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"I don't think a lot of people know a hundred percent. You can't say yes or no, you know, will Google know this is written by me or not?""WordPress is just a mess, to be honest, for the people that are in the weeds every day, like grinding, like they know how messy WordPress is.""If you have a good product, like why do you need to constantly push sales? It doesn't make sense.★ Support this podcast ★
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Speaker 1:Get access to our group of merry WordPress bandits and help support show. Head to the wpminute.com/support to join. Brian Jackson. Brianleejackson.comforgemedia.io. You've been on the podcast before on Matt Report.
Speaker 1:You're listening now, everyone, on WP Minute Plus. Brian, do you if you listen to podcast, do you use Apple Podcasts or do use something else?
Speaker 2:You know what? I use YouTube actually for most of my podcast, to be honest. And there are a couple podcasts, and then I do have them in my Apple Music app. But to be honest, I I just leave YouTube up in the background, kind of, and listen to things. So that's kind of funny.
Speaker 1:I live in two worlds as you can imagine. The WordPress world, open source, open publishing, website creation, and I live in the podcasting world, open RSS feeds, open audio publishing, and then there are sites like Spotify, YouTube, which sort of buck the trend. It's almost like the wordpress.com to the wordpress.org. Right? It's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:With podcasting, I can create an RSS feed. I can put it up in any host or my WordPress website, and people just need to know what my RSS link is, and they can listen to my audio. But then there's a whole new which is weird to say, in the podcasting world, there's a lot of conversation happening right now about is a podcast video? Is it audio? Does it have to be powered by RSS?
Speaker 1:I didn't invite you on to talk about that stuff today, but I'd love to know what your opinion is. Do you does it have to be RSS? It Does have to be audio? Probably not, since you listen on YouTube.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of YouTube things that I listen to that don't have video. Like, they're just the audio. So I I don't think it necessarily has to be. I think some people just prefer that as the place to go. And me, I'm not I don't I'm not person that listens on my phone to podcasts.
Speaker 2:I just don't ever do that. So for me, it's always when I'm at my desk working on something else that that's when I listen. So for me, YouTube is handy.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And it's sometimes easier almost to find things just like people that I'm following other than going through my podcast and Apple Music and finding all the I don't know. YouTube is just handy for me. Maybe it's just a personal preference too.
Speaker 1:Brian, we're here to talk about WordPress. I wanna talk, as I was saying before we hit record, I, you know, I was doing a lot of writing with AI lately. I'm still on the fence, and I'd love to get your opinion on it. Still on the fence of whether or not this is really useful. Does it work 10% of the time?
Speaker 1:Does it work a 100% of the time? And I was thinking to myself, boy, if there's one person out there that I know is a pro prolific content creator, or at least was back in the day, and maybe now you're spending more time with plug in stuff. But I was saying, wow. I think Brian would have a great opinion on AI and content creation and or marketing. So when I say AI and content marketing and and blog creation, what's what's your first thoughts that come to come to mind?
Speaker 2:I mean, my very first thoughts, and I'm using AI a lot. I mean, I use it actually a few minutes before we got on this call for something. And my approach right now is just hybrid approach. Is I'm using it just for things that can speed up my workflow. However, having been a content creator for so long, I'm also very hesitant to just, you know, go out there, start a brand new site, just whip out, you know, 20 articles just using like Google Bart or chat GBT or something.
Speaker 2:Now I'm sure there's people doing that right now as we speak and testing and seeing what happens. I would just be I've been through so many bad, like, Google updates and things like that that, you know, it's it's very risky, think, to still do that because you also don't know how much Google is going to detect is that AI written content. And I don't I don't think a lot of people know a 100%. You can't say yes or no. You know, will Google know this is written by me or So I'm using like a hybrid approach.
Speaker 2:And I guess a good example is I just sold one of my niche sites. Like last week, actually, we just find closed on the sale. And it's something since I'm busy with plug ins, it's just something I've it's slowly been dying. It's better to get rid of it than, you know, not touch it for the next two years. But it was like in the gluten free space and had gluten free menus and stuff on it.
Speaker 2:And for SEO, one way to increase the menus on there was I put like history of the restaurant at the bottom of the menu. Just as the history of Red Robin or something. Three, four hundred words. Now before I would go actually write that myself and I started using just AI to write that little blurb. Since it wasn't the main content, it was more just like filler and ad.
Speaker 2:I started using AI for that stuff. So I think that's a good way if I was doing stuff to kinda use it as like a hybrid approach. Use it for some things, but not the entire article. Now I I I think you could probably do our our entire articles just fine as long as you're adding maybe some personal touches on. I just I haven't done that myself and I would be hesitant to do that yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's tempting, right? You literally just tell it, Here's what I want. And it produces it for you. And of course, I recently had this sort of same conversation with Kim Coleman on the podcast because she was chatting in a WordPress Slack that we're in and talking about how she's worked with the prompts to, you know, just further enhance the experience and get better better results, right, from from the prompts.
Speaker 1:And that really started getting my gears turning, just seeing how she, like, set up her prompts and stuff. And I was like, okay. Looks like I was like everybody else. I came in. I played around with it.
Speaker 1:I said, write me a blog post about the history of WordPress, and it was super generic or missed a ton of stuff, but it's all I did was say, write the history of WordPress. How is it supposed to know exactly what I want? Because if you said the same thing to a human if I walked up to somebody who was, like, a writer, somebody who was skilled in in writing, and I said, hey, just write me the history of of WordPress, they would ask me probably a 100 questions on on, okay, like, where do I start? Where do you want me to go? Who's the audience?
Speaker 1:And that's what you have to I mean, at least in my opinion, that's what you have to kinda you have to do it with with your AI chatbot of choice. Fair statement, you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I agree. I agree. Yeah.
Speaker 2:When I first when I first, I think, used ChatGPT, I I will be completely honest. My mind was blown. Now, in two ways, as a content creator, was like, holy shit. This is gonna change everything. And I was like, holy shit.
Speaker 2:This is gonna change everything. Because Exactly. It's wow. I could I mean, you know, those days writing that Kinsta, you know, those, you know, 4,000 word articles, like, I'd pour my heart and soul into those in the evenings. And now literally someone can just do that in ten seconds.
Speaker 2:I mean, now, obviously, the quality is not there yet, but you can see where this is going and things will only get, you know, better and there'll be more ways to tweak it based on personality and tone. And so you can just see where it's going. It's very, scary and cool at the same time. I think the stuff happening with the art, think is the same way with like mid journey. I don't know if you've seen that stuff with the art.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can just create almost any piece of artwork now and it looks amazing. If I was an artist, I would also have the same feeling. It's like, wow. This is this is scary and cool at the same time.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah. I I think the best way to use it right now is like hybrid. There'll sometimes I'll say I use Google bard a lot actually because I can I can make it a Chrome web app and actually have it in my Mac dock at the bottom? So it's really nice and handy. But I'll say us re rewrite this paragraph for me if I didn't like how I personally wrote it.
Speaker 2:And then we'll shoot me back a couple responses. Sometimes I like the one they wrote better than what I wrote. So I think for like writer's block, sometimes it's great. You can just here. I'm tired.
Speaker 2:It's 1AM. Give me some other alternatives. Boom. I like that one better. Or for writing blog titles.
Speaker 2:I know a lot of people like sometimes, you know, like struggle with. So like you can just dump all your content in there and say, give me a couple of good titles for this content And it'll spit it out for you. So I think just that way, it's just using little tricks like that to make your life a little easier is what I'm really doing it for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I recently wrote a post about sort of like this this prediction, this hypothetical. If Apple's journal app, which is has come on to iOS 17, anybody who's up updated to iOS 17, I started to think to myself, boy, wouldn't that be interesting if the journal app turned into Apple's play at social media. Right? Now stick with me.
Speaker 1:I'm pontificating about the idea of you've got this app, you're literally, you know, creating a blog post, a journal post if you will, and you're uploading your photos. It's, you know, doing things like, hey, we saw that you worked out today, so you went for a run. Maybe you stopped and took photos somewhere halfway or whatever, and it could just start to analyze in a single post through your photos, through your activity, from your location that, hey, I was out at a brewery. I had some I had a couple beers, and here's some pictures, and here's the food we ate. It could analyze all that, craft a blog post for you in a second, and then you could just hit publish.
Speaker 1:Right? And I was like, wow. Apple could make a play at that hypothetically. And I used I'm a fan of Claude AI, and we'll talk about your
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Chatbot of choice in a moment. But I used it just to give me some ideas of what other markets has Apple disrupted. Right? What other small software markets has Apple disrupted? You know, give me some examples.
Speaker 1:You know, so because same thing. It was like eleven at night. I'm like, I can't think of this stuff right now. Right? I don't wanna search for it.
Speaker 1:Just recommend some other things, and then highlight like where any information that Apple has for search ad placement, talk about like the app marketplace and stuff like that. So I used it for bouncing ideas off of and helping me get unstuck on some other other thoughts. So, yeah, I agree with you. It's a fair way, you know, to use it. Like and I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1:I ran like I said, write me a blog post of WordPress versus, you know, Apple's blogging platform, if Apple ever made a blogging platform. But it was just super generic. Right? It didn't know, like, the nuances of, you know, WordPress and how somebody experiences writing a blog post, and, you know, it was very generic, a very generic response up until that point. So then I just used all that information and just wrote it up wrote it up myself.
Speaker 1:But, Cloud AI is what I'd like to lean towards. What about you? Yeah. I'm You said barred before. Right?
Speaker 2:Barred the most, to be honest. And I just really I've The moment I could pin it as a Chrome web app on there, and then they keep making updates and I really like it that it's got the dark mode and I everything in this yeah. I just Google use you is good with their UI so I think that may be one reason too. And it keeps your history in there now too which is nice. Like the last thing I did was I had it right.
Speaker 2:I I can write PHP, but I'm not my brother is the developer, main developer on the plugin. So like I can write PHP, but I'm super slow. So, usually he's the doing that, but I needed to write something quick. I didn't wanna bother him. And just to confirm, like, threw it into Bard and it actually auto corrected what I had wrong, threw it back at me.
Speaker 2:So stuff like that is just, I mean, awesome in my opinion. And the other thing, I'm just looking at my history here of what I've typed in there recently. And last week was my niece's baby dedication. So they're doing this thing at church and they were looking for a song. And so we I asked with my brother, we asked Google Bar, give me the a list of the names of songs with her name in it.
Speaker 2:And it just, you know, shoot out a whole bunch of lists with and direct links to Spotify. So it was like, well, this is awesome. So just random things like that. You can almost use it for anything these days, which is really cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the plug in business. You just hinted at that, and I know this from our previous conversation, but to catch the listeners up to speed, I know your brother's the developer. You said you use PHP in a little snippet into Google Bard, but does your brother use, I think it's like GitHub Copilot or stuff like that, to help develop, or is he still just doing it the human way?
Speaker 2:I've showed him, you know, Bard, he's, wow, that's cool, and then he never uses it. So I don't think there's a lot of the like hardcore developers that are like using it. I think it's more, I don't know what you would call them, like tinker developers, someone that like me that like, I could write things if I really sat down and focused, but I'm not very fast at it. So that's where AI for me actually comes in super handy because it can kind of correct things or give me ideas of here's what I should do. But for really hardcore developers, I'm I'm not sure how much they're using it.
Speaker 2:Now I could be wrong. I'm just using my brother as personal a example. I know he's not going into AI. He's done it enough that he's literally, for him, just like, how much can I get done in a day? And AI and our workflow just wouldn't help him at the moment.
Speaker 1:I had another crazy hypothetical. If if, let's say, ChatGPT could just like you do, let's say, uploading WordPress to your web host, right? And then you go through the famous or it was once a famous five minute install of WordPress where, you know, you uploaded the package, you went to the domain, you saw the install screen, and you went through and set up WordPress. If ChatGPT could do the same thing, where a user could just say, I want a website that is a directory of all my local businesses, and you could search by how much parking spots each business had and by the type of service that they offered. And ChatGPT could just build it and host it for you.
Speaker 1:I would say that that would be pretty scary by what kind of code it would output, but I would also say that the person kind of using that type of solution would be like, I don't care. Don't I care what the code is. Like, I've just built myself this app in a second using code that I'll never touch, and it just runs on some cloud instance somewhere. That's another thing where I think, man, if once ChatGPT or these platforms get to that level where you can actually deploy concepts into live apps or code, which might even exist already, I don't even know, but I I can just imagine that being quite a powerful tool, at least for concepts and maybe even production type apps for for the common user.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I think that's No point No
Speaker 1:question there. Just a soapbox moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. No. I I can definitely see that coming, and I think there's I think, like, Elementor's already playing with stuff like that, but I think it's, you know, kind of like pulling from an existing template thing. Say, I wanna do a car park.
Speaker 2:And so pull from something they already have. It wouldn't be like deploying, you know, all the code based on, like you said, like, customizing parking spaces. That would be really cool. But I think that is definitely coming at some point. And the scary thing is what you said is, will people care?
Speaker 2:I and like you said, I don't think they will. If it works, it works. And that's all they will care about. So as as far as the future of WordPress goes, it's kind of that's a little scary too. You know you know, for us, our plugins are focused on performance because a lot of website users are trying to speed up their sites for Google.
Speaker 2:Now if, say, they just launched it with ChatGPT or whatever cloud service it was, it's not in WordPress. You know, that's that's not in the WordPress ecosystem at that point. So it's it really is up in the air. Like, how is this gonna impact WordPress and the whole ecosystem? I liked I listened to a snippet from you the other day.
Speaker 2:Actually, I think it was it said, is WordPress going to thrive or survive, which I really liked? I know that was a more like a controversial topic, I think. But but it's kind of the same thing. Like, I think five, ten years from now, the whole Internet's gonna be a lot different than it is right now, especially just due to AI stuff. So and I don't know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 2:That's the scary part.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Speaking of of the controversial topic, Matt Mullenwicke had also recently said that we all should, just like he said, learn JavaScript deeply, we should learn AI deeply. Have any thoughts on, like, maybe what he's thinking of in terms of AI and WordPress before I hopped on with you? And two or three weeks ago when I was at WordCamp US, I saw the demonstration of Jetpack's AI feature function inside of Jetpack, which, know, is like what everyone else is doing. Let me help you write.
Speaker 1:Let me help you ideate. Let me help you refine this, you know, this piece of content. It's cool. It's fun, but it's like what every other writing service is doing largely for WordPress. Any thoughts on what Matt might be thinking in terms of AI and WordPress longevity?
Speaker 2:I mean, I do agree with his theory about learning JavaScript and stuff like that because I think, you know, there's a reason, like, my brother's not using AI at the moment. It's because you know how WordPress goes. It's so niche in the weeds that AI just has like with our social media plugin, there's just so many niche cases that it has no clue what's happening with our stuff. And we're a ways out to AI even knows where we're at with that stuff. And so when it comes to that, like it's, it takes a person still coding it.
Speaker 2:And so I think like learning JavaScript, if I was starting brand new, working on WordPress, I would learn JavaScript and react first because of the block editor stuff and, and PHP maybe after that, just because the block editor is where everything is headed, whether some people like it or not. And I do use weird
Speaker 1:statement to say these days, because it's man, it's been years.
Speaker 2:So no, no, I know. I know. I, I
Speaker 1:it too. Keep
Speaker 2:saying this and cause there's, I mean, I think the classic editor plugin still has, I think four plus million installs. I mean, there's a lot of people not trying not to move on. So, and it can be frustrating at sometimes because like for us, have to support like the old classic editor for like short codes and a whole bunch of stuff. Wish people would just say, Hey, this isn't going away. It's like cryptocurrency.
Speaker 2:Won't go down that tangent, but it's not going away. You need to learn how to live with it and adapt to it because it's not going anywhere. So I got off a little tangent there, but, yeah. So learning code still important. Think, I think learning AI also equally important.
Speaker 2:I mean, for me personally, I'm just integrating it into my little hybrid things that I've been mentioning. That's how I'm learning it. Just what can it do? Oh, cool. Here's a new feature they launched.
Speaker 2:I'll play with it. That's how I'm personally learning how to use it. And maybe I'll use it for, you know, 80% of my workload five years from now. I don't know. But I think if you don't play with the Ag tools, you're definitely gonna be at a disadvantage.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you a tough question. Talking about we'll kind of shift a little bit, talk about your business and your plug ins. Let me ask you a bit of a hardball question. It's the year 2023. You got three months left ish of of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1:Are web hosts still that bad where they can't make WordPress websites fast enough, where people need to buy your product, or are you doing things that web hosts will just never explore and never get into because each use case of a work of WordPress websites that you serve are going to be so different. In other words, what sets apart your plugin perf matters compared to what a web host gives you?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Have a couple thoughts on this because it's something I've been thinking a lot with, especially with AI and like just seeing like how rapidly everything is changing is one, I don't think hosts will ever try to do what we're doing because it is a headache and a pain. And as I'm sure you know, WordPress is just a mess to be honest. For the people that are in the in the weeds every day, like grinding, like they know how messy WordPress is. That's I think that's one reason we love it and hate it at the same time.
Speaker 2:Like, some days I'm like, man, I wish I was just on Shopify where this would just work all the time. And then other days, you're like, well, I'm glad I have a thousand different options. That's why I'm using WordPress. So, you know, it's it's that type of stuff. But yeah, that's one reason hosts are never going to go down.
Speaker 2:I don't think in that rabbit hole is just, there's too many nitty gritty things happening with performance that they could never get a handle on all of it. I mean, they can barely some hosts can barely handle just power keeping the servers up. So Keeping the lights
Speaker 1:on. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Keeping doing all the front end optimizations is just it's two separate things. There's server optimizations. I'd kinda put servers and CDNs kind of in the same boat, like Cloudflare and server and hosts are kind of overlapping a little bit now. But and then front end optimization is definitely, like, kind of its own beast.
Speaker 2:Some hosts I know have tried, but, you know, they just do something that works universally across every site that's safe. Whereas for our stuff, we're we're going in in in the nitty gritty stuff that's, you know, there's a 100 users maybe having problem. So we're just assuming that, okay, there's probably more that have this problem. We're gonna try to solve this use case and go from there. Whereas a host, they would never look at it like that.
Speaker 2:They're gonna be like, this is something that literally every single customer can use across the board. There's no problems with it. We'll deploy it. So it's Right. It's very different, I think, for a plug in.
Speaker 1:On the NovaShare side, how has the stuff with Twitter versus x.com, APIs, shutting off APIs. I I see these stories from, you know, social sharing companies or platforms, and these are probably because they're more of, like, a platform player or SaaS play than what you do, but has any of this disrupted what you're doing with NovaShare, and and how do you keep up with the different platforms? Threads, for instance.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Threads. I'm on threads, but I don't post very much.
Speaker 1:You're like, I gotta make a threads icon now in the app, in the plug in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We actually are working on that. Yes. But we just launched an overshare update last night with the rebranding for x. So it no longer has the Twitter logo in our plugin.
Speaker 2:We have all the x stuff now. A click to post Xbox. What we call it? The word x is just weird, to be honest. But Elon is weird as well.
Speaker 2:So but thankfully, Twitter actually shut off its, like, sharing API actually years ago, seven years ago. So as far as like grabbing share counts, that was just gone. That's been gone for a long time. There's a few third party, like open source scrapers that try to grab them and that's kind of what we use. And those are probably even working worse now after all these changes.
Speaker 2:But for us, it's really just been the branding for for x that we've had to update. But, like, we had to wait on I don't know how how close you followed the x stuff, but it's just been chaotic since Elon has taken over. I I think he's on the right path, to be honest. I love x. I'm gonna keep saying X even though I, like, prefer to say Twitter, but it's the network I've loved since the day I started using it.
Speaker 2:Like over Facebook, LinkedIn. I just have a lot of WordPress friends on X, and it's where I connect with the most folks. So it's I I think it will continue to grow and also seeing threads pick up super fast and then just kinda die really fast, at least according to the numbers. I think it's gonna be really hard for someone else to compete just with where x is already at. But as far as our plug ins because you
Speaker 1:know why? Because a lot of people I I I think just to step in, I think one of the things that same thing. Totally agree with you. Twitter slash x favorite social media app. Because it was it was largely text based, limited text based.
Speaker 1:Right? At the time, like, when it started, a 140 characters or, even less, I think, in the beginning, but a 140 characters max, mostly text, and that allowed you to for me anyway, like, I can see seven, eight posts at a time, like, as I scroll. It's not like LinkedIn where one post is a carousel and a whole Word document, and one person's post takes up my entire screen or Instagram where it's obviously, it's visual and it's photos, but it's just you're constantly scrolling to get with Twitter, I can get I can consume more information faster because of the nature of the product. That's why that's why I've always been a fan of it. And, course, you're you're having it's one big room with a with conversations happening, and you can dart in and out of them or consume these conversations in and out instead of, like, this I don't know.
Speaker 1:If you like this one to one situation, which might be like a a Facebook and and a LinkedIn, which is why I've always loved and I still love it, and I hope it doesn't just crash and burn, though it does look like it's heading in that direction. I I have no idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'll be honest. The thread UI was actually pretty polished from the get go. I give I'll give them that because I think they learned from the Instagram stuff, you know, how do a good UI and stuff. So I will give them that, like the UI, really good.
Speaker 2:The I mean, web version's already up and working, although it's a little more limited, but I'm
Speaker 1:just I didn't even know the web version was up. I didn't even know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It works. I post from there now. I mean, I'm just kind of watching and seeing what happens. I'm not really like aggressively trying to grow up following on that or anything like that.
Speaker 2:Just seeing what happens and go from there. I it it still seems like threads is very more focused on photos at the moment in my opinion rather than like you said, the reason I like x is because I like just seeing lots of messages, just text, but I hope X doesn't go away from that too much either. I mean, they're adding longer messages, more media. So I mean, might that might change too over time.
Speaker 1:I'm just looking at the NovaShare features page, novashare.i0/features. I see all the social media accounts that you connect up with. Nothing here for Mastodon, but probably because it's impossible to pick a Mastodon sharing server because everyone can spin up their own?
Speaker 2:We are actually adding that in the next update. Mastodon has told me we've had some requests for that. I think it's because people are now, like, searching for alternatives with all the X chaos. And so, yeah, that'll be in the next update. But what it does is, when you click share, it actually, like, prompts you for what instance you want to go to.
Speaker 2:Because that's a little like the one annoying thing kind of with with master that's the one thing I've never really liked. However, people argue saying that it's that's the cool thing is because you can take your followers to any place. But Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Humans are never gonna be happy. Let's it's either pick a social network and then get thrown into one big algorithm and then complain that that person who runs the algorithm algorithm is a trillionaire, right, on any platform that you go to, or too many ads, but then it's, here's an open source alternative, but it has to be stitched together. Well, God, I don't want that either. Well, yeah, listen, You can't have both.
Speaker 1:Right? Can't have this ease of use, wonderful experience, and then complain that there's an algorithm ads and rich people that run it. And then you can't have this open source version, which, you know, you're gonna have to do some work. News flash, you're gonna have to do a little bit of work to figure this out, but it's gonna connect us all freely independently of algorithm. But don't complain about having to do the work.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, that's you can't have both. Right? You know?
Speaker 2:It's like WordPress. Definitely keep yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But, yeah, we have to definitely keep up with all the social network changes.
Speaker 2:And a lot of times, we don't actually have to use the the API. A lot of times, we're actually, like, for, like, share two x. Like, most of these places have a, like, an API URL format that you use to post something to the network. So we're not actually, like, signing up for an API, having requests to deal with because, you know, with x, I know there's 's, you know, like the huge price increases for their API stuff. Didn't have to worry about, like, any of that nightmare for us.
Speaker 1:Awesome stuff. NovaShare, PerfMatters. Any other products in the works?
Speaker 2:Nope. Those two definitely keep us plenty busy at the moment.
Speaker 1:Plenty busy. So Cool. Just still you and your brother, you're answering support tickets, marketing, all that fun stuff?
Speaker 2:Yep. Just the two of us still. I can't say if it will always be that way because we are very busy. But after going through the whole Kinsta thing, you know, going from, I joined them when they're six, seven or something. Then, yeah.
Speaker 2:And then now they have, I think they just hit 300 employees too. I don't know something. It's a, it's a large amount now, but like having gone through the scaling, like HR department, team building, all that stuff. Like I want retreat. Run Much prefer just my brother and I, to be honest.
Speaker 2:It's very easy. Like one Slack channel. We use FaceTime for calls. We make it super easy. That's what I like right now.
Speaker 2:And I don't think we really want to change it if we don't have to. So that's one reason, like we don't do like lifetime deals, you know, it's a huge, I hate this thing in the WordPress space. Like people think they need to do lifetime deals to scale their business. We actually don't do it partially because we don't want to grow too fast. We don't want a thousand customers tomorrow, which sounds weird, but we like slow and steady growth.
Speaker 2:That's how we we would prefer that.
Speaker 1:So Same thing. Matt Mullenweg said the same thing sort of tongue in cheek on during his WordCamp US twenty twenty three presentation of the future of WordPress, said he's not a fan of lifetime deals either, and that that company should do away with them. Do you get involved with, like, the Black Friday and holiday pricing?
Speaker 2:We do one sale per year, and it is the Black Friday one.
Speaker 1:Yes. Seems to be where every WordPress product company jumps on.
Speaker 2:It is. Yeah. We don't bother with any mid year sales or anything. We just do the one sale per year. And we've been doing that consistently ever since we started.
Speaker 2:So it's nice for lots of people know that, oh, yeah. Like, they don't do sales ever any other time. So it's if this is the one time you wanna grab a deal, this is the time to do it. But, yeah, the lifetime deal thing, I know people go back and forth, but I think it creates a bad stigma in the space as far as, you know, developers have to support their families. They have, you know, they have bills to pay just like everybody else.
Speaker 2:This whole thing of paying one time and never supporting them going forward. I've never thought that was cool. I don't have a problem paying products I use to help support them if they continually make the product better. I don't have any problem with that. I know nobody likes more subscriptions.
Speaker 2:You know, you have Netflix, Hulu, all these things now that you can't keep up with, but it's the same with plugins. Like you have developers, teams behind the scenes that like they have families, bills, mortgages, they all have to pay. So, I mean, the lifetime deal is just kind of like a gimmick in my opinion to get a bunch of money. And then in my opinion, you can have a problem where then the developer stops doing work. That's a enticement for them to be lazy.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right. So I I just creates bad thing all around in my opinion. So we've always stayed away from that. I mean, same at Kinsta too. We never did like this this huge sale thing ever at Kinsta.
Speaker 2:We thought it just if you have a good product, like, why do you need to constantly push sales? Like, it doesn't it doesn't make sense. Yeah.
Speaker 1:WP Minute happily sponsored hosting by Kinsta. Thank you, Kinsta, for sponsoring the hosting of the WP Minute. Last question. Have you seen the did you see I I don't know any other details. I think they've only hinted at it, but did you see the Basecamp thirty seven signal guys saying that they're gonna release a one time purchase product?
Speaker 1:Did you see them hint
Speaker 2:at Oh, really? I didn't see that. Is is this on Basecamp or one of their other because I know they have the email Hey thing now, or
Speaker 1:Yeah. They have Hey dot com. I think it was just hinted at a couple weeks ago, or a week ago, that it was like, Watch this space, we're gonna be launching something. Just trying to find it really quick while we're chatting.
Speaker 2:As a business owner or VC investor, like, I can totally see, like, the reason to do lifetime deals. Like, money wise, there's definitely a reason to do it. But yeah. I don't know. There's a lot of ramifications too.
Speaker 2:But I'm surprised that they would do that just based on I think they've ever done that in the past with their other products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't see anything on basecamp.com, but they did hint at it on Twitter. So they'll probably be oh, here it is. It's called once.once.com. And you can see the little love letter that they've published there.
Speaker 1:So once.com, I guess watch that space. Says pay one time, own forever. We write the code. You get to see it. We give you the software.
Speaker 1:You get to host it. Simple and straightforward, not enterprise y and bloated for one fixed price once. We'll be launching the first product late twenty twenty three with more coming in 2024. So there it is. Hunts.com.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's just should fun. It'll be
Speaker 1:it'll be interesting. You'll you'll you'll check that whole conversation on your on on its head and you'll be you'll be doing one time pricing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. I'm not opposed to if someone has a lifetime deal, go out there and grab it. I grab them. Yeah. If someone has them, I grab them too.
Speaker 2:I guess, I mean, if you're gonna save money, save money. But as far as if you're choosing whether or not to launch one for your own business, like I would be very careful and think it through, you know, you can crunch the numbers and make it work, but think about the other things that are going to be impacted by that as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Represent.
Speaker 2:And it's hard to take that back too. Once you've done it, I've seen WordPress companies take away their lifetime deal on man. That is not good press. Good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, that was version two. This is version three now. And with version three, three, we have to go subscriptions. You're like, I said lifetime for version two, and you're like, no, you didn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That means someone didn't crunch the numbers correctly. Right. The first time probably. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's, yeah.
Speaker 1:100%. Brian Jackson, NovaShare. Io, perfmatters.io. Thanks for hanging out today. Where else can folks find you to say thanks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, just on, on X at, at Brian Lee Jackson. I am on LinkedIn and Facebook and the new threads too. I'm also on blue sky. That's another network that's kind of promising. I'm curious to see how that goes.
Speaker 2:And that's, that's about it.
Speaker 1:You gotta be everywhere when you have a social sharing plugin, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You do at least have to keep up with what the changes are and see what's happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Changes and icons. Alright, everybody. Thanks for listening. It's the WP Minute Plus.
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