Episode 154 – Joe Howard

A Conversation with Joe Howard about the WPMRR Virtual Summit

Joe Howard  is the founder and Chief Innovation Officer of WPBuffs, and is organizing the second WPMRR Virtual Summit.

Show Notes

Event Date: September 21-23

Event Website: https://wpmrr.com/

Twitter | @wpmrrsummit

Episode Transcript

Topher: Hey everyone! My name is Topher.

Cate: And I’m Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsor Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. Be sure to check out their new product, WP Quickstart. Web Quickstart is a fast and affordable way to build membership sites on WordPress with packages beginning at just $49. Visit Nexcess.net to get started.

Now let’s get started with Hallway Chats. Our guest today is Joe Howard. Welcome!

Joe: Thank you, Topher. Thanks, Cate. Happy to be here.

Cate: Hey! We’re really glad to have you. We know the WPMRRVS, virtual summit, is just around the corner, and we’re really glad you took a few minutes to help us tell people more about it. Well, it’s a great, exciting three days. There’s so many things about it that continue on afterwards that we’d love to be able to get this episode out so that it continues to be on people’s minds.

Joe: Yeah.

Topher: I have a quick question to start with. Joe, you started WP Buffs. Is WPMRR an extension of Buffs or is this a Joe Howard special?

Joe: That’s a good question because I don’t know exactly what it is. The story behind it is that at WP Buffs we do website management, and we started doing white label website management, which means we work with agencies and freelancers. And they wanted to offer 24/7 support. And so we would offer them as white label solution where they could sell our care plans and we provide all the fulfillment.

But then we also ran into some people who didn’t want to do white label support. They just wanted to do the support themselves. They’re just was like, “How do you do it? Can you tell us?” So I was like, “Oh, why don’t we do a course on teaching people how to do website management?”

Topher: Nice.

Joe: So that’s how WPMRR started. It was actually an online course. You know, folks could log in… you can’t register for the course anymore. But folks who originally had access still have access to be able to log in to a little like secret login area.

So created this course for folks. It pretty much open sourced everything we did it WP Buffs. And then it was great until I realized, oh, you can’t just build a course and launch it, and then it’s evergreen. You have to keep it updated. Like we’re changing things every week at WP Buffs. So it’s like, “Do I have to update this course every week?”

Joe: So it got to the point, you know, months later, maybe about a year later where I was like, “Hmm, I don’t feel as comfortable having it up anymore because I don’t want to give people old stuff we were doing. It needs to be new. And if I’m not updating it, then let’s change it up a little bit.”

So instead of doing a course, we can keep it as the WPMRR Podcasts and we could also fold in the WPMRR community on Circle, and then the virtual summit. Which is like, okay, we can do this, once a year, big to three-day event, and that itself is the content. And a lot of that can be evergreen and people can look at the date and stuff. So that made, I think, more sense for my perspective of where I wanted to go.

So to answer your question, WPMRR kind of grew out of WP Buffs.