Discover the perfect product-market fit for your WordPress venture. Unlock strategies and insights to elevate your online success today.
Unlock the secrets of achieving product-market fit in our latest video tailored for the WordPress community. We explore practical techniques and real-life examples that illustrate how to connect with users’ needs while maximizing the capabilities of WordPress plugins and themes. This informative guide will empower you to create solutions that resonate with your audience.
With Special Guest Devin Walker, SVP, Chief Innovation Office | StellarWP
Devin Walker is the creator of several highly rated and award-winning software products. He is best known for creating the GiveWP, an online fundraising platform built for WordPress. His work is actively being used by millions of websites and is featured in Product Hunt, WP Tavern, Torque, and several other widely regarded online publications.
As an advocate for open source, Walker has given back extensively to the WordPress community through code contributions, WordCamp and Meetup organization, speaking efforts, and fostering and supporting popular online groups like Advanced WordPress (AWP) and WordPress for Nonprofits.
#1 – Devin, What are some of the biggest challenges and lessons learned connected to StellarWP and SolidWP and finding product market fit?
#2 – What are some of the most enormous opportunities for StellarWP over the next 18 months?
#3 – Do you have any advice or observations on finding the proper boundaries connected to what level of support a plugin should provide connected users?
#4 – Where do you feel we are with the Gutenberg project?
#5—How do you see AI changing online business, including your own, in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back to the WP-Tonic Show this week in WordPress and SaaS. It’s episode 927. We got a regular guest, a friend of the show, but we always like him coming back because I found the discussion tends to be interesting. We’ve got Devon Walker back in the house. By his LinkedIn title, he’s SVP. I have no idea what that is. Chief Innovation Office at Stella WP. I have no idea what that title is. But does Devon know what that title is? This is the point.
[00:01:26.040] – Devin Walker
Well, I can clue you in on the SVP, which is the senior vice president and chief innovation officer. Well, we can get all into the innovating that I’m doing.
[00:01:37.510] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, the SVP was a brain fart for me, but I have not had enough coffee, obviously. We’re going to be talking about product fit in the WordPress world, basically. I think Devon’s got a lot of knowledge and practical experience in trying to get market fit. It’s a tricky one, and discussing how that is mentioned in Stella WP, I think it will be an exciting discussion. So, Devon, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:02:19.940] – Devin Walker
Sure. Yeah. So my name’s Devon Walker. I’m in San Diego, California. I’ve been developing, designing, and running businesses on WordPress since 2010,. I first discovered it by going from Mambo to Joomla to Drupal from ’08 to ’09, and then later ’09, found WordPress. And then from there, It’s just been an incredible journey. And I was a founder of GiveWP. We sold that in 2021 to Liquid Web and StellarWP, which is their software WordPress division or side of the company, whatever you want to call it. I’ve been there ever since. I’m just really happy there. Great people. And they got me those fancy titles, which you just mentioned.
[00:03:11.090] – Jonathan Denwood
So you can’t beat fancy titles. But your journey has been fascinating because many people are entrepreneurs, and I think you’ve still got that in your DNA. Oh, yeah. They don’t do too well in a much larger organization, but you seem very adaptable. That’s enough giving him praise, isn’t it, tribe? I have to go into my usual ways. It’s Kurt. Kirek, would you like to introduce yourself to new listeners and viewers?
[00:03:50.040] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure. Kurt von Ahnen owns a company called MananaNoMas. We focus mainly on membership and learning-type websites. We also work directly with WP-Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:04:01.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you, Kurt. Before we go into this great interview, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we got some great special offers from the major sponsors, plus a created list of the WordPress plugins and services. It’s a great resource. You can get all these goodies by going over to the wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deal/ deals. And you find all the goodies there, all the free goodies. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get from that page. I’ve got a history of disappointment. So let’s go straight into it, Devan. He’s caffonated. He’s ready for the interrogation, so let’s go straight into it. What have been some of the biggest challenges and lessons you think you’ve learned with this journey with Stella WP and solid as well. I think we had a chat with Tom from Converseio last week, and I think there’s a lot of hosting providers trying to find how they can find their niche in the WordPress space and offer more value.
[00:05:57.850] – Jonathan Denwood
And I think everybody’s going in different directions. And I think myself, and I’d be interested if you agree with this, Dev, and you thought about it yourself, it’s all around market fit in some ways, finding something that the audience really cares about. And it’s not always as straightforward, is it? So have you been thinking about this and what’s your own reflections on Steven.
[00:06:31.030] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I mean, I literally flew back from the East Coast last night because we were just there talking about what we want to do more to push a product out. Excuse me. And who the market is and how we create something compelling for them to make that buying decision. There’s a lot of questions, not a whole lot of answers. You have to make bets. Some bets, you really And for GiveWP, for instance, that was a very educated one over time that we just realized after building 25 nonprofit sites and trying all sorts of different items to satisfy their fundraising needs from Gravity Forms to Woocomers to roll our own solutions. That was hit us over the head enough times, and we realized this is something we could really build here versus Trying to bring something to the hosting market that’s unique and offering something because WordPress and hosting have been around for many years now, and trying to break into that market in a unique way is something we were just discussing quite a bit more. We have Liquid Web, we have Nexus, but we also have LearnDash Cloud, too. And that was actually one of the data points we looked at a lot because that’s actually been doing pretty well for us.
[00:07:59.880] – Devin Walker
So all this, I’d say you need to have a lot of data to work with. And if you can’t find it, make educated with ChatGPT and all this, you can really have a lot of You can use a lot of those tools now, which wasn’t the case 10 years ago. But yes, try to make the most informed decision as possible, right? And this is financially, who’s going to be doing it? Who are you offering whatever product for? And then, of course, build it in a really compelling and unique way. The design, the brand, the UI, UX, it all should really flow together well, and it should be really focused also. You really want to use an arrow, not a shotgun blast to provide the solution. And those are just some things that I’ve seen over the years. Focus is a big one. I remember last time on the show, harping on and on about focus and how We tried to do too many things at once, and most of them failed, versus really focusing on one thing, which was give WP. And once we realized that’s what we should do, and we did that for multiple years, things really started to work out for us.
[00:09:16.190] – Devin Walker
And I think that’s something that was just held close, near and dear to me since then, since I’ve learned that lesson.
[00:09:26.120] – Jonathan Denwood
This is only my reflection around Stella, really. Obviously, a few years ago, probably more than a few years ago, there was a big movement around WordPress being a service. Then you had a couple of what I term quasar wall gardens, five for a themes, an architect, and a couple other product services, built a wall garden, all embracing WordPress solution. Then you had this movement around WordPress as a service and using multi-site as a key platform in that. And that didn’t seem to really go as well as people were expecting. It was more trickier than people thought, because you could say you’re getting the worst of both worlds. You’re getting a quasar SaaS, but because of the way multisight works, you’re still getting all the elements of updating security, blah, blah, blah, performance. But you’re not getting the benefits. So you’re getting the worst of both worlds. You’re not getting the freedom. And you’re saying that learn LearnDash Cloud is doing quite well with you. But let’s take LearnDash Cloud. I’m a quasar competitor in that space, but I do push LearnDash. With that particular, can you install whatever plugins you want, or do you only have a certain group of plugins?
[00:11:25.310] – Jonathan Denwood
How does it work, and how did you work that out internally, what you’re going to offer?
[00:11:30.910] – Devin Walker
Well, we have to be realistic on how much time we have to go to market, but we definitely do allow them to install whatever plugin they want. There’s also… I mean, it is WordPress. We’re not hiding it. We talked a lot about, do we want to make a friendlier admin? And that’s been tried at Liquid Web with some other products as well, not on the learn-dash side. A couple of years back, and we realized that when we try to lock down WordPress and hide WordPress or make it look different, first off, it’s really hard to keep and maintain that over the years. You were just talking about websites as a service or WAS.
[00:12:15.090] – Jonathan Denwood
Was, wasn’t it? It’s still there, but it was really pushed. Would you agree it was really pushed and it died down a bit? Or would you not agree with that?
[00:12:26.310] – Devin Walker
I would agree with that. I think there was was was was. Pro for a while, and that had a decent community. But I remember just the work that they had to do to make everything white label and make it work together. And still it would fall apart in certain areas. And it was a struggle for them to support, maintain, and grow a business off of. And versus something like Laravel, which is like, here’s a tool, go build it yourself. But it’s much more developer friendly. So it gave a tool to the point and click business entrepreneurs that didn’t want to get dirty in the code, but wanted to start a business on… They don’t care if it’s WordPress. Well, some of them wanted WordPress, a lot of them didn’t. They just wanted solutions to offer this to their customers or to future clients. I’ve seen very few of those succeed.
[00:13:24.090] – Jonathan Denwood
You got any insights why it didn’t succeed? Because I’ve got no the answers for this, but I think a lot of people got a blindfold and they’re moving around a room trying to let them know whoever finds the gold is going to be quite successful. But I’m just going by gut feeling. Am I explaining myself?
[00:13:57.420] – Devin Walker
Well, are you saying from the business owner’s perspective, the one starting the WASP or the one offering the WASP tools?
[00:14:07.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, all of them. I think they’re all doing a bit of a dance, aren’t they?
[00:14:11.390] – Devin Walker
Well, it goes back to when you’re trying to pair together 50 There are 20 to 50 different plugins or themes or products. And also on top of that skinning WordPress, it’s like trying to skin a hippo. It’s not easy to do. It’s hard to do. And you have to keep doing it over time. When a plugin goes from 2.0 to 3.0 and changes everything, that creates more work for your team. I’m talking from the business owner’s perspective. And if you want to standardize WordPress, so it all looks the same, whether you’re going from Yose to Gravity Form, you’re not going to succeed. That’s an impossible thing to do over time, versus just accepting that it’s WordPress. So that’s one of the bigger lessons we learned, is you don’t really succeed It’s not going to be too well when you try to hide WordPress for what it is.
[00:15:05.120] – Jonathan Denwood
So that was the crux of it. You seem to be saying that it was the attempt to hide that it was a diverse… You’re offering a diverse plugin environment and trying to white label all those external buyer agency license, try and label it, to hide it from the users, and then try and present it as a SaaS. It’s not really. It’s a hybrid. It’s something different. Is that the crux of what you were trying to explain to me?
[00:15:47.060] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I think term we use sometimes still is we want to make WordPress easier so that the restaurant can use it similar to Squarespace or Wix. We’re always compared with that, right? The WordPress community is always looking at Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, some of these other ones. And we’re asking ourselves, how can we make it easier like that? And my opinion on that is you don’t do that by locking things out and trying to make everything look uniform. There’s other ways to do that. And it does take time and effort to learn these platforms, whether you are on Shopify or using. So you have to still understand that the user coming in fresh, if they’re willing to do the learning process and they’re willing to build it themselves, then we should be the ones providing them the materials, the course materials, the learning materials, or pointing them into the direction so that they can succeed on that, because that’s going to help reduce our churn rate. We don’t want people to get frustrated, cancel and move on. And so we give WP specifically. What we do is we have a phone number at the checkout.
[00:17:15.790] – Devin Walker
If you leave your phone number in there, of course, you believe in your email, we’ll follow up with you in email. But we have a whole dedicated customer success team that will jump on a call with you and help you with that first setup. And it’s really helped with our churn rate and overall customer satisfaction and success rate. We see more people not just-Oh, we know all about that, Dev, because Kirk and my little team, that’s exactly where we take it to a step higher than even you, Devon. Well, I want to hear about that.
[00:17:50.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, no, you’re going to have to pay me for that. Over to you, Kirk.
[00:17:57.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think listening to Devon- I’m a terrible bursary at heart.
[00:18:03.930] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s why you love me, Devon. I’m a real pirate, am I?
[00:18:07.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
If I think about Devon’s answer in that first question, there were a couple of things that you said, Devon, that just made my head snap. Using an arrow instead of a shotgun. Then I think about… Well, I’ve become friends with Pippin here in Kansas, so he’s established some plug-ins. Then I think about the chocolate factory that Jonathan is very fond of. Then I think about, quite honestly, the purchase- Maybe he won’t care in the chocolate factory. I think about the purchasing power or the building power, the leverage power that a company the size of Liquid Web and Steller have. And that takes us into question two, right? So what are some of the most enormous opportunities for stellar WP? But at the same time, going back to that first question, what’s the challenge? If If the whole Internet was your oyster and you could have the tools and the people and the staff to just leverage, like you said, a shotgun blast, I would imagine it’s a blend of the challenge and the opportunity. How do you guys best isolate that? I know you said you got together and had a meeting about it yesterday, but how does that look?
[00:19:22.600] – Kurt von Ahnen
I got to rephrase it to make it make sense. You have all of us out here on X and developers and agencies, and we’re all clamoring for different noise from all different angles. How do you guys find the arrow in the shotgun blast?
[00:19:39.400] – Devin Walker
Well, a lot of the conversation is about the stellar brand right now and making more of that arrow. Right now, when you go to stellarwp. Com, it’s largely just an umbrella brand, and it is that shotgun blast. We’re just talking about, oh, we’re a group of great people, which we are, of course, and we’ll introduce you to some of our brand and the leadership team. It’s really the main objective right now is to get good applicants on our careers page. And we’re trying to become more of a thought leader in the WordPress space with our stellar Spark conference. But a lot of that isn’t like a fine tune, this is what we are and this is what we can offer you. And that’s what I think we’re going to be shifting to in the next 18 months. Like your question said, it’s like a much more refined brand. We are going to be rolling out a new brand refresh here at WordCamp US. We’re going to have also sub brands, I want to call them, with a Stripe-like feel. I really look at Stripe, and I really love what they offer. So what I’ve been working on is a solution called Stellar Pay, and that’s one of the biggest opportunities I see in the next 18 months is capturing more of the payment revenue share market and really providing a unique tool for agency owners like yourself.
[00:21:02.500] – Devin Walker
So if you’re building a Woocommerce site for a client and you want to cut a deal with them that says, hey, I’ll lower the initial fee for it, but I’ll tack on 2% of every sale that you make on Woocommerce goes to my agency and we’ll grow together and I’ll be there for you. Right now, you don’t really have a solution to do that. Well, that’s what we’ve been building.
[00:21:24.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, unfortunately, Converseo announced that on the podcast last week. Definitely. They did exactly this. But it’s not that surprising because you’re all very… I think you’re one of the most intelligent individuals in the world.
[00:21:42.200] – Devin Walker
That’s just one of several other features. That’s a good one. But I would like to hear what they’re doing and how they’re doing it better because I haven’t seen too much of that. Is it built on Stripe? I’ll have to go back and tune in on that one.
[00:21:55.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, you have to look what they’ve done. But it’s not that surprising because I think you’re all looking at the same analytical data and you’re all driven by business logic.
[00:22:07.980] – Devin Walker
Well, I mean, we were one of the first to do this rev share solution with PayPal, with Stripe, back in 2017. I remember talking with Pippen about that. He got on that shortly after. And now we’re doing a quarter billion dollars every year. Just well, not us personally, but all our volume just through give WP. And we get points off that. Who payments is the biggest play ever. They’re doing billions and billions. I would almost venture to say that that’s a very, very large segment of that revenue of the overall pie that they’re getting over there at Automatic.
[00:22:46.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, and if I could just jump in. When you were saying that right now it’s an umbrella brand at Steller, I think if we’re just being honest and then thinking about the work we create for clients as agencies, dude, when I look at the brand list, it doesn’t feel like a shotgun blast to me. I mean, you guys got some really good ubiquitous brands. The event calendar, give WP, the cadence theme, which we use at WP tonic with our clients. It’s not a happenstance shotgun shot. You guys have some really solid products in there.
[00:23:23.160] – Devin Walker
Right. But you can’t go somewhere and use them and expect to use them altogether in one very consolidated way. You have to go pick and choose and buy a license for Cadence, buy a license here. We need to solve a solution where it’s all together.
[00:23:37.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
You could have a giant-I’ll be very flippant here.
[00:23:40.910] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re going to be authoring the App, Zoom, lifetime package deal then, Devon.
[00:23:45.640] – Devin Walker
No, it won’t be that.
[00:23:53.380] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to be totally honest now with you, Devon. I think I understood it, but I think when you went to the company and when… I think the parent company has been very fortunate in the talent that was brought in with the purchases of the plugins. Because I think you and Ben are, and I’ve got a lot of time for Ben as well. They were very… I actually think it was a bit of a hot mess what had been done before they brought you and Ben into the film. In the pure business logic of it, I think it was a bit of a shit show, to be quite truthful. But I think it’s going in the right direction because they got people like you and they got Ben and like what Kirk has pointed out, that they were very fortunate that the brands that were bought in, they had some really great I think talent, and I still think you’re struggling to find something that really clicks. But I’ve got no answer because I don’t think these things are that… I don’t like it. Like I said at the beginning of this conversation, I just sense everybody’s in the same position.
[00:25:25.920] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re all blind folded moving around a room, trying to find the pot of gold in a way to find a solution. Even the plugin providers, I think everybody in the world, they’re not given up on WordPress because it’s We still could have a really great future, but there are some concerns, but everybody still thinks there’s possibilities as well. Would you agree with that? I seem to be waffling and you’re the guest. I’m hearing more from you, not me.
[00:26:00.150] – Devin Walker
I mean, you have two sides of the… A lot of people don’t really care what it is. They just want the solution. We’re talking about the insiders in the WordPress community who are… You’re either really, we have a benevolent dictator of a leader, and it’s these leaching off of. Org for. Com, and that’s the negative side of it. Or you can be on the optimist side, which frankly, I’m on. And I think there’s some really good So there’s things happening. Sure, there’s challenges ahead. Will we keep growing to 60 %? I don’t think it’s a metric about how much market share we have. Noel Talk did a great presentation at WordCamp Asia this year, in which he talked a lot about how do we get the double S curve going? Because right now we have massive growth, and either it’s going to keep going down or we’re going to shift it back up and create that double S on back to growth again. And there’s still a whole lot of new WordPress sites being built every day. Sure, there’s more products out there, but no, I’m a big optimist out there. If you provide a great solution, you can disrupt some markets, whether it’s SEO or you go super niche.
[00:27:14.990] – Devin Walker
If you’re a smart person, you’re a hard worker, you can brand right, market it right. You can make a million dollar company easily. Multi-million dollar company. There’s people that look at rapid. Cloud, look at some of these new hosts that are coming out. Some really cool stuff. You can see my cat in the background.
[00:27:36.980] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re pet friendly. I think it’s time for us to go for our break. I think I’ve been waffling a little bit too much, beloved tribe. But there are no easy answers. There’s no right and wrong in what me and Kirk and Devon have been discussing. Nothing. It’s not that scenario. Everybody is trying to find the right solution for themselves and for their company. We’re going to go for our middle break. We’ve got some other messages from our sponsors that we really appreciate. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back. We’ve had an insightful discussion. Even Devon’s cat joined There we go. Even he or she had something to say. But before we go into the second half of the show, I want to point out, if you’re looking for a great WordPress partner connected to building complicated membership or community-focused websites, why don’t you have a look at what WP Tonic has to offer? We got some great partnership deals for you, and we got enormous experience in building out and helping you achieve the solution for your client that you’re looking for. You can find all this by going over to Wp-tonic.
[00:29:13.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Com/partners.wp-tonic. Com/partners, and we love you to sign up. So this goes a bit further on this journey, this winding journey, and I’m going to keep my mouth shut a bit more. I think with all hosting and all plugin providers or anybody in the WordPress area, Devon, I think support and the boundaries around what you offer if you’re not on an all-embracing maintenance support contract, what the boundaries or what a hosting provider should provide when you’re dealing with conflicts and nothing to do with the hosting or the plugins that you’re purposely providing. You probably had these discussions when you was the joint founder of GiveWP. So much. Those boundaries were. Have you got any insights and thoughts around this? Because you got a enormous amount of experience around all this.
[00:30:33.270] – Devin Walker
Yeah. So when we first started GiveWP, we were hosted on SiteGround. Siteground? Oh my God. It was decent.
[00:30:49.630] – Jonathan Denwood
They were the days when it was decent, wasn’t it?
[00:30:52.780] – Devin Walker
Well, the point is we found ourselves doing a lot of cis-admin stuff. We were using EDD with software licensing. We still are. And that’s running on the same server. The more license checks you have over time, you need to scale the server up. We’d be DDOSing our own site because there’d be a glitch in the code or something. I remember, I did that once. It was not fun, but we were talking about plugin conflicts and things like that. We wanted to just focus on our business. The marketing team could use the website how they wanted it. We, as developers, wanted to build our own product, not build on propping it up. And so we decided, hey, let’s go. The only host at that time that I knew that was reputable to not say, sorry, you have to reach out to your plugin or theme author, where this is out of our hands, was Pagely. And we went from paying, I don’t know, 99 bucks a month to almost $1,500 a month. But what that got us was just so much more free time. And they would just go above and beyond any host I’d ever seen to make sure our website was as fast as it could be.
[00:32:11.720] – Devin Walker
We had the tools we needed. They wrote custom scripts, hundreds of lines for various things for licensing, put these different caching layers. And that’s what I think the difference is. You pay more, but you get more time back, and you get to do better with that time. So it was well worth every dollar. And I see a lot of that at where we’re at now with Liquid Web and Stellar is where Liquid Web was built as the most helpful humans, and they still do that. I don’t want to pump them too much, but I- You’re allowed to do that.
[00:32:50.170] – Jonathan Denwood
We expect you to do it, actually, Dev.
[00:32:53.090] – Devin Walker
I host my personal site on Cloudways, and even through their live chat, I had How did you get away with this, Dev?
[00:33:02.510] – Jonathan Denwood
How did you put in front of your PR people and execute it? How do you get away with this?
[00:33:10.910] – Devin Walker
We have a lot of freedom here. But that’s how you get ahead and make customers happy, I think, is by making their lives easier.
[00:33:23.990] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you, in the organization, you said they got this telephone the number, the onboarding experience.
[00:33:33.670] – Devin Walker
Right.
[00:33:35.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Are you more lenient depending on their experience and at the beginning of them buying something from you and just to get them over the hunt? And then you… If they’re not getting it, there has to be a point where you do have to divorce them in a way because you end up a whole website for them, don’t you? They’re free, don’t you? Am I on the right track here?
[00:34:05.500] – Devin Walker
Yeah. We’re doing these nonprofit fundraising audits to provide… If you’re already having a site, and We’ll audit it to see how you can improve your fundraising efforts on there. And that is basically a checklist of a lot of things you can do better. We’re not saying we’ll do that for you, but we do have now a do it for you service. So if you do want a website built, that’s what we’re going to do. Because once it gets to a certain point, it’s clearly you’re going to want a service to provide this for you. Because there’s a cost-benefit analysis. I have a $50 license. If they’re spending more than an hour, there’s no profit left. So it’s like a one week check-in, three-month check-in, I think a nine a twelve month. That might not be exactly the timeline, but those are the check-ins we do. If you have those frequent flyers that are in every single week, there’s tactics to get them to quiet down and go away or to just understand what we offer more.
[00:35:16.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Over to you, Kurt.
[00:35:19.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Support is a tricky one because I think about what we do at Lifter. I’m not saying LearnDash isn’t great, but at Lifter, we’ve got a list of vetted experts. And so if they get to that boundary, I got no problem doing it. I get in a sport ticket and I just go, You need to check out the experts list where you can hire somebody to do what you need to do. But that’s a very difficult proposition because a lot of people, sometimes it’s just that it’s like one little magic thing. And once they understand the concept, they can take it and run with it. But some folks just don’t seem to turn the corner on their own.
[00:36:02.060] – Devin Walker
It’s very difficult.
[00:36:06.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
If we change gears and we talk about the Gutenberg project, which seems to be something we talk about a lot on the show, what are your thoughts? And again, I’m thinking about how stellar approaches, cadence and all of those things, right? So as a whole ecosystem of everything that you might be involved with, how do you feel we are doing on this 10-year project that we’re seven years through?
[00:36:31.230] – Devin Walker
Well, I’ve changed my mind over the years about it quite a bit.
[00:36:37.530] – Jonathan Denwood
I’d say the first couple- I think we all do. We’ve all slightly back and forth, aren’t we? Anybody else thinks.
[00:36:44.440] – Devin Walker
I mean, I definitely have fully embraced React as my development front-end JavaScript framework choice. I really do love React. I think the way that WordPress has done things to make it Less accessible for developers is a real shame. I think getting started with building on Gutenberg or contributing to it is a very confusing experience that can be improved upon. From a user standpoint, I think it has come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go. I look at some user interfaces, say what you want about Elementor. I think it’s pretty darn user friendly. Brex is another one that I just see so much love for out there that I haven’t tried myself, but I’ve seen some videos on it, like the building competition ones, and I’m pretty impressed by that. Grade. There’s some really great page builders out there. And when you compare that to Gutenberg and the speed at which some of them go compared to Gutenberg, Gutenberg is like, there’s like 100 people in a slow moving bus versus three or four people in a Ferrari. And that’s what frustrates me sometimes, too, is seeing some of that infighting about things.
[00:38:10.130] – Devin Walker
And then just the way terminology is used, block bindings. I just saw that’s a new thing in version 19 that just came out yesterday or today or something. What the hell? What is a block binding? You can’t explain that to the general person. And there’s so many of these confusing terminologies that I think can be simplified and user interface-wise. I would say I’m a fan of it. I build on it, but I use Cadence on top of it.
[00:38:39.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that’s what we do. We’ve built a whole library of templates on it. And Kirek knows what we’re going to be doing in the future with it. We have cadence.
[00:38:58.590] – Kurt von Ahnen
Just as a follow-up, though, and I’m going break in. It seems like when we talk, we talk like we’re talking about the block builder and or a page builder. But full site editing now has been out over a year, right?
[00:39:14.090] – Devin Walker
So we don’t support that with Cadence.
[00:39:16.850] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Yeah. So I know Cadence is on the block builder. Have you played with full site editing, though, on your own?
[00:39:22.230] – Devin Walker
A little bit. I’ve looked to rebuild my site, potentially using that. I’ve seen the videos that Rich does in some of the full site editing themes, and there’s some really interesting things you can do on it. I think it will need a couple more years before we look. Have you tried the header builder?
[00:39:46.230] – Jonathan Denwood
I just think I… Cadence. I was never a fan of Alimator, to be quite truthful. I used it because it was the best, and I really loved the people at B for builder, and I still use it, and a little bit. It’s a shame. Well, they still got great business. I think they’re doing fine.
[00:40:06.300] – Devin Walker
No, they’re good.
[00:40:07.380] – Jonathan Denwood
But they were always very… Some of the nicest, gracious people I ever met in WordPress. Very generous individuals. I was never a enormous fan because I call it dividitis. Allomator and all the divis. It’s just a frigging mess, wasn’t it? But it was the best at the time, bricks. I think the team at bricks, Tom and the team at bricks, have just done an amazing job. What I find really frustrating, and it gets my hackles up a little bit, Devan, is trying to utilize the argument, Well, it’s open source. What do you expect? In the absolute slowness, and in my opinion, the quasar mismanagement of that, of Gutenberg project, and utilizing a smoke screen, that because it’s open source, That’s what you’re going to get. I just think it’s nonsense, myself, David.
[00:41:21.330] – Devin Walker
Well, the problem is you look at some of the GitHub pull request or issues, and it can be something as simple as changing a pixel for a tab. There’s a UI issue. It needs to be changed or an icon or something. And there’s 30 pages of just back and forth about it. And nobody’s there cutting through all that and just making the decision on whether this is going to happen or not. And that’s the thing with open source that I’ve seen is if you allow everybody to debate this all day, the smallest changes, it never will happen or move forward.
[00:42:00.060] – Jonathan Denwood
There’s nothing wrong with debate in a company. You don’t want mine, but you just need a process where you just need somebody clearly at the end of a discussion period, there’s going to be a decision made.
[00:42:12.360] – Devin Walker
You’re going to debate these at a company.
[00:42:14.270] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s all you need, isn’t it? It’s not jet science, is it?
[00:42:16.410] – Devin Walker
Exactly. But that’s the thing with WordPress, everybody has that voice, and it’s a good thing in one regards, but there’s not a lot of this quick, fast, nimble development happening.
[00:42:29.850] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t see it as black and white like that, but maybe you’ve got your own view because I think you can have a period if it’s a major thing. Obviously, for micro things, I don’t see the need for discussion. There should be people given the authority just to do the change. And then you have a process that at a later stage, these decisions were looked at and then discussed and learned from. There doesn’t seem to be any structure, really, or it’s extremely top-heavy structure. What’s your own thoughts about that?
[00:43:10.910] – Devin Walker
I think there is structure there, some looser structure than I would like to see. And then a couple of those insiders that do have the decision or the commit power to just change an icon or change whatever and make no debate at all. But at the same time, I think that WordPress is a large, complex project that’s community driven, and it’s been around for so long that you need these, I guess, I want to say departments. It needs to be ran more like a for profit company. Unless like an open source, anybody can commit for it.
[00:43:58.510] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think I think the decision and react a whole new crew. I think a lot of the people that had experience with PHP and that development environment, a lot of them weren’t prepared or just didn’t have the time to learn React. And then a new group of people came through, or people like yourselves that were prepared to learn React. And I think a lot of that crew are employed directly by hosting companies or from Automatic themselves. I think you’ve got the smokescreen. It’s a community-led. And so in reality, you really don’t have any real community input. So you got the worst of both worlds. You’ve ended up… That’s my own take in it. I’m going to ease off on Devon because I’ve got you into, The cat’s returned. If you need to watch this, the cat’s returned. You can always tell if you’re dealing with a nice person, if animals like them. I’ve got no animals, see, Devon. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:45:14.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Now I’m paranoid. My labradoodle is going to come up and make noise. If we ask this question every show, I don’t think it’s asking it too much. We go to AI and we How do you see AI changing your business over the next 18 months? But then I also look at the the list of your tools at Steller, and how many of those tools are going to have AI injected into them and in the user interface. It seems like every new tool I’m downloading has some little star icon that says AI-powered, and I’m like, Oh, my God, what are we doing this time? But how do you see this changing or interacting in your space?
[00:46:02.250] – Devin Walker
Well, I think we’ve already put a lot of AI in Cadence, as you’ve probably seen. We definitely put some in LearnDash. We’re talking about what that could be with GiveWP. And I think there’s good ways to make money off of AI and really help users, but really bad ways as well. But we don’t want to stuff it, make it feel bloated and get people like you, I’m sick of seeing like, oh, this AI upsell. Here comes another AI upsell. And that fatigue is already getting so old. And that’s the last thing we want. So it’s a balance. I don’t have a great solution right now for give. Like, what can we do? Can we have an AI campaign creator? And just we’ll pay for the credits as long as it means that our customers can get up, set up faster and use our product more successfully. Sure. We’ll If you don’t pay for the tokens to get you AI created campaigns. And so that’ll reduce the barrier for entry, you don’t have to pay anything on top of that. So I want to talk more about not AI upsells, but how can we put AI to augment our existing solutions, not break the bank for us, but really provide that good solution to our customers and not upsell them on it, right?
[00:47:24.600] – Devin Walker
Does that make sense?
[00:47:26.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it does. And in an air of transparency, The first time that I was showing off at my WordPress meetup here in Hutchinson, I was like, Hey, let’s just build a sample website real quick. Let’s use one of the starter templates in Cadence. So I show the group how to load up a site and cadence, and we go to the starter templates. And all of a sudden the platform starts asking me questions, and I’m like, Well, folks, this is new for me.
[00:47:52.330] – Devin Walker
No demo goes well.
[00:47:55.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
It went really well. That was the surprise. And so we were We were making a fake construction remodeling website as a sample. And so it said, what’s the name of your company? I said, Cutting Edge Construction. What’s a short description of what you do? Boom, right? And then it went out and grabbed royalty free images and pump this starter site full of templated content, and all of it was construction oriented and formatted for the theme of the business that we had described to it. And it took seven or eight minutes in front of a group of people learning altogether, and it went really, really well. I got to say so much better than some other AI I’ve sampled in front of people for the first time. But like any other AI product, you can’t just hit publish. You got to go through and you got to find tooth, you got to filter that and you got to format it. And so in that vein, is there a part of you that wonders if AI AI, because of human’s laziness, is going to further dumb down the internet and further degrade content at an alarming rate.
[00:49:10.060] – Devin Walker
Oh, yeah. I mean, have you seen some of the make. Com or Zapier workflows you can do to connect your WordPress site and then use Open AI and pass that to Claude and mix content and just push and have a regular schedule. There’s a lot of that. And even with Cadence, if you notice, some of those new AI templates that are created are more simplified. We couldn’t get as advanced as some of the starter templates in the design that we pushed out. And so what we’re seeing is that our customers are coming back and saying, Hey, we like those starter templates more. Can you stop pushing the AI so much? Because a lot of our customers like that more curated design, the actual custom design. It already has the content in there. We’ll go and we’ll update the content using the specific AI tools that we have. So you can click on headings and provide your own headings there. But we can easily swap out the image as we have the image. So we’re talking about, okay, let’s shift gears. So we’ll slow down a little bit on the AI. We’ll start creating more of these starter templates people like.
[00:50:20.180] – Devin Walker
So that human touch is hard to replace. And so, yeah, I totally agree. It’s going to dumb down the Internet and Google is getting better at founding that stuff. And we want to augment our marketing or whatever we do with AI. We don’t want to replace actual human people in touch with that.
[00:50:43.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
And sampling the different tools is super important. I know Jonathan’s really big on AI and early adoption of different platforms.
[00:50:51.490] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I’m actually not here. This is actually…
[00:50:55.790] – Kurt von Ahnen
But he at least samples things. I saw Lama from Meta and then Claude and all these different ones. I’m always like, Well, let’s try this and see what the result is. Let’s try that.
[00:51:06.850] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I buy in again? There’s a few people in the automatic would wish that was true, actually, David.
[00:51:13.610] – Kurt von Ahnen
The big Jonathan We could program them to be more friendly.
[00:51:18.280] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m very friendly. They’re all such nice people. I’ve got some great relations. Some of them actually love my humor. I think there’s a few that don’t, but there’s quite I’ve got a few that automatically love me, actually. They send little notes to me, actually, Devon.
[00:51:35.440] – Devin Walker
Oh, wow. Love letters.
[00:51:36.890] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, little tweets, little snippets of information. You’d be amazed what I know about everybody in the WordPress space. I’ve got a little digital where I store it all, all the dirt on everybody.
[00:51:51.390] – Devin Walker
Got those little birds out there. You’re like the game of Thrones.
[00:51:53.650] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s amazing, the stuff I’m saying. I don’t publish most of it because I would end up in forever.
[00:52:05.770] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sorry. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:52:07.990] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Bigger question here, because the possibility AI, because You’ve got learned Dash. I’m going to put this because I know Kurt’s going to have to go off in the next 10 minutes. So I’m going to leave this another quiz. I’m going to go a different way. Why do But I do think you’re up against… With Learndash, you’re up against… Obviously, you’ve got alternatives like Lifter LMS or Tuta LMS, but your main competition really seems to be SaaS It seems to be either teachable, Kajabi, Podia. There’s a lot of them, but really there’s about half a dozen real SaaS competitors. Why do you think people are still looking at LearnDash? They must be doing a search on Google and all these articles that the chocolate factory produces. They’re looking at… And then they look at the SaaS solutions. In your own internal discussions, why… Then they look at LearnDash. Have you worked out in your own discussions why people still choose WordPress and choose LearnDash? And some people choose the SaaS, and then some people choose what you’ve got to offer. You got any insights why they’re doing that? What drives them?
[00:53:46.130] – Devin Walker
You could say the same thing about GiveWP and the environment somewhere.
[00:53:52.880] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s why I’m asking you because you’ve been a lot more successful than me.
[00:53:57.540] – Devin Walker
It’s hard to give you one, this is what we see every time because we have some folks leave and go to a SaaS and then come back or leave and then they’re completely happy there. We do try to survey them when they leave and why are they going? And some of it is price point. They want to pay a low monthly fee, and they don’t want to pay a $300 annual license. You see that with Bluecommerce. You see a lot of the, oh, if I need the five critical extensions, I’m paying $1,000 a year. Well, sometimes you are. And Shopify, it’s a low monthly fee. It seems like an easier sell for an end user, and a lot of them are doing that. But then once they get in there, they don’t have some of the flexibility they’re used to. So that’s when we’re seeing them come back. But why would they choose us? Well, I think it’s definitely the flexibility that we provide, the ability to integrate it with your own website. It’s a natural part of what your business offers is very compelling not to have to utilize a SAS that has maybe a design system that doesn’t work with what you’re trying to do or you want to do something custom, then you work with their support and it’s like, yeah, you can do that through our API.
[00:55:21.770] – Devin Walker
And then it’s way more advanced than doing it with what we can offer at LearnDash or with the events calendar. So I think it’s If you’re like my buddy who runs a restaurant, he tried Squarespace after WordPress, struggled with both, eventually just gave up and paid a company to handle it for $300 a month, right? Because that’s not what he did, not what he does. And they put him back on WordPress. So he went back in for this journey. So it’s interesting. But I don’t have a one…
[00:55:58.480] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve noticed with the The competition, the SaaS competition, Kajabi produced a lower starter price around $70, Podio. Well, what’s interesting is, what was a little bit disappointed I think with Podio is they’ve gone the real cheap end of the market, and they’re taking commission on top. They’re gone that route, and some of the other players went that route, and I noticed that they’ve removed that, and They’re gone to a single monthly or yearly payment structure. So there seems to be a lot of oscillation, even in the SaaS world, around pricing and what they’re offering. Would you agree with that? They’re in flux as well.
[00:56:46.330] – Devin Walker
For sure. Everybody’s looking at each other’s pricing pages, trying to undercut it, do it differently. They’re looking at WordPress, they’re looking at all their competition. I completely agree with that.
[00:57:00.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Over to you, Gankert.
[00:57:03.270] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I guess I’ll ask the last question then, and then I’ll disappear. If you had your own time machine, H. G. Welles, Doctor Who, thing, If you could go back in time and just give yourself one stellar piece of advice, what would that be?
[00:57:21.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Don’t come on this podcast.
[00:57:27.200] – Devin Walker
That’s to me first there. I want to hear Jonathan’s. But what would I do? I can’t go back to the focus thing because I beat that up so much, but that’s definitely what I would do. But besides that, I would say- Would you have gone into the WordPress world or would you have gone in the more bootstrap SaaS world?
[00:57:51.250] – Jonathan Denwood
Are you still happy that you went down the- I’m absolutely happy.
[00:57:54.700] – Devin Walker
I don’t know that other route. I do have a couple more left in me, and I’d like to take more SaaS type of entrepreneur journey in the next 5 to 10 years. There’s going to be always time to innovate or create, and I’d love to do that. But I’m definitely not trade what the last 10 years were for an unknown. I think that could have largely ended with a lot of failure. I see a lot of that happen with just trying to go after a general a personalized solution. What I would have done differently is I probably would have gotten into payments a lot earlier than I did and try to do more with that rather than 2017. I think we could have been doing a whole lot more if we got in 2013, 2012. That’s what I would… Besides focus, you already heard me say that a million times, getting into payments earlier.
[00:58:58.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you think I’m unfair in saying this a little bit? But what I don’t understand, and you’ve got a bit of experience here, is automatics, what they’ve done with WU commerce, because I really see they still can do it. Keep WooCommerce really on wordpress. Org and really jazz it up and really work on it so it could really take on Shopify in a big way. You still have the benefit of if you wanted your own, you’ve got wordpress. Org and WU commerce that you could host if you really wanted that, and you really got wordpress. Org. Do you think they’re really… I don’t understand because that just seems… I’m not the sharpest tool, but not the bluntest. It just seems an enormous opportunity that just leaving it on the table.
[01:00:02.900] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I see some of that happening right now with just some of the newsletters, like they’re getting, they’re simplifying the product creation process. They’re changing simple products than variations, making it like a much more one time Shopify like experience, whether that’s going to be all contained in a SAS that looks beautiful, like you’re talking about, they could do that with wordpress. Com dot com. That’s something that I think they tried with WordPress with Calypso, and now you see them going back to the way WordPress looks on wordpress. Com. So they’re actually going the opposite way is what I’ve seen. I don’t work for automatic. I have friends there, but I just get the newsletters and I stay in touch. So I wouldn’t… I’d be surprised if I saw that. But with WuCommerce, specifically, I think it would be a good move because some of those interfaces are a bit painful to work and look at.
[01:01:02.520] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, do you think… I think they could, if they were prepared to do it and do the work, it’s easy for me to say, but I think there’s a demand that… Because like you said with your observation about Shopify, if you’re doing a basic setup, it’s fine. You could apply the same things with your SaaS competitors against LearnDash. It’s simple until you to change things. Yes, there’s add-ons and API, but it gets a lot more complicated than even WordPress really quick, doesn’t it? You know it. Have you got another Can we wait a little bit more time? Because there’s one big question I want to ask you before you disappear.
[01:01:49.250] – Devin Walker
Got five more minutes? Let’s keep going.
[01:01:54.760] – Jonathan Denwood
I see enormous opportunities in learning online because you’ve got learnDash, I thought. Utilizing AI because… This is a broader question. I got into the internet Because I have dyslexia, and I got into computers and development because I found development easier than writing the English language. And I think we all thought that if information was like Wikipedia on your phone, on your front of your computer, you can search something, can study it, and all the information is out there, isn’t it? It’s just there. I thought it was going to really equalize society much more because there are people that genetically are very, very bright. But when When you actually look at the figures, most of us are around the same IQ level to a level where it doesn’t make an enormous difference, the genetic. It’s more society and self-motivisation that are more critical than luck. But things haven’t really panned out. I don’t want to get too political because there’s different arguments on why that’s happened. But that hasn’t actually opportunity and educational achievement in some areas seems to be going backwards, not going forwards. I really see AI in the learning space in being able to customize.
[01:03:49.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Because obviously, I did research in the philosophy and the science behind learning, and I’ve been amazed that even now, how little we understand the learning process and the amount of quasar science in that field. What’s your own views? Because I think it This is one of the biggest areas that AI offers because you got learned that. Would you agree with what I’ve just outlined?
[01:04:25.260] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I’m picking up what you’re putting down. I think with With LearnDash, specifically, it’s a little bit of a different question of what we can do with AI there. But for AI in general and how I see that affecting wider society, I think it’s interesting that you We’re talking about what makes the difference between somebody succeeding with AI or whatever with business if we’re all around the same-Well, I’ll put it this way.
[01:04:57.830] – Jonathan Denwood
I sense that you might have slightly different political views than me, but I think you want opportunity for as many people as possible, and that’s what I want: as much opportunity as possible. I sense that the number of opportunities is decreasing for many people.
[01:05:19.550] – Devin Walker
Potentially, AI is not going to replace the worker that’s building a fence out front. It will be replacing more of automating different systems, of course, and factory work. And developers have always been a target. But this is still early days. I think a lot needs to be figured out first before I can make an actual informed decision on it. I know we’re not replacing anybody because of AI.
[01:05:58.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Would you agree with the studies I’ve done that most people have roughly the same IQ levels? It’s a mixture of family, society, and personal drive. But I had thought with all this access to information knowledge. In the past 20 years, we now have access to… If you want to study something, you can take a whole course in computer science. It’s all free, it’s online. There’s no lack of information out there. Yeah, but if you were raised in a family or a home that didn’t value that and didn’t drive that, or you were not given those opportunities and that wasn’t instilled upon you, you’re likely not going to be the person that’s going and seeking that out.
[01:06:58.000] – Devin Walker
They’re not going to ask AI curious questions or go down to the community college and take that free political science course or whatever it is, because it’s just not something that… It’s a complex socioeconomic type of question that I don’t know. I have enough time to get to you right now, but I think we’re somewhat aligned in many of our thoughts on that.
[01:07:21.000] – Jonathan Denwood
I think I’m very difficult to pin down because some people think I’m a right-wing Genghis Khan type. Other people think I’m a total Communist Socialist. I’m neither. I oscillate like most intelligent people do, don’t they? Because there isn’t one pure solution. It’s all gray.
[01:07:45.530] – Devin Walker
I’m not going to put you in a box. I hope people won’t put me in a box, either. I think that’s what it is. There are ideas I agree about on all sides of the spectrum.
[01:07:57.800] – Jonathan Denwood
But it is interesting. Would you agree I got into it because I was interested in it, and it helped me with dyslexia? But also on the bigger picture, I thought having all this excess information would make an enormous change fundamentally. And in some ways, it has. But in some ways, it hasn’t. And I still think we haven’t found the real reasons for that, have we? I think it’s a bit like WordPress. We’re all trying to find that solution, aren’t we?
[01:08:31.880] – Devin Walker
Well, it took a while for things to get going, and I think we’re still going to get going on it. And Apple is going to be coming out with a revamped OS with it sprinkled all around; see how that changes things. We’ll see. This is early days, Jonathan. We got to wait some time here. Remember when the Internet first came out? It was, what’s this Internet thing again? It’s a worldwide web. It takes a while.
[01:08:59.540] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s amazing. It is incredible how it developed. Well, I hope you enjoyed it. I don’t think you would get an interview like this anywhere else. Could you, David? Thank God.
[01:09:11.290] – Devin Walker
I think it’s just a good conversation that we’re having amongst other friends, too. So yeah, this is fun. I like it.
[01:09:19.590] – Jonathan Denwood
You might come back for another interrogation, tribe. We have some great guests coming for the rest of August. Got our roundtable show. Plus, we’ve got some fantastic guests who have agreed to go in September. If you want to support the show, please tell others about it and leave us a review on iTunes. I haven’t had any reviews lately. Good, bad, or indifferent. I love the feedback. We’ll see you next week with another great interview or our monthly Roundtable show. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[01:09:52.660] – Devin Walker
Bye.
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