Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
We talked about your, your upbringing and how you have, let's call it a, a special and very interesting type of upbringing.
At a certain point in time you enter business life sure was human. Made your very first attempt.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Hmm. I mean, no, probably I would guess I was always fairly entrepreneurial. In fact, my family were fairly entrepreneurial. And so I grew up, you know, even when we were traveling, you know, we were, we had stalls selling things at festivals which I would work on as a kid or we would make cakes and flapjacks and I would walk around with them on a tray and sell them. So I guess from, from a young age we, you would look, you would in retrospect probably say that was all kind of fairly entrepreneurial stuff. That, that, that had an impact on me also. My dad had his, you know, ran his own business. He was a stonemason and started his own stone masonry business which, and gained some success doing that. And so I think I grew up with that, you know, with that kind of pretty present. That said, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't go immediately into starting my business. I did, I like went to college and got a normal job after college working in a, a school, a private school for a while. For a few years it was a private school for children on the autism spectrum.
It was residential. So I worked on the residential side, made kind of made my way into management after a couple of years. Became pretty jaded with the capitalist kind of underpinnings of private special needs education and the politics of all that. Also I was like very young and the career path was fairly age gated, so it seemed like to make it out of the bottom tiers of management, I'd need to wait 20 years or something.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I've seen those.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And at that time, you know, I was kind of teaching myself web design on the side and building websites. Like I built a website for my dad's stonemasonry business and for like some friends of his. So I guess that side was already starting.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Was that the trigger?
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that was kind of a trigger. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, he, he was, he was always into computers and so I kind of got my love of computers from him as well. But, but he didn't, he didn't have a website. All of, all of his sales were local. And so I, I think he, I think he said something to me like, if, you know, if you can sell, sell, sell any of this stuff online, I'll give you 10%, which he never did. I want on record, don't ever remember seeing that 10%, but, you know, that, that gave me the motivation that some. 16 or however old it was 15 to do that.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Yeah. At least you were.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And then, you know. Sorry, go on.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: At least you were promised money. I worked from 12.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: 24. Yeah. 23. 24. And I never. Well, I got some at the end, but certainly the first eight years I got Jack.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. You know. Yeah. Not dissimilar. I guess it gave me the motivation and I did manage to charge some of his friends, so. So it wasn't all bad.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Oh, there you go.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Um, yeah, yeah. I mean, also quite quickly, you know, I guess even back then, being a, you know, young budding web designer, you could make quite a lot more money doing that than you could working in. In education. So already that was quite pretty alluring as well. Oh, wow. I can like do this thing, which I'm. I would do for free because I'm, you know, it's like a hobby anyway. And also I can get paid like £25 an hour or something, which was wild when you were used to minimum wage.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And certainly the age has become irrelevant at that point. You're like, what is your hour? This is my hour.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that was very attractive to me because, you know, at school, my day job, I did feel pretty kind of held back by that. I was, I was way too young. People didn't really take me seriously. That was all gone on. So I loved that.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's that. I remember that. So at what point did that turn into human made? And what point did Joe enter the scene? Yeah, well, he was on. On the scene, of course, but he was.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Although when I was, you know, he was. He's a couple of years younger than me, so. So when I first started, you know, he was in school.
Yeah. So I guess I was. I was just making kind of sites on the side for friends of friends. Then I got a couple of like, okay, these are no longer my friends gigs where I was doing freelance, you know, I was kind of freelancing on the side. And that was enough to give me the impetus to like, Jack, my Jack, my day job in. So I handed a notice at my day job and decided to go. Go for it as a freelance web designer. And I probably spent, I don't know, six months or so doing that, you know, again, mostly, mostly this is still like small local businesses, that kind of stuff. It was around that time, actually that I switched from calling myself a web design, you know, freelance web Designer to calling myself a freelance WordPress developer. This is probably 2005, maybe late,005.
And I managed to kind of lock my way into like a contract WordPress developer role for a fairly big US company doing fairly like big interesting stuff with WordPress even back then.
And ended up contracting there for a couple of years, maybe 18 months. That was when I, that was when I pulled Joe in. We were like, couldn't find WordPress developers fast enough.
So I, I phoned Joe at college and was like, you've got to come and you gotta come and do this WordPress stuff with me. It's great. And so he, he dropped out of college and came and because of you joined the team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, probably, probably because of the work I would say in the. Yes. And so then we worked together there, built, built some cool stuff. Builtgeek.com which is like one of the first big tech news sites I think on WordPress. You know, probably around the time all things digital was happening with Alex King and there was aiming gadget, there was a few around at that time. So that was cool. Definitely like, you know, cut my teeth there, learn, learn how to program, really on the job doing that.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Thus Human Made was born.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: Yeah, basically down off the back of that Human Made was born, you know that we, we, we lost that contract. But by that point we built so many big things for this company. I had a good portfolio and so we found it easier to win up the work. We started to get busy, we needed to hire somebody. Oh, we got to start a real company to do that.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Yep, yep.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Human Made was born. You know, prior to Human Made, actually we called ourselves Edge Designs. That was my like an early first company name that I made up when I was 15, which was fine for a few years, but then around the same time I got a cease and desist letter because it turns out there is actually a real company called Edge Designs. They had finally got on their radar, I guess. And so I had to change the name, which I didn't mind because it's a terrible name. So I didn't mind changing.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: It's not the best.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: So that was also why Human Made came apart. You know, we had to change the name at the time and so we formed a real company and changed the name at the same time. And Human Made was born. Yeah, in 2010.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: That was 2010. And I think we met two years later.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Up until that point we were like, although we were doing a bunch of pretty interesting early WordPress work. We weren't really interacting with the WordPress community. Like, we're both from fairly, you know, out in the middle of Nowhere in the UK. There wasn't really a local WordPress community around us. I think we didn't really know much about the UK WordPress community. We knew a bit about the US community, but, but yeah, we hadn't really interacted with the community, so it wasn't really. Yeah, it wasn't 2011. I don't think that we, like, went to our first WordCamp and met. Yeah, met a bunch of people were like, oh, there's other people doing this, this is cool.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm thinking now that I probably met you, you and Joe at one of Those in, in 2011, I think.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: So I think it was worth Camp Portsmouth. It was, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we came in with a splash. Well, I remember we took the top sponsor slot and caused a bit of a. Who, who are these guys?
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Oh, did you? I don't remember that, but.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: Well, but, you know, taking the top sponsor slot's a big deal these days. But back then I think it was like £500 or something for the plan.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: No, Portsmouth. I mostly remember because I drove there and I most remember when I was just about there. Yeah, there's a roundabout, I'm uk and I go the wrong way. And Gary Jones was watching me do it in thought. And I, in the very last second remembered that I was in the UK and then did the wrong way about. Well, at least for me, the wrong way around. And, and Gary has given me about it for 13 years now, so.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Okay, well, you've not lived that down. Well, I remember it being pretty exciting meeting you and, you know, some of the other agency. And again, we didn't really know people who were running WordPress agencies, like, and we were. So it was like, oh, something exciting. We kind of looked up, you know, looked up to a bunch of you guys as well.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: Well, geez, thanks. I, I, I, I mostly remember it as being a. So the grassroots part was, was way more obvious. And with that came, I think, a certain excitement. There's a better word for it, I'm sure, but let's call it excitement. And if we Skip to now 13 years, a lot has changed. Like, for instance, if we just look at your company, when I say your company, I mean, I know it's Joe's and Noel's as well, but the, the transition you have done from starting that company, figuring out what it is, what you like, what you want to work on most and then positioning yourself in a, in a particular way that is, you know, most of us had to do that in at some point. And the end result is that you start formalizing because that's how these things work. If you want to grow, you need to define how do you want to grow, which direction you want to grow, what do you do, what do you not want to do? All of these things. And with that, you kind of lose the initial again. Excitement is not the word, but there's, there's something brewing in the, and certainly in the community, certainly in the early stages of the companies that started, though, at that time.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: What do, do you recognize that?
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Definitely, Yeah. I mean, you know, the, the. When you're at the beginning of something and there's usually a small group of you and you're probably brought together because you like, intuitively and instinctively or are all pretty aligned and are excited by the same things and, and so like, it feels very. The natural and little friction and you don't need to work a bunch of stuff out because it's all just implicit. And that's like, it's one of the most exciting things. You know, I think you see that all over, right? The, that kind of startup in the garage thing, you know, that's perhaps more in the US but just. Yeah, there's, there's. I think there's nothing. It's one of the most exciting things. Small, small little group of people starting something.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: And like, you know, hitting a wave, right. You, you feel like you've caught a wave and you're surfing in and it feels great. Yeah.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: At the time I didn't realize it was a wave, but around 1415, it. It started to become obvious that indeed it was a wave because we then had the second wave within the wave. Yeah, that was way more obvious to me at least.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: So one of the things that you as a agency and you know, most WordPress agency or agencies in general, they don't necessarily want to be bothered with hosting.
You've made a very conscious decision to do hosting. And not only that, you have a particular brand, which is this entity from Human Made. So you have obviously a very different view on should an agency do hosting? Do you have any, like, insights in how that came to be? Or is that purely natural and unintentional? And it just happened?
[00:12:07] Speaker B: You know, in some ways, Cuba Made was always an agency with like a, I guess a fairly large propensity to try and do products. Right. We had happy tables, we had dope, remote WordPress like we've always had that as part of our DNA.
And so I think that's one part of it is just we have a history of productizing the stuff we're doing, being interested in and excited by the idea of like building product. A bunch of those early products like Happy Tables and WP Remote had large hosting requirements, right? Happy Tables was thousands of sites, it was a big multi site. And so you know, we did all the hosting for all of that stuff ourselves. So I think part of it was yeah, we are attracted to the idea of doing products, you know, from very early on in human maids life and then also because as part of building those products you've got to learn how to do hosting. Because we were hosting them ourselves, we weren't host them anywhere else. And so we just like built up that capability. I think the first, you know, the main reason agencies don't want to do hosting is a really good reason which is they don't really know how to do it. And it's pretty difficult and it's quite scary. And the idea of being on the hook for you know, 247 support and what happens if the site goes down and you know, there's a lot that it's very nice to be able to rely on someone else to do that as an agency. I don't know that's a really good reason, you know, and it's true. It's just that we happened to have developed that capability already ourselves through Happy Tables, Dopy Remote. There was also always this subset of our client base who were wanting to do something, you know, big enterprise clients were wanting to do something that just didn't really fit on the existing hosting off like options out there. Like for example, in the early days of VIP it was part of the main WordPress.com multisite and so there were like just some limitations there. And so we always, and I think this is probably true of most of the, of the major enterprise agencies. There was always some of our clients where we had to build something ourselves because they didn't really fit into the options on the market. That's much less true today. Like all of the major players have matured a lot.
Those limitations mostly no longer there, but again that gave us this capability. So I think that was another factor. And then I think the fourth factor was that the, you know, I guess our own desire to like innovate in the space, you know, that we're seeing, I guess as we grew up as a company and we started to have much more awareness of like what's going on in the wider enterprise CMS space? What's making WordPress competitive and not competitive? Where's the, you know, what's the direction?
You know, we started to want to like solve some of those problems. Right. We saw, we saw opportunities for enterprise hosting in the WordPress space that weren't really being addressed. And so there was an eagerness on our part and we like looked down at our hand. Oh, hey, we do kind of know how to do hosting. Oh, we do kind of have this product history. Oh, we do kind of have this like in the trenches experience working with big enterprise. Actually we could do this. And so that, yeah, I think that that was like there was this moment of realization. Wait a minute, we could, we could actually do this. And so that, yeah, that kind of led to us wrapping all of that up and getting more serious about it. Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: And the serious part is, is I think it materialized in there being Altus. Yes, but Altus is not just hosting. There's a little bit more happening there. Can you, like how, how does, how do you go from understanding to do hosting from a technical standpoint and then say, you know, if we're hosting then we have more control over the systems. Thus it allows us to do a few things extra as well. How, how also I'm assuming a natural flow of how that came to just become a necessity because clients requested it.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Sure, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, most of that is just born out experience. Like, you know, you've got WordPress off the shelf and you've got, you know, high scale hosting. That's that means that you can serve that WordPress at scale with high performance and in a secure way. So I guess that's kind of the bar of entry. But enterprise clients are not just using vanilla WordPress on fast hosting. That's secure. There's a whole bunch of common needs that they have out of their cms, some of which you know, are not, you know, not are not part of WordPress core and like for good reason shouldn't be. And so, you know, all of us agencies have developed our own solutions to meet most of those needs. There's a bunch of, you know, there's a bunch of collaboration in the space as well around those, whether that's like two factor Auth or elasticsearch or audit logging or you know, and there's a list of like 50 of these which are all really core features that a, an enterprise buyer needs in their cms. But you don't get out of the box. Even if you just take WordPress on enterprise hosting so that, you know, to some degree that's the thesis there, right, is like, let's actually treat the enterprise CMS offering. It's not, it's not WordPress on hosting, it's WordPress plus all these other missing pieces. So that then as an enterprise buyer, okay, great, I've got this enterPR CMS out of the box. I think, you know, we really saw day in, day out, the challenge of the WordPress is like positioning and offering to market. When it comes to enterprise buyers, which is you, you go into the room and you're up against an Adobe or a sitecore or a, or a whoever and they're able to go down the feature list and say, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Yep, my platform does all of those and we have to say, oh yeah, WordPress does these ones. You need these plugins for these ones. You'll get this, these ones from your hosting. These are the ones your agency will need to build. It ends up being just like a pretty complicated and fragmented story that you're telling. And so yeah, if you can package all of that out more neatly and say, hey, WordPress is an enterprise CMS. It ticks all those boxes out the box, you know, already I think that's, yeah, I think that should be, that should be quite powerful.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: It should be. And I've seen the same type of conversations right, where you have to do the, the, the due diligence. Can WordPress do this? Because here's what Sitecore does or you know, all of these systems that you need to connect it to. Can WordPress do that? Well, yes, it can, but there's not necessarily a ready built solution to do exactly what you just asked me to do and to then compete against the same, you know, checklist like everything green on the Left and here's WordPress, here's my agency representing WordPress. First of all, there's nothing out there that represents WordPress in this way. So I'm just kind of making this up as I'm going.
I. So Altis is, is essentially, it's a platform, it's, I think you call it next generation enterprise WordPress hosting or something like that.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: So would you say that all the solutions that Altus brings additionally to what WordPress does in core is essentially for you, the, the rebrand to Altus? Is that how, how we should see it? Because I'm asking the question because there's obviously we have pagely, we have serv bolt, we have vpng, we have kinsta, we have all of these great hosts and they sell hosting and some of them have added value to that hosting. And it seems like what you're doing with Altus is quite the different approach. You don't present yourself necessarily as, hey, we're hosting.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the, one of the things we can benefit from is that we are 100% focused on big enterprise customers. And so that means we can develop a solution that's like very targeted at their needs, which is just more challenging if you're a hosting company that's trying to address like a wider range of customers. Right. If you're going from $50 a month all the way up to $5,000 a month, your product's got to address the needs of a lot of different people. And so that's just like we can be more focused and so therefore we can solve the needs more directly and more specifically, I think that's like, you know, we're being intentional there, just, just targeting that part of the market, you know. And I think it's not just, you know, there's other benefits, not just WordPress like WordPress features. There's a lot that you can, there's a lot of just like vertical integration benefit between the infrastructure and the cms. You can, you know, whereas in another, on another platform maybe you would do audit logging, but you know, you're just storing those audit logs in the WordPress database because that's really all you can do. That's all you get access to. We can surface AWS's immutable audit store and store them there. And so there's like vertical integration that you can get between the CMS features, the underlying infrastructure that again, I think are quite a nice advantage. That's again, just much harder to do if either you're not in control of the infrastructure that, or if the hosting is for a broader, broader market.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: Yep, yep. Yeah, I mean it makes total sense, but it's a, it's an interesting position that you have because I guess closest comparison is probably VIP hosting.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, I would think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there's, you know, I think Pagely also were pretty, pretty focused on the enterprise tier and of course, you know, they're all, all of the hosts with enterprise offerings are, you know, they're also address a bunch of these needs. So I don't think we're like, you know, the only ones doing this.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Oh no, for sure.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: But the space has been moving in that direction as well. I think seven, eight, years ago really was the case that Enterprise, Enterprise WordPress hosting really just meant it's got bigger servers and that and there's, and there's like enterprise security now actually the whole space has moved on I think quite a lot and there's a lot more sophistication which is like great to see. Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: I think with, with every single aspect from that, the WordPress project in the broader sense of the word touches has evolved to something either more professional, more in depth, more connecting, more embracing, you know, all, all it's inevitable because you know, we find ourselves in a world where we started, I mean like, like with the, the early work camps that we started meeting each other. Right. So that, that grassroots feeling that we're doing this together, we're building this something, we have no idea where it's going, but it's a lovely ride.
We're, we're entering a phase where the maturity becomes much more prevalent. Like. Yeah, obviously if, certainly if you're very much focused on enterprise type of clients, you are forced in that direction because they've been doing it from, you know, from inception.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Yeah, true.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: I, I, you know, I, I, I've done, I've done a lot of enterprise stuff on the inside of an enterprise. I used to work at a large insurance company and some of the projects were about solving ERP systems and it, it's an entirely different world and yet it's still a version of hosting.
[00:23:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: And the requirements are certainly, if you're working at a financial institution are ridiculous. If you have never heard about what needs to happen in terms of, you know, what a site looks like at any moment in time needs to be, you need to be able to revisit that.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: At the second.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: Yeah, we've got a couple of big banking clients and I think we're the only hosting company actually with the, the banking specific compliance.
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Awards and yeah, you know, some of that stuff is, is like technically challenging. Also though, like, I mean another benefit we get from being purely focused on enterprise, like so many of the challenges actually are not particularly technical. They're compliance related, they're just like ISO and CHIP related, account management related, project management related. You've got to be able to like, you got to know how to work with a big complicated enterprise company so you know, support SLAs, all of that stuff. And so again just being focused on that customer means you can really, really develop everything to, to fit very nicely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: But it's an, it's an interesting process to see mature. Right. So the, the, I think the first step, most agencies that start working for larger clients is that you're being added to a vendor list. That's the first signal. Okay, we're, we're, we're stepping it up a notch. And what does that mean, a vendor list? Well, it means you have, we have requirements of who we are allowing to be a vendor. Okay, so I'm a company, I can be a vendor. No, no, we ask, we are actually asking a little bit more. We need you to have this, we need you to have that. You know, all of those things. And that's just the early signs and then there's a whole array of extra stuff and, and certification that you need and compliances and you know, your own certifications. But it's interesting to see, at least from my perspective, how Human Made and altus, how they position themselves in the market.
Been fun to watch what you guys do.
One of the things I find, which is from the outside looking in, it seems completely unrelated, but I know it's somewhat related. As Human Made, you organize a lot of events. I find that interesting. Like that's not agency, that's not enterprise necessarily. It's maybe touching community a little bit, but not always.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: What can you share about that? The philosophy behind. Because you have three different types of events. I think maybe.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: Yeah, we've done like a bunch of in person events over the years.
You know, developer conferences, online events. We ran a, we ran a series of AI and WordPress online events. In fact, we're running on tomorrow, which will be in the past when this podcast goes out. I don't doubt around higher ed education and WordPress. We, you know, we do like more traditional workshops, training even and that kind of stuff.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Yeah. What is, what, what do events in, in the sense of bring back to you? Like what is the reward? Because it's having organized quite a few events myself. I know the time and energy.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a lot of work.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: It's a lot of work.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: It's a lot of work. I think a few things they definitely, you know, I think probably born out of community, the early Human Made. There were quite a few of us who were organizing, in fact organizing Word camps involved in WordCamp Europe. There was like the first few years there, there was heavy Human Made involvement there. And so, you know, heavy, heavy involvement from people who happen to work at Human Made is probably a better way to word that. But so I think probably born from that. You know, again, we kind of just had, we knew how to organize events, people on the team who knew how to organize events. We saw the power of those events in terms of bringing together the WordPress community, the WordPress ecosystem, creating space for discussion about what the future of the ecosystem is, motivating people to strive to build that future.
So for example, our AI WordPress events, you know that the, the, the we were really noticing when we're talking to our clients, you know, they are hearing about the AI roadmaps from the other enterprise CMS vendors. Adobe go in and can go in and tell a pretty joined up story about how AI is going to be worked into their products over the next five years or whatever. And a challenge for WordPress being a decentralized ecosystem is like how do you tell the story of how AI is going to feature in the, you know, the enterprise WordPress roadmap for WordPress. So we tried to do that by let's bring together this event. Let's try and bring together all the cool stuff that we're seeing happening in the community. Let's try and present that in, as like in a, in a, in a professional light.
To. Yeah, to bring together the conversation inside the community and also to, to, you know, that's useful then I think to present outside, hey, there is a lot of stuff happening, you might not read about it in the WordPress roadmap that's on WordPress.org, you know, because that's just the core software but the ecosystem actually is where all of this is going to happen.
And we can, yeah, there's a role we can usefully play to bring that together. You know, I think the other thing we've, we've gotten better at over the years is figuring out okay, you know, I think there's events like that where primarily that's an event for the WordPress space and maybe we're using the outputs of that and you know, to send clients or prospects.
The, there's. I think we've also got a lot better at putting on events which are actually for, you know, buyers or users of enterprise WordPress to like are at this, the higher education and WordPress event that we're going to run tomorrow, which again will be in the past if you are listening to this. But you can go and check out the sessions.
You know, we've, we've, that's predominantly aimed at higher education institutions. If you're working in the digital team or the marketing team inside a higher ed institution and you're on WordPress or you're interested in WordPress again we want to like bring Bring together. Turns out, you know, there's a lot of cool stuff happening. There's a lot of universities on WordPress. There's a lot of cool stuff happening there. So there's a, there's a useful role to like bring that together and tell that story.
And you know that that is just great marketing for us. You know, that's great marketing for WordPress and for us. I think we, you know, we, or always trying to play this dual role of, you know, obviously we were trying to market human made and events are a great way to like raise your profile, position yourself as a leader. Each of you organize a conference, you invite everybody else to speak and you naturally come out of that looking like the leader of that thing, you know, because you're the one that brought it together. So that's really valuable.
But I think we're always trying to balance, okay, we, you know, obviously we want to grow human made and grow human made reputation. But also enterprise WordPress itself really needs to grow and it really needs help to grow and we've got a role to play that. How do we kind of play our leading role, one of the leading players in enterprise WordPress? How do we like take that responsibility and use it to grow the space overall? So I think we're always trying to kind of do both of those things.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I think for the latter, the Scale Consortium is, yeah, I think a wonderful thing to see happening.
For those who are listening, have no idea what I just referenced would be your best TLDR.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So Scout Consortium is a group of enterprise WordPress agencies with the support of all the major enterprise WordPress hosts as well, really coming together to collaborate on exactly that problem. How do we grow Enterprise WordPress? How do we better tell the story of Enterprise WordPress? How do we better position it to market?
I have this kind of little thing I've been saying which is that we all collaborate really effectively on the technical side. Right. The WordPress CMS that we all build by volunteering is way better than the sum of its parts. None of us would be building a CMS of this caliber individually as companies. It's just not really possible. And so it's way more than the sum of its parts. It's incredibly impressive. But like the marketing and positioning of enterprise WordPress is actually way less than the sum of its parts. We really don't show up as anywhere nearly as effectively as we should out in the enterprise CMS space. Yeah, I think that there's some broad truth to that. I care a lot about the Enterprise space. And so, you know, and that's a shame because actually we all put quite a lot of effort in, you know, all these companies. We're all doing marketing, we're all doing sales, we're all trying and, but the com and you know, the combined spend and effort there is quite significant, but it's actually less than the sum of its parts. In terms of like positioning WordPress to enterprise buyers Scale Consortium is an attempt to. Yeah. To bring that together.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: How much of what you're solving there obviously particularly focused on the enterprise market, but how much of that.
I mean I'm leading the answer. I know where the answer is going to go. But in terms of marketing, in terms of positioning, that's currently not happening on anything you can find on.org in terms of priority, how high do you rank that versus all the other things going on in making the actual software better? Do you have an opinion on that?
[00:33:08] Speaker B: For enterprise specifically, I think it's of higher importance. You know I think that my take is really that the, you know, the software is in a great place. The WordPress products is excellent. It compares incredibly well to the other players. In fact, an interesting, you know, these, these analyst companies put out, you know, put out fairly in depth reports on like the state of the market and that I was reading more recently I think from Forrester where they were comparing WordPress VIP with, with a bunch of the other Enterprise cms players, Adobe Sitecore et cetera, across a range of criteria. And WordPress VIP product which, which is really WordPress as the product was, was top, that had the highest score. So like the product is excellent. We don't have a product problem.
What we have, yeah, we have a marketing and a vision and an ecosystem problem where you know, the areas we score poor are. Well, when I go to Adobe they've got a really clear integrations directory and I know it integrates with my whole stack. When I go to WordPress.org plugins I see tens of thousands of plugins. I search for Salesforce, I don't know which ones work or don't. You know, I'm not that confident that it's going to integrate with my stack.
And yeah, you know, I go to webster.org or whatever, I don't really, you know, I don't come away with a strong sense that this is like enterprise ready. So yeah, I think those, those actually are the, is where the gap is and I think the product actually is ahead. And this is, you know, we notice this almost every, every time we're pitching against another enterprise CMS. When you finally actually demo WordPress, you demo Gutenberg, you demo what multi site, you demo as possible. It like is, is, is brilliant. It blows the other stuff out of the water. Yeah. And you know, the sad thing is they didn't, they didn't realize that people don't know that. In fact, maybe they think the opposite because of the, you know, mostly the narrative about WordPress in the out in the market is set by our competitors because they're putting marketing dollars to.
[00:35:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So the, the WIX in the squarespace type of comparison is the most prevalent one. And, and for, you know, for good reasons, WordPress is getting a tough time because however wonderfully the, the site editor and the block editor works, there is a lot to be improved in terms of ux, in terms of C, in terms of ease to use. My, my main gripe is on the whole thing is the actual onboarding. But what you're saying in terms of if, if we start explaining how WordPress can be used in different verticals, enterprise being one, and we include the onboarding, then we're sort of solving. Because for enterprise we don't need like you install it and you click and you configure profile union.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: Sure. A lot of the challenges that you know, that are I think real more broadly are actually, you know, they're not so much a problem at the enterprise level because you're doing a custom installation anyway. Exactly.
[00:36:21] Speaker A: But the whole principle of thinking of verticals as we're building the software and then so the verticals have, you know, a lot of application, zero application needed in terms of what is needed in core versus what we maybe need to say on the marketing side of things. I think if we solve those two, if we diligently start focusing on solving those particular two and I know it's a huge challenge to build something that's called onboarding and that works for everybody. Just accept that you're never going to get, get a perfect situation. But what if we install WordPress? You have option 0 being let me just do my thing but have 5 options where you sort of are being channeled into a certain decision, like this is the intent of my site, then most likely you need this, this and this.
And here's how you find what you need to make your site complete. Like, I know it's a huge task and I know it's, it looks like it's impossible to do, but I think that needs to be less of a discussion, not how difficult it's going to be. I Think we just need to accept that this is what we need to do.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And I feel like we've seen some interesting innovation. I think a bunch of the hosts, right.
Have done work in that area where they have like more wizard level onboarding, which I think is interesting.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Yep. Extendify. We have Extendify.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, there are, there are like WordPress based, kind of specifically vertically focused WordPress platforms too. Right. You know, we used to run one years ago called the Happy Tables, which was for restaurants. But I know there's, I see them, you know, popping up occasionally for different verticals. I think that's a pretty interesting solution too at the enterprise level. You know, I think that, yeah, that the verticals matter probably even more because they tend to be a pretty, you know, each vertical actually has different incumbent Enterprise CMSs, they have a different stack that they need to integrate with. And so you need to, you need to be able to show. Okay, yeah, we address that. We understand the needs of this that you have as a university and the other software that you need to integrate with and the common feature set, you need to be able to show courses and you know, all of that stuff. Yeah.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Would you, would you say that the trickle down effect of solving this for enterprise to the rest is more important than the other way around?
[00:38:41] Speaker B: I mean, I guess in terms of, you know, in terms of what I can, you know, I guess where I think I can have most impact is definitely on the enterprise side. So I'm definitely more focused there.
But no, I don't think it necessarily has to be one way or the other. I think they're probably somewhat different. Although they seem similar on surface, they're probably somewhat different in practice.
Yeah, I think you do see nice, nice trickle down from enterprise, I think not least because often the big enterprise projects actually are for well known brands. And so there's like a really nice halo effect to knowing, okay, this big brand, the White house is on WordPress. NASA have moved to WordPress and so that, I think that can, can have quite a powerful effect in, you know, in the long tail then.
And you know, there's something nice about knowing, okay, this version of WordPress that I downloaded is like the same version that NASA are running or the same version the White House running. Yeah, that really nice about that. You know, the rest of the enterprise software system is not like that. They're running something completely different that you would not have access to as a, as a regular joke.
But I think that you know that there's room within the ecosystem and like the ecosystem is broad enough that we really just should be tackling this from all, we should be able to tackle this from all angles at once. I mean, I think this data liberation project that, you know, that Mac kind of kicked off at State of the Word last year and has I think been a bit slow to start, but it's picking up a team. I think that's a really nice entry into this too.
[00:40:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: So I'm excited by that, especially for that long, you know, the, you know, again that kind of outside of enterprise, I think it's not really one click migrating from enterprise. But more broadly I think that could, that can lower the barrier to entry a lot.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: That's a good point.
So I think for years we've been going about it the other way around as, as we are maturing more bigger and sites start to become part of the, the, you know, the, the percentage of sites that are powered by WordPress and that has been a natural growth and I think we kind of hit the moment where we are to accept that, that what brought us here is not going to get us there.
So yeah, I'm Data Liberation, glad you brought it up. I think that has the potential to be extremely highly impactful.
I do hope it's also being used internally in WordPress.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: In what way?
In what way? What do you mean by that?
[00:41:24] Speaker A: Well, so for instance, if I use one particular page builder and for the reason I want to move to another page build or using more WordPress with the site editor and I, I, I posted something on, on X about this yesterday. I'm helping a friend move from a Diffie based site to site editor. If I just switch, I'm left with a horrible mess of short codes and weird things. Yeah, this is one page builder example. We have dozens of page builders. But if the data liberation also is being embraced by those building page builders, we actually get true data liberation because there's a lot of, I think that's.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: A really crucial part and I'm pretty, I'm pretty confident that is the, that is, that is, that is the intention.
[00:42:14] Speaker A: I'm aware it's the intent. But the vendor lock in that those page builders create obviously helps them maintain their clients. So are they willing to, is my biggest curiosity. Because they would need to build something or some party needs to build something.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the ideal thing would be that they, you know, that there's a community, we would embrace this. I think it's like a fundamental value principle of WordPress that, you know, we're not, we're not locking people in. I think it's one of WordPress's great strengths. And so I think the ideal would be that like, you know, everybody embraces that, but I don't think it's necessary. I think, I think that there should be nothing stopping us from riding the work separately for a Divi to Gutenberg translation layer or whatever.
[00:43:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I suspect that that's where we'll end up. But yeah, I agree in an ideal world nobody actively works on creating some version of vendor lock in because I think that's, that's marketing tactics from a scarcity point of view and I don't agree with that.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: I think, you know, there's also, you know, I definitely do get as a business owner it can be hard to like that you're busy writing features and there's not a ton of benefit to like, okay, we're going to set aside the next six months of our development roadmap to making it easy for people to switch away from us. So I think that's reasonable.
I think that's something that the community also can just help to solve. It necessarily has to be on those companies themselves. 100% no.
[00:43:49] Speaker A: Agreed.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: And yeah, should be possible. I think it's a pretty cool. Another thing I like think is pretty exciting about the Daily Liberation project is that it like straight away just splinters into a million sub projects that are all. Can all run independently of each other. Right. They're like if you are migrating Divi to site the site editor maybe you're the perfect person to be like okay, I'm gonna like think about this how this would could be some kind of script or set of steps or a tutorial or something and then you can like pick up that day deliberation project, adjust for Divi to site site editor and like move that one forward. We should be able to like in parallel do tons of these all at once. I would hope across the, across the community.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: I actually found that there is a library that takes care of some version of conversion.
I'm actually looking at the tweet right now.
Frank Klein shared it to me yesterday.
[00:44:45] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:44:47] Speaker A: But I can't find it right now. But it's, it's, it's it essence. This is a, this would for me would be beginning of if and it's, it's created by Automatic VIP specifically but this is a good example of where a certain solution that and it relies on WP CLI scripts and you know, when you're savvy enough to understand how to use the Command line. This is a solution, but it's, it's, it's a perfect example of a first like let's start here. My, my, my hope is that all of these types of solutions because there's tons of agencies out there that have built scripts themselves but probably never shared because it's a one time thing. But what if we actually have the ability to build it in a way that it's not a one time thing, it's a, we can actually rely on hooking into specific functions and do all of that.
I'm very excited for that to be, you know, have these little libraries and stuff like that slowly but surely merge in the tools that we can all use and then we actually have fully Data Liberation that's inside and outside. I think is the two are as equally important.
[00:45:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think we probably all have had this feeling many times over the years where we see some new solution kind of come to life and start being used and we think why aren't people using WordPress for that? WordPress could easily do that. And, but, but you know, the fact that it's not easy enough to migrate people over from it, the fact that it's not easy enough to come in and put those things together, you know, people, people don't necessarily realize, okay, I didn't need to. I could be linking to a WordPress page from my Twitter profile or Instagram profile instead of a linking list or whatever they're called or the, you know, we see this all the time mediums as an example, substack newsletters. There's all of these things which, like WordPress, the solutions to that exist within WordPress already, but we are not packaging and positioning around that. And also it's not, it's not as easy as it, as it could be to move over from one of them, which often you see, right. Actually people, maybe they get started on something like a substack because it's so easy to one click set up. But then once they get some success actually things like owning their own data and being in control of the monetization starts to matter more to them and then they're looking to move. So you see that kind of graduation.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: And I think that's exactly the motivation why the Data Liberation project is so of such high importance. Because it's very easy, like you just said, to start somewhere and it's, you very quickly realize there's some limitation, whether that is just owning your data or portability or extensibility, that you're quickly going to run into when you're on a closed and hosted platform for any of the things that you, you mentioned and many, many more to then have the freedom to pick a CMS that has the ability but also has the intent. And I think for me, that is still the reason why I am super bullish on the future of WordPress.
[00:47:55] Speaker B: Me too.
[00:47:57] Speaker A: I figured you would be. I figured you would be. I want to thank you for this conversation, Tom. I think it's. You've shared some very insightful things for people who have no idea really on what the things that go into enterprise WordPress, what are the, like, what are the challenges they need to solve and all that.
I have one last question for you for, for someone who wants to dive into a better understanding, not necessarily, oh, I'm going to do enterprise now, but like, where does one start to start turning their journey on WordPress into a more professional one? Do you have any insights on that?
[00:48:43] Speaker B: Well, that's a very nice setup for you because I guess I could. I will plug my podcast that I'm starting that's all around Enterprise WordPress with my good friends and that was very smooth. That's very smooth. Yeah. With my good friends Kareem, who's the, the CEO of Crowd Favorite, and Brad, the CEO of Web Dev Studios on the do the Woo network, which listeners will probably be familiar with. And we are going to be kind of approaching Enterprise, the enterprise WordPress part of WordPress from Two Directions.
We're gonna be doing like one set of podcasts where, where it's really focused on the, in the internals of the enterprise WordPress space. What's happening, how, you know, what, what's the conversations we should be having, what are the interesting things that are going on?
And then the, the other side, which we'll be doing like a separate set of podcasts for, much more focused on like, okay, what's WordPress's place in the wider enterprise CMS space?
And the idea being really, okay, I work in the WordPress space. I'm probably interested in both. If I'm a enterprise WordPress like user, I'm probably interested in the second one, what's coming for me. So we're thinking of those two audiences and so come along and listen to that if you can. We've got episode zero is already out, so you can go and get a little intro and actually I'm recording the first episode later today, so that should be out maybe by the time you're listening to me here.
[00:50:12] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much.
