[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Hey everyone, this is WP Product Talk, and I am Matt Cromwell from Stellar WP.

[00:00:05] Katie Keith: And I'm Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins.

[00:00:08] Matt Cromwell: And today we are asking a really poignant question, which is essentially, what would Matt Mullenweg do? Um, when it comes to building WordPress products, there's one person who's done it the most successfully and for the longest period of time of everyone, and that is Matt.

[00:00:24] himself, the one and only Matt Mullenweg.

[00:00:27] Katie Keith: Yeah, we're super excited to have Matt on the show today. And he has very kindly agreed to share some of his experiences, um, which will help other people to grow their WordPress products. So welcome, Matt.

[00:00:42] Matt Mullenweg: Hello, hello. Great to see everybody.

[00:00:44] Matt Cromwell: Thanks so much for being here, Matt.

[00:00:45] We really appreciate it. How are you doing?

[00:00:48] Matt Mullenweg: Doing great. Um, coming to you all from the redwoods outside of Santa Cruz. I'm on a little bit of a, RV trip right now on my earth roamer. So, um, hopefully the store link and everything holds up. But, uh,

[00:00:59] Matt Cromwell: yeah,

[00:01:00] Matt Mullenweg: looking forward to chatting with everyone.

[00:01:01] Matt Cromwell: It looks great.

[00:01:02] It looks absolutely beautiful. That's a beautiful part of the country. Um, I wanted to ask you a couple of kind of contextual questions just to set the scene of what we're doing here today. Um, as I said before, you're kind of like the apex WordPress product person. Um, you've been in the space, of course, from the, from day zero, of course, um, and built a lot of products along the way.

[00:01:24] But I think a lot of folks would like to, our audience is made up of a lot of founders who are developers or founders who are marketers or founders who are customer experience folks. Um, and I kind of wondered, like, How do you see yourself? Are you like what kind of founder are you? Are you developer type?

[00:01:42] Are you marketing type? Are you just a visionary leader type? Um, what? How have you always thought of yourself in this role?

[00:01:50] Matt Mullenweg: That is a good question. And I've definitely thought of myself as doing it all. So probably not the best at any one of those things you said, but needing to do all of them. And so I, I encourage people, whatever your, I think some people call it T shaped, you know, be deep on one area.

[00:02:11] I'm probably deepest on maybe engineering or design. And, um, but then go wide and all the other areas. So learn a little bit about. Marketing about everything else, but the nice thing that brings it all together is a customer. So, you know, when you can spend time with real people and watch them use the software, try to use your software, that that's really what, uh, works the best.

[00:02:39] I would say that never, never goes out of style, never gets old.

[00:02:46] Matt Cromwell: It's actually a trend on the show. Like any, anybody we bring on, they often will just say, if you're not listening to your customer, you're missing out. It's, it's, it's a trend for sure. Um, another question I have just for context is you have a lot of WordPress products.

[00:03:00] You have Jetpack, you have, uh, WooCommerce, you have, A kismet. You have Hello Dolly, which I love every time you talk about Hello Dolly. Um, you have WP Tavern, which is a business product of sorts. Um, you have Tumblr now, like lots of different products. Uh, day one is an interesting one too. Um, which of these products do you feel maybe like you've had the most influence over or the most, like, where are your fingerprints on the most of all of them?

[00:03:33] Matt Mullenweg: Oh, wow. That's a good question. Um, so maybe Jetpack, you know, in terms of like, the things we created from scratch. I really love that logo. The J and the P, and like, you know, it feels like a logo. Has a potential someday to be like Nike, like, you know, and it's iconic Knicks. Um, it's probably my favorite of our brands and favorite of our logos.

[00:04:03] Um, many of these others, you know, as we get into WordPress everything, like, um, you know, I might have been part of the spark, but now it belongs to everyone. And so, you know, this, this W the W behind you, um, that's a brand that's defined by all of us. Meaning that in terms of brands are defining customers minds by their experience, you know, the WordPress experience is mediated so much by their host, by their developer, by the plugins they use, everything.

[00:04:37] So it's really every single one of us in the community is finding what WordPress means to someone, for better or worse, you know, one bad plugin and that end user says WordPress is insecure. That's WordPress. You know, so that is, it is a shared ownership in a lot of ways of that, uh, brand and customer journey.

[00:05:05] So that is, um, something we all have to keep in mind and why I, I really appreciate. Folks like yourselves who are encouraging entrepreneurs, developers, product owners to be better at their craft. Um, you know, I wake up every day thinking, how can I be better at my craft? What can I do today? Um, leave it, leave the world a little bit better than I found it, you know, and, um, I think that that, uh, that mentality of constant iteration, constant improvement is part of, um, the fact that the WordPress brand, not perfect, but nice.

[00:05:50] Katie Keith: Definitely. And I love what you said about how many different hats you have, how many areas you cover with your products, because I think that, um, a vast majority of people who watch WP Product Talk have a similar experience. They're generally Founders that have many hats and whether they've grown teams or not They have been involved in many different aspects of their company So for the rest of the questions, we're going to divide them into different categories of areas of wordpress products But first I just want to say that we welcome anybody who's watching live to comment You can just comment wherever you're watching this whether that's twitter or youtube or wherever And we'd love to highlight and ask Matt to respond to any relevant questions that are directly about running a WordPress product business.

[00:06:39] So let's get started.

[00:06:40] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. And just to clarify for this show, I'm just going to be called Cromwell. Just, uh, just call me Cromwell. And, uh,

[00:06:47] Katie Keith: you've given up on the Matt name. We went through this. It's Matt Mulder,

[00:06:52] Matt Cromwell: I guess. So

[00:06:53] Katie Keith: yeah, it was bad enough when Matt Medeiros came on, but you've got no chance. So yeah, Cromwell and Matt.

[00:06:59] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:07:01] Katie Keith: So, um, we first wanted to touch on product development. Um, so let's use Jetpack as an example as your favorite brand. If you could build Jetpack from ground zero today, what would you do from a product development perspective? Hmm.

[00:07:20] Matt Mullenweg: Um, I think I would have split the plug in earlier. So, um, you know, what we're doing right now with jetpack is jetpack got this perception. It's funny because even though jetpack makes your site faster, people have this perception that it has things that they don't want to turn on and it bundles a lot of things.

[00:07:40] So, um, and some of this is. Maybe the, uh, historical technical things of how plugins were distributed or bundled or other things, but now it's very possible to split into many plugins. So we're, we're splitting out Jetpack. You could always turn on and off everything in Jetpack, but now we're splitting into many plugins to, um, allow people to really choose exactly which part of Jetpack.

[00:08:03] They want to, uh, they want to use. So I think that's something I would have done earlier on. And, uh, I also just wish that sort of in that middle ground, sort of like the mid 2010s of Jetpack, um, I've been a lot more active in the community. Forms, you know, and you have to go to where the people are. So that's the Facebook groups.

[00:08:26] That's the discords. That's the everything. Um, you know, there's some negative perception of and misinformation around Jetpack, which is totally not true, which is unfortunate. I mean, if it actually, you know, was slower and secure, any of that, like, you know, bad on us, but it does the opposite of all those things.

[00:08:43] So I really need to, uh, uh, be more present. And, um, with all of the community discussions to make sure that we're, we're right there, you know, and, and showing up with metrics and numbers and saying, Hey, you know, here's it with jetpack without jetpack. It's faster. It's, um, so that's something that we really, really have to, to work to, to redefine, you know, the, when people from outside come in and look at wordpress.

[00:09:11] com or jetpack, they're like, man, you're You're like giving away Ferraris for the price of a Civic, you know, we do things that other companies or other hosts might charge extra for this.

[00:09:22] Matt Cromwell: Clarifying question on that one. Um, what would you say was the instigator for deciding to break up the features and jetpack a bit. Like what, what, what was it like, we're going to keep adding more modules. And then at one point it's like, no, we need to start breaking these out. What was the decision factor there?

[00:09:45] Matt Mullenweg: Uh, reality. So like, you know, customers listening to customers.

[00:10:03] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I think it's frozen.

[00:10:05] As we wait for Matt to come back. In my mind, the idea about breaking up, um, Hmm. A larger behemoth of a plug in into many different parts, like I would probably want to consider a lot of different things. I heard Matt say specifically, listening to customers.

[00:10:21] Um, there's definitely this sense in which, um, you don't want to go shipping a whole bunch of code that. Nobody's going to use. Um, and, uh, if a lot of customers are saying, I really only need jet pack for X or I really only need jet pack for Y, uh, that definitely would be a big reason to start thinking about breaking out the X and the Y.

[00:10:46] Um, maybe that means that you're leaving some of the, uh, of the features still grouped. Uh, in something called Jetpack still, um, while the, uh, security aspect is broken up into something unique and different, um, perhaps. Um, but, um, I think a lot of, uh, folks consider these things from a lot of different perspectives.

[00:11:09] I'll tell you right now, the events calendar particular is thinking about actually merging some of their features together, um, that, uh, were previously separated. Um, so there's a lot of ways that product owners might do. Might think about it in both directions. So, Hey Matt, welcome back. I was not trying to speak for you, but just trying to fill some space and talk about the issue of like breaking out features because of customer feedback is what it sounded like you were saying.

[00:11:36] Matt Mullenweg: Hopefully it's more stable going forward.

[00:11:38] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like you were saying you are breaking up Jetpack into different, uh, plugins because of customer feedback, essentially.

[00:11:49] Matt Mullenweg: That's the ultimate source of truth. You know, it doesn't matter what you think. It matters what your customers, uh, it doesn't matter what you say. It matters what your customers hear. Yeah. And, um, so, and also now plugins, plugin management and WordPress is getting so good, um, that it's, uh, easier to have more plugins.

[00:12:08] It was, it's not uncommon to see sites with 60, 100, 200 plugins installed.

[00:12:14] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I was really surprised just looking at the WP Product Talk website the other day. I think we're up to like 45 plugins, which. You know, 10 years ago when I was building sites, I would have been ashamed of myself for so many plugins, but it's not that way anymore.

[00:12:28] Like, um, plugin having multiple plugins for smaller purposes is actually sometimes a lot more efficient. Yeah.

[00:12:37] Katie Keith: My understanding of jetpack is that it was bringing wordpress. com features. to wordpress. org sites so that dot com users had all of those features already, and you were bringing that to the open source project.

[00:12:51] But I suppose another way to structure that would have been from the user's perspective, like a security set of plugins and a performance set of plugins and a comments and interactions set of plugins. I suppose there's other ways to structure that.

[00:13:09] Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I mean, what we saw was that, um, people using wordpress on dot com were just being a lot more successful.

[00:13:18] They were being more engaged. They were getting more traffic. They were, um, and some of these SAS features were really boosting the growth of wordpress. And I didn't want that to be contained just to the ones we hosted. You know, we've always been sort of a help the host company as well. And, um, So, uh, sort of opening up those features to where you could have access to them, no matter where you're hosted in the world, whether you're running it yourself or on any other web host, um, was very, very important to me, uh, for the ecosystem.

[00:13:50] Because otherwise we would have ended up, I think, a little closer to. What happened to some other open source projects, maybe even like a get lab where there's like, you know, kind of the hosted version and there's an open source, but it's no one really runs it that much out of like niche enterprise cases.

[00:14:11] Matt Cromwell: This is an interesting comment from one of our co hosts, Zach Katz. He says, A movement seems to be happening where plugin authors who offer many small plugins want to hide them completely on the plugins page. The parent or management plugin would be only The active one. Um, I, I could see that being an issue sometimes, but, um, I do kind of like the way Jetpack has always been organized in terms of having a central page where you can toggle things on and off.

[00:14:40] I think to me that makes a lot more sense. Um, but the whole idea with smaller plugins that sometimes like even caching plugins, they have to add those drop in like advanced cache files and things like that, or sometimes. Plugins are adding M. U. Plugins, uh, in there in order to do some things that they can't do in the plug in directories.

[00:15:01] Um, but, um, do you think that there's going to be more need or more use for things like jet pack that have features to toggle on and off or things like that?

[00:15:13] Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, very key in the wordpress ethos is customizability. So, you know, I would encourage everyone in the wordpress space to try to give your customers as much customization as possible.

[00:15:24] Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not surprised customers are asking for that.

[00:15:29] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. We have one more question here, uh, to me and Katie actually, uh, did we need to split up a plugin or two to make more components? It's a good question, actually. Katie, do you have any examples of breaking stuff out into smaller plugins?

[00:15:43] Katie Keith: Not for that motivation instead.

[00:15:46] I've several times, I have. Kind of split plugins to, I find out what the most successful use cases for my plugin and then create, create a very dedicated niche plugin designed specifically for that use case. For example, we've got a post table pro plugin, which lists any post type in a table. And most people were using that to list documents or WooCommerce products.

[00:16:10] So we created WooCommerce products. Uh, product table and, um, uh, document library pro plugin, each with specific features for that use case, and they have been our most successful products. So we, instead of doing it to kind of reduce bloat or anything like that, we've done it to find more success by targeting a particular market.

[00:16:31] Matt Cromwell: That's interesting. It's kind of similar on the give WP side. We actually have gone the opposite direction. We often have, uh, kicked off a small functionality plugin that does a specific thing as an add on to give WP. And then. Over time found that customers more and more said, Oh, no, this thing, I really need this thing.

[00:16:52] And why is it not in the core plugin? Um, and so we kind of have taken some of those smaller ones and put them into the core plugin. Um, so we've kind of gone the opposite direction. Sometimes

[00:17:04] Matt Mullenweg: I would say WooCommerce is probably going the direction of give WP as well. Some things that right now are extensions, uh, probably are going to go into core.

[00:17:13] Yeah. And, um, because again, customers want that integration for something that's really key. So I think it kind of, you kind of have to listen to them, you know, previously I was trying to drive this purely on a technical point of view, you know, um, like from an engineering and, um, how your customers think about what you offer might be different from how you think about it.

[00:17:38] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Next question up is about customer experience, um, which is what I love to talk about the most. Um, and we kind of touched on it a little bit already, but, um, over the years you have overseen a lot of ways in which customer experience, um, is, um, hold on. I lost my, where'd it go? The note moved.

[00:18:00] There it is. Sorry, I did delete the previous one. You've overseen a lot of ways in which the customer experience of products has evolved or changed in the WordPress space. So how might you rethink customer experience for any of the products that you oversee today? Maybe a little bit you just touching on how customer experience is impacting WooCommerce specifically.

[00:18:18] But what are some of those examples that you could think of?

[00:18:25] Matt Mullenweg: Well, you know, something I've been doing, you know, I took a sabbatical this year for March and April and basically every day since I've been back, I've been doing customer support.

[00:18:37] Matt Cromwell: I've always admired that Automattic has that ethos that you, you all have folks go through support as part of their onboarding, right?

[00:18:44] Do you still do that?

[00:18:46] Matt Mullenweg: We still do that and we still did a rotation once a year and, um, we're calling this a mega rotation because I'm going through every single product, you know, we have actually dozens and, um, and really looking at all the nooks and crannies of how people interact with us and that's the forums.

[00:19:07] That's um, Twitter, it's Trustpilot. It's, you know, all the places where people can, um, give you feedback and making sure we're showing up well in all of those and also taking it as feedback for what we could be doing better.

[00:19:25] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Um,

[00:19:26] Matt Mullenweg: and I think something that you're going to see Automattic improve a lot.

[00:19:29] Uh, and this year is, you know, some of our, particularly the WooCommerce site, some of our own plugins don't have great ratings. And so it's like, well, yeah, of course, if someone's rating three and a half stars, two and a half stars, you're not going to choose that plugin. You're in the store or Amazon. And so the unfortunate thing is sometimes people are choosing.

[00:19:51] Plugins that are have other issues, but have higher ratings for various reasons. Um, so that we got to address and, um, yeah, that, so that is, I think you have to be where the people are, uh, for all of that. And, um, it's easy to get in silos, particularly as we, as you scale. As your company gets bigger and bigger, or different parts of the company, or even as support gets professionalized, you know, okay, these people are watching the tickets.

[00:20:24] These people are watching socials. These people, you know, and when that breaks down, you might lose the holistic picture of how people are experiencing or some amazing customer insight that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

[00:20:39] Matt Cromwell: Yeah,

[00:20:39] Matt Mullenweg: so if you can get to the ground truth as much as possible, I think that really, really helps.

[00:20:46] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I, I will say, uh, as somebody who, uh, on the stellar side, I am overseeing all of the reviews that come in, especially on. org and every time we get a one star review, I always cringe. And it's like, Oh, here we go. Let's go through this. Um, but I will say that I've never seen an onslaught of one star reviews like the Gutenberg plugin got when it was first launched.

[00:21:11] Um, and I, I don't know, how do you, how do you, Receive that feedback. Um, how do you process that feedback? What's your take on on negative feedback like that? Well, yeah,

[00:21:25] Matt Mullenweg: that was people voting. So some people really didn't like the idea of blocks and really like the classic. That's fine. You know what? When Gutenberg launched, it was a one star.

[00:21:37] It wasn't very good. We were building in a public and we said it was going to take 10 years. So, you know, honestly, over that 10 year, I expect the first couple of years is going to be one star product next couple, two, three, I think we're kind of in the four star phase right now where it's actually getting pretty, pretty slick for a lot of use cases for some people that might, they might still consider it a three or two, but, um, shoot,

[00:22:08] Matt Cromwell: we were doing so well. It was so great. Um,

[00:22:16] Katie Keith: Well, we could bring up Jim Ross's comment, which is very relevant to what we're just talking about.

[00:22:20] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, let's do that.

[00:22:22] Katie Keith: Which was about how to balance innovation with user feedback when iterating on a product. And it reminds him of a post he saw this week on X about a lot of recent negative customer reviews.

[00:22:32] on Jetpack. So that does link quite closely with what we were talking about. I know I have some plugins that, um, get quite low reviews, which is largely because of decisions we've made about what to put in premium versus free and things like that. And it is always difficult to know what to do. Cause if you just give away everything, then, um, you don't.

[00:22:52] You're not a profitable business, as we talked about with Daniel Iser on a previous episode. That's always a dilemma. And I know that affects some of my free plugin reviews. What do you do with Give?

[00:23:05] Matt Cromwell: One thing I say to our, all of our brands now is just feedback is feedback. And that doesn't sound particularly profound, but, um, when you start to apply it to things where you feel very emotional, you feel very like, like, uh, I don't understand why this person is responding this way.

[00:23:27] Um, like just saying, well, feedback is feedback. They are saying something that you might not, uh, agree with, but it's, it's input from a customer that we should take seriously no matter what. And I, I was, I was really struck by the way Matt just now said, um, we got a lot of one star reviews because at that time it was a one star product

[00:23:50] I think that's really, it really did strike me how he said we got one stars because it was a one star product. And sometimes just owning that, um, I think is, is really important. Um, the, the ability to, uh, to say that, um, um, that's where we're at right now.

[00:24:09] We, we earned that negative review in one form or another.

[00:24:13] Katie Keith: Well, I think this raises the issue of when to release a minimum viable product. Because Gutenberg was released when he knew it needed another nine years or something to fully polish it and add all the phases, which different people think are more essential than others.

[00:24:31] Like translation, everyone's saying, bring translations in and, you know, got to get the core product right. So how do you define a minimum viable product, um, which won't get bad reviews, but you need to get the community testing and feeding back and testing feasibility as quickly as possible.

[00:24:49] Matt Cromwell: I think often in those circumstances, um, You have to know what your roadmap is, um, where the product is going and you have to communicate that really strongly.

[00:24:59] I feel like, um, Automattic did a really good job of that with Gutenberg overall. Um, and a lot of folks who are giving a lot of negative feedback with Gutenberg in the beginning just simply didn't like the direction. They were like, if this is what you're doing, I'm not about it. And they were just like, no, this is not what I want.

[00:25:17] And it wasn't even in my mind, often feedback about the product itself. It was about the vision of where, where they're taking WordPress itself. Um, but now I think more recent feedback, um, is a lot more about how, um, the block editor is taking over full site editing and things like that. Matt, can you hear us now?

[00:25:37] Are you all right?

[00:25:39] Matt Mullenweg: I think so. Can you hear me? There we go. New scenery. It's a little bit better.

[00:25:44] Katie Keith: Let's move on to product marketing.

[00:25:46] Shall we then?

[00:25:47] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely.

[00:25:48] Katie Keith: So from a product marketing perspective, I'm not going to ask you about WordPress because you were involved in that from the beginning, but you became involved in Tumblr more recently. So I'd love to know what's the first thing you would do in terms of marketing if you were building Tumblr today from ground zero.

[00:26:09] Matt Mullenweg: So I think a great place to start is by talking to your most passionate users, people who are, um, the happiest and hearing what words they use, what they identify with, with a product. So, um, something I learned actually from Mark Benioff is, uh, by the way, Salesforce executives spend at least half their time in meetings with customers.

[00:26:34] Even the very top of the company and something he would often do is he'd be in a meeting with a customer. They might have a big new initiative. They've been working on for a year. It's called, you know, X, Y, Z. And if he heard the customer referring to it as something different, say Z, Y, X, he would just change the name in the meeting right then and start to use their words instead of his words.

[00:26:56] Matt Cromwell: Interesting.

[00:26:57] Matt Mullenweg: So I think that, um, even when you're at that level, you know, top of the top, uh, Mark Benioff, probably one of the great marketers and salespeople of all time. Um, that humility, uh, to know that, um, you know, you wanted to find yourself in the terms that people are using, not how you think about it is a very, very powerful.

[00:27:18] So that's what I would do with Tumblr if I were starting from scratch is say like, Hey, let's go, let me meet the most passionate Tumblr users, the people who are spending hours a day on it that are posting the most that are, and, uh, you know, how do they talk about it? What does it mean to them? What does it represent to them?

[00:27:33] And then how could we maybe evoke some of that in the branding, the logos, the, the tone of voice, you know, Tumblr is actually quite fun to work on because it's a very irreverent, you know, it's a, it's a youth. It's almost like the MTV or like the, uh, the hot topic of, uh, of the blogging and CMS world. Um, so you could be, uh, pretty risqué there in a way that, uh, we typically don't with WordPress.

[00:28:00] WordPress, I would say, has much more of a tone of like friendly, competence, You know, community. It's like family. It's like we're family oriented. I would say, um, uh, all ages, you know, from young to old babies to, to, to 100 year olds. Uh, we, we, we exhibit something different there.

[00:28:23] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I, if I recall, there was a lot of feedback from the Tumblr community when, um, you implemented like a really trimmed down block editor into the editor.

[00:28:35] Um, do you recall some of that input or feedback? How did they respond, um, to that overall?

[00:28:42] Matt Mullenweg: That's actually been, uh, gotten super, super well. I'd say it's one of the most successful re implementations of Gutenberg, and that there were some bugs in the beginning. Uh, but we were able to open up a lot of, uh, creativity for Tumblr users for what they could post.

[00:28:57] And, um, it's been very, very, very stable after, you know, kind of working out the bugs of that initial rollout.

[00:29:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:29:06] Matt Mullenweg: Day One has also adopted, uh, Gutenberg behind the scenes, which has been really cool to see. That's been, I think, much smoother even that people haven't even noticed it.

[00:29:15] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I haven't heard about that.

[00:29:16] That's interesting. Nice. Um, next question we've got, um, is, um, one project that folks in the WordPress space, um, especially our audience would love to see more investment in is probably WP Tavern. Um, and. Basically, same question. I mean, I know Tavern right now is in a little bit of flux at the moment, but we're talking, this subject is really about business from a business perspective.

[00:29:45] Um, you're running a, I mean, we had Katie and I had this discussion about like, well, what is Tavern actually? Is it a product? It's not really a product. It's a brand. I mean, it should probably run like a business should be run in many ways. It is a product in the sense that it needs maintenance and development and enhancements and, um, those types of things, um, it needs a staff, um, in terms of, uh, from a business perspective, how might you be rethinking Tavern today or how much you rethink Tavern from the beginning?

[00:30:18] Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, it's, it's probably a good illustration that right now on the Automattic side of things, I have incredible support, you know, 1900 plus people. Um, so we do a lot of stuff, but I've got just an incredible. Team there to cover everything. Um, for the side, for me, I'll call the Audrey side or the WordPress.org side, Tavern.

[00:30:43] Um, I don't have much support right now. So those projects can sometimes, you know, go very poorly. I would say I, so all I can do for Tavern is just apologize that it's been, you know, down for months, essentially. Uh, we've got the podcast going, got some fix ups there. There's been some progress. It will be some more, but yeah, I need to get some full time editors and writers in there.

[00:31:05] And, um, there's a variety of logistical reasons why it hasn't happened yet. None of them good though. So all I can say is like, sometimes, uh, you know, last year I got kind of burnt out.

[00:31:16] You know, I, uh, I would just kind of keep working. I was putting in a lot of hundred hour weeks, you know, too many times in a row.

[00:31:26] I think it's fine to do that sometimes. Um, but we do that too many times. Your quality of work goes down quite a bit too. Um, something especially post sabbatical I'm focused on is like shutting down the laptop at 9 p. m. or at some point where you're like, okay, I got a, there's so much I could be doing. I mean, that's 1 of the beauties of the WordPress ecosystem.

[00:31:47] It's always another place you could look at or another thing you could do or another document you could take some other bug you could file. Um, but at some point I have to shut it down. And, um, unfortunately, the things at the bottom, I have to triage quite a bit. And, um, uh, so I, I prioritize a lot of, uh, uh, Automattic and I would say WordPress.org in that.

[00:32:10] And so some of the other things have, uh, fallen by the wayside. So all I can do is apologize.

[00:32:16] Matt Cromwell: It's understandable and it's highly relatable. I mean, so many of the people who watch our show are doing one primary thing and they have like several kind of secondary tertiary things that fall by the wayside.

[00:32:30] Um, and, um, I mean, I don't know if most people know, but at GiveWP, we have another product called WP Business Reviews. Nobody knows that we even have that because we don't really invest in it very much, uh, unfortunately. Um, and, um, and often those things are just simply because of capacity, um, or burnout.

[00:32:49] So I think, um, hearing from you, even, um, with the success that you had, with all the responsibilities that you have, like trying to figure out that life balance work ethic, um, still, even at that level, it continues to be a pressing issue all the time at every level of the game.

[00:33:09] Katie Keith: Should we move on to questions from the community then?

[00:33:12] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:33:14] Katie Keith: So we've had some questions, uh, via X, um, as well as people commenting, um, on the live show. Uh, we had a good one from Blake Whittle. Who wanted to know your best marketing advice for someone entering WordPress product business in 2024?

[00:33:35] Matt Mullenweg: I feel like y'all could answer this better than me. So why don't we go do a quick round? I will, uh, Matt, Katie, why don't you say one thing and I'll say one thing at the end?

[00:33:43] Matt Cromwell: Nice. Yeah, Katie, you want to go first?

[00:33:46] Katie Keith: Content marketing. That's my best advice. Do it. Do it a lot.

[00:33:50] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Entering the product business in 2024.

[00:33:55] Honestly, one thing I've been challenged by is, um, seeing some of these newer products that started off by building a huge community first. Um, like they don't have a product yet. They They built a community, and sometimes they build that community through a YouTube channel, or through a Facebook group, or through an email newsletter.

[00:34:15] Um, they, they build an audience around a specific subject that they happen to be an expert in, or have expertise in, um, and insight in. And then, later, once they've built that community, the product is a soft launch. It's easy. Uh, the people are already eager for it, already looking for it. They already look to you for insights for what that product solves.

[00:34:37] And, um, and then you're just like, all right, folks, this is, here it is. And then they, and then it sells really quickly right out of the gates on the first day. Um, Of course you still have to grow and build after that, but some, I've been really challenged by that approach that I've seen several other folks do really well at, and I kind of want to try it myself someday, but, um, yeah, start with the community first and then launch the product afterwards.

[00:35:02] Matt Mullenweg: I'll build on that to say, you know, especially the earliest days, uh, don't discount in person. The power and you know, you will be your best product ambassador. You understand it top to bottom. And so go to meetups, go to WordCamps, you know, find. Go to non WordPress meetups, you know, but it might be related to whatever area you're in and find where the people are and, uh, you know, get to know them.

[00:35:28] Your first customers are, are one of your biggest treasures.

[00:35:33] And also I would say to cherish that starting point. It is so much fun. You will look back at it, if you're very successful, you'll look back at those early days, the zero to one, uh, with a lot of, uh, warmth. So, um, Yeah, that that's like, enjoy it. I know it feels like a, uh, sometimes a grind and by the way, a lot of things won't work that's failure is very much part of it.

[00:35:56] Katie Keith: It's hard to know, isn't it You don't have that hindsight to know that all your hours that you're doing now will pay back and that you will look back from a position of success.

[00:36:08] Matt Mullenweg: I fail all the time. I guess we just talked about one with WP Tavern, but even like when WordPress was starting, like there were tons of other plugins I had written, they were like, I was going to actually fork WordPress and CMS press or something.

[00:36:22] Uh, I was going to call it multi pattern, it was going to be the CMS and then be a blog and there's all sorts of stuff. And, uh, just try, try a lot. So don't feel bad to fail as well.

[00:36:33] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I like to remind folks often how WordPress itself was marketing-wise successful by not marketing itself, um, by Meetups.

[00:36:45] Um, and, and, and what eventually became WordCamps, um, just boots on the ground, talking to people, um, trying to show how you can build websites with this new thing, uh, that's out there. Um, because a lot of a lot of people in the product space and WordPress right now, they often question like, what's the value of going to WordCamps?

[00:37:06] Like my customers aren't at WordCamps. It's really all of my competitors are at WordCamps. Um, and me personally, I don't know. I don't feel like I have like a, a number or like a specific way I can datify the ROI of WordCamps. But my personal experience is I know with certainty that GiveWP was successful partly because of our huge presence at WordCamps. Like it, it, it feels anecdotal, it is anecdotal, but I, I can't deny it. I can't deny that I know that there was something there. There's something for sure about just talking to people all the time about your product. And then six months later, they're like, "Hey, I remember I met those folks" and they try it out and all of a sudden they're a big ambassador.

[00:37:49] So I am a big fan of the, the Meetup approach of the, the day one WordPress got successful by Meetups, uh, kind of approach. I don't know. It does that resonate with you still, Matt?

[00:38:02] Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. And you know, it's not the number, it's the quality of those people you're meeting and you don't forget the ripples. So maybe you only talk to, you know, five people at a WordCamp, those five people might build 500 sites per year or influence others. So, um, yeah, never discount the ripple effects that as well.

[00:38:27] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely.

[00:38:28] Matt Mullenweg: Or you might meet someone who you're going to hire or, you know, like these connections can really change your life in so many ways. And, um, yeah, I do try to optimize my life in general for that serendipity.

[00:38:39] You know, if you kind of like optimize for luck, you know, what are you going to do this evening? You can go out or you can watch Netflix. Which one is probably gonna give you more chances more shots on goal for you know luck or serendipity meeting someone or having some experience? Um, so yeah, how can you sort of orient your business to optimize for luck and serendipity as well?

[00:39:08] Matt Cromwell: Matt, I know we said that we want to try to keep it at 45. Can we keep you for just a little bit longer?

[00:39:15] Matt Mullenweg: Absolutely. Especially now that I seem to have found the spot that's a little more stable. Hey, and by the way, happy to do a redo on this and i'll do it for one of my like 10 gigabit fiber like office layers With really good everything

[00:39:28] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Well, we'll hold you to that um got another question from the community, uh, Bowe Frankema reached out on X and he said "Are there any specific gaps in the market that have been overlooked? Um, which type of products do you hope to see emerge that would benefit the WordPress ecosystem the most right now?" Um, that's a good question.

[00:39:52] Like what's going on for website building? What's going on for CMSs in general, um, uh, that, that plugins products could, um, help serve that need better.

[00:40:04] Matt Mullenweg: You know, the thing that's biggest on my mind, I don't know if this is necessarily commercial products, is the "Data Liberation" aspect. So, as, you know, partially because of WordPress success, lots of proprietary competitors and other things are trying to get people to spend their time and publish on these other platforms, which are not free, which are not open.

[00:40:25] And, uh, that is, I think. You know, I feel bad for people doing that because they're going to get the rug pulled out from under them. Just like people who put all their eggs into the Facebook basket or put all their eggs into the Twitter basket or something like that. Like, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably know that like open source is so important, owning, having people at your domain, having a direct relationship to your customers.

[00:40:52] So, um, I do think that it's, we could do a lot better with kind of. Allowing your WordPress to be your home base and then broadcasting out to every single possible other channel, but in a way that's doing it sort of natively to that channel, not just kind of like an autopost, but actually allows you to interact and tries to bring those interactions back to your site as much as possible.

[00:41:16] So,

[00:41:16] Matt Cromwell: yeah,

[00:41:16] Matt Mullenweg: that's, that's definitely a gap I'm feeling right now. And I love that because we're If nothing else, WordPress will always be the most open platform. We want to be the easiest to get into. Also the easiest if you ever want to get your content out or whatever, like it's all there. It's all yours.

[00:41:34] Matt Cromwell: Just to clarify for anyone who might not be super familiar, when you say "Data Liberation", there's a project, a "Data Liberation" project specifically on .org, mostly through .org, right? Um, that, uh, yeah, that's all about helping, um, any of the closed system platforms migrate from that system to a WordPress site in one form or another.

[00:41:57] Um, what's the status of that project in general? Uh, is there movement and momentum there still?

[00:42:04] Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, as I talked about at WordCamp Europe, it's actually been a very slow start. But that's part of why I talked about it. And since that talk, it's picked up quite a bit, which is good. Um, I also want to say it's not just about migration.

[00:42:15] It might be about synchronization. So, for example, I think there's some very cool things like, how do you synchronize a WordPress site to a Notion site?

[00:42:23] How do you synchronize it to GitHub? Like we're doing with a lot of our docs.

[00:42:27] Um, so, I think of this also as like a way to like connectors, not unlike a Zapier or Zapier, how do you pronounce it? I don't know, but these products that actually kind of can make it two way as well. So it's not just a one way path. Yeah.

[00:42:41] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Nice. Good clarification. Katie, we have another question, right?

[00:42:47] Katie Keith: Um, so Brad Williams, um, asked about the reasoning behind recent decisions around promoting premium jetpack features more heavily.

[00:42:57] And from that, how to find the right balance between free and premium. Uh, so it won't annoy people, but you actually, um, are a successful viable business.

[00:43:08] Matt Mullenweg: Uh, you know, it's interesting. Earlier, we were talking about sort of that bringing, breaking things out from the plug in or pulling things in. We talked about how Give you're pulling some things in or WooCommerce are pulling some things in. In Core, we're pulling some things in, you know, that might have been plugins before, but they're going to be in Core.

[00:43:25] Um, I feel like this is one of those things that's a pendulum. And you're always going back and forth. I think it was maybe Jim Clark, uh, that said, you know, uh, all the money to be made in the world is from bundling and unbundling, you know, the internet kind of unbundled cable and now like it's being rebundled, right?

[00:43:44] Like now you sign up for your telephone plan and it comes with, you know, Amazon or Hulu or whatever it is. Um, I, uh, you know, Amazon killed all the bookstores. Now they're opening bookstores. It's kind of. Everything old is new again. So I would say that with Jetpack, um, you know, we had have had this thing in Akismet from the very beginning.

[00:44:07] This idea of commercial versus non commercial use. And so I think it's very powerful. Um, and having that free version of Akismet available to all WordPress sites again, huge part of the growth. So that's something that Automattic kind of subsidize. That's part of the reason that WordPress is as big as it is today.

[00:44:28] Um, now, you know, 20 years later, um, you know, it can be challenging as well to continue that if, if, uh, others aren't contributing as back much to Core, you know, that's totally up for "Five for the Future" or if there's businesses themselves, um, haven't really grown much, you know, uh, you sort of get people, maybe not following even the, that license term of commercial versus non commercial use.

[00:44:55] So, um, so we want to get better about that, but without in a way that, like, you know, is a bait and switch or anything like that. So it's, it's very, very hard and, um, I think you have to do it very gradually, very sensitively, um, you know, do it in ways that perhaps recognize people that might be contributing to your product and non monetary ways.

[00:45:19] You know, so something I don't think we're doing this for a gizmo right now, but I would love something there where maybe you're the best at identifying spam and you, your site gets a lot of it and you catch it really early. So maybe you get the free version just because we want to say thank you. So think about where you can build in generosity as well.

[00:45:37] How can you recognize your earliest customers? You know, pocket cast, we have this way. They sold some lifetime subscriptions early on. As you know, I'm not a fan of lifetime subscriptions, but, but they did it. So we're going to honor that. And we're actually gonna change the name of that from lifetime to be like, we don't know yet, but like legacy, thank you.

[00:45:54] Or something like that, basically recognizing like, Hey, you believe in this early on. And we want you to be kind of part of our street team. Like we want to like really actively involved in our forums and promoting pocket cast. And like, you know, you've got this magical golden ticket that gives it, gives it to you free for life.

[00:46:10] So now how can we also sort of like, get you really involved in defining what the future of something like pocket cast looks like. So again, Um, it's, it's shifting that mindset from thinking of these lifetime users as a liability from to an asset. And then how can you do that with everything? Like, how can you turn any problem you're having or any challenge you're having in your business from being something that's, that's bringing you down to something that maybe is actually forcing you to look at things differently or unlocking a different way of approaching it that could actually.

[00:46:41] Really level up your business. Um, and that's been true for WordPress. Like everyone says, Oh, how do you, how do you make any money when you're giving away for free, or how can you grow something on a WordPress brand when anyone can offer WordPress? It's like, well, you can see that as a weakness and a reason not to try, or you can kind of turn it on its head and say like, how is that actually perhaps our biggest strength?

[00:47:03] Matt Cromwell: Hmm. Love it. That's really good insight. Um, we have a fun question here from Zach Katz. Uh, we'd love to hear, um, The one true Matt, what books is, uh, is Matt Mullenweg reading right now?

[00:47:19] Matt Mullenweg: I just finished up a really good one called, uh, Breathe by James Nestor or Breath, I guess Breath, maybe. Um, yeah, I, I recommend that one, uh, quite a bit.

[00:47:30] Um, I'm right now reading the Tony Fidel book, uh, you know, he's the sort of main person behind some of the early iPod and iPhone and later went on to create Nest, um, really interesting book, um, kind of that Apple culture and maybe there's some Google culture of, of building things. Um, I would say in general, and I published my book list.

[00:47:51] So if you want to look at things I've read in the past, I try to balance, um, what I read between very new things and very old things. So like the two books I just mentioned are kind of newer. Um, old things I'm reading are letters from, uh, Rockefeller to his son. Kind of a beautiful set of letters that he wrote to his son on like success and legacy and everything like that.

[00:48:17] I returned to Marcus Aurelius, his meditations.

[00:48:21] So how do you, how do you balance the very old and very new? There's this concept called, uh, Lindy, the Lindy effect, you know, things that have lasted a long time are probably going to last much longer. And so what are the books that have been around for 2000 years?

[00:48:35] And you get into the Bible, it's Aristotle, some religious texts, you know, things like that. They've lasted for a reason. Um, I actually really enjoy reading religious texts of religions I'm not, you know, um, and it's actually amazing. I recently, I think it was about two years ago and back to the Bhagavad Gita, um, and just how much, how many cultural touch points are on that.

[00:48:57] But I didn't even realize were references or things we take for granted, sort of embedded in our culture, even Western culture and have the roots and stories from thousands of years ago. So, um, have that old stuff and then, you know, have some new stuff. And I think of those stuff of all your content conscious.

[00:49:11] Consumption. So that includes Twitter X and includes articles and medium posts and everything like that. Um, you know, some of that, you know, the blog posts that might be very popular today. Will people still be reading a hundred years from now? Maybe, maybe not. So, so keep that in mind with how you're sort of programming your internal LLM, training your internal LLM.

[00:49:33] Katie Keith: Will blog posts exist in a hundred years?

[00:49:36] Matt Mullenweg: Sure, I hope so. A hundred percent, if I have anything to say about it.

[00:49:39] Katie Keith: You've got your hundred year plan, so you've got your money where your mouth is.

[00:49:44] Matt Mullenweg: We do. Yeah. And I'm very excited. We actually something new there. I don't know if we've announced this actually is, um, uh, Xander Rose.

[00:49:51] So the gentleman who, who led the long now foundation for 28 years has actually joined Automattic and he's focused on the a hundred year plan, a hundred year domains sort of are very, very long term, um, products of what we have to announce so far, but I hope we have some more in the future as well.

[00:50:10] Matt Cromwell: Interesting. Really nice. Well, Matt, we always wrap up the show with one question, which is what is your best advice for any WordPress product owner out there? Think of it like your elevator pitch. You're at a word camp. You got 30 seconds between two different presentations you're walking to and somebody's like, what are you?

[00:50:31] What's your best advice? I'm building out a product business right now. What's your best advice? What do you got? I

[00:50:38] Matt Mullenweg: guess the first would be anything is possible. So, you know, if you look around at all the things you admire and all the things around you, they were all built by people just like you and me.

[00:50:49] And, you know, WordPress was co founded by someone who right now is in an RV park. So, I mean, you know, the people who built all the things are no different from you and me. And that potential lies in every single one of us. You know, don't no matter where you come from, no matter what you feel like the cards you were dealt when you were born, um, you have the ability to change that any given day.

[00:51:14] Um, and then 2nd is, you know, uh, learning today is bounded only by your work ethic and curiosity. I truly believe that it's easy to think like, even. 40 years ago, books were in the library. You know, you'd have the encyclopedias you might not have at home. And we take for granted how much the wealth of all human knowledge is at our fingertips or available for really de minimis prices.

[00:51:42] Um, you know, things like WordCamps or, or eBooks or something like that. So, um, you know, how do you build that into your personal ethos? And to go back to the previous question, how are you also making sure you're learning from? Not just the new stuff, but also the really things that have seen the test of time.

[00:52:00] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Love it. Um, that is a wrap. That's all we have for today, Matt. Thank you so much. Um, and we really appreciate your time. Uh, next week, um, we're going to be on again. We're going to be here. Myself and co host Zach Katz are going to be here. We're going to be interviewing, uh, the co founder of OmniSend, uh, uh, Raitis Loris.

[00:52:24] Um, and he's going to talk about his shift from Shopify, uh, being primarily Shopify oriented into starting to focus on WordPress a bit more and talk about the differences between those two communities. So I'm excited about this.

[00:52:37] Matt Mullenweg: That's a good example. I just learned about them at WordCamp Europe. So maybe a good example of why to go to WordCamp.

[00:52:43] Katie Keith: They're making good use of WordCamp.

[00:52:46] Matt Cromwell: They did a really good job. They came out really strong. Yeah.

[00:52:50] Matt Mullenweg: I want to say a big thank you to Matt and Katie. I think what you do is awesome. Thank you for doing this podcast. Y'all both share a lot that you learn and share, which I think is really, really powerful.

[00:52:59] And so I want to thank you for your contributions.

[00:53:01] Matt Cromwell: Oh, I appreciate that very, very much. Katie.

[00:53:05] Katie Keith: Thank you for coming on. Yeah. Cause we're very passionate about helping other product businesses to grow. So it's been really amazing to get your insights on that. And I think we've covered a lot of, um, concrete things that people can help put into practice with their own businesses.

[00:53:20] So, uh, special thanks also to PostStatus for being our green room. If you're enjoying these shows, do us a favor and hit like and subscribe, share it with your friends, reference this show in your newsletters, and most of all, we hope to see you next week. Bye!

[00:53:36] Matt Cromwell: Bye, everyone!

[00:53:36] Matt Mullenweg: Bye bye!