If you thought running a membership website was easy, try throwing a global pandemic into the mix.

Jason Resnick joins us today to talk about the upcoming re-launch of his membership as so many of his customers were impacted by the shift in their own clients. There’s a particular grit that comes with doing business in the North East, I’m not sure what it is, but a lot of New Yorker’s — like Jason — don’t give up easy. It’s a key ingredient that many “online business builders” lack, or fail to learn, over the course of their online stint.

Through podcasting and sharp networking skills, today’s hero has built himself a business that he’s not only proud of, but is a true replication of the man himself. Lots to learn here today, I hope you enjoy the episode!

Other Matt Report episodes w/ Jason:

• Productized services
• Setting web design budget expectations

Say THANK YOU to our sponsors:

SearchWP – If you’re looking to improve WordPress search, like get sweet dashboard analytics on keywords, check out SearchWP!

MalCare – Want to protect your site from malware and virus exploits? Look no further than MalCare.com!

Hold on to your hats as our fearless leader finds himself defending our beloved monolithic application against new kid(s) on the block, The JAMstack.

For the last two years I’ve been listening in from the backseat as so many of you in my Twitter stream talk about the hype of technologies like Gatsby and CMS’s like Statatmic. I felt it would be premature if I jumped right on to that hype train at the time, and while the ride is picking up steam more than ever, I’d say it’s still not ready for your everyday user.

Today’s episode is my take on a three-way “argument” over WordPress vs JAMStack, and what that means for us, the users of the software.

Articles mentioned:

• https://thenewstack.io/wordpress-co-founder-matt-mullenweg-is-not-a-fan-of-jamstack/
• https://www.netlify.com/blog/2020/09/15/on-mullenweg-and-the-jamstack-regression-or-future/
• https://www.stackbit.com/blog/open-letter-to-matt-mullenweg-what-folks-often-get-wrong-about-jamstack/
• Hello WordPress, My Old Friend

👏 Say THANK YOU to our sponsors:

SearchWP — If you’re looking to put your WordPress search capabilities on steroids, look no further than SearchWP!

MalCare — Want to protect your WordPress site from virus and malware? Check out MalCare!

When it comes to being profitable, nothing beats a fine-tuned process. As I grew my agency, some 15 years ago, the first thing I looked into was a process kit by friend of the show, Jose Caballer.

David Darke joins the airwaves today to tell us about his unique process to connecting with clients over at Atomic Smash. I can’t emphasize this enough, having a repeatable mechanism to stay in-touch with your clients is CRITICAL.

If you’re doing any kind of long-term work that requires a minimum of 30-60 days, I’d argue a weekly recap call/email that ensures both parties are meeting expectations. Tune in to today’s episode to find out how David and his team has executed on this in a COVID world.

Please say THANK YOU to today’s sponsors:

Lockedown Design & SEO – If you’re looking for help in local SEO for contractors, manufacturers, or anything close to that industry — give a shout to John!

ElegantMarketplace.com – If you’re looking for an alternative to “big box” marketplaces or looking for new opportunities outside of the .org repo — check out Elegant Marketplace!

Read the transcript

[00:00:00] David Darke: so I, co started an agency called atomic smash. We’re a primarily WordPress agency. when we started out, we were a bit scattershot with kind of what we were doing and we kind of fell into using WordPress as our sort of vault content management system. And, and it really sort of took off from there.
[00:00:17]we, we tried to most will not you to different things to try to Magento. We tried hold her to staff, but as soon as we started using WordPress and really kind of got into the community, it really just paid dividends for us massively. And as an agency we’ve grown over the last 10 years, we. Well, we first started was just two of us.
[00:00:34] Now there’s 14. Hopefully there’ll be 15 or 16 of us by the end of the year. And here for us, just using WordPress days, day has been just really, really beneficial. I think that were all key parts of when we started with us a scattershot approach, we didn’t really have a, any sort of niche or any sort of would say direction when it came to how we found our clients, the way we worked with our clients or anything.
[00:00:56] And the real thing that’s been. Good to us recently [00:01:00] has been, the way we work with our clients and this sort of continuous basis. yeah, and I mean, I can go on further. Do you have any questions at this point or any other bits just to roll into
[00:01:10] Matt Medeiros: [00:01:10] Let’s just jump right into the fire about WordPress. This is something that’s fresh on my mind. I was listening to an interview from another podcast, infamous, not a famous and infamous a individual in the WordPress space, who builds a product and he’s been building or press products for quite some time.
[00:01:26] And he was really just, beating up. WordPress’s code base, the community, the approach, and all of a sudden, and here’s a guy who started early, early days selling a premium theme. and, and he’s on this very popular podcast, really just saying boy, in his words, WordPress code based sucks.
[00:01:44] WordPress is terrible yet you’re out there making a living, selling WordPress products and. In my own Twitter feed. I see people constantly saying things like, Hey, check out this flat file, CMS, check out this jam stack thing. [00:02:00] Yeah. And I sat down the other day. I was like, let me give me, let me give one of these CMS as a trial.
[00:02:04] Let me, let me try something else other than WordPress. And it was like, step one, install composer and your local dev environment. And I said, what. I don’t need, where do I begin? Like then I started looking at local dev environments and then I’m down that rabbit hole and I’m back to it. Then it’s like a, don’t forget, you’re going to have to have ploy workflow set up to publish a blog post.
[00:02:23] And I’m like, I don’t want this. So my question to you is, and I’m not foolish. I don’t think WordPress is end all be all, but I mean, in your eyes, WordPress is. It’s here to stay. Like, I, I don’t think it’s a, it’s a bad choice and it continues to grow. I mean, obviously we’re on a WordPress podcast, but what are your thoughts?
[00:02:42] David Darke: [00:02:42] Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think the main parts. But WordPress has been able to do is again, around that committee. See, and even though, there are definite downsides to the way we’re pressing sets up and in the way it’s structured this database, there’s a lot of things that could be improved.
[00:02:57] And I guess we’ll take a loss of [00:03:00] a huge amount of community input to get changed and, and actually iterate and, and, and do well to do to me, there’s moved, but. It’s really around the community and the support which you can get that really sort of sets it apart in my mind, when it comes to content management systems, we, we actually kind of have a quite solid, definitely my framework, which we use, which is, I guess, when you’re just talking about composer, we actually use composer a lot with WordPress.
[00:03:24] And it’s a more of an advanced setup in that regard. And even the way we deploy, we deploy using a Ruby platform called Capistrano, which uses composer as well.
[00:03:33] If that make sense, do some of the more enterprise level sites. But yeah. But for us, it’s the real key thing to our WordPress does well, is, has a really great community. They had an experience if you manage it well, and, and you really curate that it’s in process. It’s really good. And it’s super simple to get yourself on board.
[00:03:53] Yeah. Even though people kind of struggled with Gutenberg at the start and that sort of transitioning process. You can, we can easily [00:04:00] give a Gutenberg sites to someone who’s never really used the web before. And they can kind of get to grips with editing website pretty quickly. I think that’s the key thing for us and the audience we’re trying to, attract is the people inside businesses that aren’t doing this stuff day to day, that aren’t not, they’re not building their own websites.
[00:04:17] They just want to edit the content or websites don’t want to sell the thing they’re doing. They want to. Communicate with our audience. They don’t want to know how the website works or sorry. They just want to use that and be able to utilize what they’re doing day to day. So, so for those people is it’s, it’s a really valuable tool.
[00:04:33] Matt Medeiros: [00:04:33] Yeah, the, the, the technical costs, the costs while, you know, while it may be seemingly high for some look, if you’re selling WordPress into an organization, it’s not just about tool. the CMS in that moment of time, it’s, it’s the decision for, you know, I guess most companies or larger organizations might be making this decision for at minimum for five years.
[00:04:57] Right? So you’re, you’re not just selling WordPress in that moment. You’re [00:05:00] selling that. WordPress site to other staff, that’s going to with it. what happens when somebody in that organization leaves and somebody else comes in and they need to relearn like the resources available, the education around WordPress is so much greater than name your favorite Gatsby
[00:05:15] David Darke: [00:05:15] Yeah, no.
[00:05:16] Matt Medeiros: [00:05:16] don’t know. I’m just throwing out words here, ...

Are you gripping to the handlebars of your product launch rollercoaster ride? Buckle up, as you’ll appreciate Lesley’s story in today’s episode.

She’s the co-founder of Newsletter Glue which spawned as a small feature inside another product that was nearly extinct. We’ll learn why they spun this feature out, how they are doing market research, and what it’s like to take on Substack as a competitor. Story’s like these hit close to home, as I’m sure you’ve had a lot of the same anxiety as Lesley and her co-founder building your product.

Please say THANK YOU to today’s sponsors:

• Mailster Newsletter Plugin — Want to build a replacement to MailChimp using WordPress? Take a look at Mailster!
• Easy Support Videos — Support your clients by embedding helpful videos inside the admin of WordPress. Check out this free plugin!

I’ll give you a second to read today’s show title…

That’s how I felt talking to Iain Poulson. Like, this dude is Neo, from the Matrix. How does one person launch and maintain so many products and still have time for everything else?

We’ll dive into that in today’s episode and much more! Here are just a few of the products we chatted about during our podcast:

• wpcontent.io
• https://intagrate.io/
• https://sellwire.net/
• https://wpusermanager.com/
• https://pluginrank.com

Please say THANK YOU to today’s sponsors:

Fathom Analytics — an alternative to Google Analytics for privacy focused and speed efficient web stats.

WebDevStudios — a WordPress agency that can meet any of your demands for business sites, to e-commerce, and everything in-between.

Today’s guest is Sebastiaan van der Lans, the Founder & CEO of WordProof.io, a new business working to build trust over the internet through blockchain and WordPress.

This was a fantastic conversation that spanned the topics of validating news content, all the way to pitching an innovative product for the chance to win 1 million Euros. (Spoiler alert: He won the 1 million Euros, tune in to find out how!)

I really enjoyed today’s chat with Sebastiaan, and I hope you do too. Follow his company Twitter: @WordProofio

Thank you to our sponsors SearchWP and GravityView.co!

If you’re looking for the best way to improve WordPress search, look no further than SearchWP!

If you need to build pages of data and form submissions from GravityForms, like directories or tables, GravityView is for you!

Check out the behind the scenes video!

Not to be outdone by their recent 1 million active install celebration, Astra finds itself in some hot murky water.

The theme was recently suspended when the theme review team found affiliate links “cloaked” in buttons recommending other plugins. Friend of the show Ron Huereca shows us a code snippet of how they achieved this, and LayerWP hosted a short written interview with a member of the theme review team.

In today’s episode, I’ll share my take on the matter and where I’d love to see the theme repo move to for small product creators. You can read the theme guidelines cited in the episode, here.

Also mentioned in the episode:

Every word of this Tweet (down to the ALT text on the image) remains true more than a year later. It's a shame that this is still allowed in WordPress. https://t.co/0iTAXx94uP

Thanks to our sponsors

SearchWP & Gravity View for supporting the show! Please say thank you on Twitter!

Read the full transcript

Matt: (00:04)
This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search wp.com and gravity view.co more on them. Later in today’s episode, we’re talking about the recent Astro debacle of just some thoughts around WordPress monetization. What it’s like to be a product creator, a product maker in the WordPress space, especially in the year 2020, let’s dive right on in.

Matt: (00:29)
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the mat reports. It’s maryport.com [inaudible] dot com slash subscribe to join that mailing list. For those of you that know they started a new job a couple of weeks ago over at Casto the makers of a seriously simple podcasting plugin. I’ll be the head or actually no, my official title is director of podcaster success. So I’m gonna help folks get their podcasts up and running over at Casos. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast yourself, send me an email, Matt at [inaudible] dot com and, uh, I guess some more videos up on the plugin Tut channel youtube.com/plugin Tut, check out all of my WordPress plugin theme tutorials. I’m going to get into some no-code stuff that just, uh, those are the things that, that really excite me. So some know code stuff that’s in and around the WordPress space. So do check out that channel recently, a theme with over a million active installs, one of the most popular, the most installed and activated WordPress theme in the WordPress repo.

Matt: (01:34)
That is not a default WordPress theme. In other words, a theme that doesn’t ship with WordPress by default Astra was, uh, was removed from the repo briefly for something of, uh, going against the theme developer guidelines of wordpress.org by injecting affiliate code links or affiliate links within the code of, of the theme. They sort of cloaked it in a way where you didn’t really know when you hit upgrade. Um, on these recommended plugins that they mentioned six of them, that they were getting an affiliate commission. If, if you did decide to upgrade, I’ve got a lot of thoughts about this stuff. I’m sure you do as well. But first search WP search wp.com is today’s first sponsor of the show and they were a repeat sponsor. I really appreciate the support from the folks [email protected]. Looking if you’re building out a website, you’re building out, you know, what’s really popular now, of course, in this pandemic world that we live in, I’ve even thought about it.

Matt: (02:49)
Myself is to start up a new directory site for a particular niche in, in my local area. Right? If I built out a directory site, I wanted to search that content. Cause that’s generally what you do. Search WP is fantastic for that. It searches your eCommerce products, custom field content, custom database tables, PDFs, and documents. I mean, even though it’s the year 2020, and restaurants still use PDFs for menus, you know, you could start a directory service of all these restaurants. And if they’re still using PDs for menu, you could search those PDFs. You do short codes, you can do Gutenberg blocks. You can do taxonomy terms, post titles and contents. But the real shining feature in my opinion is if you’re running one of these content heavy sites and you do need great search, not only consortia BP, do that for you, but they give you stats.

Matt: (03:38)
They give you analytics around what people are searching for. And this is analytics. You’re not going to get from Google analytics. This is going to be analytics on your site. What people are searching for is going to help you make better decisions with the content that you’re producing. Again, if you’re a webmaster for a university and now people are searching for classes and they’re looking for certain, uh, things to download, you can get all of these insights from that. If you’re a publisher high content traffic site, uh, this is going to help you make better decisions. Search wp.com. You can get [email protected]. It starts at $99 for one website for the year, 149 for the most popular plan. Check it out. Search wp.com. Search wp.com say, thanks for supporting the show. Okay, so I’m going to take you over to a former, a former sponsor of the show.

Matt: (04:32)
Uh, in the past, Ron, Ron Eureka media, ron.com wrote up a piece. If you’re looking for exactly what Astra did from a technical, uh, view media, Iran highlights this in the code snippet, and he shows you exactly what they were doing in the functions file of Astra. And they’re filtering the upgrade buttons to these, to these plugins. And here are the plugins that they were recommending. They were recommending Ninja forms, uh, WP forms, this social snap.com uh, plugin, which I have not heard...

I recently shared a talk about marketing your WordPress service or business at the London WordPress meetup.

Dan Maby, former guest of the show, invited me on share my idea around marketing for today’s WordPress business builders. Of course this is a topic near and dear to my heart, with a spin you might not get from every other marketer on the web.

I hope you enjoy today’s episode, I’ll leave the slides from the talk below. If you did, please consider sharing this post with others!

👏 Thanks to our sponsors LockedownSEO.com & MediaRon.com! 👏

Please take a moment to thank our sponsors. They help keep the show alive! 20% of sponsor proceeds go to supporting A Big Orange Heart.

Here are the slides to my London WordPress meetup talk.

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Matt report podcast. Today’s episode is going to be a solo episode. I’m gonna talk about marketing your WordPress product or service, maybe even yourself. I think this could be used outside of the realm of WordPress, but some of the stuff I’ll talk about today will be specific to the WordPress community. I recently did a talk covering this topic over at the WordPress meetup in London. It was my first international speaking gig where I did it virtually. In fact, yeah. You know, it’s, I don’t even think we were allowed to fly these days. Uh, but it was a fun, exciting time to talk about marketing is a little bit different for those of you that follow me know that I’m not one of those, you know, flashy marketing types, right? The core slinging, digital product affiliate person sitting in front of a Lamborghini, blowing up my Instagram, telling you how much money you’re going to make.

Speaker 1: (01:00)
In fact, I haven’t seen that in a while. It’s amazing what a pandemic can do to those types, but the way that I do marketing, the way that I’m going to talk about it today is, is, is much more about building opportunity for yourself, creating opportunity for yourself to get another customer, make a sale, meet new people, find opportunity in doing business with other businesses, right? That’s what marketing and this practice of getting yourself out there. That’s what it means to me. It’s, it’s really how I’ve been able to run businesses for quite some time and, um, find opportunity in the WordPress space, working for other companies and you know, all of that fun stuff by doing. What I’m gonna talk about today is really led made by doing this very podcast that has led me to opportunities, right? And I think that hopefully if you’re looking to grow those opportunities yourself, this will be an interesting talk.

Speaker 1: (01:55)
It’s my report.com airport.com/subscribe. Don’t forget to leave us a five star review on iTunes really helps. I really enjoy the feedback that I get on iTunes, the comments. So if you have a spare moment, if you have just a spare moment, go ahead and leave us a five star review on iTunes or wherever you listen to this podcast. Let’s thank one of our sponsors today. His name is Ronald Horeca. This is his second time. I think sponsoring the show. Thank you, Ronald. He does a ton. He’s like me. He’s probably like you just lots of projects, lots of things happening. He has a book about WordPress and Ajax, but he has two interesting plugins, a simple comment editing, right? Where you can edit various parts of the commenting system on WordPress. If you search for simple comment, editing on wordpress.org, you’ll find it. It allows you to do things like set the comment timer, stop the timer, hide the timer, allow unlimited editing for logged in users as a whole bunch of stuff that it does.

Speaker 1: (02:53)
And if that’s a unique situation that you’re in, where you need to edit this comment, functionality, check it out. It’s a plugin written by Ronald Horeca. His website is media run. I love that name, media run.com. And, uh, he has that book on WordPress Ajax. Like I mentioned, he has a bunch of plugins, but that’s simple comment editing looks pretty good. It’s got 43, five star reviews, 3000 active installs on wordpress.org.org. Simple common editing, Ronald Horeca. He does a lot, Ronald. Thanks for sponsoring the show. Alright, so the first part I want to talk about is who this is for. Like I mentioned, if you’re somebody who is building your own business, your own practice in the WordPress space, and you find marketing kind of tricky, kind of daunting, kind of hard that’s who this is, that’s who this talk is really geared at early stage product as a service or service people specifically in the WordPress ecosystem, finds marketing difficult for many reasons.

Speaker 1: (03:58)
Now, many reasons when I post, uh, polls and things like that on Twitter often about business. And I say, what’s the biggest challenge about your business? Is it running the business, right? Is it being all hats for all departments in your business? Cause it’s a small company. Uh, is it, you know, the marketing is it, the sales is the product. And nine times out of 10 marketing is always leading the pack. It’s the one that people always vote as one of the hardest things to do. And I think if you shift your mindset, like I mentioned before, you think about marketing and not such a sterile definition, right? It’s easy to think about marketing as if you were wearing a marketing hat at, you know, Pepsi or general motors or Apple, right. Big brands, right? Lots of, you know, strategic and fine lines that you can draw experiments and things like that.

Speaker 1: (04:46)
I think when you’re a small business, it’s very hard to think of like marketing as a tradition, like in a traditional approach. Sure. You do customer profiling, you do messaging and all of this stuff. But a lot of times you just, you just need to get out there in order to make sales. You don’t have time for this massive like strategic undertaking. So I think of marketing as again, getting out and providing that digital handshake when we’re, when we’re talking about online marketing anyway, but this transfers over to, on to offline as well. The digital handshake is something that I’ve talked about for a while, where all of the stuff that we’re doing online, whether...