The WP Minute+

Matt Medeiros (00:03)
Ian Misner, welcome to the WP Minute.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (00:06)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Matt. Really appreciate it.

Matt Medeiros (00:09)
⁓ We were just talking in the green room multiple green rooms in fact as we had to switch platforms because there's never a dull day ⁓ in technology land That you don't do a lot of podcasting but podcasting is important ⁓ In well in all of our worlds But you're looking at it more important as more important for your marketing efforts and you know Probably building trust and outreach and all this stuff ⁓ You're over at cash roll WP calm and dive more into what that means what you do how you service clients

But just before we get there, why do you think video is so challenging to most founders in the WordPress space? And is it video or is it just like, God, you get that story out, gotta like talk to people. What's the challenge there?

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (00:58)
Yeah, and I think overall for myself, the challenge of video is actually just the putting yourself out there like more authentically. You know, I've done blogging for many years at this point. You know, I've written thousands of articles and you know, it's I think I have a voice, you know, I think I have sort of like the way I come across in written context. But I've never really bothered to learn to do that for video. So.

You know, the value of it is very obvious and clear and there's a lot of opportunity, you know, from like an SEO standpoint, but also, you know, showing up and people getting to know you as part of the brand. But there's also.

Knowing what good looks like and not knowing that you know how to do it, it can be really challenging. ⁓

Matt Medeiros (01:45)
Sure. ⁓

Yeah, I mean, we're just living in a fascinating ⁓ age of, of course, like AI and social. ⁓ And what's that? What that is causing is this really compressed amount of available bandwidth for anyone to do anything, whether that's like you running your business to like plan and ideate, maybe on doing a podcast and doing videos. And of course, then

running the business and then your customers are in the same boat and now you're trying to say like, hey, pay attention to us to buy our stuff. And it's like somehow weaving that in. ⁓ When I put out the call to action, which you knocked on the door to say, yeah, I want to do the show. I really wanted to unearth the challenges that folks have been having with business. It doesn't have to be all challenging. If have positives, we'll talk about that too.

Just talk to me about what Kestrel does and how it's had to evolve up until this point and maybe what those challenges really are.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (02:51)
Yeah, if it's okay, I probably have to give a little bit of background for context there. But yeah, so Kestrel, we've been around only about a year and a half in this iteration, right? So we got started up and acquired a whole bunch of WooCommerce extensions. But my history in the space goes back a lot farther. I worked with Skyverge, they did WooCommerce memberships and basically every payment gateway that isn't Stripe and PayPal was Skyverge for Woo. And...

You know, worked there for a very long time and we had this sort of like moment there probably the last decade or two where the rising tide was a big part of it for all of us. Right. And, you know, as your business grew, you just kept, you know, if you build it, they will come. We had some field of dreams stuff going on basically. And, you know, you just kept putting out good products and more and more people showed up next month than showed up last month. And that's all it really took. ⁓ I mean, obviously there was a little bit more to it than that, but I mean,

that is very much.

Matt Medeiros (03:52)
Do you think that was, sorry to interject, I want you to finish that thought, but do you think that the if you build it they will come moment that a lot of folks had in WordPress was the excitement for WordPress and just like I can do this now with this thing and people are just generally excited about it or was it there was no real competition in the space and of course now we've got the rise of Shopify but. ⁓

What do you think it was what made it so good back then?

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (04:21)
Yeah, well, I mean, specifically the fact that the mission of WordPress, know, democratizing publishing and all that, like no one had really genuinely performed that. I think that the idea may not have been completely new, but WordPress really did put the power in the hands of everybody. everyone's heard like the Hello Dolly, the hooks and filters, you know, like the magic is they made it easy for anybody to just start doing what they wanted to do. And I think that attracted a huge number of people.

relatively quickly. Now, I don't know why it feels different now. I think I have like three or four different theories as to why it feels different. And obviously, know, AI is a big part of it. I also think that there's like the, you know, there's like that COVID bump hangover as well, right? So all this growth got pulled forward where, I don't know about you, but for me at least, 2019, it still felt like the internet was a place you went to, but now it's like, it's just, it is the everything.

Matt Medeiros (04:59)
Yeah, sure.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (05:20)
instead. You everyone's there, that's where everything is. And I think that the novelty is gone. Now it is just the tool that's left, maybe, right?

Matt Medeiros (05:32)
Yeah, it's an interesting way of

looking at it. Like, you know, it was the place for ⁓ the entertainment for, I to go buy that thing over there. And hey, did you see that on on Twitter or whatever? ⁓ But now more than ever, like it's just the pulse of everything. And you had kind of had to live through like at least like five years prior to covid and now five years after covid to really feel.

you know that that home and it's a great way putting it

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (06:03)
Yeah, well, like my online identity used to be like separate, you know, now my aunt sees my tweets, you know what I mean? It's sort of like, I don't know, it's all one thing now and not very much. I think that ties to the way we experience it being different. And with that, like a lot of the big players also tried to compete more with like the lower end of the market or whatever you want to call it, where, you know, you have everyone trying to make it so everyone can publish. And so that increased competition, but I think that's probably...

healthy as long as we all respond to it appropriately, right?

Matt Medeiros (06:36)
Yeah, yeah. Do you see that? ⁓ Well, take us back to Kestrel and what you've been doing for the last few years. You've been acquiring ⁓ other WooCommerce add-ons. ⁓ How has that gone? And is it as easy as it sounds? You know, like, was that the intent to launch you? You sort of stumble upon it. Like, walk us through that.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (06:57)
Yeah!

Well, yeah, so we actually started Kestrel, me and some of the Skyverge founders, we were all at GoDaddy post acquisition. We were acquired by GoDaddy in 2020. We worked on managed WooCommerce stores there. We helped revamp a lot of the managed WordPress stuff alongside the Pagely team and a number of other folks. But after a couple of years, we all left there and Kestrel was sort of like an opportunity to jump back into sort of like the roots, you know, doing

SkyVirge was always, you know, extensions for WooCommerce. We could come back, do that. And, you know, really look at it very much like a V2, you know, like what if we did it again, but faster? And so jumping in with the opportunity to acquire a bunch of things, we sort of had this like target, know, a revenue target to meet the acquisition. And I mean, the question of whether it's easier than it sounds is interesting because it really like it happened much, much like I had an 18 month plan.

And we did that in like four or five months. whether that's a good thing is actually probably worthy of debate, right? A lot of people were willing to offload some stuff around that time, but overall.

Matt Medeiros (08:11)
Yeah, Yeah. You ask and

all of a sudden all these people showed up at the door. Wait a minute. No, listen, I didn't think this was going to happen.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (08:20)
Right. Well, and ultimately it's been very good though. mean, there's some of the opportunities that came up. Like there was a team called theme squad. They had already done a lot of acquisitions of smaller marketplace plugins, like sort of the woocommerce.com marketplace. And so they had bundled up a number of these like listings that have been around like seven or 10 years. And honestly, they needed a lot of work and we've been doing a lot of that, but, you know, modernizing them, making them fit in with the woocommerce of today was a pretty clear and obvious opportunity. And when a listing's, know, seven to 10 years old,

It's got backlinks, it's showing up all over the place across the internet. And so, you know, like we, found some of those opportunities. We acquired some from barn to, you know, Katie Keith and her team. And I mean, I think she'd be the first to say they were her, like the lower end of her portfolio, but ultimately there's some good tools in there. And, you know, it helped us make a little bit of a splash when we first got started as well. You know, she's got a large marketing platform and everyone kind of heard of us.

because we acquired a few of our smaller plugins. And that actually helped bring us other additional opportunities as well, right? People learned we were acquiring things and it got to the point we had to start saying no to more than we said yes to actually, but which also gets to we've worked alongside a number of people in the space for a long time and we acquired CheckoutWC after that. So CheckoutWC was Cliff Griffin. He started I think six, seven, maybe eight years ago now.

And it was really just a tool to really revamp the WooCommerce checkout, know, React based, faster, better converting and all that. And we were able to pick that up and that's become a big part of, I mean, if anything, it's really like the flagship of what we've done at this point. But yeah.

Matt Medeiros (10:05)
⁓ Just for the listeners,

kestrelwp.com. So I'm just going to read off the top six in According to Price. Check out WC Constellation, which is WooCommerce memberships and subscriptions. Lightspeed, Point of Sale for WooCommerce. API and License Manager for WooCommerce. Rental Products for WooCommerce. Software Add-on for WooCommerce. That's just the top six. And then there's five pages I have to go through. So there's a lot more ⁓ that you all have. ⁓ Yeah, which...

Are the ones that eat that? Well, you said check out WC. That's an acquired one. That's one that you acquired. That's the sort of flagship one for you now. Which ones have you been working on as Kestrel, the company, and which ones like how do you see yourself ⁓ like ⁓ merging this merging is not the right word, but blending like flagship products and overall vision, if you will.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (11:02)
Yeah, no, it's a very good question. And we've actually had a couple of different iterations of that since we've started too. So like the very first mission or plan or whatever was ultimately just, you we were acquiring a lot of these legacy products. Like let's just put blocks in them, you know, let's make them work with new installs basically. And so we did spend a lot of time doing that. And, know, if you go to the WooCommerce marketplace for block enabled extensions, we'll probably be responsible for a pretty significant portion of that as a result. So.

You know, we have these sales channels. Can we just make the things that show up there the best for those people? More recently though, with, you know, the checkout WC growing as healthily as it does, you know, really doubling down on like agency relationships has been very important to us. And that kind of aligns with having a large suite as well. Right. So with checkout WC, we hand an agency a product that they can spend, you know, an hour's work instead of a couple days work.

on a pretty significant upgrade to a WooCommerce store. But then as they look across in all the various things they need, hopefully we've proven through good support, responding quickly to their needs and the things they're trying to get done, that we are the place they should look first when they need other things. And through a number of acquisitions, you'll usually find what you need. And if you don't, we want to hear the feature requests too, right?

Matt Medeiros (12:21)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (12:27)
Now you did

Matt Medeiros (12:27)
Yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (12:27)
also ask though, like how do we bundle it all together? I don't know yet actually. So we are working on a bit of an agency program that's going to more formalize what, you know, we hope to do in the long run for that, for that audience. But as it stands today, for the various products that we sell, we do sell them on our own site, but a lot of them come from the WooCommerce marketplace where people are finding us because they're searching for a feature. They're not looking for a platform, a product.

they want to do like a splash pop-up for a sale they're doing. So they find us there. I would check out WC. It's always a lot more conversion focused and we haven't fully reconciled all of that yet. And when you look at something like constellation or rental products, these larger products that, you know, they really do change what your site really does, what it really is. You don't need both at the same time. So there'd be separate streams even in the best case scenario, but.

If we can be the first place agencies, look, we're doing our job. Peace.

Matt Medeiros (13:27)
Yeah.

There's a lot of folks in the space that like the agency is the hot commodity. OK. Like for those listening. Like this is my opinion. I mean, you can you can fill in the fill in the blanks or or paint your own picture in a moment. But everybody wants to be. Have the hooks in the agency, so to speak, and.

The challenge in the WordPress space, maybe less for you, but I'm interested to hear, if you have, well, if you have a $249 a year plugin, but say you only have one of them, and you want to reach an agency, you want to do more things with agencies, I find it very hard to, or very challenging, for ⁓ plugin companies, even hosting companies, to partner with agencies. Because...

Well, at the end of the day, there's not a lot of zeros on that $249 a year, right? And ⁓ if I think back to my days at Pagely where I was an account executive and I saw like us partnering, Pagely partnering with an agency probably meant that my contract that I was gonna have signed for Pagely hosting was probably 50 grand a year. So it made total sense for us to.

work with that agency to optimize it, to onboard them onto AWS, to get their WordPress website right. But there's thousands, well, maybe hundreds of plugin companies that are out there. They're like, God, we'd love to be working with agencies. If they bought a license, we could help them do this. But the license is only $249. How could you even spend the resources to do that? So what I'm getting at is it becomes challenging because there's not a lot of money in that relationship from the plugin.

to the agency. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that and maybe how you bridge that gap. Professional services, contracts, something else. Like how does that run through your mind?

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (15:28)
Yeah, it's a wonderful question. And I mean, we talk about that internally quite a bit actually, but I will say for the price tag to the agency relationship, we don't spend a lot of time doing like direct outreach to agencies, right? Like we try to ensure our content speaks to that audience. We want to show up in the places where they're looking, but I haven't actually done a very good job ever of convincing an agency one-on-one to go try our product. What I have done a good job though of is once they are using it,

You you wow them enough that they tell each other, right? know, just word of mouth, really. But, you know, if you I think Cliff always knew this, but we didn't know this when we initially acquired CheckoutWC. The product does a lot to boost conversions. know, they have testimonials, you know, 30 % better. We have one that says eight times better. I don't believe that one, but I do have it on, you know, the testimonial page near the top. But regardless, that's what I thought the product was. That's what it did.

But the reality is it saves agencies a lot of time. There's a, there's a strong ROI there where, you know, they can show their customer, they can show their client a significant upgrade from the way the site started with very little work. And it includes things like, you know, trust badges, upsells, you know, things that they're noticeable and they wow a client basically. And nothing that we do, like every agency can go do these things. You know, we're not doing anything magic.

Matt Medeiros (16:46)
Yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (16:54)
But we are also doing all the little things that you're not going to spend the time on. You know, if you had to do this for every site, know, you're not, you know, Baymert Institute has a bunch of research on the best UX and the things that the subtle little changes that in view trust, you know, it's better to have that outsourced and have somebody handle that and pay attention to all of that. So yeah, you do enough of that. You make their job easier. You build that immediate ROI that they feel the first time they use it.

Matt Medeiros (17:15)
Yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (17:21)
And then the fact that it also does the thing that it's promising, the thing that we thought it was in the first place, that's what keeps them around to use it on the next site and the site after that. And another thing I'll just call out, almost half of our sites are agency licenses, like people from agencies licensing our product, but it's not even close to half of the customers, right? So investing that little bit of extra time does wonders. And the agency is essentially the first line of support.

You know, they're easier to deal with than a frontline merchant as well. So, you know, we're more than happy to try to make their lives as easy as possible and to ensure that there's more money in the long run as far as the agency partnerships, that is what we're hoping to do with the whole suite of things. But, you know, if your audience has agencies in it, you want to give us a wish list of what that would look like, I'm happy to hear that as well.

Matt Medeiros (18:15)
Yeah.

Would you agree that it's like it's a it's a distraction to just ⁓ monetize that agency, that agency license to a higher number? Here's an example. So my day job is at Gravity Forms and ⁓ Gravity Forms you know, running on some really high powered like enterprise sites and they buy it from us for

whatever the number is, 279 a year, whatever the number is for our Elite Gravity Forms license. And then they send us questions and they're fine. And they tell us, we would pay you considerably more money for helping us integrate this and do this. And we sit back, and again, I go back to my days of running an agency, working at Pagely, yeah, we could have enterprise support license for...

probably $20,000 a year per license. And these enterprises would just be like, fine, here you go, here's the, the check, you know, and now help us. But that just introduces a whole new complexity to the business, you know, bordering professional services.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (19:24)
Thank

Matt Medeiros (19:28)
I really wrestle with that idea because I think for a small creator, they could do things, or a small plugin developer, they could do those kinds of things to move the needle in their business in the early days. But I'm curious what you think, like does that just become a distraction, ⁓ professional services or a big enterprise license for one client? Do you think that's a distraction or is that something that can be leveraged?

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (19:31)
you

Yeah, so there's two parts there for the services. We actually have discussed that a little bit. I've avoided it with intention because I want to really cater to the agency relationships as much as possible. So we do get a lot of opportunities where we could charge a couple hundred dollars for a small customization, those sorts of things. And, you know, we have a couple of specific agencies that we try to write those things out to, and they tend to be the people who are using our products the most. Right. And that's sort of, you know,

They come to us, we send work their way, everyone's happy. And sure, I could probably turn that into an income stream. I just, I think in the long run, it doesn't benefit us really. think it's better to build those community relationships over time, I think for that piece. That one I feel less confident about, to be honest, because there probably is a fair amount of money floating around there. Now, the enterprise one, I have much stronger opinions, which is, I think that skews your incentive much too broadly.

I think that right now as a business, our goal is to, you know, provide as much value as we can to as many sites as possible. Checkit WC is an easy example of that where when we're developing a new feature for the product, you know, our goal is to either boost the average order value for as many stores as possible or boost the conversion rate for as many stores as possible. It's not more complicated than that, right? Like there's a lot of things we could do, but if we're doing one of those two things, we've done good work. As soon as you bring in that sort of like,

some customers are more important than others kind of level to that degree. I think, you know, your decisions get messy, I think. And, you know, we definitely do cater a little bit to the agency more than everybody else, but I mean, they're catering to the same audience we are. Right. So like, you know, they're coming to us with the same incentive structure that we are already aiming for enterprise. They want custom. They want the thing that they need. They want.

Matt Medeiros (21:26)
I get what you're saying, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (21:49)
They had a meeting with 26 people in it and they came with action items and they want you to fulfill it. And it's a different business as far as I'm concerned.

Matt Medeiros (21:53)
Yeah.

Yeah.

You could actually even flip it on. Now that I spoke about it out loud and you were answering that, you could almost flip it where you make a plugin, you don't care about the sales, but it is the intro to the enterprise. So it's like, many plugins, licenses do you sell? Three. How much do they pay you per year? 100K each. Like, oh, okay. So that's different.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (22:20)
Yeah. And I mean, we have, as a company, we've done a few services things as well for large organizations, but they aren't our plugins, right? Like we've just gone and, you know, we're very good at integrating stuff with WooCommerce. So, you know, as a big business, I mean, you could have one of your devs do it, or you can go to somebody who's done it 50 times and we're more than happy to help with those sorts of things. But that's not a plugin, right? Like that's like a, that is more like services, but it's just, it's

Matt Medeiros (22:29)
Right, right, yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (22:49)
I mean, it's barely what we intend to do. It's just, you the expertise overlaps enough that there's a way to use it.

Matt Medeiros (22:56)
We started off the conversation talking about like how like that tight bandwidth is, so there's not a lot of room for people to, you pay attention to our content, to our marketing and to buy our stuff. You mentioned that the WooCommerce marketplace, the official one, is a large driving force behind getting traffic and getting sales. I assume getting sales. And we saw last year,

and it was exposed through a lot of the automatic NWP engine stuff that, ⁓ you know, weak points in the supply chain, ⁓ specifically WordPress.org. How much does that concern you, ⁓ having the WooCommerce marketplace? ⁓ I don't, and to be fair, like I don't know how the marketplace runs. I don't even know who you reach out to to like build those relationships with. So do you feel more comfortable?

⁓ in the WooCommerce marketplace in the face of what we've seen over the last year.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (23:55)
Yeah, I mean, I think like all the various dramatic events and all that don't concern me specifically. I will say though, the marketplace does mirror sort of like the global interest in a way that I think a lot of your own personal experimentation doesn't. Right. So, you know, I don't know this is a controversial statement, but there's been, you know, global traffic declines for WordPress and WooCommerce over the last couple of years, which means, you know, that broad open demand shrinks.

And who's going to be impacted by that most the biggest sites in the space, right? And WooCommerce.com for WooCommerce is the biggest one for WordPress. It's one of the biggest ones. So we have seen, you know, some ups and downs there. I don't know if that's cause and effect though. I think that, you know, is that, is that, you know, all the WP engine stuff or is that AI is that, you know, whatever. I think I don't necessarily care that much even, you know, it just, it's a bit out of my hands and

It's still a great channel for us despite all that. And the reality is if you search for a feature for WooCommerce, WooCommerce.com is going to come up first in Google and everything. So, you know, just provide the best product to match that search intent and the marketplace makes it easy for you to get in front of those people. So ⁓ we're just going to keep doing that regardless. Now, as far as how to get into that, if there are folks that are interested in that.

There is a Woo community Slack. There's a Marketplaces channel there. A couple of our, plugin teams that are very active in the space stay active in there. But then also a bunch of the Woo team is there as well. Some of their DevRel people, ⁓ they actually have a Marketplaces team and you know, they'll work with you and they'll help you identify what's needed and to build what's there. There is a, the trade-off there though is because it's their Marketplace and we're just sort of like providing code to be sold in their venue.

You know, we can't do a ton of experimentation. You we can't do the fun, cool things that will help you build up further. And so, you know, we're doing a little bit of direct sales as well. Check out WC isn't even on the marketplace. You know, you do have to go to our website for that product. And, you know, I think doing both is probably sound. I think it's probably a smart idea.

Matt Medeiros (26:15)
Sort of like an appetizer question. Now that you bring that up, check out WC. Do you... It still has its own website though, right? Its own standalone website over KestrelWP.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (26:25)
Yeah, so even if you go to the Kestrel listing, it'll actually direct you to check out wc.com to purchase it. There's some customizations to our licensing structure there that there's multi-site licenses, there's different tiers of the product. So you can get it cheaper or more expensive depending on the functionality you think will benefit you. We've tried to mirror a little bit more of a SaaS pricing model. It is a plugin, but you trying to model more closely to what a SaaS business would do.

Matt Medeiros (26:26)
Okay, yep.

I have a million questions about your thoughts on WooCommerce. I always feel like, well, actually before I get to that question, you said before, we all know that it's on a decline, let's say, the interest for WordPress, therefore WooCommerce. How much of that do you, but you also said like it's out of my hands or it's like not my concern to like look at that, but how closely do you think it's impacted by the competition?

like Shopify, which so many people ⁓ resonate with with online e-commerce sales, and the competitors, the host of competitors that come after that, whether it's Wix ⁓ or Squarespace or Webflow doing e-commerce. how much, well guess how much of it is impacted by Shopify? Is Shopify really eating our lunch?

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (27:47)
Yeah, I mean, the stats on it are, I mean, there is a probably yes answer to that right off the hop as far as stats are concerned. I think it's a little more complex than that though, where WooCommerce is harder to get started on than Shopify. just like it is, you know, if you're an entry level user, if you don't know WordPress, you know, there's more steps to go from zero to one. Now at the very low end, WooCommerce still does tend to win, right? Because you can start literally for free.

you don't have to pay anything. I mean, like a host at go to, you know, go daddy or blue host or whatever. And, know, you're good to go for a couple of dollars, basically. I think that that'll never change. think that, you know, that very free or cheap thing. Shopify, they have very long trials now, so they're trying, but when it comes down to it, just, their, their structure doesn't really enable that. The middle is where it gets a lot more competitive where

Shopify becomes a pretty safe default for a lot of vendors. If they're, you know, transacting, if they're just looking for an all in one hands off solution and where would commerce continues to win is when you have, you know, more unique, like B2B, like when you have like a specific set of needs that are particularly challenging, you know, Shopify apps do a lot of magic, but they can't do everything you can possibly do with who commerce and regardless of what Shopify does.

extensibility, the ability to do more of what you really need to do will always be easier on WooCommerce. That does mean that at the very high end, WooCommerce starts to win again, right? So when you have all these custom needs and you're willing to invest and to afford to do that, you're gonna hire a real agency. If you're gonna do all those things, WooCommerce becomes the best answer again. That middle is where the problem stands.

And I have a lot of thoughts on why that is or what we could do about it. And I think a lot of the team is probably sick of hearing those thoughts. But some of it, think, ties.

Matt Medeiros (29:50)
.

Is it a complexity

thing or a performance thing? Everything?

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (29:58)
I mean, we hear a lot about performance, but honestly, WooCommerce is pretty fast. If you, again, if you've done the work, gotten a proper host, if you're having scalability issues, like your site's wrong, like you go, you gotta go fix it at this point. And something, you you picked some bad plugins, you're hosting somewhere horrible. We actually, on CheckoutWC, we do these email campaigns periodically where we do a conversion rescue audit. You know, we just invite people, we literally just go through their website, do a whole bunch of stuff.

make recommendations on what to fix. you know, we do, obviously we make some plugin recommendations here and there as part of the reason we do it. But more often than not, like the biggest thing people can do to fix conversions is move to a host. you're, you know, first content for your largest contentful paint reasonable and all that fun stuff, you know, it's pretty straightforward. I think that the real problem though, is that the magic of WordPress is, has been muddied over the last couple of years with

And I don't want to blame blocks, but it's going to sound like I'm blaming blocks, but it's not the blocks themselves. It is actually the, the, the huge pile of content that enabled new people to learn WordPress, to get into it. You know, all the, the blogs, the videos, those have slowed as things have grown. And now it's hard to tell if it's the content you needed. So people are finding, you know, how to videos.

on how to set up a certain kind of store is from 2019 and like it doesn't work for their theme and there's no way to know it. And nobody's creating enough.

Matt Medeiros (31:32)
I might have some videos

attributing to that problem.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (31:35)
Right.

One, honestly, you go to my own backlog. I'm sure you'll find stuff where I'm at fault too. And all of us are the problem, but there's fewer people making it. There's fewer people doing it at that pace. Again, around 2020, a lot of the biggest companies that were creating everything, they've been consolidated and you know, the place is where they are. They're still creating stuff, but not seven companies worth of stuff. You know what I mean? And so

As a new user, as that middle user, you you're willing to hack and slash your way through it. You are encountering these problems where the information you find may or may not apply to you. And you don't know why that is. And so we've created all these dead ends along the way. And I don't know how to fix that other than just more people need to create more things more quickly. ⁓ I don't know if there is a better answer to that, but then everyone always points at like, well, if WordPress only did this, or if it only worked that way. So, you know,

That's not, I don't think that is the answer. You know, I think it really is just, you know, better educational content, a lot more of it to outweigh what's out there. You know, search how to do anything on WooCommerce and the top results are from 2017. You know, that's, that's a bigger.

Matt Medeiros (32:45)
Yeah, yeah. Or somebody

who's like, you can make $10,000 drop shipping in a weekend or like, you know, some kind of just like it's just like that entrepreneur angle again, guilty of content like that in the past. But it's also that's not the stuff that like some person who's taking their business professionally, trying to sell art or muffins, you know, or car parts like that. Just like I need somebody to just train me on how to do this.

not teach me how to make money with WooCommerce, you know. ⁓

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (33:18)
Yeah,

and I'm definitely a bit biased, but I honestly think it is just as hard on Shopify. They've just done a much better job of spoon feeding it to us. you know, yeah.

Matt Medeiros (33:26)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓

So here's my loaded question. feel like, and maybe you who are much more on the inside of WooCommerce, I'm gonna have Brian, ⁓ Brian Kordes, on the podcast next week to talk about now his experiences with being at WooCommerce for the last almost year. ⁓ I just feel like WooCommerce is always left behind, ⁓ primarily for Matt when he's talking about it out in public. listen to a thousand podcasts with him.

It's part of my job. So I'm like trying to stay in tune. It's just like, why are we never saying WooCommerce? Why are we never talking about commerce, ⁓ e-commerce? It's just, you know, it's podcasts, it's Tumblr, it's, ⁓ you know, the day one, it's the acquisition of clay, which I really like. And, you know, all this other stuff. And it's just like, we've got this behemoth in the room just sitting there and no one is saying anything about this thing. ⁓

That's my feeling. mean, I don't if you share the same sentiments or like what your view is on like, how do we get this thing out there more?

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (34:37)
Yeah, I agree fully right off the hop. I do think that there is a huge opportunity in really, you know, the idea of it being WooCommerce or really just leaning into the idea of commerce enabled WordPress more fully, I think is something that I would love to see come out of automatic specifically where, know, ultimately WordPress touches 40 % of the internet, whatever number, you know, we're floating around and there's really no reason that that needs to be gated behind a separate layer. It's a separate concept.

and, you know, automatic owns them both, you one way or another, right? And WooCommerce is also an open source project. You can go submit PRs. Why does it need this sort of arbitrary separation? My theory is that there's this sort of like unapologetic commercial aspect to WooCommerce that WordPress sort of is and isn't, you know, it is obviously there's billions of dollars floating around it to commercial entity regardless.

But WordPress still theoretically the democratizing publishing, it is literally free for normal people. That feels a little at odds with something that is monetized best by payments. That's sort of a, I don't know, Matt's thinking behind it obviously, but I think that there is something sort of at odds there that might make sort of the mission-based thing a little more complicated. I don't know why though. I don't know why if that.

But I don't think it needs to be. And I think WooCommerce has a lot more potential.

Matt Medeiros (36:08)
And I do feel like they are trending. I I probably covered this when it was announced, but I think like new marketing manager or at least I feel like the marketing has been amplified, especially since Brian. I mean, just probably why like they hired Brian and like a little bit more push towards seeing more updates. You know, recently I'm seeing a lot more seeing a lot more stuffy updates like press releases like your typical kind of press releases. I'm like, this.

I mean, this might be it for the Shopify world and for the and for the investors, but ⁓ like, where's the love for the product? And I just went on a rant on this yesterday in an episode that I published on the channel where it's just like WordPress needs that product person, WordPress and arguably WooCommerce, that product person where, ⁓ you know,

Apple's a bad example because it's it's Apple. Right. Apple's a bad example because it's Apple. But there's Tim Cook on the stage representing the CEO. And then it's like, let me pass it to you to talk about iPhones. Let me pass it to you to talk about the air pods. Right. Let me pass it to you to talk about iOS. And it's just like there's all these owners that that represent that product. And like, that's what. For lack of better phrase, that's what I want to see at automatic like we own this.

person owns this direction of this product and Matt oversees everything instead of Matt just like flat, you know, flat. ⁓ What am I looking for? Flat organization where it's and I know it's not, but it feels like it's just like he is the answer to all products across all of automatic. And I'm just like, man, you can't do that. Like, how do you do that mentally? And number one, like give somebody the responsibility to lead this thing and let's ⁓ incentivize and set the goals for that envision.

for that person. So no direct no direct question. Yeah, no direct question. You can fall on that grenade in if you

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (37:55)
Yeah, I have two or three thoughts for that. ⁓

I got a couple of items. Number one, the new

marketing coming out of WooCommerce is better than anything they've ever done. It is by far well above and beyond any attempt they've made in the past to really get out there. It's heavily enterprise focused and that I think is intentional. They haven't really announced that that's sort of the mission or whatever, but if you go to their homepage, enterprise e-commerce is in the header now, basically.

Matt Medeiros (38:07)
Yes. Yes.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (38:27)
You know, it does a very good job of showing, you know, the ways WooCommerce is better at that high end for businesses that are serious about, you UX and customer experience and, you know, not just being just another one of those Shopify stores. Total cost of ownership also, they've leaned on and they've like sort of shared openly that that's something that they're leaning on. And it's all great. But that kind of gets to that problem where I said, you know, Woo's always going to win that very bottom. They're going to continue to be great at the top and they're embracing that.

but who's responsible for the middle, you know, all of the WordPress people and you know, the stuff like, you what we worked on with GoDaddy with managed WooCommerce stores, trying to build like a hundred dollar a month all in one WooCommerce solution. And you know, I don't think anyone's really running with that ball at all right now. And I think that's a big missed opportunity. And like our team, you know, we're small, we're going to keep doing what we can to enable that for everyone around in that area.

But ultimately, unless WooCommerce really fully embraces that, I just don't know. It's the community will have to continue driving that otherwise.

Matt Medeiros (39:36)
Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about the back to some of the challenges and this time with AI, ⁓ Automatic announced the Telex product back at WordCamp US. Looks pretty cool. Some folks saying, my God, will we need plugins anymore? Will we need commercial plugins anymore? Maybe one will be able to just...

log into WordPress one day and say, you know, give me a pop up at my checkout, boom, boom, ask it to make it and it makes it does a halfway decent job and somebody just goes, Okay, I'll just use this. ⁓ Is that an existential threat to product businesses around WordPress? How do you see AI making that impact?

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (40:21)
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those things where every prediction is going to be wrong. So I'm just going to share what I genuinely believe. And when I listen to this in a couple of years, hate myself for it probably. Right. But

Matt Medeiros (40:25)
Yeah. Yeah, when you and

I are cutting lawns together.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (40:33)
Exactly. But

I mean, my the thing that I've been saying, and I tweet this like twice a day as this topic comes up, the code was always a commodity, right? Like there, the code itself was never the product. And you know, you look at any of our best products, and it's all open source. Anyways, I'm not encouraging people to go fork anything. But that was always an option, frankly, right? So, you know, I don't think that that on its own is an existential threat. Telex itself is an incredibly cool tool. It's very novel.

It's fun. It's surprising how good it actually is. And the best use cases I've seen for it are the funny, goofy things that you would never actually bother building otherwise. Now, when you come to like real uses, it does also a still a very good job. But then what right like who's maintaining it, who's keeping it working, you know, again, to tie it back to you know, what I said about checkout WC, you know, you buy that product six months from now rather than six months ago, it will do better at the thing it's for.

And you know, that rapid improvement, you could argue maybe AI will eventually do that too. But you know, we're not even quite at the point where it can actually build the functional thing for you on its own yet. So I'm not worried about it replacing that. Then one more point on that agencies want to out, they want to hand off the responsibility. They don't want to have to handle 100 % of all of it if they can avoid it in a cost effective way. ⁓

Even if the code did work, I think that would still matter.

Matt Medeiros (42:06)
Yeah. So in this case, you're saying like, in that agency slash like plug in product relationship, ⁓ you know, ⁓ well, use your products or gravity forms products. It's like I'm an agency. I'm trusting that this piece of software is going to do the thing that it says it's going to do. And if it doesn't and if there's a bug, I'll knock on the door because that's my right. I bought a license. I please support me, ⁓ you know, and, you know, wait for the plug in company to support them as best as.

So it's like offsetting that risk basically.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (42:39)
Yeah, and honestly, as AI gets better, we'll just, our support will just keep getting even better because that'll be how we differentiate. And I'm actually fine with that. I'm good at that part. You know, I'll lean into that as much as possible. So that's great.

Matt Medeiros (42:50)
Yeah, yeah. You know, the tellic stuff

is actually, you know, surprised me playing with it too. And I'm. Well, I'll get your take on AI like I am still kind of in the middle of like, is this thing really going to change the workforce as much as people are saying? Because my God, it's not getting anything right.

that I've been working with it to do. And I'm just looking around at everybody saying, well, we're all doomed. We've cut 30,000 staff and everyone's gonna be out of a job. And I'm going, this thing can't even draw a picture that I've been prompting it to do for a half an hour. But back to the Telex, ⁓ just working with some examples, what's surprising is it's just not using core WordPress blocks to solve the problems. And I would have thought that the first

AI tool coming out of automatic would have clearly done that. Like I asked before I was playing before we got on, I was like, make me a sponsorship grid with, you know, images that I can place in a grid. And it just comes up with its own image blocks. It's not even like leveraging group row image block, you know, like the heading text. It's all just, you know, bespoke making it right there in the code. So it's like cool, but also.

this is not a standards. And I would have imagined that training data with Gutenberg would have been able to nail this out of the park right out of the gate. So it makes me kind of worry a little bit. Like, is this thing really trained or is it more like in, you know, confining itself into saying, like, just make it a block and that's your only mission. Like, just stay, just make it a block and that's it. I don't I don't have a direct question there, but that's just my thoughts. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (44:35)
Yeah, I think that's part of where the novelty comes from in a lot of ways though, right? Like the fact

that it's not constrained is part of why, you know, someone made Snake and posted that on Twitter recently, right? I think that being the fun of it is part of the thing that's most interesting about it though. And, you know, while to make it a tool to replace plugins, I think it definitely needs to actually adhere to constraints and best practices in ways that, counter argument, a lot of plugin companies don't.

Matt Medeiros (44:46)
Sure. Yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (45:04)
You know, so, you know, maybe it's not that different from what you're going to get. If you just go to WordPress.org and find something that being said, there is, if AI is able to fulfill the magic, the thing that everyone's warning us is going to happen. Those constraints may become irrelevant. Right. And even when figmas editor came out not that long ago, you know, they have the, you know, they convert it to code and there's a million dibs and everyone was making fun of them for it. The people are buying Shopify over WooCommerce.

care 0%. You know, they don't, they're not checking. So it might not matter in the long run. I still do think though that, you know, if the goal is to make things that are maintainable, sustainable over the long term, that the tools are nowhere close today. They're much more impressive than I would have imagined a year ago, but I think that's why I'm skeptical. That's why I'm worried is I thought it was all nonsense a year ago. And now I'm sort of like,

Matt Medeiros (45:35)
Right, right, yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (46:03)
you know, maybe it's not there yet is my current stance. And when I thought it was all nonsense, I was a lot more confident, I would say.

Matt Medeiros (46:12)
I don't know, like if... Yeah, go ahead. No, no, you, you, you your example.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (46:12)
And actually a quick example, sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

A quick example is we do have a lot of feature plugins on WooCommerce.com. You know, things that do very simple things. And I realistically there's some of those you probably could whip something up in cloud that does it and it'd probably be just fine, you know, and that's some of those lower end products that, you know, they're, they're one feature. They're very simple. They aren't doing a whole lot. I think those ones are probably legitimately at risk.

I'm fine with that. know, we'll continue maintaining our version of that and make sure it's sort of ideally the best one. If you do want to offload the responsibility, pay for support. You have a tool that can do that. But you know, you look at something like checkout WC constellation rental products. If you're going to go use AI for that today, you know, good luck. I hope you have fun. We'll be here when you change your mind. You know, it's fine. ⁓ you know, I, just, I, I find that I'm very skeptical that there was like products that meaningfully improve every month.

Matt Medeiros (47:01)
Yeah.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (47:10)
are going to be seeing serious competition from AI over the next, you know, even three, four five years. I'm just not, I don't see it.

Matt Medeiros (47:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I say a year ago or maybe even like, say, let's say eight months ago, because I think you have to measure. I think you have to measure in weeks, really. But but I'll say eight months ago, I I was saying to myself, I really can't predict. I really can't predict where this is going. And but now I feel like I feel like there is a five year and 10 year.

I think there's a five year and a 10 year now, whereas like before when this stuff was really rapidly changing every week, I was like, holy shit, how the hell can you even predict 10 years? And AI, I can't wrap this thought. I'm gonna try it on you. You're the first person I'm gonna try it on. Because I think maybe you can decipher it for me. But I have like this thought in my head. Like if you grew up in...

you know, late 90s, early 2000s when you just saw the iteration of the PC changing so fast. Processors, processor speed, memory, memory speed, storage, storage speed. And it was just like these rapid improvements to the point where it was just like, you can get memory that has 3333 megahertz of process. And you're just like, what the freak does that even mean?

Am I even seeing the difference with this stuff? And I feel like AI doesn't replace, I almost feel like AI is like a component of this tech stack that will just be like a new processor or a new graphic card. Like it doesn't replace everything, but it adds like a processing power to thinking. And it is just there.

I don't feel it wiping everything out ⁓ as much as people predict it will. It's hard for me to illustrate that, but in my head it makes sense.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (49:10)
you

I fully actually agree with that. think that the way I agree with that though is that it will, unless there's a change in the interface, because right now it's basically just chat bots outputting stuff. If that remains what it is, know, it's chat bots, it's text generation. it's, you know, assuming that's a constraint, it will continue to get better and better to the point that if you aren't striving to be significantly above average at any...

Matt Medeiros (49:30)
Yes. Right.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (49:49)
content generation, code generation, whatever, you probably could be replaced by an AI, right? And that's sort of like constant bar raising is kind of scary, I think, but maybe a net positive, depending on how you look at things. like, even today, like, you if you spit out a bunch of blog content with, know, chat GPT, like people can tell it's trash. You feel like something's wrong, but...

As the bar continues to raise, I think that continues, you know, the higher processing speed that you're talking about. I think that continues to get better and better until, you know, more and more people, they either can't tell the difference or you have so many false positives that you don't realize that you can't tell the difference. Like you assume it's AI when it isn't just because you're so used to it being there. You'll have to really, you know, the idea of like net new information or, you know, creating novel and interesting new things.

You'll really have to strive for that more than ever before. But I mean, my best argument why that's okay, I think that was always the case. You know, the people that were sort of like really pushing the edges, trying to do the new cool things were always kinda the best off. Makes me nervous still because that middle, that everything else is a big part of, you know, what people do, frankly.

Matt Medeiros (51:10)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you're right in terms of like the interface of it now. And I also think, you know, this is getting a little off the beaten path, but we're here now, we're here. ⁓ I often think that maybe even AI would replace, it's just another online experience. So you open up your browser now and you open up a bunch of tabs and you go to all the things you want to consume for the day.

Some of them being social media some of them being direct websites some of them being the work that you're doing and I think maybe that AI Enhance like ⁓ maybe even replaces ⁓ let's say Facebook or social media like you log in to to Consume all of the positive things you need in your life. Like you can tell AI just give me all the

positive things I need in my life to get my day going. And instead of it's a feed of like what all your friends are doing, some of it is your friends, but also some of it is saying, hey, don't forget you got to do the groceries. Hey, don't forget you to do this task. Hey, ⁓ I can help you do this task. Bill came in from American Express. Make sure you're you know, you're paying it. Would you like me to pay that for you now? You can just like click these things and like your life is a is like a feed. But instead of a doom scroll feed of social media, it's a

of like the things you need to do for the day or the week or whatever. ⁓ I don't know, that's the crazy thought because I just don't see it wiping everything out.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (52:38)
Yeah, honestly, I think that

and I think that sounds amazing. Actually, what you just described, I'd probably pay for that. I don't know what, you know, I don't know what I'd have to pay, but that sounds fine to me. I will say though, like, you know, tying it back to say WooCommerce is an example. You know, I see stuff online all the time about how, you know, it's going to destroy e-commerce and like all that stuff. But ultimately I'm not that worried because there's a couple of different types of shoppers, right? Like there's people that they want to do their research by the very best thing that, you know,

They decide they want a fancy down blanket and they spend three hours learning everything there is to know about down blankets to find the best one. Maybe chat GPT provides that person a better experience. Maybe it gives them here's the things you need to know and top surfaces that to the top. But then there's people that, you know, they'll sit on the couch browsing the Amazon app for hours at a time because the experience is the, looking around or, you know, there's high end coffee brands with some of the coolest websites.

Like why you're selling coffee. Why is your website like this? Like that experience of, know, being there and doing all that. I don't think that ever goes away completely. You know, maybe, you know, maybe chat, GPT starts storing a payment token and offers to sell you the best version of a thing that you've considered buying. And, know, that probably does eat into something for a lot of people, but what 20 % 50 % you know, I I don't know. I, people are still going to want to browse around.

People are still like, Twitter is not an effective use of anyone's time. You know, I don't think anyone really gets meaningful value out of it. It's a huge website, you know? So, yeah.

Matt Medeiros (54:17)
Yes it is. ⁓

Meisner, kestrelwp.com, kestrelwp.com. Check out all the plugins and the resources available there. Ian Meisner, Cliff Griffin, Becca Rice had Becca on the Matt Report years ago. ⁓ And you can check out more of the team at their About page, kestrelwp.com. Ian, thanks for hanging out today.

Ian Misner KestrelWP Ian Misner webcam 00h 00m 00s 253ms StreamYard (54:40)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.