The Future of WordPress Freemium Plugins in 2025
A “freemium” WordPress product is a plugin or a theme that, in addition to its free version, offers either paid add-ons or a premium version/service.
With Special Guest Jack Arturo, The Founder of WP Fusion & Very Good Plugins.
#1 – Jack, can you give the tribe some background info on how you got into programming, especially WordPress development?
#2 – Jack, in your opinion, is there generally any real future connected to the WordPress Freemium model in 2025?
Paid Membership Pro
Paid Memberships dev says Matt threatened to take over their plugin "like we did to ACF" when they removed it from dotorg.
byu/notvnotv inWordpress
#3 – What advice would you give a WordPress plugin or service entrepreneur connected to effectively marketing their business in 2025
#4 – You have been living in Germany for several years; what are the main differences between the WordPress and development community compared to the USA?
#5— What AI tools do you personally use to help you run your business?
#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
[00:00:01.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 942. In this episode, we will discuss the future of the freedom model in WordPress. We’ve got a friend of the show. He hasn’t been on the show for several years, but I still classify him as a friend. We got Jack Arturo with us. He’s the founder of a viral WordPress plugin called WP Fusion, and a plugin shop called Very Good Plugins. So Jack, do you want to give the tribe a quick 20, 30-second intro of you?
[00:00:56.180] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, sure. I’ve been developing WordPress for about 15 years now.
[00:01:05.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Wow.
[00:01:05.660] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, yeah. Before this I was an infusionsoft consultant and I did a lot of work with marketing automation tools, clickfunnels and, and that kind of thing. And I started getting into WordPress the way a lot of people did, setting up sites for clients with pre bought themes and customize it, put their logo in and you know, just like.
[00:01:32.160] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you’ve given us a quick intro. We’ll delve more into your journey into WordPress after our swift commercial break. But I also got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers, Kurt?
[00:01:50.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, thanks, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called MananaNoMas, and we focus primarily on membership and learning websites. We also work directly with folks at WP-Tonic and LifterLMS.
[00:02:03.030] – Jonathan Denwood
As I said, we will discuss the Freedom Model in this episode. We’re going to be discussing Jack’s Journey into WordPress. We will be discussing what the WordPress community is like in Germany and a host of other topics. It should be a great discussion. Jack has a lot of knowledge, and I think he’s up for an honest debate. But before we go into the meat potatoes of this show, 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. Before we go into the show’s first half, I want to point out we’ve created a list of the best WordPress plugins and services for the WordPress Professional, plus some great special offers from the major sponsors. You can access all these free goodies, and I know you like Your free goodies; you WordPress professionals, you can get this by going over to wp tonic slash.com deals wp hyphen tonic.com deals, and you find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for? My beloved WordPress professionals? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get for that page.
[00:03:28.710] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry to discuss more. So Jack, let’s go straight into it. So you gave us a quick intro. I cut you off because you were going off into detail. This is the time. So how did you, first of all, you know, get into the world of online marketing and becoming a consultant for infusionsoft or confusionsoft as I call it. And then how did you get into the world of WordPress as a developer? You know? So first of all, how did you get into the world of being a marketing consultant?
[00:04:07.640] – Jack Arturo
I found a job on Craigslist. I needed something to do and I had no formal education and somebody was offering I think $10 an hour as an, as an administrative assistant in New Mexico and they were using infusionsoft and so I started building all their campaigns and running their evergreen funnels and all that stuff. And I did that for two or three years.
[00:04:30.560] – Jonathan Denwood
And you still got all your hair.
[00:04:33.790] – Jack Arturo
Yeah. Don’t look in the back.
[00:04:37.590] – Jonathan Denwood
So. Well, that’s humble beginnings. I want to point out. I’ve worked with Jack on a couple projects and he’s a very good programmer and he’s, he’s pretty easy to work with, unlike some people I’ve worked with. So that happened. To be truthful about it, Jack has always been reasonable. So that’s interesting beginning. So when did you start programming and getting into the world of WordPress as a programmer?
[00:05:13.790] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, the more sites you set up, some client always wants something changed. This needs to be more significant. I want this to move over there, and if you want to get paid, you don’t have a choice. So yeah, just a lot of trial and error. This was back in the day when it wasn’t so competitive and I feel like people were doing less outsourcing and wanted to work with somebody in their local community. So yeah, it was just a trial and error and figured out as it went.
[00:05:42.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. And so you’re self-taught?
[00:05:47.030] – Jack Arturo
Yep, self-taught.
[00:05:49.060] – Jonathan Denwood
Wow, that’s amazing. Well, I’m amazed because like I say, Jack’s one of the best, better programmers that I’ve actually worked with. Is that because you probably are self taught then?
[00:06:00.970] – Jack Arturo
Jack and I just do a lot of self teaching. I don’t know, they say that. What’s that 10,000 hours to mastery thing? I think I hit the 10,000 hours a few years ago and I’m still racking them up. So yeah, I don’t know, just new skills every year and incorporating them and.
[00:06:18.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, so. So you’re kind of freelancing as a developer. What led you to into your first WordPress plugin and trying to build a business around that? What led to that?
[00:06:35.090] – Jack Arturo
Sure, I tried a couple of plugins around that time. I really enjoyed reading Pippen Williamson’s blogs. He would do the Year in Review post and that was really eye opening to me. Like you could make money while you sleep and like you could have thousands of people using your products and actually like really, really make money from it. So I tried a couple of plugins, freemium model also. That didn’t work and that’s fine. But I kept coming back to these integration problems between clients who are using CRM software and also running membership sites. So for example, somebody was doing their marketing in infusionsoft and they were doing courses in learndash and they wanted to trigger emails around student events and like somebody completes a course, they get an email, that kind of thing. So these, the same type of problems kept coming up repeatedly. And I kind of built a toolkit that I would start to use for each project to kind of get it off the ground. And I was working with a friend at the time on a project like this and he said, why don’t we go in on this and we can release it as a plugin and see if anybody would be interested in buying it.
[00:07:50.840] – Jack Arturo
And it worked. I guess it was just the right idea at the right time. There wasn’t really much out there for that level of integration. And this was right at the time when activecampaign had just come out and marketing automation was just taking off. It was still affordable. Not so much anymore.
[00:08:08.760] – Jonathan Denwood
You got fluency CRM, of course. You wrote an excellent piece about your journey from activecampaign to Fluent, didn’t you?
[00:08:16.910] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, don’t get me started on activecampaign. I’ve got some thoughts there. But anyway, yeah, I think it was just good timing. And so we launched W Fusion in the beginning of 2015 and it was basically like 100% year over year growth for the first, I don’t know, six years, something like that. And we didn’t release a free version at all. It was premium only from the beginning. And even then I think the entry price point was something like 200. So it wasn’t a cheap plugin by any means. Yeah, people. People signed up and the word of mouth was good. And yeah, it just. It took off and it’s still going really well.
[00:08:55.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:08:58.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it’s kind of ironic because now Pippen Williamson is one of my neighbors. We just moved Kansas and I found out Pippin was here.
[00:09:05.040] – Jack Arturo
I see your pictures all the time at the brewery. Yeah, I’m jealous.
[00:09:08.140] – Jonathan Denwood
I want to go check it out in the brewery. Jack.
[00:09:12.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
I do kind of live at the brewery. So what do you think are like. So your opinions, having released plugins and especially in the marketplace now that. That we’re thinking of WordPress in the space, what do you think the real future is with, like, the freemium model of coming to market with a product, offering a version for free, and then trying to upsell or upgrade from that free model, you know, through the repository and stuff? Do you have thoughts around that ecosystem?
[00:09:47.740] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, I think that it’s no longer possible just to release a free plugin and expect people to find it in the WordPress plugin list, in the admin and build a business. That way you have to already have connections. You have to have a marketing strategy. I think the upfront costs are a lot higher, but I still think it’s possible. I mean, fluentCRM is a great example. They have a really powerful free plugin that can do a lot of stuff and can save you a ton of money. And their paid versions are reasonably priced and are a great value add on top of the free software.
[00:10:27.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Joe is a great. He’s been a great supporter of me. He’s like you, very generous individual, isn’t he?
[00:10:36.170] – Jack Arturo
Oh, yeah, he’s great. I love. He’s kind of my wordcamp buddy. Every time we go to wordcamp, we hang out. Yeah. So I think that it’s possible, but you need to have. You need to, I think, be established in the community already, and that could be as a podcast host, Jonathan. But you need to have some brand recognition and some trust, and then you need to release something that’s solving a pain point, and that gives away a lot for free, and that’s difficult. I think we were really lucky and that we were profitable in the first month, and I don’t think that would be possible anymore. I think you would need to expect to wait six months or a year and build up a user base. But, yeah, I think it still can be done for sure.
[00:11:23.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’ve always been interested in the freemium model, and my first real Experience with the freemium model was working with the folks at lftr. Right. So they have this giant free plugin, right. And it does an amazing amount of stuff for free. And then of course, people come along and they go, well, I want to sell it. Okay, well, you want to make money with the product. So now we’re going to ask you to buy a premium plugin to connect your thing. Right. That whole model made sense to me, but if I try to reverse engineer that thought, as an outsider looking in, I really struggle with how do you determine what to put in your freemium version versus a premium. Right. So after the fact, I can look at LFTR’s model and go, oh, that makes perfect sense. But, like, I couldn’t imagine putting that together. Do you have thoughts on, like, how to construct the right free premium offer and then like, what’s free and what’s not? That’s a hard thing. Yeah.
[00:12:21.260] – Jack Arturo
So I think that’s a great example because, yeah, it used to be the standard was payment gateways or recurring payments if you want to take subscriptions. But a lot of people might not even try it out if they can’t take payments. Like, you’re not going to invest all your time into building a course. Like, you want to have some proof that it’s working and that you have a potential business there before you start to invest in paid add ons. I think that in the last few years it’s changed quite a bit because of the Stripe Connect program. So if developers, for people who don’t know, if developers create, for example, like a simple course plugin that lets you sell courses, they can sign up via Stripe and they can collect 1 or 2% of all the transactions that get processed through Stripe. So we’re seeing more plugins that are released completely for free with payments and recurring payments built in. Sure. CART is a great example. And they’re able to fund their growth by taking 1 to 2% of your revenue. And in most cases, that’s the free plan. And then when you make enough revenue, you can upgrade to a paid license with the plugin provider and then they get rid of the fees.
[00:13:28.740] – Jack Arturo
So I think that’s a great shift because it lets you start a new online store, validate your concept, and get revenue. If you don’t make anything, then you don’t pay anything. And if you start making a lot of money, then it’s worthwhile to upgrade to the premium version and save yourself that percentage cut.
[00:13:46.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice, Nice, Jonathan.
[00:13:49.110] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, obviously, I think there’s still some Traction in this model it’s just got more competitive like almost everything but then you’ve got the elephant in the room, you’ve got the app, the other element which has always been there but I think people decided to do a Freudian Frean deal with the devil, didn’t they? And that that’s reared its head in more ugliness partially through your own personal decision. But I think the, the more ugly uglier aspect of this is what’s happened around Paid Membership Pro. Obviously it’s been reported in Reddit so you have to take it for what it is but I think also the owners of Paid Membership Pro have confirmed this is that they’ve been though they’ve been semi threatened by Matt that their decision to remove they’re plugged in from the depository they got threatened that he was going to do what he has done to WP Engine and their plugins. I think the kind of feedback that I’ve got from the community over this it’s really put a shiver through a lot of people and it’s woken up a lot of people. Have you any thoughts around this Jack?
[00:15:27.540] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, I have a few.
[00:15:29.460] – Jonathan Denwood
I thought you bought.
[00:15:30.740] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, so I’m quite close with the team at Paid Memberships Pro. I really think that I really respect that they kind of took a stand for their principles and they said essentially, you know Matt is has not been clear with us with whom is in charge of the dot org repository.
[00:15:51.630] – Jonathan Denwood
Well it is clear isn’t it?
[00:15:53.130] – Jack Arturo
It’s clear now. Yeah, it’s totally clear isn’t it?
[00:15:55.660] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s totally clear isn’t it?
[00:15:57.120] – Jack Arturo
It was sort of made out to be this like a community community supported collaborative place where people build the WordPress project together and then when he stole advanced custom fields he said oh it’s a one time thing that would never happen again. It’s only because of this complicated legal reason that I can’t really explain the same way twice and then just and then to find out two weeks later he’s threatening other plugin authors with taking over their plugins. I think I get some leads from the.org repository but I would be happy to close our plugin there and distribute it somewhere else.
[00:16:39.070] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t feel like truthful you weren’t relying that much on him and keeping on the right side of him. I say that he’s quite capable of falking you know I, I, this is quite, I’m only stating the obvious obviously you and Jack’s much more intelligent than me audience so he’s thought of all this obviously he could still attack you quite vigorously because he’s done this before. He could still take your whole plugin and offer it for free, couldn’t he?
[00:17:14.190] – Jack Arturo
Yeah he could and he’s quite capable.
[00:17:16.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Of doing it, isn’t he?
[00:17:18.430] – Jack Arturo
We were lucky in that we launched as a premium only plugin so as I’m sure you know, many plugins their free version is on the repository and then the paid extensions are add ons to that like with Lifter lms. If Matt took over Lifter LMS the paying customers would be screwed with us. Our free plugin is standalone because we launched it much later so if Matt wants to take it over and support it and develop it when the customer clicks to upgrade they’re going to come through to our website and buy the premium plugin. So I really don’t mind. It would save us some effort.
[00:17:54.770] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah but I’m not trying to be funny here Jack, because the premier version is done under the open license. He could fork your your pream if he wanted to. It would cause an enormous amount of bad Will it be a kind of a semi nuclear explosion, wouldn’t it?
[00:18:15.890] – Jack Arturo
This is why I filed my cease and desist against Automattic in October. He could take the plugin and completely rename it, rebrand it, change all of the functionality, rewrite all of the documentation, the tutorials, open partner programs with HubSpot and Salesforce, become a Microsoft certified developer. Do you know everything? But he can’t legally just take WP Fusion and sell it as W Fusion because we own the trademarks to that and that is trademark infringement and we can take him to court for that. So if he was really determined, yeah he could, he could fork it and call it, I don’t know, Matt’s Fusion or something but it wouldn’t be practical, it would be a lot of work. But I will say we’re about to launch, launching a new business which is going to be a SaaS service and it will have a WordPress plugin. We will submit it to the.org repository but our primary distribution channel will be via our website and that was made as a choice considering Matt’s actions. We want to be secure in case anything else goes down on the DOT R repository the updates will come from our website.
[00:19:24.290] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, in some ways, in some ways I think it’s, it’s for the best to see the situation. I think a lot of people just went along with Finns because they were doing quite well financially and I just didn’t want the aggro. But a lot of people had. I’ve, I’ve not had this. I’ve always had a good experience with the couple discussions I’ve had with Matt, but I’ve had a host of other people who haven’t had very good interactions with him and. But they’ve never been prepared to talk about, in an honest way about their experiences with him. Would you agree with that, Jack?
[00:20:14.170] – Jack Arturo
From what I’ve heard, he has a public Persona and then a private Persona. I’ve heard in one on one meetings he can be verbally abusive, he can be a difficult person to be around. And then he has his keynote face that he puts on, which looks good and is all about empowering writing and open source software. I think we’re kind of getting a glimpse of that private mat, especially in his social media exchanges and just the weirdly vindictive actions like the WP engine tracker website or the stuff that doesn’t make any sense from a tactical or legal standpoint. It just really seems like he wants revenge, like he wants blood, and it pleases him somehow to get it. So I think people are starting to see that side of him that was previously only spoken about in private.
[00:21:08.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Right back over to you, Kurt.
[00:21:14.770] – Kurt von Ahnen
Okay, so if we go back to.
[00:21:18.340] – Jack Arturo
The fact, if we go back to the course at hand you asked.
[00:21:25.070] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’S.
[00:21:25.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Talk about people that maybe want to get into the plugin business. Right.
[00:21:28.440] – Jack Arturo
So.
[00:21:28.960] – Kurt von Ahnen
So you’ve got experience here, you’re well established, successful. We’ve got that. And what, what advice would you give to that service entrepreneur that wants to market their business in 2025? Because we’re coming up on the end of 2024, obviously we’ve got some instability in the WordPress community framework kind of place. People aren’t super secure. So if someone has already put in the work and now they’ve got something to release, what advice would you have for them to market that product in 2025?
[00:22:02.080] – Jack Arturo
That’s a good question. I think the best way is to create kind of a niche product in a community where you’re already established. For example, I’m quite active in the, in the BuddyBoss community and my friend Peter’s got a add on that lets you customize the BuddyBoss app in very unique ways. And he came about that idea by spending tons of time working one on1 with BuddyBoss app users and realizing this is something that they’re missing. And he’s already got the name recognition and I think is quite successful with that. I Don’t know how easy it would be to just wake up in the morning with a good plugin idea and just start tweeting about it. I think you have to have a community that already integrated with identify a problem multiple people are having and then even just develop it for one or two customers and work with them to iterate and then build it up into something that can be commercially viable.
[00:23:10.430] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. And at the risk of saying something maybe not expected, even an established plugin. Right. You want to experiment with more content. Like I know that you’re working with Emily on making some like tutorials and short YouTube things and so that’s, that’s kind of a new channel for you guys, isn’t it? To. Yeah, perspective.
[00:23:35.890] – Jack Arturo
For eight years we did no marketing at all. I wrote one blog post a year that just summed up our revenue numbers and our traffic kept going up. And then the Google algorithm update in April really killed us. Our traffic is down like 80% over last year and we’ve seen that reflected in new customer numbers. Our new customer signups peaked in like 2022 and now they’re at about half of what they used to be. Revenue is still going up because we have pretty low churn rate. Most people renew. But yeah, so something had to change. So yeah, in August I hired marketing director full time. Their name is Katie and we now have two writers and Emily working with us on social media and video production. And it’s a little bit early to tell, but we’re seeing the organic traffic start to tick back up and our pages are ranking again. So it’s been a really big change and a lot of work and just like systematizing a lot of things that were previously only in my head. Like why would somebody want to use event tracking or like what’s the deal stage in Zoho and that kind of thing.
[00:24:46.650] – Jack Arturo
So we started using Notion, I don’t know if you know Notion, which is creating this big database of all the internal policies I record hour long screencasts of. This is how I do this specific thing so that they know how to do it themselves. So it’s been a lot of work. So with that and then launching a new company and then Black Friday coming up. I don’t get much sleep these days. I’m really looking forward to the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s this year.
[00:25:14.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, I’m taking most of December off actually. Well, I’m working. I’ve got, I mean, I mean enormous, I wouldn’t say a fight because that would be A ridiculous statement, but I’m in a similar situation with Google as what you expressed, but it’s happened a lot later than what happened to you. So I’m gonna have to do a ton of work and a lot of that’s got to be started in December. But just to finish off such mixed feelings about what has happened with Matt and WP Engine, because in some ways I know this is going to sound a ridiculous statement, Jack, but this is how I feel about it. In some ways I think it’s much about nothing because everybody knew the situation. Anybody that had a brain knew the situation because he, he wants to get into a punch up with a enormously well funded, legally got a small legal army behind them and then wants to do things that in my opinion aren’t going to work out very well for him. That’s his business, isn’t it? But when it comes to WordPress, which is a much bigger thing, isn’t it? I actually, I was more concerned about Gutenberg and all the flux around that because I thought it made things very difficult.
[00:27:08.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Not for you because of the kind of plugin and your niche area, but for a lot of other plugin providers, the situation when it came to support and maintenance and making sure their plugin works, I thought because of Gutenberg and the whole situation, the situation was getting worse and worse for a lot of plugin authors and people with established business. Do you think I’m on the right track there?
[00:27:41.910] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, I mean Gutenberg’s been terrible for us. I can’t stand it. I always say up until WordCamp Europe 2019, when I saw Matt’s keynote speech about Learn JavaScript Deeply, I had no idea who he was, I had no idea who Matt Mullanoy was. And those were my happiest years in WordPress. It was a stable system to build on. Everything was standardized, it was reliable. And then yeah, he came in and decided, I guess 28% of the Internet isn’t enough, we need to get 40%. And to do that we’re going to have to compete with wix and Shopify and all these beginner website building platforms. In doing that they introduced a lot of complexity and they also, some people went with Gutenberg, but other people decided, no, we’re going to do our own custom JavaScript admin framework in Vue or something like that, or Sharecard decided for stability we’re going to run most of the stuff on our servers. It’s not even like your data isn’t even in your website because WordPress admin is about to break and they move that all over to react. So I think, yeah, I don’t know. It just feels. In both the case of Gutenberg and with WP Engine, it feels greedy.
[00:28:55.780] – Jack Arturo
It’s like, why does WordPress have to power the whole Internet? I think it’s at 43% right now. Isn’t that enough? Could we just stay there? There’s work for everybody. Does WP Engine really have to hand over millions of dollars of their revenue every month to continue to fund Matt’s project to try to take over more of the Internet? Like, yeah, I don’t know. It really rubs me the wrong way.
[00:29:19.270] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, all right. That’s pretty clear views. We’re gonna go. We’re gonna go for our break and we’ll be back in a few moments, folks, for the second half of this fantastic interview. I knew it was going to be a great one, and it’s turning out that way. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. It’s been a great first half. I just want to point out that if you’re looking for a great way to promote your plugin or WordPress service, why don’t you look at sponsoring the WP Tonic Show? We’ve got some great packages, affordable packages. You can find more about sponsoring the WP Tonic show and getting your plugin and service in front of a large and dedicated audience of WordPress professionals. You can do that by going over to wp tonic.com sponsorship wp hyphen tonic.com sponsorship and we’d love to work with you in 2025.
[00:30:45.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I got easy questions now. Well, maybe. Maybe not so easy. I don’t know. Living in Germany and. And I was actually really impressed when I. When I first met you at WordCamp, right? And I was like. And it was like, oh, this guy lives in Germany. I was like, that is so cool. So being able to pick up and go living in Germany for. For the years that you’ve been doing this would. Is there a big difference, you think, culturally in, like, WordPress here in the States and WordPress in Europe?
[00:31:14.140] – Jack Arturo
I’ll be honest, I’m not super involved in the local community here. My German is not very good. And I kind of like to. I don’t know, I. I keep my work life online, and then my personal life stays personal. Most of my friends have no idea what I do. But I do think labor in Germany is a bit different. In the US jobs are much more secure after a 30 day probation period. When you start a new job, you basically have the job for life. And so with people I know are used to.
[00:31:49.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Isn’t that changing a little bit in Germany?
[00:31:52.320] – Jack Arturo
A little bit. But you have a lot of protections and insurance is included and pension is included and paid holiday, it’s all guaranteed. So in the US I think I see a lot more people working multiple jobs like day job and then they’re developing a plugin on the side or freelancing and then they feel like that maybe that could work. And then they quit and they start a company and then the company goes out of business and they start another one. And people are always kind of trying out a new thing and maybe being a little bit more innovative. The people I know here who are working in tech, they go to work, they do great work and then they go home and they don’t think about it. They don’t have to freelance after dinner to make ends meet. So it’s just like work in general is less important. I know when I’m in the States, you meet somebody and they say, oh, hi, what’s your name and what do you do? We don’t talk about that here. Many people I see all the time, I have no idea where they work. I prefer it that way.
[00:32:53.580] – Jack Arturo
I think there are more interesting things about me than my job, so it suits my lifestyle, but it is a bit different.
[00:33:01.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, it’s. There’s a big part of me that was jealous when I met you because I had just come off of a really great run with both Ducati as a company and a decent run at Suzuki. And I got to experience cultures, you know, obviously Asia, Japan and all that. But I was still so enamored and in love with my trips to Italy and Spain and France and, and things I never would have got to experience without that job. And someday I plan on retiring, like just buy a vineyard and go to. Go to Italy and call it done. I mean, it just.
[00:33:33.230] – Jack Arturo
They’re working my plan too. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:33:36.050] – Kurt von Ahnen
Their work, life balance and like you said, their take on, on life and relationship is completely different than here in the States. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s awesome, Jonathan.
[00:33:47.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you touched on a couple really interesting concepts there because I discussed this with other guests on the show, Jack, about the concept that there’s. There’s a minority of people that. Very active in WordPress and their whole reality of themselves and their social community is totally around WordPress. I’m very supportive of WordPress. Maybe the great leader would disagree with that, but I am, and it’s been quite good to me. But I don’t identify myself my whole personality. I have friends that are totally outside of WordPress. I actually, I have people like yourself and other people that. I have good relationships in WordPress and that have been generous to me and I try and support them. But I don’t identify myself solely around WordPress. I think a lot of these people that their whole life seems to be around Twitter and going to Word Camps and talking about WordPress and then talking about Word Camps, they’ve been some of the most shocked about this whole thing. Would you agree with that?
[00:35:14.330] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, yeah. I was on the WP product talk show last week talking.
[00:35:21.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, I listened to that. You traitor. You win on that. People here.
[00:35:27.530] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a very small minority of us that make our whole income from WordPress and especially those of us now. We’re a team of 12 people. So supporting other people’s families as well. And it makes me very nervous when these big changes are happening at the top and the community doesn’t have a say in it. So for people like us, I think we’re quite passionate about it and then we do what we can on social media or on podcasts to try and make others aware of the problem. But I think there’s a lot of people who. It doesn’t really affect them. They’re still either selling their plugins or still getting clients and they. It’ll just blow over. I think. For better or for worse.
[00:36:14.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Because it’s really interesting. Obviously some people that are well known and I do respect their opinion, I don’t agree with everything that comes. They’ve might, you know, they’ve got much more knowledge. I think Spencer Forum, who’s a regular on my round table, shows that you work with on a reasonable, reasonably regular level. He’s been very vocal that. And he’s got a. Also a lot of legal experience being that he’s still. He’s not a practicing lawyer, but I think he’s still. I’ve got the term registered to practice in the law. He’s been very brilliant. That in his opinion this is really going to be very painful for Matt and for automatic it’s gonna. The outcome is bleak but in some ways. But we just don’t know because I, I really don’t wish Matt any. I, I get no joy about him getting into difficulty because I don’t get personal joy out people that haven’t done me any harm personally. But I, but his actions really don’t make any Sense, but we’re definitely in flux. But in the end it could work out better for the WordPress community in some ways. Do you. It could go any direction.
[00:37:41.860] – Jonathan Denwood
But what I mean is I don’t think it just means it’s going to end up in gloom and doom in the end. Would you agree with that? We just don’t know, do we?
[00:37:51.500] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, I agree. And change is good. I kind of. My ideal outcome would be that Automattic gets hit with a huge fine and has to pay damages for everything they’ve done. And that could be hundreds of millions of dollars. And I firmly believe that there are investors behind Matt who, if they wanted to, could ask him to step down. They’re kind of letting him on a long leash right now, but.
[00:38:19.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, he has publicly. I’m sorry to interrupt, Jake, but his last interview, I thought. Which was very amazing, his interview at Disrupt was that he’s publicly stated that he personally owns 82% of Automatic, which I. He’s verbally said that he. But I find that amazing statement. I really don’t understand how after the kind of level investment that he can actually own 82% of automatic, do you?
[00:38:58.370] – Jack Arturo
I don’t. And I feel like if there was evidence to that effect, he publishes everything it says, everything that’s on his mind. We might have seen some of it, but I don’t know. I can’t comment on that. I do feel like. I feel like Automatic is going to lose this case and I think it’s going to hurt them a lot. And I think that it’s not a problem with Automattic, the company. I know some great people who work there. They put out high quality products and services. It’s just Matt’s that’s the problem. And so my hope would be that if the repercussions are strong enough, Matt’s power will become more limited. And I think that that would be better for the future of WordPress.
[00:39:36.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, in some ways I agree with you. I really don’t. I’d be surprised that it ever gets to court myself, but who knows? I would imagine this is going to be settled. The only thing is I’m not prepared. I w. I don’t wish any ill to WP Engine. Jason Cohen is. He’s not a close friend, but I think he would be okay to say that we are friends. And as a founder of WP Engine and like you, I totally respect him and he’s one of the, like yourself, a very great. You know, I always listen to his materials that come out, but I don’t have a lot of per personal engagement with WP Engine because of the people that own it. You know, it’s just a business, isn’t it, for WP Engine? It’s owned by a venture capitalist.
[00:40:36.770] – Jack Arturo
Yeah.
[00:40:37.330] – Jonathan Denwood
And, you know, it’s business, isn’t it? You know, they will just look at the figures, won’t they?
[00:40:42.010] – Jack Arturo
And I, before this, I really don’t like WP Engines hosting. I think that it’s overpriced and it’s not very powerful and they do a good job of attracting people who don’t really understand hosting. But it’s a business and the business is working and it makes them money and they have every right to make money selling hosting. I never thought I would be on Twitter defending WP Engine, but when Matt comes after them, especially in a way that’s not backed by any kind of like, legal dispute, it’s just not attacking them. He could do that to any of us. And so I feel like I have to stand up for them.
[00:41:20.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s kind of. Yeah, I think that’s well expressed. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:41:27.830] – Jack Arturo
I really thought we were going to.
[00:41:28.890] – Kurt von Ahnen
Go for our half break if we, if we dial back the questions and wonder about. Some people would look at WP Fusion and consider that a piece of AI, right? They would consider that, like the automation, like someone fills out this, they get that. Someone does this, this happens, someone does this. But AI’s got a whole kind of different flow. How do you think you use AI in your daily life or in your work that does it? Are there special tools that you use that help you get through?
[00:42:05.340] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, it’s. It’s changed everything. I can’t believe it’s only been around a year. I would say in terms of coding, 90% of my output is AI generated now.
[00:42:18.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Wow.
[00:42:18.700] – Jack Arturo
I use. I use ChatGPT for general inquiries or like, you know, how to approach a problem. But I’ve recently started using the cursor editor for code, which it lets the AI understand everything you’re working on and work across multiple files and make changes. Just this morning we had a customer who was using Zoho and they’re sending Woocommerce orders into Zoho for their sales team. And normally we interface with the Zoho deals module, which is like one way of seeing orders.
[00:42:50.480] – Jonathan Denwood
They’re a funny company, aren’t they?
[00:42:52.710] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, that’s another story.
[00:42:54.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Maybe we can discuss that. Oh, you up? You know, we’re coming up. We’ve got another 10 minutes, but if you’re up for it, we can do some bonus content because I like. They’re a strange company, aren’t they? They’re really, they could, they’re highly successful, but they could be so do so much better, couldn’t they? In my opinion.
[00:43:14.680] – Jack Arturo
But yeah, I was just going to say the customer asked, would it be possible to send the data into sales orders instead of deals and normally that’s the kind of thing we would have to put into the queue. Get five or ten customers interested in, send it out to a developer, wait a month. And I just thought, let me just ask Cursor if it can do this, make a quick change. And it did it across like six different files, added a little option to the settings. When the option changes, it validates the different fields and make sure they’re mapped correctly. So five minutes, I was able to add this feature just for this one customer and send it out. So it’s helping us do things that we probably never would have found the time to do because it’s so niche, but now we’re able to solve those problems for people.
[00:43:55.940] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Do you think using the AI the way that you do that there’s a certain level of required expertise to understand the inputs and the outputs better, or do you think overall more and more people are going to think they’re an expert in something when they really don’t know what the heck they’re doing?
[00:44:14.550] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that never stopped a load of people in WordPress. That’s never stopped them anyway.
[00:44:21.910] – Jack Arturo
Well, and there’s, there’s two ways to look at it, so the one is that, I mean, yes, certainly, like I understand how to phrase the question in a way that I get the result that I want and I’ve pre written a script that tells it it needs to conform to the security standards and the translatability standards and the documentation standards and. But now I’m able to share that with our junior developers on our team and give them just like an hour training on how to work with the AI and the prompting and they’re able to output code at almost the same level I can. So I think that yes, you need to know what you’re doing, but it’s also a great way for people who might have been too scared to even start to get their feet wet and realize it’s not so scary. And yeah, maybe it breaks the first couple of times, but you know, then you fix it and you learn more and you iterate. Whereas before you might have been too scared to ever start a plugin business. So I Think it’s good for established developers and for beginners.
[00:45:17.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. At the low level of engagement that our agency has here, we’ve run into a couple of times already where we’ve gone to work on a membership or a learning site and somebody’s added some snippet or code or something, and I’m like, what, what is this? What do you like? Oh, I want my dashboard on the front end, or I want my reporting on the front end, or I want my. And in the old days you would say, well, let’s get a developer to build that.
[00:45:43.420] – Jack Arturo
Right.
[00:45:43.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Or let’s move that. And now it’s like, it’s there. You go into this website and it’s there and you’re like, where did this come from? Yeah, and. Oh, I just built that in chat GPT. And you’re like, oh, my God, you know, Yeah, I see where you’re coming.
[00:45:53.810] – Jonathan Denwood
From, but that’s, you know, it’s just changed. But, you know, they hired somebody from somewhere. I’m not, I’m not. Whatever. And that, you know, it was two years ago and they. They never paid the person because they weren’t happy or they fell out as. As you do. So there’s nobody, there’s nobody to talk to anyway. Now the code is produced by machine code. It’s a kind of same. But I see where you’re coming from, Kurt, but I’ve dealt so much with that scenario. Somebody hired. There was never any documentation about anything. And it’s a black box, isn’t it, Jack?
[00:46:38.960] – Jack Arturo
And it’s changing so quickly. Like the system I’m using now has only been for about a month. And before that, the code we got out of ChatGPT wasn’t that reliable. Like, it wasn’t really worth using a lot of times. And really. Yeah, probably every three months, our AI integration workflow changes completely. Completely. And it’s gotten exponentially better.
[00:47:01.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s good to hear. Right, let’s go to my last question, which is one of my favorite. Yeah, obviously, you know I’m English, don’t you, Jack? Yeah, I’ll be living in America, but I’m still so English, I feel funny enough. My. My family in the UK reckon I’ve become very Americanized around. It’s most strange, but I still think I’m pretty English in temperament and sarcasm. So, Doctor who in the TARDIS and HG Wells and the time machine. If you had your own time machine and you can go back to the beginning of your career, is there anything you would like to tell Yourself apart from not coming on this part. Podcast, Jack, all of this podcast.
[00:47:49.430] – Jack Arturo
Oh, yeah, it’s a good question. I think in the beginning I was, I’m very, very risk averse. I don’t like to take chances. And so I wanted to do everything myself. And any money we made went into like my retirement savings and that was it. We were at 90% profit for years and years and years and it was fine. But I think I was worried.
[00:48:15.800] – Jonathan Denwood
Sounds pretty good to me.
[00:48:18.890] – Jack Arturo
Yes and no.
[00:48:19.500] – Jonathan Denwood
But all my money went to my divorce. I’m just trying to. So don’t end up on the street.
[00:48:24.930] – Jack Arturo
But I never got to take a holiday during that time. You know, I was kind of always at the whim of how many support tickets were in the inbox in the morning. And then finally in 2020, Ace joined us. He’s our support lead. And I just, I guess I was worried that bringing on help would mean I would have to spend more time in meetings and managing people and less time working on code. And that was kind of, kind of made me realize that, oh, actually people can like take care of themselves and be responsible for their own tasks and do a great job in some cases better than what I can do. And so now that we’re kind of scaling up and the division of labor is figured out, I actually have more time to spend doing the things that interest me and less doing the stuff that I have to do. So I guess I just wish I’d, I got started on that earlier building a team and investing more in the company and I think we probably missed some opportunities along the way because it was just a full time job, like keeping the fires from burning out of control.
[00:49:29.960] – Jack Arturo
It’s something like fluentCRM. The idea of launching a CRM inside of WordPress. I had that idea for years, but just never had time to do it. So, yeah, I guess I would tell young Jack, don’t be, don’t be too afraid. Take chances. You know, you have to fail a few times to succeed.
[00:49:48.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, well, I’m a kind of perfectionist because I’ve got this. I’m a dyslexic and the strange feeling is I’m a perfectionist and that’s a very difficult combination. And I, looking back, if I’d just been more acceptive, I would have done more fins. But, you know, that’s just great, isn’t it? It is what it is, isn’t it, Jack? So we’re coming to the end of the podcast. I think Jack’s up to doing some bonus content which you can watch the whole show on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. Please subscribe to that. Please support the podcast by subscribing to itunes and sharing it on social media. We are one of the few continuous podcasts that are truly independent in the WordPress professional space. This is going to be our last podcast of 2024. I’m taking a break and so is Kirk. I’ve got a ton of work to do. I was traveling. I still haven’t made my mind up about that. I am oscillating on that. But we see. But we will be back in the new year with some fabulous guests. Thank you for listening to the show. I want to personally wish you and your family a happy Christmas and a new year.
[00:51:13.070] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s going to be interesting 2025 for WordPress but don’t get too worried because I still feel it’s the best platform to build a real online business. I honestly believe that. Jack, what is the best way for people to find out more about you? Your thoughts and insights, which I always read myself. Jack.
[00:51:39.290] – Jack Arturo
You can find me at wpfusional1word.com that’s where I blog about the business of running a WordPress company and then also about marketing automation. And then I have a new project that we’re launching@echo-.com and that is going to be a real time reporting tool for everything you do online. Not just your WordPress website, but your calendly events, your stripe transactions. You can forward emails into it and they’ll appear there. So I’m really excited about that. I’ve been working on that the last few months. Echo Dash.
[00:52:15.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, they’re really Jack and I’ve known Jack for a long time and he’s just. Just a great individual. I don’t say that about many people. Chat. You can send me the check after the show.
[00:52:29.380] – Jack Arturo
Actually, yeah, we’ll do. I’m the sponsor and he has to.
[00:52:34.530] – Jonathan Denwood
Deal with Spencer on a regular basis.
[00:52:37.130] – Jack Arturo
God, you must be highlight of my day.
[00:52:39.240] – Jonathan Denwood
You must be a saint actually if you’re dealing with him around Kirk. Sorry Spencer, but I had to say Kurt, how can people find out more about you?
[00:52:50.390] – Kurt von Ahnen
What you up to on the agency side? It’s manana. No mas. Like tomorrow, no more. And we’re there to help you with anything you need. And if you want to connect personally, I can usually be found on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt von Ahn on LinkedIn so I’m easy to find.
[00:53:07.170] – Jonathan Denwood
And if you really want to support the show, why not also think about joining us on Facebook, folks. Yes, Facebook, I know, but join the Membership machine Facebook group and you can leave some comments about the show. I’d love to get some more feedback about subjects you would like us to cover. And the best way is to join that Facebook group. We will be back in the new year. Like I say, I want to wish you and your family a great Christmas and New Year and thank you so much for your support during 2024. It’s just a, it’s just gone so quick. Like I say, we’ll be continuing the discussion with Jack and you’ll be able to see the bonus content on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. We see you in the new year. Bye Bye. So some bonus content. You know, like I was saying, what’s your views on Zo? Because they’re, they’re high, you know, based in India, private company, hugely profitable, you know, got some fantastic products, but got some really crappy products. Got an arsenal of different, different stuff. You know, talk about a company that’s got, in my opinion, got too many fingers in too many pies.
[00:54:23.720] – Jonathan Denwood
But they’ve been enormously successful though. So what. Who am I to criticize them? It. But it’s just, But I always. Because they know their main product, which is Xolo CRM, that’s been around for a number of years, right? It’s quite. Its integration with your own product compared to some is extremely frustrating, isn’t it? But that’s down to them rather than your great product, isn’t it?
[00:54:53.890] – Jack Arturo
To be fair, I don’t know much about how they work, but when I picture Zoho, I picture like an eight story office tower with like 3,000 people working in it and they’re all working on separate things without any awareness of what the other person is doing. And that’s kind of the difficulty that we have is that people see WP Fusion integrates with Zoho and we do, we integrate with the CRM. And I mentioned earlier you can send WooCommerce orders into deals. But Zoho also has Zoho Books, which is a separate API, different set of developers, separate website. And then they have Zoho Inventory which does not connect to Books or to the CRM. And then today somebody asked if we could support Zoho Campaigns, which is an automated campaign builder, but it can’t use data from the CRM. It has its own API. And then there’s also now Zoho Commerce. So these are all. What did I say? Commerce, inventory, books, CRM campaigns, something else. And that’s just in the marketing automation space. They’ve got calendar scheduling and all this stuff. So it’s frustrating for me as a solution provider because we support Zoho CRM but not the 100 other Zoho things that you might be using.
[00:56:00.650] – Jack Arturo
They I think are aware of this. They released a product a few years ago called Zoho Flow which is like a zapier but just between Zoho products. So we can sometimes help folks send data into the CRM and then Zoho Flow it over to books to update their bookkeeping. But yeah it’s been frustrating to work with.
[00:56:19.700] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah because it’s extremely for they really aim at the small ultra small business between 50 to 100 people businesses don’t they really have a focus around that. What’s your thoughts about you know you publicly done some great posts about moving away from Active campaign. Where do you see where they are in 2024 and my a big giant very did some amazing stuff but really hasn’t done too much for a while really that’s my kind of apart from putting their prices up quite a lot. What would you say about ActiveCampaign?
[00:57:08.420] – Jack Arturo
I still recommend it as one of the first places to look if you’re new to marketing automation, but I think that they kind of made a mistake with the pricing changes because they were always kind of an entry level product with entry level support. Their availability isn’t so good like the system does go down sometimes emails don’t send the API times out like it’s got issues but it was worth it for 60 bucks a month and easy enough to use. But then when they raise the price to 250Amonth and I’ve got customers who aren’t getting tagged or emails that aren’t going out and I can’t reach anybody on support to help me. For us it just didn’t really make sense to stay with them anymore. I feel like they maybe realized that they were having too many customers that they could properly support them. So the thought might be let’s triple prices. We’ll kick out all of the people who aren’t serious and then we can put some real attention towards the kind of enterprise level customers. I hear that it’s getting better. They’ve opened a new support center in Panama I think like and fully staffed.
[00:58:19.760] – Jack Arturo
So they’re making improvements but for us it wasn’t fast enough.
[00:58:24.620] – Jonathan Denwood
No So a company that’s always amazed me then I found that it was actually a lot of their seed funding came from Google I think I’m right. It’s HubSpot. It just amazing success story. But I’ve never really worked out why. I only presume even though they seem ridiculously expensive for what they offer compared to Salesforce, they’re cheap. So if you look at Salesforce, you think you’re getting a bargain of the year with HubSpot. I think. How would you react to what I’ve just said? Where do you think they.
[00:59:03.420] – Jack Arturo
I agree. I love HubSpot. I wish I’ve thought, oh, you love it.
[00:59:07.760] – Jonathan Denwood
You love it.
[00:59:08.460] – Jack Arturo
Yeah. I’ve thought about a future where we just work with HubSpot. They are expensive but everything always works. The new features they release are well thought out in terms of the developer experience. I have a number for a developer relations person that handles like a small group of developers. If I have any issue with the API, I can call them up. They can look at individual customer accounts and tell me what’s going wrong. Fast responses. They. Yeah, like they’re. They’re always in touch, keeping us informed on new features. It’s been a wonderful experience to work with them.
[00:59:46.190] – Jonathan Denwood
All right.
[00:59:47.630] – Jack Arturo
You get what you pay for, I guess you get what you pay for. I think their plans start at like $800 a month for the, for the marketing automation features. But it just works. It always works. And if you need help, it’s right there.
[01:00:00.430] – Jonathan Denwood
When it comes to the more traditional email newsletter like mailchimp, Send Blue, there’s half a dozen of them they know, especially Mail Chimp. When they got bought, I wasn’t surprised that they haven’t really done much because the company that bought them, but they were in difficulties anyway, I think in dealing with marketing optimization. Were you surprised? Have you been surprised? Because my impression with mailchimp, normally profitable but not really going anywhere really. What’s your own thoughts about that?
[01:00:39.540] – Jack Arturo
So for the longest time, mailchimp didn’t have any kind of automation really. You could send an email and then another one a couple of days later. And I want to say maybe two years ago they added a workflow builder like you would see in activecampaign.
[01:00:55.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I haven’t dealt with them in don years.
[01:00:57.850] – Jack Arturo
So yeah, I think they got a bad reputation as being only for when you’re just getting started and then as soon as you need automation you need to switch to something else. But it’s actually a pretty capable platform now. I’ve been impressed with the features they’re adding. We don’t, we don’t have many customers who use it. I don’t know why I haven’t had any problems with it, but it just.
[01:01:19.080] – Jonathan Denwood
The public because they’ve got idiots like me spreading these legacy views and the actual situation. But they, but you know, if you go pear shape, you got to deal with all this legacy and you seem to be saying they are. They have improved it. But yeah, maybe this legacy stuff and from people like me, haven’t they?
[01:01:38.090] – Jack Arturo
Yeah. For. For Echo Dash, we actually went with mailjet, which is just a super basic, super cheap mailing list system. But it had what we need. I think we, we like $8 a month or something for 10,000 contacts. And it can do all of our transactional mail too from the app. So there’s a different solution for everybody. If you talk to Uncle Spence, he can walk you through all your options. There’s maybe like, oh, he wouldn’t give.
[01:02:08.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Me any advice unless I was paying for it, Jack. So such a bastard. It’s a smile, don’t I now you made. You got the wrong side of me during the interview actually, Jack, you know your scandalous remarks which are so common amongst developers around hosting. But I do see where you’re coming because I’m a boutique hosting provider. That’s. I kind of. But I’m a hybrid. I’m trying to add additional functionality. Is that when you got a boutique hosting provider in a particular sector, which is Membership Buddy Boss, that kind of sector learning management systems, we deal with a lot of support tickets, you know, because they’re. If they pay yearly on the starter plan that they’re getting charged $35 a month. If they want to go month to month, it’s 55. But we give them the email, generous marketing and transactional email limits. We set it all up. Okay. We provide with a library of plugins that I bought the license or people like you were generous and gave me a lifetime license. And we provide them really quality support, right. To a certain level. And you know, we’re not going to build a whole website for them because they’re paying us $55 a month if they want to go month to month.
[01:03:46.340] – Jonathan Denwood
But we provide pacific templates that we’ve built ourselves upon Cadence, right? Yeah, but you seem to say that, that you think host. So we’re on the premier side of what we charge. But we provide a lot of value. Kirk thinks we’re ridiculously cheap. But you seem to suggest that hosting is ridiculously overpriced. And I see where you come from because a lot of these hosting, they’re pretty bad, aren’t they? But on the other Hand, I think you’re taking out of context that and also a lot of these hosting providers don’t provide really good support. But if you are providing good support and that it’s got to show in what you’re charging. Can you see where I’m coming from or am I?
[01:04:42.470] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, no, and I think, I mean that’s, that’s the argument for managed hosting and I have no problem with managed hosting.
[01:04:49.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, but that’s become totally discredited that term, hasn’t it? We say hosting plus because I didn’t want to use the term manage hosting. WordPress managed hosting. Because what does it mean now?
[01:05:01.540] – Jack Arturo
I think, I mean maybe there’s a better word for it, but I think a lot of customers like to know that if there’s a problem they can just talk to somebody and get the problem fixed and not, I mean, you know, we manage our own hosting, but we have to spend time resetting permissions on the file system and updating system software.
[01:05:20.010] – Jonathan Denwood
You have this problem yourself with, with your plugin because you do provide, you’ve always provided, my impression, really great support. Support at a ridiculous level sometimes. Where do you draw the line yourself? Or like I say, I have a. If we update a plugin, if they just got the basic hosting plan, we update all the plugins once a week and if there’s a problem, they have to self report it and if it looks like it’s supply the plugins that we’ve supplied, we’ll sort it out. If they, if they want us to check over the website, have a staging site, they’ve got to pay for a support plus package. And if they’re making money from their website, we don’t tell them, but we, we, through our in, through our communication with them, we make it clear that if they want a certain level of support, they’re going to have to pay extra because they’re making money from their website. How do you, how are you rationalize, are there any bound, are there any clear boundaries in your own company where you won’t go, or is it on an individual basis that boundary, there’s almost no boundary.
[01:06:41.850] – Jack Arturo
We do a lot for people writing custom code. We fix bugs in other people’s plugins and then send that fix to the other company to let them know that they caused a problem. But I will say that as a developer, if we have the same issue come up in two tickets, that’s a technical problem, that’s something that we need to solve. If somebody doesn’t understand why their data isn’t Syncing in the right way. We can code a solution to that so that the plugin explains to them what’s going wrong and how to fix it themselves. I’m quite active about that and trying to get ahead of people ever having to contact us in the first place. Our support volume is lower than it’s ever been.
[01:07:30.000] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s good news.
[01:07:31.890] – Jack Arturo
It’s just like anytime a problem comes up, we try to find a way to avoid turning into a ticket.
[01:07:38.170] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I suppose you’re not, you’re not a charity, are you? But I suppose the benefit is you want them to use your plugin. If they’re not using the plugin in an active way, then yeah, and they’re gonna. In the end it will mean that they, they won’t renew their subscription, will they?
[01:07:56.610] – Jack Arturo
And nobody wants to get some error message at 8pm on a Friday and have to, you know, go find our contact form and where’s their license key, fill it out and then wait until Monday to get an answer or more. I mean we reply to people next business day, which is faster than a lot of companies.
[01:08:10.790] – Jonathan Denwood
But I do, I know you do.
[01:08:12.400] – Jack Arturo
That experience is unpleasant. So anything that we can do to avoid that, whether it’s writing more documentation or a lot of times we have lists of other plugins we know that cause issues with, for example, with Learndash and their WooCommerce subscriptions add on, we know bugs that are created by that plugin and we have warnings in WP Fusion to let people know that that combination is going to cause some problems. Even though it’s not related to us at all, just because people reported it to us.
[01:08:44.930] – Jonathan Denwood
You think they would get that fixed, wouldn’t you?
[01:08:47.820] – Jack Arturo
Yeah, I don’t know, maybe they will.
[01:08:50.530] – Jonathan Denwood
But they’re pretty well funded, aren’t they? Where do you see marketing ultimate? You know, is everybody looking at everybody else because it’s a difficult. Because they’ve got AI, they’ve got this, you know, you’re building by yourself, you know, you’re looking at another project yourself. But am I right? I get the feeling that all the big players, they’re all looking at one another, they’re all developing in house stuff. It’s. It’s almost like when it comes to marketing and automation, nobody. I don’t feel anybody because it’s been so quick in some ways, hasn’t it?
[01:09:35.060] – Jack Arturo
I do, you know. Do you know Bento?
[01:09:38.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes.
[01:09:39.860] – Jack Arturo
I really like what they’re doing over there. He and I talk a fair bit and Jesse doesn’t look at all at his competitors. He works one on one with customers and when they have a problem, he solves them. And they’ve come up with some really clever stuff like if you tag a customer as a new lead, they have a thing called tag decay where that customer will decay out of the tag over time. Nobody else is doing that. He’s got a system where instead of when you send an email campaign at all, hitting inboxes at once and possibly looking like spam to Gmail, it batches it up into batches of 100 emails and sends them every 30 minutes so it looks more natural and you get less likely to be flagged. And he’s not borrowing this from other people, he’s just sitting down, talking a customer through their problem and then finding an original solution to it. So I really like, I really like talking to people who think like that and work like that. Instead of just like, oh, what’s ActiveCampaign doing? Let’s copy them.
[01:10:34.870] – Jonathan Denwood
What about how will WordPress cope with this? Because I think there’s some structural, you know, the model of a page builder and a set of starters and then you have these separate plugins. I think it, because of that model, I think it’s hard to integrate AI in an effective way. So I really. The only way that can be counted. I’m really interested in your view on this because I’ve been thinking about it a lot is a more kind of hybrid system where you provide a more integrated solution, but with the flexibility of the, of the customer being able to use external plugins, but you provide a more niche and integrated solution that in the WordPress platform that enables you to do more effective stuff with AI. Is this making any sense to you? What I’m outlining? Yeah.
[01:11:43.280] – Jack Arturo
And I think, I don’t know how much like Elementor I think has an AI page builder, but I don’t know how good AI is going to be building your website.
[01:11:52.180] – Jonathan Denwood
But no, I think that’s probably been overestimated.
[01:11:56.330] – Jack Arturo
But for example, with Echo Dash, so it’s a reporting tool, but our kind of unique value proposition with it is that you can send any data into it. And we use OpenAI to figure out the contents of your email or your web hook or your whatever and summarize it into important points and metrics and then display those in charts. So if you want to send your Amazon shipping notification emails into it, it’ll figure out when the, when the package is arriving, what the tracking number is and what the order total is and then it’ll figure out all of your Amazon orders for the last month and show a chart with how much you’ve been spending. And that’s been a really interesting application of AI because it’s not really creative work. Like the AI is good at that. You can give it a big piece of text and say, tell me what’s important about this. And it does it consistently and fast and cheap. So I think we might start seeing more AI integrated in that way. Like we’re trying to solve the problem of if you’re running a business, there’s too much information coming at you all the time.
[01:12:54.650] – Jack Arturo
How can we show you what’s important unless you act on it when you need to? And.
[01:12:59.060] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think creation will be the biggest story around using AI. When it comes to social media news, what you’ve outlined big words for in the next couple of years will be.
[01:13:12.900] – Jack Arturo
Or yeah. Then also even. Yeah. If we’re talking about keeping track of your business, take all those events and then have the AI summarize it into a daily report, and you can get an email to say, here’s what happened yesterday and here’s what’s important today. That kind of thing. So it’s good at that kind of work. I don’t think it’s going to be building websites anytime soon.
[01:13:33.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I always thought because what Ben from Cadence wp, you know, I’ve got a lot of time for Ben because, you know, he seems a great guy and when he. Stella bought him, and my mind’s gone blank—the fat. The founders of Give wp are great guys, you know.
[01:13:59.410] – Jack Arturo
Oh yeah, Devin and Matt.
[01:14:01.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Devin, you know, I, I’m very friendly with Devon. He’s always been very supportive of me, you know, Ben. However, I’m afraid I have to disagree with how they have tried to use AI in building websites. I understood why they were doing it because I think having a great library of start themes and also the great thing that’s Cadence, they opened their enabled APIs functionality that enables third parties to build and sell starter themes themselves, which is the great strength of Divi, which Divi understood. Even though I love the Divi people, the founder has never agreed to join the podcast. He’s made it clear he’s got no interest in ever coming on this show, which is now, which is fair enough. But I love the Divvy people. I wouldn’t say I like the product. You know, I, I wouldn’t say I like the product. I’ve got to be honest with it. But they’re lovely people, but he knows he built a fabulous business because he understood him, he’s one of the first, he understood his user base, and he enabled third-party people to create a whole platform based on Divi and Cadence doing the same thing. But I didn’t; I disagree with Cadence going down this AI website because I don’t think it doesn’t the start of websites do that, do they?
[01:15:48.190] – Jack Arturo
I think everybody thinks it’s cool, and they want to play with it, and they’re trying to find a way to put it in their tool. We use Affiliate WP for our affiliates, and I noticed the other day that when I get a new affiliate application, it just says the name of the person and the reasons for joining our affiliate program. I can either accept or reject. And now they’ve added a button that says review affiliate with AI. It’s like, you know, Jonathan Den with WP Tonic. I will write about you on my blog, and I’m unsure whether I need to send it out to ChatGPT and get a robot assessment. Somebody says we need to integrate AI into this product somehow. How about.
[01:16:27.630] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, there is generally a ton of that, isn’t there?
[01:16:32.940] – Jack Arturo
But I think once the initial hype wears off, I’m sure there are applications inside WordPress for managing data that we haven’t thought of. I would love to see an AI solution for writing alt text for my images for accessibility. I’ve heard some people are working on one, but I haven’t seen one I like yet.
[01:16:51.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, that’s a big area. Because accessibility has been terrible at work.
[01:16:55.930] – Jack Arturo
And that’s the thing that like that’s.
[01:16:58.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Another area that has just been a disaster is Gutenberg. It wasn’t that great, anyway. And then they put a ton of stuff on top, and the funny thing about Gutenberg is, you know, you were much more robust in your criticism. I always thought I could understand why he wanted to do it because the editing experience with native WordPress was a joke, but I think it should have just been kept in a plugin. But I think the decision to put it in Core was commercially driven. And you know, I use Cadence because it’s under Ben’s control. So I’m not trying to, and I got it. I started using Cadence, Beaver Builder, and a bit of Animator. Still, I like Cadence, but I don’t want to go down and expose myself to complete site editing and the constant changes.
[01:18:06.480] – Jack Arturo
That they’re going, constantly breaking.
[01:18:08.210] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, yeah, I can’t deal with that, and nor can I do. Can I recommend it to clients?
[01:18:13.850] – Jack Arturo
For example, the WooCommerce product editor is about to be changed to Blocks, and we have a pretty close integration with WP Fusion. And I met with Stephanie Pie, who’s leading that project at WordCamp Asia, in February, and I said, yeah, we’re a little bit worried because you’re going to change all this interface. You haven’t added any backward compatibility. So, one day, our customers will update, and it will just be missing. The response was like, the future is coming. Get used to it. We don’t care. You’re just out of luck if you don’t want to update or integrate with our super complex react-driven block system. I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel very friendly to the developer community and people who spend much time there. People choose WooCommerce because we provide this functionality, and now WooCommerce is saying, yeah, we’re going to break all that, and we don’t care.
[01:19:14.700] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, I bet that was a joyous moment. Right. I think we’re going to wrap it up. You’ve been generous with your time and must return sometime in the new year. I’ve enjoyed our conversation. I think we’ve covered a ton of stuff. We’re going to end it now, folks. We’ll see you in the new year. See you soon, folks. Bye.
[01:19:36.140] – Jack Arturo
Thanks, Jonathan.
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