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The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.170] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back folks to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 1011. In this show, We’ve got a great guest. We’ve got Matt Cronwell from Roots and Fruit. He also was the joint founder of GiveWP and he was until about 7 months ago, senior director of customer experience at SolidWP.

[00:00:45.780] – Matt Cromwell

StellarWP.

[00:00:47.070] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, StellarWP, sorry. And it should be a great interview. First of all, Matt, would you like to give us a quick intro about yourself and then we’ll go into your background deeper in the main part of the show?

[00:01:05.520] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah. Matt Cromwell. I’ve been in the WordPress space a long time. And lately I feel like I’m feeling the years, I have to say. But I founded GiveWP way back in 2014 with Devin Walker and Jason Connell as well. and we had a lot of fun building a great donation platform for WordPress. Um, exited, or we didn’t exit, we sold the company in 2021. And, um, I exited, like you said, last November. And now I help product people grow their products with growth marketing and mentorship through my agency Roots and Fruit.

[00:01:47.950] – Jonathan Denwood

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

[00:01:54.460] – Kurt von Ahnen

Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Ahnen. Uh, I own an agency called Mañana No Más, and we do some great work with the folks over at WP-Tonic and LifterLMS.

[00:02:04.010] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Before we go into the main part of the show, we got a message from one of our major sponsors that are really appreciated. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:02:15.070] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:02:48.260] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Want to point out we’ve got some great special offers from the major sponsors of the show, plus a curated the best WordPress plugins, services for the power user, the small agency owner, or the freelancers. You can find all these free goodies by going over to wp-tonic.com/deals. wp-tonic.com/deals. So let’s go straight into it, Matt. So how did you get into the world of WordPress and agency life? What was your— the early road into that area?

[00:03:29.660] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, honestly, at that time, um, I was seeking higher education. I wanted to be a teacher, um, and, um, I— in, in the States, that’s an expensive thing to do. Um, there’s a lot of college tuition you have to pay for and all that kind of thing. And so I was funding my education by building websites. And I built them however I could build them. I built them with Notepad++ and I loved CSS and Garden and all that kind of thing. And then somebody said, hey, could you build a WordPress website? And I was like, sure, what’s WordPress? And I got thrown in the deep end. Luckily, there was a bunch of folks who were doing that at the time too in San Diego, California, and they had built a little community called Advanced WordPress, and it was a meetup and a Facebook group. And I got introduced to all of them there. And I was passionate about nonprofits and higher educational institutions. And that’s what I was doing. And WordPress ended up being the best way to serve those segments, honestly. So, That’s, that’s, that’s the short of it. Very similar to a lot of folks in the space for sure.

[00:04:49.360] – Jonathan Denwood

I can ask a quick question. How was you getting your initial clients? Was it, you know, you said nonprofits and higher education. How were you getting them? Just through your network of people you knew in the area or was that basically—

[00:05:04.770] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, for sure. I think word of mouth and honestly, like, I still think word of mouth marketing is very underrated. Not enough folks really lean on that enough, especially post-COVID. I feel like we all gotta talk to each other a lot more than we used to. And word of mouth marketing, talking to people, meeting people, telling them what I do, offering my services for free to people who had no money, like all that kind of thing was definitely how I got the word out. And then honestly, A little bit of like even how I met Devon and ended up partnering with him in the end, I was blogging a lot. That was at the time the way to get your expertise out there into the world was to just blog about it. And I was one of those very, I would say, sophomoric developers who just was like not afraid of what I didn’t know and just was like saying like, I learned this amazing thing. Have you heard about jQuery? It’s amazing. And people being like, “Yeah, that’s been around a little while.” So I wasn’t afraid to sound like a fool and tell people I was learning.

[00:06:15.120] – Matt Cromwell

And it worked. I learned a lot that way, and people appreciated the candor.

[00:06:21.790] – Jonathan Denwood

So that led to working with Devin, who’s a friend, I would say. He’s also a supporter of the show. Um, with his plug-in, Rollover, um, Rowback. Um, so, um, what was your role in the agency? Because my understanding, it was agency, and then you built— you were especially specializing in nonprofits and that, which led to Give. So what was your role in the agency then?

[00:06:54.770] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, so I had my freelance, uh, set up, and Devin had his agency, and then Devin actually partnered with our third partner, Jason Kinnell, and they created an agency called ThoughtHouse, where they were serving web dev clients, but also clients who needed ad spend, essentially. And Jason and Devin both built up the agency that way. They brought me on originally to serve the web dev clients. So I was originally a contractor and just building out websites and building out web properties and pages and whatnot in order to fund our product development. And I honestly, the beginning, it was always intended that I would be a partner, but I had a family and a mortgage and I was like, I love it, sounds great, guys, but I need a salary. Like, if you can pay me regularly for a while and build up some trust, then I’d be open to a partnership eventually. And it took about a year until that happened. But as soon as we decided that we were all going to be partners in this venture, the focus was going to be on plugins and the agencies were funding the plugin work that mostly Devin and I were doing in the beginning.

[00:08:15.280] – Matt Cromwell

It was a great split because Devin was very much design and dev oriented and I was very much marketing and support oriented. Jason was really great with marketing as well, but also finance. So we complemented each other in our skills really well across all three of us. Yeah.

[00:08:35.580] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:08:39.830] – Kurt von Ahnen

I really appreciated the answer that you gave when you used the word candor, Matt. It’s that idea that we’re always learning, you know, and then it’s— I think our human tendency is to act like we’re the expert all the time, but we get so much further ahead when we just admit We really don’t know what the heck we’re doing and sometimes we could learn something. And that’s a really good part of your, your story, your answer. I want to extend that, that first question some, like, because I have a couple of sites that use GiveWP-Tonic very successfully, I’ll add too. It’s a great product. What were some of the challenges that you guys faced? Like, like, so the first couple of years of developing that business and coming out with that product, I feel like I came into like GiveWP like way after, like, like, you know, you guys did all the hard work, launched it. It was a famous plugin before I even sampled it. So what were some of the challenges you guys, you know, encountered as you were trying to launch something like that?

[00:09:37.700] – Matt Cromwell

Honestly, it was the phase that we had for, I would say, the first 2 to 3 years. We called it cockroaching. It was just us like barely scraping by and paying barely paying the bills, barely paying ourselves in order to try to grow the product and keep the agencies funding the product, which that’s all, you know, it’s a very classic story so many product folks have today is balancing the agency funding with the product work. That was definitely our situation too. And it was great when we got to finally tell one of our biggest web dev clients that we needed to stop working for them because we needed to, because we could fund ourselves with some more product revenue. That was a great feeling. It felt like a milestone. But that balance was super hard for a long time. And seeing adoption of Give was great and exciting to see that folks resonated with it. We hit the nail right on the head. It was a problem that a lot of folks knew that they had. And we happened to have solved it in basically the way that people wanted it to be solved. Like Gravity Forms did fine, but it didn’t do great about like tracking donors and things like that.

[00:10:57.440] – Matt Cromwell

And WooCommerce was just too big of a solution for doing simple donations. So we were just right in between those two mediums. But it still was a freemium model. So it’s like, it takes a while for it to pick up steam and things like that. And we knew that there were features that we didn’t have out of the gate. Like we didn’t have recurring donations when we launched. And we knew that was important. I think we didn’t know how important it really was. Like there was a lot of nonprofit organizations that would come to us and say, can we pay you to build recurring tomorrow? Because we can’t use your plugin without it. And it took a while to get there, but it was, it was, it was a great experiment because we got to actually contribute back. Our codebase shared a lot of code with Easy Digital Downloads. We weren’t really forked from EDD, but we shared a lot of the code. Especially from the payment side. And so Devin actually contributed a lot towards EDD’s recurring add-on as we were building out ours. It was a cool, cool setup that was mutually beneficial.

[00:12:05.790] – Matt Cromwell

I don’t know if I answered your question. I just kind of reminisced on that early.

[00:12:08.980] – Kurt von Ahnen

No, no, no. You kind of got there. You know, what were the challenges of, of, you know, kind of launching that when you were working with the EDD folks? Was that back when it was still Pippin’s plugin or was that after you’d already sold?

[00:12:19.800] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, yeah, I know that was Pippin. Yeah.

[00:12:21.480] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, interesting. He’s become a local friend. We moved here and I didn’t even know I’d have a friend here, but here he is.

[00:12:27.480] – Matt Cromwell

Oh, that’s awesome. He’s such a great person. Just like a really good person.

[00:12:32.390] – Kurt von Ahnen

He is. And he makes really good beer.

[00:12:34.710] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah.

[00:12:37.620] – Kurt von Ahnen

So let’s take a look at this. You’ve got agency work, right? So you’ve got experience in agency work. You’re working with a couple of powerhouses as partners. You’ve got obviously a resume in the plugin side, right? So product. That puts you in a really good position for this question. I mean, if you look at the WordPress environment now, what do you think the future of WordPress is in general over the next— I hate to say couple of years, we should probably just say, you know, 6 months to a year, right? Because it moves so fast. But I mean, WordPress 7.0 just dropped this week. So where you’re at, where are you at in your head about the direction of this thing and where it’s going?

[00:13:12.710] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, there’s so much anxiety around that question right now. There’s so many product folks who are already claiming doom and gloom that like things are bad and going in the wrong direction. And in some ways, I think there’s definitely decline. Like we’ve seen numbers that say that WordPress is now like 42.5% market share now instead of 44% or something like that. And I’m kind of like, yeah, that’s, you know, we don’t need to be Chicken Little about that. That’s still a lot of websites and a lot of folks. But I do think that this 7.0 drop, it was, is the litmus test in many ways of what kind of future WordPress will have. How well is WordPress adopting AI in a way that respects its open source users and the people who want to own their own data and who want to, you know, maintain their own website and have all the flexibility that they want. While bringing in this new technology that in some ways is kind of the opposite of that. Like AI really represents like the connector of all the things everywhere. Instead of owning your own data, you’re really sharing your data everywhere.

[00:14:30.680] – Matt Cromwell

I mean, but it’s such a powerful technology and has so much potential. And that all of the different choices that people will make besides WordPress, like I’m like, they’re not really competitors. People will make different choices now and the way that they build out their websites. If WordPress doesn’t keep up with that, then it doesn’t have a big shelf life, honestly. So how we see plugins adopt the connectors and the ability to have the abilities API in 7.0 and the MCP that’s in there, how plugins leverage all of that, um, and, um, and enhance the WordPress environment more that way is a big litmus test for what we’re going to see in my mind. Um, I’m mostly optimistic, honestly. Um, WordPress isn’t just like a simple platform. Um, it’s got, you know, 25 years of, of, um, history that AI gets to grok all the time. I think WordPress is primed to leverage AI really, really well. But we’ll see, you know, now that it’s all there, we got to see how people use it.

[00:15:52.590] – Kurt von Ahnen

So yeah, I think of people that are very, very public about their opinions or their actions, right? So Katie Keith, friend of the show, friend of mine, right? Friend with Lift Rail MS, that whole thing. She was very public about we’re going to start developing stuff for Shopify, right? And then she kind of— I don’t know if you want to say uses X as a blog for that, but I mean, it’s like you could follow her X account and just be like, well, here’s all these details. And then I was an early adopter of Kevin’s HWP-Tonic. And I got to admit, Matt, I’m still struggling to learn that platform, but trying to follow him, he just came out last week or 2 weeks ago with a post that said, you know, newsflash, we are agnostic on our beliefs and platforms. And don’t be surprised if Edge ends up on other platforms, which I found a very interesting post at the time. So I’m like you. I don’t think going from 44% to 42.5% of the internet is anything to be alarmed about. Right. There’s ebbs and flows in everything. And I think WordPress is super strong.

[00:16:56.080] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m super optimistic. Like, I’m launching an apprentice program to teach young people how to launch a successful agency. Obviously, I’m all in. I think it’s a thing to keep pushing forward. But there’s just a lot of that doom and gloom you mentioned. So it’s been really interesting to see the way this has flown out.

[00:17:12.510] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah. I mean, AI is the new sexy, you know, and WordPress does feel old in comparison. And that’s, I think, a lot of the kind of perceptions that are driving the doom and gloom. But the truth is, it really is just like PHP and a lot of React in WordPress and it’s MySQL. And like, these are tried and true technologies that people still need all the time. Like, WordPress is just a really great wrapper for all of that. And AI loves to work with these technologies. So I, I think it makes a lot of sense. So I think it’s going to work out overall that we’re not going to see major decline for these products and things like that. But I will say that, um, that it does mean that there is— the people are going to make a lot of different types of choices. Um, it’s, it’s definitely, um, that it’s going to be harder to, to stay in the market. Um, and I keep saying different types of choices. It’s like, of course you could say Squarespace or Wix. That’s what we’ve been saying for forever, but they never have been really meaningful.

[00:18:21.540] – Matt Cromwell

Nowadays, the, the biggest one, um, when the Repository wrote this article about market share and that none was a category nobody expected to see grow. That one to me is what was most significant. It’s like the none category, no CMS, that one is growing. And that’s the other types of choices people are going to make is they’re going to just create whatever they want instead of building out a big CMS website or whatnot. And that means that it’s going to be harder to make sure that our products get to the front of mind and things like that. But it doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity, just harder.

[00:18:59.310] – Kurt von Ahnen

I love that you said AI is the new sexy, but I think there’s a lot of people that also see it as like lipstick on a pig, right? It’s like there’s certain implementations of AI that are just gross. And I think that there’s as much turnoff from it as there is turn on from it, right?

[00:19:16.610] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah.

[00:19:16.970] – Kurt von Ahnen

So it’s a I think we’re in a very interesting place in the seesaw of how it’s going to work out.

[00:19:22.800] – Matt Cromwell

Just like any technology. I get horrible emails still to this day. I mean, they’re all just different types of technology, right? And there’s terrible ways to use paid advertising, you know? There’s terrible ways to do all kinds of things. And AI can be really lazy for sure. But in some ways, I, I do think of it as just like, it’s a new tool in the tool shed. It happens to be like a power tool, not like a hammer, you know? But it’s another tool and it is super cool. I think it’s great. And it can be used like in terrible ways. I mean, it could be a Friday the 13th movie if it needed to be. Nobody wants that.

[00:20:07.580] – Kurt von Ahnen

So— No.

[00:20:09.560] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah.

[00:20:10.700] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan, over to you.

[00:20:12.530] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, thanks. Um, obviously for the research for this interview, I was watching the interview you did last year in May 2025 with Mac Medeiros, friend of the show, um, when you were senior director of CX at Stella. Um, what, what were some of the biggest challenges with what StellarWP was trying to do and specifically Stellar Websites.

[00:20:47.000] – Matt Cromwell

What—

[00:20:47.990] – Jonathan Denwood

because I think, I think you’re okay to talk about the broad principle stuff. And that’s what I was really interested in in this interview because on a very, very, very, very smaller scale, that’s what I’ve tried with WP-Tonic. With mixed success. So what in your own mind and maybe your team’s discussion, what were the, what were the, the real pluses of what you were trying to do with Stellar Sites and what were some of the things that you knew were the weaknesses that you were trying to overcome as well?

[00:21:28.090] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, I think Stellar Sites was the vision of where Stellar was always intended to go. I think a lot of folks, when Liquid Web started acquiring product, the big strategy wasn’t perfectly clear and folks just saw it as kind of like a plug-in land grab in one way or another. But Devin and I and Jason, we sold to Liquid Web for a really clear reason. And that was because they had a vision for our product. They loved our team and they wanted just, they wanted us to do more of that. And I like that, that vision a lot. And Stellar Sites was an extension of that vision. When we, when Liquid Web had the same vision for the events calendar and for Kadence and for LearnDash and for Give, and that was a vision for all of them. What could we do if we had that vision for all those things all together? And so the idea was that with Stellar Sites, you can not just be selling a donation form, you could sell the whole fundraising website. And with LearnDash, it’s not just you’re selling like an LMS, you’re selling the whole entire environment.

[00:22:43.890] – Matt Cromwell

In many ways, that’s the— what every product owner in the WordPress space wants is they want to have a bigger slice of the pie, you know. When you’re just a widget on a bigger website, you know that you’re expendable. And you know that you’re only going to be around for so long until they decide they’re going to do something different. But if you are more responsible for the whole entire website, you own a lot more of that customer. And that’s— that was part of the economic or business reason why there was the idea of Stellar Sites. But then came along as well the whole idea of AI and the way that you can create a website with a prompt. That’s where Cadence AI came into the picture. And that became the whole onboarding of how you get into Stellar Sites was that you just prompt your way into a WordPress website that was prepackaged for you. You go from zero, not just zero to one, but you go to zero to 10 in a very short amount of time. and the whole environment would actually, um, uh, be set up for what you wanted to build your, your business on.

[00:23:49.610] – Matt Cromwell

That was the vision. That was the idea. Um, and I think we were, we were making progress there. Um, and I think part of the challenge was telling that story. Everyone knew Stellar as an umbrella brand, and then all of a sudden having to shift and talk about Stellar as a go-to-market brand. Was hard. It wasn’t the easiest shift for folks in general. And that makes sense. If we would have made Stellar be a go-to-market brand from day one, it maybe would have been easier, but we didn’t have any Stellar products from day one. So it didn’t work that way. In some ways, I think that’s related to the news we have this last week of the direction that Liquid Web has gone now. That what you see on the Liquid website now is in many ways that, that vision is just not Stellar anymore. And the individual brands and products are all wrapped under that one hood. That’s a lot of the way that they’ve been talking about this development for a long time. So, and now that’s finally there on the Liquid website. It’s not exactly the vision that, that we had when we were building out StellarWP and the Stellar Brands and things like that.

[00:25:09.470] – Matt Cromwell

But one thing that every product and business owner knows is when they sell, it’s not their business anymore. So I’ve been in the process of letting go of that for a long time. And they’re going to, they’re going to do what they think is best. There’s still some really great people there doing really great work. So more power to them.

[00:25:33.940] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. What was the kind of internal discussion? It’s who, it’s who your product is targeted at because, and it’s just not a Stella question or Stella websites, it’s a general question. I think you might disagree. I’m, I’m looking forward to your reply to this is because you got this big, you know, you got the DIY crowd, you know, they could use WordPress, they could use Wix, they could use whatever. And either they haven’t got the budget or they want to do it. They, for various reasons, they want, or they could use AI tool or like love, you know, they want to get into AI. So they use something like Lovable or So you got that crowd and then you’ve got the crowd that’s got budget and that doesn’t really want to do this. So they go to a digital agency or, or marketing agency or agency, whatever you want to call it, SEO. Um, and they build out the website and a lot of these agency crowd, they still use WordPress, don’t they? Looks like they’re still using it, or they might be looking at AI tools. But my, my sense is the agency market’s been surprisingly robust.

[00:27:05.410] – Jonathan Denwood

I don’t know what your feeling is, but is this DIY crowd, you know, do you think they were looking— this is with reflection— do you think they’re looking at, you know, Do they know enough to really see that, to really see the value of Stellar Websites, what they were getting? Did that DIY crowd have enough knowledge to be able to see the fantastic value you were offering?

[00:27:38.790] – Matt Cromwell

Well, I’ll say we weren’t exactly targeting the DIY crowd exactly, and that is a little bit of a challenge too. There’s a little bit of history in the way that Liquid Web approached this type of product. There was a thing before StellarWP called Store Builder that Chris Lema was heavily involved in. And that had a little bit of struggles as well in terms of trying to reach the right audience. They really marketed that as almost like a SaaS, like here’s an e-commerce site out of the box and that you just get to drag and drop your way to e-commerce success. but then the people would buy and then they got dumped into a WordPress admin environment and they had no idea what to do next. And it just, it didn’t do very well. Um, the marketing didn’t match with the product experience. Um, so we tried to bridge that gap by, um, looking for folks who wanted an AI-driven, um, uh, experience, uh, through Cadence AI in particular. And then we were also really upfront and clear that these were WordPress websites. So like, there’s kind of shades of users, you know. There are the folks who don’t want to do anything at all, and they’re just going to hire the agency, of course.

[00:29:05.560] – Matt Cromwell

Then there’s folks who want to do it themselves, but don’t even know how to use Elementor very well. And I don’t know where they go. They go to their, like, nephew to teach them how to do stuff. Maybe they go to Kurt, maybe he figures it out for them. But, or they go to Jamie Marsland sometimes. But, and then there’s the folks who are like, I’ll figure it out. Like, just give me something that’s good enough and I’ll figure it out. And those were kind of the folks that we were really trying to target the most. They weren’t necessarily developers. They maybe aren’t super familiar with WordPress, but they need to build a business website today. And we were going to give them the tools to do that. I do think that that question in general right now gets really, really interesting because of AI also. AI ideally should be empowering folks to do more with prompting, or at least interacting with it in one form or another. But the— The jury’s out on whether or not that’s actually going to be stuff that can actually drive any money at all for people. But the ability to build meaningful websites, I think, still is going to be found mostly in the developers who create great tools for it.

[00:30:30.320] – Matt Cromwell

I think the Elementor folks, for example, are not hurting right now. Even though they’re rapidly building out lots more AI features too. They actually built a whole AI SaaS right now called Starlight. I think it’s called Stick— no, I forget the name exactly. I think it’s called Sticklight is what it’s called. And which is interesting. So I’m rambling a little bit. I think— I don’t know if I’m exactly answering your question.

[00:30:59.280] – Jonathan Denwood

No, I think— was it— Just what, what do you think, just to finish off before we go for our middle break, what do you think Elevator is doing right? You say, you know, you’re saying that you feel that they’re not suffering, you know, you’re inside the industry, um, I presume you’re— it’s just a general that they’re doing okay. What do you think they’re doing right?

[00:31:22.950] – Matt Cromwell

And yeah, I think that segment of the market is huge still, the people.

[00:31:27.190] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, right.

[00:31:27.760] – Matt Cromwell

The people who, yeah, the people who aren’t going to jump to Claude and Cursor, but are willing to get their hands dirty in a UI of some sort to create a website and find success. Like, there’s, I think that segment of the market is still huge. Though there’s tons of those folks and, and I, and those folks, honestly, I don’t know if they’re ever going to want to build their website with a prompt. I don’t know if that’s really what they want. They want to be able to feel like they’re involved and they’re hand-choosing their things in one form or another. That’s what it seems. There’s just enough resistance to the prompt-based generation stuff that plenty of folks still want an agency, a good strong agency like what Kurt’s doing, or or do DIY themselves with a big tool like Elementor.

[00:32:23.190] – Jonathan Denwood

So yeah, that’s what WP-Tonic’s doing. Right. Right. I think that’s a great place to have our middle break. It’s been a great discussion with Matt. We will be back in a few moments and we’ve got some other fabulous topics to discuss. We’ve got some more messages, messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:32:45.240] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:33:14.450] – Matt Cromwell

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[00:33:15.610] – Kurt von Ahnen

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[00:33:21.030] – Speaker 4

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[00:33:59.950] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back. We’ve had a, I think, a really great discussion with Matt Cromwell. Roots and Fruit, joint founder of GiveWP, and was at Stellar as well. So let’s move on. So we’ve touched AI and we’ve just had version 7 come out. First of all, what, what’s your initial reactions to version 7? Do you think what’s been done appeals to you? And, um, what do you— I think you touched upon it in the first half, but what in your own heart, what do you think really needs to be seen for it to stand a chance to really be relevant? I think Rev— Rev— to be relevant, um, is the big question in the next couple years, isn’t it?

[00:35:00.360] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, 100%. You know, actually, I, this might be getting a bit technical in the weeds a little bit, but I really want folks to get excited about WordPress’s approach to their MCP via the Abilities API. It really is unique and different, and it can be a differentiator in the space. And It sounds boring, but like, I think it opens up so much possibility in ways that other AI-powered platforms don’t have. So the biggest thing is that like, there are a lot of folks out there right now who will talk about MCPs and that MCP is dead, maybe they’ll say. They don’t like that MCP basically is like a way to prompt into a third-party area. And it’s just very greedy. It just kind of grabs anything and everything that it can possibly find. It makes it great for the user because like with Google Analytics, I just say, tell me my highest performing landing pages and which ones have the highest bounce rate. Getting that kind of data from GA4 often was really challenging, but now I can just prompt that and I’ll get a response from Cursor or Claude and it’ll build out a dashboard for me And I— all I did was just ask it a question.

[00:36:27.340] – Matt Cromwell

That’s the power of MCP. But people are saying it opens up tons of security issues. It’s super greedy. It uses too much tokens, all this kind of thing. WordPress really approached the question of making every single WordPress website MCP-enabled really uniquely and differently. They didn’t create a big, giant, greedy MCP. They created the Abilities API. Which basically says, you can interact, hello MCP, you can interact with this website exactly in this way, only specifically according to these abilities that I’ve enabled you to do. And you can fine-tune that as an admin. If you have the AI, it’s not called AI Experiments anymore, it’s just called AI, the AI plugin from wordpress.org. There’s an Abilities Explorer that you can enable, and you can see all the different abilities that your website has. And plugins can register their own abilities there, and they can be read-only abilities if you want. So the MCB can only read things about your website, it can’t do anything on your website. Or you could make it enabled to do all kinds of crazy things too. So, you know, a little Spider-Man meme, great power and great responsibility kind of thing here.

[00:37:47.320] – Matt Cromwell

But that approach of being able to have the benefits of an MCP in every single WordPress website everywhere, but restricted according to abilities, capabilities, roles, being able to pay attention to the security aspect, to be able to see all the ways in which your tokens are being used, where are they coming from, where are they going, to what purpose they’re going to. That’s something that not a lot of platforms have at all right now. I think it’s really, really, really forward-thinking. The way that they architected the Abilities API years ago to prepare for this day right now is really impressive, honestly. So to me, that is a big reason to be optimistic about WordPress’s future, because I think they’re doing the AI thing the right way.

[00:38:39.940] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think that sounds really interesting. I didn’t actually realize I haven’t spent enough time really looking at it, to be truthful. Thanks for that. Before I throw it over to Kurt, there’s— now let’s just throw it over to Kurt, actually. And yeah, over to you, Kurt.

[00:39:04.090] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I can hear the excitement about the AI, Matt. I do. I also hear, like, I don’t want to be contradictory. I don’t want to be the person, but there’s this fear that if we use AI or if we leverage AI in our website, somehow or another we’re going to get dinged for SEO or Google’s going to take us out or whatever. What do you think are, like, Is it, is it real world to say that somebody could activate the MCP, let the AI go nuts, they don’t use the activity correctly, and then somehow or another this thing just becomes not theirs anymore? Like, like, is there, is there, is there like that, this, this weird chance, or the, or this thing where like Google goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, what happened to this website? You know, take it off the index. Um, those are like the things right now that are They’re like swimming around in my brain. Just real-world example. We have a customer, actually Jonathan and I share this customer. They want to do an AI chatbot, but they don’t have a lot of content to train the chatbot on. And so if they turn that chatbot loose on the internet to go get answers for people coming to their website, who knows what’s going to come back, right?

[00:40:16.580] – Kurt von Ahnen

So it’s like, it’s like everybody wants this AI tool. But not a lot of people have the foundation or the content to justify the AI tool. And it makes me very nervous because people get excited and they want to plug everything in and make everything work. But I’m also very tentative because I think if you don’t put guardrails on this thing, you lose it. It doesn’t become yours anymore.

[00:40:40.540] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I’ll go back to what I said earlier about it’s, it’s a tool like all the other tools that we have. And I can tell you 20 different ways you can ruin your website that have nothing to do with AI.

[00:40:54.280] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yes, yes.

[00:40:55.530] – Matt Cromwell

And those risks in the WordPress space are always there and have been there for forever. Like, if you do your permalinks wrong, you’re going to screw up your search results. If you just like don’t pay attention to the way that your sitemaps could go sideways, it can deindex you. If you just start writing really terrible content, you are your own worst enemy. So there’s tons of ways that it can go bad without AI at all. It’s another tool and it is another way that you can go badly, for sure. Yeah. I personally, I manage multiple different websites for different purposes and different reasons, and I have not leveraged AI for any of them yet in terms of like having any front-facing AI tools or whatever. That’s not 100% true. On WP Product Talk, sorry, I have a podcast also. We have a DocSpot chatbot on the site. So you can ask the bot, you know, any insights about guests who are on WP Product Talk or whatever. But I didn’t build that out. It’s like a, it’s DocSpot. But I, right now, I use AI for marketing purposes. I use it locally. I am experimenting with how I can ship new posts to my websites via the MCP and things like that.

[00:42:25.210] – Matt Cromwell

But it’s, it’s not just something that you just turn on. You really, it is a tool that you have to learn and you have to dial it in exactly right. You have to figure out how it can go wrong and prevent yourself from, from making it go wrong. It’s knowing the right way to use it is challenging and difficult. It’s not just a simple turn it on type of thing. So I agree with you about all of those concerns. I don’t see it happening today in terms of like accidentally just blowing up your website or going wild on things, just simply because that’s not the environment that WordPress is set up as right now. But if you go to all the extents to set up the MCP correctly and connect your cursor to it locally, even then, like out of the box, there is no like ability for it to nuke your database. Like it, it just, it’s literally, that’s part of why I like the, the way the approach they went there. There’s no connection between the MCP and your database in that way. So you really can’t do it. The only way you do that is if you go and maliciously do something or any of the other million security holes that might have come through because of your plugins or things like that.

[00:43:43.970] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah, AI by itself isn’t going to do those things.

[00:43:46.950] – Kurt von Ahnen

So yeah, I’m curious if you do something similar to me. I have a bunch of like throwaway URLs and I’ll have live projects on these throwaway URLs that I play and experiment on and like, who cares if someone sees it?

[00:43:59.390] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m—

[00:43:59.560] – Kurt von Ahnen

it’s not— I’m not using it to make money or to generate revenue. They’re like my experiment websites. And I know a lot of people do stuff on local, but I prefer to just use a live throwaway URL to try stuff because it’s real world and, and it— and I can see if things work or not.

[00:44:15.510] – Matt Cromwell

I do it all locally. I use, uh, I was using Local WP a lot, but now I use Studio a lot. Studio is just so super fast. Locally. So, yeah. And talking about the MCP, when you have a live site with the MCP, you have to set up an app password and things like that and connect it locally. If you’re using Studio, you don’t have to do any of that. You just tell Claude or Cursor, this local site has the MCP enabled and it just kind of enables it. Sweet. It’s a really easy connection there. So I do all my stuff in Studio. So cool.

[00:44:53.780] – Kurt von Ahnen

Good to know.

[00:44:54.970] – Matt Cromwell

Jonathan?

[00:44:56.980] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I suppose it’s kind of linked to the relevance of a website over the coming next couple of years, isn’t it? Because with AI overviews, there’s been a dramatic drop in traffic to a lot of websites. Then you’ve got people, you know, using ChatGPT GPT or, or Perplexity or whatever they’re using. Um, Claude. So they, they don’t, they’re not doing searches. They get the recommendations. They might go to one or two websites. So I think everybody is seeing a reduction in traffic to their website. You could say that if you’ve got a product. Or service, long as your website can convert, you might be getting less traffic, but they should be more qualified traffic. So, um, do you think in general the relevance of a website is just going to decline, or do you think it’s just this overall feeling of angst because things are changing quite rapidly?

[00:46:08.500] – Matt Cromwell

Hmm, that’s another, like, golden question of the time at the moment. I’ve answered this question, I think, 10 different times and probably given 20 different answers. The— where do I land today? Where I land today on this is all the above. I think there’s definitely— websites are not less relevant, but the But the way that you build out their content has to change a lot. Like, and I agree with the second thing that you said, that the, there is fewer traffic coming to the websites, but ideally it’s a higher percent of more qualified traffic than it was in the past. I’ve seen that in Google Analytics across several different sites and some of my client sites that they’ve seen a dramatic drop in traffic. But it’s kind of like the traffic that they didn’t care about in the first place. A lot of the stuff that just kind of was noise or folks who were just like interested in the one random blog post you wrote that wasn’t about your product at all. Like that kind of traffic has died away. But the traffic that continues to convert for them is stuff that is core to who they are as a product person.

[00:47:26.760] – Matt Cromwell

So I think I hope, maybe I just want this to be the reality. I want to believe that if we keep making great websites about our products, that they’ll continue to be found in a wide variety of ways. And all we have to do on our sites is only give them an easy way to the checkout. We don’t have to do all of the hard work of convincing them of who we are and that we’re, then that we can figure out all their situations. And here’s 25 different landing pages about all my feature sets. No, they’re going to find all of that stuff on YouTube and on LinkedIn and on X. They’re going to, they’re going to find all that stuff there. They’re going to validate that they like us over there. They’re going to only click through when they’re ready to buy, essentially. Um, that is what a lot of marketing folks are saying is the new reality. Um, and I, I’m still experimenting with whether, with how true that is. Google just this last week put out a big piece on, in their developer docs or their developer blog on how to optimize your website for AI search, essentially.

[00:48:38.880] – Matt Cromwell

And they basically said it’s not that different from optimizing for SEO and everybody should continue to write really great content. That’s essentially what they said. They gave some technical details as well. But, you know, whether or not you believe them or not, or whether they’re just saying that so that you continue to write content that they consume and then serve up in the AI summaries, it depends on how cynical you are about those things. But I do think that in general, content is still king. It just matters now where are you going to put that content. Your content kind of really has to live in a lot of different places now. I talk with a lot of my folks about your own channels and your unowned channels. And the unowned channels are, you know, Facebook and LinkedIn and all those places that don’t belong to you, but that you have a presence on. Those channels nowadays have become so much more important than they used to be. They used to be nice icing on the cake. Now it’s kind of like they’re a little bit the meat and potatoes. Um, unfortunately.

[00:49:49.780] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think it’s a mixture because I think if you’ve got nothing on your website, I think when people come to it, they might be more down the funnel journey, but they’re still probably not at the stage of total buying. So they probably are going to look over your website. Um, if you don’t have any useful blog content, what you know, yeah, you might put stuff on LinkedIn, you might put stuff, you know, YouTube, on TikTok, on all the social media platforms. But if you’re going to talk about anything in any kind of detail, it’s probably going to be on your website, isn’t it? How many people? Yes. Yes, it depends because how many people actually LinkedIn pages, how much traffic do they drive in here? Not that much. So I think it just varies. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:50:51.990] – Kurt von Ahnen

Oh, I guess I’m gonna get to the, to the big question, the one we ask at the end. If you could go back in time at that, to the beginning of your career, let’s say that you’ve got your own time machine God, my wife’s watching a new show about time travel right now. She just loves it. Um, anyway, if you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself, Matt?

[00:51:14.400] – Jonathan Denwood

Hmm, career-wise?

[00:51:19.620] – Matt Cromwell

Sure.

[00:51:20.880] – Kurt von Ahnen

I don’t know, maybe, maybe you want to dive off the deep end and tell us some life secret.

[00:51:24.820] – Matt Cromwell

Ah, it’s a good one, man. I’m not good at these things, um, these types of questions, honestly. Um, Are you guys into the Enneagram? Do you know anything about the Enneagram? It’s a personality type of thing. Um, it’s like a disk. It’s the one with the numbers. The one with the numbers. It’s a really good one. I would highly recommend it. I’m the kind of person that doesn’t like regret, so I just avoid it. I just pretend like, like everything I did in the past worked. Um, so why would I give myself different advice? In many ways, I think I’ll stick to career and I’ll stick to GiveWP a little bit. One thing that we didn’t do that I always wish we did was build a verticalized product next to GiveWP. I always wanted to build a DRM, a donor relation management platform. We were doing everything we possibly could with donations. And it needed to be paired with a really strong CRM, DRM. We talked a lot about it. We never pulled the trigger. I wish I would have just been like, damn it, we need this right now. I think it would have been the right move for us as a company.

[00:52:56.790] – Matt Cromwell

And we never pulled that trigger. I wish we would have done it. I think about that a lot today, actually. I’m toying with the idea of a CRM myself and getting back into product a little bit. So.

[00:53:11.790] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, you just made Jonathan’s eyebrows go right up over the top of his head. He liked the sound of that one.

[00:53:19.090] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. What’s your thought? What’s your actual thoughts about— I would have thought the CRM market is— is it, is it for a particular— I’m not going to ask you what it is. Is it for a particular vertical that you still think there’s need for a particular CRM?

[00:53:35.950] – Matt Cromwell

I think there’s a need for a CRM that’s an anti-CRM. That’s how I would call it. Like CRM, like nobody likes working with a CRM. Nobody likes it. Nobody wants to work with it, but they all have to, like you have to work with it to get your job done, to get the objectives that you’re looking for. Um, and I wish that it just would be better and it wouldn’t focus on having a giant wall list of contacts, but it would just focus on like, what’s your objective? What are you trying to get done? Um, with AI nowadays, you can have like magic sauce that just kind of helps you get that done. and we don’t have to be thinking about it in terms of like segments and lists and, and tags. And let me, let me go and look at all these, these individual contacts. Let me like find their LinkedIn or whatever. It’s more like just what do you want to accomplish and let the, the magic machine in the background get it done for you. Doing the work of a CRM without being a CRM in some ways.

[00:54:40.950] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, that kind of thing. Just to finish off the show, is that, um, where do you think this balance is going to be between plugins, commercial plugins, and WordPress? And being able— a lot of people using via coding to build interfaces, to customize this, to using WordPress, as you know, a few years ago, this headless term that came out and they’re using, but they’re kind of producing a kind of customized environment for the client because that, that’s really attractive, but that has its challenges as well, doesn’t it? 100%.

[00:55:27.590] – Matt Cromwell

You mean like agencies or products that are customizing the work?

[00:55:32.730] – Jonathan Denwood

I know a couple of advanced freelancers that are building you know, whole membership websites involve coding, um, and they’re just using a couple, like they’re using FluentCRM, they might be using LifterLMS, but the interface is totally customized.

[00:55:52.250] – Matt Cromwell

Yeah.

[00:55:52.720] – Jonathan Denwood

Um, it’s not using the traditional WordPress admin interface. It’s a total custom. And I think That’s attractive, but also you, you also can have some problems, can’t you?

[00:56:08.690] – Matt Cromwell

I like it. I think it’s a smart move. Um, uh, traditionally we’ve called that a WASP, like a WordPress as a Service kind of setup. Um, and, um, I, I think that there’s a lot of opportunity there. I’ve been telling lots of folks to think about that. Um, I think the WordPress admin is overdue for a facelift. Um, the one we got in 7.0 is like not really a facelift at all. They have some really good concepts of what it might look like eventually. But, you know, using WordPress as a framework to build out a hosted solution that solves people’s real pain points, I think smart. Even a lighter version of that is the Paid Memberships Pro folks have built out a hosted version, not a hosted version, their Offering hosting for their product now as well. It’s not quite a full-on WaaS, but trying to say like, if you’re serious about doing memberships, let’s give you all the tools, not just our plugin, but give you the whole environment. It’s similar to that motivation I was saying about Stellar Sites. You just, you kind of want to be like, we want to be able to provide as much of the solution as we can, and that if you’re going to run this business, you need what we have to offer.

[00:57:28.990] – Matt Cromwell

Not that we’re just like an optional plugin that’s stuck in the middle of your bigger business. I applaud it. I think there’s a lot of ingenuity in that idea too.

[00:57:39.920] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Matt. Hopefully you decide to come back. Absolutely. What’s the best way for people to find out more about you, Matt?

[00:57:52.350] – Matt Cromwell

I lately love being on LinkedIn. Hit me up on LinkedIn. You’ll find me Matt Cromwell. I am on X as well at Learn with Matt C. And my website rootsandfruit.com.

[00:58:07.350] – Jonathan Denwood

And Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you?

[00:58:11.340] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think me and all my friends are just going to go hang out on LinkedIn together. I’m the only Kirk Van Onen on LinkedIn. I’m easy to find. And the business name is Manana No Mas.

[00:58:20.800] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s great. If you really want to support the show, folks, there’s a couple of things you can do. You can go to, um, Apple Podcasts and leave a review. If you’re listening on Spotify, leave a review. If you’re listening on your mobile device, it’s dead easy. Or you can go to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel and leave us a review there as well, a comment. Really does help the show. We’ll be back next week with our roundtable show. We will see you soon.

[00:58:50.570] – Matt Cromwell

Bye-bye. Hey, thanks for listening.

[00:58:52.590] – Jonathan Denwood

We really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group? And also, to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter.

[00:59:05.170] – Matt Cromwell

We’ll see you next time.

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