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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.
Matt Medeiros (00:01)
Roger Williams, welcome back to the WP Minute.
Roger Williams (00:04)
Thank you so much for having me back.
Matt Medeiros (00:07)
I was doing one of those things where it like I had a million things on the screen and I was like, I could open up Riverside and I open up another tab real quick to type in Riverside and then go to another tab to finish what I was doing. And I typed in Roger Williams in the the tab thinking of like Riverside Roger Williams. I just typed it in, hit enter, went back to something I was doing and I was like Google results for Roger Williams. Like, what the heck is this? I wanted Riverside. But thanks for being here and excited to dive into what you've been up to lately.
Roger Williams (00:36)
No, man. Computing is hard. Like let's just make sure the kids understand this. Like we're trained professionals.
Matt Medeiros (00:40)
Yes, yes,
yes, it looks easy, but unfortunately we struggle. ⁓ What have you been up to? I want to start with talking about events. I'm going to CloudFest for the first time, CloudFest Miami or US in Miami next couple weeks. ⁓ Will I see you there and what else have been up to in terms of like events and people you've been meeting?
Roger Williams (00:58)
Yeah.
Yeah, no, absolutely. So yes, I will be at CloudFest USA in Miami, Florida. That is the first week in November, so coming up here really soon. It will be my first time attending the US event. I did the CloudFest in Germany, which is just CloudFest, ⁓ earlier this year. And that was a whole experience. Have you ever done that one?
Matt Medeiros (01:29)
I have not.
Roger Williams (01:30)
Wow, I mean, so it's in an amusement park. It's, think Disney World or Disneyland, roller coasters and so that's an experience. But so I'm really looking forward to CloudFest USA. ⁓ I have ⁓ very little like expectations other than the fact I'm gonna see my favorite awesome people, yourself included. ⁓ There's gonna be some interesting talks. ⁓ I saw.
that there's gonna be some good AI agentic talks, which is something that I had a lot of interest in, I don't know, six or eight months ago, and then the rest of the world universe has been hitting me with stuff, so haven't been on the ball as much with that. really interested in connecting with people. It's a hosting event.
but the customers are the hosts, right? It feels like, from what I understand, and that's kind of how the CloudFest in Germany one was. I'm just going as kind of, I'm representing Kinsta there, but we're not gonna have a booth. It's just gonna be me, ⁓ which will be kind of a nice change, to be honest with you.
Matt Medeiros (02:43)
You don't want to have to wrangle
the team of everybody, all the travelers, hey, meet in the lobby by 9 a.m., et cetera, et
Roger Williams (02:50)
You know, it'll be unfortunate. I won't have a team, because I do like having the team, but you know, I won't have to have the booth and just kind of the, you know, I enjoy the booth because it creates a place where people can like talk to me and it's like, it's okay. Like it's understood. We're going to talk about some hosting and stuff. ⁓ But it will be kind of a relief to not have that and just be able to mingle.
go and actually hear some talks. ⁓ know, shocker, there's actually interesting information being shared at these things. ⁓ And so, yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. How about you? What's taking you to CloudFest?
Matt Medeiros (03:27)
So a lot of friends in the community are saying, Matt, you should go. And well, the WP Minute just launched a hosting course. So it would be a smart move to represent that sort of like new path of content and education here. So there's that. And I am looking forward to seeing something different and being at a different event that's not just a WordCamp. It's been a while. I think the last non-WordCamp
or non-wordpress event that I went to was HubSpot inbound when it was last here in Boston, which was many years ago. And that was a massive event. That's huge. I don't know, like 40,000 people. But that was cool to just be and have a different energy. really looking to have that new vibe, which we haven't had in a while, or which I haven't had in a while. And some of the Rocket Genius guys will be there at the tail end of it.
as well, so I'll be excited to see them as well. I will agree with you 100%. Like the not doing a booth thing is just a massive like stress relief. You know, that was something I never knew until I Rocket ⁓ Genius Gravity Forms. Like setting up a booth, preparing the booth, being in the booth, like we make a bunch of like space Lego stuff, like we have to build all that. Like we have to get the t-shirts out, we have to get the stuff out, you know, whatever.
the ⁓ venue builds the thing, but then you come in and finish it all, and man, it's a lot of work. Spend some time at your friend's booth and appreciate the work at the next event you go to, for sure. Yeah.
Roger Williams (05:07)
Absolutely, ⁓
No, so super exciting. And you just mentioned something I wanna kinda digress here already and take over your show from you. ⁓ This hosting training course, you sent me the link to take a look at it. I clicked on it, I started looking at it, and then I was like, wait, I have a job. I need to get back to work here. ⁓ Talk to me a little bit about this thing. What was the impetus behind creating this?
Matt Medeiros (05:23)
Hahaha
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So for the SCC, Kinsta is a sponsor of the WP Minute, so I have to declare that. This is still a friendly conversation with my pal Roger, but your company graciously supports the WP Minute. And I'm always looking for more value to provide to sponsors, right? You and I have talked about this. We talked about this a little bit at PressConf, this past PressConf, and ⁓ we've talked about it online for a little bit.
You know where I was going with the direction of the WP minute like just the news cycle as you know is you know, it's either like it's up and down and Oftentimes it's for the bad reasons why like it's up It's not really ever like this massively exciting news cycle of things happening. So covering just news As a publisher and as somebody trying to provide value to sponsorships that only goes so far and I wanted to do something
that an audience could find value in and my sponsors could find value in. And that's hosting, bringing that education to freelancers and WordPress agencies that don't know anything about hosting. Because you and I have been in this business long enough that a lot of people who, one of the reasons why WordPress gets a bad rap, security, it's too slow, I don't get any support, like nobody can help me figure this thing out. And a lot of that,
is hosting, right? Like if that user made the right choice of hosting, whether they're an end user or an agency, if they made the right choice, the overall experience of WordPress would be elevated. And, ⁓ you know, the flag that I'm flying for the next, you know, from here on out is unapologetically supporting WordPress because I want WordPress to survive in this AI world.
Roger Williams (07:02)
⁓ Yeah.
Yes.
Matt Medeiros (07:32)
in this tough news cycle world, and I'm just gonna be like, I'll help WordPress however I can to win. And that's the impetus behind starting this course and a bunch of other courses that we have coming out.
Roger Williams (07:45)
I it. I love it. this is great. We're segueing all day today, just so you're aware. So this segue is perfectly into, I've been doing a lot of events, and a couple of weeks ago, I was at Brighton SEO San Diego. And I presented on how hosting is the fundamental, it's the foundation of your SEO work, right? Because...
Matt Medeiros (07:46)
You
Roger Williams (08:10)
if your website is not loading or it's not loading quickly, all of this work that you're putting into your site is for not. And so it was a fun conversation. I was able to go over just a lot of how hosting affects SEO really specifically, but also kind of just giving people some insights into what to look for in a host, right? It was not just an advertisement for Kinsta. I plugged Kinsta at the very end, right? Just saying, hey, that's where I work. But...
You know, I really want people to understand how to evaluate hosts. And it sounds like this training program is exactly doing that. So I would highly recommend everybody check out the training program. ⁓ You know, there's a lot of things I talk about in that talk, but you one of the big things that I like to highlight on is service level agreement, right? The SLA. And we usually see like the standard anymore is 99.9%.
That's what we offer at Kinsta and many other hosts offer that. We also do 0.99 for an additional fee. there's two parts of the SLA that people need to be aware of. The first one is, what does 99.9 % SLA mean? That means roughly you get about 43 minutes of allowable downtime in a month before you're in violation of the SLA. So that's the first component.
The second component though, which is equally as important is, okay, what happens when the host violates that SLA? And when you look at a lot of hosts websites, they don't really fill in the details, right? They're just like, yeah, there's an SLA. And then it's like, okay, what actually happens when that is violated? And so what I encourage people to do is read through the terms and conditions.
and look for, what is gonna happen? Because it's technology, right? Things break. This idea that there's a 100 % uptime, there are systems, these high availability systems that are available out there where you're gonna pay a ridiculous amount of money and most sites don't need that. Technology breaks, right? You have downtime. What happens when that downtime, that SLA is violated?
is really important, right? And so what you should look for is some sort of a partial refund, right? Like the hosting company should go, hey, you had downtime that went over the SLA by X, here's a partial refund based on what you're paying us. We're sorry, we're gonna do better. And the reason I think that's important is not because you're gonna make oodles of cash getting refunds.
It's because most businesses are not in the business of returning money to their customers, right? And so it should hold them to their word of, hey, we don't want to give money back to the customer. We're going to do our best to not violate this SLA. so anyway, just to kind of get sidetracked there a little bit, I love talking about this stuff. You know that.
And I think it's really, about educating the customer. And obviously I'd love it if they all hosted with Kinsta. The reality is that people have different preferences and different needs. What I really want them to do though is just be educated, right? Look for a good SLA, look for backups. mean, come on, it's 2025. If you don't have backups in your hosting plan, I'm scared for you. I don't know.
Matt Medeiros (11:54)
Yeah.
Roger Williams (11:55)
How about you? What
are your top things for in a hosting? And let's talk about the people that are just starting out, right? I understand Kinsta is a premium brand. Not everybody who's starting out, maybe they got a side hustle. They don't necessarily want to go and spend all that money on the hosting. They maybe want to save a little bit. What are things that you recommend people look for when they're first starting out, maybe a side hustle type thing?
Matt Medeiros (12:20)
Yeah, inside the course, what I built was a calculator. I actually built it with Telix, the AI tool from Automatic. It's a block that I built. And ⁓ I built in a bunch of ⁓ feature requests. you were mentioning SLA or custom SLA or custom terms of service and agreements and all that stuff. The calculator, when you first load it up, it just starts out as shared hosting, right? Simple site, low requirements. As soon as you start to dial up like, ⁓
Roger Williams (12:27)
Ooh. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (12:49)
bandwidth usage, page views, database size, file storage size, or you start checking off the boxes of like, I need a custom SLA with this, or this needs to be, you know, seven nines of uptime. ⁓ It starts to rank up things like enterprise hosting, manage WordPress hosting, custom hosting, all this other stuff. So it really helps that person, hopefully it visualizes for the...
new freelancer or new hopeful agency owner coming into the space like, oh, I never even thought that my customer's project requirements are going to change the hosting. Because that's how I learned, right? I was in hosting before I started my agency, but this was a zillion years ago, so hosting WordPress was so different than hosting, we were hosting front page sites. This was like, don't know, this was like whatever. But that's how I learned as I got into the
the space and started selling bigger projects, I was just like, why is this not running on a $10 shared VPS, you know, with C-PAL on it? But that's how I learned and I didn't learn and those failures helped me learn and elevate that. Then I worked at Pagely and then really started to understand. But I think that the most important thing is, as somebody's getting started out, is you don't just have to look at hosting as this like throwaway
or like sublet it out kind of thing like, yeah, go get your hosting over there. What you really want to do is get your one, two, three top hosts that you think are going to fit the type of clients you're servicing and really start to build relationships with them. Sure, some of them have affiliate programs, some of them have like white label selling. That's cool, right? But really start to understand how they're going to best help with your client.
because that client relationship is like the most important thing aside from getting paid by the client, right? To like keep them long term. The last thing you wanna do is try to like shortchange the client and just like you're afraid to say like, well, you might need to pay $50 a month to host this website, you know? And you're afraid to like have that conversation because you're used to them paying five bucks a month. Have the conversation, be transparent and be honest. The second thing that I've...
Roger Williams (14:51)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (15:13)
I failed at because I had a hosting background was when I started my agency was I started hosting sites for clients. So I got my own Linode server or whatever it was back then and I started hosting. So in the beginning, hey, profits are great. Like if I get a bunch of these customers, I'm a mini hosting company. did that in the past. Now, like this is awesome for the agency. It's a lot of revenue. However,
as soon as the kernel needed to be upgraded on the Linux server or there was a security issue in the MySQL package, then I was like, my God, I'm on the hook for this over the weekend, which is what I don't want to do having clients yell at me. So that was another thing where I went in the total opposite direction. was like, no, no, no, I'm the host. I got it. Come here. ⁓ We'll host it for you. And then when the problems hit the fan, that was the big challenge and a fast way to lose customers.
So again, leaning back on transparency and looking at it as, if Kinsta might be 50 bucks a month for a couple of websites, no big deal, you can also pay me to manage that, right? And be more honest about that. Like I'm the guy you're gonna call anyway, you're not going to call Kinsta because you're the customer and you don't know how to debug these things. I'm gonna do it, so you pay me the management fee. So it's really about like maturing yourself as a business and understanding your value.
even if your customer might be paying a hundred bucks a month to host their website. It's okay to have that conversation ⁓ because their business is important and so is the relationship between you and them and the agency. So you want to secure that. So those are my two pieces of advice. Like being super transparent with the customer and building relationships through folks like you at Kinsta ⁓ because it's going to be a win-win for everybody.
Roger Williams (17:02)
No, man, I love it, I love it. And you I think you hit on a really important concept there is the value, right? And so another thing I talk about in my presentation is there's metaphor I've been using, I don't know, 20, 25 years now is ⁓ your website is like a house, right? And so you've got the domain names, the address, that's how people find you. The house, the building is your website, right? You're modifying it and doing all the stuff. But the hosting is the foundation, right?
It's the plot of land that you're building all this stuff on. It's got the infrastructure, bandwidth, power, all the stuff to make it work. And if you start thinking of it in terms of like an actual building, think of your website as a business. well, traditionally, before the web, you would go get a storefront. How much are you spending a month for a storefront?
right, and now compare that cost to your web hosting. like, it shouldn't even be a discussion. The client should just be like, my God, I'm saving so much money, regardless of what the hosting costs, right? And so I think as agencies and as developers, we need to really take a step back and reframe these conversations with the customer of, hey, it's not the cheap, it's not how cheap we can get the hosting. It's the fact that the hosting,
allows your business to actually have a storefront. And when we compare that to having a brick and mortar storefront, I mean, it's a fraction, right? It's a rounding error ⁓ compared to like having a physical store ⁓ and then the insurance and all the additional costs, staff and all this stuff. I think when we start putting it in that terms, it should just dissolve away from the customer. And instead,
Matt Medeiros (18:40)
Yeah.
Roger Williams (18:57)
I we should be focusing the customer on the potential. Hey, when this website is up and running, how much money can your business now generate because you've got it open 24 seven, the lights are always on. People could come and buy from you at 2am on Saturday when you're on vacation and it's still ⁓ working for you. ⁓ So really like focusing that way. ⁓ I don't know.
I love having these conversations and framing it all this way. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (19:29)
wanna ask you about the Brighton SEO and some of the conference that you went to and maybe some of the stuff that you picked up on with AI. And I'll try to build the runway for it and see if you can land the plane on these threads of thought. But I've been, I don't know, for the last two years really diving into the vibe coding thing and really analyzing the space from many different angles. How productive can I be with AI, number one? And the WordPress side, how does it track and report news about WordPress?
Roger Williams (19:41)
OK. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (20:00)
Spoiler alert, it's terrible. So I still have that job alive. ⁓ And three, what does it mean for a power user? I often joke that I'm not super technical. I'm not a developer, but I can do a lot more than a lot of people. And I'm a power user, and what can I build with AI that I would never have been able to do before? So I paint that picture to say that I've been in this app called Replet.
Roger Williams (20:03)
Hahaha!
Matt Medeiros (20:24)
And I've been using that as my canary in the coal mine to understand like where the direction of the industry is going. And when I started using Replet over a year ago, I could build like it would just rip through all those tokens, man. Like for 20 bucks a month, it would just boom. It would build it out. It wouldn't get it all right, but it was pretty good. And it would just like, OK, I need to fix this. Boom. And just ripped through another bunch of tokens and it would fix it. I was like, wow, this is only 20 bucks a month. I can't believe it. Right. And they do hosting. They do database. They do all this stuff.
And I was like, wow, this is pretty amazing. But now over the course of just a short year, I've witnessed what they've done. And this is the question is, I'm starting to see the true cost of AI starting to come out. Because now Replet's process for building is so much slower, right? Under the veil of, well, we gotta do it right. You can't just rip through all these tokens. You have to...
reanalyze the code, you gotta check for security, gotta do database optimization, and what it's starting to do is stack on what I might call these accessories to the process, to now where my bill is like four to five times the cost of what it used to be. I mean, it's only like 100 bucks as I experiment with this stuff, it's fine, but I'm witnessing some of the projects that I've built, just like the cost, the incremental cost keeps going up, and the speed to development is going slower. Now, could I do this?
By my, could I do this without Replet? No, I understand it. But what I'm getting at is like, we're starting to realize this true cost of vibe coding and AI coding. think over the next year, we're gonna see that spill out even more where once we were paying 20 bucks, it's gonna be minimum 200 bucks to do what we did, is my theory. So the runway there is, what's your take on like AI site building? Did you learn or see anything?
⁓ explicitly at Brighton SEO that impacts hosts in the AI space.
Roger Williams (22:23)
Great question. ⁓ I love this. ⁓ It's so tricky, tricky landing. It's almost, it's almost Matt as if we've been being sold on a dream of an easy click button that will just answer all of our problems and provide us with exactly what we want. And what we're seeing is we're kind of waking up a little bit from this dream, right? AI is amazing. I use AI every single day.
Matt Medeiros (22:29)
You
Roger Williams (22:53)
I've got chat GPT open here. I've got a couple of tabs of it open because I can't just have one prompt going at a time ⁓ It's absolutely amazing. It's absolutely a game changer. It enhances my work. It speeds me up It does not replace a lot of fundamental things
And actually Adam Silverstein had a really great presentation at WordCamp US this year. He went through all these developer tools that he'd been working on and he was using them to create plugins and I encourage people to go look up that talk on WordPress TV. But when I was talking with him about it, you know, the big thing that kept coming up was...
These tools don't replace, they enhance. And so if you come, whatever you're coming to the tool with is where you're gonna start from and you're gonna be able to build from there. But.
Like when you go to do revisions and you go to make changes that's where things really kind of start falling apart and and we're having a solid CMS like WordPress as the foundation for your website is still absolutely critical ⁓ Securities a big one But just overall like stability and performance are just massive that these tools just skip over right and and we're also seeing the costs go up so, you know talking specifically
specifically at Brighton SEO, there were a ton of vendors that were offering a lot of SEO enhanced tools. There was one pretty cool one where you basically gave it your knowledge base and it would start generating documentation for you and for the customer. And these are very slick packages of what generative AI does, but you
If you just fire up chat GPT, you can create prompts, can create projects, can create custom GPTs to do a lot of this. ⁓ So these services that are built on top of the generative AI, there's some that are really cool and neat. Personally, I just go straight into chat GPT. It's the one that I like. I like the memory feature ⁓ because my memory is so terrible at this point. Maybe it's a replacement for that.
⁓ What was more interesting I thought at ⁓ both Brighton SEO and then I was at Digital Collegium, which is a higher ed focused conference, both of them very AI heavy conversations. And in both of them, it was talking about how do we use these tools to enhance our work? How do we use these tools to work better as teams? And then from like the SEO perspective is, okay, how does this change the game?
because people are using a chat GPT to search for things now, to get answers for things. So how do we get our product to start showing up in those? And the equation that somebody really succinctly broke down for me is ⁓ generative, ⁓ what GEO is, generative ⁓ engine optimization or something, is basically SEO plus digital PR.
Matt Medeiros (26:00)
Yeah, yeah, Yep.
Roger Williams (26:09)
plus social media. And so that's what all these generative AI tools are building from. And I think that's the important thing to keep in mind is these aren't thinking machines at this point, right? They're still ⁓ recreating information that exists out in the world. And so it's our job as creators to build websites that...
answer questions and have information readily available. Have deep information. Your about page should not just say, we have a great team of members and we do hard work for you. It should talk about you and who you are and where you came from and really set you apart. ⁓ Digital PR, right? This is where you're getting out and talking to people and you're trying to make sure you're crafting a message.
And then social media, right? You're participating in the conversations either around your brand or around the market. And ⁓ then the AI is kind of hoovering all this up. And so then getting back into your question about these tools and how these are being used, it's really this enhancement. We're really building on what we're already doing. ⁓ And so I'd love to hear what your take is on all that.
Matt Medeiros (27:32)
You know, so I try to listen, so I watch both sides of the spectrum as like a, I don't know, like a fan consumer of AI, like, as a spectator, I guess is the better word of AI, and just like being a technologist. So I watch the stuff that personally drives me nuts. I don't know why I do it, but it's like the ones that are like, I'm making $10,000 a day because of this AI thing. Because I want to, because I live that. Like when WordPress had its boom,
you were seeing those same types of, I'll call them opportunities, I guess, but you saw that same kind of opportunity when WordPress was growing up. It was like how to make a million dollars blogging. And then it was how to do this with membership sites. And then here's how to do this with courses, right? And we had like all of these similar waves. And I want to pay attention to how people are looking at that as AI, because to your point, mean, God, I remember as far back as Facebook pages, when Facebook pages came onto the scene,
and Facebook apps, like people were building little apps and like little page things to happen and people were profiting off of these features that eventually Facebook just said, nope, like not anymore, but they allowed it just like these tech companies allow APIs to be open for a certain amount of time until they hit max capacity or until they can realize that we've got enough active users, now we can turn that off and then get them into the platform and monetize it that way.
So I'm trying to find that same pattern happening. And like you said, a lot of these generative tools that sit on top of it, they're just gonna get swallowed up by what ChatGPT is gonna launch anyway. And again, another point of yours is ⁓ it's not thinking for you. It feels like it, and they're really trying to market it like it's thinking for you, but it's not. And I really think that this is just ⁓ really just them going after Google at the end of the day is just like,
going after Google search, right? Because it feels good, it's new technology, it's hype and a zillion dollars everywhere about it. And it's a great way for them to try to go land grab some of that search stuff ⁓ that Google owns so much of. My last point is, listen to it, so that's the lower end I pay attention to, then on the higher end, I listen to a lot of like enterprisey pod, not a lot, there's only a few, like enterprisey kind of podcasts that
break down what's happening with AI at the enterprise level. And it freaking blows my mind that nobody, even in these big organizations, really have a plan on how to leverage AI for their organization. It always comes down to them going, well, we just tell our team to play with it and learn it. What the, what is that? Where's the guidance here?
Roger Williams (30:23)
No, yep.
Matt Medeiros (30:28)
I struggle with this across the board with a lot of the recommendation is just go play with it. Well, if you're a leader in an organization and you're telling everybody AI is going to like take away our jobs, should at least you're the leader. You have to be giving me a path to say, I want you to learn and experiment fine. But here's how I want you to think about AI in our organization and, you know, like deploy against that. Or here's the things that leadership has come up with as a learning path and as a
gateway into AI because if yeah if it's as destructive as everyone's painting it out to be and the leaders are just like hey go learn it before we lose our jobs well man we're all gonna lose our jobs here so like that's what drives me nuts the most I mean I guess it's also a testament of how fast things are moving where people can't like really pin down one thing ⁓ so yeah like it's it's it's still such a moving target I was I've always been skeptical about it
About six months ago, was like, damn, this is pretty good. I started to feel really good. And then as I saw things slow down a bit on what, rep, lip, bolt, cursor ⁓ code, clod code, excuse me, ⁓ all this stuff, I was like, ⁓ I get it. They were just like, hey, come to our platform. We'll give you everything for free. Here's all this horsepower. And that's when it triggered my head like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen this before. I've seen this platform play before. So definitely augments.
the productivity, ⁓ there's definitely a lot of benefits to it, but I don't know anything about agentic and what that's gonna do and how that's gonna pan out. But from what I see right now, I'm like, I think my job's safe, I think, for a little bit longer. So anyway, that's where I'm at with that stuff. And it is fun, and it's great to just be on the cutting edge to pay attention to see how this is gonna impact everybody.
Roger Williams (32:10)
Ha ha ha ha.
Yeah.
Yeah,
kind of keeping on that thread just for a second. So there's a really great podcast I was introduced to recently, the Artificial Intelligence Show. And I'm going to forget the names of the hosts, but they're behind Maycon. OK. one great thing, so I urge everybody to start listening to their podcast, because they have two basic formats, right? The first one is kind of a news show. They're talking about the latest things happening in AI. And they give a really intelligent breakdown on that.
Matt Medeiros (32:33)
mic yep make on yep
Roger Williams (32:51)
And then the second format they've got is a question and answer show where they've got a course, which I need to get signed up for. ⁓ And anytime that people have questions in that course, they're taking those questions and they're answering them on the podcast. And they're just, the same questions you and I have, right? It's like, is this going to take my job? Is this going to lead to the end of the world? And then also a bunch more specific.
⁓ And recently they had a great conversation talking about AI policy inside of the company. And ⁓ this has prompted me to start creating a policy for my team first ⁓ and start dog fooding this. And I thought a really great insight that they put into AI policy in the company is do not focus on what not to do.
focus on what you can do and give examples. And I think that's where people are struggling, especially the non-initiated people who aren't like us tinkerers, ⁓ who are looking at this AI and they're kind of like, you know, I tried it once and it gave me some weird answers, so I don't like it. And it's like, well, you know, you gotta dig a little deeper. You gotta give it more and...
And so I think like helping your team members like really, hey, look, here's how I'm using it, right? Like, so I do, you know, interviews and I take that transcript and I have it generate a bunch of stuff for me, right? I have it generate my YouTube chapters and it just saves me so much time and does stuff I would never do, right? Like taking the time to create YouTube chapters is usually something I just skip over because I just don't feel like I have the time to do that.
⁓ And with these tools, right, I can generate it. Are they always perfect and exact? Probably not, but they're at least there and people can use them to jump around. ⁓ And so I think, ⁓ you know, for leaders, even if you're not a huge advocate for the AI, find somebody in your company who is and get them to start explaining to you how they use it. Maybe even just do a screen recording.
of them using the tool and then show that to the rest of the team, right? I think there's so much potential with these tools outside of the sales pitch that we're getting, right? The sales pitch is click the button, pay the fee, and everything will be happy. And the reality is it's the same thing as a word processor, right? Just because you have Google Docs doesn't mean you're gonna be Shakespeare, right? ⁓
Matt Medeiros (35:17)
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
Roger Williams (35:35)
you've got to now write it. And it's the same thing with AI. Just because you have AI doesn't mean it's going to generate WordPress, right? You've got to work with it. And I thought Adam's ⁓ conversation was really insightful for me, right? He's an expert developer. And he's pointing out, look, WordPress and these software platforms are very complex things, right? The idea that you're just going to click a button and it's going to create this.
with its decades of history as to why things were built certain ways, ⁓ it's not gonna happen maybe in the future. I don't know once the singularity happens, but at that point, you know.
Matt Medeiros (36:18)
I I
own my landscaping company by then, Roger. I just want to cut grass at this point. I don't even want, I don't want to do any of this anymore. ⁓ You know, I, we'll finish up on the AI stuff. One of the things, and this is me sort of admitting defeat to you, if you recall back at PressConf, I forget who we were talking to, but we were both sharing our podcasting knowledge and our like video production knowledge and stuff like that. And you were real proponent.
Roger Williams (36:20)
It's exciting times, yeah.
Matt Medeiros (36:47)
for where we're recording today, which is Riverside. And I was saying, yeah, but like, Descript can do all this stuff and Descript this, and you're like, well, know, Riverside has this, and I will tell you, it's what, we were there in April and we're in October, so six months. Descript has become the poster child for Too Much AI. And they were also backed really early by OpenAI, so I kind of feel like this is like their little laboratory OpenAI.
And now there's a new CEO. She was the product person. I she's great and she had a lot of great ideas. But the point is, is like, I think there's two sometimes these product companies go just too much in AI. Like I don't like Descript, for example, years use it for years for my podcast, editing audio, all the like the little quick AI tools like removing filler words, studio sound, all this stuff. Like they pioneered that I would say. And it's been it was great. But then they just went full force into like AI video editing.
and AI, like, avatar creation and like all this stuff and it's just like you have forgotten the podcaster. Like, I just want the tools to produce audio and video and get it out to the different channels that I go to. And now it's just like this completely different thing. ⁓ So now I'm fully on Riverside. like Riverside is just doing it all for me. I'm now, now I'm afraid because you have probably seen
Roger Williams (38:10)
haha ⁓
Matt Medeiros (38:16)
all the new tools and bells and whistles that Riverside have put in. Yes, that's nice. It's not as overly done as Descript, but man, I'm thinking to my like they just released AI audio editing for Riverside. Like you can just type to the thing. Man, I don't I don't want that. Right. I don't want to prompt my edit. I want to I know what I'm doing in terms of recording and all like the automated stuff that happens afterwards, like those clips and the transcripts and the chapters that it does. Fantastic.
Just leave it at that. You've got it. Like that's what I want. I don't need to talk to a command line interface to do my podcast and my YouTube stuff. I don't need it. So, you know, fully on Riverside now. And I just hope that they don't become like, we're just AI everything.
Roger Williams (38:49)
the
Yeah, so quick point on that just to keep going. First of all, I accept your defeat. ⁓ Thank you. No, it's all good fun. ⁓ It's interesting. Riverside is a little bit guilty. You mentioned, they've added this chat command. I tried it, I think, one time and I was like, no, no, no. This is.
Like, why are you, like things are going really well here. And then they've added this, like they had the cartoon avatar thing. And I'm just like, no, like what we're trying to create here is real conversation. And I think they should really like latch onto that, right? Because that's the next phase. Gary Vee is talking about how 2026.
Matt Medeiros (39:28)
Yes.
Roger Williams (39:46)
the big trend is gonna be real life experiences again. So he's like, there's gonna be people walking businesses, right? You're gonna be able to go, hey, come and meet with me and walk with me for 20 minutes. And it's already happening, right? These services are already popping up. And I think we've gone so far into AI, we've gone so far away from human interaction that we're starting to see people go.
Matt Medeiros (39:50)
Yeah, yeah.
Roger Williams (40:13)
you know, it would be nice is just to like talk to somebody about like their day. ⁓ And so, and I think with Riverside, with these tools, right, this, what we're doing right now, at some point, I guess, like Notebook LM, right, ⁓ I started playing with that. It's pretty freaky. ⁓ It's great for like creating a presentation, but for creating a conversation like this, like you can't replicate this, right? I mean,
for all of our faults and mistakes and everything, we're real two people talking with each other, sharing our emotional experiences. ⁓ I think Riverside should just latch onto that. ⁓ There's so much potential there. But yeah, man, you know, I'd love to talk about this stuff all day long, but it's your show. Where are we going? What are we talking about?
Matt Medeiros (40:57)
You
Yes, yeah, so let's wrap it up. ⁓ What's up
at Kinsta? Anything new, any new ⁓ announcements on the product side or anything you want to talk about on the Kinsta side? I did see, I won't spoil it, but I saw an email come in probably to the affiliate group about Black Friday stuff coming. Obviously I'm not going to hold you to pitch that stuff, but ⁓ anything that's new and exciting that the world should know about Kinsta?
Roger Williams (41:17)
⁓ yeah.
Yeah, so the most recent thing that we've rolled out is it's kind of like a back to the future situation. We've returned to bandwidth pricing as an option because as a lot of listeners are probably aware of, bot traffic has gotten out of control. At this point, it's just crazy. so one of the...
cool inventions in the last 10 plus years of the hosting world is this visits, selling hosting on visits. Because people can understand visits, right? It's like, if I get a thousand visits to my site, if I get 3 % of that to convert, yay, I can make money. ⁓ The problem is this bot traffic is eating up visits. And so we've come out with bandwidth pricing for people that wanna choose that.
and that basically absolves this ⁓ overage issue that was happening with the bots on the visits. So if anybody out there is getting frustrated with their visits or anything, come and give us a talk. If you're with Kinsta, talk with us. If you're not with Kinsta, come and talk with us. ⁓ So it's not revolutionary in any way. The whole time this has been being rolled out, I'm like, ⁓ this reminds me of 15 years ago when it was all about bandwidth. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (42:44)
Yeah
Roger Williams (42:46)
The issue that comes up is, again, people don't understand what bandwidth means. And so we have to do a little bit of education around that. But that's been interesting coming out. We do have a Black Friday sale coming up. I don't know the details of it yet, so I can't mess up and let that slip yet. But everybody should keep their eyes open. It's going to be a good one. And we've got some fun marketing coming with it. I'm not going to spoil anything, but.
Matt Medeiros (43:05)
Ha
Roger Williams (43:14)
there's some fun marketing that we're coming out with for it. ⁓ what else? The plugin auto update tool that we came out with last year, we've continued to refine. And I think especially for agencies, this is something to use to augment your existing maintenance program. It's not necessarily a replacement, although for end users of websites out there, maybe it is. But I think from an agency perspective, having the
plugin updates be somewhat automated. It's got the visual regression testing to catch any errors. Now frees up time for you to work on other things in the maintenance package, And, you know, working with the customer, maybe reviewing existing content to make sure it's ⁓ generative AI ready and things of that nature. So, you know, we're really working to make sure that agencies and end users of their websites can really stay focused on the WordPress side of things.
⁓ and we've got the rest of it taken care of for you. ⁓ I'm probably blanking on some other stuff, so ⁓ my marketing manager is going to get upset with me, but I think in general, our focus is always on support and really making sure that when you have a question about your hosting, we've always got somebody here to answer it for you. ⁓ And we're always happy to talk to you about your website in general, ⁓ even if it's out of our scope of support.
You know, I'm heading up our partnership program. yeah, let me mention that. We've relaunched our agency partner program. And so now we're focused not just on agencies that have a large plan with us, but agencies that refer clients to us. Now we're partnering with you. And you know, I've been doing this for over a year, but now it's really official. And we really want to work with our agency partners to help them grow their business, deliver more value to their customers. And so that's done through co-marketing activities.
and all types of fun things. So reach out to me if you've got questions about the Agency Partner Program. Love to work with you. And that's really it. I've got CloudFest US is coming up. I'm actually going to go to WordCamp San Jose in Costa Rica just before CloudFest. So I'll be there. My Spanish is muy mal, so have some sympathy for me. But I will have teammates with me who do speak Spanish, so that'll be great.
Matt Medeiros (45:27)
Ooh.
Roger Williams (45:39)
And then at the beginning of December, I'll be at Digital Summit Dallas. And I highly recommend people go and attend that. ⁓ Very focused on marketers and really helping you think about the next step, next progression in your career. There'll be a lot about AI, I'm sure, but really about thinking strategically, hey, how do I get my teams to start using AI more? So I would love to see you at any of those events. And of course, Matt, it'll be great to see you in Miami.
Matt Medeiros (46:10)
think one of the great things about Kinsta saving agency time so they can focus on other things will be going for walks with their clients. Hey client, let's just go for a walk because everything else is happening. Just talk to me about your business, which I've actually said is the key to the service's business. Roger, thanks for hanging out today. Everybody go to Kinsta.com, check out what they have to offer. Fantastic sponsors of the WP Minute. And when you take the course, ⁓
WordPress hosting decoded at the WPminute.com slash courses. You'll see their logo alongside of all the lessons because they help us do all of this great work for you, the WordPress professional. Roger, anywhere you want to point them to your social media so they can ping you when they see you at an event.
Roger Williams (46:54)
Yeah, come to LinkedIn. I love being on LinkedIn. Come say hi there. Leave some comments on my post. You're my best friend forever if you leave me a comment. You know, I've turned it away from that. I've turned it away from that. Yeah. They're not prioritizing it as much.
Matt Medeiros (47:03)
Vertical Video Man, that's the name we say behind the scenes. Okay, yes, yes, you did. I did notice that, you were right.
Fantastic stuff. Everybody else, thanks for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.