The Future BuddyBoss & Membership In a World of AI
Step into a world where AI and community converge to create a dynamic new landscape for BuddyBoss users.
Uncover how AI technology redefines social connections and empowers communities like never before. Get an inside look at upcoming innovations that will elevate your online experience with BuddyBoss.
Special Guest Graham Hoffman, Managing Director at BuddyBoss
#1 – Graham, can you give some info connected to the evolution of BuddyBoss and what particular problems it tries to solve?
#2 – What particular patterns do you see on a regular basis in people who are trying to build thriving communities on the BuddyBoss platform
#3 – What are a couple of things in 2024 that you can share with the audience that BuddyBoss is developing?
#4 – How do you see AI changing how BuddyBoss is used by its user base?
#5 – What business tools and services do you use to run your business daily that you could recommend to the audience?
#6 – If you return to a time machine at the beginning of running your own business, what essential advice would you give yourself?
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The Show Main Interview Notes & Links
[00:00:04.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS. This is episode 892. We’ve got a great interview here. We’ve got Graham Hoffman. He’s the managing director and CEO of BuddyBoss. We’re going to be talking about all things BuddyBoss. We will be talking about BuddyBoss’s plans in the world of AI, our community, building a competitor to some major SaaS community-based products, what it’s like, what the advantages of building something in WordPress, and the disadvantages, it should be a great discussion. Graham, maybe you can give us a 10, 20-second pitch about yourself and what you do at BuddyBoss..
[00:01:08.690] – Graham Hoffman
Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me on. I’m very excited. I’ve been a fan for a long time as well. On our first date, I’m not the CEO before Tom kills me. Tom is still the CEO, but I have taken the place of manager and director at BuddyBoss. In my journey, I’ve been a customer of BuddyBoss. I had a user at BuddyBoss prior to that for many years now since 2016. We’ve been working at BuddyBoss in their support team, moved over to Success, the product, and then more recently, Managing Director. Obviously, BuddyBoss is the social networking tool building for communities on WordPress. As someone who has used the tool for many years, loved it. I am very privileged to be now working here.
[00:01:49.600] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think because you’re from England and I don’t know, they should call you Vice President.
[00:01:55.180] – Graham Hoffman
Well, originally it was the General Manager. We talked about it for about a year in advance, we’d been planning this. I said, Can we just change general manager to managing director? In the UK, a general manager would be more like something of a franchise or pizzeria. I was just getting flashbacks back in college of the director general of my pizza shop when I was working there. So very different, depending on where you are.
[00:02:22.120] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got my co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself?
[00:02:27.270] – Kurt von Ahnen
Absolutely. I’m delighted to see that there is something similar there, Graham. I managed a pizza shop when I was in high school. We were here at The Italian—big shout-out to them in Philadelphia. But I’m Kurt Van Oren and I run a company called MananaNoMas. I work primarily with membership and learning websites and then directly with WP Talk.
[00:02:46.370] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. As I said, in this discussion, we’re going to be talking all about Buddy Boss, what’s its plans, and what’s 2023 will be like? It should be a great discussion. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
[00:05:30.870] – Graham Hoffman
Well, I know a few weeks ago you did a recap on BuddyBoss, but I’ll keep it brief for those who haven’t called out the show, and I highly recommend it. Thank you so much for all the positive praise you gave us back then.
[00:05:43.080] – Jonathan Denwood
You can send the check.
[00:05:45.750] – Graham Hoffman
In the new year. Well, I saw Tom was watching and left a wave as well on the recording. Buddy Boss started working and creating buddy Press Themes many years ago. Buddy Boss as a company has been around for 12, 13 years. Essentially, it was a development based on making themes. Over the years, they picked up a lot of client work. They also started doing a lot of mobile client work under the umbrella of AppBoss. Coming up to 2019, they kept finding that customers were having the same problems, the same issues with functionality. Ultimately, it led to, after a lot of back and forth with Buddypress, BuddyBoss fought BuddyBossand decided to build all of the stuff that we’ve been doing for clients into an all-in-one product. Essentially say, right, at least now we can control the roadmap and push forward with our practices and on and go along with this way. That was in 2019, BuddyBoss platform launched at that time as a customer. As I said, I was using Buddypress. I had Boss Feme, and I had my own mobile app, actually, at the time, I built an Ionic mobile app on Buddypress, and I switched all over in 2019 when we launched the platform.
[00:06:59.740] – Graham Hoffman
Obviously, that was a reasonable timeline because COVID hit at the end of the year towards 2020, and we’ve seen incredible growth and incredible success from our customers. We’ve continued to innovate, add new features, add more functionality, and hit a lot of the requests from our customers. And going into this year, we’ve had probably our best year yet in terms of how much we’ve added to the product and how much better the product has got. In 2021, we released our native mobile app, which was not a requirement, just an additional functionality for those customers who already had a thriving community but were really heavy on wanting a mobile app. We built a very clever and intelligent app-building machine, essentially, to take your buddy boss installation on WordPress, take it up to the cloud, compile it, and deliver a native app experience for your users. That again launched in ’21, and now it’s coming up to just two years, nearly that outcome, up to our third year now as we go into 2024. The main thing here is, what are we trying to do? Well, we’re trying to provide a socially engaging platform for you and your business, for your memberships, for your eLearning courses, and environments like that.
[00:08:17.800] – Graham Hoffman
Learning management systems are a large bulk of our customer base, of those who are integrated with LearnDash or with Lister, for example. Or as I’ve announced this week, we’ve just released our tutor LMS integration. This is the perfect way to combine eLearning with social. Let’s really be honest, that is definitely some of the best ways to hold your students accountable and to show success of your pupils is that social accountability and social proof of people going through courses, rather than what we find with a lot of people is you buy a course, you get halfway through and you don’t quite complete it, and there’s no push for there, or it’s hard to engage with your instructor. This is where adding social functionality to your site works really well. And of course, from my own experience, I came from community building. I didn’t have a eLearning background. I built a community that were not allowed to be on mainstream social networks and again, holding my own responsibility, hosting my own data, and essentially being a place there for a safe haven for my community where mainstream social networks are Facebook or X, it was not acceptable.
[00:09:33.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you’ve done a fantastic job. I just don’t think some people, but obviously not from a developer, WordPress app background understand. I’ve always heat praise on buddy boss because of the ambition of trying to build an app off WordPress, and I have not an active developer now, I have the limited capacity to understand the technical hurdles and the ambition of that project. I give a lot of credos for trying to do something that’s not easy?
[00:10:18.980] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah. I actually started the week of the app launch. Prior to that, being a customer, I bought my apps in the pre-launch the year before, and I had experience with another app builder and I’d been experimenting with PWAs prior to working at BuddyBoss as well. My first experience with the app builder blew me away. I had to explain to the support team. I walked into the company, got 50 support people. This is what the app does. The week of launch, showing them it all, and within two days I showed them how we could build an app in less than an hour. That is unheard of. But it’s not just how quickly we do it, it’s some of the most complicated steps when you are not a developer, like building your certificates or your provisioning profiles. These are words that most people won’t understand or need to understand. Buddybus does it all for you. So yeah, it’s an incredibly powerful tool the team have built. It’s taken many years of development. We go back to pre-2019 when under AppBoss, they were building apps. They were building it one on one for customers. I actually engaged with Body Boss back in 2018 or 2019 about an app, and they were like, It’s going to cost you a minimum of $40,000.
[00:11:36.100] – Graham Hoffman
Now we fast forward to 2021 and you can get your app for $2,000. Sure, it’s per year, but that includes maintenance, includes updates, includes future functionality. It makes apps a lot more accessible. Sure, you may not have every bit of functionality because it has to be built across the board. There is a lot of functionality and a lot of customization in there, and we will continue to expand upon that. But the underlying technology is incredibly impressive. As someone who’s not a developer as well, so I’m purely an end-user. I was blown away.
[00:12:09.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, hopefully that’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:12:12.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
I was just listening to Graham talk about the timeline and I got to say, it caught me off guard. I hadn’t realized it just seems like through our use and through our daily work that it’s been around a lot longer than 2019. You said 2019, I’m like, I was still working at Suzuki in 2000. And that’s interesting.
[00:12:31.580] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, platform 2019, we have our fifth year anniversary next year. So it is pretty crazy how far Body Boss has gone and changed since that launch of the platform. And the launch of the platform has definitely been a turning point for Body Boss. Prior to that, you’re a theme developer and a plugin developer of Body Boss had four or five themes, four or five smaller plugins. So then essentially now just have our flagship of platform and theme.
[00:13:02.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
So with five years in, you’ve had a chance to see your users and get feedback for your users and stuff. What do you think is like on a regular basis, what are people facing or trying to really accomplish in building their communities in your platform? I’m stumbling over this question, but what are some of the challenges that they’re overcoming, and then how are they achieving these successes?
[00:13:29.920] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely. I think with all of these, one of the biggest things I will say is our product changes lives. We’re not just talking the business owner, right? The business owners that have thriving businesses is always amazing to read. But it’s also the tens, hundreds, thousands of users they’ve got where they’ve changed their lives. Whether it’s having a community that you feel safe in or doing a course that helps you change your career, feel better about yourself, especially with all the health and wellbeing with COVID now. Our product changes people’s lives. Building a business is always hard. Building a social network is also extremely hard. The amount of people, and again, it took me a long time to get traction with my own community. It’s not like you just launch a social network and that’s it. It’s going to take off. You’re always fighting for traction. You’re always fighting for engagement. We will constantly add features and tools to enhance that, but it also comes down to you as the bidder, your team creates engaging content and provide value. The tools can only take you so far as the value that you as a team are going to contribute that gets that.
[00:14:37.400] – Graham Hoffman
I think that’s the same if you’re doing a social network, if you’re doing a membership, if you’re doing courses for an eLearning site, the value is the most important thing. We just are a tool to help facilitate deliver that value and help grow businesses and grow communities.
[00:14:53.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. What do you think, as a follow-up to that, what are some common stumbles that new customers might have coming to the platform? How should they be better prepared?
[00:15:06.720] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, I think one of the first things is to realize your community or your site is never finished. The amount of customers, especially when we launched the app, and at that time I was in support and I went to customer success, and I spent tens of hundreds of hours with people on calls. One week, I had 40 hours just on customer calls. And the amount of time they.
[00:15:26.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Were- Oh, my God, Pavee. Yeah.
[00:15:30.590] – Graham Hoffman
It was like, you know what? I’m going to take a call every hour of a day with a customer and start working through this.
[00:15:37.060] – Jonathan Denwood
How was your family life after that, Graham?
[00:15:39.900] – Graham Hoffman
Did.
[00:15:40.480] – Jonathan Denwood
You.
[00:15:41.010] – Graham Hoffman
Need.
[00:15:41.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Family? I think the company bought you some free fur for you after that experience.
[00:15:47.500] – Graham Hoffman
Let’s just say I make the benefit of working from home to balance family life. Prior to buddy boss, I worked in London, so I was doing two hour commutes each way, so I was like, The extra hours at home. At least I’m at home. But yeah, it’s definitely been trying times, and people at work always laugh. We have a lot of dedicated people that seem to be around day and night. But we’re going back to these stumbling blocks, the amount of people that feel like, I just need one more functionality, I need one more feature, I need one more thing for engagement or one more thing for bringing new people in. People expect change. People expect evolution. Now that these businesses have been built in a day, changing one thing is not going to change your business. It’s not going to change your engagement. So I always say with this, and same thing for the app, when customers were trying to do specific stuff in the app, I’d say just launch. Launch, get in front of your customers, listen to their feedback and iterate on the feedback there, and again, change over time. Go to Facebook.
[00:16:46.030] – Graham Hoffman
It’s not what it is today that it was five years ago and what it was nine years ago. It’s changed tremendously. Every social network has changed, and a lot of that is built on data-driven metrics, which is very hard in buddy boss. I’ll admit that one upfront, and we can talk about that as we talk about AI. But again, getting actual user feedback. And again ourselves, our roadmap, we always say it’s agile. There’s a lot on our roadmap that’s been there for a long time because we’ve not prioritized it, because we’re listening to the customer feedback, we’re just listening to the data and we’re saying, Hang on a minute. This one’s going to have most impact for people. And so being agile and being able to just move forward is normally the biggest thing holding people back. You don’t need 75 or to achieve that functionality. There’s never going to be a solid block. Just start minimum, launch, and then expand.
[00:17:39.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
I like that. Thanks, Jonathan, over to you.
[00:17:42.870] – Jonathan Denwood
So how do you… I’m consistently preaching that through my other podcast and the consultations I have with possible clients at WPtonic. You’re in a death fight with mighty networks, aren’t you? You’ve got Circle as well, and I know Kajabi are entering this market to some extent. They bought a.
[00:18:17.750] – Graham Hoffman
Startup and they’re integrating that. Yeah, Gwaiver, isn’t it?
[00:18:20.440] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t know how far. I get mixed reports about how effective the integration, and I don’t know what their commitment is to it. Itry. But your main… Because I had a mighty network expert on my other show last week, and I thought I was very diplomatic in that. She was a child and shes a charming lady and I was very appreciative that she agreed to come in with the devil. But you are in a death fight with mighty networks. What do you think, and I think a lot of WordPress solutions and plug-ins, they focus on other plug-ins as competitors for understandable reasons, but a lot of the time they’re real competitors of SaaS products.
[00:19:18.410] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:19:20.570] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you think BuddyBoss strengths are compared to your leading SaaS competitor, the mighty Networks?
[00:19:29.210] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, sure. I mean, Might’s Network’s incredible company with a brilliant tool for what it needs to be for the market. We have to remember that company had 50 million in funding and investments. It’s a company that had a huge investments. And if you consider that to the size of the customer base, we’re bigger than them, which is crazy to see. Wow!
[00:19:52.170] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s a nice achievement, isn’t it?
[00:19:54.690] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely. Kajabi and Teach for One Night outside, they’re BMFs in the size of there. But again, yes, we lose some customers to MITRE’s networks or to Circle and customers go there. Equally, we get a lot of customers coming back. What was interesting when we launched the app, the amount of customers that came to us but never used WordPress before and said, I wanted an app. I saw what BuddyBoss does. I’ve never used WordPress. Can you teach me WordPress? Because I’m struggling with the actual WordPress before we even think about building the app. So again, the power of WordPress. It’s ultimate customization. Anyone can do anything and you can hire a developer and make as much customization as you want to. You’re not stuck on someone else’s land. That’s really the biggest thing that a lot of people need to realize is, again, you own the land there. You’re not dependent on development. Sure, customers are dependent on us for development. There’s nothing to stop you go customize it or get a developer in to build a plugin or, again, in the 250-plus integrations that extend the product that we work well with and have worked with buddy Boss.
[00:21:04.740] – Graham Hoffman
I think the main one there is it’s having more power over your environment, also owning your data. You could take your data from one place to another without any reliance on there. One of the customers, and I actually did client work prior to work at buddy Boss for a customer who moved to mighty Networks to buddy Boss, it was a huge cost-saving for them. Mighty Networks is cheap when you’re on the lower end. As you start scaling, things start adding up, if you want the app, you’re talking, I think the last I heard is 30, $35,000 if you want the app. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of perks to being on a network or anything on WordPress. There’s a huge amount of power there and flexibility. Of course, the issues with WordPress, and again, it’s not BuddyBoss, it’s WordPress as a whole, is that you need to have knowledge of WordPress. You spend a lot of time in the business itself in terms of building and getting things prepared and updating your plugins and doing your mainstance and all of the stuff that comes with running your own environment as opposed to with mighty networks or something like that.
[00:22:08.980] – Jonathan Denwood
I think a lot of people when they get to a certain size, having the pro… I won’t hold this against you because it’s just business. You just launched a special partnership with a hosting provider. At WPtonic, we’re a hosting provider as well, but that’s just life. I won’t hold it. I’ll still send you a Christmas card, Graham.
[00:22:34.030] – Graham Hoffman
I was thinking we’ve got to get rid of them on the call.
[00:22:36.670] – Jonathan Denwood
But I think the main thing is, if you’re starting off, you’ve got to keep your costs under control at any stage. But what I mean is you get all these benefits, but you’ve got to be realistic. The buddy boss is a powerful, but a demanding resource platform because it does so much. Your normal GoDaddy shared hosting account will not do the job. Even your mid-range e-commerce account probably won’t do the job, depending on how many students interaction and the type of interaction. Quality hosting, but then now having a stage insight, if you’re taking people’s money, you update things on the stage in-site first just to check, and then you update on your production. You just have some systems in place and some control over what functionality you’re going to introduce. A lot of the problems are removed if you have the right attitude and you have the right systems. Would you agree with that, Graham?
[00:24:07.160] – Graham Hoffman
Hundred %. Couldn’t agree more. Again, the barrier to entry for BuddyBoss or any of these premium solutions is yes, maybe there’s a bit more of an up cost. Ongoing is cheaper. Having the right setup to begin with is important. Hosting is so vital for BuddyBoss like it is for most of the LMSs. Anything with dynamic content with a lot of users, it’s resourceful for a reason. You’ve got a lot of engagement happening. The more engagement you have, the more resources you’ll need. We are working quite a lot at the moment on performance and stability, and that’s on the app and the web. We’re looking at ways to cut down the amount of requests, which is basically what’s happening when there’s an engagement, to improve performance. But again, like you say, this is not the $5 hosting platform. This is going to require a setup. It doesn’t need to be crazily expensive to start with, but you should know if you start running into slowdowns and issues, it’s a good thing. It means there’s more engagement and therefore- You.
[00:25:09.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Need to up it.
[00:25:10.470] – Graham Hoffman
Up it, exactly. I know I wasn’t going to talk about hosting, but I’m 100% right. Yes, we’ve recently produced our hosting solution, and that’s because, again, it’s hard to host dynamic content. I know you guys are doing an incredible job when I’m giving the show to customers that are on you, and I think that’s it. If you’ve got the right person and we’ve got people in the buddy boss Facebook group who specialize in hosting, and I will always recommend people like that who know what they’re doing to host a dynamic site because it’s not static content.
[00:25:43.350] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m amazed though because it’s not jet science either, because a lot of it is switching off caching, having a backbone where you’ve got caching removed. You don’t have it in operation on the back end. You customize it so caching might operate on some of the front-end pages, but you don’t and you just have enough PHP workers. It’s not jet science, but I think even the more quality general hosting providers, there’s about three or four that I would consider, they will try and help you, but their model relies on a lot of caching and you’re just a small client to them, so they try and be helpful, but caching always comes back. It’s like a… Oh, no, I’m not going to go there. It’s like the things that comes back.
[00:26:43.000] – Graham Hoffman
You’re right. The minute you move caching, you need more PHP workers for requests. Most of these hosting companies are built where caching is where essentially they get to serve the resources with minimal footprint, which is where they’re making it work.
[00:26:56.950] – Jonathan Denwood
But it works great, doesn’t it? For the-.
[00:26:59.270] – Graham Hoffman
For staticit’s just a perfect solution. Yeah, absolutely. It’s when you want to refresh someone’s messages at the moment of their… That’s when you get problems. Or when you want to post an activity feed or go to a group, that’s there. But when you need to have more PHP workers, more CPU process and power.
[00:27:16.810] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Before I throw over to Kurt, I’ve got one other quick follow-up question. How, in your own mind, do you deal with something that I’ve been continuously thinking, not often… I’m not often on, because I don’t have many thoughts, Graham. How do you control the madness of WordPress? What I mean is all the benefits which you outlined at the beginning of flexibility, ownership. But you’ve got all these plug-ins and people can really do a big dive. They’ve got all these options, which is great. Options are great. Other people in WordPress have dealt with it by having what I call a walled garden. A WordPress walled garden is worse than going to my networks in my mind, because you’ve got the restrictions of mighty networks, but then you’ve got the hosting and the setup and all the other things you’ve got to do on WordPress. You’ve got the combination of both worse elements. You’ve lost the flexibility of WordPress, but you’ve got the overhand of WordPress. How do you avoid a walled garden WordPress environment? I wouldDo you understand where I’m coming from? Yeah, absolutely. Internally, this is ongoing discussion for yourself.
[00:28:51.270] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, it’s actually really interesting because I’ve had a lot of meetings today about our plans next year. I think one of the most important things at BuddyBoss we need to focus more on. Some of what we’re discussing a lot today, is that first users experience. We’ve seen a lot of plugins recently add really nice setup wizards. I know you spoke about it probably a month or two ago now about the Ollie theme with their setup wizards and the plugin for onboarding. For us, again, there’s a lot of configuration, a lot of options, and we keep adding more because we want to increase that functionality. We have to address how we handle the setup. So obviously we have what we would say is our default settings, but if you’re already using the feature, we keep your settings as they are, and it’s around how we train users to set up and have the best experience on there. It is difficult when a product like this, the amount of customers who have been with us for six months and go, Oh, I didn’t even know that setting was there. I didn’t even know about profile types, for example, as a customer a year into it.
[00:29:52.540] – Graham Hoffman
We provide as much documentation. We’ve got 1,600 articles. That’s far more than you want to read in the sitting. We reduce high-depth videos every single time we have new features, but it is a constant challenge. On top of all the WordPress changes and every integration has hook in options on there, there’s no easy answer, but I agree with you. You don’t want to wall in the customers and start locking them behind functionality.
[00:30:18.460] – Jonathan Denwood
It must be very tempting for you to try and do that, but it must be a consistent discussion in the come. I think our listeners to this have… The reason why I’m bringing it up, this is more focused at the WordPress, Power, User and professional, this particular podcast. I think it’s a consistent discussion they’re having as well. Is it something you’re always discussing in your own company?
[00:30:46.530] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, completely, all the time. Whenever we’re scoping a new feature, we always have to look at what’s the default setting, or what’s the customer got now? One of the things that would be lovely to do is just sunset features that aren’t in use. But we’re very hesitant to change anything that’s already there. So whenever we’re adding a new feature, we’re always weighing up like, How is this changing the existing experience? Are we going to be removing anything away from the product? Because we don’t want to remove something that’s in use, even if it’s in a small use case. It’s a bit of a constant back and forth. And I fully encourage any conversations with people who are using BuddyBoss if they have questions around integrations or around settings. Again, there’s no pretty answer, especially when it comes to developers. We do our best to try to keep that open dialog. We have a Slack channel for developers just to make sure we’re up to date with the latest hook changes or functions or on the app side requesting hooks, because on the app development you don’t get the source code. You have to request hooks if you need new additions.
[00:31:46.210] – Graham Hoffman
But it is a challenge, especially as we step further away from the original Buddy Press code and into our own code base. Those previous integrations will now not work. So we have to communicate back and forth, which is again, very hard with trying to still keep momentum and cadence with customers, with releases, but not having that knock on effect to all the custom development that may have happened, whether it’s just by one person or by a plug in author who’s selling a plug in that we’re now damaging the reputation of.
[00:32:17.040] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, over to you, Kurt.
[00:32:19.290] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, now I almost feel bad to ask my question, Graham.
[00:32:22.300] – Graham Hoffman
Shoot, yeah, go for it.
[00:32:23.510] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m plucking about new features and then just launch and don’t worry about the features and.
[00:32:27.850] – Graham Hoffman
My thoughts.
[00:32:28.980] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think it’s best that we go for a break because I want to give Kurt plenty of time and he have some questions and we’re probably all up to the 30-minute. I’m sorry about that, Kurt. I didn’t look at the clock, but I’ll cut him in mid. But he will be back with his question and follow up with the questions. I think we’re going to go for our break, folks. When we come back, I’ll throw it over to Kurt. We will be back in a few moments, folks. This podcast episode is brought to you by Lifter LMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any.
[00:33:11.180] – Graham Hoffman
Online course.
[00:33:13.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Training-based, membership website, or any type of eLearning project.
[00:33:18.330] – Graham Hoffman
Lifter LMS is.
[00:33:19.500] – Jonathan Denwood
The most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to Lifterlms.
[00:33:26.150] – Jonathan Denwood
Com and save 20 % at checkout with coupon code, podcast 20. That’s podcast two zero. Enjoy the rest of your show. We’re coming back, folks. I rudely interrupted my quote, but I didn’t do it on purpose, but I just realized I’d rabbled on… I sat in with Graham and we hit the 30 mark and we needed our other spot for our sponsors. I’ve got another sponsor for December, I’ve got Cloudways. Cloudways, you probably know them, another great hosting provider and they’ve got a great special offer. They’re offering 30% offer for four months and free migrations as well. If that’s interesting, go over to the wptonic/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals and you’ll find more information there about that offer as well and a load of other offers. What more could you ask for? I’m sorry about that, Kirk. Back over to you.
[00:34:32.870] – Kurt von Ahnen
Oh, it’s all good. I can get my mojo back.
[00:34:36.290] – Graham Hoffman
I have shows now.
[00:34:38.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
I was thinking of it from my question from an agency perspective is, you have this customer, they want this really cool social website. The whole decentralized social is a thing. That’s why there’s things like Instagram and Locals because you don’t want to get censored off of Facebook when you’re running a five-day challenge. It doesn’t work, right? Yes. You have your own platform, and then you have these clients to your point that are like, Oh, I wish it did this, or plugged into that, or did this other thing, or whatever. On one hand, you’re like, This thing is so amazing. It does so many cool things. It sounds like Jonathan’s commercial. What else could you ask for? I’m going to ask, with the new year coming, what are some new features or anything that’s in development that you might be able to share with us?
[00:35:27.520] – Graham Hoffman
Sure, absolutely. There are some of the best things I can share. I’ll just talk about the start of this year and about what we did this year. Obviously, as I said, I became the managing director this year, and prior to that I was working with the product team. That’s our main development team. One of the things that had been very much stacking the product team and caused a lot of firefighting, a lot of inefficiency, was the amount of bugs that would accumulate over many years. And so we spent essentially the first six months this year just bug fixing. And we saw over 2,000 bugs across products of our platform, Platform Pro theme, and the app side. So across five products in total there. And so we spent the first half of the year essentially bug fixing. And the goal here was always to add at least one feature or one enhancement every single month. And we did that. So again, it meant smaller wins, but it’s still meant to win. And then coming to the second half of the year, bugs are all squashed, less than 100 still maintain to date. Now it’s time to ramp up development and we spent a lot of time scoping.
[00:36:32.250] – Graham Hoffman
The second half of this year was really aimed at the activity feed, which is the core part of any social network. We’ve spent a huge amount of time this year on the activity feed and some additional pain points in between group subscriptions was one of them there, that came a side of the new pain point customers wanted, we worked to address that. So going into the start of next year, again, if we think about strategically, this year we did bugs. One of the things strategically I want us to focus on is that scalability and performance. Now I know that doesn’t seem fun for a lot of people, but it is so important to users that your performance is fast, but you’re not having to pay excess charges on hosting and going up tiers because we’re inefficient with our code. And more importantly, we want to be able to scale buddy boss to even more users with minimal requirements. So we’re going to be spending the first 2-3 months the year primarily focused on a lot of library updates, a lot of optimizations, re-reviewing code bases, and basically doing another cleaning of in-house, especially if we consider this code is going back to 2019 and before that.
[00:37:43.890] – Graham Hoffman
And of course, the MSO and the code bases still from buddy Press, which we have been overtime, organically updating and changing our notifications, is an entirely new API for our end. So the start of the year is primarily around strategically getting performance and scalability and paying a lot of attention to speed. At the moment, we’re working on a task that at least in our tests will cut the activity feed. So there’s the main social feed down by half, which will be huge. And so we’re looking at a lot of this around performance. Our architects have been told, Hey, performance is top of mind right now. We’re going to go through a lot of time on there. We still have reactions to add, and this has been the bane of BuddyBoss since it got mentioned a year ago, or longer than that for a lot of customers, reactions will be the next activity feature that we release, which again is always a given for a lot of people with social networks. And then we’re going to focus on, like I said, a lot more activity feed functionality, which primarily is all around performance side. So loading comments faster, being able to react to them.
[00:38:49.970] – Graham Hoffman
We have a big overhaul of the way it looks. So in terms of just cleaning up the interface, we did BuddyBoss 2.0, thetwo years ago in April now, and that was a big update visually, and we still have some more enhancements we want to add to that, along with notification digests. So one of the perks of adding group notifications and group subscriptions and our new notifications is that our customers are experiencing more engagement than ever before. We now introduce a new pain point. Customers are getting too many emails because they’re getting too much engagement. So one of the big challenges we’re working on at the moment is digesting notifications. This will be if you’ve received so many messages in a short period of time, rather than sending them immediately, bulk them together, send them a nice email. Take that one step further, then we can have a digest of your weekly activity for your customers or monthly activity for customers. Now to do that, we’re going to overhaul our entire email templates. Right now they’re still on the classic editor. We’re going to blockify them and move them into blocks and then that will give a lot more customization.
[00:40:00.090] – Graham Hoffman
Also that helps solve the problem where one plugin will send emails and BuddyBoss will send emails, and both of them look very different from templates. It’s such an annoying thing to see, but very hard to resolve. This will help now unify these templates all in one place. That’s really the first quarter of the year of what we’re working on. I’d hoped notification digest would be done this year. It’s just not been the case. The more we unlock, the more problems we see, the more we go, You know what? It’s better to to overhaul the existing functionality and do it properly, than try to hack away at some half solutions. Then moving after that, we are looking at groups and forums will be the next one. Staying true to that social experience. We do have a couple of key projects that we’re working on quietly aside, which I think is going to surprise and impress a lot of people. And then analytics, I mentioned earlier on data-driven decision making is so important for businesses. One of the biggest things BuddyBoss suffers from right now is as a user, you don’t have your analytics. What’s the trending topic?
[00:41:10.270] – Graham Hoffman
What’s your users doing? Who’s the most engaging? What time of it is? Google Analytics is on WordPress, but it’s not built into the product. One of the things we’re working on with the team at Oreman is we’ve already done the research into integrating Google Analytics, and we’re looking at a few other alternative solutions for those who have GDPR concerns, is building analytics into the product at a much more detailed level. Again, think about the SAS products, the analytics of levels they’ve got there. It’s bringing that into BuddyBoss and letting customers understand what is happening in your business. Helps us a brilliant understanding of the return on investment in community, but also helps you understand when is the best time to post, what’s common conversations, who’s your most active user, what’s your most active group? And so all of this will be very key. Next year, there’s a heavy drive from my side through to BuddyBoss of making more functionality for the business owner themselves to be more successful. All the activity feed stuff, which is nice to have is for your user, but it’s not for our customer. So it’s really good for you on the social network, but may not help you as the business.
[00:42:23.420] – Graham Hoffman
We want to focus a lot more next year on what can help you make more benefits as a business, which includes AI tools, includes scheduled posting, for example, includes analytics. All the functionality that helps you as a business have more success and have more knowledge about how BuddyBoss is helping you.
[00:42:42.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
First off, I just want to thank you because that was a super complete, power-packed answer. I just want to go back to you were talking about the notifications and how that can be a bit much, but I don’t want to lose sight on the fact like I’m a LinkedIn power user. I’m on LinkedIn a ton. I get so many stinking notifications and digests and stuff from. So it’s not a buddy boss problem. It’s a.
[00:43:05.600] – Graham Hoffman
Social problem. Absolutely.
[00:43:06.950] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s a thing. So yeah, if you could digest that down, that would be a really good, awesome feature when you consider the ubiquitous nature of what social is growing to become over time. So I think that’s pretty awesome.
[00:43:21.630] – Graham Hoffman
Just to say, the cool thing we’re doing about it, obviously with buddy boss and the way it works is a friendship request is one type of notification. Messages are different, an activity post is different, forums are different. So that’s our problem is all these are four, five, I think we’ve got something like 20 different email templates. So that means if you get a message from someone and then you get a forum message when it tags you, they’re two totally different emails. And this is where the complexity comes in. How do we digest into one and then how do we make that template editable by the admin? And then you think about the user experience, okay, we’ll let the site admin decide if you’re going to enable it and what you’re going to enable, but then let the users define, Okay, I do want these digested. I don’t want these digested, or I want it once a day, once a week, given the choice. We always try to balance that, given the choice between the site owner and the end user to make sure that you get a good happy medium result there.
[00:44:15.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. I think about the folks that integrate with LMSes or other types of dynamic tools, because an LMS has a series of notifications and engagements. Then the WordPress platform itself has a series of notifications that go out for different things. All of that coming from the same root URL could be a little overwhelming to the standard user that’s at home.
[00:44:35.820] – Graham Hoffman
Absolutely.
[00:44:36.310] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. You end up in the spam box after a while and nobody cares. So yeah, I can definitely see what you’re talking about with the notification stuff.
[00:44:43.600] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah. And if anyone is listening from the buddy boss group and said, Oh, you’ve introduced group subscriptions, and now there’s another problem, I get it. I do get it. Honestly, we do want to resolve this. But it’s not a quick, easy thing. You can’t just like, Oh, let’s throttle them all as one. It doesn’t work as simply as that. We have to get it right. We can’t afford to risk saying design bad is not right with this type because there’s a lot of business impacts and some people want more and some people want less. So it’s striking that balance and building, and as much as we always do, build as much customisation as possible so that every business owner has the flexibility to decide how they want to use that.
[00:45:21.010] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, perfect. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:45:25.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, just a follow-up question because you gave a very detailed answer there. Thanks, Graham. It just occurred to me. How do you deal with the judgment call? Because this is just by the scope of your reply, Graham. It’s howyou’re dealing with a lot of stuff here. Then you’ve got the question, how much functionality do you bring inside a buddy boss and how much functionality do you lead to other partner plug-ins like Lift to LMS, like LearnDash, like 2.0 to LMS, and like marketing automation. We love Fluid CRM and we love their new booking plug-in. We just love that team, what they’re doing. Like me and WP Tonic, we just love them. But there must be this internal conversation with the man of that buddy boss has become. How much do you rely on third parties? But if you try and bring everything in-house, you become this walled garden, you become something worse than my network. So how do you deal with that discussion?
[00:46:52.210] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, so again, I think it’s the whole there is a world where sometimes we step on people’s feet, but we do our very best to avoid it. For example, prior to BuddyBoss having a moderation tool as a component, there was a third-party plugin. The problem for that plugin is it didn’t work with our app, so we had to build ours. Also, we had other levels of complexity we wanted to incorporate in there. But for us, we want to work with the parties. Power of WordPress is the marketplace. The power of BuddyBoss is how open we are for development and integrations. So where possible, we try to just go, Right, there are enough pain points and issues in our own product and enough that we can develop inside that that’s only we’ve got control of essentially. There’s no need for us to roam around. Now, there are always customers that are saying to us, I wish you could do this and it’d save me this fee or save me on having this. Or if you did it, you’d do a better integration better than your core product. But ultimately, the treatment of BuddyBoss could be so big.
[00:47:51.130] – Graham Hoffman
Like you say, even like Myx networks, their courses are pretty poor, the events is not great. We’ll never perform anything for full moving role, right?
[00:48:01.480] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m sorry to interrupt. That is the core problem of trying to become a Swiss Army knife, isn’t it? Yeah. You do a lot of stuff, but none of it is that particularly well done. Then as you add more and more functionality, that problem gets worse and worse and worse, doesn’t it?
[00:48:18.550] – Graham Hoffman
Absolutely, yeah. I’m sure we will do stuff that maybe other people have done in the past, or maybe we’ve done it because either it was part of our future roadmap of what we’re trying to do and achieve in the future, or maybe we’re doing it because they’ve done one feature, we’ve got six, and so it’s better for us just to do it all as one change. That’s the point there. But wherever possible, we really want to work with these partners. Again, we have OpenDieter with a lot of them. Much like here, I’m a huge fan of all the Fluent stuff. I’ve pretty much bought all their lifetime deals as soon as they launched immediately. Fluent support is another great-.
[00:48:53.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it’s not that. It’s also the attitude of the owner, his team, the way they respond to their groups, their Facebook groups, they engage. It’s very impressive, isn’t it?
[00:49:06.380] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely. And again, we take that to tutor LMS, how engaging their group is, their community, how engaged their developers are.
[00:49:15.080] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re.
[00:49:15.570] – Graham Hoffman
Great.
[00:49:18.610] – Jonathan Denwood
People, Graham, but they don’t compare to Lifta.
[00:49:21.800] – Graham Hoffman
Lifta, yeah. Maybe I’m doing my shield for the new integration we’ve just got. But again, it’s the same thing with Lifta. I mean, Lifta, paid membership pro, another prime example, right? All of these developers that we have core integrations with, we’ve got core integrations for a reason. We’ve got good relationships. We think what they’ve done is fantastic. We know it’s a credit to the WordPress world of what they offer. Again, the pie is big enough. You don’t have to eat each other and you don’t have to become this all-in-one. Because like you say, you close off the garden for functionality. You tend to do everything average instead of excelling in that area.
[00:49:56.780] – Jonathan Denwood
So it’s- How do you make that decision? Is there an official discussion in your company about… There are certain areas that we will look at and we do, but there are certain bits that we won’t delve into because we’re going to end up being this Swiss Army knife. Is there a framework where you will look at something?
[00:50:24.670] – Graham Hoffman
Honestly, we’ve never had to do it. In the two years that I’ve been at Buddywood, we’ve never needed to because we’ve known our lane and we’ve known there’s enough areas in our own tool to worry about it. I mean, whenever we look at stuff, we always go, Oh, there’s a product that already does that. We don’t need to look at it. Again, I’ve got a having used the tool and still used the tool now, I have a slew of knowledge. But also spoke about Jason earlier, our content manager. He’s a customer at BuddyBoss. Our product owner is Thomas. He’s been a BuddyBoss customer. Our product manager at BuddyBoss, Mikey, he’s been a customer and an agency developer of BuddyBoss. Having a lot of new members into buddy boss who are actually customers for many years has also given us the knowledge of the wider WordPress world of there’s already stuff out there, we don’t need to recreate a wheel. That said though, I mean, if you look at our roadmap, all that stuff there is stuff that no one else is doing or no one else is, or it’s like a one-off thing where someone’s on for a client.
[00:51:21.470] – Graham Hoffman
All the activity features, I don’t feel should need a third party developer. We should be building it because we can write to the wider public. But obviously, if you want to cut the queue and get ahead of it, then custom development’s there for you. But there’s a lot we can do in our own product before we start going too far away.
[00:51:36.430] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I just thought I’d ask you because I think it’s the interesting element that somebody like BuddyBoss, being in WordPress, doesn’t face. It’s interesting how you deal with that because my network don’t have that discussion. No. But it’s a draw pay, but it’s also a benefit because you’ve got that enormous system of other developers worldwide which my network doesn’t have. They will never have that.
[00:52:14.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Exactly.
[00:52:16.100] – Graham Hoffman
Typical of SaaS though, isn’t it? It’s that if you’re a closed environment, you close your doors to development. If you’re an open development like us, it’s a brilliant perk. Like I said, so many integrations that work so well. It’s also a pain point. Some of the integrations that either slow down us because we want to roll a feature out but now have to legacy or maintain two versions of compatibility. It’s also, let’s say, for example, when Lister add a new feature, if we’re not aware of it, suddenly our integration is falling behind or there’s a style change that we’re not aware of. Again, for me, the perks always outweigh the cons. It’s just one of those things that we always have to juggle whenever there’s a new version out, making sure we’re ahead of the curve, much like when WordPress rolls a new version. Every time there’s a WordPress beta, we need to test first because the last thing we want is our product to not work. It’s the same with all these integrations. For the most part, we try now to have third parties build the integration, not us, because then it puts the ball in their court to maintain it because it is primarily their integration with us.
[00:53:16.400] – Graham Hoffman
But for all the core ones like we’ve done with Lifter or LearnDash, again, it falls on us. It’s another bit of an ownership and burden, and we just need to be conscious of those changes. But all in a way, it’s a much nicer environment to work with Swissway. I think customers get to benefit way more, because our product team can only do so much unless you’re going to grow the product team larger to manage a new feature, a new tool.
[00:53:41.590] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’s go on to AI. I utilize AI a lot. It’s been very beneficial for me personally, Graham. I’ve got a suite of AI. When it comes, I think to say we’re in the early days of AI around eLearning would be an understatement, but I see enormous possibilities. At the present moment, Kajabi has been playing with AI. They’ve got a free service where you’re utilizing it to write content. At WPtonic, we offer Bertha. I actually probably need to emphasize that more because we provide that as a free part of our hosting package. The AI integration in WordPress is there, Bertha, there’s a couple others, but it’s not been fantastic. What Kajah have been doing is doing looks interesting, but it just helps you write content. You could third-party tools that will help you much better to do that. Where I see the possibility, Graham, is obviously with learning at the present moment, you’ve got the social element, you’ve got the course, that Lifta, LMS, or LearnDash deals. You’ve got the community element that buddy boss is so great at. You’ve got gamification because you’ve got these different styles of learning. But I see AI offering the opportunity of being instructed that’s almost there with you that by your response to watching a video, by doing a quiz, by your interaction with the larger group through buddyBuddyBoss actually sees your progress and then customizes how new material will be given to you.
[00:55:54.930] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s coming and coming quicker than what most people think. What’s your own thoughts on this, Graham?
[00:56:03.470] – Graham Hoffman
Well, I couldn’t agree more. We are such at the early stages. We last year started building a list of how we could use AI in BuddyBoss. I think the list is 150 odd, and every day someone will come and add some more. There’s so much opportunity of AI, both on how you run it, how you use it on the front end, as well as how you use it as a business for management. I think you’re right around the LMS, instructor side, having AI help personalize the learning journey is going to be vital. Having the AI understand what you’re very experienced at and what you’re struggling in, and having it personalize that content to help you Excel in those areas and give you more knowledge in areas you’re struggling with, again, it’s just one small avenue that we could use AI for. All of the course materials, which we’ve seen a lot of in that big drive, we’ve seen the big rise of ebooks recently with ChatGPT, writing books for people on the Amazon stores. But the amount of courses that now let you add AI-driven content on there, I think that’s a bit of a gimmick or a very early way of into AI.
[00:57:11.180] – Graham Hoffman
I think there’s going to be so much more coming in the future. We’re using AI quite a lot, buddy boss one, our support team, especially those who are not native English, having AI helping them from speaking perspective. If you watch any of our tutorials recently, they’re all using AI voice. My voice is all AI driven. No one else has actually caught this or said it yet, so exclusive here.
[00:57:33.100] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m wondering- You’re really having this discussion with.
[00:57:36.800] – Graham Hoffman
Us, Graham. Yeah, exactly that. Well, if I know you should say that I was actually testing a tool recently, but I gave a recording and then it took my mouth, took it out and started speaking for me, which you can then put as a- There’s.
[00:57:49.260] – Jonathan Denwood
A lot of people would like that to happen with me, Graham.
[00:57:53.910] – Graham Hoffman
But yeah, it’s an incredible, amazing field. We’ve got a friend who’s also started a bit of business and AI as well, and a friend of buddy boss that’s just talking and throwing us some of the latest stuff he’s seeing. But taking that to buddy boss, obviously, we’re not doing any AI right now, and it is an area we’re very conscious about. We’re also aware that if you jump in too soon, just think of what happened to OpenAI just a few weeks ago, all of those companies that lived off ChatGPT could have been closed down the next day if they didn’t get that sorted with walking away and Microsoft and all of this. So it’s going to be really crazy to see, but there’s so much opportunity. So again, BuddyBoss, primarily the way I see AI, at least from a starting point, is using it to help businesses make better decision making, getting insights into community. Again, great. I’ve got these analytics. What do I do with them? What can the AI help suggest and interpret? Not just the days worth of data, but weeks, months, years. Talk about trends, talk about what’s working, what’s not working.
[00:59:02.390] – Graham Hoffman
Start helping you refine what’s coming. Of course, content creation to help find that stuff that’s trending. On the front end for your users, let’s say we’ve got Lifto LMS and we’ve got BuddyBoss. We’ve got a group in BuddyBoss where all your students are talking, it’s associated to that course. Now someone asks a question, AI goes, Yep, someone asks this question, they’re in the course. I know all the course material and the answer was there. I’m now going to post it as a reply to them, suggesting the reply to them straight away. Having AI understand the question intent and suggesting answers, knowing what else is on your site. Obviously, with restrictions in place to make sure we don’t start leaking other source material. Custom news feeds, looking at the sentiment of a question and maybe flagging it if it’s a negative for moderation. Looking at what has someone asked before and then let’s start tailoring the content based on what they’re asking or suggesting. Maybe you need to add it in this group or maybe you should do it here. Of course, we’ve got the whole friendship circles, recommending friends in the area, or people that you know or topics on trends.
[01:00:10.790] – Graham Hoffman
There’s going to be a lot of data-driven AI in BuddyBoss. I think that’s, again, if we talk about how BuddyBoss is trying to help give the business owner of BuddyBoss more knowledge and more useful tools, that’s going to be huge for us.
[01:00:24.560] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic.
[01:00:25.050] – Graham Hoffman
From the user side, it’s how do we make things more engaging by using AI? Sticking away from some of the more crazy ideas, AI voices, AI chatbots for now, just because, again, it’s sticking to the core of what we know. But there’s so much opportunity in the future. I would say I’m super excited to see what happens over the coming years because we are the really this first generation that’s going to get to see AI so mainstream.
[01:00:51.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. I’m going to throw the next two fun questions over to Kurt. Kurt, you do the next two questions, and then I’ll wrap up the show. So over to you, Kurt.
[01:01:02.610] – Kurt von Ahnen
All right, on right on. The next question, Graham, really just deals with helping folks at home and listen to the podcast figure out how do the geniuses out there make things happen? What are some tools and maybe some services that you use in your daily course of business to make things happen and stay organized?
[01:01:23.290] – Graham Hoffman
Is this across the board or AI specifically?
[01:01:25.890] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, I’m across the board guy. For instance, I’m a remarkable two tablet user. I look like I have a tablet now.
[01:01:32.510] – Graham Hoffman
We need to talk after this show because I keep looking. Black Friday was teasing me for a long time, and I decided not to. I’m like, Do I get a tablet? Do I need? It looks incredible. Well, I mean, I’m obviously… We’re a software development company, so our go-to is everyday Jira for software development. Github is where we do it. Most of us are using Google Drive. Our roadmap is product boards. This isn’t the core of what we’re doing. Slack is our communication of choice. Again, being an IT administrator in the past, I would have typically set up with most Microsoft products alternatives. But since we are Google-orientated and again fully remote and everything in the cloud, that’s really most of our go-to. Personally, I try to keep it really basic. Obviously, ChatGPT is now permanently tabbed on the dashboard there for a go-to for us for a lot of things now in terms of just helping get things out. Honestly, my day is so much nowadays on meeting with different teams and establishing what’s happening with the roadmap and planning strategically. I am fortunate that I’ve been able to keep away from a lot of maybe some of the newer tech on there.
[01:02:47.180] – Graham Hoffman
So it’s probably a little bit boring for me, on this case, to be honest. I’m just looking through my feet now of what we’re doing Figma. So it’s the normal stuff that most people use, We’ll.
[01:03:00.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Say.
[01:03:01.890] – Graham Hoffman
Spark if you’re a Mac user, Spark for emails is incredible with their AI integration to cut down the amount of clutter you get. As you can imagine, I get a lot of, Hey, you’re a managing director. Come and recruit. Come and do this. Come and do that. And it’s like, you’ve cut the noise down tremendously for Spark.
[01:03:21.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. The next question and this is usually Jonathan’s question, so I’m thrilled that he let me have it. I’m sure you know what the TARDIS is. Yes?
[01:03:32.380] – Graham Hoffman
Yes, of course.
[01:03:33.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
Okay, I’m just making sure. It feels weird to be asking you this one. But if you had your own TARDIS and go back in time to the beginning of your career, what magical advice would you give yourself?
[01:03:50.290] – Graham Hoffman
This is interesting. Part of me wants to take me back to when I launched my own buddy press, buddy boss community and told myself to pull the trigger sooner. Because, like I said, I see that happening time and time again with customers. I’m like, I myself may have been in a different place if I pulled the trigger sooner. For those not watching on camera, I have this award on my shelf, which is a worldwide vote in my industry for the best online community. I would wish I’d pulled the trigger sooner on there. That’s pretty much my… If I had to go back to the time, it would have been when I did my business there, launched harder, and focused on not trying to get things right because it took me a good year before I found—again, working, doing the side little project on the side there. I would say pulling material sooner on that one. Furthermore, just focus on offering more value than getting stuck behind the shiny objects syndrome. It’s cool with all the bells and whistles, but starting with just providing value and launching sooner would be my one-two on there.
[01:04:56.960] – Graham Hoffman
Beyond that, though, I’ll be honest. Two years ago, I was in IT, or nearly three years ago I was in IT, and now I’m here at BuddyBoss, and it couldn’t have been more than a sweet journey and a wildwind of experience. Honestly, I couldn’t change anything now. I couldn’t have been happier working here. Again, changing lives, it’s such a strong part of me. My previous job in IT was about changing lives in the industry, in food industry, and making people have healthier decision-making and stuff. So here it’s changing lives for the better and helping our customers help their customers’ lives, right? And I think we’ve done a tremendous job, and in the success stories I read, there’s that warmth of this. It is a good product that’s changing people for the better. I wouldn’t want to change too much, because if that timeline changed, unless I was that person running the business, I guess, change the abs. Sweet.
[01:05:50.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan, wrap it up.
[01:05:52.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks, Kurt. It’s been a fantastic discussion, Graham. Hopefully, sometime later on in the new year, you’ll come back. I think we’ve covered a lot of exciting topics. What’s the best way to find out more about you personally, Graham, what you’re up to, and find out more about BuddyBoss?
[01:06:12.100] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you both for having me on. It’s been a lovely show, and I’d love to come back again and talk more, and definitely talk about that remarkable too. For me, you can obviously head along to BuddyBoss.com to learn more about BuddyBoss. I’m there most days on weekly updates and newsletters, everything’s coming from me now.
[01:06:30.490] – Jonathan Denwood
But isn’t you, Graham?
[01:06:32.260] – Graham Hoffman
Yeah, this one is me. Yeah, with some handy copywriting skills and a fantastic credible team around me, it is me. Everything goes through, and I see it all. I get to juggle that side. But if not, of course, like a lot of people, my social network is pretty much open to anyone. So you could add me on Facebook, add me on LinkedIn, or reach out to me at graeme@BuddyBoss. Com. Again, there’s no hiding behind hidden profiles here. You can add me at any time—love to have conversations about community building, memberships, or anything BuddyBoss.
[01:07:09.860] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s the best way for people to learn more about you, Kurt?
[01:07:13.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
LinkedIn is my social of choice. I’m also on X. Linkedin is Kurt Van Oren. I’m the only Kurt Van Oren on LinkedIn. When you find me, you know you got the right one. The name of my company is Manyana Nomas, and I also have a podcast by the same name.
[01:07:29.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, you listen to the podcast. It’s fantastic. We’re going to have our end-of-year show, me, and Kurt next week, where we’ll be discussing our best interviews and the best plug-ins and services. The champions of 2023 should be a great discussion. This has been fab. I really enjoyed it. We will be back next week, folks. See you soon. Bye. 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 w-tonic—com/newsletter.
[01:08:09.770] – Jonathan Denwood
We’ll.
[01:08:10.070] – Graham Hoffman
See you next time.
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