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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 conversation with Remkus DeVries. You may know Remkus as a WordPress performance expert and as co-founder of Scanfully Now be sure to catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Matt Medeiros (00:25)
with the stuff that you and I are doing right now. You're on this podcast, amplifying your message. We have courses together. Maybe I can say when you finish the hosting course, now go take this performance course over here with Remkus within WP. There are ways that we can help each other, but I feel like sometimes we don't reach out to each other to help each other. And I'm curious.
if you have any thoughts on that being in the community and organizing events and doing this stuff for so long and do you see that as a content creator and be like I could help you if you help me a little bit like do you have any of that feeling?
Remkus (01:01)
I do, I do. ⁓ I think this started specifically when I ⁓ turned my newsletter attempts into a serious one, ⁓ which ultimately became the within WordPress newsletter. ⁓ That's when more people started to reach out to me like, could you feature this? I go, ⁓ so I, well, when that started happening, I had already figured this was going to happen because I'd seen slivers of it already.
⁓ I made a conscious decision saying, and I literally have a canned reply that says something along the lines of, appreciate you reaching out. ⁓ I have decided to have a black and white line between what I accept as, can you mention this in terms of if you're new to me, I'd like to have as a relationship first.
So as long as you're new to me, the easiest way for me to develop the relationship is asking you to sponsor me to do this. And that may sound weird because I'm very likely throwing off people and going like, dude, I'm just asking you to highlight this something in your newsletter. It's newsletter worthy, so why wouldn't you? But my logic is if there's a commercial value attached to it on your end, then I think I'm in my rights to have that as a minimum request.
If it's a friend that replies to my newsletter that I know for many, many years even, I'm much more inclined to already see the benefit of the collaboration and which in some cases when somebody replies to a newsletter and goes like, I saw you mentioned this, but I built this cool, neat little tool. Maybe that's of interest of your audience as well. That's a very different approach to me already because there's already a back and forth, right? So...
I approach that already differently. That's on the other side of the black and white line for me. ⁓ Then there is the layer where I go, you're in it to make money, you're in it to feed your family. ⁓ If and when you need help, I'm more than happy to ⁓ amplify your message, but it needs to be in balance. And a wonderful example is ⁓ Marco from Portugal.
who saw me tweet about a missing functionality that I had inside of WooCommerce. I was looking at solutions, didn't find what I needed because it was like four five ⁓ different solutions and none of them fully captured what I needed. And he went out of his way ⁓ to create an entirely new plugin that did exactly what I needed. Now, for me, that is like a no-brainer to amplify his messages. And that doesn't mean
that I just shared the plugin that he created and has, ⁓ you know, he sells that on his website. But that also means that when I see his content on X now or LinkedIn, I am more inclined to retweet it, repost it, share it, because that's how this symbiosis works. So if you don't get that as a content creator or a service or product builder, I think you're missing out.
tremendously on the type of ⁓ credit that you can build up. And I'm aware that I'm in this community for 20 years now, longer, that I've had the benefit of knowing a lot of people who are now ⁓ visible, let's call it that, that I have an easy access to certain people at whatever position in whatever WordPress related company.
But then I also go, I think I work for that. think I like for the 15 years that I spend organizing meetups, ⁓ setting up WordCamps, starting WordCamp Europe and everything that came with that, ⁓ I've never cashed in from that, never once. And I'm no longer currently contributing to ⁓ a WordCamp or a meetup or anything like that. ⁓
But I do think I still bring that credit that I have that came from that. And I'm not here to capitalize on it necessarily, but I do think it's normal to use it in some way if that means I have through that experience a connection to somebody that I can ask a question directly, which otherwise would probably be through four or five layers as I just knock on the door of some company. just all of this to say, ⁓
It needs to be a back and forth. It needs to be interplay. And I see too little of this happening for from small, from indie developers to just larger companies who just don't seem to get it. Like, why aren't you treating it from a symbiotic perspective? It doesn't need to be all just money connected. It's not, because it really isn't.
Matt Medeiros (06:05)
Yeah.