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E143 – WordPress vs Wix & the Fight Against Fake News (Matt Mullenweg, Automattic)

In today’s episode, Joe talks to Matt Mullenweg, one of the founding developers of WordPress and the Founder and CEO of Automattic – a distribution company committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion with the goal to democratize publishing and commerce.

Matt talks about the systematic approach of Automattic, WordPress, and the rest of the Automattic web brands, as well as scaling and hiring skilled engineers, and the upside and downside of content distribution on different social platforms. 

What to Listen For:

  • 00:00 Intro
  • 02:51 Welcome to the pod, Matt!
  • 03:09 How does Automattic work?  
  • 04:08 Get to know QuickForget – a tool designed to assist in sending sensitive information through email
  • 07:17 WordPress VIP on upscaling and continuous business growth
  • 09:32 Is there a cross collaboration between WordPress and Automattic?
  • 11:48 Finding good engineers is still challenging
  • 15:14 Four immutable aspects we can look for in new hires
  • 17:30 What separates Automattic from WordPress
  • 18:47 WordPress and Automattic remain a platform that enables
  • 20:55 Should platforms take responsibility for all content published on their site?
  • 26:04 Preventing negativity and the spread of misinformation and fake news
  • 33:13 Trustworthy and reliable institutions are necessary in our society
  • 34:50 The conflict between Wix and WordPress

Episode Resources:

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] Howdy folks, Joe Howard here this week, I got to sit down and chat with Matt Mullenweg. Now, if you don’t know who Matt is just listened to the first few minutes of today’s episode, you’ll get to know pretty quickly, but we got to have a really cool conversation. I. Prepped a lot for this episode, not a lot, but you know, five, six hours.

I was listening to other podcast episodes he’s been on. If you want hear more about him on other podcasts. And Matt report has a great episode that went out a couple months ago and Michelle did a great episode on WP coffee talk, both of which I listened to and really enjoyed. I thought maybe I wasn’t going to get a ton of time to ask him everything I wanted to, you know, I didn’t get to ask him everything or talk with every about every single topic I wanted to, but I got most of what I wanted to really talk about at the core.

We talked about automatic scaling that company, how they do hiring and recruiting there for engineers and for other positions, how they made it from 200 employees to 1400 really interesting stuff, especially from my perspective as a business owner. We talked about democratizing publishing and the era of fake news.

Matt has a really nuanced perspective on fighting fake news, the role of moderators, the role of companies, and section two 30, really some cool stuff there. And so, yeah. And the final thing we kind of talked about at the end, not kind of the final thing we chatted about was the Wix versus WordPress saga that is happening right now.

So if you’re. A core member of the community, you know, about all that stuff that’s happening. And you’ll get to hear mats opinion about that, my everything going on there and very eye-opening to hear some of the reasons why he wrote his letter on his blog or his blog posts there to clarify a few things, but also for some personal reasons as well.

So I’ll let him tell it because I can’t do it better than him. All right. Without further ado, please. Welcome. The one and only Matt Mullenweg enjoy today’s episode.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:02:03] the WP MRR WordPress podcast is brought to you by WP buffs. WP buffs manages WordPress websites, 24 seven. And powers digital growth for agencies, freelancers and WordPress professionals. Join our white label program Graham. And by next week you could be offering a 24 seven white label website support to your clients and passively growing your monthly recurring revenue or become a WP buffs affiliate to earn 10% monthly payouts every month for the lifetime of every client.

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Joe Howard: [00:02:46] We are live on the pod this week, uh, with the one and only Matt Mullenweg. Matt, I’m gonna do like a quick intro for you because most people listening probably know who you are at this point.

You are the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of automatic, but I kind of wanted to start around automatic because I think most people think about automatic and. They really focus on the WordPress side of things. I’d love for you to just kind of like break down the different pieces of automatic 1400 employees, automatic, you know, I don’t think they all work on WordPress core.

So I’d love you to do like a quick breakdown, like of all the like kind of sub companies or sub areas within automatic. That’d be cool.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:03:25] Sure. So off the top, we try to follow a five for the teacher. So that means about 5% of those 1400 people just work on WordPress core. Cause that’s about 70, a lot of that’s on Gutenberg.

Some of it’s on community organizing Josepha leads that for us and is obviously a prominent figure in the wordpress.org community. We also try to take 5% of the company. To work on what we call other bets, which we kind of shamelessly stole from Google products, going from zero to one new things or things that might be a little more nascent sensei could be a good example of that.

It’s a LMS plugin for WordPress that, that we work on the rest of the business is largely divided in kind of consumer. Where there’s like either like, do it yourselfers or developers or agencies who buy something with a credit card, like Jetpack or wordpress.com business plan or something like that. The anti-spam backup there’s enterprise, which we call VIP.

So that’s people spending usually North of 50 or a hundred grand a year for like a really, really elite proof WordPress that will like never have a problem. It’s like e-commerce through WooCommerce. And, um, we do some advertising as well. Most of that goes through our tumbler business, which is, was a competitive blogging platform.

Probably one of WordPress’s best ever competitors that we were able to buy in 2019. And we’re actually in the process of switching it over to be powered by word best. So yeah, we really want everything in the world will be powered by WordPress, wherever it

Joe Howard: [00:04:55] makes sense. Yeah. Cool. I heard a little bit about you talking about that kind of integration and transition into Tumblr on Matt, other math podcast, Matt Madeiros his podcast.

Um, and that was definitely an interesting part of that conversation. How about quick forget? I don’t know if that’s something that’s like still in your brain. Is that something that people say work on it automatic or is it kind of just its own thing that lives? Yeah, it’s

Matt Mullenweg: [00:05:17] cool that, you know, that one, that’s still one for like sharing a secret one time, right?

Yeah, exactly. That is just kind of a side project that we do. We give our engineers and we basically can create anything under our umbrella. And, um, sometimes there’s something that needs to exist in the world. Like an open source, trustworthy way to share a one-time secret that we’re pretty sure it gets deleted afterwards.

And that’s what grit for it is that, that, wow, that’s a deep cut. I actually. A while and kind of forgot that that was from

Joe Howard: [00:05:45] us. It’s fun to bring up those things from the past, we use it pretty frequently actually for folks passing things like login credentials to us safely, you know, people don’t want to do the, just the text format and an email link.

Well then Google probably has your email. So you want to keep it safe and secure. So that’s one method we actually use pretty frequent. I think someone on our team found it one day and was like, Oh, this is cool too. And then in the subheader, it’s like automatic. Family product or something like, Oh, cool.

Didn’t even know this existed, but I guess we do now

Matt Mullenweg: [00:06:11] across all of it. The number one thing that we try to do is just build trust and, you know, automatics about 15 years old now. And we just try to put more and more on the trust bank, whether that’s user that sees Automatic’s name on something, they know that it’s going to be.

You know, user centric, privacy centric, easy to get a refund. It’ll work well, it’ll be fast, it’ll be secure. And then as you know, other entrepreneurs also think maybe of selling their businesses or joining something larger, we can say, Hey, this is a place where, you know, it’s a, it’s a good place to work.

You have great colleagues really, and we’ll be able to accelerate and be a good home for the thing you built for a long period of time.

Joe Howard: [00:06:49] Yeah, very cool. You mentioned building that trust and that’s actually something I do want to dive into a little bit later in this episode there. So that’s a good little segue for something I like to talk about in a little bit, but the first thing I actually want to do was kind of talk more about.

Automatic the size of the company, how you’ve gotten to this point in 1400 employees is a lot, it’s a few more than we have, but WP buffs, you know, so man, that’s really thinking into the potential future for me, but I kind of wanted to know, because I listened to Matt. Madeiros his podcast with your new mentioned, you know, it actually may have been your podcast episode with Jack Dorsey.

On distributed podcast. I can’t remember. I listened to both because I was trying to do some prep for this podcast, but in one of them, you did talk about how WordPress VIP is about 200 people now. And one thing that you said that kind of stuck with me was you said, you know, if I’m misquoting a little bit, I’m just kind of reviewing about what you said, which was that the form of the scaling was very effective in terms of how.

It was a similar structure when automatic was at that point as when, at what VIP is right now. And I kind of actually wanted to dive a little bit more into that as a business owner, myself, as someone who’s, who wants to know kind of about scaling. Who’s had some scaling challenges in the past year, myself, you know, we’ve definitely been working on some things I’d love to know from you and dig a little bit more into that.

Like the similarities between where VIP is right now at about 200 people. And when automatic was 200 people and like, how did that 200. Turn into, you know, about seven times that many people, that’s an interesting direction I’d like to talk about.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:08:24] Yeah. So our VIP business has a CEO, Nick earner. I’m not the CEO of that.

Uh, it has an executive team, you know, I had chief revenue officer, chief marketing officer, you know, just kind of its own suite of executives. Has an informal board, which right now is opposed of, you know, me and automatic CFO and things like that. But over time, we’ll start to get more outside directors in there as well.

And they really, they own their roadmap and everything they do. So it’s, it’s, you know, I’ll review things with Nick, but by and large, 99% actually, VIP, especially, it’s not like I’m even asking them to build anything. Like I might ask like Jetpack or wordpress.com too. They’re really owning their own roadmap, their own go to market their own sales, their own acquisition.

Like we just acquired parsley and integrated that team. So that’s, that’s kind of the idea that it’s like its own company in a lot of ways.

Joe Howard: [00:09:16] So it sounds like it really fully has its own structure kind of under the automatic umbrella, but executive team, obviously its own CEO. It has, uh, a board which you’re on that kind of goes across, you know, that you’re maybe working on it with a few of the different.

Teams under automatic actually kind of leads to my next question, which was like how much cross collaboration are there between those teams within automatic? Like is the CEO of VIP, like, are all the CEO is getting together in a yearly meeting themselves. Talk about what they’re doing, what they’re seeing successful or do you kind of try to keep them independent?

I’m sure there are pros and cons to both, but I’d love to know how you kind of handle the. Multiple kind of business units within one business unit is WT buses started to get into this acquisition area and we did one earlier this year. And again, I want to know, cause I’m like, wow, I really do have to, you know, plan for the future if we want to keep doing this.

So how does that work at automatic? Yeah.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:10:07] Yeah. So we have some shared services that we think of like a service organization. We actually call it bridge because it bridges all the teams and, uh, that thinking about like legal HR. Finance, obviously, fundraising is something we run centrally. So infrastructure, you know, all the data centers, all the technical scaling, some security work, you know, so there are some things that are central services that just like, it wouldn’t make sense for VIP to have its own data centers and wordpress.com to have its own data’s.

Cause like we can, we can share some things there. And we do have a common platform which has WordPress. And so everything that we build forward, press like VIP started to do a lot more WooCommerce. A lot more WooCommerce actually. So they’re working with the WooCommerce team a lot. And like, as a, if they find a scaling bottleneck, they can work with the WooCommerce core developers to get that fixed up.

Jet pack is really central to really everything we do. And that platform that provides like real-time backup elastic, search security scan, like that is key for really everything Jetpack and WordPress are kind of our common base layer. So yeah, lots of collaboration that goes across them. We try to make that collaboration because it makes sense.

Not because you’re forced to do it so we can make those internal services really, really, really good people want to use them. And then also occasionally we’ll, we’ll say, Hey, this internal service is not living up to what you need. So let’s try and experiment where we do something else. Maybe that’s the biggest bottleneck in our company right now is, uh, hiring engineers.

So in 2021, I need to hire more than 200 engineers. I’d love as many as 300. So that’s just a lot of people.

Joe Howard: [00:11:48] Is that something you feel like has been a challenge during COVID specifically when like everyone’s going remote so everybody can hire, so it makes it more competitive for you or is it just like a general challenge?

Like finding good engineers is difficult. Is some

Matt Mullenweg: [00:12:00] of that finding good engineers is difficult? Oh, well I think it’s that a lot of good engineers don’t know about automatic. So we need to like, you know, get our story out there a bit more. And it was just has a biggest celebration of our business and particularly on the e-commerce side in the COVID post COVID world.

So. But there’s just a lot more needs, a lot more opportunity. Yeah.

Joe Howard: [00:12:20] Continue to lead into my next question. Very well. So keep it going. I kind of wanted to talk about, because I’ve heard you say that you do want to make some big hires this year. Are those hires that you’re an automatic is planning to make via.

Direct hiring, you know, do you have recruiters that are helping you to get, you know, find and recruit new engineers and you plan to do more direct hiring? Or is this more hiring through acquisitions, through echo hires or just. Potentially making a purchase that would bring a team of solid engineers, maybe not one at a time, but like 40 or 50 or a hundred at a time.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:12:55] Amber is for hiring that’s our hiring goal. So if anything comes in via acquisitions is a bonus to that. And it wouldn’t lower that hiring goal because that’s just what we need for like our existing stuff. I would say a mistake that we made was not building internal recruiting earlier. So we are just now starting to have internal sourcers recruiters and be a little more systematic in our approach there, you know, I see other companies where that’s one of the first 10 or 20 hires.

And particularly if you need to scale quickly, I think that could be a, a good investment or finding a great firm to work with. And so, and the. And that kind of experimental we’re, we’re a very experimental company. We’re also working with several externs or recruiters that are going to try to help us meet these goals, which has some bonuses and challenges.

Like they often come with their own networks when it doesn’t go well, sometimes they might send a, you know, uh, not well targeted email or we’ve had it before where we say like, Hey, please, don’t send emails to our partners. We, we don’t try to fish in the same pod. Was that the workman’s comp. You know, there’s plenty of room for us all to grow.

So that sort of thing, sometimes there’s mistakes that happen, which actually goes back to the earlier trust. Like we build trust for a long time. I a hundred percent there and guarantee that we’re going to mess things up sometimes too. And that’s just human inevitability. And what we try to do is.

Correct. Those mistakes quickly acknowledged them and hopefully have built enough trust in the past that it really is seen as a mistake and not like, ah, this company’s evil or did this on purpose.

Joe Howard: [00:14:25] Yeah. It’s somehow kind of nice for me as a smaller business owner to hear bigger businesses have challenges with hiring and recruiting as well, because almost every.

WordPress professional. I talk to every other business owners, plugin companies, theme companies, or WordPress web website management companies, hosting companies. Every time we have a conversation around the challenges we’re having, most of the time, it comes back to like hiring and finding good people and finding people who are great fits for these positions, you know, getting the right people on the bus and then getting those people in the right seats of the bus really complex.

And it’s almost like because I have background in more marketing stuff and it’s like optimizing a sales funnel or a marketing funnel. That I can do. Yes. It may take some time and some ingenuity, but I could do that. But optimizing like for people, Whoa, that’s like a way more complex problem. Um, so I would like to know a little bit more about, it sounds like you.

Are doing a lot of experimenting to find the best and most effective way to grow the team effectively. Whether you go in the direction more of, you know, using more outside recruiters or whether you pull that more internally, it sounds like testing is a big way that you’re going to test and then see the results of those different areas.

And then try and push forward on that hiring. Does that in general kind of the direction you’re going in?

Matt Mullenweg: [00:15:40] Yeah, I mean, I think part of that is hiring people who are open to doing experiments. Yeah, because change is scary. Yeah. I do like to think of kind of the four immutable aspects that we can look for for new hires, which are things that are difficult to learn or teach.

And the first is just work ethic. I think some people just enjoy working more than others. So we want more of that integrity is of course, like a baseline. It just, everyone needs to be able to trust each other curiosity or desire to learn. Learning by the way sucks. Sometimes it’s like, it’s really tough.

And like, you’re like, I know this thing. Why do I have to learn this new thing? Or you have to go through that, like Deb, where you’re like, terrible, like maybe the first day that you’re learning a new sport or to ski or to surf or something, the beginning can be like really challenging. And you’re just like falling and hurting yourself.

There’s the intellectual equivalency sounds like

Joe Howard: [00:16:29] entrepreneurship too.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:16:30] Yeah. I don’t think I look for it’s just taste and taste is, um, I think can be expressed. Yeah. It’s not being like a good designer or dressing cool or anything like that. It’s really like, you know, whatever you’re into. Do you have something you’re really into.

And like, try to hone that. And maybe that’s quilting, maybe that’s, you know, I don’t need like a really fancy resume. Maybe you created like a beautiful ASCII one, you know, just with texts, plain text, you know, do all the links on your site where there’s some basic things, you know, but to me it kind of shows that conscientiousness, that you’re thinking about the experience of whoever’s interacting with this thing that you created.

Yeah,

Joe Howard: [00:17:10] we put an operations professional position up that we were hiring for. We got like 2000 applications and the ones that stood out were really the ones that we ended up moving forward with people who like shot a loom video or people who like created a page on their website to talk about the WordPress knowledge.

Like the unique pieces were important. They’re so cool. I want to switch gears a little bit into the mission of automatic, which of course is to democratize publishing.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:17:36] We differ from WordPress as mentioned by two words. So WordPress is to democratize publishing and automatics to democratize publishing and commerce.

And

Joe Howard: [00:17:45] commerce. I see, uh, postal commerce, uh, slight adjustments, but I’m sure you have. Yeah, exactly. Hey, you’re testing. You have to be flexible around the things you’re doing. So I get it. Okay. I actually didn’t know that. So thanks for teaching me something on the pod. It’s this interesting time. I feel like I’m talking to you, Matt, because I just finished the, um, uh, queue into the storm, which is a Q and a documentary on HBO.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it or checked it out. No. I, you know, obviously there’s a lot in there and I do not want to talk about you and John on this podcast. But what I do want to talk about a little bit is eight Chan, which is the platform on which a lot of, uh, very pro free speech to the point of really letting anything be said on that platform, which led to some pretty bad stuff happening.

So I guess my general question. For you is really in this ecosystem that we’re like currently in 2021, you know, the challenges we’re having with fake news and the challenges we’re having around just verifying what is a fact versus what is not a fact? Are you still as bullish on those missions at WordPress and automatic as you always have been?

Yeah,

Matt Mullenweg: [00:18:54] I am. You know, freedom isn’t free. Democracy is messy. There is. Downsides to these things as well. But I think overall, we want to live in a society that follows these things. You know, we want to work at companies that believe in these principles, you know, moderation is tough and I believe again, not to dive into it, but like my understanding was the person pretending to be cute.

Might’ve been or taken over by the person who who’s running HR. So I don’t know if that’s a great example of like a free speech platform or if it was really just like. Someone tried to use a fig leaf of free speech and then actually promoting their own sort of, you know, need for influence or powers something.

If you actually look at the platform platforms, they don’t want to have that sort of stuff, you know, like they don’t want hate, they don’t want calls to violence that like, this is pretty clear. We’ve had a good track record, you know, for sure things that we run and host keeping a healthy environment. Um, I definitely gained a lot of empathy for larger social networks when we bought tumbler, because it was both a lot harder and a lot messier.

So I think the larger that you are, and then the more people are doing more social media stuff, the harder it can be. So I actually don’t like dunking on Twitter or Facebook because I think that what they’re doing is really, really, really hard. I think they can and should do better, but yeah. It’s unimaginably hard to moderate across that amount of things.

But for us, what we’re doing is creating the platform that enables, and I think that the software needs to exist in the world. The responsibility, I think, falls a bit to the folks hosting or distributing that software to follow the laws and principles of the place where they choose to do business and try to make the world a better place.

A lot of things in that answer, but it’s a tricky topic.

Joe Howard: [00:20:44] I agree very much that it’s a tricky topic, as much as I feel like sometimes I want to dunk on Facebook and Twitter. I totally agree with you that it is just, how do you moderate at scale? How do you do that without using algorithms and bots to hire literally a million people to moderate?

Like, I don’t think that’s a very scalable solution, you know, so I understand the infrastructure issues.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:21:04] They have literally millions of people moderating Facebook. So they hired 10,000. Maybe that’s not enough, you know? And then. That creates other issues. Like, you know, what is the experience of the people doing the moderation I think is

Joe Howard: [00:21:17] right.

I do agree. One thing I did want to key in on what you mentioned was you feel like the platforms do have some responsibility for the kind of content that does appear on their platforms. Um, which kind of like goes into this whole article. Two 30, which is, you know, a law that I actually have it written down here.

So I can say it for people who may not know what it is. Section two 30 C one provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an interactive computer service. That’s in quotes, interactive computer service, who publish information provided by. Third party users. So what do you think about two 30?

I mean, I guess the real question is, do you feel like Plath should be responsible for the kind of content that is published on their platforms, even though they just are the platforms or do you think they should be immune from that responsibility?

Matt Mullenweg: [00:22:04] Well, I think the conversation centers largely around like Facebook and things like that, but everyone listening to this two 30 is really important.

So if you have comments on your blog, Two 30 is what keeps you from going to jail. If someone posts a bad comment and it publishes to give you another example where two 30, if it work on the wordpress.org forums or plugin reviews, or, you know, our Wiki pages that anyone can edit, like all of those within become things that wordpress.org could have real liability for if something were published.

So you have to move to essentially where everything is pre moderated, probably with humans. And I mean, that gets tricky. We have thousands of posts a day on the wordpress.org support forums. I guess we would then try to get volunteers to people like it. It just gets to be a really kind of mild situation.

Now there are other laws that essentially do you post moderation. So after something is published, if it’s reported as being bad, you have like a, a window to, uh, to fix it. Um, most famous as it is being the DMTA. So let’s say that. I don’t know. I’d say I post a comment on your website and I include the copy-written lyrics to a Taylor Swift song.

And now I saw

Joe Howard: [00:23:21] your post that you just posted that before we came on this podcast.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:23:24] Now they’re coming after you and saying, Hey, Joey, you violated our copyright. You’re republishing. This thing. The fines could be a hundred thousand dollars. I mean, they could take you to court. They could, there could be all these sorts of things that happen right now with the DMC.

You have kind of a protection where they notify you. You can say, Hey, you have like, uh, an undefined amount of time, but let’s call it like a week or two to either say, actually that’s fair use or it’s fine. Or take it down. That’s a huge protection for you as a website operator. So I worry is that sometimes these battles of the giants like Google and Facebook and Microsoft are fighting each other, the collateral damage is all of us in the independent web.

So like some of these privacy things that were, I think, targeted at like Google and Facebook essentially now mean that every other website in the world has to have one of these terrible cookie banners. And third party advertising networks have been decimated and it actually sent into centralizing power with Google and Facebook.

They now have more of the ad market than they did before some of these regulations happen. So there can be unintended side effects of, I think even well-meaning regulation. I think what everyone agrees with is a lot of these laws were written in like the nineties, the eighties, the seventies, and they don’t.

You know, sometimes they still kind of work, but it’s not perfect. And something more modern, I think could be really nice. Yeah. You know, especially if it was hashed out, you know, through, in America, through our legal system, you know, we have this, how a bill becomes a law. She ever see that, uh, that cartoon is that called.

That’s right. Yeah. Like that is by definition, it’s on purpose to be an adversarial process and, you know, people will, should fight and then they kind of work out a compromise and hopefully that’s what’s best. That is something that I, um, I hope we can have some more of in the future, but just a broad scale, like repealing section two 30 would be disastrous for independent website publishers and lots of like volunteer open source projects.

The big companies could afford to hire another 10,000 moderators. I don’t know what we do for something like a wordpress.org or GitHub what’s like code. Like if someone posts like it have is protected by this too, someone posts something that violates it. GitHub is not liable. For the code that someone puts in their own repository.

So

Joe Howard: [00:25:49] yeah, I appreciate that nuanced answer. Honestly. One of the reasons I was excited to talk to you is because I’ve listened to you on podcasts and all sorts of stuff before, and you are very nuanced in your answers. And I knew I was going to learn a lot this podcast. So I think there’s, there’s a lot there.

I would like to like the challenge around. Fake news is a very difficult one. And it’s maybe there’s a Venn diagram where it’s kind of part of the intersection of two 30 and the other things we talked about, but one of the things I’m going to quote you here. Uh, one of the things I have heard you say before is disinformation can make its way around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.

Or get ready. I’ve never heard that quote exactly like that before, but I think what you were really talking the study, you know, there’ve been multiple studies around how, you know, fake news travels and gets shared at a rate that is what six, seven, eight times, whatever. I don’t want to put an exact number out there, but it’s multiple times.

Faster and more shared than factual stories. And as someone in your position who runs automatic, a lot of the content on the web, I’d love to know your thoughts on how like in 50 years, or maybe let’s say 10 years in 10 years, let’s say we’d like figured out how to, I don’t know, not have fake news, be such a driver of bad things happening in the real world.

What’s that? Solution or maybe like the beginning. So that solution,

Matt Mullenweg: [00:27:14] is this a tricky one and to full credit for that quote? I think it’s like a Winston Churchill quote. I mean,

Joe Howard: [00:27:21] to quote someone else. Yes.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:27:23] It’s good to think of a spectrum. And I believe this concept comes from Ben Thompson, that the closer you are to the wire, like network provider, the more that you should try to not be too much and like deciding what is right or wrong and more just following the laws of the lands.

Uh, which do tend themselves towards being a bit more open with rules, for calls to violence and other things like you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s not free speech, but you know, saying something that just straight up wrong is okay right now, as you get more on the spectrum where you’re actually distributing things.

So it’s not, does it, is it allowed to exist, but more like, is it getting put in everyone’s news feed and in front of everyone? I think as you move along that spectrum, you get a lot more into the responsibility for the type of content that you’re distributing and how to maybe have high. There are lower trust given to certain sources, or I think there’s been a lot of us around COVID information.

You know, a lot of COVID misinformation out there and a lot of the networks have put like labels on things are, might even prevent certain things being shared. I mean, I don’t love that

Joe Howard: [00:28:37] you don’t love the part of it that’s stopping the information or you don’t like the information. I

Matt Mullenweg: [00:28:43] don’t love the part that stopping the information, but I think what they’re trying to protect against which by the way has happened a lot in the past year is some false information goes out.

Especially if it’s localized, a mob can literally form and people can die, you know, before it’s corrected. Yeah. There’s example and examples in BMR there’s examples in India, where there were allegations that, you know, someone was assaulted, people of a different group got really angry about this. They started attacking, I remember it was Hindus Muslims.

There was there’s some version of this story and, you know, I think that the networks are not responsible, they didn’t create the fakeness, but they, I think they do have a responsibility to try to insert something in there that increases the friction a bit, or sort of catches things. Yeah. If they’re, they’re escalating out of control.

Let me give you an example, which is not that controversial, which most networks have social networks, for example, on tumbler. If you start to post things that make it look like you’re going to harm yourself. There’s certain things that people search for or my post, or do there’s a bot actually that just kind of algorithm detects that says, Hey, here’s a number you can call if you’re feeling terrible.

And it’s essentially like a suicide prevention, it’s actually some of the first code I worked on my first job. When I moved to San Francisco, it was actually a question, a Q and a sites, uh, run by CNET called help.com. And it was a Q and a set kinda like Yahoo answers or core or something like that. I poured it into WordPress who answers, but it turned out that a number of people with type health.com when they were going through a challenging, personal situation or mental health issue or something like that.

And so part of what. We did was create something that could sort of point them to resources that said, Hey, you know, in this moment, here’s another thing to do. If you look at it, that’s kind of what people are trying to do when they say like, if you’re posting LinkedIn, something here is the official COVID information or here’s what the science says.

Or the doctors are saying about vaccines where I don’t love it as also, you know, sometimes the authorities or they’re wrong, you know, or, or they learn things over time. I think though that we conflate the fact that everyone is wrong sometimes with the idea that everything is probably wrong all the time.

And you must like find your own sources. So like, yes, the CDC has made mistakes in early part of COVID, but are those mistakes still there a year later? No they’ve corrected them. And so I think you do kind of want to look at the, not just does a source make a mistake or not, but how do they correct it over time?

And that being a proxy for trustworthiness over time and all the examples of this, like thinking there were weapons of mass destruction and Iraq, and the attire was the New York times was saying that CDC who like. Every single authority will make mistakes. It’s kind of similar to the trust I talked about earlier, where I said is going to mess things up at some point, maybe that’s like accidentally putting it at a bad ad for jet pack or something like that.

But how do we correct it? And that behavior over time is where trust comes from. Not imagining that anyone’s perfect. Cause no one is. Yeah. Thinking there because I saw you make so many faces while we were talking about that, man.

Joe Howard: [00:32:00] I was just thinking that what you said about just the fact that people make, make mistakes doesn’t mean they make mistakes all the time, or you said something like that.

And I think about that with like the news all the time, and people make mistakes, like using that as an example, like just because the CDC. A very trustworthy organization over time that has built up trust over time has made some missteps and COVID, and the issue around that is although most people or a significant amount of people would say, yeah, they made some mistakes.

You know, people will make mistakes, big organizations make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. Some people will take those mistakes and use it to political advantage in my opinion, and will use a certain thing. Someone said to spread it out and then it spread seven times as fast as the truth does. And that I think is still a big challenge.

So yeah, I think around that moderation is we, it needs. To take steps forward, but how it does take steps forward is a challenge because the people moderating also have a political leaning. So, and it felt like you were kind of in the middle of that a little bit, like you don’t like what could potentially be censorship, but you also do think that moderation is necessary at a point.

And it’s like, where’s. The middle of there. I don’t know.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:33:13] It’s also really important to have institutions that we can trust and rely on, like it’s necessary for a functioning society and particularly a democratic society. If you look at regimes or leaders that try to say question everything, they’re usually saying question everything.

It’s set me. And this sort of idea, which meant that I couldn’t in Russia voluntarily and was like, these types of leaders are part of their playbook is to say, don’t trust the media. Don’t trust doctors. Don’t trust, like, you know, these more democratic institutions, because they’re either trying to just create a general fear, which then they can capitalize on.

Or they’re essentially trying to create this like strong man populism. Yeah, it is one of the dangerous forces in society today. If you look around the world or where that is happening, um, those are societies, which over time you and I probably don’t want to live in. Now.

Joe Howard: [00:34:12] Yeah, I think I would agree. It, it, it felt from my point of view, like I was living in there from 2016 until 2020, but that’s a whole nother conversation.

The one thing I did want to dig into a little bit, again, I’m going to switch gears a little bit, cause we don’t have unlimited time here on the pod, but I wanted to talk a little bit about. The Wix versus WordPress. I don’t know if I’ll say versus here, but the Wix slash WordPress may have put WordPress first WordPress slash Wix saga.

Yeah. That seems to be kind of unfolding over the last 10 days or two weeks or so. I’m just going to kind of review things solely and Matt, you can. Step in with corrections or anything like that. But from what I’ve seen, Wix sent folks, WordPress influencers, I guess you could call them. I didn’t receive one of them.

I’m actually a little bit disappointed. Wix, what has happened there? They send some more press influencers, some headphones, and then started this whole, these were like Bose wireless headphones with a link to a new marketing campaign that became more public kind of bashing WordPress. Maybe I’ll remove the word kind of from there, bashing WordPress and, you know, giving people a reason why they should jump over to Wix and WordPress folks in WordPress based.

We’re not very happy about this, including yourself. I’d imagine you have a blog post that you wrote it like an open letter to Wix on Matt, M a T T that you know, I read in full. Um, and then the CEO of Wix wrote an open letter back to you, you know, kind of throwing swings back. I just kinda wanted to get your.

Feelings over it. And it feels like, I don’t know, like as in your position, everybody is somewhat susceptible to some kind of stress in their life. I’m sure this hasn’t been like a super fun two weeks for you, but maybe you’re just laughing it off. Maybe you’re just like, whatever, but I’d love to know what you’re thinking right now.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:35:53] Just a few things I’d like to clarify there. I was not writing a letter to works or their CEO. I have no interest in writing a letter to him or talking to him. I was kind of trying to say just what had happened, which was really bizarre. And a fight that we did not start nor want to participate in. You know, so part of what they were doing is they were actually impersonating WordPress.

Which is kind of weird so that the headphones that came out were, like I said, here’s something I sent for you, like from WordPress. And then the video that you would see was kind of like this like guy who actually had a WordPress logo on his quarter, a jacket, and he’s saying, Hey, I’m WordPress. Let me tell you.

And so some people are going, his confusion was real. So people really thought that maybe the WordPress, I guess the WordPress community had done this as like a thank you.

Joe Howard: [00:36:42] Oh, I didn’t, I didn’t catch that.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:36:45] Yeah, because the video said, Hey, I just want to say Wix is about to attack me. And so we got to like watch out.

And so it was kind of that impersonation, I think was, um, was kind of strange because. Uh, yeah, that was weird. And then once the commercials came out, it was part of their plan though. So these commercials came out. I just found it a little tasteless where, you know, in the midst of a pandemic, when a lot of people are struggling with mental health, the post I wrote was a few days before the anniversary of my father’s passing and this, this kind of WordPress character was kind of like, kind of like a drunk absent father character.

And they had a son in like a therapy session who was like saying. Essentially in this abusive relationship with this absent father character. And, and it was that sort of personification and the kind of tastefulness of that I found was a little, a little odd, even for an attack ad. We get attack ads all the time.

I know there’s been one from Duda and others in the past that we don’t respond to or worry about, but that’s why I wrote the blog posts both to also clarify that this wasn’t from us, for people who are legitimately confused. Andrew saying like, Hey, this is a low blow. Then I took a few shots at Wix too, because I think it’s, you know, we do have a history with that.

Where are they a few years ago, stole GPL code, embedded it illegally in our proprietary application, then denied it and then lied about it and then rewrote it essentially when they, it was clear that they were caught. And then more recently I’ve made the point that Wix doesn’t allow you to export contents.

Squarespace Weebly, Webflow, Facebook, Google, everyone in the world allows you to export content. Of course, WordPress.

Joe Howard: [00:38:34] I liked how the other CEO’s note to you said like, yes you can. But like when your blog posts, like the featured image on social is literally like their policy and like you’re not allowed

Matt Mullenweg: [00:38:43] to do this.

I feel like we’re taking big pot shots because it was a screenshot of their own documentation. It wasn’t like for us, they’re also trying to, like, they’re saying one of the things they made fun of was out of memory errors. I guess when you’re upgrading at a memory errors, honestly, I don’t know. That would be even top 10 on my list for things that we need to work off because every host, I think, is corrected for that, unless you’re with like a really terrible, like really bad web host, they get out of memory errors are much, much more rare because the GoDaddy is a blue host.

So WP engine’s the site grounds, like all of the automatic stuff. Like we now have higher requirements, you know, that, that hasn’t been as common of an error in the past. So. And they will also conflating wordpress.com on WordPress at Oregon. Some people are like, Hey Matt, you had an issue with that. Why did you write this up behalf of the community versus like riding it for automatic competition, but literally on their landing pages and the footer, they said to clarify, this is about wordpress.org.

And so that’s why I was kind of wearing my wordpress.org hat and trying to defend on behalf of the wider community. Now  has always been an aggressive company. They have every right to their customers, proprietary software, et cetera. Like it just, you know, leave us alone. Right? Like we’re, we’re not focused on the competition.

We’re focused on our own users. I have our top 10 list of problems. Like, gosh, like we need the block patterns to work better. I want themes to be more customizable. Like, like I do want upgrades to be easier, but I want them to be totally automatic. So you never think about them. Like we have the list of things we’re working on with the four phases of Gutenberg with every release of WordPress.

And we’re not taking the pot shots, but to be honest, you know, there’s another quote that I forget. I don’t attribute it to me. It’s like, Don’t wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty. The pig likes it. I feel bad for taking the bait. Um, I actually wrote the post a few days. I want to use that for a few days.

And I had shared the draft with some friends and someone was like, you know, this is not that bad. You just, just post this out. But obviously they were planning for that. So that’s why they had their letter ready to go and stuff. But in the WordPress community, I would say if this has, has bugged, you. The number one thing we can do is just help a friend, teach someone WordPress, teach them, you know, the advantages, if any of them are having problems like around those videos, show them the easy ways to get by like getting a good web host.

And if you have anyone you love that uses Wix, maybe, maybe help them upgrade.

Joe Howard: [00:41:21] I have a friend who uses a good friend of mine who has their website on Wix. And honestly, until this. Whole thing happened. I was like, Wix fine. I actually didn’t know as much about the stealing of the GPL information. And I think the challenge there is using it for proprietary software.

That’s clearly aware of the bounds of GPL licensing stops, but I actually sent her that article and I sent her your blog post as well. And I was like, Hey, just so you know, like there’s some shit happening. And so you should probably know about it. If you have somebody, you know, she’s not a. Website person.

She runs just her business on it. So she may not care too much, but it’s important for her to know the kind of company she’s working with. So I did send that to her, Matt. So I got it.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:41:59] If you can help migrate the site, they don’t provide an export. So it’s a little tricky, but, but you can, you can even upgrade the design or something like that, I think is kind of a nice way for us to kind of.

Just do our own community thing. And it’s true, by the way, you might also experience how hard it is to get a refund from Rex. That’s another dig. I took it though, which by the way is not like me making stuff up. It’s just on the internet. You can compare even like, you know, automatic complaints, every business has complaints, but the ones about wakes are like 10 times more, which obviously means they’re doing something very different when you try to cancel your account.

Joe Howard: [00:42:33] Matt, thank you for jumping on the podcast. I really appreciated you jumping on. I really did enjoy talking with you. I learned a lot personally, and I think listeners will have to the second to last thing I like to ask our guests to do is just tell folks where they can find you online. Read blog, contents, find you on social media.

I know you say you’re kind of, you’re active in some Slack groups. Where can folks reach out to you or find you.

Matt Mullenweg: [00:42:55] Okay. The plug section. So a plug, two things, business-wise do it, you know, back.com will commerce.com for a lot of the audience here. I think that those are two great products to be building on jet back to.

Sort of make your site faster and more secure and we’ll commerce. If you want to sell stuff, a lot of people still don’t know that on wordpress.com business plan, you can actually run plugins and themes and have full control over code and SFTP access. So keep that in mind, as you’re deciding between managed word process, I am at Emmett ITT.

It’s my blog. That’s where you can see this Wix thing on Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter. I’m Fotomat P H O T O. M a T T and I think I’m just Matt on wordpress.org. So you can hit me up on the Slack there, or, or, you know, look for my tickets or plugins or anything like that. I love connecting with community and I really appreciated connecting here.

So, you know, let’s do this again and that’s, I’ll make this the last time we get together having to come back on every year or so. And, and, uh, please reach out next time. You want me back on the pot? You

Joe Howard: [00:43:56] got it. You got it. And last thing I like to ask guests to do is to ask our listeners for a little Apple podcast review.

So if you wouldn’t mind asking folks listening for little review,

Matt Mullenweg: [00:44:05] I’d appreciate it. I guess if you enjoyed this podcast or if he didn’t leave her more reviews the better.

Joe Howard: [00:44:14] Yeah, totally. If you liked it, you can go leave the five-star review. If you didn’t like it, then you can email us and you don’t have to leave a review at all.

Exactly. Cool. Send me a Twitter. Yeah. Right, right. Awesome. If you are a new listener to us here on the show, we’ve got a hundred plus a hundred Matt. You’ll probably be on episode 140 something of the podcast, but we’ve got a whole bunch of older episodes. You can go back and listen to WP mrr.com forward slash podcast.

Go to use the search feature there. Do you have trouble on pricing or growing your business? How to make more MRR, how to help democratize publishing can find this episode, lots of old topics to dig into. If you want to bus a review on Apple podcasts, WP MRR forward slash review. That new, we used to, it used to be four slash iTunes, but we updated it because I tend to say Apple podcast.

So that should be live by the time this podcast goes live. If you have questions for me on the show, email, yo Y O at WP, M R r.com. Uh, I like to do Q and a episodes every once in a while as well. So shoot questions to me. Uh, or you can find me on Twitter, Joseph H. Howard at Joseph’s H Howard fan. You can hit me up.

There as well. That is it for this week. We will be in your earbuds again next Tuesday morning, Matt. Thanks again for being on. It’s been

Matt Mullenweg: [00:45:33] real. I really appreciate this and keep up the good work. This is awesome. What you’re doing for the community and key man

Joe Howard: [00:45:39] late everybody.

Podcast

E182 – Selling $100,000+ Projects (Matt Medeiros, Pagely)

In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Matt Medeiros’ conversation. They talk about how running a family-owned agency honed his entrepreneurial and sales skills, constantly giving value to potential customers, and learning effective sales talk.     

Matt is a content creator and the Director of Podcaster Success at Castos. He hosts the podcast, Matt Report, where he talks to a wide range of digital business owners and web consultants. People in the product, marketing, and the agency space are the primary guests.

What to Listen For:

  • 00:00 Intro
  • 01:02 Welcome to the pod, Matt!
  • 01:52 How did you start your podcast?
  • 03:46 Transition from entrepreneurship to joining Pagely
  • 07:26 Running a family-owned agency
  • 12:35 Selling perspective from an experienced sales person
  • 15:57 Conveying the value that you’re adding for the client
  • 24:21 You learn to speak with people regardless of their position
  • 26:12 This giant clip with several overlays
  • 29:35 Find Matt online

Episode Resources:

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: Yo WordPress people. Welcome back to the WP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe,

Matt Medeiros: and I’m the witch king of ag

Joe Howard: mark. And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast, the witch king of ag Mar this week. Love this character selection. I always, I always love when people. More unique characters. Cause I really get to dive in and remember all of my favorite movies and books, et cetera.

So wish king of ag Mar welcome. What’s going on this week for you?

Matt Medeiros: Just a typical slang folks in different dimensions, moving in and out of time without anyone seeing mates, it’s an amazing.

Joe Howard: Yeah, this is a great characterize. As we’re here on this podcast, I’m looking at, I know I’m just doing some searches so I can get the field as character and man scary, scary character badass.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. That is a very good way of putting it.

Matt Medeiros: They always get like the best like superpowers, the coolest weapons, you know, and it’s just, that’s why.

Joe Howard: Yeah, for sure. We have the witch king of ag Mar uh, also known as Matt Madeiros on this week. Thanks for hopping on man. Uh, I’m a big fan of.

Everything we’re pressing, you do online. Big fan of the podcast, know about a lot of the stuff you do at Pagely, but why don’t you give people kind of the rundown of all the WordPress things that you do?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Super quick is a, the maryport.com is the podcast also YouTube channel. And you can find me during theDay@pagely.com as a one of their sales reps, just sort of helping folks pick a right pick the right solution on Pagely and get them set up on managed WordPress hosting.

But during this time, Few years now. So a lot of stuff out there, but that’s my primary work.

Joe Howard: I have a question about the podcast. Actually. You mentioned that you do the podcast, obviously that comes in audio format, but also you do YouTube stuff. When you started off doing the podcast and kind of doing YouTube stuff, were you, was your plan to do them both.

Did you start audio and then move to video? What did that look like? It was actually, I

Matt Medeiros: started with both audio and video and. It just became like way too much work. Uh, and this is like six, six years ago. So like even like editing videos and chopping off the beginning and the end was just too much time to even do that.

So I, I stepped away from it, but on the YouTube channel now it’s more just quick little talking head things. If I’m doing stuff on the Maryport channel or from on the plugin Tut channel, it’s much more like tutorial driven content stuff that like teaching people how to do things with WordPress.

Joe Howard: Yeah, cool.

That that’s my ultimate fear is, is bringing on something that is going to take up way too much of my time and not even just taking my time, but it will take up my time because I’m not fast at it. I’m not efficient or good at it. And like video editing is not my thing or, and audio editing. So if I were to do that, that was.

My fear, like maybe it’ll just take, it’ll suck up my time. Then four hours later, it’d be like, okay, edit one video suite. And then, well, where’d the rest of my,

Matt Medeiros: yeah. I mean, that’s the thing with content creation at any level, either whether it’s a blog or, you know, whatever content channel you’re committed to, it can definitely be a time suck and you can quickly get lost in it.

So doing things that you’re comfortable with that you can do pretty efficiently is.

Joe Howard: Agreed a hundred percent. So we got the Matt report podcast and we got Pagely stuff going on as well. So this is interesting timing, actually talking to you this morning, so this is actually kind of a perfect time to maybe jump off from that and talk even more about it. We had some really good conversations about what that looks like in general, how a lot of people, they think that like they work a job, maybe they don’t like it.

Maybe it’s just not for them. And then they move into entrepreneurial. And they find something they like, and they get it to work. And then like, that’s the end of the road? Like, that’s it. I did it like, I’m an entrepreneur now. And that’s like, clearly just like usually not the case. Like there are different chapters of life that happened.

So you kind of went from doing some of your own stuff in WordPress to now working at Pagely. Maybe let’s talk about that transition a little bit. What did that, what did that look like?

Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so, I mean, it’s definitely chapters, you hit the right word right there and that’s the way that I think.

Collectively people, you know, should look at this entrepreneurship is a difficult road, right? So a lot of people who are that have a job, they hate their job. And they’re like, Hey, I want to be this entrepreneur. Right. I want to be this person who starts a business and make some money while they sleep kind of thing.

Totally cool. And it’s totally how, like a lot of us sort of got inspired to get into this game, but it’s, it’s a long journey. And for most of us, we’re just doing it heads down by ourselves. It’s it’s lonely and it can become quite difficult. Now, in my case, I started a digital agency with my father, uh, about a decade ago.

Uh, and the agency is still running. Um, it was just. Different time in WordPress a couple of years ago. Uh, you think you can just go around the horn of many agencies and even boutique agencies a couple of years ago, right around the presidential election, where I think many people at the higher level were just tightening their belts a little bit.

Cause they were unsure of where the economy was going. Um, and the agency gained became pretty difficult. Um, and I was like, I’m the one that can step away from this and have the agency still continue to run and get a job at a, at a place like Pagely and the stars sort of aligned because they still allow me of course, to do my podcast and do my content creation stuff.

Um, so that’s a benefit, but, uh, it’s, it’s a great team too. It’s just a great fit all around and it doesn’t feel, I hope Josh isn’t listening, but it doesn’t feel like a job, you know? Um, Great people. Uh, you know, we have a great system down in and really enjoy working with them and, and the stuff

Joe Howard: that I do.

Yeah, cool man team is everything. You know, if you have the right people around you and you’re spending time with the people that bring you positivity and bring you the drive and passion, then you know, there may be times when it feels like a job, but it feels like a positive driven as opposed to like, you know, driving because you feel like you have to or something.

I don’t want to get back

Matt Medeiros: another piece. That’s just sort of underappreciated in a lot of this is. It’s if you’re able to level up. Right. And in my case, I mean, I was running an agency for years. You know, maybe the biggest projects that we were securing at the time was maybe around like, I don’t know, 30 grand, 40 grand at most in terms of project size, but now I’m able to do.

I’m just learning so much being at the Paigey level with the types of customers that they work with, um, that I’m seeing, you know, the multiple hundred thousand dollar projects. Right. And like just seeing and learning and seeing how everything is done at a higher level. It’s just like, it’s a huge boom to your career.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Pagely is, uh, is now maybe moving into is wrong, but has moved in the past towards more of an enterprise level customers that, right.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I mean, you know, not today. Talking about their solution to everything is sort of just dedicated hosting, right? There’s no shared fabric. There’s no shared hosting that the model is not, that it is, is about having dedicated servers and about having a dedicated dev ops team that somebody would work with much closely.

So your development team would work with our dev ops team, you know, way closer than your typical, like. Help desk.

Joe Howard: Yeah, very cool. I’m a big fan of people who have found models, where support is really a core piece of it. We’re obviously big fans of awesome support here at WP bus cassettes. A lot of our jobs, significant portion of our job is just providing great support to people.

I want to, I want to come back to page Lee’s stuff in a second, but you’ve said something that I feel like I have to dig into even a little more because I don’t hear very often. You started an agency with your father? That’s something I don’t hear super often. Dig in there a little bit more selfish that it’s kind of want to learn what that experience was like.

Matt Medeiros: Yeah. So it’s a, so I’ve been working with my father for, for many years. So he and his and my grandfather had started a car dealership. You know, I don’t even know what 60, 70 years ago at this point, uh, we, one of the first Mazda dealerships in the country. So my father and his brothers and his father, they ran a car dealership for about 40 or 50 years in the local community.

And I was always working there that sort of. Learned everything from sales to customer service to everything. So I’ve been working with them for literally all my life. And, uh, when we were getting out, uh, when he was getting out of the car industry, I was getting out of an ISP that I worked at, where I managed a team of developers and it was actually a Drupal shop that I had managed.

And uh, if somebody wanted to build a website, you know, the quick story is somebody wanting to build a website. He was a pro photographer at the same time. It’s something that he did. So then somebody said, Hey, can you build a website with these products that these product photos you took? And he said, yeah, I can try that.

And he turned to me. Uh, these guys want a website, do you know how to build it? And I said, shirtless would give it a shot. Right. And that was sorta like the Genesis of building, uh, the agency.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I’ve heard that agency. Genesis story multiple times. Hey, I need a website with this. Can you help?

Yeah, sure. I can. And thus, an agency. It was your father kind of into some of the cause obviously to, to maybe, you know, Cove bound or to run an agency with your dad, you have maybe kind of different perspectives on technology as technology changes a lot. Did you find that like one of you was carrying the torch more technology, one more on sales and or marketing?

Or what did that look like? Well, just

Matt Medeiros: two different game plans in terms of. You know, he’s very versed in technology. I mean, giving, giving him credit, he learned a whole heck of a lot and he was always into sort of tech. I mean, we always had a computer in the house from way, way back from ever. I can remember, um, is how I got into computers, but his, you know, his knowledge level just sort of stopped at a certain point.

Right. If we started talking bigger enterprise solutions. Yeah. That’s, that’s where I, you know, came in, but we both shared the torch on sales market. It was just a different segment of customers that he was able to.

Joe Howard: Yeah. I’m trying to think about running a digital agency with my dad and it’s like, Nope, I don’t think that’s going to work.

Sorry, dad, you’re listening, but I don’t think you don’t think you’re quite technical enough to help handle the, uh, the running of a digital agency. Maybe you could do some sales and marketing, but

Matt Medeiros: yeah. I mean, family owned businesses. It’s tough. I mean, it’s, it’s no different, I mean, every. Every context has its own diff his own challenges.

Right? So if you’re solo you’re you’re by yourself. If you have a co-founder, you know, I, I used to start, uh, I’d started Dropbox before Dropbox was Dropbox. Right? Years and years ago, I built, uh, uh, started to build a company with a friend of mine. He was a co-founder and I remember we got some seed investments and I remember talking to the seed investor and who is the advisor who was also the father of my business partners, girlfriend.

And I remember him telling me. You know, we were pitching him the business and, you know, back then we were talking about like sinking files to the cloud and it, you know, the cloud wasn’t even like a thing. And we were like, what do you think about this? And he was like, look, I don’t care about any of this.

He’s like, what you guys have to do is work together and build a business. That’s the challenge that you guys are gonna face. And we looked at each other. I remember, I remember it vividly being at dinner at this guy’s house. Sitting with my business partner at the time, his name was also Matt and hearing that and being like, what is mark talking about?

That was the guy’s name. I was like, what is Marco? Of course, we’re going to build a business. What do we think we’re doing here? What else? Right. And that was ultimately the challenge because then my business partner broke up with his daughter and then, and then he just lost all it all interest in building the business.

And he stopped like coding stuff. And I’m like, oh, this is what this guy was talking about. This is the challenge. It’s not the product and the customer. It’s cohesively working together with any partner, be it family, or just somebody you’re paired up with.

Joe Howard: Wow. That’s cool. I did not know that about you.

Yeah, I think you’re right about that. It’s a, like a lot of businesses co-founded businesses fail because something happens with the, with the partnership between the two. I mean, even you see this, this was successful companies, you know, the, you, and you’re married to that person in building a business and it doesn’t always work out in a lot of cases.

It doesn’t. And then that causes, obviously, if there’s a riff between founders, there are going to be some issues building the business, moving forward. It’s hard enough when you’re a hundred percent cohesive and on the same team and working together every day and doing it well, it, even in that situation, it’s hard to run a successful business, you know, to do it when, if that’s not the case, definitely a challenge.

I would love to talk about a little bit more sales stuff. We have had a few people talk about sales in the podcast before, but this is, I think this is a big area. Of interest for a lot of people, a lot of people, you know, in terms of WordPress, they’re technical enough to put a WordPress site together, especially listeners of this podcast, mostly WordPress professionals, people who kind of know their way around, around WordPress, but a lot of the kind of business development and sales stuff.

I mean, that’s a really big aspect of running a business that people need to focus on that. Not everybody has an expertise on. It sounds like you have a background in sales from car dealerships. And now have kind of applied that at Pagely would love to hear a little bit more about, about that. Yeah. I mean,

Matt Medeiros: that, that is one thing that is, you know, sorely lacking in a lot of like, uh, uh, either plugin authors or people who have premium plugins or even themes.

And I think a lot of people can admit this too, right. Because I think the overall feeling in at least this space is. They say they don’t know how to sell. And at the same time, they’re also saying like, I don’t like to sell, I think it’s like this, this evil thing. Right? So when you combine that in that person’s head, they will just never do it because one, they they’re afraid because they certainly they’re uncertain of their abilities.

And they’re also afraid because they feel like they’re projecting on somebody, something negative. And it’s, it’s truly not. I mean, I can safely say that in the year 2019, um, that selling is vastly different than it was. 10 years ago, 20 years ago. I remember I remember being in the car dealership at the Dawn of consumer internet when people could actually first look up car prices, which is, you know, Very common now, right.

People would come to us or come to me with, you know, a pile of papers that they printed out from all these websites that they found and all these other reports that they would buy. And they was just like, ready to come to war with you. Right. There’s this, like, we want, you know, this, we want another, a hundred dollars off and this is why.

And you know, and it’s just like, well, look, we’re not, we’re not going to war with this stuff. And even back then, You know, selling on value, being a family owned dealership was huge. Selling on value is absolutely huge today. And in fact, you know, it’s, it’s the differentiator for, it can be the differentiator for a lot of these plugin, uh, in theme folks in service, people in the WordPress space, right.

Just selling on that value, telling your story building trust is really not that hard. And at the same time, you know, and it allows you to filter down on finding the right customer. So if you’re telling your story and you’re out there. You know, either doing content or podcasts, YouTube blog, whatever, or out meeting people at networking and things like that.

You’re finding customers that want to connect with you and the customer is savvy enough today to do research and understand that they want to give their dollar to somebody that’s going to be there to support them and answer their questions. Sure. There’s like that 20% of bad customers that come along and they just demand everything.

You were all in a position these days to resign from those types of customers and only focus in on, on, um, the customers that we want to serve. So yeah, selling isn’t really as difficult or as challenging, and certainly not as sleazy as some

Joe Howard: people can try it to be. Yeah. Most people think about sales and they’re like, they think about, you know, the slick salesman and I think in a lot of senses, Tack it doesn’t work anymore with, with people being able to do as much research as they want to across different mediums.

I mean, people can really choose you for a bunch of different reasons besides just the 15 minutes or conversation you have on the phone with people, you are doing sales, maybe in a slightly different area than some of our listeners. I think just based on kind of statistically, there are probably a few larger people working with a lot of enterprise people, but a lot of people in the WordPress space.

Doing, you know, required to do sales with, with smaller customers, maybe up to the point, you know, that you used to with your agency, maybe, you know, the smaller deals are 5,000, but maybe the bigger ones are 40 or 50,000, but you’re working in the enterprise space. Can you maybe tell listeners what, what you think has worked with.

For you and kind of what you’ve learned in your time doing sales at Pagely really looking at these like pretty mammoth deals, at least according to the people who come to us for, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month, you know, a hundred thousand dollars project, it’s a big, big deal. What’s uh, what does sales look like on that level?

It’s the same.

Matt Medeiros: With just added zeros. It’s the

Joe Howard: same thing

Matt Medeiros: with added zeros. Right. And, um, you know, whether you’re selling a $500 site or, you know, there’s a, a $50,000 site coming on board with, uh, you know, $4,000 a month hosting account with Pagely effectively, people are, people are looking for the same exact questions, the same exact service.

Um, but you know, in the enterprise, yeah, there’s, there’s some more legwork, this or more paperwork, there’s legal stuff, you know? And, and, and that’s one of the things that. Uh, quickly discovered being in this space, but it’s, it’s all the same challenges is, is folks want to know that plausible deniability, right?

They’ve picked Pagely because, you know, they know that if something goes wrong in the middle of the night, that the Pagely team is gonna, is going to be there to fix it. And they just want to know that they’re making the best. For a, for number one, their job security, but number two, uh, with the budget that they have, have to spend.

And I would say that on the positive side, on these larger scale deals that I see now is people are a lot less price sensitive where they might be at, you know, the, the 500 to $5,000 range of a typical, you know, mom and pop customer where, you know, they’re not just looking at every single thing and asking you a million questions about, you know, it was, you know, what about, should I just use.

This instead of this, like why, why can’t I get this and why doesn’t it take, you know, why isn’t it faster to get this stuff done? People at the higher end, they already are well past that. And they’re just, they just want to make sure that they’re giving their dollars to the right

Joe Howard: place. Yeah. I think that it would be an interesting conversation.

I mean, I’m, I’m on, Pagely the pages of the website right now. Just kind of looking at some of the. Your client said, I think it would be very strange if like someone like Disney or like booking.com or visa came to you and were like working to put together some Wix websites. That conversation doesn’t really make much sense.

Right. They’re coming to you saying as a company that has pretty good amount of revenue coming in, we need a solution that does X, Y. Can you provide that you guys say, you know, come together and say, is this a WordPress solution then? And with our team and our, uh, our specializations, yes, we can help you.

Here’s how much it’s going to cost. Obviously, there are more steps in that, but in general, the grand scheme of things, you know, people need a solution. If you can provide that solution. And like you said, in that sales process, Really conveying the value that you’re adding to them for like really honing in on the pain point that they are really having.

And, uh, and really saying this solution is going to not only solve that pain point, but maybe even here’s how it’s going to solve it financially. Right. You’re spending this much money on this now, you know, with this solution, you pay this much, but for the ongoing support and for how much I know how much better this is going to work for you moving.

Over the next six months or the next year, like you’re actually going to see a positive ROI. So that kind of conversation. Yeah.

Matt Medeiros: Another side to the coin too, is, uh, for the hopefuls that want to get into the sort of the higher level, I’ve seen some crazy things with people that have plenty of money, plenty of budget and plenty of resources I’ve seen.

Funny things happen

Joe Howard: with what’s one of those one or a couple of those funny things with WordPress that people have been kept coming

Matt Medeiros: out of this. Yeah. I mean, from, from the, you know, the regular WordPress side, you know, we’ve seen people that haven’t updated WordPress and literally years, and it’s like a corporate site.

It’s like, wait a minute. Why what’s going on with all of that? You know, why haven’t you done this, right. This is a pretty big

Joe Howard: set for you as your main company website, because they have nobody been maintaining it.

Matt Medeiros: The typical, the typical. Sales processes. Hey, we, you know, you do the sort of, uh, the presentation and then it’s like, okay, we’re going to go with Pagely and then, okay.

We have all of this, like InfoSec security stuff. We need you to, uh, review and make sure that you are compliant with how we do InfoSec security. Like, yeah. Okay. No problem. And then you get to see their website and it’s like, version three of WordPress and you’re like, wait a minute, this just doesn’t line up.

Like, you want all this stuff, but you’re on version three. Like, what are we missing here? Um, all the way down to like some of the things that. You know, being a, starting off the agency, if you’re somebody who’s just starting off like a service or consultancy pricing is always that difficult thing where you’re like, am I charging too, too much, too little of my worth it?

Not at, um, um, you know, again, some of the things I’ve seen with, with other developers and, and what they charge. At the higher end too, when I start meeting these, these larger brands or these organizations, and it really it’s really, eye-opening like, wow, you might want to follow the money a little bit better, a little bit higher, right.

Because I’m seeing what they’re doing and what they’re charging. I’m like, wow. I mean, I, you know, I was charging a fraction of that at my agency. I could have charged, you know, four times the amount for this type of process. So I opening it all ends both the, the end user customer and some of the developers that, uh, I’ve come on.

Joe Howard: Yeah. I think one of the things I’ve learned as a business owner, or maybe two of the things is that hindsight’s 20, 20, it’s really easy to go back and see where you made the mistakes. And the second thing is just like, you kind of, you don’t know what you don’t know. Like there are certain things that until you kind of like, fuck up a little bit and see someone else like charging twice as much and like selling to just as many clients.

And you’re doing pretty much the same thing. Their prices are just double it’s like, oh, like, okay, cool. Like I get that. Uh, you know, when you’re, when you don’t know it, you don’t know it.

Matt Medeiros: So I think it’s all goes, it’s a good lesson for what we said, what we talked about earlier, like chapters in people’s lives and being an entrepreneur and, you know, in the world of Instagram and Twitter and everything, everything is always like, Hey, you know, check out the Ferrari I bought or check out the numbers.

Here’s my transparency report. We’re doing like 50 grand a month. That kind of thing. And everybody who’s like, we’re listening

Joe Howard: and don’t know there’s actually a Ferrari right in the background with my video with Matt. So I’m trying to press him as much as I can,

Matt Medeiros: you know, in this, in this kind of, you know, uh, vanity metrics world, a lot of people who start a business and if it’s not working yet, It’s a very difficult thing for people to say, Hey, I’m wrapping this up.

It didn’t, it didn’t do what I, what I wanted it to do, but I’m gonna take all these lessons. I’m going to get a job. And this job with the right team and the right company is going to just level up all of that knowledge. So that if I do go back out again as an entrepreneur, I start my own business. I have a whole range of new info data research, um, to level up.

It’s not a bad thing. To have to step away from, you know, your entrepreneurship days in this new chapter of your life. And then maybe just, maybe you might start something else later on.

Joe Howard: Yeah, dude, I think you totally nailed it. I a hundred percent agree, Christie and I had a very similar conversation on our episode, which, you know, relates around there’s, you know, there’s so much media around successful entrepreneurs and people.

Making it, and like, you’re talking about all this transparency report for in, in the background of my video stuff that when something doesn’t work out, we feel bad. Like we feel like we should have made it. And like we’re letting people down when in fact this is just part of the journey, right? You don’t always see all the failures of successful entrepreneurs.

If someone was a successful entrepreneur, their first time out trying that’s the exception, the extreme exception, and for most successful entrepreneurs use. 10 different projects they tried before that didn’t work out also what you said about man, like working somewhere to be able to level up your skills.

I mean, I’m sure you’re learning a ton about sales and enterprise sales and all this stuff at Pagely that working at your agency, you may not have had that you may not have had that ability to, you know, if your highest point project was $40,000, you’re not really working in enterprise. The ability to not only have some comfort in.

Having a, a regular paycheck and all that, but the ability to actually have professional development as part of like your day to day execution, like as a business owner, I feel like I lack a little bit of the professional development in the sense that like, I don’t get to work as much on like marketing and like the SEO and, and S and, and sales, like the stuff in the business development stuff.

Enjoy doing, but I don’t feel like I’m super leveling up in those areas because I I’m like managing a team. I’m somewhat jealous of some people working at companies like you, because of the fact that you get to, like, you get to like, be Excel in sales or you get to like pastor of this trade, I feel like I’m kind of a, like, what is it like a, like a master of none sort of thing.

I’m okay. A lot of stuff. I don’t really feel like I’m super good at one thing I, that does, it’s a cool thing to be able to have for sure. And

Matt Medeiros: definitely like. You know, w w if you do, if you are somebody sort of transitioning into a new, a new role. Yeah. It can be scary. I mean, being in sales, all my life for selling so much stuff, I used to, if you remember, there was a company called circuit city.

I used to sell computers way, way back in the day when I was sitting, when I was in college. And then, uh, you know, going into this role, I was like, man, I, you know, uh, I had my own self doubts. I have my own imposter syndrome. Like, how am I going to get on the phone? At and T and Comcast, Verizon Experian, all these people and be like, I feel like the biggest idiot in the room.

Right. And in the beginning, yeah, it was, it was pretty challenging mentally, right. To step up to that. But now after two years, you’ve learned so much, you understand it and you understand that it’s still just people to people, right. It doesn’t, it doesn’t change. You know, you’re not shifting gears just because.

Uh, an executive position at edit and another company.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Very true. It that’s one thing you learn along the way is there’s a lot of advice you can give to people to help them build a business. I mean like unlimited advice or best practices, or, you know, telling your own story to help other people. The one thing that probably covers, you know, everything, you know, if you want to be successful, surround yourself with other people who are trying to do what you’re doing and other people who have, you know, maybe even been successful doing.

If you can find the right people and surround yourself with them, then you’ll at least like not, if you go off the rails, when you go off the rails and things go wrong, you will have those people to lie on. Right. It’s like, you know, you’re bowling, you know, with a, with no, you know, those, uh, gutter, blockers, you know, you still use this.

That I probably used for way too long growing up because I was not never very good, but if you have those, it doesn’t matter which direction you go in. The people will help you to move in the right direction. If you want to go there, we’re going to wrap up somewhat soon. But last thing I would love to touch on here.

A little bit of content marketing stuff. One thing I saw that you did at Pagely that I was super impressed with. I thought it was really cool was you put together these little sales videos and they kind of strung together in a way where you could kind of have a sales associate of Pagely talking about the different things to do a page.

You can actually click on that video and say like, uh, you know, first was you just introducing yourself. Hey, and what do you want to talk about? The video stopped. It had a little button said, oh, I’m a individual owner or whatever. I’m a, an agency owner. I’m like a big agency owner. Then it moved to the next video.

And depending on what people clicked, it would push them into a different video that would talk specifically to them. I thought that was super dope. I never seen that before. Is that something you’ve put together before, or was that your first time trying it?

Matt Medeiros: So we always are launching different project names and that, uh, internal project names.

And that was the internal project name was called bottled beer. Beard was sort of like a genius bottle, but my beard kind of thing. Um, and, uh, Sean Tierney, my, uh, the, the VP of sales, it was his idea. We had chatted about like building some kind of like, choose your own adventure. Um, and he found a service that, uh, would.

But you have that overlay that you were talking about, it was like, you know, your piece, the, uh, the, the, you, it was actually one giant YouTube clip. And then it just had like this menu overlay, and there’s, there’s lots of services out there that can do that kind of thing. But that was a particularly, that was a lot of work.

It was a lot of work because the software is self. Like you have to map all the questions and answers and all that stuff in the checkbox check boxes, but it was also a lot of work to, to feel. Uh, filling in my office here and then do it without having to say like all the ums and AHS. I mean, I still do it in there.

I mean, I’m not a professional, but, um, that was a lot of, uh, of recording time, uh, as well. But a lot of people is great. I mean, our tactic in a lot of this stuff, Look, if you, if you don’t want to get on the phone. Cause a lot of people don’t want to do a online presentation through zoom, which is what we use.

If you don’t want to do that, you know, here’s all like we have handouts, we have obviously the website and here’s just another thing that you can use. And at least they get to see who I am and that they actually talk to me when we do get on the phone. And it was actually really well received by, by customers as well.

So yeah, it was a, it’s definitely helpful to put as much content as you can, uh, out there. A lot of people forget. That content marketing is a great pre-sales or sales tool that can alleviate a lot of, you know, the general frequently asked questions. I mean, I’m sure I can tell that you’re probably a big proponent for like automation and getting things lined up correctly.

So you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting every sale that this is like a perfect case of that. If you’re putting out. These frequently asked questions and sort of like a choose your own adventure fashion. It’s really going to help customers warm up to you. And you don’t have to ask all the same old questions when you get on the phone.

And you can just say, are you ready to sign? You know, are we ready to do the deal that you’ve seen everything else? You have a couple of questions leftover. Um, if not, let’s, let’s just, let’s move on.

Joe Howard: The perfect sales tactic. You jump on the phone and you get the document sign that that’s a sales 1 0 1.

Right? Cool, man, this has been a ton of fun. We’re going to cut it a little short, uh, because I know you are heading out, uh, I’m checking out this, uh, live Q and a you’re going to be on. So you’re doing this Gutenberg times. Q1. With Joe Casabona and carry deals to other people who have also been on the WP MRR podcasts.

So I got all three of the Gutenberg, but that looks fun. Go and enjoy. We’ll wrap this up now, but the last few things we’ll go through, I just want to make sure people can find all your stuff online so they can go listen, people listening to a podcast right now. So they’re maybe on their phone. Where can they go to find.

Find your podcast, maybe also where you are online, Twitter or website,

Matt Medeiros: stuff like that. Yeah. So maryport.com is the WordPress podcast. If you looking for everything I do, it’s crafted by matt.com has every link for every possible thing. I’ve either launched and failed at or still do today. So crafted by Matt has everything that I do.

Joe Howard: Uh, and I will give a quick shout out to Pagely pagely.com for anybody looking for. Uh, hosting partner, uh, on the right on your homepage here, we help big brand scale word press. So if that sounds like something you’re interested in doing or something that you have clients interested in doing Paisley is an excellent partner for that as well.

Uh, Matt, last thing I always ask guests to do is to ask our audience for some iTunes reviews. Would you mind. Asking our listeners here, if they can leave a review for

Matt Medeiros: us. Yeah. If you want to leave a review for the Matt report, just kidding.

Joe Howard: This is what I always do afterwards. So I always say also go leave him a Firestone.

So I’ll give you, I’ll hit you up WMR podcasts, and then we’ll get you out.

Matt Medeiros: Listen, I, I. I’ve been on a, I’ve been talking to a lot of folks lately about, about podcasting with other podcasts and such apple needs to do something about reviews. They need to make it as easy as hitting the like button on YouTube or like a Facebook or something like that.

That should the particular challenges is even if somebody is listening with their mobile device, that is the easier way to do it than doing it through iTunes, but they just need to make it so much easier. Cause it’s still like five clicks you have to do. And then you have to scroll all the way to the bottom and hit the stars at the end, leave a review.

They need to make that easier. But having said that, take a moment and go and give Joe’s podcast. Five star. Because it helps people like him get found. It really does. And it encourages Joe to wake up every day to keep doing this because podcasting is not an easy feat. I think a lot of people forget that or don’t realize that there’s a lot of effort that goes into this.

So leave them a five star review. I’m sure he would really appreciate.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Hey, I appreciate that, man. We tried to make it a little easier for people. If you go to WP mrr.com forward slash iTunes, it forwards you to the iTunes link. So it makes it a little easier. So it’s four clicks, I guess, instead of five, but yeah, people want to leave a review.

Make sure you leave a comment with Matt’s name in it and just mats. How, uh, you know, talk about how Matt, how awesome Matt is. Cause this was a pretty cool episode,

Matt Medeiros: terrible map. I will take all

Joe Howard: sorts of criticism. First episode was now. Yeah. If you want to leave a one-star review, you can just email us that want to start with you.

You don’t have to put it online. New listeners. If you’re in here for the first, maybe second time, we have a ton of awesome episodes recorded. Already. Feel free to go and binge you already binge on Netflix. Why not binge WPM or our podcast and why don’t while you’re at it. Go ahead and binge Matt report podcast as well.

They’ve got some brilliant guests on there too. If you have questions for the show, you can email. At yo@wpmrr.com. Uh, we’re always getting new ideas for episodes. So if you could help us, we will give you a nice shout out on the show and go ahead and answer questions. That’s always fun. Uh, WP mrr.com is the site.

If you are interested in doing a video course all around increasing your MRR by selling care plans for. Clients then check that out as well, and feel free to grab that 30% discount on the site too. Other than that, we will see you and be in your ears. And next Tuesday, Matt, thanks again for coming on.

It’s just Joe. Thanks for having .

Podcast

E181 – Making it as an Influencer (Shane Barker, shanebarker.com)

In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Shane Barker’s conversation. They talk about why real-time engagement matters more than fake following, how influencers shouldn’t rely on just one platform, and staying visible online through relevant and relatable content.    

Shane is a top digital marketing consultant, keynote speaker, and influencer. He has helped businesses accelerate their growth with customized digital marketing consultation and services. Having won many accolades, he has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.

What to Listen For:

  • 00:00 Intro
  • 00:50 Welcome to the pod, Shane!
  • 02:11 Teaching a course in UCLA
  • 04:46 How would you define an influencer?
  • 07:20 Fake followers versus real engagement     
  • 15:21 Drive social media traffic to your website
  • 20:03 When your social media account gets shut down
  • 22:21 Think where your audience is at
  • 29:14 Presenting yourself on social media without bragging
  • 36:55 The pressure of having a lot of visibility online
  • 43:11 Find Shane online 

Episode Resources:

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: Hey, WordPress people. Welcome back to the WP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe

Shane Barker: and I’m

Joe Howard: overing. And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. We’ve got Wolverine on the podcast this week. One of the most popular X-Men, uh, around what’s going on.

Shane Barker: Nothing man. Just hanging out, looking forward to, hopefully we’ll be filming a movie here soon.

Also, you guys can’t see this on the podcast, but I have an, like an aggressively red beard that I’ve grown out for the new movie. Yeah.

Joe Howard: Nice, nice. Everyone knows that. Wolverine is a, is a red head.

Shane Barker: Yeah, secretly, I mean, who doesn’t want to be a redheaded C? I mean, especially in elementary school, I was so popular.

Joe Howard: Uh, cool. Wolverine, uh, the red headed Wolverine on the podcast this week also known as Shane Barker. Shane. Welcome to the podcast, man.

Shane Barker: Hey man. Thanks for having me. I’m excited. Yeah, for

Joe Howard: sure. Cool. Uh, why don’t you tell people a little bit, uh, about yourself, about what you do, uh, maybe like, as it relates to the WordPress space, it’s kind of a WordPress podcast and most listeners WordPress professionals, but you know, you do some stuff with WordPress and some stuff in the marketing world as well.

So yeah. Give us a little, a little play by play here.

Shane Barker: Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve actually been like in the digital space for about 25 years. I actually teach at UCLA. I teach personal branding and how to be an influencer course. And I’ve used WordPress forever. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s been the platform that I use for all my clients when we used to develop websites quite a bit in my earlier days.

I mean, I say my earlier days, probably 10 years ago, maybe eight years ago, seven years ago, but we use WordPress for my own website, obviously index as well. I mean, there’s nothing, you know, everything’s phenomenal about it. You know, keywords and getting index and all the fun stuff. So I’ve been, I do that.

I have a consulting company called Shane barker.com. Um, I also have, uh, a few, I have a few different companies that I have. I mean, they’re all, like I said, in the digital space that all come into driving traffic and converting traffic. And so that’s kind of, that’s kind of my expertise, but also the influencer side of things, because I’ve been writing about it for about seven or eight years, and I teach a course at you.

Cool man.

Joe Howard: Uh, if the tissue in the course of UCLA is actually, I didn’t know that about you. I did a little research about you. I was like, what’s up with shame. You do it online, but I didn’t, I didn’t catch that UCLA part as someone who’s been in the digital space for a little while. I don’t hear about a lot of like teaching of this kind of stuff, especially in universities.

So that sounds like that’s kind of new to me. What w how did you, how did that come about.

Shane Barker: So it’s crazy, man. It’s actually kind of a funny story. So I, this was, uh, probably about two years ago. I had a local junior college cause I’m here in Sacramento, California, and our local junior college. One of the instructors that I’ve known for awhile while reached out to me, said, Hey, we want to, we really liked for you to teach a course.

Um, you know, I mean, you know, in a roundabout way, she furnished with the instructors that we have are old and they don’t, they’re not in the current space. Right. They’re not an Instagram. They’re not on Tik TOK. They’re not on wherever. I don’t think tick-tock was around two years ago, but anyways, you get my point.

They would, they’re not on these platforms. And so really looking for a practitioner. So they, and I said, well, it sounds awesome. Let’s see, let me look into this. And they said, well, but you have to have your master’s degree. And I said, okay, well then let me go back and get my masters. So I was looking into my master’s degree.

Two weeks later, I might have UCLA reached out to me and said, Hey, we’re, you know, hiring for this position is personal branding, how to be an influencer. And so I sent him an email back and I was like, well, Hey, just so you guys know, I don’t have my master’s, you know, and they said, that’s it. The problem is what do you mean really?

So I said, okay. So I flew down there and they’re like, yeah, we’re really looking for a practitioner. We’re looking for somebody that’s in this space. It’s such a new space. We just know a lot of the instructors. Aren’t going to know how to teach it. And we want somebody that’s, that’s actually been in the space.

And so it was interesting to me because. Usually it’s not that way. Right? I mean, unfortunately academia or the university systems. They’re like, you have to go through certain things, right. You have to do this and you have to do your masters. You have to do this. And in a lot of the times you’re not grandfathered in.

If you have, you know, 20 years of, um, background in marketing, right? Like that should be better than any degree that you received 20 years ago. Right. As soon as they reached out to me and it was because of the content that I was writing. And because of the, my website, obviously it was, you know, were pressed and that was indexing well, and they read my articles and said, Hey, we think you’d be a good fit.

And that’s how I got the job. Like, I didn’t even apply for it. Like they came after me. So it was kind of a crazy little deal. Um, and I’ll be honest. The first time they emailed me, I thought I got hacked. I thought somebody was hacking me in. You know, Hey, UCLA wants to hire you. And I was like, oh, sounds good.

Okay. Whatever buddy. You know? Okay. Let me give you my account number, you know, so yeah, so, but anyways, but yeah, it was a, it was a real deal. And then all of a sudden I had a job at UCLA. Nice.

Joe Howard: That’s funny that a lot of opportunities that people have, uh, you know, you put yourself in good opportunities to, or you put yourself in a good position to be lucky to get opportunities, but a lot of times opportunities kind of find you, you know, it goes both ways.

It’s a

Shane Barker: crazy deal, man. It’s a crazy world.

Joe Howard: Cool. Okay. So teaching this stuff at UCLA, so you must know a thing or two about influencers, personal branding, that kind of stuff. Uh, I mean, my first question is like, what makes someone an influencer? Like how would, how would you define an influencer as someone who knows tons about the topic?

Shane Barker: Yeah. I mean, it’s, you know, influencers like is like a, it’s like a dirty word these days, you know, if you were like, oh, you’re an influencer. Like what, what warrants an influencer? Like at what point do you go, Hey, you know what, now I have influence over my community or whatever that is. Right. So the thing is, is it used to be follower camp?

You were like, oh, if you get X amount of followers and you’re in theory and influencer for me, it really comes down to it. It’s not necessarily a follower account. It’s if you’ve built. And your community listens to you, right? So you, Joe has an example. You are an influencer. You might not look at yourself that way, but you have a podcast.

You have a, a heavy amount of people that use WordPress, right? Your very, your niche down in your space. And so if you go and you have a sponsor on your podcast and whatever it is, it’s SCM rush or whatever that is. There’s people that are going to say, well, if Joe uses it, then maybe I should use it. Right.

And there’s, there’s going to be some validity to that because you actually use those programs or software. So an influencer once again does not have to be people. Think Instagram is kinda like the first thing. Oh, that must be an influencer. An influencer can be a reporter. It can be a blogger. It can be a blogger.

It can be anybody that posts content on Instagram. It can be tick-tock, it can be Twitter. It’s, it’s just somebody that is built out. Some kind of a social media platform have built out a website and they have people that follow them. And that. Like what they put out there and are willing to potentially purchase something and practice service that somebody either reviews or talks about.

So, you know, we have like YouTube COVID unboxings. I mean, there’s just, there’s literally hundreds of different ways that you can, you can use it or work with an influencer and an influencer what’s going can, does not have to be somebody that has a million followers on Instagram. That doesn’t mean that instantly they’re an influencer.

You can have high numbers, but that doesn’t mean you’re influencing people. So I think that’s always a, a misnomer about it must be. So the follower count and that’s not always.

Joe Howard: Yeah. I, I hear that. Um, I feel like when I think about influencer, like I follow a few people who I guess I would consider influencers, right?

Like, like I’m, I’m a YouTube person. So I’m on YouTube, you know, watching different videos. Like Casey Neistat is someone who like, I watched a lot of his videos because I’m very interested in his life and the things that he does. And so, you know, this influencer. I agree with you. Some people are like, kind of like, ah, influencer.

That’s like a dirty word, like, ah, like get that vocabulary out of here. But it’s, I like to think about it more as just like the concept behind it, I think is what’s more important than the, than the actual word or terminology of it. Um, but can you talk a little bit more about like follower count versus actually being an influencer or like size of your email list?

Sort of things I’ve always felt that these can definitely be vanity metrics, but. What’s like kind of the difference between just having a big email list or a big audience and having people actually like, you know, follow what you do and trust and have trust in you.

Shane Barker: Yeah. I mean, I think the, the issue is, is that brands will, for years, they’ve always looked at follower count.

Right. And, and that actually has started the, you know, I’m not going to call it an epidemic because people think it’s like rampant and people are dying because of it. But because of like fake. Right. And, and adding fake followers to your account. So the issue is if you’re a brand and you’re going to an influencer and you say, Hey, listen, you have 20,000 or 25,000 people following you.

So we’ll give you a thousand dollars. But if you get to 50,000, we’ll give you 2,500. But if you get up to 100,000, we usually pay those influencers 10 grand, and then guess what? As an influencer, I go, okay. How do I get to a hundred thousand faster? Right. It took me five years to get 25,000, but how do I get to a hundred thousand?

Like, I don’t have another 15 years to do it. Right. And then people start doing fake followers and not everybody’s doing it. Right. I mean, a high percentage of people have fake followers. Right. And it really comes down to like how many fake followers you have. But the thing is this, you know, as much as you read about it, like, oh, fake followers, Oh, my God, it’s an epidemic and kids are dying because they have fake followers.

I’m being facetious obviously, but no kids are dying because of fake followers, but it really comes down to if you’re a brand, you just look at somebody’s engagement. You look at like, you know, they save a hundred thousand followers and they get a thousand likes on a picture and they get two comments.

Whether that number is true or not true. Two comments is not real engagement, right. If you have those type of numbers, right. Okay. And if I was speaking to a hundred thousand people and I only had two questions at the end, you know, it just seems, it feels like there would be, if you, if you’re producing good content and people like your content, they’re going to be more engaged with what you have to say, right.

With the content you’re putting out there. So, you know, it’s, it’s a, the fake follower thing. And the fact that you have influence just means the way I look at it is back in the day it was, Hey, we post a picture with an influencer right on, on Instagram. And we see how well it does. It’s not that way anymore.

And what I mean by that, It really comes down to a strategy. You have to figure it out, put a plan together, right? So you go to an influencer and say, Hey, where do you have? What do you think you have influenced? And, well, I have a good followership on Instagram. I’ve got a buy blog, puts brings in a hundred thousand a month and I’ve got a 15,000 email list.

And so really now what should happen is a brand should say, Hey, that’s interesting. Um, what we’d be interested in doing is we have a budget of, let’s say $5,000. And what would you do for that $5,000? And the influencer goes. I would post two pictures on Instagram. I would do three stories. I’d write a blog post about it, and I do a blog about it.

That would be keyword driven. That would go after the keywords that you want us to go after. And then you as a brand have to go, okay, for $5,000, do I think that’s worth it? Right? Cause that’s the other big question is like, what do I pay? Influencers? How much do I pay an influencer? Well, First of all, we have to quit putting all influencers in one bucket, right.

Because everybody has different packages, right? That’s like, it’s not, everybody’s the same. So they say, what should I pay an influencer with this, this, this, and this. And it really comes down to, what do you think is fair? Like right. If J tell you this is the package I’m putting together for $5,000 and you look at it and say, okay, I sell $5,000 widgets.

All I have to do is sell two widgets to break even on this. And do I think this influencer can at least sell two widgets for us, right. To break even enough, obviously the goal isn’t to break even, but the goal is to at least get your money back. Right? And so you just have to figure that out. If you’re putting together a campaign and you sell, you know, $1 forks and you have to sell 10,000 forks, you have to go, okay.

That campaign that they’re putting together, do I think that they’re going to be able to push, push the needle? So they sell 10,000 forks. W the lower price point it’s sometimes becomes a little more difficult once again, depending on the influencer and their audience and stuff like that. But it comes down to a frequency deal.

You can’t just do one picture, don’t hire an influencer to put up one picture and then expect to move to The Bahamas and drink Coronas and my ties the rest of your life. Right? I mean, you can do that, but that isn’t going to equal the money that you’d be able to do to go retire. Right. So the idea is you put a strategy behind it.

You have to put a campaign behind it. So every influencer is different. So I usually, when I pursue an influencer. I tell them, Hey, this is what my budget is. And what would you be willing to do for that budget? And some influencers. This is the other side of it. So the other side of it is a lot of influencers don’t know how to put packages together.

Right. And that’s what I teach at UCLA because they go, okay, well, I’ve got this, these things going on. And I have a brand that brand wants me to put a package together. Like, what do I do? Like, I don’t really know what is, what’s a package like. And you say, okay, well, you have to figure out where do you think they’re going to get the most traction and what kind of content you’re going to have to produce and what that’s going to cost you to produce that content.

And if that content is going to be a one-time Instagram post, that’s going to go down in the feed and people aren’t going to see it. It’s only going to have some traction mainly in the beginning for the most part, or is it going to be a blog post? That’s going to be evergreen that could potentially be number one on Google and can continue to bear fruit.

Right. So, I mean, there’s just a lot of different ways to look at it. And I think, you know, my big thing these days is I do heavy education. So I actually teach a word. I do a workshop with brands to say, Hey, listen, this is how you find influencers. This is how you work with them. This is how you put your brief together.

This is what you want to put in your contract. And then I also talked to influencers and say, you know, because a lot of influencers aren’t marked. Right. That’s the thing is like your Helen, the yoga instructor. She’s not a marketer. She just has people that really like her and like she’s authentic and she’s genuine.

And you know, she does all this great stuff and gives out great content. Well, she gets a lot of the time, doesn’t know how to put a package together. So I have a course and I’m coming out with it. We’ve already talked about the, how to be an influencer.com is the course, but how you can go there. And then what they can do is take a.

And personal branding, like how did, like, how do you put these packages together? And first of all, before the packages, how do you like get your website up? Right. And how do you get your, you know, your custom email address? Like these basic things that you want to have, right? You don’t want to have like hot girls, 69 at Gmail, emailing Nike and saying, Hey, I want to be, you know, I want to be your number one influencer, and they’re gonna be like, well, first of all, you, you have a Gmail account, right?

Like you gotta kind of like show that you’ve right. I mean, it’s cool that you’re hot and 69 is awesome, but what, you know, we got to kind of figure this thing out here a little bit. Right. So that’s really what it comes down to. And so I’m the education side of it, because I think any of the, the, the, some of the news about influencers can be negative because once again, it’s a new thing and they it’s, you know, it’s like two, it’s like two high school kids getting together to dance.

It’s kinda like, I’m not really sure where to put my hands or what to do. I’m like, you know, it’s kind of this awkward little situation and I’m here to be. You know, I guess I, I guess I’m the awkward teacher at the dance that shows you how to dance with each other. That sounds super weird when you say it out loud, but the idea is just to help facilitate it, right?

I mean, that sounds super awkward, but I’m not really going to be at a dance with your kids and making sure that they’re holding each other. It’s

Joe Howard: disclaimer.

Shane Barker: Don’t worry. Yeah. Stranger danger, stranger danger. No, I, you know, really it comes down to just getting it so that brands and influencers can work better together.

I mean, that’s really my goal.

Joe Howard: Cool, man. Okay. So a lot of information there as someone who’s in the WordPress space, uh, I mean, I guess I hesitate to call myself like an influence. I understand the concept of like, I have some certain characteristics of what an influencer would be to like, you know, cause I do this WMR course.

I run this company. I have a little clout in the space, uh, after being here for 5, 6, 7 years doing this stuff, I find that in the WordPress community, um, being a core part of the community, uh, is really important to really loving open source softwares. It’s pretty vital, uh, wanting to help others and to kind of help smaller businesses come up after you’ve come up and give your advice to other people.

Like those are things that, that help you be someone who people look up to in the WordPress space. Um, but there are definitely some other strategies involved. I would love to hear a little bit, and this, this may be some, some of the stuff that you’re including your course on how to be an influencer.com, but, uh, maybe we could go through just like, if someone’s kind of starting from.

Zero. They’re just kind of like, okay, like this sounds like something that I may be able to do. Uh, maybe particularly in like the WordPress space, like someone wants to say, you know, I’m a pretty good developer, but I don’t really have, uh, like any visibility online or like I’m a solid designer or I’m a solid marketer even, but I don’t have a lot of, uh, you know, blog posts out or I don’t have an Instagram profile.

What are like the first, I don’t know. I want to say first three, but like. Well, the first steps that you would, you would advise someone to take just like, as someone starting out.

Shane Barker: Well, first of all, if you, your audience is WordPress people there for they’re starting off, that’s where you need to start off as building a website.

Right? Because what happens is, is what, what we’ve seen we’ve seen consistently is that whether it’s Instagram, it’s YouTube, it’s, whatever everybody complains about that. Right. So it’s this it’s like, oh, I used to make more, so much more money. Two years ago, I made tons of money and now the algorithm change and there’s this, there’s that right?

So at the end of the day, it really comes down to using WordPress building your own website, right? Because the idea of all the social platforms that you want to be on, and we’ll go over that here in a second, the idea is you want to drive the traffic from those social platforms to your website, right? Or to your course, or to whatever you have going.

Because that’s where your money’s at. Right? And you control that, right? Not necessarily controlled all the way when it comes to Google and trying to index, that’s kind of another conversation, but you can, you, you, you pay your hosting for $10. You pay your 10, $15 a year, whatever it is and how in, in domain registration fees.

And there we go, you own that, right. As long as you’re paying those fees, you have that. So that’s what I’m teaching people to do is like you’re, if you’re just on Instagram, you’re literally waiting to get shut down or have something happen because the only guarantee is that Facebook is going to. They did it with Facebook, right.

They, all of a sudden you’re getting tons of engagement. Everything was awesome. And then all of a sudden overnight you’re like, God, nobody’s responding to my stuff. Or what did they say, Hey, do you want to boost this post for seven bucks? Okay, that sounds good. And then they’re getting $7 a post and they’re buying, you know, times a hundred million people.

I mean, you do the math, right? It’s not that everybody did it, but my point is is you get engagement, you get dish, you’re getting all this, this great traction. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to pull back on that and then you’re going to have to pay for that, right. They’re going to have to, there’s going to be a pay to play, and that’s not a problem.

That’s their model. And they own the site. You don’t own Instagram Ford slash. You don’t. I don’t know that I absolutely do not. They can shut me down for my political views for anything. Right. I’m not trying to be negative, but really at the end of the day, they can shut you down in a hot second. But if you have, if you diversify view of other platforms like Instagram and Facebook or whatever, this is wherever you want to produce content.

And that’s another thing too, is that you have to produce content where you want to produce content, right? Like if I go. Hey, Joe, you really need to jump into video. And you’re like, ah, but I hate the way I look on video and we were going to fight for three months, six months. You’re never going to a video.

It’s going to, you’re going to kick and scream all the way. Right. And I can understand the first one is always weird. Cause people always hate the way I read the first blog wrote log article I wrote was terrible. In fact, I showed it to my students and they’re like, dad, that’s terrible. And I’m like, exactly.

Now I’m teaching you. So you do the math on that one. Right? So, but it’s thing with video, like you feel like I was just terrible and I’m stuttering and I looked terrible and the lighting’s not good. If that’s, if you’re only worried about that small thing, you can get past that. You just keep doing it. But if you say, listen, I like, I stayed up all last night with anxiety and I was throwing up this morning thinking about doing the video.

Probably you’re not going to do that many videos. Right. So you have to figure out where do you want to produce that content? And let’s get all that conscious reproduce with the goal of driving it back to your WordPress site, right? That’s where the money’s at. That’s where your all we’re consistently going to have control over that.

There’s a lot of ways to do it through social. And there’s obviously SEO and there’s, you know, PPC that you can do. There’s a lot of different ways that you can drive that traffic to your website and be able to convert them. And influencer marketing is no different. Like the idea of influencer marketing is to get people, to buy things or get people to, you know, if you’re looking for more eyeballs or, or exposure, it just, you have to figure out what your KPIs are, right?

Your key performance indicators or what your goals are. And then you build a campaign around that. And then you have to have some. Things, you know that obviously you talked about KPIs, like, well, how am I going to know that somebody closed a deal, right? How do I know that Shane, when he posted this video, that he was the one that brought all the boys to the yard.

And you know, once again, I know all kinds of sales happen. Well that’s coupon codes and some other stuff we’ll talk about, but really it comes down to, like I said, if you’re, if you’re in WordPress, you should build a website. You have to have that. That’s going to be very, very key to this whole thing and use everything else is just a tool to drive the track.

Joe Howard: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. We’ve Christie and I have done some episodes on open source versus closed source and talked a lot about this exact thing. You know, if you have a Instagram account with a hundred thousand followers, it could get shut down tomorrow because you post something about your political views, like you say, and you know, the instant, the 10 top people on Instagram came together and said, actually, we don’t really like this person.

We’re going to shut it down. WordPress source. So when you buy your hosting, when you install WordPress, the GPL language tells you that that is your content. You own that content, uh, and you can publish what you want there. So, yeah, I’m a big, uh, we’re big believers in owning your content and democratizing publishing here in the WordPress space.

For sure.

Shane Barker: Yeah, you have to man. Cause if, once again, it’s, your, your stuff can get shut down for no reason. And they don’t have to tell you why I’ve had big clients that, you know, on Instagram or wherever they’ve gotten shut down. And we go back and really at the end of the day, Facebook and Instagram, nothing against them, but they don’t really care unless you’re an advertiser for the most part.

Right? I mean, if you’re spending big bucks, then you get the private phone number and you get, you know, Helen that will answer the call because, you know, you’re spending a hundred grand a month, but if you’re Joe blow the political. Loves or hates trumps and wrote something crazy on there and they shut your account down.

Yeah. You’re going to get crickets, my friend, you don’t get the private phone number to, you know, we’re, Helen’s gonna answer. Harold is going to be like, you know, being real weird where she’s not going to answer that call. Right. Cause you’re not, you’re not spending money and that’s just, that’s the reality of it.

And so you have to go fight to get your account back. And, you know, we have been able to get some of our clients stuff back and it doesn’t happen all the time where it gets banned, but when it does. Let’s say you wake up and your number one source of revenue, and then all of a sudden it’s shut down. And you’re you talk about helpless that sucks, but your website will always be solid, you know, as long as you have the hosting up and you’re not getting, you know, span with links and all the other fun stuff that we have to fight, but it’s, it’s yours and you will always have that.

So. Yeah,

Joe Howard: I hear that for sure. Okay. We talked a little bit about social stuff as well. So using social media to drive traffic to your website, uh, as a fellow marketer, I’m a big in the inbound marketing and content marketing stuff. So we read a lot of content to try and drive traffic that way, but we don’t have as much like.

Driving as much traffic from social media. Like if you look at our Google analytics, you’ll see like referral traffic. And like 90% of our traffic comes from organic search and then like 5% comes from referral and then 3% comes direct. And then there’s like this little, you know, little one to 2% coming from email and social media.

Um, so as someone whose organization is, I wouldn’t necessarily say we’re bad at social media, but I would say we’re bad at driving. Traffic, especially meaningful traffic traffic that will subscribe to our email list traffic that will sign up for one of our care plans or this WP MRR, WordPress course traffic.

Pay us money for something or become ritually, become part of our audience. Uh, in terms of people we can reach directly like via an email list. Um, social we’re not as good at driving the traffic from social. Um, so maybe we could talk a little bit about, we could do like a mini coaching session here and help me think about some of the strategies we could use.

Not only. Drive more traffic via social, but like what, yeah. What, what aspects can we do to make social more meaningful for us?

Shane Barker: Yeah. I mean, social is, is kind of a bear just in the sense of, cause you’re, you’re talking about you guys are having the WordPress space, right? So you’re not going to see too many people that are on Instagram and go, I’m going to go follow Joe.

Cause all he talks about is WordPress. It is so hot. Like I wake up on a Saturday morning. Right. And then you’re like, God, I just, Joe talks about code and it just gets me revved up. Right. It’s just not as sexy. Right. Instagram as an example is more like lifestyle and this happened, the other I’m drinking my tea and my private jet with my pink poodle on I’m eating caviar.

That was gonna be all that’s fake. I was

Joe Howard: yesterday, right?

Shane Barker: No, I hear you. That’s me. I’m like, that’s, I, I actually just came down to my private jet. I was actually a dream, but that was the closest I’ve gotten to my jet. But that’s the thing is like, it really depends on where you think your audience is going to be in social is becoming more difficult.

Right. Because I think. People are because there’s just so much, right. There’s so many different places to get content. And that’s where I think, you know, it’s important for, for companies. Like, let’s say yours as an example, to figure out where you think your audience is at. Right. And if you say, Hey, I think it’s Instagram.

I might disagree. Right? I’m not saying they’re not people there that use WordPress. Obviously there is, but there’s there. You’re probably not going to go to Instagram for WordPress information, right? The reason why 90% of your traffic is from, is from Google. Organic is because. If I’m one questions about WordPress, I’m like, okay, where do I go?

Is it Twitter maybe? Right. Facebook. Nah, not really. It’s going to be Google. Right? You’re going to go. I’m going to go and Google search. I’m going to go to core. I’m going to find out where people are asking certain questions and then, so that’s why you’ve optimized for that. Like. Your breakdown of your traffic is like almost the same as mine.

Like I get almost all of my stuff is organic because I write about, you know, marketing. So if somebody wants to know that SEO, they’re not going to go look at, you know, cool, hot Shane on Instagram to find out what he’s talking about, SEO. Right? Like, so yeah, she should, it’s pretty popular cause I’m going to create it right when we get off this podcast.

No. And that’s the thing is you’re not really going to get that. It’s like, where’s my word. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have one, maybe it’s for your own personal stuff or thing you’re doing, or, you know, you can use Instagram for like your course, or you can talk about people that have had successes in your course.

Right. And testimonials, and Hey, this is John and Nick is a 15 thing. John’s talking about how he went from zero to $10,000 a month, whatever that is. Like, people are like that. Keeping the dream alive. And people are like, oh, that’s exciting that somebody took Joe’s course and he’s crushing it because of that.

And it’s only a $97 investment, but yet this guy made 10 grand. So that’s where things can get interesting. Right. In regards to the type of content that you think. Right. So for that, it’s not necessarily going after the WordPress professional, you’re going after the person that wants to be a, you know, get into WordPress.

Cause they, they feel like there’s riches. There there’s money to be made if you take my course, that will make it. So. You know, I’m going to give you the 10 years of knowledge here in this 17 hour course or whatever 10 hour course. And you’re going to be able to be, you know, once again, you’re going to be able to go in and be able to make, do things faster and not have to spend the 10 years that I spent, uh, understanding like how we do things, right?

So I’m going to streamline that. It’s like a mentor. And so there we go. So now the person who says, Hey, I want to do a website and I’m not a big WordPress person, but I can take your course. And at least, you know, be 80% closer to where I need to be than where I’m at. Yeah.

Joe Howard: Gotcha. So I think we try to do a little bit of social strategy in terms of, we find that different channels are good for certain aspects of sharing who we are.

So like our Twitter account is kind of about sharing our content and sharing content maybe we’ve been featured in, or it’s. It allows us to build relationships with people by like tagging people who we’ve included in articles and saying like, Hey, like we included you. Plugin. Thanks for being awesome.

You’re part of our list and then maybe they’ll retweet us. And so we can kind of get in front of other audiences that way and kind of share that like hashtag WordPress community on Twitter, Instagram, is we your rights? Like, no, we don’t find that anybody’s going to Instagram, like retweet like a specific WordPress thing, unless it’s around or re gram or whatever it is.

To like really do it, that high gate and stuff, unless it’s around word camps, there’s some word camp X activity on Instagram, but we try to use it really more for like a window into WP buffs to make us just like two people can get to know us. So it’s really more about like a remote team and people can come and see, like, what are they doing?

Oh, there’s a couple in front of a huge in Japan. And like, there’s Diego just ran like a hundred mile race, like in the middle of the desert and it’s like, whoa, okay. So I know this team does this stuff, but like I wanted to learn more about them as, uh, as people. And so we tried to use NCA. Exactly. So we try to use Instagram more for that.

Does that sound. Decent

Shane Barker: manifestation. Yeah, because cool. Yeah, because you, you’re probably, I mean, the idea of it is, is that you want to show that there’s real people behind this and people kind of like that. Right. Because I want to know, like, I can go take Joe’s course, but when I see that you’re doing this and you’re traveling and doing this and I’m like, God, it seems like he’s out there.

A great life. And obviously it’s because of his course and the knowledge that he has. And he’s obviously doing some things that are right, right. It’s not like he’s, if you had on your Instagram, you’re like homeless and you know, eating out of garbage cans or like, I don’t know if I’m going to take Joe’s chorus because he’s, he’s eating garbage cans.

Not that you can’t eat out of garbage cans. I’m just saying they might think that you’re not doing good. Right? There’s that they’re judging you obviously. So totally judging

Joe Howard: this new millennial trend of going in and grabbing fresh food from the garbage. Not bad yet. So people may think I’m cool for doing that.

I don’t know.

Shane Barker: You know, what’s crazy about that and this, and this is I’m going, I’m going right. And we were just talking left. There was just, I was, I was watching the, uh, Charlie Manson, Charlie man’s like his little group of people that he had, the way that they would get food, the way that they didn’t have to do, they would go into trash cans.

So would go to like bakeries the day after. So when you said that, I was like, oh, I guess that probably could be pretty fresh. Food is in plastic bags. And so when you said that, I, I instantly thought. Charlie Manson. I mean, who doesn’t think about

Joe Howard: before? And I want people to associate it with that. So great.

Shane Barker: Millennials and Charlie Manson. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s like hand in hand. There we go. Just kidding, by the way. Yeah.

Joe Howard: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I will also want to talk about, because we talked, touched about this a little bit, like the word influencer people. Sometimes it can be like a trigger word for certain people who are just like, don’t want any of that language.

I like if people have followed me on. Vale and seen like my cover photo of my background. This is the thing that I feel like has I’ve done. That’s been the most, like, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable in this. Like, is this kind of influencer sort of thing that I’ve done? Because my cover photo on Twitter is me like sitting in a hammock on my laptop, like in front of this icy mountain, in the background.

Okay, cool. I’m not going to lie. Okay. It’s a super dope picture. That was awesome trip. It was really cool. But even putting it up there, I almost felt like it was a real moment. Like I was doing work in like in the hammock and someone took a picture of me, but it’s, it’s kinda, it almost feels like show off a little bit to me.

How do you meld that? Like, I want to get more followers and I want people to think I’m impressive because. You know, some of the stuff I do is impressive. Like of course, like, um, I want to be humbled, but like some of the stuff I do is kind of cool. So like, I do want to share that. How do you find the balance between, you know, sharing or may potentially oversharing and trying to be humble and real?

Uh, I feel like there’s a middle ground there, but I’m not exactly sure how to find it.

Shane Barker: See the way I look at that is like, I did see your picture and I did instantly think God, what a dude. No, I’m totally kidding. No, no, no. For me, I looked at that and I was like, that’s where I would want to be. Right.

Because I have a whole remote team too. So for me, I travel a lot and I, the, the hammock in the mountains behind it and you and your lab, Literally could have been me. Like if I sent that picture to my wife and cut out the head, she’d be like, when did you go there? Like, it looks right. Obviously we’re like twins.

Right? We look identical. But yeah. So, no, I mean, for it’s, I don’t think there’s a problem with that, right. Because you’re just saying, Hey, this is a great picture. And this is kind of the lifestyle that I live because I’m a remote worker. Right. And I, I travel and I do, I’m going to look kind of a digital nomad.

There’s not a problem with them. There’s people that want that type of lifestyle. And guess what, if you’re going to go do WordPress stuff. The cool part about WordPress, all you really need is an internet connection. Right? So to be able to get onto that. So I think it keeps the dream alive of like WordPress is the avenue for making money and for traveling, if that’s what you want to do.

Right. So your picture to me, screams freedom free it screams like, Hey, I can get some stuff done, but look at this view, right. And people can look at that as bragging or like, oh, you’re just bragging. I’m like, well, but at the end of the day, you would like to be here. I mean you would, right? I mean, let’s, let’s just be honest.

It’s not. And so to me, I mean, that’s like me, so I, I do speak in events and on my profiles, I have pictures of me at a speaking event now, my bragging or my maybe a teeny bit, but I’m also telling people I’m a speaker. I want them to know that. Right. And for you, you want to say, listen, I work hard, but also, and I’ve got some great views around me and I’m enjoying it.

I’m enjoying, I have this work-life balance. I’m sitting back and drinking a beer and I’m on my laptop and getting a few things done. Like there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, I guess you have to figure out what, what you think your audience likes. Right? If it, if I think the audience wants a lifestyle like fat, I would think I going say, most people I do.

Let’s say, well, I’ll just speak for myself. I enjoy that. I look at that and go, man, that would be awesome. I would love to go to that mountain. I’d love to be in that hammock and I’d love to be hanging out like that. So for me, I think that’s awesome that you’re doing that. You know what I mean? That’s, for me, that’s more of a lifestyle thing, but I’m a traveler.

I like doing that. So I like those pictures. I go, God, where was that at? And then I’m going to engage with that. Cause I want to know, like, how do I get to that spot? How do I get to your hammock that you were just in right to me. I don’t look at it as like bragging, you know? I mean, I guess if, if you were like saying, oh man, another million dollars today and crushing it and you know, it’s like, you’re like slapping kids on the way out.

Look at me, I’m a big deal then. Oh, okay. I get it. Josie, big deal. Like, you know, but I don’t even have to go tell everybody and just slap kids on the way out of the door, you know, it was kind of weird, but the idea of it is, is like, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I really, really don’t. I think if people have a problem with that, then that’s their own.

Things like, why would you do put a picture of that? Like, to me, it’s like, what’s the problem with it? Like you weren’t, there’s nothing wrong with it in my opinion. And I just think you’re just showing that you’re living a good life and there’s nothing, you know, what do you think social media is for guys?

That’s why everybody’s happy on Facebook. And I put my air quotes up. Everybody’s happy, you know, that’s we want to show like, Hey, what we’re out there doing and having fun and, you know, taking part and, you know, enjoy. Yeah,

Joe Howard: probably important as you’re. I think anybody who grows their own business or as an entrepreneur, as they start to see success in their business, like you’re almost by default going to have more visibility in the space.

And it’s important to remember, like, not everyone is going to love you and hopefully not everyone is going to hate you, but you’re never going to make everyone happy. So it’s important to like, you know, What you think your audience likes and not try and appease every single person out there.

Shane Barker: You’ll never make everybody happy.

This is the thing too, is you have to realize if people start to hate you, then that means you’re on the radar. I mean, really though it really is. And people don’t, it’s hard for people to understand that, but really at the end of the day, if people are starting to hate you, for whatever reason, there’ll be a small amount of.

Let them hate you just let, just let it roll right off yet. Cause at the end of the day, that means you’re on their radar and that’s okay. That’s not a bad thing.

Joe Howard: Yeah. I actually love that. I kind of want to even highlight what you just said a little bit more. Like we’ve had people duplicate our entire website over at WP buffs, trying to just duplicate what we, what we’ve done and.

Not like we teach a course on it. So we want people to get into the maintenance space, but like we’ve had people like literally duplicate like word for word, the exact website on like three different occasions. And the first time it happened, I got pissed. I was like, what the fuck? Like this is BS. Like, I can’t believe they did this.

And by the third time I was just like, Oh, so like we’ve gotten somewhere like, like it’s almost flattering that you want to like duplicate my business. Like thank you. But like, don’t do that, but like, it’s cool. Like it, we’ve gotten to a point where we’ve made a lot of people happy, but there are some people who are going to take those, this, I guess wasn’t a hater example, but it’s a taking it in the negative direction example and that’s going to happen as you gain more visibility places.

So I totally hear that.

Shane Barker: I mean, trust me, I it’s, you know, somebody when copied something word for me, I’m not going to be happy either. But the cool part is, is that people are copying you, right? Which that means that you’re a leader. That means somebody is looking up to you and, and even, you know, and you have to realize, I’ve realized this over the years, I used to be really protective of whatever I was doing to this.

I can’t tell people this can’t do this. And now I’m just an open book. I’ll share anything. I’ve done open this are they? This is what works. This is what doesn’t work because for me. It’s just easier that way. Right. And that way I pull in clients cause they go, man, it seems like you’ve done this. And you said you had issues here.

And this is just very transparent about things. You know, I was always worried back 10 years ago that like one of my other businesses that somebody would, you know, they’re going to take this and they’re gonna be able to open a business like. The thing is they don’t have the experience that I have. They don’t have the 25 years of what I’ve went through the right turns and left turns and this, and being slapped in the face, being kicked here and doing this, like that is built my business today.

And there’s nobody that can do that the way that I did it. Right. I mean, they can learn some stuff from it, but there’s nobody that’s going to take over, you know, my, my thing that I’ve built. Right. And so when they go and they take it, it does suck because at the end of the. A little bastards, you know, cheating and you’re like, you know, I’m gonna find you, you know, and I’m going to shut your stuff down, but you know, it’s a flattering still.

Joe Howard: Yeah. I totally agree with that too, because you can take my entire website, put it somewhere else. Rebrand it. Good luck. Like the reason my business is successful, it’s not just because of the website. Like there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of painstaking, painful challenges, successes, and, and a lot of experience that got us where we are today and like good luck.

You know,

Shane Barker: it can’t happen overnight and you have a network, right? I mean, somebody to have to go to the podcast to do this, like they’re not going to. Th they’re going to try, they’re going to chip away at your business and they’ll take your two, 3%, whatever it is. But really at the end of the day, they’re not going to have the traction that you have it, it takes time to do that.

And it’s just not an overnight type thing.

Joe Howard: Yeah, totally. I would love to finish off a little bit here. Kind of wrap things up by. Opposite side of things we started and kind of talk to people about, like, if you’re starting off, like what can you do to like, you know, push more in this direction and push your social media out there and, you know, get more visibility and all this, I would love to talk a little bit about what the other side looks like.

Like once you’ve gained traction and have. You know, I guess I’ll say a large audience because it, it does differ depending on the context, right? For some industries, like a hundred thousand people is going to be a lot for some like five million’s a lot. But, uh, I want to talk a little bit about the pressure of having a lot of visibility online.

And how that can affect the kind of content you’re putting out there. Like, I feel like I don’t know anybody with like 5 million Instagram followers, but I would feel like they feel a little bit of pressure every time they push the publish button, because there are so many people looking at all their stuff.

I, but I think about people like Joe Rogan, who has this podcast that’s listened to by, you know, millions of people, but he just like keeps saying. Pretty real. And it’s just like, talks about whatever he wants to. So it’s kind of, it’s, it’s a there’s examples of each, but, um, have you found that like, people feel pressure to.

Keep what they’ve done to get those followers and keep putting out the same content, even as like they evolve as a person and change. Maybe they want to post new content, but they can’t because they have, you know, they got 200,000 followers who want X kind of content, even though they want to do Y content.

Shane Barker: So, well, first of all, so the reason why nobody talks shit about Joe Rogan is cause he can kick their ass. Right. And so that’s the first of all, that’s. Yeah, exactly. I mean, not to mention his contents. Good, but he can also, I mean, he actually, he actually had a heckler that I don’t know, there was like a video.

I have to look it up. I can’t remember the name of it, but like Joe Rogan got into it with a guy that was talking shit about him. And he went and met the guy and they like wrestled. And of course, Joe puts him in a hold and, you know, anyway, so I think it’s kind of funny, but the, when it comes down to conduct.

Here’s the issue and this is what people, some people don’t see. Like, what I teach at UCLA is I ask people, Hey, what are your, you know, what do you expect from the course? And what do you want to do? Right. So that’s like a, oh, I want to be in The Bahamas. And I want to be in a bikini and I want to do yoga and I wanna drink my child latte.

And that’s all great. If that’s the lifestyle you want to live, that’s perfect. You know, but what happens is, is. Well, people don’t understand about influencers is that when you’re an influencer, you’re you always, you have to be on stage. Right? And so what I tell people is, Hey, the minute you quit performing, like the minute you quit doing your podcast, you quit writing content.

Guess what’s going to happen. They’re going to go over to John. Your competitor. Right. And they’re going to start looking at his stuff and going well, you know, he’s given a lot of information out and Joe kind of, I don’t know what happened to Joe. Like I think he’s, you know, he’s over at that, he’s in that hammock and he lost his laptop and we don’t know what happened to him.

Right. It’s been two, three months. So it’s the same thing with Instagram and same thing of all this stuff. If you’re not producing content, And you start, you know, used to people, used to seeing you once a day, and then you’re doing it once a week and then it’s once a month and it’s once every two months they’re going to find somebody else.

And that’s just how it goes. And people don’t understand what that does to people. Like if you’re an influencer, some people go, oh, poor influencer. Like, you know, there’s people that are using the, what is it at? And they’re like these, you know, ninja and all these other guys that are making, you know, a million dollars a day or whatever the number is.

And he goes, yeah, but I have to work 18 hours a day and they go, oh yeah, but you’re making a hundred thousand dollars a day. Like, what are you complaining about? But like, literally if he doesn’t work 18 hours, if he took a day off. It could affect his income by a hundred thousand dollars, $200,000, $300,000.

Now I get it, you know, Hey, just take a day off. But the thing is, this is you. Once you’re in that limelight, you’re performing and you’re putting out content. And either everybody loves you and they’re clapping their hands or you put something out or you take a day off for God’s sake. Things can switch.

Things can change on you and it becomes an, it can happen overnight. I mean, I had one of my clients that was always in the limelight, always talking about this and doing this and had a great following. And you know, it was very heavily engaged. They all loved her. And, but one of the issues with her, she had like five bucks boyfriend’s a year, but she’s, she posts about all of them.

Oh, here goes John other things. Great. Oh, I’m here with Howard. I’m here with Michelle. We were like, God, you’re, you know, you’re out there just doing your thing. Like you’re having sex with like, and so people started kind of going off a little bit and she’s like, oh, I’m, can’t believe this. And we’re kind of talking about it.

And I’m like, Hey, I, I, it’s important to be honest. But the problem was that she’s always on stage. She was talking about everything in her life. Right. No different than a celebrity. Like seventies. Don’t always say that, but yet pop Razzi that’s running around. So when you’re sharing these intimate things in your life, You have to realize that there’s, you’re giving up something, right?

The Kardashians have billions of dollars. That’s awesome. But they can’t go anywhere. Right. That you know everything about their life, whether it’s true or not true, who knows. Right. But can you imagine jumping if you’re Kanye west or anybody and you jump into that family and you’re like, I don’t want a little privacy now, wrong family, not picking it, because guess what?

If you’re not on stage moving your hands and giving everybody a performance. I mean, that’s part of the whole thing is like, it’s one of the things being an influencer is like, you get to a point. I mean, you look at YouTube, like if you’re a prank. What’s the next level. Right. There’s always has to be something that’s the next level.

Right? So we have, you know, somebody that like, I mean, they used to have, what was it back in the day? How was the name of them? The guys who do all the stunts on MTV. And I might be dating myself on this. Like, I’m like all these guys that used to do crazy, crazy stunts and

Joe Howard: oh, is it like the jazz guys? Or

Shane Barker: like the jackass that was them?

I didn’t watch a lot of TV, so I was a little sheltered, but I mean, but that’s the thing is like, you know, next, you know, you’re, you know, hammering a nail into your privates or something. What like that wouldn’t happen three quarters ago or whatever three seasons ago, but now you’re so it’s like, what do you have to do?

And that’s what influencers are people that are influential. Like you always producing content, but they’re very emotional to the ups and downs of what happens. So when you get an algorithm, It’s hard for them, you know, and I know people go, oh, poor influencer. Now they’re not going to be able to get there, like, you know, gold Corvette or something.

It’s, it’s something it’s more than that. Right? Really. It comes down to it’s like, you have to be out there. You have to be putting on the show. And if you don’t put on the show, somebody else is going to do that. So, you know, you have to figure out is that the life that you want to live, do you want to put a magnifying glass on your.

Uh, assuming that’s what you’re, you know, that’s what you’re going to be doing to some kind of, you know, you can be a writer, a blogger, like I could walk on the street and not have anybody notice me. Right. I’m not that big of a deal by any means. Right. But if I was on Instagram and I was doing pranks and Dino’s big and Sacramento, who knows, I might not be able to do that.

Or, you know, it’s just, you got to figure out what you’re going to be giving up in regards to your life, what you’re willing to expose in your life for the world to see for, you know, potentially money.

Joe Howard: Yeah, good thing for people to think about. Now, if they’re starting off or starting to get a little bit of visibility in whatever space you’re in, uh, do you want to keep rolling, you know, go in going in that direction?

Um, or do you want to, you know, grow your business or do your thing without as much visibility? Um, I guess people have the choice, but, uh, cool. I think that’s a good place to, to wrap up today. Um, Shane, thanks for coming on. Let’s give people the new course that you have started, how to be an influencer dot.

Shane Barker: Um, yeah, you guys can go over there. We actually have an email templates that you guys can use. You can download them for free and you can actually send them out to brands. So the idea of it is you can use these as templates to pitch brands that you want to work with, um, and then if anybody needs to get in contact with me, you either obviously the how to be an influencer.com is the site for influencers. Um, if you’re a brand or an agency and you’re looking to learn more about influencer market, you want to jump in the space.

I do personal workshops as well, but you can reach me. This is my personal email at just Shane and that’s S H a N e@shanebarker.com. I’m going take a look at the website, sign up for the newsletter and the. Cool man. You

Joe Howard: beat me to the second question, which was, you know, where can people find you? If you’re starting off and you don’t have as much social clout or whatever, or you just kind of want to learn more about this stuff, uh, had been influenced or.com is a great place to get started.

, and go check out. Yeah. Shane has some free templates. I’m on the site right now and I was just checking out some of those free templates that look pretty, pretty cool. Social profiles. Can people find you on like Twitter or Instagram or. Yeah,

Shane Barker: you can go on Twitter. So Twitter, just Shane underscore a Barker I’m on Instagram.

It’s just Shane Barker. And then also LinkedIn at Shane Barker as well. I was able to grab all of them except Twitter. Um, I’ve threatened the guy, I’ve done everything. I’ve sent people over to his house and he just won’t give up it. And so, you know, what are

Joe Howard: you doing? We’ve got the same problem. Some, someone who has never tweeted and never like no activity on the profile has WP buffs.

So we are the WP buffs, but I’ve tried. Patent or the trademark on WP buffs and still fits. They’re technically not violating Twitter’s term up. Tell me about a closed system. Doesn’t care about me because I’m not paying them advertising dollars.

Shane Barker: That’s exactly it. People can squat on stuff unless you’re will Smith or something.

Nobody’s going to listen to you when it comes to the squatting. There

Joe Howard: you go. I’ll get well a DM and see if he can help me. Um, cool, man. Okay. Last but not least, I always ask our guests to ask our audience to give this podcast a little five star iTunes review. So if you wouldn’t mind giving our audience a little ask, I’d appreciate it.

Shane Barker: Hey guys, what’s going on? This is Shane Barker, also known as Wolverine. Once you guys to go do as a huge favor and give us a five-star rating for this podcast, man, I really.

Joe Howard: Thank you, man. Appreciate that. Uh, yeah. When you leave our view, make sure you leave Shane’s name in the comments, something maybe you learned about the episode or something.

Cool. You’re going to try with influencer stuff. Uh, yeah, we’ll shoot a screenshot and shoot it over to him and thank him for getting us a little iTunes review there. Uh, WP mrr.com forward slash iTunes, Gavin, redirect going on right there to make it nice and easy for you. Uh, if you’re a new listener to the show, you already been Shaw.

TV shows, why not binge something that’ll help you grow your WordPress business. Go check out some old episodes, WP mrr.com forward slash podcast. We’ve got tons of episodes on there. So no matter what challenge or thing you’re facing right now, it probably did an episode about it. So it goes through the old logs and see if you can find something that you can listen to maybe later today or this weekend that will, uh, will shed some light there.

Uh, if you have questions for us on the show, Christie, I’d love to do Q and a episodes. So we’d love to answer some more of your questions. Anything? Well, I don’t care. It could be. WordPress could not be. WordPress could be totally random. I don’t care. We’ll answer them on the show. Uh, yo@wpmrr.com, I man, that inbox personally.

So I will get back to you and we’ll get your question answered on the pod WP, mrr.com. If you are reporting. Agency in the WordPress space, or maybe you’re a freelancer you want to do more monthly recurring revenue stuff. Uh, so we’ve opened source the stuff we do at WP buffs, 24 7 care plans, open sourced.

It created a video course around it. Shane and I are big course people. So we have the video course here as well. And. How course there you go. Cool. If you’re interested in that, go check it out. It’s cool. Course. Shane’s cool guy. He’ll teach you some stuff for sure. Uh, this college professor can do. Uh, help you move forward in that area.

Cool. We will be back next Tuesday for another episode, because like Shane said, don’t want to stop producing content. We want to keep putting new, new, great content in front of you. So we’re going to keep going. So Shane, thanks a lot for being on man. It’s been real. Hey, thanks for having

me,

Shane Barker: Joe.

Podcast

E179: Leading the Charge on Headless WordPress (Scott Bolinger, AppPresser)

Travis Pastrana crashes in on his motorbike and does a triple backflip into our foam pit! He’s here today to talk on mobile apps for WordPress and more.

In this episode, we talk about AppPresser, the advantages and technical skills needed to work with headless WordPress, and the next generation of web hosting.

Tune in to know the best stunts for your WordPress!

Episode Resources:

Podcast

E178: Running a Growing Sales & Marketing Team (Nathan Bliss, Kinsta)

The legendary Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi stops in today to share his ideas on directing and guiding his mentees. 

Today on WPMRR, we discuss the reputation of the endeavor of sales, being a supportive and successful manager, and how Kinsta is diversifying their marketing and sales strategies.

Tune in for tips on having your sales and marketing work in tandem.

Episode Resources:

  • Contact Nathan via email
  • Follow Nathan on Twitter
  • Check out Nathan’s blog 
  • Send us your questions to yo@wpmrr.com
Podcast

E177: The Powerful Women of WordPress (Amy Masson, Women in WP)

Hermione comes through the Floo Network and enlightens us on the path of the empowering female-led project Women in WP. 

We speak on the history of Sumy Designs, the conception on the Women in WP podcast that follows, plus WordCamp experiences and hype!

Don’t miss out and get hit with a Stupefy!

Episode Resource List:

1 2 3 30 31
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