The WP Minute+

Matt Medeiros (00:00)
Remkes, welcome to the WP Minute.

We were chatting in the green room. Well, we were chatting over Twitter DMs ⁓ and we were saying things like, hey man, I launched a course, you launched a course, maybe there's some shared knowledge here that we could talk about and share with the audience. So that's part of the goal today. And a part of the goal is just catching up, seeing what you're up to as we wind out 2025. ⁓

how business is going, how the plugin stuff is going, how the performance stuff is going, and what you look forward to in 2026. Let ⁓ me kick this off with just saying, how did you feel after watching the State of the Word? Did you watch the State of the Word? How did you come away from that?

Remkus (00:46)
Not live, but I watched the recording, ⁓ clicked through it. think some... ⁓ So I've been to the State of the Word ⁓ when it was held in Madrid. ⁓ I very much enjoyed that atmosphere, the stuff that was shared and the vision that was ⁓ demonstrated in the conversations that were presented. ⁓ I missed that a little bit.

in this one. Obviously, we live in a little bit of a different world now. I think the message is probably tailored to that, maybe a little bit more cautious. ⁓ What I did like, what I did enjoy is the solid focus on AI. I think it's inescapable. Yeah, AI is here and there's many different ways of how you can implement AI into the WordPress project.

And I really like the different facets that it's touching currently. And I specifically use the word facet because I think it's very much, know, a diamond has a lot of facets, but they need to be polished before it becomes a diamond. And I think we're in that phase. There's a great opportunity with what it's doing inside of WordPress, the actual software, as well as the project and the

the possibilities of ⁓ just quality enhancement as a whole from everything that's happening on the ticketing side of things track to what's actually inside a WordPress. And there's a whole bunch of stuff in between. So I like the hints that were dropped in that direction. I like that very much. As to the projection of the future, ⁓ it's hard to... Yeah.

Matt Medeiros (02:34)
Yeah.

I, in my, in my piece that I wrote about, the, ⁓ sort of just recapping the state of the word, ⁓ you know, I, like with most, I think releases and what we've seen with WordPress over the last couple of years, it's a lot of building blocks to like the next thing that we're getting to, like no pun intended. It's like building up that sort of plumbing that's going to enhance things. I am getting a little tired of saying that though. Like we do want to see something that we can, you know, touch and play with and be like, aha, this is.

Remkus (03:06)
Yay, yay, yay, yay.

Matt Medeiros (03:10)
this is the new WordPress now, but I also understand like these are the, you know, this is the baby steps to get there. I was actually interviewing ⁓ our mutual friend, Miriam Schwab this morning from Elementor. And one of the criticisms I had in my piece was like, it just didn't look and feel like a, ⁓ like a state of the word. Like I look at state of the word like an Apple day and it didn't feel that way. But then she told me that,

Remkus (03:31)
I think, yeah.

Matt Medeiros (03:37)
They weren't actually allowed to take pictures of anything inside the venue. And she said that inside the venue was actually really beautiful. And it was like a lot of like nice. felt really nice inside. It's like, Oh, well, had I known that, maybe I wouldn't have criticized it as much, but your thoughts on the Apple day of, of a state of the word.

Remkus (03:45)
That's weird.

you

⁓ Yeah, I think what I said is very much ⁓ leaning into that. That part of the event didn't gel with me too much. I ⁓ think I'm still lacking an opinion proper. ⁓ It's probably also a little bit of frustration. ⁓

Project Gutenberg, which has given us the block editor, the site editor, ⁓ and then now phase three is supposed to bring collaboration and all that sort of stuff. I like the site editor. I love the block editor. I have nothing with ⁓ the collaboration mode and all of that. And I had hoped we would finally go in a little bit into the actual ⁓ enhancement of WordPress. So that is a new dashboard. And for me, that's an entirely ⁓ native

multilingual solution, which we've been waiting for ever since I started using WordPress. I'm a little bummed that's still not part of what I'm seeing or hearing. ⁓ So maybe my glasses were a little tinted in that direction that I go like, Why am I still not hearing anything in that direction? I love the AI part. love the other stuff, the little things. I love the integrations of all the various ⁓ APIs that we see now.

They're doing wonderful things. I think we have a bright future ahead still, yet why aren't we not doing that? So other than that, I don't have much opinion on the state of the word as a whole.

Matt Medeiros (05:31)
You primarily, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think like myself and I think many others, when they hear your name and they think of what you do, a lot of it comes back to like the performance of WordPress, like making WordPress perform really well. Do you feel like it's in a healthy state out of the box?

Remkus (05:51)
Yeah,

yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I would say for the last, and don't quote me on the exact number, but let's call it five, versions of WordPress. They have all seen significant improvements in terms of internal performance handling. ⁓ We've been measuring the impact of a new version as a standalone thing. But if you just look at the query side of things,

The optimizations there, the caching layers, how things are now being optimized. And shout out to Johnny Harris for being one of the people who was spending a lot of time in these types of ⁓ improvements. I really love that part. And that's the thing that a normal user will never see because that's fully internally inside of WordPress. But it means a whole bunch of scenarios that used to cost just a lot of resources or show signs of slowness is just now

Improving and improving significantly certainly if you look over what's happened over the last two three years ⁓ I like the the the fact that block edit block themes are out of the box faster now than a classic theme is I like that principle I like that they're working on it. I like that they have that as a focus ⁓ Yeah, so on the performance side of things, I think we're going in the right direction maybe a little bit less

⁓ fast as we could be going in terms of what's happened over the last over this year particularly but ⁓ I'm a fan nonetheless.

Matt Medeiros (07:27)
You do have a course called The Complete Blueprint for Blazing Fast WordPress Sites, Make WordPress Fast. We're definitely gonna get to that ⁓ in a moment. I'm curious how we see, or how you see ⁓ WordPress evolving with so much demand and interest in AI. I'm in the middle. Let me frame it this way. With AI.

Remkus (07:33)
Yes, sir.

Matt Medeiros (07:53)
I, well, maybe I'm slightly more on the positive side. Like I still, it's one of these things where it's like, just, maybe I don't trust this technology as much as the hype is, but I'm definitely leaning more on the pie. I was squarely in the middle, but now I'm a little bit more positive. But I'm curious, like, how does this impact, how does this impact performance? How does this impact the adoption of WordPress? If suddenly WordPress, if suddenly somebody can connect their WordPress site to their favorite chat bot of the month. ⁓

What happens when they start going haywire with, hey, know, chat GPT, go and make these 1,000 pages really quick, make these images and load them all in. Like, what is that gonna have as a domino effect? So I'm just curious, like, positive outlook with all of this AI and WordPress from you, what are your thoughts?

Remkus (08:41)
⁓ I think so, but I think it's good to take a little step back and determine ⁓ what is AI in this particular context. ⁓ most people look at AI on the generative side of things and ⁓ as helpful as it can be in a great many way of generating stuff, whether that's code or content or whatever, it is the farthest thing away from artificial intelligence.

And in reality, it's the stupidest name considering there's zero intelligence and it's absolutely not artificial. So if you apply what it does to a particular field, whether that's coding specific or a niche within coding or optimizing or performance, of those things, you need more of the agentic approach than the, I mean, a chat box doing something. So agentic meaning there's...

models inside the AI being built on the fly doing something very specific and optimizing and measuring. In an ideal world, we would have an AI that looks at the whole site, specific pages, and then goes, look, I see that this is happening, but we can optimize this, this, and that. In a way, whatever you're doing in your lighthouse, ⁓ your core WebVital reports, that sort of gives you an idea of what's going on.

And if that feedback loop from that report went back to the AI and then the AI would then fix it and you know, that became a thing, then your question would be fully valid in terms of is this a worry or some...

Like, do we need to worry about where this is going? Right now, this is just too fragmented to be worried about. There's elements of what you can do. ⁓ What I think, I think that the actually the most important thing currently that AI allows you to do is the debugging part of the performance problem. So you can tell it's report, you can tell and you can share the screenshot and you can say, this is what it looks like and you can give it the HTML, you can give it the URL.

And you can sort of combine those things into one and say, look, I'm flabbergasted. I do not understand what IMP means in this context and why is it not good enough? And then the AI will exactly tell you in other language than the help documentation says, look, this is what you need to do. And the image is okay where it is, but it needs to be loaded first because this and this and that reason. So I think on the whole, I'm positive where it is currently. I'm super positive when I...

just start dreaming about what those types of integrations can look like in a year or two or three. ⁓ But we're not there yet. ⁓ In terms of looking on the negative side of AI, look, ⁓ we need guardrails for anything and everything AI touches. So as long as we're aware that when we're building integrations on the AI side of things that are supposed to help us, we need those guardrails to be, I was about to curse, but ⁓ flipping really tight.

Matt Medeiros (11:42)
It's okay, you can.

Remkus (11:43)
they need to be flipping tight. And that for me is essentially where the tension is. So if we're building stuff, wonderful, but we need to be so careful to have our guardrails in place as we're doing these things. ⁓ We saw a very fun, ⁓ at the CloudFest Hackathon in Germany ⁓ this year, we saw a fun project where ⁓ we essentially had an AI talking through

⁓ WP CLI interface. So you gave it commands and it did stuff with your WordPress site. And that was wonderful to see what it could do, but it was very, very clear that that was a hack. That was a hackathon product and it had zero to no guardrails. Meaning if I wanted to do something bad, I would create ⁓ a plugin on the fly that would allow me access to anything and everywhere all the time. Hide this, do that. ⁓

Matt Medeiros (12:29)
Yeah. Yep.

Remkus (12:39)
The command line just allows me to do that if I'm giving that particular AI integration power to create a plugin and activate it and do all those things.

Matt Medeiros (12:48)
Yeah. Yeah. Miriam used the same exact keyword. She used guardrails when they were talking, when she was talking about what they do at Elementor with AI. And of course they have a lot of AI in their product. have a standalone AI product itself. she talked about guardrails. And yeah, I mean, one of the things that I'm really concerned about, ⁓ like I, you know, hearing about Abilities API and all that stuff, and I'm like, this is, this is really cool. We can do all these other things. And then it's like, wait a minute.

That means that people can do anything they want and I can't imagine a, and they will. And you're to have bad actors, but you're to have people who are, who simply just don't know. And I think that opens up a whole new world of support. And for somebody like yourself, who is like helping people with their site performance, if all of a sudden they turn to you and they go, or I guess my site is loading slow. And then you turn to them and you say, well, what did you do? I said, well, all I do is talk to chat GPT and suddenly now my site's loading slow.

Remkus (13:18)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they will.

Matt Medeiros (13:43)
And I think those kinds of things open up to areas that neither one of us, or probably people listening to this have ever experienced before, because now there's like this AI middle person who can just do things. And if that user doesn't know what's happening, we're going to be like, well, man, what do want me to do?

Remkus (14:00)
So I'm co-founder of Scanfully and one of the things that we do, we monitor for site health things. part of that monitoring is an activity log. So a WordPress activity log, not living inside of WordPress, but outside. So it's actually, we have better control over the data and all that sort of stuff. One of the things that we're looking at is when we get to the point where the MCP start becoming.

real, meaning the connection layer between your WordPress or even specifically WooCommerce and somebody from the outside giving it some prompts, ⁓ there's going to be changes. And we need to start monitoring for those changes as well because those are impactful in terms of what it might damage, what it might hurt. It might also bring good, but we don't know. ⁓ There's just, we're aware that this is a thing that we're going to have to build for at some point.

But yeah, that's a real risk if the guardrails are not in place, especially on the elementary side of things where it's mostly on the generative side of things. Yeah, there's more than a few deep breaths you need to take before we say absolutely 100 % go.

Matt Medeiros (15:13)
⁓ You gave me a good segue into talking about scanfully and yes, we will start talking about courses in a moment ⁓ But I think I saw a tweet I was trying to quick it try to quickly find it to reference it and I'm gonna paraphrase here But I think you said like two steps forward one step back or something like that or one step forward two steps back Yeah, we're we're where are we with with scanfully because I remember chatting about scanfully with you, you know many years ago and ⁓

Remkus (15:31)
The other way around, Yeah.

Matt Medeiros (15:43)
like hearing all your ideas about it and stuff like that. Is it still on pace? Like how do you feel about it as a business?

Remkus (15:50)
It's on pace in the sense that the pace is for us to determine. We've had opportunities where we could accept ⁓ investments. We've said absolutely not. That's not our priority currently because we don't know how large the thing is going to have to be. And we're not looking to fast track stuff. We want to do this good.

And one of those conclusions of wanting to do it good, we reached that in the beginning of this year where we realized we have a few sites in there that are just having hundreds and thousands of posts. And just on the activity log side of things, that's wild what's happening. They are producing a few of those sites are in the 10 to 15 posts per day, multiple editors constantly working across different articles, correcting each other. if you just look on the activity side of things or what that means, that's a lot of data.

So we realized we're running into data structure issues. ⁓ And that's not to say that we didn't think about this beforehand, but the sheer size of these sites just forced us to reconsider this way sooner than we anticipated. ⁓ The end result of that is we needed to rethink our database structure. And when we started rethinking our database structure, there's ⁓ the principle of a tenant and a multi-tenant ⁓ architecture.

meant that this was also now the good moment to make that switch. essentially every single client has their own version of a database, but then the R layer is the shared and ⁓ it gets really technical really fast. And my co-founder Barry is much better in explaining that. ⁓ it meant that we had about six, seven months ahead of us of doing a rebuild without anybody seeing any changes, which is

frustrating on a few different levels. ⁓

Matt Medeiros (17:40)
feels like WordPress.

Remkus (17:41)
Yeah, in a way. Yeah, but it really was ⁓ probably three steps back and one forward eventually. So we are now in a much better place to start implementing our features. We are currently beta testing the broken links feature, which we've added. And the broken links is the first on the content health side of things. And that's really what we build scanfully for. So we're...

We don't have the aim to be the performance tracking tool and just that. We have the aim to specifically be the health monitoring tool inside of WordPress where performance is a part of it. So there's some stuff we're doing right now and we'll add a few things to it, but we're not going to do the you ⁓ know, room vision as an example of ⁓ all those tracking. So broken links is what we're adding currently and ⁓

We have a whole variety of ⁓ content health related stuff. For instance, forms, are they working? Are they present? Can you actually send them? Is it actually being sent out? Can we verify all of those things? But you can also consider the same type of logic happening on the e-commerce side of things. Is there a product that I can see? Can I add that product to a cart? Does that cart actually show the product in when I then look at the cart? Is the cart then allowing me to go to checkout?

When I'm at the checkout, can I fill out the checkout form? Does it allow me to pick a payment provider? And when I've done all of those things, can I then click on the, me see if the payment provider starts picking up? All of these things you want to know that it works, ⁓ because your money depends on it. These types of content health things are where we're going to go hard on in 2026. Again, Broken Links is in beta currently. ⁓ First iteration is there.

⁓ But yeah, that was a year of wanting to do a lot of stuff and launching a bunch of stuff, but we were just like, yeah, we're just going to have to take a few deep breaths again. And all right, let's do this database stuff, the boarding stuff. ⁓ But ⁓ Barry, my co-founder, did a wonderful job in ⁓ understanding the challenges, mapping them out.

building them, testing them, and now we had a database with huge sites in there. So we had more bulk data to test things. ⁓ yeah, we wrestled through. It's how these things go. You plan with what you know, and we quickly learned we needed to know more to plan better.

Matt Medeiros (20:25)
Do you think this shifted? Before we hit record, we were talking about our approach to courses, ⁓ which we're going to get to. But ⁓ you talked about like, my courses are going to be for a different type of WordPress user. ⁓ Do you feel like maybe Scanfly has changed its customer avatar with all of the more higher end stuff that you're doing?

Remkus (20:48)
Not that much just yet. We want to be the choice that is the obvious choice for the single site owner as well. But we're for sure. So in Q1 of 2026, we're going to introduce an agency planning plans. Sorry, not planning plans. So meaning we're going to think of the companies that are servicing other sites and want to provide these monitoring tools as a package.

Matt Medeiros (20:50)
Ahem.

Remkus (21:17)
So when we do that, we still want to be friendly to those who have one or two sites. I don't think the avatar has changed too much. think it's, if anything, we're leaning a little harder on the content health side of things because ⁓ one of the things we did in the interim between Barry doing most of the rewrites, well, the entire rewrites, should say, for the database layer, all of that,

I had more time to think about the product in terms of the features. When you take the time to look at these are the things that determine what is a healthy WordPress site, you kind of land on, let me just ⁓ define that array a little wider than I originally had thought. I don't think the avatar changed much, but I think there's a...

Inside that avatar, there's different layers. So the more professional ones they will see our offering and go, yeah, no brainer. We need that.

Matt Medeiros (22:21)
Yeah, yeah. All right. Let's talk about courses and some of the redirection or not redirection but sort of the addition to value that you've brought to within WP and I'll say the same for the WP minute like I am always looking for extending value to the audience right to the readers the readers the listeners the viewers and of course The great sponsors that that back our stuff. I'm gonna read a tweet from you ⁓ First this was on December 3rd

In-depth WordPress hosting knowledge prevents 80 % of fires. The WP Minute launched a course that is all about understanding how to make the right choice for WordPress hosting companies as a freelancer, as an agency. It's not like, hey, does your hosting plan have eight gigabytes of memory versus the other plan has 16 gigabytes of memory? It's all about evaluating.

Well, I guess the health of a hosting company, sure, what features do they have, but what does that mean to you and to your customers? And how can you scale with that? So it's a unique course, completely free. Your course is about performance. It's not, it's probably not meant for the general WordPress user. It's probably meant for the freelancer and agency owner who wants to make his or her client sites more ⁓ performant ⁓ versus like out of the box WordPress.

So paint the picture for us. Why did you get into courses and how are you approaching it differently?

Remkus (23:52)
I got into courses because people kept asking me to explain the same thing over and over again. And ⁓ that's a good sign of if they then start working with it and they realize, right, I hadn't approached it from ⁓ that way. ⁓ This would make sense. Thank you. And so I kept getting that a few times. And I started thinking about how ⁓ what direction I wanted to ⁓ push within WordPress into.

Matt Medeiros (23:57)
You

Remkus (24:22)
and courses then became the logical step. And I'm aware that there's ⁓ current course builders who are ⁓ kind of done with the way normal courses work because they're seeing less sales and a lot of maintenance in the courses and that sort of stuff. And I get it because I think there's a lot of

Certainly in the WordPress ecosystem, there's a lot of course builders who will build very specific things for very specific solutions with very specific version numbers. And when that changes, you need to redo the whole thing. Now, when I started looking at that and looking around me to see what everybody else was doing, I was like, I think we're missing a particular layer. ⁓ When we were in the green room, I kind of hinted to that already.

There's the, think the largest percentage of course builders or content creators or educators currently in the WordPress ecosystem. They focus on one or two main tools and then a few on the side. that 60, 70 % for instance is Elementor driven or Bricks or forums that are part of the 30%. And then there's a few things.

fixing the gaps here and there. But that's about it. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. ⁓ There's a place and time for all these types of content ⁓ and educational stuff. But what I, for myself, concluded as this is what I think is missing is talking about the tool. So that is WordPress itself with all its internal ⁓ stuff. But it's also a whole bunch of applications to WordPress or in my

particular case the course that I chose as my first course is Make WordPress Fast and the whole premise of the course is not diving into technical part necessarily but making you understand all the layers that go into this is how you build performance sites. Now spoiler alert this is also how you build any site because it's just a principle of how you should be building and ⁓ performance is then a logical ⁓

Exponent of that. Exponent, what is it? The emphasis. Yeah, exponent. So for me, that was the logical step to take, because I like talking about solving problems at the root. ⁓ If you look at design stuff, that you can do in Elementor or Bricks or any of the other tools, ⁓ that doesn't really make me excited to be

Matt Medeiros (26:44)
Yeah, exponent.

Remkus (27:09)
thinking of WordPress in that particular fashion. ⁓ But if we're talking about how to build more smarter sites that are built from a foundational level correctly, that gets me excited because that stops a whole bunch of problems from even happening or for having to solve problems. So ⁓ Make WordPress Fast is the first one. The next one is Cloudflare for WordPress. And I approach it from a similar level. ⁓

wide array of things you can do on cloud-less infrastructure that benefits your WordPress site. But because most people don't really know where to start or what it actually does or what is even edge caching, ⁓ why don't I start explaining what that is and how you can build for that and how you can implement that and all that sort of stuff. So I sort of found myself slowly ⁓ transitioning into, let me look at the ecosystem of development.

that brings its own set of tools, but those are not really covered anywhere. So ⁓ I've landed on, I'm starting with a bunch of courses and I will turn that into a community. And that community will be full of people like they're treating their craft in the way you should treat your craft. You're meant to educate yourself in becoming better at your craft.

And for me, it's not necessarily that I'm focusing on developers only. ⁓ WordPress builders, just the same. Agencies, just the same. There's a huge layer that roughly stays the same. Doesn't change that much, but that you really need to understand. So how does version control actually work? Did you know you have options besides the GitHub pull request methodology? There's Git flow, which in some cases makes more sense. And there's

combinations of those and I'd like to more educate on that side of things of just building smarter and result of what we've built is built more smarter. So most of the problems have been solved while you're building it instead of typically for performance for instance people think that when they're done building all they have to do now is slap some caching plug on it and call it a day. But know caching for one.

⁓ doesn't solve a performance problem, it hides it really well. That is literally how caching was invented. It was supposed to enhance certain processes, not necessarily performance gain. That was a result of it. But ⁓ if you're not aware, then at the end of what you built, you just add ⁓ either NitroPack or WP Rocket and call it a day. ⁓ But the end result is that there's people who will visit that site that you just...

optimized and you will never see a fast version. Why is that? Well, first of all, you didn't build for it. Second of all, there's a thing called cash hit ratio. So meaning you'd be lucky if you get it in the 80s, but in some cases it's even less than 50. Just really depends on how you built it, what the site is doing, what kind of traffic it's seeing and all that sort of stuff. And if you don't know, you don't know. So I'm not here to blame people, but I'm here to facilitate people learning there are better options in how you build.

So my membership, which within WP will grow into, will do a whole wide array of facilitating learning and growing in knowledge and understanding these types of things. So one of the things I'm going to do is do release parties. Meaning when WordPress has a new release, like we now have with 6.9, I'm going to focus on

explaining all the new things inside of that new version of WordPress that you now have to your availability. And that means we touch all the APIs that have been introduced. We touch all the APIs that have been ⁓ updated or improved in any way, just so you understand what tools you have. Because the beauty about open source is that it's all there. You can see it. You can play with it. But the downside of that is

Ain't nobody got time for that. Like, where do I start figuring out what I need to learn here now? And if you read my newsletter, the Within WP newsletter, you can see that that's my focus. I highlight the APIs, the new stuff, the new tools that we have to our availability. I highlight them all the time. I talk about them. I explain why you should want to know them. And I repeat them, because it's not like a one time mention and then gone. No, no, like the abilities API. ⁓

Matt Medeiros (31:32)
you

Remkus (32:00)
the interactivity API, all of them have been mentioned numerous times over the past ⁓ six, seven months, just because I want you to understand that these are the things that we need to be building on top of. Very long answer, but that's essentially how I see courses, yeah.

Matt Medeiros (32:13)
Yeah.

Want it's it's funny how you you sort of looked at like say the greater like YouTube creator world and sort of like backtracked from that Or I mean a little bit anyway, I mean I do I do the same thing you and I have been creating content for quite some time ⁓ as a content creator I'm interested to know like You know, I don't put those folks who strictly focus on like page builders and The different courses that they have for that. I there's nothing wrong with it. In fact,

And this is what I'd like to get your opinion on. From a business perspective, like it makes sense because there's just a ton of traffic and attention ⁓ and good payouts from affiliate side of things. like naturally, if you sit down and you say, I want to monetize a content creation business, it's it makes total sense to ⁓ migrate in that direction. And I don't fault them for it. ⁓ But eventually what happens is.

Well, we have these gaps, like you and I are hopefully trying to fill with what's the fundamental education to keep WordPress healthy and to keep WordPress thriving. Not to say they're not doing that, but like our point of view is something from like a WordPress health, to steal your phrase, a WordPress health benefit is the way that I see it. So your thoughts on like the content creator business side of it.

Remkus (33:39)
Yep. Yep.

So if you look at how these content creators have grown historically, ⁓ most of them figured out at one point that it's the page builders that make it the easiest ⁓ to connect revenue to. ⁓ Meaning from either earning ⁓ YouTube monetization affiliates that you can then add to that. ⁓

There's a lot of new people there who are just dying to understand which are the recommended hosting companies. So on the affiliate side of things, there's plenty of options. And I get how that has grown. ⁓

I fully understand that. So one of the things I'm going to go hard on 2026, I was supposed to be doing that already, but life happens. But ⁓ I'm going to breathe a lot of life into my YouTube channel, like a lot lot. And one of the things I'm going to do differently is I'm not going to go for the views. I'm going to go for the added value. I'm going to go for making ⁓

People understand that there's topics they should have in higher regard and essentially drive traffic to either my newsletter community or courses or the combination. So that is my base and I've consciously made that decision because I don't want to do the thing that I see is where basically all the things that they can talk about is the new stuff that's being made available or the...

the very long, is how you build a WooCommerce site. I get it, it's good, it's important, ⁓ but those kind of miss what I think is the base principle. ⁓ So yeah, I get how that economy works. I get where that came from. I don't think it's very different from the early blogging days where that was also the same type of approach. That drew traffic.

I've tried to blog more in the early 2010s, ⁓ see if I can get a portion of that traffic and monetize that and all that. But you need to just produce, at that time even, this is 15 years ago, you needed to produce ridiculous amounts of content to make that a worthwhile thing. I quickly learned that's not me. ⁓ So I blog regularly on my site. I talk about topics that I think are important for you to know.

Or, and sometimes it's a question that I've had with a client as I'm onboarding and they ask me this offhand question, I that's a good one to answer because apparently this is not clear. So I just answer the questions that I have, ⁓ either in my DMs or from clients or whatever. And I want to educate. I want to help you understand there's a better way. And sure, I want to monetize that. So ideally I lure you into looking at my courses and if you find something you like, ⁓ hopefully you purchase one. Sure. You know, I need to make money as well.

But my goal is to approach the whole market around content differently than what you typically see for what a typical content creator is doing.

Matt Medeiros (37:07)
I want to figure out how I have this idea. I saw a tweet the other day. Here's the context. I saw a tweet. I'm trying. I don't want to out anyone because, know, it's I don't think either of these folks would even care really. And they'd actually be willing to have the discussion. But I want to be able to formulate. I'm going to have a podcast episode about this. But someone from Automatic said something.

about ⁓ a new thing coming and somebody else chimed in with ⁓ a response and they said, you know, I've always felt, and this is a product person, this is somebody who has products, he sells products, makes products, plugins, and he says, you know, I've never felt any kind of ⁓ connection to automatic, sort of paraphrasing here, like, you know, I've always felt like I've been pushed away from automatic because of X, Y, and Z. And like you, like you and I have been doing this for

many, years, like the content, the community stuff. And I thought to myself, hmm, you know, that person who says they're feeling pushed away from automatic and maybe automatic developers and core contributors is also sort of like, they're not helping like me either. Like when I've knocked on their door before, they're just like, yeah, yeah, whatever. You're a podcaster. You got these crazy ideas. I have nothing to do. But we all have.

some way to help one another. Like, help me help you, because if you're feeling pushed away as a product person, well guess what? You could come to a podcast or a newsletter like Remkes and I and share your thoughts and share your opinions. And then we can amplify that, which might actually affect the top, right? So we have like this weird interconnected community and we can all help each other, but sometimes I feel like we don't help each other. ⁓ Like,

with the stuff that you and I are doing right now. You're on this podcast, amplifying your message. We have courses together. Maybe I can say when you finish the hosting course, now go take this performance course over here with Remkes within WP. There are ways that we can help each other, but I feel like sometimes we don't reach out to each other to help each other. And I'm curious.

if you have any thoughts on that being in the community and organizing events and doing this stuff for so long and do you see that as a content creator and be like I could help you if you help me a little bit like do you have any of that feeling?

Remkus (39:40)
I do, I do. ⁓ I think this started specifically when I ⁓ turned my newsletter attempts into a serious one, ⁓ which ultimately became the within WordPress newsletter. ⁓ That's when more people started to reach out to me like, could you feature this? I go, ⁓ so I, well, when that started happening, I had already figured this was going to happen because I'd seen slivers of it already.

⁓ I made a conscious decision saying, and I literally have a canned reply that says something along the lines of, appreciate you reaching out. ⁓ I have decided to have a black and white line between what I accept as, can you mention this in terms of if you're new to me, I'd like to have as a relationship first.

So as long as you're new to me, the easiest way for me to develop the relationship is asking you to sponsor me to do this. And that may sound weird because I'm very likely throwing off people and going like, dude, I'm just asking you to highlight this something in your newsletter. It's newsletter worthy, so why wouldn't you? But my logic is if there's a commercial value attached to it on your end, then I think I'm in my rights to have that as a minimum request.

If it's a friend that replies to my newsletter that I know for many, many years even, I'm much more inclined to already see the benefit of the collaboration and which in some cases when somebody replies to a newsletter and goes like, I saw you mentioned this, but I built this cool, neat little tool. Maybe that's of interest of your audience as well. That's a very different approach to me already because there's already a back and forth, right? So...

I approach that already differently. That's on the other side of the black and white line for me. ⁓ Then there is the layer where I go, you're in it to make money, you're in it to feed your family. ⁓ If and when you need help, I'm more than happy to ⁓ amplify your message, but it needs to be in balance. And a wonderful example is ⁓ Marco from Portugal.

who saw me tweet about a missing functionality that I had inside of WooCommerce. I was looking at solutions, didn't find what I needed because it was like four five ⁓ different solutions and none of them fully captured what I needed. And he went out of his way ⁓ to create an entirely new plugin that did exactly what I needed. Now, for me, that is like a no-brainer to amplify his messages. And that doesn't mean

that I just shared the plugin that he created and has, ⁓ you know, he sells that on his website. But that also means that when I see his content on X now or LinkedIn, I am more inclined to retweet it, repost it, share it, because that's how this symbiosis works. So if you don't get that as a content creator or a service or product builder, I think you're missing out.

tremendously on the type of ⁓ credit that you can build up. And I'm aware that I'm in this community for 20 years now, longer, that I've had the benefit of knowing a lot of people who are now ⁓ visible, let's call it that, that I have an easy access to certain people at whatever position in whatever WordPress related company.

But then I also go, I think I work for that. think I like for the 15 years that I spend organizing meetups, ⁓ setting up WordCamps, starting WordCamp Europe and everything that came with that, ⁓ I've never cashed in from that, never once. And I'm no longer currently contributing to ⁓ a WordCamp or a meetup or anything like that. ⁓

But I do think I still bring that credit that I have that came from that. And I'm not here to capitalize on it necessarily, but I do think it's normal to use it in some way if that means I have through that experience a connection to somebody that I can ask a question directly, which otherwise would probably be through four or five layers as I just knock on the door of some company. just all of this to say, ⁓

It needs to be a back and forth. It needs to be interplay. And I see too little of this happening for from small, from indie developers to just larger companies who just don't seem to get it. Like, why aren't you treating it from a symbiotic perspective? It doesn't need to be all just money connected. It's not, because it really isn't. I feature a whole bunch of content in my newsletters.

Matt Medeiros (44:49)
Yeah.

Remkus (44:57)
that ⁓ I'm absolutely not paid for. And yes, I have sponsors. Yes, I have community sponsors. Yes, I have all of that. And ⁓ every single sponsor that I've had, there's a version of an agreement. And in that agreement says that I am minimum. Well, these are the amounts of exposures you get in my newsletter in this particular timeframe. I've exceeded them all. went.

did way more than what's ever been in any of those contracts. But it's not so much for the contract for me, it's because I like your company. There's a lot of people that want to sponsor my newsletter that I go, thanks but no thanks. I have no interest in that. I say it more politely.

Matt Medeiros (45:37)
Yeah.

Yeah. You could say go talk to Matt Medeiros. He'll take... ⁓

Remkus (45:42)
Yeah. No, I mean, I think

for some you would say the same. go like, yeah, but no.

Matt Medeiros (45:47)
Yeah, yeah, yes.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've tried to build that same on-ramp for folks who, know, again, like, you're not, if you're an indie developer, indie plugin, theme author, whatever, you come to me and you say, hey, could you, you know, feature this? Could we feature that? First I look at it, I go, how interesting is this to the audience? Like, is this something that's really gonna be, like, remarkable or, it doesn't have to be remarkable.

It has to be just something different, right? Or you have to come at me with a different story of how you got to this point and who this thing might serve. ⁓ If I evaluate you and I go, well, it looks like you got some money here and it looks like this is something that you're trying to sell. ⁓ At minimum, how about you join the membership for $79?

and you get into the Slack group, you start chatting with folks, that's a great way to support me. You know, and then we have like different like sponsorship tiers, very affordable stuff, if I do say so myself. And I try to offer them that as an on-ramp. But the first thing I try to do is say, just join this. If you're looking for exposure, join the Slack and just get involved with the community. That's all I'm telling you is jump in.

and talk about yourself. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to push you out into the newsletter, into the YouTube channel, to the podcast. But if you get into my group, it's a tight knit community of people who care about what's happening with WordPress. And that's a great place for you to springboard. And so many people just don't jump at that opportunity. And I don't know why.

Remkus (47:04)
Yep. Yep.

I think there's, I think the why, because I see the same thing. I don't offer it in that context, but I see the same principle. There is a, there's a huge layer that is for outsiders or newcomers in the WordPress ecosystem. That is a very,

And they don't fully understand the layer. They know it's there, kinda, and they call it community, or this is how WordPress works, but they don't fully understand it because what their experience is, that it's a...

You know, they're used to this is how we promote our stuff and this is how that works. My previous ⁓ little rant that I just answered as your question is very much driven on credit. Meaning ⁓ tit for tat, quid pro quo, where you've done something for me, I do something for you. There's no need for money to exchange hands.

⁓ And that is.

That whole layer I feel is bypassed by certainly by newcomers who understand that the market of WordPress is so large they need to be here. So I have a product and now I make the product specifically better for WordPress and now I feel like I should approach the market. And as such, I am looking for ways to amplify my message, but they approach it from entirely bypassing the open source layer, the giving back layer, the

the out layer, the understanding the community layer, whichever way you want to approach it. ⁓ For me, it's very much in that direction. For me, it's very much about them not fully understanding the market. And I don't think there's necessarily an answer that solves that problem for them ⁓ other than us educating them more, I guess. I mean, I suppose that's probably the direction. ⁓

But then again, if you do not have the capability or the willingness to see that, and you just approach it from, me get the clicks, ⁓ and can we sponsor you for the clicks? Then yeah, sure, you can. But it's not making me happy. It's not making the end client happy, the visitors, the viewers. I think it's a tough one to solve. ⁓ I do my best. I provide...

When I see this is happening, I provide them context, but that's because they may be dropping a hint of them not understanding. And you don't always know if that's the case, right? So if somebody just doesn't understand that ⁓ joining the WP Minute just makes a lot of sense from being closer to those who care, yeah, I think that's a no-brainer.

Matt Medeiros (50:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, you know, I try to think of this and I'm probably not going to phrase this the right way, but I promise it be the last time I say that you and I are alike on this because I don't want to continue to offend you. ⁓ But I think maybe it's, I look at both of our bodies of work over the X amount of years that we've been doing this and it's like, well, speaking for myself, like I have never, I have not given up on WordPress.

Remkus (50:29)
Yeah

Matt Medeiros (50:45)
I continue to do this day in and day out as a side thing, ⁓ because I think WordPress is so important and I do love the software and I do love the community. And I just, have not given up on it. That's the thing that has, now I have various iterations of it, right? Matt Report, the YouTube channel WP Minute, but I have not given up on the core mission of supporting the

people in the WordPress community and publishing content around that. And so many people have, and I think like folks like you and I, have, maybe it's because you and I have, we're, I don't know the best way to say this, like we have value in other parts of our life, where we're not trying to just monetize the WordPress thing. I mean, you have products and courses.

I have a full-time job at Gravity Forms. you know, we have value in other parts of our life. So maybe it's easier for us to do it. Basically, what I'm trying to get at is, I'm trying to not, I'm trying to make an excuse for the, folks who come in who are like, I just got to make money with this thing right now. Cause it's all I have. Maybe you and I are different because we have value in other areas of our life and we don't need to do this.

Remkus (51:58)
Potentially.

Potentially. I think that might be a component of it. ⁓

Matt Medeiros (52:05)
Mm-hmm.

Remkus (52:06)
But I also, from my experience, what I've seen, excuse me. ⁓

The layer that doesn't get it is the over commercialized layer. So they see the money that is inside the project. They see a very businessy approach of, I need to be in this space because there's just money to be grabbed left and right. And there is nothing wrong with that. I think to be perfectly honest, I think as a whole, the whole of WordPress

Matt Medeiros (52:19)
Mm.

Remkus (52:42)
Misses this way too much. I don't think we're approaching this enough from the business perspective as we should could must ⁓ But if you're jumping in now ish and you go Let me let me let me just Yeah, let me just force it my way that's not gonna work. That's just not how this community works. That's not

In general, how open source works, that's specifically not how WordPress works and that's specifically not how the core of the community works. And you need that core to amplify your message because that core includes all the content creators. It includes the the def rels that the various companies automatic included. That core includes any type of educator that is in or right around the edge of what we know as the

the WordPress world as a whole. And if you're just kind of haphazardly diving in because you think this is where you need to be financially, yeah, you're skipping over a few things. And I think that's for me the more ⁓ where the shoe starts to not fit anymore. They're forcing themselves in there. But yeah, if you don't see the whole picture, you're just kind of

Like the bull in the China just ramming stuff without you understanding that you're doing it because yeah, it's me, it's here. Everybody, hi.

Matt Medeiros (54:19)
He's Repkiss. You can find him at withinwp.com. can buy his course. You can get the course. Go to withinwp.com. I won't mention the price just in case it changes. Withinwp.com. Click on courses. You can get Make WordPress Fast available now. I see a notify me on a Git for WordPress builds coming soon, I'd imagine. ⁓ And community coming soon. Cloudflare for WordPress. All kinds of stuff. And of course, scanfully.

Anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks?

Remkus (54:51)
Um, you know, uh, not specifically just happy to happy to talk. If you want to find me on LinkedIn or X, uh, I'm there. Um, there's, there's days I'm vocal. There's days I'm not, uh, I do try out, try very hard to, uh, uh, so I, I'm, I'm, I'm closing in on, I think 16,000 followers on, X and I contribute that mostly because I show up and talk.

And I do my best to do that, but sometimes work is just work and I just kind of lurk in a day. But if you want to say hi on any of those platforms and engage, I'd love to follow fellow people wanting to understand the WordPress world in greater depth, and I'm happy to help in that direction. But yeah, just Google my name and add the word WordPress and there's no way of escaping me.

Matt Medeiros (55:49)
I say the same thing about Matt. Just say WordPress and Matt, you'll find me. Thanks for hanging out today. You can also find them inside the WP Minute community. If you go to the WPminute.com, click on our courses. can take the hosting course for free and join the Slack community for free. Thanks for hanging out, everybody. We'll see you in the next episode.

Remkus (55:50)
Yeah, one of us is right.