Freedom in WordPress w/ Noel Tock

But I'm not hearing, Solutions, I'm hearing like emotional hopes and dreams and a lot of like we should do this. We should remove that Wouldn't wouldn't it be great to have like freedom and WordPress?

But I'm not hearing how we get there and I'm not presenting a how we get there because I don't know either But maybe we can like hash some of this stuff out on today's live stream got questions Drop them in the, in the, in the question box, wherever you're watching this video before we get too deep into that stuff. Noel, what have you been up to with human made these days?

but what's been, I guess, amazing out here is that yes, it's war, it's humanitarian crisis. And surprisingly, WordPress has also been a big part of the response here. many of the thousands of new charities that popped up are built on WordPress. Be it for prosthetic limbs, humanitarian goods, FPV drones, high risk evacuations, non profit media, and more.

And it's, you know, it's powerful to know that the software you work on and that everybody on that, everybody else works on here too, has such an impact, it's software of humanity and it's a privilege to be a part of. And that's why, despite, you know, the WP drama, I think it's amazing to be, you To be in the presence of contributors and community who keep going.

And even, you know, today shipped the first iteration of WordPress 6. 7 and WordPress humanity, this planet needs this kind of software at a fundamental level.

I mean, I see it as some of these points that you've just described, or like, This is software that impacts humanity at At various levels that aren't just the freelancer building hers, you know, web design business or you know, the school educate, the, the, the higher ed system that needs a 3000, you know, college CMS installation. Like this is for like humans. We need to get words out. We need to get structure content out for these hotspots that are happening.

Might only be there for a month, six months, a year, but these are things that are very, very important. And, Yeah, I see WordPress as far beyond the viewports of freelancer or CMS kind of thing. what other, and you have, so you have human made and you have Altus, right? Let's frame what Altus is for the discussion today. Cause we will obviously be talking about WP.

And, you know, that gave us a really unique perspective that, you know, Compliments than the other players that are also doing enterprise. And all of that is kind of coming together, where we now have to scale consortium, which is multiple, enterprise agencies coming together.

so really just, you know, despite, the, the challenges you see in the economy today and, a lot of competition, a lot of ad spend, a lot of stimulus checks going to, you know, these headless composable CMSs and all the, all this other stuff where, you know, trying to provide, Just a great service platform, outcomes for enterprises across the globe.

And you see, you're from a different vantage point. Like you have this global presence, but what's the temperature of agency space these days for, for delivering WordPress projects.

Like the ratio of sponsor space in terms of squared meters versus, you know, the, the, the net new amount of sites that are launched on WordPress is, it's probably at an all time high or all time low or anyway, just, there's, it's just extremely competitive, in the space now, like it's, you know, we had our honeymoon phase, that was, you know, it was really steep growth curve. we've seen WordPress, market share, if we can call it that, you know, Robin. The mystical 43 percent plateau.

so, you know, regardless if you believe in that number or not, it's, it's still, you know, you're still following a certain trend over years, which used to be very steep and now it's quite flat. there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of pressure. And, you know, we still believe that WordPress is probably one of the best solutions in enterprise today. but there's a lot of work that's needed around not only then selling ourselves, but also selling.

Enterprise WordPress as a concept from a product marketing perspective. and then just the, the sort of challenges we face in the economy. you know, us was probably the fastest to kind of come out of challenging times and, and still that's not for sure. Europe is somewhat behind and then Asia is still lagging quite a bit. so. Yeah, it's a tough time to be in the game. I feel like we're learning a lot. we're having to adapt.

you know, we're having to pick up skill sets that we didn't necessarily, or that we took for granted maybe 10 years ago, in terms of, you know, building out a very comprehensive sales and marketing team or commercial team. and yeah, I'm very proud of, you know, how far we've come in that regard, but yeah, you're right.

It's, it's a, it's a tough environment, but ultimately with a lot of the budgets, enterprise budgets, maybe being, you know, focused towards AI and other like emerging technology, do companies really want to hold on to large license costs and large maintenance costs of proprietary CMSs that do the same thing as WordPress? you know, like these are the, the kind of more macro things that I'd say we hold on to and where we see a lot of opportunity within the enterprise space.

but yeah, I, there's, there's still, There's, there's been a massive marketing push from the whole composable headless kind of space. And then some of these players like Adobe and psych or creating these more comprehensive suites with personalization, AB testing, customer journey orchestration. so that it's, it feels like a much larger product whereby CMS is just a sub, subset of that. And I guess, you know, a large part of the economy went through.

Either this, you know, there's large all in one suite and then got disrupted by the headless composable ads and players that came into the space. And we've never had a very strong product marketing position towards that. So we, we, we interface with the market where we can, but it's not that enterprise WordPress is just receiving inbound leads as much as it should.

Like, when you're in the enterprise space, Aside from the, we'll build something for you with a headless, with headless components, is there another player in the ring who's more of a nameplate that people can identify to?

The more comprehensive, Hey, this, this can be your primary web experience. that's, that's a difficult conversation. And also we haven't as an industry come up with a very comprehensive Sort of list or a marketplace that's very interoperable with all the enterprise tech. And sure, we have integrations for Salesforce. We have integrations here.

We can use APIs to connect to various things, but we haven't productized that marketplace layer, around enterprise specifically to say, here's your, you WordPress project. a starter kit, that is on wordpress. org or somewhere else.

We need something we can move faster with and WordPress is a great solution for that. Therefore, that is the secondary CMS in this massive enterprise that we have. Is that a fair statement? Secondary being like, ah, teams can move faster with this?

so then you're able to grow from there and we've, you know, certainly made those experiences, but that is a bottoms up approach to, which is a hacky way because we're always low budget. we, we don't have global spend that's, you know, being used, for all agencies. and that's very different than an Adobe that will come in and maybe target everyone, host dinners, invite you to the conferences, and, you know, fair play.

There's, there's, there's nothing wrong with all these things, but it is a very impressive go to market strategy then versus our more, Scrappy, let's say, approach to things.

bootstrap, no outside investors, we were very much against the grain of, you know, the typical big, hosting providers out there. They eventually sold to, GoDaddy, but I competed with WP Engine quite often, you know, with clients, and it was very, a very typical, enterprise sales, that, that I was going up against. They would come in, they would come, big clients would tell me, Hey, WP Engine's willing to fly out. They're willing to demo to us. they're going to undercut your contract by 30, 40%.

these were things that, you know, a cash strap business, not strap, but a bootstrap business couldn't really compete with. And WP Engine was, and maybe still is these days. It's been a while. yeah, typical sales, enterprise sales. And, Lots of money, involved on that side of the spectrum and WP Engine is nowhere near like the Adobes and the Microsofts of the world that will go out and sell this stuff.

My tweet this morning, how much will it cost to clone and maintain a community driven dot org mirror? How do we get mass adoption? Because don't forget, wordpress. org is hand coded into the, to the bowels of wordpress. Which host will support it, right? If all of a sudden there's the utopian world and all of a sudden there's another mirror out there that we can use, will all the hosts support it? in the world that we know these days. And what's that long term sustainability?

WP Engine is seemingly about to do it, right? They've just said that, you know, people can now update plugins. How does their iteration evolve? does it become a HubSpot style marketplace and only available to WordPress Engine sites or WP Engine sites long term? Is it a true marketplace? Like, what is it that WP Engine is going to do with their mirror, loosely speaking, How can we get this WordPress independence? Is it even possible with all the stuff that people are asking for?

So I say all that, to hand the mic over back to you and say, what are your thoughts on a mirror? The answer is yes. Click.

And when, when I tweeted my thread the other day, it was really about the kind of the top down approach to this, where it's, it's not necessarily how you build it, but why you build it, because doing this properly isn't about a marketplace, it's about power and power doesn't belong to the person who forks the software.

But rather to those that forked the community and a marketplace that does this effectively and has the right, let's say, has the right, marketplace slash community around, extensions, plugins, themes, Premium functionality, potentially, giving people credibility and authority for various work they do. So you have profiles, that can start leading into, premium mechanics in terms of getting paid.

If you're various, if you have pro, upgrades and things like that available to you, because obviously you're a lot closer to the customer. a platform like that can lead to that. can, can act as organic acquisition, WP engine does spend a lot of money on paid search. so, you know, part of this can offset, and this is not really only about, WP engine in this regard, you know, there's various players, even wordpress. com, you know, created their own marketplace.

They've, they've brought these pieces in and they're able to create a better customer journey for some of these customers that only know wordpress. com, instead of having to, you know, faff around with going on. org, how does this work and how does that work? This is kind of the challenge with this whole ecosystem. and then the sort of other, challenge to all of this is even if you go ahead and do all these things to what end, are you trying to create a wp.

org, pure competitor, or are you trying to service specific verticals, out there? So if you go on Wix or you go on Squarespace, Guaranteed to go after hairdressers, anything with booking appointments and all that. Like they, they have crafted a journey for that, that this is their strategic goal, is to take on as much revenue or as much share of the revenue you generate on, on your websites for your SMB, for your business, so that they can be a part of that.

Now, likewise, Can you know, something like WP engine do something like that too? It's quite far for them. They don't, they don't promote themselves as going after any vertical or niche. I guess the closest thing would be flywheel, which goes after designers. So potentially you have an MVP there that has a lot of premium solutions, that are just added on to, the, the flywheel subscription every month, potentially to taking on transactions at some point, whatever that may be.

you could easily see a world, I guess, come together like that. But the question is, in my mind is, are you trying, which customer segment are you going after? And you know, to what end, because what WP Engine has achieved probably in my mind, even with the 400 million, contribution or not is they've probably done very well at the customer journey of WordPress hosting.

and WordPress hosting, whatever that may be, and maybe have even reduced churn for the overall ecosystem by providing a better experience there. so what, what comes next to, to what end would you create a marketplace? Is it to capitalize on the webmaster, the web builder, or is it the business owner?

You can either look at that as altruistic and be able to like spend all this money, but we just don't know what is involved there, like what that infrastructure looks like. I saw somebody that was Actively cloning it. I saw a tweet fly by where they were at like 600 gigs of like X amount of percentage cloned and just the sheer size of this repo, never mind the traffic hitting it, like the costs are pretty staggering.

I'd imagine for just a one year of maintenance, let alone like sustaining it infinitely, you have a thought on like what The size of that infrastructure and what that would run, somebody to independently No idea. That's not my world. Yeah. Obviously,

Then we had the C panel hosting. Now we have to sort of managed where you have a nice UI, you have staging, you have all these things. and now we really need more solutions than tools because we're just kind of there and this whole note, no code. Movement is obviously working for a company like Wix that is able to push over a billion in revenue.

It was either that or maybe he knew they were going to do something like a cloned repo and create their own marketplace and he didn't like that. Or they were going IPO and he was like, there's no way you're doing IPO without me doing it first, so I'm going to put you on blast here. There had to be something happening there. Years ago, I, I theorized that, HubSpot would buy WP Engine. I I thought the HubSpot would be a great, oh, she liked

They're going to launch a marketplace and it's going to be vendor lock in for their stuff. And I think maybe Matt thrust this on to us a little bit faster. Like, this could be something bad that we don't realize now. We're all cheering for WP Engine to, like, save the day. And then, like, a year from now, we might be like, Holy shit, they built a marketplace that people can't leave. Or get software from if they went to GoDaddy or another host. That's my question.

Theory on this stuff any thoughts on like what happens to these marketplaces for players who can support it like a WP engine

so if the, you know, if you really go deep into a marketplace, you probably really need to know what your customer journeys are, who your audiences are, what the outcomes are.

it's that that's, to me, that's almost expanding the market as opposed cannibalizing it, I'd say the more altruistic side of, you know, this discussion is, I wish that, you know, coming back to the very beginning of WordPress for humanity, everything, I guess I wish that hyper profitable companies would see this opportunity or rather privilege, to be part of something greater, to be involved in the discussions, be thought leaders themselves, because the world is just in a challenging spot and,

you Open source projects like WordPress do their part in supporting a better future for all. and if WP engine would be a larger part of this, I think it would be a net positive regardless of, you know, where marketplace aspirations go and what they end up doing. it's, yeah, I, I don't know how much of automatic jetpack competes with WP engines, business stuff. You know, WordPress VIP doesn't compete with lower tier Bluehost things.

There's, there's just a lot of market to go after, if things are done properly and in many places, WordPress doesn't necessarily need to be the end solution. It can be a hybrid where it's part of the solution, but it's not necessarily the thing at the forefront.

I'm all in, I'm going to clone three terabytes and I got plenty of Bitcoin to power this thing for the next couple of years. how does momentum happen? Like, how does that even pause? How was it even possible from your perspective?

And if they did a certain level of activity on their platform too, those tokens would get released and all that. And it was good money. and it gave them enough time to play around and potentially like the new platform more. so I, I think, you know, these kind of hostile takeovers, which is what you're asking about. I, I think has to come down to. Two things, money or attention. And attention probably ultimately leads to Still ego or money.

so it's going to be, it's going to be pretty primal things, I think.

so. credit where it's due. you know, does that mean that it's a pass on everything for the future? Not necessarily. I think it's, you know, it should be a discussion. I think, you know, we're at the size where there's a lot of smart minds inside the community. you know, Yoast wrote about it. He's, you know, clearly has a lot of good ideas. There was a project that Morton had put together on WP Governance, that was, you know, really, really good.

So there's a lot of ingredients out there, I, I, I think that bring us to the next level. and being able to try and pull those together in a way that is, is almost like the, the, the new layer of community for such a large project, I, I think would be very beneficial to its longevity.

Yeah, I'm really hoping I was really hoping then yesterday I saw Matt and in the WP builds live chat, but I was really hoping out of this we we could get more clarity on five for the future and what contribution means and like how we can play with that because I love the concept from a slogan from a marketing perspective and for like encouraging people look 5 percent of whatever it is you do. Let's put it back into WordPress and let's get this thing going.

Yeah. But then I saw a man on a live stream and he was, people were asking like, so what does contribution means? And he says, whatever's in your heart. Well, shit. Like I need a number, man, 40 hours a week. Yeah. Like I need a number and I, and I hope we can get to get back to some clarity around that because ultimately we need that direction. So that we don't have this ambiguity of like, am I going to piss you off? Is this enough? Are my do, am I doing the right thing?

Cause I think largely people won't mind the whole five of the future thing. It just needs more clarity moving forward.

And you're kind of waiting for the off season to be able to, you know, bring all the pieces back together so that you can once again, play another season, but do so with rules that benefit all.

I think Another thing that comes out of this is now all web hosts are sort of like, Oh shit, I, I gotta be careful of how I phrase WordPress and or where's that license thing? Like, how can I get that so I don't get in trouble? Like, what, what's the ramifications for the web hosting industry you think moving forward after this? Are you waiting to see what happens or do you think people are already making, making decisions moving forward?

that's probably been my favorite posts on everything, but just because he's always clarified what means what, and that's been extremely beneficial to me. but yeah, it's, I, I, I don't like, I, I, it comes back to clarity and I think the hosts are absolutely looking for that. and you know, wondering what does this mean for them?

I'm guessing they're probably looking at their own stuff, their own product names and, you you know, doing a bit of an internal audit, to see, you know, have we misstepped anywhere? we don't want to get caught out on this. I, that would be my gut feeling. but you know, every, the whole center stage right now is occupied by WP Engine who haven't said much themselves, which is obviously quite interesting.

And I don't know how to phrase this, but it's also like things like this that was posted yesterday. The future of the social web is in good hands. Social media in its current form broke and chaotic. A new organization is the Social Web Foundation aims to change that. and Automatic is, part of that, along with a bunch of other, companies and brands that are behind this. So, I think when monies go into Automatic, they're a good steward for the open web. Quite a

When I do see things like Automattic is doing, aside from WordPress, that are cool things for the open web. So, will all the money go to WordPress? I don't know. I think a good chunk of it will. But also, Automattic does some other stuff where that money is going, which is also benefiting, WordPress. Yeah,

It would not only be, quite a large volume, but also very diverse activities. So it's not necessarily just about throwing money at one thing, but also experimenting with different topics, areas, experimenting with different things, not always succeeding, and, you know, as, as you say, I think they're a good steward in that regard.

I started writing it and one of the things I was saying was automatic is just going to strip out everything that is a distraction products like simple note, which I love. You don't need it anymore. Pocketcast. Love it. Use it every single day as my podcast app. Automatic shouldn't focus it on anymore. Automatic should triple, quadruple all the resources into WordPress. That is the focus. Not even Tumblr, man. I mean, I love the idea of Tumblr and WordPress. Get it out of here. Right?

Anything that isn't directly WordPress, get it out. We need the focus on WordPress. You know, because they do so much. And, I think hyper focus is still gonna happen. Maybe this is that slight direction where we're gonna start to see commercial land of WordPress focused, excuse me, commercial land of automatic hyper focused on, on revenues and growth, for WordPress sake. And I think that's this Band Aid moment. Rip the Band Aid off moment for me anyway. Any closing thoughts from you?

He learned a lot and I think, you know, even if, even if Tumblr doesn't necessarily belong in the automatic portfolio, he still gets to bring that wealth of experience back. and I think that's extremely beneficial. So, you know, same for us at Human Made. You know, we, we experiment with different things. We, we try to go a bit too large with the DXP sort of labels, pull that back down to cloud. you live and learn. it, it's kind of the space.

You know, you're part of an expansionary market, called WordPress, and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, you know, it's 2020 or 2019, 2018, things are just slowing down a little bit, in terms of the growth curve and then Covid hits. And that's really. Put, you know, put a breaks on a break on everything you come back and work camps are half the attendance, less, you know, in terms of global attendance, global activity.

so I think it's a humbling experience for all of us to, you know, see what's in a portfolio, what makes sense, how do we go to market? because WordPress overall WordPress, numbers can decline whilst parts of the market can grow. And that's, you know, absolutely the approach that we take with parts of enterprise.