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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Matt Medeiros (00:02)
Hey, Kevin, welcome to the WP minute.
Kevin MacGillivray (00:05)
Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me.
Matt Medeiros (00:08)
Lots of excitement around opportunities and WordPress these days. I do have to also just disclose you from pressable We're gonna learn more about who you are what you do at pressable today pressable is a fantastic Three year running foundation sponsor or excuse me pillar sponsor for the WP minute. So we're extremely happy ⁓ With for your support and it helps power not only this podcast, but all the courses we've been doing In the community behind the WP minute. So thanks ⁓ as always to
Pressable for supporting the WP Minute. For folks that don't know who you are, what's your day-to-day like at Pressable? What do you do over there?
Kevin MacGillivray (00:40)
Our pleasure.
Yeah, so first of all, hi everybody. It's great to be here. I'm Kevin, of course. I've been at Pressable for about six months. I joined the team in July as the Chief Marketing Officer. So what does that mean in this context? ⁓
It really means coming in and helping Pressable scale and keep pace with the growth that we're seeing from what is a great product ⁓ and help make that story clearer, sharper, more consistent ⁓ in the market ⁓ and add some maturity to how we position our product ⁓ out there for the users that need it most. So agencies, Woof stores, growing and scaling businesses and making sure that they can connect with the value and see the value in our product.
and partnership and can see themselves using our product and getting a lot of value there. And a lot of what we do in marketing at Pressable as well is acting as connective tissue between all the other parts of the business and creating really important feedback loops with product and engineering and all the folks that are building at Pressable to make sure that we're solving some of the most important needs of our users.
Matt Medeiros (01:59)
What people might not know is ⁓ we recruited you from the dark side. You came over from the I mean, say we but I'm sure ⁓ Pressable and Matt and Automatic recruited you. You come from Shopify. I definitely want to dive into that ⁓ in a moment. But ⁓ the world of open source first like reference so people can understand like what it means like the world of open source. Do you find it different?
Kevin MacGillivray (02:04)
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Yeah.
Yep.
Matt Medeiros (02:26)
Like, different from your days at what we'll call like a closed source SaaS provider? Like, is it largely different in how people think about it?
Kevin MacGillivray (02:37)
I think in some ways it is actually very much or there are lot of similarities. It's very much the same. And in some ways it's not. So a couple of ways that it's the same is both WordPress and we'll use Shopify as an example. They're both building things and they're building tools that help get more things in the hands of more people to be able to achieve and succeed doing what they're doing. So in Shopify's case, it's purely commerce based, but it's giving people tools they may not otherwise have access to in more of a closed ecosystem. But like,
They're doing that to help people start businesses, make a livelihood, you know, all really good endeavors. And a lot of ways WordPress has the same thing. It gives people the building blocks to do, you know, arguably way more than commerce. When you're thinking about WordPress as a whole, but be able to build and have the pieces and tools to do things themselves. They might not normally be able to do so in that sense, almost philosophically, they're very similar. And that's one of the things why I love working at Shopify. And I've loved my time so far in WordPress.
is that's a really cool thing to get behind. ⁓ Like it's about access, right? It's giving access to more people to more things. Now, how are they different? Shopify is a little bit more of a...
I'll use the word closed ecosystem, even though that's not like entirely, entirely true. But they are building a product roadmap for what they believe is the best ⁓ path for building and selling and operating in a commerce world. And with that comes focus. comes a lot of really interesting innovation that they're building in that space. But on the flip side, ⁓ what we have on our side in WordPress and WooCommerce ⁓ now is like you get that extra flexibility of you can really like build your
path in many ways and that could be a curated one, it could be one where you know we suggest something and you build it and it could just be that kind of barrel of Lego you build whatever you want with and that's part of the joy of working in WordPress.
Matt Medeiros (04:36)
Yeah, one of the great things ⁓ that I've been afforded is I've been able to interview Vic, your ⁓ CEO at Pressable, Phil, who heads all the support stuff. So I've heard it from two different positions, like the sort of broader thinking that Vic brings to the organization. then Phil is like, OK, I'm dealing with these folks. Here's how we try to keep them satisfied and keep that customer success.
Kevin MacGillivray (04:59)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (05:01)
Now I get to talk to where the rubber hits the road is like, how do we take these pieces and get people to understand what WordPress is? Because, you know, I would say, well, I'll put words in your mouth, but then you can, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. Like when you get in this position now, you come from Shopify, you get to WordPress where one of its strengths is I can do anything with this, man. I can do anything with this WordPress site. can build it however I want. I can make it an e-commerce store. I can make it a membership site.
Kevin MacGillivray (05:05)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (05:30)
But as a marketer, you're like, my God, how do I tell everybody that they can do anything with this? And is that the kiss of death on the marketing side? Your thoughts.
Kevin MacGillivray (05:33)
Yeah. Yeah.
I think it can be the kiss of death. I know one of the things that you would want to chat a bit about was like how marketing is shifting in general. The question you just asked is a great example of that where.
What I'm finding and what I think a lot of marketers are seeing is vagueness is starting to be a path to losing. Like you, don't win business. You don't win followers. You don't win advocates and evangelists by being vague. So when you're talking about how do you actually, ⁓ you know, Robert hits the road and actually get a message across about what WordPress is and the value there is benefit in focus and specificity. like, how do you, how do you actually get real problems, real scenarios, real workflows in
front of people who are actually building them ⁓ and make it tangible and make it specific to their use case. And that doesn't mean, you know, all WordPress users everywhere, like this one thing, it's like WordPress user ABC who has this particular thing, this particular workflow, this particular business. How do we talk to them and then find people like them? So I think that's, that's how we kind of have to approach the problem to make it stick.
Matt Medeiros (06:48)
Yeah.
Yeah. 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 (06:54)
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (07:15)
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 (07:17)
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 (09:00)
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 (09:14)
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 (10:05)
Mm.
Kevin MacGillivray (10:10)
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.
Matt Medeiros (10:29)
Yeah, the shift in marketing, obviously, that's obviously one of the topics I want to talk about because I think it affects. Well, it affects all of WordPress, right, of how we all all of us together ⁓ position WordPress, talk about WordPress and on board our customers, whether it's a customer at a hosting company or a customer as like agency client relationship, we're even just recommending WordPress to do something with. ⁓ How has that changed even over the short
Kevin MacGillivray (10:38)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Medeiros (10:58)
six to seven months that you've been there because of my god how fast AI has changed. Like how has it changed for you to go from like, all right I thought I was marketing hosting accounts but maybe actually I'm marketing that e-comm solution or that membership solution because WordPress can do these things.
Kevin MacGillivray (11:05)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's two angles to this. One is how AI and the acceleration of that technology has actually helped me in my craft as a marketer. And that's just accelerating at an incredible rate. So what that means is...
⁓ All the marketers on my team and the people I work with have suddenly in the last six months gained an Exponential amount of leverage to be able to do more things build more things like do some coding themselves just Do way more with less. So I think that's that's a hundred percent ⁓ True. I think the step further from that is AI is changing how people interact with products ⁓ and evaluate products and look at products so that that's changing at a macro
level and also in terms of what they're expecting products to do for them. And I think maybe one of the side effects of this as well before we talk a little bit more on the product side but one of the side effects is the
need for authenticity is probably bigger than it's ever been before in a world of AI proliferation. this is, you know, video, it's things like community. Like this is where WordPress actually has a huge advantage, I think, around the human component and the community component. People learning from each other, people, ⁓ you know, having a higher trust with other folks and agencies and partners and builders that they've worked with before or know as part of the community. That is what's going
to add a lot of value and leverage at sort of that umbrella level ⁓ going forward as more and more is just like slop and it's hard to figure out what's real online.
Matt Medeiros (13:00)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Is the feeling, this is something that Vic and I had talked about, like Pressable feels like a startup within a startup. Is that still a culture that you feel? Yeah.
Kevin MacGillivray (13:12)
Yeah, 100%, 100%.
It's actually one of the things that attracted me to this role at Pressable is you have all of the benefits, or most of them of being in a startup, of moving ⁓ agilely.
you know, being scrappy, lots of experimentation, lots of testing things, lots of short feedback loops from customer feedback to things we build in the product. Those things are possible because we operate very much like a startup. ⁓ But we're nestled within automatic, of course, which has benefits from, you know, being part of that broader ecosystem and infrastructure. But operationally, we get a lot of good startup energy.
Matt Medeiros (13:55)
me ask you a bit of a harder hitting question about the product marketing side of things. ⁓ This is either a benefit or this is a boon or ⁓ a bust. Jetpack is a common thread across all of automatic and ⁓ it's a core experience to .com, ⁓ VIP, ⁓ WP Cloud.
Kevin MacGillivray (13:57)
Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (14:19)
and certainly pressable hosting. Like it's a common thread that enhances the use of WordPress. Does that feel like, man, I just want to be able to market unique pressable things where you might get marching orders, where it's like, nah, let's focus on the bigger Jetpack stuff because it helps automatic as a whole.
Right? Like if that customer comes from dot com to Pressable, they can go, this was just like dot com. Like my stats are Jetpack stats. And if that person ever graduates to VIP, they go, my stats are Jetpack stats when I get to VIP. So they get that common thread. Do you find that as like, man, I wish we had our own thing here. Or is it not like that in Jetpack? Maybe isn't as talked about as much in the internal meetings.
Kevin MacGillivray (14:56)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think using Jetpack is actually a great example of there are things that kind of transcend the different pieces or brands or products within automatic. ⁓
And as a marketer, do have to get creative around how you position those products and features or, know, whatever the instance let's use Jetpack as an example. The differentiation there comes in how good you are at explaining the value and leverage those tools can provide to your customer or your audience for the problems they're trying to solve. So even though there may be technology that transcends multiple products, being able to articulate that well, that's the challenge in those instances.
And then there's absolutely things that we lean into across brands that are, that are, ⁓ know, different and, you know, pressable as an example, like we lean quite heavily into how good our product is for agencies. ⁓ and that that's a very pressable thing. and we build to solve for a lot of those problems. So in addition to the broad reaching things, we do also have a lot of those unique value points or value propositions and the mix works.
Matt Medeiros (16:18)
I bring that up because, this is not a problem. This is not specific. I don't want say it's a problem. This is not a challenge that is unique to automatic dating myself. I grew up in the car industry. My family owned a couple of car dealerships and one of them was Chevrolet dealership. And I remember specifically like when we would sell Chevrolet trucks, which are like the number one seller. General Motors also had GMC or has GMC and they are literally the same truck.
Kevin MacGillivray (16:43)
Right. Right.
Matt Medeiros (16:46)
Right. And then I remember specifically like trucks coming off the off the loader when they were delivering trucks to the dealership and the tailgate, the thing that comes down in the back. There was a truck, I'll never forget, had a GMC badge on it. The front of it had the Chevy badge and they forgot in the manufacturing line to take off the GMC. And it's like it's a real thing to be able to say, OK, this comes from, let's say, you know, the the mothership or the bigger brand. How do we differentiate? OK, GMC gets better leather.
Kevin MacGillivray (17:00)
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (17:16)
Okay, better leather.
Kevin MacGillivray (17:16)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (17:17)
then the Chevy guy as the salesperson, you don't need that leather. You're out there working like you're this is a work truck. You don't need the leather in that GMC Denali truck and you don't know what do you want to pay for it. So these are challenges that come from all brands and maybe even at Shopify too.
Kevin MacGillivray (17:22)
Yeah.
Yeah.
⁓ Absolutely, it is everywhere and I think in more consumer facing brands it's even more prevalent because you have so many things that are just very much ⁓ the same.
What marketers then have to lean into a lot of the time is like, you don't talk as much about the features themselves. Like this is the tire or this is the leather. You're selling an outcome. Like you're selling speed, you're selling comfort, you're selling, you know, coolness or like whatever the marketing angle is for your product. And that's how, that's how you start to differentiate as like connecting ⁓ the outcome with your primary user for you and your brand.
Matt Medeiros (18:02)
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin MacGillivray (18:12)
And then the message transcends or moves beyond the actual feature itself if the feature is more ⁓ commonplace or similar. that's it. Yeah, go ahead.
Matt Medeiros (18:22)
I want to talk about, yeah,
no, I was going say, I do want to talk about like how Pressable is working with agencies because a lot of agency owners are like, my God, I need more business. So this stuff that you can help with, with that. before we get, before we get to that, um, you know, from the, uh, from the product side, when Pressable positions itself, uh, for, you know, the agency, what are the things that you look at?
Kevin MacGillivray (18:33)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (18:51)
not Jetpack and not WordPress that adds to your equation of like the outcome for the end user. Is it the unique control panel? Is it the customer support experience? What threads do you pull on that are not WordPress that make your end result interesting to the consumer?
Kevin MacGillivray (19:04)
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think the number one thing that stands out is actually like a feeling type thing, which is we strive to never have agency customers feel scared about what is going to happen to their customers. So we are, we work with the agencies, but we know that like the agency's number one priority is delivering an excellent experience to the customers that they're working with. So that rolls up to things like support. It rolls up to things like smooth migrations. It rolls up to things like being able to access
tools that you need when you need them, get questions answered. ⁓ In the fall we just went through this big ⁓ agency
storytelling exercise where I think we added nine, seven or eight or nine new case studies to our repertoire. And the common theme across all of them was I don't have to worry anymore. ⁓ So being able to offer that comfort blanket, part of its technology, like the tech actually does what it's supposed to do, but part of it is that human touch that Pressable 100 % leans into to make sure you know we are here if you need us. So that combination is the
Matt Medeiros (20:03)
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin MacGillivray (20:21)
comments read by a long shot.
Matt Medeiros (20:22)
Yeah.
You know, we'll talk. We'll also talk about AI, maybe a little deeper in a moment. But, you know, one of the things that I just got off of doing a webinar for my day job, a lot of the topic was like, what are agencies going to do about AI? And lot of people are just in fear of how fast things can be built, how fast things can be researched, how fast quotes can be made and what.
sort of the innate fear is, oh my God, if this can happen with me, my competitors are gonna do it and how am I gonna compete? I'm trying to think of things like, wait, you gotta start. My only short-term solution in the beginning of 2026 is to become more human and to get more connected to the customer. So I'm curious how you think about that and connecting deeper with agencies, getting on phone calls.
I'm gonna throw things out here like pressable meetups pressable webinars like how can you get closer to that human? Because AI is just gonna accelerate all these other like ones and zeros that we can just program programmatically do but like that connection still can't be done and probably won't want to be done by Claude bot Running on your Mac mini somewhere
Kevin MacGillivray (21:12)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Totally. Totally.
I mean, you look at everything that has been automated in recent history.
Trust is not built through automation in a lot of ways, like efficiency is speed results, whatever, but like the actual trust that you build with somebody or a product to do what you want it to do. There's still very much a human touch to building that trust. I think that's gonna, that's going to continue. And you hit on a few interesting things that I want to talk about. So number one, one of my goals heading into 2026 is to have Pressable play a much larger role in knowledge sharing. So that's not just like, here's what our product does.
and like go use it. This is like, how are you using AI to plug into Pressable, agency one, let's talk about it and share that resourcing with the rest of the community. How are you increasing your margins by doing this with AI? Great. Let's share that within the community. ⁓ That's probably from a con like a content standpoint, the most valuable content that can go out there. And this goes back to being specific. It's not like, God, AI like use Claude. It's more like we know that these are the five problems that
Matt Medeiros (22:35)
Yeah.
Kevin MacGillivray (22:38)
agencies are going to be running into, whether it's margin or efficiency or just tool integration, let's talk about them and help facilitate the sharing of that knowledge. ⁓ On the human front, we're actually hosting with one of our partners, Big Red Jelly, that's actually based in Utah. In February, we're doing a joint event with them that is all about how community can help you accelerate your business. And like that human piece can actually help you accelerate with AI and tech.
if you operate and learn from each other and, you know, stay tight knit and all that kind of stuff. So we're definitely leaning into helping facilitate and foster what you just described.
Matt Medeiros (23:19)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a it's a super big challenge, right? Logistically and, you know, often for years now. I mean, the whole point of AI was just like, how do we just make this thing happen? I just want to make it happen. I don't want to have to do it. You know, I want to I want to zap this. I want to automate this. want to AI this. And now we're faced with like, God, everyone's doing it. ⁓
Kevin MacGillivray (23:31)
Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (23:43)
You know, I think the event industry is probably going to start booming again because people are going to be doing things like that ⁓ for sure. ⁓
Kevin MacGillivray (23:47)
⁓ yeah.
% like you it's sort of another you know how people had social media fatigue where you have like fatigue from just the constant turned on there is gonna be a level of like AI and like internet fatigue where people will actually to an extent craves Situations and scenarios where they can interact with real people IRL and I think that's great to have the combination of two ⁓
Matt Medeiros (24:17)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin MacGillivray (24:19)
One of the interesting things I think about how AI will be used in agencies is a great example here is I think AI, like it's hard to sprinkle in AI and have it be an effective strategy as like a sprinkle. ⁓ You kind of have to think holistically about how you want AI to interact with your product. know, hosting is an interesting example where
you know, AI in a lot of cases going forward is going to be the user or an agency wielding AI is going to be the user. Like how do you, how do you build and, and, and shift the, the, you know, best practices to a world where, know, the systems can, ⁓ you know, explain things, take action, recover. Like if we hit this threshold, do this and just have those, that agentic kind of component built into products as a user would be interacting with it rather than.
and let's put this interesting magical feature here.
Matt Medeiros (25:18)
Yeah, Yeah,
yeah. Like dashboards and reports don't need to look pretty anymore because literally no one's going to look at it. Their AI is going to consume the stats from the hosting and then on their end, just spit it out in a dashboard of their own usability. That's definitely an interesting ⁓ thought ⁓ on how people are to be interacting with this stuff.
Kevin MacGillivray (25:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then it saves the human time for things that require judgment. like, yeah, have the AI do the boring, like number crunchy spit out in the thing. And then you can actually spend more of your cycles, you know, applying good judgment to what to do with that information.
Matt Medeiros (25:47)
Mmm.
Yeah, yeah,
for sure. ⁓ One of the things that I've always been ⁓ critical about, well, automatic as a whole and an opportunity is the partnership stuff. And I always used Shopify as an example only because I had talked to so many as I was running my agency. Again, this is years ago. But like running my agency, I was like, damn, look, like Shopify has a partnership program and they feed people leads. Right.
Kevin MacGillivray (26:09)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yep.
Matt Medeiros (26:24)
That
is so interesting and I always look at it over the fence going, why don't we have that in WordPress world? And again, this is years ago, so I'm curious, how does Pressable think about partnership? You can't partner with everyone who knocks on the door for obvious reasons because if they're just getting started, you just can't take your client, the Pressable client, say, yeah, this person just started here, go work with them. There's gotta be some threshold. How do you think about feeding?
Kevin MacGillivray (26:33)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (26:52)
I'll say, feeding leads to agencies and is that a thing these days?
Kevin MacGillivray (26:56)
I think it absolutely is and should continue to be. One of the analogies that I really like to think about is...
And this was true at Shopify. So this is a, this is a Shopify adage, but I think it applies here where like Shopify or WordPress or automatic is building in many ways for the main quest. You are trying to make whatever you build as applicable to as many people as you possibly can. That's what you normally do to try product adoption. Side quests are things that may be valuable and definitely are valuable to smaller groups along the way, maybe particular use cases, particular, you know, whatever functionality.
but it's not core to e-commerce or ⁓ web development or site building.
That is where partners come into play where like you can have the main company focus on the main quest and have all of these partners that are building things or are well situated to have Products that add heaps of value along the way for these side quests type Environments where like we absolutely need that built but would we ever build it ourselves? Probably not but that's where this like ecosystem comes into play ⁓
And in terms of your like lead sharing piece, like I'm looking at, you know, opportunities even just now about how we can do more things like that, ⁓ particularly as community becomes more important to drive growth for our business, but also our agency partner businesses. And a lot of them offer a ton of really great value that works awesome, works in a very compelling way, adjacently to the pressable stack.
Matt Medeiros (28:29)
Yeah.
I know it's probably, it's that hard balance of being under the automatic umbrella with the dot com and the VIP and both of those divisions are trying to do best, the best they can for their customer. is, are there, are there, ⁓ is there plumbing in place for somebody to go from.com to go, Hey, look, they're really pushing the boundaries of what.com can do. They need their handheld to, to, to move over to something like pressable. And at that moment, does the pressable team go, I've got an agency.
Kevin MacGillivray (28:48)
Yep.
Matt Medeiros (29:04)
I've got an agency that can help make this transition. Is that a common plumbing piece in this?
Kevin MacGillivray (29:05)
Yep.
It is. And I think even more so, the more complex you get as a business, the more of these you run into where we honestly need to do this more about identifying agencies that can plug one of these gaps in a migration or move or transfer or set up or something like that. ⁓
that's exactly what their skill set is developed for. And we do have those all the time, by the way, where people move from a .com to a pressable or a pressable to a VIP, and there is change management that has to happen. So the example you're describing is spot on.
Matt Medeiros (29:48)
Yeah.
If an agency's knocking on your door going, hey, I want to be a partner, like, how can I get better situated with Pressable? How do you evaluate them? Like, what do you want? What do you want to see on their resume, for lack of a better phrase, that says, are my capability, here are our capabilities, so that you can ⁓ measure, like, okay, this could be a fit for the Pressable agency.
Kevin MacGillivray (29:56)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (30:13)
Partnership program or just for you to recommend them. Is there a certain requirements you want to see?
Kevin MacGillivray (30:16)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think on two levels, one, we have a broader program called Automatic for Agencies, which is sort of our existing framework for working with and managing agency partners across all of Automatic. Pressable is a huge piece of that because we have a lot of partners we work with within ⁓ Pressable, but there's sort of that overarching framework of how to become a partner and how to work with...
and pressable in that regard. Specifically though, I think it's actually on us, on the technical side, and also as these partners kind of come up or crawl out of the woodwork to identify the most important opportunities where there are gaps today and both reactively and proactively solve this. So if we see something that is a gap in our product or experience in some way that a partner can fill, we should be actively looking for partners that can
play a role there rather than just reactively where this partner does something really cool how do we plug it into somewhere in our process I think making sure that the need is there is also a really important part of that process because you're right you don't want like needless proliferation of complexity and how we operate either so we want to make sure that you know the opportunities are real one.
Matt Medeiros (31:27)
Yeah.
Yeah,
The ⁓ getting that message across, you mentioned before that where you're going to do an in-person event with an agency. ⁓ What other things are or you that you have planned for twenty twenty six? That is I guess the better question is, is like, are you launching any new marketing campaigns that Precipil hasn't done yet? Like you investing in more like video or.
Don't launch a podcast, but you're going to launch a podcast. What is it? What else are you doing that is like new for pressable in 2026?
Kevin MacGillivray (32:04)
Yeah.
I love this question. So a bunch of things. So number one is we're in the process of hiring our first brand and community leader to be on the Pressable Marketing team. And what they're going to spend a lot of time doing is leaning into like a the Pressable brand and making sure we continue to like mushroom in terms of visibility. This is the role that's going to be building.
co-marketing, partner programs, community building, events. We're going to work Camp Asia, work Camp Europe for the first time in the spring. We were increasing our presence at other events in ecosystem. We partnered with WooCommerce for our first partner event at EcomExpo in London back in September. ⁓ There's a lot of new spaces that we're going to be moving into. ⁓ And then content is obviously one we already talked about, but actually building
content that meets the needs we described about kind co-sharing, co-learning through real experiences of customers using our product, agencies we partner with, ⁓ and all that, and getting that much more accessible than it is today. ⁓ That's like only a small handful of all the things that I've got in my...
Matt Medeiros (33:20)
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin MacGillivray (33:21)
in my pocket that I want to go do. But the theme is really ⁓ being coordinated and focused. So it's not just random acts of marketing either. It is a coordinated, like these are the messages we want to get across in these places with these partners and the stories we want to tell. So it feels very smooth.
Matt Medeiros (33:41)
Yeah, it's
⁓ a sort of a testament to that shows that Pressable does live a startup within a startup or independently because it's like you've made a partnership with Woo, you went to the e-commerce ⁓ expo or whatever the thing was in London and it must be a challenge as well as like finally, like a breath.
Kevin MacGillivray (33:59)
Yep.
Matt Medeiros (34:06)
Like an exhale, like finally. Like, Woo's been there all along, obviously, and now we're making that connection. It's good to see, I think, from the health of automatic to say, we're connecting the dots now. We're saying like, this is pressable, that large middle, I think you called it. ⁓ And it's good to see those connections. Probably challenging at the same time to be like, okay, why aren't we doing this with Woo? But finally like.
Kevin MacGillivray (34:23)
Yeah.
Matt Medeiros (34:32)
okay, we're finally doing this with Wu. Right, like that breath, ⁓ exhale, and that's a good thing and probably a challenge for you at the same time, I'd imagine.
Kevin MacGillivray (34:35)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we're breaking new ground, right? Like we're breaking new storytelling ground. And I think what I as a marketer really try and lean into is like the proof is in the pudding. Like talking about how these two products work together in other parts of the automatic ecosystem is like.
That's just what it is, right? Like the products work really well together and it is built on the same infrastructure. And, you know, there's a lot of really juicy stuff you can get into that almost, that doesn't speak for itself, but you're just speaking truths and getting those truths out there. Um, I what the experience is in those instances.
Matt Medeiros (35:01)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. ⁓
Anything else at Pressable before we close out? Anything else that you want to hit on or that agency owners ⁓ in the space should definitely know or any kind of landing page opportunity for them to sign up to for upcoming stuff?
Kevin MacGillivray (35:31)
Yeah. I think I'll just close by saying I started six months ago and I've, I've actually now is the most excited I've been since I started about what's on tap, for Pressable, both in the product side, things we're doing with marketing and the storytelling we're doing with partners and customers. There is so much good stuff, coming down the pipe. So I'm, I'm, I'm as confident and excited as I've ever been about, ⁓ what we've got going on.
We'll have a lot of things that folks can engage with on the agency side throughout We do a lot of co storytelling with agencies tons of our customers have done ⁓ things with us. We're going to continue doing events ⁓ We've got even we just actually launched today. We've got like a really juicy promotion ⁓ for agencies and not just agencies but with some good free hosting ⁓ offers out there for a limited period so ⁓
It's a good time to join partner talk about Pressable. ⁓
Matt Medeiros (36:33)
Updates to the
product, I assume we're going to see more AI stuff coming.
Kevin MacGillivray (36:37)
Yeah, I think they'll be a good combination of what we always do, which is like listening really carefully to our customers and building solutions for what we hear are the most pressing things. And then, continuing to lean into building our AI story and our AI narrative along the themes we kind of spoke about today.
Matt Medeiros (36:44)
Cough
You don't have to comment on this, but I'll put the theory crafting, the tinfoil hat on for you. I think one of the biggest things, and I think it already exists in WordPress Studio, the app. I can deploy to Pressable, I think, with the WordPress Studio app. I think my big bet 2026 is we'll see that with the Playground, playground.wordpress.net. ⁓ I love Playground, use it almost every day to like test little random things on WordPress.
I think one of the big opportunities are going to be launching one of those blueprints from Playground right to Pressable. We'll see. We'll see. Kevin's straight face. For those of you just listening to the in on the podcast app, he's not budging. But I think that'll be the big thing that we see along with some other stuff. Kevin, thanks so much for hanging out today. Pressable.com. Check it out, especially if you're an agency owner. You got a good story. You have a good client that you're working with that you think, hey, this would be a great.
⁓ sort of use case for Pressable, definitely reach out to Kevin and let him know that you're an agency, you use Pressable, and you have a great client, and maybe a case study is in your future. Kevin, thanks so much.