Matt: Nat Miletich, welcome to the WP Minute.
Nat: Nice.
Nice to be here.
Thanks for inviting me
Matt: I'd like to talk about the challenges of freelancers running
a boutique agency, the general throes of surviving as a small
business on the web these days.
But before we get to that, I know you from your consistency and
your meme god levels on Twitter.
What's the secret there?
is that the biggest marketing channel for you?
Nat: the, no, it's not.
It's actually probably my third biggest and my first two are SEO and referrals.
but I love social media.
It's definitely a great marketing channel.
I've met a lot of cool people through social media and I've really kind
of taken my agency to the next level because of social media.
So I, I owe a lot to it, but I also like to have fun.
I don't like to keep it all like business on there.
So like, like it to be a bit more entertaining than that.
Matt: you're the owner of Clio websites.
You can find it at C L I O web sites.
com.
a leading web design company, specializing in custom websites, WordPress development,
and SEO challenge you for a little bit.
I know, we've chatted a bit back and forth on Twitter.
I think at some point you were, recently you were diving into web flow and you
kind of liked it, but hold that thought.
We're going to talk about that in a moment.
where do you see.
The biggest challenges, maybe for yourself, for small agencies
and freelancers who are focused on WordPress headed into 2025.
Biggest challenges you see headed into 2025.
Nat: I actually think for WordPress agency specifically, it's sort of
that fragmentation of like different ways of doing things in WordPress.
I think that, you know, WordPress as a platform is, you know.
Solid choice.
I, we, you know, we keep investing in it.
I don't think it's going anywhere.
I think it has a bright future.
I think the biggest challenge for people, especially new people trying
to get into things, and I can, I'll provide some feedback and my
thoughts on that in a minute as well.
But I find if you're trying to get into this sort of, you
know, WordPress landscape right now, it's that fragmentation.
And, you know, because there's like a million ways to make
a WordPress website, right?
You can use a page builder.
You can do a totally custom site.
You can use Gutenberg, full site editing, you know, and depending on
which approach you take, it feels like.
You know, you, you might or might not be setting yourself up for success.
Right.
so, so I think from my perspective, like in the WordPress specifically in the
WordPress space, that's probably the biggest challenge and the way to overcome
that challenge is to find something that works for your agency or something
that you enjoy doing as a freelancer.
If it's a.
Website builder.
Great.
I mean, a page builder.
Great.
If it's a custom developed sites, great, but, you know, focus on
one of those, learn it deeply and kind of pursue it, you know, as a
solution that you offer to everybody.
Matt: The listener knows that I ran an agency for about a decade, ran it
with my father still runs it today.
This goes back, I left the agency when I started having kids
because I needed to make money.
So, it was about eight years ago.
Every agency owner knows that, you know, you're a paycheck away from
bankruptcy when it comes to, you know, clients and stuff like that.
But, when I started, it was just like, hey, let me cast this
wide net, let me do anything.
Anything to get, revenue in the door.
I'm talking, again, way back, business cards, logo design, like, whatever.
Social media management.
This was just casting this wide net.
And I quickly learned, like, okay, I really need to dial in,
build a team, hyper focused on WordPress, and get specialized.
Which then led me down a path of going, my god, I can't stand the
web designer who comes in and sells a website for 500 bucks.
Man, it drives me nuts.
Do you If you remember those days, 15, 18 years ago, do we, are we
challenged with that same like entry level competition these days or is
now our competition like, Oh, our customer can just do it themselves.
Now we really just have to skip ahead and build them that five to 10, 000
website straight out of the gate.
Nat: Yeah, that's a great question.
And I think it kind of depends on where you are at with your, in your journey.
I mean, like you said, it's tough, you know, when you're getting started, how
do you distinguish yourself, especially if you don't have a portfolio, if you
don't have clients, you don't have referrals, you don't have contacts.
Right.
how do you 500 website?
Right.
That somebody else is going to create, and get clients.
It's tough.
I think I'm not going to lie.
Like I think in the beginning stages, that's probably the biggest challenge.
one of the mistakes I think I made like early on is the same thing,
like trying to do everything at once.
I think there's a real value in niching down.
Not niching down necessarily like, you know, super niche out of the gate
because, you know, that's going to be tough as well, but keeping it,
you know, sort of wide enough that you open yourself up to, you know,
more opportunities, but then also.
Not trying to do everything, not trying to do social media, marketing, websites,
SEO, and you know, all these services may be focusing on, you know, WordPress
development, let's say, that's still niche enough, you know, something
that's more hyper niche would be.
you know, WordPress development for law agencies or something like that, right?
that's something I probably wouldn't recommend somebody go
into, sort of as a starting step.
But keeping it wide enough and still sort of niche enough, you know, finding
that balance is probably a good way to protect yourself a little bit from from
those, you know, 500 jobs or whatever.
However, that being said, when you're getting started, you
do have to start somewhere.
So, you know, I always tell people I, you know, I'm a part of a
freelancing community, for example, and that's probably the most common
question people have is like, you know, how do you get started?
How do you get those first few clients?
And the reality is you're probably gonna have to make those 500 websites, you know,
for the first few times in order to build your network and build up your portfolio.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Matt: One of the first sets of clients that, my father and I ran into
because he had just a whole bunch of, other professional colleagues that,
that he knew was a big law firm.
And I remember sitting in that room and I was only at the time.
I don't know, early 30s or late 20s at the time.
And we're like, yeah, we, our proposal started 2, 500.
Right.
And then, you know, and I sit in the room and there's like 12
attorneys and they're looking at me and I'm looking at them and I go.
Did I say 2, 500?
I meant 250, 000.
I want to add a few zeros just looking at you all sitting in this room.
And that was this quick lesson, you know, that I learned about packaging,
you know, positioning, having a portfolio that you can lean on
experience and all this other stuff.
What I'm seeing today is even with AI, and we'll talk about that in a
moment and how fast you can rapidly develop with AI and the pros and cons.
The point I'm making is like this.
Human connection, I think is still the challenge, like it was a challenge for
me back then because I didn't know what I was getting myself into, I didn't know
the legal landscape, I couldn't speak to it, and today, human interaction,
packaging, presentation, experience, I think is going to be that next step.
You know, five years for boutique agencies and freelancers.
Like, how can you make this a human level that people are going to
appreciate, even though they might know you're using AI on the back end?
is that a fair assessment?
How do you think about human interaction relationships
Nat: Yeah.
No, that's a great question.
And I've seen that, I've seen those like types of posts on social media before.
It's like people that use AI tools are going to replace people that don't use
them versus as opposed to AI is going to replace us making websites, right?
So there's a distinction there.
And I believe in that, like, you know, use the AI tools in order to yeah.
Optimize your workflows a little bit and speed things up.
but you know, you still that like human interaction and that
customer service is still key.
I think for people as corny as that sounds, it's like, you know, you
know, customer service is number one.
Well, it is actually, you know, it sounds kind of funny, but, you know, we get
a lot of clients because people either don't deliver what they said they would
deliver, or they don't deliver fast enough, or they don't do a good enough
quality sort of product and stuff.
And so there's something to be said, there for sure.
And, yeah, I think, I think that humans sort of, yeah.
interaction is key, not just for, you know, taking care of your current
clients, but also, getting new clients.
So, you know, that personal touch is gone.
now you get like, you know, how many like newsletter or like sales
pitch emails do you get per day?
Right.
And they're all like generic and you can tell like nobody, it's
like an AI thing or whatever.
Somebody automated it, you know, what, you know, people are missing out on
these days is, you know, especially when they're looking at client acquisition
is that personal touch, like you said.
So, for example, the things that do work.
that work on me as a business owner, but also that work if you're trying to get
clients is something personalized, right?
Like, so you look at their website, you say, okay, this needs to be improved.
You record a video and you say, Hey, so and so here, I recorded a
video for your specific website.
Here's how we can improve it.
That's going to have a much, higher close rate than just like
a, you know, spam email or an AI generated sort of email or pitch.
Matt: Yeah.
One of the challenges we started to hint at it.
We talked about, some dialogue we might've had on Twitter with you
testing out web flow, maybe dipping your toes into that category.
Do you see.
The CMS, WordPress, the CMS as, I don't want to say challenge, but the idea
that folks have many choices now and we've been waving the flag for open
source and GPL and, you know, own your content and experience with WordPress.
But, you know, there's a lot of drama and issues in this last back half
of the year surrounding WordPress.
Then these WebFlows and Squarespace's, they look kind of nice and you're just
like, I just, I'll just pay you, you know, I'll just pay the monthly fee.
Where do you land now that you've had some time to experiment with
WebFlow and some of these other CMS's?
Nat: I mean, I still haven't found anything better than WordPress,
and I love to experiment.
I, and we also, you know, honestly, we didn't start off as a WordPress agency.
So I always say, like, you know, I'm not saying WordPress is
going to be our tool forever.
We might, you know, in the future, if.
Something better comes along and you know, we need to pivot.
We'll pivot just like we did in the past before WordPress was a thing But you know
through my exploration and some of these other tools, they all kind of have their
advantages and disadvantages I still think as an overall package and the value
that you get Out of WordPress still can't be matched by these other solutions.
with Webflow specifically, I think it's mostly branding.
You know, I've had clients like we want Webflow because it's new and it's cool.
You know, you can do animations and stuff and you know, things
can fly in and all that.
And I'm like, well, we can do that in WordPress too.
It's not.
Matt: Yeah.
Nat: but they're already sold.
They're like, no.
You know, WordPress is old.
Webflow is new.
We want the newest and greatest, you know, kind of thing.
And, I mean, that's always going to be the case.
Like I think your job as an agency owner and as a technology person is to educate
your users a little bit as well to tell them why, you know, maybe, you know,
WordPress is a better option for them.
And, and to approach it that way, there's, you know, I've been, working
with Wix, Wix studio, quite a bit as well.
And there's, you know, some great stuff that they do really well that I think
probably WordPress can learn from, right?
you know, for example, it's super simple.
CMS solution, for blogs.
Like there's no, like it's, you know, it's a super easy, interface for clients
to go in and update or put in their content, whereas in with WordPress,
it's, it can be a bit challenging if you haven't used it before.
And, so yeah, we're always exploring, but you know, I, I haven't found anything
better than WordPress when it comes to the complete sort of package of offering
and features and stuff like that.
Matt: In your agency, do you have a, stack that you use
depending on the type of client?
And what I mean by that is I know some agencies are still running
Word with WordPress, but they're using that at the higher end.
And then they have at the entry level, they might use Webflow for
the entry level for like rapid development and deployment of.
Whatever the client's, situation is, but interior to WordPress, do you have a
particular stack you say, okay, if this customer is below X amount of dollars,
we're just going to give them, I don't know, cadence theme with this template
and we, you know, we move on, like, do you have those kinds of stacks that you
use depending on the type of client?
Nat: Yeah.
we have, we actually use Elementor pro for 90 percent of the projects.
we use bricks as well.
In some cases, we're still exploring it a little bit.
we like page builders, because they.
Are easy for the client to maintain their content later
and pages and stuff like that.
and for us, we've worked with it for years that we know it's rapid for us,
no matter what, if we're making a small website or a large website, you know,
all of my staff, they're like trained on Elementor and Bricks and they can get
a site up, up and running in no time.
the issue with those page builders sometimes is the, perceived
like performance and, you know, people run into issues with.
You know, slowness and stuff like that.
But what we found through working with both of those three years is
that we know how to use them properly and how to tune them that, you know,
we still get excellent, page speed results as well using those builders.
And so we try to standardize as much as possible.
So every website, you know, we're not going to use cadence on one generate press
on another element or on a third one.
We like to use Elementor on all of the websites so that like we
basically, you know, we're very familiar with it and super quick.
It just kind of improves our workflow and speeds things up significantly.
Exactly.
Matt: somebody from my YouTube channel sent me a contact, form asking, like,
she is, getting a little bit more serious about her freelance and agency work.
And she was asking me like, Hey, I'm drowning in options, you know, out here.
Right.
It's just like, I heard Elementor is good.
I heard Elementor is bad.
I heard Cadence is good.
I heard Bricks is, you know, there's all these things that if you're looking to.
Start your freelance business.
I mean, God, imagine what your customer is going through.
If you're having these challenges, your customer is having the same thing.
I'm sure I wrote back and I was like, look, I think if you're
looking for an ecosystem within an ecosystem, Elementor is your best bet.
if you're looking for all the tools, you're looking for one place to go and
learn this stuff, Elementor, possibly Divi, with their new version coming.
and then you started like.
You take a step back and you go, okay, if you want a hybrid theme, you know,
you're not going to have all the, like the popups and the email SMTP service, like
the whole robust ecosystem that Elementor has, but you want a hybrid approach.
Then it's like a cadence or a generate press.
And then if you want like core experience, you know, get ready with
2024, you know, and just like launch a site, install jetpack and move on.
There's like these three tiers.
it's interesting how, WordPress is shaping, the tooling around
WordPress is shaping up.
I don't have a direct question there, but I don't know if you have any
other thoughts on like any kind of like tier that you see happening
with how people use WordPress.
Nat: Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's a great question and a great point where, like imagine
what clients are going through and they're trying to decide what, you
know, what stack to use for WordPress.
What I usually recommend to freelancers and agencies is To actually just like
learn one deeply versus, playing around with generate press, playing around
with cadence, playing around with Elementor and Divi because all of them
work slightly differently and you're not really going to get into those
nuances without learning one deeply.
And that's why we use Elementor.
We find that between Elementor Pro.
Building the layouts in Elementor Pro and doing some custom code stuff that we
pretty much can do everything with it.
And, you know, you get to learn some of those nuances.
For example, you know, if you have a slider, why can't I lazy
load my background images, right?
That's going to be very specific to Elementor.
Some performance tools will be able to do it a certain ways.
Other ones don't, won't.
And I'm sure there's a bunch of little nuances like that for Divi as well, right?
Or GeneratePress or whatever, right?
So, you're not gonna really learn those and have as much experience
if you're using Different kind of tiers and solutions, I think.
So my advice has always been to agencies and clients is to focus
on one and kind of learn it deeply.
And we've had some great success that way.
We, you know, created a bunch of content around Elementor Speed, more
specifically, where we've had clients approach us to be like, we love Elementor.
We want to stick with it.
We have an existing site.
The speed's killing us.
Can you fix it for us?
Or can you create a site that's like done properly in Elementor that, you know,
meets PageSpeed Insights and gets great scores on mobile and stuff like that.
Matt: Yeah, I wonder if you can give us some insight into how you
have, created a sustainable agency.
and let me frame it for you.
When I started my agency, I was doing everything.
and it was, you know, selling, supporting, launching, designing, developing.
So there's always this moment where you go.
I can't grow this business if I'm doing this.
And the first thing I peeled off was I can't do design and do all
this other stuff, hired a designer.
Then I quickly realized I can't do the development with this
designer and grow the biz, hired a developer, so on and so forth.
Project manager, accounting, office management, all this
stuff slowly, just like.
Pulling myself out so that I could sell and grow, the agency.
how, what does your internal workflow look like?
Customer knocks on the door, I want to quote, and then what happens
Nat: Yeah.
so for us, I'm in charge of the sales mostly and, I was doing.
Matt: The most fun part.
Nat: fun part.
Yeah.
And I was doing, some project management as well on the, you
know, various development projects that we have in the, on, on the go.
I started like you, I had, you know, I was a one man show for years and years.
And then I realized, okay, you know, as I was starting to do a little bit more SEO
and marketing, I was getting more leads.
And so I was like, okay, well, I can't be doing both.
I can't be building sites and.
you know, doing the sales and project management and all that other stuff.
So I hired a developer first, so I hired a developer and then I
hired another developer and then I hired a designer and so forth.
So now my team is seven people plus me.
And, just through like different needs and things that we
had, the different projects.
that's how the team kind of grew sort of organically in terms of the workflow.
so we have leads coming through mainly through SEO, through our
website or through referrals.
we usually start off with some like pre qualifying questions in
terms of, you know, their budget.
We tell them our pricing up front, just because we don't want to waste their time.
We don't want to waste our time in terms of like jumping on a
call and trying to do sales.
If you know, their budget is a thousand dollars and our minimum
site is like five, there's no point really you know, wasting their time.
And so we try, we start with some pre qualifying questions.
if they're a good fit, I start off with an estimate, more detailed sort of project
proposal in terms of this is what you get.
This is how much it's going to cost and so forth.
After they accept that.
Then we do, sort of like a, we have a checklist, a sort
of a startup questionnaire.
and then once that's done, we assign a developer to it, or a designer and
a developer to work through those specs and sort of give them their
sort of phase one of the project.
And all that happens fairly quickly for us.
My latest hire has been, like a client manager.
So that's been really nice as well, where somebody else can like.
Meet with the clients, you know, manage the product.
Matt: I remember that.
That was the best.
Oh, it was the best.
Nat: Totally.
So I have really cut down on my meetings.
Matt: Yeah.
Nat: Yeah.
So that's kind of, you know, sort of the beginning stages.
And then obviously there's a few iterations in terms of like the
delivery and the testing and the launch and, you know, pre and
post launch kind of checklist.
And, that's pretty much it.
We have, SOPs for all of those steps where we have, you know, certain steps that
get taken, depending on where the project is at and, works pretty smoothly so far.
I'm like a process improvement geek.
So, I love to dig into that stuff and improve things
when I see there's an issue.
So.
Matt: Yeah.
I'm curious how you, this is a more technical question, but I'm curious
how you handle, the workflow of designing, let's say front end design.
If you're using Elementor or making changes in Elementor or Bricks for that
matter, and you're making sort of like this code level adjustments, but it's.
in the actual page builder itself.
How do you handle that revisioning?
so if, you know, one developer front end developers working on your team,
then that person's out or transitions.
How do you like get that next developer up to speed?
If it's not generally in like GitHub, all version controlled, how do you solve that
complexity these days with page builders?
Nat: Yeah, that's a good one.
And we don't use get hub, or version control, but we use it sometimes only
if the client, if it's a bigger project and there's multiple developers involved
in, and it's developers that are not on, on my team as well, then we'll use get,
get hub, but it's, it's fairly, Yeah, it's fairly uncommon for us to do that.
So we mostly, use, Elementor Pro and then we use a certain, we put the code
always in certain areas so that we know exactly where to look if we have some
sort of, you know, cross development going on between the different developers.
However, I like to also keep consistency and keep one developer working.
on a project, mainly because of that reason, because there's not
a lot of cross training required.
in some cases, we do have more than one developer working on a certain project,
or we have somebody else take over if there's something that's a higher priority
or something that's a specialization of one of the other developers that
they have to jump onto something else.
So the key there is to keep everything in one place.
So, for example, for us, if we're doing certain types of changes, we'll put
everything Elementor has their own, like custom code sort of section where you
can add different snippets and like, you know, styling or code changes.
So they're always in one place.
They're always named a certain way and we know exactly where to
look for other types of changes.
We also always use, child theme.
So for other types of changes, they're always in the child theme.
So you always know, you know, where to look for certain things so that
we don't like overwrite or clobber.
other people's changes, in terms of the design itself and the actual development,
we always start with either a Figma design, where we get the client to,
approve the design and Figma before we started developing it, or we do
write an element or, like a homepage.
Design initially and then they approve that and then we
proceed with the other stuff
Matt: Yeah.
Nat: And so those are kind of the two approaches if it's more design heavy a
design heavy project where we think okay This has to be done with a little bit
more care we'll do everything in Figma first, but sometimes we go straight into
Elementor and we just Put up a home page and get them to provide feedback on that
Matt: The dedicated listener is going to be sick of hearing me talk about this AI.
I've been, learning it, in an intense fashion.
I'm building micro little ad hoc react apps.
I'm not touching WordPress, but it, what it has done for me is give me a renewed.
sense of appreciation for WordPress, right?
Like I could go and build my air quotes own WordPress with like Claude
and cursor and deploy all this stuff.
That's great.
But if it's just there in that one instance, there's nobody maintaining it.
There's no one critically thinking about it.
Certainly not this guy.
And I'm not going to patch it and make any kind of security updates.
So I have this like renewed, you know, you know, thankfulness for WordPress
and like all of the stuff that happens, because now you look at that,
if you spend like two weeks using.
A.
I.
To code stuff for you.
You'll go.
Oh, you know what?
Just give me this wordpress thing off the shelf.
I don't care if it's old.
You know, I like it.
first sort of broad remark from you.
What's your take on A.
I.
In impacting your business?
Nat: yeah, it has been great.
I think, you know, for us, we use it daily, for various things.
we do a bit of SEO as well.
It's very helpful there in order to do planning and get ideas in
terms of content, and so forth.
We use it also for creating content for clients when they're stuck
in terms of not being able to.
Figure out like what type of pages do they need?
What type of content did they need on those pages as a starting point where
we give them sort of a blueprint.
and they use it as a starting point to develop their content for their website.
We also heavily use it for, Plugin and for customizations on WordPress specifically.
So the chat bots are really good, or chat clients, AI or open ai.
and Claude are very good at sort of understanding the WordPress sort of
context as well, so you can ask it some very specific WordPress related questions.
You know, I'm trying to make this and this plugin.
How would you approach that?
And it gives you some snippets that you can use in order to get a, get
a starting point and it's helpful.
I find even with the senior.
Developers where it gives them sort of an idea of, you know, if they're not familiar
with a particular thing that they can, you know, they're not going to copy and paste
that code, obviously, you know, they're gonna, but it will give them ideas.
Oh, okay.
This is where I should look.
This is the hook, or this is what is possible with this plugin or that plugin,
in order to, use it as a starting point.
So we like.
Now, I think we use it so much.
I don't, it's one of those things you couldn't, we couldn't live without it.
You know, we didn't know what we had, we didn't have before, but
definitely it's a renewed, our, also appreciation for WordPress.
And like you said, the stability of the platform and the having the team behind
it to, you know, patch it and improve it and continue to evolve it as well.
Right.
Matt: Last month.
Last month or a couple months ago, I was talking to my brother and he
was like, oh, if I would pay chat PT like 400 bucks a month, you know, for
like the value that I get out of it.
And then they came out with their pro version last week for 200 bucks.
I sent him a, yeah, I sent him a text message.
I, I hope you're on that 200.
He was like, oh, well no.
Well, I'm not gonna get on it yet.
I'm like, oh,
Nat: That's right.
Matt: Praying to your AI gods now, huh?
For a lower price.
Yeah, no, that's fantastic.
I've been looking at it as, WordPress, AI plus WordPress.
Hopefully AI helps extend and augment that.
Um.
the stack that we already have, like you shouldn't replace it.
And I've been thinking like we might get to a point in agency world.
And I'm curious, obviously on, on your take on this, but I think we might be
looking at a pricing grid for agencies in the future where it's like, how many
humans do you want on your project?
Do you want one?
And 90 percent AI, or do you want five in 50 percent AI?
And it's going to be just, I don't have a reference for it yet, but
it's just gonna be wild to see how pricing and how we put humans in front
of the client for that experience.
Just like we're buying CPUs on a server.
It's very matrix and scary to think about it that way, but it's like
five humans on this project is going to be a hundred thousand dollars,
you know, and the customers will be like, yes, I want more humans in
Nat: That's right.
That's right.
You already see that in the S.
C.
O.
World for content creation, right?
So it's like, you know, almost every content agency now is like
human generated content or A.
I.
Content.
Do you want one or the other?
Right?
And so it's I could see that happening as well in the WordPress development world
or website development world in general.
I think, you know, I've played around with the A.
I.
Tools.
I don't know if you have in terms of these, AI web builders and stuff.
None of them have made me scared enough to, you know, to look to shut the
agency down, yet, but you never know.
I mean, you know, I've, you know, I'll always refer to something.
I've been doing this for a while.
I've had my business since 2007 and, you know, we developed everything
from scratch in those days.
So when these.
Web builders came along.
I'm like, Oh crap, we're going to be out of a job.
Like Wix came on.
I think one of the first ones where it's like, make your own website.
Right.
I'm like, man, I don't know.
I think my days are numbered, right?
Like, I don't know how long we're going to be making websites for people.
And you know, more and more of those tools started to like come up in
terms of, you know, this thing can do everything and the client is going to
do their, do this thing on their own.
And I've stopped worrying about that because.
I've been in tech long enough to know that, you know, something that
proliferates as much as WordPress did, it's going to be very hard to
replace and it's going to take forever.
And then the second thing that I realized in my career is that the clients that
want to do it on their own, you probably don't want them as clients, you know,
so they're always going to find a way to do it on their own and you shouldn't
be trying to win their business.
You want clients that, you know, Are focused on growing their business
and leaving the web development or marketing or whatever up to professionals
that, you know, do it for a living, no matter what tools we use, right?
Matt: Yeah, one of the things that we were talking about earlier is like, how
do we, you know, combat the 500 website builder and a lot of this AI stuff, at
least the stuff that I've been using to make like these react apps, what
that has done is throw me down this rabbit hole of understanding all of the
frameworks that exist out in the world.
And you're just like, Oh, like, this is why there are.
People looking at WordPress going, WordPress, that thing's 20 years old, when
somebody's like, you have to run this new framework that's only 6 months old, made
by 2 people living on top of a mountain, you know, somewhere, and you're just like,
wait, this is the one I should be using?
And what I've come to realize is, this, what this AI tooling does, maybe
specifically with like React apps, I don't know, but this is just what I have found.
Is this almost feel like AI feels like the page builders for WordPress 15 years
ago for that world and I've seen this social shift just like I saw 15 years ago,
people going, don't use a page builder.
You're crazy.
Build it by hand.
That's the right way to do it.
Now I'm seeing these people in these JavaScript frameworks, forums and
stuff go like, don't use AI, you know, you know, you have to build it
by hand, you know, don't trust us.
And I'm looking at this going.
Yeah.
I heard you people 15, 20 years ago in WordPress.
So guess what?
It's coming for you just like it came for us.
Nat: That's right.
That's right.
It's so funny.
I think that debate still goes on page builders are crap.
Got to do a scratch or it's not good.
Right.
And, it's so funny.
I've had, I don't know, we, I feel like almost.
One or two a month.
you know, the projects that we do is converting.
Custom developed WordPress websites, Intel, a mentor, because the clients are
sick of not being able to update anything.
So there's that side of the equation as well.
Matt: Yeah.
He's Nat Militech.
You can find his website, cleowebsites.
com.
You can find him meming away at x.
com slash nat militech.
Nat, where else can folks go to say thanks?
Nat: hit me up through my website.
That's my primary mode of communication.
or, I'm on all the socials.
I'm trying to be a little bit more on LinkedIn.
So, connect with me on LinkedIn.
Matt: You and me both.
I'm just trying to make a chat bot to do it for me.
Oh, thanks.
Thanks everybody for listening or watching today.
So the WP minute dot com, the WP minute dot com slash subscribe to stay connected
and we'll see you in the next episode.