Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to within WordPress, the podcast about all those wonderful people inside the WordPress ecosphere. Today we have a special guest from across the pond with us today is Alex Standefort. Welcome, Alex.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hey, thanks. I'm glad to be here.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Happy to have you.
I think we follow each other on ex, formally Twitter for quite a while. But my default question, my first question for everybody is, where could they possibly know you from within the world of WordPress?
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Well, I've been around for a little while, so I've been in the circles, particularly in the US. I'm pretty well networked. I know a lot of people in the area. So if you've been to a word camp, view Wordcamp, us, I went to Philly, I went to DC. We probably ran into you there. I basically am always in the networking track, all day.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Hallway track is where it's at.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So, uh, I spent a lot of time there. Um, you probably, if you know me from that, you might also know me from, um, the last four years. I was traveling in a camper, um, all over the country, and, uh, I had a lot of people interacting with me on, on x just based on that kind of stuff. And then you also might know me just for mastodon. I'm on the mastodon community, and I'm a pretty big proponent of, um, the open web and, you know, that kind of stuff as well. So I've met a lot of people through that as well.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: I'm with you there. I'm not seeing it go as fast in the direction I would like. I've had a Mastodon account myself since 2016, but I like that there is some movement on it.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Red's just joined the metaverse, so I'm pretty excited about that. So there's a lot of.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Saw that. Yeah.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Just like overnight, tens of thousands of people just, bam, are in the metaverse. That was a big deal.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: The only thing is, I don't like threads, so.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Yeah, right, yeah, I get that. I figure, I figure, you know, some people want that algorithm, so. And that's okay. And I'm not. I don't know, I understand that the way Mastodon works isn't for everybody. I just want it to be open. That's really, at this point, that's all I care about.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Yep, I agree. I hope at some point x is going to end up in that direction, but for me, that's where the most enjoyment is. At least the largest group of WordPress people still. Still there. But, yeah, let's just say that as a conclusion of your introduction, you've been around not only time wise, but also location wise.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Yes, for sure.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: What prompted you to do the camper thing?
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Well, we were. It was all kind of just a crazy, like, amalgamation of events, right? So we were. Our lease was up for our rental. I wasn't in a position to be able to buy a house anytime soon. We were like, well, we could rent out this house for another year, and we were planning to do that. Right. We weren't in any hurry to do anything. Um, I've been working remote for a few years, and, um, we had just bought a camper that November for, like. It's crazy now because pre Covid, it was right before COVID So we bought this camper for, like, you know, $6,000, which is just unheard of now.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:04] Speaker B: Yeah, we had this camper and we had all this. Yeah. More than. Oh, my gosh. But. So we had this camper, and we were planning on basically parking it for a summer, um, at one campground so we could see my family and hang out with them more and do stuff like that. And, um, my wife Kate, she came downstairs to me one day, and she's like, you know, we have this camper, this lease is up, and we could be anywhere in the country, and a lot of people are doing this, you know, rv life thing. We've talked about doing it a couple times. Is now the time? And I told her, I said, if you jump, I jump, jack, let's do it. And, um. Yeah, lo and behold, three months later, I was, you know, ripping out stuff in a camper and all this stuff. And one summer later, I'm in Taos, New Mexico, on a plot of land and, you know, like, using a bucket toilet and a cistern. And, you know, it was nuts. It was the craziest four years of my life, and I loved it, but.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: So what did you do in the four years? Did you, like, travel all around or did you have a plan or what? Did you have, like, a. Okay, this is the. We have x amount of states we haven't seen yet. This is what we're going to do. Or.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Yeah, so we had.
Our first year, we just wanted to go west. We were, like, the first thing we had to do was, I'm from Ohio, the Midwest, and I never really got to see California or the american Southwest or anything like that. I've been to San Francisco for business or something like that, just flying in. But I never got to see the national parks or the mountains or any of that. So we kind of formed a plan around that. And we happen to have some family in Texas, so we strategize around that. So we ended up, we would drive down to Texas from Ohio, which is about halfway to California, which is like, it's crazy when you think about it. Like, you think that Texas is west, but it's really kind of dead smack in the middle of the country. So we drive to Texas, we stay warm over the winter, and then from there we would decide where we were going to go. And the first year we went over into, we went west into California. The second year, we went up into New England, and we just kind of strategized around that. So all of our maps always ended up becoming this giant loop that kind of started and ended basically in Austin.
And we picked that spot again because its centrally located but south, so youre still warm. So it let you kind of like pick the east or west direction. And we did that. Wed pick a, we would pick like, a pinnacle, right? Like the farthest point that we want to reach that year. And we would basically just build a route around that. Our first year was Washington.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Would you, I'm just curious, would you do a couple of days of driving and then parking, camping, or like, hop every few? How does that work? There was like, I'm asking because, okay, is it something I, you know, I wouldn't mind doing that. Well, probably the european version, but yeah.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's so many different ways you can approach that. Um, it depended on a lot of things, like the time of year. Um, it depended on my workload at the time. It depended on, like, just everything. There was just so many different things. Like, I was, I was doing still am sometimes. I was picking up some freelance work in the winter. So, like, when we were parked in Texas and not moving, I would just do a bunch of freelance work on top of my day job. So I basically didn't have a light for those three months. I was just, you know, parked at this campground and I would just work and I would walk around the campground and the kids would play, whatever. Um, but, like, the rest of the year, it would, we would travel, like you're saying. And the, the schedule. I spent, like three years trying to figure out the schedule, like, what the perfect schedule was before I finally decided that there isn't one because we did everything from, I would, I would do, um, 100 miles, hops. So we would, like, when we were in California, it made a lot of sense to do that because there's so many wineries and breweries that you can park at for free, right. I mean, you gotta, you know, you gotta, like, stay there and, like, be a customer, right. So you're, whether it's board or tasting wine or whatever, you know. But it was a pretty nice routine for a while until I got sick of drinking the wine. Um, so basically, I would, you know, I would, we would, I would wake up, I'd work a little. I'd drive 100 miles to the next winery, and I'd spend my evening on a, on a private winery, you know, sipping wine with my wife. Sometimes we would see other full timers, and we would, like, talk about our travel stories with them, and then, you know, go to sleep, wake up and do it all over again. It was, that was great. I love that. But a couple months of that, and you get pretty tired. I found that no matter how, how I spun it, like, we also tried to do, like, bigger hops where we would do what we would call a Georgia sprint because it's 600 miles from Georgia to Ohio. And it seems like every time we ever needed to do a big run, it was that. So we called it a Georgia sprint, but a 600 miles hop instead of a 100 miles hop, and thats all day. You wake up, youre driving, and youre done. And for me, that made a lot of sense in the middle of the country where I didnt really, there wasnt as much stuff to see. Right. So if Im in Texas and I wanted to get to, say, the east coast, I would probably just do a couple 600 miles hops just to get past Mississippi and Alabama and, like, you know, parts of the country that I wasn't as interested in seeing.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Yep. So the, essentially, what you're saying is for, for four years, you went from half a plan to no plan to. And figuring it out on the way.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Our first year, we had, we were, like, on the rails. Like, my wife had planned every stop between Texas and Oregon, and it was like dozens of stops. But by the second or third year, we kind of realized you only really need to be, like, six weeks out, like four to six weeks out to be able to guarantee a spot. And we just started doing that. And then we found out that if you have your passport and you can go to Canada, there's a lot of kind of a code, it's a cheat code for the holidays because, like, like, for example, Victoria Day is on a different, is like one week before Memorial Day weekend here in the United States. And Memorial Day is like this crazy camping weekend where, like, every, it's like opening of summer, right so everybody is camping, and it's so difficult to find a camp, like, a reliable campsite. That weekend, July 4 weekend, independence Day and then Labor Day, which is, like. It's kind of like the kickoff of, like, the. The announcement that summer's basically done, right. So, like, those three days are really difficult to find campsites on. So we just started going to Canada for those holidays because they're not celebrating the holiday, so it's just another weekend to them. Yeah, but, yeah, it was. It was fun. I loved it. I. Did you.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Did you do work camps in those four years as well? Did you plan around that?
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Yeah, we did a little. Not as much as you might think.
Just because Covid had hit. Right. I mean, we moved into the camper and literally, like, two months late, two months after us moving in, Covid was in full swing. So, like, the can't. In fact, the campground that we were at was shut down, technically, and we weren't. The only reason why we were allowed to even be there was because it was considered our primary residence.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: So we were kind of, like, able to go in, but it was. It was freaky because.
It was freaky because the campground was, like, completely empty. So it was like. Have you ever seen those, like, old, like, amusement park photos of, like, abandoned amusement parks? It felt like that. It felt like a ghost town. Like we were alone in this campground, like, isolated out in the middle of the nowhere, nowhere, in the middle of this pandemic. And it just really kind of added to this eerie effect. It wasn't the best start to this life, but, you know, we kind of cut our teeth and learned, like, you know, so how long ago do it.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Since you did the last trip?
[00:10:40] Speaker B: We. I actually just got back yesterday from picking up our camper from Vermont, but we've been. But our.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Our.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Our last trip was officially, I think, was November of last year. So we just stopped a few months ago, um, mostly because we had an incident where a truck driver, um, he was delivering our camper to Texas, and, um, he damaged it on the way there and didn't tell us. So when we got there, yes, we got there, we discovered the camper was damaged, and we had to scramble to figure out where we were going to stay and ended up being a whole mess. And the camper was damaged severely enough that we ended up needing to basically total it. So we were looking at the situation and were like, okay, well, we could either take this money and build a new camper and start over with all that, or we could just say, okay, it's been four years. This was a good run. We had a lot of fun. We never intended to do this forever. This is a pretty good exit opportunity, so we opted for the exit for now just.
It was four years. We were getting tired of moving and, you know, it just. It wasn't as fun as it used to be. So we were like, you know what? It's time to take it easy.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: For me, this would be like a thing you would do in the summer. Like a long summer, right. So, yes. What is it? Start in May, June, July, August, and then kind of. Kind of head back.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: But, you know, that's. That's an interesting. That. That, I'm sure has been an interesting four years just by my own. So I've driven around the US quite a bit. I'd say I've seen probably half the states. I guess at some point, most Americans. Possibly, possibly. But just the difference that is from state to state, even though it goes ever so gradually, there is a difference. There is a different mini culture, there's different values and norms and stuff like that. Just encountering that from east coast to West coast must have been, you know, looking back, a big thing you were processing on the side, because it's not just the travel. Right. It's also the meeting the people and interacting with them and all that.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Recognizing the differences and seeing their cultures in ways that they may not even recognize themselves, you know?
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:59] Speaker A: Was there a moment when you said during those four years, instead of at the end, where you kind of, you know, kind of have to make this decision? Was there ever a moment where you went, like, yeah, we're never doing this again? Or has it just been what is.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Yeah, we had some.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: So it's not one.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: For example, we. We.
There was a summer that we spent in Taos, New Mexico, which is right on the border of. Northern border of New Mexico, right there by Colorado. It's a beautiful area, has the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and there's just. It's. It's beautiful. However. So what we did was that summer, we bought parcel of land for like, $5,000. We literally just bought it from a website.
And it was like, I figured, worst case scenario, I'm probably going to spend that much money to camp somewhere for the summer. So if I stayed there for a summer, it's. Money pays for itself. I can spend that money or whatever.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Excuse me. Sorry. So.
So we had that money. We did that. We bought that land, and we. We parked on it. Now, of course, it was just raw, raw land. So we had to put a driveway on it and we had to put a cistern on it because it's New Mexico, so you can't drill for a well. The water is like so far down. Yeah, you're 8000ft up, you know, and it's technically the arid desert anyway, so we had to get a cistern, we had to get water delivered and all this stuff. And it was crazy. Like, we didn't have septic, we didn't have electricity. So I was like, I actually have solar panels in my truck that I brought back from Vermont because I had brought them with me from New Mexico that summer. And we use them to, you know, power everything anyway, so it was crazy. So we're like, needless to say, I'm learning a lot. There's a lot of stuff going on. I'm a little like my, my, my stress. My resting stress level is a little higher than normal just simply because I have to manage, like how much water do we have? And are the. Do I need to do anything with the toilets? And like, what's going on with the electricity is how's my battery right now? And all this because none of it was sufficient. Mostly because we were just experimenting and learning. It was great. It was fun. But in the middle of that, one of the big things about my system that I was depending on was that my fridge ran on propane. That way I didn't have to worry about the electricity of the solar panels or any of that stuff. I was running on propane and the darn thing died like two months in. Like right after I had. We just started to get settled a little bit. And the. That paint that, um, Fridge died on me. And I had to drive several hours south to find an electric fridge that would even fit in that camper. And it took me like a week to even find it. And like, it was just a. It was a mess. So we. And we had to like, rip that, rip that fridge out. And it wasn't. It was built in, right, because it's a camper. It's not like it's just a residential fridge that you just roll out, you know? So we had to like, figure out how to get that thing out of there and dispose of it. And, and, uh, you know, the fridge I bought was an electric fridge. Cause I couldn't find a propane one that would fit. So I had to like, change the capacity of my solar panels and all this stuff. And, um, so it was pretty rough then. And that night, I was trying to sleep, and I was having some trouble sleeping some nights during that summer because we're, like, we are out in the middle. We are, like, on the edges of, like, american society here, right? So, like.
And there's other people that live there, but there's not a lot of houses. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, there's, like, there's. There's people that'll drive by in a u haul, and you're like, oh, they live in that. You know what I mean? Like, it was a very, like, countercultural kind of place. And so I was never exact. I was always a little, like, on edge, to say the least, that, like, who knows? Like, it would. It's just not. You don't exactly feel safe out there, which is a lot of the reason why I left.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: But that night, I'm already, like, stressed from all this. And I'm sleeping great, and I'm. And I'm trying to sleep, and I hear noises outside because it's. It's dead silent out here in the middle of nowhere, right? There's no trees to rustle because it's. It's all sagebrush. So it's silent, so you can hear the slightest sound. So I hear this rustling sound outside, and I'm like, what the heck is that? I. What? You know, what? What is happening here? So I. I peek out the window and I can't see anything. And I open the door, and I look to see what's going on, and I still don't see anything, but I think it's behind my truck. What the heck is that? And I'm freaking out, thinking it's like some drug addict or something just ransacking through my stuff outside. And they heard me. The sound heard me. Whatever it was seemed to hear me and started rustling in my direction. I couldn't see them, and I panicked and shut my door. I was like, oh, my God, what's happening? You know, I'm freaking out. And I.
After getting my composure a little bit, I peek out the window, and it was two donkeys.
They had escaped from somebody's house, and they were just curious. They were poking around. It was two donkeys, which is the most new Mexico thing I can imagine. But.
And, you know, so I obviously felt very relieved. But at the same time, that was. That was actually kind of the breaking point for me, for Taos and almost for camping in general. I was like, I am. I am not cut out for this. Like, this is too straight for me. I need to take a step back. So literally, the week after that we went back to Texas. We went to this like jelly stone like resort with like a jump pillow and a swimming pool and electricity and, and you know, pizza that can be delivered to me and all this stuff. And I was like, I was like, give me society. I want it back. I accept your taxes. I understand. Now there's some valid points.
[00:18:44] Speaker A: You know, funny you uh, you mentioned, um, freelancing on the side.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: What would be the main job?
[00:18:54] Speaker B: I work for Godaddy.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: So I do, I work on their woocommerce product, their woocommerce offerings.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: Okay. So that means whatever freelancing you do is also woocommerce related. Or do you pick something entirely different?
[00:19:09] Speaker B: It's usually just WordPress related. A lot of the stuff I do these days has been around plugin development or consulting on how to build a WordPress plugin or maintain a WordPress plugin. So like, yep. People often come to me because they have a lot of technical debt and they don't know how to fix it. Right. So I'm really good at refactoring. I'm really good at taking bad code and turning it into scalable code that's maintainable for those of us list for.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Those of us listening who do not know what technical that is, could you briefly explain?
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. So the best way I could think about it is think about the maintenance on your house. So if you have a furnace that you buy, and maybe that furnace is, you bought it in like the eighties, right? And it's showing signs that it's going bad. Right. And instead of in the nineties, maybe you bought a different furnace to put into there. But it wasn't like the right kind of furnace for what you need, but it was something that would get you by for now.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: But you know, later on you're going to have to fix that or replace that furnace. That is a debt, right. It's a technical debt where it's like, I don't actually have like a monetary or a time based like expense here, but I know that this is a problem that I have to fix later. Yes. So technical debt and programming is that kind of thing where you take a shortcut before you launch, um, something that will end up biting you later. Most of the time people don't even know that they're incurring it. That's the real problem. So you'll end up with, you'll end up with um, a plugin that, you know, is, is successful in bringing in decent money and stuff like that. But then your customers will be asking for features or something, but what you built doesn't, can't like do the thing they're asking from you easily without you having to rewrite a whole bunch of your software. That's where I come in. So what I like to do for freelancing is I'll come in, I'll look at the code base and I'll say, these are your pain points. We can fix these pain points by doing these things. And also here's how we get to that. Because you can't just rewrite everything. You can't just stop using the software and stop progressing it and then build it. You're kind of like making changes to it as it's running so you can't stop it, you know what I mean? So you have to incrementally change it over time.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting challenges are always there when you're removing technical debt or adding features that exceed whatever you had in mind as you were building it.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: I would assume you have experience with building WordPress plugins to begin with.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:04] Speaker A: Generally if somebody understands how to un spaghetti code refactor, it understands the concept of technical debt, then they are also capable of designing it the way it should be.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Is that something you do also? Do you build plugins from scratch?
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Yes, that's really how I cut my teeth in WordPress in general.
I started freelancing in 2014 because I was transitioning into WordPress from being a mechanical engineer. And uh, between, between 2014 and now I've literally built hundreds of plugins, um, everything from a single file to like, you know, really big complicated things. Are you, you know, and everything in between.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Are you currently building something?
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Yes. Um, so I am building a piece of software called Siren affiliates. And basically what it is is it's an affiliate plugin that um, kind of fits into what I'm talking about, about the scalability. So like you can, instead of it just being only an affiliate program, you can do all kinds of different things like maintain course.
Go ahead. Sorry.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: I just want to make sure that I fully understand it's a plugin that facilitates the affiliate component of whatever you want to have. Affiliated.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: And then connect it to Woocommerce or edd or anything.
[00:23:24] Speaker B: How does woocommerce at launch?
I'm going to, a big part of my strategy is going to be integrating with other plugins as I go, but woocommerce is going to be day one just because it has to be. I mean, everything integrates.
[00:23:40] Speaker A: I want to make sure that I understand the full scope. So it's an affiliate system for products in your Woocommerce store and you are giving an example of courses.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And then in the future I'm going to be integrating with other things like lmss and stuff like that. But the idea is that an affiliate program is just one possible program that you can create. And if you think about it as like a pay for performance kind of thing where like you pay this person based on how, how well they perform. Right. So there's all kinds of different things inside of a business that can fall under that. I just today was talking with my sister in law and she has a, she's with an electrician and that electrician got a bonus because the project was done on time. Okay, so like that's a pay for performance program. So like Siren allows you to, will allow you to build, you know, an affiliate program, but it will also allow you to build something like say maybe a multi course like Udemy clone with WordPress where you have like, you know, a dozen or so different course creators or however many, it doesn't matter.
And all of them maybe get paid based on how many views they had or how many course completions their students brought in. And maybe they get paid like a percentage of the available bucket or on top of their sales or their cut or anything like that. There's all kinds of ways you can do that.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: That's a very different approach to a regular affiliate because a regular affiliate, you click on the link, so you track the link. If there is a payment following that, clicking the link, you, you know, you first you store the cookie, you check the link, and then within whatever specified amount of days purchase is happening, a commission is taken care of. So that's, that's not necessarily a small feat just to have that as an affiliate plugin. But you went like, you know, I'm going to challenge myself here because by the sounds of it, you're going to make everything possible. The sort of track that's the goal.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: Is to make it to where if something can realistically be cracked, right? And you have a way to be able to measure something, you should be able to incentivize people for it. So maybe it's a, it could be a support system, right? So maybe you have people, support representatives on your team and maybe you pay them based on the number you pay them. Obviously you would pay them a base payment, right? I'm not, I'm not suggesting that this should replace like a salary, that's not what I'm saying. But like it could help incentivize further some other things. Like getting good feedback or getting any feedback. Right. Maybe, maybe it doesn't even really matter. Maybe it's how many tickets they do in a month. Maybe it's their volume. Maybe you give them a cut based on any time they ever convert an internal sale or something like that. Like there's so many different ways you can approach that. Another one is a bug bounty. Right. So maybe something that I plan on doing with siren is making it so that a person who other developers can work on, you know, bugs that I put that are like in a public place for like the people in that program. And if they do that, they solve that problem, you know, they get some kind of payout. Right. So there's different programs that can exist. That is an affiliate program, just one of them.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that's very, very interesting approach. I don't think I've ever heard.
For the record, I'm not fully entrenched in the affiliate world. Obviously I have some affiliates links here and there, but that's relatively passive. But what you're essentially saying is you think of the metric you want to track. It needs to be in the database so we can track, I'm assuming, and from there anything can be the trigger to.
Yeah, payout.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Definitely, yeah, exactly. And it really breaks down into a few different pieces. Right. It's, it's like what's the thing that we can measure? What the value of that thing we're measuring and then how are we paying it out? So like another side effect of this that I hadn't considered whenever I was building it, but I'm seeing now is um, with this system you would be able to avoid the, one of the things that really annoys me about affiliate programs today is that one affiliate gets paid and it's almost always the last affiliate who made the referral. Right. Which kind of stinks for like people who have a product that is a considerable commitment. So maybe, you know, maybe three or four different affiliates have linked to this product and recommended it during this person's research, but only one of them is going to get the credit for that. But this system would make it possible for all of them. If you chose right, you can, you can opt out of this and you can do it however you want. But if you chose, you could say pay everybody an equal amount, or you could say pay the last person, you know, most of this and then pay like every one of them, like a degrading percentage based on the order. Like, there's so many different ways you can approach these things. And I haven't even like, fully imagined what those possibilities are. I'm just building the system that allows people to be able to like, measure and associate those different data points with rewards.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: I recently saw Katie Keith of Barn, two plugins she shared.
I think it was her. I think she shared something on x saying something along the lines of that they promote. No, not promote. They reward internal staff like support. If they happen to, maybe the client only has one plugin but then converts to somebody who buys the whole suite. If that happens, based off of what support has done or suggested, they are being compensated for.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that. Absolutely sure.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: Well, first off, I'm pretty sure that's what I think it was her who said it. But if I hear you correctly, that is just one of the scenarios that it would solve.
[00:29:36] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a great scenario because I think your support team is kind of your sales. I mean, they're your internal sales team, really, you know.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: Yeah. There's different ways of looking at it because you could also argue this is part of their job and if that happens, yay. More for us. But I think in a more appreciative way.
This is a wonderful gesture, which I think for sure, and this is just one angle I'm well aware, but it's an angle I'm familiar with. So if somebody from your service desk understands support and knows how to help, that doesn't necessarily mean they also know how to sell.
[00:30:13] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: And this would at least incentivize them a little bit more than you know.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: You can also look there, but more in terms of actually selling it to the client. I like that. This is an, yeah, you can hear that I like this idea because it treats the whole affiliate thing from a very different perspective. So, affiliate. You know, most people, uh, when they say, you know, I do affiliate, you go, yeah, okay.
[00:30:41] Speaker B: Yeah, right. It's the same thing. And the only reason why I even call it siren affiliates right now is because it's the only way, only program that everybody's familiar with. Do you know what I mean?
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could call it renumeration or rewarding.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Or rewards siren collaborators.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: Why the siren part, by the way?
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Um, it's about the siren song and the idea of, um, it attracting, um, things to you.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: I like it. So how did you, how did you get to this? Because this, uh, is this purely born out of, uh, this is a problem I see, I want to fix it.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: Yeah, kind of. Well, yeah, definitely. Um, so it's funny because I've been, I've been noodling around the idea of different programs like this forever. I mean, as long as I can remember. One of the first, in fact, I just imported my entire Twitter history into my personal site a couple of weeks ago. And one of the earliest tweets I had was in 2009. And it was like talking about how I wanted, I had a program that I developed for photographers because I was creating digital montages at the time because it was actually not super automated quite yet. And I was offering programs to photographers where they could sell my montages using their photos to people. So, like, and I, so I was already thinking about stuff like that. Even back in, back then, obviously I got into affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is just kind of a part of the conversation in blogging in general. Right. So, like, and obviously, and I got into WordPress. I was doing tutorials with the photo editor gimp, and I was doing affiliate marketing to make some money with that.
And I also spent a few years working on affiliate WP actually. So I was actually on that team for a little while.
[00:32:25] Speaker A: From automotive.
[00:32:27] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it was sandhills at the time. I never worked for awesome motive, but, yeah, so they, but, so, yeah, so I've, I've had some experience with that. And then whenever I actually ran an agency for a while and when I was running that agency, I was actually doing a lot of this kind of stuff. The entire format of the agency was built around this and this space, this basis. So like every project I would have come in, I was doling out a percentage.
[00:32:52] Speaker A: This format was the last I heard.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: So this format was actually used from top to bottom in the agency I was working in. And so like, I would sell a project, right? And I would literally base the budget of that entire project based on the incentives that I was going to pay every person from top to bottom in the company who was going to touch that. So, and it could be, you know, five or six people who would touch this project, but all of them would get a piece of that.
So the thing about that they made it nice was whenever the business was making money, it was, you know, it was paying out everybody, including myself. But when it wasn't making money, it didn't have any expenses, it was incurring. So like, it was really nice because if I was only working six months or three months out of the year or whatever for freelance, I didn't have to think about my monthly expenses, really, or any, any of that stuff. It was able to kind of scale up and scale down based on my needs. I was, and I was thinking a lot about that. I created a blog content bonus program where, you know, people who are writing content on my site, if they got people to fill out a specific form and that person, I converted that person into project, they would get, you know, a cut of that sale as a person who attracted them to me in the first place. So I was doing a lot of that stuff. I was already thinking about different ways an affiliate program could be done or a program can be done.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I like it. I like it. This is, this is one of those ideas that when you hear, they go like, oh, nobody thought of this before.
[00:34:24] Speaker B: No.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: Is there a competitor?
[00:34:28] Speaker B: Not a direct one, not one that I found. Not that can. Not one that can do exactly this. That can, you know, have different programs and stuff like that. There's plenty of different options for affiliate programs. Right. And there's world and there's plenty. And they all have different approaches to affiliate programs. Right. So you have some that can do like multi level marketing and, and if you, you know, really want to go down that road and. Yeah, right. So there's, there's different things like that.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: But it's in general, the world. I want to not touch you.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it's kind of sleazy, but I got, I got bit by that when I was younger. I joined into one of those and it just.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Who hasn't at one point, I mean.
[00:35:10] Speaker B: Yeah, no kidding.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Like certainly in the early. Sorry, in the late nineties, these things were everywhere.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: Everywhere.
[00:35:17] Speaker A: Yeah. And at the time we didn't know what the consequences was. We didn't really know what it meant. So, you know, I jumped into something. Hold on. What am I doing here?
[00:35:25] Speaker B: Yeah, two years in. Yeah, exactly. Exactly two years. Why am I spending this much money through energy drinks?
[00:35:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think of the thing, what's called I don't remember and probably because I don't want to remember.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: Yeah, no kidding.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: No, but that's interesting. So your day job, you touch a lot of the woocommerce side of things in terms of the servers around it. And in the night job, you go like, I didn't quite see enough code today.
Let me jump into something that is heated and people have an opinion about it, but I'll find myself something that is uplifting because I genuinely think you have an interesting product here. Where a field, the world of affiliates is frowned upon is probably not the right word, but more of like stigmatize probably, yeah. And then finding a wonderful way to segue yourself into. Okay, but you can do it in a nice way, but treat it a little different and have different rules and different metrics and all that. I like it. I like it.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:36:36] Speaker A: So on the woocommerce side of things at GoDaddy, what kind of things do you do? Can you share a little bit about that or is that.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: I can share some, sure. So I could do it out at GoDaddy. I do a lot of the coding for the managed woocommerce they're offering for their commerce production pretty much. I'm mostly focused on making sure that the integration in their commerce platform plays nice with woocommerce. So I do a lot of, and that basically means I have to touch pretty much every part of it because it is impacted in every way, you know what I mean? So I'm doing a lot of that, a lot of thinking about woo and I mean, that's what I was doing prior to. Right. When I was working on affiliate WP.
At the end of the day, if you're in WordPress and you're touching ecommerce at all, you have to know woocommerce. You just have to know it top to bottom. There's no getting around it.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: There used to be many options to do this inside of WordPress, but I think it's, I can't think of any e commerce module that has a, even if I look back at woocommerce, which obviously at one point was jiggle shop, but even the impact that it, in the early days, I mean, the early days of woocommerce, I don't think there's anything right now that has the potential to go down the same trajectory.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: I don't think at this point, no.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: So you used to, and I've used this quite a bit actually, back in the day. Shop with double p. Sure.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Card comes to mind too.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well that's more recent. Right. So sure. Cart is, and I haven't, I haven't worked with it yet, but I like the premise of it in terms of what it tries to solve, like being the one solution that has everything in it versus woocommerce. And now I'm extending it. And we all know the problems of extending one piece of code written by person a with an extension written by person b c D E F g a.
[00:38:54] Speaker B: That's where the technical debt comes in.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. No, but I mean, from early days, I don't think there's anything left. Like Surecart is, as far as I know, relatively recent. And you obviously have EDD, but I think they kind of solidified on the d part.
[00:39:10] Speaker B: Yeah, no kidding.
[00:39:12] Speaker A: So I don't think there's much usage of edd as a products handler like your general store. So it's kind of interesting to see how woocommerce is slowly but surely how it has become the one that we're all thinking of and referring to.
[00:39:33] Speaker B: Yep. And they've been working a lot. I don't know if you've, I mean, it's changed a lot. Woocommerce has over the last like three or four years. Crazy how much they've put into it.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And I would even say that I think we're in the beginning of the on ramp of professionalizing it, solidifying it. We obviously have a scalable database structure available to us now.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: Now, yes.
[00:40:01] Speaker A: So that's nice, but, you know, that's long overdue. Yes, we have, we have a bunch of general stability inside of WordPress which are also now being used in woocommerce. All the wonderful work that WordPress core performance team did over the last two years. That is, we can see how that's all being moved over to woocommerce in terms of hooking into that and making it more performance. I'm a big fan of making it as performant as humanly possible.
It's still just mainly woocommerce. Right.
[00:40:35] Speaker B: It's just as, I mean, that's the only four products. Right. I mean, there's, there's also, you know, you've got member, uh, membership management systems and learning management systems like lifter, LMS and whatnot. Um, that, you know, they, they all have their own checkout process and things like that, but it's, it's focused on that specific type of product. It's not.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:57] Speaker B: You know, woocommerce is the only one that's just generic. You can sell digital, you can sell physical, you can sell both.
[00:41:03] Speaker A: So I have clients who, who have the full, full spectrum. I have a brick and mortar store that also uses woocommerce, but you can go and walk into their store and I have. And everything that, like, literally everything that they have in the store you can find there. Yep. Well, maybe not. Maybe not literally. I think they have like fourth is not in store and they can order in and, you know, you'll have it done the next day. But that's one end of the spectrum. And there's all the other versions where it's just digital or where it's just selling and hooking to access to courses and all of those things. It is a huge array of what you can do with woocommerce nowadays.
I'm not saying that you can't do this with shore card or can't do this with Edd. I'm sure to some degree you can, but it's interesting looking back how it became the de facto standard. Yeah, I think.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: I think that. I think the place where EDD tends to win over woocommerce is the licensing aspect of it. They've done, you know, sandals did a really good job of setting that up. I mean, they were, you know, it goes without saying that they were obviously dog fooding their own products, so they, they had, they had, you know, really good licensing set up all built into that plugin. I think woocommerce has one, but honestly, I haven't used it, so I'm not. I can't speak for how it is.
[00:42:28] Speaker A: But there's a few versions, actually.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:31] Speaker A: So I think that's already an issue.
[00:42:33] Speaker B: I don't plan on using EdD for siren, so I have to figure out what I'm doing with that soon.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: It's interesting to see how that has changed over years. And you're working at GoDaddy work on a specific environment, so to say, around this particular product. There's plenty of other products that you could do the same thing. Right. But we're not, we're still not fully seeing it. When do you think we have it? We have the situation where we have these types of verticals where you can get the generic hosting and now we have woocommerce hosting. But do you think we'll move in the direction where you'll have Buddypress hosting, body bus or LMS hosting, whether that's lift or learndash. Obviously we have those at the parties that make them. But do you think this is going to, we're going to see more of this?
[00:43:28] Speaker B: I think the thing is with, so with Godaddy's e commerce offerings, the one thing that's kind of the big thing about that, promise your example earlier where you have a client who works in a store, has a store, right? And they, they sell online and on that store. That's a multi channel scenario. And there's also scenarios where maybe a person's buy selling stuff on like Amazon or eBay or like different places on top of that. So you could potentially be selling in five or six different places at once, right?
[00:43:59] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:43:59] Speaker B: So like the GoDaddy's ecommerce offering is intended to centralize all of that so that you can sell from, through your GoDaddy account on your eBay site and Amazon and here, and it's able to track it all in a single centralized location. So. So to answer your question, um, I think the, the way that this would form is probably, at least for GoDaddy, I would guess, and I don't know, this like this isn't like any kind of internal information or anything like that. This is literally just a guess from an outsider perspective. Um, I would guess that a platform like that, if it was going to go into like lmss or LMS specific hosting or something like that, I could see maybe kind of pivoting that centralized approach to work with those lms as a separate channel or something like that. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, but not necessarily optimized hosting, but I'll never say never. You know what I mean? I think that I could see places like WP engine in particular were really niche hosting providers like that. I can see them doing something along those lines where it's specific to that.
[00:45:12] Speaker A: I think we're.
My opinion is, or my guess is, I guess because it's not really an opinion, but the direction it'll move in. In general, I think whether that's hosting or plugging the build, because your plugin, yes, it's part of affiliate, but it's a niche part within affiliate.
I think that's a trend that we're seeing across many other spectrums of the market that we work in. So whether that's the niche is more into the woodper side of things or the niche is more into the plugin side of things or the hosting side of things, I think the general trend is that we are going to see more niches because the more tailored you are to your end public, the better you can sell to them. And if you, and you know, if they do that smartly, they'll use woocommerce probably. Maybe your plugin as well, so they can track whatever's happening.
[00:46:09] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. I think they should, but I'm biased.
[00:46:12] Speaker A: So the first plugin you mentioned, like this is what I'm working on, was a very interesting one. But I'm kind of curious, do you do other plugins as well? Do you have other plugins that people can purchase or is everything, or are there free versions available?
[00:46:28] Speaker B: I have, I have a couple of older plugins that I have on, on the repo that I, you know, every once in a while will dip into and check on, but um, not really doing much with them. They're just kind of there and they, you know, they exist. Um, I mostly did them because I was learning, honestly, and I didn't realize that, oh, hey, you know, this is actually a commitment and you're going to have to maintain this. You got what you wanted out of it.
[00:46:51] Speaker A: I can, I can share with, from personal experience that uh, if that is the case and you are done with a set plugin, you can either hand it over to somebody who wants to work with it or ask the plugin team to delete it down. Yeah, I have done so. I have done so.
[00:47:07] Speaker B: I'm due to do it. I just haven't done it yet. I already have. And what's crazy is I know there's a leak. It was in the craft beer industry whenever at the time, because for a while I was in that niche and I know there's at least a couple of agencies that could probably just scoop it up and be fine. And I just, I just haven't taken the time to do it. But I have a couple of things. So one of the things I haven't done it yet, but a lot of siren, I've built it very very intentionally. And one of the key intentions was to make sure that it is positioned so that if I ever wanted to use this software outside of WordPress, either as a SaaS or something like that, I can make that pivot without basically rewriting the code or worse, running WordPress for the entire SaaS platform, which would not be ideal.
All of that code is separate. I've got layers. There's this framework that I've built that allows me to do that. Then there's siren on top of that. You know, the integration between the two that makes it all work. But I've been thinking about open sourcing that entire top layer called PH, I call it PHP Nomad, but I haven't open sourced it yet because it's not quite ready and I haven't decided if I want to. But then I also do have another framework that is open, very much open source, and it's also a WordPress plugin development framework. It's called underpin, but that one isn't designed to allow you to be able to work in or out of WordPress. It's just designed to make a service provider like pattern in WordPress easy. So it just kind of. One of the things that's annoying about development in WordPress is that, at least in my experience, is that a lot of it. There's not a lot of structure to the code. It's a whole lot of arrays that are not, you don't get any type of from your ide or anything like that. Um, it's very inconsistent. Right. So over the years, the way that we've approached development has come from people contributing with different mindsets from different times. Right. So if you think of it's, I mean, the original version of PHP, traits were not even a thing yet, you know what I mean? Like classes weren't even really a thing. So like, you have to like understand that there's, there's generations of stuff and with a commitment to never breaking backwards compatibility, there's a lot of stuff they just simply can't do. So underpin the purpose of that is to solve that problem and pipe all that through a consistent framework that can be changed, that can break backwards compatibility because it's not technically different.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: So from a different bootstrap tool, different implementations of functions, how far are you taking it?
[00:50:01] Speaker B: There's literally a package for everything, a user package for example, that makes it so that if you wanted to create a role package, so if you wanted to create custom roles or anything like that, it can be done.
It abstracts away the hooks and all this stuff and just makes it where it's all just the same set of methods and it does that across everything. So if you wanted to create. Because if you think about it, WordPress is really just a whole bunch of registries.
[00:50:32] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:50:33] Speaker B: Like that's really all it is. Right?
[00:50:35] Speaker A: Like a whole bunch of them, but.
[00:50:37] Speaker B: Yeah, a whole bunch of them. Right. So even, even actions and filters themselves are inherently a registry. So like, everything's a registry. So once I realized that, I was like, well, if I just make the way to add to everything in WordPress consistent, this would be a lot easier. Right. So that's, that's kind of the baseline for it. So if I want to add a user, the set of methods I call are through this user package and it's very clear how it's done because it's all like type hinted and stuff.
[00:51:06] Speaker A: So what's interesting is that you're essentially saying you've, in a way you forked WordPress.
[00:51:12] Speaker B: Yeah, kind of. I mean, it very much depends on WordPress. So it's not, it's not a fork.
[00:51:16] Speaker A: Of it, but yeah, in a way you're using WordPress's inherent means of adjusting the code or extending on it. You're using that mechanism to fork it into the version of what it actually theoretically in the direction that it should be.
[00:51:33] Speaker B: Yeah. A word for it is encapsulate. So I encapsulated WordPress basically. I put it in a little bubble and I said, okay, you can work however you want, but underpin is going to wrap up WordPress and you as the developer would interact with underpin directly. It would interact with WordPress and then you have control over the version of underpin that you're using and all of that stuff. And it's separate from WordPress.
[00:51:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And you haven't open sourced this yet.
[00:52:02] Speaker B: That one is open sourced.
[00:52:04] Speaker A: That one is. Okay.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
Which is a completely separate thing I have in.
[00:52:08] Speaker A: Where can people find it?
[00:52:10] Speaker B: That is at, I think you can just go to under pin. Let me just double check real quick. Hold on. Okay. So yeah, if you go to GitHub, it's GitHub.com underpinwp slash. Yeah, that's it. GitHub.com underpin dash Wp.
[00:52:24] Speaker A: Awesome. I think that's a great one to leave the show on because that's essentially what this is about.
[00:52:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:52:31] Speaker A: WordPress is open source and sharing good solutions with each other is how we learn to make even better solutions.
[00:52:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Sharing the bad ones too.
[00:52:41] Speaker A: I didn't go down that road, but yes.
Thank you so much for sharing, Alex.
[00:52:47] Speaker B: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.
[00:52:50] Speaker A: All right. Yeah, you're most welcome. And we'll see you on the next one.
[00:52:54] Speaker B: Yep, for next time.
