Kurt: Hey, welcome listeners and viewers.
My name is Kurt v Onan.
I'm here with Toby Kres, and you are at another episode of Who's
WordPress Agency Is this Anyway, and Toby, welcome to the call.
Thank you, Kurt.
Toby: We got a story for you.
Kurt: I'm all up for
Toby: stories.
I went to a no code meetup in Minneapolis.
Kurt: I, I, I was gonna ask you why I saw the notes and I
was like, I should ask him why.
I said, I'll just wait till the show.
what possessed you to go to a no code meetup in Minneapolis?
Toby: Well, turns out there's this thing called AI and a lot of
people are talking about it and no code is like the extreme of ai.
It's like people who have no business coding are coding.
And so I was like, I don't really understand it, but
I'm gonna go check it out.
And I've dabbled in it, but like.
It was really something, Kurt.
'cause there were about 15 people there, and almost all
of them have real businesses.
Some of them had, one guy had like 10 employees.
He has no idea how the code is written.
Like he has 10 employees.
None of them know what the code is.
And I'm just like, and and he, he was upfront in the media, he's like.
If something happens, I have no way to get this back.
Like, there's no backups.
Like, like he doesn't know what he's doing.
He's got 10 employees and customers paying him.
I was just like, this is
Kurt: awesome.
How many times have you seen this in your agency Walk of life though, where
you're, you're doing the work, you're putting in the homework, you're, you
know, you are pushing the wheelbarrow man.
You are doing what it takes to grow your agency.
A way that you think is, you know, equitable and
ethical and all those things.
And then you run into people that are growing businesses with customers and
revenue, and you're, and they're like, well, my MRR is, and they're talking
all this, you know, entrepreneur speak.
And they outwardly appear to be doing very well and have no clue what they're doing.
na: Yeah.
Kurt: Yeah.
It's freakish.
It's absolutely freakish and it happens a lot.
Toby: Yeah.
And you know, maybe the analogy, I don't think it's a one-to-one analogy, but like
we probably both know people who have started WordPress agencies who have no
idea how to design, no idea what good design, bad design, good code, bad.
They don't code maybe like.
But they, they're, I know a guy in town who probably hasn't learned
how to design or code, but he's still running a pretty big agency.
Kurt: I told people for the longest time, and I used to even say it on the other
show that I'm on with Jonathan Denwood.
I would say I'm more of an implementer, not a designer, but I added designers
to my team to make up for my deficiency.
And what I didn't realize that I was doing when I said that was I was automatically
giving myself the backseat and telling people I didn't know what the heck
I was doing, when in reality I did.
I just don't prefer to be the one trying to invent.
Design, you know what I mean?
Like, like if someone shows me a website and it's got a really bad
representation for white space or glaring color, that should not be on a page.
Or, we talked about accessibility last week, right?
So, so maybe I'll see something of, oh, well that's not accessible, that's
a, there's not enough, variance in the color from the background to the text.
And so when I have those conversations, I realize, oh, I am, I am a designer.
I just.
Choose not to soak up my time in that space.
That is completely different than, I don't know what the heck I'm doing
at all, but I run the company and I try to make a gazillion dollars at
this thing because sooner or later I.
The cat's out of the bag.
You know, people recognize you don't know what you're doing and
they've given you their money.
So now, you know, and especially in the world of Stripe, I don't know
if you've ever had anyone say, I want my money back with Stripe, or
one of these tools that we Sure.
Mm-hmm.
There's not a, there's not a whole lot of, Flexibility in the argument.
Right, right, right.
Like you wake up one day and the money's gone and you go, Hey, Mr.
Stripe, what happened to my money?
And then, well, the customer said they weren't happy.
Well, well, let me show you why they should be happy.
You know?
And then you gotta spend eight hours.
Yeah.
Documenting every conversation you ever had with the customer to justify
that you are correct in hopes of getting some of your money back.
so I'm really curious as to where these people are gonna go that don't
know what the heck they're doing.
Well, I think,
Toby: like, to me it's, it's a different mindset to be like, I.
they have no, for me, like I always have feel a lot of
accountability for what I produce.
Mm-hmm.
Like, and part of it's probably the WordPress ethos, like, like, we're
backwards compatible, like, you know, we're, you're gonna have a community
supporting you, whether it's me or.
Someone else.
these people don't have any sense of that.
They're just like, I'm out there for the money.
And, and frankly, some of 'em were nonprofits, that, that were doing real
work in the community and had investors and you know, like had people and you
go like, and they're doing great work, great things, you know, like you go like.
I don't know.
It was foreign to me because they took no responsibility.
Like, like future facing responsibility?
Kurt: No, no.
Like, like their lifetime deal isn't for the lifetime of the client.
Their lifetime deal is like for as long as I feel like doing this.
Yeah.
Toby: Yeah.
And I thought I, you know, like, I wonder too, like that comment
actually like sparked something in me where I'm like, we've seen a lot of
lifetime deals since you and I have been in WordPress lifetime deals just.
Disappear from the, you know, you bought it and now it's gone.
Now you're paying monthly all of a sudden.
Yeah.
Poof.
And so it's not, I don't wanna like say it's like something weird that's
happening that hasn't, you know, but I don't know if it's ethics.
What is it that I'm, you know, like
Kurt: I, this is so akin to you and I are like in the same
space, but different ballparks.
Right.
I was reading A-T-L-D-R.
You know, email link this morning, and it was about somebody in the SaaS space
that considers themselves a developer.
So they consider themselves a developer.
Boom.
And they realized they needed to rework their entire platform and they've been
getting real interested in AI and things.
So they jumped into, you know, Claude and Cursor and all these things and,
and they started rebuilding this project on a different platform.
So they were, they were.
They had a project that would worked well, but was getting dated, and
they wanted to update that platform on something completely new.
They, they wanted to update that platform on something completely new.
My computer just glitched, so if I'm gone, you're
Toby: there.
Kurt: I'm here.
Good.
So, he starts rebuilding this thing, but using all ai and he puts in the
article, I was flying, everything was coming together, things were
working, you know, and then there was a little problem here and he went
to fix it and it, and it fixed it.
But then it, another problem over here and the, and then he starts
playing Whack-a-mole in this thing,
Toby: Uhhuh.
Kurt: And then by his own account, he says, I had to make the recogni, the
recognition that I am a developer.
I am a coder.
So I had to start looking at things that I had to greenlit,
you know, through this process.
And he said that's when the nightmare started.
He was like.
There were, there were folders inside certain packets that had like, not
the identical name, but a similar name, and they did the same functions.
He said that AI had built for him this thing, but he, he compared it
to like, maybe he's, maybe he's the, the lead coder on the project and
he's got eight to 10 junior coders underneath him, and he said it was like.
You locked all the coders in soundproof rooms by themselves
instead of like in a cubicle farm.
Mm-hmm.
Where they could talk to each other.
Yeah.
He said nothing related to the other thing.
And even though it forcibly performed a function, it didn't do it effectively.
And he had a lot of like, just like code burden, like there
was just junk everywhere.
And he said, so.
because I didn't just trash it, but I'm reworking it now from the perspective of
it's not about saving time, it's about doing it right and it's about having
a quality product and something that your customers will enjoy downstream.
Because if you have AI build all that stuff, and it's, this
is where I'm just in my head.
'cause we, we talked about this very slightly an episode or two
ago about AI and, and this thing with customers thinking, I'll
just have AI make me a plugin.
Who updates that, who, who comes along and says, let me fix that for you.
Or, 'cause people think it's easy.
Like now, you know, in the day of like, this is WordPress 6.8,
great, you're on WordPress 6.8,
you've made a plugin.
Boom.
WordPress 9.0
rolls out in 2027 and all of a sudden your website gives you a big
white screen, says critical error.
What are you gonna do?
Just turn off your custom cool plugin or try and hire a guy like me to fix it.
'cause I don't wanna fix it.
Toby: Right.
Well, yeah, and I think there's another piece that it's like, I.
Just some kind of like, like, cowboy mentality, if that makes sense.
Like, so there's a guy at that meetup that was claimed to have been doing
a million in recurring revenue on a platform he built with no code.
He has no idea what's server it's on.
But he is making a million bucks a month.
He says, you know, maybe he is, but like, I'm like.
Does this seem weird to anybody?
Like is, are any alarm bells going off?
Kurt: Well, I don't think there are alarm bells going off in some of these circles,
and that's, that's kind of where I get, I.
When AI was first rolling out the way that we think of it now, a
couple years ago, you know, when I was on different shows and stuff, I
wasn't like a say no to AI person.
I was like, be curious, like be a be AI curious.
Go figure things, things out.
Go use it.
Play with it.
You know, I recently signed up for a Magi account that combines it.
A ton of different AI tools together, and I get to pick and choose what I
wanna play with, and, but I'm using very specific words like I play with,
I learn about, I, I don't go like blindly into something and say, build
me something amazing and then put it up for sale for a hundred dollars a month.
Toby: Yeah, well along those lines.
So I got curious over the weekend.
I built an app.
I have, I have a WordPress plugin right now that is a music library of stuff.
I was like, I'm gonna port, I'm gonna try to rebuild this
as a headless WordPress thing.
and it, I'm like, seven hours in and it's partially functional.
Was not easy to get it to this point, and it made me think, I betcha I would
be much further along if I had just said.
Forget WordPress.
Just build me an app on whatever technology you want, add stripe to it.
you know, like partition it, multi-tenant, you know, blah, blah, blah.
I, who knows, maybe I would have a fully functioning app.
It was the tying back to WordPress that was slowing me down.
And by the way, AI was not very helpful with getting that connection going.
So I had a, a window open with chat.
GPT.
And then the window opened with Versel and, I'm, so, I would like go to chat pt.
I'm like, Versal said this.
What do you think's going on with my WordPress site?
And I asked, because Versal doesn't know WordPress.
I guess I was asking it stuff.
And it's like, no, I don't know WordPress.
Like,
Kurt: that is a
Toby: bummer.
Yeah.
anyway, that's where I'm at with no code.
it was fun.
maybe I'll, but yeah, the question would be like, should I just.
Build the app with Versal and then port my data, make an Im use Versal
to create an import function.
Kurt: Like, well, but that takes us to another kind of another one of
your big questions in our notes, and that is, you know, you would asked
about our live WordPress meetups dead.
Toby: Yeah.
Kurt: And then I start to think about.
Live WordPress meetups.
My last few live WordPress meetups, I run the one here in Hutchinson, Kansas.
So ours just started.
So, you know, I know you, you made a note about one just dying and
it's like, oh, I see 'em coming and going, coming and going.
But I started the one in Hutchinson just over a year ago, and the
last couple of meetups that we had very, very light on attendance.
but I'm thinking back to the people that came.
And so like six months ago, a girl from high school came and she's like, I'm
not really into this WordPress thing.
I like to code.
na: And
Kurt: I was like, you code what?
I don't know.
We just do coding.
Like, okay, you're out.
I can't talk to you.
and then my last couple of meetups have, I've had people on this topic of ai.
Oh, I just want the computer to do this.
I want the computer to do that.
I, how's WordPress gonna help me to do that with ai?
And I'm like, why is AI your linchpin?
Why?
Why do you think AI is the solution for you considering you don't
have an online business yet?
Like AI is not gonna run your food truck for you, right?
You're still gonna have to cook the sandwiches.
So I, I just.
The, the impression, the branding, the media is pushing AI in this weird way
that people outside the industry are coming in with these very strange notions
about what they're gonna accomplish.
na: Mm-hmm.
Kurt: And so is, is, what are your thoughts on the live WordPress meetups
and then based on the experience I've just had, do you think they're
gonna morph and change into more of these generalist conversations?
Or do you think we're gonna end up playing gatekeeper and telling people
that WordPress is WordPress and you should leave some stuff alone?
Toby: Yeah, I've been wondering that.
I think so.
When I went to this meetup for the No code, one thing stood out to me.
There's an energy in it that doesn't exist in the WordPress meetup.
Yeah.
In the sense like, this is new and interesting and let's see what craziness,
crazy things we can build today.
Why don't we do a meetup next week where we all build something
awesome and launch it, you know?
And.
That's the energy we had at WordPress meetups 15 years ago.
Yeah.
yeah,
Kurt: that's back when you said, Hey, let's build a, let's build
a website for a food truck.
Everybody went, that would be a right.
Yeah.
And now you're like, Hey, let's build a website for a food truck.
And they're like.
Yeah, there's lots of food trucks.
Toby: Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, and it's, it's like, like if someone was like, let's, let's say,
let's talk about Microsoft Windows.
It has that like, yeah, why would we talk about Microsoft Windows?
Everybody uses it.
Like, have you all seen Vista?
right.
So we do have a WordPress Wednesday meetup that's been going for 15 years
now, and that's, we meet up for coworking.
There's no agenda.
We go to lunch sometimes.
I.
But yeah, I don't, I've been wondering if like the WordPress
meetups are, are just kind of dead.
at least the local ones.
I did go to Word Camp last year and I spoke at it in We Minneapolis.
it's hard to say.
I, it's hard.
I'm kind of like, I don't, I was only there for a short while, so I didn't
get the full, just Do you go to any, word camps or other meetups or, I.
Kurt: I will tell you, the one in Phoenix is like off the chain.
Right?
But then you have to get back to, you gotta put your head
back in the space of reality.
Right?
GoDaddy lives there, right?
And they had all those people, they, I know they had their big layoffs and all
that stuff after the last one I went to.
So may maybe the energy and the vibe is gonna be different, but,
you know, GoDaddy's there, all those people come and, and show up.
What freaked me out about going to the, to the meetup in Phoenix was it was.
There was a ton of people that were like, oh, I just have a WordPress
website of my own and I wanted to see what this was about, you know?
And I was like, that is bizarre.
'cause I didn't think, I didn't think that's who was coming.
but I ran into a bunch of site owners that were not WordPress people.
They were, they were site owners.
and I just really felt the vibe in Phoenix was like tremendous.
na: Mm-hmm.
And
Kurt: then, you know, there's these, and that's not, I shouldn't
say that's a meetup, right?
That's a word camp.
The Phoenix Word Camp.
na: Mm-hmm.
Kurt: The meetups when I started doing them on the West coast.
'cause I, I moved to Kansas recently, but when I was in
California, they're in person.
They were not.
Exciting.
Even the one I went to that had five or six people show up, it wasn't exciting,
but then they had a virtual one, and so if they didn't do live, they would
do virtual and then the attendance would be three times as many people.
But then I start to recognize some names from some other
meetups that I went to virtually.
And so like there's, there's a guy that lives in Idaho that
is in the San Francisco meetup, the San Diego Meetup, the.
Inland Empire Meetup.
You know, he's, he's, he's obviously attending meetups every day.
but there's, there's a ton of people like that that go to a bunch of virtual.
WordPress meetups and it gives 'em this false energy, like it's that region,
but it's not, it's, it's like all these same 10 people that know each
other that jump on all these calls.
Hmm.
But what I really, really loved about that particular setup, that
was the Inland Empire one, run by, various, I think is his name.
And, the people would come in with websites.
They owned a website, and that meetup would not stop until they solved
whatever that person's problem was.
I.
It was cool.
Someone would come in like, oh, I can't get this form to work.
Oh, well, what form tool are you using?
And then 10 people you know when the space start, you know?
brainstorming this thing and they would just fix it.
Or my website has a critical error.
Well, what's your host?
Sign in.
Share a screen.
Let's get to work.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and that part was really cool.
Like, that was, that was the vibe you were talking about.
Like, let's build something.
Yeah.
Like let's build some, let's fix something.
And it was really cool watching some seasoned old dudes fix some stuff.
na: Mm-hmm.
Kurt: But I personally think that these in-person meetups
should be more geared towards.
Almost like recruiting, like recruiting younger people to the space we're in.
na: Mm-hmm.
Kurt: And I kind of struggle with that, finding these younger,
younger brains, younger minds.
Toby: Oops.
Kurt: It's tough though.
'cause like even in
Toby: the WordPress space, like seasoned WordPress developers are
like, I'm gonna try, was it flow?
Or whatever the flow.
Web flow.
I'm gonna try like, like there's not a loyalty that there
used to be like a, you know,
Kurt: well, at the end of the day, and, and I don't mean to sound like such a
callous jerk, but WordPress is a tool like for agencies and, and builders.
It's a tool like, so what tool are you gonna use?
Like, some people use Makita, some people run down a Harbor Freight,
some people run down to Home Depot and buy the the blue thing or whatever.
You know what, sometimes, like you just said, maybe it would be
faster if you didn't use WordPress.
You just used some other platform and, and built out your idea.
Right.
I will tell you, I got curious.
I loaded up Drupal to see how much it's changed in the last few years.
I couldn't wait to get out of that screen.
I was like, I'm running back to WordPress.
I don't like this at all.
you know, 'cause I had done Drupal before.
I had done Jula.
na: Mm-hmm.
Kurt: I did one called, It was a Camelback Live sites by Camelback or something.
All right.
that was, and it did what I needed it to do at the time.
But you know, I take a look at these things now, these kind of
sassy kind of platforms, and it's like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
It's not, it's not hitting the mark.
It's not giving me the freedom to build what I want to build.
And so I end up back in the WordPress space.
na: Mm-hmm.
Toby: moving on new this week.
I, I, I'm paying a bunch of money for our LinkedIn marketing campaign.
na: I'll ask again.
You got, you got me, you got me.
The bait is out.
I'll, I'll, I'll take a, at this hook.
Why, why is he spending a bunch of money on LinkedIn marketing?
Toby: So, well, I run an agency, you know, it's, we have, two full-timers
now and five or six contractors.
and I'm not looking to go hockey stick, you know, but if I can like.
They have a slight bump.
I, I see it.
If I get one or two new customers a year, I notice it.
and so I'm always trying to close more deals.
Like my job is basically sales.
and most of our leads come from SEO these days.
We get some referral, but so I'm always like listening for opportunities.
And there's a guy in town here who pitched me.
he built an app probably with no-code as my 'cause He is part, well, a partner at
the no-code meetup, but he bought an app.
No, he didn't buy an app.
He built an app.
He had a vision for what the app should do, and I think he built it.
and the way he pitched it is this.
He goes, and this resonated with me, by the way.
'cause like I.
I mean, how many times have you been pitched social media
marketing and you're just like, Ugh, well this is how I respond.
I don't know about you.
Like, no, thank you.
Like, that's my, my gut reaction is like, no, thank you.
But, and the reason it's no, thank you is 'cause like the metric
for success for social media people is imp what's the word?
It's not impressions.
It's something worse than impressions.
Like the conversions.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Way worse than conversions.
There's like conversions, then impressions, and then like,
like something less than views, interactions or something.
oh.
But anyway, I'm always like, first of all, it's like just to climb the social
media ladder, you have to define what is an interaction, what am I paying for?
I.
So this guy pitches me this LinkedIn thing, and the gist of it is this.
He's like, look, our goal is gonna be to get you phone calls with qualified leads.
That's kind of the, the gist, like, so we're gonna start with the end in mind,
and all it is is building your, He built a tool that kind of makes this quicker.
But it's all stuff you could do with the click of the mouse.
But, he basically, right, let's, right now, let's say I
have 2000 friends on LinkedIn.
He's like, we're gonna try to get you up to 3000, then 4,000 and
we're gonna start where you live and we're gonna grow, grow, grow.
And you're gonna annoy the heck outta some people.
'cause you're gonna be like the, what the software does, is it like.
Once they say, yeah, let's connect, it starts sending them my
program of like a series of stuff.
and the goal is to get a phone call at some point for a sales call.
But, I.
But the idea is once you build the network, then you start
doing webinars on LinkedIn live.
And so let's say now I have 5,000 people, the invitations on LinkedIn come into
a, they come in in a different way.
It's not like you're getting spammed an email, it's just kind
of however it is, it's different.
Yeah.
That's what I'm told.
and the gist of it's, I'm gonna do the same webinar every week.
For the next 172 weeks.
And, maybe he's, he's like, look, I've done it.
It works.
You're gonna get five people at every webinar.
There's gonna be like one person that attends six in a row, and
then that person will call you and like, so that's the whole thing.
It's very.
There's nothing tricky about it.
but that's it.
And the goal is to sell.
If I can sell one more a month on average, like, yeah, exactly.
But to me it made sense.
Like I go compared to all everything else, I'm being pitched.
I go, eh,
Kurt: seems okay.
It makes sense.
I used a very similar tool.
I was at like 1800 connections on LinkedIn, and to me, a connection
me, it means I should be connected.
Like I, I, I tend to overdo everything, right?
So I'm like, let's get down to basics.
So my goal is I want to have.
I wanna have an icebreaker conversation with everybody I'm connected to.
Like that's my goal.
It's not realistic, but it's my goal.
And so I went through my account and people that I had connected with that
I never talked to, never interacted with, never shared a message with.
I just disconnected.
And you know what?
They never missed me anyway.
Right?
So then I drove it down to like 1100 connections or something.
And then I used a tool that would be like, view their, so search people out by basic
search criteria in that search criteria.
View their profile, like one or two of their posts, send them a connection
request, send them a message.
to me the key to the messaging in LinkedIn is to use it like text messaging.
Very brief, very easy and non-salesy.
I don't send them any.
appointment links or anything like that up front.
I just say, Hey, it's great to connect.
If you're up for an icebreaker call, let me know.
Boom.
Like, that's it.
And then amazingly, a lot of people are curious 'cause then they're like,
this guy didn't pitch me a dang thing.
What is he, what, what is this about?
And I tell 'em, I just like to get to know everybody I'm connected
to and it goes somewhere great.
If it doesn't go anywhere, that's fine too.
If turns out you have five friends I should be talking to instead of you.
Just put me in touch with those five friends.
and that works.
And so I will tell you, I got up to 10,000 connections pretty quick and
that turned into a nightmare, Toby.
So, so I turned everything off for a long time, and then I had to kinda
let the spam wave die down because my inbox was full of spam from LinkedIn.
Hmm.
So I had to kind of let that die down a little bit.
And then I just kind of slowly reengaged at a, at a much more organic pace.
na: Mm-hmm.
Toby: And, and in terms of slowing down, was part of it that like you were feeling
like your belly was full of enough work?
Is that kind of like,
Kurt: well, yeah, I wasn't looking to have a second job.
You know, all these people, you know, and then the, the pitches, you know,
the 3, 4, 5 paragraphs from strangers, you know, and I'm just like, delete,
delete, delete, delete, delete.
And then I'm thinking to myself.
I probably reached out to these people to make a connection.
They think I'm a, a sucker on the line, so they're sending me all of this content.
And I, I don't want all this content.
I just wanna know if you're a human being, I wanna chat with or not.
And apparently you're not because all you wanna do is sell me something
in my dm, so I don't wanna be a part of your business anyway.
Toby: But this is, I think, may, maybe there's something here to
we could dive into a little deeper because, What we're describing is
a sales or a marketing process.
Kurt: Yeah.
Toby: And every marketing process is gonna have problems that you have to
resolve, whether it's social media, this, like your, your goal is to
get qualified leads, even if it's SEO whatever, like you're, although.
In a case like this, we're gonna, we know we're gonna get
way more spam than not spam.
Yeah.
With LinkedIn or social media or whatever.
and many other thing, my dad got a death threat once.
'cause he did a robocall.
He was, he did a robocall to like 10,000 people.
He was like, starts getting death threats in return.
Return.
One more time.
I'll kill you.
Exactly.
I will come there.
I will chop off your leg.
That I will come after your children, you know, like, but I think like.
The goal is isn't to like have the most efficient, this is my opinion, like,
like with a process like this, like let's say I can figure out how, let's say I
figure out that it's generating leads, then I have to figure out, okay, I can't
be in my inbox all day, so I might need to hire someone to like go through my
inbox then, and it becomes more of like.
That's just part of my business process.
Kurt: Yeah, that's, that's virtual assistant days right there.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Go through these and try and earmark which ones have the, the earmarks of success
and ones that have the earmarks of doom.
Yep.
And then try to, try to filter through them.
It, I had so much fun building my, my LinkedIn up to the 10,000 connections.
I actually made a LinkedIn course.
It's, it's on my website.
I encourage people to check it out, but it's it was my experience and I
thought, well, if I can go from 2000 to 10,000 connections on, on LinkedIn,
I can show other people how to do it.
But, it's interesting because now you can go to 30,000 connections on LinkedIn.
That's a pretty cool thing of that platform.
But I had to really sit back and go, do I want 30,000 connections on LinkedIn?
the way that I grew my account, this sounds crazy, but I mean, I have
literally spoken to probably 6,500 or 7,000 of the 10,000 connections.
Toby: Wow.
Kurt: And so it's weird, like if someone comes to me and says, Hey, so-and-so's
on your list, do you think that's someone you could introduce me to?
Chances are I've already spoken to them and I know if they're a
good connection for you or not.
na: Mm-hmm.
Kurt: You know?
Yep.
And I think I told you before, I have this remarkable tablet, but yeah.
Mm-hmm.
I take every, every meeting I have, I take notes.
And so if I met with that person, their name's in there.
So even if it's like, I didn't remember their name right.
But if you say, oh, did you talk to Mark Smith?
I can go Mark Smith, boom.
Mm-hmm.
I say, yep, talk to him.
November, 2023, these were the things we discussed.
Toby: Yeah.
That's pretty cool.
along those lines.
So, I wanna just kind of, you mentioned you, you did it, you, you saw an
opportunity to teach a cl you know, you probably did the work and you're like, I
might as well create a class out of this.
Yeah.
it was successful.
And then that leads me to another question, similar to the marketing
process, I'm curious about.
Another marketing process, which is getting speaking gigs.
Yeah.
preferably in person, in town.
but you mentioned a class.
Have you pursued, you know, you could do, like, LinkedIn now has classes,
LinkedIn learning and apparently a friend told me like, yeah, you can like sign up
and teach a class at LinkedIn Learning.
And I was like, what?
there's Minneapolis.
Minneapolis has community ad and then, or you can like just spend your
own LinkedIn does live streaming.
Like I'm gonna be doing YouTube.
Have you seen anyone do this or have you done any of this stuff?
Or you, or, let me ask the question differently.
Do you ever speak in town, like at a Yes.
How do you get
those
Kurt: gigs?
So let's go one step further.
I wanted to be a speaker before I wanted to be a WordPress agency owner.
So I paid the money, I made the investment.
I became a a John Maxwell certified leadership coach and
trainer, and all those things.
So I got the little piece of paper that hangs on the wall somewhere.
And, And I really enjoy it.
the thing that I found though is that paid speaking gigs, you know, the ones
that make mortgage payments and car payments and things, they're not as easy
to come by as people think they are.
You know, you gotta be really good looking or really funny or really
popular from some other source.
I think.
So, and I also have this weird thing where I, I really like to pay
it forward with younger audiences.
And so I really like, like the young, like the early twenties groups.
I like the, I like the vibe.
So, so I speak at the community college, the high school here in town.
I have a big background in automotive and motorcycles and marine.
So I talk at the STEM and CTE programs at the high school and college.
And then I also volunteer with the college age group at church just because.
I like to pay it forward that way, but then you'll hear the, there's a pretty
consistent theme in all of that, and that is that none of those things really
put money in my bank account, you know?
And so then, I've had a couple, I spoke for Marine Max, and this is a weird one.
I.
Marine Max is like the biggest boat retailer in the country.
And they said, Hey, we're gonna be at the show in Las Vegas and we'd
like to hire you as a speaker.
And then I said, well, okay, yeah, I charge this much for
a daily rate plus travel.
And they said Sold.
Right.
Which is the sure sign that that number's way too low.
Mm-hmm.
In the Harley Davidson space, I know of one guy, he charges $10,000 a day
plus travel and he gets two suites on the top floor of every hotel.
He stays in one for him and one for his wife.
And they continue to hire him to do that.
And I think to myself, he can't be that good at it.
when I worked for another company in the power sports world, you
guys could look at my LinkedIn to figure out who this might be.
Here I was a certified speaker on staff in leadership and they hired some lady
and paid her 10 grand for the afternoon to come and talk to us about leadership.
And I was like, hello, you pay me a salary.
I work here.
I could run this workshop.
I.
But these big companies, they wanna bring in a strange face.
They, they want to, they want to pass the liability off.
They don't want someone internal to do things.
And so that was hard for me to come to grips with.
So then I had to come down to, well then how do I market myself?
I put myself down as a speaker on my personal website.
I joined a thing called Gig Salad, which helps you find speaking gigs.
But I think Toby, I, people are gonna tell me my answer's wrong,
but I think you still need.
Like a Gary Vaynerchuk would say, you need to put your best stuff out first,
free and get a couple of samples and, and get a couple of, a couple of recordings.
Couple, couple, live action photos from, from an event.
And then you got something to market.
you didn't mention book, write a book.
Oh, I did write books, but that's, so I wrote a book on leadership ta
and I wrote a book on, how to run a better service department in the
automotive and power sports space.
That book is what changed the total direction of the
success I had in the space.
But that's, I didn't go to college so.
Like, some people could say, you know, well, I graduated from
Yale, or I graduated from Harvard and I did this and I did that.
Well, I, I don't have that to say so, so now I say, well, after I published
that book in the automotive space, then people go, he published a book, right?
He's so smart.
And then, two things, and, and these are like secrets I tell people
all the time, it's not a secret.
as soon as you publish a book, people stop asking where you went to school.
The other thing is, as soon as you.
Start your own agency or start your own business.
Nobody cares about where you went to school or how you got trained.
All they care about is what services can you provide.
Will it be done on time and how much will it cost?
Nobody.
After I started Manano Nomas, nobody has ever asked me, how did
you train yourself to do all this?
Like, right, doesn't matter.
This is what I do.
This is how long it's gonna take, it's how much it's gonna cost you.
And no one's asked me about backing that up since, so maybe
that's why those no-code SAS guys get ahead because they go.
Yeah, you got a pain point.
I got a solution.
It's gonna cost you this much.
Toby: It's an interesting thought.
I mean it is, particularly if you're new to coding.
'cause there's a lot of fear right now that you're not gonna have a job coding.
Yeah.
Your job might be knowing the AI marketplace, like we use Elle for this.
They put the database here and da da.
Kurt: I think there's gonna be a big future for experienced
people in debugging, coding.
Toby: Yeah.
Well that, so I think earlier you're like, who's gonna do the work?
Whoever has the skills and is willing or maybe, yeah.
I like, I.
I, AI is so bad at that thing you talked about earlier, like,
yeah, now we have three folders.
They all do the same thing.
Like that's what AI does for you.
Like in addition to making a fully functioning app, it just
builds all this crap with it.
yeah.
And you to date it, I mean.
The, like I said, I just built something the other day and
here's where it got caught up.
It had like a mostly functioning, finally I got it pulling in the
rest API from a headless WordPress.
And then I was like, okay, add a search box.
And it like went berserk, broke it, and I went through like 10
iterations trying to fix it.
And finally I was like, just roll back to 10 versions ago.
'cause we're not gonna do a search today.
Kurt: Yeah, yeah.
I'll forego that one this time.
But that, I find that so interesting because.
Just this week I was in a client's website.
Now I didn't build it.
I did not build it.
I'm just a consultant helping them get to the, to the launchpad and they said, well,
hey, and they're using the Elementor Hello theme, which is not my theme of choice.
I'm not saying it's bad, I just don't have a lot of experience.
It's the most
Toby: popular theme in wordpress.org.
Kurt: Yeah.
I don't, I don't have, I don't have anything negative to say about it.
Mm-hmm.
I'm just not super familiar with it.
And they said, Hey.
when Lifter LMS shows this course card, it has all this information on here.
We don't want all this information on here.
We wanna take this thing out.
And I was like, well, that's not really an option.
There's no tick box for that, but we could get rid of that with custom CSS.
And they're like, say no more.
Have at it.
And I was like, I.
Okay.
And I'm thinking probably take you 20 minutes.
dude, I'm, I'm so embarrassed.
I was like, display.
None this, Nope.
Display none.
Not sure that display none.
Yeah.
Let try this class name.
And I was trying everything that I could think of.
And it wasn't working.
It wasn't working.
And then.
I tried, oh, let's, let's try this.
I think they call 'em variables, but I called it important, you know?
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Because I kept looking at the code and the chrome inspector and I'm
going, it keeps saying, like, when I say display none, it keeps crossing
it out like I'm not doing it.
Yep.
I'm like, I'm telling you to do it.
I am telling you to do this.
And, it took a lot more than 20 minutes Uhhuh, and I couldn't charge her the 20.
Right.
I couldn't charge her my real time.
Newsflash for people that are listening.
you shouldn't charge your customers for the time that you are educating yourself.
At least I don't think so.
so I charge like real time, right?
But now I'm like, now I'm going negative.
Right now I'm going negative, trying to figure this thing out.
So I put in the, the important and all of a sudden one thing went away,
but the other thing didn't go away.
But they didn't really care about the other thing, so I was like, good enough.
Right, right.
Good enough.
Boom.
we're done here.
But that's like, I.
Here we are talking about AI and no code and, and like I'm
not a coding genius, right?
I'm jumping into someone else's website.
Some, something someone else built.
I got a theme I'm not familiar with.
I'm trying all the tricks I do with Sky Pilot and with
bricks and with, and nothing.
I'm putting in works and I don't know why the theme's disregarding
everything I'm saying to do.
And I go, you know, exclamation point important and then it boom.
It works.
how many people are gonna know that, right?
Or how many people are gonna go into AI and say, give me some custom CSS
to make this disappear from my screen.
And then it's gonna say, put this in.
Well, that's not gonna work.
Okay, well then put this in.
Right?
Yeah.
It's not gonna work.
Toby: Something, something funny that we, we were talking about, I
was talking with someone about ai.
even if, it gives you the, like, it won't get, it won't say no.
And this is the problem.
It'll, it'll make It's the hallucination.
Yeah.
It, yeah.
It'll, you're like, it, like, Hey, can I, can you fix this for me?
It'll say, sure.
Do this, and, and it, you'll do that.
And it'll be like, it didn't work.
And they'll say, oh, sorry.
Yeah.
That's right.
That's wrong.
Here.
Do this.
It, it's incapable of saying no.
Like, yeah.
Kurt: Well, it does say no when you ask it questions.
It doesn't want to answer by the code.
For code.
It's always gonna say, it's always gonna say, yeah, I can fix that for you.
Toby: Right.
Kurt: And then.
It's not fixing it for you.
Right.
I've been through this so many times now with, with clients and you know,
in a way it's kind of cool 'cause they always gotta come back to you
and go, oh, I tried this on my own.
It's not working.
Uhhuh, can you fix this?
And we go, yeah, we can fix that for you.
But then you have to ask yourself, you know, why didn't they just
come to me in the first place, even if they're not my client.
I think that, like I'm on the show with you.
I do a show with Lifter, LMS, I do a show with WP Tonic.
I have my own podcast called Manana.
Nomas.
Like people know who I am.
So why did you try 17 other choices before ringing me up or sending
me an email asking for help?
And it's 'cause they assume I'm at like $600 an hour for
an agency rate or something.
Right.
And it's just not true.
'cause you and I both know we, you and I, we can't run our agencies at those
rates and think we're gonna keep clients.
Toby: Right?
Yep.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's probably true.
yeah, if they thought it was cheap, they probably would've called you.
Or if they thought it was not cheap, cheap, iss probably the wrong word.
If they thought it was gonna be a couple hundred or even 300,
maybe they would've called you.
Kurt: Yeah.
If it was gonna be affordable, you know, if it was gonna be
within a, within a budget concept.
And I think, I think in some cases, because of being online all the time,
being live all the time, I think that.
Sometimes heightens the expectation that, oh, he's gonna be super
expensive, or we can't afford that.
no.
It's like, it's like everyone assumes Codeable is gonna be expensive,
but then you go to Codeable and they're like, Hey, we get three bids.
You get the average of the three bids.
It is what it is, and it comes out to like $80 an hour to have something done.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
It's, that's a smoking hot deal.
Jump on there, get something handled.
Toby: Is co ball still hiring?
Last I, last I checked.
They weren't doing, they weren't accepting new applicants.
Do you know?
Kurt: I don't think they're hiring.
I think they have, I think they have all the people they need.
Toby: Yeah, that's what I thought.
Because that's, that's a pla.
Yeah.
You go and you.
Say, Hey, build this for me.
And then they have a team of freelancers, right?
Kurt: Yeah.
Yeah.
And then, it's like a blind audition.
Mm-hmm.
People bid on the task.
Mm-hmm.
And they put a dollar amount in there, and then it averages the bid amount out, and
then whoever, then you choose it, right.
Based on this is the set fee based out of these three sources, and then
you pick the source and they do it for the fee that was the average.
Toby: Hmm.
I actually think, If you're getting started in the industry, and maybe
it's an avenue for me to pursue too, but like, Upwork or, you know,
there's all these places where like people go to buy the work and like,
I'm just thinking out loud here.
So, let's say I did a project that was.
Relatively easy on Upwork, and I got underpaid for it, but it led
to a hosting contract or something.
Like I could see that work, math working out potentially.
You know,
Kurt: there's so many of those things, so, so there used to be one called
e Lance and then Freelance, and then Upwork and Fiverr and all those.
And generally Upwork and Fiverr seem to be these markets that are just.
Driving to the bottom right?
Mm-hmm.
Just a race to the bottom.
They want a task done, and it's the cheapest one is gonna get the bid.
and I really don't like to play in those markets.
I mean, I just don't because it, it just doesn't f the mentality of the
client doesn't fit the mentality, what I'm looking for as an agency.
So I kind of try and stay away from that.
But, I've also noticed.
So I had a client I was doing a big project for, and they were
supposed to supply a ton of content.
And I said, okay, great.
You know, so where's this content at?
'cause I've built it.
So where's your content?
And the content wasn't coming.
Wasn't coming, wasn't coming.
And finally I was like, you said you had content.
Where's your content?
Like I was, you know, you, because everything I do that's,
you said it based on a calendar.
You know, I, I tell people we have deadlines.
I have a deadline.
And newsflash, you have a deadline.
You're the customer, but you still have a deadline.
Yep.
And, They were way, and they, then they finally confessed, oh, I've got
this person, you know, writing the course for me that I hired from Fiverr.
And when I got, it was a series of PDFs they wanted me to put into their
website as as courses and lessons.
I said, I can't even put this stuff on your website.
I, in good conscience, I can't do this.
I've already edited for free the first three lessons I said,
but this content is so poor.
Yeah, unless you're paying me, I cannot continue to edit this work, but I
cannot put my name on this anywhere.
Like you, I can't have website powered by Ana Nomas or any of that on your project
because yeah, this content is so horrible.
It's interesting.
Toby: so I'm selling, our house, and I'm working with a realtor.
And they had me fill out a Google form that was like, tell us about
your, your house and your experience in your house, and dah, dah, dah.
So I filled it out, took like five or 10 minutes.
and then the next day they sent me something that was so clearly chat,
GPT, like just this garbage writeup.
I.
Kurt: You're like, thank you.
I don't want to use you anymore.
Toby: well, I'm already on the hook, but like, but I got it.
I had to write it.
I went back to GPT, I was like, let's rewrite this.
My realtor couldn't figure it out, you know?
it's
Kurt: hard.
Toby: Mm-hmm.
Kurt: It's hard.
All right.
So somehow or another we managed to work AI into just about every
segment of our, of our talk today.
Like,
Toby: like Matt Mullenweg said,
what's the future of WordPress ai?
Kurt: I guess we're gonna have to figure it out.
Toby: Yeah,
Kurt: we're gonna have to figure it out.
Anything else?
no.
Thank you so much time.
Yeah.
So we're gonna have to wrap this one up and we're gonna have to save our
talk about manage WP for another day.
I think.
Toby: I think you're right.
Which like,
Kurt: that's the cliffhanger that gets people to come back to another episode.
Toby: We have a whole bit.
the question is, is managed WP dying?
For next time.
Kurt: Peace out folks.
I'm Kurt.
This is Toby.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful day.
We'll see you in the next episode.