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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the PublishPress podcast. I'm Steve from PublishPress. And Dan? Dan Knauss from Multigots. Dan, who are we talking with today?
Steve Burge:Today, it's, Matt Medeiros from his, omnichannel empire. Too many properties and channels to name, but, WP Minute and and many others that he's well known for in the WordPress space.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. We invited Matt on to talk about WP Minute, and then he started talking about his other projects. And well, we put as many as we can in the show notes, but Matt is really a personality who's almost everywhere in the WordPress space. And this was a really interesting conversation about how Matt got to this point being a WordPress journalist and what he's pushing into next, including focusing on other CMSs and also AI.
Steve Burge:Hey, Matt. Welcome to the PublishPress podcast.
Matt Medeiros:Steve Dan, it's a pleasure.
Dan Knauss:This is not your first rodeo. Not your first podcast, right?
Matt Medeiros:That is correct.
Dan Knauss:I mean, you're probably one of the most prolific podcasters in the WordPress space. You have a a WP Minute podcast. You have a Gravity Formless podcast. You're the guest on at least one other podcast a week. Am I missing any others?
Matt Medeiros:I like to look at, WP Minute as an omnichannel publication. And, it is, it is audio. It is video. It is the blog. It is the newsletter.
Matt Medeiros:It is social, and it is community. But, yeah, I I dabble, in a lot of WordPress podcasts, the Gravity Forms podcast. I have a a a back catalog of successful and failed podcasts that we could talk about. But, it's been quite the journey to leading up to to this point.
Steve Burge:Could you
Dan Knauss:give us a quick overview? How did you get to this point? How did you get to being a a WordPress publisher?
Matt Medeiros:I'll try to give you the fastest way of the last twenty five years so we don't bore the listeners. But, it started, many years ago. I was salesperson at Circuit City. That's how far back we're gonna go, boys, because, the fact that got me into technology was, one day, we were selling boxes of Linux, on the shelves. And, you know, getting into open source and learning how to build an alternative to work, to Windows was very interesting to me.
Matt Medeiros:Worked family, had a car dealership, Chevrolet and Cadillac dealership. I was the only person there that knew computers as it's as the as the people say. And, they just sort of had this love for, like, technology growing up. Worked at an ISP. We acquired a, web development.
Matt Medeiros:We had acquired another ISP, had a web development arm. They were using Drupal four at the time, and the designer, whom I'm still friends with today, was like, Matt, we gotta get off this Drupal thing. I heard there's this WordPress thing. How do we do like, how can we transition to using this WordPress thing? So that was my early experience into getting WordPress.
Matt Medeiros:Once I left that ISP with some knowledge and understanding on agency life, we were selling clients on websites. Again, this goes back very, very, you know, two decades plus. When I got out of the ISP, my father was getting out of the car dealership industry. And, we started we happened upon starting a WordPress agency, where some of my early employees at the time were, John DeRozho, who now works at Bluehost, Jeff Galinski, who works at, Automatic. And, you know, I had quickly learned about the WordPress community when I was trying to start my agency with, as a nontechnical founder and as somebody who never kinda, like, ran an agency except for the experience I had at the ISP, which was kinda short lived.
Matt Medeiros:Found a WordPress meetup in Providence, Rhode Island. There were other some big hitters there as well. Jake Goldman, from TenUp, Jesse Friedman also at Automatic, Jay Tripp who's at Automotive now. You know, and, it was a pretty, quick learning experience into the world of WordPress. But the issue was as I watched my fellow friend and colleague, Jake Goldman, grow 10 up quite quickly, as an engineer and as somebody who knew the WordPress community, I asked myself, how do I do that?
Matt Medeiros:How can I do the same thing? And, without being Jake and, the super dev. So I was just at the time, I was like, I'll just start a blog and interview people. I was a big fan of Mixergy, Andrew Warner's podcast. I turned that into a podcast called Net Report where I interviewed, guests from around the WordPress community and used it as a way to just meet people.
Matt Medeiros:Right? How do I find other developers? How do I talk to other agencies and learn how to do this stuff? And that built a a portfolio of of friends, colleagues, and other freelancers to work with. Agencies that weren't taking on, the smaller projects, you know, trusted me because I've interviewed them.
Matt Medeiros:They've seen my content. And it became a real, driving, revenue driver for, the agency. And after a few years of doing that, it turned into, a sales tool, for the agency. And, it was a way to show clients that, you know, we have this deep understanding of WordPress. Literally, like, if you wanna see what it's like to work with me, like, listen to these episodes that I I'm publishing because this is this is me, you know, raw.
Matt Medeiros:This is me talking about building websites. If you like this, then you'll like working with me. It it was an advantage. Right? As we had a, you know, I don't wanna say weak portfolio, but we had a very young, immature portfolio compared to the competition.
Matt Medeiros:So it became a sales tool. And, then it just, like, the the passion for WordPress and continuing to, teach and help other people, hopefully, entertain, educate, you know, inspire a little bit of folks, along the way. And, Matterport ran for a decade plus, and then transitioned into the WP Minute when I was like, hey. You should take this a little bit more serious and build, like, an asset out of this thing and, like, make it a real business. Like, can I turn this can I turn WordPress media into something sustainable?
Matt Medeiros:And that's the crazy idea about four and a half years ago that got me down the WP Minute path and what's led me here to this fine conversation with you guys.
Dan Knauss:So you now have an omnichannel empire
Matt Medeiros:I do.
Dan Knauss:Of of podcasts and videos and newsletters. How does it all fit together? Is there one of these that, dominates? I know you have a Slack channel that is members only and it really is quite busy, quite popular.
Matt Medeiros:Slack. Yeah. The the the community, took to the streets when I had Discord. They they weren't happy when I was was on Discord. But I I will still say, Discord has, a great free plan, of course, and you can do a lot more with, like, the the the the, you know, the technical side of it.
Matt Medeiros:But, a lot of folks in the WordPress side, very used to and accustomed to to Slack. Omnichannel, at least, the the the nuggets I'll throw out there that that maybe we can talk about. I think in this day and age, I've never created content that was, SEO driven for better or worse. Right? You know?
Matt Medeiros:Like, I have never become beholden to that that drug of, ranking SEO and, making sure that everything is optimized, and I have to constantly watch my rankings. Does this blog post have enough links, and do I have to go back and, you know, nurture this content? It is totally against any kind of, like, true digital, I guess, true digital digital publication strategy. But when I see, like, what is happening with with AI and search shifting, I feel a little bit okay that a lot that a lot of my traffic has always been, I guess, I don't have a a reference for it, but, like, an outbound and inbound game. Like, it's never been about SEO for me.
Matt Medeiros:Like, I don't have anything that ranks for WordPress entrepreneur, blue collar digital worker that is driving revenue to this business. It's about creating the content that we like, pushing out and promoting it, cultivating a community around that, and and hopefully that community helps bubble up this content to other folks. In other words, just I'm not on I'm not looking at Google search. I'm not looking at pay per clicks. I'm not doing Facebook ads.
Matt Medeiros:So I feel like it's a slower grind, but it's also not something that I'm addicted to, I guess you could say.
Steve Burge:Is anyone searching for blue collar digital workers? I
Matt Medeiros:Absolutely not.
Steve Burge:But it's it's what stuck in my mind a long a long time ago. And, it what say more about that. Does that define your, your community earlier on or still? Or is that,
Matt Medeiros:the general I was thinking about this I was thinking about this topic on the way to the, to my office today, in anticipation for this conversation, but this is just something that is it's just part of me. Right? You know, if you go back to the the to the early chapters of my career and working at the family dealership, the car dealership. It was General Motors, and we were, you know, Mega Corp, before they went bankrupt, before the financial crisis. And we were just a family owned and operated car dealership, you know, 50 miles south of Boston.
Matt Medeiros:But if you went 50 miles north to Boston, you had mega dealerships. Right? Herb Chambers, he's a billionaire. You know? I don't even know how many dealerships he has, a hundred plus.
Matt Medeiros:I I don't even know. And you had that typical frame of reference of, like, what it's like to buy a car. Oh, gosh. Right? They're gonna take my keys.
Matt Medeiros:They're not gonna give me my license back. I have to deal like, I have to go to war with these people. And when we got those types of clients in to purchase cars, it's like, no, man. We're family owned and operated for fifty years. Right?
Matt Medeiros:There were people that worked at our dealership that worked nowhere else for their entire lives. They started when they were 18 and they retired, you know, working at our dealership. We were the essence of small business and family owned dealership. So we were always I was always sort of, you know, taught to be like, I'm always, you know, my back's always up against the wall. Right?
Matt Medeiros:It's these big dealerships competing with us. It's General Motors telling you you have to do this thing. And the only way that we could stand out was to, like, be good community citizens. Do things in the community, give back, treat our employees well, treat our customers well. I know it's a foreign concept to a lot of people, but that's how it worked.
Matt Medeiros:And I try to instill the same thing with the WP Minute and, of course, like, the Matt report. Where are the things that I can help others that were like me who didn't understand the community, who didn't understand, you know, the topography of this crazy, you know, universe that we live in. And can I help others understand that? Like, not trying to sell a course, not trying to get you into a membership specifically, except if you wanna support me. But it's about like, I understand what it's like to just put a good business together, work hard for the client, and just try to profit so you can live to see another day.
Matt Medeiros:Right? And that's what that blue collar worker is for me because I interviewed people who are just like, yes. Every project should be a hundred thousand dollars, and you should have this deliverable, and your contract should look like this, and your proposal's like that, and you should time time box your developers and, you know, desires and do all this stuff. Hey. Great.
Matt Medeiros:But when you're in the trenches of doing this stuff, it's it doesn't always pan out that way. You try your best, and you're not gonna sell a hundred thousand dollar client every single time. If a client has $5,000, can you walk away with 30% profitability so you can survive the winter time? You know, because that's what it's like as a small agency owner. So, that's, you know, that's sort of like that blue collar essence is how can I show others, this information and share it with so that they're educated and they can go off and do their own things?
Steve Burge:Do you feel sorry, Steve. Yeah. Do you feel vindicated like that's coming back? That that's gonna have its moment? I'm thinking of you know, we recently spoke with Brian Morrissey's, consulting and dealing with publishers in the digital space where very traditional things.
Steve Burge:Like you've got a newsletter and you talk directly to your audience. Andy, too, who we spoke with a few weeks ago. Very, very close relationship. Sounds a lot like what you're talking about. When you have the audience, you know, they're not gonna get the same thing from AI or from you know, they're not gonna find it as a result of a search.
Steve Burge:They've gotta get in in a community.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. I mean, you know, in the with the temperature in the room for WordPress these days, you know, for me anyway, it's about being level headed. Are we happy with what's happening? No. Is there anything better?
Matt Medeiros:Like, is there a an an absolute alternative to WordPress that allow you to run the same business? No. So, like, we're stuck in this middle point, at least my opinion, and it's how do we how do we continue forward, doing, doing what we're doing while, you know, questioning what's happening and is this the right move? But also supporting WordPress to say, well, this thing is fundamental to our business, and many businesses. So how can we at least stay positive to wanna push this thing forward while we figure out what's happening at at the top?
Matt Medeiros:And when it boils down to the agency who's actually servicing this stuff, absolutely. I've been saying for years that in the face of bigger business, it's that human side that's going to win out. Why I love podcast like this because it's the human emotion, it's the experiences, and I don't see that getting replaced anytime soon. It's about being like a champion in I don't really not labeling myself a champion, but the ideal ideological way of saying, like, it's about being a champion in this space. When I ran an agency to
Dan Knauss:maybe a a fanboy or a Yeah.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. When I ran my agency, one of the, like, outside of the box things that we did is we printed a, in this little corner of Massachusetts, Southeast Massachusetts, South Coast Massachusetts. There's a small but budding, travel industry, whaling museum, a lot of historical stuff. And, we ran a printed publication travel guide, like real estate, you know, like the old real estate books. I don't know if people if they even still exist, but the little printed, real estate magazines.
Matt Medeiros:And it was that size, and we would print out, I don't even remember, 20,000, 30 thousand. I don't remember what the number was. But we did that for, like, three or four years as a way to champion the area and say, like, we really like this area. We wanna support this area, and here's all the good things happening on, like, local business and local tourism. And, you know, we would sell advertising to support it and sustain it.
Matt Medeiros:It's the same model that I use for the WP Minute. It's like, please please support us so we can actually continue to do this. And those that found found it valuable always showed up to reestablish, an ad spot, and it was a a great centerpiece for folks to come coming into the area to find all the good stuff. Now, again, this is, like, fifteen years ago, but, that's what we did. And I feel like, you know, I'm kinda doing the same thing again.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Your dad's still running the the agency side. Right? That's still going? Still a family business?
Matt Medeiros:Yep. Still a family business. I did it personally for a decade and then, started having kids. And I was just like, ah, yes. Agency life and having kids is quite difficult.
Matt Medeiros:You know, and, I had to get to I had to get a day job.
Dan Knauss:Can you give us a breakdown of how the WP Minute business works? You have you have sponsors. You have people that pay you each year to be to be part of your private Slack. And how how does the revenue come in through WP Minute? What keeps the business going?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. So, definitely sponsors is the the biggest portion of the revenue. There's just two plans, a pillar sponsorship and a foundation plus sponsorship. And those pillar sponsorships are the ones that really help, drive the business. Helps pay, my editors, helps pay, Eric Karkovac who writes for me and who is now doing, some podcast.
Matt Medeiros:He has now taken over the WP Minute, short form podcast to talk about freelance stuff. So it certainly helps with that. So it's this collection of sponsorship. I'll also do sponsored YouTube videos as well as another sort of, like, channel. You know, you know, if you're not interested in sponsoring, you can get sponsored, YouTube content as well.
Matt Medeiros:And then simple donations. Hey. If you like the work that we're doing, $5. Buy us a coffee. And if you wanna pledge $79, that's the membership that's, sort of like the VIP level of sponsorship.
Matt Medeiros:It's just a way to say, like, hey. We really, like, like the work you're doing. Either way, a donation gets you access to, our Slack group, which is highly focused on talking about WordPress news. You know, post status and other groups have, a different sort of lens that people should be joining those memberships for, whether it's, like, support for the business or, you know, networking, mental health stuff. Like, there's a bunch of, like, little, you know, niche categories in those types of Slack groups.
Matt Medeiros:Ours is, like, specifically, hey. You're here to chat about the news. Like, everyone in this in this Slack group knows where news is coming in. We wanna talk about it. We wanna chat about it.
Matt Medeiros:And that's, like, the promise. So, that's the sort of multifaceted revenue, channel. Classified section, that's actually pretty popular as well that goes into the newsletter. Those are little do do it yourself or DIY ad spots that customers can come and buy. So it's just a collection of revenue streams.
Matt Medeiros:The YouTube ads for, the YouTube channel helps. It's not massive, but it certainly adds to the to the pie. And, I'm starting to expand with, another property called CMS Minute. So can I take that same model and bring that over to the wider world of CMS? And, the first season of that podcast is, sponsored by Ghost.
Matt Medeiros:So they looked at it and said, yeah. It's the it's the same approach I had. I said, hey. I'm gonna make some some podcasts. Do you wanna sponsor it for this kind of content?
Matt Medeiros:It's great for your community. It's great for the the as a whole. And, you know, John O'Nolan said yes. So, really proud to to see that, come to
Dan Knauss:life. That's just what I was thinking. You need another podcast.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah.
Dan Knauss:How do you make it all work? How what's your how do you organize having you got a full time job with Gravity Forms. Yep. And you've got a Gravity Forms podcast as part of that full time job. Yep.
Dan Knauss:Then you have the WP Minute Yeah. Organizing newsletters, videos, podcasts, the Slack channel, organizing staff members who are also churning out content. Now you're adding another podcast, another website, another channel. Yeah. How how does it all fit together?
Dan Knauss:How do you make it all work?
Matt Medeiros:Sure. One, you have to be a little bit crazy. Right? So there's that check. Two, like, you have to love this you have to really love, like, this kinda, like, WordPress content.
Matt Medeiros:When I started the WP Minute, it was, it was an effort to, like, do what I was calling community journalism at the time, which was like, hey. You have important news topics. Let's all come together. You share your news topics, and we'll we'll sort of curate this what was supposed to be just a newsletter. It was supposed to be just a newsletter.
Matt Medeiros:That's all it was supposed to be. And, you know, sort of growing this effort to get folks to, you know, join in on the fun. You know, a lot of people with the stuff that's happening now, stuff that's happened prior, you know, Dan, I'm sure you've gotten DMs before like, hey. You should be writing about this. Hey.
Matt Medeiros:You should be covering that. You know? Why aren't you covering, you know, this particular topic or this particular community? And, you know, this is all happening and it happening behind the scenes, sometimes in public, and it's just like, because there's no money here. Okay?
Matt Medeiros:Like, how how much time and effort do you think I can put into this? And what do you think? I have, like, this, you know, this massive, mega corp behind me sponsoring this stuff. The point is is when I started the WP Minute, it was actually a lot of work, trying to, like, curate all that news and do it and have commentary around it. And that sort of died out a little bit because that was a lot of work.
Matt Medeiros:Then I transitioned into writing a weekly monologue for the five minute podcast. And, again, like, focusing on the in the the industry news was difficult. Right? Dan knows this. Ray knows this.
Matt Medeiros:Sarah Gooding knows this. It's very difficult to, you know, come up with this topic every single week if there's no massive drama happening. I mean, plenty of money in WordPress news business in the last few months. But when nothing's happening, it's just like, what are we doing? Like, what are we talking about?
Matt Medeiros:And that was a lot of work. So I then transitioned that down. Even that five minute podcast was very difficult mentally to produce every week, along with the interview stuff. So then, now I've just transitioned. If you picture stair steps, I'm I'm going down right now.
Matt Medeiros:I'm I'm trying to lessen that workload. And now what I'm doing is just focused on the interviews, what I do best, bringing people in, talking them, talking about those topics. And Eric is stepping up and writing more and doing the five minute podcast now. I'd love to get into a position, I'm sure Eric would as well, where if I can get more sponsorship, there's more more money to invest in work from Eric and and maybe others to, you know, support this this content. So I'm finally, you know, four and a half, five years into this WP Minute thing, trying to extract myself from the weekly investment of time and, you know, put others in place, which was the goal all all along.
Matt Medeiros:It just took five years to get there, and we're not even fully there yet. So the short of it is, you know, creating the content is easy, air quotes, easy for me. Forty five minutes, for an interview, do a bunch of those in a week. I have a month worth of content. And do, YouTube content when when I'm motivated to do it.
Matt Medeiros:And that's that's how it goes. CMS Minute, same thing. Bucket a bunch of people to interview for a season one. That's the promise to John. That's the promise to CMS Minute.
Matt Medeiros:Release that season. See how it goes. Invest if things are if things look, positive, and create another season. And rinse, repeat.
Dan Knauss:What I'm hearing is that you're almost in your constant motion. You're like the the shark of the WordPress world. But It
Matt Medeiros:it yes.
Dan Knauss:There are people who do great work in WordPress. I'm thinking like Nathan Wrigley with his his podcast, which he does a bunch of them, but every Monday, every single week, he has four people on. They have their routine every single week. And, maybe say Bob WP over with his WooCommerce stuff has really quite a regimented schedule and has been with small iterations been doing that for quite some time. Whereas from you describing your journey from Circuit City to where you are now, but what seems to be the constant is you're always iterating and what you're doing this month is almost guaranteed to be different from last month.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. I recently acquired, Master WP, and I've just put that out into into the universe. Right? Like, I want that to be much more of, like, training and education, maybe somehow support folks with WordPress careers. But that is something that is, like, what I'll do is I'll start something small.
Matt Medeiros:I'll launch it. As long as it's launched, I haven't forgotten about it. And, I will slowly, you know, iterate. And I have ideas for it, and I'm just, like, trying to take things slow. Really, the jump from c m or WP Minute to CMS Minute is is at least a small laboratory test to say, like, look, I can I can make another property?
Matt Medeiros:I can monetize that. Can I do that again on another property? I have another newsletter, the podcastsetup.com, which is about sharing people who have podcast setups that wanna share what they're doing with their podcast setup. It's great free promotion. They can just fill it out, and I post it.
Matt Medeiros:You know, there's a little questionnaire that they fill out powered by gravity forms, and I, you know, pro promote it to the newsletter. But I also cover other important, things happening in the podcast space. Not as frequent for sure on that newsletter, but I'm trying to get all of this stuff in motion. Just takes takes some
Dan Knauss:time. Man, the the show notes for this episode are gonna be insane. We have we need to also add masterwp.com. Right?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:Which is a
Steve Burge:How many of you have talked about? To Pulse WP.
Dan Knauss:As they got a a podcasting newsletter as well. And then you have this new branch of your omnichannel empire, which is CMS Minute branching out to cover perhaps Ghost and Drupal. You've been oh, what's the word for it? Not cynical. That's not the right word.
Dan Knauss:Realistic perhaps about some of the problems in the WordPress space and Yeah. How they might affect WordPress going forward. This is your kind of attempt to to branch out to a future where WordPress might not be quite as strong in a few years' time?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. So, I mean, it's just like as I, you know, have witnessed everything, you know, happening, you know, I think it's important where, like, I know that there's, there's a ceiling, right, in WordPress news content or even, like, WordPress freelancer content. Like, we're we're covering me and, Eric and I are covering stuff where we want we wanna talk about, and we wanna publish things that are experiences. Right? We're we're not trying to do listicles, tutorials.
Matt Medeiros:Every every now and again, we might post something that's, like, really interesting to us or maybe important, for what's happening in in the world of WordPress. The idea is that we're we're publishing this stuff with some real human experience in it. Like, if Eric's giving you advice, it's because he lived it in the freelance world. If I'm giving you business advice, it's because I lived it in my business world. And there's a ceiling on that kind of content, in my opinion.
Matt Medeiros:And 10,000 English speaking people across the globe, that's my number. That's my back of the napkin math, for, you know, who's interested in this kind of content, in WordPress. So it's like looking at that going, okay. I'm only gonna make x amount of revenue on WP Minute, potentially. So CMS Minute is all the CMSs, including a little bit of WordPress.
Matt Medeiros:And, again, it's just like a testament to seeing if I can take that blueprint and put it on here. But, certainly, it spawned because I started looking at what was happening back in October or September, August, October, forget when the month was. And I was like, I gotta I gotta make sure I have some kind of insurance policy here. Right? Something else that's gonna take, take me out of this WordPress thing if it all goes, you know, to hell in a hand basket.
Matt Medeiros:So that's that's when the idea started. You know, it was literally right after that stuff.
Dan Knauss:I guess when you include Ghost, suddenly then you open up Substack, Beehive. If you if you can put those under the under the CMS phrase, then perhaps that's really quite a quite an enormous space that opens up to you. Yeah. I mean talking about newsletter platforms too.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Newsletter platforms, Wix, Squarespace. I'm not going for, like, the big commercial brands first. I'm going for the smaller folks. Craft CMS, Statemic, Ghost.
Matt Medeiros:There's, another one I interviewed. I can't remember the name of his app right now. But I'm trying to go for, again, like, the the folks who are building content management systems that are much smaller than WordPress, but are also growing because of what's happening, you know, to WordPress. And I'm trying to make season one not all about, like, hey. You see what's happening with WordPress?
Matt Medeiros:You know, why should people switch over to your CMS? But I'm, you know, I'm I'm pushing into them a little bit and saying, like, well, why aren't you GPL? What don't you like about that open source model? Why do you charge $200 for a license? Like, I I understand why they do it, but I want them, you know, to to articulate that.
Matt Medeiros:So, yeah, trying to, like, really look at these alternatives, you know, and usher people in. Like, if you want an alternative to WordPress, because let's be honest, WordPress isn't for everyone or for every project. Look. Maybe maybe Craft CMS or Statimic is a solution. Right?
Matt Medeiros:So that's that's what I'm hoping to do in that season one.
Dan Knauss:So you're very much leaning into a future where other platforms may be nibbling around the edge of WordPress' market share. Sure. And you've also been posting quite a lot about AI as well.
Matt Medeiros:Yes.
Dan Knauss:That that's the post WP that Dan mentioned?
Matt Medeiros:Yep. Yep. AI or as I like to call it the page builder for any software.
Steve Burge:Well, it's a it's a little deeper than page building. It looks like you you kinda leveled up your skills to a new new, new level of, development, type project that that ended in, in this new site pulse, pulse.cc. Pulsepulselbp.cc.
Dan Knauss:You're not a non developer anymore, Matt. You have AI to help you out.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's it's honestly, it's the same kind of, you know, energy, that same kind of, inspiration that, you know, when I learned about Drupal CCK and views many years ago, I was like, wow. This stuff is awesome. I can do this.
Matt Medeiros:I can make a PHP query and database query without writing code. Then I discovered WordPress. You do that same kind of thing with ACF. When I found gravity forms, I was like, oh my god. I can do all I can, like, I can do solve customer problems with just this plugin.
Matt Medeiros:That was really powerful. And now kinda doing, like, the same thing. You know, using all these AI tools that are available to us and building these little mini apps, these little utility apps. And Pulse WP is just just a WordPress RSS, news aggregator, but it was just something that, like, helped serve what I do every single day, which is, like, try to keep up with the news. So, I wanted something like that.
Matt Medeiros:Something that summarize the articles for me. Something that made little socials share snippets that I could use in social media as I share it out. You know, just cut down, like we talked about before, how do I manage all this stuff? Give me, like, 10% more efficiency every day on keeping up with this stuff and and that's what pulse is and I got some, you know, ideas for it, but, I can only go as far as the AI agent will let me.
Dan Knauss:Yeah.
Matt Medeiros:Because it's a lot of ramming my head into the wall.
Dan Knauss:Can you talk us through that? So you started off with the idea. Yeah. We are at the February 2025 now. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:So we're dealing with the tools as they are now. Two months later, they may be entirely better and different. But right now, what platform did you choose to use? What was the process like to start with the idea and then end up with a whole new website to best gain access, aggregator?
Steve Burge:Yeah. What was the process like?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. I mean, I would say that if, you know, if you have your traditional publishers watching with this, you know, just like Matt Mullenweg says, to learn AI deeply, as he just mentioned again, WordCamp Asia. I think the tools that are out there can really help you build interactive maps, you know, data summaries, summaries of local, government, meetings, which is, like, another thing I wanna do on the side. But I used a platform called Replit, r e p l I t, for this. And like you just for Pulse WP.
Matt Medeiros:And like you just mentioned, I just got an email yesterday. They're already, like, Claude three point seven came out. It's supposed to be the best. Like, every month somebody leap frogs, you know, or every week I should say, an AI platform leap frogs another one and says it's the best. But they're already mentioning that they're building a whole new better AI coding agent inside of Replit.
Matt Medeiros:But I like to think of Replit for those that know the reference. I like to think of Replit as, like, the elementor for AI. You may not like that statement, but it does it means that it has everything inside of it. I've used other platforms, like just vanilla chat GPT and trying to, like, extract code and putting it into environments. That was a mess.
Matt Medeiros:Another great one is Bolt, Bolt.new, but you're still, like, playing around with all the infrastructure and getting it all working together. Repl just has it everything in house. It has, you know, coding agent, the hosting, user management, which is a big thing, debugging, you you know, connecting up with GitHub, all this stuff. So I use that because everything was there, and it was just one central system. And I came up with the idea and just started prompting away, to to building out this pulse app, and it's hosted at Replit.
Matt Medeiros:And, yeah, I started to work and iterate on it and build it up, you know, to to where I needed it to be. But you really start to become a developer, when, you know, you're you're writing, like you're asking it to to to run tests for you. You're asking it to build, like, administrative features that are just for, you know, analyzing what's happening. So for example, you know, I have the idea, say, hey. Build me an app that takes in RSS feeds and then displays a summary on on the home page.
Matt Medeiros:That's it. Right? Start with that, and it builds you it. And that's all it is. And then you then you go and you you go to add an RSS feed, and it gives you one field.
Matt Medeiros:And then you're like, well, wait a minute. I don't want one field. I want, like, 10 fields. Maybe I wanna paste in, like, 10 of feeds at a time. I wanna make this process faster.
Matt Medeiros:And then I started building that feature out. And then what would happen, I was I put a bunch of RSS feeds in, and then nothing would happen. Where's all my r s like, where's all the content? And then the back of my head is like, oh, this thing is processing it. It's not telling me it has to process it.
Matt Medeiros:It's not saying, hey. It's gonna take a little while to process a hundred articles that you just put in. Right? So I would then I started to build features that would show me what's happening in the server. Like, if I'm processing RSS feeds, show me a countdown.
Matt Medeiros:Like, how many feeds are you processing? How many are left? Tell me where the system's at, and then I would build that feature. So then I I could log in and see, okay, if is there a problem processing RSS feeds? Is the AI system still, like, waiting for OpenAI to give it a summary response?
Matt Medeiros:And you start becoming, like, that user experience person, QA person, UX person. You start to learn all this stuff. It takes time if you if you're a non techie like me, but you eventually get there at the cost of 30,000 tokens, inside of your AI slot machine that you're pulling down every few minutes.
Dan Knauss:So you found that to be a real learning curve?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. I mean, that's the yeah. That's the, you know, that's that's the learning curve. Is it's only gonna give you what you ask for, and if you'd if, you know, if you don't know database structure and, like, what you should be asking for, you could certainly spiral, you know, out of control. Luckily, I have some experience and I kinda understand the stack having, you know, been doing it for
Dan Knauss:You probably registered the AIminute.com already?
Matt Medeiros:I did.
Dan Knauss:I knew it. I knew it.
Steve Burge:Was that a WordPress project or pulse, WP Pulse is is totally separate? It's not
Matt Medeiros:It's totally separate. Yeah. It's a it's a React app. You know, it's React based with a or it's Replit's database back end, which is Postgres. Mhmm.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. And it's just all custom made.
Steve Burge:I have little Replit experience, but it was pretty fascinating. You go go in there, and and it'll build something. It'll set up a server, and it will it will do WordPress. And Yeah. Then it will then try to test and validate its own work.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. It the the weird thing is is again, so I'll make I'll make this quick. If anyone's gonna go and try, replit, you know, to to see check it out yourself. One of the like, if you start building something more complex, like PulseWP is at this point, what you have to do is finish talking to it. Because here's what I found.
Matt Medeiros:It would you'd ask it for a feature. It runs through. It builds the feature. And then it'll if you don't like what it or if if you don't confirm the feature is done, it kinda, like, remembers that you were asking about that feature. So what'll happen is, you know, the next day, an hour later, you could be asking for another feature, and suddenly it will rewrite the feature from before.
Matt Medeiros:Because, like, in its memory, you've never said, hey, that was great. Good job AI. Like, you've completed the task. So, like, I found myself having to have, like, these complete smaller conversations so that I take it in smaller chunks at a time. You know, much like if you were talking to a developer and you slammed, like, this 50 page, spec sheet on on them for building an app, they're gonna look at it and go, oh my god.
Matt Medeiros:You I need to I need two weeks to look at this. Having those smaller tighter conversations are very important, at least with Replit from from my experience.
Dan Knauss:So part of your realism about WordPress is also inspired by AI as well. That if you want to make an RSS reader, you can go to Replit and for $15.15 bucks a month, start creating your own RSS reader. At some point, that's gotta happen inside of WordPress too. Right? Log into your WordPress dashboard, type, I would like an RSS reader plugin, and there'd be an iterative process to get that get that plugin generated for you automatically.
Dan Knauss:And that's that's what people are gonna expect pretty soon. Right?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. I mean, that's one of the scenarios that I'm predicting. You know, there was a lot of criticism around Matt Mullenweg's WordCamp Asia talk. I did a reactionary video to it, intentionally click baity, but I gave a lot of my, opinions, you know, on it. I was called an apologist, of course.
Matt Medeiros:But I think that there is something yeah. There is definitely something there. And you can only, you know, the question that prompted all this was Courtney Roberts and asked, hey. What's the five year plan? And sort of looked like Matt and Matthias both kinda shut down when they heard, like, you must predict five years, especially through the lens of AI.
Matt Medeiros:So I would love a world where WordPress and AI get parallel, where you can go to a chat bot and code WordPress blocks or code WordPress. One of the big things that I've found throughout this experience is I now appreciate WordPress a lot more by being that monolithic app that I can just launch. Right? Because if you start to experiment and you don't know what you're doing like me, it takes a lot of time. Right?
Matt Medeiros:It's, like, forty hours to build Pulse WP. Right? Where where I'm sure a skilled developer would be like, I can do that in five hours. Right? I can do that in a fraction of the time.
Matt Medeiros:So I have a a a better a better appreciation for WordPress to say, well, number one, this is done for me. Like, user login and management. These systems are not if you don't ask for it, it doesn't build it. Right? I'm sure they'll get better.
Matt Medeiros:Right? For sure. But, like, WordPress has all that stuff built in. Right? So Pulse WP could have been a WordPress site.
Matt Medeiros:I mean, I didn't want it to be because I wanted to try all this stuff. But the I the point is is, like, WordPress is done for you. The other thing, which is hard to compete with is who's taking care of Pulse WP besides me? Whereas WordPress is, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of people who take care of this open source project with air quotes. That's a huge bonus.
Matt Medeiros:Right? Yeah. Yes. The are the argument is is AI will have agents that just run-in the background, shoot you an email, and say, hey, Matt. Notice that Pulse WP has a security flaw.
Matt Medeiros:Do you would you like me to patch it? I will say yes. Right? But, you know, that's a a world that's still I don't know how many years away. One, two, three, five.
Matt Medeiros:I don't know what how far off that is. But right now, like, this human generated software is is very important. And, I don't know what the world's going to look like when it's just AI agents constantly thinking about the software that you built. I don't know what that leads to. Replic kinda does that now.
Matt Medeiros:It'll serve up features for you. Like, if I say, hey. I'm done with that feature. Great job. It'll say, hey.
Matt Medeiros:We can build these features too. It's kinda cool. Right? But, I don't know where that all all leads, you know, for the future of software development. Like what software looks like?
Matt Medeiros:Is this good or bad? I I have no idea.
Dan Knauss:I I guess what's future proof is probably your your attitude. Right? Your focus on personal connection. You take the you take the thread from Circuit City through to the car dealership to the agency and the agency podcast to your WP Minute work now, it's the the focus on making a a human connection. Yeah.
Dan Knauss:That what actually powers the connection, the technology under the hood may be generated with with WordPress or Drupal four or AI or whatever might be coming in the future. But what's layered on top of that is something that may stand you and us in in a good shape in the future, which is the focus on providing some human value for people.
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. I mean, it's something I've been pre you know, urging WordPress companies and product companies and agencies, right, is is, you know, again, I always go back, like, start a podcast, start a YouTube channel, like, where's that human side of you? Like, I I recently switched from Mailchimp to ConvertKit simply on the ideals of, well, I know Nathan Barry. I know he's one guy. I'm, you know, software, you know, hit or miss on a few features.
Matt Medeiros:Some things don't match up, good and bad, both sides. I was just like, how can I start voting with my software for small people that I know run this company? Right? I don't know anyone at Intuit, and no one at Intuit cares about me. Right?
Matt Medeiros:So, I'm trying to make these these, conscious decisions to work with software from from people that I know. And WordPress has a massive advantage for that. A lot of WordPress plug in companies, there's a human a single human behind it or a dozen humans behind it. And I want everyone in the WordPress space to, you know, to extract that that human side of your brand and and get it out there. It never makes dollars and cents, in terms of, like, the ROI on marketing, but it it does have a a broader brand, sentiment and branding opportunity, in my opinion.
Dan Knauss:So final question from us, which kind of maybe continues directly on from your talk about people putting their their human face forward as part of their brand. Is there a publisher? It it could be part of a company or could be an individual publisher who you've seen lately that does great work. Someone who you get their newsletter, you see their YouTube video drop. Is there someone out there whose work you really admire at the moment?
Matt Medeiros:Well, for sure, Ray, whom you've had on before, at the Repository. She does fantastic work, in the WordPress space. I'll I'll give another hat tip to ConvertKit, and for Nathan's investment, into, into creators. He's actually starting up, I don't know what the website is off the top of my head, but he has a local podcast studio, I wanna say in Ohio, at an office that he has in Ohio. I think that's where it's located.
Matt Medeiros:But that's a like, I love seeing that. That's like, we serve creators and we're building a podcast studio for for our customers to show up and, like, create content. I mean, that's that's amazing. You know, and then on the on the YouTube side, so these guys at Neil Patel. That's what I'm thinking of.
Steve Burge:Oh, yeah.
Matt Medeiros:And and I will say that I have not been a fan of Neil Patel for for many years, because of you know, I I felt like his SEO stuff was always kinda gray hat, but he has. I'm just looking for it on my feed, and and, of course, I'm not seeing it. But Neil Patel, here it is. Marketing school. So these guys did actually did a one eighty.
Matt Medeiros:And this will be my last sort of sentiment on this. Marketing school, And if you search for that on on YouTube, you'll find it. It's Neil Patel. When they launched, he did what I've always, like, kinda disliked from him. So he I don't know when they launched this podcast about a year ago.
Matt Medeiros:And it was just riddled with ads. Right? Ad, like, five minute it was a twenty minute show, had to have ten minutes of of ads in it. And I was like, I cannot stand what these guys are doing. They're typical marketers, just ruining everything, myself included as a, you know, as a marketer.
Matt Medeiros:I understand what we all do, but slowly has evolved to having a much more pure conversation, less ads, and the topics are are pretty on point for small agencies and and folks in the AI space. That was a long ramble. I'm sorry.
Dan Knauss:Cool. So so if people want to get more more met, they want access to to your podcast, to your news. What's the best way to do it? Can they
Matt Medeiros:so you can find me at my
Dan Knauss:day join?
Matt Medeiros:Yeah. They can find me at my day job at gravityforms.com. That's where you'll find, all the stuff I do day to day. If you are interested in the WordPress in WordPress news and you wanna just find out what's happening there, the best way to do that is go to the wpminute.com/subscribe. And then I have one site that has everything I do at craftedbymatt.com.
Dan Knauss:Awesome. Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate having you. I'm off to write, some epic show notes after this.
Matt Medeiros:This is what AI is for.
Dan Knauss:That's a good point. Let's check. I'll let I'll let you know if AI can
Steve Burge:summarize all the links we had on this chat.