Special Guest Katie Keith, Founder & CEO of Barn2 Plugins
We discussed how Katie got into WordPress and her thoughts on where she feels WordPress is going in the last quarter of 2024.
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. Let me switch off my email. Every time, I forget to switch it off. Three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 937. We got a friend of the show. We have Katie Keith, the founder and CEO of Barn 2 Plugins. Very successful female entrepreneur in the WordPress space and a straight talker in general. So, would you like to give us a 10, 20-second intro quickly, Katie?
[00:01:21.770] – Katie Keith
Sure. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Like you said, I’m Katie Keith. I’m the founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins. We mainly specialize in WooCommerce, although we’re not exclusively WooCommerce plug-in. I’m from the UK, and I now live in Majorca, Spain.
[00:01:40.290] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, I’m not envious, Katie. I’ve got my all-patient co-host, Kurt. He’s here this week. He has returned from his conference, where he was up to last week. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to new listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:02:01.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan. Thank you. My name is Kurt von Ahnen, and I own a company called MananaNoMas. We focus mainly on membership and learning websites. Besides working with WP-Tonic, I also work with the great folks at Lifter LMS.
[00:02:14.830] – Jonathan Denwood
And in this episode, we’re going to be asking Katie about how she got into the world of WordPress, what she sees as some of the opportunities or challenges in the next 18 months for Bound2 Plugins, what she thinks It’s about some of the comments from Matt around DHA, David from Ruby on Reels. That blew up a little bit. And a lot more. It should be a great discussion. Before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we have a great list of the best WordPress plugins and services and some great special offers from major sponsors. You can get all these goodies by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals, Wp-tonic. Com/deals. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get from that page. I’m sorry to disappoint. I have a career of it. Katie, let’s go straight into it. So, how did you get into the semi-crazy world of WordPress and plugins? I read your LinkedIn.
[00:03:48.280] – Jonathan Denwood
I know you did your degree. I think it was in philosophy.
[00:03:52.540] – Katie Keith
Yeah, philosophy in English. Not tech.
[00:03:55.710] – Jonathan Denwood
No. Then I think you worked maybe for the National Health Service in the UK, but I’m not sure.
[00:04:04.730] – Katie Keith
It was more social care. It was local government fostering and adoption, finding families for children that didn’t have a family.
[00:04:13.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, excellent training for WordPress, then, isn’t it?
[00:04:16.860] – Katie Keith
Absolutely. Well, it was.
[00:04:17.950] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s probably very appropriate, especially at this time.
[00:04:21.420] – Katie Keith
I did their Google Ads, I did their website. It was very good training.
[00:04:26.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, I was concentrating more on the human side, dealing with stressful situations. See my beloved try, Katie gets my humor. I think some Americans get it, but they struggle, Katie. You seem to get it straight away, don’t you?
[00:04:48.000] – Katie Keith
No, that is a definite thing. Americans don’t understand all my language either.
[00:04:53.710] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s more deeper with me than my language. There we go. Can you tell us How, from that background, did you get into the semi-crazy world of WordPress then, Kate?
[00:05:06.960] – Katie Keith
At the time, I didn’t know there was even a world on WordPress, certainly a semi-crazy one, or even when I got into it, I didn’t know there was a community for literally years. But going back a bit, my husband, who I met at university, was a software developer. He was doing computer science. That’s a lot more of a clue to where we would end up than my degree in English and philosophy. All through our 20s, we had normal public sector jobs and we’re frustrated with the lack of flexibility you get from working in a large organization. We would talk endlessly about how we wanted to start a business together. We believed you needed a big idea to start a business and watching TV shows like Dragon’s Den, which is called Shark Tank in the US, and thinking you need to have a big idea. So that put us off. Then eventually, my husband, Andy, got so disillusioned with his job that he ended up quitting to work freelance, and we started a business together, which I did part-time while supporting us both on my salary and he was full-time. The business we decided on was web design because he was a software developer, but that felt like an easier route to entry because anyone can set up as a web designer.
[00:06:29.180] – Katie Keith
He taught those skills which weren’t exactly what he’d done. Also that combined my skills with marketing and that thing, so I could communicate with the clients and do the copywriting and the SEO. We did that and discovered WordPress just as a tool to build the website. We didn’t know anything about open source. We certainly didn’t know there was a community around it. It was just a tool that we’d come across. So that stuff all came later.
[00:06:57.780] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. So what led to the plugin side of it?
[00:07:03.630] – Katie Keith
Yeah, so we did the websites for a few years and we started hiring freelances to help us with them. We didn’t really like the idea of having a proper team and becoming a big agency and managers and all of that. We thought that would take us a bit more back to our roots of large organizations which we didn’t enjoy. We thought, Okay, how can we scale more than this in a way that won’t require being a big company? We thought, Okay, WordPress products looks like a good idea. We knew about those through building the sites for clients. We had a bit of insight into some gaps in the market from what our clients weren’t able to find and where we’d have to code custom plugins for them. So we thought that would be a good way into the product market. We started building some small plugins on the side of our client business, and it grew amazingly fast. Within six months, we could stop taking on new clients All right.
[00:08:02.320] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s quite quick. Why Majorca from England to Majorca? How did that materialize, Katie?
[00:08:16.450] – Katie Keith
Well, Majorca is actually a compromise for us, strange it may be to say, because ideally we’d like to have more flexibility. We’ve created this flexible company for ourselves and the lifestyle that comes with that. But we have a child in school, so that is not so flexible. We were feeling a bit sad for a while thinking, Oh, well, when she’s 18, we’ll do this. Well, she was nine at the time. That’s a long time. Then at some point we thought, Okay, well, what can we do? Rather than just looking to the distant future and thought, Well, maybe we can move abroad somewhere for a year as a trial, and maybe that wouldn’t be too disruptive if we choose somewhere that has lots of English speakers and British schools and things like that. Actually, Majorca fits the bill for that. It has loads of British international schools and more German speakers than I realized. There’s more Germans than Brits, which I didn’t know. Nothing against the Germans. It’s just that I would have liked to either speak a language I know or learn Spanish. Not really so interested in learning German, but still plenty of British people as well.
[00:09:34.060] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. Obviously, with Britain leaving the common market, it’s become a bit more complicated. So have you managed to obtain Spanish residency or are you seeking to become a dual national?
[00:09:50.450] – Katie Keith
There’s no such thing as dual nationality with Spain. We can never change our passports. But yeah, that was a total pain. We We decided to move six months after the end of the transition period. We were one of the first people to need a visa to move to Spain from the UK after Brexit. There was a massive backlog the time we were applying because it was a new system and the powers that be hadn’t figured it out yet. Particularly, there was a lot of demand from students that suddenly British students needed visas to live abroad for a year to study We tried to apply for a visa and we didn’t even get an appointment. Months and months went by and we couldn’t even get an appointment. We ended up moving on the 90-day tourist visa that any British person can use to go to the EU thinking, We’ll have our visa sourced before then, but we didn’t. Our daughter started school and it was really stressful because we couldn’t even get an appointment to apply, let alone see if we’d be successful and accepted. We ended up doing something that most people can’t do, which is buying a house just to get residency.
[00:11:08.020] – Katie Keith
They’ve got this special thing called a golden visa where you could basically just buy your way in. We borrowed a lot of money from the company, which again, we were lucky to be able to do and got the golden visa, but it was hard. Since then, they’ve introduced a new digital nomad visa where you don’t have to spend any money, and that would have been perfect. But We were too early for that.
[00:11:32.150] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Thanks for that, Katie. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:11:35.710] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. I love how your story emulates with so many others about you found WordPress as a tool and for years didn’t even realize there was the community. And especially now that we’re seeing some of the stuff we’re seeing in WordPress, I try to remember thousands, millions of people, developers, implementers, a lot of aren’t even aware that there’s any community or that there’s any this distraction happening. It’s just a tool that works. And it’s so cool that you were able to get your start in that way. That’s pretty awesome. When we think about where Barn 2 Plugins is now, and 2024 going into 2025. What do you think are some of the most significant opportunities or challenges that you guys might be facing as we come up on the end of this year?
[00:12:26.510] – Katie Keith
I see my biggest opportunity at the moment is learning Coming from what I already know. We’ve got 19 premium plugins now. We did have 24, but we sold five of them earlier in the year. That gives us a lot of data in what sells and what doesn’t. Instead of building new products which may or may not be successful, I see my biggest opportunity as perfecting the ones that are selling so that we can maximize the results from those plugins. At the moment, we’ve totally stopped building new products and we’re really focusing on probably the three that are doing the best because the customers are telling us what will make them more successful through the feature request and so on. We’ve got a very clear blueprint of how to get more sales from what’s already working.
[00:13:15.230] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Now, as an outsider looking in on your X account, I see you on X a lot. I also see people that go, How come she gets all the airplay on X? How come she gets all the posts? How come she gets all the visibility? I’m like, When I look at the quality of the posts and the vulnerability and the transparency you put in your posts, it’s pretty obvious. I mean, you go and you say, We launched this, or We are selling this, or We are about to announce this for sale. What do you think? You really put it out there. Have you found that to be a really great asset for you in some of your decision making and how you look at these challenges, or is X more of a distraction for you?
[00:13:58.390] – Katie Keith
It’s both because it’s definitely a distraction, obviously, but I get so much out of it, which I never anticipated when I joined exactly two years ago. I’m pretty new compared to most of WordPress community on it. I basically treat it like a free business consultant. If I need to research a new tool or something, I just tweet about it, and then everyone tells me what they’re using and makes recommendations. If I’m looking at making a change to my website and I’ve got maybe two designs to I ask people to vote, and I just get all this free advice. It’s not from random people, particularly, because the Twitter community consists of very experienced business people in the WordPress space. I’m getting a lot of good, relevant advice, which is amazing. And it seems to benefit me and build me a following. And people are saying, oh, she’s so transparent. I really applaud that when actually I’m really taking a lot from it and using it as a tool to grow my business. But I hope it helps other people as well because it’s all public, obviously, and other people can learn as I’m learning.
[00:15:10.310] – Kurt von Ahnen
When I look at your account there, I think to myself, this is an excellent case study on how social could be a useful tool rather than a cesspool of nonsense. I think you’ve done really well there. Jonathan?
[00:15:24.850] – Jonathan Denwood
You said you pruned this quite extensive library of plugins. You recently sold four of them. What was that process like? And is there any advice that you could share to the audience that you learned through that process, Katie?
[00:15:49.600] – Katie Keith
Well, that follows on directly from our previous conversation because I found the buyer simply by tweeting for advice about how to go about finding the buyer. I just said, I’m thinking of selling some of my plugins.
[00:16:03.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Anyone got any advice? We did rehearse this, folks. It’s just-I know.
[00:16:08.290] – Katie Keith
I know that just was perfect. Max Rice doesn’t even really use Twitter. He’s one of the founders of Skyverge, who sold to GoDaddy, and they’ve recently set up Kestrel. They’re big players in the woocommerce space. He doesn’t even really use Twitter, and yet somebody told him about my tweet, and he was looking to acquire some woocommerce plugin. He logged in probably for the first time in ages, and replied and said he was interested. That did actually lead to a sale of five premium plugins and two free ones, which they now own. Just through A simple tweet.
[00:16:46.900] – Jonathan Denwood
So what led to that decision to dispose of those particular plugins? Was it just purely a financial decision or was it more complicated? You just didn’t feel that they fit it in to the other plugins. I’m just presuming this. What were some of the criteria that you looked at to make that decision, Katie?
[00:17:14.350] – Katie Keith
It was a bit of both. Towards the end of last year, I did a big 80/20 rule analysis of various aspects of the company, ranging from the products to the marketing and so on. And whenever you do that, you discover that most of the things that work for you are coming from a tiny amount of the things that you do. The trick to growing your business is to focus on the things that are working and get rid of the things that are a distraction and aren’t having results. In this case, the majority of our plugins were bringing in a minority of our income, particularly those five, which we were all making, I think, about $1,000 or less a month, whereas we had other plugins doing a They were all selling. They were getting regular sales, but they were smaller than our others, and we were having to spend time in developing and maintaining them and supporting the customers, of course. I just thought this is time to focus on what works, as I was saying earlier. And part of doing that involved reducing our overall suite of plugins so that we were freeing up resources.
[00:18:23.750] – Katie Keith
And interestingly, Kestrel were having a completely different strategy. They were building a new marketplace of many WooCommerce extensions, and they knew these were my smallest plugins. I didn’t cover anything up, and they were happy, even though I was completely honest about my reasons because their motivations were different.
[00:18:45.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s fantastic. So you remarked that your business is established into WooCommerce, but you’re also attempting to diversify. Can you explain why you want to do that? Because some people would say that by doing that, you might lose focus on the factors that established your success by moving away from your core expertise, which is around providing third-party solutions for WU commerce. You probably discussed this yourself. But why did you still make that decision that you’re going to attempt to slightly diversify, Katie?
[00:19:41.420] – Katie Keith
It’s not so much as an attempt as just what has ended up happening without a plan. So our biggest plugin is Document Library Pro, which is not for WU commerce. It just lets you build a document library on any WordPress site. Our WU commerce specialism wasn’t really a planned thing. It’s just that apart from that plugin, particularly, the ones that sold best for Woocommerce, so we produced more of them. But in a way, our roots are table plugins because I think our second premium plugin was a dynamic table plugin called PostTable Pro, which basically lists any custom post type in a searchable table. And then that led to the development of other plugins because lots of people wanted to list WooCommerce products in table with add to cart buttons and things. We then created our Woocommerce product table plugin, which helped us to get into the Woocommerce side of things. But the other big use case for PostTable Pro was people wanting to list documents in a table which looks just like the product table, but it’s for documents with download buttons and preview links and things. We created our document library plugin. Interestingly, our two big plugins that are in different areas are both table plugins.
[00:21:01.150] – Katie Keith
That led to this weird lack of identity in the business where most of our successful plugins are WooCommerce, but we’ve got this really successful document one as well.
[00:21:12.130] – Jonathan Denwood
So where do you think or where do you… What’s your sense of where WooCommerce is at the present moment? Obviously, one of its biggest competitors is Shopify, but I think I think I am correct that the second biggest is Woocommers. I might be incorrect about this. So where do you think do you think WuCommerce share is declining or is it static? How do you see it compared to its main competitor, which I feel is Shopify? I’d be interested to see what you think.
[00:22:01.040] – Katie Keith
Shopify is definitely its main competitor. In terms of which is ahead, it depends on where you look because Built With, which you’ve probably seen, says that Shopify is slightly ahead. But if you look at, I’ve forgotten the name of the website, but it’s actually linked from the woocommerce. Com homepage. The data that they’re using says that woocommerce is ahead. So it depends on how you’re analyzing it. Are you looking at shops by size, like the top million stores in the world, or are you looking at all websites on the internet? So it depends on how you define it. But I have to conclude they’re pretty close, basically. I would say that root commerce is stable. I would like to say that it was growing, but I’m not aware that it’s particularly growing. Although I am feeling quite positive about it because it stayed largely outside of the current controversy. I know it’s owned by automatic, but it feels like it has separate management and it’s not been drawn into the that have been going on directly. I know quite a lot of people that are decision makers at Bluecommerce and that they’re doing really good work.
[00:23:07.930] – Katie Keith
They’re looking at things like what makes Shopify so successful. Even upcoming competitors as well that are smaller but are doing good work. They’re analyzing all of that and thinking, how can they make Bluecommerce the best it can be? I’m feeling quite positive about the professionalism and growth of that in the future, although I don’t think it’s growing in numbers right now.
[00:23:30.040] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you think are one or two of the biggest weaknesses of the Woocommerce platform at the present moment then?
[00:23:36.380] – Katie Keith
The biggest weakness which I’m struggling with is actually WordPress, because Woocommerce has to be on a WordPress website, which means that it’s subject to things like the Gutenberg project, which is taking a very long time, has some usability problems which everybody, most people would accept or a lot of people would, and things like that. So for For example, it has to be part of the WordPress admin, which I would love to see modernized and redesigned. It looks more like Shopify in the back-end in terms of the clean, modern look and so on. Some projects at Woocommerce are struggling to progress because they’re subject to, say, the development of blocks in WordPress core and things like that. So however good the work people at Woocommerce are doing, there are some obstacles because they are dependent on WordPress. So it’s important for WhoCommerce that the WordPress project is going in the right direction and moving quickly and that the blocks keep being developed and aren’t just in experimental mode and all that thing. Yeah.
[00:24:44.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think I didn’t want to influence you, but you confirmed my own thoughts about what are some of the factors that have been limiting WU commerce, because I do agree with I think it has a fabulous possibility of growing, but I think there’s a certain group of circumstances over the last few years that have held it back a little bit. And I do agree with you. I think a lot of those circumstances have been around Gutenberg, which personally, even though I’m financially or personally not really involved with to any substantial, I still want WordPress and people involved in that particular area to prosper, and I think it’s quite frustrating in a way. I think we’ve had a great discussion so far in the first half. I think it’s time for us to go for our break. Katie has been very direct and precise in her answers as normal. I I’ve tried to stop me from wandering away. My WordPress weave, as I say, I think I’ve been quite effective in reducing the weave, folks. We will be back in a few moments for the second half of the show, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks.
[00:26:26.400] – Jonathan Denwood
We’ve had a great discussion with our friend, Katie, a true WordPress entrepreneur. Before we go into the second half of the show, I want to point out that if you’re looking for a great hosting partner, why don’t you look at what WP Tonic has to offer? We specialize in membership and buddy-boss development and hosting for your demand in clients. We provide everything that your client will probably want, which will make your experience of building those type of websites a lot easier. We also got some great plans for you to find out all about what WP Tonic has to offer. All you have to do is go over to wp-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. We love to something special together. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:27:34.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think this part of the conversation drives more towards just that open source topic. Katie, I don’t know if you’re familiar or not, or if you went through the link, but did you see the post from DHH, from David about taking less than what you create? His whole idea about Ruby on rails and how rewarding it was to see giant projects projects built off of his work without really becoming a billionaire on his own. And then, of course, the response from Matt to that. I don’t know if you saw the original response and then the redacted response. But did you have any opinions on those thoughts on open source and where we’re all working right now?
[00:28:23.300] – Katie Keith
Yeah, I thought the original response from Matt was very unfair, and that’s why he redacted it. It’s just personally insulting to David. It just wasn’t professional, was it? To insult him as an individual and to say he wasn’t successful enough, which many people have since pointed out have missed the point because open source is about creating something bigger than yourself to enable other people to then find success. So your own personal wealth isn’t the only factor in assessing your success in building an open source project. I thought David’s points were very valid.
[00:29:06.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, when I read David’s post, and I don’t know David, really. I just know of him. It just seemed like Super humble, super to the point. It was short, it wasn’t long, it wasn’t a giant pat on the back to himself. It was really like, I’m thankful. I picked up this vibe. I’m just thankful. A lot of cool things happened. Shopify went and named all these things that are built on his product. For me, I don’t have the experience that you have in development and stuff. When I see things like that, especially from founders, I’m always awestruck, like, wow, you built something really awesome and it became incredible. And then you see someone come along and pooh all over it. And part of me felt like, wow, what an incredibly harsh, unprofessional thing to do. You get critical. And then there’s another soft spot in me that’s like, imagine the pressure that Matt’s under running the whole show and the critique and the comments that come his way. I try to have a little bit of leniency for everybody and everything, and I’m just not sure what direction we’re going in. Are you hopeful on where things are going to go with WordPress right now, or are you throwing the balls in the air and seeing where they land?
[00:30:25.310] – Katie Keith
I am concerned that some of the actions will have an impact on people wanting to use WordPress, particularly at the agency and enterprise level, because of the way that Matt has been acting, and I have said this to him both on the phone and on Twitter, I believe it will cause some people to lose confidence in WordPress as a platform so that they don’t see it as such a reliable option to build websites on. Therefore, they might build fewer websites, which affects my business, of course, because I need people to be building WordPress sites and using my plug-in. So I have expressed my concerns directly to him, and he’s aware of that. He doesn’t seem to agree with me, and it is a really nice argument that WordPress is incredibly strong. I’ve seen a lot of that through the community and the strength of that. Even the fact that probably at least 95% of people that I’ve seen writing, and maybe I’m in an echo chamber on Twitter, but I think it’s a wider WordPress circle and not just people that have the same view. But people do seem united, actually, in certain ways, and when they think something’s acceptable or not, with a few exceptions.
[00:31:39.000] – Katie Keith
So I’m seeing this incredibly strong community. But then a lot of people are being really negative about the future of WordPress and saying that Matt’s completely destroying it. And I feel that it’s bigger than him. He doesn’t even have the power because it’s got a life of its own. So I’m concerned he can do damage, but I don’t think he can destroy it because it’s way beyond its tipping point. It’s the biggest web building platform in the world, so it’s not going anywhere, even if some people do get put off using it, even temporarily.
[00:32:11.810] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. Thank you for your feedback. Jonathan?
[00:32:15.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you made a fabulous point there. It’s one of the things that rubs me up a little bit by Matt’s language. He should take great pride about what he managed to build, but he didn’t he built it in a vacuum. He built it with the contribution of hundreds of developers and hundreds of other people in the WordPress community. And I’m sure he doesn’t really mean this, but I hope he doesn’t, Katie. But you do get the impression that he thinks through the language that he chooses to utilize, that he is the singular driving force of WordPress. But that isn’t the case, is it, Katie? Do you think I’m being a little bit unfair, or do you think…
[00:33:03.440] – Katie Keith
He’s the creator, and he has huge power. He’s not the singular driving force. He doesn’t have full control over what is also an independent ecosystem. Is that fair?
[00:33:17.430] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s more of a stylistic way that he has chosen to communicate that I think is a little bit unfortunate. When it comes to David, I was just quite amazed by That’s the original answer. Because David, I don’t know David, we have exchanged some messages because he has provisionally agreed to come on this podcast in the new year, hopefully he won’t change his mind. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t want to discuss his discussions with Matt at all. And I I totally understand that. But for David, I thought his post was quite calm and collective, because sometimes David can be extremely direct. I don’t agree with everything David says, because I don’t actually agree with the way that he runs Ruby on Rails and the Ruby on Rails Foundation, this benign dictatorship, that it’s not a democracy I do understand where he’s coming from in some ways, that it’s not a political country or county or state election organization. But on the other hand, it is open source. When people use the language of benign dictatorship, personally, it just rubs me up the wrong way. It just really rubs me up, really, the wrong way.
[00:35:03.880] – Jonathan Denwood
But I thought it was… Was you taken aback by Matt’s response to what I thought was a quite mild-mannered critique from David, actually?
[00:35:19.300] – Katie Keith
I would say that yes, because I’ve seen him be like that recently, but that would be against WP Engine, Silver Lake, his targets in this campaign. So I was surprised. I suppose I was a bit surprised. But then he had also been quite rude to some people on Twitter, for example, and blocking people on different slacks and so on. So it seems over the top to me, particularly to respond in such a passionate way against what was quite a measured and reasonably written article. But actually, the more I think about I can’t say it was a surprise. It was just another more of the same, really, because I don’t like the way he’s talked to some other members of the WordPress community recently.
[00:36:11.310] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, also this thing about blocking, I just don’t… There are some people that I won’t follow. It’s very few people that I’ve totally blocked because I just don’t believe in it. They really got a… Obviously, it’s a personal choice. They really I have to come out with some really extreme comments. But in general, I am disappointed in him blocking people on wordpress. Com. He’s been at it on wordpress. Com, isn’t it? The profiles and various other.
[00:36:49.820] – Katie Keith
He’s been on a bit- Is that dot org?
[00:36:52.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Dot org, isn’t it? He’s been on a bit of a charge with the block in there, isn’t he?
[00:36:58.280] – Katie Keith
Yeah, that’s the thing. Some People have been personally insulting to him, particularly things like questioning his mental health. If somebody says that, then maybe I can accept that that’s personal and they should be blocked. But I have been told that other people have been blocked for things like doing a clown emoji in response to his ACF announcement, and then they report they’ve been blocked. If that is the reason, then that seems like a bit extreme.
[00:37:26.940] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s so intellectual, isn’t it? To send him a clown emoji, isn’t it?
[00:37:31.470] – Katie Keith
There were dozens of clowns. It was hilarious, but people don’t know how to express- You’re showing your English, Katie.
[00:37:39.570] – Jonathan Denwood
You’ve got a deliciously dark sense of humor, like me. Kurt just goes white sometimes when the stuff that comes out of me. But it’s very English. A bit like Katie, really. See, Kurt?
[00:37:55.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
I can handle it. I can handle it. Over to you, Kurt. Well, the next question is… It’s awkward for me, right? So it says, Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen the WordPress professional community engaging with the leadership of WordPress in a… The way it’s written is like a semi-public lie, right? But I liken it to… I think about people that get paid $250,000 a year to work on the homeless crisis in California. If they fix the homeless crisis, they don’t get 250 grand a year anymore. That’s that a lie. When I think about it, attending word camps and being part of the word camps and talking about the different cultural and community efforts of WordPress, do you have a sensation of participating in the word camps and being part of the big show and then understanding that it is meant to be open source and part of the common good and all those kinds of things? Or do you think it’s largely driven by finance and politics?
[00:39:07.360] – Katie Keith
I think probably both, but I think most people know that. So that there are people in charge.
[00:39:16.190] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I just butt in for a second? I apologize, Kate. Can you understand why I drew up that question? Or was you puzzled why I decided that we were going to ask you that question?
[00:39:30.060] – Katie Keith
I don’t know. I mean, this is your show. I know how it goes.
[00:39:35.540] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but I’m such a weave, aren’t I, Kate? I’m all over the place, aren’t I?
[00:39:41.610] – Katie Keith
Yeah, but I think that it’s not so much a lie. Everybody knows that organizations are complex. Everybody knows that there’s the profitmaking. Com, which is closely linked to the nonprofit foundation. I didn’t know how. Org was owned until recently, so that was interesting.
[00:40:02.150] – Jonathan Denwood
It was, wasn’t it? It was a bit of a… It was a bit of a…
[00:40:05.280] – Katie Keith
That’s a bit scary. It feels like that should be owned by the foundation, as I assumed it was. But I mean, he’s entitled to own a domain, of course, that it’s very important, that particular website. But in terms of the stewardship, I think people know that while it’s a democracy, there’s still somebody at the top making decisions. We’ve known for years that, say, the Gutenberg project had a particular direction that had been set from above. It was what, two or three years ago that there was a lot of debate about the they thing. It was who were they that make the decisions? There was debates about lack of transparency. So I don’t think any of that has changed. Therefore, it’s not so much a lie as just people questioning how it’s run.
[00:40:52.830] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, maybe the lie is too strong a word. What I meant, there was a It seemed to me there was a influence that it’s all open and we’re all WordPress and we’re all so open. And he does go on podcasts. I’m not sure you ever come back on mine again. Hopefully he would decide, but that’s up to him. I think I’ve tried to be fair about the situation, and I certainly haven’t personally attacked him. I I think that would be extremely unfair. Even though I don’t agree with his actions, I think he’s not doing himself any favors, to be quite truthful about it, Katie.
[00:41:44.100] – Katie Keith
Are you blocked?
[00:41:47.160] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t know because I don’t check. Yeah, you should check.
[00:41:50.630] – Katie Keith
But that’s often the thing.
[00:41:51.590] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not that bothered. There’s a small group in the WordPress community that make a lot of That’s for noise that have blocked me, but that’s for other factors, other things that I’m supposed to be, Katie. And, yeah, get back to it. But there seemed to be a collective… It’s just me, Katie. I just wanted to confirm if you thought that I was onto something, or I’m totally deluding myself. There seemed to be this narrative that was promoted by Matt and other people, that it’s all open, and it sucked in people that they just presumed it was this cooperative open source. But then when you’ve had this, what I call the hand grenade, explode him with WP engine, he owns everything, he controls everything. It’s not this particularly open community. It’s open to a certain level, but then it’s totally controlled by one individual. I see that as a total paradox. What’s your own response to what I’ve just outlined?
[00:43:20.960] – Katie Keith
I think the most shocking thing has been advanced custom fields because that was. Org using something that was always in their terms and conditions to take ownership of a plugin on there. And they’ve described it as forking it, which there are processes for, but it’s a very gray area because of taking the existing users and the listing and all of that stuff. I think that is the thing if you want to look for a lie somewhere that they might do that because they’re in a legal dispute with the company that runs it. They have taken ownership that plugin, and they said there was precedent for that with other plugins in the past. But as far as I know, it’s only been used for if the plugin had been abandoned, they might have taken it over or something. As far as I can see, this is new territory that people are surprised by and are feeling concerned by for their own plugins.
[00:44:24.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I suppose the other thing is that, like David, it is It’s Ruby on Rails, he gave it to open source, but he makes no… There’s no miscommunication about that he runs Ruby on Rails. He is a benign data, and that’s it. If you want to be part of the Ruby Rails community, he’s running it, he owns it, he runs it. It’s open source. Where with WordPress, they seem to I’m not sure if this is the right word to use. There seemed to be a level of propaganda about that it was much more community-owned and focused, but the reality is, underneath It’s run just like David. David owns, I don’t know, the precise set up of Ruby & Reels and its foundation. But when it comes to WordPress, there seemed to be this unsaid thing that it was so open and everybody… And I think a lot of people really, especially new people, to the WordPress community. I had a chat with Mark last week about this, and he said to me he felt that people who had a long time in WordPress really understood what the real setup was, but it was the new people that they bought into it.
[00:45:59.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Much more open than it was.
[00:46:03.920] – Katie Keith
What’s your response? Because it’s a philosophy, almost a religion that people attach their values to, which doesn’t necessarily happen with proprietary platforms. And so people have these expectations because it’s an open source philosophy, and I think that makes people more emotional about it and create those expectations. But regardless of that, I would I’d like to see more clarity in how decisions are made and what is up for grabs in terms of consultation and what isn’t.
[00:46:39.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, back over to you, Kurt.
[00:46:41.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
I got a lighter question. So in your For me, day to day, first off, do you use AI tools? Are there AI tools that you use? Then if you would, what are your most common? What helps you drive success for yourself with AI?
[00:46:59.350] – Katie Keith
I I use them in a fairly basic way, but regularly. I’ll use mostly BingChat or Claude. They seem quite similar to me, but Bing Chat has an internet access, so when I need that, I use that. I use it for Things like research, headlines. I’m not very good at writing headlines. If I’m, say, planning a podcast episode for WP Product Talk, then I might tell it what the episode is about and get ideas. Things like wording and idea generation. But I would never use it to, say, actually do copywriting because I like what I write to sound like me.
[00:47:41.920] – Kurt von Ahnen
We’re similar in that way. I get prideful. I consider myself a writer.
[00:47:45.570] – Jonathan Denwood
I use it so it doesn’t sound like me.
[00:47:51.910] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sometimes, I’ll use it as an outline tool. I’ll think of a subject, I want to write about it, and then I ask for an outline, and then I’m relieved because it’s like it’ll give me two or three pieces in the outline that I didn’t consider myself. And I’m like, Oh, that’s awesome. So I can expand on that. But when it comes to the actual narrative content, I like to write that. I want to know that it’s my voice, words, and thoughts. But then, when you run it through some SEO tool, it seems like it comes back and says, Hey, Kurt, you’re a moron. These are the wrong words. You didn’t use the right keywords or whatever. So, I have found Weirdly, and I just want to see if you feel the same. I tried to adopt some of these AI tools, but they have stolen some of the joy of creation from me. Sometimes, it’s added work rather than the initial intent, which was to take work away.
[00:48:51.080] – Katie Keith
Yeah, I think I’m quite good at not using it where that is happening. If I ask it to do something and it’s just not adding any value, and it’s sounding really generic, and sometimes when it doesn’t outline, it’s good. Other times it will just add loads of things like, I don’t know, a troubleshooting and an FAQ section to a blog post, which isn’t necessarily what the search intent of people find it is. Then I just won’t use it. I pick and choose and sometimes don’t use it at all.
[00:49:21.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, I tried using Grok yesterday, just as a funny story. I’m graphically handicapped. I had to hire graphic people for my team because it was not imaginative. I thought, Well, I’ll try to use Grok to make some images. I told Grok what I wanted it to make, and it kept sending me imitation half-naked women in these things. I was like, No. I even put ‘Fully clothed’, which still sent crazy pictures. I was like, You just can’t. Even if you tell it what you want, you sometimes don’t get what you want. It just keeps forcing something at you.
[00:49:53.010] – Jonathan Denwood
It sounds like a developer, doesn’t it, Katie?
[00:49:59.950] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan, I think that sends the last question to you.
[00:50:02.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. We don’t have to bother with H. G. Wells because Katie comes from England. She knows Doctor Who. So if you were Doctor Who-I’ve never seen an episode of Doctor Who. Oh, well, we better go back to I can do H.
[00:50:19.000] – Katie Keith
- Welles, but not Doctor Who.
[00:50:20.320] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ll just go back to H. G. Welles. I don’t know. You never watched Doctor Who: The Daleks or the Cybermen. I used to hide when I was a child. I had to hide behind the city when the cybermen were on. So, let’s go back to H. G. Wells. If you had your time machine, you could go back to the beginning of WordPress or just after you left university, and you could tell yourself one or two things. Is there anything you’d love to say to yourself?
[00:50:52.250] – Katie Keith
I’d love to tell myself to think bigger and be more visionary. I don’t know if that would be realistic because I’m very good at getting things done. I’m very motivated, but I’m not a visionary and don’t have big ideas. I think my business would be much more successful if I had thought bigger. For example, I’ve spent a lot of time on minimal single-feature plugins, five of which I sold because they were too small for the company. I should have spent less time on little ideas that would never be huge sellers and more time on the things that had huge potential, which maybe required more confidence because they were more competitive.
[00:51:34.750] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m the opposite. Kirk will guarantee. I’m full of all sorts of crazy ideas. I know, Kirk. They know me, Kirk. Yeah, they come quick and fast. All over the place, we’re, Oh, Kirk. He’s so different. Yeah, I’m a squirrel, Kate. But I can focus when I want to, Kirk, can’t I? Is that true, or am I deleting it?
[00:51:58.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
You can, especially on this latest project.
[00:52:00.010] – Jonathan Denwood
I can focus when I want to. It’s just I don’t want to. It’s the weave, Katie. It’s the weave. I’m a dyslexic, so it’s all about my thinking patterns, which are a bit unusual, Katie.
[00:52:13.850] – Katie Keith
Well, the trick is to partner with people different from you. So I should partner with a visionary, which I haven’t done, and that thing.
[00:52:23.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you have straightforward communication for the tree, haven’t you? Very direct, aren’t you, Katie? Which I like myself. So how can people learn more about you, Katie, what you’re up to, and your insightful views, which you’ve shared with us in this episode? I think it’s been a great discussion, and you have brought some tremendous common-sense views. The old WordPress community is getting hectic, but I think you’ve brought some great common sense, Katie. How can people find out more about you, Katie?
[00:53:05.610] – Katie Keith
Well, for that thing, you can find me on Twitter at Katie Keith Barn 2. For the company side of things, It’s barn2. Com.
[00:53:17.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Fantastic. And, Kirek, how can people find out more about you and what you are up to?
[00:53:23.230] – Kurt von Ahnen
Anything agency-related would be Manana Nomas. I’m branded well on that. Anything you find online that’s Manana Nomas typically leads to me. And then I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn. So, if you just want to connect from person to person, LinkedIn’s my jam.
[00:53:38.270] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And we love your support. If you’re generous, why don’t you go to iTunes and leave a review, good or bad? I don’t care. Or go to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel and comment on this discussion or any others. That would be fantastic. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ve got some great guests in October plus November. And then we’re having a break in December because I feel burnt out. But we will return in the new year, which is coming rapidly. I can’t believe it. We will be back soon, folks. Bye.
[00:54:19.820] – Katie Keith
Bye.
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