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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 (00:01)
Brian Richards, welcome back to the WP minute.
Brian (00:04)
Hey, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to get a time to chat with you.
Matt (00:09)
We are test flighting an app that I'm working on. So hopefully all things get recorded, sound good, look good, and everyone's happy.
Brian (00:18)
Yeah, I think the audience is going to enjoy the experience regardless, even if we have to record a second time.
Matt (00:25)
first time I tested this, I almost ran out of disk space. So
Brian (00:28)
That's
fun.
Matt (00:30)
So hopefully the new code changes have been applied. But that's not why you are here to just be my forced beta tester of software. you are relaunching relaunching LoopConf, and we're gonna get into why we're calling it I'm calling it a relaunch. You'll fill in the blank of how I look at that now, June sixteenth, June sixteenth and the seventeenth, twenty twenty-seven. I think it was supposed to be this year. Loopconf.com. Get your tickets now.
To help fund this wonderful event. Brian, again, welcome back to the show. What's happening with LoopConf?
Brian (01:07)
man, yeah. Relaunching is a really great label for it. It's the relaunch to the relaunch. So LoopConf was relaunched as an event in twenty twenty five after a long hiatus. I took the reins from our dear friend Ryan Sullivan before the pandemic picked up, and then the pandemic railroaded my plan to return to running physical events until last year when it happened in London, which was great.
And this year I was bringing it back to the US in my own backyard of Grand Rapids. And about six weeks, almost to the day before the event was scheduled to begin, just as I was ramping up for the full marketing launch because I was dragging my feet, our lead sponsor had to pull out, which sucks. I don't slight them for this. nobody wants to have to send that message.
but they were responsible for about eighty percent of my sponsor inventory and fifty percent of the operating budget overall. And as I evaluated my options, it was very quickly apparent that the only real option was to cancel the event as we had it planned for September and find a future date. Because either I was going to operate at a huge financial loss or
run a subpar experience and I was not interested in a subpar experience. Everything that I'm about is about the audience experience. So
Matt (02:45)
The last time you and I chatted was September well, the publishing date was September sixteenth, twenty twenty five, when you were when you and I talked about the UK event that you put on for LoopConf. your current sponsor is or the sponsor pulled out, which made things quite difficult. What are the challenges these days? You and I talked about challenges in twenty twenty five about in-person events, but I think a lot of it was through the lens of
Hey, we don't know what's happening with this AI stuff. we don't know what's happening with WordPress and people want humans again. is that still true a year later? And we'll definitely talk about what's happening with AI and WordPress at the back half of the show, but give us the rundown. running these events, challenging for sure.
Brian (03:31)
All all of those things are still true. Running a physical event has always been challenging. I have rather quite enjoyed it. My particular flavor of ADHD is I like learning and doing new things. And I happen to have inadvertently collected all of the different kinds of skills that are useful for organizing a conference, physical conference, virtual conference, you name it. And so I particularly like the challenge historically.
Now the problem continues to be that it is a difficult sell for sponsors because it is more important than ever for them to have to justify their ROI coming to an event. And I do believe there's an ROI for events. And if you are part of a team that has to regularly justify sponsors, I think the correct thing to lean into is that the conversations that happen at these physical events cannot be manufactured.
elsewhere. And even though they don't directly result in a sale, they frequently cannot, often they are assisting a sale down the road. But it's it's really hard to to trace that. And so when it comes to like how much money did we make from being at that event, the answer is frequently zero. And and I get that, right? Like I understand the plight of sponsors. And I hate having to like constantly help them
recognize the value that's there because sometimes it's it's not. And it's not just the cost of the sponsorship that they have to pay for, but it's also the cost of getting the staff there. All of the orchestration internally for like how they want to market and position and pitch, what they're doing at the event, then the cost of the staff being there, additional meals for things that they might be hosting, swag the booth cost for you know backdrops and and everything. Like it's
It adds up really quickly and it it gets really hard to justify for anyone who's not in the hosting business, who can quickly though difficultly justify the thing because it's you know, if they convert an agency who then brings multiple clients to their platform in a year, they're seeing all of that money back and then some. But for anyone else, such as Gravity Forms or you know individual shops.
It's a really tall ask. And I want more of those smaller orgs to be able to represent and show up and and show off. But like the the money just it doesn't work. And then the at the other end of it, attendees are equally difficult to persuade to be at the thing. The f I think we talked last year, right, that the
The way hybrid events emerged out of the pandemic revealed that there are functionally two different groups of people who come to events. So the people who are coming for the hallway track, like a summer camp reunion. I I want to have these conversations, I want to meet these people, I want, I want all of this stuff. And the sessions are just kind of like secondary background. Like, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe. And then there are people who are really interested in the sessions and the things that they're going to learn, and they don't really care about all of the other benefits. And
for a long time, it's been hard to get both groups back in a room together. And so we've seen across all kinds of events, across a variety of industries, that attendance is down, sponsor participation is down, the cost of organizing is up. And so economically, it is probably harder than ever to put an event together. It's the very long answer to your very simple question.
Matt (07:20)
You and I have chosen two terrible business models and that is to be sponsored by you know, for for us to get the work done, we must beg for dollars. I I you know, I'll I'll say that maybe you have a bit of an advantage because you have one big content thing that you do. I'll call it a content thing. You put out one big thing, and I'm trying to do this for a year long with sponsorships, and things are difficult, certainly in the WordPress space, to get those sponsorships. And I'm
I'm curious, I mean you've alluded to some of it, you know, these days is is sponsors want more for their money. I am trying to be optimistic, with a twist of pessimism, I c I guess, where you know, I I think we're on the cusp of from from well, here's what I see. Let me let me phrase it this way. Bigger brands are starting to tighten their their wallets again, right? and
In my opinion, it's because they're unsure if they want to invest in brand awareness in WordPress. And then second, those that do are again, big brands are saying, Hey, you know what? Instead of a sponsorship, which helps you do the actual work, how about we just sweeten the pot and give you like a sixty-eight percent affiliate, you know, commission on a on a link.
And that just doesn't pay the bills. And everybody's switching to this performance marketing from a lot of sponsors that I've talked to, but that's not going to help the WP minute. Certainly wouldn't help you put on a a an event, an in-person event. And I think we're on the cusp of these big companies just blowing money everywhere to finally look at folks like you and I and say, All right, let's g let's put money where there are smaller pockets of humans that have
better interactions for us because I think they're all in trouble in terms of views and traffic and link clicks and all this stuff. They're gonna need to come to folks like you and I who put on more curated experiences. So maybe your attendance goes from I don't know what your number is, but let's call it 300 down to a hundred in in a couple of years. But those hundred are going be so much more valuable to the brands and maybe you have to shift
To something that's more valuable to the sponsors, like workshops from the sponsors' software or whatever. I think it's just all changing and you and I are caught right now in that storm that's happening where no one really wants to spend money and they're all trying to figure out new ways to spend money. But, you know, damn it, I'm we're gonna stand here until the good money comes back. That's how I see it. in the long rambling, how do you see the tightening or the different spending?
strategies from brands.
Brian (10:11)
Yeah.
Okay. A lot to unpack there. Yeah. First before I forget and and bury the lead forty minutes into our time together. Yeah. the focus for LoopConf 2027, attendees willing, is I want it to be one hundred percent attendee focused, one hundred percent attendee funded experience. So I have until November to help convince as many people that it is in their best interest to buy a ticket now rather than wait two weeks before the event.
So that I can confidently not invite sponsors to help underwrite the experience. So that 100% of my attention can go into building the best possible attendee experience. And then every decision I make gets evaluated against the one question of is this better for attendees? This is generally how I've operated all of my events. But there's always a trade-off when you start catering to multiple audiences.
Right, like doing something that is good and beneficial for sponsors, who historically are the ones paying for the experience that all of us get to enjoy, is not always what would be best for attendees. Right? Like no attendee has ever said, I wish that there were more sponsor booths. I wish that the content was more interrupted by hearing from the sponsors. None of them have ever said that. So the the moment you do anything to give
sponsors the attention that they deserve is taking away from the experience that the attendees want. Conversely, right, only giving attendees what they want is a bad deal for sponsors, usually. And so if you're watching this and you're interested in what a sponsor free event can look like for WordPress developers, agencies, plugin owners, core contributors, etc., engineers who choose WordPress and are also interested in the broader world
Beyond WordPress, you should buy your ticket to LoopConf right now and help me realize that yes, people want this. Pitch aside, let's continue to unpack the things that you said. There were there was a lot there. First, the because it's quickest for me to address, sponsors who are trying to pursue will give you a bigger affiliate cut instead of paying you up front. Very attractive offer for them because.
Seemingly your interests are aligned, right? The better you do in promoting them, the bigger your payout is going to be, way bigger in in theory than them just giving you money up front. And it's revenue that they're realizing because they're here, directly attributable, which is great for everything that they need to do to justify where their marketing efforts are going.
But it falls flat. And so this is the clip that you can send to every sponsor that asks you and invites you to take this offer. And to everyone else who has done sponsor supported production. We cannot benefit, and you will not benefit from us using an affiliate pitch because what we're building is not optimized for affiliate style pitches.
We will not see the kind of revenue that you're offering from an affiliate deal because it requires a different tactic, a different approach to work. Affiliate programs are amazing. And if you as a content producer are producing things specifically to point people towards things that you believe in that have an affiliate payout, that works.
If you're running a podcast or conference or doing other kinds of training material, and the offer is, hey, instead of us underwriting the cost and time of production, let's give you a link and you can get paid later. That doesn't work because you need the time to allocate now to do the production. Therefore, you need the revenue now, not six months from now, 12 months from now, 24 months from now. Because that's where the real value in an affiliate
marketing works is that long tail effect. You make something that's really good, that positively shows off what you like about the thing, and then you get a kickback from that for as long as that remains relevant. Which doesn't work in a podcast or conference or other kinds, most other kinds of settings. So sorry sponsors, we understand the the value. We agree that we are aligned, but it it it doesn't it cannot fund this work and therefore it's not
a good trade. I can unpack other things.
Matt (14:58)
I think it's also lazy from from you know, and I'll I'll take the hard line as I I usually do is I also think it's a lazy play from would-be sponsors to just throw an affiliate and say, yeah, let's just work that way because as I was saying before, like everyone's traffic is down. So like how how do like what else do you expect even bigger content creators to do in this day and age to get
any kind of meaningful affiliate sign up to drive, you know, revenue to the business. I mean, I guess if you're if you're just doing a numbers game as a brand and you're getting, you know, 10,000 creators to talk about you, okay, fine. Like maybe that works. but I also find it to be a lazy play because it's just like, you you go out, you make the content, and then we'll make maybe the customer signs up. Right. And it's also like one of those things where it's not it's not guaranteed
To the creator. Like the creator is guaranteeing a piece of content to be made in the light of a positive, you know, review for that piece of software. You're guaranteed that video or that newsletter post or that blog placement. and there's no guarantee from the other side that you're going to get that affiliate sign up because not only are you unsure if the customer is actually potential customer is going to sign up.
that experience has to be great for the customer, right? I I have to hope that when they click my affiliate link in the description below, that your sign up process, your promise, you know, your onboarding, your hopefully not you know hidden pricing doesn't block that process for them to say, you know what, forget it. I don't even want this anymore. And then I lose, you know, as the as the as the person who was
you know, funded by the affiliate link. So anyway, we could beat that up for for a while. I just hope that there are brands that see the work that folks like you and I, and Rae do in the space and others, of course. but we just take a different tact and and and maybe maybe I'm too hopeful that that there's a a a pot of gold on the other side of that rainbow in the future. or we're in the wrong business. I don't know.
So anyway, that's my take on affiliate or sponsors kind of being lazy, handing us the affiliate link, even though it might have a little bit of a bump, a little bit of a boost to say, hey, instead of the thirty percent, we'll give you sixty percent. your thoughts on being lazy. Not that you have to take my words.
Brian (17:38)
No, no, no. lazy is a a fair frame. Sorry, sponsors. That is how it comes across. I know you've got a bunch of things to do, so we don't slight you for it. You touched on something earlier that I think is a a much more prescriptive thing that we can say instead of like don't do this. Right. That there there are
Two competing thoughts that I have here. One, you can continue to go wide with your sponsorship dollars and like invest in a bunch of different places because you never know what's going to hit, right? The old adage is 80% of your marketing budget is wasted, but you never know what 80%. And you can't know, even if you're great at what you do. Like, is this pop podcast going to pop off? I don't know. Being at this event, is that going to be great for us? Maybe. and so you you spend money in a bunch of different places.
Or you get more selective and you go really deep on just a couple, like you said, right? Finding the the niche audience because LoopConf is very specifically like upper echelon senior engineers, the people who are building WordPress, the people who are pushing WordPress past its limits, the people who are putting WordPress in pipelines where it had previously had no business existing. And that's a very specific kind of audience that
is an extremely valuable group of people to talk to, to certain sponsors. Great. But I think a more resilient strategy is to intentionally find these very specific things to go deep on and actually have a proper partnership. Not just here's some money, talk about us and put it out there. That's great. But
cross-promotional stuff. We're going to put this in front of our audience as well. And we're going to use the thing you make for all of the things we're doing. Right. Like it becomes part of your bigger marketing strategy. Not just we've invested in this podcast and we want our ads here, but we ha want you to interview our founder. We want you to interview some of our technical folks, whomever, right? Whatever narrative, we want you to interview some of our customers so that they can share their case study. And that becomes case study material that they distribute across
their other platforms. I think that is a much more aligned strategy if they can make it happen. Because now it's not just, hey, we're giving you money to fund your thing and you talk about us, but like we're also using your thing as part of our other paid content strategies. And so we're we're just moving the budget around. We were already going to invest in making these videos or putting out the the these things. Instead we're going to pay you
To do it on your thing and also use it on our thing. I've I'm sure you've gotten pitches somewhat in that direction, because I've gotten them and I barely have conversations with sponsors. That that feels to me like concentrating your thing will less but better, I think is the summary here.
Matt (20:27)
Yeah,
and and I th again I I I think because I focus a lot on watching other you know, from the business perspective, yeah, I mean I'm competitive. I watch a lot of I watch you, I watch I watch Rae you know, and and I both also recommend folks to to consume and to purchase from both of you. and I watch the industry and I and and it's more so from what are sponsors doing so that I know and I can try to be a step ahead.
And you know, the adding more value is something that I'm always trying to do every year to keep this thing to keep this thing going, because I don't see a world where the affiliate link or even the, you know, in kind sponsorship thing will work because that's that doesn't make a business, right? That doesn't make a business. I I've learned that lesson. I continue to learn that lesson that, you know, one year a company comes in, they say, okay, here's a big space.
big pot of money for a sponsorship, but then the next year, there might not be around because it's just a campaign that they're running. They're just experimenting. And, you know, if if everything was aces in the WordPress hosting world, you know, things wouldn't be things would be a little bit easier, at least for me, probably for you, for these companies to continue to recommit. But it's also like it's just they're all just moving their chess pieces around. And it's like one year you get it, next year you don't.
Maybe three years later that brand comes back and says, Okay, here you go, let's try this again. 'Cause there's a new marketing director. So the sponsorships game is tough. and and I I I don't know how even the WP minute survives long term on just sponsorships, unless all of a sudden the WordPress industry hits a big tailwind. for sure. How are you reshaping l I'll call it loopconf US versus what you did in the UK?
With all things considered that we just talked about with sponsorships, with you having to restructure because you did lose that sponsorship. How are you rethinking it? I know it's a call to action. It's two, it's two ninety nine for early bird or two forty nine for early bird right now, and then three forty nine if you miss the early bird timeline and you have to go and purchase full price, which is still super affordable in terms of of events. what are you doing to reshape the event?
learning what you learn from the y from the UK and now with this monkey wrench thrown into things here having to to to pivot.
Brian (22:54)
Yeah. So thanks for the question. As I said in my earlier pitch, I want to have like a fanatically obsessed attendee experience here. And so I am inviting all of the prospective attendees to buy their tickets way earlier than they would ever reasonably buy them, 10 months in advance for people who are getting in right now. And that is to provide that advanced working capital.
To signal like, okay, enough people want this. I don't have to start having sponsor conversations. The the way that this shift forced it forced my hand gave me the timeline that I've always wanted. Like I've I have long wanted to attempt an attendee-funded, attendee-focused experience. But historically, it doesn't make any sense because the sponsor conversations have to happen before or by November.
That's when they've set their budget for the next year. Anything much earlier than that, like sorry, we're we're too focused on the final quarter of the year. Come talk to me later. And anything much later than November is now too late. They've already figured out where their spend is going. So you've got like this sweet window, just like the first couple of weeks of November, before Thanksgiving here in the US, after Halloween here in the US, where it's like, okay, we're ready to talk about next year. we're interested in talking to you. What what is the deal? And so I now have.
Eight weeks before that to see, are there enough attendees who want this thing? Buy your ticket now, tell me that you want this. And enough people do, I don't have to have those conversations in November. And I don't have to invite sponsors to provide funding for the event. There is just enough margin in the ticket price alone to cover the outlay of running the event without sponsors. And that's exactly what I'm going for. I have always been attendee-minded in the way I approach events.
And so I frequently am working to curate an entire schedule that is playing off of itself to give you the most interesting opportunity for the people who do want to sit in sessions and learn from these experts and be excited about who's on stage and what they're talking about. But I also relish the hallway track and all of the conversations that can only happen when you have the right group of people together. They don't happen online. They don't happen in larger forums. And so
I have intentionally s aimed for a smaller audience at LoopConf. so targeted's a hundred people. up to two hundred is where I want to draw the line. The venue could s hold up to close to three hundred, but I think once we pass two hundred, the the vibe that I'm going for gets lost. And then smaller than a hundred, it feels a little too small perceptually. It's still great.
And so I think the real sweet spot is right as you start to get to a hundred and fifty attendees, because the group is small enough that you don't have too many different groups and too many different kinds of conversations happening that you can't be aware of and catch up on all of them as you're talking to people. And once you pass 300, like w none of us can ever know all of the different kinds of things that are happening at WordCamp US or WordCamp Europe or WordCamp Asia, 'cause there's just too many people, too many conversations, too many floating attentions. So I'm
Aiming for something that's small on purpose. And in addition to curating what I think are going to be truly outstanding talks from some truly impressive people, I have also made personal invitations to equally impressive people to just be present at the event so that we can have incredible conversations. And and that's most of the pitch is is that you are going to have some transformative conversations. the thing that I realized earlier this week as I was trying to
Condense this into a smaller package to express quickly and succinctly is that the conversations that happen at loop comps and the talks that you can learn from are all designed to expand your capability and perhaps even help you I don't want to say like 10x your skill set because that's such a dumb, unrealistic thing. Go with it.
Matt (27:00)
Brian feed into the marketing.
Brian (27:03)
Because
you were here having these conversations, not just with like how you use WordPress, but also how you operate more broadly. I've always been friendly to inviting perspectives from outside of our WordPress community because we don't exist in a vacuum. The websites that we're building exist in a sea of websites. The clients that we're helping could go anywhere to get their problem solved. They didn't
usually they're not coming to us because they want WordPress for the fact that it's WordPress. They come to us because they want their problems solved. So how can we get better at solving those problems more thoroughly? Those are the conversations I'm interested in having. And we happen to be constantly, but also v very precisely right now, in an uncertain state with an uncertain future. You mentioned like where's the industry going courtesy of AI? That's playing out in every industry. But also like
Where is WordPress as a project going? Where's the WordPress community going? Are they leaving? Are they doing other things? Or what? I, like you, happen to think we will continue to have a thriving WordPress community of the people who are out there doing business. Thriving might even be a bit strong. There will continue to be people who do incredible things with WordPress, potentially forever, and can do so profitably for a very long time. So WordPress won't be
gone or even close to being gone in 10 months. I prefer to in all of the things I build, not to look at the bleeding edge, but like the trusted solution. Like like what was great two years ago? Is that what people are still doing now? Awesome. Then it will still be good two years from now. But also, where are we heading? What is the trajectory? What do we need to like what needs to enter our awareness now? And so those are the conversations that I invite and encourage.
and I think are the most valuable. It's not just we're only ever going to use WordPress and nothing else. It's we use WordPress and also we use this thing and also we use this thing. Or we take WordPress and we put it here. One of the talks that I was excited about for September that is sadly not going to make it in June, because scheduling is messy and every date is a every date that works for somebody is an exclusionary date for somebody else, which is a bummer.
I had been talking with Aurooba Ahmed, who brought WordPress into her current place of business. No one else on the team has any past experience with WordPress. Everybody loves what happened. It gave really great capabilities to the editorial team, courtesy of the block editor, to make very specifically designed experiences that then get transformed through a pipeline and published, forgetting now. I think it's Rails, Ruby on Rails maybe is is their stack.
And they used AI to help aid in that pipeline to bring this foreign technology into their existing stack and have as seamless of an experience as anyone could hope for. That's cool. That's an amazing case study. and that's a really novel use case for, hey, I mean, it's headless WordPress with extra dressing, but it's it's a completely new workflow and it's an incredible thing. And so I love
Conversations like that. Last year I hosted John O'Nolan, who gave us some insights from his experience running Ghost for the past decade. I particularly like that one for the poetic callback to when he was at LoopConf a decade prior. And that's tremendous because it's not just, hey, I'm doing this other thing. You should come leave WordPress and do this with me. It's hey, these are the things that we did differently in Ghost that you should also consider doing in the WordPress space.
This is why we do them. This is our principled stance, et cetera, et cetera. It's just it's valuable to have these other perspectives. And I love putting out the opportunity for people to experience them.
Matt (31:03)
we have WordCamps, which are what I would say is the the generalist event for for WordPress. that's the big one with air quotes for the community, for WordPress, for you know brands in WordPress, mostly hosting companies, who go and and sponsor those and have booths and that's your typical sort of corporate event for for WordPress. We have Press Conf, which I would squarely say is from Raquel.
Which is more of the business side. I've always looked at LoopConf as the developer side. It sounds like that's a fair statement. but when you and I chatted about a month ago when you said, my you said, Matt, I'm gonna we were gonna record our podcast about loopconf then all the stuff happened, you're like, I have to, you know, restructure this and gonna have to relaunch it and get a new like price point ticket out there to sell to people so we can fund this thing. And I said to you, Boy, what how do we think about
next year in tur terms of WordPress. Like that's a a scary proposition for you because as we experienced yesterday in the in the WordPress community, Matt Mullenweg was put on a leave of absence from Automattic, which is just head blown here. I mean, this is just another milestone that you're getting I don't want to say railroaded by, but you know, you were there
And now and now we're kind of reliving another unknown moment here. We got eight we we're nine, we're in month nine. We've got nine months, right, until your event. Anything can happen to WordPress from now and then, though it does sound like you're hedging against that by introducing newer technologies, technologies that run well alongside WordPress, concepts that run
alongside WordPress, like not everything is just how to make a plugin at LoopConf. these are much bigger or or smaller variances besides just WordPress.
Brian (33:06)
Yeah. Boy, a lot to unpack there as well, right? Like this is a very tumultuous time. It's been a tumultuous two years now in the WordPress community. And it's going to continue to be in the future. I don't I'm not excited, to be honest, about where we're heading for the court proceedings. I think regardless of the outcome of those, everybody loses. Like no matter who wins in the court, we're we're all losing.
as a result of going through this. And and so it's it's ugly and it's uncomfortable. Perhaps it was necessary. and I I still am optimistic that on the other end of this we can recover and do great things. Presumably with WordPress, maybe maybe something different. I I don't know about that part. but yeah, it's it's tough. So like how how do people decide where do we go? What do we do? I was surprised to learn in a conversation I had earlier this week with
Ray Morey and the repository that WordCamp US is the only official WordPress event to happen in is the only WordCamp to happen in the US. PressConf happened in Phoenix, which is for the business of WordPress. And a quick plug, PressConf is coming to Europe. And if you are in the business of WordPress and you are either in Europe or inclined to get a ticket to go to Europe, you should go to PressConf EU.
At pressconf.events, all of the dates and details and tickets, et cetera, there. You should do that. But like to your question, where like how how do we prepare for this unknown thing? So one of the things that I did, both to make it easy for people to say yes to buying a ticket for my event this early, but also just in general, is anyway, all tickets are fully refundable until January thirty first. And after that you can still transfer, resell, I'll help you find a new buyer if we can.
So that should your mind change? Should should your schedule change? Should the trajectory of your business change so substantially between now and January 31st? You're like, I like going to LoopConf no longer feels relevant in my life. You can get your ticket refunded, no further questions asked. I like, I don't want to like hold anyone's money hostage here. In fact, I refunded everyone's ticket as soon as I realized we had to move. and also
provided refunds for any of their non-refundable travel so that they weren't like financially at a loss because I had to move the dates. That didn't sit well with me. And so like I love giving people escape hatches. I love providing as much runway as I can for people to change their minds. but also the the programming that I have planned from the talks that were already scheduled for September that can still happen in June.
And ideas that were still coalescing, of like, man, I wish we could talk about this and that and other thing. Like, loopconf will be relevant to you and your business and the way you're building for the web, no matter where things are going. You can be sure that this will likely be the best place for you to be because these are the exact conversations that are going to thrive in the face of uncertainty. The people that I've invited, both on stage and to the audience, are the exact people who are.
Building towards this uncertain future. They're helping invent some of the technologies that we use, right? Like we have core contributors who are talking about how WordPress is expanding and evolving and changing, as well as agency folks and how WordPress shows up in the work that they're doing. So regardless of of the way in which our work is getting reshaped, those are the conversations we're going to have. Those are the things we're going to talk about and learn about at LoopCon.
Matt (36:55)
And it's it's not like you did a foolish thing like put W P in your brand name.
Brian (37:00)
Again. Yeah.
Matt (37:05)
at least for loopconf sorry. Sorry for stiff arming WPSessions, but I'm just making fun of myself in this in this category.
Brian (37:12)
Like, maybe that was narrowly focused. I I even thought about that for WPSessions, honestly, when I launched it. Man, are we in 15 years now? I think so, or close to it. because even when I was running WPSessions, even from the jump, the first few quarter that it was running, not every talk was strictly about WordPress. The the reason it launched, the lore here is that I because we're all independently directed learners building the web,
All of us have different blind spots. And one blind spot that I realized I had decades into building was that I didn't know how to write a performant query in MySQL. And none of my colleagues did either, because most of that had been abstracted away from us. I'm like, man, I wish I could just pay a a database expert for an hour, whatever their hourly rate is, to just sit and answer my questions on Zoom. Wouldn't that be tremendous? And I had that idea going into Memorial Day weekend here in the US.
And by the time Memorial Day rolled around, I hadn't stopped thinking about my career. I have to buy a domain right now and see if I can do this thing. Because what I realized, like, I maybe I can. my gosh, I could invite other people to learn from this. my gosh, we could all get smarter. Maybe I could sell tickets. Maybe the person could earn better than their hourly rate. And everyone comes out smarter and better equipped on the other end of that. That's lovely. And so that's what I did. And so I wanted talks about WordPress and how to do things with WordPress, but also talks about like, how do you manage client relationships? How do you provide support? How do you think about
Writing proposals and building contracts and terms of service and like all of those things which aren't unique to WordPress, but everyone who is working with WordPress also needs to know these things. and so my audience has always been us who choose WordPress, but the topics aren't strictly exclusively uniquely relevant to us.
Matt (39:04)
Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's a good bet to place. I wanna just wrap it up with this sort of thinking piece here. And I'm gonna start to you know, I'm gonna start to go through the coping phase, I think, of like where we're at in this space. I have said quite recently in the last few months that I'm
You know, I'm going to die on the hill of of WordPress because I think it's more than just software for me. It goes beyond it. And I'm not going to go down that path right now, but I think folks who listen to me know about that. But what I'm sensing right now, especially with this move of Mullenweg off of Automattic, at least in the short term, is there's going there's got to be something that we obviously there's something that we don't see, obviously. but I think it's something to do with the lawsuit. Maybe it's just financially automatics in a bad place.
And that's a big disruptor to the contributions and the development of of WordPress, regardless of you whether you like him or not, or if you like Automattic or don't. Like it's it's going to be something that really changes this landscape. And just looking back at the Matt Report, I interviewed you 13 years ago, August 26th, 13 years ago. you and I have been in the space for a while. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on why.
We don't give up on on WordPress. And I'm starting to feel like is that a good thing or a bad thing? Like the the the the the inner monologue is starting to kick in going, are we too close to the flame? Are we too close to this? Why are we so close to this? Why do we love this? Is this something that it's because it's all we know and all we've done? So there's that innate, you know, feeling of like I I
Just can't let this go. should we be looking at this more objectively, going innovation's been slow, lots of, you know, tumultuous events happening at the top? this new event could be signaling something big. I'm curious if, my God, if something happens to Automattic, who takes it over? Is it like a sales force? That's not going to be great, right? Being one of their biggest investors, or at least I think it's still one of their biggest investors. Why do we still latch on to this?
that's my that's my question.
Brian (41:22)
Yeah. Those are really good questions that I think everybody should be unpacking at some kind of regular interval. The simplest, least impressive answer is psychologically speaking, we are resistant to change. We prefer what's comfortable and known. And so those two reasons alone are like have sustained people in far less tenable situations than we are in.
The thing that brought me to WordPress in the beginning, when I first started building with it in 2007, was wow, this is a very established code base. There are lots of people who build with it and lots of sites that are running it. And most of the problems that I encounter doing web development have been solved for things like contact forms and user management and
production workflows, et cetera. Like those were already solved problems even in 2007. I'm like, okay. and the fact that it's a very permissive open source license means nobody can take this away from me. I have forever now a functioning copy of this site that I built that can work indefinitely and no one can can stop that. That's a really powerful thing to be able to say truthfully. And that's true now, right? Like even if
The impossible scenario happened where like WordPress stopped being available today, yesterday, a week ago, even if it happened already, and we are just discovered like, wait, the code base is gone and there's no future support for it. no. Everything that we've built continues to run. And there are enough people who are interested in the success and viability of this thing that it will outlast any of us. And an example that springs to mind.
Which might fall flat because now I'm blinking on the name of the maintainer and the name of the project. is it a WordPress? There there is a really well-worn custom field utility that ultimately got abandoned man a decade ago already. and the maintainer said, like, sorry, I can't run any of these things anymore. someone else can
adapt it if they want and then just bounced. And not too long after that, a year, two years after that maybe, I had to justify to a a very concerned security team of a very large multinational conglomerate brand that everybody knows. Why are you suggesting we bring this code base under our maintenance? It has been abandoned. What if there's a security problem? What if like we need an update? And I was able to very confidently say,
You don't have to worry about any of that because so many people depend on this. If that ever happens, it will be taken care of in short order. And not even a month, I think, after we had that conversation, something did happen and we did need to ship a a security patch. The community rallied around, like, all right, well, here's here's the thing for this. And I got to point out to them, like, hey, this thing that you were worried about because it's abandoned. it has no reason to change. And when there is something severe enough.
the the people show up and take care of it. So that's I think I mean that's why I'm still optimistic about WordPress and why I'm going to continue to enjoy it and and recommend it for as a tool, because no one can take it from you. It has been proven so thoroughly. why would we choose this in the face of other emerging technologies? That's a harder question to answer. And that is it indeed if
For all of you watching and listening, something you have to perpetually evaluate. Is WordPress the right tool for solving this problem? It isn't always the right tool. Sometimes a static page solves it. spoiler alert, the loopconf website does not run on WordPress. it is a WordPress conference for people who use WordPress where we're talking about WordPress, but the site itself doesn't need to run WordPress.
It's a single static page for the most part. there's a couple other in there for you know a code of conduct. The point is, it's a really small stack with a really small footprint. I didn't need to spin up and run a full-on WordPress thing for the thing that I was doing because the way I was managing like my sponsor CRM and my attendee database, et cetera, was already outside of WordPress. I'm like, I can just make this little static site feed the data from there, and then we're done. And so
Even me, a stalwart supporter of WordPress, doesn't always use WordPress for all of my projects. And that's okay. That's also a good thing. Pick the right tool. The more tools you're aware of, the more opportunities you explore, the better each of your individual solutions becomes. Yeah. So that's that's one answer. the your question is too big, I think. We we would be here for another hour if I tried to address each part of it.
Matt (46:24)
Loopconf dot com. Loopconf dot com. Get your tickets now, June sixteenth and seventeenth, twenty twenty seven, in a little place called Grand Rapids, Michigan. Little place
Brian (46:35)
second biggest city in in Michigan.
Matt (46:38)
Right.
The second biggest city in Michigan. Get your early bird tickets as when's the cutoff date on the early bird ticket?
Brian (46:45)
As soon as they sell out. I think there are
Matt (46:47)
Soon they sell out.
Brian (46:48)
three extra early birds that are that are left at the time we're recording. Those are likely to be gone by the time it gets published. And then a smaller number of regular early bird tickets will be available. Well, not smaller than three. I think there's I think there's fifteen available. That was we didn't even talk about that. One of the things I had to cut out was like I can make it all work without raising ticket prices. I just have fewer discounted tickets that I could give away. So early bird tickets will be gone quickly. So if you want to save
Matt (47:14)
Needs it who needs a discount when the general admission is only 349. Extra early bird tickets, 249. Early bird tickets, 299. And if you miss both of those birds, can't kill two birds with one stone. get the general admission for 349. loopconf.com. You know, I was I'm south of Boston, about forty-five minutes, fifty minutes, and Webflow is doing their conference. I think it already happened, or it's sometime this month. And I'm not going.
certainly not for the price of twelve hundred dollars for a general admission. Who the hell wants to talk about web flow for twelve hundred dollars? Not me. You go to loopconf.com, you spend three forty nine. it's ten times the value to 10x your development shops at loopconf.com. Thanks for hanging out today, Brian. Pleasure.
Brian (48:04)
Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.
Matt (48:06)
Beautiful.