How Gutenberg Block Builders Are Taking On The Page Builders in 2024
Discover the future of website building as Gutenberg Block Builders challenge traditional page builders in 2024. Explore how these innovative tools revolutionize the digital landscape and empower users to create stunning websites easily. Witness the clash of technologies and learn how Gutenberg is reshaping how we design online platforms. Don’t miss out on this groundbreaking showdown – watch our video now!
With Special Guest Christiaan Pieterse Co-founder & CTO Maxiblocks.
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
#1—Christiaan Pieterse, welcome back to the show. What have been some of the biggest developments connected to Maxiblocks since our last discussion?
#2—Where do you see things going in 2024 related to the competition between Gutenberg block-based builders like Maxiblocks and full-page builders like Elementor and Bricks?
#3 – What are your thoughts on frameworks like Tailwind CSS and Automatic CSS?
#4 – What are your thoughts on what has happened to Cwkcly?
#5 – How do you AI change Maxiblocks 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?
The Show’s Main Transcript And Links
[00:00:01.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to another live WP tonic and WordPress and Sash show. We’ve got a returning guest. It’s been about ten, nine to ten months since we last had a chat with Christian. Mexico blocks seem to be moving forward rapidly. We like an update and we’re going to be discussing a load of Gutenberg and where Finns are against the page builders. Should be a great discussion. I’m going to do my countdown. I’m going to switch off my email because it bibs. I’m going to do my countdown. We go straight into it. So three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to this week in. Do that again. Three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to this week in WordPress and SAS. It’s episode 904. We got a returning guest. It should be a great interview. We got Christian Pessas with us. I probably butchered his surname, but he’s been on the show before so he’s probably got used to it. He is the co-founder and CTO of a. It’s a block builder based in Gutenberg, but much more going head to head with the page builders, as I would say, he probably wouldn’t agree with Gotta. We got to get some excitement.
[00:01:36.190] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s an exciting period. So, Christian, would you like to quickly give a second intro about yourself, like in 2030?
[00:01:45.650] – Christiaan Pieterse
Sure. My name is Christian. I’m the co-founder of Maxi Blocks. We have a small studio with about eight people. We develop products for WordPress and people who build websites specifically so that they can build professional websites for their customers using pre-made designer templates to grow their audience and their income.
[00:02:17.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. That’s fantastic. And I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:25.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Absolutely, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Anen. I own a company called MananaNoMas, which is focused largely on membership and learning websites. I also work directly with WP-Tonic and the good folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:02:37.190] – Jonathan Denwood
So in this show, we’re going to be covering what has been some of the significant developments in Mexico. Where does Christian think Gutenberg blocks are compared to full-page builders like alameter and bricks? We’re going to be discussing his views on frameworks like Tailwind and automatic CSs and a lot more. It should be a great interview. We’ve got a great list of subjects to discuss. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I’ve got a couple of significant messages from our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. Coming back, folks. Got some great special offers from the major sponsors, plus a created list of the best plugins for WordPress professionals and services, all tested by Kirk myself, or the team at WP tonic. You can find all these goodies by going over to wponic.com deals and wponic.com deals, and you find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but as you know, if you’ve been listening to this show, that’s all you’re going to get from that page. But it’s fantastic. Also, consider signing up for my newsletter, which you will find on that page as well.
[00:04:15.670] – Jonathan Denwood
I do a weekly newsletter which is a curation of the leading WordPress and tech stories of the week. Plus a little write up from me. Like I say, what more could you ask for? So Christian, you came initially on the show about 910 months ago, and you’ve done a tremendous amount of work on maxi blocks. I was very impressed, and I know Kirk is. So, in the past nine months, what has been the progress of maxi blocks, and what are some of the things that you’re most proudest of in this period?
[00:05:01.230] – Christiaan Pieterse
I would say the size of the library. We’ve certainly grown the size of the library. I don’t know if you guys had a chance to take a look at it. When we last spoke, we had roughly 600 patterns in the library. We didn’t have any pages. In the meantime, we’ve grown the pattern library to 2024 patterns and 158 pages and then some of the features that we added to the plugin. In the meantime, we added some advanced custom fields. Support for advanced custom Fields’ dynamic content has been added. Most of the things that we’ve added to this point have been driving towards getting everything ready for the theme and the theme we hope to push into beta next week. So I’m putting out a call for beta testers. If anyone’s interested, send us an email or visit our website and just send us a message and we’ll add you to the list.
[00:06:13.490] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. So. So is the theme a full site edited theme or is it a more kind of more traditional theme? I suppose you’re going full site editing, are you?
[00:06:27.550] – Christiaan Pieterse
Absolutely no. You have to go that route at the end of the day, at least for us. The entire site editing adds incredible functionality that works with maxi blocks in particular because it’s a visual editing interface. Everything up to date has been a little bit of a challenge with complete site editing, as I’m sure you’ve had many discussions related to it. However, the last couple of updates have genuinely made improvements. Just today, we’ve been testing the update for WordPress 6.5 with maxi blocks, and we just had a report back from our testing crew, and they said there were no fixes to be made. So our reaction immediately was, okay, that’s not possible now we have to go and test more. But seriously, I mean, our guys test really well, and they’ve just done the testing, and we just had a report back that there were no fixes to be made. So we are extremely positive with the way that it’s moving and the functionality that we’ve built into maxi blocks with the page templates, and the patterns just work so beautifully inside of the full-side editing interface. And I think it’s been, every update that’s come through, it’s been improving and getting better.
[00:07:57.770] – Christiaan Pieterse
So we’re really excited to see what the next six months to year will bring inside of WordPress.
[00:08:06.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Over to you, Kurt.
[00:08:08.970] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, well, I guess it’s no secret I became kind of a fan of maxi blocks after our first interview. Christian and I used it on a couple of projects, and at first, it did take a little bit of a learning curve because there were the blocks, and then there were the pages. am I affecting a template, or am I affecting a block? I was a little lost in what was happening, but once I got used to it, it became a pretty good tool and I thought the styling was more modern because there was a lot of stuff that was available from other sources that seemed more dated. I’m really curious: when you go from 600 to over 2000 items in a library, how hard is it to stay focused on appearance and block variation versus getting ahead with the whole project from a theme perspective and all that? Is it very hard to compartmentalize that work?
[00:09:07.470] – Christiaan Pieterse
I’m trying to formulate an answer to your question. I’m not sure I fully understand what you’re asking. Can you ask again if you don’t mind?
[00:09:18.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
For me being an outsider looking in, I see the growth of the library, right, because I’ve used the product at the beginning and I’ve seen the product recently and it’s obvious that it’s grown. How do you prioritize growing the library versus focused on a theme or coming out with a new thing?
[00:09:39.440] – Christiaan Pieterse
Okay. The reason we started with the library was first we had to build all the blocks, the custom blocks, in order to create the library. While we were busy adding the necessary functionality to the plugin, we continued developing the blocks. So the patterns themselves are the building blocks of what makes pages and in order to build complete sites, you need the patterns to make the pages in order to do the rest. So we’ve continued to develop all the patterns concurrently while we were busy adding the necessary functionality to the plugin to add it into a fully functional theme. And that’s where we’re at right now. When you say, wow, you’ve got so many patterns. Yes, because we can continue developing them and testing them and build up a huge library so that when the theme is ready, we can go out and make tens of difference of themed with those pages. And later, when we talk about the AI integration, it will start making sense to you why we’ve gone about it in this way. Does that answer your question?
[00:11:05.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and thanks for clarifying that. If I move on to the next question, it is basically, where do you see things going in 2024? When we think about the competition between a Gutenberg based builder like maxi blocks and full page builders like Elementor and bricks, how do you see this whole thing moving forward?
[00:11:28.190] – Christiaan Pieterse
I think in many ways they appeal to a different market segment. When you think about Gutenberg and page builders, there’s an audience who uses page builders because they’ve become familiar with it. They’ve got a lot of websites on it. Exactly like you were saying earlier was, it took you a little while to get your head around how the new page layout and the page format works inside of Gutenberg. But once you got your head around it, it was like, oh, wow, this is actually quite easy. I’m starting to understand how it works. That is what’s called, in a way, is a switching cost. People that have used divi. A lot, people that use Elementor, they familiar with it, their customers know it, they have a knowledge base. All their emails, all their documentation, everything is set up to deal with that particular product. So there’s a sort of inertia in that and people don’t want to change because they don’t need to change. Why change something if it’s already working? So when it comes to Gutenberg, I think it’s appealing to a slightly different audience. An audience that was never necessarily using page builders. They were just using the old blocks or the old page builder interface.
[00:12:59.300] – Christiaan Pieterse
And now we’re making a new market. In a way, Gutenberg is making a new market. So from my perspective, I would say that in some way there’s some part that we’re competing with page builders and there’s another part that we’re not competing with. Just we’re tapping into a new audience who never used these kind of tools. That’s my thinking on it.
[00:13:27.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
Interesting. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:13:31.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I see where you’re coming from, Christian. I think you’re correct. I think these different buckets, as I call them, kind of groups, do overlap one, but I think you’re onto something there, because I think the page builders kind of appeal to some extent to the small design or one person design agency that’s dealing. It’s got multiple hats or slightly bigger agency where Gutenberg and the block library overlaps with these people, but it also wants to appeal to the end user and the DIY individual. But there’s a lot of overlap as well. But I do agree with you, there’s been a lot of discussion that one of the main criticisms of block library website builder page builders is that they’re not class based. Really. I think there’s been a bit of movement there for the positive and the negative. So what’s your own view about? Can a Gutenberg page website builder be truly produced, truly accessible code, and can it really be easily updatable and kind of be based on modern web standards? What’s your own view? Only a slight question, Christine, when it comes to classes.
[00:15:29.150] – Christiaan Pieterse
Yes, that’s an interesting discussion. So our previous business, or another business that we have, was making templates for Divi, and we started making templates already in 2017. So we’ve made a lot of templates. So we’ve made almost 3000 templates and pages inside of the divi theme. And I’ll get to my point in just a moment. We sent out a survey probably two years ago, and we’ve been asking people, what is it that you find most important or most valuable in our library and how do you want it to go? The overwhelming theme that came back was people saying, we don’t want to do CSS, we’re not interested in doing CSS or classes or anything like that. That’s the reason we come to you for templates, because templates make it easy for us to be able to update and do our things. So when we say classes and that type of thing, for me, that falls into a developer category and there’s a certain audience who knows how to work with classes and that’s what they want because they know how to use it. When it comes to Gutenberg, for me, we’re transcending that. I’m sure someone will object to that term, but there’s an audience that’s not interested in that.
[00:17:04.280] – Christiaan Pieterse
They want to build with a visual interface. And that’s the interesting thing of what we’ve had to do was we’ve had to build both the code to make the front end patterns for the visitor experience and the UI for the person making the edits in the editing experience to be able to build the page visually. So that’s been quite a challenge to get right. And if we didn’t have that experience from five years in talking to people and support and helping them through their particular challenges, we may have ended up building a product similar to quickly or to bricks or to other products that use a lot of classes. And I don’t know if we would have built it that way. So now we’re really happy that we’ve gone the route that we’ve gone and the conversations that we have with people in support. People are really happy with using it and with the styling functionality and we’re getting really good feedback. So that would be my answer on that one. Right.
[00:18:23.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Yo, so where to go with that? So I think what you’re saying is that the group that you’re trying to attract, this conversation about that would appeal to another group. I think what you’re saying is that the people you’re trying to attract and provide value to, they’re not even interested in that discussion.
[00:18:56.970] – Christiaan Pieterse
Exactly. But the interesting thing though is that when you use classes, you’re trying to get your styles to move across pages on your entire website. One interesting thing is synchronized patterns. That’s inside of WordPress. So all these updates are being made where you’ll be able to transfer your styles across the website. So in a way, Gutenberg’s providing solutions to a similar problem, but in a different.
[00:19:38.790] – Jonathan Denwood
One of the, you know, obviously I think you were part, I don’t know if it was you personally that contributed a little bit to my discussion with Brian Gardner, with Kevin. Obviously it’s been able to update a website easily. I think one of the responses to what you’ve just said is the more you keep to standards and transferable technology, the less chance there is that you get entrapped into a situation where you got update hundreds of websites because the technology, the key part of your technology stack has gone out of business, which we’ve recently just seen. What I think you’re saying is that you’re basing it on fundamental Gutenberg patterns, so you’re not going to get entrapped in a way and it kind of substigates the need to use to lie classes. I’m on the right track.
[00:21:06.950] – Christiaan Pieterse
Do you have something to say? It seemed like you had something to say. Okay, I’m good. No problem. Yeah, I actually don’t have an answer for.
[00:21:23.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, yeah, very wise. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:21:29.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’ll give Christian the default nice guy answer. And that is, I really appreciate the way that you’re able to clarify your avatar and you’re able to say, well, we’ve interviewed, we’ve done the research. We know what our customer, well, you know what our specific customer is looking for, and that’s what we provided. And I think there’s something to be commended there because I think there’s a lot of people trying to be all things to all people. Like sometimes you’re peanut butter and jelly, and sometimes you’re peanut butter and bananas. And I’ll tell you what, I don’t like peanut butter and bananas, but it’s kind of nice to hear somebody in business say, well, we did the research first. We built the product to meet that avatar, and that’s what we delivered. So that’s cool, I guess. Speaking of avatars and things that might not have hit the mark, what are your thoughts on what happened over there at quickly?
[00:22:24.190] – Christiaan Pieterse
First of all, I’d like to say that I’m really impressed with the product that they’ve built from the perspective of the things that it can do and the way that they’ve put it together and how capable it is as a product. They’ve done an amazing job. At the end of the day, the market decides whether they want to use a product or not. That’s one thing. So it can be discussed how successful the product is amongst a certain audience. Yeah, and I think in some way because it’s closed, and when I say closed, I mean it’s not open source and they’re not on the WordPress repo. I think the community might feel a little bit more at ease if it was an open source product because then someone could pick it up or they can use parts of it and they’re able to continue development even though they can’t do the development of the product anymore. This is what I would suggest to them, is open source the product, then probably people would feel a little bit more comfortable about it. That’s one thing. The other thing is it’s really difficult to develop for Gutenberg and JavaScript in WordPress.
[00:24:01.510] – Christiaan Pieterse
It’s a challenge. We’ve experienced that ourselves and you have to just grind it out. This is the beginning stages. We really feel like we’re getting somewhere now and we’re making some progress and the experience. People are getting more familiar with the Gutenberg interface and how it works. So it feels to me like the momentum has shifted. Initially, when we started four years ago, I thought, oh, we’re late to the party, I hope we didn’t miss it. Now I’m feeling we were early to the party. So this is how development goes and how it works. And I mean, we don’t know what situations or what’s going on in the quickly developers life, why they made these decisions. It could be multiple factors. And it’s sad for the community at the end of the day. And I’ll say one more thing, people or companies can products all the time. Just think of Google, how many products they’ve killed. This is the risk of today’s technologies that you work in. Every two years, there’s changes that happen and you just have to go with the flow. That’s how it’s been for us from the beginning. Every two years you have to make a switch and do something else and keep testing new things and keep going.
[00:25:36.800] – Christiaan Pieterse
The only thing that is certain is change. It’s going to change, especially now with AI, it’s moving a lot quicker.
[00:25:45.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I kind of like what you pointed out there about Google. I was just writing an article a couple of weeks ago and I was amazed at the size of LinkedIn versus the size of Facebook, the size of Google plus, the size of, because LinkedIn is small in those regards. And then you look at Google shutting down Google plus and I had like 540,000,000 users or something, and they were like, it’s an abject failure.
[00:26:09.440] – Jonathan Denwood
We must close it.
[00:26:12.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
I guess everyone’s expectation or the weight that someone puts on a product is different. It’s subjective to whoever owns it or runs it, right?
[00:26:22.330] – Christiaan Pieterse
Yes. And whether you find it useful and if you work it into your business, but I mean, there’s many plugins that have gone out of favor, that the technology kills it or something changes in the marketplace. This is the nature of the web. You just have to adapt. I can understand that people are upset by it and frustrated. It would be easier if the code was open source because then people can pick it up or someone else can take over the project and continue with it. So we’ll see what they end up doing in the.
[00:27:02.070] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think. But I think the clux of your own focus is that your many years working in the Divi community isn’t think I now understand, a bit clearer, your own vision, because I think your vision comes from your successful experiences in the Divi, which I take the Mickey a little bit out, but it’s only good natured fun. But on the other hand, it’s a highly successful community and it’s a highly successful company. So just to recap, before we go for our break, I think what you’re trying, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I get a sense that you’re really trying. But it’s an interesting thing because obviously I get the sense that you’re driven by your experiences with the Divi community. But how are you going to compete when Divi bring out their own Gutenberg based library of themes and patterns and that? Or do you think you have built an enormous library and that you put an enormous amount of work in it? I’m just interested in your own views about what Divi is going to bring out in the near future and how you’re going to respond to that.
[00:28:33.010] – Christiaan Pieterse
We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing. I mean, we’re sitting inside of Gutenberg. We have a pattern library and a template library that people can use Divi themselves. Divi Five is coming out. It’s been coming out for the last three years. Well, yeah, I know the amount of work involved because it took us four years building maxi blocks just to get to launch. Well, three and a half years and we nine months into our public launch and here we are and we’re doing well. So I know working with react is not easy because the challenge is you’re building the visual interface for someone to build a web page instead of coding it. So you have to think about everything. And when it comes to classes, instead of us using classes, we have to build the visual UI to replace the function of the class because it makes it easier for people to use. So, yes, if Divi comes out with whatever they’re doing, we’ll see what happens. We’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing. We’ve got our existing library that’s there and our existing user base, and we keep adding products to, I mean, we keep adding patterns to that product and we basically serving both audiences and see what we learn from each and try and cross pollinate our learnings and improve the products any way that we can.
[00:30:14.550] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Just a quick do you think one of the problems with Divvy’s journey is obviously Gutenberg’s been ongoing moving train, but also they’ve got all the legacy of all the clientele, which you don’t have that technical burden, do you? You’re starting fresh to some extent and you don’t have to deal with all that technical baggage that comes from the previous product.
[00:30:45.150] – Christiaan Pieterse
Yes, there’s no technical baggage, but there’s a constantly adapting development thing that we have to update and fix. But for me, a big sign is exactly what I said earlier. We did a test for WordPress 6.5 and there was no fixes. So to me, if it turns out to be true, when we find out tomorrow when we do further testing, if it turns out to be true, that’s a really good sign that we haven’t had to make all of these massive updates in order to fit with what’s coming.
[00:31:24.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Just to finish off. I don’t expect you to, you probably don’t even know yourself. And also I don’t expect you to give a quantifiable figure. That would be not right of me to ask you that. But do you know, I’ve listened to a few people and they say to build a Guggenberg library or a page builder you’re looking at half a million to a million dollars in total investment of time and money and gray hairs. Would you say that’s probably around correct, between half a million to a million?
[00:32:02.070] – Christiaan Pieterse
It would be accurate. And the thing about react developers as well is because they, in web three, they’re into crypto, all of those different things. So whenever the crypto market is going up, their prices go up and they all jump ship. So just as an example, we’re trying to develop a product and you can pay a certain price that you can afford and then all of a sudden the crypto market goes up and all your developers are gone. And now the same thing happened with AI as an example. Luckily we have a long relationship with our developers. They’ve already been with us for the last eight years coming from Divi. So we have relationships with them. We know where we’re going and what we’re doing, so we’re able to keep them happy and so that’s where we’re at. But yes, it’s not easy. It takes a lot of time. It’s not cheap either. That’s the reality of it.
[00:33:06.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. All right. It’s been a fascinating discussion. I’ve enjoyed it so far. We’re going to go for our mid break. We’ve got a couple of messages from our sponsors. Sponsors are always welcome. We got some great long term Spencers. We’ve got a new one that’s joined us, but we will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. It’s been a fascinating discussion. I just want to point out if you’ve got a client and you’re building out a learning management system, a buddy boss community website and you’re looking for a hosting partner. Plus a lot more than just hosting. Why don’t you look at WP tonic and what we’ve got to offer. We offer a tremendous package for those that have got a client and you’re building a large learning management system community website and you’re looking for more than just a great hosting partner. You can find more by going over to partners and you can book a chat with me and we’d love you to become a wptonic development partner. Right over to you, Kurt.
[00:34:36.070] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I guess he’s already kind of previewed the question a little bit on us when he mentioned AI in his last answer. But Christian, how do you feel AI is going to change or affect your product maxi blocks in the next year and a half?
[00:34:54.270] – Christiaan Pieterse
It will have a significant impact, without a doubt. So let me just start by we’ve already integrated OpenAI’s as in bring your own API key into our text maxi module. So we have a roadmap that’s got nine steps in it. We’ve already done the first four steps, which was integrating the OpenAI API into the text module so that when you are inside of a pattern, you can click on any text element and then have the AI generation functions for you in the sidebar. I don’t know if any one of you has seen it. It’s really cool. It allows you to do a whole bunch of different things, set the style, the tone and the standard feature set that you get pretty much with everyone at the moment. The extension of that is going to be taking it into the library so that when you have an onboarding flow and basically you can have a starter site that you can download that’s pre built, that comes with the theme and the templates. Or you can have an alternative creation flow where you choose your topic, you answer a few questions, you’re basically getting a conversational interface that asks you around what your topic is, what your website is about.
[00:36:31.920] – Christiaan Pieterse
And then through that flow we can show you the relevant patterns which you might want to choose and go okay, cool, I want this pattern, I want this page, I want that thing. And this is the topic that I’ve got. And we’ll take you through that flow to the point where it creates the page for you and all the different elements and then you’re ready to go in and complete your website. So a starter site from that perspective. So that’s where we see it going, at least from our perspective and the way that we’ve built it with bring your own API key format, is that we enable people to swap out different AI models. So if you want Mistral AI or if you want Claude, I know the new Claude model that just came out, everyone’s raving about it. There’s open source models, there’s local models, there’s language models that we can train ourselves inside of maxi blocks as an example. So this is a very fast moving market and for us, we’re trying to keep it as flexible as possible to allow people to plug on the bits and pieces that they need in order to get their website projects done, however they need to get them done.
[00:37:54.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
I want to ask a follow up question, but I’m fearful that I might be asking something that might be hard to answer and makes me look stupid. But I’m okay with looking stupid.
[00:38:03.780] – Jonathan Denwood
It never bothers me when you mention.
[00:38:08.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
People can plug in their own AI. Right, so let’s say someone’s on Gemini, someone’s on OpenAI, whatever, right? Someone gets your product, puts in their API, and then gets a substandard output, gets something that they feel they’re not happy with. You go, well, you’re using Gemini, of course you’re not going to get the images you want, right? Because that’s kind of the joke right now. But how do you as a company, address that type of situation when you created a tool that is basically flexing the muscle of someone else’s tool?
[00:38:50.570] – Christiaan Pieterse
I think it’s more a case of giving people the tools that they are comfortable with. I’ve become familiar with using GPT four as an example. When I’m prompting that model, I know I’ve got my text file and I’m copying in certain prompts and you know how it works. So you familiar with it and you’re comfortable with it. So that’s why we’re taking it from that perspective, at least in the early stages. We allowing people to bring the tool that works for them. As we interact with people and we get feedback through support chats and conversations, we can share that knowledge and tweak and refine as we go. The reality of the situation is we may have something that completely blows everything out of the water in the next six months, we don’t know. So to go and develop something and say, okay, our way is the way to do it is probably going to backfire on you. So we’re trying to stay as flexible as possible and build our products so that you can install your patterns and then edit visually and if you want intelligence added, you can choose some of our options or you can bring your own options if you find them to be easier to use.
[00:40:20.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I guess my follow up to that would be if someone wasn’t happy with the output. Do you have a way of looking at what they’ve created or looking at something and saying, oh, well, that’s related to the way our tool works here and here, or that’s related to the way you’ve implemented it.
[00:40:39.310] – Christiaan Pieterse
Yeah, I mean, we don’t have a specific way to deal with it other than in support when the conversation comes in and then we find solutions to it. These are all completely new things. I mean, there’s no tried and tested method for any of these topics. At the end of the day, we provide the visual interface and the template library that you can choose your items from. And what you do with the content afterwards is very much on you from that perspective. And then we’ll see what happens with WordPress and the multiplayer component. That could become really interesting where we may even be able to be in a situation where a customer can ping us a message and say, hey, I’m having a problem with this. And we can actually join in and look at their page and go through the process with them and then maybe train an AI model to help that person. There’s so many permutations that it can go into.
[00:41:46.930] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’d be a good revenue vertical to expand into, but Jonathan, I’ll pass to.
[00:41:59.090] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got to be honest, you haven’t been on my radar to the same extent as Kurt. But it’s not that I’m not supportive, it’s just that I have a lot to deal with, basically. I’m not saying Kirk hasn’t got a lot to deal with either, but it’s just a different amount of stuff to deal with. You said you’ve been doing this for almost four or five years now, moving maxi blocks forward. And it’s a grind. And I think with Crickley, I think he made some statements that it’s been how some people in the WordPress community have been treating him and his team. I think it’s a combination of factors, of burnout, probably many factors, and that last factor kind of pushed him over the edge. But you said financially and resources, this has been a real grind. I think you’re making progress. But have you worked out in your mind when it’s time to give up? When is the time that you’re still grinding but in your heart you know it’s time to give up on this. Have you worked out when that time is or you’re making steady one step progress?
[00:43:32.630] – Christiaan Pieterse
This is every startup founder’s dilemma. When do you give up? Or when do you say, I’ve had enough and this is something that you depending on. Okay, hang on, let me say it another way. When you look at startup forums and startup conversations and people that give advice and all of that stuff that relates to startups, one common thing that they say is most startups give up too soon, people just stop doing it and they’re not interested, or they give up too soon. And the way that we started this product, we know that there’s an audience for what we’re building because we have an existing business that’s been running off it. That business has funded the new business that we’re doing. Now, if I was in a quickly scenario, I don’t know if they have an additional source of income or et cetera, and maybe that would have changed it for them, I have no idea. But if they had another source of income or something else that might have helped to continue doing it, then they might have continued, at least from our perspective. That’s how we funded this. We know that there’s an audience for what we’re doing, we know that we can improve the product and there’s a better way to do it.
[00:45:04.790] – Christiaan Pieterse
And just purely based on the conversations that we’re having with customers in our support, people really love the product. Now, I need to be careful on how I say this. We found that people that use maxi blocks tend to build really nice looking websites. And we’ve been surprised by that, because in some of our other businesses, it can sometimes be a bit mix and match. And all the things that we’ve learned that we’ve applied to our product reveals itself in the way that people are using our product. So that’s what gives us confidence, knowing that we will be successful. We just need to stick at it. And for us, we’ve built all the functionality and all the feature set. And as you can see, the size of our library is testament to the product that we’ve built and that these things are there, they’ve been built, they work, they’re functional, and anyone can use them.
[00:46:20.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Because in the library, obviously, we got the big gorilla, which is Divi. But like you say, you’ve been very diplomatic. Well, not diplomatic, that would be disparaging. You’ve been factually correct, they are the big gorilla. But they’re three years into really producing something that goes live, in my opinion. You seem to be getting traction, but you’ve got three main competitors, but they’re very different. You got cadence and Ben and all the resources that he’s got. And we love Ben, and we’re big cadence. I am a big cadence person. And then you’ve got spectra, wherever you pronounce it. And then you got generate blocks, but generate. When you look at what you’re trying to do, and then you can see what generate blocks are doing. They’re two very different animals, aren’t they? It’s a kind of blank canvas with generate blocks to a certain degree. And then he’s just introduced this class system where you’re going more pattern starter. You got your template, your starter patterns, your enormous icon library. They’re such different animals, aren’t they? Really, aren’t they?
[00:47:57.850] – Christiaan Pieterse
When I speak to my partner, Kyra, who’s the designer, she’s been a designer for 25 years. If we didn’t have the experience with building patterns and layouts for Divi, we would have built a completely different product. And now we’ve ended up building maxi blocks. And people just find it much easier to use because we took all of those 25,000 support conversations that we’ve had and we took all of that experience and we said, we’re going to build something the way that we know it can be built. And when you say Divi, maybe they struggling a little bit to get it right, or as you were saying earlier about the technological debt, we have the benefit of looking at their product and going, we can build it differently. So they were the first ones. So in many ways I’m thankful to them because we could learn from their experiences, we could learn from Elementor and then look at the new technology and take it what Gutenberg’s doing and make it our own. So we’ve without a doubt benefited from what they’ve put out there and put it into our product so that we can make it better for our audience.
[00:49:32.140] – Christiaan Pieterse
And I think the market is massive. I don’t think people understand how huge the market is. And for us at the moment, we came from a standing start. So at this time we have 800 active installations, which in some way feels like a little, but we’ve hardly done any marketing. We’ve spent no money on advertising because we’ve been focusing on building the product and get it into a great state with the theme that adds the next step is the theme. And now we can really start cranking the marketing machine, doing tutorials, getting people familiar with it. And as an example, cadence. They’ve got a hosting company behind them. I mean, we just don’t have those resources. So despite the fact that we have a great product, even though we say it ourselves, when other people use it, they’re happy with it. Nobody knows about us.
[00:50:43.630] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I think you’re going to like this. Hopefully it’s only my opinion and I might be totally wrong. I think you’re kind of pushing yourself into number three place, which is a great achievement.
[00:51:02.390] – Christiaan Pieterse
Thank you.
[00:51:03.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Because I think Cadence, to my opinion, Cadence is the clear leader and what Ben is doing and the totally. I wouldn’t say unhappy. I’m not totally sure about their focus around AI because it is really interesting and you can’t. But it’s a difficult one that we.
[00:51:32.770] – Christiaan Pieterse
All figuring it out. Yes.
[00:51:35.010] – Jonathan Denwood
And it can abstract your focus, generate press. I think it’s amazing what they’re doing, but it’s a totally different animal in some ways to what Caden and what you’re doing and what Astrid. I think you’re getting close to kind of being treated as an equal, pushing them slightly out, which is an enormous achievement because you’re dealing with a company, but they’ve got a lot going on with a lot of products. So you have got the advantage of focus just to finish. So I’m going to throw it over to the last question. Over to you, Kurt. You can answer the last question. Go on.
[00:52:28.270] – Kurt von Ahnen
I just want to congratulate them for a moment. When I first signed on to Maxi blocks, I think the repository said there was less than 35 active installs. And you just said you’ve got 800 in less than a year. That’s pretty dang. I have some projects I wish I had 800 users in. But the last question is assuming that you know something about Doctor who. Do you know who Doctor who is?
[00:52:54.100] – Christiaan Pieterse
I do.
[00:52:55.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
Perfect. So if you had your own TarDIs, your own time machine, and you could go back to the beginning of your business journey, what advice would you give yourself?
[00:53:07.470] – Christiaan Pieterse
My advice would be to get to recurring income as quickly as possible, whatever that means. Just find a way to get recurring income so that you can stop worrying about getting money in and start focusing on moving your product forward, listening to customer feedback, making improvements, and starting the iteration cycle.
[00:53:45.290] – Kurt von Ahnen
Perfect.
[00:53:47.610] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s your position? I don’t expect you to give any specifics, and I’m more interested in your philosophical position on this. I get the impression you have your existing business, so I get the impression that you bootstrapped this. Are you resistant to getting investment to help you move this? I think there’s a place where bootstrapping something to a certain degree means that you don’t have to give too much equity away to get an investment in it. But I also think that for some people, bootstrapping becomes a total religion, and there’s a time and place. Is it something that you’ve been thinking about with your partners? Is it the time to give up some of the equity and get some investment?
[00:54:38.410] – Christiaan Pieterse
Yes, it is. And we’ve got traction. We’ve got users, we’ve got a great product, we’ve got an enormous library. There’s a momentum shift in the WordPress marketplace related to Gutenberg, and we are ready to take investment if anyone’s interested.
[00:55:03.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. That’s interesting. What’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what your team’s up to?
[00:55:11.250] – Christiaan Pieterse
They can go to our website, maxiblocks.com—all one word. You can go to YouTube—YouTube at maxi blocks. It’s the same handle on Twitter at maxiblocks. And that’s where you can find us. Come and have a chat or get onto our website, open the chat box, and send us a message. We’re happy to discuss anything or help anyone with problems they face.
[00:55:41.150] – Jonathan Denwood
And Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:55:46.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
Kurt LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn and make a connection. We’ll have a chat.
[00:55:53.580] – Christiaan Pieterse
Awesome.
[00:55:54.530] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s great. We’re going to finish up the show now, folks. If you want to support the show, why don’t you go to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel and subscribe to it? We’re posting a load of videos there every week and every month. I am a production engine. I feel we’ll see you next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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