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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.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today, I'm joined by Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm recently started a role at Pressable, a pillar sponsor of the WP Minute, and has vast experience in the WordPress and Drupal ecosystems. He has also co-authored a novel with his wife, which I have to ask about. Malcolm, welcome to the WP Minute.
Malcolm Peralty (00:25)
Thank you so much for having me.
Eric Karkovack (00:27)
So ⁓ I know you've worked in WordPress and Drupal for a long time. So I got to ask, which one did you use first? Where did you get to ⁓ start in this open source CMS world?
Malcolm Peralty (00:41)
Yeah, so I went from, I used Blogger at first. That was the first thing that I used. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that to anyone. And then I ended up using like Movable Type and a few other tools thinking like, there's gotta be a blogging tool that I can work with and found WordPress at version 0.72 like 20-ish years ago and thought, oh, this is PHP based. I kinda know PHP.
and started using it as my primary blogging tool ever since then.
Eric Karkovack (01:15)
So I think anyone these days who works with multiple CMS systems kind of knows, I kind of consider them a Renaissance person, maybe a modern Renaissance person. So how did you get into Drupal and how do you compare these two systems?
Malcolm Peralty (01:32)
So Drupal happened more because of my agency experience. So ⁓ even back in when I was working at 10 up as a project manager, some of the projects that I had were helping companies move from Drupal to WordPress. And then, that gave me like the introductory experience into the platform. And then when I moved on to other development agencies, I helped build out Drupal website projects from scratch or moving from NoCMS to Drupal. And then
That kind of just spiraled from there. I didn't expect to ever work at Acquia. That came out of the left field a little bit for me, but a person that I knew from the old days of WordPress blogging reached out and said, hey, would you ever consider working for Acquia? And I said, sure, I'd at least have that conversation. Yeah, they're the mothership of Drupal, kind of like how automatic is for WordPress. So they're fairly equivalent in a lot of different and interesting ways.
Eric Karkovack (02:17)
And they're the company behind Drupal,
Malcolm Peralty (02:30)
And ⁓ yeah, so I got hired on there as a technical account manager at Aquia and spent nearly three years there, which was pretty awesome.
Eric Karkovack (02:41)
How would you describe the, maybe the development differences between those two platforms? Cause I've dug into it only as far as, you know, the front end. haven't really, I never really took a deep dive into Drupal. So for those of us who don't know, like what would be the main difference if you wanted to be a Drupal developer and you come from WordPress.
Malcolm Peralty (03:03)
I would say it's a fundamental difference in architecture. I would say Drupal is kind of like ⁓ a database interface for connected information. It's very much about ⁓ one to many or many to many connections of data more than about anything else. And so that gives you lot of flexibility to do all kinds of interesting things on how you
design your post interface for users to add content and how you design the front end on what you pull and show, how you deal with search or ⁓ archive pages. It's super, super flexible. And if you think in data structures, Drupal is a very powerful tool to like achieve really cool websites. ⁓ I've always found WordPress to be a blogging engine with a lot of customization through plugins and themes. ⁓ And I think
You know, we're very used to how WordPress works and looks and feels. A lot of the websites that I go to, can like almost instantly tell if they're WordPress, Drupal or something else. And I think fundamentally, if you are a WordPress developer, ⁓ please install a copy of Drupal. They've made it easier than ever. If the last time you tried Drupal was like more than three years ago, I highly recommend circling back to it and giving it a go because they've done a lot of work there to make the
⁓ onboarding experience and the development experience much nicer. And if you're already a PHP developer and you use PHP in MySQL all the time, guess what? Drupal uses those exact same languages. And when I was in the Drupal space, I advocated for the reverse. I was like, Hey, if you already work on Drupal, come check out WordPress and bring some of that knowledge there because ⁓ I'd love to move beyond advanced custom fields as like our main, like data connection tool or expansion tool for WordPress. And so if some of that Drupal knowledge came our way, I think it would benefit.
Eric Karkovack (04:55)
Yeah.
Malcolm Peralty (05:01)
WordPress greatly.
Eric Karkovack (05:03)
Yeah, I think there's so much benefit in learning more than one system just because you are in a bubble, right? In WordPress, we tend to be in that bubble. ⁓ And we think we have the answer for everything. Everything's a plug-in, everything's this or that. But it's nice to see how another system does it and maybe it changes the way we think a little bit.
Malcolm Peralty (05:23)
And much like how WordPress is adding in a lot of AI functionality right now, mean, Drupal has been doing that for over a year. ⁓ They like to consider themselves like an AI first CMS. And while I think that's more marketing hyperbole than fact, I do think there's a lot that we can learn from how they've integrated those different tools into the user and developer workflows for Drupal.
Eric Karkovack (05:50)
Yeah, so it's definitely something worth checking out. think maybe I'll install a local copy here and see what I can see what I can break without hurting anything. ⁓ But we're also, of course, here to talk about your role at Pressable. You just started a couple months ago, right? How's that going? And what are you ⁓ working on these days?
Malcolm Peralty (06:11)
Yeah, so ⁓ first I would say that it's super interesting to be at Pressable because Pressable is a automatic company, which you would expect that that means that we're like integrated into the automatic way of doing things, but we're actually treated very arms reach, which allows us to be super flexible and adaptable. And we run much more like a startup, which has meant my onboarding was really a giant fire hose of information and a lot of like
Seek and ye shall find. So I had to lot of like ⁓ conversations like we're having now with people on like Google Meet and stuff like that to really kind of pull from their brain what only exists in MeetSpace. ⁓ It's been difficult, but it's been very fulfilling. ⁓ Unlike a big company, know, Aqua and other big companies I worked for, Pressable has no silos. Like if I want to speak to Vic, the CEO tomorrow, I can put a slot on his calendar and...
he'll join the call and talk to me for half an hour. And that feeling of connectedness within the team has been super helpful in helping me get up to speed and start providing value back to the company.
Eric Karkovack (07:19)
I imagine it has to be nice. ⁓ And this is from someone who has not worked for an actual other company in like 25 years. But when you can talk to somebody who ranks above you and you don't have to go through like five different channels to get that message up, that has to be ⁓ refreshing.
Malcolm Peralty (07:38)
Yeah, it was really funny when I was first interviewing for the role, I emailed and said like, hey, Vic's assistant reading this email, if you could set up an appointment for us, that'd be really appreciated. And Vic responded back with, I'm my own assistant. What are you talking about? I'm going to set up the appointment. ⁓ So everyone's super approachable, which is super nice. ⁓ I've worked both in a lot of startups and in some bigger corporations. ⁓ And I wouldn't say one is better than the other. The onboarding experience that I've had in some of the bigger corporations.
was very smooth and ramped up very nicely and was very easy and made me a better team member and a better employee to execute on things. ⁓ The freedom to explore also has its own value and we're like a team of 32 people. ⁓ The automatic for agencies, which helps like sell pressable services and products ⁓ to agency partners is larger than the entire pressable company. So it's just a very different
experience and the speed of innovation and the speed of progress and change is just so much more rapid than anything I've experienced in the last little while. ⁓ And so that's a lot of fun.
Eric Karkovack (08:46)
So I know you're working on some AI integrations for Pressable. ⁓ What are you guys doing these days and what are you excited about on that front?
Malcolm Peralty (08:58)
So, I mean, the big thing that is being developed is the, we have the MyPressable control panel, which is what users use to manage their websites on Pressable. And they're adding in an MCP, which will basically mean that you could integrate your interactions with like Claude or with ChatGPT or with any AI agent that you're already using. And you could say things like, which of my client sites are still on PHP 8.2?
and it'll give you that report, right? So the intention there is how can we allow people to use natural language to get deep understanding of what's happening on their platform? When it comes to hosting, like this is such a different piece than WordPress as an install, right? Because there's a whole bunch of services behind the scenes that you might need to manage or understand, or maybe you're confused about something, you're trying to figure it out. So you'll have the ability to do queries of like,
what's going on with my website that it feels slow and the MCP will connect to Pressable and grab log data and your AI will parse it and give you that result or information. And then you could say, can you fix that? And it could actually take those actions on your behalf. And I think that is the big power up is having AI take actions on your behalf lowers that buried entry and also potentially speeds things up, right? So again, if you're an agency with like 200 sites, ⁓ it can just really make it.
easy for you to have a good understanding of what's going on with all of those sites at once or update all of them at once or maybe spin up a sandbox server for all of them at once, right? So that's that those bulk actions or even those singular actions in natural language, I think is super impactful. ⁓ And I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be a phased rollout of different features. But by the end of June, basically anything that you could click on within the
control panel at Pressable, you'll be able to use an MCP to be able to act on your behalf.
Eric Karkovack (11:02)
I could see that being, you know, a huge boost of productivity for like freelancers and agencies. Just for example, if I want to know which, ⁓ which sites I'm running a specific plugin in on, I could probably just ask this agent what, what sites have it so I can, I know that I may have to do something, you know, related to an update or something like that, or a security flaw that I've got to patch. ⁓
How do you... I'm sorry, go ahead.
Malcolm Peralty (11:32)
I think...
I was just gonna say, think one of the biggest advantages or the most fun advantages will be for developers. ⁓ So in the enterprise tier, you typically wanna spin up an environment to test new things on. And you could do that if you have the MCP set up in your IDE, in your development environment, you could have it do that for you and then deploy the code that you're working on. And you could have it like quickly maybe connect to Puppet or some other tool.
to actually test that deployment and then give you the result back all within your coding environment. So you can be in VS code and do all of those actions in pressable and make sure that it's actually going to work on production without ever opening a browser tab. I just, I think that, you know, completion of work can be super interesting too.
Eric Karkovack (12:22)
Yeah, that sounds like a great workflow boost right there. mean, the ability, I said, not to leave VS code, you could test what you've written and make sure that it's going to work on the server. Because we've all had that problem where you're doing something locally and it works great and then you push it up to the server and there's something. I actually had that happen last week. So that's a really cool idea. So I have to ask about, you know, we were talking a lot about hosts and adding
the AI layer to it. Have you guys had like discussions about where maybe it's AI is maybe too much or maybe ⁓ it's distancing you from customers a little too much? How do you find that balance?
Malcolm Peralty (13:13)
Yeah, it's something that I've had as a small part of my responsibilities, both at Aquia and at Pressable. And those discussions are still definitely ongoing. ⁓ We continue to draft and refine kind of what our North Star is for AI internally as a company on what we're doing internally and externally on how we're presenting to the public and customers. And we're always looking to figure out that balance as well.
I think a lot of my friends and family and coworkers think I'm very pro AI, but I like to think I'm pretty balanced on that. We've, we internally, a few of us have pushed back on how AI is being integrated into things. Cause we're trying to figure out, you know, is that truly valuable to the majority of our customers? ⁓ Does this make sense from like a skill perspective? Like if we, if we just do things for you and never explain how or why it was done.
Like how does that enable you to upscale? ⁓ So a lot of the stuff that we're working on behind the scenes is those kinds of discussions ⁓ on, you can ask it like which site is running PHP 8.2, but maybe it should also tell you how it figured that out. ⁓ Maybe there's commands that it can give you or insights that it can give you on how it figured that out so that you can hopefully, whether you choose to or like if you choose to. ⁓
look into that and understand that more deeply. So maybe you don't need to use the AI in the future to get that answer. Or if you want to develop a script around some of these commands so that you can kind of have a better understanding of how these workflows work. ⁓ We're trying to enable that as much as possible so that customers, agencies, developers really feel empowered more than just kind of like ⁓ offloaded or ⁓ kind of given these tools without any kind of understanding on what they mean and what they do.
⁓ But yeah, you're right, finding that balance is near impossible and it changes all the time. As these AI models become smarter, it's hard to not just offload things to them and be like, just do that for me, would you? I don't wanna think about that, I just want the result. And I guess part of what we have to decide as a culture is like, what do we care about most? I am very anti the commodity hosting. think that's a...
Eric Karkovack (15:23)
Exactly.
Malcolm Peralty (15:33)
a really poor business model that some companies kind of fallen into of competing on lowest price. And I think that at the end of the day, you when you buy a web host plan, you're looking for a great experience, a great service, something that'll run your website and reduce your concerns, fear or need to kind of manage these things. And we're hoping that this will just be another layer of that, right? Where you feel like you have a
technical partner, like you still provide the brain, right? We're not giving you an AI agent in Pressable right now to undertake all these things, right? There's no little chat window that's gonna go and spin up all of these things for you. We're developing an MCP so that you can decide like what brain are you gonna connect to this? How are you gonna interact with it? You know, what are the limitations of that interaction? You get to kind of define a lot of that yourself. It doesn't mean in the future we won't release that, but we'll always leave that option available for people to kind of chart their own court.
chart their own course and figure out how they really want AI to be integrated in their workflows. I had a couple of customers at Acquia that were anti-AI or couldn't use AI for regulation or security or other reasons. And so we'll always try to find ways to make sure that the interface for the control panel has buttons for every feature and functionality you would want them to have buttons for. But again, it's really a choose your own adventure rather than a...
you know, this is the way it has to be and we're going to be very prescriptive about that and too bad if you don't like it.
Eric Karkovack (17:05)
Yeah, that's interesting that you have that option of connecting to the AI model of your choice, because I mean, a lot of hosts these days that are turned to AI pretty much have their own setup, right? I mean, I won't name names, but we have them that, you know, that they just come with this AI agent and they kind of drop you off in the middle of the hosting forest and they expect you to find your way without any instruction. So it's kind of interesting that you can go to Pressable now.
And when this is launched, you'll be able to, I can choose, okay, I want to use Claude here, or want to use ChatGPT here, and here's what I want to do with it. How much control do you get in terms of like, you know, do you, when you do connect, are you going to be able to choose, okay, I want, I only want AI to touch these parts of my account, or is it pretty much open at that point?
Malcolm Peralty (18:00)
I'd be lying if I said I had a full understanding on how we're doing the permissions for the MCP. ⁓ I do know like we're taking a phased approach on what we're unlocking first. ⁓ I also know that customers can and should like create limitations when they're working with any kind of MCP out there, especially if it has the ability to write to something, which this basically does, right? You could say delete my website from Pressable.
And it would be like, are you sure? And you'd say yes, and it would delete your website from Pressable, right? It has to trust you as the user, knows what you want to actually do. ⁓ MCP is basically just a USB plug for connecting our control panel to your AI. And if you misuse that, I mean, guess that's why our human support exists. We can help you restore your website if you make those mistakes. ⁓
In the future, expect that we'll probably have toggles within our control panel to limit permissions to different endpoints in our MCP to restrict AI from doing things. Maybe you can have a read-only one that can only get information from your pressable control panel. ⁓ But yeah, if it doesn't already exist, which again, I'm not sure of, I will definitely take that back to the team to make sure that we have that planned out.
Eric Karkovack (19:21)
We're all just some of the early stages of this, right? So it's really all like a big beta test in a way with everyone. We're all just trying to figure out what this technology is gonna be good at and what may be that we should still leave to humans. I think that's, know, so it's cool that you guys are doing something different with it though. I like that approach.
Malcolm Peralty (19:42)
Yeah, I mean, and we're also, we're looking for those edge cases and those issues, right? So like part of my hope is that like deeply technical customers that use Pressable will come along and say like, in this situation under these circumstances with this kind of request, it doesn't work exactly how I thought it would. ⁓ Like we're already trying to use AI to help us do like site auditing to determine like product fit, right? So.
you Eric, you come along with this new WooCommerce site where you're going to sell amazing WP Minute merch and ⁓ we're going to help you out with that. And one of the things that I'll do is get you to put a test version of your website on one of Pressable's installs. And I'm going to run this tool that's going to collect a whole, it's going to run a bunch of like WPC live commands. It's going to check our server data. It's going to check error logs. It's going to grab all this information for me and it's going to process some of it and ⁓
we're working on a gated system where there's a lot of human in the loop pieces because we realized in trying to completely automate our auditing, what ends up happening is, is we get kind of this low value or mid value kind of result. Whereas if we have a human in the loop and are guiding and directing it, it has a bunch of technical abilities, but doesn't necessarily have the ability to understand some of the nuances and some of the interconnectedness of the data to give like a realistic and valuable result.
And so we've had to find those points where we need people to kind of be in that process. And we're hoping to figure that out for the MCP and really any AI addition that Pressable makes going forward is like where do humans need to exist and why, and how can we make that as seamless and smooth as possible?
Eric Karkovack (21:22)
Yeah, I mean, the human element is still going to be there, right? No matter what we we try to automate all the things and it's great. We all want to save time. We want to save money. But at some point, a human is going to have to interact with something ⁓ which kind of leads me to ⁓ you mentioned to me ⁓ in our ⁓ lead up to this that you are part of a new TAM department and I'm trying to figure out what TAM is. So
Please explain TAM to me and what that means for pressable customers.
Malcolm Peralty (21:54)
Yeah, it's always difficult to discuss because ⁓ some people think of technical account management as either account management, which it's not really account management. We're not selling. We're not responsible for money, which is great. I don't want to be responsible for money. And some people think of it as like an extra level of support. We're not support. You know, we're not here to like help you out with emergencies. Pressable as a company, which is amazing, doesn't have tiered support.
Like there's no tier one people helping you only with like getting access to your control panel. Everyone at Pressable and support is amazing. And so we don't need or have tiered support. So technical account management is really two things right now at Pressable. One is in the early phases of being developed and is where my passion really lies. And one is a little bit more mature. So technical account management at Pressable helps with pre-sales technical strategy.
We help with product fit, like does Pressable have an account tier that fits your website and your needs? We help with technical understanding. Do you really understand what Pressable provides you? Do you have someone on the call like your CTO or your developer or your agency that wants to ask us questions about maybe how our platform will work with their development workflow? The TAM would answer those questions. And then the second part, which is the part that I'm more interested in is the post sales.
This is the technical strategy. What do you want your WordPress website to be like a year from now? When you look at your stats, how do you expect that to grow? When you look at like lighthouse scores, what are your biggest concerns and how can we kind of help you figure that out over the next, you know, eight weeks, three months, a year to kind of get them to where you want to be? So my big goal for Tammet Pressable is to really kind of develop that post-Hales piece a little bit further.
The other person that was hired, Philip, is amazing from end to end, hasn't really, because he's been a one-man show, he hasn't really had the opportunity to kind of move into some of those strategic initiatives with customers. And so now that there's two of us, we're really hoping to dive into that a lot more and help our customers just figure out what they're doing next. know, customers that maybe don't have any technical understanding of WordPress, they can depend on us, or all the way up to, you know, customers that have agency partners that are doing the development piece.
Maybe they don't know Pressable's hosting platform as deeply, right? I can help them monitor end of lives or be aware of changes that are happening on the platform that might impact their coding or their plans for marketing or development. So technical strategy is basically what I try to focus on.
Eric Karkovack (24:39)
It's kind of nice to have that expert that you can go to when you are, like say you're planning a new feature on your WooCommerce site. You're going to have a big sale and maybe you expect a spike in traffic. ⁓ Can my account handle that? It's probably nice to have someone to go to and say, hey, what do I need to do here? ⁓ Are we going to be able to handle this? Is there something I should be doing?
Malcolm Peralty (25:08)
Yeah, I mean, I wish I could say like a lot of the customers that come to me with that a lot of the times the answer is, well, we do have auto scaling up to 110 workers. So you're probably going to be fine. But if they do want to deep dive into it, I love to like take a copy of their website, do a load test on it, check out code performance and profiling and yeah, give them those opportunities to improve things. Sometimes that even includes ⁓ ideally not.
coding a full plugin, but sometimes we do create like some scripts to kind of help do like microcaching or figure out where we can, you know, make improvements to WooCommerce. So a lot of our time right now as a TAM at Pressable is actually specifically related to WooCommerce and WooCommerce performance. And we are working with the automatic WooCommerce team on things that we can do from a platform perspective that will improve performance just, you know, across all WooCommerce sites on Pressable. So it's a really fun time to be a TAM at Pressable.
Eric Karkovack (26:05)
So WooCommerce, mean, yeah, having that inside information kind of on WooCommerce is actually, ⁓ I would take a huge advantage. can make sure that everything is fine tuned exactly for what it needs. ⁓ So speaking to Tam, is there certain account levels that that's going to apply to? Or is that kind of an across the board system that you're going to be implementing?
Malcolm Peralty (26:31)
⁓ So right now it exists for ⁓ the premium account tier. So we have two account tiers. We have signature and premium, but we also have been helping out with larger signature plans ⁓ where there are like agencies running like a hundred sites or 200 sites or 500 sites on our platform. We'll jump in and kind of give them some tips and tricks and insights onto how to improve performance across their entire network of sites. ⁓ My hope is in the future,
we'll be able to offer it as a product where if anyone's willing, they can just purchase like a monthly subscription to TAM and have a piece of my month to help them figure out whatever they need every month as we go forward. So, but that's more midterm, longterm growth opportunity.
Eric Karkovack (27:17)
I can see it being very useful. So often you sign up for a host and they may help you in the pre-sales portion of things, but once everything's up and running, it's kind of up to you, right? To have that expert to bounce ideas off of or get advice from, I think is huge value. So props to you guys for doing that. ⁓
Malcolm Peralty (27:37)
Yeah.
Yeah. And I mean, we try to be really open with our documentation on the changes that we're making. We have a public change log for every feature release for our control panel and every change that we see in our underlying architecture. But ⁓ translating that, understanding that, and applying it to different types of WordPress websites with different kinds of needs and expectations or skill levels ⁓ for management, ⁓ that can also be a really useful way of having TAM provide value to customers.
something I enjoy doing. we even run little training sessions sometimes. So we've had customers who, you know, they know WordPress, but they're like, am I using WooCommerce? Should I use Shopify? Like, how can I make this work for my specific need? Tim will come on there and kind of like, here's how you do like product variations. Here's how you set up swatches. Here's how you now optimize those things so that they don't like crush the server. If you get a giant like front page of Reddit kind of traffic. ⁓
A lot of my history and experience has been on application efficiency and performance optimization. ⁓ It's so fun because we have access to server graphs that customers don't have access to. So being able to watch that change in trajectory as traffic goes up because of some change that we help the customer make is just so fulfilling, so rewarding.
Eric Karkovack (28:55)
Yeah, I imagine that's really a fun part of the job is to see that result in action and the happy customer and their website is humming along because you were able to step in and provide some advice.
Malcolm Peralty (29:07)
Yeah. Again, it's a super new discipline at Pressable. Only started a little over a year ago. Like I said, I'm the second one there. If you have any listeners who are interested in technical account management, Pressable is not the only company that does this. Like I said, I was a TAM at Acquia before this. I think Pantheon has TAMs. A lot of kind of the enterprise WordPress hosting companies have TAMs. A lot of big...
Companies like CloudFlare, for example, have Tams. So this is a discipline. It's a job title that maybe not a lot of people know about, but it exists in a lot of companies. So if this sounds like something you would like to do, please search it out. We're not necessarily looking for anyone at Pressable right now, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't at least toss your resume our way if you're interested in this kind of thing.
Eric Karkovack (29:55)
Well, now that I know what it is, I'm really excited about it because I think it can really help people. So thank you for explaining it so well. ⁓ Is there anything else we should know about going on Impressible right now that may interest our audience?
Malcolm Peralty (30:11)
⁓
We are definitely growing our automatic for agencies customers. If you are running an agency, ⁓ please reach out to the automatic for agencies team. The advantage of that of course is multi-tier depending on how many sites you're working with or how many customers you're working with. There's a lot of value there. I've reached out to a lot of the agencies that I used to work for and have thankfully heard that most of them are already part of that program and the ones that aren't I'm helping kind of get on boarded because not only does it give you
access to Pressable, but it gives you access to the full automatic suite of products and services and, you know, great value in terms of opportunity there. And, yeah, and hopefully if you pick the right plan and you're at the right level, you get access to me, which I would enjoy working on some new and difficult things. So, yeah, please don't hesitate to reach out to them. And then in general, Pressable is just growing like crazy. I mean, I would be surprised if the company doesn't ⁓ double or triple in size over the next couple of years.
Like I said, we're a group of like 32 people right now. And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we, if we grow that fast and we're attending, you know, WordPress and non-WordPress related events. So I'll be at DrupalCon later this month in Chicago and we'll have a contingent there. And ⁓ we're typically at most of the like ⁓ country or location specific, a bigger location with specific word camps. And we're looking for other events to sponsor and attend. So if you run a...
an event related to this space, please feel free to reach out.
Eric Karkovack (31:45)
Awesome. I have just one more question for you. ⁓ And that is, tell me about your experience co-authoring a book with your wife. I just think that's the almost awesome thing because as someone who's done a lot of writing, I have never had the courage to sit there and write fiction. So please tell me about that and tell us about the book.
Malcolm Peralty (31:55)
my goodness.
So we started it when we were dating and everyone that I talked to said, you're basically going to kill your relationship. Two people writing a book together while they're dating is like a recipe for disaster. ⁓ But we both had our own skills and abilities in that space. I really enjoy setting the scene and coming up with the overall plot structure and some of the like characterizations and like the twists. And my wife enjoys like dialogue and like
So I was very much the setting the scene and the stage and she was having the characters interact with each other. And every night we would sit in bed and we would pull from our plot description that we had set up a couple of bullet points and we would write like 1200 words together in a shared Google doc. And we did that until we had completed it we're like, oh my goodness, we have a first draft of a book.
We went through and did a full refinement pass on it and a line edit on it and we kickstarted it and it was successful and we had to do the crazy thing of trying to ship out like, you know, 200 copies of the book around the world, which was painful. It was so funny. We walk into the post office and the lady looks at us like, I'm not taking a break anytime soon. Am I? I'm like, we, can do this in pieces. Like we can come back tomorrow and the next day and the next day. She's like, ah, just let's just get it over with. Um,
Eric Karkovack (33:17)
Wow.
Hahaha ⁓
Malcolm Peralty (33:34)
But in terms of writing the book...
Eric Karkovack (33:34)
So you hand
packed everything and shipped it? Wow.
Malcolm Peralty (33:38)
yeah, ⁓
yeah. yeah. Yeah, soft covers and hard covers. And yeah, we really wanted to, like had like bookmarks printed and we wanted to like sign every copy that was back through the Kickstarter so that, you know, people felt like they had something a little bit more personalized. ⁓ The book actually, the funny thing is the thing that kicked the book off for us was a ⁓ comedy video that we had watched together when we were dating.
And it was basically ⁓ these two young men who were like at this facility and they were buying a superpower and they wanted to be Wolverine. And he said, well, that's really like two superpowers. It's the adamantium claws and the mutant healing. And you only have the money for one. So which one do you want? And both guys picked the adamantium claws and then it cuts to them in like a hotel room or whatever. And they're like bleeding everyone. like, why did we do this? Like,
Eric Karkovack (34:35)
Hahaha
Malcolm Peralty (34:35)
Why? Right? They're freaking out. It's just so it's such a funny video. And my wife and I looked at each other and we're like, could you imagine like buying superpowers? Like, what would that be like in our society? In our capitalist world? Like, would that create a whole new like, upper class tier of people like people that have superpowers versus people that don't? And we're like, that's a book right there. Like, we have to write that. And so second class super is specifically about that. It follows Kaia, a young woman who
has an office job and she's trying to save up for her for a superpower because she wants to move out of kind of the lower echelon of society into that group of people with superpowers. And it's very expensive to buy superpowers. And like we started creating all this lore behind it, like when did it start and how many can you have and all these things. And it was just a really fun project to work together on.
Eric Karkovack (35:26)
That sounds like a great piece of teamwork there. I love that. And to have it something that was kick-started and funded and you got people interested in it, so congratulations on that. That's awesome. Where can people get the book, by the way?
Malcolm Peralty (35:41)
It's on Amazon. So amazon.com or dot CA or whatever your local Amazon is. exists there both as like a ebook and as like a paperback trade. And if you want a quick link to it, you can find it on like my personal site, ⁓ peralty.com So it's my last name, P E R A L T Y dot com.
Eric Karkovack (36:00)
Awesome. Well, where else can people connect with you online and maybe get some, pick your brain on Pressable's TAM and other stuff coming up.
Malcolm Peralty (36:08)
Yeah, so honestly you'll laugh, but I spend most of my social media time on LinkedIn now just consuming things there, ⁓ which is weird. So ⁓ on Twitter or X, I'm at find purpose. ⁓ So if you're looking for me there, that would be the place to do it. And outside of that, my personal website has a contact form. Feel free to email me through that ⁓ or malcolm.peralty at pressable.com.
Eric Karkovack (36:16)
Me too, unfortunately.
Wonderful. Thank you so much for being on Malcolm. I appreciate your time and thanks to everyone who watched and listened today. If you want to go visit us over at the WPminute.com slash subscribe, you can get our newsletter and become a member, support the work that we do and even access our Slack channel and speak with us anytime.