fidzu : WordPress

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case WooCommerce innovations, and trends selling online.

If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you'd like us to feature on the podcast, I'm keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured, on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have James Kemp. James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce. After working with WooCommerce, running a plugin shop for 10 years, he joined the team at the end of 2023 to help shape the future of e-commerce.

James talks about his journey with WordPress and WooCommerce, and explains his role at Automattic, where he's tasked with connecting the community's feedback to the developments in WooCommerce, ensuring that the Woo platform continually evolves and improves.

He discusses the innovations within WooCommerce, the challenges of balancing the needs of small and large scale stores, and how the team navigates an environment filled with both competitors and opportunities.

He gets into the positive impact of WooCommerce's recent rebranding, and how the system positions itself amidst the ever-growing competition from SaaS platforms like Shopify.

James shares his insights into the trends shaping e-commerce, like the seamless integration of newer technologies and consumer buying habits.

If you're keen to understand the breadth of WooCommerce's impact on e-commerce, or are curious about the direction of online shopping, this episode is for you.

If you're interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you'll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you James Kemp.

I am joined on the podcast by James Kemp. Hello James.

[00:02:50] James Kemp: Hello, how are you?

[00:02:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Nice to speak to you. James is on the podcast today to talk all things WooCommerce. And he really is a very, very credible person to talk about WooCommerce, because James is the Core Product Lead for WooCommerce over at Automattic.

However, when I say that title, James, I don't really know what it means. Will you just enlighten us? And also, if you feel like throwing some other biographical information at us about your history with WordPress and things like that, feel free.

[00:03:17] James Kemp: Of course. Yeah, I mean, we've spoken a couple of times on a podcast like this. I don't know if we've done the Tavern one before.

But yeah, as a quick introduction, I started using WordPress in 2009, and I started building with WooCommerce in 2011. And from that time I worked with customers and specifically like building websites for customers who needed websites.

And in that time I built up a collection of plugins, which I sold on a premium basis, which eventually turned into IconicWP, which was a WooCommerce plugin shop with 14 or 15 premium plugins. Sold that, well, that was acquired in 2021 by Liquid Web, Stellar. And I stayed there for a couple of years, carried on working. My whole team came over with the acquisition. We carried on just working as we were really, but under this kind of bigger brand of products and WordPress software, which was quite nice. It was nice to kind of get that experience from companies selling products like we were, but they were at a much bigger scale than we were at the time. That was a nice experience.

And then, yeah, towards the end of that, I reached out to Paul, who was the CEO, at the time, of WooCommerce, and just kind of said, I feel like I could have a good impact on WooCommerce itself, is there anything there for me? And I was kind of open to whatever that might look like. There was no job description that I applied for. I just kind of reached out and said, this is what I want to do, this is what, I like doing, this is what I'm good at. And then, yeah, here we are just over a year since I joined.

I joined as a product manager. And like you say, now I'm a Core Product Manager, which is a new role within WooCommerce. So a Product Manager would be, and for context, there's eight or nine Product Managers within WooCommerce. When I joined, we each kind of had an area of focus. So my area was order management. So any project or improvement or just, my day to day would be looking at order management and, how can we make this better? It kind of shifted outside of that a bit as well into other areas. But each Product Manager has that kind of role where they're focused on one kind of key area of WooCommerce.

But there was never really any product manager that had an overall vision of the whole product. And that's what the Core Product Manager role is. So I'm less focused on one specific area, and more focused on just, how can we make the whole thing better? And part of that role is kind of connecting the dots a bit. One team's working on this, another team's working on that, how do they overlap? But also connecting the community dots to the stuff that we actually put out there. So, what are people asking for? What are the common kind of requests that people have, or the complaints that people have? Or even the positives that people have and, how can we make those things better?

[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: So is there just one of you? So there's one Core Product Lead. There's not multiple of those.

[00:06:18] James Kemp: Correct.

[00:06:18] Nathan Wrigley: Oh gosh, that's really interesting. So you've got like the 10,000 mile high view of the entire project. And so you are kind of open to suggestions, innovations, improvements, tweaks, that all comes under the purview of your job.

[00:06:32] James Kemp: Correct, yeah. There's different areas. There's what we call product, which is kind of the user facing experience. And by user I mean merchant, and probably customer as well, so the visual aspects of the product that people interact with. And then there's the platform side of things, which are backend architecture and performance and all those kinds of things.

So I'm primarily focused on the front end aspect, not front end but, you know, the core experience we call it. I am actually focused a lot on the platform side of things at the moment as well, because the person who usually does that is on sabbatical, so I'm kind of helping out a bit there. And it's quite nice to have, you know, that understanding as well, for approaching core experience type things. And it also encompasses the WooCommerce app and many of our premium extensions, many of our marketplace extensions, premium or free.

[00:07:22] Nathan Wrigley: I'm guessing that if you ask anybody the question, is their inbox pretty full? You know, the to-do list that you have is pretty full, everybody would probably say, yeah, I've got plenty on my plate. But it sounds as if you may well have a lot on your plate.

Now, I don't know if there's a lot that you've got to deal with in there, and you've got a lot of ideas, and innovations that you'd like to push forward. But is it fair to say that there's a ton of innovation still to be done inside of WooCommerce?

[00:07:46] James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. It's something that I'm still trying to figure out. Like, how do you stay on top of all of these things and, where is my input within this most valuable? Because I'm still working alongside all the other product managers.

And actually that's been really nice to kind of connect with a product manager that's working on something specific, and work with them to make that the best it can be for WooCommerce.

But yeah, I'm still trying to figure out how to like organise all of these things so they're not just in my head, but they're out there in a manageable way.

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: How do you get intelligence about what needs to be done? I mean, obviously there's the team within Automattic that you deal directly with, I would've thought of, but do you keep your door of your office kind of half open a little bit? Are you prepared to listen to community suggestions?

And again, I'm not trying to get you to give out your email address or anything, but is there that element still? Do you still listen to people out in the community, users, and what have you? Do they come directly to you, or is there some kind of filtration process which people have to go through in order to get ideas in your head?

[00:08:46] James Kemp: There's many ways. Yeah, I think one of the things that I love most is talking to the people that actually use it. And I do that primarily on X or Twitter. I talk to a lot of people over there.

The downside to that is the majority of them are agencies and developers. It's not a downside, the downside being that I don't get that kind of open communication necessarily with merchants directly. So if I want to talk to a merchant that's more of a filtered, as you say, it's an intentional, you know, I have to reach out to a merchant and schedule a call and all that kind of stuff. There is the occasional merchant on X, but it's not their stomping ground.

So yeah, I'm also in the Slack, the WooCommerce community Slack. Some of what I've implemented is these kind of external channels within our own Slack. So one example of that is a project we're working on for fulfillment statuses, where I got Becca from Kestrel WP and Patrick Garman from Minesize into one of our internal Slack rooms to discuss and kind of help shape this project. So they're directly involved in that way in stuff that we're working on.

And I think something that we really want to do is be really transparent with like, this is what we're working on. You may well have seen over the course of the last year or so that that has been the case, via GitHub discussions, via the Developer Blog, via Slack, the community Slack. But yeah, I love getting feedback from people on Twitter. I still don't know what to call it, Twitter or X.

[00:10:18] Nathan Wrigley: I often wonder if the sort of inside baseball of WordPress is a little bit hard to penetrate, because I'm imagining there's a lot of people who use WordPress that in a million years have never opened up the WordPress Slack, GitHub is not a thing for them. And I've always wondered how people such as yourself, you know, in senior positions get that information. How does it get to you? And X, Bluesky, whatever the alternative is, that's a really interesting way of kind of completely circumventing that process. I will make sure that your profile, your X profile is linked in here and then people can reach out on that basis. Yeah, that's great. Thank you.

Let's just paint the picture of Woo, and how big it is because we keep hearing the statistic. The one that everybody talks about is this 43%, which is the WordPress statistic. And I never quite know how to manage that in my head, what that exactly means. But a fairly sizable number is also the e-commerce side, the WooCommerce side of WordPress.

Where are we at in terms of the web, and in terms of WordPress, how much of WordPress is WooCommerce, and how much of the internet is Woo? And every time I hear this number, it changes a little bit. But every time I hear it, it's still breathtakingly large.

[00:11:24] James Kemp: Yeah, that's an interesting one actually. In terms of how much of WordPress is Woo, I'm not sure on that. I think we could probably calculate that based on the figures I do have, which is how much of e-commerce is WooCommerce, and that is 37%.

[00:11:41] Nathan Wrigley: 37%. Okay, so whatever the percentage is, be it the top million websites or the top 10,000 websites, whatever that metric is, let's assume that that's solid and safe. 37% is done on a WooCommerce platform. That is breathtaking.

[00:11:56] James Kemp: Which is a huge amount, for the listeners, and for you if you want to check it out later. If you go to woocommerce.com/newsroom, we update these numbers every month. We have some numbers there, like there's 3.6 million live installations. 37% of e-commerce sites are powered by WooCommerce. There's 1,000 plus official marketplace extensions. That's actually going to grow, I think substantially this year.

And then, yeah, some other stats that are listed there, which I think are useful to keep an eye on. And there's, I believe the team that updates those numbers kind of, they take the data primarily from Store Leads, which is a data gathering outfit. And I think they kind of dial them back a bit, rather than, you know, inflating them, I think they actually go the other way.

[00:12:41] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of the trend of that, so the 37%, I'm not looking at that chart at the moment, but is your impression that, has it stagnated, has it gone up broadly in the last, let's say five years, something like that? Is WooCommerce basically growing, stagnating, declining?

[00:12:54] James Kemp: Over the five year, I would expect it's gone up. There's no graph to look at. There probably is somewhere, but I don't have it in front of me now. But I do know that this was updated this week, I believe. And it was updated from 35% to 37. So there's definite growth there. And I would expect, just the nature of e-commerce in general, that that number's grown over the course.

[00:13:16] Nathan Wrigley: When you say that, what's the thing in your head which is promoting you to say the nature of e-commerce? Because I really don't follow e-commerce, but I have this impression that during the lockdown period, 2019 and on, it felt like everybody, for very credible reasons, had to move whatever they were selling to an online format. So I imagine there was a bump there.

But also it feels like the world is now inundated with pocket size technology, which means that I can buy anything 24/7, no matter where I am. And so it feels like high streets in the UK, the shutters are going up. Bricks and mortar shops seem to be closing. Certainly where I live, that is a broad trend. It's not particularly rapid, but it's definitely a trend.

And I'm imagining that the confluence of mobile technology, ubiquity of internet connection, computers available all over the place, certainly in the country where you and I both live. It feels like this inexorable rise, this trend towards purchasing things at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, sitting on a sofa, a bus, wherever you might be. It does feel like that's the way the world is moving. Are those kind of the intuitions that you have when you say WooCommerce is rising for obvious reasons?

[00:14:23] James Kemp: Yeah, exactly. I think just the nature of the internet and the online world has kind of exponentially grown since its inception, right? And I would expect that e-commerce will grow with it.

I think one of the greatest things about the internet is that you can buy online. I should look into the history actually, but I can't imagine what the thought process was back when the internet was invented. Did they imagine that e-commerce would be a thing? That people would buy stuff, even from the other side of the world, and have it shipped out to them in a matter of days or weeks.

And I just think as technology evolves, and we've seen the boom in AI, and just the boom in like generational development on computers, and coding and all of that is advancing, and I think e-commerce will follow suit as well.

[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels like there's no place but an upward trend for e-commerce. Now, whether or not WooCommerce fits into that landscape perfectly in the next decade, we'll see. But it feels like I, and I can really only rely on myself, I feel like I'm going to buy more things online in the decade to come than I am this year. It feels like each and every year, my desire to get on my bike and go into the town centre dwindles, and I'm far more likely to buy things online.

And now the merchants have pivoted their offerings so that, you know, if you don't like it, you can freely return it and things like that. So even the impediments that were there have suddenly changed, and it's just remarkable.

And also the mere fact, just capture in your head for a moment, the fact that you can get all of this for no money down. The WooCommerce platform, and I know, in order to get the best out of it, you will definitely want marketplace things, third party, but other places as well. But the thing is free. It's completely free. And I find that utterly remarkable. I just think that's breathtaking in all honesty, that that's available.

[00:16:15] James Kemp: Yeah, I think it's one of the key selling points about WooCommerce is that you can get started for free, as close to free as possible, when you account for hosting and transactional fees that naturally come with any platform.

But on top of that, with WooCommerce specifically, and with the age of AI now, you could make WooCommerce do what you want it to do for free. And every site could be tailored to specific needs, and like a specific execution of functionality without too much technical knowledge, which I think is really interesting.

And you've seen people are building apps, and I've built a few as well, specifically for needs that they want to solve. I saw one yesterday, I think it was Maddie on, Twitter, I can link to it. She built an app to automatically put an emoji over faces in photos. I don't know if you've seen, when parents share photos of other people's children and that kind of thing, they typically put an emoji over the face. She said she was getting annoyed at having to do that with every photo. But we're in that era now where you can kind of roll these things with no technical knowledge, whether the output is good, I think is questionable, but it's pretty good.

[00:17:24] Nathan Wrigley: Does the advent of AI, and what you're suggesting, you can add your third party stuff, if you like, for want of a better word, to WooCommerce with the assistance of AI. Does that undermine the longevity of the free, open source WooCommerce project? Because I imagine that there's a lot of underpinnings there, you know, the marketplace that WooCommerce, as I imagine those plugins that are sold to add different functionality and what have you, that must in some way pay for the freeness of it all.

Does AI, does that concern you? You know, that if we erode the need to purchase third party software in order to get out what you desire, yeah, does that erode the possibility of WooCommerce being free in the future?

[00:18:05] James Kemp: I don't think so. I think it assists. I think it depends what you're making. Like, I wouldn't want to build out a full subscriptions platform just using an AI prompt. And maybe that will become more advanced in the future. I think as someone running a business, you don't want to be dealing with this code yourself, maintaining it, making sure it stays up to date. And I think that's the case for, or that has been the case since e-commerce software existed. There used to be a trend of rolling your own e-commerce solutions, and I think that's less likely to happen these days.

[00:18:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a good point. If you think about just a regular WordPress website, if it's just a brochure site with no e-commerce attached, go with the AI, you know, it seems like there's loads of scope there. But obviously if you've got the compliance, and the financial obligation, and all of the law that underpins an e-commerce shop, I imagine there are impediments in people's heads which will say, wait, did an AI make that? Are we really going to trust that? So maybe it inoculates itself given the nature of the websites which are in question.

Okay, just moving on, tell us a little bit about the kind of people that are using WooCommerce. Now, I know this is a very, very broad question, but in my head, for some reason I have it, that a significant amount of people that are using WooCommerce will be small stores. But I'm guessing also maybe WooCommerce really does dig deep into the enterprise as well. Does it run the gamut of everything? Or is there a kind of focus for you, and teams within Automattic because there's a certain type of clientele which largely consume WooCommerce?

[00:19:37] James Kemp: Yeah, it does kind of span everything. So people just starting out either want low cost, in which case WooCommerce is an obvious choice. You can start setting things up, especially for brand new e-commerce, whereas they're just selling single products. There's nothing too technical there that would require an expense of some kind. So it's super easy to spin up a WooCommerce site and test it out pretty much free.

So yeah, we have that audience. It's not necessarily our focus, our focus is primarily the higher revenue, higher traffic e-commerce stores, because that's the aspiration for anyone selling, right? They want to become successful, they want that to be their business, is e-commerce. And those are the users that we're focused on. And then naturally anything we do for them is going to trickle down to benefit the people who are just starting out with the platform.

So it does span a wide range of users, but we do focus in on the higher revenue and high product volume, high traffic, those kind of things. Or at least that's what we're focusing on this year. That target evolves over time. But that's been our focus for most of my time since I've been here. So it's nice to have that vision of who's using it and what we can do to make the platform as good as possible for them.

[00:20:52] Nathan Wrigley: We have this expression in the UK, Jack of all trades, master of none. I don't know how that works outside of the boundaries of the UK, but it basically means if you try to be everything to everybody, you sort of succeed at nothing. It's something akin to that basically.

And I'm wondering if there are bits of WooCommerce which you have to manage those sort of trade offs. Like, okay, if we build this thing, which feels like it's a real enterprisey thing, how is that going to work with our more modest users, let's say?

Or if we really focus on the more modest users, how are the enterprise going to feel like that? And it not being a niche, and it being the full spectrum of sites out there, yeah, at times that must be actually quite frustrating, I would've thought.

[00:21:29] James Kemp: It's a challenge, yeah. It's something that we're working on at the moment, is making the base of WooCommerce have the majority of features for the majority of users, the features that you'd expect in an e-commerce platform, which I've touched on in other podcasts if you want to go and find them.

But it's a process called More in Core, which is the kind of code name for it. Where we're just trying to build out the base product to have the majority of things that merchants and builders need, without needing to go and find all these plugins and custom development and things like that.

But the challenge is which features. The features that people need are going to change depending on what type of store they're running. So I've seen a lot of people want subscriptions in Core. And then I've also seen the complete opposite where people don't want subscriptions in Core because they see it as bloat. There's a challenge there for sure, to figure out what that kind of sweet spot is without being bloated, but also without nickel and dimming, and making the average number of plugins required too high or too low.

[00:22:28] Nathan Wrigley: I've often thought that if I worked at Microsoft on Windows, the software, the OS, it would be my constant annoyance that I had to think about every possible permutation of hardware that could ever be used. Whereas if I worked for Apple and was working on the Mac OS project, it'd be like, there's just this one set of hardware, it's just so much more straightforward, we build it.

And I imagine that commercial rivals, things like Shopify, and we can get into that in a moment, probably have it easier in that sense because there isn't this, well, I know that they have an ecosystem of sort of third party apps, I believe they're called. But there isn't this whole backwards compatibility thing that 5,000 different plugins that bind into WooCommerce and what have you. And so I guess you've always got to be taking real careful steps when you develop a new feature or tweak anything, which maybe the other platforms don't have to think about in quite the same way.

[00:23:16] James Kemp: Yeah, I actually posted about that exact thing on X or Twitter earlier. I'm just going to call it X. I want to call it Twitter, but I'm going to call it X. It's a challenge because, and this touches on the 37% number, like any update we roll out is affecting over a third of all e-commerce stores online, which is a crazy number.

It has to be backwards compatible, it has to be rolled out in a way that isn't going to break things. There's a lot more consideration that needs to happen because of the multitude of environments that could exist. There could be bad hosting, there could be good hosting. There could be low performance, high performance, number of products, different plugins, different themes.

For a platform like ours, that is one of the greatest challenges, but also one of the greatest strengths as well, because of how flexible it is. In a platform like Shopify, like you say, they have an app marketplace, but it's a lot more restricted. There's only really a handful of ways to do something. Whereas with WooCommerce, you've kind of got full control because you are hosting it yourself. You can pretty much do anything. Which, like I say, is a challenge, but also a strength.

It requires navigation, and I touched on this in a, I do a monthly, Inside wooCommerce podcast. The last one that went out was with Julia, who is the lead for our release process. And it's worth a listen, because it's quite interesting to hear, now, how we roll out releases and how we're able to test and watch for signals for issues that might arise. And be able to roll it back, fix that, and then roll out the updates. There's quite a nice process there now, which we'll obviously refine as time goes on, but yeah, it's a challenge.

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: More recently, and we don't need to get into the story behind it, but there is a story behind it. But the Automatticians, so the people that work for Automattic, have in some cases been repurposed. So their work that they've been doing for many years in one direction has now been pivoted. And I think it's probably fair to say that focusing on things which generate revenue is a crucial part of the decision behind that.

I'm wondering if that's had an impact. So this whole thing is not really that old, it's maybe only five, six weeks old, something like that, so maybe it hasn't yet. But I'm wondering if it's had actually a positive impact on the teams that you work with, or maybe there's steady away, no change.

[00:25:38] James Kemp: I would say there's no change actually. I mean, WooCommerce has always been, we're building a free product, but we are also a business, and we've always been a business. We wouldn't be able to afford to put out a product and not have any money coming in to continue developing it. There's always been a business aspect to WooCommerce.

But yeah, the teams that have kind of moved off of the open source contributions that they were making previously, I haven't seen any of them come over to WooCommerce. And maybe they have, if they come in as engineers, then I probably wouldn't see that anyway. But yeah, in my day to day, I haven't seen an impact. But, you know, Automattic has multiple products and experiments and things that exist outside of WooCommerce, and I honestly don't dig into them too much. I'm very focused on the WooCommerce side of things.

[00:26:27] Nathan Wrigley: You've recently, I say you, WooCommerce recently had an entire upending of the branding. If you don't follow it very closely, it may be that you haven't seen this story, but maybe it was not that long ago in the last week or so. It feels like the message dropped that a lot of the branding has been redone, and I often look at rebranding and I think why all that effort?

What was really the point of that? What was the need to upend everything, and make people have to see something new? And I'm just wondering if you know what the point of that was? I mean, it's nice. It looks lovely. Don't get me wrong. I thoroughly love it. But I'm curious as to what the reasoning was. Did it feel stale previously? What was going on there? Do you know?

[00:27:06] James Kemp: All of the above, yeah. So I've known about the branding, in its current form of, what it's gonna be like since maybe October last year. And it's been really interesting to watch. If you compare what we had previously against this, it's clear like why it had to happen. The branding that we had previously was the same branding that WooCommerce had when it was initially formed via WooThemes. If you compare it, it just looks out of date. The colors are flat and, not very inspiring. And the new branding now allows us to be a bit more modern, I think. It's modernized the brand.

But it also opens us up to be able to go out and do more effective marketing and acquisition that we haven't done prior. Branding isn't just changing the logo and updating some colors. There's a whole array of assets that come with it, and like a story behind the assets and what we're trying to put out there into the world. Which we didn't have before, we just had a logo and some colors.

[00:28:04] Nathan Wrigley: There's this sort of nod to a shopping cart in the W of Woo, which is actually quite clever, I think. And you're right, it does just smack of more modern.

Being a complete non-designer, I can never summon up the vocabulary to express why I think something looks good. But saw the new branding, and I saw the video that was associated with that, and I did think, yeah, that's great. That looks really great, but I can't for the life of me tell you why it looks great.

But interestingly though, was there a market push, not just because it was stale, and let's move this conversation into the rise of the SaaS. Because over the last period, the Wixs, the Squarespaces, the Shopify and all of these other things, I'm sure there's many more. They've brought to the market a fairly affordable alternative. There's nothing free, as far as I'm aware, but it's a fairly low monthly cost. And I imagine over time these companies are eating up some of the new people, maybe even taking people from WooCommerce. I imagine it's a bit of ebb and flow and what have you.

But was it that, were they becoming more professional, more visible in the world? Super Bowl ads and all that kind of thing. Was there some of that in the rebranding as well?

[00:29:14] James Kemp: Yeah, I imagine so. I think if you look at our branding previously, I don't think it was necessarily thought out as a brand as such. I think it evolved over time. Whereas this was, the rebrand was much more focused, who are we trying to connect with here? What type of customer are we trying to pull in? And how can we reach them? What do they want to see? And I don't think we had that before.

And yeah, definitely it helps us compete with these SaaS solutions that are quite easy to pitch. You know, influencer can pitch this stuff, because they have cool branding and, it's hard to say really.

Like I think you could say about any product, like if Apple had a really badly designed, like 3D Apple from the nineties as their logo. In this modern era of what you expect from a brand, and a brand that's powering 37% of all e-commerce or, I don't what Apple's market share on mobile devices is, but I imagine it's pretty high.

It's just something that needs to be considered, and there needs to be a thought process behind why we look like we do, and who we want to attract with that. And we didn't have that before with the previous speech bubble thing.

[00:30:25] Nathan Wrigley: I remember listening to, I believe it was Bill Gates, this is many years ago, and Bill Gates was asked a question by an interviewer and it was, what keeps you awake at night, in terms of the longevity of Microsoft? And he said three things. Google, Google and Google. And basically he's terrified of Google.

I'm gonna pitch the same sort of question to you. Of the SaaS things out there, are there any bits out there which make the Woo team think, oh gosh, that's interesting. We need to copy that?

Does the sort of gouging out of the pricing, their very affordable pricing, those kind of things. How do you cope with that? How do you compete with that, with something which is basically free? I don't know if that keeps you awake at night.

[00:31:06] James Kemp: Obviously like any business has its competitors. There's nothing that's come up that we've been like, oh, we've got to copy that and we've got to get that in. It's more like comparatively are we offering an equal playing field to a potential customer?

And this ties back into the More in Core stuff that I was talking about. Is there stuff that not just Shopify, but other platforms have in their core offering, and this may be like low priced or free plans, or there's other self-hosted versions as well that exist. They are comparatively free. Are we offering the same functionality? Do we have those essential features available? Yeah, we do, but do we charge for them? Probably, if there's stuff that's missing, there's probably a premium extension for it. Or there's a free extension for it, but it requires the merchant to go out and find it, rather than like us presenting it to them as a solution when they need it contextually.

Yeah, things like that are definitely considerations. We need to be innovating, and we need to be keeping up as well. That could be said about any platform versus another platform that there's always, again, going back to Apple, Apple and Samsung have this kind of to and fro.

So yeah, it's a consideration for sure. The target audience of someone going onto Shopify versus someone going onto WooCommerce is slightly different. The kind of core things that they are looking for are what we need to be offering.

[00:32:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's interesting because if I was a WooCommerce user, which as I explained I'm not, that would be the sentence I needed to hear, I think. The people working in the offices and the places where you are working is, okay, we are keeping an eye on what the competition are doing. And if something is a moving, shaking feature, which is upsetting the industry and everybody wants it, then you've at least got your beedy on it.

[00:32:55] James Kemp: That's one part of it as well. What are the competitors doing, but also what are our marketplace sales saying? What are the trends saying in e-commerce, even TikTok, Amazon, like all those kind of things that aren't directly related to what we do, that's accounted for as well.

And also what are the customers saying? And we touched on it earlier, but we have a whole, what we call the feedback river, which is just a big database of feedback from everywhere. From within the plugin itself. From support. From reviews and from wordpress.org, and like all of these places combined into one database. So yeah, I think you have to keep an eye on all of it. And the challenge is figuring out is this essential? What percentage of users actually want this specific thing?

And actually that's always been a challenge, like even working on much smaller scale products at Iconic, it was always hard if a customer reaches out and says, oh, I wish it did this, it was hard to say no to that, because you are excited that someone's using it, and they want to adapt it to their own use case. But you have to take into account, is the effort to implement this going to be valuable for everyone? Is this the priority for the majority, or is it just going satisfy this one person? You have to do that at scale now, or I have to do that at scale.

[00:34:14] Nathan Wrigley: I know that time is short, so I'm just going to pivot just for one final question before we leave and it's, it really has nothing to do with WooCommerce specifically, although it may? And that is, I'm just curious if you know of any interesting things which are happening around the periphery of e-commerce that you personally are finding interesting and engaging. Something that maybe our general audience won't have come across, because they're not deep in the weeds of it.

That could be inside WordPress. I dunno, the Interactivity API, or it could be something the browsers are thinking about doing, or third party vendors who've got some curious technology that we might not have heard of.

So, really just any interesting thing that James has spotted lately that you think we might want to look at?

[00:34:54] James Kemp: Yeah, I dunno whether I have anything that nobody's ever heard of.

[00:34:57] Nathan Wrigley: That's fine.

[00:34:58] James Kemp: There's a definite rise in platforms offering their own e-commerce. So, TikTok, commerce and all that kind of stuff is growing. And you touched on, something before we started the call actually, which kind of relates to that, the ability to see something on a device and just purchase it there and then. And within TikTok you get that experience. Within a typical e-commerce platform, you have a flow that you go through. You've got the cart, and then the checkout. You've got to populate details. So yeah, I think there's gonna be a, an evolution into how quickly can I buy something. And that's what the merchants want. Whether it's good for the population and spending habits, I'm not entirely sure.

I personally love the experience on, like Amazon, for example, and I don't know how long they've had it, it's been there a while now. But on product pages, you don't need to go through the cart process, you can just click buy now. Although that has tripped me up a couple of times.

[00:35:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, me too.

[00:35:54] James Kemp: You press buy now, and it goes on some card that you never use.

So yeah, I think that is a definite kind of trend, that I've seen a lot of. And I think we touched on something earlier as well, which I haven't seen much in the way of solutions to it. But one of the key things about people buying from a brick and mortar is that they can try on the product and they can physically see the color of a product, and touch the product. Which is possible. You can order now and it's getting a lot easier to return stuff. But can you do that with a sofa, for example? So, I expect that we'll see some innovations around that.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Sort of augmented solution, where you can drop room and, yeah, size it up, and things like that.

[00:36:38] James Kemp: Yeah. I don't know what that looks like.

[00:36:40] Nathan Wrigley: No, and it will be sort of a strange simulation of reality, but probably enough to get a proportion of the people over the wire, I would've thought.

[00:36:48] James Kemp: Yeah, for sure. There's been AR stuff for a while now, right?

[00:36:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and things like, you want to put a logo on a t-shirt, here's what that look like on the t-shirt. Those kind of things.

I think for me, one of the most, most interesting things is what the mobile wallets have done to my capacity to spend. I just that is remarkable. Especially out in the real world where you take the Tube in London, the underground, and you just don't do anything anymore. You just walk by a thing, and your phone's in your pocket, and it registers it, and you walk out and at the end of the day you get a bill, and so these kind of seamless solutions.

[00:37:21] James Kemp: I don't feel like you have that so much on a computer though.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: No, but I wonder if that's coming with, I don't know, biometrics. Like purchase this, put your finger print in, your done.

[00:37:33] James Kemp: I think that would be nice. I still populate, I use 1Password, so it does it for me, but I still populate the card.

[00:37:39] Nathan Wrigley: An intermediary, a trusted intermediary getting in the way. Yeah, it's interesting. Again, I wonder if those kind of things might be handled natively by browsers, and things like that.

Anyway, we're sort of staring into the future, and we've no idea. But I know that you've got to go in about 30 seconds time, so I will just round it off by saying James Kemp, fascinating chat about all things WooCommerce. I appreciate it, and all the hard work you and your team are doing to democratize e-commerce. Is there anything you want to add just before we round it off? Maybe a Twitter handle or something like that?

[00:38:08] James Kemp: I'm jamesckemp on most things. C, the letter C. Yeah. The only thing I'll add is just, if you have questions, ideas, theories, my dms are open there, so I'm happy to hear it.

[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: Well, thank you very much, James Kemp. Been a pleasure chatting to you today. Really appreciate it.

[00:38:25] James Kemp: Thank you very much.

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how podcasting shaped our guests WordPress journey.

If you'd like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you'd like us to feature on the podcast, I'm keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

[00:01:11] Nathan Wrigley: So on the podcast today, we have John Overall. John is a veteran in the WordPress podcasting world, bringing over 16 years of experience with the WP Plugins A to Z show. He's an early adopter of WordPress, and has seen the platform evolve and grow, and has built a wealth of knowledge around plugins, which he thinks have been pivotal to WordPress's versatility.

John shares his journey into the world of podcasting, initially using it as a tool to grow his business, and expand his expertise within the WordPress ecosystem. He gets into how the podcast landscape has shifted from its early days to the present, with technological advances making it easier than ever to produce and distribute shows.

We talk about the evolution of WordPress plugins, how they have shaped the WordPress platform over the years, and John's unique approach to managing and understanding these powerful tools, making a podcast to help him better understand what each plugin does.

John also shares stories about his interactions with his audience, and how the podcast has forged connections that might not be the norm for client relationships.

We move into the ever changing WordPress environment, and John shares predictions and insights about the platform's future, and how he's using podcasting as a medium to continually learn and adapt, which in turn benefits his audience.

Something new for John is how he's involving his family in his podcasting journey. His daughter has breathed new life and perspectives into the show, hoping to appeal to a younger generation while retaining his loyal audience.

If you're passionate about WordPress, podcasting, or just interested in understanding a holistic approach to long-term content creation and audience engagement, this episode is for you.

If you're interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you'll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you John Overall.

I am joined on the podcast by John Overall, how are you doing?

[00:03:20] John Overall: I am doing fantastic, thanks Nathan. I appreciate being on your show.

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: I am really pleased to have John. I want to call you Jonathan. Is there a time when you were a Jonathan or have I just misremembered?

[00:03:31] John Overall: No, no, I've been called Jonathan, Johnny, Johnny Boy. I answer to all kinds of names. My mom actually calls me Alan because she refuses to call me John.

[00:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it's an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast today.

Very frequently when I interview people, people tell me that they've listened to my podcast and I find that really, I get quite emotional when people do that, I think that's lovely. But the tables are turned, because today I'm here to say that I have listened to Jonathan's podcast many, many times in the past.

And I was just saying that there was a period of time in my life when my children went to music lessons. And I used to accompany them to those music lessons, and I had to sit in the, if you call it like a waiting room, basically. Every week I would sit there faithfully listening to your plugin podcast, you know, it was the, we call it A to Z, but you call it A to Z. And I would listen to you talking about plugins, and giving them ratings and what have you with your co-host. And so this is a bit of a stars in my eyes moment. I'm so pleased to have you on the podcast.

[00:04:31] John Overall: Well, I appreciate that. And yeah, the WP Plugins A to Z, and we do call it Z here in Canada. But when I had my American co-host in the beginning years, he called it Z. So we used to argue with it. And then we actually have someone, our intro, one of my listeners, he recorded it, and we have a minor intro that says, it's WP Plugins, A to Z, not Z. It's still something we use. It was generated years ago by one of the listeners. But yeah, it's been a longstanding show. It's been around for over 16 years now.

[00:05:00] Nathan Wrigley: So I really didn't know that podcasts were a thing. And podcasts came into my life at the moment when mobile phones had apps that could do that. I didn't listen to them on desktop or anything like that. And it was always for me, a bit of dead time. I wouldn't listen to them in the car or anything like that. I would always listen to them in a moment where I was sat in a chair and had nothing else to pay attention to. And I just found them immediately really, really important in my life.

And then I found WordPress. And then quickly found a bunch of podcasts which I listened to, and yours was the one that somehow settled in my brain as the, I'm going to music now, I'm going to sit for half an hour and consume the podcast.

And really, without listening to podcasts like yours, my life would've been very different, I think. Because it occurred to me that, as I was listening to you and your co-host talk, I got a sense of, well, you're not a media personality. You are not somebody who is sitting in some sort of CNN type studio producing content. You are a guy that does the kind of job that I do. And I got a real sense of, gosh, maybe this is something that I could explore at some point. And there we go, and the rest is history. That's now all I've done for many years.

[00:06:07] John Overall: Well I will gladly take the credit for expanding podcasting. I've enjoyed podcasting since the beginning. I discovered it as I graduated from my applied communication program at college, which led me into the internet. And it was shortly after that that we saw the rise of it. And of course, Adam Curry from the No Agenda Show, who is known as the Pod Father, he created podcasting as it stands today with the RSS feeds.

And he's even ensured that it's going to stay a free and open source platform due to the now existing podcasting index. Which is where everybody gets that in their newfangled apps. Like I quit using the apps from the Apple store for my podcast. I use the newer apps, because they do a much better job and they go into the podcast and index for everything.

So, yeah, it's really great. And the nice thing is, what it did was allowed me, with WordPress in particular, was to expand my knowledge. Because I used it to build my knowledge. I saw WordPress and what it was doing with the plugins. Because in the beginning, WordPress was great for a blogging platform. I started using it probably about version two, so they were like two, maybe two and a half years old when I discovered WordPress.

I'd seen it once before when it first came out, and one of my clients put it on my server and I almost banned it from my server because its use of resources was ridiculous. It was literally crashing one of my servers. But I ended up working with it, and it kept getting better and better and better. And then when they introduced the plugins to it, to expand it into a full CMS, I went, oh dear God, this is going to be huge.

And I've watched it as it climbed from like, I went back recently to look at my first episodes. My first episode there was less than 9,000 plugins available for WordPress. I watched it grow and grow and grow and grow. And now there's over, hundreds of thousands of plugins. The WordPress repository has only 50,000. At one point they had 90,000, so they've cleaned out a big mess, it has expanded it, and it's going to take, you know, WordPress is going into, it's in a changing mode right now.

WordPress is in a massive flux right now, with all the things that have occurred in the last six months. But many people have been panicking, oh my God, It's going to go away. It's like, no, it's not going anywhere. It's going to change, and a lot of things are going to be different, but there's too many people in the world making a living, depending upon their daily bread, their monthly rents, having WordPress fully functioning. And there's companies that are as big as Automattic, if not bigger, that are using WordPress.

I was reading an article yesterday of the top 12 websites built in WordPress. We're talking NASA, The Times magazine, well, we know whitehouse.gov is using it. And you look at them and some of them are just insanely developed. And if it wasn't for the plugin capability of WordPress, it wouldn't be possible.

[00:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: When you look back over all those years, so rewind until, let's say the month, the year before you began your podcast journey, what was the thing that kicked you into doing podcasting? Was it just like a bit of serendipity? Did you know that you wanted to create audio content or was it just a bit of an accident?

[00:09:09] John Overall: It was a bit of everything. What it really was, was I was just starting, I had just sold my computer store, so I was working off of money from selling a successful sale of a computer store I had for several years. Because I sold out the computer industry just before it went full mobile and impossible to really make a living with a computer store. And I was going back to the internet and developing websites and I was exploring things.

I looked at Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, trying to figure out what would be the best CMS system so I wouldn't have to write PHP code, and CSS by hand anymore, or at least minimise it. And I needed a way to reach people. And one of the ways, podcasts was just starting to pick up at that time, that was somewhere around 2010, 2011, right around there. And it was just starting to pick up, and I realised, wait a minute, people are listening to the podcast. I can start putting out a podcast and I can focus. And I looked at WordPress and I realised, you know, what would be the best component to focus on in WordPress?

And so I chose plugins. And I went, okay, well I needed a domain. I went, WP Plugins, well, A to Z. And I had this really crazy idea at the beginning, because there was so few plugins, I was going to cover WordPress plugins, literally from A to Z. My first 20 episodes was A, B, C, D plugins starting with those letters. I got that far into it and I went, okay, this ain't going to work, there's no way.

And people were adding them at a continuous rate every week. And I went, okay, this isn't going to work, but it still constitutes, the name constituted everything. So I just started diving into what I thought was the best plugins, or if I used the plugin and I thought wasn't very good, it was a way to warn people, please, avoid this plugin. Don't make my mistake.

So it was all of those things. So it was a little bit of serendipity, but what I was more after was growing my business. And it literally did grow my business for several years. I would suddenly get a call, or an email from people, because I put my email and everything into the shows. I would get emails from listeners saying, hey, I've been listening to your show for several months and I'm having this WordPress problem, and you talked about it. Can you fix it? And I said, well, hold on, let's see what we can do.

And so I still have six or seven clients from those early years, that have been clients ever since they came to me. And they came to me because, when people listen to you on podcasts they begin to trust you. They start to feel like they know who you are, because they've been listening to you. You're a friend, you're not a stranger. And because of that, what happens, I had people, they would contact me and I asked them for, I'm really cautious about what information I get from my clients to access their stuff, their hosting or whatever. And I get people and I ask them for this, and all of a sudden they've given me all of their keys to their castle. And they have no idea who I am. They don't know if I'm trustworthy of that, but I've built that trust by the way they've heard me talk over the however period of time, months or years they've listened to my show.

[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting because from your perspective, you haven't given out any metric which might be a measure of trust, but you have. You really have. I mean, giving that much time and putting out your thoughts, and speaking like you speak, and talking like you talk, and the language that you use, and the way that you present yourself, it does lend trust.

And it is very, very similar with the podcasts that I listen to, dozens that I listen to each week. And I really do get a feeling that I know these people. I never thought of using a podcast as a marketing tool to be honest. But I do remember the sort of bits that you would drop in, and I thought, yeah, that was kind of interesting.

Yeah, perfect, it ended up creating new business, not just a bit of fun that you had to crowbar into each week.

[00:12:38] John Overall: It literally helped build my business, and it made it successful to sustain me for many years. And that's what I've enjoyed. That's part of what I've enjoyed about it.

The other is, I got to meet lots of people virtually, all over the globe. In addition to the, well, we're going to do episode 642 next week, and in addition to those episodes for just the WP plugins, I did interview shows, which were a separate episode. And I've done over 150 of those over the years.

Plus I've also had three or four other podcasts, I kept thinking I was going to start different podcasts for different things, and I'd get maybe 20, 30, 100, 200 episodes into them, and then that's like, okay, I don't have time for these ones anymore, and they just fall by the wayside. In total I've probably got 2000 episodes of podcasts behind me for various podcasts.

[00:13:23] Nathan Wrigley: You really are a veteran of this industry. How has it changed? Just for those of us who are podcasting nowadays, it's so simple. There's a tool for everything. There's a SaaS platform for everything. You can pay your monthly subscription, and it'll more or less podcast for you really. But back in the day, when I started there were definite hurdles, but you were many, many years before me. So I'm imagining there was lots of hurdles to overcome just to get the thing out there.

[00:13:49] John Overall: In the beginning it was really hard, especially if you had a host, a co-host. It's like we didn't have the easy software like we're using right now for recording back and forth. Even now, I don't use this software for doing mine. I use Microsoft Teams for recording with my co-host. But in the beginning we had, oh, what the heck was it called?

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: I'll tell you what I used at the beginning and this will kind of date me. I used Skype.

[00:14:13] John Overall: That's it.

[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: That was it.

[00:14:14] John Overall: That was it? Skype? I was trying to remember what it was. It still loads on my computer when I reboot my computer and I have to shut it off because I just haven't got around to, well, I haven't rebuilt my computer for almost 10 years. I'm getting a new one this next year, because my computer's finally ending its life.

But yeah, Skype. And the other thing was, is we didn't have the easy ways to clean up the audio feed that we have now. You get those high pitch wines, or bad cable, or background noise, or whatever, or even the mismatched audio levels. You had to actually go in and kind of edit that a little bit to get your audio as clean as possible.

Because the biggest thing from the beginning I knew is, it doesn't really matter what you're talking about, if the audio's not clean, people will stop listening. If the audio's got annoying noises or something, or they can't quite hear, or one host is suddenly blaring in the air and the other host is like a mouse talking in the other ear, they go, oh, I can't listen to this. And they won't listen to you.

[00:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it's really interesting because somebody warned me of this right at the beginning of my podcast journey, and they framed it even more than that. They said that if you're watching a video and the quality of the video is poor, you'll forgive that. But you'll never forgive bad audio. You just can't watch something on, let's say, YouTube or a film or whatever if the audio is crackly or distorted. There's just nothing, you know, unless you can lip read, there's nothing coming at you that's useful.

And I remember taking that to heart and thinking, okay, that's important. But then being frustrated by the technology that, just things like Skype couldn't keep up. There'd be dropouts in everything, and so editing was a nightmare.

[00:15:48] John Overall: Yes, it was. And although pretty much all my shows are live to tape, I discovered a program that's called Level Later. And it's a very old program, but what it does is you can take any audio file with multiple levels in it, you throw it into this, it runs it through some passes, some computer magic, and it comes out and all the levels are perfect in it. And I've been using Level Later for years now, because no matter how hard I try, I can never get the levels perfect when I'm recording it between two hosts. Because I'm not using intermediate software that's doing it for me. I record mine straight to OBS.

[00:16:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, if you are thinking about getting into the podcasting world, and we can decide whether or not that's useful these days given the dearth of podcasts. But if you are, honestly, it's so straightforward now. I'm using, currently, an app called SquadCast, but there's a whole bunch of rivals out there in the marketplace. There's things like Riverside.FM and many, many others.

And they allow you to record through a browser, and in this case, John's track and my track will be isolated, I'll download them both. And so that never happened. Before it was just one track that you had to, if your audio is mucky, then so was mine. There was no way of separating those two.

But now yours will come separately, mine will come separately, and if I've got 10 guests, they'll all be separate. And then I throw them into, similar to you, I throw them into an app which basically cleans things up and automatically levels things. And then will create transcripts, and it's just miraculous. It's so, so straightforward.

[00:17:13] John Overall: It's gotten really good. I'm, re-embracing all of that stuff. For the last four years, I'd taken my business down to the minimal levels of what I had to put into it, and I focused on my farmstead that I have, my urban farmstead. And in this last year I realised I needed to get back to my roots, and my WordPress and all of my other work. And so this last year we've been rebuilding everything.

And the WP Plugin show, it went off the rails for a little while. I got a little political for a little while and lost a large chunk of my audience, and a lot of them are coming back now because I've got it back to what it was, the show it was before. It is allowing everything, and also I've got a new co-host in there, my daughter, been training in my business for the last five years to take over this business as I get ready for retirement time.

She's become my co-host on there. In fact, she's more of the host than I am now. She does more of the talking and more of the direction of the show each week. Which is kind of interesting. It makes for a more interesting show, having a different viewpoint on it than mine. Because I think I went, when Marcus left the show back in 2016 or 17, and I did like four years of just me on the show. And it's really hard to be a single host on a show week after week after week.

[00:18:27] Nathan Wrigley: I feel your pain.

[00:18:28] John Overall: That's why you need guests or you need to have a co-host to help keep some life in it. Anyone who tries to do a podcast, like podcasts nowadays. Yeah, anyone can do them and, yes, there is a dearth of them, but the problem is, if you go look at those podcasts, about 80% of them never make it past episode 30.

[00:18:45] Nathan Wrigley: Or even, I mean, it's probably like 50% past episode one in all honesty.

[00:18:50] John Overall: Yeah that too. They find out, wait a minute, this is a lot of work, and it's really hard. It's usually the ones that try to do it by themselves and they've got the momentum for the first 10, 15 episodes. After that, you've got to keep pushing yourself.

[00:19:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's a grind, isn't there? And although we've just made the case that making a podcast is straightforward, from a technological point of view, it's easier than ever. But the grind hasn't gone away. And in fact, new grind has been added in.

So when you began, and when I began, social media was a bit of a thing, but not really. It wasn't kind of an essential component. But now it's almost like the only distribution mechanism, outside of RSS, and perhaps a WordPress website.

All of those pieces have kind of got bundled in. So you have to make sure to promote it, and cross-promote it, and create, I don't know, alternative, different snippets of it that go on this platform and that platform. So there's a whole load of other things.

It isn't something that, unless you've got a real passion for it, it's something that, like you said, episode 30 is probably going to be where you get and give in because you start in New Year, brand new, New Year's resolution. January, I'm going to do a podcast, and you keep going for a little while. And I was telling you that there are very few things in my life where I've had the capacity to stick at it, but podcasting for some reason has worked for me. I guess I just like listening to my own voice.

[00:20:05] John Overall: There's that aspect too, listening to your own voice. Sometimes I listen to myself and I go, really? That's me? You don't get used to that. No matter all these years, I still can't get used to my voice.

But the other thing is, for some people, a lot of people use it to help improve their knowledge in their particular area they're podcasting about.

I like history podcasts from time to time. And those ones there, it means it's a serious history buff doing a podcast about something he's excited about. And what he's getting a chance to do is share to the world what he's doing.

The same I do with WordPress, I share things to everybody about what is in the WordPress world and what's changing. And now our show has moved in a different direction. We dropped down from the number of plugins we do each week. We have more discussion about things we see happening. There's new segments coming into the show that'll be talking about, here's a problem in WordPress we found, how we solved it, coming from my daughter's perspective, who, she's five years into this, so she's relatively new and everything. It's like everything's brand new to her. A lot of it's all, oh yeah, it's just CSS. I don't understand that Dad. And I was like, oh yeah, you're kind of new at this. I have to explain things.

So when I've discovered problems, there's problems I can solve in like 20 minutes and it takes her five hours because she doesn't know where to go to see the problem. These are what I'm starting to bring back to the show. Stuff that used to be in the show and it had gotten lost along the way. And it's also we're talking about what we see changing in the WordPress environment, and how we see this environment evolving over the next couple years.

We did a show, our Christmas and New Year's shows were prerecorded. We do prerecorded shows usually about that time, so we can spend time with the family and not worry about the show. But we'd made predictions of what was coming in the New Year that hadn't yet come to pass. By the time we did our first show, a week and a half ago, by the time we did our first show for the New Year, we had already had two or three successful predictions of what was changing in WordPress.

We're both starting to see this, which is exciting in the fact that, oh, okay, this sort of event is going to happen in WordPress and this is where it's going to go. With all the doom and gloom, as I mentioned, the doom and gloom as I see, like I follow the forums over at the Reddits, and Twitters, and all over the place because I get our news from everywhere to keep up. And I see a lot of people, doom and gloom of people abandoning.

I tried abandoning WordPress at the introduction of Gutenberg. I even took my show towards ClassicPress. And that happened for about two years. And then I realised, unfortunately, ClassicPress didn't have a community momentum behind it, and WordPress kept going. Even though I currently build in WordPress, I don't use Gutenberg, because no matter how many times I try to wrap my head around it, I can't get my brain to think that way. And so I use Elementor for all my builds. And it allows me to continue using the Classic Editor.

But that sort of thing is going to continue. They were going to supposedly stop supporting the Classic Editor, but unfortunately it's not happening, because a good 50% of the WordPress community still uses the Classic Editor, and a page builder of some sort. Versus 50% that are using Gutenberg. And they can live together. It took me a while to realise that they can live together. You just have to work with it.

I have a couple of clients who use Gutenberg. I can sort of muck my way through it if I really work at it. But it's going to continue, and these things are going to keep changing and evolving. The WordPress plugins, I've seen the developers creating some amazing developments. When we just launched the new website for our business, we actually have a whole WP Pro A to Z lineup, WP Plugins, WP Pro A to Z.

When we launched our new site, I found a plugin I didn't know existed, which will be coming in one of my shows, upcoming. If you need a booking plugin and you use Gravity Forms, somebody wrote a full blown addition to Gravity Forms for a booking plugin. So you don't have to go spend money on another third party service or a service as a software, SaaS service where you're putting out money. You pay for this one plugin, integrate it into Gravity Forms and you get everything. And now it's all in one form and you still control your data.

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: I really like the idea that you had of having that kind of theme running through, because in any of the podcasts I do, basically each episode is atomised, you know, it's just an episode and then you listen to a different one, and there's no real connection necessarily between the episodes. And I really like the idea of having a thread which runs through.

But also, I am really curious about plugins in particular, and I would love to have the excuse to play with them. Because then it would be, air quotes, then it would be work suddenly. The excuse of, what are you doing? I'm doing work. I'm playing with a plugin.

[00:24:39] John Overall: Play with a plugin, figuring it out, throw it on one of my dozens of domains that I'm doing nothing with, that collect all kinds of stuff.

No, the other joy is, as you mentioned with plugins, is of course, because once developers rediscover us, and the way we review stuff, and we give honest reviews, we tell them, truthfully what we find wrong and what we don't. We give a good, honest rating. It's very seldom we'll give a rating as low as a two, but it has happened in the past.

We don't automatically like give it a five, it has to be worthy of a five. Most of them fall between three and four, which is where most of them are anyway.

But the other joy is, is I get developers, they got a premium plugin and they go, hey, you want to check it out and I say, yeah, give me your premium plugin and a license, all give it a review.

So I get to play with premium plugins without having to spend the money on them, which is a joy. But it also allows people to find out what it might do. And the other thing that's coming again, I used to have training videos, create training videos on how to use plugins. In fact, my training videos on my YouTube channel, some of them are still some of my highest rated plugins.

[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that I was really lucky being in the WordPress community, then discovering podcasting. Because I feel like all the pieces of the jigsaw, which go into making a podcast, are easily handled with WordPress. And so that was just a nice bit of serendipity. If you understand how to put a website up, well, that's one thing you kind of really do need if you're going to have a podcast.

And there's plugins which will handle the RSS feed. There's plugins which will handle the contact forms. There's plugins which will handle the display of your website if you're not using Core. And so I felt that talking about WordPress, and having the capacity to use WordPress was a real boon for me. Just made the whole thing much more straightforward. But like you're describing about your daughter, not the same for everybody.

[00:26:21] John Overall: Yeah, well, one of the interesting things about, when you mentioned a plugin for this and a plugin for that, you remember the early days of the Apple advertising, There's an app for that.

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: For the iPhone, yeah.

[00:26:30] John Overall: We used to say for the longest time, well, there's a plugin for that.

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And there was.

[00:26:34] John Overall: There literally was, and there still is. And if you don't think there is, it's easy enough to build. It's like, I've actually gone so far, in the last couple of years, to pay developers to create plugins for me. Sometime around the end of this year we'll be introducing a plugin that has not been created yet for any of the things on WordPress. We've been working on something, and so that's a little tidbit of what's coming. As we get closer to the beta release, which is expected, the beta release is expected September, October of this year. Then we'll be talking more and more in depth about this plugin.

[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: Do you still intend to keep going with your podcast into the, basically into the future, forever? Do you have a sort of timeline, like when you get to, I don't know, a thousand episodes of this particular podcast, that'll be it?

[00:27:18] John Overall: As long as the show has still got listeners, and some audience, and it still provides value for what we do, no. Because one of the biggest things, and even my daughters realised this. Because she has to do research for every episode, because a lot of people don't realizse, okay, you do a podcast, oh, it's about an hour long. They don't realise that that hour long required three to four hours of research in preparation of your notes and everything for the show, plus whatever post-production, everything else. By the time you're done, a one hour show is usually a five to seven hour investment of time.

The thing is, when you're doing that research, what it does is that increases your knowledge, because you're looking at things you hadn't looked at before, and it helps increase and input more knowledge into you, and expand your knowledge as an expert in the field. Many, many people started podcasts as a side hobby, and turned into experts in their field, because of their podcast. That's what it forces you to do, is it forces you to become an expert in whatever field your podcast focuses on.

[00:28:18] Nathan Wrigley: Did you ever get into creating podcast websites for people?

[00:28:22] John Overall: No.

[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: No, me neither. And there's some part of me which regrets that, because I think that would've been a real good wheelhouse for me.

[00:28:28] John Overall: It would've been, and it would've been except for, you would've been changing a lot, and the investment in time and the screenshots for it would be even higher than the investment in time I've got now.

It was all about how much investment in time versus the return on that investment in time. It is how I've done it.

I did training videos, and my training videos are still some of the highest viewed videos on YouTube, and they're old and ancient now, and they're out of date. And I even got a question from one of the training videos, what was it, a couple of months ago, somebody contacted me and asked me questions. I said, oh, dear God, I forgot I did that.

And when I went and looked at it, I said, I'm sorry, it's out of date. I haven't used that plugin in four or five years now, so I don't know. And this is the problem of it. And so I'm starting to create new ones, partly because I'm creating these training videos for my clients to be able to manage their sites. Because my job as a web designer is not to manage their website forever, but build them a website that they can do all their own content and not keep having me having to put the content in, because they don't want to pay the fees for simple things like adding content.

And so we build websites to do that, but they need instructions on how to do it. So we build nice, simple training videos that they can go look at and remind themselves how to do it. And so I'm actually starting to do that with the plugins again. And for plugins, in fact, one of my training videos for a plugin I did a few years ago, the plugin developer adopted that video right into their code as their training video for how to use the plugin. I do do very detailed, and something people told me was, I'm very good at translating geek to English.

And that was the nice thing is, if you try to tell them how to do it in geek, and a lot of computer guys, they can't translate geek to English.

[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: Also you have this strange thing on an audio podcast where in many cases you're trying to describe the functionality of something, which would be so much easier if you could just see it. So it does this, and the way it does this, oh, okay, and you have to try and explain it. And sometimes that involves saying, well, you have to tick this box over here, and then go over here, and do this, and this.

And it really does make you stop and think, what's the best way to describe this? What's going to work? What's not going to work? And I think you're right, it does make you think around the problem. They say that if you can teach something, then you truly understand it. I think there's a little bit of that in there.

[00:30:42] John Overall: That was the other thing I did in the beginning of WordPress. I actually taught WordPress. I had courses here in Victoria where I live. I had night classes that people would sign up and come pay me money to teach them how to use WordPress. And I did those for about, all the way up until version four of WordPress when YouTube got flooded with tutorials and my courses became irrelevant. But for a few years, that was another way I expanded my knowledge was I taught it to people, because in preparation to teach it, I had to know what I was telling people.

[00:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned that there was a period of time where you fell out with podcasting or it fell out with you, or whatever it may be. You sort of dropped away from it. Did you find though, that when you came back, you mentioned that the audience is sort of still there? The curious thing for me is, I noticed this just the other day, a podcast that is in my podcast player that I have never listened to for years, and the reason I haven't listened is because they just went away, but it's still there.

And then they came back. RSS is a bit brilliant like that. Because there's no algorithm feeding it to you, there's no algorithm like on YouTube saying, okay, now what about this. It jumped right to the top of my playlist. And I suddenly thought, gosh, I haven't seen that one for a while. Click play, and the first words were, we're back, we've had a couple of years off or whatever.

I thought that was really cool. So I did wonder if your audience, by just mere fact of the way RSS readers work, and RSS feeds work with podcast players, if they'd stock with you, even though they didn't know they were sticking with you.

[00:32:05] John Overall: I'd say about one third of my audience, in truth, I never left it entirely. We would always put out a episode of WP Plugins A to Z. We would put out an episode, at worst it fell to an episode a month is what happened. It was never completely off the air. But the audience dropped down to, we're about one third right now the audience we used to have.

And a lot of them left me during my period of despair with the world, is lack of a better term. A lot of them left me during that period there. I chased a few of them away. Some of them I will earn back, some of them I won't. Some of them have retired, I imagine, because what was interesting is my audience for the most part is as old or almost as old as me. And I'm pushing, you know, the upper echelons of fifties now. Because I've been doing this since my early forties. And some people, they've aged out.

We're actually, because my daughter is a millennial, she's in her thirties now, we're going after the people in her audience segment. We're changing our audience focus. We're no longer worried about the old time geeks, the ones that know what they're doing. We want the younger people who don't know where they're going, what they're doing, they're looking for advice, they want to do these things.

We're working the audience to go after the younger generation, the millennials and the Zoomers, who are just now coming up into, okay, I need to build a business. What do I choose for building my website? Do I go with WordPress? Do I go with Shopify? Do I get Wix? Do I go crazy and go on a Drupal website? You know, it's like, what are they going to do?

And so we're hoping that we can find these people that are hunting, and get them to look to us for the expertise and advice, and come see me. Like, I now have 25, actually 26 years now of experience in this industry. So I've just started offering consulting services for building a website. Because a lot of people don't realise it's like, you can dive into your website and you can spend, what's your time worth? Is your time worth money, or is it not as valuable?

So you can spend the next 70, 80 hours trying to figure things out. Or do you want to buy a few hours of my time and get some direction, and save yourself hours and hours of time, and know where you're going with your website. Like, we've been fortunate enough to, in the last couple of years, build some very high frontend websites such as we rebuilt the website for the sierraclub.bc.ca, here in Western Canada.

So we've had a few high-end websites like that we've built the last couple of years, to be able to showcase the kind of work and capabilities we have now. So it helps show that, yes, we have expertise in this. And I'm just going back and tying into all my years of knowledge now and bringing it back forward.

[00:34:44] Nathan Wrigley: I think that's a really credible thing to be able to show as well. You know, I've been doing a podcast for 15 odd years or something, it's definitely a lot of credibility. But also I think it's great that you've managed to sort of co-opt your daughter into it. So not only has that breathed a whole new generation of an audience into the podcast, but it's also binding you to a family member, a close family member, and I think that's lovely.

[00:35:05] John Overall: Yeah, well, I'm also trying to co-op my granddaughters into it too.

[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: Really a different generation.

[00:35:10] John Overall: Neither one of my sons are much interested in technology, they're so, so. But my oldest son's become an electrician. My youngest son is looking at possibly going into trades as a welder. But my oldest son definitely is being an electrician, he starts as an apprentice as soon as he graduates.

But it's really good to bring in your next generations. If you have them, bring them in. If they're excited in any way, find which component of your business they might be excited in, and put them into it. That's one less person you have to worry about. And you can help ensure that maybe your business will last a couple of generations.

[00:35:43] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Jonathan, unfortunately time has got the better of us. I really appreciate all of the content that you've put out there. I hope that it carries on and you'll be able to make the new show with your daughter a real success. Where do people find you?

[00:35:55] John Overall: You can find us online at two places, WP Plugins, A to Z, or Z for the Americans .com. And that's where the show is hosted at. And all of our show notes are there. And you can also find us at wpproatoz.com. That's our company website.

[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: I will definitely put all of those links into the show notes. Jonathan Overall, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:36:19] John Overall: Thanks a lot, Nathan. It's been a pleasure.