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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from Matt's interview with Kevin McGillivray, Pressable's Chief Marketing Officer. Kevin stopped by to fill us in on his role at the hosting company and what the brand has in store for 2026. Now, you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Be sure to visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Matt Medeiros (00:30)
And you're in an interesting position, not to put you on the hot seat already, but you're in an interesting position because Pressable is part of Automatic, right? it's it's well, I mean, I would say that Automatic probably wants the very most basic entry level user probably to go to WordPress.com. And then they probably want like that real high touch, real high enterprise, probably to go to VIP.
Kevin MacGillivray (00:33)
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (00:55)
And then everything else pressable is my how I bucket that. Like, so you're you're you're kind of like as the marketing person kind of competing, well, I can't talk to like the mom, maybe not the real mom and pop. Like maybe that's a dot com thing. And maybe I have to go VIP. How do you balance that? Or maybe there's a directive to say, hey, Kevin, if you ever start to do more like enterprise content and messaging, mention pressable, but also say we've got VIP. Does it boil down to something like that?
Kevin MacGillivray (00:57)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Honestly, sort of like this was actually as a marketer. This is a really fun problem to solve and my background is in product marketing, which is all about connecting the right product with the right user at its fundamentals. So to answer your question directly, yeah, we have there's wordpress.com there's pressable and there's wordpress VIP to borrow a phrase from earlier in my career. Pressable sits in the big middle, which is we can stretch all the way down and have a great experience for an entry level user and all the way up to kind of the threshold of a VIP
experience and there are some black and white
use cases on the other side where like this user definitely should be on dot com. This user should definitely be on VIP. Sometimes that's feature driven. Sometimes that's cost or resource driven. Sometimes it's just capacity driven. But there is a lot of gray in those areas. And what I spend some time doing is working with my counterparts in those different parts of the business to make sure we're always focused on the number one thing, which is making sure the customer and user ends up in the place that is best for them and that they get what they
need. And then we often kind of figure out the different use cases of like, well, if you kind of have this type of customer, let's, let's veer them over this way or, or, or suggest a path that looks like this and vice versa. So it's a combination of black and white and gray.
Matt Medeiros (02:40)
Yeah, yeah. Is it this probably start? No, this definitely started before you joined. So let's try to get some breaking news here. Is is that whole like help the host be the host? I forget the nomenclature that Matt rolled out, but is that still a thing that's still happening?
Kevin MacGillivray (02:54)
Yeah.
I think to take the actual nomenclature you described out of it for a second, I think of that piece a little bit of a different way. And I used a Lego analogy earlier, and this is sort of part of the discussion that we're working through and having ⁓ internally is what is the difference using my Lego analogy ⁓ for continuity between.
giving someone a Lego set that is already built, giving them a Lego set with an instruction manual and the pieces to go build, and then just a barrel of Lego to do it themselves. And we're figuring out how opinionated we want to be in buckets one and two. like, how do we, like, do we talk about like, this thing is packaged up exactly like this, if this is you. And that kind of actually looks like a little bit more Shopify-y of like, you know, deliberately packaging something, not saying that we would build it exactly like that.
Matt Medeiros (03:44)
Mm.
Kevin MacGillivray (03:48)
but that's kind of one path. And then the middle one is like, here is a suggested route where people find success and there's some variability, but here's the pieces to go and build if this looks like you. And I think, yeah, we're looking at how to address those three different types of users.