Billable Hours

In this episode, I talk to Nico Martin about progressive web apps. Nico is the founder of say hello, a Switzerland based web agency focused on modern WordPress development. Nico knows a lot about progressive web apps and in this episode, he shares a lot of his knowledge. Links Nico's website say hello Nico on Twitter Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Transcript coming soon! Sorry! (our transcription service was down when this went live)

In this episode, I talk to Rian Rietveld about accessibility on the web. Rian works as an accesibility specialist at Level Level, a full-service agency based in Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Rian also teaches accessibility with the A11y Collective. Links Rian's website Rian on Twitter A11y Collective Level Level Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Transcript coming soon! Sorry! (our transcription service was down when this went live)

In this episode, I talk to Zuzana Kunckova of Larabelles about moving from WordPress to Laravel. Zuzana is doing some really amazing community work with underrepresented developers in Laravel. Listen in to hear about some of the differences between WordPress and Laravel. Links Zuzana on Twitter Zuzana's website Larabelles on Twitter Larabelles website Onramp Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Today, I'm really excited to welcome Zuzana Kunckova onto the show. Zuzana is most known for her incredible work with underrepresented developers within the Laravel community through Larabelles. However, she does have a background in WordPress development and today Zuzana and I are going to talk about what it's like to move from WordPress and into Laravel. You can find Zuzana on Twitter at zuzana_kunckova. And I strongly encourage you to check out Zuzana's project larabelles.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments on your account.  Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying. You can sign up for free on branchci.com. I started this episode by asking Zuzana to take us back to when she first discovered Laravel. Okay. So that was about two years ago. So back then I was working for a digital agency and it was mainly WordPress jobs, but they also had, I think, a couple of bigger Laravel based projects. So I was doing my, the WordPress side of things, but I got a chance to look into another little project at that point. I knew nothing about Laravel. I mean, I only knew WordPress and I knew it's a bit of JavaScript, but I didn't even know what a lot of it was. So I bought the Laravel up and running book and I started reading that and I watched a few YouTube tutorials. I knew about Lara cars, but for me back then, it assumed too much previous knowledge for me, Lara, because at the beginning it just wasn't the right fit. So that's how I found out about a lot of it. Like I was taught. Larva is a framework is PHP framework, and this is our project. And do you want to try to. Do this feature for us. I was like, well, okay. I can try. And yeah. Took it from there. I mean, it wasn't easy because it was so different than anything I knew because I didn't know any other, I don't even know chelas good frameworks or personal frame. I didn't know any backend frameworks, so I didn't learn well. So for me, everything was. That's really interesting, actually. So I'm created a poll on Twitter or recently where I asked among like my followers that are WordPress agencies or freelancers. How many of them also do other kinds of projects besides WordPress? And one of the options were larval and almost 50% of the people who answered that survey. And I think it was about 200 people answered that they were also doing level projects. So I think. It's a really big trend. I'm seeing where agencies aren't exclusive WordPress agencies, like they're taking advantage of some of the other newer frameworks that are around. Do you have any sort of idea about why some projects were liable and not WordPress? Like what was the difference between those projects? I think it was the size. I mean, you can build anything with WordPress pretty much, but if you do want to go. Baker gala, you use a lot more plugins and you will have to do so much customization that at that point, you might as well just do it in Laravel instead of trying to use WordPress for something that was not intended to in the first place. I mean, you can do, I think pretty much everything in WordPress, but. The question is, should you use WordPress? So I think, uh, once you have a bigger project, when you want some sort of dashboard for the client admin, I mean, yes, we also have WordPress, but WordPress has a look. It has a certain style and the way they do things, and yes, you can customize it slightly, but not too much, not enough. So if you want to have anything more custom, but you might want to reconsider whether using WordPress sister, right. Choice. Yeah. One of the things I've kind of like experienced, if you would try to do a really big project with WordPress, either, as you said, like you're just stringing it together with a lot of plugins and like, you just hope that they are good plugins. They're maintained well kind of like crafted, but then like it ends up at as almost like a vanilla PHP project then like, if you really try to customize stuff, like you have to go really bare bones anyway. And it's kind of like start from scratch. You have to see that different tools are right for different kinds of projects, especially with WordPress. It's important to keep that in mind, because I think work best became known as the tool to do everything with, but good to sometimes stop and thing. Should you really use it? Yeah. Okay. So you, you discovered Laravel and you mentioned Matt Stauffer's book, right? Laravel up and running. What was your firsthand experience? How did you think about it? Like once you kind of like started getting your feet wet and tried adding some features. And I was like, Oh, it's so many files and folders. What do I do for that? I still remember the first time I got Laravel running on my back then windows machine. So I installed valet, which again, wasn't straightforward to use on windows and what's Valley ballet is the local development for level. So that's up. So it's quite, once you have it installed, it's really easy. You just install, you know, a lot of a project and then it just works. You can have like a local security, so you can run negative BS websites locally. You can share your mess a lot to do with Valley. I didn't do it the easy way. I just thought, Oh, everyone's using valet. Let me try to that too. What? I didn't realize that while I was meant for Mac OS while I was a windows computer. So yeah, but I've got it working at the end. First thing was like, Where does everything go? There's so many directories and I didn't understand what they meant. And that was still me looking at the vanilla Laravel installation with no changes to it. So my initial feeling was like, there's so much, I don't know what to do. Kind of the philosophy behind. Laravel and WordPress are quite different. Like WordPress is a CMS and Laravel is I think most people call it an MVP framework, like model view controller. So it's just a different architecture. So did you have to like step back and kind of like understand the idea behind it or the architecture, or it was so different from WordPress because WordPress, you don't have to. Think about some of the things because they are done for you. I mean, you can, if he wants to, but a lot of the things like authentication, you don't have to worry about it and routes, you don't have to worry about it in Laravel. You still don't have to worry about it, but you are more involved. Like you need to make the decisions yourself. And yeah. So when I started reading about  and VC came up, I was like, what is MV? So then I there's a lot of rabbit holes you can go down through when it comes to learning something like Laravel like a backend framework. I knew PHP, but I knew WordPress PHP. So while I knew what classes I would objects, where I didn't necessarily have to write a lot of it myself, I would. Customize a lot of things, but, and I was making my own custom themes in Iowa. So I wasn't just like customizing existing theme. So I did do some PHP work, but in Laravel it was, you know, it's all PHP. So I had to learn what is object-oriented programming? What are the solid principles? What is interface and factories and single sentence and all these things that he didn't need to know about WordPress work. And especially for me, when I learned something, I need to know it well enough. To move on. I don't like to have just like the bank idea. I need to be able to explain it to myself at least. So yeah. I spend a lot of time looking into these fundamentals of PHB. The more I think about it. It's quite insane actually. How many things you need to learn about like dependency, injection containers and serverless containers and like all of these concepts, like the more I think about it, like the more jargon and terminology there is, was all that covered in that book MedStar for road. I think most of it is, but I didn't read it from the beginning to the end. So I started, but then the thing with reading a book, it's all very theoretical. And until you actually need something, need to implement something. At least in my case, I wouldn't understand. So when I read it, I understood perfectly, but give me a problem to solve. And I would be like, I don't know what to do. So while I had the book, I then went back to YouTube videos and I did some YouTube tutorials and what those gave me, it was mainly just to build a, like a blog, you know, and create a course, a beta course, that sort of thing, but it gave me the bigger picture. And once I knew how things are supposed to work, then I couldn't go and digging into the other aspects and concepts that I didn't understand. It's funny how a lot of the tutorials that when you're learning, Laravel actually teaches you how to build a basic blogging platform. Yeah. And not many take it further. Yeah. Once you do one, two, three of these tutorials and they'll say, okay, I know how to do a block. Now I know how to do that. Can you just teach me something else for a change so that I would appreciate if there were more tutorials, but not covering the basic stuff that you can find everywhere else or like to do up, you know? And you learn from them. Like if you learn a view or react, every time you look into tutorials is how to build a, to do up. I don't want to build a two. Can you please show me another. Real life use case. Yeah. Do you remember what the first project was that you worked on with Merriville? So other than the one that agency, which I kind of joined, which was already up and running. So when I started working on that one, they asked me to implement a log page. So it would be on the admin dashboard for the client to tell them whether we fix the bug or updated something or new features. So it was that sort of page. So I would say that was when I had to move on from just reading a book or watching tutorials to actually do something. That sounds kind of complicated as the first project. If I could go now and look at it, what I would think. I don't know. Cause I was like over two years ago, so I don't know if I saw my work now, what I would think back then, I felt so accomplished. I mean, it took me a while, but if I could display the page that was like, wow, I had no idea. I could do that. Like, you know, Everything I did in Laravel. I kept surprising myself that I could actually do this. Cause again, if I can compare it to WordPress, I never felt that way because in WordPress, you've got a dashboard and because a lot of the things are done for you. Like yeah, you prefer the themes and the design, but you don't necessarily do much with it. Work best dashboard itself, but in Laravel if I wanted anything, I had to do myself. So every time I managed to display a page or display a new text or fetch some info from the database, it was like, wow, I did that. And I think that's what got me hooked on Laravel because it's such an amazing feeling when you can do something and you managed to make it work. Yeah. I can definitely relate to that. For me. It was Ruby on rails. When I started learning MVC. And, um, all the tutorials back then there was like a Twitter copy. So that was it for me. I'm really curious. You have a background in psychology and how do you go from psychology and into web development? Well, I'm not one of those prodigy kids that started coding when they were like 10 and that's not me at all. I was very uncomfortable on computers for a very long time. I mean, we didn't even have computer at home when I was growing up. We didn't. So the first time I. Started using computer was when I got my first job when I was in my twenties. And even then it was really just to using the computer, you know, turn it on, turn it off. So then I studied psychology. I already had two kids at that point. So they were four and six when I finished my degree. And when I tried to look for a job, I mean, I, I really loved working with people, but the jobs were not flexible at all for me, for what I needed back then, because I needed to be flexible to be around the kids with the kids. You know, kids often ill and they have school performances and our holidays, a lot of holidays. And my husband used to travel for work a lot. So it was mainly me being around the kids or having to be there for the kids. So when I finished my psychology degree, I actually ended up working in the school as a teaching assistant for like special needs children. But I knew that that's not what I wanted to do forever. So I sat down and I look genuinely, honestly opened up the computer and I sit down and I Googled things you can do from home and web design and web development kept coming up. And my husband he's a social engineer. So I mean, I knew he was doing something on a computer or at work, but that's as much as I knew about his work. And he told me like, why don't you try, you know, make a website? I was like, ah, I wasn't into design. I wasn't into computers. But yeah, I thought I try. And, you know, I think it was mainly beginner's luck that the first website I did, I used to bootstrap. I didn't even use WordPress. So I used bootstrap. We did the hosting, everything ourselves. Certainly we bought the hosting domain. So, but we didn't use WordPress with a lot of, but things and as it goes, beginner's luck, it all worked. And I was like, Oh, that's not that hard at all. I made the form work, everything worked. So, and I think that's the thing. We've about development. You've got like instant gratification in. A lot of cases that if it works, it works immediately. You don't have to wait for things to, you know, like when you work with people, often the results. If you're working with the children or adults, the results are not immediate. It's a long process, but on the web you do something right. And it just works. And I was like, Ooh, okay. Maybe I can do it. And that's how it started. I just sat down at home and I started learning. That is really cool. You're right. Like the feedback loop is very short and then you discovered WordPress somehow and you realized you were doing work. You didn't need to do. Yeah. So most of the things like anything I did. As a book developer, a lot of it was sold out. So like, I didn't, I happen to do WordPress because I knew that was work in WordPress. If I wanted to work remotely or flexibly. And I looked online. Yes, there's lots of web developer jobs and offices, but if you want it to be a fiance or flexible, it was always WordPress. So at that point I decided, okay, I need to learn WordPress. So it wasn't because my website was based on where personal it was. Again, me looking, what can I possibly do? To provide for my family, for my kids that will still allow me to be there for them. And it all went from there. Really. That's great. So did you start out as a freelancer or did you find a job instantly as like a WordPress developer or so at that point I had my third child and he was a baby. So I did a lot of things. I did lots of online courses and I did you just set a course? I think it was called mobile web specialist. So it was one of those courses that was funded by Google. So I got a scholarship for it, and I did the course. Anyone can do dusty courses, or I dunno if it hasn't changed since then, because that was like three years ago. But back then anyone could do it for free. But if you wanted to get a feedback on your code and you would have to either pay or get a scholarship, so I got a scholarship didn't have to pay. But at that point I felt like, well, maybe it's not just me playing via the computer in the evenings. Maybe I can actually do something with it because I was getting feedback. From somebody else. And I had assignments I had to do and things I had to build. Um, at that point, I think it was winter time and I decided. That I wanted to go out and meet other developers. Because up until that point, I was still just at home doing everything from home. I didn't meet anyone. I went, I checked out a meetup website and looked for some local meetup groups and there was WordPress group and there was WordPress and it was also JavaScript and PHP, but the WordPress group was on the right day for me. So it was Monday evenings. It wasn't too big. It wasn't too small. And the topics like the past meetups. They seemed understandable to me. So it wasn't like completely something I didn't understand. So I decided to go to one and I think that was what kind of pushed me to think about myself as a web developer, because then I was at a meetup with other people and they ask you to introduce yourself so I could have just said. Hi, I'm Susanna. I'm just visiting. Or I could say I'm Susanna, I'm a web developer. So the first few times I said that I felt like a fraud because of, I'm not a web developer, I'm a hobbyist at the best, because I don't have a job. I don't, you know, but if you say it often enough, you start kind of believing it. And because of the psychology, I was really interested in web accessibility. So about three months later, I offered to do a talk and that word me subsided that web accessibility talk enough to death. Talk. I was approached by who ended up to be my boss. So this guy was sitting in an audience and he saw me give this talk. And then he came to me. He said, well, I've got this agency, which would like to work for us. And that's how I got my first job as the WordPress developers. At that point, I didn't even do any WordPress work. I installed WordPress locally and I did some, you know, bits and pieces at home. That's a great story. And I think it just underscores how important all the small WordPress meetups around the world are. Like it could be life changing potentially. I used to go to the WordPress meetup in Glasgow, and I think there's some of the same similar stories I heard from there. And it's just really a good way to get involved. Like if you're interested in getting involved with the community, like fairly simple thing you can do is like getting involved with the meetup and the could have a big impact. It definitely did for me, because the hardest is to get your first job, because you've had nothing to show for your skills and he offered me the job. Based on my talk only. So that was amazing. That's really cool. So now you're a WordPress developer and then you worked on WordPress for a couple of years or not that long. First I started working for them as a freelancer. Then I got employed. So I worked with this agency for. A year, something like that, then I was employed by them. And even though it was part-time and pod remotes, I didn't have to be in the office every day, but I still had to be in the office. And even when I was working from home, I had to be at my desk at a certain time. And I still found that really difficult to deal with, like when it comes to the kids, the other thing is I kept feeling guilty. So if I was working at home, I was like, I should really be with the case. And when I was with the case, I was like, I should really be working. So I made a decision to go properly freelance because at that point I had some experience with WordPress and the Laravel. Like I said, I am feeling guilty. I felt I couldn't give the job everything it deserved. And I thought, I don't want to work like that. Like if I do something I want to do properly, and that sets such as didn't work for me. So I decided to go freelance. I have to say it was a split of a moment decision. And I do not recommend it to anyone because I be able to say, you know, before you go freelance, you need to have some clients and you need to have some income while I had nothing. I just decided, you know what, I'm going to go freelance. And it goes, when I left, we left on good terms. It wasn't any bad blood. Like we asked her in touch and I just told him, look, I need to try to do myself. And if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. So from January, 2019, I went freelance just before the global pandemic hit. Yeah, it was interesting because most of the work I got was thanks to the people I met at the meetup. So again, what you said about how networking is really important, because basically all my jobs as a freelancer, I got either word of mouth or because I met somebody at the meetup or, you know, somebody to meet some new somebody, you know, so that's how I got all my work. Have you ever gone to a larval meetup that isn't any around here? And I think there's before the pandemic, there was one Laravel conference in London was quite expensive. So I would have to probably go to London and then the tickets are never really thanks to the pandemic. Now we can take parts in the online ones, which is amazing, but I've been sort of word camps in London. I went to two or three of them. Can't remember, but so these are great. These are like, you know, weekend things from Friday to Sunday and they are really affordable and you meet a lot of people. So I went to that. I haven't been to learn about one. I'm realizing now that, cause I was thinking like, what are actionable tips that we could give people who wanted to move from WordPress and intolerable and with your experience and the experience from my Twitter poll. Like, it just sounds like the way to do it is to get a job with an agency that does both work prison level. And then you can see if you can sneak in on some of the level of projects, if you want to get your feet wet. I mean, they asked me what I prefer, but I prefer working with  and I said, I just like Laravel, but I know I was much slower in lava because there was so much more I had to learn. But from the beginning, I just prefer Laravel and I can't, I don't know why, because it's not like I had something to compare it to. I didn't work this. I didn't know any other frameworks. Yeah, you're right. Like there's a lot to learn and I kind of wanted to talk a bit about some of the technical differences between Laravel and WordPress and it's like technical. Differences. I almost want to say like technical barriers because WordPress is like always been famous for its five minute install, you know, like you just click, click, click, and then you have a WordPress site somewhere and that's not the experience with terrible. Um, so like the first thing that comes to my mind is composer understanding like command line stuff and compose, you must've run into that at some point I've been like, what is this thing? And like, why do I need it? And what does it do? Compost and not so much, because at that point I knew about NPM composers, pretty much, you know, the PHP version of NPM. So I knew what MPM did, what it stood for and how it works. So I didn't find composer difficult at all. I think the first time I used NPM was like, so I'm supposed to use all these packages, like built by somebody else. And what if these people are not good people like, you know, even to this day, I still think that we are, most of the web is built on. Work with somebody else that you don't even know who they are and hope for the best, pretty much, right. That's a good point. Another big difference is something that we already mentioned, which is desirable. Like there's not an admin dashboard, like there's an WordPress. Yeah. So it's more of a blank slate, right? Yeah. You mentioned you worked in some dashboard with , so kind of like the thing is you have to build your own, right. Or you use a package or something like that. Yeah. I think the big difference that I noticed as a WordPress developer, you have a choice. You can be. As technical as you want, or you don't have to be technical at all. You can still be a WordPress developer and all you can do is customize the dashboard and tick the boxes and install themes and plugins. You know, that requires skills and knowledge as well. Or you can then customize existing themes and then you can go and build your own, but it's your choice. You have a choice. How deep you want to go, but Laravel, there is no choice. You have to do it all pretty much. If you want to be a lower level. But I think still the easiest way is to start with WordPress because WordPress, you do build your knowledge gradually, but in Laravel you just jump in and then you have to make it work. And it's not easy because you have some of the things you have to think about, but also does some of the things you don't know. You don't know. And I think that was what tripped me up many times because like, how do I know things that I'm supposed to do when I don't even know about them? And there is no checklist, like, make sure you do this then that, so that was definitely a barrier to entry to Laravel development. I have to say, yeah, you're right. Like with WordPress, I keep saying WordPress is the original, no code tool because you can just throw plugins together and pick a theme and customize it, but you're right. Like then you can slowly start to like, like you could create a child theme. If you want to like start coding a bit more, or you could create a pocket in for a simple use case for something. And then you can start to do more coding. That's a good point. Like you could. Gradually like move in. And then when you feel like you're writing too much code, or it gets too complicated, like maybe that's a good time to try to see, like how hard would it be to build this and marvelous that at least in my experience, like if you decide to actually do the coding and write a lot of code, like you get a lot of help with level that you don't get with WordPress. That's another thing, like a difference between WordPress and larval, I think is WordPress really is created for the end user, right? Like the user experience was focused on someone who locks into the dashboard and edits content, right. Because it's a content management system. Whereas with Laravel the whole entire focus when it comes to usability is for the developer. So it's the developer experience. So I know WordPress is kind of like trying to focus on developer experience, but it's the other way around, like it's first, the end user and then think about the developer and like try to make it available. But if with Laravel there's no end user, at least not from like a larval perspective. That's true. Now I'm starting to appreciate how good Lorimar is for developers. Because again, if you don't know, you don't know, you've got nothing to compare it to, but the more I work with now that I am comfortable in Laravel, I'm starting to see how other frameworks do stuff. So that's, at this point I can compare and contrast, see how lava makes things easier. I saw on your Twitter stream that you were playing around with staff to make us well, which actually is a CMS, but it's terrible based. Yeah. What's your experience been like with a  based CMS? It's interesting because I'm much more comfortable in the code base now, so I know where to find stuff. So it's easier for me. If I was a new developer. I probably wouldn't go for statistic because I think that there's a lot of assumed knowledge you should have already, but as a Laravel developer, I chose that domain because until now liability websites are running on tick. So the static site generator generate the check. So by title, which is also like, Laravel kind of inspired so very similar, but I wanted to have some dashboards. And yeah, I could have gone WordPress Bibles. I'm already working with Laravel. It's about Laravel Laravel Laravel, you know, I'm not going to go on a little bit purpose. So instead of building a brand new Laravel project, what is a step down like something that I don't need to do everything from scratch. And then they start to make, which is perfect. Yeah. I still requires quite a lot of, not in my, maybe this is how I look at it now, because I've lost the understanding what it's like for somebody who's brand new to development. Maybe they would understand it. But I think I would struggle if I picked up stomach instead of WordPress as I was starting out. I think I would struggle. Yeah. That makes sense. I think I agree with you on that one. So that's technical differences and there's a lot more like technical differences between the frameworks and I encourage people to just. Honestly, read through the level of documentation because it's really good. And it might just give you an idea at least like, it'll give you a list of new words. You can try to see if you can understand, but I thought maybe we could talk a bit about like some of the human differences or like the community differences. And you mentioned that you had been part of some of the online level community. Events that have been going on, but you're also like have experience with a WordPress meetup. Are you noticing any difference like in the community? Well, Lara document is much more technical because WordPress committee is more diverse. You can have all sorts of people in the WordPress community. You can have the designers and developers. And like I said, developers that do. Theme customization. And then those that build plugins. So there is such a diversity and because workplace is so I don't want to say old mature that is, people have been working with it for very long time. People who've been working with it for how old is WordPress, 10 years. No, it's more, it's like 2003 or something like that. And I think I've been using it for 14 years or something. Okay. So people who've been using it for a long time and people who are just beginning, you said the community is so diverse. Well in Laravel not so much, although Laravel is also humble is Laravel. I think it was. Built in, was it 20, 2012? Maybe the first one, but by the time it got popular, I feel like it's newer. So you don't get a lot of our developers have been doing Laurel for 10 years. No. And it's funny when you see people try to recruit for like 10 years of, of experience. I love as not at all. Yeah. But so I think that's a big difference. Yeah. But the other thing is in Laravel I think the people are paying a lot of attention to what are people like, how people communicate. There is a lot of people, they emphasize empathy, for example, and they want people to be kind. And if you are not kind devil, you know, try to talk to you and say, okay, this is not on. In general, it feels nice to be part of this community because it's so big and there's so many different people, plus like, I dunno, WordPress has a bad name. I don't know why, but when you say to people, your WordPress developer now like a WordPress or a PHP, you know, I think you've been there. We've all been there. Yeah. I can't complain about workers coming community, because like I said, it gave me my first job and it helped me as I was learning. Cause the worker Slack channel, it's amazing. Every time I had problem, you know, there's always people would help you out with a lot of it. There's also that press community. It does an amazing job. I think being more inclusive and being, but it's really hard to compare really. Just a nice community, as you mentioned, like it's a very big community, so it's almost like the world, you know, like I've seen, like people are wearing political statements that you maybe don't agree with at word camps and stuff like that, but it's just so big. So it was just like a broad slice of the world because, uh, also like WordPress powers, like 38% of all websites, which is. Quite insane, but yeah, that's definitely something I've noticed. Like communities feels like a big part of WordPress, I guess just when I realized I even was a WordPress community, I kind of got sucked into it a bit and like really enjoyed going to word camps and stuff like that. The one thing that a lot of elk meat doesn't have. I think it's the diversity, but I think it comes with time and exposure and, but size as you grow as a community, it's going to attract more people. Well, for us has already had done that because there is no shortage of women. Anyone who works in WordPress could be part of the community. Yeah. And you were working on this. So let's talk about that because now you're saying there's no shortage of women, et cetera. It's not only women, but. Just underrepresented people. If you look at what the so-called Laravel elite, I think people refer to it. Like it's not super diverse, but you're working on a really cool project that I think everyone should check out their bells. And how would you describe it? I briefly described it in the intro, I think. But how would you describe it? It's a community for, so I don't want to say underrepresented developers because that's so huge. And I wanted to really focus more on the gender. So for women and anyone who identifies as a woman, Laravel developers, because like you said, the level elite while they're all really nice kind people, they are mainly white men. And I've noticed over the last few, uh, Laravel conferences, they've tried to bring more women there and it's amazing. And I think more work can be done. And I think a lot of the time it's because people don't know the women working with Laravel. I don't know that many, I know many, many men, but do I know many women? Not really. And I don't think that's because they don't exist. I just don't think that we know about them. Yeah. I mean, I've been in the larva community for six or seven years, and I honestly don't know a lot of women and it's bad. So I definitely. Love the project that you're working on. And I think it's almost like a, would you say like is almost could become like a repository for like women in larva? Like there's no excuse to say that you couldn't find women for your conference. Well, once we have this running, that would be next to your right. So that's the whole point. I mean, yeah. When I sat on Twitter that I'm going to launch Laura, some people wondered. Whether I'm not damaging the community because liberal community is really good. And I think it's one of the selling points of Laravel that that community is so welcoming and big in a friendly, and I'm not saying it isn't at all. I'm just saying we can do more. And like as a woman, even at the WordPress meetup or any meetup, it doesn't as hell. Kind and friendly demand. Oh, if I am the only woman there, I'm going to feel a little bit out of place just because, I mean, it's important for the community to be kind and welcoming, but at the same time, we need to encourage more women to come forward and be public about their work, because that will bring other women forward. And hopefully we will kind of level out the field. I'm not asking to have like 50, 50% representation of 50% men, 50% women. I'm not asking for that. I'm trying to make it. Easier for women to be hurt and known about. So that's the whole point. I'm not trying to cause a revolution. And I'm not saying that the line of argument is bad. It isn't, I'm just trying to make it even better. Yeah. I think that's what a lot of people misunderstood when you launched it. Like you can always improve and like, just because you want to improve something, it doesn't mean that you're saying it's bad necessarily. It just means that you care. I guess like, I mean, in WordPress we have these sort of. Communities, I think at least there's more of it. And then there is in Laravel. So like, you could also just ignore it the Laravel community, but instead you choose to make a really meaningful contribution, which I think is great. We'll see how it goes. So when you mentioned like to have like a repository of women, that's what I'm working on currently and trying to involve as of next newsletter, I'm going to be featuring Laura Bellis. So allowable member in each newsletter, one or two, I haven't decided yet just to. Let people know about us. And just me asking him on Twitter, if anyone knows about an era of us to be featured, I've already bet so many fantastic people that I didn't know about and I'm trying to find them. And then if you see companies looking for employees, level developers, then they'll have a list of women that they can approach. And not just for jobs, for conferences, for me, it's as for anyone just to, yeah. So how's it. How's it going so far? So, um, Taking it slowly on purpose. Cause when I launched, I had no idea what caused such an uproar. I thought I was going to be grateful for a few lakes and a few comments, but I mean, the response was amazing at that point I was like, Oh no, I have to finish it. And I have to launch it immediately because yesterday was too late. But I was like, no, this is a community. It's not a product that you want to launch and everything to be perfect. This is a community it's about people. So I am taking it slowly. So we currently have. A Twitter account that I think is already working quite well. It's active. So we've done a few giveaways and we going to do more. If I hear about a woman that does something, I want to retweet her tweets or projects. And the other thing I have is monthly newsletter. I've sent out two so far and it was mainly about what's going on. So I'm building Larabars in public. I decided to do it in public because again, it's not a product that needs to be. Close behind closed doors. No, I want people to know what I'm doing and how it's going. Cause I haven't built a community before. I don't know what I'm doing really. And there is no manual online to tell you to build a community of sort of this and that. No. So I'm going to make mistakes. I'm learning, but it's all about people and it's already working. I mean, if it didn't the first week or two, I had a lady contact me saying that she actually got a job. Straight away that the company was hiring. They said they agree with Laura Bell's ideas. And they wanted somebody from like late woman Laravel developer. So she got a job and she sent me an email saying like, thank you. And that was for me. But at that point I didn't even do a newsletter. I only had a Twitter account and it was my restless tweet that went out and it already made a difference. If that's all it debts, I'll be happy already because that changed somebody's life. Oh yeah, totally. I want to offer a piece of advice here for listeners. Like if you're a WordPress developer and you're thinking about moving into the world of Laravel and trying out that yeah. And you fit into the sort of profile for Lara bell, maybe that would be a good entry community because they will be in the larval space, a community waiting for you like an inclusive space. So instead of just like landing in the middle of. Whatever, like fight that's going on on get hub or Twitter, like look up layer bells. And maybe that's like a way to get into of could be a good idea. I'm hoping for it to be a safe space. Like there's no pressure is no membership. You know, you don't have to pay anyone. It's just, just getting touch. And we are still in the early days. So now I'm working on the website, which will feature Laura bells. All the ladies and anyone who would like to be featured, but the other plants I have is pet programming, mentoring. So I had people approach me saying, okay, I'm not a developer, but I would like to offer mentoring, like management sessions, anything like if I can help. I will. Why not? So as long as it's a little bit connected to larva. Yeah. I have to be careful. I try not to focus on two big group of people. I'm trying to be really focused on Laravel and women. And I went, who identifies as women because otherwise it would go too big and too crazy. And plus that already groups that do like women who code and then four pipes and jungle girls. And for Ruby on rails, I think there are rail. Real life stuff. I think most of the frameworks have communities for women, which is, I was surprised that there wasn't one for Lauraville. Yeah, really. So two things, is there any way people can get involved with layer bells or help out with that? And if people in general are interested in kind of exploring Laravel, do you have any practical advice for where they should start or where they should look? Yeah. So to get involved with Lara Bellis right now, It's mainly Twitter, but I'm going to be opening discord channel that's actually, which is just so for somebody to help me, because I will need moderators. I can't do it all. So I have my own job. So I do a lot of belts on the side, so I can't do everything myself. So once I do open the discussion, I will need somebody to help me moderate it. But right now you can send me an email. You can send me a DM item, my personal one, all are those one. And if there's something you can offer to the community, Whether it's product and you want to do a good way, or if it's your skills, if it's something like mentoring sessions, please get in touch. Because once we have the website going, I think we'll give it more structure to learn about itself. Like there will be calendar and I will start running. Hopefully regular sessions, but right now it's just get in touch. Let me know you exist. And if you are Laura Bell and you would like to be featured, please get in touch. Because even if you're not looking for work, even if you happy where you are, just let the world know that we exist. Because I think that's part of the problem. People don't know about us. Like you don't have to be looking for work. You don't need to be looking for conference talks. No, let's just let people know that we are here and we do our work. And what was the second question? If people want to dip their toes into Laravel and they're coming from the WordPress world, do you have any ideas for where they should start? I noticed a lot of costs, but for me, when I started with Loma that it was too much, I didn't understand because I think a lot of the videos, they assume previous knowledge. So for me, I know a lot of people are happy with it, but for me it was too much. So I just went and started looking on YouTube. And then there's also MedStar style, first project on ramp, which is again, helping people too. Become Laravel developers and he has three pathways. So it's for a WordPress developer and then it's one for new developer. And what's the third one, I don't know, but there's definitely one for a junior developer and one for a WordPress developer trying to get into Laravel. So that will be a collection of resources. So that's called on ramp. We'll link, all of that. And that just get involved the community, because I think there's so many tons of people who share their knowledge freely online in videos and podcasts. And once you get to know who to listen to, and then it's like, you know, you can start connecting the dots. So if you follow one person, then you'll see, Oh, this person follows. And then you're just kind of get involved with the community. And I think that's great because if you have questions like there, wasn't a question that. I had that wasn't answered in a nice, friendly way. I hope this conversation has inspired some folks to at least check out Laravel it's right there next to WordPress PHP. It's a different way of thinking in the architecture and stuff, but there's a lot to learn and. Yeah, I'll encourage people to check it out and, um, Zana, thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. And, uh, I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. emos 

In this episode, I chat with David Vogelpohl, Vice President of Growth at WP Engine. Before joining WP Engine, David founded and ran his own agency Marketing Clique. Through his role at WP Engine, David is connected to thousands of agencies around the world and in this episode, he shares his thoughts on growing and scaling a successful agency. Links David on Twitter WP Engine Flywheel Growth Suite Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Today I am really excited to have David Vogelpohl as my guest. David is the vice president of growth at WP Engine. Before joining WP Engine, David ran his own agency marketing clique. Through his role at WP Engine, David is connected to thousands of agencies around the world, and I can't wait to dive into today's episode where we'll be talking about growing and scaling an agency. By the way, this is not the first time David and I talk on a podcast. One of David's many involvements in the WordPress community is as the host off the Press This podcast where I've previously been a guest, you can find David on Twitter at WP David V. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your work per sites. We've got your back with recipes for all the common workflows that WordPress developers need making it super easy, and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines, it's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments on your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. I started this episode by diving into David's own experience, running an agency, David, in your work WP Engine. You work with thousands of different agencies nowadays. Um, but your background is also an agency and you had your own agency marketing click before you started working with WP engine with all. The things that you're seeing now, Adobe engine and all the thousands of agencies that you interact with at different levels, like, is there something you would have done differently at your own agency? Kind of in hindsight, if you could. Yes. Hindsight's always 20, 20 Peter. So it's funny, actually, my agents. See, it was a vendor of WP engine. So before I actually joined WP engine directly, a WP engine was a client for actually many years since nearly the beginning of the company. But you know, when I started the agency, I didn't know anything about running an agency. I guess I freelance, I guess you would say on my own for probably about three to six months and then hired my first employee within that six month period. And then eventually grew it to 22 employees. When I felt it was time to exit the agency world. After about five years, I decided to kind of shop my agency if you will, to see what sort of acquisition offers I could get. And I would say the biggest thing I learned in retrospect probably was from that event. I think there's other like operational sides. Um, but what ended up happening is I did have an asset acquisition of the, kind of. Value of the business, if you will. But the multiples I got wasn't very high and the reason was because I didn't have established like long-term contracts with customers or like a recurring revenue stream baked into the business. So that was kind of a nice little surprise on, I decided it was time to move into something else and looking back, I wish I had baked. Those elements into my business. We did have long-term customers who spend a lot of money each month, but they weren't locked into contracts. So that at the end of the day actually undervalued the business. In my view, that's super interesting. And it really ties into, you know, the whole title of this podcast. I guess that's just a great lesson. And I think, you know, there's a book John Warrillow built to sell is. Exactly about this whole thing. Like basically, and we have a few of the episodes on this podcast as well about basically how to think about recurring revenue, maybe even stuff like productized services. I don't know if that's something you've ever come across a productizing where you basically offer your services as moral, you package it as a product with different pricing plans and tears and stuff like that. Yeah, the maintenance packages, um, or a care packages, uh, site maintenance, like these kinds of offerings, this product is , it's interesting. In my agency, we would have like big ticket customers, you know, like for us, we really wouldn't want to mess with anything, unless it was at least $5,000 of work. And then many of our clients were, you know, 10 or $20,000 a month. Worth of work. And so I often viewed those care packages as kind of not super helpful for the business. In reality, though, productizing your services in that way, one can help you have higher margins, right? So you're not always having to do, you know, that amount of money's worth of hourly work to keep that customer in good shape. You can also leverage your technology and your systems to kind of scale that kind of work to further increase your margins, but also by having that kind of long-term value in your business that builds up over time. I'm a little bit of a science nerd. One of my favorite topics are things called solar sales and the way solar sales work is they collect sunlight. And there's very little pressure of the sun's solar wind, if you will on the sale, but because there's no friction in space, each little push gets the spacecraft going faster and faster and faster, and you go to like insane speeds using this method. Well, I think of that same thing within an agency business, as we think about these monthly recurring revenue care packages or maintenance packages or productized services, if you will, because each one of those, you add adds a little bit of pressure forward pressure, upward pressure for your business. And so I think from the business strategy perspective, they actually make a lot of sense. And even though you may not make a lot. Per customer in that way over time, you can build that base up and have a lot more reliability in your business. I'm a big fan of them from a business strategy perspective, for sure. Yeah, I love that metaphor. I think, you know, it just a good thing to remember about recurring revenue is you also have to provide recurring value, right. To justify the recurring ness of it. So it's just also is a good way to just keep in contact with your customers and, you know, keep the relationship going. Yeah, I think so. I kind of shied away. It's it's funny. Cause like I ran the agency for five years and you know, tried a lot of different approaches, a lot of different billing models, hourly rates and so on and so forth. And when I realized at that time, which would have been 2010 to 2015, you know, even still today, there's this push around like, well, don't charge by the hour, like charged by the value, right. Charge based on the value you're delivering to the customers, not just like break it down into the hours and a lot of other different approaches similar to that. And what I found was that, yes, I could do that, but if I didn't do any work, of course, which I didn't like try to do, I didn't try to cheat my customers, but I was just saying at the end of the day, it really did get down to like, what did you deliver? And then how did it perform? And you have to account for the, what did you deliver it part because a customer's not going to keep writing you $10,000 checks or even a $200 check or credit card charge if you're doing nothing. And so, as you think about these automated systems that set customers up for success, I think it's important. That helps. Of course you gain margin by not having to spend so much time doing the things, but if you're automating it, it's helpful to let the customer know this is happening. You know, if you're patching plugins, if you're, you know, doing other maintenance type activity, even in an automated way, it's important to keep like nudging them to like, say, Hey, look, I got your back this month. And these ways. If you are patching plugins and particularly patches that include security patches, that's absolutely something to bring up to a customer to let them know, Hey, look, I had your back, there was a vulnerability in your plugin. We got the update that it was patched and we applied the patch and you're safe. Um, so yeah, these are challenges as you have these kinds of maintenance packages, which is like, how do you keep proving that ongoing value? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think we'll talk more about that in our conversation as well. I'm curious at your agency, you've touched on this a bit already, but what was your role in the beginning and kind of, what did your role involve into and kind of, how did it look in the end when you finally sold the business? Oh, well it was a journey. It was my first business that I'd ever started on my own. 100% funded by myself. I started it with the notion of building an agency. I didn't start freelancing and kind of stumble into creating an agency. Like a lot of folks did, like it was actually my purpose. My business plan was to leverage the agency and the resources. It had to build our own products, which we would then monetize. So that was our path. If you will. For kind of that recurring revenue or like non hourly based revenue stream. And there was a lot of precedents to this. Like, you know, I'd kind of come up in the early internet days and there are agencies like run by people like Rand Fishkin who spawned products like Moz or SEO Moz at the time. And so this was really inspirational for me. But the first year was mainly me doing a lot of the work. Of course I started with just me and then started slowly adding folks over time. What I found though, and I would say a lesson learned to maybe convey to others that are running an agency or thinking of running. Ryan was, I'd say one of the big misses. The stakes I made was really trying to do too much, trying to be an expert at all the different parts of my business and not fostering good leaders in every group I did in some, but not in others. And what I found was that spread me too thin in order to help progress the business. I was much more micromanagy than, than I am today. And what I found was this. Thing, what I call anyways, like this organizational decay, meaning that I go from team to team and I show them how to spend the plate, you know, spinning plates and keeping your plate spinning. But I would show them the best way that I thought how to spin the plate. And then I would go from group to group showing them how to spend the plate and I would come back and they had forgotten some of the techniques or they had done them in a way I didn't think was optimized and the plates would just be wobbling. As I got back to each team. What I found though, through the course of running the agency and also sends, you know, working here at WP engine was that if I can foster those leaders, then what they do is they figure out the best way to spend the plate. When I started adopting that model, what I found was is I got back to each team. The plate was spinning better than ever. There were laser beams, like keeping it balanced and like things I just never thought of. I discovered through that journey, that building that strong leadership culture in any team, but in particularly in agency is super, super important. Otherwise you're just going to spread yourself too thin. Yeah. I mean, I liked the metaphor there as well, and I think that's really solid advice and kind of like, what it makes me think is like, do you think an agency is a good first business model for people who wants to like run their own business? Is that a good place to start? And what at least Mizzou is kind of like, what does a successful agency look like? So if people are starting an agency and kind of like yourself are also at the same time looking to evolve into. Products and maybe more of a nun hourly build business. Like what should they aspire to build? And like, what are the foundations and the groundwork that they need to lay? Sure. Absolutely. I'll kind of take these one at a time. So in terms of like, is an agency a good business to start? I mean, I think obviously you have to have some level of skill that the world will want to buy before you start this agency. Even if you're not going to do the work, even if you're going to lead other people, obviously you have to have this baseline. So assuming you have that, then the question is, is an agency, you know, a good choice for you? Or should you think about something else? So I'd say one of the things about starting an agency Peters. When I started it, I thought I was pretty smart. I thought I knew a lot of things. I'd been around the block. I'd worked in tech and digital for. You know, I dunno, 15 years at that point or something like that had done some really cool things and made a lot of money for a lot of companies doing it. And I thought I knew a lot of things. And about three months then I was like, Oh yeah, I don't know anything at all. And so it was really eye-opening to see the different kinds of business models and challenges that have wide variety of businesses had. Yeah. Because you help other businesses run their business when you run an agency as well. Right. So you get to see a lot of stuff. Absolutely. And my way of doing these types of things like optimizing digital and thinking about growth is I always start with like, well, what's your business objective and what are you trying to drive? And like your question just a minute ago, what does success look like in like, what's the KPI? What are we trying to sell? And then to build everything out from that. And, you know, I would have clients really all around the board. You know, people from driving sales directly on their website, like e-commerce SAS or platform companies like WP engine WP engine was actually really early clients. I, I did have some background in hosting. Of course that was an unfamiliar, but all kinds of different ways of monetizing leads and so on and so forth. And then different strategies for approaching those. And getting that education, I think has greatly helped me, particularly in the role I have today, but also to kind of broaden my mind on what was out there and what are the challenges people face, which I think can be great fertile ground for coming up with ideas. Like we did actually produce products through the course of the agency. And I'm going to kind of skip ahead to your third point there, like is starting an agency a good way to start products in a sense. Yeah. Because you have people at your disposal with technical or design or whatever their abilities are that can help you build out that vision of what you think might be helpful. And then the other benefit of course, is that within the agency, world, seeing all these different scenarios and all these different problems, you can identify opportunities of like what to make. So that's super valuable. The downside though, is you have a payroll that's coming due in two weeks. And when you think about dedicating your team to building these products, you start thinking like, okay, well, when we have downtime, that's the time we'll use to go build the product. But as a business owner, when you have downtime and a bunch of. Paid checks to make twice a month, or however, often you pay, you're like, Oh, wait a minute. This downtime isn't that great. And so we really had to be very purposeful with how we dedicated that time. And I would say one mistake I made in executing that kind of strategy was thinking about it in terms of when we have downtime, because when those moments hit, I was a little more concerned about keeping the revenue flowing than I was, you know, Thinking about something that would be material, you know, a year from now or more. And so I think the correct way to think about it is to dedicate that time, like just say, Hey, I'm, we're going to spend 10% of our time doing this, or 20% of our time doing that and treat that product like a customer, not like a side project. Yeah. I like the intentionality. And then I guess the final question you'd kind of made there was, you know, what does success look like? So people find success in all kinds of agency models. You know, the biggest of the big agencies charge by project charge by retainer. Um, the biggest of the big didn't necessarily get there through things like maintenance plans. Now. It really just depends on what you're trying to do. Like the biggest of the big of course, primarily are either working on very large company sites and projects, right? Like enterprise level stuff, where you're charging, you know, millions of dollars, even the build out and an experience. And then the other type of kind of very large agency are kind of those that. Maybe more productize what they do for smaller customers. And matter of fact, if you're in a freelancer agency, a lot of these processes are familiar to you because they're probably what you do in your business. But things like providing, you know, pre-made templates with light customization, but really this more kind of productized approach to delivering that experience for the smaller customers. And these are generally what makeup like the biggest of the big. So yes, you kind of can get there, like in terms of super huge with maintenance and care packages. But it depends on what you're trying to do, you know, for you as an individual, or if you're part of a partnership and you all wholly own that business, then, you know, maybe making $5 million a year in care, packages is just fine for you. So I think it really depends on what you're trying to drive out of it, but I wouldn't say that there's one model that only drives success. Cause I would actually say that there's very large agencies under each model that you could actually point to. Yeah. And I guess like, if you can charge a high hourly rate, even if you're out of like a retainer agreement with someone, like that's not a bad situation to be in, even though you're technically charging by the hour. And some of the things I would love to talk to you about today is, you know, stuff like brand. Stuff like sales, more like professional things we have in businesses that a lot of like small agencies and freelancers maybe don't think about as much. Like if you're starting a startup, for example, you'd probably be more likely to think about your branding and your sales maybe than if you were just a freelance web designer, but actually some of these. Activities can I think help make billable hours a good business model. If you have the right pipeline, if you have the right processes and if you can charge enough also. Yeah, I mean, we made good money as marketing click was operating, you know, we had large clients, pioneer was one of our clients, the electronics manufacturer, major brand brands like Easter and. Um, which is now part of another larger insurance company, but they were a very popular brand at the time and others. And I mean, we were commanding very large relative to like the entire agency space project-based work. I would say just things to remember as to like, Think about those long-term contracts, because we were kind of month to month a way we thought about it as we earn the dollar each month and we've actually pitched it this way to our customers. Like we have no long-term contracts. Like we want you to be a long-term customer, but we're going to earn that from you each month. That was part of our sales pitch. On the branding side. That was the very first thing I did when starting the agency was I found a designer, someone who specialized in logos and branding, and I hired her to create the visual imagery, the logo, the color scheme, all the things that would fall past that. And I spent a lot of time getting that. Right. And that was the very first thing I ever did. I'm sure like. Incorporated the business or something like that. But like, I'm just saying the first major project was actually the logo and the brand. And I spent so much time and attention to it. We actually never changed the logo on all five years. Oh, wow. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like it's so rare, right? Your first logo usually jettisoned after two years. Yeah. You know, there was one part of it. It used to cursor and this was right when mobile was getting up and I'd kind of wished I'd not used a cursor in the logo, but. Was very, very pleased with how it landed. And so that was the first thing I did was to create this identity. Now I also was kind of angling to get those bigger projects. And so I needed a strong brand identity in order to make those folks feel comfortable that I could kind of do the same for them. So that was important early on. And we did, you know, upgrade the website over time to kind of keep attracting that kind of higher tier of clients. If you will. One of my pet peeves from the startup land, which is more familiar to me than necessarily the agency land is people start out by hiring support people and basically the ECR roles or the stuff that's easy to outsource. And they spend their early resources on stuff like support instead of spending those resources on. Some maybe higher leverage roles and like higher as someone who's like a superstar at something, or like a really, really, really good customer success person. But in general, like it just seems like it's less like growth minded. When you think like the first role at your startup should be a support person instead of like a really, really good developer or something like that, that could really move the business forward. And I think even like within agencies, like you sometimes. See, like, okay, we can take this stuff and outsource to someone who's like achieve all the rate or something like that, but it's not really the growth mindset that you need to really like grow a big business that I don't know if that's something you think about as well, like in terms of hiring and like who you need on your team, like to build a successful agency. Yeah. I think you really touched on it or at least one of the points I made earlier was just this notion of building leaders within your agency. Right? Exactly. Now, I think you have to balance that though. And again, for the most part agencies, and no matter how you cut it for the most part, almost every billing model is in effect charging by the hour. So billable hours, if you will. So in my case, my first hire was someone that could charge billable. Yeah. Like someone that would help me grow my revenue. And so I viewed like the number of people I had is directly correlated to the amount of revenue I had. And so my first hire was someone that could bill and it was actually not a very expensive hire because it was my first hire. I wanted to save a little money. So I found kind of a marketing intern type person that could help with some of the SEO work I was doing alone at the time, but would bill for their time at a lower rate than I build for my own. So that was my first hire. My second hire though, was the developer an engineer and a very good one. And, um, I got very lucky working with that person. And then he was with me for almost the entire five years. And I even actually still work with him today in various contexts. But yeah, building those strong leaders is super, super important. My hiring strategy in general was I would take more work than my team could handle. And I would take that additional work and distribute it through some trusted freelancers and contractors. And when that pool of work got big enough to support more than a new full-time employee. Then I would hire a new full-time employee. Usually one of the contractors or freelancers I was using. And then I would have, you know, a little bit of overflow work just for buffer. And that was my strategy. Like I would just keep selling, keep selling, keep selling, keep selling, keep getting the pot bigger and bigger and bigger in terms of billable hours. And then when I had enough in the freelancer pool, then that's when I would trigger that next tire. Is that a Mo your recommend. Because I see a lot of people do that. Right. Even, maybe you start out as a successful freelancer yourself and you just start like offload work and build up an agency, basically like more organic way like that. Absolutely. I mean, it was a very responsible way of growing, right. I wasn't like hiring someone full time and then, and keep in mind I was all self-funded. So, and I didn't invest a ton of my own money into the business because I was trying to be scrappy and get it going. So, you know, it was like, You know, you were building the business organically based on the resources of the business. And so by using your freelancer pool where you're not carrying as much responsibility with that group, you know, in terms of like a certain amount of money each month, or the other overhead from that, and you have to be very careful with your employment decisions and how you engage with freelancers based on where you're based, because that can get very sketchy real fast in terms of your liabilities. You want to make sure to do that right? So check with your lawyer and stuff like that. But if you go about it, right, it's a very responsible way to kind of grow your employee base. I'm a big fan of having full-time employees over freelancers. Um, one, it reduces the employment, law risk and things like that. Cause you, you have to stay on top of that, but the other reason is. You really get the person to go all in, right when they're only working for you. Part-time and you're also competing with their time with their other clients. They're not thinking about your business all the time. You can't set their priorities all the time. And so these things can have a negative effect on the projects you do for your customers and some, a big fan of using full-time employees in favor of contractors and freelancers. But I think that model of like using your freelancer pool, building it up to enough full. Time hours to justify someone new and then hiring someone new is absolutely a good strategy. Did you ever think about having a co-founder or a partner? I guess it's like the agency worked for co-founder. Yeah. Um, I did, of course over the course of the running the agency. I did not in the beginning. I had founded it. Myself and wholly owned it and wholly owned it the entire time. There were good parts and bad parts. I think the bad parts, I'm probably not as privy to cause they didn't happen to me, I guess, at least in terms of if I had had a partner, like you can have issues. I think the reason I avoided it was you really tied to that. Person, you know, if something goes awry, if they don't contribute the work that's needed to operate the business. And you're having to take that all on. I mean, this can land in court as you try to resolve these kinds of issues. And meanwhile, you have as an individual, this baggage of this other person's issues, if they have issues. And so that's a lot of risk to take on when you take on a partner. I think the downside though, is it's all on you. And that means that building that leadership. Uh, organization or roles within your business is super critical in this zone, because if it's all on you and the strategy is on you, and you're really just setting yourself up for failure, I think in general, yes, I did consider it. I got very close a couple of times, but never pulled the trigger, having that stability and knowing that I could kind of control my own destiny was what kept me away from that. But I certainly missed out on a lot of benefits that having a partner would have come with. Yeah. I mean, there are so many pros and cons. It's just an endless, it, it better be someone you trust if you're going to do that, because it's a big mess. If it doesn't work out. Yeah, for sure. I kind of want to ask a question that we might just end up repeating a lot of the things that you've already mentioned, but maybe that would just be a nice way to summarize stuff, but I kind of want to ask you, David, like if you landed in a new city, you didn't necessarily know anyone. You didn't have your role now with WP engine and you were starting. An agency from scratch. Like I would love to know, like with all the experience you have, but not. So the resources you have now and the network you have, how would you do it? How would you start? What would you be thinking about now? Yeah, I think I'd actually do very similar to what I did when I started my agency. Or I guess now the basic strategies, I don't think have changed very much. So in terms of like getting the business off the ground. When I started my agency, I actually didn't know anyone in my local city. I had been in digital marketing and running dev teams and optimizing and building sites internally for companies for years. And I'd been involved in the community, but only more now. National or global sense. I actually didn't know anybody in my local town that had these kinds of interests and I didn't focus on local businesses at all. So in a sense, Uh, Peter, I was kind of new to my town, even though I'd lived here for years at the time, but the first thing I did and I would do this, absolutely. Again, it started going to meetups and not just WordPress meetups or whatever the meetup is. That's related to your technology. That's great. And you get to learn a lot and collaborate a lot and find opportunities there, but go to meetups where the people aren't like you. I would go to chambers of commerce meetings. I would go to, we had a very heavy engineering presence in our agency. I would go to like internet marketing meetups because those people needed developers. And we also had a marketing side. So I'd still go to the developer meetups if they needed marketing partners. And really just start to get to know your community. I think the one mistake people do make, when they start this kind of activity is they go out and they think, well, how many leads am I going to get tonight? And I did that when I first started going out and I got some leads, but they weren't very material and they didn't work out. And it felt like a waste of time, but I kept going and I kept going and I kept going. I met essentially WP engine, which ended up being a very valuable client for my agency and referring partner, referring customers to us at a meetup. The very first one I actually ever went to. So that was kind of a boon there. And then there was another meetup, it was an internet marketing focused one, and I got some leads the first night and then they didn't work out. They weren't very material. And I remember thinking like this, this doesn't work. I'm just not going to go. And then I kind of forced myself to go back, but I wasn't going to search for leads. I was just going to hang out and I hung out at that meetup for 12 months and didn't get one lead. And on the 13th month, I got lucky 13, right? Peter from the 13th month, six leads came to me. I had friends, I had met at the meetup who brought people over by the hand to meet me, to tell them that I could help them with the problem they had. That's nice. Yeah. What I learned is that by establishing those relationships, I didn't have to go hunt people down and bother them and see if they want to buy what I was selling, because they knew the value that I was delivering. They were actually bringing me the leads that meetup ended up being a huge source of customers and revenue for us, but it took me 12 months of grinding it out. And of course the very first meetup I ever went to. Luckily I got WP engine as a client, so yay. But that was of course getting lucky. So spread broad. Go to lots of different kinds of things and then be consistent, but just hang out, like tell people what you do. If they have a need, they'll let you know, like be present, let them know what you do, get to know them. And then over time you'll earn people's trust and you'll get that return back in your time. Investment. Yeah. I mean, I love that you starting with the network and it's just something, even if you aren't starting right now, but your aspire to start something later on, like, you can just never go wrong if you have a good network. So I think that's really solid advice to start there. Yeah, certainly don't be afraid of emailing people and asking for work ads. Even I did spend money on Google ads and Facebook ads. So I don't know, in your hypothetical scenario, Peter, if I have a little bit of money in the bank account, but if you do definitely look into those ads, if you're not using. Live chat or something similar on your website. Definitely do that as you launch your agency because you really want to be present to be talking to folks visiting your site because those conversations can turn into great big opportunities. But I remember with ad-words and my first month I spent $10,000. They didn't invest a little bit early on, but I had spent about $10,000 in ads and I got about $2,000 in business out of it. And I was like, Oh, that hurts. But I started tracking those customers over time. And what I found out over the course of about three years, this is that I actually made about half a million dollars in total revenue off of the clients. I had acquired that first month for attendance, $10 investment. So I was like, well, that worked out that moment. It didn't feel like it worked out. Just keep that in mind, keep in mind your lifetime value with customers. Because if you're only thinking about that first project, then you're going to be under-investing in your marketing. What business model would you aim for with this hypothetical agency? Do you think, like what's your favorite split between maybe some recurring revenue, maybe some retainer clients, maybe some traditional betting on projects or, or completely zapped of all my resources, Peter, I would go project-based. I would go with what customers are used. Too in the beginning, we're going to redesign your site. It's going to cost this amount of money. I'm going to do your SEO. It's going to cost that amount of money, because if I'm just starting a business and maybe I don't have a lot of money in the bank, then I'm going to be thinking about that next paycheck. Right. I got to make brand, I've got to make my mortgage. If I've. You know, incorporated the business. I might have other overarching expenses, but I would go straight to project based billing just because that's the fastest way to get revenue. And then I would very quickly start building in the notion of care packages, if not just from the very beginning. And then I would try to productize that as much as I could. And then probably over time split my marketing activities from focused on. Big projects and then activities focused on like acquiring care or maintenance packages to build that MRR base in the agency. But the MRR monthly recurring revenue part is just so critical. Um, you know, I can't count how many months I was sweating getting that giant check-in on time. So I could make payroll and having that monthly recurring revenue base can help, you know, kind of. Ease your mind in terms of, you know, getting that sustainability in your business and then building beyond that, to even getting, you know, more material outcomes. I mean, with care packages and monthly recurring revenue, I mean, if you're an individual and you can build that up into something that can sustain you and your family as an individual without hardly any help at all. I mean, that's a wonderful place to be in, or even with a small team. And then you can kind of. Purge off that project-based business. But if I have to pay my mortgage, Peter, in your hypothetical scenario, I'm going project based billing to begin with. First of all. I love the answer. I think it makes a ton of sense, I guess like with combining like some of those like maintenance packages and stuff that you mentioned with also like the strategy of working with freelancers for like overloaded or like offload some work and stuff like that, you can kind of build like a pretty nice lifestyle business to use, uh, a term that from the startup world as well around like your agency business and you don't necessarily have to work. That crazy heart yourself, because you have, you know, trusted partners that you can offload some of the work too. So that's cool. Switching gears a bit. Something I've noticed recently when I go to the WP engine website, is it doesn't talk that much about WordPress anymore. And it talks a lot about digital experiences and the it's something I've seen. Some of the larger agencies that we work with through branch, as well as like, they talk about these digital experiences. And it made me curious about like the language here, and I think that's like sales and marketing and maybe even branding as well. Some of these traditional WordPress agencies are moving up market a bit and selling something that's more, not necessarily enterprise, but it's a different product they're selling. Can you explain or talk a bit about like this shift from thinking about I'm selling a WordPress sites to like. We're selling digital experiences and how maybe that affects an agency. It's largely about positioning it to be fair though. WordPress appears twice in our H one tag on our website as is definitely still signing your name. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely still center to our universe, but what you see is the way we describe WP engine on the home page is the WordPress digital experience platform. And kind of this notion of like beyond managed WordPress hosting and in general, like, I don't think WordPress is a bad part of your marketing strategy. As a matter of fact, in my agency days, one of the reasons we settled on WordPress as our CMS of choice was because of customer demand. And we still see that today in the agencies and customers I work for in the WP engine context. It's like a lot of brands just to see. I assume you're going to use WordPress because it's best in class for a lot of use cases. It was initially released in 2003. And what we've seen since then, I guess this would be what, like 17 years now is really an evolution in what WordPress is. And so of course in the early days, really being more focused on blogging, but as capabilities have been added over the years and in particular things like the rest API and WP CLI that really. Make WordPress, more extensible and more integrated with other things. What we see is like, what WordPress is used for is kind of hard to define now. Right? Like certainly blogging still. We see it used in the JAMstack with things like headless WordPress, and then we see like really interesting applications built with WordPress. One of my favorites is the Campbell's recipe. Reality soup checker. Basically what it does is you enter your Pinterest, feed it, then scans your pens, using artificial intelligence and recommend soup recipes based on the things you penned. I know, right? Like that's not a word press side. I'm doing air quotes here. Of course it's a podcast. You can't see that. But like, what is that? Right? And of course they leverage custom plugins and the rest API in order to accomplish these things. But they built something that was fundamentally not. You know, like what you would think of traditionally as a WordPress website, but it actually worked quite well. It was a very successful campaign, still alive today for Campbell soup. Like Thanksgiving, whenever it was launched like two years ago, it just like blew up. And so there was a huge fervor around it, but like, well, what is that? Right. And so when you start thinking about like, well, WordPress is the means the tool to do these actions, but what you're really building are digital experiences. One of my favorite examples was what word camp Austin did for their event. They had the event and a virtual reality space and the content within the event was actually also powered by WordPress. So this is why in the WP engine context, we really embraced it. This notion of digital experience platform, certainly not to jettison WordPress. WordPress is the first word in that WordPress digital experience platform, but it's really acknowledging what our customers are already doing and not just our customers, but people all across WordPress where they're building like so much more than a website. And I think as you. Think about this from the agency lens. I definitely wouldn't purge WordPress from how you pitch your services, because a lot of value and benefit for businesses when they choose WordPress. But this notion of like coupling it with a broader vision of how you can empower their total digital experience. Absolutely. It can help you up level how you position your services, that rates you can charge the kind of clients you can get. And so this is one of the reasons WP engine pursued this path is really, it was a. Reflection of what our customers were already doing and an acknowledgement of the wonderful experiences they were building. I love that it's a better positioning for what word actually is today. And I hope that every agency owner listening to this podcast took notes because this was a really, really good pitch for WordPress in general, um, that I think people can use and take inspiration from when they're pitching their clients on WordPress really, really liked that. There was one other thing I kind of want to talk about. And that's some of the work that you do through WP engine work with agencies, you have your agency program. I think last time I read about it, it was more than 5,000 partner agencies. You're also mentioned to me that you were working on a new. Tool for agencies. And I think it's related to some of the stuff we talked about with recurring revenue and kind of like building up that base. And I would love to hear a bit about some of the work you do and how you're helping agencies and what challenges. Absolutely. So WP engine does have an agency program for those listening. WP engine.com/agency-partner-program like many partner programs. Of course it includes the ability to refer customers and you can opt in to earn commissions from those referrals. As long as you disclose those commissions to your clients. And then there's a portal for basically managing your experience as a partner with WP engine, there is actually very useful information and like the content section of that portal. And then we typically will send a newsletter once a month with updates about like what's happening with our platform, but also more broadly in WordPress. So people do find a lot of value in that. The agency program also comes with a free WP engine account that you can use for testing for staging client work. And then for those unfamiliar, and you can do it with the free account or on your own, you can actually access all of your client's sites. So they would grant you access to it as a user. So even if the client isn't like buying hosting from you, you can still kind of have like a client hosting dashboard where you have access to all of your clients kind of in one view. So that's super helpful. But I think in general, like the way we approach our kind of agency partner program philosophy is through this notion of growth. Like the whole business WP engine business is really centered around like customer and partner outcomes. In our partnerships. We asked first, how will working together help someone else, right. How we'll help another business, how will it help our partner service someone in their universe? That's also an ours. Then we think about like, well, how will these partnerships then provide value to our business? And so that's the general philosophy with how we work with partners and our agency partner program, including things like providing listings and our agency directory, which is heavily used by our support department to refer customers who need help above and beyond what our support provides. So if you're an agency looking for leads, definitely check out WP engine, agency partner program, because again, we're funneling those customer referrals through that system so they can find help when they need it. So that's one thing we've done on the agency partner program and a little kind of a window into our philosophy there. The other thing you mentioned was something we have, and for those unfamiliar, a couple of years ago, WP engine acquired flywheel found a gift, flywheel.com. And there's a product we've launched@getflywheel.com. Get flywell.com forward slash growth dash suite that is currently in a private alpha, but will be launched in the next couple of months. Basically, there's a wait list. You can join at that URL. I just mentioned. And what gross suite is, is it's kind of. An expanded version of flywheels white labeling service, where an agency or freelancer could white label hosting and charge a monthly recurring fee for that gross suite builds on that by providing kind of this. Full customer management and MRR billing suite for more than just hosting. So you could build for your maintenance packages. You can actually also build for like one-off projects if you want. But you would think about this as like a client management and billing platform, but specifically optimized around MRR. Like that's the hero outcome for gross suite. Yeah. I love those ideas so much. It's such a good idea. And I would sign up right away if I had an agency. Yeah. So we're in that private, yeah. Alpha right now. But if you enter your email there, you can get on the wait list and then it should be fully GA in January. But we're really excited about that. But like, whether you go with Gris suite or the WP engine, agency, partner program or anything like that, just look for these opportunities with. Hosts and with your technology partners for like, how can I leverage what their assets, their programs to drive growth in my business. And that's, you know, really our, our philosophy around how we release programs and products is like, how can we drive value in our customers and partners, businesses? Yeah. I mean of you start to think about it. There are so many small things that you could package up, right? Like with the white lip and the hosting, like if you're doing SEO, SEO monitoring is a big one. Yeah. Yeah. I have an SEO tool that allows you to generate a nice report that you can send to your clients every month, maybe white labeled as well. Like there's so many these things that you can kind of like package up and. It's a great experience for your clients as well. Like our accounting we're using bench, which is also a productized service, but because it's a productized service and it's very well packaged. Like the experience is also really great as a customer because everything is so streamlined and professional. And I think actually some of these things that you're mentioning is also just an opportunity for an agency to become more professional at first, like seem more professional to their customers. Absolutely that should help you gain some bigger project work, perhaps from those clients or even bigger clients in general, David, I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope people found it inspiring as well. If there's anything you want to plug or anything you want to mention now is your time. I think I did end up plugging in the last session for Peter. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. And thanks everyone for listening. I really enjoy kind of sharing some of my worst stories. Hopefully you learned a little bit from some of my mistakes and some of my successes. Yeah. And if people want to listen to more that we'll do a plug for you. Because I've also been on your podcast, press this where you're the host, so people can check out the podcast as well. Yeah, that'd be great. And if you want to hit me up on Twitter at WP David V. Awesome. David, talk to you later. Thank you so much. Thank you, Peter. PWE P

In this episode, I talk to Jason Bahl, the creator of the WP GraphQL plugin. Last year, Jason and his plugin joined Gatsby to work full time on making GraphQL more accessible to WordPress developers. Jason has a lot of knowledge to share about static and headless sites and, of course, GraphQL. Links WP GraphQL Jason on Twitter Gatsby Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast get twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Today I'm excited to  welcome Jason Bahl onto the show. Jason is the creator and maintainer of the GraphQL for WordPress plugin. Last year, Jason and his plugin joined Gatsby. I'm really looking forward to talking to Jason about everything, static, headless, and GraphQL. You can find Jason on Twitter at JasonBahl and the plugin on WPGraphQL.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast. We'll double the amount of free deployments on your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. Jason, what makes a WordPress site headles?  Uh, headless WordPress site, uh, would be, we use WordPress to manage your content. So you use the admin interface that WordPress provides to manage your content, but then you use something other than the WordPress theme layer. To render the data. So that could be an iOS application. For example, that may be used as react native or Swift or something like that to pull data from WordPress, but uses some other rendering mechanism other than the WordPress theme, API and commonly lately, we've been seeing a lot of JavaScript frameworks using their rendering mechanisms, whether it's react or Vue or Ember even, or angular or anything like that, then they'll communicate to WordPress. Via an API and render the data with the JavaScript framework instead of the WordPress PHP theme API. So does that mean people are mostly interested in the workers, admin and not so much, like they wouldn't be using a theme for example, right? Yeah. I mean, there's obviously still a huge market that wants to use WordPress that quote unquote classic way, but yeah, there is a Ryzen. Tooling and things specifically in the JavaScript ecosystem where you can build component-based architectures much faster, potentially scalable with a lot of benefits, like tree shaking and whatever. So like your front end performance ends up being faster, but you still need to manage data somewhere. And instead of reinventing the wheel and building a whole CMS, It to existing stuff like WordPress, WordPress powers, what is it? Something like 38 ish percent of the web today, the top 2 million sites or whatever. And it's still, you know, a lot of content editors, a lot of teams that are writing content and posting content are familiar with it. And they just want fast websites. Developers have been using WordPress because it's existed in people like to write content in it and there's plugins and all sorts of stuff, big ecosystem. But a lot of developers don't love the experience of developing for WordPress, right? Like stack exchange or whoever it is, does a survey every year. And WordPress is almost always at the top of most dreaded software for developers. So, if we can give the users the experience of writing content in a system, they like, but also give developers and experience of using tools. They like the decoupled architecture can be a win for both parties and ideally a win for the users, the end users, because you have a really fast site as well. So wait until you're basically saying if we're using headless WordPress, we won't really have to be WordPress developers. We won't really be doing WordPress development so much. Depends. So I maintain WP graph QL, which is a graph kill API for WordPress. So that does, is it exposes much of your WordPress data in an API. So if you can get by with a lot of the core data that WordPress provides and that's all you need, uh, you can start right away consuming that data into whatever front end technology want, whether it's Gatsby or next or anything like that, or an iOS app. Oftentimes, you're going to run into points where you're at go shoot. Like we have this certain custom data that we manage also. So depends like right now, Yoast SEO, for example, is a really popular WordPress plugin. There is an extension for Yoast that exposes Yoast data to the WP graph, kill API as well. So in that case, if there is a way to make your data that you're managing and WordPress exposed to the API, then you can start consuming data right away without having to write any PHP in WordPress. If you're doing something with custom data and maybe there's no max for that data to the graph API, then in that case, you yourself were a developer, you know, or whoever might have to write some code to expose the data to an API. Currently I'm supporting like best custom fields, which is a very popular WordPress plugin to manage custom fields in WordPress. So you can add metadata to posts and taxonomy terms and users and things like that. And so I have a plugin that maps all that data. You can build your forms, however you want, and maps that data to the graph API. And then there's like plugins, like custom post type UI, for example, where you can register post types and taxonomies. So I have an extension that just adds like a little check and a couple of fields that allows you to register those to the GraphQL API as well. So we're working on all sorts of extensions. We've got WP graph kill for woo commerce. For example, maintained by Jeff Taylor WP graph kill for gravity forms maintained by Kellen mace. So we've got a lot of community members that are bridging some popular WordPress plugins to graph QL. So that, yeah, you can be a purely react or Vue, JavaScript developer or iOS developer, for example, or Android or whatever it might be. And you can start using WordPress in many cases, without writing any PHP or any history of WordPress development. That was pretty fascinating. Actually, when I first heard about graph QL, it wasn't immediately obvious to me what it was. Do you have maybe a simple way that you're explained to folks what graph QL is? If they've never. Work with it before then maybe they've heard it mentioned, but they don't know much about what it is or what it does. Uh, yeah. Uh, I'll do my best. So graph QL is a query language specification for writing queries to an API and getting data returned to you in the exact shape that you asked for it in. It has some similarities to rest API, and I can get Jason responses, uh, when he asked for data. But the difference is you have one end point. And you specify yourself, the client, whoever's asking for the data specifies down to the field, what data they want, where rest API, you specify the endpoint and the server specifies what data you'll get in response. So you have limited control or graph QL. You have to explicitly express what exactly you want. And you'll get that in response. And you can follow relationships as well in a graph QL API with WordPress, for example. You could ask for a list of posts, but then you can also ask for the author of the post, which isn't a different entity. And then in a restful API, that would be a different endpoint. You'd have to hit an endpoint for posts, and then you'd get an ID for the author. And then you'd have to hit an end point for the author or in graph QL. You can follow those relationships, uh, in a single request. And then you can specify the exact fields on every object type. Uh, that you want in response. So it actually, it feels more like a SQL or something like that, where you can find ways to pull out, you know, you could join tables and do stuff like that. Yeah. There was some inspiration from SQL. So GraphQL was created by Facebook back in 2012, they use it an internally for few years, open sourced it in 2015. And they, they were heavily inspired by SQL and some other data languages. It's also quite a bit different than SQL, but yeah, it's a, there are some similarities in that we can get multiple types of data, individual requests. So when you're using, and that we already mentioned this, like you have a plugin that helps people use graph kill with WordPress. And when you're using your plugin, how deeply do you need to understand graph QL to benefit from using your plugin? It depends how you want to use it. I think a lot of people that use it today are JavaScript engineers. JavaScript developers are the primary users right now. Uh, so understanding how to consume graph QL would probably be important. In my opinion, that's pretty easy to get going with there's amazing tooling to start tinkering with it. Uh, you might not know deeply, but you can feel productive within a few minutes, understanding at least the basics. So WP graph QL has when you install one of the latest versions, it has a tool called graphical built in. So when you install it, you have this tool called graphical in your WordPress admin. And it's an IDE that lets you write graph QL queries. And it has really cool features like type ahead. So you just start typing like the word post and it will show you all the instances of posts in your graph, QL schema. And then you can select what fields on the post you want to ask for. And then he just hit this play button. It executes a query. It gives you the data back and it feels like magic the first time you ever do it. And then you're hooked and then you use graph Gail for everything. So what your plugin does is basically you've implemented the graph cradle layer on top of like the common WordPress data models and plugins that a lot of people use and stuff like that. Can you explain a bit how that works? Yeah. Sure. So when you saw WP graph QL, it creates a slash graph tool endpoint on your side. So it'd be site.com/graph 12. And then that allows you to set in graph QL queries to that end point and get data in response. So graph kills based on the schema. So what that means is you described the types of content or types of objects. That your API can return. So WP graph, QL defines types in the schema for things like posts and pages and you know, categories and tags and users and comments and media and all that stuff. So it does a lot of this out of the box for you so that WordPress content just can work and then it sets up all the relationships too. So if you set up a post type to be connected to a custom taxonomy, it automatically sets up. The ability to query those relationships like custom post type Bay. And then you can ask for taxonomy B or whatever. Uh, so it sets up a lot of that stuff for you and sets up the fields like, you know, the title of a post and the content of a post and the excerpt of a posts. So like sets up most of the stuff that you can do in normal WordPress internally in PHB allows you to do outside of WordPress in JavaScript or whatnot. And then it provides a lot of APIs for. Plugin or theme developers on the WordPress side, in PHB to hook in and register their own fields too. And types of data to add that to the API. So yeah, out of the box, It gives you most of the core data that you can think of that would be useful even like general settings, like the title of your website, for example, and things like that. So if I'm building a, like a JavaScript app or JavaScript based side, or if I'm building an iOS app or something like that, I can kind of like. Make the same query. I'm thinking like the good old loop in WordPress, when you're building a theme, like you can get all that information and display it, like in a JavaScript context or like work with it in a JavaScript context, for example. Yeah, exactly. So you can do exact same thing. So you'd write a query and you specify, you want to list the posts and then on each post you want the node, which is kind of a graph QL language thing, each entity, and the graph we call it nodes. Uh, so you can write a query that just says, Hey, I want posts. And on each post node, I want the ID, the title of the dates or whatever. And then you'll get a Jason response. So you don't quite have to do the loop. The reason you use the loop and WordPress is to handle like global state WordPress uses a lot of global state. So like, as it loops over your data, it sets the current post in global state. And that sets the author of the post and global state and things like that. So then you can determine. Is this post allowed to be seen by the person who's asking to see it and things like that. So WP graph killed does all that behind the scenes for you. So you can ask for a list of posts and it's going to know if you're allowed to see the posts or not, for example, behind the scenes. So it does all the global stuff that the loop would do for you behind the scenes. If you're logged in, you cast for things like draft posts, but if you're not logging. And you asked for draft posts. You won't get any in response. It knows you're not allowed to see them. Same thing with password protected posts, like it'll expose certain fields like the title, like a WordPress homepage might do, but it won't show the content so respects, like all the access control rights or whatever the term is for WordPress content that it abstracts it away for you. So like normally if you're building a WordPress theme, you're going to write some PHP to query some content. And then it's kind of up to you to determine with current user can functions like can the current users see this field or can they not? So WP graph QL tries to abstract that away as much as possible and say, Hey, this is how WordPress core treats data. I'm not going to make you stress about it. Like I'm gonna respond if you have access to respond or I'm not, if you don't have access to it. And then he can granularly control that for like your site behind the scenes. If you need to, like, if there's a certain field that WordPress maybe keeps scribing, but you want to allow there's filters and whatnot to override some of that default behavior. Let's say an agency is building like a next JS site or something like that. And they're using WordPress on the backend. So they want to use your plugin to allow that. Do you find that they typically would have to extend the plugin to get the functionality that they need or would for most use cases, it would just work out of the box. And also like part of the question, like how extendable is it? Is it fairly easy to extend it? Like if you have extra data or something like that, Yeah, it kind of depends on what data they need. Like, uh, I would say in most cases you're probably going to extend it just like WordPress. Like it's pretty rare that I've ever seen anybody using WordPress. With just like the default theme and no plugins. Like, I think I've been working on with WordPress for 12 years. Full-time and I don't think I've ever seen that other than just like people playing around for the first time. I don't know if I've ever seen a production site that hasn't extended WordPress in some way. And so the graph Kelly APS is going to be the same way. It expects it to be extended. And so a lot of the work I've done is building APIs that make it easy to extend. Let's say you have a post and you want to expose a color field, for example. In the back end, you're gonna build a metal box for the user to enter some color on the post. And in graph QL, there's a function called register graph, QL field. And so you just write a registered graph, go field, you specify the post. I want to register this to the post type in the schema, and then you give it a field name, like color. And then you just write a function to resolve it, or while you specify the type. So you'd say, Hey, this'll be a string. This is always going to return a string. So the user knows what to expect. And then you write a result function that is past the post object, and then you can do whatever you want, like get post Metta for that post ID, the color meta field. And then you return that. So, you know, three lines of code, you can add custom fields to the graph, kale schema. And then what's cool about that. Since it's a graph anywhere you can get to that post in the graph, that field will be available to it. So you can ask for lists of posts, for example, and then ask for the color field of each post. Or you can ask for one individual post by ID maybe, and he could ask for the color filled on that post, or you can ask for a specific category or tag, and then the posts within that tag. And then you can get the color field on that post. So with three lines of code, you can have SS this color field of every post, like a hundred different ways where like, in rest, for example, the rest API you'd have to register an endpoint and then register fields, like you'd have your post endpoint and it would show up there. But if you wanted to specify, like I want featured posts or something, Well shoot. Now I got to go register a new end point and then I got to specify what fields on that end point is like not everywhere. A post shows up in the rest API. Is it treated the same as, because you want to control usually like you don't want to over-deliver data in rest, both graph QL you, the consumer specifies what they need. So you don't have to worry that, but that problem, the server can say, here's, what's possible for you to ask for. But then it leaves it up to the client to actually ask for it when they need it. You have the ability to extend on the server as much less involved than extending the rest API and certainly like Dex all our QC API. Yeah. It sounds like it's pretty extendable. That's awesome to hear. This next question might be slightly politically loaded. Maybe. I dunno. Maybe even like slightly explosive topic, but why would we need the rest API, if we're half your plugin? Like why would you choose the rest API over? Well, for example, so graph QL is new. Obviously rest is a technology has been around for what, 20 years or something like that. So it's familiar for folks, right? Also rest API for WordPress is actually in WordPress core. So I think that's probably the biggest reason is, you know, it's always there on every site, WP graph kill right now as a plugin. If you're building a plugin and want to use graph QL in the admin of WordPress, for example, well, there's no guaranteeing graph kills going to be there unless you ask the user to also installed this other plugins. So that's a big trade off, right? Like right now as a plugin, more targeting like agencies and whatnot that want to. They'll decoupled sites or even build stuff coupled like you can use Graphco within PHP too. It doesn't have to be JavaScript or iOS or whatever. But yeah, the target is, since it's not in core, you're limited on how you can use it unless you want to like bug your users. Hey, install this dependency also, which is not a common thing I would say in WordPress. So I think that's the biggest trade-off is it's not in core. Will it ever be in court? I don't know. That's a loaded thing. Graph QL is evolving outside of WordPress. Right. And if I want to keep up to date and we're is really committed to backward compatibility, right? We decided today as a community, Hey, let's get graph QL and decor and graph QL decides they release a new spec every six months. So the graph killed today might not be the graph QL of six months from now. And so WordPress has a decision to make like. Do we actually make a breaking change or do we have two versions of graph QL with a lot of technical debt? I mean, WordPress is obviously not scared of technical debt. So you, you kind of like, do we evolve with the world or do we freeze in time? And, uh, as a plugin allows us to, you know, opt in, if it's a valuable thing for your project, but we can also keep up and you can opt often to whatever version makes sense for your project. So if we make breaking changes, you can often when you're ready to. Uh, where if it's in core, you're stuck with whatever decisions were made the day it landed in core. So like the rest API, for example, came in what, late 2016, I think. And we've seen extremely little changes to it over the years, other than minor things to support Gutenberg. We're seeing application passwords coming in this next version, which is cool. WP graphical works with that too. So you do authenticate and stuff with application passwords, but yeah, the rest API has seen very little evolution over the four years. It's been in core and I think it's graph kill word and I can in core, we'd see the same thing. The rest of the world would continue evolving graph QL and WordPress would be stuck on whatever version you're seeing people using the rest API for their headless sites, as well as the Kraft Carell plugin. Yeah, for sure. I would say the rest API can be a little bit easier maybe sometimes to get started with, because all you do is hit an end point and boom, like you got a bunch of Jace on data where with graph, Joel, you actually have to write a query. So you have to understand a little bit of the semantics of how to write a query there's tooling, like graphical, for example, that makes it, I would say pretty easy to get started with how to write a query. You do have to understand the nuances of it. Uh, we're with rests. It's like you hit an endpoint and boom, you've got some data and then you do something with the data. So it starts off a little bit easy with the rest. It can get hard when you start doing stuff like relational data, like, Oh, I need a list to post, but then I need the author and then I need the authors avatar. So now I'm hitting a post end point, an author end point and avatar end point. And then I got to figure out how to cache all this stuff. And then I gotta figure out when do I render it? Do I have to wait for all three end points to hit? So like it starts easy, but can get more complicated, faster graph QL, probably I would say starts maybe a little more complicated because you got to learn this new language. If you've never seen him before. Then you got to figure out, okay, how do I make this as an HTTP request? There's tooling that helps, like there's a client called a Paulo and they support like react and view and iOS, for example. So pretty much any front end that you're going to be working in, you can use Apollo with and they obstruct a lot of things. So you just write your graph, QL query the same way you would in the graphical IDE. And then you could just copy that string that you wrote as a query and paste it into Apollo. Paul handles like all the magic of making an HTTP request, getting the data, caching it, normalizing it. So then you can reuse it throughout your application without having to talk back to the server. So there's tuning and graphical. That makes it easier. But I think it's more complicated to start. So I work at Gatsby, which is a static site generator based on react. Uh, you can build really cool stuff, not just that excites. You can build applications with it and everything to Gatsby before I had joined had a WordPress source plugin, which allowed you to get data from WordPress, from the rest API. Beyond like very basic sites, people ran into issues pretty quickly. And the reason is because the rest API in WordPress doesn't enforce a schema. So a decoupled application like Gatsby doesn't know what is possible to be returned from WordPress. It just like all of a sudden gets data. So Gatsby does have the graph QL layer itself. And it needs a consistent data source basically to work well. I think any application really needs consistency to work well, but when you're talking decoupled architectures, you really need that. You need, Hey, you promised me you're going to give me this. And all of a sudden, give me something different. I don't know what to do. And the rest API is guilty of that. It doesn't enforce a schema. And so deep couple of applications don't know what to expect. So if you install like. Advanced custom fields for the rest API, and you start populating advanced custom fields in your WordPress site. Every single post in your rest API response is going to have a different shape of data. And there's no way for a decoupled client to know ahead of time. What's possible. It's just like, Hey, you're going to get some data, but like prepare for literally anything, because I can't tell you how to time. And so folks ran into issues really fast using Gatsby with WordPress. And honestly, it's not a Gatsby specific thing, any decoupled architecture you're going to run into issues. You can't predict what you're going to get at that time. And so graph QL enforces a schema. So like you can't use graph QL if you don't declare ahead of time. What's possible to be returned like advanced custom fields, the pro version, which I think most users are probably familiar with has a feature called flex fields. And what that means is like you can return a field that is one of many different shapes, similar to Gutenberg blocks, right? It could be an image block. It could be a paragraph. It could be one of many things. So if that's because some fields has this feature where you can define the layouts, they call them. And it could be a group of fields with a text field, or it could be an image field, or it could be a select field, or it could be a user field. And for decoupled application, you need to know ahead of time, what your possibilities are. Can it be one of these five things or can it be something else? And so graph QL solves that by saying, Hey, you don't even have to ask for data, but I can tell you it's going to be one of these sub set of options. And then something like Gatsby, we can prepare for that and say, okay, I'm now prepared to accept any of these five things. And if you don't return that, then like you're the one screwing up and you need to fix it. Right. So, yeah, that's a big thing. Even on basic sites, you get burned pretty quick. I think using the rest API, there's like funky stuff too. Like if you asked for a media item, for example, it'll tell you the parent ID apparent of a media item could be of any post type. And you're given an ID, but you don't know what type, so you don't know, end point to hit. So you'd have to iterate over every possible post type endpoint, just to figure out what the parent of media item is. And so there's just like quirky things like that. That if you start building something and trap ticket production, you'll get burned pretty quick. Yeah. Like when I think about it, like, it seems like graph Carroll is more pragmatic. Basically the client creates their own end points in a sense. And with, with rest, it's like, it's more idealistic because it's like, we want to fit everything into this breast full model. Where each entity has like their own end points for like index for all of them and like show for a single item. And we try to like religiously like fit everything into this restful model. Whereas with graph curl, it's much more pragmatic. It's like, okay, well this page, I actually just need these three things. And like these other things and a fourth. Thing. And like you just kind of like put together what you need and kind of like also what it makes me think of as an analogy. It's like, when I open up my SQL editor, basically, you know, to look at my database, if I just click the table name, it just shows all the data. And that's kind of like reminds me of like a wrist end point. But then when I go to like the query builder, I can just query for enjoying like the specific data I want. And that's more like what you we're able to do with graph QL. Yeah. That's a pretty good analogy. I think one different SQL you can do like select star queries, and then it'll give you everything from a table that doesn't exist in graph, QL graph, QL enforces. You have to specify the fields you want. There's tooling out there that like you can start typing it. And it will, pre-fill literally every field or like graphical. If you install WP graph, kill, you, get the graphical in the WordPress admin. And it has like this checkbox builder where you can like, build like what fields you want on a post. So you can do similar things. But you still do have to be explicit. And you have to say, if I want everything, you actually have to explicitly define what you mean by everything. And you're going to stop somewhere, right? Because a graph QL, the nature of it being a graph, you can follow those relationships. So you're going to have to stop somewhere. Otherwise you get in these like endless recursive loops, cause you could ask for the post and then the tag of the post and then the posts within the tag and then the posts and then the tags of that post. And then the posts of that tag, you have to tell graph QL, like when you want to stop. So there's constraints like that. That can be like maybe a little confusing at first or whatever, but. I think like when you start working with it, you're like, Oh shoot, like this is saving me from doing something stupid. Cause you can do the same thing with rest, right? Like you could write a function to go get a post endpoint and then follow up to get the tag end point and then get the, like you could accidentally find yourself in that side as a consumer of a rest endpoint. Um, we're graph. Gail says, Hey, you don't have to tell me when to stop and then I'll stop. Yeah. It's just a whole different, like way of doing things. And I remember the first time I interacted with the graph queue graph, Joel API was to get hub API and suddenly it's like, it's no longer rate limiting. And like, in terms of like how many. Requests, you can make, like each request has like points for, or credits for like how advanced Aquarius, because, you know, you can make one query that's really, really heavy because you're querying for so many relations. So they'd have a credit system based on that and they charge per request. So that's just like a different paradigm. Switching gears a little bit here. We talked about like how a site can be headless. The next thing I kind of want to hear is what makes the sites static. Uh, yeah, sure. So static site would essentially be a, yeah. You have your content and your templates, all prebuilt and deployed to a CDM. The actual pages will be served from the edge instead of the user, having to make a request and executing PHP, which executes my SQL, which then builds the template and then return something. So that's kind of like the normal WordPress flow. Obviously you can put a like page cache in front of it. Which is essentially it makes him sad, excited at that point. Yeah. So static would just be like, you have just a prebuilt page. That's served from a CDN is kind of the most basic definition and one example of a static side. Generator right. Is Gatsby essentially the company behind Gatsby also acquired your plugin and essentially, I guess, equity hired you to work on this plugin. Full-time right. Like, can you kind of explain the setup there? Yeah. So yeah, I'm an employee of Gaspe now, uh, WP graph, Gil's a GPL community project. I'm maintaining it for the community. You don't have to use Gatsby to use it so you can use it with whatever you want. Next or any grids on which is like a view competitor, uh, iOS apps, like anything you want. Build PHP themes and use graph killer, like it's to benefit everybody, but Gatsby is investing pretty hard in making the WordPress plus Gatsby experience a good one. I've been working on it for a little over a year and there's two parts to it. So I'm working on the API side of WordPress to expose data from WordPress. And then I have a coworker Tyler who's working on the consuming side, getting data from WordPress into Gatsby, so that then you can use all your work with data that. WP graphical exposes in Gatsby with your react components. And then you can also use it alongside other data sources. Like, like a lot of places I've worked, I've built websites where 90% of the contents in WordPress, but the HR team always wants to plan and job postings and some other system. Right. But like, I think that was pretty common. And so like, you got like all your content come from WordPress and now you're like, Oh shoot. Like how do we render this data from this other. Third party. It's like, I guess we'll I frame it, you know, like who knows, like whatever we'll have guests, we can pull on a source plug-in from WordPress and then he could pull on a source plugin from whatever other like. Job management API that they're using. And then you can source both things, build your react components with the same styles and the same, everything, the same component libraries that you're using. Then it outputs a static page that you can serve from a CDN. So instead of having like the user load, your job listing page, and then it has to wait for some live requests to some remote service to figure out and then render. So like, People are waiting three seconds to see a job listing it's prebuilt. Right? So the way Gatsby works, it fetches the data ahead of time. You write components or pages dope out of components and then a composite to a static HTML page, and then it on queues react, uh, when the client visits the page, but a lot of guests besides you can use without JavaScript at all, not everyone, some of them depends on how they're built. Um, but a lot of them, you can turn off JavaScript and you just have a static HTML page and it's going to load in milliseconds. And every time the user is visiting the page, it's not talking toward press directly. It already talked to word, press once and built the page. And then what we're doing also, we have another plugin called WP Gatsby, that kind of tracks activity on the WordPress side. So it's another WordPress plugin. You install. And as you're making changes, like, you know, you fix a typo in the title of a post. It sends notices to Gatsby saying, Hey, this content changed. And then Gatsby says, Oh cool. Like you let me know that a post changed Gatsby tracks aware all the pages of posts content would live. So WordPress sends notification WP Gatsby sends a notification. Gaspe saying something changed Gatsby. Then rebuilds just the parts of the Gatsby site that were affected by that change. It's called the incremental builds. So then within a few seconds, in many cases, you're. Static site is rebuilt, and now you have a really blazing, fast static site for your users, but a dynamic editing experience still. And you could potentially be sourcing from multiple data sources. It's not limited to just WordPress. Something that a lot of more precise have installed is a, some form of form builder. How does that work if you're running a static side? Like, can you still have forms on your website? Yeah, you can. I would say currently the integration between like Gatsby and WordPress form builders, it's got work to do still there's like dub hate graph Gil for gravity forms, which has maintained by killing mice. And he uses it for a pretty big project. He was building. So it does work. There are options. Maybe a little complicated at the moment, but you can also use other things like, uh, format. I think they have a cloud service now. It's like, you can build like these rec forums and then you submit it to their cloud service. So you can put it in a static page and it'll submit, or you can use there's all sorts of forums as a service libraries out there. Um, so you can definitely use a lot of those as far as submitting back to WordPress. Right now, we have probably a ways to go before we like have a real good solution on that. You can do it on your own right now, though. WP graft kills, kill supporting mutations. So we've talked a lot about querying data, like getting data out of WordPress, but don't you figure out if kill also supports mutations, which is writing data back to WordPress. That was actually like the original use case of WP graph go. I worked at a newspaper and we syndicated a lot of content. We had a network of 54 PHP sites that had to talk to each other. And so graph kills primary use case or non was sending data to other WordPress sites. So you can do that. You can register mutations, like you could register a mutation for contact form, for example, and you can specify what fields you want to accept. And then you could fill the form and a reactor view or whatever you're using. When the user clicks submit, it would submit a mutation to graphical API. So you could register a post type or even hook into an existing form plugin. And have a mutation that saves the data in however, you're saving it in WordPress for it to be kind of like out of the box with form builders. We do have a ways to go on that, but you can do it today. If you don't mind writing a little bit of code. That's one thing that's kind of like different from like the normal, like WordPress paradigm. I guess another thing I'm thinking about is hosting. Like, I guess you still need to host a backend somewhere, but then the Gatsby side, or like you mentioned a CDN, but like, can you explain just kind of like, what does the hosting look like? Sure. Yeah. So depending on your setup, if you're the only author, like if it's a personal blog or something, and you're the only person that's editing content, you can potentially just even use it to like local by flywheel or something like that, maybe. But if you have more than one person and you know, don't want it on your local machine. Yeah. You're probably going to have to host WordPress somewhere. The benefit though is if you're using something other than WordPress as the front end, You don't have to support the front end traffic. So if you were paying X amount of dollars to support a hundred thousand views a month or whatever, you don't have to support that anymore. You just have to support the editors of the content. So if you have five people writing content and a hundred thousand people visiting the site, you really only have to support those five people now. So. You might be able to cut costs quite a bit on the WordPress hosting, but then yeah, you do have to host your static output somewhere of the Gatsby site. Like GitHub pages, even like you can host like static files on Netlify has a free hosting you can pay for like Netlify builds. So like you can hook up your WordPress site to send notifications to Netlify to build. So gasoline cloud is a service that we have now. Okay. So there's actually one thing we didn't talk about guests and cloud has a thing called preview. When you go decoupled with WordPress, you lose out on a couple of things that you get for free and WordPress and preview as one of them. So gasoline cloud brings that back. You can build your site in react and Gatsby, and then you can click preview. And if you're using Gatsby cloud, you will see your preview in Gatsby. So it's super cool experience, but yeah, so you get that with Gatsby cloud and the Gatsby cloud right now is a build service that can deploy to any host you want. So you would hook up your WP Gatsby plugin in your WordPress admin to point to Gatsby cloud. Whenever you make a change in your content, it would notify Gatsby cloud gastric cloud would do the incremental build and then it would deploy to whatever CDN pick that is supportive. So they get deployed in Netlify or. Look, Amazon S3 or whatever CDN that you configure. Um, some of them are free or extremely cheap. Like my doc site docs dot WP sql.com is on Netlify today and I'm not paying for it. Yeah, the free hosting is definitely a benefit of building these static sites and having everything behind a CDN is great. It should be pretty hard to like Dede us a static site, unless you can take down cloud flare or something like that. Yeah. The whole world has got problems on their hands. Yeah, I think so. Jason, this is really cool. I think this is a great introduction to some of the concepts here, and I think maybe a good introduction for people to not know everything, but maybe just enough to get their feet wet and maybe just install the plugin and kind of like play around with the graphical editor. And just see it for themselves, because obviously it's harder this audio format, it's hard to explain all this stuff and it's probably helps to see it. So, yeah, Jason, I really appreciate your time. This was super interesting to hear about and I'm sure people find this helpful. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Awesome. We'll talk to you later. Take care.erPdrOW o

In this episode, I talk to Birgit Pauli-Haack about the WordPress block editor, Gutenberg. Birgit is the self appointed cheerleader for the Gutenberg project, she runs the Gutenberg Times website and is the host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast. In this episodes we talk about how agencies should think about Gutenberg and what the future of the project looks like. Links Birgit on Twitter Gutenberg Times Gutenberg Changelog podcast Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Today I'm really excited to have Birgit Pauli-Haack on the show. Birgit runs her own podcast called Gutenberg Changelog. Gutenberg is of course the code name for the WordPress block editor. And I thought Birgit would be the perfect person to bring on, to talk about blocks. Birgit is also the  founder of Pauli systems. And you can find her on Twitter at BPH. That's the three-letter Twitter handle right there. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments on your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without pain, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. We started this episode by talking about Birgits involvement with Gutenberg. Okay, Birgit, so do you want to tell us how you got involved with Gutenberg? Well, after three years, I'm pretty much the self appointed cheerleader for the product. It seems, but I'm not alone anymore, but in June, 2017, that was the first time I saw the first demo video at WordCamp Europe in Paris. And I thought this was the biggest innovation since, um, yeah, I have a battle. What you see is what you get editor as developer, as, as content creator and try to teach people things so Gutenberg or the block editors it's called now has been a real revelation for me as that. So I wanted to learn everything I could about it. And also see what the people in the community did with it. So I collected all the updates that went up many at the first, but then coming closer to what came to us 2017, there were quite a few people experimenting with the block. Editor was building blocks, was making the seams work and all that. My updates were on Storify and Adobe, the owner of story five announced in December, 2017, that they will discontinue story five in may of 2018. And I said, Oh man. Yeah, again, never build on rented land. Um, so sooner or later, so it turned out. I also have many requests to actually. Build a newsletter around the updates on good Morgan block editor. So it was time to build a website and in January, 2018, couldn't work times came about. And then where I update things, I have a weekly newsletter that goes out on Saturday and noon. Most of the time, sometimes it's an hour later, sometimes a day later, depending how my weekend goes. And, um, but it's in the 140. Four edition comes out next Saturday. Wow. We also have live Q and A's with people who have a workforce. Yeah. Mostly practitioners or from the Gutenberg team that have worked as good and work and have done new websites or are a publisher that uses it, or it's the block directory team telling us how that came about or it's the theme developers that. All working on the block-based theme. And once in awhile, update us how this all works. So the video is all, most of the time have a transcript on our website, including also the resources that we mentioned in the conversation. So that's definitely a very good source for someone starting out to just go back and look at those videos. And then in June, or may. 2019, I was in contact quite a bit with a Maki reign, who is a designer on the team, and I've just flat out, asked him, do you know, every two weeks we have this wonderful updates on a Gutenberg plugin, and we only scratched the surface on, or what's published, but not going deeper into what are the bug fixes? What are the enhancements? What are the documentation updates and the change log. Came up out the Gutenberg changelog podcast we have now recorded 30 episodes and 9.2, we will record the 31st one, which also will have updates. What will be in replace 5.6 and what we'll be in public beta. We're still on the plugin. So that's, um, what couldn't work times. Nice. Yeah, that's a lot right there. We shouldn't really call it good and Berg really these days. Right? Or what do you think about that? That was the code name in the beginning. It is the Lakota name. Yeah, kind of because the block editor is actually the official name. Now, as soon as it's in court, that's the stuff that's emerged into WordPress right now. In WordPress, we don't have to install a plugin that you can use out of the box. And the Gutenberg plugin is where all the development happens and is released. Um, and people who have the plugin installed are pretty much using that to also test new features and give feedback, actually, some of. The more braver people actually have the Gutenberg plugin on production sites to have the newest features actually tested in production, which is the ultimate test of your risk-taking measures. And it has been pretty stable. Yeah. What comes out and. It wouldn't look plugin unless you go to the experiments, which is a subsection. So there is a plugin with all the new things that come to the block editor with your posts and pages, and then they'll the experiments in the plugin that you have to turn on. And that's really the place where you can get yourself in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I think it would be awesome if we took a step back maybe, and just in a few sentences, just explained what Gutenberg is and how it's different from what was already there. Because it worked for has already had an editor for adding posts and pages, but now we have Gutenberg or the block editor and maybe the name implies what it is maybe. But, uh, do you want to briefly just explain to people. Just the core differences. Sure. The core difference between the classic editor and the block editor, the classic editor, when you open it up is a white canvas and you have a toolbar on top and you can do any additional magic layouts. I call them. So if you want to do a cover section on your. Post or page, you would need a plugin. If you want to do a media next to texts, you need a plugin. And if you want a gallery, you could either use the build in gallery from cool or a plugin. So you know where this was going. So the block editor, the tool set for content creators just exploded. You get blocks. So you have a paragraph blocks. You have a list block, you have a media block, an image block, a video block. Audio blog. Yeah. All kinds of blogs that all help you display your content in a more attractive way than just a white wall of text. And we have found when we migrated some sites over to Gutenberg and kind of gave him a new theme for that. We eliminated it. The number of plugins from maybe 32 to 14. Um, just because there was so much already built into WordPress. So that's the stage in 2018, when it came in 19, there were additional features coming to pass. One of them was block variations and then block patterns. And the block parents just came out with the last version, but they are a combination of. Core blocks with us certain attractive design that can be used over and over again. So theme developers now can actually create the design and then create a design system where they can have a section of very special color blocks that has all the different things that I content create and needs. But it's already built into the block pattern. You don't have to use all the tools to make it over and over again. Yeah. It's like a reusable block, but just in a pattern way, there are some features like the reusable blocks that were never possible. Well, I don't even think there was a plugin where you could use this. Maybe a text snippet, one. We use reusable blocks for the branch website because we do guides for how to use branch with different hosting companies. And. A large percentage of the content and those guides are actually the same. So basically most of the stuff you'll have to do on the brain side. Like one example is there's a section on how to sign up for branch. That's the same, even if you're using three P engine or Pantheon or whatever you're using. So we actually use the reusable block for that part. So we can just go to one of the pages and edit that were usable block. And then it changes in all the different guides at one point or at one time. So. It's a really effective way to manage your content. Yeah. And that opens up a lot of possibilities, for instance, for affiliate marketing or for call to actions that need to be consistent overall, your website now, where you're only created once and that pull it in if you want to change. So there are two things that trip people up and now with block pattern, that distinction is really good. One is when you change it, once you change it on all of them, some people don't want that. They just wanted to use it as a template. And so the step in between you need to do is convert it to regular blocks. Yeah. And then you can do that. And blood parents may push that metaphor much further and that's really cool. Uh, absolutely. The fan for it. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like something I want to dive into for when I think about Gutenberg and how we use it. For me, there's a very big distinction between the end user and the developers. Hopefully it's a better experience for the end user because it should be easier to build your website, but it's a little, very different as a WordPress developer to interact with Gutenberg. It's a whole different ball game, but even end users, there are quite a few end users that have a hard time getting started. Accessibility comes to mind that's accessibility, but it's also just the overwhelm of new tools and stuff. So it's like moving into a new city neighborhood. Yeah. Where you're all of a sudden all the noise around your flat or your house is new. Yeah. You hear the Trump passing by, you hear the bells ring from the church. You hear the delivery every day of a band spring and merchandise to the shops. That's overwhelming. And a lot of people have that feeling when they start out with Gutenberg as a content creator. But when you move in a neighborhood, if you don't sleep for two nights, but then after five days, your brain doesn't feel anymore, the flight or fight reactions. And it kind of quiets down. So to jumpstart, that particular experience, I suggest to every content editor who has that to move the toolbox that comes with every blog and sometimes overlaps the previous blog and all that. And it comes up when you just click in that. And you just want to change that you have this book hula, there, there isn't a setting in the three.menu on the right hand side that you can tack. Well tape the lock tool up to the top of your screen, and then it will be much quieter experience. Yeah, that's helpful. I've seen, uh, quite a few people who had noticed that that should have been the default setting for the writers. That's kind of a 50 50 problem with that. You have a feature that you build in 50% people like it. 55% of the people hate it. So, yeah, there is no good decision there, but that's okay. That makes sense. It's very different. Cause it's all react. Yeah. Yes. There's definitely a learning curve there. Sooner or later, you will have to build blocks and react JS or a vanilla JavaScript. You could do that too, because, um, but prescripts abstract. All the reactions. Part of it. And you could actually access the scripts with a vanilla JavaScript and you can also do in PHP so you can build blocks and PHP. You can build blocks and PHP. If you use the tool for that, developers not only build blocks, they also extend core blocks with additional features and. The tools for site owners and theme developers, style the blocks and create the block patterns. It really depends on every learning step. You have a way to get started without having to do JavaScript deeply. Yeah. That makes sense. What we're talking about now is basically what Gutenberg is right now. It's like, it's something that you can use to build out posts and pages with these blocks, but already we're seeing Gutenberg go beyond just replacing the old editor. So basically the way I understand it is it's also replacing the customizer, which is a tool that you can use to customize the entire side. And how the entire side looks eventually Gutenberg. Won't just be for changing a single page or a single post. Right. Gutenberg started out with a vision of four phases. The first phase was the editing experience for posts and pages. And we are through that. Uh, we are not completely done because there are some issues and it's a constant reiteration process. The second phase. Is Anne, I just wanted to stop by the customer will not be replaced. Yeah. Or for a long time, because it's so used by so many people, the block editor started out to think about all the mystery meat that comes with a WordPress site being shortcodes being rigid, being a sidebars and all that, that a site owner needs to know about to actually. Organize their site and that mr. Amit kind of puts everything on the chopping block, so to speak. And the phase two is the envision to have widget sections, be addressable with blocks instead of widgets kind of thing. Um, so you can use normal core blocks as well as special widget blocks that are created. And the first iteration of that will come in plus 5.6. Right now it's a testing phase. So from now on and to the release candidate of surplus 5.6, um, everybody is kind of calling to test it, to make sure backwards compatibility works. And third party plugin that use widgets sections also work in that. So that's like the footer and the sidebar. That's where we are now. Right. If the theme has a widget section in the photo or in the sidebar, you can address it as an end user with a block. If the block has already been styled, it might follow that style or you get a wrap around it for the theme to have a different styling for a widget area. Kind of thing, but the vision is the full site editing part where it's a block-based seam. So all these sections, the block areas, you can pull in blocks there and you can edit them through a so-called site editor and also have navigation screen and navigation block. The header, the menu and navigation, everything will be blocks eventually. Yeah. So it's a good time to learn how to use blocks now. Right. Right. And theme development actually will become easier. Because the blocks are already there. And it's really about styling. It's about making the best combination of blocks with the styles that you do. Oh, so basically what you're saying is instead of the good old, when we're doing themes, the old way, like we have to think about the loop and all like these different things we add to our themes. No. In fact, there blocks for all these common use cases of sections features. And as theme developers were styling them and maybe using some Java script or PHP here and there, but we're just composing blocks and providing these block patterns and styling and design systems and stuff like that. Excellent. Yeah. So it's the more, the kind of going back to the roots of a theme, what is the purpose of it and then provide, so they're all working on global styles. That is a design system where you, as a theme developer can tap into it and just have a color palette and then attach it to the global styles. And the whole site is taking that over and booth. That also comes a sidebar in the so-called side editor, which is a block editor where you can change the custom styles or custom colors, and then change the whole theme of it. Yeah. That's an idea. So yes, they create the site title block. The post block was post off a block and it's kind of really granular. I have post eight block and also the, there is one block that is a little bit of, um, a mystery still. That's the query block. They're trying to get the design, right. How to manage those, um, all the different, yeah. Custom post types categories, tags, pagination with, or without it, with features, without the feature image, all that kind of thing. It would be put in one block. So it's the loop in one block and in the CMU address it just with the WP query block kind of thing, and put the attributes on that. Yeah. So that's in the future. Is that phase three or phase four? That's phase two, actually what's phase three and four. Do we know? Yes, no. Well, in theory, we know, so phase three is creating a collaboration, like a Google doc collaboration tool with the block editor and Riyadh Benguela who's the lead developer on the phase two. He has started to get his head around, um, fully encrypted. Online experience to have two people or more work on the same document and then share that also you can get a link. So there is a site out there it's called AAS blocks.com. So as blocks.com, where he writes about it and makes it available, it's quite interesting to see that really changes how a publisher and editor or a bigger team is working with the blocks. Yeah, they don't have to go to Google docs and do everything there and then copy paste it over. And even some of the stuff that people themselves can build on WordPress, like you can build collaborative tools on top of WordPress and that's really, really cool. Yeah, I'm curious to know what phase four phase four is, what a lot of people and WordPress really need is building a multilingual site was cool. So that's a big sleep. Yeah. Do you thought that full site editing would be big, but, um, what, when you have a motto. Lingual site. And we hit the borders where the boundaries of a block editor already on the core sites or the wordpress.org sites. Um, in documentation, I ran into that when we wanted to use reusable block for the same sections over and over again, we can't because they don't travel to the. Polyglot sites to the other Recita and they only see the number, but the custom post type is not migrated over to their site. So they don't know what the content is and we need to actually convert them to regular blocks. We use them as templates. Yeah. So we need to kind of rethink some of that documentation process with that, but that's just one thing. Yeah. So I'm waiting for that. Yeah. That's interesting. There was one question I wanted to ask. Which I think you already touched on a bit. And I know Matt famously said at word camp, in which word camp I was at that word camp, but I don't remember which one it was, but he's at learn JavaScript deeply Philly. So basically like how much JavaScript do we need to know to work with Gutenberg and start using in client projects? Yeah. So ultimately I would think any developer who is using reprints professionally might need to make her way to react JS, um, sooner or later. So in May, 2019, um, I wrote an article for the WP Tavern create blocks without JavaScript. And I compared two plugins on how they do blocks and how you can, as a WordPress professional developer can create blocks versus using your skills that you already have. Um, and the biggest one is definitely advanced custom fields. Elliot Condon has continued to enhance the plugin with blocks and block building. Then there is one in the article's called block labs, and then other one is lazy blocks and they're all let you create a field and custom fields and field groups. And then, uh, give you the tools to say, okay, I want this as a block. And then with the PHP or theme template, or even a handlebar template, you can create the front end rendering. Or if you need also the rendering in the editor. So those are three tools you can use that don't need you to create JavaScript. If you use ACF advanced custom fields, definitely get the pro version and five point. I think it came out of 5.8, 5.9 is now Elliot has just released 5.9 with the inner blocks that you can create your blog, but then you can let the. Content creator add additional core blocks to that section that you just created. And that's pushes you even further into the block editor using blocks. And bill Erickson has actually wrote a nice tutorial on how to use inner blocks with ACF. So that's maybe a good starting point, but what you're saying is learn JavaScript, learned, react, at least to some extent, just kind of get started on that. Um, there will only be more of it. Yeah, block labs got actually bought just recently by WP engine. And it's now marketed as, um, Genesis custom blocks together with the atomic blocks, former atomic blocks as Genesis blocks on the Genesis themes. So there's also a whole framework and environment that you might already know that. Brings you along on the block editor and what I definitely like on all these three plugins was the input and export functionality. So you can make it easier to reuse your code or reuse the thinking about things. Yeah. So there is start down. So this is. Technical question, but I wanted to ask you, um, the audience here is primarily WordPress agencies. Do you think basically Gutenberg all blocks makes it easier or harder for an agency to sell a WordPress project to a client? Is this a good selling point? Do you think. Definitely for someone. If they have clients that create their own content, content, creators love the block editor. It's really amazing how far that has come. And if you use ACF, because you are in the mindset that you need to have clean data and you need to work with that clean data, that's certainly something you need to consider, but it's absolutely magic when you see your content creator. See. What they are building at the time, they're building it through the, what you see is what get an editor. So migrating some of the fields into block pattern, some of the things into custom block is definitely a much better experience for a content creator. Most agencies that I know actually are not selling WordPress as a thing, they're selling a product . Definitely is ahead of a lot of custom management systems. Yeah. And I think it would be a good opportunity for these agencies to also keep in mind those different faces that you mentioned. Basically they could say their customers. If we built this site on WordPress now with this Gutenberg thing that it now has like. Eventually you will have a way to have Google docs, style collaboration. You'll have a multi-lingual side if you need it. Like that's a good vision to share with your customers potentially, I think. Yeah. Do you have any practical tips for maybe how to remind great your customers? Do you think people just get it or do you need. Some sort of education. Cause I know a lot of people kind of jumped to install the classic editor plugin when Gutenberg came out because they thought this might be a distraction or a disruption to their customers. So I had two kinds of customers. One said, I'm never going to touch it. You do whatever you do with Gutenberg, but don't take away the classic editor. So we do hybrid methods. So if they want to do the classic editor do, but we, when we update their site on certain landing pages or something like that, we use the block editor. They're all project managers who said, I don't care. Just install it or make it work. And we did adjustments on the. Brand colors. So they're not going wild on the color schemes with the background colors. And we made every block core block work in the scene. And after that, they are off to the races, they picked it up on it. Um, if they had proper like, well, our team was able to show them how to do this, but we have one advantage where we do, that's kind of a policy, every. Customers gets the WP one Oh one plugin installed as long as we are working with them. And with the 90 day warranty that we have afterwards. And if they stay on the maintenance and update contract, they have that forever on their website. So they can go in and read up about things. If they don't know things. Like media and texts is really something you need to think about how you're going to use it and put on the dials and kind of see how, what does that do when I click on here and that takes a while to get into it. And I know a lot of users have trouble clicking on buttons until they know what they do, because they have really the fear that they're set off a nuclear bomb, but something, and say, if I go in and edit an old post, or like, if a client goes into an old post that wasn't published with Gutenberg, Can you still be edited with Gutenberg? Yeah. Yeah. So there are two things that one is the classic editor, but there's also in the blog editor of classic block. And that also is kind of a transitional thing, but it's also the block when all the old content is kind of in a classic block. So you have all the toolbars and it's one piece of content. There is a feature, there is a congruence, two blocks. And that works well. So you can actually, when you're accustomed to I'm, I really don't want to go back and not be able to move paragraphs. I've been down with just the Iraqis. Well, add an image there. So there's converted to blocks status there. And now I saw a plugin and the repository that I keep testing. So. Some of our clients have two or three years now, already with Gutenberg and they say, okay, can we make the seam now a little bit more modern? And all of a sudden you need to think about how does that old content that never got updated or converted to block look in the new scene. And there is a bug convert. Plugin blog, convert blocks, I think is the name of it where you can say, okay, these are the old ones. It goes through the whole thing, and then you can change it. It's quite an interesting block. Yeah. You mentioned something else I wanted to dig into. So you said you made sure that all the core blocks, I don't remember which word you use, but worked with the theme essentially. What does that mean to do that? Well, it means that if you have an image blank, that it displays well on your theme. If you have a gallery block that it displays well on theme that the quotes log and done. So there is a block unit testing plugin in the repository that you can install on a site. And then it creates one page with all the core blocks in different variations. We went a different way because at the same time, That rich table was working on that we already were migrating that. So we put seven pages together with every block on it and then put it in a good hub, just because you can create a page and copy paste that in on the site. And then you see what works and what doesn't work. Um, and you need to do some styling on that. So basically what you're saying is that each individual blog, when it's rendered into a page. Is it rendered as HTML and CSS classes? Yes. So what you did was that you rendered all those different blocks and you made sure that your styling or your CSS for your theme took into consideration the styling of each of those individual blocks. Yeah. And the features of it. Yeah. So people like the Haber block quite a bit, and it has a features to do stripes or to have a background on it. Yeah. So those are colors and yeah. So you seem needs to be aware of that. And then if somebody puts stripes in that, that you actually just pay stripes, that's a simple way. And image has two different styles that has an enormous style and a rounded style. And if somebody. Selects the rounded style. Do you think he needs to be able to handle that they have their own rendering by themselves, but that not always with an older theme works well. So you need to take care of that. I really appreciated you taking us through all this. Gutenberg stuff. And I encourage people to follow your three letter Twitter handle. And you really are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to Gutenberg. And if people want to follow what you do, what's the best place for them to, well, it's definitely good and work times and subscribe to our news that comes out every week because that's where I share links to what other people do. That's one place. The other place would be to follow me on Twitter, BPH or Gutenberg times, if you don't want to see my pictures and my other. Yeah. Sometimes I'm a little bit political and especially in this time or any private stuff wouldn't be at times is really focused on it. For agencies. We just finished a live Q and a Victor Ramirez who has a four level approach. To customizing Gutenberg for clients and some of what we do matches what Victor does, but that's the last live Q and a and our YouTube channel. And, uh, we have quite a wealth of information on the good work times in the post. Was, uh, links to bill Erickson. He does a wonderful job sharing what he learned with other developers and other source of rich Teebo has, uh, quite a few tutorials on his blog. CSS tricks is a good site to look up the keyword or category Gutenberg. So there are plenty of information out there that are all geared towards the developer. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. If people listen to this, they probably like podcasts. So Gutenberg change, luck podcasts. They can find that in their pod catchers. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, Peter. Thank you so much for having me. It was a great pleasure discussing this with you. Bye bye.

In this episode I talk to Tracy Levesque about her agency YIKES, Inc. We cover a lot of important and interesting topics, such as diversity and inclusion. YIKES truly stands out by being a deeply ethics-based business, by being a certified B corp, a certified Womens' Business Enterprise and a certified LGBT Business Enterprise amongst other things. We can all learn a lot from YIKES and I'm excited to publish my interview with Tracy. Links YIKES, Inc. Tracy on Twitter Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Today, I'm really excited to welcome Tracy Levesque onto the show. Tracy is the co-founder of YIKES, a web design and development agency out of Philadelphia. YIKED truly stands out by being a deeply ethics based business, and we'll unpack what that means, by being a certified B Corp, a certified women's business enterprise and a certified LGBT business enterprise amongst other things, we can all learn a lot from YIKES. And I'm excited to dive into today's interview with Tracy. You can find Tracy on Twitter at LilJimmi and YIKES on yikesinc.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with recipes for all the common workflows that WordPress developers need. Making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast will double the amount of free deployments on your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. We started this episode with the history of YIKES. Back in the nineties. I started this company with my wife at the time and a friend of ours named Vicky. And so the three of us, we always did computer stuff for free, usually for non-profit organizations or groups that we're involved with. And then we really bonded because really like computer stuff. And we all had a different skillset. And one day we were like, Hey, why don't we charge money for this? And that was it. Then when you started in the agency, you know, since that was a really long time ago, we went through a lot of different web technologies. And in 2006 I had a baby and my wife Mia started a blog for the baby on WordPress. And also during that time, we were trying out different CMS and we didn't really like any of them. And then I started to hack away at WordPress for the baby blog. And realized that I really liked it. I probably did everything really, really wrong. Cause it was the first time using WordPress, but in 2010 around, we became a exclusively, a WordPress. So we only do WordPress. Now, what were you doing before? Word press? Do you remember? We've tried everything from like OS commerce, Mambo, Joomla expression engine. All the different PHP, frameworks and stuff called fusion. We did a lot of cold fusion work and we made custom CMS. So everything under the sun. Really? Yeah. That's cool. It's rare to see like an agency with this seniority or like the age of your agency, I think from your website, you started the same year that I started in school. So quite a long time ago, when you think about it through a couple of recessions, a couple of.com collapses. Yeah, that's cool. So what the company looked like today, we are a WordPress VIP agency partner. So we do a lot of enterprise work, which is really super fun, but we've always stayed with our non-profit roots, probably over half. Our clients are non-profits and our biggest client is a nonprofit they're out a client. That's been with us since the very beginning, since the nineties. And so we're, you know, a very mission-based company or a triple bottom line company, meaning. Planet people and profit, not just profit. So while we've been doing more work in the enterprise space, we still committed ourselves towards doing really good work for nonprofits. That's really cool. Yeah. I kind of wanted to talk a bit about the business. So you mentioned already, like the kind of customers that you have. So what I would love to know is more about what services you offer to them, or is it all like one-off projects or do you have. Any sort of recurring revenue or just kind of like a little bit about like the business model or like how the business works. First. We do mostly agency work, see like 90% of our income comes from agency work and we also do some plugins. So we have about nine plugins in the directory. Combined or plugins tab over 200,000 active installs to those plugins, the most popular ones we have either pro versions of those or paid add-ons. So that's fun. I was nervous to get into the plugin world is I just imagine like lots of angry people sending mean tickets, but it's really fun actually. So a former employee talked me into it cause he was really into plugins. I'm like, okay. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, you have to do all this infrastructure. We have to become knowledge base. We have to make platform. People buy the plugins and licensing and all this stuff and pay sales tax, which you don't have to do, you know, for an agency. And it's really fun. It's like there is way more people that are happy for your plugin and happy that your plugin helps them do their job or accomplish whatever it is then. I mean people out there and they're going to be super mean in the forums or mean, and tickets. And it's just really satisfying. It is different, like selling a $30 plugin versus a hundred thousand dollars website. But I don't know, I guess the volume of customers and the positive feedback you get back. And also when you go to work camp and people are like, Oh, I use your plugin. I love it. You know, I don't know. It's nice. It's fun. Um, so that's one, but it's a really tiny part of our business, but it's just a nice recurring revenue. It pays the rent, you know, and like utilities and things like that. I mean, that's awesome. If you get it to that point, is it connected to the business in any other way? Like, did you use the plugins for customers websites or is it just slowly like another side thing? Or like, how do you think about it? I think about it as I'm not a side thing because it's part of the business, but it's something I definitely want to grow, you know, and develop more plugins. And every year, you know, that recurring revenue goes up because people then renew their licenses. So that's a nice part. It, I love seeing this upward line of recurring revenue. So if it can pay for itself in that way or even make a profit, that's good. That's one leg of the business. And then the rest of it is like a traditional agency. So we do projects. So client will come to us and like, we'll do a project for them from beginning to end, beginning to development launch. Sometimes they have like, you know, recurring services with us. Um, our biggest client, they pay us monthly on retainer to do everything for them. At any time they have like a direct line to ping us whenever they need something. So that's, you know, one side spectrum and the other, one's like, you know, a smaller project like Guinea. And then once we've done, we're done and we filter it for them. They're kind of finished. Don't have more projects for us, but maybe they will in the future. And we could do that, like in a, you know, an hourly rate or maybe a new scope of work for something small, but. That's kind of the range. And we do have like a monitoring service. So clients will pay us like a monthly fee to keep all of their plugins up to date for up to date and we'll fix it. If something goes wrong because of a plugin update. And we also like monitors their site prep time and malware and security and all those good things. So that's recurring revenue as well, right? Yeah. It sounds like when you have a client on a retainer, it's not like it's something you try to force them into when you sell a project, it sounds like more like something organically. That's kind of like you've grown into with these clients because you have such a long working relationship with them. Yes. Or we understand that they're going to need our help after launch. Yeah. You know, they have a lot of projects going on. They have a lot of content they're like constantly like generating and new features and new ideas, or, you know, during the discovery phase of the initial project, you realize, Oh, there's going to be a phase two and phase three and all these other ideas with features. So those are the folks that during the time of signing the first contract, we'll put in like some sort of recurring hours for like the future for like up to a year. I'm kind of curious, going back a little bit, because I think the way you started your agency, it sounds very similar to, I think how a lot of agencies start, like, you start doing some work, you start doing it for free, then you're really, you could charge for it and you start just slowly just get more serious and more professional. But it's always like a challenge, like going from like not charging to charging. And how much do you charge and like, how has your kind of like evolved in this over your almost 25 years doing this? Gosh, that's a good question. You know, definitely when we started this, we were all young and we didn't know anything about business and also being all women. I think women definitely put themselves on sale in general. They don't charge what they're worth. They don't ask for the salary. They're worth a lot of imposter syndrome and I'm not good enough kind of thing. So one thing I learned and the times that I've, for whatever reason, worked on projects, where it was mostly dudes, I just kind of sat back and observed the way they behave. They just set out to get what they want. You don't really care about how much it's going to cost and they just do it. And so, I don't know, I learned a little bit from that experience and that we cannot put ourselves on sale. We have to charge like what we're worth, because we're awesome. You know, we're really experienced, we know WordPress inside and out, like we do really good work. So one thing I definitely learned is that you can't put yourself on sale. We do have a 10% discount for non-profits, which we're committed to for the rest of our lives, you know, because we are a mission-based business. But we no longer give work away for free, unless it's on purpose. Like we do have a couple of pro bono clients that we do work for, but otherwise we've gotten a lot better at making realistic, uh, proposals and just not stressing out about who is that going to be too expensive. Like we're worth it. You know, like we do really good work and where. Where's the money we charge for it. Yeah. I think I've heard like in the salary negotiations, like it's pretty well known that men, you know, or this is like a job application situation. Like they apply for a job that they think they can do, not necessarily one that they have experience with and the women they're more likely to apply for something I have experienced with, or I know that they know for sure that they can do so I think that's kind of like ties into the same thing that you mentioned there. And other side of hiring. I absolutely see that. It's like, you know, I've talked to some dudes who have literally none of the skills out of the box seven and the skills that we need, but just have confidence that they'll be able to do it anyway and demand like a really high starting salary. And I'm like, no, it's like, we're going to have to put so much investment in you and time and energy to get you up to speed. And you know, it's not worth it to us, but I know there's this sense of entitlement that like, Oh yeah, sure. I'm worth that much. And you're right for women. It's the opposite. A woman will look at a list of job requirements. And if there's like one or two, they don't know. They're like, Oh, I'm not qualified. I think that's hard. Isn't a lot of cases. Okay. We become a VIP partner because that's the top of the workforce agencies. That's like the enterprise deals, the big projects. Well, you know, I always knew of the VIP program. And before I thought that you had to be a really big company, like the size of 10 up to be able to become a VIP agency partner. And then I learned that no, there's a shops of like three people that are also VIP agency partners. So it's really learning the platform. Because we're pressed VIP has a certain set of coding standards. It has its funny things about VIP, like hosting. You just have to get to learn. Then we were able to do a VIP job as a subcontractor and kind of prove that we knew what we were doing. And then, um, It was just a matter of like, you know, talking to the people who run the agency partner program at VIP. And it took a while to like over a year, I think. Yeah. And we should say VIP is the automatic enterprise testing. Do you partner with any other hosting companies? Uh, yes. We have a couple of dedicated servers with WP engine for our smaller clients. That's really cool. It sounds like a cool business. And, um, you mentioned this early on already, but I want to know more about what makes a business sustainable. You mentioned the triple bottom line. Maybe you can talk a bit more about that and how you think about that in your business? Sure. From the onset of like our business, back in the day, it was called like socially responsible business and there wasn't a real community around it. We knew of like Ben and Jerry's, you know, and, but that was it. And so we just. Set out to do what we wanted. So we want to have a business where we would want to work ourselves. We want to have, for people were treated fairly, uh, had autonomy, felt valued, like had a lot of freedom. You know, now you talk a lot about work-life balance that wasn't a term back in the day, but that's what we really want. And we want people to enjoy their life outside of work. Then also enjoy work too, but we didn't want to like monopolize anybody's time. It's like, if you're a cat sick, or if your kid is sick or for whatever reason, you have to stay at home or not be available that day, we are a results only workplace. Meaning as long as you make your deadlines, as long as you keep clients happy, as long as you're being a good team player and generally nice person to work with and, you know, Doing your best and consistently learning and trying to improve your skills. I don't care what hours your work. I don't care if you take a lot of vacations, I don't care if you have to stay home for whatever reason at the last minute, as long as you're making all those goals, I'm happy. That's cool. You mentioned result-driven and you know, this podcast is called billable hours and with some agencies, it's like, that's the number one metric for employees. It's like, how many billable hours did you get in this week when you would make a proposal for a client? Is that also like result-driven or like value based pricing or do you look at the hours? Like how does that actually work? Yeah, we do look at hours to do track hours as hard as we use harvest. The forecast and stuff, but for me, it's not a punching the clock situation. I want to aim any field. Like they have to punch the clock when they come here. It's like, the way I measure is like, how happy are the clients? Did we meet their deadlines? Did we give them the features that they wanted? Do they feel empowered to like manage their website? Moving forward? Those are the things that I measure and I'm not the person who makes the proposals. My wife makes the proposal, she does the business development. I help, I help a little bit, but, um, I'd say it's a combination of hours estimates and kind of like base pricing for certain things. You also mentioned you don't care how much vacation people say, and I've heard it with startups, like some stars offer like unlimited vacation and perks like that. And then in some cases like the results ended up being that no one actually takes vacation because. Yeah, because like no one just takes, you know, no, it's like, that's another part of the work-life balance thing. And the triple bottom line, it's like, you have unlimited vacation, but if you request vacation days, you get side-eye and you get like, you know, other people like, Oh, well they're taking vacation. Like, Ugh. You know, like when folks take vacation here, we want them to be able to, 100% is connect. Like we're not going to ping you, turn off your Slack, turn off your email, turn off everything, just leave your phone at home. Like really be disconnected. And the nice thing about that is that if me and I need to go away, we can do that too. And I feel confident that folks will want to allow us the same freedom, even though we're the bosses and still have to stay, always kind of keep an eye on things and stay connected. People work hard to not have us be paying dwell on vacation. So that's really nice. Yeah. That sounds nice to talk about. The triple bottom line is part of the bottom line, the profit, like that's your accountant, but like he doesn't prepare a statement for your people in the planet kind of metrics. How do you measure that or think about that. Do you have like quarterly check-ins or our counselor she's by the way, but that's okay. So triple bottom line and people, planet profit is a concept of B corporations. You're familiar with B corporations benefit corporations. So we have to do annual reporting with them. So B Corp certification is very similar to like lead certification for a building or passive house certification. For a building, it's a point system in different areas and you have to earn a certain number of points to be able to be certified, to be corporation. So we've been certified B Corp since the second year of its inception. The first year we were kind of skipped, like what's this V corporation. Um, but then we like we're on board. From year to now. It's really great because we work with other B Corps. So other B corporations will seek out us to work with and the same way, like our fully desks, like we got new fully desks for the office and there would the corporation. So if you work with another B Corp, is that a way to get points as well? I don't know, honestly, me, it also does that piece, man does all the hard we use help scout for our help desk Smith branch. And I think they're a B Corp as well. So I think you could find B Corp's for like different categories. You mentioned Ben and Jerry's ice cream from a B Corp. They're famous for that. Yeah. Yeah. But now they're bought by Unilever. So I don't know if they retain their, uh, Yeah, but the thing that's nice about the certification, it's not greenwashing, you can't make it up and they actually come and audit, like they've come to our office a few times and like audited us, you know? So it's the real deal. Yeah. I mean, you just called me out. And I noticed that even when I said, like, when I said he, when I refer to your account and it's just like, it's just all these things that like, so ingrained into our culture and it pains me, like when I say stuff like that, um, and I'm glad you called me out, but it kind of leads me to the next question because your company is certified. A women's business enterprise and LGBT, uh, business enterprise. And those certifications mean that your workplace is like extra inclusive. Well, it does certification means that the ownership is. Yeah. Yeah. So what I kind of wanted to know was like, are there like specific things that you think makes. Yikes more inclusive as a workplace and things that work differently than like a lot of other companies. No, me and I, from the very beginning, we have always cared a lot about diversity in tech, especially, you know, being two queer women in tech. And often being like the only woman in the room and just having the deal in the really male dominated industry. Like we want to make this better. You know, we want to change the way the game has been played. And it, this is across the board. It's like when you have diverse leadership, you wind up organically with a more diverse team because your networks are more diverse. And you also hopefully are thinking about that kind of thing. And we all have biases all of us, um, but maybe have some fewer biases about, Oh, well, this person is more valuable because they're this kind of person and this person couldn't possibly be as good because they're this kind of person, but. Not just that it's always been consciously on our minds, like trying to fight bias, trying to fight name bias. And I don't know. And when you have like a direct diverse leadership, then people also want to work for you. Yeah. So it's been just a very conscious effort on our part to have a diverse team. And we've always had a diverse team, you know, since the nineties, but most has been really organic. We haven't had a situation where five years in, we're like, Oh my gosh, we're only all white guys. We should do something about this, you know, and then try to fix it right. Yeah, but then also just not know what to do. And there are a lot of hand ringing and what do we do? And, you know, we didn't have that hurdle, you know, we've always just thought about this and wanted to have like an diverse and inclusive workplace. Yeah. I mean, the signaling is different when your leadership is more diverse. That totally makes a lot of sense. Like, I'm wondering, so I'm starting a startup here, right. And I'm a white dude, so like I'm not like underrepresented in any ways. I can't do what you did necessarily. I think your behavior also is a signal as well. Right. And the people you work with and stuff like that, do you have any. Tips around like recruiting. Are there mistakes you see, people make like, not respecting pronouns and stuff like that? Definitely. Yes, but let's reel it back, you know, before like pronoun level. Uh, the number one thing I think is that people start companies with a very homogeneous team and then you keep going. And then, like I said, like five years down the road, you're like, Oh my gosh, Oh, wait, we've created like a. To leave onto this team. What do we do? What do we do? How do we fix this? Oh my gosh, how do we, then you feel like, Oh, we have to hire somebody. And then it feels like tokenistic, you know? Um, so number one, I think people need to understand when you're creating a business. If your team is not diverse, you are at a disadvantage. Productivity wise, problem solving wise and profits. It's like, if you look at the research with diverse teams versus matches teams, diversity and Jack perform every time. And that's outperform, not just speed it's quality of product, because when you have a group of people who are all like minded, even if you have a group of the best of the best, but they're all the same kind of person, right? You have all the rock stars and the ninjas all together in one room. They still won't do as good a job as like a diverse group of people with different skill levels, because they're all coming from the same place. And so the problem solving ability is just better. The products that you make are better because you have folks anticipating, Oh, well this is going to be a problem for this person, because this is stupid or whatever. I think there was a study with something to do with surgery and like, Being too big for what the tans. And it was like, now you've gotten to market with this product and it's not good for everybody. If they study like bigger businesses, like huge businesses and their level of diversity, especially in leadership down the line, the ones who are more diversity, more profits. So it should be part of your business model, not just the right thing to do a part of your business model to create a strong team. A strong team is diverse team, a homogeneous team, not as good, it's obvious in so many parts of society, like who built the system that you're interacting with. And I obviously see it less because I'm like part of the non underrepresented people. Like another thing that this made me think about is like accessibility. And disability is a part of diversity. It's like one fun people identify themselves as having a disability of some kind. So that is a huge percentage of the population that you're under-serving if your products aren't accessible. Yeah, exactly. And like, even, I don't know if people get near this, but like my six week old babies crying in the background right now. And like, you know, when you're breastfeeding a baby or holding a baby, like you only have one arm. And you know, my wife is doing that because she's in a maternity leave. So she's holding a baby all the time for like the next six months or something like that. And just in general, like it just I'm realizing, pushing the stroller around and stuff like that. So it's not a wheelchair and like, it's much easier of course, but like you just realize there's just so many places. Yeah. Like the people who built this system or like came up with this solution here, like clearly didn't have any of these issues. Yeah. These folks weren't on the team who built these systems. So that's number one. It's like realize that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. If you're not thinking about this from the very beginning, in addition to being the right thing to do. Right. So when you realize this, like there's many things, meritocracy is a myth. Meritocracy meaning, Oh, the most qualified person gets the job, but because of unconscious bias, it's like some qualified people never even make it past the initial cutoff point and they don't even make it to the interview stage. And this is not to make anybody feel bad. It's just something that's been researched. And proven that named bias is a thing. So they did a research study at a university where they reached out to some professors at different universities and they sent them all fictitious resumes. And they're all identical, except for one thing, one half had the name, John and the other half had the name Jenny. And of course professors offered. If they were to offer Jenny a job, they offered her less pay, lower salaries for the job. Identical resumes. Identical. Yeah. That's just the horrible. And then there was another study where they went to like the Chicago Tribune and they answered job listings and they sent in resumes again, all identical, except some of them had like black sounding names and some of them had like whites on the games, same thing. And then what they did was they raised the quality of the resumes with the black sounding names and they made these folks appear to be. Overqualified. And it only resulted in like a 3% raise and response rate. They've measured success as the people offered this person an interview. So keep that in mind when you're, you know, when you're going through resumes, when you're looking over at potential hires, like, why am I thinking that person's not qualified? You know, you can even anonymize, you can have somebody and just like hide the names. Um, and just look at skills and qualifications. So just keep that in mind when you're hiring and also like the job listings that you do, right. It's like make sure that they're inclusive and welcoming to marginalized folks. Like a lot of language, like if I see a job listing is like, we're looking for a rock star and Ninja and you use all these words that are very aggressive or kind of like, dude, bro, like signaling. He's going to turn people off and they're not going to want to apply for your job in the first place, or they're going to think like, Oh, the company culture, there is not for me. Yeah. Like the company culture, like it reminds me of like, so I've worked for many different startups and been involved in a lot of startups, especially here in Denmark where I'm based. And it's like, it's really common and to like have beers on a Friday afternoon or something like that. And it's like, that's just such a big risk of not being a very inclusive environment. Like, first of all, like there's alcohol involved and like, there's just so many people where for many reasons, like they don't drink alcohol, it could be religion. It could be, they could be breastfeeding, they could be pregnant. Maybe they don't want to tell someone. Right. They can just not like it. They could be sober. There's a million different reasons why people wouldn't want to drink. So like alcohol is like a big thing I've seen. And just in general, like expecting people to hang around, like outside of work hours is also like hard for a lot of people. Like easy for a single dude. The thing to think about, like, I do a talk on diversity and I have one slide. That's my way of saying no one gives a shit about your beer pong Fridays. You know, and that kind of culture may not be welcoming to some folks or you're just maybe telegraphing, like, Oh, I don't know if I feel welcome there and included. Yeah, I guess it's okay to have like social events. You could have them within like, Your work hours where people are getting paid to be at their job, at least in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think I would never forced anybody to do like team building exercises or something, but I like things that are celebrate Tori. And I also like being part of events that help the diverse tech community. So tech week is the thing that happens every year. It didn't happen this year. It would happen virtually this year, but. Um, often we would participate in a couple events that are like focused on diversity inclusion. And if people want to go, like they can go to that and we have sponsor. And, but you know, if there's going to be something with alcohol, we always try to have like a mocktails or like alternatives and make sure there's plenty of it. And also just not encourage people to like drink too much because that's when people make bad decisions and. It's just like a side. I do agree. It's like, there's something about like drinking and the tech scene that just go hand in hand. And I think we really need to just be really conscious about that and make sure that we're being careful. We're talking a bit about like practical tips now for diversity and inclusiveness. We didn't talk so much about accessibility. Is that something you think about it? Yikes, definitely. I mean, my wife and I bought the buildings that we were in. At the offices in, and we did a lead platinum rehab, which is also part of our triple bottom line stuff, the environmental stuff, it's all wheelchair accessible, but you know, the work we do, we just actually worked with a client who went through a really serious accessibility audit for our theme and learned a lot. And I'm also a big proponent of captioning video. Like all of the more popular talks that I've done, I've sat in like, Done the captioning for them for deaf and hard of hearing people. And also, you know, whenever I've been involved with events, always try to get an ASL interpreter or card captioner for the events. So like those things are accessible, but I have to say, uh, captioning your talks. You really. Learn your vocal ticks and like everything, it's like terrible. It's like, it's painful, but it's also a very good exercise and it helps you become a better speaker. Yeah. And you know, we were talking about a recruiting and stuff like that now. And we talked about startups a bit in, and I'm a startup. So I kind of want to like, get your take on this. Or maybe you just call me out again actually. And we'll see, but branch is a small startup and we have a little bit of funding, but not that much. And no, it's definitely not profitable yet. So like, I think what often happens in startups is like, you don't work for free and brain, but we don't have like an amazing salary by any measure. And also like, if we were to hire someone now, like we wouldn't hire someone full time because we couldn't afford it. And you know, you would also have to be a contractor because we don't really have the set up right now to have proper like employment we're US-based but like I'm in Denmark and like in the U S you have to like, Think about health insurance and all these kinds of things. So it's like at job for like working for branch right now might not be a very good job for someone who actually just needs like a real job. Sometimes it can be hard because like, if you looking for someone who can work on a startup part-time as a contractor for not that much salary or whatever, a lot of the people, you know, that can do that. Are like someone, you know, who's in school or like who has extra time who can afford it basically. So it makes it harder. I think, well, assumptions don't need to be made about like, who is that person who can afford it? Who can have the time, you know, just put that out of your mind. And what you have to do is you have to cast a wider net, like, especially in the WordPress space, we keep swapping employees among essentially agencies just keep swapping them. We keep advertising and promoting. Are jobs in the same spaces to the same people, like one part of fixing it and making it better. And also, you know, making yourself better is to like, just stop networking with the same people. And it'd be in the same echo chamber in a baby step. You can take, if you're on Twitter, it's like, who are you following on Twitter? Are you falling like dudes look just like you, you know, whoever you are, people who look just like you, are you staying in this little world, um, big, diverse WordPress out there, and you can find those folks and you can find those accounts and just start following them and just get into with like, what are those folks talking about? You know, what are the problems they're having? It's the good times that they're having and, you know, just like things are concerned and you don't have to insert yourself into the conversation, but you can at least like absorb it, you know, just be a good listener and just. Get out of the bubble you're in. And then in real life, like before COVID, you know, there's lots of diverse networking groups or diverse chambers of commerce. And as a business, you can join a chamber of commerce in a Hispanic chamber of commerce, LGBT, as you know, as an ally. And the great thing about those networking events is people are there to make connections and to drum business up for themselves. I think it's a pretty like welcoming space because people want to know make deals. They want to meet people, um, and go and not with the intention of just. Being like a person collector and just, you know, making all these superficial connections, but actually connect with people, um, and become friends and like widen your network and do a lot of listening and not a lot of talking. And then you'll find new ways to like advertise your jobs or just reach out like. The bigger your network is, the more folks can reach out to you when, you know, there were opportunities that you want to offer people. And that's even like when it comes to putting together conferences and speaking, and panels or jobs or whatever it may be, or if a podcast. Right. Exactly. Or if, you know, you need business services, like supplier diversity is also really important and another way to open up your network. So it's like, okay, We need the floors refinished in our office, or we need the walls painted. It's like, Go to these diverse chambers of commerce and look at their business listings and like find people like diversify, whose services you paid for, and then just you open up your world. And it's great. That's the fun part for me. It's like, I think people get so scared that, Oh, I'm going to be seen as an intruder people. Aren't like me or they're going to judge me. And it's not the case, especially with business. It's like people want to network. People want to make money. People want to find potential clients. So I think those are really safe spaces to network in, you know? And you make friends and that's fun. Right? Making new friends. Yeah. That's really good advice. I want to call out Ellie Nimmons. She created a Twitter list for every Oh yes. Yes. I love that. That's great. Even actually, before I found that list, when I was starting to like, think about this podcast I wanted to do, I realized that. Especially WordPress. Like I wasn't following a very diverse group of people. Um, so I just started like looking for people that look less like me. And honestly it didn't take very long before Twitter noticed. So like the algorithm, you know, it just more and more people just came on my radar. So it's definitely a good place to get started, I think. And that list is really good. As you mentioned, it's a great list. Put it in the notes for the podcast. Yeah, definitely. We will. So the other piece that we haven't talked about so much is inclusion. A company's going to put an effort into diversifying their workplace, but still do not have things in place for inclusion. So if you hire somebody and they don't feel included, or like there's a. Future for them there. And they're not going to stay. If they look at the leadership and the leadership is completely all the same kind of person it's like, you can't have one without the other. You can't have true like success, um, in building a diverse team without inclusion, you know, there's different factors. That research have identified to help with inclusion. And one is inclusive leaders. It's like if folks do not have leadership to look up to as like an ally or a mentor, or like somebody that's going to listen and take advice and implement feedback and give actionable feedback and share credit for team success, that kind of thing, you know, the place makes you feel like a diversity hire. Which is not a thing I don't believe in diversity hires, actually thing it's because diversity makes your team better. But if you make somebody feel that way, they're not going to stay and nothing is authenticity. It's like, do I feel like I can be my true self at work? Like if I have to hide a part of myself or tone down a part of myself that other people don't have to, then I'm not gonna feel good coming to work. Like if I feel I can. Put a picture of my wife on my desk, but other people can put their opposite 6,000 on their desk. Do I have to wear my hair a certain way? Do I have to whatever it's like, then you're not going to feel welcome there. And then networking and visibility. It's like, is there a mentorship within the organization? You know, are there senior employees that you can look up to you and can help you? Like. Climb the ladder of the organization, whatever that may be. And then also clear career paths. Is there like the secret game that has to be played to like get ahead at a company and do you feel like, Oh, I unblocked out of that game. I can't play it. I don't like that about businesses in general. It's like, I really love transparency. I like people supporting each other. I like a no drama workspace, you know, and I think that's just like healthy and good for a work environment. Anyway. Have you had to call that out sometimes and just like shut it down. I hope not. And then we're very small to like manna. Yeah. We set the tone, you know, I try to be as transparent and I try to elicit feedback from employees. And if somebody has a good idea, I'm a hundred percent open to it. Even if I've been doing it a different way since the nineties, you know, I try to be super open-minded and just like receptive to feedback. Even if it's something that I'm doing, it's not the best way to do it. And also just making sure people get. Props. Like, I think something as small as when I'm communicating with a client, because I do a lot of the project management and communication from client to the dev team. Like I always say like, who fixed the thing instead of like saying like, Oh, we fixed that. It'd be like, Oh, well so-and-so fixed that thing. So they're getting proper credit. I'm just trying to really be conscious of like, if I'm. Interrupting people. There's a thing where you can amplify somebody or you can kind of like take credit for what they said. So things like that. Like, I think all those little things, um, as a boss or a manager, whatever, like they matter, they absolutely matter. Yeah. I think there's so much like in your language, like, instead of just always saying, we, like, you could actually call out the person who did it give them credit. I've also like something I really hate is business owners. When they talk maybe to a client or something, they're like, My developer did this, or like, it's not your developer, it's not your person or your colleague or a teammate or whatever. So many small like nuances in the language that I think people can start to think about. Right. You know, as business owners, you start a business because you have an idea, you don't have a master's in business or anything, and you don't have all this diversity training and lead management training. You just start a business. And now you're here and it's years down the road and kind of like never laid the groundwork for those. Sorts of things. So I think it's really good from the beginning to have that in your mind, and to lay the groundwork for, you know, that path to have like a inclusive workspace. Tracy, I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing all these tips in your story. If people want to check out your company, maybe some of your plugins, maybe some of the stuff you're doing, like, do you have anything you want to block? Or like anything you want to mention where people can go learn more? Well, you can always go to our website, which is geisinger.com. You can follow me on Twitter, little Jimmy. Um, it's L I L J I M M I awesome. Tracy, thank you so much for taking the time. I'll talk to you later.

In this episode I talk to Vito Peleg, the founder of WP Feedback. Vito and his team launched WP Feedback in the summer of 2019 and it was one of the most spectacular and well executed product launches I've seen in the WordPress space. This was manifested in more than $100,000 in sales in the first month. Listen to Vito unpack the journey from freelancer, to agency, to successful product business. Links WP Feedback Vito on Twitter Vito's band Chase the Ace Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Today on the show. I'm excited to bring on a Vito Peleg to tell the story of how he went from client work to one of the most eye catching product launches in the WordPress ecosystem that I remember at least Vito is the founder of WP feedback, a product that helps you systematize your website, project delivery process from start to finish. From what I recall from my conversation with Vito at the hallway track at WordCamp Brighton, he started out busking in the streets of London, and I can't wait to unpack his journey on this episode. You can find Vito on Twitter at feedback WP. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your work for science. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need, making it simple for easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Why is this many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free and branch cei.com. I started this episode by asking Vito to explain what his business looked like before he launched WP feedback. Vito, you want to try to explain how your business looked before you launched WP feedback, and then two weeks after you launched it. Like how did it look before and how did it look after? Before WP Feedback I had an agency and we're working at 12 guys, a few was in London, but the rest were abroad, you know, like all around the world. And we were basically building websites for clients that was the day-to-day every day, full few years. And then having a few hundreds of projects that throughout this time. I was looking for a way to get out of the agency model for a while. You know, when I was looking at all kinds of different aspects, maybe creating even a course. Or, you know, all of these kinds of channels that people look to scale up while I was doing my research and how I can actually do this. The problem with communicating with clients is always been there. Um, and you always jump around between a thousand tools and they, you know, they, you just don't get on the same page as they did. But while I was trying to focus on finding a way to scale, this was actually really hurting our business and profitability on the other side. So I came up with the idea of how it should be laid out, and I asked the dev team to build it for us. You know, not even thinking about this as it's going to be the product, but actually thinking about, okay, let them fix this problem while I actually focused on what I want to build as a way to scale up, but it worked like magic. And then it just kind of dawned on me that it's probably not a problem that only I am experiencing. We went on the market research and as soon as we launched it, we had a pretty nice explosion right at the beginning. We managed to generate six figures in revenue within the first 30 days as a new product in this space, this was groundbreaking. Like no one did that before. And yeah. And so as soon as this happened, I was like, okay, no more client work. That's it. It was clear. Cut like that. You were just telling me before we hit record. That you're working on V2 of WP feedback and it felt like the way you described it, like, it feels like there's quite a big difference between mean doing client work and being product business. So like what's the day to day difference between your old business and the business you're running now. Right. So in my previous business, I was the business. So I was in the middle of everything and I was the biggest bottleneck of the company. Everything had to land on my table. Well, it was distributed out to other people. So my day to day was very much influenced by that. I was actually, yeah, talking to clients and sending out invoices and making sure that this task has been done. And following up with my team. Doing all of those, uh, repetitive tasks that are mind numbing. I even compare this. If you remember it back in the fifties, there was this lady is that the call centers, where they were just like redirecting the calls from one place to another. And that was my day, you know, looking back, it's such a devaluation of my time. Doing this three hours out of every day, uh, that it's crazy compared to what I'm focusing on right now. So now I'm a lot calmer to be honest, but I was back then, you know, I delegate a lot more. So I'm totally aware that the way that this product has developed as evolved over the past year and a half, it brings it to a point where I am no longer the thing, you know, I don't matter. In the grand scheme of things, it's all about understanding the client's needs, our user's needs. And trying to implement that. And when you're working as an agency, you only get to build the first version of the product. In most cases, you know, you build a website and then you send off to the client to figure things out on his own. Of course you do care plans and stuff, but there's no continuous development in. Most of the projects, you know, which means that, um, for us, the client is the client, you know, is the guy that bought the website. But now the client is actually the user, which I think is a much more healthy, uh, way of looking at things. So of course we were doing market research with our clients and asking them, who is your target audience and all of that. But, you know, you can't be as tuned into the end. Clients wants and needs as when you are the guy in charge of the product itself. So we definitely going to talk a lot more about dopey feedback. I tease this in the intro, but you, your background is as a musician and it's kind of funny. Like, I feel like every time I talk to someone in Europe, the way they started making websites is because they built a band website. And when I talk to people in the U S it's always the church website. So I don't know what that tells you about people, but it's just interesting. So you got started in music. I found your band on YouTube. JC ACE, right? It's the band. So people can go and check that out. We'll link that in the show notes as well. And somehow you ended up running WordPress agency. How did that happen? I always want to, you know, since I was a teenager, I wanted to be a rock star. That was my kind of dream as a teenager. And that was my focus. So we were actually building a band back home in Tel Aviv in Israel and, you know, doing the rounds for a few years, trying to make it right while this was happening. Of course, you have to make some kind of a living. So I started getting into digital just a little bit more from the point of view of, I had a pretty nice success with my space, with a band. And I built our first website in a four when I was in high school with geo cities. If you remember back in the day, we got it. Then megabytes to build the site for free. And so I already had a bit of experience with HTML CSS and all that kind of stuff. But, uh, when we actually got signed and we all moved to the UK, started touring around the world from our base was here in London. That's when I needed to create some revenue while I was on the road. So I was literally living in a van and I was looking for a way to make money cause the band wasn't cutting it. And so. I started building websites for clients. You know, they just came from the experience that they saw, how I'm marketing the band. And I built our kind of, uh, resources and stuff like that. So we start with friends and family, and that was my first freelancing. This, you know, stealing wifi for McDonald's as we pass by on the Autobahn. After that ended, you know, we finished kind of our twenties and that we put the bands to rest. I said, all right, let's see what I can do to actually grow this business. Within the first year, I got to six figures in revenue as a freelancer, they said, all right, let's scale this up and see what we can do in year three. I already had a team of 12. And then by year four, we were already doing WP feedback. So I feel that it's kind of a continuous evolution, you know, from being a freelancer. And I would even say from being a musician, like you're saying, eh, there's a lot of creativity involved, a lot of manifestation of something out of nothing. This very much relates to how people build websites. You know, you have that picture in your mind. Kind of the same as you create a song, you know, you get the content, right. The designer does all their production and the sound around it, and you need to also market it and launch it too, so that people actually listen to it eventually. Yeah. It feels like every step was the school that I needed for the next one. That's very interesting. Um, thinking now, like as a musician, you need inspiration. To come up with songs, but when you're talking about business as well, like what was your inspiration and how did you learn about the next step and what inspired you to. Grow pretty fast actually, and keep like moving to the next stage and not end up getting stuck at one stage. Yes. Thanks. Stagnant. Which is what a lot of people do. And sometimes it's the right thing to do if your goal is different than that's cool. You know, it's just a matter of knowing what you want. And, you know, I see a lot of our users that are freelancing. Successfully for years, they're not looking to build a massive team or to grow beyond that. They are very satisfied with what they can provide for their family. And they get satisfaction from actually doing the design work and working on the website itself. For me, I started the whole thing with a very early age when I decided that I wanted to be a musician. Everyone told me you can't. Right. That's the next thing that happens when you state the big goal, you're going to have people that's going to tell you that you can't. And I try to kind of research on my own, figure it out. How can I, you know, I wasn't accepting the possibility of this not happening. And so I got into all of these business books and stuff like that when I started reading. And literally when I was 16 years old, if you remember there was back then I reach that Paul dad and all of those things. That build your mindset. And I think that this is the core of it. If you have the mindset for growth, you're going to grow and that's it, you know, everything else figures itself out. But if you have that intention that you're going to be at a newer, bigger, a better place than where you are right now, everything is, will just happen around it. That's cool. I think it sounds like when you started doing websites, when you were on the road, like you kind of fell into it a little bit because you learned the skill because you, you needed it for yourself, but when you launch the VP feedback, even though the product started out, it sounds like as an internal tool, it sounds like you were pretty intentional about that. And Oh yeah. I would love to know like, basically when you knew that, okay, this is going to be a product. And because when it launched. It was a big splash. And, you know, the headline was that you got to $100,000 in annual current revenue and like the first month or something like that. Right. Which is incredible. I've never heard about that in the word, the space before. So basically. From you decided this is going to be a product that we're going to go out in the market with. And you got to that amazing result. Like what did that look like? And that happened, first of all, there was a lot of intent in this. Like you're saying Peter, as soon as I decided that we're going to go down this route, I started looking at what is happening in this space. And I've been using WordPress for 12 years old, a little more than that. And, uh, throughout that experience, I got to know all of those products as a user, you know, so as a gravity form user, and even back then you'd have visual composer and all of that. And I with the tools as well. So I started with that as little bit of research into the space what's happening there. I found a great blog by freemium famous.com. Which later they published the case study of how we reached our results. And that was an amazing resource to read. I just read the entire blog. Like it was a book just to kind of get to that insight. What I found is that, like we were saying before about some people that are deciding to be freelancers, which is cool. This is the same concept that you see in the WordPress space when it relates to products. Some people are cool with having like a side project and that's what they want to, they just want to have a few extra thousand dollars added. To their revenue every month. And that's cool, you know, that's, that's the goal achieved. Right? And I, to be honest, I also have one plugin like that, that is running in the background. No one really knows about, but that's part of it, you know, that it just runs on its own. But with WP feedback, I decided to look at the big companies and see what they do because I saw a massive, massive potential. And more than realizing it myself. We went out and did market research. So we surveyed 600 WordPress professionals. I think the booklet, when we met last year, Peter, right? Yep. And surveyed the 600 WordPress professionals to see what they do, how do they deliver a project and what is their workflow look like? And then we saw it's a complete mess all across the ecosystem. So I found that there was a massive kind of a demand for something like this. And we approached the whole thing. Very strategically with a launch sequence. So we use the survey as the first mechanism of getting the better users and delighted the beta users to the point where they helped us promote the hell out of this thing. When we went out to the market a month after the beta started that coupled with, uh, Just being out there. This is what I kind of call the omnipresent strategy where you want to try and corner a group of people from every angle possible. So, uh, I was on the podcast, you know, during the podcast rounds and the, every conference that happened, I was there last year. Yeah. So I did about 20 something conferences throughout 2019. This is where we met as well, Peter, less, uh, in a blight or last year also, we were running Facebook ads, Google ads that are doing remarketing to the same audience, which created this experience that we came out of nowhere and with every well. That's how it felt. Yeah. That was the strategy. It's just, you want to try and map out all of these touch points that your target audience might have with you and in the WordPress space that would be being at WordCamp speaking at WordCamps a sponsoring WordCamps that would include doing partnerships with companies like GoDaddy or elegant marketplace or WP engine, and also being on all of these podcasts. So that you're always seen. All I did was tell my story. But I am the user, you know, so it made it very relatable and very easy for our target audience to say, okay, this guy has experienced the same problem. I am. The only difference is that he took the time to figure it out and build something that will fix it. And now I can benefit from it. That was the intent. That's awesome. Did you start with any kind of. Discount or deal or something like that to get that initial revenue. Yes. So my, my thought was this, if I want to build a business and I saw this form of hundreds of clients that we were building, uh, websites and basically online businesses for, and how they treated the marketing after. And again, it's the same thing as musicians. Some people, what they do is they. Put all of their effort into the album, you know, they spend, they spent 10 years creating the album, making sure that it's perfect and they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars getting the best mastering engineer that will go in and put that gloss finish on top of it, work with producers and all of that mess. But then there's no budget for marketing. Even more than that, there is no focus on how to bring this to the market. So I was always, it was loaded with the music under this different approach. And this is more like the lean startup kind of concept that you don't know until you go out there, you got to hypothesize an idea, bring it to the market, have them decide if it's good or not. And then add them, tell you what needs improving to make it even better for them. So that was our strategy when it comes to the product, which means that from idea. To market. It took us two months and for me, better to pop a lunch, it took us 30 days. And from blanche to 130,000 in revenue, it took us 30 days. Again, every stage had a clear path to it. Now, when I was starting, the thing I said, all right, if I really want to build a big company, I need to have a lot of money. Fast, but building AI building Emma is even harder, you know, getting those fuses, especially at an earliest stage where the product is probably not awesome. You know, it just came to the market. So it's probably not going to be as amazing as a Santa or, uh, you know, active campaign or, or these products that have been around for more than a decade and been improving this with teams of dozens of people. So we decided to go down the lifetime loud to get people, to invest into the product early on. Have just a limited amount of lifetime licenses that we're going to be selling. And this way we have a small group of people that invested a lot, which means that they are invested in the success of the product long-term and they are also invested in giving us those feedback reports, telling us the hard truth that sometimes as product makers, we don't want to heal. So when you get to someone to spend a few hundred bucks, they're going to tell you the truth, no matter what you say, right. I actually leaned into that. I embraced that as the mechanism of improving. Now, talking about lifetime deals, those two approaches to this, there is the AppSumo out and there is what we did. Uh, the AppSumo out is I think a bad idea. I say why? I think that, that, um, it's already putting you. Support at a place where it can't handle it and absolutely is designed for founders that we're not awesome at marketing and they need to get those initial users. Right. That's usually the case for the product on there. So if you don't know what you're doing in marketing, I guess that might be a good approach, but it's not going to be. Profitable as doing it on your own. For me, this round, this launch round was the mechanism of creating the seed round that we needed. I think that's what I kind of, even when we talked about this last year, I told you about this seed round concept is like, how can I get a few hundred grand? So I can actually build a popup company, not just a bootstrap. The life out of it, we sold licenses for 500 to $600 each, which means that we got about 300 users that will on this plan. You could see how that leaves the support at a pretty easy going state. It's only 300 users, but then also allow us to build enough reserves to execute on the plan like sponsoring WordCamps or spending Facebook ads to begin other users that will actually start building the all. And throughout out the rest of the year, this was the base. So after your big launch, there must have been a lot of work to do, like incorporating all the feedback and talking to those users. But also like that's when you also start to build up that more like recurring revenue from those people that aren't on a lifetime deal. Exactly. It sounds like the hard work maybe starts after that initial launch. Yes. Yes. I guess every stage is a hard work on its own. Uh, it has its own challenges, but you're right. Building ALR is not easy, you know, especially in the highly competitive world where it's not a matter of direct competition. I am in competition with JPL because the user is spending $100 a month on JPL. So even though we don't do anything related, they are already chipping into the user's budget. So I agree. This is definitely one of the challenging parts of it, but without having the seed round, I think we would have gone bust way before we reached a point of profitability, you know, just for me. So your customer funded in a very like literal sense, I guess they did. Yeah. What does WP feedback look like today? What's the product like, and what's the business like? So nowadays, which is one and a half years after we first launched this, we launched it in last June, June of 19. Now the solution is being used on more than 11,000 websites. We closed year one with very nice, uh, profit, as well as, uh, growing the team to a team of nine guys, full time, uh, developers and team members that are helping the product. Grow first of all, as a product itself, you know, it's cool. Uh, but also, uh, attracting more users and making sure that as the product evolves, and this is one of our latest challenge that is very interesting. As a product evolves, people have a different perception of how it was. Compared to where it is right now. And I think that you might have the same experience with your product, Peter, because the startup process is an iterative process. You know, where you go and you play around and you see what works and what moves the needle for you and for the user, or even better for the user and also for you. And then you add features or pivot features according to that. So when we started, it was the MVP, let's call it, you know, version 1.0. Was a sticker stool. You know, you could install a plugin on a website and you get a layer on the top of the phone and the backend that allows you to put post-it notes that are attached to the HTML elements of the page itself, which means that it makes it super easy and visual to collaborate and to communicate internally inside the website, instead of taking screenshots and sending links and doing all of that, you get the thing on email with no screenshot and just forwards. Yeah. You have one hour to figure it out what the client is even talking about. Once you do, you take a screenshot and then you send it to the devs and they take the screenshot, go back to the website. It's a whole fragmented mess. Our initial point was to fix this process, but from the get-go, the vision was, we need to build the. Only system or the best system to deliver website projects. And that's when, uh, we built the dashboard, which is not attached to work with at all. It's more of a SAS solution on Lavelle and react that allows for the user to integrate all of their websites into one centralized hub that acts as your inbox, because the way I see it, email is the biggest threat. To, to, uh, uh, to your clarity when you're dealing with communications specifically around visual stuff. And 87% of the market is using email, uh, which is a 30 year old tool that was never designed for this use case to collaborate and communicate something that is super highly. Visual that is the dashboard itself. And now inside the dashboard, we have our task center, which brings in and filters automatically all of the different tasks from all of the different websites into one centralized place takes automated. Screenshots, tells you the screen size, the Basel version. So you're basically logging into there every morning as your inbox. More than that, we elaborated the project, uh, uh, control feature, uh, which means that. Again, now the way people do it is they get a revision or request from a client. They copy it from their email into a sauna or into Trello or base camp, and then the developer, or they go in there and tackle the task from there. Then go back to the email to notify the clients that it's done. So we said, all right, we can cut the whole thing out of it process because we already have the stickers on the website. They have statuses. So based on that, we created Kanban boards that give you the clearest snapshot of your project. Any given moment without any cost be paste or duplication of different platforms. The van division Peter is to bring it all home. We get to a place where you manage the project. We like to say this from the proposal to the support, from a tool that doesn't fight you and it doesn't battery with every step that you need to train the client that you need to learn yourself, the ability to take a step of a project and move it from the wireframing stage that is done on a third party platform. To the site mapping stage that is done on another platform to the task tracking that is not on another platform. So everything is like manually lifted and moved. And our vision says slide from one place to another. I think one place where branch and dopey feedback or similar. Is that they're both WordPress aware. Like they both understand what a WordPress project is and what people need when they're working on a WordPress project. I agree. And this is something that there is no competition for work process of now in the market when it comes to building complex websites fast, you know, which is what most clients for smaller agencies, it's more business owners are looking for. I believe that this focus is the way to go. Even though there is plans for the future. Once we grab enough of a market share here to explore other platforms as well. That's awesome. And it's definitely something I think that people should check out. Yes. I want to get your thoughts on how. Other people can maybe start to explore the world of products. I don't know necessarily. And I want to hear what you think about this. If people need to go all in, like you did, like maybe there's a way to have a more smooth transition into product work, or just add some products to the mix. Right? First of all, like I think a big challenge that people might have is. It sounds like you basically just dedicated your entire team to work on this for a couple of months. That's a big bed, essentially. So how should people think about like finding the time and resources to do this? Do you recommend the way you did it or do you recommend more like a transition or slow iterative process or something like that? So I believe that speed builds momentum and now it's saving most. Speed to market will always beat perfection. So as soon as you can get something out there, then you start learning. But if you think her with it forever, you're never going to get to that stage. So the way that we approach this, first of all, I said, he was built for us internally. So it was like super scrappy, you know, just something that we can use ourselves worked only on our stack. And, you know, in WordPress, every environment, there are. Uh, be in variations of people's stacks, uh, that you need to consider when you're building your product in this space. And we didn't have any of these challenges, you know, when we were just building it for us. So initially it was a very small project that was just, we did it for a couple of days to get it out there. Then once we thought, all right, this works, let's develop this product. We actually created. I talked to my friend that is, um, after the fact, the designer. And I showed him the tool. I told them what we needed to look like. And we created a screen cast video that is not real, you know, that is actually done in after effects. That is mocking up what the tool will do once it's ready. That's what we took to market initially, even before, you know, just to get to people's interests. And that got us like a mailing list of 1300 people that helped us actually get customers for me. How did you get 1300 people? I took that video and I placed it on a few Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups, no money spent whatsoever. And the idea inspired people. So I told him that, uh, you can sign up and once we are ready, we'll let you know. We didn't promise that it's ever going to be ready, you know, but we just said that, uh, this is what we're building. And if you want to hear about it, sign up here. So this was how we did our research that I told you right after people gave us their email, the next. Step straight after that was a survey. How do you gather the content right now? How do you approve designs right now? How do you provide support right now? What is your go-to page builder? So we knew which tools we needed to be compatible with. Uh, at least from the first early stages. What is your go-to theme? All of these kinds of questions that help us slip. Yeah, the better. Uh, but your question Peter was more around, uh, eh, if people should go all in or not, right. Yeah, but it sounds like you're definitely removing a lot of risk by going step-by-step and basically testing your assumptions in a way at each of the steps. Like you're being guided by the demand in the market. It sounds like when you're exactly, because it's all about feedback loops, you know, the feedback loop process means that you come up with an idea, you hypothesize something and then you got to build it or build some kind of an MVP of it so that you can bring it to market. Best it get market feedback and then come up with new ideas that will listen. It's a never ending cycle, right? If you picture this in your mind and you picture it like a wheel, the faster, this will goes, the better momentum you're going to build for the business. So if you're trying to iterate something for a year, Before you're actually showing this to anyone. You know, the wheel is not moving, I think a hundred years to get to where you would get competitive, completing a full feedback loop every week. And that was what we did even with the update rounds. Yeah. Uh, we were doing the first six months of the product. We were literally pushing updates. Every single week, every week there was a new feature. There was a couple of bug fixes and, uh, you know, it slowed down a little bit after when we got deeper. So as the product evolves, there's a lot more conditions to take into account, uh, before you can actually push or complete a feedback loop. And that's what happens, you know, if you're looking at it, In bigger companies. So like corporations and stuff, their feedback loops are super, super slow. And that is because of that. You know, you have bureaucracy that builds over time, uh, because of the depth of the company or the product itself that requires safety mechanisms. So you don't break things as you're going through those loops. When you're young, when you're early, you can run through a lot every single day. I think that's some really solid advice. If people are looking for product ideas and they're already doing client work, do you recommend that they look for internal tools like you did? Or how should they go about finding those ideas? Do you have any thoughts about, yes. So I actually answered this through a friend of mine that works in real estate. You know, we worked with a real estate agency, uh, for the past few years now we had a kid who had just had a baby girl and the, it was, uh, asking me Vito, how can I actually generate a little more cash for my family now, which is more of the side business concepts that you were describing. I told him, just look at your day and see what you can automate. And build that, that's it. So what he did is he found a thing that every time they have a guy that is a, you know, a landlord that is from abroad and they need to do the taxes thing here in the UK, whatever he needs to send something to this guy and then send it to that guy and then log into this website and then. Go to that thing. And it's a posters that a lot of people don't want to do, and he knows how to do it. So to him, it takes him like 10, 15 minutes and it gets, it done gets 300 pounds every time he does it himself manually. So don't automate it, you know? And that's it keep the 300 pounds every time someone needs it, even more, put them on a cycle because taxes come every year and you're good. You know, you have a little product. There's one more question I want to ask you. Is there anything you miss about doing client work? Am. No, I don't think so. To be honest with you, we do have a few clients that are on the care plan. So we don't do any, any new projects. Right. Uh, but we do have care plan clients that we kept, uh, just so that we can still get high on our own supply. You know, so we're still using our product every day and the developers and the support agents go in, use the product to help, uh, our. 10 clients that we have kept using the tool on their day to day operations, which that we're there to find the bugs before I will use those do. Other than that, you know, I gained so much clarity since I stopped this forces. I can hear now from a lot of our users that thanks to our platform, this really helps alleviate a lot of these pain points that I was experiencing. But a lot of your day is basically dealing with it. The people that don't have full trust in you. If that makes sense. You know, you always put under the place where you're a little bit questions about your motives, if you will, you know, because you're actually supplying the service to these people, you know, that what you're doing is the right thing for their business. But I don't know, you know, they're not meant to know if what you're doing is the right thing for their business. So they're always kind of on the questioning side in a lot of those relationships, but, and what I found is that this is poisoned for your mindset. Compared to being around a supportive group of people, which are our users, the same people as us, you know, they are agency owners and freelancers themselves, and they come from a constructive point of view rather than a, I don't think we should do that. Maybe we can do it like that. And because I don't have a lot of these communications on phone or this I'm getting to experience these conversations. On my day to day, you know, like what we're having right now, uh, you know, you talk to smart people, you learn things along the way, as opposed to saying the same thing. Can you please send me the log ins to the domain register? Well, no, this is not the domain register. Yeah, I think people can definitely relate to that. That's great. Vito, thank you so much for sharing your story. Uh, this was really good. If people want to learn more about doopy feedback or you, where should they go? Please visit WP feedback.co. Our users are seeing an 80% decrease in the project completion time from the standard five weeks. Down to 10 days, three weeks down to three days. It's miraculous. So I invite everyone to come one boat and try it out. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks spitter. Uh, out to you at the next work camp. Awesome.

On this episode I talk to Joe Howard, the founder of WP Buffs, a productized service offering WordPress care plans. He's also the co-host of the WPMRR podcast and runs the WPMRR Summit. Joe is all about recurring revenue and if you're interested in how you can start to implement recurring revenue into your business you should listen to this episode. Links Joe on Twitter WP Buffs WPMRR Summit WPMRR Podcast Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) This week, I'm super excited to talk to Joe Howard about MRR or monthly recurring revenue. Joe knows a lot about MRR. He's the host of the WP MRR podcast. He also runs WP MRR summit, and he's the founder of WP buffs at productized services business that brings in you guessed it monthly recurring revenue. You can find Joe on Twitter at. Joseph H. Howard and his business on WP buffs.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. I started this episode by asking Joe what comes to mind when he hears the phrase billable hours. Joe, what comes to mind when you think about the word billable hours? Ooh. It makes me think about how I need more billable hours. It makes me think that I'm trying to get billable hours somewhere. Man. I got to keep getting more billable hours to keep powering what I'm doing. Recurring pain. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It makes me think like, okay. If I'm focused on getting. Billable hours. Like there's a lot of pieces of my business. I got to focus on too. It's like, I gotta get more billable hours and then I actually have to execute those billable hours. So it's like, I kind of do some sales and I have to like actually do the operations of my business and then I have to, Oh, there's all the admin behind it. How do I invoice them? Like, do I have to like follow up on the invoice? Is that all automated, like kind of makes me think about like freelance work and how there's a ton of stuff to do around being a freelancer. You have to wear a lot of hats. It's not a fan. I wouldn't say I'm not a fan. I'd say, I think there are a lot of challenges around being a freelancer. I know a ton of freelancers who do great work, who run super scalable businesses by themselves. You know, maybe you'd call them like solo preneurs or like just, I don't know if they'd probably call themselves just freelancers and they run super successful businesses just by themselves. Maybe a couple of contractors. I'd probably know a lot of people who run those freelancers and very, very small businesses that are more profitable than businesses with say like 10 employees that. Maybe the media would say like, Oh, they've got 10 employees or 20 employees. Like, they're a bigger, better company now. It's not really how it works. You know, if someone else who runs a small business, you know, as well as I do, that's not really true, but I'm definitely a big fan of focusing more on a monthly recurring revenue and like subscription models. Pricing models, business models, as opposed to focusing on billable hours. I think if you can run a business where you can, you know, charge $500 an hour and easily get, you know, a ton of hours every month, that's great model, nothing wrong with that. But I think it's a little bit less stressful, a little bit more. Scalable. If you were trying to like grow your business, or if you're just trying to like want a small, comfortable business to set up a product, or maybe a productized service package plans, whatever that provides ongoing value for people. So it's something you're doing kind of month over month, so you can say, Hey, charge them every month. Now you're providing value over the long-term for people, which is good for you and good for them. And you're able to jump into the subscription model, which makes it a little less stressful to run a business. When you kind of can predict your revenue a little bit, as opposed to the billable hours thing where it's like, all right, I got this many billable hours. Okay. I got to get 20% more mobile hours next month. Like, how am I going to do that? Well, if you're a subscription model, you know, your churn. You know, your growth trajectory. So you kind of have an idea how much money you're going to make the next month. So you can predict who can I hire? What's my profit margin going to be mixed a little less stressful. I think. Yeah. I talked to Brian castle about productized services on this podcast and it sounded to me like, You know, the recurring revenue part of it is a really key to basically why it allows you to just focus more on the business side of things. And like, once you're kind of close to sale, you can focus more on the delivery and you don't have to sell new people every month. Yeah. Shout out to Brian. Brian's one of those productized service guys and just like startup guys who I follow online. I love all this stuff. Productized course stuff that I followed for a long time, as someone who kind of like started doing this stuff after him, he was kind of, and those people who was that kind of, one of those people who I was like, I got to follow this guy. Cause he knows a ton of stuff. Um, runs a few successful, small businesses doing this kind of work. I would say this subscription model is super helpful. In terms of, especially like a productized service. So like my business does WordPress care plans, you know, branch, you know, you do WordPress work as well. This subscription model for me is easier than the website building. We do WordPress care plans. So we're managing WordPress websites and we have a white label program. So we work with some agencies and freelancers as well to help them. Make one monthly recurring revenue too. And I used to build websites. That was tough for me to kind of scale that and grow that as a business, people have done it before very successfully, right. There are a lot of agencies that do website builds and are super successful, but I just kind of couldn't crack it. So I figured it out. Let's do management instead, and that actually worked way better for me in a way better for us as a company. So I'd say focusing on that, it can be easier than a lot of ways. Yeah. So you were touching on it there, but like, I'd be curious to know a little bit more about your background and kind of your journey into recurring revenue because you guys, you mentioned you started out with more of like a traditional freelance or agency route. Yeah, definitely did the business model. Yeah. I've been at WordPress for like eight or nine years. Something like that. And, you know, I used to be a freelancer and most people start off in WordPress. You kind of learn WordPress, what is this open source software? And they learned to like put websites together. Oh, there's page builder. Oh, here's some themes I can use. Uh, what hosting should I use? And you know, most of that stuff for someone who has like basic tech skills is pretty straightforward. I consider myself a non-technical co-founder like, don't ask me to be a dev, like don't ask me to be an engineer. You don't want me to break your website? That's not my bag. Um, but I know basics of WordPress and how to get around the dashboard hosting basics. I know XML, CSS, basics. I know the foundational stuff. Um, and so I was able to put websites together for folks and that's where most people in WordPress start, they're like, Oh, let me find some clients to build websites for. And yeah, I mean, we talked about it a little bit in my other answer, but it was just like, And I have to like find new people to build websites for, and they got to build the websites and I have to do all of the admin for my business. I mean, it's just a lot to do as a freelancer. And I found that I was trying to think of a different model. I was like, what else could I do besides just the bills? And I kind of searched around, do some Google searching and found some other companies that were doing like website management through these like kind of website care plans and subscriptions. And I was like, Oh, that's what I want to do. Like, cause that's a much more scalable model for me. Like the maintenance and ongoing support. I can build a 24 seven team. It works perfectly into like me wanting to build a remote team. Cause I can like use 24, seven support as an excuse to like work from home myself. Like, Oh, we're a remote team. I want to work from home too. So perfect. Well I'll work from home and also build a team that's international. And I really liked that, that our team, you know, we've got like 25 folks now on the team. Maybe almost 30 now, but from so many different places, that's really cool to me. Anyway, you saw those companies doing that. And I was like, okay, I don't have to do proof of concept. Like these businesses do this, like, cool. I can do this. So my skills, I said, I'm a non technical founder. Don't ask me to dev by. You can totally ask me to do like content marketing and some growth stuff. Um, some sales by necessity, but only because I kind of had to at the beginning, but like I can do the growth part of things and the marketing part of things. I'll say that's my bag. I'll bring some people in who are better at the operational side. Yeah. We'll do this thing. And that was like, I don't know, five years ago or seven. Yeah, here we are. So you really started a business and you didn't transition your freelance work into this. Like you actually started that business with a product and something like people could sign up. Yeah. Honestly, when I started doing like these care plans, that's what I call it. I, you know, it was WordPress care plan. I still kind of call it that. And we do kind of as a company, but we recently went through a rebrand and we're kind of positioning ourselves as more premium. So we're talking more like language, like subscription support, WordPress subscription that powers your, your digital business. You know, that kind of verbiage at the basic core level. We're doing WordPress care plans and website support for folks. But I didn't have a lot of this language. When I started, I was like, care plans. I guess that's what we're doing, but I didn't know what a product high service was. I didn't know any of like the subscription metrics that I was supposed to be tracking like lifetime value of a customer, you know, MRR. I didn't even really know what MRR was. I just kinda knew, like, I want to charge someone. Once a month, you understood the concept. Yeah. And you know, you're part of the tiny seed accelerator. So, you know, the world of MicroComp shout out Rob walling and all the folks at micro confident, and we'll do all that sad. We couldn't do a real, you know, IRL MicroComp maybe we would've met up in microphone, you know, this year, but my first micro conference, I went to three or four years ago. I remember going and afterwards. Being like, Oh, like this is the foundation. I can really build this business. I'm like, I understand what I'm doing now. Cause I understand like the basic metrics that I need to be tracking as a subscription business. And like that's my business model. It's like subscription pricing. It's kind of like what SAS products do. It's just happens to be we're a services company and we put our services together in a package. So that was super. Eye-opening for me, uh, after having gone to micro conference, I felt like I could see the path I needed to go on because I knew where I was. I knew where I needed to go. Whereas before I was some like character in a video game, like discovering the new like territory, like I don't, I don't really know where I'm going, but now I have a more clear path. So that was a big help for me. In my conversation with Brian, one of the things he mentioned when you're productized your services, it's much easier to market it because it's easier to tell people what you do because you've packaged it up. So it's easy just to present like what your service is, because you thought about like, this is who we're doing it for. This is what we do. Like, this is how much it costs. If you go to the extreme level with like a protest service, like people can just put their credit card on your website and buy it. I think you can buy your service with dopey buffs. Like you can just. Put your credit card in there and purchase a plan, right? Yes. It's interesting because you can do that. Most folks who work with us, they'll book a call with us before they buy. It's a little different than other subscriptions you buy because when you buy our subscription, you're actually. Giving us and allowing us full access to your website and your hosting area. Like we are managing all that for you. So, and that's like a huge deal, right? It's like if maybe someone has a small website, you know, it gets like 50 visitors a month, maybe not as big a deal. Like, Hey, can you guys work on this? But we work on a ton of websites now that are doing, you know, millions of dollars of sales. Every month that are getting two, 3 million unique visitors every month and traffic, and these are pretty big deal websites. So someone like that's probably not going to like, just buy their subscription and be like, okay, like, let's go here are your login credentials, right. They want to hop on a call. They want to probably talk to a sales person. They probably want to talk to someone higher up the company if they're a big company like that. So there's kind of a sales process and we're make booking calls really easy. So, I mean, that's one reason, but also because. We actually want to vet people too. We're at the kind of growth point now where we actually don't want to like work with everyone, nor are we a perfect fit for everyone. Some people just need a freelancer to do like one or two hours of work a month. That's fine. You know, we're not claiming to be the best fit for everyone, but we are the best fit for folks who like want a technical support team that helps work with whatever they want to do with WordPress 24 seven. So when we hop on calls with people like their sales calls, quote unquote, but they're really for like education and to like, Talk with people to like fit them with the right care plan for them. Cause we have multiple options to make sure care plans are right fit for them to make sure that working with us is going to truly benefit them in the longterm. That's really like what we try to focus our calls on. So yes, people can come. If people are listening to this and run a WordPress site, they can totally come and like buy on our website right now. But we usually push people to book a call just because we want to talk to people beforehand, too. Like your website's a big deal. Branch, cio.com is a big deal to you, right? That's your business, it's your passion. It's where you make your money from. Like, it's not something that you're like casual about. Right. And so it's like, we're doing video right now as an addition to audio. It's like, you want to talk to someone you want to see who's going to be working with your website. I want to make sure that they're authentic. You want to make sure that there's someone you can trust and building that trust is the biggest part of bringing on new customers and new white label partners for us. It's like, we're a team and that's important. I think actually for this audience, the white labeling stuff is probably more interesting. And, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. I wanted to ask you and this. This might be different between services. So you can maybe help me understand that one of the, maybe bad things about recurring revenue or not bad things, but one of the things about it is it's all about the lifetime value of the customer. So when you sell software on a subscription model, you don't ask for the entire lifetime value upfront, like you allow people to pay for it monthly, but then also I'm not saying this is bad necessarily, but then you also have to deliver that value. Every month because otherwise people are going to churn. So I don't know if you can make the same, like comparison to services, but is it always better? Like if you can get people on a subscription compared to just, you know, cashing in the whole entire lifetime value upfront, if you can, and like, how do you think about this? Yeah, that's a super interesting question. I love monthly recurring revenue, but I, for sure I'm not the person who is like. All the time monthly recurring revenue is better. It's kind of like remote work. It's like, I'm a big fan of remote work. I love working from home, but I'd never say like remote work is the only way to work like in office is over. Like for everybody, no one should ever work in an office. Again, there are a lot of benefits to working in an office as there are probably a lot of benefits to getting the lifetime value of a customer upfront. I think. If I've learned one thing, building a business it's that there are a thousand different ways to accomplish a goal. A lot of it is just like, I like to think about everything in this kind of lean methodology kind of circle. If you've read lean startup, you'll know that there's kind of this, you know, you build an MVP, something small, you test it and you measure it and then you make changes and you try it again and simple way of describing it. You just do that over and over again. And so if people are thinking about doing what the recurring revenue, or like trying to get lifetime value up front, I'd say like, try one of them and see how it works. And you can always shift down the line, especially when you're starting off. When you're small, you can do whatever you want to pretty much like if we change our whole business model, now it'd be a total pain in the butt because we are like a million dollar a year business. Like there's more at stake. There's more complexity in our business, but if you're just starting off, try something for a month who cares now? No, one's going to see it. No, one's going to care, but you can figure out what's gonna work best for your business. Everyone's in such a different context. It's hard for me to say like, you should definitely do monthly recurring revenue. We should definitely do lifetime value upfront. But I would say, I think that I actually see the, having to provide ongoing value to achieve that lifetime value of a customer. While doing a monthly recurring revenue sort of pricing. I actually see that as a positive. Yeah. I think that it makes us better to have to sell this ongoing care plan on a month to month basis. We don't do contracts. We're not like, you know, Comcast like sign up for two years and you get this deal. It's like, no, like you work with us month to month. Then if you want to cancel anytime you can cancel no big deal. Um, and I think that actually makes us better because it kind of creates this like, No pressure, no diamonds sort of situation for our operations team, where they have to find more ways to continue to provide better ongoing value for people. So that hopefully we're even actually providing more value for people on month 12 and month 24 and month 36. And we are on month one. And that allows us to one, just become a better company and do a better job. And to bring more to our marketing and sales team to say like, here are the things that we do here are the ways we've said. Maybe we weren't doing the best job. We actually improved all these things. Now, you know, we're actually a better company and allows our sales and marketing team to kind of put more at the forefront of like, here's all the great stuff we do that we probably wouldn't have been able to say or do or use in our sales and marketing team. Had we not kind of put a little pressure on our operations team. So I kind of think of it as, as positive pressure. It doesn't always work out that way. Right. There may be more stressful situations in which, you know, that'll be. More stressful or more difficult than not been easy for us. Of course it's been a challenge, but I think that's actually been a positive for us in our context. Okay. What about expansion revenue? Yeah. Expansion revenue is huge. Yes. Actually, when I went to micro conference, I learned about, okay, there's this thing called net negative churn. And there's this thing called you can upgrade your current customers and that's kind of part of growth and part of sales at that point, I was starting to think already. Okay. We probably need to have like a customer success team. Um, we need someone who really focuses on our current customers, not just to make them happy, but to make them successful, but to upgrade them from, you know, their plan level into new plans to help our white label partners add more client websites to their plans. That's where a lot of expansion revenue comes in trust. How would you explain that negative churn to people? You can get a little bit complex, but I'll give people kind of a simple version of it. And honestly, how I think about it, because I think about everything as simply as possible, if it gets too complex, like I'm not gonna understand it. So I try to keep things simple just for myself, net negative churn is if you say, if you have a hundred customers and you have 10 of those customers turn out in a month, that would be kind of. 10% a user churn, but if you think about revenue, it's a little bit different than user turn. So use your turn is kind of like the percentage of users that drop off. Maybe those 10 customers are dropped off for all small customers. And the revenue churn is actually pretty small. Maybe they were your biggest customers and that's a big revenue turn and that would be not as good. But if you think about that revenue turn from those 10 customers in a month, take that as one number. Okay. Listeners, let's set that number aside. Let's say it's a thousand dollars of revenue turned out of your business. Okay. Let's set that thousand dollars aside. Now let's think about the other 90 customers or your business. Maybe you were able to upgrade. 10 of those remaining 90 customers, maybe now those 90 customers, instead of paying you $50,000, they pay you $70,000. So you've raised that number $20,000 of your remaining customers. Okay. So now let's put those two numbers together, minus $10,000 and plus $20,000. That would in essence, be net negative churn because your upgrades and expansion revenue is bigger than your churn revenue month over month. Now, if you can achieve that, this, this is kind of sounds silly, but it's like kind of like the Holy grail, like growth for a business subscription business. And if you can do that and maintain that and month over month over month, Ooh, you're in a really good position. That's in essence what net negative churn is. And. People probably most important to like start off and figure out what your turn is, where your user journeys. So your revenue journey is what your expansion revenue is. I figured out all these things and you're not going to have probably meant negative turn from day one. Right. But no, all these numbers and over months, and maybe over years, you will figure out how to form it, those numbers into a way to hopefully get you to net negative term. I don't think it's super common and it takes a lot of work to get there, but that's something we're working on right now. We've actually had. A few months of net negative churn, and now we're working on keeping it consistent. And so if we can really figure out how to keep that really consistent month over month and do it every month, as opposed to like a month here or two months here, then we'll be in really good shape. Yeah, that's really good. I think another thing that people don't always understand about subscriptions is the number of people you churn. It's a percentage of your customers. So like, let's say 10%, but the amount of people you bring in every month is dependent. Not on how many customers you currently have, but on how many customers you get into the top of your funnel. So that's a fixed number. Let's say 10 customers a month, not 10%, just 10 customers. So like eventually if you don't have expansion revenue, your churn will just be bigger. Then the amount of people you bring in and you'll hit a plateau and you won't be able to grow. So then it's very important that you have this expansion revenue kind of build into the entire, like cohort of where customers. Yeah. I honestly, another reason I'd say it's important is from what we were just talking about, which is like, you want to provide ongoing value for people. That's how you're going to keep subscriptions going and how you keep your churn low. A lot of that involves continuing to make your product better. Like, there are a lot of ways to grow a subscription business. Right? You could get more, like you said, customers, top of funnel, do a lot of sales, get a lot of folks in, but a lot of people probably know this analogy. If your churn is really high, you have your bucket with pouring more water in, but there's a big hole in the bucket. A lot of water is pouring out. You're never like adding water to bucket, right? So adding new customers is one way to increase your monthly recurring revenue subscription business. But if you can lower churn. That's just as valid way of growing your business. I guess I'd caveat that by saying like mathematically, you have to figure out what is more impacted full for your business. Right? Like every business, the dollar figures are going to differ on like, what is reducing churn this much? How does that affect your business? How does this many new sales affect your business? How much does this expansion revenue affect your business? I would tell people to go like, get a bare metrics, subscription, use that to like pour all your Stripe. Revenue in there and they can tell you like what your lifetime value is. You need your lifetime value, your churn rate, your customer acquisition costs, all those different numbers to work with. Yeah. And I love lifetime value. Like that's one of my favorite metrics because our direct customers like a small business or not coroner who has a WordPress site that comes to us, you know, pretty good lifetime value. But our white label partners who come to us, like some of them come to us like 50 sites, 75 sites, like. Those lifetime values can be really big. And so that allows me to say, okay, here's our average lifetime value for all of our white label partners. Okay. Now it's pretty easy to have a good sense in my mind of how much money we can spend on acquiring a certain customer. Okay. If we're going to try and go out and get a big customer, that's going to be a hundred thousand dollars lifetime value for us. Okay. Well, like I can spend $20,000, like trying to go get a client like that. It makes me less hesitant to grab a high. Ticket price item to conference. Cause I want to go meet some big agencies or to hire a head of growth so that he can do a lot of outreach and make sure that he is maintaining good relationships. And that's actually like part of his, and it can be a little bit hazy to be like, I want you to spend 20% of your time on like relationship management. Like what does that is that growth? Like, that's kind of like a hazy thing, but to me, it's not because I know the lifetime value of a big client. And I know how much time it requires to put in to sometimes get some of those big clients. And so that's another reason these metrics are really valuable because it really gives you a clear view into like how much value does it a certain kind of customer. So bring into your business that way you kind of have a really good idea of like, I can spend this much on things that he's talked about, but like how much can I spend on like Facebook ads? Yeah. What can I spend on Google ads? I don't really like either of those as customer acquisition channels personally, but like, just as an example, like, Hey, if you want to do Facebook ads, like, well, how much do you spend? Like, I don't know. 500 bucks, like no, have a good idea of how much it costs to acquire that customer with aleck. And by that customer is that'll give you a good and less stressful way to say here's so much money. I feel like I can spend you have a good idea of kinda like what margins look like. Yeah, that's good. And I think even for like traditional freelance businesses or agency business models, people could still think about the lifetime value of a customer. Like how big is the project? And like how often do they come back and do more projects? I mean, it's not easy, but it's. It's a nice framework. I think, yeah. Measuring this is not easy. All this stuff is not easy. I mean, I mentioned like tools, like bare metrics. There's like ProfitWell as well, where you can port your Stripe subscription into their products. And it just gives you a really clear picture of like, what's your lifetime value? What's your turn. But that's like level one, like that's like the first step of it. There's so much more to be able to measure and all this stuff, right. It's like to calculate what your customer acquisition cost is, is like super difficult. And it's really. Based on everyone's business, but like there's so much to measure in terms of like what your sales funnel is. Right? Like our funnel is like most of our traffic comes from like content marketing, right? So people come in via search, they'll read a blog post and then like 3% of those people will like join our email list or book a call and then people book the call and then we'll talk to them and then we'll send some up emails and maybe some of those people will join up. And so that's our funnel. So how do we like measure, which of those pieces of content are doing the best and like how much of it. Cost to write that piece of content and then like, Oh, should we write more content like that? And then do we have to look at like Google analytics to like figure all this out. We have to create all this customer portrait. I'm making this a little more complicated on this audio podcast. Sorry, everybody. But like, that's how it is in a lot of cases, you add these layers of complexity and it's hard to like have one single dashboard where like all your stuff is. Um, so if people are trying to do this, I I'd definitely say like, It's okay. For things to be a little bit disjointed, to be a little bit complex. You can always work on improving and always work on trying to bring those things into a singular area, but it's not going to be perfect to start. The most important part is to start and to like take steps forward. Eventually you'll, uh, maybe grab some new software or do some more things to go and get some analytics help to bring all that stuff together. I wouldn't focus on like being perfect with your data. I would say actually what you said. A little bit ago, which was like, you want to have a window into seeing kind of the trends and in general, the performance of things, like the exact number to me is not the most important part to me. It's like, okay, sales last month, like we got 30 new accounts in last month. Oh, we got 40 new accounts in this month. So that means 25% growth from last month. This month, the trend of it is what I'm more interested in as opposed to like the exact number, which. Can be kind of arbitrary. Yeah, for sure. It helped me unpack the white labeling stuff you offer with your business. Maybe I don't understand this the wrong way, or I get this the wrong way or why this is valuable to agencies, but is your wide labeling solution as a way for agencies to build recurring revenue into their businesses as well? Or is it just to add value to their customers for both? So. The white label program pretty much allows an  or a freelancer. Let's say you're running an agency, Peter, and you've got 20 clients you're working with. And most of your money comes from like the marketing stuff for the design work you're doing, or maybe the website builds. So you're focusing on, but you have, I have these 20 clients and they keep asking you for. This and that on their website, and maybe you're not charging them or maybe you're charging them billable hours. Maybe they're just kinda like, that's not really where you're making a lot of, of your money as an agency owner. So WP buffs would come in and that your agency would come and work with us. And you'd hand off the 24 seven support to our team. But it's a white label solution. So we hook your support inbox in the, our help desk. You know, we have your logo and your signature at the bottom of all our emails we send, we pretty much allow you to resell our care plans, our 24 seven support to your client base. We also, and it was a white label partner. We give you a discount on all their plans, so you can read it, sell at some margin, which actually helps it become a profit center for your business as an agency. So let's talk about before and after. So after you're, you're working with us. You are continuing to be able to dedicate all the time you want to, your website builds your marketing or design anything. Your agency is doing what you're doing as a freelancer. You're still managing 20 clients sites, but you're making profit on all of those care plans that you've kind of resolved through WP buffs and. That has become more of a profit center for your business. That's more monthly recurring revenue that you're driving with. Your business actually has become part of your business model to resell care plans. After you've done, the website builds most importantly of all that stuff is really that your clients are super happy. You know, we've done 24 seven support for years now. We're kind of at the, you know, I guess I'd say at the forefront of this area in the WordPress space, We know how it's done. We have excellent systems. We take care of our clients and our clients, clients, our partners, clients, and your clients get this awesome 24 seven support that maybe you as a freelancer or an agency, like, do you have time to like go hire an international team or like team around the world to do this stuff? Well, you can also just plug and play into WP buffs so we can do that. So some people want to do it themselves. Some people want to build out. Internally. That's totally cool. I'll help you. If anybody wants to do that, come talk to me. I love talking about this stuff, but if you want an easier kind of more plug and play solution, and honestly one where you don't have to like, worry about speed or security of your client sites, or like doing all the updates or like if a client comes to you and it's like, Hey, like I need this color changed on my head. Or you're like, ah, like, do I charge them for that this five minutes of work? It's like, no, just sell the care plan that comes with unlimited 24, seven website edits through us. And. Make profit on it and your client's really happy and it just works. So, yeah, that's an essence how the white label program works. There's some services where I could see people do this themselves, but for 24 seven support, like that would be really hard for even the big agency. Like that's a business in and of itself that they would have to build. Another thing like this makes me think of is some hosting companies like flywheel, for example, They allow agencies to resell their hosting. So there's actually quite a few different services like yours with the  and maybe the hosting company you use. Like, there are many ways that you can actually fairly easily, like where you you're almost like an affiliate partner and you just take a cut because you bring in the customer, but you're also providing a great experience for your customers, but you're also starting like to see. Just a little bit of that recurring revenue, which is really good. Yeah. Peter, you're a smart guy. You should come with me and tell more hosting companies about this stuff. Cause I've been thinking about it in the exact way you have for a long time. Like we run an affiliate program through WP boss so people can earn commissions for referring folks over to us. We have a few significant. Partners in the WordPress space, you know, whatever theme companies that need overflow support, Hey, go to WWE, get some help, some plugin companies, same thing. Um, hosting companies as well. We've got some of the bigger hosting companies in WordPress space using WP bus has overflow support as kind of a referral relationship. Some actually don't use our affiliate program. They're like not our style. We just, you know, here's a resource for you. We'll go use them. But some do what my thought about all of this is. I love this world of kind of managed WordPress hosting. Like I love the idea of paying a little more for hosting and like not ever having to worry about the hosting. That to me is a really cool idea. And what I've been thinking about for years is like, let's take the next step of that. Like manage WordPress hosting. Great. What about managed WordPress? Take the hosting out hosting companies. I like, I've been wanting to roll all of this into one service for a long time. And I think hosting companies are starting to get this. Honestly, a lot of hosting companies don't really want to give them the services game because sometimes it's not a scam. Like they want to stay in the like product area and they don't really want to be responsible for services. Hey, you can refer those folks over to us. That's fine. But in terms of like adding as well value for customers as possible, and for folks running WordPress sites, like I love the idea of just managed WordPress. Like the hosting is taken care of. You get a WP bus care plan with this. It's a monthly subscription and it's all one monthly subscription up until now. We haven't sold any hosting. Like we don't resell hosting. We don't include hosting in our care plans cause actually want to partner with hosting companies. I love the idea of like, We're the best of 24 seven WordPress support. They're the best at hosting. Right. But like we're experts in our areas. Let's combine those into one package and roll with it. Yeah. I like that vision. Cool. So besides support and hosting, do you have other ideas for where people could get started with this? Like what are things that they could try to like switch to a subscription model to kind of get their feet wet? Yeah. Do they need to start a product from scratch or like a productized services or like, is there a ways that they could more like step-by-step fashion or like try to get some recurring revenue with their existing customers or, yeah. Um, I would give our summit that we just did a little shout out. Um, we just. Through the WP MRR virtual summit. So people know I like monthly recurring revenue, WordPress, monthly recurring revenue, WP MRR, virtual summit. Um, we have a YouTube channel where we put all the videos up for free. So people are more than welcome to go check out the WP buffs, YouTube channel, and just watch some of the videos from that summit. I thought they turned out excellent. It's all about monthly recurring revenue and building a WordPress business focused on subscription. Services product, et cetera. I love productized service. The biggest reason I actually really like it is because I think it's the easiest place to start a subscription business without necessarily being highly technical. And for me, like, I am not technical, like building a SAS software product is really hard. Like there's some technical like requirements. Maybe you could hire someone to do it, but like, if you don't know any technical stuff, like how do you hire somebody to manage a product? If you don't know what. Building and like, maybe I'll look out, but like probably not. Right. So I think that product I service is really interesting to me because I would say people are thinking about like doing subscription stuff, like start with consulting, like start with a one time projects, help people with their websites. Do website builds. Like I did, you'll learn the pain points for folks. And all you have to do is I kind of take that and like put it into a package that sounds simple. And it's not that simple, but. You'll figure it out along the way. That's pretty much like if I'm saying it simply, that's how I did it. That's how everybody does it. If they're moving from kind of consulting to a productized service, you figured out the pain points for people you learn from people you use that kind of consulting to like talk with people and like maybe get your first few clients. And then you put this package together with all those learnings. And that's pretty much what a productized services it's like solving pain points for people through a services company, by putting a package together. That's like an anti-pain point package, then that's pretty much what it is. So I like that because it doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge. Like I knew a little WordPress when I started WP bus, I guess, a good amount of WordPress. So I knew a little bit, I knew a good amount, but I didn't need to be highly technical to start WP Bluffs. I just took kind of my website build knowledge and I kind of put it into what people need. Speed optimization, security optimization. They need their updates done. People don't want to do this. It is, they don't know how, or they just don't want to find a tie, but they don't. They're like, don't want to dedicate the time that has to deal with this stuff. And that's how w buffs came about. So I would say for people starting, like. If you're like, whatever consulting right now, we're doing one time projects. There's nothing the bad about that. That's where you should start. If you're thinking about going subscription, like use that knowledge, like that's actually a super easy bridge to move into a productized service sess, maybe a different story. I think there's a higher technical floor to building a SAS company. That being said higher risk, higher reward. I mean, I think SAS companies, because it's purely a product you can scale it probably better. You probably have better margins on average. Not all the time, but on average with a SAS product I service, but I'd rather have no a big bite of something that actually exists. Then a big bite of I'm not saying because I couldn't build a software product. Right. So. Yeah. I liked that when I spoke to a veto from Adobe feedback, basically the way they launched. So you already had basically an agency and they did like a big flash sale lifetime deals, which was basically the seed funding for their product. And that allowed them to work for it for awhile. But I think for most agencies and you're like working by the hour, it's hard to just set aside time to just. Build a product, but a productized service like Dan Norris, which I think basically had a competing product with WP buffs. He wrote the seven day startup. And I think it's right. Like you could literally just start something in a week or even shorter. Like you could just put up a website with some sort of offer and see if people want to buy it. Yeah, Vito. Awesome. Dude. One of my good friends in the WordPress space, like his product a lot. I've had him on my podcast too. So, uh, he said when I picked the brain of a lot as well, um, Dan is someone who I may have emailed Dan, when I was starting off W2 buffs, just saying hi, honestly, I can't remember. Maybe I didn't type. I have no idea. Maybe I'm making that up. It feels like I did. Sounds like something I do anyway. He's someone who started WP curve before I was even thinking about doing this and actually grew WP curve before I even was like, kind of in this area. So he's someone I actually probably have to thank for kind of being one of the first in this area. And growing the first business that really did this, I think a lot of us came after him. Yeah. I think he sold that business, which is another nice point about like building a subscription businesses that you can actually sell your business. It becomes an asset, all these subscriptions, it's now GoDaddy support services or something like that. But yes, WP curve is now part of GoDaddy and Dan's no longer part of WP curve. Yeah. The selling of a productized service business. Is kind of complicated. I'd say you probably have more success trying to sell something like a software company or like a SAS product that a productized service. If you're selling a productized service for the profit margin, maybe over the last 12 months or something, how successful the business is maybe for some folks on the team, maybe like us having an international team that might be a benefit to someone who might want to buy something like that. A software product though. Now you're talking about like, I'm buying this. Actual code of this. Like, we don't have a WP buffs. We worked at WordPress, right. It's open source and we don't have any like code that is ours. And so. There's no value to that. Like our value is in how successful we run our business, our systems and how tight our systems are. And then also there's additional areas. Like all the traffic we drive to the website, I guess the website itself, right there is our YouTube channel. There's, you know, our, our summits that we throw, like, there's a lot of other additional things as well, but we don't have any like proprietary software that we built as someone would come and buy. Like they would come to buy the success of the business. Not necessarily like the code that you wrote probably unless you. Wrote some code alongside it. So yeah, people are thinking about running a productized service. Like if you're thinking about doing it to sell a business, it's definitely going to be different than like selling a SAS or selling a piece of software. It's probably going to be more difficult. You're probably going to have a harder time finding a buyer, but it's not impossible. Like if I wanted to sell WWS today, like I could. Do it, it probably wouldn't be too difficult also. Like we're pretty successful. So yes, we could probably find someone, but I love what I do. Um, uh, I have no plans to do anything. That's gonna be rough stands around. I think this was a really inspiring chat and I hope it inspired some false true check-out. Recurring revenue and see if there are ways that they can think of building that into their own business and mix up those billable hours with some recurring revenue. And if they want to do that, you have a lot of different places. They can go to follow all your different MRR branded projects. Do you want to plug a few of them? Short website, WP boss.com, WP mrr.com for the summit and for the podcast. That'd be few boxes, our business as a company. So people can go there. If they're interested in the white label program, they can come and live chat on the website and ask questions, or you can book a call or any of that. Everything else is there. You can scroll to the footer and there's all the usual footer stuff and all the social Shannon's so awesome. Awesome, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciated it. And then join our conversation. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Peter. It's been fun. Take care. You too.

In this episode of Billable Hours, I talk to Brian Casel. Brian is the founder of ProcessKit, a software tool that helps agencies document their processes and also helps them actually follow those processes. He's also the creator of the Productized online course and he runs his own productized service AudienceOps. Listen to hear Brian's advice on how to move from billable hours and into the world of productizing. Links Brian's website ProcessKit Productize & Scale AudienceOps Brian's podcast BootstrappedWeb Brian on Twitter Try Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress Branch is my company and the sponsor of this podcast. Branch helps agencies and freelancers set up automated deployments for all their WordPress client sites. Listeners of this podcast gets twice as many free deployments by identifying themselves in the live chat widget! ➡️ Create a free Branch account Transcript of this episode (automatically generated) Today on the show I'm excited to talk to Brian Casel, a true legend when it comes to productizing. Brian is the founder of quite a few different businesses and products, but two of them are especially relevant to you as a listener of this podcast. The first one is ProcessKit, a software as a service product that helps you document your processes and also helps you actually follow those processes. The other one is Productized an online course and community that teaches you how to productize your client work. Brian is also the co-host of the BootstrappedWeb podcast, and you can find him on Twitter at CasJam. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy. And fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines, it's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. I start out this episode by asking Brian a pressing question, Brian, what's so bad about billable hours. I love that first question. Billable hours is obviously charging money for your time. And you know, you're, you're calling out like the headline on my productize and scale website. And the thing is like, that's sort of just a way to speak to what most agencies end up running against it for a lot of freelancers and consultants as well. Which is at a certain point, you know, you get to this point where it's like is my entire business reliant on me, sitting here at my computer, doing the work, delivering the services. And, and even if you start to, you know, hire people to do some of your tasks, if you're still billing by the hour, Still relies on you to be there and, and to drive every single project, you start to see the ceiling insight. I mean, I definitely ran into that early in my career. I was a freelance web designer, web developer. I was doing a lot of work with WordPress and I didn't even bill by the hour, either as a freelancer, but I built by the project. So what would you say is the alternative to build by the hour? Is that value based pricing? Yes. So like a lot of people say that the alternative is to do, do a project based. Some people call it value based pricing and that's one way to look at it. And I also went that way when I was a freelancer, I would just talk to a potential client, figure out what the project scope is, and then just give them a flat price. And if there's scope creep, then we deal with that later. But I think that's a good start, but what I tried to get across when I talk about productized services, is that that too still doesn't solve all of your problems, all, all of your stresses as a freelancer or as an agency. Because what I ran into was, even though I was doing project based pricing, maybe value-based pricing still, every single project was completely different. You know, I was, I was doing websites, but I was doing websites for universities and then websites for doctors and then websites for restaurants and websites for a blog. Like that's still a completely different project, but that's also a completely different customer each time when you're doing a project based. Pricing strategy in the background is still based on the amount of hours that you expect to use on it. Like, is it still in theory, billable hours, but they just, basically, you try to guess how many hours that's going to be, and then you make an offer based on that. I know that a lot of agencies do it that way, but I never did. I honestly, I just never really cared so much about, um, the hours that I spent. I only just sort of cared about like, does this project basically seem profitable to me? Yeah. When I was, uh, when I was a freelancer, it all that mattered. Was that I made X thousand of dollars a month. I'm doing my work to keep the bills paid, basically. And you know, a lot of times, like as, as you grow as a freelancer or an agency, you start to raise your rates. So like the same project, the same scope, the same requirements that you might do in year one, you can start to charge five X for that. In year three. And that's also where you get into like the misaligned incentives of like billable hours. Because as you get better at your job, your skill set, or as your team gets better and better, they become faster and more efficient. That doesn't mean that they should charge less and less really. They should be charging more and more, but that's the opposite of, you know, if you're, if you're charging by the billable hours, but even if you're billing by the project, you still run into the ceiling of like the number of simultaneous projects that you can take on. But more importantly, If you're doing projects for anyone and everyone and all different types of projects, scopes. You're still in this treadmill of, Oh, we have to create a new custom proposal. We've got to do this whole discovery process. We've got a hope and rely on referrals. You know, we can't really do any sort of real marketing because we don't have a target customer. We don't, we don't have one person that we're speaking to. And that's where I get it to productize services is because like, you know, eventually you want to figure out like how can this become a, an actual business and an actual brand. That I can go market actively. Yeah. So, so let's talk about productized services because it sounds like that's basically the answer to all of these issues. Like basically with, you know, like traditional client work, it sounds like you started from scratch. Every time you start a project because you have to figure out everything and come up with everything or reinvent the wheel basically for this customer. Um, but it sounds like part-time services is a very good answer to this. Um, so let's talk a bit about basically what a prioritize service is and, um, And how it solves some of these issues that you just mentioned. Yeah. So with productized services, you know, a lot of people like to sort of like compare it to freelancing and, or, you know, just agency services in general. And one way that I like to differentiate it is that yes, it's still done by people. Largely, uh, you know, manually delivered services. And in many cases you can combine some software, some, some techniques, whether it's somebody else's software product or your own, but there's always an element of personally done for you or done with you services. But the real difference is that your. Targeting one ideal type of customer you're solving the same problem again and again, and you're doing it in a very consistent way. Like even if you dial in one problem to solve, we all know there's a thousand different ways to build the same type of website. So your product has service business. Should. Basically settle on your ideal methodology, your tool set your process, um, the systems that the roles on your team who need to deliver that, the timeline of how it gets delivered, all of that can become highly, highly standardized so that it can run very, very predictably. That's the goal of doing a productized services that you can literally 10 X and 20 X, the number of customers that you bring on every month and your team, the way that you're able to do that is because you know, that. Your processes run very predictably because typically with an agency, even as you start to grow, you still start to hit that friction of like all, but even just hiring another person. That's, that's a lot of work to get them trained up and to figure out, you know, who the right person is. Um, with a productized service, everything becomes more predictable. It sounds like potentially with a part-time service, you have to say no a lot, because you only want to work on like a very specific type of projects, basically the type of work that you have sort of productized and are offering in the marketplace. So I'm imagining, like if you start out as a kind of like local WordPress agency, are you moving to. Uh, more like productized philosophy, potentially. Like you'll have to say no to a lot of projects because they don't really fit whatever you're offering, you know? I think yes. And no. First of all, early on in your transition from general consulting into, into a productized service. Yeah. There might be some of that. I'm certainly not recommending just overnight. Decide like Friday of this week, that's the last day I'm doing general services. And then from that time on, it's all I'm going to say no to everyone, except for the ones that fit my box. Like, no, I'm not, I'm not suggesting that it's, it's always a gradual, you know, you phase out the old stuff, you phase in the new stuff. Right. But that being said, as you start to get traction with a productized service and you become more successful with it, you know, more. Really good customers coming your way, and then you can develop really good case studies. And then you can literally start to actually do marketing for your service because you know who your best customers are at that point, it starts to naturally attract the best. Perfect customers, because now you've become known as the solution for that problem. Right? I mean, I run audience ops. It's a blog content service. Like there are a lot of people who don't know me or anything, they just, at this point have, have heard of audience ops and they, they come in already convinced, like they already know that they need blog content produced. They don't need selling on that. And frankly, like the positioning of the whole business, like. Turns the other people away naturally. Right? Like we don't get people coming asking for website design because it's abundantly clear. We don't do website design, you know? Um, we just do blog writing. So yeah. So it's like, once you figure out a way to kind of. Package your services and more similar to how you would offer a product. You set the marketing and just turning it into a business, becomes something you can do. Like marketing becomes easier, your messaging around what you're offering. Like it might be easier if you were just saying we're a WordPress agency. If you're a WordPress agency, designing websites for whatever new CMS or something. Yeah. Yeah. The thing I love to talk about is that it's. Once you make your way to like a productized offering that has a really strong value proposition. You basically get it to a point where for the customer, it's just a yes or no proposition. It's like, yes, this is a perfect fit for me or no, I'm not the right person for that. And so it becomes a lot easier. To sell a new customer, but it's also a lot easier for a new customer to buy your service. You compare that to agency services where you'll spend hours doing meetings, you'll then spend a day plus writing up a whole custom proposal, and then you send it to them. And then you've got to negotiate back and forth on what what's in the project scope. When you're doing these hours estimates and all these different things. It's like a lot of time and effort on your part. And it's a ton of time and frustration for them. Cause they, they sorta know that they have this problem. Then they got to figure out well, is this agency actually going to deliver with this number of hours and all this stuff? So with a protest service, first of all, you don't need to do. Custom proposals. It's this is the problem that we solve. This is how we solve it. This is the price point. And for the customer, you know, they come to your site or they hear about you, you know, how are they? They find you it's Oh, everything that they're showing me completely resonates me. Like they get me, they're describing the problem. Like they're inside my own head. Like, clearly they've worked with hundreds of other customers who are just like me, right. They get me. And if they have that sense, then it's like coming to Amazon and finding the product that you came there to find. And then it's like, yep. Purchase. But if it's not the right fit, that that would be clear right away as well. And they probably wouldn't even reach out, you know? So it just makes it easier and less friction on both for both parties. So you fronted least. Two different part-time services that I know of. And the first one is restaurant engine, and the second one is audience ops. And kind of the way I understand the, the journey restaurant engine was your kind of the way you got into all this productizing stuff. And after running that business and also selling it, you started teaching other people how to run a practice service. And then audience ops is kind of like. You designing, I want to say the ideal productized service, because at this point you have some experience, you've done it before you've seen other people do it. Um, and you kind of do it again. So I think. I want to hear about restaurant engine and kind of like how you got into prototype services. And then I kind of want to get the roadmap that you followed for audience ops and kind of like how you got that off the ground or, um, uh, that's mostly correct what you were just saying. So my background is I'm a web designer, mostly designer front end kind of person first. And then, uh, you know, years ago, 10 plus years ago, I got heavily into WordPress. I was doing a lot of WordPress. Projects for clients. Um, and then I built restaurant engine, which when I first started it, I started that business around 2011 or so at the time, the thought was like, I want to build a SaaS. I wanna, I wanna make this a SaaS that's built on WordPress. And the idea was it would be a niche niche. Niche, uh, website builder for, for restaurants and we'll call it restaurant engine and any restaurant can come on board and sign themselves up. And I invested a lot in building this like fancy signup system and automatically creates a website for them on our WordPress multi-site network and had templates and all these features built in what I very quickly learned was restaurant owners don't want to do all that. They just want a website. So I started offering. Done for you set ups just to get them on board on onto the platform. I was offering that for free. And then eventually I started making it like an optional setup fee. And then eventually I learned that all the best customers are the ones who pay the setup fee. So why don't we just make that required for everyone? And then ultimately that was like the business model was, it was a paid done for you set up and then they're just subscribed like a SaaS, but they get like done for you. Updates to your website. Like you need to change out our photos, just send it to our team and we'll, we'll swap them in for you. And so, like we, we used our tech that we built on for restaurant engine to make our team really, really efficient at setting up these websites for restaurants. And that's, that's where it started to click that. Like, this is really. Not a SaaS. This is actually more of a productized service with a little bit of tech that powers it. Is there a lesson there that if your customer don't really care by using your software, like, it might be an idea to think about, like, if they actually do need to use that software, if you can just use it on behalf of them and kind of offer like a software with a service, I think I've heard it. Yeah. I love that model the software with a service. I've got an article about that on my website. Um, Also, uh, you know, speaking of product services, I have this newer article that's that lays out like six different business models, even within productized services. There's different variations that, that have worked. You were saying about like, like the ideal model for productized services. And the way that audience ops was built is like, that's just one, but there's many others that have grown much larger than, than audience ops. And so we kind of go through all those examples on, on the article. I can link that up. Yeah. We'll link that up in the show notes. Yeah. From there. Yeah. I did start teaching productized services still near the end of when I owned restaurant engine. I think I launched that course in 2014 and it continues to this day. I've got a little community around it and the training has been updated a few times in 2015. I exited restaurant engine and. Started audience ops right around the same time that I sold restaurant engine. Yeah. So do you want to talk about what audience ups is and how you started it? The journey is documented on your podcast. I remember listening to your podcast back then and enjoying following that journey. Yeah. Yeah. That's on a bootstrapped web with my buddy Jordan gal. Yeah. Audience ops started in 2015 and the idea at the time was, you know, I knew that I was exiting restaurant engine, so I was looking for. What's the next business that I could start that, you know, because the, the exit from restaurant engine, it was a nice cash exit, but it. Wasn't like life changing. I definitely still had to work after that. So I, I was really thinking about like, what's the fastest way to basically replace my bootstrapper income from a restaurant. Imagine, cause that's going to go away in a few months and I don't want, I just burn through the cash that I get from the exit. So I was considering a few different options. I was even looking at a SaaS idea at the time, but I came to the conclusion that it would just take way too long. To get a new SaaS software product built and validated and first customers and get it up to an MRR level that even came close to restaurant engine. I was thinking about just like burning my cash from the exit and taking like a year or two to do that still. I just didn't feel comfortable with that. So I looked to the productized service model and within 30 days, It was already halfway up to the MRR that restaurant engine had. And within 60 days it definitely surpassed it and it went from it. It just grew so much faster than restaurant engine did. That's incredible. That's the thing with productized services that you don't need that many customers. So like our plans are between a thousand a month and 2000 a month. And so you just need a couple of customers on board too, to have all of a sudden, a decent little MRR. And then that can grow. Sorry to answer your question. The audience ops is primarily a done for you blog content as a service. So we power the blogs for a lot of software companies, actually a lot of WordPress plugin companies and like SaaS, B2B, SaaS. So. When they're coming out with educational blog content and lead magnets, my team writes those and we also publish them for you and do some social media for them. We've also expanded into a small done with you podcasting service. And we also do some case study articles for customers as well. So instead of hiring a freelance writer and basically giving them a process for publishing blog posts on our blog as a company, like we can hire audience ops and there's a package that we can purchase from the website, or at least, you know, we can see it described. And it's sold as a product. And then inside of that product is the service and we no longer need to like go out and hire a freelance writer and interview them and figure out what they should actually do. Yeah. And this is actually a good exercise, everyone that I recommend, but this is what I went through at the time. I was thinking through the idea for audience ops because in my previous business restaurant, engine blog, content and Google search. Being visible on the first page of Google for all our key terms, that was the primary marketing channel for restaurant engine. And I was talking about that at MicroComp to people. They were asking me questions about how do you hire writers? How do you give them a process? How do you take yourself out of that process? I got that question enough that it, it became apparent. Like there's an actual need here that I do know how to solve. Cause I solved it with restaurant engine. I hired teams and I, and I put the process together to remove myself. And so. Here's the exercise that I recommend you, you go through, it's like, suppose that you had a customer come to you and say, you know, we have this problem. We know that we want to achieve some goal or do X and our business budget. Isn't really an issue for us right now. We just don't know exactly how to put all the pieces together and what, what we would need. And this is like a dream scenario. Most agencies, you know, they've got to like haggle over scope and everything, but just imagine this for a second. That's your opportunity to. Basically come up with your best ideal scope. For what, what that should include. And at the time with audience ops, I was thinking, well, I don't just need a writer. I could hire a writer, but I still need to continuously come up with new topics to write about. I don't want to have to feed the writer topics every time I don't want to publish typos. We were going to need an, a copy editor. We're going to need to upload and set up every article on the blog. I want to do like email opt-ins for, for content upgrades. I want to do social media. Postings for every article that we do. Um, I want to send out an email newsletter with my articles. I've needed a featured image for every article. You know, like all these little things, it's like, Oh, I'll need to hire someone for that. Or I guess I still need to do that myself, or I need to edit their work myself, like all these things. So, so I was like, what if a service just did all the things that you, if you want to do blog content in your strategy, here's a service that you could just plug in and be like, now we have. A blog running. And not that it's completely hands off, like we still want to interview and gather insights from the client and from their customers. But, um, it's, it's set up so that you don't need to think about all those little things and, and we give you a dedicated writer and a dedicated copy editor, content manager. It keeps the schedule going. So, so I just wanted to like, like basically like check all those boxes. In a service and put a price on it. And that, and that's really the exercise that I think everyone should think about when they're thinking about like productized services. I want to talk a bit about basically some actionable advice for people who maybe want to dip their toes in productizing. When I think about it, like if I'm imagining myself as a freelancer or maybe just. No, starting from scratch. Like, it's kind of straightforward for me to see like how I could maybe start some sort of prototype service, but if I'm already an agency, like if I already have a team, do you think it's feasible to kind of like transition towards like a, more of a productized offering or is it better to start from scratch or do you have any tips for. Maybe an, an agency that already has a team and they're already doing client work and, um, charging by the hour, basically. Yeah, it's, it's, it's certainly feasible. So there's a few pathways you can go. Like one thing that a lot of agencies do is they, as they start to introduce a productized offer that is basically designed to lead to a custom project. But the initial offer is, is a paid service. Like it's very common for there to be a, uh, like a paid discovery project. Especially for like a website redesign, you know, over the course of four weeks, we will meet three times and we will assess your current website and, and your goals. And we'll develop a report and a game plan and a roadmap, maybe some wire frames. And that is the deliverable. Right. And that costs X thousand dollars. And then you can take that and go shop it to other agencies. I mean, that's one model you can do other agencies that I've seen start to offer like maintenance services and hosting and maintenance and upgrades and all that kind of stuff for like a monthly fee. I mean, that's something that actually agencies tend to float to other services, kind of just charged a bunch of money for the initial redesign. But really like, if you want to make your agency worth more, you know, if you want to add value and if you're ever going to sell your agency and get a higher multiple, what you really want is recurring revenue or retainer clients, because that's ultimately what a buyer would be buying from you. And whether you plan to sell your agency or not, it's still a healthy. Business choice to seek more ongoing retainer services. And, you know, I know that a lot of agencies shy away from like the smaller maintenance tasks, like, Oh, it's not worth our time. Like we lose money on it because we're counting hours on it. But if you can build the systems and processes to support that, And over time grow a base of subscribers that adds MRR and it just adds value. You know? So there's this model it's in that article, I was talking about one sub model in the prototype service world is what I sort of call it. The quote unquote unlimited model. So like unlimited tasks per month or unlimited X deliverables per month. The reality is it's not truly unlimited. Usually it's like you get one maintenance task a day or a 30 minute task only, and you can only stack so many of those, but the concept is that over time, most customers are not going to utilize your service. A hundred percent of the time, but it's still valuable because they know that you're there. Uh, I think WP curve was one of the first to offer this. Um, and now there are many more like it, but the idea is if you need on demand, help to manage your website, this service is there for, for a monthly fee. And it's kind of like an insurance policy because it's like, We might not use it for six months straight, but when we need it now, it's nice knowing that we have it now. So that's another way to look at it. That's awesome. And it makes a lot of sense. I want to talk a bit about your other product that you're working on now called process kid. And as far as I understand, like process kid, It's like the ideal tool to use if you're also offering a productized service or even maybe if you just want to like start to spend some more time thinking about your processes and streamlining your agency a bit. Um, sounds like process kit, um, kind of like has some of those things built into the tool? Yeah. So process kit is, is the software I've been, uh, designing and building for the last two years. It's, it's been grown with customers since last year. And yeah, we do have a lot of productized services naturally, you know, using it, but I'm also just a lot of agencies in general using it. It's basically a tool for designing and building and automating your processes with your team and then turning those processes into actual tasks. For your team to, to execute, but the nice thing about having them in the same tool, so your processes and SLPs and your team's tasks together in one place, the benefit of that is that you can build automation rules into your tasks. You know, the typical thing, and what I used to do is I used to document. SOP is over in Google docs. And then we do our tasks and whatever other task or project management tool that we use. But when your service is so predictable and standardized that every project is the same. And every time you onboard a new customer, they follow the same. Flow. They, they fill out the same forms. They do all these different things. And internally you have the same people doing the same tasks. Do you want that to run very predictably? I mean, there's still naturally going to be variations. Like, Oh, if it's a client who purchased our gold package, then these tasks should apply. And these tasks should be hidden. You know, you can build that sort of logic into process kit and, and integrate it with everything. So, um, the website, it says that it process could also kind of helps you actually stick to those processes that you have defined. And you just mentioned that process get probably replaces like Google docs and then plus like some project management tool. How are you able to do that? Like, how are you able to help people stick to their processes and actually do whatever they. Thought they were going to do when they designed that process. That's a really good question. It's there's two key ways that we do that with process. One is your processes. So like 10 steps in a process become 10 tasks and a task list. So all of the instructions that you've built in to the steps in your process can be texted. You could have embedded videos, screenshots, whatever it is, all of that gets automatically copied over. To your tasks. I mean, you're, you're, you're a developer, it's kind of like a class and an instance. You can have 10 different instances of the same process running, but every time instead of your team having to go search through Google docs or wherever it is to go find the instructions that they need. It's right there in front of them in the same place where they check off the task. Also, they don't need to think about which way should I do this? Should I, should I follow these instructions or those instructions? Oh, I don't know. I better stop and go ask my manager. Um, all of that is removed because process kits, logic takes care of. Those decisions so that you and your team can just focus on the next task and doing really good work. But the other thing that's unique to process kid is that we have this feature called propagating changes out. So you have a process say it's like your new customer onboarding process. And it's currently being used on 15 different customers who are currently onboarding this month. Oh, we want to make some improvements to it. Yes, we, we realized we could streamline it in a few new ways. You make some changes in your process template, you just click one button propagate and it automatically updates all of your active projects and tasks, and it doesn't wipe out any progress that your team has made. It just updates the changes. That's the way to like continuously improve your processes. Whereas like most agencies. They might spend a little time documenting stuff over in a dock somewhere, but then they leave it and it doesn't get touched for like a year. So that's awesome. I love the idea of process kit and I think it sounds like something that a lot of more agencies should be using. And it sounds like potentially like a really good way to impress your customers and seem more professional. And I think there's definitely a lot of very professional WordPress agencies and freelancers out there, but they're also a lot of people that probably could need those almost want to call it guide rails. Yeah. It's funny. You mentioned that almost all of our customers do invite their team and sometimes their clients. And we have like a guests feature for clients, but that's the direction we're going in this year. And next year is like, Really doubling down on my client portals and, uh, and intake forms, um, coming into process kits because that's, it's a really, really common use case agencies like inviting their clients in and giving them a branded experience, but controlling what they could see. And then, and internally their team can see different things. Awesome. So I want to ask you finally, like besides process kit, are there any other tools or maybe even some general advice you want to recommend to people? If they're thinking about like how to start a productized service, or even just move a little bit in that direction with their agency. Zapier comes to mind. I was going to say Zapier, huge Zapier fan. We've been developing a really solid Zapier integration since day one with process kit. If you're not using Zapier, you should start finding little ways to use it. And then once you find a few little ways, your Zapier account will look like, start to look like mine with like 50 different stamps going everywhere. That's really great. Everyone's a little bit different on this, but just personally, I'm, I'm sort of like anti meeting. I try to reduce the number of like internal. Meetings that we have. So, so we rely pretty heavily on Slack, but also, um, I just really like to send video messages to people. I use loom.com for that. So it's just nice to look at something and say like, Hey, just want to show, like, instead of like writing all this out on an email, let me just. Show you what I'm seeing on the screen. And there's a few little issues or some questions for you. Like I send that to my developer all the time, or I send it to my team and then they send me back something and we can get something resolved over like two days. But we're in different time zones. We don't have to actually like have a call. I liked doing that a lot. Awesome. Brian, if there's anything you want to pluck to, people are mentioned, feel free to do that. I know you have a course as well. That teaches basically how to start a productized service. So if this was interesting for people, they'll probably find the course even more interesting. Yeah. So I do have the course called productize, but also on process kit, which is the software we were talking about. There's now a free course on how to, uh, automate your processes, uh, for service companies. And, uh, and we've got a lot of new content coming out over there as well. Nice. We'll link to all of that in the show notes. Yeah. Brian, thanks for coming on the show. It's a pleasure talking about this stuff and it's nice to kind of get into the business side of things I think, and not just all the tech stuff. So I thank you for coming on. Yeah. Sounds good. Peter. I want to come back on and talk about all the tech. Okay. We'll see what we can figure out. Awesome. Thank you, man. All right. See ya.

Welcome to Billable Hours, a podcast for all the WordPress agencies and freelance shops out there. My name is Peter, and on this show I bring on interesting people from all around the WordPress ecosystem to talk about what's moving in the world of client work. My own background is building products for WordPress developers, first with WP Pusher and now with Branch.If you're doing client work and work with WordPress, this podcast is made for you. We'll touch on a broad variety of topics relating to both the business and technology side of things. The keywords here are WordPress and client work. If this sounds like you I would love if you would hit the subscribe button to know when I got some new episodes ready for you. Oh, and please share this with a friend or colleague! I'll hear you soon! This podcast is sponsored by Branch - Automated deployments for WordPress