[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Hey, everyone. Welcome to WP Product Talk. Today I want to talk about the biggest threat to any sales business is shrinking markets. But what happens when your entire ecosystem is shrinking? For WordPress product businesses, we depend deeply on the success of WordPress itself. So when there is talk of shrinking market share or slowed growth of WordPress, every product owner's heart skips a beat.

[00:00:36] Or maybe five beats. If your heart is skipping right now, then this show is for you.

[00:00:43] This is WP Product Talk place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more, it's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners, by WordPress product owners, and now enjoy the show.

[00:01:08] Welcome Amber. How are you doing?

[00:01:10] Amber Hinds: Doing great. I'm super excited about this. very timely and important topic, which is why we brought not just one guest like we have, but four amazing people that are going to share some really great thoughts with us on today's show.

[00:01:29] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. I'm excited. So first we're going to be talking about data.

[00:01:32] Is WordPress market share actually shrinking? And how do we know this? Does it even matter for our businesses if it's shrinking or not? Uh, for that, we've invited Yostafak and Noel Tak. Both of them have presented compelling data on this question, and we're excited to have them both here.

[00:01:50] Amber Hinds: Yep, and then after we do that, we are going to be talking about what WordPress product owners should actually do About shrinking market share.

[00:02:00] Is there anything we can do to contribute to fixing the problem? If there is one, we'll find out when we go into the data. And how can we help increase adoption of WordPress as a whole as we adapt our marketing techniques or other things as product owners? So I think this should be a great show.

[00:02:17] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:02:17] Who's going to be talking about that with us? Yeah. For that question, we thought there was no one better to talk about those things than Miriam Schwab from Elementor and Rich Tabor.

[00:02:29] Amber Hinds: So let's get started and welcome Yost and Noel.

[00:02:35] Matt Cromwell: Hey guys. How's it going? Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for inviting

[00:02:41] Joost de Valk: us.

[00:02:44] Matt Cromwell: Do you want to give an example of like talking over each other? We're going to do our best.

[00:02:49] Noel Tock: We've known each other for like 12 years, so it makes sense.

[00:02:53] Amber Hinds: Yeah. For anyone who has lived under a rock, Would you like to give a quick blurb about your backgrounds, who you are, what you do in WordPress world before we start talking numbers?

[00:03:04] Joost de Valk: So I'm the founder of a company called Yoast, which you might know in the WordPress space. We sold that in 2021, started investing into other companies, uh, and building other fun new products. So, uh, both, both an investor and a product owner of my own new products.

[00:03:26] Noel Tock: No, I'm not sure. Yeah. Um, I am a co founder of human made. Uh, which is, I don't know, one of the longest standing, I guess, enterprise WordPress agencies around. And a number of years back, we also decided to launch our own enterprise hosting, um, just tailored for really large platforms, really large sites, uh, called Altus.

[00:03:46] Um, so we do the two of those things. Uh, and that's really what occupies most of my WordPress space these days.

[00:03:53] Matt Cromwell: Nice. I have a follow up question for both of you then. Why do you care about market share? Like, why did this thing become a thing? Like, Joost, your blog about it is, uh, obviously prolific. Um, Noel, your presentation, um, and some of your tweets about it have also been widely shared around, uh, what made you both interested in this subject at all.

[00:04:14] Uh, Joost first.

[00:04:17] Joost de Valk: Well, so both when you're investing and when you're building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to, uh, well, to get people to, uh, to buy the software that you want to sell them. And, um, especially as P as sites.

[00:04:41] That have been online for a while don't tend to change plugins as much as new sites, uh, new sites coming online is actually very important to it's like, it's, it's super important to know that people are working on their websites, actively working on their websites, um, And that's why I was interested and started following.

[00:05:01] I've also got a slightly wider view of just not just WordPress per se, but also open source in general. I've always been interested in how well is open source doing and well, how is it doing against the other CMS is out there. So that's why I started. Uh, well, blogging about that, uh, first biannually and slowly, uh, well, more, more and more often.

[00:05:28] Matt Cromwell: Excellent. Noel, what about you?

[00:05:30] Noel Tock: Um, yeah, it's been a multiple kind of reasons, I'd say. Um, we've been on this kind of up only trajectory for a very long time. Um, you know, when we kind of started off and we had this honeymoon phase and we had custom post types that are so cool. And at some point, the rest API came, there was talks about this block editor thing and everything was on the up and up.

[00:05:50] And it just felt like it slowed down in the last few years, not necessarily just looking at the data, but just the conversations I was having and the quality of conversations. Um, so I just wanted to, you know, it felt like there was a need to kind of reconcile. Um, and then, uh, you know, there's numbers, um, you know, what we traditionally called market market share today, which I feel, um, you know, has kind of hovered around the same region does well here, maybe not so well there or whatever, but it has kind of like been at the same place.

[00:06:19] And my curiosity is, you know, does that, um, is that a maturity that declines or is that a pause and then gas again?

[00:06:30] Amber Hinds: Yeah. So I think it would be interesting for each of you to give maybe an overview of what. I know we've referenced, you know, some tweets and, uh, Yoast has a CMS, uh, market share report, which we can throw a link to in the chat, just maybe high level for people if they want to take a look at these more, um, sort of sharing what, what data points are you looking at when you're trying to assess if market share is growing in WordPress or not?

[00:07:03] Joost de Valk: So, um, for me, my report is based on the, uh, HTTP archive data set, which in itself is based off the Chrome UX data set. Um, which immediately, uh, should make you pause for a tiny bit because that day, what that data set is, is actually important. It's sites that get, uh, enough traffic for Chrome to want to report on them.

[00:07:31] Um, publicly in the Chrome UX data set, which means that these, uh, sites are not my, not tiny sites. They're usually a bit bigger. Uh, even though there's like 13 million sites in that data sets right now, it's still only a fraction of the, uh, the entire internet. Um, And not every site will be included in it.

[00:07:55] And because it's the basically the top sites to some degree, um, these results are also to to some degree, um, a measure of market share in terms of traffic. Um, so if WordPress sites overall do a bit less well in search, for instance, then you might see these sites drop a bit. If they do better in search, then you might see them go up a bit because more sites might make the cut.

[00:08:27] So So it's

[00:08:30] Amber Hinds: less about usage than SEO?

[00:08:33] Joost de Valk: Well, no, it is both. But it is, the problem is that the data set changes every month. So you're not comparing apples to apples every month. You're just comparing the percentage within the data set every month. I think it's a, it's relatively reliable, but when we're talking about my new changes, and when we say that WordPress is declining based on the numbers that I shared there, um, if you can go up, uh, I don't know who's controlling the scrolling map, I think that you'll see that WordPress looks like it's declining a tiny bit, but I think honestly that there's too much uncertainty in the data to, to be able to say that clearly.

[00:09:13] Yeah.

[00:09:14] Amber Hinds: So for people who can't see this, it's WordPress is up at the top with market share on this. It says 35. 26 percent and you're found a month over month down of 0. 28%. Yeah. And that's what you're saying. You don't, you think it's in like the error margin that that might not actually be true.

[00:09:31] Joost de Valk: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's very possible that that might change in another direction.

[00:09:37] The month after, it's not like a very steep decline in any way. Um, and it's also like, these numbers are pretty hard to, to do well. I'm constantly tweaking them. I found that. Um, when I was not running the Elementor numbers, for instance, there was a gap in the Elementor numbers, and I was like, that's not logical.

[00:09:59] There's no reason why Elementor would suddenly start dropping when it's been growing like forever. Um, so I actually ran them again this week in another way with help from, um, some of the people behind the HTTP archive who are luckily all very helpful in, in running these queries. It's a huge data set, so it's actually hard to query it well.

[00:10:19] Um, And came to the conclusion that Elementor isn't shrinking at all. In fact, it's still growing in much the same pace that it has been over the years. So, this data is A good, like a large differences in it will actually mean something, but my new changes of like less than a half a percent don't really mean much.

[00:10:48] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, yeah, I do like that one view though. That's a lot more. Over the last year ish, um, it does show WordPress increasing market share over the last, um, while, um, which is, you know, a lot of the question that folks have, um, I have thoughts

[00:11:06] Joost de Valk: about that, but I'll let Noel go first.

[00:11:09] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, let's hear from Noel. I also have a chart here.

[00:11:13] I'm going to put up on the screen. Noel, um, how do you, uh, think through this from a data perspective?

[00:11:21] Noel Tock: I, so, you know, to, to connect back to what you're also saying, cause he's talking about market share, um, the most relevant here, I think not the actual obvious market share line, not the pink line, but, uh, the blue bar chart, which is just registered, um, detecting new WordPress websites coming online.

[00:11:41] Um, that's really what I've been looking at feeling. In the market. And that's what I sort of pursue. So even, you know, on a, on a quarterly basis, I'll take the new WordPress websites inside of the top 1 million on built with, which is a very different data set, I think, than what yours is looking at. Um, his is more comprehensive in that regard.

[00:12:05] Um, I'm really looking at the, just like that, the top million. Um, and I. I'll look through every line item, just kind of scan down all often, like check the sites, see what they're at. Um, if, especially if they're large, uh, companies or big brands, I'll, I'll, I'll see, you know, where is the install? Um, so, you know, the Donald Trump site, for instance, has now registered WordPress.

[00:12:28] But that is on 1 sub domain for a single page created as a landing form type thing. Just a lead gen kind of capture. It's nowhere else. Um, same for delta airlines where we see that for delta flight products, the F P dot delta or whatever. Um, so there's, there's a lot, there's, there's almost like, um, a ratio, uh, which.

[00:12:50] Like, I don't have an exact number on, like, I've looked at this in the past where I've seen, okay, you know, almost three quarters or two thirds of new WordPress sites, um, in, in a given period over the last year anyway, uh, have been on sub domains as opposed to mains, uh, main domains. And that is something in terms of, I don't want to say the word quality, but maybe like relevancy or weight that, uh, like the, the site gets, you know, like how does that feed into market share?

[00:13:17] Because we, we talk about market share in a very different way. Distinct way in terms of WordPress being detected anywhere on a domain. And then we, we received that domains entire worth, so to speak as a, as a binary, uh, it's there or it's not. Um, and in that regard, you know, like I, I just have questions or thoughts, you know, uh, for myself, at least like, you know, is that something that's improving and declining?

[00:13:44] Are we eating more of the site, less of the site? Um,

[00:13:49] Matt Cromwell: interesting.

[00:13:50] Amber Hinds: I am curious. I

[00:13:52] Joost de Valk: want to clarify for my data. Yes, please. Front front pages only.

[00:13:57] Matt Cromwell: Oh, you're only front page, it's interesting. Yeah,

[00:14:00] Noel Tock: that's very valuable. Yeah,

[00:14:02] Amber Hinds: that is very interesting. So, and, and sorry, but what you're looking at with your data, Noel, I was just going to ask you're, you're looking at top million, meaning like largest sites.

[00:14:15] So it's more skewed towards enterprise, right?

[00:14:18] Noel Tock: Uh, I mean, and yes, and large sites, you know, like sometimes you have high traffic sites, which are not necessarily high traffic

[00:14:25] Amber Hinds: publishers or something. Yeah,

[00:14:27] Noel Tock: but just a clarification for you, um, and on his data set is, is front page also a front page of a subdomain or are all subdomains kicked out?

[00:14:36] Uh, subdomains

[00:14:36] Joost de Valk: are included. Right. Which is, which is, which is because otherwise things like wordpress. com subdomains would never make it.

[00:14:45] Noel Tock: No, no, that's very important. That's that, that helps me a lot because if we have pure, pure domains, like I, it would feel, it wouldn't be like a true data set to kind of represent, but it would give us momentum, I guess, in a certain direction.

[00:14:58] Joost de Valk: Yeah, no, but it, no, so it is, uh, subdomains are included and that to some degree is also. Questionable, uh, but not for wordpress. com, for instance, a lot of wordpress. com sites probably won't make the traffic requirements.

[00:15:14] Noel Tock: Mm hmm. I agree.

[00:15:17] Amber Hinds: So I, I think that's interesting because Jos, you think it is growing.

[00:15:21] No, based on this, do you think that it's growing or not growing market share?

[00:15:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, that's actually, we wanted to kick that off there with kind of like a TLDR. Like, what is your, what is your quick take real quick? No, what's your quick take? Is market, WordPress market share declining?

[00:15:37] Noel Tock: I don't think it's declining nor it's increasing.

[00:15:40] Like I, but what I do think is that. As we talk about it today is a lagging indicator because to make a purchasing decision, um, to even like research CMS is to pick one, to install it, or then pick one after to hire an agency or do it yourself or whatever it is, that whole time to launch, uh, and then time to detection that, that can be quite like that.

[00:16:04] That's a significant enough gap. That attention is a more important indicator than adoption in some ways for people who operate in the market, and that's where the word that's like, quite key to me, I guess, is excitement. Um, I'm missing the excitement of WordPress, and I'm not feeling that in the market.

[00:16:26] I think we can do that. I think a lot of that is around the, the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals. Because this one size fits all means that in every single vertical we're being, uh, displaced by campaigns, uh, that have paid or, you know, have received a, a certain amount of funding, uh, and can go after us, right?

[00:16:46] We've seen that with content full, for example, over a number of years in the headless space, um, with an inferior product and displacing WordPress completely and still today. We have no integration with Next. js or anything like that. And so we've, I think, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll let you, you know, take that from there, but you know, that's kind of my sort of challenge.

[00:17:06] Matt Cromwell: Quick summary there. Basically you're saying it's not necessarily declining, but it's not increasing and the energy is lagging. It's almost, I think maybe the best word is just stagnating. The growth is stagnating. Is that the summary?

[00:17:22] Noel Tock: To end the summary, I would say I foresee a decline, um, and, and we can, and I don't mean like a ridiculous sort of like, it can be a very kind of tapering off sort of decline, um, but some sectors can still outperform and grow.

[00:17:40] So I, I think government will perform. I think edu, uh, higher education will perform. I think publishing will continue to perform. And that's what I see in terms of net new sites. When I look at like the last quarter, uh, it's predominantly in that kind of sector, um, and then the rest is kind of up for grabs, um, in that regard, at least from like what I see, but I'd, I'd love to get Yost's opinion on that too.

[00:18:01] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yost, first off, what's your, what's your quick take is WordPress, uh, market share declining?

[00:18:09] Joost de Valk: No, I agree with Noel. I think it's stagnant. Um, and, and I actually agree with the markets he mentioned, too, with, with two additions. I think that there is a huge opportunity on the e commerce side, uh, with Woo, and we see, we actually see Woo drive growth.

[00:18:28] Um, and I think that, uh, to some degree, some products are actually driving WordPress as a whole forward, and Elementor is a very good example of that. And I think that once we realize that, I think that the. The only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is, has actually always been a pain point, um, is now starting to actually hurt us.

[00:18:55] So, On

[00:19:00] Amber Hinds: that graph that Noel has, You have a, a search interest that is going down and, and I'm curious where that's coming from, is that literal searches for like WordPress, that's just Google trends.

[00:19:13] Noel Tock: I mean really universal kind of very macro curve. WordPress just the word and,

[00:19:18] Amber Hinds: and, but the WordPress, the word, not the longer tail like.

[00:19:22] Noel Tock: No, it's a,

[00:19:26] Amber Hinds: I think

[00:19:26] Noel Tock: it's a term that I searched as opposed, because sometimes you can take a, uh, you can take a theme or a brand on Google trends. And in this case, this is really just the term, just the raw term. And I think this is the line you often see from many people in terms of what they post. Um, when I talked to people 10 years ago and said, I do WordPress, they're like, Oh, the website builder.

[00:19:46] And now they're like, what is that? Um, you know, so I think that's the kind of analogy of how, of what this chart is.

[00:19:55] Amber Hinds: Well, I think, and Joost, I'm sure you might have thoughts on this. Sorry about that, y'all. Um, I'm sure you might have thoughts on this. Uh, but I, I think the way people have searched or are searching is very different.

[00:20:10] Now, uh, like we, it might be that how people are finding WordPress is not because they've heard of WordPress, but they might be searching like website builder for flower shop or something. I don't know. Right. Like, like we're very like long tail and how we searched, especially if we're doing voice search or things like that.

[00:20:30] And so perhaps this indicator is not as scary as it is because there's other searches, you know, getting at what we're talking about, Elementor or something, you know, people might literally be looking for Elementor or looking for WooCommerce. Or if they saw, you know, a commercial for a hosting company during the Super Bowl, I don't know, they might go look for that hosting company and then get introduced to WordPress there.

[00:20:53] I don't know if you guys have thoughts on that and the search and whether this is worrying this line,

[00:20:58] Joost de Valk: you know, I think it is worrying and I and I agree with know that it's the lack of excitement around the product is what causes this. Um, and funnily enough. And I don't want to, uh, like whisk away everything that rich is probably going to tell you about, but I don't actually think it's a, I don't think it's a product problem.

[00:21:21] I, I, I think very much that it's a marketing problem and. Um, if you actually, I was just opening Google Trends right now, looking at the numbers and the graph that Noel has is actually going a bit up again for WordPress, but both WooCommerce and Elementor are at the same size and they're stable, uh, over time.

[00:21:47] I just feel that, um, if you, if you look at this from a, from a big perspective, then WordPress can do what a lot of these competitors that we, that we are losing to can do, but we're not telling those stories. Um, and. Every what what's happened traditionally is every once in a while, we'd have a like an economic crisis somewhere and people would start cutting costs and start looking at what is the cost of the software I'm using and WordPress would actually do fairly well at that because people would look at like, hey, how can we do this more cost effectively?

[00:22:28] Um, we've not had that for a bit. Uh, we, we, we might at some point, get that again. And then people might look at that again. I. I think it's actually fairly funny to see the Shopify has literally doubled their prices last year and basically not lost market share

[00:22:45] Noel Tock: and

[00:22:45] Joost de Valk: it's not a cheap solution anymore. It's actually a fairly expensive solution to run an e commerce site and

[00:22:52] Matt Cromwell: Webflow too.

[00:22:53] Yeah,

[00:22:54] Joost de Valk: they're all becoming more and more expensive and what I do think is that we also have a bit of a branding problem and that I think very many people don't even know that their sites run on WordPress. No, it's just the system they got from their host. Yeah.

[00:23:12] Noel Tock: Yeah. I would add to, to what Yos is saying.

[00:23:14] Um, and also to what you said, Amber, before in terms of like this long tail thing, like, I think we're way past that. Um, if you look at, um, like a Squarespace or Wix or whatever, like that's, that's not a website builder anymore. That's like a SMB operating system. Right. You do your reservations, you take transactions.

[00:23:32] Like if you look at the cohorts on the Wix, uh, annual reports, uh, sort of quarterly or notice the annual reports and you see how much, how, how many transaction dollars they're bringing in per customer and how that's ramping up. It's insane. Like they are just running a part of that business. It's not a website builder anymore.

[00:23:51] That's the lead gen. So that's not the competitive thing. And what that does is when you're a hosting company doing WordPress, and you also have to be the one selling WordPress and packaging WordPress, and then bringing that to market and then telling the customer how to run a successful, like SMB platform or whatever, forget it.

[00:24:10] And that's why I think, you know, when, when Yost and I talk about product marketing, packaging, marketing, all these things, Um, we need to create, we need to provide a much higher level of that so that all the vendors in the space can also benefit from that.

[00:24:24] Joost de Valk: And if you actually look at the market search, uh, uh, trends for our competitors, then, uh, for instance, Wix is going up quite, quite hard.

[00:24:34] But. But what you have to realize, so when I did this, uh, I think a year and a half ago, and I should probably run it again at some point is I ran a comparison of the, uh, market share numbers and the annual results of those companies. And what you see is that for most of those companies, every percentage of market share is worth between 1 and 2 billion a year.

[00:25:04] Tasty. And, um, I actually know because a friend of mine was run, was VP growth at Shopify for quite a while, and his team was not a couple of people. It was hundreds of people.

[00:25:18] Noel Tock: And,

[00:25:19] Joost de Valk: and we've basically disbanded our marketing team recently yet again, and, and, or replaced it with something else. And we basically have no marketing function for that hour.

[00:25:28] So, um,

[00:25:29] Amber Hinds: We do have a WordPress YouTube director now. Well, I

[00:25:33] Joost de Valk: actually, Jamie is doing some of the best marketing that we've ever seen for WordPress, but we need to do much more of that. And we, and we also need to, to approach different categories with different stories. In a way, what I think we're ready for in, In Linux, you went with, they went with different distributions.

[00:25:56] So you have all these different companies that have different distributions of Linux. To a degree, what, uh, HumanMate is doing with Altis is a distribution of WordPress with, with, with a lot of, uh, add ons for specific types of customers. I think the market is ready to do more of that. I think Elementor is that to some degree as well.

[00:26:16] Um, I saw someone in chat say it's a city within a country of WordPress, a big city within a country of WordPress. I think that's fair. And, um, some companies like Yoast was in the past would actually run across almost all of those because it's basically a utility. Uh, but for most types of products in the WordPress space, there's different areas where, yeah.

[00:26:41] And I, and I do think that we need to. We need to get much, much, much better at that marketing. Uh, and, and, and do the packaging in a way where we actually fix that. And I think we also have another problem in that. A lot of people are on WordPress and might use it, but they don't really use it. If you see the amount of WordPress sites that are stale, that are on old versions that are not upgrading, that are, there's a problem there too.

[00:27:11] Uh, and to be honest, um, the recent CrowdStrike incident with all automatic updates causing a lot of mayhem is not doing that a whole lot of good because it's actually people thinking, Hey, automatic updates might not be a good idea, but we need something that helps us. Push the ecosystem forward to newer versions, because if you're still stuck on WordPress 4.

[00:27:32] 0 and you think that that is WordPress, um, then you're never going to get excited about WordPress.

[00:27:38] Amber Hinds: You know, there was a comment in here that I think was really interesting. The perception of WordPress as a quote old platform is a problem because of the appearance of the admin UI, which I'm sure we can talk more about when we have rich on, um, but it reaffirms the idea of it being old.

[00:27:57] And I don't know if you thought, like, is that something that you're hearing in the community is that it just, it's a dated platform. I can't do what my business needs.

[00:28:08] Matt Cromwell: I will say,

[00:28:09] Noel Tock: I

[00:28:10] Matt Cromwell: know, I hear people say that all the time. I think that's WordPress inside speak, honestly, um, because. I don't know how many of them have logged into a Wix site.

[00:28:20] Um, it's not a beautiful app. Any enterprise

[00:28:23] Noel Tock: headless solution, which has come out last year and has tons of funding and is supposedly like the next gen solution. No, it's not that. They're all ugly. I mean, I have never seen CMS that is not ugly. I mean,

[00:28:33] Matt Cromwell: you guys are hard. They're hard to deal with. Yoast

[00:28:35] Noel Tock: doesn't discriminate.

[00:28:36] Everyone, everything's ugly.

[00:28:38] Matt Cromwell: No, I, I. They're all

[00:28:39] Noel Tock: trash.

[00:28:39] Amber Hinds: The thing that I think is really interesting about this market share issue in question, and Noel, you sort of started to get to this talking about, well, you know, there are some sectors where it's not a problem, right? Like government or university. Of course they move slow.

[00:28:56] They're not going to change their platform as quickly as small business owner might. But I do think that there has been a problem in the last few years with WordPress, not Really knowing who it's talking to and what it's building and what features are being released and how they're being tested first.

[00:29:14] Because I mean, we work with a lot of government and higher ed and large companies, and they don't want all the fancy stuff, like they want to be able to create a very. walled off very specific set of tools for their content authors that do not allow the content authors to make mistakes or break the brand colors or add accessibility problems or whatever it might be, right?

[00:29:39] And that's such a different audience than the, I'm a DIYer who just wants to build something that looks cool for my hobby project.

[00:29:48] Noel Tock: I'll say that it's a

[00:29:48] Amber Hinds: problem. I think.

[00:29:50] Noel Tock: I mean, I guess we're running against time. So I'll kind of say the last thing. Um, I think universally, regardless, if you're talking enterprise, DIY, or.

[00:29:59] It's about excitement at a very fundamental level. That's the North star. We don't need more features. We need to inspire the market. We need to be bold. We once again, need to be in the spotlight. And I think that's attainable. If you combine the strengths of WordPress with the best practices of fast growing and emerging tech SAS companies.

[00:30:17] You'll propel WordPress onto a new S curve. And I wouldn't only like support such a push. I try my best to contribute to something if we actually decided to do that. Um, because the software as WordPress is actually like fundamental to the future of humanity, because I witnessed that every day. So I think it's a very important thing to fight for, and I hope that we find a way.

[00:30:36] Um, as a group to look past whatever roadmaps we have set in stone today and re imagine the future starting very soon because the ad spend has turned back on for these proprietary vendors as of three months ago.

[00:30:51] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Um, excellent, excellent conversation. Thank you both so much for your contributions.

[00:30:57] Um, and, um, we're going to kick you off for now. Um, and, uh, and get onto, what do we actually do about all this? Can we

[00:31:04] Noel Tock: kick the other two off? Can we keep going? No, I'm just kidding.

[00:31:07] Amber Hinds: Sorry we invited you, but you don't actually get to come on. No, I think we all really Yos

[00:31:12] Noel Tock: was supporting that. You could see it in his eyes.

[00:31:13] He's like, yeah, no, I think that's a good idea. Well,

[00:31:15] Amber Hinds: for all that Yos teed up for Miriam, we have to have her come on. No, I would love to. And she'd all be expertise in secrets. I'm looking forward to hearing what they have

[00:31:25] Noel Tock: to say.

[00:31:27] Joost de Valk: And I also want to hear how they do product management for, for basically 20 different sectors, at least.

[00:31:33] That's impressive. We might

[00:31:35] Matt Cromwell: have some hard questions for Rich, honestly. All right,

[00:31:41] Amber Hinds: well, we'll see you both in a little bit.

[00:31:45] Matt Cromwell: Amber, that was really great. Um, both of them brought some really good info. I thought it was really interesting. I think the summary I took away. Was that, um, the, the WordPress product, uh, market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating.

[00:31:59] And I almost wanted to like, um, get Noel to be a little bit more specific. He says it's not stagnant. It's not decreasing now. It's almost sounds like he's like, but it's going to for sure. Like he was like projecting a, the sky is falling, not today, but in the future. Um, and I, I thought that was really interesting.

[00:32:18] Amber Hinds: Yeah, the indicator that he's seeing it more on subdomains or less important URLs than the primary URL is something probably to be concerned about. Like, why do people not see WordPress as the solution for their main revenue driving site and only for like, oh, a little landing page we need to collect leads from or a blog or internal company thing, right?

[00:32:41] I think that is probably something that We need to be worried about, but as product owners, I think let's, let's, we're all solution focused, right? So I think this is a good moment to bring in Miriam and Rich and talk about what, what, what we do about it, what that looks

[00:32:59] Matt Cromwell: like. Absolutely. And here they are.

[00:33:02] Hey folks. Welcome. Welcome.

[00:33:04] Amber Hinds: Hi.

[00:33:06] Matt Cromwell: Thanks for being here. That sounded super awkward, like, oh my god, they really set the scene in a way. Um, hey, we'd love for you both to do some quick introductions. We know you all. We think everybody knows you guys, but, um, but probably not. Just in case. Yeah, real quick introductions.

[00:33:21] Miriam, how about you?

[00:33:23] Miriam Schwab: Okay. Hi, I'm Miriam Schwab. Uh, I'm head of WordPress relations at Elementor. I am formerly the co founder of a company called Stratik, and it was acquired by Elementor over two years ago. So, you know, since then, before that, I Founded and managed the WordPress development agency for 13 years.

[00:33:38] So I've been in the WordPress space for quite a while.

[00:33:41] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Rich.

[00:33:43] Rich Tabor: Hey everyone. I'm Rich Tabor, product manager at Automatic, and I lean in on product design and engineering fronts every day, helping to drive the WordPress experience forward. Previously, I built and sold a number of WordPress products here and there.

[00:33:58] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Good stuff. Thanks so much. So, I'm going to give away, um, the whole spiel here, basically. We've got two big questions for both of you, just so everybody in the comments knows. By the way, awesome comments, folks. Keep them coming. I really appreciate all the live action going on. But we are going

[00:34:16] Amber Hinds: to put some of those

[00:34:17] Matt Cromwell: up.

[00:34:17] Yeah, we have a couple start that we're going to bring up. Um, so two big questions are, um, how can we increase adoption of WordPress as a whole? So the big takeaway there actually, spoiler alert, is that that WordPress isn't necessarily declining. Um, but it does sound like there's less energy or there's less Um, that was previously, um, the thing that was bringing a lot more adoption.

[00:34:42] So how, regardless, like, how can we help increase adoption of WordPress as a whole? And then the second one is what can we do as product businesses to adjust our marketing to this reality? Um, there's a lot of, uh, marketing adjustments we're having to do lately because Google loves to make our lives difficult lately.

[00:34:59] Um, but also just in this new reality, what can we do there? So that's how we're going to approach this. Actually. Also, I wanted to try to bring in, um, uh, a question from Jeff C, um, that I think is a good way to kick off your two takes on that conversation with Yost and Noel. Jeff saying, when WordPress market share slows or decreases, why is there a subset of people to treat the information as if it's the death knell of the platform?

[00:35:26] Did you feel like from the conversation with, with Joost and Noel, that like, that they were saying like, oh my gosh, the beginning of the end is now? Uh, what, what was your take, uh, overall? Uh, let's start with Rich. How did you think about that conversation?

[00:35:40] Rich Tabor: Um, let's see, how do I say this? Uh, you know, I almost, you know, we're really passionate folks, right?

[00:35:46] Like, we're really into this. Like, it's really, this is our thing. Like, we've, many of us have built our careers on WordPress, and we're really, really close to this, and it's something we hold dear. Um, so I do think that, um, it is easy to get kind of sucked into this vortex of like, I don't know that something's happening, like what's happening.

[00:36:00] And then you kind of raise the drama level in a sense. Um, you know, when, when I look at, uh, market share decreases, increases, like I'm really just thinking about like the people using this thing and, and can they be successful and if they are, then like, yes, like we're moving in the right direction, like if, if they're not successful, then that's, that's kind of my measure as a, as a product leader, uh, and what we're doing to work for us.

[00:36:22] Matt Cromwell: Excellent. Miriam, what about you?

[00:36:25] Miriam Schwab: Um, so I'm old and I've been around tech for a while. And so I have seen other very popular pieces of technology, um, um, start to weaken. And I think that Noel really nailed it when he said we're missing the excitement factor. Um, when WordPress started growing and we all got excited about it.

[00:36:50] Some of us might be considered old. Okay, I'll say that. Um, uh, WordPress was so, uh, brought so much to the table that didn't exist in any other product at the time. There were some other similar products, right? What else was in the CMS, the open source CMS market? It was Drew Pal and Joomla. But WordPress gave you the five step installation process and plugins and this burgeoning ecosystem of enthusiastic people and WordCamps.

[00:37:18] And there was so much to be excited about. And every release was exciting. Custom post types, right? One of them mentioned it. Like, that was exciting. But these things were game

[00:37:26] Amber Hinds: changing. It turned

[00:37:27] Miriam Schwab: it into CMS and all these things. And plugins like Yoast, which gave us all SEO capabilities at our fingertips.

[00:37:35] And all of this was game changing. And now from a, I think from a product perspective overall, not just WordPress specifically, it's, it's stagnating. It's not exciting. You know, it's like now like tweaks and incremental things that are happening that like, just, it's hard to be excited about it, even us who are super passionate and then let alone like people who are like exploring or newbies or whatever.

[00:38:00] Um, they, you know, are they going to get excited about it? I doubt it. Um, I think that a product like coming from the world of Sass, right? Because Stratik was Sass and Elementor is Sass. You never rest, even if you're growing, you don't, you're not like, this is fine. No, you are always fighting to grow, even when you're growing.

[00:38:24] And if WordPress is like, we're fine, but we're not growing it. I think what Noah was kind of hinting at, and he can say better, like, I think we're interpreting. I think we're interpreting. What might be around the corner is the downturn and okay, let's say, well, depending on Google's numbers or W3Tech's numbers, like correct sort of that, we're either 35 percent of the internet or 43 percent of the internet.

[00:38:44] Big numbers, right? So we could be like, well, that's fine because we'll like coast along and like we'll still be bigger than everyone else. But I don't think that we can allow ourselves to be like, it's fine and we'll coast along and oh, we'll lose some market share eventually because it's not excitement.

[00:38:57] So that's, it's okay. And I think Ghost is exactly right that we're missing marketing. As a product, as a platform and as an industry, we don't have a marketing function. We had some efforts that like didn't go anywhere for various reasons. And I think it was fine. That was fine for a while while we were like growing because of enthusiasm.

[00:39:19] But now. We have other very powerful products out there that are investing a lot of money in their marketing. And we as an industry don't have that. We also might assume that we're all competing with each other. And so for that reason, we don't have to like market WordPress, but I really think that we do.

[00:39:35] And I'm just going to put out there a marketing consortium of larger companies in the industry who come together, bring their marketing expertise, like Elementor to market WordPress. And I'm just here, a challenge that we all have probably all have as product marketers.

[00:39:52] Amber Hinds: I think, can I, yeah, you know, I think an interesting point to what you're saying about it, not having the game changing features.

[00:40:00] I think there's been an impression lately that core is kind of playing catch up to things that page builders and other plugins have already figured out how to do really well. And so the releases in the last few years, while they have been adding, you know, Sometimes very helpful and necessary features the core, they're not novel, right?

[00:40:24] Like being able to add columns without shortcodes wasn't novel. There were lots of page builders who figured out how to do that long before core could do that. Right. Um, you know, or whatever it might be. And so I think like, that's why maybe some of the excitement isn't there is because the innovation isn't happening in WordPress anymore.

[00:40:43] The innovation is happening in the product companies. Build upon WordPress and WordPress. The open source project is kind of playing catch up with that. I don't know. Feel free to object rich and tell me you disagree, but that's sort of where I've been seeing a lot of that.

[00:41:00] Matt Cromwell: I want to chime in a little bit.

[00:41:02] It is a very contentious statement to phrase it that way. And I do feel that sometimes a little bit of our problem is, um, the way that Miriam summarizes it, saying that sometimes we're competing against each other, the way in which sometimes there's segments of the WordPress product area that is essentially like needing core to be bad in order for their stuff to be good.

[00:41:29] Um, that, that kind of thing to me is sometimes a little bit of the problem. Um, and not, not the solution. I

[00:41:37] Miriam Schwab: would see that from a different angle, which is one of the beautiful things about WordPress and has been until now, which is that if you Our user and you identify a gap in wordpress, right? Because one of the the mission statements, I think of wordpress is, uh, like, not not too many.

[00:41:53] What is the line? I can't remember a decision. No, not options. Whatever. Like, not too many, right? It's not trying to be everything for everyone because it's extensible. So if WordPress has, uh, it's not even a weakness, it's, let's say a weakness for a particular segment or could do better in some way, then you can come along and develop a plugin for it.

[00:42:12] And that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress. It's not, I don't mean,

[00:42:17] Matt Cromwell: I don't mean to say that there shouldn't be, uh, products that extend WordPress. Like that's how I've made my entire living. There's products that extend WordPress, uh, for sure. Um, but there, there's segments of, of, uh, of folks.

[00:42:29] Who really want Gutenberg to fail, like, who really try to make it really, really clear that Gutenberg is not, and I keep seeing Gutenberg, the site editor, block editor, full site editing, that that whole section of WordPress core is a failure, and it's important to them that it's a failure in order for their product to look a lot better than it is.

[00:42:48] Um, but I feel like we're talking around Rich. Rich, I'd love to hear your take. I'm just kind of

[00:42:54] Rich Tabor: absorbing right now. For those who aren't

[00:42:56] Matt Cromwell: initiated, Rich is actually really highly influential in the direction of where Gutenberg is going. Full site editing, where the block editor has been designed. He's really done a lot of work personally on the UI.

[00:43:08] Um, So, uh, Rich, what's your take on all the things that we've seen on your lab right now?

[00:43:13] Rich Tabor: Yeah, on all those things, you know, at the end of the day, uh, what Mariam said about like the diversity of choice is, is paramount, right? Like, you can have WordPress in whatever flavor you want and you can add anything and everything, and that's why, or one of the main reasons I would think it grew to where it is today.

[00:43:29] Uh, now the, Now, the topic of the editing experience, the WordPress editing experience, encompassing the site editor and the block editor and all the associated pieces, you know, I think it's imperative that core stays unopinionated, but we do need more of the inspiration. And right now where I think we're lacking on the inspiration is when I think of like inspiring products, right?

[00:43:52] I think of things that are very intuitive. That are like, like empowering, like, like I want to do something, I do it and I'm like, yes, I can do that now I'm inspired like to move on and to keep pushing and that's where I think that there's the biggest opportunity on the product front. Now, if we get the product into to into a point where it is inspiring again, and this is just WordPress, it doesn't have to be just the editor like WordPress in general, if we get to that point, then marketing efforts will have much more of an impact because then now you're now you're.

[00:44:19] Yeah. You're marketing inspiration. You're not marketing feature sets, you know, and Elementor has been really great at this, like pushing, like what you can do and what you can accomplish and how beautiful of a website you can build without knowing relatively or even almost no code. Um, I think WordPress needs to lean in that direction to account for that inspiration that's lacking.

[00:44:39] Um, and that doesn't mean new features, um, necessarily. I think a lot of it is, um, taking and refining a lot of the pieces that have been built over the years. We have a lot of. A lot of capability is just now not in a, a state where it's inspiring.

[00:44:56] Miriam Schwab: I, um, I, I think you're right. I, uh, I just had a call like right before this podcast with a startup, uh, like a more advanced startup, and they wanted to consult with me about what they should choose to rebuild their website.

[00:45:08] Of course, their developers chose to build it as a react app, which is always a terrible idea. And now they need to go in a different direction. And I explained why WordPress, and I, I'm obviously somewhat biased because I've been in the industry for so long, but I always keep my eyes on the other products out there, and I still think WordPress is the best option.

[00:45:26] For companies like theirs and many other organizations because it will grow with them. They won't hit walls with it. They won't suddenly get hit with gigantic bills. Um, you know, it's highly flexible, open source, all of this. And I, I marketed it to them just because I think it's like the best option for them.

[00:45:42] I'm not trying to sell WordPress, um, specifically, I don't get anything out of that. Um, and so I, but like I'm doing, I'm doing this one on one other people are doing this one on one, I think a concerted effort around it could really reflect. The strengths that WordPress brings to the table. It's just, it's not, it's not happening.

[00:46:00] And I just want to talk about the deployment factor. So, since joining Elementor, Um, I started leading our delegations to WordCamps. So I really get to meet Elementor users, like, face to face in that way. And, um, In the beginning, I was, I was actually shocked by how excited they were about Elementor and passionate about it.

[00:46:18] And, um, that, and I think that probably has something that like explains some of the growth of Elementor, which we was discussed previously. And it's because Elementor is a product that people love, but also because Elementor does good marketing. I mean, I, I'm, I'm, I think, uh, probably so WordPress can do that too.

[00:46:39] If people come together to do it, um, properly. So,

[00:46:43] Amber Hinds: yeah, I'm, I'm curious on that marketing front, do we feel like It is people need to come together in the open source project to market literally WordPress, vanilla WordPress. Or is it more that we think more product owners should be following Elementor's lead all about at whatever budget level works for them and actually be doing more marketing in a way that brings people like, for example, should give go out and be like.

[00:47:12] Not just trying to acquire people who already have WordPress as give customers, but being like, you are a nonprofit who needs donations. You need give and WordPress together and marketing to those people who are not WordPress at all. Like where, where do you see that? Is it just, we need to market WordPress or we need product owners to build excitement by marketing their products that bring new people to WordPress.

[00:47:35] Miriam Schwab: I think we need to market WordPress. I think product marketers need to market WordPress. I think we product, uh, companies are limited in being able to do that. Um, for example, we can't use WordPress in our marketing material. I don't know how many companies are people are aware of that, but like there's trademark limitations on it.

[00:47:56] Um, so even though We tried

[00:47:58] Amber Hinds: to run ad, word ads for like, WordPress accessibility plugin, and you can't do it, but I'm like, that's literally what people would search if they wanted my thing. And I

[00:48:12] Miriam Schwab: can't. That's the strength of a company like Elementor that has such wide reach talking about WordPress in our marketing, clearly.

[00:48:19] But we can't do that. And it's so people are like, Oh, you're not, you don't want to be a WordPress. No, no. We want to be a WordPress company. And if you talk to us, we'll say that we're a product for WordPress, except for that in a lot of our marketing materials, we just can't actually use the WordPress word because it's a trademark that belongs to other people who don't allow it.

[00:48:37] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, yeah. You can target that search, um, just fine. You just can't use that brand term. That word

[00:48:44] Amber Hinds: to describe what your product is.

[00:48:47] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, you can find, you can be found when people do those searches. Um, but, uh, but then you have to be clever enough to make people feel like that ad is relevant without using those words, which is hard.

[00:48:59] Amber Hinds: You can put WP on it, but then I'm like, do people actually know what that means? Probably not. They're like, what's the weird WP at the beginning of this? Headline.

[00:49:07] Matt Cromwell: So Rich, I want to hear a little bit more of a direct response from you in terms of like, how do we actually increase WordPress adoption? Like, I'd love to hear just like, what's your straight shooter response?

[00:49:19] How do we increase WordPress adoption? How do we do it?

[00:49:22] Rich Tabor: Yeah. I mean, you know, marketing is one angle and I think that's, that's imperative. And at the same time, we get a lot of people that come to find WordPress or come looking for WordPress and they try it and it doesn't work for them. Yeah. I think that the product, like I said earlier, needs to be more intuitive.

[00:49:40] You know, simple things should be easy, intuitive and complex things should be obtainable. This should be possible. That's what, that's what WordPress grew off of. And we're both of those areas. I think perhaps over the last few years, we've leaned in on complex things possible without focusing on the simple things being easy and intuitive.

[00:49:57] So

[00:49:58] Noel Tock: I say we

[00:49:59] Rich Tabor: need both, um, the marketing. You know, you can you can send twice as many people to WordPress, but with twice as many stay. I don't know.

[00:50:06] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I can you give us a little, um, you know, be careful, of course, to do what you say what you can say or whatnot, but like internally and automatic. How does this conversation go when it comes to, like, it.

[00:50:19] I mean, it's not a secret that WordPress needs better marketing. It's, it's talked about everywhere. It's talked about at WordCamps. It's talked about on stage at WordCamps. It's talked about from automaticians. Um, what is the nature of the conversation about how WordPress might get better marketing? Um, I don't know if you're privy to those conversations, but in, in your circles, uh, what is the state of that conversation?

[00:50:41] Rich Tabor: Yeah, yeah, I'm not privy to like the, the specifics of the marketing teams, um, at Automatic. What I, what I lean in, especially is, um. You know, as we lead releases and whatnot for WordPress, um, you know, two or three times a year, those are kind of the times that I lean in a little bit further on the marketing front, and that's mostly about selling, selling the vision of where WordPress has come over the last few months and where it's at today.

[00:51:02] Um, you know, again, I think that's only part of the part of the solution. I do think, um. There's lots of opportunity, especially with Jamie, you know, doing videos, but Jamie is just, just one, one person. I know there's a bunch of others that are doing videos too, but, uh, I like the idea of like a concerted effort of high quality, I think that that that's very imperative, like high quality videos.

[00:51:22] Like if you go to. You know, any of these other CMSs, uh, the YouTube channels, like, you know, Framer, Webflow, um, I would even count Figma, really, and, um, Wix, like, all of these videos are very top notch. Like, you know, they're like Elementor style quality, or Hostinger does really great videos too. Like, it's really pushing, pushing out good content, and, um, you know, as a, you know, as a one off here and there, some folks do create good content, and it's great, and others, you know, have, uh, You know, a different style that might not translate very well over, you know, the, the WordPress product in general.

[00:51:55] Um, so I think that if we did find a way to push efforts together and raise that quality bar, then marketing on like marketing team in general could be, um, could be something impactful. Mm

[00:52:06] Matt Cromwell: hmm. Yeah, I think we have a good question here. Uh, I want to go get to the question from Courtney real quick because I think it's also hyper relevant because automatic, of course, is primarily responsible for the WordPress project, of course, but there's a ton of contributors out there doing really good work everywhere.

[00:52:25] There's contributor days at WordCamps and things. Courtney is, is one of the people, um, on the forefront of a lot of, uh, volunteer activity. Um, she's asking, like, from a contributor perspective, how can we help WordPress adoption? I really do think the learn, um, dot WordPress dot org project is really interesting, and Courtney's heavily involved with that.

[00:52:45] Um, there's a lot of, of, of other initiatives happening on WordPress dot org specifically. I think all of that is going in the right direction personally. That's I just my answer to Courtney would be like, yes, and more like all those things that we should continue to have them. But they are on the backs of volunteers, which is sometimes the, Um, the thing that trips them up a little bit, but anybody else, um, uh, take on Courtney's question here.

[00:53:14] Amber Hinds: So that was actually the comment that I was going to make, which is that I think there is a challenge here if there's not budget. Um, because while contributors can do that, and there are a lot of great people who are making interesting YouTube videos that like show how to do that. You know, cool things that you can do with WordPress or various plugins or tools within the WordPress ecosystem.

[00:53:37] The reality is when you think about some of the other CMSs that WordPress competes against, you know, Is, you know, like Rich, you were talking about making really nice videos, like literal advertisements to promote it and then, and then it's not just the money of like making it, but if you want to show them as an ad on relevant YouTube videos, you got to pay Google to do that.

[00:53:58] Right. And, you know, or we're going to run a commercial during a high watch TV event or something like that to grow awareness outside. So, so I think that's a question of how much can contributors do and how much does there need to be literal budget for this and where does that come from?

[00:54:16] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I would tie that together also with data that Matt Mullenweg shared at WordCamp Europe, that meetup attendance is really, really, really down as well.

[00:54:25] Um, I think that's another really big avenue, especially for activating younger audiences too. Um, and, and those meetups have had less and less attendance. Um, that is also for me, a stagnating, uh, data piece that's, uh, that's worrying personally,

[00:54:43] Miriam Schwab: I think the, the flagship work camps are also, I like, I have, I haven't looked at it properly and nobody's really been talking about it, but I think the flagship work camps are getting less attendance than they project.

[00:54:55] Um, as sponsors, you know, we keep, You know, you're like, we expect this number and then the actual numbers is less than it feels like that's happening more than it did in the past. But, um, I, I'm finding that people don't actually know that WordCamps exists. I was just talking to that company and I was like, I'm coming to Portland for WordCamp US.

[00:55:15] And they're like, Oh, what's that? Like that's interesting. And one of them was someone who's been in the web space for a while. So one positive development is that they decided to allow WordCamps to now have some budget to promote themselves. So to increase awareness, because we're like this like a echo chamber of WordPressers.

[00:55:32] We've been around for a while and we know stuff, but like, The new people don't know stuff and WordCamps are a great way to get new people and young people excited. I brought my daughter to WordCamp Europe last year and like she was super enthusiastic and left with like WordPress stickers all over all of her stuff and and but like you know how many people are going to be like her ideally more like when we were younger not that I'm old now apparently but uh and we would still make the effort to go far to get to these WordCamps so yeah.

[00:56:03] Matt Cromwell: I love this comment here from Mike. Mike was on the show a couple weeks ago. He says the kind of marketing we need to move. The needle needs to be unrelenting, uncompromising, sustained, highly coordinated with a coherent and transparent strategy so others can buy in. Preach it, Mike. Oh my goodness. That's absolutely what WordPress is.

[00:56:21] I

[00:56:21] Amber Hinds: have, we should allow people to sell premium plugins on wordpress. org and take a cut, and that can be the budget for marketing WordPress.

[00:56:29] Matt Cromwell: The marketplace idea. I mean, seriously,

[00:56:32] Amber Hinds: or we're going to ask people to donate money, like. There has to be some way to monetize on WordPress. org that can then generate revenue that can fund the growth of WordPress, or, and that is probably one of the best ways to do it is having a marketplace that sells and takes a cut on themes and plugins, just like an app store does,

[00:56:52] Miriam Schwab: right?

[00:56:52] And, or another direction could be that, uh, large companies that are highly dependent on WordPress, um, and need and want WordPress to continue growing and it's important to them. With this type of marketing consortium idea, everyone puts in some budget. Yes, I know that's a crazy idea, but these companies tend to have pretty large marketing budgets anyways, and putting in what to them is like relatively small amount could have a big impact.

[00:57:17] And then, but that would all have to happen with a very clear, coherent marketing strategy, not just tactics. I feel like WordPress tends to like drown in tactics. Um, you know, like it's amazing that Jamie is now, um, head of the WordPress YouTube. Uh, channel amazing and video is super impactful. That's one thing, right?

[00:57:38] That's like one tactic.

[00:57:44] Rich Tabor: And today we, I mean, we do have the five for the future, um, efforts. So, and that's, I'm, I'm pretty confident. That's what Jamie is a part of. So it's, it's interesting, you know, to be able to, like, if, you know, if we took one of the, you know, one of the great, uh, like. Creators content creators of mentor one from, you know, another host or so and try to have those folks work together, put together the plan and really start pushing things forward as part of even part of 5 for the future.

[00:58:09] So that there's less messiness and more just leveraging what's there today. Um, potentially that, you know, is a, an interesting path forward.

[00:58:19] Miriam Schwab: It's, it could either work within the WordPress project, but based on the history of how marketing initiatives have gone so far, where their hands have been tied and shut down and like not getting access to more information.

[00:58:32] Hopefully, maybe that wouldn't happen this time. Like if this kind of thing before, but if it did, then just do it externally and just like market WordPress, because that needs to happen and you can't wait for everyone to give you permission and the right, you know, all that.

[00:58:44] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead.

[00:58:50] Amber Hinds: Oh, I was just gonna say, well, we all know that in a couple of weeks, many of us, maybe all of us are going to be together for a contributor day. So perhaps there needs to be a marketing table at contributor day and people should show up and try and figure out how to put some of these ideas into action.

[00:59:06] Miriam Schwab: That's a really great idea.

[00:59:08] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely.

[00:59:08] Miriam Schwab: Yeah,

[00:59:10] Matt Cromwell: that

[00:59:10] Miriam Schwab: would be

[00:59:10] Matt Cromwell: really important. Everyone's going to be there. Rich is going to be there. Miriam, you're going to be there.

[00:59:16] Miriam Schwab: Assuming I can get there, but yes.

[00:59:18] Amber Hinds: And shall we pop our other guests in and find out, Noel, are you going to be at WordCamp US?

[00:59:24] Noel Tock: Uh, no, I'm staying in Ukraine.

[00:59:26] Uh,

[00:59:27] Matt Cromwell: yeah, you have a good reason. Yoast, are you going to be at WordCamp US?

[00:59:32] Joost de Valk: Nope. I actually have a marketing conference that conflicts and I find more important. So he's going to be

[00:59:40] Amber Hinds: learning more about marketing and then he'll come give feedback.

[00:59:45] Matt Cromwell: I, I would love to do more marketing and then they don't show up to do more marketing.

[00:59:49] What's that guys?

[00:59:51] Joost de Valk: Hey, I'm perfectly willing to send someone to do more marketing. If we, if we find a way to lead that effort, uh, I, I think that, uh, I, I very much agree with the comment you showed from Mike, uh, that we need that sustained effort. The problem is that we need someone to lead that sustained effort because unlike Mike.

[01:00:13] Building a product, which I actually think you can do by committee to some degree, uh, good marketing campaigns don't necessarily come from, uh, from a committee. Totally. Totally.

[01:00:25] Miriam Schwab: Yes. Um, and it probably sounds familiar, but I think WordPress needs a CMO.

[01:00:32] Joost de Valk: It does sound familiar. And, uh, well, in, in, in, in my past or there's been a path where I, where I tied that for a bit, um, I, well, it was, it was short lived.

[01:00:44] Um, no, I, I, I still think that that is, that to, to a degree, WordPress does need a CMO, but we also need. I think that's what even more important than getting a CMO is is getting rid of the distaste for marketing.

[01:01:04] Noel Tock: Yes.

[01:01:05] Joost de Valk: Um, I think that, uh, I was commenting this earlier. I think that Elementor actually shows that with good marketing and a product that's, I'm sorry, Miriam.

[01:01:15] I don't think it's even better. Um, you, you can actually, um, grow. And, and I think that Woo shows us that with a product that has features that people need, you will also keep on growing. And, and I think we need to embrace the whole plugin ecosystem much more than we, than we did. And for a while now, I think that.

[01:01:43] Both WordPress core is relatively in catch up mode and, and the plugin side of the WordPress ecosystem isn't as innovative as it used to be. Uh, and if we can get back to that and get, can get back to thinking about, Hey, how can we do amazing things with WordPress and how can we add the missing features that WordPress has into some degree to compete with competitors by building plugins that add those features?

[01:02:13] Um, I think we, we have a fantastic story to tell

[01:02:17] Matt Cromwell: and

[01:02:18] Joost de Valk: we can be everything to everyone.

[01:02:21] Matt Cromwell: Let's do a send off. Uh, the thing we always end this show with every single time is best advice. You get one sentence, folks, one sentence. What's your one sentence from everything that we've been saying today? What's the one thing folks should take away and do?

[01:02:35] Uh, after they hang up from the show, uh, Miriam, one thing,

[01:02:41] Miriam Schwab: uh, one thing, the thing that spoke to me the most, I think out of what was said here is, uh, getting people excited about your products in general, right? Because we're all talking about within the WordPress ecosystem and about WordPress specifically excitement.

[01:02:55] What is about

[01:02:57] Matt Cromwell: rich?

[01:02:59] Rich Tabor: I would say, um, you know, focus on building beautifully simple experiences.

[01:03:05] Noel Tock: No, let's get out of the WordPress bubble and compete with the rest of the world.

[01:03:11] Matt Cromwell: Let's do it. Yoast,

[01:03:14] Joost de Valk: uh, try a new plugin every week. If you're in this ecosystem and see the new stuff, no, but there is actually, there is a lot of very cool stuff happening from, uh, from accessibility Jack, which Amber's team is building, which is amazing to things like.

[01:03:34] Well, and I'm not just here to promote the products that we've invested in, but things like personalized, but Altus is a good, is a good example. There, there's a lot of very cool stuff happening in the space that I don't think everyone sees, and I think that it's up to us, all of us to be excited about the new stuff and to, uh, and, and to show people that you can do very, very cool stuff with WordPress.

[01:03:59] Matt Cromwell: Somebody writes a shiny new plugins blog every once in a while. I just thought somebody should look that up. Amber, one thing.

[01:04:06] Amber Hinds: So my, my best advice related to this conversation is that you should show up for contributor day. Even if you can't contribute for other things, there's like, at least one of those near ish you a year, go for that one day and see what you can do to get involved.

[01:04:25] Matt Cromwell: Yep, absolutely. Uh, my one piece of advice for all product folks out there is if you don't have a piece on your site right now that says, Why choose WordPress for X for whatever your product does. Write that article today, write that article and promote it all the time. We have one on give that says why WordPress for fundraising.

[01:04:45] We promote it all the time. Um, why WordPress for whatever your product does. Why WordPress is great for accessibility. Why WordPress is great for SEO. Why WordPress is great for page building, I guess. More or less. Um, so those types of things. Yeah, Rich has

[01:05:01] Amber Hinds: a great example. I'll throw it in the YouTube chat.

[01:05:06] If people want to go check out Rich's, why WordPress?

[01:05:09] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. So thanks so much, everybody. This was super exciting. I love seeing all six people on the show here and everyone. Thanks so much for your comments. Um, we are, this is our last one for this season. Uh, we're taking a little bit of, Oh no, it's not.

[01:05:24] No, we have a surprise next week. I forgot next week. We're actually having Kevin Geary on the show to talk about how to, uh, uh, how to get excitement around a product launch. He's launching a new thing called Edge. Uh, he's actually, you know, I feel like we almost mentioned his name several times today, honestly.

[01:05:42] Um, but he has a new thing called edge and he's been really pumping it in a really interesting way. I think it's a great way to talk about marketing your product launch. So we're going to talk with him next week, next week, Wednesday at noon Eastern, and thanks everybody so much. We'll see you next time around.

[01:05:58] Bye.