[00:00:01] Speaker A: What was the name of the show?
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to another edition of Within WordPress podcast. On this show today we have Mario Peshev.
Mario, can you please introduce yourself a little bit to everyone not familiar with you?
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Hey, Ramkas. First off, thanks for having me. Me, my interest pretty hybrid. I tend to adapt myself to different situations, and I've done so over the past 20 something years. I built my first static website back in 1999. Since then, I transitioned to freelancer WordPress developer consultant, digital consultant, business advisor, serial entrepreneur, and a bunch of different things. I'm well known with founding Debris Top 20 WordPress Agency worldwide some 13 years ago. And I've been dealing with a lot of other crazy stuff in between. And something that people don't know is that about ten or eleven years ago, I was asking you some questions like what's the meaning of management and how does marketing work and so forth. So I can attribute some of that glory to yourself personally. I can probably find some email threads back in the day.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: That's funny, I'd forgotten that. Yeah, we go back a little while.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: No way. It's probably, what? Twelve years, give or take. Maybe more probably, yeah, time flies. Let's say you were younger, so it's.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Just as much yeah, I was younger, but I look better now. I feel better now, and I'm trying to see the positive side of getting older.
I would say you're sort of underselling yourself because you're quite active inside of a lot of different things. In the WordPress community, though.
Defrix is your company, but you do a lot more in terms of content and stuff you put out there on Twitter. And I think you publish at Forbes and what are some other.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: I have a comb in Forbes and Entrepreneur and a few other places that are not as popular. And they also have lots of content across Ink magazine Business, small Business Insights. Right.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: So you're quite prolific in the type of content you pump out.
One of the things that I found very interesting in the stuff that you put out. There was a tweet not too long ago about the it's hard to captulate it in one sentence, but roughly the challenges Ecommerce has in our space, whether that is wu, whether that is BigCommerce, whether that is shopify, or there's a lot happening in that space, in that market. From layoffs to innovations to AI and everything in between. And you most certainly seem to have an opinion about it. So let's start with the first question. So you are servicing clients.
What kind of e commerce solutions are you using for your clients?
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Sure. So Devrex is primarily a WordPress agency, and the main thing we sell are WordPress retainers. However, the way we structure that is WordPress well retainers for businesses primarily using WordPress, and business consultancy and technical partnerships for businesses primarily using WordPress. That doesn't mean that everything we do is WordPress. We have different platforms with Microservices, with tools written in Go, in Python, some deployment automation tools in Ruby and so on and so on. And so for instance, we have some publishers running their main publishing website in WordPress and then running commerce in BigCommerce or Shopify or you know, sometimes it's kind of a self hosted thing like Opencard or Show and we are managing or maintaining portion of that stuff. So it's a pretty diverse mix, especially with larger every and that's probably something that many people outside of the WordPress community don't know is but the larger the business, the more diverse their technical stack for sure.
One example is we work with one of the largest, well, the most popular screencasting software for tutorials, like video tutorials and that kind of stuff. They have like over 30 million installs their main tool set, their main website is in ASP. Net but their entire blogging network is kind of WordPress. Right. Same goes for Microsoft. Microsoft and Skeptics blogs are in WordPress. We don't manage them, but just as an example are in WordPress. Even though Microsoft has invented C Sharp and the net framework. Right. So that level of diversity gives us access and insights and intel into lots of different tools and systems. And we've also worked closely with some clients that specialize in these ecosystems as well.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Yeah, so if there's a sort of a mix that you can define like how much are you touching WooCommerce versus other stuff, I'd say that WooCommerce is.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Probably leading the charts. Shopify is next and then there's kind of a mix of other systems from Magento and Opencard through BigCommerce, through any other self driven type of thing. Yeah.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: I'm always intrigued by companies focusing on multiple text techs at the same time, which sounds like is what you're doing.
So how do you find clients that are no, let me rephrase. How do the clients pick you when their tech stack is so diverse? It's not necessarily a WordPress company.
How do you make yourself stand out? So like this is the extra thing that we're doing. Nobody else does it. This is why you pick us. How does that happen?
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Sure. So, first off, I want to draw the line between just offering multiple things by default versus offering WordPress solutions. We actually do the latter. But building a strong technical relationship and trust and partnership with a client usually exposes us to other tools and systems they have. So it's usually the other way around, so to speak. We definitely don't advertise ourselves as like a BPO.
We cannot afford that. We are like 45 people or something, I don't know. And it's unrealistic to provide the level of expertise and multiple people for that kind of stuff, right?
[00:07:31] Speaker B: I would think so, yeah. Hence the question.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Yeah, we don't promote that per se.
Again, so it's a twofolded question. The first part is we normally sign a client with our WordPress expertise. They love the way we work. We communicate, we plan, we strategize. And they work with like 30 different agencies for different things to use. So sometimes we take over their marketing work, sometimes we take over their Net platform or their Go microservices or something else, their AWS infrastructure. And that's kind of how we take over certain pieces of the stack.
So first and foremost, that's kind of the execution road forward. And second, in terms of expertise, the fact that we specialize in high scale, high profile solutions means that it's necessary for us to work with engineers. And engineers are rarely constrained to a single stack. They normally do mobile apps in Android or Objective C, or they build their own tools in Python because it connects better to TensorFlow for AI, or they do Python again for machine learning. So there are different solutions solved better or kind of getting more adoption with different tools. And that's kind of how you get exposure to that. Like, one example is like Shopify is one of the tools. Like, Shopify is in Ruby on Rails, and it's a completely different infrastructure. But we used Capistrana for deployments eleven years ago. Capistrano is also Ruby driven, so some of our deployment systems are in Ruby. And people who have been deployment, been building deployment tools and recipes for a while are very well versed in Ruby, and they've also taken courses and so forth. So normally we have people with additional expertise, and those are people interested in just exploring new tech and spending, like splitting their time between different technologies. Right? Yeah.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: So that makes sense. I understand better now how that works because I think in a way, that's how it works for most. I think you are probably focusing more diverse compared to others.
So the tweet that you sent out, that I'll add it to the description of this podcast, but the tweet that you sent out was you mentioning a few things happening.
I'm tempted to call it big commerce, but that's also one of the providers. But in the larger scale of ecommerce, there's a lot of stuff going on right? There's AI.
There's obviously a recession going on.
Can you give me your highlight of where you think the what's, what's happening in ecommerce that you find the most threatening? Like what's what's really something we should worry about?
[00:10:32] Speaker A: That's a pretty broad and complex question, but I'm going to take it a step back and just provide some context too. First off, back when we decided as an agency to focus on WordPress, my background was in engineering and my background was in Java enterprise development, right. Talking about telecoms and banks and that kind of stuff. So penetrating the WordPress space was only possible for me to step up and focus on the high scale solutions. I was not competitive for locals websites. I was not fast. My expertise was in solving very complex problems. So that's kind of what I focused on. And later on, as we kept scaling, this inevitably led to high scale websites and high transactional websites. In most cases, we are talking about publishers, especially ad revenue. This is kind of one of our specializations, is publishers with hundreds of millions of page views generating revenue from ads. So we do have adopt department and stuff, and the other one is ecommerce. Right? So money making systems on top of WordPress. So that's kind of how we entered the WordPress market. Then again, some of our clients were not publishers of commerce, but they also have other commerce systems. And we've also worked with some that are in the commerce space. But indirectly, one of the common examples is I spent a year and a half as the CTO of Brainjoat, California based startup. I just left a couple, three months ago or so, but I'm still in an advisory role and working day to day with them. So they are one of the largest Amazon affiliate publishers. So they are a publisher, but their revenue comes from affiliate product on Amazon. Right. So that's how I gained a lot of exposure to Amazon directly and their business model, their red cards, and a lot of stuff happening in their ecosystem.
So with that in mind, I'm also working closely with a Shopify app that I'm partially managing myself in, again, the Shopify space with many thousands of clients. So this really gives me kind of broader sense of things now as to what's happening in the space. The more conversations I have, the harder it is to actually get a clear picture of how much of that is speculation, how much of that is just a market push, how much of that is investors squeezing businesses to reset and just focus on profitability versus what's happening in the real world. Now, in my experience to date, at least, speaking, in May of 2023, even though it's been roughly a year since the recession has begun to unfold, it's still fairly well balanced. Sales are still either going up or stable, and it's hard to see any proof of the space struggling. We're talking about Amazon GMV and reported GMV for Q One. We're talking about generic shopify sales. We're talking about our customers and them growing revenue in different departments in different areas. Now, there are, however, different interpretations for that because GV goes up, gross merchandise value is going up, but also inflation has increased costs for certain products, about 20% on average. Right. So you may actually decrease sales by 15%, but prices up 20% and you're.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Still growing and you're still good.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's important to dive deeper into data in order to figure out what's happening. At the same time, we see layoffs. I lost.
My dear colleagues and partners got laid off from Amazon and Shopify.
Just yesterday. Shopify had another layoff of 20% of their staff, including some of their top engineers. And we see that's happening. Amazon is probably allegedly planning another layoff. So there is definitely movement in the space what's about to happen and what's actually happening on the scale side is yet to unfold, I think.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Yeah, so layoffs is a good indicator of something happening. I don't always see that as an example of something bad necessarily.
I think it's oftentimes used by companies as a sort of a culling, sort of a mechanism.
I'll give you an example. I've worked at a large company many, many moons ago where it was declared that there was going to be 1000 people laid off. And I happened to know that the normal flow of people and that was going to happen in a year. And I happened to know that the normal flow of people leaving the company was about 1000 people per year. So I was like, why are you announcing something that is naturally going to happen anyway? But they wanted to let go of 2000 in total.
There's a little bit of marketing and optimization happening as well. And I think the recession as we're seeing it for, however it is noticeable, is also being misused here because I think that's just something naturally happening.
But here's a conclusion with what you're saying. It almost sounds like using one of the hosted solutions is probably more of a challenge than using something native inside of WordPress or WooCommerce for instance.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Well, this may or may not be true. I actually had a few conversations with well, again, I'm going to take it a step back. So first off, Devrex partners up with several hosting providers, but our largest clients are hosted with Pagely and Pagely got showed to GoDaddy. And ever since we've also been exporting their hosted kind of commerce solution, right? We also have customers who we've migrated off of Liquid Web and again, no harm or anything to Liquid Web. Just again, that's kind of the term of events. And their e commerce solution, I think it was Nexus Rochelle. We have tested out like Dow P engine and their offerings. So there are different versions and variants of hosted WordPress and hosted WooCommerce in that particular.
And one of the news that broke maybe a couple weeks ago is that WooCommerce is actively working on Woo experts I believe, which is their hosted.
And I got I got in touch. Well, they kind of connected with me, some of the Woo experts folks building the system to gain some insight on what's happening on the other side of the fence. And we've been having conversations and back and forth of what makes some of the hosted platforms competitive.
Again, I wouldn't say income, but most of my net worth comes from WordPress and I'm still biased in that.
However, I'm also trying to stay objective as to what's happening on the other side of the fence. Right. We've lost clients as an agency to webflow, it sucks, but in some cases I can see how this may be an okay solution for a customer. In some cases it's merely marketing, but in some case webflow makes more sense for you. Right. So these no code or hosted solutions, they also have some perks. And one example I'm going to give is one of the pains of being a plugin developer or a theme developer in WordPress is the limitation of the marketplace, the inability to sell through the marketplace, the public one. Unless you're on theme forest, that's really painful, the lack of insights of what's happening in other tools. You may have a diagnostic stop in your plugin, but you still need to ask your client to send it. You still have no idea who your client is whatsoever when they install your plugin. And that's absolutely ruining businesses. If you go to the Shopify site, the moment someone installs your app, first off, you probably are going to receive payment because it's completely legit and legal to get payments for your solution. You can also charge subscription based or volume based on sales and orders. You get access to who your client is, what's the store, when did they sign up, how old the store is, what shopify plan they have, how many apps and which apps they're using, what integrations for different cases like email marketing and so forth, how many orders and what's the volume of sales over the past 30 days.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: That's a treasure of information versus what you get from WordPress, correct?
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Yeah, literally, you can build a myriad of businesses on competitive platforms just due to that information. That's utterly, completely impossible. And the reason I'm sharing that is because it's public information. Like the moment you have an app or a theme, you can see that. And that's what I share with experts. I'm like this is the ecosystem that's going to build WooCommerce, plugin, extension, whatever, developers and theme developers and incentivize them to grow that part of the market. Right?
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that's an interesting one.
I'm translating this to essentially meaning, yes, it may make a lot of sense to, yes, go with your owning your own data, have your own store, WordPress WooCommerce, and you can scale it and you can do whatever you like with it. There is just one big difference between that and a host solution like Shopify. You have zero data to use to base any decision on what to do with your product or how to optimize or what even succeeds and why.
Yeah, that's an interesting point of view.
That's why I enjoy having this conversation with you, Mario, because I like your point of views. I like that you take a step back and look at the larger thing because that is essentially what the content you're sharing is also always about. And that's a smart approach.
And I guess it also is because like you've said before, you've sort of detached yourself from WordPress itself. Yes, it's the main tool. You work with your company does. But there's more in this world than just WordPress. And on that note, note, there's a lot of folks that want to solve everything inside of WordPress.
If it's a small, plain paying client, maybe you need to, maybe that is the way to go. But there's most certainly a case for where you're using different systems alongside WordPress, but it doesn't make sense to cramp everything in there that you can possibly think of.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: So.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: What is the thing that a client suggested that you had to push back on? Like, no, we're absolutely not doing this in WordPress.
[00:22:10] Speaker A: That's another great question. There are specific things, and I've actually been documenting part of that journey on my own blog and I know I have specific examples for that on my own blog. I know that one of the systems is video hosting platform, right? If I need to rebuild YouTube, I would never use WordPress. It makes no sense. I need to think of what does the CMS include and kind of what's the core stack. So it is a content management system and the video is content, but you also have comments, you have tools, pages, like lots of things. You're not going to have different users, you're probably not going to have roles, maybe just admin video uploader or something.
The UI, like the dashboard is going to be different. You can't control counter. You're going to use very few aspects of WordPress for a video hosting platform. That's why I don't think it's a good idea. But when you think of, let's say, a TripAdvisor or so well, it is a listing of journeys, it is a list of events. When you think of any other listing space, WordPress is a great fit, right? So it's more about hey, if I build on top of WordPress, how much time I'm going to save from just using custom post types and taxonomies and user roles and permissions and baked in admin panel and when creating a new type, being able to do some stuff. How many external integrations I'm going to need that I'm going to be easily connecting with a plugin and so forth. So I guess this is kind of the key thing. But one of the most important answers here is that times change and things change and the more we, I'm not going to say age, the wiser we get.
That's a nice workaround. Of course we understand that there are ups and downs and life is kind of moving in mysterious ways. So one example for that is because you said in some case it doesn't make sense cramping everything into one system you can decouple. And I'm working with a business right now that's trying to get everything modular microservices and different tools. And the Amazon cost is staggering. It's pretty high and we've been going back and forth. It's really hard to rebuild anything that's in production. So it's kind of a painful and just the other day, I saw Amazon Prime, I believe, publishing a study that they went from a decoupled modular system to a monolith kind of a single core fat application and they saved 90% of their AWS costs amazon saved 90% of their AWS costs by moving it to a single app. Right. And I was like, well, that's one example of adhering to best engineering practices in the real world. Probably makes sense. But understanding that the real world is probably hosted on a cloud like AWS or Google Cloud means that this may actually cost ten times more expensive just because of how computing power and instances up and running and vertical scaling works. Right?
Yeah.
That level of curiosity for me, just trying to understand the space and what's moving how is begging different questions of like, should we do that or not. And one example is we used to think in building horizontal systems, right? You need four web servers, two database servers, load, balancer, blah, blah, blah. Now you can go to a mage host and say, okay, I'm not going to pay $1,000, I'm going to pay $2,000, and I'm going to solve all that problems with one instance in the cloud. And it's just a different mentality nowadays. Yeah.
[00:25:50] Speaker B: That'S a great example of you always need to think about it smart. It's not a given.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to want to cluster everything in WordPress but the mindset where it becomes a forced thing. I have to do this in WordPress because WordPress, that's never a good one, but I'm still mulling over the 90% reducing that is huge.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: So, out of curiosity, you do a lot with Amazon, specifically AWS, or what are the services you tend to use a lot inside of the Amazon ecosphere?
[00:26:32] Speaker A: Well, again, it's broad. We use different things.
We host some things on cloudways ourselves, and they got acquired by DigitalOcean. We have like maybe 30 droplets from DigitalOcean for different microtools that we have. We do a lot of stuff on the agency side with BigQuery because we spend some time on data engineering and data analytics and some data science. So BigQuery does really well with that. It can be hooked to Google Data studio, which is now looker, studio. And we also do a lot of that. AWS is kind of traditional in setting up EC, two instances with RDS for some applications. Also Pagely is a managed Amazon host. So that's why we kind of dive between different systems that's kind of on the infrastructure end of things. And the other part is, again, when we do some stuff for Amazon, in particular as to integrations for Amazon and so forth, you naturally tend to lean to their cloud ecosystem.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Are you using cloudflare in some of their innovative new ways, like R two, and they have their forgot the name, but they have a solution for their database as well.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: We have different cloudflare plans, including enterprise accounts, with them for certain things. In most cases, it's cloudflare workers. We use them heavily for reverse proxies and all that.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: Maybe explain a little bit what a cloudflare worker is because I think the vast majority of people listening have no clue what that is.
[00:28:17] Speaker A: Well, it is a script that you can kind of run on the fly as an intermediate layer that's doing some things on your behalf before the user request. Well, after the user request, before actually rendering the page, before it could be the server. Exactly. It could be pretty instrumental to changing certain behaviors of your website, including introducing context, understanding where you're coming from, introducing localization or rendering different ads or different services, or even rendering completely different pages based on that.
Additionally, it allows for loading different systems, including different sites on a subdirectory, which is pretty hard to do on a hosting level in kind of most cases.
A lot of the web application firewall is pretty powerful and resilient. The CDN is pretty robust and broad, so it handles quite a lot of load. There's image optimization tools like broadly that you can embed. I mean, it's a pretty diverse ecosystem. I don't claim I'm an expert in all of that, but it solves a lot of problems for us for like, hey, let's detach these scripts on the fly and improve performance, or let's contextualize and understand what's that customer, where they're coming from, where should we point them real time?
[00:29:33] Speaker B: So your stacks are, in that regard as multifaceted and layered as they can be from WordPress to the different types of tools that are working alongside WordPress, but also on the stack that you are either on EC two or combined with cloud for and everything. So the reason I'm asking is how do you maintain you said you have about 45 folks working with you. How do you maintain the level of knowledge within such a large and diverse systems, of systems that you're using?
[00:30:13] Speaker A: I don't pretend to know everything. I have general knowledge of a lot of things I read. I work with the people working on projects. I try to fill in some gaps by reviewing what people have done and how. I also touch base with other people in the ecosystem, like other agencies or other businesses, figuring out what they do and how they do in order to figure out which tools make sense or services and which don't. So it's kind of an aggregated knowledge of, hey, I've done that myself for over a decade, and then I've been building teams doing that for another decade and more.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: So how do you make sure the team understands what you understand?
If two engineers are working on a project and they set up this particular combination of all the tools, how do you make sure that two other engineers that are working on a different project that end up using half of those tools are using the same type of best practices and stuff.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Well, in reality I probably fail half of the time, but it's just impossible to scale in reality. Right.
It's kind of a combination of aggregated knowledge, right. It's public information of what other people are working on. You can review a stack like there are other people. Like we have a CTO in house, we have two technical leads. So people in charge of transferring that knowledge horizontally and making sure that people are aware of what we can use and kind of what's the best tool forward for specific projects. I'm also involved especially kind of building a long term roadmap or like a three month plan of what are we going to do? Or a migration. We just do broader meetings with more people like, hey, what's the best service we can use? Or like, hey, does it make sense migrating to that? So in most cases we try to both document and expose that knowledge publicly and have other people who coordinate that work among people. In lots of cases I'm personally involved myself in just high level strategy meetings. But again, it's not like communication doesn't get lost in the way, right. We probably use five different quiz plugins or I'm going to say slider plugins, but we don't do sliders. But you get the point. There's more optimization. That would happen for sure. But we are focusing on the high impact initiatives.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Yeah. You don't do sliders. I wonder why?
[00:32:38] Speaker A: Because of the great user experience.
[00:32:40] Speaker B: Yeah, because of the high interaction and engagement. You see measurably?
Yeah.
If you're not aware and you're listening to this and you go like, what's wrong with sliders?
There's a Nielsen study years ago which essentially says that anybody thinking folks interact sliders on your website is what, 1% of the total audience?
[00:33:09] Speaker A: Something like that. Something like that.
[00:33:11] Speaker B: It's ridiculously low.
Okay, I have a different question.
You work with a very broad sense of understanding tech.
If we're bringing that back to WordPress, what are the things you're most excited about that is inside of WordPress now?
What excites you to still work with WordPress after all these years?
[00:33:44] Speaker A: Honestly, nothing new whatsoever.
What excited me five years ago is still here. And that's definitely a problem. Well, just resilience of the system, the ability to scale specific markets and segments like publishing how hard it is to take over that market share by anyone just because of the broad plugin adoption and demo adoption, that kind of stuff. But again, the problem is that the problems I was having five years ago are still here.
It is pretty endless list.
It's not like I'm hiding anything from anyone or something.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: No.
Give me three examples of stuff that you're referring to here.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: I can do my top 30.
The quoter admin puano is just horrible. The dashboard from 2006, it should be changed ASAP. Like it's just unfriendly. People hate it. It's one of the top three reasons why people. Avoid WordPress for a new website or a build. It's just like no, that's too complicated. So that should go. Certain tools just as links disappeared as a core component many years ago. I believe that most menus should disappear like tools.
Common menu should disappear.
I mean, like the WordPress admin dashboard, the left admin bar. Right.
Who needs tools?
Who goes to tools. Unless you want to export or import some content. No, you probably do it once. Exactly. And you can just put it as a link under Settings as everything else. Comments? I don't think we use comments actively and that's been the case for Mean. Even if you do, it's probably a plugin territory and lots of other cases. Right.
Editorial experience, gutenberg is accessibility problems. That's a major one.
Mapping what you see in the backend to what you see in the front end is just nope, it's completely different. All the patterns and kits and everything else going on, they just don't work as advertised. You can import something as a kit and it looks nothing alike and that's a major problem. Unlike what you see in any other hosted system whatsoever. Like you just set up a site, a page, it just works frontal.
These are some of the kind of key components the adoption of new users. Back in the day, bloggers were the people who were blogging hacking on WordPress. And then bloggers become people in companies and they introduce WordPress either on the tech side or become marketing majors and directors and they bring WordPress. Now who's bringing WordPress to the workplace?
I don't think that anyone is.
And I think state of the word or so that I listened to Mean, that's one of the common questions like what do we do for kids who are supposed to be the next WordPress adopters? He was like, well, we are building.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: I'm not really answering the question.
[00:36:53] Speaker A: Yeah, first off, I've never really seen a real person in real life using Tumblr.
I know there are ten, I know.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: About a handful, there are some, but.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: Yeah, please, I need an introduction to someone using Tumblr. But literally, I don't know a single person using I'm not kidding. I mean, I may be living in a bubble, I just don't and that's a problem.
I see kids, kids are using TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram I get that or whatever. Right. I've never seen anyone using Tumblr. That's just the fact.
And that's odly concerning. If the future of WordPress and adoption of kids is Tumbor needs to step up their game for Mean. Lots of yeah, I was going to.
[00:37:42] Speaker B: Say Matt has indicated that he wanted to move Tumblr to be fully WordPress based.
I don't know where that is in terms of intent and timeline and stuff, but is that something that would solve it?
Is that something that is changing the future?
[00:38:07] Speaker A: I actually thought that it's already mostly on WordPress, but it's not. So I guess you're behind on maybe.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: I am behind, I don't no, no.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: I thought it already migrated, but I'm just looking at there no, actually Tumblr.com says it's running on WordPress. Yeah, maybe it isn't. It's probably on WordPress already. Yeah, I think it's already I have.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Missed some of the problem.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Yeah, but to your point of how is that changing, you need to ask some of the people who have used Tumblr because I just don't know them.
[00:38:41] Speaker B: I need to get somebody from Tumblr onto the podcast is what you're and.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Yeah, that's actually going to be helpful because mean, I understand if people get excited about WordPress, but we've also seen, hey, Twitter sucks, let's go to Mastodon. How many people are using Mastodon now? Right, yeah, you pick up a management.
[00:39:03] Speaker B: Will always prompt those types of movements.
[00:39:09] Speaker A: The founder of Wikipedia, I believe, created WT Social, as in like a free Wikipedia or something like that, or another social network. Several years ago I signed up, it was even a paid system and it died. Right, so lots of attempts but not a lot of successful ones.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: No.
You're touching on a point that has been raised in this podcast a few more times.
How do we get new users inside of WordPress, and not just users, but developers and such?
Are you seeing that becoming a difficult thing to do, finding folks that know how to code inside of WordPress and or are not running away from it at the same time?
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Well, personally, I've been having troubles finding PHP developers for probably eight years now. That's one thing. Now 1 may argue that WordPress is a lot more JavaScript. I would say that it's still minor, 30% JavaScript perhaps now or so, but it's just not primarily JavaScript we need to be realistic about.
So that has been a growing problem. WordPress and Laravel are the two systems and maybe Symphony and Zen, but I'm not really sure are the system that are keeping PHP alive for the most part, but it's just not a trendy language. So first off, we have an advertising issue with PHP because the way it works is you bring developers to the workspace by incentivizing schools and universities to teach programming language. That incentivization normally happens by Oracle and Microsoft going to universities and saying we have a gazillion jobs opening and partnerships and stuff.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: They're not talking about PHP.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: Yes. Because again, Oracle owns Java and Microsoft owns C Sharp. And that's what you normally see in high schools and universities because they're highly progressive jobs. Or the trendy things like Python, due to the fact that AI has a pretty decent adoption on Python systems. Python is fine, but there's no community or anything incentivizing universities and schools to teach more PHP. Right, and that's a problem for the technical adoption, that's one thing. WordPress and Laravel are not doing a lot for teaching PHP whatsoever. I mean, Laravel is, but it's not large enough for community. So that's one problem. On the technical end, then you have the user end. Now, I firmly believe that most people and our audience, like our persona, is actually 35 to 45, 50 years old marketing major directors who start a new job over the past three to six months. So they're new on a job in a small team of themselves and maybe one other person, high expectations. To achieve both short term and long term, they need an entire team assembled. They can't hire six people unrealistic, but they have a budget for 8100 hours, ten or on our end to build everything for them and keep them growing and going. Right, so our audience, being the new adopters of WordPress, are normally 35 to 45 means that people 25 and younger, normally I mean, they're not necessarily management yet, but they're not normally exposed to WordPress in the same way. They're not former bloggers, or if they are, they go to, again, Webflow or Wix or Squarespace or Weebly or any other tool that also does blogging. Or they're just on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, and they think that blogging is Instagram captions, which is actually a thing. Lots of people do that and scary, but they do.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: Don't get me started on that one.
That's never made any sense in my.
[00:42:58] Speaker A: Not.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: You can't find it, there's no formatting, nothing but yeah, that's the solid point.
[00:43:06] Speaker A: And the more I've extracted myself out of the WordPress bubble, I see that people are like, why are you even blogging? Why does that make sense? Like, well, my tweet will disappear next week, but my post copying over my long tweet is going to be here for the next six years. See the difference? Like, the business that I get is not from the tweet, it's from the tweet making itself immortal, combining with 200 other tweets. That's the difference we are talking about here. But people don't get it.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: So would you agree that we can sort of say that the rise of other social media platforms such as Twitter, and then the features that Twitter starts, especially now in 2023, the new features that we're seeing, like longer text and all that, would you agree that that's a thing that you could say is starting to threat WordPress?
[00:44:05] Speaker A: Take a look at the WordPress market share. It's been flat for the past, I think, two years now. It used to be growing two to 3% a year and then it reached about yeah, and it reached 44 point something percent. Now it's 43.1 or so. Right. So it's been flat for the past two years, even slightly declining now. My explanation again is there are no people to bring WordPress to the workplace. And also large numbers means that WordPress has broad adoption for because Net and Java probably have 1% market share, but they own enterprises, so the revenue generated from them is 100 times what WordPress generates. So we also need to make a difference. But looking into a dipping market share means that new users and starter websites are not built on WordPress, they're actually built on webflow or other tools, if.
[00:45:04] Speaker B: Websites are built at all, whatever is yeah, yeah.
[00:45:08] Speaker A: Well the Super Bowl, they had another ad of squarespace, if I'm not so.
[00:45:16] Speaker B: Possibly I missed had one.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: They had one several years ago with Keanu Reeves. I remember that one. Now I forgot the actor's name, but it was also like the Mr. Smith type of situation. So they're making that popular for people watching Super Bowl. And Super Bowl is something that people watch with their kids because it's a big enough of an event and they have lots of things happening there.
[00:45:39] Speaker B: So it's not the social media changes.
What is the thing that is holding us back then? Why are we seeing this happening? Because it can't be just the exposure in large media campaigns or is it, is that the problem? We're seeing it's many problems.
[00:45:56] Speaker A: Once again, social media definitely facilitates that. People are communicating quickly, more rapidly and got any information there?
I think like Google just announced and that's due to OpenAI, but Google's traffic dipped as well. It may be 1%, but it's a major thing. So kids are not Googling as much. We also need to be aware of that. They're searching on TikTok, which is a fact. TikTok is a search engine know it's crazy. Yeah. And there's also advertising because we don't see WordPress advertising whatsoever. There's the technical adoption of people building solutions for WordPress. There's the reluctance to the WordPress ecosystem to promote paid teams and plugins. Now, again, a premium shopify theme is about two hundred and fifty dollars to three hundred dollars. Right. It's not a fortune, but it's still five times more expensive than most team forest teams. Right. So it makes sense when it's hosting their marketplace, it makes sense to promote that. And when you take a
[email protected], it's fine to buy premium teams there, but it's not on Wordpress.org. So I understand it's free and community and stuff. I'm not saying that WordPress should be all premium, no, don't get me wrong. But there is no chance to develop a thriving ecosystem of indies and small shops if you prevent them from monetizing.
[00:47:19] Speaker B: So you're essentially saying it's a multifaceted beast of problems which altogether culminate in the fact of we're not seeing growth because we're not growing because we're not helping from onboarding to understanding to innovating to the whole thing.
How much of a problem is that?
Are you experiencing it in a negative form other than observing the fact personally?
[00:47:57] Speaker A: Again, we work on high profile systems, meaning that normally sites that have been up and running for six, seven, eight years, right. So even if that happens, we are still going to be five years behind or more. Similarly to banks still use Cobo and Fortran, right? Yeah. They died 40 years ago. But I mean, there are still systems written, so personally I'm not necessarily experiencing that. Besides hiring. Right? Hiring is just a problem.
But yeah, I believe it's the autodadge of death by 1000 cuts.
You can't kill one system that owns 44% of the universe with one thing. Like you can't slap it with a lawsuit. It's open source, you can't tax it so that it sucks. So it is a debt by 1000 cuts. It needs to be approached by lots of competitors, tackling different segments, each one grabbing a little bit, introducing something that's a little better, and all of them kind of uniting themselves around that for the most part.
That's what I think is happening. And again, when I take a look, webflow is not I kind of get webflow, but Wix and squarespace and Weebly, they don't look bad. They are simplified. Lots of themes. Themes actually look like what's advertised. Have you seen the WordPress theme space? It sucks. It's boring. You don't get templates there. They're not accepted. The review process hasn't changed in twelve years.
Again, if I had the magic wand of just being the Joseph of WordPress, I would change a lot of things. And they're not going to harm any open source users. It's just going to be here's the veted space of premium themes and pokings like totally fine, use all the freebies you've got. But there is a premium. Oh, by the way, there's an enterprise tier because guess what? Shopify has a Shopify Plus or Pro Plus that starts at $2,000 a month. Right. So they say there's the $9 a month or $90 or whatever, but there's a 2000 plus. So we have a completely different marketplace for you guys. They're vetted, they go through rigorous review process, they get badges for that, they have compliance issues and blah, blah, blah.
[00:50:06] Speaker B: There's money for it as well.
If you're charging that type of money, you can hire people to actually do the vetting and stuff.
It doesn't need to fully resolve on the availability of either people fully volunteering or Automatic, in most cases, footing the bill for the employment in those areas.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Is it though? How much of the team review process is automatic? I'm not sure how much review itself.
[00:50:38] Speaker B: But the whole maintenance of.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: It'S not quite open source. I mean, it's allegedly open source. It's just exposed some pieces of the product that are created by Automatic.
[00:50:54] Speaker B: I'm not specifically referring to the software itself, but the domain, the site and everything that goes with it. As far as I know, that is for the most part serviced by either folks from Audrey Capital, which is mass investing company, as well as Automatic, and for the rest, a handful of volunteers. And I may be off here in the exact metrics, but your point of these are the things that we need to change if we're going to make this a successful thing.
I think they're very valid points I think we are in a time where the whole including commercial entities and methods and ways onto is definitely not hurting the open source principle that's behind it. I think you make a very good point there, very valid.
[00:52:07] Speaker A: I think if you try to segment the key market players in the web space and it's hard because they're not exactly by revenue or post size or anything like that, but I would say, roughly speaking, right, you have ecommerce, you have publishing as actual publishers, then you have small starter websites, portfolio websites and blogs. Then you have the enterprise systems like what Java and Net systems normally do. Then you have hosted systems, right? So if you take a look at that broader scope and there are other aspects and segments here like the government space, which is Drupal for example, works well with publishing space. WordPress still dominates. All right, cool. E commerce space, dubious. WooCommerce has pros and cons, works fine, not quite. There's also Shopify and BigCommerce and all the others. So it still has some ownership, but not exactly because Shopify has four and a half million stores. So just context, that's kind of important and they're actually generating revenue. So shopping space, all right, small blogs and portfolios on five page websites, webflow, wix, squarespace and whatever it is, weebly and other systems, they are crushing it there. There are tools like card with two or 3 hours, I'm not sure, popping up and like, yes, you have a site like $9 a month, hosted web, 3D templates, blah, blah, blah, right? Lots of these systems eating that small space. Then you have the high enterprise space where you see, well, we have ESOP compliance and 17 other types of compliances that you're not necessarily passing or open source seems hacky because you read security reports all the freaking time. And also the PHP stack doesn't make sense because you're either Microsoft back Corporation with or Java kind of ran Oracle organization with Oracle. So enterprise space, not very well served. Then the hosted space, like again, the Shopify and webflows, it's hosted WordPress, besides WordPress.com, which I don't find very appealing, or that new e commerce systems that are evolving now, like Woo experts. So what I'm saying is when you take a look at the main markets, you see a lot of clear competition, maybe even doing better and growing faster. And that should be ringing some bells in the right places from where I stand at least. Yeah.
[00:54:29] Speaker B: I probably need to digest it a little bit more and do my own research in the broad sense of the topics that you touch. But from my gut feeling, I'm saying you're right.
You're making a strong case of why this year is the year to Pivot to change.
Pivot is a big word, but change into a direction where growth is the first thought instead of an afterthought.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: I even think that there are some ecosystems that weren't even available previously and now they are. So on the one hand we have communities. Yes. We have Budy Press and maybe Buddy Bolts, many, some of these sites. But you also have Circle communities and Kitchen Dot Co and others pretty well and pretty resilient and stable and so forth.
[00:55:24] Speaker B: Notifications is a great example of a community.
[00:55:27] Speaker A: It is. Yeah.
So this is one example of underserved communities that we never really got adoption to and we can. Another example is actual web apps with actual web experience and looking into bubble. Bubble.
Now they had some pricing issues. They just ten X prices and stuff so that they still have that pricing issue. Yeah.
But they're probably going to normalize and they have 18 months transition period.
So bubble, you can actually build extremely beautiful charts and wizards and Next, next outstanding look and feel with no code, like something that I cannot achieve in WordPress without lots of custom work at the office, I cannot achieve that. I agree. We've actually had that comment for webflow like yeah. How do you do with transitions and animations and the parallaxes of one component moving as you keep scrolling? It's a default in webflow. It's like you just drag it there.
We don't so bubble is one thing and even if it's not bubble, there's software and there's Framer or like a bunch of these other tools that are no code. And again cost like $15 a month with hosting. And you can build yourself and connect to Airtable which is free and have a database which is free online.
[00:56:46] Speaker B: It's crazy. It's crazy what you can do with no code or low code, whatever.
[00:56:51] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the thing of yeah, we are using WordPress. I still prefer that the businesses that we are serving kind of stuff is WordPress, but who's sleeping on what's actually happening over the past 5678, right? Yeah.
[00:57:06] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:57:08] Speaker A: And again, just as a kind of side note, that's not to say WordPress dying next year. There's no WordPress. That's not the case. WordPress, yeah, the second largest CMS or so has like 2% market share and WordPress has 43. There's a pretty broad gap out there, right.
We can be dying for 30 years.
[00:57:28] Speaker B: And they still wouldn't have caught up.
[00:57:30] Speaker A: Exactly. But it's almost like the global warming, right? It's happening, but it's happening in like 200 years. So there's a lot we can do. There's time for us to do the right thing, but we also need to work a lot more as a community to step up and just work together towards solving most of these problems. And it's kind of a sense of apathy or like soul player attitude right now going on.
[00:57:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So I was going to ask you an ending question, but you asked it yourself and answered it yourself already.
What is the positive note? Yeah, what is the positive note here?
So as a final question, what are the things to focus on if you are inside the WordPress bubble and you want to explore the possibilities the world presents.
Just two what are your two biggest tips you can give people?
[00:58:31] Speaker A: You can't limit me to two things. Okay, the two things are first off, WordPress is a great framework. I just think it's not advertised as such. And Matt tried to do that many years ago. Like WordPress transition from a logging platform to a CMS to an application framework. Right. So there's a reason why headless web applications often built on top of WordPress. Because if you're a publisher, great platform.
Again, lots of users for WordPress as a content entry backend system, just not necessarily fast enough or flexible enough for the front end. So considering that WordPress may take different shapes and forms over the next years is a great tip, especially if you learn JavaScript deeply or whatever and just accept that you may end up connecting lots of different tools and systems as a headless app, as a react app, on top of WordPress and all that. That's kind of the one thing. And the second thing is there are still some strives to make WordPress better, like Gutenberg. If Gutenberg works, it's perfect, it just doesn't and it's been five years. Or the full site editing, theoretically. Again, if it works technically, you drag something and you edit it and it's actually there and it saves and it doesn't overwrite itself. Great. So some of these things may really wipe out some of that self code market. So those are the two things. And again, keep in mind that many of these competitive businesses are funded startups, so they work with money thrown out of thin air from the sky. And now money is kind of over for a while. That's why tools like Bubble introduced ten X pricing changes and so forth. So we may see Glide as well.
[01:00:26] Speaker B: Glide is also doing that thing.
[01:00:29] Speaker A: So those are two good tips.
[01:00:30] Speaker B: Those are two good tips.
I think you've shared a lot of insight from a very different perspective than most people inside the WordPress ecosphere, and I want to thank you for that. I appreciated you jumping on taking the time of booking. What was it, the equivalent of three meetings in your calendar today?
[01:00:55] Speaker A: Something like that. Three meetings in the 30 minutes gap?
[01:01:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So, most excellent. Thank you, Mario. It's been a pleasure and we'll see you on the next one.
[01:01:08] Speaker A: Thanks again for having me. And let's meet next time with 50% market share.
[01:01:12] Speaker B: Okay, let's go for that close.
