WordPress Marketplace in 2026 is evolving fast. Discover key trends

With Special Guest Angie Meeker, GM of OptinMonster.com + ThriveThemes.com

WordPress Marketplace in 2026 is evolving fast. Discover key trends, top plugins, and revenue shifts shaping the first half of the year.

In this insightful video, we dive into the state of the WordPress Marketplace during the first half of 2026. We analyze key trends, growth metrics, and emerging opportunities that have shaped the platform’s landscape. Whether you’re a developer, designer, or entrepreneur, understanding these developments is crucial for navigating the ecosystem.

This Week’s Sponsors

Kinta: Kinta

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.150] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back folks to the WP Tonic show. This is episode 1009. We’ve got the great pleasure of a great guest on this show. We’ve got Angie Meeker with us, GM of OptinMonster and Thrive Themes and a lot of other stuff as well. A busy lady, but she made time to be on the show. We’re going to be discussing where we find the WordPress marketplace in the first half of 2026. So Angie, would you like to just give a quick intro, a quick 10-15 second intro, and then we go into your background in a bit more detail in the main part of the show.

[00:01:04.350] – Angie Meeker

Yeah, for sure. So I, again, Angie Meeker, um, I’ve been with Awesome Motive for about, uh, it’ll be 11 years this August. And, um, I’m the currently the general manager of OptinMonster and Thrive Themes both. Thrive Themes, I took over as GM in March of last year and OptinMonster about 5 years before that. And started, we’ll talk maybe a little bit more about how we got to this point, but started in technical support with OptinMonster. And over time I’ve just grown with the company and really, one, love WordPress, two, love working at Osmotive, so, and love small businesses. So happy to talk about any and all of those things today.

[00:01:49.060] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. And I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

[00:01:55.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own a company called Mañana No Más, and we work directly with teams like WP Tonic, LifterLMS, and others.

[00:02:05.270] – Jonathan Denwood

Like I say, we’re going to be talking about everything around WordPress and a lot more in 2026. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, of the show. I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:02:21.850] – Kurt von Ahnen

Hey, running a business is tough. You shouldn’t have to worry about your website too. With Kinsta’s managed hosting for WordPress, you get lightning-fast load times, enterprise-grade security, and 24/7 expert support from real humans. Switch to Kinsta and see site speeds improve by up to 200% with effortless migrations and powerful, easy-to-use dashboard. Join over 120,000 other businesses who also trust Kinsta. Get your first month for free at kinsta.com. That’s K-I-N-S-T-A.com. Kinsta, simply better hosting.

[00:02:55.300] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back. I wanna point out we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors, plus we’ve got a curated list of the best WordPress technology. If you’re a power user, freelancer, or agency owner, you can find all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic.com. Wp-tonic.com/deals and you’ll find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re gonna get on that page. So let’s go straight into it, Angie. So, um, how did you get into the world of WordPress and also working for Awesome Motive?

[00:03:35.290] – Angie Meeker

Yeah, so, well, I’ll try to keep this as short as possible. So way back in the day, I’m talking like Dreamweaver days, Okay, that’s how long ago. Way back in the day, I was working for a church, and the church said, we need a website. And they said, can’t you build us one? And I was like, I don’t know how to build websites, but I can figure it out. So they got me a copy of Dreamweaver. And now, we’re not gonna tell the company that I— this other company that I did this. But way back in the day, uh, you could, you know, you could just inspect the source code, copy it all paste it into Dreamweaver, and then I just went and like changed out the, um, uh, you know, image links and this type of thing. And suddenly my website for my church looked very much like a very popular coffee chain at the time. But it looked good. I mean, it looked really good, but it resembled very much a coffee chain where I had kind of borrowed and learned from, um, learned from them. So that’s kind of how I got started, and that just kind of moved on from there, from ‘Hey, can you develop a website for our church?’ to eventually discovering WordPress back in the WordPress 1.0s, um, even way back before there were, uh, pages, back when there were just posts and no menus, easily maintained menus.

[00:04:50.870] – Angie Meeker

Um, and I did a website for a Crime Stoppers program here in Columbus, Ohio, and that led to other Crime Stoppers programs from around the country calling and asking, ‘Can you do one for us?’ And Just kind of one thing led to another, uh, as far as the work I was doing on my own as a freelancer or later with a small agency that I built. And somewhere along that way, the local community here in Columbus, the local WordPress community, was holding a WordCamp each year, but it was part of a podcasting meetup as well. And so eventually we split those two things and had a dedicated WordCamp. And that WordCamp, WordCamp Columbus, is actually where I ended up meeting Syed in person. So I was running our WordCamp at the time. I had known Syed kind of from around affiliate marketing and marketing in some Facebook groups. And I just knew that this is someone who is building something that’s going to be important in WordPress. So invited him to come be our keynote speaker a couple of years in a row. And this is, he was very young at the time, like maybe 18 or 19.

[00:05:59.780] – Angie Meeker

And, just formed our friendship then and kind of kept in touch. So many, many, many years later, you know, almost 10 years later after that, I had an opportunity to join Osmotive, but it was in technical support. And I said, I don’t want to do technical support forever, Syed. And he said, you won’t. Come join us now. I think I was employee number 5. He said, join us now, and I promise we’re going to build this into something big. And that’s what we’ve done. And it’s been a really a pleasure to be a part of every step of that building process along the way.

[00:06:31.310] – Jonathan Denwood

So was you— so how— so you built this site for this church and then you moved on. So was you like a small freelance agency before?

[00:06:41.030] – Angie Meeker

So at the time when I was working for the church, I was literally just the secretary for the church. So I was, I was the youth pastor on one hand and then also the secretary. And because I could just— I was good with technology, they just said, hey, can you do this thing? And As always in life, my answer is almost always, yes, probably I can do that. I’ll figure it out. And so that’s how that started. And then when WordPress came around, it was, you know, uh, it was just easier, frankly. Like, I think I started using it for blogging personally. Um, actually, I know I did because I had my friend Jimmy way back in the day. He was using, uh, what was the other one? TypePad? Is that what it was called? Type, uh, Was it right? Was it TypePad back in the day? Yeah. So he told me, you’re not a blogger, you’re not someone who could, who will blog every day. And I was like, I will show you. And so I started blogging. And then after I was blogging for a while on Blogspot, this is it, this is all coming back now, blogging on Blogspot.

[00:07:39.170] – Angie Meeker

And then WordPress came, you know, basically came out and I was like, oh, I think I’ll try WordPress. And then when they had pages especially, I was like, oh, I’m definitely moving over. So Those were, I mean, it’s such a varied path that we all find ourselves to WordPress, right? Especially if you’ve been around for a while. And once you’re, once you’re using WordPress, then you get the curiosity of how do I customize this? And that’s when you start cracking open the code and learning that way. So, yeah.

[00:08:06.710] – Jonathan Denwood

So, so you went, so did you kind of slowly grew your own business?

[00:08:13.190] – Angie Meeker

Yes. Yeah.

[00:08:13.910] – Jonathan Denwood

So, yeah.

[00:08:14.970] – Angie Meeker

Yeah, so for probably 10 years, like the whole first 10 years, I, I think of it in terms of my daughter’s life because that’s when I started basically, was when she was very little. Um, I was building sites for other people and continued to do that basically until she was almost in middle school. So almost, almost a full 10 years that I, I built sites for other people and had my own little agency and then at a point decided I didn’t want to do that anymore. And that’s when Syed and I got in touch. And that happened very quickly. There was literally a tweet where he messaged me and said, “Hey, do you want to come work for me?” And 15 minutes later, I’d interviewed with Thomas Griffin, who was the co-founder of OptinMonster. And the next day I started with them. So—

[00:08:59.020] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:09:02.380] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I’m just going to say, Angie, that this is a wonderful, nostalgic walk down yesteryear. Um, I remember getting my Macromedia Studio 2004 CDs.

[00:09:14.400] – Angie Meeker

Yes.

[00:09:15.140] – Kurt von Ahnen

And forcing myself to learn Dreamweaver and Fireworks, which I still miss to this day. Um, I’ve never mastered Photoshop like I did Fireworks. I don’t know why.

[00:09:24.820] – Angie Meeker

Right.

[00:09:25.480] – Kurt von Ahnen

Love that program. Um, and very similar pathways. I, I started doing stuff for other people. I had a job where I was working 14 hours a day that I didn’t like, and I was as a hobby building these, these sites. And I— the economy took a dip and I thought, well, I could stand around and make no money at a commission-only job I don’t like.

[00:09:44.810] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah.

[00:09:45.670] – Kurt von Ahnen

Or I could help other people launch their businesses and try and do something. Where I think you took the ball and ran with it though. It sounds like you got in the community pretty early in your journey.

[00:09:57.410] – Angie Meeker

You know what? I think that is true. And I don’t think that we knew back then what WordPress was going to become. Like, I can look back on my blog at the very, very, very early times, and, um, you know, there are blog posts in there that are like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe WordPress is 6% of the internet now. This is amazing, you know, this is incredible. I can’t believe I’m part of this thing, you know. So like, you look at it now and that seems like small potatoes, but yeah, it was really exciting. And some of those first WordCamps, um, the folks who had come to those WordCamps were people who would go on to found some of the largest, you know, companies in WordPress, really, and have some of the biggest impact in WordPress. So they were good times for sure. Yeah.

[00:10:41.280] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, that, that’s actually one of my biggest regrets is that I never learned about the community until I started working with LifterLMS, you know, 8, 10 years ago, something like that.

[00:10:50.990] – Angie Meeker

Yeah.

[00:10:51.890] – Kurt von Ahnen

So that leads to our next question then. And now you’ve got like this bevy of files to go into in your mind. But like, what are the biggest lessons that you’ve learned along the way, especially becoming general manager at Automotiv? Because it just, I mean, you go from 6% of the internet to 43% of the internet and you’re one of the, you’re part of one of the biggest companies on the ride.

[00:11:15.190] – Angie Meeker

Yeah. So I think the lesson, the most important lessons I’ve learned, they’re not really specific to WordPress or software in this specific role. Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned are, are you familiar with the book Radical Candor or the concept of radical candor? So one of the most important things that we can do as business leaders for our teams and for our leaders is to be both clear and kind at the same time. So when you’re setting your expectations for your team or you’re sharing the vision for your team, it’s not enough to just be clear. Because you can be clear and be a jerk, right, about setting your expectations and making sure that people are meeting those expectations. Or you can be kind but not clear about what you expect. But being able to be both of those things at the same time, being clear with your team about what I expect and not apologizing for it, but also being kind, that’s like the sweet spot. And it takes actually a lot of practice to do that. And there’s a lot of ways that that can go south. But that’s actually, for me, been one of the biggest lessons is how do you make sure that you are being clear about what you expect, but also doing it in a way that’s kind and not manipulative or out of anger or any of these types of things so that your team feels supported and know that you’re behind them.

[00:12:43.000] – Angie Meeker

I think that, for me, has been one of the biggest things. One of the other things that kind of immediately came to mind was something that Thomas used to say frequently that has just always stuck with me, especially being someone who started in technical support and then customer success, operations, product, GM, is that you’re never too good to be the janitor. Meaning you’re never ever, no matter what role you’re in, you’re never too good to get in and just do the work when it needs to be done. Um, and, and that’s totally true. Like, I still sometimes, if support gets really backed up, I still will jump in and help with support, or I still will get into a Facebook group and talk to customers or hop on a sales call. Like, I still will get in and code things. Like, just even recently, some of the features that are being shipped for OptinMonster were things that I physically created because I wanted to understand better how is our tooling working with AI and the pipelines that we have set up for AI and type of things. So, I think those two things together are some of the most impactful things for me is you’re never, in this role, in this specific role, you’re never too good to be the janitor because it also helps you inspect what you’re expecting.

[00:13:55.370] – Angie Meeker

Like, if you think to yourself, I’m too busy or I’m too important to get in and actually answer a support ticket anymore, then you’re going to lose touch really quickly on what’s actually happening on the ground and what customers are saying. Those are two of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned along the way.

[00:14:14.060] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I’m listening to you and Jonathan knows this about me. I have a background that’s very diverse. Lots of power sports, lots of marine, you know, working with boats. And I focus on fixed operations, which is after-sales, parts, service, all of that. And then you’re talking about a background from technical support working up, and it’s really kind of out of step with normal, right? Usually upper management comes from sales, marketing. Hey, I see you there, right? And the service people generally are the grunt, the work that gets done, but rarely patted on the back. And maybe I’m jumping a shark here, but when you can elevate your position and you have that functional background of knowing what it’s like in the trenches, I think that’s a giant, like, secret weapon.

[00:15:08.030] – Angie Meeker

I, I, I, I think you’re— I think you’re correct. Um, and I think it is one of the things that, um, I certainly have heard, um, other leaders say about me is that that experience of having worked directly with customers and kind of touching all of it, but also having the, the marketing background too, um, is a little bit of my superpower. Now, I think anyone can do that. That’s not specific to me personally or to having started in technical support, you can do that same thing if you’re a developer. You can also be a developer who is very customer-minded or a developer who goes out of the way to understand the business or the marketing side of things. And so it’s like whatever, whatever your core strength is, you can still build on that. And by doing that, you, you unlock superpowers that other people in your role wouldn’t have. And you’ll, and you’ll open up new opportunities for yourself. For sure. Like, I have seen that. I remember Ben, who is currently the president of All-in-One SEO, used to be a developer for OptinMonster. And Ben was one of those developers who was always curious.

[00:16:14.290] – Angie Meeker

He always wanted to know the business side of things too. And that has, you know, served him very well over the years for sure.

[00:16:21.740] – Kurt von Ahnen

Awesome. Jonathan, over to you.

[00:16:25.190] – Jonathan Denwood

Right. And she’s so You know, you work for a powerful entrepreneur, Saeed. That’s true, yeah. People either love him or they don’t, but that’s not, you know, he’s always been okay with me. So what are a couple of things you’ve observed that you, you’ve observed working with him that won’t say surprised you, but you, that you think have led to his success and you’ve learned by working with him?

[00:17:08.530] – Angie Meeker

Yeah. Um, so I do, first of all, I do really like working with Syed. So I report, just so everyone knows, I report directly to Syed. Um, so we get to spend, uh, a lot of good conversation together. And obviously we’ve known each other for a really long time too. I always knew that if I was going to not work for myself, Syed would be the person that I wanted to work for in WordPress. Like, I honestly can’t think of anyone else that I would really like to work for. I don’t sit around thinking, oh, well, what if I go work for this company or that company? I enjoy working with him. And part of, I think probably the primary reason that is, is because I trust him. And I trust his personal values. And that spills out into everything that he does. There’s not— I know from the decisions that happen behind the scenes that people will never hear about, that will never be made public, that when he says, “Awesome Motive is people first,” or that we labor for simplicity, or we fight for customer success, like all of these, some of the values that are Awesome Motive values, I know that he’s living those things behind the scenes with us and with customers, with the team, with partners.

[00:18:28.790] – Angie Meeker

And that goes a really long way. Like, it’s one thing if you work for a company and they say what their values are and it’s a poster on a wall, and it’s another then if they turn around and in the background, they’re not doing any of those things. Um, but I’ve seen, even for myself, I’ve seen like, uh, there were, there were people who have followed me on, on socials or know me, um, in the community may remember that there was a long period like when my mom was very sick and I was taking care of my mom. But that’s also when, um, I was kind of moving up in my career at Awesome Motive. And typically those two things are at odds with each other, especially for women. You would see that, you know, if someone has to take care of a kid and an elderly parent, typically they’ve kind of exempted themselves from the workforce, basically. Or they certainly are not going to be given more responsibility through that. But, um, Syed, I think, was able to trust me and help me trust him through that process to say, if, if I am, uh, diligent with what I’m given now and I take good care of what I’m given now, that they will help make sure that I make it through that transition with my mom, you know, safely and easily.

[00:19:41.730] – Angie Meeker

And they did, right? And that’s saying something. And it’s not normal. It’s not normal when things like that happen. It’s far too easy, especially in a tech company, to just say, you know, to find a way to work yourself out of that or to work that employee out of that. And that wasn’t the case. So I’ve seen a lot of things behind the scenes that that show me that we can trust Syed. And I think it’s why you see a lot of the largest, most respected companies in WordPress sell to Awesome Motive, because they know too that they can trust him with their baby and that he’s not gonna go destroy it, but he’s gonna be diligent with it and take care of it. And then the other thing that like, this is not a thing necessarily that people would see unless you have a chance to really talk to him frequently, is that he, and it’s not even specific to him, this is more business leaders in general, I think, but he tends to think in frameworks. I mean, he thinks about thinking in frameworks so that he doesn’t have to think so hard all the time.

[00:20:42.190] – Angie Meeker

And I’ll explain what I mean by that is that the more quickly we can learn to make decisions and the more quickly we can act on the information that we do have, because we never have perfect information. So like, how do you teach yourself to make decisions more quickly and thoroughly without having all of the information that would make a perfect decision? Well, there’s a lot of proven mental models and frameworks that can help you do that. And he is extremely disciplined at using those mental models to help make decisions. So like, one of them is if you are, if you come up against a problem and you’re trying to solve it and you need to get to the root cause of that problem. So just asking yourself, why did that happen? Then you answer that. Why did that thing happen? You answer that question. You just keep asking why and why and why until you get to the actual root of why that thing happened. And then you’re solving the right problem. But if you don’t keep asking yourself that over and over again, you’ll solve the wrong problem because you’re solving something that’s on the surface.

[00:21:39.600] – Angie Meeker

Um, same thing you can do that with, and then what? And then what if we do this? And then what happens? And then we do that, and then what happens? Or kind of inverting your thinking and asking not just like, what does success look like here, but how do we die if we do this thing? How do we die? Or, um, If what does easy look like? What if this hard thing we’re trying to do were just easy? What would that look like? And so there’s like all of these proven mental models that he’s extremely disciplined about using himself and then also helping us use and holding us accountable to use really too. So those are things you wouldn’t necessarily know, but I think they contribute to his own success and the success of Awesome Motive too.

[00:22:24.520] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, before we go for our break, I’ve got, um, additional question. Um, where do you think, you know, with automotive, with you being a general manager of, you know, of two large plugins, but a lot more than that, aren’t they? You know, they’re kind of quasar SaaS, aren’t they?

[00:22:45.250] – Angie Meeker

Yeah.

[00:22:45.740] – Jonathan Denwood

Um, where, where do you think we’re we’re finding ourselves with WordPress, the general marketplace, the general community. Where, where do you think we are in the 5th month of 2026 generally? What do you sense?

[00:23:05.280] – Angie Meeker

Yeah, um, I think that, I think overall WordPress is still in a very strong position. I think it is, um, it is naive to say that WordPress is dead or dying when WordPress still controls 46, you know, plus percent of the internet. That’s not something, that’s not an advantage that just poof goes away overnight. Now, I think AI is shaping what that looks like. And I think some of the things that we in WordPress might have considered competitors in years past, like we would say Wix is a competitor or Squarespace and these types of things. I think they are, but I think they’re having the same challenges that WordPress is having, right? Like they’re, they’re I think less concerned about how does WordPress eat into us and maybe thinking a little more about how, what happens when people just don’t need to go to a website as much. You know what I mean? Like when, when the AI overviews get people the answers that they need and the actual visit to a physical website is less important in making the sale as it has been in the past. I think so. The conversations around, um, what is kind of what’s the future of WordPress, I think are much less WordPress versus Squarespace versus Wix versus Shopify, this type of thing, and much more just a bigger picture that we’re all facing.

[00:24:34.310] – Angie Meeker

It’s not even specific to WordPress at this point, but I think WordPress is still in a very strong position. I personally think open source is going to continue to just win and win with especially with AI around, I think open source becomes only more important. And I think the people who were in WordPress for the open source are probably the people who continue to be leaders in WordPress. And the people who were here just because it was cheap or free, I think they’re not going to probably realize the full potential of WordPress as it relates to AI in the years to come. I think it is the open source piece that’s most important still.

[00:25:13.120] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think we’ve got some interesting things when we come back for the second half of the show. We’re going to be asking Angie about AI, but you’ve touched some things about open source and AI, which we can discuss in the second part of the show. So I think it’s a good time for us to go for our mid-break. We’ve got some— it’s been a fabulous discussion the first half. I think the second half is going to be of a similar quality level. So we’re going for a break, folks, and we’ll be back in a few moments.

[00:25:44.670] – Kurt von Ahnen

Updating plugins and themes shouldn’t feel risky. That’s why over 300,000 WordPress users trust WP Rollback. With just a click, you can safely roll back any plugin or theme. No manual file uploads and no downtime. And with WP Rollback Pro, you can download premium plugins and themes. Tools like Elementor, Gravity Forms, more. Track every rollback you do with detailed activity logs. Protect your workflow and take the stress out of updates. Learn more at wprollback.com.

[00:26:21.740] – Speaker 4

This podcast episode is brought to you by LifterLMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code PODCAST20. That’s PODCAST20. Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:26:59.240] – Jonathan Denwood

Coming back, folks, I want to point out If you’re looking for a great host, but a lot more, your technical partner, if you’re building a large learning, um, management system or a large community website, you’ve got that dream client, but you’re looking for a rock solid technical partner and a lot more. Why don’t you look at what WP Tonic offers? You can go over to wp-tonic.com. Wp-tonic.com/partners, and let’s build something special together. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:27:40.940] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, kind of let the cat out of the bag before the break, talking about AI and open source and stuff. You know, we had Matt Mullenweg on the show not too long ago, and he seemed to just be busting at the seams about WordPress and its interaction with AI. And, you know, we were talking about the Playground that was coming out at the time. And, and it seems like everything is moving like in a positive way in that way. Could you elaborate like on your thoughts, Angie? Like where, where do you see AI going, especially in the WordPress space? And you have any upcoming stuff, you know, in, in your folder of goodies that AI is really a key part of?

[00:28:20.290] – Angie Meeker

Yeah, so I, I think, um, I tend to agree with Matt and the— and I agree with the things that he said in that episode. Um, I think that, uh, open source, I think, continues to win with AI because it— the communities that then feed into those models give the languages kind of infinite fine-tuning, essentially, and that’s what they need. And I think when you look at The fact that Anthropic released or open-sourced the MCP protocol and Gemini released Gemma and the Gemini CLI and the agent-to-agent protocol and OpenAI with the Agents SDK and DeepSeek and this type of thing. Like, it’s very clear to me that all of the major frontier model companies, they understand the importance of when open source is important and when it’s, when it’s okay to keep something proprietary behind closed doors. And I think WordPress is just so well poised to help expand all of that. You think you have one, you have a piece of software on your site and you need to change one small thing about it. I mean, that’s always been the brilliant thing about WordPress. And now that ability to make that small change is just democratized even further by the ability to use AI to do it.

[00:29:44.990] – Angie Meeker

So I think that’s great. I do think that, um, kind of, so one of the things I did in prep for this was I wanted to understand of the plugins in the WordPress repo that are somehow using AI or have an AI feature, like, where are they categorized? What would they be categorized as? So that we can understand a little bit better, how is the WordPress community thinking about AI right now? So is it okay if I share some of that, like, breakdown? I think you guys might— interesting. So 35 to 40% of the plugins that have AI integrated into them in some way are just AI features to existing plugins like SEO plugins, form plugins, page builders, or chat. And I think that that’s important. Like that’s clearly, that’s the most visible. Those are the most visible places where AI should be inserted, I think. So it’s kind of to me like the absolute lowest hanging fruit. And I think there are people doing really great job. Core is doing doing a really great job on this. And then if we look at some of the AM brands, John Turner from SeedProd, which a lot of people might only know SeedProd as back in the day when it was just a coming soon page, but they’ve moved, they moved to being a theme builder.

[00:30:57.600] – Angie Meeker

And then now they have a whole like one prompt to a website. And that website is integrated with the Playground. So when you mentioned the Playground earlier, I think seeing that interaction between AI and the Playground and how quickly it lets you spin up new opportunities. I don’t even want to just say a new site, but how quickly it lets you spin up new opportunities and test new things. The Playground just becomes so much more important in that process. You imagine you have an agent that you want to test something for you, and you can just spin it up and have it tested on the Playground. And if it works, then you get it back into your site. It’s really exciting, I think. But OK. Majority of them are just additions to existing plugins. Then we have like, another 20% that are basically content writing and generation, which also makes sense, like write this blog post for me. Another 15% are chatbots and conversational AI, also makes a lot of sense, and you see like, companies like DocSpot absolutely kind of running away with that, right? And just doing fantastic work there. Another 8%, MCPs and infrastructure and connectors.

[00:32:08.160] – Angie Meeker

Makes a ton of sense, right? We need to get all of these things that are inside of WordPress to be able to talk to AI. So you see that, but image generation is next. Translation with AI is next. So like we just released Universally, and that part, part of what I want to talk about here is where I see some of the opportunities in WordPress. And Universally is a good example of this, and I’ll tell you why. So translations with AI is about 5% of the plugins that are in the repo right now, and then SEO metadata and spam and moderation after that. I think if you look at that, all of the stuff at the top, it’s basically content production. It’s all plugins that deal with content production. And then you start to get into things that deal with security, performance, site health, plugin conflicts, and even like conversion optimization. All of that stuff at the bottom, that’s the harder stuff to solve. Than the content production. The content production is absolutely the low-hanging fruit. It’s what the end user sees. But the biggest risk to WordPress right now and the biggest opportunities are all in those bottom things, in security and performance and site health and plugin conflicts.

[00:33:17.310] – Angie Meeker

And like, AI is incredible at all of that stuff. Yes, we know it’s great at content production. That was like straight out of the gate. We know those things. But these, these lower things, I think, is where there’s still a lot of opportunity in WordPress. So like, if you’re someone listening and you’re thinking, hey, where can I contribute? Or like, or, you know, if I, if you’re looking for business ideas, essentially, look towards some of these lower areas of security, performance, site health, CRO, and plugin conflicts, and figure out how you can help improve that situation for the end user. Because that’s not being attacked right now very much. And some of the solutions for that might look different. Like, we have translation plugins for WordPress. But when you’re running a giant site, like a lot of Awesome Motive’s sites are, or our publishers, you’ll find out really quickly, you can, your database can only hold so many translations before it absolutely dies. And so being able to figure out how do we move some of that offsite and kind of SaaSify our WordPress plugins in some ways, AI unlocks a lot of that, which then makes your site more performant.

[00:34:23.540] – Angie Meeker

So there’s a lot of opportunity, I think, within WordPress. And, you know, to depending on the product that you’re looking at at Awesome Motive, the ones I personally am responsible for. So we’ll talk about Thrive Themes. Thrive just last week finished building and releasing the API for Thrive Architect, which is their page builder and theme builder. Well, their page builder plugin that lets you design inside of AI wherever you want to be and then push that design into Architect. And we see that already, like for Gutenberg, we, there’s a lot of those flows set up already, but Architect’s its own page builder and it has its own code base. And so we had to go and, you know, build that translator basically specific to Architect. So that’s out now. I’m really excited about that. And I know Thrive customers have been asking for that already. And then on the OptinMonster side, we’re working on essentially the same thing, some other more, I think, some interesting things on Optimonster’s side because we have 12 years of data that we can work with. As a SaaS, we’ve had 12 years of data that we can work with in terms of what works and what converts well in this type of thing.

[00:35:34.630] – Angie Meeker

So I’m excited to see some of that develop over the coming months too.

[00:35:40.130] – Kurt von Ahnen

I, I kind of feel like we agree, but maybe there’s a hairline difference. Like I always thought of it as like content AI versus functional AI. Like in my mind, I always think of like functions of a site. And I think part of the, the obstacle with AI for a lot of people is, um, when we think about like chatbots and we think about like those service-oriented things.

[00:36:01.330] – Angie Meeker

Yeah.

[00:36:02.130] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think a lot of companies just plain and simple don’t have enough supporting content to feed that feature. And so everyone goes, oh, we need an AI chatbot to do our customer service, right? But then they can’t just set it loose to the whole internet to get answers to questions. They want to restrict their content, but their content’s not strong enough.

[00:36:22.550] – Angie Meeker

Yeah.

[00:36:23.180] – Kurt von Ahnen

And so we’re kind of stuck in this, um, chicken or egg kind of thing, I think, with the race to AI, because it’s, it’s— we, we, in a lot of respects, we just don’t have enough of what the AI needs to be efficient or effective. And when we don’t supply it, it kind of supplies itself and does weird things.

[00:36:41.930] – Angie Meeker

Yes. No, that’s absolutely true. And I think there, you know, I think that there, even, even for us internally, um, as we’ve added some of those features to products on the front end, essentially. So things like DocSpot and that type of thing. As we’ve added those, we’ve had to build out some of those resources ourselves, right? Or we’ve had to refine those resources, I’ll say, that it’s going to learn from to make sure that it’s delivering good results. And yeah, that’s a whole, like, that’s a whole workflow and task and project unto itself to make sure that you’re giving it enough information. You think about, and this is a part of why you hear people say like, like, AI is going to take over WordPress and everyone’s just going to go build their own stuff. Why would they ever buy another plugin when they could just go build it themselves? That’s— listen, like, is the person— is the company that sells shoes on Main Street, like, are they really gonna go build their own CMS and their own e-commerce plugin and handle compliance? And, you know, like, no, they’re not. That’s— they want to build shoes, they want to sell shoes.

[00:37:48.030] – Angie Meeker

Like, they don’t necessarily want to go and rebuild all the software. And I think because we are so insider ball and, you know, we, we understand what’s happening and what can happen. We’re so eager to go and build those things ourselves that we think, you know, everyone’s going to go and do that. And I just don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think that the end user wanting to just get a done-for-you solution is going to go away. But I do think for people who understand, like what you just said, that the AI needs good information. Like it has to have good context to work from. I think that opens up a whole nother role within WordPress of helping equip small businesses to get that information so that they can take advantage of some of the tooling that is coming, you know, available and some of the resources that are coming available. So yeah, I think you’re not wrong there for sure. You don’t, you don’t give it the right context and a lot of those things become not even useful for you for sure.

[00:38:47.200] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, for professionals in the market, we’re hitting, you know, two different messages, right? We’ve got on one hand the Kevin Geary and his tribe. You’re not a professional if you don’t build and code these things from scratch and use this awesome tool I’ve made. At two, you know, we use a separate AI-powered template building website tool, right? And like you said, you put in a prompt and you pick some pictures, you pick some colors, you pick a format. And 3 minutes later you have something you can show a client. And does that mean you’ve lost your professional touch? No, because you’re like, okay, because there’s still marketing, there’s still copy, there’s still images, there’s still formatting, there’s still global styling to address. There’s still the job, but we’re getting to market much more quickly.

[00:39:35.270] – Angie Meeker

Yeah. Yeah. I think especially for those of us who have been around for a long time, we’ve seen the tooling changes, you know what I mean? Like, it, it, remember when we didn’t even have page builders? And then when page builders came out, people were like, oh, that’s cheating. Okay, well, and now if you’re not using a page builder, it’s kind of inefficient, right? You’re almost like, why are you doing that? Why are you not using something? Even if it’s Gutenberg, it’s essentially a page builder, right? Like, why are you not building with blocks? Why are you hand coding all of that? That seems archaic at this point, right? And but also that conversation of, oh, if you’re not coding it, you know, are you really doing it? That’s been around in WordPress also for ages. You know, that’s not specific to now, but we want to use the tools that help us get to the right business outcomes most quickly and most efficiently. And if that means that we use AI to do it, great. Let’s do it.

[00:40:31.240] – Kurt von Ahnen

Nice. Well, Jonathan, over to you.

[00:40:33.540] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, there’s so many follow-up questions. I’ve got one about Five Themes. I’m not a personal friend of Shane, but he came on the podcast a couple of times and I keep in touch. He’s an interesting entrepreneur, isn’t he? He’s an interesting cat. I was— was that your observation? I didn’t know Paul that well at all, but I— and Shane, I thought he was one of the more interesting WordPress entrepreneurs that I came across. What was, what was your observation?

[00:41:08.920] – Angie Meeker

So this is interesting. So Thrive was actually acquired by Awesome Motive about 2 and a half years ago, and I wasn’t brought into it about until a year into it. So I never— I didn’t actually meet Paul and Shane, but I do know of them just because they’ve obviously been around in WordPress for so long. And I will tell you this, I think that— and I’ve always said this about Thrive, and I told the team this when I joined them as GM. I said Thrive has always had one of the most engaged communities in all of WordPress, always. And that is a direct relation to how Paul and Shane interacted with customers. They were— I, and I almost still feel this way. I think they are probably some of the most dedicated community to their founders than any other community inside of WordPress.

[00:41:57.760] – Jonathan Denwood

I mean, even more than Divi.

[00:42:01.510] – Angie Meeker

Yes, I think actually, yes. So, I mean, they are just, they absolutely loved Paul and Shane. And I think that is just a testament to the fact that number one, Paul and Shane poured their heart and their soul into Thrive Themes and they built a really great product and that they cared about their customers. I mean, they absolutely cared about the people who were using their products and that shows in the feedback from those folks. But as far as Paul and Shane themselves, I never actually got the pleasure to meet them. So I can’t really say, but They definitely, you know, everything that I have seen of them is that everything that you just said is true.

[00:42:37.630] – Jonathan Denwood

So when it comes to the AI, what’s, what’s your thoughts? Because I think Apple have been criticized quite a lot and some people say that they might buy one of the AI large learning models. Yeah, Perplexity seems to be touted. But do you think— I think, I think they’ve been quite astute really, aren’t they? Because I think a lot of people— and you saw that with OpenClaw, with everybody in that area buying Mac Minis straight away— that there’s a, there’s a possibility that people will want to run their large learning model but on their own machine. They— For sure. And I think Apple have been quite cute about, because I got, I’m not for sure, because in some ways I think the AI is a bit of a, I use a fair bit of it myself, not coding, but if I could motivate myself, I really need to get into that a little bit. But you do get the feeling that this is a bubble, but the contradictory side of it is if people was saying that’s a bubble, it normally isn’t. It’s when nobody’s saying it’s a bubble, that’s when it is a bubble.

[00:44:23.150] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, but it’s got every sign of it in a way. So do you think that there’s, there’s going to be quite a few of these companies that basically lose a lot of money for their investors? Basically.

[00:44:39.120] – Angie Meeker

That’s a really good question. I think a lot of the, the, um, frontier model companies, they’re not yet profitable. They— I think they will be, but they’re not yet profitable. So in terms of losing money for their shareholders, you see some of that happening already. Um, but that’s expected, you know, that’s really expected with any company when you’re just— when you’re ramping up. So, um, for Apple specifically, I will be honest and say I don’t— I hardly have an opinion on Apple anymore. I don’t know where Apple is going at this point. And with some change in their leadership recently, maybe Maybe that will become more clear over time, but I tend to think that Apple is going to stay in the hardware space and try to keep themselves flexible to accommodate whatever model the user wants to use and just try to equip that person to be able to do that with whatever hardware they end up needing, as opposed to, you know, trying to lock the user into one model or another on their hardware. And that’s honestly like, I wish I had more to say about Apple, but I just, I use it and I love it.

[00:45:47.850] – Angie Meeker

But in terms of where they’re going overall, I don’t know that I have too much more to say about them. But it’d be interesting to see where they go though, like what they choose to do and how they choose to integrate these services.

[00:45:59.730] – Jonathan Denwood

But it must be, it must be ongoing conversation in automotive on how you introduce AI in a way that actually does help the end user, that just isn’t, actually makes, makes things worse in a way. Can you, and how, how have those conversations been going? Is it still very much you’re learning inside your own team? Is there anything that you’ve introduced into your own products that you’ve been quite proud of, you think you’re on the right direction?

[00:46:39.360] – Angie Meeker

Yeah, so I think, um, in bigger picture, I think two things. Um, that’s been probably two years ago at this point that I heard Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot, who I absolutely love, um, say— someone asked him, as, as a software builder, um, where should we be thinking about where and how to introduce AI into our products. And his response at the time, which I thought was so astute, which is exactly how he is, is he said, essentially, anywhere that you’re asking your customers to make a decision is where AI can be helpful. He said, literally, if there is a button click or a field where you’re asking them to make a decision, that is a place where in their mind they had to search for the pattern that was going to output the result of whatever that UI was trying to get them to do. And he said, and that is a place where where AI will be helpful. And I think that that’s a framework that I have taken into when I think about where can we— where should we be inserting AI into our products is where are the decision points in the activation flows or in the primary— yeah, essentially the primary flows that users have to go through where are the parts where the decision-making is the hardest and we can help them make a decision?

[00:48:08.000] – Angie Meeker

And that’s going to be different for every brand. So like for Thrive, a lot of that decision is what do I want this page to look like? You know, if you’re talking about Architect, what do I— Thrive is 9 different plugins. So when I say Thrive, I don’t, you know, it’s not one thing or another. It’s a lot of different things. But like when you’re building a page, what are some of the most important decisions that you have to make for that? Well, the design definitely is one of them. Copy is one of them. So those are the types of things that we’re, we’re attacking or releasing for Thrive. At OptinMonster, again, we have 12 years of data. So not only do we have the ability to say, how do we reduce the decision-making paralysis around the design, but we also have the data to be able to know, here’s what converts well in this industry, in this type of pop-up. We have all of that information, and then the small business owner doesn’t have to guess at those things. Because again, they’re experts at making shoes, not figuring out CRO pop-ups on a website, right?

[00:49:06.300] – Angie Meeker

Like, we are experts in those things. So we, with all of our data and all of our experience in industry and intuition, we can build in the decision-making frameworks using AI that help them make those decisions or know what step to take next that previously they would have had to make themselves. And that every time you introduce that little bit of friction in your product, and make it a little bit harder for them to see the success of whatever it is that your product is built to do. So that’s how we are thinking of— that’s how I won’t even speak for all of AM because I don’t speak for all of AM, but for my brands, that’s how we’re thinking about it is product by product. Where are the places where we can reduce decision-making and use AI to help us do that?

[00:49:51.170] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:49:54.230] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, uh, hey, thank you so much for a great conversation. Uh, I, I seem to get the last question here. It’s if you could go back in time to the beginning of your career— so we think in terms of like, you know, if you watch Doctor Who and the TARDIS and the time machine— um, if you go back to the beginning of your career, what advice would you give yourself?

[00:50:15.890] – Angie Meeker

Yeah, don’t tell your— don’t be the one to tell yourself no. Like, let somebody else tell you no, but don’t tell yourself no. Don’t be the one who stops your progress because you think it might not work out. Just go. Just go until you hit the barrier that someone else puts in place, and then you can figure out how to get past that. Because just because they tell you no doesn’t mean that that’s the right answer. But you don’t want to stop yourself from going forward by telling yourself no in your head first. And then this is so, so important. I think it’s true for everyone regardless of role or company or any of that. It’s just that nobody’s thinking about you as much as you are thinking about you. So you don’t— like, let that fear go of what is everyone else going to think? Because in a given day, they’re just not thinking about you. Like, you go heads down. You focus on what your goals are and what you came to do. And get that done and let the results speak for themselves. But you really don’t, you know, you can let that fear go of what everyone else will think because the majority of the time they’re thinking about themselves, they’re not thinking about you.

[00:51:27.840] – Angie Meeker

So I think those two things together, um, you would— if I learned some of those lessons earlier on, you know, um, I might have gotten to some of the results that I got to sooner.

[00:51:40.890] – Kurt von Ahnen

That is So insightful, Angie. I remember, you know, I was older by then, and I would see people filming themselves in airports and thinking, what an idiot. And then I was making social content, and I worked with a pretty large brand at the time, and I thought, you know what, I’m going to see all the technicians I’m training in Texas. You know, I should probably film a little something in the airport. I was so self-conscious, you know, I was like, oh my God, everyone’s gonna think I’m the idiot. And then I whipped out the camera, I did, I did the piece Nobody said anything. No one kicked me.

[00:52:09.700] – Angie Meeker

No one even stopped? You mean nobody stopped and like, you’re such an idiot, I can’t believe you’re filming in public.

[00:52:15.960] – Kurt von Ahnen

Nobody threw coffee on me. And nothing. And the technicians really liked it. And I was like, what was I so afraid of?

[00:52:23.970] – Angie Meeker

Yes, exactly.

[00:52:24.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

And we do that with so many small things in life. Imagine the big things we let get by.

[00:52:30.560] – Angie Meeker

That’s exactly right. Yeah.

[00:52:32.400] – Kurt von Ahnen

So insightful. Jonathan?

[00:52:34.840] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, got a quick follow-up question. So are there any kind of WordPress products, individuals or not, in the WordPress space that’s come on your radar lately that you think either doing interesting stuff or, um, are kind of on your radar that you kind of go to their website or you’re a part of their social media? And you’re following them now, is anything come on your radar that you’d like to share with us?

[00:53:06.460] – Angie Meeker

Yeah, I mean, this is— it’s going to be a little, probably a little too recent to be able to really point to something specific, but I don’t know about you guys, I’m extremely interested in knowing and seeing the results of Automattic’s 2-week AI swap. Right. So are you guys familiar with this where they are, they kind of took their team members across roles and they mixed them up and they matched them with each other and they said for 2 weeks, just go build whatever you want. Wow. And, um, the results and like basically literally whatever you want. They did not give them any direction. They said, just go talk. And it might be like a marketer’s paired with a developer or a sales rep is paired with someone from HR. Just go use AI. To build something and solve problems. And I’m extremely interested in seeing what comes from that. And as I understand it, they’ve been encouraged to build in public and share some of that. So I want very much to know, to see what’s happening there. And then it’s not a company, but I mean, what Core is doing right now, just what Core is doing with a lot of the APIs that they’re rolling out and the MCPs and the work that they’re doing with with literally with AI itself right now and building into the product the tools that everyone else is going to need to build off of.

[00:54:27.580] – Angie Meeker

That’s really exciting. And honestly, I think if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably not paying close enough attention to what is happening with Core. Not, not because of the podcast specifically. I just think we all need to be paying closer attention to what is happening with Core because it’s— they’re right now building the solutions that are going to determine what else we can build a year from now or 2 years from now and the opportunities that that unlocks. If you go back to, you know, like I think back to WordCamp Portland, which was what, like maybe 2 or 3 years ago, and seeing some of those first demonstrations of what would later become like the interactivity API and some of those things that were demonstrated at WordCamp, There are now entire businesses that were built off of the APIs that were being hinted at, at WordCamp US that year. And so I think that’s probably, if I’m putting my attention anywhere right now in WordPress, I’m trying to make sure that I stay locked on what’s happening in core and the possibilities that that unlocks for sure.

[00:55:35.080] – Jonathan Denwood

So we’ve got a dog barking, sorry. It’s actually Kurt. He’s probably got the post person, the delivery person. Um, so, um, Angie, what’s the best place for people to find out more about you? It’s been a fantastic discussion. You have to come back, um, sooner than later. So what’s the best way for people to find out more about you?

[00:55:56.480] – Angie Meeker

So, um, I’m, I’m always available on Twitter, so that’s @AngieMeeker on Twitter, and pretty much everywhere else is @AngieMeeker as well. So LinkedIn is @AngieMeeker. You can always email me [email protected], or if you want to reach me personally, you can get me at [email protected]. And so those are some of the, some of the best ways. Twitter’s honestly the absolute easiest, but email is also good too.

[00:56:21.930] – Jonathan Denwood

So, and you do what I do, I insist on calling it Twitter. I won’t call it X. I never—

[00:56:30.450] – Angie Meeker

and you can pry Twitter and that bird out of my cold dead hands. Yeah, it’ll be Twitter till the day I die.

[00:56:37.080] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s what I’m gonna— um, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:56:43.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m the only Kurt Von Ahnemann on LinkedIn, so it makes me easy to find. And, uh, my social handle is my business name, Mañana No Más. So if you go to Mañana No Más on any social channel, you’ll find us.

[00:56:54.220] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. If you want to support the show and support, um, independent media, The best way, folks, is to leave a review. If you’re listening on your phone, on iTunes or Spotify, they make it really easy. You just scroll down, there’ll be a section there to leave a review. It could be 5 stars, it could be 1 star, I don’t care. But if you could leave a review right now, it really enables us to get quality guests like Angie and other people that aren’t I’m always surprised that agreed to come on the show. We will be back next week. Um, I’ve got a personal friend, well, a new friend coming on the show, a true SEO expert. He’s coming on the show next week. Should be a great interview like Angie’s one. We’ll see you soon, folks.

[00:57:47.640] – Angie Meeker

Bye. Hey, thanks for listening. We really do appreciate it.

[00:57:51.340] – Jonathan Denwood

Why not visit Mastermind Facebook group, and also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter.

[00:58:01.960] – Angie Meeker

We’ll see you next time.

WP-Tonic & The Membership Machine Facebook Group

Why don’t you sign up for the Membership Machine Show & WP-Tonic Facebook group, where you can get the best advice and support for building your membership or community website on WordPress?