Pressable: An Automattic Brand with Its Own Personality

[00:00:00] Matt: It’s the WP minute, plus your home for long form discussions around the WordPress ecosystem, deeper insights and conversations that you won’t find on that other five minute WordPress podcast that we do. Follow both podcasts@thewpminute.com slash podcasts.

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[00:00:38] JEss: Hey Matt, thanks for having me.

[00:00:40] Matt: Had the wonderful opportunity to run into you at, I almost said WordCamp Washington, DC. WordCamp US, out in, National Harbor, Maryland, outside of DC. I had a good time. How about you?

[00:00:53] JEss: I had a great time and it was amazing getting to meet your kids. I felt a little bad for your wife meeting them because I don’t know, it was like she didn’t even need to be involved in the process. You just sort of spawned these minis.

[00:01:07] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, my wife doesn’t listen to my podcast. Who am I kidding? You know, I was going to say if when she listens to this, she doesn’t listen to anything that I do. but you know, they, they are complete replicas of her. like me, you’d have to have them lined up alongside of the two of us to actually really like to see that.

[00:01:28] but her whole side of the family, of course, is like, Oh yeah, they look exactly like Sarah. Like there’s, there’s no trace of DNA in these children from you, Matt. so

[00:01:37] JEss: that’s so funny.

[00:01:38] Matt: It was great. had a great time. you had the pressable booth there, man. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a word camp. I don’t know if, did you go to Europe and, and Asia?

[00:01:49] JEss: No, no I didn’t. But I did go to WordCamp US last year in California as well. and it’s been interesting seeing the evolution as we are all kind of coming back from the COVID years when everything was at a grinding halt. you know, last year, WordCamp U. S. was kind of an on ramp, you know, almost like a WordCamp U.

[00:02:09] S. mini. And then this year definitely felt like we’d return.

[00:02:14] Matt: It was pretty overwhelming, right? Like the booth size. It’s been a while since I’ve been to like a proper,sort of vendor meetup or vendor hall. The last one that I went to, not even WordPress related was, HubSpot inbound.

[00:02:28] The booths were huge, like there’s so much stuff going on and it was great to sort of like feel that energy. again, but tiring. The venue was massive, walking back and forth and actually having to work, actually having to work a booth for the first time ever, was, was interesting, but fun at the same time.

[00:02:46] Tiring. Just standing up all day meeting people.

[00:02:49] JEss: Well, I’m gonna steal something from you guys because, honest to goodness, who knew that people would lose their minds over Legos? I mean, I should have known. I should have known. But when it came time for you guys to pull your winners, I swear to God, you would have thought Rolling Stone had just walked into the building.

[00:03:06] It was awesome.

[00:03:08] Matt: Yeah, they do,the giveaways are fun. Like it’s crazy people, how much people love, obviously love swag, love free stuff. We’re giving away a meta quest as well. so that was probably part of it, but yeah, Mike on our team, former principal for, I think like a grade one through five school. So he knows how to corral an audience with his, you know, with his voice and get, and get people going.

[00:03:32] Aside from going to WordCamps, aside from work in the booth, what else, do you do, in your role at Pressable day to day? What is it like to be Director of Operations for Pressable? Again, aside from having to watch over Jeff Mattson.

[00:03:49] JEss: Well, that is in and of itself a new full time job that I have recently acquired. Working with Jeff is such a trip. Every single day is fun and new, and he brings so much energy to the team. We’re really excited to have him. but I’d be lying if I said that every single day I wasn’t wondering to myself, is this going to be the one?

[00:04:08] That we get kicked off of Twitter. so far so good. but director of operations honestly feels almost like a catchall position since I joined. you know, I’ve been with the company since, last. February and I have absolutely loved the last year and a half. I got back into an ops role, which, you know, I had back in the copy blogger days and, you know, then I moved into a product role and I would say that this one really takes all of it.

[00:04:35] and brings it together into one really cool role. you know, Pressable is small and scrappy. So I oversee operations, product, and marketing. and for a while we didn’t have anybody in the marketing leadership seat, so I was kind of running all of that with some agencies, while also still doing some product, and then of course, you know, the day to day ops fun.

[00:04:56] but thankfully we have some incredible leaders, and some incredible team members that, we all just sort of rally together. I don’t know that we have siloed job descriptions. Of course, to an extent every team does, but you know, when, when one of us is kind of, you know, floundering, everybody just instinctively jumps in and helps.

[00:05:19] And that’s really, really cool.

[00:05:21] Matt: When you first, came on as a WP Minute partner, we talked about, you know, we, Chatted a lot about sort of where pressable came from, you know, where it is today and sort of like what everyone wants to know when I talk to, I don’t know, anyone from, let’s say a jet pack to the tavern to pressable is so how much does Matt dictate what you do day to day?

[00:05:44] And you were like, he doesn’t even not, you know, he doesn’t knock on the door. We act like a, like a startup within, the bigger universe. Of automatic, because you have wordpress. com, automatic does as sort of like the,hosting du jour every day at, at automatic and then pressable, the managed WordPress hosting side of it.

[00:06:05] one would almost think Hey, do you all compete with each other? Do you have any optics into. com and do both? You know what I was gonna say partners, but to do both properties talk to one another about the the the overall approach to wordpress hosting

[00:06:22] JEss: That is a really, really good question, and it’s one I’m not asked nearly as much as I would think that I would be, but it’s also, you know, another great way to honor you for your keen observations. just to back up for a second, when we started talking about sponsoring the WP minute. I just want to kind of honor you and what you and the team are doing here.

[00:06:42] We are thrilled to partner with you on this because I really believe in what you guys are doing. And I love the voice that you have in the community. It’s not like other voices. and so we’re, we’re really excited to, you know, get to support you guys in the work that you do. but it also kind of speaks to Who Pressable is working to become now, especially with the hiring of Mattson.

[00:07:06] We are kind of changing our voice to be a little more informed. answering your question, yes, we are owned by Automatic. you know, Pressable was one of the original three managed WordPress hosts. Of course, back then we were called ZippyKid. Fun fact, my paychecks still say ZippyKid. but you know, when Automatic fully acquired, pressable and they changed the name to pressable and we’ve been that since, we have a board of directors that, you know, work for automatic as well.

[00:07:35] And, you know, they heavily inform, Well, I wouldn’t say heavily. They, they certainly have opinions and recommendations on what we do and don’t do, but for the most part, the joke that I usually make is we’re like the cool cousin that came to, you know, live in Bel Air, but we’re not allowed in the house.

[00:07:52] We kind of live in the shed out back and, you know, we’re allowed to use the bathroom, but never the good towels, you know, stuff like that. I would say that most of the team at automatic kind of just. Does their own thing. We’re we’re in our own separate slack. So we don’t even commingle with, you know, most automaticians.

[00:08:12] the, the structure of information is such that they can access. Pretty much everything that we can do, but we can’t access what they can do or what they do. I’m sure you are aware and inside Automatic, we use a internal blogging system called P2. And P2 has, you know, different levels of access. And so, to, to your point, the, the people at com and Jetpack can actually read all of our P2s.

[00:08:42] We can’t read all of theirs. So, you know, when Matt does an annual review, which has happened once since I joined the team, he did it at the end of, the year, last year. he made some recommendations about the site and different things that we should change. And one of the things that he pointed out.

[00:09:00] Was in the footer, you know, like all automatic properties, it said something along the lines of an automatic invention or something to that extent. And he challenged us to think of a better way to put it so that it, you know, talked more about the fact that Pressable is where they test, you know, hosting integrations and functionality because we’re built on WP Cloud.

[00:09:22] for those that aren’t aware, WP Cloud is an infrastructure that we’re now actually selling to other hosts. And possible is kind of the, the proof. That shows, you know, how it can work for you. And so we took that challenge from Matt and we changed it up so that we’re basically an automatic hosting lab.

[00:09:42] Now, that’s not to say our customers are, you know, being tested on. But it is to say that you’re probably going to get the newest and coolest when you come to Pressable. Because we’re where Automatic wants to figure out what works. And so we work really hard to be, you know, the innovative, cool cousin. and again, going back to the WP minute and, you know, the tone of voice that we’re trying to change into, I feel we have more freedom to be opinionated.

[00:10:14] maybe even a little, Oh my God, Matson’s going to kill me for saying this word, but sassy.

[00:10:22] Matt: I will make sure I send this clip to him right when this episode

[00:10:25] JEss: He’s that Jeff Matson’s a real sassy pants. I would say, you know, we’re, we’re able to be a little edgier than I think the rest of Automatic can be. And so, you know, there’s upsides and downsides, but I definitely feel like we’re part of the family. It’s just, you know, a little removed. We’re more of a startup inside the conglomerate.

[00:10:48] Matt: Yeah, I mean, everyone has their what people listening to this, the agency owner, the freelancer, right? The the product company who’s who might be looking for a place to host their product WordPress product website There’s no Podcast, video, blog that somebody is going to consume is going to change their mind whether or not they want to do business with automatic, right?

[00:11:12] People are very opinionated about that. And most people are just like, I already understand. I’m either yes or no on this, but you have to be a real insider to make that distinction. You’ve had to be around for a long time. But what I like is if you are evaluating, you pressable and say, they’re pushing the, the boundaries more. Automatic and siloed is not the right word, but just like how you put it before is look, you can also rely that it is an automatic company, right? There’s, there’s some insurance there, So that you can have a reliable managed WordPress host.

[00:11:50] That’s doing things differently, but at the end of the day, built on WP cloud, which by the way, I interviewed Jesse Friedman on. Whenever they made the more public announcement of WP cloud, I’ve known Jesse for years. He used to, we used to be in the same WordPress meetup in Providence, Rhode Island. it’s cool to hear that, like that technology is there, like that incubator style.

[00:12:10] and I found. Some incredible, usability inside pressable. I look, I’m not trying to make this a pressable ad because that’s not the promise.

[00:12:20] JEss: but you can, you absolutely can.

[00:12:22] Matt: I know, I know you, I know you want to, and I want to talk about the, I want to talk about the, the product in a minute because I’m using it day to day. on a project that I’m working on with a friend of mine, but before I get there.

[00:12:34] Two other things. One, I’ve always been curious about the automatic such and such in the footer of automatic properties. One day, last year, I started going around to all of the properties and clipping all of the, and screenshotting like all of the logos that are in there. And I was like, right. And I was just like, Oh, I’m going to write this piece.

[00:12:54] I’m like, listen, there’s, there’s the 1 percent of WordPress. And then there’s People are not going to care about this. So I didn’t, I didn’t pursue it. Right. but it’s interesting that maybe Matt comes up with the challenge, which I guess I’m not surprised Matt came up with the challenge, to you to come up with a different word.

[00:13:10] Is that a thing across all properties? Right. Come up with a different word.

[00:13:14] JEss: this is speculation because I’ve never asked the question, but I have always thought that there’s like this pool of things that it could say when you go on a site and it just sort of refreshes and, you know, scrolls through them all. with ours, it just, it stays the same. I don’t know that he has officially challenged other brands to kind of put a flag in the sand.

[00:13:36] but for us, he did. And. Understanding that we’re the only automatic brand that operates this way. I think you can probably understand why.

[00:13:46] Matt: Yeah, I like that. It’s the only automatic brand that operates, this way. Talk to me about to, to the, to the degree that you can. and again, like I’m a former. Well, I’m a former agency owner and a former web hosting salesperson, so I like, I kind of see some, I know some of the, like the internal dynamics, when a customer comes to you and they’re doing millions of page views a month, obviously Pressable can handle it.

[00:14:12] Does, does VIP ever say, Hey Jess, that person there with millions of page views a month, maybe, maybe you can set up a meeting with me and we can talk about VIP. Does that ever happen? Right.

[00:14:23] JEss: we, we trade leads back and forth with VIP. you know, we’re, we’re working on a piece right now talking about different types of agencies. And as you well know, there are many different kinds of agencies. You know, there’s the, the solo design builder. That calls themselves an agency, even though they’re, you know, freelancing in their basement.

[00:14:42] and then there’s the full stack that, you know, do the, the CNNs of the world. sometimes customers will come to us directly without their agency. And those are often the case where, you know, I don’t, I don’t want to drop a name, but you know, a huge organization came to us and they were interested.

[00:15:02] Could we have handled it? Maybe. Were they a better fit for VIP? Absolutely. And so that’s where the business went. Sometimes VIP will get an organization that’s fantastic. They think they want VIP until they see the price tag. And then they’re like, actually, maybe I don’t need all that. VIP sends them our way.

[00:15:24] Because, you know, Pressable can handle a tremendous amount of bandwidth, but VIP is truly an enterprise level product. And it’s not just the infrastructure that spells that out, there’s features and, a lot of, a lot of tailoring that goes into their product that we just can’t provide at scale.

[00:15:42] Matt: Right. There’s and sort of like piggybacking off, you know what we’re talking about not trying to paint like this Automatic VI versus VIP VIP versus pressable pressable versus the world kind of thing because this is not uncommon for brands to own other brands that Semi compete with another with each other And just do it with a different flair, right?

[00:16:10] I mean the obvious for me as a car guy again. I used to I grew up in a family that owned car dealerships and I grew up selling cars. We had General Motors and you know, you had Chevy trucks versus GMC trucks, same company, literally the same truck, just a different logo on it. And you’d be, you’d have customers price shopping, the, you know, these trucks or cars, right?

[00:16:32] Like the Cadillac versus maybe a higher end Chevy. Or Buick, same platform, same engine, different logo, a few more nuance, nicer leather, right? Different kind of like display screen on the radio kind of thing. But ultimately, ultimately at the end of the day, same vehicle under the hood. this is not an uncommon thing.

[00:16:52] There, there is a world in, you know, in, in my head where, where Pressable serves the customer who might be doing millions of page views a month that need that. That doesn’t want the rigidness of VIP. Now, I know nothing about VIP. I just competed with them for three years, dating back five years ago. I feel like Pressable is at that place where you could go to be like, Oh, we want some more flexibility.

[00:17:19] We can handle that. We can do the things that maybe VIP doesn’t want to do at a, at maybe a lower cost. And that’s okay because that’s our sort of brand hierarchy. Is that, is that a fair statement?

[00:17:29] JEss: I think that’s fair to an extent, yeah. but as you, of all people, know that, At enterprise level scale comes a lot of different needs, and expectations. you know, we, we wouldn’t necessarily want to host the white house because my God.

[00:17:50] Matt: you don’t want what you’re saying. You don’t want Jeff on the call,

[00:17:53] JEss: Yeah, not even that. But, you know, it’s not even just about being able to handle the traffic. It’s being able to handle the incessant DDoS attempts and the various other, you know, issues that come alongside it. you know, there’s, there’s a level of scale involved that pressable. While from a performance basis could, you know, potentially scale to handle, it’s just not what we do.

[00:18:17] but who we’re great for are agencies that perhaps will have multiple sites and they need to, you know, have them all scaling. you probably saw in the most recent WP Hosting Benchmarks, survey results. We killed it in every single category. Our performance is fantastic and we can handle hugely popular sites.

[00:18:38] You know, we’re coming into the holidays and so that holiday rush is coming. we absolutely can take a heavy hit. It’s just what else you need in addition to it that I think establishes the swim lanes.

[00:18:54] Matt: right, right. you mentioned coming up to the holidays, you’re sort of helping me segue into a, a question I had in the back of my head. Again, we can cut this out if this is . If we, if, if this can’t go into the actual conversation, but I, I’m always curious and not just, impressible. Instance, but in, in automatics instance, especially.

[00:19:15] com is the world of WooCommerce, right? The world of, I need to build an e commerce store. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to set up. It’s not that it’s difficult. There’s just a lot. And for, for most people who are going to kickstart a store, I’m always thinking, because I’m deeply rooted in, in local business as well, it’s the mom and pop shop.

[00:19:40] Bakery, restaurant, selling gift cards, gift certificates, doing door like a door dash with air quotes, alternative, right? Helping people, you know, get small product and small business off the ground, man, they’re working 50, 60 hours a week. And then it’s go build a WooCommerce store. You’re like, Holy crap, how am I like, I’m just, I’m, I heard about this thing called Shopify and it’s all they do is store.

[00:20:04] So I’m just going to go do this thing. What I’m getting at is, is. Is there communication or is there a balance of Hey, Pressable wants to go after… This flavored WordPress, this WooCommerce focused WordPress. We want to build our own experience. Is that a thing that you can do? You have the flexibility to do, or is that nah, we’re going to leave that to the automatic side to with WooCommerce.

[00:20:31] com. And I know you can host WooCommerce. It’s all built into the plans and everything. There’s all the performance layers for it. But if you wanted to build a flavor of WordPress, is that something that Pressable is able to do?

[00:20:43] JEss: So, fun fact, one of the first things I did when I joined the Pressable team was I got rid of our WooCommerce plans. We, I saw this at a previous employer and, you know, we have been seeing it at Pressable before I joined, you know, people will come to us and they’ll say, well, I’ve got five sites and three of them are Woo, do I need, you know, five plans?

[00:21:05] you know, and can I put just plain WordPress on a WooPlan, you know, and it, it just causes all kinds of confusion. And I understand why the market started doing these, you know, WooCommerce branded plans, but when it comes down to it, if you’ve got an incredible hosting product, you don’t need to flavor it. You know, you can hand out the flavor sticks and they can pick what they want. but to your other point, you know, that’s, that’s another swim lane question and, and let’s be real here. I have absolutely suggested that some people go to a Squarespace or a Shopify because for those exact reasons you said, they don’t have time to learn it.

[00:21:47] They don’t want to learn it. They’re the equivalent of, you know, a brochure. With a checkout and they’re selling, you know, a jar of honey or a bottle of honey. Like those are your choices and they don’t care about plugin updates. They don’t want to know about WordPress versions. They just want to sell their freaking honey and they’re okay with that monthly cost.

[00:22:09] it’s not the perfect fit for everybody and the same goes for pressable. you know, I think dot com is doing a really great job of building an easy to use on ramp for new users. And I think the dot com experience is definitely a Wix killer. I think that they have done an incredible job of extending it so that you can actually grow in place at dot com, but pressable is what you graduate to when you want more than that.

[00:22:37] and especially if you’re doing a bunch of sites, would I make an informed product again, that is, you know, specific to a WooCommerce? No. would I make a landing page explaining why you don’t need that? Absolutely. We have one.

[00:22:53] Matt: As somebody who’s been covering WordPress for a while and, and you’ve seen flavor WordPress, in your, in your past experience, that was a prediction that, you know, not just me, but many people either made or bet on years ago. And at the end of the day, like I feel like WordPress is moving so rapidly, even though it feels like, you know.

[00:23:17] The days are long, the years are short, kind of thing, like you feel like it’s not moving, but it is, and it’s moving fast, so it’s hard, even for pressable, even for automatic, to create this new experience in WordPress when WordPress core is always changing, and all these, and the web is changing, so what I’m getting at is, is I had predicted, yeah, flavors of WordPress, surely that’s the bet every web host needs to make, and People are making attempts at it, some onboarding experiences at it, you know, across the industry.

[00:23:51] It’s not easy. And at the end of the day, if you have rock solid core WordPress support in terms of humans supporting you and the infrastructure, it’s like, why would, why would any company spend millions of dollars trying to make this whole new thing when we have the core, it works. And there’s so many other ways for people to, to learn and experience WordPress online that they’ll just take that knowledge and just bring it to you as, as the web host.

[00:24:21] I’m going to make this other prediction right here. I don’t even think when admin gets redesigned and turned into blocks everywhere, I don’t even think we’re going to see experiences for WordPress built the way we predicted years ago. cause I think people are just going to be like, yeah, core WordPress, that’s what I want.

[00:24:38] And then I’ll just going to tailor it to how I want to use it.

[00:24:41] JEss: and you know, that speaks to something interesting that I’ve been seeing in the industry, you know, with these flavors, you know, people are just buckling on more external features and functionalities, you know, oh, well, this WooCommerce plan comes bundled with this plug in this plug in and a whole bunch of other stuff you didn’t ask for.

[00:24:58] You were just looking to do word WooCommerce, you know, but we’re also seeing that at the hosting level too. Where, you know, they’re extending their performance by partnering with CloudFlare, or something like that, you know, Pressable has their own, we have our own edge caching, you know, that we do, we don’t use CloudFlare.

[00:25:17] But, you know, I’m just picking on CloudFlare, they’re fantastic, but it’s one example of where These other companies are trying to basically, they’re not trying to create it, but it almost seems like they’re creating these Franken plans, these Frankenstein plans with all these other options bolted on, as opposed to letting you choose your own adventure.

[00:25:38] And perhaps they’re saving you from having to, you know, review what’s what, maybe they’re getting some cost savings cause they’re buying it bulk. Maybe they’re not, maybe it’s all marketing. But, you know, as more plans become more informed, I think that’s where we’re also seeing this consolidation of ownership, you know, hosts scooping up plugins and things like that.

[00:26:00] and it’s just really interesting to watch at scale, how, how it’s evolving to what you’d said.

[00:26:09] Matt: Pressable has now we’ve talked about, we’ve talked about how. Maybe there’s no, you know, optics for, for the pressable team upwards into automatic or. com or VIP, but you do have an advantage, a controversial advantage, with other, that other hosts maybe don’t get. And, you know, there are other hosts who might, let’s say, partner with CloudFlare, partner with Google, Amazon cloud, like whatever.

[00:26:37] And they’re sort of reliant on these larger infrastructure plays because. It just, there’s either a monetary agreement there or it just makes sense to them because there’s no way for them to build the same infrastructure these other giants have built. Every website at Pressable comes with Jetpack. Jetpack in itself is… A massive, what I’ll say, a massive infrastructure play because it does a lot of things that maybe people aren’t really realizing that it does right because on the surface they haven’t dug into it or jetpack is just a controversial plug in and I have my take on it, which I’ll get to in a moment, but jetpack allows the user to have, extra security CDN stats now bringing in AI.

[00:27:24] I just demoed that on the YouTube channel the other day. I mean, for the type of user that, that maybe you’re targeting, you know, customer, you know, goes around their agency. They say, you know, I just want a better host, you know, pressable. Can you do this for me? Jetpack has a lot of great solutions for that end user where they don’t need all this other stuff. How has that Jetpack relationship been for you? Do you work closely with them or is that like tightly knit into the WP cloud infrastructure?

[00:27:57] JEss: I freaking love that you pull no punches with these questions. These are, I’m like, yes, like journalist, Jess loves it. And then, you know, pressable, Jess is son of a nutcracker. we work very closely with Jetpack and honestly, I, I will tell you, having worked in WordPress for a very long time, I was not always a fan of Jetpack.

[00:28:18] you know, I found it to be clunky. I found it to slow down my site. I actively recommended against it. but I would put it on certain sites where, you know, perhaps somebody didn’t understand Google Analytics. and it gives them a great way to show stats, but I will say that over the last, you know, five years, Jetpack has made huge improvements, huge, more than five years, but I’m going to say in the last five, it’s been most pronounced as far as my opinion is concerned.

[00:28:49] and I think that by breaking things up into their own specific. feature sets. it opens doors to people who might have said, you know, I really just want the security stuff, but not the rest of it. so that’s just speaking as, you know, a WordPress user and fan. speaking on behalf of Pressable, I can say that it is enormously powerful to be able to include that premium functionality at no additional cost.

[00:29:16] Going forward, we are working with Jetpack to offer a more tailored, product. to our customers. quite frankly, we’re not going to be giving away the, the whole enchilada anymore because, quite frankly, Jetpack deserves, you know, Jetpack is worthy of what they are charging. And if you want the rest of it, you can pay for the rest of it.

[00:29:45] But, you know, this is, you know, more insider stuff, things that you will never see us get rid of, things like Jetpack security, it’s a must have. It’s an absolute must have, not because we’re not secure, but because it’s just an incredible product and I will fight to keep it no matter what it takes.

[00:30:01] Matt: Yeah, and, and, and let’s be honest, there’s other web hosts, they either roll their own plugin, which is probably like a, a, a, a rebranded plugin from somebody else. Right. And they’re just like repackaging and Hey, this is our security set. or they have nothing at all, right? And, you know, whatever, they have their own like security thing.

[00:30:22] But, you know, I used to be a systems admin too, but it’s always like IP tables, right? And the Linux command line and that’s what you have for security. you know, and they don’t have this sort of branded product, right? So it totally makes sense to, to continue to have, you know, Jetpack security in there.

[00:30:37] JEss: but I want to make it easier for people to buy things like Videopress. I don’t know if you’ve played with Videopress, but

[00:30:45] Matt: One of my favorite products, by the

[00:30:46] JEss: it’s so hot, right?

[00:30:48] Matt: Yes.

[00:30:49] JEss: People don’t know it exists.

[00:30:50] Matt: yes.

[00:30:51] JEss: I freaking love that product.

[00:30:53] Matt: I said that to Matt in my last interview with him. You know, look, let’s just quickly unpack the, you know, the Jetpack stuff. Cause I feel like we have an opportunity to have, to have you on the call and talk about Jetpack. it stems from years ago.

[00:31:10] Here’s the issue. A lot of the problems in WordPress, a lot of the controversy is less about WordPress and more about the humans and the communication side Jetpack. Disliked, because years ago it was underperforming, it was bloated, it was doing all this stuff. Yeah, sure. There’s some, some other legacy stem that stems in the, in there add like upsells ads, taking over the search bar.

[00:31:37] There’s going to be some nuanced areas that are still. aggravating to some people, but guess what? There’s a lot of other plugins that do that too. I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but that’s the world we live in. second was my very first interview with, with Matt Mullenweg was over jetpack. And again, this is years ago when he said.

[00:31:57] A lot of the growth to WordPress was thanks to Jetpack. I’m kind of paraphrasing that, but that’s before freaking Jetpack did half of what it does today. And back then, there’s no way Jetpack was helping grow the WordPress ecosystem more than, you know, folks in the WordPress community. And third party plugins, specifically legacy developers like Pippin, you know, and so many others that were like really growing the ecosystem back then.

[00:32:26] That was sort of his way of maybe envisioning where he might see Jetpack in 2023. But this was something he stated back in, I don’t know, 20, 2007 or something like that. So there’s all of this 10 years later, where people are still hanging on to this stuff. And I. Enjoy using jetpack now that it’s more modularized.

[00:32:47] specifically for people who, Hey man, I don’t want, I’m not going to give my buddy who’s building out this nonprofit site, Google analytics, his, his mind would melt, right? Jetpack stats answers that for him. And I don’t want to be called in the middle of the night that your site was hacked. You have jetpack security.

[00:33:06] That’s what’s going to protect you and backups don’t call me because I don’t want to have to deal with it. And I think jetpack is a great alternative for somebody who is faced with the holidays coming up with a family member going, Hey, I know you do websites and you’re like, Oh Christ, I don’t want to build you a website.

[00:33:24] And I also don’t want to tell you go to Wix. I want to keep you in the ecosystem, use pressable or jetpack with your site because that’ll. Sort of ease onboarding into this world of, of WordPress. soapbox moment, but that’s what I have to say about Jetpack.

[00:33:42] JEss: No. And I, I am with you 100 percent on all of it. so to the, to the original point with this, yes, we absolutely do have a huge benefit with our association with JEDPAC. And I think going forward, you can expect to see, more opinionated opportunities with that as well.

[00:34:03] Matt: That’s awesome. breaking news. Pressable and Jetpack releasing a new AI onboarding tool. I’m just guessing.

[00:34:11] JEss: You know, it’s either that or, we’re gonna just replace all the writers on your team. Maybe the developers too. why not?

[00:34:19] Matt: Why not? All right. So wrapping up here, Pressable, is a great solution for end users, specifically agencies and freelancers who need to collaborate with, with team members, have a rock solid, infrastructure. I’ve been using it on a nonprofit site that I’m helping, my friend build, for a son who passed away, my godson.

[00:34:41] And it’s been fantastic. It’s been super easy to use. And I, I’m pretty sure you all just. Updated the way that you go from staging site to live site because that process was like instant And it was so much easier and I remember you and I talking about it earlier on because I did a an overview of pressable And it was a bit of a challenge.

[00:35:03] It wasn’t like difficult to go from staging to live When I did my video, but

[00:35:08] JEss: It was clunky.

[00:35:09] Matt: a little clunky, okay, a little clunky. but now it was like super easy. I just put in the note, the new domain and it just went live. And I was just like, Oh, I thought it was going to have to replicate a database and re sync everything.

[00:35:19] But it was super easy.

[00:35:21] JEss: Yeah, we think so. It’s, it’s definitely steps forward. We’re not done yet though. Always improving.

[00:35:26] Matt: Jessica Frick. Director of operations for pressable. We’ve got some inside baseball stuff today. This was good. This,

[00:35:34] JEss: Well, you ask really good questions, Matt.

[00:35:37] Matt: this was good. We, we, we covered a lot of bases. pressable is a great. Sponsor of the WP minute or partner, as we like to call it a great sponsor. So thank you very much, for your support.

[00:35:49] It really helps. no, it, I mean, we literally need it. So, thanks. thanks for that. Check out pressable, especially if you’re an agency or freelancer and you’re like, my, my web host doesn’t really have the features that I need, as an agency, check out pressable. com. all the links will be in the show notes.

[00:36:08] Jess, where can folks find you to say thanks?

[00:36:11] JEss: Xo, Jess Frick on X, Twitter, whatever, , and I’m a Mastodon and all that. Or you can check out my personal site, jessica frick.com, and it has all the links. or you can find me in the WP Minutes slack, which you can have just by signing up today. And I’ll let you put that in the, put that in the notes. He did not pay me for that, by the way.

[00:36:33] He,

[00:36:34] Matt: The WP minute at the WP minute. com slash support. If you want a different kind of WordPress Slack membership.

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