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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.
It's the WP Minute Plus, your home for long form discussions around the WordPress ecosystem. Deeper insights and conversations that you won't find on that other five minute WordPress podcast that we do. Follow both podcasts at the wpminute.com/podcasts. Big exciting news at the wpminute. You can now join our Slack membership for as little as $5 virtual coffee donation.
Speaker 1:Head to the wpminute.com/support. Purchase your spot, be in the new refreshing Slack channel for WordPress professionals. Our annual membership still exists if you want to find some great annual member perks. But if $79 a year is a
Speaker 2:bit outside of your reach,
Speaker 1:you can now join that membership and support our work and get access to our great group for as little as $5. So what are you waiting for? Join your new home for WordPress professionals talking the news, business, and all things WordPress at the wpminute.com/support. The wpminute.com/support. First of all, just just to clear the record so everyone's aware, Christian is a sponsor of the WP Minute, though that came afterwards.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:After we set up the meeting for the podcast, I saw that you acquired a company on Twitter. We're gonna get into that. I saw that you sold a company or a product. We're gonna get into that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which I know nothing about, by the way. So this is gonna be an exploration of explorations. But I do wanna thank Christian for supporting what we do here at the WP Minute. Really helps. He became a foundation plus sponsor.
Speaker 1:You'll see the Image SEO logo on all the emails and blog posts going forward. So thank you for that, Christian. Thanks for supporting the show. Here we go. Let's get let's get right into
Speaker 2:it. Sure.
Speaker 1:You purchased Image SEO recently. You sold another plug in slash product. What got you into the WordPress product game? Before we talk about those two products, what got you into WordPress, and what's that backstory of building products for WordPress?
Speaker 2:Sure. I think the answer is gonna be pretty surprising because most people step into this space as a natural progression because they started most of them started in agencies. So they just naturally progressed to products at some point in their careers. However, I got into this space. I met with a bunch of people like ten years ago, something along those lines, ten, eleven years, I can't remember exactly.
Speaker 2:And these guys were building custom WordPress themes, and they were selling them on ThemeForests. And while they were were bringing in serious numbers for the business, what attracted me the most to this concept was the fact that the guy who was sitting across the table is telling me all this all this story, like, had 20 employees at the time and were making easily 6 figures a month. This was eleven years ago. So, you know, it's not a lot of theme shops back then on the on the marketplace. So just launched a product, and they were making crazy amounts of money quite easily.
Speaker 2:She was supposed to travel across the globe just with his laptop in his backpack. And this is what actually got me into this space. I was more attracted to the fact that I could be working from home and working from the comfort of my own space, you know, instead of going to an office, which wasn't ideal. I live in in in Bucharest, Romania. Bucharest is, I think, one top three most crowded cities in the world, especially for cars.
Speaker 2:So it's traffic can be pretty crazy. Initially, I just wanted to save some time and be able to focus on the stuff that I enjoy doing instead of instead of working for other people. Started off with an SEO background, an SEO heavy background, actually. I progressed towards learning how to build websites because I was ranking them on Google, but I never knew how to, you know, make any tweaks to the sites. Like, anytime I wanted to tweak something, even a simple label, I couldn't do it myself.
Speaker 2:So I started teaching myself how to do it. And we progressed towards agency. We did that for, like, three or four years locally, and then we started building Warped themes, of course, because, you know, remember this mister Ray said earlier. And after that, I think we just naturally progressed towards plug ins. And, you know, this that bring us to to today where I show our latest acquisition image SEO is natural progression towards a hybridized concept of both WordPress plugins and also SaaS offerings.
Speaker 2:Like, this is the thing where I I wanna focus more of my attention going forward of adding SaaS like components into our product lineup and being being able to offer way more value to our users and also at the same time go be go beyond just a simple WordPress plugin, shop and company.
Speaker 1:So the lineup of products that you have now are what? It's three three total plugins?
Speaker 2:Three bigger plugins. Yeah. Each with each each of them on the extension model. So we have three core plugins. Each of them have fifteen, twenty extensions.
Speaker 2:So that's close to 60 plugins because every extension has a plugin in itself.
Speaker 1:Just go ahead and list off the name of the of the plugins and products that
Speaker 2:We've you got download monitor. We've got module image gallery, and the last is strong testimonials.
Speaker 1:And the one that you just sold was?
Speaker 2:So we didn't just sell one. We sold a portfolio of plug ins, if you will, because I acquired all of these three plug ins few years back with the exact purpose and building, like, a network of of of products. So we just sold, check email, check and log email, which was a simple email logging plugin, and it also helped with bugging email sending from your WordPress install. WPSMTP, which is, as the name implies, an SMTP plugin. And the last one, which Jack just announced today on Twitter was kbsupport.com, which is which was one of the most interesting plugins I hope to be able to develop, but never got the chance to actually do it.
Speaker 2:Essentially, it's it's like a like a self hosted version of HelpScout, if you will, but way simpler. And it cuts off email usage because email is the biggest problem when doing support. A lot of emails land in spam or never reach never reach your inbox because of, you know, firewalls, spam filters, whatnot. So what this plugin does, it just uses custom post types. And every time you submit a form, it just creates a new entry in your custom post type.
Speaker 2:It's as simple as that. It's pretty much like if if you want an analogy, it's it's how the comments feature works on on WordPress.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about your concept or the way that you view a portfolio of products. There's a lot of things I wanna get into in this conversation, but I think that a lot of folks and maybe it's just me and it's my competitive nature and joking like world domination. That's that's just like, you know, the thing that, like, you know, keeps you going. It's like, you know, I wanna have, like, the biggest and and the and the best, or at least I wanna perform well and build a great product, you know, however wherever you fall on that spectrum of product building. But talk to me about your concept of product portfolio and how you approach building the business of all of these products.
Speaker 1:In other words, it sounds like, hey, we don't need to build, like we don't need to go up against WooCommerce. Not yet anyway. Right? But we can build a stable portfolio of products by finding these things that are a little bit more niche, stack that one against another one that's little bit more niche, stack the next one's a little bit more and then before you know it, those really niche plugins becomes a whatever. I'm just throwing a number out there.
Speaker 1:A 100,000 users, active users of people who might or might be already customers or potentially could be customers. Might be freemium model, you get that one to 2% purchase ratio, hopefully, and then we're turning those into into pro customers. I put a little bit of words in your mouth
Speaker 2:on
Speaker 1:that one, but talk to me about your concept of of building a suite of products. So
Speaker 2:I guess it all starts with overlapping, microsegments, if you want. Imagine you have so let's take an example of of two of my products. Right? So let's say a user acquires one of my products, Module Image Gallery, and they're they're a photographer. They're building their own portfolio website where they want to showcase the photography.
Speaker 2:They do it on the weekends and on events. And let's say that a considered percentage of these users will also need a testimonials plugin to collect testimonials from their happy customers. So the purpose here is to find these overlapping segments, figure out their needs, and deliver a solution that they're willing to pay. Once you got them into the buying new warranty, once they're not on the checkout page or they've purchased your product, you just, showing them another potential product that they might need that will enhance their business. You you know, that you've already won their trust by delivering a great product first.
Speaker 2:You've hooked them. You got it into your funnel, and you're like, hey. Here's another solution for your problem. So let's look at email space. Right?
Speaker 2:So one of the automatics acquisition a few years back was MailPoet. MailPoet fixed a bunch of issues, and it's it's like the WordPress version of SaaS counterparts. So you should want it's like a Mailchimp, but for WordPress or call ConvertKit, for WordPress. You know, it's not a one to one clone. It's not one to one feature, but the concept is pretty much the same.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of unmet needs in the email space. And the whole purpose of acquiring those two plugins, like Check and Log, Email, and WLeaks WLeaks because they fix two of the biggest issues with WordPress and emails, which is deliverability, and adding support for your own SMTP servers. So that fixes email deliverability. The Kibi support acquisition was supposed to be so a lot of if not most, like, if if not all, most of the customers we have also have to offer support for the users. The what what they use is is usually commercial solution SaaS, like HelpScout.
Speaker 2:And we've seen HelpScout's pricing balloon to insane amounts just because they've got runs of investment and just have to go for those profit increases every single year. And it's For simpler usage, it's a glorified email inbox, pretty much. If got a small team, like under five people doing supports, you're overpaying by a lot. So we provide TV support just for a reason. Then we realized, well, people will want to also need sometimes an email inbox.
Speaker 2:When you need an email box, you're still stuck with the same issue of email deliverability. This is the overlapping segments and micro segments I was talking about earlier and why these acquisitions made sense. Because you're promoting some customer running solutions that are in the exact same overlapping micro segment and solving a real issue for people. In KB support case, we could easily recommend this product to all of our purchases because they do support in one way or another. And it's it's it's usually messy.
Speaker 2:Like, you should do this through your email inbox, just your email personal email inbox. It's super messy. And it it it's yeah. So
Speaker 1:one of the things and I think it's a fantastic approach. I think what a lot of us by us, I mean, I'm an ex product builder, but my day job is at Gravity Forms. But I think a lot of us look at WordPress as that sort of not alternative, maybe price point alternative, like your example with Help Scout. Right? Help Scout look.
Speaker 1:If I zoom out, I feel like all products, all SaaS products go this way. Maybe even all plug in products go this way. Plug in or product comes onto the market like Help Scout, freaking everyone loves it. It's awesome. We're all jumping on this thing.
Speaker 1:Look. It's solving this one problem really well. It's clean. It's minimalistic, and it's really affordable. Fast forward five years, ten years It's a lot of hate.
Speaker 2:And now it's got
Speaker 1:a zillion yeah. Zillion features in it. It's getting more clunky, more complex. That company's got VC funding. I mean, Mailchimp is actually a great
Speaker 2:Example.
Speaker 1:Around this where it's like, man, everyone loved Mailchimp. It was like, wow, this is a billion dollar company that a few guys down in Georgia, in The US built. I think it was Georgia, Atlanta area. You know, and look how awesome this is. And then it started getting like more competition came into the market, Mailchimp started getting more complex.
Speaker 1:And then it was like, we're gonna sell to Intuit, which is like selling to Darth Vader. Right? It's just like Darth Vader just bought my email provider or my ESP. And now it's just like, what is this thing? And then no no one loves it anymore.
Speaker 1:Right? It's a vicious cycle that a lot of products go down, and an even more homegrown base to this is EDD. You know, Pippin. When he started easy digital downloads and he had Sandhills plug ins and he was building out his suite of products. You know, even he had to struggle with this with customer requests and, like, building the ecosystem, and then eventually selling out selling it out to Awesomotive.
Speaker 1:Do you have any thoughts on how that customer experience can stay how people can stay in love with the product as you build and scale and connect all the dots across your organization?
Speaker 2:Wow. That's such a lovely question because, you know, it's it's super subjective subjective because Yeah. With WarperSpace, what I see the most is a huge fragmentation. The market is divided into micro groups or just groups, if you wanna call them like that. Like, we've got the power users.
Speaker 2:We've got the developers. We've got the site builders, but these people just use tools like Elementor or Bricks or whatever they use. Like, they don't touch code necessarily. They just know how to combine multiple plug ins and get the results they need. Just don't know exactly how it works under this hood.
Speaker 2:We've got the designers. We we've got everyone. Right? Everyone has opinions on how everything should work. I've rarely seen an implementation that's been founder led.
Speaker 2:Like, the founders came up with a with a with a with an interface with a product. They kept pushing it, and the market eventually loved it. No. That's that's why I've never seen that. So EDD's implementation, in my opinion, was Pippen's vision or Pippen and company vision.
Speaker 2:Like, they had a team and they all consulted and they made made various decisions and they launched what they thought was best for the for the end user. I think there's an when it comes to community, and as you said, there's always, always going to be that that group of people that's not happy with the decision. It's always going to be like that. And it's I think it applies to WordPress as well. You're a lot of feature, 60% of the user base is happy, 40% is not.
Speaker 2:It's nothing you can do. You you just have to strive to deliver something that's best for the biggest percentage of your audience and just be willing to improve things over and over and over until that percentage just grows and everyone is either happy or you've just accepted that this is the best they're going to get as long as it fixes their problem. I think people don't care as much about how it's being done as long as it fixes the problem. Basecamp is a great example of this. They had like even now they have super old UI.
Speaker 2:The program is the software story is not built on the latest tech, and it still brings in people and it's still considered one of the greatest SaaSes ever built. Hey, for example, is is another great example of of this. They they haven't reinvented email by any means, yet they have a successful product. I guess it comes down to vision, how you sell it, how you stick to your guns. Because if you try to please absolutely everyone, you're not gonna get there.
Speaker 2:So, you know, micro iterations, you get to a a point, but without sacrificing most of the initial vision just to lure in as many users as possible. Whereas in the previous example with VC backed companies, they're just trying to cast wide wide as possible net to alert every paying user. And that in turns means you get this broken up experience with a ton of features that are not necessarily useful for everyone, and you still get them into UI, it's complex, and it's confusing.
Speaker 1:Do you have you've used examples like, you know, 37 or Basecamp and Help Scout. Is there anyone you look to in the WordPress space for inspiration or somebody who's doing it well with a suite of products?
Speaker 2:I'm gonna answer that with with another question, define doing well.
Speaker 1:Somebody you look up to. Like, you look at the that organization, you say, okay. They have a suite of products, they connect the dots across their customer base, simple product, gets the customer in, and then they have, know, whatever tiered products, add on approach or whatever. Marketing is is done well, Brand is done well. Customer experience is done well.
Speaker 1:Do you see anyone in our space doing that?
Speaker 2:Honestly,
Speaker 1:no. If the answer is no, that's totally fine.
Speaker 2:No. Honestly, no. So I'm gonna lead I'm gonna lead this by saying that we haven't done it either. I'm not going to use ourselves as an example and say, no, we're the only ones doing it well. No.
Speaker 2:We're not doing it well either. But I haven't seen anyone in the WordPress space that's doing it well from start to end. I mean, maybe a one product actually comes to mind, and it's it's one of the antidogs. It's blocky, and they're very small team. And they built great WordPress theme, in my opinion, that I I I'm using on all of my websites, and I love it.
Speaker 2:It's it's like, it obviously, it still has its quirks, but out of the old WordPress themes, I tried and tested this delivered the best possible experience. So, you know, I think I think this is one of the the issues with the WordPress space because we all tend to look at at just at the repo for solutions instead of looking outside of the repo and looking at the bigger players at what they do, like, the bigger frameworks they have, way more validation through their market. And it's it's what what I've been starting to do as well for the past year and a half. I'm looking outside of the WordPress space for ideas and solutions and not relying just on what people are doing in the WordPress space.
Speaker 1:Do you think the challenge is that in the SaaS world, like Basecamp, like HelpScout, they have the luxury of having all their users on their own platform. Right? It's not a fragmentation of, oh, I'm on hosting or, oh, I'm on Pressable. Oh, I'm on Bluehost. And you have all of, like, this mixed environment.
Speaker 1:You have different customers doing different things, preinstalled tools. Is that one of our biggest struggles as WordPress product folks, or do you see it something different?
Speaker 2:I think that's part of the problem. Yes. Because you have, like, all of these exotic setups. So we have DownloadPunter, which is a you know, on the surface, it's simple. It's a it's a software that just protects your files and offers a way to track file download.
Speaker 2:Under the hood, it's the most complex code we've ever written. The the the most versatile solution we've ever built. And we've patched it patched it so many times because of different hosting setups. Like, it says one thing on their website, but under the hood, they use something completely different. So just it's super confusing all the time because you can't control the server.
Speaker 2:You can't get everyone at the same time on the same version. So these are challenges in the you can never add you know, even if you if you look into privacy focused solutions and you wanna add tracking into your software, WordPress doesn't love this. Like, they collect a ton of metrics. They don't share it with them with us. Sorry.
Speaker 2:We don't get access to any of that. And these are tools, like, just to name a few of the tool, that SaaS companies have access to, and it just gives them an edge over anyone else. Like, you control everything. Can you there there's tools already that you you can deploy on your SaaS app, and you get a bird's eye view of everything that's going on inside your app at any moment, and you can see user journeys. You can see exactly what they're doing on your app.
Speaker 2:You have heat maps. You have a ton of information that we don't get access to. And now we're just building on guesses, on feedback, and intuition, and experience mostly. Like, veterans will be able to figure out maybe 60% of the the potential bottlenecks in use cases when when launching the plug ins. But newcomers are gonna struggle really hard because there's there's a lot of legacy to WordPress.
Speaker 2:Now with Gutenberg, it's it's even more difficult.
Speaker 1:The Yeah. I remember. I forget what software it was, but at my last job, we had a SaaS app, and you could literally log in, jump into somebody's session, and watch how they're using the SaaS app. Like, literally watch everything. It's just like, wow.
Speaker 1:Like, this is such an advantage product owners, not just from, like, what, you know, what are my users doing and how can I upsell them, but just user interface, user experience, what are they really struggling with? They used to track things like I forgot what it was called, but if, like, people started, like, shaking the mouse, that was like an that was like an event because it it melt yeah. Like, people were like,
Speaker 2:had So struggling with this
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I mean, just yeah. It's such a a a huge a huge leg up. Let's talk about Image SEO. You can find imageseo at imageseo.io.
Speaker 2:Soontobe.com. Does this I just wanted to make sure I add that.
Speaker 1:Soontobe.com. Did you own the.com before?
Speaker 2:No. I just acquired it, and it was our biggest domain acquisition. Like, it was a 4 figure acquisition. I've shared it publicly on Twitter. I think we paid, like, $2,600 for it, which is Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Surprising. I thought it's a lot of money just for what what usually is a $10 domain name, but I've had friends tell me it's super cheap. Like, they've paid even 5 figures for a domain name. So apparently, I'm getting off pretty pretty easy on this one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That sounds pretty good. I mean, I I'd say and listen. I'm no expert on this, but I used to own an agency, and I had a guy I won't say the domain because I think it's actually for sale. It's a single word domain.
Speaker 1:It's pretty good. It could it's it's the name of it's at the name of a city. Okay. Right? And it's the name of a city that's also in it's I'm in New England in The US.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's also a name in England in England. Okay. Right? So but he wanted, like, $700,000 for it or almost like a million dollars for it at the time.
Speaker 1:And I'm like, it's gonna be a tough sell, buddy. And that was that was, like, eight years ago. Like, where you could potentially get that kind of money for it. And nowadays, I don't think you're gonna get it.
Speaker 2:I mean, it all comes down to how much traffic you're actually buying. Because if you're ranking number one for and that city gets, like, five hundreds half a million of searches naturally, organic every single month. That's half a million of people you can sell something to. And you're buying your buying your way into all of that traffic for a one time fee. Whereas if you're renting that traffic from Google by paying for your ad campaigns through AdWords, you're gonna probably end up spending way more than, I don't know, let's say, 5 years.
Speaker 1:Back to imageseo, imageseo.io, soon to be imageseo.com. You can try it for free. It does up to 10 images. Let's talk about this product. First of all, tell me how it fits into the rest of your product suite, or is this sort of the outlier?
Speaker 1:Give us the rundown on that.
Speaker 2:It currently sits with mostly our gallery plugin lineup. We have three different gallery plugins totaling close to, I think it's probably close to 150,000, 170,000 users, active users across, straight across all three, with Modula being the most popular one. So we're going to slowly roll it out to these people and offer it as a so we're going to include the number of credits for free for each package in Modula to start things off. It doesn't have as much overlap with all our other plugins, like the testimonials plugin and the download manager plugin, but that's fine. It's it's sort of an outlier, but we also wanted to have like a ramp where we could la launch deploy plugin.
Speaker 2:It needed to have overlap at least with one of our bigger plugins so we could soft launch it there and see some net organic growth, get some feedback, and figure it out from there. But I'm lucky we've acquired a working product. We've acquired a platform that is already making money. It's just been neglected because the guys who sold it to us were being were focused more on their latest startup, which is wp-umbrella.com.
Speaker 1:SEO Yes. To shift gears a little bit is my god. Like, I'm starting to, like, try to refocus on it for the WP minute. You know, just trying to pay attention to things like content, website structure, am I doing things, you know, the right way? I'm looking at my Twitter feed on on one screen, and everyone's like, AI, and I'm creating, you know, fountains of content with AI, and my sites are ranking.
Speaker 1:And I'm looking at that going, should I be doing this? Then, like on the left hand side, I'm over here creating audio, video, written content, newsletters, social posts. And I feel like the old guy in the room because I'm just doing things the way I've been doing it for the last twenty years is write content, record content, both audio and video, and try to connect the two and put it out on social media, and my God, hope somebody comes. I don't have any SEO strategy because it's scary, overwhelming, and aggravating. But something like image SEO takes a chunk of that pain away from me, for me, for images.
Speaker 1:Now you're rooted in SEO, images, image search Yep. Big thing. Yep. And this is where your plugin helps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, you know, images image search is depending on the space you're active in can be pretty critical. So for example, if you got a ecommerce solution, most product acquisitions that happen from search engine traffic start with an image search. So that's how they acquire their paying users. Normally, just want to see how the product looks before actually buying it.
Speaker 2:So if you're not ranking high for your search terms, you're not gonna make that money. It's it's as easy as that. It's you're not gonna make any money. And the thing here with, Image SEO is that it fixes one of the most boring and tedious parts in image optimization, and it's alt alt text generation as well as file naming. Like, that's the most tedious part.
Speaker 2:It takes forever to do it inside of WordPress, especially because you have to do it image by image. And, you know, if you have a thousand images to go through, it's gonna take a while for you to do it. Don't get me started on updating those. It's gonna take even longer. But, yeah, it it so my logic was that anyone's gonna be willing to pay, like, $10 to go through a thousand images automatically and have them updated for them.
Speaker 2:And that's the whole goal here to build a solution that's that that that can target multiple segments. So I I mentioned ecommerce is one. Accessibility is gonna be the second one because we're gonna focus on context aware image captions. So it's gonna analyze the content around the image and then generate a caption by taking into account all of that surrounding content. So not just focusing on the image because an image can mean different things depending on the context.
Speaker 2:And the third one is I want this to be a tool in your arsenal as a developer, a command line interface tool. You just plug in into your build process. You got your API key. You run it, and that's it. You know that you've generated all the alt tags for your images, hassle free.
Speaker 2:It's done for you. It doesn't cost you an arm and a leg. So, you know, it's accessible to anyone, and it's reliable.
Speaker 1:And I like the the pricing models models. So let's talk about that. You have your monthly plan, which I'd assume is yeah. Like you said, you you'd probably be an ecommerce person. You got a lot of product.
Speaker 1:Like, recently, I've been starting to do some car shopping. I have a one of my cars is, like, ten, fifteen years old. I have 15 years old at this point. So I'm like, hey. I got a time to replace this thing.
Speaker 1:I'm putting a lot of money into in into keeping it up and running. Love it, but it's time to replace it. And Which probably a very US American thing to say. I I wanna talk about that in a minute too. I wanna talk about your the perception of The US, WordPress market versus, the European market.
Speaker 1:But I've been searching so anyway, searching for cars. Yeah. You're absolutely right. I've been starting with images. I'm like, what does this car look You know?
Speaker 1:Show me the different variations of this. And I'm not doing Google web search. I'm doing Google image search, and then going into those articles or those reviews based on that image that, you know, that that I'm looking for. So a 100% agree with that. You have that monthly plan, which I'd assume is for people who are publishers, ecommerce, doing a lot of stuff with images.
Speaker 1:Even developers. Maybe for something like
Speaker 2:You've you're building Or even developers.
Speaker 1:Building, you know, agencies building out a bunch of sites for customers. But maybe for somebody like me, you know, at most I'm doing eight articles a month. I'm not like producing a ton of of content where there's like a a ton of images. You have this one shot plan where I can just say, hey, you know what? Let me buy credits for 500 images, and then I can run
Speaker 2:through Now
Speaker 1:is this all AI driven in the back end that analyzes this stuff?
Speaker 2:Yes. It's we
Speaker 1:You don't have to give away the secret sauce. It's it's
Speaker 2:it's it's it's we're using as any as everyone, we're using AI models that anyone can use. So these are accessible to anyone. The secret sauce is actually the parameters we pass down to the AI models and the training we've done and how we've actually integrated three different AI solutions to talk to each other to get the best possible results on the market. Like, most people just go to an AI solution that's as cheap as possible. We have competition in this space doing this.
Speaker 2:They're just delivering it. They're making a lot of profit. They're launching on lifetime deal websites to cash in as much as possible, but they're not delivering a good solution. They're not delivering, you know, a solution that people can actually rely on. Just delivering what the AI is delivering without much hassle.
Speaker 2:They're saying, well, it's a the AI issue to improve blah blah blah until the AI improves and the response improves. There's nothing we can do about it. Well, that's that's not true at all, unfortunately. And there's not much to say besides the fact that, you know, the secret sauce is in the fact that we've been training this on a lot of image data that we had access from our collection of plugins.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fantastic. I mean, it's definitely a pain point for me, SEO, and, you know, a tool, you know, a tool like this is is fantastic. Any words of advice for anyone looking at SEO these days aside from picking up image SEO to help with the images? Like, where does one start?
Speaker 1:Do I just keep my head down and just create good content and share it? Like, is that just the best practice still to this day?
Speaker 2:So it depends on it depends on this is this is the most common phrase you're gonna hear in the SEO space. It depends. I think that is you don't want to get go really heavy into the SEO space and get really technical and look into all sorts of stuff, more advanced topics like programmatic SEO, which is creating a bunch of pages with content that's dynamically created based on different you know, you stitch together a bunch of data sources and you create one big page with all the information on it. And try to rank as many pages as possible. Just reading great content, naturally getting backlinks.
Speaker 2:And I think the easiest way for people such as yourself who don't necessarily wanna teach themselves everything that's out there related to SEO because there's a lot of information and also a lot of misinformation. I think YouTube is the easiest way to go about it. Like, YouTube is slowly becoming the biggest search engine Google has access to. Alphabet, sorry, the parent company. And it's it's it's completely different, when it comes to how people search online, but it's it's becoming the default way for people to search stuff online.
Speaker 2:Like, people just prefer a video or or an audio of someone walking through walking them through the steps of their problem instead of, like, looking it up on Google. You know, Google hasn't been doing such a great job in the past couple of years of surfacing quality results. It's just spam filled ad written results where you spend quite a bit of time going through each result and actually finding the one that's that's gonna fix your problem. Whereas with YouTube, it's it's it's a lot cleaner. It's a lot better.
Speaker 2:It's it's slowly becoming the go to go to solution. So, yeah, I think just creating great content as you've been doing for, I think you said, fifteen years. Yeah. Fifteen years. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes. You can hear that you can hear the anger there. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, fifteen years.
Speaker 1:So do I rank number one for WordPress podcast? No. Why? Because WordPress and podcasts is generally something when somebody's looking to figure out how to do a WordPress podcast versus, like, I wanna listen to a WordPress podcast because, you know, I have my own thoughts and theories of the the max level of audience there is for a WordPress podcast, but I'll save that for another one. Another conversation.
Speaker 1:Wrapping up, I wanna get your perspective on your part of the world looking at the WordPress US market versus what The US market thinks the WordPress market is. If you have any opinions on that. You know, in the business WordPress entrepreneur sense, I feel like in The US side of things coming back from WordCamp US a couple of months ago at this point, being somebody who tries to raise sponsorship money for a podcast for a publication. A lot of my US friends are like, hey, man. Budget's tight.
Speaker 1:We we can't sponsor right now. You know, I still see them, like, saving up money to sponsor a word camp, which is big money for a short amount of time and short attention. And I feel like The US market is kinda just like on edge a little bit. Like, we're not really spending money. The market's a little tough.
Speaker 1:I get a lot of people, you know, talk to me about businesses down a little bit. Maybe the excitement for WordPress business is down a little bit in The US. Is that the same in in your part of the world? I feel like the folks that I met at WordCamp US that were in the European region were like or the Asia region, they were like, oh, we're loving it. We're loving WordPress right now.
Speaker 1:We're loving the product space. We're loving what we're selling. We love building themes. And that feels like a different vibe. True?
Speaker 1:False? Somewhere in the middle?
Speaker 2:I'm still thinking of a way to phrase this. Sure. So economically speaking, I think US is still the biggest economical engine in the world. Like, you know, most startups, most funds, most most everything, most buying purchase comes out of The US. So even our user base is mostly US based as well.
Speaker 2:So even if we're based in Europe, we don't have a lot of European clients. That maybe the difference is that in The US, with the inflation growing, costs of living have gone up as well. So even if business has stayed flat, so there's no growth this year or past two years, costs of living have gone up and made it look like not as a great outlook. Whereas we've had a growth in Europe as well, but it still hasn't caught up to the levels of and it makes it more tolerable. There's a lot of countries in Europe as well that have had access to European funding.
Speaker 2:My country doesn't invest in solutions like this. But I know that for example, in France, this has been happening, I think, for five or six years. Think they get up to half a million euros in funding to build their startups. It's nonrefundable. They don't have to come with come up with anything besides a business plan.
Speaker 2:And, you know, it's it's quite a bit of money, especially in in the workplace space where, as a friend recently put it, this is the best space for amateur level business launches. Like, you you get your grades here in the WordPress space, then you can start slowly moving outside of the WordPress space because you've learned quite a bit of it. It's it's a safer space for newbies, especially.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 100%. 100%. Agree. Christian Raber, imageseo.i0.com coming soon.
Speaker 1:Imageseo.i0.com. Coming soon. Thanks for being a sponsor of the WP Minute. Thanks for hanging out today and telling us more about your story. It was fascinating.
Speaker 1:Love lovely conversation. Love to have you back. Where else can folks go to say thanks?
Speaker 2:I keep postponing to launch my own blog. I keep postponing that. You know, it's it's it's always the same with we have a saying in my country because when you go to you know, you you met you you meet a good carpenter. They build amazing stuff for for clients. Right?
Speaker 2:But when you go to their house, it's all crappy. It's yeah. And it's exactly the same with me. I don't have any time to build my own website, even though I build websites for our business. I built all I built all of the websites.
Speaker 2:I maintain them. I do everything. I code on-site as well. I just don't have any time. I I can't find any more time to write on my blog as well.
Speaker 2:Keep postponing that. So, yeah, there's not a lot of places besides Twitter right now where I'm trying to post as much as possible about my building public journey with Image SEO. It's I feel there's a lot of people in the WordPress space, especially one man armies that are looking into the SaaS world that are trying to build SaaS solutions. They've been doing WordPress for quite some time, and they're not looking into SaaS solutions. So I'm trying to talk to these people and hopefully, try to build a small audience because I think my I'm pretty sure my story is completely different from most of other people's.
Speaker 2:I started with SEO, then I tried web development, and I kind of landed myself in business development mostly nowadays. And That's Twitter and email if you if you wanna reach me.
Speaker 1:That's it for today's episode. Get the weekly newsletter at the wpminute.com/subscribe. Want to support the show and join a Slack group filled with WordPress professionals? Talk about the news, share your WordPress business content, and network with others, head to the wpminute.com/support. Get access to our group, support the show for as little as $5 or more if you feel we provide more value.
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Speaker 1:We'll see you next week.