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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today, I'm joined by Adam Warner from GoDaddy, a pillar sponsor of the WP Minute. He's here to tell us about the latest happenings with the company. We'll talk about AI, the company's agency program, Hub, and whatever else Adam has in store for us. Adam, welcome to the WP Minute.
Adam Warner (00:22)
Hey, thanks, Eric. Happy to be here.
Eric Karkovack (00:26)
So, what's keeping you busy these days at GoDaddy?
Adam Warner (00:31)
Where should I start? A lot. There's a lot of a lot happening here. ⁓ You know, we're a pretty sizable company. We have quite a ⁓ large suite of ⁓ solutions and offerings for people. ⁓ My role ⁓ is ⁓ community focused, which means customer focused. ⁓
We sponsor different events. ⁓ We engage ⁓ different communities, ⁓ WordPress being ⁓ one of the primary ones that we're responsible for. And by engage communities, what I'm really saying is we are WordPress users. We are agency owners. We are builders ourselves. And ⁓ by engage, I mean being active in conversations.
about all of the pros and cons of building sites for clients, the hurdles that ⁓ we face, that ⁓ other people face, ⁓ and really trying to learn and keep our ⁓ eyes and ears on the pulse of what's happening in the WordPress ecosystem as a whole and making sure that we bring that feedback ⁓ back into the company.
for ⁓ engineering teams, for our care teams, for leadership, kind of across the board ⁓ to make sure that we're doing right by our customers and offering the solutions that people need. And oftentimes that pivots over the course of years, things change, ⁓ especially now in our AI world. There's been a lot of ⁓ change ⁓ in that topic as well.
Eric Karkovack (02:23)
So just to summarize that, mean, a lot of what you're doing in the community kind of comes back and ends up being part of the product roadmap,
Adam Warner (02:34)
It does, oftentimes, yes. ⁓ We consider ourselves one of our roles as a feedback loop, right? So ⁓ we have a ⁓ lot of insights that we share, ⁓ which could be more immediate, right? So if there's ⁓ a high priority security issue, let's say within the WordPress ecosystem, we make sure there's awareness of that and follow through.
We have a large network of connections and by we, I mean everyone here at GoDaddy that participates in the community, which is much more than just our team. ⁓ And ⁓ through those connections and I'm speaking specifically about one-to-one relationships, know, people that we meet ⁓ at meetups or at conference events or in various communities like WP Minute and ⁓ the admin bar group and others.
⁓ It often results in ⁓ product enhancements, improvements, ⁓ bug fixes, and sometimes we're contacted one-on-one by people from other businesses in the ecosystem. ⁓ One example, and I won't go into detail with names and things, but we had a CEO of a product with millions of installs and their users were having an issue with
a certain part of our platform. He reached out to me because we had met, we held an agency dinner last year at WordCamp Europe. We met in person, formed that relationship. He reached out to me directly through LinkedIn and saying, hey, we're having this issue. Can you connect me? Of course I did. And within, I think an hour or two, the issue was identified, ⁓ corrected, fixed, and ⁓ everyone was happy. So it's...
little moments like that that don't necessarily move the needle in terms of the size of our customers or the revenue that we bring in. But at the same time, those kinds of things are critical ⁓ to making sure that we're delivering what we promise.
Eric Karkovack (04:48)
That's so important. Companies often overlook those one-to-one relationships, and that's how things kind of fester and get to a point where maybe somebody isn't so sold on your services anymore. But if you're having those relationships and you're able to give that personal service, even as big as GoDaddy is, even as ⁓ automated as things are now, that personal touch, I
keep hammering at it because I think it's so important when you're working with other people. You have to be able to communicate and you have to be able to help them in those situations. So kudos to you on that. It's good to see that it's a focus.
Adam Warner (05:34)
Yeah, yeah, thanks for that. the credit goes to GoDaddy leadership for recognizing that ⁓ this kind of community work or engagement and having dedicated people to that and encouraging people to get involved in whatever, not just WordPress, but whatever community ⁓ that they're in that is connected to the work that they do here ⁓ or our solutions. Everyone is encouraged to participate. ⁓
and bring ⁓ those kind of insights back. So it's rewarding. It's rewarding work. ⁓ But it is across the board of community work. ⁓ It's sometimes difficult to prove the business outcome. And a lot of times, companies have a tendency to focus on the bottom line.
which they should and they have to in order to exist and grow. ⁓ So ⁓ it's a thing, but GoDaddy does a really good job of ⁓ encouraging and supporting this kind of direct to customer feedback loop.
Eric Karkovack (06:48)
Well, that's great. I know AI is getting into the, you mentioned that earlier, that's like the big thing we're all doing now, right? So we have to talk about it, but you have this Arrow AI Suite that includes WordPress. I've tried that site builder. I was impressed with it, I have to say. It was not what I was expecting. But I know you've got more things going on with Arrow. What's happening with that product right now and what...
What kind of tools are we talking about?
Adam Warner (07:18)
Yeah, so the way that I describe Arrow at GoDaddy is basically it's GoDaddy plus AI. And Arrow is our AI tool. ⁓ It ⁓ pulls from multiple places, ⁓ and it's been integrated into, I don't know all, but I would say most of our offerings. ⁓
Arrow ⁓ now powers ⁓ some of our domain search. It powers our website builder, which is non-WordPress, ⁓ our plus marketing digital suite. So if for creating social posts and content, and then ⁓ in our hosting platform, even in the background, ⁓ Arrow's powering a lot of that. ⁓ The ultimate goal, I think with Arrow is to
simplify a new user or existing customers ⁓ ability to find what they need for ⁓ whatever they're doing, right? So if they are a small business and they come to kind of the main Aero portal, it's really prompting. What do you wanna do? I wanna build a website. I need an email address. I need X, Y, and Z.
And Arrow on the back end does a ⁓ really good job of kind of directing people to where they need to be in servicing the solutions based on their prompts. Now, Arrow for WordPress, right? Well, let's talk about AI in the WordPress ecosystem in general for a second, if I may. Absolutely. We've seen the advent of AI across the board, but in the WordPress ecosystem specifically, there is a huge
opportunity, I think, in front of us and for WordPress, the software in regard to AI. know, it all started with people building solutions for content creation and those sorts of things. And then we have the WordPress website builders, which there several of them that are AI powered. And then, excuse me, then the idea of
⁓ building in AI into WordPress itself, right? As a core function, what does that mean? What does it bring to users? What does it bring to WordPress, the platform itself? And there was a recent article and whoever wrote this, please forgive me, because I don't recall, but it was recent about ⁓ WordPress is dead. And the whole angle of the article was it's obviously not, right? That was another.
topic of, there's this Vibe coding platform and that Vibe coding platform. And now everyone's going to create every website and every solution with these. But then it became clear pretty quickly that there are gaps. So you build something with a Vibe code. ⁓ Then you have to go outside of that to do the rest. You have to go get a domain. You have to go get a payment solution. And then come back and build those in and those sorts of things.
And ⁓ I think the trajectory of WordPress the software ⁓ being positioning more ⁓ as an engine ⁓ with the advent of AI and the things that are being built ⁓ offers WordPress the software a huge and long term future. This whole fear of it's going away ⁓ I think is it's natural.
It's a natural reaction, but I think it's unwarranted as things move forward and we'll see what the future holds. so. Getting to Arrow and WordPress here at GoDaddy. ⁓ We had started, I think about a year. Or more ago ⁓ experimenting with ⁓ AI and Arrow powered WordPress website creation. It went through.
many different iterations. There was a lot of ⁓ beta user testing, ⁓ a lot of feedback, ⁓ and it's in a state now where it's pretty robust. ⁓ You put in a prompt, you build what you want. It puts out ⁓ nice looking sites. It accomplishes the mission. And then you have the option of... ⁓
exposing the WordPress dashboard right there within our Arrow for WordPress tool as well. So you can get into the nitty gritty of any WordPress dashboard, WP admin area you'd need to get to. ⁓ So there's a lot more on the roadmap for Arrow for WordPress, but it's been very successful so far. I also want to mention GoDaddy ⁓
has two distinct type of audiences or customers. And on one hand, you have SMBs and DIYers who want the no code drag and drop builders, which are GoDaddy website builder addresses. But then of that subset, you have people there that say, I've been told to use WordPress and then
You know the standard WordPress when they first drop into the admin, ⁓ it's. It's jarring right, but it's a lot. We know that that's being worked on right ⁓ by the community. ⁓ But then we have this other audience which are builders, web designers, developers ⁓ who are agencies who are building for clients and. ⁓
Arrow for WordPress is also for them. So it's for them for spinning up quick mock sites or quick smaller kind of client sites, right? ⁓ More of a simple ⁓ projects where there's not a lot of customization. You don't need to have ⁓ a thousand plugins or do any custom coding to get the job done. So it opens up an efficiency.
for agencies and builders to perhaps take on more work, maybe not the 50 or $100,000 client jobs, but the $1,000 to $5,000 client jobs, they can do more of those because they can do them faster. So it's a continual process of finding the balance between those two audiences of WordPress here.
Eric Karkovack (14:30)
Yeah, that's a challenge to satisfy both audiences with tools that are smart when you need them to be really smart and simple when you need them to be really simple, right? When I took the AI Builder for a spin, I was impressed that, for one, it used a block theme that was very minimal. There were not 20 plugins installed. ⁓ It was nothing of the sort.
Because I picture in my head the traditional site builder where you have maybe this third party theme that is very ⁓ robust and it has tries to please everybody without really pleasing anybody. So I was impressed that this had a very simple block theme. could start something up, tell it what pages I want, tell it what color scheme I want, ⁓ upload a logo. And then I've got my starter site there and I can just go in and build. And for maybe for the small business owner that's doing this on their own.
Maybe that's enough. They just go in and change the content a little. ⁓ But for the professional, it's more of just like a starting point. It's like, okay, I can go into this block theme now and make whatever changes I need to, to make it look the way I want and make it work the way I want. And I have, you know, I've done that in five minutes. I have this whole site. So I think that's something, I can see the value both ways.
Adam Warner (15:49)
Yeah, and that's nice to hear, Eric. And that was very intentional, was to use the default WordPress full site editing block theme ⁓ and expose the admin area of WordPress within that Arrow for WordPress AI experience ⁓ for many reasons. One, why overcomplicate things, right? Use what's there and enhance it and amplify it.
I can't speak for the team building arrow for WordPress or the ones who have built it, but my take is ⁓ not only was that intentional, but it sets a framework for the future, right? Because we're not over-complicating with custom things, right? Like a page builder.
would have all of their ⁓ features and options. And then you have a thousand ⁓ of that page builder add-ons that you could then add, right? So it just adds complexity when then complexity adds more work for the person maintaining the site. It could potentially expose security issues because you've got just more points of ⁓ potential points of failure with that kind of stuff. So it's been fun. It's been fun to watch.
I'm in way too many Slack channels internally, ⁓ but ⁓ it is incredible to see the discussions ⁓ happening there with developers and engineers. And I always learned something, even though I tried to be a developer and I broke most of everything I tried and I tried to be a designer and ⁓ everything was ugly. So I'm happy to watch from the sidelines.
Eric Karkovack (17:38)
Yeah, it's just interesting to see what how this evolves. You know, as you said in the WordPress dashboard, I just see such a big opportunity there because you know the new person isn't going to know where everything is, where every setting is. ⁓ So having the AI agent in there, being able to ask it to do something for you. That makes that makes a lot of sense, and it really cuts down on that learning curve.
Adam Warner (18:05)
Yeah, but I wanted to do more to do but go ahead. Sorry
Eric Karkovack (18:08)
no, was going to say, you spoke about the professionals. And I know you have an agency plan, an agency program going. How is that working for you? And how have you seen that evolve since launching it?
Adam Warner (18:24)
Yeah, that's been very exciting. ⁓ know, any business offering agency tools or programs and things, we're seeing a lot more of that ⁓ in this ecosystem. ⁓ And the GoDaddy agency program here started last year as a pilot program. And through several different iterations and through the
sheer amount of applications that came in and then the agencies that are in the program seeing how they're utilizing not just the program but the kind of the ecosystem that we've built around it. ⁓ They're growing ⁓ and they're growing faster due to our research than other agencies who aren't in any kind of
program and don't have kind of a centralized portal. this year, ⁓ the GoDaddy agency program is a major focus for us in helping to scale that. And the whole idea with an agency program is, you know, we're not charging for inclusion or membership or anything like that. ⁓ It really is ⁓ kind of a not kind of I'm looking for the right word, but
There are multiple reasons why the agency program exists. There's the obvious one ⁓ from the business case. We would love to get more people using our solutions, right? Whether that's domains or hosting, ⁓ Arrow for WordPress or Hub, which I'll talk about in a second. And because, you know, we're a business, obviously. But the benefit to the users is that we're bringing in
these solutions and tools into a centralized location to help them manage their agencies and their freelance business, ⁓ manage clients and site maintenance and all of those things ⁓ in one spot. So it's been good. We have a big plan. ⁓ We've gone global ⁓ with the agency program. And so far, it's been really well received. And our goal is to help you grow, right?
If an agency or an individual freelancer grows, so do we. It's so- That's it.
Eric Karkovack (20:57)
So what kind of tools could someone expect that an agency owner wants to look into this? sorts of, you said site maintenance, I know the hub is part of that. ⁓ What other types of things are you offering?
Adam Warner (21:11)
Yeah, so within the agency program, ⁓ it does ⁓ require ⁓ opting into the hub use, ⁓ which ⁓ you can use or not use. There's no charge. It's free. But what the hub is, ⁓ it's basically, it started out as ⁓ kind of a site maintenance tool or a client maintenance tool as well, right? So all of the things that we know in our industry that are ⁓
pretty ⁓ table stakes these days. If you're building sites for clients and you're offering a maintenance plan as another revenue stream, recurring revenue stream, you need to tend to those sites like a garden, right? You need to run regular security scans. You need to update themes and plugins when there's issues. You need to monitor uptime. All of those things that ⁓ are a little bit commoditized.
Nowadays, admittedly, ⁓ we have been doing that for years, right? With our, ⁓ with managed WP joining the GoDaddy. so within the hub, you have that. But we have also a client area in the hub. And it's where you can enter your client details, their site, their contact info, all of the things. ⁓ And then on top of that,
within the client area of the hub, we've built Arrow into that as well. And so ⁓ the first Arrow integration was client market research. So I've got a new client, ⁓ came through my contact form, ⁓ they've given me a little information about their business, or I've done an initial call and then I've set up a discovery call. I can take that information that that potential client has shared.
and I can prompt it inside the client market research. So let's say it's a local turf installer as an example. ⁓ I write a bit about their business, what their location is, and then that market research will spit out ⁓ kind of an overview of the industry in that location, what the opportunities are, ⁓ historical context. ⁓ It will suggest ⁓ opportunities where ⁓
where that particular business can succeed. And you take that to the client and it's impressive that you've done that work, right? You've learned about their business, about their industry, which supports them wanting to hire you, right? But it's not trickery because you've also informed yourself about what this business needs, what this client needs, which informs how you build a site.
Now, the latest iteration of the hub, ⁓ it's moving fast. ⁓ Proposals, ⁓ proposal creation is now built in. ⁓ Invoicing ⁓ is an option there. It's built into the hub using our GoDaddy payments ⁓ processor, which ⁓ I think still has the lowest percentage in the industry. I'll have to double check myself on that. ⁓ So the idea is you can manage your.
your client information everywhere from the initial contact all the way to the site build and then further on to maintenance. That's the idea is to kind of bring everything in there and keep building in more aero solutions into that to automate whatever needs to be automated or make sense, I suppose, to automate.
Eric Karkovack (24:51)
That's good to know. Actually, when I first started looking into the hub a little bit, the first thing that did come to my mind was managed WP because obviously when you acquire them, you get that technology for all the site maintenance things. But now you're also adding just the opportunity to kind of take care of your client's relationships along with their website, which I think is kind of a nice touch. don't, you know, we're so used to these days having a
having to log into like 30 different places to do business these days. ⁓ So you have this one portal basically and you're just doing all the things there.
Adam Warner (25:29)
Yeah, that's the idea is to make it a one stop kind of a business toolbox for any freelancer or agency. And there's a lot more involved in that, but I won't go into detail, let people check out the hub for themselves. ⁓ Again, it's free. if you're a GoDaddy ⁓ customer, if you have a GoDaddy account, or you can create a free account, just search GoDaddy Pro Hub and ⁓
you'll get right in there and see what's available.
Eric Karkovack (26:00)
Awesome. Awesome. is there anything else going on at GoDaddy that you're excited about? ⁓ where are we going to see you this year? Because I know you're always off to word camps and things like that. Yeah.
Adam Warner (26:14)
Yeah, so ⁓ there's so much going on at GoDaddy. And ⁓ again, ⁓ I'll mention GoDaddy plus AI. There's no turning back from ⁓ AI integrations and toolings and ⁓ feature sets and all of the things. ⁓ One of the ⁓ exciting things that I don't have a huge depth of knowledge in just yet is our agent name service offering.
And what that is, and we've all seen the advent of AI agents, and we've seen the pros and cons of those things. And the ⁓ agent name service, or ANS as it's known, ⁓ is meant to verify the ⁓ identity of any given agent that happens to join the agent name service in order to build a flag.
⁓ for whatever agent is in there and across the industry. So think of it like a, almost like a domain service in that, ⁓ you know, it's verified, right? The agent will be verified. So that's pretty exciting ⁓ kind of at scale. ⁓ But...
Yeah, with me ⁓ traveling, I've taken a bit of a step back. ⁓ I've made a few trips last year and I've got a couple more coming up. But what I tend to do is instead of doing it all myself, ⁓ we have a team and we have ⁓ no lack of people within the company that would have the subject matter expert for any event or meetup or ⁓ anything else we wanted to do. So part of my job is
⁓ coordinating and finding the right person for whatever opportunity is in front of us.
Eric Karkovack (28:13)
Yeah, that sounds good. mean, there's only so much world traveling you can do with the number of world WordPress and another, you know, Cloud Fest. Those other type of events going on. Probably good to save your frequent flyer miles for another.
Adam Warner (28:26)
day.
you know, I was a road warrior for many years traveling to events. And ⁓ now that my kids are a little bit older, ⁓ it's, ⁓ it's, it's, it's more important now than ever that, ⁓ that I'm here, ⁓ instead of gone every week, which, you know, it's, it served its purpose. And it, and it was great. And I loved it. But ⁓ you don't have to be everywhere all the time. And there's ways to support
the community and these events from afar as well.
Eric Karkovack (29:01)
Absolutely, that's important. mean, the family time, you know, that's the most important thing. So good for you on taking a step back on the travel and getting to spend some time with those kids. So where can folks connect with you online, Adam, if they want to ask questions or they want to take this agency program for a spin?
Adam Warner (29:23)
Yeah, so the short answer is too many places. That's on me. I've got so ⁓ many messages in so many places it's hard to keep up. I would say ⁓ I'm on X a lot, ⁓ or Twitter as I'm still going to call it, at WPModer, W-P-M-O-D-D-E-R. ⁓ And side note, that's a handle I chose. ⁓
Back when I started really digging into WordPress and I was modifying WordPress through, you know, page templates and functions and those sorts of things. I'm also on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find there. ⁓ you know, within WP Minute, within WordPress.org, Slack, within ⁓ the Facebook specific WordPress groups, ⁓ I'm everywhere.
Eric Karkovack (30:21)
So pretty much just look anywhere you happen to be and Adam Warner is going to be there ready to answer your questions.
Adam Warner (30:28)
That's it. I'll go with that.
Eric Karkovack (30:31)
Sounds good to me. Well, thank you so much, Adam, for being on the show and thank you to GoDaddy for being a sponsor of the WP Minute. We really appreciate that. And ⁓ for you folks watching and listening, we thank you for supporting what we do here at the WP Minute. Please visit us at the WPminute.com slash subscribe. You can get our newsletter, find out what's ⁓ happening in the world of WordPress. And there's some new things in our newsletter. We're actually getting some exclusive content. I'm writing a column in there now and we're going to do some other things.
to ⁓ spice it up. So thank you all for watching and listening, and we'll see you next time.