What’s Disappearing from WordPress?

He has no idea how the code is written. Like he has 10 employees. None of them know what the code is. And I'm just like, and and he, he was upfront in the media, he's like. If something happens, I have no way to get this back. Like, there's no backups. Like, like he doesn't know what he's doing. He's got 10 employees and customers paying him. I was just like, this is

And then you run into people that are growing businesses with customers and revenue, and you're, and they're like, well, my MRR is, and they're talking all this, you know, entrepreneur speak. And they outwardly appear to be doing very well and have no clue what they're doing.

Design, you know what I mean? Like, like if someone shows me a website and it's got a really bad representation for white space or glaring color, that should not be on a page. Or, we talked about accessibility last week, right? So, so maybe I'll see something of, oh, well that's not accessible, that's a, there's not enough, variance in the color from the background to the text. And so when I have those conversations, I realize, oh, I am, I am a designer. I just.

Choose not to soak up my time in that space. That is completely different than, I don't know what the heck I'm doing at all, but I run the company and I try to make a gazillion dollars at this thing because sooner or later I. The cat's out of the bag. You know, people recognize you don't know what you're doing and they've given you their money.

So now, you know, and especially in the world of Stripe, I don't know if you've ever had anyone say, I want my money back with Stripe, or one of these tools that we Sure. Mm-hmm. There's not a, there's not a whole lot of, Flexibility in the argument. Right, right, right. Like you wake up one day and the money's gone and you go, Hey, Mr. Stripe, what happened to my money? And then, well, the customer said they weren't happy. Well, well, let me show you why they should be happy. You know?

And then you gotta spend eight hours. Yeah. Documenting every conversation you ever had with the customer to justify that you are correct in hopes of getting some of your money back. so I'm really curious as to where these people are gonna go that don't know what the heck they're doing. Well, I think,

And, and frankly, some of 'em were nonprofits, that, that were doing real work in the community and had investors and you know, like had people and you go like, and they're doing great work, great things, you know, like you go like. I don't know. It was foreign to me because they took no responsibility. Like, like future facing responsibility?

What is it that I'm, you know, like

So they jumped into, you know, Claude and Cursor and all these things and, and they started rebuilding this project on a different platform. So they were, they were. They had a project that would worked well, but was getting dated, and they wanted to update that platform on something completely new. They, they wanted to update that platform on something completely new. My computer just glitched, so if I'm gone, you're

He said that AI had built for him this thing, but he, he compared it to like, maybe he's, maybe he's the, the lead coder on the project and he's got eight to 10 junior coders underneath him, and he said it was like. You locked all the coders in soundproof rooms by themselves instead of like in a cubicle farm. Mm-hmm. Where they could talk to each other. Yeah. He said nothing related to the other thing. And even though it forcibly performed a function, it didn't do it effectively.

And he had a lot of like, just like code burden, like there was just junk everywhere. And he said, so. because I didn't just trash it, but I'm reworking it now from the perspective of it's not about saving time, it's about doing it right and it's about having a quality product and something that your customers will enjoy downstream. Because if you have AI build all that stuff, and it's, this is where I'm just in my head.

'cause we, we talked about this very slightly an episode or two ago about AI and, and this thing with customers thinking, I'll just have AI make me a plugin. Who updates that, who, who comes along and says, let me fix that for you. Or, 'cause people think it's easy. Like now, you know, in the day of like, this is WordPress 6.8, great, you're on WordPress 6.8, you've made a plugin.

Boom. WordPress 9.0 rolls out in 2027 and all of a sudden your website gives you a big white screen, says critical error. What are you gonna do? Just turn off your custom cool plugin or try and hire a guy like me to fix it. 'cause I don't wanna fix it.

A ton of different AI tools together, and I get to pick and choose what I wanna play with, and, but I'm using very specific words like I play with, I learn about, I, I don't go like blindly into something and say, build me something amazing and then put it up for sale for a hundred dollars a month.

Just build me an app on whatever technology you want, add stripe to it. you know, like partition it, multi-tenant, you know, blah, blah, blah. I, who knows, maybe I would have a fully functioning app. It was the tying back to WordPress that was slowing me down. And by the way, AI was not very helpful with getting that connection going. So I had a, a window open with chat. GPT. And then the window opened with Versel and, I'm, so, I would like go to chat pt. I'm like, Versal said this.

What do you think's going on with my WordPress site? And I asked, because Versal doesn't know WordPress. I guess I was asking it stuff. And it's like, no, I don't know WordPress. Like,

And so like six months ago, a girl from high school came and she's like, I'm not really into this WordPress thing. I like to code.

Like AI is not gonna run your food truck for you, right? You're still gonna have to cook the sandwiches. So I, I just. The, the impression, the branding, the media is pushing AI in this weird way that people outside the industry are coming in with these very strange notions about what they're gonna accomplish.

I. But yeah, I don't, I've been wondering if like the WordPress meetups are, are just kind of dead. at least the local ones. I did go to Word Camp last year and I spoke at it in We Minneapolis. it's hard to say. I, it's hard. I'm kind of like, I don't, I was only there for a short while, so I didn't get the full, just Do you go to any, word camps or other meetups or, I.

What freaked me out about going to the, to the meetup in Phoenix was it was. There was a ton of people that were like, oh, I just have a WordPress website of my own and I wanted to see what this was about, you know? And I was like, that is bizarre. 'cause I didn't think, I didn't think that's who was coming. but I ran into a bunch of site owners that were not WordPress people. They were, they were site owners. and I just really felt the vibe in Phoenix was like tremendous.

And so like there's, there's a guy that lives in Idaho that is in the San Francisco meetup, the San Diego Meetup, the. Inland Empire Meetup. You know, he's, he's, he's obviously attending meetups every day. but there's, there's a ton of people like that that go to a bunch of virtual. WordPress meetups and it gives 'em this false energy, like it's that region, but it's not, it's, it's like all these same 10 people that know each other that jump on all these calls.

Hmm. But what I really, really loved about that particular setup, that was the Inland Empire one, run by, various, I think is his name. And, the people would come in with websites. They owned a website, and that meetup would not stop until they solved whatever that person's problem was. I. It was cool. Someone would come in like, oh, I can't get this form to work. Oh, well, what form tool are you using? And then 10 people you know when the space start, you know?

brainstorming this thing and they would just fix it. Or my website has a critical error. Well, what's your host? Sign in. Share a screen. Let's get to work. Mm-hmm. You know, and that part was really cool. Like, that was, that was the vibe you were talking about. Like, let's build something. Yeah. Like let's build some, let's fix something. And it was really cool watching some seasoned old dudes fix some stuff.

You just used some other platform and, and built out your idea. Right. I will tell you, I got curious. I loaded up Drupal to see how much it's changed in the last few years. I couldn't wait to get out of that screen. I was like, I'm running back to WordPress. I don't like this at all. you know, 'cause I had done Drupal before. I had done Jula.

And there's a guy in town here who pitched me. he built an app probably with no-code as my 'cause He is part, well, a partner at the no-code meetup, but he bought an app. No, he didn't buy an app. He built an app. He had a vision for what the app should do, and I think he built it. and the way he pitched it is this. He goes, and this resonated with me, by the way.

'cause like I. I mean, how many times have you been pitched social media marketing and you're just like, Ugh, well this is how I respond. I don't know about you. Like, no, thank you. Like, that's my, my gut reaction is like, no, thank you. But, and the reason it's no, thank you is 'cause like the metric for success for social media people is imp what's the word? It's not impressions. It's something worse than impressions. Like the conversions. No, no, no, no, no, no. Way worse than conversions.

There's like conversions, then impressions, and then like, like something less than views, interactions or something. oh. But anyway, I'm always like, first of all, it's like just to climb the social media ladder, you have to define what is an interaction, what am I paying for? I. So this guy pitches me this LinkedIn thing, and the gist of it is this. He's like, look, our goal is gonna be to get you phone calls with qualified leads.

That's kind of the, the gist, like, so we're gonna start with the end in mind, and all it is is building your, He built a tool that kind of makes this quicker. But it's all stuff you could do with the click of the mouse. But, he basically, right, let's, right now, let's say I have 2000 friends on LinkedIn. He's like, we're gonna try to get you up to 3000, then 4,000 and we're gonna start where you live and we're gonna grow, grow, grow. And you're gonna annoy the heck outta some people.

'cause you're gonna be like the, what the software does, is it like. Once they say, yeah, let's connect, it starts sending them my program of like a series of stuff. and the goal is to get a phone call at some point for a sales call. But, I. But the idea is once you build the network, then you start doing webinars on LinkedIn live. And so let's say now I have 5,000 people, the invitations on LinkedIn come into a, they come in in a different way.

It's not like you're getting spammed an email, it's just kind of however it is, it's different. Yeah. That's what I'm told. and the gist of it's, I'm gonna do the same webinar every week. For the next 172 weeks. And, maybe he's, he's like, look, I've done it. It works. You're gonna get five people at every webinar. There's gonna be like one person that attends six in a row, and then that person will call you and like, so that's the whole thing. It's very. There's nothing tricky about it.

but that's it. And the goal is to sell. If I can sell one more a month on average, like, yeah, exactly. But to me it made sense. Like I go compared to all everything else, I'm being pitched. I go, eh,

And so I went through my account and people that I had connected with that I never talked to, never interacted with, never shared a message with. I just disconnected. And you know what? They never missed me anyway. Right? So then I drove it down to like 1100 connections or something. And then I used a tool that would be like, view their, so search people out by basic search criteria in that search criteria.

View their profile, like one or two of their posts, send them a connection request, send them a message. to me the key to the messaging in LinkedIn is to use it like text messaging. Very brief, very easy and non-salesy. I don't send them any. appointment links or anything like that up front. I just say, Hey, it's great to connect. If you're up for an icebreaker call, let me know. Boom. Like, that's it.

And then amazingly, a lot of people are curious 'cause then they're like, this guy didn't pitch me a dang thing. What is he, what, what is this about? And I tell 'em, I just like to get to know everybody I'm connected to and it goes somewhere great. If it doesn't go anywhere, that's fine too. If turns out you have five friends I should be talking to instead of you. Just put me in touch with those five friends. and that works.

And so I will tell you, I got up to 10,000 connections pretty quick and that turned into a nightmare, Toby. So, so I turned everything off for a long time, and then I had to kinda let the spam wave die down because my inbox was full of spam from LinkedIn. Hmm. So I had to kind of let that die down a little bit. And then I just kind of slowly reengaged at a, at a much more organic pace.

I just wanna know if you're a human being, I wanna chat with or not. And apparently you're not because all you wanna do is sell me something in my dm, so I don't wanna be a part of your business anyway.

He was like, starts getting death threats in return. Return. One more time. I'll kill you. Exactly. I will come there. I will chop off your leg. That I will come after your children, you know, like, but I think like.

The goal is isn't to like have the most efficient, this is my opinion, like, like with a process like this, like let's say I can figure out how, let's say I figure out that it's generating leads, then I have to figure out, okay, I can't be in my inbox all day, so I might need to hire someone to like go through my inbox then, and it becomes more of like. That's just part of my business process.

I encourage people to check it out, but it's it was my experience and I thought, well, if I can go from 2000 to 10,000 connections on, on LinkedIn, I can show other people how to do it. But, it's interesting because now you can go to 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. That's a pretty cool thing of that platform. But I had to really sit back and go, do I want 30,000 connections on LinkedIn?

the way that I grew my account, this sounds crazy, but I mean, I have literally spoken to probably 6,500 or 7,000 of the 10,000 connections.

Have you pursued, you know, you could do, like, LinkedIn now has classes, LinkedIn learning and apparently a friend told me like, yeah, you can like sign up and teach a class at LinkedIn Learning. And I was like, what? there's Minneapolis. Minneapolis has community ad and then, or you can like just spend your own LinkedIn does live streaming. Like I'm gonna be doing YouTube. Have you seen anyone do this or have you done any of this stuff? Or you, or, let me ask the question differently.

Do you ever speak in town, like at a Yes. How do you get

the thing that I found though is that paid speaking gigs, you know, the ones that make mortgage payments and car payments and things, they're not as easy to come by as people think they are. You know, you gotta be really good looking or really funny or really popular from some other source. I think. So, and I also have this weird thing where I, I really like to pay it forward with younger audiences. And so I really like, like the young, like the early twenties groups.

I like the, I like the vibe. So, so I speak at the community college, the high school here in town. I have a big background in automotive and motorcycles and marine. So I talk at the STEM and CTE programs at the high school and college. And then I also volunteer with the college age group at church just because.

I like to pay it forward that way, but then you'll hear the, there's a pretty consistent theme in all of that, and that is that none of those things really put money in my bank account, you know? And so then, I've had a couple, I spoke for Marine Max, and this is a weird one. I. Marine Max is like the biggest boat retailer in the country. And they said, Hey, we're gonna be at the show in Las Vegas and we'd like to hire you as a speaker.

And then I said, well, okay, yeah, I charge this much for a daily rate plus travel. And they said Sold. Right. Which is the sure sign that that number's way too low. Mm-hmm. In the Harley Davidson space, I know of one guy, he charges $10,000 a day plus travel and he gets two suites on the top floor of every hotel. He stays in one for him and one for his wife. And they continue to hire him to do that. And I think to myself, he can't be that good at it.

when I worked for another company in the power sports world, you guys could look at my LinkedIn to figure out who this might be. Here I was a certified speaker on staff in leadership and they hired some lady and paid her 10 grand for the afternoon to come and talk to us about leadership. And I was like, hello, you pay me a salary. I work here. I could run this workshop. I. But these big companies, they wanna bring in a strange face. They, they want to, they want to pass the liability off.

They don't want someone internal to do things. And so that was hard for me to come to grips with. So then I had to come down to, well then how do I market myself? I put myself down as a speaker on my personal website. I joined a thing called Gig Salad, which helps you find speaking gigs. But I think Toby, I, people are gonna tell me my answer's wrong, but I think you still need.

Like a Gary Vaynerchuk would say, you need to put your best stuff out first, free and get a couple of samples and, and get a couple of, a couple of recordings. Couple, couple, live action photos from, from an event. And then you got something to market. you didn't mention book, write a book. Oh, I did write books, but that's, so I wrote a book on leadership ta and I wrote a book on, how to run a better service department in the automotive and power sports space.

That book is what changed the total direction of the success I had in the space. But that's, I didn't go to college so. Like, some people could say, you know, well, I graduated from Yale, or I graduated from Harvard and I did this and I did that. Well, I, I don't have that to say so, so now I say, well, after I published that book in the automotive space, then people go, he published a book, right? He's so smart.

And then, two things, and, and these are like secrets I tell people all the time, it's not a secret. as soon as you publish a book, people stop asking where you went to school. The other thing is, as soon as you. Start your own agency or start your own business. Nobody cares about where you went to school or how you got trained. All they care about is what services can you provide. Will it be done on time and how much will it cost? Nobody.

After I started Manano Nomas, nobody has ever asked me, how did you train yourself to do all this? Like, right, doesn't matter. This is what I do. This is how long it's gonna take, it's how much it's gonna cost you. And no one's asked me about backing that up since, so maybe that's why those no-code SAS guys get ahead because they go. Yeah, you got a pain point. I got a solution. It's gonna cost you this much.

The, like I said, I just built something the other day and here's where it got caught up. It had like a mostly functioning, finally I got it pulling in the rest API from a headless WordPress. And then I was like, okay, add a search box. And it like went berserk, broke it, and I went through like 10 iterations trying to fix it. And finally I was like, just roll back to 10 versions ago. 'cause we're not gonna do a search today.

And I was like, I. Okay. And I'm thinking probably take you 20 minutes. dude, I'm, I'm so embarrassed. I was like, display. None this, Nope. Display none. Not sure that display none. Yeah. Let try this class name. And I was trying everything that I could think of. And it wasn't working. It wasn't working. It wasn't working. And then. I tried, oh, let's, let's try this. I think they call 'em variables, but I called it important, you know? Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Because I kept looking at the code and the chrome inspector and I'm going, it keeps saying, like, when I say display none, it keeps crossing it out like I'm not doing it. Yep. I'm like, I'm telling you to do it. I am telling you to do this. And, it took a lot more than 20 minutes Uhhuh, and I couldn't charge her the 20. Right. I couldn't charge her my real time. Newsflash for people that are listening. you shouldn't charge your customers for the time that you are educating yourself.

At least I don't think so. so I charge like real time, right? But now I'm like, now I'm going negative. Right now I'm going negative, trying to figure this thing out. So I put in the, the important and all of a sudden one thing went away, but the other thing didn't go away. But they didn't really care about the other thing, so I was like, good enough. Right, right. Good enough. Boom. we're done here.

But that's like, I. Here we are talking about AI and no code and, and like I'm not a coding genius, right? I'm jumping into someone else's website. Some, something someone else built. I got a theme I'm not familiar with. I'm trying all the tricks I do with Sky Pilot and with bricks and with, and nothing. I'm putting in works and I don't know why the theme's disregarding everything I'm saying to do. And I go, you know, exclamation point important and then it boom. It works.

how many people are gonna know that, right? Or how many people are gonna go into AI and say, give me some custom CSS to make this disappear from my screen. And then it's gonna say, put this in. Well, that's not gonna work. Okay, well then put this in. Right? Yeah. It's not gonna work.

It, it's incapable of saying no. Like, yeah.

I do a show with Lifter, LMS, I do a show with WP Tonic. I have my own podcast called Manana. Nomas. Like people know who I am. So why did you try 17 other choices before ringing me up or sending me an email asking for help? And it's 'cause they assume I'm at like $600 an hour for an agency rate or something. Right. And it's just not true. 'cause you and I both know we, you and I, we can't run our agencies at those rates and think we're gonna keep clients.

It is what it is, and it comes out to like $80 an hour to have something done. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's, that's a smoking hot deal. Jump on there, get something handled.

I mean, I just don't because it, it just doesn't f the mentality of the client doesn't fit the mentality, what I'm looking for as an agency. So I kind of try and stay away from that. But, I've also noticed. So I had a client I was doing a big project for, and they were supposed to supply a ton of content. And I said, okay, great. You know, so where's this content at? 'cause I've built it. So where's your content? And the content wasn't coming. Wasn't coming, wasn't coming.

And finally I was like, you said you had content. Where's your content? Like I was, you know, you, because everything I do that's, you said it based on a calendar. You know, I, I tell people we have deadlines. I have a deadline. And newsflash, you have a deadline. You're the customer, but you still have a deadline. Yep. And, They were way, and they, then they finally confessed, oh, I've got this person, you know, writing the course for me that I hired from Fiverr.

And when I got, it was a series of PDFs they wanted me to put into their website as as courses and lessons. I said, I can't even put this stuff on your website. I, in good conscience, I can't do this. I've already edited for free the first three lessons I said, but this content is so poor. Yeah, unless you're paying me, I cannot continue to edit this work, but I cannot put my name on this anywhere.

Like you, I can't have website powered by Ana Nomas or any of that on your project because yeah, this content is so horrible. It's interesting.