[00:00:08] Speaker A: All right. So welcome, Matt, for those who do not know you, which I think is not that many, but please introduce yourself.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Matt Madeiras. Now community at gravity forms. You're catching me as your first interview as me as a rocket genius employee, started last week representing one of the most prestigious brands in WordPress, and I've been podcasting about WordPress for over ten years. Matt Report and the WP Minute is where I focus most of my efforts these days, talking about yeah.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I noticed that. So congratulations that's fortunately didn't because you were let go. Is that the right yeah.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: So the big tech layoffs, that happened in January, so I was part of that at my last role and then was very fortunate to have a solid network in the WordPress space and was very fortunate to have a lot of offers and a lot of folks reaching out and landed at Gravity Forms.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, happy for you. Gravity forms. Carl hancock is one of those places that I admire.
They're maybe not as vocal on Twitter and such as they were in the early days, and I'm talking 2008, 2009, I think early.
It may be the actual very first premium plugin that I bought.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it was definitely my very first, and I still pay for it today.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: I'm grandfathered in, so I think that means I'm part of the first thousand or something.
But that's a great place to land.
That's a company I admire, at least. So happy for you, that.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Thanks.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: It didn't take too long.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Same here. I have the same sentiments, right. A lot of respect for surviving this long as a form company, building out a great team, and I'm excited to dive in with them.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Yeah, awesome. So your community, what does that mean? What does that entail?
[00:02:22] Speaker B: It's going to be an interesting yeah, so it's going to be interesting to see me dive into this role.
Everyone who I'm going to be working with left for WordCamp Asia this week. So I'm the guy sitting around the office trying to figure out how everything works and where everything goes, but leveraging a lot of my current talents that I already do in the WordPress space. So podcasting, YouTube, connecting with others, looking for opportunities to help grow the business, maybe some partnership stuff. It's a bit of a hybrid role, but when I look at any software, especially WordPress, and why I'm so attracted to WordPress is because as a non developer, the software makes me feel pretty powerful. Right. I can spin up a blog or I could spin up a community site. I can do a lot with WordPress without having to really learn a lot of code and hopefully maybe beating that same drum with Gravity Forms, because Gravity Forms is a tool that makes me feel really powerful as a non developer, like all the things you can do with Gravity Forms to build out.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: It's amazing.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah. A site or an app. Right. So really looking forward to producing content like that for Gravity Forms.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Nice. Yeah, I agree. It's one of those plugins that empowers you and you don't really have to know any code you can, and you can make it even more wild in what it can do, but just using the basics. And I use a few of the other Gravity Forms extensions as well.
There's quite a few, but combined, it's amazing. It's absolutely amazing what you can do with it, but good. That's nice to hear. I like community. I've done at least at Yoast. I did a large portion of that as well. Partnerships and being active in the community, as vague as that sounds. But that's essentially what it was.
And it's a great role, it's a great company.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: It's an interesting time right, for folks like you and I who are content creators and we've built community ourselves with our own, I hate to say like personal brand, but we've built our personal brands or our personal networks. And it's an interesting time for folks like us to have that be leveraged or maybe even exploited, even though that's probably a harsher term for it by other brands, because I talked to a lot of brands when I was looking for a job, and there were some folks that were like, hey, we'd love to have you on the team, but you can't do your own personal podcast anymore and stuff like that. Which I totally like. I get it. I respect it, I understand it. But I think we're living in a time where so many of us, whatever, we have our side hustles, we do our things because yeah, man, you never know with the economy, you never know what's going to happen. And a brand that allows you to do that, one, I'm fortunate enough to have that with Gravity Forms, but also Gravity Forms gets a little part of that indirectly, which is kind of cool for them. And it helps us as content creators to have that sort of cachet for us to have and to invest in not only ourselves, but the brands that we work with.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's very accurate. I think there's two ways of looking at it, and one is possibly from the negative side, you can think, aren't you competing with yourself, with us in some way or whatever? Or and that's how I like to see it. It's an extension of whomever your employer is.
And as long as you do that in a fashion where that's beneficial for all, then there's really no no drawback there's. There's just pluses yeah, no, but it's that's great to to see you in in that role, in that fashion, because I think your branding, your reach, the sense of community that you have around you sorry. The sense of the community that you have around you as well as the people who are in your community.
I don't know. I think that's an asset and I think it should be treated as such.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Right. So we tweeted back and forth a few weeks back.
We do it happens more often. But this led to me inviting you on my podcast and the general topic that we were discussing was the media landscape of WordPress in general.
I don't know where we landed or if we landed at all, but it's at least one of the topics I'd like to discuss with you because I think I mentioned I have opinions.
There's things going on that irk me. There's things going on that I like.
There's at least a lot happening over the last, let's say two to three years where stuff is starting to change.
My first question to you would be, are you seeing the changes as well? And if so, are you seeing them as a positive, a negative, neutral? What do you see in general, if at all?
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Yeah. So if we're strictly talking about the changes in WordPress media well, first let me just restate that question to you. Are we talking just WordPress media changes?
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah, mostly.
I say mostly because it's also bleeding out of the community as it was five years ago.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think that if we look back at, let's say 2007, 2008, when there was another sort of global financial crisis, you had this perfect storm for WordPress. WordPress was going from just okay to pretty damn good. Right? At that time, version three something, Custom Fields was really taking off, custom post types. And people were looking at this thing like, wow, I can do a lot with this, I can build a business with this. Agencies, plugins, themes, those were the heydays, right? People really coming into the market because economics and stuff like that. It was a great way to build revenue for those who are looking to build a business and get a new job. Same thing I think is going to happen. Maybe not to the same degree into 2023, into 24, but with 200,000 tech folks recently laid off, I think we'll see a boon in WordPress happen again.
It's not going to hit that perfect mark where all of a sudden full site editing and Gutenberg are going to be amazing and everyone's going to love it as much as they did custom fields. But it is getting better and I think we'll see a positive impact over the next year. So when Gutenberg was announced, now if I zoom out and I look at what's the effect of WordPress community, WordPress media, and how has this all impacted into what we have today? If I look at when Gutenberg came out, which was four ish years ago at this point, that was a moment in time where you saw a rise of no code apps. You saw so many different hosting things coming about, people building SaaS apps to do all these unique features, new coding, frameworks. I'm not a developer, so don't beat me up over the terminology. But that was a time where people were already 15 years into WordPress and when they didn't like the direction of Gutenberg, it was a perfect opportunity for people to be like, you know what, I'm going to go get this other shiny object that I like, right, I don't want this. I don't want JavaScript, I don't want to learn this code again and I'm not having it. And that was a perfect moment for a lot of people to exit the community, as it were.
That was like a little bit of a deflation of momentum for WordPress at that time. Now, hold that thought.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: I've been doing this for all that.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Yeah, right. So hold that thought. I've been doing this now for a decade, and you've been in the community probably just as long, if not longer. I think the ceiling for folks like you and me, when we look at the WordPress Media landscape, I think the ceiling of the most amount of people in the world who care as much as we care about what we're talking about is probably under 10,000. It's probably like 7000 to 10,000 people who actually care about WordPress as much as we do. Like, who would listen to a 45 minutes podcast about WordPress.
Now, the broader landscape of WordPress and probably why we've gotten to the point of where we're at with WordPress Media is the broader landscape of WordPress is the person who's just like, I need to learn how to install a contact form, I need to know how to customize my website. And that's all they care about. They don't care about WordCamps and what's happening with Core and what the economics are of WordPress. They just want what they want as WordPress end users. That's a massive audience, a lucrative audience. If you're a media person, if you're a YouTuber, a newsletter person, a blog, affiliates, all of this stuff, it is a massive audience. And it's how we get if I'm kind of reading into your question, it's how we get the top ten restaurant themes. Now, that stuff isn't as prevalent, I don't think, these days because of probably like envato and template monster have all sort of diluted that market space. But it's how you get the generalist content, I think, because the landscape is quite broad and I'll pause to get your reaction to that.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: I'm with you.
I think there was a big shift starting in 2008, specifically catapulting even further from 2010, when custom post types and custom fields and the whole array of how do I make a really fancy WordPress site became a relatively easy thing for someone who is not a developer. I think that's probably around the time also that CMB, which was a joint thing between Webdev Studios and Human Made, that became CMB two later on. And you also had custom post type UI from Webdev Studios.
I think those are perfect examples of where WordPress really started to venture out to a larger audience. And of late, I think page builders specifically, I don't like them necessarily.
Let me just get that out of the way. But I think builders are servicing a crowd which are generally not into the if you call them the Ten K intimates, they don't really care. They just want to solve their problem. They just want to do whatever they want to do, need to do whatever.
Yeah. And that brings a very different world in which we find ourselves now.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that type of content consumer, I would love to do a study on what the lifetime value is of that kind of content consumer. For affiliates, I'm not a big affiliate person. I just recommend the tools that I recommend, and I don't even track it.
I don't have a plan to promote affiliate links like some other folks do, which I applaud them for the dedication to it. But the point is, I've seen so many of those folks, especially in the page builder world, just move from one tool to the next to the next for just the next free feature. And it's mind boggling because lots of these folks have it's your typical customer that you never want to service as, let's say, a design agency or a WordPress development agency. It's always give me more for less. And that's what these folks are doing, yet they're the ones going out and building websites for other people. And it's just mind boggling to me. Like these page builders, I don't care which one you love, which one you hate. What they're all trying to do is make web development easier for you. They're literally trying to flip 30 years of web technology on its head to say, here you go, end user. I built this GUI for you, for coding. And then people are just.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And for that, I applaud them. When I say I don't necessarily like page builders, it's mostly because they're not built with speed or scalability in mind.
In a few exceptions, and there's a few exceptions where doing the right things, you can make them performant. But it's an afterthought. And for me, that needs to be a forethought, that needs to be, okay, lean and mean, we start from there and we build up on that, and we don't go, let's just build wild and then see how lean and mean we can get it. That's a different approach and it's not my so to give you an example, do you know the YouTube account Living With?
[00:16:41] Speaker B: I do.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: So I met the guy, I think his name is Reno.
He's from the Netherlands as well.
I met him at WorkAmp, Netherlands, last year, which was his first.
We had a very nice conversation.
If you don't know and you're listening, then reno mostly focuses on elementor, and he has 160K subscriber count, which means if we're just taking that ten k example, there is a crowd 15 times, 16 times larger than that that is very much into design and Elementor, which is exactly the crowd you just mentioned.
And I've known they are there. Obviously, historically I've been hired a lot to fix them sorry, fix their sites because something happened and it's not working, it's not scaling, please help, which is fine, it's business.
So I've been aware of that crowd, but I've never been part of that crowd. And I feel that we're slowly seeing that crowd move inward a bit.
I don't know if I say that I mean accurate or if it's just N is one, I don't know.
But that's kind of how I see it change, at least. And I agree with you that there is a lot changing and as with any recession, it's a great opportunity to rethink what you're doing. And I think a lot of people are rethinking what they're doing.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
When you look at Elementor, which is the largest elephant in the room in terms of page builders, I mean, you saw this exponential growth well beyond visual composer and just like whatever, fill in the blank site Origins page. Like, I remember those days of these tools that you're like, wow, these things are fantastic. But then Elementor just took off and from somebody who's been in the startup world for a while and analyzing the WordPress startup world for a while, it's not easy for them either to grow that fast and hire people and build out the code base. Meanwhile, playing in the WordPress sandbox, which is a challenge unto itself through Wordpress.org and it's not an official marketplace like Shopify or fill in the blank of another marketplace, get the data that they need and then be backwards compatible with what WordPress wants. Super big challenge. Which is why you see them going into now the hosting world, as one would imagine, is because now they have to right, they have to be able to control their software. And it's no different than what we'll see.com and Wordpress.org do. I think in the coming years, where you'll see this sort of more packaged and marketed line from Automatic that says, if you want the best way to experience WordPress, start on.com for $10 a month, and then, oh, by the way, you can just do it yourself and connect it with Jetpack On and forget about third party developers at that point. But you'll see that connection and that marketing speak, I think much greater in the coming years.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I see that happening already.
I'm still waiting for them to rebrand from Jetpack sorry, from Whippers.com to Jetpack blog or something like that, that makes more sense to me.
But it's quite possible that the piggyback off of is helping them. Still never really got any insight into that, but it's always made me curious.
But that general move is happening.
So with that you mentioned offhand the best ten restaurant themes or plugins for whatever. As, as one of the things we were inundated with, I would say for the least, for the last ten years, the whole listicle thing really blew up.
Quality of WordPress news as it was, went down, I would say to a quality level of almost nonexistent. Just I need to get in front of somebody else and I have my affiliate link, so here they are.
That type of content, what do you see changing in that portion of the media landscape?
[00:21:45] Speaker B: So WordPress, like true WordPress content is really tough. And I know that you could probably by tough, I mean it's a difficult thing to turn into a business. And I'll break down some of the parts of that. One we've already talked about is the audience size literally is not there, right? It's just not there for what we do. And maybe you see things, broad things that happen, like social media. How many times do humans need to go through social media outlets pulling the rug out from underneath them, right? It's their data, it's their content, it's their algorithm, it's their rules. And you keep getting less and less for your money. It's like taxes. So it's just like, what am I getting from this? So you hope to see things like the rise of Macedon over Twitter, or at least the awareness of it, that it's important that your biggest and most valued open source content management system that allows you to express yourself, build a business, do whatever, that there's some kind of watchful eye over this stuff. So basically what I'm getting at is hopefully humans care a little bit more, and next year the numbers of people who care more goes up to 15,000 people, which is tiny, right?
So there's that. And with that is the money factor, right?
As somebody who has been doing this now for a while, there's only so much sponsorship you can get. There's only so know, not talking affiliate play, you're not talking the listicles and stuff like that. Just focused on what I do at WP Minute. There's only so much sponsorship you can have. Why chicken and egg? Because of the audience size. When I sell sponsorship, most of that money is going to come from a web hosting company. Because they have the money. They have the money. But you get in front of big hosting companies and they want everyone's favorite term, ROI. How many clicks am I going to get? How many accounts are we going to have sign up? And it's like, you probably want to go sponsor Tim Ferriss's podcast instead, because he's going to have millions of downloads versus my thousands of downloads. And that's just the game you're going to have to play if you want to support independent content. That's why you're here. So there's that challenge, right? And then there's the challenge of writers and content and what are we covering?
And the cost of that, the cost of running that business. I employ Eric Karkovac. He's the editor at the WP Minute. And I literally take all of the money I earn on sponsorship and slide it across the desk and give it to him. And it's not a lot of money, and I'm so grateful that he does it with me. But it's very challenging to grow a team in this space, which means that if you're listening to this and you're saying, well, how can I survive? Yeah, I mean, number one, I do the WP Minute. It's a five minute podcast because of that, because I need to keep the time invested down because it's not making a ton of money. But then you start to look at broadening the coverage, just like a newspaper, where you might be looking at, okay, here's the news, but then here's Fashion Week.
Here's the latest trends in fashion, which goes back to, yeah, here's the best page builder, right? Yeah, here's the best page builder. Here's all the restaurants. Here's restaurant week. Here's all the seafood places that are open this week. And, yeah, you have to strike that fine balance to bring in the most broad listenership or readership, viewership to kind of build that business. So it's tough. The last thing I'll say here is Topher, who runs Hero Press, had recently reposted from his own archives that he originally started a Kickstarter for Hero Press at $60,000 to get that off the ground. And I messaged him, as I do on Twitter with a comment, it's like, yeah, but now it's probably $160,000 to run that because whatever inflation time went by. But to realize the actual cost it would take to employ just one or two people to produce good content, yeah, it's going to take some money and time.
[00:26:07] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great example where it's super obvious that whatever worked in the past does not work in today's world.
I started thinking about something else you kind of touched.
If we're to find people outside of the current bubble, current circle, and include them, if you want to grow to the 10,000 fans, to 15,000 fans, do you see the media landscape being the party that is supposed to be taking care of that? Or is that a job of whatever happens at WordCamp Central Meetups?
Where does that responsibility lie? Or should it be designated anywhere?
[00:27:07] Speaker B: So I'll give you my secret sauce and what I'm trying to do, and then I'll talk about it from the broader perspective.
I'll start with the broader perspective first. So if we take a look at the WP Tavern, love what Sarah does over there, love what Nathan does with the podcast. But I'm going to give the trophy to Sarah on terms of WordPress journalist really digging for the stories, but also having to put out the Gutenberg's tutorials and overviews and stuff like that. And I'm saying that because as an insider, I see the comments, I see people comment on the Tavern, like, why are you covering? You know, you're just a shill for Automatic, which is the furthest from the truth. However, as much respect as I have for Sarah and her work, it is solely owned by Audrey Capital, which is Matt's investment company, allah Matt and Automatic. And again, nothing wrong with that, but the idea is the only real paper of record for covering WordPress and Automatic is owned by Matt, who also runs Automatic. So there's that challenge. But when I analyze it, why isn't there more? Why haven't we hired another staff writer at the tavern? Why isn't Matt really investing in that one? He's the most busy guy I know.
So, I mean, I can understand there's not many brain cells left for the Tavern after that, but still, you'd expect some kind of push on that. And maybe he is, and maybe that's happening behind the scenes, I don't know. But Sarah has a lot of work on her know to do and now I'll talk about somewhere in the middle of where I was going to go before. There's a lot of disadvantage and what I'll say is unfairness in the media landscape. So how do we reach that? How do we go from 10,000 to 15,000 to 50,000?
The only on ramp I know for exposing WordPress News to regular WordPress users is that little throwaway widget that loads up on the dashboard of every WordPress site, which anyone can disable.
It does not like this big banner that shows up, like, you should watch this. But that is like, the one way I would love to see more openness for sites like you and me. Right? I mean, I've been covering it now for over a decade and no one's ever asked me to be in there or included in there, though there are others that are in there and I don't know of a formal way to request my media to go into that.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: WP. Candy is still in there, right?
[00:29:53] Speaker B: Yes. So there you go. Whoever buys that site, if he ever sells it one day, will just magically appear in the dashboard. So there's some friction in the middle, as there always is in the WordPress world of like, how do that person get that and how do I get this and how do we connect the dots? Now, moving to my secret sauce of how do we move to 10,000?
The whole concept, when I thought critically about how can I build a business around WordPress News, one, it was to decouple that content from Matt report, because it's not a very scalable asset. I can't really sell Matt report without selling.
Just I wanted to focus on something that was purely WordPress and the product of the WP minute is five minutes. So I thought to myself, I'm never going to get in front of the WooCommerce store owner and she's selling cupcakes and she's got a brick and mortar store and she doesn't care about WordPress, but she might care about big security patch or big change in WooCommerce that changes taxes and how she handles her taxes. Maybe a five minute podcast that she can just put on Amazon Alexa and just hit the mark every Wednesday. Maybe that type of person will tune in to that type of content. So that's my sort of playbook of reaching the masses for WordPress news. That's why it's hyper condensed. Five minutes. Bullet point ish, but with Eric's fantastic writing skills, adds a lot more value and content to the bone of that newsletter.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting approach.
Without having had asked myself that particular question, I do have the answer for myself, and that's mostly on when I left Servvault, my last employer, I had time to figure out what I wanted. Did I even want to go back into WordPress full time on my own, was the initial thought.
I quickly settled on that. But then now there's this opportunity to focus specifically on stuff that I really want to do versus on, hey, I'm looking for work, just throw anything at me.
And I believe in Kismet, so whatever would come my way would then be whatever it needed to be.
But I also kind of want to become a little bit more of a master of my own destiny. So I started thinking, what are the topics I really enjoy and what are the things I really enjoy? And then I got back to why I started using WordPress in the first place. So this is 2004 was my first playing and then I discarded it for almost a year. So end of 2005 were my really first honest attempts of doing something with WordPress.
And it was mostly just content creation, blogging sharing stuff, not just text, but whatever I could create was put on there. I'm also very happy to say that that URL is no longer available, nor will I ever share what it was.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Remcus world.
Net.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: No, but let's just say I learned and improved myself in that area as well. But that was what pulled me in and I then went, so I have stuff that I want to put out. There is stuff that I think that needs to be out there.
I'm a huge proponent of performance first, lean and mean. I've said it before.
How about I focus on that first and then sort of satellite around it what I think is nice and interesting. So instead of just rebooting my agency, which was still technically there, I went ahead and new name, new specific focus.
And I started to include, okay, I want to do the newsletter. I have been wanting to do the newsletter proper for forever and I've done it on and off. But there was always a reason why I couldn't spend more time on it. So that is now fixed schedule in what I do and then quickly.
Video podcast YouTube became, I really want to play with this. This is fun. This is a new way of educating, helping people.
And I'm sort of using the same focus I have with my agency and the stuff that you see me promote most on Twitter and mastered on. But I kind of went like so let me just brainstorm around these general topics that I find interesting and come up with tutorials and how to's or don'ts and things of that nature and it's essentially servicing the same purpose.
I don't necessarily expect to get incredibly wealthy off of whatever I put on YouTube, but I also have recognized that in the last we all know what happened early 2020 that from that moment on stuff really started to change on video side of things. So YouTube really became very prominent in okay, there's a lot of information here as well.
And when you couple that with I'll turn 50 this year, so I'm no spring chicken anymore. But the realization I had versus I have kids half my age and a little bit younger, they don't primarily search through our traditional search engines. They use whatever medium they have and YouTube is one of them.
So they'll paste their questions into YouTube, which is, I read it somewhere and I had never checked that with my kids. So if you need to search this, where do you go find your they the eldest two went like, YouTube, where else? I'm like, yeah, well, here's the list of where else.
Just that realization which happened before the summer of 21, I think I started understanding the landscape. The landscape has really changed.
Kind of made me investigate what's going on here, what is there? And then as with the low quality content on the website side of things, that also happens on the YouTube side of things. So me being not hindered by any imposter syndrome went like, I think I can do that.
I don't know how. I'm still figuring out a lot of how to do it. But I've started to create my first tutorials. I went easy and started using those that certain clients of mine needed, but then handle it professionally. This could go onto YouTube for a generic public.
And by doing that, I find myself in a flow again of enjoying, creating. And the byproduct is people enjoy it. People learn of new things, learn of things that you and I find very normal within the WordPress community. But on the whole, that whomever group outside of Ten K really doesn't understand or is not aware of or never even heard of anything remotely.
Okay, so yeah, I know my site needs to be fast, but what does that really mean? Yeah, that means every single choice you make from the moment you install it to you publish that first post has an impact on performance. And they go like, yeah, I kind of know that, but really? Yeah, really. So let's explain. Let's dive into that. So courses, newsletter and YouTube are going to be the three pillars.
And where I see my podcast, part of YouTube are going to be the pillar for me going forward in terms of I'm focused on dedicating time for this. So it's not going to be an afterthought. It's going to be part of whatever I do.
Yeah.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: So a few things when you look at the landscape of content creators, look, I love it when you launch a podcast. Michelle for Chet launches her 80th podcast. I love it when new podcast, WordPress podcasts or newsletters or blogs or news sites come into the space. Because, again, a firm believer that the more content, the better.
I just hope that when folks come in, they have put as much thought into it as you have and Michelle have and so many others. Because the thing we don't want is to know, to do the quick buck thing, which is make a quick sale on affiliate links or sponsorship stuff.
I certainly won't name names, but, man, so many times I've seen people come into the space and ask for sponsors and get sponsors, and then all that does is just like when I was in the agency world, when somebody sold a $500 website and it was terrible, or they disappeared and didn't support them. And then they came to my agency, and we're like, it's $5,000 to start. They're like, I'm not paying that, I got burned already. And it just screws up the whole balance of the ecosystem.
So there's that. And just like you're finding it's going to become more challenging, you have to be omnichannel for your audience and for your brands because you're not going to get it in one place. Like, you won't just get that one market through a podcast or that one market through a newsletter.
You can certainly do it and be sustainable and be successful, whatever success means to you. But if you are trying to grow it to the maximum, yeah, you have to be omnichannel. You have to do YouTube, probably have to do TikTok. I'm not even on that. I'm not even touching that.
Yeah, it's going to be challenging for folks.
And I've talked about this publicly before on some of the post status Twitter spaces before the shift to focus more on the WP Minute, the first year revenue with sponsorships, which kind of crossed over from Matt report. So for the last three years, it was probably $50,000 in revenue that I did for sponsorship through the Mat Report, and then into $50,000 a year into the WP Minute. So that's like pouring ten plus years into this space of all content types and then me knocking on people's doors like, please support me. Please sponsor this content.
And that's not a lot of money to grow a true air quotes. Again, for those of you just listening, it's not a lot of money to grow a true business out of it. Like, I can't just go and hire a writer for 50K, there's all the money and what else? Like, I got to pay the bill, I got to pay the hosting fee. Actually I don't, because Kinsta supports me. But you get the point is you need hundreds of thousands of dollars just to even make a dent in a sustainable business like a writer and somebody else. And then there goes all that money. So how do you grow WordPress News to half a million bucks a year? Right, and beyond. So that's why the approach is challenging.
[00:42:23] Speaker A: I think there's only one person who has achieved that.
[00:42:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
Are we naming names? I thought you were going to name a name.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: WP Beginner, as far as I know, and I should say the empire that is WP Beginner, because it's not just that site. There's a couple of sites that are essentially built in a way that combined, they dominate the top five for any search query you have related to WordPress.
I'm not necessarily a fan of it because it's struggling to. So this is a good example of really liking a person I really like, sayat I don't necessarily like the product because what it does, it's not neutral in any way, shape or form.
Having said that, you don't need to be neutral, it's not about that. But when you're not that omnipresent, it's hard. It's hard for anybody not in that circle, not understanding how all those sites interconnect and how everything just keeps piggybacking off of each other. Now look, it's incredible what he's achieved in that realm, but I think it comes with a downside and I think I just mentioned it.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:03] Speaker A: I think they as a whole are the only content creating party within WordPress News that I'm fairly confident is making at least the type of money that you just mentioned. Per.
[00:44:24] Speaker B: Definitely, definitely a lot more through the WP Beginner. I just had him on the WP Minute Plus podcast and we talked more about the product sales and sort of facing the community with the marketing strategies around the products, the cross promotion, that kind of thing. We didn't get into the WP Beginner stuff, but yeah, it's definitely a gray area. And look, also very friendly with Syed, known him for years. One of the worst mistakes I ever made was WordCamp Miami telling him that I had more YouTube subscribers than he did. And then he went and started a YouTube channel and then just put his staff on it and just outpaced everybody.
Yeah, he's trying to grow a software business in WordPress, which is not easy. We're all taking this experience for granted these last 20 years because when the mothership changes and repackages and remarkets and pivots that there's a paid
[email protected] and a free version over at the landscape is going to shift. The better Jetpack gets, the more the blue collar digital workers, the ones who are making one hundred K a year selling some plugins here and there, they're going to get squeezed by jetpack because of marketing and the way that everyone onboards the software purely the weight that they pull. Yeah. So I respect the game that Syed's in, and what he already realizes is the customers will vote with their dollars and the community will vote with their recommendations. So the more he upsets the apple cart, the less folks like you and I, who are the decision makers in the community, with our clients, with our local communities, with people that we help with WordPress, we're going to tell them, don't use that product. Right. That's going to be the unfortunate trade off that he'll have to face.
If that continues to happen, which it sounds like the community is already doing, but his business is still growing, then you have to sit back and look at it and go, well, the customers aren't upset with the product and the customers are okay paying this money and the customers are okay with a flash deal. That wasn't really a flash deal. I mean, at the end of the day, if he's servicing the customer and they're happy and they're happy with the software and the software is improving, you can just take a deep breath and be like, yeah, this is what it is.
[00:47:05] Speaker A: I agree. It's tough to form an opinion on, right?
At least, is it good or is it bad? Because that's a question you'll never truly answer.
Like I said, I salute him for what he's achieved and what he's made possible.
He's also giving back tremendously.
It's just that for someone new jumping into the search engines and the whatnot and wanting to find information that is neutral, it's tough. That's tough.
It's just not a lot out there that they haven't covered. Right.
So it's one of the things I looked at and have looked at in previous years.
Wprelm.com was an attempt, but that became partly because just not enough time, but also just ended up me being alone just doesn't work.
It's not a side job type of thing.
Let me just squeeze that in in the evenings or whatever.
[00:48:25] Speaker B: Now you're exposing me because that's exactly what I do.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I did as well. But I came very quickly to the conclusion this is not working. This is just yeah, this is just too much. And then, so what, what's an interesting question here is how much of a what's the English word?
How much of an advantage does he have? How much is he in front of the pack?
Will his dominion, his dominance, will that ever be caught up with?
I'm struggling to find any other answer as that'll never happen.
[00:49:10] Speaker B: Yeah, he has a tremendous advantage over a lot, technically, from search engine SEO terms, like he has a tremendous advantage, links, cross promotion, the many different products that he has. I mean, he has a really strong advantage. And I would look at it like if I were in the plugin business or here I am. At Gravity Forms is you keep your head down and you focus on your core customers and your core product. Offering not playing the game that he's playing because ultimately he'll also get to a point, and this is just me. Totally hypothetical conspiracy theory. But you'll get to a point where at some point you're going to acquire so much that there has to be some massive pricing change. There has to be something that's going to change in his portfolio of products to reach all customers.
Because I don't think he'll be able to really keep up with having because we talked about this a little bit. So you could go buy Thrive Themes, which he just acquired and whatever the price is, I don't know, let's say it's $400 or something like that. Then you're going to go and let's say buy Opt in Monster for all those sites. If there's a cross promotion there, what I'm getting at is there's going to get to a point where his customers be like, hey, there's a premium at every product I'm paying you for. And he'll get to a point where he'll get so much customer feedback that maybe not maybe I'm just wrong, that they're going to be like, hey, look, I want one price for all your stuff because I'm going to use it on my sites. And now I'm looking at like, I'm paying you five grand a year, where maybe I just go to HubSpot for $200 a month and get all of that sort of like functionality from one vendor. And what will happen is there'll probably be some restructuring which will really reshape the focus of the business. Or not. I mean, he's bootstrapped, right? There's no outside investment, so he says, which is tremendous. The only one that should really be looking at him is one Elementor, and two people should be looking at him. Elementor and Automatic should be like the really only ones looking at him like, oh shit, what are we going to do about this guy, right?
I've publicly said I think if anyone's going to buy Elementor, it's going to be awesome motive. Because it's either he has to get a hosting company next, or he has to just get a massive page builder that's going to acquire 5 million customers or he's going to buy a mail. Yeah, or both.
[00:52:02] Speaker A: Or both.
[00:52:03] Speaker B: Or he buys ConvertKit. Like there's going to be something that he does that is going to get to the next level. That's going to be a big shock.
[00:52:12] Speaker A: The way that business is growing, it's going to have to end up with hosting. And page builder is very likely, at least in my book, in terms of he wants to be the one stop shop for anything where you're a commercial, where you commercialize your website. His products are essentially targeting that from that perspective. He needs to be on the hosting side of things, and he needs to be. But the question is, do you want that kind of headache? It's a different world.
I don't know, but it's an interesting one. I think Automatic should have been there. And I think that this comes back to your mentioning of WP Tavern.
I've said this before, WP Tavern doesn't target me as an audience.
That's not to say that it doesn't have a good place in the media landscape of WordPress. I just think it's lacking a lot.
And that is something I think Automatic Audrey, or maybe just say Matt could have been in front of earlier, because that clearly where the battle is.
[00:53:48] Speaker B: Look, when I look at news, right, like, I don't look at WP beginner getting into that, like, the WordPress, like, community and news stuff and why? Because there's no money in it. So there's money in recommending other products and affiliate links and hosting companies. And that's where Syed focuses the WP beginner.
This is what I was alluding to earlier in the conversation about folks like you and me and others may be listening to this, who are content creators and leveraging that I've been doing this. One, I've been doing this again many, many years. One, because I love open source and I love WordPress and I love what it can do for humans. Not like I can build a cool website, but that somebody who lost a job or is on down an unlucky path, they can learn a skill and use WordPress as a tool to change their lives. Like, communities could invest in WordPress development shops or educational classes and really help a local community thrive in a technical sector, which is not just WordPress, but open source in general. And that's why I really love it and that's why I continue to do it. And two, it's not about the year or maybe hoping to get to year in revenue of sponsors, but that look, when I lost my job, I put out a video, said I lost my job, and I had a massive network effect of people reaching out saying, we would love to hire you. So my payout on creating this content is a little bit different, maybe similar to you, but maybe different than most who look at it, who are like, no, I'm trying to build like an affiliate farm. I'm trying to grow revenue. And that's cool, you can go and do that. I have no problem with that. But I'm putting sort of building my trust and who I am in this space, and that's my investment for whatever the next opportunity is. Literally, that's all it is. It's like, what's the next opportunity? Or how can I help other people? And that's it. That's what it's all about for me. And if I can generate revenue to build a sustainable asset, which is the WP Minute, then cool.
And that's how I'll keep this thing going without me. Just like totally burning out from content generation.
Yeah. Everyone has a different path with WordPress content. Hopefully the good ones stick around.
[00:56:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I hope as well. I would love to see something like Wplift.com, which is for me, nothing more than listicles, but they have a potential.
I learned that last year. It switched owner again.
I at least see Wplift account be more active on Twitter, but there's more out there that I think deserve a place.
But yeah, it's hard to make that on its own and have it make money. That's incredibly hard.
[00:56:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Did you watch the auction and see how much it sold for?
[00:56:54] Speaker A: I didn't watch the auction, but I think it was significantly less than what it was purchased for earlier.
[00:57:00] Speaker B: Yeah, because I had originally interviewed when it was purchased before, which I think was like four hundred k, three hundred and eighty k, something like that. And then I forget his name.
Yeah. I thought he was from the Netherlands. No, he was. Yeah. So then I think this recent auction went for like one hundred and eighty k, and I wrote a piece on the WP Minute about it because I was like, furious, which is more like I'm like, damn, 180K. Maybe I should have just been doing that all along, right? And I could have been just doing affiliates and listicles, but whatever, I'm sure you are too old.
Look, you have been happy doing that.
Look, if I could build out an asset, I'm always looking to reinvest it into something else. The work that this is why I've made sort of like this creative pivot to not like I haven't done a Matt Report podcast.
I did one last month, but prior to that, not since last September, because I only have so much time and I've been focusing on the WP Minute. I want to build something that is, number one, sustainable, but two, helpful to a group of people really passionate about the WordPress community, really passionate about the podcast community, because there's a big open source movement there and I'm really passionate about my local community. So I'm like in this tug of war in my head of like, how can I serve these three different communities effectively? Through my talents, which is fucking podcasting and YouTube. Right? So I would have been happy having something I could reinvest into those other efforts. Yes, but yeah, you're absolutely right. When I started my YouTube channel I'll make this quick. When I started my YouTube channel, Plug and Tut, which I created, I think, 2017, which I've now rebranded to the WP Minute, I was just probably just like, you tutorial, tutorial, tutorial, tutorial, four days a week, five days a week of just pumping out these hour know, tutorials. And I hated like I got to a point where I couldn't stand it and I remember just totally burning out and never logging into the YouTube account, never logging into the YouTube account. When I got to like 900 subscribers and I'm like, this is not fun, I hate it. And then Google AdSense sent me the first $50 check or $100 check, whatever it is that they paid out, and I was like, oh, cool, this is like months later. And then I logged in and it went from when I last shut the laptop to 900 subscribers to whatever it was like 2500 subscribers without me even touching it. And then I was like, oh man, I shouldn't have given up on this. And then I started to reinvest in it again and then hit another burnout too, because started to have kids and all this stuff and keeping up with the algorithm and the thumbnails, and I'm like, this sucks.
But it started to generate revenue. And when I was having my kids, when they were using seven diapers a day or more, whatever the number was. Yeah, like that extra 700, $800 that came in from Google AdSense every month. That was awesome. That was nice. So now it's up to like 14 and a half thousand and I'm just restarting to put the WordPress news stuff on there and just taking it slow again because it's a scary ride, man. Like the algorithm and pumping it out and views and you're always like watching it. Then you get the negative comments and you're like the humans. Not every human is built for this, that's for sure.
[01:00:46] Speaker A: No, well, yeah, I think the whole being of service helping is wonderful, but it's clear that that's not the only thing you can survive on. If you want to be part of the WordPress media landscape and to come back to the original back and forth we had on Twitter, I think that essentially is my biggest opinion. That is it's unsustainable to be fully independent and servicing the community.
It's undoable.
It's just too much. There's too much that comes with it. And you're too dependent on somebody else's gratitude, somebody else's check. I guess even it's hard. The only way it works is actually approaching it from an affiliate point of view. But that leaves you with debt content. I mean, for me, it's debt content. I don't appreciate reading it, I don't work with it, I just skip it altogether.
And the only thing that for me now works with my newsletter is that I already did it a little bit, but I'm explicitly speaking in my own voice.
I'm adding my humor, my take on the things that I see, and I put time and effort into making sure that what I cover, at least three quarters of what I cover, is not being covered by anybody else.
And that's what I can do. And if somebody wants to sponsor, that, wonderful.
If somebody doesn't, not wonderful, but it is what it is.
[01:02:49] Speaker B: So what's your monetization play? Are you doing sponsorship already? I don't remember you requesting sponsorship no.
[01:02:58] Speaker A: So I mentioned at the bottom once that I have open sponsorships and I have my first sponsor for my next newsletter, but it's low key still. I don't want to push it too hard yet, but the number of subscribers have been going up continuously over the last couple of weeks. So when I rebooted, I had, I think about 100 and 6170 email addresses, and in about two months, I'm closing in on 500. So the audience is starting to become somewhat significant.
And with that, once I cross 500, which is either this week or next week or something like that, then I'll start making noise a little bit more.
But yeah, ideally I'm in a position where I have people wanting to sponsor me and who want to get in front of a crowd who and I must say, the responses that I keep getting after every single newsletter I send out of positive of great feedback, which I've never had before. So it's nice to know that once I switched to a very more my style type of thing that's been appreciated. And I enjoy that. So that makes it fun to the point that if nobody wants to sponsor me, I'll still do the newsletter.
[01:04:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I've been there.
I've been there.
[01:04:33] Speaker A: No, but it's fun. I enjoy doing this for pretty much the same reasons as you are. So I see you fully.
[01:04:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you.
[01:04:44] Speaker A: Thanks again and see you next time.
Bye.
