Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible>. Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're to startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:19 All right, welcome to rogue startups, episode one 79 today we bring back Mr Matt Madeiros. How are you doing today man?
Speaker 2 00:29 Dave? I'm doing fine. It is the first time I'll be playing golf this season tomorrow, so I am just excited to get out there.
Speaker 1 00:37 Very nice. Very nice. Yes, summer has finally decided to stick its head out of the hole around here as well and we are enjoying that although it's a very mixed bag at times. Yup. Yeah, sure. So for those of you in the audience today, Craig is out at WordCamp Europe and in honor of Craig not being here, we decide that we were going to go on a wordpress rant today. So I brought my favorite ranty wordpress guy back on and we are going to talk about stuff that's going on in wordpress today. So if you're not into wordpress, I'm sorry, this episode today is probably going to be largely about wordpress, maybe a little about business. And the intersection of those two topics. But you know, there, uh, there are things that are near and dear to mine and Matt's heart and our livelihoods. So there are definitely things that are worth talking about.
Speaker 1 01:34 And if you're working on a wordpress plugin or a theme or you're looking to get into this space or you even work in this community or you even have a wordpress site, I think this episode will still be relevant to you because there's a lot of stuff that's going on right now in the community and in the space in general, and it's going to affect you or impact you one way or another. So with that said, let's jump right in, Matt. Let's do it. All right. Well, so my opening salvo here is going to pull no punches. What do you think of the whole Gutenberg situation in wordpress right now? I could use other adjectives which would color my impact on this one and we'll definitely hear my impact in my opinion in a minute. But I'd like to start with your take on this.
Speaker 2 02:19 Burn it all down, Dave. That's what I say. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah. Look, I mean I think at least from my perspective as somebody who is a critic of wordpress, not critical, but just a critic of wordpress, not to get confused. Um, the, the whole thing is a movement that has to happen for wider user adoption. And I guess one could argue, do we need more user adoption? You know, do we need to continue to grow? I think, you know, as an entrepreneur myself, I say yes. I say yes. I know there's a lot of people out there that say, hey, it should stay this one track and we, you know, 35% of the modern web is good enough. Why do we need more? I do really admire mats, motives to democratize the web, although that's been skewed a little bit as the years have gone on.
Speaker 2 03:11 I think the thread and the pulse of that is still around and I am a true proponent for, you know, freedom of speech and, and, and being able to publish your thoughts and, and make a movement happen online. And I do not like platforms like a Facebook, a Linkedin, a medium where they are, they want you to publish all of your stuff there that so that they can control it. So at the end of the day I want wordpress to succeed in the utmost, you know, ways of success can be, can be had. Now Gutenberg rollout, communication factors are or play a huge, I mean the communication plays a huge factor on, on what I would say is not a catastrophic rollout but certainly it turbulent one from an end user's perspective. Like what is this new thing I'm playing with? To the community's side of it. People who have been contributing to word press for years being like, oh, we're just being totally ignored on a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 04:12 And it goes from, you know, user experience of the software. It goes from usability of the software all the way down to like the real technical components and the accessibility of the software. Just lots of things that were in motion where people were like, my God, why can't this just wait another six months? When I talk to small businesses, as I mentor a lot in an accelerator that I'm in locally and of people who listen to my podcast have probably heard me say this a million times, every six months, there is 12 new businesses that come in. Not, not, not any different than what Craig's in right now, uh, with cast dose in his accelerator. And these are small businesses, traditional businesses in my local market. And I would say 0.5% of these entrepreneurs can handle wordpress and they all default to Squarespace, wix, and even some Weebly and usability factor.
Speaker 2 05:03 That's why. So when I see something like Gutenberg, I am excited for it because I f I want more small businesses to own their, their content and their platform. I don't want them to see to go see them go to a closed CMS, you know? But at the same time, I think the biggest thing that has happened is just the catastrophe around the communication aspect of all of this stuff. And for every time you see the communication barrier breakdown, you're like, Geez, that'll never happen again. It happens again. And you're just like, why are we learning our lessons every time this happens? So I guess I'm 50, 50 on the whole thing. I like the idea of it. I want more pressure to succeed. I just didn't like how it's rolling out and I am still having a heck of a time publishing with Gutenberg. So the software is still not up to par. That's where that takes me. Yeah. All right. So I have to say your, your take was very well spoken.
Speaker 1 05:57 Uh, I agree with you on a lot of those points. And I think the key one that I'd like to emphasize here that I think is the one thing that's probably going to start biting the wordpress community in the ass is the fact that most entrepreneurs are getting overwhelmed or intimidated by the complexity that's on wordpress. And until we can fundamentally solve that problem,
Speaker 1 06:22 I think we're going to cap out and I don't know what that, when that is going to happen. And I don't know what that looks like, but there's definitely a significant percentage of people out there that are able to technically handle it. But you get the newbies on here and we're definitely at a point in the curve, the adoption curve where the newbies are coming on board. And if you're not, uh, you know, handling the newbies well, your platforms just not growing. Yeah. And there's like, you know, I, I look at a variety of crazy statistics and some of these are just like, they're dumb. Like if you look at wordpress versus wix versus Weebly versus Squarespace on Google trends, you'll see wordpress is going down, but it's been going down for years. And I don't believe that, that actually, I think people are just more aware of wordpress.
Speaker 1 07:04 And so they're not searching about, well what does wordpress, because that's what that sort of picks up. But there are things that I do find that are interesting that tell me this whole Gutenberg devil is exactly that, a debit call. Uh, I, I hesitated to use that word when I opened this up cause I wanted to you know, give you the openness to present your opinion. Although I'm pretty sure that you are aligned with where I was at. But in this particular case, so I'm looking at the plugin dashboard on one of my sites and if I look at the number of installs on the classic editor versus the number of installs for Gutenberg, the numbers on these things are down deanly telling. So the classic editor has five plus million active installations. So at this point it won't tick up until it gets 6 million installations.
Speaker 1 07:48 But that's a, that's a big beefy number. Now if I look at Gutenberg, it says that it has 200,000 active installations, which if you do a little bit of math on that one, that is a significantly lower percentage of adoption. There were talking what like 4% if I'm doing that right, mentally probably not. Yeah. But I mean 4% adoption on all the sites. That tells me something, especially this late in the game, Cause Gutenberg came out what? December, December, December is when it got pushed and word press five and here we are six months later and we have 4% adoption. Now I can tell you as a plugin author that when I push out a new version, it takes me about six months to probably get anybody who wants to upgrade to upgrade. And here we are at that six month boundary and we have 96% of the people that are flipping the middle fingers saying, I'm sticking with the classic editor.
Speaker 1 08:43 Thank you very much. And the whole Bs Line that Gutenberg was for new publishers and that, you know, all these people that have never used wordpress before, they love Gutenberg. Well, in a, how deep did, did anybody go with those usability studies here? Because every wordpress professional that I've seen tweeting about this, so, uh, Jennifer Bourn runs an agency out in Sacramento, California, big person in the wordpress community. She was posting online about how much she was really struggling using Gutenberg and how much it gets in her way. And how frustrated she was by this. And then Angie Meeker who's at customer success, that optin monster chimed in and said, hey, yeah, me too. And these are people that are using wordpress like on a daily, minute by minute basis and they're like deep experts in these things and if they're struggling we'll, what chance to the rest of us have, you know? Yeah.
Speaker 2 09:39 I mean I remember when I first started using it and I, you know, and, and I held off upgrading and I was like, finally I'm just going to activate it. And you know, because I don't do a lot of long form publishing on my site, it's really just putting up my post for my, for my podcast or whatever. And then I was like, I was like, I'm just going to put in a list, just a regular unordered list with a little bullet points. That's all I want. And I could not get that damn block to render correctly while I was typing. And then I was like, I put it in the wrong place because I hit enter and now I had to like grab it and track it up a little bit. And I was just like, I just literally spent five minutes, I'm trying to put in a list in the between two paragraphs. And I was like, how is this even ready? Lots of, there's, there's still lots of friction. And one thing, I mean, one thing I just want to say about the numbers, I think the classic editor is more telling because I don't think we can really look at the Gutenberg plugin any more in terms of indication because now it just shifts with core. Right? So is the Gutenberg Plugin installations still telling? Certainly from the reviews, there's a lot of data and insights in there.
Speaker 1 10:56 Yes. There are 2,794 of them as of this publishing date right here. And it's average rating of two stars. So yeah, that's, that's some opinions there.
Speaker 2 11:08 The thing is, uh, you know, I will preface all of this by saying like, I wouldn't want to be Matt. Okay. I do not envy his position in making any of these decisions. And let's all be honest, I think the elephant in the room, and it's even more telling as we saw somebody like Yost from a Usaa CEO stepped down out of the marketing position alluding to the fact like, look, you know, I thought I was going to be sort of a, maybe a talk a talking head for wordpress in a good way. Maybe I was able to position wordpress, uh, with uh, the community and maybe other partners. It doesn't look like he can. And just as the months go on, you kind of learned that while Matt is the deciding factor in all of this stuff, I preface all of this saying like all of these decisions that are being made, big swath Waf decisions that happened with this, with this project come from Matt.
Speaker 2 12:01 Right. And I think we can all agree on that. And I wouldn't even say Matt would, would say yes to that. So I don't envy being in his position to have to make these critical, these difficult decisions. And I think what he's looking at is, oh my God, how do I keep wordpress relevant in this super hyper fast changing economy? And he's a lot more poetic than I am, very difficult person to interview too. I've had the pleasure of doing it a couple times. He's very poetic and all of this stuff. Very uh, a very deep thinker. But I think at the level that he's flying at, when he looks out his window, he sees, you know, bigger organizations, bigger impacts that he can make with wordpress that you and I don't see, right? Even even a million page view a month blog that, you know, you and I might run or know people who run even that is like just a fly on the elephant's ass.
Speaker 2 12:57 It's, it doesn't make a mark, uh, compared to what he thinks he can do with wordpress. So I think this was, I think this was a difficult decision for him to make. I think he knew that there was going to be some fallout from this, but I think he just said, look, in order to move the needle, I have to do this now. And I think Matt is not so different than you and I as small business owners where we don't, we don't have, we have, there's plenty of time and not enough resources. Even a company the size of automatic with 900 plus people. Like when you look at how he spoke about jetpack before jet pack was jetpack, like he talked about jet pack in a way of being a game changer two years before it really, until we all started to realize what this plugin was about to do.
Speaker 2 13:44 He was already talking about it two years prior. So he's just like you and I like he's got these visions, but even with all these people and all the money that he has, he still can't ship the perfect product. Right? He's still, he's still like, man, I want that feature. I want that feature. But it still takes time. So it takes time to develop and I think that's what we're seeing and I think Gutenberg was him looking at what he's been doing with jetpack and be like, I just need to ship this thing. I need to get this thing moving. I can't wait like I did with x, Y, Z products and features in the past. I need to do this now. And that's where I think and how I think all of this sort of unraveled in terms of getting it out the door, but, you know, feature wise code-wise yeah. And there's a lot of team core players that just aren't listening to the rest of the people and we don't know why. That's the challenging part for, for us in the 1% of wordpress. So are you familiar with the Perl community at all? I'm not. No. Okay. So let me see. Let me take you back into a little bit of the past here and, uh, and expose my age a little bit. So in the, in the 90s, Pearl was a very popular web and
Speaker 1 14:52 it was used a lot for gateway scripts that would do back end processing. So Larry Wall was the creator of Pearl and there were many famous sayings, uh, attributed to the perl language like Tim Toady. There's more than one way to do it, uh, which is a really horrible thing to say about a language. It should be more clear and easy to program in. But that, you know, that's my personal aside on that one. But one of the comments, and I don't remember if Larry said this himself or somebody said this, uh, about Larry, but it was, it got attributed to the perl language itself and that was, oh, a camel is a horse designed by committee and it was a commentary about pearl and how features kept getting bolted onto the side and eventually like Perl six became this massive nightmare where they tried to make an object oriented and, and just didn't go well.
Speaker 1 15:49 And because everybody wanted everything that was going on that they wanted all this networking stuff added in and then they want all this object features added in and then they want memory protection in this and that, and then all of a sudden you've got this cake cottony it makes me wonder if that's where we're at with wordpress at this point that we have this, you know, we've by democratizing the web, we now have this group of people that all have competing agendas or different priorities. That's probably a better way to say it. A competing agendas makes it sound like they're all at conflict, but really different priorities. You know, there's a lot of, when I came into wordpress, it was all about, hey, this is an easy way for me to set up and build a website. Publishing posts. Yeah, that's great in a blog. But if I'm just trying to set up a, a marketing side for something that was, you know, that was, wordpress was the Goto thing for that. So have we gotten into that point here with the wordpress community in your opinion?
Speaker 2 16:42 Um, so I have a lot of, is definitely just my opinion, but there's a few things I think at play. So again, one of the statements that I really got behind from Matt, which came out years ago, sort of went away for a little bit, but now I'm starting to hear it back again. Come back again, is he wanted wordpress to be the operating system of the web. And when I first heard that and first heard them talking about that, I was like, yeah, this is a mission I can get behind. This is a mission I can build a business around because you know, if we're really making this the central part of all these things we can do on the web. Again, just thinking about this five or eight years ago, whenever he had said it, I was thinking of things like, wow, I mean, you know, wordpress could tap into anything.
Speaker 2 17:30 It could just be this Ui control panel for anything, write anything on the web. And I was like, this is awesome. And that's really what was like, you know what, this is the right place to be. And then I think what has happened over time is that was just become a huge task for him too, to take on. Right. I think just things just way too hard for him to take on with the that he had at the time. And then it sort of just became this no stomping ground for, you know, web consultants and website builders to just build sites. And then people were doing some other cool things with like building apps out of it and whatnot, but like you said, it just became this like Frankenstein of stuff. The real, and now of course it's come back like the phrase, the operating system for the web is back and, and I have some ideas around that.
Speaker 2 18:13 And then obviously it has a lot to do with Gutenberg, but I think what the other reason why he said we need to ship this now is because wordpress got so big, it became it's own worst enemy in the sense of, well, we've got elementary, we've got beaver builder, we've got all of these other page builders, right? We got themes that do all of this, all of this stuff. And now we have web host, very large web hosts that are changing the way that wordpress acts when they first start. When somebody first installs, it comes preloaded with all these themes and other plugins and you know, maybe the dashboard looks a little bit different. The experience of wordpress is changing and to the point where it was like people are going to get frustrated with using wordpress and it's not vanilla wordpress in other words is not the way that you know automatic and the Datto would contributors in the community had envisioned it.
Speaker 2 19:04 It was the way Ella mentor envision it. It was the way go daddy envisioned it. And I think Matt has seen that and says, well okay, we need to get that experience under control. Much like you would, you know, compare Ios to android. Android has whatever, 50, I don't even mean it. Probably even more on a hundred hardware manufacturers out there that do android all in different ways. And then apple is just apple and Ios is just the Ios. I think we've talked about this when you were on on my show and he needs to reign in that experience because what is causing is too much fragmentation. And if people didn't like the way they use wordpress with Ella Mentor, they just blame wordpress. Oh we're presses, you know, too much, too much stuff going on. It was slow. It was clunky. It got hacked and I don't trust wordpress anymore.
Speaker 2 19:52 It wasn't WordPress's fault. It was the big hunking layer of let's say, and I'm not saying elemental was exposed or whatever packed or whatever. I'm just using it as an example. You know, this, this plugin made it maybe have this problem and I don't like wordpress now. Yeah, Matt, Matt needs to rain that in for the sake of wordpress. But the other side of that coin coin is for the sake of revenue. Right. Uh, and that is, you know, that's the investor side. That's the automatic side. That's the jetpack side where this cohesiveness has to come together in order for him to, uh, monetize it more effectively. I'm not saying that's the goal or that's his primary focus, but it is a focus for sure.
Speaker 1 20:35 Ah, well good. I'm glad you brought up jetpack here. Cause that was another thing I wanted to rant about it today. So you mentioned that one of his goals here is to monetize and obviously they're trying to do that through pack now. A pretty vocal criticism of jet pack is that they're basically doing all of these things that they for years have told the rest of us. You're not allowed to create a marketplace, you're not allowed to promote your items and certain parts of the pages, you're only allowed a certain level of advertising inside of things. And these were all informal guidelines, less so than you know, formal prohibitions. Although that's slightly changed I think with the guidelines over the years and it's evolved slowly. But it just seemed like the way, like for example, search in jetpack suddenly got done where somebody could actually promote their results above everybody else's. And it was kind of done in a very hand fisted way and it almost seemed like jetpack. And Matt, we're just giving the middle finger to the rest of the wordpress business world, you know, what do you, what do you think about that and what, you know, what, what should they have done better and what should they be doing now to really address that moving forward?
Speaker 2 21:47 There's a lot here too. Where do I pick?
Speaker 1 21:50 Oh, just let it all out, Matt. Just let it fly.
Speaker 2 21:55 At one point in my career, um, we were selling themes and um, we had started, I can't even remember now, maybe 2008 ish, 2009 ish. Um, I should say that I also was one of the very first people, to my knowledge to ever sell Drupal themes and that's how I got into discovering wordpress and selling digital products. You should sell a, a a theme called Drupal real estate. Uh, and I had to domain Drupal real estate till I realized it was, you know, against copyright. Yeah.
Speaker 1 22:25 Oh was the head have that domain. But anyway, that's another story
Speaker 2 22:29 that was a really successful product. Anyway, I remember getting into the theme space and realizing how politically driven decision making was to get themes up there. And then there was a whole game of vacation of the system. Cause back then basically if you just had a team of people to review themes in the review queue, you would be able to choose which theme you could put on the featured page of wordpress.org which maybe at the time was like the 70th that most trafficked websites on the internet and famously cyber chimps, which was owned by a trend Lapinsky Lapinsky at the time just employed a bunch of people to review themes. And that's how he got cyber chimp. I think that was the name or responsive, what was the name of the theme up to the top of the, of the selection pool every single month. And um, you know, there's just like this, the you stuck.
Speaker 2 23:19 That's when people started to find gold and the theme business and people started to rush over there and it really started to get flooded. But you know, I remember, you know, submitting themes and just the ambiguity of it all is just, hey, we had a theme called Journal and that was the name that we thought because yeah, a little bit of Seo but you want to start a journal online, you would pick this theme called Journal. And I remember submitting the theme and the name getting denied because it was too generic. Right? But there were like other themes in the, in the Ri, in the repository, like paper, you know, canvas or whatever the, you know, like, it's just like, how, how did this get denied? Right. And it goes down to, you know, one or two people at the time that makes us decision, but then it's like other people get through it.
Speaker 2 24:05 And then as you go through the review process, you get new reviewers get spit to the back of the line, that kind of thing. And, and because these are all not freelancers, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Uh, you know, people who are just giving their time for free to do this stuff. Volunteers, volunteers, since they're just volunteers at, you know, a lot of them are just antibusiness, you know, hey, we don't like the way you worded this call to action to upgrade to pro or you have too many pro call to actions. And let me just be the first to say it. Like we never lifted our theme with protocol to actions like other people did, you know? But it was always like this land, a minefield that you had to walk through to get these things approved with no real rhyme or reason.
Speaker 2 24:51 I had always said to myself, why don't they just tax us? Right? Why don't they just make it a marketplace? Because if you do, the math is probably hundreds hundred million, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions that happen through the.org experience and just go off and spider off to all of these other shops like yours and mine. Just make it a marketplace and tax us. And again, I think that's just a, a piece of the puzzle where Matt was like, this is, this is an uninteresting to me because I have bigger plans for wordpress. And then the whole jet pack thing comes out and you're just like, Jeez, air quotes. The same organization that's been telling me not to do this stuff is now doing this stuff. And um, yeah, it's, it was definitely a, a slap in the face. And one of the things that really got me, which I had a whole interview about Matt or with Matt about was, you know, once jetpack started to monetize, he started to do his marketing around jet packing.
Speaker 2 25:52 It was the wordpress adoption has really grown since jetpack. Jetpack has really stimulated the growth and the adoption of wordpress. And I, and I wrote a blog post called the digital blue collar worker. And I was like, no. The reason why wordpress has grown so much is because of people like me at the time was responsible for, I don't know, a thousand websites online using wordpress through my agency and consulting people and having other people I know use wordpress. You know, folks like listening to this show who has have helped, you know, the same amount of number, if not more or less people get online. It's the wordpress consultants. The wordpress developers that really pushed this forward, uh, preach, preach. And that was my whole thing around that. And, and you know, when you see all again, when you go back to Gutenberg, you see that roll out, you see what's happened with jet pack, you know, you, you're just like, why aren't the developers that the boots on the ground really being spoken to this is when you realize that we don't have a wordpress software problem.
Speaker 2 27:00 It's just the human problem. It is the same problems that we all face in our daily lives with whatever family members, local government, state government, federal government. Why are people listening to us? We're doing this here already. You know, something very similar to this is I live in a smaller city outside of Boston about an hour south. And this friend of mine, she started a coworking space, one of the very first coworking spaces here on the south coast a couple of years ago. And people had no idea what coworking spaces were. So she's been going around having to hustle and draw people in. And now the city, you know, here we are two years later and she's always out there like we need coworking space, we need to, you know, evangelizing for this whole movement with no help from the city, only to find out the city now has plans to try to build their own $12 million, you know, city funded slash state funded coworking and art center without even asking her anything. You know, and it's just, it's moments like that where it's like you're beating the drum, you're the hard worker, you're the boots on the ground and then the death star shadows over the sun and you're just looking at it going, where the hell did that thing come from?
Speaker 1 28:14 Yeah, done, done, done. That's what it was. All
Speaker 2 28:20 how old, you know, falls out in my head.
Speaker 1 28:22 So by that, does that mean that Matt Mellon Waig is Darth Vader or is he the emperor and if he's the emperor who started fader? No, I'm kidding. I mean that's, that's, that's being overly dramatic about the whole thing there. But I mean I hear what you're saying and I've absolutely agree that there's definitely, I mean man is a visionary. Matt is an idealist. You can't separate that from his overall plans for wordpress and that. I think that's the thing that for for me as a pragmatist and a businessman, I struggle with the most because I mean the idealism is great and the visionary thing is great, but at the end of the day for me there has to be a practical working set of things to base stuff on and wordpress like it or not for better for worse is now a business oriented platform. People are doing business with it, they're running their businesses on it.
Speaker 1 29:21 They're using the platform itself to create a business for themselves and I think that's getting holy ignored by the, the idealistic faction of wordpress and a lot of them sit on the core teams. A lot of them are sitting on the, the plugin and theme review things. And so they run into the stuff that you talked about where your theme stuff gets denied for too many CT A's. And I mean it can be pretty heavy handed. I think they've pulled it back a little bit in the last few years and that's gotten a little bit better. But if you're a new person coming in now trying to launch something, the whole experience is, it's intimidating and it's different and it's a lot harder than it used to be. I mean, absolutely.
Speaker 2 30:02 You know, it's, we haven't really even sort of breached like the whole cross branding experience that automatic and there are services gets to enjoy by being able to use the words wordpress in there, you know, brand experience and maybe even signage and verbiage. Um, you know, being able to, being so closely associated to the term wordpress just brings in so much trust. You know, when somebody says, I want to go get wordpress, uh, and where do I go get that? When you get at the most trusted source, of course you go to jet pack and or, or automatic right? And they can leverage that. And we actually haven't even seen, we haven't even begun to see how they are going to leverage that. And when you look at jet pack, and I dunno, uh, the, the most recent block was a, I think like a s a lightweight membership block.
Speaker 2 31:02 Like you start to realize that they will go after every single feature and plugin that's out there because they want people to use jetpack, right? They'll have a thousand blocks in jetpack by, you know, in another year from now, and you'll get it all for 59 bucks a month or 59 bucks a year, whatever jetpack premium costs are pro costs, and you're gonna get a ton of other services for it. It's going to totally demolish a lot of small business, a plugin developers. Uh, and that's just, that's just not fair and an automatic, and Matt can leverage this to an extent that other people can't. And the one thing that has really bothered me recently is the human capital that automatic and Matt have just lost, uh, out of sheer disregard or just, I don't know, just being naive to the, to the sense that people who are giving their time, all right, I won't name names, but there are people that were in community positions who had thought that they were in lead roles in this community position.
Speaker 2 32:08 You know, the marketing position, uh, was one of them. And I guess I can mention her name, Bridget. Um, she, uh, has, has talked about this online before and it's just like, oh, this is not a real roll. All of this time you've put into this, sorry, we're just going to push you aside and we're going to place the Yoast in this place. Okay. And then I see other thing, I, you know, I see other, you know, um, there was a woman that was leading the accessibility. Um, you know, you know, and, and, and you get the sense that, you know, we want five for the future. We want you to give. This is open source. You must, you know, and I saw the new lead of community, uh, sort of put out like this illustration of a ladder of how one becomes, uh, uh, key figure in the community. And it starts by, you know, volunteering your time and you sort of work up this ladder. Wait a minute, hold the phone, okay. Because nothing is assured in any of this stuff. Okay? If you want me to work this way, I need assurances, right? What are you going to do for me for five of future? While you're giving back, you're, you're making this product and project people bigger. Yeah.
Speaker 1 33:18 This is not, this is not a job description here where you're guaranteed a certain salary a year and a, and a career track. This is very much pie in the sky. Contribute thousands of hours and maybe, maybe we'll recognize you in the future. I mean, that's bullshit really.
Speaker 2 33:33 And one last thread of thought on that that really, really angers me, uh, is when I see people who, they come to Twitter and they're like, I can't make ends meet. I've got medical bills, I've got bill bills. I've got to, you know, put food on the table, you know, any kind of, any kind of help that you can get me by retweeting or offering me a job or doing a Kickstarter, you know, and it's underlined by, I've been, you know, I've been, been a volunteer for, you know, five, eight, 10 years in the wordpress space. Jesus. Okay. Jesus. You know, it Sorta, it just angers me because I feel like sometimes like there's this false sense of it's false sense of community sometimes, like as don't worry, give, give, give and you're going to get there. And who's really making out in all of this stuff, which is why I try to do my small pieces.
Speaker 2 34:28 I'm not a developer. I don't contribute time on wordpress.org I don't answer questions on, on forums, but I try to stick up for people that I see getting, you know, getting lost in this conversation. Uh, and as a critic and a, that's the one that really bothers me the most is when, when people get into this and it's like give holy to wordpress. And then when it comes to a critical point in their lives where they actually need help, it's like, okay, the, the community, and I'm not saying that Matt has to do something about this, but there, there has to be some guidelines to Eh, you know, maybe tell people to pump the brakes, maybe don't commit so much time because we don't know what's really going to happen with this stuff. Um, that's the ones that really bothered me the most.
Speaker 1 35:10 Maybe have some paid positions, maybe, you know, instead of automatic being this, you know, soul paid entity out here that have all these community positions where they're like trying to get people to volunteer their time. Well, let's actually say, all right, if you contribute to this part of the code right here, we're going to pay you x dollars for that. But we're also going to vet who's coming in to get that. So you, you get good people. They actually get compensated for it. No, it's not the ideal of contribute to all this and you know, open source, Rah Rah Rah. But know you have less of that. Oh God. I remember, I remember this specific one on Twitter that you're talking about and it broke my heart to see that. I mean, I stopped and I had to, I had to reread it three times to make sure I was actually reading what I thought I was reading and it was unbelievable. Just unbelievable. Yeah. Yup,
Speaker 2 36:04 Yup. Oh, or more more recognition. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, just more recognition, more visibility to people who are volunteering so that, you know, if along the way they are looking for work or somebody who's looking for work, is there a way to dip into this pool of volunteers to say, hey, this person's great at x, y, Z. I want to hire her. This person, she's a great developer. I got somebody on my project, I'm going to hire her. Right. Uh, just some visibility, uh, to these volunteers. Greater visibility. I don't know, but that's like a whole communications.
Speaker 1 36:36 Yeah. I mean, can you think of how many wordpress agencies would salivate to have a pool of a thousand vetted contributors? I mean, every single one of them would be snapped up and hired. If they really wanted to work, if they needed to work, if they wanted a paycheck and they weren't getting one, they could find that work easily. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, that's, that is frustrating. Um, what else did I want to rant about here today? I think, uh, we ranted about a lot of good stuff here. Oh, uh, well you touched a little bit on Yoast departure and you know, when I saw that on post status when he had posted, somebody had posted that he tweeted that he was leaving and I went and checked it out on Twitter and back on post status back and forth. I actually, you know, send a message to Yost and I said, hey, I'm really sorry this didn't work out because I thought if anybody was going to make a difference in this position that it was going to be you.
Speaker 1 37:31 And I thought you had like the right, you know, it was a basically a really good intersection of communication position in the community development skills, marketing skills, understanding of the space. Like there just weren't a lot of people that had all of those things. You know, not that I'm knocking Bridget and she shouldn't have had, you know, the role that she did and got knocked out of that. I mean that, that's a whole different story. But you know, if Matt was going to try to hand pick somebody and make this work, he also wasn't a bad choice. All right, so let's talk about that for a second. Here you have this guy that runs literally the most successful Seo Plugin to date in wordpress, has a huge business built around it. His wife is now the CEO of it, and he couldn't make this work like he, this man with this position and this background could not bring wordpress rallying around this because of this democratic ideal where there's just a total lack of consolidation of authority and leadership and direction, vision.
Speaker 2 38:36 You know, how do we fix that at this point? Is that fixable? Well, yeah. Matt has to make some hard decisions. That's how it's going to get fixed. Um, when I was watching the live stream of WordCamp us and they were rolling out Gutenberg and they were talking about all the, all the stuff about it. You know, first, first name's John, I forget his last name. He was sort of leading Gutenberg at the time. He was doing his presentation and it was very developer oriented. Again, I am not a developer, uh, but it was like, here's all the cool things that you can do with Gutenberg and it's Code Code, code code code, feature, feature, feature. It's like wordpress and needs a product person. You know, wordpress needs, uh, Steve Ballmer to be up there and be like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Right. Yeah. Um, I would say that maybe even Matt thinks of himself, uh, as a Steve jobs to a degree.
Speaker 2 39:33 Uh, he, they need, they, there needs to be that presence. And I do agree with you. I think Yoast does fit that part pretty well. And I sort of like a little tongue in cheek. You know, when I, when he took the position, I tweet at him like, Hey, just another step in, you know, getting acquired. Right. And I, and I, and I, I mean that from like the whole like go get em entrepreneur, right? Because if anybody's going to get acquired, it's going to be Yost. And I don't, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Like, Hey, awesome, if that's what <inaudible> wants to do, go for it. Everybody knows how this game works. And you know, here we are a couple of months after or however many months it's been since he since he did. And he said, yeah, I just can't do it.
Speaker 2 40:14 We're press truly needs that kind of figure in there too, to be that product person to talk to both sides of the camp. And um, I, I, you know, to answer the question, I don't think it can be fixed until Matt is really ready to step away. And, and I don't think he is for like another 10 years unless something drastically changes. There's a lot of people out there that say like, this is all like money driven. We have to give back to the vcs, you know, venture capital, blah, blah, blah. And a lot of people, because there are a lot people are against that kind of thing. And I get it. I actually think that what we're seeing to the detriment of uni, and maybe some of the listeners is Matt is trying to outsmart the venture capitalists, right? That's the way that I see it.
Speaker 2 41:01 Whereas they might be looking at him like, hey man gave you this money. Where's our return? You know, we're sick and tired of listening to the democratization of the web. We want some money back and he's slowing them down. Like he's playing a different game than the rest of us to protect wordpress. But it's good to, somebody has to lose, and I think it's gonna be small plugin and maybe even the the the freelance web consultant, right? Because I think what he's doing is saying, hey, don't worry, vcs, I've got this thing called jetpack. We don't need to go in and monetize core wordpress. Right? People would flip out. It would burn the bridges. If all of a sudden there was like an upsell built right into core wordpress that says host with us at automatic or, or a wordpress.com so jet pack is a way to appease those vcs and be like, let's not attack wordpress. Let's protect it, but in front of it we're going to put chat pack and that'll be the connection. So that's the way I see it. Like, uh, all a lot of this stuff spinning out. It's while, while yes, it might be some VC driven going to get it, get him a profit kind of thing. I think he's mad is actually trying to outsmart the traditional VC approach is how I sort of, you know, read all of this stuff.
Speaker 1 42:17 But that's an interesting take. And you know, I mean Matt as an intelligent guys, freedom, yeah,
Speaker 2 42:23 yeah. To protect that, protect wordpress. But again, like I said, somebody's going to get caught in the crossfire and it's you and me.
Speaker 1 42:29 Yeah, yeah. And I, and I don't think he, to him, I don't think that kind of collateral damage even matters. So closing that pier. Matt, I want to ask you an important question and you know, I, I'm afraid that the answer might be depressing, but you know, one thing I do appreciate from you and your perspective is that it's honest and that you s you call it like you see it and you have a lot of experience to, to give a good perspective. So if somebody is coming into the wordpress space today, either as a developer or they're trying to build a business on wordpress, or maybe they're being an, uh, trying to run an agency, what do you think their outlook looks like in the next two, five and 10 years?
Speaker 2 43:16 So two, five and 10 years. Uh, so if it's the two year outlook is come on in, the water's great. Uh, you can come on in and whatever you have planned, uh, you know, we can certainly, we can certainly use you. Um, I think that what people might be afraid to do is, is share their ideas and, and really connect with other, even if you're just like a service agency, right? Connecting with other service agencies and not being afraid to sort of, you know, reveal what your, you know, what you're doing, what you're pricing out, what kind of customers you're going after because you're going to learn a lot, especially if you're brand new. Get those, those failure, those war stories from other people. So you know, you don't make the same mistakes or make the same mistakes and certainly learned from them because that's a lot of how all of this stuff, you know, plays out, you know, for five years.
Speaker 2 44:02 It's really taking a look at, uh, you know, what everybody's doing. I think we're still super early and again, I'm not a developer, but looking where things are going with javascript and headless and Gatsby and all these other frameworks being built around wordpress, that's where you know, what you really want to do is start to invest in what you think might be the cornerstone piece for the next five years. Like, what is it your agency or your product's going to do that is going to be no more bleeding edge. So it's 80% of your work is traditional website. Maybe some APP building stuff and maybe maybe you jump over a little bit and go 20% was something that you don't normally get yourself into. Again, Gatsby jazz is a or Gaspe themes or Gatsby js is a great thing to look at because I see a lot of headway moving in that direction, right?
Speaker 2 44:49 And what people are building around a wordpress, you know, for the long term it's really picking something that uh, you know, Dave, I know you're well into his ECOMMERCE, right? Look really looking at solving solutions for people with wordpress that they can tie back some Roi to directly. And that's generally going to be ecommerce. It's going to be membership is going to be publishers, right? These are people who are definitely using wordpress as a, you know, they log into Google analytics, they run a report and they say 1 million page views made me $300,000 versus you know, a website where you're like, hey, you got some lead Gen forms there. Eh, you know, the, the value of this lead is 50 bucks. You know, people who are just making transactions are making advertisement stuff online. You know, I think the making a decision for the longterm for over the decade is picking a niche or an industry that's can be totally tied to two online revenue, uh, without any guesswork.
Speaker 2 45:49 Software wise. That's a tough one, uh, for, for what a decade runs. But you know, a lot of people, you know, since the whole Gutenberg thing, I don't know about you Dave, but I know a lot of people who are now looking at other cmss. So now wordpress is taking the same approach that I've been taking with a lot of these entrepreneurs that I mentor were breast is like the advanced level. So if you came to me, you know, I interviewed, uh, the gentleman that runs static, which is a static website. So yes, um, had him on the show and Jack, I believe is his first name. And Hey, great solution. If you had customers, I'd be coming to you that only have like 1000 bucks, 1500 bucks. Wordpress is not the answer for anymore. It's just not the answer anymore. I mean, unless you're doing something super fast and elementary beaver builder do something in a static cause then you're, you have to update it anymore.
Speaker 2 46:35 You don't have to worry about the 50 plugins that you have in there. And is it backed up? And as the plugin updates process running, um, ultra small site, build it on another tool, you know, find another CMS and then save wordpress, uh, for the more advanced people that people that are going to do some, again, e-commerce membership stuff plugin wise, well make some blocks, make some blocks, you know, the, whoever's distributing the blocks is, is going to be, the, is going to be the clear, the clear winner here, right? The more blocks you have. Uh, it's, it's, it worries me though, you know, it does worry me. I'm worried about what happens to the price points of all of this stuff. Um, you know, I'm seeing people now monetizing this. So this is crazy. So this is an a little bit of a last rant here.
Speaker 2 47:22 So there's plugins that do a whole bunch of stuff, forms, ecommerce membership stuff, and then yeah, that's a saturated market. And all of a sudden, you know, we dial it down to real, you know, niche plugins, right? So maybe like mine, like conductor or easy support videos and, and now, you know, then there was a short race to like, let's build some awesome like content blocks. And I don't really see many people monetizing that, but now I see like this whole movement to monetize the tab, not the task bar but the editor Bar, right? Like they're, they're working to insert more stuff to click on, you know, in the editor bars. So you have more options like inside the block. It's just like, man, like we are getting, we go really big to bring it down a little bit and now we're trying to monetize this one little block.
Speaker 2 48:09 It's Pr. It's pretty crazy. But um, I also think some longstanding software will actually succeed. You know, I talked about this in the past. There's a headphone company called Gredo labs and they're handmade headphones. Yeah, no Bluetooth or wireless crazy stuff. No, Lebron James Sponsorships, homemade made in Brooklyn, New York, I think for the last hundred years. Literally. And they're still in business. And they're not competing against apple and beats and Sony and Bose, uh, they don't have the market too, but they're still in business, solid product, strong, loyal customers and they're, you know, they're doing it, they're doing it the way that they want to do a traditional way and they still have people buying it. Sort of like what you ranted about with, with Justin Jackson about picking a, a large market versus a small yeah,
Speaker 1 48:55 that was a great episode. Yeah. That uh, yeah, that's a whole other topic. Um, we've already ranted on that one. I want, yeah. Yeah. All right. So one last bonus question for you, Matt. If you wanted to like put a message out there that Matt or the core contributors or somebody would magically take up as a mantle and then push forward as the one thing that they focused on for the next year to improve the wordpress community, what would you say that should be?
Speaker 2 49:26 Okay. It would be live streaming decision making meetings large, you know, either core version updates or, you know, when, when big milestones are being decided on. I know things happen in slack. Um, but there needs to be more visual. Um, there needs to be more clarity around this stuff and you know, you call it investors, an investor call or whatever you want to call it, like something where people can literally tune in and not have to be in slack to watch all this stuff or read an email, some kind of visibility, some kind of communication that says, you know, in audio or video format. Here are all the decisions. Here's the thinking process behind all of this stuff. Uh, podcast, right? He started a new podcast for is for the other venture, for the, uh, the new software stuff that they have going on, distributed. Uh, you know, I want to see better visibility around these decision making processes. Not track, not get hub, not make.wordpress.org. You know, uh, maybe I'm in the minority, but I want something that I can tune into and listen. Visualize inexperience.
Speaker 1 50:42 Yeah. Yeah. I think transparency is a great thing and we, we need more of that, especially if we're ever going to hope to, you know, empower people to really take up a leadership mantle and operate without Matt being the benevolent dictator here. Because at some point, either he's not gonna want to be the benevolent dictator or something is going to change and he can't be the benevolent dictator. And I don't know what that is, but until we can get
Speaker 2 51:09 wants to, he definitely wants. Yeah.
Speaker 1 51:11 Yeah. I mean he, I think he wants to be, and as long as he retains control now that's fine. But you know, there might be an event that precipitates a change on that and I think that's, it's probably coming, I can't tell you what it looks like. I can't tell you what it's going to happen, but dictators don't live forever, so, yeah. I don't know. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on today. And if anybody out there has any thoughts about wordpress Gutenberg jet pack, you just want to rant, get it off your chest, send me an email podcast@roadstartups.com maybe we'll bring Matt, Matt, Matt back and have yet another rant because you know I love ranting and he loves it when I'm unfiltered and maybe I'll have you do out there too. So until next week,
Speaker 0 52:01 thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
