[00:00:19] 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 real life AI tools and workflows in WordPress development.

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 Corey Maass. Corey’s been building for the web since the late nineties, starting out in the early days of Photoshop and tables. Learning JavaScript, ASP Classic and PHP, and eventually falling into the world of WordPress around 2010. Since then, he’s taken on building SaaS apps, managing client projects, and experimenting with a growing number of productivity tools and frameworks.

He’s joined us before, and today he’s here to share his perspective on what it’s been like adopting AI tools into his workflows, especially from the point of view of building projects for clients.

Although AI has dominated headlines over the last couple of years, Corey brings a practical angle to the conversation. He discusses the evolution of his tech stack and how embracing AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot have completely changed the way he builds software and manages projects, allowing him to work faster, automate code, review, and unlock creativity in places he hadn’t expected.

We hear about how his journey with AI started, how he’s reimagined old projects using new tools, and how learning to interact with these models, sometimes granular, sometimes letting them run freely, has reshaped his daily workflow.

Corey describes the shift from using AI to just save time, to using it as a sounding board for inspiration and idea generation, even weaving it into artistic endeavors like music production.

Much of the discussion centers around how these advances have affected client work with Corey exploring the real world balance of responsibility, efficiency, and the changing nature of value for developers. Do clients care who, or what, wrote the code? Or just that it works? What does authentic creativity mean in an era where prompting and randomness a part of the toolkit?

Whether you’re a developer, curious about what working alongside AI means, or just wondering about the future of tech, and WordPress, in an increasingly automated world, 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, Corey Maass.

I am joined on the podcast by Corey Maass. Hello, Corey.

[00:03:33] Corey Maass: Hello.

[00:03:33] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Corey’s been on the podcast several times before. He’s here today to talk about the subject, which almost nobody has touched during the year 2025, that’s AI.

But actually I think we’ve got a curious angle because we’re not just going to touch it from a sort of more generic point of view, although we might. We’re going to talk about it from a client point of view and building things for clients and how, I guess, Corey is leveraging that to make life a little bit easier for himself. Let’s find out.

First of all, Corey, would you just introduce yourself? Give us you a little bio, tell us about you.

[00:04:04] Corey Maass: Absolutely, Corey Maass. I currently live in New Hampshire, which is in the northeast of the United States. I’ve been building for the web since 97, I think. Back in the day when we would do designs in Photoshop and then slice them up and put them in tables. And then I learned JavaScript, and I learned ASP Classic, and I learned PHP, and I got obsessed with building SaaS apps, you know, making websites actually do stuff instead of just look pretty. And then I found WordPress in about 2010 and it’s all been a wonderful, joyous, rollercoaster ride of happiness without exception.

[00:04:45] Nathan Wrigley: That’s lovely. And I think we should end the podcast right there.

[00:04:48] Corey Maass: And I met this wonderful guy named Nathan somewhere along the way, and my heart is full.

[00:04:53] Nathan Wrigley: It does not get better than that. I really think we should end there. Congratulations, Corey Maass, we’ll see you next time. No, let’s get into it properly.

[00:05:01] Corey Maass: And then the robots came.

[00:05:03] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. That’s what we are going to talk about. But you’ve been building for a long time. I mean, in terms of the internet, you really are like the heritage, aren’t you? 1997 was when people were just sort of starting out. I mean, there’s a few people that go maybe a little bit longer than that, but you’ve seen the whole thing.

Seems like in the year 2023, something like that, maybe 2024, certainly 2025, we’ve now got the advent of companions, AI companions that are helping us to do things online and build websites and so on. And I’m kind of just curious, let’s talk about your stack and where it is at the moment, and then we’ll get into how that stack has changed. But just tell us what you’re using right now. And we’re recording that December, 2025. And no doubt that will change fairly soon.

[00:05:45] Corey Maass: Still changes frequently. We’re chatting before we started recording and you said, have you updated Mac OS to this glass nonsense? And I went, absolutely. I bought into, to put myself in context, like I bought into the Apple ecosystem a few years ago. And I tend to, when they say update, I update. I might wait a day or two. Usually I will hear about, if something is truly crashing your computer, I’ll usually hear about it on Reddit or what have you. And so I might wait a day or a week, but I’m generally an early adopter is the point I’m trying to make.

But with that said, I’m also a pragmatic developer. So I want to use the tools that are the most beneficial, but I’m also not cutting edge, bleeding edge on what model is the absolute best and all that kind of stuff. But I’m also not not going to use AI once it actually benefits me. So I’m probably somewhere on one side of the bell curve or the other, but I’m not bleeding edge.

Anyway. So as of today, I am using Cursor as an IDE, but I am not using the AI in Cursor at all. I have been meaning to, but again, it’s pragmatically. I’m not trying to use things because they’re in front of me or what have you. So we can talk about why I wound up using Cursor. But what I generally am doing during the day is opening Terminal inside Cursor and using Claude Code almost exclusively. Which then, a buddy of mine has gotten me back into the process of actually doing pull requests, so that the code gets pushed to Git. And then I’m running Copilot, which is GitHub’s AI to do code reviews. That’s what I was trying to say. I’ve got Claude generally writing the code, and then I’ve got GitHub’s Copilot checking the code.

[00:07:40] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, so that’s where you’re at the moment. But historically, if we were to gaze back over the last year, let’s go with that, how often does that iteration change? How often do you move from one thing to another because the landscape has moved or something superior appears to have come along?

[00:07:53] Corey Maass: Yeah, it’s kind of amazing. This is part of why I wanted to have this conversation is, for me it started pretty much in March. I went to Thailand for a few weeks visiting a buddy of mine there who’s a developer, he had to work. Like, every weekend we were running around looking at temples and stuff like that. During the week he had to work, and so I was left to entertain myself. And so doing my usual client work, which was still very clicky, clickly, because it’s still WordPress, and WordPress hasn’t quite crossed that bridge, though we’re working on it.

But I said, okay, I want to use this time to start my AI journey. That’s where I said, let me subscribe to Cursor, 20 bucks a month, not unreasonable in the scheme of all of the software subscriptions that I have, and let me see what I can do.

And I have an app called Timerdoro, which is a productivity timer app, Pomodoro and that kind of thing. Friends and I built it, now it’s got to be 20 years ago, and we’ve never figured out how to monetise. In fact, yesterday I finally just slapped some ads on it because I couldn’t stand it anymore. And, no, that’s not true. I found an ad network that I wanted to try. But that’s kind of a perfect indication of how I think of Timerdoro. Timerdoro, I have rewritten at least a dozen times in at least four different, using four different tech stacks because a lot of people use it.

It has a hundred users a day or something, which is really cool. None of them want to give me any money, which I totally am fine with. It doesn’t cost me anything. But it gives me an opportunity to, here is a product that people are using, let me continue to play with it, tweak it, design it, totally rewrite it. And so I rewrote it again in March using Cursor, which was an okay experience.

Looking back, I can see how much Cursor has improved, both the IDE and the models that are built in. And I have completely changed, because a big part of it is your own learning how to work with it. And so, at what level do you give it, build a productivity timer, go? Or do you say, install the following libraries, create the following files, make the classes look like this, name the methods and functions like this? Like, too granular, where it just does the typing for you. Versus, it totally conceptualises everything. And so you’ve got to fall somewhere in the middle, maybe, right? Or figure out where you are in the middle.

And I generally, having written my own code for years and years, sure enough, was too granular. But I think that benefited me at the time. Whereas we’ve come a long way, where you can be more in the middle and something like Claude can figure it out.

The buddy that I was visiting, coincidentally, has absolutely doubled down. So he follows, he always talks about Tech Dev Dan or something, Dev Dan, who is sort of the thought leader in AI that he follows. And so he signs up for anything that Dan puts out, classes or courses or videos. And then he tends to, my friend Robert tends to distill some of that down to me. And so I might or might not implement it.

But then I’ve also got other colleagues in the WordPress world. I actually had a friend of mine come to me and be like, hey, will you kind of be my AI buddy as we figure out how to negotiate all of this changing landscape? I said, absolutely. And coincidentally, it has turned out that I’ve kind of been the Robert to him a little bit, where I am a little bit ahead of him, and a little more embracing of things than he is. And so we’ve all kind of, we all evolve, but we’re all kind of getting information from different sources.

So somewhere along the way, I mean Reddit and Twitter were just absolutely blowing up nonstop Claude. Claude Code when that came out. And so I was actually a little slow on the uptake, meaning a month, because I just, I didn’t get it. Like, so many of these things, people are like AI, and you’re like, right, but where do I type? Where does the code go? Or, I want to use AI, I am doing air quotes here, how do I get a website on the internet where people can click on it? It’s actually not intuitive necessarily to make that leap until, again, Robert has explained some things to me of, because again, he’s much more up on the words where he’s like, I think it’s called a harness is the thing you type into versus, the model is the actual AI you’re interacting with.

And so you’ve got TypingMind or you’ve got Claude, or you’ve got Terminal, but then you’ve got Claude, but you can actually use Claude with Gemini’s model if you want, or a Cursor. You know, if you go into the preferences, you can select which model. Do you want to use Open AI Opus, or do you want to use Gemini or do you want? And it was like, oh, right, okay, so there’s a thing you type into or interact with, and then there’s the actual model. But then, again, what are the patterns?

And like I said, I’ve just recently started, so with my buddy, we’ve been rebuilding, I have a game that I’ve talked about for a while. Mexicantrain.online is the website. And so it’s an online version of the Domino game, Mexican Train. I built it during COVID and I talked about it at WordCamp US two years ago, because it was kind of an amazing, one of those projects that I built because my wife told me I should, so that our family could play, continue to play, during COVID. And then it turned into thousands of users, and so it just became this, organically became this nice thing that a lot of people use. And it’s run by donations, which cynically, I never would’ve thought actually works. But people continue to give, I mean it’s amazing.

But it’s been a long time coming that it needs, the tech is now five years old. I needed to rebuild it. I approached my friend and said, hey, would you mind building this with me? Because we’ve kind of looked for a reason to work together. We worked together at a big WordPress agency five years, eight years ago, which is how we met, but we haven’t worked together since. And he’s gone very enterprise, and I tend to be still my freelancer self, working with individual clients directly and stuff like that.

And so what’s been hand ringing, but good is he’s like, okay, we’re going to introduce pull requests because we’re going to have Copilot check our work, and we’re going to have full suite testing. And I tend to not, like I can do that stuff, and there’s the occasional project where I need to do it, but for the most part I’m a, make a change and push it to the internet and see what happens kind of developer. And so we’ve introduced more process, but again, it’s neat because I have to make myself be like, do what he tells you kid. And so then I’m learning better ways to use these tools to build more robust software.

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: Was there ever a moment where, I don’t know if you were always bullish about technology, especially AI, it’s entirely conceivable to imagine that any given person that you see could be extremely bullish about AI, you know, somewhere in the middle or extremely, a little bit allergic to it or what have you. Now, I don’t know if there was any point where you swung between those two extremes or anything like that. But I was just curious if there was an epiphany that you had, like if there’s a particular moment that you can remember where you thought to yourself, oh, this is curious, you know? This is not something we’ve seen before. And if you do have one of those, I’d love to know what it was.

[00:15:07] Corey Maass: There’ve definitely been those moments where, mind blown, mind blown, mind blown. Even recently, Nano Banana the new image AI is mind bogglingly good. And so there hasn’t been one moment, there have been many moments because things like, I did pay for whatever the original ChatGPT was for a while. When it really became popular, I think last year, right? And so I said, well, let me pay 20 bucks a month. But I wasn’t using it. It wasn’t that good. It was definitely helpful, but again, it was more of a dumb typing companion. I need an email that says this. There’s your 20 lines. I didn’t have to think about it. I skim it, I edited a little, I might run it back through, and then I’d go, yep, good enough. Take out the em dashes so it doesn’t look like AI, paste, send.

Treated it more like that. A year ago when I tried to have it right code, sorry robots, I love you. In the future, don’t murder me. You know, but a year ago, like the code that it was generating wasn’t great. It really was hallucinating a lot. Oh, you need to write a WordPress function that uses this hook. A quick Google determines that hook does not actually exist. Stop making stuff up. Whereas I very rarely encounter hallucinations these days.

[00:16:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s a profound realisation.

[00:16:23] Corey Maass: Yeah, but to answer your question, like there were just these great moments of, like I had it write song lyrics and I was like, wow, these are surprisingly good. Or I remember early silly moments like we all had where I was like, take these song lyrics and rewrite them so that they’re in pirate speak or whatever, ha ha ha. Like this is a gimmick, right?

But then, again, probably in March, working through my first project building Timerdoro again, using Cursor. Googling how to use Cursor, taking the time to watch videos to understand how better to use it. And then again, moving along throughout the year, these little moments of, oh, that’s amazing code or, wow, and in 45 seconds we had an entire authentication system with front end that a user can sign into and it all just works. The database is already created and all this stuff. And you’re like, oh, okay, wow, it’s getting more and more powerful.

There’s always this thing in the back of my mind, I’m like, has it always been capable of this, meaning in the last year? And I’m just sort of taking, giving it more lead. Because again, I mean a big part of this is how we interact with it. And I keep thinking about scientists using it, or artists using it, because it’s the, little by little, again, we’re taking the collar off or, there’s a horse or a dog metaphor in here somewhere, I can’t quite. But giving it its own freedom to do what it wants, you know?

And how far can you take that? Like I keep thinking about, again, like science, where if you could give a model enough information, could it conceivably jump ahead months or years in our own research? Now research needs to be done, and things need to be proven and all that kind of stuff, but like in terms of thinking, are there things that it can conceive of that we just can’t? Brian Eno, the musician. I think it was him. I want to say it was him. I’m going to pretend it was him.

[00:18:14] Nathan Wrigley: He feels like the kind of character that it easily could be him. There’s a lot of technology in Brian Eno’s life, isn’t there?

[00:18:20] Corey Maass: Even away from technology, he, I believe it was him, I have to Google this. He created a deck of cards that said, as a musician, you’re in the studio and you’re like, my creativity needs help, right? And so there’s this deck of cards where you’d flip over a card and it would say, play the melody backwards. Or you’d flip over a card and it would say, what if this piece of music was being performed underwater? Or, what if somebody had a gun to your head? These thought experiments, right?

And you could actually look at that as, I don’t think anybody really would, but you could look at that as, oh, that’s not true creativity because something else is helping you do the work, right? As a human, if you’re a pure artist, it’s all supposed to come from your brain. You’re supposed to sit there in a dark room with a pen and a piece of paper. If it doesn’t come purely from your brain, then it’s not pure. And again, I don’t, it’s a weird example, but I don’t think most people would actually say that. They’d be like, it’s fine that you found random inspiration. Just like looking at nature, it’s going to inspire a painting or whatever, right?

[00:19:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, or looking at a previous painting will inspire your next painting.

[00:19:26] Corey Maass: As long as in theory it’s not too derivative or whatever, right? So the interesting thing about AI that I keep trying to use, the way that I’m using it, even past writing code or what have you is, help me introduce that element of randomness, the flipping of a card. Next time you’re having your favorite AI model write an email, or do some creative writing, or come up with funny slogans for, like a lot of us are using it for. Help me come up with the tagline for the next SaaS landing page that I’m building or whatever. Introduce negatives. What is it not? Or say things like, have it write this in German and then translate it back to English or, write it like a 5-year-old would. Basically like help introduce that element of randomness and creativity.

[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting, the sort of through line that I’ve gathered from that is that at the beginning when you were using AI, correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like the entire productivity gain, or the gain was a function of time. You were trying to reduce the amount of time a thing took to do. So, you know, if you want to, oh, I don’t know, modify the game that you were describing, this train game that you’ve got. You were trying to reduce the amount of time it would take to do the next iteration of that.

But it sounds like in the last year to 18 months, something along those lines, the expectation has now shifted. I’m presuming that the time thing is now just in the background. That’s guaranteed all the time. It’s always going to be quicker than it would be for a human to do it. But you’ve now moved into this curious creativity phase, which for many people I think was almost like the Turing test. You know, it was the bit that the computers, you could never imagine that the computer would ever be able to approximate something like that. And there’s a whole philosophical thing in there, which is probably too deep for us to open.

But it sounds like you are making use of that. You are using it to generate ideas, to come up with variations around a theme and relying on it to be creative. Now, if that’s the case, I wonder how long it will be before that becomes just the normal, in the same way that maybe the time function has become normal. I wonder how long it will be before we’re all just, well, yeah, the creativity piece, of course, go to a computer, go to an AI if you want ideas.

I wonder what the next thing, the next sort of hurdle to fall is? Because it’s hard for me to imagine anything beyond creativity in all honesty. Once it’s got approximations and mastered that, I’m doing air quotes this time, if it’s mastered that, it’s difficult for me to imagine what the next domino to fall would be. But no doubt there is one.

[00:21:49] Corey Maass: And that’s what I’m getting at with the science stuff. There’s definitely, I think we’ve sort of chosen not to talk about the negatives. There are plenty and, or we’re foreseeing plenty or fearing a lot of things. Optimistically, at least in terms of output, to me we’re looking at coworkers who can do things faster, or employees or, I’m hesitant to say people who work for us but, you know, work that gets done on our behalf faster than we can do it, and in a way that we are satisfied with, right? Writing code is black and white. That’s not true at all, but it’s much more black and white compared to like writing a song.

[00:22:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s true. I think the, sorry to interrupt. I was just going to sort of establish that point a little bit more. I think you are absolutely right. The WordPress slogan, code is poetry, obviously kind of leans into this a little bit, but there is a kind of binary nature to it. When you finish it, it either works or it doesn’t to some extent. The goal is to do this thing, does it do this thing? No. Okay, something’s wrong in that. Something needs to be ironed out. The ones need to be zeros and the zeros need to be ones, whatever it may be.

In the real world, things can be a lot more messy than that. So for the tech industry, it feels like the technology is perfectly aligned to satisfy the goals of that. But, I don’t know, let’s say you are a, let’s find something which would be a great example. Let’s say you are a psychoanalysts, or a therapist or something like that. It’s not quite so straightforward, but the industry that we are in, it lends itself heavily to great success in that arena. Right, sorry, that was my interruption over.

[00:23:20] Corey Maass: No absolutely. Perfectly restated. The code, there are degrees of efficiency. There are, you’re taking into context all of the different elements. So like Claude might write a method but it needs to work well with the way that the database is set up or whatever, right? So there’s nuances. This is what we’ve made careers off of.

But exactly as you say, at the end of the day, it needs to work, it needs to be performant, it needs to be sustainable code, a few things. You check off these boxes and good enough if nothing else. Versus like, I am also a music producer. I make dance music and I like the way that I make dance music. It probably could be made by AI, if I’m honest, but it won’t scratch that itch for me, and that’s fine, right? This is a thing that I will probably, I and my music colleagues will all continue to do, even in the face of AI, because that’s not the point. It’s not about a thing that does work. And we’re going to talk about a client project in a minute. We said we’d talk about that, right?

I have a client who’s hired me to build a piece of software that needs to do a certain thing. And so with her blessing, I am co-writing it with Claude Code, having it checked by Copilot, but at the end of the day, she doesn’t care who writes it or what language it’s in or, dot, dot, dot. It has to do a thing. It has to let people do a certain kind of work, right?

Different from music. I’m not, for me, bedroom producer, I’m not trying to make millions of sales. I’m not a pop recording artist who’s reliant on this stuff. And so for me, it’s about connecting with other humans after I produce a piece of, let’s call it art, which is, I think a stretch.

But I’m also, I’ve always struggled with the actual mixing of the music. Like hearing all of the frequencies and optimising the output. Because there is, again, a right way, like it’s not, again, it’s not black and white, but it’s much closer to, there is a right way for a song to sound with infinite variations, but within a very narrow gap, right? So I could write any kind of song I want, but the way that it should sound when I release it on Bandcamp does have answers. And in fact, this morning, I had finished a mix of a song last night, different from writing it, I’m going back through and tweaking it to try to make it sound as best as it could so that when I send it to DJs and they play it on dance floors, everybody throws their hands in the air, right?

I’ve always struggled with that. My ears aren’t good at hearing those kinds of things. I dropped the track into Gemini, and Gemini came back with a, you’ve got a peak of frequencies at around 5,000, so you should drop that by two db. Your kick and your base are competing, and so you should add a ducker to the base so that the kick comes through and that’ll actually save you four db of headroom when you’re mastering. Like, I mean it was.

[00:26:09] Nathan Wrigley: It just gave you all the science, which is absolutely fascinating. That is genuinely interesting.

[00:26:15] Corey Maass: It probably isn’t perfect, and it definitely can be subjective, like maybe I’m going for Lo-Fi House instead of Big Room House. But I gave it that information where I said, here’s the genre, make me sound like these other artists. And so it said, well, here’s sort of how to help guide you closer to their sound.

[00:26:33] Nathan Wrigley: The interesting thing there, I think, is it gave you a new rabbit hole that should you wish to explore, you just got it prized open. And you wouldn’t have known what any of that was. And so you could probably map that into a million different scenarios, you know, music, art, whatever may be. And it will just give you something back and you’ll be, oh, there’s that universe of stuff to get interested in. You know, the headroom of the dbs and all of that kind of, I mean it means nothing to me, but I kind of grasped that there’s a thing there.

Do you know, you said something really interesting earlier and it probably just slipped out of your mouth and you didn’t notice how interesting or profound it was. You said it wasn’t the point. And you were talking about making music and using AI for that isn’t the point. I think that’s going to become the metric of so much in the future. What’s the point of that thing?

So as an example, if I want to go and see a band, I do not want to watch a video of a band where I have a suspicion that there was an AI involved and it created this video and the music. The point is I want to go and see a bunch of human beings who I know have struggled with their art and their discipline and, you know, failure and moderate success and all of that kind of stuff. I want to know that there was that soul searching going on in that musical arena.

But curiously, when I go to a SaaS app, the point is, does it work? It’s really simple. Does it work? And do I care too much about how the functioning of it was achieved? Not really. The point is, does it work? And maybe we’ll be asking ourselves that question more. What is the point of the thing I’m about to do? Does it matter to me if AI was involved? On closer examination, yes it does. I’m going to avoid that thing. Or, no, it doesn’t. That’s fine. I’ll embrace that thing. It really landed with me what you said there. So that’s kind of curious. I wonder if I’ll start doing that more in my own life, examining the point of it. Is it a human enterprise, something extremely human and only for humans, or is it somewhere else on that spectrum? Yeah, interesting.

[00:28:32] Corey Maass: An example just came to mind, which of course has now just gone out of my mind because I started thinking about six other things. But like I read a couple of graphic novels. That’s what it was, memes. I read a couple of graphic novels and some of it is, I read for the artistry. Some of it I read for the stories. There’s graphic novels where I actually really don’t like the artwork, but I like the storytelling. How would I feel about the art being generated by AI? Because the person who was writing the story couldn’t draw, but could tell a good story.

Or the example that had come to mind were memes, or funny photos, right? I’m not a meme person. I generally don’t repost animated gifs, or can haz cheeseburger, or any of that stuff. Some of it’s cute or whatever, and I’m not against it, but it doesn’t tickle my sense of humor, right?

But lately, I’ve long been proficient in Photoshop because like we said, I started in 97 when you were designing websites in Photoshop or whatever. And so for a long time, like I would say, so here’s a good example. One of my big clients is Seattle Magazine. And so we were doing, I don’t remember, there was some reference of Sasquatch, creatures that are most active in the Pacific Northwest, often around the Seattle area. They are real, by the way.

But the joke was that our editor was writing his letter or something. And so I, quick, ran over to AI and said, here’s the picture of Bigfoot that everybody knows, walking across the stream bed or whatever. Here’s headshots of my editor. Put my editor in this photo. And it generated a photo of Jonathan as Sasquatch, like walking across the river. And it made us all laugh. And I think we did end up putting it in the magazine. I don’t remember.

I would have done the same thing in Photoshop, much less effectively. Even 10 years before, I would’ve grabbed a copy of the original photo and done my best to Photoshop Jonathan into the photo, maybe he’s hiding behind a bush or something. I couldn’t actually change his body to be walking in that pose. Now I can.

Is the effect the same? And again, we’re not talking about the negatives, or obvious negatives, about image generation of other people. Used in a harmless, funny way or day to day. Like, another good example. So on the Mexican Train website, one of the things that I wanted when I created mexicantrain.online was, again, this was about people connecting. This was my COVID project. And so I, a couple of years before, I’m chatting with a buddy online, I was joking about how I was eating Cheez-its, which we like never have in the house and how Cheez-its are just the best thing in the world, and they’re dangerous to have in the house. And a week later, a box of like 50 packs of Cheez-its arrived because he had shipped it to me as a joke.

So I took a picture of me like looking absolutely exalted, elated, holding up Cheez-its. Oh my God, Cheez-its, right? And that’s what I put on the Mexican Train website as a like, hey, I’m Corey, I built this thing, because it was a very relatable photo. A funny little side story is that still, five years later, a lot of people who play Mexican Train daily or weekly using my website buy Cheez-its, or buy Cheez-its for each other as prizes and things like that. Like, it all became an inside joke.

In building the new version, I wanted a new homepage. But that photo, I’ve actually lost the original file of it, and I only have a low res version. So I uploaded that into Gemini. I’m also more bald and my beard is longer. And so I uploaded the original photo and then a couple of photos of me more recently and said, hey, Gemini, using Nano Banana, create a new version of this. And also, like the original photo is very zoomed in. You could really just see my face. And so I was like, I want head and shoulders. And it did a beautiful job. Fixed the lighting. It looks almost a little too polished, frankly. And my wife looks at it and she’s like, I don’t know why, but I can tell that’s AI generated, like I can tell that’s not you. But to anybody else, it’s certainly close enough. I look at it and I’m like, it’s me but I’ve been photoshopped a little or, you know, it’s been cleaned up or something. But it’s close enough. But it’s a better photo that still conveys the same message, but it works better on the page, I think. But it’s not authentic, air quotes.

[00:32:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that whole authenticity thing is going to be, well, I guess it’s going to be a question for everybody going forward, certainly in, you know, you can imagine politics and things like that. Just judging whether or not the politician that’s on your screen at the moment is in fact doing that thing.

[00:33:12] Corey Maass: That’s the terrifying part is, what’s real anymore?

[00:33:15] Nathan Wrigley: There’s no doubt that we are going to have to kind of work that through.

When you are using your AI, and we will get onto your client bits in a minute. When you are using the AI, on what level do you feel that you are in some kind of relationship with it? That’s a very ephemeral question. But, do you view it as, so you described that a year ago it was less good. So in human terms you might say, okay, it’s more childlike or something like that. You know, it’s a smaller version of a human being. It’s less mature and what have you. Now it’s grown up, for want of a better word. It’s a little bit older perhaps, or more mature or whatever it may be. Do you think about it in any human terms?

[00:33:48] Corey Maass: Oh, absolutely.

[00:33:49] Nathan Wrigley: Isn’t that fascinating.

[00:33:49] Corey Maass: So what’s funny is, we’ve had a few of these conversations lately. My neighbors have Alexa in their house and they changed it to respond to computer, and they will only refer to it as, it. They did not want it to be humanised dogmatically. Like, it’s important to them that this is not a companion, a creature, a whatever, right?

I don’t care that much, and in fact, I enjoy playing with language. And I don’t see, the current state of how we’re interacting with our technology, I don’t have a problem with humanising it, or at least using certain pronouns and things like that.

And that’s why I say that specifically, Claude is a, he, it’s a male name, male, Western English name, right? Or if nothing else, I’ve never met or heard of a woman named Claude. Claude has always been a he. But one of the funny things that happened working with my buddy Robert, is he, like I said, he introduced Copilot to do code reviews and we’re chatting, he’s one of my, the buddies that I have where, you know, we chat online all day, every day, ongoing conversation. And he just started saying she about Copilot. And I did too. I did notice it, but I’m like, I have no objection, reaction to this. I see no harm in it.

I have no idea if we’re going to take this conversation way too far. The Octocat, that is the mascot of GitHub. I don’t know if the Octocat has a gender or pronouns or what have you. If you’re going to think of Copilot as some version of the Octocat, like I don’t, how you might get there, even subconsciously, right? But like just using Copilot, Robert started saying she, so I started saying she. And then he actually said after, Robert, after a couple of days was like, you know, by the way, I don’t know if you noticed, but I’d started saying she for Copilot. For some reason I got a, call it a feminine energy off of her. And I was like, yeah, I noticed. I could maybe pick up, perceive that too, if I’m going to overanalyse it. I mean it so doesn’t matter.

So now Copilot is she and Claude is he. I’ve never thought to ask Copilot if they have preferred pronouns, which I guess would then actually get it into that like real world and societal conversations and philosophical, not to say that a gender discussion is philosophical but, you know what I mean? Like, actual consequences of real world issues, let’s call it that.

[00:36:06] Nathan Wrigley: It is so interesting that a lot of things, the sort of anthropomorphic nature of it, so we’re trying to build robots at the minute, and in many cases we’re trying to build a version of a human being. You know, it’s got legs and arms and clearly in many cases that is the least plausible design for the thing it’s trying to achieve. But we have this notion that, well, if we get a human being out of robots, that’s going to be great. It will be able to do all the things that we can do.

But equally, on some level, we’re trying to get it to approximate human intelligence, human creativity, and things like that. And that kind of leads me to this one final thing before we talk about your clients, and that is, at what point do we start learning from it?

[00:36:43] Corey Maass: Aren’t we already? You’re constantly asking questions.

[00:36:45] Nathan Wrigley: Well, that was exactly the question. Yeah, so it would appear that in the case of code, at least anyway, you know, you ask it to do a particular thing and it will come up with this, I mean you could ignore what it’s done and just play the output and interact with what it has achieved. But if you were to delve into the code, I suspect there is quite a lot of head scratching and looking at things and going, gosh, that’s interesting. Why has it done it that way? That’s curious. Oh, I should be doing it that way.

[00:37:08] Corey Maass: Is it better than me, versus is it better than everybody? We don’t have a way to determine that. And that’s why I brought up the science stuff earlier. I’m like, okay, so if a bunch of scientists, let’s just be vague here, are in a laboratory, or in a think tank and are working together, but they’re also feeding everything that they’re thinking into an AI who is also thinking, at what point if, somebody comes up with a brand new concept or a new way to approach a medical issue or something like that, you’re like, oh, that’s amazing. I don’t think that’s been done before. What happens when that’s Claude or ChatGPT?

Presumably, in that specific instance, like the same process of like, oh, that’s, I don’t think any of us have thought of that before, let’s go do some experiments to see if that actually works, kind of thing. What if it’s well beyond our comprehension? What if it’s, there’s a conclusion, words that are typed on a screen that are so far beyond anything that we’re doing? You think of Einstein or you think of these scientists who have done stuff that, you know, or even, I mean you could be as vague as like painters who died in poverty and obscurity, but we revere them today. Vincent Van Gogh of course comes to mind.

[00:38:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious because obviously each one of us is a little entity and we’re constrained by our biology. You know, we’ve got this finite capacity in our brain. You have a finite time span on earth so, you know, for much of that time, you are just basically a recipient of knowledge, if you like? You’re this sponge, which is sucking things in. And then for a period of time you’ll be able to regurgitate it. You know, if you have an accident, your capacity will be diminished. If you’re knocked on the head or something like that. But you’re bound in time and you are bound in capacity because of the size of the neural network that you’ve got in your head.

And yet we’re now being confronted with this other thing, which can do things remarkably quickly, can have the entire corpus of more or less everything at its disposal at a moment’s notice. And it can, this version of the entity over there, inside that other box is exactly the same as this one over here. You know, they’re kind of replicas of each other. And then if you put those two together, they can do things in symbiosis at twice the speed than, basically they’ve got this whole load of stuff going on that we can’t hope to manage.

And it’ll be so interesting being in relation with that, and how we start to learn from it because, when was the last time you actually went to a book or went to a human teacher in your adult life to learn something? You just sort of go to Google, don’t you? And you’ve trusted on a computer to serve up the information for you for a long time. We’ve now got a new route to that information. I wasn’t really going anywhere with that. It was more of a sort of thought process. Yeah, interesting. Okay, let’s move to your client then.

You did allude to this a little while ago, and it sounded like, certainly for the one client that you’ve got, there’s no obstacle here. You are just building the stuff. The client is entirely happy. I presume you are taking on the responsibility if the things that you produce with the AI kind of backfires or something is not working correctly. Is that your estimation of sort of the future into 2026, 2027, that the clients basically don’t care?

And if that’s the case, does it allow you to be more profitable because you are spending less time? Or more effective because you can do more complicated things? Or, do you sense that maybe we’re going to hit a point in the years that come where the clients start to, well, rebel is the wrong word, but you know what I mean, their expectations will be, well, it’s no longer, well, I know that Corey’s using AI, so my expectation’s going to go up in terms of his output, but also my expectation of his fee is going to go down as well? So there’s a lot in that question, but unpack bits however you choose.

[00:40:47] Corey Maass: So answering part 2.6b first.

[00:40:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that’s helpful.

[00:40:52] Corey Maass: The story is, I had a client who had software built, it didn’t work out. But that meant that, largely her budget had been spent and so she was left with software that was, didn’t do everything she needed it to and, or at least there was not a lot of budget leftover for, because it’s, when the rubber hits the road kind of thing. Going, oh wait, we didn’t think of this. Now that we’re actually using it every day, we need it to do this and this instead of this and this. You design in a bubble and then you actually need to use the thing. And there just wasn’t budget left over.

And so when we started talking, she’s like, I need these few things fixed. I looked at it and was like, I can’t really maintain this. We really want to, I mean typical, this is going to sound like every developer is like, I have to build it from scratch my way. But in some sense, at least in order for me to maintain it, it needed to be rebuilt my way. But we kept looking at, what would that cost? And she’s like, I’ve already spent my budget and so we’re waiting for new clients to come in or lightning to strike so that Corey can do this.

AI happened to be that lightning. And I went back to her and I said, I think we’re to the point now, this was just a couple months ago, that I can build it for probably half based on hours. Because we’re still, at least at the moment, going, okay, we’re charging X dollars per hour of Corey’s time which isn’t, has never been, or at least for a long, long time, has not been just me typing characters into an IDE, right? A code editor. You’re paying for Corey’s experience, you’re paying for Corey’s planning, you’re paying for conversations that we’re having in order to come to certain conclusions to figure out the software we’re going to build, blah, blah, blah.

So thinking of it in that same context, it’s not just about me typing. And so now it’s not about me typing at all. And in fact, I’ve had friends now, and I’ve read this too where the sentiment, or a sentiment, of developers now is we are project managers. We are product designers, or acting as the client in classic agile project management style. We are code reviewers because we’re not, why should we take the time to write the code anymore? And again, this is why, part of why we introduced Copilot, because it’s like, oh, then if we can also not do that part of it.

Humans are valuable. That was something that you inadvertently alluded to earlier, is that we are still currently, we think we’re steering the ship, telling AI what to do and controlling how we’re using it and stuff like that, but like we make mistakes just as much as AI does. We aren’t the stop gap we often think we are, because we often make mistakes, or we don’t know what we don’t know, like you said a minute ago about just googling everything and that kind of thing.

So anyway, talked to the client, said, look I think we can build this for half the price. I’m willing to take the risk if you are. I’m very upfront about like, we’re building this with AI, which is part of why we can do this. And she said, great, let’s do it. And so it’s been a slightly different experience. We still had to have the conversations about what the product looks like, what it does, and stuff like that. But I was in fact able to get it going a lot faster than I would have before. And because this is client work, I’m checking it a lot more diligently. Because again, like you said, there’s liability, or at least I’m going to be the one that has to fix it, so I need to make sure that it’s written in a language that I understand, and it’s laid out in a way that I understand.

And I was a little more opinionated because I want to make sure that files are in certain folders, which nobody, as we said at the beginning of the call, nobody cares about. Like, as long as the software works, nobody cares where the files are. But we’ve, over 30 years of development, we’ve developed certain patterns that just make it easier. So why shouldn’t we take the time to make it easier? And especially since I don’t have to do the work, I can say, hey, Claude, you put this file over here, put it over here instead. And Claude goes, sure. Why not? I don’t care.

[00:44:47] Nathan Wrigley: I guess if we ever get to the point where the AI is literally doing everything, then all of that would go out the window, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t ever need to care where that file was, so long as the AI had a hand in knowing where that was, and it could retrieve that information and modify things as it was. But it feels like we’re certainly still in that human diagnosis phase, where you need it to look a certain way. I’m doing air quotes again, the sort of old fashioned way, you know what I mean? The way you’ve always done it, so that when it puts something out, you, yourself can look at it and go, okay, this is comprehensible to me. I can understand and see if there’s been errors. But I would imagine it’s not going to be long until that moment has passed.

[00:45:23] Corey Maass: With the new version of Mexican Train, treating it kind of like I talked about Timerdoro early on, I’m caring a lot less, and I’m forcing myself to care a lot less. I’ve got a working version, this is an online game that is important to people, and it’s not that it’s not important to me, but I am comfortable with taking a little more risk. And so I am letting it more freely do what it wants.

What’s interesting is we are not to the point yet where, as you said, this box is the identical to this box. So I am finding that on certain days it’ll go, well, I’ll put the file here, and on other days it’ll say, put the file here. It doesn’t matter, right? At least with that example, it doesn’t matter. You want it to write performant code, so you want it to make choices where things like performance matter, but whether a file is in one directory or another does not have real impact on the performance of the game.

But comprehension down the road, because this is where we overlap with humans. You’re like, okay, so Claude tomorrow needs to understand where things are. It still makes more sense to have a logical file structure so that Claude tomorrow can go, oh, it looks like all of these types of files are in this directory. And so we end up coming to some of the same conclusions that 30 years of human development has decided are the better patterns.

[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, that’s kind of interesting. I mean, I guess it was ultimately because it’s creating its own, I don’t know, it’s next word based upon the whole corpus of the human word written down on the internet. It’s probably going to make, draw some broadly similar conclusions.

It sounds, from what you just said, you used the word like half, I think a minute ago when you were talking about maybe the budget or the time available. Sounds like you were at roughly 0.5, half of whatever the commodity was, budget or time or what have you. Is that roughly where you think you are at the moment compared to pre AI in terms of efficiency? And do you see that efficiency, again, time or money, whatever it may be, do you see that dynamic changing so that you eventually get to, I don’t know, 0.4, 0.3, 0.1 of the amount of time that you would’ve done? And do you have an expectation that, at the time that you are doing 0.1 of the work for the same outcome, that you’ll get 1.0 of the salary that you got? Or will you have to do, you know, the other 0.9 on other jobs?

[00:47:43] Corey Maass: There’s a reason why developers really like starting new projects or rewriting them from scratch, right? Clean slate. And I think that that work, where you are in total control, in an empty directory, all technology at your fingertips, I see that quickly speeding up. I’ll tell you, one of the biggest hacks, I should have said this way up front, like the best value, because I’m finding a lot of people don’t know this, is screenshots will save you.

Claude Code does not, there are ways around this, but largely Claude Code or other AIs do not know what things look like in the browser. So taking screenshots, dropping them in, you can now say, look, the columns are misaligned or whatever. But also, even text, like I am just constantly taking screenshots and throwing them in to Claude, right?

So part of what I’m doing right now, I know there’s a better way to do this, but I haven’t stopped to figure it out yet, is, Copilot reviews the code and then spits out a bunch of comments, right? I am taking screenshots of each one of those comments and dropping it back into Claude and saying, here’s what Copilot said, fix it. But I don’t even really have to type any words because Claude just reads the words that are in the screenshot. So it takes me three seconds to take a screenshot, drop it into Claude, and then Claude goes, oh, it looks like Copilot said we should do this instead, that makes sense. Or even has come back and said, well, Copilot doesn’t understand the bigger context, so I’ll push back on this kind of thing, right?

But I’m still copying, I’m still taking screenshots and pasting. There’s got to be a way, I fully intend to do this soon, to figure out how to have Claude just read those comments and so the two of them can work together. So I shouldn’t be involved until there’s, I want a system that comes back and says, Claude did all, made all these changes, Copilot made all these comments, Claude is cool with these and not with these. Overall, we’re good to go.

[00:49:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’d be so interesting to set the two agents against each other, I don’t know, at bedtime on one evening, and to wake up in the morning and see quite how they’ve got along, if you know what I mean? You know, has it been this entirely, because obviously it’s built upon the corpus of human knowledge, it’d be interesting to see if it’s been this entirely productive experience, or if there has been some element of humanity creeping into that conversation where, you know, one of them throws their toys out the trolley halfway through and things like that. It’d be absolutely fascinating to see if they, you know, or if one just sort of, I don’t know, determines that maybe, oh, that AI’s doing a much better job than I am. I’m going to slow it down with some.

[00:50:19] Corey Maass: Or level up or, yeah. So getting back to your question though, right? Nothing is the same as actual humans interacting with something. So if we’re talking about traditional software that humans are clicking on, and then that’s my second biggest point right now is, since we’re supposed to be talking about WordPress, WordPress is all about clicking, right? It’s all about interface. It’s all about, you’re signing into an admin so you think about how visual that is, and then in the admin, you’ve got this left menu with, here’s all your options, click, click, click, click. And then the design of the page, right?

Every client wants the logo to be bigger. And so you can go into AI and say like, oh, where I’m at right now is, if I’m building something new, I can use AI, I can generate it if I’m building software. But trying to essentially retrofit into current existing WordPress sites, we’ve got all these features that require clicky clicky on buttons, and AI can’t do that readily or what have you.

So I’m still spending a large part of my day signing into WordPress sites, clicking around actually making changes, reconnecting. When we post a story, it pushes to Facebook and so I’ve got to actually go in and connect and click through the screens and all that kind of stuff. Which at the end of the day, most of the changes that you’re making in UI correspond to things being saved in a database. So at some point we’re going to get to where AI knows, oh, for Beaver Builder, I can make this change, store it in the database in a certain shape, and Beaver Builder will know how to render that on the front end.

I’m already finding that with ACF, for example, like I have ACF save field groups as JSON, a feature they’ve had for a decade. But because it’s in JSON, in text files, AI can read that and then go in and make changes or replicate it sideways because it says, oh, it wants the data to look, have this certain structure so I can create another file and make the data have this certain structure and does a great job. But there are 50,000 plugins. And I’m not about to let AI go and look at my database willy-nilly to say, oh, Elementor wants the data to be stored this way in the database, let me just start writing things to, you know? And so there’s still that disconnect right now.

[00:52:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think WordPress is doing a lot of work with things like the Abilities API and things like that to sort of surface what WordPress is capable of. And I would imagine, you know, you mentioned Beaver Builder and Elementor, I’m imagining that in a future, they’ll be writing what their capabilities are, and where they’re storing their information in such a way that the, hopefully anybody with any AI can kind of instruct the AI to do the thing, and it will know what the thing is.

Absolutely fascinating. I’m so curious because you are doing a whole load of stuff that I’m just not doing. I was never really an out and out developer, I was kind of dangerous with code. But equally it does seem like folk like me, who are not really experimenting with this too much are getting, well, left behind is maybe one way of describing it, maybe we’re sort of enjoying it on some level as well. We’re enjoying watching other people do it, and we get to worry about what the societal impacts will be.

[00:53:44] Corey Maass: It’s points of integration. Electric cars came along and most of us were like, I don’t want or can’t buy a Tesla. But then the Prius came out and everybody went, oh, I can buy a Toyota. That’s probably historically inaccurate. Maybe the Prius came out before Tesla, but you get my point.

The people around me, my neighbors are teachers. One of them has no interest, has no reason to use AI other than like, oh, let me look up a recipe or something. Versus, the other neighbor who really wants to be cutting edge and also thinks that this stuff is really neat. Is constantly trying to figure out, how can I run, generate, bingo cards was the new thing? Have AI figure out how to do these bingo cards for my students, or what have you. And you get into the moral gray area of, who’s actually writing papers and then who’s actually grading them? And so basically you’ve got AI grading papers that were written by AI. And you can get into, like anything, there’s all these sort of side effects. But, again, trying to keep it upbeat, like there’s neat things.

[00:54:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. No, I think we’ve done a great job of kind of keeping it upbeat. You’ve just been relentlessly positive about it. You know, it’s obviously had a profound impact on your life, your capacity to do things. You sound like you’re infinitely curious about it as well. So it’s, maybe the life of a developer was something that wouldn’t have held the same level of excitement for the next decade or more. But this new technology getting injected and shaking everything up a bit, makes it so that you can do things that you might not have ever taken on, because the technical challenges or time might have been too difficult.

[00:55:12] Corey Maass: Would I want to be a new developer? I don’t know. Again, I think things are, I’m trying to describe where I’m at now, where, again, like WordPress is still very clicky clicky, and that happens to be the majority of the work that I do professionally.

I also think that, like I run a lot of websites for friends and for local nonprofits and stuff like that because there’s still something to be said for having a website. And the easiest way, so like we have a local, city owned, calling it a ski mountain is generous. You can technically ski on it. Most of the value to the community is there’s a tubing hill. So you get pulled up the hill in a tube and then you come screaming down the hill at 25 miles an hour. It’s freaking awesome.

I volunteer there and so when we needed a new website, I said, let me make a new website, right? I don’t want to be, if I’m involved in a tubing accident, this is the pointed version of getting hit by a bus, the developer scenario of getting hit by a bus, right? Somebody else needs to be able to step in and maintain that. So the website can’t, the value of something like WordPress, a CMS software in general for generating websites, right. I can’t, and even, TMI, but the guy who had the previous website had built it all by hand, and so nobody else could begin to maintain it or make changes to it.

And so for the new version, I was like, this is literally the best scenario for WordPress because I created the website and then I shot a video of how to update the website. And just a week ago, the head of the board in charge of it got in touch and said, hey, how do we make changes to the website? Do I have to send them to you? And I said, here’s a video, go give it a try. And if you get stuck, then absolutely contact me. But if there was any sort of running of scripts or FTPing into the server to make changes, or any of that stuff, like it would fall flat. And so you still need, at the moment, you still need clicky clicky.

Shortly, as you said with the new API and stuff, there’ll be a little chat bot where you’ll say, look at this website. And the AI will go, oh, it looks like you’re using Beaver Builder with ACF, and you’ve got Yoast installed, dah, dah, dah. And then you’ll say, okay, we need to change the homepage to say the following things. And I think we’re going to go through, like any of this stuff, we’re going to go through a phase where it’s going to absolutely break the website and my phone will ring.

But six months later, it’ll get better and better and better, and then using certain plugins. And I think, you talk about adoption, I think, if the plugins that lean into making AI be able to use their software well and quickly. So like I’m a big fan of Beaver Builder. So if Beaver Builder leans into enabling AI to interact with Beaver Builder, right? Then we are going to, just like any of the things in WordPress, there’s good and there’s bad, there’s favorites, there’s things that break over time. There’s all that kind of stuff, things that are maintained well and whatnot.

And so we’re going to get to a point where certain stacks are going to work better with AI. And I think site creators like me are going to say, oh, I don’t want to maintain this website for our local ski hill more than I have to. But instead of them having to go in and click on things and adjust boxes on a screen, I’m going to use Beaver Builder, but maybe I give up, ACF will never let me down but let’s, hypothetically, ACF doesn’t work well with AI, but Meta Box does. So I might say, okay, I’m going to switch my AI friendly stack to be Beaver Builder with Meta Box, so that they can just go in and type something, it’ll all sort itself out more reliably. And I think that’s what we’re going to see over time.

[00:58:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think there’s been so many interesting predictions about what is coming. Most of my predictions have turned out to be just hot air, essentially, because the rate of change is so, so, very fast. But I do like the direction that WordPress is going in, where it’s being sort of agnostic of the AI, the actual API, for want of a better word. You know, it’s just going to hopefully be able to bind to any of those. I think that’s a curious direction, and it kind of leans into that, I guess the philosophy of something like WordPress as well. That it’s there for everybody and it’s not there to generate money for a particular company, be it Open AI or Gemini or what have you.

We’ve probably hit the sweet spot in terms of the amount of time that we can give to this. What an interesting discussion though. So far ranging. We ended up with lots of sort of philosophical points, and lifestyle points and all sorts in there. But I think in the end we sort of wrestled it back to WordPress.

So Corey, where can we find you? If somebody’s interested in sort of having a chat and wants to talk AI, where would you be online?

[00:59:53] Corey Maass: Sure. Twitter, @coreymaass, is probably the social that I’m most active on. But also, Post Status, the WordPress community. Always love shouting that out. That’s been invaluable in my life and career. And then me as a developer, company, gelform.com. G-E-L-F-O-R-M .com. You can email me there if you want to yell at me or praise me or, but privately.

[01:00:21] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. We will put all of those into the show notes so that anybody that wants to reach Corey can do that. Head to wptavern.com, search for Corey’s name. It’s a slightly unusual spelling. The surname, it’s C-O-R-E-Y, the Corey bit, but Maass is M-A-A-S-S. So search for that and you’ll be able to find him. Corey, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[01:00:39] Corey Maass: Thanks Nathan. Always a pleasure.

[00:00:19] 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’s challenges and innovations in a changing WordPress landscape.

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 Brian Coords.

Brian has been active in the WordPress space for over a decade, starting out in agencies, building and managing websites, and is now a developer advocate at WooCommerce, bridging the gap between woo’s internal engineers and the wider developer community. His journey includes being a high school teacher, working for nonprofits, and writing for the WP Tavern before landing his role at Automatic.

If you’re interested in where WooCommerce and WordPress itself are headed, this episode will help as Brian shares insights on WordPress’s evolving focus, the importance of embracing AI, and how a slower pace of change can be a strength in any open source ecosystem.

He talks about the massive rebrand at WooCommerce, the challenges and opportunities in competing with SaaS giants, and the unique developer relations role that balances his technical experience with communication skills.

We get into how the team Brian works with supports developers and agencies with documentation, office hours, and feedback loops, and how WooCommerce’s global Reach makes for a complex but thriving ecosystem.

There’s discussion about recent marketing efforts, the realities of open source support, and the surprising diversity of WooCommerce users worldwide.

Towards the end, we look ahead to what’s coming for WooCommerce, which is greater integration with block based editing in WordPress Core, major investments in AI to streamline store management, and the future landscape of online shopping.

If you want to hear how WooCommerce and WordPress are responding to a rapidly changing tech environment, 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 Brian Coords.

I am joined on the podcast by Brian Cords. Hello Brian.

[00:03:09] Brian Coords: Hey, thank you for having me.

[00:03:11] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very welcome. I have a lot of respect for Brian. I’m hoping that by the end of this podcast you also have a lot of respect for Brian.

Brian has been kind of part of my browsing on the internet and WordPress journey, I want to say, for five or six years, something along those lines, I’ve known about you and followed your stuff. Pretty much everything that you’ve done. I’m really pleased that you’ve come on the podcast to talk to me today about WooCommerce.

Those people that don’t know Brian, I’m going to give you an opportunity just to introduce yourself. So would you mind, I know it’s a banal question, but little potted bio, couple of minutes about your WordPress journey, or you can talk about the guitars in the background if you prefer.

[00:03:47] Brian Coords: Yeah, nobody wants to hear me talk about or play a guitar.

Yeah, so I’m Brian. I’m a developer advocate at WooCommerce, so I work on sort of the community side, bridging the gap between the community of developers that build on top of WooCommerce or build stores with WooCommerce, and then our internal engineers and make sure that communication channel stays open.

But before that, I spent probably 10 years working at a WordPress agency. So building sites, managing team of developers, doing all the kind of work that a WordPress agency does and sort of lived through that time from early page builders all the way until the last few years in the rise of the block editor. So I kind of have that personal experience of what it’s like just selling WordPress websites for a living.

And before that, my career went through a whole bunch of different places. Was a high school teacher, worked at nonprofit, all sorts of different things. So happy to be at Automattic, where I get to sort of teach, sort of build websites and just hang out with people.

[00:04:44] Nathan Wrigley: I had no idea that you were a high school teacher. I have enormous respect for anybody who takes on a role in public education. So that’s interesting.

So I’m going to segue a little bit. This question’s just occurred to me from everything that you’ve just said, given that you’ve been in the space of WordPress for the last 10 years, more.

So it’s a bit of a peculiar one, but are you as excited about it as a project as you were, let’s say, 10 years ago? Do you still think that it’s got the future that you probably thought it had a decade ago?

[00:05:13] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean that’s a good question. I would say overall, yes, I am excited about it. I think that if there’s any concerns about WordPress or things to be not excited or scared about, it has nothing to do with WordPress and has everything to do with the internet as we know it, and AI and everything changing and economics and all these other sorts of things.

The project itself, it seems to, I would say over the last year, really narrowed its focus on what it thinks its role is. And I think it’s adopted the AI change really well, and that’s made me very excited. I think it understands, you know, I think some of the things about WordPress is sometimes the day to day, you feel like the decisions are a little confusing, but if you look at it over the long term, it’s half the internet. So clearly the decisions tend to work out in the long run. So I think I still have faith in the project.

[00:06:01] Nathan Wrigley: I find that the slow pace of change is actually one of its greatest strengths, but it takes an awful lot of mulling it over and sitting down and being calm with yourself to think, why hasn’t it got all these features? Why is it not keeping track of this, that, and the other thing that’s going on on the internet? But broadly, when you look back at any 2, 3, 4, 5 year period, I think usually that was the right decision, although it feels like it might not have been the right decision when that moment is passing.

[00:06:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, there’s a lot of people who look at a lot of decisions, like say the block editor and they say, well, why didn’t they just take Elementor and stick that in Core and stuff, you know? Regardless of the fact that Elementor is a successful business that probably doesn’t want their software stolen and taken into Core. But I think if you look at it now you, a lot of those decisions would’ve seemed a little crazy.

And the fact that it doesn’t throw everything and that it just throws the kind of basic foundational layer, and then it allows something like Elementor or any of these other page builders to be successful businesses and do their thing. The fact that it empowers that to exist, or it empowers all the other builders to exist, or it empowers WooCommerce or all these other plugins to exist, is a testament to the fact that it didn’t try to be everything to everyone, and it just kind of stayed in its lane as a foundational layer. And so I think it’s, it doesn’t feel like it’s doing that much, but it’s working out well for everyone in the ecosystem.

[00:07:24] Nathan Wrigley: We don’t want to get into this, in fact, I’m going to insist that we don’t get into this. But I think it is a really interesting time with the tsunami of things that are going on with AI to see how a CMS can cope with the future with AI as a possible tool to do everything. To do every single thing that would be required in building a website. It’ll be interesting to see how the project goes.

And, you know, there’s a lot going on there, and I think this is one of those moments where we have to just sort of sit down and be calm and see what the teams are doing and just have faith. I think at least that’s my position anyway. So you don’t have to respond to that if you don’t want to.

[00:08:00] Brian Coords: Yeah, I’m just overwhelmed by AI sometimes on my day-to-day work. And so I do have to remind myself the only thing you can do is sit and go slow and just see what happens, because I don’t think we can predict it.

[00:08:11] Nathan Wrigley: No, I think you would be right. So when you joined Automattic, how long ago was that now? Roughly.

[00:08:16] Brian Coords: Almost a year. Early this year.

[00:08:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Did you have intuitions at that point that WooCommerce was where you were going to end up? Was that where you were heading or is that just sort of serendipity?

[00:08:26] Brian Coords: No, well, not really. When I first started, I kind of was all over the place. I was here at WP Tavern for a few weeks as part of that trial writing project. I did some work with wordpress.com and kind of got to see behind the scenes of that, and I had friends at all different parts of the company.

What I knew that I wanted to do was developer advocacy or what some people call developer relations. I knew that that’s where the role that I wanted, but I don’t think I would’ve thought of Woo. But then when the opportunity came up, there was a lot that I really liked about WooCommerce that I thought it had such a strong idea of what the product is, who the customers are. They had just done that rebrand where they had the new logo and the new colours and the new design. It felt like the whole company was kind of just doing really cool things.

So once the opportunity came up, I’ll be honest, I didn’t build a lot of WooCommerce stores before I joined. So other than being kind of afraid of learning all of this stuff it was, definitely it made sense once the opportunity came up.

[00:09:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. With the sort of WooCommerce side of things, are you happy with that move? You know, you’ve got your feet onto the table now and you feel that’s where you’re going to stay, I guess, for the near future.

[00:09:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, definitely. What’s interesting about Automattic is over the last year, since I joined it’s been kind of a turbulent year at the company, but one of the things they’ve been really trying to do is centralise things and be more consistent.

So in WooCommerce, there’s a lot of stuff that WooCommerce would go off and do, and it would be kind of different from say, Core WordPress or wordpress.com or WordPress VIP, or all these different kind of parts of WordPress inside of Automattic.

And over the last year, they’ve tried to kind of centralise and say, why do we have three different plugins that are doing similar things. Or why can’t we streamline all of this or have everybody working on the same stuff. So WooCommerce has been doing a lot of work really towards Core WordPress, and making the Core WordPress experience better so that WooCommerce can use those tools instead of doing it.

So in a weird way, I’ve actually gotten to collaborate a lot more with some of the other sides of the company and people who do this job but are not in WooCommerce. There’s a whole team that has people like, let’s see, Ryan Welcher, Justin Tadlock, Jonathan Bossenger, that whole group. So it’s kind of nice. We’re in our little Woo bubble too, but then I get to work with them and learn from them, and work on Core WordPress too. So it’s kind of, it’s been nice. We’ve kind of brought everyone a little closer, I think.

[00:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of interesting over the last 18 months or so, having spoken to quite a few Automatticians, it does feel like the landscape inside the company has changed. I don’t think we need to go into that, but it is interesting you saying that, because feels there was some realignment and moving around, and decisions about which teams were going to collaborate more with which teams. And that seems like what you are saying as well, so there we go.

So on the WooCommerce side of things, you mentioned that you are a developer, well, you said developer advocate, developer relations, kind of the same term really. For anybody listening to this who doesn’t know what that is, basically, what is the job contract that you’ve got there? What is your role?

[00:11:19] Brian Coords: Yeah, so we cover a few different things. From a high level, it really is, we’re there to help developers inside the company know what developers outside the company are doing and vice versa. So if you’re building stores with WooCommerce or you’re building extensions to sell in the marketplace, you know, like plugins that add-on to WooCommerce, or you’re working at one of our partner companies like Stripe and Google and Snapchat and Reddit and all these companies that integrate with WooCommerce, our job is to make sure that you have access to good documentation and good examples.

We make sure that when a new version of WooCommerce comes out, which is every five weeks, that we publish all the release notes, and make sure that that information is, you know what’s coming, what’s changing, what’s different. We do some video content, we do some office hours hangouts in a community Slack, we keep an eye on the repo for community contributions. So it’s a lot of different things, but it’s really just, at the end of the day like, hey, does this help developers on either side of the wall move forward basically?

[00:12:19] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have to be technical in order to carry out your role, or would there be any scope for somebody in your position to be non-technical? Let’s say, you’re a marketing person or something like that. Is there any aspect of that to it? Or is everybody doing your kind of role a technical person with a background in coding and what have you?

[00:12:37] Brian Coords: It’s a unique role and it’s kind of a long debate inside of the developer relations community is, does this team go in an engineering department or does it go in the marketing department?

So for example, at Automattic there is another developer relations team that handles a lot of that WordPress Core stuff that I was talking about, and they’re kind of a little more attached to engineering.

For our team, we’re part of the WooCommerce marketing department. So of course that’s going to change a little bit of what we work on, how our decisions are made, that sort of stuff. I don’t think it changes that much, and in some ways it gives us access to a lot of cool stuff like their design team, which is really nice to have.

So it goes both ways, but you really have to be a unique person where you have to be a good communicator, and you have to have some amount of technical experience. You kind of really need both, because at the end of the day we look at a new version of WooCommerce and it’s, oh, we changed this API and it’s going to affect developers in this way. It’s like, I need to be able to communicate that. I need to be able to understand it. I need to be able to know what the implications of that are. So it’s kind of both.

[00:13:35] Nathan Wrigley: Do you produce this content in multiple languages or is it kind of English first and then it gets translated in some other department, or indeed does it get translated into another language, do you know?

[00:13:45] Brian Coords: No, I think pretty much English first. There is a lot of stuff that is translated for, I would say on the, what we call like the merchant side, sort of like the user side. So if you’re looking for extensions in the marketplace, that’s available in a lot of different languages. The software itself is translated, but the developer stuff is pretty much English only. Because we’re a really small team. Like when we look at, there’s only, at any time, three or four of us working on this for software that’s on whatever, 8% of the internet, so English only for now.

[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the reason I ask, maybe you were present at State of the Word where Matt went through a bunch of statistics. And it was curious to see, for the first time, so WordPress more broadly, not WooCommerce specifically, but WordPress more broadly is now used on non-English websites more than it is on English websites. And so if we’d have had this interview a week ago, that question probably would not have arisen.

But I’m guessing that WooCommerce goes along for the ride there. I’m guessing it’s not just on English speaking websites, I’m guessing WooCommerce is just literally in more or less every part of the world, in every locale and every jurisdiction. There are people who are using your code, but probably not speaking English.

[00:14:52] Brian Coords: That’s definitely the case. So we have a free Slack, that’s the WooCommerce Community Slack, and it’s more than 30,000 people in there. It’s all over. You can definitely tell that people are coming from all over the world.

One of the weird things about e-commerce is it’s very geographically based because the currency matters. The payment provider that handles the payments matters. The shipping options matter. So there are certain places where you can only use WooCommerce because you want to use the custom bank payment provider that’s only in this one country, that sort of stuff.

So because of how diverse the types of integrations you would need, yeah, WooCommerce is very global. That was one of the things that really surprised me was finding out that, oh yeah, there’s payment providers you’ve never heard of, and banks you’ve never heard of, and shipping companies you’ve never heard of and they need to integrate.

[00:15:40] Nathan Wrigley: And tax. So much tax, I’m sure.

[00:15:43] Brian Coords: Oh my, yeah.

[00:15:45] Nathan Wrigley: I’m sure it gets brutal. I don’t know exactly when the time was, but it feels like about, I’m going to say 18 months or something, when Woo underwent a fairly significant rebranding. So from a marketing point of view, the logo changed, the colour palette changed, the website changed.

I didn’t really notice until that moment when it did change that it needed to have changed, if you know what I mean? It just always looked fine to me. But the moment it changed, I kind of got a sense that, oh, okay, this is real now. We’ve kind of identified that there are these SaaS players, so you know, we don’t need to name them, we all know who they are, where you pay your monthly fee and you get a shop and yada, yada, yada. But I don’t know if that’s a part of the roadmap.

And summing it up as more serious, obviously that’s trivial and a bit, really not the right term, but do you know what I mean? It feels like WooCommerce has, I don’t know, grown up a little bit over the last 18 months and realises the, I don’t want to use the word fight, but I’m going to, the fight that it’s in with the SaaS players.

[00:16:41] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think that was the intention of that rebrand. So I think the goal was to go from saying, hey, we’re a WordPress plugin that lets you sell things. To saying, we’re an e-commerce solution, and we happen to run on WordPress. It’s kind of just a different framing.

But one of the big things is a huge investment in marketing. And so the marketing team has gotten really big. We have a pretty killer CMO. There’s a ton of investment into different types of ads and demand generation and leads and all this stuff that I kind of don’t understand, a lot of like acronyms that are thrown around that I don’t fully track. But it’s a huge investment to basically reposition WooCommerce as something that feels a bit more modern and, not a SaaS, but kind of can sit there next to the SaaS. So when a company is looking at the options and they’re saying, oh, do we want to use Magento or BigCommerce or Shopify or WooCommerce, we look like we belong there, and it looks like it’s an option.

[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious that there’s, real money has to be spent on this endeavor because, I was in London just a few weeks ago and I walked onto the Tube, you know, the underground train network. And the platform that I was on, the first thing that I saw when I walked onto the platform was this huge ad for Shopify. And then I looked left and I looked right and it was Shopify ads all the way down. They’d obviously, I mean I can only imagine how expensive that real estate is.

But the same thing would be true on radio, on TV, online, on print. These companies have gigantic, I mean truly eye watering budgets. And I don’t know if the WooCommerce side has to be a bit more guerrilla or if you also have a fairly gigantic budget. I don’t know if you’re able to peel any of that back. It sounds like marketing’s not really your thing, but maybe there’s bit of interest there.

[00:18:25] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean since we’re in the team, we see a lot of it. We did an event earlier this year where our marketing team walked through some of this stuff, so I can maybe give you a link to put in the show notes. We kind of wrote it, did a write up about that very concept. Because we get asked that a lot, why am I seeing Squarespace and Shopify ads everywhere? And it’s, you know, obviously if you look at the size of the companies, it’s a fact, like a whole factor difference, like we’re not anywhere near the size of those companies.

And part of the issue is that you don’t just go to woocommerce.com and hand us money, you know? The Core plugin is free so the way we monetise is a lot different. You can run it anywhere. You can, a lot of people that run WooCommerce, they’re not paying us in any way because they’re using their own payment providers and those sorts of things.

So it is definitely more of a challenge. But this past year, that’s why the rebrand started, that’s why they’ve been investing in it. And it’s been kind of cool. There’s a lot of podcast ads that we’ve been running and LinkedIn ads and all these sorts of things. And part of the issue too is that our target market is just much more narrowly defined, and so WooCommerce is much more customisable. It’s extensible. You can do whatever you want with it. And that’s just a different value proposition then you would say to somebody who just wants the easy SaaS solution.

So it’s a lot of things, but it’s kind of just knowing who we want and targeting directly to them. And so you probably won’t see ads on the Tube at any time, but for certain areas you’re going to start seeing really targeted ads for people at the places that would actually really benefit from having WooCommerce.

[00:19:51] Nathan Wrigley: That was the thought that I had about seeing the Shopify, in this case, ad on the London underground was just how much the audience, the eyeballs that were actually staring at that had no interest in it at all. And so almost like the bottomless pit of money that they must have to throw at these things. And obviously it sounds like you are targeting people.

Are you kind of like riding on the coattails of WordPress in general? In other words, are you targeting existing WordPress users in the hope that they’ll think, okay, yeah, we’ve got a WordPress site, now it’s time to upgrade to WooCommerce, or is it a bit more scatter gone, you need a website, you need e-commerce, we’re your solution?

[00:20:26] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean that’s an interesting question because I think when WordPress was growing, it was a lot easier to target inside of WordPress, and I think now we’re seeing all the big companies reevaluate that. So I would say the ads that I see a lot are, you know, Hostinger, Elementor, wordpress.com. And I think a lot of them are realising now, you know, we need to target outside.

So for example, WooCommerce this year, we go to all the WordCamps, but we started going to e-commerce expos that are trade shows that are not anything to do with WordPress. It’s just for people in the commerce industry and partnering with companies that are in the marketing and commerce side. And so, yeah, it really is about branching out and finding those new areas.

I think all WordPress companies are going to kind of have to start facing that as well because WordPress is 43% of the web. It’s like, how much bigger realistically can you get, once we pass 50%? I mean that’s, it’s pretty hard to grow at that point.

[00:21:19] Nathan Wrigley: Did you attend any of those events? The sort of expos for e-commerce more generally?

[00:21:23] Brian Coords: No.

[00:21:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was going to follow up with a question about whether or not there was brand recognition. At those events, if you’ve got a WooCommerce stall, I was curious as to know what proportion of the public would walk past a WooCommerce sign and go, yeah, yeah, I know what that is, I’ve got complete familiarity with it. I feel like some of the SaaS ones, maybe they’ve done that job so well that that brand recognition is there, but maybe that work still needs to be done on the Woo side, I’m not sure.

[00:21:49] Brian Coords: There’s definitely not going to be the same level of brand awareness. I think, like you said, like guerrilla marketing is definitely part of it. One of the things they do at these is they’ll find a local store that uses Woo and use them for swag. So they’ll get really good swag. They did like homemade, like embroidery things and all this sort of stuff. And so they end up getting very popular because of how cool the swag is, and how meaningful it is, and it supports a local merchant. But yeah, it’s a big battle, you know, to raise that brand awareness.

[00:22:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let’s just turn a bit more to your Dev Rel stuff. And you were saying that, well, I don’t need to repeat what you said. You said a little while ago, who it is that you are interfacing with out in the real world.

How does that work? Like, do you just sort of put content out there and tutorials out there and videos out there and change logs out there, and kind of hope that the people that need it get to see it somehow? Or is there more of an endeavor of, I don’t know, providing the bat phone, for want of a better word, to agencies and people so that they can communicate directly with you? How does that whole thing work?

[00:22:48] Brian Coords: Yeah, so it’s interesting because there’s definitely different audiences that we have. So we have developers who are building extensions and are, you know, they’re selling WooCommerce plugins basically. And so we have them that we need to communicate with. And then we have the agencies and the agencies are building WooCommerce stores for people. So they’re setting up WooCommerce.

And those two audiences, they both need some of the same information, but they also need a lot of different information. And so we’ve kind of seen a lot of change over the last year.

Automattic has launched a program called Automattic for Agencies. I’m not sure if you’ve seen this. It’s kind of like an agency program where you sign up and you get access to extensions, you can get affiliate fees, you can get kickbacks on payments, volume, all that sort of stuff.

So that side has really, sort of owned the agency space. And so what’s nice is we can go to them with any new information. We could say, hey, just pass this along to your audience in your next newsletter, that sort of thing. But really, if we want to have the conversations, I would say the Slack is the most common and we never lack for feedback. We get plenty of feedback. We do a monthly office hours in Slack or sometimes on Zoom, where developers will come and share their questions, that sort of thing. So we get tons of feedback. But yeah, it’s really just about being present there, being present on Twitter. We’re ramping up YouTube, because YouTube’s really important right now. And we’re just, like I said, small team and trying to hit all of those different content areas.

[00:24:13] Nathan Wrigley: My sort of follow up question there really was going to be something about shouting into the void and I wondered if that, it was in fact what was happening. But it sounds from what you are saying is if, no, there is an actual loop there. You put stuff out and you get feedback. I mean I’m guessing, from the sounds of it, there’s maybe more feedback than you can actually cope with, which is intriguing. I had an intuition that would be the other way around.

[00:24:32] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean it definitely depends on, sometimes you get feedback that’s kind of the same. We know what people want, and we’re trying to work as fast as we can to make the changes that developers and the community want. And sometimes you put out a feature and it doesn’t resonate.

But generally when we do calls for testing of a new feature we’ll post, all right, we have a new feature coming, it’s in experimental mode, here’s how to turn it on and then let us know if it’s working for you, if it’s working with your plugin and stuff. We definitely have a pretty healthy group that will take the time to contribute back, let us know if things are working. I mean it’s an open source project. We get community pull requests. We get people, they need a feature, they build it and submit it and, you know, hopefully we merge it. And so the feedback loop is definitely there.

But if you’re, the thing that I’ve learned about WordPress is that I think it’s like an iceberg and like 90% of the WordPress community, they’re not really listening to WordPress content, and they’re not listening, they’re not even tracking WordPress in general. And so I think there’s probably a much broader community that we’re not getting access to, and they’re just living their daily lives and just building stores and stuff. And so I would love to find more of those groups. I think Facebook is probably a place that we haven’t even touched yet, and I’m sure a lot of them are there. There’s definitely work to be done there.

[00:25:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that was maybe the piece that I was thinking. Is that Woo is the biggest solution out there. If memory serves, Woo is the biggest e-commerce platform out there. It kind of dwarfs all the others. I don’t even know if WooCommerce is bigger than the rest of them combined but, you know, it’s on that kind of level.

And yet, if you were to have a, I don’t know, a Shopify store or something, there is probably like a little submit feedback button in the UI somewhere, and you can talk to the support representatives, and they’ll have the answer specifically because they know exactly what the platform does.

But the jigsaw puzzle over on the Woo side is, yeah, it must be much more messy, much more kind of difficult to wrangle everything. You know, you’ve got people, end users who are using WooCommerce. You’ve got developers who are building plugins. You’ve got agencies who are building on behalf of clients. You’ve got people who are building rival things so you’re in direct competition with people in the plugin space who are building rivals to WooCommerce. It’s just, well, messy. But that’s open source, right?

[00:26:44] Brian Coords: I mean that’s exactly what it is. You know, we have, you have WooCommerce support, right? And our support team is really great. Every time I go to a conference and one of our support engineers is there, I’m always pointing to them to answer all the questions because they know the product so deeply.

But if you imagine the, you know, most WooCommerce stores will come to us for support, but there’s no financial relationship. If they’re not using our hosting company or they’re not using Woo Payments, or they’re not using extensions that they bought in the marketplace, maybe they bought their extensions just off the internet or something, there’s a good chance they might not be paying us any money at all. And yet, you know, we’re going to support them and make sure that they’re having a good experience, because that’s kind of the goal of it. So it’s definitely a bit of the Wild West out there.

[00:27:28] Nathan Wrigley: There must be some kind of strange tension there as well. I mean, you’ve described it very eloquently and I think you’ve stepped around that beautifully, but that is a peculiar thing, isn’t it, that you would not have to deal with elsewhere? The fact that you may very well be dealing with rivals. You may well be dealing with people who are using up your time, but like you said, they have no relationship with you financially at all, but they built something, third party thing on top of the WooCommerce ecosystem, and I guess that’s just the broader philanthropic goal of something like WooCommerce. You’ve just got to step up and be there.

[00:28:00] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean I think wordpress.com probably has a lot of the same things because if you Google WordPress, you know, you’re probably going to end up on wordpress.com, even if you’re not their customer.

On the flip side though, you know, the benefit of being open source is that, like I said, we get community contributions. We get a lot of eyes on the software. A lot of people, they give us feedback, they give us code, they give us all sorts of things. So it is a bit of a trade off.

But I think it’s kind of worth it for the software to just exist freely and for everybody who runs on it, to always kind of know deep down that they own their store and they can do whatever they want with it, and they can put it wherever they want, and Automattic or WordPress or WooCommerce is never really going to take that away from them or take them down, you know?

[00:28:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’d be curious to know what proportion of Woo kind of props up the broader WordPress project, if you know what I mean? I don’t think we need to go into that, and I don’t know if there’s any data out there anywhere, but there must be a lot of money sloshing around inside the WooCommerce ecosystem. It’d be interesting to know what proportion the broader WordPress ecosystem was was made up of just Woo stuff. That’d be an interesting thing to dig into.

[00:29:01] Brian Coords: When I worked at an agency, the kind of rule was if you wanted to make money making websites, you did websites that made money. So e-commerce was a big part. People, you know, their website’s more critical to their business, so they’re going to be buying more plugins, they’re going to be paying more developers, they’re going to be using more tools. So I think that’s part of it. E-commerce isn’t the only way websites make money. There’s definitely a lot of other things, big publishers and that sort of stuff. But yeah, it’s definitely a big part of the community.

[00:29:26] Nathan Wrigley: Well, big and not going anywhere. Speaking of going places though, what’s coming up in the near future? So when we’re recording this, it’s kind of the middle of December. I imagine this episode will hit in the beginning of 2026 at some point. Roughly around that kind of time, what’s the thinking? What are the, some of the top level items that people may not know about? What’s the stuff that you’re working on? Roadmap stuff, I guess.

[00:29:46] Brian Coords: Yeah, I would say the big things that I’ve seen that are really the big focus right now is, number one is really making WooCommerce closer to WordPress Core, which means making WordPress Core a little better. So WooCommerce has been pretty ahead of the curve of transitioning to blocks, using block templates and block based everything. So, I mean you can do your whole WooCommerce store in the block editor, which gives you a lot of kind of design freedom. But that means if we need something better in the block editor, we’ve got to commit that up to the block editor and make Gutenberg better. So there’s a lot of work to improve a lot of stuff inside of Gutenberg so that your WooCommerce experience is better.

So that’s been a lot of the focus. And so we’re, there’s a lot of cool stuff coming around just new blocks, new block designs, patterns, things you can do to really customise the visual aspects of your store. And then the second big thing, I think that is taking up everybody’s mental space is AI. You can’t not talk about it. So it’s, that’s the other piece.

[00:30:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, despite the fact that it consumes all the air in the room, it is so fascinating. Do you have any insight into some of the things that may be on the agenda for a WooCommerce store owner in the near future? The kind of things that you are thinking of. Even if they’re just aspirational for a WooCommerce store owner. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on that.

[00:31:01] Brian Coords: Yeah, I think there’s two different aspects of it that are really going to be important. One is managing your store. So we have right now in beta what’s called an MCP server in Woo. And what it basically lets you do is open up, you know, ChatGPT or Claude or something and say, log into my WooCommerce store and update all my products, put them on sale, change out the pictures, write better copy for them. It kind of lets AI log into your store and do things for you.

And so that’s in beta right now, and it’s pretty cool. I’ve been using it. It’s pretty neat. I’ve been setting up some demo stores for people, and I just go, all right, log in and make me, you know, 50 fake sweaters with a nice description in different colours. And it does it. It’s kind of mind blowing.

[00:31:43] Nathan Wrigley: Do you trust it at this point? And I don’t mean, you know, the broader kind of debate about AI and whether it’s trustworthy. I mean, in terms of the store, you know, do you trust it to update all of the particular product lines and what have you, or update the images? Do you feel that if you’ve given that prompt, you can sort of sit back and go, okay, that is definitely being done?

[00:32:02] Brian Coords: I haven’t done it on a live site, I will say. The nice thing too is you can have it ask you for permission every single time, and you can kind of see what it’s going to do. That obviously kind of ruins the whole efficiency part of it, but it can do that. So I think it’s early days.

But I do think, once you start interacting where you don’t have to actually log in and click a bunch of buttons, and you can just tell your computer what you want it to do, I think it’s going to be hard to come back from that. I think people are going to start expecting it. But I, yeah that’s, I mean we’re not doing that on the live, on any live sites, I hope not.

[00:32:32] Nathan Wrigley: So that was half of it by the sounds of it. That was one of the threads. What was the other one?

[00:32:35] Brian Coords: The other one, I think is about how people are going to be shopping in the future. And I think showing up, obviously all these chat companies, they need to make money, and we know that they’re going to start showing ads and they’re going to start wanting to do the same thing when you go to Google, and you look up something and it gives you some shopping recommendations and shows you some products you might want to buy and some ads. You know, we’re going to start seeing that in our chat bots and stuff.

And so I think it’s going to be important for people that have WooCommerce stores, they want their products to show up there, and they want their ads to show up there, and they want to make sure that people who are using AI to get product recommendations, which my wife does all the time, that they’re going to show up there. So I think that’s the other half of it.

[00:33:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Do you know it’s really curious, the whole, what we might have called SEO, which is fast giving way, I think, to AI. It’s kind of curious. I think there’s like a whole section where the discovery of the website is going to be everything. So an example might be apparel. I don’t suppose anybody’s just going to buy a blouse or a shirt based upon some text that they saw in a chat bot, but getting to that page and saying, find me, locally to me, find me a place which sells, I don’t know, affordable shirts for work, or something along those lines. And have a recommendation, which gets you to the WooCommerce store.

But for more utilitarian things, just the stuff that you don’t really care about like, I want to buy a bunch of nuts and bolts, or hammers, or spanners, or whatever it may be, I feel like there’ll be a point where the store itself, obviously all of that commerce will take place in the store, but it will be invisible to you as a user. You’ll just tell the AI, buy these things, I need 50, or even just repeat the order from last month for these things, and it’ll just magically happen in the background. You’ll get a receipt via email, and WooCommerce will have handled it. The site will have been notified in some way, but you’ll have had no interaction. So it’s kind of scary, but interesting at the same time.

[00:34:23] Brian Coords: I think one of the thing, I think Google’s the best example because I think WordPress and Google have this really symbiotic relationship because we make the websites and they provide the traffic. And I think it’s been good for both of them. They want a bunch of websites to send people to, and we want them sending people to our websites. And so I think Google’s a great example.

But they’ve had product recommendations that you can connect to your WooCommerce store, you know, for a while now. It’s kind of in some ways not really that different from just Googling something. Google shows you some products and then you click through and you buy it.

If it becomes that seamless where you don’t even have to realise you’re going to a website, which I think is possible, I also wonder, will people want to do that? Will they feel as trustworthy? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, that is probably going to be the case.

And so that’s going to require a lot of these, the discussion’s already happening. They have these payment protocols and things, and we’re starting to see the very beginning of it. So it’s kind of interesting to be inside of WooCommerce because the companies that do all this stuff, the Stripes and the PayPals and the Googles and stuff, these are partners that they work closely with. And you get to see a little behind the scenes of them trying to figure this out in real time, you know?

[00:35:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it kind of speaks to trust really, doesn’t it? So the repeat order thing through a ChatGPT style interface or whatever that looks like in the future, be it voice or speaking to a camera or whatever it may be, I could totally see myself ordering the, I don’t know, the groceries or the toothpaste or whatever it is that, I really don’t need to see that thing. I don’t need to go to a shopping checkout. I just need to know that my next pack of toothpaste is going to arrive reliably tomorrow morning. That’s all I need to know. I feel like there is, there’s a there there, if you know what I mean? Despite the fact that we’re so wedded to this interface of, go to the website, look at the pictures, click the cart number, click how many you want, go to the cart, proceed with the checkout, dah, dah, dah. Most of that is going to be obsolete for the utilitarian stuff, I think. I don’t know. We’ll see.

[00:36:15] Brian Coords: I feel like Amazon’s been trying that for a while, but I still have to check it because I feel like we return 30% of the things we buy at Amazon. It comes, it’s the wrong size, it doesn’t look anything like the picture, all that sort of stuff. Hopefully those problems still get solved, before we get to the point where I’m not even going to look at what I ordered. I think we still have a lot of time there.

[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: Well, so even if that interface isn’t quite as radical as I just suggested, but even if there’s like a back and forth between the AI and the website. I don’t know, I ask for a particular thing, and then the chat interface or whatever it may be shows me a picture from the website or something along those lines. This whole scraping of the website and surfacing the content of the website, and then I can make those decisions based upon what I see. Maybe it’ll be a bit more back and forward, and far less of the AI, and more of the AI meets human kind of interface.

[00:37:01] Brian Coords: Yeah, and I think a lot of it is, it’ll feel like magic to the end user with an AI, but really it’s just going to be a ton of code and protocols and extensions and things. Under the hood, that’s going to be a ton of manual work, getting all that stuff there. But I think with WooCommerce especially, most of the Woo stores I come across, they’re very weird, I guess is the best way to put it. They’re unique products, you know? They’re often not selling the toothpaste and that sort of stuff. Or if they are, they’re selling the very interesting toothpaste that you can only buy from this one company.

So I think that’s what’s fun about it, is I think it’ll really be for people looking for those weird, unique products, and the kind of stuff you’re not going to get on Amazon or you’re not going to get on a basic walmart.com or something. So yeah, I think it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

[00:37:44] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if Automattic, or WordPress more generally, do you know if it’s investing anything in its own AI? Everything at the moment, all the oxygen seems to be being consumed by the, let’s say, four big players that we’ve all heard of. We don’t need to name the names, we all know who they are. But it’d be curious as to whether a company obviously deeply rooted in tech, like Automattic is inventing, creating those kind of things. That’d be a curious shift.

[00:38:07] Brian Coords: Yeah, I mean you can see it already. Telex is a product that’s come out from Automattic. It lets you build blocks. They have a AI site builder. If you go to wordpress.com, a good amount of people are actually, the first thing they do is use this AI site builder that gets you kind of from zero to like a pretty decent starting site. And then you can go in and the block editor and customise everything.

Is Automattic training their own models and stuff? I don’t think so, or at least I don’t know. But, I mean there’s a bunch of stuff happening, that’s the public facing stuff, which is building websites. There’s stuff around WooCommerce, there’s stuff around support. Our support is very heavily leaned into AI and it’s actually very good. There’s all sorts of these other places.

And then there’s a ton of stuff internally in the company that we have because, you know, when you work with a thousand people, there’s a lot of information there. And so we have internal stuff that’s kind of like search through all of our, you know, internal dialogue and find this conversation and summarise it for me. And so it’s all there. It’ll be interesting to see which ones end up becoming good products.

[00:39:05] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it sounds like exciting times. It sounds like you’ve landed in the right part of Automattic for you at least anyway. Yeah, fascinating times. The year 2026 for e-commerce, and WooCommerce more specifically, looks very, very bright.

Can we just ask you, before we go, where would be the best place to find you if anybody wants to reach out and say hi?

[00:39:23] Brian Coords: Yeah, definitely. So if you are interested in WooCommerce, you can go to developer.woo.com. That’s kind of our developer blog and it has, it’ll take you to like the docs, it’ll take you to the community Slack, it’ll take you to our email newsletter and all that sort of stuff. That’s developer.woo.com.

For me, it’s my name, briancoords.com, and I’m mostly active on Twitter and YouTube these days. I tried all the other social networks, but everyone in WordPress stays on Twitter, so that’s where I’ll be for the foreseeable future.

[00:39:47] Nathan Wrigley: So Brian is, as you would imagine it’s spelled, but Coords has two O’s. So it’s C-O-O-R-D-S. I’ll put all of the links in the show notes so that anything that Brian mentioned can be found there, wptavern.com. Search for Brian’s name and you will be able to find that episode. So Brian Coords, thank you so much for chatting to me today.

[00:40:05] Brian Coords: Yeah. Thank you.

[00:00:19] 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, build it and they might come, bridging the gap between WordPress plugin development and marketing success.

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 Muntasir Sakib. Muntasir, has been active in the WordPress space since 2018, working with well-known plugins and companies such as Tutor, LMS, Droip and more. He’s played a key role scaling products from their early days helping them achieve wider adoption.

He’s also been active in the WordPress community more broadly at events such as WordCamp Asia and Word Camp Sylhet.

The focus of today’s episode is a crucial, yet often overlooked topic, especially if you’re a plugin developer. It’s a chat about the moment when plugin development ends and the real success can begin. In a WordPress marketplace that’s more crowded and competitive than ever, simply build it and they will come, does not mean that users will. Muntasir wants to bust the myth by digging into why marketing is essential from day one, and not an afterthought left until launch day.

We start by learning about Muntasir’s journey through the WordPress ecosystem, and his approach to balancing development and marketing for plugins. He explains the key differences between marketing in the WordPress ecosystem versus the SaaS world. In WordPress, you don’t control the full stack and your users expect openness and interoperability, making community focus and support critical.

The discussion then turns to the practicalities of launching and growing a plugin. Why throwing new features at a product isn’t enough, and why listening to users and building community relationships is often more valuable than racing to add features no one has asked for.

We talk about the dos and don’ts gained from Muntasir’s experience, including the pitfalls of relying on lifetime deals for early revenue, and why a recurring revenue model is key for long-term sustainability.

We also talk through the role of community, partnerships, and events like WordCamps, not just as marketing opportunities, but as places to build the relationships and collaborations that can help plugins thrive.

if you’re a WordPress plugin developer wondering how to turn a finished product into real success, or you’re trying to figure out where marketing fits into your roadmap, 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 Muntasir Sakib.

I am joined on the podcast by Muntasir Sakib. Hello.

[00:03:47] Muntasir Sakib: Hello, Nathan. How are you doing?

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Very nice to connect with you. We’ve had a long chat prior to hitting the record button. And we really touched on all sorts of things in life. But that’s not the purpose of the podcast today. We’re going to keep it firmly on the WordPress side of things, and particularly about marketing, I guess maybe a good way to sum it up, which is a topic that we don’t often get into.

Before we get into that, Muntasir, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just introducing yourself. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. How come you’re connected to the WordPress community? Whatever you think fits the bill.

[00:04:18] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan, for giving me the opportunity to talk about myself a bit, and it’s nice being with you here.

Well, I’m Muntasir, I’m Muntasir Sakib and I have been with WordPress since 2018. So you can say over half a decade. And throughout my career, I worked for some really, really amazing plugins and companies such as Tutor LMS, Droip, EasyCommerce, Core Designer, ThumbPress.

So when I joined JoomShaper, like premium, back in the days, I was talking about 2019, we had Tutor LMS and Tutor LMS had probably 15,000 or less active installations back in the time. And then within three and a half years, with the help of the amazing team we had back then, we all worked together day and night, and with our beautiful clients and customers all around the globe we achieved 100,000 plus active installations within three and a half years. And that was a phenomenal number to mention in the WordPress industry, in the WordPress ecosystem.

And then there’s Droip, the first ever true no-code website builder for WordPress, and that was born. It got a traction that we ever expected it to be that much. So we were overwhelmed about it as well.

And then during my tenure so far, I, along with my team, represented Tutor LMS and Droip at WordCamp Asia 2023, WordCamp Sylhet 2023 and some other WordPress meetups as well.

And why did we join WordCamps? That could be a question. It’s because we sponsored those events to show our gratitude to the WordPress community and the ecosystem. Because there’s a thing in WordPress, which we say Five for the Future, as per Matt. So every product companies and every business that do business in the WordPress industry should contribute in the WordPress ecosystem, contributes in the open source market so that it get better every day.

Because we are working in the ecosystem, we bring some real value for our clients. So what if our foundation is not strong enough to get those clients, to get those correct tractions? Because in the SaaS market nowadays, there are lots of, plethora of SaaS products, but we have to bring something together, stronger and better than SaaS, so that people believe in us and they come together to work with us and use our products.

[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. So you’ve been working with a variety of different clients in the WordPress space. And when I put out a message saying, I’d like to chat with a variety of people on this podcast, you reached out and you mentioned that you wanted to talk about essentially the gap where development finishes and success begins. Because I think it’s fair to say that if you were to rewind the clock, I don’t know, maybe 15 years or something like that, maybe 10 years, it was much more straightforward to build a product as a developer, put it out into the marketplace, and because you were potentially the prime mover, the first person to have such a thing, you might succeed just off the basis of build it and they will come. That old chestnut.

Whereas now the marketplace is much more mature, much more saturated. And so the idea of build it and they will come. Oh, really, I mean unless you are incredibly fortunate, or maybe you’ve already had some success and so have, I don’t know, your company has notoriety or what have you, that really isn’t the case anymore. When development finishes there needs to be this whole marketing piece that swings into action to alert the community.

So how would you differentiate between the plugin marketplace, in terms of marketing, and the SaaS marketplace? What makes those two things different?

[00:07:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, that’s a pretty important question that we mostly overlook. Nathan, thank you for bringing that out. We need to be very specific. When it’s about WordPress product marketing, it’s more like ecosystem driven than SaaS. When we’re talking about SaaS, you control the entire environment, your onboarding journey, your analytics, your pricing model, your customer journey. Everything is under the one umbrella.

But when it’s about WordPress, then you are selling inside an open ecosystem where users make dozens of plugins together. So you cannot give your customer some boundaries that if you use my product or my plugin, you cannot use others. It doesn’t make any sense.

So they’re going to use as many plugins as they want to, and you have to be compatible with every one of those. So you don’t control hosting, themes, PHP versions or the user’s technical setup, all of which impact your product experience, right?

And in wp.org, wp.org acts as a distribution channel. So you need to think about it. It’s more of like app store, which influence reviews, support expectations, and growth. In most cases, all the products start from wp.org, which provides a free version of every plugin.

So the founders and the marketers mostly overlook the thing that free plugin often becomes your biggest acquisition engine. So your marketing depends heavily on the documentation, the on point documentation, and the onboarding journey inside your WordPress dashboard. Your operation, the smoother it is, the better it’ll be to get the traction of the pro customers and the continuous updates, and your community presence. If you have no community presence in the ecosystem in your WordPress community, then you are just gone.

[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: It’s so curious, when you sort of say it like that, the idea of logging into the WordPress backend, if you’re a plugin developer or a regular user of WordPress, you’ll be really familiar with this. If you go into a website, there’s often dozens of different things. And maybe a lot of them are kind of overlapping, so there might be things which integrate with other things. And as a plugin developer, that kind of overhead is something that you just don’t really need to worry about with SaaS, because you just build the thing, and you make sure that it works and everybody logs in, and it works because it’s yours and you control the infrastructure and the hardware that it’s on and the servers and all of that kind of stuff.

Whereas the WordPress thing, it’s just so much more complicated and you’ve really got to be thinking all the time about sticking to coding standards to make sure that at least you know your thing is doing it right. And if there’s a conflict and something breaks, well, you can be fairly sure that it wasn’t your fault, it might be somebody else’s fault. So it is much, much more complicated.

And then throw into it all of the other bits and pieces that you’ve just mentioned, community and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, it really is a very complicated picture, and I think getting more and more complicated year by year.

So have you, in your previous work, have you kind of identified this moment where the development cycle ends and the marketing cycle begins, if you like, but the plugin developer has basically made no preparation for the marketing piece? They’ve just built things and then have an expectation that, oh, it’ll just sell itself. Do you see that? Is that a real thing?

[00:11:22] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah, that’s definitely a real thing. And the thing is, I don’t give the blame to the developers actually, because they were supposed to build the product, they were supposed to follow the compliance issues, and they’re supposed to build fresh code so that the thing cannot break when people are using it massively.

But it’s mostly from our and from the marketers end that we need to tell them beforehand, like what to do and how can we get the KPIs? What are the things that we need to sell to our customers that going to help them to solve their problems?

Because the fun fact is, in most cases, when our founders or a developers is planning to build a product, a plugin, they were thinking from their end like, okay, fine, I want to build a product so that the product going to be that much good that everyone going to use it. But it’s not the case, because we have almost like 59,000 plugins right now in WordPress directory. So in every category, in every niche, there’s a plethora of products, plethora of competitors. So there were some big competitors and there are some upcoming competitors who are small.

So how they compete with someone who has already hundred thousand or a million of active installations, millions of happy users. We cannot compete them with just everything they have. Whether if we come with some specific niche, like some specific problems that they’re facing from our competitors, and we can add value to them, to our clients, they would be happy enough to try our product.

So you need to give something to the customers first so that they can rely on you. And if you have a good reputation beforehand, like if you are not new in this industry, you have some other plugins beforehand, and if have a good reputation and you are coming with another solution, they’re surely going to try it. And there’s the catch.

When people start using your product, they give you the feedback, and those feedbacks are gold mines. So you need to talk with your customers. You need to talk with the developers. You need to connect with them on regular basis. And that’s the job of us. That’s the real job of us, like the support system, the marketers, content creators. The documentations all need to come along and they need to figure out the problems, what they’re facing, and what the customers are asking for. What are the bugs they’re having? It can be a bug based on their environment, like everyone has their different environment, right?

But the thing is, when we speak to the customers, when we talk to them and when we try to figure out their issues and try to solve their problems, they’re going to do the best marketing you can ever imagine, the word of mouth. And WordPress is doing the exact same thing. WordPress is depending on word of mouth. Your 10 happy customers is way more important and valuable to you than a hundred thousand dollars.

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: And I think that kind of speaks to what I would imagine, or at least what I would hope to be the case. When I look back at my time in WordPress and I go right back to the beginning of it, it felt like a really good, solid playground for hobbyists. There were an awful lot of people who were doing things for a hobby, and then now it’s become much more professional. In fact, when I joined the WordPress community, that whole thing was just beginning to open up. There were a few companies who were making a great deal of success for themselves, selling things into the marketplace, you know, they had a free version and a pro version. But it was still, it still felt like the beginning of that, the wild west of that.

And I think that still there’s a little bit of that hobbyist mentality still out there where, you know, you attend events, you hang out with like-minded people. You can see that this individual over here, they had success, I could do the same. But there’s that whole thing that you’ve got to have prior to building anything, and it sounds to me like you’re making a real difference between the marketing people and the development people.

And, okay, maybe you are this unique person that can do both. Maybe you are brilliant at developing and you are going to be an amazing marketer. I think it’s fair to say that most people are not that. They don’t have the time, they’ve got other things to do, their skillset is developing, their skillset is marketing, they’re kind of different entities.

But it feels like for many people, that realisation hasn’t been made yet, that you need to, before launching, so maybe even at the moment you think, I am going to build this thing, maybe that’s the moment where you think, okay, two thirds of my budget is going to go into development and one third into marketing, or 50 50 or 70 30, or whatever it may be. I think that’s what you’re saying is that you need to be thinking about this right from the beginning, not leaving it until the last minute if you want it to be a success.

[00:15:57] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly, exactly. You have to have a plan from day one when you started developing a product. How and where should I go? Who are my primary audiences? Whom to reach out. Which influencers should we work with? And when should I give them the beta version to test? I can give a beta version to like hundreds of peoples, who are willingly giving it a try. Tell us some beautiful insights, some valuable insights so that we can develop the product even more before going to the market. So that’s the thing.

In most cases, what developers are thinking, what mostly the founders who are mostly developers, they’re thinking like, well, I can develop the product like 80% and then for the rest 20%, we can start working with the marketing team. I can think of how to go to the market and how to have some early traction. Early traction is easy, but it’s not the kicker. Early traction is easy because if you have a freemium plan, you can definitely go for wp.org. There’s a free version so everyone can use it.

There’s a term, founder led marketing. So when you are a founder, yeah, you can just announce on your socials, like, yeah, I have a plugin. I developed it and I launched it on wp.org so you can try it. Everyone going to try it. No problem on that. But the thing is, there might be a hundred plus active installations on day one, but on day three it could go way below 10, 10 to 15.

So where are the rest of the people went? They just came here to try the product, you didn’t ask for anything. You didn’t know how to contact with them. You didn’t know how to collect the data, how to collect the information that you don’t have in your mind, in your head. What’s the fuss about? What’s the problem they’re having? So they didn’t even bother to share?

You need to ask first. Be the first person to ask the questions like, what are the problems you are having using my product? I eagerly want to know. I want to solve your problem. So when I am talking with each and every person, each and every client, as he’s valuable, we bring value to their life, they’re going to bring something for me too.

[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think the curious thing about a lot of the developers that I know who’ve brought a plugin to the market is that they’ve been focused a lot on the features. They’ve got this laundry list of features and they get really wrapped up in the features and they execute that, they build the features. And then maybe somewhere along the line they realise, oh, there’s this other feature that would be quite nice to have. Yeah, let’s do that. And then before you know it, the idea of launching the product just gets pushed back and back and back because, oh, there’s another feature and, oh, I’ve thought of another feature. And on it goes.

And the whole time you haven’t been doing exactly what you said, kind of trying to figure out how to build up an audience, trying to figure out how to get influencers involved, how to put it out on, in this case, wordpress.org or whatever it may be. And that whole puzzle, that whole jigsaw piece, inside that puzzle needs to be thought out, I think for many people, at a much earlier date.

I get quite a lot of email from people who would like to have some product or service distributed through something like a podcast. On some level, it’s amazing that the people would like me to help them, but also when you go to the property that they’ve got, you can see that the thing that they’ve built is amazing, but also the marketing side of things hasn’t really been taken care of. So the website is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is. Everything about it, you know, the documentation is nowhere near the standard that the plugin is and so on. So there’s this sort of real disconnect.

So do you have any like do’s and don’ts? Have you got any, like a list of things that you highly recommend people do if they want to market a plugin? But also some things which you think, actually no, stay away from that, that’s snake oil, people have tried that and it doesn’t seem to work. Any order of any of those things.

[00:19:35] Muntasir Sakib: Absolutely. If you’re talking about like developing features and releasing it every alternate week, these are the most common picture when we are thinking about WordPress ecosystem, or any other products. 80% people are doing that. But the problem occurs when, feature first development means you keep building what you want, not what your customers actually struggle with, right?

So when you release a product, you have the roadmap. You make it public. You show the customers like, well, these features are coming next, but people don’t bother about what features are coming next, they’re mostly bothered about what you have right now, and are those working properly or not? You might have, like when you were thinking of any e-commerce, you might have 20 or 30 payment gateway integrations with it. But I don’t need all the payment gateway integrations, right? I need specifically like one or two, like maybe I need PayPal integrations or Stripe integrations or Wise or some other integrations like Klarna.

The rest of the integrations you have are useless to me, so I don’t even bother whether they’re coming or not. I do bother about my product and I do bother about whether, as I am using your product, so even giving me the value of my requirements, like the PayPal is working fine, in the next update the PayPal is working still fine and it’s secured. When I click the update button, or if I enabled auto update, with an update the PayPal is not working. My business will go through the loss.

So it’s your responsibility to take care of my business because I’m using your product. So you have to make sure that every specific niche I am giving the solution for, are working properly after every updates and everything.

I often see companies who are trying to develop the update version, who are trying to give updates regular basis. They often consider giving it the quality assurance, the QA. The QA team mostly were doing nothing. They were just going through on the surface level. They bring the update, and then the people updated it, and the site crashed. And then they figured out, well, it might be your environment issues. It might be from your end because we are doing nothing. It’s working fine from our end. So let me see. Give me your backend credentials so that I can see what’s going on here. It’s a big no. It’s a big no for me. If you are talking about me, like it’s a big no. Why would I give my credentials to you? It’s your responsibility to take care of your product so that it’s working fine from my end.

These are the common things, and apart from that, when we are talking about feature first development, this leads to slower performance. The more the features, the slower the performance is, and it’s non-negotiable. The higher support workload and our roadmap, as I said, a roadmap that is reactive, not strategic. So strategic roadmap is important. Reactive roadmap means you are actually way far behind from your competitors. So many founders think that features is equal to value, but features are not equal to value. In reality, clarity, reliability, and use case fit, drive adoption and revenue.

[00:22:49] Nathan Wrigley: So the really interesting thing about this is that there’s really two completely different worlds in collision here. So if you are the developer, you are basically sat in a chair looking at a screen, wrangling code. And it’s this, you’ve got this small window on the universe. You’re just sort of staring into this thing. You’ve got complete control over it. And it’s clean and it’s, I don’t really know how to describe it. It’s all just right in front of you.

Whereas the other side, the marketing side is the exact opposite. It’s like, turn away from the computer and look at the entire planet. Every single human being in it, all of the messiness of that, trying to find them, trying to figure out how you’re going to talk with them, trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that you exist. Trying to figure out how you’re going to let them know that your product is exactly what they need. Trying to figure out how to do the SEO piece, and we could go on and on.

There really are two very different universes colliding there. And I feel that in many cases, a really different personality type fits those things. Like, you know, the developer sitting in the chair concentrating on that code is a really different kind of personality type, if you know what I mean, than the person who can turn around, look at the world, cope with that messiness and figure all of that out. I’m not saying that they’re not possible by two people, I’m just saying they are very, very different things. One, much messier and harder to figure out than the other.

But from what you are saying as a developer, you have to do both. You have to turn around and look at the world in all of its messiness because your users are going to kind of, you know, they’re the people that are going to tell you whether or not what you’re building is a good thing or what they need.

[00:24:26] Muntasir Sakib: No, no, I think we got it wrong because I didn’t say that developers need to do both of the work, they need to code fresh and they need to look around all the users, what they’re saying and how their product is performing. It’s not their job.

We need to be very specific. If I’m a developer, my only responsibility should be to do fresh code and to make sure that my product is working fine on every environment. And it’s the marketer’s duty to talk to the customers, to talk to the world, and if as a founder, I don’t need to jeopardise my business, my company, then I need to align with everything, with every team possible. Like there’s sales team, there’s marketing team, there’s support team, content team, developer team.

The thing is, market research should be done by the marketers. Market research should be done, the customers should be talked with the marketers, with the salespeople. They need to come along with the ideas that, well, fine, these are the opportunities we have right now. So if we want to build a product, if we want to develop a product, we need to bring these three or four features before releasing the product in the market because these are the things people are having problem with. So I am giving you this list of features, or this list of things that you need to have in your product, and then it can go to the design team. The design team come up with a very beautiful design and then the developers start developing it.

And then we need to figure out the fact that, well, the product is almost 80% done, so we need to reach to the influencers, we need to reach to some YouTube influencers who have great audience so that they can use it. So we can give them the beta version. They can use it, they can bring some beautiful solutions, some beautiful suggestions to make the product even more mature before going to the market. And we can share the thought with the developers so that they can update accordingly.

[00:26:22] Nathan Wrigley: Right, I got it. Yeah, so I get the piece there. So really when I was talking about, you know, the developer facing one way and then facing the other way, the computer and the world, you are introducing then, in the middle, the developer turns around and instead of talking to the world, talks to the marketer.

And then the marketer absorbs those messages, whatever it is that the developer thinks, okay, it’s ready, it’s nearly ready, here’s the features. They communicate with the marketing people, the marketing people turn that into real world action. And then they themselves turn around and look at that bigger world and figure out how to do that.

I think the curious thing is, in our community, there’s so many of the solo developers who, when that thing that you’ve just suggested, gets suggested. That some of the budget goes to a marketer, it’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I can do it all. I’ll be fine, because we know it can work in some rare cases. But it’s not going to be as effective as getting somebody else on board.

But I think in our community, there is a, I don’t really know how to encapsulate this, but there’s a little bit of a divide between the marketing side of things, the sort of sponsorship side of things, the affiliate side of things, all of those bits, and the developers. And it’s not always an easy conversation to have.

I suppose, in the end it comes down to things like money and things like that, which our community is maybe not as comfortable talking about as other different communities.

So is there anything that you think is a bad idea? I remember in the show notes that you sent to me, there were a few things where you thought, for example, you mentioned things like the one-time revenue trap of lifetime deals and things like that. Do you want to mention some of the gotchas, some of the things in the past that you’ve thought, nope, don’t do that, that’s a bad idea?

[00:28:00] Muntasir Sakib: Yeah. You were talking about the solo developer. There are a lot of solo developers, I might say. I must say because they are a one person team, and every project they build, every line of code they write, it’s like their children. So it’s always normal to be biased to your product. Like, yes, my product is the best because I have developed it with all my passion, with all my hard work. Why aren’t people using it?

And you might have a tight budget because when you are solo developer, the budget’s going to be tight. So you might not have that much money to spend on marketing before going to the market. And that’s fine. Welcome the community because the WordPress community is so helpful that even if you go to the community people and you tell them like, well, I am working on a product all by myself, and I want someone to come up with me and test the product and give me some valuable insights about what I can do better, before going to the market. And they’re always helpful. There are like hundreds and thousands of people who can help you, making your product even better by testing your beta versions, by testing your RC versions.

The thing is you have to be vocal. You have to talk to the poeple. You have to ask for help because you are helpless, you are working day and night on your product, and you cannot let people know, you cannot talk to people. You are very shy to ask for help, to ask for a hand. So how do I know that you are building a very beautiful product? I am here to help you, you just need to ask me. You want to give it a try? Sure thing. I will definitely give it a try and have some suggestions for you if you may allow me. That’s it.

And about the question is one time revenue, you think? Yeah. And whether it’s a trap or not. It’s a trap. It’s a trap. Nathan, I can say to you, like many WordPress founders rely on lifetime deals, one time license and large seasonal discounts. I mean Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the year end sales. Might going to create some cash upfront, but that doesn’t bring sustainability.

Sustainability is something way more different than cashflow. Because sustainability comes with recurring revenue. Your support is recurring, but if you have only lifetime deals, then your revenue is not. So how can you go along with your support team year after year, when you are running just once from a customer?

Because once a customer has got something lifetime from your end, you have to give him support. You have to provide him top-notch support for the rest of your lives, for the rest of products life. And then every year, fixed cost goes up. Teams, servers, your support team will go along. Your team will be bigger than the last year, along with your product. So your fixed cost will always go up. And lifetime buyers often create the highest support load while paying the least.

So you have to have that in your mind that when I am working for a easy traction and I am giving them the lifetime deals, and I want to onboard thousands of customers, lifetime customers, you need to think that you need to give them support, you need to develop the product for these thousand customers who will not ever going to pay a single penny to you anymore. So this is a big burden for you.

So real WordPress companies that scale, focus on renewals, annual plans, and clear upgrade perks. So here are the things, you might have like three to four pricing plans for one site, for ten sites and for unlimited sites. And I bought the one site license. And then I fell in love with your product, and I want to upgrade to ten site plans. So there should be a very, like one click upgradation plan, upgradation system where I can just go from one site to ten sites. And if you can’t give me that opportunity, and if you going to tell me like, okay, fine, buy the ten site license, give me the one site license key, and I’m going to dispatch that. I’m going to deactivate that and activate your license manually, that doesn’t make sense because that’s a hassle to me. I’m your customer, so you need to give me the smoother way. This is the thing.

[00:32:09] Nathan Wrigley: When you’ve been working for some of the, I don’t know, agencies or companies where there’s obviously a marketing team which has been a part of the success. Do you know roughly, I mean, maybe it’s just a ballpark figure, do you know roughly how much of the wider team so, you know, think of Company X, which is a development company, but they’ve got in-house marketing as well. Do you know how much of the company, in terms of personnel or revenue, is given over to marketing as opposed to everything else? So, you know, is it typically like in the sort of 20%, 30%, 50%? What’s your rough estimate for those?

[00:32:43] Muntasir Sakib: My rough estimate is your marketing budget should always be at least 30% of your total estimation cost. Because marketers need to talk to people, they need to reach out to the people, and they need to collaborate with most of the influencers who going to work for you, and you have to give them the honorarium to do the work for you.

So if the budget is not standard enough, then they have the boundaries to not do their works. So you need to give them the free hand, explore the sides to work with the other WordPress companies, to collaborate with better partners, to collaborate with other companies and to onboard their clients as well, so that your client base will increase day by day.

[00:33:24] Nathan Wrigley: And in the old way, when I was talking about sort of 15 years ago, it felt like most things were driven by interaction with the WordPress community. Do you think that’s still like a viable way of doing things or, you know, in the case of, I don’t know, let’s say that you’ve got an LMS plugin or something like that. Your market really isn’t other WordPressers, your market is the entire world, you know, educators and what have you.

So do you put much stock in sort of turning up to events, and sponsoring WordPress stuff, or do you sort of advise, focusing on your customers? I’m just trying to figure out where the community bit might fit into all that.

[00:33:59] Muntasir Sakib: Well, the thing is, let’s talk about the sponsorship first because in WordCamps you need to be sponsored under your product. If we are talking about any LMS plugin that we have. We want to let the WordPress community know that, yeah, we exist and we sponsor to this event. And the most important thing is only in the WordCamps or the WordPress meetups you’re going to get along with other companies in person, so that you can connect with them, you can talk to them. You can figure out an opportunity to work with other companies. If I am an LMS company, I have an LMS plugin, my customer’s going to need some hosting plan. They might need some security plugins. They might need some SEO plugins.

[00:34:39] Nathan Wrigley: It’s more of a sort of partnership opportunity.

[00:34:42] Muntasir Sakib: Exactly.

[00:34:42] Nathan Wrigley: Figuring out who, in some curious case that you may not yet have imagined, how you could collaborate in the future. So like you said, you know, hosting or whatever it may be, or maybe there’s a form plugin out there, which you kind of get the intuition that, oh, we could use bits of your form to onboard people to our platform, or whatever it may be. So it’s very much not about marketing to the end user. It’s more about figuring out partnerships and things like that. But also being a good custodian of an open source project, I guess, as well.

[00:35:11] Muntasir Sakib: Of course, yeah. That’s true. Because in every other companies who are doing great in WordPress ecosystem, they have a very strong relationship with the other companies. They have the mutual connections with all the people, with all the companies their customers might going to need. And the partnerships, affiliates are the best way to do the marketing to grow, to scale your product in WordPress market. Because as I said at first, word of mouth is something that brings the most valuable customers in your back.

[00:35:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean, you only have to look on Facebook and LinkedIn and things like that to realise that there’s a lot of people in the WordPress community who attend these events and hang out with other people at these events and make great friendships and partnerships and those kind of things. I presume they’re doing it because, A, it’s fun, but also there’s a real value to it, you know? I know all these people and so I know where to go when I’ve got a particular problem, or I just have an intuition that I want to spin my company off in a slightly different direction. I’ve now got some people that I know, some contacts that I’ve already made who might be able to help me with that.

Okay. What about the, sort of last one, and it’s actually alluding to your, one of the questions that you wrote here. Is there anything about the sort of psychology of this, the sort of mindset? Because I think with the best will in the world, a lot of people in our space, they kind of see marketing as a bit of a, an icky thing. Something that they really don’t feel comfortable doing.

Is there any kind of psychology here that you could recommend or some kind of mind shift that somebody like me, for example, who is terrible at marketing, that I might be able to undergo, some magic wand that you can wave to help me out?

[00:36:41] Muntasir Sakib: We all are learners. We learn every day. I’m still a learner, and most of the world famous marketers are learners, even the passionate developers. You still learn how to develop well, how to write fresh code in even a better way.

But the most important thing is there are some mindset differences. There are someone who is a builder, and there are someone who is a business owner. So the thin line between builders and business owners are builders think about features. They think about features, what to come along with next, what to give to our customers, whether they like it or not. But founders think, I build outcomes and value. I bring value to the customers.

Another mindset, if we talk about like the short term revenue and the long-term sustainability. So when we are selling lifetime deals, one time license, that’s the short term revenue that give me an early traction, a good traction within a few months. But it’ll never going to be sustainable. If you want to be sustainable, you need to have a recurring plan, you need to have recurring customers, you need to onboard more customers, but your recurring customers should be like around 70 to 80% or even more than that, so that you can sustain all along.

Then if I’m talking about another mindset that it can be the focus on the product versus focus on the user. Failing founders, like those who cannot scale, they think that what feature should we add next? But the scaling founders, if you talk to them, they’re going to think where my users are getting stuck, so I need to solve the problem first. I need to bring value to their life so that they come along with me. They’re going to be my best audience and they’re going to do the marketing for me.

[00:38:24] Nathan Wrigley: This stuff is so intuitive to you because obviously it’s something that you’ve spent a long time thinking about. I’ve got to say, for me, a lot of this stuff is kind of intuitive, but not at the same time. I’m definitely more on the kind of builder side than on the marketing side. I don’t know what it is about marketing, I just struggle to do those kind of things.

And you’ve written a lot of your thoughts up in three articles, which you’ve published on LinkedIn. I don’t know if they’ve been published elsewhere, but they’re definitely on LinkedIn. And they describe all of the different scenarios of, you know, what founders need to do, how plugins can have success, where the community lies, how you can get yourself involved in different things. But also quite a lot of work you’ve put into what not to do. So example, lifetime deals, which you don’t think are a particularly great idea.

I’m going to link to all of those different bits and pieces in the show notes so that people can go and read those, and then hopefully having been armed with all of that knowledge, they’ll understand better what it is that we’ve been talking about.

Where do we find you, Muntasir? Where do we go online? Apart from LinkedIn, obviously, where could we find you?

[00:39:28] Muntasir Sakib: I’m always available on Facebook, on Twitter. And I am always available on LinkedIn as well. These are the platforms you are going to find me.

[00:39:36] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I will link to the LinkedIn posts and I will endeavor to dig out your Twitter handle as well. So hopefully people can find you and if they’ve got questions, you are open to suggestions.

So thank you so much for chatting to me today. A subject of great interest to me because, well, as I said, there’s just great interest for me. I won’t say more than that. But thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:39:56] Muntasir Sakib: Thank you, Nathan. Thank you for talking to me. And it’s great talking to you and sharing my knowledge and expertise with you.