WordPress vs. The World: An Interview with Scalemath CEO Alex Panagis
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Speaker 1:And give your brand the boost it deserves. Hey, Alex. Welcome to the program.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:First time, you and I have chatted. Saw you tweet something that's, that's always been on my mind about, open source WordPress versus the world, especially Webflow. You know, just looking at the rise and potentially fall of no code tooling and how pricing is going up across the board. Well, maybe we'll even talk about this, seeing pricing going up in the WordPress world as well, Elementor, other builders that have recently announced price increases, so I'm happy to talk about that stuff today. We'll bury the lead a little bit.
Speaker 1:Tell us what you do at Scale Math.
Speaker 2:So in short, we work with software companies, mainly b to b SaaS, but we kinda started out in the WordPress space, and we still have a lot of deep roots there where Heart is clearly very close to the WordPress community and we still use WordPress as a part of, I'd say almost all if not really every single company that we work with uses WordPress as some part of their marketing stack essentially.
Speaker 1:Scale Math, not to be confused with Rank Math. Yes. What's the math all about?
Speaker 2:Well, we actually the name comes from the fact that Rank Math was one of the first companies we worked with. Before Scale Math is what it is today, and at the time it was really just me and a couple other people. So yeah, they helped me settle on the name. The concept of the math in the name is that we back what we do with data and we try, although marketing attribution continues to get harder and harder privacy regulation heavy world, but we try to attribute as much of the work that we can do and track that we are actually driving positive ROI, essentially.
Speaker 1:The last time I actually had to care about marketing marketing attribution was when I was working at an old gig many years ago many years ago where it was, like, critical to, like, my day to day strategy. And now at Gravity Forms, I'm part of the marketing team. So it's something we talk about quite often. And wow, I was like, ten years, this didn't get any better, did it? It's been a while since I've had to do this stuff.
Speaker 1:It was impossible a decade ago. And now you're just like, what do I do with this stuff? It's quite challenging. Talk to me about starting rank math and spending a lot of time in the WordPress world, but then broadening your horizons. Do you remember why you said, okay, WordPress is great, but I need to get bigger.
Speaker 1:I need to go for bigger companies. Let me just read the tagline for those that are just listening on your website. We operate and advise industry leading software companies that don't mean WordPress all the time. So many of us are just used to living in the WordPress bubble. Why go beyond WordPress in your case?
Speaker 2:I think so WordPress was a natural shooting off point, and I don't I think it comes across as wrong when you say, like, grow when and it's not just you, but the the, like, whole concept that it's us growing out of WordPress or growing beyond just working with companies in the WordPress space because, I mean, there there's clearly credit to Gravity Forms is in and I say this sarcastically, just a WordPress form plugin or just a company in the WordPress space, and it's by no means a small company. It's not like WordPress itself is boxing yourself in. For us, was just natural in the sense of from broadening our market as a company and the type of companies that we can work with, but also mostly at the time, and this is as you say, changing slightly with prices going up in WordPress. The fact that in b to b SaaS, had a higher customer lifetime value, which made the work that we're doing a lot easier to justify. It's it's quite difficult unless you're already at a significant scale from organic, like natural growth over time and you've already built a pretty good distribution mechanism to work with a company like us, if your average lifetime value is like a $50 a year subscription and you keep customers on average for two years.
Speaker 2:You can't really hire a team like us to build out SEO as a channel or build out outbound sales or do paid acquisition because the math just generally doesn't work out. Again, unless you you already have enough built out revenue to justify doing it anyway.
Speaker 1:Do you still get a lot of folks coming to you from the WordPress space, saying, hey, help me grow this thing, but then you have to educate educate them on the economics of WordPress, freemium, you know, if they're not at scale yet, it doesn't really make sense. Do you have, like, a whole education mechanism for folks to level up to eventually work with you?
Speaker 2:So the it the answer, twofold. I think we have the education mechanism I've always wanted to do, and we we launched something two years ago, which we didn't end up sticking around with, which is essentially was called Scale Math Academy. Now we're planning to sort of rejig that and redo a lot of the content in it and package it up as the the vault. And that will essentially not only just for WordPress companies, but also kind of put together all of the learnings and the things that we learn from our experience of operating the companies that we work with into something that people can learn from without necessarily hiring us. But on the other side of like companies approaching us to work with us, I think there's always some way.
Speaker 2:It's difficult because if it's a super small company, which definitely has not enough revenue to justify working with an agency, the the, like, agency mindset with which if you want to box us into, you know, agency, which in a sense we are as a service based business when we partner with companies, is you have to turn away the clients that are too small. I have a soft spot for companies in WordPress, and I think that there is a happy medium, because we're not a super big team, we're not like 50 plus people, that we can still choose to work with companies and sort of justify. We have to be a bit careful with it, but essentially the logic is if a company comes to us that isn't super big, but we know that we can grow it, then we justify like, okay, we'll collect the, like a smaller fee from them now just to cover the costs or maybe not even cover the costs of the work that we're doing. But we have the capacity because we have the people full time and they're not, you know, they're not filling their hours in theory. So we kind of justify that we can fill their hours with work for a specific company, we grow it, and then ideally we reap the benefits of when we do grow it together and we develop a super long term partnership with the companies that we work with.
Speaker 1:Is there when you look at it, is it as easy as assessing annual revenue, or is it profitability that is the first, like, hurdle someone has to get over? Like, do I have to be a million dollar a year business to to work with you or a quarter million dollar a year business, or does it then drill down into what's the profitability per per user or or account depending on if they're SaaS or or, you know, selling a product?
Speaker 2:It definitely depends a bit on both. I'd also say business model. So like the how long the buyer journey is as well is it kind of plays a big role in what we do. So if it's something where you don't have a self serve sign up process and it's really only sales led, those tend to be the type of companies that we don't find. We can work with them and we can do like strategy positioning, website copy work, and we we have success in that element of it, but it just ends up not being as effective of a growth mechanism, I guess, to bring us in because we can't sort of amplify what we do with all the channels that we're able to tap into.
Speaker 2:So the ideal ideal ones are definitely over 500 k in annual recurring revenue. We do work with companies that are under this, but I think at that point it becomes, I I guess, similar to what you're seeing at Gravity Forms now, which is much bigger than 500 k ARR from my understanding, although I don't have actual numbers, is that, you're trying to attribute the marketing work that you're doing, but also you're kind of in this luxury position where you have to attribute it, but you can also operate based on gut and what you think is right for the company. And I think Ahrefs' Tim Sullo talks about this a lot. It's like, sure, if we measure just direct conversions from content, I could argue that there's pretty much no impact of writing content for the Ahrefs blog at this point because everybody already knows them. But they realize there's so many downstream effects of doing it and they choose to still do it because it's just what they believe in as a company and they have the revenue to justify it.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about the process or at least the early day process, a customer. And I promise, listener, we're going to get to talk about, like, pricing in the WordPress world and and and this in the, no code SaaS world and stuff like that. That's that's, you know, the the the genesis of this conversation, but I'm very interested in this agency side of things as well. Talk to me about the early steps one goes through when they first sign with you. And even, actually, more specifically, let me hold that question for a moment.
Speaker 1:This is a terrible way to frame this question. But I think you had mentioned before companies that you work best with companies that have a sales led approach. Did I hear that No.
Speaker 2:I don't have. So if they're if it's like a company which does have pricing on their site that has, like, you have to get on a call with a salesperson
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 2:That can be part of the approach. So there are, like, SaaS companies when it's once even with like Notion is a great example. We don't work with them, but that's a great example of a company which does this. They don't you don't have to get on a call to sign up with them, but if you want to, you can book a demo with a salesperson if your org is big enough. That's kind of the the model that works best for companies.
Speaker 1:Got it. And that's what works best with you, right? A company comes to you and they say, hey, we sell this thing, but you have to book a call and demo. Chances are it's not what you're going to advise on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not that ends up we we do work with companies that have this type of model, but it ends up not being where we do like our full service engagement, where we do various things, we do content SEO, essentially, and paid ads, because it's not as effective to do that in my view and my experience and what I've seen for companies that just have this sort of closed off process.
Speaker 1:Got it. Which now leads into that question. As the person signs with you sort of day one, month one, week one, however you see it, what are the first things you're getting them set up with, or how should they be thinking when they've, you know, first enter into a contract with you?
Speaker 2:I love to say the age old answer that you'll get from people in SEO, which depends on what we're entering the engagement into. So depending on what the company needs. At the moment, content is definitely still a foundational aspect of the work that we do. Although how we do it is shifting, no doubt with the advent of AI, of course, that's kind of on the top of everybody's mind. Understanding the product and what they do, if we don't already.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the companies, like Rank Math, for example, when we started working with them, I actually reached out to them and I had been using the product for, I think, maybe six, seven months before we started working together for that's been the case for a lot of the companies which we've kept for, like, four plus years. Was I act I used the product, and I thought this was a really good product that we could scale and we could acquire users for, and it deserves to have more users because it's actually a good product that I could stand behind, and that was sort of the shooting off point. So but if that's not the case, and it it's a let's say it's an industry where we don't really have a strong footing. Like, it's a it's a product where we actually don't like, I'm not an expert in in in that side of things. I I wouldn't give a talk about funding, about investing, about this side of, like, how EMI share agreements work, but let's say it's a platform that does something related to this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the early part of the process is definitely getting as clear of an understanding as we can for me and for the rest of our team of what it is that they do, the market they serve, the customer profile. So I guess establishing the customer profile and trying to mold ourselves into that customer profile to become a part of it so that we can think in the customer's shoes is basically the the the definitely the step one for every company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Here's something I'm I'm interested in this sort of meta conversation of being an agency owner and being an agency owner in the SEO world. And I don't wanna just bucket you as, like, an SEOist, unless that's what you want, but I love to sort of just get your thoughts. I have my thoughts, but I just wanna hear yours. I promise I won't try to say mine. But when you're an agency owner and you're trying to scale the business and you're trying to grow, like, what are you thinking about when you're competing with other agencies?
Speaker 1:How do you think about growing the agency? I'll preface it just a little bit. Like do you start to think, okay, we need to get better at SEO, and that'll get us better clients, or better results, which hopefully leads to better clients. Is it some other technology or product piece to sort of scale the organization horizontally, and then hopefully lift off a little bit higher? How do you think about growing an agency, SEO agency, amongst so much competition in the space?
Speaker 2:Amazing question. So the answer is multifaceted. The first is product is definitely a part of it. So we are when we the and that kind of I think our tagline hopefully does a pretty good job of communicating that is while we work with companies in our group which are clients and pay us to do a service, which inherently that description makes us an agency. On the other side, and that's our long term vision as a company is we don't treat any of the companies that we work with as agency clients.
Speaker 2:Think that's not to talk down on how other agencies treat clients at all. But in our sense, we just view them as if they were a company in our sort of portfolio. And that's how we try to treat them. That's how we try to dedicate resources to them. So we only work with a company where meaning if we grow and we have another person that joins the team, even if it doesn't mean we can directly or immediately bill more for our work and we can get a better result for a company that we have in our sort of group of companies, we will deliver that whatever service it is or do whatever it is that we can do with the the new team member that we have on our team, for example.
Speaker 2:And I think the result of that is it's very dangerous. It's a very it's you know, I I will be the first to admit it's probably the stupidest concept in terms of us growing our business and and to trying to just drive as much profit for ourselves as possible. But for me, it's like, I I don't want to say that money doesn't matter, but an element of it is definitely we have to scale slowly and we have to bring on the right type of clients for it to work, a. But B is also we have to do work that we're proud of every day. And then comes the third part, which is because we are also building our own products, the intention is to build essentially the world leading team that we can on every aspect.
Speaker 2:So that's like design, engineering, product, marketing. So bring that sort of experience all together, and we can apply that to the companies that we work with to extend their existing teams, most of which are internal to them. So they have their own design and engineering teams. At the moment, the most of the work we do for the clients we work with is growth focused. But on the other side, we are building our own stuff, which I think gives us a unique angle on how we work, which is not just, oh, we're coming in and we're doing x, y, z service, x, y, z deliverables, and then we call it a day is we look at the entire stack as much as possible.
Speaker 2:And the fact that we're building our own things as well, hopefully to launch relatively soon, that gives us another angle on, okay, we have to be really good because we're the people we're hiring aren't just doing deliverables that we get paid for. We're investing in building our own product, and we're putting money and spending their time on that. So it has to be really good, essentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One of the most fascinating things that I enjoyed I'm not an agency owner anymore. Ran an agency for a decade ran it for a decade a decade ago, so it's been quite some time. But one of the most fascinating things of running an agency, in my opinion, is the fascination of branding and branding as the agency. And I'm curious of your thoughts.
Speaker 1:Like, when you look at the sea of competitors, let's say you were at a a word camp of of I don't know what industry events in your field are aside from, let's say, word camps. But let's say you're at a word camp. There's a 100 other agencies in the room. I feel like 98% of them can all do the same things. They're all delivering the same things, but one person is better at marketing themselves than the other.
Speaker 1:And that's how people are winning, which then leads into bigger contracts because it's the name brand. Like the old saying of you can't get fired for hiring IBM or what, you know, that old saying from many many many years ago. That is a fascinating aspect of the services business, of the agency business. I don't have a direct question, but Don Draper, Mad Men. You think about how you can build up and grow this respect in the industry, for customers, for other SEOists.
Speaker 1:And you're like, yeah, can raise my prices just because we're badass. And I didn't add a new team member. I didn't add a new product. I just said, we're the best. And I went in and I pitched 100 ks higher.
Speaker 1:Talk to me about that. Do ever think about the branding and the sales process in the company?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, I think the point you make is super valid. Mean, if you look at the big five accounting firms or the big, you know, in the agency world, the biggest agencies there are in the world, I don't think any of them really win because they put the output of the work that they do building the best possible team first, and they wouldn't have grown as big if they did because that's not a scalable model by any means. So, yeah, 100%. Think it's it's entirely a positioning and marketing yourself angle and you kind of earn the right ones.
Speaker 2:You have a big enough name to charge the money and turn clients away because you you if they don't if they say no to paying your, like, exorbitant fees, then you just turn them away and you don't really care because you have enough revenue already. I'd like to think so, I mean, we're we're all in this at the end of the day in business to make money. We wouldn't be working so hard otherwise. So, we we wouldn't work, like, in the early days, eighteen hours, and now still long long days in order to to get our work done. But we are passionate about it, at least I speak for myself.
Speaker 2:I'm passionate about what I do, and I think I love it. I say I think, it almost sounds as if I'm uncertain. I am certain. Well, I do love what I do. And I I don't think that I would charge just because I could.
Speaker 2:Like, let's say a company approaches us and I've always felt that pricing should be fair to what it costs us. Like, we deserve to have our margin. So I can put a bit of a bit of a example maybe to the picture of how it works. So like we've started working with companies where we charge a few thousand dollars and that's basically consulting strategy style of work. Then they come to us and they realize, oh, you can actually do a lot more than this.
Speaker 2:You have a team and we don't wanna hire in house, but we wanna do X, Y, Z. And can you find people to do it? And I'm like, yeah, it will cost us probably about this, but you already pay us the existing $2.03 k for strategy and basically planning the work. So now if we just wanna do it as well, it will cost us a little bit more and we sort of price within that. So they know their pricing is like matched to what they try to do it in house.
Speaker 2:It would cost probably most of the times more depending on what is done. Sometimes it would cost less to do it in house, but we just can do it better than they would if they would hire one person to do it in house. So I think that's what our pricing revolves around at the moment. That's not to say I I hope I don't come I mean, maybe I do. Like, three years down the line, listen I I remember this interview and I I think we we changed our model and now we're just like sending out 7 figure proposals or RFPs for really big Fortune 500 companies.
Speaker 2:If that ends up being the direction that we take, then I would like to think there's a way to split it into two divisions of the company where you have one which operates in this way and one that can still serve the SaaS companies that are like 500 ks to 5,000,000 ARR versus just the ones that are way bigger and would easily not even blink to sign a much bigger contract.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I'm not here to to give you any advice because you're way smarter than I am in this in this realm. But I think of like your field as being much more you have to be much more reactionary and thinking on your toes than, like, when I was running my web agency, which was intake a project. We know what this project is. We scope it out.
Speaker 1:We plan it. We build it. That process takes time. There's no there's no way around it. We have to build out the the the whatever.
Speaker 1:The wireframes, the designs, we have to show it to everybody, then we have to educate, we have to on we have to launch this website, all the things. Right? There's a big piece of infrastructure when you're building a website and trying to launch it to the to the client. I feel there's a premium that can be paid to an agency like yours for the sake of, oh my god, the algorithm just changed. What do we do?
Speaker 1:Like, midstream, right, all of a sudden, another platform changes the way they do things or AI all of a sudden launches. And that, like, three, six, nine month, twelve month plan that you had now has to adjust because of some other entity that is out of your control. Versus, like, a web agency where it's like HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript. It's changing. Like, we're not yet any.
Speaker 1:And, like, we have we have some time while we build the site, whereas yours, feel like, is more reactionary. And that's where these bigger agencies, at least from what I've seen when I went up against bigger agencies, they just had, I don't know, luxury resources. Like, oh, you want somebody to talk to? When we come to the meeting, we we're bringing you coffee. We're bringing you breakfast.
Speaker 1:Where do you wanna go? Like, it's like it's all this, like, experience, and then, like, 20% of it is work that they actually do. Right? And I think there's like a lot of people that want that experience and who pay for it. Big dollars for it because it's a comfort zone.
Speaker 1:Right? And it's like less tech. I I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's what I saw when I was going up to buy I'm outside of Boston. So when I would pitch clients from other, like, Boston agencies, it was just like, no chance. Like, who's this guy who drove an hour to get here?
Speaker 2:You know? Yeah. No. A 100%. And I think, yeah, I think I I don't know.
Speaker 2:I'm doing a misquote, but it's like another, like, McKinsey or or, you know, what what's the other big firm? I can't even think of the name now. Deloitte quote, which is like, you don't hire, like, one of these firms because they're really good at what you do. You hire them because they're a good fall guy for the situation, which is like 100%. One of the other things.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I I think there there's definitely like a lot a lot of credit to both sides. Like, at the end of the day, there where businesses, I think speaking of SEO, there's like this current topic on Twitter, which is always funny to see. People criticizing Neil Patel. I think he he gets a lot of criticism in the SEO space. And he's kind of died down and he's quieted down if if you've probably realized in the last few years.
Speaker 1:I almost did that this morning, Alex. I'll tell you. I saw a tweet from him and I almost did it.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, there's a lot of split opinions, and there's also in the WordPress space. I can think of a a couple of people that people have split opinions on as well. And it's like, at the end of the day, he's shifted his focus to do his agency in a certain way. He's building a successful business. If he if I mean, I hope I don't know much.
Speaker 2:I hear some rumblings about how happy his clients are, but I won't comment on that. And as long as the clients are happy and they continue to pay him, if they continue to pay him and they're not happy with the service or they don't get good results, then I would blame that on the company and not having the according process to determine that the agency they're working with is not successful. I think with the companies that we work with, we kind of don't have that luxury because we're not working with non savvy customers or big businesses where it's kind of delegated to some marketing manager who doesn't really have the ability to just decide whether to let go of an agency because they can clearly tell the work is not good. So we're working with people that are really, really good at what they're doing, but they just want that certain aspects of their work off of their plate or done by us because we kind of take that burden of growing the team, managing the whole process. And like you said, with AI and everything kind of forcing us to be a little bit more reactive or I would say proactive, we have the luck of like, or the benefit of working with multiple companies.
Speaker 2:It's like, would you rather as a software company that's impacted by an algorithm update or by AI content, how do we take advantage of it? Work with like two in house people that you have that are fully dedicated and sure they might be spending in total eighty hours a week working on your company, or would you rather work with us, which we're working with like a dozen or so other companies doing this and we see the impact that it's had, we've tested, we've had the ability to experiment with permission when we can be a bit more experimental to see how things work and then make decisions based on actually doing things as opposed to just, okay, we're gonna try something on a smaller scale, and it takes way longer to see any sort of result from it.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna I found the tweet. Yeah. Now we'll talk about this pricing thing. I I promise the I promise the listeners. Here's the tweet.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to WordPress, folks. I know a few Webflow agencies are already making plans. What can I say? You were warned. Now here's your thirteenth reason not to build on platforms that you have zero control over.
Speaker 1:And this tweet is showing off a screenshot where somebody posted $35 per month per locale and saying the expensive 12 US plan wouldn't translate. I've seen other people posting things like their Webflow pricing went up to, like, $50,000. You know? And they're like, I just have this website, but you're charging me for records. You're charging me for users, and none of this stuff exists in the WordPress or or WooCommerce world.
Speaker 1:I remember writing a post about Elementor versus Webflow on the Matt Report blog, talking when people were up in arms, the first Elementor price increase, which was I don't know. I don't have it front of me a few years ago. And people were, like, exploding. And I was so all you have to do is look at Webflow. If you stack in everything that Webflow has as, like, a builder component, and then the CMS side of it that WordPress gives you, you're and and a simple ecommerce site, you're talking like a thousand dollars a month at Webflow.
Speaker 1:That was then. That was years ago. Now it's probably like $56,000 just to get into that base level. How do you see the landscape? Are you advising folks?
Speaker 1:Hey. Switch to work. Like, if you come to across a a company, say, hey. Switch to WordPress. Are you wrestling with Webflow or other proprietary CMSs?
Speaker 1:Give me your lay of the land of open source versus closed source.
Speaker 2:So I think I we both have come from like a definitely a place of natural bias when it comes to the conversation. There's no doubt of that. So yeah, it goes without saying I personally don't prefer the flexibility webflow offers or lack thereof. Their CMS product and much of the suite really over WordPress, whether standard or you go with, you know, Next. Js front end or something like this.
Speaker 2:For the majority of the work that we do, that's what we see work best. And then if you use a, you know, if you wanna build headless, whether you then say go with a different CMS that is more suited to headless like Sanity is, I see a lot of great sites built with it, and it's a great experience to work with it as well. I think that it's personal preference. My personal preference is now not to turn to Webflow. Price aside, because if you can build great sites with WordPress, and you can build great sites with Webflow as well, I think both of us have probably seen terrible sites built on both platforms.
Speaker 2:So it's not a matter of like, oh, one platform can build an empirically better site. But I would argue that the flexibility WordPress offers means that you can control more of your site, and as you say, you aren't tied into their ecosystem. I think that to kind of put a pin in that side of it, in terms of the end user being able to do what they want, I don't have a like a force because like the tweet was taken out of context. It was basically saying, I'm advising, I was warning people not to switch to Webflow by no means. If you can build a better site with Webflow than you can with WordPress, build it with Webflow.
Speaker 2:I'd rather you build your site with Webflow than you build a half botched WordPress site that doesn't get you good results. You can always move to WordPress or a custom front end or rebuild when you have budget to hire a company to do it or hire a great developer in house to do it. But if you yourself or your company is currently able to do it with Webflow and can't do it with WordPress and Elementor or WordPress and full site editing, then do it with Webflow. I have no opposition to that. I think it's not great to build on a closed source platform though.
Speaker 2:The same way, the same argument goes back to the age old discussion of like, running a newsletter instead of just having all of your audience on YouTube and social media. I think it's to me, that whole discussion is in the same vein.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's also there's I mean, we kind of made the argument we we kind of made the argument for Webflow for a particular client in the first half of this conversation. Look, if you have the money, and there's a lot of organizations out there, you know, use the Neil Patel example, like, hey, I don't like what he's doing, I don't like, know, the market he's going, I don't like but it doesn't matter, he's he's building a business. Right? And I've said this about, you know, WordPress's favorite punching bag, which is Awesomotive.
Speaker 1:You know, look, you you might not like it. I get it. There's things I don't like about it, and I'm friends with Syed, but he's got 400 plus people he continues to grow and acquire, and what can you do unless the products are really bad, people aren't buying them anymore? That's what's gonna bring down the business. I don't know what you want me to say.
Speaker 1:Same thing with Webflow. Hey. There are organizations out there who are like million bucks a year. Webflow? Fine.
Speaker 1:Better better than Microsoft, better than Adobe, better than Oracle. Right? And going into these other bigger, you know, things. And we only see it from that open source looking up. Right?
Speaker 1:The WordPress world, which is usually just lesser dollars. But there are plenty of agencies that are building massive WordPress sites. It's not to say. And then I think maybe it becomes the issue of, okay, maybe you throw a price aside, It becomes about being vendor lock in, flexibility of the platform. And that's maybe what security issues, publishing workflow.
Speaker 1:These are things that the bigger the bigger organizations are are probably evaluating on and and less about price.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because if you're You know what? We're being honest, like, 35 per locale, if you're actually translating your entire site, you're gonna be spending more than 35 a month to maintain multiple languages of your your site in multiple languages. There's no doubt about that in my opinion. So I think it was it came across like, the price is the reason to move away.
Speaker 2:For me, it's more the eco it's definitely more the ecosystem. I prefer trying to eliminate as much vendor lock in as possible. If we switch gears from outside WordPress, you could argue in some ways, people in Next. Js are saying that a lot of the stuff that they're pushing forward with front end technology is kind of limited or at least much more difficult to do outside of Vercel, their deployment platform. I think this is a great example as well.
Speaker 2:Now in there, I think they're not intentionally doing it. It's just taking a while for the other deployment platforms to catch up a little bit. But yeah, in general, like you don't want to choose a platform that limits you. So if we switch out of WordPress to apply more context, so like I can think of calendly versus kyle.com. Or there's actually two other there's plugins in the WordPress space.
Speaker 2:There's the one from Brainstorm Forest, LatePoint, and there's also the WPM Manager Ninja guys have the other one, which is called Fluent Booking or Fluent Schedule. So if you use that example and then you take WordPress versus whatever your favorite closed source website building platform is as platform number two. And then in the third example, take project management and then you say Asana, Atrium, Basecamp, And then I can't even think of an open source project management platform probably for better, for a good reason. And I think in two of those, it's pretty easy that you would probably want to choose an open source alternative. But in the third one, project management, you wouldn't want to self host.
Speaker 2:Now with WordPress, I think it's quite a clear example where for us and our natural bias and experience and just preferring the workflow with WordPress, we do want the control, we do want WordPress, we wanna host it with a specific hosting providers that we trust and own as much of the stack as possible. And then beyond that, we can control the plugins that we run. We can run our own plugins easily without being charged extra to do all this stuff basically.
Speaker 1:You know, another piece of this, and this is getting a little bit deeper into the rabbit hole of like SaaS pricing and and and business models. But again, at an old job, we transitioned from one from one devil to the next and it was HubSpot to ClickUp. And, you know, and you go from HubSpot's a local business to me and, you know, have actually known them for years having traveled to Boston and being in that selling in that space for quite some time. It's funny to see how large they've gotten. But anyway, the point is, you sign up with ClickUp and you're like, oh, it's $50 a user.
Speaker 1:That's not bad. It's better than Hubspot, blah blah blah. And you start going into it. And then, you know, as you get into the platform, their sales specialists or whatever their titles are contacting you. And it's like, oh, hey, did you know about this module?
Speaker 1:And you're gonna need this module to enable that. You're like, oh, damn, I didn't know that. And then it's $99 a user and you're like, oh, okay, now it's $99 a user. And then they say, and then we'll set it all up for you for $10,000 Literally, right? They have their professional network or their professional services side of it.
Speaker 1:You're like, I thought software was supposed to be better than this. Like, I thought the reason why you charge so much is to be better than this. That's not the question, though. I I was recently watching David Henmeier Hansen, DHH, from Basecamp. I don't know if you caught it with Jason Kalicana.
Speaker 1:He was talking about their upcoming once.com product. Sounds like it's gonna be a Slack competitor, which I kinda guessed early days. What do you think about that model moving forward? Do you think that's do you think they're gonna be able to survive? Well, I mean, of course, they're be able to survive.
Speaker 1:That's not a really good question. But what do you think about the pay once model for these larger software companies?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think Basecamp is like Basecamp can justify it because they're a 100,000,000, I think, a a year or more. But I don't think it's a great model for new software companies to try to break into. So if you're, like, looking at a space let's say you wanna build a HubSpot competitor and you think, I've nailed it. I'm gonna build an amazing HubSpot competitor and launch it.
Speaker 2:And it's just gonna be a thousand per license per user, but you pay once and never again. And I don't think that and I don't think that you and there I would be I would love it if someone proves me wrong at some point, but I don't think anyone can build a sustainable business model like that. I think the choice for it to be a Slack I was also a bit confused, and I'm very curious to see how Basecamp launches it because we we used Basecamp for a really long time. Only recently, we now we switch to Asana for most of our internal stuff, except visual projects for which we use Atrium, of course. And I think, yeah, because chat used to be a core part of Basecamp itself, and they kind of intentionally didn't make instant messaging more of a center of attention in Basecamp, and that was an intentional product decision.
Speaker 2:So for the first ones.com product to be a chat product, I wonder whether it will be completely separate from Basecamp, what the whole intention of doing it that way is essentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I listened to that episode, of course, and, you know, DHH is a character himself. Right? I mean, he's you know, you can be polarizing or or whatever, but it it's funny for him to talk about, like, the exorbitant profits that these, you know, mega corporations make, you know, like the ones we've mentioned before, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, etcetera. And but also, so does Base Camp.
Speaker 1:Right? Like, they've made tons and tons of profits. In fact, I saw Jason Fried, like, post his Chicago house for sale on Twitter the other day. It was, like, $7,800,000 in the in the in the, you know, in the heart of Chicago taking up three city blocks. And I was just like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:You guys are doing alright. I guess it's okay to launch this once product because this is probably like the final chapter of your of your online business career. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think they're planning to launch a lot more. I'm I'm super curious. And I think their, like, execution of it will kind of I I think they've gotten to this stage, Basecamp, where they hadn't changed their pricing model for a really long time. Like, they they were at $99 a month for unlimited users for the longest time. So you could argue that for the project management space, arguably not the greatest pricing model, considering that you have the best expansion model revenue that when a company grows and hires a new full time employee or contractor, they pay additional money to you.
Speaker 2:And they kind of nuked that with having $99 a month pricing. I think they experimented for a while switching away from it. I don't know what it is now exactly. And now they're becoming even more expand experimental. They're pushing the product forward as well.
Speaker 2:Ever since we moved away, they've shipped a bunch of improvements, some of which we were waiting for years that they would make. So, yeah, I think I'm very interested to see. I wonder, like, whether they turned the once.com stuff into a portfolio of companies, which is what it sounded like. They wanna build multiple things. I I thought that what they would launch was their deployment platform or deployment script that they were talking about as an open source developer tool because they ever since moving away from the cloud, is sort of this big thing that, again, DHH was so opinionated about was that they would show how they deploy with rails their rails application to their own homegrown cloud solution that they, you know, pay instead of going to AWS.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see, obviously, what they do. Wrapping up here real quick real quick. What's your take on the impact of AI in your space?
Speaker 1:You know, I, again, am a novice in this. I I have my ChatGPT account. I've made a a GPT for Matt Report. Like, you can go and search the 350 plus episodes that I that I recorded over the years. I use it as an ideation tool for blog writing, but I don't trust it.
Speaker 1:I I don't use it. I still feel it kind of cumbersome to actually craft long form content. It's not the doomsday kind of thing that I see on Twitter. What are your thoughts?
Speaker 2:I think there's there's good applications. Like, similar my experience with it is very similar to yours. Like, I found it great for certain things. I find it great for, like, when I really have no inspiration for email subject lines and I wanna make a joke, because ironically, I'm not able to, like, incorporate a pun into something, then I find it funny to turn to chat GBT and useful because it saves me the time of just sitting at a blank screen for a long time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it's becoming more and more useful. What I will say is the biggest shift that it's had is in hiring. And I think that that's across the board in customer support, in content, and everything is that the type of people that it actually, and this sounds insensitive, but it actually makes sense to hire has gone up. Like you need people that are original thinkers, are doers, that are actually able to come to a topic and bring some original thought. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to hire them in content.
Speaker 2:In customer support, you don't need somebody anymore who can answer the question that's already in your documentation. Because that will you know, Intercom, HelpScout now as well. They acquired another AI company to build that into their platform. They all do it really well. So, yeah, I think it's raised the bar, which makes it more difficult to find people that are very good at the moment.
Speaker 2:But I think long term, what it will do is it will just force everybody to become a lot better, which I like because I think it's done it for our work. It's made a lot of the work that companies like us and I would say I'm not gonna exclude us from it. I would say like the bottom 10% of the work that we do, the types of content that we created, like the listicles and the stuff like this, it's made all of this pretty redundant, pretty easy to create. So it's leveled that playing field And it makes us focus more on the actually interesting things to do, which long term is more enjoyable, creating more value for the Internet as opposed to just spitting out a bunch of junk. I don't know if you saw, I think it was The Verge, the article that was like SEOs have ruined the Internet.
Speaker 2:That was like a couple of weeks ago and it was basically like, oh, every article is an affiliate article. But then people pointed out that like a significant amount of traffic to sites like The Verge, The New York Times are affiliate posts on their wire cutter, you know, affiliate sites and stuff like that. So yeah, I think overall it's raised the bar. So I hope it continues to be a positive thing and not a negative thing.
Speaker 1:Is there a general sentiment in your space where if content was created by AI, like you have to like, you know you know, you're informing the customer, like, hey. We yeah. I don't know. 20% of this was made by AI, 80% was checked fact checked by a human or whatever the number is. Like, do you see AI content working, but then also now we have to disclose this as a as the mechanism of source?
Speaker 2:So I I had the opinion in the very beginning. I was quite opinionated that companies should openly disclose on their website and almost be forced to disclose that they're using AI. Obviously, it's not as simple any it's anymore. It wasn't at the time really that black and white. And I I it take the same opinion as I used to with just low quality human written content or just not low quality, but just low effort human written content.
Speaker 2:So something was quick to put together. And I think one of the experiments early on and it's there's a case study of this recently, which is really funny. Is this a finance financial planning software company? I don't know if that's the category they would box themselves into, but that's kind of what comes to mind for me called causal or casual. I don't know how you pronounce it.
Speaker 2:They did a bunch of glossary definitions in their space. So like, what is investing? What is like stock options? All of this. And like, I don't know if those were specific examples, but things like this.
Speaker 2:And they created all the content with AI, no original thought, no original images, nothing. And of course, quickly, because they spun up 1000s or maybe even 10s of 1000s of pages, they drove a lot of traffic. And somebody posted the person who did it wrote bragging about what they did and that they automated the hell out of it and they didn't actually do it without saying the company name, but because they said the category they did it in, everybody knew quite quickly who it was. And then people were saying how this is just unethical and it's low quality, it doesn't add value. And quite quickly after the traffic to the site started tanking and people were posting about it.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I think that's the angle that we take. If it's something that's so and it comes back to if it's something that's so easy to create that there's very little value in it, then we question whether we did enough. And we try to judge because let's say you are writing a best WordPress form plugin post. You don't need to write a 10,000 word post about that topic, even if you are Gravity Forms and you have tons of opinions to bring to the table. So you don't wouldn't use AI if I were Gravity Forms to write that post because it's clearly the highest most important post to write and rank for.
Speaker 2:But there's a limited amount of original thinking that you can bring to a post like this. You can bring your take and then you can sort of like introduce alternative options, free alternatives and things like this, and kind of leave it at that because the end user already knows that you're writing about your own product and gonna put yourself first anyway. So yeah, think it kind of comes to a decision of what you're writing about, can you actually bring original thought to it? If not, then you don't force yourself to. And then you can use AI to accelerate and improve parts of it.
Speaker 2:There are ethical ways to do that. Yeah. I think that's kind of where I see it at the moment.
Speaker 1:Man, I I wanna have you back in six months. We can talk about how this stuff has changed. Alex, thanks for hanging out today. Fantastic conversation. Probably gonna go down as one of the best conversations of the year.
Speaker 1:There's not much time left for anyone to take that slot from you, so thanks for hanging out today. Where can folks go to say thanks?
Speaker 2:You can say hi to me on Twitter alexjapanais, or just check us out at scalemath.com. Yeah, and it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
