Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Hosted by Toby Cryns and Kurt von Ahnen, the Agency Action Podcast (Part of the WP Minute Podcast Network) dives into the real-world ups and downs of running a WordPress agency. Each week, Toby and Kurt share open, honest conversations about the challenges and victories that come with building client relationships, pricing projects, finding the right tools, and growing a sustainable business.
Whether you’re just launching your agency or refining your systems, you’ll get practical insights from two agency owners who live it every day—along with stories that remind you you’re not alone in this wild WordPress world of global teams, AI disruption, and constant change.
Follow the show and explore more at TheWPMinute.com/podcasts
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (00:00)
Welcome to another spicy episode of the agency action show with our star Kurt Von Annen and myself Toby Cryns Kurt, I have a tweet here that you brought to my attention. Why don't you read that to us and we can react to it?
Kurt von Ahnen (00:14)
It it's more like a series of tweets, Toby, and and it and it blindsided me a little bit just because I feel like there's undue pessimism in our space. And I feel like optimism really is a winning trait when it comes to running an agency. So d we'll cut this one short, right? young lady gets on and she posts s and I'm gonna read it quote for quote, so you'll see my eyes dart around if you're watching video.
six months of being unemployed in WordPress and tech. Not a single accepted freelance project, not a single one. And I I gotta tell you, man, I saw so you've been doing this a long time. I've been doing this a long time. I just went through a financial, you know, winter. I just went through a sales winter at December, January, February, March. No sales for me either, right? But but here comes the big but.
It's not WordPress's fault. It's it's I'm confused on where this is coming from. So I'm seeing six months of being unemployed in WordPress and tech. Okay, great. That we get that. Peep that happens, right? Not a single accepted freelance project, not a single one. Okay, what are you doing? What what energy are you putting into this? What what does your website look like? Does your website have
You know, conversion-oriented copy on it? Do you have an effective call to action? Are you sharing your website? Are you guesting on podcasts? Are you like, what are you doing to put yourself out there as a freelancer and get these gigs? And do you have the aspiration of going from like freelancer to agency? Like there's a lot of confusion and gray lines in the WordPress space. some people might call me a freelancer, right? Because I run the agency out of my house.
And I do the the subcontracting model. You you have 10 employees. So obviously people look at you and go, you're an agency, right? But for me, they they could kind of go, well, Kurt's not really an agency. Like, like people can judge all they want, but at the end of the day, you know, we're we're pulling down better than six figures, running the sucker out of the house. And I'm looking at these posts and I'm going, where's the disconnect?
I mean, what are you thinking,
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (02:13)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (02:14)
Toby?
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (02:14)
Well there's one thing I that I thought of with this specific one. So again, I'm gonna read it. Six months of being unemployed in WordPress and tech. Let's just start there.
Kurt von Ahnen (02:23)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (02:23)
Unemployed? Does this so I'm I'm gonna like I'm gonna like Right,
Kurt von Ahnen (02:27)
What what is it? Are you unemployed or are you a freelancer?
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (02:30)
yeah. You mean you're this is like to me, like and this is where my mind went. I'm like, what it seems to me is that they had a full time job, maybe working in WordPress.
And now they're unemployed. And the mentality of getting work in freelance is very different than getting work, you know, a full time job with someone. It's a different type of marketing, different type of sales. If you just look at it as a marketing equation, and let's say you are if you're trying to get a full time job and to freelance, that's a confusing message to put out there. Let's just start there. Let's say you're going, yeah, let's say you're going on Twitter
Kurt von Ahnen (03:01)
Yeah, you'll end up with neither.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (03:05)
and saying, I'm
Both a freelancer and I'm looking for full time work. Well, people aren't gonna give you freelance work then. And the maybe you'd be considered for a full time job, but like don't like I just think like you have to decide. This is marketing one one. Pick a lane and go for it. and so that's my ini my initial reaction was like, what are you? What are you going for? What's your target? What are you what what's
Kurt von Ahnen (03:25)
What are you? Well,
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (03:27)
your yeah, like
Kurt von Ahnen (03:28)
talk about the struggle there, right? Because you nailed it. Unless it's a very short project. Like a, like, hey, I just need someone to change the headings here. I just need someone to build me a hero section, right? Like, like that could be a short freelance job that an unemployed WordPress professional nails, right? But if it's a project.
Like if if if I'm looking for a freelancer to help me launch my new e learning project and it's gonna be a three month ordeal, I am not hiring someone that also says they're looking for a job.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (03:58)
Yeah, I'm not gonna hire a subcontractor who won't be there in two months or three months, like even six months. I'm like, I don't think so. I'd I'd I'd rather just find someone who's gonna be a permanent freelancer. there's other things. Let's let's say they hypothetically, let's say we're getting this wrong and they are really looking to dive in freelance. And this is a big stretch. Let's just assume that's your maybe one of our listeners is like, no, seriously, I'm a freelancer, I've been marketing myself.
And so then I go, okay, let's talk about how you're marketing first of all. are you on Upwork? Upwork is the world's biggest platform for freelancers. I don't care what you're charging, it could be a hundred bucks an hour, whatever, go on there. You're gonna be competing against two dollars an hour. That's fine. But you should be when it comes to marketing, do all the free reasonable things. So start on Upwork. I don't know, maybe there's a monthly fee, but if it's eight bucks or ten bucks a month, pay it. It's worth it. It's just marketing.
go on podcast. And if you don't know any podcasts, start your own podcast. Market your podcast. Don't think too hard about this, people. Like you just gotta if any idea you can think of, go and do it. Like, and this is like I think something that holds a lot of people back. They think you need a strategy. And I've always been like, strategy is nice, like it's great. Like the Mighty Mo has some strategy. We're actually investing a ton in our brand right now.
But it it took us eighteen years before we invested cent number one in our brand and and our marketing outside of SEO. and so like I always think don't overthink this. You need work today, go get it. Like just do whatever you can do.
Kurt von Ahnen (05:27)
You you said it but a different way than I did. When when I lost my corporate job and the pandemic was ramping up and I was still looking for a job, and it wasn't going well. Like it was not going well. I just said to my wife, I said, we gotta change the focus. I gotta focus on revenue. And she was like, What? I go, I'm not looking for a job now. Now I'm looking for revenue. We're gonna we're gonna do activities and tasks that generate revenue.
I didn't care if I was painting a neighbor's bedroom for 600 bucks. I was generating revenue. And once you get in, once you get some revenue coming from whatever channel you invent for yourself, you get any kind of revenue coming, that dopamine hit hits hard. And you're like, I did it. I can go get another one, another one, another one. And then you start to niche down and go, okay, well, I don't have to paint the neighbors' houses anymore. I'm building websites. It's actually working. But it's the the main thing is
Revenue. What can I do to leverage myself to get revenue coming in my home? And then once that starts to happen, then you can fine tune and push things in certain directions.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (06:29)
And this is like let let's talk about revenue. I'm just gonna move one of our bullets up a little bit. the question when I think of revenue, and and if you just think of it in revenue, it's a really neat way to think about, you know, if you're stuck and you need money, one question that we're thinking about is like are agencies becoming IT departments? And if you think about that as like, let's say you're a freelancer that you're selling WordPress, but maybe you also know how to
set up
Google Gmail, Google Workspace. Maybe you know how to do DNS. Maybe you know security-related stuff as it pertains to websites. You can like branch out into like IT department stuff. There is an immense need for IT department types of activities right now. Tons of small businesses and nonprofits are looking to hire IT teams that don't exist anywhere. The IT teams all went away. It was just they couldn't figure it out. And now there's just like bigger.
Like in Minneapolis, there used to be, I don't know, probably fifty IT companies that we you could call if you're a small business to set up your internet or to manage your email. Now there's like two and they're big. And so that means they charge a lot and they they're probably really good, but but you're you know, when you go in there and they're like minimum fifty grand or something, you're you're gonna be like, No way, but you as a freelancer, I hear that and I go, I can help.
Kurt von Ahnen (07:45)
I could help. Well, that's another thing that you nailed, right? So many people would take like DNS management or email setup or any of those things and just assume that's part of their responsibility as the freelancer. If they're building the website, they've got to hook up inbox for their customer or they've got to, you know, do DKIM stuff for the for the emails in the DNS. No, those are add-on services, right?
I built you the website, but if you need inbox functionality, we're that's another, that's different that's a different level, right? So so we're gonna need to add that to the the the scope of work. And I think a lot of people just absorb it when they when it should be the add-on. I'm not trying to teach you how to rip people off. That I'm not saying rip everybody off, but I'm also not saying don't rip yourself off. Like you you gotta take care of yourself and build the revenue where appropriate.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (08:33)
Let's go to another pessimistic WordPress tweet here. a member of our community said, who shall remain unknown through all time, says, This is the WordPress world we all live in. This is the WordPress world that sucks. The best advice anyone has is to leave the WordPress world behind. It generally leads to getting a raise as well, meaning leave WordPress and you'll get more money. That's the gist of it.
And
Kurt von Ahnen (08:57)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (08:57)
And additionally, this person thinks WordPress sucks. By the way, this person is one of the most connected WordPress people on earth. I'm not even joking about that. So that's what this person's saying.
Kurt von Ahnen (09:07)
I when whenever I see the pessimistic posts from this particular individual, I always think to myself, really? Really? I Toby, I struggle with this. I do. there's a guy in my neighborhood, right, who started his own AI website company two week two years ago, I guess, and and got my attention about 18 months ago, right? 'Cause he started to pick up momentum in town. And I looked at what he was charging.
And I looked at what he was doing and I was like, yeah, his margins must be crazy. Like, I'm sure he's making more money than me. And but the quality of the websites was not to the standard that I would give my clients. Right. And so I you have to make a decision in those in those spaces. You, you have to make the decision. Do I want to lower my standards and follow this path? Or do I want to stick to my guns and know that long-term success.
Is what my agency is built on. Now I'm not saying I'm a WordPress only guy, right? I've got a couple of SaaS tools that I incorporate too, right? Like so, so there's a lot of arrows in my quiver. I'm not, I'm not just one thing, but I'm I'm very much founded in what am I an expert in? I think that's important. What are you an expert in? How do you build your value? And what are you really selling? I am not selling WordPress as an agency. In fact, I just did a bunch of
SEO research yesterday with Claude, looking at the content for my personal marketing. And Claude pointed out, you don't mention WordPress anywhere, right? And it's like, well, did I do that on purpose or or what was my mentality there? So now I'm actually injecting some WordPress verbiage into my content, right? But I'm not selling customers WordPress. I'm selling customers my solutions to their problems. And that's
what we generate our revenue off of.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (10:50)
That's a great point because this person is probably deep in the politics of WordPress. I use WordPress every day and I pay many salaries with WordPress. And I don't read WordPress politics stuff. I'm just not interested. I don't think it hasn't helped me one bit to get deep or any any politics stuff, by the way. It hasn't helped me to to be a better person or a better business leader. And I think like
WordPress is just a tool, to your point, Kurt. Like WordPress is one of many tools. I'm not even saying like do WordPress. I'm saying it's the tool I've chosen. It's my hammer and nails set. But like really the the challenge is running an agency or running a freelance business or whatever. That's the challenge. The challenge is not WordPress does not get in the way of me selling a single thing. It it really doesn't really help me sell a single thing either, by the way. It's just a tool. And the
Even if people come in asking for it, they generally don't care. They they're just like, I want a website that does X, Y, and Z. And so they might come to me and say, I want a WordPress site that has e-commerce. So I want to use WooCommerce. But if if I were to bring them an alternate solution, let's say Shopify, and really pitch that hard, I betcha I could win that business. And so it's not WordPress.
Kurt von Ahnen (12:03)
No, it's
it's our expertise in the space. I have let's say coworker, right? Because I I don't want to name people on the show, but let's say I have a coworker. They actively will build websites for people and then connect Shopify as the e-commerce choice for them. They're like, I would much rather work with Shopify than deal with WooCommerce, right? And then I have other associates, peers that are WooCommerce freaks.
I have customers on WooCommerce. I have customers on Fluent Cart. I have customers on Shortcart. And to be honest, I consider my team to be experts in those three channels. So like we can serve our customers at any level. So then it comes to use case, right? If someone wants something that's lightweight and fast and they don't have a bunch of intricacies inside their shopping cart, we're gonna go with Fluent Cart because it's easy, it's lightweight, it's clean, it's new, right?
If they have a bunch of intricacies and and automations and things they want to do internationally and VAT tax and all like all the stuff, then it's like, okay, we're in WooCommerce. We're just in WooCommerce. And
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (13:00)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (13:02)
so I think understanding your tool set WordPress is not the problem. It's like not understanding the full scope of the tool set, I think, becomes the problem.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (13:12)
There's also this question like, what do you mean by WordPress sucks? And everybody has a different idea of what that means. And I don't actually think it sucks at all. I think it's an amazing tool. And I've been deep in not other platforms, but I've been building apps. And there's so much that WordPress does that's better than, you know, in a way, in some ways, way better. It just definitely seems more mature. And you can see the maturity. A lot of the complaints that I
read recently, let's say this morning after reading your the tweets you posted, they're they they don't like they're about even the complaints about WordPress. It's really the complaints that come with a mature project project product. Like so like a lot of the complaints that I was reading on on X.com or whatever were were like, the the development moves so slow and like why do the
Why did they release it and then immediately released a security update and that sort of thing? And and I'm like, this these are features, not bad things. And I get like you would love to like do what AI does and build with React, but these React apps are unstable and insecure. The ones that you just built today with AI, they might not be secure today, but in a week they're gonna be insecure and you won't know it. At least with WordPress, you know it. And this is the maturity part where like
Yeah, like you you know that it's been it's it's now gonna be hacked and so you can fix it, but you don't get that with the immature products.
Kurt von Ahnen (14:32)
No, so this this one really got to me. And I I think I'm kind of dipping down. I I might be screwing up our own order here, but we're like, what where does the bad stuff come from WordPress, right? Bad stuff comes from WordPress. Even people that are happy with WordPress, it's like it's Friday afternoon. You do an announcement for a security update going into the weekend. We've got a
You know, a couple handfuls of websites. I know you've got a bunch of websites. So now it becomes a race. So here's the way that that my brain works. My brain works like WordPress comes out with a 7.0 update. Not a big deal. We'll get to it over the next week or two. Everything's fine, right? they come out with a security update because people could hack your website and blah blah and they and they put it in print. What could happen? To me, it's like every hacker in the world just says, race is on. How many can we get?
You know what I mean? And so then I I do get anxious. I'm like, well, now we've got to make this quick. You know, we've gotta we gotta update these things fast. And with the hosting that we provide, we update the site. We also take a screenshot of the site. We make sure the screenshots match, you know, homepage to homepage. you know, we no green, no white screens of death, make sure there's no plug-in conflicts. And then when you update to the newest version of WordPress.
Then you immediately get all of the updated versions of the plugins, right? So then you've got to update all the plugins. And so we did have a lot of activity over the weekend that to me was anxiety-ridden, if I was to say that the right way. But again, to your point, I don't consider, I think the timing sucked. I think Friday afternoon sucked. to to do that and make my team do stuff over the weekend. Here's where.
The optimism for me comes in. Out of all of our websites, Goose Egg had a problem. Everything updated fine. No white screens of death, no plug-in conflicts, all the plugins, all the major reliable plugins that we use as an agency, all updated, no problem, right? We had zero problems.
And I put out an email to my entire customer base Monday that said, Hey, you may have seen an email or a post about WordPress security. Don't worry with your hosting, it's all covered, blah, blah. And it just makes us look like we're solid. Everything's done. So we took a negative, turned it into a positive, and it became marketing content for us.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (16:45)
Yeah. I think also like so this idea like, hey, I'm pissed off that WordPress patched the software and released a new you know, a notice saying that we patched the software. That's really what you're upset about. You're upset, not you personally, Kurt, but you're up people are upset about the timing. This is an example of like WordPress sucks problem. and I'm thinking like, this is your job. People pay you to do this. I if
Kurt von Ahnen (17:07)
This is what you
signed up for.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (17:08)
If
if you're pissed about doing this work, either you can live with being pissed, you can you have options. And a couple of the options are, and this is what an option that came to my head, I'm like, you're pissed about it. Maybe you're not charging enough for this service, or you haven't explained the service to your clients enough to where like they understand the risk. Maybe you say, you could have in your terms of service, look, if there's a security update, let's say we have bronze, silver, and gold maintenance packages. If you're on the bronze and you're paying the l least amount of money,
You don't get these in real time. You get them once a month on the third Thursday of the month. If you want to pay silver, we do this on every Monday. If you want to pay gold, we do this on Friday evening or on Tuesday at midnight. Whenever they come out, you know, like you can build this into your product. And this this is like a lot of the complaining I hear. I'm just like, dudes, this is an agency problem or a freelance problem. This is not a WordPress problem.
Kurt von Ahnen (17:59)
Exactly. Exactly. so let's we pointed out something that everyone got upset about, right? So so we pointed that out. I'm I'm curious, Toby, what keeps you optimistic in the WordPress space?
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (18:10)
There's a lot of if if you listen, first of all, if if you're like in the politics of WordPress, which I am generally not into the politics, like I don't follow it too closely. Follow it a little bit closely just to like so I can comment if there's a conversation a little bit, but more like colloquially. I'm not on Twitter or anything. I'm generally optimistic about WordPress. And maybe I'm optimistic because I don't engage in that politics thread on X dot com, you know.
and I know I read rec that Matt posted some, he just like, you know, Matt, or not Matt Mul Matt Mullenwig, the guy who runs the WordPress project. he posted something really negative about the community. But I gotta be honest, I just read the tweet. I didn't read any replies, but I was like, i there's some truth there. Like, and so yeah, he's kind of become like a lightning rod and cause he posts he's not thoughtful in the way he posts anymore. He used to be very thoughtful. He's not anymore. That's seems to be the case.
but
Kurt von Ahnen (19:02)
He needs more jazz.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (19:03)
yeah, yeah. And so like and I don't criticize him for that. I go, you know, like he's he is who he is and that's fine and he's done a lot of good in the community and you know, like you know, he he's does what he does and that's fine.
I'm so but I I'm optimistic, not necessarily for WordPress, but like as an agency owner, even with AI, I was a little bit pessim more pessimistic a few, let's say a year ago, when I was learning what AI could possibly do. I'm like, wow, I'm gonna be out of work pretty soon. And now that we're here a year or two years or three years later, I'm like, you know what? I can see avenues to a profitable
Future for the Mighty Mo. And it's going to be a different company. Don't get me wrong. Like we're going to change our products. And because the question that I ask, and this is also the optimist question: in a world where software development is free, what changes? What's different? What opportunities exist? And believe me, there are loads of opportunities, but trust me on this, it ain't going to be selling WordPress.
You might still use WordPress, but the opportunities are gonna be: hey, it's cheap to build this software. What software do you need built? And this is where I'm learning. Like people have ideas for software, but they don't they need someone to help flesh out those ideas. They need someone to build it. Even if I'm not writing the code, I still need to sit there and manage the code prompting and security. And and as I'm describing this.
This is what running a WordPress agency is, effectively. Like like p everyone can build a WordPress site and yet I have fourteen employees. Like what we're we're it's the same problem, same team, maybe, maybe slightly you know, like the problem's the same.
Kurt von Ahnen (20:39)
My optimism is actually different than yours. And that's this is part of the reason I love talking to you, Toby, because I think we have two different perspectives. And I think it even the listeners were probably like, wow, these guys should probably get on the same page someday. my optimism is in that the last three projects that we sold as an agency, and two of them are sizable. One is
W w one's more than a beginner website, but two of them are sizable. They are literally like out of the box. Lifter LMS, Fluent CRM Pro, Fluent Form.
That's really it. Astra is the theme, right? out of the box, no custom code, no custom CSS, nothing. It comes the sale that we made was the expertise we have in Lifter LMS to help them with their curriculum development. And so far, like this one giant project we're working on is something like we're like 800 videos in with all of their lessons and courses. And so
We're in charge of like all of the content and the organization of content and all and building all the access plans for the individual courses and all these things. And there's a certain complexity to that. And that that answer, what you just said, was yeah, anybody could build a WordPress site, but I have 10 employees because we build the build four, because no one wants to do it themselves, right? So they're paying us to do that. And my agency is in a space right now where our last three projects are.
Simply simple websites, Astra theme, a couple of like heavy hitter, reliable plugins, and we're making money. And I struggle with people that jump on a public forum and go, my god, it sucks. I can't make any money. And I'm like, Well, maybe you're overcomplicating things. Maybe you're trying to inject everything with an MCP and you don't even know what you're trying to build yet. Just find a customer that has a problem.
Offer them a solution and collect your money.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (22:27)
Yeah. There's another way to make money here that I'm also optimistic about. and you're describing even an off-the-shelf solution, which is not easy to put together. Like it's not a simple project. Maybe it's easy. You click here, click there, but it's not a simple undertaking, especially if there's eight hundred videos and courses and stuff. Yes.
Kurt von Ahnen (22:45)
Yeah, I mean it takes strategy and planning. Yeah.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (22:47)
and kind of what you're describing, and and you could people can take this in all sorts of directions, but
Continue to focus on the hard stuff. So the hard stuff is not installing the Lifter LMS plugin and configuring it. The hard part is putting the puzzle together. And WordPress has always been free. And you can buy all those tools probably for, I don't know, less than a thousand bucks, I imagine, to get all the plugins and you know all that. so that's part's cheap. The the expensive part is putting it all together. and and hard stuff can take many forms. The Mighty Mo is really.
really good at complex WooCommerce problems. And so we have a client right now that has a 32-point checklist just for WooCommerce. Every time we upgrade WordPress or a WooCommerce plugin, we have 32 tests, some of which are automated, some of which are very manual. And we're talking things like, add a p add a product to the cart. Does the flyout menu do its thing? If I check out, we use actual live credit cards. Does this process, does the money hit the bank? Did that
zappier thing come through to Slack. You know, we're testing all this stuff. This is the hard stuff to do. And each step in and of itself, not hard. But when you have 32 steps, each one of varying complexity and also putting together, by the way, we wrote those 32 tests. That's what they're paying us for.
Kurt von Ahnen (23:56)
Yeah, to be the professional. So I mentioned I use plugins like off the shelf. I know a lot of people make their own plugins, right? And I think this is another like optimism of WordPress that we have the freedom and the ability to do this. But I have heard from people, especially like established plugin developers, that plug-in sales seem to be down, right? Like like the new sales of plugins.
Is going down. And they're like, well, thank goodness for our recurring income. Thank goodness for our new subscribers. Thank you know, like, thank goodness for people that re-up, right? And then I'm also seeing what at what seems to me like an unprecedented rate of like new plugins hitting the market. Like I have a friend right now that's entering the product market. They're like, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna release my first product this week, right? And so A
What is inspiring people to continue to make an offer product to the masses? Because I think it's different. You make plugins that you use internally, right?
Have you
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (24:53)
yeah, yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (24:53)
have you added them to the repository or tried to sell a premium version of any plugins?
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (24:57)
No. I have six plugins in the repository and I don't monetize them.
Kurt von Ahnen (25:00)
Yeah, so so I I so I wonder what inspires people to continue to enter the product marketplace knowing that it might be in decline. And then what do you think causes that? Do you think it's the influx of AI that's just bolstered the ability to make
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (25:16)
Let's go back to our original question. In a world where software is free, what else is true? And I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing people who don't know how to code plugins, maybe they're marketers. I bet you there's gonna I betcha there is and will be more marketers entering the plugin market because they're
Kurt von Ahnen (25:33)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (25:33)
vibe coding it or getting it done super cheap on Fiverr, because the Fiverr people are now vibe coding everything. And so that price is the price of software is the software's free.
That's how I consider it right now. To build software is free. And it takes human hours and human time to build it, but you don't need any expertise in it. You just kind of need to have an idea of something to say to a computer and it'll build it. Like, and that's what I that's my hunch, is that like, so yeah, these established players, but I think like, maybe they need to reframe their problem too. I think of like let's take WP Rocket and there's others like that that are
Plugins that manage caching, that's a difficult problem that I would not try to solve myself. I'd rather pay them 200 bucks a year to solve that problem. And I think like what I wonder, the form plugin, Gravity Forms, they're mature. They have all the add-ons. They're probably okay. But if you're like anything like less complexity than that, that doesn't need a lot of add-ons, you know, Lifter's probably fine because it's complex and.
But but like anything that's gonna require like that I could just go and get it done in five minutes on a chat GPT, those are done. Like those plugins if you're charging for and by the way, I I I just built one of these, how to delete all my WooCommerce products. And we had thousands of products. I just wanted to delete them all on a staging site, for example. I could only find paid plugins to do that. And I was just I guess I said
Okay, I'm just gonna go to Claude and just tell Claude to build me a plugin. Five minutes. It built a plugin that was fantastic. It had a status bar, you know, like, yep. And I was like, okay, I'm no I'm never gonna buy another plugin that does something like rudimentary again.
Kurt von Ahnen (27:13)
Yeah, it's I had a client just the other day ask me like how do I have a lot of comments, I have a lot of spam comments, how do I get rid of those, you know? And it's like, I know how to get rid of right? But then I was like, what do I do for a customer? Same thing, right? Hey. Boop, deep, boop, boop, done, gone. Yeah, don't worry about it.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (27:29)
And I think like the problems you know, so the the products will change a bit, but the problems of business are always the same since time immemorial. It's marketing and sales and conversion and these days we talk conversion optimization and SEO, but those are all just functions of marketing and like how do you get eyeballs, how do you get them to pay? The problems remain whether you're an established plugin maker or not.
Kurt von Ahnen (27:51)
I wanna do something dangerous. I wanna take our conversation back to where we opened. And I wanna ask you just point blank. Six months of being unemployed in WordPress and tech, not a single accepted freelance project, not a single one.
I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna prelude this, right? So I have a friend in the space, always talks about SEO, always talks about hits and clicks and conversions and this and that and and complains about revenue, and then I say, Well, yeah, but you've just spent all this time talking about marketing and you haven't told me anything about what you're doing for sales. And when they when they try to
Talk back to me, they repeat what they're doing in marketing, but again, nothing about sales. And you and I have talked about this before. I think about my economic winter I went through until, you know, through March this year. And I think about the mental shift that happened and what enabled me to close the amount of sales I made in April. And it was sales. It wasn't marketing, it was sales.
Toby, people hear you all the time. You got ten people working for you. You're running the Mighty Mo. It's it's a profitable agency. What to you is the difference between marketing and sales?
Like how would you
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (28:56)
And
Kurt von Ahnen (28:57)
go six months, not a single project, not one? Like that what?
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (29:00)
I wouldn't and
you know, I mean, I don't know, maybe this person lives in a I don't I don't know this
Kurt von Ahnen (29:05)
And they glue.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (29:05)
person's thing. I'm saying I wouldn't in my current scenario, even if you took away my entire business operations, I I'm confident I would go find business. I don't know how much business, I probably be fine. but your question, what's the difference? This is what I think the difference is. Marketing, you talk about WordPress. This is my opinion, because
you need to like meet people at where they're searching. So their boss is like, find me a WordPress builder. They that for marketing, you're like, okay, I'm I'm doing WordPress. I'm a WordPress professional, dah, dah, dah, dah. And maybe you do a webinar on how we're how expert you are at WordPress, you demo something. As soon as you get them on the phone, now we're talking sales. So that all was marketing. Now it's sales. Do you have them on the phone or in a one-on-one at a coffee shop?
Don't mention WordPress, don't mention technology, don't talk about flows, don't talk about anything code related, don't talk about AI, don't talk about anything. You're now talking about the business problems. Cause they already trust you enough to have the meeting. That's the marketing part. The sales is closing the deal and it has nothing to do with the technology.
Kurt von Ahnen (30:09)
I love that. I love that. I almost wonder if that's where we should just end the dang show. find a need, fill a need, right? And and when you meet with the client, you're focused on their business problem, not all the crap you do, but what's their problem? Focus on them. What's their problem? And then what's your solution to help them with their problem?
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (30:26)
And here's a metric. If you if you're a metric person and you're at a coffee with someone or on the phone, if they're not talking eighty percent of the time, you're not selling.
Like you want them to talk a hundred percent of the time on the call. And in lieu of that, you try to notch it down by one percent with mm-hmm, tell me more. that's interesting. It's like think
Kurt von Ahnen (30:43)
Tell me more.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (30:45)
about it as a date. You you don't go in if you go into a date with someone you're interested in dating, I don't it's been a while for me, but if you go and talk it about yourself, you're not gonna get a second date. You gotta sit there, you gotta ask the thoughtful questions, listen, respond. This is what we're doing.
Kurt von Ahnen (30:59)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (30:59)
We're dating.
During the sales process.
Kurt von Ahnen (31:01)
I I love that. I I hear so many people complain about a lack of revenue and when I ask pointed questions it seems like they're not selling.
I'm like you. That show undercover billionaire. there's some people on that show I'm not very fond of, but the show is very interesting. You take a billionaire, you take away their their access to their money, you drop them in a town with $100 and a used car or truck, right? And with that hundred bucks, they're supposed to create a million dollar company within what was it, 90 days or something, right? and almost all of them can do it. Because
They lever well, A, they're experts at leveraging other people, right? But they leverage other people, they make relationships, they leverage those relationships, they find opportunities, they leverage those opportunities. One thing grows into another thing. And to me, someone sitting at home posting on X saying that they can't find any task in six months to pay anything, that just tells me that you haven't put yourself in the in a proper audience.
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (31:58)
Well, and think about this. That post I read that post by that person, but it would have been way more impactful to me as somebody who could potentially hire this person if that person instead posted, Hey, I don't know how to find work. I'm really trying hard. I'm a WordPress developer. Here's my expertise. Can somebody help me figure this problem out? That's an interesting problem for me as a business owner, and you know.
Kurt von Ahnen (32:20)
well you just opened a whole new can of worms and I think we're out of time. We'll have to talk about it next time. Folks,
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (32:24)
Yes. Exactly.
Kurt von Ahnen (32:27)
this is Toby Cryns I'm Kurt Von Ahnen Toby, how can people reach you?
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (32:31)
You can find me on the LinkedIns. my last name is C R Y N S. you can also find me at the Mighty Mo, and that's T-H-E-M-I-G-H-T-Y-M-O.com, where we specialize in marketing, SEO, website design, complex WordPress problems. Kurt, what do you do and where can we find you?
Kurt von Ahnen (32:50)
the name of my company is Manana no Mas You can also find me at LinkedIn. I'm the only Kurt von Ahnen there, easy to find. And we primarily focus on enterprise level learning websites and membership sites. Folks, we'll see you next time
Toby Cryns - The Mighty Mo! (33:02)
Thanks everybody. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (33:04)
on the agency action show.