[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to within WordPress. Your podcast, your favorite podcast, I hope, about all the wonderful people inside the WordPress community that make up the whole. Many people know you, Christian, but probably not everybody knows you. So please introduce yourself.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I wasn't expecting that. A lot of people actually know me.
Been using on Twitter for quite a while now, so I guess they don't know me for the right reasons. Hopefully this podcast will change that.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Yeah, let's hope so.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Yeah, one can only hope. My name is Christian Raber. I'm from Romania. I'm currently 37 years old. I run a business under wp chill.com brand. We own several WordPress plugins such as WP Modula, strong testimonials, download monitor, which we acquired from boddy. You probably know Bari by now.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: I know buddy personally.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And yeah, that's pretty much it. We've. I've been developing plugins for, I think, twelve years now. We started with a local agency in Bucharest, Romania. We initially built, and by we, I mean I built hand crafted themes and plugins, like for every client we build like a plugin or custom theme, depending on the need they had.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: So that's how I got started with WordPress. We weren't earning a lot of money, unfortunately, because that was a market at the time, especially in Romania, and we decided to pivot to commercial themes. So we built commercially available themes for like four years, I think. And we made good money out of it, I think. But then we kind of started seeing a lot of less developed countries entering the marketplace where they could afford lower wages, they had lower income taxes, so they were kind of flooding the market with products that were maybe not as good initially, but they caught up in a very short amount of time in terms of quality, way, way cheaper, impossibility to compete at that price point, especially with. Even though Romania doesn't have the highest taxes or highest salaries, it was still way higher than other countries. So we decided again to pivot to plugins. And one of the first plugins we acquired was module. We bought this off of Fliphop from a buyer at the time. He was advertising it as was making around $800 a month. And after we bought it for like nine grand and a half money, we entire profit. We raised an entire year of our theme business. We let it sit for about 18 months without touching it. We only built themes up until that point, we knew nothing about plugins. Like, we didn't know what to do with it. We just looked at it and we were surprised that it wasn't actually earning $800 a month as advertised. It was earning more like 300 to 400. So it was half of what was advertised.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: So you bought a Miller?
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Kind of a bought another one. Well, it took a while until I bought another one, but I think at some point when my daughter was born, I realized that I need to step up my game and kind of decided to do something with my entrepreneurial life and kind of decided to actually be serious about it and treat it as an actual business instead of like a hobby, which was mostly what it was initially. I spent more time gaming than I spend on the business.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: What kind of game? Because people are going to ask what kind of game?
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Oh yeah, sure. I used to play professional cs. Go. So when I was a teenager, okay. I used to play professionally and then I got what's called Dota. It's a multiplayer online game. It's a silly game, it's one of the. So there's the esports championship where you have counter strike, you have Starcraft, and then you have Dota, which is, I think it's the leader right now probably in terms of winning potential. So I spent a lot of time doing that because I was so stuck on the business, I didn't know what to do to grow it up until one day when I said, well, you know, excuse my french, but fuck it, I'm gonna take a stab at it. And, you know, I won't give up until I. Until I figure it out. So we wrote module from the growing up. It took another year for that to happen. And when we launched a, we went from I think like 1000 a month to 7000 a month almost instantaneously. Right. I rebuilt the entire site. I rebuilt the plugin we featured, which.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Was, what was your biggest thing that made the biggest or the biggest change that make the biggest impact? Because that's an interesting one. You say you started focusing on that, obviously.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it was having a kidde.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: My wife, that's the trigger. But you moved from a little bit of revenue to good revenue.
Is there a singular thing, or is it.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: If the question is so, is this question about me personally, what changed with me personally or with the product?
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Actually both, because there's something that's a trigger, then you change into, okay, there's stuff that I need to change if I go, if I'm going to increase the revenue. That's interesting to understand from a personal perspective. But then also, what is the actual change you did?
[00:05:30] Speaker B: Sure. So on a product level, we worked on a feature that no one had on the market at the time, which was our custom grid feature where you can kind of drag images by their corners and resize them however you see fit on your gallery, which was a neat feature because a lot of photographers should, in various orientations, but in the gallery, plugins on the market all squish down the images to a single known format because most of them just use the same JavaScript scripts to create the library to create a gallery. Sorry. So I kind of looked at it and I was like, I think I know how to fix this and I imagine how it would work. It took a lot of tinkering to get to a solution because no one had, at least in my book, no one invented anything like this prior to us. And we launched it, and once we launched it, it took another year of bug fixing to address it because it worked well on desktops, but then you had tablets and mobile devices with different orientations as well. So that was tricky to tackle. And on a personal level I think just realized that I need to offer a better life for my kid and I needed to start like yesterday. I felt like all the years prior to this moment were absolutely wasted on a silly activity, just gaming. And even though it's, you know, it's a pleasurable thing to do, it must be done with a limit. It's a wasteful type of activity. It hits all your dopamine levels and it feels satisfactory at the end of the day. But you're not making any progress towards a real target or a target that would have, you know, benefit my family. So I just prioritized my family instead of me. And once I got into that mindset I was like, well I think I can go on 4 hours of sleep at night and just google every single fucking idea I have and ask Google questions like how do I do this, how do I, you know, how do I grow my business, how do I rank on Google, how do I write a product description? How do I create a landing page? I knew nothing about, essentially nothing up until five years ago. My kid is five and a half years ago and we launched module 2.0 when my kid was one month old. So five and a half years ago, we weren't making any money, we didn't actually have a business, we had a hobby.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's funny because you describe gaming and moving away from gaming exactly as the reason why I never really got into it. I've never seen the point of spending so much time just to level up in the game without actually leveling up in life. And I'm fully aware that there's things you learn while gaming because it's problem solving and it's thinking.
It forces you to think in possibly different directions than your brain is naturally wired to. I get all that. I just never understood the like. Why would you spend so much time in it?
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I can actually explain why it works so well and why it's so attractive to many people.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: Please do. Because it's been baffling me.
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Here's a version of it as I understood it. So it plays to one of human's basic needs, which is to climb the evolution ladder.
We have, all the games have a leaderboard and the best one sits at the top. You have to remember that most big companies, game companies hire psychologists to design their game, to choose the colors, to choose the pace of the action. Like a lot of psychology is involved in making a game. It's not just me and you sitting in a room and throwing ideas at the wall. And let's make this purple, let's make this pink. Doesn't work like that. If you want to make it, you know, make it global and make a lot of money. For example, with counter strike, you know, people are split into people who want to defend from the bad. So it's, you know, you have the police, then you have the terrorists. Like they divided the camps in two and then said, well, the best one gets at the top of the leaderboard. And everyone fought for that. Which mimics the same behavior we have in real life because humans climb to the top of the evolution chain by killing everything else. Or, you know, using usually brute force. Like, we've killed animals, we've cut down trees, we developed weapons, we colonize. We're trying to colonize another planet now. Just, if you think about it, it's mentally insane because we haven't yet used up all the resources we have on Earth. Like, if we could all live more, model moderately and use resources more responsibly, we could probably easily double the digits on earth and we'd still have resources enough for everyone. But we're consuming so much that we're now looking at, you know, inhabiting other planets and extracting resources from there. Just mind blowing.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: Agreed, agreed. But that's an interesting analogy, that climbing the virtual leaderboard equates to whatever you would do in society. I've never made that connection, which is why I think, I mean, I've done gaming when I was in my teens and early twenties, I guess, but then life took over. Id certainly was a large factor in there for me as well.
But that's interesting.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: I still game, by the way, but I have way less energy today to do it. And I do, like, I don't know, maybe 2 hours every three months or so. Like I have a desktop computer right here on the red side. Like a top spec desktop computer with all the stuff that would make 16 year old me super jealous and envious about this setup, which at six, and I had a janky setup, obviously. Poor as fuck. It's just that. Don't use it. Like the reality of being a grown up is you can offer all the toys you didn't have when you were a teenager.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Grown up money is fun.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: No time or energy to actually. Yeah, no time or energy to actually use them. So just you have them. It's just they sit there like, you know, a book on the shelf, just look at it from time to time and get, oh, I have it, but I can't play with it because I don't have any energy left in me.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: So for me is anything. Cars? I feel like if I invest in cars, I can't drive all of them at the same time. Sure. But I have to get from a to b every now and then, so I end up actually using them. And in my head that works the best. I don't really have any other hobby, so cars it is. And I guess that's where my money goes. But, um, that's funny, you, when you say you switch the mindset, so you, you turn into version two of modular. Right. So what was the.
Sorry, sorry, I didn't.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Christian as well?
[00:13:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So version two of Christian.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: So it was version two of modular.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And version two of Christian was the, was the realization that if I. Once you saw the reward of the energy and attention you put into the product, so it became the next version and you started making money. What was the reaction in terms of, oh, oh, if this already made this impact, what else could I do? How did you go about doing that?
[00:13:25] Speaker B: I think we hit the plateau that everyone kind of hits at some point, especially in amateur land, which is WordPress, where we're all professional amateurs. We're trying to build up the best possible software we can. But, you know, where most of us don't come from? A background building successful businesses in the past or having like a portfolio behind us or advisors like most VC funded companies have. They have a board of people that help them make better decisions. That's why I call this professional amateur land. We hit a plateau where I kind of hit my limits. So I'm not naturally good with people. I'm good with conversations, but I'm not good at managing people. I found that I either do a lot of micromanaging or no micromanaging at all.
There's no gray, there's no in between area here. I can't do it. I'm either all over the place and I'm trying to micromanage while I'm explaining things, hoping for the best. Like, my mind goes, if I break this down for them for the next three months, and if I explain every single thing, they'll have their aha moment and then they can go on about, you know, doing their jobs better. It never worked. I just got more and more exhausted, and they kind of people just kept coming to me for solutions. And at some point, I think I looked at it and I was paying 14 or 15 salaries, and I was exhausted as hell. And I was doing their work like I was doing all the heavy lifting, I was doing the thinking, and they were just doing the executing. This made no sense to me. Like, if I'm paying you, just execute. Why am I not hiring a va? Then why am I paying you a full salary? As your job description says, you have to know these things and you're supposed to, you know, I'm supposed to be buying back most of my time by hiring more people, not spending even more time while paying through the nose for it. So I decided this was, I think, last November. I decided I'm gonna fire the non performing ones and just keep the ones I think were doing an okay job for the money I was paying and then hire better people. And when I mean better people, what I mean by better people, I mean people who are, um, self starters. So I just tell them, hey, we have to do this. Here's the high level overview, and just go and fucking do it on their own. They tell me when it's done, they usually have two or three improvement ideas. They either bring those improvements to me and we quickly discuss them and we're like, yeah, let's do this and this, or we won't do that. And yeah, I think this in itself was like a lesson on learning how to hire people because I was super optimistic initially, and I hired people who, on paper, seemed like they could do the job or they had the highest chances of doing the job by learning on the job how to be better at it. But they never did. They were complacent. They kind of, you know, I think.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: There'S a, this is a good example, I think, of the difference between somebody who has the skill set of building the thing and somebody who has the skill set of understanding what is needed to build the thing. Because building the things is essentially, you write it out and, you know, however high level you want to go down to the details of this is what it needs to look like. But the second person understands that whatever is written, whatever is explained. There's also the implicit part, like, you shouldn't have to write out that the code is scalable, you shouldn't have to write out that the code is easy extendable. You shouldn't have to write out all of these presuppositions that are there, which don't necessarily need to be explained verbally every single time. So you need somebody who understands with half a word, but the full word means or half a sentence with the full sentence means probably better. Yeah, that's a great understanding to come to.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. I've been, been able to buy back a lot of my time now, and we're setting up the team and the company essentially for efficiency. So the goal here is that within the next 18 months tops, we get a handle on how we want to operate going forward. So that's procedures, frameworks, software we're going to use to organize ourselves, measure every fucking thing, and then make cutthroat decisions on what gets implemented, what doesn't get implemented. And based on this, we're going to decide, we're going to do one of the following three things. We're going to either expand one of our products into new markets, we're going to build a product from ground up, or we're going to acquire something else.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Which one are you leaning towards? Like, what would your preference be?
[00:18:31] Speaker B: I found that what's best for Christian isn't necessarily best for business. So I'm kind of trying to remove myself from this logic because if I want to have a clear head and if my employees want to have a leader that acts with its clearest head and, you know, gets the best overview image image and makes the best decision, I need to be less and less involved in the day to day stuff because that kind of forces you into day to day picture and kind of removes you from the, you know, the big, big picture from the big image picture. And it's easier when you're detached from the business to make certain decisions, especially business ones. Instead, when you're directly involved and you have like, an emotional involvement with a product, where a product is closer to your heart, you're not gonna make financially sane decisions. You're just gonna make the decisions that you like.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: When you say detached from the business, I'm assuming the. That the core of the business you're referring to is the actual building of it. So the writing of the code and all of that, is that what you mean or is it all aspects? Because it sounds like the way you're explaining it now.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: No.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Like you're detaching yourself completely.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: No, I should actually add actually a few more words into this. So the whole idea is for me to actually accept my role as a CEO and start acting as a CEO. And my role is to make strategic decisions and make sure we're hitting our KPI's, that's mostly my job. And then figuring out where to best put our money. It's either investments or new product, or build a product from ground up or hire more people. These kinds of decisions. I'm equipping my team right now with the best possible tools for them to make all of these decisions. I'm teaching them the way I look at things. It's obviously an open conversation. They can all have questions or feedback. They can always say, well Christian, this is a dumb fucking idea, let's do it this way. And I'll be like, sure, if we all vote at it and decide this is a calculated risks risk we're going to take together as a team, sure. I have no issues with that. It either means they have stakes in the decision making process sometimes, especially the more senior ones. And I always told them like, look, we're going to reap both the benefits or the downsides of this. Either the business goes down or we lose a bunch of money and we, you know, we all see our work going down. It's just going to be frustrating as hell because you've spent six months on this and you see it going nowhere, or we're going to see it up and then you're all going to get bonuses.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If so, you've made a conscious decision to move more into the CEO role, less into the product development or do you still do product development?
[00:21:44] Speaker B: I still do it, but I do it at a way higher level than I used to. So now they just get one pagers from me, which describes the new thing I want to do at a high level. So, you know, we're going to add payment gateways into one of our products. Here's the payment gateways, here's how I want it to work, here's how I want it to act. I want this to be super simple for users. Here's a few examples. And I just type them out. That's it. And they'll come back with prototypes like design work. They'll come with a few ideas if possible. Came back with estimates. They're going to be like, this is going to take a month, three, six, nine. You know, I think it's a leadership nco type of role. I don't know. I never looked this up. I don't know if a CEO also acts as the leader of the business, but it's. For me, it's both. It's like a combination of these two.
[00:22:40] Speaker A: I think they should because, you know, it's chief executive officer, meaning all the executive decisions are made by that person. To me, they are synonymous with the leadership role of that, of the company.
Obviously, micromanaging as a CEO is a bad thing, but horrible. Yeah, but there's a question in what type of CEO you are. Right? So I know companies where there's two CEO's that works because they have different but slightly overlapping fields. I know companies where the CEO is generally the one that just runs the business, like the actual operational side of things. It's close to a CEO. I know companies where the CEO is the one with the vision, the ideas. And I guess there's no real right.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: Answer to my strengths. I think the visionary one plays more to my strengths.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Yeah, by the sound of it. But my point is that I don't think there's one particular type of CEO. That is the way everybody should be in that particular role. I'd like to think it's whatever that company needs combined with the people that are working there. So if you have people who have zero vision but are really good at executing what they need to build with proper instructions and everything, then it makes zero sense to have a CEO that does the same thing, because that's like, okay, hold on, this is too much of the same thing. We need somebody else to have a different type of view or have the ideas and just say, this is the direction where I want something to happen, make it so, or give me three versions of how you would have want to approach it. So the empowering part is essentially, I think, across the board the same thing. Right. So a CEO has to have, in a particular way, a connection to whoever is working in that company, but they also need to have that motivational that I want to work on this if, as I'm receiving your instructions type of connection to it. I think that's interesting that because you start from code and you're essentially moving yourself, if I understand you correctly, moving yourself out of that equation. And just moving, like, literally. So could we say that we're starting to see Christian 3.0?
[00:25:02] Speaker B: It's definitely a more mature version of myself.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: Yeah, 2.5.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Yeah, let's call it 2.5. Let's call it the middle ground. Maybe it's not the final version. It's not 3.0.
I think one of the decisions that I made earlier this year was that in the past, I kind of cornered myself into any of the roles that the company needed at the time. So it was a designer, it was developer, it was a sport agent, it was a project manager, product manager, whatever the company needed. I was that type of person. I was wearing that hat, and I made a conscious decision.
I told myself, well, I mean, if I want to turn this around and make it. We've been growing in the past three years, of course, but growth kind of has stalled for a while. I mean, we're not seeing as much growth as we used to see. Of course, you can blame that on the markets as well, because the market's shit right now and a lot of jobs are being cut and not a lot of spending is being done because of the inflation. The one thing I promised myself was that, well, I started this business, and I haven't spent any time on actually enjoying myself doing this. So this time I'm going to make a different decision, and I'm going to choose what's best for me and hire for the other role the company needs. Instead of me trying to be all the things the company needs and getting burned out and getting upset that I have to do things that I don't enjoy doing, which is usually operations.
I just fired someone who's going to do all of these things for me, just point them in the right direction. I tell them how to do it or what I expect to get at the end and have to do it.
That's it.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: I like that. I like that.
So for a lot of folks, when they grow a company and they hit hurdles and stuff like that, they'll just be like, okay, I got to fix the next hurdle. And then whatever that hurdle is, it's fixed. And you either educate yourself in that direction or you find somebody you can hire for that. I like how you're basically saying, I'm aware of my limitations, I'm aware of my skills, and instead of waiting for it to happen to me, I'm going to start designing my company in the way that most benefits me, but also the larger picture of, I'm sure that, and correct me if I'm wrong. I'm sure that also includes the well being of the people that work for you.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. So the people that I hire are all people who enjoy doing what they're doing. So I've hired a developer, for example, who sleeps and eats code. He loves coding so much. He's one of the best developers I've ever had the chance of working with. He's also a personal friend, and it's bought me so much peace of mind whenever I go to him and I go like, hey, we have this. I want to do this. This thing would be hard to do it. And he was like, no, that's easy. I'll do it. And three days later, he was like, done.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: This sounds like somebody I know.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Yeah, that's probably Bari.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: This is most definitely notable.
[00:28:09] Speaker B: Yeah, this is not about Bari, but I've kind of. I kind of know he has the same mentality from our past conversations and I've seen him think and act, so.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Yeah, because you did. We mention it. You. So for those who are listening, who don't know who Barry is, buddy Koi is my co founder for scantily. But Barry Coy also builds WordPress plugins. And you bought one of his plugins download monitor a while back.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, about three years back, I think. I don't want to go. I don't want to move to this subject just now because I didn't have one more addition for the previous conversation. So one thing you could say about what I'm doing right now is instead of fixing hurdles one by one and fixing them all at the same time. So I've moved myself into an observatory position where I'm the observer of the problems in my business and then just using money and making super fast decisions to fix all of these. Just not thinking about profitability right now. I'm just thinking about how can we move so fast that we figured out how to fix all of these problems while throwing money at it? Because you're going to throw money at it, no matter what's going to happen, it's just going to take way, way longer to do it. So instead of doing, you know, instead of taking two, five years to fix this, I'm going to take 18 months, tops, and then we'll have a mean, well oiled machine to.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: That already operate.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: Going further. Yeah.
We acquired download monitor from Bodi, I think, three years back. And one of the funniest things that happened was that Bodhi told me, I think after we already agreed on the price and agreed, the fact that it's going to sell download one, two to me. He said that I've been approached by, I don't know, just pulling numbers out of my hat right now with probably 50 people, 50 different people, about selling download one to them. And you were the only one who I felt had, like, real interest in making this and turning this product around and not just seeing it as a business. Of course, the business, you know, the business potential is still there, but I had such a vision for it. I think I sent Barry, he told me, we talked through LinkedIn direct messages, and he said, if you have any questions, send them my way. And I think I sent him like a barrage of questions. Like, I said, 45 or 50 questions.
[00:30:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: In a.
They were not easy questions. They were like, when were you weren't right? That type of questions. Like, where did you start this product? Where did you make this decision? How does it impact, you know, revenue? What's the current churn rate? A lot of stuff that he had to work for. And I sent him the list. And I think for a week or so, I didn't hear anything back from him. I was like, fuck, I scared this guy.
And then he came back with the answers and told me, and I won't forget this, he said, you're the first one to ask so many questions about this product. And it took me a while to dig up all the information that you needed, but I hope that now you can make an informed offer for this product. And then we kind of. It took like two more minutes until we hopped on a Zoom call. We had a gentleman's agreement on the price and that the rest is history.
[00:31:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that sounds, that certainly sounds like buddy.
[00:31:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. He was like, we had instant chemistry, in my opinion. Like, we didn't have to use a lot of words to seal the deal.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It almost sounds like a half bromance there.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I promise. What surprised me the most about Barty was how low profile he was, at least for me, and actually how. How much stuff has done. I was aware it was part of the initial themes. Yeah, about part of the initial themes team. And then he was like, I think he's into kickboxing. Like, when we started talking, he was way fluffier. I think he stopped doing sports, contact sports. And then all of a sudden, like, eight months passed, right. And I had a question about an issue with download manager. We hopped on a Zoom call and he was all fucking jacked. Like, sitting here on a call. It was fucking big.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: What the hell happened?
[00:32:23] Speaker A: Yeah, that's funny, he was surprising because he works out a lot as well.
[00:32:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think that it was surprising because.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: No, I was gonna say I think.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: That people lack the motivation. Sorry.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: Yeah, no, go ahead, finish.
[00:32:37] Speaker B: Oh no, that's it. That's it. A lot of people lack the motivation to make that big of a change in such a short amount of time.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: For sure. I was gonna say that the everybody listening to this podcast, they know one or two, call it a handful of people who are very, very active inside the WordPress community, but are virtually unknown for the simple reason that they're not huge on social media or they don't have a high profile plugin or whatever. There's tons of small businesses that have almost invisible people behind it. I started this podcast by saying to you, like a lot of people know you, but more people don't know you. And what I meant with a lot of people know you, you are quite vocal in your particular niche on x, for instance. So if you follow as a product builder, as a plugin builder, if you follow the regular crowd, you'll follow you, because I don't think you can be missed in that scene. But having said that, the group of people that are building the coolest stuff is just way, way larger than what is visible for us as we're navigating through the social media channels and even work camp Europe was a couple of weeks ago. And what's interesting for me there always is that you see a crowd where there's a large portion of the people you see there are familiar, and then there's a portion of the people you are, you know, you haven't seen before, you don't know them yet. And you strike up conversation, you learn more people and all of that. Sure. But I always remember or keep reminding myself, like whatever I'm seeing now, whomever I am interacting with, it is just a sliver of the totality of all those people working to better WordPress. Whether that is by building a product that enhances it, whether that is actually working on stuff that's on meta or.org or whatever.
The array of people that we don't see is just so huge that it's wild to think if you start categorizing them and naming them all, it's a huge list. And Buddy is a good example because he's not only prolific in the stuff that he builds, but he's also very, you know, helping out with the plugin review team.
He's, he's doing surprise for me.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: I got an email from him one day, I think, and was from
[email protected]. or I don't know what happened. I think it had his signature, but super surprised because body. And I was like, holy shit, this is the same body.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: I know. Yeah, yeah.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Has to be him. Yeah.
[00:35:27] Speaker A: That's funny. So, you know, people like that exist and they're, they're, they're, they're everywhere. But not everybody has a high profile. And I always refer to buddy as somebody who's a proper full stack. Like, like proper, proper. And that, that particular type of developer is also rare. But he has a business mind as well. So, you know, for me as a, when he, when we're discussing the idea of Scanfolye, that was a natural choice for me. I known Barry since probably 2000, 920 ten. So I know Noam. We interacted.
He's done work for me. So I know how he works and what he delivers. He's a classic example. If you can give him like a quarter of a sentence and he'll figure out the rest of the sentence because he just understands. But the group of people that are out there that are of, that are basically invisible, I keep reminding myself of how large that group is. It's also the group of people we depend on incredibly much without actually realizing that we do.
And this, obviously this goes outside of the WordPress community itself. It's open source in general. There's so many tools that you and I and everybody listening that uses, that we use that are just built by people that we have no knowledge of. Like, yeah, we know it's there, but who builds it have no idea what dependencies they have inside their plugin that also have somebody really unknown build something really cool. Yeah.
Just the sheer realization that those people are there I find very humbling. Like so many people bringing out what ultimately becomes one of the most, well, the most used cms out there. Fascinating.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: Maybe that's the entire beauty of WordPress. It invites and welcomes every single type of person. So, for example, there's going to be people out there who, like me, have super strong opinions about things. They're going to post about them publicly on, uh, x and not worry about the consequences because it's my opinion. So, you know, if you're, if you don't agree with it, just unfollow me. It's fine. Life is life, right? But there's a lot of people out there who just enjoy writing code and sitting behind the screen, not interacting with any human being, want to interact with machines and the WordPress community welcomes and, you know, cherishes these people. We have the credit section for each release, something for big release for WordPress. They get mentions from time to time. Obviously not as much spotlight as we would want, but it's a big, big ass organization. It's a lot of people. And spotlighting every single one means there's no one actually sitting in the spotlight. So it's kind of an art to highlight all of these people at the same time, but then try to highlight their best important features, like the best, sorry, contributions to the WordPress core project.
I think it also plays to each person's strengths. There's people who are naturally inclined to without any business incentive, because if you have a business incentive, then that's gonna alter your perception of what you want to do.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: People who naturally are going to go up on stage at Wearcamps and give a, you know, a star presentation about, I don't know, you know, speed performance in WordPress where I guess canfully is going to be a very good tool to have in your arsenal. Hopefully I got this right.
[00:39:18] Speaker A: It is, it is. That is the goal.
[00:39:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I haven't. So I've been planning for a while to go up on stage at some point and have a presentation, but the whole goal for me isn't to make any money out of this. And what I dislike a lot about Wordcamp presentations is that a lot of the people going up on stage have agendas. And don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with business, but we're all mostly business people attending a business conference.
It's a tough crowd to sell to. And, you know, it's your, if you're going to use, I've learned this recently because I've tried to pick up YouTube content creation. So if you're going to use a catch title, an attention grabbing title, you have to fucking deliver on that promise or otherwise it's called clickbait.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: Because if I'm clicking on your title or your title draws me into the conference room and then your presentation's shit, I'm gonna hate you and I'm gonna, you know, hold you forever in my heart as the one person that gave the shitty presentation with the awesome title, whatever, I'm probably savage. Of course. This is, this is, this is probably gonna be unpopular opinion. Or if it's a popular opinion, it's not as popularly exposed online. Like most people don't have the guts to call them out on this, but I personally completely dislike this type of approach.
[00:40:40] Speaker A: So I think it depends on, I think it depends on where the presentation is done. So if we're talking, for instance, on the flagship, flagship wordcamps, that should be of a quality, of a higher standard, click baity type of stuff, shouldn't be there. Selling your business or service through a presentation shouldn't be on, if we're talking smaller wordcamps and certainly meetups, I think it's perfectly fine for somebody very inexperienced in the whole process, but has wonderful knowledge to share to have them be on that stage. And I would say generally people are very open to learn what works and what doesn't work. I'm very much aware that the community that we have in WordPress has a different dynamic in terms of business y approach than most other types of communities. And that means you need to, if you want to operate in this business, in this community, you need to be aware of that and you need to act accordingly. For instance, there's companies that they have a product, maybe they started with, I don't know, Shopify, and then they figure out like, hold on, Shopify is a segment inside the online world. But here's another product that we should probably want to be involved as well, WordPress. Now if you approach the world of WordPress in the same way as you did Shopify, you're going to have a problem. Like there's a huge disconnect between the one and the other. You're going to have to adjust and you're going to have to listen to feedback and you know, and just understanding that what works here doesn't necessarily work there, meaning you have to continuously adjust your agenda according to the person you're talking to or the group of people you're talking to, that's inevitable. Will there be mistakes? Sure. You know, that's also inevitable. But when I look at the quality of the presentations on, at wordcamps, certainly the larger ones, there's ones that absolutely do not concern me. Like I don't, I don't care for it. That's not because I know everything, but it's because it doesn't hit me in terms of excitement of learning about it. And there's ones where, where the topic is just super interesting. And I go like, well, that could have been a better presentation because the excitement that I had for it isn't increased. It's like I still have questions.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: Catch, settle again, for instance.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think that's inevitable. I think that will always be the case, but that's fine, right? So I think we need to accept that if we're all working to learn from whatever we did and we're asking for feedback. And this is more about being a smart person than it is about the WordPress community or the stuff happening at work camps. If we're open to change and learning and improving ourselves, then is there a bad experience? Probably not, because if it's a learning, a bad experience can be turned into a good experience, but it needs to happen from both ends. So it's not just the people doing the presentations that need to up their game, it's also the people jumping into those conversations and talking to those people and letting them know what kind of information they actually would like.
It's a huge and complicated mix, but yeah, I hear you. It's.
[00:44:23] Speaker B: One of the things that I told a friend in this space who's got a platform for people to sell their plugins, starts with a letter f. You know, which one I'm talking about about two years back was that if you start teaching more of your users, platform users, harder businesses, since your business is to make money out of commissions taken out from their earnings, you're going to earn more, they'll be happier and they'll earn more. So one of the things I'd love to see with Wordcamp presentations is how we can better our businesses. How we can better our businesses by also giving back more to the WordPress community or foundation. I'm always confused about these two because it's super nuanced in terms of who owns what and what does each of these do. The goal here for me was like, how could you more responsibly build better business for WordPress? How could we actually act together as a community and build a better WordPress for our children or better children for our next generation of WordPress? Build better stuff instead of hey, here's our new AI powered solution, starts at 199 a year. Buy it. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a place for that. But don't trick me into with your title coming into presentation, thinking about learn something and then you're trying to absolve me because again, I'm going to remember you. I'm going to keep you forever in my head. It's, you know, I already tagged you. This is, this is at least in my opinion, and by the way, this is all personal opinions, right? You can disagree with it. I have no problem with do whatever you want with your business. But most of the conversations I have with people I meet at webcams are lightning questions about what's your business, what do you do what struggles do you have it help? And they're like, well, we've tried this and this. You came up with five ideas. We've tried four out of the five ideas. They didn't work. But maybe we'll try the fifth one and that might help. I think this betters the entire community and there's a lot of way more experienced, way, way more experienced people in the community than myself that could help a lot of us be better at our stuff without competing or, you know, I think this is big enough and it's growing fast enough. Yeah, right. So, like, workshops from within WordPress from automatic or whatever, sponsoring WordPress, because at this point it's all blurry as hell to me. And the, you know, here's the roadmap for the next five years of WordPress.
You've got like the leading plugins in this and this and this part of WordPress. Like, let's sit together at a table and discuss, like, at least on a high level overview how you could take advantage of this, how you could explain it to your users, how we can better train, you know, your clients for this accounting features. They'll be happier. It'd be easier for them to recommend WordPress going forward and will actually listen to feedback. Not just built in a bo, in a bubble, which is happening right now. It's siloed. Every release of WordPress feels kind of siloed. They kind of say they listen to community feedback, but at the same time it kind of takes ten years for a ticket to land in core, which is an insane amount of time to take.
[00:48:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's good feedback.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: It's feedback. I mean, it's my opinion. So.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: No, I think so. I think I kind of know the answer as to why that is.
It's because there's just too many moving parts, which it just becomes a matter of priority and then we can debate about whose priority it is. But I think it's more of.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: The.
[00:48:35] Speaker A: Impact of the choices that are being made in terms of what goes into the next build, what goes into the next version, what goes into the.
The thing we focus on as a community to help us improve all of those things. I think that is and always will be the most difficult thing to solve. I don't think there's actually a solution for it. I think we will actually never figure out how to do this proper.
[00:49:04] Speaker B: So I don't think there's a perfect solution for this. But I think if you start a communications channel, even if it gets only 10% better than it currently is. It's still a big improvement.
[00:49:17] Speaker A: Oh, I know. But in all fairness, I think over the last couple of years we've seen huge improvements in that direction. It's just.
We also have to accept that the size that we're at, it is just not something that moves easy. Right. It's the same. It's the oil tanker that floats through the ocean. If it wants to move one degree to starboard, then it needs to think about that probably a few kilometers back before it actually is starting to hit that 1%.
It's a big moving thing. Any changes that are being done now is going to have to ripple through time to have the effect that we're shooting for that we're hoping for.
It's a tough one to solve. As simple as that.
[00:50:11] Speaker B: I have a counter argument to this, by the way, and feel free to hate me for it. Apple's Apple, Microsoft, they fix it. They have developer conferences.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: They're also closed systems.
They're closed systems. It's incomparable in my head.
[00:50:28] Speaker B: That's a good point.
Imagine for a moment that you'd know two years in advance 80% of the roadmap of WordPress and internally that might actually be something real. They might know it. They're just not, you know, publicly sharing it with the entire world at the same time. It's just doing it in bits and pieces. Right. So if you knew 80% of the roadmap, then you could have developer conferences. Because for the amount of time that, that the roadmap is valid, it's a closed system because you're going to only merge what's on the roadmap.
[00:51:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: Does that make any sense? It does.
[00:51:14] Speaker A: I think. And I think that.
Yeah, agreed. And I think that's, that's the combination that is the most interesting one to hope that we get there because what you're saying now is essentially saying we understand that we are a big moving part and where there's, because it's open source, somewhat nebulous of where we're going. Having said that, if we were to force ourselves to work more like closed source in the sense that your examples, Apple and Microsoft, they think about their roadmap two years ahead and they start communicating that roadmap maybe not two years, but at least a year ahead so that companies working with the product and building upon it have more time to interact and, and eventually react.
I 100% agree with you. That is where we need to be.
It's a good one.
[00:52:15] Speaker B: That's the short version of it. WordPress got to this point because of its openness and open sourceness. But it's time, in my opinion, for WordPress 2.5 as Christian 2.5 launched as well this year, where Worfus gets more mature and the leadership actually acts. You know, you had this example of an oil tanker, which is a big fucking ship, and it's hard to steer or super hard to steer fast, but it has a crew, and all of those people work in tandem to execute all of those maneuvers with perfect timing and execution. And I think if if other corporations can pull it off, workers can for sure as well.
[00:52:58] Speaker A: And that's a lovely note to end this episode on. Thank you so much. I agree.
