2020 End of Year Review

Welcome back to the Matt Report podcast, it’s the show for opinionated resilient business builders.

How’s that, “opinionated resilient business builders.”

Anyway, we’ll keep working on it, I like it and that’s what is leading us into the 2020 year in review!

1. Finding the Premise for the Matt Report

There’s 1.8 million podcasts out there and about 20 of them are about WordPress. You’d think that made for great odds, but not that many people actually care about WordPress at a global scale.

It’s a topic I’ve covered at length before — being a content creator in the WordPress space — you either do it for the love, or do it for the affiliate links.

But as I’ve labeled myself a content creator and an artist — the topic of just WordPress is less interesting to me — maybe even you.

So as I work out my premise — the show for opinionated resilient business builders — new guests and content will be produced.

I feel like I’ve been telling you this for a while now, at least ALL of 2020, and that’s update #1 — that’s where I’m at with the show.

I’ll continue to deliver interviews and solo episodes, with the occasional roundtable show. Some of the tools people are using to build businesses and websites these days are very intriguing. Webflow, Airtable, Notion, are all very exciting to me.

And to be honest, I think WordPress is moving in that direction.

Sponsorship will still be open and I’m happy to say that over the course of the year, I’ve raised over 2000 dollars for Big Orange Heart.

Side update to the update? December was insanely busy — and I will be working on the videos that people purchased from me in January. That effort raised a lot more money than I expected, but also created a lot more work!

2. Business5000

At the end of 2019, heading into 2020, I started shopping around my idea for the Business5000.

It is…was? an idea accelerator. I grew the email list of interested people to 100 and I felt like I could get the chips to fall where I needed them to — but then COVID hit mixed with a heap of social unrest in America and it was just a shitty time to launch something like this.

Plus, I didn’t want to. I lost the interest in all of it.

I still think it’s a strong idea, and creating a community of people that achieve results in a particular area is something I’d still like to create.

But for now, Business5000.com is shelved.

3. Easy Support Videos

You know, that plugin that sponsored the show!

We launched ESV back in 2016. Four years ago.

I’m a nontechnical product maker. It started with Drupal themes, then WordPress themes, then Conductor plugin for WordPress, and now Easy Support Videos.

I took a lot of the lessons learned from Conductor, like not tackling an overly complex product that needs to be deeply integrated with WordPress core, 3rd party themes, and other plugins in a hyper-competitive market.

I’ve talked about this experience in the past so I won’t go too much deeper on this podcast about it, but I highly recommend keeping your first — or next — product as lightweight as possible.

The biggest challenge here is that my lead developer for the plugin, Scott, is still 98% of the time, working on Slocum Studio client work. We never could get themes + conductor to outpace services work in order to flip the switch to just product.

The cash flow wasn’t the only reason, but it was a big part of it.

We now have version 2.0 s