Why He’s Buying (And Selling) Plugin Companies

 First of all, just, just to clear the record so everyone’s aware, Christian is a sponsor, uh, of the WP Minute. Though that came afterwards,

Yeah.

after we set up the meeting for the podcast, I saw that you acquired a company on Twitter. We’re going to get into that. I saw that you sold a company or a product.

We’re going to get into that, which I know nothing about by the way. So this is going to be an exploration of explorations. Uh, but I do want to thank Christian for, uh, supporting what we do here at the WP minute really helps. He became a foundation plus sponsor. You’ll see the image SEO logo on, uh, all the emails and blog posts going forward.

So thank you for that Christian. Thanks for supporting the show. Here we go. Let’s get, let’s get right into it. You purchased image SEO recently, you sold another. Plugin slash product what got you into the WordPress product game before we talk about those two products What got you into WordPress? What’s that backstory of building products for WordPress?

I think the answer is going to be pretty surprising because most people step into this space as a natural progression because they started, most of them started in agencies. So they just naturally progressed to products, uh, at some point in their careers. However, I got into the space, uh, I met with a bunch of people like 10 years ago, something along those lines, 10, 11 years, can’t remember exactly.

And these guys were building custom WordPress themes and they were selling them on ThemeForest. And while they were… Um, we’re bringing in serious numbers for the business. What attracted me the most to this concept was the fact that, uh, the guy who was sitting across the table, he’s telling me all this, all this story.

Like they had 20 employees at the time and we’re making easily six figures a month. Uh, this was 11 years ago. So, you know, it. It’s not a lot of theme shops back then on the, on the marketplace. So it’s just launched product and you’re making crazy amounts of money quite easily. Uh, he was supposed to travel across the globe just with his laptop in his backpack.

And this is what actually got me into this space. Um, I was more attracted to the fact that I could be working from home and working from the comfort of my own space. Uh, you know, instead of going to an office, which wasn’t ideal, I live in Bucharest, Romania, uh, and Bucharest is just, I think, one top three most crowded cities in the world, especially for cars.

So it’s, traffic can be pretty crazy. And initially I just wanted to save some time and like, be able to focus on the stuff that I enjoy doing instead of, uh, instead of working for other people. I started off with an SEO background, an SEO heavy background, actually. I progressed towards learning how to build websites because I was ranking them on Google, but I never knew how to, you know, make any tweaks to the sites.

Like anytime I wanted to tweak something, even a simple label, I couldn’t do it myself. So I started teaching myself how to do it. And we progressed towards agency. We did that for, like, three or four years locally, and then we started building WordPress themes, of course. You know, remember this Ray said earlier, and after that, I think we just naturally progress towards plugins.

And, you know, that brings us to today where I feel our latest acquisition image SEO is natural progression towards a hybridized concept of. Both wordpress plugins and also sass offerings like this is the thing where I want to focus more of my attention going forward of adding sass like components into our product lineup and being being able to offer way more value to our users and also at the same time go beyond just a simple wordpress plugin shop and company.

So the lineup of products that you have now are What’s three three total

Three bigger plugins. Yeah. Each with each on each of them on the extension model. So we have, uh, three core plugins, each of them have 15, 20 extensions. So that’s close to 60 plugins because every extension is a plugin in itself.

I just go ahead and list off the name of the Of the plugins and products that you have.

Uh, we’ve got download monitor. We’ve got modular image gallery, and the last is strong testimonials.

And the one that you just sold was

So we didn’t just sell one. We sold a portfolio of plugins, if you will, because I acquired all of these three plugins few years back with the exact purpose of building like, um, a network of, of, of products. So we just sold a check email, check analog email, which was a simple. You know, logging, uh, plugin, and, uh, it also helps with, uh, debugging email sending from your WordPress install, uh, WP SMTP, which is as the name implies an SMTP plugin.

Then the last one, which, uh, Jack just announced today on Twitter was kb support. com, which is, which was one of the most interesting plugins I hoped to be able to develop, but never got the chance to actually do it. Uh, essentially it’s. It’s like a self hosted version of Helps Call, if you will, but way simpler, and it cuts off, uh, email usage, because email is the biggest problem when doing support, a lot of emails land in spam, or never reach, uh, never reach your inbox because of, you know, firewalls, spam filters, whatnot.

So what this plugin does, it just uses custom post types, and every time you submit a form, it just creates a new entry in your custom post type. It’s as simple as that. It’s pretty much like if you want an analogy, it’s, it’s how the comments feature works on, on WordPress.

talk to me about your concept or the way that you view a portfolio of products. There’s a lot of things I want to get into, uh, in this conversation, but I think that a lot of folks. And maybe it’s just me and it’s my competitive nature and joking like world domination. That’s, that’s just like, you know, the thing that like, you know, it keeps you going.

It’s like, ah, you know, I want to have like the biggest and the best, or at least I want to perform well and build a great product. You know, however, wherever you fall on that spectrum of product building. Um, but talk to me about your concept of product portfolio. And how you approach building the business of all of these products.

In other words, it sounds like, Hey, we don’t need to build, like we don’t need to go up against WooCommerce, not yet anyway, right? But we can build a stable portfolio of products by finding these things that are a little bit more niche. Stack that one against another one that’s a little bit more niche stack.

The next one’s a little bit more niche. And then before you know it, those really niche plugins becomes a whatever. I’m just throwing a number out there. 100, 000 users, active users of people who might are, might be already customers or potentially could be customers. Might be freemium model. You got that one to 2 percent purchase ratio, hopefully.

And then we’re turning those into, into pro customers. I put a little bit of words in your mouth on that one, but talk to me about your concept of, of building a suite of products.

So I guess it all starts with overlapping. Micro segments, if you want. So imagine you have, let’s take an example of two of my products, right? So let’s say a user requires one of my products, a module image gallery, and they’re, they’re a photographer. They’re building their own portfolio website where they want to showcase the photography they do on the weekends and on events.

Right. And let’s say that, you know.

A small considered percentage of these users will also need a testimonials plugin, right? To collect testimonials from their happy customers. So the, the purpose here is to find these overlapping segments, figure out their needs. And deliver a solution that they’re willing to pay once you got them into the buying move.

Once they are on the checkout page or they’ve purchased your product, you just showing them another potential product that they may need that will enhance their business. You know, that you’ve already won their trust by delivering a great product first. You’ve hooked them, you got it into your funnel and you’re like, Hey, here’s another solution for your problem.

So let’s look at the email space. Right? So one of the automatics acquisition a few years back was mail poet. Mail poet fixed a bunch of issues. And it’s, it’s like the, uh, workers version of, uh, SAS counterparts. So you should want, it’s like a MailChimp, but for WordPress or ConvertKit, but for WordPress, you know, it’s not a one to one clone.

It’s not one to one feature, but the concept is pretty much the same. And there’s a lot of unmet needs in the email space. And the whole purpose of acquiring those two plugins, like Check and Log Email and WPSMTPE is because they fix two of the biggest issues with WordPress and emails, which is deliverability and adding support for your own SMTP servers.

So that fixes email deliverability. The KB support acquisition was supposed to be, um, so a lot of, if not most. Like if, if not all, most of the customers we have also have to offer support for the users. And what they use is, is usually commercial solution SaaS like Helpscout and we’ve seen Helpscout pricing balloon to insane amounts just because they’ve got rounds of investment and just have to go for those, uh, uh, profit increases every single year.

And it’s, it’s, it’s. For simpler usage, it’s a glorified email inbox, pretty much. If you’ve got a small team, like under five people doing supports, you’re overpaying by a lot, right? So we acquired KibySupport just for this reason, and then we realized, well, people will want to also need… Sometimes an email inbox and when you need an email box, you’re still stuck with the same issue of email deliverability.

So this is kind of the overlapping segments and micro segments avatar I was talking about earlier and why these acquisitions made sense because you’re promoting cross promoting solutions that are in the exact same overlapping micro segment and solving a real issues, a real issue for people. And then KB support case.

We could easily recommend this product to all of our purchases because they do support in one way or another. And it’s, it’s, it’s usually messy. Like if you do this through your email inbox, just your email, personal email inbox, it’s super messy and it, it, it, yeah.

Um, so one of the things, and I think it’s a fantastic approach, um, I think what a lot of us, by us, I mean, uh, I’m an ex product builder, but my day job is at Gravity Forms. Uh, but I think a lot of us look at WordPress as. That sort of, uh, not alternative, maybe price point alternative. Like your example with help scout, right?

Help scout. Look, if I zoom out, I feel like all products, all SAS products go this way. Maybe even all plugin products go this way. Plugin or product comes onto the market. Like help scout freaking everyone loves it. It’s awesome. We’re all jumping on this thing. Look, it’s solving this one problem really well It’s clean.

It’s minimalistic and it’s really affordable Fast forward five years ten years,

There’s a lot of hate towards helps. Go. Yeah.

Yeah a zillion features in it It’s getting more clunky more complex that company’s got VC funding. I mean MailChimp is actually a great

Example of this.

example Around this where it’s like man. Everyone loved MailChimp.

It was like wow This is a billion dollar company that a few guys down in Georgia in the u. s. Built. I think it was, Georgia, Atlanta area You know and look how awesome this is and then it started getting like more competition came into the market MailChimp started getting more complex and then it was like we’re gonna sell to Into it, which is like selling to Darth Vader, right?

It’s just like Darth Vader just bought my email provider or my ESP And now it’s just like what is this thing? And then no one loves it anymore, right? it’s a vicious cycle that a lot of products go down and An even more homegrown base to this is, uh, Edd, you know, Pippin, uh, when he started Easy Digital Downloads and he had Sandhills Plugins and he was building out his suite of products, you know, even he had to struggle with this with customer requests and like building the ecosystem and then eventually selling out, uh, selling it out to, um, Awesome Motive.

Do you have any thoughts on how that customer experience can stay? How people can stay in love with the product as you build and scale and connect all the dots across your organization.

That’s such a lovely question. Cause you know, it’s, it’s super subjective subjective because, uh, with WordPress space, what I see the most is a huge fragmentation, the market is divided into micro groups or just groups. If you want to call them like that, like we’ve got a power users, we’ve got the developers, we’ve got the, um, site builders, but these people just use.

Um, tools like, um, Elementor or Bricks or whatever they use. Like they don’t touch code necessarily. Just know how to, um, combine multiple plugins and get the results you need. It’s just, don’t know exactly how it works under the hood. Um, we’ve got the designers, we’ve got everyone, right? And everyone has opinions on how everything should work.

I’ve rarely seen an implementation that’s been founder led, like, uh, The founders came up with a, with a, with an interface, with a product, they kept pushing it and the market eventually loved it. No, that’s just, I’ve never seen that. So EDD’s implementation, in my opinion, was Pippin’s vision or Pippin and company vision.

Like they had a team and they all consulted and they made, made various decisions and they launched what they thought was best for for the end user. Um, I think there’s, when it comes to community, and as you said, there’s always, always going to be that, that group of people, that’s not happy with the decision.

It’s always going to be like that. And it’s, I think it applies to WordPress as well. Uh, you’re a lot of feature, 60 percent of the user base is happy. 40 percent is not, it’s nothing you can do. You just have to strive to, uh, deliver something that’s best for the biggest percentage of your audience. And just be willing to improve things over and over and over until.

That percentage just grows and everyone is either happy or uh, they’ve just accepted that this is the best they’re gonna get as long as it fixes their problem. I think people don’t care as much about how it’s being done as long as it fixes the problem. Basecamp is a great example of this. They’ve had like Even now, they have super old UI, the program is, uh, the software is not built on the latest tech, yet it still brings in people, and it’s still considered one of the greatest SASSs ever built, and, uh, Hay, for example, is another great example of this.

They haven’t reinvented email by any means, yet they have a successful product. I guess it comes down to vision, how you sell it, uh, how you stick to your guns. Uh, because if you try to please absolutely everyone, you’re not going to get there. So, you know, micro iterations, you get to a point, but without sacrificing most of the initial vision, just to lure in as many users as possible.

Whereas, uh, in the previous example with, uh, VC backed companies, they’re just trying to. Cast wide as possible net to alert and every paying user. And that in turns means you get this broken up experience with a ton of features that are not necessarily, um, uh, useful for everyone. And you still get them into UI and it’s complex and it’s confusing.

Do you have, you’ve used examples like, um, you know, 37 signals or base camp and help scout. Is there anyone you look to in the WordPress space for inspiration or somebody who’s doing it well? Uh, with a suite of products,

going to answer that with another question define doing well,

uh, somebody you look up to you like you look at the, that organization, you say, okay, they have a suite of products. They connect the dots across their customer base, simple product gets the customer in and then they have, you know, whatever tiered products, uh, add on approach or whatever marketing is, is done well.

Brand has done well. Customer experience has done well. Do you see anyone in our space doing that?

honestly, no,

If the answer is no, that’s

no, honestly, no. So I’m going to lead, I’m going to lead this by saying that we haven’t done it either. So I’m not going to use ourselves as an example and say, no, we’re the only ones doing it. Well, no, we’re not doing it well either, but I haven’t seen anyone in the WordPress space that’s doing it well from start to end.

Um, I mean, maybe, maybe one product actually comes to mind, and it’s, it’s one of the underdogs. Uh, it’s Bloxy, and they’re a very small team, and they’ve built a great WordPress theme, in my opinion, that I, I, I’m using on all of my websites, and I love it. Uh, it’s, it’s, like, it, obviously, it still has its quirks, but out of the old WordPress themes, I tried and tested, this delivered the best possible experience.

So, you know, I think. I think this is one of the issues with the WordPress space, because we all tend to look at just at the repo for solutions instead of looking outside of the repo and looking at a bigger players at what they’re doing, like the bigger frameworks that have way more validation through their market.

And it’s, it’s what, what I’ve been starting to do as well for the past year and a half, I’m looking outside of the WordPress space for ideas and solutions and not relying just on what people are doing in the WordPress space.

Do you think the challenge is that in the SAS world, like a base camp, like help scout, they have the luxury of having all their users on their own platform, right? It’s not a fragmentation of, Oh, I’m on hosting or, Oh, I’m on pressable. Oh, I’m on blue host. And you have all of like this mixed environment.

You have different customers doing different things. Pre installed tools. Is that one of our biggest struggles as WordPress product folks, or do you see it? Something different.

I think that’s part of the problem. Yes. Because you have like all of these exotic setups. Uh, so we have download pointer, which is a, you know, on the surface, it seems simple, it’s a, it’s a software that just protects your files and offers a way to track file downloads. Under the hood, it’s the most complex code we’ve ever written.

The, the, the most versatile solution we’ve ever built and we’ve patched. Patched it so many times because of different hosting setups. Like it says one thing on their website, but under the hood, they use something completely different. So just super confusing all the time because you can’t control the server.

You can’t get everyone at the same time on the same version. So these are challenges in need. Um, you can never add. You know, even if you, if you look into privacy focused solutions and you want to add tracking into your software, WordPress doesn’t allow for this, like they collect a ton of metrics, they don’t share it with us, sorry.

Um, we don’t get access to any of that and these are tools, just to name a few of the tools, that such companies have access to and it just gives them an edge. Over anyone else, like you control everything you can, there’s tools already that you can deploy on your SAS app and you get like a bird’s eye view of everything that’s going on inside your app at any moment.

And you can see user journeys, you can see exactly what you’re doing with on your app. You have heat maps, you have a ton of information that we don’t get access to. And now we’re just building on guesses on feedback and, uh, intuition and experience mostly. Like veterans will be able to figure out maybe 60 percent of the potential bottlenecks and use cases when, when launching the plugins, but newcomers are going to struggle really hard because there’s, there’s a lot of legacy to WordPress.

Now with Gutenberg, it’s, it’s even more. Difficult.

The, uh, yeah, I remember, I forget what software it was, but at my last job, we had a SAS app and, um, you could literally log in, jump into somebody’s session and watch how they’re using the SAS app, like literally watch everything. And it’s just like, wow, like this is such an advantage. Um, product owners, not just from like, what, you know, what are my users doing and how can I upsell them?

But just user interface, user experience, what are they really struggling with? Um, he used to track things like I forgot what it was called, but if like people started like shaking the mouse, that was like an, that was like an event because it, it melt. Yeah. Like people were like,

I’m confused. Yeah.

So. So, I mean, just, yeah, it’s such a, a huge, a huge leg up. Uh, let’s talk about image, SEO. You can find Image seo@imageseo.io.

to be.

How does this

Just wanted to make sure I had

soon to be.com ? Okay. Did you own the.com

no, I just acquired it and it was our biggest domain acquisition. Like it was a four figure acquisition. I’ve shared it publicly on Twitter. I think we paid like. 2, 600 bucks for it, which is, yeah, surprising. I thought it’s a lot of money just for what, what usually is a 10, uh, domain name, but, uh, I’ve had friends tell me it’s super cheap.

Like they’ve paid even five figures for domain names or apparently I’m getting off pretty, pretty easy on this one.

Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I mean, I, I’d say, and listen, I’m no expert on this, but I used to own an agency and I had a guy. I won’t say the domain because I think it’s actually for sale. It’s a single word domain. It’s pretty good. It could, it’s, it’s the name of, it’s the name of a city. uh, uh, and it’s the name of a city that’s also in, it’s, so I’m in New England in the U.

S. It’s also a name in England, in England, right? So, uh, but he wanted like 700, 000 for it. Or almost like a million dollars for it at the time. And I’m like, it’s going to be a tough sell, buddy.

Uh,

Uh, and that was, that was like eight years ago. Like where you could potentially get that kind of money for it.

And nowadays I don’t think you’re going to get it.

I mean, it all comes down to how much traffic you’re actually buying, because if you’re ranking number one for, and that CD gets like 500, uh, half a million of searches naturally organic every single month. That’s half a million of people you can sell something to, and you’re buying your mind your way into all of that traffic for a one time fee.

Whereas if you’re renting that traffic from Google by paying for your ad campaigns through AdWords, you’re going to probably end up spending way more. And I don’t know, let’s say five years.

Um, back to image SEO, image SEO. io, soon to be image SEO. com. Uh, you can. Try it for free. It does, uh, up to 10 images. Let’s talk about this product. First of all, tell me how it fits into the rest of your product suite. Or is this sort of the outlier? Give us the rundown on that.

Um, it currently fits with, uh, mostly our, um, gallery plugin lineup. We have three different gallery plugins totaling close to, I think it’s. Probably close to 150, 170, 000 users, active users across spread across all three with modular being the most popular one. Um, so we’re going to slowly roll it out to these people and offer it as a, uh, so we’re going to include a number of credits for free for each package in modular to start things off and it doesn’t have as much overlap with. All our other plugins like the testimonials plugin and the download manager plugin, but that’s fine Um, it’s it’s sort of an outlier but we also wanted to have like a ramp where we could Launch the plugin and it needed to have overlap at least with one of our bigger plugins so we could Soft launch it there and you know see some net organic growth get some feedback And figure it out from there.

I’m lucky. We’ve acquired a working product. We’ve acquired a platform that is already making money. It’s just been neglected because the guys who sold it to us were being, we’re focused more on their latest startup, which is WP dash umbrella. com.

SEO,

Yes.

to shift gears a little bit, is my god. Like, I’m starting to like try to refocus on it for the WP minute. Uh, you know. Just trying to pay attention to things like content, website structure. Am I doing things, you know, the right way? I’m looking at my Twitter feed on, on one screen. Everyone’s like AI and I’m creating, you know, fountains of content with AI and my sites are ranking and I’m looking at that going, should I be doing this?

Then like on the left hand side, I’m over here creating. Audio, video, written content, newsletters, social posts. And I feel like the old guy in the room because I’m just doing things the way I’ve been doing it for the last 20 years is Write content, record content, both audio and video, and try to connect the two and put it out on social media, and my god, hope somebody comes.

I don’t have any SEO strategy, um, because it’s scary, overwhelming, and aggravating. But something like Image SEO takes a chunk of that pain away from me, uh, for me, uh, for images. Now, you’re rooted in SEO, images, image search, big thing, and this is where your plugin

Yeah. So, you know, images, image search is. Depending on the space you’re active in can be pretty critical. So for example, if you’ve got an e commerce solution, uh, most product acquisitions that happen from search engine traffic start with an image search. So that’s how they acquired a paying users.

Normally, people just want to see how the product looks before actually buying it. So if you’re not ranking high for your search terms, you’re not going to make that money. It’s as easy as that. You’re not going to make any money. The thing here with image SEO is that it fixes one of the most boring and tedious parts of image optimization.

And it’s alt, alt text. Generation as well as file naming, like that’s the most tedious part. It takes forever to do it inside of WordPress, especially because you have to do it image by image. And, you know, if you have a thousand images to go through, it’s going to take a while for you to do it. Don’t get me started on updating those.

It’s going to take even longer. Um, but yeah, so my logic was that anyone’s going to be willing to pay like 10 bucks to go through a thousand images automatically and have them updated for them. And that’s the whole goal here to build a solution that’s that, that, that can target multiple segments. So I mentioned e commerce is one accessibility is going to be the second one, uh, because we’re going to focus on context aware.

Image captions. So it’s going to analyze the content around the image and then generate a caption by taking into account all of that surrounding content. So not just focusing on the image, because an image can mean different things, depending on the context. And the 3rd one is I want this to be. Uh, a tool in your arsenal as a developer, uh, a command line interface.

So you just plug it into your build process. You got your API key, you run it and that’s it. You know that you’ve generated all the outtakes for your images hassle free. It’s done for you. It doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg. So, you know, it’s accessible to anyone and it’s reliable.

Uh, and I like the, the pricing model, so let’s talk about that. You have your monthly plan, which I’d assume is, yeah, like you said, you’d probably be an e commerce person. You got a lot of product. Like recently I’ve been, um, starting to do some car shopping. I have a, one of my cars is like 10, 15 years old, 15 years old at this point.

Um, so I’m like, Hey, I got a time to replace this thing. I’m putting a lot of money into, into keeping it up and running, love it, but it’s time. to replace it. And, uh, which is probably a very U S American thing to say. And I want to talk about that in a minute too. I want to talk about your the perception of the U S WordPress market versus the European market.

But, um, I’ve been searching. So anyway, searching for cars. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I’ve been starting with images. I’m like, what does this car look like? You know, show me the different variations of this. And I’m not doing Google web search. I’m doing Google image search and then going into those articles or those reviews based on that image that, you know, that, uh, that I’m looking for.

So a hundred percent agree with that. You have that monthly plan, which I’d assume is for people who are publishers, e commerce doing a lot of stuff, uh, with

even developers, you

you’re somebody like.

you’re building agency.

agencies building, you know, agencies building out, uh, a bunch of sites for customers.

But maybe for somebody like me, you know, at most I’m doing eight articles a month. I’m not like producing a ton of, of content where there’s like a, a ton of images. You have this one shot plan where I can just say, Hey, you know what? Let me buy credits for 500 images. And then I can run through this. Now, is this all AI driven in the backend that analyzes this stuff?

yes, it’s we,

You don’t have to give away the

no, it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, we’re using as any, as everyone, we’re using, um, AI models that anyone can use. So these are accessible to anyone. The secret sauce is actually the, um, uh, parameters we pass down to the AI models and the training we’ve done and how we’ve actually, um. Integrated three different AI solutions to talk to each other, to give the best possible results on the market.

Like most people just go to an AI solution. That’s as cheap as possible. We have competition in this space doing this. Uh, they’re just delivering it. They’re making a lot of profit. They’re launching on lifetime deal websites to cash in as much as possible, but they’re not delivering a good solution.

They’re not delivering. You know, uh, solution that people can actually rely on just delivering what the AI is delivering without much hassle. And you’re saying, well, it’s a, the issue to improve until the AI improves and the response improves, you know, just nothing we can do about it. Well, that’s, that’s not true at all.

Uh, unfortunately, and there’s not much to say besides the fact that, you know, the secret sauce is in the fact that we’ve been training this on a lot of, uh, image data that we had access. From our, uh, collection of plugins.

Yeah, that’s fantastic. I mean, it’s definitely a pain point for me, SEO and, um, you know, a tool, you know, a tool like this is. It’s fantastic. Any words of advice for anyone looking at SEO these days, aside from picking up image SEO to help with the images? Like, where does one start? Do I just keep my head down and just create good content and share it?

Like, is that just the best practice still to this day?

So it depends on, it depends on, this is the, this is the most common phrase you’re going to hear in the SEO space. It depends. Um, I think that if you don’t want to get, go really heavy into the SEO space and get like really technical and look into all sorts of stuff, more advanced topics, like, uh, uh, Programmatic SEO, which is creating a bunch of pages with content that’s dynamically created based on different, you know, you stitch together a bunch of data sources and you create one big page with all the information on it.

Um, and try to rank as many pages as possible. Just creating great content, naturally getting backlinks. And I think the easiest way for people, such as yourself, who don’t necessarily want to teach themselves everything that’s out there related to SEO, because there’s a lot of information and also a lot of misinformation, I think YouTube is the easiest way to go about it.

Like YouTube is slowly becoming the biggest search engine Google has access to. Uh, Alphabet, sorry, the parent company. Uh, and it’s, it’s, it’s completely different. Uh, when it comes to how people search online, but it’s, it’s becoming. The default way for people to search stuff online, like people just prefer a video or an audio of someone walking through, walking them through the steps of their problem instead of like looking it up on Google, you know, Google hasn’t been doing such a great job in the past couple of years of surfacing.

Quality results is just spam filled ad written results, where you spend quite a bit of time, like going through each, each result and actually finding the one that’s, that’s going to fix your problem. Whereas with YouTube, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot cleaner. It’s a lot better. It’s, it’s, it’s slowly becoming the go to solution.

So yeah, I think just creating great content as you’ve been doing for, I think you said 15 years,

Yeah.

years. Yeah.

Yes. You can hear that. You can hear the anger. Yes. Fifteen years. Do I rank number one for WordPress podcasts? No. Uh, why? Because WordPress and podcasts is generally something when somebody’s looking to Figure out how to do a wordpress podcast, uh, versus like, I want to listen to a wordpress podcast because, you know, I have my own thoughts and theories of the the max, uh, level of audience there is for a wordpress podcast, but I’ll save that for another one.

Another conversation wrapping up, I want to get your perspective on. You’re part of the world looking at the WordPress US market versus what the US market thinks The WordPress market is if you have any opinions on that, you know in the business WordPress entrepreneurs sense I feel like In the U. S. side of things, coming back from WordCamp U.

S. a couple of months ago at this point, um, being somebody who tries to raise sponsorship money for a podcast, for a publication, a lot of my U. S. friends are like, Hey man, budget’s tight, we can’t sponsor right now, um, you know, I still see them like saving up money to sponsor a WordCamp, um, which is big money for a short amount of time and short attention, um, And I feel like the U.

S. market is kind of just like on edge a little bit. Like we’re not really spending the money. The market’s a little tough. I get a lot of people, you know, talking to me about businesses down a little bit. Maybe the excitement for WordPress business is down a little bit in the U. S. Is that the same in your part of the world?

I feel like the folks that I met. At WordCamp US that we’re in the European region. We’re like, or the Asia region region, they were like, Oh, we’re loving it. We’re loving WordPress right now. We’re loving the product space. We’re loving what we’re selling. We love building themes. And it feels like a different vibe.

Uh, true false somewhere in the middle.

Sure.

I’m still thinking of a way to phrase this. So economically speaking, I think U. S. is still the biggest, um, economical engine in the world. Like, you know, most startups, most funds, most, most everything, most buying purchase comes out of the U. S. So even our user base is mostly U. S. based as well. So even if we were, we’re based in Europe.

Uh, we don’t have a lot of European clients that maybe the difference is that, um, in the U S with the inflation growing costs of living have gone up as well. So even if business has stayed flat, so there’s no growth this year or past two years, costs of living have gone up and made it look like, you know, not as a great outlook, whereas, you know, we’ve had a growth in Europe as well, but it’s still, it still hasn’t caught up to the levels of.

And it makes it more tolerable. Uh, there’s a lot of countries in Europe as well that have had access to European funding. Uh, my country doesn’t invest in solutions like this. Uh, but I know that, for example, in France, there’s, there’s, this, this, this has been happening, I think, for five or six years. I think they can get, they can get up to half a million euros.

And funding to build their startups. It’s non refundable. They don’t have to come with, come up with anything besides a business plan. Uh, and you know, it’s quite a bit of money, especially in the, in the WordPress space, where, uh, as a friend recently put it, this is the best space for amateur level.

Business launches like, uh, you get, you get your grades here in the WordPress space, and then you can start slowly moving outside of WordPress space. Cause you’ve learned quite a bit of it’s, it’s a safer space for newbies, especially.

Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I agree. Christian Raber, imageseo. io. com, coming soon. imageseo. io. com, coming soon. Uh, thanks for being a sponsor of the WP Minute. Thanks for hanging out today and telling us more about your story. It was fascinating. Lovely conversation. Love to have you back.

Where else can folks go to say thanks?

I keep postponing to launch my own blog. I keep postponing that, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s always the same with, uh, we have a saying in my country because when you go to, you know, you met him, you meet a good carpenter. They build amazing stuff for, for clients. Right. But when you go to their house, it’s all crappy.

It’s yeah. And it’s exactly the same with me. I don’t have any time to build my own website, even though I build websites for our business. I built all, I built all of the websites. I maintain them. I do everything I code on site as well. I just don’t have any time. I can’t find any more time to write on my blog as well.

Keep postponing that. So yeah, there’s not a lot of places besides Twitter right now where I’m trying to. Post as much as possible about my building public journey with images. You know, it’s, uh, I feel there’s a lot of people in the WordPress space, especially one men armies that are looking into the SAS world that are trying to build SAS solutions, you know, they’ve been doing WordPress for.

Quite some time and they’re not looking at SaaS solutions. So I’m trying to talk to these people, uh, and hopefully, you know, try to build a small audience because I think my, I’m pretty sure my story is completely different from most of other people’s. I started with SEO and then I tried web development and I kind of landed myself in business development mostly nowadays and yeah, that’s Twitter and email if you, if you want to reach 📍 me.