How To Build a Successful Plugin Business in 2025 With Special Guest Devin Walker of RollBack Pro & Give WP
Learn how to build a successful plugin business in 2025 with proven strategies, monetization tips, and market insights. Start your profitable journey today.
In this video, we explore the key strategies for establishing a successful plugin business in 2025. From identifying niche markets to optimizing user experience, we cover the key elements that drive growth and profitability. Discover the latest trends in technology, marketing, and customer engagement to differentiate your plugin in a competitive landscape.
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:59.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 981. In this show, we have a returning guest. We have Devon Walker with us, a real WordPress entrepreneur. We’re going to be talking about everything you need to know to be successful in launching a WordPress product. In the last quarter of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, Devon gained significant experience in this area. He has founded a couple of highly successful WordPress plugin businesses, so he has a lot of experience in this area. So, Devon, would you like to give us a quick 10-15 minute intro? And when we return to the main part of the show, we will ask for a more detailed description of your background.
[00:01:51.340] – Devin Walker
Yeah, sure. 10, 15 seconds, right? Yeah. Got it. Sure. So my name is Devon Walker. I’m in San Diego. I’m best known as the co-founder of GiveWP, which we sold to Liquid Web in 2021. Since leaving Liquid Web, I’ve been on my own little journey, and happy to go into it more.
[00:02:18.100] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt, with us. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:25.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
Sure. Thanks, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas, and work directly with the great folks over at WP Tonic.
[00:02:33.640] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Before we go into the main meat and potatoes of the 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. I’m going to throw it over to Kurt now. We’ve got another monthly sponsor, and Kurt’s going to tell you more about it.
[00:02:58.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, thanks, Jonathan. Today’s episode is sponsored by Mastereo LMS, and here’s why we’re generally excited about them. Their free version isn’t a trial. It’s not limited. You get unlimited courses, unlimited lessons, unlimited students, forever. No credit card needed or anything like that. Think about that. You can build your entire courses, course business without paying a cent. The drag-and-drop builder is there. Quiz creation is there. Student progress tracking is built into payment processing with PayPal, and it’s all included in the free version. So when you’re ready for certificates, drip the content or advanced features, and you can upgrade to pro. But honestly, most course creators can launch with a free course in Misterio LMS, and that’s M-A-S-T-E-R-O. K-r-i-y-o. Com.
[00:03:48.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks for that, Kirek. Let’s go straight into it, Devan. Can you give more background on how you got into web development, specifically WordPress, and what led to your journey with WP Give?
[00:04:01.760] – Devin Walker
Sure. Yeah. I graduated from college. I had an internship my senior year at a large company here in San Diego in the IT Department. I was always doing computer and Internet things, building websites. Remember GeoCities, Tripod, and all that fun stuff back in the day, and doing a bit through, but the internship really ignited my passion for being in tech. And so, after the internship, I was fortunate to be hired as a full-time IT employee. And at first, they had me handing out laptops to new hires, making badges, doing inventory, and doing mundane stuff like that. But then, eventually, I got tasked with building the company’s Internet, and we were using Microsoft technologies. So I learned some ASP. Net and got into ActionScript 3 with Flash a bit, then started playing around with more PHP and open-source stuff. And at first I was doing this just on my own outside of work and discovered Mambo, which was the predecessor, or I guess merged with Joomla eventually. So I went from Mambo to Joomla and then discovered Drupal. And then, finally, I think it was maybe six months into this open-source discovery journey.
[00:05:41.060] – Devin Walker
I couldn’t believe at first you got this all from free because coming from the Microsoft corporate side, I knew how much our licenses were and all that. And it was incredible. You could start up your own VPS and put all these different CMS or content management solutions on there. And eventually, the admins were a little clunky with Joomla. Their plugins weren’t my favorite. And then I found WordPress, and I was like, I remember logging into the admin for the first time and just being like, oh, my Gosh, what is this? This is amazing. And then discovering plugins from there. And from there on, I remember emailing one of my college professors and being like, hey, I know you’re trying to get something going for the journalism school. You’re using Drupal. You got to switch to WordPress. Check this out. And so from there, I kept trooping on at this large company in IT for about a year and a half after that and just doing WordPress on my own. And then I was like, I got to leave here and do something more exciting. So I just took a leap of faith, left that position, moved downtown San Diego, applied to a bunch of agencies, got hired within two weeks at an agency just doing WordPress work for hospitality businesses.
[00:07:05.500] – Devin Walker
So really fun websites, really fun designs at restaurants, hotels, all sorts of different fun stuff here in San Diego. And did that for two years, eventually left and started doing white labeling websites for another agency who did primarily nonprofit websites. And so we’re talking… There was a lot of religious organizations, a lot of other There was like farmers markets, all sorts of fun stuff. And they all were asking for fundraising through WordPress. And we tried Gravity forms and different forms-based solutions. They said, this is great. But now I want to manage my donors. I want reporting specific to the donors. I need all this different stuff that wasn’t included or you can monkey pouch it together. It didn’t really work. And then we tried with commerce and they said, well, we want the We don’t need the checkout on every page. And we don’t need this cart system. We don’t need this product catalog. We don’t want it to say customer anywhere. So eventually we’re like, well, we keep trying to jam this square peg through a round hole. Why don’t we figure out something else so we can do a full solution and build it ourselves?
[00:08:21.320] – Devin Walker
At the time we saw there was easy digital downloads. There’s these niche larger plugins doing pretty well. And this is 2014, after the State of the Word in San Francisco, I sat down with Matt Cromwell, who was partnering with me at that time. We’re like, well, let’s do it. And so we built it for six months, launched at Work Camp San Diego in April of 2015. A very MVP version. Took a little while after that to get it off the ground, but after, I’d say, late 2015, 2016, things started to look really promising. We started to really expand the business after that. So that That’s a bit of the background right there.
[00:09:02.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, fantastic story. It just shows you what you can do, doesn’t it, really? Over to you, Kurt.
[00:09:08.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it’s really ironic because I just met with the church last night for their website, and we brought up GiveWP in the conversation. It’s like the gift that keeps on giving, Devon. Thanks for that.
[00:09:20.040] – Devin Walker
No problem.
[00:09:21.860] – Kurt von Ahnen
It says, you’re best known for the GiveWP and the founder of WP Rollback. What What would be a tip, tip or insight that you wish you had known during the journey when you’re taking on these kinds of projects? You and I have a similar background. I’ve done the Joomla, Joomla, Drupal, Dreamweaver, and then now I’m in the agency space. And every time I think about going into the product space, I’m not going to lie, my heart rate goes up a little bit and I go, now, forget about it. So what would be a tip, tip or trick or insight about going the product path?
[00:10:00.220] – Devin Walker
Well, I think the biggest thing we found was listening to the customers and then scratching our own edge to build that solution that they’ve been asking for. They were hammering at home that this what was on the market wasn’t working for them. And we tried other competitor plugins. I won’t name them. There were a few back in the day doing donations and doing them okay, but not really anything that we thought was impressive enough to put in front of our clients. And so we took a look at what was the need that we were constantly being asked for? What was out there in the market landscape? Was there a really serious competitor or solution that we weren’t aware of, that wasn’t SaaS, that was WordPress, that we could really… That would be a hard time for us, and there wasn’t. So we did our research, and And honestly, we were running an agency, too, at the time, and we funded a lot of our efforts from the money we’re making from the agency. So we were funneling money between services and product. So I would say the number one thing was, listen to the customers that you’re working with, the need, or what are you passionate about?
[00:11:26.960] – Devin Walker
What are you the expert on? After building, I I don’t know, 25, 50 nonprofit websites, we knew pretty well what these customers needed and what they wanted and what we can build for them that would fit that larger market. Without that, knowledge, I don’t think we would build something as well adopted within that specific customer segment.
[00:11:55.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, the way you describe that is there’s a real intuitive sense it. They pulled the product from you, right? There was a demand and the product got pulled from you, as opposed to getting together with your friends over some beverages and saying, Hey, what do you think we could make? And then you end up with like, Well, now we have to educate people what it is and why it’s a need and why blah, blah, blah. Instead, it sounds like there was a demonstrable need. You were able to slide right in there. Like they pulled the product from you and you’re able to slide it in, get it in use. And then, of course, widespread, it had appeal.
[00:12:29.620] – Devin Walker
Yeah. Yeah. And you see this. This is one example of working with customers on an agency level. But you see it also in the non-wordpress space where ex-Google founder leaves ex-Facebook developer leaves and starts this new startup or ex PayPal developer starts new Bitcoin type solution, whatever it is, they went into a larger organization in their circumstances, figured out, hey, there’s this niche type of solution we could build here. Based on my experience as this larger organization, I’m going to take a leap of faith and go ahead and do that. And it’s very similar to what we did, just in the reverse. So I think having your real understanding and eye on that need and a solution in mind where you’re an expert on it is really important to the success of what you’re building.
[00:13:30.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Nice. And then I’m going to hit you with a sideways follow-up question, Devon. I hope that’s okay. We’re connected on Facebook, too, and I see that you just got a ton of projects, like a ton of life changes, projects, patios, like your general contractor thing. Do you think that that balance of having like, Hey, I got this thing in the tech space, but I also got this tactile, tangible thing I’m doing, does that keep you better balanced and give you more patience for the tech side of life, or are you just all in 100% all the time anyway?
[00:14:00.980] – Devin Walker
No, I mean, that stuff keeps me balanced for sure. I’ve got a couple of different passions besides… I mean, obviously tech and being in product is my career. It’s what I do 40 plus hours at minimum per week. But I need to stay balanced for sure on the outside where I tried building a fence myself. I did build it. It didn’t turn out that great. So I needed to find an expert that did hardscaping really well. I wasn’t about to build this patio. I found an awesome one. And so what I’m doing is overseeing that, which provides real value. But when it comes to gardening and yard work, I love doing that. My lawn is particularly one of my passions as well. And then in volleyball, going out to the beach riding my bike down there. So all that keeps me balanced and then spending time with my wife and my cats and things like that. So that’s for sure. I wouldn’t say it’s anything I’m looking to go into business with. One One of my buddies is a great chef. I invested in his restaurant. We’re opening a third location in Encinitas next month.
[00:15:08.380] – Devin Walker
So we’ll have three locations right next to the beach. And so that’s doing really well. And I’m just really proud of him. I provide my two cents every once in a while, and he runs it, and I love it.
[00:15:23.460] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’s awesome because we talk to other creators, other product people, and sometimes you get the feeling, and you don’t point it out, but sometimes you get the feeling like the product space can get burdensome if you don’t split life up a little bit. It’s really cool to hear that you’ve added that balance.
[00:15:39.780] – Devin Walker
Jonathan? Sure.
[00:15:41.260] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks. Obviously, you got the give WP, but you got this other fantastic plugin, WP Roadback. Devon has been very gracious in being a sponsor of the WP Tonic Show, but it’s a fantastic plugin. But what So you got a couple of really very successful plugins under your belt. So what do you think somebody entering the WordPress Premier plugin space? Are there a couple of things about the market that you think a lot of people misunderstand and maybe you can give a couple of insights about?
[00:16:23.160] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I think the first is it’s a lot different of a market than it was 10 years ago, 11 years in my case, maybe if not more than that. And you need to differentiate now a bit more than you did in the past. We were fortunate we were fortunate. We didn’t have to do too much. We did spend a lot of our money, but we did funnel, again, a lot of that agency money in there. We made a lot of sacrifices as far as time and family goes to go to all these different word camps and hit the street. We had the fortunate thing that there were a lot of regional word camps still. That’s not something that’s happening anymore. We were hitting word camp after word camp, Miami, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh. I can’t even name them all. Seattle. We were organizing in San Diego. We were sponsoring meetups. And I see some of that coming back. I’m organizing. I restarted the word camp or the San Diego meetup, and I capt it at 30, and now we have a waitlist going. And so there’s this real need underneath that. That’s a side note. But anyways, that’s not part of really what it is.
[00:17:40.360] – Devin Walker
You’ve got three main word camps now, right? Asia, Europe, and US. To sponsor that, it’s minimum 10 grand just to get your booth, or not even a booth, a little table. And then you got to get there, you got to get swag. You’re looking at 20 grand at least, minimum. And that’s a monster amount amount of money for somebody just getting started off. So what do you have to do? Okay, well, maybe then you can buy some AdWords, and that’s difficult in its own way. So it’s a different landscape. You got to be a lot more competitive, and then your product has to stand out, too. I think some of the riches are in the niches. So we went with a nonprofit fundraising product. You could even niche that down even further just to do a donor management solution. You got plenty of CRMs, And with the landscape now, there’s a lot more you could do innovatively. So I think those are a couple of things. Get creative with your marketing, seeing as it’s a different landscape now. And then focus on what makes your product unique and don’t try to do everything. If you’re going to go take on Elementor, it’s like, oh, well, I’m going to go build the next Facebook type of thing.
[00:18:53.220] – Devin Walker
It’s like, unless you’re really loaded, then that might not work.
[00:19:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Where do you think the WordPress? Because Kerp brought up churches. It used to be a very dominant market for WordPress. I just sense that a lot of churches are now using Wix and Squarespace. I think there’s still a reasonable percentage that’s still using WordPress. I brought it out. With AI, and it’s not only WordPress, this could apply to Squarespace or Wix. With AI page builders, and there’s some good page builders that use AI in the WordPress space. Do you think this is going to be fundamentally disrupted in the next 18 months? Or do you think it’s going to be… It’s always changing, isn’t it? But do you think it’s a longer period of space? I’m sure you’ve been thinking about this.
[00:19:55.100] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I think it will be more disruptive than it is in the past. You see Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, they’re climbing up in percentage of the web, essentially. But it’s very minimal type of increase pieces versus what WordPress has done over the last 15, 20 years.
[00:20:19.660] – Jonathan Denwood
What are your thoughts why that is, actually?
[00:20:23.580] – Devin Walker
Well, I think it’s a lot of vendor lock-in, what you’re looking at. Agencies prefer Not to a lot of agencies, I’d say, prefer not to put their customers on those platforms, like to manage their sites on their own terms with their own servers, their own Maintenance plans. You can… A lot of Squarespace has an agency’s program, so does Wix. I’ve seen some of them doing better than others, Shopify also, but they’re still not as lucrative as if you control the whole stack yourself. And I think from just organizing this meetup and seeing, I’ve been very encouraged to see like, oh, my gosh, there’s this pent up demand that I think is just out there that people aren’t really considering. There’s four questions I ask before you can get into the group even. And it’s like, how long have you been using WordPress? A lot of them say multiple years. Have you ever been to a word camp? Almost always no. And are you a designer, developer, agency owner? Lots of agency owners. And so there’s people that… We’re so in a bubble in the WordPress community that we don’t understand that there’s this wide world out there that are loving WordPress.
[00:21:48.190] – Devin Walker
They just don’t really care to really get involved past the point of it’s a tool that I use to run my business.
[00:21:55.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s encouraging because I was talking to a friend who has a small digital agency in Kansas City, but she has a lot of experience with Salesforce and HubSpot, and was a customer of mine, but became a friend, and now helps a lot of nonprofits and small businesses, and she was a bit negative on WordPress. She said a lot of the smaller companies that was helping were using either Wix or Squarespace. But I see I’m actually more boiant about it, a bit like you. I think in the agency space and those that know, they’re seeing But you’re still very in the WordPress space. So I get different messages, but I do agree where you’re coming from.
[00:22:53.020] – Devin Walker
Well, I think there’s different agencies as well. You have the super dev-heavy agencies that want to put it on Larevel or Next. Js and build their own back-end where then it’s headless on the front-end, it’s pulling from a REST API, and there’s no concept of plugins other than what they’re going to build for that customer. What APIs are they going to tap in. Those are the higher dollar ones, where then you have more like the Elementor point and click ones, where they want to spin up a really fancy design for you and make it look really nice and put that in an Elementor, Cadence, Beaver Builder, whatever type of a builder, and do that without really even touching the code and using a lot of plugins. And then there’s the in between. I think it depends who you ask on, right?
[00:23:45.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it’s diverse, isn’t it? Thanks for that, Devon. We’re going to go for our middle break, folks. When we’re back, it’s going to be a fabulous second half. Devon’s a friend of the show and a friend of mine, and he’s got an enormous amount of experience. It should be a great second half. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks, for the second half. But before we go into it, I want to point out we got some great deals, a curated list of the best WordPress plugins, and special offers from the major sponsors as well, which I really appreciated. Like I say, some great special offers, There’s a created list of the best WordPress plugins and services that will save you time, all used by the WP Tonic team. You can get all these resources by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals, Wp-tonic. Com/deals. I want to point out, Devon with Rhoover has got a fantastic special offer on that page, so you definitely want to take advantage of that. So over to you, Kirk, for the next question.
[00:25:05.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m still trying to get over the fact that you have a waiting list for your meetup. I run a meetup here in Kansas, and we typically get two, maybe three people, and we run it at a tap room. We run it at Pipp and Williamson’s tap room in. But interestingly enough, our latest convert came from Squarespace and came from the meetup. So So they were trying to build in Squarespace, and they were getting frustrated, and they make custom software. They’re a custom software developer, and they were frustrated with Squarespace, and they came to the meetups, and then they were like, Can you just make me a website in WordPress? I gave, bada boom, Bob’s Your Uncle, here you go. So it worked out really, really well. But man, it’s inspiring to hear that you’re having success where you’re at with your meetup. That’s really cool.
[00:25:53.320] – Devin Walker
Yeah, we could do a whole show on meetups, but I’m in Southern California. There’s like, I don’t 20 million people within 100 miles or something. So I think it’s a little different. And plus we have a great co-working space that’s central and has parking. That was one of the biggest challenges. We would just do it at different locations downtown. People would always complain, I got to go downtown, I got to park. Well, we’ve got a great location in the middle of North County, South County. And thankfully, it’s donated from one of our long term partners down here. And I’m bringing pizza, did a great design for the meetup main banner. The agenda is all spelt out. So I think all those little things turn some heads, and that’s why we’re getting a lot of that attention.
[00:26:43.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. And it’s a great area. I used to bicycle the San Diego Century every year. And so that’s a heck of a ride. And it’s such a great location. Yeah, we don’t have that here in Kansas. I don’t have any custom logos or pizza either. So So obviously we’re excited about what’s going on in WordPress, and you and Jonathan touched on it. But is there anything that pops off to you about excitement in the WordPress marketplace? Is there something that catches your eye that you get motivated behind?
[00:27:16.720] – Devin Walker
Absolutely. And it’s AI. I think the three things that have turned my… Let’s just say two. One is TELX, the automatic block creation AI from Automatic. That’s been really useful. I’m rebuilding my website right now, and I’ve created some really cool custom blocks from that that I’ve been ported into my custom plugin that’s running on my website. It’s not live yet. I’m hoping to get that live today. I’ll tweet it out when it does, because I think it’s pretty impressive. And then the second thing is Angie from Elementor, where you can really… When I was at Steller, we built an integration with Angie to automatic… If you want to say, Hey, start an event next week. It’s a meet up starting at 8: 00 PM at this location in San Diego. It’ll say, okay, well, I have this tap into the events calendar. I can easily just do that. Boom. The person doesn’t even need to mess around with any admin interfaces or anything like If you need to change it, just ask the AI. And what this is all brought about from is the Abilities API from WordPress core. And so where WordPress is going, I think it’s going to make it one of the cool kids now.
[00:28:44.400] – Devin Walker
I don’t know if you guys saw that article, how we lost favor with the development of cool kids. And that’s a lot of the case. Like, oh, you go to a React meet up here in San Diego, I go to it all the time. Well, what do you do? I work with WordPress. What the hell? It’s like not Next. Js from first cell. Like even Laravel because it’s PHP based. That made PHP cool again in a way. And I think WordPress is headed towards that way. I’m really liking what James Lepage is doing. Jason Adams, who I’ve worked with for almost a decade now, is now at Automatic doing some really cool stuff. I have some really cool news coming out pretty soon. And so where WordPress is headed, where Automatic is taking it, where the community is taking it with our mentor, Angie, some of these bigger players, really, really stoked on that.
[00:29:36.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
So to expand on what you describe there, right? I think that’s the dream for a lot of creators. They would love to just be able to talk to their computer, right? Like we’re on Star Trek, right? So they hit the dictation button and they go, Hey, make me an event, right? If you fast forward that thinking, and I’m not asking you to pull out a crystal ball, I’m just I’m asking for your opinion. Do you think that that’s going to leverage work away from agencies, or do you think that’s actually going to drive people to agencies because there’s going to need to be experts that know how the crowd works?
[00:30:13.380] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I think It’s going to make agencies’ life easier. For instance, my buddy who runs… He’s a chef, right? He’s got three locations. He’s got the need for a website that can grow over time as more locations come about. He’s got a social media need to broadcast new specials, happy hours, all sorts of events going on at different locations. And he doesn’t have time to do any of that. And he doesn’t have the tech skills in a lot of circumstances to do that. So having an agency partner to work with him is always going to be the case. And that is just one of thousands of different types of businesses that will always need that agency. Their bread and butter is not building a website. It’s cooking the best food for the customers and making sure they have the best experience. No matter how good AI gets, it’s still not going to be what they do. Unless there’s some 10 years from now, I might be completely wrong, but I don’t see it within the next couple of years.
[00:31:24.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. And I love that positive perspective that you have, Devon, because so many people are like, oh, this to the end of the agency. And I keep driving back to, nobody wants to… No one has the goal of being the webmaster when they’re running an automotive repair business.
[00:31:39.820] – Devin Walker
Exactly. Yeah.
[00:31:41.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
And so I constantly drive back to that. And then The other perspective is they go, well, they’re making it just so easy. But I mean, I literally just had who I consider a brilliant client. I mean, the guy is smart as a thack, right? I mean, just he’s awesome. But I looked at his website and his menu was all jacked up. And I was like, so I sent him a message and I said, Hey, I was doing an update on your website. I noticed your menu looks funky. Is that on purpose? I don’t want to be insulting. And he goes, Oh, I’ll play with it. And then two hours later, I get a message like, I keep making changes, but I don’t see the changes. And of course, we’ve been around a little bit so we know what you got to click a location on the menu, blah, blah, all that. And I made a quick tutorial for him and sent it to him. And he was like, Man, that’s why I use you, man. You’re so smart. You know where everything is. And that’s not incredibly difficult, but it is for the client that doesn’t know where the tick box is.
[00:32:32.260] – Kurt von Ahnen
And I think that our value as experts in the space is only going to get more valuable as more integrations with different AIs and intric and layers build up over time.
[00:32:44.380] – Devin Walker
Exactly. And I think there’s a real need to automate things for that business as well online. You can use or even ChatGPT is doing it now, whether it’s responding to reviews like we’re doing at Rosemarine. We want to make sure everybody has a a positive review or response back when they leave a review or if it’s a critical one that we’re doing something to address that everybody doesn’t have time to go in and address every single one. Let’s automate that. It’s a perfect situation. And agencies can feel that need. They can not only provide those web services, but provide optimization services as well.
[00:33:21.060] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’s awesome. Jonathan, over to you.
[00:33:24.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think the agency world, I’m sensing what you’re saying is WordPress is still pretty strong in the agency world. But I also think you’ve got this whole world of influencers, and I think it affects, what I’m going to say, affects Squarespace, Wix, maybe not Shopify, because that’s the main competitor to WordPress in the e-commerce space. But you’ve got this whole subculture of in the media, on YouTube, in podcasting, of a certain reporting influencer market, where they say that people don’t need a website. Young people don’t have a website. They don’t blog, they don’t care.
[00:34:13.980] – Kurt von Ahnen
I’m building on Instagram, bro.
[00:34:16.060] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s TikTok, it’s Instagram, it’s social media. What’s your feeling about that? Do you think it’s just a certain crowd that pushed that message?
[00:34:32.200] – Devin Walker
I’m not going to lie, Instagram has been incredibly important for Rosemary, which is the name of the business. We’ve got collabs with San Diego magazine that get thousand likes, 400 plus comments. Like when we announced in Sanita’s location, we do all these reels that are super professionally done, and it brings mad business through the door. I hear All the time, we saw you on Instagram, we saw you on YouTube, and we actively solicit food bloggers to come try it out. Yelp as well. It’s all been really, really important. But when they go to Google or they go to ChatGPT or wherever and they ask, or best burgers in San Diego, or they search for us name brand, it pulls up the website first and foremost. It pulls up a profile card to the right, which has our website link in there. You still need that website, I feel. And if it’s a brick and mortar like this one is, it’s especially important as well. So I don’t sign. I think a website is very, very important part of this that is the glue that pulls all this social media together in a way. But I’m not going to discount the fact that the website hasn’t brought in as much business as Instagram has, but it still gets people to click on it, gets people to call, gets people to see the menus that don’t use Instagram.
[00:36:10.940] – Devin Walker
We get a lot of different demographics coming through the door, and a lot of them don’t use Instagram, have never even seen us on Instagram, never even heard of us, just walking by type of thing, or they’re just searching for the best burger near them. And that’s where a website really comes in handy.
[00:36:28.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m probably going to do a lot more on Instagram because I don’t really want to use Meta, but I really don’t want to use Facebook. I’ve gone off it a lot, and I’ve got over on my personal account, I’ve got over 7,000 connections. But I’ve really… So I’m really looking at it, maybe TikTok, Instagram more. But I do a lot of social media anyway, on YouTube, on LinkedIn, on X. So you just got to choose your poison. But I think they’re excellent points that you’ve pointed out there. Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:37:12.720] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, we’re going to jump back to AI. You’ve mentioned a couple of tools already with telex and stuff, but in your daily walk, in your daily regimen, are there AI tools that have risen to the top for you for LLMs or things like that that you can share with the audience?
[00:37:29.180] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I use a cloud code a lot within CURSOR. And I use also the cloud 4. 5 model, which just came out recently, which is quite affordable. Within Cursor as well. And those have just revolutionized how I develop in the last two years or so. I remember two years ago seeing the potential of this and from where it’s gone to where it is now. If you I told me two years ago, maybe three, actually, I don’t know when exactly it first was, but I would have been just blown away. And so it’s like I have super powers now, and you have to keep it within on the rails, right? Which means you need to know how WordPress should be built, how PHP should look. I like using tailwind a lot. So how tailwind classes interact with WordPress and how React should be… It tries to import React in your components. You’re like, no, no, no, no. So you have to create cursor rules or cloud rules. And so that has just changed the way I work. One of my buddies, Brandon Dove, he runs an agency, Pixeljar here in Orange County. And He’s doing a lot with N8n.
[00:38:47.600] – Devin Walker
I’m not even sure if I’m pronouncing that right, but it’s like an open source automation UI toolkit where you can just make. And he’s doing this, like I said, like an agency service for his customers to optimize what they’re doing. And so I really want to get into that and start optimizing.
[00:39:06.300] – Jonathan Denwood
What does it can go in a bit more detail what it does?
[00:39:10.420] – Devin Walker
Yeah. I mean, do you know like Auto kit from the SureCart guys? It’s essentially where you can connect different LLMs and agents to do different tasks, whether it’s I got this contact form submitted, now it needs to go into HubSpot from there. Hubspot needs to send me an email and then put it as a new lead or something like that. I want to do it to make my social media easier. I want to do it to help my schedule more optimized. There’s a lot of different occurrences or ways to use it, and I haven’t done that as much as I should be doing it.
[00:39:54.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. That sounds really fascinating. It really does. So you see That is a real door for agencies, really, because I don’t really think the average business owner really wants to get involved to that, do you?
[00:40:08.800] – Devin Walker
No, I don’t think so, but they don’t know what they are missing until they get to talk in with somebody that just does this every day and says, Okay, walk me through what you do on a daily basis. Well, I do payroll and that takes me an hour. It’s like, Okay, well, let’s double click into that. What do you do with payroll? Why is it taking you an hour? And what can we do to make it take five minutes? Just like the responding to reviews. Oh, well, my business partner has to go in every single day to see what five star, what reviews we got. How can we take those bad reviews and improve upon them? How can I tell that to the staff? Well, that’s something that’s perfect for this. And it was a big focal point of OpenAI’s Dev Day, which was just a couple of days ago. They announced that they have their own built in workflow for creating these agentic connections between this automation. They have a UI, essentially now. And so that’s what I need to do more. I need to take a look at what I’m doing that’s taking a lot of my time.
[00:41:17.160] – Devin Walker
That’s tedious that I can do a lot that I can automate.
[00:41:21.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. We had one particular client that’s no longer with us, but they consistently were saying to us, Well, I’ve done some AI research, and you should be able to do this customization really easily i. E. Cheaply. And a consistent pattern appeared. Obviously, I think with AI you can do a lot more, but you need the experience and knowledge because it will produce code, won’t it? You need somebody who knows something. Do you think this is a trend that you’ve heard from other people, clients saying, Well, with AI, you should be able to do that, or do you think that was what I’m laying out, it’s just that particular client?
[00:42:27.600] – Devin Walker
You’ll probably see some more of that as it gets passed around, the more tech savvy ones, I wouldn’t say… I mean, it’s a classic — like, I’ve got a cousin who knows some code, and he told me he could do a list design in an hour. You charge me for a couple of days’ work here. What’s going on with that? And it’s like another iteration of that, where instead of the cousin, it’s the media, OpenAI, or Esalt somewhere. And so I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. I think it might increase over time. But there’s plenty of talk of an AI bubble right now, right? Everybody thinks gold just hit 4,000 for multiple reasons. But the one I hear is that people are very wary of the valuations being tossed around. Or what happens with that bubble burst? Everybody thinks that… Or maybe the perception that AI can do everything tamps down on that feedback you’re hearing there, or so a lot can change. But I’m personally a big fan of AI. I don’t think we can do everything, though. Figma can now remove the background around my picture really well, but it can’t do everything I have in mind and put it into a frame for me.
[00:43:50.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Back over to you, Kurt.
[00:43:53.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, you can’t do it yet. Elon’s working on that neural link thing.
[00:43:58.540] – Devin Walker
Yeah. He’s been working. I’ve been on that for a while now, though.
[00:44:03.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
All right. Well, I think we’re going to go to, correct me if I’m wrong, but we’re going to go to this last question, our patented question about time machines and H. G. Wells and Dr. Who and all these things. Devon, if you could go back to the beginning of your career path, what advice do you think that would you give yourself?
[00:44:26.140] – Devin Walker
Yeah, I would say my advice would be to get a mentor earlier in my career, somebody who doesn’t need to be in WordPress, but somebody that you trust and value their opinion and has experience that you don’t have and is willing to meet with you regularly, preferably on a nonpaid basis. But it can be a family member. My stepdad was a great mentor to us from the latter part of 2017 onward, through our acquisition. And the value or the information and just the lessons that we learned as a partnership or as partners were incredibly valuable from somebody who’s done it on a larger scale and somebody who is older than us, who we have respect for. And I wish I had pulled that in earlier.
[00:45:40.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, that’s super insightful. Same boat for me. I didn’t have a mentor until… I met this old veteran when I was 19, and he was awesome. He was like my replacement father figure for a couple of years. And now all these years go by, and I look back and I go, That was the dude. That was the dude. I should have stayed closer to his side.
[00:46:00.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s very insightful, Dev, and I wish I had somebody… I suppose it was my dad, but he died in 1997. I got into web development as a second career later, in my late 30s. But I also decided to do a degree in Web Multimedia Development, because I was the only person in my family who would ever do a degree. That’s changed now with my nephews and nieces, but it was okay. It was a bit of a waste of time. I don’t regret it, though. But I wish I had pushed myself a bit harder, but I was running a successful business at the same time, so I was a bit pushed for time. I think we’re going to wrap up the show now. What would be really helpful, tribe, is if you’re listening to this on your phone, on iTunes or Spotify or whatever podcast player you’re listening on, most of them make it really easy to leave a review, and that really does help the show, and it helps get in quality guests like Devon to come on it. If you could leave us a review, it would be really appreciated by Kirk and me.
[00:47:27.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Like I say, it’s dead easy. Do that now, and that will really help us out. We’re going to wrap up the show now, and we’ll be back next week with another great guest. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
WP-Tonic & The Membership Machine Facebook Group
Why don’t you sign up and be part of the Membership Machine Show & WP-Tonic Facebook group, where you can get all the best advice and support connected to building your membership or community website on WordPress?
Facebook Group
