182 podcast episodes 🎙️



In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Joost’s conversation around SEO and WordPress. They discuss the story behind Yoast, getting involved in the WordPress community, leveraging SEO for content and marketing, and pushing WordPress into tremendous growth.

Joost is the founder of Yoast, where he’s currently the Chief Product Officer. He founded the company in 2010, after working in several different companies as a digital marketing consultant. The Yoast SEO plugin, which started as a hobby, became the main product.

What to Listen For:

  • 00:00 Intro
  • 00:56 Where Yoast got its name
  • 03:48 It all started with SEO consulting
  • 06:54 Growth over the last 7 years
  • 09:50 Redesigning WordPress.org
  • 11:14 The community is the strongest aspect of WordPress
  • 16:34 WordPress’ market share in the web
  • 22:44 WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
  • 28:24 How smaller companies can push WordPress forward
  • 32:28 Find Joost online

Episode Resources:

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: Hey folks. And welcome back to the WP MRR WordPress podcast as always I’m Joe and I’m quite God. And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. We have a, uh, old G Jetta on the podcast. Hey, what’s going on? Well, I’m still trying to find my next

Joost de Valk: Pato on, but, uh, other than that things are quite well

Joe Howard: as long.

Just make sure the name of your new pad wan is not Anik and Skywalker. As long as we can avoid an anecdote. And it turns into Darth Vader, we’re going to be all good. I

Joost de Valk: can’t make any promises there,

Joe Howard: but we’ll see you go. Yeah. The history has already told itself. I think that we have made your selection.

Um, very cool to have on the. Pod this week, not actually quite gone, Jen, but we actually have the one and only Yoast debulk. Uh, and I actually had to ask, uh, Yoast one when we jumped on, I was like, okay, the company’s called Yoast. Your name is spelled J O O S T. What’s the, is it, are those the same? Did it as your name different.

And then you had kind of a funny story behind that. Yeah. Yeah.

Joost de Valk: It’s actually a friend of mine now around Fishkin of Mars and now a spark Toro. We, when we first met 12 years ago at a conference to Stockholm, he asked me, has a, how do I pronounce your name? I like explained it to him. And he’s like, so it’s toast Twitter.

Y. He was saying that to me. And, and as he sat there, I was like, yes. And I turned around and registered geos.com and well, that’s where it started. This is what I started using the NIC for myself. And later on for the company.

Joe Howard: Very nice. That’s cool that you, uh, you, you know, ranch pretty well. Uh, I, I’m a big fan of, of ran and everything that he did.

SEO, Moz announced Burke Touro. Uh, and I’m also, uh, read his book a few months ago. It was right when it came out. Uh, and honestly couldn’t put it down. It was one of the most kind of, you know, you read a lot of stuff in the startup world.

It’s

Joost de Valk: a very good read around, actually spoke at our conference last week.

Uh, and, um, I was chatting with them. Like I read your book and then I saw that you got funding for your new company and I couldn’t reconcile. So, uh, now he has done that in quite a different way for his new company, but it’s still, it’s always funny to us because we don’t have any funding. We’ve always grown, uh, basically on our own cash.

There’s no outside investors whatsoever. So it’s my wife, myself, and, uh, uh, Omar MCU, our management team. We own the company with the four of us. And yeah, it’s, it’s weird to me to look at all those dynamics of outside investors and, and, and all these things. It feels

Joe Howard: unhealthy. Yeah, I, uh, WP boss is similarly bootstrapped.

Uh, and it’s not quite at the scale of Yoast, not yet, but, um, I am, I feel the same way. It’s, uh, you know, it’s, so it’s so important when you’re, you know, if you’re raising money to have really, really the same, not only the same kind of value structure as the people who are investing in your company, but the same idea and where the company is going and.

Even if you do have that, I think the chances are still high that, you know, you’re getting into a marriage at that point. And it’s, if there’s something that’s different thinking between the two parties, then there’s going to be trouble down the line and you can, you can avoid all that. Although maybe moving a little bit slower.

Bootstrap. And self-fund, I mean, now that we’re kind of diving into this, I have some questions I kind of want to talk about in the interview, but the, uh, now that we’re talking about this, I want to talk about this a little more. What did Yoast look like at the, at the beginning of the company, you know, 10 years ago?

Uh, if that’s accurate, it’s not

Joost de Valk: even, it’s not even 10 years ago yet. So I found the Yoast, the company in May, 2010. Basically to do consulting. I was doing SEO consulting for some of the largest brands in the world and basically started doing that on my own. So I had a, a couple of clients that, um, I could take along from my previous job, including eBay.

So I had a very safe salary based on that. Uh, but it was just me. There was no WordPress SEO plugin yet. I mean, I had some plugins, but it was all relatively small and there was certainly no money coming from that. And over time, I, um, made a lot of money on affiliate for hosting stuff and hired my first employee, um, Hughes.

Now one of our partners to help me in doing. And then in 2012 we started selling plug-ins and only early 2014, we started selling WordPress SEO premium and as a that’s five years ago.

Joe Howard: Yeah. So that’s really four or five years. The, that, uh, you’ve really started to see some, you know, more financial success.

I think that’s an important lesson for people listening. It takes, sometimes it takes time why,

Joost de Valk: and we were already growing. We weren’t doing well. I mean, we w we can seriously, could not compete. The step from being two people in 2012 to being, uh, over 100 people now is it was quite

Joe Howard: a stop. Yeah. That is fast gross growth for a bootstrap company for one that’s self-funded.

I think there are few funded companies out there that can grow that pace, but that’s a very, very big challenge for someone who, or for a company that self-funded, it’s

Joost de Valk: always a cashflow is always a challenge at the same time. It’s also like that challenge also keeps you. On your edge and the fact that there’s no unlimited amount of money, but you have to make like smart decisions about your money, because otherwise you will not be able to afford what you’re.

So you have to predict all the time, like how much of this growth that we’ve had over the last few months. It is sustained. And we’ve basically grown between 50 and 70% per year, over the last seven years. So, um, I mean, that is in many ways, ridiculous. If you look at it, uh, we’ve just been lucky in a way.

And we were, uh, we were quite quick into a market quite well. I think it’s always, it’s a bit more of a challenge when you’re completely self-funded and when there’s no external. So there, there is not, there’s never, there has really never been like a couple of million in the bank to, to feel free.

Joe Howard: Yes, it makes it a very, very different story.

Um, but cool. It’s interesting to hear her about how Yost came about and um, now kind of yourself and you’re moving in a, in a slightly new direction. Uh you’re now the marketing and communications lead for WordPress. Tell us a little bit about how that transition transpired. I just use two T words that might be a little confusing.

How did that all come about? Uh, has it been kind of a little while you’ve been thinking about this for the last year or so, or is this something that’s been more recent?

Joost de Valk: Well, so I’ve been working on like, what is SEO for WordPress and what is. Um, marketing for WordPress in general for quite a while already.

And Matt and I have been talking about that topic for three, four years. And over time we’ve been investing more and more time into a WordPress as host. So last year we had like 10 people working full-time while we’re press Corps. And I started feeling like, Hey, I want to be involved closer. My. I’ve been a fan and user of WordPress for over a decade.

I feel like I have something to add to the project that developers do not necessarily have to add because we, we had marketing, but it wasn’t really like coming into full fruition, fruition. It, I felt it needed more, more power and well, talk to Matt about that and, um, um, At a certain point, we decided like, Hey, this is, um, we should probably do this.

Um, yeah. And that’s, I mean, going into it now has also been very fun because there’s a lot of work. Uh, but there’s also been such a gigantic positive response from the community from agencies, et cetera, reaching out and offering design time and, uh, and help to, to fix things on WordPress would Oregon and more, you know, in a slightly broader spectrum.

So we’re redesigning to showcase at the moment we’ve already re rewritten like five or six pages on.org. Really old. We now have a roadmap that’s up to date. It’s like, it’s all that simple stuff that feels simple, but that I felt needed more attention than it was getting. And it’s had a positive response from everybody has been awesome.

So it’s a lot of work, but at the same time, it’s also, I feel like I’m mostly unlocking other people to do the work and yeah, it’s, it’s really cool to be able to work on that.

Joe Howard: I think that’s, uh, uh, uh, Underrated skill of a leader that they unlock the ability of other people to be able to do an awesome job, right.

Or job is leading. The marketing team has to optimize the whole team. It’s not just you doing all the work or executing on everything. You have a whole team under unit to do all that. You mentioned the roadmap, which is, which is, uh, which is pretty exciting. I’m sure. A lot of my questions I have today are coming from your blog, which is just yoast.blog, which it’s not Yoast.

Y O S T it’s. It’s your actual name? J O S t.blog. So you can check out the blog there for people who want to follow along kind of while you’re listening, but the roadmap, there’s a link to the roadmap there. . I think the first

Joost de Valk: step for us now is to get wordpress.org to be more reflective of how good a CMS WordPress is. Um, I think we’re not always doing a very good job of telling us.

And then also telling the story of which use cases where Chris is good for. So that starts with a redesign of, uh, some of the core pages on.org, kind of redesign and refilling of the showcase. Then I’d like to add, uh, an enterprise section to WordPress org to, to highlight a bit more where, how WordPress is used in the enterprise and what kind of things there are there, because I think it’s really undervalued in that area.

And then on top of that, but one of the, the longer ago implants, but that’ll take a lot of coordination is we have, we have all these work camps worldwide, and if I can make all those WordCamps reach one or more. Journalists that they can actually tell about WordPress and tell the story of both WordPress to platform and WordPress to community.

If I, if we can reach that, then we’ll suddenly have a reach that’s like very hard to beat. So I want to really involve the community a bit more in marketing, WordPress as a whole. I use all these, if you had us that we have not to just talk to ourselves, but also to talk to the wider

Joe Howard: community. Cool.

Joost de Valk: I mean, in a way we were, we owe it to ourselves to have that kind of.

And it’s also a matter of, uh, that’s something to match started last year by, by starting to grow consoles and by grow, by getting get HSCs and the hosts more involved. I think all of us have a combined, well, we, we all benefit from, from, uh, from a WordPress that grows and, and telling this story better together and using our combined resources to tell that story better is incredibly powerful.

Joe Howard: Yeah, very much agree. I think the community is, is clearly one of the strongest aspects of WordPress, um, and to continue to grow it, we’ll have to do it together. We’ve

Joost de Valk: done a relatively good job of telling people what the software could do, and don’t even think a really good job, but a relatively good job.

We’ve done a pretty shitty job of telling them the power of the community and why there’s so much more to justice. The list of features that, that they should pick WordPress. The fact that you can just start using WordPress and find developers. Whereas for a lot of butters, CMS is finding developers already is a big problem, simple stuff like that, that, that can make a whole lot of difference when someone needs to make a

Joe Howard: decision.

Yeah. Agreed. I think that, uh, you know, Christie and I talk a lot. Products in the WordPress space. And, you know, obviously like as, you know, you have to create a great product for, to, for people to want it, buy it for people to, to want to be involved in your community, under WordPress, all of that stuff. But the other side is the business development is the marketing is the communication side of things.

I mean, those things have to be strong if you want to see. That’s growth. Like you’ve seen it yellow straight, like 50% growth year over year for seven years. You know, the, if we want to continue the growth with WordPress that’s that seems like it’s going to be key

Joost de Valk: to be fair. WordPress already has the type of market share where that kind of growth is no longer possible.

Joe Howard: Right, because I don’t think 50% a year over year is going to be quite possible. If we’re going

Joost de Valk: to go from 33%, which we’re currently at to, uh, 48 in a year, I think I’ll, I’ll call it a success. I also think that’s the rather scary. No, I mean, let’s be realistic. The, the amount of time it takes for websites to switch over to under CMS is, is it’s not a year.

I think people build a website for three to five years. And so you’re not going to get like that massive amount of growth on the CMS side, switching out a plugin is relatively easy. So yeah, I think there’s a, we should aim for growth. We’ve had growth over, over the last few years. It’s not like the growth for WordPress has really slowed down, but yeah, I mean, we’ll just have to keep an eye on.

Joe Howard: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s really, it’s really important. What you said about the growth of WordPress powering the growth of all of our jobs as well. Um, at the end of the day, everybody who works in WordPress does owe it toward press, uh, to, for, you know, our financial freedom for us. I mean, it could have built

Joost de Valk: the most awesome SEO plugin for tumor and being absolutely nowhere now.

Right. I mean, I, that, that would make the market that a, that we could reach like 11 times smaller than WordPress without even a lot of my own doing at that point. So it’s like, we all have benefited from the gigantic growth of WordPress over time. Uh, and that’s also why I want to give back now and, and be involved in, in helping sustain that growth.

Joe Howard: Very cool. Speaking of Joomla, speaking of Wix and Squarespace and all the other CMS is out there, you have a very interesting post on your blog on stop. Uh, did you stop like blog that talks about some of the relative growth of some of these CMS has compared to others? Um, obviously everyone knows the defacto line.

No WordPress powers a third of the web. Um, I guess almost a third of the web just about there, but, uh,

Joost de Valk: yeah, at 33.1% now it’s like,

Joe Howard: But you talked a little bit about in this post is very, it definitely piqued my interest because I didn’t know about a lot of this relative growth. Um, and so from your calculations, you’ve kind of looked at how much growth, not just total market share each of these CMS has has, but how. Their growth has looked over the past years compared to the growth of the other CMS is around them.

Yeah. Right. Exactly. From what you’ve, uh, kind of discovered here in, in a few of your calculations, it looks like WordPress is, it looks like the open source market. Uh, or the open source market share is growing, but most of that is powered by WordPress. Um, the other kind of fast growing CMS is out there are not they’re they’re they’re closed.

So it seems like, although open source is still technically winning. A lot of people are moving to the. It just works closed systems because they want to get on, they want to build something, they just want it to work. What do you think the future looks like in terms of like, how does, how does WordPress play a role in that future is WordPress continued to be the leader and what does it have to do to remain there?

So

Joost de Valk: I think we’ll probably remain the leader. We, we can’t draw it at those rates anymore, simply because. Already as big as we are. And so relative growth is also a weird metric because if you’re our size, you’ll never have the relative groves on as Squarespace hat. Um,

Joe Howard: simply because like over a hundred percent growth or something for Squarespace, I think

Joost de Valk: it was a waste for weeks.

It was 150 it’s it’s high, but I mean, we can grow under 50% simple. There’s not enough web for us to do that. So it’s a flawed metric endeavor drive, but it is good to look at it to just realize like, okay, some of these guys are growing harder than you you’d think if you just look at the small numbers because the numbers are all relatively small, a Squarespace has like 1.5% market share now.

And Shopify has something like that too. That’s relatively small, but if he doesn’t look at their revenue now, And see how much money they’re making by hosting 1.5% of the top 10 million websites in the world, because that’s what all of this is based on. And that doesn’t mean that they have only 1.5% of 10 million sites.

They probably have more, but they just don’t fit into that top 10 million sites in the world because there’s a lot more than 10 million sites in the world. So in itself, that’s a flawed metric.

Joe Howard: Yeah, that’s probably important just to touch on for people. Cause I think a lot of people say the stat, like WordPress pouch, third of the web, technically not correct.

Or just to make sure that people know that when they’re saying that it does come from this w three score, uh, w three tech score of it’s we’re talking about the top 10 million sites. Uh, and we’re talking about market share of those sites. Yeah. Yeah.

Joost de Valk: So, uh, what they do and, uh, builds with another statistics provider does something similar.

They scraped the top 10 million sides as provided by Alexa, um, which is. Oh, it’s a, basically a flood, a flood metric, but over time it gives a good view of market share because you’re comparing it to itself. That doesn’t mean that it’s definitely the truth to be fair. I think that if we measured the entire web, our market share would probably be.

Uh, because I think we’re, we do better in smaller sites WordPress. One day, when you look at these numbers, you’re looking@wordpress.org and.com and wordpress.com probably does better in, uh, in this more, uh, section as well. So, uh, there’s not a whole lot of.com sites in that 33%. I

Joe Howard: don’t know to agree. If the 10 million to 20 million, I think you’d see higher than the 33.1% of WordPress share there.

Joost de Valk: So what does that look like? Well, in my perspective, there is a couple of things to note there. One is that Squarespace and Wix and we bleed, I got acquired by a square. They all have a lot of money to spend on. And they do things like Superbowl ads and, uh, uh pre-rolls for every bloody WordPress video on YouTube

Joe Howard: and a lot of YouTube ads for Shopify and Wix and Weebly.

And I’ve never been to their sites, but somehow they find me.

Joost de Valk: Yeah. Well, they target you based on your WordPress preference, probably so. Yeah. And they have a lot of money to burn on that stuff and we don’t, so we need to be more. But apparently that method of marketing is working because they’re growing fast.

Now all of them are burning money. I think we’re just profitable. I don’t know about Squarespace, but they all look relatively okay-ish, but, but they also look like they’re beefing up their numbers, but it will have to see over time whether they can keep that growth. But it’s good to realize that you have a couple of competitors in that top 10 of CMS in the world.

They’re spending tens of millions, if not more of marketing, uh, and uh, you have to be creative and outdo them in another way to keep up. Otherwise our growth might, uh, turn negative or, um, even slow that.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Yeah. I think that, whew, there’s a lot in there. It seems like WordPress. Yeah. I have a hard time thinking of it, you know, declining in market share, but it’s with the, with the fast growth of some of these other companies think it’s post.

I don’t think

Joost de Valk: that’s a, that’s a likely outcome. I don’t think that will we’ll quickly go to a decline, but I also, I mean, It’s one of the questions that I get asked the most. When I took this role, I was like, how are you going to look@wordpress.com versus.org, et cetera. I actually think that wordpress.com plays a role in this because it allows us to compete with Squarespace and Shopify and Wix, and I’d hope other people would build something similar on WordPress multi-site and use that wisely, et cetera.

But I think that. Uh, that allows us to compete with those SAS kind of services that people appear to be want while also maintaining the strength of that. And, uh, the fact that you can go to a full install for yourself on a, on a, uh, on its own server, et cetera. I mean, in, in the top 10 million sites, the vast majority is.org sites.

Why is that? Well, because they’re all too big to be run on. Uh, On a.com instance because they need more than that. But that’s fine. I mean, there there’s, there’s probably a lot more VIP customers in there or other like large hosting company, uh, customers in there. I know we’re in that top 10 million with yoast.com.

Uh, I can assure you that we don’t run them once in one small server is a lot more than. And I think it’s good. So it basically adds to each other and it makes sure that we have both the SAS side and a self hosted side of, uh, of this market. And we can cover

Joe Howard: that. Do you think though, that wordpress.com is the it’s going to be the main kind of tool we can, you know, that that’ll be battling against the Wix and Squarespace?

Um, I think people usually go to those for. Built out, you know, to, to, to not, not just a drag and drop functionality and the simple functionality, but just the fact that they can push something up pretty easily. And I think wordpress.com is probably more comparable than the wordpress.org. Do you think that the.com is, is what’s going to help us to continue to gain market share there?

Do you think it’s more. I think it’s

Joost de Valk: both, to be honest, I think both are still growing and I don’t know the.com numbers. So I could, I couldn’t even tell you, but I think we need both. I think we need it. Have the fact that we have both makes us stronger and, and the fact that we can add to each other. And because it powers.com and Matt spends so much of his money and people on making the product better.

I don’t think a lot of people realize how many people that really are. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s not one or two developers. It’s it’s entire teams of developers that are working constantly on making WordPress better for both the oregon.com and. That has been the investment that has sustained this ecosystem, which is also, I like there’s, there’s this dichotomy that people make from it that I just don’t think it’s true.

It’s one in the same thing in many ways. And of course there are differences and those are fine, but we’re all using WordPress.

Joe Howard: Yeah. I agree with that. I think a lot of people have this, like what is wordpress.com and what is wordpress.org and what is the difference? And it’s confusing and. I think that that is true.

I think there’s this, there’s somewhat of a, like, what is, what, what am I, some people don’t know what they’re on, but I think for the vast majority of people, it’s just, WordPress is a publishing platform. Um, you mentioned this kind of before the show and

Joost de Valk: we see people move from.com to self hosted and then because they want stuff that they can’t do on.com yet.

Hey, that’s fine. I mean, that’s, the ecosystem allows for that and I think that’s the strength, the ecosystem you don’t have. It’s quite hard to outgrow WordPress. And I think that’s a strength. I think that a Wix and Weebly and, and Shopify will have a very hard time competing with the fact that you can’t outgrow.

Joe Howard: Yeah, that does seem to be why people would move from somewhere else, like a Wix or Shopify to a WordPress, because, well, if you can’t do something on their system that you want to do, that’s somewhat custom or that they just don’t offer, then you literally have to move if you want to do that.

Joost de Valk: Yeah. And, and, and usually in our case, it just requires a plugin that’s already doing.

Uh, so there is a vast majority of functionality that we already have that they, that they have to spend money to build where we just have like this, these 40,000 plugins in a plugin repository to offer all sorts of functionality. I think that’s the strength of WordPress. It’s what I love about WordPress, uh, is that you can basically use it to build that.

Joe Howard: Yep. I agree with that. When I heard that you were going to be the marketing communications lead to WordPress, I thought you were, I thought you were the perfect selection for a position like this. Having run a company like, you know, because if you look at, if you, if you do a search for SEO on Google and you look at all the top websites, they’re all WordPress sites.

There are no Squarespace sites or no WIC sites. Yoast as the majority, having the most market share of SEO plugins in WordPress, you know, you’re significantly responsible for a lot of that. And I think that because we’ve been so sick, WordPress has been so successful as a publishing platform, not just because of things like Gutenberg, where you can publish easily and it makes it an actual.

Writing content is not difficult, but how do you get that content out in front of people? How do you make yourself visible online? I mean, that’s just as important as the writing part. And so I think that you’ve helped us get this far in Yoast as a company has helped us get this far only in, even the last five, six years, but really over the last, even longer than that, you guys have been working on it.

So having. Having gotten us this far. I think you’re, you’re the person to help us, help us move forward. I think you have a, you, you, you, I feel like you have a very good knowledge of where we are and where we need to go. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Thanks for the

Joost de Valk: compliment. I hope to live up to it.

Joe Howard: Yeah, no pressure, no pressure at all. The last one, the last things I love to dig into a little bit is for the rest of us here, uh, for me and other listeners for the podcast, um, you know, you have a team of a hundred plus people and Yoast, um, which I guess now is, is technically your wife’s team, uh, at Yoast, but, uh, y’all’s team at Yoast.

Joost de Valk: I still work for like, so I I’m in the Yost offices right now. I have four, four out of my five days a week I spend on Yost. And one of those days I tried to spend on WordPress. That’s about the shared time it gets. Uh, that’s good to know. I didn’t know that, um, in all honesty right now is it’s one day and all of my evenings, uh, But, I mean, there’s, there’s a choice there.

I do both. So I, I’m still the chief product officer Joe’s too. And I, and there’s a lot of cool things that we’re doing at Yoast. So it’s, I just want to keep on doing that.

Joe Howard: Very cool. The question I want to answer about the company is that you guys have a hundred plus people you’ve said you’ve kind of dedicated, you know, double digit people full-time working to, to be dedicating their time to WordPress development or pushing WordPress forward, whatever area it’s.

And like, what advice would you have for people who are working at smaller companies? Um, or even. Doing solo work, uh, you know, working with them. So are working, you know, as freelancers, et cetera, how can people help to push WordPress as a whole forward? Um, without some of those bigger resources that a bigger company might have.

Joost de Valk: Um, there’s a lot of ways actually. Um, I, I would always recommend you go to a work camp that has a contributor today and start there and see which themes that you like. And there’s a lot of different teams at, uh, uh, contributor days. Basically add new people and to help you get set up to do, to do work on WordPress.

And that can be a whole lot of different things. So if you’re a developer, you can work on core, but you can also work on a team that I spent most of my time in, in the last decade called Metta, which is like the team that maintains wordpress.org itself and everything around it. And, but there’s also a design team.

There’s a marketing team. Of course there is. The docs team, that’s just writing docs. So if you don’t have a whole lot of time, but for instance, uh, you could help us move some of the docs on, onto codex to the new help hub that we’re working on. Simple stuff like that. Even moving one doc a month over from one to the other would already be like, awesome.

If I’m a hundred people do that, we’ll be done in a couple of weeks from now. So there is a lot of small jobs that need to happen. And it’s great way to meet new people and also to build yourself a backbone of people that are very knowledgeable about WordPress, so that you can reach out to them. If in your day-to-day job, you run into problems with WordPress that you can fix yourself.

I, for us, one of the reasons we spend so much time on WordPress core is because it’s just really helped us a to know where WordPress is going and to even guide some of that, but B also to, to make sure that. We can integrate better than anyone else because we notice system better than anyone else. I mean, for goods and work, we’ve built all of the API APIs that plugins need to integrate.

We built those because we needed to, of course, that’s a huge contribution to WordPress, but it’s also a contribution to us being able to maintain the quality that we wanted to with Gutenberg for our own product. So it works both.

Joe Howard: Yeah, I think that’s a very fascinating point. I think a lot of people think about a contributor day is like, okay, I have to go.

And I have to spend time and extra day to like help WordPress. And how much is it really going to help my company or help myself as a freelancer? And I think it’s actually. Just the opposite. Like I think like the more you go to contributor days, the more people you get to know, the more closely you get to know WordPress, the core contributing teams, how WordPress really works and functions.

Especially if you’re someone technical, you’re going to really understand how to build software or build plugins, uh, or run a marketing company or any, or anything. You’re going to be able to do it better because you understand the network better. You understand you, you, you know, people in the space better, you understand a little bit better how the community

Joost de Valk: you’re learning from others.

I mean, dies. I think that’s the biggest strength of all of this is if you can learn from other systems and learn from other people. And that really is very worthwhile and they don’t have to be developer for that. I mean, one of the biggest teams had a lot of these. Contributed to is, is our support team.

That answers questions in the forums that might seem very benign, but it’s like the backbone of everything that we have. So I, yeah, I really urge people to start there and then figure out, okay, which team is my, do I feel most at home in that. Can I learn most in and then start there. And then a year later you want to do something else by all means.

Go do

Joe Howard: that. Yeah. Very cool. I dig it. Yes. This has been a blast. I appreciate you. Jumping on. This has been a lot of fun and happy

Joost de Valk: to come back and.

Joe Howard: Cool. Uh, let’s see, we usually close the show out, wanting to tell people where they can find you online, Twitter or website, et cetera.

Joost de Valk: At Jayda Volcom, Twitter, J D E V a L K a R on your stock blog, uh, as in J O S t.blog.

Of course, I’m on yours.com Y O S t.com. And then, well, if you. Got all three of those that you’re probably sick of me already. So let’s stick to,

Joe Howard: you can always look out, you always know Yost from the, uh, the, their style of, uh, of, uh, cartoons and animations they’re online. So I’m on your Twitter profile right now.

And I’m like, yeah, I see this all the time. Cause it’s very distinct. I always know. Yeah.

Joost de Valk: That’s one of our illustrators does those. It’s a lot of work, but it’s very worthwhile.

Joe Howard: Yeah, very cool. I’ve been thinking about doing more custom, you know, uh, or customizing our brand a little bit more with our design style.

Uh, and one of the main drivers is you guys, cause I’m sure a lot of people see you guys are like, yes, we know he goes through the animation, but of course it takes a lot of time to put all these together and a lot of resources. But at the end of the day, if you’re at the size where it makes sense. Well, to be honest,

Joost de Valk: I think it’s the other way around.

And if I can be real quick, my third hire was a designer. My, for fire was a illustrator. Uh, so it’s the other way around building a brand is more important than anything else.

Joe Howard: And it looks like I have some more to do after I get off this call. I was listening to this podcast. Reach out to me, please.

Joost de Valk: Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, building that brand is really simple.

Joe Howard: Hey, that’s an excellent place to finish, I think for anybody listening. Cause Hey, the, you know, from someone who’s built a company of over a hundred people, uh, that the brand was central in that. So design and illustration should be a first, uh, uh, think about it sooner rather than later.

Um, cool. Yeah. The last thing I always ask guests is, uh, if you wouldn’t mind just asking your audience to give us a little five-star iTunes. That’d be awesome. If you could just kinda like, Hey, ask people to have mind doing that. Hey, if you’ve just

Joost de Valk: listened to this awesome podcast and you notice where if a five star review, right.

Go do it. Now.

Joe Howard: There you go. Uh, and uh, if, uh, If you have any questions for the show, you can feel free to email them in yo@wpmrr.com. Uh, we answer questions on the show every once in a while. So shoot those in, uh, if you have any questions for Yoast, you can shoot those to us, or you could shoot them to him on Twitter, but if you should have noticed we’ll forward them to him so he can take a look.

The. What else did I have? I have Ms. Mills. I think I’m good. We asked for reviews. We ask people to email us questions. That’s all. We’ll have another episode next Tuesday, Yost again. Thanks for jumping on love. Hearing about where we’re presses going, uh, excited for what’s next.

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