Building Influence Through Using Podcasts in 2026
Building influence through using podcasts in 2026 is easier than ever. Discover proven strategies to grow your authority and reach today.
This Weeks Special Guest is Steven Sauder of Hustlefish
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
#1 – Steven, can you give us more info on how you got into web development and WordPress?
#2 – In 2025, you started your own podcast, ” Through The Dip.” What lessons have you learnt doing the podcast?
#3 – What are some of the biggest challenges that you feel agencies are facing at the present moment?
#4 – What are your feelings connected to AI, and how do you see this technology affecting WordPress development over the next 18 months?
#5 – What are a couple of individuals in the WordPress space that impress you most that you like to share with the WP-Tonic tribe?
#6 – If you could go back in time to the beginning of your career journey, what advice would you give to yourself?
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:24.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 994. Yes, folks, we’re getting close to the 1,000. One,000 episodes, my God. We’ve got a friend of the show, a former co-host. He’s still mentally recovering from the experience. No, he’s still a friend. We’ve got Steve Saunders in the house. He is the joint owner and joint principal of a leading WordPress agency, Hustlefish. We’re going to be talking about his experiences with podcasting, how he sees AI affecting WordPress-focused agencies, and agency life in general. So, Steve, would you like to give new listeners and viewers a quick 10- to 15-second intro, and then, when we get to the main part of the show, we can delve into your history a bit more in depth.
[00:01:33.520] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, for sure. I’m the co-founder of Hustlefish. We’re a full-service marketing agency, but we specialize in WordPress. Working on WordPress websites, helping people market those and promote whatever products they’re trying to sell.
[00:01:50.700] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to new listeners and viewers?
[00:01:57.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, folks. Kurt von Ahnen. I’m I own an agency called Mañana No Mas. We focus largely on learning and membership-style websites, and we also do a lot of work directly with WP Tonic.
[00:02:08.780] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I have got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to take the opportunity to tell you that we have some great special offers from the sponsors, plus a list of the best WordPress technology and services, aimed at power users, freelancers, and small agency owners. You can get all these goodies by going over to WP-tonic. com/tonic. Com/tonic. Wp-tonic. Com/deals, Wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you’ll find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going on that page. I’m sorry, I just love to say that. Seems the tribe loves me,e saying that as well. So, Steve, maybe we can delve into a little bit of detail. How did you get into web design and development, and then specifically into WordPress?
[00:03:21.660] – Steven Sauder
I started doing marketing, and out of college, marketing has a lot to do with the So whenever I was working with a company doing marketing stuff, there were always these big web question,s and really started leaning into the WordPress space just as a place to build out websites, customize stuff, because you could really do whatever you wanted with WordPress. And many systems were much more locked down, and there weren’t quite as many options as there are today. So it was pretty easy to find WordPress and gravitate towards WordPress. And as I started just doing marketing stuff, got more and more into web. So whether that’s web design, building the sites, thinking about conversion rate optimization, all that stuff, just got deeper and deeper into WordPress and learned more and more about how to build themes and plugins. And now we’re in the great age of all sorts of page builders and the ability to create pretty much anything you want.
[00:04:22.720] – Jonathan Denwood
So what were you studying at college, actually?
[00:04:26.300] – Steven Sauder
Marketing. So I majored in marketing. They always told me that marketing is like the liberal arts degree of the business world. I had more fun hanging out with people in college than I did in classes. I ended up in marketing just because it was an easier path that seemed more fun. It turns out it can be pretty complex, and you can get pretty detail-oriented in the marketing world, too.
[00:04:56.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I was going to say, we’ve known one another for a few years. You’re quite technical as well, aren’t you? How did that develop? Is it just that you also… Because basically, you’re one of those few hybrids that I know that’s really effective, but you’re what I mean by that, Steven, is that you’ve got a good business mind and marketing, but you also… You like the tech, too, don’t you?
[00:05:26.520] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, I think there’s something just inside me that always gravitated toward problem-solving. And because a lot of the marketing work had web components, when I got out of college and started working full-time, I pretty quickly volunteered to start building stuff and the website, rather than having a developer do it. And I just enjoyed solving those problems and figuring them out and piecing them together. And I think that a lot of times marketing can feel really intangible. You’re running a lot of campaigns and ideas, and just what’s actually working, what’s not, especially 15 years ago, there was a lot less data. Now we can get way more data on way more things. So I think it felt even more intangible back then. But when you were building a site, and you could see somebody clicking a button, and you knew that if you changed this or that, you could see a change in the metrics, I think that’s what really hooked me. And so to get better at that, I had to learn more and more about web development and how to build websites and how to program, teaching myself JavaScript and PHP and all that goodness.
[00:06:47.220] – Steven Sauder
I think that’s how that path led down to that area. And as my coding skills improved, my marketing skills improved, too, because I think those go hand in hand a bit. They’re very related.
[00:07:03.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Over to you, Kurt.
[00:07:05.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think it’s so funny to have conversations with people and realize, wow, this person thinks completely differently than I do. So I am part of a couple of different marketing little circles, and I always find the people that are really into marketing, and they’re brilliant in their own right because they do things I can’t possibly… I’m not graphically creative, right? And so I’m more of an implementer. I can problem-solve and make things happen, guy. And so I have to add people to my team who can do the super creative visual stuff. And I refer to that as like crystals and pyramids, right? I think these people are like crystals and pyramids. They’re out there in the Ether, but when they have a certain brilliance, you can chime in on. And then you’re a really rare unicorn, because if you are really focused and driven by marketing, but you’ve also embraced the code and the technical side of it, that’s a superpower.
[00:08:03.520] – Steven Sauder
Yeah. And I think where I’ve really found that superpower is I’m not the best coder in the world. I’m not the best marketer in the world. But being able to sit in between those spaces means you can be the best in something. My older brother works on satellites, and it’s this amazing mechanical engineer. And his mind is just the ability solve these really technical problems is incredible. And I’ve never been able to solve mathematical equations the way that he’s been able to solve. And I’ve had friends who are really amazing designers. I’ve never been able to design at their level. But being able to sit somewhere in between those two worlds where you can pull in, like you were saying, a designer, or you can pull in a developer with some really deep, deep technical knowledge to help you get you unstuck. You have to know enough to span that gap or to speak those languages. And I think as I found that that’s the area that I am really good at, I’ve leaned more and more into that space and into that area. And I think half the battle of life, especially building a business, is figuring out what your niche is.
[00:09:19.240] – Steven Sauder
And I think a lot of people look at niches as what sector do I like it? Am I going to be in the lawyer or doctor sector? Am I going to be in home improvement sector, right? And I’m going to build a business that caters to this group of people or that group of people. I think there’s also this idea of niching into what you are good at. And just like, what are you actually great at adding value at better than most other people. And as you can lean more and more and more into that, then the value that you can provide as a business just keeps increasing and increasing. And I think as I started a marketing agency, I started really big and big, we’ll do anything. You have a job? You want to pay me money? Yeah, over here. I’ll figure out a way to do it. But as we’ve grown as a company, realizing that what we’re really good at is highly technical stuff that takes an element of marketing and design is our niche and what we’re really good at. Right now, we’re working with a fairly large company, working on a jobs board, integration with an HR platform.
[00:10:31.280] – Steven Sauder
And so the marketing aspect, how do they market their jobs better and get more eyeballs on their jobs besides just the standard posting it all over on all the jobs platforms. But to do it, we had to integrate a bunch of APIs and create a bunch of daily automated tasks that run behind the scene that update things and delete things. And when we can find a space like that, that’s where we can add a lot of value.
[00:10:56.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
That’s cool. It’s If we were to take part of your answer there about talking about niches and segue into our second question, that was… And this is neat because I didn’t know that you had a podcast. So it came up in the show notes and I said, Oh, let’s go listen to the Stevens podcast. So I did. I really like the episode with the Feral Outdoors.
[00:11:18.320] – Steven Sauder
Oh, yeah.
[00:11:18.700] – Kurt von Ahnen
I thought that was cool, but I’m an outdoors person. So I was like, Oh, this is cool. What’s this guy talking about? Your podcast is called Through the Dip, right? So anyone that wants to go find that, it’s Through the share with us what lessons you’ve learned exploring this niche.
[00:11:35.700] – Steven Sauder
I started the podcast because we went through our own dip, trying to figure out business as a lot of businesses do. It felt like when we were going through that phase of our business and having all these existential questions, it felt really lonely, and I felt like I wasn’t sure who to turn to or ask questions to. And then when I did find people to ask questions to, it’s like the questions were more foundational to who the business is and who I am as a person, then it is actually, oh, well, here’s what you need to do from an accounting method standpoint. And what I realized is that when companies are facing these really big dips, a lot of times the thing that they have to figure out is not business, but who are they and what is their relationship to this? What are they trying to do? What are they trying to put into the world? What are they trying to say? And the more the CEO or the leader of that business can figure out what they are doing and can articulate it clearly, it has an infinitely bigger impact than just saying, oh, how do we optimize this product line or how do we cut spending?
[00:12:56.980] – Steven Sauder
I mean, those things all have their places. But wrestling with existential questions and understanding the answer to them, I think is insanely important. And so all of a sudden, I wanted to be able to go around and start asking people, how did you navigate this? What questions were you asking about yourself? What were you trying to find out? What were you wrestling with? How did it affect your family and your relationships and friends? And it’s really hard to just be like, hey, let’s grab a beer and talk about these really deep personal questions. That’s stuff that it takes years of friendship to get to the point where you can sit down across from somebody and be like, yeah, how did that impact your relationship with your wife when X, Y, or Z happened? You have to earn that. But what I realized is that With podcasting, people automatically all give you the license to ask those deep questions. That’s the point of it. You have this mutually agreed thing. All of a sudden, I found that I could jump into these conversations and start having some really deep, meaningful conversations that would take years of friendship to get to.
[00:14:07.760] – Steven Sauder
But because it’s in this platform or this mutually agreed to, I’m asking you deep questions about life, that I could start asking these things that were in the back of my head, how did other people navigate their companies through the dip? And so that’s where that podcast came from and why I started. There was almost as a therapeutic way of dealing with what I experienced or felt by going through the dip myself.
[00:14:35.320] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, and I think if I could just be transparent and share something, I met you at a word camp in San Diego. Yeah, yeah. I’m just going to let the audience know right now, I think you doing a podcast and articulating your goal of the podcast or how you communicate with people, I think that you’re very natural at that. I still remember vividly the deep conversation that you and I had had on a specific subject, and I really felt like when I walked away from that table that I had made a new friend.
[00:15:08.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Steve had never had deep conversations with me.
[00:15:13.820] – Steven Sauder
That’s how you felt about those conversations, Jonathan.
[00:15:19.880] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think that’s an inherent quality that you have as a person, and you’re able to amplify that through the methodology, through the tool of the podcast. I mean, if I could be so bold, right? Because that’s the only time we’ve shared a physical space is with San Diego.
[00:15:35.520] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, totally. I think it goes two ways. You made that space open for me to start asking deep questions. I think if I remember, that was quite a few years ago, but I was at this place of trying to figure out religion and church and my relationship to all that. From a very personal standpoint, not as much business standpoint. But just who you are as a person, too, I think opened up the space for me to be like, hey, Kurt, what do you think about this? And I think there’s something that’s very interesting about meeting a new person and being open and transparent with that person and allowing them to speak into your life because they don’t have the context for who you were. Sometimes that’s incredibly helpful. But getting fresh perspective from somebody where you can just lay it out and all of a sudden, somebody who’s not rooted in your own context, I think can be super helpful. I thought back to that conversation several times and really appreciated that chat that we had.
[00:16:42.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think a lot of it comes to your point, to that vested interest perspective, right? We’re supposed to love our spouses and share everything with our spouses. But if I’m going to make a big decision in my household, or let’s say I’m even thinking about a big decision in my household, if I bring up like, Hey, I think I’m going to buy a Corvette this summer. My wife is going to go, No, absolutely not. That’s foolish. Because that’s that bias. She has a vested interest in not taking financial risks in the house share. Whereas if I shared that with a stranger, they might be like, Hey, what’s your favorite generation Corvette? Do you go for the LT1, the LT3, automatic, manual? You need to have conversations with a broader circle to get better input sometimes.
[00:17:30.800] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, for sure. And I think it’s interesting with doing this podcast is watching how people have made those decisions, those big decisions in life. I think it’s the first podcast that I published with this guy who was starting a dairy. And there was this moment in time where he chose to not pay for his health insurance and pay to feed the cows on the dairy. And it ended up like his wife found out she was pregnant that month, and then insurance wouldn’t cover it because it had lapsed when they had figured it out. And it created this huge juggernaut of a problem. And I think it’s easy to look at that and be like, well, why? That’s a terrible choice, right? From a relationship standpoint and from a safety standpoint and a health standpoint. But if you sit down with someone and talk to them for an hour and a half about this, all of a sudden you understand the situation that they were in. If you didn’t feed the cows, the cows weren’t going to produce milk, which means you weren’t going to be able to pay your bills, which means you were just going to get farther in the hole.
[00:18:40.360] – Steven Sauder
And it became this logical decision that Maybe you would make a different decision, but it’s not a completely irrational, insane decision. And all of a sudden, you have empathy for that person in that space. And I think that’s the beautiful thing about being able to do podcasts or sitting sitting down and just talking with someone for a long period of time is that you can start understanding and unraveling that story, which allows you to have a lot more empathy for that person. I think when you just see headlines or quick blurbs, I think about this in the news all the time, right? So and so did X, Y or Z or whatever happened. It’s just like there’s a lot of underlying context to that that you necessarily don’t have. And that context is important. I to truly empathize with a person, understand why and how they made those decisions.
[00:19:36.580] – Kurt von Ahnen
I agree. Jonathan?
[00:19:39.400] – Jonathan Denwood
I just got a quick follow of you. Questions. I was getting the impression that the decision to make to do the podcast, and I think you do it in seasons, don’t you? Is that correct? Yeah. Was it a decision to work out It wasn’t totally for commercial reasons, or was there also a commercial element? Because when I started the WP Tonic show, there was no commercial element to it. I was asked by a former host who was in podcasting, Why don’t we do a podcast together about WordPress? That was almost over 10 years ago. Crazy Bill, as I call him, I I did speak to him a couple of weeks ago, and he’s still doing… He’s still as crazy as ever, but he’s doing okay. But there was no… I just thought it was interesting. He knew something about editing, and why not? The second podcast I do, which I also do with Kurt, was done purely on commercial reasons because it’s targeting the industry sector that I’m trying to build a business in. So I get the impression that this was more about a slight crisis that you were facing with your business, and that was why you gave the title of the podcast, and that’s why you wanted to talk in that area.
[00:21:22.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Am I on the right track, or was there a element of commercial influence?
[00:21:28.440] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, I think looking at it now, you’re right on the money. But I think that if you would have talked to me when I first started the podcast, I think I would have told you it was for a lot more commercial reasons. I don’t think I realized necessarily exactly the full reason why I was starting it or naming it what I was going to name it. Really, I was like, we need to figure out how to sell marketing services. Let’s start connecting with business owners And this is the topic that I’m interested in and I would like to talk more about. And so I think there was a commercial element behind it. I think as I started talking to more people and thinking about it more and thinking back through my own journey, which you have to do to meaningfully engage with other people that have been through similar situations as yourself. And all of a sudden, they’re teaching me more about myself as we’re talking about their stories. I think my purpose for starting the podcast wasn’t actually didn’t have very good commercial grounds, and I just made it up to justify the the action of doing it.
[00:22:43.110] – Steven Sauder
And I wouldn’t have admitted it to myself at the very beginning. I would have been like, oh, yeah, this is a very smart marketing commercial thing. But what I’ve gotten back from it is so much more than the commercial side ever gave me back from the podcast.
[00:22:59.400] – Jonathan Denwood
When we’ve discussed things, when we had the last discussion, you were actually question, was that a good, broad subject? And it got some negatives. But I think you’ve also in this discussion, you covered the more benefit side because it’s a deeper concept and discussion you’re going to have somebody. But I also think that anybody that’s done anything in in life has had some very dark periods. I know I have. And really, they challenge the total concept of what you are, what you think you were. And anybody that’s had any success says that they haven’t had those periods, either they’re lying to themselves or they’re trying to bullshit you. That’s my opinion. Would you agree with that, Steven?
[00:24:05.940] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, I think that… I mean, whether something is created for more a commercial reason or you’re creating it for more a personal reason, I think that any time you open yourself up to the process of creating, you learn something about yourself and you’re able to go deeper into yourself, whatever you’re doing, And by leaning into that creative thing, whether it’s in business or work, you end up diving deeper than you initially thought. And I think it’s the diving deeper that separates the bullshit and the BS from everything else. And I think from just different podcast guests that I’ve had on, the people who are willing to open up and go deeper or have opened up and gone deeper and understand themselves more, those are the stories that really hit versus the ones that stay a little bit more surface level. And that’s where the BS happens, because it’s not the actual meat or the root or the thing that is underlying that. And so I think in the process of creating something, you always get to dive a little bit deeper. And I think it’s always worthwhile to the exercise of creating, whether that’s a podcast or art or building a new website.
[00:25:29.740] – Steven Sauder
If you’re willing to open yourself up to that creative process. It’s not just the thing that you create, it’s the thing that you learn about yourself that I think- Yeah, because there is this, and I’ve discussed it with Kirk, there’s this culture that’s quite prevalent online about that business is easy, building something is easy.
[00:25:51.880] – Jonathan Denwood
You follow, I’ve got this secret, and if you give me a load of money, You can be successful in two weeks or three months or whatever. And it’s nonsense, isn’t it? It’s just absolute nonsense.
[00:26:14.960] – Steven Sauder
Yeah. I think the tricky thing is that business is easy when you look at it from just a very informational standpoint. Create something that people will see as valuable and sell it for more than it took to create it. Done. Right. Successful business. But then how does that actually work? How does that get implemented in real life? That’s the hard part. Looking at a balance sheet or a profit and loss statement, we got to make more money than we spend. That’s an easy concept. Everyone understands that. It’s not that hard to teach. It’s the actual how you move through it and how do you do it. It’s like love. Loving someone is easy in until it’s not. But that’s when love actually really starts. And so I think like all these gurus, they’re not necessarily wrong. Yeah, business is easy if I give you a PowerPoint presentation and show you how market demand and pricing works and stuff There’s basic concepts, but how do you actually make that work inside of a product with actual real people who end up changing the scope of a project because their business goals have changed? How do you walk?
[00:27:27.140] – Steven Sauder
That gets complex because people are involved. And anytime people are involved, the complexity increases infinitely.
[00:27:35.520] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. I think we’re going to go for our middle break. It’s been fantastic catching up with one of my former co-hosts. It’s been a great discussion. We’re going to go for our middle break, and we got some great topics to discuss in the second half. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I just want to take the opportunity, if you’re looking for a great hosting partner, why don’t you look at WP Tonic? We specialize in the hosting of membership and community-focused websites, plus WU commerce. We are more than a hosting provider. All our sites are hosted on Vulture, but we are a lot more. We’re your technical and marketing partner as well, if you need that. To find out more, why don’t you go over to WP Wp-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. We also offer some great financial affiliate packages. If you become a partner, it’s a great package. Let’s build something special together. Let’s go straight into it. Did you like that, Steven, that last bit?
[00:28:53.120] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, it was very nice, very smooth.
[00:28:55.640] – Jonathan Denwood
It only took me five years to work that one. I’m a very slow learner, but I do get there. There we go. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges agencies, regional agencies? I’m not talking about the freelancer. I think they got separate issues, but the 10 to 20 person agency are facing at the present moment. What are some of the things your agency are facing? And when you talk to other agency owners, principals, they discuss with you.
[00:29:35.480] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, I think one of the hardest things right now, I mean, it’s always been hard, but how do you grow? How do you get bigger in a industry that takes a lot of trust and developing that trust with people. And I think that the world is incredibly noisy right now and it’s getting only more noisy, just with social media feeds, posts. You’re just getting bombarded from every side. And I think breaking through that noise is getting harder and harder. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Seth Godin’s Purple Cow This is one of those things. The concept is easy and very understandable. If you see a Purple Cow in the field, you’re going to tell all your friends about it. And that’s free marketing or advertising. If you can design a product that’s a Purple Cow, where people will talk about it and share it with their friends. All of a sudden, you can grow and spread your message and what you’re trying to do in the world. But I think it is getting harder and harder and harder to have a Purple Cow because there’s so many people with insane and crazy stuff that are just being posted all of the time, everywhere.
[00:30:52.440] – Steven Sauder
And to try to make something that actually stands out against the crowd, I think, is getting harder harder these days. I think you can see that in ads budgets, in what you’re spending on ads and how far an ad will reach and how far an ad will go. You can see that in websites and what it takes to build a great website is a lot harder than what it used to. Customer service, all of that stuff.
[00:31:19.900] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s funny you say that. I thought with Lovable, you can look up a website that converts straight away.
[00:31:26.420] – Steven Sauder
It’s true. Yeah, at least that’s what they tell me. Apparently, I’m just dumb or I don’t understand how to use it right, but it’s a lot harder than they say.
[00:31:36.740] – Jonathan Denwood
You just don’t put the right prompts in, Steve.
[00:31:40.380] – Steven Sauder
It’s always the prompt’s fault. If only you had the right prompt, you The things you could build.
[00:31:48.680] – Jonathan Denwood
So what you’re, just to summarize, your discussions between you and your colleagues, is it? It’s just growing the agency and getting it cutting through all the noise. You just feel that is increasing, being able to grow the business the way that you would like to.
[00:32:08.880] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, it feels like it is getting harder and harder. Like the posting on LinkedIn doesn’t have the reach that it used to have. Posting on social media doesn’t have the reach that it used to have. I think just as noise gets louder and more, it is harder for people who don’t want to be the noisiest person in the room to break through. I don’t love the game of who can be the loudest because oftentimes the loudest people are not the people that you want to be listening to. Let’s look at one little thing, cold email. Cold email used to be challenging to send, and it was actually somewhat meaningful. But as AI has grown, the amount of cold emails that people are able to send has grown exponentially. And there’s just so much more garbage and chatter in that space. That it’s just like, it’s not… If I’m spending a day going through LinkedIn, looking at people in my local area that I want to connect with, and I’m going to reach out and send them a cold email, say, Hey, let’s grab a coffee or something. I used to always get responses back to those.
[00:33:21.440] – Steven Sauder
But because of all this other crap cold email, it is really hard to actually genuinely connect with somebody. Because just breaking through is… People’s attention, just they don’t have as much attention, and so you can’t break through as easily anymore.
[00:33:38.900] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:33:41.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I think we scraped the surface with that last round of answers, but we were really meaning to ask about AI and how do you see the technology affecting WordPress development over the next 18 months? I mean, you mentioned AI in a phrase. And I’m in this weird space internally myself right now. I’m like, I use AI, I leverage automation tools, but I’m also really struggling with how do I maintain a more organic approach for my clients? Because my clients seem to suffer AI fatigue before I even meet them.
[00:34:17.000] – Steven Sauder
And so we’re in this really unique dichotomy situation.
[00:34:23.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
I was wondering what your thoughts were in the space.
[00:34:25.960] – Steven Sauder
Yeah. I think from a From an agency standpoint, what I’ve seen a lot of agencies make mistakes and are continuing to make some, I think, pretty costly mistakes right now with AI is that they’re trying to move faster than AI is moving. You can design automated systems and ways of trying to do something smarter than what ChatGPT is doing or what Crock is doing or Propelxity or whatever the AI platform is that you’re subscribed to. You can create all these prompts, prompt engineer, try to figure out how to do something better. But you’re putting a bunch of time into something that’s changing incredibly rapidly. And it is better to just be like, you know what, this isn’t working right now. But in six months, someone will probably already have this problem solved because AI is just going to get better. Our models just need to get better a lot of times. And if you can wait until AI gets to the point where you want it to get to, then I think you have a lot more likelihood of getting to success instead of wasting a ton of time designing and over engineering systems to try to push AI at the very forefront.
[00:35:52.200] – Steven Sauder
I think as an agency, if you take a couple steps back and you lag behind by several months, you will have far more fun and a lot more success than trying to push into the latest because it is moving so fast. If it was something that was moving slow, something that took a couple of years to iterate on, sure, go spend some time, become the best at something, push something to the very edge, and you can get clients because of that. But when you put a bunch of time into pushing something to the very edge, and then it changes, and it’s infinitely better than what you were able to get to because a new model was released, all of a sudden, just all that work and time could have been put to something else that actually would have moved the needle. And so I think that’s one of the biggest traps. So AI site creation, I don’t think is near where it needs to be right now. You can’t just put in a prompt and get a website that’s great. You can put in a prompt and get a website that’s okay. And then instead of spending hours banging your head around how do you create the best prompt to create the best site and handle all of these edge cases, just get the pretty okay version and then start working through it yourself to make it great.
[00:37:05.460] – Steven Sauder
People still need to exist to bridge the gap between where AI is and where we want it to be right now. And I think it’s going to be in that space for a little while. And so don’t be worried to try to hop in and bridge that gap with manual work and manual effort. Wait for AI to get there. Don’t be the person to try to invent the system to get us there. Unless that’s your SaaS product and that’s what your whole company is built around. But I think as an agency, I’ve seen a lot of agencies just burn so much time on trying to create something that they shouldn’t be creating.
[00:37:36.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s funny you mentioned that absolute scenario right there. That’s actually one of the products we do. I know Jonathan at WP Tonic, very similar similarly startups and low budget projects that can’t afford a bespoke custom website. I want it to look like this Figma file, right? Like, those are great jobs. My agency loves to see something like that come in. But a lot of times We have clients that don’t have budget. And so we end up using ZipWp or CadenceWP. We use the AI site builder, right? And that really helps the client, break through that writer’s block, right? Yeah. You can imagine what my site would look like. Well, great. Let’s do this. Let’s put in a paragraph. Let’s get some base first draft content, pick some pictures, pick a format, pick some colors, pick a font. And now you’ve got a great first draft starter site that you can go through, like you said, and you can pick it out. You can say, okay, I’m going to change this picture, change this heading, change this call to action. But at the end of the day, you got them a great Head Start.
[00:38:44.060] – Steven Sauder
Yeah. I I think that’s where I’ve seen the most efficiency increase in AI is you take somebody like you guys who are good building sites, you know how to build sites, and then you layer in AI to assist you. You can move so much faster and get the places way faster. But you take a client who doesn’t know anything about site building or just really struggles with it, then you layer in AI and it creates a worse mess than if they would just try it themselves. If you already understand how to do something, AI can make you way more efficient at doing that thing. If you have no idea on how to do the thing, AI just becomes us really frustrating roadblock where you almost get there, but you can’t get past a certain point. I think the same thing with just actually writing code and developers. The better the developer, the more efficient I have seen AI is at helping them do what they’re doing. The worst developer, the less AI is actually really helpful because it ends up creating these scenarios and situations that just become some horrific monolithic code thing that’s just really hard to unwind or find out what’s happening or what’s going on there.
[00:40:00.800] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. And then Jonathan and I actually had the overall worst experience with AI. And that’s when a client says, hey, I asked you guys to build me this plugin and you told me it would cost so much money. But have you ever heard of ChatGPT and how easy it is to make a plugin? All I need you to do is put this file on my website. It’s true.
[00:40:20.900] – Steven Sauder
It’s easy until it’s not. And then it’s really, really, really not. I mean, it can speed you It can make you faster, but it’s not going to get you to where you need to go if there’s any complexity in it, and especially if it has to work inside of your business systems and constraints. Because trying to communicate the nuances of a business system to AI and spell it out in a way that you have completely articulated all of the variables. I think people don’t understand how humans, we can hold all these variables simultaneously in our head and be able to build something that works. Trying to take all those variables and take them out of our brain, document them so that AI can understand all the variables and then create the thing is almost impossible. And we can see that in humans. If I’ve built an application, and now I’m going to pass it over to you, Kurt, to support. And I tried it. And I’m like, All right, I’m going to give you a download on how this thing works and everything that it functions, inevitably, I will miss something and not completely completely explain some nuance or some small aspect of it that I understood or knew, but I just forgot to put that in.
[00:41:36.660] – Steven Sauder
I forgot to explain that because I just know it. Our brains just can work that stuff out. And so all of a sudden, you’re in the dark. It’s the same thing with AI, right? Except AI doesn’t necessarily have the tools to have all that contextual knowledge from years of working together right now that me and Kurt could have had. And so you can end up in this place where it’s just really hard to solve the problem because you as a person aren’t very good at getting out all of the details. I mean, think about a client trying to explain what they want their site to look like. Unless you have built tons of sites, it is very hard to find the exact words to communicate exactly what you want. And I think that’s where experts still are incredibly important because you need somebody that has the words or the ability to verbalize it. I think another great example is they talk about colors and languages that have words for more specific colors, those people can see actually different colors than people that don’t have the words to describe it. And if you would take the time to learn those words and be able to distinguish between these two different colors, you would start seeing a lot more colors in the world and distinguishing different colors.
[00:42:46.500] – Steven Sauder
And someone has to be able to see it and verbalize it for AI to be able to do anything with it. And that’s why people like Kurt and John, you guys hop in helping out with AI. Chatgpt can’t just do it. They can get you there. They can help assist you, but they’re not going to be able to write the whole thing because we don’t necessarily have the words to communicate it the way that it needs to be communicated with all the context and variables involved.
[00:43:11.480] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m partially colorblind, but I know what periwinkle is.
[00:43:15.120] – Steven Sauder
It’s a good one.
[00:43:18.620] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan, over to you.
[00:43:20.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’m going to see what the time is, maybe replace five for this question, but this maybe do quickly. Where do you think WordPress is in the 10, 20 person agency space at the present moment? You remarked earlier on in our conversation that there’s a lot more options out there than when you started with WordPress. But in some ways, I’ve been quite impressed how robust the usage of WordPress still is in the small to medium size agency space. So in your own agency, when you talk to other agency owners, what do you think are the general feelings around using WordPress?
[00:44:15.860] – Steven Sauder
I think that a lot of companies, when they come to agencies and asking them for help with something, they are expecting a system that can be flexible enough to be adopted to a very specific business case, and they don’t want to have to change their business case to work with said system. And I think that’s why WordPress is still one of the number one things that agency uses, because of that expectation. If I’m in Shopify or I’m in Webflow, there are quite a few scenarios that can come up where the system just can’t do it the way the client wants it, and the client would have to change how their business runs from some operational standpoint, Sometimes that’s a big thing, sometimes it’s a small thing. But the client generally has the expectation that you will customize the solution to fit their exact business case. I think you see the same thing with like a course courses and us learning, online learning things, where there are oftentimes very specific things that people want. When do people get certificates? How do people move through a course? When are some courses unlocked? When other courses, not unlocked?
[00:45:31.540] – Steven Sauder
And there’s a lot of great off-the-shelf solutions out there if you are okay with changing how you are running your business or structuring your courses to match your system. Within WordPress, there’s a lot more customization that you can do, and so you can make it run the way that you want it to run. And so I think that’s why it’s still such a popular thing in agencies is because that expectation from the clients of, You will make this run the way that I want to run. A lot of systems out there are too constrained to actually do that.
[00:46:05.480] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you’ve put that very coherently, actually. Let’s move on to what should have been the… Now, I’m not going to I’m going to say to you, marketing business or WordPress, because you span all those worlds, really. So are there one or two individuals in the marketing business or WordPress buckets that really impress you? And when they’re producing some content, you will watch it or consume it just because they’ve come back on your radar.
[00:46:42.200] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, that’s a really good question.
[00:46:44.000] – Jonathan Denwood
You don’t have to mention me, Stephen.
[00:46:47.340] – Steven Sauder
Fine. Then I’ll mention Kire.
[00:46:49.940] – Jonathan Denwood
Much wiser.
[00:46:52.980] – Steven Sauder
You know what? Over the last six months, I’ve really taken a step back from listening to the influencers or talking heads in different industries and spaces, just because I’ve gotten so tired of hearing their opinionated ideas on something. I used to really pay attention a lot more, but I think that I have found a lot more value in trying to figure out things myself and trying to come up with the opinion or thought myself and not put more weight on the so-called guru or expert and actually trying to find something that solves the problem. So I go to Reddit now far more than I did a year ago, and I’m way more involved in Reddit than I ever have been before because it’s the last place that it feels like I’m actually talking to humans still. Although I will say that it feels like there’s more and more bots getting involved, but at least there’s historic stuff from three years that we know our humans. I don’t know if there’s any two or three people that I pay specific attention to. But I have found myself reading through change logs and update stuff, more boring things to see what’s coming out and what’s new.
[00:48:22.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Sounds like your lives get inside, Steven.
[00:48:24.720] – Steven Sauder
It’s true. I mean, it’s winter here in Michigan, of course.
[00:48:28.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, dear.
[00:48:29.200] – Steven Sauder
There’s two feet of snow outside, and we’re going to get- We got that to look forward to tomorrow, the next day.
[00:48:36.540] – Jonathan Denwood
I think just a remark, there’s a few people I listen to regularly, and I’m a great consumer of podcasts myself because I do a lot of walking to try and keep myself fit. I just love podcasting. But there are small groups of people, but especially in the AI space, people I’ve noticed there’s a lot… There’s a few people that are highly intelligent that were in venture capital, in business. I’ve noticed there’s a few people that are highly intelligent that were in venture capital, in business. I’ve noticed there’s a lot of people that are I’ve never really been in the technical side of AI, and they tend to be very upbeat. There’s also heads of AI laboratories like Gemini, Perplexity, They are pushing their book in some ways, but I think they’re… But then there’s people that got a lot of experience with AI, and they’re quite negative on how far we can get large learning models. I’ve never known a period where there’s people I’ve followed who are totally giving contradictory messages. I I mean, so wide for one another that there is no plausibility. They don’t seem to be lying, and they don’t seem to have an obvious book of business that they’re pushing, but their positions are so contradictory on the same data that it’s mind-blowing, basically.
[00:50:25.060] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s something I’ve observed. Over to you, Well, now I’m confused.
[00:50:31.820] – Kurt von Ahnen
Am I supposed to talk about who my people are?
[00:50:36.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, yeah, maybe you maybe give us a couple of people that you follow, because I know you got to be off in a minute. He’s very busy, Steven. He’s very booked up.
[00:50:47.640] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it’s interesting. I mean, WP Tuts to me is incredibly insightful and some of the information he shares. So I like that. I used to listen to Jamie Poodlepress quite a bit, but ever since he did the thing with… Ever since it switched its direction, I haven’t. And then I’m an etch consumer, so I listen to a lot of the etch stuff because I got to figure out what the heck I’m doing with that tool anyway. My learning curve on etch was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be, so I made a crazy assumption and paid for it and then realized I had to learn a lot. So yeah, that really puts it into a nutshell for me, Jonathan, because you and I do so much content content together that we have to study up show notes and product reviews and stuff for that. So it soaks up the time.
[00:51:36.870] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you do. But no, I do the ideas and get everything set up. So I think we have a diversion of labor.
[00:51:48.300] – Steven Sauder
I think a part of it is what you were saying, Jonathan, or even what you were saying, Kurt, is just people’s thoughts and opinions have changed really fast, and they keep changing really pretty fast. From people that were following, they were saying one thing, and now there’s very pro-AI and then negative AI, and all of a sudden, they’ve switched or they have aligned with this person, and then all of a sudden, they’ve killed ties with that person. Now they’re aligning with this thought and this person over here. And I think that I’ve just gotten really tired of it. And so that’s probably why I don’t follow a lot of people. There’s just so much noise and so much movement. And I would rather just take a little bit of a breath and slow things down a a little bit, which maybe means I’m a little bit behind on things. But I think with where things are right now, moving a little bit slower is almost advantageous, even from a political standpoint. The political environment and what’s happening is changing so quickly that it’s almost impossible to make really solid and good bets based on current information because it can change so fast.
[00:52:58.460] – Steven Sauder
One of our clients used tons of their cash to purchase a ton of parts from China before the tariffs would go into place. And at various times this year, he was like, I’ve made the best decision. This was so good for our business. And then other times this year, he was like, I made the worst decision. I should have kept that cash flow free. And that’s where we’re finding ourselves, because we’re in the sea-sawing of just AI changing every day it feels like. And from a political standpoint, what rules and laws and trade agreements and stuff changing all the time so rapidly that trying to keep up feels exhausting. And I think almost playing things a little bit more conservatively allows us to just create a little breathing room and maybe make some more thoughtful decisions.
[00:53:54.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Are you okay to do some bonus content for 10, 15 minutes or do you have to be off? Yeah, sure. That’d be great. I know we’ve got to round it up because Kurt’s got to be off. So, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kurt?
[00:54:08.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, for a personal connection, it would just be LinkedIn because I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen there. I’m easy to find. And then for business, it’s Manana Nomas on all the channels.
[00:54:17.200] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And Steven, my beloved former co-host, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what your agency is up to, Steven?
[00:54:27.770] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, hustlefish. Com, if you want to check out the agency, and then LinkedIn, if you want to check out me. Although there are a lot of Steven Souders out there, so try to match this ugly mug to the one you see on LinkedIn.
[00:54:40.920] – Jonathan Denwood
I always loved the agency name, Hustlefish. I thought that was a fantastic name. All right, we’re going to round it up now, folks. We will be back next week. It’s our roundtable show. Also, we’ve got the big boss coming on the show in February. We’ve got Matt, Matt, Marenweg coming back on the show for an interview about AI. It should be a great discussion. It’s really interesting to see where WordPress in the age of AI is going. I’m sure Matt will have some great things to say about that. We will be back next week, folks. We’ll see you soon. Bye. We go into bonus content. We I was watching… I was having my coffee, I was watching a couple of YouTube stuff, and you got this thing about Alimator, how they’ve repositioned themselves. Obviously, their pricing and other factors, and it’s obviously they’re going for the agency market. They’re dropping the DIY market to some degree. Obviously, the growth there has diminished. I always thought Alimator was really a less a real hardcore DIY. It was a quasar professional tool that produced a lot of junky code. But at the time, it was the best thing unless you were going to do it all by hand.
[00:56:20.220] – Jonathan Denwood
So that was my opinion. I never liked the code it produced. It was divitus on steroids. I always thought something like beaver was better than that. I’ve gone more Gutenberg route with cadence and generate press. In your own agencies, in most agencies, it’s normally price. It depends on what you’re doing for the client. Are you mostly doing hand coding, or do you actually use a page builder, or does it vary depending on the budget.
[00:57:01.980] – Steven Sauder
It varies based on the budget and the project. We started really leaning into a bricks builder, though.
[00:57:08.680] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:57:09.720] – Steven Sauder
Thomas. I have been really enjoying using bricks builder. I think It’s one of the better builders we’ve used. There’s a lot out there these days, so I haven’t used all of them, but we’ve really enjoyed leaning into that. We still have quite a few Elementor sites that we support, and we’ll develop some Elementor sites every once in a while. But yeah, it seems like Elementor has been trying to redefine who they are a little bit and getting a little bit more dev-centric. But I think that’s more has to do with just market share. It feels like maybe they’ve tapped out their market share on the DIY stuff. Really, the next step for them is, how do you get agencies that are controlling 50 sites, 100 sites, a thousand sites?
[00:57:54.820] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you’re not only seeing that in the WordPress space. You see that with Wix, with their Wix Studio influencing the SEO crowd, which I’ve become fanatical about SEO and how I market my own business. You’re using Bricks. What’s your opinion about Gutenberg? Because on my own site, on a couple of properties, I’m using now Cadence WP, and I quite like it now. I know quite a few people also to use Generate Press. I’m not too sure about full-site editing, but Kirk really likes it, so he’s into Ollie, and I think that’s great. Then you got what Divi is doing with Divi 5. So you, as an agency, have kept a bit of distance from Gutenberg then. Is that correct?
[00:58:54.120] – Steven Sauder
We tried leaning into Gutenberg and using Gutenberg, but ultimately, What happened is that you still have to add various plugins to get Gutenberg to do what you really want Gutenberg to do. And so we came to the conclusion that, you know what? It’s easier just using a page builder tool instead of Gutenberg as your page builder, right? To build the sites that are not trying to be this weird in between DIY and dev friendly stuff. And that’s what Gutenberg is right now, it feels. It’s like a Gutenberg base level is very DIY. You can add some plugins, add some more stuff, then you can add other plugins, make it much more dev-focused. And so we just lost faith maybe in the Gutenberg project a little bit. That’s why we just moved- Do you think that experience is not your particular experience?
[00:59:59.350] – Jonathan Denwood
You sense that a lot of agencies feel that way?
[01:00:03.680] – Steven Sauder
I think Gutenberg never quite developed into what Gutenberg was supposed to be partially due to all the turbulence in the WordPress space these days. I think that the picture that was painted for what Gutenberg was going to be, I don’t think we’ve ever gotten there.
[01:00:30.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you think that some of this is trying to be a tool for somebody that doesn’t really… Trying to be a Squarespace, but also be a tool that can be used by professionals and by agencies. Is that possible, really, anyway? Is that the fundamental thing that you can have one tool that can be used on such a spectrum spectrum of experience which we touched in our main interview? Is that part of the problem?
[01:01:10.320] – Steven Sauder
That’s a good question. I think trying to be too many things to too many people is always a challenging thing. I think one of the big things, too, is that it’s not only is it it’s trying to be something that developers can use and something that DIY-ers can use, but it’s also trying to be open source. And it’s also trying to be heavily controlled by a single organization. And it’s also trying to convince a lot of other organizations to put dollars and time into it as well. And I think WordPress as a whole is struggling, and has always struggled with all of these different variables that people are trying to put onto WordPress and what it’s supposed to be, specifically like Gutenberg right now since that was supposed to be in full-site editing, which was supposed to be the big new thing in WordPress and push it to the next level. But I think all of those competing interests have muddied the water and have caused, I think, more frustration, at least for me in working with Gutenberg. I know some people that love Gutenberg and will only build things in Gutenberg, and that’s great.
[01:02:20.920] – Steven Sauder
I think just from who we are as an agency and who I am, I like more opinionated approaches and things instead of things that feel half baked, something that feels fully baked by a dev team, versus when you are using Gutenberg and adding plugins, you end up having various settings, various features in different places in a way that just has caused frustration for me.
[01:02:47.450] – Jonathan Denwood
So you haven’t been tempted to join the Edge bandwagon then?
[01:02:54.640] – Steven Sauder
No, I haven’t, but I actually don’t know very much about it. I should probably- Kevin doesn’t Kevin doesn’t like me very much.
[01:03:02.890] – Jonathan Denwood
But I don’t like Kevin, but he doesn’t like me very much. But there we go.
[01:03:07.320] – Steven Sauder
I do like some of Kevin’s stuff. Because Kevin is the one that does ACSS, right? Is that correct?
[01:03:17.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, he’s got some plugins. Yeah.
[01:03:20.220] – Steven Sauder
Yeah. I think one of the big reasons why I haven’t dived into Edge is just because it’s so new, and I think it needs some some time to mature a little bit. From the very little quick video that I saw on it, it looks like it had some cool ideas, but I have seen enough WordPress projects start and not get to where they need to be to just be an early bandwagon person. This goes back to, I feel like I’m just in the season of life right now where I’m just trying to move a little bit slower. And I think there’s a lot of value in moving slower than just hopping from one platform to the to the next platform to the next platform. It’s probably me just getting old at the end of the day.
[01:04:05.980] – Jonathan Denwood
If you think you’re old, God knows what that says about me. But I think for some of you are my age. I’m reasonably well preserved, so I’m trying to keep it that way as long as possible. Desperately trying to keep that, but before I just descend into absolute old age. As long as I don’t end up a certain president, I’ll be okay, I think. But it is interesting. Where do you think WordPress in the agency space is going to be in 18 months? Do you think it’s going to be much the same. And do you think… When I spoke to Matt, Matt, and Wag last time before we went live, both me and Kurt got the impression that Matt is committed to WordPress and he’s extremely passionate about it. I think there’s some things that he’s done that I wouldn’t agree with, but on the other hand, the essence of what he was saying, I actually do agree. I think the idea that you could get hosting companies, especially hosting companies that have certain ownership, to really invest. I think, realistically, the only organization that’s going to fundamentally invest in WordPress is Automatic. For that to continue and to increase, it’s really important that Automatic is highly successful.
[01:05:46.780] – Jonathan Denwood
I think Automatic has some very profitable elements, but I think in some ways it’s also a little bit lost. In essence, do you agree with what I just outlined, or do you have a different perspective?
[01:06:03.160] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, I think WordPress as a whole got insanely big. The amount of websites that ran WordPress or that currently run WordPress is crazy. And I think that the idea that you could keep up that market share and increase that market share is the probability of that, I think, is pretty small. I think people sometimes look at WordPress and saying WordPress getting smaller is a bad thing. I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think that WordPress is an amazing tool that’s out there that a lot of people can use and has added a ton of good. But there are more tools out there today than there were 15 years ago, than there were 20 years ago. The tools are getting better for more specific I think WordPress, as long as Matt keeps focusing in on- Can I…
[01:07:07.820] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not being rude. Can I just interrupt there? Yeah. But I think it’s linked, which you express so coherently and clear in the main part of the interview, this ability to customize to the customer needs rather than the customer’s business logic, internal business logic, being able to adapt WordPress to the internal business logic. I think it’s the great strength. But also the community, almost not only the library of plugins, but just the general community around WordPress at different levels, where I think AI, even if large learning models, you only see some improvements, but not general intelligence, which I think is pushing it a bit far myself, but what do I know? But I think even slight improvements is going to take quite a period to get the true value that’s probably there, especially around… I see with Claude Coding, I see somebody that has experience with Coding, they’re going to be prototyping, pushing something out the door. I think what I’ve witnessed and seen that it will make experience people much more productive. I think the pinch point, which was engineering around projects, is going to diminish, but that pinch point is just going to move somewhere else in the cycle.
[01:08:58.180] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you touched… I think it was that you touched it, that you felt burnt out with all the… Not burnt out is really quite the word, but all this stuff that’s thrown at you. I haven’t quite worked out where the pinch point is. Also, I think WordPress has got some major strengths. Just to finish off our chat, how would you respond? Because I think I’m just given you two very large questions, haven’t I?
[01:09:33.880] – Steven Sauder
Yeah, well, okay. Say those two questions again in a more succinct way.
[01:09:39.340] – Jonathan Denwood
That would be, as you know, Steve-Impossible?
[01:09:42.580] – Steven Sauder
I can take a stab answering them then.
[01:09:45.880] – Jonathan Denwood
Here, go on, just have a staff. Just deal with my madness. I think you can see that I’m struggling, but I think you also can see that there’s something, hopefully, that there’s something to what I’m trying to explain.
[01:09:58.340] – Steven Sauder
I I think that the future for WordPress is still bright. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere. I don’t think it’s going to diminish in a meaningful way, where no one’s using it anymore. What I think the best value that I’ve seen added to WordPress is when automatic has come in in their very opinionated moments and created the best thing. For example, their creation of WP Cloud, which is a hosting platform. We’ve switched to using pressable as our hosting. And I’ve used tons of hosts over the years. I’ve ran my own servers. I have been on WP engine. I have done GoDaddy. I have done from the best to the worst. But being on a system that is integrated so strongly, it’s owned by automatic. Pressable is an automatic company. It has smoothed out some of the rough stuff that we have experienced in a way that is amazingly beautiful. And what I would love to see is Matt making some more opinionated choices on the best way to move WordPress, because that allows other people to fall in line and say, okay, this is the direction we’re going. Let’s all pull in that direction.
[01:11:23.620] – Steven Sauder
I think Gutenberg had moments of clarity about it. But then there was this big moment where he’s like, “It’s up to the community to build it and make it happen.” And then the community had a bunch of opinions on how it should work. And some of those opinions, I think, were very weird. Some of them were great, though. And I think Matt has an incredible ability to listen to others and make decisions. I think there are times when I wish he would make stronger decisions to lead a community forward, instead of just sitting in this place and spinning wheels a bit. And people get madder at him for doing that. That’s It’s an opinionated thing. A lot of people would not agree with me. I know there are a lot of people who are not fans of Matt himself. But I have found, in my time as a developer and building sites, that I appreciate systems that have opinions on how they’re going to work, how they’re going to function, and where they’re going to move. When it is just a hodgepodge, that’s when I find myself getting the most frustrated.
[01:12:31.360] – Steven Sauder
I think we’ve just gone through a period where WordPress was in this weird, unstable, shaky, what-is-Gutenberg? state. What is it supposed to be? I’m hoping that the next season of WordPress, the next 18 months, the next five years, we start getting more direction and more opinionated on this is what WordPress is supposed to be, and this is how we’re going to build it.
[01:12:54.040] – Jonathan Denwood
What’s your response? Which I made a terrible effort, but let’s clarify. I think the cost of restraint in software was engineering talent. I think that pinch point is going to diminish because I think things like Claude Coding, it’s very early days, isn’t it? But I think you are going to be able to produce prototypes, changes much quicker. You are going to need people who know about security and best practices, and who will check the code. But I think Something like Claude and other systems are going to become a personal assistant if you’re a coder, and a lot of coding is very time-consuming and not that productive. I see the pinch point from engineering moving to another, the bottleneck, the thing that restrains something from being a success or not moving. Is that making more sense?
[01:14:02.800] – Steven Sauder
Yeah. I think we’re going to see a huge efficiency boost from AI. We’re already seeing that, and it removes many constraints, allowing one developer to become way more efficient than they ever were before. I’ve been talking to some people about customer service stuff, and they’re using AI to respond to all their customer service tickets. Well, I mean, AI is writing a draft, and a person is reviewing it and editing it before it’s sent. AI isn’t actually sending anything. A human is sending it. But just by having AI draft the response and a human being who’s really good at service editing that draft, their efficiency increases 4X. So, essentially, one person can do what four people used to do. I think it’s the same thing with code. If a developer is good, they can review what the AI is doing, tweak it, adjust it to fit and function, and debug it incredibly fast, in a way they never could before. And build things efficiently. But you still need the underlying direction of what we are building and why we are building it?
[01:15:11.850] – Steven Sauder
And what is the ultimate goal with Gutenberg? Or what is the ultimate goal with WordPress? Just like from a customer service standpoint, what is the goal of the customer service team? Is it to resolve tickets as fast as possible? Is it to resolve tickets in as few conversations as possible? Is it to have the most satisfied customers as possible? You have to choose which metrics are most important to align a team behind. And as long as I think Matt can set that for WordPress, and what we are actually caring about right now, I think there are some really cool things that could come from that.
[01:15:48.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think we’re going to wrap it up, but you put that so well, Steven. But I think what you want to avoid is like Benny from Salesforce, where you sacrifice 4,000 sales and support personnel, and then three to six months later, say, probably that wasn’t such a great idea. You just want to avoid that, don’t you?
[01:16:08.200] – Steven Sauder
I think that goes into the bucket of making changes too fast. Make changes more slowly. Think about it. The world’s moving fast, but we don’t have to move at that speed. We can move at whatever speed that we feel is right for the company or our clients.
[01:16:24.180] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, Stephen, you dealt with my madness really well. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you. You have to come back later in the year. Hopefully, you agree. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation as usual. We’re going to wrap it up now, folks. We will be back next week for our Roundtable show. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Bye.
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