Zack
it's one of the hardest decisions when you have a successful product. Do you pour everything into the thing that's working, On one hand, doubling down can mean deeper impact, higher margins. On the other, though, diversification might be the only way to unlock growth and future-proof your business. The problem? You don't know what's right until it's too late. So in this episode, we're talking through how to wrestle with this exact choice, plus how to make the call with more clarity and less regret. This is WP

Intro
Product Talk. A 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.

Zack
Hello, I'm Zack Katz, founder of Contactified, IDX Plus, GravityView, GravityKit, Trusted Login, Data Kit, who knows what's next.

Amber
I feel like you've already told us your answer to diversification. And I'm Amber Hines, CEO of Equalized Digital.

Zack
Just one thing, huh? That sounds nice. So this is the 15th episode of the sixth season of WP Product Talk. We're going through each stage of building a WordPress product step-by-step. And today we're talking about a topic near and dear to my heart, Amber, whether to diversify or to double down. I feel like it's a choice that every product owner will have to make many times, but maybe that's not the case.

Amber
And we are so excited to invite our special guest, Kevin Geary here today to talk about diversification with us. Welcome, Kevin.

Kevin Geary
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

Amber
So can you give a little introduction to yourself and what you do?

Kevin Geary
Yeah, for sure. Been in WordPress since 2005. Currently live in Atlanta. I've done the agency thing. I've done the software thing, the freelance thing, the kind of everything in WordPress. Our company right now, Digital Gravy, is 100% a software company, and we create products like Automatic CSS and Frames and Etch, which is our big project that we're working on now, which is a new visual development environment for WordPress. So that's currently our main focus.

Zack
Your main focus. Can you tell us more about what that means to you?

Kevin Geary
Yeah. Well, main focus is right now we're working in stages. Okay. So we had automatic CSS, which was our flagship product. And we're kind of transitioning to a new flagship product, which is Etch. Does that mean automatic CSS is going away? Absolutely not. But the flagship label is definitely changing, which I think is an interesting thing that we can talk about today for sure. Now, when I say main focus, my focus is split. But when we build a software company, the goal is for teams to have a main focus so that they can stay efficient and productive. And so we have etch developers and we have acss developers uh and of course you know at the at the top we have our cto mateo and myself we're kind of overseeing everything but as a company we are definitely uh in that transition period of going from uh having one product a few years ago automatic css to now having a portfolio of products

Zack
yeah there's so much to get into i i kind of just want to get right into it so like yeah can you talk about the transition and how you decided what this a new product was needed and like how you how can you tell us what you know how you structure this

Kevin Geary
yeah yeah so what we have done with our products is we have looked at what people need instead of looking at like is there an opening in the market or is this market competitive or is there a room for another player or or can we just do things a little bit better we've looked at what the actual users are needing and asking for in a lot of ways, right? So with automatic CSS, it was what were they needing? Because in page builders, we saw there was a great lack of maintainability and scalability because people weren't really using fundamental techniques like CSS variables and classes and things like that. And so we created a framework for them to help them out, a framework for page builders, not just a framework for web design, but a framework for use in page builders. And that brought that scalability and maintainability into page building. And then they saw what we were able to do with that. And along the way, they just started asking. Like people were literally like, Kevin, you have to build a competitor to a page builder. Of course, I said, no, no, no, no, no, for a very long time. We ended up saying yes last year for very big and important reasons, which we could get into. But that's been the transition. Now, what I feel and the advice that I would give to people is if you're in that situation where there is a product that is not just a separate product, not just a new product, but a product that essentially works together with the other product that you have, right? Those two things piggyback off of each other. ACSS can absolutely be used in etch. That's a very different scenario than like, okay, we got this one successful product. Let's just create a new, completely new product that's different and it'll be in our portfolio, but they don't really go together, right? If you look at our portfolio of products, Frames, ACSS, and Etch actually all work together, right? None of them are like separate products. And that's a very different scenario than like, hey, let's just create a new product and another new product. And we'll just have this portfolio of products, but they don't really work together. That's a different scenario. So I think that's an important thing to touch on as well.

Amber
Yeah. I'm curious when you were having these conversations and thinking about, you know, the size of your team and maybe you could share some of that, right? Like, are you thinking about, okay, well, if I'm going to build this new thing, that means that I might have to not do as many enhancements to this other existing thing or support might slow down or new features, that kind of thing. Or do you feel like maybe automatic CSS is in such a great place? There isn't a lot more depth and it's already in like just bug fix or like tiny modes. So it's okay to set that aside for a little bit. Like, how do you, how did you balance that?

Kevin Geary
That's a really good question. I think, um, I want to touch on that. Like, is it a mature product that shouldn't really be iterated on that much? And can we just leave it alone and just support it and do bug fixes and things like that? I think that's a very dangerous kind of thing to think about any software product in this day and age with things moving so quickly and being so competitive and people trying to vibe code competing products now. Right. And so they're always bringing different options to the market, not to mention the industry that we're in. Web design moves very quickly on its own. CSS evolves very quickly. The techniques that are being used, the tools that are being used, these all evolve very quickly. And I don't think that any tool in that space should say, oh, yeah, we've kind of built what we wanted to build. And now we're just going to maintain it because it will get left behind very quickly. You know, it will it will get beat out. So that would be one thing, which means that if you are going to diversify into other products, you do absolutely need teams. You can't take a team just completely off of a product and put them on a new product because now that product is going to linger and it is going to fall behind. And that's likely not what users want in that regard, right? So you do need to keep team members on that old product, pushing that thing forward. Whatever leadership or visionary was involved in creating that product in the first place still needs to be involved with that product because users want to see that constant innovation and tools need that constant innovation in the work that we do. So I would say if the plan is take team off of this product and move them to this product, I would say avoid that as much as possible. Let's put a new team on the new product and keep the old product moving forward.

Zack
So that sounds great. We have a small team of two developers and two support people, a QA person, a marketing person, myself. We don't have teams. We have one team that manages a bunch of different products uh how do you how do you make that work with a small team

Amber
uh it's tough with your team coming our

Kevin Geary
team is currently 11.

Amber
okay so

Speaker 5
that's not a huge

Amber
how many of them are dead it's not

Kevin Geary
a huge team uh how many of our devs five to six i think six six devs two ux ui and the rest are support Now people can bounce from team to team. For example, UX UI is not needed much on ACSS anymore, right? The, the way the dashboard was built you know, there's, I can, I can go in like a non UX UI, I can go in and add new features and functionality and things like that. Never have to really consult with the UX UI person on that side of things. So they're able to put their current full focus on etch, right? And then the development side of things, there is a developer who can come in. if there's new things that I need to add that I can't add myself because of limitations in the architecture or something like that, they can step in and do that. Right? So they're still involved in it. They just don't have to be as involved as the etch team is involved in etch. Right? So you are shuffling people around, but I mean, I was in the same boat. Like we, when I started automatic CSS, it was me and I got Mateo and I got Mateo from my inner circle community. I reached out, I said, look, I can build the framework. I can't build the dashboard, right? I'm not a PHP guy. I'm not like whatever needs to happen with this dashboard. I can't do that. And so I reached out and I said, hey, is anybody available with those skills? Mateo raised his hand among three, four other people, did some calls, brought on Mateo. And it was me and Mateo for a very, very long time. Then it was support people because I was like, I can't keep moving this product forward and answering everybody's questions 24 hours a day, right? So started to bring in support people. And then it was, let's start building more developers because we want to build a fancier dashboard and we want to start taking things to the next level, yada, yada, yada. And it just goes slowly over time like that. So I would say that recognizing the need for bringing on more people, which if you are going to expand the portfolio, I think that is a real need. And that's a really justified time to bring in more people and not just try to keep it super small for the sake of keeping it super small. Obviously, the numbers have to work And it's going to be dependent on the actual products being marketed and sold and the price points that those things are sold at. Of course, all of that has to come into play. But I would say keeping it small for the sake of keeping it super small. I mean, like you said, 11 is still small. Like to a lot of people, that's tiny, right? So it doesn't have to be 100, but it needs to support the work you are trying to do.

Zack
And when you're considering whether to bring on a new person, let's say there's a new product that you want to build and you know that your team is currently maxed out. You don't have the resources available.

Kevin Geary
Yeah.

Zack
And your budget, you'd be deficit spending to bring on somebody, but you really believe in the product. Is that a no-go because you don't have the money there to fund

Speaker 5
it? How

Zack
do you approach when you don't have the funds to expand, but you know that you need more team members to do that?

Kevin Geary
So is this, it's context dependent. Are you talking about we're brainstorming a new product and it's like, hey, we want to get this new product off the ground, but we don't have the bandwidth to work on it right now? Like we would need to bring on somebody or are you just trying to expand features and functionality of what you've already got going on? Like what's the context? Let's in this context, let's say a new product. Okay. Great question. Um, it's, I got a lot of flack for this, right? Like, uh, we did a very public etch launch pre-launch. Uh, we sold etch with zero code, zero screen. There wasn't even of screenshot for people to look at, right? It was, we were going to talk about the philosophy of etch, the problems in the current ecosystem and how we envision solving those things in a really big way and changing the landscape of what front end development of WordPress looks like, and especially visual development, right? And so we said, look, we can't, we need a lot of money to build etch and we need a lot more people to work on etch. And we want them to work on it full time because the timeline for this project has to move relatively quickly to keep momentum and, and be an actual player in this space. And so got to have money for that. And so we weren't like, oh, well, let's take a risk. Let's do deficit spending. Let's do it. No, let's pre-sell the concept and it either wins or loses right out of the gate. There's no like, oh, it's going to lose six months from now potentially. And then we're out a bunch of money and it's not going to work. And then everybody's sad and no, no, no, it's going to win or lose tonight. You know? And so that's why when we did the launch, when we brought on the team and we put everything together, we'd already won. It was our, the winning part was already done. And now it was just time to actually build the thing. And we had the money and we had the people and now we knew exactly what was going to happen. Right. So it took all of the question marks off the table.

Zack
And for those who are interested in that process, Kevin joined us in a previous episode of WP product talk to talk about pre-selling your product. So check out that episode. Amber, what do you think about this?

Amber
Yeah, I was going to say we've been, we just started experimenting with this a tiny bit. Our diversification this year has been going into courses because our software product, Accessibility Checker, is a tool that can find some accessibility issues. But as any accessibility professional would tell you, you still have to do some manual testing. You can't just use automated tools, whether it's ours or someone else's. It's not just a flaw in our product. That's just the reality of accessibility. And we realized that there was an opportunity to sell teaching people how to do this because there are some people who hire us as a service, and there are some people who don't have the budget or just want to be able to do it in-house. And so I had thought I was going to have two courses done before our big sale that's going on literally right now, but I only did one. And then we talked about it. And literally I said, you know what

Zack
Kevin did?

Amber
He sold, like I, I went to my partners and I said, he did this. Why don't we try? We have one course people can buy and we have another one. We labeled it presale. It's a discount. It's cheaper than it will be when it actually is available to buy. It has a date. It says you're not going to get it until August. So people know it's been going really well. I'm surprised how many people will buy

Speaker 5
nothing.

Amber
I mean, they're buying the promise

Speaker 5
of something,

Amber
but right now they are buying nothing. Right. And I'll say honestly, like that little experiment for me at first, I was a little bit like, will people do this or not? But then it was like, well, it doesn't hurt anything to put it up there and see if they'll buy it. Right. And then if only and, you know, we were like, well, if only two or three people buy it, then maybe we just refund their money and say, nevermind. We're not going to spend time building this course because obviously nobody cared about it. And it doesn't, it's like a waste of effort because I'm going to tell you, I have learned creating courses is a lot more

Zack
work than I ever thought it would be. And how did you,

Amber
so I You talked a little bit

Zack
about your decision to create the courses, but in terms of diversifying your products, Amber, can you tell us more about that?

Amber
Yeah, so our, on the software side, We have felt a lot more like we are going deeper rather than going wide. So everything that we have product-wise now very much aligns with Accessibility Checker and is coded to support it. I don't feel like we're really at a point where we'd be like, let's build something else that isn't related. In fact, we had a different plugin that was a schedule, conference schedule plugin that we sold. You can now buy it from the events calendar. We sold it to Stellar because we were just like, for us, it made more sense to be hyper focused on accessibility. And even that diversifying into courses, well, those are intended to support our plugin. And we're going to have some other courses that we almost see as a potential, like they'll buy the course, they'll take the course. And then it would lead them to buy the software. So I don't know. Like I haven't ever felt like let's just do something totally different. It feels like in the mission of our organization, it makes the most sense to stay within accessibility and that kind of stuff. And any other add-ons or things we build are just like for the core plugin.

Zack
And similar to what you've done, GravityKit is one of my products. I have GravityKit Trusted Login is a service that I'll talk more about the structure of this. By the way, what I did, don't do what I did. Do what Amber did. Do what Kevin recommends. Chris Lemma also speaks about this very eloquently as well. Sell to your existing customers. Do what you know. Sell to your customers. That's the easiest way to grow. And so, of course, what I decided to do was to sell to myself as the customer that needed trusted login, which makes it easy to log into your customer's website securely without exchanging emails and passwords and stuff. It's a great tool. I needed it, so we built it and we've been running it and we're slowly building. But like, oh, it's really taxed my ability to manage. And I'm already not a very good product manager because I am distractible. Part of the way I got here to GravityKit is that I just started developing a bunch of plugins and putting them on WordPress.org and seeing which ones hit. And the Gravity Forms directory plugin was very popular, so I pivoted to do that. If something else had been more popular, I might have done that instead. But I really focused on Gravity Forms and add-on development and focused on GravityView specifically. And then that led to GravityKit having a bunch of add-ons, each of which its own product that needs to have its own development priorities, its own documentation, its own marketing. It's so hard to manage GravityKit, let alone trusted login and data kit, which is platform agnostic, not just Gravity Forms, that I have overwhelmed my own ability to manage this stuff. And so I'm interested in learning more about how y'all manage that. And also where AI fits into this equation. I saw that's because AI helps change.

Amber
Let's start with how does Kevin. Yeah, Kevin, how do you manage? Before

Zack
we go down the AI level. What does he do like, Mr. Product Manager guy? So

Kevin Geary
I actually don't manage the products.

Zack
And

Kevin Geary
I would probably recommend.

Amber
You have an employee. Well, yeah, we have

Kevin Geary
a, my Mateo is my CTO. And so he is the software project manager, right? So he is responsible for what is the progress of ACSS right now? What is the progress of edge right now? Now I'm on every single call, right? And we have a call every Monday. We're actually probably going to do a joint video about how all of this is managed. Cause a lot of people are very interested in it, but every single Monday we get on a call, we do weekly sprints and the, the Monday call is the entire team. and it's literally prioritizing that week's sprint and what can fit into that week's sprint, what's practical for it. We're also not, we have no interest in releasing like, okay, we need feature X and at the end of the week, feature X has to be done. No, you can break feature X down into smaller chunks and you can do that in the sprint and ship that. And literally people in the community will see a partially done feature, but they'll get to play with that little partially done feature. And they'll understand the bigger picture of what's coming next week and next week and next week. And so nobody's ever sitting around twiddling their thumbs like, oh, when's the next update? The update comes every Thursday. And whatever is ready on Thursday will be in that update. And there's no waiting around or wondering what's going to happen next. Right. So that, I think, is one thing to keep everything on track and very smooth and keep everybody on the same page and keep users happy. By the way, users test that little partial version of that feature and they'll be like, ah, I don't like this little thing right here or that that's I know it's not done, but that part's like it's bugging out. Right. And we can clean that up and fix it up by next week. And so the feature is like by the time it actually is done, it's like almost rock solid at that point, you know, because it's already been user tested for four weeks by the time that the full feature is actually done. So there's a lot of different strategies you can put in place. But like the short answer to your question is I don't manage the products like somebody somebody does need to be dedicated to doing that. I am if I'm doing marketing, if I'm doing videos, if I'm doing education, if I'm doing customer engagement, if I'm doing the WordCamp, if I can't also be the full time product manager. Right. That's very, very difficult. So you do want to put people in the right seats on on the bus. And again, that may mean that you have to expand the team a little bit.

Amber
And I think, you know, looking at your own skill set as a product owner and realizing what are your weaknesses and hiring people to take that over for you, if that is their strength.

Kevin Geary
A hundred percent. You

Amber
know, I think what you were saying, Kevin, kind of reminded me a little bit of, I don't know if either of you have read Basecamp's Shapeup book, but they talk a lot about how to work in sprints and like how to pitch different features or even new products and then how to like really fit it. you don't fit the timeline to the feature, you fit the feature to the timeline. So if you know you're going, you want to have this released by this date, okay, what is the right minimum viable product, the minimum viable version of this feature that we are willing to release to the public so that we can get it out by this date and then we can iterate in future sprints. I highly recommend that there's like a free audio book version and there's like a PDF

Zack
and a website and all kinds

Amber
of stuff. Like they don't charge

Zack
any money for it.

Speaker 5
Yeah. I agree. It's great.

Zack
It also, it doesn't speak to my strengths, which is like, it requires organizational management that I lack. So it sounds like I might need a...

Amber
You need to hire

Zack
yourself a lot. I need to

Amber
hire myself a lot. There you go.

Kevin Geary
I mean, if we're going to put a bow on the whole thing, And we were talking about the context of I've got a new product idea and we want to launch it. I don't have the bandwidth. And bandwidth might mean I don't have a developer to work on it. Or this thing is going to take us into a portfolio situation where I can't manage these products effectively. And so maybe my expansion needs to be a CTO kind of thing, right? Or a project manager or whatever. And so we talked about the idea of, well, let's prove that that thing is going to be successful before we actually build it and commit to it and add it to our portfolio and get into this potential like quagmire situation. And you do that through the act of pre-selling. And I've been very vocal that I think every single product should be pre-sold. Every single product. There's no reason not to, except for one thing. And Amber's comment earlier about she was surprised at how effective it is to sell nothing. I want to clear that up, right? Amber isn't selling nothing. Amber is selling Amber, right? And Amber is selling Amber's track record. And that's what people are saying yes to. And that's what people are buying. If you're brand new to the situation, you can't do the things that we're talking about. You can't come out of the shadows

Speaker 5
and be like,

Kevin Geary
hey, I got this idea. Nobody's going to buy it. in that scenario, right? Nobody would have bought Etch if we didn't have the track record and the brand and everything else behind it, right? And so you should move into the territory. If you have a successful product already or you have a successful track record of any kind and personal brand or company brand of any kind, then what we're talking about will work. And it's because like Amber talked about, it's working really well because they're buying Amber. Like they know when she says, this is what we're going to do. if enough people buy it and it's successful, this is what we're going to do. They know Amber's going to do it and they know that they're going to like it. Right. So that's exactly what they're buying. And then in that situation, you should always do that.

Zack
And or if Amber decides not to move forward and not just Amber, but like anybody who has this reputation, they will give you a refund. Like that's the other side

Kevin Geary
of it. Yes. They know my money is safe with Amber,

Zack
you know, like, you know, so she's not going

Kevin Geary
to disappear.

Amber
She's not going to disappear.

Kevin Geary
So yes, That's what they are buying.

Amber
I mean, I guess it depends on how many millions of people go buy the course. I might disappear to my own. By the way, I

Kevin Geary
do make the note that this is safer for the customer also. Okay. It is not safe for a customer to really need and want something and want Amber to build it or me to build it or Zack to build it. Only to then figure out down the road that, oh, well, we didn't actually have the funding or we didn't actually have the people. And what everybody ends up with is just a lot of disappointment. Everybody down to the customer that was really, really hoping that this thing would exist and really, really wanted it and needed it. Right. When you set everything up correctly from the beginning, it works for everybody, including the customer, because they know, hey, I'm putting money into a properly funded and properly led product. Good things happen in that scenario.

Zack
And yeah, if you hand over money and

Kevin Geary
you say, like,

Zack
there's an expectation that you will get the product that you requested as opposed to just another name on a wish list.

Kevin Geary
Correct. Correct. And let's not forget, like, a lot of products are built in the dark of night. And so, yeah, people don't hear about them until alpha beta. And then a bunch of people still buy in alpha beta. But because it was built in the dark of night and it wasn't really marketed all that well. I mean, there's a graveyard of dead plugins and dead products. Right. But those things were purchased by lots of people in the alpha and beta stage. They didn't pre-sell it, but they got it. Like they limped it over the alpha finish line enough for a lot of people to buy in. And then it was just not enough people bought in. And it was just kind of mostly just crickets. And so those initial people either lost their money or had to be refunded. I mean, how many people have bought LTDs for things that are partially done, right? Because it's like they got it as far as they could. And they're like, we need money. And they're like, all right, LTD it, alpha, whatever. A lot of people buy in, not enough people buy in, and then it just ends up dying. Like that is the, unfortunately, probably the norm maybe in a lot of these scenarios. Who does that serve? That doesn't serve anybody. It doesn't serve the people creating the product. It doesn't serve the people that purchase those LTDs hoping that things would take off, you know? So it's better to just get all this stuff out of the way up front.

Zack
And when you decide to start a new product, how do you make that decision? So with Etch, you said that there was a moment that you got to yes. I imagine that might be a WordPress political moment.

Kevin Geary
Actually, it's not. No, we should talk about it. Yeah, for sure. Okay.

Zack
So when you decide, how do you decide when to start the product? And do you have a decision framework for making that decision? Do you have like a table with a grid that has calculations? like walk us through how you decide yeah to start something for

Kevin Geary
for us it's does it fit well into the portfolio always has to be like a really important question like i'm i mentioned that acss action frames all work together okay that's very important i i'm a big fan of tangentially related products that just piece themselves together um and i i look at that as not really going wide but going deep you know like because they these things stack on top of each other They're almost like a ladder. It's like you climb the ladder from one thing to the next thing. I'm a big fan of architecting things that way. The second thing I look at is, can we actually innovate like the experience or the, obviously there's a problem we're trying to fill a need for does our quote unquote solution actually bring anything new to the table and not just like a little bit new, but fundamentally new. And so that's why, you know, 2021, 2022, I'm being asked on every single live stream. Kevin, you got to create a page builder. You got to, and I was like, eh, at the time, like I couldn't, I didn't know what the next era was supposed to look like. And what I could imagine was taking something like bricks and making it better in a hundred different little ways. But there was nothing fundamentally different that I envisioned at that time. And because of that, I said, no, like, no, no, no. Cause that's a huge project for like a little bit better. oh, we're just gonna be a little bit better than this thing over here at the end of the day. Didn't wanna be involved in that, right? Last year, we put a few pieces together where I was like, oh, okay. Well, if we did it this way, this would be a radical change. This would be fundamentally different, fundamentally transformative. There's a few features that nobody's ever talked about before, much less ever seen before. That is worth going after. That is worth going after. And by the way, I would not have gotten to those realizations, if you wanna call them that, without saying no for week after week after week for two straight years. It was all of that saying no, like gave the space to finally realize what needed to happen. If I just said yes before, because I knew, hey, I got enough people, they got enough money, we can cash in on this. Could have done that, could have done that, but we would have come out with a little bit better bricks, nothing fundamentally different or better. But we said no, no, no, no, no. And we did that for long enough for a light bulb to go off and be like, oh, okay. Now we see what actually has to be built. And now we're building something that actually changes things.

Zack
And you don't think you would have gotten to where you are now if you had, you could have had a page builder this whole time and then had version two be what you're releasing now. Do you think like?

Kevin Geary
I don't think so. I don't

Zack
think so.

Kevin Geary
Because we would have made critical architectural decisions that would have aligned it much like a bricks or an oxygen. And that's why what we're doing behind the scenes and technically speaking, a lot of people are looking at that and they're saying, well, bricks can just catch up to that or they can't. They can't. These are fundamental architectural like day one, week one, like early on. You have to decide that the thing is going to work like this. Otherwise, you're working through so much technical debt and so much going backwards and redo. And now you can't change a product that fundamentally, when you have a whole user base, that worries about backwards compatibility and all this other stuff. So I just don't see that as a path forward. It really had to be a, you got to decide to go down this road. They all went down this road. And there's no crossing over.

Amber
I think there is something to be said, though, for getting a product idea and vibe coding it. Is that the term now? Like just doing some exploration in a day or a week or two weeks or whatever makes sense for your business just to see what could this be and potentially even releasing that knowing that in a year or two years, this is going to require a complete refactor. I don't want to completely dissuade people, especially new product owners who are trying to figure out how to break in to think that like you have to have this really perfect, really solid idea before you, you know, create

Speaker 5
your second product,

Amber
right? Like if you, if you have one that is successful and you feel confident in spending some time trying to replicate that success in a different area or in a different way, I think that being nimble and being open to trying that, even if you do know that you're going to set yourself up for a refactor in the future, it's just you need to be aware that that is a possibility and be prepared for it. I mean, I'll definitely say like accessibility checker today is nothing like accessibility checker in 2020. Accessibility checker in 2020 was all like super procedural. It's not testable. There's nothing object oriented about it, right? Like it was where we were and like what we were thinking and what can we get done in a few months. And now, I mean, literally two weeks ago, my partner Steve released an update where there is no PHP tests anymore. Every check runs on a fully rendered page via JavaScript. And over the past like couple of years, we've been totally refactoring so that it would have test coverage and like all kinds of stuff. And getting a product out there sometimes is, it's messy, but getting it out there is better than waiting until it's going to be perfect.

Zack
100%. So how does AI change this equation? We're going to be in an era of the most software being released and promoted in the history of the world where anybody can release a product and diversifying your product portfolio is going to be easier than ever. So how does that change the moment where, like, how does that change how we approach things?

Kevin Geary
I guess I'll take it. One is velocity. And if you're going to do it the non-AI way, and well, I shouldn't say there's no non-AI way anymore. There's an AI assisted way. Because even if people are like, okay, my brain is coding this. but like I can use AI to help me where I, where I want to speed things up or I don't want to do redundant work or whatever, you know, like that's AI assisting vibe coding is kind of the, like, I don't really know what I'm doing, but like this thing's going to hopefully write this for me by the end of the day. Um, and, and what you're going to see either way is you just need velocity. You need velocity and releases. You need velocity and in everything that you do, because people are not just going to sit and wait around a month or two months for another version of the next iteration of it the next feature the next step like you've got to move quickly you've got to move quickly with your idea and then you've got to move quickly with releases okay so that's that's number one is just the velocity has to increase because that's what people are going to expect and that's what ai is going to assist other teams in doing your competitors really it's going to help them move faster you got to commit to moving faster okay so that would be that would be one of the biggest things that that i would say um i'll let amber or anybody else jump in and then we'll We'll continue talking about it. There's some other points that I think are good to make too. So I

Amber
think on the AI front, as a product owner, obviously, you know, you can use a lot of AI to get things out faster. But if you think about this from a marketing perspective, I think this is an opportunity to potentially differentiate yourself because from a quality perspective, because there are a lot of people. I mean, I saw someone not too long ago who was literally like, I'm just going to use AI to help me rebuild every WooCommerce add-on

Speaker 5
and release them. Right? But like those

Amber
AI plugins, and I'm not speaking about those because I haven't looked at them, but AI generated code frequently does not have the quality. It might not be very performant. It might not. Probably isn't accessible. It might not do great on responsive. Like, I don't know, right? Like there's a lot about it or it might have security flaws. It might not follow WordPress,

Speaker 5
whatever that might be.

Amber
So if you are a product owner who is taking the time to do more like AI assisted, but really having human review and not just like spitting out plugins every other day, like you can, I think, differentiate your products to your customers as, hey, you know, yes, there might be these competitors that have suddenly thrown up a plugin that they built two days ago, but our product is used on all of these websites, has been tested and built over the past, you know, however many years or months or whatever that might be. And I do think that that is a way that you can differentiate and put more trust in your product. And I don't want people to be afraid of all the AI generated stuff because I don't think they're going to ultimately stand up. And the thing about those two is a plugin, a product developer who is using AI to code the vast majority of their product is going to get stuck when they get asked for a feature or when support comes up or when someone says, hey, there's a security vulnerability in this and you're about to get taken off WordPress.org unless you fix it in however many days, right? Like they won't know what to do because they don't understand what the code is in their software.

Zack
Yeah.

Amber
So I don't know. I'm not too afraid of that.

Zack
I think

Amber
that future

Zack
is coming where people won't need to, where they will be able to support automatically and have bugs fixed automatically. I think that future is coming pretty quickly, but it's not there yet. I do agree that the most important thing is your branding and your personal brand and the trust that like Kevin was talking about earlier that we were talking about where the ability for people to know that your product and your brand are honorable and worth investing in. One thing that we've come across and it affects our ability to diversify. And this is we're about to release a new product. And one of the things we already struggle with is communicating it to customers. So we, like everybody else, send newsletters announcing what we're up to. We send product announcement newsletters and we announce it on social media. I've been doing one-on-one customer calls over the past few weeks where many customers don't know part of the plugins that we sell. And we have a landing page built into our plugins that shows our other products and they don't know that those are there. I think a lot of what diversification needs is a mode of communication to get and connect to your customers. And, you know, if you want to pre-sale, that's great. You need to be able to reach the people to get them to the pre-sale page and to communicate what you're doing and why it matters to them. I think is one of the biggest struggles for diversifying is saying that this exists and getting it out there and getting it known.

Kevin Geary
Yeah, I think for sure. like to piggyback off the marketing and the personal branding side of things, and kind of what Amber said as well. You know, in a way, we don't have to be super afraid of the vibe coding tribe. Because again, like I mentioned earlier, people are not just going to come out of the shadows with some vibe coded product. Everybody is just going to purchase like gangbusters. Like at the end of the day, people just their first question is, who are you? Where did you come from? You know, like, and so I would say, And if you are wanting to get into software and take advantage of opportunities, or you think there are big problems that you can solve, you should focus on the marketing side of things first and producing value in other ways before you go right into the software product. Because yes, AI assists you in getting to the product fast, but it's not the best product that wins. And it's not even just the product that exists that wins. It's the best known product that wins. and nobody knows you and nobody knows about the product and you can't communicate what it does and the problems it solves, you don't have that marketing backing. It's not going to go anywhere. It's going to be a complete waste of your time. I think the people we do probably need to be afraid of are, and I actually see probably like an influencer marketplace kind of going in this direction because people are going to recognize that, hey, I can vibe code these solutions. Like I get in the dark at night and I get, you know, you leverage AI, but I don't have the, I don't have the brand to push them, but I can go find an influencer who's willing to put their name behind it. Right. And suddenly you do have like some sort of marketing or edge into the market. Plus this vibe coded thing. And I don't, I don't think that's good for anybody. Cause like Amber said, it's like these things under the hood are, are terrible. Um, and they're ultimately in a lot of ways, architecturally, structurally, technically going to fail. Right. Um, and you know, I think the one thing you have to, from a true competition standpoint, the one thing you maybe do have to really worry about is somebody with a good marketing backing vibe codes, an initial kind of thing and enough people buy it that now they have the money and they're smart enough to take all that initial money and go to people with it, not go back to AI with it, but like, okay, now bring in real developers. Okay. Like we, and we proved the concept using this, like those are going to be legitimate plays in the marketplace. There's going to be a lot of trash, though, a lot of junk and a lot of trash. And it's the Wild Wild West. So you just got to be ready for anything.

Zack
Yeah, so I think we're at the time of the show where we should give our best advice for people who are considering whether to diversify or to double down. I'm going to say double down.

Amber
Does

Zack
the person

Amber
with like 10 different products?

Speaker 5
Okay, before we do

Amber
best advice, I want to know though, because you had a question idea, which we didn't talk about, but I almost feel like, do you regret diversifying? Or

Speaker 5
is there a product?

Amber
Yeah.

Zack
Maybe you'd be afraid

Amber
to say that because you don't want people to stop paying for that product.

Zack
I think the problem with my diversification has been my product management capabilities. And I've tried hiring three or four different product managers. They didn't work out. And when I say product managers, I mean people who can take a bigger picture and who are good at organizing things and keeping on track of multiple things. I'm really myopic. When I'm focused on something, I focus on it hard. And then I lose sight of other things. And that was when I focused on Trusted Login, I lost focus on GravityKit a little bit. Same with DataKit. I needed extra people to help me manage that. And I should have known that. I should have hired somebody. I should have kept finding the person to do that type of organizational overview. So that's my regret. I think the products are great. Trusted login. We use it every day. More people are coming on. DataKit has a lot of opportunity. We're still talking about how to implement that. It's a matter of management. And I am not the best manager. So that's, I don't regret it though. How about you, Kevin? Do you have any products that you regret launching or?

Kevin Geary
No, no, not that we regret. I think it isn't, like my advice would be, if you, especially if you're in the beginning stages of diversification, maybe you have like one really good product and you're like, okay, I've got an idea for a second one. One, it would be, do you have the money? Do you have the bandwidth? Do you have the team like to actually manage that properly? based on all the things that we talked about earlier, right? That would be a significant one. Another one would be how well does it fit into the portfolio? Like, and does it plug and play with the other products? It's always safer if, and we could ask Amber that, like Amber, does your course, you said you were building courses was part of your diversification. They can obviously buy the plugin and then buy the course, right? Can they do it backwards too? Could they buy the course wanting to learn about accessibility and then be like, oh, I need that plugin.

Amber
Yeah. So our, I mean, the courses that we have selling right now are how to screen reader test. So one with voiceover and one within BDA,

Speaker 5
those don't

Amber
require our plugin at all because it's just how to use a screen reader. Like what are

Speaker 5
the keyboard shortcuts

Amber
you need to know? What are the settings? And then it has example components. Um, we do have some courses planned that will be more like how to do a full audit that will utilize our plugin. You could still buy the course and look at those, but

Speaker 5
you

Amber
wouldn't be able to put it into practice if you didn't have the plugin.

Speaker 5
Yes.

Zack
But

Speaker 5
I

Amber
think a lot of the courses that we have are supportive because understanding that our product only fills a certain niche within a need of our audience, right? So our audience, if they need to know if their thing is accessible, our plugin is part of that, but

Speaker 5
there's this whole

Amber
other piece that software can't solve. And so having the courses helps to support that. We're probably also going to create a course on how to sell accessibility because that is a thing that agency owners have been telling us like they have a hard time with or they don't know and they don't know how to do that and of course it benefits us if people who use our tool and pay for it can sell it to their customers

Speaker 5
yeah right

Amber
so again it'll be agnostic to our plugin you could just buy that and not use our plugin i suppose right um use some other software tool, but, but it would also be supportive of, well, if you are better at selling accessibility to your clients, you are more likely to buy our product

Kevin Geary
is kind of how

Amber
we thought about that.

Kevin Geary
Yeah. So that, that is the scenario I would recommend people try to create if they're, especially in the early stages of diversification where one product actually sells the other product and vice versa, like it can work in either direction. When I had, I first had automatic CSS. Well, before I had automatic CSS, I had my inner circle, which was a membership community. Okay. So people would come into the membership community. That's actually where I pre-launched automatic CSS. Then we created automatic CSS. But at that stage, when automatic CSS was going well, you could come into the inner circle community knowing nothing about automatic CSS. And after two weeks, you would come to the conclusion based on all the discussions and trainings and everything in there, I need to get automatic CSS. It would sell it, right? You could also not know anything about the inner circle. You could just buy automatic CSS. And then through getting support for automatic CSS, you're going to hear about this thing called the inner circle over and over and over again. And then you're, you end up in there. And then when we added frames, it was the same thing. People would see frames in action and they'd be like, what's that? I want that. And the minute they would try to get it, they'd be like, oh, I have to have this thing called automatic CSS to even run this. And they would get that too. Now they're buying them both together. But like, it wasn't marketing this over here and that over here. and just having to put all effort into those two different lanes, whatever effort I put over there feeds back into every other lane that we're doing. And now the same thing with Etch. Like I can sell Etch. Nobody knows about ACSS. They don't know about frames. They don't know about the inner circle. They buy Etch. They're gonna know within two, three weeks about all those other things and they're gonna start adding them on and they can go in either direction, any direction, doesn't matter. So if I go put a lot of effort into one channel, it feeds all of the other channels indirectly just because of how the products relate to each other. And I gave a talk at the R3, the Recurring Revenue Conference, about this exact scenario where you wanna avoid products that aren't related enough, right? They're still in the same niche, technically speaking, but they don't directly feed into each other because any effort you put over here doesn't help this one all that much. You want that like reciprocal energy where it goes like this feeds that, feeds this. They all feed each other. That works perfectly. And that's the safest diversification model. That's the route I would recommend people go if they were asking for my advice.

Amber
Yeah, honestly, that was literally, you said it so much better than I did, but that was going to be my best advice too, which is that you need to figure out who your audience is and create products that serve that exact same audience and that work collaboratively together so that you don't feel like you're taking your attention away.

Zack
And I'll add a little bit onto that. If your temptation is to do this and you're not sure, you can always add that. Well, you might be able to add that feature to your existing product and branch it off into its own product later. Like if you're not sure, you can always build the functionality and then take it out and sell this as a separate product as well. So that's an option that we didn't really discuss very much. But that is...

Kevin Geary
As long as you don't... You might make

Amber
people angry if you remove the functionality. You would

Zack
have to leave it in the product, I think. You can

Kevin Geary
take it out. Grandfather some people in, yeah. Yeah, exactly. There

Zack
are opportunities there for not diversifying until later, but still building the product.

Amber
We have a few small feature plugins, and I've seen other people do this too, where they're like, okay, this would be an add-on maybe for accessibility or checker or it's like a testing ground. some of our fixes exist as just an independent free plugin

Speaker 5
because

Amber
that allows us to get like feedback before we actually roll the feature into our paid.

Zack
We do that too.

Amber
Yeah.

Zack
Well, thank you so much, Kevin. That's a wrap. Thanks for joining us. Where can people find you online?

Kevin Geary
If you go to geary.co, you can find pretty much everything. So that's G-E-A-R-Y.co.

Amber
Next week, we are going to be closing out season six of WP Product Talk with the final topic, which is all about exiting from your product. So

Speaker 5
if you're someone who

Amber
thinks that you are interested in potentially selling or getting out of being a product owner or getting rid of one of your diversified products, definitely tune in for that. Matt Cromwell and I will be here speaking with special guest Iona to discuss how to optimize business valuation and sell your product business. So make sure you tune in next week.

Zack
Yeah. And if you're enjoying these shows, please do us a favor and hit like, subscribe, share it with your friends, reference this show in your newsletters or your podcasts, and don't forget to tune in next week. Bye.

Bye.