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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 (00:00)
Nathan Tyler, welcome to the WP Minute.
Nathan Tyler (00:02)
Yeah, Thanks for having me.
Matt (00:03)
You've been in the space for quite some time. we've run into each other once or twice at WordCamps and other WordPress events. Sadly, you're leaving us. No, I'm just kidding. You're not leaving us. You're not leaving us yet, but I'll let you color in the lines of that statement. You're the co founder of Simply Schedule Appointments, which famously ran on WordPress and integrated with WordPress. Now you're launch launching something else called Blink Pages,
Tell us who you are and what you've done in the WordPress world to bring you to where you are today.
Nathan Tyler (00:36)
Sure. Yeah, I've been here forever, it feels like. I started off doing agency work, built hundreds of WordPress websites for clients, did agency for about 10 years, started launching WordPress plugins, simply schedule appointments, draw attention, both are on still tens of thousands of sites each on WordPress.
I built and launched a SaaS business around doing WordPress updates. So like we did visual regression tests. We sold that to Pantheon in twenty nineteen. So I've been in WordPress a long time. Have a lot of love for WordPress, but this year I moved my sites off of WordPress. So
Matt (01:10)
Draw
draw attention was one of the first video or one of the first plugins I did a video for for my agency. You probably don't even remember this, but I Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Tyler (01:18)
I do, I do. I we had a call even I think. Yeah.
Matt (01:23)
and it was like one of those things like cause this is I don't know how however long ago that was, like twelve, thirteen years ago. I I don't even remember. But
Nathan Tyler (01:30)
Yeah, it's
just about then I think twenty fourteen was when we launched it.
Matt (01:34)
Yeah.
And we I remember using it for a client site. I don't even remember what the client site was, but it was one of those moments was like, like this is it's sort of kind of like the backdrop to maybe some WordPress discussion first. It was one of those plugins where you install it on the site, you could draw on the image, right? And you could do comp I think you could do like comparison stuff, or eventually that came. But it was like one of those moments where a customer came to us, they were like, Boy, it would be great if we could do this.
And again, thinking back fourteen ish years ago or whatever it's been, people were like, I don't know how to build this. Right.
Nathan Tyler (02:07)
Yeah.
Matt (02:08)
And and certainly that customer doesn't have the budget to to build this. So what the heck are we gonna do? And it was that magical moment that makes WordPress so great for the plug-in ecosystem to go, somebody has built this and it's a couple hundred bucks. And when I put it on the site, the client goes, my god, I would have paid you thousands. And then in fact they did, you know, to
To help incorporate that into into their workflow. So yeah, thank you for that. But I think that's one of the, you know, great things about about WordPress. So let's just start with that. W I mean, you have this new product, I'm gonna say static site builder. You'll fill in the rest in a moment. But where where where are you with that feeling for WordPress like you had 14, 15 years ago to where you are today?
Nathan Tyler (02:50)
Yeah, I I think that was such an exciting time and we were we met at WordPress events and WordCamps and there's just this explosion of community and creation and the whole ecosystem. and that was that was a great time. I I do miss that. And like in many ways, like there was I was not itching to get off of WordPress. I was not like
mad, I was not like hell bent on getting off for any, you know, any particular reason. Like I've been here for a long time, but I think that there's been this slow erosion of of the value that WordPress is creating. And then in in an AI world, right, like a lot has gotten turned upside down. And like one of the primary benefits of
WordPress is having this ecosystem of all these little utility plugins and writing little you have plugins that you would sell that were like fifty lines of code that did a little thing and like now AI can do that. And really big picture even outside of the plug in ecosystem, I think
That a lot of what we've created and what WordPress was built was on a very fundamental concept that you couldn't manage 2,000 pages of HTML. Right back in the 90s, you would write HTML pages, and then we started adding layers. Cause of course I can't manage 2,000 pages, so I'm gonna make templates, and then I'm gonna have a database to populate the templates, and then I'm gonna have
A CMS, a WordPress that I log in to manage the database that goes into the templates and kind of layers upon layers upon layers. But that fundamental issue has changed, right? Like now AI not only can manage 2,000 files, it it actually prefers. It's actually way more efficient in terms of tokens, in terms of speed, in terms of accuracy for to manage 2000 text files. And
So I think that as great as WordPress has been, and all those were obvious incremental steps along the way and were wonderful at the time, like if we had Claude in 1990, like none of that stuff would have ever like been necessary to create. and so like there's a lot of attempts, and I've attempted to like kind of shoehorn AI back into WordPress and do all these different things. I'm like, yes, it's possible, but
fundamentally I I don't think it's the right solution for the vast majority of sites anymore.
Matt (04:55)
My typical I don't want to say argument, but debate point on that when I when I talk to some other folks is well there's many there's many points and and remember, you know, I'm I'm dying and I'm not saying, you know, I'm not painting you this way, but I'm I'm dying on the hill of WordPress. That does not mean that I believe WordPress is great for everything, right? Like let's I I also agree with you that if there's a a a
Plumber friend, electric elect electric electrician friend comes to me or some small, you know, there's like I've been helping a s a few small local government candidates who are running for l elected positions and stuff. That they they're never gonna log into WordPress. They're never gonna blog, right? They just need a landing page. Yeah. Like, let me show you what we can build statically. Let's just launch it super cheap and fast, whatever. But I I do wonder from like an agency perspective or from a product perspective.
WordPress to me brings more than the CMS and the theming and the plugin. It does bring the the ecosystem and the community, where we all kind of build with one another for the betterment of the I mean of the software, but of all of our stuff. I feel like do you feel like you might miss that at all? Like going in in a static world and you're just like, well, Claude builds it for me, Codex builds it for me. How how do we humans get together and
Even if we're competing with each other, how do we say like, hey, this is this joint effort thing? Or am I just, hey man, that's that those days are gone. Like you're ne you we're not gonna get that back.
Nathan Tyler (06:21)
Yeah, and and I'm like, it's probably much more popular and on social media to be completely polarizing. I'm not completely polarized on the on this issue. Like I think
Matt (06:27)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Tyler (06:30)
I think that there is a lot of room for nuance. and I think even this isn't happening just to WordPress, right? Like even what you described, this erosion has been happening for years, right? Like we haven't recommended our local coffee shop
To really spin up WordPress for a long time. Like a Squarespace template has been just fine for a lot of people for a lot of years. You know, 10 or 15 years ago when you and I were talking, like that like I had clients who were local coffee shops and the local plumber and all of that. And over the years, like those templated page builder type things have seemed like a better option. So I don't think that part is entirely new. And
I think the same case against using those page builders is the same as what I'm saying about WordPress. Like you can have AI manage those sites. So will will will we miss the community that's there? yes. Like I think there's positive aspects, but there's also a lot of like there's a lot of clunkiness in WordPress because to create that community, right, you have these.
of centralized solutions and most people are only using like twenty percent of these solutions and so there is a lot of like bloat and overhead in some of these and there's a whole category of things that don't even really need
a plugin, right? Like there's a plug-in for that like was great when the alternative was like write everything from scratch in an agency who has to like do billable hours. Like you don't want to rebuild draw attention. You don't want to build a widget to maintain all of the little status bars for like countdown timers across your header or something. But there's there's small things like that that are really just small utilities and like
Even if there is a plugin to do that to manage notification bars, like is that the preferred interface? Is that the best experience? Like because now there's this whole little subsystem of like, I go into WordPress and I click on this and I click the scheduler date and like it all works, but it's this own little separate discipline, like yet another thing that your client doesn't want to log into, like
All the client wants and all the agency wants is to say, Hey, we're running a Black Friday sale, just put one of those countdown timer things across the top, make it match our branding, right? And that can be done. And you've just shortcut and that's the ultimate interface, right? Like I don't I don't really want to go to a place to look at seventy five meta boxes of like scheduling for this. So
There's larger things like l LMS, membership sites, things like that. Like I would say those are the strong case for what you're describing. where there's a lot of stuff going on and it matters. but there's a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't really matter. so yeah.
Matt (09:00)
one of the other d debate points is so you have and we're gonna talk about it, you have blinkpages.com. Imagine your website without the clunky page builder. one of the other things I I've told friend of the show, Mark Samatkiw,'s come on a few times. He's somebody who started his pr freelance slash agency pre practice maybe five or six years ago, got in with sort of like Elementor. He wasn't a developer, he's younger, much younger than us.
got in with Elementor, helped that's what helped him learn how to build WordPress sites, probably just like how you and I learned on like the standard theme from 8 bit, you know, 20 years ago.
Nathan Tyler (09:34)
Yep. Yeah.
Matt (09:34)
and then Theme Forest. But so he came in through that path, Elementor to a bricks to learning how to build sites, learning how to sell to client sites. And now he's firmly sort of moving away from WordPress, going, I just I don't want to wrestle with all of it anymore. I just want to talk to the agent to build the site, and I want to be on
Beyond with my day and it like grow the business and everything like that. And I, you know, I obviously I I salute him for that. But I told him the other day when we were recording a podcast. I'm like, well, I I still think that there is a certain need for WordPress, like you said, LMS, e-commerce, you know, membership sites, something like that. I also feel like there will be teams of people who who want WordPress for
What I'll call like the accountability, right? You have users who you know, they can track the edits, they can do and I know L I I know your agent or your chatbot could do that, but I still think like there are organizations where like, you know, Cindy needs access and we need to make sure when Cindy has access, she can only edit these pages and it's far too cumbersome to set up a a Grok bot or a chat GPT dot to do that just yet. Like, how do we do this in Teams? And I think WordPress fits the bill there.
This is a long way of getting to, like I told him, I said, well, maybe you don't have to dislike WordPress for all of the speed bumps you ran into building it for small client sites. Maybe WordPress exists at the higher end, at the upper echelon of that client. Where if you charge that client 10 times what you would charge them today with WordPress, would you still do WordPress? Like as a thought experiment. Like maybe we just weren't charging enough. Maybe the frustration was the software itself.
And we weren't getting paid enough money like to do the work.
Nathan Tyler (11:11)
Yeah.
Matt (11:12)
So I don't know. That there's no direct question there, but that's me on my soapbox moment going, I don't I will I I I do think that the lower end will get absorbed by, you know, great static tools like yourself or or agents themselves, but I still think there maybe there's an upper end to WordPress that we will have to, I don't want to say settle with, but something that new that we'll discover. Like, okay, maybe this is a more advanced tool now.
Your thoughts on that huge sweeping topic.
Nathan Tyler (11:37)
Yeah, I think that like when I we were starting out, if you said WordPress in kind of any enterprisey or university con like context, they would kind of like no, like security issues, like they finally WordPress has got them past that is now like a trusted default, like okay, WordPress, great. so I think it will last longer in those in those circles. in terms of actually solving the problems though, I
The tracking of changes like is infinitely better in a Git repository meant to track changes than WordPress's like with kinda the database, kinda the templates, kind of Elementor's own little schema that it made up. Like it's very hard to track changes and do granular control. and that's a lot of what
we've we've worked with and actually have much more control now. Like every single change is in a Git repository. You can control exactly who can change what. You can lock them into a preview. Like making staging URLs is like impossibly complex in WordPress. Like whole products have spun up around that. And you know, in a static world it's just a simple pile of files that are very easy to manage and you can put access control on who can do deploys and merges and all that.
so I think there's actually much technology better answers to some of those problems in a in a static site and like you could go back to any point in time in the last five years, like show me what this page looked like five years ago for compliance reasons. Like that's not even any kind of difficulty in this other environment. So I think WordPress as a name brand is definitely has a place. There are mature tools and trusted workflows.
I I think it will e exist longer at the enterprise level. but
Matt (13:15)
Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Tyler (13:17)
fundamentally I think there's it'll still have issues.
Matt (13:20)
Yeah. when we talk about WordPress from the like the like the cost perspective, right? From like small site to to large site, obviously there's like this this huge gap of like what what freelancers and consultants have been doing for years. Like there's lots of people who just go and buy a fifty dollar theme and then chart charge their clients
Five hundred, five thousand. I mean, I'm guilty
Nathan Tyler (13:41)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Matt (13:43)
of it when I was young and doing this stuff, but I was also like learning. I know there's a lot of people who just do it to like make a quick buck and like they're off. And then you you and I get the call to like some guy built a site, I don't even know who he is anymore.
Nathan Tyler (13:52)
Yes. Yeah.
Matt (13:54)
so there's like that. I'm worried, you know, that and that used to be a big thing that we used to talk about. It actually used to be a segment on the Matt report like 20 years ago where I would talk about like the problem with the five hundred dollar website because it was
It was an example of somebody just not caring enough and not delivering enough value to the customer. I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, like do you have that same thought? Do you have those same fears? I'll call it fears, but do you see that same thing happening with, hey, somebody can now just go chat GPT, whip up an HTML site, boom, see you later to this customer
Nathan Tyler (14:26)
Yeah.
Matt (14:27)
for 500 bucks and now they're looking at you going, I don't even know what to do with this thing. Yeah.
Nathan Tyler (14:29)
Yeah. A hundred percent. Like like Claude design,
like anybody can whip up a site. We can all recognize them now. It's got the serif and the sans serifont and the headers and the dark theme. Right. Like we can all kind of spot it a mile away. that will evolve. But like that basic thing of just smashing out some HTML from a Claude artifact and then publishing it on the web is going to be a problem. And
You know, I I wanna clarify, like, I'm actually not for just like a pure static HTML site, which is what it generates by default, but Astro, which is the framework powered by Cloudflare, it it's been around for about five years and has gotten very mature. It has all the stuff that we love about WordPress, it has content types, which are analogous to post types, it has taxonomies, it has all the relationships, it has the template hierarchy that our themes have. You can have a template and then you can override the template, like building in that structure.
Is critical. Like if you're gonna do the AI vibe-coded site, there's a world of difference between those two that are completely invisible to the client, right? Like they're like, okay, it looks, it can look identical, but if you're in an Astro framework, you have all that rigor and structure that we like in WordPress, easier to change, manage your changes at scale, have like actual structural integrity between pages.
All of that stuff's really important and I we're gonna see the same thing repeat, right? We're gonna have people who just show up for five hundred bucks or a hundred bucks. They'll like go into the coffee shop and be, I'll make you a website for a hundred bucks. Here I'll make it on my phone, publish. Like that's absolutely gonna happen.
And there's gonna be people picking up the pieces. Yeah.
Matt (15:53)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, listen,
I I've been trying to put myself, I mean, I have I have it I have far too many jobs. I have a day job at Gravity Forms like the WP Minute but do a bunch of other stuff. But it's, you know, there's for better or worse, there's local politicians who know me that know that I I do digital stuff. And had one guy hit me up the other day and he you know
Obviously he's not technical, right? So he's just like, hey, I need an app. So we're going on this, I'll make this short story. So he's I need an app. I need I need constituents to be able to contact me for issues. I'm like, why not just a website? What what are we doing an app? Like, why why are you researching building an
Nathan Tyler (16:26)
Yeah.
Matt (16:30)
app for a contact form, right?
Nathan Tyler (16:32)
Yeah.
Matt (16:33)
you know, so like a super non-technical, nice guy. But so then like I all I do is grab, you know, and everybody knows the magic of this stuff, but you grab his image from his all he has is a Facebook page, grab his image from Facebook page, hey codex.
You know, just design me a quick landing page with a contact form. he doesn't even have content, doesn't even want to put an about page, like just the just contact information in a form. And I show it to him, and he's just like, Yeah, it's exactly what I'm looking for. It's exactly what I want. I just want that. And in my head, I'm thinking to myself, from a business person, because I'm always thinking about the agency. and this runs up to the next question. I'm always thinking about what the agency does. And now in 15 minutes, I created that landing page or codex did.
And then all I have to do is ship it to either Cloudflare or Space Fast and I can host this statically. So what what do I charge that person? Two I just in my head I go two hundred and fifty dollars a year? Like is that is that the number? Right? Two hundred and fifty dollars a year to do something like this. And I just like you said, hey, meet me at the coffee shop today. If y you want a website.
Meet me at the coffee shop. I'll be there between you know 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Let's see how many websites I can bang out in a day. Can I make a thousand bucks sitting at a coffee coffee shop just cranking out websites for people, right? Obviously, it would add value. I'm not an idiot, but it's just an amazing time. So what where having said that, where where do you think agencies and freelancers go from here, right? I mean, obviously you probably want them to leverage blank pages, but how do you think about
What the agency owner charges, what their roles are day to day.
Nathan Tyler (18:03)
Yeah, I I think that's a really tricky and challenging question for people to
face head on. Like, I mean, all the all of these agencies, and myself included, got very used to like, well, we build the website and then we sell hosting and then security and maintenance because there's all these plugin issues and and that's like part of the deal. And that grows a lot of agencies, right? That recurring like if you're selling packages for a hundred, three hundred, five hundred bucks a month, whatever for the security and maintenance bundle, that's a big part of the business.
That no longer makes sense. Like we know that technology wise, right, you don't need plug-in security and maintenance on a Cloudflare single page site, right? And it's definitely gonna move that way.
Whether we're gonna say polarizing a hundred percent or not, like it will definitely be moving that direction. and you can't do that, so you have to find new ways to create value, which like, yep, you're gonna be the AI operator monkey that knows how to use these things and these other people don't, right? That will always be true. But I think
It's also an opportunity to take on more challenging roles that we would have typically ducked. Like I would have absolutely ducked any kind of SEO, anything in my agency days. I'm like, SEO, like not my thing, go find somebody. I can't possibly. Right? But in a world now, like yeah, maybe your local
restaurant owner wants a website, you can build it for them in 45 minutes. Do they really want the website or they want people to like show up to the restaurant? Do they want people to come to their place? Right. And so now you have an opportunity as an agency to say, yeah, like I could do SEO. I could tell Claude to analyze the SEO once a month and then just fit make all the changes in Astro and then just publish it. Like all of a sudden these things that are way out of reach and way out of scope.
For most agencies, because they were so focused on the building part, I think become very possible. And you are doing business solutions, right? Like I think it's the same thing that has always been, but 10x the scale, because you can you could have a small team and you could be doing SEO packages and actually delivering actual SEO value and improvements to their sites on a monthly basis for 100 clients that you're managing.
Matt (20:06)
Yeah. Do you get concerned? Like when you built Blink Pages, you know, and we'll we can start to talk about like some of the the tooling and and and the value that it brings. Do you get concerned about that outsource of intelligence and work from an agent? I'll f I'll I'll wrap some context around that. the tinfoil hat in me is we haven't seen the rug pull yet. And when we do, it's gonna be like this ex this cost.
That a lot of us are gonna have to settle with whether we're gonna pay thousands and thousands of dollars a month to frontier models, or lose access to it, therefore losing access to to do these things. I mean, I know it won't be that extreme. You can also make the argument of open models. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. But do you ever think about outsourcing that intelligence and that work because it is so cheap right now? Or do you feel like it's just gonna get cheaper and we're just, you know.
You're just ahead ahead of the curve right now. Like how how do you think about that cost and sort of outsourcing what I call the intelligence and the work of a lot of the stuff that we're building?
Nathan Tyler (21:03)
Like from the cost perspective or like the value you end up creating? Yeah. Yeah.
Matt (21:07)
I would say both. I would say like I would say
like the actual like token cost. I don't know if you ever run like comparisons of like
Nathan Tyler (21:12)
Yeah. Yep.
Matt (21:13)
open router versus your OAuth frontier models, but then the actual cost of that, like, shit, what happens if in the United States, let's say you're using an open model, in the United States, they say you can't use an open model anymore. Or like you could probably use it, but you might, you know, sign a a contract with a medical company and the medical company says you can't use open models when you're building our software. And like, what is that reject?
What does that mean for for a future world? So that kind of cost that you might incur?
Nathan Tyler (21:38)
Yeah. So I mean I think in terms of the value, right? Like I think that outsourcing like all of your branding and marketing and thinking like generate the whole website and all my copy for me is like a big mistake that is increasingly obvious. Everybody has started to build this skill of like that's AI slop and I so I think that is not a good use of AI.
Because that's like your core like that's your core thing you're trying to communicate that you're now outsourcing. But what we should outsource is all the tedious drudgery junk. Like nobody needs to wrestle with HTML, CSS, or even one of our beloved page builders to know whether it's this pixel or this pixel that I have to drag it to to get it in the right subcontainer before the whole page blows up, right? Like I I you and I are like technically capable people.
I'm I'm
ultim very capable of managing my own elementor site, but even I just couldn't even deal with like we had an elementor guy. So we would design the page or figure out what it needs to be. We're gonna add this new pricing tier and then we gotta go send it to the Elementor guy because I just can't you know screw around with this thing all afternoon. So like that is the perfect use for AI. Like like instructing
Hey, I wanna add a third price tier and I wanna add the little free thing at the bone. I want to put the little stupid banner that says it's the most popular one, even if it's not, right? Like like Yeah. Yeah, like I I wanna be
Matt (22:57)
Your monologue sounds exactly like my inner monologue when I'm building something.
Nathan Tyler (23:02)
able to just say that and then just have it like sixty seconds later. Right? That's a fantastic use for AI.
To do just the drudgery stuff. So in terms of value, I think people should be using it more in those scenarios, like of course, blank pages and websites, but other scenarios that it's just the drudgery implementation part and less of the creative part. Like, why don't we actually just spend the time that we now have to craft in our creative message and and what we want to say? and then on the cost.
it's very hard to forecast, but I feel like there's gonna be this continual arms race and leapfrogging of models and frontier this and frontier that and the open source ones will trail belong behind, like and it for certain use cases, like
A low enough model is going to be good enough. Like Opus today is fantastic at page layout and all of the replacing Elementor page builder stuff. And you know, a year or two from now, like there's gonna be some open source model or some, you know, Frontier Lab model that's dirt cheap that is still just as good. Like I don't need I don't need Fable 78.9 to, you know, do that pricing box thing. So I think that the costs for
certain use cases will, you know, go to zero. Of course the frontier will always be the frontier and pushing forward and stay expensive and who knows what's gonna happen to pricing, but yeah, I don't worry about it too much because I can't do much about it. And I think that
Matt (24:25)
Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Tyler (24:26)
for certain use cases like Blink Page's use case, it's going to kind of commoditize out and we'll be fine.
Matt (24:32)
Yeah, fair. blinkpages.com. I'm on the price. Well, first it says the drop down. Who's it for? it's for consultants, founders, marketers, agencies, and organizers. the pricing has an interesting twist. So I'll let you you fill it in. You have a migration, like a one time migration, which comes with a a fee and then the monthly. The monthly goes between forty nine and one ninety nine a month. is would you say this is like
Quasi productize service where especially on the migration stuff, like a human's checking it out, a human's migrating it, that's the in that's the first fee. And then after that, it's 49 to 199. Those on the sidelines might say, Hey, that sounds like the same cost of me hosting a WordPress site. So what's the difference? I'll let you color in the lines.
Nathan Tyler (25:15)
Okay, sure. Yeah, so th right on the productized service for the migration, 'cause one problem that people run into is like
They want to manage their site with AI. They already have a site that they like. They don't want to build a generic cloud design new site, right? Most people have a site that they like, and if they have significant content or years of blogging history or custom post types or all these landing pages, just getting it into this new structure in Astro where you can manage it well with AI is kind of a annoying process as we've learned. as we've we've migrated a bunch of these sites.
And we've built up, you know, a Claude skill that does a good portion of it and checks all of these different things, launches sub-agents to check typography and hover color states and all of these different things that go wrong, and then we do human review on top of it. we do visual regression tests and screenshots and all this good stuff. so that that's a very annoying process that we've gotten very good at. And so we can do that in seven days, take any website and migrate it to Astro. Of course, you could then just take it and
Do whatever you want with it. You could host it on Cloudflare for almost nothing or Vercel. So like our value proposition for the ongoing plans are not hosting. Everybody knows that the value of just hosting is going to zero. So this is like managed hosting all over again, right? We've seen this with WordPress play out. And we know that you can host it on a VPS for 50 bucks and cram a thousand sites on there. We know that it costs almost nothing. But you know, WP Engine and all the other people that we know can charge hundreds of dollars a
site.
for that managed value. And so we are managing some of the infrastructure and plumbing, and then we do some of those annoying things that are a little bit hard, like creating a dedicated staging URL for every branch and version of your site.
One thing that we run into is like there's this contention in this static site world where your friend Mark and like the AI forward, everybody like doing stuff with AI first for their website, and then you have the other person in the company who's used to logging into WordPress and likes the steady, consistent experience, and like, what are you doing? I had this in my company. This is actually how it started, is my marketing and ops person who's like generally very nice and friendly and upbeat, looked me in the eye.
What the
What are you doing? Like,
Matt (27:33)
Yeah.
Nathan Tyler (27:34)
because I I like she's like, I tried to log into WordPress. And I'm yeah, it's not there. I moved I moved it to Astro. And like I was all excited because I like spun up all my integration pages. I've done all this annoying stuff that I hadn't been able to do in my Elementor site. And she's like, Well, what do I how do I just edit this headline? Had like I was like, yeah, no problem, you just launch up VS Code. And she was like, No, no, no, no. I'm not I'm not doing
Matt (27:55)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Tyler (27:58)
any of that. So I mean a lot of what Blink Pages is doing is bridging.
That gap. So she can now go in and she can just edit a headline, or she can just drag a new image into place, or she can tell it, hey, change the pricing page and do these things. And she never has to touch GitHub, she never has to touch a code editor, right? She gets this nice visual experience. It shows the three versions, you know, that it that Claude made, and she can pick one, it shows her the before and after, highlights the differences on the page. so a lot of it is that, right? Like being able
Able
to edit something as easy as a Google Doc, just edit text on the page, or do your AI prompts but do it in a safe way because the number one concern is something like, well, I don't want to screw up the site, right? And your typical person who's doing the day-to-day content management on the site is not the developer. and so being able to tell them, yeah, tell Claude, make a new page, here's a here's my Google Doc link where I drafted the blog post, like make a new one on the page, they want to be able to see
it.
in a preview staging URL environment that's safe and like the worst cases they just throw it away, right? Like or they can say looks good and it's delivering that confidence. So there's a million other things that we're doing at Blink Pages and SEO and a bunch of other stuff we could get into, but that's how I differentiate it. It's not the hosting, right? The hosting is basically free and all and has been in WordPress too.
Matt (29:16)
Yeah. So
you you act as the I'll I mean, you do you call yourself a CMS? Is are you saying you're the CMS or you're the editor experience for?
Nathan Tyler (29:26)
Yeah, it's it's just the editor. Yeah. I mean it's like manage astro hosting that has editing and all these things layered on.
Matt (29:33)
Yeah. And and I guess for I mean, even for me, even for my own sake. Like I know they Cloudflare has emdash. but even when I started to experiment with Astro, like I couldn't and it's it's because of like decades of muscle memory with WordPress of like login, dashboard, pages, posts, well, pages and posts, and like this is where I need to edit content. And if I need to change the site, it's site editor or customizer, like
Nathan Tyler (29:58)
Yeah, yeah.
Matt (29:58)
These are like three major areas my brain has been trained to go to to edit parts of the site. But I struggle like I don't see unless I'm just not looking in the right place and maybe blink pages is the solution. Like, I don't see an easy to use, like familiar interface to do those most basic tasks that I think at the end of the day a lot of people will say, just just
Fine, just give me WordPress because I just want to log in. And yes, I know it's got all this other stuff, but I'm not going to use it. I just need a place to log in and and punch in the new sale. I mean, I know there's a debate of agentic or I just want to talk to the chatbot and the chatbot does it, but yeah, I just don't see a good astral thing. So is is was that half of your impetus behind doing this?
Going like, Yeah, I really see
Nathan Tyler (30:39)
Yeah.
Matt (30:39)
anything great in the market. Let me go build it.
Nathan Tyler (30:41)
Yeah, I did play with emDash the the first versions, and I wasn't that over it seemed like a test project. I haven't checked out the one point they just released last week. I'm sure it's better. but we did provide like we have our own admin panel, but we also have some customers who are running emDash We have a customer running Sanity. There are other CMSs. Like we're not trying to push our CMS as the main thing. We have a good default one that has exactly what you described. I can go into the back, I can see all the pages, I can see all the posts. If I want to edit a
you know, meta title or meta description, I can do that right there. so we are providing that experience, especially for someone who is not the tech AI forward person who just wants the familiar way. There is a familiar route.
But I think that over time people need some time to adapt the new way because like, do we really want to go to like appearance, customizer, theme, that widget, that widget area, that menu, that thing, or do I just want to like click edit and just change the name of the menu item that's there? Like, or and I think a lot of what we're doing with Blink pages is giving that old familiar way, giving the AI forward agentic way, giving a front-end editor way, multiple paths to do the same thing. but
That's it's definitely a challenge, right? People need time to absorb thinking about it in an entirely different way. But
Matt (31:56)
So I I'll challenge you just a a touch and maybe you already have a a solution and answer for it. The same thing I say to Mark, like a lot of the value that we talk about with agentic building is hey, I just want to talk to my thing. I want to talk to it and have it
Nathan Tyler (32:07)
Mm.
Matt (32:08)
build it. You know, and then we're where consumers and prosumers and business owners are all going to start getting marketed to agents, right? Grockbot, MetaMuse, Chat GPTs,
Nathan Tyler (32:19)
Yeah.
Matt (32:20)
dot.
And and they're gonna start maybe knocking on door and going, Hey, my this thing's telling me I can just talk to it. How can I just talk to my site and make the changes and not have to talk to you? Not in a way like they want to move away from you, but they just want that convenience factor. How do you how how does how do you solve it with blink pages if you do right now? And how do you think about, you know, for years we built stuff in WordPress with like ACF and and custom
Nathan Tyler (32:43)
Yeah.
Matt (32:44)
fields so that the customer wouldn't screw up the site. And now
Nathan Tyler (32:46)
Yeah.
Matt (32:47)
we're like,
Yeah, like whatever your agent wants to do, just go ahead and do do it.
Nathan Tyler (32:50)
Yeah.
Matt (32:50)
Like how how do you build for that that future?
Nathan Tyler (32:53)
Yeah. So I mean the same way WordPress has ACF, there's also the equivalent in Astro, so you can have they call it front matter, but it's basically metadata on posts. So you can lock in certain fields and types and teach the agent about it. So you can also put a filter in front of all those requests like hey talk to my website, but you can only edit these meta fields and you can only edit the title and like you could put that layer and say, Hey client, talk to my site. So we help people set that up. and we have like
See what your first question was about was the first question?
Matt (33:23)
Well
it's like it's it's about connecting up like if a if a customer comes to you and says, Hey, I I just want my bot to talk to my website, how how do you relinquish or how does a customer
Nathan Tyler (33:31)
right, yeah. Yeah.
Matt (33:34)
do that if they can do that with your stuff? and then
Nathan Tyler (33:36)
They can. So like
We set up all the plumbing, so we set up the GitHub repository and everything in the background. We give them access to that. So like they can use our editor interface, their marketer can use our editor interface, but Mark could hook up his, you know, his Claude or his codex directly to the GitHub repository. So they also have access that way. And then we also have Blink Sidekick, which is kind of what we're w what you're talking about. you can basically send a Loom video, you could send an email, you could actually have it join a live meeting and
it will listen as
The meeting is going on and make changes in a staging URL of your site and show it to you like this, and you can approve it and publish it live during the meeting. So we kind of have that talk to your site thing, which the kind of end consumer could use, or more often, what we've been doing is been fitting that for agencies, because right, the agency wants to put that protective layer and filter for this client who could send anything, and so we can set it up so that you know agency can run on blank pages, they can have their 50 clients site.
sites, they can have all of their rules and they can say, hey, I'm just gonna forward every client email to you and like go make a staging copy with these changes or invite it into my meeting with my client and then we can do those custom rules and fitting to their site. So it really is like kind of a power tool for agencies who are trying to manage stuff at scale or an end user who wants to kind of who's a little more tech forward who wants to play with these things.
Matt (35:01)
Yeah.
Yeah. No, that that is that is pretty cool. how has the launch been? How has it been received? What are you getting for feedback? What's the roadmap look like? How's that all how's that all panning out? Have you made the right
Nathan Tyler (35:13)
it's good. I mean we
Matt (35:15)
choice?
Nathan Tyler (35:16)
Yeah, yeah. It's we've been soft launched since earlier this year. So we've migrated, you know, well over a hundred, couple hundred sites through our migration tool. we have some agencies, some mark like CMO fractional CMOs and marketers on board. so the response has been great. The the usage day to day, it's amazing to see what people are able to do with it. because there are a lot of like weird technical hurdles that I think we've helped smooth out and made it easier for people.
people
to adopt when they do have that less technical person who doesn't want to be intimidated or overwhelmed by this stuff. you know I I think you've you and I chatted on LinkedIn there were some posts, you know there's obviously
people in the community that are still all gung ho WordPress and and I heard from those people and and I heard from other people who said, Yeah, I kind of agree, or I've been dabbling, or I've been playing with this, but like to your points, like, there's this little weird thing about Ash or this annoying thing that I don't understand, right? Like and
That's hopefully what we're trying to solve with Blink Pages, is just all of those things. Like there's other stuff like forms, which is obviously near and dear to your heart, right? Like Astro as a static site. Like if you just have pure information on your site, great. But most sites do a little bit of something. They process the form. They schedule an appointment. They let you buy like one product with a stripe link or something.
And so we've we've got a lot of nice solutions for that, like all on the simpler end, right? Like just the mechanics that become annoying with like, okay, I've got Astro and Cloudflare and all this, but now I need to get a postmark account and an API key and embed this thing just so it can send an email confirmation, right? so we provide a lot of those low layer things that you would expect from a managed host.
Matt (36:56)
What the what's the best customer for you right now? Somebody listening to this WordPress agency, WordPress freelancer, is it them as an agency to bring stuff over and like launch deploy agencies, or excuse me, client sites for w within their agency? I guess sort of like a reseller model, or is it the end user like they refer their customer to come sign up with you? So for the folks listening, like w what's the best way for you? I mean, I know you we talked about the list that you have on the site, but what's your
Nathan Tyler (37:21)
Yeah.
Matt (37:21)
best fit right now?
Nathan Tyler (37:22)
Yeah. I mean we work both ways and I find that most agencies work one way or the other, right? Like there's some agencies like I don't want to sell hosting, like I'm referring to my clients. Great. Like we'll partner with you and figure out how to help you deliver more value and give you a place where you can manage and log into all your sites, but like they'll be direct customers. Or, you know, the agency's like, No, I resell and I bundle everything and I have my retainer. ultimately it's the same.
Like we're doing the same thing and solving the same problems. It's just like how the money flows through that agency. so I think both work fine for us. But I think that we are at this stage in AI, like I know we're all in a little bit of a bubble where it feels like it's everywhere and it's happening and everything's moving so quickly, there's so much of the world that that's not the case. I think we are actually are a good power tool for agencies at this moment where there's enough of this technical weirdness and like
you know, clients are still gonna screw up their site or they're gonna like they know enough to know that like it's a question and part of the conversation of probably every agency who's pitching a website right now is like well how do how does this AI how do I AI you know affi my business
I think this gives a really good scalable answer without a lot of the annoyances. Like we can help people deliver that. But I think our best customer is still going to be someone slightly technical who understands how to navigate that stuff and isn't immediately overwhelmed by it. So yeah, I think agencies and technical marketers right like are probably our best fit right now.
Matt (38:47)
Blinkpages.com, done for you migration in seven days. you can actually book a demo. I assume the demo's with you.
Nathan Tyler (38:53)
Yeah, yeah, it is right now.
Matt (38:55)
There you go. Until it's
until it's an AI avatar, you know, or
Nathan Tyler (39:00)
Yeah, yeah. I just have to train it a few
more times. Just show up and like then my my AI avatar will get more training.
Matt (39:07)
Yeah.
that's amazing. Blink blinkpages.com. Check out blinkpages.com if you like what you heard today. If you just want to check it out and see what what they're building over there at blinkpages.com. Thanks for hanging out today, Nathan. where else can folks go to say thanks?
Nathan Tyler (39:18)
yeah, I'm always on LinkedIn. You can always message me there or yeah, blinkpages dot com. You can book a demo.
Matt (39:24)
Awesome stuff.
Awesome stuff. The WP Minute.com, the WP Minute.com slash subscribe. It's number one way to stay connected. We'll see you in the next episode.