Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Within WordPress, your podcast about those wonderful people inside the WordPress community. With us today is again, Noel Talk. Good day to you, Noel.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Thank you so much. Ramkus. Glad to be here.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Yeah, this is not your first appearance on the podcast, but this is the first one that we'll cover a little bit differently because we actually are going to talk about a very specific topic. You opened up, you keynoted WordCamp Asia, and the topic of that presentation was about essentially, where are we with WordPress on our path in terms of market share and what is really happening? So for those who do not know you, can you please introduce yourself as well as talk a little bit about what prompted you to do this topic as. As a keynote?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Noel. Some of you may know me, most probably do not, and that's probably because I've stepped away from a lot of WordPress events in recent years, but I have been around the space since 2009 or so I'd say, and, you know, co founded Human Made with Tom and Joe, and we also have all this and everything else. So we're really entrenched in WordPress enterprise and we focus on that solely as opposed to some other agencies that may have moved on or do other things. We are still one of the original large enterprise agencies in the space.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So that means, you know, WordPress inside out.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: No, no, I feel like I did at some point, like in 2009 when custom post types came out and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And it just gave me such a.
Such a rush to think that I could just build anything now with custom post types. But, you know, it's, it's. There's always something new coming out. Like a couple weeks ago I learned about this interactivity API. I was just like, what is this thing?
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: And yeah, it's all really, really cool in terms of the things that are being built and. Yeah, just very exciting. But I don't have my finger on absolutely everything anymore.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: No, no, I think that's. I think we could also say that the project has become that big, that that's just not feasible.
No, but in terms of the topic at hand, WordPress market share and your keynote on it at WordCamp ASIO, you've been doing the future of WordPress type of presentations for quite a few years.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: Now, trying to iterate.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: Yeah, they're certainly not the same from year to year. But what was the interesting part about this one? Because now we've had 20 years of WordPress behind us, we're in our 21st year, you posted a thread on X which I'll link in the show notes, but you posted a thread on X as well last week, essentially highlighting the key talking points about your findings. Let's start with that. So there is some talk about inverted relative demand. Maybe start with that. So market share, WordPress, we are very happy to say it's 43%. What does 43% mean? And what does it mean? We inverted relative demand and supply.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: That sounds like a very fancy term in retrospect. I didn't mean for it to come across like that, but I will explain it. So market share as we've come to know it is what percent of domains on the Internet have WordPress installed somewhere, anywhere on the website, Sorry, on the domain that has been changed to or modified or amplified to say WordPress powers 43% of web or powers 2030. Whatever value we had, which I've.
I understand it from a marketing point of view, but from a forward looking perspective, I think it's.
It's not that kind of metric. I think it's an amazing testament to all the work people have put in, how the ecosystem has grown and this undeniable force of open source. I feel as if that's a badge of honor. It's something to be very proud of, but not necessarily the metric that's indicating success or not. Don't get me wrong, like any figure that is double digit, anything in this regard is truly amazing. But I think that WordPress is at a point now where it has some great opportunities ahead of it just because of how the market has evolved, how the market is shaping and where it's all going. And it's something that I'm just quite excited about now. What I spoke about in that particular thread and at WordCamp Asia is that in, you know, assuming or not assuming, but we've had two decades of WordPress and if you try to cut it right down the middle, which is almost where we've kind of seen a shift, you can really say that there was a lot of attention and a lot of demand, a lot of search volume, things like that in the first 10 years relative to how many sites were being built. And attention and search is probably a forward, like a forward looking indicator of sites being built because it takes a couple months or a year to build the site. Right? Like you learn about WordPress, you search more about it like, hey, we're going to install it, we do a bunch of other stuff and then launch at some point. So that might be a year later or whatever. So you see that kind of lag now on the flip side, Once we hit 2014, 15, 16, we sort of started plateauing in terms of, and this is the data set I'm looking at is the top million websites. So I'm not looking at the full breadth of the Internet, which is an important caveat. And in that subset of the top million sites, we can see that the amount of new WordPress sites start plateauing per quarter. And that dropped off a cliff as soon as Covid happened, which is understandable. But then as money was being injected into the economy and things were reopening and we saw, you know, a lot of these SaaS products take off and do quite well and you know, off the back of large VC investments for growth and being in this kind of remote first environment, all of a sudden, you know, like a lot of these other ones were bouncing back quite well. But WordPress didn't bounce back, it just kind of stayed in this lower area.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: What kind of SaaS products are you referring to?
[00:06:54] Speaker B: So take Shopify and Zoom for example, which were probably two of like the market's most successful products on the stock market. And just in terms of user counts, remote culture. Right. Like people started ordering everywhere they need to do online calls. But at the same time, you know, just this whole, there was, there was a cash and being injected into the market and VCs really saying, hey, we're going to go after tech now. And you see the Nasdaq really, you know, firing off all cylinders. That's, you know, that's a lot of money just going into these companies. And we even saw that in the WordPress space with you know, some of the hosting companies taking on pretty large investments. And then the market in, you know, the last two years has corrected at various parts and that's also been challenging. But WordPress as an open source project doesn't take investment. It doesn't have a, a dedicated product marketing or marketing or growth team. You know, we, yes, we've, we've had a marketing team and obviously there was recent news around that and that that's been more almost like PR now communications, but that sort of dedicated product to product marketing to then strategic marketing hasn't been something that, you know, we've provided direction for.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: No.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: And I think this goes back to my talk at Work Camp Europe and Belgrade, I think where one of my main points there was that at the time, you know, in the first decade WordPress as a platform, as a CMS was the solution.
You didn't consider it a tool, you installed it and that was your entire website. And nowadays that is not the case anymore. It's more like underlying piece of technology or tool in this larger toolkit that then comes together with other things to create a website.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Is that from an enterprise perspective or would you say in general?
[00:08:49] Speaker B: I would say that's in general. I, you know, I think that's where you can look at, you can look at like Squarespace and wix and I'm not drawing direct comparisons to them in terms of rivalries or whatever, but they, they, they didn't necessarily pivot the business, but they started off as these website builders and then they almost start feeling now like a operating system, like a digital operating system for small businesses. So you have your bookings, your cash transactions on there and everything. So the website is just kind of the hook at this point. The real money maker for these companies is getting a percentage of transaction fees that come over to platform. So maybe if you're on a lower tier, you get the site for like $30 or whatever per month and then you also pay 2% in transaction fees. If you're higher up, maybe you pay right. Like you figure all that out. But you can see how they've bundled all that together. And on the WordPress side of things, a lot of freelancers started bundling these things together. You know, we had, I think it was like EDD back then, right, for like online purchases. And then you might connect to another tool and maybe you'd have like a newsletter tool inside of WordPress, like mail poet or whatever back then. And now a lot of that stuff's been offloaded to SaaS companies. So yeah, I'd say your digital toolkit, your digital landscape, even as a small business might easily be 10/SaaS applications.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: I think that's on the low end.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: I'm trying to be.
It's still impressive compared to having everything in WordPress and just using WordPress plugins to achieve almost everything.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I agree.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Which was the case back then and that's changed. So.
Yeah, so, and then in terms of this invertedness, just to finish off the chart, whatever, we as WordPress have matured our services. So we have partner programs, every host has a partner program, we have directories of agencies. And all of this commoditization that we've seen around services, host and everything that helps power WordPress to the market has become very, very mature and large in size. So we have a very mature and commoditized service industry around WordPress. But demand is not what it used to be. So the relative difference between the two is for me that the first decade to say to simply was a bit of a honeymoon phase where we're all getting paid relatively easily if you're looking for that work. And now there's a higher chance that we're fighting over the same dollar.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment, at least from my perspective. So when you look at the two phases, right, we've had the honeymoon phase and we have the maturity phase, let's call them that. One of the things that you say about that it's time for WordPress to change, meaning be bold and ambitious again is I think what you specifically said, what is the goal of.
So I think there's a couple of questions that I have with this. So what is the first of all, who is the.
The WordPress in this particular case? What does that mean in terms of the project slash, the Core or whatever you want to have as more bold and ambitious again? And secondly, what problem are we solving by doing that?
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So I don't necessarily like Core is actually really good. And maybe this is a bit of a misunderstood point, but my point in Asia and my point now is that I think Core is great and trying to invest a lot of time into coding more things is just going to create more debt around product marketing. Marketing and trying to figure out how it relates to the market. Sure. You know, there's places where we should probably move strategically in terms of AI and other spaces. But does that need to exist inside Core yet or can it be a feature plugin? Right. Like there's a lot of open questions around that. But I think in terms of why is because I like this. This last summer I had to build a WordPress site and you know, a small one, not an Enterprise1. WordPress is great at enterprise because it's competing against Adobe Experience Manager, sitecore, IP Server, things that takes you need to get a CD in the mail to install a local thing and then so you have to go find your CD ROM device. I'm joking, but like it feels a bit like that from the horror stories I've heard. So WordPress and Enterprise is great and I'd consider it a leader. It just struggles from a positioning point of view with Gartner, Forrester, the kind of quadrants there because it doesn't have a commercial vendor necessarily attached to it. So that's why you see VIP and Pantheon on there as vendors. But then we kind of struggle as like smaller agencies or whatever. Now, why change or why? Why be ambitious and bold again?
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Yeah, what is it? What problem does it solve?
[00:14:06] Speaker B: I think it goes back to the WordPress philosophy and that is that WordPress is designed for everyone. And when I used WordPress this summer, I struggled. At some point I just told myself, should I just build this on something else? Because it's not a very complicated site. And the philosophy in that regard, when you really look at the original stuff, is that WordPress is out of the box. It's designed for the majority. It's decisions, not options, and striving for simplicity. This sounds like the tool, sorry, the solution we had 15 years ago because it was the thing that you installed and you launched your page and you did your site and everything. But now we've added quite a. You know, not only is there this increased landscape of tools you use, so there's additional complexity, there's an additional demand from users in terms of how much content you're supposed to have on your site, how interactive it is, how good it is. Like, what is that experience? How does that experience feel like? And then third, the plugin, I'd say like just the ecosystem, it doesn't feel like it syncs to the same tune. Not that the entire ecosystem does. Right. I think every ecosystem can have a stable part and then a very innovative crazy part where you just do whatever you want. And I think right now we're very much leaning into chaos environment whereby WordPress is not designed for everyone anymore. You need to have a bit of grit to install this.
As a solo non tech person, you'll have to really push through by yourself I think for a little bit compared to what other solutions have done. I'm not saying let's go copy what another SaaS CMS has done. I'm saying look at what the entire technology space has done in terms of just creating better user experiences for people, figuring out good patterns that have been spread across the entire kind of spectrum of different software. Users just expect faster, smoother, more streamlined, less friction.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we can say that even if the product had stayed the exact same and solved the same problem as it did 15 years ago, what you highlighted at the end there is that the actual user has been going through quite a bit of a change in terms of what they expect.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. That's a very good way to frame it.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: And in turn, not term, in turn, workers should have adapted quicker to that change because we saw it happening, but it actually didn't. I think a lot of the.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Are.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: And where we should BE is mostly being, being fixed in one way or another, but it's happening all over the board. So it's very hard to see it. Like, we see the block editor improve, we see the site editor improve. You know, 6.5 will be released today if all goes well. You have three wonderful new APIs and who knows what they can do. It's, you know, block binding API is a wonderful thing. Interactivity API, same thing. But you know, to have that be more on the forefront of this is what's happening. I think from going from 6.4 to 6.5, I think this is the first period that I see that at least the developers around it, whether that's developer working for the project or standalone developers who build stuff and share what they are building. I think this is the first time that I've seen in a very, very long time that we're starting to close the gap between where we want to be and where we are by explaining what the delta is that was being added. Now, is that a, is that a finding you see as well?
[00:18:14] Speaker B: I mean, from, from a product point of view, like I'm, I'm happy with everything, you know, like, it's just, I, I'm, I'm, I'm less in the trenches of, you know, where is Gutenberg going next? Or whatever. Sure. Like, you know, we have multilingual coming and these other things and collaborative, like these are all cool things. But I'm almost more excited about just packaging the stuff we already have properly so that the market even understands that. I think when you look at the waves of CMS, if you will, let's call it that before WordPress and Drupal go a step before that even to really like the, like the PHP nuke days or something like that. Right. Like there was some crazy stuff like that and we evolved into this monolithic CMS as it's been labeled. And around 2015 we really saw that composable headless trend take off and companies did a really good job of explaining or promoting and selling that. Now, the technology wasn't great, but they absolutely created a market within that. Now, from a technology point of view, WordPress has been much better at creating a full headless solution than all of the solutions were at the time. Sure, some of them have come a bit further and are, and they still don't have the breadth of WordPress, but they've gone after the head, they've created some headless specific features which are nice for the people using and stuff. But we missed that opportunity to expand Our own markets.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: If I may just clarify, what you're essentially saying is that whatever's happening from the marketing side of things that are, that's being done by the end users, the developers, the layer that's in between the implementation and these are the new tools is what I'm kind of hearing you already say that it's more about, it should be more about what is being marketed as such as an intent instead of just letting it happen.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: That's the outcome. Yeah, yeah. And this is from the WordPress solution days. WordPress can do anything. Yeah, that's the WordPress solution. And now in the last decade we've seen that there are market leaders for all the small verticals or niches. So if that's headless, that's composable, that's small E commerce, that's big E commerce, big commerce. You know, like there's, the company literally called themselves that. There's, there's a lot of players in every single vertical and part of the matrix in that regard. And that makes it very hard for us to apply our one size fits all marketing to all of that. So in many ways, think about it this way. For every line of code, how many units of product marketing should we be doing?
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
[00:21:36] Speaker B: I think that ratio is favored towards the code for now and we have an opportunity to just consolidate. Like I don't think we've.
The thing is, I see this as an opportunity. There's nothing that's been lost. The force of open source and the size of the WordPress ecosystem is so tremendous that it's almost impossible for any proprietary incumbent to try and displace WordPress in that regard. So if anything, it's just a matter of us going after a lot of these low hanging fruit.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Have we been a one size fits all for too long? Is that the conclusion behind this?
[00:22:21] Speaker B: I think so. People don't know what WordPress is. They call it a blogging tool, they call it a legacy cms. And we've kind of seen this convergence back from headless composable tools to take on some of these monolithic CMS traits like page previews. I think next has like server side rendering components, server side components, all that kind of stuff where you know, you have a bit of convergence back. But these companies can, you know, allow themselves to say, well legacy CMSs like WordPress and Drupal will not be able to do the things that we do. We don't even, we don't even have marketing. That takes a counterpoint to that. We, we Essentially adopt what the market gives us in terms of traits and labels and all that stuff.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so, so. And a good example of that would be for the longest time we've been, you know, people threw the you're just a blogging tool at us when we were still like. And still happening. But you know, you and I know that just a blog was until 2006 when pages were introduced.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Well, I wasn't even around.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: There you go. So. And then certainly in 2009, 2010, when custom post types and custom taxonomies were introduced, changes everything. We could do anything. But we've been mostly trying to solve that argument. We're not a blogging tool. We can be, but we can do so much more. So did we kind of get lost in that? Is that essentially what you're saying? We lost? Well, not lost. We went from the defending ourselves to not understanding where we stood.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: I just don't think we've ever taken a true position as a group. I mean, I think WordPress.org says things about itself in terms of what is WordPress and because that is the WordPress project and not necessarily abstractions into enterprise, SMB, consumer blog, restaurant websites, wedding photographer portals, whatever. Like we, obviously there's none of that, those sort of abstractions and verticals in that kind of detail. Nor should we go into any kind of crazy detail. But we've never even gone to that next sort of tier in terms of really breaking down. How does an SMB really go after it with WordPress, you know, what is, what is. Where is the sort of WordPress.org SMB? Sure, we have WordPress.org Enterprise and you know, from a scale consortium point of view, we'll, we'll be looking to try and make as many amendments and additions as we can. But some of this is not just about a marketing sort of. It's not about pretty pictures, case studies and things like that. It's a. It's a strategic alignment of different components throughout the journey of creating a website that play nice together and by playing nice together create a multiple multiplier, an exponential sort of value that is very hard to attack from the outside. It creates a moat.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I hear you there. So what is the risk of us not doing anything in this direction? What happens does not change its marketing tune.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: I don't think there's a massive risk.
I don't think we'll, you know, I don't have any kind of doomsday predictions or anything like that. We're in a maturity phase. What comes after Maturity is decline. I, you know, I could have, I can envision a, you know, very slow decline of WordPress, certainly not a rapid one, unless there was an amazing sort of solution that came out. But otherwise I, and when we talk about decline, we're talking about market share now we can lose market share and increase the size of the WordPress economy.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: And I don't think people necessarily realize that, that we can be more efficient with our through by being more efficient with our product marketing and being more targeted. Even if that's, you know, still covering 90% of what the for all solutions kind of talked about before, we're still creating better pathways for customers and companies to drive larger outcomes for their businesses, which in turn allow them to spend more inside of our economy and do so in a way that makes more sense because they understand what they need to do within a particular vertical. So if they want to do a headless site or sort of a composable setup, they can see like this is the agency, these are the tools. Maybe we have some things that are sort of first class plugins or more native and they see the pathway and that's a much easier buy. So by creating that larger top of funnel opportunity for companies that are, and customers that are relevant, we should be able to create new value instead of potentially relying more on recurring revenue. Right now.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: Does that mean agencies? Because you know, it's not just agencies, obviously, it's hosting its agencies, it's plug in build, it's the whole enchilada. But if I focus on agencies, is their task to find different ways of explaining how they can help.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: Oh, so yeah, deep sigh. And it's a deep sigh because as an agency we work much harder than an Adobe agency, let's say an Adobe or a Contentful or even like a sanity agency. So we can even take open source projects. They are under a pretty tightly defined sort of set of product marketing collateral. This is the tool, this is how it works, this is what we're good at. These are the outcomes you drive. There's recipes, if you will, in terms of creating value and how to approach projects and all that. On our end, I've had to talk about the blogging thing. We had Siemens as a client and in the first meeting I had to sell WordPress. So I had to dispel the notion that WordPress is a blogging tool. It came up there, right, like it's, it's, you know, this is a company that makes I don't know, 100 billion a year plus minus it's a great company to use WordPress, but us as an agency, we don't have the backing of any kind of commercial WordPress vendor. So we have to go do the selling of WordPress ourselves and then once that's done, sell Human Made or the agency and, you know, continue that journey. But it's almost like there's double work involved in terms of carrying, you know, the need to not only sell the software, but then also your agency, whereas in other areas you may just be selling your agency.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So it really just depends what kind of agency you are and what kind of clients you end up in the room with.
Yeah, but, but if we're, if we're. So I'm curious for them if the goal of your presentation, your keynote, is to educate people on where we are in terms of market share, in terms of opportunities and things we should do and focus on what is there. Is there anything you can say that is generically true for Anyone working with WordPress or is it a. Largely. It depends on what you do.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: In terms of what.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Sorry, in terms of if you were to have, if you were allowed to give one advice to Everybody inside the WordPress project in one way or another, whether that's hosting, agencies, developers, you name it. Is there an advice like start focusing on this because it will bring us to the next place that we want to be in the most optimal way?
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd say learn product marketing. I wouldn't say, I didn't say this on stage because product marketing, it's not the easiest term for most people, because even product marketing can. There's arguments within, where does that belong? But the work around product marketing and positioning is.
The thing is, I would say this to the entire ecosystem because I think that's where the largest opportunity is, or bang for buck without having to write a line of code. So we don't necessarily need to rely purely on developers, which are a limited resource, but we can rely on a larger part of the economy to power or drive this, assuming we can find a way to organize ourselves and do these things. But this is where the challenge of such projects comes in, because we, you know, essentially, and I think we'll see more of this potentially, where leadership will say, we'll put their foot down, kind of like how they did it with the marketing team and say, look, we're doing this or doing that, let's move forward here, let's do this. And I think, you know, for better or worse, that's the way how you, you drive output and then you can Test that output against the market and see what sticks.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: So in that, in that regard, the making of a WordPress Media Corp, is that the right thing to do? Because that has recently been announced.
Are you on board with that initiative?
[00:31:47] Speaker B: I think it's a decent initiative. I don't have any hard thoughts about it.
I think it probably will make that team more effective. Probably what we do need at a leadership level is to reimagine or rethink what does product marketing look like in terms of contributors and leadership, time, dedication, resources and so on and so forth. And that's, that's a fresh conversation, I think. I'm sure it's happening in places, but I, you know, I think that's what it takes. Like the team of marketing volunteers, you know, have been around for a long time and, you know, have put in a lot of work, but it's also not fair to look at a team like that, that's just a contributor team and expect them to do product marketing, which is not the expectation. I'm not saying that. And the point I'm making is that we are talking about something very different here, something we haven't traditionally focused on.
[00:32:45] Speaker A: So one of the things that is in that proposal is about creating qualified media partners who will then start help bringing the news, I guess, in, in one way or another. But what I kind of hear you say is we should, we should also be much more focused on from a high level. This is what WordPress is and this is how we're doing our, our product fit to whatever different scenario there is. So in that case, you, you, you gave an example of what's happened at enterprise. So WordPress.org enterprise, the scale consource, which is where Human made is part of as well. What is that trying to solve in this regard?
[00:33:30] Speaker B: I think it's a similar take on what I'm saying in terms of trying to alter the perception of WordPress in the enterprise space and trying to bring multiple small organizations together to feel like a large organization and have a larger voice and be more recognized, let's say, by the industry. And whilst I can go a good distance and will certainly learn a lot by doing all these things, my point is that these things need to be happening at the core, not core development, but at the core of the project.
In terms of the project saying, as you just said, this is who we are, this is where we specialize, this is our collateral, these are our marketing assets. This is how we talk about this, this is how we talk about that. And then agencies and hosting companies and everyone else who wants to adapt that particular strategic narrative is welcome to do so, especially if they're in an enterprise or other kind of trains like that, where it makes a lot of sense. And that's exactly what other vendors in any space do with their partner programs. And that's why the vendor, the service partner, the technology partner, and everybody who is part of that customer. Customer's journey is saying and reinforcing the same competitive edges so that you have a higher likelihood of succeeding.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: I would even include after sales. Yes.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: I mean, I'm just happy with sales right now.
[00:35:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I get it. But if you look at the whole cycle, then the after sales is the one where you. Not only because you know there's different ways to do an after sales, but the one I like particularly is where it's not actually sales, where it's actually listening to feedback and learning and incorporating it again. And that in effect will result in more sales. I see very of very little of this happening throughout the project. Obviously I'm not inside of any agency other than my own small one, but there's not a lot of talk about this. We can brand each else, we can focus on certain things of how we're explaining how we're bridging ourselves between the desired, the need, the want and the product. But after that, what do we do there? Do you have any thoughts on that or are you just happy with sales?
[00:36:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, it's a good question. You bring up a good point. Like wordcamps, I think, are a classic example of that whereby we have a industry conference for WordPress. But it is very meta. It is for us, bias.
[00:36:17] Speaker A: Incredibly meta.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. We don't have customer events, not like aws, not like Adobe, not like WP Engine. Did you know that one conference for all their customers. These are excellent opportunities to have those conversations to reignite some excitement in terms of what's coming next, meeting other clients, having these kind of mastermind exchanges or whatever you want to call them. And that's just symbolic, I think, of the opportunity that is ahead of us within certain strategic narratives or verticals.
[00:36:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree with you. I think that's. I am familiar with those types of conferences. I've been to those.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Yeah, cool.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: Before my, my jump into the world of WordPress. It is a very.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Before you got into the Truman Show.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: No, no, no. PeopleSoft label.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: Oh, that's horrible. You were doing PeopleSoft.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: No, we were. We were between one and the next tool. We ended up going, I really can't.
[00:37:21] Speaker B: Imagine you doing HR software, being responsible for HR related things.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I am. I was, I was.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: What's that smile for?
[00:37:29] Speaker A: Because it was a funny period. It was.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: I used PeopleSoft.
[00:37:32] Speaker A: So we were in a. Essentially three vendors. Narrowing it down to one is essentially the project I was part of. PeopleSoft was one, Oracle was one, and SAP was the third. And we landed on SAP. But that's. That the, the types of events you go to there are indicative of something that we have absolutely in no way, shape or form anything of inside the world, the world of WordPress, mostly because it's distributed. We're everywhere and we're nowhere. WordPress belongs to everyone, belongs to no one. So it's very hard to say, you know, this is a thing we're doing, because I think the perceived risk of sending your clients there is that they may come across somebody else they like better and you, oh, I just lost my client.
[00:38:19] Speaker B: We've sent clients. It's been okay.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: Yeah. But in, in general, I think that is the fear.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: I understand.
[00:38:26] Speaker A: And then that's, that's kind of hard to. That's a hard problem to solve. I, I like what the Scale Consortium does in terms of unifying a voice in a particular vertical. I think that we have a lot of opportunity to smarten up and do this in other sections of the entire ecosystem of WordPress. Is it going to be difficult? Sure. Because how do you organize yourself if your end clients are the ones you want to get in conversations with, but you have maybe, maybe you're a normal agency, you have about 25, 30 people and you have maybe 10 customers that are in the publishing side of things now. How do you combine those with a competitor who's essentially having the other 10 and then maybe somebody else has two. So how do you, how do you combine those into. Let's go to an event where we learn from each other without having the fear of, oh, I may potentially lose my clients here. I don't know if that's a problem we can solve. So I'm, you know, I'm very much looking into what the Scale Consortium does in terms of how does that work, how do you organize? What do you do?
[00:39:40] Speaker B: I also don't think that I don't. I mean, I can speak for the enterprise level at least. Like, I don't think enterprise relationships are disrupted.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: They're not that fluent. Yeah.
[00:39:52] Speaker B: And if they are, and if they are disrupted that quickly, then maybe the writing was on the wall before, you know.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that probably wasn't a good fix fit anyway.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: And I'd say that there's a natural level of clients leaving one agency and saying, hey, didn't want to work with them, not a good fit, they go to you. And then the same is true the other way around. So I think there's a natural sort of rotation of clients in that regard. Nothing that I would start worrying about.
I'd be much more excited about the upside of WordPress having sub brands. In an ideal world Whereby there's a WordPress Enterprise sub brand that is a distinct category on the website with distinct sets of first class plugins, integrations with a list of agencies or whatever that you know, may be part of five for the future or something related to that, to have a bit of a base, but to have that sort of strategic connection between all these different elements in a way that they're singing to the same tune, which is enterprise. And giving prospective buyers, existing buyers and long term buyers or whatever all the confidence that they are on the exact right platform would open up the top of the funnel, the market and everything a lot more than we have to worry about. I think that's a wonderful clients.
[00:41:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a wonderful argument.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: And that brings us back to.
I'll finish it real quick. And I think that is the opportunity to feel that honeymoon phase again because we didn't worry about clients being stolen or any of that kind of stuff. Then the argument you bring up in terms of clients potentially getting stolen belongs to the mature part of the cycle. That makes a lot of sense. So how do we reignite growth? We don't have to look at the 43%. We have to look at time to launch, we have to look at lifetime value, we have to look at NPS potentially at various levels of the WordPress economy.
[00:42:04] Speaker A: What does that mean?
[00:42:05] Speaker B: Net promoter score?
It's when you go on a website and it asks you something to effect of how likely is it that you would recommend WordPress, let's say in this example to a friend or a colleague.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say it depends.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Right. And for me it's like right now I'd be in part of the score that is not one, that is you have to be a nine or a ten to really be in that sort of brand ambassador category. And I'm not there because I don't want the headache that comes with the questions of I referred WordPress to somebody and now they're going to ask me a bunch of questions because they're finding it hard to get set up.
[00:42:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, good one. So for all of those listening that do not really have enterprise type clients or a very specific vertical that they. They are representing themselves in. Any advice there? Would you, Would you recommend them to find a vertical? Would you recommend them to. Is there anything you.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: So if we got some verticals, I'll say this about enterprise again, because I realize I am coming from the enterprise space, but my arguments are not directed at enterprise. I think out of all the verticals that exist within WordPress, I think enterprise has the best chance of growing the most this year relative to the others if we do nothing. So my arguments and my pitch is really about this idea of WordPress being designed for everyone.
[00:43:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So with that you're kind of answering the question, if you pick a particular subject, type of site, type of client, that's going to favor you as an agency, even as a solopreneur going forward.
[00:43:58] Speaker B: Well, the market's changed. I think this was part of my argument in 2018 also was alongside WordPress being the solution, the website was deemed a success if it was online.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: It was a binary thing. Yeah. Do you have a website or do you not have a website? That was the binary outcome. Success, failure, whatever. How can you not be online? And nowadays everyone is online and success is click throughs, conversions, SEO, SERPs, performance, speed, whatever. Like it's all these different things. Things.
And that is just very, very different than back then. So I think you could be the web assembler, freelancer, whatever you wanted to be in the honeymoon phase of WordPress because there was also just enough work going around. But like any product, any service in any market, you do kind of have to, you know, pick what you're good at. Like merge. Merge the knowledge you have of WordPress with the knowledge you have of problem spaces. Which market do you understand or you see having problems? The ones closest to you are often ones you can best solve for. And that then gives you an edge because you have the technology and you understand the problems or you're close to the problem space and thereby can create hopefully a solution that is competitive in that regard. So I think that's where Sometimes we see WordPress as a service, something else that has evolved in the last decade as opposed to the first decade.
[00:45:29] Speaker A: I agree.
I see the same opportunity by redefining what you like, who you know, where you are and where you are known.
I'd like to ask a few questions on another topic that raised recently, if that's okay. You said something about, and this sort of goes with the topic we have been discussing, but you said Something along the lines of one of WordPress's biggest opportunity is remaining is reimagining the plugins ecosystem. So one of the biggest WordPress opportunities there is is reimagining the plugin ecosystem. You had a whole thread on ideas and thoughts that you had that were essentially all designed to make the plugin ecosystem a better one. But let's start with identifying what the problem is.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: Currently the problem is I want to create a website, I want to maybe add a few custom special blocks, I want to add a cookie banner, I want to add an SEO tool, I want to add a forms tool and I just have to face I don't know how many decisions.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: A lot.
[00:46:46] Speaker B: Just trying to get a basic loadout of tech and then the directory itself, you know, like getting a bit more tactical here, like the search function doesn't necessarily prioritize free tools. Not in a negative way. I'm just saying that, you know, often premium plugins that put a lot behind the payment gate might have a pretty high result or the top result and then that creates additional friction for a first time user. And there's a number of these challenges. If I just search Salesforce for instance, like what am I going to find? It's all mess. If I search HubSpot, there is an official one, but will you download something else? So we have an opportunity, I think to just clean up because we've essentially kept what we've had from back then, we haven't changed anything. Now we can clean up the directory and provide a more relevant experience there. But I think the large opportunity that I'm speaking to is to also provide a, almost like a special badge or rank or class or tier of plugins which strive to not strive, have to meet a certain set of rules with regards to ui, UX and beyond. So that when a user first uses WordPress and they want to just get started, there's probably, you know, a couple hundred plugins that fit those criteria are easily found and you're able to move quickly between them because the experience is the same. You feel like you've just installed a WordPress extension as opposed to a third party notice bar abuse thing. It's a bit of an arms race at this point where everybody's trying to come up with new ways to stand out and everybody trying to stand out creates a lot of confusion for a user. Now this is the point where I say I don't think we need to police the entire ecosystem. It's not about that.
Even just Shopify only has this certain classification for just 5% of. Of their plugins. And that already allows a good deal of users to say, okay, these are plugins I can trust. I move quickly, they match the ui, I understand what the UI patterns mean because I've used the same UI somewhere else. So it's all very consistent and designed to be productive. And from my point of view, that helps new users and new ish users or no code users to get to those aha moments lot quicker whereby they're like, oh, I'm feeling productive. I'm getting this site done. Oh, I'm about to launch. You know, like it's. I think this is the magic of this. And this comes back to WordPress philosophy in terms of designing for majority. It's. It's designed to be out of the box, right? Where everything feels consistent and where, you know, when we talk about decisions, not options, we don't necessarily want users to spend hours installing uninstalling plugins till they find, you know, one that, you know, actually does what it's supposed to.
[00:50:00] Speaker A: Or a mix. Like oftentimes you have to combine certain things and then you want to add the fourth one and you. Oh, turns out the second one doesn't do it anymore. So.
[00:50:09] Speaker B: And it seems like it's a bit controversial because. Which I don't know why, but I.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: Think I get why. I think the. So I saw your thread. I and I followed the replies and people talking about it, but from what I gather, most see it as. So we currently have featured plugins within the plugin repository, right? So that means there's, there's a couple that are, for whatever reason are featured. And I think most people confuse what you're suggesting with how that system is set up. And in my mind, what you're proposing is something entirely different. It is essentially saying, here's, let's, let's call it 10 different ways of how your plugin on the repo is favoring the best way going forward. Meaning whether that's from a coding standard perspective, whether that's from a integration of how it actually looks and feels inside the WordPress site itself, in how it shoves or does not shove marketing stuff in. In your face on every single page, load in the libraries, sorry, in the various page views. But it also is maybe on a, on a, on a performance standard, like have some sort of standard saying this is actually done right, right. So functions, the right functions are used to achieve the right type of functionality. This is scaling, this is performance. You know, all these types of metrics that you can For a very large portion, you can measure systematically, programmatically. You don't have to actually dive in, but there's a lot of stuff you can, you can scan for. But essentially you'll then have a list of plugins that are just adhering perfectly. So we have the list of things that plugins need.
[00:51:54] Speaker B: A minority of plugins, yes.
[00:51:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And you'll, you'll end up with plugins that go above and beyond to fit that. Let's call it the 5% of plugins. And then are, they're still a minority, but they are highlighted, they are featured, they are rewarded. That's the word. And if we make the distinction between the current featured plugins and the rewarded plugins, I think your, I think your idea makes a lot of sense to actually start thinking about. Like, okay, so what are the things we can do? Especially giving that we're at the brink of moving to a new, entirely new WordPress dashboard interface, which is such a.
[00:52:38] Speaker B: Great opportunity in terms of exactly.
[00:52:40] Speaker A: That is, that is the perfect planning to just not just so I, I, I see people on, I, I shared a little video of what the new dashboard would look like and you get the questions like, I don't see how my plugin is going to fit in that. Now if, if you start out with that idea, that's a difficult problem. Problem to solve. Right. Because if you don't see how that needs to be because you're too opinionated on how your particular plugin should look, how that interface should work, and all of those things, then you're not getting the advantage of having a seamless experience from the end user. You just want your plugin to get the most views and the most eyes and possibly by standing out the most, you achieve that. And I think that's the wrong way about. But the, the opportunity we have here is, I think, one of the biggest we've had in probably a decade. How long have we had the base of the current design?
[00:53:34] Speaker B: For a long time. What I'm proposing is to wipe the slate clean. It's to say, knock out the featured plugins.
And this might be semi controversial, but Jetpack essentially could not look like Jetpack anymore. If it wants to be part of the rewarded plugins, I think it does want to be, and my gut feeling is that they would probably be one of the plugins to lead the way in terms of aligning themselves, I would gamble that.
[00:54:04] Speaker A: I would almost say that's the way it has to be.
[00:54:08] Speaker B: Exactly. Otherwise there's no leading by example in that regard.
[00:54:11] Speaker A: Exactly. Leading by example, when you posted that thread on, on X, what was the number one complaint that you saw? Because I clicking through that post, I see a few things coming up. What was the thing that stood out for you? Like people don't get it. People do get it.
[00:54:27] Speaker B: I think there was, it was that innovation was somehow threatened. Like this wild west of innovation. And I'm not taking any.
This probably comes down to actual like words and understanding as opposed to actual differences between people. But my, my feeling is that they just didn't understand that I'm only speaking about a minority of plugins that are rewarded and highlighted. The rest of innovation can continue to exist. You can have entire different plugins that have a completely different UI for the same category still be listed. There's nothing wrong with that. People will still find you and use you, especially if they're an advanced user. But new users should not be exposed to that. I am sorry.
[00:55:09] Speaker A: So which brings me to my next question. If we want to solve this perfectly, then we're solving. We need to solve something else as well. That is the entire process of onboarding. We have our famous five minute install.
But you are then.
[00:55:23] Speaker B: And then the 50 year build.
[00:55:26] Speaker A: Yeah, like I'm kidding. But certainly an hour in trying to figure out, you know, if you're an experienced builder, you know which plugins you're using. It's not that hard. You, you can even automate that with a nice WP CLI script and I would certainly recommend you look in that direction. But the general user is not going to be able to do that. They're not even going to be able to make the choice because they don't know where to start. They don't know how to pick one plugin from another. They have no idea what they're buying into. There's plugins that are ranking very high for certain search terms, but end up with a horrible, horrible black pattern user interface, luring them in, pushing them in, yanking them into a, a sub ecosystem that serves no one but that particular plugin builder.
That's a hurdle. That's a huge hurdle.
Do you have any ideas on where we should be starting to solve that problem?
[00:56:19] Speaker B: So I think the plugin ecosystem and the strategic narratives, I think that really takes care of quite a bit in terms of at least laying down a much stronger foundation in this building. Because right now hosting companies are trying to do the whole thing the same way that agencies are trying to do the whole thing. Right when I'm going to the market and I have to go sell WordPress and then human made hosting companies I think are doing very much the same kind of work where they're selling WordPress or Drupal or whatever and then selling their hosting on top of that, and then they're trying to come up with one size fits all onboarding processes. And I think this is where you can bring the two together, where we have very strong foundations at the project level, strategic narratives, plug in ecosystem or just a cleaned up ecosystem, let's say better integrative landscape. So part of the plugin ecosystem I think, or this first class set of solutions is that we also have the opportunity to separate integrations. So we can put all the integrations which are created by the vendor themselves, so HubSpot for example, just on a different page. Because then that from a product marketing perspective highlights our ability to connect to the broader web, which I think is quite important. And that's not a. There's literally no code change here. This is a product and product marketing and packaging shift.
So if we do all these things and then the hosting companies have access to that and then they're starting to decide for themselves, do you use cadence? Do we use something else? I think that's where the innovation happens. And it's also for the host to figure out what problem space they're figuring out. We talked before about what if someone, you know, a random freelancer that was doing kind of everything before, what do they solve Now? Hosting companies are somewhat trying to do that. Some of them go after key verticals, some of them go after specific regions, different price tiers, whatever that may be, or a mix of that. And the onboarding tools will often have to be, I'd say customized based on what those problems or needs are.
[00:58:27] Speaker A: Are you familiar with Extendify?
[00:58:29] Speaker B: I've heard about it, but I haven't looked at it. Oh yes, no, no, no, I do know it. I do know it's. Yes, I do know, Sean. Yes.
[00:58:36] Speaker A: Yeah, so what that solves and it's mostly used by, by hosting companies. But what that solves, if you have those one click script installation type solutions at hosting companies, you click on it and it not only just installs WordPress, but it kind of asks you what is your purpose, what do you want to build? And as you are answering the questions, it has pre selected pre highlighted plugins, kind of what you just said.
[00:59:02] Speaker B: Yeah, Luke Karbis gave me a demo last WordCamp Asia.
[00:59:06] Speaker A: Yeah, so, and, and, but the end result, yeah, the end result is you have a, you know, a combination of plugins installed that serve your purpose specifically. Now obviously the hosting company has a lot of influence of how this onboarding project implementation, what that looks like. They have a lot of influence over which particular plugins they would like you to have installed. Maybe that's because they have deals with the, the plugin builders and, and all of that sort of stuff. So my question is kind of this, how much of this should we start facilitating inside WordPress itself? Because if we're solving a better plugin ecosystem, we still have to solve the actual onboarding. We still have that thing, the bridge that is taking away the pain points of. I don't know what I'm selecting, I don't know what I'm choosing. Because even if we have that 5%, even if that is perfectly the type.
[01:00:01] Speaker B: Of plugin that is perfect, perfectly fitting, perfectly complimentary.
[01:00:04] Speaker A: Exactly. That's exactly what you need. You still don't know whether you made the right choice because that other one that does essentially the same is also perfect.
[01:00:12] Speaker B: What do I pick?
[01:00:14] Speaker A: Which one do I dive into?
[01:00:15] Speaker B: And yeah, I think it's interesting.
[01:00:17] Speaker A: And additionally, last comma, how do premium plugins hook into that?
[01:00:23] Speaker B: What? Hook into the 5% type?
[01:00:26] Speaker A: No, the onboarding. Like how do we take care of people understanding the full options they have so they make the right choice? Like if I have, I need to start a E commerce store, pretty straightforward, right? Then per country I may need specific plugins inside of WooCommerce. Per payment provider I may need some stuff, maybe I want to optimize my checkout fields, delete, add, change, you know, those are questions we can ask them and we can provide to things there. So if that means that on, in the back of the, in the background, certain plugins are installed automatically, some will be existing on the repo, some will be for instance premium like barn2 plugins, they have wonderful plugins for WooCommerce. How do we ensure that that part of the ecosystem is also part of such an onboarding experience? It's a long question.
[01:01:17] Speaker B: No, no, no, I get it. I like it. And as you're talking about, I'm going through it in my mind and I almost feel as if there could be room for an onboarding plugin which is part of the first class, which is an optional install, which users then say, hey, I want to install this because I need an extra helping hand. And then the shape that that takes can either be very wizard like, which is something that we've experienced from a lot of SaaS applications, or it can be a bit more open the Way we experienced Excel, Clippy or whenever you have like an AI co op player in a video game that roams around the free world with you and just gives you tips and stuff like that. But it feels like that is, that is somewhere where we have room. That's something where innovation can have a very nice impact. It can be a pretty competitive space. Where does someone like Extendify provide that first class plugin and you know, they, they may have deals to then referrals or whatever for other plugins that help the customer later on. There's commercial models around these things. But I, it's not, it's not my first sort of idea to. I feel like it's still something that hosts should be solving for the most part. And then as the. Or if we do have the learnings and we do know what does constitute a great onboarding for a new WordPress user, then we can actually productize or codify it as probably something optional to begin with. And if that has great success, then maybe a bit more proactive inside of first time admin.
[01:03:05] Speaker A: Yeah, in my ideal world, that looks very similar to what you just said. I would start with a feature plugin created by the dot org team, or at least maintained created by dot org team and that would essentially solve the first bridge like, okay, I've installed it now what? Because that dashboard, we can talk about how many different ways we can solve the dashboard. You land on the information it provides and how it guides you. Doesn't guide you.
[01:03:37] Speaker B: Controversial space.
[01:03:38] Speaker A: Exactly. So there's a lot to be said what's in there currently. But I kind of want to bypass that because in my opinion as soon as you've hit the all right, Sparky, let's install this thing. Then I then am prompted to log in. Okay. Once I'm logged in, I just see that dashboard. That makes no sense. How do we fix that?
[01:03:59] Speaker B: And we have a lot more complexity now than we had 15 years ago in terms of how much is listed there. And then you have these high expectations of what the website needs to have and that's a lot more than before. And then on top of that, the user also expects a much better experience than they had 15 years ago. So this is why I think this is the largest opportunity. It's not in the code of Core itself, it's everything around it.
[01:04:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And if it's everything around it, then that means that it's from the before you install it, once you have installed it, but also once a plugin is activated and I like to see gravity Forms as a good example of that. Once you've installed Gravity Forms, you know, it's prompting you to install your first. Sorry, create your first form. But then it asks you, what kind of form do you want? And then the formula. Exactly. So we're.
We're not pushing, but we're. Whenever somebody chooses to go down the stub, we're nudging them in the direction of. Okay, these are the smart decisions to make consecutively.
[01:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah, no, go ahead. Sorry, it was small. Like, I tried the webflow wizard the other day because the interface reminds me a lot of Sketch, you know, the tool, the competitor to Figma before Figma took over the world. And yeah, it was very, very guided in terms of, like, very specific. So you're really like building blocks, resizing them, doing like changing like their flexbox properties and everything so you could tell who the audience was for. But it was interesting because I almost clicked away from the wizard and it said people who complete the wizard have an 82% chance, higher chance of building a site than those that don't, or something like that. So, you know, there is probably something statistically true for trying to nudge these users in a certain direction. I think the pushback we face is WordPress is, you know, open source and supposed to be for everyone and let people choose their own path as opposed to guide them down these paths. But again, if we do have strategic narratives and then we do have these kind of, these potential guided paths to certain things, then maybe that is. And it's optional or it's a feature plugin or whatever. I think this is exactly the kind of space and how these things should live and operate.
[01:06:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. And I think we're seeing, at least on the plugin side of things, we're seeing better onboardings happening all the time. WooCommerce 8.8, which is slated for later this month, we'll have an onboarding wizard, like a proper new version that actually guides you through. Sure, there's stuff that we can improve on, wording this and that, but in my mind, we're solving a lot of potential future problems by solving the onboarding part better. And that starts with hosting, but it also is, you know, if you, if you hire any agency to create you a website and you ask them to build it for you, you have the same problem then. Right. Once you've installed it, once it's done, you hand it over to a client, but the client's going to have the same questions as if he just installed it himself.
[01:07:26] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[01:07:26] Speaker A: So if we have a solution.
[01:07:28] Speaker B: Unless it's fully managed.
[01:07:29] Speaker A: Sure. But that's, I would say, generally the minority. If we end up with a solution that does take care of the onboarding, as soon as we enter the admin of WordPress for the first time, that is something that's fully hookable for an agency to add their stuff to it, that makes it specific to somebody onboarding that site for the first time, then in my mind we're actually starting to solve problems because then we've solved the plugin ecosystem part. We've solved the choices we make for them. So the decisions, not options. Plus anybody going through that process will feel properly onboarded, will feel at home, understands what they're doing there, and that will, in, in, you know, the end result of that will be a higher retention for whomever was in part of that process. Whether that's the hosting company, WordPress, the agency, the plugin builder, anyone.
[01:08:18] Speaker B: Exactly. And I think that brings us back to the ethos of being out of the box and the, the, the true intention behind the 5 minute install. Not just it being an install, but you know, that, that, that, that ease of use that just came as soon as you installed it. You're clicking, you're going, your, your site's live, you just got to uncheck the, the search indexing and you're good to go. You know, like great good.
[01:08:41] Speaker A: Well, at least we're in agreement there because.
Yeah, I don't, I don't.
[01:08:47] Speaker B: Fighting words.
[01:08:48] Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, but it's, you know, there's, there's, there's a lot of folks building wonderful solutions that are very much against change, which I always find a very weird thing. You're building software, you're building solutions. Why would you oppose change? I don't get it. It's the only constant, especially in the world of software. We're constantly improving, adding new APIs, adding new things. How can you be against change?
It's a thing I don't get. I genuinely don't get.
[01:09:20] Speaker B: It's just. Yeah, I mean, I think the fear of change is also a constant, just like change itself is. And you know, put on top of that, that we, we live in this sort of ugly time in humanity, I'd say, you know, with polarized politics, with climate, with disinformation, all these things that are, yeah, just very ugly and just not very nice. And then the, you know, people's wealth or whatever may not be what it used to be or their purchasing power is not quite there and might be worried about this or might be worried about the economy, might be worried about God knows what, there's wars going on and you know, this, this is the time to build, if there is one. But that runs counter to most people's for a lot of, not, I won't say most, but like to a lot of people's idea of when to make that, make actual change happen.
[01:10:25] Speaker A: I think that's a wonderful note to end the show on.
Cool, because I agree.
[01:10:29] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, I'm glad you agree.
[01:10:32] Speaker A: No, but I mean part of open source is wanting to facilitate change in humanity, right?
[01:10:38] Speaker B: It absolutely is.
[01:10:39] Speaker A: And that also means touching the big topics, the one you just raised. So if, yeah, go on.
[01:10:47] Speaker B: I was just going to add a few more bits to that to wrap up my side. I think, you know, if we're able to bring change to the project in such a way that it brings excitement to the market, it brings excitement to WordPress and it makes it a technology that people want to use again and everything, then it reinvigorates the, sure, it reinvigorates the ecosystem around it also financially, but ultimately starts bringing contributors, new blood on board again to really be this new wave of contributors and contributions to WordPress for this potential next wave cycle shift of word, whatever WordPress will be.
And I think that that would be a beautiful thing for the project. But 43% is a lagging indicator and we need to look towards forward looking indicators that may help us inform of these things that happen after. Because if it's, you know, someone being excited, I mean, let's go all the way to the root. We, we, we, we decide on a change that may impact product marketing or whatever that excites a prospective buyer, they get into it, they start using it more, other people start using it, the economy grows, there's an excitement around WordPress again and at some point more contributors come on. From the inception of this idea to a new wave of, let's say a new growth spurt inside the economy that could be a couple of years and for contributors that could be even, you know, bit more so these are seeds that we have to plant now and these are changes that we should talk about now while the world is in.
[01:12:37] Speaker A: Such change again, 100% agree. Thank you so much.
[01:12:41] Speaker B: Thank you.
