Why PeepSo Is Bringing Community Home to WordPress

Why PeepSo Is Bringing Community Home to WordPress With Eric Tracz

Why Are Members Flocking Back to WordPress? Eric Tracz of PeepSo shares insights on building thriving communities on your own platform.

Join Eric Tracz as he explores how PeepSo is revolutionizing member management on WordPress. In this insightful show, discover the powerful features that make PeepSo an essential tool for building vibrant online communities. Eric dives deep into the platform’s capabilities, showing how it can boost engagement and connection among members. Don’t miss this chance to learn why PeepSo is the ultimate solution for WordPress users.

This Week’s Sponsors

Jetpack: Jetpack

Ninja Forms: Ninja Forms

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:22.070] – jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic show. This is episode 1031. We’ve got a great guest here. I know I say that regularly, but I’m going to butcher his name. Even though he told me how to pronounce it. We got Eric Tras with us and he’s the joint owner of Peep. So it’s a platform that allows you to build a membership but also a community-focused website. We’re going to go in why he took it over, some of the things that he’s learned from the process. He’s also a world traveler. He’s been He spent a lot of time in the Far East. He’s back in Europe. We’ve got a ton to talk about. So, Eric, would you like to give us a quick intro, a quick 10-20 second intro about yourself before we go into the main part of the show?

[00:01:19.040] – Eric Tracz

Of course. Hi, Jonathan. Hello, Kurt. Nice to meet you guys. Uh, a long time listener, first time caller, like Deadpool said in the last movie. Yeah. So we, me and Mat, we are co-owners of peepshow.com and a couple of other ventures. We go way back to like high school years. It’s actually where we met. A couple of years ago, we celebrated our 25th anniversary of friendship and things like that. So, you know, it’s a big milestone. And yeah, we did travel the world a bit together. We spent over a decade in Southeast Asia. Then he moved to South America for a bit. Now he’s in Rome, if I’m not mistaken. And I arrived recently in the last couple of weeks in Budapest, in Hungary. So a nice little change of pace. And I’m telling you honestly, I haven’t seen snow in over a decade, so I’m looking forward to it.

[00:02:13.590] – jonathan Denwood

All right. And I’ve got my co-host Kurt. Would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers, Kurt?

[00:02:20.620] – Kurt von Ahnen

Sure thing, Jonathan. We own a company called Mañana No Más and focus largely on membership and learning websites and also do some really great products with WP-Tonic.

[00:02:32.100] – jonathan Denwood

Thanks. Now, like I say, should be a great show. Eric’s got a lot of knowledge on online products, WordPress, a heap of experience. Should be a great show. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, we’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:02:52.630] – Kurt von Ahnen

WP-Tonic is sponsored by Jetpack. Managing WordPress sites shouldn’t mean stitching together a pile of disconnected plugins. Jetpack brings security, performance, publishing, growth, and AI tools together in one WordPress-native toolkit.

[00:03:11.320] – Speaker 4

Use what you need: backup, scan, boost, social, VideoPress, stats, and more. All with modernized dashboards built into WP Admin. For your site or your clients’ sites, see what Jetpack can do. jetpack.com. WP-Tonic is sponsored by Ninja Forms, and let’s talk about one of their powerful tools, conditional logic. Conditional logic is the clearest example. Every rule for the whole form lives in one panel instead of being buried field by field. On client work, build speed and low maintenance are part of your margin. A form that is fast to configure and that a client can run afterward without coming back means less friction during the build and less support load after the handoff. Ninja Forms— powerful and genuinely easy to work with without being dumbed down. To learn more, go to ninjaforms.com.

[00:04:11.540] – jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back. Got some special offers from the sponsors, plus we got other goodies free. We got a curated list of the best WordPress plugins, services for the freelancer, small agency owner, or power user. A lot of free stuff. You can get all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic.com/deals. wp-tonic.com/deals. .com/deals. That’s where you’re going to get all the goodies, my beloved tribe. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. Uh, um, so, so Eric, so you, um, with the, um, with the help of AI and looking at a few previous interviews, blah blah blah, I got the impression that you and Matt took over Pipsow around 2017. I have no idea if that’s the actual truth. I presume it is. If that’s the case, why did you take it over? What did, what did you see in it that, that you liked?

[00:05:21.940] – Eric Tracz

So a little bit of background. So me and Matt, we come from JumSocial, from Joomla background. And if you don’t know what JumSocial is, it’s one of those, I think it was called a component for Joomla, if I’m not mistaken. So it did a similar job. Unfortunately, Jump Social and the whole Joomla community started losing market share. So as a business, it’s less viable day by day, year by year. When we got into Joomla, it was about 20% of CMS market share or so, and then it started dropping. And right now it’s like under half a percent, if I’m not mistaken, but don’t quote me on that. So Marav, was the owner of the business at the time. She hired me and Matt, and I started as a support guy in JumpSocial. So I was helping clients. I really had to understand the product to be able to answer their questions and whatnot. So with Joomla declining, Merav took a big step and basically invested a lot of time and effort and money in WordPress. So we made a version of JumpSocial, Ipso, for WordPress because there’s no direct port, as you guys know. That took a couple of months to have the very basic version of it.

[00:06:45.870] – Eric Tracz

And well, after about a year or so, she just decided that she wants to retire from the whole online business situation. And she kind of sold the project’s to different other companies and other people. And me and Matt, we got the first dibs on PeepShow itself since him and myself, we kind of started it from ground up. So since we know the product very well, Matt is taking care of the technical stuff, I’m taking care of the business stuff, promotion and all of that. And we knew exactly what we were doing. So when the opportunity presented itself, we kind of bought it out. So that’s kind of the general background.

[00:07:30.960] – jonathan Denwood

Right. So did she have other online businesses as well?

[00:07:36.990] – Eric Tracz

She did. So yeah, so she did have a whole portfolio. It was called iJoomla, if I’m not mistaken. That whole business. So they had a publisher, ad agency, guru, like an LMS situation, and a couple of others that right now, for the love of God, I can’t remember. And she sold those off to other companies and myself and Matt, we just took over Peepshow. But now she’s doing an AI business called Makyo, if I’m not mistaken, M-A-K-Y-O. And she’s running hospitality businesses around Bali.

[00:08:20.520] – jonathan Denwood

Oh, Bali. All right. Yeah.

[00:08:23.170] – Eric Tracz

And so she spent 3 years of my life as well.

[00:08:26.480] – jonathan Denwood

All right. That’s, that’s really interesting. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:08:30.830] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m, I’m still just reeling from the whole Joomla thing. It took me way back in, in, in when we were doing work as an agency. We had a, a real estate, really complicated website we built, uh, in Joomla, but because the way everything was like data orchestrated, it just worked really well. Mm-hmm. It was a shame to see it go away. Um, I say go away. I mean, I guess you could still do it, but yeah. Um, I call it decentralized social media, this idea that people are tired of big tech running all of the social space with Facebook and, and, and, and stuff like that. But in your own words, why do you think like a creator or an association should be like, nah, we’re not going to do a Facebook group, or we’re not going to do Discord or Circle or Slack. We want our own space, like in, in a way that the, the new listener might understand. Why do you think it’s so advantageous to have your own social product?

[00:09:27.840] – Eric Tracz

Right. So that’s a, that’s a very important question. I think that this is actually the question, if I may start with just setting some ground rules first. Don’t discard this. Don’t discard Facebook and Discord and all of the other big platforms, X, Instagram, whatever, immediately. They all have their place. So if people want to scroll Instagram, that doesn’t mean that they cannot be a part of your own community. But coming back to why would you actually need your own community? So I’ll give you 2 examples, not to kind of drag it out. One, if you’re a business owner for whatever business, let’s say you’re selling bicycles. And bicycle gear, and you’re selling your own language. Oh, there you go. Roberto is actually a bicycle guy. So if you’re selling bicycles online, so you may have you may have a client who’s coming to your website. They’re gonna buy a bicycle. Then maybe they will buy a chain or whatever. And if you send them to oh okay, I created a Facebook group where you guys can do meetups and around the the the Facebook group and. What is stopping your direct competition from showing ads targeting your Facebook group?

[00:10:44.720] – Eric Tracz

That’s one. You’re basically taking all that traffic that you really worked so hard to get to your own website and you’re giving it to Facebook where Facebook can monetize it and you’re losing revenue potentially, you know, whatever it may be, depends on your business. Anything from a buck to a million. So that’s one. But when you have your own community within your own website, People may come to you to buy a bike, but then they see like-minded people and they want to have meetups. They want to share their Strava routes and times and whatever. They keep coming back to your website. Plus, let’s say you bought something, I don’t know, for your bike, and then we talk about it, and then you recommend a product that you bought on the website to me. Then I want to buy the product. So you have all the social proof in the world. I trust you because I know you. I don’t necessarily want to trust an ad because I don’t know that. So that’s one thing. So if you’re a business owner and you want to keep that very heavily, very difficult, like how much you spend on getting that traffic, why would you send it away?

[00:11:53.340] – Eric Tracz

Just keep it on your website and people will keep coming back again. They may have come to buy a bike. They will keep coming for other people. And the other thing is privacy, security, and control. Because if you’re hosting the whole thing, your website, your community, you are in control of everything. There’s also a great example of a community using PeepShow for people with disabilities. So people with disabilities, they get— that’s what we heard from the founder, and I’m paraphrasing— they get bullied, they get made fun of. No one’s, you know, Facebook doesn’t care. Moderation sometimes catches those things, sometimes not. When you have your own private community, it doesn’t have to be private, but in this case, yes, then you are in control of everything. You can vet whoever the new member might be. If something doesn’t play right, you immediately take action or other people can vote them out, report them and whatnot. Privacy as well. If you’re into, you know, spicy communities on these kind of things, That’s also a thing. You don’t necessarily want to share whatever you’re into with your boss on Facebook or Instagram and whatnot. So there’s a lot of potential applications and all you need is pretty much a WordPress website.

[00:13:09.470] – Kurt von Ahnen

Sweet. And I just wanna touch on, I don’t want this to go like unrecognized. You had mentioned like talking about consumer products, getting people integrated, involved, right? Active within a community. I have a strong background in bicycling and powersports, and I’ll tell you, the dealers that actively engage their community, that have events where you encourage people to actually use the product, you know, when people use stuff, it wears out, it breaks down, and it drives sales. So those companies that are active from a social stance generally have higher revenue marks because their people are actually using the product. Um, that’s real prevalent in Ducati. Like, people will buy a Ducati and park it in their living room like an art piece, right? But if you’re, if you’re a dealership that does track days— oh, I don’t

[00:13:58.610] – Eric Tracz

know.

[00:14:00.250] – Kurt von Ahnen

That’s beautiful. That is beautiful.

[00:14:02.850] – Eric Tracz

That’s my Monster. Just wanted to share it.

[00:14:05.770] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. So someday I could tell you a story about being at the factory and helping them develop the Monster. Um,

[00:14:12.140] – Eric Tracz

so continue. I’m sorry.

[00:14:14.680] – Kurt von Ahnen

So Ducati is one of those brands that typically doesn’t get ridden much. Um, the opposite of BMW. Someone buys a BMW and they tour the world with it, right? With Ducati, they kind of keep it like an art piece. So if we can encourage them to use it like a piece of sports equipment, well, now it’s going to make shop appearances. It’s going to get new tires, new brakes, new stuff, right? So, um, huge advantage for people in the consumer business. The other side of the coin that you kind of mentioned was that privacy thing. Yeah. But there’s a challenge, and I feel like I’m not doing the job to the listener unless I mention the challenge. It seems, I don’t wanna say impossible, but it seems very difficult to get people to leave those bigger platforms to come to your personal platform. Like we’ve noticed when we try to migrate audiences, when we say there’s a new feature in our social tool on our website, come, join our website, they’ll stay on the LinkedIn page, they’ll stay on the Instagram, they’ll stay on the Facebook, but it’s hard to migrate them to the actual site we want them on.

[00:15:19.560] – Kurt von Ahnen

Do you have any clues for people in that space?

[00:15:23.250] – Eric Tracz

Yeah, people don’t go to a website for features. They go for the other people and they go for content. So all the bells and whistles in the world can bring and keep people on a website. It’s the same. It’s exactly the same issue with all the communicators. It’s like, why would I install WhatsApp if none of my friends are on WhatsApp? There needs to be kind of, you know, there needs to be content and people that you can interact with. No one’s going to go to— okay, if I go to your community and there’s a post that was last published a week ago and no one is making any comments or content, I’m just going to leave. Nothing’s keeping me there. Nothing is keeping me engaged. You as a community manager, at least in the first couple of weeks of your community, if it’s not blowing up, then you need to encourage people to come back. You need to kind of recall them. You need to make sure that they get notifications. You need to make sure that they feel welcome and that their comment is valued. People like to be valued. And they come because, you know, internet can be sometimes a dark place.

[00:16:32.440] – Eric Tracz

But if you give them a nice warm environment, they might just stay. But again, it’s all about content and community. It’s not about features, bells and whistles. So it’s a— it’s kind of counterintuitive. But if you look at screenshots of like the first Facebook when it came out, Jesus Christ, there’s nothing there. There’s, there’s a wall and you can comment on it and maybe upload a picture and that’s kind of it. But it was that all the people kind of started coming in.

[00:17:03.960] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, good stuff. Jonathan, over to you.

[00:17:07.620] – jonathan Denwood

Yeah, with my research, it looks like you’ve released a plugin called Achievements. Can you tell us what that’s about and why you’ve released it?

[00:17:22.160] – Eric Tracz

Eric? Yeah, it’s the whole gamification concept. So making sure that people have those little steps and badges and the sense of, well, achievement, I suppose, or progress in their community and whatnot. So it can be, it can be a little gimmicky for some people and for some communities, and there’s nothing wrong with having a little gimmick. But it needs to be configured and set up properly. So if you give people points just for writing posts and they get badges for that, then they’re going to just spam your community with whatever. It’s just generating rubbish. That’s not helpful to anyone. So there are also mechanisms which don’t— many other gamification solutions don’t really recognize. There are limits to how much, like how many points you can get, for example, per day, or what kind of achievements you can get. There’s also configurable, if someone is giving you negative feedback, then it’s going to deduct your points. So if you start posting rubbish, you’re going to get bad reactions, and those bad reactions are going to take, let’s say, your points or karma, whatever you want to call it, down. So the same way that You have, for example, Duolingo.

[00:18:45.110] – Eric Tracz

You get those little badges and those little achievements and those little progress marks. The same way you can have this with communities. You can set up your community that every time you get a positive reaction on your comment means your comment was helpful. So you get a little sense of achievement. Okay, that’s all good. People like my comments. So you want to achieve put some thought into creating content, into helping others. It’s the same that the same things that Reddit does. You can have helpful badges or comment or whatever. So there’s a lot of configurable achievements that you can do. You can also call them quests. You can do anything from, you know, filling up your profile. And then when you’re invested a lot already, as a person and you already commented a bit, you got to know some people, then you kind of keep coming back and you want to get that another badge and whatnot. It doesn’t work for everyone and doesn’t work for every community, but it does work on a general basis. And it’s for you to decide what fits your community. So you don’t have to give people badges or achievements and whatnot.

[00:19:57.880] – Eric Tracz

You can configure it however you want that fits you. And your community.

[00:20:03.950] – jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it makes sense. So, you know, what led you to actually think there was a demand for this particular plugin in the marketplace?

[00:20:15.740] – Eric Tracz

We have been asked about it through our many support channels and whatnot for years to get it done, actually.

[00:20:22.640] – jonathan Denwood

Oh, right.

[00:20:23.150] – Eric Tracz

Because people have been using and we have integrated with— there used to be a great plugin called BadgeOS. If I’m not mistaken, but that got— that became abandonware, which is unfortunately not uncommon in the WordPress world. Then there’s Microware, which is a great solution, but it didn’t hit all the spots that our clients were asking for. There’s also GamiPress, which is a great solution, but there you have only so many things that integrate with Pipedrive itself. So finally we decided to get it done ourselves. And we pretty much hook into everything that you can do within Pipedrive. And there’s going to be a new release next week that’s actually going to cover pretty much everything that you can do in Pipedrive, including anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, and whatnot.

[00:21:14.260] – jonathan Denwood

All right. So before we go to a break, obviously, what in the WordPress space, your main competitor is BuddyBoss, really. Yeah, I don’t know if you agree with that. You might disagree with that, but that’s how I see it. But if people were looking at the 2 solutions, what do you think is PeepShow’s strengths really in that comparison?

[00:21:47.460] – Eric Tracz

Well, first and foremost that comes to my mind is We are still run by the people who created it. BuddyPress was sold at least once in its history, which can be a good thing, which can be a bad thing. It’s not for me to judge. However, when you get under an umbrella of, for lack of a better phrase, corporations, some things fall through the cracks. You don’t get so much support, attention anymore. You have to wait for replies. People just I don’t want to say don’t really care, but it’s not the level of service that you were used to or expecting anymore. The same when it comes to pricing. With today’s advancements in AI and the immediate help that developers get, the price of a mobile app should not be $5,000, $6,000. It just should not. So our mobile apps, the way we do it, It’s very affordable and BuddyPost is not anymore. Definitely not. And when it comes to features, it’s, you know, I don’t want to say apples and oranges because BuddyPost also has its place in the world. They are very heavily LMS oriented, especially LearnDash. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, they do claim that they integrate with all of the plugins from BuddyPress because they’re kind of built on that architecture.

[00:23:22.400] – Eric Tracz

Unfortunately, that may be true. However, most of those, and I did the research, most of those plugins are either abandoned or not updated for years or not supported or they’re clashing. We make pretty much everything in-house and we’ll make sure that it works together. We have automated testing that runs, and I’m kidding you, I’m not kidding you, we have a dedicated server that runs 48 hours nonstop to test everything just before the release to make sure there’s no regressions or problems and whatnot.

[00:23:56.530] – jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. I think it’s time for us to go for our break. It’s been a great conversation so far with Eric or Pipsa. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:24:06.850] – Speaker 4

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[00:24:43.890] – Speaker 5

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[00:25:21.370] – jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Just want to point out, I do a weekly newsletter. It’s totally free. I write it myself. I choose one of the topics in the podcast that I do, I expand on it. And also I, I kind of find stories that I find interesting about WordPress and tech in general. And I put those in the newsletter as well. To get it, all you have to do is go over to wp-tonic.com/newsletter. wp-tonic.com/newsletter and sign up, and it will be in your inbox on Tuesday or Wednesdays normally. So over to you, uh, Kurt.

[00:26:05.860] – Kurt von Ahnen

Eric, I know this question’s not like in the questions, but hopefully you kind of saw this one was gonna come. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned the mobile app, and, and I’m just gonna say right off the top, it, it will like immediately ding to me, right? I personally My personal opinion is like all these people say they want apps and in reality they’re not ready for apps. Like their business is not scaled to where they need apps. From an agency perspective, most of my clients are in a space where they don’t need it, but then you list it and to your point, it doesn’t seem like it’s priced, you know, in the BuddyBoss range. It seems like it’s very affordable. So in that sense, do you recommend like the setup for Peepso to be like a subdomain so that creating that mobile app is like a standalone piece and the site’s still kind of like a link to it? Or do you really profess like a real integration, everything’s in one URL and it’s one big happy family? Because then that’s very difficult to translate that to an app environment, isn’t it? Or no?

[00:27:07.130] – Eric Tracz

Um, not really, because, uh, okay, so we, we have to run the app on the website subdomain, domain, whatever it may be with the setup. where Pipsa runs. So basically where your WordPress runs. It can’t really run on a subdomain because of the database connections and whatnot. The general app is built in native, React Native, and you have elements of WebView. So you can configure the app or we can configure the bespoke app for you however you want to fit your style and whatnot. And the clients would never know, regular clients would never know it’s a WebView. I’ll just leave it there. So to touch— so yes, and we also have the push notification set up and everything else so you can get those notifications on your app and bring people to your community. It’s not much more strain on your server and whatnot than just browsing with your computer or phone browser or whatever. It’s basically the same load. It doesn’t, doesn’t take less or more. Coming back to the beginning where some of the communities don’t need an app, I totally agree. Yes. Which is why we also introduced our universal app called Universal.

[00:28:32.260] – Eric Tracz

So if you look at peepso.com/app, we have a free one. It’s a universal app. So the way it works, you enter your URL, Login, password, and you’re in and done. You have an app, it’s called Universal, so you can kind of run it through your community. Hey, just install that, enter the URL, and you’re in. It’s a free app. Nice. We also have the app plus that for $99 a year, and then you get push notifications, no ads and things like that. So $99 per year. for access to mobile app and push notifications is not a big investment. We always tell people when they come to us, oh, I want to have a new Facebook. I’m like, no, you’re not going to have a new Facebook. No, that’s just not how things work. We are not going to make a bespoke app for you. Start with this. If it works for you, we can upgrade. It’s not a problem. So my background, I’m Polish. So I’m a no BS kind of very little diplomacy in me. So when clients come and they say, oh, I want to make new Facebook or new Instagram, whatever, I’m like, no, you don’t.

[00:29:40.000] – Eric Tracz

And if you do, then it’s just not going to work. So I’m trying to save people money and sanity as well, because then they come back to us, oh, it didn’t work because Pixel. No, it didn’t work because you aimed too high. And there’s nothing wrong with aiming too high, but there’s a place for everything. So apps not ready. Some of them, yes. First, you need to build a community. And like I said, people have to have a reason to come back to your website. And if you want to have a free app with that so people have your community in your pocket, please do that. Start with that. Don’t invest more money. Focus on gathering people to your community first. And there are so many niches. Like I said, bicycles is one of them. spicy people, their gardening, their transporting communities, actual transporters who are sharing where they saw which strain and whatnot. So the possibilities are endless and there’s so many like-minded people around the world who want to connect. And yeah, it’s never been the greatest time to do it than now.

[00:30:44.180] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, no, that’s all great stuff. You kind of mentioned it, right? It’s like the hard part is getting people to give them a reason to come back to the community, right? So that leads us to, to our next thing. And that’s the idea that A lot of members, even if they become part of the community, a lot of people are that, that the lurker, right? We call them lurkers. They, yeah, they, they look at posts, they read posts, but they rarely have any input. How do you, how do you get that quiet majority to like actually do the thing? Does that go back to like the gamification of social, or is it, is there some other magic that you’ve got in your back pocket?

[00:31:23.910] – Eric Tracz

Well, it really depends on your community and the profile of people who you want to target. And again, targeting everyone targets no one. That’s just how it is. So one way could be gamification. Another way could be like, if you know that someone is lurking constantly, you can tag them in a post. Hey, what do you think? Yeah. Or I would like to hear from that guy. You cannot do that with like 1,000 people, but there’s one way to do it. Do you remember how before AI on Stack Overflow, people tried to get great answers to their questions? The way that what people would do is like, oh, I don’t know how to do XYZ. So I’m just gonna write, oh, you can do XYZ by doing ABC. And that was obviously the wrong answer. And people started arguing, oh no, that’s not how you do it. You do it like that. So sometimes the kind of, let’s call it reverse psychology thing kicks in and people want to correct you. So give them a trigger to come and correct you. So there are many little, little things and hints and tips and tricks that you can use to get people to actually be engaged.

[00:32:35.720] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, but what I’m hearing from you is this community thing isn’t like a set it and forget it. You’ve got to moderate it, babysit it. Oh no, coddle it. Yeah.

[00:32:44.990] – Eric Tracz

No, no, no, no, no. There’s the same way you can, you can think about it from your own perspective and ask yourself the same questions like, why would I participate in this if there’s like nothing going on or no one cares? There’s no like newsletter that’s coming out. There’s no like updates on this and that. There’s no XYZ. There’s no friends. There’s no nothing going on. There needs to be something going on and there need to be people, you know, who you want to do stuff with, whether online, offline, and whatnot. So sharing those things, you can also set up, you know, let’s share the picture of the cat today kind of situation. You can share whatever kind of let’s hang out online and have a little online beer if that’s your fancy. So there are little triggers here and there. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:33:38.280] – Kurt von Ahnen

you’ve already hit bikes and beer in this interview. All you got to do is mention barbecue and you’ve got me on all 3 channels.

[00:33:44.430] – Eric Tracz

Well, well, I did, I did my first brisket a couple of weeks ago. It was not great, but I’m glad I started something.

[00:33:50.930] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, come to America, have real brisket at my house. Jonathan, back to you.

[00:33:55.980] – jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I’m gonna ask you, um, because I think we’ve covered the Marlboro a bit, um, so Let’s add some extra questions. So how do you, how do you think WordPress is going to cope with AI? And do you think it’s going to be able to adapt and offer something that people really, you know, that, you know, so WordPress avoids what happened to Joomla? Have you been thinking about that yourself? And If so, have you come to any conclusions, Eric?

[00:34:35.770] – Eric Tracz

Yeah. Okay, I’ll be very honest. So end of last year, beginning this year, sometime around that, I had a little breakdown because I started panicking and it all boiled down to, you know, why would anyone start buying WordPress plugins or anything if anyone can do anything with AI nowadays, especially Now. But then after using it for quite some time and after talking with Matt, who actually calmed me down a lot in that regard, we both kind of came to a conclusion that you can— AI can solve a lot of problems for WordPress and can solve it very quickly and it can solve very simple issues. And create very simple plugins in no time. However, very complex, large-scale operations like DeepSoar, WooCommerce, Odoo, whatever it may be, that’s something that really takes expertise. You can’t really tell AI, hey, make me a WooCommerce clone. Like you could, and it’s going to do it, but it’s going to be full of bugs. It’s going to be very, very leaky. It can be easily hacked. Hackable and all of those things. So even with AI, you got to know what you’re doing. It’s the same thing that I can go to Home Depot, I can buy all the bricks and cement and rebar and whatever I want, but I’m not able to build a house.

[00:36:11.800] – Eric Tracz

I need someone to build that house for me that it doesn’t collapse on me while I sleep. It’s the same with WordPress. You can, you can make your own stuff, but it’s not going to be great. And it’s gonna collapse sooner or later. And it’s not even about building things because anyone can build something. It’s about maintenance and making sure that it works with future versions of WordPress, making sure that it doesn’t collide with other plugins and situations. So yeah, there’s a lot of things to consider. So I think that at least for the time being, we’re not only safe, but we’re gonna thrive, which is, which is great. Plus, if you have, if you have a plugin price of like $250 or something per year, which is what, like $12, $15 a month, it’s pretty much nothing. And a subscription for AI is going to be like $200 a month, a month to kind of get stuff down to the level that you could actually use it. So, you know, something for something.

[00:37:12.560] – jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think there’s strengths, but also I’ve been a bit like you, and I think everybody’s in the same boat. But I also think I see, which has been quite encouraging, people in the WordPress community offering solutions around AI that seem really interesting. Do you think AI— I don’t know, you’ve been thinking this way— is there ways that maybe AI can help with engagement in actually just running a community and keeping people engaged. You know, it’s, it’s a lot of effort. Do you think AI can help in that at all? Is it, it’s contradictory? You know, people really join an online community because they want it, they really want to talk to other real people, don’t they? I don’t know if you’ve been thinking about that at all.

[00:38:17.410] – Eric Tracz

Uh, we have. Uh, we actually got asked by a client a couple of weeks ago whether we’d be willing to create an AI bot that would participate in community, create posts and things like that. I mean, sure, we can do it, but you gotta market that it’s AI. I mean, people will know Anyway, by speed of replies, the way things are formatted and whatnot. Plus, kind of what’s the point, right? Like you said, what’s the point of me talking to an AI in your community? I can just kind of talk to it directly. But you said like there’s solutions with AI integrations and whatnot. Unfortunately, most of those solutions, the way I see it, are all just wrappers on top of OpenAI or Claude or something. There’s nothing really innovative. Oh, you still need to add your API keys to have it work. Why not just cover kind of work with it directly? Why do you need that wrapper? You can spend a week or so even talking to an AI and train it to do whatever you want within what scope and on what website. So I don’t think that you would need those wrappers.

[00:39:32.950] – Eric Tracz

They seem nice and shiny on top, but under the hood, there’s, I don’t know, there’s not much value from my perspective unless it’s something really, really innovative that it’s an actual breakthrough. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of still of that AI slop, how people are phrasing it, and it’s easily spottable. So you can kind of see it very quickly. Once you see 1, 2, 3, you can see all of them. However, I will say this thing. In the, I think in the version of PeepSaw that we are including in the next release or the one after that, we do have an AI integration which will be only monitoring your community for like bad comments and things that should be reported and removed. Oh, right. So general moderation. General moderation reasons, but not really creating content and whatnot. So moderation, yes, plugging things. So that’s what we want to do. Yeah. Or actually, yeah.

[00:40:38.510] – jonathan Denwood

That’s interesting. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:40:42.530] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I think the moderation is one of the biggest scary factors for people new to the community space is they really feel the weight and the responsibility of having to you know, police and clean the community they’ve built. So if you’ve got a tool coming that helps with that, I think that’s a huge add. I think that’ll be awesome.

[00:41:01.470] – jonathan Denwood

Yeah.

[00:41:02.340] – Kurt von Ahnen

Um, let’s, let’s go to, um, the beginning of your career, Eric. Let’s say that you had a time machine, you know, a TARDIS or something like that, right? Um, you go back in time to the very beginning of your career at that journey. Uh, what advice do you think you would pull aside and give yourself?

[00:41:22.980] – Eric Tracz

Buy Bitcoin. That’s one. On top of that would be just learning more and reading more and communicating more. But on the other front, I think that we did most of the things right. I mean, in business, because coming from, coming from, you know, customer support background in the IT sphere, of things. Coming from customer support background and then kind of going through the hierarchy ladder to where I am right now, it really teaches you all of the positions in this kind of business. So you know what to focus on. And not a day goes by that I don’t check our support system and making sure that everything is taken care of. And you can see customer feedback, you’re kind of ear to the ground and making sure that things Don’t slip through the cracks. That’s kind of it. Paying attention to details really matters.

[00:42:22.370] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, that is— I feel like I want to follow up on just something that you said there, and it’s you personally look at these support tickets, you’re looking at things. At what point do you think it’s worth like hiring a VA or someone to do some of those elements versus keeping tuned in yourself?

[00:42:41.900] – Eric Tracz

Oh no, we have support staff. So we have support guys who are taking care of our support needs or our customer support needs 24/7. So that’s not a thing. I just like to pop in every now and then, like once a day at least, to make sure that everything is okay, to make sure that the quality of the replies of our staff is on point, to make sure that they didn’t forget anything, to make sure that if there’s any grievances or clients have issues, to make sure that that’s taken care of. Because when everything pretty much comes down to the client. So if a client has an issue, if you don’t solve that problem, then that’s just going to follow up and they’re not going to recommend us to anyone else. They’re going to have a bad experience that translates to another lost community, let’s say. And we don’t want that. We’re not in this business for ignoring people. We’re in this business to actually help people. You want to create a community for, I don’t know, your church, for example, or for your other religious community gatherings? Go for it. Make it personal. Make a community for your neighborhood, your neighborhood watch, and you guys can extend and exchange information there.

[00:43:51.690] – Eric Tracz

And again, it doesn’t have to be separate from— it doesn’t have to be like this or Facebook or Instagram or whatever. You can have like an extra app on your phone, for example, for your neighborhood watch. And you can have those things there, things that you don’t want to share publicly, publicly on any kind of forums because it, for example, pertains to the security of your neighborhood. So yeah.

[00:44:13.150] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s perfect. Jonathan?

[00:44:14.990] – jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think we wrap up the podcast part of the show. But Eric, hopefully you can keep on for another 10 minutes because you’ll be able to watch, listen or watch the whole podcast on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. But Eric spent a few over 10 years in the Far East, and I’ve got a couple questions about his experience there. Um, but Eric, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:44:43.650] – Eric Tracz

Oh, uh, pipsaw.com, I suppose. oDesk.com, uh, swipewp.com. We have a bunch of other solutions if you want to do that. We have our own community, which by the way reminds me, not many community/social networking plugins actually use their own software on their own websites. BuddyPress doesn’t have a community. They have a forum. BuddyBoss doesn’t have a community, not anymore as far as I know. So after they got bought out, they probably abandoned that whole idea. Symposium or Symphony, whatever it was called, I forget, they didn’t have a community. And there are a bunch of others. I think only one Fusion company, I forgot, they have a community, which kudos to them. Great. Use your own software. We create our own software because we need it. We don’t create it because whatever. There’s, you know, there’s an actual need.

[00:45:43.500] – jonathan Denwood

Thanks. And Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find more about you?

[00:45:48.350] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, even with all the spam, I’m still pretty active on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt Fanon in there and easy to find. And, uh, Mañana No Más is the company name, so mañananomas.com, or reach out to Jonathan at WP-Tonic and he’ll connect us.

[00:46:01.160] – jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Like I say, if you want to support the show, leave us a 5-star review on iTunes or Spotify. That really does help the show. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

[00:46:15.690] – Speaker 6

Hey, thanks for listening. 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. We’ll see you next time.

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