Thinking Outside of the WordPress Box

so for the uninitiated, what does Tessa do these days?

We don't really want to talk to salespeople. We don't want to talk to marketing people. So we got to find, you've got to find those people where they're at and really, truly engage in that authentic way. So it's kind of a TLDR, but, yeah. Yeah.

you know, with X percent being, like, the real, you know, hardcore developer. And this is a role that I see, you know, Automatic constantly hiring for, especially now in WooCommerce. I've seen a lot of their job postings coming up with, with pushing into that space. A lot of hosting companies as well with developer relations. It's, it's important. It's like, you know, customer service for your product. At the end of the day, it's like, how do I reach these folks?

And, you know, I like to think of it as, is it just because you can speak developer ish? Is that, like, the essence of this role? Because that's what it is for me, but is that the essence of DevRel in your world?

and that it's still sort of this like audience of people that are building things, right. They might not be the. Hardcore quote unquote developers, right. That we might be thinking of, but there's still developers on the list. They're like builders, right? They're bringing those things together. They're creating something. And I think when you're that, that type of personality, it just works when someone authentically engages with you.

and to actually kind of take that a step further, I've, I believe that if all companies started operating in the way that DevRel operates, where we get to know our audience and we actually. And authentically engage in them where they're at. I think everyone would find a lot of growth from that tactic. And so, yeah, fundamentally, I think that it's, it's really about getting down there and like hanging out with those users and like, who doesn't want that for, from a company, you know?

And I really started to see more dev rel stuff pop up, right. You know, be this community liaison, really know the product. It sounds great. And I'm sure, just like if you made a job posting for a content marketer, a gazillion people will come through the doors looking for this. How does one stand out? How does one really take this job serious where it's not just show up at word camps and high five each other and eat some cupcakes? What does it really take to be in this profession?

Professionally.

It was a lot of eating cupcakes and hanging with your friends and it does work and it can work, right? But at the end of the day, it only works for so long and if you're actually not focused and targeted and being really strategic about where you're eating those cupcakes, that value isn't going to be there and so I think that I feel is the true essence of DevRel is actually being that voice, right? You're that voice for the company. And it's not that you're the only voice for the company.

Of course, there are many people inside of a company that should and could be a voice for a company, but you are that voice with that user base that you are focused on. Right. And so you're out there, you're advocating for the company, you're learning, you're absorbing, you're hanging with the peers. Ideally, they're falling into that very perfect target audience that your company is looking for. and you're bringing everything that you're learning back to the company.

And I think that there's often that, that gap or that void where the insights aren't being brought back to the company so that we can continually improve what marketing is working, what sales tactics will work, what products. You know, feature, should we pivot to, should we bring in, what are we not considering? Right. and so I think a really good Devereux program, although yes, lovely job, I've had it for the last 10 years. It can be really beautiful.

It also is a job where like you are tasked with driving some sort of objective or some sort of results. Right. And those results need to be clear and the company needs to see that. And so that kind of speaks to sort of the, the COVID trends we were seeing in which Devereux was created and that. That impact was just not as visible as it needed to be.

Which It's very hard to like quantify that to your boss,

And we have a tight group of people and I can stay connected to these people. But I can, I can only imagine that that might be difficult. So, on the exterior of WordPress, like other platforms, other coding tools, other technologies, is it challenging and how do you quantify that relationship part in this whole thing?

Has has been the beautiful thing in WordPress most recently. Maybe that's shifting. We'll see. but I think that, you know, when you're in these other ecosystems, it's no different, right? They're all the same. There's always, there's this, this sort of, ecosystem around anything. Right? And is this kind of like where you're, where you're asking sort of, it feels like it's easy to stay connected in a WordPress, but maybe not as easy in other, other spaces.

I was worried getting out of an ecosystem that I was so deeply tied in and so deeply, I don't want to say known, but then my connections were deep, right? they all happen. Everywhere you go, because at the end of the day, if you're the kind of person that thrives on that, you enjoy hanging out with people, you enjoy meeting people, you enjoy being a part of that ecosystem and bringing all those great insights back, you're going to find your current, no matter where you go.

it can feel scarier though, right? Because you're going into something new and you're still trying to sort of. Forge that in, but, it's actually interesting. I've been pulling together sort of these just one off developer events where I'm like, Hey, just come hang out because I'm realizing how much we like deeply miss the community driven events and engagement. and so, I think honestly, when you're looking at other ecosystems, it's no different, right?

It's just like, how do we start to dive into that ecosystem? Who's. Who are the players in there? And right. How do we just put ourself out there? And I think that's the biggest thing, right? And I think that's why, like, you're so great at your job and why you are so, you know, able to do like, what is like such a fun quote unquote job, right? Is this because you're able to go out there, build those relationships, understand what businesses need from all of your experience, right.

And be able to bring that forward. And I think if anyone has those chops or those, you know, in interests in doing so, right. Like you're going to have that interest, no matter what ecosystem you're in.

I can imagine that's like, you know, a WordPress freelancer going, I'm going to go build a website for a restaurant because their website is terrible. But then you find out that restaurant website owners are just way too busy. They don't have the budget. They don't have the technical understanding. So it's a bad fit for a client. it looks like. Oh, obvious low hanging fruit. And then you get there and it's like, Oh, this is just a rotten apple. This is not going to help.

is that the same particular challenge that you might face when you're trying to find customers that just don't get community?

So different. So coming into, I would say sort of middle. Stage startup into enterprise and sort of beyond. Absolutely. There's like a, there is definitely a shift that you have to start to almost like forge with them around, Hey, here's why developer relations is valuable and sometimes they have technical founders, right? They, they, they're years from it because they're established companies. Right. But they, they forget. They like forget what it's like to be a developer.

They forget what it's like to sort of be this user. That's like, yeah, I don't want to hang out with sales or marketing. And I kind of just want to find my crew, you know? and so, yes, however, in my scenario, I targeted my, Essentially my target audience. So I didn't have to do that work because I'm so burnt out on that work. It's something that in DevRel is very common to have to advocate for. Here's what DevRel and here's why we do it. And here's how developers think.

And it gets exhausting, right? It's like having an accountant constantly having to tell you, you have to do your taxes, you have to pay your bills, right? Like no one wants to chase down someone.

They don't really care about the technique. They just want to know what's going to be the best approach to drive that growth immediately. And so they're eager. They're, You know, they're scrappy, they're fast moving. those are my people. And so in that case, I don't have to explain it to them because they, for the most part are a lot closer to the original days of building their product. They're a lot closer to being a developer.

and now there are a lot of really great resources, out in the world that are really speaking to DevRel and why it's so valuable. And so most of them come in with some. Some understanding that developer relations and community is going to be valuable. but if they don't, it's still us talking about, Hey, you have to be where your devs are because they're not going to, they're not going to come through ads or these other technical channels, not technical, normal channels.

I was talking to, my writer, Eric Karkovac, earlier today, and we were just like, Just talking about the industry in general, and one of the things that I still see today in the WordPress world, I stumbled upon a plugin that I just found interesting, never heard about it before, but I hit the pricing page and it was the typical 47. 97, 147 for the price, and I'm like, okay. Are we still doing that in 2024? Like, are we still, that's what we're still charging these days?

We all realize we're heading into 2025, right? And like, sustainability and survivability is like, a thing, and like, making money isn't bad, and the prices should go up, because the prices of my bananas have gone up. so certainly this piece of software should go up.

Is there a thread there that you, that you see now being on the exterior of WordPress learning from all these other bigger tech, outfits, or even the startup outfits that you're working with, that you look at and say, Hey, WordPress, get, get a little bit better with this thing that you're doing, whether that's pricing or packaging or presenting to, to your end user. Is there a thread there that, that you can pull on that from your experience these days?

And so I think what's really interesting about that is that we see in WordPress, a very open source mentality type of a pricing structure, right? Which is very much what you're alluding to the, I'm just going to charge you a little bit of money. And maybe even sometimes you're getting a lifetime license, or even sometimes you're getting, you know, all the bells and whistles for 47, which, you'll never see that in big tech, right? Absolutely. We'll never see that.

And there, there is, there's good and there's bad here, right? And I think that when we look at the WordPress community and the people who are, who are the developers who are used to the open source kind of model and methodology, even in big tech, you will see them not charging as much. You will also see them giving away things for free. You will see them, you know, building big, beautiful projects with no monetary value, because that's the mission and what they want to do. However.

There's always going to be that, right? There's always going to be that open source version or that free version or that freemium version. I think that in the cases of WordPress, I think that what is happening is that folks feel like because the ones that may be vocal or the ones that they're experiencing.

Are the ones that only want to pay the 47 and this is very much where it comes into a lot of the work that I do in my business in the early part when I'm working with a client is the market research. How can we understand the value at which a tool or a product for a developer is providing and what are they willing to pay for that? Like I actually go out and talk to their target audience and I'm like, would you buy this? I don't say, would you buy this? Cause that's a horrible question.

You want to ask the question, you want to ask the question of, is there value in this for you? And if there is, how do you envision using it? Right. And then from there, there's the followup question of, okay, Hey, yeah, let's dive into actual pricing. What are you willing to pay? And I think that oftentimes WordPress. Generally, right. We'll just go with, Hey, here's what my peers are doing. But at the end of the day, WordPress is like, was it 43, 44?

I can't remember the exact percentage now that WordPress is, is hosting of the web. Imagine that like huge, big brands. I mean, we've got Coke, we've got Disney, we've got just huge brands, right? They're not. Carrying about a 47 plugin, they need the functionality that they need. Now I can't necessarily speak to Disney and exactly what plugins they need and how they build their infrastructure and how they care about that.

There's lots of great people that I know have been on your show that can, but when you think about it from that space, I think what happens in WordPress is they just get so stuck in, this is the way. This is the way this is how we price and we're always going to do a Black Friday sale, which also I just laugh about because like why Black Friday really like devs are spending money all the time. Like I just, the Black Friday thing just makes me chuckle because it is such a a constant thing.

But at the end of the day, like I'm not thinking about buying a tool on black Friday, right? I'm thinking about buying a tool when I'm in the pain point. I have that problem and I need a resolution and I'm not saving that pain point for black Friday. So it's, it's, it's interesting to me that, you know, some of the trends and things that we see in some of these open source communities versus what we see in big, in big tech, right? I could go on for a long time on this, but.

We just talked about like some of the challenges that WordPress has, but what are the challenges in your space that clients might be running into for you?

Where's the receipts? What was the value you got out of that conversation? Right. And, and years ago, we didn't see that as much. I think we, we still saw it. There's always been a scenario where people are, you know, shifting and hustling and whatever, but. and so with that, what I've actually learned is VC change. So a lot of venture capital trending and a lot of different investment trends. previously you could show traction, Hey, I've got users, I've got users.

I'm retaining users that haven't churned users who are continuing to find value. and maybe they weren't always a paid user where now those VCs are like, what's the revenue. And it isn't about adoption. It's about revenue. We want to see adoption plus revenue. and I think coming back to the conversation we just had around pricing, right, that's everything.

If you're, if you're in a space where you're looking to get funded, I know WordPress and VC funding are not always, you know, in a combination together, but should someone be thinking about that? That's definitely those trends now of like, we used to be able to just prove adoption and now we need actual, they want to see those dollar bills, y'all.

And I would say that these days you probably see half, if not less than half of that. And now you're focused on do these people actually want to. Read this stuff. Do they really want to engage with my content? And that's like the obvious thing we should have all been wanting from the beginning, but we got so caught up in like the vanity metrics and whether that's like on that money side, the money line, like you just talked about, like we just raised 50 million and it's like, great.

Are you profitable?

And there was such a push for like, help me create viral content, help me raise all this money. And you know, a lot of us on the sidelines who weren't doing that, we're going like, wait, is this the right way? Are we,

GitHub stars tells you nothing that someone was like, I might build with this one day. It doesn't mean anything. Right. And now it's like, what does that actually mean, which speaks into or sort of leans into had three trends. One was VCs and they want revenue. The second one is what I'm going to dive into here and then we'll get to the AI one. But the second trend, Is around truth, right? And I think this is more than anything we can all relate to this, especially with the election.

Everything we have going on is there's no trust anymore. And so the sort of, Oh, okay, cool. I'm going to trust what you do is gone. And it's more of like, I don't believe you. And so when, when an immediate reaction for someone is, I don't believe you and I need to validate. And it's not that they're like, Oh, I see you. And I think you're a liar. It's just more like the initial sort of, Trust that we had inside of us as has dissipated. And now we want to question everything.

and I think that makes business really, really hard, right? What used to be a little bit easier, there was an inclination. There was sort of a, a curiosity, right? And that curiosity would take you down a path. And now that curiosity needs to be pretty validated and actually pretty warranted for someone to come in and actually want to do business with you. which gosh, we could really dig out a whole bag of worms. And you start talking about trust in this regard.

Nobody wants to be outside looking at this car and they just are at odds with you immediately. Like the chances are just so slim, you know, to, to land a deal. and you're like, no, like you can trust me. I'm trying to do this. I'm trying to do right. We're not like this high pressure car sale. I want to get into car sale, but it's like not a high pressure car sales, family owned and all this other stuff. And they're just like immediately coming to war with you.

And this is, this was me in car sales, like literally 25 years ago. That's, you know, how long it's been. And, it's still, you know, the same, you still see that stuff, you know, you know, happening today. It is, it is crazy. but trust is massive,

Why did you show up and say you could do this if you can't do this job? Right? But then the other half of me is like, I get it.

Like I get why you're stressed because you're a small business and you got a gazillion things going on and you're just one person You know, and i'm always like at odds of like where I draw that line you know when i'm dealing with people and it's Yeah, I really think like one day if I ever write a book it's going to be like why everyone should be a car salesperson You know step one be a car salesman first to really learn what it's like to go through the throes of you know, one on one human

interaction in a non critical sale sales environment, like non critical meaning like this isn't life threatening thing. You have choices. you know, and, and yeah, there's a lot to lots to be learned there. And I could get on that car sales soapbox for forever too, as well.

But trust also sort of goes into this like whole AI thing, which I'm sure in your world is, you know, Disrupting it at an even faster pace than maybe even WordPress with just like so many people onboarding and starting a bit I've seen so many AI businesses doing things. I'm just like wow, there's you're doing that, too But I also have to remember is that a false floor over there? So, how do you transition into AI with with all of this stuff?

I would say about 50 percent of my clientele falls into that bucket too, where they're building something in that AI ecosystem or space. I think what's interesting about sort of the trends and what I think is funny. So before I jumped on this call, total developer thing where I was like, and you can relate to this, like, you know, referring to sort of maybe not being fully technical chops, but still like you have that ambition and desire to like build things and create things.

I was using Bolt, which I don't know if you've heard of Bolt, but there's like.

So we're like pop the first time in and you'll see what the rest of the times look like. Super great. Right. Really easy. And I'm like, that seems simple. And then I'm like, okay, let me see if bolt can do something bigger and bolder than this. So before we got on this recording, I was actually in there and I was. building out, what I do a lot of times is like, I do a lot of channel listening for my clients.

And so what that means is that there, there's a pain point that their product solves, and I'm listening for those conversations that include that pain point. So I can say, Hey client, you should go engage in this conversation. And so I wanted to build out essentially this channel discovery. I was like blown away at like it bringing in Reddit APIs and some of this other stuff. And, you know, outside of my own curiosity and things, it's very interesting to see.

and understand sort of technologically what we can start to sort of cut out and what we can't. And I think that The trends that I'm seeing in AI is that there is a lot of, you know, there's a lot of companies and leaders and, you know, the boards, the VCs, the investors, the ones pushing for the big decisions who are like cut, cut at all costs, cut people, use AI, but at the end of the day, what I'm realizing is that if you don't have sort of the.

Capabilities to validate and verify AI and what it's doing, that it is not something that you can use as a cutting out source. It's more of a supplement. So for me, it's made my role a lot more efficient. And I think for other companies, they're seeing the same. Yes, they can use AI in a developer workflow to start to build things with different AI tools. But a developer that knows what they're doing still has to validate and verify and be involved in that process to understand.

So I think that, you know, your listeners likely, are in this space of like. Oh my gosh, what should I be investing in? What should I be spending time in? How should I be leveraging it? you know, and if I can share any insights there, I think there's so many different tools and I think just taking a step back and saying, Hey, what do I do in my day to day workflow that I can potentially bring into some other solution, whether it be content, writing, ideation. Writing emails, et cetera.

but in terms of, you know, it cutting out our jobs, I think we're, I think we're years from that, but I do think that we are definitely seeing an evolution of growth where we can, we can definitely do some pretty cool things really

Yes, is it going to have the same attention and scale that Gravity Forms has now? No, because the same appreciation that I've uncovered for WordPress actually building out my own standalone React apps through Bolt and Cursor and, you know, use Bolt as like the front end ideation and then Cursor to implement the more like strategic parts of it is what I've been doing the last month or so. you know, yeah, you can build these standalone things, but that's it.

Like you're the you're the human responsible for it now you created it and if you don't know what the hell you're doing You're not gonna be able to think about what comes next in that passing moment. You've made something awesome, right? But with WordPress, you know, you would look at it and go. Oh, this thing is 20 years old. This is monolithic app It's you know, it's old. It's lethargic.

Okay, totally agree But it's like 10, 000 people plus have it touched this this This app that is running and sustaining and people are still caring about it. Your little app that you made, sure you made a wordpress with chat GPT, but it ain't going anywhere. Right? And, and it's just that, like it's done. And, you know, you're not going to sustain it. Now, eventually.

I'm sure, you know, these platforms will say turn on the sustainability, module and it will continue to think and evolve it for you, which is, is the scary part in an amazing part.

But, you know, until then, it's like you still need that human interaction for these critical parts that, you know, the, the human brain needs to, to interact with because, as powerful as it is, it's, It's, it's just not going anywhere further than where your prompt left it, I guess, if you're the uninitiated, that was a long rant, but what I wanted to get to was.

What this also has exposed to me is what I saw early on in, in the WordPress world, which is like, now I'm learning about all these frameworks, right? Next, JS, you know, React, like all this other stuff and all these little pockets of communities that exists, just like we see in WordPress, but they're like tiny little thousands of tiny little pockets of communities that exists for all this other real world coding.

And what this AI thing has done is the same thing page builders has done to WordPress because now I'm seeing it. On the outside, where people going, Well, if you don't understand how to use this stuff, You shouldn't be coding in AI, right? Which is the same thing I heard like 15 years ago, When people were like, if you're using a page builder, You don't know how to build a website, you shouldn't be doing this. And I'm like, where have I heard this before? Oh wait, I said that, 15 years ago.

To somebody who came in with like, Beaver Builder, or page, well back then, It was like page lines, or thesis theme, And you're like, you didn't do this right, All you did was buy this on ThemeForest, and launch it.

You know, until I got educated obviously and understood like how people learn and now people are learning like this with this kind of technology It's just interesting to see how humans react to maybe not gatekeeping But they're like I've put 10 years of sweat equity into this and now you just showed up and launched a react app with bolt That's not fair. Right? No real question there, but I don't know if you have like a Comment on where that world is heading

And then that all comes back to that trust, right? Is it's like, yes, we're all going to grow. We're all going to evolve and things are going to change. And there's all these other use cases.

And I think that we forget that like, we're one, we're like a one person and we're using something in the way that we're using it, but we don't think about, Oh, people who can't, you know, build something or people who don't understand how to, how to build a WordPress site without a page builder or how to build an app without AI, right?

But I think what, you know, what I think you brought a really good point to is like, you can build all these things, but just because you build it, it doesn't mean they're going to come right. And so I think that that's the point of all of this, of we can create these really great things and it's awesome. But at the day, we still have to be humans that can build a business. We still have to understand the use case. We still have to understand our target audience.

We still have to know who's willing to pay for that tool, what they're willing to pay for it, we still have to show up and do the marketing. And yes, we can hire AI to write our content, but that's not how marketing works, right? It's all these different things that go into it. And so when we build these things and they are new and they are early, there's a lack of trust coming back to that other trend, right?

And I think that when we do start to build these things, that's, that's essentially where I feel like. Both politics and AI have created this lack of trust, right? Of can we actually create things with AI that has a person behind it that is trustworthy, and utilize it in that way. So I think that's my commentary there is like through all of that, it's all, it's all been trust, right? How should we trust this?

Hmm. I question this, but what is it that we can do to bring a lot of trust to what we're, what we're doing with AI?