[00:00:00] Spencer: It’s Spencer foreman from WPLaunchify.com. Special correspondant for the WP minute and today’s show, I’d like to talk about the future of WordPress as an enterprise solution that’s versus the present consumer and small business solution that it is. I’d like to go into what this means for agencies, creators and outside companies.
[00:00:22] First of all, let’s set the stage. I’ve been around WordPress since nearly the very beginning in 2006. And what I like to say visually. Is paint a picture of all of us sitting around the campfire sharing stories and roasted marshmallows, because basically from 2006, till about 2008, nine or 10, that’s what it was.
[00:00:41] And then starting around 2008 to 10, many of the biggest WordPress plugin authors that we know of today and theme companies as well started to realize there was money to be made from 2008 to 2014. It was the era of build WordPress websites with all the old fashioned tools. And then suddenly. Came a lot of the page builder action, right around 2014.
[00:01:03] It became very obvious to those of us who are making our living in WordPress, that there was a whole wealth of consumers who didn’t want to learn HTML and PHP and CSS, but they just needed solutions for their small business or for their ballerina studio or for actually selling subscriptions online.
[00:01:20] Instead of using some kind of jenky SAS solution. Yeah, that was a really, really exciting moment in time. And it led to some of the biggest names that we know of today, including Elementor and divvy and even BeaverBuilder and so forth. But now that we’re in 2022 and we’ve got two realities upon us. We’ve basically visually achieved the point at the top of the hill.
[00:01:46] We’re going forward. Everything is going to start racing forward and that’s as follows. First of all, Gutenberg has one Gutenberg. Whatever it becomes the block editor and everything from it is now the default mechanism that will make page builders for the most part, no longer a conversation. Sure. Divvy and Elementor will exist in their own ecosystems.
[00:02:08] And they have hundreds of thousands. If not millions of users that will keep them satisfied for some time. The real issue is. That with Gutenberg becoming the unified tool. Now the rest of the stack of stuff can come together and make it easier for the rest of us. Those of us who are focused towards WordPress as a business solution for enterprise to start to offer a coherent solution.
[00:02:33] Just like the SAS products and this is different than what’s got us here. What’s got us here has been a bunch of tinkerers and individuals and small businesses and people willing to experiment, but that’s absolutely completely different than what medium SMB companies and enterprise want. What they want is a coherent.
[00:02:55] Aggregation was two, $5 words together. That’s $10. I just [00:03:00] gave you, but a coherent aggregation of the best software in a fashion that comes with the kind of support education assurances. Legal enough. That if they invest the time and effort into this, that it will act and look just like any of the other professional enterprise solutions that we’ve all known for years, the kind of solutions that have come from Microsoft or Oracle, or even in the CRM world, like sales.
[00:03:28] And the reason that they need and want that is because open source is an amazing opportunity, but it cannot be done. I’m arguing by going forward in the way that it’s been done thus far, these companies, these large enterprises are not going to get involved in sitting around the campfire. They have thousands of users that must be conditioned and trained and taught and oriented towards using these solutions.
[00:03:52] And so one of my focal points in 2022 and beyond through my existing agencies and the other new ones I’ve created with strategic partnerships and just spreading the word is to let it be known that 2022 is the birth of WordPress as an enterprise solution. And for those software authors who I either represent or help or will do.
[00:04:14] So in the future, I invite you to come have a conversation about what this means. Likewise, if you’re an agency or a creator and you’re looking for where your next audience or your next customer is going to be, I challenge you to think upstream with me. And instead of looking at selling onesy, twosy to individual people who.
[00:04:35] We’ll still be cherished and still be sold and still be protected. But that’s a consumer market. Instead of thinking of those people start thinking of your solution, your service, your software, as something that can be sold to an SMB of size or an enterprise of large size. And now you can add several zeros onto the end of everything.
[00:04:57] Now you don’t necessarily have to take on the extra burden of supporting these companies, because I’ve said this before, and I’m saying it again here. I see the future of WordPress enterprise as being something that can be supported outside of the effort of the original creator or the original software.
[00:05:16] And that doesn’t mean that you’re going to lose your branding or lose what it is that made you special. It just means that you can take your existing plugin or a new plugin that you are creating and you can start to sell it to the consumers. You can test it out, you can MVP it, but when it’s ready to go to the big leagues, there was a waiting audience of people who will be using.
[00:05:36] When it is folded into the larger thing that is being offered as an enterprise solution or as an agency solution. Let me speak to that for one minute. Thus far agencies have had to find their clients where they can. And it’s a much different thing to service an individual site owner than it is to service a large corporation or enterprise.
[00:05:57] For many agencies, they have a large and [00:06:00] qualified staff, but they spend their days repeating the same onesy twosy types of sites for customers and finding themselves in a pinch between great. And actually getting paid the value of what they’re worth for their high level of expertise. My suggestion is that in 2022 and beyond agencies are going to be the featured rock stars of the WordPress environment, because they’ll be able to service the kinds of clients who can afford to pay for what they have to offer.
[00:06:29] And they’ll also be provided again through some of the things that I specifically I’m working on as well as others in this mindset. Stacks of things that are working together specifically for enterprise. I challenge you think of any other business out there? One of the ones that comes to mind is the Linux software environment.
[00:06:52] And I’m a little old, so maybe you don’t know what Linux is, but before Microsoft was the only game in town, many people played around with it and it too was open source. But what happened was red hat and others realized that by commercializing it by organizing it by branding it by packaging it, they could service.
[00:07:10] Who needed that kind of deliverable because they couldn’t afford to go tinkering around or rely on onesy, twosy type sales. They didn’t want to get billed onesy, twosy. They needed the kind of wrapping and support that is standard in the typical, large scale. And so I hope you’ll join me comment on this particular episode, coming over and have a free call with me or otherwise just send me an email to help a WP launch Wi-Fi on this topic.
[00:07:37] I’m sure we’re going to be talking more about this in 2022 and beyond here on the WP minute. And.
