it’s hard to ignore that and there’s energy and Wu too, but to like sort out the wheat from the chaff is a little more challenging because those really good Wu developers aren’t necessarily out there trumpeting themselves, talking about how great their agency is. [00:34:04] I can tell you the top five shops. Development agencies right off the top of my head because of what I see on Twitter, because of what I see in their blogs and just general social media activity, I would have a harder time doing that for woo commerce based on those factors. I know a few of them, but they’re harder to pick out. [00:34:21] Matt: [00:34:21] Right. So do you think that’s because Shopify helps prop those agencies up to part of their marketing and sales? [00:34:28] Dave: [00:34:28] Yes. So WooCommerce as a platform, doesn’t do enough for partners and agencies, not the way that Shopify does, like here at Shopify at unite announced that they were abolishing the 20% at a revenue share on all of their partner apps up to your first million dollars a year. [00:34:49] So basically it’s like everybody on the platform got a 25% raise, including recapture, which I was thrilled about. WooCommerce. If you want to go to their store, there was this discussion in post status that I was contributing to. If you are exclusive to the woo commerce store, 40% revenue share. If you’re non-exclusive it’s 60%. [00:35:09]I understand why WooCommerce didn’t want. To just let every person possible onto the platform and turn it into the repo, like the repo turned out to, it’s kind of a, we’ll call it a mixed bag. I think that’s the, the most politically correct way I could say it. Yeah. There’s a lot of garbage out there and there’s a lot of good stuff and it does take some time to sort through it and figure out, I think they were trying to curate the woo commerce store experience to be a little higher quality than that. [00:35:41] But I think they went about it wrong. And it’s [00:35:43] Matt: [00:35:43] been it’s 60% to automatic [00:35:45] Dave: [00:35:45] or 60, 60% to automatic. Yes. Wow. Which is, like, come on really. You’re taking more than half of my business. How am I supposed to be profitable at that point? It’s not this isn’t a charity to you. So these numbers are just [00:36:00] wrong in my, like, they don’t encourage [00:36:02] Matt: [00:36:02] catches a lot of flack for 30%, right? [00:36:05]Dave: [00:36:05] Come on, apple, apple at 30 bucks percent is considered untenable and you all at WooCommerce that are doing 40 and 60%. Come on, give me a break. That’s why my plugins are never going to be on the WooCommerce repository. I know I’m not alone in this. So, there are some plugins that are there, but guess what? [00:36:23] They’re all free. 40% of zero is still zero. So you’re good. They’re, they’re asking for me to share my revenue 60% a month. You just killed my profitability to the point where I can’t run my business anymore. So it’s that sort of mentality. That I think is hurting the Wu commerce ecosystem. Like there isn’t an agency support program. [00:36:44] There isn’t a big conference every year. That has the energy of Shopify unite. There isn’t a partner program that really nurtures everybody along. Like with Shopify partners. Like you sign up, you’re getting an email a day for like 30 days telling you here’s some partner tips. Here’s this development thing. [00:37:01] Here’s this resource. Here’s this? Here’s this here’s this guess how many times we got from WooCommerce? Zero. Yeah. Yeah. I, it they’re very different ecosystems and I think it’s to the detriment of WooCommerce, that they are not putting more energy into that, that piece of it, because that is a big part of why Shopify has been successful. [00:37:23] Matt: [00:37:23] Yeah. I agree a hundred percent. And again, I have very little experience from the Shopify side. I just know from what I don’t receive from support from WordPress and seeing what everything else is happening. And I guess look at when you. Zoom out and take a look at the sheer size of WordPress compared to Shopify just I’m talking like installed platform based like that kind of thing. [00:37:46] Yeah. The, the, the play for WordPress and automatic is when it comes to open source. How are you going to monetize it? It has to be done through like that trust factor. So it’s open source. It’s super flexible. It’s the same message. Automatic and you and I can go out and tell a customer and they’ll just win by having the most trusted plugin, a jet pack or a premium ad-ons from woocommerce.com or something like that. [00:38:17] And they’ll win. On that trust level where Shopify, you’re just going to go there and spend money. Like you’re choosing that platform. So you’re you, you’ve made the decision to go there and they’re telling you, the whole platform is trusted with WordPress it’s. Hey, it’s great. It’s open source. Do whatever you want. [00:38:34]But by the way, Jetpack is the most trusted way to secure and manage your site. And that also comes with whatever WooCommerce add ons that you buy for those bundles that they have for like 2 99, 3 99 or whatever. And their argument will be you trust it because it comes from ashore. You can go get Dave’s go ahead and get Dave’s. [00:38:53] But you know, you’re going to trust us better because we’re the, the company behind it kind of thing. So I can’t fault them [00:39:00] for it. It’s just, one of those things. So many people have pushed towards jet pack or excuse me, to WooCommerce and WordPress because they love the software and there’s no, there’s that love doesn’t come back to us. [00:39:15] What are we going to do? [00:39:16] Dave: [00:39:16] Nothing we can do. There’s nothing we can do, unfortunately. And the other thing. I, I don’t like, is that w well, so to contrast this, let me say, oh, Shopify does this. So Shopify does do acquisitions on things, but not like, not at the same level that I’ve seen automatic do it, where they pull in things like mail poet, right. [00:39:35] Or there pull all this stuff in and turn it into Jetpack. Like Shopify is not doing that. They build stuff and they’ll build it to a level like, there was a year, I think it was like the first unite I went to and it was me. Two years after I’d acquired recapture and they released the abandoned cart emails. [00:39:52] And those that knew me at the conference were like, so how do you feel about abandoned cart emails on Shopify now is like, I feel okay about it because they’re just, they’re 60% solution and I’m a hundred percent solution. And I can tell you like all the shortcomings, it’s great for people getting started out and it gives you those tools to get going and get your store off the ground. [00:40:14] It’s never serious enough to like take you to the next level. So it’ll get you to like the 5,000 a month rate. But after that, it’s going to break down pretty quickly. Cause you’re just not doing as good of a job as you could be with other apps that are more professional. And I’ve seen this a little bit in big commerce, too, where they build in these features and then know they’re okay, but they’re not great. [00:40:35] And you build your store up to a certain level and then you get these other things and you use them instead. I don’t see that with WooCommerce. They’re trying to pull in everything and say, okay, we’re going to be really good at email. We’ve got mail poet now, but are you really the best at email? Because you got all these other things you’re doing too. [00:40:54] And you’ve got this team, that’s doing mail poet, and I don’t want them to fault the male poet folks. They’re a great plugin and they do a lot. It’s just, your priorities are going to be driven by the platform, not the customers that are using it. So. Is that going to make it the best it could possibly be and truly drive be driven by the needs of the customers on the platform, as opposed to the benevolent dictator for [00:41:18] Matt: [00:41:18] life. [00:41:19] Yeah. What’s next from, is there a next platform play for you to integrate with? I think I was looking at another W3C techs report the other day and it for specifically for, e-commerce and. I would have to go back and dig this report out. Maybe, I saw woo commerce and in the Squarespace, e-commerce almost like neck and neck. [00:41:41] Is that true? Is there square? I was like, suddenly like what Squarespace e-commerce is this big and even realize it is that like an area you’re going into or another platform? That’s interesting. [00:41:50]Dave: [00:41:50] We’ve, I’ve taken a quick look at Wix and Weebly and Squarespace, all kind of in the same breath. [00:41:57]There is definitely a. [00:42:00] We’ll call it an economic shift on this platform where it is. It is aiming for a tier of store that doesn’t want to pay as much as you get in Shopify, or you want to get in Wu. And it’s difficult for me to convince a customer who’s paying $4 a month for their e-commerce website to pay 29 for mine. [00:42:23] And I know this because of how the pricing worked in Shopify, like the base level in Shopify as 29. And the fact that I aligned with that. It makes it easier for me to sell my product because they’ve already made that mental commitment for 29. They’re getting another 29. Isn’t that bad. But when you’re at four and you jumped to 29, that’s too big and that’s not a, that’s not a battle I want to fight. [00:42:45] That’s not a set of customers that I think are easy to deal with in that regard. So, I’ve looked at other platforms where we can head up markets. So our other e-commerce spaces. So things like Salesforce, cloud commerce. Things like that, but it’s a little trickier to get into that because you kind of need to know some stores to have the testability. [00:43:09] Cause it’s not like you’re just downloading this, installing it and testing it out. You kind of have to work in tandem with somebody else. So, I I’ve got some plans. We’re kind of cooking that up right now. I don’t see, I’m keeping an eye on Squarespace and Wix and Weebly. And if they start moving up market. [00:43:25] Mid tiers, which is quite possible. They could, then it would make a lot of sense to integrate because there’s going to be a large customer base there, but right now it doesn’t look economically viable. Yeah, yeah. [00:43:37] Matt: [00:43:37] Yeah. That makes, that makes total sense. I guess that’s probably why I was so shocked at the footprint of the Squarespace. [00:43:42] Cause I was like, yeah, it makes sense. Because then you’re like, well, what are these people selling? They’re really seriously. Probably something like photo prints, and a couple of handmade things. That’s probably about it, certainly not an apparel line or kayaks, which you’ll probably find on Shopify, right? [00:44:00] People who are manufacturing, things, stuff like that. Very cool. Dave wrote ball, recapture.io. Congrats on being a free man than the last time I talked to you running the business day to day. Where else can folks find you? What else can they look forward to from. [00:44:15] Dave: [00:44:15] Well, we just did our big release the 1st of July for SMS card abandonment and order notifications on recapture. [00:44:23] So if you’ve been itching to try that out or see what that’s like, come to recapture.io and check that out. We also have broadcast emails out after Jill announced their shutdown, we had to make sure that was working to be able to seamlessly migrate folks over. So if you’re. A former Jilt customer and you’re looking for a place to land. [00:44:41] We’d love to talk to you at recapture and see if we can make things work for you. If somebody is looking to get a hold of me, you can find me on Twitter at Dave. [00:44:51] Matt: [00:44:51] I heard you’re actually making phone calls too. Right? You’re calling people up, doing it the old fashioned way [00:45:00] [00:45:00] Dave: [00:45:00] because your cell phone fashioned way, I would like, knock on their doors and press the flashes as it were, but that’s not happening. [00:45:08] Matt: [00:45:08] Everyone else. Matt report.com maryport.com/subscribe. Join the mailing list. Don’t forget to tune in to your weekly dose of five minute WordPress news every week@thewpminute.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you. In the next episode.

“Managed WordPress Hosting” is as commonly known now, thanks to Sally Strebel as Kleenex. Pagely continues to be a market leader in the hosting space. And they’re privately funded! Their business conference Pressnomics is also Sally’s brainchild and attended by a host of entrepreneurs. In this episode, Sally chats with Bridget and Jason about how our previous experiences can help us see a path forward. Follow Sally Strebel on Twitter @BizGirl “Last, being underestimated is a gift. They’ll never see you coming until they can’t help but notice. If you’re with the right people while that’s happening, there’s no better feeling.” Read her essay, “Marginalized” on HeroPress https://heropress.com/essays/marginalized/ Show Sponsors Desktop Server – ServerPress https://serverpress.com/ WPsitesync https://www.wpsitesync.com/ Become A Patron And Support Us On Patreon!

For links, show notes, transcription, video and more visit: https://pagely.com/podcast/episodes/ep-20-rahul-bansal Rahul Bansal has built RTcamp from scratch to be a hugely successful WP dev agency. We were honored to have him speak this year at PressNomics 6 on the lessons learned from growing his organization. In this conversation Sean interviews Rahul about the pillars of a solid company culture, how to implement them in one's own company and Rahul's lessons from growing his dev agency. Enjoy!

For links, show notes, transcript, video and more visit: https://pagely.com/podcast/episodes/ep-13-jon-bickerton/ Jon Bickerton is a proactive CPA specializing in corporate tax, research & development tax credit studies and cost segregation studies. His talk for PressNomics 6 covers the the major traps to avoid and opportunities on which to capitalize in corporate tax matters. In this episode we discuss strategies to avoid getting audited, common mis-steps that lead to audits, what you need to know in the event you are audited, capitalizing on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, R&D tax credits, cost segregation studies for accelerating depreciation and other strategies for wealth preservation.

For transcript, links, show notes, video and more visit: https://pagely.com/podcast/episodes/ep-9-mike-roberts Mike Roberts started SpyFu back in 2005 and has managed to grow it to become a healthy, profitable, entirely-bootstrapped company having never taken investment. This has given him a lot of freedom in terms of how he runs things and latitude to maintain a course with the business that closely aligns with his values. In this interview (of which Mike’s side is conducted from his beach house in Oceanside, California) we discuss points from Mike’s talk at PressNomics 6 on what staying bootstrapped affords you, advice for early-stage companies intending to not raise capital, some gangster veteran tips about how to handle your ISP when your internet goes down and the finer points of Segway jousting (pun intended). Enjoy!

In this episode we welcome Primoz Ciglar from Proteus Themes. We were first introduced to Primoz when he embarked on an interesting experiment to make connection with other Entreprenuers at a not too distant Pressnomics WordPress business conference. Topics Included: Transitioning from developer to marketer Suplementing marketplace sales (Theme Forrest) with your own shop Managing multiple support and distribution channels Marketing Expirements Facebook Live The struggle of ROI A/B Testing Customer Feedback Personal Brand, transparency, mental health Connecting to the larger community Invest with the right people You are not alone and your situation is not unique Taking care of yourself Primoz Cigler Proteus Themes Facebook Live Experiment Primoz T-Shirt and PressNomics review

Welcoming back James, the hosts get back to square one and catch up on both work and personal life, while sharing recent Pressnomics and business takeaways. Topics Include: James shares his 5 Year Pressnomics veteran experience. Takeaways from this year's conference. The magic of the hallway track & after-party discussions. Switching things up: personal goal updates! Jean keys us in on his progress toward being a professional Padel player. James's fitness check in. A brief on diet and hobbies. Cautionary tales: When to-do lists do more harm than good. Limiting digital shopping can open up a surprising amount of free time. Sleep vs actual rest. Metrics for maximizing your time in dream land. The benefits of routine and meditation. Take advantage of your biological clock's prime [functional] time. Mentioned on the Show: Sleep by Nick Littlehales Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy

This week I talk to Tim Strifler about his take on attending his first Pressnomics conference Upcoming Events WordCamp Douala – April 15 Segment 1: In the News Yoast — is nagging people to update PHP! Segment 2:  Interview with Tim Strifler Follow Tim: @TimStrifler ‏ Segment 3: Tool of the Week Simply Schedule Appointments   This weeks…

This week I talk to Tim Strifler about his take on attending his first Pressnomics conference Upcoming Events WordCamp Douala – April 15 Segment 1: In the News Yoast — is nagging people to update PHP! Segment 2:  Interview with Tim Strifler Follow Tim: @TimStrifler ‏ Segment 3: Tool of the Week Simply Schedule Appointments   This weeks…

This week I share tips ways to plan for 2017 – It's Not Too Late! Upcoming Events WordCamp Torino – April 7-8 Pressnomics 5 – April 6-8 Segment 1: In the News WordCamp San Diego was great. Kari Leigh Fundraiser WordPress Essentials Course – Online Segment 2:  Planning for 2017!  Acorn Digit Segment 3: Tool of the Week…

This week I share tips ways to plan for 2017 – It's Not Too Late! Upcoming Events WordCamp Torino – April 7-8 Pressnomics 5 – April 6-8 Segment 1: In the News WordCamp San Diego was great. Kari Leigh Fundraiser WordPress Essentials Course – Online Segment 2:  Planning for 2017!  Acorn Digit Segment 3: Tool of the Week…

Life Updates Adam: WCSD was great Kyle: Starting new job! WordPress News. Sucuri to GoDaddy.   Pressnomics is this week..  Whoohoo! Wearing/Drinking Kyle – WC Chicago Hoodie + Water Adam- ServerPress Polo + Water from a USF Mug Questions If you're doing freelance on the side, where are the best places to find clients? Is…

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Brian and Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative. They are a vibrant, creative studio that delivers purpose-driven design and engaging experiences for businesses who want to stand out and step into the spotlight. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Launch your new site today! Brian and Jennifer love challenges and deadlines, and are brand building, WordPress wielding, Lego playing nerds dedicated to creating beautiful, flexible, and powerful platforms for rapidly growing businesses. In this 38-minute episode Brian Gardner, Jennifer Bourn, and Brian Bourn discuss: The founding of Bourn Creative Using Genesis within a Creative Agency Choosing a business size that fits your lifestyle Tips for maintaining a consistent workflow from home Creating a work/life balance that revolves around family The importance of scheduling and client communication Building a profit margin into your client services Creating partnerships to create recurring revenue streams Evaluating expenses on a consistent basis Listen to StudioPress FM below ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes This episode is brought to you by Digital Commerce Summit Follow Bourn Creative on Twitter Follow Brian on Twitter Follow Jennifer on Twitter Visit Bourn Creative on Facebook Inspired Imperfection Visit Inspired Imperfection on Facebook The Transcript How to Sustain a Profitable Creative Agency Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us. Attendee 1: For me, it’s hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work. Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before. Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools. Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers — people like you — more easily. Here are a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events. Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m learning a lot and having a lot of fun. Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to? Am I missing something?” Attendee 6: The training and everything — the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connected with both people who are putting it on and then the other attendees. Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. Voicevoer : StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy and building an online platform. Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian talks with Jennifer and Brian Bourn of Bourn Creative on how to sustain a profitable creative agency. Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone, welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner. Unfortunately, I’m on my own today because Lauren is out. It worked out well because today we have two guests: husband and wife, Brian and Jennifer Bourn. Very excited to talk to them as we continue the series with the members of our Genesis community. Today we’re joined by Brian and Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative. They are a vibrant creative studio that delivers purpose-driven design and engaging experiences for businesses who want to stand out and step into the spotlight. Brian and Jennifer love challenges and deadlines, and are brand-building, WordPress-wielding, Lego-playing nerds dedicated to creating beautiful, flexible, powerful platforms for rapidly growing businesses. They are also very good with words, because that was a mouthful and well said. There you go. It’s a huge pleasure to have you guys on the show. Welcome and thank you for being here. Brian Bourn: Thanks for inviting us. Jennifer Bourn: Thanks for having us. Brian Gardner: This will be a fun challenge because I’ve got two of you. Hopefully what I’ll do is address questions to either/or and then we’ll have things open. There’s no process here, so we’ll just do our thing. Brian Bourn: Sounds great. Jennifer Bourn: Sounds great. Using Genesis Within a Creative Agency Brian Gardner: There we go. Let’s talk about WordPress and Genesis, in that very order. Brian, why don’t you talk about how you guys got involved with WordPress? Then, Jen, maybe you can talk about the Genesis side. Brian Bourn: Perfect. Yeah, they’re all intermingled. We’ve been in business now for 11 years. In July we passed our 11th year. Just think, 11 years ago when we first were into web — when Jen was on her own, which she’ll talk about later, the roots of some of our agency — everything was done in static HTML. Then we transferred over to a private label content management system and designed and built custom templates for that. We quickly reached the limitations and then were looking for something more, something better, something more capability-focused. We then made that switch to WordPress. I don’t know the exact year of that, but I do know it was around version 2.7, 2.8, somewhere right in there. It was the upper 2-point-whatever version. Jennifer Bourn: It was the end of 2008, the beginning of 2009. Brian Bourn: Yeah, and as far as WordPress, we started out designing and building completely one-offs, custom themes. I know for a fact that Jennifer bought some [revolution themes inaudible 00:05:16], some of your very early origins, and then migrated. She also bought some themes from StudioPress before Genesis was ever a thing, when the themes used to be standalone. Then when Genesis came out, and the whole child theming concept, and WordPress sites were getting more complex, we were looking for a good starting point that would aid our development and make our product better for our clients. Once we tried Genesis a few times we haven’t looked back and we’ve built every single site on Genesis since. Jennifer Bourn: That pretty much covers that. Brian Gardner: Okay. In that case then, Jen, you get the next question. How about that? Jennifer Bourn: Sure. Brian Gardner: You guys are obviously a husband and wife team. You have your own agency. You’ve managed to do very well for yourselves and probably could grow way bigger than you are now. I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but why the decision to I know you work with a few people outside of yourselves, but why the decision to keep it smaller scale than growing into a huge agency? Choosing a Business Size That Fits Your Lifestyle Jennifer Bourn: We’ve gone back and forth about growth. Do we grow? Do we not grow? I think it’s something that a lot of people wrestle with. We grew and expanded for a while and found that the structure of our business at the time didn’t support that and our freedom at the same time. Our kids are now 10 and 13 and they’re not going to be at home for much longer. Natalie is in eighth grade now. In five years she’s going to be gone. Carter not that much longer after her. We really looked at what we wanted for our life, and we want to do really great work for great clients that we enjoy working with, but at the same time we want to really live life and enjoy the kids while they want to hang out with us, while they want to spend time with us — and they’re fun. We want to be able to have the flexibility and the freedom in our schedule to be able to structure our client work around travel and vacations and family adventures and all of those things. Also, looking at the way that we’ve structured our business, duplicating ourselves is really difficult. The market is highly competitive, and finding the right people to fill in the gaps that you need is tough. We have some subcontractors that we work with who are amazing. They allow us to keep the train moving when we’re traveling and help fill in some of the holes of where we might not be the strongest. For right now, we’re really happy with the size that we’re at, the projects that we’re doing, the clients that we’ve got, and the flexibility to be able to do tons of fun things with the kids all the time. I don’t think I know anybody that takes more vacations than we do. Brian Gardner: I was going to bring that up later. We’ll get to that later, because it’s true. Jennifer Bourn: That’s not to say that we aren’t taking away conversations in the background about growth and looking at what that looks like for us. Brian Gardner: It’s refreshing. We recently spoke with Bill Ericson and he also talked about work-life balance and how important that is for him. I see in my little community and ecosystem — which includes people like you and Bill, and even Rafal and Jason Shuler, who is another one we talked about — people who have probably the chops and the capability of growing bigger than they are, but they refuse to because they want to put so much emphasis on family and spending time. As I mentioned on Bill’s show, it’s so refreshing to be around people who share that sentiment. It is huge, I know. My son is 12 and in seventh grade, and we also have only a few years left. There’s time to go crazy and work harder and grow and get bigger when they’re gone. As they say, the days go by slow, the years go by fast. I don’t want to look back and be like, “I built a great business, but not a great relationship with him or with Shelly” or whatever. It’s so great to hear that from you guys. Jennifer Bourn: That’s the thing. You’re never going to look back and be like, “I’m glad I took that extra meeting,” but you’re going to say, “I’m glad we took that trip.” Brian Gardner: Yeah. Jennifer Bourn: You’re never going to look back and wish that you answered more email or you sat in front of your desk any longer that you did. I think one of the things that’s unique about the WordPress ecosystem is that so many people share what’s going on in their business — challenges and struggles — and you get these sneak peeks into other people’s businesses. From some of the people that we’re friends with we’ve been able to see what happens behind the scenes at some of these larger agencies. Brian and I have both said, “I don’t want that life.” Unless we can do it the way that will fulfill our personal life just as much as our professional life, then we don’t need to go there. I think it’s different for everybody, and I think, too, personal experiences and personal stories drive that too. Brian had gallbladder cancer a few years ago, and facing the mortality of somebody that you love or yourself really puts things in perspective. We didn’t always do this much fun stuff. We worked a lot more and did a lot less fun things. Life experiences put things in perspective for us too. The Founding of Bourn Creative Brian Gardner: Yeah, they always seem to do that. In some fashion we all, I think, have that to some degree. Brian, walk us through the process you guys went through when you started the agency years ago. I know a lot of things have changed on the web — tools, software, trends, that kind of thing. What are some of the early challenges you guys faced when making the decision to go out on your own and to start this as your thing? Brian Bourn: In the early days in the very beginning, Jennifer was on her own. She was an in-house designer at a PR agency and we had our daughter, which was two-years-old. Jennifer found out she was pregnant with my son — I had a different career at the time. It was one of those It was not working for us family-wise. We made the scariest choice that we’ve ever done, but at the same time one of the best decisions we’ve ever made looking back. At the time it was terrifying to do that. We knew that for our own sanity and raising a family that it was the best thing to do for us, and Jen went out on her own. That early challenge was: how do you pay the bills that come due in 30 days the day after your last day? Jennifer Bourn: We had just bought a ridiculously ginormous house and I was pregnant. Brian Bourn: Based on the salary of two full-time employees with benefit packages and all that sort of thing. Then one them decides to We decide to start the company. Jennifer Bourn: Yeah, when I started my business it was, “If you’re not working you’re not getting paid.” I worked all the way up until the day that I had Carter and then was back at work two weeks later. Those first years were tough. Brian Bourn: That was an extreme challenge, having a newborn and a toddler in the very early years of the business. In the very early days, all I did with Jennifer was the admin side of the business. None of the client-facing work that was being output, just the admin while I had my day job. Until I left that job and joined her full-time, the first few years of the company Jennifer was on her own. That was very difficult too, when one person is a freelancer and then the other person has a salaried position with paid vacation and sick leave. It creates very different demands and dynamics in our personal relationships and professional relationships. It was navigating not just that, but navigating us on a personal level. Figuring out, “How do we make this work around raising kids? Around getting client work done? Around trying to take vacations and do things? The human side of it was very challenging in the early days. Brian Gardner: Yeah, I bet. Jennifer Bourn: 2008, 2009, and in 2010 we took almost no vacations and did almost If you look at our stock of all the digital photos by year, there’s the tiniest amount because I worked from 4:00 in the morning to 1:00 at night, seven days a week. It was ridiculous. Now I’m reaping the rewards of that. Brian Gardner: I was going to say, it’s a far cry from what you guys are doing now. Jennifer Bourn: It was tough, but it was one of those things that we looked at as short-term sacrifice, long-term gain. “It’s only going to be a few years to build a brand, build a reputation in the market, and get a solid base of clients. The kids are going to get older.” When we first started the business it was, “Let’s hang on until the kids hit kindergarten. Then we can start looking at growth. Then we can start looking at where do we want to take the business. Then we can really start looking at more than ‘let’s do enough client work to pay all our bills and make sure everything’s good and get the kids to kindergarten.'” Then it was, “Once Carter’s in first grade and they’re both in school full-time, then let’s look at what can we do with the business and where we can go.” Then it was, “When Brian’s parents are both retired and we have tons of babysitting then we can travel and go to WordCamps and we can do stuff together. That’s the next phase.” Now we’ve gone through phases of life, our business has mirrored the phases of life as we’ve grown. Tips for Managing a Consistent Workflow from Home Brian Gardner: It’s definitely something I can see from the outside. Good stuff. Brian, you manage the business. We talked about the team, day-to-day operations, and so forth. What’s a typical day look like for you now that you’re at home and working as part of the business? Brian Bourn: This is something that I definitely have room for improvement, my own personal time management. I found the best thing for me to manage my day, to keep a typical day, is to keep a very regimented regular schedule. I keep certain rules, no calls on Mondays. I never schedule calls on Mondays. If I do have calls, I only ever do no more than two in a single day. Things that interrupt that work flow, I’ve found — especially anyone who does design or development work or anything like that — you can’t get anything done in 30-minute blocks, you need good solid hours of uninterrupted time. I have switched my day-to-day schedule around to where I am ruthless with my schedule and maintain some very large chunks of time, especially in the morning, those early hours from when I This time of year, when I drop the kids off at school until I take my lunch break I don’t open my email, I stay off social media, and I use those key hours in the day to get my work done. Then, as the after lunch time, you start getting distracted. I’ll use that time to do email or work on short tasks. Things like — maybe I’m working on a proposal or clearing out my inbox, back and forth with sales leads, looking at GitHub, seeing what’s going on with the partners that we work with, looking at commits, and reviewing code. Using those small tasks that it’s okay to get interrupted and saving those for the afternoon. Because I am managing the primary sales funnel and a lot of this other business aspects, I’ll go days at a time where I don’t write a single line of code because I’m doing business operations. By keeping a regimented schedule of “these certain days of the week are reserved for these certain things,” it allows those chunks of time which keeps me overall within a semi-normal working schedule, day to day. Brian Gardner: Semi-normal, is that a thing? Brian Bourn: Normal is as defined by the person. Brian Gardner: Yes, for sure. Jen, what about you? You consult on brand, website, and digital strategy. You lead all the design projects — specifically within WordPress, that’s your specialty. Same question I have for you here, what does your typical day look like? I’m sure it’s somewhat similar but also somewhat different than Brian’s. Jennifer Bourn: My typical day is so much better now that Brian does all the business admin. Brian came in and now does all the things I don’t like doing, and it’s amazing. Typically I am the same, I keep email closed, keep social media closed, keep all the distractions — mainly because we want our evenings and weekends free. The more we can cram in that 9:00 to 5:00, the better everything is. We stay highly focused there. I, right now, am lead organizer for WordCamp Sacramento, which is happening in October. I’m really busy with that. We’ve got regular client work and then I’ve got my new blog that I started, Inspired Imperfection, where I’m sharing recipes and our family adventures and things like that. I’m juggling all of it right now. The great thing is we’ve shifted our agency over the last probably 2 years to 18 months from being very heavy in design work to being very heavy in development work. If I get to my desk before 9:00, it’s my own personal stuff. At 9:00 I start client work and I look at, “What’s the big project I have to get done during the day?” I try to only have one big time suck, energy suck comprehensive project per day. A theme design, something that’s going to take a bunch of time. I do that first to get it done and get it out of the way and get that client deadline met. Then I’ll knock out any other small client projects we’ve got, then I’ll pop over and I’ll work on WordCamp stuff or I’ll work on stuff for Inspired Imperfection, things like that. Brian Gardner: Man, you guys have a lot going on. All good stuff, because you’re doing it well. You’re profiting, you’re living the dream with your kids and all that. We talked about the question I was going to ask next which is, aside from running the business you guys are parents and love to travel, that’s very obvious. Anyone who follows you on Facebook or social media clearly can see the things that are important to you. It’s funny how social media works. I love watching you guys go on vacations. You talk about it ahead of time and then I get to follow along day after day. “They’re going here now. Now they’ve gone here.” Whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, it’s fun to watch — not just you guys, but others in the community when they go on vacations. It’s that, “Vicariously live through them and get to experience other places.” Aside from when you guys travel to conferences, your trips are generally what seem to be, a) outdoors, and always with the kids, minus a Grateful Dead concert here or there. I swear, just recently you took them to a concert too, didn’t you? Jennifer Bourn: We took them to three in a row. We did a road trip. We did Portland, then one in Washington at the Gorge, and then the shoreline on the way to San Diego. Creating a Work-Life Balance That Revolves Around Family Brian Gardner: I got you. This all leads to a bigger question I have, which is what we talked about a little bit earlier about work-life balance. How do you guys manage to do it all? Not just do it all, you do it well. Do you work a lot while you travel, or do you not and shut it off and then work a lot before and after you travel? It seems like that would be a slippery slope in some fashion. Jennifer Bourn: Most people don’t believe me when I tell them this. When we first started traveling together there would be this big ramp up before we left of tons of work that had to get done. We’d work like maniacs. We’d go and be exhausted when we’d go on vacation, and then we’d come home to this massive amount of work that was waiting for us. We slowly learned how to manage that to the point now that we don’t have a big ramp up before we go on a trip, we usually can take the day before we go on a trip off so we can pack and we’re not stressed out. When we come home there isn’t a giant stack of work waiting for us, there’s a normal workload waiting for us. We don’t have that stress anymore. The biggest thing that allows us to manage work and travel and balance all of this is a ginormous three-foot by four-foot wall calendar that hangs in my office. A lot of people talk about wanting to do fun things but they never end up doing the fun things because family obligations and life and errands and all of these other things get in the way. It was true for us too for a long time. Brian Bourn: A very long time. Jennifer Bourn: When we started putting this giant wall calendar in my office, what it allowed us to do — part of it was Brian’s previous career where he had to pick every vacation day and holiday in December for the following year. Every day that he got off was picked a year in advance. When he left that career we kept the same tradition going. This year in December we’ll print out our 2017 calendar and at the beginning of December we’ll line out all the days that the kids have no school and then we’ll look at, “Okay, spring break is here, where do we want to go?” We put it on the calendar in a sharpie. It doesn’t come off, and it’s marked on the calendar. Then we’ll look at what business conferences or WordCamps do we already know the dates for that we want to go to and we can work into our schedule. We can say, “Put it all on the calendar,” because then it’s a commitment to get it done. When a concert comes we do the same thing. When a concert pops up on Facebook — this weekend there’s a Saints of Circumstance, they’re a local band that we love, there’s a concert in Mountain Ranch. We said, “We want to go to that.” We put it on the calendar in sharpie, and it’s a commitment and we go. What that allows us to do is when other things come up — even family stuff — we can say, “We’ve already committed that day.” Brian Gardner: Yeah, that sounds a lot like our baseball schedule where we know in advance which weekends we have tournaments. We put them all out on the calendar and when other people or family or travel comes up and they want to “Hey, can we hang out and do something this weekend?” We’ll say, “Nope, that weekend in July we have planned. We’re going to a tournament and we’re playing.” Those types of things take precedence. I think it’s good to keep track of that type of thing, especially when it comes to travel, because you guys travel a lot. Jennifer Bourn: You can’t feel bad about telling people, “Nope, I’m busy.” Even if it’s for fun stuff. At the beginning of the summer we looked at our schedule and we laughed and said, “My god, we’re booked every weekend until October with fun stuff and no obligatory crap stuff. This is amazing.” Then family is like, “Can you do this?” Nope, we’re gone. Can you do this? Nope, we’re gone. You have to be okay with not feeling guilty about that. The Importance of Scheduling and Client Communication Jennifer Bourn: The other thing that that big calendar allows us to do is communicate clearly with clients about our schedule. People are also like, “How are your clients okay with this?” We’ve never ever had an issue with a client that’s not been okay with our travel schedule. A lot of clients we are in Basecamp with, so we put our travel schedule, when we’re going to be out of the office, in the Basecamp calendar, in a shared calendar. We communicate with them up front in advance, “Here’s when we’re going to be gone. Here’s when we’re going to be back. Here’s the status of your projects. Here’s where we’re going to get the project to before we go.” We usually start planning a few weeks before we’re going to be gone to get their project to a point where it’s pushed onto their plate. If we’re in design, we give them the design drafts right before we’re going to go on a trip. If we’re doing copywriting, we’re going to get them the drafts before they go on the trip. If it’s a big development push So that it’s on their plate and it’s their work while we’re gone. They’re moving the project forward while we’re gone. We communicate with them that a subcontractor is going to be working on certain parts of the project so they know exactly where the project’s at, exactly what’s going to be happening while we’re gone, and what we’re going to be tackling when we get back. The other thing too, is when I’m gone, I’m gone. I don’t work at all. I barely check email. Brian checks email every morning and checks in with Basecamp every morning, mainly because it allows him to be more relaxed when he can check all of those things. And he does manage all the sales funnels. The big calendar and communicating with clients far in advance and that active project management so that they know exactly where it’s at allows us to do it with very little impact to our work and our deadlines. Brian Gardner: Okay, you guys take a lot of trips with the family and you also take a lot of trips for business, whether it be WordCamps or conferences like the one that we put on at Authority, which is where we had a chance to meet and sit down and talk. How do you guys stay — this is the question I have with you guys. There’s a couple of other people — like for Jeff and Marla Sarris of SPYR, I have the same question, because it seems like they’re always traveling somewhere. My question is more about how do you guys stay profitable with that much expense? Travel expenses, hotels, flights, driving and stuff like that. How do you get the work done when you’re traveling so much? To deliver that on time and to make sure the clients are satisfied. It seems like every other weekend you guys are going somewhere. How do they afford that? How does that work in their budget? I’m not trying to ask a personal question, more from the business standpoint. How do you justify that? Is there ROI when you go to these conferences such as WordCamps and so forth? Brian Bourn: Sure. The one thing is, if you were to look at a map on Follow our Instagram feed. We are very fortunate to live in northern California, which is an amazing spot in the world and we do tons of — we call them Super Saturdays, where we leave at 7:00 in the morning and we don’t get home until late at night. We ice chest a bunch of food and there are national parks, national forests — literally a lifetime of adventure possibilities all within a two-hour radius of our house. Jennifer Bourn: That are cheap. Building a Profit Margin Into Your Client Services Brian Bourn: That are free. You park and you hike and you go do outdoors. That’s one part of that. As far as conference goes — it talks about what the focus of the whole interview is about: running a profitable agency. Oftentimes when we talk to other freelancers or other small agency owners like ourselves, is the failure to build in a profit margin to your projects. Not only when we estimate a project do we cover all of our time and our cost, but we also build in a margin. Every business has margins. Cars, they don’t sell cars at cost, there’s always a profit margin. The same should be done with client services. We take all of our costs — ongoing software to the hard business costs — add in our salaries that we pay ourselves, and then we add in a profit margin and then divide It’s a little bit of a math worksheet that I did. I know exactly on a regular basis how much we need to charge to cover all of our time expenses and then have that profit margin. That profit margin we use for reinvestment. Things like traveling to Authority or traveling to a WordCamp. It’s paid for out of that margin that we build into the business. We don’t believe there is an immediate ROI to this, but there’s definitely a long-term return that we have focused in on. Some of our greatest personal friends now are ones that we’ve met through the WordCamp community events. People that have influenced the way that I have run our company and the decisions I’ve made because we’ve met at WordCamps or Pressnomics, or some of these other non-WordPress focused events and have become friends have been there to ask questions and have some mentorship roles with me as far as, “Hey, what should I do, I’m in this weird situation?” That has been critical. Through a very long-term way, it has eventually led to referrals for clients and even new clients. But it’s definitely a long game, where the ROI is there but it’s going to be into the future, not immediate. Jennifer Bourn: Let’s also look at the strategic management of travel. The business pays for all of our business travel, but then all of those points and things — it’s leveraging some of those opportunities to make family travel even more affordable and more doable. You can do more of those things if your hotel stays are free or your flights are free. Brian Gardner: Okay, a little bit personal question here, and this is more specifically regarding the efficiency and the profitability of the company and stuff like that. What is, at this point — not everything’s perfect, we don’t run everything 100% the way it should be run — what is the Achilles heel of your company, Brian? What do you feel like there are areas where you can improve on, whether it’s time or delegation or any of that stuff that gets in the way of that profitability or the ability to scale where you want to go and do the things that you guys want to do? Brian Bourn: Sure. Some of that is what I consider our Scaling ourselves and the intrinsic skills that me and Jennifer both bring to the table. As a partnership, we complement each other very well in our skill set. The ability to scale that beyond the amount of hours that we have in a week is our biggest issue to getting bigger. At the same time, we choose not to do that by choice in order to create the personal life that we want right now while the kids are young. Down the road we know that if we do want to expand and bring on more team members, that it will be a very difficult task to find people to replace some of the things that we do internally for the company. We need to be able to turn those specific tasks over to them, whether it’s print design or front-end development, or whatever it may be — or project management. To find that key person that we can say, “All right, this is your thing now. Go forth and do well.” I find, for me, that’s the hardest issue that I see moving forward. Jennifer Bourn: I think that one of the things we’ve gotten way better at — and part of it is time — but I think there’s still room for improvement, is core project management. For a while in the early days when things were hairy and we were doing a ridiculous number of projects a year — at one point in time we were doing a custom Genesis site, one per week — our project management was terrible. It was not active, it was passive. We’ve gotten, over the years, a lot better at being active, borderline aggressive, with our project management. Partly for our own time management and partly so clients are really clear about where we’re at. I always think that, in terms of managing those projects and managing scope change, there’s always room for improvement. I don’t care where you’re at, I think it always could be done better. Brian Gardner: All right, I’m going to go even deeper, because this is fun. We have never had a husband and wife on the show. I’m going to ask Brian first — this is almost like one of those things you see on The Bachelor or something like that. Brian, tell me what is the one thing about Jennifer — this is not about profitability and all that, but I think it helps in the bigger context to understand how these dynamics work — what is the one thing about Jennifer you wish would change about what she brings to the business? I’m going to give her the shot to then do the same thing. This is not throwing each other under the bus, this is more about room for improvement, let’s say. Brian Bourn: As you know — I’m not BS’ing here — Jennifer is an extremely talented person, more so than probably anyone I’ve ever met. The one area, as far as related to an agency, is not telling her boss to screw off so often. No, it’s one of those things I’ve never even thought about it. We’ve been firing on all cylinders now for a while. I definitely would say Jen has a habit of When we go on a trip or something like that she loves to clear her plate and dish everything off, which then tends to mean that half the time it’s kicking onto my plate before we go somewhere. I wish that it would not wait until Not do that. That is the one area I wish would improve, is to manage not just her timeline as good as she does, but to look at it as the company as a whole timeline and what that does to everyone. Brian Gardner: That’s the answer I was trying to get to. Perfectly answered for what I was going for. This would have been a fun question five years ago to ask when things weren’t quite running on all the cylinders that it’s running on now. Jen, your turn to throw Brian under the bus. Jennifer Bourn: I would say where Brian … Brian Bourn: There’s not enough time in the show for all this. Brian Gardner: It’s another episode, a follow-up episode. Jennifer Bourn: No, I would say where Brian could improve is he drastically underestimates his own skills and abilities and talents. Projects will come in that he will turn down and shoo away because he thinks, “I don’t know if we can do that,” or maybe, “that isn’t something I’ve necessarily tackled before.” There are things that I know that he could do with his hands tied behind his back, but sometimes I think we all doubt ourselves. I think that he tends to do that and doesn’t take some projects because of that. Then the other — he would totally agree — is Brian has a hard time shutting down at 5:00. Part of it is because he has to do all the development and all the business stuff too, so his work plate is much fuller than mine. But he has a little bit of a harder time shutting off. Brian Gardner: You guys are brilliant because you ad-libbed answers that were building each other up in the context of talking about … That’s wonderful. I see you guys as totally a type A and B relationship. Shelly and I are the same way. She’s very type A, admin focused, very process-based, and I’m more of the creative. I think you guys are probably a flip flop of that. Do you guys have any final tips and tricks? Things that you would Nuggets of wisdom to pass along. Creating Partnerships to Create Recurring Revenue Streams Brian Bourn: Yeah, the thing that has led to the most growth on effective hourly rate and as far as profitability as a company — which then leads to personal freedoms and the things that we talked about a lot on this call — is, from a client services perspective, looking at your clients not on a per project basis but as a partnership with them. It’s not just thinking, “Okay, I’m going to design and build a WordPress theme and launch it. Here you go, great.” And then going from project to project. Every client we take on now — they are more of a partnership model where, yes, we are going to build a site for you, but we are going to continue working with you at bare minimum ongoing support and maintenance to create recurring revenue stream in the agency. Most of our clients stick with us either on a monthly basis for a retainer for ongoing consulting support, strategy, additional development, and design work. That means being very selective with your clients. This took us a long time to get here, where we work with fewer clients per year than we ever have, but we work with them not just on one project that’s siloed off and then it’s done. We work with them to create and launch the project and then continue working with them on an ongoing basis. As anyone will tell you, it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a new customer by tenfold. When there is none of that discovery and they already trust you and they’ve already paid you, it’s a simple matter of, “Well, let’s get this done.” “No problem, it will be this much.” You do the work and you get paid. By creating that ongoing partnership with your clients and being a critical role in their business success online, it has led to where we are at today. Brian Gardner: Good stuff. Jen? Evaluating Expenses on a Consistent Basis Jennifer Bourn: I think the other thing to note is that a lot of people talk about wanting to make more money or have more income that they can have available to do whatever it is that they might want to do. The focus on that a lot of times is always, “I need to make more money, which means I need to do more work,” or “I need more clients,” or “I need bigger projects.” One of the things that we have really focused on is not just looking at profits coming from more clients or more projects, but looking at how we’re spending, how we’re using, and how we’re putting the money we’re already making to work for us. It’s looking at regular expenses. For example, we had for years a subscription to Shutterstock, which we used the heck out of because we had certain retainer clients where we were doing print work every single week and we needed access to stock imagery every week. When we were building full custom Genesis sites every week, we used a ridiculous amount of stock photography. Our business has shifted so much that we’re using so much less. It’s looking at where are the expenses that you can trim and what expenses can you scale back? We were able to get rid of that subscription, so we saved $250 a month. We switched from Infusionsoft after we were with them for so many years. We switched from Infusionsoft to Agile CRM and we saved $300 a month. Evaluating where is your money going, where are you spending it, and do you need to spend it there or is there a better solution? You look at those two things — we cut our monthly expenses down by almost $600. That could be less client work that you are under pressure to sell. Brian Gardner: That’s a great set of guidelines for us, even outside of the business world, even in our homes. As you were talking, all I could think of was Joshua Becker talking about that type of thing within our own personal lives. The message that he talks over at Becoming Minimalist. It’s not about making more, it’s about saving and spending and having less, and so on. Jennifer Bourn: Yeah. Brian Gardner: That’s a great segue into the last thing I want to talk about, which is work and life balance. As you say, they aren’t separated into neat little boxes, they are mixed together, integrated, and part of each other. Jennifer, your new personal blog, Inspired Imperfection, which you talked about and we’ll link to in the show notes, encourages everyone to live an inspired life, embracing imperfection and creating the life that nourishes our soul with our kids in tow. I love that. For those listening, if you want to follow them you can follow Brian and Jennifer — their business perspective — at Bourn Creative, also in the show notes. To see how they balance their work life with their kids and go on vacations and all that stuff, you can check out Jen’s personal blog at InspiredImperfection.com. If you like what you heard on today’s show here at Studio Press FM, you can find more episodes of it at, you guessed it, Studiopress.FM. You can also help Lauren and I hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes, that would be helpful, very much appreciated. It is also a great way to never miss an episode. Brian, Jen, on behalf of Lauren and I and everyone in our company and the podcast network, we’re very thankful to have you guys on the show. Brian Bourn: Thanks for having us, it was fun. Jennifer Bourn: Thanks for having us. Brian Gardner: All right, we’ll talk soon I’m sure. Everyone who’s listening, we’ll see you next week.

Welcome to Episode 27 of Mastermind.fm! Today masterminds Jean Galea and James Laws interview Zack Katz, author of the WordPress plugin GravityView! Hang out with us for a bit and have a listen! This was a super fun and interesting interview and Zack has lots of great advice. He's experimented with several marketing and advertising strategies and we can all learn from his experiences to take some smart shortcuts in choosing the best promotional methods for our plugins. Zack also talks about his favourite WordPress conferences. We both met Zack at Pressnomics earlier this year and this interview is a follow-up based on the great discussions we had there. Questions we asked Zack How did you get into WordPress and full-time development? How do you select projects to monetize? You build Gravity related plugins, but Gravity Forms doesn't have an "official" community development model around Gravity products. How does that work out with the Gravity team? How was the transition as your work began to be noticed by Gravity? How do you feel affiliate links being removed from the WordPress repo affected the WordPress ecosystem? How do you feel about the lack of an official WordPress market for premium products? Should WordPress have an official monetization model? What can you tell us about the progress of GravityView as a product? What does the structure of development look like for moving GravityView forward? What can you tell us about your website and promotional ideas? What has been the most effective method of content marketing for you? You've had success with Google Adwords pay-per-click. Can you expand on your methods? Do you have any good resources for folks who would like to learn Google Adwords? Do you manage the campaigns yourself or do you have someone do that for you? Do you have specific marketing techniques to guide customer interaction? What is the one piece of advice you would give to someone who is thinking about starting their own business? What would you do differently before starting your own business if you had it to do over again? What is the most exciting thing about your business right now? What's you favorite tool that you think our listeners might not have heard of that they could benefit from? Do you have any books you'd recommend our listeners read? What's your favorite conference? Featured On The Show: Gravity Forms GravityView Easy Digital Downloads WP Rocket Envato Math by GravityView Jonathan Mann Appleworld.today CartHook.com Getdrip.com Segment.com Waffle.io PressNomics CaboPress Google Analytics Academy    

Welcome to Episode 21 of Mastermind.fm! Today our masterminds Jean and James will continue last week’s discussion of product launches and gaining traction for your new product. Last week they covered getting a website together, building a mailing list and social media presence, and a handful of other great advice for making your product launch successful. What else will they talk about today? Come find out! As always, show notes are below but listen in for  the whole conversation so you don’t miss a thing! Engaging Your Users What are people saying about your product? There are a few good places you can test the pulse of your product from and use to draw more interest with your own feedback to users. WordPress.org Support Forums Reviews Social Media Facebook Twitter In the early days of any product, there are bound to be bugs and a shifting of focus/use cases from your original intent. Pay close attention your first customers, engage them, make fans and cheerleaders of them. Word of mouth in the early days is critical! Build a great reputation as an engaged developer right out of the gates. Content Marketing Building a foundation of great content surrounding your community and product is a great way to draw attention while contributing back to your community. Delicious Brains is a great example of blogged content built up around products. Offering content via email is another great way to reach people. Affiliate Marketing Joining in with others raises visibility and lends credibility to your product. You’re essentially paying people to promote your product, but in James’ words: if you believe in your product, what does it matter how people discover you? Get it out there to them however you can if you’ve got something that’s going to make their life better. Plugin Partnerships If possible, team up! Partnering with theme companies can be great promotion and ensure that your product looks great in popular themes. Hosts are another good potential partner. GoDaddy for example is moving to a heavy focus on the WordPress ecosystem, partnering with popular plugin developers to offer a great experience to WordPress users. Attend business conferences like Pressnomics and be prepared to lay out how your product can be a solution to a company’s needs. Translate WordPress reaches a much greater audience than just the English speaking world. Provide a translated readme.txt and work towards getting translated into as many languages as possible. This not only gives you a wider potential audience, it gives you a huge advantage over non-translated competing plugins. Even if you can’t afford to hire a translator, there are other incentives you can offer, such as free licensing. Featured On The Show: Ninja Forms WP Mayor WP RSS Aggregator Post Status WP Tavern Delicious Brains Optin Monster Envato Astoundify UpThemes Parallelus GoDaddy PressNomics SiteKick Pro WPML MailPoet

I believe a big part of success in my business comes from the fact that I hang around people who are smarter than I am. Does that mean I’m dumb? Of course not, but I know there are plenty of areas where I either don’t have experience or have a hard time seeing clearly because of my proximity to a situation. It’s why I preach relationships and community. I was thrilled to meet Brandy Lawson (a.k.a. TekGrl) at Pressnomics 2016. Brandy understands the importance of relationships in business (especially for the lone entrepreneur), so much so that she’s launched a business around developing and nurturing entrepreneurial communities. Tune in this week as we discuss how to find the right people to connect with, the various structures a mastermind can take, and even how to know when it’s time to move on.

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. Today, we answer questions from Post Status community members, who asked us all sorts of stuff on the Post Status Ask page. If you'd like to ask a question, be sure to go there and we'll see if we can answer it on a future show. Questions & Links We answered the following questions: Why WordPress? In a survey I did before my PressNomics talk, the top answer for what's important to people in regards to the WordPress world was the quality of the community. WordPress' ubiquity -- powering 26% of the web -- helps too. What is the biggest mistake you made learning WordPress? (Or, what would you do differently?) Joe and I each shared what we tend to do wrong when learning new things. We are fully on opposite ends of the spectrum. Recommended link: Just Build Websites. Also, my post on learning WordPress holds up pretty well, considering I wrote it in 2014. Why did a lot of web and WordPress people get upset about the Mandrill pricing changes, when we want people to value the work we're doing ourselves? We discuss what made Mandrill's pricing changes controversial, and why we think some level of "outcry" is understandable here. Basically, Mandrill isn't differentiated enough to warrant the new pricing, in our opinions. However, it's obviously their right to change their pricing and structure, and the questioner has a valid point in how we value other services versus our own. Why isn't the WordPress importer being worked on more intensively? Good question! We talk about the state of the importer, some other options like WP Migrate DB Pro, WP All Import, and WP CLI. We also discuss how to get involved with open source development. Should taxonomies have the same feature capabilities as posts in the future? There's been a lot of interesting work on taxonomies in the last several releases, and you can read more about some of that and find links going back from my release post for WordPress 4.4. However, we think taxonomies and posts should be different. With the introduction of term meta, it is more important to consider architectural choices well in advance. Finally, the Fields API will be interesting in how it affects customizing term edit screens. How should I use my own domains with Multisite? This turned interesting! Fortunately, Multisite component maintainer Jeremy Felt came through while we were on the show to point us to tickets that were merged in WordPress 3.9 for enabling simpler domain mapping, and in 4.3, when a better UI was introduced. So, today, it's much easier to use a custom domain in a network -- within the existing WordPress Multisite options interface -- versus using a tool like Mercator. In addition to these questions, we also banter on about some other things and answer a few less serious questions we go from funny listeners. And at the end, I make a pretty big announcement... Today’s podcast is sponsored by Design Palette Pro. Design Palette Pro makes it easy to customize pretty much any Genesis theme, without touching code. It’s perfect for when you’re helping a friend with a website, but they don’t have a full service budget and you don’t have time to custom code every element. Get a great website in no time, with Design Palette Pro. Go to GenesisDesignPro.com for more information. Thank you to the team at Reaktiv Studios, who builds Design Palette Pro, for being a Post Status partner.

Earlier this month both James and Jean attended Pressnomics 2016 in Tempe, Arizona. We had a blast and took the opportunity to conduct a series of short interviews with attendees, asking them about their biggest takeaways from the event. Here's who we interviewed: Andy Wilkerson Ben Arellano Brad Touesnard Brian Hogg Dave Rodenbaugh Jackie D'Elia John Turner Kyle Brown Liam Talbot Matt Cromwell Robbie McCullough Syed Balkhi Vova Feldman

Today we have updates on our latest projects as well highlights from the recent PressNomics event. The post Episode 57: Product Releases and PressNomics Highlights appeared first on Apply Filters.

Today we have updates on our latest projects as well highlights from the recent PressNomics event. The post Episode 57: Product Releases and PressNomics Highlights appeared first on Apply Filters.

This week I share 5 ways to stay front of mind with your customers. Upcoming Events WordCamp Mumbai – March 12 – 13 2016 VIP Workshop – May 9-12 (early bird pricing ends March 15th) Segment 1: In the News WordPress 4.5 Beta 2 Pressnomics interview with Alex King Segment 2:  5 ways to stay…

This week I share 5 ways to stay front of mind with your customers. Upcoming Events WordCamp Mumbai – March 12 – 13 2016 VIP Workshop – May 9-12 (early bird pricing ends March 15th) Segment 1: In the News WordPress 4.5 Beta 2 Pressnomics interview with Alex King Segment 2:  5 ways to stay…

In this special episode we discuss our tips and tricks on how to get the most benefit out of your next conference. We're getting ready for Pressnomics and in preparation we're dusting off our tried and true techniques for making stronger and more effective connections, where  and how to spend your time, and even something to do even before you start your travels. Featured On The Show: WP Mayor WP Ninjas Ninja Forms 3 PressNomics SmartPassiveIncome Easy Digital Downloads Astoundify JeanGalea.com JamesLaws.com Revolut

It has almost been 1 year since I met Troy Dean as a guest on his own WordPress podcast. Shortly after that, I met him at PressNomics, where we became great friends and chased after the same guests for our audience. In between sessions, we plotted our podcasting world domination scheme. We’ve kept in touch talking strategy, doing a host-swap, and I made an appearance on his WP Think Tank show. Today I’m honored to have him on my show to talk about how he got started, what his business is like, and ask the question — do we really compete with one another? Enjoy! (more…)

  In Episode 9 of the WP Elevation podcast I spoke with Collis Ta’eed, CEO of Envato, home of ThemeForest, CodeCanyon, GraphicRiver and more recently, Microlancer. I was eager to hear how Collis and his wife have built such a behemoth of a company and I wanted to ask him how he responds to the criticism that his marketplace based business has devalued web design and web development. His answers are well worth listening out for. I interviewed Collis just after I had returned from Pressnomics and we had  a great chat off camera about the WordPress business space in general and where it’s headed. Collis is one of the true gentlemen of the WordPress business world and it was an absolute delight to spend some time chatting with him. Envato has grown so rapidly it makes the mind boggle. You can reach out and thank Collis on email or Twitter. Collis suggested I interview the guys behind the smash hit theme Avada (around $150K in sales per month!!!). So ThemeFusion boys, I’m coming to get you. Hint: to enter the competition, leave a comment below telling us the #1 tweak to a WordPress website that you’d like to palm off to Microlancer. The post Episode #9 – Collis Ta’eed appeared first on WP Elevation.

Just getting back from PressNomics and flipping through my Rolodex of awesome new connections. Oh and catching up from jet lag — sorry Rebecca. ★ Support this podcast ★

Just getting back from PressNomics and flipping through my Rolodex of awesome new connections. Oh and catching up from jet lag — sorry Rebecca. If you’re interested in attending PressNomics or learning what it’s all about, check out my review here. Loads of good comments there too. So what’s up in episode 53? I had a chance to sit down with Josh Strebel founder of Page.ly at the event and chat with him to find out what’s going on in his world. If you’re thinking about starting your own managed hosting WordPress service you’ll want to tune in. (more…)

WP Late Night is back in full swing tonight with Brad, Dre and Ryan discussing the news of the week and the big WordPress events of the month. If you’ve been wondering about Pressnomics, John O’Nolan’s Ghost project, or Jetpack Photon than this is the show for you. Enjoy! Or you can grab the show […] You just finished reading WP Late Night #29: "You fork, I'll spoon" on WPCandy. Please consider leaving a comment! The post WP Late Night #29: “You fork, I’ll spoon” appeared first on WPCandy.

WP Late Night is back in full swing tonight with Brad, Dre and Ryan discussing the news of the week and the big WordPress events of the month. If you’ve been wondering about Pressnomics, John O’Nolan’s Ghost project, or Jetpack Photon than this is the show for you. Enjoy! Or you can grab the show […] You just finished reading WP Late Night #29: "You fork, I'll spoon" on WPCandy. Please consider leaving a comment! The post WP Late Night #29: “You fork, I’ll spoon” appeared first on WPCandy.