Matt: Mario Peshev, welcome to the WP
Mario: Hey ma, thanks for having me.
It's been a hot minute.
Matt: I should have, yeah, you know, I say this all the time.
If I was an experienced podcaster, I would have looked up our last episode
together, which was on, the Matt Report.
And, you know, I'm gonna, let me do that right now.
So let me just go search.
I haven't had any other Mario.
So let me search Mario.
the first, the last time we chatted was 2015.
Mario: wait, I do have a 2017 thing from your blog, but it could be a blog mention.
Yeah.
Okay.
So 2015 Yeah, just a decade What do you know?
Matt: that's all.
Mario: Holy moly
Matt: So what have you been, what have you been up to with DevRicks and your agency
Mario: Yeah.
Living a life, man.
Living a life.
no, seriously though.
I mean, we've been around for like, what is it?
15 years now, give or take.
I mean, we're still, most of the team, the vast majority of the team is on site.
so we actually started back in the old days as a remote
company before it was cool.
Switched slowly to like hybrid 2016, 2017, then decided that it's about time to
spark creativity and do some stuff on the.
Kind of, whiteboarding, brainstorming type of front on site, then the
pandemic hit and everyone went remote and said, look, we're, trendsetters.
We actually decided to move in office.
And right now there's the return to office and said, it only took six
years for people to get back to office.
So, so there's that.
but, but seriously though, I mean, it's been, it's, it's
definitely been a journey.
WordPress has gone through like all sorts of transformations Decade,
especially over the past year, I would say there's, there's been a lot going
on, but, yeah, it's still, even though.
we've definitely kind of transitioned over the past five, six, seven years
into a consultancy model with lots of go to market kind of ITP research.
We are also HubSpot partners, SEMrush partners, so lots on the kind of
marketing consulting front as well.
We still, WordPress is our go to tech stack and our largest platform,
certainly on top of WordPress.
So we still consider WordPress being our underlying framework.
And I also, I believe that I'm also a contributor in the latest release,
but I'm waiting for it to drop.
Matt: Nice.
I, you're definitely the guy I want to talk to you about the impact or the
perceived impact of AI, in our space.
sort of, tongue in cheek about the last time we talked, cause we
did talk, when I worked at Pagely, which one is selling commercial
or enterprise, WordPress hosting.
Back then you were focused.
your agency was focused on a lot of media partners, right?
So, big publishers doing hundreds of thousands, millions of page views a month.
Is that still the same sector you found yourself comfortable in or have
you moved to a different niche in your
Mario: Yeah, we, I'm probably going to do kind of a rundown of the past 15 years.
So starting around 2010, it was everything that flies, everything that moves.
We captured it because it's the beginning of the agency space.
Everyone was just starting out, freelancers, young agencies,
they know what I'm talking about.
So it was like pretty much everything.
Over, over time.
We, we did a lot of consulting work with including banking and telecom in
WordPress, just pretty tough project that required consulting and we were a
small team of like three, four people then 2013, 2014, maybe we, we were lucky
to work on some of the largest WordPress based software and service applications.
And we kind of pivoted into a space of building WordPress based SaaS, including
LMS and kind of, marketing SaaS platforms with subscriptions and lifetime value
and top sales and down sales, like the, the fusion engines that you can
now see on go high level or system or some of the modern recent tools, a
decade later, then 2016 ish, which is around the time that we spoke probably.
Is we landed a pretty strong strategic partnerships with, an art major
and provider, it is called RTK at the time that it was acquired by.
Rubicon, then Magnite, we're gathering around, but you know, went
through a different acquisition.
They had about 400 clients.
we took a couple of them and they were happy with the work.
So we just kept adding more and more and more.
And that's how publishing became a thing in parallel.
Our other channels are all around B2B SaaS due to the other SaaS transition
that we had the expertise on that.
So we kept working with those two segments for a while.
and you had some other sprinkled here and there, like.
Franchise networks and affiliate and some others.
But these were two very strong viewers.
Then what happened in, I'd say 2021 or so is like SEO started to pivot
into different realms that was close to the time when open AI really.
started to penetrate the space before chatGPT.
We were actually integrating open AI, but lots of people already
use Jasper for content creation.
They start integrating programmatic APIs for creating
mass programmatic SEO content.
So SEO's volatility started to kind of, become a problem.
And also B2B SaaS funding also started to become questionable and slightly volatile.
So in 2020, vast Percentage of our clientele was hit pretty hard, you know,
mass layoffs losing tons of revenue and all that so we are still working with
probably half of them but in the meantime other Verticals and other trajectories
and kind of categories started to pop up as well so now our portfolio is
pretty diverse some of the Kind of old category of clients have been getting
back to us over the past six months But it's definitely been a pretty dry
late 2022 end of 2024 period that The core two categories that we counted on
for the most part disappeared and we're in scarcity mode or shrinking down or
trying to build into something else.
Luckily, because of our marketing expertise, we've been a HubSpot partner
since 2016 and SEMrush 2019 or so.
we, we got a bunch of other contracts on the go to market space.
Like, Hey, we are losing all of our channels, losing all of our money.
And we are saying, okay, like we have.
specific playbooks that work for email outreach, personalizing
data, like identifying buyer level identity data, and lots of other
playbooks that we can quickly launch inside landing pages, do A B testing
effectively, and launch different campaigns pretty much twice a week.
so this was kind of what kept us rolling 2022, 2024.
and now there's a lot more return to where we were a while back, even though
again, AI has definitely a pretty.
You know, strong impact on what do customers expect today?
Matt: Yeah, so it's safe to say that you're you're not doing like the mom
and pop WordPress websites or even like the smaller to medium sized business
that just has a lot of stuff going on Which is you know scoping out a project?
custom post types content content migration You're operating at a different
level and if I could I want to get your opinions on As someone who has seen a
lot, who has done a lot in enterprise, therefore understands enterprise
requirements, not just on the development side, but on the delivery side, on the
management side of an enterprise customer, if I could, can you compare that to
what I see in the page builder world?
Where Folks who operate with even more, air quotes, professional page
builder tools like Bricks, and even the longstanding Elementor, where do you
stand with running an agency or offering agency services to the enterprise?
leveraging tools like that.
Is it possible?
Is it the wrong choice?
What is, what's your feeling around that?
Because so many people swarm to different solutions as like,
okay, Elementor doesn't have this.
Let's go over here and move over to this one.
Okay, Bricks has this.
Now Bricks doesn't have this one.
Let's move over to this one.
that's the kind of thing that I see at early stage agencies, which I
think is detrimental to their, at least, maybe short term success.
Like, they have to understand, like, sustainability and
scalability and all that stuff.
So, if you could, it's a big loaded frame, but if you could share your thoughts
Mario: Yeah, the only thing I'm afraid off is the Dalpy minute may turn into the WP
week if I have to properly expand that.
But you just need to take a look into that from different perspectives, right?
So over the past year, maybe two years, we actually have More websites
running on Elementor or, you know, Briggs or Oxygen or some other,
you know, existing frameworks.
We also have more websites, professional websites coming up that were built
with Divi or Astra or some of the other kind of more generic, I
would say, teams and team builders.
I see that other agencies in the space and the kind of other top 10
agencies, if I have to put it this way, are also using other teams,
again, Astra or Olly from Mike McAllister, which is also pretty common.
My own website is with Olly, by the way.
so I see a lot more move into let's try to reuse what, what's there and
kind of what exists in the market.
So whether these make sense or not is contingent on several different factors.
First, is the client willing to pay for a bespoke design nowadays?
And for a custom theme back in the day when money was kind of broadly
available, funding zero interest policy and all that, it was more common to
have, Hey, it's totally fine to pen to pay, you know, another 10, 20, 30
grand for bespoke design and the custom theme for like even small midsize site.
It was common.
Nowadays, it's more about, we need a feature set.
We need a couple landing pages.
We are actually fine doing that with.
Unbounce, lead pages, any of the other tools, or we also have HubSpot.
We're fine to use HubSpot pages, but we need something like strong underhood.
Right?
So it's, it's less about design bespokeness and more about, we need
an underlying solution that's stable enough, not necessarily paying a
small fortune to get it rolling.
So we're just seeing a lot more of that coming up nowadays.
Second thing is what is your agency trying to deliver?
If you want to solve all problems in the universe, you're not going to
be experienced enough to be a number one professional in Elementor, in
Oxygen, in Astra, Cadence, Genesis, like whatever you're using, right?
You can't really spread yourself too thin.
So if you like a framework, if you like a specific solution, there's enough
market for that, and you can be a professional, you can be an expert there.
But if you try to spread yourself too thin, it won't be too different
from building websites in PHP and in Ruby and in Python and
in Java and in everything else.
So, So if I'm, if I have to give, you know, specific piece of advice
is once again, figure out what your clientele wants, whether they want
a bespoke solution in the first place or whether they're fine with
an existing theme and the builder.
Second, what do you feel most comfortable with and most confident?
Everything has pros and cons.
There's no one unique solution.
Otherwise the other ones wouldn't exist in the first place.
So again, we just need to be aware of that.
So just use.
What you like and what you're comfortable with that you can provide
and produce a proper solution with.
And, and the third thing is try to figure out whether that's tapping into the type
of market that you want to conquer, one or two or three or four or five years ago.
Because some of these solutions are not necessarily acceptable in enterprise.
Others are.
There's also the type of enterprise that runs 17 different companies.
And the top one is bringing, you know, half a trillion in revenue, but then
there are several others that are doing, you know, two to five million,
and they actually need your solution.
And it's totally fine to just build something for the
enterprise, for the side brands.
There's no shame in that.
There's enough work in that.
And this is what kind of, you can serve that population.
So that's the non 17 hour explanation of what you asked me to do here.
Matt: Yeah, I appreciate that.
no, that, that's great advice.
And what I'm trying to do with this episode, while I, while I have you, cause
you're, you are a wealth of knowledge and you've had this massive breadth
of experience and you're a guy that.
you know, obviously we don't, we just said, we really haven't talked in
many years, but I always watch, you know, the stuff that you're doing.
I use you as one of my, barometers for like where the market is going.
I won't call you a canary in the coal mine, because I certainly
don't want to see you pass out.
But, you're the guy that I watch to see like, okay, like
what, what is Mario doing?
Like what, what is him and his team doing?
Because you're always sort of at that, that leading edge, in my opinion.
where that takes me is you mentioned a few times being a HubSpot partner.
for the folks listening who are like, man, I'm struggling to get clients.
Where do I get my next client?
Where I landed my, you know, luckily I got a referral to this
big 30, 000 contract and how do I get more of these types of clients?
The importance of multiple channels for your agency, right?
Referrals obviously marketing inbound outbound channel
partners with like HubSpot.
How, if you could, if you can remember, Paint the picture of how you got involved
with HubSpot and how one should think about partnering with these, what
I'll call like, elevated solutions.
Like, you know people using HubSpot have money, you know, versus like,
I don't know, maybe MailChimp.
I mean, I'm sure there's people that do a lot of revenue using MailChimp, but
the average user on MailChimp is probably a mom and pop shop versus a HubSpot.
How did you make that, that connection and how does that help serve the business?
Mario: Look, that's, this is a great question.
And we signed with HubSpot again back in 2016.
And at the time inbound marketing was one of our strongest lead generation channels.
But I also want to stress on that.
I would live and die by the idea of SEO, but SEO has not been
the same since September 2023.
So I'm, it's no longer a priority channel for us, even
though we do have SEO contracts.
It's, it's, it's the whim of the SEO algorithm gods.
And something that changes overnight with a click of a
button and an algorithm change.
So it's, I would hardly call it something sustainable.
But to the point of HubSpot and also Salesforce and Pipedrive and some of
the other professional CRMs out there.
over time, what we found out, especially working with, you know, different
clients, is that larger cohorts of businesses in different categories,
Rely on certain tools and systems.
And if you get to know and understand these systems better, you can become
a niche expert in a given field.
What I just said, like, 10 minutes ago or so is we went through different phases
of we were the the WordPress SaaS gurus.
Then we went into what is it publishing and then B2B SaaS and then go to
market consulting for not just WordPress and going international.
We have several of these verticals actually have a whiteboard out there,
which is experimentation as a service.
It's one of our also key packages that we have right now, just iterating and
testing new offers every single week.
So niching down and kind of turning yourself into a core expert in a In a
market, in a skill set, in a specific vertical, like over 100 million pages per
month or e commerce doing over 50, 000 products per show, or, again, a tool like
HubSpot, like NetSuite, like Salesforce and PowerDot, a bunch of different tools.
Try to, try to discover and uncover some of these and figure out
whether you can deliver that better.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't give a blanket advice of you need
to specialize in HubSpot.
Why?
On Thursday, I had a call with a partner agency.
They said, we take all of our contracts from LinkedIn partnerships.
So you can be a LinkedIn partner.
Monday, we met another friend who's also taking HubSpot partnerships.
It's kind of the core channel.
Yesterday I had a call with a friend from Meta who said, Hey, we have
tech solution partners from Meta.
There's, there's budget to be allocated and so forth.
Two weeks ago, I had a call with Google and they said Google's
allocating 500, what, what was it?
50 million in funding, different startups in like.
Google cloud and big query and data packages.
So the truth is there are budgets also again, a couple of weeks ago, AWS
partner saying we've been funding like AWS is funding Ukraine for like three
years of like free credits and stuff, but they're paying service partners.
So if you're a service partner, you're getting paid, your client isn't paying
and essentially it's a win win situation.
So there are a lot of these buckets, but it really depends on.
Your target audience, who are you serving and whether they're
using whatever you're using.
We have a couple of large clients using, Oracle's NetSuite.
So we specialize there.
We have several HubSpot, clients and we are serving HubSpot there.
We have, again, many integrations with, WhatsApp and, you know, lots of Facebook
and, you know, tons of Instagram as well.
So we're also delivering services there.
So if you, if you establish a specific bucket of like several clients
within the same niche, it could be Publishing, specific between SAS,
healthcare, FinTech, you know, large e commerce, wholesale, franchising.
There, there are some of these buckets.
If you have three of these clients, chances are at least two
are using one specific tool set.
Focus on building integrations and features and extensions and, and
learning the APIs and the endpoints and the core features that are needed.
And once you get to know them, Take it a step further and try to become an
integration partner, because this is probably going to open up more work.
We probably have 30 different tools and systems that are very
important and integral, but they're all market dependent.
Unless you're able to, unless you already have kind of a case study of
two or three clients that you've done that, it's really hard to push forward.
But if you've done the work successfully for two or three that you managed to land
somehow, then it's easier to just use them as a trampoline for the other ones.
Matt: Yeah.
I, I'm gonna ask you a broad question.
and, and, you know, hopefully, folks listening to this get, get a real, some
real value out of this one, because I think this is one of the most important.
I've, I've been talking to a, a friend of mine who's, you know, running an
agency and stuff like that and really trying to like, and it's just a solo age.
It's just him.
It's just him, you know, trying to get this thing off the ground and I'm trying
to tell him like, you have to think at, you know, depending on what his
goals are, his goals are to, you know, grow it and become an agency operator,
let's say, which is very different than somebody who loves the craft.
You know who I'm talking about.
Like the two or three person shop, the owner just loves to design or loves to
develop or loves to do marketing and that's all they're thinking about, but
they're not thinking about how do I.
How do I operate this thing?
How do I get out of the work and become the operator of this business?
What's your best advice for getting somebody to, to think in that way, if
that's the direction they want to go?
Like, no longer will you be developing, no longer will you be
designing, you'll take a step back.
And grow different channels, explore new opportunities.
How did you get yourself out of that mindset of like, I'm done
optimizing my databases, and now I'm building the business?
Do you remember that point, or do you have a piece of advice for
Mario: my, my follow up question or rather my, my contradiction towards what
you're saying is, is it really worth going through that hassle or rather
some people are just great consultants and individual contributors and maybe,
you know, indisplaceable assets in even large organizations and they can be
just fine doing whatever they're doing.
so I've.
You know, I've spoken a lot about entrepreneurship and founding companies.
I believe there's a lot of value in that, but I also feel it's, it's, oversaturated
in the sense of everyone and their mom are building WordPress websites right now.
So getting into a vastly competitive space, it's, there's a popular book,
you know, Blue Ocean, which is comparing the blue ocean and the red, red ocean.
It's pretty common.
but.
certain spaces are oversaturated and you turning into that operator
means that you're doing completely different things on a day to day, right?
I had six hours of meetings today.
You know, I had interviews, I had feedback sessions, I had brainstorming
and roadmap sessions, and, and they have more coming up, right?
Like sales goals and like prepping proposals and, you know, assessments
and lots of other things that are not.
I'm going to design the most beautiful website in the world, right?
It's a different craft.
It's a different skill.
So my personal passion is, so I care about entrepreneurship,
but I care about education.
I care about giving back in order to educate.
I need the resources and the know how to be able to educate with the types of tips
that I'm sharing here on that podcast.
In order to give back, I need the resource of the entire company to
allocate portion of the profit and fund more causes and all of that.
So my.
My intrinsic motivation, my core values require capital, so I'm
willing to sacrifice what I want to do, like write articles all
day and, you know, philosophize.
Yeah, for example, so I'm willing to sacrifice that for
the greater good in a sense that requires different type of work.
But I know a lot of people, you know, especially the 95 people who
want their, you know, pay time off or working from home or not really
dealing with payroll or chasing.
You know, overdue invoices and all that stuff, people like that, for the most
part, they shouldn't be entrepreneurs and they may look for a kind of small
acquisition or maybe calling, you know, say yet or some of the other companies
that are buying companies left and right and just getting assumed and making
sure that payroll is guaranteed so they can focus on kind of what they do.
So I just want to delineate it.
So if you, if, if craft, if you want to design for the next 20 years,
don't focus on elevating as operator.
If you want to operate, Okay.
There are completely different skills related to sales, negotiations,
finance, OPEX, you know, adopting something like EOS or at least OKRs,
managing teams, reviews, scorecards, one on ones, lots of other things
that are almost 100 percent major.
I think it was Paul Graham who had that essay for maker versus,
what was it, maker versus manager.
These are two different roles as an operator.
You're going to be a major full stop.
There's going to be very little making happening on your own unless you're
spending nights and weekends, which is, by the way, what I'm doing to
make to, to engage in that initiative.
But your core value, your, your, the highest KPIs, the highest return on your
own investment is managing, educating, coaching, selling, negotiating, coming
up and visualizing processes that you can repeat and, you know, increase
better yields and do PR and lots of other things that are not making.
So essentially decide on whether that's for you or not.
And if it is just step into the executive functions and roles
that you need to be working on.
and, and you definitely have to shift from making in the first place.
Yeah.
Matt: answer because it definitely frames, well, to simply put
it like the grass isn't always greener on the, on the other side.
Right.
And, that's a lot of decision making that, that, that folks have to make.
And, yeah, I'm right there.
I'm right there with you on, on that kind of critical thinking.
I want on the last, third of our episode here, I want to turn to the interior of
WordPress and talk about the challenges, of course, AI, and we'll get to that.
Yeah.
But also, the current temperature in the room, right?
automatic in Mullenweg versus, WP Engine.
Lots of folks, at least on my Twitter feed, are saying it's the end of days.
you know, I, you know, listen, I'm also concerned.
There's a rumor that we might only do two major releases up until 2027,
until this court thing is done.
whatever that means for open source WordPress.
My particular opinion is Even if so, if that's a direction that we go, that
means that maybe automatic, especially now that automatic is clawed back
there, open source contributions.
They'll take that, those resources and point that towards either dot com or WP,
cloud solution, whatever it is, they're just basically at the end of the day,
make automatic products better, which by the way, I have no problem with at all.
like I think that should have been happening for quite some time, so
that, the mothership could have been competing with the Squarespace's
Wix web flows of the world.
And we could have been doing this open source thing, air quotes on our own.
So two particular challenges to, to boil this down.
The temperature of WordPress.
Are you seeing your clients saying, Oh, that Matt Mullenweg thing.
We don't like that.
We don't want to use WordPress.
And then we'll talk about AI.
But temperature in the room.
Are your clients affected by
Mario: Look, so in, in Q4 in particular, there was definitely turbulence.
I remember several times, last minute calls, emergency Sunday night call
by actual private equity saying, you know, we're in the process of acquiring
a business and, and we don't know whether we should do that or not.
And it's like an hour and a half conversation on GPL, like, don't
worry, you're not going to violate GPL, or like, you're not like, there
had been a lot of fear in that.
We had prospects that pulled back and said, we're either going to pose that
for the time being, or we're just going to pick Webflow or something
else in the meantime, just because we don't want to deal with the drama.
So saying that it didn't have effect in the space would be, would be false.
Whether it was.
a dramatic shift.
I wouldn't say so just because most, most of our clients and kind of
most of the ecosystem that at least kind of my broader circle isn't
paying too much attention on that.
Of course, when it's something that bubbles up on ink magazine or tech crunch
or show it reaches us, there's some.
There's some disturbance in the force, right?
and, and there's that fear of is, is WordPress imploding?
Like whether we should dig into that, you know, but, but it,
it hasn't been too fragile.
And right now in Q1 at least, we haven't seen, we, we've almost seen no
indications of people being bothered.
They see it as if they heard something, it was some drama
happening in September and October.
It's, you know, that doesn't set out and it's not really a problem
per se, but for the most part, of course, different organizations,
they have tech teams and they're kind of advocating internally, like.
Hey guys, you know, there's some stuff happening with WordPress.
Maybe we shouldn't spend the next six months building a WordPress build.
We don't know what's exactly going to happen.
Let's consider keeping it static website or let's just, again,
use Webflow for another year and see what happens and all of that.
So, there's still impact out there.
I, I definitely don't think it's, it was wise for the community.
I can understand where Milawaki is coming from, even though I completely
disagree with like tanking and dooming the entire freaking community, because
when you're, what's the saying, post economic, well then, then you can't
really relate to how people are making a living with WordPress, like losing a.
If you live somewhere and you lose your monthly website, essentially
you're out of work for that month, which isn't cool at all.
so yeah, this, this drama seems to be having less of a reflection
right now, but, but it's definitely not fully out of the woods yet.
As to the updates to WordPress, honestly, I wouldn't care if WordPress
isn't getting a bit for five years.
It's a stable framework with APIs and hooks and, you know, a pretty resilient,
even if it gets detached as backpress or whatever it was called back in
the day, there's the core product.
There are 50, 000 extensions.
There are several core teams that you can use and you can build.
insanely powerful and stable products without having to deal
with like a core development.
And that's with all my due respect to the core contributors working on rest API and
like everything else they're working on.
It's great.
It's really helpful.
Thank you for that.
But the core product has been stable for like six to eight to 10 years.
It, it hasn't, it.
There are very few gradual improvements out there if you don't account for
Gutenberg, which I still believe is in its infancy, honestly.
And all of that could have been built as a plugin just as it is right now.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Matt: this as concise and on point as possible.
There's obviously a lot of noise, like, there are people who don't want
you to use WordPress at all anymore.
there are people who don't want any kind of like, you know, I don't
know, good, good vibes is the only phrase I can come up with right now.
Like, people don't want you to be nice to automaticians,
which I think is ridiculous.
People are talking about forks of WordPress, which, fine, that's great,
but You know, show it to me like when you have it, you know, and I'll
take a look at it, but it's, it's so hard to stop the machine that is open
source WordPress being distributed by hundreds, if not thousands of web
hosting companies across the world with so many people already invested in it.
I've been saying that if we're sticking around, a vote for WordPress is a
vote for Mullenweg at the same time.
And that's just what we have to deal with.
I've been trying to look at this as, listen, we need to take a step
back from under, like, feeling like we ever had control over this.
By the way, I never felt I had control over this.
But I never had control over this.
And you can still make a living with WordPress.
You know, until he pulls like, you know, this is no longer
GPL, no longer open source.
Okay, we might have to scramble and figure things out.
But in the meantime, even if you're not happy with the direction that it's
going, you can still run a profitable agency or side hustle or freelance
business leveraging this software.
You just have to care less, I guess, about the direction.
I don't know if that's just too crude of me to think in that, in that fashion.
But I say, listen, if we have Matt, Matt is WordPress.
As of now.
And that's the vote.
If we're sticking around, that's who we're sticking with.
In other words, I'm done complaining about it.
And I'm just gonna ignore it.
I guess.
I don't know if that's the right thinking.
That's how I think.
What do you think?
Mario: if I have to simplify it, like if something happens to
WordPress, then there's the entire rest of the ecosystem that has to
decide what happens afterwards.
You said the hosts, they have been the biggest, you know, advocate of WordPress.
You go to a host, there's a one clicks of Taculous or Fantastic or whatever
it is installed WordPress, right?
So it gets you a WordPress.
org version that you download and you still go to the admin and you
can like add and install plugins.
If you don't want, you know, you can download them from the repl.
So if WordPress isn't GPO anymore, it's going to get fixed.
For if the WordPress repository stops working, I don't think
that even automatic, would.
from that one way or another.
But if that happens, the way I see that is if I have a client coming up and ask you
for WordPress, I'm going to say, we have a better flavor for WordPress under hood.
100%.
All of your WordPress plugins are going to work with that system.
A hundred percent.
We can still use whatever team you like on the planet, 100%, and we can
still develop it for the next decade.
Right?
So what I would say is eight out of 10 times, this is going to be sufficient
and they won't ask for your questions.
So.
even though they will still come for WordPress because of 21 years of branding
and tutorials and all that, even though they still want open source and like
knowing that Yoast is going to work or like any of the other popular plugins
like Gravity Forms or whatever they are using, they, as long as they get
all of that, they're still going to be content if I tell them we have a
flavor of WordPress that's just faster or is like more stable in our hosting.
and, and I want to stress on that because it's, I think it's, it's
not really talked about quite a lot.
like, you know, even small business coming from a WordPress website, essentially
they want, they may have seen Elementor, their nephew has showed them Elementor
and they want to see that they have Elementor or whatever working or Bricks
or Oxygen or any of the other builders.
So if you can provide them with the previous version of WordPress that
was stable, they'd be fine with that.
Do you think they're going to care about updates over the next three years?
They want to make sure they don't get hacked.
As soon as you provide that by other means, which is not ongoing
updates, then you're totally safe.
So it's a little bit more cynical.
I definitely hope that there's going to be a resolution for that.
But I think the lawsuit is in like 2026.
so definitely nothing coming in the next like 18 months or something.
Matt: Yeah.
Okay.
Let's talk about the other thing that's gonna end the world, ai,
and like where you stand on that.
I'm really interested to get your opinions on that.
I wanna start with the marketing side first before we start, before
we talk about the development and, how it might impact WordPress as
a, as a CMS in, in the, in whole.
I was talking to another agency owner, the, the other day, respect him a lot.
and he was saying like, man, this AI stuff, I can.
Like I can replace an entire marketing team, with what I'm seeing and I'm kind
of like worried, but excited also for, for the future inherently as a marketing
person myself, who's always put my face and my voice out into the world.
Like I have some bias against that.
Like I think humans will want to interact with other humans.
Maybe some base level blogging stuff gets replaced, but how do you get.
How do you extract the human out of like human connections and emotions?
I'm not too sure about that.
So starting with marketing first and particularly maybe for like your agency
or maybe for your clients Where do you see AI impacting that over the next year?
I'm not even asking you to predict five years Go ahead if you'd
Mario: so first up, the, I do have like a, an open role for account
management here, but I have probably three open marketing roles here.
so I just want to stay that pretty clear.
we use AI.
Intensely.
And we've been doing that for a while now.
by the way, you know, AI is a buzzword when we are talking about the effort.
Most part of people mean wrappers around chat GPT or cloud or Gemini.
first on that front, we've been integrating open AI for ever since
2020 for product descriptions, for e commerce and lots of other things.
Before that chat GPT was out there, we've been building machine learning since 2013.
So we've done.
so we've been around the block for a while and I'm actually looking
for more marketing people right now.
So marketing is far from that.
and again, want to stress on that.
the, the second thing is, and I talk about that.
pretty much every week in my, newsletter, by the way, cause this is kind of one of
the topics of the day, you know, Chinese AI models and digital transformation
and go to market channels and like it's inbound dying, like all that, because
it's pretty volatile and that's what happens to be the topic of the day, but
literally, one of my common questions, questions I'm discussing, but, to kind
of sum it up the problem with AI and marketing is that the marketing is.
Spread across multiple channels, which is again, SEO, paid ads, you know, video
content, like a few other channels, you know, depending on what you use,
like Reddit or whatever it is, and it's very, very easy to oversaturate these
channels, meaning that whenever you discover a video that's doing an AI
avatar, or whenever you discover a channel that's building viral LinkedIn copy
or X copy, it means that in two weeks, 50, 000 people are going to use that.
two months, Half a million people are going to use that.
So your entire feed is going to be quittered with that, and it's
no longer going to be effective.
And I can understand the use of AI for operational efficiency internally, right?
Every company can upgrade its operational efficiency, use more tools for research,
for building business plans, for wrapping up proposals, for summarizing emails.
This one is here to stay.
But when it comes to marketing, using role marketing right now out
there, it's more likely going to embarrass you than serve you good.
If not, that's probably a problem for your existing team being not skilled
enough, underpaid, outsourced to, you know, areas that don't really speak
English well, that don't understand marketing, that don't understand your ICP.
And if AI is doing better, then there's probably a down
skilled problem with your team.
But AI is not the solution.
It's not solving your problems.
It's something that gets sunset pretty quickly.
It's something that gets recognized a mile away and is very far away
from the quality that you want to have to actually do something.
I can't use raw AI to write content.
Build landing pages, write my social posts or anything like that.
Nothing that doesn't take a lot of editing or just patching things together.
Even if I feed an agent with my own thoughts and my book and my
blog, it requires a lot of work to actually make it work properly.
Like, I kid you not.
so this one is vastly kind of overrated.
And on the technical, on the technical front, it's definitely a problem.
simply because the prototyping part is shortened quite a lot.
So, a while back we, we discussed HubSpot as people with HubSpot have
money and people with WordPress are more likely looking for something
that's low in budget, right?
So the reason is when you get 90 percent of your feature set with WordPress for
free, getting the other 10 percent is really hard to justify as prioritize.
Really, really, really hard when you pay 10 grand a year for HubSpot and then
adding some bells and whistles It makes more sense to pay for custom development
and spend another 20 30 grand on other things But WordPress this is kind of the
gap and right now what we have is Someone building a prototype with bold or cursor
or v0 or something else and they say look what I did in like five hours So you
just put it in the WordPress And build
Matt: talking about me, ladies and gentlemen, he's talking about me, but
Mario: Yeah, but, but, to give you an example, like, I actually have a
video in my channel from, like, last March or so, and I said, here's an
ICP kind of proof of concept tool that I built here in an hour, right?
So I'm breaking down how you do that with Cursor or, or something.
And, and, there's a prototype, there's like a stupid one
pager that I can use myself.
Then I assigned it to my team and we started building that and it
took like five months building that into an actual product.
And it's not a skill issue.
It's look, we need proper login management.
We need a proper database to store these.
We need a cron job to pull the data every single week.
We need to enrich with this.
We need to scrape LinkedIn.
We need to do this.
And the actual product has nothing to do with the prototype.
It looks similar.
But it's a properly fully fledged product.
So the problem with AI is clients are building something and they say, look,
how easy it is to build it myself.
And then it's the gap to pay for an actual product that gets
lots of discussions nowadays.
So this is a bridge we need to start crossing.
And this year is going to be about that setting expectations of this is
what you get with cursor, but it's not a product you can launch out there.
It's not a SaaS that you can release out there in the public.
It's just going to be a GPT wrapper.
You need a lot more value.
You need a data mode.
You need research.
You need, that's the one thing.
And the second thing is due to that, there are over a hundred SaaS apps
launched on Product Hunt every single day.
So go to market is just becoming 10x more expensive.
So even if you build it, your marketing is going to be 10x more expensive
and AI is not going to cut that.
Matt: Yeah, on the technical, I've seen this argument, where people say, well,
look, and I had a good conversation with my brother who's like deeply in
the stuff, but more on the finance side where the argument was, well, now we're
going to see just many more individual like million dollar SAS businesses.
because of this stuff, like individual million dollar SaaS businesses.
I, I have a problem wrapping my arms around that because if you're saying it's
so easy for, for somebody to spin up a million dollar SaaS business, then it's
gonna be so easy to spin up a million dollar SaaS business for everyone,
not just a lucky few that can do it.
So I have a hard problem wrapping my, my hands around that because I just feel like
it's either just gonna go from a million for the first year and then 500, 000
the next year, then 250 the third year, because everyone's gonna be doing it.
Or, these big businesses, like Chad GPT, Gemini, Claude, Facebook, Microsoft,
like, they're gonna just build the tool, they're gonna build a solution that
does whatever these little stagnant million dollar SaaS businesses are doing,
like, in my opinion, through native AI.
not a direct question, but just like a thread of thought that I saw through,
like, through Twitter feedback.
Mario: I have a few of these people in my circle.
I'm also part of 30 different communities, some of them by very
highly esteemed, you know, gurus in soberneurship and AI and all that stuff.
so I've been reading all that, you know, breaking news, many AI, seven
figure businesses and all that.
So on the two schools of thought.
Yes, it is possible.
and the reason it's possible is not because you're going
to build the next cursor.
It's because there's still lots of untapped niches that
you can now tap into yourself.
And I'm talking about, I'm talking about, Dali and, and
that's a very morbid example.
I'm sorry about that.
But like, Dali integrated AI SaaS to, for, for funeral homes.
Right.
It's a pretty nasty space.
Nobody wants to touch that, but like, imagine providing a tool for them
to set up and like, do like the, the casket type of thing with this, right?
Horrible example, right?
Not a niche that most people, not a niche that most people want to get
into, but like, if you go there, probably it wouldn't be too tempting
for others to just disrupt you.
Right.
It's not large enough to make a hundred million dollars and it's not funny
enough to be worth disrupting you.
Right.
And there are lots of, especially for traditional work, like.
plumbers, roofing services.
A lot of those traditional services may get small micro AI tools that
help and get a thousand clients paying a hundred bucks a month.
And there you have it, a seven figure business.
this one is possible and we're probably going to see more of
these niches tapped out there.
However, any niche that's.
that's cool and is trending and is surprising and has like a vivid active
community, especially a community that's online and just tracking the news
is going to be very easy to disrupt.
And we're going to see the race to the bottom.
Everyone like a 13 years old teenager is going to set something up and make
it a freemium with donations and going to completely wipe out the space or.
You know, a solopreneur with an exit of like 10 million dollars is just
going to do it for fun and then going to sell the data in a different way.
So it's, it's going to be a different kind of premium model.
So a lot of that disruption is going to go because product is no longer remote.
Back in the day, it was because you need money and capital to hire expensive
engineers to build something complex.
And it's a mode when product is not a mode, there are different skills and
different ways to distribute your budget to go there, contacts, relationships,
going to events, field sales, and a lot of the other buckets that most
people are not really caring for.
AI.
Everyone is fighting for a very tiny slice of the pie, which is.
Mostly, by the way, geeks like you and I, who spend a lot of time
on social and read these news.
but the vast majority of the people, yeah, real estate agents, or like just
traditional services, hunters, gatherers, and like all the other people who are
not even online, they don't care about that, they don't follow the news,
they don't go on product hunt, and you need to actually do the footwork to,
door to door sales to make it happen.
Matt: yeah, yeah, I'm actually holding, an in person, AI workshop next week here in
my co working space for small businesses.
And it is literally like, I, I have no agenda, I'm not trying to
sell them anything, I don't have an agency anymore, I just want to talk.
to, to small businesses and just see and hear have you heard about this
stuff or am I just living in this, this bubble on my Twitter sphere?
Like, is it really impacting you?
Are you really thinking about it?
Have you seen what it can do?
You know, show off some examples and stuff, but I, you know, I'm just only six
months ahead of anybody who just needs to sink their teeth into it and just learn
like I'm doing and just start using it.
so I think it's very important.
You know, keep our ears and boots on the ground for this kind of stuff.
Because yeah, I think sometimes we're just living in this, algo and it's
just telling us, you know, what, what we want to hear half the time.
Mario, this is fair.
Go ahead.
Mario: there's, all I was going to say is there's a lot
of the brand value is rising.
And a lot of the free content and free resources we are seeing
that are high quality are going behind walled gardens right now.
I want to make it crystal clear.
Almost all of my executive friends who are public online are pretty pissed with chat
GPT scraping their stuff or other people launching AI avatars with their content.
So they move to sub stacks to pay it's like communities to other places.
I myself am.
Kind of partially doing the same, and we're going to see that the high
quality content is not no longer going to be open and available.
And you'll see that a lot of the secret sauce of great SaaS is going to be
paid, maybe even expensive or invite only, just because of that, rapid
acceleration of everyone can launch something and the space is crowded
and you need a verification batch in what works and what's available now.
Matt: Yeah, that's actually a quick bonus round.
Like, I think that was, I've been thinking about that too.
Like, WordPress is a great platform to house all of your content, but
we need to shut it off, right?
At, you know, Google stole from us, AI stole from Google, so like we,
we just keep getting stolen from.
And I just want to say like, you know, let's put our content in
something like WordPress and that's why I still have this, Desire to
see WordPress succeed regardless of what's happening at leadership level.
And I still think it's a great open source publishing platform and I want
to see that continue to have like.
A database.
It's a database of our content, and it, you know, we can grant access in and out.
So anyway, Mario has been fantastic.
I want to have you back at the end of the year so we can see, what
we're doing because, I always love.
Talking to you, derick.com.
DEVI, D-E-V-R-I x.com.
dericks.com.
You have a team picture there.
The team is about 10 times larger than the last time.
we interviewed each, or I interviewed you.
check it out.
dericks.com.
Where else do you want folks to go?
you have YouTube channel.
I know you have your book.
Where else can go?
folks go to say, thanks.
Mario: well, I know my website is mariopeshev.
com.
It's pretty trivial.
My, first name, last name.
com.
and I'm hosting all my others still there.
I do, my newsletter is where I spend the most time nowadays.
Honestly, it's weekly.
and you can subscribe there from insidergrocer.
com.
But, yeah, it, it happens to be the place where I can gather a lot of data
and not rely on SEO distributing it.
Or LinkedIn showing it up because of our great like if you sign up you get
it every single week and i'm talking about Most of what we discuss here,
AI stuff digital transformation go to market channels Whether there's
money in the b2b economy and all that.
So this is probably the best place to go to today