The WP Minute+

Eric Karkovack (00:01)
Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the WP Minute. I'm your host Eric Karkovac and today I have a special guest, Devin Walker, is ⁓ recently been named as the head of Jetpack, but he is also the founder of GiveWP, which if you're familiar, it's a online donation platform for WordPress, kind of turns your site into a hub for fundraising, but he has since moved on to Jetpack. ⁓ Devin, welcome

the WP minute and thanks for being on.

Devin Walker (00:33)
Hey,

thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to chatting about Jetpack and my history and all that.

Eric Karkovack (00:40)
So yeah, I imagine the last couple weeks have been a little crazy for you. You had a blog post a couple weeks ago announcing this big move. How's it gone for you?

Devin Walker (00:52)
It's going well. ⁓

Automatic is the largest company I've worked at since right out of college. So It's funny like I left that large IT business went to a small agency then freelance and then started growing give and by the time we Were acquired by liquid web. We were around 25 people then went to liquid web, which if you count like the WordPress software business was around 200 to 300

Varying in between there and now at automatic thousand plus so it's kind of gone full circle and It's good to get all sorts of different experiences with those size of organizations

Eric Karkovack (01:37)
Yeah, that is quite a little bit of a change, isn't it? And of course, automatic's distributed, so it's folks all around the world. how have you found the communication so far with that?

Devin Walker (01:50)
I found it really, really great. think you do have to make some adjustments in your schedule. That's nothing new to me. We've I've been in a distributed work environment for the last 15 years and I like working at night. I got up pretty early this morning to be on a call also. So it's just built into my DNA now. And whether you're in India or Eastern Europe or

Asian Pacific that we can make it work and Slack is good for part of that, but then also what I've been impressed with at Automatic is the diligence of the teams to use P2, which if you've been in WordPress for a while, you likely know what that is. It's like their internal blogging system where...

It's great. It's really helped me come up to speed ⁓ on Jetpack, the history of Jetpack. There's literally like the history of Jetpack written from 2011 onwards, ⁓ which just was incredibly helpful for me.

Eric Karkovack (02:58)
That's a lot to take in in just a couple of weeks. So congratulations on ⁓ digging into that. Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about your time with Give and you said you were acquired by Liquid Web. What was that acquisition process like for you? And I mean, you stayed on after that and sometimes founders don't. ⁓ What was it like for you to kind of make that transition? ⁓

Devin Walker (03:02)
It's not all in yet, so don't be fooled on that.

Mm.

Yeah, so when the pandemic hit, ⁓ our business really took off. A lot of nonprofits and religious organizations were going online that had never been or making a concerted effort to boost their online giving and fundraising tools and platforms. And WordPress was a natural fit for many of them. then ⁓ alongside that, we...

⁓ We were a great fit. And so during that same time, ⁓ a little bit later, like 2021, we were still going through the difficult ⁓ time there, but ⁓ that's when a lot of businesses in WordPress were being acquired. ⁓ A lot of equity was flowing, whether it was from larger hosts or ⁓ other companies like Awesome Motive, for instance, or...

⁓ or similar and ⁓ and we were like, you know, this is a pretty good time we've been in give and focusing on that since late 2014 or ⁓ and we put in a good seven years at that time about and and it seems like ⁓ we and of course that that good ramp up in ⁓

And revenue ⁓ was also a good motivating factor to sell. ⁓ And valuations seem to be on the higher end. So we decided, hey, let's see if there's anybody interested in the market. And we did a lot of conversations with various hosts.

⁓ various private equities and venture capitals. We had lots of good meetings and we knew that we wanted to first take care of our team, make sure that they were going to be taken care of for the foreseeable future, that they had some upward momentum wherever they were going, they would get better benefits, things that we couldn't really provide at the level we were at.

We also wanted to make sure the brand would be taken care of. wouldn't just go away within the next six months or get eaten into another larger offering or poached, like, you know, whatever happens to some of these brands you've seen going away over the over the years. And then finally, it had to make sense for us as partners. And after all these conversations, the one that stood above all of them was Liquid Web. And

So the process of actually getting through that was around six months, lots of conversations, lots of due diligence, lots of ⁓ peeking under the covers here, lots of cultural fit conversations, ⁓ lawyers going back and forth towards the end, debates within our own partnership and company. And ⁓ finally, the stars aligned and... ⁓

And made that transition in, I believe it was late May, 2021.

Eric Karkovack (06:31)
So what were you doing then at that point? ⁓ Were you still working primarily with Give or were you kind of branching out to some of the other products in their portfolio?

Devin Walker (06:43)
So for the first two, let's say year and a half, ⁓ I was primarily focused on making sure Give was still growing and making sure the team, the product, everything was still flowing in the way that it should be. ⁓ The transition was pretty smooth. It was maybe two months to really get settled in. But from there,

⁓ We started looking at how we could integrate with some of the other brands that we had ⁓ and boosting each other up together.

after around a year and a half, then I started looking at some of our other brands. big, one of the first big projects I moved to after give was rebranding iThemes to solid WP. iThemes have changed a lot over the years. It was one of the first acquisitions of liquid web back in, I don't know, 2016 or 2018. I forget the exact year. But iThemes didn't really sell themes anymore, right? The theme market had changed substantially. They're, they're big.

offering was I-Theme Security and ⁓ I-Theme Security is a great product but it was confusing because there wasn't a theme company anymore and the second biggest product was ⁓ Backup Buddy. Backup Buddy had been sitting on a shelf for a while we needed to get some more love so really had to take a look at that brand

Eric Karkovack (07:52)
Yes.

Devin Walker (08:12)
cut a lot of the legacy themes business out of it and carve it into like three main offerings that fit together. Security, backups, and ⁓ their site management platform, which used to be called iSEEMS ⁓ Sync, and now it's called Solid Sync. So all those three fit really well together and just sort of had to figure out.

the future of what that could be. And so that was the next big project I worked on for around six months after that. That took me to the two year mark where my contract was up. And I was like, this is some pretty interesting stuff. I really liked the team. Everybody's pretty motivated and eager. I get to work with a lot of the give folks that I've been working for for a long time.

I don't really have another plan to go start something or an idea that's that I need to I believe in so much that I want to go do and take a chance on so let's sign up for ⁓ some more time and I did and and that's why I stayed there for almost four years after my contract was up

Eric Karkovack (09:18)
So this summer, ⁓ things kind of changed for you then. You decided to kind of go off and try a new adventure?

Devin Walker (09:29)
Yeah, well, you know, I realized that WordPress is what I'm going to do with my life as far as the career wise goes. And things have changed internally at Liquid Web in ways where, word.

weren't aligned with what I was ⁓ really thinking would be the best for what I wanted to do in the future. And that's kind of the political way of saying it. You can kind of read between the lines there. ⁓ Let's be real here. ⁓ And so it started to affect ⁓ my mental health in a way that I hadn't really seen.

for quite some time. mean, the last time I saw it was when we were really grinding hard on just giving give like off. It was sort of floating above the ground, but getting it to sort of take off and start going on his own. And that required a lot of hard work and effort and dedication and travel and money and risk.

But this was a bit different where I felt like things were out of my control more. I couldn't steer the ship in the way that I wanted. We were limited on resources. Morale wasn't where I wanted it to be. I couldn't affect it, the morale or boost it to where I think all ship companies should be. ⁓ I was thinking about it, how the lack of control was...

I don't need to control everything, but I need to have some levers to pull. so I just decided it's not, this isn't for me yet. I still didn't really have a good idea of what I wanted to do next. I knew I wanted it to be in WordPress, but I knew it wouldn't be at liquidweb slash stellar anymore.

Eric Karkovack (11:25)
Yeah, I can imagine for a founder especially when you kind of lose that little grip on some things that you you do want to have some control over, that would be a difficult transition for you. ⁓ what led to ⁓ the opportunity with Jetpack? How did that come about?

Devin Walker (11:45)
Yeah, so when I left ⁓ Liquid Web, I wrote a blog post about ⁓ kind of closing that chapter. And it goes more into depth than when I just briefly went over there. And I had met Matt.

Molenweg a few times previous to that and have done some work for a nonprofit of his with give and had the opportunity to meet with him a couple times around that and talk about WordPress talk about payments donations WooCommerce all sorts of stuff at various word camps and ⁓ He saw that post and reached out to me and we started a conversation around

me potentially joining Automatic as an option. And at that time, I wasn't super sure what I wanted to do. I was building little things on the side, just to have fun, giving back to the community, restarting the San Diego WordPress meetup, and enjoying some time off.

The more I thought about ⁓ Jetpack, the more I thought about automatic. ⁓ How I first felt about that company or the first time I heard about it getting into WordPress in my 20s and learning about the community, learning about ⁓ WordPress core and how automatic really is this.

and Matt has been a great steward of the platform that have turned into my career and have been for a long time. ⁓ I thought better and better about it and the challenge there ⁓ would be one that I'd be willing to take on as long as I do have not all the control, of course, ⁓ but some and some levers to pull to really think about Jetpack differently.

build it in a way that hasn't been done in the last four, there's been a lot of stuff tried with that product. ⁓ But then also market it and put it out there in a way that reimagines it and gives it some new light. ⁓ And so that's what I'm hoping to do.

Eric Karkovack (14:08)
I would think you ⁓ talked about the rebrand with ⁓ iThemes to Solid WP. I would think that gives you a great leg up, at least in experience, knowing what's involved to get a well-known product like Jetpack to where it is now, to someplace a little bit different in the future.

Devin Walker (14:31)
Mm-hmm.

That was a great experience because it it also has products that are pretty massive code bases With a lot of different hands building it over the years a very large user base ⁓ Between all the products ⁓ a brand that Has a decent reputation but no longer is relevant, but you want to bring along that audience

And ⁓ a team that's somewhat large within a larger organization. So that's a great comparison. really haven't thought too much about that or reflected about that. But yeah, I think looking back on that, it went pretty well. I don't know if I'd scored an A, but I'd score it at least a B in the overall outcome of it.

and I'm hoping to get an A plus with Jetpack. But I think there needs to be a lot of synergy between engineering, design.

And then on this side, marketing, customer success and support. And then I find where the most success is, is when I sit in the middle and I can make sure that everybody's kind of aligning between ⁓ where are we getting the feedback from? How is it being aggregated? What does marketing feel like the product needs to do in order to ⁓ succeed? ⁓ What does the engineering team want to do to take care of the bugs, the quality of development experience so they can move faster?

and then how can design ensure ⁓ that the UIs and the experience are living up to what everybody thinks it should be. And then throw an AI in the mix where that's sort of having a rethink of everything. And so when I look at Jetpack, I look at a website.

It's okay. It looks pretty nice. It's not the greatest but there's like the lamest feedback form ever the pricing page is kind of confusing ⁓ the support

You know, I did a full two weeks support rotation the team tries their best and they do have great outcomes But they're not resolved as much as as fast as I like the connection is faulty We still use XML RPCA to very Connect there's there's a lot of stuff in there that I really want to get started on get building but I know I have to ground myself and and

use at least through the end of this year to learn, to listen, ⁓ and then to plan to get going in the new year.

Eric Karkovack (17:14)
Yeah, in your blog post, you mentioned yourself as kind of the artistic director ⁓ of Jetpack, which is kind of a cool thing because, mean, honestly, I can probably ask 50 WordPress users what Jetpack is, and they'll probably give you 50 different answers based on how they use it, right? I can put a firewall on my site with it. I can use it as a contact form. I can use it for a CDN and caching of, you know,

Devin Walker (17:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Eric Karkovack (17:42)
backups, video embeds, and all that good stuff.

Devin Walker (17:46)
It does a lot.

It does a lot. ⁓

Eric Karkovack (17:48)
So

as an artistic director, then how do you tie all that stuff in together into a package to where everybody knows what Jetpack truly is and what it's capable of? Cause I think that's one of the challenges, isn't it? Like you asked me what I think of Jetpack and what I, you know, when I use it, what I use it for may be completely different than what the person next to me does and so on. So how do you tie that all into, to

Devin Walker (18:16)
Mm-hmm.

Eric Karkovack (18:18)
⁓ like that synergy with the messaging.

Devin Walker (18:23)
That is the biggest challenge right there is to make it, ⁓ it can be a jack of all trades and master of none in the way that it works. But Jetpack's really unique and it provides a lot of the special sauce of what WordPress.com is. the kind of the why it was born is to bring a lot of that special sauce.

Into the self-hosted environment. So if you're not on.com you can utilize a lot of these CDNs boosts what you vault press used to be announced jetpack backups and ⁓ and really compete with a Squarespace or wix where you have Video you have forms. You have kind of the all-in-one experience WordPress has it ⁓

as it should be in a way where it's not tethered to core, you can kind of move faster along. Like it doesn't take six months to put an accordion block in it. You just kind of put it in there, right? ⁓ But telling that story in a way that makes sense is going to be the biggest challenge. And I think I look at other companies that do a lot also in the way that they tell stories to their audience.

And it's one concept that's been really new to me. I wouldn't say new, but thought in different way here in the last two weeks is the concept of jobs to be done. And that's how we're starting to think about more of it at automatic from.

⁓ A product standpoint. So when I say that it means like a person doesn't go out and buy a quarter inch drill ⁓ Because they want the drill bit, right? They want a quarter inch hole and so they use that tool to get the job done

And so when we think about it in that different perspective, it reinforces and puts you in the driver's seat more. And then we'll be creating more thoughtful solutions around that. And Jetpack's done that a bit in the past. Like, you know, it's gotten a lot of flack for slowing down the sites, being a monolith, being bloatware. And you see like you can now use individual plugins where you see fit. Not a lot of people know that that wasn't really marketed well enough.

But I see the future of jetpack in order to get the growth where Matt wants it and it should be an automatic it's need there's gonna have to be some aggressive moves that needs to happen whether that's providing more of a developer experience like think of it maybe like a versell of WordPress or or providing more of these kind of like

Shopify like Squarespace tools that are done in a way that ⁓ Is much more intuitive than jetpack is to this day and more visual right now when you get into to jetpack it's toggle madness like you're You're you don't have a great experience for somebody like a beginner, right? ⁓

And we really want to make that a lot easier, a lot more seamless and a lot more satisfying. And AI can help with that too. ⁓ So there's a lot of cool stuff with AI as well. So I know that was a lot. You can see my mind is going all sorts of places right now, but that's really what then these next two months of the year is so I can start grounding and landing some of these ideas and planning for them.

Eric Karkovack (22:04)
Well, there's a lot to do, right? mean, you talk about AI, personally, I feel like that could be the best onboarding tool that WordPress has seen. I mean, we haven't even gotten there yet, but...

For a new user, know, WordPress is a lot. If you're not a professional developer, there's this big menu on the left side, ⁓ but you can install something like Jetpack to make all these various tasks easier or add things that, you know, instead of adding 20 different plugins to my site, I can add Jetpack and have all these different functions as I need them.

but people don't quite know that, right? So I think the onboarding experience maybe is something that ⁓ could be, I guess, a game changer for you guys.

Devin Walker (22:54)
Yeah, I think you you right now we did like a before I came on board and onboarding push to just make it a little bit better and a little

when you're connecting, but I'm thinking like you're thinking, taking it to a whole other level and having it as that joyous entry point into WordPress, right? Not just throwing you into the admin, but asking you questions in a conversational way or letting you prompt it and telling us what you need and then bringing in and setting up and configuring it for you based on what your needs are and what job you need done, essentially.

Let

us know what you need and then jetpack and WordPress can take care of the rest And then once you are set up, let's let's make sure that you're able to Succeed in what you need for your business or yourself. Like do you want to get your writing out there and get more exposure or do you need to?

sell event tickets to your space or a product. Like there's just so many jobs that need to be done. And right now when you're just kind of plunked in there without much expertise, you suffer from it.

Eric Karkovack (24:08)
Yeah, I mean, there's a learning curve and I think that's something that a lot of the bigger WordPress products are trying to solve right now with an AI, I think can help with that. So it'd be interesting to see how Jetpack evolves toward that. I know you had mentioned that you wanted to listen to users. How are you gonna go about that? mean, are you going to have like events or is there gonna be like a way to get in touch with the team and so you can kind of see firsthand

people are experiencing.

Devin Walker (24:40)
Yeah, ⁓

so I think it's going to start with first a couple just feelers out there probably on LinkedIn or X just seeing what people think maybe some Facebook groups like the admin bar or Dynamic WordPress what what have you there? Introduce myself more. I'll probably have to have some thick skin here and there but I already do ⁓

And then ⁓ on the website, I want a like a user voice, but much ⁓ more transparent on how feedback flows into that and gets uploaded and how happiness engineers can then ⁓ provide.

insights within that. ⁓ One public roadmap or user voice type of interface I really liked was on post-hoc.com. It's essentially an upvoting, but there's a lot more. It's tied to GitHub as well. So can see if it's within a GitHub issue, you can track it along, bringing that more developer ⁓ and expert user level to it, if you are on that level. ⁓ And then...

on top of that ⁓ a Facebook group. can't believe there's not a Jetpack Facebook group yet. ⁓ Yeah, but I want to create that. But also at the same time, I can't manage this all by myself. That's why I want to start with ⁓ just me putting out feelers, some cool stuff for people to look at, some polls.

⁓ There is a lot of feedback internally already that's been collected over the years. I want to understand that understand how I can use that and ⁓ And then really I put a public changelog on the website see like what's new do it in a way that looks really nice

⁓ stuff that you you see a competitors and wordpress doing but when you look out at the wider sas market you see them doing it as well and when cursor updates Like i'm like, ⁓ like it just updated to 2.0 today. What did I get? That's new and shiny like I will continue building or paying for this ⁓ coding software because they keep adding so much new. It's on the cutting edge. I know that my skills as a developer

using this will continue progressing as well. I think Jetpack can do that as well, and providing those bits of, you get this, you get this. ⁓ And that really hasn't been done too much in the past, as I've seen.

Eric Karkovack (27:19)
Yeah, I do notice like even like WooCommerce, ⁓ you know, has like the upvoting system, at least they did in the past. I don't know if they still do that ⁓ for different features. And I, you know, even when you update WordPress, you do get that nice screen that tells you everything that's new. So mean, something like that with Jetpack would seem to be a natural fit, right? That you could, that everybody could see, hey, we've added this feature or we've refined this feature so that it's easier to use, or it also does X, Y, and Z now. ⁓

So it sounds like you're going to have your hands full with a lot of stuff.

Devin Walker (27:51)
Super cool. Yeah.

I don't know if you've tried the Jetpack mobile app either, but that's one of the best experiences that I've had with Jetpack. So if you're using it self hosted, you can connect it to your self hosted. also taps into .com of course. But one of the coolest features is reader. And I don't know if you've used .com much, but it allows you to connect into that reader system. And it's kind of like a social network. There's so much more that can be done with that to bring that experience

Eric Karkovack (27:59)
I haven't, no.

Yes.

Devin Walker (28:25)
the self-hosted side into there more and to get your content out there and there should be a commerce section of Reader as well. Maybe it's called Shoppers or I don't know what it could be called but...

There's a lot of untapped potential in all this and there's 4 million active installs out there. And anytime you go to add new plugin, Jetpack sitting right there as the number two featured plugin. There's no reason this business shouldn't be way like flying, right? And I just...

I'm gonna fight for as hard as I can the tools that I need to get it done, but I'm really optimistic because I know folks like James LaPage, he came in here maybe six months ago, eight months ago, I don't know what it is, maybe a year. But anyways, he's just getting stuff done here and really, I'm going to New York next week, it's a whole, there's 50 of us or so going out to the office ⁓ and it's all AI week.

And that's all we're going to talk about. There's going to be all sorts of information and collaboration. And I'm going to sit down and talk to them and be like, how are you getting all this stuff done? And, ⁓ and how can I learn from that and get it too? Cause, ⁓ I'm going to fight tooth and nail for it. And, ⁓ you know, I'm not going to take no for an answer. And if he, if I get delegated somewhere else, well, I've done pretty well in the past. I can go on and do some other stuff. So I don't want to say that, but you know what I mean?

Eric Karkovack (29:52)
Yeah,

you've got a vision and you want to carry that out, right?

Devin Walker (29:55)
Yeah, gotta be set up for success, you know what I mean?

Eric Karkovack (29:58)
But looking at the big picture, like if we're going like a year from now, we're approaching Halloween here. If we're looking at Halloween 2026, where would you like to see Jetpack compared to where it is today?

Devin Walker (30:14)
Yeah, well, I think, A, it's going to be a much better connections experience. When I have worked with the happiness engineers, the almost.

every other ticket more than that. I'd say 75 to 80 % of the tickets had to do with a connection issue. There was some sort of issue communicating between our cloud and their site. And it can't be that way. And whether it's their host is blocking XML RPC, we've created like this other version. There's just so much complexity in it that the baseline of the whole thing to work on self hosted

is for that connection to be stable. And there needs to be transparency when that connection isn't. need to get a, the customer needs to know when it's not or what's happening. That's going to make our happiness engineers a lot more efficient. It's going to make the customers a lot ⁓ more satisfied with the quality and uptime of the product.

And so that's just baseline right there, right? Whether that means getting rid of XML RPC and writing the whole thing in REST, which already has a lot of RESTful ⁓ methods and functions within it.

⁓ I need to understand that more but ⁓ that's one and that's probably a bigger task than I'm giving it. Two, the form building experience. We don't have conditional fields yet. We need conditional fields. That is something there's no excuse in 2025 not to have that. So conditional fields having that in there. A much better building experience where

You have a form builder interface right now you when you build a form you have to do it in a page or post that you see ⁓ and build it right there. That's not like any traditional form builder out there like gravity forms our biggest competitors, right? Customers or users are used to using it in a in an actual form builder isolated interface where you don't have all these blocks and it's not confusing and so changing that experience so it's a much more

Eric Karkovack (32:06)
Yeah.

Devin Walker (32:24)
traditional yet cutting-edge way to do it and then finally Improving our already existing AI integration which if you've written with it does an okay job But it's getting old and it hasn't been touched as much as it should that can be a lot more improved and and then finally thinking about what The big big next things are right or not even just thinking about it getting started on that and already have been started like whether that's called version

2016 or whether it's a whole more aggressive approach having that in the wheels going on that while also turning out and Marketing the hell out of it and having a really nice website. That's constantly updated and not just posting bullshit articles ⁓ That's all What I want to get going

Eric Karkovack (33:14)
So you're coming in to ruffle some feathers, right? You're not just gonna let this thing sit there and rot like...

Devin Walker (33:17)
That's my job like that's what Matt

brought me in for is bringing that outside perspective being in the community Having done it before not like getting like I I want to make some moves here and And build the 10x this product essentially and you can't do that by Ho-hum. I'll just do this little like like let's add this little field here and change the color here

Eric Karkovack (33:45)
Yeah, I mean, it's a big job and it sounds like a long-term commitment, so I definitely wish you well in all that. ⁓ So we'll wrap up here. I just want to thank you, Devin, for ⁓ being a part of this. ⁓ How can folks reach out to you and tell you all their jetpack wishes and problems?

Devin Walker (33:52)
Thank you.

Yeah, okay check out my website Devon org dev in org or on x slash Twitter at ⁓ interwebs I N N E R W E B S

Eric Karkovack (34:17)
All right, awesome. Well, thanks for being on and thanks for letting us ⁓ see what the future of Jetpack looks like.

Devin Walker (34:24)
Thanks for having me.

Eric Karkovack (34:27)
And that's gonna be it for our episode. I want to thank Devin again for being here. And thank you for watching and listening. Please visit us over at thewpminute.com slash subscribe. You can get our newsletter, you can become a member, support our community and all the content like our interview with Devin here. Thanks and we'll see you next time.