Or not, because who the hell can predict any of this stuff. Here are my thoughts, anyway. 

My side bet with Justin https://bsky.app/profile/justinjackson.ca/post/3mhjgd65f6k2j
Jason's thread https://x.com/jasonfried/status/2035074613773050266?s=20

The course is designed to help businesses make better decisions before starting a WordPress project. It’s not about which plugins or themes to use. It’s about the fundamentals—planning, communication, budgeting, and understanding what success actually looks like for a website.

If you run a WordPress agency or freelance business, you might find this especially useful to share with prospects. It walks potential clients through the kinds of questions they should be asking before hiring someone to build their site.

I created this alongside Eric Karkovack, and it pairs nicely with our other free course on choosing the right WordPress hosting. Together, they’re part of our effort at The WP Minute to help people have a better experience with WordPress through education.

Both courses are free thanks to our pillar sponsors, and you’ll get a certificate when you finish.

If you take the course, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Links

Hire Smart & Scope Right: How to Plan Your Next Website Project Built on WordPress
https://thewpminute.com/courses

Free Course Launch: Pricing & Scoping WordPress Projects

• Taught by Eric Kovac (30 years in web development)
• Covers project requirements, agency selection, and client communication
• Useful for freelancers learning to scope projects and for clients understanding what agencies need
• Available at thewpminute.com/courses

Accountability Cohort Program

• Six-week program for freelancers and agency owners
• Group check-ins, goal-setting, and peer support
• Designed to build momentum for growing your business in 2026
• Apply at thewpminute.com/accountability-intake

WooCommerce as the Big Opportunity Matt's theory: SaaS platforms like Shopify, Webflow, and Wix may feel AI's impact first as licensing costs rise and get passed to customers. This could drive businesses toward WordPress and WooCommerce for more flexibility and control.

Rethinking the Agency Model

• Basic code, wireframing, and brainstorming increasingly assisted by AI
• Opportunity lies in becoming a strategic partner, not just a technical vendor
• Critical human thinking and industry expertise become more valuable

AI Cost Predictions Expect AI subscription costs to rise significantly—Matt predicts plans like Claude Code Max could double to $400/month or higher as companies face the real economics of frontier models.

Reality Check on AI

Despite using AI tools daily for plugins and experiments, Matt notes the technology isn't fully there yet. His example: Claude built a landing page but put "2024" in the footer—a small error that raises questions about reliability on more complex tasks.

Links

• Courses: thewpminute.com/courses
• Newsletter: thewpminute.com/subscribe
• Accountability Program: thewpminute.com/accountability-intake

00:00 Introduction and Context

00:54 Debating WordPress's Versatility

02:50 WordPress in the Agency World

05:43 AI and WordPress: A Complex Relationship

10:30 The Essence of Open Source

13:50 Continuity and Client Assurance

19:17 AI's Limitations and Future

21:38 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

00:00 Introduction and Personal Background
01:03 Challenges in WordPress Media
03:52 Building the WP Minute
04:59 Achievements and Team Growth
08:11 Professionalism and Sponsorship
12:47 Community Engagement and Final Thoughts

00:00 Introduction and Personal Reflection
00:31 The Changing Dynamics of the WordPress Community
01:56 Business Focus in the WordPress Space
03:35 Economic and Legal Influences
04:27 Technological Shifts and AI Impact
05:22 Sustaining Long-Term Success
05:55 Final Thoughts and Call to Action

This course has been years in the making. It’s built for anyone who works with WordPress, from newcomers trying to understand hosting basics to agency teams that want to level up their technical awareness and client communication. The goal is to help you avoid common pitfalls, make better strategic choices, and deliver more reliable sites for your clients.

Alongside the course, we’ve included a WordPress Hosting Calculator to help you evaluate client requirements and choose the right hosting tier. It’s not about promoting specific providers. It’s about empowering better decisions that improve your clients’ long-term experience with WordPress.

Key Takeaways

• WordPress Hosting Decoded is a free professional course for freelancers and agencies.
• Includes a hosting calculator to match client needs with hosting types.
• Perfect for onboarding or training project managers, sales staff, or new team members.
• Focused on education and strategy, not product promotion.

Important Links

• WordPress Hosting Decoded Course
• Agency Action Podcast
• Vote for The WP Minute at the WP Weekly Awards

https://www.youtube.com/@wpminutepodcasts/
https://blog.samaltman.com/sora-update-number-1

Additionally, he highlights the necessity of a human touch in content creation, especially in an age dominated by AI-generated content.

Takeaways

• Marketing roles are increasingly labeled as specialists but often require generalist skills.
• A true specialist should focus on a specific area rather than a broad range of tasks.
• Brands need to hire individuals who can authentically represent their values and culture.
• The role of a marketer is complex and requires critical thinking and experience.
• 'Founder marketing' is essential for understanding the brand's mission and audience.
• Content creators must balance entertainment, education, and information in their work.
• The rise of AI content necessitates a more human approach to marketing.
• Trust in content is difficult to measure but crucial for brand success.
• Marketers should be given the freedom to express their creativity and individuality.
• Creating unique and original content is a significant challenge in today's market.

Chapters

00:00 The Rise of Marketing Specialists
06:00 The Challenge of Brand Representation
10:22 The Human Element in Content Creation

• The evolving role of the WordPress community and the “four freedoms” at the heart of open source.
• Addressing the “elephant in the room” and the impact of recent legal and industry challenges.
• WordPress’s push to be more present on YouTube and across platforms, and why authentic community engagement matters.
• The future of AI in WordPress, including hands-on impressions of new tools like Telex and thoughts on browser-based AI.
• Predictions for the next 10 years of WordPress and Automattic, and what it means for users, professionals, and the open web.

Whether you missed the keynote or want a thoughtful recap, this episode covers the key takeaways and what they mean for the future of WordPress. Subscribe to The WP Minute for more insights, news, and community updates!

Matt's video on Telex AI by Automattic https://youtu.be/t5dRm70FnSg
Mullenweg's Keynote WCUS https://youtu.be/45HRzzc0waU?si=DIhxDiqwGNzAPWTL

The Dog Daze of Agency Summer is a live, interactive webinar for WordPress agency owners looking to beat the late-summer slump. 

Matt Medeiros, Kurt von Ahnen, and Toby Cryns will share strategies to keep momentum high when client decisions slow down, contracts stall, and teams drift into vacation mode. We’ll explore how to use this seasonal downtime to prepare for a strong fall season. From internal planning to energizing your team and sharpening your sales pipeline.

Key Takeaways

+ Turn downtime into prep time – Use the summer lull to refine processes, update proposals, and revisit client strategies.

+ Reignite team motivation – Tactics to keep staff engaged and productive before the busy fall rush.

+ Jumpstart stalled sales – How to nurture leads and tee up contracts so they’re ready to sign after Labor Day.

+ Plan for Q4 success – Align your marketing, sales, and project delivery for a strong close to the year.

+ Engage with peers – Live Q&A and open dialogue with other agency owners facing the same seasonal challenges.

Takeaways

• We need to shift our mindset as consultants.
• It's important to work with clients, not just for them.
• Understanding the audience is crucial for content creation.
• Partnerships should be collaborative, not transactional.
• Brands should engage in real conversations, not just promotional speak.
• The product should cater to a specific customer avatar.
• People will seek deeper connections in business.
• AI may replace menial tasks, but personal interaction remains valuable.
• Consultants should focus on providing real value to clients.
• The future of business may require more hands-on approaches.

The discussion covers the dynamics of WordPress content creation, the challenges faced by creators, and the perceived gatekeeping within the community. With over 17 years of experience in WordPress content creation, Matt shares unfiltered thoughts on the subject, highlighting the struggle to garner attention and the importance of focused content lanes. The episode also touches on the evolution of the WP Minute, the role of AI in content creation, and the significance of supporting diverse voices within the community.

00:00 Introduction and Context
00:42 WordPress Content Creation: Personal Insights
01:32 AI News and Updates
01:49 Unfiltered Feedback on WordPress Business
03:03 Challenges and Reflections on Content Creation
05:13 Navigating the WordPress Community
09:35 Supporting and Amplifying Other Creators
14:40 The Role of Open Source and Community
22:31 Final Thoughts and Call to Action

Imran's YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xtW4R8-nrc
Remkus' blog post: https://remkusdevries.com/the-fine-line-between-editorial-focus-and-echo-chambers-in-wordpress/
Join the WP Minute https://thewpminute.com/support

This episode unpacks one recurring pain point I’ve been hearing from folks in the trenches: paid discovery. Is it still a viable strategy? Has it gotten harder to pitch? Or are AI-savvy clients now walking in with their own ChatGPT-generated briefs? I share a bit about how I handled discovery back in my agency days and pose a few questions to you, the listener, about whether that model still works.

Plus, I highlight the important voices at the WP Minute—like Kurt, Toby, and Eric—who are publishing honest, from-the-ground insights that agency owners need more than ever. If you're building, billing, and battling with what it means to be a service provider in 2025, this one’s for you.

Key Takeaways

• “WordPress professional” now means more than just knowing how to build a site—it’s about adapting to new tech, especially AI.
• Paid discovery still confuses or frustrates clients—but it's a critical step that many agencies skip or undervalue.
• Your expertise is worth paying for, especially when it uncovers issues clients didn’t know they had.
• AI tools are beginning to change how clients approach scope, strategy, and expectations. How are you responding?
• The WP Minute is doubling down on serving the freelancers and agencies still out here doing the work—through podcasts, articles, and real-world representation.

Great Quotes

• “You're not just pushing pixels—you’re solving problems the IT guy forgot existed.”
• “Discovery isn’t a cost, it’s a plan.”
• “If you're building a house, wouldn't you want a blueprint first?”
• “Clients now show up with AI-generated outlines. So how do you insert your expertise into that?”
• “I want to help WordPress professionals and agency owners again—but not from the trenches, from the tower with a megaphone.”

Links & Resources

• The WP Minute Plus Podcast
• Subscribe to the WP Minute Newsletter
• Follow Eric Karkovack’s short-form WP Minute episodes

Takeaways

• Competing on content requires a long-term strategy.
• Personal branding is about building trust over time.
• AI is evolving and will impact content creation.
• Human interaction remains crucial in content engagement.
• Evaluating the quality of AI-generated content is essential.
• AI can assist but shouldn't replace human creativity.
• Freelancers must adapt to the changing content landscape.
• Understanding AI's limitations is key to leveraging it effectively.
• Positioning oneself uniquely in the market is vital.
• Continuous learning and adaptation are necessary for success.

Important Links

• https://pulsewp.cc
• https://thewpminute.com/support
• Cloning my Content Business

That momentum brings me to a pressing question for the WordPress community: where is our innovation happening? I draw connections to the new FAIR initiative, a federated alternative to the WordPress.org plugin and theme repository. It’s promising, technically. But like all open source efforts, adoption is the hard part. FAIR could bring resilience and distribution freedom to WordPress, but the larger question looms: will it even matter in a world where AI generates code on demand?

I push back on the current pace of WordPress innovation, especially in light of AI's rapid evolution. If plain-English prompts soon build complete websites, what role will plugins and themes play? And how does a system like WordPress, which still relies on zip packages and install screens, keep up with a future where everything is delivered by prompt?

🔑 Key Takeaways

• “Innovation in open source is painfully slow—but when it clicks, it changes everything.”
• “FAIR is technically exciting, but adoption will determine its real impact.”
• “If the future of websites is built via prompts, how long do themes and plugins matter?”
• “We need a clear vision from Automattic and the broader WordPress leadership on where we go from here—especially in an AI-driven world.”
• “WordPress still has that 'old tech' stigma. Will we shed it before it's too late?”

🔗 Important Links

• Podcasting 2.0
• FAIR Project (via Linux Foundation)
• Matt Report

This episode is less polished, more personal. I dive into the contradictions and moral gray areas we’re all grappling with as AI tools become more accessible and influential. I share my cautiously optimistic view of where this tech is heading, and why I think adoption will remain uneven due to competition, complexity, and user habits. I also challenge the notion that AI is the first to commoditize creativity—Google did it long ago with SEO and structured data.

It’s not about blindly defending AI. I’m right there with you asking, “Is this sustainable?” and “Where does this leave original creators?” But I also can’t ignore the reality: this isn’t new. Developers (and creators) have always borrowed, repurposed, and remixed—AI just happens to be doing it at warp speed. This conversation is a reminder that these tools didn’t invent the game—they're just playing it faster.

Key Takeaways

• “I’m not saying AI will take over everything, but it’s not going away either.”
• “Google gamified the entire internet before AI ever did. SEO was the original MMORGP.”
• “Copy-paste culture in coding isn’t new. AI just made it instant.”
• “In open source, sharing and remixing code is the whole point—so where do we draw the line?”
• “We need to explore this tech critically, not evangelize it blindly.”

URLs Mentioned

• https://www.youtube.com/live/fIYMsn3DcPI

The heart of my advice revolves around human connection. Rather than panicking about pivoting your entire business, double down on understanding and engaging with your customers. The value in maintaining strong, meaningful interactions will likely become even more critical. I foresee a shift from focusing solely on deliverables—like websites, content, or features—to prioritizing deeper relationships and tailored experiences. Your expertise, insights, and ability to genuinely connect might become your most valuable assets.

While it's important to stay informed about AI and how it's evolving—be it through APIs, LLMs, or new middleware like MCPs—it's equally vital to maintain perspective. We're in a dynamic and uncertain phase, and no one can predict exactly how things will unfold. So, rather than reacting impulsively, invest time in building deeper client relationships and adapting thoughtfully to the changes.

Great Takeaways:

• "The value of human interaction will likely become your key competitive edge."
• "Instead of panicking, talk to your customers regularly and understand their changing needs."
• "AI won't replace meaningful relationships—it might even make them more valuable."
• "Don't pivot blindly; enhance your current strengths and deepen your customer engagements."

Important URLs Mentioned:

• Learn how to vibe code WordPress plugins the right way

I compare today’s AI shift to the 2008 financial crisis that helped fuel the rise of WordPress agencies. Back then, budget-conscious clients and evolving CMS features gave WordPress a clear advantage. Today, the same kind of shift is happening with AI, but the pace is faster and the stakes are higher. The good news is that clients are still learning and need guidance, which opens the door for agencies to lead with clarity and experience.

At the WP Minute, we’re ramping up our focus on agency content. Whether you’re hearing clients ask about AI, seeing DIY sites that need fixing, or rethinking how you price your services, I want to hear from you. Let’s get the conversation going and share how real agencies are navigating this transition.

Takeaways and Quotes:

• “Where do you land on the spectrum: zero, one, or two? Zero being ignoring AI, two being fully transformed by it.”
• “We’re at another pivotal moment like the WordPress 3.0 days, only now it’s about how AI reshapes how we work.”
• “Clients are still learning how to take photos on iPhones. You think they’re ready to fully trust AI for business workflows?”
• “There’s a huge trust gap with AI. That’s where agencies can step in and lead.”

Important URLs:

• The WP Minute – Subscribe for agency-focused podcast content
• @mattreport on Twitter – Respond to the episode with your AI stance (zero, one, or two)
• Agency Series with Toby & Kurt – A behind-the-scenes look at running a WordPress agency

Let’s make this a conversation. Agencies aren’t over, they’re evolving. Where do you fit in?

Whether you’re a developer, marketer, agency owner, or solo creator, I’m encouraging you to take a moment over the next 90 days to write a blog post, record a podcast, make a LinkedIn carousel, or shoot a video sharing your personal story or professional use case. Why do you use WordPress? How has it powered your career? What makes it relevant, especially now? This content isn’t just for vanity metrics—it’s a way to reconnect with the essence of WordPress as open publishing infrastructure, a business enabler, and a creative toolbox.

The episode also touches on my experience with past marketing efforts inside the WordPress ecosystem—like the now-defunct Media Corps and the challenges of volunteer-led marketing teams. But rather than wait for centralized solutions, The Thriving Project is about creating decentralized momentum. It’s about amplifying voices, celebrating wins, and fostering pride in our platform without the red tape.

Great Takeaways & Quotes:

• “We all know WordPress has a marketing problem… but we don’t have to wait for an official fix.”
• “This isn’t just about WordPress thriving—it’s about you and your brand thriving by sharing your ‘why.’”
• “WordPress is a bridge to open publishing. It’s portable, empowering, and still one of the smartest decisions for your business.”

Important URLs Mentioned:

• mattreport.com
• thewpminute.com
• LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and other platforms where the #WhyWordPress hashtag may emerge

Let me know if you're on board or planning to contribute—I’d love to help amplify your story.

The article calls for companies to support the WordPress community with not just money, but time, code, and visibility. And I’m all for that. But it misses a key detail: some of us never left that middle ground. I’ve been covering the WordPress economy through The Matt Report and The WP Minute for 15 years—often operating without the support or even recognition that pieces like this seem to think don’t exist. If we’re going to talk about this divide, let’s not forget the creators and media voices who’ve been holding the two sides together.

Visibility isn't just a concern—it's one of the biggest challenges facing WordPress media today. Outlets like mine, which aim to bridge the community and business sides, consistently struggle to get meaningful support, whether that's financial backing, promotion, or access. We've long been amplifying voices and stories from both sides, but the support ecosystem hasn’t kept pace with the value we bring. The shuttering of the WordPress Media Corps is a missed opportunity to bridge that gap. And while Joost’s piece focuses on the lack of business contributions, I argue that the flip side is true too: the community hasn’t always embraced the business-minded, even though many community contributors work for those very businesses.

So, is WordPress stronger when both faces look in the same direction? Absolutely. But let’s not overlook the people already doing that work. We need to invest in the in-between: the storytellers, the indie media outlets, the connectors who understand both sides and are building the bridges every day.

Takeaways & Quotes

• “One does not build an empire by serving this intersection of community and business.”
• “There are a handful of us still doing the work Joost is calling for—we just need visibility and support.”
• “The business side has long been dismissed by parts of the community, even while funding it.”
• “The Media Corps was an opportunity to get independent voices closer to .org. We lost that.”
• “People want content that resonates with them, especially in an AI world—flaws and all.”

 Resources & Links Mentioned

• Original blog post by Joost de Valk: The Two Faces of WordPress
• The WP Minute: thewpminute.com/support

I also share how imposter syndrome creeps into marketing for all of us—yes, even after years in the business—and why it’s crucial to slow down and break things into tiny, actionable steps. Sometimes, what feels basic or obvious to you is brand new to someone else. By explaining things clearly and authentically, you can chip away at that feeling of not being good enough. Practicing your pitch, your content, and your story—whether through a podcast, a blog, or even a five-person webinar—will build your confidence over time.

We talk about how “promotion” isn’t inherently inauthentic or annoying—unless you make it that way. If you’re coming from a place of genuine value, people notice. The biggest hurdle? Just starting. That might mean launching a blog post, sharing a story on social, or asking a handful of people to join you on a webinar. The process is iterative—much like a stand-up comedian refines their material over years, you refine your marketing one step at a time.

To wrap up, I invite you to take action—just one piece of content in the next 24 hours. And if you want to join a community of like-minded creators, check out our WP Minute membership for just $5. If my years of content have brought you value, consider joining us and bringing your perspective to the conversation.

Takeaways & Quotes

• “Start small and tackle that one cornerstone thing you can do really well.”
• Marketing isn’t about doing everything—it’s about telling your story authentically and consistently to the right people.
• Imposter syndrome happens to everyone, but the cure is taking one small step at a time.
• “If you want to sell a thousand, you must sell one first.”
• Practicing your message, even to a small group, is how you gain confidence and build momentum.
• Authenticity and value-driven marketing always win out over being “salesy.”
• “In the age of AI, human stories and genuine engagement matter more than ever.”

Important URLs Mentioned

• WP Minute “Be a Podcast Guest” Free Mini Course: thewpminute.com (Scroll to the footer for the sign-up)
• Join the WP Minute Membership (Slack Community): thewpminute.com/support
• Matt Report: mattreport.com

This got me reflecting on the intersection of personal branding, content strategy, and monetization. Unlike creators who seem to plot out their value propositions with precision (think Jay Clouse or Pat Flynn), I’ve taken more of a “create-first” approach. I focus on building trust, relationships, and a long-standing body of work. That’s come with its own rewards—and its own costs.

I open up about leaving money on the table by not tying every piece of content to a monetizable plan. But I’m okay with that. For me, content has always been about passion and serving a community.

Now, with The WP Minute and WP Minute Plus, I’m doubling down on agency-focused conversations and bringing in fresh voices to carry that torch.

🔑 Takeaways & Quotes

• “The Matt Report still shows up in AI search results, and I haven’t touched it in years. That says something.”
• “I think of a personal brand as a lifelong story—it ends when you die, not when you pivot businesses.”
• “Content for me is about surface luck. I show up, create, and trust that good things come from that.”
• “I’ve never led with a marketing funnel. I lead with the message, and I see what resonates.”
• “The best content educates, entertains, or informs—ideally, all three.”

🔗 Important URLs

• The WP Minute
• Subscribe to The WP Minute Newsletter
• WP Minute YouTube
• WP Minute Podcast
• WP Minute Podcast

I’m back with an update to what’s going on with Matt Report, and a potential new direction I’ll be taking the content through the new year. While I love all of the deep conversations I’ve had about WordPress, the new home for that is The WP Minute.

That’s where I’ve been focusing all of my WP energy these days, with lots more fun stuff to come.

I also wanted to take an opportunity to share one of my favorite episodes ever, with Jose Caballer. It’s over a decade old but it’s SO worth listening to again. While some of the websites and links he’s mentioning no longer exist, the content of providing great web services is still very relevant in today’s world.

I hope you enjoy it (again) and thank you for being a loyal listener of the show!

Having hundred if not thousands of WordPress-loving peers under one roof might have you stuck in your tracks, no pun intended. How do you meet new people? How do you get noticed? How do you recharge if you're an introvert?

Thanks to Gina, we'll learn about all of that and more! If you enjoy today's episode, please share it on social media, especially if you're headed to WordCamp US 2022 this week!

Important links

• Gina on Twitter
• Gina's WordCamp tweet
• First WordCamp tips and tricks
• Support the show; Join our #linksquad membership
• Check out what InMotion hosting is up to with their new Managed WordPress product!

I didn't know much about it, where to begin, or how much time it would it take to implement the various practices. That fear steered me away from presenting it as part of a web design project.

I'm not in the agency space anymore, but I know there's some of you out there faced with the same dilemma. Lucky for us, folks like Anne Bovelett advocate for both sides of the cause.

Important links

• Anne on Twitter
• Anne's website
• Rachel Cherry on Matt Report
• Amber Hinds on Matt Report
• Taylor Arndt on Matt Report
• Support the show; Join our #linksquad membership
• ⚡️Check out what InMotion hosting is up to with their new Managed WordPress product!

Transcript

From billion dollar hosting companies, to boutique agencies, WordPress is quite vast. It took Yaw a few years to even realize that Automattic, the commercial entity behind WordPress, even existed!

We'll explore his story today, starting out as a freelancer and now working for VIP at Automattic.

Important links

• Yaw on Twitter
• jyoansah.me
• BlackPress
• Support the show; Join our #linksquad membership
• ⚡️Check out what InMotion hosting is up to with their new Managed WordPress product!

We unpack the history on discovering the beloved software development tool and partnering with Steve Carnam, alongside Gregg Franklin.

What makes this WordPress business so challenging from others? What held back some of the development and getting ahead of the market? The answer might surprise you!

Important links

• Marc on Twitter
• ServerPress
• Marc's coaching website
• When it's time...it's time
• ServerPress is shutting down
• Support the show; Join our #linksquad membership
• ⚡️ Check out what InMotion hosting is up to with their new Managed WordPress product!

Ken Elliott knows this role all too well. He's a self-described "networking introvert" that built a WordPress agency with his co-founder, will be emceeing WordCamp US next month, and appeared on this podcast!

We dove deep into how he built his agency, lessons learned from servicing clients, and what steps he's taking to grow the business through 2022.

If you enjoy today's show, please share it on social media!

Important links

Ken on Twitter

bkreative.net

Support the show; Join our #linksquad membership

✨Check out what InMotion hosting is up to with their new Managed WordPress product!

Stop the Slacking, the doom scrolling, but forced to focus on the agenda of improving...everything.

That's exactly what Kim Coleman, co-founder Paid Memberships Pro & Sitewide Sales, did to re-focus the Sitewide Sales business. Running a business of 2 core products, 14+ employees, and with her husband...it was time to "get away."

If you enjoy today's episode, please share it on social media!

Links

Kim Coleman on Twitter

Paid Memberships Pro

Sitewide Sales

Jason Coleman on Matt Report

Support the show; Join our #linksquad membership

✨ Check out what InMotion hosting is up to with their new Managed WordPress product!

Important links

• Corey on Twitter
• Gelform
• Mexican Train Online
• Where will the WordPress middleclass go?
• Check out the NEW stuff from InMotion hosting!

After a few years back in the saddle of day jobbing, he's now running Social Link Pages plugin for WordPress. He also spent some time during the pandemic launching a new online game -- built on WordPress.

Come learn what it's like to sell your plugin business and venture back into a day job...and then back again.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider buying me a virtual coffee or joining the membership.

• Corey on Twitter
• Kanban for WordPress
• Social Link Pages
• Gelform
• Mexican Train
• Support the show!
• ✨ Try Managed WordPress on InMotion hosting by clicking here.

Compare and contrast the community vibe, to the business vibe. Porto looked like a ton of fun, sad I missed it! The WP Minute showed up in a big way, so I'm really thankful for that.

Plus! I couldn't hold off from ranting about the WordPress content space...again.

Say THANK YOU to InMotion hosting for sponsoring the podcast. Support the show by purchasing us a digital coffee or joining the annual membership!

Links mentioned

https://thewpminute.com/

https://thewpminute.com/where-will-the-wordpress-middle-class-go/

https://masterwp.com/

https://poststatus.com/

WP Tavern: Nathan Wrigley & Matt Mullenweg

WordPress as a paint brush, not an NFT.

In this episode we uncover how she found WordPress and bringing those skills to her day job at DigitalCube. As a loyal Elementor builder, what does Rachel think about Gutenberg and FSE? Tune in to find out!

Find Rachel on Twitter https://twitter.com/VisualWebmaster

Rachel's Website https://www.visualwebmaster.com/

DigitalCube https://en.digitalcube.jp/

Subscribe https://mattreport.com/subscribe

Buy me a coffee to support the show https://buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

✨ Thanks to InMotion for supporting the show. Check out my InMotion deal here: https://mattreport.com/inmotion

Easier said than done. Niches are still hard to find. Crowded markets together with figuring out what you're best at providing to customers can be a challenge.

What if that niche involves web sustainability? That's not a crowded space -- right now.

You, a developer, literally saving the planet by coding efficient web applications and optimizing WordPress?! Sounds like a great opportunity to me!

That is just a slice of what Hannah Smith does for her clients at https://opcan.co.uk/. Learn about that and more in today's episode with Hanna Smith!

If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting the show by buying us a virtual coffee or joining the membership.

With over a decade of experience in the WordPress customer support space with WooCommerce and Automattic, Ines knows what it takes to run a successful support team.

You can hire her team to help build you a complete plan for supporting users or download some ready-made templates for responding to customers.

If you enjoy today's episode please share it on social media and consider supporting the show by buying us a digital coffee.

Courses, memberships, ebooks, videos all assuring you that $10,000 projects are just a click away. Why wouldn't you believe them? They're on the gram throwing hundred dollar bills off a boat or speeding away in a Lambo.

To be fair, I haven't seen a Lambo video in some time, but the one that gets me the most now is holding up an iPhone in selfie mode with AirPods and a cleverly placed whiteboard in the background.

How about grit and persistence? Patience and confidence? How about going through the paces enough to uncover your self-worth and simply raising your rates.

That's exactly what Chima Mmeje of Zenithcopy did…plus a whole lot more.

I read her blog post, The Year I Learned Audacity and instantly DM'd her to ask if she'd be willing to share her story here.

Luckily for you and I -- she said yes.

If you enjoy today's episode please share it on social media and support the show by buying me a digital coffee for as little as $5 or whatever you think the show is worth at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

When we look back in the Gutenberg history books we'll be able to show that blocks, patterns, and javascript not only rocked the code of the project, but the community as well.

Some immediately dropped out, other stayed, and new stars appeared. Born out of the ashes of WordPress old, rising like a Phoenix came our new celebrity (hero?): Aurooba Ahmed!

Okay, okay, I know I'm going really heavy with that one.

She doesn't consider herself a WordPress celebrity and prefers her collection of plugins and developer chops speak more than her Twitter space or podcast appearances. Today we'll learn how new stars handle their fame, build plugins, host + appear on podcasts, and balance a day job.

If you enjoy today's show please share it on social media and consider supporting us by buying a digital coffee at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

I think there’s that slightly jaded view of the TechCrunch Disrupt vision of days gone by. Building a unicorn. Changing the world. Buying that Porsche you always wanted. It’s about the endgame we so cleverly convince ourselves of.

However, some of the best business builders are doing it because they are naive. Wait. Naive? Hold that thought: not in a bad way, but in the way I am guilty of and maybe even you are too.

We set out not knowing that the roller coaster ride is going to tip us upside down, spin us in a 360, and do it at speeds in excess of 100mph. If we thought the ride was going to be anything but gentle…maybe we would have never bought that ticket.

Entrepreneurs are both lucky and crazy.

Joe Howard founded WP Buffs and grew it to a point where it just wasn’t for him anymore. He put a CEO in place, retains majority ownership, and he barely thinks about it.

He’s off building another product called Drifly and blogging at https://blog.driftly.app

This might have been my favorite interview ever. Let me know what you think by sharing on social media or buying me a digital coffee at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

Unqualified customers are the biggest threat to the early days of building a business. Also known as bad product fit, when we're offering something to the wrong customer, the whole relationship is setting off on the wrong foot.

When you're offering your WordPress work to a customer that already gets it, in this case, other agencies, so much more can go right rather than wrong.

We'll explore building an agency, hiring, and we'll throw in purchasing MasterWP for good measure.

If you love the show please subscribe at mattreport.com/subscribe and consider buying me a virtual coffee or joining the membership at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

We're dragging blocks, inserting patterns, and visually building our themes these days. There's been great discussion spurred around themes, where Matt Mullenweg

What's the side effect from WordPress changing so rapidly?

We're dragging blocks, inserting patterns, and visually building our themes these days. There's been great discussion spurred around themes, where Matt Mullenweg wants 5,000 new themes in the directory while WP Minute Producers like Daniel Schutzsmith and Spencer Forman say we only need one.

Even if we split the difference and built 2,500 new themes…who's going to build it?

Not only is the code changing, but so are the people writing it all. This is the shift we're quietly seeing happen in the background. So what is a WordPress business owner to do? Find great WordPress developers or train up a willing engineer?

Mayank Gupta joins us today to talk about his strategy to growing a WordPress team for his day job over at PerforMedia.

He has strong opinions on educating and inspiring an individual -- possibly ignoring the typical WP rock star.

This is a phrase that I see a lot of companies using in their marketing, which includes Malcare, today’s guest and sponsor of this show.

Products and services targeting the type of buyer that might be managing a high traffic site like a Buzzfeed or a large WooCommerce store, like, well I can’t think of one right now. High traffic or highly functional equals high performance?

My vote goes to high value.

I know it’s not as appealing in the marketing world, but there are lots of website owners that value their site’s speed and security that aren’t pushing millions or even 10’s of thousands of page views a month.

And that’s what Akshat Choudhary and team are building at Malcare and Blogvault. The catch? Protecting valuable high performance WordPress websites so easily, you don’t even have to think about about it.

Enjoy the show today, please share it on social media, and if you want to support my efforts here consider buying me a virtual coffee or joining the membership.

I can comfortably admit that I didn’t see Artificial Intelligence as the next big thing for WordPress in 2022.

The march to Gutenberg and FSE adoption across the product landscape is sure to reveal new opportunities to be introduced to our favorite low-code software. AI, however, wasn’t even close to what I was expecting to be the next big thing for us.

Bertha.ai is an all-new solution for helping users craft a near infinite amount of text for your WordPress website. From H1’s to entire blog posts, what Vito Peleg and Andrew Palmer are creating with this tool is quite impressive.

Let’s get the elephant (yes, the real one) out of the room first, shall we? Bertha isn’t leading us to copywriter extinction. Hearing from Andrew in today’s interview, Bertha should still be used as your writing assistant — not your writer. You can give the AI assistant the ideas, the direction, and what you want to focus on, but will still require some editing chops to refine it.

It’s still a darn good tool.

You can download Bertha for free from WordPress.org to try it yourself. Consider supporting the Matt Report before the robots take over at https://buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

If you’re like me, stuck in a proverbial hamster wheel of self-doubt & content creation, today’s episode is for you. In fact, if it weren’t for today’s guests, I would have never got back into pressing send in MailerLite. (A recent switch from MailChimp, because I have a bad feeling about the Inuit acquisition.)

If you need a boost of confidence or a programmatic way to warm up your newsletter engines again, Kim Doyal and Jason Resnick are here to help — with a twist.

The duo joins me today to talk about their new co-venture, Deliverit. (use the full link so they know I sent ya, it's not an affiliate! https://getdeliverit.com/mattreport/)

This will be a meta approach to building a newsletter list in public. They will share what works and what doesn’t, when it comes to growing your email list. Learn straight from the email horses mouth — it’s going to be exciting.

Thanks to Malcare & Blogvault for supporting the show.

It can be challenging for new WordPress freelancers to get started in this industry. You have to find the right tools, the right customers, get paid and…actually build the websites! Is there a right path to take?

Meet Terry Carter, Manager at Newfold Digital WordPress Live & Blue Sky teams. Terry is also a WordPress freelancer who kick started his side hustle after winning a web design contest at a previous company.

Terry joins us to share his experience with supporting WordPress & WooCommerce users at his day job, and what works for him as a part-time freelancer. We’ll learn how the market jumped pre-COVID, how things are adjusting, and where you can spot new opportunities coming into the market.

Thanks to Malcare & Blogvault for supporting the show.

In fact, it wasn’t his themes that revolutionized my thinking, it was the checkout process. Brian Gardner launched a theme company using a payment portal and delivery tool called e-junkie.

I just checked, they still exist, they were the Gumroad before Web 3.0 was even a thought in Web 2.0’s mind. I couldn’t believe it. Someone could zip up WordPress code, put it on a website, set a price, and someone could buy it?!

I wanted to do the same thing.

But until then, I had an agency to run so I used Revolution Themes, then Genesis, then to the whole StudioPress suite to make that happen. Fast forward, Gardner not only sold SP to WP Engine, but he left the gig shortly after, only to make a return with his latest product, Frost.

Enjoy today’s conversation with Brian Gardner, Principal Developer Advocate at WP Engine, creator of many things and many blogs. Find his newly redesigned blog at briandgardner.com.

If you fancy supporting the show, buying me a digital coffee or joining my fantastic private Discord server, head on over to buymeacoffe.com/mattreport — I’ll shout your name from the Twitter rooftops.

[00:00:00] Matt: so many folks who sit on the sidelines and Monday quarterback like me I see folks sell their business and , and they joined the team and I know in my heart that as a builder, as an entrepreneur, , they won’t be there that long.
[00:00:14] And they’re there for a year. I think roughly you were at WP engine for a year after selling studio
[00:00:20] Brian: press to them longer than that. But it sort of been to which in and of itself as a piece of conversation. Go ahead.
[00:00:26] Matt: And then I saw you sort of leave P and L I was like, yep. I knew it. And there’s nothing wrong with that because God that we have such a passion to build something, but I don’t know of anyone who’s who sells it to the company, leaves built something else, sells it back to the company and.
[00:00:41] You’re going for a hat trick question, mark.
[00:00:44] Brian: No. No. And in fact, it’s, it’s funny, you are the only person who, with the exception of Bob Paul, Lacey, who had months ago made a kind of comment about that. You’re the only person in this round when I got hired and when Frost was acquired to actually have.
[00:01:01] Pointed that out. And of course I took that bait and this is why we’re on the show today. But I talked to our PR team and I was like, look, this is just something that could be a thing that people might talk about or in this context. And surprisingly, and that’s fine because it’s really, it really was a news event.
[00:01:16] This time around Yeah. I was just like, okay, what are the possible negative reactions? People might have to something like this. And I was like, that’s about the only thing I can come up with. Well, people may point out that this happened and it, whatever, it’s all good. Everyone’s happy. You’ve built a
[00:01:31] Matt: lot of stuff from digital products to courses, to eBooks, to blogs, to knit mail email lists and newsletters, like all things that were in some form or fashion, a business, a micro business.
[00:01:43] When I saw you. Go back to a WP engine and they had acquired frost in my head. I started thinking, you know what, these, and this is my words, not yours. And I hope it doesn’t offend you. But these micro products are almost like a fantastic calling card to get an awesome gig. Right. Ha had it not been you, but somebody else in this position, it could be like, I built an awesome little product.
[00:02:11] And sometimes the weight of that is like, oh God, I got to S I get up market. I gotta sell it. I gotta promote it. I gotta support it. I got to take over the world. But then sometimes it’s like, no, I can actually use this in place of a resume and get an awesome job somewhere. Is that a fair statement?
[00:02:27] Brian: I would think so.
[00:02:28] I don’t think that that necessarily applies to everybody. We know right now, Matt, that the competitive landscape in WordPress is off the charts, especially in light of the behemoths. And, and we’re one of them, right? WP, engine, GoDaddy, liquid web, all those it’s really difficult to, and I’ll conversely, make a counter argument here after this.
[00:02:47] It’s very difficult to like create and launch something new and have it be successful and widely adopted and so on now, conversely. That is also, if you have the idea, something really, really brilliant, that really solves a problem that catches a lot of users and stuff like that. Then it becomes because of aforementioned behemoths, a very interesting acquisition piece, right?
[00:03:07] Go to liquid web. They’ve bought a lot of things lately. None of them have been, well, that’s not true. Some have been larger, right. Eye themes and so on. And then some of them are just like smaller pieces that kind of fill a niche that allow them to use their sort of their. The abilities to reach and build and support from an infrastructure standpoint, a subset of people.
[00:03:28] And so it can work. It can be, I wouldn’t necessarily say that should be someone’s business plan. Just given my tenure in the industry and the success I’ve had, it’s been helpful to have that sort of be true.
[00:03:41] Matt: Web hosts, obviously WP engine being one of the largest, if not the largest managed WordPress hosts in the industry GoDaddy liquid web.
[00:03:49] I think a lot of folks myself included have sort of illustrated this picture, that well, we all kind of hypothesized that they’re all looking to build and curate their own WordPress experience. Without giving away the secret meetings, maybe at WP engine and the secret sauce. Is that, is that something that you see coming down the pipe, maybe if not WP engine others, and maybe why they acquire fros and studio presses to sort of put these pieces in place.
[00:04:19] So when you come to a WP engine, you experienced WordPress. You go to liquid web, you experience it that way. Is, is that something that you see as holding true in the year 20, 20
[00:04:28] Brian: a hundred percent, a hundred percent. I think we see it on several levels. And even outside of the WordPress market, just the, sort of the consolidation, the platform building, go daddy sold domains back in the day.
[00:04:39] Then they went to hosting. And then when they realized that the people who are buying those things would buy other things or are doing other things. Then all of a sudden they’re an email marketing company and then, oh, WordPress explodes. Now we’re going to be a WordPress hosting email, but like, like, and so yes, it makes sense.
[00:04:54] And everyone’s good at what they do. And when you really find what you’re great at, then you sort of, I wouldn’t say exploit, but then you really sort of double down on that by looking around in the space and saying, Hey, are there products that align with what we’re trying to do? And is it, is it better for us to acquire those products?
[00:05:10] Because it takes us less time to build. We can go right to market. We can, there’s an existing audience as studio press was a huge audience that WP engine picked up and things like that. So yeah, I would say that’s a fair state. Do you know,
[00:05:21] Matt: there’s in the news and the courting eh, in the week of this week, it’s January 13th.
[00...

If you haven’t listened to the previous episode, I suggest you go back and learn what the WordPress Executive Director does on a day to to day basis.

Today, we’ll be exploring some meatier topics that come up in the community like contributor compensation and Five for the Future. If you didn’t already know, Josepha leads a podcast of her own. We’ll find out why Matt Mullenweg nudged her into that journey.

Thanks to folks over at Malcare for supporting this episode of the Matt Report. If you want to support me, you can buy me a digital coffee or join the super-not-so-secret Discord group for $79/year at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

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

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

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

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

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

[00:01:36] Matt: yeah. Right. 

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

[00:01:50] And so it’s a lot better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:03:15] Matt: Get an NFT? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:06:30] And give money to people and yea...

Or that she’s part of the Open Source Group Division inside of Automattic. Something I always knew, but once framed that way in discussion, was more interesting to hear.

I was lucky enough to chat with Josepha for nearly an hour, so I’m breaking up the conversation in two parts. Today, part 1, we’ll cover the logistics of her role, bringing WordCamps back, and the challenges with Gutenberg.

Thanks to folks over at Malcare for supporting this episode of the Matt Report. If you want to support me, you can buy me a digital coffee or join the super-not-so-secret Discord group for $79/year at buymeacoffee.com/mattreport

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:05:50] And then we also have we, the WordPress project also have the five for the future contributors who work with me and that’s a little l...

I get away with covering WordPress here on the Matt Report because our guests share lessons on how they built their business or spend time telling us how they navigated the community, until they found their way.

But news? Well, that’s why The WP Tavern has been the only name in town for a while, loaded with two critical components: A dedicated staff and they are funded.

If you want to make it, you do things differently, you do things like Rae Morey‘s The Repository newsletter. Today we’ll chat about building her WordPress news newsletter, background as a journalist, and explore what it really takes to make all of this work.

Thanks goes out to Malcare today for sponsoring a month of Matt Report and The WP Minute. You can help us by visiting buymeacoffee.com/mattrpeort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[00:05:53] Feedly probably 20% of them. I would reckon are [00:06:00] our newsletters or have a newsle...

I don’t have that today.

What I have is a young entrepreneur that impressed me with his story, branding, and how he’s approaching the business of…college movers. I know you normally tune in for the SaaS powered wins or the WordPress unicorns, but trust me when I tell you, Sam Chason, founder of Storage Scholars, is bringing the heat.

I’ll admit, his story was so good, that I almost didn’t believe him. I fully expected to decline the interview headed into our pre-interview. Luckily that wasn’t the case, and now I’ll be rooting for him from the sidelines hoping he can turn this business into a massive success.

By the way, we do talk WordPress/WooCommerce and the platforms he’s tried in the past — we’re still getting our hands dirty here.

If you enjoy the episode and want to buy me a virtual coffee in support, go to buymeacofee.com/mattreport and show your support for the show.

[00:00:00] Sam: Storage scholars is a door to door, white glove service for college students. So basically the way that the service works it’s generally for out-of-state or international studies.
[00:00:09] I was from New York. I went to a school called wake forest, North Carolina, and I had two international hallmates, one from China, one from Ethiopia, and I would stereotypically see them bring over two large suitcases overseas. They’d bought the rest of the stuff that they needed at target bed bath and beyond, et cetera.
[00:00:24] And there was just no way they were going to ship back their bedding or school supplies back to China. Right. So I thought, had to be a better way type deal. So the way the service works now is students receive boxes and packing supplies that we prefer finalists. They packed up their stuff. They snap a couple photos of the items.
[00:00:39] They’re looking at store add any extra insurance, lock up their room and go home. And then we generally have contracts with these universities. We get key access from the dorms. We use students on those campuses to do a contact us, move out about a 24 to 72 hours after campus closes, store it for the summer, however long they need to store it for and then have it ready and waiting in their new room pre delivered when they arrived back on campus.
[00:01:01] So that’s some storage scholars in a nutshell.
[00:01:03] Matt: Yeah. When I first, before. You and I chatted. I was like, okay, moving. Like I say, moving company. And in my, in my head, I’m like, big industry makes sense. But then when we chatted and you’re like, yeah, but people don’t need to bring all their stuff back.
[00:01:17] They’re gone for whatever a month, 45 days, a half semester or whatever the thing is. Ship, all this stuff back. And I was like, wow, this is really interesting. You mentioned that there were some competitors out there kind of doing this same thing, but just kind of half asking it. Right. It was just a little bit of, one thing, a little bit of the other, not the full, the full compliment.
[00:01:38] What are you doing better than the
[00:01:39] Sam: current. Well, yeah, definitely shout out Nick hubris, sweaty start up. He was one of the first people I met doing this up at Cornell and that’s kinda how I ended up on Twitter and probably my view as well. He, he sold a similar business up in the Northeast, so we were more so in the Southeast, we actually just recently signed a contract with a school in Pennsylvania a couple of days ago.
[00:01:56] So making an expansion there watch out during removers, but a lot of it has to do with not only the university partnerships. So we’re doing everything by the school’s books. There’s some others kind of, Companies out there that will just farm emails blast to a school and just figure they can get 30, 40, 50 customers per school and say that they operate at 80 a hundred institutions across the country.
[00:02:16] We’re more about building deep in Beth’s in-depth relationships with those schools. And not only with the administration, but then also. Really fostering entrepreneurship on these campuses and kind of in two to three students, generally sophomores, they have some long longevity and bring these kids on board.
[00:02:31] Having them shadow us, they can learn really important, like marketing operations, entrepreneurial type skills in school and ideally pay the wafers their way through college, kind of the same way that I
[00:02:40] Matt: did. Yeah. So it’s like, it’s I don’t, these are my words. You tell me paid internship. Is that how it.
[00:02:47] Sam: That’s funny. You say that that’s actually quote unquote what I just put on our handshake profile. Some of these schools, cause it was not getting accepted before as more of like a high paying job. I figured not only is that what’s more appealing to a college student nowadays. They want something for their resume, but also something they can make money on it, but it’s also kind of the way we were able to get it out of these universities and getting on those job boards in the shop postings.
[00:03:07] But, but it’s very valid to,
[00:03:08] Matt: so to my dedicated audience, so. Of what Sam just said is probably clicking to you. Why? Sam is here generally, I’m interviewing somebody who has a digital product, a digital service and agency software as a service. We’re going to get to that in a moment, but I really love the, because again, people who listen to this know that I’m a huge proponent of entrepreneurship, but learning the nuts and bolts of it, rolling up the sleeves and getting to work.
[00:03:33] It’s a fantastic model. So I applaud you for like having this platform for people to. Really figure things out. I don’t want to say the hard way, but like, you’re getting them a job. They’re learning all of this stuff. Have you been able to measure that? I know it’s kind of early days for you, but how have you measured the success of people actually learning the business side of things, even if they’re not sticking with you, for years as their end, is there anything like that, that you have a feedback loop?
[00:03:59] Sam: Yeah. I mean myself. I The reason why I started this business was to pay my way through school. I did it more out of necessity. But my business partner, actually, he was a year younger than me. He’s across the room over here. He’s probably got his headphones in, but he was a biochemistry major coming to school, like 4.0 student, like probably could have gone to Stanford med.
[00:04:16] But really got the itch, got the bug working with. And decided about halfway through his junior year to tell his whole family, Hey, I’m putting my medical career on hold. I really want to actually make, not necessarily to make a difference, be able to actually do things with my, with do things with my time, like immediately, as opposed to going to medical schoo...

I know people say that your work is not your worth, and I get it, but it’s really hard for me to disconnect from that. To show the world what you’ve built and put it into the hands of your super fans. To punch up as the underdog and prove to the Goliath that you can win in this arena too.

It’s addictive, it’s fulfilling, it’s enriching for us and hopefully those around us.

Jordan Gal returns to the Matt Report to share in his next chapter, Rally. Jordan brings the passion, he’s a business builder I’m on the sidelines rooting for. We’ll explore his challenges with building on a platform like Shopify and how he plans to disrupt that with his latest play in decentralized (and headless) e-commerce.

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/

[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 dif...

I guess at the end of the day, folks that build businesses or create content are simply seeking acceptance. We want to see our idea flourish, to be adopted by the masses, and to leave an impact.

When Maciej Palmowski launched WP Owls with his wife Agnieszka, it was (and still is) a publication that served the Polish community. But it clicked. People clicked, literally on to the website and their stories, so the co-founding duo decided it was time to go global.

Combined they’ve published over 200 articles about WordPress and the community on the blog, with no signs of stopping.

Oh, and if you’re wondering how to get a job like WordPress ambassador at Buddy, you’ll learn a thing or two about CI/CD today!

[00:00:00] Maciek: some people are afraid when it comes to version control system. This is a command line tool. So it’s scary and it’s only for developers now. That’s not true. We can use get crack and it’s really easy. We can use tower and there are probably some other tools also even using a gift and their web version.
[00:00:20] This, this is also a really friendly approach
[00:00:23] This episode is brought to you by mind size visit dot com for maintenance for WordPress. Woo commerce and more. Over at mind size. Dot com Hey, you know, it’s all the rage these days. Woo commerce. You know, what’s so difficult to maintain as a freelancer and a small agency. Woo. Commerce. Outsource your maintenance to mind size over@minesites.com. They’re the only, service company that I know that servicing specifically for WooCommerce and supporting you as an e-commerce shop as a merchant. so you don’t have to worry about how the heck to scale woo commerce, which is also one of the hardest things.
[00:01:00] Yes. There’s a lot of great hosting companies out there. But they’re not going to help optimize the code, drill down under the hood and really make the right decisions. For your WooCommerce site. Check out mine, sys.com and check out their WooCommerce service plans so you can get to better ruin. That’s a, probably not a joke. We’ll use again. Check out mine. sys.com. Thanks for supporting the show.
[00:01:25] Hey, do you like WordPress content in media? Like this? Do you like WordPress news and getting the hot takes community journalism and op-eds from your peers and colleagues in the WordPress space. Consider supporting the WP minute and the Matt report. By buying me a coffee over@buymeacoffee.com slash Matt report.
[00:01:45] You can join the membership, which also has a private discord you can chat with like-minded injured individuals and get your hands in the WordPress news every single week in our discord server. Going to buy me a coffee.com/matt report that’s buy me a coffee.com/matt report There’s no better feeling than when you launch something that just clicks with people. I guess at the end of the day, folks that build businesses or create content are simply seeking acceptance. We want to see our ideas flourish, to be adopted by the masses and to leave an impact. When launched WP hours with his wife. Agneshka it was instill is a publication that served the Polish community.
[00:02:22] But it clicked. People clicked literally onto the website and their stories. So the co-founding duo decided it was time to go global. Combined, they published over 200 articles about WordPress and the community on the blog with no signs of stopping. Oh, and if you’re wondering how to get a job like WordPress ambassador.
[00:02:41] At buddy get, you’re going to learn a lot about that today, along with continuous integration and continuous development. If you’re a small agency or a freelancer, it’s time to start getting serious about how you manage code. And that’s what today’s lesson is largely about. Okay Onto today’s episode
[00:02:58] Matt: one question I didn’t throw at you. How did you become a WordPress ambassador?
[00:03:02] I see a lot of folks these days on my Twitter stream saying I would love to just work for a brand and talk about WordPress and talk about their products, any insights into how to land an awesome job like yours.
[00:03:13] Maciek: To be honest, it’s walls a bit of coincidence because. I was working at WP M Def as at their second line of support.
[00:03:22] So I was mostly a developer and at some point Rafael, the CTO of Bobby, just reach out to me and asked, Hey, would you like to become our ambassador? Because on one hand, the day learned that WordPress is really getting bigger and bigger, and it would be a great idea to I have someone promoting their, their tool in worker space.
[00:03:44] And on the other hand, we had the, we had the chance to meet earlier on because one of the organizers of a word can Poland it will be the last word component. So it was 2019 and there were one of the sponsors right then. So we had the chance to talk to meet. And I was using body for many, many years.
[00:04:03] I was always asking questions asking for some new features. So, so, so they remembered that there, that there is one month. Of the dirt and he knows WordPress, and he probably likes our tool because he worked at a few companies and every time he asked us about something, because every company I switched during the first few years, it was one of my first decision.
[00:04:28] Maybe let’s try to adopt the body because it will speed up. Rework. So in the end, I, I have a chance to work here. And this is what I would say. This is a really a dream job.
[00:04:40] Matt: Yeah. We’re both biased because we both work for companies that represent WordPress in some either direct or indirect fashion.
[00:04:46] And I have for many years now but this is a, this is a role that I think. Whether it’s an ambassador hat or a title or some other title that, that you might get. I think this is a smart move for a lot of other WordPress companies to really invest in is you need to bridge that gap as we’ll talk about in a moment, you need to be able to bridge that gap between that technology and that sort of average consumer of that technology, because it can’t just be developer speak and it can’t just be the marketing speak some at some point, these brands need to cross over in the.
[00:05:17] And shake hands and agree that somebody can speak both sides of it. Exactly. And, and this is just an amazing time in WordPress. This space was so much acquisitions and, and big money coming into the space and bigger brands adopting. I think folks like you and I are going to be much more valuable.
[00:05:32] Maybe we should ask for raises as you and I
[00:05:36] Maciek: wait w with all our taxes rising in Poland, this, this is for sure what the, what I will do at the beginning of the next year
[00:05:44] Matt: you were in here first. Okay. So let’s talk about CIC D I know the definition, I’ll let you define it. And more specifically why it’s important for.
[00:05:55] Let’s say the smaller agency, who’s starting to gro...

Don’t let Full Site Editing steal all of the thunder, there’s still so much happening around headless WordPress and the ability to integrate 3rd party APIs to take the place of plugins. Look, I know it’s a polarizing thought process to some of us, but if we want WordPress to continue to grow — we need to give it some room for new use cases.

I’m joined by Alexandra Spolato to talk about her company GatsbyWPThemes and how this hotness comes with some red hot opportunity.

If you’re wondering how to make money in the WordPress theme space headed into 2022, look no further than this conversation.

Get schooled on the technology and learn how the heck she found her co-founder along with their recipe to success splitting the responsibilities.

[00:00:00] Alexandra: JAMstack is really the new hotness. Now it brings speed, which is an essential law with ACO, with the new Google measures about about some core vetoes for us that now are really essential. So we’ve we’ve Gatsby and JAMstack. Really really super fast website.

[00:00:20] You check. Pages instant, it’s static. brings all sorts of security because your database is not exposed, but have more flexibility great developer experience because now most developer. Learning react, not PHP. So people want to learn. We react. So it brings a lot of advantages.

[00:00:42] Matt: This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by foo plug-ins or specifically foo plugins, foo gallery. You can find it@foo.gallery. There’s a new pro commerce plan, and it gives you two way integration into WooCommerce. So if you want to sell photos, you can sell photos with foo.gallery and woo commerce.

[00:01:04] It makes your job. Super easy, especially if you’re a photographer. I just had family photos taken the other day and I looked at the big conglomerate website that my photographer sent me. He said, man, it would look so much better if you. Right through WooCommerce, especially if you use something like foo gallery, check out food, art gallery, and learn more about their pro commerce plan.

[00:01:26] Check out their WooCommerce integration. They have a great way to watermark and protect your photo galleries. Check them out and thank them for sponsoring the show. It’s food, art gallery go-to food art gallery today. Start selling images with foo gallery and.

[00:01:44] Now that the WordPress acquisition market has cooled off a bit. It’s time to stoke the fire on all things Gatsby in jams, tackiness. Again. Don’t let full site editing, steal all of the thunder. There’s still so much happening around headless WordPress and the ability to integrate third party API APIs to take the place of plugins and look. 

[00:02:02] I know it’s a polarizing thought process to some of us. But if we want WordPress to continue to grow, we need to give it some room for new use cases. 

[00:02:11] I’m joined by Alexandra Salado to talk about her company Gatsby WP themes over at Gaspe WP themes. Dot com and how this hotness comes with some red hot opportunity. If you’re wondering how to make money in WordPress theme space headed into 2022. Look, no further than this conversation. Get schooled on the technology and learn how the heck she found her co-founder along with the recipe to success, splitting the responsibilities. 

[00:02:36] This is the Matt report a podcast for the resilient and business builder i’ve launched something new you might have heard called the wp minute and you can join us as a member to get into our private discord server and take part in crafting the weekly wordpress news check out buy me a coffee.com/matt report join and thanks to food plugins fu gallery for sponsoring my work here on the mat report and the wp minute okay here’s [00:03:00] alexandra’s blotto on jamstack and Gasby wordpress themes

[00:03:04] Alexandra: JAMstack is really the new hotness. Now it brings speed, which is an essential law with ACO, with the new Google measures about about some core vetoes for us that now are really essential. So we’ve we’ve Gatsby and JAMstack. Really really super fast website.

[00:03:24] You check. Pages instant, it’s static. brings all sorts of security because your database is not exposed, but have more flexibility great developer experience because now most developer. Learning react, not PHP. So people want to learn. We react. So it brings a lot of advantages.

[00:03:46] . Then in my dream, Always been to, to make a product in some development, to be honest, I really wanted them to create the way I went into development because I’m a creative person. And when I was in what brands I wanted to do themes, but the market was crowded.

[00:04:01] And then I discover, I begin working with react NSC. It was, this is my bad, this is what I want to do.

[00:04:07] We need premium themes with nice designs with options. So people. Especially developers or agency can have some things. They can, they, they can reuse pre-made designs, but not only that, because myself, I use my own themes for projects to not reinvent the wheel. I have a developer team that I can modify everything, but it contains another themes that get all the data and all the options and And I work really faster with that.

[00:04:39] Matt: Here’s what I see. I’m not a developer and the WordPress world is still heavy on the, the development talk, right?

[00:04:47] The interest of WordPress is still largely for developers. First and foremost, and I see a lot of people. Hey, this whole like learn JavaScript, deeply thing. Gutenberg, Gatsby. I feel like some people there’s a camp of people who are like, oh, that’s that’s too technical. Like I can’t even enter in WordPress anymore.

[00:05:08] Because it’s no longer just modify some HTML and CSS and know a little bit of PHP lightly. Like that’s how I got into the WordPress world. So I could kind of relate with that, but I’m not a developer. So I haven’t been practicing this skill for like the last decade. What’s your thoughts on somebody from the outside, just getting into WordPress development?

[00:05:27] Is it that much of a challenge or if they’re starting fresh, you kind of just learn this language and your.

[00:05:33] Alexandra: So is that?

[00:05:33] different type of developers and What you want to do myself? I’m self-taught then I, when I begin with WordPress, I did have not shaman and CSS. I just began taking themes and playing with them. And. Yeah, the design sense. So deep things begin to work and I begin to learn as GMs, CSS, and begin to, to my themes and, and I love, and I discovered I’m a developer and I love that.[00:06:00] 

[00:06:00] So I wanted to go deeper and I wanted more. So I did a JavaScript bootcamp and I react and I, that was that’s me. Okay. Now there is a, of a type of developers and there is WordPress implementers. Doesn’t that blob, but they do great things to Wednesday address to work different type of clients. I think. So I think there is place and things for really different type of person.

About 6 weeks into this 12 week program, I teach a class on web & marketing. By this point, the founder drowning in information overload. Asking them to learn WordPress is already a massive order: getting them to understand SEO + content? They aren’t ready.

Today’s guest Derek Gleason has something to say about that. As someone who worked early on with CXL and now creating content at Shopify, he’s witnessed the gamut of content + SEO projects. We recorded his conversation a while ago, which was a month or two removed from when he and I originally booked, so some of the current events might sound a little outdated.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode!

WordPress is certainly in an inflection point. Where as the software is evolving, read: gutenberg + fullsite editing, the community of users grapple with what WordPress really is.

I feel like that’s a statement which has lingered in the air for a few years now. When you unlock it’s power of custom post types and fields with a dash of REST API magic, the CMS can become a neural network for your data. Yet with an interface that I struggle to drag a single block into the 3 column of my page layout.

Today’s guest has mastered the teachings of WordPress, specifically with Elementor for his students over the last few years but that usability struggle I mentioned earlier? Yeah…that’s caused him to pivot his teachings to a hosted platform you may have heard of before on the show before — Webflow.

Welcome today’s guest Dave Foye, as he unpacks the challenges of not only learning a new CMS, but the challenges of designing a curriculum for new students seeking to become proficient in it.

[00:00:00] Dave: switching tools is, is not for the faint-hearted, it’s quite an expensive process, isn’t it? In terms of well sunk cost in terms of what you’ve already.

[00:00:08] Put into the amount of time and energy that you’ve put into learning tools that you’ve previously used. I also had have still, a multiple six figure a year business teaching WordPress teaching, very specific tools, WordPress and elements are, that combination elements or page builder.

[00:00:25] Matt: This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by foo plug-ins or specifically foo plugins, foo gallery. You can find it@foo.gallery. There’s a new pro commerce plan, and it gives you two way integration into WooCommerce. So if you want to sell photos, you can sell photos with foo.gallery and woo commerce.

[00:00:47] It makes your job. Super easy, especially if you’re a photographer. I just had family photos taken the other day and I looked at the big conglomerate website that my photographer sent me. He said, man, it would look so much better if you. Right through WooCommerce, especially if you use something like foo gallery, check out food, art gallery, and learn more about their pro commerce plan.

[00:01:09] Check out their WooCommerce integration. They have a great way to watermark and protect your photo galleries. Check them out and thank them for sponsoring the show. It’s food, art gallery go-to food art gallery today. Start selling images with foo gallery and.

[00:01:27] As designers or developers, even product makers when WordPress is your hammer, everything looks like a nail. WordPress is certainly in an inflection point right now. Whereas the software is evolving Reed Gutenberg in full site, editing the community of users grapple with what WordPress really is. I feel like that’s a statement which has lingered in the air for a few years.

[00:01:50] When you unlock its power custom post types and fields with a dash of rest API magic, the CMS can become a neural network for your data yet with an interface that I struggle to drag and drop a single block into a third column of my page layout today’s guest has mastered the teachings of WordPress specifically with Elementor for his students over the last few years.

[00:02:12] But the usability struggle that I just met. Yeah, that’s caused him to pivot his teachings to a hosted platform. You may have heard of before on the show web. Welcome today’s guest Dave Foye, as he unpacks the challenges of not only learning a new CMS, but the challenges of devising a curriculum for new students seeking to become proficient in it.

[00:02:34] You’re listening to the Mer report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. If you’d like to support the show, please visit buy me a coffee.com/matt report. And buy me a digital coffee or joined the membership to jump into our private discord server with others. Chatting it up about the.

[00:02:48] And greatest in our crazy WordPress world, that’s buy me a coffee.com/maryport. And thanks to Fu plug-ins for supporting today’s show. Check out food gallery food art gallery for more. Okay. [00:03:00] Here’s my interview with Dave. 

[00:03:01] Dave: I had a lot of resistance, a lot of inner resistance to partly because, switching tools is, is not for the faint-hearted, it’s quite an expensive process, isn’t it? In terms of well sunk cost in terms of what you’ve already.

[00:03:15] Put into the amount of time and energy that you’ve put into learning tools that you’ve previously used. But I mean, I also had have still, but, I had at the time, like a multiple six figure a year business teaching WordPress teaching, very specific tools, WordPress and elements are, that combination elements or page builder.

[00:03:35] And so it, it really was kind of. It, it, it was, it was a real kind of crunch time for me for thinking that I have got to the point where I cannot use these tools anymore. I’m finding that I actually I’m finding that. I’ll talk about the details in a moment, but I can’t in all conscience recommend this particular combination of tools that I am well-known for and, very well paid for I can’t carry on.

[00:04:05] So, believe me, it was quite a, quite a risk. I think I remember one of my students say, and I’ve mentioned it’s something in, in the, in the little private Facebook group that I’ve got for one of my courses. And he just said career suicide. Nice. So,

[00:04:23] Matt: for thanks for the vote of confidence.

[00:04:25] Dave: Awesome. I mean, it, it probably had a point, you probably had a point 

[00:04:29] Matt: What was that? Oh, just real quick. What was that concern for you to say? You know what, I don’t feel like I can recommend these tools anymore. Was it more a, an ELA mentor thing? Was it more a WordPress thing? I mean, we’re in this chaotic times where it’s like, Gutenberg is still trying to get better full site editing’s coming in.

[00:04:48] You layer on the complexity of a piece of software that wants you to build a website a certain way? Are we just hitting a perfect storm here? Or was there something specific?

[00:04:57] Dave: Yeah, possibly. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I had got to the point where I started, well, I’ve, I’ve been using WordPress since 2007, something like that, so for my own personal projects and my own client projects, I’d use WordPress for, for a good long time. It was when I actually decided to teach online. I long story, I think we’ve covered this plenty of times before, but for 10 years I was actually a school teacher.

[00:05:23] I’m a, I am a qualified teacher, so I was a qualified teacher, teaching young children in the, in the UK. Like in the nineties and early two thousands. And I then got into web design and build up a great business, but it just decided that I just miss teaching so much. So for me, around 2016 ish, I decided I actually want to get back into teaching, but I want to teach the thing that I’ve been, I’ve been working with the web design tools that I’ll be working with for, for, for many years, what, what a perfect combination.

[00:05:54] So, I did a lot of research, long story, but I’d discovered elements or which...

If this week were a heavyweight fight between Learn Dash and Sandhills Development, Pippin would certainly be the beloved veteran. You can hear more about his side of the story in this podcast interview.

Today I got to sit down with Syed Balkhi, founder of Awesome Motive, to recap his point of view on the acquisition. It hasn’t been without some controversy, but hey, that’s WordPress for ya ★ Support this podcast ★

I’m honored to call Pippin my friend who has helped me “grow up” in the WordPress community. I’m happy for him, and sad that he’s retiring from the WordPress world…for now.

I had a chance to sit down with him earlier this morning to hash out all the feels around this news. I hope you enjoy the episode, please share it with others!

[00:00:00] Hey,
[00:00:01] Matt: everybody. Welcome back to a special episode of the Matt report, breaking news almost. And not this one’s not erring on the WP minute, but we broke a lot of news on the WP men. They go to the WP minute.com. If you want your weekly dose of five minute WordPress news delivered in your inbox every week, uh, this episode is sponsored by easy support videos, easy support videos, support your WordPress users right inside the WordPress admin.
[00:00:23] Using videos. Check out easy support. Dot com why am I doing this in line with the episode? Because we have a special guest today, Pippin, Williamson, Pippin. Welcome to the program. Thank you, Matt.
[00:00:35] Pippin: It’s great to be back.
[00:00:37] Matt: I woke up writing my weekly script for the WP minute and I was getting all of the acquisition news in there.
[00:00:43] I was getting all of the liquid web and learn dash and what WooCommerce was up to and I was ready to send it to my executive producer and I looked on Twitter one last time. And there you were saying that Sandhills was acquired. My awesome
[00:00:59] Pippin: motive. Sorry to screw up your, uh, your scheduling plan.
[00:01:04] Matt: I had a donut in my mouth and I’m trying to type in like, oh my God, what’s happening.
[00:01:08] I was real newsroom, uh, breaking moments here. First of all. Congratulations. Thank you. Um, at the top of this episode, what I want people to do is an, a link this in the show notes is please. For the love of all that is holy. If there’s anything you do with what I say here at the med report, read the blog post on Sandhills dev.com that Pippin wrote about the breakdown, phenomenal piece, one of your best, the best that you have written, uh, you know, uh, to, to bookend this, this, this book, this chapter of your life.
[00:01:49] Uh, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s actually an emotional thing for me. I don’t have a question straight away. It’s an emotional thing for me. I feel like I’ve been part of this journey with you. Have you felt that same vibe from others in the WordPress?
[00:02:02] Pippin: You know this entire morning, um, when we publish the, the announcement that all of the WordPress products were joining automotive and that after a transition period that I’m retiring from WordPress, um, and moving onto some other things, uh, it has been pretty much a constant stream of messages from.
[00:02:25] Friends colleagues, people that we’ve met once or twice at word camps and, and so many friends. And, um, from over the years, just, you know, saying hi, saying congrats, mentioning, you know, something about, you know, what we did together. You know, there’s so much. People that we have worked with over the years and that I’ve had the amazing opportunity to get to know.
[00:02:51] Um, so yeah, it was it’s, it’s been a pretty wild ride and a journey and hearing how many different people, um, have been impacted by the work that we’ve done over the last 10 years is an amazing way to, um, you know, maybe conclude this part of it.
[00:03:14] Matt: They’re in my, in the WP minute, uh, script that I wrote today, I said that you are your Sandhills and you specifically are either one of the most respected.
[00:03:30] Product companies in the WordPress space, if not the most respected, uh, WordPress plugin company in the space. There’s yeah. There’s such a deep connection that I think a lot of people share this. It’s what makes WordPress special, I guess, is because we all get, so the reason why we’re all so emotional about it, or at least I know I am is because we all get so connected with one another.
[00:03:51] We want to see each other when we want to see the software do well. I’m retiring from work. I was, I just ran to grab a coffee before we hit record. And I was thinking about some of the questions that I was going to ask you. This is probably a pretty blunt question to ask, but there’s the side balconies of the world.
[00:04:13] And then there’s you and me, right? How do you frame yourself to be able to say, okay, I’m retiring with WordPress from WordPress. I don’t even think the word retire is. In vocabulary. What do you think makes the entrepreneur your yourself as an entrepreneur versus SIADH maybe so different and has that played a role into making this decision?
[00:04:40] In other words, we’re world domination,
[00:04:43] Pippin: really? So it absolutely played a role. You know, one of the, one of the most challenging parts of, of this type of transition is we have this, this huge history of, of, of customers, of our team, of our products that, you know, those don’t just turn off those don’t just suddenly go away because I’m moving on to other things.
[00:05:11] What we have to try really, really hard to do. I spent an enormous amount of time on over this last summer is finding the best avenue for those to carry on for the products to carry on for the customers to continue to be supported better than we were ever able to do. And, you know, finding the right fit that ensures that that will happen.
[00:05:34] Truthfully requires someone like CYA, you know, SIADH is extremely laser-focus. And driven for his mission of helping small businesses. And he, his, you know, the first thing when, when he, and I started talking about this in depth over the summer, one of the first things that I, I asked him is, you know, what are you, what are you going to do?
[00:05:58] And what is the time, um, you know, do you plan to continue working on these and building these for years to come quick answer was, yeah, for at least this next 60 years, uh,
[00:06:12] You know, that is something that is a huge amount of reassurance for someone in my position that is, you know, knows that it’s time to move on to something else, but also, you know, agonizes over the details of how do we ensure that the customers and the team and the products are taken care of and, you know, knowing that he is committed to the long-term future, um, is extremely important to me.
[00:06:36] Um, You know, I, I recognize a couple of years ago that while I have had an amazing time and I absolutely loved the last decade, I’m not ready to keep doing it for another decade, you know, I need to do something else. Um, so
[00:06:56] Matt: yeah. I mean, it takes a lot of courage to admit that you’ve always been one, that’s been transparent with your posts and, you know, income reports and all this stuff with, with the pr...

There’s lots of potential users, customers, and room for investment (note: we just saw the acquisition of Yoast happen by Newfold, formally EIG. If I had to guess, somewhere between a $30-50M deal.)

If you though the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically the membership & LMS veritcal, then I have a surprise for you today. Nathalie Lussier, founder of AccessAlly a LMS plugin for WordPress joins us to talk about her venture in building her business.

From selling online courses and building community to building and selling software — this is a fantastic lesson for all of us. Her and her team are really proving that in the a crowded market, you stand apart from the crowd by knowing who your perfect customer is and building them the perfect product.

[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] Matt: Even with all of the WordPress consolidation happening, there’s still plenty of opportunity ahead for them. There’s lots of potential users, customers, and room for investments notes. We just saw the acquisition of Yoast happened by new fold, formerly EIG. If I had to guess a deal somewhere between a 30 and $50 million acquisition, if you thought the plugin space is crowded or even more specifically, the membership and LMS vertical is crowded.
[00:01:22] Then I have a surprise for you today, Natalie Lucier founder of access, ally and LMS plugin for WordPress joins us to talk about her venture in building her. From selling online courses and building community to building and selling software. This is a fantastic lesson for all of us. Her and her team are really proving that in the crowded space, you stand apart from the crowd by knowing who your perfect customer is and building them the perfect product you’re listening to the Maryport a podcast for the resilient digital business builders.
[00:01:51] Subscribe to the newsletter maryport.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on. Spotify, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Please share this episode, please do, because I just read that the best way to grow a podcast is word of mouth and sharing. So please share this episode with others.
[00:02:09] We’d love more listeners around here. Okay. Let’s get into today’s episode.
[00:02:13] It almost feels like a SAS software as a service. Tell us about that, that moment when you realize I’m teaching people, I might as well build the software too.
[00:02:22] Nathalie: Yeah, absolutely. So I was in the like marketing and tech space and doing videos on like, how to build a popup and how to do things on your WordPress site and how to market your courses and all of that stuff. And I was teaching. In courses and also on YouTube and people who were, signing up to our free challenge.
[00:02:42] We had a challenge called the 30 day list building challenge to help people build an email list and they were signing up. And it was, becoming pretty popular. So we had a lot of people logging in at the same time. And at the time. I thought we were getting attacked by hackers or something.
[00:02:56] Cause we have so many logins and the way that our plugin that we were using at the time it kept pinging our CRM and every single time somebody went to any page on that site. So, we were having nightmares basically. I would wake up every morning and have to call my host to have them. Unlock us, essentially, we put my website back up and then all the people who were signing up were upset with us because, they signed up and they couldn’t get what they were asking for or what we had promised.
[00:03:21] So essentially my husband and I were like, okay, let’s just quickly whip up a plugin to replace what we have right now, just to stop this problem. And so that’s literally in one weekend we wrote the first beta beta version of access ally. And it was just to solve our own problem. Yeah. But then after that, we kind of realized like, Hey, okay, this gives us a lot of, interesting options.
[00:03:40] And we started adding on and kind of building other things that we thought would be very useful for the people going through our courses and content. And that was kind of the start of what you see today.
[00:03:51] Matt: So you ha I, I didn’t write this down in our peer review, but what was the timeline you had popup ally first and then.
[00:03:58] Then we created access ally, correct?
[00:04:00] Nathalie: Yes. So we built SSLI first just to solve this problem. And we knew that someday we might release something like this, but it just felt like too big of an undertaking to do a whole like online membership or LMS or anything like that. So we ended up building popup ally next and releasing that first because we knew we could do a free version.
[00:04:19] We could see how that went. Then we could do a paid version and see how that was. Being responded to and how we could handle support and all of that. And then we realized, okay, yes, we can actually do this. We have the chops. And so let’s go all in on SSLI and kind of build
[00:04:33] Matt: that. And I’ll, I’ll paint sort of the the, the picture at least of the way that I see it in my head is pop-up plugin a very, very broad market, big market.
[00:04:44] Chances are anyone who might be selling courses or digital content is going to be attracted to a pop-up to use on their site to capture the visitor’s attention. And, oh, by the way, we also. Have this LMS plug-in fair statement.
[00:04:58] Nathalie: Yeah, it totally started off that way. It’s a much broader, pop-ups are much broader.
[00:05:02] And then, yeah, like you said, people who are using them to build an email list and audience, they probably will want to sell something online. So, so that pretty much leads to access ally.
[00:05:12] Matt: Yeah. I want to start with something that I won’t say it’s a curve ball, but a little bit on the hot seat, but something that I totall...

We could subscribe to every podcast, take every online course, thumbs up every video Troy Dean puts out on Facebook and we still wouldn’t be 100% ready.

Imagine having a full-time job and peddling your small piece of software on the side. Before you know it, it’s making 500 to 1,500 in monthly sales. If you dedicate more time to it, you can turn it into an almost full-time gig. But when? If you dedicate more time to it, where do you focus that precious resource?

Travis Lopes just made that leap from full-time at Rocket Genius — the makers of Gravity Forms — to run his software business, forgravity.com. He’ll take us down (or up?) the decision tree on how he weighed the opportunity ahead of him. Also, what about building for a niche product within a niche product?!

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.

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 ...

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that I’m constantly trying to learn and dissect what some of the most successful brands are in my space.

• How did she do it?
• What does the website look like?
• Productized service or digital product?
• Smash that like button on a secret formula to generating $5m in Facebook ad sales

All of this with our blinders on. Sometimes, the real secret, is just staying in the game. Jason joined us eight years ago, right when he and his wife Kim were making the transition to full-time product sales, leaving custom client work behind.

Now, Paid Memberships Pro has over 100,000 active installs according the WordPress.org directory and his business is getting a lot more focused on…doing what works.

Has he considered convergent PMP into a hosted solution? What about outside acquisition? You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out!

This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by how to market your plug-in dot com a framework for the sleep deprive developer. If you ask yourself, how do I get more downloads for my plugin? What about more sales? Should I do this lifetime license thing? You need to pick up the book, how to market your plugin over app. How to market your plugin.com.

Programming is about computer behavior. Marketing is about human behavior. Fortunately for us both a fairly predictable and you can learn more inside the book. How to market your plug-in dot com.

This book will help you market while you’re building your plugin. Instead of treating your marketing as a last resort. I can’t tell you how many times. How many interviews I’ve had, where the developer has just fallen upon luck and chance that they have a business in front of them. People are downloading their plugin. People are buying their plugin, but they hit a certain point of plateau where they need to scale. They need to get the word out there and this book will help you do it. Check it out@howtomarketyourplugin.com. Thanks for supporting the show.

This episode is also brought to you by media, ron.com media ron.com Ronald Ereka he’s back. He creates WordPress plugins. In fact, one of his plugins I was searching for the other day. Totally forgot that he made it called highlight and share. He creates a highlight and share plug, and you can highlight sections of texts and share them with your network right on your WordPress website.

Event tracking for gravity forms, simple comment editing and custom query blocks.

I’m going to click into the event, tracking for gravity forms. Of course you’ll need gravity forms, but you can download event tracking for free, right from either his website, media, ron.com or search for it on wordpress.org. It’s got 30,000 plus active installs. Well at the time of this recording, it was, it was updated a week ago. But if you’re looking to connect Google analytics, Google tag managers, to your gravity forms. Well to do a vent trackings, this plugin will do the trick. Check out media, ron.com for more of his plugins, reach out the Ronald you reca. If you have any other questions about building a WordPress plugin for yourself.

Thanks for supporting the show.

Probably just like you, the exploration for the secret ingredient to running a successful business is a tricky one. Speaking for myself. I can tell you that I’m constantly trying to learn and dissect what some of the most successful brands are doing in my space. How did she do it? What does the website look like?

Product I service or digital product. Smash that like button on a secret formula to generate $5 million in Facebook ad sales.

And all of this with our blinders on. Sometimes the real secret is just staying in the game. Today’s guest first joined us eight years ago. Right? When he and his wife were making the transition to full-time product sales, leaving custom client work behind. Now paid memberships pro has over 100,000 active installs, according to the wordpress.org directory and his business is getting a lot more focused on doing what works.

Has Jason considered converting, paid memberships pro into a hosted solution. What about outside acquisition? You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out. You’re listening to the Maryport.

A podcast for the resilient digital business builders. Subscribe to the newsletter at maryport.com/subscribe or follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Share this episode on your social media. We’d love more listeners around here. Okay. Let’s get into today’s episode.

With Jason.

hey, Jason, welcome to the program.

Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m a big fan, a big listener, and it’s good to just get to chat with you again. Um, I’m going to do this every couple of weeks.

Like there’s a thunderstorm today and I’m going to, you know, the thunder storm is gonna cancel this one too, and I’ll have to reschedule for next week.

so I last had you on eight years ago, when you were one of the founding. Interviewees of the Maryport podcast, a lot has changed. And a lot hasn’t changed. Uh, for paid memberships pro and your business. Uh, and for WordPress. Chris lemma re recently wrote a post about, uh, the future success of WordPress, which we’ll get into in a little bit and sort of how he sees hosts playing a role in the adoption of WordPress, uh, streamlining WordPress onboarding, even specific flavors of let’s say membership sites, e-commerce sites, that kind of thing.

But go back in your time machine and let me know, where were you mentally? Eight years ago with the business. And when we first interviewed.

Yeah. Um, so that, that would have been 2013, which would have been a couple of years after paid memberships pro launched. And at that point PM pro was really a loss leader for our consulting business.

So it was mostly just Kim and I, and we had a couple of contractors, um, you know, who helped out with random things. But we, you know, we had a membership plugin for WordPress and we parlayed that into, you know, 10 to $30,000, you know, gigs installing WordPress from membership sites and things like that. Um, and we were, we were doing that transition of like, Hey, how do we transition from a consultant company to a products company?

We were just starting that around 2013 and, and also like figuring out our first hire. I remember how hard, like the first hire was, um, And now it’s kind of like, you know, we’re hiring all the time. It’s like, it has to be a process where we’re constantly, like we have relatively low turnover of employees and we’ve been like, grateful for that.

But even that, like just growing and, you know, people go occasionally that, you know, we have to, as a process now, like hiring people as a process, it was like a huge deal. The biggest thing of the year, you know, in 2013. And now it’s just another process. Yeah.

Probably one of the most, uh, popular, free membership plugins that are out there.

I know there’s a lot of plugins out there that sort of skate by semi membership. You know, they’re doing like log-in and access control, but certainly not to the degree of integration, ad-ons support general reach that you have memberships a hot space. Uh, when we...

In today’s episode, I break down a few clips from a recent episode of Bootstrapped Web, where hosts Brian & Joran discuss their challenge of filling this role.

I refer to this as Founder Marketing.

When a young company is hiring for this role, it’s a responsibility that can’t be left to the fundamental content creation tasks. A capable candidate must be able to channel their inner founder in order to create content that resonates across: sales, marketing, product, and support.

Someone that not only knows how to create a piece of content, but that also is as passionate for the business as they are the audience.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments or engage with the following Twitter thread.

My friends @CasJam and @JordanGal are looking to hire for the "Media Creator" role. I do this for @CastosHQ and have lots of thoughts.

Someone that can execute, what I call, "Founder Marketing."

Let's start a ★ Support this podcast ★

This goes beyond simply linking to each others business or handing over the occasional customer referral. I’m talking about two (or more) partners both handling responsibilities and working towards a shared goal for the overall mission.

Tara Claeys, founder of Design TLC, has a certain knack for this stuff. She co-hosted the WordPress podcast Hallway Tracks along side Liam Dempsey and is now laying down the roots with a new partner in podcasting, Aubrey Bursch.

So I think it goes a little something like this: Aubrey invests her knowledge and experience with Easy School Marketing into the podcast content, while Tara flexes her strengths in design, compassion and years of podcast experience.

Together they host Mindful School Marketing, The Go-To Podcast for Independent School Professionals.

Tara Mindful School Marketing Matt Report + 2

[00:00:00] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by mal care. Learn more about Malik here at Dot com. You’ve heard me talk about mal care before, but they’re back with some interesting updates. Not only are they the WordPress plugin with instant WordPress malware removal. Well, let me read some of these features. 

[00:00:15] Deep malware scanning. They know about malware that other plugins don’t. Number two, that one click malware removal process makes it super easy to remove from your WordPress website and number three, a new feature called auto bot ultra defense system. Okay. I made that ultra defense system part up, but get this, it automatically blocks the bots hitting your website. 

[00:00:35]So, not only does that protect your website, but in the long run, it’ll improve speed of your site from not letting those bots through the doors. Check out mal care at care.com that’s mal care.com. I don’t want to be a malware specialist. You don’t either check out mal. care.com. thanks for supporting the show

[00:00:56]Matt: [00:00:56] episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search WP. Find search wp@searchwp.com. Let’s talk about the power of their metrics. Add on for a moment. Since I redesigned the Matt report website, I put search front and center on my homepage. Why search WP metrics metrics. Give me the inside data to what visitors on my site are looking for.

[00:01:18] I love the graphs and the actionable advice that it provides me. I can make informed decisions to create new content or optimize existing content that my audience is searching for. Remember when Google gave you all of that search data? Yeah, it was great. Back then, way back then when they gave it to us, they don’t give it to us anymore.

[00:01:36] Put on-site search front and center for your visitors. Get that data back. Get searched wp@searchwp.com along with their metrics. Add on that search wp.com. Thanks for supporting the show.

[00:01:49] Forming a successful partnership in business might be the most powerful, yet most challenging things to do. Right. That’s probably an understatement of the year. This goes beyond simply linking to each other’s businesses or handing over the occasional customer referral. I’m talking about two or more partners, both handling responsibilities and working towards a shared goal for the overall mission. 

[00:02:10] Tara clays, founder of design TLC has a certain knack for this stuff. She co-hosted the WordPress podcast hallway tracks alongside Liam Dempsey, and is now laying down roots with a new partner in podcasting, Aubrey Birch. So I think it goes a little, something like this. Aubrey invests her knowledge and experience with easy school marketing into the podcast content while Tara flexes her strengths and design compassion, and years of podcast experience. Together. They host mindful school marketing, the go-to podcast for independent school professionals. 

[00:02:40]You’re listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter at maryport.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts better yet. Please share this episode on social media. We’d love more listeners around here. 

[00:02:56] Okay. Let’s talk to tara and aubrey and why they started this [00:03:00] crazy podcasting thing that they 

[00:03:02] Tara: [00:03:02] First of all. Thanks for that. Nice mention and hallway chats is really a labor of love that Liam Dempsey and I did for three years. And I think that was it a great experience for us and introduced me to podcasting and it was a complete community donation, there was no business development involved with it at all.

[00:03:21] And so, and we loved it and I continue to love it. But As time went on during that three-year period of time, I started niching down my own WordPress agency to do work for mainly schools and nonprofits. And as part of that process reached out and met other people in the school, community, marketing community, Adria among them.

[00:03:38] And she and I have been in a mastermind for over a year now. And so we struck up a good friendship and also collaboration, our services sort of overlap. And so the long answer is that we in that. In that relationship that we built as hallway chats was sort of winding down. I really didn’t even miss a beat before reaching out and seeing if Abby would like to do a podcast that that was directed toward our, our common target audience, but also that we could have fun doing as well.

[00:04:12]So there is a business development aspect of this for us, as well as a community aspect as well.

[00:04:18]Matt: [00:04:18] The, yeah, you’ve obviously have a knack for finding.

[00:04:25] Great co-hosts, which is not an easy feat in the podcasting world. It’s one that I have failed miserably at for about nine years as a podcast. It’s like just trying to find somebody who just wants to talk to me for an hour every week. What’s wrong with that.

[00:04:39] Shouldn’t be that difficult. It’s very difficult. Aubrey, I’m going to pass the question over to you. Is this your first time into podcasting? And if so, how did you feel 

[00:04:49] joining 

[00:04:50] Aubrey: [00:04:50] And it’s been a blast. And I am so thankful every day that Tara actually asked me to do a podcast with her because I was thinking around February, 2020, I was like, I should launch it. Podcast. And I’m so glad I didn’t act on that first impulse because Tara’s kind of taken me under her wing and really like showed me everything that goes into, preparation for a podcast, execution, everything.

[00:05:15] And it’s just been a great learning process for me. And also Tara?

[00:05:19] is one of the most generous, amazing. Like solid people you’re you’ve ever met. I, as you probably know, Matt. And so we just kind of hit it off in terms of, understanding each episode and what our flow was with the episode.

[00:05:34] And so we jumped right in and she’s been just such a great...

Let me frame that for you: A high-touch, white glove services business is people + time intensive.

If you own a boutique agency, you’re aware of the time and money you invest on all of processes around building a website.

It’s hard to prove value for, too.

And if you’re launching something like a done-for-you service, chances are there’s less customer interaction + hand holding, but at a price point that reflects the value.

You’re doing something the customers perceives as valuable for the money they’ve agreed to pay you, and your internal processes are efficient enough that you are profitable to repeat this type of work.

Lindsay Halsey, co-founder of Pathfinder SEO is taking this to the next level, with a guided approach. You get a valuable product, a valuable service, and then you sprinkle some controlled face-to-face time on top.

A guided productized service.

I’m absolutely fascinated by this and I think it’s the natural step to increase value in a world now saturated by productized services on one side, and Software as a Service on the other. Marry both worlds, and you get an extremely happy customer.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode, if you do, please share it with others!

Lindsay Halsey PathFinder SEO

[00:00:00] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by mal care. Learn more about Malik here at Dot com. You’ve heard me talk about mal care before, but they’re back with some interesting updates. Not only are they the WordPress plugin with instant WordPress malware removal. Let me read some of these features. 

[00:00:14] Deep malware scanning. They know about malware that other plugins don’t. Number two, that one click malware removal process makes it super easy to remove from your WordPress website and number three, a new feature called auto bot ultra defense system. Okay. I made that ultra defense system part up, but get this, it automatically blocks the bots hitting your website. 

[00:00:34]So, not only does that protect your website, but in the long run, it’ll improve speed of your site from not letting those bots through the doors. Check out mal care at care.com that’s mal care.com. I don’t want to be a malware specialist. You don’t either check out mal. care.com. thanks for supporting the show

[00:00:55]Matt: [00:00:55] episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search WP. Find search [00:01:00] wp@searchwp.com. Let’s talk about the power of their metrics. Add on for a moment. Since I redesigned the Matt report website, I put search front and center on my homepage. Why search WP metrics metrics. Give me the inside data to what visitors on my site are looking for.

[00:01:17] I love the graphs and the actionable advice that it provides me. I can make informed decisions to create new content or optimize existing content that my audience is searching for. Remember when Google gave you all of that search data? Yeah, it was great. Back then, way back then when they gave it to us, they don’t give it to us anymore.

[00:01:35] Put on-site search front and center for your visitors. Get that data back. Get searched wp@searchwp.com along with their metrics. Add on that search wp.com. Thanks for supporting the show. 

[00:01:49] There’s a fine balance between optimizing your services for profits and providing satisfactory value for the money you charge your customers. Let me frame that for you for a second. High touch white glove service business is [00:02:00] people in time intensive. Anyone that has run a small boutique agency knows that the time and money you invest on all processes around building a website is hard to prove value for. And if you’re launching something like a done for you service. 

[00:02:12]Chances are there’s less customer interaction and handholding, but at a price point that reflects that value. You’re doing something, the customer perceives as valuable for the money they’ve agreed to pay you. And your internal processes are efficient enough that you’re profitable. Every time you repeat this type of work. 

[00:02:28] Lindsay Halsy co-founder of Pathfinder. SEO is taking this to the next level with a guided approach. You get a valuable product with a valuable service. And then you sprinkle some controlled face to face time on top. I guided a product I service. I’m absolutely fascinated by this. And it’s the natural step to increase value in a world now saturated by product I services on one side and software as a service on the other. 

[00:02:53] Marry, both worlds and you get an extremely happy customer. You’re listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the [00:03:00] resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter@mattreport.com slash subscribe and follow the podcast on apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet. Please share this episode on social media. We’d love more listeners around here. Okay let’s dive into today’s episode with lindsay 

[00:03:17]

[00:03:17] Matt: [00:03:17] One of the things I want to dive right into this, because Pathfinder SEO is not just. Hey, come hire you to do SEO stuff, right? It’s more than the services side. What is, what do you compliment the services side 

[00:03:30] Lindsay: [00:03:30] with that Pathfinders? We consider our approach to be a guided pathway. And when you think about the SEO world if you’re a business owner and you’re looking to get found on Google, you essentially have two options.

[00:03:42] One go and hire an agency. Have them build the traffic for you and engage in SEO. Or to take a, do it yourself, approach, take courses, install, plugins and learn your way through the process of growing your own traffic. And, and so we for many years for about 10 plus years have been over on the agency [00:04:00] side, delivering SEO services.

[00:04:02] And one of the things that we heard from business owners is that sometimes they can’t afford a professional to hire. And, and they can’t outsource that piece of their marketing. Other times they can’t find an agency, they can dress. To deliver sound SEO services, and yet the courses and things that, that take them out there and give them a lot of information.

[00:04:18] A lot of insight, the software out there gives a lot of insight, but doesn’t always actually show them the process to follow. So they didn’t really know what to do. And, and so that process-based approach to SEO is really what we specialize in over at Pathfinder on this guided approach. And so we share our process that we developed over 10 years break SEO down into a series of easy to follow steps.

[00:04:41]We include coaching because who doesn’t want to jump on a call with a mentor coach friend and, and get your answers answers to your questions and get held accountable for kind of going to the gym and doing the workout of guided SEO. And then tools. So you can do your keyword research, get your monthly reporting, track your rankings all in Pathfinder.

[00:04:58]And, and so that’s really where, [00:05:00] where we’re coming from is that happy medium between hiring an agency and going DIY. But then we also kind of discovered along the way that a lot of freelancers and a...

At one point in his career, he was pumping out content on Kinsta’s blog like an absolute machine while I was raging against that machine, selling would-be customers on Pagely’s hosting stack.

So where is Brian Jackson, former marketer at Kinsta now?

He co-found Forgemedia with his brother Brett, and have released 3 unique plugins, two of which help WordPress site owners optimize their sites for ranking and social sharing. Oh, they tossed a coupon plugin in there too to help affiliates increase sales for good measure.

Once frienemy now Matt Report guest, I’m excited to share this conversation with you today.

Brian Jackson Forgemedia Matt Report

[00:00:00] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by mal care. Learn more about Malik here at Dot com. You’ve heard me talk about mal care before, but they’re back with some interesting updates. Not only are they the WordPress plugin with instant WordPress malware removal. Well, let me read some of these features. 

[00:00:15] Deep malware scanning. They know about malware that other plugins don’t. Number two, that one click malware removal process makes it super easy to remove from your WordPress website and number three, a new feature called auto bot ultra defense system. Okay. I made that ultra defense system part up, but get this, it automatically blocks the bots hitting your website. 

[00:00:35]So, not only does that protect your website, but in the long run, it’ll improve speed of your site from not letting those bots through the doors. Check out mal care at care.com that’s mal care.com. I don’t want to be a malware specialist. You don’t either check out mal. care.com. thanks for supporting the show

[00:00:56]Matt: [00:00:56] episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search WP. Find search [00:01:00] wp@searchwp.com. Let’s talk about the power of their metrics. Add on for a moment. Since I redesigned the Matt report website, I put search front and center on my homepage. Why search WP metrics metrics. Give me the inside data to what visitors on my site are looking for.

[00:01:18] I love the graphs and the actionable advice that it provides me. I can make informed decisions to create new content or optimize existing content that my audience is searching for. Remember when Google gave you all of that search data? Yeah, it was great. Back then, way back then when they gave it to us, they don’t give it to us anymore.

[00:01:36] Put on-site search front and center for your visitors. Get that data back. Get searched wp@searchwp.com along with their metrics. Add on that search wp.com. Thanks for supporting the show.

[00:01:49] today’s guest used to sit on the opposite sides of the WordPress hosting competition table. For me, at one point in his career, he was pumping out content on  blog, like an absolute machine. [00:02:00] Well, I was raging against that machine selling would be customers on Paisley’s hosting stack. So where is Brian Jackson?

[00:02:06] Former marketer at Kinston now. He co-founded forge media with his brother, Brett and have released three unique plugins, two of which help WordPress site owners optimize their sites for ranking and social sharing. Oh, they tossed that coupon plugin in there too.

[00:02:20] To help affiliates increase their sales for good measure. Once frenemy now, Matt report guests. I’m excited to share this conversation with you today. You’re listening to the Maryport podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter now. report.com/subscribe and follow us on apple podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, better yet.

[00:02:40] Please share this episode on social media. More love we get more listeners. There are around here. Okay. Don’t forget to listen to the WP minute podcasts. It’s weekly. WordPress news. And under five minutes while I just said it every week, the WP minute.com. It’s the WP minute.com. Subscribe to the [00:03:00] newsletter there.

[00:03:00] Brian Jackson, here we go.

[00:03:02] Brian: [00:03:02] I am running just a small little agency with my brother. We’re both the co-founders of forge media is what it’s called.

[00:03:09] And we have a, kind of a marketing blog where we talk about WordPress related stuff in marketing and SEO. And then our main focus is actually our, we have three different WordPress plugins that we develop. One is a coupon plugin for like affiliate marketers, and other one is a social sharing plugin.

[00:03:27] That’s really kind of focused on the performance aspect of it. And then we have our perf matters plugin, which is basically trying to tweak, WordPress to get it to be as fast as he can kind of a compliment to. Some of the other performance plugins that are already out there. So like we see a lot of people are using ours along with another one.

[00:03:47] Matt: [00:03:47] \ I’m going to take this in the reverse order when we had our pre-interview something that just struck me. What is the attraction to. Social sharing plugins. I feel like it’s one of [00:04:00] those things, whereas , isn’t this solved already. Shouldn’t it be solved by WordPress at this point.

[00:04:06]Social media is obviously here to stay. We’re recording this in the year 2021. You’d think that those buttons, those things for sharing your articles and your posts out would have been solved already. What is the attraction to that? What’s so good about that. 

[00:04:22]Brian: [00:04:22] And actually. I would actually say since we’ve been in developing our programmatic plugin for a while, and now we’re developing our social sharing plugin, the social sharing plugin is actually more complex to develop than our performance.

[00:04:36] One sounds strange, but behind the scenes, there’s a lot more that goes on. Especially once you get into. Doing the social share counters and how to make that work for performance stuff. And then just Pinterest is just a nightmare to work with because you have your things, like you click a Pinterest image and it brings up all the images on the page.

[00:04:57] There you can select there’s different [00:05:00] things you have to go through. And WordPress is just never going to be up to par compared to The social sharing plugins. I think WordPress will get to the point where you’ll eventually have a nice block with, I want these three buttons. Here’s my block.

[00:05:11] I’ll drag it into the widget. We’re pretty much close to that. But as far as going beyond that, I don’t think we’re press ever...

This will be his 6th appearance on the show. With this episode, we’ve covered 4 different SaaS based businesses, with a handful of digital products and one service-based business that’s still running, of which, I’ve never fully interviewed him about.

I really should since it’s the cashflow center he has to fund all of these business experiments he’s chasing.

His name is Brian Casel and he’s trying something new, it’s called ZipMessage. It’s an asynch way to share videos with customers & colleagues. Out of everything he’s worked on, I think this will be the software project that defines his career in the software business.

Just like I called it with Paul Jarvis and Fathom Analytics taking over his product world, I bet we’ll have Brian back on for a 7th time when he sells his company to Microsoft.

Enjoy today’s episode!

[00:01:39] Matt: [00:01:39] It took me a while to draw out what I wanted to say in today’s monologue about our guests. This will be a six appearance on the show. With this episode, we’ve covered four different SAS based businesses with a handful of digital products and one service-based business. That’s still running of which I’ve never really fully interviewed them about. I really should. Since it’s the cashflow center, he has [00:02:00] to fund all of these business experiments. He’s chasing.
[00:02:03] Can you guess who it is? His name is Brian Casel. He’s trying something new. It’s called zip message. It’s an async way to share videos with customers and colleagues. Out of everything he’s worked on. I think this will be the software project that defines his career in the software business.
[00:02:19]Just like I called it with Paul Jarvis and fathom analytics taking over his product world. I bet we’ll have Brian back on for a seventh time when he sells this business to Microsoft. You’re listening to the Maryport a podcast for the resilient digital business builders. Subscribe to the newsletter@mattreport.com slash subscribe and follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet. Please share this episode on your social media. We’d love more listeners around here. Okay.
[00:02:46] Let’s talk to Brian and find out why he’s launching yet another product. Hey everybody. Welcome back to what I’m calling the Brian report. Brian. Oh man. Welcome back to the podcast. You’ve [00:03:00] clearly won the, a amount of recurring times on the, on the merit port show. I should just have applied for all of the products that you launch. I should just have a podcast all to yourself and everything that you have going on today.
[00:03:12] We’re talking about. If that’s
[00:03:13] Brian: [00:03:13] not a sign of failure, I don’t know.
[00:03:15] Matt: [00:03:15] What is failure show castles here to talk about what might be another failure, the message you can find zip message@zipmessage.com. I’m going to open this up. I think a lot of people know your backstory. If they haven’t, they can listen to the half a dozen shows that you and I have already done on this podcast.
[00:03:33]Why this product last time we. We chatted. You were just getting your, you were, you were getting that sort of Ruby on rails, getting your chops down on that, like learning how to build whole other platform and suddenly zip message appeared out of nowhere. How, why, when did it come about, why did you pursue it?
[00:03:51] Brian: [00:03:51] Yeah. I don’t, I don’t remember exactly when our last show here on a I’ll call it Matt report aired. It must’ve been [00:04:00] probably around 2018 or 2019. I can’t believe it’s actually been that long, but you and I have chatted since then. The, so a little bit of of the timeline process kit, which is, you know, I still run and still going that product.
[00:04:15] I basically started working on it really full-time in January of 2019, I kind of started planning it in 18, but really got full-time into it in January 19. Launched that to first paying customers by around June of, I want to say, yeah, 2019, and then really focused a hundred percent on that. Throughout 19 and 20 and into 20.
[00:04:40] And then at the end of 2020 you know, process kit just got to the, to that place where a lot of SAS get to where, you know, a couple thousand in MRR it’s really slow to grow. It has some. You know, so some, some challenges I tried a bunch of stuff and I’m still trying some stuff, but I decided at, [00:05:00] in around December of 2020 to just take a step back and start to open my mind to like, maybe I should try another product or two or three.
[00:05:12] And actually like back in, back in, you know, back in January, the idea was. Let’s let’s throw a couple of ideas at the wall and see what sticks, but there was really this one idea called zip message, which I had the idea and midway through 2020, but I, you know, I shelved it along with all the other shiny object ideas in my long list of them.
[00:05:29]But I was like, let me just try this. Take a little breather from, from really pushing on process kit, put it, put the roadmap on process could a little bit on, on maintenance mode. And and I went into zip message and, you know, I really liked the idea. I was attracted to the idea because a number of different things.
[00:05:46]First of all, you know, in, in a lot of ways, it’s sort of really every business that I ever get into, I’m trying to course correct from something that I learned in the, in the previous one. Right. One of the big challenges with process kit [00:06:00] has been that it’s a really big. Product, which means it’s a really big task to adopt.
[00:06:05] If you’re a new customer, like it literally takes new customers a good month, at least of. Of like everyday work on their part to, to
[00:06:13] Matt: [00:06:13] really, they have to appeal the process out, template it out into your system, if you will, and then engage people to, to use it. And I remember you and I chatting a lot PR you know, privately between the two of us, like, wouldn’t this be a great idea, like free templates to like kickstart that and nurture.
[00:06:30] Yeah.
[00:06:30] Brian: [00:06:30] And, and we have templates in there which really did help a lot in, in late 20, 20. Added the templates and put them like front and center in the onboarding experience. So actually since then we’ve had, you know, more customers, self convert without, without the heavy customer support load that it did have for a while there.
[00:06:45]And that, that continues, I guess it’s just super slow, you know, to, to grow and, and become a thing. And for those that don’t know, like in the background, I also have audience ops, which I’m not super involved in day to day, but that, that is the other business that I have that, that sort of.
[00:07:00] [00:06:59] Funds all the runway for, for getting into SAS. So it gives me a little bit of space and time to be able to explore different ideas which is, which is really nice. But with zip messaging, I really liked it because the first things that really attracted to me as the business idea is that it’s so fast to get value from, you know, like again, process kit is like, you got to really commit like a good month to get, to really start to get value....

At first, I thought she was creating the typical tutorial videos channel around this very popular app building platform, but as I explored more, I realized she was building a very unique business behind the scenes.

I think most of us in the client services or consulting space, long to have an additional stream of income that isn’t directly tied to our consulting hours. You’ll often see a digital download, a one-time course, or a finely-tuned productized service that effectively optimizes our work effort to profit margin ratio.

But what Kristen and her partner are building at coachingnocodeapps.com is something of a hybrid.

It’s a coaching series, a course, and recurring consulting for customers that need help building out their Bubble app.

In the WordPress world, this might be like selling a web design course for Elementor while you do monthly check-ins to help your clients build out new pages or add new functionality.

Needless to say, I really like this model.

Kristen brings the knowledge in today’s episode. I’m going to leave you with this one question to ponder as you continue on…what do you think the most challenging part of her business is?

You’re listening to the Matt Report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter at mattreport.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet, please share this episode on your social media! We’d love more listeners around here.

Kristen Youngs Matt Report Podcast

[00:00:00] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by mal care. Learn more about Malik here at Dot com. You’ve heard me talk about mal care before, but they’re back with some interesting updates. Not only are they the WordPress plugin with instant WordPress malware removal. Well, let me read some of these features. 

[00:00:15] Deep malware scanning. They know about malware that other plugins don’t. Number two, that one click malware removal process makes it super easy to remove from your WordPress website and number three, a new feature called auto bot ultra defense system. Okay. I made that ultra defense system part up, but get this, it automatically blocks the bots hitting your website. 

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[00:00:56] This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by gravity forms. One of the [00:01:00] most trusted longest lasting oh geez. Of the WordPress product space, gravity forms. 2.5 has arrived. All new builder experience, tons of certified developer. Ad-ons. And the most accessible form plugin in existence. If you’re doing complex form stuff on your WordPress project, user registration, storing data, connecting them to other automation workflows, you know, not to look any further than the plugin I’ve been paying for since 1997. 

[00:01:25] Okay. Maybe not that long, but it’s the first plugin I ever bought and happily renew every single year checkout gravity forms, 2.5, all new builder experience. At gravity forms.com. That’s gravity forms.com.

[00:01:39] I came across Kristen Young’s YouTube channel while I was exploring the popular no code bubble.io platform. At first, I thought she was creating the typical tutorial videos around this very popular app building platform. But as I explored more, I realized she was building a very unique business behind the scenes. I think most of us in the client services or consulting space long to have an additional stream of income [00:02:00] that isn’t directly tied to our consulting hours. You’ll often see a digital download a one-time course or a finely tuned productized service that effectively optimizes. 

[00:02:09] Our work to profit margin ratio. But what Kristin and her partner are building at coaching no-code apps is something of a hybrid. It’s a coaching series, a course, and a recurring consulting for customers that need help building out their bubble app. In the WordPress world, this might be like selling a web design course for Ella mentor. While you do monthly check-ins to help your client build out new pages and, or add new functionality. 

[00:02:33] Needless to say, I really liked this model. Kristen brings the knowledge in today’s episode. I’m going to leave you with this one question to ponder as you continue on, what do you think the most challenging part of her business is? You’re listening to the Matt report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder, subscribed to the newsletter at 

[00:02:51] port.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet. Please share this [00:03:00] episode on social media. We’d love more listeners around here. 

[00:03:02] Kristen: [00:03:02] I am the co-founder of a company called coaching no-code apps, and we essentially help entrepreneurs, business owners, people who already have existing businesses or people who are looking to launch new businesses.

[00:03:15] That are app based. We help them go from their idea stage to having that first version app that they can either launch within a business and help scale their operations or launch as a brand new business. And they don’t need any coding backgrounds, no technical skills in order to do that. 

[00:03:37]Matt: [00:03:37] We chatted in our, pre-interview talking about like how excited I was when I first discovered bubble. And I was like, Hey, coming from the WordPress world, this is in my eyes. I was like, this is going to be like a page builder. I can just drag and drop things around and I could build myself an app and I’ll, I’m going to be a superhero.

[00:03:52] And I was like, wouldn’t it be nice to connect up to a rest API of WordPress or like my podcasting host company [00:04:00] and get this data. I was like, how do I do that with bubble? And I started like researching it. I started doing it myself and I was like, God, no way, am I going to be able to do this by myself?

[00:04:09] And then I found your video and I was like, Oh man, there’s, there’s a lot of stuff to this, no code. And this bubble thing is there, like one thing that really sticks out. In your engagement with customers, that same feeling that they share with you, thought this was going to be easy and Oh my God, I’m going to need your help with this.

[00:04:27] Is there like one or two things that you come across every day with this stuff? 

[00:04:30]Kristen: [00:04:30] Yeah. And I think it’s less about specific technical functions and more so just because when people hear about no code. They think that it’s going to be easy. And I think it gives the impression that you can kind of just come on board, whatever platform it is, and have a custom application up and running within, maybe a few hours or a few days.

[00:04:58]A lot of people, they don’t [00:05:00] realize how complex th...

Whatever that “job” is for you.

It could be publishing a simple blog or helping a university with a multi-site solution for an intranet — WordPress is powerful, but the solution can be expansive. Our stack is moving well beyond plugins, and that’s a good thing.

One person leading the charge to expand our knowledge in this space is Christie Chirinos, former product manager at LiquidWeb and now host and creator of the Open Source Economist podcast.

If you’re selling an open source product (or any product for that matter), Christie is someone you want on your team. I’m excited to learn more about the open source space through her new podcast.

Okay, don’t forget to subscribe at MattReport.com/subscribe, let’s get into the show!

I’m “borrowing” this concept from a show called 3 Clips that we produce at my day job, Castos. In that show the host, Jay Acunzo, asks his guest to “play it forward” by recommending another podcast that the listener should absolutely be listening to.

I’m excited to do the same today, by sharing 3 clips — okay, another thing I’m borrowing from our other show — by sharing these 3 podcasts with you today.

So how can you take part in playing it forward?

1. Go check out the podcasts I’m highlighting today they are worth subscribing to!
2. Share these links to the episodes on social media.
3. Say thanks to the hosts and guests today — putting a podcast together isn’t easy, go tell ’em they’re doing a good job.

I pulled these clips out because they were either really solid pieces of business advice, painted the picture of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, or illustrated real clarity for an upcoming goal.

I hope you enjoy today’s play it forward episode, please share the original WordPress podcast episodes below!

Clips in this episode come from the following podcast episodes:

• WP Coffee Talk: https://wpcoffeetalk.com/bet-hannon/
• Women in WP: https://womeninwp.com/podcast/054-torre-capistran/
• Hallway Chats: https://hallwaychats.com/episodes/episode-150-cate-and-topher-derosia/

The stories shared on this podcast are born from some of the most difficult times for the individuals starting a business. In terms of the economy, there’s an entire cohort of successful agencies and WordPress software products that started during the financial crisis of 2008.

In 2020, a global pandemic rocked industries of all shapes and sizes. Impacting, to this very day, the certainty of our livelihoods. For Taylor Arndt, losing a job at a local University was the spark that kicked off a flurry of ventures.

From laying the foundation of a new freelance business to starting a podcast + YouTube channel, Taylor isn’t letting anything get in the way of building a successful business. I’m happy to share this story with you today.

As someone that has been doing exactly that for the last 15 or so years, I can tell you, it’s the only way I really know how to do something.

If you’re unfamiliar with the practice, it starts as early as the idea phase. You might tweet about your idea or write a blog post explaining the overall value of said idea. Its your spaghetti against the wall moment, lets see what sticks. Do people retweet it, comment or click the links you’ve shared.

Once you hit some gratification, you move on to the next step: planning the actual product or service. From here on out, you should be “live journaling” this whole experience. It’s what the collective “we” expect from you. We want to see how it’s all made, start to finish, followed up by what happens post launch.

This is the “normal” I see in my circle of entrepreneur friends.

Don’t get me wrong though, there are lots of people — maybe even the majority — that plot, plan, build, and release products without making a peep first. Heck, that’s what my brother does mostly. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in some markets, you should do that to fend off competition.

Today’s guest, Kieran Ball, has done this about 17 times now, in the no code space. In fact, he started in the WordPress world, but quickly discovered his passion for building products were best achieved using other tools.

There are 100 moments of failure in my career that have redirected the course of my business building journey. While they sting in the moment, even collapse relationships or new opportunities, I can’t help but learn from them.

But failure in business, is not the lesson today. No, it’s about how we take our business persona — the stuff we tweet about, throw on the ‘gram, scribe into our linkedin profiles — and sew them directly into the fabric of our self-worth.

I mentioned failure because often, for me anyway, failure equals fear. Fear of failing, means I might not be accepted by you. You might not think of me as someone who can but someone who cannot.

I am directly attaching my self-worth to my revenue — and that’s wrong.

Adii Pienaar joins us today to explore these very vices in his new book, Life Profitability The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success. Sure, you know him as one of the founding fathers of WooCommerce, but he’s so much more than that.

I’ve talked about this before, it’s not something that is driven by huge financial gains and certainly not backed by huge financial interest. If you want to earn a living with podcasting about WordPress, you best read up on many multiple streams of income.

One of the most underrated victories a podcaster can claim is that of opportunity. Resiliency as a podcaster — about any topic — often leads to an introduction, a lead, or as today’s guest found, a new gig.

Nathan Wrigley is a seasoned podcaster who produces the WP Builds podcast, recently featured here on the Matt Report in January, and returns with a new title: Host of the WP Tavern podcast, Jukebox.

By the way, when did they drop WP from the site title in favor of WordPress tavern? Is that legal?

Anyway, in today’s special episode, we talk to Nathan about getting the gig and how many coins it takes to spin a record in the ‘ol jukebox.

I stitched together clips from the years top shows in terms of download count and compelling conversation.

Simon Bruce on where he draws his passion for the product space. Amber Hinds talks about her reasoning to form a Certified B Corp. Matt Mullenweg shares where WooCommerce is in the lifecycle. Miriam Schwab discusses how she thinks about raising money from venture capital.

I hope you enjoy the first Best of I’ve ever published! Please share it on social media.

Remember the Page Builder race? Then remember when Gutenberg came on the scene smashing the ground, cracking the earth beneath her like Wonder Woman in Zack Snyder’s cut of the Justice League?

Okay, well, maybe not that glorious of an entry but mirroring the audiences continued mixed reviews…

It seemed like only yesterday that my friends at Beaver Builder were on a rocket ship ride to the moon and the likes of using Gutenberg were slim when you saw the install count of the classic editor plugin.

Here we are nearing the tail-end of Q1 in the year 2021, and Elementor recently crossed over 7 million active websites, made a not-so-smooth pricing update, and enter into any Facebook group to the bemoaning of users looking to switch to Oxygen builder.

Gutenberg has gotten largely better over that time, but still with some massive gaps in its usability. Even tasks like dragging blocks into columns is not as effortless of SiteOrigin’s page builder from 6 years ago…okay wait, could you drag blocks in that?

Anyway, full-site editing is the next contestant sure to be challenged like the past Core Champions that fled the arena — I’m here rooting for it. I do want this stuff to get better even if I’m not the ideal user for it.

I still want advanced tools and themes that get the job done without all of the overhead, but that’s just me.

Which leads me to the discussion part of this podcast: choosing the Best WordPress theme…for me.

You’re listening to the Matt Report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter at mattreport.com/subscribe and follow the podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Better yet, please share this episode on your social media! We’d love more listeners around here.

Here are the themes I mention in this episode:

• Anders Norén — Chaplin & Eskell
• Neve Theme
• GeneratePress
• Blocksy

From 1 to 2 people, 2 to 10, 10 to 50 these are moments in your career that not only make or break the company — but will deeply challenge yourself as a business owner.

One of the reasons why I’m personally so attracted to creative agency offerings are there are “no rules.” Meaning, you can provide whatever service you’d like, build any product you desire, and then sell it to any customer you’re willing to chase down. But no rules also means no blueprint either. It’s exciting but potentially dangerous, as you dodge some of the pitfalls that client services work can lead you down.

Appearing on this very podcast 3 years ago to talk about her methodology to maximizing profits for website projects, Lisa Sabin-Wilson returns to share how her position as WebDevStudios COO has expanded. How do you navigate a global pandemic for your customers and your employees — all while hitting record setting revenues? Well, we’ll find out in today’s episode.

You’re listening to the Matt Report, a podcast for the resilient digital business builder. Subscribe to the newsletter and follow the podcast on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Better yet, please share this episode on your social media! We’d love more listeners around here.

From starting as a simple blog to grow awareness, all the way to fueling a digital e-commerce engine powered by WooCommerce. There’s a certain flexibility — almost luxury — business owners have when the first brick in their foundation starts with WordPress.

This flexibility doesn’t come without a cost, however. Keeping the infrastructure supported and optimized over the years isn’t something for the feint of heart. Even if you’re technical in nature, following the decisions made by all of the code touching your site can be a costly endeavor.

Today’s guest, Evan Medeiros founder of The Trade Risk a financial media company, has seen both sides of the equation.

He started blogging to grow an audience, used Paid Memberships Pro to start a membership, and now leverages WooCommerce to sell other digital downloads. We talk about this eight year journey of how he grew the business and how WordPress has held up during the flight.

Check out the thetraderisk.com and send my brother a tweet to say thanks @evanmedeiros on Twitter.

The headline made news again on Techcrunch back in 2019, along side the news of Automattic raising $300m from Salesforce Ventures. I don’t feel the need to get caught up in debating what it means at this moment, other than, yeah…I’m in.

I’m at the point where I feel I should have a blog post dedicated to my time in Drupal 5 using CCK/Views modules and how powerful that made me feel as a non-developer, just to point to when I mention it, like I am now.

I want WordPress to be a hub where I can interface and model (or display) data with the layer of user access on top.

Plugins like WPGraphQL fascinate me, but I’m still too afraid to touch them, because I’m not a developer. Again, this is why I built Conductor plugin years ago.

Back when I ran pluginawards.com pre-COVID, WPGraphQL was the highest rated plugin in that little experiment of mine. But what is this unicorn plugin I see so many developers talking about? I invited Jason Bahl the creator/maintainer of WPGraphQL, which is a derivative of GraphQL, a query language for your API.

He answered questions like, why isn’t WPGraphQL in WordPress core? And, will we ever get a “page builder” type interface for it?

But first, we pick up on Jason telling us what WPGraphQL really is…

Curiosity is what the nocode movement has reignited for me. When I think back to my days of using Drupal 5 with the powerful combination of CCK + Views modules, two things come to mind:

1. Why the heck doesn’t WordPress do this natively yet, some tweny years later?!
2. What are my opportunities with nodcode tools AND WordPress?

Powerful tools that create seemingly limitless opportunities are fascinating to not only me, but also for today’s guest.

He doesn’t consider himself a developer, but carries a wide range of ideas that come to life with software building tools like Bubble.io. For example, when COVID hit, he saw an opportunity to build a portal to help parents discover activities for their children locked down at home.

He built it — and visitors like his brother — loved it.

But, like all great entrepreneurs, he pivoted, taking the lessons of app creation with him. He’s now blazing a path for content creators in the newsletter space to help monetize their work.

Building Hecto.io is a fascinating story coupled with a solid business opportunity. I’m excited to share Simon‘s story with you today, please reach out to him and say thanks for joining the show.

⭐️ Say THANKS to our sponsors ⭐️

• SearchWP now with the amazing Metrics add-on
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There are those of us that start businesses out of the desire to control our own destiny, but then grapple with the inability to see the forest through the trees.

Every reason why we started a business to begin with — freedom, choice, creativity — become the very anchors that hold us back.

Great entrepreneurs know that in order for an idea to flourish and make deep roots in the world, she needs to decouple herself from the ownership of it all.

When Miriam, today’s guest, raised $6.5 million in a Series A VC round (which includes Automattic) for Strattic WordPress hosting company, she wanted to build something great.

Two challenges lie ahead: 1. To make the decision to wind down a thriving WordPress services agency 2. Go get that money to watch her idea come to life and grow beyond just a side project.

Join me in welcoming Miriam Schwab as we explore the hyper-competitive landscape of managed hosting through the lens of a static WordPress solution platform.

Say THANKS to our sponsors:

• PaidMembershipspro.com for the most complete membership plugin in WordPress.
• Head over to Mindsize.com and signup for their site performance audit service.

Elementor, the most popular page builder for WordPress these days, has announced a price hike which will come into effect on March 9, 2021.

Comments are as you expected:

Are you freaking kidding me? You guys are hugely successful which means you already make a pleasant amount of cash monthly/yearly but still, this is not enough, you need to charge (A LOT!) more money from your loyal customers!? Are you that greedy?

I loved Elementor PRO, but $999 instead of $199 is a complete dealbreaker!

Crazy! Your products are very good, but your operation is very bad. 

Elementor is no longer competing with “WordPress,” they’re going after the biggest bully in the room, Webflow.

Elementor vs Webflow

Elementor vs Gutenberg is a zero-sum game.

Listen to my recent episode with Matt Mullenweg to get his opinion on Jetpack vs. the world for more clarity. Why compete against an ecosystem that harvests low-price offerings and a general feeling of: I can do this for free?

Elementor would be smart to take on Webflow.

#nocode is a massive movement right now. Coding tools that put the power back into the hands of — well — people like me. Savvy enough to know how web technology comes together, but not smart enough to actually learn how to code.

If you’re looking for a product that makes coding a site easy to sell to clients + does the hosting + gives you a billing portal to earn your cut, Webflow is hard to beat. Note: I didn’t say it’s cheapest way to do all of this, that’s the rub.

If I’m Elementor, that’s the market I go after. Gutenberg + Jetpack are going to dominate the free/low-cost offering in a year’s time. Gutenberg + Full-site Editing inside of free WordPress, is a mass market play into laying the monetization ground work for Jetpack.

Elementor is smart for keeping the beta tag on their cloud offering, too. They’re going to build this plane while it’s in flight. More on that later.

Elementor Pricing vs Webflow pricing

Elementor old/current pricing:

Elementor new/current pricing:

Webflow site plan pricing:

Webflow account plan pricing:

Webflow team plan pricing:

Webflow ecommerce pricing:

A video which has been viewed over 1,400 times and caught the attention of today’s guest, Matt Mullenweg co-creator of WordPress & Founder of Automattic. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Mullenweg back in 2015, and have consumed nearly every other podcast he’s been featured on since.

I thought about doing a more in-depth analysis on Matt’s responses to my questions, but I’d rather let the content speak for itself, allowing you to digest our discussion then arrive at your own conclusions.

Though there is one word that sticks with me, and that’s: vulnerable.

There are some vulnerable moments when discussing topics relating to blue collar digital workers — or builders/implementors — that could spark a change in Matt’s long-term regard to a group of WordPress users that I feel control the under current of the CMS’s adoption.

Matt is also responsible for nearly 378,000* products under Autoamattic’s umbrella, to which he informed there’s a new internal initiative rolling out to help disperse some of the responsibilities not only from him, but the 1,400 other Automattician’s.

As for me, I do get very passionate about WordPress and my response to moments like these might do better if I sit on them a little longer or reach out to Matt directly. Who knows, maybe we’ll get more podcast episodes out of it.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode, please share it with the world, and leave a comment on the post.

Subscribe to my newsletter for more.

⭐️ THANK YOU to the sponsors!! ⭐️

The WP Minute – A new audio experience for WordPress news coming soon.

Easy Support Videos – A fun way to support your customers inside WordPress with videos and text.

Don’t forget to subscribe, over at mattreport.com/subscribe because there’s a new podcast coming. I’ll hint at it today and give you the loose backstory on how this all came together.

Plus, we’ll hit on my upcoming interview with Matt Mullenweg, simplifying my WordPress branding, predicting freelancer ecommerce, and some thoughts on the podcasting world.

First, let’s kick it off with a quick story about my role at Castos, Director of Podcaster success. Currently, wearing a lot of hats in the role as a Director, marketer, account executive, and content creator.

All of which lead to a customer’s certain level of success, here at the company. I’m going on 6 months in this role, and I’m really beginning to smooth out the sharp edges of everything.

It’s an interesting process as largely my brain is half owner and half employee. Meaning, there are goals Craig (my boss) wants me to achieve, and then there’s introducing new things in the business.

That could be a new way of thinking about podcasting all the way to introducing a new internal process on how we focus our marketing efforts. I’ve been trying to put a label on it, like all great marketers do, and call it something like: “Founder focused marketing” or “Ownership marketing”

In other words, how can I produce content, materials, and systems like an owner would? Like my boss Craig would?

What even is that?

To me it’s this balance of knowing which content makes the biggest impact for sales, search ability (marketing), and brand awareness (the founder role.)

I hate saying “be the face” of the organization. To me, that detracts from the entire team’s effort — but — it’s about being someone that can show up on a podcast or a livestream and represent all areas of the business, and they aren’t the person who owns the company.

So why am I even talking out loud about this stuff right now?

Because I see a lot of solo founders and smaller product teams really trying to figure this stuff out. The kneejerk reaction is that you outsource to a ghost blogger, someone that manages your social, and perhaps a VA that gets you on a few podcasts here and there.

I’d say you start with hiring someone that is a great podcaster, youtuber, or storyteller. Bonus points if they can sell your product — wait, do they love your product first and foremost.

I love podcasting and I love what Castos can do for podcast creators, so maybe I’m just lucky.

Founder marketing I think has something in it — a gem we can latch on to and turn into a “thing” that opens up a new type of role at small product companies.

I’d love to know what you think and how you approach your marketing efforts these days.

A sentiment that might lead you to believe that this is a method reserved only for people building products or software companies. Though, I’d challenge you to disrupt the phrase and leverage it for building your brand — even if you don’t have a product idea yet.

Eight years ago when I started this podcast, I had no idea what kind of opportunities it would afford me. I thought I was building my business in the open, but what really made an impact was building who I am out in public.

I don’t want to cliche-it-up and say “personal brand” but I will say it sets your digital handshake. Something that people can see, relate to (or not), and accept if they want to connect with you or not.

This is exactly what Nathan Wrigley of WP Builds has been doing over the last 5 years with his vast array of digital goods. From a podcast, to a blog, to weekly deals — this is how it’s done.

This wasn’t a master plan set in motion after reading 4-hour work week (am I dating myself here?) but a process he’s refined through trial and error. It’s how he met his partner David Waumsely and came across the other voice you’ll hear on today’s episode — Paul Lacey.

One more lesson before we wrap up: What I really enjoyed in this conversation is that content collaboration — which you’ll hear more about soon — is a very powerful tool if you’re trying to come up in this space.

You’ll have to tune in to find out the how’s and the do’s so I’ll leave it at that. Enjoy today’s episode, and please share it on twitter if you have a moment. Share the link to the blog post or a clip from your favorite podcast app.

Don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter, mattreport.com/subscribe as I have a new podcast coming soon — if you can believe it.

Okay, on to the episode!

You want a piece of that action. Managing customer expectations are daunting.

Your master product plan comes together over night and you decide to cut off the deal flow coming into your business and even raise some capital to make this dream come true…

…but then two major moments happen: A huge client contract that you thought went dark pops up their head and says “Yes!” aaaaaand the world hits a global pandemic.

Now what?

You’re going to find out from today’s guest Amber Hinds, CEO of Road Warrior Creative and Equalize Digital.

Hey, if you like the show, how about a review on iTunes. And I’m looking for a quote or two put on the website — tweet at me @mattreport with a quote about how this Podcast has helped you.

MattReport.com/subscribe to join the mailing list — I may or may not be working on something new so stay tuned there.

Okay, tune in to find out how Amber handled all of this!

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Amber Hinds on Matt Report

Amber: [00:00:00] I am the founder and CEO- is what I’m using these days- for Road Warrior Creative LLC and Equalize Digital, which is our side brand that we pivoted to in 2020. We do work as a marketing agency for Road Warrior Creative and we specialize under Equalize Digital with accessibility audits, remediation and accessible development.

Matt: [00:00:27] and you started the agency back 2015, roughly, you’ve grown to, I think when we last chatted, we’ve grown to about seven-ish team members. Correct?

Amber: [00:00:36] Yep. That’s right.

Matt: [00:00:38] I think, and I might be just talking for my myself here, but maybe not, because I’ve interviewed so many people, I remember starting my service agency and like after year one, I was like, I need to get into product.

Like, this client services thing is pretty darn difficult and my God, that product thing looks super attractive over there. Have you ever had that sort of longing to create a product or has this been a moment where you said, a product, a plugin is something we should have.

Amber: [00:01:07] Yeah my self and my partner, Chris, we were organizers for WordCamp Denver for a couple of years when we still lived in Colorado. And I can tell you, I had a moment during a WordCamp when someone was talking about their business, and they were talking about selling things that they had made and not having to remake it every time they made a sale. 

And it was between that, which was maybe only a year after I grew from, I’ve been working in WordPress as a freelancer since 2010, so very early days and shifting into the agency world, but then at a Word amp, at that exact moment when I went, “Man, we really need to figure out a product.”

And I think too, we’re a Certified B Corporation and we try really hard to be transparent and to do a lot of things. And there’s a couple of businesses that I really admire in that space. One of which is Buffer, and they, it’s, again, it’s a product, it’s a saas, right? And so for a long time, we’ve been watching them and talking about, “How do we get to that point?” 

And that’s when we realized we really needed a product last year. Actually, I should say, now that we’re in 2021: In 2019, we got really serious about it. 

And we actually said, if we’re going to be serious about building a product, we need to treat ourselves as the client, which means we need to commit to paying our developer, our designer, whatever, out of our pocket, instead of constantly scheduling them for client work to make us revenue. So we have to invest in this. 

And we- that’s really, when we started doing it, we weren’t totally sure what that product would be, but we started putting the plans in place in 2019. We actually raised some capital in order to do that.

Matt: [00:02:58] How did you start to say, “Well, should we detract from client services, take a hit, and then push that, those resources towards product development though?” I think you’ve just answered it by saying you’ve raised some capital, so maybe you had the foresight to say, “Oh yeah, we’re going to take a hit on client work to be able to produce something like this.”

Amber: [00:03:17] Yeah, so we realized that was pretty much what we had to do in April or May of 2019. We took out (I’ll be totally transparent) we took out a little bit over a $100,000 loan because on the business-end we said, we’re going to commit to it. 

We put some stuff on our calendar and then we got a massive RFP that we had previously written. We were selected for the project for a government agency, and then we did zero work on product development. We literally took that cash that we’d raised. We put it in a savings account and we’re like, just stay, it was just there. So what really drove us to do it?

I think there’s always this fear, right? It’s hard to say no to work. And when, especially for us, when we’ve got a team and we know that people are relying on us for their livelihood, it’s hard to take that risk of, if you dial back the client work and the product doesn’t take off right away, will the client work be there when you come back to it?

That sort of thing? Well, COVID hit. And the client work dialed itself back pretty severely

Matt: [00:04:35] Yeah, you didn’t have that made the decision for you

Amber: [00:04:38] in 2020. And that was the decision, and we said, “Well, a lot of people are laying employees off. We took out, we had committed to building a product. I think this is the universe telling us now is the time to build a product.”

And so we built – we actually had originally thought we were going to build and we have a free version of a plugin that does a conference schedule. And we had thought we were going to build a pro version of that, but, a year’s difference in time and we were looking at it and we realized that there’s a lot more, I think, space on the accessibility side and we have maybe a lot more that we could give and contribute there. 

Whereas there’s quite a few scheduling tools or displaying an event schedule plugins are already out there. Whereas there aren’t as much on the accessibility checking side. And so, we ended up deciding to launch a plugin that tests for accessibility problems in WordPress.

Matt: [00:05:38] Before we go down that path, I want to uncover the moment where you sat down and said, okay, we will dial back client services.

Did you put post-it notes on a wall to weigh the pros and cons...

While my son’s really enjoyed hearing themselves with the echo effect on when I let them play with my podcasting set up the other day, I did forget to shut it off.

Today’s episode is audio extracted from a recent YouTube video.

It’s a response and a feeling piece over the recent discovery that Automattic is getting into the custom websites game.

Matt was responsive and left some feedback on the YouTube video. So go check out those comments, too. If you want to see more about his thoughts on the unfolding of all this. And we will finally get together and record an episode [Matt Mullenweg and I.]

So, if you have any questions for him, please leave them in the comments below. With everything going on in the world and specifically today in the US, I’ve realized that, and not just through this episode, wordpress is not everything.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy and fruitful 2021.

How’s that, “opinionated resilient business builders.”

Anyway, we’ll keep working on it, I like it and that’s what is leading us into the 2020 year in review!

1. Finding the Premise for the Matt Report

There’s 1.8 million podcasts out there and about 20 of them are about WordPress. You’d think that made for great odds, but not that many people actually care about WordPress at a global scale.

It’s a topic I’ve covered at length before — being a content creator in the WordPress space — you either do it for the love, or do it for the affiliate links.

But as I’ve labeled myself a content creator and an artist — the topic of just WordPress is less interesting to me — maybe even you.

So as I work out my premise — the show for opinionated resilient business builders — new guests and content will be produced.

I feel like I’ve been telling you this for a while now, at least ALL of 2020, and that’s update #1 — that’s where I’m at with the show.

I’ll continue to deliver interviews and solo episodes, with the occasional roundtable show. Some of the tools people are using to build businesses and websites these days are very intriguing. Webflow, Airtable, Notion, are all very exciting to me.

And to be honest, I think WordPress is moving in that direction.

Sponsorship will still be open and I’m happy to say that over the course of the year, I’ve raised over 2000 dollars for Big Orange Heart.

Side update to the update? December was insanely busy — and I will be working on the videos that people purchased from me in January. That effort raised a lot more money than I expected, but also created a lot more work!

2. Business5000

At the end of 2019, heading into 2020, I started shopping around my idea for the Business5000.

It is…was? an idea accelerator. I grew the email list of interested people to 100 and I felt like I could get the chips to fall where I needed them to — but then COVID hit mixed with a heap of social unrest in America and it was just a shitty time to launch something like this.

Plus, I didn’t want to. I lost the interest in all of it.

I still think it’s a strong idea, and creating a community of people that achieve results in a particular area is something I’d still like to create.

But for now, Business5000.com is shelved.

3. Easy Support Videos

You know, that plugin that sponsored the show!

We launched ESV back in 2016. Four years ago.

I’m a nontechnical product maker. It started with Drupal themes, then WordPress themes, then Conductor plugin for WordPress, and now Easy Support Videos.

I took a lot of the lessons learned from Conductor, like not tackling an overly complex product that needs to be deeply integrated with WordPress core, 3rd party themes, and other plugins in a hyper-competitive market.

I’ve talked about this experience in the past so I won’t go too much deeper on this podcast about it, but I highly recommend keeping your first — or next — product as lightweight as possible.

The biggest challenge here is that my lead developer for the plugin, Scott, is still 98% of the time, working on Slocum Studio client work. We never could get themes + conductor to outpace services work in order to flip the switch to just product.

The cash flow wasn’t the only reason, but it was a big part of it.

We now have version 2.0 slated to release in January with a whole new set of features and a website that I’ve — slowly — been working on.

I’m envious of the WP developers out there that can code their own product, and don’t need to spend resources directly on that area.

Either way, I’m excited to launch version 2.0 of Easy support videos, so look forward to more updates around the success of that product in the future.

4 the move to Castos

The move to Castos was the right one for me.

Selling WordPress hosting isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s market that wasn’t all that interesting to me. Being able to sink my teeth into product development, marketing, and of course podcasting is a dream come true.

The team is great and we’re growing really fast. It’s great to work alongside someone like Craig, the owner of Castos, that really wants to see the product improve. It’s not just resting on the laurels of the industry, but we’re creating something that solves a need for lots of podcasters.

I’m also scratching the creative itch and it’s been a huge benefit stress-wise.

I’ve mentioned this on other shows before, but I haven’t been producing nearly any videos for the youtube.com/plugintut channel and I feel okay about it. I love growing out the Castos YouTube channel — youtube.com/castos — and I’m happy to say I’ve doubled it since I started contributing there.

I can’t wait to see where we’re at when I do my 2021 EoY review.

That’s all I have today. I hope you were able to pull some threads of commonality out of today’s discussion and it shines some light on the similar challenges you might be faced with.

As always, I appreciate you listening to the show, subscribing, and if you do one last thing before the year is out — leave us a five-star review on iTunes.

Alright, that’s the show, see you next year.

See, unlike a services business or a development shop, content takes time and an energy that you must dig deep to find.

A practice that can exhaust you physically and emotionally. I mean this stuff, can really rock you to the core. It’s not for the faint of heart.

You need an audience to connect with, you need to entertain or educate, and you have to do this for YEARS until you start to convert.

Don’t be fooled by the — “air quotes” — overnight success your favorite YouTuber or podcaster has found. It’s taken them years, even decades to get amass their following.

While the road ahead is challenging, it’s massively rewarding if you dedicated yourself to improving, learning, and remaining…resilient.

Today’s guest is Joe Casabona, and he’s done just that. An accomplished podcaster and content creator building a business out of education and digital services.

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Hey, look, if you have a moment — please drop us a five-star review on iTunes. It’s the lifeblood of the show — right next to all of you fantastic listeners that send me tweets and DMs. I’m always looking for the next great story, so keep them coming.

I love talking to that resilient business builder and today’s guest fits that persona — perfectly.

I mean, he’s runs buildupbookings.com, a Vacation Rental marketing & SEO agency amidst a global pandemic. Not only is he figuring out how to survive in this new normal, he brought on two new team members at the top of 2020 and just made an acquisition of a productized service, guesthook.com

It’s a service that focuses on creating copywriting for the vacation rental industry. We’re going to talk about what that’s like to be a small boutique agency acquiring another business in this space, with a world on lock down.

His name is Conrad O’Connell he’s been on the show before and I’m excited to have him back to talk about his new chapter.

🎉 Say THANKS to our sponsors! 🎉

MalCare — Looking for a great way to protect your client’s WordPress website? Don’t deal with the hassle of cleaning out malware or infected plugins, turn to MalCare!

Say THANKS to our Sponsors!

MalCare — Looking for a great way to protect your client’s WordPress website? Don’t deal with the hassle of cleaning out malware or infected plugins, turn to MalCare!

If you’ve dipped your toe into the #nocoded movement, undoubtedly you’ve come across the Makerpad community + tutorials staring back at you. Now, picture Makerpad but for marketing processes — that’s what Corey’s building.

You’ll love the multiple streams of income and micro products + services he’s stitching together to make this all a reality. I hope you enjoy today’s episode, and if you do, please say thanks to Corey and our sponsors!

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Do the Woo podcast — Looking for a podcast that is dedicated to the coverage of WooCommerce?! Check out BobWP’s latest venture!

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Blog posts mentioned

• https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
• 1,000 True Fans? Try 100

Noah Bragg joins us today to tell us the story of how he recently grew his business, supportman.io to the first few hundred dollars a month in recurring income.

What I didn’t know before interviewing him was that he started a whole SaaS based business around serving coffee shops that didn’t end so…hot.

Failures are the greatest lessons in this space, and for those crazy enough to keep on going, we can reinvest them into the next venture. I hope you enjoy today’s episode — please share it with others!

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Paid Memberships Pro — Save $50 on the most popular membership plugin for WordPress by clicking the link. 100,000+ other sites trust PMP for their membership sites, you should too.

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Fun fact: Bootstrapped Web was the first time I was a guest on a podcast way back in the day!

Creating a solid content marketing strategy + executing on it, might be one of the most challenging points of running a business for a solo founder. Brian shares the his point of view on creating video content, podcast content, and the return to WordPress as his preferred content CMS for ProcessKit.

Enjoy today’s episode!

⚡️ Please say THANKS to our sponsors ⚡️

Do the Woo podcast — Looking for a podcast that is dedicated to the coverage of WooCommerce?! Check out BobWP’s latest venture!

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Results are rarely immediate for most creators, with the Google SERP odds being stacked against you. If you want to fast track it: You will find more opportunity producing largely searched for content like how-to tutorials or topics on design and development. It’s just a numbers game, really.

Reporting on the plumbing of WordPress the software, the crossover of Automattic/.org, and the community might be a longer burn. Few brands do it successfully like Post Status (privately owned) and WP Tavern (owned by Audrey Capital).

I earn roughly $15-20k a year through my side-hustle of WordPress content creation. It only took about 8 years to get here.

If you want to learn more about it how I approach my content efforts, why I give 20% to Big Orange Heart, and what big opportunities you can tackle — better than me! — give today’s episode a listen.

Welcome back to the Matt report podcast, mattreport.com – mattreport.com/subscribe. Join that mailing list. Leave us a five star review on iTunes. Everyone says it. Everyone says it. I say it every other podcast or says it’s a, it’s a form of validation. That people are listening to the show. People are happy with the show.

I have a stretch goal of 200 reviews on iTunes. I’d love to get there. I’m at 130 right now. If you have a moment, jump on over to iTunes you have in your iPhone. Did you get the brand new iPhone? Is it your you’re already listening to this on your iPhone 12 who an Android user. I’ve never even logged in to my Google dashboard to see how many reviews I got over there.

Probably zero. Well, wherever reviews are found. Go ahead and leave us a review there really appreciate it. That makes me feel good. I feel like I’m getting something done that they have some value here. We’re going to talk about that today. We’re gonna talk about why monetize content, how much money I make as a content creator, hopefully.

Yeah. To set the stage for you. Maybe you’re making way more money than I am creating content. Maybe you’re not making a nickel yet, but you want to get into it. So I give you my perspective on this crazy WordPress space, making money specifically in the WordPress space, and then sort of how I’m trying to broaden the horizons.

Hey, you want to listen to our sponsors today? Cause we’re going to talk all about sponsors today. There are no official sponsors, like there’s nobody paying me today except for my own plugin, easy support videos. Easy support videos. If you just Google that. My God, I hope that the first result will be easy support videos in the WordPress plugin directory.

We have a new version coming out. early November. Maybe if you’re looking for ways to embed video support for your customers or for people you’ve built WordPress websites for your organization, your internal company. Easy support videos allows you to embed a video in the admin. We give you a little own admin action.

You can embed a whole library of videos for helpful support tutorials. A little note that goes along with each video, don’t forget how to register users. Don’t forget how to write this awesome blog post. Don’t forget how to use this Beaver builder template. You take your video from any OEM bed source, you drop it right into the admin of WordPress, and it’s just for your users.

You can do things like member roll access and things like that. To see who can modify videos, who can’t, who can see the videos who can’t. We have a new version coming. Like I said, it’s going to do some fun things. It’s going to get a little bit faster. It’s going to get a little bit more efficient. You’re able to serve up some videos in other areas of WordPress.

When you’re logged into WordPress, check it out. Easy support videos, easy support videos. All right. Okay. So how much money do I make creating content in the WordPress space? And again, I’m putting this out there. One, because I’ve gotten into sponsorships recently. I just generally want to talk about my approach to it, to want, to help educate others who are thinking about creating content in the space, or maybe you’re making a ton of money in this space, creating content.

And you want to say, Hey Matt, you’re doing it all wrong. Here’s how you can make more. Hey, I’m all ears. So I make anywhere between 15 to $20,000 a year through monetizing content through being a content creator. And that’s both on the podcast side and YouTube side. So 15 to 20 K a year. This is a, this is a side hustle for me, right?

This is a side gig. This is a complimentary to of course my, my full time job over at Castillo’s.

And, you know, one of the other reasons why I’m bringing this up is, you know, I read a blog post recently. I don’t want to get into the minutia of the, of the premise of that blog post, but they, you know, they use the word, uh, sort of set their sights on, on podcasters at large, in the WordPress space, uh, being somewhat problematic and, um, That they shouldn’t be funded or they shouldn’t, you know, we should turn our sites away from the typical WordPress podcast or, uh, because we shouldn’t be helping them fund these things.

And look, that’s a discussion for another time, but the idea is this is not at least from my perspective, not this media giant.

right. I did not get rich quick quote, unquote, being a WordPress podcaster.

I mean, I got to this point because I started a podcast eight years ago. I thought I wanted to grow my WordPress agency through a podcast. It worked,

you know, when we talk about making money in the word press or in podcasting, there is an opportunity to sell your services, to build up your profile, to connect with people. There’s hundreds of thousands of dollars tied to that, which I’m not accounting for here. Cause, you know, it’s very hard to measure that metric, but yes, people who have listened to this podcast have hired me to do jobs back in the day or referred my agency back in the day, I use my podcast as a sales tool back in the day, to, to filter into services clients.

It’s a, it’s a strategy that you know, that you might take, but if you’re looking to specifically monetize podcasts and content, that’s what this discussion is about. And I brought that up because it just made me think like, wow, I don’t know how many podcasts are quote, unquote funded. Like they’re this big media empire with a, with a, with a thing that they’re trying to accomplish.

Right. I mean, uh, we have, uh, doc pops show, uh, which I was on. He’s paid, he’s a WP engine employee. He runs torque mag. Right? They do media. So I think they do a podcast. They definitely do a Google live stream. I was on there a couple of weeks ago, WP Tavern, which is owned by, uh, Audrey capital, AKA Matt Mullenweg, uh, before Jeff left, which feels like just yesterday, but maybe it’s a couple of years now.

I don’t remember at least a year. I can’t, I don’t really know the timeframe he did a podcast. I guess you could consider those two funded. When you talk about, you know, companies that are behind them with millions and millions of dollars in the bank. Uh, WPM U dev, I think still has a podcast. I should have done my notes here first, but let me just WPM you dev podcast.

Hello WP yet. It doesn’t look like it was, or the last episode was put out in 2019. Tell you, I was jealous of...

He’s taught people how to make the perfect omelet, how to win a dog race in Alaska, all the way to today where he teaches Educational Entrepreneurs thrive in business. He’s the CEO of famed WordPress LMS company, LifterLMS.

We packed a lot into this episode, from how he navigates the 100-year old digital product space to what the future of WordPress means to him. You’re going to learn a lot so get ready for the ride!

👏  Say THANK YOU to our sponsors:

SearchWP — If you’re looking to put your WordPress search capabilities on steroids, look no further than SearchWP!

Lockedown Design & SEO – If you’re looking for help in local SEO for contractors, manufacturers, or anything close to that industry — give a shout to John!

Jason Resnick joins us today to talk about the upcoming re-launch of his membership as so many of his customers were impacted by the shift in their own clients. There’s a particular grit that comes with doing business in the North East, I’m not sure what it is, but a lot of New Yorker’s — like Jason — don’t give up easy. It’s a key ingredient that many “online business builders” lack, or fail to learn, over the course of their online stint.

Through podcasting and sharp networking skills, today’s hero has built himself a business that he’s not only proud of, but is a true replication of the man himself. Lots to learn here today, I hope you enjoy the episode!

Other Matt Report episodes w/ Jason:

• Productized services
• Setting web design budget expectations

Say THANK YOU to our sponsors:

SearchWP – If you’re looking to improve WordPress search, like get sweet dashboard analytics on keywords, check out SearchWP!

MalCare – Want to protect your site from malware and virus exploits? Look no further than MalCare.com!

For the last two years I’ve been listening in from the backseat as so many of you in my Twitter stream talk about the hype of technologies like Gatsby and CMS’s like Statatmic. I felt it would be premature if I jumped right on to that hype train at the time, and while the ride is picking up steam more than ever, I’d say it’s still not ready for your everyday user.

Today’s episode is my take on a three-way “argument” over WordPress vs JAMStack, and what that means for us, the users of the software.

Articles mentioned:

• https://thenewstack.io/wordpress-co-founder-matt-mullenweg-is-not-a-fan-of-jamstack/
• https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/09/15/on-mullenweg-and-the-jamstack-regression-or-future/
• https://www.stackbit.com/blog/open-letter-to-matt-mullenweg-what-folks-often-get-wrong-about-jamstack/
• Hello WordPress, My Old Friend

👏 Say THANK YOU to our sponsors:

SearchWP — If you’re looking to put your WordPress search capabilities on steroids, look no further than SearchWP!

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David Darke joins the airwaves today to tell us about his unique process to connecting with clients over at Atomic Smash. I can’t emphasize this enough, having a repeatable mechanism to stay in-touch with your clients is CRITICAL.

If you’re doing any kind of long-term work that requires a minimum of 30-60 days, I’d argue a weekly recap call/email that ensures both parties are meeting expectations. Tune in to today’s episode to find out how David and his team has executed on this in a COVID world.

Please say THANK YOU to today’s sponsors:

Lockedown Design & SEO – If you’re looking for help in local SEO for contractors, manufacturers, or anything close to that industry — give a shout to John!

ElegantMarketplace.com – If you’re looking for an alternative to “big box” marketplaces or looking for new opportunities outside of the .org repo — check out Elegant Marketplace!

Read the transcript

[00:00:00] David Darke: so I, co started an agency called atomic smash. We’re a primarily WordPress agency. when we started out, we were a bit scattershot with kind of what we were doing and we kind of fell into using WordPress as our sort of vault content management system. And, and it really sort of took off from there.
[00:00:17]we, we tried to most will not you to different things to try to Magento. We tried hold her to staff, but as soon as we started using WordPress and really kind of got into the community, it really just paid dividends for us massively. And as an agency we’ve grown over the last 10 years, we. Well, we first started was just two of us.
[00:00:34] Now there’s 14. Hopefully there’ll be 15 or 16 of us by the end of the year. And here for us, just using WordPress days, day has been just really, really beneficial. I think that were all key parts of when we started with us a scattershot approach, we didn’t really have a, any sort of niche or any sort of would say direction when it came to how we found our clients, the way we worked with our clients or anything.
[00:00:56] And the real thing that’s been. Good to us recently [00:01:00] has been, the way we work with our clients and this sort of continuous basis. yeah, and I mean, I can go on further. Do you have any questions at this point or any other bits just to roll into
[00:01:10] Matt Medeiros: [00:01:10] Let’s just jump right into the fire about WordPress. This is something that’s fresh on my mind. I was listening to an interview from another podcast, infamous, not a famous and infamous a individual in the WordPress space, who builds a product and he’s been building or press products for quite some time.
[00:01:26] And he was really just, beating up. WordPress’s code base, the community, the approach, and all of a sudden, and here’s a guy who started early, early days selling a premium theme. and, and he’s on this very popular podcast, really just saying boy, in his words, WordPress code based sucks.
[00:01:44] WordPress is terrible yet you’re out there making a living, selling WordPress products and. In my own Twitter feed. I see people constantly saying things like, Hey, check out this flat file, CMS, check out this jam stack thing. [00:02:00] Yeah. And I sat down the other day. I was like, let me give me, let me give one of these CMS as a trial.
[00:02:04] Let me, let me try something else other than WordPress. And it was like, step one, install composer and your local dev environment. And I said, what. I don’t need, where do I begin? Like then I started looking at local dev environments and then I’m down that rabbit hole and I’m back to it. Then it’s like a, don’t forget, you’re going to have to have ploy workflow set up to publish a blog post.
[00:02:23] And I’m like, I don’t want this. So my question to you is, and I’m not foolish. I don’t think WordPress is end all be all, but I mean, in your eyes, WordPress is. It’s here to stay. Like, I, I don’t think it’s a, it’s a bad choice and it continues to grow. I mean, obviously we’re on a WordPress podcast, but what are your thoughts?
[00:02:42] David Darke: [00:02:42] Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think the main parts. But WordPress has been able to do is again, around that committee. See, and even though, there are definite downsides to the way we’re pressing sets up and in the way it’s structured this database, there’s a lot of things that could be improved.
[00:02:57] And I guess we’ll take a loss of [00:03:00] a huge amount of community input to get changed and, and actually iterate and, and, and do well to do to me, there’s moved, but. It’s really around the community and the support which you can get that really sort of sets it apart in my mind, when it comes to content management systems, we, we actually kind of have a quite solid, definitely my framework, which we use, which is, I guess, when you’re just talking about composer, we actually use composer a lot with WordPress.
[00:03:24] And it’s a more of an advanced setup in that regard. And even the way we deploy, we deploy using a Ruby platform called Capistrano, which uses composer as well.
[00:03:33] If that make sense, do some of the more enterprise level sites. But yeah. But for us, it’s the real key thing to our WordPress does well, is, has a really great community. They had an experience if you manage it well, and, and you really curate that it’s in process. It’s really good. And it’s super simple to get yourself on board.
[00:03:53] Yeah. Even though people kind of struggled with Gutenberg at the start and that sort of transitioning process. You can, we can easily [00:04:00] give a Gutenberg sites to someone who’s never really used the web before. And they can kind of get to grips with editing website pretty quickly. I think that’s the key thing for us and the audience we’re trying to, attract is the people inside businesses that aren’t doing this stuff day to day, that aren’t not, they’re not building their own websites.
[00:04:17] They just want to edit the content or websites don’t want to sell the thing they’re doing. They want to. Communicate with our audience. They don’t want to know how the website works or sorry. They just want to use that and be able to utilize what they’re doing day to day. So, so for those people is it’s, it’s a really valuable tool.
[00:04:33] Matt Medeiros: [00:04:33] Yeah, the, the, the technical costs, the costs while, you know, while it may be seemingly high for some look, if you’re selling WordPress into an organization, it’s not just about tool. the CMS in that moment of time, it’s, it’s the decision for, you know, I guess most companies or larger organizations might be making this decision for at minimum for five years.
[00:04:57] Right? So you’re, you’re not just selling WordPress in that moment. You’re [00:05:00] selling that. WordPress site to other staff, that’s going to with it. what happens when somebody in that organization leaves and somebody else comes in and they need to relearn like the resources available, the education around WordPress is so much greater than name your favorite Gatsby
[00:05:15] David Darke: [00:05:15] Yeah, no.
[00:05:16] Matt Medeiros: [00:05:16] don’t know. I’m just throwing out words here, ...

She’s the co-founder of Newsletter Glue which spawned as a small feature inside another product that was nearly extinct. We’ll learn why they spun this feature out, how they are doing market research, and what it’s like to take on Substack as a competitor. Story’s like these hit close to home, as I’m sure you’ve had a lot of the same anxiety as Lesley and her co-founder building your product.

Please say THANK YOU to today’s sponsors:

• Mailster Newsletter Plugin — Want to build a replacement to MailChimp using WordPress? Take a look at Mailster!
• Easy Support Videos — Support your clients by embedding helpful videos inside the admin of WordPress. Check out this free plugin!

That’s how I felt talking to Iain Poulson. Like, this dude is Neo, from the Matrix. How does one person launch and maintain so many products and still have time for everything else?

We’ll dive into that in today’s episode and much more! Here are just a few of the products we chatted about during our podcast:

• wpcontent.io
• https://intagrate.io/
• https://sellwire.net/
• https://wpusermanager.com/
• https://pluginrank.com

Please say THANK YOU to today’s sponsors:

Fathom Analytics — an alternative to Google Analytics for privacy focused and speed efficient web stats.

WebDevStudios — a WordPress agency that can meet any of your demands for business sites, to e-commerce, and everything in-between.

This was a fantastic conversation that spanned the topics of validating news content, all the way to pitching an innovative product for the chance to win 1 million Euros. (Spoiler alert: He won the 1 million Euros, tune in to find out how!)

I really enjoyed today’s chat with Sebastiaan, and I hope you do too. Follow his company Twitter: @WordProofio

Thank you to our sponsors SearchWP and GravityView.co!

If you’re looking for the best way to improve WordPress search, look no further than SearchWP!

If you need to build pages of data and form submissions from GravityForms, like directories or tables, GravityView is for you!

Check out the behind the scenes video!

The theme was recently suspended when the theme review team found affiliate links “cloaked” in buttons recommending other plugins. Friend of the show Ron Huereca shows us a code snippet of how they achieved this, and LayerWP hosted a short written interview with a member of the theme review team.

In today’s episode, I’ll share my take on the matter and where I’d love to see the theme repo move to for small product creators. You can read the theme guidelines cited in the episode, here.

Also mentioned in the episode:

Every word of this Tweet (down to the ALT text on the image) remains true more than a year later. It's a shame that this is still allowed in WordPress. https://t.co/0iTAXx94uP

Thanks to our sponsors

SearchWP & Gravity View for supporting the show! Please say thank you on Twitter!

Read the full transcript

Matt: (00:04)
This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search wp.com and gravity view.co more on them. Later in today’s episode, we’re talking about the recent Astro debacle of just some thoughts around WordPress monetization. What it’s like to be a product creator, a product maker in the WordPress space, especially in the year 2020, let’s dive right on in.

Matt: (00:29)
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the mat reports. It’s maryport.com [inaudible] dot com slash subscribe to join that mailing list. For those of you that know they started a new job a couple of weeks ago over at Casto the makers of a seriously simple podcasting plugin. I’ll be the head or actually no, my official title is director of podcaster success. So I’m gonna help folks get their podcasts up and running over at Casos. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast yourself, send me an email, Matt at [inaudible] dot com and, uh, I guess some more videos up on the plugin Tut channel youtube.com/plugin Tut, check out all of my WordPress plugin theme tutorials. I’m going to get into some no-code stuff that just, uh, those are the things that, that really excite me. So some know code stuff that’s in and around the WordPress space. So do check out that channel recently, a theme with over a million active installs, one of the most popular, the most installed and activated WordPress theme in the WordPress repo.

Matt: (01:34)
That is not a default WordPress theme. In other words, a theme that doesn’t ship with WordPress by default Astra was, uh, was removed from the repo briefly for something of, uh, going against the theme developer guidelines of wordpress.org by injecting affiliate code links or affiliate links within the code of, of the theme. They sort of cloaked it in a way where you didn’t really know when you hit upgrade. Um, on these recommended plugins that they mentioned six of them, that they were getting an affiliate commission. If, if you did decide to upgrade, I’ve got a lot of thoughts about this stuff. I’m sure you do as well. But first search WP search wp.com is today’s first sponsor of the show and they were a repeat sponsor. I really appreciate the support from the folks over@searchwp.com. Looking if you’re building out a website, you’re building out, you know, what’s really popular now, of course, in this pandemic world that we live in, I’ve even thought about it.

Matt: (02:49)
Myself is to start up a new directory site for a particular niche in, in my local area. Right? If I built out a directory site, I wanted to search that content. Cause that’s generally what you do. Search WP is fantastic for that. It searches your eCommerce products, custom field content, custom database tables, PDFs, and documents. I mean, even though it’s the year 2020, and restaurants still use PDFs for menus, you know, you could start a directory service of all these restaurants. And if they’re still using PDs for menu, you could search those PDFs. You do short codes, you can do Gutenberg blocks. You can do taxonomy terms, post titles and contents. But the real shining feature in my opinion is if you’re running one of these content heavy sites and you do need great search, not only consortia BP, do that for you, but they give you stats.

Matt: (03:38)
They give you analytics around what people are searching for. And this is analytics. You’re not going to get from Google analytics. This is going to be analytics on your site. What people are searching for is going to help you make better decisions with the content that you’re producing. Again, if you’re a webmaster for a university and now people are searching for classes and they’re looking for certain, uh, things to download, you can get all of these insights from that. If you’re a publisher high content traffic site, uh, this is going to help you make better decisions. Search wp.com. You can get it@searchwp.com. It starts at $99 for one website for the year, 149 for the most popular plan. Check it out. Search wp.com. Search wp.com say, thanks for supporting the show. Okay, so I’m going to take you over to a former, a former sponsor of the show.

Matt: (04:32)
Uh, in the past, Ron, Ron Eureka media, ron.com wrote up a piece. If you’re looking for exactly what Astra did from a technical, uh, view media, Iran highlights this in the code snippet, and he shows you exactly what they were doing in the functions file of Astra. And they’re filtering the upgrade buttons to these, to these plugins. And here are the plugins that they were recommending. They were recommending Ninja forms, uh, WP forms, this social snap.com uh, plugin, which I have not heard...

Dan Maby, former guest of the show, invited me on share my idea around marketing for today’s WordPress business builders. Of course this is a topic near and dear to my heart, with a spin you might not get from every other marketer on the web.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode, I’ll leave the slides from the talk below. If you did, please consider sharing this post with others!

👏 Thanks to our sponsors LockedownSEO.com & MediaRon.com! 👏

Please take a moment to thank our sponsors. They help keep the show alive! 20% of sponsor proceeds go to supporting A Big Orange Heart.

Here are the slides to my London WordPress meetup talk.

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Matt report podcast. Today’s episode is going to be a solo episode. I’m gonna talk about marketing your WordPress product or service, maybe even yourself. I think this could be used outside of the realm of WordPress, but some of the stuff I’ll talk about today will be specific to the WordPress community. I recently did a talk covering this topic over at the WordPress meetup in London. It was my first international speaking gig where I did it virtually. In fact, yeah. You know, it’s, I don’t even think we were allowed to fly these days. Uh, but it was a fun, exciting time to talk about marketing is a little bit different for those of you that follow me know that I’m not one of those, you know, flashy marketing types, right? The core slinging, digital product affiliate person sitting in front of a Lamborghini, blowing up my Instagram, telling you how much money you’re going to make.

Speaker 1: (01:00)
In fact, I haven’t seen that in a while. It’s amazing what a pandemic can do to those types, but the way that I do marketing, the way that I’m going to talk about it today is, is, is much more about building opportunity for yourself, creating opportunity for yourself to get another customer, make a sale, meet new people, find opportunity in doing business with other businesses, right? That’s what marketing and this practice of getting yourself out there. That’s what it means to me. It’s, it’s really how I’ve been able to run businesses for quite some time and, um, find opportunity in the WordPress space, working for other companies and you know, all of that fun stuff by doing. What I’m gonna talk about today is really led made by doing this very podcast that has led me to opportunities, right? And I think that hopefully if you’re looking to grow those opportunities yourself, this will be an interesting talk.

Speaker 1: (01:55)
It’s my report.com airport.com/subscribe. Don’t forget to leave us a five star review on iTunes really helps. I really enjoy the feedback that I get on iTunes, the comments. So if you have a spare moment, if you have just a spare moment, go ahead and leave us a five star review on iTunes or wherever you listen to this podcast. Let’s thank one of our sponsors today. His name is Ronald Horeca. This is his second time. I think sponsoring the show. Thank you, Ronald. He does a ton. He’s like me. He’s probably like you just lots of projects, lots of things happening. He has a book about WordPress and Ajax, but he has two interesting plugins, a simple comment editing, right? Where you can edit various parts of the commenting system on WordPress. If you search for simple comment, editing on wordpress.org, you’ll find it. It allows you to do things like set the comment timer, stop the timer, hide the timer, allow unlimited editing for logged in users as a whole bunch of stuff that it does.

Speaker 1: (02:53)
And if that’s a unique situation that you’re in, where you need to edit this comment, functionality, check it out. It’s a plugin written by Ronald Horeca. His website is media run. I love that name, media run.com. And, uh, he has that book on WordPress Ajax. Like I mentioned, he has a bunch of plugins, but that’s simple comment editing looks pretty good. It’s got 43, five star reviews, 3000 active installs on wordpress.org.org. Simple common editing, Ronald Horeca. He does a lot, Ronald. Thanks for sponsoring the show. Alright, so the first part I want to talk about is who this is for. Like I mentioned, if you’re somebody who is building your own business, your own practice in the WordPress space, and you find marketing kind of tricky, kind of daunting, kind of hard that’s who this is, that’s who this talk is really geared at early stage product as a service or service people specifically in the WordPress ecosystem, finds marketing difficult for many reasons.

Speaker 1: (03:58)
Now, many reasons when I post, uh, polls and things like that on Twitter often about business. And I say, what’s the biggest challenge about your business? Is it running the business, right? Is it being all hats for all departments in your business? Cause it’s a small company. Uh, is it, you know, the marketing is it, the sales is the product. And nine times out of 10 marketing is always leading the pack. It’s the one that people always vote as one of the hardest things to do. And I think if you shift your mindset, like I mentioned before, you think about marketing and not such a sterile definition, right? It’s easy to think about marketing as if you were wearing a marketing hat at, you know, Pepsi or general motors or Apple, right. Big brands, right? Lots of, you know, strategic and fine lines that you can draw experiments and things like that.

Speaker 1: (04:46)
I think when you’re a small business, it’s very hard to think of like marketing as a tradition, like in a traditional approach. Sure. You do customer profiling, you do messaging and all of this stuff. But a lot of times you just, you just need to get out there in order to make sales. You don’t have time for this massive like strategic undertaking. So I think of marketing as again, getting out and providing that digital handshake when we’re, when we’re talking about online marketing anyway, but this transfers over to, on to offline as well. The digital handshake is something that I’ve talked about for a while, where all of the stuff that we’re doing online, whether...

That was enough for me to reach out and invite her on the show to talk about how all of that came together. We discuss how WordPress can be a great platform for rapid development even with lots of moving pieces. Rachel also shares a lot of agency insights as the owner of her woman-led Geek Unicorn firm in Toronto, Canada.

I had a great time chatting with Rachel, and if you have a moment tell her thanks for doing an episode with me.

Thanks to our sponsors!

Today’s episode is brought to you by SearchWP & Uncanny Automator plugin!

If you need to have better search on your WordPress site, look no further than SearchWP!

If you want automator actions like a Zapier, but for WordPress, Uncanny Automator plugin is for you!

Today he’s back to discuss how the organization has re-branded itself to Big Organge Heart, as a way to reach beyond the just the WordPress community.

While their hearts are still within the WordPress community, the hope is that being able to approach a broader audience will increase the support they need to keep the charity going.

As you know, I’m a supporter of the organization and all profits from my merchandise store are donated to the charity.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode!

I’m convinced Tom McFarlins post, WordPress Developers: Clarifying the title, remains the best definition for these two competing roles in our community — give it a read through if you haven’t already. Mark’s post is great, but I feel it illustrates a percentage of implementers still “need a home” in the community.

Twitter conversation referenced in the episode.

In todays episode, I’m breaking down my opinion on the matter and sharing some of my own real world experience finding a fit amongst my WordPress peers. I’m interested to learn your thoughts, either comment below or connect on Twitter.

In other news, I found the use of Gutenberg in this Chatterbox idea to be a telling story on how “WordPress” might reach a larger footprint of the web.

If you enjoy todays episode, please share it with others!

Thanks to our sponsors!

Todays episode is brought to you by SearchWP and CheckoutWC!

If you’re looking for better search with more control over results, speed, and reporting look no further than SearchWP!

If you need to customize your WooCommerce checkout experience or improve overall conversions, CheckoutWC is for you!

👏

That’s how Vito Peleg started his agency business many years ago while touring with his band. Today, he’s the founder of WP Feedback, a great tool for supporting WordPress users. Here’s just a few things you’ll learn in today’s episode:

• Focus your service offering to find high-growth
• How to transition service to product
• How to survey and identify market problems
• How to harness the power of community to grow your offering

There’s a lot to learn here in a short amount of time — buckle up!

Don’t forget to tune in and register for his FREE summit.

I think now, more than ever, we’re all starting to realize that growth at any cost isn’t for everyone. Small products can become big products, or small products can become many products under one portfolio. Diversify.

There’s no playbook for any of this, that’s the exciting part, though I’d urge you not to fall into the trap of attempting to replicate the success of a founder you follow on Twitter — make it your way.

How to sell your WordPress plugin business

Like most things in life, there was no perfect path for our hero’s journey. Dan narrates us through the entire process of selling his plugin business Sprout Invoices, both technically and emotionally.

I’ll save the good stuff for your listening pleasure.

I’m happy my friend is moving on to another chapter in his career. If you’re looking for him, find him at Sprout Ventures.

If you’re looking for an SEO specialist for manufacturing clients, check out lockedownseo.com!

Want some powerful add-ons for Beaver Builder or Elementor? Visit IdeaBox.io!

It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but Sean has a way of solving challenges through methods that would never occur to me. His approach to automating and systemizing the pre-sales process was an experience that transcends the phrase, “work smarter not harder.”

You can read about it here.

We’ll cover a few ways you can start your own automation framework, how leading his nomad lifestyle began, and most importantly his new startup Charity Makeover.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode, please take a moment to thank Sean and my sponsors below. Stay safe!

If you’re looking for an SEO specialist for manufacturing clients, check out lockedownseo.com!

Want better search results in WordPress? Look no further than searchwp.com!

I admire Jonathan’s approach to doing business, that of becoming a story teller (or broadcaster) to hold an engaged audience. There’s no other sorcery or growth hacks involved, just good old fashioned digital boots on the ground.

These days, you can either spend dollars or sweat equity to grow your business, but one thing is certain: you need to lead with an opinion and define your core values. We talk about a lot of that stuff in today’s episode, I hope you enjoy it.

If you’re looking for an SEO specialist for manufacturing clients, check out lockedownseo.com!

Want better search results in WordPress? Look no further than searchwp.com!

I often joke that Post Status is a competitor to the Matt Report, truth be told, Brian and Cory are valued voices among the WordPress discourse. For people like me, publishing opinions and content that express my position in the community are the few ways I can contribute to this crazy world.

When a “frienemy” joins the fray it amplifies awareness that voices & opinions truly matter. Setting aside my critique of the WP Tavern re-brand and this recently published topic, I feel it’s important that more WordPress outlets lead with something other than The Top 14 Gutenberg Themes.

There are more ways to contribute to WordPress than just lines of code. Your means of communication can contribute, or even shape, the path to 50%+ of the web.

Spin up a blog, a podcast, a YouTube, a TikTok — let your voices be heard.

Stoked that WordPress journalism is making a comeback in 2020. Here I was feeling all down and out over covering WordPress and a few friends of mine are re-investing in the space. Happy to see Cory Miller become a partner at Poststatus and finally get Brian working on the company again. ;)

Well-known WP Tavern founder Jeff Chandler is set to reclaim the throne through his new initiative WP Mainline. I'm eager to have someone so dedicated to the WordPress community get back on the podcasting airwaves.

Things are moving along with Business 5000 and I'm actually content with the slower pace it's taking at the moment. I want to build something valuable for those involved and rushing things won't help. p.s. I'm looking for more people willing to pitch their ideas and more advisors to judge the pitches.

Friend of the show Syed Balkhi of Awesome Motive has acquired the All In One SEO plugin to round out his suite of marketing and conversion tools. This is going to be a big win for his company and especially his customers. I'm predicting an e-commerce product purchase will come soon enough.

I recently previewed the powerful Blocksy theme which comes loaded with a unique header/footer builder built in the WordPress customizer. I'm excited to see what they have to offer in their upcoming pro version. My major concern is when product owners compete over "free/fastest/most" and I'll share those thoughts towards the end of the episode, but also highlighted in the video below.

If you like the episode PLEASE share it with others.

Here's the article I mention in the podcast, Marketing lessons learned over more than a decade growing startups.

I'm excited to jump into new areas of content creation through the rest of 2020 -- I hope you join me for the ride.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn!

As the founder of Freemius, a platform that helps WordPress software developers monetize their product, Vova has a bird’s-eye view of the changing economy in our space.

We’ll talk about how .org and business opportunity is shifting, how Freemius onboards customers to find success, and what challenges the Freemius team is facing. It’s a lengthy episode, but one that I hope you enjoy over your holiday break.

It’s the last episode of the year and I can’t thank you enough for listening! Please consider sharing the episode on your favorite social channel!