WP Product Talk

We talked with Colin Devroe, Head of AI at NerdPress, about Model Context Protocol connectors and how they change day-to-day WordPress work.

Colin put it simply: an AI only gets useful when you feed it the right information. At NerdPress that means both internal tools and Guided Agent Connector for clients, so an agent can work against a live site instead of guessing from a thin prompt.

Katie already uses general AI against WooCommerce and her plugins without shipping dedicated MCPs. Zack pointed out that most customers have not done that learning curve. A product-specific MCP can make the useful actions obvious.

We see the useful move as giving agents clear tools for the job the customer wants done. That is the shift we spent the hour on.

Katie Keith from Barn2 and Ian Misner from Kestrel spent this episode on a decision both of them have been living: expand a WordPress product business into Shopify.

Katie's trigger was risk. WordPress drama, possible WooCommerce feature overlap, and a desire to spread platforms before sales dipped. Barn2 has since launched Shopify apps and learned how approval, badges, naming, and a different kind of customer change the work. Ian brought Kestrel's longer multi-platform experience, including marketplace dynamics and the cost of rebuilding and supporting a second stack.

We talked installs, paid conversion after free periods, and how much support and product velocity you burn to get a foothold.

The hard question for us is whether the new channel grows the company or splits the team. If you are weighing expansion, this is the war-story version from two operators who are already in it.

Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine, joined Zack and Katie to talk about pricing as a growth lever.

Jason's core point is that price is part of the product. A low price can pull in customers who are a poor fit. Raising price is about more than revenue per seat. It can change who shows up, and sometimes you sell more into a better segment.

We also got into profit margin math, the idea of a growth ceiling tied to churn, and the work of finding the segment that actually agrees your product is worth the new price. Then you have to speak to that segment on purpose in ads and on the homepage.

If you have been afraid to touch pricing because you think volume will collapse, listen to how Jason walks through the tradeoffs. He keeps the caveats in the room.

Britt Celata joined Katie and me to unpack influencer marketing for tech products, using WordPress.com's Stories Worth Hosting campaign as the case study.

Britt's definition is useful for WordPress shops: an influencer is someone with a trusted audience speaking honestly to that audience. Britt cares more about trust than follower count. The campaign leaned on creators telling their own stories, with WordPress as part of the life.

I called out Macy's sourdough example for that reason. Britt tied it back to work she had done at Nike, where the brand shows up inside real days. We also got into measurement beyond vanity metrics, how affiliate and influencer roles blur, and why partner hashtags matter for tracking.

If you already have an affiliate program and almost no creator strategy, this episode gives you a concrete playbook from someone who just ran it at Automattic.

I hosted part two of our growth panel with Aaron Edwards of DocsBot and Derek Ashauer of Conversion Bridge and Sunshine Photo Cart. We stayed grounded in themes from our Product Growth Survey.

A line we kept coming back to is demand. Getting traffic alone does not get you there. Aaron talked industry pages and high-intent searches. Derek talked writing for niche problems fewer people have, then showing up on social and Reddit so the work is not a lonely SEO article.

Classic search and wp.org referrals are less of a free ride than they used to be. Aaron's churn review had a sharp number: mentions of customers building their own alternative, often with AI or vibe coding, jumped from about 1.6% to about 13% of churn reasons, even while overall churn improved. Derek noted that small utility plugins are the easiest things for people to recreate.

Growth here looks like demand creation and product depth. Waiting for directory traffic to return is a thin plan.

Growth looks different for WordPress product businesses than it did a few years ago. Google organic search is becoming less dependable, AI is changing how people discover and build software, and simply adding more features isn’t necessarily translating into more sales. So what is working? In this special episode of WP Product Talk, Matt Cromwell, Katie Keith, Zack Katz, and Ian Misner dig into the real-world growth strategies behind three WordPress products that are growing right now: Nimesh Patel of Multidots, Mike McAlister of OllieWP, and Robin Pietersen of FooEvents.

The conversation goes beyond marketing tactics to explore what product owners can actually control in a changing market. The guests share how retention and upsells are driving growth, why product-led growth and education can create powerful momentum, how meaningful new features and pricing changes can move the needle, and why customer support can become a source of product insight and revenue. They also tackle a bigger question facing WordPress businesses today: as AI makes it easier to build alternatives to traditional plugins, how can product companies become more valuable, differentiated, and resilient?

What happens when you accidentally become a WordPress plugin developer—and then keep going? Jonathan Hall of BerryPress joins WP Product Talk on September 9 with co-hosts Ian Misner and Matt Cromwell to share the winding path from an unplanned venture into plugin development 11 years ago to building multiple plugin businesses and eventually co-founding an international WordPress product company.

Jonathan has developed dozens of plugins and learned plenty along the way about finding product ideas, marketing paid plugins, working with partners, and building a sustainable WordPress products business. We’ll also explore how AI and modern tools are changing plugin development and QA, along with the lessons Jonathan wishes he knew when he was just getting started. Whether you’re thinking about launching your first WordPress product or trying to figure out what comes next, this conversation offers a candid look at what it really takes to become a plugin developer and build products people want.

Your WordPress product website has a big job: it needs to build trust, explain your product, demonstrate its value, and ultimately convince visitors to buy. But what actually makes a product website work for a WordPress plugin or theme?

On September 2 at noon Eastern, Imran Siddiq of Web Squadron joins WP Product Talk with co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Zack Katz to share his perspective on product website strategy, drawing from his experience building websites, teaching Elementor, creating WordPress content, and working with agencies and product businesses. We’ll dig into how to showcase features without bloated design, when live sandbox demos make sense, how to structure Free vs. Pro offerings, and why transparency can matter more than flashy marketing. If you sell a WordPress plugin or theme, this is a practical look at how your website can turn more visitors into confident customers.

Before a single line of code is written, the most important product decisions have already been made. Join us on August 12th as Zack Katz and Ian Misner welcome Brad Griffith of Buckeye Innovation for a conversation about why so many digital projects fail long before development begins. From unclear goals and undefined workflows to misunderstood user needs, Brad shares practical lessons from building websites, applications, and digital tools for purpose-driven organizations.

Using a digital product strategy approach, Brad will explore how product teams can align strategy, design, and development to create solutions that solve real problems and deliver measurable outcomes. Whether you're launching a new WordPress product, planning a major feature, or evaluating your product roadmap, this episode will provide actionable insights to help you build the right thing before you start building anything at all.

Artificial intelligence is changing the role of software developers in ways that go far beyond code generation. On August 5, Katie Keith and Zack Katz welcome Ross Morsali to explore how AI research workflows are helping developers tackle problems that once seemed far outside their expertise, unlocking new opportunities for WordPress products and beyond.

Ross shares how AI-guided research helped him completely rethink the indexing architecture behind Search & Filter by borrowing ideas from enterprise search systems and adapting them for WordPress. From there, the conversation expands into an exciting look at what's possible when developers use AI to venture into unfamiliar territory, including speech-to-text systems, custom language models, and other ambitious projects that would have once required years of specialized experience. Instead of asking AI to help us build faster, we should ask how AI can help us build things we never thought we could.