The Biggest Challenges & Opportunities For WordPress in 20.26

Discover WordPress challenges & opportunities in 2026. From AI integration to security—what’s shaping the platform’s future?

In this insightful video, we delve into the biggest challenges and exciting opportunities awaiting WordPress in 2026. As technology evolves, so do the demands on this popular platform. Discover the trends shaping its future, the competition it faces, and how you can optimize your use of WordPress. Stay ahead of the curve and equip yourself with essential knowledge.

With Special Guest: Raitis Sevelis, Head of Product at WPBakery

This Week’s Sponsors

Kinta: Kinta

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:00.660] -Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 997. In this episode, we’ve got the pleasure of Rances Salas, Head of Product at WP Bakery. Probably totally butchered his name, but I did my best. I did my best, so you’re probably used to it. Should be a great show. We’re going to discuss what it’s like to run a plugin that powers many WordPress websites. The inside track, what’s that like? Rance’s story, how he got into WordPress. Do you think you can give us a quick 10- to 15-second intro? When we come back from our break, we’ll probably delve into more detail about your background.

[00:01:03.740] – Raitis Sevelis

Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Raitis. I’ve been a head of product at WFP Bakery for 11 and a half years now. Okay, happy to be here.

[00:01:18.980] -Jonathan Denwood

It was fantastic. You agreed to come on the show. I’ve got my fantastic co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

[00:01:27.920] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, sure, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von. I own an agency called Mañana Nomas, and work directly with the great folks over at WP Tonic.

[00:01:36.240] -Jonathan Denwood

Like I say, we’re going to discuss Rans’ background and what it’s like to run a plugin that powers many websites, plus his views on AI and how it’s going to change the plugin environment. It should be a fantastic show. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Also, I want to point out that we got some fantastic special offers from the sponsors. Plus, we created a list of the best WordPress plugins and services for power users, freelancers, or small agency owners. You can get all these free goodies and special offers by visiting WP-Tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. So, practice, can you tell us how you got into the world of web development or agencies, and how that led to your involvement with WP Bakery? Hey.

[00:03:01.500] – Raitis Sevelis

So I was studying for my master’s together with the wife of our CEO, Michael. And basically, she introduced me to her husband. We started to discuss things, talk business. And at that point, I was running my own local agency. To be fair, I didn’t know much about WordPress or WP Bakery. And yeah, he was actually looking for someone who would take care of the product management, marketing, customer success, a bit of user interface, user experience, basically, who would sit on those many chairs. And that dynamics, I really enjoy it. And yeah, we somehow came toan agreement. At that time, it was almost 12 years ago. I barely remember myself before WordPress. Now, there were 10,000 customers for WEP bakery. Now, there are around 6 million websites powered by WP Bakery. And yeah, I still sit on that- I’m shaking my head, not negative.

[00:04:24.040] -Jonathan Denwood

It just blows my mind that WP Bakery is supporting almost six million websites. Do you still remember that figure?

[00:04:36.100] – Raitis Sevelis

If you transfer it into a percentage, it’s like three % of the internet, the active internet, which is amazing. Basically, I was facing the same problems the agency folks had before joining WP Bakery. So, here’s how I can help resolve those issues. So smoothly transition into that. Other than that, yeah, that’s probably the story short. But I think it’s hard for me to separate WP Bakery from WordPress. So it always went together.

[00:05:20.520] -Jonathan Denwood

So how long did it take before you saw some explosive growth?

[00:05:27.320] – Raitis Sevelis

It has always been pretty steep, steep growth. There were certain features that were moving us into right direction. The API, which is both a blessing and a curse, is really open. People love it for the ability to customize and optimize things to their liking, and it goes beyond content elements. We see people completely adjusting the user interface there. And you are looking at some version, and it’s like, what is it? It’s like, oh, it’s WP bakery. Yeah? And yeah, so that’s one thing. And then, of course, the grid builder, which focuses on developing archive pages and archive page items. And yeah, of course, the add-ons, the seams that basically integrated the product, helped to grow us a lot. And a few partnerships with hosting companies. By the way, we partner with workers. Com. So to give their usersthe opportunity to get WP battery out of the box.

[00:06:51.200] -Jonathan Denwood

Right. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:06:54.300] – Kurt von Ahnen

I find the whole subject incredibly interesting, actually. So if I think of WordPress as for hobbyists, and then I think about it as for professionals. WordPress is a platform that anyone from all walks of life can use, right? And so, if we isolate the conversation to the professional market, I see people who are, “Hey, I’m full site editing,” or “I’m using the Gutenberg block editor.”

[00:07:20.400] – Raitis Sevelis

I’m just going to stay within the WordPress editor, or I’m going to leverage the extra tools and capabilities blocks for a page builder. Where do you think, realistically, for professionals in the first quarter of 2026, where do you think the professional finds himself, and how do they make their decision on what to use? I think that everyone has their tech stack. It’s as if we’re talking about professionals. So I think they are looking for something that blends seamlessly with the rest of their stack. So this is one of the most important things, and it’s often overlooked by many WordPress products. We tend to, let’s say, 2025, what everyone was thinking, we need to add an AI feature to the product. That’s the main thing that we should do. And now at the beginning of the year, we start to realize, okay, it’s not enough. So people start to look back at the basics, to some extent. Ensure how things work together. How, I don’t know, WP Bakery works with ACF, how it works with Wukomerts, and how, I don’t know, Wukomerts works with Ninja Forbes as an example. So the smooth integration actually ensures that it is easy to use your product because your product is…

[00:08:58.200] – Raitis Sevelis

We tend to think that we are so big and so important and so on. In reality, regular user and also professionals often, they don’t care that much. I use iPhone, but I don’t know when the next release of iOS is going to be. I don’t care, to be fair. Okay, if I start to develop applications, then I would maybe pay a bit more attention. But still, we We tend to think that our products are very important while they are just a piece of puzzle for the rest.

[00:09:37.400] – Kurt von Ahnen

You mentioned something interesting in your answer, and I want to explore this a little bit. No one cares what version the iPhone is, right? No one cares what version on Android there, unless they’re building within that space. But I’ve noticed even at the customer level, when you start talking about WordPress, people tend to ask more like functional or integral questions about your tech stack or what you’re building. Whereas if I’m going to vibe code something, hey, I vibe coded this, right? It’s like boom, it’s like it’s magical, right? But for some reason, WordPress always seems to have that little extra layer of scrutiny from either the professionals in the space or even the clients that are the customers. Do you have any idea why that is? Is it just because they can or?

[00:10:27.240] – Raitis Sevelis

I think that WordPress It has always been promoted in a way that you can customize it. There is a plugin for everything and you can extend it and so on and so on. And I was like, okay, there is actually lack of marketing in WordPress. Everyone is talking about it. But at the same time, on the personal level, we just talk about it. You can do things to WordPress, and people are used to that. So it’s like, if I want to go a bit technical, a bit more into customization, basically, If I can basically achieve things that I cannot do with, let’s say, Bix or Squarespace, I will go with WordPress.

[00:11:10.800] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan, over to you.

[00:11:12.860] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, thanks. In the last, let’s say, 18 months, what have been a couple of the biggest challenges that WP Bakery’s faced that you feel that you can share? Maybe give the audience a little peak, pushing the curtain away and seeing what a plugin with the amount of customers that you’ve got, some of the problems that you’re faced and how you overcame them.

[00:11:42.520] – Raitis Sevelis

I think there are actually two directions, two challenges, I would say. The first one is how to get people from outside the WordPress to start using WordPress. That’s the first That’s the thing that we have been fighting with. I think it’s somehow related also to the question what Kurt asked about the technical thing. Again, something that we and Other WordPress businesses have often ignored. When we talk about customer onboarding, most of WordPress plug-in, Siemens, or services, they are focusing on Their part. Like, okay, I’m going to show you how amazing my user interface is, how amazing my user experience is. But again, you are just a piece of WordPress puzzle. Somehow, we don’t pay enough attention to educating people how to use WordPress. And again, it all comes down to all the collaborations and partnerships. And we expect people to start using our product without helping them to get around WordPress. And that has been a challenge for many, I believe. And this is why we see that WordPress is… It’s growing, but growing slowly. We see that other competitors are starting to get some traction. And yeah, so we started to think about that a lot.

[00:13:16.580] – Raitis Sevelis

And basically, I’m happy to know that WordPress is also thinking about that. There’s this WordPress Foundation programs related to education. One of them is WordPress credits. So we recently We join that as a sponsor. So it basically helps students to learn WordPress while they are taking actually their internships within the university. So at least there is a direction. Another thing is more of a product thing is how you introduce changes. So it’s six million websites. We cannot I know that there are a lot of suggestions. Hey, you should just go and sound like, overwrite something and change everything. You cannot do like a lumbar jack. You cannot go into the forest and just start chopping trees. So we respect that people have websites and they have other things to deal with. Yet they don’t want to work maybe on their website just because we decided to rewrite something. So every change for us is something that you need to reconsider. You need to ensure backward compatibility, the testing, just to make sure that there are plenty of hot fixes, the businesses don’t stop. But yeah, so the whole 2025, we have been rewriting Some of the core functions related to drag and drop experience, related to user interface experience, attributes.

[00:14:52.800] – Raitis Sevelis

So we plan to introduce that actually in somewhere around one and a half months. So So everything we’ve done in 2025 will basically come live pretty soon in 2026. We’ll see. As I said, that’s a challenge. So till this moment, we ensure that everything is working. We are also collaborating with the add-on authors to ensure that everything is working on their side and so on. So pretty excited about that and a bit afraid.

[00:15:26.320] -Jonathan Denwood

But you’ve got… There’s There’s a lot of page builders out there, isn’t it? Where do you think you position WP bakery? How do you attempt to position it? You’ve got Cadence, you’ve got Breakdance, you’ve got various page builders aimed at the professional market, the agent more that are aimed at the do it themselves, people. Now, look at… I don’t… That would be interesting question. Obviously, it’s tricky because you don’t want… If I was in your shoes, I don’t want to speak bad about a competitor, but I like to just get some broad insights from you about Alimator. They had their refresh about a month ago. They seem to be trying to pitch it at the more professional market. Can you give some insight? You must have observed that, I would have thought. What was your impressions about what they were doing?

[00:16:50.300] – Raitis Sevelis

To be completely sure and comment, you need to understand their whole strategy, where they’re So they don’t reveal that, there is definitely whatever they are doing, there is a reason, specific reason for that. If I have to guess where they are going, they probably at some point want to decouple themselves from WordPress. That’s pretty much my opinion. So I think that’s also the reason why they are trying to attract developers. Because if we look on the web flow, maybe what they want strategically is to repeat to keep this success of Webflow, where Webflow is able to attract a certain amount of developers that are working and delivering projects. So at that point, where they have enough user base of such developers, agencies, freelancers, basically, I suppose that maybe they will be ready to decouple themselves from WordPress a bit more. If you look on their website, a new website, you need to scroll somewhere around 60% until your first time see WordPress mentioned. That states something.

[00:18:21.980] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. That’s fantastic. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:18:27.180] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, you mentioned AI a couple of questions ago, and that’s the next thing on our list of things to talk about. I agree with you. It seemed like everybody was in a rush to try and integrate some AI widget or field or something into their WordPress. It just seemed like it was just a craze. It seemed a little unhinged to me at some level, right? And then you had mentioned maybe people are going back to a more organic approach or a back to basics approach. But I’m curious. Our question says, do you think AI will semi destroy the WordPress professional marketplace in the next couple of years? But we’re asking, how deep do you think AI is going to go? And do you really feel it’s going to cut into agency work, or do you think it’s actually going to grow agency demand? I mean, there’s people on all sides of this conversation.

[00:19:25.040] – Raitis Sevelis

Yeah, so AI topic, it is still hot and it’s going to be hot. Yeah, what I probably didn’t mention about myself is that I do have some free time from WP bakery. And at that time, I also read lectures at Regan Nordic University. Also to MBA students, and I have a topic, artificial intelligence in economics and business. So I talk about AI a lot. So first of all, I don’t really like the word thread. Yeah, it’s not a thread. It’s an opportunity, I would say. But we need to understand it’s a general purpose technology, AI. We can compare it with electricity. And it was, I think, the second industrial revolution, somewhere like 1980, 1920, when electricity was majorly adopted. It changes everything. And it will change the way we live, we work, we think. Also, the new generation that is Kids being born now, they won’t know the life without AI. And I would say that wherever you are, in WordPress, outside WordPress, you just constantly need to push yourself towards thinking, can I apply AI here? How would I apply AI here? Just, for example, from the business perspective, to stay competitive. There is no other way around.

[00:21:16.340] – Raitis Sevelis

And why actually many people use thread? Because we are, as human, we are afraid of what we actually don’t know. And we We think that we are all that smart and sexy, but we still have no idea about where it leads us. We are at the very beginning of AI. And there is like, okay, if AI will get, we expect this year, it could get as smart as an individual actually being capable of the same things. Okay, so it can overgrow humanity. What happens next? We all watch the movies related to that. And I think this is what frightens us.

[00:22:05.840] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I’m just amazed at the three of us smart, sexy guys having this conversation. I’m curious because I have a saying that says, we always have to find the opportunities within the obstacles. During the pandemic, I was so sure that everybody was going to panic. And if you just kept your head straight and look for opportunities, you would find an opportunity somewhere. I feel that way about AI. But if you feel that way about AI, you said part of your answer was, every time you do something, you need to consider, is this something that I could do with AI? Can you, since you talk on the subject, can you walk us through what that really looks like? I go through my spam every day in my email. Should I be thinking, how can I have AI eradicate my spam? Or Or is it like that? Or do I think of AI like my virtual assistant? Or do I think of it more in terms of building products with it?

[00:23:09.160] – Raitis Sevelis

I would say you should start thinking about the shortcuts. What are the smaller things that can be replaced by AI within your process? Then slowly, when you see several things being replaced, you can see how to automate the whole process. As an example, I think it was a few months I was talking to one student, and she’s working as an accountant. And basically, accountants are actually considered one of the first who will disappear, vanished because of AI. But we were starting discussion like, Okay, so how do we apply AI? And she was telling, Okay, I have a small boutique company. The process is pretty straightforward. And I’m just taking the invoices, adding them, and making sure that the balance fits. I was like, There is no place where can I add AI? And I’m asking here, so how do you add invoices? She was like, Oh, While I’m typing. Why don’t you just take a photo, upload it to AI, and tell, Hey, prepare it, like digitalize it, and prepare in a certain form. And wherever the invoice is, it can prepare you in specific form that you can instantly upload to the system. And it’s a small tweak.

[00:24:35.330] – Raitis Sevelis

And it’s very simple. But instead of manually typing, you save tons of time. So half of the day, she just spends digitalizing things. It’s pretty obvious. And it’s not that AI is taking your job away.

[00:24:54.980] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s helping you do more of the job.

[00:24:57.880] – Raitis Sevelis

She has to not to do the job you probably don’t want to do. That’s also the case.

[00:25:03.660] – Kurt von Ahnen

From a very introspective point of view, and especially through the work I do with Jonathan, I can see that I’m a person that uses AI to help create a lot of content. I’m a content creator, and it really helps me creatively to open up and unlock certain things in my mind and make better material. But then I think that that’s what a lot of people do with AI. It’s like they pigeonhole it into this one vertical And so I haven’t leveraged AI to pick up a bunch of tasks out of my day. I should probably consider that. I’ve used it to generate content, but I haven’t used it to take the burdensome stuff off my schedule every day. And I bet you there’s a lot of opportunity there.

[00:25:48.100] – Raitis Sevelis

I think with the development of AI, we will see more and more opportunities. So right now, the agents and their capabilities Also related to the web, so MCP, it’s a bit limited. I tried the new browser by OpenAI. It’s like the agent mode. It’s a cool thing. You can give it the instructions and search something on the sky scanner, the best light, and go drink coffee, and it works smoothly. At the same time, I tried the agent with the local airline went to get some coffee, came back, well, zero results. It struggled. It somehow started to look for language switcher, and that’s it. Those things I think development will give us also more opportunities there. Nice.

[00:26:51.300] – Kurt von Ahnen

Thanks. I appreciate it.

[00:26:52.640] – Raitis Sevelis

Jonathan?

[00:26:53.880] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think we go for our middle break. When we come back, I think there’s a couple of things I want to discuss around AI in the second half of the show. But I think it’s a good place for us to go for our middle break, and we will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a really fantastic discussion about WordPress AI and a lot of other subjects. But before we go into the second part of the show, folks, I just want to point out that if you’re looking for a great specialized WordPress hosting provider, why not you look at WP Tonic? Basically, we specialize in membership learning management systems and community-focused websites. We have our agency Freelancer program. You get some great affiliate packages with us, but we’re much more. We’re your technical partner in your build-out, and we provide some of the best plugins on the market as part of our hosting package. You can get more details by going over to wp-tonic. Com/partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. Let’s build something special together. I just wanted to add some more to the AI discussion. I think my own journey with it, I have got enormous amount of value in certain areas in content similar to Kurt about producing content.

[00:28:40.580] -Jonathan Denwood

I do use it to write written content, but it’s always edited. It tends to be a bit out of date or it’s recommendations. Some of it recommendations I totally disagree with, so I I have to change it. Alitas, I found it to be a bit of a time waste, to be truthful. Sometimes I could make an image quicker than asking whatever AI platform to make an image. I find I can waste more time. But I think what we’ve seen recently is AI agents, isn’t it? It’s semi-autonomous agents that go out and actually do work for us and then talk to other agents and Claude, what’s your view on autonomous agents? Because I think some of examples are interesting, but also a lot of it is a little bit overblown. I find it very difficult to find a realistic place. I think it’s What’s your own views about these autonomous agents?

[00:30:19.660] – Raitis Sevelis

Yeah. I think that, as you said, that some of them are like, bloated a little We are still in the early stage. My experiments till that point show that, okay, they are slow, they make mistakes. If you expect something big from them, something like that you would really give a process away. So maybe for some smaller, simpler things, they They can be pretty valuable. Of course, we’re talking about first-level customer support. That would be a simple chatbot, but we can extend it with a bit of a technical part. But again, that’s just at this point, there are speculations. I think that to have that value, we We really need to ensure that agents are able to navigate across the web. So websites need to be ready. This is where we probably can get more value out of it than that they’re be such struggles.

[00:31:48.760] -Jonathan Denwood

Because also we’ve seen with some AI website building platforms like Lovable, You’ve also seen it in Framer. I think Lovable and Framer are the two that I think have the… I think Framer isn’t as Exactly like Lovable, but they are introducing more AI elements, but definitely Lovable, and there’s two others, but I think Lovable is on the lead. Really, interesting, and it’s early days, but do you think, do you think their big lovables are a bigger threat to Wix or Squarespace than WordPress, or do you think Lovable and similar platforms are a threat to everybody? Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, Squarespace, or more professional web platforms.

[00:33:00.000] – Raitis Sevelis

I like how you framed it. I guess that platforms like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, should definitely be more afraid of lovable and similar products because they share the same audience. Again, for WordPress, of course, there is a portion of people that are somewhere in between. But what Kurt That’s what I said. When we talk about WordPress, we tend to instantly get a bit more technical. And here we actually believe in human oversight and a bit more customization. And we can see already that people are starting to complain that lovable actually at some point starts to give some patterns. The layout seems to be really like, Okay, this is lovable generated. So it lacks maybe uniqueness at scale. So we haven’t heard that about WordPress. Okay, from time to time, you visit the website and you see like, Okay, that’s the template. Yeah, I saw that on on forest. But overall, we will see, and we see already different other integrations, like AI integrations within WordPress. But the question is like, yes, the What AI features and capabilities do we add to WordPress and why? And for example, we always question whenever it comes to AI within WP Bakery, we instantly question, is it helping professionals?

[00:34:50.620] – Raitis Sevelis

Because I’ve seen some of the products, I don’t want to name any, but they They aim to work like to be for professionals, but at the same time, introduce AI features telling, Hey, this AI will replace developer. My question is, what do you expect? Promote to developers the feature that will replace them and hope that they will use it and promote it and give it to their clients. You actually need to make sure that your AI solutions help your target audience, the user base that you care about.

[00:35:35.600] -Jonathan Denwood

There’s been this divide for a while, isn’t it, between somebody that works for a medium or large Fortune 500 company that wouldn’t really consider WordPress. It’s JavaScript, it’s JavaScript libraries, it’s custom coding, it’s It’s using React, it’s using one of the other popular JavaScript libraries. Then you got the medium small, semi-small Where freelancing, where most of the agency work comes from, that’s still surprisingly, in some way, I’ve been surprised how rebutt, rebutt, that’s It’s still dominated by WordPress, isn’t it? So I just, in some ways, I see this AI appealing to people that in some ways were that had turned their back on WordPress. But I think I’m waffling now. I’m just verbalizing what I’m thinking, basically. So I’m going to throw-Sorry.

[00:36:58.000] – Raitis Sevelis

Sorry. You actually You mentioned like, Fortune 500 companies. I think that’s a great example. I guess that those companies or the companies that work with Fortune 500 companies, probably like workers, VIP agencies or something. They are a bit more careful about introducing AI. If something goes wrong, who is responsible? And this is the AI legislation, regulations, and so on. You cannot blame AI. Ai as a client, to be fair, if the price is the one that fits me, I don’t care how you make it. I don’t want to know details. It’s like, I want it to work. It’s as simple as that. It’s like if we talk about the hosting, the best hosting is the only thing when you think about the hosting, it just when you see it on the statement that the monthly payment was done and that’s it. You don’t have to worry, nothing breaks, and that’s it. The same with the internet connection. I have internet provider at home, and it is working. I’ve never seen any problems there. Other companies are calling me and telling me, Hey, maybe you would love to switch to us and we will offer you the better pricing.

[00:38:23.600] – Raitis Sevelis

It’s like, Guys, the only time I remember about my internet provider is when you call me and and try to sell me something else. It is working, so I’m good.

[00:38:36.300] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:38:39.420] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’m laughing because I escaped California and I got to Kansas and I signed up for a high I need internet in Kansas, and it is by far the best internet service I’ve ever had in my life. It’s fast, it’s reliable. And to your point, yeah, it’s like, No, you can send me all the postcards, all the phone calls. I’m not switching. This thing just plain works. Gosh, let’s switch over. Let’s see if we can’t depress the audience a little bit. Give them some hope, right? Everyone’s had difficult periods. So I could point to the pandemic, right? I could point to, I gave up my company for a while and I worked corporate because I got lured away by a paycheck. And then, of course, the layoffs came and we had to start over from scratch again, right? What’s What’s a difficult period that you went through? And good or bad, what was the takeaway from it? How did it improve or educate you along the way?

[00:39:43.360] – Raitis Sevelis

Yeah, it was about the time when we were actually leaving the Envaro. It didn’t went that easily. They wanted us to stay, and we were thinking about introducing side product, and we started to deal with the trademarks.

[00:40:08.500] -Jonathan Denwood

Can you give us a bit of background about.?

[00:40:14.480] – Raitis Sevelis

Yeah. So WAP bakery has been available on Cote Canyon, Envato market for many, many years. And the limitations of the marketplace, we just organically outgrew the marketplace. And of Of course, we want to have more control over data to be used in marketing and so on, over the pricing as well. So we decided that, Okay, we need to start selling elsewhere. And at that time, we also were experimenting with a completely new version of the product. And we decided, okay, so what do we do with the product name and the branding? Because there was this, and Vato was pushing us and we had that new product. So we decided to rename the old product. So before it was named Visual Composer. And we decided, hey, let’s use the Visual Composer name for the new product, while for the old product, We will use WP bakery. And we thought, it’s a pretty simple thing. It’s like few emails to our clients and several blog posts around the community will basically explain everything. It’s been around six years since that moment. We are still from time to time dealing with the confusion. So this is what I talk that you tend to think that you are that important and you just spread the news and everything just grasped it.

[00:41:51.240] – Raitis Sevelis

And it’s like everyone is waiting for you to announce something. In reality, the majority never cares. And they skip it. And maybe it’s something really important. So we created a huge confusion with the naming. Basically, because of a lack of experience, I would say, and a bit of arrogance, probably as well. So it’s a mix of everything.

[00:42:20.320] – Kurt von Ahnen

I appreciate that. Thanks for the clarity and transparency. Jonathan?

[00:42:27.400] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, let’s talk If you could go back to the beginning of your career and you could have a little chat with yourself, what would you tell yourself? What would be a couple of insights or a little bit of advice that you would like to be able to tell yourself? You mentioned you met the founder of WP Bakery when you were both in college. Is there anything you like to tell yourself?

[00:43:02.060] – Raitis Sevelis

It’s like, okay, we all have been thinking about such things, apart from which stocks to buy, that you should invest more during the pandemic now, and all those things. To be fair, ideally, I don’t know; if the situation arises, you will probably think differently. But ideally, nothing. Because I would say to get the experience to be the person that I am today and to be able to judge things based on my experience, I need to experience all those things, all those failures, including deep branding issues, some other smaller things. The first divorce. All those things, the first divorce, all those, I think you just need to live them through to get that experience and to become the person that you are. And if I were to tell it something to my younger self, it might be: maybe that person won’t experience it, or how it will impact the rest of the land. They never know that. That’s a very philosophical question.

[00:44:26.780] -Jonathan Denwood

No, but I totally understand your logic. Before we wrap up the show, I’ve got another question. Obviously, I can’t remember straight off which Baltic country you’re based in, actually. Is it Latvia?

[00:44:41.960] – Raitis Sevelis

It’s Latvia. It’s in the very middle. We are often mixed with Lithuania. It’s like Slovenia and Slovakia.

[00:44:53.220] -Jonathan Denwood

You got Estonia, Latvia.

[00:44:56.140] – Raitis Sevelis

With them, it’s easier.

[00:44:58.400] -Jonathan Denwood

What is the tech like? What’s the tech community like in your part of the world? What’s the WordPress community like?

[00:45:14.660] – Raitis Sevelis

I would probably talk about the whole Baltic State, because if we take them separately, then Latvia has fewer than 2 million people. Estonia is the same. Lithuania is a bit more. But yeah, and size-wise, we are pretty small. So always been close. So I would say that community is there, like the WordPress community, but maybe it’s not that active. I think the Lithuanian community is currently more active, so other communities should follow suit. At the same time, we have many products from the Baltic States that are well recognized among WordPress users, and not only that. Blackwell. Then Patch Stack Hostinger. Those are just some, like Omnisum as well.

[00:46:28.700] -Jonathan Denwood

I understand because they’ve sponsored the show a couple of times. They’ve been a long-term sponsor. Hopefully, they will return someday, but they’re a great company. It’s just, why do you think so many technology companies have come from the Baltic States over the last 20 years? Was it an emphasis in the education system, or did people see opportunities and have the skills?

[00:46:58.860] – Raitis Sevelis

Yeah, of course, that’s the opportunities of getting out, becoming global, proving something. But if we talk about Estonia, for example, that’s probably a bit better example in terms of the government actually being strategic about IT and growth. And I think it’s six. I think Estonia actually has either six or eight unicorn companies. And we’re talking… And Germany, for example, has only four or let’s say six or eight. Germany has fewer unicorn companies compared to Estonia. And we’re talking about the country, about 2 million people. So this is where a strategic decision supported by government funding can get us.

[00:48:08.340] -Jonathan Denwood

All right, Enres. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the show. What’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:48:19.160] – Raitis Sevelis

They can reach me anywhere on various social networks. I’m probably a bit more active on LinkedIn now. I’m always happy to connect, chat with people, exchange ideas, and be open. That’s one of the reasons why I got into higher education. Communicating, sharing, giving back to society, and, of course, listening.

[00:48:49.480] -Jonathan Denwood

Fantastic. And Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:48:55.760] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, if he accepts my connection request, you could go to the right and add me as a connection on his LinkedIn, and I’d be under his connections there. I’m on LinkedIn all the time myself. LinkedIn is a great place to make that connection. Our company name is Manana Nomas. So manananomas. Com if it’s for business.

[00:49:11.840] -Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. We’ve got a special episode next week. Matt Mauwerk, the founder of Automatic, is going to be our guest. We’re going to be talking about all things WordPress and AI, and how he sees WordPress adapting. It should be a fantastic show. It should be an interesting show. So please join us live for that. And we’ve got some fantastic other guests during the month. We’ll see you soon, folks. Thanks. Bye.

[00:49:50.020] – Raitis Sevelis

Bye.

WP-Tonic & The Membership Machine Facebook Group

Why don’t you sign up for the Membership Machine Show & WP-Tonic Facebook group, where you can get all the best advice and support for building your membership or community website on WordPress?

Facebook Group