Matt: Hey Lawrence, welcome to the WP minute.
Laurence: Thank you Matt.
How are you?
Matt: Doing well.
I saw you posting on blue sky, about your content creation role at, Freemius.
And I'm like, wait a minute, he's doing content.
I love content.
We're doing YouTube.
We're doing tutorials and talking about the wonderful world of
creating content and WordPress.
Give us the, the backdrop.
What, what do you do at MIUs?
Laurence: So, at Freemius, I joined Freemius as a WordPress developer.
I'm mainly working with the websites and so on.
It's a dynamic place and you find yourself like doing different kinds of things.
So you'll find yourself, trying out the support, find yourself, Besides
doing the development, like working with the websites, then you're
dealing like with the APIs and so on.
So it's a very neat place if you want to grow.
And that's how I found myself, jumping into, like the content team, even though.
Initially I started out as a WordPress developer.
Yeah.
Matt: as well, right?
It's youtube.com/at
techie press, T-E-C-H-I-E press, seven and a half thousand
subscribers, 200 something videos.
I mean, you're no slouch on YouTube either.
do you still do that?
And, and did, did Vva look at you and go, oh wait, you do content too?
Yeah.
How about some of that over here?
Laurence: So, I don't know whether I should be saying this, but, during one of,
Matt: You can say it.
You won't get in trouble from Vova.
I know him very well, and if he says anything to you, just direct him
Laurence: Yeah.
So, one of the things that made my CV stand out when I was, applying
at was the YouTube channel.
Because they were able to go and see what I can do.
And also just generally see who, like the type of person I was.
Understanding what I'm doing or, like generally it was my portfolio.
And that excited them.
And right now it's been two years being at Freemius.
So now is the time when I'm plugging into the content team, to help out.
But unfortunately,
Matt: made you,
Laurence: oh, sorry.
Matt: I was just gonna ask, what made you start your own personal YouTube channel?
Like, why did you start doing content?
Laurence: I love sharing knowledge, but I realized that many of the WordPress
content creators in terms of, like development, most of them would come
in and after some time sort of die out.
So as a new developer, someone who wanted to learn, I found
that there was a big space.
So I wanted to be able to just fill in, in there, and then also make content
that would help other people generally.
Matt: After 200, making 200 something videos, do you have any sense as
to why those WordPress creators burn out or stop creating content?
Laurence: Yeah, it's the same old story.
you get a good, you get a good job, and there's a lot of demand.
Maybe there are things that change in life, like family coming in.
And so it's usually a responsibility that takes you away and it's a hard balance.
Sometimes you make it, sometimes you realize, nah, I don't think it is for me.
Matt: Yeah.
Sometimes people will publish, you know, a hundred videos, 200 videos, and
they only get a handful of subscribers.
Maybe they only have a hundred, 200 subscribers and they're pulling their
hair out going, my God, how much more do I have to do, you know, to sustain this?
do you remember early on what it was like for you uploading YouTube videos?
Were you nervous?
Were you looking for an audience?
How did you start, you know, growing your audience?
Laurence: Vividly, I remember the first time I thought about, initially my first
video was me teaching my son how to play the recorder, like his first notes.
And then I realized, I don't think this is what I want to do.
Something much better.
So I started making YouTube videos.
Sometimes I would be seated under a tree, make sure there's not so much
noise, hit record, and then upload those.
I gave me an adrenaline rush to see that they were always going up.
yeah, eventually settled in and then started making longer form videos.
I'm trying to.
Get the quality right.
and it's still a process that I'm undergoing really.
Matt: When you started out, creating the content, were you also, did you
have like a full time job as well where you were developing or you freelancing?
How did you balance that time?
Because that's the other thing is it is such a time commitment.
Nevermind just like the content commitment, but now you have to carve
out many hours just to get one video out.
How did you balance the time?
Laurence: So when I started the channel, I was a high school
teacher teaching, information, communication and technology, ICT.
so.
In between that and coming home to my family, I, I had a young family.
I just had to strike a balance.
The thought was, you know what, if this hits big, maybe YouTube will be able to
pay our rent, get her for some bills.
so it was from that point of view.
You never know what happens.
as long as I'm happy, some people are also gaining from this because initially
WordPress is what gave me the platform to sort of like start development and even
get my job teaching at the high school.
So I was thinking, you know what, somebody else could probably
run the same risk that I am in.
So it was a 50 50.
Do good and you never know the universe will repay you.
Matt: Yeah, that's great.
Were you teaching tech and WordPress at high school?
How
Laurence: it's a Cambridge education system.
So they will look at developing websites.
You'll do networking, tech, the whole shebang of I of, computing.
So you get small fragments of everything, basically from grade four.
Which is like year four of school till grade 12, which is, the next
class before you go to college.
Matt: much did WordPress play a role in, in that education?
Like when you shared it with students, how much of, of the
curriculum was, was about WordPress?
Laurence: It's the website development area.
Because I want you to know a little bit of HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
As a way of showing the real world implementation.
I also experimented with the students how to use WordPress.
Now, the funny thing is that our local curriculum, which is not Cambridge
right now, has a similar module.
And their teachers, our local teachers association, is basically like, trying
to make sure that they all learn WordPress because it's an easier way.
For developing websites, and it's a big thing.
So if you're big on social and you're following the Uganda,
teachers association, you'll see that many of them are trying to
get WordPress, to the students.
there are a couple of guys who are trying to make sure that they have a thousand
WordPress ninjas in the next five years.
So, yeah,
Matt: The, one of the over things I always talk about, like when I talk about.
You know, my, my love for WordPress and like why I've supported it for so long is
that because it is one of those tools, and I don't want to talk about like what your
opinion is on AI, everybody's sick and tired of me talking about it already, but
I want to get your opinion on on AI and its impact, but one of the thing that's I
think is overlooked is WordPress, like if you want it, like, how did I learn how?
Like car, like car, motors and engines in cars work.
Well, I had like a moped with one cylinder and I took it apart and I
learned how the cylinders fired with the spark plug and how gap fuel, you know,
poured into the cylinder head and caused the combustion and I kind of learned
all that stuff from, from a young age.
And then, same thing, when I got into computers, I took apart a computer, I
learned how a hard drive and connect it up to a motherboard and how CPUs and memory
chips connect it to the motherboard.
WordPress is that tangible thing for me that somebody can pick apart
and understand here's the front end, here's the back end, here's
the management, here's the admin, and because it's this complete.
Thing.
I think it's a great place for people to, to learn, even if they don't
use word, like even if your students didn't use WordPress after they left
your, your school or your, your, your class, they could take that and,
and, and understand how bits of the, of the web work is, is that a crazy
thought or, or how do you see it?
Laurence: I think you're right on the money.
there are people who start out with WordPress and eventually, head out into
the more traditional languages and even, go to greater heights of developing
desktop systems and all of that.
So it's a platform.
Personally, that helped me learn more of PHP development and that's one of
the skills that I really, really need when I'm doing my work at Freemius.
besides the more web based, languages, I would say.
Yeah.
So it's a nice platform for you to springboard into your next career.
Matt: One of your, well, I'm looking at your top, videos right now.
Your top videos are custom WooCommerce payment gateways, setting up visual, VS
code, right, for WordPress development, FTP sync and local development.
A lot of it is, is dev.
Heavy, whereas a lot of us in, the YouTube space are doing much more on, you
know, here's this great plugin review.
Here's this new theme that's being launched.
I'm guilty of it.
That's kind of the content that I do.
but your, your content is much more methodical.
How long did it take for you to make these more technical videos?
Like a 30 minute video took you how long of 15 minute video took you?
How long?
Laurence: So relatively a 15 minutes video will take you about six hours.
So take one, take two, take three, preparations, then go down to editing
and cutting out what you don't like depending on your whole process.
But you're looking at about four to six hours for you to just make a film.
for the longer ones, the 30, what I did was record chunks and
then keep on coming back and then patching everything together.
So the longer 30 minutes videos would take you almost a whole day.
To just do
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah.
What, what tools were you using at the time, to make
your content workflow easier?
you know, four or five years ago, were you just using like,
screen, Camtasia or ScreenFlow?
Like what tools helped you get the videos out?
Laurence: so initially I wasn't big on the tools to make things easier so
I started out with OBS and then just clipped things with my iMovie and then
eventually I moved on to using ScreenFlow.
managed to make a few savings from the channel about ScreenFlow, and
I realized it was a better tool for me to record and then edit in one.
Yeah.
So that's, that's how I transitioned.
Yeah.
Matt: similar to WordPress when you can find the right tool to get that job done.
ScreenFlow is the one that I still primarily use, although it's also one
of the ones that I, it's like, when are you going to give us some new updates?
Like, like this, this is, this is still kind of getting a little bit, you know, I
feel like that average consumer now with.
With ScreenFlow, I'm like, all these other places, I can do text to speech, I can
edit with, I can edit the text and that'll edit the video, better transitions,
like, there's so much other cool stuff happening in other apps, but I still go
back to ScreenFlow at the end of the day, and I guess that's where they get me,
it's they're just like, they know I'm going to come back to use it, because
it is like the best editing experience.
Laurence: if a tool is not broken, then why try to fix it?
they nailed on the basics and all the newer, cool, shiny
tools that are coming up.
are sort of trying to leverage AI as a topic.
They don't give you that comfort and that confidence that I'm going
to record 30 minutes straight and I'm going to have all my stuff.
Autosaved on my computer and I can be able to recover them and then, do like
more complex stuff, in terms of editing.
Yeah, so ScreenFlow is like that nice balance between Adobe
Premiere Pro and ScreenFlow.
For example, yeah,
Matt: Yeah.
Yeah, I
Laurence: I mean screen
Matt: So you're building up.
Laurence: The
Matt: Oh, yeah, I use ScreenStudio as
Laurence: studio.
Yeah.
Matt: Yeah, just for short stuff because like short clips because if you're
editing, this is getting inside baseball right now, but if you're editing, long
form videos on the screen, so it's terrible, like trying to like find the
thing and delete the zoom in and do it.
It's like the timeline is just way too basic for long form videos.
so years are going by, you're, you're uploading videos to
your personal YouTube channel.
How did you find Freemius?
I mean, we already hinted at what you do at Freemius, but how did
you find Vova and team at Freemius?
Did, did they notice your content?
Did they, did you use that as leverage to get the job?
How did that all come together?
Laurence: No.
So, after COVID hit, I left high school teaching.
And sort of continued my freelancing, but then I realized I wasn't making ends meet.
And, Freemius was looking for a WordPress developer.
It was right there on their website.
so I just submitted my CV and hoped things would go well.
And yep, they gave me a call.
It was just
Matt: Was it Vova that, was it Vova that called you?
Laurence: yeah, so I got an, an email from him and at that time he was still
doing the, the first like meetup face to face and we got to just talk and,
of course they talked to my references, but I think they liked what they had
and then they said, Hey, would you be happy to do a technical interview?
And that's how things moved until eventually got in.
Yep.
Matt: Yeah, and so you leveraged all of like your development stuff that you
had been learning and and teaching other people Over on the YouTube channel.
What kinds of things were you?
Challenged with when you first started Freemius it has a pretty what
I'll call a complex product right?
I mean API's license keys your You're, you're distributing software.
There's payments, there's all this stuff.
There's reporting on that data.
It's not a, you know, small plugin, at least in my opinion.
What kind of challenges did you have when you first started
and how did you overcome them?
Laurence: So I got in as a WordPress developer and my first task was to work
with, the website and at that moment, at that particular time, Freemius
needed to revamp its whole blog.
so that's the first thing that I worked with, working with existing data and
just writing like, a theme over that.
Now that was the time when we were divided, really
deciding whether should we go.
Gutenberg, or should we keep things classic editor and so on.
So the challenge was in there, like deciding whether you want to
like dive into this new tool that's available, how long is it going to
take you to come up with a final product at the end of the day?
but eventually we came up with a solution and we have a nice looking
blog, I would say right now.
Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
How much has, yeah, we'll bring, we'll go, we'll go into the bigger topic,
which is like the, like the AI or the big topic of, of the end of the year, I
guess, which is like AI and how that's impacting, WordPress development.
Has AI started to impact you?
Are you leveraging AI for anything?
what are your thoughts on AI and developing with WordPress?
Laurence: Definitely, AI is a, like a time saver, I would say.
I'm using it, mainly with, tools like Copilot and then, of course,
ChatGPT, asking a few questions here.
So in the olden days, you had to scour, The whole WordPress documentation just
to find one little function that's going to help you solve something.
But,
Matt: Hold on, I want to, you said olden days, which was like six months ago.
Laurence: yeah, I'm trying to be like a gen Z here.
But, yeah, you needed to like scour the whole documentation and there
are some hidden gems in there.
But AI is trained on all this content.
So it knows the right tool.
You'll just give it your scenario.
And then it will give you the tool, go read about that
documentation and say, this is it.
So I don't have to go to stack overflow and read like five different
articles to get that one solution.
just to, just to start off my whole journey with, developing
a particular feature.
Yeah.
Matt: How do you feel about that?
How do you feel that the answers are so direct in terms of like coding,
which I guess is a technical thing.
It's almost, well, I guess.
Season developers might argue this point, but it's like, it's either on, it's either
on or it's off, I guess, you could say, like, it's gonna work for me or it's not,
but I guess there's nuance in that, it's like, how much code is it giving you, et
cetera, et cetera, but how do you feel about that directness, versus, if you were
younger, and you were just starting out, some of that exploration of going to 18
places, Actually, it was kind of useful.
It was terrible for time, but you, you saw a lot more.
And I feel like you maybe stumbled around and found some other
things that you didn't know about.
And I think that that's what's going away with these direct responses from ChatGBT.
Again, no direct question, but do you have any thoughts on
Laurence: Yeah.
Yeah.
I always believe that in the information edge that we're in, things are not hidden,
like everything is right in front of you.
but if you, unless you tell chatGBT not to explain the solution and you just say,
give me the solution, it's going to pour out all the reasons of why A is so, and
why do we go to B, and why do we go to C.
So, you end up learning the basics of a particular thing.
Let's say you're starting to learn HTML.
It will explain why you need to have the body, why you need to have
the head, and why particular things are in this particular section.
So you end up learning the basics, just like in traditional school.
so unless you're going advanced user on it.
Then you're still going to get your traditional teacher in
front of your classroom block.
Matt: Yeah.
I was thinking to myself, you know, when I first started to see AI come
onto the scene, I was like, man, if I was in school, if I was still in
high school and nobody knew about ChatGPT, I'd be passing every class
with, you know, with straight A's.
So as the teacher, inside of you, the one who actually, you know, taught,
other students, how does that make you feel like AI in the classroom?
Is it a good thing?
A bad thing?
How do you see it from that teacher's perspective of like truly understanding?
a particular topic.
Mm.
Mm
Laurence: is brilliant to use in a classroom.
I don't think we should shy away from it Let me give you a scenario if you
had your friend flip their paper and show you the answers It is sort of a
similar situation with using, using AI.
So you're just copying off the answers and then dropping them
into your own paper, right?
Matt: hmm.
Laurence: If I'm using, let's say chat GPT, and I'm learning about algebra
and say, can you give me like 10 different questions for me to practice?
about algebra, and this is like a sample question I had.
It will be able to generate for you ten different questions that you can
put in a question for your students.
it can be nice practice for the students.
And it can even model different scenarios that would be out of the ordinary.
For the student.
So it can be used for both good and bad, but for most cases, when I've looked at
how people using AI to cheat their way into stuff, eventually they get caught.
It's up to you to just say, you know what, let me use it for good.
Mm hmm.
Mm
Matt: sense.
My, I have three young boys, eight, six and five.
And, my middle son, came home with his English homework the other day.
And, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's on paper.
It's, you know, they call her stuff in.
I mean, he's, he's young, right?
So it's just like, here's the 12 or 18 words, whatever it was that
they're focused on this week.
And, he didn't, getting him to do stuff on paper and like cut the
paper out and put the words together.
It's just, it's a very difficult task.
so what I did is I was able to
a bolt, which is a front end sort of, you know, take human
words and build an app with it.
And I built him.
Like a little game that he could play with those 12 words and it was all like
built in react had sound effects It was fun for for a kid to play with those
kinds of things are truly amazing, right?
That's really shifting and I totally agree with you It's like leaning
into that stuff for AI is just like it's mind blowing to what what you
what we can do with it right now
Laurence: Yeah.
So I think teachers can also just ask AI, I'm teaching this topic.
How can I be very creative about it?
And it would give you solutions.
I think there's much more that we can dig from it and utilize.
Matt: Yeah What's the future for WordPress and ai?
one of the things that I've been thinking about is, you know, you could
look at it and say, well, just build me a, you know, hey cursor or co-pilot,
build me a WordPress alternative.
, what's your thoughts on the existence of the sustainability, the future
of WordPress in a world where AI seemingly could do what WordPress does?
Laurence: So it depends from what angle you're coming from.
If you are a developer, I don't think AI will ever replace developers.
For starters, okay, it can throw out some code, but in most cases
that code needs to be refined.
AI is very open sided, like it's not opinionated in how
you do particular things.
So as a developer, you'll need to sit in and think through the solution,
find the best way to optimize it.
so developer.
site covered.
They're never going to go out of fashion or out of need.
If you're looking at it as a content creator, still in order for you to
make, diverse content, like you're writing a blog, you cannot depend on
your solely on AI to give you that full.
300 words that's going to take someone's soul, like it doesn't take
away the creativity that the human mind has, but it can give you a basis.
Yeah, exactly.
that's for the content creators, but I also see it, giving us nice visuals.
Like if, in places right now, people are using it to do like.
Text to speech and, graphics from that particular text.
So there's a nice balance to it, that we can have.
yeah, that's it.
Matt: Yeah.
Has, you know, you don't have to give us all the secret sauce at Freemius,
but is Freemius doing anything with AI, for, for front end customers
that customers can interact with AI at any level of, at Freemius?
Laurence: Yeah.
we've trained.
we have a bot that we've trained with our documentation so that in, in, in any case,
if you want to, to find a particular, like you have a particular question, the
AI will provide you with like resources that you can read right in there.
And all we need to do is just make our documentation better.
And that means people will be served much, much better.
Matt: What product feature are you working on these days?
I mean, I know we just talked about the content stuff, but what are
you doing that people will see when they're interacting with Freemius?
What can they either praise you on or yell at you about when they
interact with, with Freemius?
Thanks.
Laurence: I think I have something for you.
You have been a big proponent for data liberation.
That's something, Matt has talked about and recently we have been making sure
that people can be able to export whatever kind of data they have on Freemius.
And we've been progressively, doing that for the different sections that we have.
So.
Interesting thing is, one of, the, the, the people that are using Freemius
the other day just developed a chat GPT bot that is using that data and
they're doing crazy stuff with it.
So, yeah, data liberation is one thing that we've really, really, put a pedal
on besides the bug fixes and all of that.
Matt: Yeah, that's fantastic.
Yeah, I mean obviously whenever it comes to any kind of Like, e commerce
platform, you know, connecting up, you know, your payment, to a system.
And it's like a platform play.
There's, there's always that hesitancy from people to be like,
Oh God, I gotta connect this up.
it's gonna have all my data and, you know, am I gonna be able to move this stuff
from, you know, one platform to the next?
And it's great to hear that, that you all, are investing.
In that stuff.
Lawrence Bahari, thanks for hanging out today.
Where else can folks go to say thanks?
Where can they go to meet you online?
Where do you want them to go?
Laurence: So I have a very old blog that I last posted on
eons ago, which is omchigai.
com, but I spend a lot of my free time on Twitter, just reading about what
people are developing and occasionally sharing a joke here and there.
And of course, newly on a blue sky.
Matt: Yeah, fantastic.
That's where we connected.
I'll have all that stuff in the show notes.
And don't forget to check out, Lawrence's YouTube channel, youtube.
com slash at techie press and all of his work at Freemius.
So WP minutes, the WP minute.
com slash subscribe.
It's the number one way to stay connected and we'll see you in the next episode.