We Discuss Adii Pienaar’s New Book “Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success.”

We with discuss Adii the foundations of Woocommerce and why he sold his share of the company. What has he learned connected to starting and selling two tech companies? We also discuss his latest book “Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success.” and what are the main things that Adii would like the reader to get from reading the book.

Adii Pienaar is also the founder of Conversio. which was successfully sold to CampaignMonitor and recently he has founded Cogsy a company that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands forecast how many inventory units they need, predict when to re-order, and plan promotions and product launches for maximum profit.

Intro: Welcome to the WP-Tonic podcast where each week Jonathan and his co-host, interview the leading experts in WordPress, e-learning, and online marketing. Jonathan, take it away.

Jonathan Denwood: Welcome back folks to the WP-Tonic Show, this is episode 579, yes, five, seven, nine. I sometimes over-say this, but we have a really great guest this week; we have Adii Pienaar, the joint founder of WooCommerce, and a couple of other startups. So, Adii would you like to give the listeners and viewers a quick intro, a 20-second intro about yourself?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah, totally. I think the first thing is, for anyone that can see is; I actually had a mate of mine who recently joined WooCommerce, Steele, got me some WooCommerce swag that came just in time for this interview, which is pretty cool. But yeah, as you mentioned there, Jonathan, I’m a co-founder and with teams in WooCommerce, I subsequently left and founded another company called Conversio where we built email marketing automation software for e-commerce brands.

So, really continuing kind of, that journey for me about working with e-commerce brands, sold Conversio to Campaign Monitor in August 2019 spent last year with Campaign Monitor, and then recently spun up a new startup called Cogsy where we’re helping e-commerce brands make smarter purchasing decisions.

Jonathan Denwood: And even if that wasn’t enough, he’s written a book, Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success. So, you just do the odd thing, you only multitask a little bit, do you right. And I also have my great co-host Steven Sauder, Steven, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, Steven Sauder from zipfish.io, we make requests fast by optimizing themes, plugins, and the code that runs on the server.

Jonathan Denwood: And before we go into the main areas of the interview, I’ll be asking Adii about the early days of WooCommerce, and does he have any new reflections about those early days? And then in the second half, we will be talking about his book and the main things that he is intending to get across in the book, and then in the bonus content where it’s going to be a free for. And we’re just going to throw in anything that comes to our mind during the interview.

But before we get into the main part I’ll just want to talk about one of my major sponsors and that’s Kinsta hosting, Kinsta hosting is a WordPress-only hosting provider. I think they’re one of the better ones on the market, a great team; I cannot sing their praises higher, great people to work with and they provide great technology as well. Google Cloud, great interface, all the bells and whistles that you’re looking for as a developer, not only for yourself but for your clients if that sounds attractive and it should do.

I suggest that you go over to Kinsta and have a look at what they have to offer and buy one of their packages for yourself or for your clients. And please, if you do, do that, please tell Kinsta that you heard about them on the WP-Tonic Show, it really helps Kinsta and it really does support the show substantially.

Adii Pienaar: Sorry, Jonathan. Serendipitously I am a Kinsta customer as well with Cogsy, so doubling down on the ad there. So, anyone that tells Kinsta about hearing this about them on the WP-Tonic Show, tell them Adii was on the show and Adii loves t-shirts.

Jonathan Denwood: Alright, that’s great. What more can you ask for Kinsta? So, let’s go into the main part of the first half. So, I think that you live in America now, but you were based in South Africa in the early days, is that correct for WooCommerce?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah. And I’m still in Cape Town, South Africa, born and bred here, never had the desire to live elsewhere in the world.

Jonathan Denwood: Wow, that’s fantastic to hear. It’s a beautiful country, unfortunately, I’ve never been there, but a lot of my family have visited South Africa, so I know a fair bit about it. So, how did you get into building WooCommerce? What were the early days? Why did you get involved with your co-founders in the e-commerce space Adii?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah. So, the precursor to WooCommerce was just WooThemes and so I built the first theme that became WooThemes’ first theme that led me to meet Magnus Mark way back in 2007. And at that stage the only others that were doing similar was; one of them was Brian Gardner, who eventually founded New Studio Press. But it was very kind of a new space, and that’s really where we started as WooThemes, we were building themes on top of WordPress, it was in those days where people were kind of testing the limits of what WordPress could be doing.

Trying to do other things that weren’t just kind of your typical kind of your blogs showing a bunch of posts in chronological order. And what effectively happened was we stumbled through this category of kind of themes that we called business themes back then, it was to build kind of brochure-like websites that’s kind of most businesses any industry would need to kind of give them this online presence. And it grew so fast, became so popular and then those customers of ours just kept asking us, hey, how do I add a shopping cart to this?

And that was that genesis like we initially thought kind of the, and WooCommerce itself has a slightly longer story. But we had initially tried to just use plugins that were out there because we thought we were a themes company; we never thought we were a platform company or a plugins company. This is what it eventually became, after eventually launching WooCommerce, I believe late, 2010, early 2011, but within a year it completely flipped the business to where WooCommerce was 90% of the revenue.

So, at that stage, we’re talking about a four-year-old company completely flipping its revenue from one product category to this whole new thing.

Jonathan Denwood: Wow. That’s insight, over to you, Steven.

Steven Sauder: Yeah. With developing WooCommerce, when you decided to take on the whole e-commerce space, that adds a lot of complexity, like jumping from themes to e-commerce is a pretty big step. Was that something that was debated a lot internally, like inside the company? Like, is this something we actually want to take on or were you guys very optimistic? Like, oh no, we figured out all this theme stuff, we know what we’re doing, this is like we can dominate this space or was it like, hey, let’s dabble in this, let’s see what happens, who knows kind of thing.

Adii Pienaar: Yeah. That’s a great question actually. So, there were three failed attempts trying to create something like WooCommerce and I don’t think we had the name even but essentially our own e-commerce platform. And all of them were, I would say at arm’s length, I didn’t fully commit to it because we didn’t think we had the DNA in us.

And I actually think that the part of the WooCommerce story that often doesn’t get told I think with enough figure and with enough transparency is the fact that when WooCommerce itself as a product, was a fork of another open-sourced product called Jigo-Shop. And J Koster and Mike Jolley, who were kind of the lead engineer and designer on the product, we kind of hired them. And I think they came in and they effectively form a product standpoint at least directed where things needed to go.

And I think Magnus, Mark, and I were great at identifying talent and giving them all the resources they need, the strategic guidance, et cetera. But I don’t think when you think about doing things slightly outside of your comfort zone, like being able to trust people that you work with; J and Mike were integral to that. I don’t think without them WooCommerce would exist today, as an example.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, I was going to ask you about this because obviously there was a little bit of controversialism around that. A lot of it I thought was extremely unfair to you and you are the joint founders of WooCommerce because some people in the community at the time said literally, I don’t think they said it directly, but in a roundabout way. It isn’t unusual in WordPress, that she said that you stole the code, which is total, I don’t know where to get it from, first, it’s open-source, so anybody can use the code they could use WooCommerce’s code.

And secondly, from my understanding and I don’t know all the ins and outs of it but my understanding of it is that you made an offer to buy the business and the people rejected it. And some of the key staff decided that you were better entrepreneurs than their employees and because it’s not slavery, they have every right to go find and employment wherever they’d like. Do I have the basic facts correct?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah, totally And I think even in hindsight, I kind of get it but I think when anyone builds a business on top of an open-source platform, whether it’s WordPress or something else, then they also buy into these things. Whether they agree with it or not, those aren’t like, you can’t play a game and acknowledge what the rules are and then pick and choose which rules you want to adhere to and which you don’t.

All of those things construct the game and that’s just the dynamics of it, I think that’s the first thing that I will say to it, which is why to me, it’s almost a moot point, we did nothing illegal, we did nothing unethical. We just did something that people didn’t like, and I don’t think that’s enough of a reason to not do something.

Jonathan Denwood: Can I just interrupt on reflecting back, why do you think that they didn’t like it? Why did you think some people in the community started gunning for you and your other co-founders?

Adii Pienaar: I feel that it’s insecurity, I think many people that we’re building products in the space, looked at it and said, well, if Woo could do this to Jigo-Shop, who else can do this to us? And effectively what that means is that I keep telling people that those initial experiences for me as an entrepreneur really shaped and still shape the way I think about entrepreneurship in a way that’s, I don’t think entrepreneurship and building a business is a zero-sum game, right?

So like, I am all for competition, a rising tide lifts all boats, all of those kinds of things because WordPress and WooThemes and WooCommerce taught me a single thing, which is if IP rights, isn’t your defensible moat, that you can build here, you have to do other things. And with, what we did was we were absolutely superb at branding marketing rights and customer service.

So, I think people had insecurities there, I think the people that were kind of frustrated about our decision there probably looked at their own businesses, their own products and thought that, hey, my code is the most valuable thing that I have, and this can just be forked and that’s not great. Which again, meant that’s probably misaligned then with that business model of, then don’t build something on open-source software.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, over to you, Steven.

Steven Sauder: Yeah. That’s a really good perspective, I think too often, even me, I want to hold onto that secret sauce. Which is it’s easy to say, oh, that’s the actual code that I’m writing or that’s the patents that I have but when it comes down to the actual thing, that makes up such a little component of why somebody engages with a company or buys from a company.

And it’s a little naive to say that my thing is like that secret sauce that only like, this is what I had to pretend like, no, you have to look at it from a much larger global view where it’s that brand, it’s that marketing, it’s the support because all of those things come along with that product. It’s not just, oh, here’s some code run it or doesn’t run it, you need support for that; you need to know that that company has your back and that it’s being iterated on.

And the surest way to succeed in any industry is just to iterate faster, be better than the other guys, it’s not about the actual patent that you have, sure, it could be, or if you’re building like an actual product. Right. But in 20 years or 40 years or whatever, the patent law is, it’s going to be gone. You have to be faster, you have to be better, you have to do things and be competitive on multiple levels.

Adii Pienaar: Exactly. And actually without calling out the company in the recent past, but there’s a company in the e-commerce space building a checkout product, and they’ve raised a ton of money. Literally, I can’t remember the last number, north of a hundred million dollars in just the last two years; we went from kind of your co-founders to 200 plus people. And the challenge that I’ll kind of bring it back to, how this relates to, especially the J and Mike and WooCommerce and Jigo-Shop back in the day is, I think it’s all dandy.

Because the founder was on Twitter the other day saying this is a rocket ship, everyone wants to join my company and whatnot. And I pointed out and I said, you know what? It is very, very easy for anyone to join a raw kind of a fast-growing startup and get paid a lot of money. That’s an easy decision, as soon as shit hits the fan, I don’t know am I allowed, can I swear? Hits the fan, then those people are off because there isn’t that kind of connective tissue, that bigger purpose of actually being here.

And I think if we bring that back to ultimately and I don’t want to, I don’t mean this as criticism of Jigo-Shop but ultimately we had made Jay and Mike an offer, which they accepted. And in that sense, it was a free market, and we obviously had something there for them that was more attractive, more aligned with what they needed or wanted to do personally. And to your point, Steven, I think that when you do those kinds of things in business and especially around people, that’s when you start building that much more wholesome defensible emote.

It’s not just this one single thing, because if it’s only your tech if it’s only your code, that’s a single point of failure in your business and business, especially if you want to build a long-term bigger business needs to be more robust, more resilient than a single point of failure.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Take some easy digital downloads, just to name another competitor in that same space. One reason why I trust their products at Sandhills development as a group of people is because I like some of the stuff that they put out and they have some really smart people working there. And so, to me it’s more than just, oh, here’s a plugin that fulfills a lead, it’s like, no, here’s a group of guys that I resonate with and I like what they’re doing and I like their approach to life.

And so, to me, it’s more than just a checkout system for a digital download, I like the company behind it and I’m going to choose them over anybody else right now, because of much more than just the code that’s running underneath the hood.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah I think that’s great. Now when you decided or, I just want to ask you about when Automattic took over WooCommerce. In your joint partners, were you actively looking for a buyer, or was it a situation where Automattic approached you and then you thought, well, a serious company really wants to buy our company for a substantial amount of money, we should consider this. Which one was it? Or was it a mixture of both?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah. So, I’ll share another one of those stories that is definitely public knowledge, but I don’t think people have fully connected the dots, and clearly. So, the simple answer is we’d always had an interest in WooCommerce both from kind of your venture capitalists to other acquirers, so they were always on our radar. And it was significant interest at all times. I actually stepped down as CEO of Woo end of November, I think, November early December of 2013, and I, at that stage sold my equity to Magnus Mark.

So, I was not familiar, I’m still to this day, I don’t know any of the details with regards to the Automattic deal. I found out about the deal when it was announced on Tech Crunch on that day, for example, so again like many people they don’t, I said I’ve been public about that, I wasn’t involved, I was out by that stage.

Jonathan Denwood: If you don’t mind me asking, what led to that actual particular decision?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah. I think probably some context first which was I think for Magnus, Mark, and myself, WooCommerce, the whole Woo, but let’s just say WooCommerce was really a roller coaster ride in the sense that we were first-time entrepreneurs, we were learning kind of as we were doing. It wasn’t like we were prepped and well-versed in terms of what this should look like and I think as the business grew and developed, we also grew and developed as individuals.

And I got to a point where for me at least I love a challenge and I wanted to see how far and how big can this thing go, and Mag and Mark had different considerations at that stage. And I had a very, very concrete idea of what I wanted to build back then, and that idea is still on the radar, I will name drop this at least; I had a chat with Matt Mullenweg about this literally a couple of weeks ago. But Mag and Mark didn’t feel at that stage that we were ready, it wasn’t within our DNA and it definitely wasn’t that I can agree with, it was an ambitious project.

And when we decided that we weren’t going to do that in Woo, I decided that as an individual like Adii, I needed a new challenge and that morphed into something a little bigger for me, which was, I wanted to prove that I can build another successful business. I wanted to prove that I can take all this learning’s from those couple of years, I can distill the best things, and I can reapply that into a new business, so I ultimately made a very personal decision there to step away to found another company.

And the one thing that I can say though is even if the reported numbers, in terms of the automatic declaration of who is off by 50%, it means that I sold for a massive discount compared to kind of what Magnus and Mark sold for 18 months later.

And the honesty in all of that is I’ve never regretted that for a single point in my life, purely because I had to tick this box off, can I do this again? And I ultimately did that, as I mentioned, I sold camp Conversio to Campaign Monitor 18 months ago but yeah, that is that whole story, it’s nothing nefarious and it was ultimately just me figuring out what I really wanted to do next, regardless of the success we had, had up until that point.

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, that’s great. We’re going to go for our break, when we come back, we’ll be talking about Adii’s new book Life Profitability: The New Measure of Entrepreneurial Success. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks.

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Jonathan Denwood: We’re coming back. We’ve had Adii on the show, the joint founder of WooCommerce; I’ve really enjoyed the conversation so far. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed it Adii, I think we’ve already covered some interesting territory. So, onto your book, I haven’t read the book, but I have listened extensively to a number of your interviews, what I get about what you’re trying with the book is that difficult balance between total identification, your total personal identification with a business and the pros, and also the downfalls of that.

And also why that sometimes can be a bit difficult. And the other factor I get from it is that I’m not trying to be sexist here at all but I think women in some ways are more successful in keeping, not totally identifying all their identity with their business, their personal identity. They always have the ability to break their identity into certain areas. Am I totally off about one of the main points you were trying to make and what do you think I’ve just stated?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah. I’ve already started the latter. I think one thing that I’ve learned over the years, Jonathan, is this notion of toxic masculinity, and I think unfortunately that toxic masculinity for all the wrong reasons has gotten intertwined in capitalism. Mostly because it’s also a system and kind of a view of society that was constructed by a bunch of old white guys.

So, I think that I don’t know it’s just off and I think, I ultimately think that we’ve made entrepreneurship and we’ve made capitalism and we’ve made success such a kind of brute force pursuit, such a binary like yes, you’re successful or no, you’re not successful. Yes, you’re good enough or no, you’re not good enough, and I think I just came, and I’m just pretty riled up and I need to, and I know that that’s the masculine energy in me as well.

I think what I’ve just learned is that there’s so much more to life than just that, there’s a way to view life and our businesses and our professional ambitions in a much softer way in a way that, where I had this belief and I am very aware of both the masculine and feminine energies within myself. And I know in which context, like one of those two are more dominant and that has nothing to do with my gender either, that’s just me acknowledging that there are these two poles and there’s energy flowing at all times.

And I think as I become more aware of that other side of me, the side of me that I maybe didn’t get nurtured into as a young boy, for example, I’ve just started seeing a much broader spectrum of how I would then define life profitability wise, what I would kind of define as a profitable life, which isn’t this very narrow pursuit of, Hey, I need to build a very, very big business. And for me, we’ve been speaking about WooCommerce rights.

I was very, very young when we got into, as I mentioned, that absolute kind of rollercoaster and rocket ship, and it took me years, even just beyond kind of Woo after I’d left to get to a point in my life where everything almost broke down. Because what I hadn’t realized is, as I was running on this very, very narrow path, I was creating so much collateral damage along the way; I was incurring so many life costs for myself and for others.

And the brutal part of that was I wasn’t aware, and I consider myself to be a pretty smart person but I was not aware because I was so focused on just this one thing. So, I think that’s all of that is, there’s different toxic masculinity involved in capitalism and entrepreneurship today, and I honestly hope that part of what my book does at least is to start tackling some of those issues and to start illuminating what these alternative kinds of options or paths might be.

Jonathan Denwood: Over to you, Steven.

Steven Sauder: Can you define life profitability? Just for our listeners and myself, what does that mean? Life profitability?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah. So, what I wanted to do is, I firstly wanted to riff off a word that most of us understand, which is profitability in the financial sense, but life profitability essentially just flips that and kind of takes that definition of profitability slightly broader. So, the idea there is how do I build a business that is not just financially profitable, but truly life profitable, so not narrow but much wider. And the way I would try and kind of define or quantify that kind of wider or broader perspective is to say, I have a life portfolio and my work and professional ambition, and my business is just one, one stock in that portfolio.

But my family, my health, me sleeping well, me doing exercise. Those things are part of that. It’s me having making time to geek out about wine and drink some good wine, that’s part of my life portfolio. Playing FIFA on PlayStation, which is the only kind of gaming I do, that’s part of that life portfolio, similarly, there’re bigger things there; I mentioned my desire for new challenges, my thirst for learning, and all those things.

Those are the things in my life portfolio and what I effectively need to do, if I want to take the lens from my businesses, kind of your standpoint is say, what do I need to do in my business, so that I empower those things? And not the other way around, because I think so many entrepreneurs start out on their journeys and they have this vision of freedom that they want to pursue. Like I want to work in the way I want when I want on what I want, et cetera.

And then they ultimately, like, all of us have been there. I’ve been there, you get captured into new things. So you get some freedoms by all means. But then the worst kind of freedom that we give up is the fact that our businesses are now living in our pockets and we’re super connected. We never close an office door and just say, you know what, work is for tomorrow again or this is Friday, I’m going to have a weekend with friends or family whatever kind of floats your boat.

But we tried so many other freedoms for this thing that we want so I’m trying to have a different kind of conversation there where it’s like, hey, let’s take a step back and figure out what does it actually mean to love and be human? And I don’t think, I have a lot of very strong opinions, again, going back to capitalism, at least, capitalism is a human-made thing and what we all acknowledge, at least as humans are imperfect, yet capitalism is like the predominant way in which we structure live our lives, at this stage.

And I’ve honestly had enough, I’m not saying I’m not polished, I’m not ambitious, I’m not an entrepreneur, but that’s not the version of entrepreneurship that I’m keen on, not for those that I care about.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, Adii, I’m going to be the devil’s advocate here a little bit, obviously, there’re so many aspects of what you’ve just said, and hopefully we can do that in the bonus content. Obviously, we only have 30 minutes, so I don’t want listeners just to hear my voice because some say I speak too much anyway but some of the response to some of the topics that you’ve put in the book is that, oh, we have this white guy, this white privileged guy talking about the work-life balance.

I’m sure he’s a hard worker, but he’s not on a minimum wage trying to feed his family, how do you respond to some of that criticism that your book has received a little bit?

Adii Pienaar: I think much of it is totally fair. I think ultimately if the rule was that no person that achieved something or reaches some form of enlightenment are allowed to share some of their learning’s or ideas, because it gets pointed out that, oh, you’re only saying this because you’ve been successful, then I think we’re failing as a society in any way, I think that’s the first part of it. The second part of it is, I think capitalism in our economies needs reform, I think someone living on a minimum wage, and they might not have the ability to pursue life profitability as I proposed right now.

Because ultimately at the core of it, yes, money is still kind of your pays bolts and they might not be able to create the kind of space that I propose for anyone pursuing life profitably, I totally acknowledge that as well. My hope is, and one of the key components in the book talks about concentric circles, and what I mean in concentric circles is it starts with you, then it kind of ripples outwards to those closest to you, your team members, your customers, stakeholders, et cetera, your society, and crucially, at least what I wanted to do with my team at Conversio was I wanted to figure out how can I have an impact?

And instead of trying to solve one of these massive kinds of global warming, worldwide poverty, et cetera, things that I’m probably too far away from and don’t have the skills or the resources to tackle. What I instead figured and tried to do was a, how can I be a better entrepreneur? Which probably meant that I needed to do work on myself, and I needed to figure out my own family life.

But then secondly, as a leader and a builder of my team, how can I help my team members do similar in their lives? Because what eventually happens is if I can do that and I can empower my team to do that then we’re all rippling outwards, and hopefully in the future somewhere, because we’re all pulling in a similar direction, we’re helping those people that can’t pursue life profitability on their own because of historical kind of disadvantages and just an imperfect system that got them into that place immediately.

So, ultimately I think the teal your r there, Jonathan is it has to start somewhere, someone has to try and do something about this and I’m not kind of the Messiah here at all. I’m just a single person that is willing to stand up and say, hey, I have a couple of ideas and I hope to inspire some people to try some of these things out, to help build a better society.

Jonathan Denwood: Just to respond and then get a response and then we have to wrap up the podcast part of the show, is that I’m not a great fan of those that purvey the four-hour week concept of entrepreneurship, to be honest, I think that’s total, absolute bullshit. And when I have people they’re treated with respect if they’ve really bought into that ideology but I think they’re deluding themselves, I work crazy hours but I’m single, I’m 57, seven years ago went through a messy divorce.

But I work crazy hours, but I choose to, and I’m in control to some extent, I work five and a half days a week, it’s best not really to call me on Saturday afternoons. And definitely, unless there’s a life or death emergency don’t call me on Sundays, but the rest of the time I’m pretty accessible because I’m in business and I can choose not to be. So, you have to accept, but there have to be boundaries as well, so is that one of the things you’re trying to get across is that you have to understand your own boundaries understand yourself a bit, and then there has to be kind of boundaries personally and collectively.

Adii Pienaar: Yes. But I think boundaries are an important part of that. I think the key there is just that I don’t think there is a one size fits all model here, and if all three of us kind of worked through, for example, the worksheets that I have in the book to define what life profitability looks like for us, we would each have a kind of your perfectly unique and different version of, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

The one thing I didn’t want to do with the book is to propose a perfect blueprint, which says, hey guys, just take these 10 steps and your life is going to be exponentially better because I also don’t believe in that, I believe all of us are too unique to follow a single blueprint or live our lives by a single blueprint.

So, and to that, I’m mostly agnostic then in terms of how people structure the lives in business, I think there’re a few core things, which is for starters your business needs to align with your personal values. As an example, if it doesn’t align with your personal values, it doesn’t really matter how you work, what you work on, who you work with. There’s always going to be that disconnect, and that is the part, and I was speaking about life portfolio rights; I think that should be important to everyone because business and work aren’t everything.

And just having the clarity and awareness about what that is, is probably already better than going through life, and just looking at to-do lists that are never-ending.

Jonathan Denwood: That was great. Going to wrap up the podcast about the show, Adii’s agreed to stay on. We’re going to be talking a little bit more in-depth about some of the big subject things that he’s alluded to in the podcast part of the show. So, Adii, what are the best ways for people to learn more about you and some of your ideas?

Adii Pienaar: Yeah. Probably two places. The one would be if you’re on social media, Twitter, at Adii, I’m ready to be active there, and then otherwise my personal website, which is adii. me, where there’re details about the book as well as about 10 years of writing about similar-ish things as well, so go there.

Jonathan Denwood: And Steven, how could people find out more about you and your company.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, head over to zipfish.io, run a speed test, see how much faster your website can be.

Jonathan Denwood: That’s great and Steven and his team have helped with the WP-Tonic website, they made it a much more speed machine, even like any old WordPress website to say it’s a little bit cranberry plugins and other stuff would be a slight understatement, but he did a good clean up him and his team. I highly recommend them also before we go and call the podcast part of the show to an end, I want to tell you about a live webinar or educational seminar, Spencer Foreman and I are doing on Friday, the 9th of April.

Basically, it’s about how to replace ClickFunnels or as I call them DickFunnels and Shopify with WooCommerce and LaunchFlows at literally a fraction of the cost and you get more flexibility and power. It’s going to be a fantastic webinar, you can watch it on YouTube live and you’ll be able to ask us questions; that’s at 10:30 AM Pacific standard time. All you have to do is go to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel, you’ll see it right in front of you and you just click the reminder button and you’ll be able to join us.

We’ll be back next week with another great guest, another great conversation. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye

Every Friday at 8:30:am PST we have a great and hard-hitting round-table show with a group of WordPress developers, online business owners, and WordPress junkies where we discuss the latest and most interesting WordPress and online articles/stories of the week. You can also watch the show LIVE every Friday at 8:30 am PST on our Facebook WP-Tonic Show page.

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