Are you struggling to find a profitable niche in WordPress for 2024? Look no further! This video is packed with expert advice on selecting the right niche that can lead to long-term success. Gain practical tips on research methods, keyword analysis, and content creation explicitly tailored for the upcoming year. Start building your thriving online presence today !
#1 – Melissa, can you give us some insight about your background and how you got into web design and WordPress?
#2 – What are your thoughts connected to the future of page builders vs Gutenberg”
#3 – You seem to have found a nice niche in the photographic industry. How did you get any insight or advice that you would like to share on how web designers/developers find a profitable niche?
#4 – What leading web and UX design trends will grow in 2024?
#5 – How will AI change web design in the next 18 months?
#6 – If you return to a time machine at the beginning of your business journey, what advice would you give yourself?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
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The Show’s Main Transcript And Links
[00:00:02.510] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS. This is episode 901. Goodness gracious. We’ve got a great special guest. We’ve got Melissa Love, the founder of the Design Space and the Style Cloud. Melissa has been building business in the WordPress space for several years. We’re going to be about how you can find your niche in the WordPress space, how you can build an effective business in that space, and some of the mistakes that Melissa has made so she can share them with you so you don’t have to make them. Melissa, can you give us a quick 10, 20-second intro about yourself before we go into the central part of the interview?
[00:01:00.930] – Melissa Love
Yeah, sure. Yeah, I’m Melissa. I have been in the WordPress space for about 15 years. I’ve done everything from building websites for people to owning plugins, and now I’m getting right into the SaaS market. My background is in graphic design, so I’m a self-taught web designer, giving hope to self-taught web designers everywhere. And yeah, I live in the UK, in Cornwall, a very southwest part of the country, with my family.
[00:01:28.150] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. And I’ve got my great co I suppose, Kurt. Kurt, do you want to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:34.890] – Kurt von Ahne
Yeah, thank you, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I work directly with the great folks at Lifter LMS and WP-Tonic, as well as owning my own agency, MananaNoMas
[00:01:45.440] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. So before we go into the main meat and potatoes of this great interview, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We’ll be back in a few moments. See you soon. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we got a new sponsor tribe. We have Omicen returning, and they will be sponsoring the show for about 6-12 months. I want to say Omersend, what do they do? They provide an excellent SMS email service, specializing in e-commerce, but not solely in that. Every $72 spent on text and email, every $1 spent. You seem to get a $72 return. That sounds fantastic. They’ve got a great special offer. You can find out plus the other sponsors, they also have offers, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services. You can find all these goodies by going over to Wp-tonic. Com Wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you discover a new omniscient offer. I think they’re offering 30% off for the first three months. And pre-migrations as well, you find all the details on that particular page. So let’s go straight into this great interview.
[00:03:23.870] – Jonathan Denwood
So, Melissa, you gave a quick interview. So how did you initially get into web design, and then what led you into the world of WordPress?
[00:03:35.150] – Melissa Love
Well, I grew up with graphic designer parents, but back then, there was no such thing as graphic design. My mom was a typesetter, and my dad was a paste-up artist, so literally in our spare room, they would have little golf ball fonts, and my dad would cut it all up and stick it to a board, then they’d take it down to the print shop and have it blown up into a plate.
[00:03:52.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Sounds such fun, doesn’t it?
[00:03:54.910] – Melissa Love
Yeah, I was never allowed to touch anything in the office. I did get put to work at quite an early age.
[00:03:59.500] – Jonathan Denwood
As a child, how did you ever resist that, Melissa, or did you not?
[00:04:04.130] – Melissa Love
Well, I was just… We weren’t given a choice. I think about 12 years old, I sat down, and I was like, Right, we need a hand, and you’re going to get involved. So I was brought up. I can recognize the size of a tight face from about 50 paces. It was a good… It was a good grounding in graphic design, but it looked like really hard work. They won’t mind me saying, but their work was boring, like extensive medical catalogs. And I was like, Yeah, bye. I’m leaving home. I’m never going to do that in my spare bedroom. And then, of course, I went and did everything but that. Then, I found myself with two young kids who didn’t want to go back out to work in my former career, which was working in hotels, hospitality, and travel. I couldn’t do that. So I was like, what should I do? I might dust off those graphic design skills and start doing that. So I did a crazy thing. I started a magazine, one of those freebies that you put through people’s letter boxes and pay for it by ads.
[00:04:52.420] – Melissa Love
I pounded the streets. And actually, it was really pretty successful. And I built myself a website and I built it with, I’m a bit I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but I made it with Moon Fruit. Do you remember that? No.
[00:05:05.200] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s like. That’s a build-it or whatever it is with a couple of crossbars.
[00:05:10.940] – Melissa Love
Oh my God. It’s a bit like Wix before Wix was Wix probably bought them, I don’t know. So I was flogging these ads for £30 a go. And then someone told me I really love the website you’ve built for the magazine. Could you make me one? And I was like, oh, yeah, I And they were like, How much do you charge? I was like, Well, it’s quite a lot of money. It’s £299. And I was like, They’re never going to go for it. That’s crazy money. And they were like, Yeah, that sounds great. I was like, What? So I started building these terrible websites. No, they weren’t awful. They looked good. They just were made of that terrible platform. And then WordPress came along. I remember standing in my publisher’s office, and he said, Have you heard of this WordPress thing? And I was like, No. What’s this? And so I went, he said, That’s what all the proper website people are using. And I was like, Really? God, I better become a adequate website person. And back then, you had to build a database. You had to download WordPress from. Org. You had to upload it manually.
[00:06:08.020] – Melissa Love
I was like, Oh, this is really not the same as Wix. But I persevered. Anyway, here we are, all these years later. So that’s how I got into it, by accident, really.
[00:06:19.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. It sounds like an exciting path. I have to find out if this particular page builder platform is still in existence or is long gone.
[00:06:30.290] – Melissa Love
It might be, you know. It was still a few years ago, the last time I looked. So you’ve picked my curiosity now. I guess I got to have a look after we’ve finished talking.
[00:06:42.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, well, there you go. That is my job. Over How about you, Kurt.
[00:06:46.830] – Kurt von Ahne
Melissa just gave me really fond memories of one of my first corporate jobs, and that was working at the Prudential Insurance Company, where they used to make the catalogs with cut and paste, and they’d these really cool high tech printers that had colored markers in them that would zip around and draw things on paper. And it’s amazing to think of how far we’ve all come so quickly, so quickly.
[00:07:08.790] – Melissa Love
Yeah. My parents before they used… Macs weren’t invented. They were using something called a quadratic tech, and you could type code in. You couldn’t see what it would output. You could just type code into it, and it would output a form. So it was very mathematical, and my mom was brilliant at this thing. And I remember going along to a showroom with my parents. We were going to get a new one, and it was the size of our house. So we could We either get a slightly smaller version of it or this new thing called a Mac, and we went, oh. And my dad, the us of the immortal words, he said, Oh, those Macs, how can you just trust something where you’re waggling like a mouse around on a screen? That’ll never catch on. So we spent, I’m not kidding, we spent 64,000 dollars on the upgrade, and the Mac would have been 3,000 dollars. And two years later, we just went and threw it away at the tip.
[00:08:00.040] – Kurt von Ahne
I remember those days. I remember throwing stuff away. It was so weird. Anyway, I digress. What are your thoughts? Talking about newer technology now, what are your thoughts on the page builders? I know that you’re active in Cadence now. We just helped a client that has one of your Cadence products, and you’re famous in the lifter space for your work with Divi. So what are your thoughts connected to the future of page builders versus Guten Verg versus the rest of the ecosystem?
[00:08:33.340] – Melissa Love
Well, I started off when WordPress was really hard and involved lots of coding and then a page builder came, or you had to choose a theme and try and adapt it. And then when Divi came along And I was like, what is this magical tool? It’s amazing. And obviously loads of other people thought that. And we were the first people to ever sell any third party product for Divi. I was all in with it for years and years. And I still am a really proud supporter of Divi, don’t get me wrong. But definitely for the last two or three years, I’ve been a little bit putting my head in the sand like, oh, I’m sure Gutenberg is never going to be as good as a page builder. I’m slightly ignoring it. And then I just couldn’t ignore it anymore. I bought a Cadence lifetime license. I started playing around with it. I was like, damn, this is good. This is like WordPress has come a long, long way. It’s time to really… And the more I played with it, the more I thought this has got to be the future. And I bet it’s giving a few page builder owners some very soupless nights wondering how they’re going to integrate or fully integrate what they’re doing with blocks because I think they have to.
[00:09:42.260] – Kurt von Ahne
Yeah, on a personal note, I too put off… When Gutenberg first came out in the blocks, it was like people were like, Classic editor, try that. Try Elementor, try Divi. I’ll do the Jonathan, try Divi.
[00:09:58.610] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m on each Both Jonathan and myself have dove in with the Cadence and the Cadence Pro and the Cadence blocks.
[00:10:08.850] – Kurt von Ahne
And then once you click that magical tab that everyone seems to ignore that says patterns on it, it’s like things explode and you go, Oh, there’s all these opportunities, and everything gets fast and easy. But I think there’s still a learning curve with that. How would you compare the learning curve with going from a page builder to the Guten Do you think it’s more difficult or same-same?
[00:10:33.940] – Melissa Love
Do you know what I think is more difficult? People are used to being in the block environment now because even if they’re using a page builder, hopefully they’re still using the block builder for their blog post. If they’re not, they’re going to run into trouble at some point. But I think the problem, the thing I see most often, because we’ve dealt with thousands of new users in the last six months, is that people don’t quite know where something like Cadence, an enhancement to the block builder begins and the native WordPress features end. So for example, your row width is controlled by WordPress, but Cadence gives it some extra things. The pop up tool tip on any block gets enhanced, But really, it’s WordPress-powered. Then you’ve got your editing panel on the right-hand side. I think the integration is difficult to see what’s core WordPress and what’s not for a beginner who’s not super familiar with the native Block Builder. Like, how do I How do I use the navigation panel? Some of those things are hard to find when you first get into the block builder.
[00:11:35.850] – Kurt von Ahne
Yeah, I’ve worked with some clients where I sign into their site and I’m like, Oh, yeah, you can just adjust that right over. Hey, where are your buttons at? But they don’t have spectra or cadence blocks or something else added. And so then it’s just missing, right? And so, yeah, I can see that. Jonathan, I’ll kick over to you.
[00:11:55.350] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I was just thinking, Melissa. So would you say that I don’t know what the position is. Obviously, you’re developing niche products in the cadence market, but it sounds like you got established in the divvy world. It’s a world that I’ve known a few entrepreneurs have established really great businesses, but it’s a world that I never really established any presence in. So did it really have to take some thinking? Because I know the divi have been talking about they’re in a transitional period themselves, where they’re moving away and moving into the world of Gutenberg-based blocks. It looks like what they’ve outlined is that they’re going to be doing in some ways, I think similar to Cadence. So did it take you… Did you really have to think about that? It seems like you’re really moving big in the Cadence world to some extent? Or are you going to also just… You’re just watching what’s happening with Divi, and you also be producing some products in the divvy world?
[00:13:14.140] – Melissa Love
That’s such a good question. To be honest with you, my niche is not builder-led. My niche is the niche I’m in, which is mostly serving photographers. I’ve been in that niche for a really long time. I have broadened it slightly over the last five years building divvy products. But if you look at our Design Space website, we actually issue all of our themes in elemental divvy and cadence. So we’re about giving photographers their tool of choice to get a beautiful website. So funnily enough, our new offering, which is a suite of themes and a big cloud-based library of sections and layouts in Start Cloud, we actually built that for ourselves as an agency. One night, I was like, why am I building this same page again? But it’s a custom build, so I shouldn’t really use a template. And I was like, this is insane building a two column layout. I should just have all this stripped down to this really neutral library of things I can just drop in. So I built it for us as a team. And then I thought, actually, this is pretty good. We should see if any other web designers want to use this.
[00:14:16.250] – Melissa Love
And then all my photography audience just really wanted to jump into it, too. So we’ve made it much more photographer friendly. So for me, I’m driven by my niche and the audience I serve rather than which tool, which means I am open to We’re using new tools all the time. And for a lot of photographers who are coming to us from other themes that aren’t page buildery, they really do want the block experience because that’s where the reputation is for speed and SEO friendliness, and we have to meet that demand. So I gave everything a proper good audition, Spectra, Bricks, everything. I was like, I’ve probably more lifetime licenses than is healthy, so I could try everything out. And then I just really liked Cadence. I really like the team. I really like what they stand for, and I really like their view on when they’re going to go to full-site editing. I just felt like it was the right place for me to make a bit of a home, just like I felt that with Divi. I had a personal friendship or connection with nick Roach at the very beginning. I feel like I know the team at Cadence really well, and I’m really well supported.
[00:15:20.080] – Melissa Love
So for me, it came down to that instinct. That’s why I went with Lifter, because I just thought what Chris and his team were doing was outstanding. I felt like I do know him. I do I feel so present in his brand. It’s lovely to feel you know the founder. And so I guess I was looking for more people like that.
[00:15:38.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, certainly, nick, I’ve spoken to him a couple of times, and he’s a very impressive individual, an entrepreneur. And Ben from Cadence, I’ve interviewed him a couple of times. He seems a fabulous developer, and he also has also the ability of knowing where the market is going, and he seems to have a real roadmap in his own mind where he’s taking cadence. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:16:11.360] – Kurt von Ahne
Well, Melissa, you mentioned the photography niche, how would you give advice or talk to designers on identifying their niche or finding their best opportunity or expanding that opportunity?
[00:16:28.260] – Melissa Love
Well, I am the niche for sure. I think the thing that people worry about with nicheing is that you’re going to turn a lot of people away, but you don’t have to have one niche. All you have to do is have the resources to go into a market and say, I’m literally the expert, which makes every… Going with someone else just too risky. You want them to think I’d rather go with me because I know the photography industry inside out. I know all the labs, I know all the integrations. I know how to compress their images. I know what they need. So people are prepared to pay more to work with me than someone who isn’t an expert, than someone who’s just my friend’s cousin who’s a web designer. But you don’t have to do it for just one niche. All you need is a cracking landing page for each niche, a portfolio of projects you’ve worked on for that niche, and a great sales page, and familiarity with the systems they use and the integrations you need to stand out. And And once you’ve mastered one niche, you can then dive into another. There’s nothing stopping you from doing that.
[00:17:36.690] – Melissa Love
But I would say, what you’re looking for is a niche where these people can be easily found. So a lot of people come to me who I mentor quite a lot of web designs. They’re like, I really want to get into the coaching and wellness coach website market. And I’m like, good, but so does everyone else. But these people are actually quite hard to find that, yes, they congregate in Facebook groups. They don’t have many conferences as they go to. I speak at photography conventions all around the world because thousands of photographers gather together in one place. So wherever thousands of photographers gather, you’ll find me not far behind being involved in that. So I think as long as you know, you can access that niche physically sometimes, and then it’s there for the taking. And we haven’t got time today, I’m sure, but I’ve got lots of tips on how to dominate a niche and how to get a foothold in a niche.
[00:18:31.540] – Kurt von Ahne
Nice. Well, as the queen of niches, would you say that you can build more than one niche at a time, or do you think you go into a niche, master that niche, and then expand?
[00:18:44.520] – Melissa Love
I think it almost doesn’t matter because it’s always… If you’re a one-man band like most people are, it’s just how much time have you got to build landing pages. And if you don’t have enough projects to make look like a specialist, you might need to build out some example sites, give yourself some practice projects and do that. So I think it’s really how fast can you work? If you’re someone who can churn out 10 portfolio pieces, great, and build yourself multiple landing pages. But I think it does help if you do have that fairly spotlight focus on something, because actually, if you try, you have to live, you have to really, you do have to really be the expert. You can’t just pretend, I literally do go to all the conventions, and I became a photographer myself from working with photographers. So you have to have a passion for that niche. But it doesn’t take long to get up to speed. We have a secret little other niche, which is working with boutique esthetic clinics who do facial esthetics and stuff, and what the wellness market in terms of medical, like home health testing. It’s not something we advertise, but quietly, we’ve developed a little niche for being the medical wellness marketing website experts.
[00:20:05.490] – Melissa Love
And that took us a little while to develop, too. So it’s something that developed on the side. But we’ve really dived into that market. We know what systems they use. We know what integrations they want, how they use, what CRMs they use, specifically for bookings in clinics, and what medical protocols you have to follow to keep their data safe. So if someone’s talking that language to you instead of like, yeah, I can build you a really nice website. I’ve also built a website for a bakery. Like, They’re going to go with the people who are talking their language. So if you’ve got the time to put in to not just pretend to learn their industry, but really know it and understand it, then the decision making becomes no brainer. It’s very rare. We don’t convert someone who approaches us because we talk their language.
[00:20:48.620] – Kurt von Ahne
It’s wonderful. Jonathan?
[00:20:51.400] – Jonathan Denwood
So you got into photography. I would imagine that you got into it like a lot of these conversations conversations I’ve had with agency’s owner, Melissa, that you did some actual custom website work for photographers, and then you found you liked the clientele, and you slowly When you really moved into that niche. I’m just presuming this, but that’s fine. But I’m not saying this is the stage now, but in those early days when you were developing this niche, how did How did people actually, your clientele, your photographer clientele, how did they enter your orbit? How did they enter your funnel, your marketing, your broader marketing funnel? Was it through just native SEO? You say you go to these conferences a lot as well. But what was some of the key drivers that enabled people to actually find your products? And then you developed these conversations and they became clientele.
[00:22:04.760] – Melissa Love
Well, I had two very lucky what I call fairy godmother moments. My best friend from university came to stay one weekend and she was a photographer, and she said, My website is terrible, and it was terrible. And she said, I paid someone $5,000, which seemed like a crazy amount because I was charging $299 to build it for me. And I said, I think I can do a better job than that. And I rebuilt it that weekend while she was there. And she was like, this is It’s crazy good. I’m on this photography course. I’m going to go and tell my friend. She said, right, I told my friend, you charge £2,000. I was like, Are you actually insane? Of course I don’t. She’s like, Yes, you do. Look at what I got for $5,000. And she said, That’s fine. She thinks it’s cheap. I was like, This is crazy. I said to my husband, Oh, my God. So I built this website, and they both went back to this course they were on and told the owner of the whole photography training school, You need to meet this person. So I met her and she said, I’d like you to come up and lecture at this lecture four times a year on this course, meet all the students, and we’ll recommend you as the only person who should build a website.
[00:23:07.180] – Melissa Love
And at the same time, I got hired by one of the most famous photographers in the States. I built a site and a brand for them. They launched it live on Creative Live, the online TV channel. And it just… This all happened in the space of six months and everything went nuts. I had like a waiting list for the next three years. And I do appreciate that does not happen to most people. Massive, lucky lucky stroke. But I then wanted to launch templates and courses, and that has been a really hard graft of, yes, I had an audience, but I might have been well known for building sites for photographers, but I had to pitch myself to speak at conferences. Then I had to build my list. When I first was going to do a course, I had a list of two people, which was me testing things and my mom having a go as well. So I literally started with two subscribers and went from 2 to 2000 in a year before I then launched Can I interrupt then?
[00:24:01.470] – Jonathan Denwood
So courses have also… Obviously WP Tonic, that’s our bread and butter community website and building learning management systems. So You mentioned these courses, so obviously you need a bit of luck, but you’ve worked really hard and you’ve got the ability and the insight to capitalize on those lucky breaks because a lot… You need more than luck. You need the insight and be prepared to do the hard graft as well. You just mentioned these courses, so you mentioned it, so I get the impression that building these… So what were these initial courses about? So were they shown for some… Because I don’t know much about photography. I like it, but I have known photographers, and they seem to want to build their websites themselves. The few that I have, I wouldn’t say worked with, but advised in that, they’re a little bit control freakish, but I don’t know, it’s just the ones that I’ve not exactly worked with, but advised. So were these courses showing seeing photographers how to build their website, or was it something broader?
[00:25:35.620] – Melissa Love
No, it was exactly that. But I’m a real listener. So I was building these websites, and I did happily move from charging £299 to around the £5,000 mark. But when I was meeting photographers who are new to the industry, they’re like, well, everyone said I need to work with you, so here’s my money. I was like, do you know what? I don’t think I should take your money. You shouldn’t be spending £5,000 on a website at at the beginning of your career because your style is going to change. Your brand will definitely change. You just need something simple to start with. You’ve already spent five grand on camera gear. Let’s not replicate that with your website. So I just couldn’t take their money. I just knew it wasn’t the right time for them. But I wanted a product that they could use. So I started building the templates. And then, of course, I love your templates, but I wish I knew how to use them properly and use WordPress. So I was like, okay, so I’ll do a course. And that was the first time I used Lifter LMS. And that was when I really built my list and I invested in Facebook ads and I was running lead magnet ads.
[00:26:39.550] – Melissa Love
It was really successful. I did my launch and it was really successful. And then people were like, Well, thank you for doing that course. I’ve built a lovely website, but how do I do marketing? I’m completely lost. And that’s when I thought, I need to build a membership, which is what the marketing fix is, which is, again, all a big membership, but with Lifter LMS. And again, I’ve had people come along with me on the journey. A lot of the people in the membership I’ve known for 10 years since I started in the industry. So it’s very much been an organic journey, but really listening to what people need and reacting accordingly. And that’s where I am now with a brand new product with Start Cloud. It’s like actually people, the way people are building website is changing. They want to be able to add pages on the fly. It used to be the web design, it builds my website, then I don’t touch it for five years because I might break something. So I was like, people just working in a different way now. They used to being able to edit things more easily.
[00:27:35.960] – Melissa Love
I call it the Canva effect. People want things they can just drop in and build out quickly that aren’t hard to use.
[00:27:44.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I totally agree with you there. Well, the first half of the show has gone quickly. Got some other great questions to ask Melissa. She’s obviously a bit of an entrepreneur animal. Is there I’m very impressed with… That’s a London term, folks. That’s a compliment. That’s not to say somebody’s a bit of an animal. It means that they know what they’re doing. So don’t complain. I’m not being sexist there. So Can’t have that, can we, tribe? We’re going for our middle break, folks. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast of knowledge from Melissa. She really is very impressive. She’ll have to come back, hopefully, for another chat. I’d love to. Before we go into the second half of this great interview, I just want to point out, if you’ve got a client that’s building out a membership website or a community website on Buddy Boss, why don’t you look at partnering with WP Tonic? We offer great hosting, but much, much more. A suite of plugins, so you don’t have to argue with the client, plus email marketing, all integrated with the hosting platform. Plus we can hold your hand, advise your client and yourself.
[00:29:16.720] – Jonathan Denwood
If this sounds attractive, and it should do, why don’t you go over to WP-Tonic/partners? Wp-tonic/partners. Fill in the short form. We can have a chat, and we offer some great partnership deals. That should sound attractive, shouldn’t it? So hopefully we can partner. On we go. I want to continue where we ended in the first half of the show, Melissa. Obviously, you developed this presence in the photography industry, but I think, and I’m only surmising this, but it’s based on what I’ve observed, I would imagine you You then had the encroachment of the multiple head monster of SAS. You had the external competition trying to muscle in to something offering, like in the membership area, we got Kajabi and we got Teachable. Obviously, you had the landscape WordPress compared to Joomla or my God, Drupal. Obviously, WordPress is much more appealing, and you offered these templates and these solutions, but then you had the sasses encroaching. First of all, am I on the right track? Secondly, how did you deal with these sasses, trying to muscle in with maybe VC backing like Kajabi in the the eLearning area. Is this making sense, or am I waffling, Melissa?
[00:31:05.720] – Melissa Love
No, no, it makes perfect sense. I mean, I’m lucky because I’ve skirted around the edges. I make products that operate on top of other products. So I think Squarespace was quite disruptive in the photography market. Yes. But there are now plenty of people making Squarespace templates. So I’m not saying it doesn’t concern me because it’s a huge interest. But Whether you start with… It doesn’t matter whether you’re paying monthly, annually, or whether you buy a one-off thing. Unless you buy a design to go over the top, you’re pretty much starting with a blank page, whether it’s divvy or elemental, unless you either need to be a pretty good designer to make something look good or you need to buy something to help you. So I didn’t really mind how people were paying for their base tool. I would always be happy to make a product that worked with it. That said, I first… In the design space, we sell for a one-off cost, and photographers love that, but it is changing. So when I first started a membership, that was my first foray, not into SaaS, but certainly into a membership model. And that’s been interesting to look at the figures, to get to grips with why you get churn and how to mitigate that, and how you need to keep the membership alive.
[00:32:18.610] – Melissa Love
That’s been a really interesting- Yeah, it was interesting because you seem to really be with the courses.
[00:32:26.320] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re offering the WordPress solution, one-off price, like you say, but you’re also offering the education and the knowledge in a price point that your photographers can afford that goes that step further and tell them how they can market and they can utilize this great digital resource in a way that can help them. Maybe some of the sasses haven’t been able to do that so effectively, or?
[00:33:02.260] – Melissa Love
Well, yeah. I think if you are, say, Squarespace, and you’re going to venture into the education world, you’re going to need a Department of People to do it well. You get to the point where you can’t just have someone just winging it, like some random member of your team winging it. You need a strategy, and then you need a whole team. And within the photography industry, we have had bigger companies, like a good example be HoneyBook bought a community of Facebook, shootproof bought Cole’s classroom. They’ve then sold it back. So I have seen people making a foray into trying to buy an existing educator or educator’s audience. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. So it’s hard when you’re operating a big company, you need a leader to lead the education offering and be passionate about it. And it’s obviously very easy for me to be passionate about my own business. But I think it’s hard for a big brand to have that nurturing feel So, yeah, you talked about Squarespace, but what are some of the one or two more focused?
[00:34:07.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Are there some SaaS competitors that are really focused in providing a web solution an integrated marketing solution in the photography industry?
[00:34:21.410] – Melissa Love
There are some non-wordpress ones. So Pick Time have a little mini funnel, upsell, downsell, built in there. And there are things like Queensbury albums and Pixie set, which you also have a car added so you can sell prints and things like that. But probably there isn’t anyone… I mean, I just don’t think big companies can offer that nurturing environment very well. There’s one company who I love called Showit, who are quite photography-specific. They are a drag and drop, like you mentioned, if you had Canva or Wix, but it’s much more advanced than that. And they integrate WordPress in. They integrate a WordPress blog into what they do. They are a wonderful company. They care about their people. They’ve flown me over to go on to their ranch and go to their head office before. I’ve known them all since the beginning of whenever. So they do a really good job. But I’m pushed to think of any SaaS brands where people feel a real connection with. And we’re now… It’s interesting. We are now with our new product, with StyleCloud, we are competing with Squarespace, and we are competing directly with Showit because we just happen to be using Cadence to power what we do.
[00:35:38.420] – Melissa Love
But we’re going really the extra mile on our customer service and our education. For me, I think that’s the point of difference, to handing your money over to a SaaS or handing your money over to Melissa and her team on a monthly or annual basis. I think that softens the blow when you know who you’re dealing with.
[00:36:00.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. Before I throw over to Kurt, you mentioned going to all these conferences. So is now having your digital marketing side, but going to these physical conferences in the photography space, how important is this in your own mind as a pillar of your marketing outreach?
[00:36:24.360] – Melissa Love
Well, it’s interesting. It used to be absolutely crucial, and then along came COVID, and photographers sat at home for two years, like many people, but obviously their source of income was all canceled. And then it was all bundled, like thousands, hundreds of thousands of people didn’t get married. Then they all got married in one year. So photographers had a It was a really hard time because I don’t know if you know, but most photographers take a substantial deposit up front and then the whole amount before the day. So they had a whole year where they were working like crazy people without a lot of revenue for it. They already had that money and spent it during COVID time. So it was a really, really hard time for photographers. And there wasn’t a lot of money left over for going to conventions and workshops. And actually people selling online courses did well because that was an affordable price point to continue their education and be part of a community. But now I’d say this year for the first time, or maybe last year, I’m seeing excitement again about people really getting together. People are a little bit more back on their feet, and I think it’s going to go back to how it was to some extent.
[00:37:28.220] – Melissa Love
I’ve seen lots of user figures or attendee figures, so there’s definitely a bounceback happening, which I think is fantastic.
[00:37:36.310] – Jonathan Denwood
But like I say, before COVID, how important was going to these conferences in a driver to your business? Did you see a direct linkage, or is it more indirect of building your expertise and more of a positioning driver than a direct driver to the bottom line, if you know what I mean?
[00:38:04.690] – Melissa Love
I think it’s more… It depends on what stage you’re at. Before COVID, I would strategically pick conferences who are my exact target market and just maintain a presence there through like a minor sponsorship or a stand or speaking at speaking. So I just felt like I would cherry-pick and go to three or four events. I used to do the really big conventions and have a big stand and stuff. But once we It became more established online and our reputation was more and our SEO was more of a cornerstone of what we were doing, it became less important to go to the big conventions. So I now cherry-pick the smaller ones and have presentation where people are… Because at the big ones, you get people who come along and it’s someone who’s a hobbyist photographer who’s got a really big long set of photography lenses, and he just wants to talk about photography all day. He’s not in the market for a website, like a lot of tire cookers. Whereas when I go to conventions where people are very serious, these smaller boutique workshops and gatherings where that tribe is our tribe, they’re quite hip, they’re quite young.
[00:39:13.520] – Melissa Love
That’s what we want, that market, where we want to be with people who are setting trends in the photography market, and the big conventions don’t really do it for us anymore. But we love. I’ve got one in a few weeks, then I’ve got one in September. I love it when I do go. And you often just also you meet other speakers and you meet other suppliers and never underestimate the power of getting together with people and having a presence. Those in-person conversations are wonderful. I mean, It’s like that with WordCamp, isn’t it?
[00:39:47.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. All right.
[00:39:52.050] – Melissa Love
I said it, Rob, put my foot in it.
[00:39:55.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Matters who you’re talking to, doesn’t it? Over to you, Kurt.
[00:39:59.580] – Kurt von Ahne
My question takes us back in the other direction again. What would you think would be some of the user experience design trends or things that might change or grow in 2024? How do you see… Just how do you see some of the trending that we see now and how do you see it evolving as we go?
[00:40:23.500] – Melissa Love
I think that we’re going to see… I think we’re already seeing a resurgence of microanimations, slightly more interactive websites. But I’m predicting that people are going to break out of grids. There’s a real desire to have… It’s the Canva effect. People are used to being able to create to position things exactly where they want to or to give the impression that they have done. So I think the companies, the platforms that are going to win are ones which allow people more design freedom. I mean, isn’t it funny? I remember saying to someone, oh, this Canva, I don’t think I’ll ever use that. I’m married to all my Adobe, like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and then I’m literally in and out of Canva all day. The whole team uses it for almost everything apart from when we’re properly designing brands or we do use Figma, but for graphics and quick jobs. It’s become a real powerhouse. It’s a huge company, huge turnover, and they are a company with real heart, actually. I love their state of Canva, their launches that they do.
[00:41:27.650] – Jonathan Denwood
A female, they’re based in Australia, aren’t they? A female. I have asked her to come on the show. I’m still waiting for a reply. But she is a powerhouse, isn’t she? Her technical founder. They started it as students, actually. I think she went to over 100 VCs before somebody actually invested in the company and the vision, actually. It’s quite an amazing story, really.
[00:41:56.280] – Melissa Love
Yeah, I think it has so much more influence than most people I think it does. It really does have a lot of influence. It lives rent-free in lots of people’s minds, and people might not think they rely on it, but they really do. And when you dig under the hood, the apps they’ve got integrated, the AI, even the deals they’ve done with font houses, with font foundries, to have that range of fonts and with pixels. They’re doing big deals. It’s super impressive.
[00:42:23.480] – Kurt von Ahne
From a personal perspective, and I tell my clients this, I’m not really ashamed of it. You got to be honest when I’m not good at something. I always looked at myself as being graphically handicapped. That’s why when I started the agency, I brought on graphics people. They were the first people I talked to, because if someone doesn’t give me the color palette and a cool logo, if I have that stuff, I can make a wonderful website. But if you want me to develop from the beginning, it’s really difficult. And Canva just opened up a whole world of, Hey, this is easy. If I got the color palette and the logo, I can build and expand that concept really easily, which actually infuriates me because it takes the professional out of it. It’s like you thought you really had an angle on something, and then you don’t.
[00:43:13.270] – Melissa Love
Well, so I think you say that, but I think it’s a bit like AI. I think with Canva and tools like AI design, you can make an adequate thing. What you can’t make is that extra missing any X-Facts that would make somebody go, Oh, this is amazing. ‘ It’s just when people ask me if I’m worried about Canva or AI, I’m like, Great, makes my life a lot easier, but it doesn’t threaten what I do.
[00:43:42.730] – Jonathan Denwood
‘ Yeah, I think what it helps to avoid, Melissa, is these awful… It depends how far you are up in the food chain, but it even happens on larger client projects. You’d be amazed. Oh, we don’t want to spend any money on a logo. We’ve got this logo, My NICE, knocked up for it. This is a 100-person organization, and You got the CEO’s niece designed a logo, and they want to use it. You’d be amazed. Or whatever. We still want to use our old logo, whatever. You can just now knock up something, and it’s not the greatest, but it avoids having to get into these crazy conversations because sometimes they listen to you and sometimes they don’t. Would you agree with that?
[00:44:50.890] – Melissa Love
Oh, sorry. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:44:53.540] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re supposed to agree straight away, Melissa, but obviously, I was just- I thought you were talking to Kurt, actually.
[00:44:59.650] – Melissa Love
Sorry. Sorry.
[00:45:00.310] – Jonathan Denwood
No, it’s all right. I was waiting for what happens. I was waiting for what happens.
[00:45:04.250] – Kurt von Ahne
Jonathan doesn’t like to talk to me.
[00:45:06.540] – Jonathan Denwood
I do. That’s not true. Let’s move on to AI. I use a lot of it myself, Melissa. Love it, but it’s like a two-headed monster. I think, obviously, it’s increasingly is going to be affecting various elements of business, graphic design, coding. It’s obviously going to have an increasing element. But at the present moment, it’s also a lot of marketing flannel out there. I know No cadence of really pushing hard in the AI, and I’ve got mixed feelings. I totally understand why they’re doing it and why Ben. I haven’t played around with their latest AI solution. You can literally build a whole website. I’ve just got mixed feelings about the whole thing. Where do you stand about AI and where do you think it’s going in the next 18 months, year, 18 months?
[00:46:18.580] – Melissa Love
I think it’s like everything. I remember when people, photographers, stopped developing things and marking up in the dark room and using Photoshop and everyone lost their minds about it. We We can’t tell what’s real anymore because of Photoshop. So I just think it’s the next iteration of that. But saying that, let’s be polite to our AI overlords in case they take over the world. But I see it as a tool in some areas I dabble, in other areas I use it more extensively. Can a website, Web AI, be programmed to produce really beautiful layouts? I don’t know. I’ve played around with a few of them. There’s ZipWP. I’ve played around with the Cadence one. It produces something that I call adequate, but people don’t come to me for adequate. So I think if you’re in the market of providing adequate designs where you are recycling generic themes or layouts And because this is you are starting off on your web design journey, I think it will make… So I always think it’s something like a WordPress AI, like Cadence. For your average user, they don’t know about hosting and domains and installing WordPress and plugins and getting to even the point where you can generate the AI-generated version.
[00:47:34.870] – Melissa Love
You can get into that point terrifies a lot of people. So there’s still a big barrier to entry that something like Squarespace doesn’t have. So if Squarespace masters AI, I think we might all be in trouble. But there’s a… I know that Jamie Marsland is talking a lot about barriers to entry for beginners on Twitter at the moment in the WordPress space, and he’s right. WordPress has got a job to make things a lot easier. Like the onboarding of WordPress is still pretty clunky and pretty intimidating. The dashboard, the left menu. It’s not cool if you are getting into the market. So for many, I don’t think most web designers are going to be in trouble, but I think it’s going to enable the DIY market who aren’t scared of getting into WordPress. Access to more tools, will they produce something amazing and brilliant? Let’s wait and see. I don’t know.
[00:48:32.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it’s a difficult one because you can get a bit finicky about all this, can’t you? But the reality is that I haven’t been in Donkeys yet, but Theme Forest. Somebody approached me and they got a theme, and it’s a page builder as well. I forgot the name of it, Melissa. And they got like a quarter of a million cells on Theme Forest. I haven’t even heard of it. I wish I could remember. It came on my radar a couple of weeks ago. But that regularly happens, but I haven’t been to Theme Forest in Donkeys yet, but I think their glory days have declined a bit, but they’re still a substantial force, bigger force than I probably realized, really. There’s definitely an area in this. I’ve got to be honest, I think that was this… Every town, I don’t know if it’s the same in the UK, But every small town of any population size in North America has a do it all graphic design individual that does logos, graphics for vans, does headers, does a lot of print, web design, and they work with a load. I think that nick and Divi knew that crowd really well, and they positioned their products really to that journalist in every small town in North America.
[00:50:07.980] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it was one of the big… I might be wrong here, though, Melissa. I think it was one of the significant drivers of divvy because the other end was studio press, and you had to go into functions, and it appealed to that more code-orientated crowd. So I might be waffling there. Back over to you. Well, I’m going to leave the last question to Kurt. You can do it, Kurt.
[00:50:39.610] – Kurt von Ahne
Oh, my goodness. I don’t even have to ask if she knows who Dr. Who is, but let’s suggest that like Dr. Who, you have your own TARDIS and your own time machine. You can go back to the beginning of your business journey. What advice do you give yourself?
[00:50:57.910] – Melissa Love
That’s such a good question. Well, my advice would be to not worry about what people think of you, which I struggled with for quite a while. I know you might not think that now because I’m a pretty confident person now. But we’re talking we’re 10 to 15 years on, so I’ve grown a bit more of a thick skin and find it easier to put myself out there. And the second thing I think would be to listen to what your audience is telling you. They will tell you what products they want. And don’t sleep too long on developing products. If you’re a service provider like a web designer, don’t think everything’s already been invented. The people who trust you want to buy your product. I am so coming up with a product to supplement your income. There are also a couple of things like I didn’t have the confidence to manage a big team of people. I must have built thousands of websites, and not everyone has ever gone on a care plan because I thought I didn’t like hosting. I don’t deal with that. I’m massively sidestepped, earning a lot of money.
[00:52:04.460] – Melissa Love
If all of those people had put them onto hosting and care plans, I’d have a substantial monthly income or more significant than I have now. And so I think looking out for opportunities, I didn’t know that I didn’t have the confidence I could find someone to take it off my hands, or I didn’t feel confident taking someone on. It felt too risky. So I wish I’d have taken more risk and not dismissed other things. Earlier on. But we are where we are. Maybe if I’d done that, I wouldn’t have had the time or the inclination to build the set of products and memberships I have now. So who knows? But yeah, listen to what people are telling you, what you’re already telling you, and don’t turn down opportunities.
[00:52:48.190] – Kurt von Ahne
Nice. Well, Jonathan?
[00:52:52.370] – Jonathan Denwood
I just got a quick follow-through question. But obviously, is there a So it’s been an actual service product, plugin, that you’ve done, and you thought it was a great idea. You got very enthusiastic about it, and you did it, and there was no response, just crickets. Reflecting on it, did you work out what… Obviously, I can tell that you’re a pretty instinctive entrepreneur with good judgment, but we all do something that we think the market’s going to be enthusiastic about, and then you learn quickly that there is… Has that ever happened to you? And did you work out in your mind why it felt flat a bit?
[00:53:48.970] – Melissa Love
I can’t think of anything that’s been a total disaster, but it’s when I’ve carried the process. I haven’t built an audience in that niche; when I haven’t got the results that I want, it’s always because I didn’t put the time into either segmenting the audience and sending the message to the right people or warming them up. When I’ve been a bit slack on nurturing a particular niche, and then I try to launch or sell something to them, they’re like, I haven’t heard from you for a while. What? You’re just popping up and trying to sell me something? So I think that nurturing of an audience… Well, we coach a lot of businesses through the launch process. We do funnel, launch, and funnel marketing for people as an agency. And we see many people, and it’s always when they haven’t been building and nurturing their audience. So as long as people trust that you’re an expert and they feel like they know you because you have been demonstrating that expertise for some time and showing up regularly, then the marketing and selling part becomes easy. So it’s always when I take my eye off the ball and I don’t communicate with a specific part of my audience about certain products, then I suddenly expect it to buy it, the results just aren’t as good.
[00:55:04.720] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic, Melissa. So Melissa, really enjoyed the chat. Hopefully, you’ll come back later on in the air, maybe for another one. What’s the best… Thanks. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you and your company and the products?
[00:55:19.650] – Melissa Love
The best thing, our main website is thedesignspace.co, but I have a Facebook group called the Design Space Lounge. I’m in there all day long, so that’s where I’m chatting to people. But come and find me on Facebook or Twitter. I love getting a DM, and I’m easy to find.
[00:55:40.490] – Jonathan Denwood
And Kirk, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and what you’re up to, Kirk?
[00:55:46.270] – Kurt von Ahne
Well, Jonathan, LinkedIn is still my jam. So I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn. When you find me, you know you got me, hit the connect button, and we’ll click and go from there. And then, of course, anything Manana Nomas online leads to me.
[00:55:59.920] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. If you want to support the show, folks, why don’t you join the Membership Machine Show Facebook group? We have a great group of people looking to build a membership community website plus a WordPress crowd. Love you to join us there. We will be back next week with another great… I think it’s going to be our roundtable show next week. We’ve got some great guests and panelists. It should be a great discussion. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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