The WP Minute

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Recently on the WPMinute, I was able to have another interview with Eric Karkovack a producer at the WPMinute about his view of the Freelancer in WordPress.

Eric has been a freelancer since 1999 and knows how the changes and ups and downs can impact your business. Eric started organically in the WordPress world by coding and writing on his own blog. He had the opportunity to blog for Speckyboy for additional income. This is easy to do if you understand concepts and can contribute through documentation or a tutorial. Blogging allowed Eric to get his opinion out there and connect with people. As a freelancer, you can try this same approach with your area of expertise.

There have been many topics recently in the WordPress space. For example, Plugin ownership has impacted freelancers. When the plugin changes ownership how does that impact the freelancer? How will you convert sites and determine how much to spend on maintaining these plugins? The other big area making an impact recently has been WordPress core.

The challenge for WordPress freelancers has been the difficulty of navigating and following what is happening in the WordPress space. There is a big barrier with how the freelancer can educate the customer when it can take hours to navigate the updates from WordPress and other channels. When you are impacted as a freelancer in many areas, it helps to write and post about it to keep others informed. Just get out there by practicing writing and posting on social media.

This is a great interview with Eric. If you take his advice, you may be able to expand a side project as a freelancer.

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WordPress 6.0 Beta 2 is now available for testing. The call continues to be made for testers and if you would like to contribute to this cycle jump over to make.wordpress.org.

The WordPress Performance Group has a stable release of their plugin. The Performance Lab plugin is a collection of modules focused on enhancing performance of your site. This plugin allows you to enable and test the modules before they become available in WordPress core.

Other news from the WordPress Performance team…the WebP by Default proposal is currently on hold after the community voiced critical feedback and significant technical concerns.

Over on make.wordpress.org Phi Phan Launched a Separator Block With an Icon Option. Justin Tadlock covers the options of this plugin in his article over on the WPTavern.

From Our Contributors and Producers

Open source Calendly rival Cal.com has raised $25 million in a series A round of funding and launched what it calls an “app store for time” so developers can build their own apps on top of Cal.com’s scheduling infrastructure.

Google Analytics Universal Analytics will be sunsetted on July 1, 2023. Google is providing a conversion migration tool for Google Analytics 4. Search Engine Land covers how you can convert your goals without having to recreate them. 

Rob Howard shared his opinion on paying WordCamp speakers over on his MasterWP publication. 

“Paying for speakers’ lodging and airfare is a cost that could be recouped through sponsorships from Automattic and the other large companies that are bringing in millions of dollars in annual revenue while riding on the good name of the WordPress open-source community.”

With all the changes being made to WordPress core, many of our listeners may want some ideas on how they should build their next WordPress project. Eric Karkovack has an article on the WPMinute when considering early adoption or sticking with your legacy business. This article is worth checking out.

“Why are the #wordpress .org make blog emails now branded with a Jetpack logo and powered by Jetpack?” asks Tom Nowell over on Twitter. See this link for the trac ticket for the source.

Featured segments today:

Learn WP minute by Hauwa Abashiya

Creator Clock by Joe Casabona

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Daniel and Matt are back to discuss the week in WordPress news.

They'll cover some of the important stories that came across The WP Minute news desk like:

• TinyPress
• WordPress.com Makes Major Unannounced Pricing Changes, Slashes Free Storage Limits
• Matt's Twitter survey
• Jetpack vs .com pricing
• Daniel's theory on WP as a better no-code tool

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News

There is a call for WordPress users to help with the upcoming release of WordPress 6.0. This release is scheduled for May 24, 2022. There have been over 400 updates and 500 bug fixes since the last release and they could really use everybody’s help to test. Jump over to make.wordpress.org to join the core slack channel and get involved.

The WooCommerce blocks roadmap has been released. There are a lot of cool things happening over at WooCommerce with most of the work taking place right now in the WooCommerce Blocks repository with store editing. Take a look at the ways you can contribute. The plan is to release quarterly updates.

From Our Contributors and Producers

If you missed it, go check out the latest eCommerce minute, on the WPMinute with Dave Rodenbaugh. He provides additional news and perspective on the owner of FAST, the one-click checkout provider.

Jodie Fiorenza wrote a great article on Omnichannel marketing over at WebDevStudios. With an omnichannel strategy, the customer becomes the focus of the campaign. Take a minute to read Jody’s article and see if you can consult with a customer using multi-channel marketing in your business.

The Admin Bar community created an anonymous WordPress Agency survey for all of their community members to ask them questions about their revenue, and various focuses (including accessibility, SEO, hosting, etc.). The results were very interesting and worth checking out.

The first issue of Tiny Press went out this week by our contributor Daniel Schutzsmith. The article covers 3 WordPress design and development links.

There is also a great interview of Chris Coyier from css-tricks.com by Nathan Wrigley on the WPTavern podcast about his sale of CSS Tricks to Digital Ocean.  This is a great podcast to learn about Chris’ journey.

Friend of the show Scott Bolinger is seeking a buyer for his pop-up plugin Holler Box.

New Members:

Next up:

Simplified Business Minute with Sam Muñoz

“Block Editor Dev Minute” by Aurooba Ahmed

Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today: 

• Lisa Sabin-Wilson
• Birgit Pauli-Haack
• Daniel Schutzsmith
• Dave Rodenbaugh
• Liam Dempsey

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One Click Checkout provider Fast, headed by Domm Holland, shut down unexpectedly this week after attempting to secure a down round of funding to deal with their financial obligations. What obligations you might ask? Well, according to their pitch deck, their monthly burn rate was over $10M dollars for their 500 plus employees.

And to top it off, their company was making about 50,000 dollars a month, or around $1200 per employee. These stats are pretty depressing for a company of that size and certainly must be frustrating to the investors who put in over $100 million over several rounds.

The news came fast and along with it, a barrage of folks linking to articles that point out Domm’s shady past. In 2010, Domm purchased a domain that would be useful to the Australian airline Qantas and then redirected traffic from it to a direct competitor. By way of threat he sold the squatted domain to Qantas for 1.3 million.

After that, he started the Uber of Towing and ended up in a $15 million dollar legal dispute about cars no one cared about. Holland threatened to release the private bank account and driver’s license data of 21,000 drivers. When the Supreme Court refused, he shut down the company with no notice to any of its employees and notified them via text message.

Not content to cause problems in his country, he moved to Silicon Valley and started Fast in 2019, a one-click checkout competitor to Bolt, Apple Pay, Shop Pay and others. He hired a team of contractors from Nigeria to build the initial version of Fast and acquired funding for it. Three months in, he fired all Nigerian contractors and took full credit for their work in subsequent press releases. Again, with no notice.

These are only some of the stories that came from this very chaotic startup. In the last few months, Domm’s social media account had been uncharacteristically quiet in comparison to last year as they went on a hiring spree. When word leaked about his financial problems, the startup went to an abrupt death spiral and imploded here on Tuesday April 5.

Some of the 500 employees found out about the troubles while attending the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas, NV. Salespeople and project managers found their corporate credit cards stopped working mid-conference. As they starting asking coworkers what was happening, the word got out and there was a brief attempt to shop the company to save it.

Given Domm’s chaotic and troubled history, it’s not surprising he was unable to secure any funding under those circumstances. My heart goes out to the employees who lost their jobs in such a demeaning way.

Fast’s destruction puts the future of one-click checkout into some doubt. Originally a feature patented by Amazon, once the patent expired a number of competitors have sprung up in the space, including Bolt, Rally and our own WP-based solution PeachPay that has been funded by the good folks at WooCommerce and Automattic.

In other news, one-click competitor Bolt has acquired a crypto startup for 1.5 billion dollars according to the Wall Street Journal today. This could be a signal of a pivot in the space given Fast’s quick and painful demise. Crypto buyers and sellers both suffer from terrible experiences in the checkout process, from the exchange to using it directly in the real world. This appears to be a step in changing that experience for the better.

That’s the ecommerce wrap for this week. Have something you want us to cover about ecommerce? Tweet us! This is Dave, signing off until next time.

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