Key Things Learnt Connected to Marketing, An Innovative Plugin

Discover key marketing lessons from an innovative plugin. Boost your strategy with proven insights that drive real results.

With Special Guest Matt Schwartz, Founder of Checkview Plugin and Inspry WooCommerce vs Shopify Agency based in Atlanta

This Week’s Sponsors

Kinta: Kinta

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:00.780] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is our first show. No, it isn’t. We did the show in the New Year, didn’t we, Drive? It was our second show in the New Year. We’ve got a great guest with us. We have Mark Schwartz with us, the founder of Checkview, a really innovative plugin. Additionally, he is the principal of Inspire, a successful Atlanta agency that handles complex WU and Shopify integrations. We’re going to be talking about Matt’s journey with his plugin and about running a, not totally, but a highly emphasized WordPress agency, how he sees Swins going in general. Should be a great interview. So, Matt, can you give us a quick 10-15-second intro? And when we come back from our break, we’re delving into your background in a bit more detail.

[00:01:26.160] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. Thanks, guys, so much, Jonathan and Kurt, for having me. My name is Matt Swartz. I run InSpring, as you said, an agency here in Atlanta, and Checkview, which is a WordPress plugin. Look forward to diving in.

[00:01:38.620] – Jonathan Denwood

That’d be fantastic. I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:01:45.440] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Annen. I own an agency called Mañana Nomas. We primarily focus on learning and membership sites and work directly with the WP Tonic team.

[00:01:55.720] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. We’re going to go for a quick break. We will be in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to note that we have great special offers from the show’s sponsors. Additionally, we’ve created a list of great plugins and services for freelancers and small agency owners. It’s all great stuff. You can access all these free resources at wp-tonic. Com/deals. Www. Wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you get all the goodies there. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. Everyone, thank you. He always smiles at that, but I don’t know why. There we go. I think they only listened to hear that, actually, Matt, half of them. I don’t know. Matt, let’s delve into your background. So what led you initially into the world of web development and specifically WordPress, then, Matt?

[00:03:05.120] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. I started building websites when I was probably in fourth or fifth grade. It was back in the day when you created HTML tables, and Template Monster was the thing to use. I would just go to their website and stare in the middle of a class like I was such a nerd. I’d be like, oh, these are such cool designs, right? I remember saying, “Mom, that’s what I want for Christmas.” And she’s like, What is wrong with you? But anyways. So, yeah, I did a lot of web stuff growing up for clubs and that thing. I started, I think it was like, ninth grade, I got my first paid gig. It was for my mom’s dental office, but that was cool. And I was doing a lot of HTML stuff. From there, it wasn’t until college that I used a CMS. I started with Drupal because the University of Georgia used it, which was a difficult start for me, since it’s complex. From there, I started exploring others. I did an internship at Disney, and they wanted me to pick their internal CMS for It was at the time an animal kingdom.

[00:04:31.670] – Matt Schwartz

And I looked at Joomla, WordPress, Drupal. Ironically, we landed on Joomla, but I started using WordPress.

[00:04:40.500] – Jonathan Denwood

If he’s going down here quickly.

[00:04:42.660] – Matt Schwartz

Right. Yeah. But we then… I started using WordPress for my own stuff on the side based on that experience. It was still more of a blogging platform at that point. It was like 2008, 2009. But yeah, I started using it after that. Over the years, we built many different platforms. But we were already using WordPress about half the time by probably 2013. I was building WU sites around that time as well. Started building out sites. I had some of my largest clients early on with WU, which was both good and bad. It was a little rough because we were still developing. But yeah. Since then, we’ve primarily focused on WordPress and Wu. As you mentioned, we also work with Shopify when a project makes sense. We love what you can do with WordPress. We obviously love the community and just the ecosystem that’s built around it. It’s been great.

[00:05:47.680] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:05:51.080] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s always funny to hear how people came up in WordPress. Thanks for sharing that. I did Joomla for a bit. So I did Joomla, tried Drupal, went WordPress. And then when all the hoopla started a couple of years ago, I said, I’m going to see if Drupal’s got any better. And I launched a Drupal site and I went, No, not better. Right back to WordPress.

[00:06:10.400] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, it’s still Drupal. I actually last year was at a conference where They showed the Drupal AI stuff, and it was neat what they built, I will say, but it’s still just Drupal at the end of the day. But they do have a chatbot built into Drupal, so I’ll give them that. But yeah, it’s definitely a complicated beast and quite different than WordPress. And I don’t know, it doesn’t fit for most of our clients.

[00:06:37.640] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, same boat. Look, I’m going to be real transparent with you, Matt. I didn’t know about the Checkview plugin when you first got booked on the show, so I had to do a little bit of a dive, right? And I’m sure that whenever someone creates a new plugin, that’s probably part of it, right? How do I get people to even know what the thing is? But can you give me some background on the check view plugin from your perspective and what you’ve built and why the team developed it. So again, maybe I’m devil’s advocate, but you read what it does. I bet you there’s a ton of agencies out there that go, Well, why do we need that? But at the same breath, I get a ton of spam, and every now and then I click a link and it goes nowhere. So then I go, Well, that’s why you need a tool like that. But from your perspective, how was it developed? Why did you develop it? And What’s the key problem that it really solves, especially for agency types?

[00:07:34.020] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. A great question, Kirek. I totally get the skeptics on it. I get both sides, but that’s what I’m going to try to explain. So when we built it, obviously, we had been running the agency for 10 plus years. And something we came across, and I’m not going to say it was all the time because it’s not all the time, but we did come across definitely times where we’re WordPress forms didn’t work as expected, whether that’s because they got stuck trying to fill out the fields, and there’s a JavaScript error, or it submitted, and then it threw an error, or the email didn’t get sent because SMTP stopped working. So we had, in particular, it was actually with Wu, we had a really awkward conversation with a client where their checkout broke, and it was during a really important event for them. And it was a It was an awkward conversation when he was trying to calculate how much money we lost him, which we obviously have contracts to protect us, but you never want to be in that situation. And ultimately, it was on us to monitor this stuff. And as we know with WordPress, one of the beautiful things about it is you can add plugins.

[00:08:51.360] – Matt Schwartz

There’s all this third-party code working, which is fantastic. But on the other end, you can’t control everything. But ultimately, as an agency, you’re responsible for everyone else’s code that you’re installing on their sites, on client sites. And they don’t care if you’re half the time using WordPress. They just want to know their site works. And most importantly, that if they have forms with leads, that they’re getting those, and people can fill them out. And then we would check out that they can complete an order properly. I mean, that’s pretty much, I would say, the use case for what 90 % of the websites most of us are building. So really, it was a situation where we really didn’t want to ever be in that situation again. And again, I will note that I totally get the skeptics that are like, well, I run this website for my nonprofit and we’re super tiny, and if we lose a form or two, I don’t care. I’ll just run an update and it will work, hopefully, on the next one. Someone will tell me. And I think there’s totally a valid argument to that. But I think as an agency or a business where your leads are coming in and they could be worth thousands of dollars, your checkout.

[00:10:05.160] – Matt Schwartz

There’s definitely an argument that if that piece breaks and you don’t know it until someone alerts you, which could be three, five days, two weeks later, you’re going to have a big problem. Ironically, when we were building this product, one of my favorite stories to tell is that we were using a hosting provider. I’m not going to say which one. They let you set SMTP at the server level, not on a plugin level. We’re like, Oh, that’s actually better. Well, guess what? We were testing check for you. I thought check for you was broken. It was not. The SMTP for the entire server hooked up to sync grid just stopped working. We contacted the host. They basically said, Yeah, this is an actual bug that we had at the server level. Which, again, you think can’t happen if you’re doing it at the server level, but it does. And in that case, the client was relatively disconnected. We were almost like building a site, and it was a subcompany. So they didn’t know who to contact. So they had been trying to figure out why their forum wasn’t working for about four weeks, and they had literally dozens of leads coming in that they never had.

[00:11:09.460] – Matt Schwartz

And we had to go back to them and be like, well, our plugin picked this up, but here’s all your leads that it saved, at least. So definitely, I would say it’s more common than people think, even going into this, as we built out this plugin, we run tests all the time internally to make sure our plugin is working with all the form plugins we support. And obviously, Maybe the form guys know what they’re doing, but there still are definitely updates where people’s forms sometimes break, or there’s some field issue, and it will get fixed in the next release, and no one really notices. But there are some people losing leads over stuff like that, and they just have no idea. So that’s why we built it.

[00:11:50.200] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, from an agency perspective, I can completely see the way you describe that. It seems like everything works when everything works, right? And then a customer buys a mail list or does something, right? And they go, Friday at noon, we’re going to launch something, right? And then Friday at four o’clock in the afternoon, you get the emergency email that something failed, right? Right when they’re launching something. So I can definitely see it. To me, it’s like a timing thing. And the updates lately have been really frequent, and the updates have been pretty major. We went for a span where if there was an Elementor update, my team was told not to touch them. Don’t do any Elementor updates until we know whatever patches need to get done three days from now get done. And that comes with experience, right? Yeah, definitely.

[00:12:40.910] – Matt Schwartz

I mean, I remember when I used to update them all the time because I thought that was the right thing to do. But it’s really not unless you know there’s a security update, which obviously, while running vulnerability scans all the time is important. So you get alerted when it’s a security update. But for sure, I think that at the end of the day, I would say the way I look at it is when it comes to updates, outside of security, if I know that I can run my updates and these items are working like my leads in checkout, yes, there may be some cosmetic issues, there may be some other issues, but usually, those are the most critical things on most sites. So you know, at least at that point, your client is not going to be yelling and screaming because they’re losing money. That’s how I look at it.

[00:13:26.040] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, and then just to wrap this question up and then pass it back to Jonathan, I just really want to emphasize the fact that when things don’t work on a website, it impacts the trust with the end user at a phenomenal depth. So right now on the internet, with the amount of scams, nonsense, and stupidity, it’s like trust is so important. If someone goes to buy something on your site or to sign up for a lead magnet and it doesn’t work, they’re not coming back. Typically, they’re not coming back.

[00:13:55.820] – Matt Schwartz

100%. Yeah, definitely. I think they’ve even done studies on that, and they that basically if your form doesn’t work on your website, it’s some astronomically high level that they will never contact you again. If you never reach out to them because maybe you didn’t get on the SMTP side, same thing. They’re not going to come back to you again. We see that with leads. If you don’t reply to a lead, even if you get the lead, if you don’t reply within a day as an agency half the time, it’s over. Definitely, that’s why we ended up building, and I know some people, again, would I would say that it’s overkill, but in our opinion, it’s not. And a lot of our clients, especially, I would say if you’re an established agency or you’re more about providing a tailored solution for your clients and they trust you as an agency, I would say it’s huge. Of course, if you run an e-commerce agency yourself or you run a website where leads are very important, having it even as an individual agency owner and website owner, I think is important.

[00:15:01.660] – Kurt von Ahnen

Nice. Jonathan, over to you.

[00:15:04.080] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, thanks, Kurt. So with the development of the plugin, what have been a couple of the biggest lessons you’ve learned?

[00:15:13.630] – Matt Schwartz

Oh, yeah. I’ve learned quite a lot.

[00:15:17.400] – Jonathan Denwood

So how long has the plugin been public?

[00:15:22.380] – Matt Schwartz

So we launched at Word Camp US, not this the past year, but the following year. And what would that be? ’24. So in 2024, we launched publicly. We were beta testing it with some agencies as well as our own for about six months before that. So pretty much we had a working version early ’24. We designed it all in ’23. So it’s been quite a journey to get there. It wasn’t a quick process. Part of it, of course, as you guys know, when you’re running an agency and you’re also building a platform, you have to balance those and Obviously, yes.

[00:16:00.560] – Jonathan Denwood

I know that much better than you probably think because I’ve been developing a product as well, which hasn’t gone public. Might never go public. I hope it will.

[00:16:13.680] – Matt Schwartz

Make it happen, man. Make it happen. The only reason I made mine happen is because Kyle, the admin part, literally pushed me weekly being like, You’ve got to do this, man. You’ve got to get it out.

[00:16:24.770] – Jonathan Denwood

I might have a discussion with you about that. So What have been a couple of the biggest lessons you’ve learned then?

[00:16:34.580] – Matt Schwartz

Besides, obviously, the balance of time between an agency and just realizing that that’s going to be difficult and Just being able to focus on two major things at once is pretty difficult. But I think some of the things I learned pretty early on was when it just came to the nuances of a technical product like this. We joke that WordPress is the king of edge cases. When you’re building stuff out, there’s a million ways to do things. But when you’re building a tool like this, where people can have a lot of different forms, a lot of ways to do checkout. You do have to really decide on what you’re going to support very early on, which requires obviously customer feedback. So getting customer feedback early on, I think, was definitely a big lesson, which honestly, I’m and still learning and still working on. It’s very different than agency land where with an agency, yes, you need feedback from your clients, but they’re usually coming to you. They have a specific need. You have to pull it out of them, but they have a specific need. When you’re building product, you’ve probably heard this a million times, you really do have to talk to those customers one on one and figure out what makes sense for your target audience or your target user base.

[00:17:57.980] – Matt Schwartz

You can’t make everyone happy. It’s not going to be for everyone. Where agency I try to build and tailor every product, at least as a non-product type agency for all of our clients, right? I tailor everything to them. That’s why we do a lot of complicated woo stuff. But I would say that’s a major one is getting that customer fit, getting customer feedback early. And then just another one, I would say, is SaaS in general. It’s a SaaS product with a WordPress plugin, right? Because while I would have loved to build this in WordPress itself, the issue is you’re having to store all these tests. You’re having to run automated testing, basically. You don’t want to be doing that on your own website. That would be very, very resource-intensive. And the way we really do it is, and I can explain in a minute if you guys want, I can explain how the plugin works, which might be helpful for the audience to know. But yeah.

[00:18:59.320] – Jonathan Denwood

Maybe we do that in bonus content a little bit later on. But yeah, so I totally understand that it’s a SaaS-based product. I think certain products, services aimed at WordPress are done best on a SaaS level, or it’s also a bit can be done on the website and a bit on the SaaS. It’s all by case by case. In my mind, a lot of people would disagree with me. They seem to be totally fixated that everything’s got to be native, isn’t it? I think there’s a balance myself. I don’t want your views on that, Matt.

[00:19:43.360] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. I think when I was first building our agency, I was like, Let’s do everything in WordPress all the time. I really still obviously enjoy WordPress and try to do that, but it wasn’t built for everything. That’s just the reality. Yes, you can do everything in it, but it’s like, well, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And I know not everyone has that opinion, and I think that’s okay. But I would say look at most of the maintenance systems that are out there for WordPress, which is the easiest equivalent to what we’re doing. And most of them are SaaS-based or at least self-hosted outside of WordPress. Things like WP umbrella, WP, those things. And that’s really where we followed when we were looking at what’s the best way to build this, knowing all the technical archiving and data that we have to store, and we want to make sure it’s lightweight on the actual website. But SaaS was completely different for us because we were a WordPress agency. We had built WordPress plugins. We build custom ones for clients. We build themes, that thing. So doing SaaS, building it in Node, React, which our team did have some experience there, it still was quite a learning curve initially for us to get all that up and running compared to just let’s build a WordPress plugin.

[00:21:11.340] – Matt Schwartz

They go install it on their site and you never hear from them until They put in a support ticket, but it’s all hosted on their site. So you’re basically responsible for all that data. So that was probably one of the biggest things I learned is you’re going to get into this space and do SaaS, you should be aware. But I am seeing more more WordPress plugins are going more this SaaS hybrid model.

[00:21:36.680] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re on the same page here. It’s quite uncanny, really. You built the plugin, so Before we go for our break, what has been the biggest lessons that you’ve learned on the marketing side? Because a plugin, a SaaS, it’s a totally different animal than… When I talk to a lot of agency principals, they say, Well, we get our clients from referral, which is nice to hear, but I don’t believe it myself. I think you get some… It’s a lot of outreach. It’s a lot of the team going out in the community, building alliances, shaking a lot of hands, doing a lot of work for nonprofits that is not paid, where it is paid in the end. But that’s my… But when it comes to a SaaS or a plugin, it’s a total. So did you have a marketing strategy? Because obviously, I’m making the assumption that this is really aimed at the WordPress agency, the freelancer. It’s not aimed… Well, I might be totally wrong here. That’s why I’m asking you this question. I presume it’s aimed at the WordPress professional, not aimed at the end user, or is that incorrect? And what was your marketing strategy, or have you learned that you need one on the way?

[00:23:13.880] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, so that was one of the lessons I learned. I need a marketing strategy. Typical technical founder. I obviously been in the agency space, so I knew that I needed a marketing plan. But of course, that has a process that I’ve been trying to figure out as I go. Listening to podcasts like yours, for example, has been huge in that process. Having some mentors has really helped. But yeah, definitely, it’s different than agency work, where once you at least get established, it’s just a referral base, right? Like the first part is hard. Yeah, it’s depending on what you’re doing. But for us, at least, we were coming from mostly referral base. Like, yes, when I started my agency, I was on Craigslist doing random stuff. But I think with with SAS or even with WordPress plugins in general, you definitely are Having to build up your momentum and your noise maker a little bit. And that really means deciding who you’re going after, which to answer your question is, typically agencies, that’s one thing I have figured out very early on. It’s agencies, WordPress professional is who’s using this tool. Mostly, it’s not typically a website owner.

[00:24:36.960] – Matt Schwartz

We’ve had some, but I would say almost all of our clients are agencies or small, I’d say some freelancers, but mostly agencies that are a couple of people up to 15 or 20 people, where they have enough sites that this is something they are not going to be manually testing all the time, which we do have a lot of clients that have come or customers have come to us that used to manually test their client force and that thing. So definitely, though, when it comes to our marketing plan, we’re still working on that. I am working with a marketing Coaching Coach to improve that process who’s in the WordPress space because it is primarily built for WordPress. It can work with actually other sites, but it’s primarily all the goodies are really built for WordPress. And that’s really What makes it different than if you went and use a different tool out there because there are plenty of tools that are doing to some extent what we’re doing, but they’re not as simple for WordPress. They’re not catered towards WordPress. There’s really nothing on a large scale out there level that does exactly what we’re doing in that space.

[00:25:51.320] – Matt Schwartz

But yeah, getting into the WordPress ecosystem, even though I helped with the co-organization on like WordCamp Atlanta and stuff. It’s not like I’m this big name in WordPress. So trying to get anything out there, it just takes time. And I have talked to many WordPress plugin owners who said it took like two, three, four years for them to actually build traction, which is pretty crazy, but it’s very much that. It’s not going to be an overnight success type situation. You may even have to pivot. But having a sound marketing plan, this This will be our first year. I think we’re going to have an actual solidified one we’re working on now. It’s very exciting.

[00:26:37.200] – Jonathan Denwood

I thought that was very insightful. Thanks for that, Matt. Of course. I think it’s time for us to go for our middle break. We got a ton of other things to discuss with Matt, who’s got a ton of experience as an agency principal, and he’s plugged in as well. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Before we go into the second half, I want to say, if you’re looking for a great hosting provider and a lot more, why don’t you look at WP Tonic? We specialize in membership learning management systems and community-focused websites. Not only do we provide really fantastic hosting packages, but we offer a suite of the best WordPress and technology as part of the package. You don’t have to have that awkward conversation with your clients. We provide all the technology in one bundle. Plus, we provide support for you. So if you If you’re taking on a larger project and you’re a bit worried that you’re going to be able to finish it, we’re there to support you. It’s a fantastic package. To find out how you can become a partner with WP Tonic, go over to Wp-tonic.

[00:28:03.980] – Jonathan Denwood

Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. Let’s build something special together. So over to you, Kurt.

[00:28:17.620] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, this question is near and dear to me because it affects me personally as well in my agency. But I wanted to get your feedback on this one, Matt.

[00:28:28.200] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah.

[00:28:29.120] – Kurt von Ahnen

Ai. So obviously, we bring up AI almost every show, but what are your personal views connected to challenges that agencies face with AI over the next year, year and a half?

[00:28:45.400] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. I know that everyone’s still talking about AI. I don’t think that’s going to change. I think we’re all think of it, but also it’s real, right? This is something that is affecting things. I mean, I think my perspective is it’s like a lot of other tools. There’s a lot of really awesome things about it, especially for agencies. Also, just personally, there’s a lot of great things about it. There’s a lot of things that are going to be, I think, continue to be disruptive. And if we’re not careful, just as a society, we’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot with AI. With any technology, we’ve been moving that way, where things are a little less human-centric. And again, without getting too far into that side, it’s like I was in a waymo, right? And I loved the waymo experience, but I was like, oh, great. This is another way. I’m disconnected from a group I didn’t really talk to before. And it just isolates us in the bubbles. But on the agency side, I think that this was something that I’ve been using for a long time, obviously with ChatGPT. But even before that, when we were looking at Checkview, we were looking at some of the early AI tools that were out there for automated testing, because that’s really what Checkview is.

[00:30:07.080] – Matt Schwartz

It sends a bot to the website and fills out a form, which AI is actually really good at. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better at. So we were already looking at those things. But when it comes to agencies, I think it was already a somewhat difficult place for especially smaller agencies to show their value because a lot of clients already knew they could use Wix or Squarespace. And then we talked about how, yeah, that took a little bit of the market, but a lot of people still didn’t really want to even deal with that. They still came to the experts. And I think to some extent, that’s still going to be very true. I think people are going to trust people, but there will be another segment, I think, that will be like, okay, I’m just going to use Lovable to build my site. And I do think it’s, again, going to continue to be on the lower end of the market, though. Imagine a Hummer, he uses Lovable, he builds his site, he’s not thinking about maintaining that site or adding on to it, and that’s going to be a nightmare later for him.

[00:31:08.080] – Matt Schwartz

But at his cost level and what he cares about, he may not care. He might be like, Whatever, I’ll rebuild it again later. And again, I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but I’m seeing that’s how there’s going to be some mentality, I think, about that. And then the other part of it that I’ll mention, I know this is a whole spiel, and I think I wrote on this with my LinkedIn, is when it comes to just the disconnect with ChatGPT and chat-based ones, at least, with people’s brands and their marketing in general. Because before, we had websites. Websites were very much like stand-alone stores. You had to drive to them, you had to find them. Then we had social, which became more like malls, right? And people could see your competitors, but you still had a little control over the design, et cetera. It got you foot traffic, but it’s still not the full experience of your brand, your marketing. And now with, I feel like ChatGPT, Jimny, et cetera, they’ve abstracted all that out. You get words back, maybe an image. So there’s Very little branding, very little marketing, which I think is going to make things a little bit more difficult for marketers, once again.

[00:32:26.580] – Matt Schwartz

I think there are going to continue to be websites. I think people still want to go off to websites, but there will be a group, I think, that goes to ChatGPT. They get an answer there. And from there, especially if they integrate in e-commerce there, they’re just never going to go to your website. They’re just going to pick it. It’s like Alibaba, but even a lower level, more of Tractive, right? I just need this widget. I don’t care about the brand. And that’s how a lot of other countries actually are. The US is just not that way. We are very brand century. Good and bad things about that. So going back to agencies, I think that when it comes to AI, there’s going to be more and more, I would say, price reduction on websites and less websites, to some extent on the lower marketing end. I do think established brands will continue to use website professionals, WordPress professionals to build out sites. I don’t think that’s changing, but they are going to expect more for less, just like what’s happening in every industry. They’re going to expect you to use AI to cut costs or to do more things for them, I think.

[00:33:37.940] – Matt Schwartz

And so if you’re not hopping on using AI as a tool, you’re competing against people that are going to be able to spin up websites and do more custom functionality, et cetera, in a lot less time. And they’re going to have to make that comparison with who they want and who they trust, basically. So ultimately, I think it can be good. In the sense, you can get more stuff done if that’s not your background in certain parts of web development and design. But if you’re not doing that and you’re not looking ahead, I think it’s going to be an issue. It’s going to become a problem for some WordPress professionals, which is why our team is digging into it and trying to figure the stuff out as we go, which I think is what a lot of people do.

[00:34:28.900] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Yeah. So my perspective is actually from the other side of the equation. We’ve had a few people get pretty bullish about AI on their own, like the website owner, so not the end user, right? Website owner. And then they contact us and they go, Hey, I just vibe coded this cool tool. All I need is for you to throw it on my website for me. We’ve bypassed that. Now, at my agency, we’ve actually added an AI audit audit service. We’ve just said, Hey, here’s an AI audit service. It’s part of our website. You can get the details here, and we’ll quote on a per job basis. Coincidentally, one of the jobs that I’m pretty sure it’s the job that I priced myself out of and didn’t really want to do, I saw a larger WordPress house, I think, get that job and then post about it and about all the security problems they found in that piece of code. It makes me really, really nervous because there’s a ton of people in our space, Matt, that don’t have the years. They haven’t done the reps. You know what I mean? They don’t have that politely scared intuition that says, well, this is a bad idea.

[00:35:42.300] – Kurt von Ahnen

And I think we’re going to see a lot of A lot of junk really come out. And I think security would be an issue.

[00:35:49.160] – Matt Schwartz

Oh, for sure. I think you’re 100 % spot on. I think that when it comes to the security side, some people are aware, some people aren’t. When you’re, let’s say you vibe code a WordPress plugin, you don’t really know what’s going on under the hood. You don’t know what things are being introduced. And that, like you said, even be less experienced agencies doing that with their clients, or it could be your own clients. We use a tool we have called Agency Toolkit. It’s free in the WordPress repo, but it does let you disable clients installing plugins. I know some people say you shouldn’t do that. It’s their site, but it’s our responsibility. We take it very seriously if we’re maintaining their site. So we actually disable. We don’t allow them to do that. If they want to use FTP or Git, they have to ask us for us and sign a disclaimer saying, if you blow up your site, this is on you. But I do think that’s a huge concern that people are just installing functions and plugins. And again, it depends on the the level of the agency. And if they’re still doing code reviews, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using AI to develop things if you’re still doing a code review on it.

[00:37:09.400] – Matt Schwartz

But it’s definitely a huge concern. And then maintenance of those custom functionalities and plugins. When we work on any site that we inherit, for example, we require a pretty extensive audit. We go through all the custom code. We lose a lot of potential sales because of that, but it’s just not That’s something I’m willing to take on. So I think you’re 100 % spot on. It’s definitely a concern that we just have to educate more people, I think, about.

[00:37:41.300] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, there’s a ton of stuff that freaks me out, as an agency, Because we’re a small house. It’s me and a couple of contractors. And so I got to be real cautious about jumping into some pre-existing project with a bunch of hidden doors.

[00:37:55.960] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. And I love the idea, and I think you’ve talked about on another podcast of that audit AI package, because I thought of a very similar idea. I haven’t put it on our site, but I think that’s a fantastic idea because I do think we’re going to More and more and more of people… We inherit these sites, and they have all this AI generated code, or they want to add AI generated code. And it’s going to… Ai, to some extent, is getting better at coding. There’s no doubt about it. It is. But I think it inherently is always going to have security flaws. It’s basically just it’s pattern-based. It’s not thinking. It is pattern-based. Agi is not real, at least not right now. So it is just going to learn from patterns. And I think having a service like that makes a lot of sense. And I would say another bit of a check view is not just check view, but all automated testing platforms is if people are adding a bunch of code on their site, at least this way, they’re testing their sites, and they’ve got some fundamental checks going on when it comes to their mission critical parts of their website.

[00:39:09.920] – Matt Schwartz

If they are going to add AI, of course, ideally, they would have a developer view it.

[00:39:16.200] – Jonathan Denwood

I think I’ve got almost three separate questions to ask you of this, but I’m going to do that in the bonus content. I really just do quickly remark and then go on to the next question. I haven’t really made my mind up. Can an open source project like WordPress really adapt to AI? In some ways it can because it offers a headless solution that’s very popular. Is it actually a more of a threat to SaaS or to open source project? You saw Salesforce share price be hit quite hard. I think it’s recovered because people in the industry actually see AI being a threat to established SaaS players. I’m actually going to be interviewing Matt Mauerweg in February, and we’re going to be discussing these issues with Matt directly, because to see if he’s been thinking about this, because I can’t make a decision about it because I think it’s all up in the air. But it’d be interesting to hear what Matt’s views are about this. Let’s go on to the next question. Are there a couple of individuals, obviously apart from Kirk and myself, that you follow, that you’re really impressed and you read and really follow religiously what they say.

[00:41:03.410] – Jonathan Denwood

Maybe if there is, you could share those with the tribe.

[00:41:07.160] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. I don’t know if it’s religiously per se, but definitely- WordPress is a religion, isn’t it? A little bit. I can’t lie. When I started, when I was younger, I was like, I don’t know. Wordpress seems a little bit like drinking Kool-Aid. I don’t know. And then I ended up drinking the Kool-Aid. Here we are, right?

[00:41:30.740] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s most strange that you say that because it has its good elements because people are very passionate. They’re probably more passionate than the average SaaS product. But it also has the bad side as well, doesn’t it? Because it has some connotations of religious fervor, doesn’t it? Almost when you say it is worse.

[00:41:51.100] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, I think in some sense, especially if you’re coming in from an outsider, you can be like, you can obviously people are super friendly But at the same time, I think some of the flaws of WordPress people just overlook because they obviously see if you’re in it, you see all the benefits from the ecosystem and the community and the people. Not necessarily, let’s say, flaws or issues with core, which if you’re just looking at the technical side, I think why WordPress got to where it is is 100% exactly what you’re talking about. Well, I think- Or a lot of it is.

[00:42:25.840] – Jonathan Denwood

I think one of the areas is that I’ve had on principle some concerns about my own exposition, but I’ve never, and I think Kirk would agree with this because I do listen to Kirk, is I haven’t made it a personal attack when I’ve disagreed with Matt Mauwegg. But there is a certain group in the WordPress, they make it very personal when they disagree with somebody, and a lot of things are great, aren’t they? But they have this religious fervor, and they really start gunning for people, don’t they?

[00:43:06.740] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah. I mean, I think that is definitely a concern. I mean, yeah, when I was looking even at Disney and options from the business standpoint, I was already looking at, oh, Matt Mullenweg basically runs this thing. Should I be advising Disney to use a CMS that’s dictated by one person?

[00:43:28.720] – Jonathan Denwood

And that Or with Drupal and Joomla, it’s by committee, isn’t it?

[00:43:38.200] – Matt Schwartz

Which has a whole lot of issues, too.

[00:43:40.260] – Jonathan Denwood

Which has its own issues. Or do you go… When I was an active developer before I had a major burn out. I was doing a lot of work in WordPress, but I was doing a lot of work in the expression engine. I don’t know if you’ve ever… Oh, he’s shaking his head. He’s just gone dry.

[00:43:56.560] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, I did a little bit with it, but most of my background actually was in Joomland before WordPress, and the design by committee thing was a… I hate to say it. It was hard. I had more issues integrating myself in that community than I did actually in WordPress, because there was definitely, I would say, a lot of levels that kept it from growing as much as it could have. And a lot of it was just personal territory with people, stuff like that. So there’s obviously benefits to all of these different models of organizations. But it is funny that you bring that up with just the religious fervor. But I do think ultimately, the reason WordPress has done so well is because people marketed it out in the world, and it was a good combination with having someone like Matt that had a vision and getting out and making it a household CMS name, which a lot of the other CMS weren’t able to do. And ultimately, that allowed WordPress with its simple database and its simple processes, really, to become this much more robust, flexible option. So I actually think it’s a really cool story how WordPress was able to evolve from a blog into a full-blown CMS, because on paper, it wasn’t necessarily the best CMS out there.

[00:45:31.700] – Matt Schwartz

But I think it grew into that over time. I think that’s a really neat story. And a lot of it’s because of the people that made that happen.

[00:45:43.470] – Jonathan Denwood

And yeah, I think So as a typical, I went off topic. So what are a couple of individuals that really impressed you?

[00:45:54.760] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah. So one would be, I don’t know if you all know, Ian Ian Misner. He runs Kestrel on the Wu side. He also was part of, I think, Skyverge before that. But I’ve talked to him many times, and he’s helped talk me through some of the… Just from the product management side of things, right? And he has some really cool ideas of the perfect balance of how to manage your team as you’re building on products, because that That is another thing I forgot to mention. Another thing I’ve learned is, as an agency owner, I am not a product manager. Now I’m basically also have a product manager hat, which is a completely different job. So from my product management side, he’s one that I think has done really well to develop out a really good process and how he handles support, how he handles out new features. And then his transition just from Skyverge over or to Kestrel. And he also is relatively vocal about like, Wu and the direction they’re going, which I appreciate. He wants Wu to continue to improve because that’s pretty much where his ecosystem is, and he’s not afraid to talk about it.

[00:47:15.400] – Matt Schwartz

So he’s definitely one. If you haven’t checked him out, I know he was- We definitely gave him info.

[00:47:20.960] – Jonathan Denwood

What’s another one?

[00:47:23.400] – Matt Schwartz

So another one, I would say, who I will note, I don’t know as well, but I definitely follow on LinkedIn, and I’ve talked to a little bit is, I think it’s Arealo. I don’t know how to say his name specifically. He’s from WP Umbrella, but he is one of the founders of WP Umbrella. What I love about him is he’s super transparent about their build-out from when they built the SaaS to their transparency reports on users, and the fact that he was getting into a relatively established SaaS space within WordPress, WordPress maintenance plugins. There was already Managed WP, WP remote, a lot of good options relatively out there, and they were able to carve a niche. So I think his journey and his story and the things he continues to just pretty transparently share about building their SaaS from the SaaS side, I think is definitely worth checking out if you’re looking at doing a SaaS or anything like that.

[00:48:28.720] – Jonathan Denwood

Thanks for their recommendations. I’ll probably do some outreach. They sound tremendous discussions. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:48:37.220] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I think that drives us near the end of the pre-planned questions. The one that we like to finish up our shows with is the whole time machine question. If you could go back in time, whether it’s a TARDIS or Stargate or whatever your favorite sci-fi is, if you could go back in time, beginning of your career journey, what advice would give yourself?

[00:49:02.020] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say connect earlier to the community, connect earlier with mentors, 100 %. I spent 10 years figuring out everything I honestly could have figured out in a couple of years, made basically every mistake. I was really lucky that I had some really good long term clients that let me do that. But yeah, it was This conversation is uncanny, actually.

[00:49:34.210] – Jonathan Denwood

Actually, it’s been quite good. I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for myself for a couple of months, but we have to discuss that off there. I’m in I bet. You’re right. I’m in a better mood. I’m in a better mood lately. It’s been uncanny, this conversation, actually. That’s fantastic. I forgot, did I interrupt, Kirk? Was our beloved guest going to actually tell us what- He was in the middle of telling us something really insightful and personal. Yeah, I’m sorry about that, Troy.

[00:50:07.120] – Matt Schwartz

No, no, I’m glad. It got you excited. It made you, put you in a better mood. I mean, that is why we’re in WordPress. I feel like when I talk to WordPress people, I always get in a better mood, or at least most of the time.

[00:50:18.300] – Jonathan Denwood

Can you tell us, when I rudely interrupted you. I did do it on purpose though, what you were going to finish off with.

[00:50:26.380] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, so definitely the mentoring side or just being part of the community and getting surrounded by other agencies, whether that’s in-person or online. I went to WordCamp and some meetups over the years, but I’ll be completely honest. I think it was what Christina, Romana, I don’t know if she’s even still in the WordPress space as much, but she had a course, and that course got me eventually to Kyle at the Admin Bar, maybe four or five years ago now. I was just introduced to so many new people. And again, I was in the space before, but once I was in that group and some of the other groups out there, you don’t feel alone. You don’t make the same mistakes. You have people to talk to. You find mentors that way. So I’d say You’re starting an agency or you haven’t done any of that as an agency. It’s definitely worth doing. And then secondly, on a not very insightful note, if I could go back, I would have started offering WordPress maintenance plans years and years ago, like back in 2010, ’11, because I was obsessed with it. I told you, I love doing the made that stuff.

[00:51:37.300] – Matt Schwartz

I would do it too much if I had thought of making a product-type service out of that years ago. Oh, man, that would have been huge. But that is obviously not as insightful. That’s just my own thing. But yeah, definitely mentor and community. It really is everything, even if it took me a while to figure that out.

[00:51:57.460] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, Matt, you’re going to have to come back later on the air. I really enjoyed the conversation. We’re going to have some bonus conversation with Matt, and you’ll be able to watch it all on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. But we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. So, Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kirk?

[00:52:16.200] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, if it’s for business or consulting, I’m at maniananomas. Com. And if it’s just to chat or get to know each other, man, LinkedIn is my connection tool. Jump on the LinkedIn.

[00:52:27.220] – Jonathan Denwood

And Matt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, your views, and what you’re generally up to?

[00:52:33.460] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. So for the agency side, definitely hit us up at insprey. Com. Anything around e-commerce, Shopify, or just more complex, I’d say WordPress plugin development. Happy to chat. Just free consultation for Checkview, checkview. Io. Happy to have a demo, show it to you. Again, no cost. We also have a trial. Then lastly, I’m trying to get more active on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. Everyone, hopefully, cheerlead for me. I’m not as open. I’m trying to be. I’ve been putting some posts on there. Definitely follow if you haven’t.

[00:53:13.480] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, definitely look at Checkview. It seems a really fantastic plugin, SaaS solution. Definitely feels a need, so I would highly recommend it. What I’ve seen, hopefully Matt’s going to give me a license so I can try it out. You never know. It depends how generous he feels, but it does look really cool.

[00:53:33.800] – Matt Schwartz

We can get you a license.

[00:53:34.740] – Jonathan Denwood

It looks really cool, actually. We’re going to wrap it up. If you want to support the show, like I say, go to the WP Tonic YouTube channel and watch the whole interview plus the bonus, give us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. That would be very appreciated. If you’re listening to the podcast version of this show on your mobile device, on Spotify or iTunes, leave a review. That really does help the show also. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. So three, two, one. We’re going into the bonus. I think as you were talking about what your personal view news around agency and AI, I don’t know if you’re aware of this particular story. It exploded today, actually. It came on my radar, and it’s from Adam Wyvern. I think I’m pronouncing Adam’s second name correctly, hopefully, the CEO and creator of Tell Wins. He did a X-Post. It’s an audio, just him just talking basically as he was walking, and he was talking about how Tell Wins has been really affected by AI because there’s just been a dramatic drop in traffic to the Tell Wins website, and that’s where they sell Tell Wins Pro and some other add-on products that basically finance the open-source project, which is Tell Wins.

[00:55:33.940] – Jonathan Denwood

He’s had to let go about 75% of his staff because he didn’t realize how sales were being gradually riddled down. They’ve got plans, but it was a brutally honest audio discussion as he’s walking. I’ve never spoken to Adam. I’ll probably later on the year try and get him on the show because he sounds a fabulous guy. But I think a lot… Obviously, I’m very big into SEO. I’m into WordPress, but I’m a marketer now, and I’m big into SEO and a lot of people, and I think it’s affected the plugin space to some degree. But obviously, that’s one of the factors, because you don’t Because it’s a SaaS, and that you don’t offer a free version. Was that a big decision? Because I think a lot of people that got this premium model, they haven’t been so effective because they generate their premium cells by offering a free version of the plugin. You decided not to go down that road for obviously reasons because there’s costs in what you’re doing, isn’t there? Or did you think about offering a free version? What was your thoughts around that?

[00:57:07.100] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. Well, I think you bring up some really good points, even with Adam and Telwyn. I’ll mention, I haven’t read that or listened I’ve seen that, but I do know- It’s really impressive for him to be so- Transparent.

[00:57:20.020] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s a painful feel for him, and I’m sure they’re going to recover. This is a fabulous product, isn’t it?

[00:57:26.840] – Matt Schwartz

Well, that’s, I think, what’s just detrimental is it’s not just a fabulous product, it’s everywhere. And if I spin up a new lovable app, it’s probably going to use Tellwind. But the user doesn’t know that. And to their point, that means they’re never going to get the license for it. They’re never going to actually know it’s there. It’s just running in the background. And it’s really unfortunate. I would say that I think they focus primarily on lifetime deals, which can have its place. But I think with a product like his, where literally they load it via CVN for free, they’re not Google. They don’t have Google money. Google can do that. I’m hoping that they change their model, and I’m okay paying for Tellwin for some of the apps I’ve built. I think you made some fantastic points there because I’m not one of these that attacks lifetime deals.

[00:58:19.580] – Jonathan Denwood

I think they have a place, especially to get traction, but you can well overdo it, and it can lead to some either the company getting into a really bad place or you have to do some dicey stuff around not giving a true lifetime deal. And I think both have consequences. One can be disasters in the short term, but the other one can lead to consequences as well, can’t it?

[00:58:53.160] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah. I mean, I would say the person that I’ve seen who takes the best approach, who actually does lifetime deals, is probably Katie with Barn, too. She’s always very keenly aware of how much they’re doing. She’s keeping it under a certain ratio every year. I think that’s where, again, obviously Adam is brilliant, but if they had a process in place, probably like that, where how many sites are actually loading tailwind and keeping their lifetime deals in mind with how much they grew, it probably would have been a lot more sustained. And what, again, it’s in hindsight, I’m not in their position. I I don’t know all the ins and outs, but that’s why Katie does that, I think, is because it ultimately will dilute the value of your organization on top of, obviously, the costs, too. If you ever are looking at an exit, you’re not going to be able to get an exit if you have 50 % lifetime deals. That’s going to be extremely difficult. So, yeah, I think it’s… I really feel for Tailwind because we use it in a lot of projects. But ultimately, for us, when we- Are you seeing…

[01:00:00.910] – Jonathan Denwood

Because the other factor he was talking about is that over the last 18 months, and I’ve seen it at the WP Tonic website, it’s recovered to some degree, but I’ve had to put in a tremendous amount of work, just mind-blowing level work. He’s seen a 40% decline in traffic to their website. I’ve spoken to other people. I’m not sure if you’ve seen that because you’re in the e-commerce space, and I think content marketing, but I think it affects e-commerce as well, unless you’re a really established brand. Have you been hearing from your own clients about reductions in traffic, and you’ve been having those discussions?

[01:00:49.100] – Matt Schwartz

Definitely. I mean, we are more on the development and the design side, but we obviously work with a lot of marketing agencies of our clients. And that is a constant issue right now because it comes back to what what we were saying before, which is it’s abstracted all of the branding and marketing out. So even if you do land in ChatGPT, you’re just another bullet on that list. That’s it. Unless they go to your website, you can’t actually show your value most the time anyways. But for us, as far as InSprey, our agency goes, I think we were niched in enough that we’ve actually gotten some leads in the past couple months from ChatGPT. I’ve asked people and they said, oh, yeah, ChatGPT. And I was like, super surprise. But yeah, I mean, I think if you are, especially for like plugins, I’ve also heard that like WordPress plugin owners, where people would type in like what their problem is in Google, and then they’d go to the website because they wrote a blog post about it. People aren’t doing that now. They just go to ChatGPT a lot, then they get an answer.

[01:01:58.020] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m not sure about that. I think I think it depends on industry to industry. But I think AI overviews from Google, because when you look at the latest data, I think about 4% to 6% has been going to ChatGPT. But Google still dominates the market. I think it depends on the industry. I think if you’re in the development area or tech, probably the amount of drop off from Google to things like Jack ChatGPT is higher, but generally, general search. But I think it’s been the AI overviews, and I totally understand why Google did it, because they had to in a way. But I think that That’s been the real hammer rather than JAP, GPT, or Plexity, or any of them, really. But that’s just my point of view. I might be wrong. I don’t think you’re wrong, though.

[01:02:58.060] – Matt Schwartz

I do think that’s the Google AI overview. It’s like you said, they basically had to do it. They don’t even know how they’re going to make money off of it. I assume they’re going to force us to pay ads and get in the overviews or something, which unfortunately is still not great, in my opinion, because then it’s just PPC all over again.

[01:03:16.900] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, this is the thing that’s not discussed. You brought up another… You definitely have to come back. You brought up some fantastic topics. This is the other area which I haven’t seen really expressed in all the podcasts and influencers that I follow, is that people presume that GPGT or perplexity or whatever they’re using, it’s just telling you the product because it actually does. It’s made a mathematical assumption that it is the best product. But if you introduce paid advertisement on JAP, that level of naivety, and I know that’s rather vicious to say it, but I think it is a level of naivety, and I think it comes because it comes from a non-human source in a way. But I suppose it applies to people naivety around WordPress, YouTube influencers, or any type of influencer, because the reality is the more credible ones actually say, I’ve to promote this product. But lots of them, they don’t even say, do they? They just take the money and they just promote something, don’t they? I presume when anybody is on YouTube or anything and they’re talking about a product, they’ve probably been my stance is they’re probably in some way being paid for it.

[01:04:55.400] – Jonathan Denwood

That might be unfair, but I haven’t got a problem with it. I just don’t I presume that they’ve been paid for it. And so then I treat everybody the same. So I’m not bothered by it because everybody’s got to make a living, haven’t they?

[01:05:13.200] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, but I think you are correct on both points, which is with Google search, people knew it was a list of rankings. But when they’re using ChatGPT, they think it’s like an advisor. And then if you start introducing paid search, it now is this, is it a trusted advisor? Probably not, right? And then YouTube. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s something that I have even learned when I’ve been marketing check view is a lot of stuff is paid Pay to play, pay to play. That’s just how it is. That’s how the world works, I guess, right? So I do think YouTube, et cetera, a lot of blogs, a lot of the partnerships you see are pay to play because ultimately, yes, people have to make money. But I do think to your point, being transparent is what’s key. So what I imagine Google would do in this case is they would treat it like PPC where it says it’s sponsored or something like that. And it would give you a list of like, here’s the plugins or companies that are doing what you need. And then they would mark that somehow showing you that these are sponsored.

[01:06:20.940] – Matt Schwartz

I would assume that they’re going to have to make money eventually on this. They’re spending so much money. They said it’s going to take like, I forgot what the crazy amount of investment is.

[01:06:29.580] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s more than that, isn’t it?

[01:06:31.080] – Matt Schwartz

Oh, they said it would have to be like, I could be wrong on the stat, but it was like 100 years worth of productivity or something to pay back in the industry of AI investments for human capital. I don’t know. It’s something crazy. We’ll see what they do. But I do think the overviews, like you said, I use the overviews, and it definitely keeps me from going into two websites. I think that’s ultimately- Especially It’s strange, isn’t it?

[01:07:00.840] – Jonathan Denwood

Because I utilize AI content. I still produce a lot of video, and I’m looking at other marketing channels, but I will still be producing blog posts and that. I do use AI. I rewrite it and I edit it strongly. It’s around topics that I actually know something about. It’s a good job I do because it’s full of inaccuracies or out of date or assumptions that I totally disagree with about what’s the best learning management plugin at the present moment. It’s, in my opinion, totally incorrect, so I have to edit it strongly. But if I didn’t know anything about the topics and I just publish it, it would be just AI dribble because it’s not right or its opinion isn’t right. Is that making any sense, Matt?

[01:08:03.080] – Matt Schwartz

Oh, 100 %. And I think that is something I’ve thought about, even not just with business, but in general, and this may be a little dark, and this is just my opinion, but what I realized when AI was introduced is that there’s a certain level of value that people get out of the different services, the different businesses that they’re interacting with. And they’re expecting to get a job done, and they’re trusting you to do it. But ultimately, they’re not typically double checking it. They’re not reading into the details. So that’s why I think there’s this constant fight between people that are like, AI is amazing and it does everything. And then AI is inaccurate and doing a lot of things really poorly is because I think, as you said, as you get deeper into it, If you’re an expert on that topic, you’re going to realize the issues it has. But the real question is, is this actually affecting the end result to your customer? Do they even know? And that’s depressing, but obviously, you should do the right thing. But I think it’s only taught me more that a lot of the work that we do maybe is, I’m not going to say it’s not effective, but we have We have to make sure people are getting value out of it.

[01:09:32.420] – Matt Schwartz

Actually, we’re only including things that have value because if it has value, they’re going to know. If it’s something that they’re not really paying attention to or this does the job, then maybe this wasn’t the best use of our time.

[01:09:45.760] – Jonathan Denwood

I was wondering where you were going with that, but now I think I understand. Because you can focus on things which the actual end-loser’s your clients, don’t actually care. You should be focusing on the things that they do really care about. The last area I want to cover, because I don’t want to take up too much of your time, and you’ve been very gracious with it, which you know a hell of a lot about, is Woocommers. Now, where do you think Woocommers is at the beginning of 2026? It’s a big competitor. It’s Shopify. They’re two different animals. I will be putting a question to Matt. I know Automatic, through marketing and other statements, they’re trying to up their game, but I think they’re leaving a lot of money on the table. They should have a fully hosted. A lot of people in the woocommers in the agency space would probably disagree with me, but I think that Automatic should have a fully hosted solution that really competes with Shopify head to head. But then you have the ability to have a self-hosted solution where the hosted solution doesn’t feel your requirements. I think that would be a win-win for the WU commerce agencies and a win for automatic.

[01:11:25.800] – Jonathan Denwood

I might be naive because I’m not the blunt… I’m I’m not the dullest blade, but I’m not the sharpest blade either. My bank balance will prove that. But I think I’m only… Or am I missing something? Where do you see where Woocomers is against Shopify and some of the other competitors?

[01:11:50.180] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, well, let me start by saying, if you think you’re not the smartest and not the dumbest, that means you’re actually pretty smart. Because they say, if you think you’re the smartest, you’re probably not the smartest, right? So I think that’s a good…

[01:12:01.000] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, but- I’ll just interrupt. I’ve been trying to cut it. I have cut it back, and I don’t do it out of spite. I don’t know. I think it’s something to do StreamYard and Zoom, but there we go. I’m making an excuse, but I have tried to cut back, though.

[01:12:14.660] – Matt Schwartz

No, you’re good. You’re good. I mean, I get it. But when it comes to Wu, I think, like you said, they’re putting some more marketing behind it. They’re trying to work on that brand a little bit. I think that where Wu Who, at least personally, using it all the time, from an agency perspective, it does honestly what we need it to do most of the time. We don’t really have a lot of issues with that. It does require extra plugins, but that’s because we’re dealing with those plugins, and honestly, our clients aren’t. Maybe they’re having to pay for some, but if they’re an established business, that’s usually not an issue. They just don’t want to… I think where we really struggles, in my opinion, is if you aren’t an e-commerce WordPress professional and you’re trying to build your first e-commerce site, or if you’re a do it yourself, or who is not building websites, right? And I think that’s where Shopify has excelled not only because they host it, which to your point, it does help move the needle, but they have a lot more built in on functionality. We was built very minimal. I think it was purposeful.

[01:13:29.440] – Matt Schwartz

But I do think what automatic is now trying to do and what wordpress. Org is trying to do with Wu is they’re trying to build in more actual features that pretty much every e-commerce site needs, like with taxes and shipping, and they just added cost of goods sold, stuff like that. Because what ends up happening, I think, is if WU is almost like a step more challenged than WordPress. The challenge of WordPress, as we all know, is because it’s self-posted, people have to learn what posting is, and they have to set up a site, and that is a process. The onboarding is difficult. Then you have Wu that has that issue, but also doesn’t even have all the functionality you expect an e-commerce site to have, right? So in my opinion, it’s actually easier to fix that second issue first, which is let’s try to get the rest of the features in. And things like Jetpack, where they have tax calculations built in, continue to build on that so it can compete with Shopify. I think a hosted solution, Woo or automatic tried to do. They had Woo Express for a couple of years, and now I think they’re trying to push some version eventually to wordpress.

[01:14:44.620] – Matt Schwartz

Com. With more e-commerce integration. I think it’s a great idea.

[01:14:48.920] – Jonathan Denwood

If you got any insight why they have not been able to effectively do it and offer really… I don’t know if you’re prepared to share what your real views of. I don’t blame you. No, no, no. Because you got to be a bit careful, you can upset people. But have you got any view? Because to me, it’s a win-win. There’s so much money in that area. Shopify, it’s been a while since I built out my last Shopify, but that can quickly turn, when I was doing it without using third-party solutions, and that could turn into a bit of a nightmare in its own right. And you think, I would have been better off building this in woo, but It swings and roundabouts.

[01:15:46.770] – Matt Schwartz

Right. Yeah. They each have their challenges. But I think, and this is just my perspective, at least traditionally, I don’t know if it was that automatic didn’t realize the net value of Wu. I think what it was primarily is, is WordPress was built as a content management platform, a blogging platform, and e-commerce was almost like a secondary add-on. And some people would say it even goes against the ethos of WordPress being democratizing everything because your… Wu is for e-commerce. We’re making money straight up. That’s the only reason you build on it. So I think from that vision standpoint, It was maybe difficult from the focus standpoint to focus on WU as much. I think now they’re realizing, like you said, there’s a ton of money in that. They need to continue to grow, especially automatic, to fund WordPress. To fund it, they need WU to grow, and now they’re doing that, but they’re very early on in that.

[01:16:51.500] – Jonathan Denwood

The reason why I went down this road with you, because to me, it’s got echoes of what Adam of Tellwins for a… I think Matt is really passionate about open source because that’s what he told me when I had my last discussion with him. He seems very passionate about open source. For automatic and an open source project, it needs money. It needs… And that’s what Tellwin is finding. You got to to have money to keep an open source project moving, haven’t you?

[01:17:33.960] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, you have to. Some people would disagree, but when you look at the contribution rate of automatic versus everyone else, they build most of WordPress. That is the reality, and I’m not afraid to say that. So obviously, they have a lot of issues that they have been working through and a lot of other things going on. But ultimately, unless the hosting company spend a lot more money contributing it’s going to be difficult to grow. So I think from the Wu side, Automatic is realizing that they are trying to come up with a product now. They’re also on the agency side, trying to, for the first time, really pushing for agencies, at least our size, on the smaller side, realizing Shopify did a very good job of catering towards us. And so Wu is picking up on all of this with automatic, but I think it’s taking time. But I do think ultimately having some run hosted solution makes sense. I think, like you said, having the open source self-hosted solution also makes sense, but integrating probably more functionality into some page made productized SaaS option, like jet pack, honestly, not necessarily jet pack. But imagine if there was a jet pack equivalent or maybe it is jet pack, that not just does taxes, but it helps with a lot of the payment gateways.

[01:19:00.860] – Matt Schwartz

It helps with shipping. And that’s what automaX has been trying to do. But having that optional flexibility to install that on your site, if you want all this stuff built in, you just install their plugin. It’s going to do a lot of those things Shopify does that would be very heavy lifting, and you’d have to buy the individual payments and shipping and taxes and add-ons, I think. And then they could potentially charge some nominal fee or something for that. So I do think there is a space, and that’s where automatic is trying to eventually go with that. I just think it’s taking time for them to figure it out. But right now, when you look at it, I think WU is getting more stable. They’re adding new features. There’s way more focus than has been on it in many years, actually, I think.

[01:19:51.900] – Jonathan Denwood

Have you got time for one other question? Or are you going to be off?

[01:19:54.980] – Matt Schwartz

No, go for it.

[01:19:56.460] – Jonathan Denwood

You got your agency in the land I checked you over, you’ve got a very good reputation in Atlanta and your national work as well. To me, obviously, Obviously, on the DIY front or the small company that’s brought in a one-person marketing expert, I think WordPress has been losing traction quite rapidly in the northern and European market to things like Wix and to Squarespace. I think the growth has been in the Far East to some degree in the Indian subcontinent, but In the more established Western markets, it’s been losing. What’s helped it maintain market share is its dominance in the agency market. Now, Now, obviously, you’ve got WixStudio. They’ve been throwing a ton of money at it about improving SEO, getting some major SEO influencers to say that WixStudio is a lot better. And then you got a couple of other products aimed at the agency. Now, you’ve got products like Lovable and a couple of others. Where do you think WordPress is at the beginning of 2026 with the small to medium size agency market? Do you see a substantial decline or do you think if something is sorted out and you got the headless option with it as well, where do you think we’re going to see that side of the market moving in the next year, 18 months?

[01:22:03.440] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a great question. I think for less established businesses that are starting out, like you mentioned, a lot of them looked at Wix and Squarespace and that thing. And I think a chunk has slowly gone that way from WordPress. I think I’m actually less concerned with the Wix and Squarespace of the world. I am mostly concerned for WordPress in that part of the market with things like Lovable, because I think it’s actually less about AI, and it’s more about the age of people building sites that are going to be building less established sites. And they’re not going to be in their 30s and 40s necessarily. They’re going to be in their teens or 20s. And those people aren’t using WordPress most of the time, is what I’m at least finding. And I think It’s actually less because of anything WordPress has done, it’s just a lot of these, I would say, teams, et cetera. They can’t grow up with apps. They want to type it in a chat prompt, and it just built a whole site for them, which is a much bigger social conversation. But at the same time, that is, I think, what they’re looking for to some extent.

[01:23:20.620] – Matt Schwartz

And I think that’s what WordPress is going to be competing with more and more this year, next year, the following year for small marketing sites is those spun-up AI ones. And obviously, you can argue all the benefits of WordPress. But I think where WordPress has the most benefit long term, 100 %, is true to its open source nature, which is when you need to build something flexibly, modularly, you need to continue to add on to it as it grows, that will always be WordPress’s power from the technical standpoint, I think. I believe that’s even what Wu is advertising now. They aren’t advertising; we are your e-commerce shopping cart. They are now advertising, we are the most flexible cart for your custom user experience. And I do think they are spot on with that. And I think Automatic is starting to realize that, and that’s why they started the Automatic for Agencies program, which you haven’t joined. If you’re an agency, you might consider it if you’re comfortable with Automatic, but that’s their support system for established agencies.

[01:24:31.960] – Jonathan Denwood

I suppose the real crux is whether AI and platforms like Lovable are more of a threat to Wix and Squarespace than WordPress?

[01:24:41.700] – Matt Schwartz

Oh, 100%. I think so. If I can do it myself, why would I use Wix or Squarespace when I can spin it up with Lovable, as long as Lovable gets good enough to handle remedial edits and that thing? Because they’re basically direct competitors. I think WordPress, on the low end, is a direct competitor. But as you get into the mid-market and more complex WordPress sites, it’s not a competitor with those other platforms quite as much.

[01:25:11.160] – Jonathan Denwood

But won’t Wix look at this? Wix and Square. But do you think they’ve got the ability, they’ve got the money, probably, just to become a competitor to Lovable? Or is it the technology and the people involved, the legacy, and other factors we’re not aware of that make it much more difficult?

[01:25:35.720] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, I mean, I think they’re trying to build their own AI-generated features in those platforms. They already are doing that. But of course, as you said, they are an established brand. It goes back full circle to what you were saying, which is that with AI, it seems to be, minus the big Googles of the world, a lot of these AI tools, it’s almost like CMS was back in the day, where there were a billion CMS coming out, right? And one would be discarded after another because people are building these AI tools.

[01:26:13.720] – Jonathan Denwood

It was as bad as JavaScript libraries.

[01:26:16.080] – Matt Schwartz

I was going to say that as well. Yes, JavaScript libraries, the same thing. I think many tools are being built that will be better than Wix or Squarespace for people building their own sites. But for the people who realize, oh, I want something established, I want something that’s going to stick around, probably sticking to WordPress. And if you’re going to use one of those SaaS platforms, like Squarespace or Wix, it makes more sense. However, I think many people don’t think that way. They’re just like, What can we do it the fastest? What looks the best? And there’s going to continue to be AI for, and then you’ve got the other element in the WordPress space where you’ve got players like GoDaddy, Bluehost, that Hosting, there’s about half a dozen that are producing.

[01:27:06.640] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s based on WordPress, but they are building AI Quasar solutions, are they? Which I think won’t be very exportable. But they’re really delving into that. How do you think that’s going to play out?

[01:27:27.480] – Matt Schwartz

I think it’s a good play, in that it would allow people to generate AI sites, which many want to. You can argue if it’s good or bad. They can generate these sites, but they still retain full control over them as long as they’re not using proprietary materials. Exactly.

[01:27:49.540] – Jonathan Denwood

I suppose it just depends on how exportable it is, doesn’t it?

[01:27:55.080] – Matt Schwartz

Right. But if you actually build that, I usually look at those tools. For that reason, I’m not using them right now, but I think those tools are effective because they give you the best account of both worlds. You can do whatever you want with WordPress. You get the power of open source and all the code modifications you want to make, but you’re still able to generate things really fast and on the fly. I think that’s the sweet spot where WordPress could eventually land. And to me, it makes a lot of sense that WordPress would do that. And maybe with the Abilities API for WordPress that’s coming out, plugin developers. We use Cadence, which currently builds AI tools, but I’m hoping it takes them to the next level. Not that we’ll be using it all the time.

[01:28:40.520] – Jonathan Denwood

We still customize the design style. We use the basic tool I use on my own website: Cadence. I was really sad to hear that Ben had left. Because he’s a fabulous guy. I don’t know him well, but I’ve interviewed him three times, and he’s always been extremely helpful. Just seems like a really fantastic guy. I was sad to hear that.

[01:29:05.440] – Matt Schwartz

What was that for? Sure.

[01:29:07.360] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I think we’ve wrapped it up. You have to come back. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation.

[01:29:11.640] – Matt Schwartz

Yeah, definitely. I would love to.

[01:29:12.540] – Jonathan Denwood

You’ve handled my brief interruptions and my mind wandering really well. But I think we really have- I love it. I think we’ve covered a lot of interesting material. Thank you so much for agreeing to appear on the show. We, as I say, we’ll be back next week with, hopefully, another fantastic interview like this. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

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