Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to within WordPress.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Thanks. Rumkis featuring.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Hi Noel. How are you, Rumkis?
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Yeah, very, very good. Thanks for having me. We were hanging out in Camp Switzerland. It was great to have you there.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: We were, yeah.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: As a regretted guest through your journey of work. Camp Switzerlands.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: Yeah, there's been a few. Isn't he?
I think this was the third one. Fourth one. No, wait, we had the episode where we went from we were calling this Work of Switzerland, and then we were not allowed to call it Work in Switzerland. And then we're back to work.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: It's probably four or five, I guess.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: And you behaved very well this time. I'm proud of you.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Mama raised me right.
So tell us a little bit about you. Obviously, you and I go back very long time, but there's a lot of people listening to this podcast who have possibly no idea who you are. So how about you introduce yourself?
[00:01:11] Speaker B: I'll try my best. I realized the other day I'm terrible at introductions.
The thing I always say is I build cool shit with cool people. And that's the thing I've just stuck to no matter what. So anything I'm doing now, and we'll probably get into that, just aligns with that vision and just not willing to compromise on that. I enjoy working my fair share and putting in the time and having that kind of balance between life and work and all that good stuff. But from a work perspective, yeah, that's the one motto that kind of drives it forward, I guess.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Well, not sort of. That already tells a lot about your mindset and stuff. But in terms of what's the company, what kind of cool stuff do you build? Can you share a little bit about that?
[00:02:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll give you the rundown. The bullet points going way back I'd say, like, way back in the day, pre WordPress, I was in private banking.
That was good fun between Bahamas and Switzerland. But at some point I just didn't learn as much anymore. And I started creating these websites on the side, and I was doing photography and all that. And at some point I got into WordPress themes by just creating a single theme. And I remember it was my first online sale or something like that. Like half past midnight, I had finally shipped this theme and these $99 coming through PayPal. I'm just like, Holy shit, this is changing everything.
It doesn't matter what happens next. It's just you feel that rush, that energy, and you're like, okay, this is freedom, right? And then I go on that path of being my own boss.
That comes with the risks, the highs and the lows and everything, but the wave is way crazier than, I guess, a regular job or whatever. But on that path, I met Tom and Joe, and we have human made together over ten years, which at its core is a WordPress agency, like a global WordPress agency for enterprise. That's probably the scope. And then within that we've built plenty of products and done a bunch of things ranging from Happy Tables to WP remote to working on the WordPress Rest API.
Yeah, it's just been this phenomenal journey that we've been able to share with even more people as we've grown the company and yeah, just really enjoyed that. So there's that. And then on the flip side, I'm now down in Ukraine with another budy of mine, Fred, which I met in a nightclub at 02:00 A.m., and by 04:00 A.m., he said, hey, you want to crash on my place for a couple of months? I'm like, Hell yeah, I just known this guy for 2 hours. And then this amazing friendship begins.
Now I'm doing the animal rescue thing down here and trying to apply everything I've learned from building a business over the last ten years to building a charity that then scales and grows and is effective in itself too.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an impressive journey.
I think you and I met first in 2012 in what was WP on tour in Situ, Spain. I think that was the first time we actually met.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Right. Was it not WorkAmp Portsmouth?
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Oh yeah, that was right before because.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: The accommodation for WordCamp Portsmouth was in the indie UK, not the US. For people watching was in the dormitories because that was the accommodation back then. That's how early WordPress was for us. And yeah, we were just hanging out and I think you had just come in around like 11:00 midnight or something like that, and you had come in quite late. I did, I drove, yeah. And then I think Siobhan was still working for WPMU Dev or something.
And then after that we went to the Wolf House.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: The wolf house.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
That's an entire episode by itself. The founding of Workhamp Europe. It's where it started. Yeah.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: But that's been quite a while. So that's twelve years, I guess. 1213 14, I lost count. But you've been doing some amazing stuff over the years.
So you started with Happy Tables and you mentioned it briefly in the introduction.
What is the status of that?
[00:06:01] Speaker B: Is that still part wrapped it up? No, we still have the IP, we still hold on to that, all that good stuff. But ultimately I'd say I made two mistakes building that. The first is getting into an industry I'm not necessarily fully intimate with, which is hospitality.
So trying to really dig in there. And I remember at Work Camp San Francisco, 2012, I think it was, when Stripe invited me out because I had the first Stripe WordPress plugin, which again back then was for Dog charities, hilariously enough, but they flew me out and then that way I was able to speak at the Word Camp.
Someone in the audience at my Happy Tables presentation asked me how do we, as WordPress builders use your software, use Happy Tables and I was like, you don't. I've cut you guys out because I want to sell directly to restaurants. And that's that that jump. So both in sales and then product market fit in terms of how that merges, I think what we built over the years is phenomenal. We built Gutenberg before Gutenberg was out.
Me, I failed to build an effective sales machine to actually drive that beyond, you know, some kind of significant mass or whatever. So that, again, it exits that it has an exit velocity to just leave revenue equals cost kind of territory.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember seeing the product and you demoed it over the years, new versions of it and all that. It looked extremely impressive. But I can imagine this being a highly competitive market, mostly by partners who are already extremely vested in that particular industry. The hospitality, is that essentially what you're saying? There was too little of a connection to really push through.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: I feel like I didn't have the network. I didn't really get stuck in. If you leave the sales piece out to really understand their pain points, I should have done more user interviews and things like like we were doing this stuff before Squarespace or Wix or anybody like that had any kind of niche vertical. So they were calling us up saying like, hey, interested in working together at some point? Or whatever.
But yeah, I mean, it's competing kind of priorities in many ways because you're running an agency, you're doing this. You have WP Remote, which has like 140,000 sites.
You're going to all these Word camps, recruiting people too and everything.
I think for the startup stuff, it can't be like a side product or product within the business. You go out there, you raise money for it, and then you give it your absolute max with that funding to build product and sales team.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: Yeah, that's quite a different trajectory than from what you did. And I see that.
I think there is a road in between. But given the scale of what you were doing, given the complexity of what you were doing, you mentioned something which I'd like to learn more about. You said we had a version of Gutenberg before there was Gutenberg. So in my mind and remembering this I don't know how long ago it was since I saw that last demo, but you had like a page builder of kinds for happy tables, which essentially is a segue into one of the topics you are keen to discuss at presentations you give at work camps, which is the future of WordPress. So essentially you saw the future of WordPress and you already building it, but in a very specific niche. How do you find that future? How do you find what is next?
What is the thing to focus on?
[00:10:14] Speaker B: I don't know. Maybe I've just gotten lucky.
It's not to say that I think a lot of people have ideas. You know, it's easy to get your ideas on paper and then go do a talk and you know, maybe there's a lot of other people in the space that would have similar ideas.
I think sometimes it's the presentation of those ideas and then taking those ideas to another level so that they're consumable by other people.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: The execution on the idea that makes an idea a valid one.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: I don't know, depends. What do you mean by if an idea leaves the idea stage and becomes a product or it becomes validated, the validation changes everything and you're essentially in a very good spot.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: If I translate that into what that essentially means is that you have a good idea, you need to start sharing it and you need to start adding people to the table in order for something to evolve. In the vision that you had staying with the Gutenberg thing, that has a high impact on themes. It has a high impact on where themes are going. And for the longest time, themes have been a very static version of a product inside of WordPress.
What you did with Happy Tables and I'm sure in other areas as well at Human Made, you've done some very innovative stuff. When you look at the world now we live in with WordPress, obviously, what is the thing that you see happening even further than this, like where we are now versus what you think is worth spending time on and getting people around that same table to grow it even further? Are we there yet? Is it done now?
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a great question.
I'd say that with anything because of how everything is changing so quickly now due to not going to use the buzword yet, but due to that and then just the changing of economic cycles and just the kind of chaos we're in right now. I think it requires a bit of humility to not be all in conviction on one thing, but to be able to adapt to how to hype and the flow is how the currents are quite strong at the moment and to be able to just be adaptive or dynamic to those currents.
But bringing it back to WordPress, WordPress, to our detriment when I sell to enterprise clients, is still viewed as a blogging software and the blog is essentially the atomic unit, which is crazy.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: I did the calculation, it stopped being a blog in my mind with Webest 3.0 where we got custom post types, custom taxonomies, and it was no longer a blog before that. But that was the big change. That was 20, 10, 13 years on. That's interesting.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: We go on and I agree with you. The blog back then was the unit of WordPress, right? The more blogs you created, blog posts, blog articles, whatever you want to call them, the more outcome output you had on your site, assuming all things are equal. And as you correctly point out, me personally I feel WordPress had a few kind of force multipliers, if you will. The one is the plugin ecosystem and just the open source kind of marketplace around that and everything's free and just moving very quickly. It's adapting very quickly. So for that 2010 to 2015 phase, it just fueled growth. Insanely. The second was custom post types, which means when was that? Like 2.9 or so? Like around? Yeah, 2.9.1, something like that. And that to me was ground shaking. That's why I got into WordPress.
I started looking at this and I was like, wow, this is structured content. In a way. We weren't using that title yet, but structured content. Schema.org having this idea of like, you can mold content to be anything or data to be content or whatever you want to call it, was incredibly powerful for people who just wanted to use WordPress in a backend. And then the third thing, I won't spend too much time on that because you're about to ask a question is Rest API?
[00:14:50] Speaker A: No, no, I'm still processing.
Yeah, the Rest API, it's a huge change as well, which is done by the original version was done by Ryan McHugh, one of your colleagues at Human Made.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And Rachel Baker and Joe Hoyle.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Yeah, also the three of them.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Not sure what the exact constellation was, but they were the ones putting in the sweat equity in that regard.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: So if those are the big jumping points, gutenberg is probably in my head at least the next one.
So what is beyond this? So back to my original question. What do you see for the future of WordPress in terms of what's happening with themes, what's happening with the presentation of the data in the broader sense of the Word?
[00:15:49] Speaker B: I think it's so hard because we inside of WordPress tend to look at things from a WordPress perspective. So we look at it like a bottoms up approach to this is what we have. So what are we building next? And when I go play around with things like framer as like a website builder or wix or squarespace and the sad truth is I've been recommending those solutions to my friends for years when they've said, hey, I want to build a website for XYZ for a small thing, because you take something like any of these smaller kind of consumer, small business SMB platforms, they seem like they're flipping the narrative from being a website builder. That's how they get you. But then they want you to run the whole reservation management know, if it's like Hairdressers, if it's a restaurant, whatever, they want you to run payments over that, it becomes like an SMB operating system.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:48] Speaker B: And that's a whole different solution. And they're able to carve out that part of the market whilst we're still WordPress. One size fits all for everything, which has its place. But it's not necessarily something that's I can't just give WordPress to a friend and say, off you go, have fun. It's not that easy. It still needs the glue. People who understand the setup.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I fully agree. It needs proper onboarding to start the base principle of onboarding you into software, which is weird because we've had some sort of installation wizard.
I don't know how long that's been there, but there is a way to install software and then take you through a certain flow.
We've known of that principle since I don't know how long have we been able to install XE on Windows, right? Many of those had some sort of flow thing happening to them.
I was reminded of how much we were missing by checking out extendify recently. I've seen it probably a year ago and I revisited just checking out what they had in terms of demo and information on their site. Have you seen those? Have you seen that?
[00:18:15] Speaker B: Wasn't it right? Now.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: Extendify, what it essentially does, it handles the onboarding part. So instead of having your default WordPress installation flow, the famous five minute one, it then sort of takes over and then as you onboard into WordPress, you are guided, you're helped along. So in their version of how to make this better, you can define plugins that are already installed or downloaded or a theme activated or maybe want to change the dashboard or everything we can possibly think of. That indeed is already being done by wix and squarespace and all and what have you. They're taking care of that, which is why I'm bringing this up. I think the future of WordPress, if it is to succeed for the smaller versions of websites, needs to be in this realm, sort of.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Sorry, go ahead, please.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: I was going to even say I'd even go as far as saying that it sort of needs to be part of core, not the whole extendify thing, but parts of what's in there we need to have.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: But yeah, go ahead.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: You were saying?
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I remember the name. It took me a moment because Luke carbus actually works there and I spent time with him at Work Camp Asia. Like, looking through all that, and it raises so many good questions about how to potentially automate so many. Things like the on ramp in terms of how quickly do users get into WordPress and then are able to find value and activate and all these kind of things. I think it brings up this really good point where there's a multitude of these things, but I think they all come back to we have enough code WordPress works.
The thing is, people aren't using it as much as they could be because of some of these on ramps or other issues. I think something that's parallel to this onboarding could be almost like it's not necessarily like third party plugins, but also like second party to a certain extent or in between, like 2.5, where there's just a higher level of standards or best practices to then create, like a directory of very clear integrations for MailChimp salesforce, HubSpot, all these different things where we don't say, yeah, there's some plugin and directory somewhere. Just go figure it out. But we have actual semi native integrations, and it raises all sorts of issues in terms of how do you set this up, who do you decide who the winner is and all these kind of good things. But maybe that's part of Core or whatever. No idea. But ultimately the outcome is that, especially with Martech nowadays, where even your restaurant down the road is using at least 20 technologies, these things have to be able to speak together and play nice. And that's not something that they want to configure. It's something that should just activate with strong defaults. And there's all this friction. Oh, there's a lot of at the SMB level, that's what I feel is a massive challenge. I'm happy I'm an enterprise, and I think WordPress is an amazing solution at the enterprise level. But for SMB, it's a challenging story to tell. Yeah.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: So the answer to my question about future of themes is essentially not about themes. It's about how do we get them inside of WordPress and be happy with whatever's happening after we install, in terms of what's available, in terms of what we see, in terms of how it connects and all of that.
Interesting. So I'm guessing you haven't mentioned it yet, but I know part of what you're offering as human made is altus.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: I'm guessing lots of what you just mentioned is processed into that.
Maybe explain a little bit what altus is for those who don't know what it is.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: To an extent. Altus is we started off as DXP because we wanted to really go after the decentralized part of the market, and that was quite a big chunk for us to bite off. We probably skipped ahead a few steps in terms of our ambition, my ambition, to go after that part of the market. And now we've broken that out. So that's alt's cloud, and that's really what we think is the best representation of enterprise hosting in the space today. And then two, really the thing between the most advanced competitor that exists and then doing it yourself, because we're still quite hands on and a lot of our competitors are trying to standardize our processes so that they're more hands off and that everything works in a kind of seamless, repeatable fashion and we still have quite a bespoke element to it. So we're in between that no man's land or whatever of do I do it myself or do I go with someone that's got like, a template? And then we have Altus Accelerate, where we've chucked in all the marketing DX point features.
Digital experience. Yeah.
So digital experience having its root in.
If you want to take web experience as what happens in your browser, digital experience is the omnichannel version of that through email, push messaging, digital billboards, whatever you want.
And that can be represented through or that can be powered through solutions such as WordPress. But Accelerate is really a point feature whereby it's very block centric, how we've approached it.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Block centric in terms of block editor.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Block centric, yes, in that we believe that the block is probably the most important unit around content in terms of its size.
As soon as you go into multiple blocks, you have a page, essentially, which is not necessarily something that you're not going to use the same page all over the place. And if you break down a block into too many small pieces so like atomic kind of individual, like a sentence, a separate image or whatever, that's more like a content repository. So the magic for WordPress is more inside the block. So we do analytics at the block level, native analytics. We have one click upgrades to a B testing, one click to personalization.
We now have degenerative AI stuff in there too.
But the biggest, I'd say philosophical change there is that when I say block centric approach to things, it means that you start with the block and we expose blocks as global blocks. So that you have a global block that sits at the top as the single source of truth, the content, and then that is inserted in pages below. But how WordPress is out of the box is you have a page and then you create blocks within that. And if you want to use a reusable block, you're essentially copy pasting a block, which doesn't really like that. That doesn't help create global or universal content across your pages, across your sites in such a way that larger SMEs enterprise teams may want to use content.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's a very interesting approach.
I think it also highlights a very specific change that we see happening in terms of there is this moment now where we're and I've seen more solutions kind of approaching what you're just describing.
We get to a point there's no single point of content anymore, right? So everything is essentially built for whomever is the actual visitor on the site at that particular moment in time. So marketing wise, you have all these different types of personalities, personas, and ideally you build your content to match any of the personas that you have defined. What you're saying is essentially we are going away from fixed content.
We essentially are using fluid content.
Is that a correct translation or am I oversimplifying it now?
[00:27:16] Speaker B: No, I think you're there I'd probably say that's even an abstraction of something that's happening even further when you zoom out more and you look at take digital content as a concept before we talked about WordPress having digital content as a unit of a blog or whatever back then and then maybe a couple of marketing pages. And that was an enterprise's digital content 1020 years ago. And nowadays you kind of have the entire enterprise, the wealth of knowledge they have their marketing material, their communications material, their guides, their manuals. Everything exists online and is accessible for consumers. So that creates a very large and disconnected set of content pieces. And that to me, when you bring them together or try to bring them together, represents this marketing buzword which is coming up a bit, which is composable content. So we have Composable architecture where that kind of started. We have then composable Martech stacks or whatever. And that's a whole best of breed approach to marketing stacks that is moving away from a single suite, like having Everything, Adobe Everything sitecore. And this is much more of an enterprise lens here, but we can look at any of our own tech stacks. Like even our personal tech stacks are just so many different tools, right? You even need facilitators in between like Zapier to just help connect you some of these things. But on the composable content side you may have marketing web content. On one side you may have a repository or like XML stuff. On the other you might have another SQL database that is randomly stuck somewhere else with your e commerce stuff. Who knows, right? Like there's a multitude of things and these are being brought together in many, you know, GraphQL may bring those together in a super grass and you see both Apollo and Gatsby going after those things.
But the point I'm making is that at least at the enterprise level, there's this thought that there's this very large wealth of content. And the thing that you're talking about in terms of personalization and where that's going is being able to look at this wealth of content.
And now let's just park that on the side. And on the other side we have a wealth of customer data. And that's where enterprise has been doing this for a number of years with CDPs, right, customer data platforms. And that started off with Segment, which is wildly popular, was acquired by Twilio. And the whole idea is that you have all these information points coming in from different places to enrich and augment a customer's profile. And then because you have everything in one place, you are able to then use machine learning to then determine various clusters that they belong to or whatever, and then activate that customer.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Maybe you're already going to explain it, but as you were explaining, I'm like so at what point do we integrate AI with this?
[00:30:27] Speaker B: Because that obviously Walmart and Retail has.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: Been doing it since the in what way AI is helping them?
[00:30:35] Speaker B: What way? Do you remember that case where this father had received pregnancy sales material sent to his daughter? It came through the mail or something like that. Yeah, this is just like two decades ago. And then he called up, I think it was Target or Walmart, I'm not sure. Was one of the two, he called him up and it was like, hey, what the hell are you guys doing? Blah, blah, blah. And they're saying, well, based on your daughter's purchase history, wasn't she didn't buy, she had not given birth.
Like this is wild. Predictive models just saying, hey, look, we need to be able to get this customer to be a mother for her child at Walmart or Target for the next 18 years because we want to capture that lifetime value.
This stuff has been happening at a retail level for a very long time. And sure, AI before this year or whatever was very much consulting. It wasn't productized. And now we're seeing this access that we all have all of a sudden to powerfully use these things. But then there's also these APIs. So that brings me to the to kind of bring this full circle in terms of what you're talking about is, I think content is not just content anymore. In the sense that content that's stored in your database is not necessarily replicated or shown or presented one to one on the front end. You may have a combination of content based on rules, based on personalization.
Even if you're personalizing content, is that content something that's permanent because a human has entered it in some field and said for the North American audience, we are going to show this text, or is it fully temporary and it just expires seconds after the API call is made to generate this piece of text? Because all of a sudden the viewer has looked at the message and said, wow, okay, I'm going to click on this link. And then that kind of brings this concept of content at Edge, if you will. That's the kind of best way to think about it. So that then gives you a spectrum, I think for content from your source truth you notice as fact to wildly transitory, expiring personalized content that is so cheap that it could be personalized to an audience of one.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say, at what point does it just become just so I don't even know if I know. The word for this becomes bleeding, that it's just is it actually still content?
I'm sorry for interrupting you earlier, but I'm just trying to process what essentially the impact of this is. Because as you were explaining, my head said so. Okay, AI will at some point, obviously will have a connection with this. And a few clients of mine have quite extensive integrations with ad networks that are built from their own company. So I have a little bit more insight on what those things do.
That's essentially the same thing, right? So presenting an ad, most of us think that it's sort of random and whatever, ad companies as a whole buy up huge data sets which include your IP address and all that, that sort of predict the next thing you're going to want to see, which is. Kind of what the Target Walmart example is about.
If then content itself starts moving into the same direction, which I guess is what you're saying, it is being hyper generated at the edge and therefore, as fleeting as it possibly can be, this is bringing it back to the management part of it, which is what I'm curious about. How does it actually you as a company having a website, are you guaranteeing what is being produced is actually valid or desirable? What is the control layer of that? Because if content is indeed moving into that direction, and I think you and I both agree that it to various degrees, depending on the type of company, whether they're enterprise or not, but we're slowly moving into that direction that becomes a very not even slightly gray, but very dark gray area.
Isn't that like a problem? We're inviting in two points because I.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Think you're on the money. The first is zooming back out and going taking it back to WordPress for a moment and like WordPress's roots and looking through everything you just said through the lens of user generated content.
We've gone through this journey from taking the blog post, which is user generated, which was that expressive form on the web back then, and we've exploded that into Instagram, Facebook, you even have this temporary fleeting thing when Snapchat came out, right, because those expired. And then Instagram replicated that so you can only view it once for a couple seconds or whatever. So we've already gone through this atomization of content in that regard.
I think as users, we just want more and more and more refinement and personalization. And some of that we've already achieved as users because we say, hey, I'm going to post this on Instagram, I'm also going to add it to my Facebook story stuff, or I'm only going to post it, my close friends, I'm only going to send it to these three people's.
People. And that exists, I think, at that level. But the second part, to answer your actual question in terms of taking us down this dark path, it's inevitable, right? Like, how are dinosaurs going to stop the Ice age, right? They're not going to eat ice or whatever.
[00:37:20] Speaker A: This is happening if you're dependent on body heat by different sources.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: Yeah, you talked about ads a bit, right, where there was a purchasing of second party data, third party data. Now we've moved into first party data. And this whole AI revolution stuff is actually like the superpower you need to be able to get the most out of first party data. Assuming you collect your customer data well and you do your content well, and we have enough governance or regulation in the market to make sure that these things are not abused, it should go down a decent place. And when I speak of atomization of all these pieces, it also implies that the entire loop of feedback in terms of what's the engagement rate? And is this doing something for customers is present for these organizations to be able to iterate towards models that not only convert but also preserve their brand reputation?
Yeah, I think Booking is a good example. Right. There was this post on Hacker News, like a couple of weeks back where Booking.com amazing A B testing machine years ago, they wrote about how to do 250 A B tests a day, and they've abed themselves into a bunch of dark patterns where this is the last room book. Now all this all these short term, isolated kind of conversion goals, and from a brand reputation perspective, it's not great.
So there is that line to be walked. And consumers aren't stupid either.
[00:39:04] Speaker A: No, I think consumers are most certainly waking up way more and more rapidly, I'd say in the last year or so than previously. I think the recognition.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: People.
[00:39:27] Speaker A: Understanding that there is such a thing as dark patterns, right.
We're being tricked into it. I think that has helped a lot in terms of people understanding how far they're being pulled down a particular road that is not necessarily of their choosing. I think we're waking up to that principle more and more. But, yeah, I think Booking is a good example of where you're AB testing yourself into a dark hole because that is essentially what has happened there. That the site unless you start ignoring every single thing happening outside of what you actually need to know. So where is it? What does it look like? What does it cost? That's the only thing you need to know.
If you just focus on those data points, then it's a doable thing to be on Booking. But let your eyes slide off 5. You're toast because you're being hooked into something that is not of your choosing, I guess.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: How does this translate back into where the world of WordPress should be focusing? Because it almost sounds like we're at the level where what you describe what you guys are doing, and I'm pretty sure there's other enterprise focused WordPress agency as well doing similar things. Are we close to splitting off of WordPress in terms of what needs to be done to meet future goals?
[00:40:59] Speaker B: I did this talk, I think the first time I presented it was in 2014 at WordCamp Tokyo, and it was the Word WordPress. But then everything in between the W and the S was redacted. Kind of like one of those CIA top secret documents or whatever, whereby my argument was that WordPress is just getting pushed down the stack and there's newer and cooler things coming out on top that kind of sit on top of it and everything. So my mind now is in terms of and I'm not sure if this is what you meant by splitting, but I think there's essentially two superpowers WordPress can have in these coming years, and one is and this one's a bit debatable I'd say is splitting off or rethinking the kind of content structure of the back end. Because right now a big product marketing issue is, oh, this is an outdated content model based on blogs and everything starts with posts.
I get it.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: The database scheme as a whole needs an overhaul. Yes, let's just start.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: Let's say that's a separate thing that's built and then that is in the composable content world. A content repository that is nice and pure and can be adopted by more organizations to not only capture things you want to render on WordPress templating front ends. But potentially you want to capture outside of that because you now have a universal open source content repository platform because it's so important to own your content. So if we go back to the customer data thing where I talked about CDPs before, a lot of them bought in that software and then bought Adobe or Segment or whatever. And now they use their own solutions because they need to own the customer data inside their own data. Lakes and content warehouses, customer warehouses, whatever you want to call them. Same thing needs to happen, I think, for Content.
Now, assuming you have that back part and then you have the front end, which is WordPress to software, the expression, the plugins, the templating engine, it's amazing. Right? Because you can fast forward into a website through the WordPress Templating engine, which is not easy to do with other composable content tools. Right. What are the other composable content sort of headless CMS things? Contentful absolutely ate our entire cake. They had a subpar product when they launched to work contentful.
[00:43:45] Speaker A: No, I don't think I've ever so.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: This is one of the big like, headless CMS. They're in the headless CMS category.
[00:43:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: So there's an entire headless CMS category, especially for Enterprise, whereby they say, hey, you can be super omnichannel everywhere. Because we have a Gui type content, it's basically just like GUI on top of a database. And WordPress was significantly superior to that. But Contentful was getting all the deals and has an excess of 30,000 sites today, a lot of them enterprise, and we've lost deals to them. Certainly not too many, obviously, but still enough that it hurts. And I know it's hurt us as an industry. And that's where WordPress as an open source project or as whatever, has many shortcomings in terms of how it's presented to the marketing. Yeah. Being everything to everybody worked ten years ago. Great. Absolutely horrible right now. And that's a pain. You see on the consumer side, we talked about before on SMB, and then the same thing is happening to us on our enterprise. Yeah.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: What got us here is not going to get us to the next station, that's for sure.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So the first part is the content repository, which you do on the side. And then the other part is having this beautiful piece of software that speaks to the outcomes that customers are seeking in today's market, it's product market. And for all of these people, you also package the repository kind of side of this in an invisible way so that they can just leverage that. But to me, I think there's an opportunity for Enterprise and SME and even like SMB Plus to have a world whereby they're able to say, yes, we have all our content in here and this is horrible. Name. Let's call it WordPress DB or whatever. Or WordPress content. Lake.
And then just one of those channels happens to be WordPress that sits on top of that. And maybe you're powering other experiences such as your entire AI chat GPT plugins or whatever.
These things don't even need structured content anymore. We've made a big deal out of structured content and AI is kind of smart enough to see through all of that too.
[00:46:14] Speaker A: Yeah, it is.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Well, yeah, getting there. But obviously if you have something like a kayak or a Booking.com chat GPT plugin, you obviously want to provide structured data in the sense of exact prices for exact routes and dates and all that kind of good stuff. So, yes, we still need structured data.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: We do.
As such, I think the world of WordPress still has its place for a very long time. Going forward, I do think that there's a good way to start thinking of what the future should look like. In terms of all the things that we've discussed so far. I think there's one thing we're missing in terms of what I think is one of the it's something I've been playing with a lot over the last two years and that's the no code movement I think we have traditionally always had to have either I'm just going to broadly call them configurators. It's not meant as a derogatory term, but it's more of a you install a plugin, let's call it elementor, for instance, and it's helping you essentially clicking through to get the desired yeah, like a wizard. And extremely heavily relying on the GUI.
And then you obviously always why GUI? GUI. GUI.
[00:47:51] Speaker B: Is GUI? Like a Dutch term.
You're not awake yet.
That's the hook for this episode, GUI.
[00:48:03] Speaker A: So that part of being able to configure your site. Sure, you've always had the developer, so that's a way to configure your site.
And when I say configure, I mean that in the broadest sense. And now you have no code, which there's quite a few tools that are so damn good that I think.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: With.
[00:48:33] Speaker A: Everything that we've discussed so far, we also need to acknowledge that role of what that piece of integration can do for WordPress. And I think that works on every single layer.
How is your experience with the GUIs and the no codes and all of that? Do you play with that at all? Do you look at it at all? Or what's your thoughts?
[00:48:59] Speaker B: Spietenberg is no code right?
In a way that's something where we as WordPress were quite early with regards to that, and then other solutions came out that were just very similar.
And so all the website builders are kind of block based now, I'd say, at this kind of SMB plus level or whatever. Yeah.
That being said, if you are out in Peru or something like that, and you produce clothing and don't use a computer very often or whatever, and your internet connection is maybe not amazing or whatever, so you can't just transfer files up and down all day long. You can still go and build a shopify store pretty easily, I think, without ever having to hear the words PHP, Rust, MySQL, JavaScript, whatever these other solutions are coded on. You don't have to FTP stuff, there's none of that nonsense.
The website builders in the last ten years have been no code for the most part. And sure, we had these website assemblers or so called website designers come in to essentially add a bit of additional CSS and they understand how the plugins worked and they were that glue. And I think that goes away assuming that we at a WordPress level for the directory, the product and everything are able to create or stay up to date in terms of how customers expect products to run and to that expectation level. Could be your apps on an iOS device or whatever. Most popular SaaS applications out there, you take a basket of those and that's probably like the baseline, and then you want to be competitive. You have to be above that baseline, go after a niche or something. That's pretty high bar compared to where we are today in that sense. Yeah.
[00:51:15] Speaker A: I think I agree with you.
[00:51:19] Speaker B: Can I give you another example? Yeah.
An analogy, I think when digital cameras became like a big thing when I'm.
[00:51:30] Speaker A: Looking sorry, like the one I'm looking into right now.
[00:51:35] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
That displaced the old school photographers, so to speak, because everybody was an expert and even then people were still doing tweaks with these digital cameras and everything. But at some point these cameras have become no code in a sense. And the most recent example is, I think, Samsung's, not generative like AI augmented pictures of the moon. So when you take a photo of the moon with your Samsung device, it actually goes through all its data of Moon pictures and enhances it to add the craters and everything. And it still feels like it's your picture that is fully no. There's no touching up, there's no like, hey, I'm going to do some HDR plugin on this. There's no, I'm going to try to bring the shadows out or do sharpening this or that. It's fully no code. I took a picture of the moon.
Yeah, to me, that's the kind of no code sort of analogy where we went from handwritten semantic HTML back in the day, and we're also proud to have that on our personal websites to using tools like WordPress and the WordPress Revolution of 2010 or whatever, and then we're able to just do a bit of work on top of that. That's the digital camera. And now we're getting to the point where the consumer can just do the thing themselves and it's correct and they don't need you or me.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So that's essentially the direction that I was curious about, which is prompted me the question. So one of the things I've been looking at, and for most people the no code stuff is highly dependent on Zapier like tools and that is a very large portion of it, but there are these tools that allow you to build whatever you want hooking into WordPress and I think a wonderful example of this is Draftbid. I don't know if you've ever draftbid?
[00:53:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:47] Speaker A: So it's essentially a platform where you can configure your iOS and Android nice and it essentially just hook into the rest API and what have you and you can create proper apps.
It's absolutely not hard anymore. The only thing you need to have as a tool set is understand structured data, because it's still structured data, but it allows you to do just wonderful things. And there's more of those bubble, there's a whole bunch of these platforms. But I'm also very curious of what's going to happen in terms of no code in that direction because it's not just the component that you mentioned and obviously that's a huge one, but it's also the builders are going to integrate no code more and more. It's not just a little bit of Zapier here and there's. There's these plugins inside of WordPress that do certain connections that just take the programming level out of it.
[00:54:53] Speaker B: It feels like programming languages are essentially inefficient because I have to write in a specific way to get something out of it. So even if JavaScript is quite cool and everything, you still have to learn JavaScript. And no code is essentially saying as long as you know English or whatever other language you want to program in, you can go ahead and create whatever you want. So you remove that inefficiency.
[00:55:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think a very large portion of the future of WordPress, but essentially the web is a mix of no code, AI and whatever you use for your main content. So if that is WordPress, great.
43% does it, I guess. But that mix is definitely going to change more into the direction of just combining the tools that do the job for you, that you may have needed a developer for and may have costed you between five and ten k previously. And now with a little bit of time and effort and maybe you need a little bit expert help here and there, but you're done with two k, right? So it has a huge impact just as long as, again, you still need to understand structured data. You need to have a structured way of looking at content. There's no way around that.
But even that is teachable, it's, learnable.
We can get to the point where everyone understands how to do a version of a no code WordPress AIdriven powered application of sorts. I have no doubt.
[00:56:30] Speaker B: Yeah, just to lay this out, because this is where I'm kind of at right now is with the shelter we have here, we're growing quite quickly. We're turning over and getting 70 dogs adopted per month from the front lines into western Ukraine and beyond and increasing that.
And we need a tool to essentially manage dogs as inventory, structured data, if you will, to say where's the dog condition is it adopted yet, all that kind of stuff. And I threw some stuff together using Chat GPT Four, where I said, hey, I need an application that does in that I'm thinking of using these tools. And I think I said something like, I want to use Superbase, which is like the firebase alternative, and I want to use Next JS and a couple of other things and maybe even build like a native think, you know, in a couple of weeks time or a couple months time. I take your draft bit example, I combine that with Superbase or whatever, and some auto GPT or whatever, the ones that chain those kind of like GPT conversation just goes and builds the whole thing.
[00:57:47] Speaker A: I think that is the sound of inevitability. I just saw the metrics again this weekend, but that's the first thing that pops up.
[00:57:55] Speaker B: Sounds dark. I mean, our real world is darker than that.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: But we're going into that direction.
There's no two ways about it. If you're not seeing that yet, I hope at least this conversation helps you think in that direction, because there's so much more happening beyond just your normal website stuff. That layer, and I think it used to be just the ad layer, right? And that layer is just being expanded on like crazy. If you're not seeing that, if you weren't aware of it, now is the time to wake up because there's just so much happening.
And with Chat GPT evolving as quickly as it has, they're the first to do this big. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be the only one doing this big.
What that will turn into, you need to start wrapping your head around now. If you're in the business of building something on the web, for sure, anything.
[00:58:58] Speaker B: I think if you're in a business of anything, whatever that is, you have to evaluate the AI opportunity for your business before you continue on your growth trajectory.
[00:59:12] Speaker A: Oh, 100% universal.
[00:59:15] Speaker B: Forget if you go like Sasses are replaced with bit of stuff anyway. But if you're selling carpets down the road or whatever, how is AI going to help you? Is it going to start doing the HR stuff for you? Is it going to start doing, it's.
[00:59:29] Speaker A: Going to innovate somewhere and you need to start figuring out where.
Yeah, but it opened up a huge layer of opportunity and I've tried to be very vocal with friends and family that are just not in my field. I'm pretty sure you can relate to that. Absolutely.
The very day it came out, I visited my folks.
Not because it came out, but I was going to anyway, and I mentioned to them, so what I saw today on the internet is something that's going to change our lives for sure, in a more drastic way than we can possibly imagine right now. And that was just from me playing around with it for one or 2 hours. Like, holy crap. Just understanding what the impact is as soon as you start truly generating any kind of whatever you can think of scenario.
And then my mom said something like, so you've never seen this kind of earth shattering movement before? And I was like, let me think.
And I think the only thing I can think of is me being introduced to WordPress at the time.
[01:00:49] Speaker B: Because work in Europe.
[01:00:51] Speaker A: Work in Europe, obviously, but that's kind.
[01:00:53] Speaker B: Of.
[01:00:56] Speaker A: But understanding that you can build something that represents data that you want to convey.
[01:01:02] Speaker B: Right.
[01:01:03] Speaker A: Content with WordPress at the time was to me revolutionary. And I think for a lot of people it has.
But this next step, which is not necessarily about WordPress, but it can be integrated into WordPress, and we're seeing great examples of this, but this is it. This is like whatever was happening, it's squared. It's like it's exponential.
[01:01:28] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I think that's how I look at all these things, the sort of exponential power of this. And to me, if I look at the examples I gave before about the rest API, custom post types and then the whole plugin directory, those for me inside the WordPress bubble of sorts was exponential. And AI to me and the world is exponential the same way that the App Store was my day. One analogy was the App Store.
[01:01:57] Speaker A: And I was like, yeah, that's probably a good example. And I came up with WordPress in terms of what the impact for me personally was because the question was geared to me personally.
But App Store, I didn't have the first two versions of the iPhones, but as soon as I got one, yeah, that just clicked. And the options and the possibility, it's endless. And I think we're in the next phase of that.
And I think like you said, it's exponential. It's moving so much faster now than even the difference between 3.5 and 4.0.
I've had a few more complex type of prompts in 3.5, which I reproduced in four.
[01:02:46] Speaker B: Yes, amazing.
[01:02:48] Speaker A: The difference is astounding if that's just a 3.5 to 4.0. I don't even want to try to imagine what 7.0 is going to look like. That's crazy.
[01:03:00] Speaker B: What does this mean for the average listener. Are they all unemployed in like two years time?
[01:03:05] Speaker A: No, I don't think so. But I think this is a good moment to start adapting.
If you were just coasting on your so I think there's two things, probably more than two things, but I think two main things I can see happening.
I don't mean this positive negative, but the bottom layer, like the first layer, let's call it that, the first layer of those building in and around WordPress that's going to continue for quite a while.
But everybody building innovative stuff in one way or another for their clients is going to see they're going to experience a revolution. And whether they see it or feel it is a different thing. But they're going to have to get on board real fast. Real fast. So in other words, if you're not playing around with what chat JPT can do for you, you're already sort of lagging behind.
I'd like to mention we started with last time we saw each other work Camp Switzerland.
[01:04:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:04:14] Speaker A: Joe Hoy.
[01:04:14] Speaker B: That was years ago in AI terms.
[01:04:17] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. So Joe was there as well, and he demoed a very small thing, like 1 minute he demonstrated. And I think the thing was where you both were working on. So the output of essentially block editor compatible code that was based on this is what I would like to see. It needs to have this content and I want to have this layout and just give me the code so I can just copy and paste it. So that sort of thinking is where you need to be in terms of how AI can help you, because that's such a small example. If you can chunk it, if you can chain it and then you can catch the output correctly, you can essentially start with a briefing that your client gave you. You have your design files here and there and then you start with and there you go. This is the first example of I.
[01:05:14] Speaker B: Mean, the client can start with their client briefing.
[01:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:05:20] Speaker B: It'S just a joke. I mean, half a joke. But to go back and to talk about a bit about the kind of speed of the pace here.
You saw that demo there like day.
[01:05:31] Speaker A: Two, if that's what it was, day.
[01:05:33] Speaker B: One, I was still trying to convince Joe, we need to go do this.
And then he's like, yeah, okay, let's do this. And then he hacked around and he's like, hey, I got it. Outputting this stuff. And now we're at the point where accelerate because we have a B testing. So you can one click upgrade A blocked into a B testing. You can one click your way into a second variant that will just a B test against that is generated by itself. So now we can create millions of variants and find the ultimate response. I mean, it's obviously not going to go down that kind of rabbit hole because there's economies of scale and what's that called?
Yeah, you lose benefit over time, right. The more variance you have or whatever.
[01:06:18] Speaker A: But there's sweet spots here where traffic to proper count.
[01:06:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:06:27] Speaker A: Again, if that click hasn't set with you yet, let this be the prompt to really have you look into how it can help. So if I look at how I'm using AI specifically either on the generative side, it's more of I have a couple of ideas, help me figure out more validate certain things. That's basic stuff, but it helps tremendously in getting stuff out there.
The second part is it's not super good at coding yet, makes a lot of mistakes and does a lot of bad assumptions of actions, filters and stuff that's really not even existing.
[01:07:10] Speaker B: Easy to learn.
Easy to learn though. Yeah, easy for the solution to learn. Yeah.
[01:07:16] Speaker A: But the thing that I'm using it for, for instance, all the time, and I have one client which has still a huge amount of legacy code which I didn't write and some of it, it's no longer on PHP four, but it's still credibly ancient.
If I want to understand quicker of what it's doing, I just copy paste it in the Chat GTP and have it explained to me and I can validate very, very fast if that explanation is correct. Because extracting somebody else's logic, which oftentimes was just lacking into something that is processed by an AI that sort of understands what it's doing and then presents it to you in a way that you can then process and digest easier. Just that flow is just so much easier to think of what that AI can do for you. It's a different way of understanding.
[01:08:11] Speaker B: Well, the analogy is that you have literature people who have Shakespeare or whatever, and you throw it into Chachi PT or whatever and you say, hey, please explain this to me. That's essentially taking someone's stylistic code and normalizing it into TLDR eli five.
[01:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
[01:08:34] Speaker B: It's scary. Are we just going to go dumb?
Maybe the next episode should be like how to retire with your WordPress business in the next 13 days.
[01:08:46] Speaker A: Is there a future for me?
[01:08:48] Speaker B: Help.
Good thumbnails. Yeah. Oh dear God.
[01:08:55] Speaker A: I think the future is bright still. I think now more than ever, this is the moment you realize you have to adapt again. I think the two paths I outlined, I think they're more than those two.
Which one would I be missing if I stick to the examples I gave?
What do you think in terms of how will things progress?
[01:09:29] Speaker B: It's tough to say for there was an interesting conversation, I think it was on the all in podcast, they were talking about roles that were going to be made completely redundant. So someone that analyzes x rays for a particular condition, disease, whatever, can be made completely redundant because machine learning and AI can. Essentially have a higher hit rate, and I think there's a variance of that with regards to what you do now. If you are someone that has, ten years ago, just been building WordPress websites, and then your only added skill was just kind of combining the hosting and the theme and the WordPress software with a couple configurations and maybe some CSS tweaks, like you are absolutely not necessary anymore. However, if you own the relationship and someone trusts you to do something, and you are someone that understands not only WordPress but also the space around WordPress and how everything ties in together and how that actually generates a certain outcome down the road, which may be multiple steps removed. You have a place, but you also need to integrate these tools to make yourself more efficient.
I hate that as much as the next person. Right. It reminds me a bit of when I used to play SimCity, like 20 years ago, and I go through my friend's computer because when I let SimCity run normally on his new Power Mac back then or whatever, it would speed through all the years and you couldn't even play it. It was just going so fast. And it's the same thing now, almost. I think there will be a phase where it's going to be stressful, it's going to be all FOMO, you're going to try to augment and work faster and everything, and these 8 hours per day, 1215, whatever, are going to be like they're going to be knocking years off your life, I guess. But ultimately that's maybe this kind of post COVID, pre recession period we're in where you just need to grind.
If this is the future you want, there's more and more people on this planet and seemingly less and less jobs, I guess, when these sort of innovations come out. Yeah.
Wow.
[01:12:04] Speaker A: On that positive note, I'm hype.
[01:12:11] Speaker B: All.
[01:12:12] Speaker A: Right, well, on that positive note, I'd like to thank you for being on the podcast and sharing your insights.
[01:12:21] Speaker B: Thank you for having me and for letting me finish. On this positive note, remcus, I was hoping to be able to say something nicer.
[01:12:27] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:12:29] Speaker B: I don't even know what I'll give you a second try.
This was great for me, and I think we talk a lot about this kind of future of content stuff, and I actually submitted a talk for WorkAmp Europe and it got rejected. Future of content. So I feel like you got a good chunk of it in.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm glad, because I think there's a lot of conversations to be had. Maybe if I can end somewhere, I'll say this, if we don't ask ourselves the hard questions now, in terms of where we are in this economic cycle, where this new technology is coming out and everything, how can we be expected to be best positioned? Sorry? How can we expect to be best positioned as an agency, a product company, a podcaster whatever to succeed in this space in the coming years if we're not tackling this stuff and speaking very openly about it. Because we need WordPress as this kind of umbrella ecosystem that we're part of that has clear leadership and all these kind of things to drive this change that comes out of these hard conversations and hard questions. Because that WordPress honeymoon phase that we all had between 2012 and 2015, that's gone.
[01:13:55] Speaker A: That's gone.
[01:13:56] Speaker B: Damn. I was going to end on a good note. I did it again.
Find me at the next Word camp. I'll buy you a beer if you've been offended by this.
All right.
[01:14:08] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Noel.
[01:14:10] Speaker B: Thank you.
[01:14:10] Speaker A: It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you, sir.
[01:14:13] Speaker B: Likewise. Bye.
