The WP Minute+

Matt Medeiros (00:00)
Sandra from Greyd welcome to WP Minute.

Sandra Kurze (00:03)
Hey there, thank you for having me.

Matt Medeiros (00:06)
We chatted a couple of weeks ago and you said something that you haven't done many podcast episodes ⁓ solo, but you've done some WordPress media, right? Like in person and stuff like that. This isn't the first podcast that you've done.

Sandra Kurze (00:22)
I think it's actually first where I'm being on the other side. You might know that we started our own great conversations podcast a couple of months ago and I've been in there, but mainly as a host. I'm used to being on stage and giving talks and all that, but this is actually my very first podcast.

Matt Medeiros (00:43)
Greyd has been around for a while now, which is which is kind of weird to say it's probably what you're in your fifth year

Sandra Kurze (00:50)
Yeah,

mean, yeah, officially we were founded in 2018, but we really started selling the product and being part of the WordPress community about five years ago.

Matt Medeiros (01:03)
I remember when Greyd came out and a ⁓ lot of folks were like, wait, how much per month? Like, this doesn't make any sense to me. And I sat back and I was actually trying to find it. I might've set it in an episode in one of like the live streams that I had done when Greyd first came out. I couldn't pinpoint it. I thought it was a podcast episode. But I was like, no, coming from the world of like where I used to work at Pagely and enterprise hosting and stuff like that, and just being in the ecosystem for a while,

like price point and all this stuff. Like we've all been saying, like WordPress is far too, you know, inexpensive at the bottom. And a lot of this stuff is ⁓ agencies and freelancers are super dependent on ⁓ the software that, well, that they're dependent on, right? They're running their business, they're building WordPress websites and great as trying to position themselves and as position themselves as a piece of software that's critical to ⁓ freelancers and agencies.

But for the folks that don't know anything about GRADE and what the product is, how do you differentiate in the market? How do you set yourself apart from, it's not just a plugin, it's not just a theme?

Sandra Kurze (02:13)
⁓ The name already says it, product is an entire suite of tools for web agencies and enterprises. In theory, anybody building websites and managing websites can work with great, but you will have the most benefit and we differentiate ourselves the most when it comes to high-volume website projects. What distinguishes us from ⁓ other solutions in the market is really this

all in one approach. So we do have page building features, but ⁓ different to, for example, page builder tools, we don't add an additional layer on top of WordPress, but we integrate our features directly into the blog ⁓ and side of WordPress. And it's not just a page building, we have management features and most importantly, we have the ability to connect any number of sites with each other, no matter whether it's single sites, multi-sites, can be different hosting environments.

connect these sites to each other and synchronize assets across any number of sites. ⁓ Assets could be content, post type structures, forms, templates, whatever kind of posts. And that is what enables you to really build these large scale website systems like you would see them, for example, with franchise clients or universities with hundreds of departments or locations that all need their own website.

You kind of need to have central and global control over a couple of things like the design, legal information, certain parts of the content, but you still want to do be able to have local changes as well. That's the case or another example would be probably a big enterprise with a lot of websites and landing pages and they would need or want to have like a central library.

of dynamic assets, which they could use to really speed up the creation process of spinning up new sites and again, having synchronized assets. when they change a certain text or their design or whatever, they don't have to work on hundreds of sites and just click it once in the library and that will be published to all their sites.

Matt Medeiros (04:24)
I think there's a particular ⁓ formula that gets lost ⁓ in the typical WordPress community member, like probably the one that's listening right now, where we love WordPress and we've been in WordPress for a while. And even the folks who've only been here for the last five years, but certainly those that have been here for 20 years. Like we love the fact that we can take WordPress off the shelf and we can do whatever we want with it.

I can, you know, as somebody who works at Gravity Forms, you know, I can bring in Gravity Forms, I can bring in all of these plugins, you know, page builders, other block plugins, anything that does all this functionality. We love it because of it's like this bespoke nature that we can build anything that we want. And I think that that is a core, you know, power of WordPress. And, but I also think that that's also for a certain...

well, a certain agency, a certain freelancer, a certain type of person who wants to do all that. And the message of what GRADE does is says, hey, that's cool. You can bring, you know, all these plugins in and I'm sure there's plugins that work with GRADE and there's also an ecosystem there. But the fact is it's giving somebody a foundation, a blueprint that's like, you don't need to go get everything. It's all here. And we're supporting that.

long-term business owner in WordPress can sometimes like, they just don't see that because they're like, I've always built everything from scratch. Why would I use this? Well, because some businesses want that blueprint to be done for them. Not everyone wants to go scouring for a new feature every single time that they're building a WordPress website. Is that the general consensus that you get from your own customers that say,

Yeah, we're just happy to use these tools. We don't want to go searching for a bunch of things.

Sandra Kurze (06:21)
There's a couple of things to that. So first of all, we don't stop you from using the tools that you want. That's one of the big benefits from working as close to WordPress core as possible is that we are also compatible to all the other tools who are doing the same. So for example, Raze comes with a block theme, but you don't have to use that. You can use whatever other block theme or even non-block theme that you want to use and can still go with that. Same for forms. We have a built-in form generator.

But you don't have to use that. You can also add other form builders like Gravity Forms to that if you want to do that. The idea behind having one integrated solution is when it really comes to more complex projects and also projects that maybe not just cover one website, but maybe dozens of websites, then the more tools that you combine with each other, the more issues you're going to have. There might be compatibility issues, page speed issues, whatever.

And even if there are no issues at all, there are still a lot of maintenance work to do. And all that we're doing at GRADE is targeted at increasing efficiency, enabling smaller teams to handle more complex and bigger projects, probably to also enter the enterprise market, which is really interesting one, but it's also very difficult one for a small agency to target because usually what they would be required would

be to also grow their team in Headcount for these kind of projects. With the approach that we're going, we're offering one integrated solution where everything fits perfectly together. And there's also one solution so you don't have like a bunch of different tools that always has an effect on your code, for example, the performance.

It's just one integrated solution. I completely understand if you have a favorite tool that you have been using for years and you want to go on with that. We don't stop you from doing that. You can combine most of the tools with Create Suite just fine.

Matt Medeiros (08:30)
What makes in grades perspective, what makes a project an enterprise project or a big project for like what grade suite of tools solves really well? I think again, for the freelancer or the WordPress professional that might be listening to this, it's numbers first and foremost, right? It's like, oh, it's a $50,000 project, but what does that mean? Like we know that it's a big number.

But what does that mean? just to give you a second to just like think about it, I remember landing my biggest project at my agency and it was just a very unique solution. They were using WordPress as this intermediary to ⁓ mobile apps that they were distributing through hospitals and other like medical facilities. And WordPress was really just the great place to create the content.

for all of their like this particular company's editors and researchers, very nice interface, obviously web-based and it would just take that content and we help them take that content and send it out to the mobile apps and to this other software. I guess you could say your typical WordPress headless experience, but it was very custom because we're building it into their network of servers. ⁓ And that was a big project to us, but big projects could vary. So.

How does GRADE solve it for their own customers to say, here's how you can tackle these big projects and what are those big projects?

Sandra Kurze (10:01)
⁓ Well, to be honest, we also have a quite loose definition of what we see as an enterprise project. mean, could be different things, could be declining just literally being an enterprise and coming with a lot of different requirements, also probably different kind of sales cycles. And also these typical like real enterprises, they are often the ones who struggle the most with buying WordPress because

There's just not one product they could buy. have like WordPress, have this plugin, they have that plugin, these, this, this and this. So it's really difficult for them to compare what they get in WordPress to what they could get from, I don't know, a Hatton CMS or something where they really buy a product. So that's kind of enterprise, but also what we also see as enterprise projects is really big and complex projects involving a lot of websites.

Some examples, like I said, would be franchises who don't have to be like literally franchises, but the moment they have like, let's say more than 20, 25, 30 locations that all need their individual websites, that's the point where you usually get into trouble when you start building all that as individual sites and then imagine just a small change they have like...

I don't know, either a rebranding or they have a new offer and you have to get this offer on all these 30 websites that might still be working ⁓ depending on how much stuff you have, but it's a lot of manual work. And what we enable you with this approach of centralizing websites, managing them from a central place and not just the website itself, but also their assets and having things synchronized and connected to each other if is.

I could push that new offer to all those 50 sites or 200 sites or even 1000 sites with just a single click. And that's where we bring in the difference. Because usually when you're building these kinds of projects, it starts by the requirement of most of the times, either have a lot of custom development, like you mentioned in your project, and or HATLIFT CMS, which always requires you to have a lot of depth.

staff or technical experts and we enable you to do that with designers. We enable designers and marketing people to do the kind of work that usually would require ⁓ much more technical focused resources.

Matt Medeiros (12:38)
Yeah, there's always, you know, when you say things like synchronize content, and I'm just looking at the pricing page of grade to kind of like set the stage for this ⁓ next question, but enterprise pricing. mean, enterprise pricing is ridiculous, right? I mean, I think some folks think enterprise pricing and they go, it's a few hundred dollars a month. But when you get into the enterprise, it's crazy, the numbers and the contracts. And a lot of it is, a lot of it's inflated, I'll say, but also a lot of it is because they're so

There's so much at stake. are so many people. There's so many departments. There's so many like stakeholders. Like this is why these numbers get so big. All to do the simplest thing. And the thing like you said about like, well, one website needs a piece of content. Let's say it's a, let's say this big sale or it's like this big piece of information that like every website in the organization needs. The typical WordPress freelancer goes, that's easy. I can just, I can just write this little, this little plugin and it'll work.

⁓ until it doesn't and then that enterprise says, what did you do to the site? Why isn't the site getting all of this, all of our sites getting this information? It is a critical component. And in the enterprise, those things need to be stable. And like I was saying, your price point, 79 a month, 299 a month, 499 a month. If you're selling into the enterprise, this is a fraction probably of your contract. even this isn't insanely expensive.

for the insurance policy that you're getting, right? And I think that's a thing that a lot of WordPress folks need to kind of recognize is like trading this trust in your software so that your client is getting that same feeling of trust with you. And it's like this sort of like domino effect, like we all trust each other here and I'm using trusted software. And I think that's what you're trying to bring to the table here.

Sandra Kurze (14:30)
Yeah,

that, but I wouldn't just limit it to enterprise. I you already said in WordPress in general, we have the issue that a lot of great tools are just way underpriced, which might seem as a good thing from a buyer's perspective, but if the providers will not be able to make a living out of that tool, chances are high that that tool might not be there in two, three or four years and you have built your business on that and you know how it goes.

The other thing, and that's probably the more important one is that a lot of folks in the WordPress community, especially when it comes to smaller agencies and freelancers, when they look at tools, they just compare the cost. They see, okay, I can get a theme for 50 bucks or I could get great for 70 bucks a month. Okay, I've done it. Obviously I'm going to take the cheaper one. But what they don't take into account is that at least 75 % of their cost

building websites, it's labor, actual work of doing the design and building the site and getting all the plugins and whatever they need. And if there's a solution that enables you to streamline all these processes to get much more efficient, to probably do twice or even more times projects in the same time, then you also have to take this into consideration. If you're only looking at the cost, you will just always go for that 50 bucks theme.

but you will probably also not grow your business. It will always stay there. If you want to look at it differently and see how can I increase my margins? How can I get more clients in the same time without needing to hire more people in my agency, which is usually the only way if you want to grow your agency business. In most of the cases, the only way to do that is hiring more people, which again comes with more costs and all that. If you want to do that without.

growing in headcount, then you need to invest in tools. I really, I use that word of purpose. Choosing software, running your business is an investment and an investment should never be looked at just in terms of the cost. You should always also look at the benefit and see what do I get out of that and what are the costs and then take all this into consideration and then compare the products.

Matt Medeiros (16:53)
I want to unpack the, this labor side of it because it is something that is, ⁓ again, I just pulling on my own experiences. was the same thing. Like business started to grow. That's a great thing. Right. Client more clients. Hey, we heard about you. We want to hire you. You did good work. We saw you do this other website. We want that too. It's like, awesome. Let me help you. We'll help you build this website. And as somebody who is running the agency, right. I was just sales and marketing and

and just like helping grow the business. I wasn't actually building the websites any longer, know, five, six years into the business. Well, the only thing I could do was hire somebody else ⁓ and like bring them on. And not only is that a huge expense, but there's that whole learning. Yeah, responsibility and yeah, the responsibility of like, now I have to like bring on somebody and health insurance taxes, like all that stuff. ⁓ But the,

Learning curve is something that you don't that you don't really expect because you're thinking It's just WordPress and and we have a way that we build websites and certainly that's just an easy thing I hire somebody that knows WordPress I bring them on and they will just go and start building websites for me and it'll be profitable But it never works like that because your agency has a process and now grade helps with that, right? So help me unpack what that labor part is for you

Sandra Kurze (18:19)
It's just streamlining, for example, building a website. Most of the time, there's the design part, which is kind of individual. There's a lot of creativity in that, but as soon as you carry that, it's just building the site, putting the content in there, ⁓ setting up the installation, taking care of the go-live and all this.

That's not really the part where that distinguishes you. What distinguishes you is like the 10%, the creativity you put in and all that. The rest is just work. And what we're trying to do is we help you streamline that part, which is just work and make you more efficient there and enable you to do a lot more of that, automate a lot of that. So you can focus on doing more of that 10 % that actually is responsible for the money you're earning.

And with all the AI developments that we're seeing at the moment, I think this becomes even more crucial because this just work part, that's the part where probably AI might be your biggest competitor in the future. That 10 % where's the credit creativity, like understanding the client and bringing that, translating that into a great website or whatever kind of design or creative art we're looking at. That part.

I don't think that AI will be replacing anytime soon, but the actual, just build it, just like turn the design into an actual website kind of stuff. That part will change drastically in the next couple of years, I think.

Matt Medeiros (19:59)
Is it fair to say that an agency owner could hire somebody who's more junior level, but on board with the way that grade helps them build websites to take sort of like ⁓ level them up faster. ⁓ So in the event that person leaves the company or, you know, whatever they don't work out, you have this foundation where you bring on new people and it's like,

Hey, you don't have to start from scratch, just build with grade and we'll teach you grade and how it all works together, but this is the way we do it. This is the process we use it. Do you think it helps at that capacity?

Sandra Kurze (20:38)
⁓ kind of, I mean, if you want to offer create design, you obviously still need great designers because we don't do the design for you. So in that part, would say no. But when it comes to like more technical resources, ⁓ I'm not saying, ⁓ you don't need developers anymore, but, I'm sure most of the developers listening will agree that they would rather be working on like actual development work and really developing something great and something new.

rather than taking care of basic tasks of maintaining sites, probably not updating sites, but creating staging environments, doing goal lives, migrating domains and all these kinds of things. And for that part, you shouldn't be relying on these also very expensive resources and not just expensive resources, but also resources that are just not there on the market in the amount that you would need them.

⁓ you can look at it in different perspectives. can say, okay, I have a certain team. I don't want to grow the team, but I want to grow the business. That's one way to approach this. But also what we're seeing in a lot of enterprises, for example, is that they have already reduced their team due to cost factors. And now we, for example, we have one client, a huge German enterprise, and they used to have like a huge team of tech specialists, marketing people, designers. And now it's.

Only the marketing team with a couple of designers will have to do all that work, taking care of all these hundreds of sites. They don't have a lot of technically sophisticated people anymore on the team, but they still need to be able to do all that. That's another way to look at it. And also what we're seeing in a lot of large scale enterprises is they do have all these developers and they are able to do a lot of custom development.

But the way they're working is also very expensive. So they kind of just can't do that for like the really, really expensive enterprise projects. They are not, they would like to also take on smaller projects for like 50 K, but they can't do that because their workload is just too expensive. They wouldn't earn any money with that. So that's different ways. there's a lot of different perspectives here. ⁓

really depends on how your team looks like and what kind of projects ⁓ you want to build. ⁓ But yeah, that's definitely part of what we're offering.

Matt Medeiros (23:17)
Is any of the grade suite a SaaS product where somebody's like hooked into something and it's treated more like if they were had a HubSpot account or something like that?

Sandra Kurze (23:26)
No, it's still, I mean, it's just a regular plug theme that it's optional and it's the suite, the entire functionality of the suite comes with one or depending on your plan, also two or three plugins. It's completely based on resource.

Matt Medeiros (23:43)
notice in the middle in the higher tiers, ⁓ customers can get ⁓ onboarding and one-on-one support. What does that look like from, first of all it's mind-blowing, right? Because like I don't know of any other like plugins or you know ⁓ WordPress software except for maybe like VIP from you know from automatic or something like that. Even at Gravity Forms like we don't

We have really great support, but we don't do one-on-one or onboarding calls. So what does that look like from grades perspective?

Sandra Kurze (24:18)
Well, ⁓ one thing is for the kind of projects that you can build with GreatSuite, and you mentioned a couple of things being like really, ⁓ and entire enterprises relying on your work and your tech stack to just function. ⁓ So in case you're running into any issues, you need to have personal support. And that's something that it's really, really high in our agenda because we are convinced that

This is also a big differentiator, like I said, usually in the WordPress ecosystem, you put your tech stack together, would probably have some custom work, but then you have all these plugins and then you're running into an issue. And then some of these plugins might not even offer any kind of support or you can write the ticket and probably if you're lucky, it will get answered. But what you would really need in this situation, especially if you also have contracts with these enterprises in the background that ⁓

also can have financial situations coming up. ⁓ would want somebody who hops on a call with you, looks into the backend together with you and helps you figure out what the issue is and how to solve it. And that's the kind of support that we are offering in all our subscription tiers. And this is also one of the reasons why we are more expensive than the average

plugin solution of whatever kind of tool you're building. And the onboarding is just because we realized that Crate Suite is a very comprehensive solution and there's a lot to learn and depending on the kind of projects you're building. It probably also changes the process of building and we just realized that people need some help with these kinds of changes.

they need some proper onboarding to really getting started with Create Suite and seeing the first successes. So we found that when we actually accompany the client, the customer with their first Create Suite project, then that's a good way for us to make sure that the customer actually ⁓ is happy with the tool and is going to continue using it and can actually get the benefits out of it that they expected.

And for the client, it's a huge relief because they don't have to build that first project on their own. always, I mean, they, course they have to support, they can contact at any time, but the onboarding is even more intense because they have like a dedicated person who's available to them who has several one-on-one appointments with them and really helps them get the first project running.

Matt Medeiros (27:05)
Yeah, and you know, that's one of the things that I urge every agency to do, right, with their customers. Like the worst thing that can happen, and I'm guilty of it too, is like you make a sale as an agency owner, like you make a sale, you land a project, not a massive project, but at the start of it, you're like, hey, this is pretty good. It's, I don't know, five, 10, maybe $15,000. And you're like, okay, this is, this should be good. Right? And then things start going south.

because maybe the client's asking for stuff that you didn't agree to. Maybe you took on a little bit of work that was like, ⁓ I thought I could do this. Like I thought I could figure this out or I thought my team could figure this out in, you know, 20 hours, but now we're at 25 hours and I'm starting to like dip into some of that profitability. And what happens is then like there's no, like that lack of communication. You don't wanna talk to the customer. The customer doesn't wanna talk to you. Like all of that stuff starts to unravel.

And if there's not like this clear communication, this clear delineation of like who's responsible for what in the beginning and when, like that's when I've seen the projects be the worst, right? Like when you're not keeping up or you're just simply not keeping up with the customer and the customer is like, hey, what's up? I, you know, I paid you a lot of money. Why haven't you given me an update? And you're trying to like, you know, not take phone calls and all this stuff. When you can be clear and upfront with customers, I think that's going to be one of the most critical parts of success.

And even actually, the more you communicate, the better it'll be when something happens. Like when you're like, hey, by the way, I think we are going over budget. I think maybe we need to kind of revisit like this feature you wanted us to build. And it's going to be a little bit more money. Had you been communicative throughout the whole process, the customer would be less stressed, you know, during that time. And so would you, in fact, because

you've built up a relationship and I think that's a super smart move.

Sandra Kurze (29:05)
And it's also a very great opportunity for you to actually get to know your customer and really understand what they are trying to get out of the product in our case, or the agency of project. ⁓ And that offers you also additional opportunities. So for example, if we have a customer on our smallest tier, if you wouldn't talk to them and ⁓ didn't listen to them and realize that they probably

have needs that are current tier is not 100 % meeting, we would probably never get into a conversation with them where we could tell them, so, hey, we also have another tier. It's a little bit more expensive, but it offers you exactly what you would need to unlock this, this and that. I mean, this is active sales and active talking to the customer and getting to know them and understanding their needs. The alternative would just be like,

giving the product out to the customer and let them do their thing and just hope that they're doing it in a way that the product was built and they're happy with it and probably they will contact you again and then upsell or ⁓ not cancel the contract. But from a point of view, what's really important is being really close to the customer at all times to being able to help them, but also to identify possible future opportunities.

both for you and the customer.

Matt Medeiros (30:36)
In the face of AI, this is like the most, it's the only thing that I can figure out to, even for my own business with the WP Minute, as like we do sponsorships and stuff, it's, the only thing I think I can add is how can I deepen the relationship with my sponsors, with the members? ⁓ And I don't know any other way, like, yes, we can all get more efficient with AI. We can build more stuff with AI. ⁓

and there will be a time where maybe your customer too is gonna be like, hey, I've got AI on my WordPress website and I'm building stuff and I just need you to come in and do like this 20 % that I can't figure out. Deeper human relationships is the only answer I have right now. know, halfway through 2025, it's just like, I got nothing for you, we just all have to be friends.

and they do business together because I got nothing. Like I got no solution. ⁓ You know, it's not better advertising. It's not, you know, make your developers 30 % more efficient with cursor ⁓ and build this crazy tech stack. It's for me, it's just like my brain's not even thinking beyond that other than build relationships with these customers and serve them as best as possible. That's it. Having said all that.

What you think about AI ⁓ in WordPress these days? What's, what's grade doing with AI? If you could talk about it, if there's something in the works.

Sandra Kurze (32:06)
There actually is a lot of inner works. We haven't talked about it a lot yet because it's still being developed, but of course we're also working on AI. We're actually even funded by the German government for AI developments. ⁓ And what we've seen is that a lot of tools or a lot of companies and the WordPress ecosystem at the moment are focusing on

streamlining that creation process, like helping you with the content tasks or with like some basic tasks, like having all the accessibility requirements met and all these kinds of stuff and like getting faster from the design you've created to an actual website. So we decided to not work on that because there are already great companies out there doing exactly that and probably companies with a lot more money than we have.

So we decided to go one step deeper. We're actually working on self automating websites because at the moment, what you do is you build a website, you have certain target groups in mind, you have certain goals in mind and you build the website in a way that you think that these goals would be met best. And then probably you do some A-B testing and then you do some changes and all this, but there's a lot of...

manual work in that. And that's the part where we put AI in. imagine the AI knowing about the target groups that you want to target with your website. The AI knowing about the goals, not just one, but probably several goals that you want to achieve with your website. And then since with GreatSuite, you don't just build like one website, but you build a lot of dynamic assets that together ⁓ get a website. So the AI can now

There's different modes, but yeah, I can now automatically adapt the front website and the front end based on some rules that you have set and say, okay, based on the behavior that I'm seeing from this visitor at the moment, this visitor probably belongs to a target group A, or C. And with this target group, we want them, for example, to download a white paper or something like that. So.

The website automatically adapts itself to that particular target group and that particular goals and auto optimize themselves over time, gathering more data and all that. And of course the website will not do just anything. There of course have to be restraints and these restraints could be like it has to stay in a certain design or probably. ⁓

All the AI is allowed to do is like reorganizing stuff and not creating new stuff. Or for example, you could also say, I don't want to do, have the AI do anything on its own. I only want it to come up with suggestions on how to change the website. And that's what we're working on at the moment.

Matt Medeiros (35:08)
Nice. that going to be, and you know, don't have to, we won't hold you ⁓ too hard on this one, but is it going to be part of the grade suite or are going to be a separate tool that somebody can sign up for?

Sandra Kurze (35:21)
I mean, we haven't decided yet on exactly like how we price it and which plan it comes in or if there will be an additional plan, but it will be part of Great Speeders.

Matt Medeiros (35:32)
Yeah, nice. That's awesome. ⁓ When when do you think again, it's nothing set in stone, but when do you think ⁓ it's going to be available?

Sandra Kurze (35:42)
I mean, we're actually working already on it. And for us, the project comes in several steps. So the first step is obviously to have to build an AI that is able to understand Trade Suite and being able to use it. So that's what we're doing at the moment. So we already use it for ourselves. And the first step is like to use it also in the support to assist there. The next step will be... ⁓

having a back-end AI assistant that helps you do all the stuff that you at the moment have to do manually and just tell it, I need a custom post-dive with these taxonomies and I want this to be synchronized about ⁓ these websites, build that for me. And the last step is this auto-optimation where the website itself do certain tasks on its own. The first two parts are probably something that we might ⁓

be able to release this year already and the second the last part with the self-automating websites ⁓ will be released next year.

Matt Medeiros (36:50)
Nice. I want to talk about the, I want to talk about WordPress. I want to talk about how your market, we were talking before we hit record, grade's about to embark and you specifically on this really cool and exciting opportunity in the U.S. market. And I do want you to describe what's going to happen with that. But first, like in your part of the world, in Munich,

And for your customers and for your team, how do you see WordPress in your culture? ⁓ I feel like a lot of us in the US are a lot of drama queens. Like we love to like talk about like all the stuff with like Mullenweg and we're like, of course, like look what's happening. You know, here he goes again, like more Matt Mullenweg drama. But I'm really worried about the perception of WordPress. Well, because of

Things like the WP Engine versus Automatic Lawsuit, but also like, I don't care, we got AI, we have strong competition from other market players. How are people feeling about WordPress? When you say that, we're great and we help people build WordPress websites, do they go, WordPress? Or they go, WordPress? What's it like when you talk about WordPress and you're part of the world?

Sandra Kurze (38:15)
I mean, first of all, the interesting thing that I learned, I don't know if this is an international thing or probably also European or probably also just a German speaking area thing, is that the WordPress community, the people attending WordCamps and being aware of all the drama that has been happening in the last couple of months and the actual customers of us, like the actual users, the WordPress agencies,

They kind of are two completely separate groups. So when we started getting into the WordPress community and being active there and attending events, ⁓ the first thing that we realized that almost none of our customers didn't even know about any of these events. probably 90 % of our customers have never ever attended a WordCamp and probably didn't even know that it existed. ⁓

because they're building their entire business on WordPress, but they're not really into the WordPress community and everything that comes with it, like the WordCamps, the WordPress meetups, or also all the content formats out there targeted at the WordPress community. They're just not heard of that. ⁓ As a result of that, many of them probably haven't been even been aware of everything that's been going on in the last couple of months. ⁓

And the way we see it, I mean, we're selling a WordPress solution. ⁓ And of course, we're also talking about that it's WordPress based and we're targeting different forms. So the one kind of target group is the people already working with WordPress and we are just another solution that we are presenting them. So we don't have to convince them of using WordPress because they are already WordPress agencies, for example.

The other folks are folks who are actually looking for a solution to a specific problem. Like for example, that franchise who needs to be able to maintain all those 300, 500 sites and have ⁓ fitness studios, have fitness club owners maintain the local content who have no technical knowledge at all. And they're not interested that much in what solution or what technology this is built on. They just need a solution for their

for an issue, for a problem. ⁓ and that part, I mean, in the end, of course, at some point there is a discussion on, what is the technology and what does open source mean and all these kinds of questions depending on the client. But for them, it's really about, I get a solution that fixes my problem or that enables me to do the business that I want to do online? ⁓ So yeah, that's the book here.

Matt Medeiros (41:10)
Yeah, and ⁓ so I'll give you the opportunity to talk about ⁓ this new experience you're about to embark on. Somebody somewhere said WordPress saw Greyd, saw your application, saw that Greyd helped WordPress, and they were like, well, it's still relevant, still cool. So let's get them into this program. So what is the program that you're that you're jumping into ⁓ so that folks can know that Greyd is also leveling up their game as well?

Sandra Kurze (41:39)
Yeah, we're actually, ⁓ we've been accepted in the German accelerator program as probably one of the most prestigious programs for companies like ours who have a certain track record also in their already in their whole market and now want to expand that to a certain foreign market, like in our case, the US and ⁓ by expanding,

internationalizing, I don't just mean that we want to sell there. I mean, we already do that and we can perfectly do that from Germany. There's no need to like fund an entity there for being able to do that. But for businesses who really want to like build key staff also in the US, for example, sales people, but also customer support and are able to being able to offer like 24-7 support all over

all over the world, these kinds of things. ⁓ And this is actually, I think they do that three times a year. And in the cohort that we are in at the moment, it's only six companies who have been selected to be part of that. And the program goes over, I think, three months and is three months of highly valuable, dedicated, tailor-made mentoring just for a grade. ⁓ How to access the US market in terms of

A lot of things like if you want to find an entity, where's the best place to do that in terms of access to employees, access to clients, also like tax, legal, financial kinds of things that you have to take into consideration. But also in terms of say as a marketing, how do you need to adapt probably your marketing strategy? The US for us, there's a lot of.

target groups that just don't exist in that sense in the European markets. So for example, we do have franchises, but a franchise business in the US is a completely different level. And also, for example, higher education. mean, basically we also have universities, but in the US it's completely normal for one university to have like hundreds of websites and probably also like dozens of different host or hosting partners and all these kinds of things.

It's kind of the same target groups that we are already tackling here, but to a much bigger, bigger extent. And for that, we just think that we need to be there and not just do everything from Germany.

Matt Medeiros (44:10)
Yeah, for sure. that that might mean opening up an office in the U.S.

Sandra Kurze (44:14)
Probably is.

Matt Medeiros (44:17)
Hopefully not just Mark Zemansky sitting behind some desk picking up the phone, some 1-800-Grade number. It's just Mark Zemansky picking up, walking you through how to set up a tutorial. No, it's fantastic. ⁓ I I've talked to many WordPress companies before, and actually I should ask, and this probably also opens up the door for investor opportunities, I'd imagine as well.

Sandra Kurze (44:43)
Probably, I mean, that's probably also that makes us a little bit different to a lot of companies out there. And also in the WordPress ecosystem at the moment, we are 100 % bootstrapped. So we don't have any investors on board at the moment. We have financed the entire development of Crate Speed, the entire growth until here out of our own pockets. And we've really enjoyed that because that gave us like 100 %

control over creating exactly the company that we wanted to create without the pressure of having to grow in a certain ⁓ pace, for example. ⁓ But it doesn't mean that we're not open to investments because there might be situations in the future where ⁓ growth and scaling just require us to take that into consideration. ⁓

This is definitely also part of the program.

Matt Medeiros (45:44)
Yeah, that's fantastic. ⁓ I wish you all the best of luck coming out to the US, of course, going through this program and everything with GRADE. ⁓ Where can folks go to say thanks? What website can they visit? Where can they find you online?

Sandra Kurze (45:58)
It's great.io and there's also a free, there's a video on there, a 50 minute video on there, looking you through what GreatSuite has to offer. There's also a free download there and of course there's also the possibility to get in touch with us.