Pippin Williamson on Life After WordPress, Selling a Business, and Beer
Download MP3It's the WP Minute Plus, your home for long form discussions with WordPress professionals and industry experts covering our favorite topic, WordPress. Be sure to follow us. Search for WP Minute in your favorite podcast app. Follow this podcast and our five minute weekly edition. Or head to the wpminute.com/ subscribe and join the newsletter.
Speaker 1:I'm told it's like a warm WordPress blanket that gets delivered to your doorstep every week. Looking for all things WordPress? The WP Minute has you covered. This episode of the WP Minute Plus is brought to you by our friends at Omnisend, the top rated email and SMS marketing platform for WordPress stores. With Omnisend, you'll be launching pre built ecommerce automations in no time, as well as intuitively segmenting customers based on their shopping behavior and even trying out SMS or push notifications all from the same platform.
Speaker 1:More than 100,000 ecommerce brands use Omnisend to drive sales and build better customer relationships, converting their customers with quick to create, highly relevant emails and texts. Are you ready to start building campaigns that really sell and convert your customers? Find out more at omnisend.com. It's omnisend.com, 0mnisend.com. Omnisend.com, and give your brand the boost it deserves.
Speaker 1:Hey, Pippin. Good to see you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Matt. Pleasure to be here. Been a long time.
Speaker 1:I reached out to you the other day because WordPress world is changing as you witnessed before your air quotes exit. You're always on my mind. You're always on my mind. It's the first time I ever sung on a podcast. And I'm always just curious.
Speaker 1:What are you doing these days? Give us that recap of what's going on with Pippin.
Speaker 2:So first of all, my my primary focus right now is twofold. One is just being more present and available and around family. That was my number one reason to leave the WordPress world. We had some family health issues, and we're just, you know, very aware that our time is short and precious. And my work had been pretty all consuming for me.
Speaker 2:And so at some point, I realized that it would be best for all of us, on on our family if we, set that aside. And then what's it like to leave the WordPress world? Well, truthfully, when I left, which has now been a little over two years ago, I got to a point where I was definitely far less enamored with WordPress as a platform and with all of the work involved that both that me and my team and just in general what was being done around the WordPress space, it was not as exciting for me anymore. It was more of a it had kind of become a bit of a grind, truthfully. So leaving it was, well, first of all, terrifying because it was all that I had known in my professional life, but it's been great.
Speaker 2:Like, I don't believe that there's like, there's a lot of things that could have been could have gone a little different, things that I wish I had done better or, you know, etcetera. But I would describe it to you in this way. Zero regrets. Absolutely. We know for certain that it was the right move for us and for our family.
Speaker 2:So I do pay a little bit of attention to the WordPress world. Just try to kinda keep an eye on what's happening, you know, what my former team members are working on and what kind of things are going on over there. And mostly out of curiosity, you think. I do still use a collection of WordPress products, including some of my former products on a couple of website projects, but I barely touched any code. I've done one small little custom development project, actually worked on with my dad for a former client of his, and that was to get back into the development world, but I'd immediately realized that I was very rusty.
Speaker 2:It was fun, but it was also it was both, like, really refreshing because it was like, oh, cool. I can still do this. This is you know, I can really enjoy this, but it was also a reminder of, you know what? I don't want to do this anymore. This is not my jam.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Yeah. The world is good.
Speaker 1:Do do you follow, like, Gutenberg and block this is weird. This is
Speaker 2:like a celebrity. Do you even look at this
Speaker 1:stuff anymore, man? Like, having known you being so rude
Speaker 2:to this, it's I do look a little bit at it. Like, I don't pay attention very much to, like, the development news and, you know, what's coming or, you know, what's in the next version of Gutenberg, what's coming in WordPress core, you know, what are the major developments on this plugin or that plugin. But I do still I use WordPress for a couple of sites that I still run, and I use Gutenberg actively on those as well as Elementor and a few other things. It's interesting. I actually had a a funny conversation the other day because as anybody who's been in the WordPress world for a long time knows, like, there's this weird like, take the combination of, say, Gutenberg and Elementor.
Speaker 2:There's some wonky things that happen in that user experience. Some of them are great. Some of them are not great. And I was showing one of my team members at the brewery, like, how to make changes on our brewery website, and I was showing them, like, the kind of the, like, hip this way over here, you're gonna use the Gutenberg editor, and over here, you're gonna use Elementor. And over here, well, this one this part over here is the way it is because of a long history of, you know, the core and plug ins doing different things.
Speaker 2:And it was in a way, it was fun because it was like, you know, I still intimately understand and know, like, why some of these behaviors or, like, why the interactions between Elementor and Gutenberg or, you know, some of the old WordPress editor stuff is still there. I know why it's all like that, But I also have been out of the WordPress world long enough that I almost feel like I was coming back in with a fresh set of eyes. And, you know, there's some stuff in here that, like, this is not great. This is rough. And so it was kind it was kind of interesting getting that, like, different experience.
Speaker 2:You know? I think when I lived in the WordPress world day in and day out, you know, there's so many things that you get used to, and you just you either you accept or you recognize that, hey. We're working towards improving these or whether, you know, whether it's we as in our me and my team or it's, you know, somebody else within the WordPress space is working to improve these. And I think we maybe are more accepting of of certain challenges. And now that I'm not intimately in the WordPress world anymore, I see those more I think more as, like, an end user.
Speaker 2:Right. I had experienced them that way.
Speaker 1:I think when you sold the business and you moved on from WordPress, that was a a chapter of WordPress's life where a lot of people were whether they were a business owner or not, like, sort of feeling burned out from WordPress. Like, we've at that point in our lives, it was, I don't know, whatever, twelve years or more consumed with WordPress, building WordPress, teaching WordPress. And then the software was changing with the introduction of Gutenberg in this sort of new direction, a lot of unhappy people, and it was like that for a few years. And listen. I lived it.
Speaker 1:Same thing. Man, do I wanna keep podcasting about this? Do I wanna keep doing this content thing? And it was challenging. I I think we're entering a new chapter because I think the software over the last couple years, yes, it's been rough.
Speaker 1:It still is rough. Some rough, I should say. But I think it's gonna get better in 2024, certainly into 2025, and I think there's gonna be this other roller coaster ride. Putting that aside for a second, when you look back on your decision, what was that hamster wheel that you were on that you are so glad to be off of now? Like, what is it that you look back on and say, damn, this was the right decision?
Speaker 1:There
Speaker 2:there's probably a lot of diff a lot of pieces to that answer, but here's the main one. I I realized that one of the things that I was, just to be brief, I guess, very tired of and that I did not feel that I had the energy and want to do anymore, is the requirement when you are a product development company to keep up with all of the other things that are happening within the ecosystem that are constantly causing you to have to detract from your current focus and do so and, you know you know, it like, give a couple of big examples. You know, we're building these products, and then all of a sudden, the g GDPR thing comes in, you know, a few years ago. And then we're we're focusing all of these products, and then EU VAT issues come up. And then we're building we're focusing on these products, and then a major change comes to WordPress core.
Speaker 2:Then a major change comes to, you know, a a different product that is frequently used with within our own products. Basically, the endless cycle of, development challenges was initially really fun. Like, that's one of the things that makes building something, especially in open source, so enjoyable and exciting because there's always a new challenge. There's always something new to do. Like, there is no such thing as done.
Speaker 2:There's no such thing as done. But I wanted to have an endpoint. Like, at some point, was like, well, where do we stop building? There is no such thing as, like, this product is now done until the day it is retired. And so, you know, either we retire a product, like, as a team, or we stop working on we start stop working on that product either at, like, personally.
Speaker 2:Like, I lead the business or I you know, we sell the product to somebody else. Like, that is the only endpoint for a development project inside of I let's just be fair and say within the realm of the Internet. Right? If you build a product on the Internet, the only endpoint is when you hand over control the product or retire the product. And so in a way, like, I kinda realized that, like, there was we were on a development hamster wheel as is every other product development company.
Speaker 2:And so there wasn't really an end in sight for, like, the type of work that we did for for me. And I just realized I didn't wanna do that work anymore. It wasn't what I enjoyed. And then the other one is that and I I started to recognize this much, much more with as I was building out the brewery alongside the the WordPress side of the business was that if you're not growing, you're dying. That is the reality of the tech world.
Speaker 2:And I did not like that mindset. I came to really battle with that mindset of, you know, why does that have to be the case? The lovely thing about the brewery business is that it doesn't have that mindset. We get to a point where we are happy with our production levels and our sales levels, and that's just where we stay. You know, of course, there's always a desire to, you know, to grow a little more or bring in a little more revenue or increase your profit margins, etcetera, but the mindset within this business is vastly different than in the tech world of that endless pursuit of growth is not there.
Speaker 2:Now not to say that it doesn't exist, you know, within the beer industry because it don't absolutely does, And there are you can see that pretty clearly if you go and look at some of the macroeconomic things that are happening within the beer industry. But for us, it doesn't exist because we built our brewery business as little more than a neighborhood brewery. We we're just a neighborhood tapering. That's all we are. And so there is no, like, okay.
Speaker 2:What's our ten year growth plan? There is no you know, we have to keep growing. We have to keep increasing our distribution footprint. We have to keep increasing our production volume. No.
Speaker 2:Like, we found the endpoint, and we can just enjoy existing now. And that is lovely. I mean Yeah. Seriously, that is, like, one of the best things because we're not, yeah, we're we're not on a hamster wheel. I mean, there's still there's still hamster wheels within the dairy dairy industry.
Speaker 2:The absolute
Speaker 1:Business is business. Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think that's the thing that I look back on and, like and I realize, man, I enjoy not focused like, not being so caught up in the, okay. What's the thing that I have to worry about that's coming down the pipe from WordPress core? What's coming down the pipe from WooCommerce? Or what's coming down?
Speaker 2:Or, you know, what are the things that are coming down, you know, from the legal side of things? You know, for example, like GDPR or EU VAT or taxation issues. You know, just not having to worry about those as much is lovely. So Yeah. Those are some of things I look back on from, like, the business side of things and say, no regrets.
Speaker 1:What what do you think now, again, looking back on it is more satisfying? Is it more satisfying being synonymous with EDD, walking around a word camp, people going, oh my god. Because of you, I I ran a I run my own plug in business. I sell $200,000 worth of plug ins. You've changed my life.
Speaker 1:Or is it sliding that beer across the bar, having somebody sip it and say, damn. This is good. Like, what would do you have a a level of priority there?
Speaker 2:I don't I don't know. You know, I look back, and there's a lot of things that I'm really proud of that we did that I take great pleasure in, like, saying, like, yeah. That was what my team did. That's some of the stuff that we did and that I did. You know?
Speaker 2:I look back and I you know, when I told the team what was what was happening, that I was selling the business, I looked to the way that the things that they said to me and the way they reacted to the news. And the the truth is, like, everybody like, in general, people everybody understood, and everybody was happy for me, but everybody was very disappointed in my decision. And the reason was because we had built something awesome. We had built a great team, and, you know, the way that a couple of team members described it was that it was the end of an era of, like, the way that our team worked together. And that's what I look back and I say, that's what I'm the most proud of.
Speaker 2:You know? Sure. I'm proud of the products that we built. I'm proud of, you know, a lot of the information that we you know, that through, you know, WordCamp presentations and blogs and, you know, a lot of the you know, we were there throughout the development of the the commercial WordPress ecosystem, and we helped with a lot of it. And I'm really proud of that.
Speaker 2:But I'm most proud of the quality of the team that we were able to build around the products and the way that we took care of our people. That's what I'm the most proud of. So do I get more satisfaction from, like, the history of everything that we did within the WordPress space or talking to our local customers and sliding the beer across the counter, I think they're on par with each other. I think they they're very different, but they there's a lot of satisfaction that is kind of rooted in the same psychology for both of them. You know?
Speaker 2:I actually for for the brewery side of things, it's much less about the the beer itself as it is the space that we have built and the community that we have fostered around it. Our goal going into the brewery business was not to sell beer. Our goal was to build a community within a local community, a community space, to be a community gathering space, to be that third place for people, and to be a force of positive change within our local community. That was our goal. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we've been able to see that happen, and we've been able to see the the proof of that actually happening. And so I I get great satisfaction from that. You know, I'm proud of the beer that we make, but the beer is nothing more than a vessel through which to actually achieve our goal, which is to be a community gathering space.
Speaker 1:And this is probably a fantastic time for you. Right? Holidays, not just, like, but community wise, getting people to come, maybe do events, meet up with people, have a a holiday party, stuff like that on-site is a very fulfilling thing. It is. Very a lot of synergies between, hey.
Speaker 1:Sandhills development had a Slack channel or you met up with people at WordCamp and you had this, like, digital community, and now you're doing the same thing. You were create and all your products was a creative outlet for you, but now so is making beer. Right?
Speaker 2:Like Oh, absolutely. It's it's What And and both of them were ultimately rooted in, like, the the value that we ultimately got from both of them, you know, setting all of the monetary side things aside. The value that we got was the relationships and the community building that EDD and Affiliate OP, etcetera, that those fostered and created for us, and then the the community and the relationships that the brewery have fostered and created for us as well. You know, that's the most valuable.
Speaker 1:I I forgot to frame this, but how disconnected are you from WordPress these days? Like, you don't even have you're not on Twitter. Right? Unless you have, a lurking account. I mean, technically, it's
Speaker 2:still there, but I don't use it.
Speaker 1:But you don't use it. Like, you don't even you're not even online looking at this stuff. Right?
Speaker 2:I the closest I get is, you know, I still get some email notifications from a whole series of newsletters, and slowly over time, I do kind of weed them out and, you know, unsubscribe from some that, you know, I decide that I don't not too interested in anymore. Most of the connection that I have is to a few specific core set of people, that I still, communicate with, not as actively as I would like. You know, one of the one of the the side effects of leaving the WordPress space that I knew was going to happen, but it's kind of it's kind of interesting when you know something's gonna happen versus actually experience it happening. Like, I knew that I was gonna have to be much more intentional about maintaining a bunch of relationships and maintaining the communication because a lot of my really strong relationships within the WordPress community, both with coworkers and friends, etcetera, naturally was maintained through the work that we did. I don't do that work anymore.
Speaker 2:So I'm not actively, like, you know, talking to this person every day about this thing that we're working on together or this thing that we're working on or this, you know, this collaboration with this other team or etcetera. None of that's happening anymore. And so, you know, it's very easy to go weeks, months, and so they realize like, oh, hey. I haven't talked to that person in a long time. I wonder how they're doing.
Speaker 2:I should check-in with them. Like, you have to be very intentional about it. And I will be honest and say that I'm I'm really bad at it. I'm really bad at it. So, you know, that's definitely something, like, I knew that would happen, but actually, like, recognizing and experiencing it happening, still caught me off guard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The hamster wheel we chatted about before, keeping up with taxes, keeping up with the business side of things, keeping up with the software side of things. I'll hit you with the harder question because I'm sure the the listeners are curious. Syed and Awesomotive still has a lot of bad press. I'm very friendly with Syed.
Speaker 1:He's in my Slack membership. We chat often. I recently interviewed him about this. Like, look, man. People are saying they don't like these marketing practices.
Speaker 1:They don't like the way you handle this stuff. And he's very unapologetic about his approach to business because he has a very focused mindset. I'm growing the business. I'm serving customers. I'm building the product.
Speaker 1:I rinse my hands. I repeat, and I'm not doing anything wrong in the sense of growing a business and serving customers. Looking back, do you feel Awesomotive is was the best place for your products to go?
Speaker 2:I think so. Yes. So there there's two primary angles that when assessing actually, I'm gonna there's there was three things. When assessing who I wanted to hand hand them over to, there's three things that had to happen. One, the team had to be taken care of.
Speaker 2:Two, the products had to be taken care of, and along with the products, the customers have to be taken care of. I put those together. And then the third is the price has to be right. Was those were kind of the three things that I had to balance when discussing handing over the products and the team to a new caretaker. And let's just let's be completely clear that there isn't there was no perfect buyer.
Speaker 2:There was no one no one was absolutely perfect. That and that is true of any transaction, and that is in no way a diss to anyone else who was a potential buyer. It is no way a diss to Ausimotive or or Syed. In no scenario is they're perfect. What they're is who is the best?
Speaker 2:Who is the best fit of all of the the criteria that you have? And along with fulfilling those three criteria, you know, there also has to be a, you know, a willingness and a desire. You know? You could say, hey. This company over here would be the perfect, but if they don't have the desire to do it, then, you know, that doesn't go anywhere.
Speaker 2:I absolutely believe that Ausomotive was the best steward for the products and to ensure their longevity and ensure their development and their success. I think there was no question about that, and I still feel very strongly that way. Now I I have to admit that I'm also saying this with what is happening around the my former product ecosystems. I am not intimately familiar. And so, you know, it's possible that there's been things that have happened or didn't happen that, you know, people are either happy or unhappy about, and I am not aware of them.
Speaker 2:And so all my answer here is still kind of going back to what I experienced and what I considered at the time of the sale and what I have been aware of post sale, which as time goes on, I'm aware of less and less because I don't actively consume that information digest anymore. There I know that we had a higher team turnover than I had hoped. In any transaction, any handover of a business, you're going to have some turnover for one reason or another. More turnover than I thought would, and that I was not thrilled about. I'm not going to pretend to know the ins and outs of why some of those turnovers happened.
Speaker 2:You know? Who, you know, whose side was it? I don't know. I just know that it happened. That's all.
Speaker 2:And I wish that had gone a bit better because it was absolutely my goal and hope to secure 100% of the team in the transition and for everybody to be thrilled with it and be really happy with the results. And I know that not everybody was, but I also know that it was going to be impossible to perfectly take care of everybody. We did the best that we could, or at least I felt that we did at the time. One of the things that I really stressed about a lot when deciding whether or not Ausomotive was the right place for the products to go or if someone else was the right place was I wanted to ensure that the products had a future. One of the things that we've seen on a lot of the consolidation of the WordPress space over the last twelve to fifteen years or so has been you know, it's an not to pick on a particular segment of companies, but hosting companies have a knack for buying a product and then, you know, merging it in and then it it it disappears over time.
Speaker 2:You know, either it gets merged into something else, like, as part of the hosting package or the team gets siphoned off, the talent gets siphoned off to other projects, you know, added the product languishes and dies. I felt that handing the products to someone like Awesomotive, who is a very product focused company, was the best way to ensure that the products had a future. And and I still I think that's still the case. Yeah. You know, with some of the other conversations I had because, you know, Ausomotive was far from the only potential acquirer that we talked with.
Speaker 2:You know, it was very clear in those conversations that they were interested in they being people other than automotive. They were interested in, you know, this product, but not these two. Like, they would take they might take them all, but they really only wanted one. And so that was, like, the automatic, you know, death sentence to those products if we went to that acquirer. Awesomotive was the only only one that said, yes.
Speaker 2:I want everything. You know? I I don't know if every product has gotten the equal love and care post acquisition. You know, ultimately, that is up to them to decide and to weigh the pros and cons of putting developer resources on each of the products.
Speaker 1:So I think that there's a lot of folks in the space, and I totally agree with you. Like, if your products went to a hosting company, again, not to throw any shade at hosting companies because we do have some sponsors who are hosting companies, the products would get lost because I think at the end of the day, like, a hosting company is just gonna be infinitely more scalable and profitable than a WordPress plugin. So at some bean counter is going to sit there and be like, jeez, do we keep investing in this EDD thing, or do we just keep getting more hosting customers? Because the hosting is always gonna win in terms of profitability and scale.
Speaker 2:You know, that's one that's one of the the major things that we thought about as we were going through the the process of, you know, picking out and vetting the acquirer, etcetera. And, you know, truthfully, hosting companies probably would have been willing to pay a much higher dollar because they almost always are because they have the biggest budgets. But we, you know, we ended up we did fine for ourselves. Let's just be clear with that. But we intentionally walked away from, you know, a much bigger payday, if you will, because we wanted to ensure, you know, the best care for the products and the team.
Speaker 2:And the choice that we made is where we felt we had the best likelihood of success for all three major metrics.
Speaker 1:I get a lot of flack. I wrote a piece, I don't know, ninety days ago, a hundred and twenty days ago about awesome motive. And once again, been friends with Syed forever. People called me an apologist for awesome motive. Right?
Speaker 1:And and my thing is if the community WordPress like, largely the very active WordPress community is developers, designers, agency owners, freelancers that are building sites and solutions for end users. If you're not happy with it, don't use their products. If you come across a a a company, I know this sounds harsh, but if you come across a customer who's using it and you are that passionate about not using awesome motive products to replace it with something else and tell them this is what I wanna use.
Speaker 2:That's that's true. That's the definition of voting with your dollars.
Speaker 1:Right. It's a vote it's a definition of voting for your dollars. And if Awesomotive was doing stuff really bad, customers wouldn't be buying it. Right? But the con the company continues to grow.
Speaker 1:Last chat I had with Syed, he said, you know, we're at, like, 400 plus people now.
Speaker 2:You know, in the last
Speaker 1:time I interviewed him, he was at 200, so he, like, doubled the size of the company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It was around it was around 200 when we sold.
Speaker 1:So the the company's still growing. I get it. He he's he has a particular strategy that a lot of people don't like. There's some borderline there is like, is this legal with content and marketing? I'm not here to decide that because I'm not a legal person.
Speaker 1:Right? And I certainly don't have the lawyers to defend myself if Syed was like, hey, Matt. Didn't like what you said. You're gonna send my lawyers after you. But that'll that will happen.
Speaker 1:If it's something that's that bad, it the chips will fall eventually. I'm not an apologist. I'm just saying he's running it the way a any traditional business I know is run. You might not like some of the marketing practices, but let the market decide that. And if you're that passionate against it, find replaceable find products you can put in place.
Speaker 1:And if you can't Yeah. Then he has a great product. I don't know what else to say.
Speaker 2:I totally agree with that.
Speaker 1:When you were in negotiation I forget, because I I did interview you back on the Matt report when this all happened. Did you ever talk to Automattic?
Speaker 2:Yes. And it's actually kinda funny because I had reached out to Matt directly, and we had a couple of brief conversations. And Automatic was actually one of the ones that basically said they were interested in one or two of the products, but not all of them. So that that kind of stopped the conversation there. We didn't think it was gonna go anywhere.
Speaker 2:And then we had gotten pretty much all the way through with the automotive side of it. And then they reached back out. I was like, okay. Now we'd like to chat. And I was like, dude, we're already in a contract.
Speaker 2:Like, I came to you months ago, and so do ask. Can you
Speaker 1:say which products they were most interested in?
Speaker 2:I believe that would be. Really?
Speaker 1:Wow. I I was actually gonna say EDD. That's interesting. It's funny because Matt recently tweeted a little, I guess, snarky sideball comment that he tends to do about Elementor raising their prices. And he mentioned something like, hey.
Speaker 1:A lot of page builders are going to be raising prices and churning customers because they can't keep up with the demand and the technology moving so fast. I'm paraphrasing here, but basically saying, like, Gutenberg's the way to go. Site editing is the way to go. Had you all invested in this in the past, they being like Elementor and all and all these other page builders, maybe we'd all be in a in a different boat. Like, Gutenberg's site editing would be better.
Speaker 1:Your businesses would be better. And I was just like, that's a typical Matt comment because, you know, there's a lot of features that these companies have that are are really good. Like, aside from, like, performance with Elementor, you might complain about that or code quality, you might complain about that. But you're taking web development and really making it simplified for a lot of people that enable them to build websites that they could never do, ever do without, you know, years of learning how to do HTML and CSS, JavaScript, and all this other stuff. And it's funny that that affiliate WP was the the one that he wanted, not, like, augmenting WooCommerce.
Speaker 2:You know, the major advantage that plug in companies have, and, you know, I get that kind of comment from Matt or any anybody who works, you know, on the core platform saying like, hey. If we all just focus on core, you know, we could build core, be much better. We all just did this instead of building all these individual, you know, plug ins, you know, why don't you guys come and help invest your resource into it? Well, the answer is because they can iterate really freaking fast. Right.
Speaker 2:Because they don't have to deal with the the massive scale of the entire platform. They can do their own little section. And, you know, obviously, at this point, things like Elementor and any other major plugin are monstrous. And so, you know, that's the pace at which they can iterate is a little slower than say when they were, you know, new. And that's true of every product that gets built out over time.
Speaker 2:Your development gets a little bit slower, little slower because your your scale gets there, both in terms of your audience, but also, like, the code base and the complexity of it. But it's it's a pretty hard ask to say, why don't you do less of this thing where you could work really fast and do really good work and build the features that people want and instead come build with us really slowly? Like, that's it's kind of hard to ask. And that's why plug that's also one of the great benefits of of the plug in ecosystem is why it's always been that way. Doesn't surprise me that some of those those clips have happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't come in.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna, like, go deep into the mindset of of Mullenweg, but it's always felt like that. He's always said things like that. You know? Hey. The reason why Jetpack or excuse me.
Speaker 1:The reason why WordPress grew so fast was because of Jetpack.
Speaker 2:This and this was, like, eight years ago, he said this. It's just like, no.
Speaker 1:It was not. You know? And it was through this it was through the same issues I that everyone has had with WordPress. Like, why does it do it this way? Why does it why did one theme go this route?
Speaker 1:Why does a plugin have these options? And it it's that fragmentation that people struggle with that are also the the benefit to WordPress because there are so many different ways to get things done. And it out of that chaos comes innovation and hopefully a market leader of whatever, you know, the plugin is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, it's that fragmentation that I was describing earlier as, like, I step back into experiencing using Elementor and BeanBurn and just WordPress as a whole as an end user versus as a developer. You know, I did this was a couple of weeks ago, and it is really interesting to, like, get that new perspective again because, like, I've, you know, I've been intimately aware of the fragmentation that happens because of core versus plug ins and the different paces in which they build and where the innovation is coming from. And I think we do tend to, as the developers and builders who are tied into the why and, like, the process of how this these things are being built out, we are very forgiving of that fragmentation. End users don't understand or I shouldn't say don't understand, don't have the awareness or the knowledge of why that fragmentation exists.
Speaker 2:So all they experience is the fragmentation. And it I think to, you know, kind of side with Matt for a moment, the ultimate goal of the platform should be to provide a tremendous user experience. And it is very challenging to do that when you have a core platform that is, you know, working towards an a goal. And then you have because the open nature the open source nature of of the platform plus the plug in ecosystem, You have all of these independent development teams that are working to their own goals and your, you know, as the, quote unquote, captain of the ship is, you know, really trying to steward them all into the same endpoint, but you have very little control over that. And so, you know, that is not always a great user experience, but it's a really big challenge.
Speaker 2:And it's that like, that is one of the challenges that I don't circling back to that question earlier of that's the hamster wheel. Yeah. Man, it feels good to not be
Speaker 1:You and Matt, very similar. Multiple products, many different things that that you were both doing, and it wasn't just EDD or Phil at WP. It was like, how do I manage this whole thing? And the I see the issues here, Again, Twitter sphere recently with, you know, a lot of this the Matt Malawic drama that came up, and it's like, hey. It's corporate overlordship, and he's trying to make this drag and drop platform so he can for the betterment of wordpress.com and all this stuff.
Speaker 1:I just signed up for a wordpress.com account just so I could, like, really drench myself in in the automatic experience. And guess what? That is not that is so far off the radar because what I noticed is he, here's the problem. He doesn't have enough time or people to get this stuff done because the wordpress.com experience isn't like, oh my god. Is this gonna take over wordpress.org?
Speaker 1:There's so many rough edges in that product. Right? And, like, he has never mind, like, this whole Tumblr debacle, and he's got 7,000 other investments that he does. He needs focus he needs core focus on core, right, to, like, really make this WordPress thing better. He's struggling with the same things we all struggle with.
Speaker 1:He just has that larger footprint, 2,000 plus employees. Yeah. Billions of dollars in value, but it's not helping. And it's the same struggle we all have
Speaker 2:at the end of the day, in my opinion. You know, Bell was one of the other things that, like, I I was finding that my mental state and my ability to steer so, like, on the sandals development side, we had, like, five different ships that we were trying to steer. And then on the brewery, we had a ship that we were trying to steer. And then, you know, all the various family and personal ships that we're also trying to steer. I felt like I was at a point where I was just trying to captain too many ships, and I really just needed to narrow it down to one or two.
Speaker 2:And I'll tell you that it was this is where I get to the no regrets because I look back and I say, yes. There are things that I could have done better. There are things that I wish had ultimately worked out differently. But I have never been in a better mental state in the last ten plus years than today. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's pretty hard to put a price on. Yeah. And, you know, that's not to say that the last two years have been sunshine and rainbows. We've had some a couple of really interesting challenges.
Speaker 1:Price of barley.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:The price of barley.
Speaker 2:The price of barley? Though, truthfully, that's almost not impacted us. Right? One of the nice things about being, like, the nanoscale of the beer industry is though the macroeconomics of supply chains, like, yeah, they impact us, but, like, we're talking, like, a few $100 a month impact as opposed to, you know, tens of thousands to millions of dollars, you know, because, you know, we buy 4,000 pounds of grain a month. Our grain bags of grain are, you know, 50 to 55 pounds each, and they cost between 30 and $55 each.
Speaker 2:It's kind of in the standard price range. Well, when the price of barley goes up, we go from a $42 bag to a $42.50 dollar bag. You know, when you're buying, you know, 50 to 60 bags a month, it doesn't make that much difference. Yeah. So those types of scales.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Granted, you did run some really interesting legal issues if you're interested at all. That was fun. Yeah. I don't know if fun is the way I would describe it.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. What happened?
Speaker 2:So one, last about a year ago, we actually almost lost every license, or our license to sell an alcoholic beverage to buy a glass due to this little thing called, basically a food sales requirement where there's this old law in Kansas that says, if you are in certain counties, you are required to sell a certain percentage of your, all of your alcohol sales must be food sales. And this is a law that has been been on the books since the mid eighties, very poorly documented. There's no information or awareness at all about how enforcement or penalties or anything like that works. And, anyway, what the short version of what happened is we got caught surprised when suddenly the way this law was going was enforced, changed, and we found ourselves in a situation where if we did not sell a massive amount of food and recognize we're not a restaurant at all, we we all we are just a beer tap room that sells a tiny bit of, like, pre made food. We found ourselves we had a ten day window, and we had to sell one and a half times or two x our annual food sales in ten days if we wanted to keep our license.
Speaker 2:Otherwise, our license was gonna be revoked and which was going to kill the business. And, so we sent out a we well, we ultimately made a plan, and we sent out a call on social media to our local community, basically saying, if you like and support this business and you like the fact that we are here and you think this is a value add to the community, we need you to come buy $10 hot dogs. We're gonna be cooking hot dogs all night long and all week long, and we're gonna bring in some smokers, and we're gonna cook a whole bunch of smoked meats and other things, and we're gonna bring in a whole bunch of pizzas, and we need you to come buy a whole bunch. And, so we ultimately we sold $43,000 of food in a five day window, and we were able to secure our liquor license through that. And then the challenge for the last year has been actually getting that law changed.
Speaker 2:So we have a lot of media publicity in our local community and our and and all around the state as well about this issue because this old archaic law that pretty much everybody thought was defunct and nobody actually cared about got really close to shutting down a local business, our breweries, that a lot of people really like and care about. And so then after that happened, we were able to get involved into the the legislative system to figure out how to actually change this law and get rid of it. And on November 7, we successfully got rid of it. So we spent a year learning learning how to do it and going through the campaign process and, you know, raising awareness and then, you know, ultimately culminating in getting people to go out to vote. And because it had to be done through a ballot measure.
Speaker 2:And so we had to have a simple majority had to vote on it, and it passed decisively.
Speaker 1:So Is that just in your town or city charter, or is
Speaker 2:that a single? It's a state level law for the state of Kansas that is then passed down to each individual county within the state of how they want to do it. Basically, there was three options. You could be what's called a wet county where you can sell you can be a, you know, you can be a bar or restaurant, but you don't have a requirement to sell food. You can be a dry county, which meant that you have no alcohol sales, or you can be a semi dry county, which meant that you can sell alcohol, but you have to sell 30% food as well.
Speaker 2:The way that law was built, basically, each of the individual counties was able to opt into us into one of those three statuses when the law went into effect. But then the law was designed to basically make it impossible for any county that chose to implement food rules to make it impossible to have nonrestaurant establishments that sold alcohol, which is what we are. We are not a restaurant. We are a small brewery taproom. And then the only way to change the law is to county by county.
Speaker 2:Each county can vote on it during an election, but the only way to vote on it is if you can you either get a certified petition of registered voters that puts it onto the ballot, or you get the county commissioners to pass a majority resolution to put it on the ballot. And then the registered voters in the county get to come out and vote on it on whether to remove it or not. So our little food sale debacle last year that just about shut down the brewery successfully resulted in the change of this law in four different counties around the state of Kansas.
Speaker 1:I mean, who what if somebody with no time on their hand dust off some freaking rule book from the eighteen hundreds and say Sand Hills Brewery is breaking the law? Like, how did it even come up?
Speaker 2:So we act there we don't really know, but we have a theory. The the the short theory is basically this. No one cared about this law. This law has not been enforced in a long time, and we are actually a perfect example of it because the only time this law gets enforced is when you go through the renewal process for your liquor license, which happens every two years. Two years ago, we went through the renewal process, and we did not have enough food sales to qualify for the requirements of the law.
Speaker 2:Nothing happened. No one said anything. The the licensing agents agents handed us our new license and up of it. But then two years later, which is the last year, we go through the same process again, but all of a sudden, they decide to care about it. What we discovered was that the legal so the it's called the ABC, which is the Alcoholic Everage Control.
Speaker 2:It's the department at the state of Kansas that issues the licenses. Their legal oversight is the attorney general for the state. And it just so happened that when we went through that in October '22, the attorney general happened to be running for governor. And so we're pretty sure that the attorney general said, anything that falls under my purview must be absolutely by the book, everything, because I don't want any question about, you know, whether or not how my administration is or my you know, anybody under my jurisdiction is operating. Well, we then went on to uncover and discover that this rule that basically says, if you sell $10,000 in combined food and alcohol, 3,000 of that has to be, it has to be food for a 30% ratio.
Speaker 2:That rule is actually written into the internal handbook, and they draw guidelines of the ABC that says if an establishment has 29.9%, they lose their license. There's no leeway. There's no flexibility or anything. And you absolutely are required to revoke their license. And, technically, the way the rules are written, they're required to revoke the license at the time of discovery, not just at not at on a every other year review.
Speaker 2:It's literally like, if we come at any point, you don't have 30%, you forfeit the license immediately. Well, we discovered that because that's the way the rules are written internally for how they're supposed to operate, they haven't been following their own rules for years, and we are an example of that. Because three years ago, they didn't follow their own rules, and they gave us a license when they weren't supposed to. And then suddenly, we go through the process again, and they decide to enforce the rule to the tee. And we're pretty sure it's because of attorney general's running for governor.
Speaker 2:So that that's our theory. We have no way to prove it, but that was our theory at the time. And, ultimately, you know, we were able to rally the support of our local community, and they bought a whole bunch of food, and we kept our license, which was hopefully, you know, what we were really that's all we were trying to do. And then we were able to use that to successfully change the law. So I I learned something in that whole process that I think I already knew I am not built for politics.
Speaker 2:I do not like politics. I was just gonna say desire. You've never brought it
Speaker 1:to William. That's how Pippen Williamson went from WordPress to governor of Kansas. No. From this process. Oh, man.
Speaker 1:That that is fascinating and also not surprising when it comes to local politics, which, you know, is just like WordPress to a degree. Man, it's been great catching up. I'm so glad to hear about the mental health side of things. It's a race,
Speaker 2:and
Speaker 1:running a business whether, you know, whether you're brewing beer or building plug ins. There's challenges in each business, but I can certainly appreciate after, you know, the decade plus that you sunk into WordPress or longer that you found some some peace in this exit, and maybe you'll come back one day.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things that I is true of any business that if you are the, you know, if you're the owner or the operator, what have you, is one of the things that will pretty much guarantee to happen is random things are gonna land in your lap that you have no idea what to do with. You have no idea how to respond to it and you just think, what the world? Like, I'm just trying to sell beer or I'm just trying to sell WordPress plugins. This is totally unrelated. Why do I have to do this?
Speaker 2:But that is the reality of being a business owner is you are you know, it is a requirement of the job to get uncomfortable and do things that you are not comfortable with or find a way to get around them. You know, I think of, like, back in the WordPress space when we had a, you know, a crisis comes in of some kind or other of, you know, there's a massive amount of fraud that is flying through our Stripe account, and we're trying to track down where it's coming from. And then, you know, then you have something like GDPR come in. You're like, this is totally bound by territory. Why do I have to do this?
Speaker 2:But that's the reality. The beer business, you know, weird obscure law comes in and says, well, you don't have a liquor license if you don't do this. But but we're just trying to do our thing. And, you know, it's true in any business. You know, the different challenges that you're gonna face definitely will differ and, you know, the scale of those challenges will be different.
Speaker 2:But I think that's kind of what entrepreneurship is honestly about. It's like diving into the unexpected and the unknown challenges and just finding a way through them. And it's definitely a fun journey. I mean, I'm enjoying it still. I'm still enjoying the world of business ownership, but I do really enjoy not checking my email as much.
Speaker 1:Oh, man. You should just come back to a word camp. It'd be amazing to see you at sandhillsbrewingcom. Can you ship beer?
Speaker 2:We cannot, unfortunately. Cannot. That's another obscure annoyance to Well,
Speaker 1:let me tell you. When you become governor, there's gonna there's gonna be a lot of beer getting shipped. Now is it just Kansas can't ship beer?
Speaker 2:They're they're surface state. Federal. Basically, the liquor walls around the country vary from state to state to state. Some states can. Some states can't.
Speaker 2:Kansas is one that does not allow you to ship. At least from the business. An individual could ship, and, you know, you can ship it to your friends or family, but a business cannot ship. Interestingly, there there's ways to ship beer into Kansas. You can't ship it out of Kansas.
Speaker 1:A stage wagon with a company from horson..com. It's been great talking to Pippin again. If you're in the area Hutchinson, Kansas and Mission, Kansas, go to the tap rooms there. Check those out. Sandhillsbrewing.com.
Speaker 1:I I did have a couple questions that come in through Twitter really quick. Let's see. Jeff Chandler, you might know him, said Oh, no. Are you satisfied with how Awesomotive has treated your extended your products? I think we answered that already.
Speaker 1:Let's see what else we have here. Corey Moss said, I wouldn't ask him anything. I just thank him for everything he put into WordPress over the years. Devin Price asks, what's the best beer you've made recently?
Speaker 2:Oh, German dapplebock. Heavy rich winter lager.
Speaker 1:I see you have a new don't you have a New England brew out here? I saw it, I thought.
Speaker 2:We do. We truth that we make some of everything, and the beers that are shown on the website is just a very small subset of what we actually make. Oh, okay. Because, basically, we have, like, our core beers, and then we do, you know, one up experiments every day. The thing that we always tell our customers when they come in the building is our menu will change every single week.
Speaker 2:So come back next week, it will be different.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Sandhillsbrewing.com. Pippin, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2:It's been fun. Thank you so much, man.
Speaker 1:That's it for today's episode. Get the weekly newsletter at thewpminute.com/subscribe. Want to support the show and join a Slack group filled with WordPress professionals like you? Talk about the news, share your WordPress business content, and network with others. Head to thewpminute.com/support and get access to our group.
Speaker 1:Support the show for as little as $5 or more if you feel we provided more value. Thanks to our pillar sponsors, Pressable, Bluehost, and Omnisend. Thanks to our foundation plus sponsors, WP World, Image SEO, and Hostinger. Thanks to all of our annual supporting members and you, the listener. Without your support, the WP Minute wouldn't be possible.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening.
