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Negativity is everywhere online, so how do you deal with it?
Today on the WPMRR podcast, Joe and Christie talk about dealing with online haters, proper online moderation, and how webinars are overcrowding digital learning.
Listen in to learn how to deal with haters in a healthy manner!
Joe Howard:
Well, some people I don’t like probably just because they’re easily unlikable. But there are probably also people I don’t care for very much just because we just don’t see eye to eye, and that’s fine. People see differently than me, that’s fine. That’s good. They want to run business differently than me, no problem. Do your thing.
Christie Chirinos:
Hello, WordPress people. Welcome back to the WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Christie.
Joe Howard:
And we are Joe and Mo.
Christie Chirinos:
Ah! And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. What’s going on, Joe and Mo?
Joe Howard:
We are good. Yeah, okay. We’re doing video now, so if people want to see Mo and what he looks like, you can watch us on the YouTube channel. He’s like seven-and-a-half months now, so he’s getting big. He, as you can see, looks a little bit like his dad, which everyone seems to think is true. I can’t really argue with them. But yeah, we’re good. Sterling and I are at Lake of the Woods, which is about a two hour drive outside of DC. We’re doing a lake house with my parents and my sister this week, so we’re combining germ pods and all taking it easy at the lake house this week.
Joe Howard:
It’s been good. Trying to get in some work, hanging out with Mo, hanging out with family. Yeah, continuing to get some work done but also relaxing. I’m definitely not working eight hours a day. It’s three hours or four hours and answering emails and being on Slack and helping the team out and stuff. Whoa, he wants to be on the podcast too. But it’s been good.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s so good. That sounds so relaxing.
Joe Howard:
Yes.
Christie Chirinos:
Especially needed right now.
Joe Howard:
Definitely. It’s a nice mental health break, I think. It’s with not being able to travel much these days, it’s nice even to do a little trip out somewhere. So I’m feeling good outside of my usual element of just being home in DC. It can get a little monotonous, especially being stuck at home, so it’s nice to break that cycle a little bit. Yeah, got a nice lake out here, so I’m doing some swimming. Mo’s doing some swimming. Yeah. It’s been good.
Christie Chirinos:
Can you swim, Mo?
Joe Howard:
He’s taking some classes. He took a swim class, which was fun. He enjoys the water. He’s swimming, but it’s just mostly just like throwing him in the water and see what happens. It’s pretty cute though.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s adorable.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. What is new with you?
Christie Chirinos:
Oh, nothing much. I am not out by the lake. I am here in my walk-in closet. But I’m actually really excited about this. I set up a bunch of equipment, lights and things like that in here for some content that we’re recording at Nexcess, some video content and other content. Now I have at least V1 of my little recording/streaming setup going, which feels really great.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, looks good.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, yeah. I feel really good about it.
Joe Howard:
You got a nice background and you’ve got, it looks like, a new microphone, which looks great.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mentioned that I got this new microphone a while ago, actually, but not have it mounted and set up in a permanent space. That feels really good. I’m super excited about that. Yeah. Hopefully I sound good. Hopefully, this microphone helps my voice sound less like this and a little bit more radio. You know?
Joe Howard:
Yeah. There you go. I’m just on the AirPods this week. So sorry, folks, it’s not quite as good audio quality as when I’m home, but it’ll have to do while mobile.
Christie Chirinos:
Oh. Well, I think we all forgive it for the baby cam.
Joe Howard:
Woo-hoo. Baby cam. Yeah, you trade a little audio quality for some video quality.
Christie Chirinos:
Exactly, yeah. But yeah, that’s me. I’m actually working on a ton of content for work, so it very much feels like that-
Joe Howard:
Cool.
Christie Chirinos:
… is the anchor of my life this week because content’s hard. And it’s so funny saying that being podcasters, but I really struggle with it, especially in the way that I’m doing it this week where I’m writing a handful of articles for multiples Nexcess properties. I’m making videos for-
Joe Howard:
Cool.
Christie Chirinos:
… the eCommerce master class we’re rolling out. I’m recording a couple podcasts. I did one live stream, so just very sort of content heavy kind of week. It takes so much out of you because it’s like a performance, right?
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
Whereas, the work of mine that is more product management, like managing my partnerships, managing my vendors, talking to customers, calling customers is a lot more task based and almost like a laundry list rather than a show. I think it uses a different part of my capacities, so a lot of my week has been about shifting mindset and getting ready to crank out some ideas from brain to paper.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, cool. Is it content around Nexcess features rolling out or is it more like market… I don’t know, yeah. Is that the focus of the content?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. There’s a handful of Nexcess features rolling out that I’m working on content for. We are going through an organization, sort of the sales and marketing organization, so we want to make sure that when this new structure goes live that the first thing they do is go through a product retraining. So working on a whole bunch of that kind of stuff fell on me. My team divides work and different projects, they’ve been assigned to different people. That tends to be something that I love and I’m very good at is being the face of getting everybody to rah-rah behind a certain situation, but it does mean, like I said, it’s just a different mindset. It’s front lines work as opposed to behind the scenes-
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
… sneaky product manager work. Yeah. We’re also doing, like I said, that eCommerce master class. That’s being spearheaded by Mendel Kurland, who’s on my team. So yeah, we’re just creating a ton of content right now, and I very much feels like a sort of sprint.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I totally get that. I get the feeling the zapping of energy because you feel like you’re always on. You’re always in front of your audience, so you have to always be on. I’m doing a webinar for GoDaddy this afternoon on a lot of the tools we use, so I’m doing this podcast today and getting ready for that. So I’m feeling also like, “Okay, it’s going to be like a performance every day.” But we’re similarly doing a lot of content right now. We’ve got the new YouTube channel with a bunch of tutorials going out.
Joe Howard:
We’re starting… We haven’t really decided what it’s going to be called, but it’s like weekly round table or meetup. It’s kind of webinar-ish but also kind of WordPress community hangout-esque, so throwing a lot of that out there. We continue to push forward on written content. We’re doing a lot more ebooks. So we’re kind of in that same boat, and it’s a lot. It’s a lot to manage, and it’s a lot to do well at scale. I’m sure at Nexcess it’s a whole nother level of stuff. But yeah, I get where you’re coming from with that, feeling like you’re always on.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. I’ve definitely had that feeling this week.
Joe Howard:
Well, take a breezy. Take a breezy. Take some breaks. Take some deep breaths.
Christie Chirinos:
Mo’s shaking his head. Mo’s like, “Do not take breaks.”
Joe Howard:
No breaks. We don’t need no breaks.
Christie Chirinos:
No breaks.
Joe Howard:
No stinking breaks.
Christie Chirinos:
He’s loving…
Joe Howard:
Yes. He’s reached this age of being extremely active, so he’s started doing a lot of rolling over. He’s very vocal. He’s started to eat solids and everything. So a lot’s happening over here as you can see. Cool. All right.
Christie Chirinos:
Cool, cool, cool.
Joe Howard:
So updates done. I’m glad you’re doing well.
Christie Chirinos:
Well-
Joe Howard:
Glad Austin is good.
Christie Chirinos:
Austin, oh my gosh, yeah. We can back up for a second. Austin is so great. I mean, I’m sure that it’s going to be greater when things are open again and when the world goes back to normal and our lives, but for now I mean, I can tell you that if I have to choose between living in a 400-square-foot studio apartment in downtown DC during a global pandemic where I can’t leave or an 850-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with a giant recording booth in my walk-in closet and a lap pool and then another pool and also a boardwalk trail 10 minutes away, I can tell you which one I would choose. You know?
Joe Howard:
Yep. I think a lot of people are starting to think like that. I saw an article. I can’t remember if it was… It was either Washington Post or Wall Street Journal or New York Times, but it was talking about people living in cities being like, “Why do we live in cities?” Why do we really live in cities? The density of human beings, there’s a positive to it. There’s a lot of studies around the more people who are around, the more innovation happens.
Christie Chirinos:
Network effects.
Joe Howard:
There’s just a bigger footprint. Right. But there’s also obviously negatives like density obviously leads to bad things happening like during these times. So people are, including myself, starting to think like, “DC’s great. I love this city, but do I really need to live there? Can I not live somewhere I can have a little bit more space or a little bit just different positives than necessarily the positives I get from living in a city?” I get that and it sounds like Austin has been a good change for you.
Christie Chirinos:
I know the article you’re talking about, and we can talk about that article for a minute right here and do a quick COVID update.
Joe Howard:
Sure.
Christie Chirinos:
Because I actually thought that article was really silly when it came out, and I still do.
Joe Howard:
Okay. Because I just read the title, and I didn’t actually read the article. But I thought about it, and I was like, “Oh, that’s an interesting idea.” I don’t think differently, but tell me why. You read it, so you’re a better person to talk to about what was actually in the article. So why’d you think it was silly?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. Essentially, what you said was what was in the article. It was just questioning the way that COVID was going to change our perspective on where we should live and how. The thing is I know exactly why I like living in large, dense urban areas, and I still do. It’s everything that you said. It’s the proximity to other people. It’s the network effects, the water cooler effects, the innovation, the many things there are to do, the diversity.
Christie Chirinos:
I very much enjoy a small studio where the outside street is my living room, where that’s where I go to experience life and to be with people I love and whatever. Then I go back inside and I retreat to my small space. I see that and that’s something that I really appreciate and love about places like DC. I lived in New York for a few years.
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
For me, this move to Austin makes sense because that kind of life isn’t coming back any time soon. That’s an important distinction, I think. Because when I read the article, I was like, “Well, this is silly because this pandemic thing will blow over in three months once we get it under control and then I’ll go back to my life. And no, I’m not moving away from the city just because I can with my remote job.” But six months later that perspective really changed simply because we don’t know that that’s going to come back soon. We’re looking at 12 additional months, 18 additional months.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. People are starting to say, “Vaccine in fall of 2021.” And then it has to roll out, and so it’s like, well, it really could be the new normal for the next few years realistically, right?
Christie Chirinos:
Exactly. So effectively, what has happened to my physical space is I’ve realized that I need an external place to go that isn’t the outside, and that’s almost how my apartment is structured. It’s like there is a divider between the living room and kitchen areas and the more inner, like the closet where I am right now and the bedroom. Then there’s like, I know live in a building with amenities, so there’s the building amenities that are an additional external space that continues to be self-contained, a little bit more safe than being out at a bar during a little pandemic or something. So yeah, that’s the COVID update. I think that our opinions are quickly changing.
Christie Chirinos:
I did the Torque Social Hour last night, so it’s fresh in my mind. We were talking a lot about just the way that WordCamps are going to look different over the next year.
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
The way that-
Joe Howard:
That’s another reason we’re doing a lot more virtual content and virtual meetups and happy hours, which it sounds like you too. I think a lot of people are pushing into doing more digital meetups because this, it’s the new norm. There’s some long-term strategy behind that, right? It’s not like, “I just want to do virtual.” Maybe we do, but also it’s like, well, we may not have WordPress real WordCamps until 2022.
Christie Chirinos:
Exactly. Oh, here’s a controversial question.
Joe Howard:
Ooh, yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I saw this on Twitter last night at one in the morning, okay. Matt Cromwell tweeted out, “Controversial opinion, the ratio of people making webinars to wanting to attend webinars is probably 10 to one.” Agree or disagree?
Joe Howard:
Say that ratio again because I want to make sure I understand which ratio is which person.
Christie Chirinos:
There are a lot more people making webinars than people who want to attend webinars. Let me not butcher his words. Let me look up the exact tweet so that-
Joe Howard:
That’s okay. I understand the concept. So what Matt’s kind of saying is everyone’s doing webinar online stuff and it’s like we’re all attending each other’s things. But everyone wants to throw an online event, but there aren’t as many people out there who maybe are the attendee types. That ratio is getting closer to one to one, I guess, or I guess he said 10 to one.
Christie Chirinos:
That was exactly his point, yeah. Here, let me read you the exact tweet.
Joe Howard:
Yes. I’ll get it exact verbatim.
Christie Chirinos:
Matt Cromwell, @learnwithmattc, tweeted out, “Controversial opinion, maybe. The ratio of those who want to host a webinar to those who are eager to attend one is roughly 10 to one. If virtual conferences are our future, it’s time to rethink virtual conferences already.” Thoughts?
Joe Howard:
I always agree that it’s time to rethink things. I agree with that second part, definitely. I mean it’s always important. Because look, there are a lot of people that throw virtual conferences and really just use it as a marketing strategy. It’s just like collecting email addresses, right? Let’s just be realistic about that. That’s actually why I was kind of hesitant to start the WPMRR Virtual Summit because I was like, “I want to do this really well… ” Whoa.
Joe Howard:
I want to do this really well. I don’t want it to feel like a markety conference. It’s why Brian Richards is helping and running this conference with us because I wanted it to be like WooSesh or WordSesh, a solid conference. There was a part of me that was feeling like that. But we’re working really hard to make it a really unique, valuable virtual conference, and we’re always thinking of more unique things we can do and ways we can not just do like every other online conference out there. That’s really active in our minds. It’s one of our biggest values that we put together before we put this conference together.
Joe Howard:
So I agree with Matt for sure on that. I think I feel like the first part of what Matt is saying is I think he’s right in the fact… I agree and I kind of disagree. I agree because I think that there’s more people throwing virtual events than ever. There’s a lot of noise out there. There’s just a lot out there. So I think to him it feels like that’s the case, that there are a lot, a lot of people throwing webinars, which there are. But the WordPress space is just so big, there’s always going to be new people coming into WordPress as the market share grows.
Joe Howard:
The market share’s growing so fast. There’s always going to be new people coming in. With every tenth of a percent, it’s tens of thousands of new freelancers coming in, right? Theoretically, that’s how my mind calculates it. Maybe that’s not exact numbers, but that’s how the math works. As everything grows, as the market share grows, more people need to come in to WordPress professional area. That’s how economics works, I think. I think what Matt’s perspective is is from someone who’s really embedded in the WordPress community like us.
Joe Howard:
Of course, we see every single event that comes out, so it feels like there’s so much coming out. But I think there’s a ton of room for more, actually, with so many people. The WordPress community is so big but also so small. There are a lot of people who do WordPress that aren’t part of the WordPress community, and people are always discovering it, I think. I think there’s room for more. What I’m saying is I agree with Matt. I kind of disagree, but I think he’s overall right because I think as we move into every conference being virtual, there’s going to be so much overlap and so much of the same stuff going on that we really need to think about how do we do an online conference different and how do we stand out from the crowd, right?
Joe Howard:
Because being unique is so important, and if everyone is just throwing the same events, then it’s kind of worthless to everybody. I mean not worthless, but it doesn’t add value from a conference someone threw a month ago. That’s why monthly recruiting revenue, MRR subscription-based lessons and talks, that’s what we want to do. Yon is doing agency summit specifically to help agencies scaling. I think picking a good niche is good.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I just talked for a long time, but I think that Matt, you’re pretty spot on. You’re also just so WordPressy. You’re probably seeing a ton of WordPress stuff come out because you probably see every single WordPress thing that comes out. A lot of WordPress people out there, so I think it’s all good. I don’t know. What do you think?
Christie Chirinos:
That’s a super interesting perspective, and I think that the thing about me that I want everyone in the world to understand is all of my strong opinions are held loosely. I’m very passionate about this thing, but like, I don’t know, I might be wrong, I don’t know, about just absolutely everything. I think that when I read Matt’s tweet, it stood out to me because I was like, “Oh my god, yes. I totally feel like that’s true.” But just now, you presented this idea that yeah, I feel like that’s true because I’m plugged into the ecosystem.
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m seeing every single webinar that every single person is doing, so of course I feel like there’s too many. But the Nexcess marketing team is doing a ton of webinars, and I’ve just been like, “Ugh, why are we doing so many webinars,” even though I’m doing one of them.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, why do so… Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
But you’re right, yeah. The Nexcess audience probably only has maybe about… well, definitely not as many companies as I do in my face throwing webinars, right? They maybe interact with three to four, five vendors that do website-related stuff, and so to them, they’re not being bombarded by everybody’s webinar. The Nexcess webinar probably provides value. I hadn’t considered that point of view of getting out of my own head of being acutely aware of the ecosystem, and I think that’s a really good point.
Joe Howard:
Totally. I totally agree with that. Yeah. We used to do a lot of webinars, and we stopped doing them. They weren’t adding a ton of marketing value for us. We didn’t throw them in a way that was efficient for the marketing we were doing, so it was kind of hit or miss on those. But we have Ally on our team now, so I think she’ll be very good at organizing and doing all that.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I think there’s also… It gives us a lot of space to be able to team up, honestly. It’s like, “Oh, you do webinars? We do a podcast. Hey, I can come onto your webinar to talk about, I don’t know, security or maintenance. And you can hop on the podcast and we can put each other in front of each other’s audiences and maybe get some good visibility for each of us. Maybe it throws a couple customers each of our way.”
Joe Howard:
I was just talking with someone from Weglot, and we were talking about as a WordPress ecosystem matures, companies need to do better around being premium and charging more money and growing up from a financial standpoint, which we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast. But I think that part of that is like, okay, how do we get in front of more people? How do we increase our audience? I think that there’s a lot of good work we can do. We don’t have to sacrifice just marketing and just growing our audience for growing our audience’s sake just to the put low-quality content in front of people. We can do both.
Joe Howard:
But I think to Matt’s point for Matt’s tweet, that’s super important for us to continue to think forwardly, not just do the same old thing. I think when we were doing webinars, we were just doing webinars for lead generation, and that’s why it didn’t really work for us because it was like, we didn’t have a unique value proposition for our webinars. It didn’t seem like we were honestly adding enough value, so we stopped doing them. And we’re going to pick them back up in a more community-oriented way. I think that we have a lot more direction in terms of where we want to go with it, and I think that’ll make all the difference.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, to Matt’s point, I think with everything we do, it’s always thinking about how do we make this really good?
Christie Chirinos:
That’s what I was about to say. I don’t think that rule is strictly about webinars. I think it’s about everything, right? That’s because I’m someone who I’m aggressively selective with my attention, especially these days. I cannot be exposed to all the content that’s out there. I would be exhausted.
Joe Howard:
There’s so much. Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. For me, I’m just very, very, very gung-ho on high quality content. So webinars but also podcasts, blogs, I don’t read anybody’s blog. That’s not because I don’t care.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally.
Christie Chirinos:
I very much care, but there really has to be a kind of quality level and effort that goes beyond, “Oh, we’re just doing this to check a box,” for it to really capture my attention because there is so much noise and so much content out there across every single industry that it really needs to be something that nobody else is doing or it just does not even stick in my brain. You know?
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Honestly, we didn’t plan to really talk about this today, but I thought this was really cool. You’re on Twitter a lot. I’m on a little bit, but when you see tweets, we should talk about that on the podcast. This was a fun section, like talk about this person’s tweet. I thought that was really cool. I think one last thing I’ll say before we get into whatever, the second main topic of today’s discussion, is I think that people are… To be able to start doing marketing stuff, everyone wants to put out super high quality content, of course, but you have to start somewhere. If starting by doing something good and not great means you started, I think that that’s okay.
Joe Howard:
I don’t want to stop anybody from putting something out in the world that maybe is not the best thing they have ever done. It’s okay. We always improve and get better. But once you’re at the scale of WP Buffs and definitely at the scale of a Liquid Web like Nexcess, expectations will be higher. That’s why we’re going through a lot of content revamps right now and making old content that wasn’t that great way better. I think there’s room to be able to improve, but I don’t want people to feel like just because something’s not great doesn’t mean they shouldn’t put it out there in the world. Make it good and put it up.
Christie Chirinos:
I definitely think that it’s a balance between the volume game and the quality game, right?
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Because at the end of the day, you have to have blog posts that try and rank for search terms. That’s never going away, but we are in a continually noisier and noisier internet. And so how do you stand out in a way that makes sense, right? It’s actually funny, we can totally incorporate a Christie reads through tweets section into WPMRR, but I have opinions about them in regards to my own Twitter. I mean people will laugh at me when I say something. I’m like, “My work Twitter.” They’re like, “Your what?” Because my Twitter I think upon first glance is very personal, but to me that’s actually by design.
Christie Chirinos:
Just about the past three years of my career have been driven by Twitter, connecting with people from conferences on Twitter, offered opportunities, jobs, contracts through Twitter DMs. That’s because my Twitter is a work Twitter, but that doesn’t mean that I schedule two weeks of helpful blog posts and content via Buffer. It means that I present my genuine opinion. I share things that I genuinely care about, and I’m kind of myself. I’m a kooky person, and so I let myself-
Joe Howard:
That’s exactly how I describe you to people, “She is just so kooky.”
Christie Chirinos:
And I let myself be authentic on Twitter and share both the good and the bad. It works and it, I think, hopefully stands out above noise. You know?
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
And filters through opportunities for me. I think that’s what your content, your podcast, your webinars, your virtual conferences, your blog posts should all be doing. They should be hitting that point of being unique, of bringing in opportunities that are right for you, and of standing out in a noisy marketplace.
Joe Howard:
Absolutely. I don’t think anybody could look at your Twitter and think it was not authentic. It’s one of the most authentic things online, I think. Yeah. I feel like what you see is what you get. When I talk to you, I’m like, “Well, it’s the same as Twitter.” I feel like you’re not hiding anything. It’s like, you are there.
Christie Chirinos:
The one thing that I’ve gotten in regards to that is like, “Oh, yeah. It’s the same person that’s on Twitter.” I got this a lot at WordCamp Europe, which was really funny, “But you’re a lot shorter than I thought.”
Joe Howard:
You look so tall on video.
Christie Chirinos:
I look so tall on video, and you have such tall energy on Twitter. You’re a lot shorter than I thought you would be.
Joe Howard:
Tall energy, yeah. Yeah, nice. That’s true. Are you sure you’re not six-foot-six, because you should be dunking in the WNBA, I’m pretty sure. Oh, you’re five-foot, I don’t know.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m a very short person. I am five feet tall, yeah.
Joe Howard:
Five feet. Straight five. That’s interesting. I used to teach with someone who was actually five feet tall. She was the high school teacher, but she would go up to these big six-foot-four, 300 pound football players and, oh, they listened to her because she had… I don’t want to… Tall person energy, but that’s nothing against short people. I just mean she had big energy for a small person. That’s what affects people’s mentality towards someone. It’s not just their physical stature but their emotional and intellectual stature, that’s a really important thing. Yeah, you’ve got WNBA dunk-on-them energy, I’m pretty sure.
Christie Chirinos:
All right.
Joe Howard:
All right. Should we dive into the, I don’t know, second piece?
Christie Chirinos:
Yes, yes.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Absolutely.
Joe Howard:
We’re on about 30 minutes, so we may have, I don’t know, 25 or 30 more minutes left. But okay, second thing we wanted to chat about today was, it’s kind of like dealing with haters section or dealing with negative feedback.
Christie Chirinos:
Tell us what kicked it off.
Joe Howard:
Well, what kicked it off is I had this experience, when was it, it was last week sometime. What is today? Today is the 30th, so it was late July. I was just working, and I got a DM on Slack from someone. I think it was in post status or making WordPress. It was a screenshot of a post from a Facebook group that I’m not going to name here on the podcast, but it was a Facebook group of a pretty well-known other WordPress podcast and community. Someone posted in this group a screenshot of an email that we had sent. It’s part of our sequence emails. The person said, “If you’re ever unsure if you’ve used too many emojis in your email, just compare it to this one, which I find unreadable personally.”
Joe Howard:
Okay. I want to talk about this in a way that makes sense because I did not prep a lot of what I was going to talk about before. When it was posted, the email does have a good amount of emojis in it. It’s got like 10 emojis in it, so it does have a lot of emojis in it. It had our company name in it. It didn’t name our company name in the post, but it had it in the screenshot. So it’s a screenshot of our email with a ton of emojis in it. Honestly, the post is not that bad. The post itself is not the issue, was not the issue to me when I saw it. The issue is all of the comments underneath because this is a Facebook group of 3,000 people.
Joe Howard:
This is why I don’t use Facebook very much. I made a big, long comment on it when I saw the replies to it. I made a big, long comment. Well, okay. What happened was it got posted. I got the screenshot sent to me. I was told where it was. I applied to be part of that group. I had to request to join. The person who made the original post accepted me an hour later and commented my name on the post so I knew where it was. Then I read through all the stuff, and I was reading through comments.
Joe Howard:
To go back to my point I was making, this is why I’m not super active on Facebook because I feel like it’s a pretty toxic environment of… I felt like the person who posted this was… It didn’t seem malicious. It was just like, yeah, there are a lot of emojis in this email, ha-ha, too many. Then when someone sees a post like that, I think Facebook tricks people’s brains into being like, “Yeah, pile onto this. Yeah, exactly.” Just a lot of, I don’t know, not nice or polite comments on it. Yeah.
Joe Howard:
That’s what happened, I mean, I don’t know, I could read some of the comments. I don’t even feel like I need to read them verbatim. Two or three positive comments, but 30 like, wow, this sucks. Yeah. I think that from my perspective, I was like, I don’t really care at this point. I said in my comments, “If this was two or three years ago, I probably would’ve cared a lot.” Because I don’t know, I probably wasn’t as mature, and I would’ve taken it personally. Because it’s my business, so of course, I take that kind of stuff personally. Today I don’t really give a shit. It’s okay, this happens, move on. If I see anybody who commented on this post at WordCamp in 2022, I will give you a hug.
Joe Howard:
I’m not taking it personally, but I thought that it was, I don’t know. I didn’t like that someone posted my company without blurring out my company name and just putting it out there when I wasn’t in the Facebook group to make a comment on it. I actually would’ve appreciated if that person had reached out to me and said, “I’m posting this to 3,000 people.” Also, it’s pretty easy to blur out my name. That would’ve been much more kosher to me. You don’t need to call out my company and do that kind of stuff, so to me it was a respect issue. But yeah, I can read my direct response to it. I feel like it was like 500 words, so it’s kind of long.
Joe Howard:
I don’t know if I necessarily need to do that, but I’d love to hear what you think about that and if you’ve ever experienced something like this happening to you. Maybe at Liquid Web and Nexcess that’s a bigger scale. I’m sure you get haters all the time. You’re just at the big of a scale that someone’s always going to be saying something. “Ah, this wasn’t that great,” blah, blah, blah. But maybe at Caldera where it was your company, did you ever receive hate stuff like this or just negative attention? I don’t know. How did you deal with it?
Christie Chirinos:
I have so many thoughts on this, but first of all, I want to start with I’m so sorry that happened. That is so crappy, and I’m sorry to anyone listening to this currently thinking to themselves about the one time this happened to you. I am also sorry because it sucks. It’s such a crappy feeling. I think that a lot of it comes down to courage behind the keyboard. Because people who engage in this kind of toxicity, the reality is they would never come up to you in face, in person with their body in front of you and say, “Your email’s got too many emojis, ugh.” You know? That’s 100% a courage behind the keyboard kind of thing.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I’m sorry. To be clear, I actually appreciated the feedback. I like when I get real feedback. Because it’s true, when someone’s right in front of you, they don’t want to give you negative feedback, so you rarely get real negative feedback. I just want to be clear, I actually appreciated the feedback. I like to know what people think about my emails even if it’s negative because it makes me think, do I want to change it or was it just a bullshit opinion? I don’t know, but it gives me something to think about. I don’t want to make people think that I didn’t appreciate the feedback. I said that in my comment, feedback great, it’s just the way that it was presented and the way that people think on Facebook. It just turned something that wasn’t that bad into this snowball effect of negativity.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, the pile on.
Joe Howard:
It’s like, well, now I’m thinking about it and it doesn’t bring any positivity to anybody at the end of the day. Yeah, but go on. Sorry to interrupt.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. That makes sense, though, right? I think, like you said, it wasn’t the emojis in the email comment. It was the posting to a public forum with your name on it and 30 people being like, “This is stupid.” Again, that’s also just keyboard courage, right?
Joe Howard:
Keyboard courage, I like that. Right
Christie Chirinos:
Because that wouldn’t happen in a face-to-face context. I have never understood the impulse to be mean on the internet. This is the flip side of there’s so much content that I’m selective with my attention about what I read. It’s not that I don’t care, but it’s that I want high quality content. There is no way if I can’t even get through all the stuff I’m interested in, I can’t get through the stuff that I don’t like. Just move on. That has always been my approach, but it’s not the case for a lot of people. I’ve known that. Negative attention on the internet is part of my DNA at this point.
Joe Howard:
What, your controversial comments on Twitter get you controversial feedback? What?
Christie Chirinos:
So funny enough, I think that I have gotten to a point where I have filtered out my feed and the access that other people have to me to a point where I don’t even see the crap, but it took me a long time to get there. This kind of stuff used to affect me a lot, and it’s because I’ve been online for a long time. I’ve been publishing my things to the internet for even longer than I’ve been working with WordPress.
Christie Chirinos:
A lot of the time I tell stories about the way that I was publishing my… Oh, good. Publishing music to the internet when I was a teenager, the way that I was publishing blog posts and ideas and photos to social media and to original micro-blogging platforms for a long time. I’ve been all over everything. I remember watching grown-ass men, grown-ass men criticizing my music when I was 14 on Yahoo Answers or whatever.
Joe Howard:
No.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, yeah.
Joe Howard:
Oh my god.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s just how it goes.
Joe Howard:
Cringe.
Christie Chirinos:
It’s like, look, you are out here criticizing a 14-year-old’s music on Pure Volume, and I hope you find peace.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I hope you find peace, my dear.
Joe Howard:
I don’t know if this is the way, but I hope you do.
Christie Chirinos:
I got so used to it so early on, and then I definitely think there’s a sexism component to it too. I think that’s maybe beyond the scope of what we’re talking about because we want to talk about how to deal with it.
Joe Howard:
It’s within it. There are people out there who experience things like you do, so for sure I think it’s within the scope.
Christie Chirinos:
Right. I definitely think that there was a component of it to that. I think that’s why I’ve been exposed to it so much more. You know what I mean? But that just means that I’ve gotten good at it. I’ve learned to figure out how to roll it off my back. I’m very passionate about not only being selective to where you put your attention, but who gets access to you and why.
Joe Howard:
Yes, yes. So important because we only have so much time and bandwidth-
Christie Chirinos:
Absolutely.
Joe Howard:
… if you try to talk with everybody. It’s important to be able to say no, to be able to control your time and your schedule. Because it’s like what you were saying about controlling that, it’s like when I think about wanting to be physically healthy. You want to eat healthy food to be physically healthy. It’s the exact, exact same thing with mental health as physical health, right? Mental health, you do the same thing with content. If you read every pice of crap content out there, it’s a crap mental diet. Your brain, that same, your brain and body. I totally agree with that and finding strategies and ways to make sure that you are in control of who you talk to and your time is super important. I love that idea.
Christie Chirinos:
Right. There’s a general understanding that people on the internet, I don’t know what about the internet makes people say things that they just wouldn’t. But oh my gosh, I remember being in college and being featured in this bicycle commuting article and just all the comments on the article were so mean. I was just like-
Joe Howard:
What were they about? What could they be mean about?
Christie Chirinos:
It was like a lot of them-
Joe Howard:
She can’t ride a bike.
Christie Chirinos:
A lot of them were focusing on during the photos that the photographer took I had a bruise on my knee, and that quickly became a very sexually inappropriate-
Joe Howard:
A hot topic. That’s crazy.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. It’s like a part of my DNA at this point. Then when I started working on Caldera and I particularly had lots of exposure within the WordPress niche, I mean some of the emails that we got were absolutely remarkable. For a little while, the listeners are going to love this, I had a male name account on Help Scout to escalate tickets to myself in the case that I got an email that was like, “I want to talk to Josh. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” whatever. Or, “I want this to be escalated to your manager because whatever.”
Joe Howard:
That’s smart.
Christie Chirinos:
Because I got that frequently, frequently, “I want this to be escalated to your manager, dear.” I had lots of dear in the emails.
Joe Howard:
So condescending.
Christie Chirinos:
Things like that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just why, because my name is Christie. It’s such a cute name. It’s not even a cool, gender-neutral name like Alex or something. No, I don’t know. It’s just Christie. So I came up with strategies to work around it, but some were spectacularly bad. I remember there was this one time that it was the very similar situation where several people reached out to me privately in DMs with a screenshot and were like, “Don’t listen to this person. This is not who you are. You’re so much more than this.”
Christie Chirinos:
I was like, “What is even going on at this point?” I go, “Look… ” It’s this wordpress.org group. It’s still live. I wouldn’t know how to find it, but I’m pretty sure it’s still out there. It’s just like this 500-word review of why Caldera Forms is terrible ever since I started working with Josh and how now all the company cares about it money and I’m this profiteering, useless bitch who this and this and this and that. It was just like, “Oh my god.” Maybe it’s gone now because it might’ve gotten taken down for violating community guidelines. I think that actually may have happened.
Christie Chirinos:
One of my favorite people that I have a great relationship with in the WordPress community is Jan. Jan is one of the community moderators, and the way that our relationship developed is he realized that I was getting exposed to a lot, to an unusual amount of abuse on the community forums.
Joe Howard:
Oh, man.
Christie Chirinos:
Right. I remember the first time I met him in person after years of interacting online and just monitoring the forums for inappropriate content and fake accounts and things like that. I just gave this man a huge hug, and I was like, “You’re one of my favorite people.”
Joe Howard:
Totally. When someone has your back and stuff like that, it sticks with you.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. To go back to the original question, it’s in my DNA, and I have come up with a lot of ways both internal and external to deal with it. Internal, one of the big ones is realizing that people say things on the internet they wouldn’t say in person. Practicing acceptance with that, seeing the way that other things affect the propensity to receive negative feedback. That’s why I mentioned the sexism. And then there’s also internal ones, leaning upon the help of the people who send us the screenshots and say, “Hey, don’t let this get under your skin.” The people like Jan who have your back and make sure that things remain appropriate, above board. Asking for help is really big.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, I think at the end of the day it’s kind of like a bank account. It’s very easy for us to fixate on the negative comments, and that’s why it’s really important to remember all the positive ones you’ve gotten so that when you get a negative one, you can lean on the seven positive things you’ve heard. And there’s always, always, always, always, always a component to where’s the truth in this? Feedback is good. Being called a useless, profiteering bitch on the wordpress.org forums maybe is not constructive feedback.
Christie Chirinos:
But even out of that, I can remove myself out of the emotionality of that and think, “Okay. Well, you know, let’s make sure that I’m not alienating some of our Caldera forums free users because that’s not something I want.” Part of the project is to make sure that we’re being really helpful to everybody. When we get negative feedback on Nexcess and the platforms, and yes, you’re right, we get that all the time. We’re just operating at a scale where that’s always going to happen. I mean we have a team that deals with it. I’m not on that team. You know what I mean? But even-
Joe Howard:
Wow, a whole team to deal with it. We are at that point now where we get it pretty frequently also just because of the scale we’re at, but I’m looking forward to having a team for that.
Christie Chirinos:
It’s pretty great. It’s pretty great, especially compared to my previous experiences, right?
Joe Howard:
Yeah, reputation management team, kind of.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, exactly. Even when we look at the not so positive feedback, digging through the haystack to see where the opportunity for improvement is or even the opportunity for messaging improvement or whatever can be a really helpful exercise. But that’s definitely level three. Level one I think is accepting and letting it roll off your back. Because I think what I see a lot is I see especially newer entrepreneurs or maybe even existing entrepreneurs but people who just do not have negative attention online embedded into their DNA the way I do get really upset about it and post about it and even amplify the negative feedback about themselves through being so upset about it. That’s okay.
Christie Chirinos:
I think catharsis is really important, and I think the first round of reaching out to your community and asking for help and support to fill up that bank is super important. But then there’s a point at which you have got to let it go or else all your energy is going to go into that and not into the things you want.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. It’s a good point. I was pretty much like, yes, to everything you just said. I have a few things I also want to touch on. I did an episode with Jason Coleman from Paid Memberships Pro. It was just a year ago, so I forget what episode it was. It was like 30 or 40 or something, but it was about dealing with haters, specifically in the WordPress forums and running a plugin company. That’s a good resource for people too, like how to deal with one-star reviews there. That’d be a good resource. I think it has a lot of valuable lessons there.
Joe Howard:
For the feedback stuff you’re talking about, I think it’s really important to separate the good feedback from the bullshit feedback. You want to create systems in what you’re doing to gather more good feedback. So okay, for example, this new podcast recording software we’re using, Riverside, and with all the software we use, honestly, I get a lot of feedback. It’s always very respectful and positive, and I give a lot of feedback.
Joe Howard:
For them, I was like, “It would be cool if you had a Calendly integration. I use Calendly. You should know that. That’d be cool if other people need it, obviously. You can’t just build it for me. But just so you have it, add it to your feedback log because I actually want to help them get better. I think there’s definitely a right way to give feedback and a wrong way. This posting it on Facebook group is not constructive. It doesn’t help anybody really. It’s honestly not helpful to anybody, I don’t think.
Joe Howard:
I think people should be more cognizant online about how they’re giving feedback to people, and companies should be building stuff out to gather more positive feedback like that. This probably wouldn’t have helped in this case for us because it just got posted somewhere, but it’s just something I think to think about. I feel like part of me when I saw the posts go up, there’s this quote out there and I forget the exact quote. The gist of it is pretty much like, if you’re not doing it, if you’re not in the shoes of that person, then you can’t really comment on the things that they do because you don’t understand.
Joe Howard:
I don’t know how big a lot of those businesses and some of those people who commented built. Maybe some of them are bigger than ours or whatever, do great work too. That’s awesome. Okay, I’d love to hear your feedback. But if you’re letting a tiny little business, you’re not really at my scale, so part of me was like, “Come back and talk to me when you’re ready.” Again, I don’t know any of those commenters, honestly, so I don’t know if that’s the case. But that was my initial upset thought.
Joe Howard:
I think it’s important, you were talking earlier, Christie, about not even allowing this into your time or into the time you spend. To a point, I for sure agree with that. I 90% agree with that because I almost never read the comments. I don’t know. I just keep going. I know what’s good. I know what’s not good. It’s fine and this is not even that big of a deal. But I posted my reply to this and it was a pretty long reply. I got a bunch of, “Oh, this is a really good reply. Thank you for posting this.”
Joe Howard:
But the one that stuck out to me was someone who said… Okay, this is exactly what they said. I’m reading verbatim. “Good response. I’m sure this wasn’t pleasant to come across. I tend to use a lot of emojis to support my point/intention at times. I also refrain from posting, commenting, and heck, building our email list more because of the fear of responses sort of like this. I’m self-conscious in real life and online too, I guess.” That was the reply that someone said to me.
Joe Howard:
I usually don’t read the comments. I usually don’t really care about stuff like this, but when I do care about stuff like this, it’s because it was in a public enough forum that a lot of people were seeing it and commenting on it. I think it’s important for me to reply to something like that or someone from WPM to reply to something like that and stand up to that kind of behavior because there are 50 other people in that Facebook group that think the same as that commenter did, like I get nervous about that stuff. Seeing us stand up to folks when we’re like, “That’s bullshit. Come on. What the fuck?” That gives them power to be able to do the same thing. So I think there’s power in calling people out on stuff like this, especially when it’s not just my emotions.
Joe Howard:
If it was just me, I’d be like, “Whatever.” I literally wouldn’t have replied. But to me there’s importance of as a community, we have to stand up to this stuff. If one person does it, it empowers a hundred other people to do it. So hopefully, some other people saw my reply. I got 20 or something reactions and thumbs up for my reply, so I think it got positive response. The person who DM’d me was like, “I don’t agree with this opinion. I think your emojis are great,” but obviously some people…
Christie Chirinos:
I think your emojis are great, by the way.
Joe Howard:
Thank you, thank you. A lot of people like them. We actually get replies from a lot of emails like, “I love your emojis. Thank you.” I actually got the idea from Ahmad Awais. He uses a lot of emojis in his writing.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, yeah.
Joe Howard:
Probably better than we do, but it’s really interactive and fun. So I was like, “We want to do that.” Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. Yeah, that’s all. Keep being thoughtful about what you’re posting online. I think before you just pile on, what do you really thing? Don’t just post what everyone else is posting. It’s important to not get carried away, which definitely what happened in this post.
Christie Chirinos:
Tying the last knot with the diversity knot, I think that we hear a lot of stories about women who receive this higher concentration of negative attention online that they just give up. I don’t know. That sucks. That’s so terrible. There’s a lot of power, yeah, in saying, “Hey, maybe focus your attention on the things you love and not the things you hate and we’d get a more positive, diverse, productive ecosystem all across the board where not only the fittest and loudest women can survive because any others will just get sunk.” That’s not fair.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally. I think there’s also something to be said about proper moderation online. Part of my comment on that thread was like… Here, I’ll just read that section of it because I think it pertains to what you were saying, which was, let’s see. Okay. This group has rules, and I said, “I read through the group rules, and 6A says, be kind to each other, which seems pretty straightforward. I think this started out pretty lighthearted,” meaning this post. “I think it started pretty lighthearted, but there were a few commenters who probably toed the line.”
Joe Howard:
I won’t read all that, but I wanted to read that because I think that you have to set up a community with intent. You can’t just forget that intent once it grows and it’s becoming successful. It’s 3,000 people in this group, cool. Then it’s even more important to remember your group rules. I think that it’s true what you were saying, we need to protect each other. A group of people, when you put a bunch of people together, things get crazy. That’s just human nature. It’s like you put 3,000 of any kind of people together, woo, 3,000 people, let’s party. But that’s the job of the moderator to moderate your community.
Joe Howard:
I should probably say, this is the only experience I’ve had with this community. It’s probably a great community. I have no reason to believe that at scale if you look at a hundred posts, it’s great. I just had one bad experience, so I would never say, “This is not a good community,” or anything like that. I think it’s probably a good one. Everything I’ve seen has been good. I just had one bad experience, but that’s important. As communities grow, moderators and the leaders of those communities have even more responsibility to protect women, to protect companies, to protect people and their emotional integrity. It’s something that I think is important for everybody as they’re growing a community to think about from day one because it’s always going to be more and more important as the community grows. It only gets more important.
Christie Chirinos:
I think the interesting note there is you might not think that you’re protecting women by protecting men from negative attention, but you are. Because if you say something about that, you’re preventing three other pieces of feedback that maybe are more private or more subtle. Because if you don’t get away with one thing, you don’t get away with seven things. I think that’s an important consideration. I think a lot of people are watching, more people than we realize. How much stuff do you lurk on a daily basis? I lurk a lot of stuff on a daily basis.
Joe Howard:
Most users are lurkers in most things.
Christie Chirinos:
I am such a lurker just all over the place.
Joe Howard:
Me, too. Yeah. I’m not on social that much, but when I am, it’s usually because I’m just seeing what’s going on.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. All right. Well, I think that’s our note on haters.
Joe Howard:
That’s a lot on haters. I think a lot of your advice was really good though, like staying positive, surrounding yourself with positive people. We’ll tell you, both of us, from companies that we’re at a bigger scale than your average small business, and obviously Liquid Web Nexcess is a pretty big scale. As you grow, you’re going to receive more haters. You are. You’re going to have more trolls. You’re going to have more haters. You’re going to have more people asking you for back links to their web. It’s all going to increase.
Joe Howard:
Surrounding yourself purposefully with positive people is really important. It’s actually probably one of my joys of doing this podcast, Christie. I love doing the podcast. It’s great, but it’s also an excuse to talk to you every week. It makes my week better to get to chat for an hour. That’s really nice. Yeah, hey, we’re friends. So keep doing that. Be diligent about the team you’re putting together has to be people that are going to bring positivity. The people in the WordPress space you interact with, most people in the WordPress space are great. There are a few people who I don’t really care for very much or who I’ve learned not to care for.
Christie Chirinos:
Name names. I’m just kidding.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah. Who are they? That’s okay. Maybe we’re just… Well, some people I don’t like probably just because they’re easily unlikable. But there are probably also people I don’t care for very much just because we just don’t see eye to eye, and that’s fine. People see differently than me, that’s fine. That’s good. They want to run business differently than me, no problem. Do your thing. But it’s just not my cup of tea. Let those people go. I say, “Okay, you go.” You don’t need them to do well.
Joe Howard:
You need to surround yourself with good people, and as you move forward it’ll keep you moving forward as opposed to trying to get stuck somewhere. I think from what you said, that’s the best way to fight against negative. When negative does happen, you can focus on it, but if you have a lot of positivity around you, that can outshine some of that shadow, I guess.
Christie Chirinos:
I think I’m a very positive person, but I take positivity in a very realistic way if that makes any sense. I love positivity, but I am very comfortable saying that sometimes things just suck. They just suck and they’re bad, and there’s no reason why they are other than just sometimes things are bad. That’s the positivity but also not engaging in a toxic sort of positivity that forces you to be positive all the time.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m a big fan of alternate thoughts that can help frame a situation in a way that’s just easier to accept that it sucks and that it’s just kind of terrible and it’s going to be terrible and move on. When it came to a lot of the Caldera forums type stories that I have so many. We could do a whole nother episode on. Eventually, I developed this motto, I guess, that was just like, but isn’t it so cool that we’re big enough for this to happen.
Joe Howard:
I think that’s important to think about.
Christie Chirinos:
No.
Joe Howard:
You’re right because it’s almost like we’ve had instances where we found people duplicated our whole website. They literally took our site and duplicated it somewhere and tried to sell. It was like, “Okay, that’s literally our website. I get you wanting to do this, but that’s not cool.” It’s not great, but it’s also a sense of like, well, someone wanted to do that. You’re obviously doing something right because someone wanted to, so trying to think about it positively is good.
Joe Howard:
I think about the same thing honestly as this post, Facebook group. It’s like, hey, if we’re out there, if 90% of the stuff is good and 10% is bad, that’s sometimes how it is. The fact that just we’re out there is probably something I should take positively and keep trying to improve. That’s all we’re trying to do, right, get a little bit every day. So, cool.
Christie Chirinos:
And you can take that positive thought with the primarily negative ones, right?
Joe Howard:
Yeah, definitely.
Christie Chirinos:
I think that’s the important thing to me. I think it’s very dismissive, especially for women receiving abuse online, to be like, “Oh, but think about it positively.” No, don’t think about it positively. It’s stupid. It’s terrible. It’s absolutely terrible. Also, isn’t it kind of cool that you’re big enough for this to happen? Isn’t it kind of cool that people think your seven-person company is so large that they could send this kind of abuse and that it would just get filtered through the abuse filter and not go directly to the owner? Aren’t you doing something right?
Christie Chirinos:
And also, this sucks, is inappropriate and should stop, and also here’s just an alternate thought to get you through this kind of blech situation. I think that kind of strategy is super important for just being okay-
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
… and being a healthy human.
Joe Howard:
Agreed. I think yeah, to wrap up, I would just urge people if you have something you don’t like about someone’s company or something that you just don’t think is that great-
Christie Chirinos:
And send it to us instead, yo@wpmrr.com. We’ll read it.
Joe Howard:
We’ll post it in our Facebook group and we’ll hate on those people.
Christie Chirinos:
We’ll read it. You hate this plugin, don’t leave without a review. Just send us how much you hate this plugin in an email.
Joe Howard:
Totally. Honestly, I love feedback if it’s negative. I want to hear it. If someone had the respect to come up to me and say, “Hey, this email’s way to many emojis,” I might not agree with them, but I would really appreciate someone who had the balls to come up and say something to me about that. I don’t feel like I’m a big, mean guy online, like I’m going to hate on someone for coming to me with some negative feedback or something I didn’t like. Just present it respectfully, and we could be friends.
Joe Howard:
I like getting feedback personally, and I think a lot of business owners think like that. So if you’re thinking about this thing’s not that great, well, okay. This company is not perfect, no company is, and they probably want to get better. So let’s help them. Help them to get better by hey, send them a screenshot on the Intercom chat or email their support saying like, “Hey, just saw this.” We get some people email grammar mistakes on our blog, and we’re like, “Oh, we didn’t want to do that. Thank you. Get 25% off some merch and stuff.”
Joe Howard:
Two people commented very positively on emojis in the group and in my comment I said, “We’re going to give you some free merch. Thank you for being bufftastic and not getting drawn into craziness.” We’ll send those people some free swag. I would urge everyone to try and be positive and talk with companies about this. Help them get better. That’s the only way they’re going to get better if they get the feedback and don’t feel shitty because someone said something bad about them.
Joe Howard:
All right, that’s good for today. We’ve been going for an hour. This is a good episode.
Christie Chirinos:
We did several topics in one. That was kind of fun.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah. What are we going to title this episode? I’ll have to figure that out. Cool, all right. If people want to go back and listen to some old episodes, you can do that, a hundred-plus episodes. This will be 106, 107 or something, so lots of old content. People can go back and binge. That’s great. How about questions? Christie, where should people shoot questions?
Christie Chirinos:
If you have questions, you can send them to us at yo@wpmrr.com. I love doing a Q&A episode, so please make me happy and send me questions.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. They are fun. They are fun. We’ll do more Q&A, and now we can do tweet. We can do a tweet analyses as well. That’s fun too. Cool. Oh, and you can also listen to the podcast on YouTube. We’re publishing all future episodes there as well, so go give us… We need some listens and subscribers because we don’t have that many yet because it’s a new channel. So if you want to go and add a new subscriber, that’d be cool. Wpmrr.com…
Christie Chirinos:
… dotcom.
Joe Howard:
… if you want to check out the summit, it’s going to be dope. You heard a pre-roll for it on this episode, so you already know about it. But go register. It’s free. It’s going to be awesome. Christie’s going to talk. What else do you need to know? That’s all. It’s just Christie talking 15 times.
Christie Chirinos:
Just me on all the different topics.
Joe Howard:
Christiemrr.com.
Christie Chirinos:
If you would attend a conference that was just me talking for 15 sessions, tell me at yo@wpmrr.com.
Joe Howard:
There you go. We’d love that. Tweet at Christie, nothing negative, only positive. We’ll be in your podcast players again next Tuesday. Thanks for listening. All right. See you, Christie.
Christie Chirinos:
Bye.
Online translations have sped up research and business growth, now how about paying for a one-stop shop translation plug-in?
Today on the WPMRR podcast, Joe talks to Augustin Prot on co-founding WeGlot into existence, why premium subscriptions should offer more, and how community support adds value to a business service.
Listen to how the translation business has evolved for a broader mass consumption.
Augustin Prot:
At the end of the day, if you’re a big online E-commerce player, you have hundreds of thousands of millions of words. I mean, just you can’t… You don’t have the time to do all manual translation.
Joe Howard:
Hey, hey, good WordPress people, welcome back to the WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Joe.
Augustin Prot:
And I am Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. And you’re listening to the WordPress Business Podcast. We’ve got Obi-Wan on the pod this week. Obi-Wan’s a popular character, obviously. People love Obi-Wan in the Star Wars. Yeah, we’ve Obi-Wan on the podcast this week. What going on, Obi-Wan?
Augustin Prot:
I mean, I’m fine. A bit of quarantine with the COVID. But apart from that, I’m fine.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Tell me about it. It’s, I think it’s been a tough time, tough time for everyone. Although, I’ve heard a lot of people in the WordPress space, people say, business is going well, everyone’s online, everyone’s doing more WordPress stuff. So things are picking up for me. But it still doesn’t mean it’s not tough for people. It’s a challenging time, I think for everybody in the world right now. But yeah. We’ve got Obi-Wan on the pod this week. Also known as Augustin Prot. Augustin, we met at, I think it was WordCamp Europe last year, right before we started recording. We were like, “Oh, so good to see you.” It’s been a year since we saw each other. But yeah, I think it was WordCamp Europe 2019. Is that right?
Augustin Prot:
Yeah, exactly. We also met at WordCamp US 2019 too, I guess.
Joe Howard:
Oh, we did both.
Augustin Prot:
Maybe no. No. We actually met together at WordCamp US 2019 and you met the other co-founder of WeGlot at WordCamp Europe 2019.
Joe Howard:
Oh, okay. That’s where my brain is short-circuiting a little bit. Cool. I remember seeing you guys at WordCamp Europe because I feel like everybody who has a booth or something, or is doing some sort of promotional for these big WordCamps have swag or they have T-shirts or hoodies. You guys had the hood less sweatshirts, which were super unique and I was like, “Those look really cool.” And WeGlot was really nicely printed on them. I remember being like, “Oh, WeGlot’s got awesome swag.” Yeah. We could take a lesson out of your book because I was kind of basic.
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. We tried to improve our swags over years. I could show you the pens and the pencils we had the first year we did the WordCamp. I mean, there is no shame but it was very off and far beta version of our swags.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Right on. It’s that, it’s always a journey, right to view? Anything cool you see, you should have seen the five versions before that. It’ll give you some clarity into the work that went into making it really good. But, cool. Yeah. Okay. Augustin, tell folks a little bit about you. About WeGlot. I already blew it. You’re the co-founder of WeGlot. But yeah. Tell folks a little bit more about the company and yourself as part of that.
Augustin Prot:
Yeah, sure. With pleasure. I’m the co-founder of WeGlot. We’re two in this journey. The other co-founder is Rémy who is a more technical guy, I’m more the business guy. WeGlot is actually… it’s a solution to make any website multilingual easily. Basically, you have a website. It’s in English or in French and you want to make it available in other languages, Italian, Spanish and others. You would use WeGlot to do that. So it would help you to translate and to display the translated versions to your end visitors. Right now we have approximately 50,000s users in the world. Yeah, it’s going great. We are 20 people in the team. I mean, it’s an amazing journey. We’re very happy.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Very cool. So, 50,000 users about. What’s the split between… I don’t know if you do a freemium version or if it’s only premium. Is it part of those free users and part of those paid users?
Augustin Prot:
We do free trial and free version. We have a free trial freemium model. We have approximately 15,000s paying customers and we have 35,000s free customers… users.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah, cool. That’s a pretty good split. That’s like 30% of your folks who use WeGlot are premium users, which, I’m not a plug-in guy, so I actually don’t know if that’s high or low. But it seems pretty high to me. Like 30% of people use it are paying for it. That sounds pretty good. Because I know a lot of plug-ins I’m sure have a lower percent, 10% are paying and most are free. Cool. Have you been using the freemium model/having a free plug-in and a premium plug-in since the beginning? Or have you changed your business model as things have gone?
Augustin Prot:
No. We changed actually. At the very beginning, we didn’t have a plug-in, we had only a JavaScript library. We would ask people to add the JavaScript snippet in the HTML. At the very beginning again, we used to go to remote working offices. I was asking everyone on the tables, “Do you have a website? Can you add my product and tell me what you do… If you like it or not?” Most of them would reply to me “Yeah. But do you have a WordPress plug-in? I don’t know how to add the JavaScript snippet?” That’s how we went from having a JavaScript library to a WordPress plug-in. And to be on the directory, you need to have a real free version. Before that, we had a free trial and we actually added the free version because it was required to be listed on the directory.
Joe Howard:
Oh, okay. That’s interesting. I feel like that’s something I should know as someone who is deep in the WordPress space. But I don’t know if I ever explicitly knew that. It sounds like, having a free plug-in allows you access to be in the repository. And, although you’re using that probably to bring in mostly free users, it’s also kind of free marketing for you. Like, it allows new users to come in and potentially upgrade in the future, but it’s also… It gives you a huge market for, to find new users from. I guess that’s kinda how it works?
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. It’s an amazing hub of distribution and it’s… you can touch many people. It was great for us to test traction and to test if it actually works… worked initially. And if you were able to make money with it. Yeah, the proof of concept was great things to distribution through the directory. And also, I would say that making the decision to have a free version was a very good thing. I mean, apart from being able to be listed on the directory, because we really try to bring the value very quickly to the user, so we don’t having him getting his credit card or anything else. So having the possibility to use the product for free for very small project, I think it’s in a way it’s… It’s removed the idea of, we only want your money to users that are trying to discover the product.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah, I totally get that. We… I always feel like we’re trying to do that better because we don’t… Like we’re a services company so we don’t have like a free anything we do because you can’t really do free services. That model doesn’t work for a services company. I think what we try to do and like that equivalent space is, we really try to educate people. We have ton of great blog content. We just started a YouTube channel with tutorials and it’s… At the end of the day these are marketing opportunities for us, but we want to be a marketing opportunity that shows people like, “Hey, you can trust us.” “Hey, we really helped you with these things.” Maybe now you want to work with us. So I totally get that. And I think that that makes a lot of sense. I’ve always-
Augustin Prot:
Even when you look at what’s going on in the software industry… When you look at Slack, at Zoom, at other great services, they have a… It’s a large feature. It’s not just a tricky feature when you only have a 10th of the product. It’s really something that people can use and they can discover, and then they can bring it in their own company or department and it provides value to the rest of the team. And I just find they can convert into a paying customer.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I think that’s something that people in the WordPress space are very cognizant of, if a free version of a plug-in is, it’s just a free version just to have a free version, but it’s not really useful to people. I’ve heard a lot of people who say… I won’t name any specific plug-ins under that. Definitely some free plug-ins out there that people like complain about like, “This is all just you have to upgrade to do anything useful here.” So I’d be interested to hear from you, how did you walk that fine line, and I’m sure you still are, but how do you find that balance between offering a lot of great things in the free plug-in to make it really valuable for people while also making sure that the business is sustainable and giving people the opportunity to upgrade when something really is going to be that valuable for them? Like, how do you guys figure out what’s going to go in the free version and what goes in the premium paid one?
Augustin Prot:
It’s hard. I think it’s a balance between what we can do and how users and customers responds to what we’re trying to build at their… in terms of line between the free and the paid one. And on the other hand, it’s also a cost issue. I mean, we’re paying based on usage. So, for example, if a website has 10,000 of words and low traffic, we’re not paying the same for website that has one million translated words and high traffic. So, it’s normal that the terminal one would pay more than the first one.
Augustin Prot:
And then, we also, we had the feeling that the key values of WeGlot it’s being able to add WeGlot in minutes, I mean, to make your website machine work in minutes and being able to translate your website, at least if it’s a small one, a landing page for an app, or a small hotel website, you could do that for free. We tried to make it possible for this kind of chore to get the free version. But it’s a very complex line. We iterated a lot and now we have the feeling that we found kind of a balance that’s working.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Cool. I think a lot of people who are starting off… Like, if someone’s thinking about starting a translation plug-in they’d think that kind of pricing is so complex and what do I include free? What do I include not? And I think it’s important to realize a lot of this comes with experimentation. A lot of the things comes with hearing feedback from customers and no-one’s going to get it right the first time and it’s always going to be an evolution. I’m sure you’re still at the point where you’re kind of thinking about a few features like, “oh, what should go here? What should go here?” It’s a constant journey and it’s going to be for everybody. And so we have free version [inaudible 00:11:52] version.
Joe Howard:
Why did you start a translation plug-in, or is this something that you found a need for, or are you really into translations? Is that part of your backstory? I love to hear why people started businesses in the first place in terms of being in the translation space in this instance.
Augustin Prot:
So, it’s actually not my story. It’s more my co-founder’s story, this one. On my side, I had a financial background. I didn’t know about CSS or HTML before, so it’s really about my co-founder, Rémy. Before WeGlot he did… I mean, he started another startup that was a mix between Google Maps and, for example you know apps where you can buy and sell things to your neighbor or to anyone. So it was a mix between the two of them and he was in charge of the web development. So he did the web app, he did the mobile app, and when he faced really extremely complex challenges, technically speaking, he always found a solution. So for example, when he had to do text messages he used Twilio. When he had to do E-mail he used SendGrid just to be placing a small snippet and it was working. When he had to do payment he did Stripe. And then paying… Doing an online payments gateway, it’s very complex, so having a solution like Stripe, or its competitors, it’s really useful.
Augustin Prot:
And when he had to do translations… He speaks English, he made part of his studies at Columbia, in New York, but the technical complexity behind that was low value, time consuming. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t find just a tool to make it easy to just make your website multilingual, SEO friendly, taking care of URLs, and you just focus on translations. And that’s really how the idea came out. That’s where the frustration, a pain-point he experienced and when he decided to stop the first startup, because he couldn’t… I mean, they didn’t make money, he just say, okay, “I need to build a product that does that.” And I met him at this point, so we started to do sort of the rest of the journey from there.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I want to dive into that even more because I think that a lot of people like you who are on more of the marketing business development side, everyone’s looking for like a technical co-founder, right? It’s like, I have all these great ideas, but I don’t really know how to build it. I could really use some help there. So I like to dive in a little bit into the… How did you meet your technical co-founder story as maybe like the non technical co-founder. Cause that’s me, I’m a non technical co-founder, and Nick is does everything technical, as does the rest of my team. But in terms of you two meeting, did you meet and then two weeks later start to get to work together? Had you known each other for a little bit before you started working together?
Augustin Prot:
Well, we didn’t know each other before. And actually we met through a friend of mine that used to work for kind of an incubator for startups in France. They were being incubated by this incubator. And so the one then that they would stop the first startup and then they were open to meet other people that can have complimentary skills. And that’s how the idea… That’s how we get to meeting together. And then during the meeting, we kind of described who we were, what we were working on, both of us. And he had a strong pain point, he already had a first prototype and a first user. And I really liked their… Not only the idea because I didn’t know about websites or even SAS, like SendGrid or Twilio, but the way he presented me the issue and the problem he was trying to solve and the way he was building the prototype very customer centric. He was doing things. He was not trying to explain me how to teach me things because he was doing things and I was like, “Okay, if you’re looking for someone else, let me try being the number two.”
Augustin Prot:
So, I tried to find as many users as possible during the next weeks. And then learning from that, trying to… How we distribute, how we do the pressing. The goal was to prove that we could make money. I mean, 10 customers and there is… Then there is a market for that. And we did that without a bank account for the company, without a registered name, nothing, just checking that. And once we reached that 10 or 20 customers and we saw the traction, especially thanks to the WordPress community, we said, “Okay,” so now we do the statements and we register the company and we can focus on the development.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Cool. I like that all of that came about from an introduction from someone who said, “Hey, you two should meet.” I think a lot of people are like, “Ah, networking, like that sounds so formal and stuff.” And you don’t have to network in the most formal way possible, like shaking hands and trading business cards. But it’s another lesson of that. Like having and knowing some people in the space is important because these big things all WeGlot, it started because there was one introduction and these small little details can blossom into huge things. And they almost always do. Probably most people who’ve done big things, have a few small pieces that are like, “Wow, if that hadn’t happened, who knows what things would have been like today.”
Joe Howard:
Cool. I want to jump into community stuff here in a second, because I’m interested to hear about utilization of the community to help grow your product, the WordPress community specifically. But one thing before we jump into that is, you mentioned previously that WeGlot is able to… One of your values is helping people to be able to set up a multi language website in minutes, which I think is really valuable for a lot of people who don’t necessarily have the time to do all sorts of manual translation and to spend hours doing that or pay expensive rates for people to be able to do that for their whole website. But I think there are also two camps of people. One is automatic and fast and maybe not a 100% correct translation, but then there’s people who are like, “I manually translate everything, I get translators to manually do it because I know it’s going to be correct.” Sounds like WeGlot’s in the promotion of getting websites translated for everyone, even if it’s not 100% correctly translated, but maybe I’m not right about that.
Joe Howard:
I’d love to kinda hear a little bit more about like WeGlot’s perspective on fast translation and how you help people to translate quickly and get the website translated in minutes, but also giving them high quality translations.
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. Thanks for the question. So I think it’s very important to clarify. Yes, so we are not translators, so we are not there to be a translator. We’re there to provide the tool to make it possible to translate the website and to manage [crosstalk 00:19:38]. And so what we do is then we provide a first layer of automatic translations. Like you say. Because I think it’s two reasons. First, automatic translation engines gets, they are so good now. It’s really impressive, Spanish to English, English to Spanish, French also. It’s really impressive. So first the quality of the automatic translation really improved over the last years. Second, it’s pretty good to start with something. So when you install WeGlot you have your first layer of translation, then you can yourself, your team, your in-house translator, you used to work with, you can just edit and validate the translation if you want directly on the WeGlot tool. And last, if you prefer working with professional translators, you can adjust other professional translations directly from the WeGlot tool too.
Augustin Prot:
So the idea is really to give you the resources to build your own workflow, depending on your budget and your constraint and how you want to do that. But at the end of the day, if you’re big online E-commerce player, you have hundreds of thousands of millions of words. You don’t have the time to do all manual translation. So you need to do a balance between maybe the key pages, the key products and the other one that are less important on your website. At least at the very beginning. And then you can improve it over time. That’s a way to build it, but you can have a different workflow. Again, the users create their workflow.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I like that idea and concept a lot. Of allowing people to create their own workflows. And I like the idea of speeding up translation by starting with an automatic translation and then, instead of having to manually translate everything, you edit a translation and have someone just proofread it, which probably is a lot faster than going through and manually translating all these pages. And the idea of… I know some companies that do manual translations for all their pages, and it seems like a lot of work and it seems very expensive. And I think that it’s also understanding to hear, because technology is getting better, right? In 10 years, think about how good auto translate is going to be, so maybe people don’t need manual translators in 10 years because the error rate will be so so small. I think it’s cool that you’re helping people do that now, because it will only probably continue to gain momentum as time goes on, because again the technology just gets better.
Joe Howard:
Community. Sounds like community has been really important for you to grow WeGlot. It’s important for us here at WP Buffs too. We’re very involved in the community. Community has helped us grow. Significantly. And we’ll always have to be thankful to everybody and continue to give back to the community. But, I’d love to hear from a plug-in developer’s perspective or a plug-in’s perspective, what did you guys do to lean on the WordPress community a little bit to help grow WeGlot? And what kind of… How useful was it in terms of your journey?
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. Maybe I can first talk about the very beginnings because at the very beginning when we knew nothing about WordPress, we discovered that there was a French community. And so we tried to contact people, calling many people. Obviously not everyone answers you, but we had many answers. So, for example, Johnathan from WP Rocket, also Kim from MailPoet. These are two guys that had great plug-in and businesses at this time. They could just ignore us, but they replied and they actually give us advice. It was really useful and helpful, and it was, I don’t know, maybe it’s a kind of way doing business. It’s not just about money, but they were happy to share their experience and advice.
Augustin Prot:
And from there we sponsored our first work in Paris, France. It was very early 2016. That’s when we officially launched WeGlot. And that’s where we met most of the people from the community. And yeah, I mean, they have been very helpful, very welcoming. So, overall it was surprisingly easy to get access to great people into the community, the friends that you meet them. So, thanks for everything. I mean, I think that this first traction could not have happened without that.
Augustin Prot:
So from there we understood two things, that we needed to keep investing into the community because we could learn a lot of thing, and also the power of the community as a way to reach more people for your business. I don’t want to do… Of course there is a part of that that’s marketing when we support WordCamp we expect to be more visible to the community. But I think it’s, we’re trying to do that in a healthy way. So we’re trying to invest our time and money to give back to the community and to make sure there is a fair balance between what you get and what you give to the community. I don’t know if we achieved that, but that’s what we’re for trying to do.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. It’s a hard balance. It’s one that all companies, I think in the WordPress space, are always trying to do. That’s what I want to talk about too, is the balance between giving back to the WordPress community and trying to give back more than you take and leave a place better than you found it. Right? It’s that mentality. But also growing a healthy business and one that is financially healthy and successful. It can be difficult to find that balance sometimes. Right? I’m not gonna lie. There’s sometimes I want to do more marketing stuff. And a lot of times I think that all the marketing and community stuff I do is pretty much in line. All the marketing stuff I want to do is pretty in line with the community stuff, because our values as a company are structured in a way that’s like, we want to help people and that’s how we attract customers. But it can be a challenge. And I know it can be a challenge for other folks too. So in terms of what y’all do at WeGlot, sponsorships sound like one thing. Maybe some other things too?
Augustin Prot:
We’re doing similar things, but we’re doing classic sponsorships to a WordPress WordCamp. I mean, right now there is no WordCamp anymore, but it’s going to come back. Yes, all virtual. And then we’re also doing the same for meetups when it’s possible, for local meetups. What we also love to do is to try to partner with a member of the community, individuals, and rather than going ourself, taking the plane and being there for the WordCamp, we prefer partner with local people. And making them kind of ambassadors of WeGlot for a day or two. Obviously it’s only the case when they like WeGlot, when we have a good feeling between them and us. And I think it’s a way of, it’s a balance. Of course, we hire them. So there is a fee for that on top of our sponsoring. I don’t know, it’s a fair balance between what we give and what we get in some sort of a way to make the community keep growing in a healthy way. I mean, that’s a feeling we have. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think it’s a good way to increase our presence inside the communities.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I think probably that’s right. And that’s a good way to think about it and the more… Okay if you want to grow more from the community, you have to give more to the community. That seems like the only real equation that’s going to make the community sustainable, is if people aren’t just like taking, taking, taking from the community. Sure, maybe you can take a little bit more from the community, but you have to put in twice as much as you’re taking or three times as much or whatever that number is, but yeah. Yeah.
Augustin Prot:
And that’s why I’m thinking that there is this wave of this trend of no code. So more and more easy things to use, more and more plug-ins and solutions in WordPress, but also outside of WordPress. And so, if you want this to continue and you want WordPress to keep a growing market share, I think we also all need to have more professionalization of some of the service, like what you do, currently. And so it’s also means people getting more from what they do for WordPress. So paying them more for things they do. So it’s also… I think it can make sense. WordPress is attracting more and more money. It has to go somewhere else also into the community and not only through the WordCamps.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah. We’ve talked about that a lot on the podcast of the WordPress space changing a little bit and more money coming into this space which in essence changes a lot about how the WordPress space functions, both community-wise and economically. How do you think companies can continue to professionalize their services better? Like what pain… What gap are you seeing in terms of companies that could do a little better in that area? Anything specific that you’re like, “Oh, companies should probably try and do X, Y, and Z better.”?
Augustin Prot:
I’m not gonna name anyone because I don’t actually have any example in mind and I don’t have a… I mean, I’m no one to give advice for that, but what I see as a trend is very focused solutions for very specific pain points or problems, even if it’s a niche. If it’s good and you’re focusing your time on it, you should be paid. So we need more and more premium solutions, more and more paid solutions within WordPress that are doing things great. That’s a general comment I can do.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I totally did not mean I want you to call out a company. But, I totally agree with you. I think probably the WordPress space, like a lot of people in the WordPress space have probably been underpaid for a long time. I think that as the WordPress economy, we have some growing up to do to match the money that’s coming into WordPress. And I think that instead of providing a good solution for a good price, we… Folks should be continuing to try to find how can they provide a better service? How can they make an even better product that people will pay more for? That will be more expensive, but that gives more to the end customer as well. I think that’s really important and a lot of folks have found more financial success when they move up market.
Joe Howard:
And I know a lot of folks in the WordPress space, they want to help everybody. They want to be at a price point where anybody can afford them and they want to help as many people as possible. And I totally get that, but I think that there’s also the space to make sure that things are priced correctly. I think you can do both. I think you can help a lot of people. And I think you can also be priced correctly, whether you have a new pricing tier for certain people. Or someone has a million pages need translated, obviously they’re going to pay a little bit more for that. I think that there’s… Every WordPress business should be thinking of ways to offer more premium offerings so that they can run a healthier business financially and continue to give back financially in the ways that are important to help the space grow. So, I dig what you’re saying. It makes sense to me.
Joe Howard:
All right, cool. We talked a little bit about community stuff, helping you build. Support. I’d like to talk a little bit about that, cause that’s something you mentioned here, it was one of the things we could talk about. Obviously we do a lot of supports, like the main thing we do at WP Buffs, but a little bit different, different for a plug-in company. How do you do support and where is it in terms of like your priorities as a company?
Augustin Prot:
We’ve done supports like 95% of our time the first year of doing WeGlot with Rémy. I mean, we were so happy to have people chatting to us. We spent hours to get people to the product. And when people are coming to your product and asking you questions, you are happy. I mean, you can include your Game of Throne and whatever [inaudible 00:32:42] whatever. It’s great.
Joe Howard:
It means they’re using it and it means they want to do more with it because they’re asking questions. So it’s like, yes.
Augustin Prot:
Exactly. And it’s… That’s where you understand your issue. That’s where you have your best features requests. This is at the very center of our company today, we have a bit more than 20 people and it’s one-third tech team, one third marketing, and one third support. And we provide support to all our users, I mean free and paid ones. And it’s very important because we believe that’s… We’ve all been in a situation where we need support for anything from a phone company to an online issue with a product and so on. And when you have the answer timely, and it’s exactly what you were looking for and it’s fixed, you’re very happy. So it’s… I think it’s part of the journey and you need to be very focused on the customer journey. On the other hand, it’s your responsibility and your job to decrease and lower the level of support by improving your product. So that’s so where to see if your product is going to the right direction. So if the average number of support per user is decreasing and if their difficulty per case is decreasing, it means your product is improving.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I think that there are definitely plug-ins out there, and definitely folks out there who are like support is a premium thing. Like you have to be a paying customer to get support, which I understand, like I understand the concept of that. I think there are definitely distinct advantages to doing support also for free members. Obviously, you may not be getting directly paid for that free support, but like you said, it’s part of the customer journey. You’ll probably get more people to stick with you, to upgrade to a premium license, also to talk about you more, more five star reviews in the repository. I think also as a company that, like all companies, we all have to listen to our customers and get feedback from them to figure out what we’re going to build next.
Joe Howard:
And if you’re doing free support, it actually gives you a huge access to all your customers because they’re telling you their pain points and you can build lists of like, “Oh, 10 people in the last month asked about this thing. Like we should probably change the UX there.” and that can help all your customers, including your premium customers which will eventually reduce churn for your premium customers. So I think there’s… It’s a complicated science between choosing to go which route you want to go, supporting free customers or not. But I think there are definitely a lot of advantages to doing that. Plus it’s just a good thing to do, like you said, so yeah.
Augustin Prot:
To me, I go for supporting free customers. I mean, they’re giving you ideas, they’re giving you features, they’re giving you big issues. So it’s value actually, it has value. And also on the other hand we’re a subscription based service. So if someone is not happy with our service, it can stop paying us the next months. So we have a responsibility to keep improving the business to make sure they’re happy with the product and they’re happy with the service every month. Which is, in sense, it’s a healthy way to do business because whenever it stops, we stop improving the product or we stop solving their issues, are we creating more problems to his experience? There’s nothing… They can just remove our plug-in, our solution, and choose another product. And we’re not just, sorry, we’re not only on WordPress. We started out in WordPress, but now you can use WeGlot if you have another CMS or even custom websites.
Joe Howard:
Okay. So like works across Squarespace or Shopify or Wix or some stuff like that?
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. No, you can do it, but also if you have something in JavaScript or in PHP Symfony, you can use it.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Cool. Support’s just so important and adds so much value to everything you’re doing. It’s always good to hear when people are so focused on it. I think-
Augustin Prot:
And I want to say that our support team is amazing. Really. I’m really proud to work with these guys because they’re doing an amazing job.
Joe Howard:
Totally. I feel the same way. It’s like the support is so core to what we do. It’s like, they’re doing the most important work we could do, which is helping people when there is a problem. Also, when, proactively, when they need help doing X, Y, or Z. But especially when there’s a problem, like to be the people who are there on the front lines to help them when someone’s having a challenge and, you know WordPress pretty well at this point. There’s all sorts of stuff that could go wrong, to be able to help people through that challenging time. It’s great. So I say the same thing to our support team, like nice. Alright. Very cool.
Joe Howard:
I like to kind of wrap up at the end of these by hearing a little bit more about what the future of WeGlot looks like. What do you have planned during the next year or so. Or… Yeah, what does next year look like? Especially now during this kind of crazy time in the world of COVID happening, not a lot of… No WordCamp Europe this year, no WordCamp Europe next year. What do you have planned for the next year?
Augustin Prot:
It’s hard to say. And first we’re among the lucky ones, we can do remote work easily, the business is up, we don’t need to fire anyone. So, just for that I think we’re very lucky and it’s great that we can keep doing business. Then for the year coming, we now have the possibility as I said to use WeGlot on any website. So we’re trying to grow also into other communities. So you name for example, Squarespace. It’s interesting. That’s where we’re also trying to do things with them. And we’re also for supporting the community trying to keep talking to all people we were talking before the COVID and we’re trying to share best practices of people going 100% online between… For example, I think that it’s in Toronto, they did meet ups 100% online and they didn’t… It’s doing great for them. And so we try to share their best practices to other meetups we know, so they can, if they want, they can do it and they can apply the best practice and the guidelines of the guys in Toronto.
Augustin Prot:
And we’ll see, we’ve found out that WordCamp supports virtual WordCamps, when you do on these sponsoring booth, it’s not working that well. At least when you don’t have a big name, like WP Engine or Good ID, which are great, but they have a big brand name. We don’t have this level of brand name. So, we’re trying to find another way to give back and being visible, which is not always easy. I think there are more and more local initiatives, for example we’ve seen podcast and online courses in Spain. It’s really… There is a strong, active community over there and we’re trying to support them also. So yeah, it’s really… If you have any ideas or initiatives come to us, we always like to discuss. We will be very quick to say yes or no.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I really like your focus on local WordPress, because I think a lot of people in the WordPress community think about WordCamps and they think about WordCamp US and WordCamp Europe, but there are so many local WordPress meetups and just WordPress on a somewhat smaller scale that’s no worse than the larger scale. And in a lot of cases, more intimate, you can have more conversations with fewer people, and these local meetups are great. Like our DC meetups has been awesome over the years. So, yeah. All that sounds cool man. Let’s wrap up. Discount code. Folks want to try out WeGlot premium. Can they use a little discount code?
Augustin Prot:
Sure. You can. First, you can try WeGlot without paying anything, just creating an account. And then if you’re convinced you can use a 20% lifetime discount code, which is WPBUFF20, I repeat WPBUFF20.
Joe Howard:
Nice. WPBUFF20 if people want to check out the premium version. Like Augustin has talked about on this podcast, they do support for free users as well. And they love their free users and want to continue to support them. So yeah, try it. And then when you’re ready to upgrade, feel free to use that discount code. Cool. I also like to give people your information, where can people go to find you online? WeGlot, social media, all that.
Augustin Prot:
Yeah. You can find us on our website, www.weglot.com, it’s available in French, English, Spanish, Japanese, other languages coming. You can also find us on the official WordPress directory. We have a plug-in page. We have a YouTube channel. We have a Twitter and LinkedIn, you can find us. Yeah. And if you have any question you can just send an email to contact@weglot.com or support@weglot.com.
Joe Howard:
Awesome. Last thing I like to ask our guests for is to ask our listeners for a little iTunes review for this show. So if you wouldn’t mind asking folks for a little review, I’d appreciate it.
Augustin Prot:
Oh, yes. So I’m asking a review for you on the podcast?
Joe Howard:
Yes, you are.
Augustin Prot:
Just to be sure I understand [crosstalk 00:43:11]. So yeah, we all know reviews are key. I mean, I know that I’m chasing one star reviews and turn them into five. So don’t put a one, put directly a five, it’s easier. Yeah. Rate this podcast is great, I love it.
Joe Howard:
Right on, man. Thank you. And if you leave a review, make sure you leave Augustin’s name in the comments or something you learned from this episode, that way we can get feedback and know what episodes you really liked. And then we can also shoot it to Augustin and say, “Hey, thanks for the review. Appreciate it.” If you are a new listener to the WPMRR WordPress podcasts, we’ve got a bunch of old episodes, especially during this time where we’re all working remotely, and we’re all home looking for new things to do. Don’t go binge Netflix or Hulu or HBO Max or Disney Plus or whatever. Go binge some old episodes of the WPMRR WordPress podcasts, we’ve got a hundred plus episodes in the bank on whatever topic you need to listen about. So, go check out some of those. If you have questions for us at the show, feel free to ping us with those. So we can then do more live Q&A episodes, just yo@wpmrr.com Y-O-@wpmrr.com. And yeah, well Christy and I will do some more Q&A episodes. Those are always a fun time.
Joe Howard:
wpmrr.com. If you want to check out a virtual summit all about helping your WordPress business do better around monthly recurring revenue and subscription pricing and all that stuff. Come check out the WPMRR Summit. It’s this September, and it’s going to be awesome. All the details are right on the website, wpmrr.com. We will be back in your podcast players again next Tuesday. Augustin, thanks again for being on man, it’s been real.
Augustin Prot:
Thanks so much.
Augustin Prot:
(singing)
Podcasting is more than just talking into a microphone, what happens after you finish recording?
Today on the WPMRR podcast, Joe and Christie talk about running a podcast, how they record, and the technicalities of producing an episode.
Listen now to get ideas on creating your own podcast!
Joe Howard:
What’s most important is you’re having fun doing the podcast, and yeah, maybe you want to grow and get more listeners, but it has to be your way. You’ve got to do it your way, and this is our way. Hey, hey. Welcome to the WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Joe.
Christie Chirinos:
And I’m Christie.
Joe Howard:
And you’re listening to the WordPress Business Podcast. Christie, what’s going on?
Christie Chirinos:
Whoa, that countdown was crazy.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, it was. That was nice. That was pretty slick, huh?
Christie Chirinos:
Whoa. We are using a whole new different tool for podcasting, and it is fancy, and it had a fancy countdown. But we’ll get there. Things that are going on in my life, oh, my gosh. Well, after six interesting weeks of cohabitating with other people. For my emotional wellbeing, I am on my own again. On my own again in Austin, Texas, and it is pretty awesome I have to say. Someday in my life I will start a family and I will love every second of it, and I will love my future husband and my children having them run around and having it smell like food all the time, some of the things that I remember about living with a family.
But I’ve got to tell you that there is something magical about living in your own space and running around in your underwear, and leaving the door open when you go to the bathroom.
Joe Howard:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Those are the important things, the most important things.
Christie Chirinos:
These are the important things. And I missed it, and I have a new sense of perspective for feeling grateful for the right to eat cheese straight out of the fridge while I was Indian Matchmaker on Netflix.
Joe Howard:
Oh, yes.
Christie Chirinos:
So there’s that. But yeah, other than that, I got this new microphone. I’m kind of excited about it. I had mentioned to you-
Joe Howard:
Audio mic?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, new audio mic, and new condenser mic for my voice. I had mentioned to you that with my new apartment here in Texas, in Austin, Texas, it’s a lot bigger than my old place is. Texas has a lot more land. Joe, you’re in DC, you know, and I think listeners know that for the most part I’ve lived in cities sort of in the US East Coast that are much more bunched together. So this is a big adjustment for me. But one of the interesting things is that apartments are just kind of bigger in Texas, and definitely bigger than the very small, characteristically and famously small apartments in New York City.
Joe Howard:
Oh, yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. And in DC they’re still pretty small. So, I have all this extra room, and one of the things that I decided to do was create a little closet recording booth that’s popular strategy among podcasters and other people who like sound. And so I did that, and I got a new mic, so I’m kind of excited about it, and about standing up that project. That’s a whole new thing to me that appeals to all the things I like, like music and podcasting and shopping for new electronics.
Joe Howard:
Oh, new fancy things.
Christie Chirinos:
All the things that bring me joy. So yeah, so I’m pretty pumped about that. Also, I want everybody to know that today is July 23rd, and we are recording this podcast and a new Taylor Swift albums’s coming out. Exciting.
Joe Howard:
Oh, wow. I’m not in that world at all. I don’t know anything about when any album drops or anything like that. But I’m glad now I know. Now I can tweet.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m embarrassed. Yeah, I’m embarrassed to admit that I am a passionate Swiftie.
Joe Howard:
All right.
Christie Chirinos:
How about you? How are you?
Joe Howard:
I’m good. It was funny what you said about being in the closet and recording. We are pretty good friends with someone who works at NPR, who’s one of their main podcast people. I don’t know if I’d say main, but she’s on air a good amount of the time.
Christie Chirinos:
Wait, who?
Joe Howard:
I don’t know if she’d want me to say [crosstalk 00:04:39].
Christie Chirinos:
Oh, you can’t namedrop on our podcast. Understood.
Joe Howard:
I don’t know. I’d want to ask her.
Christie Chirinos:
I’ll pull her up later.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, we’ll talk about it offline. But she records in her closet. She shot us a video once of her just getting into her closet, like, “Going to record this NPR intro.” Oh, that’s kind of cool. Okay, I guess if the professionals can do it, then we can do it too, so I totally dig it. I think that’s a good strategy. Yeah, what’s new with me? Stuff going on. I don’t know, usually my updates are just the new stuff we’re doing. And yeah, we have recently hired a new head of growth, which is exciting. That announcement will come, I don’t know, probably in the next month or so when he gets started and gets rocking and rolling on things. So that’s a new thing that I’m preparing for. I’ve haven’t really onboarded someone in the marketing position in a little while, so I got to go back through how we do onboarding and figure out how to do that again in the new style. So that’s a big project on my plate.
The YouTube channel I started, so this will also be live on YouTube, people want to go check it out. But also, obviously we’re just doing the traditional podcast publishing as well. But yeah, YouTube channel with some tutorials, so Allie is work a lot on that, and I’m… If I said I was working with her on it, that would be giving myself too much credit. She’s pretty much knee deep in everything and running with it and doing a great job, and I’m just adding thumb up emojis in Slack, like, “That’s good. Keep going.” So, that’s the extent [crosstalk 00:06:17].
Christie Chirinos:
Looks great.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, so she’s doing a great job there. We’ve got a couple tutorials up. Plan to do one to two videos every week, so that’s cool. And then obviously WPMRR Virtual Summit, woo, that’s like a…
Christie Chirinos:
Woo woo.
Joe Howard:
It’s a big thing, but it’s actually not been a terrible amount of work so far. Brian Richard’s obviously helping out with it, so we’re in Slack daily just talking about different stuff and working on things. Yeah, it’s going to be super awesome. So people will have heard that in the little intro to this episode, but that’s a big thing that’s coming down the pipeline. And yeah, Christie, you’re going to be speaking. That’s the first speaker announcement, Christie’s speaking, but I think we have 11 confirmed speakers right now. We’ll probably end up with 15 or so at the end of it all, so we’re moving forward on things, and people will obviously hear about folks when they get announced and stuff. So yeah, that’s what’s up with me. That’s what I’m working on.
Christie Chirinos:
That is super exciting. I saw the announcement go live for the summit, and I thought it got a really good reception. I was really excited.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, me too. It’s always so funny when you launch something, I’m not big on launches or anything. Honestly, I kind of like more of a soft launch and putting it out there and tweeting about it, and putting it out in the world, but I don’t have this big launch plan. It’s pretty much just five-step bullet point, like “Tweet it out. Share it with some people in Slack. Maybe have some people I know share it around.” It’s not a huge thing. Share it with our email list. But I’m always pleasantly surprised that there are always a few people… I always feel like I have a few cheerleaders on my side who are like, “Yeah, retreat. Hell, yeah. Let’s share this.” It’s like, this feels good, you know? It’s nice to have people on your side in that stuff. I don’t know, I guess I’m not surprised that they do it, but I’m always a little bit surprised. Oh, maybe they really like me.
Christie Chirinos:
People care what I’m doing. Yeah, I know what you mean.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that’s gone live. Actually, I should say this to all WPMRR course members, people who have bought the course before. When people bought the course… So, WPMRR used to be this video course to teach people how to implement and sell care plans. It kind of got outdated after like two years. It wasn’t bad, but it was just a little bit outdated. We changed a lot of stuff we did in two years, and so I needed to update it. And I was like, “I’d rather do this summit thing,” so I actually just switched everything from a course to a summit kind of quickly.
People who bought the course originally had lifetime access. They bought lifetime access. So I moved the whole site over to the new summit page, but in the footer of the website, you can scroll down and click ‘login’ and still use your old login information to log into wpmrr.com and take the course and continue the course. It’s all still there so people who have signed up before still have lifetime access. I actually haven’t emailed anybody in the course telling them about this yet. I totally dropped the ball on that because I was basically with launch stuff.
So, sorry everyone who didn’t get an email all of a sudden got a new page come up one day. But I will send an email soon, I promise. And people can definitely scroll to the bottom. It’s all still there, you have full access to the whole course even though it’s a little bit outdated, so wanted to throw that out there.
Christie Chirinos:
I actually think that’s really cool because then you have all those folks that were in there getting new content through the summit. I definitely appreciate it when companies mind my login experience. It’s like one of my small little pet peeves. I want to be able to log in with the stuff I created. That drives me crazy.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I lose at the slightest inconvenience, and there’s definitely an inconvenience of different portals and things like that, that kind of always gets under my skin, so I really like that.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
I mean, the announcement comes when the announcement comes.
Joe Howard:
Totally. I agree with that. Cool. Okay. Intro, done. Let’s get into the meat of the episode. I mean, it’s kind of [crosstalk 00:10:26].
Christie Chirinos:
[crosstalk 00:10:26] tease it a little bit, right? I was like… [crosstalk 00:10:31] cool little transition. Oh, wow, look at that countdown. I was dropping hints, hints, hints.
Joe Howard:
Oh, yeah, that’s what we do is we get people excited and then we totally tangent off into crazy intros and then come back 10 minutes later to actually talk about the episode, which is perfect. It keeps our engagement high. So yeah, podcast, my mom will continue to listen. Don’t worry, she’ll listen.
Christie Chirinos:
My mom doesn’t listen to any of this, or anything else I do.
Joe Howard:
The episode today is Breaking the Fourth Wall Podcasting episode. I did an episode recently, it was about podcasting with Joe Casabona, obviously he’s one of the podcast kings in the WordPress space. He was a great person to talk to about building and growing a podcast. I think this is going to be an awesome follow-up episode to talk to people about how we run our podcast, like all the aspects of it, and that’ll give people an idea. I think it’s good to get a way in so you can really see what’s happening, so it’s not like a mystery. Because I feel like from the outside everything always looks good, like oh, the podcast is great. It sounds good, it looks good on YouTube. We honestly don’t do a ton of crazy stuff in the backend except Bradley, our brilliant editor who does a bunch of that stuff I don’t know how to do, which we’ll talk about in the episode.
But, yeah, I think this’ll be a good episode to start. So, we wanted to start… Christie, you want to tell the quick story about just how it got started so people just have a little bit of background? We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but one minute just to remind people.
Christie Chirinos:
We’ve told you all these funny story before, but I will recap the story of how Joe sent me this beautiful heartfelt email, about how he was starting the WPMRR, would love for me to be his cohost, and I ignored it. The moral of the story is literally never email me. Call me, text me, send me a Twitter DM, Slack me, I’m so available on the internet, but apparently when I see an email… I think what it was, was I thought that it was a mass mailing. I quickly scanned it and I was probably busy or out of it or whatever, but yeah, I was just like, “Oh, I’ll get to this later.” And he emailed me later again and said, “Hey, I sent you this email.” And then I went back and was like, “Oh, crap. I really messed this up.” So that is the story of why follow-up emails are super important. And that’s how we got started.
But I mean, I think… And I said yes, and the rest is history. But I am also kind of curious about the topic for the podcast, because we’re kind of breaking the fourth wall, and I think that sometimes people say, “Oh, should I have a podcast?” And then the next question is, “What should my podcast be about?” Now sometimes the topic comes to you first and you’re like, “Well, how do I set you this podcast?” But I’m curious about your thoughts on that.
Joe Howard:
Yes, totally. Before we do that, I want to touch back on personalization of email a little bit because I actually sent out speaker emails for folks for the WPMRR summit, and it was kind of like a copy and paste email, except I adjusted obviously names and stuff, and I adjusted what I want that person to speak about, like, “I think you’d be a great person to speak about…” X, Y, or Z. “You’re a designer, you should talk about scaling design for an MRR business.” So it was personal, but Allie actually gave me some feedback that it felt like a copy/paste email, which it probably makes sense, because a lot of it was a copy and paste email. So I think that I actually have a little work to do on making sure I personalize messages for certain people, obviously from the email you got and from the emails maybe Allie gave me feedback on.
I think an easy way to do that is a Loom video. So if you insert, “Hey, watch this video,” and it’s a video shot specifically for that person… Loom’s this tool you shoot videos, you can insert the links in email, shoot them the link to watch a one-minute video just explaining things. That would have been a cool way to personalize things to make sure people know this email was made for you. So I don’t know, just throwing it out there as I’m thinking about things.
But, topics. Topic selection. How do we choose topics here at WPMRR Podcast? We’re not great at it. This one of the things that we just kind of do. Okay, so fully transparency, right. Today, we started this podcast, we logged in to this room and we said, “Okay, what are we talking about today?” We don’t have a VDA who’s searching for ideas, bits. We don’t spend hours behind the scenes thinking about podcast topics. We kind of log in and say, “Hey, what do we feel like talking about today?” Which I think has some advantages, because a lot of what we talk about is top-of-mind. We try to log in every week to do a podcast. Okay, what were we thinking about this week? What were the challenges? What kept me up at night? What do we want to talk about? And that kind of leads to our ability to talk about things that 1) we’re passionate about, and 2) are just right there in front of us that I think probably makes sense to talk about, because if it challenges for us, maybe it challenges for other people.
But we don’t have a ton of organization in the ideating behind podcast ideas. So not every episode is totally built out and structured in a way that might make it, I don’t know, easier for people to absorb information. We usually spend 10 minutes. We’re looking at a Google Doc right now together, shared Google Doc that just has a bunch of notes about all the stuff we want to talk about, that we just created right before the episode. So we choose right before we record, we write down, I don’t know, what is this, like 200 words? Something like that. Pretty short little bullet points, like 10 bullet points about stuff that we want to talk about.
And then we just kind of go. So that’s our strategy behind that. Christie, I don’t know what your feelings are on that. Do you feel good about how we choose episodes? Are you like, “Could we do more?” I don’t know.
Christie Chirinos:
I feel great about that, and I felt great about that over the 100-plus episodes that we’ve done now. But I mean, I think that goes back to what I was saying. WPMRR is an example of that first category of podcast where we were like, “We want to have a podcast about this general topic. Now what are we going to talk about?” As opposed to maybe podcasts that come with the topic first, and then you set up the other structures around it, and so that’s how we do it. And we’ve been doing it for a while now and it’s working, and people seem to like it. So turns out, that it’s totally okay.
I think that that process has actually taught me a lot about not over-planning, because how many things do we over-plan and then it takes us forever to get them out there. One of the things that I’m working on right now at this moment in time for look at web Nexcess is a handful of blog posts, and I’m having to get over my own perfectionism and just riff and speak and speak and speak about the things that are already living in my brain. And I have this impulse to outline and find links and sources and statistics and things like that, and you don’t always have to present information like that.
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
I think that’s a really great thing to get out there.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I always said that about the difference between blogging and doing podcast. I feel like when I blog or I write an article, like I wrote this big long, detailed article about the WP Buffs rebrand. It was a great article. It had all the links, had all the details. It was great to give people information about that whole process and an in depth look into that, and resources to if people wanted to try and do that themselves. But that is what a blog post is for. It’s prepared. You can wait. You can present your information and edit it for hours before you publish it and really make it perfect.
To me, podcasting is this medium of… Of course, everyone does it in a different way, and there’s a lot of different ways to be successful with it. Some people do it the same as blog posting. They want to make it perfect. It’s totally produced and totally one thing after the other after the other, all thought out beforehand. And it works well, and it presents people information well, and that’s great. I always gain a lot of information… I like the informality of just hearing people talk and hearing people’s ideas on things. Almost not prepared, because I think that adds a different kind of value because if I prepare everything I’m going to say, everything like a blog post, everything I’m going to write, sometimes that actually gives me too much time to think about things. Sometimes it’s more valuable to hear what people really think. Well, ask me a question. Okay, I guess I’ll answer right now. I didn’t think about it before.
The informality, I think, of the podcast actually, I think, to me adds a value that people can really 1) get to know us, and 2) really get to know what we think because a lot of these things were not preparing a lot beforehand, like what do we think about this? We just take it, choose a topic, riff on it for a little bit, and I think that has a different kind of value, which is why I like… Yeah, blog posts are good for one thing. Podcasting, I think, good for another. But again, I don’t think that’s the one way to do it. We’re not saying that. Of course some people have super polished shows that are very regimented and disciplined about things, and that has value too.
Maybe we’ll do some of that in the future, but for right now I think we like our style of… It is, it’s our style of just kind of like… It’s where we add value. We talk about things, we ideate. We think about things a little bit off the cuff, and I think that’s hopefully helpful to people. We’ve had a few listeners along the way, and I think it’s always easy to think how can we make it better, how can we get more listeners, how can we do more… Everyone could do that. Everyone could always optimize and do better things, but what’s most important is you’re having fun doing the podcast, and yeah, maybe you want to grow and get more listeners, but it has to be your way. You’ve got to do it your way. And this is our way. So, yeah, does that make sense?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, yeah. I love that, and I think it’s important to get it out there maybe for the perfectionists in the room. You can totally do a podcast this way, and it works.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Agreed.
Christie Chirinos:
How we record the podcast. Well, today, we’re doing something new.
Joe Howard:
Oh, my God, perfect time to talk about this.
Christie Chirinos:
What? Yes.
Joe Howard:
Okay. So quick story [inaudible 00:21:28] today. So, we’re using this tool called riverside.fm. It is a tool that… So, how we used do the episode, and what I used to require all our guests to do was we’d set up in Zoom. We’d record in Zoom, but the audio and video in Zoom is compressed, so it’s not the highest quality. We’d use video from Zoom, but we’d also use audio from Zoom. But the audio from Zoom was the backup. We’d also record individual audios, so I’d open QuickTime, you’d open QuickTime. We’d record our own audios, drop that into a Google Drive folder when we’re done here. So it’s kind of like a lot of work I’d also require guests to do that, so it was kind of… I don’t know, it’s fine. If someone asked me to do that, I wouldn’t have any issue with it, but it’s not super professional. It’s more of a pain in the butt than it’s not a pain in the butt. So, I think that that’s why we’re trying to use this new tool, riverside.fm.
So, Bradley suggested we use this tool. He’s actually been suggesting we use a tool like this for like a year, and I just haven’t gotten around to it. So, Bradley, I apologize and I’m slow at these things, but we’re doing it now, so you can’t be mad at me anymore.
Christie Chirinos:
Bradley, I had no idea. I fully blame Joe.
Joe Howard:
Christie was not part of this scheme I had to not use a tool like this. But this is, I think, a lot better. So riverside.fm, what you do is you have access to your own room. We’re doing video here in riverside.fm. It records HD video and HD audio on both ends, individual audio, so it’s recording my individual audio right now, and Christie’s individual audio, my video and your video, and it just saves the file right within the tool. So I can just give this to Bradley and he has everything recorded. We don’t have to drop folders or do anything like that. That’s one thing that’s really cool about it.
You can also record live, so you can hook it into Facebook or YouTube or whatever other tools, Twitter, I think, and you can do a live recording, which is cool. We’re not doing that right now. Maybe at some point we’ll do some live stuff, but I thought this was a cool tool to be able to do that, so you know, maybe we’ll start thinking about doing more live events. You can do that, and also it has a call-in option. So we could have some fun, Christie, and do a radio episode or… yeah, like a radio episode with people calling in to do FAQ and stuff. That could be a cool opportunity. I don’t know, I thought it was cool, so I was like, “Oh, this tool is awesome.”
How did I get started with it? They have a free trial here, and Bradley emailed me, I started the free trial. I jumped in, I started working on stuff. It was a little live chat thing in the bottom corner. I was like, “Hey, how do I do X, Y, and Z?” Someone was like, “Oh, whatever. Here’s how you do it.” And I was like, “Oh, thanks.” And I had a few more questions that were a little bit more intricate and he was like, “Hey, you have time to hop on a video call?” I hop on a video call with the guy. Turns out it’s the founder. He’s the guy on the video on the home page. I was like, “You look familiar. That’s cool.” He walked me through some stuff. I said, “Dude, this is a cool tool.” I skipped my free trial and I went straight to being a paid customer because I thought that was so awesome that he did that. So yeah, we pay like 50 bucks a month for this, but I think we’ll also use it for all sorts of other…
We could do happy hours or Allie’s our new community person, so I’m trying to give her more resources to do community stuff. I think that would be a cool… yeah, opportunities there. So, anyway, riverside.fm is the tool we use now. But we didn’t, literally until, what is this going to be, like 104 or something? We just did Zoom recordings and QuickTime recordings. It was not a crazy, special thing to record. But now we’ve stepped up a little bit and this, I think, makes things easier, so I don’t know, Christie, were you ever frustrated by having to, “Oh, I got to drop another thing,” or whatever, file here, file there?
Christie Chirinos:
Not at all. Not at all. I actually think it’s valuable to outline how we were doing things before today because it’s so much more approachable because it was all tools that people already have right now. All we would do is get on a Zoom and Joe would record a Zoom, and then we would record our individual audio. uSync with time audio on our Macs, and bam, that was it. And then we would upload the QuickTime audio files to Google Drive so that we would have them all in one place. And then Bradley, the true MVP of this podcast, would edit them into episodes.
Joe Howard:
Yup, totally. One issue that we were having with Google Drive is we keep all our old episodes in Google Drive, like the hard copies, which is great to have them all there. But Google, I think, has this… They don’t know who owns what, so I own all the Google Drive things and I share them folders, and I share them with Christie. I pay for Google Drive storage, so I think I pay like 10 bucks a month for like a terabyte of storage. So I’ve got enough storage. We’re not running out anytime soon.
But, Christie sometimes, I try to drop her files in Drive, and yeah, Google would tell you, “Oh, sorry, you don’t have enough space.” And I’m like, “No, this is my folder. Why does she need space?” And so we did run into that issue a little bit, so hopefully we don’t have to worry about that anymore, so solving the little challenges like this is always good.
Christie Chirinos:
That is actually a really good point about riverside.fm, because I ended up just paying for Google Drive. Remember that? It was like one day I could just upload and he was like, “Fine. Here’s my money.”
Joe Howard:
I was like, “Christie, I’ll just pay for your thing just to not have to deal with this.”
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, you were like, “I will Venmo you $20. I will Venmo you a dollar a month.”
Joe Howard:
Totally. Okay, okay, so that’s how we record. So right now we use riverside.fm. It’s a cool tool. They have a free trial so if you can go and definitely check it out. The founder’s an awesome dude. Yeah, I’m pretty impressed with it so far. So, okay, tools.
Christie Chirinos:
Gear.
Joe Howard:
This is the gear topic where everyone’s got different gear and we’re not saying our gear’s the best. I’m totally not an audiofile, so I bought what someone told me to buy, and I just use it. Maybe Christie knows more. Do you know more Christie? I don’t know.
Christie Chirinos:
Totally not.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. These are the gear we use. I have some idea of start gear versus intermediate/advanced gear. But honestly, you’re going to talk to 10 different podcasters who have 10 different gear sets. In Joe Casabona’s episode, he actually talked about he has a page where he has all his gear. I would definitely trust him and his selections as well. And we actually use some of the same stuff as he does, probably because I asked him like, “Joe, what are you using?” He told me, and we bought those things. So, but regardless, we’ll talk about the stuff we use. So Christie, you want to go first? Tell us about your microphone and your headphones, and I don’t know, anything else that… video camera, whatever.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, I mean, I’m also not an audiofile. If anything, I have strong feelings about not obsessing over gear too much, right?
Joe Howard:
I totally agree.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, especially when you listen to interviews with musicians and things like that, and some of the most amazing musicians in the world are just kind of like, “Whatever. Make things with what you have available to you and the rest will follow.” And I’m definitely a big student of that kind of mindset. I find that trying to get all the perfect gear in place and collecting gear should come after the creation process, just because as you create, you discover the things you wish you had, and then you have a more targeted gear collection process.
I actually really enjoy the process of shopping for technology and gear and things like that. It’s something that makes me happy because it sort of incorporates all the things I like. It’s like kind of geeky and the second-hand marketing is really good and fun, so sourcing things is kind of interesting. It’s the same things of what I like.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, and that’s a really good reason to want to get more gear is you enjoy the process of it. That’s probably a better reason then like, “I have to get the best gear or the ideal gear.” Do it because you like it.
Christie Chirinos:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), exactly. Than dropping a bunch of money on a pack or something. I don’t know. But, yeah, I mean, my setup is super simple. I have this Blue Yeti mic that I have been using for this podcast for a while that I like to use for just overall video recordings. I just got a vocal condenser mic, a Shure SM7B that I’m really pumped about, and the audio interface for just a single plug, like Focusrite Solo. So that’s hooked up to my Mac.
Joe Howard:
Do you know anything about the condenser, like the audio condenser and what that does? I actually have no idea. I know it sounds cool. It sounds like it’s good, but I don’t really know what condenser means.
Christie Chirinos:
So, what I know about the condenser effect is very, very limited. I know that it is an effect that… yeah, makes it sound good by removing the frequencies that you don’t need. I guess vocal registers don’t need the lower frequencies.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
And some of the very, very, very high ones, so when you take out all that unheard noise, the things that you can hear sound a lot better. And that is, dear God, if there are any audio engineers, they’ll just cringe at that explanation. Send me an email.
Joe Howard:
[crosstalk 00:31:27] roll with that, actually.
Christie Chirinos:
Disgusting. Like yes, send me an email. I don’t know, you know, I won’t read it. And yeah, so I got that. I’m excited about it because of yeah, the project that I was talking about with my little booth in the closet that I’m sitting on now that I have this little bit of extra square footage to do all kinds of recording, including WPMRR and all the other types of recording that I do. I record a lot of videos. I’m in a lot of videos calls. I would like to record some of the songs I’ve written that I only play for people on my guitar and piano. So, lots of little audio projects, it seemed like a reasonable investment. I just got it. I have the closet for it, so I’m pretty pumped.
Web cam-wise, right now, I’m just using my MacBook Pro web cam, hi. But I do have [inaudible 00:32:15] 20 sitting around that I have actually on a tripod to get maximum webcamming experience. That sounded a little PG-13. And then, my Mac, of course, my iMac has one of the FaceTime HD cameras on it, so I use that in the closet. And yeah, but you know, I am super chill on gear. I’m all about making something with what I have and investing in gear as I find that I need it.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally. I think starting off with basic gear’s really important. And as you do more episodes, you can give yourself a treat, like that’s a cool idea. After you’ve done 25 episodes, ah, you’ve earned the ability to upgrade this piece of gear. Doesn’t mean that you have to have a huge audience, 25 episodes that your show has to have grown enormously. It’s just like you did that, and that’s cool, and I think to me, that’s a good opportunity to want to buy more gear.
So I started off with a Blue Yeti as well, which is the microphone you’re still using. I upgraded randomly because I went and did BeachPress, what was that, two years ago? And I wanted to record some episodes there, so I bought a mobile microphone, a microphone I could use mobiley and just hook into my computer, which is what I’m using right now. It’s an Audio-Technica ATR2100 USB mic. It’s a great mobile microphone, and I told our editor, Bradley, I was using it, and he said, “Oh, just use it all the time.” And I said, “Okay,” so here it is, still using it.
But this is a good mobile microphone as well, so if you’re always recording your podcast episode in one place, maybe you don’t need a mobile mic. But I do some traveling. Well, I did before COVID-19, but I hope to do more in the future, and so I like to have a mic that I can grab, put in my bag and roll with, which you can do with your microphone as well. This one is just, it’s literally a microphone you can hold in your hand, like it’s built for that.
Video Logitech BRIO Ultra HD Pro Webcam. Again, it’s one someone told me to buy, so I bought it. It sits on top of my big monitor here, and yeah, it’s pretty HD-quality. It’s probably not the best quality. Yeah, this microphone, I think, is 150 bucks or something, and the video camera’s like 200 bucks, so it’s mid-tier gear. It’s definitely not starter gear, but it’s also probably not the top of the line gear as well. People have recently been putting out the ‘gear I use’ stuff. I know Chris did one, Chris Lemma put out “the gear I use at home.’ Matt Alweg did one as well. Matt’s was hilarious because it was like, “Here are the earphones I use because they’re cool.” They’re like $10,000 ear phones. Okay, I’m probably not buying those today. Chris’s gear was also pretty expensive, but that was kind of the point. It was for, I don’t know, people who are on video a lot, and it’s really important to look professional there. His camera was thousands of dollars. I’m probably not going to do that right now.
But, I also just bought one of those lights that helps your lighting, because I’m doing the summit, and so I’m like, I don’t know, this light, it’s not bad. You can still see me, but I’m slowly trying to get a few more professional things. I don’t actually remember the brand of the light I bought. I bought like a $50 ring stand thing on Amazon, and so it’s nothing crazy, special, or expensive. But maybe just adjust my lighting a little bit and see if I can get that a little better. So, yeah, that’s the stuff I use.
Christie Chirinos:
Chris’s camera is really nice. I look at it almost every single day. It’s good video. But, I think what’s important to outline about those two examples is that those people built up to that, right? They didn’t start yesterday. They didn’t start with that setup. They built up to it. I can actually tell you that I know that eventually Chris hired a video consultant for the setup. So that’s also an option. At some point you don’t have to be an expert or everything.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
But I think it’s just so, so important to drill home that gear should not be the thing that stops you from creating and putting your ideas and content out there. Right now I am literally sitting here in a MacBook Pro webcam and a Blue Yeti. This is like $100 microphone. And we’re doing this podcast, and it’s going to come out fine.
Joe Howard:
And it sounds good. It sounds very good.
Christie Chirinos:
It sounds fine, exactly. I have some other gear hanging out in the closet waiting to get set up. It’s a little bit of, like you said, not the starter gear, the medium gear. But it’s 9:00 a.m. and I’m sitting in my kitchen drinking my coffee and podcasting with Joe and my Blue Yeti, and I feel great.
Joe Howard:
Totally. And a little more background about the podcast, it probably will drive a few registrants to the conference. We get a few people coming over to WP Buffs who are potential white label partners, so it drives a little bit of revenue to the business. I’m sure a few people go to Liquid Web and go check out, and Nexcess and go check out hosting there because they listened to the podcast or click-linked on wpmrr.com. But I don’t know how much… I don’t think this podcast breaks even. We pay hundreds of dollars a month for Bradley to manage the whole podcast stuff for us, to do post-production, so it’s not quite $1,000 a month, but actually it probably will be $1,000 plus a month. I’m having him help out with our YouTube stuff moving forward, so it’ll probably be like not thousands of dollars a month for Bradley, but more than $1,000 a month. So that’s probably just something people should know.
This podcast is not super profitable. We don’t make $50,000 in ad sponsor perhaps. It’s not that kind of podcast. But, you know, and so we don’t feel like we need top of the line gear to do everything, but it’s one of those ‘nice to haves’ as you do more, and it becomes part of your life. We try to record this every week. It’s nice to have some things that are… even like level two things. And so, yeah, as we’re talking about the podcast, I just thought it would be good to be transparent about the podcast and really, that’s the biggest cost.
Obviously we pay like $50 a month now for riverside.fm, which is funded by WP Buffs, no problem. But yeah, I mean, it’s not cheap to run the podcast, and have Bradley do everything, which we’ll talk about here in a second. But, yeah, to me, it’s worth it because I get to talk with you every week, and we get to talk about awesome stuff.
Christie Chirinos:
Yay.
Joe Howard:
It honestly helps me as a business owner hearing stuff that you have to say and question my own thoughts, and like, “Oh, I said this one thing two episodes ago. Am I sure I feel like that?” That helps me a lot. Hopefully it helps you too. Cool, okay. Next topic kind of transitions from that, it’s how we edit and publish episodes. I don’t know, magic. Happens magically. We drop the episodes, now they’ll be in riverside.fm. They used to be in Google Drive. Bradley and his team pick them up, and one upcoming Tuesday they come out on all the podcast players, Spotify, Google, whatever play. I don’t know them all. Apple.
Christie Chirinos:
Like I said, Bradley is the true MVP of this podcast.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, totally.
Christie Chirinos:
We are just the pretty faces.
Joe Howard:
Yes, we are. And Bradley, I’m going to find your website here in a second, so I can give you a shout out. But we’ll include it in show notes as well just to make sure. Record, edit. Oh, I have it, hold on. Record, edit something. Recordeditpodcast.com. Bradley Denham. That’s it. I’ll say it again because I’ll make sure I get it right: recordeditpodcast.com. He’s the editor of our podcast. He actually edits a ton of high profile podcasts. He’s really good at what he does, so that’s why our podcast ends up sounding so good. Audio engineering’s great. And he manages the whole process. We give him files, he publishes it, and it sounds awesome.
Again, like I mentioned before, it’s not the cheapest option. You could definitely someone on Fiverr or Upwork to do it for a fraction of the cost. But at this point, it’s hit the easy button because that’s not stuff I want to do. It’s not stuff I know how to do. It needs, to me, at least be really good quality. That’s just how I want to do things.
Now that we’re 100-plus episodes, okay, we should have a well-recorded podcast. At this point I feel like we need that. So yeah, totally worth it to me though. I never think twice about paying him every month. I’m like, “Yup, four podcast episodes came out this month. They were all awesome. Keep going.” But yeah, that’s how we do things honestly. There are times to save money and to start off small, and when you’re starting, maybe you do want to do that. But at this point for us, and definitely for me, I’d much rather pay someone to do all that process for us who’s better at it and knows the whole process and has it all systemized, and has our podcast coming out sounding good. So yeah, I don’t know what else to say about that.
Christie Chirinos:
Totally. No, I completely agree on all of that.
Joe Howard:
Cool. One new thing we’re doing, again, this is kind of pushed to YouTube. I know a lot of podcast folks do YouTube as well, so we’re definitely not first to this. It just happens to be something new that we’re doing. But we have this video, it’s like we should do something with it. And I know some people listen to the podcast when they’re taking their dog for a walk or when they’re driving, so obviously video’s not good for them, but a lot of people will have YouTube on as a second browser or while they’re doing work on their computer. So I think it’s good to publish podcasts there. It takes a little bit of extra work, but I think it’s worth it to have that extra medium out there. So YouTube is something we’re starting. We’ll do video here. So that will be a cool part of what we do as well.
But again, not something you have to start off with. Start off with just the audio, and you can move to video when you want to. Our first podcast episode that went on video was like episode 102 or something. Kind of random, right, but it’s like, “Hey, whatever.” You got to start somewhere and don’t feel like everything has to be perfect right away. Hey, it took us over 100 episodes to start doing YouTube stuff, and that’s fine.
Christie Chirinos:
Right.
Joe Howard:
In 50 episodes no one will remember. Everyone will just say, “Yes, it’s on YouTube now.” And all you have to do is just start one day. So, yeah, cool, YouTube. How we grow and get listeners. Very interesting topic. We’re actually probably not very good at. We just record the podcast, and we’ve got some stuff I’ll talk about, but is there anything you do to put the show out there or just sit here and record.
Christie Chirinos:
No, no. We very much put it out there and just like, “I hope you like it.”
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
But I think that’s a factor of the fact that we think it’s fun first, right? And if other people think it’s fun to listen to, that’s a nice bonus, but I like doing it just for the sake of doing it. And I think that that’s a really important part is the process has to be fun for you. Don’t do something that’s like pulling teeth hoping that it’s going to get you certain lead number of results. It’s a nice perk, but there’s probably something out there that you can do that you genuinely enjoy doing, and can also lead you to new business and more subscribers.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, agreed. I think it’s important that you mentioned doing what you enjoy doing. And if you’re not a marketer or whatever, and you don’t want to sell your podcast and put it out there, the quality of content’s the most important part. You will get listeners over a longer period of time if you put out a good podcast and it just may take longer if you don’t do some more proactive stuff. But I have some stuff that I do that’s actually pretty basic. I don’t think it’s anything crazy, and honestly, it doesn’t feel like salesy or markety when I do it, so I kind of want to tell people some details about what I do after every podcast episode goes live.
So, for all episodes we just share them out on Twitter. We have a new Twitter handle wpmmrsummit, so right now we just changed the process. We’ll tweet it from there. I’ll retweet it or actually I had another process. Maybe I tweet it from my account, and WP Buffs retweets it and WPMRR retweets it. I don’t remember. But one tweets it, the other retweets, so it starts to get a little bit of momentum there.
Christie Chirinos:
I retweet it.
Joe Howard:
Hashtag [crosstalk 00:46:19]. Yeah, Christie retweets it, woo, three people. The #WordPress is important just to make sure it’s within the conversation of WordPress. I don’t know, that’s not going to get you 1,000 new listeners, but it’s just a good best practice to be part of the WordPress conversation on Twitter. What I do when I have a guest on the episode, I actually have a question that’s specifically talks about this. So people have to fill out some information to be a guest on the podcast. And one of the things I have here is we want to reach one of the questions and you have to check the boxes of things you’ll do. We want to reach more WordPressers and you can help. None of this is required, but these are things we ask of our podcast guests.
Can you help us promote your episode by sharing the episode on social media, mentioning the episode to your email list, add an episode to a ‘featured on’ area or any other relevant areas on your website. Sharing the episode with your online community, like Slack group, Facebook group, et cetera. And then I just added this like two days ago actually, which is embed YouTube videos somewhere on your website.
So, it allows people to just check boxes and say, “Self-select. Yeah, I don’t really have an email thing I send out, or I’m just not comfortable doing that.” Sure, don’t check that. After the episode I’ll always email everyone being like, “Woo, your episode went live. It’s awesome.” You mentioned wanting to do these things if you haven’t done them already. Do you still want to? And I don’t tell people they have to, I just kind of remind them the things they said. And that’s all. I don’t try to remind them again. I just ask once, and then… because they already said they’re doing it. So it allows people to self-select there.
So, I use [Camilee 00:48:01] for guest booking. It allows you to add custom questions, so that’s definitely one thing we do using the guests’ audience to help us put the podcast out there a little bit more. Helps get the episode out there a little bit more, but also helps get links back to wpmrr.com to different podcast episodes. That over the long-term will snowball into more listeners, more traffic, that kind of stuff.
The other thing I like to do, there are some sites where you can post new content. People have probably heard recently wpcontent.io is now managed wp.org has transitioned to wpcontent.io, it’s kind of the same site I think. Now it’s just managed by the Delicious Brains team. You can post content there, so I post every new episode there now and every new blog post and WP Buffs and YouTube videos. So that’s just a good place to post your content. I don’t think it drives us a ton of new visitors, but it’s worth it. What if asset grows and gets bigger? You want to start there, so I think there are a couple sites like that that you can do that kind of thing.
I think we submit it to WP newsletter, because they have a little submit area. It literally takes like five seconds to do, see if they want to include it in their newsletter. Sometimes I’ll ping friends. Maybe I know Corey a little bit. Maybe I’m like, “Hey, Corey, I thought this was a good episode. You want to listen to it?” And he’s like, “Whoa, it was a good episode. I’m going to include it in the post-status newsletter.” A lot of times I just ask if he wants to listen to it or whatever, and I have a few contacts like that. So networks also cool too, but again, I probably do like 10 minutes of whatever, marketing for the episode, and it’s those things. I don’t do anything else. That’s my shtick. Hopefully people can use some of those tips. Yeah, I don’t think I have anything else. That’s it.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s a lot more than I knew about actually… Look at all the [crosstalk 00:50:01]. Why just do nothing? Maybe it’s time for me to start pulling my weight. Let me think about something [crosstalk 00:50:12] about the products.
Joe Howard:
You carry the podcast in the podcast content. I just follow along. So if I can do a little bit more to help promote the podcast, that is totally fine. And again, it’s not a ton of work. It’s really just a few minutes of stuff I want to do afterwards. And sometimes other people do that stuff, but I like to do it sometimes because sometimes, I don’t know, it’s a nice personal touch I had a guest on, I emailed them instead of someone on my team who’s just like, “Hey, Joe says thanks.” I don’t know, that’s fine, but sometimes I like to do it too, so, yeah, cool. I learned something new today. We tried to put the podcast out a little bit into the world and there’s a thing of putting a great product together and not having anybody ever listen.
And you want to try to do something to put it out into the world. Do something. And again, we’re on 100-plus episodes. We don’t do a million things. We just do a few things and you know, eventually people are like, “That’s a podcast in the WordPress space.” That’s one of the main ones. And you’re like, “What? I just… [crosstalk 00:51:18].” Yeah, so a lot of it is just time too, I think, in terms of growing the podcast. It takes time. Don’t think you’re going to start a podcast and then three months later you’re going to blow up. Maybe you will if you already have a platform. I know a few people have launched podcasts and they became pretty popular pretty quickly. But it’s already because they had a big audience. They were already a big company in the WordPress space. It’s easy to launch something and have it blow up more like that if you already had an audience.
Oh, one other thing I will mention that was actually a bigger and longer-term project was if you do a Google search for ‘WordPress podcasts,’ we have an article on wpbuffs.com that actually ranks number one for that, very strategically, and guess what podcast was listed number one on that list? Oh, WPMRR Podcast. And we’re very clear, “This is our podcast.” But hey, you probably want to listen too. We have great episodes from X people or X companies, people at X companies. So when people search ‘WordPress podcasts,’ and want to find a podcast, it does get a good amount of searches every month. People will find that blog post and then find our podcast and then hopefully subscribe. So that’s something that very strategically we’ve used WP Buffs domain authority and SEO performance to try and help drive some stuff towards WPMRR as well. So that’s maybe not something everybody can do.
And no one should do that because we want to keep that number one spot. But hey, if you want to try and rank for it, that’s good. It’ll make us step up our game too, so yeah, that’s just one of those things that was a longer-term thing. But you know, I think probably drives some listeners and some growth towards WPMRR Podcast. So, woo. All right.
Christie Chirinos:
And last, but most certainly not least, how we improve. I mean, you improve by practicing.
Joe Howard:
Yes. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Christie Chirinos:
No.
Joe Howard:
You feel like over 100-plus episodes, just talking for 45 minutes to an hour times 100-plus episodes, do you feel like you’ve gotten better at being on the podcast?
Christie Chirinos:
I hope so. I think the listeners can tell me better than I can ever tell myself, but I would hope so. I think that I’ve gained confidence. I think that I have stopped speaking without aim or the ums, and ahs, and uh, but who knows? All you have to do is practice and keep putting things out there. Of course, I think it makes a lot of sense to have a sense for the things that you like and want to imitate. I find that people are often afraid of imitation. I embrace imitation. I think it’s the greatest form of flattery, and when I like something, I’m like, “How can I make something like this?” Because the reality is that it’s really hard to make something exactly like something else.
Joe Howard:
Totally.
Christie Chirinos:
You really have to either copy/paste, in which case… what? Or you have to actually try to copy something, and being inspired by something is actually an excellent strategy. So listen to other things that you like. Yeah, and I think of anything getting honest opinions is a really great way to improve. A lot of the time it’s really hard to get honest opinions, because you’ll ask people and nobody wants to be brutally honest.
Joe Howard:
It’s great show.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:55:06] awesome, awesome.
Joe Howard:
You’re perfect.
Christie Chirinos:
But I have found that when I explicitly communicate that I want critical feedback that I’ll get it. Yup, hey, I’m looking for your opinion on this, I would like to hear your critical feedback. I can take it. I want to be better, and I want to know what you didn’t like.
Joe Howard:
Won’t hurt my feelings.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, exactly. And of course you have to actually mean it. Don’t ask for the critical feedback and then immediately start defending yourself. Accept, nod, take note, and find what you can improve. And I think those are really great ways to get ahead and grow as you do, but really I just can’t drill home enough how important I think it is to just do. Just work something. Put it out there. No matter what you do, you’re going to think it’s terrible three years from now. Honestly. Because if you don’t look back at something that you made three years ago, and are horrendously embarrassed by it, you’re not growing. That means that you didn’t learn anything. So just brace yourself for the embarrassment. Oh, my God, I have watched some of the stuff that I did in 2014 or some. I’m like, “No.”
Joe Howard:
Yikes.
Christie Chirinos:
And I have to just remind myself that’s because you’re growing and you’re learning every single day, and that’s a good thing. Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I really like what you said about getting critical feedback. One thing I would mention there is there’s feedback that’s really good, that’s critical, and that helps you grow, and that is good feedback for the episode. I’ve gotten feedback before that’s like, “Why do you put the guests in the beginning…” or “Your guests are always some character. It’s kind of annoying because I can’t see the whole title. It doesn’t show up sometimes.” And I was like, “That’s totally valid feedback, and I’m glad someone told me that.” I actually don’t even remember who it was. Maybe it was Bradley, but I think maybe it had been a listener as well.
And I was like, “Great feedback, but I like doing that.” So I’m not going to change it, and that’s also important I think, taking the feedback and knowing what to change and what is okay that maybe one listener doesn’t appreciate, but that’s okay. Maybe that one listener is probably suggestive of probably 10 or 50 other listeners probably think the same thing. But like we’ve said before, you have to do things your way. I like that aspect of the show, so I’m probably not going to change it.
Another thing, someone mentioned to me, we curse sometimes on the show. It’s not very frequent, but yeah, we drop an F-bomb or whatever, every once in a while. Someone told me on the show, or someone emailed me and said, “Hey, I listen with my daughter sometimes, but I may not listen anymore because you curse sometimes. My daughter’s around.” And that was for sure one of those things where I was like, “Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate you being honest. That means a lot.” But I’m not going to change that about the show at all, because the authenticity is important, and to be able to drop a ‘shit’ sometimes. If I feel passionately about something, I want to be able to say that. And so to that listener, of course I want you to be a listener, I want your daughter to be able to listen, but we’re going to do the show our way, and you know, that’s a good opportunity for her too. You’ve got to talk to her about cursing and language and that kind of stuff, so maybe I’m doing you a favor. I don’t know.
The other quick thing I’d say is in terms of learning, I listen to a lot of non-WordPress podcasts as well. That actually gets me a lot of really good learning. One direct example is… I listen to Indie Hackers Podcast a lot, and they talk about a lot of revenue-funded business stuff, like software as a service, subscription business, a lot of information about that kind of stuff. There’s a ton of stuff, I was just listening to the other day about someone who built a cookie delivery business to a $2 million a year business in like 12 months. And I was like, “What? That’s crazy.” And so that gives me a ton of ideas of maybe what I can bring back to the WordPress space as a lesson from that podcast I listened to.
Christie, you mentioned it’s good to take ideas from other places and apply them in different situations. I think there’s a lot of external WordPress space stuff that we can apply to the things we can talk about here. I may write down some ideas in an idea doc that’s like, “Oh, that would be a cool thing to transition and to talk about, how does that apply to the WordPress space?” Yeah, I don’t know. So learning, I’m listening to other podcasts.
Also, how they format their podcast, how they do things. That also gives me ideas, like, “Oh, I really liked that when that podcast did that. That was really cool. Gave me a really good feeling.” Somewhere in me I really enjoyed that, and it makes me think higher of this podcast. Those things are hard to find and hard to discover. And you can’t always discover your own podcast because you’re too in it. Listen to other podcasts, you realize some of those things, and I can say, “Hey, Bradley, we should try and do something like that.” And that leads to improvement as well, so that’s another thing, listen to others.
Christie Chirinos:
So, yeah, there you’ve go. We’ve broken the fourth wall, and then the podcast about how we podcast. This was kind of fun.
Joe Howard:
It was, and I have a call coming up in two minutes, so we should wrap up the episode. But it was a good episode. I thought it was great. Hopefully gave people some good transparency into the podcast and everything we do here.
Christie Chirinos:
And if you’ve been curious about starting your own podcast to boost your monthly recurring revenue, hope it gives you some insight into what we get and don’t get out of it.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
And where can people find us, Joe?
Joe Howard:
People can find us at wpmrr.com/podcast. If you want to give us an iTunes review, that’d be swell. Wpmrr.com/itunes redirects you right there. Got a lot of old episodes people can go through, listen, binge. Like we’ve talked about before, don’t go back too far, because what were we even talking about two years ago? I don’t even know. Go back to episodes like 25 plus. Those are good ones. I don’t know, they’re all fine. Bingeing episodes, good idea. If people have questions, where can they reach us?
Christie Chirinos:
They can reach us at yo, that’s Y-O@wpmrr.com.
Joe Howard:
Woo. WPMRR Virtual Summit. Come see Christie’s talks, going to be awesome. Can’t wait. We will be in your podcast players or YouTube embedded a video player ago next Tuesday.
Christie Chirinos:
Woo.
Joe Howard:
Although I don’t know if YouTube videos are being published on Tuesdays. We haven’t figured out scheduling for that yet. They’ll come whenever. They’ll be on YouTube at some point, but Tuesday or some other day of the week, you’ll listen to this. It’ll be awesome. Okay, cool. We’ll see you next time.
Christie Chirinos:
Bye.
The questions keep coming and the answers may not be what you expect them to be!
Today on the WPMRR podcast, Joe and Christie tackle the bus factor phenomenon, converting one-offs to subscriptions, and the pros of ConvertKit.
Listen now for more business management insights!
Christie Chirinos:
Hello, WordPress people. Welcome back to WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Christie.
Joe Howard:
And I’m Joe.
Christie Chirinos:
And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. What’s going on in your life this week, Joe?
Joe Howard:
This week feels like kind of a new beginning for me, like a new chapter, because Morrison started his… Today he’s at his third day of daycare today, and he goes… It’s like everyone’s being super safe, as safe as possible, everyone who’s going gets negative tests, negative COVID tests. The daycare, they do the temperature when you walk in, that kind of stuff. But he’s gone for three days this week, and I feel like I’ve gotten so much work done, it’s crazy. Like, I can sit down for like three hours and work on something now, and it’s totally… It’s like I didn’t really realize how, you know, I was getting some stuff done, but it was like 15 minutes of work, hang out with the baby for half an hour, 15 minutes of work. You know, it was like I was trying to put a lot into a little bit of time. Now I really have time to spread my wings a little bit and do some more work, so it’s been excellent. That’s what’s new with me and my newfound bandwidth.
Christie Chirinos:
I mean, that is super exciting. Isn’t it so funny how we take things for granted sometimes with the whole “I can work for three whole hours without stopping”? Yeah, well, congratulations. They grow up so fast.
Joe Howard:
Thank you, thank you. What is new with you?
Christie Chirinos:
It also feels like a new beginning for me, because I have relocated completely to Austin, Texas.
Joe Howard:
Wow.
Christie Chirinos:
So, Joe and I, as of this recording, small tear, are no longer in the same city. That was a fun year of this podcast being produced in Washington, DC, but alas, that has now changed. And I’m excited about it. You know, Joe knows, most people, if you know me and you listen to this podcast and you personally know me, you know that I move around a lot. I’ve sort of always been semi-nomadic, and just the trying on different things, especially at this stage in life, and with the flexibility that our job allows. I was here, I got here about a month ago, and finished bringing over the rest of my belongings, not very many, but I had some things. I had like two pieces of furniture. Finished bringing those over over the weekend, and here I am.
Joe Howard:
Amazing. We were talking a little bit off air about this before we started recording. I was saying, “Oh, I’m going to miss you very much,” but it sounds like an exciting opportunity for you, and I was like, oh, I’d probably do the same in your shoes. Austin, lots of outdoor space right now, when you can still go outside without necessarily having too much social… I don’t know, what’s the difference… What’s the opposite of social distancing? Social proximity?
Christie Chirinos:
Closeness?
Joe Howard:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:03:13], all sorts of stuff. Closeness, I should’ve thought of that one. But it’s also, it’s a little bit cheaper of a city too.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
DC is, we know, is somewhat expensive, and so it’ll be a nice change of pace for you, I think. Plus, it’s like, yes, I will miss you and hanging out in person more often, but WordCamps will come back, and plus, we see each other every week because we do this anyway, so it’s… [inaudible 00:03:39], in person we will miss a little bit, but we still get to see each other every week, so that’s cool.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. Leaving Joe and [Mo 00:03:47] and [Sterling 00:03:48] behind was definitely on the cons column. But yeah, exactly, the pros column contained a whole lot of, hey, our lives are not and should not return to “normal” any time soon, and if I’m leaving in this abnormal situation for the next 12 months, I need to do that somewhere where I can save some money, be healthier, and have a little bit more space to be inside. I lived in a 400-square-foot studio apartment in downtown Washington, DC, so awesome during normal times, where I can go outside every single day and go to bars and go places, and the very expensive and beautiful city that is Washington, DC, is my living room. Not so awesome during pandemic times, and so, made some quick decisions, and thankfully, I’m very privileged that my life has that flexibility where I can just be like, “All right, you know, let’s try something different.” So, I’m feeling great, but yeah, it’s definitely a new adventure.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah. You also mentioned that there’s other folks on LiQuid Web team too in Austin, right? So you get to combine remote life and some IRL work time as well, so that’s cool.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m actually super excited about that. There are maybe about 15 or so Liquid Webbers, Nexcessers, here in Austin, and then the whole bunch of them in San Antonio, which is about an hour away. I am pumped about that. I’ve said for a while that to me, I love remote work, and I would never go back, but I’m the kind of person where the lack of office culture and office social life is actually a drawback of remote work. It’s something that I deal with and compensate for, but that I genuinely enjoy the traditional office-work setting. But the benefits of remote work are so outstanding that I sacrifice the office social life. And so, I feel like I am going to get a little bit of the best of both worlds by being here, and I’m really excited about that.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. That’s a really good point, actually, because I think remote work has a lot of advantages, and a lot of people like the aspect of being able to work remotely and not being location dependent, and that’s great, but I think great remote work probably comes with some balance of some in-real-life interaction, maybe not totally professionally, but at least personally. There has to be some aspect of what you do that’s IRL too, because human beings are such social creatures. Maybe some are extroverts and some are introverts, but it’s like… During this whole COVID thing, it’s like we’ve had to lock down in our house and work remotely, which is great, we can keep working, but I don’t know about you, I’m sure you know some people too, it’s like they feel like they’ve hit breaking points of, “I’ve been sitting in my house for six straight weeks doing work, and it’s kind of driving me a little crazy.”
Joe Howard:
Yes, remote work’s nice, it’s nice to be able to do that, but you got to find some sort of balance with some outdoor time, or some friends time, or some… you know, a happy hour now and again, and some social interaction, because it’s tough… Remote work is tough when it’s 100% remote. It’s kind of like anything, it’s tough when you’re 100% that. You need a little bit of balance.
Christie Chirinos:
Absolutely, and I think that we maybe found that balance, and then that balance was thrown off center by the coronavirus pandemic, and so we’re having to re-find that balance and figure out how that’s going to work for us in a world that’s probably not going back to the way it used to be, right? Even when we have a vaccine and we can have our old normal back, there are economic things that probably won’t go back to being the exact same way. How many companies are now fully remote and are kind of loving it, and could be saving $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month on that commercial office space, you know? So we’ll see, and we’ll all have to figure out how to operate as more remote workers.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah, or like Twitter, they’re like, “Oh, we’re remote now, no one has to come back to the office,” or Jack Dorsey’s like, “No one come back to the office.” Imagine how much they’re saving in office space.
Christie Chirinos:
Millions.
Joe Howard:
You remember, it was like two years ago, I think, when Automattic made that announcement, that they’re losing their San Francisco office, they’re moving out of it? It was like two years ago or something, and I remember reading about it. I can’t remember how much they were spending on it, but it was like, “Holy shit, Automattic has been spending that much on an office where like 10 people come in a week? That’s pretty crazy.”
Christie Chirinos:
Right. I remember the article and that headline, and I remember the article saying, “Yeah, you know, right now coming to the office is optional, and it’s kind of quiet and sad in here because no one takes advantage of it.” It was a Bay Area office.
Joe Howard:
Probably tumbleweeds, tumbleweeds rolling across, yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. But yeah.
Joe Howard:
Right on. Today, whew, we have another Q&A episode, but before we dive into that, we wanted to chat a little bit about our episode about being minorities in the WordPress space. This is our first time jumping on and being on the podcast and recording after recording that episode, and we just wanted to, I don’t know, give not a recap, but maybe some shout-outs to some of the feedback we got from it, and just put a little bit of a bow on it, because it was kind of an intense episode. If you haven’t listen to it, feel free to jump back a few episodes and check it out. But yeah, maybe you want to start with some of the, I don’t know, feedback you got, and/or some of the last, somewhat final commentary… “Final” is like, this is an ongoing conversation that will never be final, probably, but to put a bow onto that specific episode, anything you wanted to say about it?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, I mean, I thought that we got really positive responses to the episode. I definitely want to acknowledge it just because it would feel kind of awkward and random to not acknowledge it, right? It was very much an unusual episode for us, and when we published it, we got an unusual amount of…
Joe Howard:
Unusual amount of microphone feedback.
Christie Chirinos:
Please hold, technical difficulties.
Joe Howard:
Do you want me to go?
Christie Chirinos:
We’re back.
Joe Howard:
You still sound good to me, I think you’re on.
Christie Chirinos:
Oh, yeah, okay, good. Wow, what was I saying?
Joe Howard:
Some of the feedback you got from the episode, you said it was mostly… Mostly positive, yeah?
Christie Chirinos:
We mostly got… Yeah, all positive feedback, definitely was a bit of an unusual episode for us, and I think our listeners and people especially within the WordPress community noticed. But yeah, just want to shout out a couple of people that were really sweet. Chris Ford, you’re wonderful and a big supporter, and thank you for using your voice to amplify the podcast episode. And yeah, also the contributor most commonly known as Rarst, Andrey Savchenko, thank you so much for your support, and Rachel Cherry, thank you for your support. And yeah, just thanks for reaching out, for listening to the episode. I hope you learned something new. Definitely also want to shout out Liam Dempsey, big fan of him and all his work within the WordPress community, and just some people that reached out and said nice things about the episode. Thanks for listening, and thanks for being you.
Joe Howard:
Oh my God, Liam’s just… Liam’s the best.
Christie Chirinos:
Yes.
Joe Howard:
I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who’s so purely good before. I don’t know, every time I talk to him, I’m like, “Oh my God.” He’s like an angel almost. I’m like, “So, Liam…” Yeah, what Christie said, I couldn’t say any better. Thank you for being you. I’m actually talking to him on Twitter right now, DMing him about sponsoring WordCamp Philly this year, so it’s a good coincidence.
Christie Chirinos:
Ah, cool.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I wanted to give a few shout-outs to some folks too. I got a few here, just a few nice responses to the episode. Kevin Hoffman from the Give team just tweeted at us, “Thank you for sharing your stories, experiences, recommendations with us. The paradox of tolerance, that’s a new concept for me, and I enjoyed learning more about it after the episode.” So thanks, Kevin, for the reply. Aaron Jorbin gave a nice thank-you to us, a nice little reply, so thanks, Aaron.
Christie Chirinos:
I love Aaron.
Joe Howard:
Aaron, shout-out. Brasco… Brasco. There’s no first name in the Twitter account, or maybe Brasco is your first name, there’s no last name? But Brascoder, Brasco, thank you. “Just listened to this episode. Thank you both for using your platform to shed light on the issue.” And Brasco also looks like a minority in the WordPress community, so it’s nice to get some feedback from other folks who are also in our same shoes who listened to the episode, because, you know, there are people from different backgrounds listening, and so it’s nice to get some positive feedback from different folks, which is nice.
Joe Howard:
Joseph Dickinson… Nope, sorry, Joseph Dickson. Messed your name up, Joseph, but I’ll say your name a few times now and give you more shout-outs because I messed your name up, Joseph. Awesome name, Joseph. Your name’s super dope. “The most important WordPress community conversation I’ve listened to in some time.” Thank you, Joe. I don’t know if you like to be called Joe; some people don’t like to go by nicknames. Hannah Smith gave us a nice reply. The Events Calendar gave us a nice reply.
Christie Chirinos:
Oh yeah, I saw that.
Joe Howard:
I’ll read those tweets quickly, because I don’t want to leave them… I read other tweets out, I don’t want to leave them out. Hannah said, “Took the time out to sit down and listen to this episode today, and I’m so glad I did. It was a great convo to be party to, and you did it so well. Kudos to you and a million thank yous.” Heart emoji. Is it a green heart emoji? I like the alternate heart, not just the basic red heart, but a green heart.
Christie Chirinos:
Purple heart, blue heart.
Joe Howard:
Purple heart, blue heart.
Christie Chirinos:
Yellow heart.
Joe Howard:
Events Calendar: “Really great episode, Joe and Christie. Extremely important for the WP community to think about inclusiveness more, especially when it comes to dismantling systematic racism.” They got it. They got the… They listened, they definitely listened, because they nailed that one, pretty much. So, Events Calendar, thank you, appreciate it.
Joe Howard:
I also got some DMs, some folks slid into my DMs because I said… Okay, my direct messages are no longer open, because I don’t leave them open for extenuating periods, because I don’t like to get a ton of direct messages, because I’m… Honestly, it’s not just because it’s spammy a lot of the times, but just because I’m not going to probably read them that much, because I’m not on Twitter all the time. But I did get some messages as well. Taco Verdo sent me a very nice direct message. It’s pretty similarly in the vein of what other people sent me. It was a direct message, so I’m not going to read it, because it was not a public tweet, it’s a direct message. So, Taco, I’m not trying to not give you a shout-out. I super appreciate the message; I just want to be cognizant of your privacy. It’s a direct message, so I’m not going to read it, but thank you, Taco, for the equally as awesome feedback I got from other places. Last-
Christie Chirinos:
I got a message from Taco too, but I wanted to let you give the shout-out, but thank you, Taco. Your message meant a lot to me
Joe Howard:
Oh, okay. You get a double shout-out, Taco, nice job, nice work. Thank you. And honestly, this is a good moment to give a little bit of feedback for everybody. We both got direct messages from Taco. We both loved Taco before, but now we super love Taco. So a really easy way to make good friends in the WordPress community is like, “Hey, I saw this thing you did. Nice job.” It really takes 10 seconds, and it really can connect you with someone. So, Taco, you’re at the top of my list now, buddy. Thank you.
Joe Howard:
Cory Miller gave us some nice shares, he shared us in the Post Status group. We got some nice shares in this episode. We’ve got a share in the Post Status newsletter, which you should for sure subscribe to, and the MasterWP newsletter, which you should for sure subscribe to, and the Repository newsletter, which is sent out by MailPoet, which you should also subscribe to. So, it was nice to see it get shared around a lot. I think that sharing is indicative of saying, “I agree with something, and I think this should be put out there in the world, and I want to share with my audience,” and that gives positive… It’s not just like pushing a button to say “I’m sharing this,” it’s like, “I have some agreeance with that.”
Christie Chirinos:
We might say sharing is caring.
Joe Howard:
Ooh, sharing is caring, on this episode of Barney, or Sesame Street. So, yeah. That’s all we wanted to say about the episode, just give some people some shout-outs and thank you for the positive feedback on it. Yeah, we may do some more episodes like that in the future. We’ll try to stick to monthly recurring revenue-related stuff, but these are important topics, and we want to talk about monthly recurring revenue, but we want to talk about what’s most important right now in the WordPress space, so, glad we got to do that episode, and we appreciate all the positive feedback. So, woo.
Joe Howard:
Okay, Q&A episode. Episode 100 was a Q&A episode, and episode 100 and… whatever episode this is going to be, 5, 6, something, I don’t know, will also be a Q&A episode. So, we got some nice questions to go through. Christie, are you ready?
Christie Chirinos:
I love Q&A episodes. I’m ready, these are my favorite.
Joe Howard:
All right, sweet. First Q&A… First Q, and we’ll give the A. First question is from Nate Hoffelder. Nate’s in DC with us, so… A lot of shout-outs this episode, shout-out Nate, thanks for the question. Nate’s question is, “Does everyone here…” Or, “Do folks have a plan for if they get hit by a car?” is pretty much the question. There’s also a follow-up question which is like, “Who doesn’t have one?” which I think is also an interesting part to the question, because there’s stuff to talk about around having an “if you get hit by a bus” or “if you get hit by a car” plan, and people who don’t, why don’t you, and what do you… Do you need one? What should be included in it? So it’s kind of two pieces of the same question, but a super-interesting one. Christie, you want to give an answer for… Do you have one? I don’t know, do you?
Christie Chirinos:
I have so many thoughts on this one. Bus factor. The bus factor is real, and bus factor is a huge business risk that you need to be aware of, and that it takes a lot of humility to work through. You are not forever, you are not invincible. You could go down any second, and whatever you’ve created doesn’t only belong to you, it also belongs to your team, your users, your customers, your investors if you have them, your vendors. And if you don’t have a bus factor plan, you need to make one, because figuring out how things are going to continue to exist without you is, in my opinion, the ultimate goal of what we’re doing here with WPMRR.
Christie Chirinos:
With that said, the “Who doesn’t have one?” bit of this question really gets me, because-
Joe Howard:
Me too.
Christie Chirinos:
… because I actually know someone who straight-up got hit by a car.
Joe Howard:
Oh man, [crosstalk 00:19:36].
Christie Chirinos:
Like, was biking down a bridge and got hit by a car going 55 miles an hour, and they were knocked off this bicycle.
Joe Howard:
[crosstalk 00:19:48].
Christie Chirinos:
If they hadn’t been wearing a helmet, they would’ve died. And he was incapacitated for three months, he had several concussions, he couldn’t take care of himself for three months. And let me tell you that no plan that you have for getting hit by a car is enough of a plan.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:20:08], totally.
Christie Chirinos:
It is just the kind of thing that when it happens, you’re just flying by the seat of your pants. You can plan for this, and I don’t know that he had a plan, right? But just the severity of this type of situation, of anything that incapacitates you for several months. I want to tell you that I think at the time, this friend of mine was in pharmacy school, and it was like, yeah, there’s definitely a bus factor risk of being in pharmacy school, also known as “What if you get hit by a car and then can’t continue?” But when he was in bed, unable to take care of himself, his entire family was coming together to take care of him for the next three months, no one was thinking about pharmacy school. And chances are that if you got hit by a car, literally, you would not be thinking about your business as much as you would be thinking about your physical survival.
Christie Chirinos:
With that said, bus factor risk in business is extremely important to consider, because even if people don’t literally get hit by a car, we don’t want to create dependencies on single people. What do you do about this, Joe, at WP Buffs? You have more of a problem with this than I do now.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, that’s true. I do want to ask more from your side, because even as a teammate and employee, it’s important, your role is… Like, what if no one’s doing… What if you’re not there for the next month? Who picks up the pieces? How do other people pick up the pieces? There’s a lot of systems questions there. But I’ll go into how I think about things at WP Buffs.
Joe Howard:
You’re also very right, especially at big companies, they have… It’s like C-suite insurance. It’s literally an insurance you can go get, and it’s pretty fucking expensive. Like, think about Automattic. Matt Mullenweg has… They probably pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for insurance on Matt, because if something happens to him, he’s a huge part of Automattic. They get a payout, it’s insurance. It’s probably the same with a lot of big companies; WP Engine I’m sure has a lot of this stuff. Any big company that you’re thinking in the WordPress space definitely has insurance, especially on C-suite employees. So it’s a real thing; you can literally get insurance for this.
Joe Howard:
We don’t have that insurance; I don’t have that insurance for us, speaking honestly. But we do have things in place so that if I’m incapacitated suddenly, things will be okay. Interestingly, we’ve done episodes before about how to take a three-week vacation; that was one of our first 10 episodes I think we did. We’ve done a lot of episodes about how to decouple yourself from being super required to do day-to-day stuff at your work, and being able to replace yourself pretty easily.
Joe Howard:
So, a lot of this is actually stuff you should be thinking about on a regular basis, regardless of if you get hit by a car or not. You should be making sure other people can do your job if they need to and be flexible around that. It’s one of the reasons why we’re very big on forcing people to take vacations and forcing people to take time off, because it’s not only good for that person’s mental health to take some time away, but it helps other people have to take up those persons’ responsibilities. It gives people more responsibilities and more ability to be promoted and stuff. So, it’s actually good for everybody, so that’s something you can think about, because if that person gets hit by a bus 10 days after they get back from vacation, well, someone else was ready to pick up their stuff already. So, that’s something.
Joe Howard:
Another thing, just from a practical standpoint, is have health insurance coverage for yourself and your employees. If you get hit by a car and you have $50,000 in medical expenses, and you’re a contractor, you’re a little bit screwed. That’s something you’re going to have to pay out for the next 10 years of your life, maybe, if you don’t have health insurance. That’s crazy. So, I think that if you’re not majorly successful financially or whatever-
Christie Chirinos:
If you’re not in the US.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:24:19] not in the US. If you’re a leader of your company, have health insurance for US employees. Cover health care expenses for your international employees. A lot of international outside the US people have state-sponsored health care, but they still have to pay for it. Pay whatever their $200 a month for health care coverage is. We do that for all our employees, even international ones, and for US ones, we have full US coverage, and really good health insurance. We’re hiring right now, so come talk to me if you are looking for a new team to join. But have health insurance; that’s just a… That’s an important thing for if you get hit by a car, I think, a pretty practical one too.
Joe Howard:
The last thing I’ll say here is just, it kind of goes with the other thing I was just mentioning, but most… Especially for leadership positions, but for most positions, you should probably have a junior to you who’s learning to do what you do. There’s not that much that I do at WP Buffs that’s like “Joe has to do this.” There’s some marketing stuff that I’m the best at, for sure; there’s some decision-making that I’m the best at, for sure. But if I wasn’t here, someone else could, and especially a group of other people could come together and make probably about as good a decision as I could. I mean, the amount of times I’ve made a decision and part of my leadership team has been like, “Nope, that’s not what we should do,” and I’ve been like, “Yup, you’re right, thank you for letting me know,” is a ton of times.
Joe Howard:
So, I think for me, it’s having Nick around, especially, but Dean also. I mean, they’re both people I rely on heavily all the time, and the more I rely on them, the more responsibility and accountability over work they can have, the more they give back to WP Buffs, and the more ready they are to be leaders at WP Buffs. And they are, and have been for a long time, so I’m far from the only leader here at WP Buffs, and probably not the most important piece of the equation, and that’s been… I’ve done that purposefully, not just it just happened to happen. I was like, Nick and Dean are going to be more central to our core competencies than I am. Also, they’re just super great at what they do, and there wasn’t really another thing that could’ve happened. Like, I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried. They’re too good at what they do.
Joe Howard:
So, yeah. I mean, those are some, I guess, somewhat practical things to have in place. But now we’re talking about insurance. I probably should have some sort of additional insurance for if I get hit by something. I think that’s probably a pretty good idea, but… Yeah, I don’t know. What do you think, slash what are maybe some systems you have at Liquid Web that are helpful?
Christie Chirinos:
I agree with everything you said. I think that for people who are curious about this or have never maybe even considered it before, I deeply, deeply encourage you to Google “bus factor,” right? Talks about this particular type of business risk-
Joe Howard:
Bus factor. I never heard of that specifically, but it’s a good term [crosstalk 00:27:13], okay.
Christie Chirinos:
It’s a term, yup, that’s a term, that’s a term. It talks about the specific type of business risk, how to overcome it. It’s a very well-documented phenomenon, because… And this is kind of what you wanted me to talk about, was even in large companies, this is a problem, because if you have one person who is very central to a lot of processes and a lot of stuff lives in their head, if something happens to them, that can bring down hundreds of people, right? So bus factor business risk is something very important, and that’s literally what it’s called, and it’s called that because it’s the “What if you get hit by a bus?” type situation, right?
Christie Chirinos:
This has especially gone out into the entrepreneurship and startup spaces, because obviously, bus factor is massive with founders. But it can be really key with, say, directors of engineering; it can be very key with product leads. Product leads have big bus factor. And especially, for example, my role, I am not a product manager, I’m the product manager for the product line for Managed WooCommerce at Nexcess, which means that with me, if we weren’t doing things correctly, there could be some bus factor. There could be things about Managed WooCommerce that only live in my head, and that if I got hit by a bus, knock on wood, then we would possibly have some difficulty, right?
Christie Chirinos:
And so, how do we overcome that? Well, we collaborate on teams, right? I work on a team, and my team knows what I’m working on every day. So, if I got hit by a bus, my team together can take over, and that goes back to what you were saying about how bus factor for founders eventually turns into a leadership team can make decisions that that person would’ve traditionally made, right? So, maybe we work a little bit less efficiently because we’re going from one person singularly making decisions to a group of people coming together to make decisions. But groups of people make optimal decisions a lot of the time when they come in with different types of expertise, so that can be really helpful.
Christie Chirinos:
And then another thing that I do, because I’m particularly conscious of this type of problem, is I document everything. When I come up… I have this one Google Doc that it’s just my job, and when I come up with new things or new rules or new places to do things, I just jot them down in a little list. And that also makes the process of handing off work, whether for vacation or to move on to your next role, a lot easier, because then you can just be like, “Hey, here’s the thing. I documented all the stuff that I’m doing. This should give you what you need to get started.”
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah, documenting’s big about that too. It’s a big reason why documenting’s so important, you know, obviously to get systems down, be more efficient at things, and share information, but part of sharing information is like, if something happens to one person, everybody has access to it. Definitely something we probably don’t do a good enough job at. We’re actually doing a big revamp on all our documentation right now and making it better, and getting one real central hub for it. That’s something I’ve written down… Actually, also just emailed the guy who manages… He’s our broker, he manages all our insurance and stuff like that, and I asked him about this insurance, so I will be looking more into this as well.
Joe Howard:
I know small businesses, there is insurance you can apply for as a small business to… It’s like business insurance. It’s around this kind of thing, like if I get incapacitated or something, so there’s not… It’s not just for big companies. I think there are also smaller-company versions of it, or maybe it’s just you just pay less because you’re a smaller company or something. I don’t know exactly how they… I’d have to do some more research into seeing exactly how they calculate it, but that’s definitely something people should look into. “Business insurance for founders” would be what I would Google to check this out if you’re a smaller business or freelancer with your own little LLC, definitely something to look into. So, cool, nice, good answers, Christie. I think that was pretty good.
Christie Chirinos:
Awesome.
Joe Howard:
All right, next question. This next question is from Daniele Besana. Thanks for the question, Daniele. I think it’s Daniele, I think is how you pronounce it, D-A-N-I-E-L-E.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
So, Daniele.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s like Italian Daniel.
Joe Howard:
It’s just the spelling on that. Yeah, it’s a non-English spelling, so, sorry, Daniele. But I think I got it right.
Christie Chirinos:
I went to high school with a guy named Daniele with an E at the end, and everybody called him Danielle, and he was like, “No, it’s Daniele.”
Joe Howard:
He was like, “Goddammit.”
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Well, I’m glad… See, your experience is coming very important here to the [crosstalk 00:31:56].
Christie Chirinos:
Thank you, Daniele.
Joe Howard:
“Hello, folks.” Okay, so this is kind of a subscription versus one-time support question. Daniele asks, “Nine out of ten leads ask for a one-time quote and are not interested in a subscription. At this stage, we only want subscriptions, so we consider them out of scope. I’m trying to figure out if it is a normal ratio, or if we’re attracting the wrong leads. Do you have any experience that most of the people don’t want a subscription? Any input is appreciated.”
Joe Howard:
So, this is kind of more support-related for me, because hosting companies don’t get, probably, people asking for one-time stuff, but maybe in your support, you do get a good amount of people asking for, like, “I need help with this WordPress thing, can you help?” This was specifically for, like, “I’m selling care plans, and I get people asking, ‘I just need help with this one thing, can you help?'” But I think we can probably both have interesting answers to this, because again, I’m sure you get support that’s totally outside the scope as a hosting company, and I know a lot of hosting companies do. So, what about for a hosting company, Christie? Obviously you do subscription billing, and you want to get people on subscriptions. Do you get asked for one-time support a lot? And if so, what do you do with the one-time help ask?
Christie Chirinos:
I have a lot of thoughts on this, because yeah, we do, actually, fun fact. With hosting, when we get asked for “one-time quotes,” what ends up happening, really, is somebody has the specific length of engagement, and they don’t want to sign up for something recurring, so they’re like, “Can I just pay for a chunk of time at once?” Usually a year, right?
Joe Howard:
Of hosting.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative). So, we actually do have annual billing, but it’s annual recurring. So you can get billed annually if you want, you’ll get a discount for doing it.
Joe Howard:
As opposed to monthly?
Christie Chirinos:
Right.
Joe Howard:
Yes.
Christie Chirinos:
You’ll get a discount for doing it, because obviously, money now is better than money in the future. And a lot of the time, people will say, “Oh, can it be just this year?” and it’s like, no. “Well, why?” And that goes back into the core of this question, which is, because when you’re selling a subscription, you are selling ongoing value. To me, you getting this question indicates that you’re not communicating your ongoing value. I don’t know what Daniele’s website looks like or what types of content he’s putting out that’s attracting leads, but if your marketing clearly states, “This is the way in which we’re going to help you from now until the future, this is what you’re going to get for your entire life every month from us,” then people don’t ask, “Oh, but can I just get it one time?”
Christie Chirinos:
And then, when they say, “Can I just get it one time?” you can easily turn the conversation around and be like, “No, no, no, the benefit of this is that you continue to get it. Look at all these new things that happen every month. Look at all of these ways in which we save you time and continue to build upon the thing that you’re paying on each month due to your monthly subscription. The product gets better, the services get deeper. We get to know you better.” Because the reality is that if you’re selling something that’s just kind of the same every month, of course they only want to buy it one time and then kind of get over it, right? You have to continue to keep building.
Christie Chirinos:
You asked about out-of-scope support requests in hosting, and yeah, we get those all the time, right? There are people that specialize in one-offs like this, and that is what they want, and we keep a directory of them, but it’s not what we do. Right? That is a type of product, and that product itself has been productized in a way; it’s just not what we do, and we have an entire partner directory where we can send people and say, “Hey, this person needs help with this one particular thing, they want to build out this one particular feature.” The reality is that a lot of the time, when you’re looking at things that are one-offs, one-offs are rarely one-offs. How many things in this life do you really, truly, only need to do one time? Very few.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think people who come for one-off help often are going to need help on an ongoing basis. The challenge you have as a business owner is, how much time is it going to take to educate that customer on the value enough, to the point of getting them to buy a subscription? And is that worth your cost of acquisition cost in terms of education? Because education is one of the most expensive customer acquisition costs. If you have to educate everybody who comes to you that they need to go from one-time to subscription and then close them, that’s going to take a ton of resources and time.
Joe Howard:
I agree with what you said, Christie, about just messaging and marketing and copy. I think that Daniele said nine out of ten people come to him for one-time support. To me, that’s, yeah, one of two, probably, issues it’s most likely. One is either targeting the wrong kinds of customer or the wrong kind of target market, where they’re people who just need one-time support. So you may have the wrong traffic coming to your website, so if you wrote a blog post about where to go to find a freelancer for the help on that one small issue, and you get a lot of traffic to that blog post, and people are contacting you, well, probably it’s because they were searching Google for “How do I find one-time help?” and then they came to you.
Joe Howard:
So, that would be an example of just targeting… And I’ve never seen Daniele’s website before, but… This is totally an example, but that would be an example of writing a blog post that actually targeted the wrong kind of customer for you. When you’re looking for subscription customers, you want to write more blog posts like what we do at WP Buffs, like “How do you make more monthly recurring revenue?” “What tools can I implement on my site to actually capture subscriptions?” There’s more subscription-related stuff you can write.
Joe Howard:
So, that’s one thing, is just the targeting aspect, and then the second is the actual copy on your website, and the way in which you’re selling your services and subscriptions, which is kind of what you were talking about, Christie. It’s like, you don’t want to be talking about one-time support on your sales pages. You want to be talking about the subscriptions you offer, and educate people on the website, because that’s a much more scalable way to educate people than having to talk with every single customer and explain the difference between one-time and subscription. Explain it really nicely on your website, maybe have a video about subscriptions. The more you can talk about the subscription service, the more you’re going to attract people who are interested in a technical partner or whatever, a subscription, and the less you’ll have to talk to people who want one-time help, because they’ll get the message.
Joe Howard:
This is a challenge. We still get a good amount of people that come and ask for one-time support. And it’s annoying, I’m not going to lie. It’s a little annoying. Did you not read anything on the website? We talk about subscriptions everywhere, and people are like, “Maybe I missed it. Maybe they do do one-time support, maybe I should ask them.” Which I get; I shouldn’t make fun of them with that voice. You’re allowed to ask for one-time help, that’s fine. We just don’t do it, if you’re listening. Don’t ask for one-time help, we don’t do it.
Christie Chirinos:
“Oh. Oh, right.”
Joe Howard:
Yeah. But that’s part of business, also. You’re never going to target a hundred percent the right people. It’s a long-time play, you have to change, you have to adapt, you have to improve. The goal for good customers is to continue to try and attract good customers. How do you attract more people like that? And you can talk to your current customers: “Hey, what else do you need? What else can we build to help you more around subscription stuff?” That’s a good way to attract more people like the subscription customers you already have.
Joe Howard:
What do you do with the people who come to you that are asking for one-time support? For me, I like to keep them in my universe. Like, I like them to be subscribed to my email list, I like for them to read our blog. I want to help them; it’s not like I don’t want to help them. That’s cool. And maybe over the long term, we’ll educate them. But I also don’t want to spend high price time on them. I don’t want to spend five hours trying to sell them on something if they’re not going to end up buying it. I want to attract people who are interested in a subscription so I can spend one hour selling them, and get them in, and get their lifetime value up.
Joe Howard:
I always say, get the people you… Look for your red flag metrics, like people asking for one-time support, that’s a red flag metric for us. Get those people out of your direct sales funnel and get them into your long-term sales funnel, or your education funnel, or your email list, and you’re sending them out more podcast episode or blog posts. And then maybe in a year, they’re like, “Oh, I have like 10,000 visitors a month on my blog now. I need someone to manage it, because I’ve got to work on growing it. This could be a big thing.” Maybe at that point, they’ll be ready. So, that’s some of my advice, and I think that hopefully is helpful. That’s how we think about it at WP Buffs, how I think about it at WP Buffs, anyway.
Christie Chirinos:
Agreed.
Joe Howard:
Sweet. Okay, we could do one more question. Do you have time, Christie, or do you have a… time?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, I have one more question, although I feel a little bit of shyness around this one. I’m going to let you go first.
Joe Howard:
Okay, I will go first.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
And you can comment if you’d like to, but you don’t have to. This is our podcast, Christie, we do what we want. You talk about stuff, you don’t talk about stuff, whatever. This question is… And let me do a quick little search to make sure I know who it is. It’s from Terry Loving. Thank you for the question, Terry. Also, excellent last name.
Christie Chirinos:
Loving.
Joe Howard:
My son, Morrison, his middle name is Loving as well, and so, excellent name choice there. I won’t tell the whole story about the middle name, but same middle name, so Terry, super appreciate you. Terry’s question is, “Wondering what advantage you find working with ConvertKit versus others.”
Joe Howard:
I will tell my quick story about ConvertKit. I love ConvertKit for certain reasons, and I also dislike it for other reasons, and let me talk a little bit about that, because I love… Let me talk first about the reason why I love ConvertKit. I love ConvertKit because it solved a really big pain point for us and for a ton of people by doing a few things really, really well. We used to use Mailchimp, like three years ago, and it just didn’t have simple… Like, how do I get a list of people tagged with this thing, or segmented with this thing? It had horrible tagging and segmentation, and I just wanted to say, “If someone clicks this link, it tags them as someone who uses WooCommerce.” Like, they clicked on “10 WooCommerce strategies to use,” it tags them as WooCommerce, so when I send a WooCommerce email out, I can just send it to those people.
Joe Howard:
Mailchimp was shit at doing that, totally horrible. And maybe they’re better at it now, I haven’t used Mailchimp in three years, so I won’t totally shit on them right now. But ConvertKit did it awesome and made it so easy, so I was like, “Let’s use ConvertKit.” Like, tagging and segmenting are done so well, it’s perfect.
Joe Howard:
But they also do some things that I would expect better of a somewhat big bootstrapped company, like a company that starts revenue-funded and doesn’t raise money, and makes it to… Like, we just crossed a million-dollar-a-year barrier, which has been pretty cool, so it’s like, “Yeah, we hit this cool milestone of a million dollars at WP Buffs.” ConvertKit is at, like… I think they do like $2 million a month, so they’re at like $25 million a year as a bootstrap company, which is pretty big for a bootstrap software company. Not the biggest, but significant size. They should be doing, like, have a better editor. The editor is pretty wonky, and some text doesn’t come through the right size in email. So, it’s totally not perfect. There’s definitely things I think they could work on and do better at.
Joe Howard:
But they do great things in terms of email, tagging, and segmenting, and if you just want to have a sub-list of people of your whole list that are of a certain… something special about them, they clicked on a WooCommerce, or maybe they run a membership site. Or for us, we do direct customers, are they an agency, are they a freelancer? Those are important for sales. And to monetize an email list, this is kind of a best practice, but it’s also, I feel like it’s pretty true, is you have to segment our email list into somewhat relevant areas so that you can send people things that they want. If you just send every email to every person, you’re going to have higher unsubscribe rates, you’re going to have higher people not really reading everything, and that’s bad for your send rate, it’s bad for your emails not going into junk and appearing in the main inbox tab and stuff.
Joe Howard:
So, you want good click-through rates, and you want good open rates, and that kind of stuff, so segmenting your email list helps with that. Plus, it’s just like, you send people what they want, just like… So many people don’t do that, it’s like… I don’t subscribe to almost any email things, because most of them are pretty bad at targeting me. But there’s also people that don’t follow that rule and just send one email out to everyone, like Matcha WP, I’m pretty sure they send just their newsletter out to everybody every week, and it’s great, but that’s their shtick, it’s like, “We send a newsletter out.” It’s not like… You know, there’s not as much targeted sales stuff like we’re doing.
Joe Howard:
So, that would be my big advantage of ConvertKit, is tagging and segmenting. Also, you can create nice rules so that if someone’s tagged as this, they’ll be added to this sequence. It’s all around tagging and segmenting email lists that I think is really powerful for ConvertKit. And I think that this is one of those companies that… I really like ConvertKit, even though I have a few issues with them. I like ConvertKit a lot. I like their team, I like their founder story, which is like… “I’m going to shut this down, it’s not really working,” and someone was like, “You should actually double down on it and do it.” “Okay,” and now it’s a $25 million company. It’s a pretty cool story. You should go and check out that story.
Joe Howard:
But anyway, I think ConvertKit, if you’re looking to… If segmenting and tagging email subscribers as certain things is going to be a big lever for you in terms of monetizing your email list, or having good, happy email subscribers that want to get your emails every week or every day or every month, then ConvertKit, I would definitely try that. I just talked for a long time, and a lot about ConvertKit, but those are my thoughts, and those are, or I think are the advantages, so hopefully that is helpful, Terry. Did you want to add something, Christie, or are you like, “No thanks”?
Christie Chirinos:
No, you said absolutely everything I would’ve said. I started off by saying that I’m feeling shy about this question, because… And I want to start by saying that my opinion of ConvertKit is the same as yours. I love their founder story, I think they’re making such a cool product, it’s so good for segmented email marketing. The tagging system is unbelievably powerful, it’s just really, really well done. Billing is transparent as well, which I love.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
But I was feeling shy about this question because my personal experience with ConvertKit was actually that when we started getting more serious about our email marketing program at Caldera WP, we decided to migrate from Mailchimp to ConvertKit, and I found it so difficult to use that I switched back to Mailchimp.
Joe Howard:
Wow, interesting, because totally separate experiences.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
What about using it was difficult? You’re allowed to have a little bit… Like, this is good feedback for them, if they listen. This is good feedback.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, if they listen, this is good feedback, and I’d love to talk about it. And what’s funny is, I still have an extremely high opinion of ConvertKit; it’s just that I wasn’t the right user. ConvertKit is very much intended for someone who wants that incredibly powerful tagging system, and wants and has the capacity to get into the minutiae of absolutely targeted segmentation. And for me, that cost-benefit was a little bit off. It was so much work, and I just needed segmentation that was level two, not level seven. And I was already seeing the kinds of lists that I wanted from basic segmentation, and I didn’t have the marketing team in place to get into advanced segmentation of my users. And so, I found ConvertKit to be overkill for what I wanted to do, and I ended up bringing everybody back, because I was working with a bunch of contractors, and it was easier to contract out Mailchimp work than it was to contract out ConvertKit work.
Joe Howard:
Gotcha.
Christie Chirinos:
And a lot of my team and my users, especially working on a form plugin, were deeply, deeply visual people, so form design and things like that went a really long way. Email design, image design, and those things tended to be easier in Mailchimp. And I think that if anything, this is a lesson for our listeners on… Your product can be the most amazing product at its stated value proposition, and it’s still not going to be right for someone, and that’s okay. You don’t have to fight to get the people who aren’t right for you; different products are right for different people, and that’s why we have a large variety of products to choose from out there.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I totally agree with that. I think if people from ConvertKit are listening, they may actually be like, “Good.” I don’t actually consider Mailchimp and ConvertKit to be super-direct competitors, because I think… The way I think about it is like, Mailchimp is level one, like you start at Mailchimp. Most people do. Then level two is ConvertKit; if you want, have a team, and you’re doing more advanced stuff, you’d go to ConvertKit.
Joe Howard:
And then to me, I actually had the same issue as you did, but I’m maybe one level up, because I was choosing, I think, between level two and level three, and level three would be like ActiveCampaign, which I was looking at, and I had a sales call with them, two sales calls with them. And it was super expensive, and I was like, “But it does so much cool stuff,” but at the end of the day, I was like, “This is too fucking complicated. There is no way I’m going to be able to…” Managing this requires me to have a full-time, maybe not just a full-time marketer, but a full-time marketing team to manage just the organization around ActiveCampaign.
Joe Howard:
I think it’s super powerful, but that was my reason I didn’t go with them and I went with ConvertKit, was because I thought ConvertKit’s level two, I get this. As a marketer myself, my marketing skills are pretty good, and I can understand exactly what ConvertKit’s doing. It’s pretty simple for me. But ActiveCampaign, I was like… If it’s too complicated, I’m not going to do it, or I’m not going to understand it, or I’m not going to want to understand it, and I’m going to get frustrated, so I need it to be simple for me to be able to do it as well.
Joe Howard:
So, I think, I totally get where you’re coming from, Christie, and I think that that’s a really good point, actually. I’m super glad you brought that up, because I think, Terry, if you’re thinking about ConvertKit, yeah, you should probably have some segmenting and tag experience to want to go and to do more of that work. I think someone who’s a beginner could go and learn it, but it will take time to figure out how ConvertKit works, and all those things. Maybe there’s some… I’m sure there’s some YouTube videos out there that could help in all that stuff. But that’s a really good point, Christie, of ConvertKit’s probably like… I don’t know if I’d call it level two and Mailchimp level one, but it’s definitely level 1.5.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Like, it’s at least a half step up from Mailchimp. And I’ve heard Mailchimp now actually does segmenting and tags much better than it did when I was using it.
Christie Chirinos:
A lot more advanced than they did when I was making these [inaudible 00:52:11] for sure.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, okay, so I’ve heard that too. Maybe Mailchimp is good to… Still, if people aren’t super interested in… If you just want to send an email out to some folks, Mailchimp might be a good place to start. ConvertKit is like, once you’ve gotten your sea legs under you, maybe you move to ConvertKit. Maybe you start on ConvertKit if you’re feeling saucy, but if not, then Mailchimp’s fine too.
Christie Chirinos:
Use both.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, exactly.
Christie Chirinos:
No, don’t do that, please don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Pick one.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, [crosstalk 00:52:36] whoa, we’re going into Christie’s bad advice here, yeah. Next episode, yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Bad Advice with Christie Chirinos, yeah.
Joe Howard:
I’d listen to that podcast. Okay, cool. Well, we did three nice, juicy Q&A today, so we can probably wrap it up there. Let’s wrap it up, let’s finish out the episode.
Christie Chirinos:
All right.
Joe Howard:
If people want to have more awesome Q&A episodes like this, you’re more than welcome to shoot them in to yo@wpmrr.com. We really like to do these Q&A episodes, and yeah, it’d be fun to do some more. People can binge the episodes. Right, Christie? Should they go and do some binging?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. Get into your podcast app and sort from oldest to newest, and hit Play. Bam.
Joe Howard:
Ooh. Does mine do that?
Christie Chirinos:
100 hours of content.
Joe Howard:
I don’t even know if mine does that. Is that a thing, you can sort different ways? I don’t think I… I think mine automatically sorts by newest to oldest. You can do it different ways, I guess.
Christie Chirinos:
Really? I think you can usually flip it, at least you can on the Google Podcasts app.
Joe Howard:
Okay. I use Downcast, so I don’t know, maybe they have ways. I’ll check it out.
Christie Chirinos:
Maybe it can. I don’t really know.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, do what Christie said, order and listen. But maybe… Yeah, go check out our first episode. That’d be a trip. [crosstalk 00:54:01], probably didn’t know anything then. What else? Reviews, oh yeah. Hey, we love those. If you want to give us a nice review-
Christie Chirinos:
Please.
Joe Howard:
… that would be super awesome. It helps us in a bunch of different ways, actually. Obviously, it helps us get found in the iTunes store, that’s nice. It makes us feel good and want us to do more episodes, which is awesome. It also actually gives us really good feedback for new episode ideas, so if you leave a comment like, “Hey, I loved this, would love…” Like, “Love this topic, five stars,” we’ll do more topics about that. So, all it takes is a quick wpmrr.com/itunes, and just leave a little five-star review. That would be super splendid.
Christie Chirinos:
Just a little five-star review.
Joe Howard:
A little five-star review. Wpmrr.com, some big news coming out around wpmrr.com. I don’t know when this episode’s going to launch, so I’m not going to say anything right now, but-
Christie Chirinos:
Ooh, mysterious.
Joe Howard:
… if it’s out there, you’ll know about it. We’re launching a new Twitter account for WPMRR, and I’ll tweet about it. Like, it’ll be out there in the sphere of WordPress. So, come and look around for WPMRR stuff, and we’d love to see it. So, mystery closed, end mystery. Code text. Cool, you can tell I’m not [inaudible 00:55:24] because I don’t even know how to say that. We will be in your podcast players again next Tuesday. All right, see you, Christie.
Christie Chirinos:
Christie Chirinos:
Hello, WordPress people. Welcome back to WPMRR WordPress Podcast. I’m Christie.
Joe Howard:
And I’m Joe.
Christie Chirinos:
And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. What’s going on in your life this week, Joe?
Joe Howard:
This week feels like kind of a new beginning for me, like a new chapter, because Morrison started his… Today he’s at his third day of daycare today, and he goes… It’s like everyone’s being super safe, as safe as possible, everyone who’s going gets negative tests, negative COVID tests. The daycare, they do the temperature when you walk in, that kind of stuff. But he’s gone for three days this week, and I feel like I’ve gotten so much work done, it’s crazy. Like, I can sit down for like three hours and work on something now, and it’s totally… It’s like I didn’t really realize how, you know, I was getting some stuff done, but it was like 15 minutes of work, hang out with the baby for half an hour, 15 minutes of work. You know, it was like I was trying to put a lot into a little bit of time. Now I really have time to spread my wings a little bit and do some more work, so it’s been excellent. That’s what’s new with me and my newfound bandwidth.
Christie Chirinos:
I mean, that is super exciting. Isn’t it so funny how we take things for granted sometimes with the whole “I can work for three whole hours without stopping”? Yeah, well, congratulations. They grow up so fast.
Joe Howard:
Thank you, thank you. What is new with you?
Christie Chirinos:
It also feels like a new beginning for me, because I have relocated completely to Austin, Texas.
Joe Howard:
Wow.
Christie Chirinos:
So, Joe and I, as of this recording, small tear, are no longer in the same city. That was a fun year of this podcast being produced in Washington, DC, but alas, that has now changed. And I’m excited about it. You know, Joe knows, most people, if you know me and you listen to this podcast and you personally know me, you know that I move around a lot. I’ve sort of always been semi-nomadic, and just the trying on different things, especially at this stage in life, and with the flexibility that our job allows. I was here, I got here about a month ago, and finished bringing over the rest of my belongings, not very many, but I had some things. I had like two pieces of furniture. Finished bringing those over over the weekend, and here I am.
Joe Howard:
Amazing. We were talking a little bit off air about this before we started recording. I was saying, “Oh, I’m going to miss you very much,” but it sounds like an exciting opportunity for you, and I was like, oh, I’d probably do the same in your shoes. Austin, lots of outdoor space right now, when you can still go outside without necessarily having too much social… I don’t know, what’s the difference… What’s the opposite of social distancing? Social proximity?
Christie Chirinos:
Closeness?
Joe Howard:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:03:13], all sorts of stuff. Closeness, I should’ve thought of that one. But it’s also, it’s a little bit cheaper of a city too.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
DC is, we know, is somewhat expensive, and so it’ll be a nice change of pace for you, I think. Plus, it’s like, yes, I will miss you and hanging out in person more often, but WordCamps will come back, and plus, we see each other every week because we do this anyway, so it’s… [inaudible 00:03:39], in person we will miss a little bit, but we still get to see each other every week, so that’s cool.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. Leaving Joe and [Mo 00:03:47] and [Sterling 00:03:48] behind was definitely on the cons column. But yeah, exactly, the pros column contained a whole lot of, hey, our lives are not and should not return to “normal” any time soon, and if I’m leaving in this abnormal situation for the next 12 months, I need to do that somewhere where I can save some money, be healthier, and have a little bit more space to be inside. I lived in a 400-square-foot studio apartment in downtown Washington, DC, so awesome during normal times, where I can go outside every single day and go to bars and go places, and the very expensive and beautiful city that is Washington, DC, is my living room. Not so awesome during pandemic times, and so, made some quick decisions, and thankfully, I’m very privileged that my life has that flexibility where I can just be like, “All right, you know, let’s try something different.” So, I’m feeling great, but yeah, it’s definitely a new adventure.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah. You also mentioned that there’s other folks on LiQuid Web team too in Austin, right? So you get to combine remote life and some IRL work time as well, so that’s cool.
Christie Chirinos:
I’m actually super excited about that. There are maybe about 15 or so Liquid Webbers, Nexcessers, here in Austin, and then the whole bunch of them in San Antonio, which is about an hour away. I am pumped about that. I’ve said for a while that to me, I love remote work, and I would never go back, but I’m the kind of person where the lack of office culture and office social life is actually a drawback of remote work. It’s something that I deal with and compensate for, but that I genuinely enjoy the traditional office-work setting. But the benefits of remote work are so outstanding that I sacrifice the office social life. And so, I feel like I am going to get a little bit of the best of both worlds by being here, and I’m really excited about that.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. That’s a really good point, actually, because I think remote work has a lot of advantages, and a lot of people like the aspect of being able to work remotely and not being location dependent, and that’s great, but I think great remote work probably comes with some balance of some in-real-life interaction, maybe not totally professionally, but at least personally. There has to be some aspect of what you do that’s IRL too, because human beings are such social creatures. Maybe some are extroverts and some are introverts, but it’s like… During this whole COVID thing, it’s like we’ve had to lock down in our house and work remotely, which is great, we can keep working, but I don’t know about you, I’m sure you know some people too, it’s like they feel like they’ve hit breaking points of, “I’ve been sitting in my house for six straight weeks doing work, and it’s kind of driving me a little crazy.”
Joe Howard:
Yes, remote work’s nice, it’s nice to be able to do that, but you got to find some sort of balance with some outdoor time, or some friends time, or some… you know, a happy hour now and again, and some social interaction, because it’s tough… Remote work is tough when it’s 100% remote. It’s kind of like anything, it’s tough when you’re 100% that. You need a little bit of balance.
Christie Chirinos:
Absolutely, and I think that we maybe found that balance, and then that balance was thrown off center by the coronavirus pandemic, and so we’re having to re-find that balance and figure out how that’s going to work for us in a world that’s probably not going back to the way it used to be, right? Even when we have a vaccine and we can have our old normal back, there are economic things that probably won’t go back to being the exact same way. How many companies are now fully remote and are kind of loving it, and could be saving $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month on that commercial office space, you know? So we’ll see, and we’ll all have to figure out how to operate as more remote workers.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah, or like Twitter, they’re like, “Oh, we’re remote now, no one has to come back to the office,” or Jack Dorsey’s like, “No one come back to the office.” Imagine how much they’re saving in office space.
Christie Chirinos:
Millions.
Joe Howard:
You remember, it was like two years ago, I think, when Automattic made that announcement, that they’re losing their San Francisco office, they’re moving out of it? It was like two years ago or something, and I remember reading about it. I can’t remember how much they were spending on it, but it was like, “Holy shit, Automattic has been spending that much on an office where like 10 people come in a week? That’s pretty crazy.”
Christie Chirinos:
Right. I remember the article and that headline, and I remember the article saying, “Yeah, you know, right now coming to the office is optional, and it’s kind of quiet and sad in here because no one takes advantage of it.” It was a Bay Area office.
Joe Howard:
Probably tumbleweeds, tumbleweeds rolling across, yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. But yeah.
Joe Howard:
Right on. Today, whew, we have another Q&A episode, but before we dive into that, we wanted to chat a little bit about our episode about being minorities in the WordPress space. This is our first time jumping on and being on the podcast and recording after recording that episode, and we just wanted to, I don’t know, give not a recap, but maybe some shout-outs to some of the feedback we got from it, and just put a little bit of a bow on it, because it was kind of an intense episode. If you haven’t listen to it, feel free to jump back a few episodes and check it out. But yeah, maybe you want to start with some of the, I don’t know, feedback you got, and/or some of the last, somewhat final commentary… “Final” is like, this is an ongoing conversation that will never be final, probably, but to put a bow onto that specific episode, anything you wanted to say about it?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, I mean, I thought that we got really positive responses to the episode. I definitely want to acknowledge it just because it would feel kind of awkward and random to not acknowledge it, right? It was very much an unusual episode for us, and when we published it, we got an unusual amount of…
Joe Howard:
Unusual amount of microphone feedback.
Christie Chirinos:
Please hold, technical difficulties.
Joe Howard:
Do you want me to go?
Christie Chirinos:
We’re back.
Joe Howard:
You still sound good to me, I think you’re on.
Christie Chirinos:
Oh, yeah, okay, good. Wow, what was I saying?
Joe Howard:
Some of the feedback you got from the episode, you said it was mostly… Mostly positive, yeah?
Christie Chirinos:
We mostly got… Yeah, all positive feedback, definitely was a bit of an unusual episode for us, and I think our listeners and people especially within the WordPress community noticed. But yeah, just want to shout out a couple of people that were really sweet. Chris Ford, you’re wonderful and a big supporter, and thank you for using your voice to amplify the podcast episode. And yeah, also the contributor most commonly known as Rarst, Andrey Savchenko, thank you so much for your support, and Rachel Cherry, thank you for your support. And yeah, just thanks for reaching out, for listening to the episode. I hope you learned something new. Definitely also want to shout out Liam Dempsey, big fan of him and all his work within the WordPress community, and just some people that reached out and said nice things about the episode. Thanks for listening, and thanks for being you.
Joe Howard:
Oh my God, Liam’s just… Liam’s the best.
Christie Chirinos:
Yes.
Joe Howard:
I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who’s so purely good before. I don’t know, every time I talk to him, I’m like, “Oh my God.” He’s like an angel almost. I’m like, “So, Liam…” Yeah, what Christie said, I couldn’t say any better. Thank you for being you. I’m actually talking to him on Twitter right now, DMing him about sponsoring WordCamp Philly this year, so it’s a good coincidence.
Christie Chirinos:
Ah, cool.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I wanted to give a few shout-outs to some folks too. I got a few here, just a few nice responses to the episode. Kevin Hoffman from the Give team just tweeted at us, “Thank you for sharing your stories, experiences, recommendations with us. The paradox of tolerance, that’s a new concept for me, and I enjoyed learning more about it after the episode.” So thanks, Kevin, for the reply. Aaron Jorbin gave a nice thank-you to us, a nice little reply, so thanks, Aaron.
Christie Chirinos:
I love Aaron.
Joe Howard:
Aaron, shout-out. Brasco… Brasco. There’s no first name in the Twitter account, or maybe Brasco is your first name, there’s no last name? But Brascoder, Brasco, thank you. “Just listened to this episode. Thank you both for using your platform to shed light on the issue.” And Brasco also looks like a minority in the WordPress community, so it’s nice to get some feedback from other folks who are also in our same shoes who listened to the episode, because, you know, there are people from different backgrounds listening, and so it’s nice to get some positive feedback from different folks, which is nice.
Joe Howard:
Joseph Dickinson… Nope, sorry, Joseph Dickson. Messed your name up, Joseph, but I’ll say your name a few times now and give you more shout-outs because I messed your name up, Joseph. Awesome name, Joseph. Your name’s super dope. “The most important WordPress community conversation I’ve listened to in some time.” Thank you, Joe. I don’t know if you like to be called Joe; some people don’t like to go by nicknames. Hannah Smith gave us a nice reply. The Events Calendar gave us a nice reply.
Christie Chirinos:
Oh yeah, I saw that.
Joe Howard:
I’ll read those tweets quickly, because I don’t want to leave them… I read other tweets out, I don’t want to leave them out. Hannah said, “Took the time out to sit down and listen to this episode today, and I’m so glad I did. It was a great convo to be party to, and you did it so well. Kudos to you and a million thank yous.” Heart emoji. Is it a green heart emoji? I like the alternate heart, not just the basic red heart, but a green heart.
Christie Chirinos:
Purple heart, blue heart.
Joe Howard:
Purple heart, blue heart.
Christie Chirinos:
Yellow heart.
Joe Howard:
Events Calendar: “Really great episode, Joe and Christie. Extremely important for the WP community to think about inclusiveness more, especially when it comes to dismantling systematic racism.” They got it. They got the… They listened, they definitely listened, because they nailed that one, pretty much. So, Events Calendar, thank you, appreciate it.
Joe Howard:
I also got some DMs, some folks slid into my DMs because I said… Okay, my direct messages are no longer open, because I don’t leave them open for extenuating periods, because I don’t like to get a ton of direct messages, because I’m… Honestly, it’s not just because it’s spammy a lot of the times, but just because I’m not going to probably read them that much, because I’m not on Twitter all the time. But I did get some messages as well. Taco Verdo sent me a very nice direct message. It’s pretty similarly in the vein of what other people sent me. It was a direct message, so I’m not going to read it, because it was not a public tweet, it’s a direct message. So, Taco, I’m not trying to not give you a shout-out. I super appreciate the message; I just want to be cognizant of your privacy. It’s a direct message, so I’m not going to read it, but thank you, Taco, for the equally as awesome feedback I got from other places. Last-
Christie Chirinos:
I got a message from Taco too, but I wanted to let you give the shout-out, but thank you, Taco. Your message meant a lot to me
Joe Howard:
Oh, okay. You get a double shout-out, Taco, nice job, nice work. Thank you. And honestly, this is a good moment to give a little bit of feedback for everybody. We both got direct messages from Taco. We both loved Taco before, but now we super love Taco. So a really easy way to make good friends in the WordPress community is like, “Hey, I saw this thing you did. Nice job.” It really takes 10 seconds, and it really can connect you with someone. So, Taco, you’re at the top of my list now, buddy. Thank you.
Joe Howard:
Cory Miller gave us some nice shares, he shared us in the Post Status group. We got some nice shares in this episode. We’ve got a share in the Post Status newsletter, which you should for sure subscribe to, and the MasterWP newsletter, which you should for sure subscribe to, and the Repository newsletter, which is sent out by MailPoet, which you should also subscribe to. So, it was nice to see it get shared around a lot. I think that sharing is indicative of saying, “I agree with something, and I think this should be put out there in the world, and I want to share with my audience,” and that gives positive… It’s not just like pushing a button to say “I’m sharing this,” it’s like, “I have some agreeance with that.”
Christie Chirinos:
We might say sharing is caring.
Joe Howard:
Ooh, sharing is caring, on this episode of Barney, or Sesame Street. So, yeah. That’s all we wanted to say about the episode, just give some people some shout-outs and thank you for the positive feedback on it. Yeah, we may do some more episodes like that in the future. We’ll try to stick to monthly recurring revenue-related stuff, but these are important topics, and we want to talk about monthly recurring revenue, but we want to talk about what’s most important right now in the WordPress space, so, glad we got to do that episode, and we appreciate all the positive feedback. So, woo.
Joe Howard:
Okay, Q&A episode. Episode 100 was a Q&A episode, and episode 100 and… whatever episode this is going to be, 5, 6, something, I don’t know, will also be a Q&A episode. So, we got some nice questions to go through. Christie, are you ready?
Christie Chirinos:
I love Q&A episodes. I’m ready, these are my favorite.
Joe Howard:
All right, sweet. First Q&A… First Q, and we’ll give the A. First question is from Nate Hoffelder. Nate’s in DC with us, so… A lot of shout-outs this episode, shout-out Nate, thanks for the question. Nate’s question is, “Does everyone here…” Or, “Do folks have a plan for if they get hit by a car?” is pretty much the question. There’s also a follow-up question which is like, “Who doesn’t have one?” which I think is also an interesting part to the question, because there’s stuff to talk about around having an “if you get hit by a bus” or “if you get hit by a car” plan, and people who don’t, why don’t you, and what do you… Do you need one? What should be included in it? So it’s kind of two pieces of the same question, but a super-interesting one. Christie, you want to give an answer for… Do you have one? I don’t know, do you?
Christie Chirinos:
I have so many thoughts on this one. Bus factor. The bus factor is real, and bus factor is a huge business risk that you need to be aware of, and that it takes a lot of humility to work through. You are not forever, you are not invincible. You could go down any second, and whatever you’ve created doesn’t only belong to you, it also belongs to your team, your users, your customers, your investors if you have them, your vendors. And if you don’t have a bus factor plan, you need to make one, because figuring out how things are going to continue to exist without you is, in my opinion, the ultimate goal of what we’re doing here with WPMRR.
Christie Chirinos:
With that said, the “Who doesn’t have one?” bit of this question really gets me, because-
Joe Howard:
Me too.
Christie Chirinos:
… because I actually know someone who straight-up got hit by a car.
Joe Howard:
Oh man, [crosstalk 00:19:36].
Christie Chirinos:
Like, was biking down a bridge and got hit by a car going 55 miles an hour, and they were knocked off this bicycle.
Joe Howard:
[crosstalk 00:19:48].
Christie Chirinos:
If they hadn’t been wearing a helmet, they would’ve died. And he was incapacitated for three months, he had several concussions, he couldn’t take care of himself for three months. And let me tell you that no plan that you have for getting hit by a car is enough of a plan.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:20:08], totally.
Christie Chirinos:
It is just the kind of thing that when it happens, you’re just flying by the seat of your pants. You can plan for this, and I don’t know that he had a plan, right? But just the severity of this type of situation, of anything that incapacitates you for several months. I want to tell you that I think at the time, this friend of mine was in pharmacy school, and it was like, yeah, there’s definitely a bus factor risk of being in pharmacy school, also known as “What if you get hit by a car and then can’t continue?” But when he was in bed, unable to take care of himself, his entire family was coming together to take care of him for the next three months, no one was thinking about pharmacy school. And chances are that if you got hit by a car, literally, you would not be thinking about your business as much as you would be thinking about your physical survival.
Christie Chirinos:
With that said, bus factor risk in business is extremely important to consider, because even if people don’t literally get hit by a car, we don’t want to create dependencies on single people. What do you do about this, Joe, at WP Buffs? You have more of a problem with this than I do now.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, that’s true. I do want to ask more from your side, because even as a teammate and employee, it’s important, your role is… Like, what if no one’s doing… What if you’re not there for the next month? Who picks up the pieces? How do other people pick up the pieces? There’s a lot of systems questions there. But I’ll go into how I think about things at WP Buffs.
Joe Howard:
You’re also very right, especially at big companies, they have… It’s like C-suite insurance. It’s literally an insurance you can go get, and it’s pretty fucking expensive. Like, think about Automattic. Matt Mullenweg has… They probably pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for insurance on Matt, because if something happens to him, he’s a huge part of Automattic. They get a payout, it’s insurance. It’s probably the same with a lot of big companies; WP Engine I’m sure has a lot of this stuff. Any big company that you’re thinking in the WordPress space definitely has insurance, especially on C-suite employees. So it’s a real thing; you can literally get insurance for this.
Joe Howard:
We don’t have that insurance; I don’t have that insurance for us, speaking honestly. But we do have things in place so that if I’m incapacitated suddenly, things will be okay. Interestingly, we’ve done episodes before about how to take a three-week vacation; that was one of our first 10 episodes I think we did. We’ve done a lot of episodes about how to decouple yourself from being super required to do day-to-day stuff at your work, and being able to replace yourself pretty easily.
Joe Howard:
So, a lot of this is actually stuff you should be thinking about on a regular basis, regardless of if you get hit by a car or not. You should be making sure other people can do your job if they need to and be flexible around that. It’s one of the reasons why we’re very big on forcing people to take vacations and forcing people to take time off, because it’s not only good for that person’s mental health to take some time away, but it helps other people have to take up those persons’ responsibilities. It gives people more responsibilities and more ability to be promoted and stuff. So, it’s actually good for everybody, so that’s something you can think about, because if that person gets hit by a bus 10 days after they get back from vacation, well, someone else was ready to pick up their stuff already. So, that’s something.
Joe Howard:
Another thing, just from a practical standpoint, is have health insurance coverage for yourself and your employees. If you get hit by a car and you have $50,000 in medical expenses, and you’re a contractor, you’re a little bit screwed. That’s something you’re going to have to pay out for the next 10 years of your life, maybe, if you don’t have health insurance. That’s crazy. So, I think that if you’re not majorly successful financially or whatever-
Christie Chirinos:
If you’re not in the US.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:24:19] not in the US. If you’re a leader of your company, have health insurance for US employees. Cover health care expenses for your international employees. A lot of international outside the US people have state-sponsored health care, but they still have to pay for it. Pay whatever their $200 a month for health care coverage is. We do that for all our employees, even international ones, and for US ones, we have full US coverage, and really good health insurance. We’re hiring right now, so come talk to me if you are looking for a new team to join. But have health insurance; that’s just a… That’s an important thing for if you get hit by a car, I think, a pretty practical one too.
Joe Howard:
The last thing I’ll say here is just, it kind of goes with the other thing I was just mentioning, but most… Especially for leadership positions, but for most positions, you should probably have a junior to you who’s learning to do what you do. There’s not that much that I do at WP Buffs that’s like “Joe has to do this.” There’s some marketing stuff that I’m the best at, for sure; there’s some decision-making that I’m the best at, for sure. But if I wasn’t here, someone else could, and especially a group of other people could come together and make probably about as good a decision as I could. I mean, the amount of times I’ve made a decision and part of my leadership team has been like, “Nope, that’s not what we should do,” and I’ve been like, “Yup, you’re right, thank you for letting me know,” is a ton of times.
Joe Howard:
So, I think for me, it’s having Nick around, especially, but Dean also. I mean, they’re both people I rely on heavily all the time, and the more I rely on them, the more responsibility and accountability over work they can have, the more they give back to WP Buffs, and the more ready they are to be leaders at WP Buffs. And they are, and have been for a long time, so I’m far from the only leader here at WP Buffs, and probably not the most important piece of the equation, and that’s been… I’ve done that purposefully, not just it just happened to happen. I was like, Nick and Dean are going to be more central to our core competencies than I am. Also, they’re just super great at what they do, and there wasn’t really another thing that could’ve happened. Like, I couldn’t have stopped it if I tried. They’re too good at what they do.
Joe Howard:
So, yeah. I mean, those are some, I guess, somewhat practical things to have in place. But now we’re talking about insurance. I probably should have some sort of additional insurance for if I get hit by something. I think that’s probably a pretty good idea, but… Yeah, I don’t know. What do you think, slash what are maybe some systems you have at Liquid Web that are helpful?
Christie Chirinos:
I agree with everything you said. I think that for people who are curious about this or have never maybe even considered it before, I deeply, deeply encourage you to Google “bus factor,” right? Talks about this particular type of business risk-
Joe Howard:
Bus factor. I never heard of that specifically, but it’s a good term [crosstalk 00:27:13], okay.
Christie Chirinos:
It’s a term, yup, that’s a term, that’s a term. It talks about the specific type of business risk, how to overcome it. It’s a very well-documented phenomenon, because… And this is kind of what you wanted me to talk about, was even in large companies, this is a problem, because if you have one person who is very central to a lot of processes and a lot of stuff lives in their head, if something happens to them, that can bring down hundreds of people, right? So bus factor business risk is something very important, and that’s literally what it’s called, and it’s called that because it’s the “What if you get hit by a bus?” type situation, right?
Christie Chirinos:
This has especially gone out into the entrepreneurship and startup spaces, because obviously, bus factor is massive with founders. But it can be really key with, say, directors of engineering; it can be very key with product leads. Product leads have big bus factor. And especially, for example, my role, I am not a product manager, I’m the product manager for the product line for Managed WooCommerce at Nexcess, which means that with me, if we weren’t doing things correctly, there could be some bus factor. There could be things about Managed WooCommerce that only live in my head, and that if I got hit by a bus, knock on wood, then we would possibly have some difficulty, right?
Christie Chirinos:
And so, how do we overcome that? Well, we collaborate on teams, right? I work on a team, and my team knows what I’m working on every day. So, if I got hit by a bus, my team together can take over, and that goes back to what you were saying about how bus factor for founders eventually turns into a leadership team can make decisions that that person would’ve traditionally made, right? So, maybe we work a little bit less efficiently because we’re going from one person singularly making decisions to a group of people coming together to make decisions. But groups of people make optimal decisions a lot of the time when they come in with different types of expertise, so that can be really helpful.
Christie Chirinos:
And then another thing that I do, because I’m particularly conscious of this type of problem, is I document everything. When I come up… I have this one Google Doc that it’s just my job, and when I come up with new things or new rules or new places to do things, I just jot them down in a little list. And that also makes the process of handing off work, whether for vacation or to move on to your next role, a lot easier, because then you can just be like, “Hey, here’s the thing. I documented all the stuff that I’m doing. This should give you what you need to get started.”
Joe Howard:
Yeah. Yeah, documenting’s big about that too. It’s a big reason why documenting’s so important, you know, obviously to get systems down, be more efficient at things, and share information, but part of sharing information is like, if something happens to one person, everybody has access to it. Definitely something we probably don’t do a good enough job at. We’re actually doing a big revamp on all our documentation right now and making it better, and getting one real central hub for it. That’s something I’ve written down… Actually, also just emailed the guy who manages… He’s our broker, he manages all our insurance and stuff like that, and I asked him about this insurance, so I will be looking more into this as well.
Joe Howard:
I know small businesses, there is insurance you can apply for as a small business to… It’s like business insurance. It’s around this kind of thing, like if I get incapacitated or something, so there’s not… It’s not just for big companies. I think there are also smaller-company versions of it, or maybe it’s just you just pay less because you’re a smaller company or something. I don’t know exactly how they… I’d have to do some more research into seeing exactly how they calculate it, but that’s definitely something people should look into. “Business insurance for founders” would be what I would Google to check this out if you’re a smaller business or freelancer with your own little LLC, definitely something to look into. So, cool, nice, good answers, Christie. I think that was pretty good.
Christie Chirinos:
Awesome.
Joe Howard:
All right, next question. This next question is from Daniele Besana. Thanks for the question, Daniele. I think it’s Daniele, I think is how you pronounce it, D-A-N-I-E-L-E.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
So, Daniele.
Christie Chirinos:
That’s like Italian Daniel.
Joe Howard:
It’s just the spelling on that. Yeah, it’s a non-English spelling, so, sorry, Daniele. But I think I got it right.
Christie Chirinos:
I went to high school with a guy named Daniele with an E at the end, and everybody called him Danielle, and he was like, “No, it’s Daniele.”
Joe Howard:
He was like, “Goddammit.”
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Well, I’m glad… See, your experience is coming very important here to the [crosstalk 00:31:56].
Christie Chirinos:
Thank you, Daniele.
Joe Howard:
“Hello, folks.” Okay, so this is kind of a subscription versus one-time support question. Daniele asks, “Nine out of ten leads ask for a one-time quote and are not interested in a subscription. At this stage, we only want subscriptions, so we consider them out of scope. I’m trying to figure out if it is a normal ratio, or if we’re attracting the wrong leads. Do you have any experience that most of the people don’t want a subscription? Any input is appreciated.”
Joe Howard:
So, this is kind of more support-related for me, because hosting companies don’t get, probably, people asking for one-time stuff, but maybe in your support, you do get a good amount of people asking for, like, “I need help with this WordPress thing, can you help?” This was specifically for, like, “I’m selling care plans, and I get people asking, ‘I just need help with this one thing, can you help?'” But I think we can probably both have interesting answers to this, because again, I’m sure you get support that’s totally outside the scope as a hosting company, and I know a lot of hosting companies do. So, what about for a hosting company, Christie? Obviously you do subscription billing, and you want to get people on subscriptions. Do you get asked for one-time support a lot? And if so, what do you do with the one-time help ask?
Christie Chirinos:
I have a lot of thoughts on this, because yeah, we do, actually, fun fact. With hosting, when we get asked for “one-time quotes,” what ends up happening, really, is somebody has the specific length of engagement, and they don’t want to sign up for something recurring, so they’re like, “Can I just pay for a chunk of time at once?” Usually a year, right?
Joe Howard:
Of hosting.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative). So, we actually do have annual billing, but it’s annual recurring. So you can get billed annually if you want, you’ll get a discount for doing it.
Joe Howard:
As opposed to monthly?
Christie Chirinos:
Right.
Joe Howard:
Yes.
Christie Chirinos:
You’ll get a discount for doing it, because obviously, money now is better than money in the future. And a lot of the time, people will say, “Oh, can it be just this year?” and it’s like, no. “Well, why?” And that goes back into the core of this question, which is, because when you’re selling a subscription, you are selling ongoing value. To me, you getting this question indicates that you’re not communicating your ongoing value. I don’t know what Daniele’s website looks like or what types of content he’s putting out that’s attracting leads, but if your marketing clearly states, “This is the way in which we’re going to help you from now until the future, this is what you’re going to get for your entire life every month from us,” then people don’t ask, “Oh, but can I just get it one time?”
Christie Chirinos:
And then, when they say, “Can I just get it one time?” you can easily turn the conversation around and be like, “No, no, no, the benefit of this is that you continue to get it. Look at all these new things that happen every month. Look at all of these ways in which we save you time and continue to build upon the thing that you’re paying on each month due to your monthly subscription. The product gets better, the services get deeper. We get to know you better.” Because the reality is that if you’re selling something that’s just kind of the same every month, of course they only want to buy it one time and then kind of get over it, right? You have to continue to keep building.
Christie Chirinos:
You asked about out-of-scope support requests in hosting, and yeah, we get those all the time, right? There are people that specialize in one-offs like this, and that is what they want, and we keep a directory of them, but it’s not what we do. Right? That is a type of product, and that product itself has been productized in a way; it’s just not what we do, and we have an entire partner directory where we can send people and say, “Hey, this person needs help with this one particular thing, they want to build out this one particular feature.” The reality is that a lot of the time, when you’re looking at things that are one-offs, one-offs are rarely one-offs. How many things in this life do you really, truly, only need to do one time? Very few.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think people who come for one-off help often are going to need help on an ongoing basis. The challenge you have as a business owner is, how much time is it going to take to educate that customer on the value enough, to the point of getting them to buy a subscription? And is that worth your cost of acquisition cost in terms of education? Because education is one of the most expensive customer acquisition costs. If you have to educate everybody who comes to you that they need to go from one-time to subscription and then close them, that’s going to take a ton of resources and time.
Joe Howard:
I agree with what you said, Christie, about just messaging and marketing and copy. I think that Daniele said nine out of ten people come to him for one-time support. To me, that’s, yeah, one of two, probably, issues it’s most likely. One is either targeting the wrong kinds of customer or the wrong kind of target market, where they’re people who just need one-time support. So you may have the wrong traffic coming to your website, so if you wrote a blog post about where to go to find a freelancer for the help on that one small issue, and you get a lot of traffic to that blog post, and people are contacting you, well, probably it’s because they were searching Google for “How do I find one-time help?” and then they came to you.
Joe Howard:
So, that would be an example of just targeting… And I’ve never seen Daniele’s website before, but… This is totally an example, but that would be an example of writing a blog post that actually targeted the wrong kind of customer for you. When you’re looking for subscription customers, you want to write more blog posts like what we do at WP Buffs, like “How do you make more monthly recurring revenue?” “What tools can I implement on my site to actually capture subscriptions?” There’s more subscription-related stuff you can write.
Joe Howard:
So, that’s one thing, is just the targeting aspect, and then the second is the actual copy on your website, and the way in which you’re selling your services and subscriptions, which is kind of what you were talking about, Christie. It’s like, you don’t want to be talking about one-time support on your sales pages. You want to be talking about the subscriptions you offer, and educate people on the website, because that’s a much more scalable way to educate people than having to talk with every single customer and explain the difference between one-time and subscription. Explain it really nicely on your website, maybe have a video about subscriptions. The more you can talk about the subscription service, the more you’re going to attract people who are interested in a technical partner or whatever, a subscription, and the less you’ll have to talk to people who want one-time help, because they’ll get the message.
Joe Howard:
This is a challenge. We still get a good amount of people that come and ask for one-time support. And it’s annoying, I’m not going to lie. It’s a little annoying. Did you not read anything on the website? We talk about subscriptions everywhere, and people are like, “Maybe I missed it. Maybe they do do one-time support, maybe I should ask them.” Which I get; I shouldn’t make fun of them with that voice. You’re allowed to ask for one-time help, that’s fine. We just don’t do it, if you’re listening. Don’t ask for one-time help, we don’t do it.
Christie Chirinos:
“Oh. Oh, right.”
Joe Howard:
Yeah. But that’s part of business, also. You’re never going to target a hundred percent the right people. It’s a long-time play, you have to change, you have to adapt, you have to improve. The goal for good customers is to continue to try and attract good customers. How do you attract more people like that? And you can talk to your current customers: “Hey, what else do you need? What else can we build to help you more around subscription stuff?” That’s a good way to attract more people like the subscription customers you already have.
Joe Howard:
What do you do with the people who come to you that are asking for one-time support? For me, I like to keep them in my universe. Like, I like them to be subscribed to my email list, I like for them to read our blog. I want to help them; it’s not like I don’t want to help them. That’s cool. And maybe over the long term, we’ll educate them. But I also don’t want to spend high price time on them. I don’t want to spend five hours trying to sell them on something if they’re not going to end up buying it. I want to attract people who are interested in a subscription so I can spend one hour selling them, and get them in, and get their lifetime value up.
Joe Howard:
I always say, get the people you… Look for your red flag metrics, like people asking for one-time support, that’s a red flag metric for us. Get those people out of your direct sales funnel and get them into your long-term sales funnel, or your education funnel, or your email list, and you’re sending them out more podcast episode or blog posts. And then maybe in a year, they’re like, “Oh, I have like 10,000 visitors a month on my blog now. I need someone to manage it, because I’ve got to work on growing it. This could be a big thing.” Maybe at that point, they’ll be ready. So, that’s some of my advice, and I think that hopefully is helpful. That’s how we think about it at WP Buffs, how I think about it at WP Buffs, anyway.
Christie Chirinos:
Agreed.
Joe Howard:
Sweet. Okay, we could do one more question. Do you have time, Christie, or do you have a… time?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, I have one more question, although I feel a little bit of shyness around this one. I’m going to let you go first.
Joe Howard:
Okay, I will go first.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
And you can comment if you’d like to, but you don’t have to. This is our podcast, Christie, we do what we want. You talk about stuff, you don’t talk about stuff, whatever. This question is… And let me do a quick little search to make sure I know who it is. It’s from Terry Loving. Thank you for the question, Terry. Also, excellent last name.
Christie Chirinos:
Loving.
Joe Howard:
My son, Morrison, his middle name is Loving as well, and so, excellent name choice there. I won’t tell the whole story about the middle name, but same middle name, so Terry, super appreciate you. Terry’s question is, “Wondering what advantage you find working with ConvertKit versus others.”
Joe Howard:
I will tell my quick story about ConvertKit. I love ConvertKit for certain reasons, and I also dislike it for other reasons, and let me talk a little bit about that, because I love… Let me talk first about the reason why I love ConvertKit. I love ConvertKit because it solved a really big pain point for us and for a ton of people by doing a few things really, really well. We used to use Mailchimp, like three years ago, and it just didn’t have simple… Like, how do I get a list of people tagged with this thing, or segmented with this thing? It had horrible tagging and segmentation, and I just wanted to say, “If someone clicks this link, it tags them as someone who uses WooCommerce.” Like, they clicked on “10 WooCommerce strategies to use,” it tags them as WooCommerce, so when I send a WooCommerce email out, I can just send it to those people.
Joe Howard:
Mailchimp was shit at doing that, totally horrible. And maybe they’re better at it now, I haven’t used Mailchimp in three years, so I won’t totally shit on them right now. But ConvertKit did it awesome and made it so easy, so I was like, “Let’s use ConvertKit.” Like, tagging and segmenting are done so well, it’s perfect.
Joe Howard:
But they also do some things that I would expect better of a somewhat big bootstrapped company, like a company that starts revenue-funded and doesn’t raise money, and makes it to… Like, we just crossed a million-dollar-a-year barrier, which has been pretty cool, so it’s like, “Yeah, we hit this cool milestone of a million dollars at WP Buffs.” ConvertKit is at, like… I think they do like $2 million a month, so they’re at like $25 million a year as a bootstrap company, which is pretty big for a bootstrap software company. Not the biggest, but significant size. They should be doing, like, have a better editor. The editor is pretty wonky, and some text doesn’t come through the right size in email. So, it’s totally not perfect. There’s definitely things I think they could work on and do better at.
Joe Howard:
But they do great things in terms of email, tagging, and segmenting, and if you just want to have a sub-list of people of your whole list that are of a certain… something special about them, they clicked on a WooCommerce, or maybe they run a membership site. Or for us, we do direct customers, are they an agency, are they a freelancer? Those are important for sales. And to monetize an email list, this is kind of a best practice, but it’s also, I feel like it’s pretty true, is you have to segment our email list into somewhat relevant areas so that you can send people things that they want. If you just send every email to every person, you’re going to have higher unsubscribe rates, you’re going to have higher people not really reading everything, and that’s bad for your send rate, it’s bad for your emails not going into junk and appearing in the main inbox tab and stuff.
Joe Howard:
So, you want good click-through rates, and you want good open rates, and that kind of stuff, so segmenting your email list helps with that. Plus, it’s just like, you send people what they want, just like… So many people don’t do that, it’s like… I don’t subscribe to almost any email things, because most of them are pretty bad at targeting me. But there’s also people that don’t follow that rule and just send one email out to everyone, like Matcha WP, I’m pretty sure they send just their newsletter out to everybody every week, and it’s great, but that’s their shtick, it’s like, “We send a newsletter out.” It’s not like… You know, there’s not as much targeted sales stuff like we’re doing.
Joe Howard:
So, that would be my big advantage of ConvertKit, is tagging and segmenting. Also, you can create nice rules so that if someone’s tagged as this, they’ll be added to this sequence. It’s all around tagging and segmenting email lists that I think is really powerful for ConvertKit. And I think that this is one of those companies that… I really like ConvertKit, even though I have a few issues with them. I like ConvertKit a lot. I like their team, I like their founder story, which is like… “I’m going to shut this down, it’s not really working,” and someone was like, “You should actually double down on it and do it.” “Okay,” and now it’s a $25 million company. It’s a pretty cool story. You should go and check out that story.
Joe Howard:
But anyway, I think ConvertKit, if you’re looking to… If segmenting and tagging email subscribers as certain things is going to be a big lever for you in terms of monetizing your email list, or having good, happy email subscribers that want to get your emails every week or every day or every month, then ConvertKit, I would definitely try that. I just talked for a long time, and a lot about ConvertKit, but those are my thoughts, and those are, or I think are the advantages, so hopefully that is helpful, Terry. Did you want to add something, Christie, or are you like, “No thanks”?
Christie Chirinos:
No, you said absolutely everything I would’ve said. I started off by saying that I’m feeling shy about this question, because… And I want to start by saying that my opinion of ConvertKit is the same as yours. I love their founder story, I think they’re making such a cool product, it’s so good for segmented email marketing. The tagging system is unbelievably powerful, it’s just really, really well done. Billing is transparent as well, which I love.
Joe Howard:
Yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
But I was feeling shy about this question because my personal experience with ConvertKit was actually that when we started getting more serious about our email marketing program at Caldera WP, we decided to migrate from Mailchimp to ConvertKit, and I found it so difficult to use that I switched back to Mailchimp.
Joe Howard:
Wow, interesting, because totally separate experiences.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
What about using it was difficult? You’re allowed to have a little bit… Like, this is good feedback for them, if they listen. This is good feedback.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah, if they listen, this is good feedback, and I’d love to talk about it. And what’s funny is, I still have an extremely high opinion of ConvertKit; it’s just that I wasn’t the right user. ConvertKit is very much intended for someone who wants that incredibly powerful tagging system, and wants and has the capacity to get into the minutiae of absolutely targeted segmentation. And for me, that cost-benefit was a little bit off. It was so much work, and I just needed segmentation that was level two, not level seven. And I was already seeing the kinds of lists that I wanted from basic segmentation, and I didn’t have the marketing team in place to get into advanced segmentation of my users. And so, I found ConvertKit to be overkill for what I wanted to do, and I ended up bringing everybody back, because I was working with a bunch of contractors, and it was easier to contract out Mailchimp work than it was to contract out ConvertKit work.
Joe Howard:
Gotcha.
Christie Chirinos:
And a lot of my team and my users, especially working on a form plugin, were deeply, deeply visual people, so form design and things like that went a really long way. Email design, image design, and those things tended to be easier in Mailchimp. And I think that if anything, this is a lesson for our listeners on… Your product can be the most amazing product at its stated value proposition, and it’s still not going to be right for someone, and that’s okay. You don’t have to fight to get the people who aren’t right for you; different products are right for different people, and that’s why we have a large variety of products to choose from out there.
Joe Howard:
Yeah. I totally agree with that. I think if people from ConvertKit are listening, they may actually be like, “Good.” I don’t actually consider Mailchimp and ConvertKit to be super-direct competitors, because I think… The way I think about it is like, Mailchimp is level one, like you start at Mailchimp. Most people do. Then level two is ConvertKit; if you want, have a team, and you’re doing more advanced stuff, you’d go to ConvertKit.
Joe Howard:
And then to me, I actually had the same issue as you did, but I’m maybe one level up, because I was choosing, I think, between level two and level three, and level three would be like ActiveCampaign, which I was looking at, and I had a sales call with them, two sales calls with them. And it was super expensive, and I was like, “But it does so much cool stuff,” but at the end of the day, I was like, “This is too fucking complicated. There is no way I’m going to be able to…” Managing this requires me to have a full-time, maybe not just a full-time marketer, but a full-time marketing team to manage just the organization around ActiveCampaign.
Joe Howard:
I think it’s super powerful, but that was my reason I didn’t go with them and I went with ConvertKit, was because I thought ConvertKit’s level two, I get this. As a marketer myself, my marketing skills are pretty good, and I can understand exactly what ConvertKit’s doing. It’s pretty simple for me. But ActiveCampaign, I was like… If it’s too complicated, I’m not going to do it, or I’m not going to understand it, or I’m not going to want to understand it, and I’m going to get frustrated, so I need it to be simple for me to be able to do it as well.
Joe Howard:
So, I think, I totally get where you’re coming from, Christie, and I think that that’s a really good point, actually. I’m super glad you brought that up, because I think, Terry, if you’re thinking about ConvertKit, yeah, you should probably have some segmenting and tag experience to want to go and to do more of that work. I think someone who’s a beginner could go and learn it, but it will take time to figure out how ConvertKit works, and all those things. Maybe there’s some… I’m sure there’s some YouTube videos out there that could help in all that stuff. But that’s a really good point, Christie, of ConvertKit’s probably like… I don’t know if I’d call it level two and Mailchimp level one, but it’s definitely level 1.5.
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah.
Joe Howard:
Like, it’s at least a half step up from Mailchimp. And I’ve heard Mailchimp now actually does segmenting and tags much better than it did when I was using it.
Christie Chirinos:
A lot more advanced than they did when I was making these [inaudible 00:52:11] for sure.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, okay, so I’ve heard that too. Maybe Mailchimp is good to… Still, if people aren’t super interested in… If you just want to send an email out to some folks, Mailchimp might be a good place to start. ConvertKit is like, once you’ve gotten your sea legs under you, maybe you move to ConvertKit. Maybe you start on ConvertKit if you’re feeling saucy, but if not, then Mailchimp’s fine too.
Christie Chirinos:
Use both.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, exactly.
Christie Chirinos:
No, don’t do that, please don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Pick one.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, [crosstalk 00:52:36] whoa, we’re going into Christie’s bad advice here, yeah. Next episode, yeah.
Christie Chirinos:
Bad Advice with Christie Chirinos, yeah.
Joe Howard:
I’d listen to that podcast. Okay, cool. Well, we did three nice, juicy Q&A today, so we can probably wrap it up there. Let’s wrap it up, let’s finish out the episode.
Christie Chirinos:
All right.
Joe Howard:
If people want to have more awesome Q&A episodes like this, you’re more than welcome to shoot them in to yo@wpmrr.com. We really like to do these Q&A episodes, and yeah, it’d be fun to do some more. People can binge the episodes. Right, Christie? Should they go and do some binging?
Christie Chirinos:
Yeah. Get into your podcast app and sort from oldest to newest, and hit Play. Bam.
Joe Howard:
Ooh. Does mine do that?
Christie Chirinos:
100 hours of content.
Joe Howard:
I don’t even know if mine does that. Is that a thing, you can sort different ways? I don’t think I… I think mine automatically sorts by newest to oldest. You can do it different ways, I guess.
Christie Chirinos:
Really? I think you can usually flip it, at least you can on the Google Podcasts app.
Joe Howard:
Okay. I use Downcast, so I don’t know, maybe they have ways. I’ll check it out.
Christie Chirinos:
Maybe it can. I don’t really know.
Joe Howard:
Yeah, do what Christie said, order and listen. But maybe… Yeah, go check out our first episode. That’d be a trip. [crosstalk 00:54:01], probably didn’t know anything then. What else? Reviews, oh yeah. Hey, we love those. If you want to give us a nice review-
Christie Chirinos:
Please.
Joe Howard:
… that would be super awesome. It helps us in a bunch of different ways, actually. Obviously, it helps us get found in the iTunes store, that’s nice. It makes us feel good and want us to do more episodes, which is awesome. It also actually gives us really good feedback for new episode ideas, so if you leave a comment like, “Hey, I loved this, would love…” Like, “Love this topic, five stars,” we’ll do more topics about that. So, all it takes is a quick wpmrr.com/itunes, and just leave a little five-star review. That would be super splendid.
Christie Chirinos:
Just a little five-star review.
Joe Howard:
A little five-star review. Wpmrr.com, some big news coming out around wpmrr.com. I don’t know when this episode’s going to launch, so I’m not going to say anything right now, but-
Christie Chirinos:
Ooh, mysterious.
Joe Howard:
… if it’s out there, you’ll know about it. We’re launching a new Twitter account for WPMRR, and I’ll tweet about it. Like, it’ll be out there in the sphere of WordPress. So, come and look around for WPMRR stuff, and we’d love to see it. So, mystery closed, end mystery. Code text. Cool, you can tell I’m not [inaudible 00:55:24] because I don’t even know how to say that. We will be in your podcast players again next Tuesday. All right, see you, Christie.
Christie Chirinos:
All right, bye.
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